QUEEN MARY’S PSALTER. English, 14th Century
From the Life of Joseph
(Brit. Mus. Royal MS. 2B vii. 11 × 7 inches)
After studying the best of fourteenth-century English illumination in Queen Mary’s Psalter, I like to turn to the Bedford Book of Hours, to make comparison with one of the most beautiful French manuscripts of a century later. This is also at the British Museum, so in the brief space of time required by the attendant to change the volumes on the rack in front of me, I am face to face with the romance and the beauty of another famous volume, which stands as a memorial of English domination in France.
Fashions change in illuminated manuscripts, as in all else, and books of hours were now beginning to be the vogue in place of psalters. This one was written and decorated for John, Duke of Bedford, son of Henry IV, and was probably a wedding gift to Anne, his wife. This marriage, it will be remembered, was intended to strengthen the English alliance with Anne’s brother, Philip of Burgundy. On the blank page on the back of the Duke’s portrait is a record in Latin, made by John Somerset, the King’s physician, to the effect that on Christmas Eve, 1430, the Duchess, with her husband’s consent, presented the manuscript to the young King Henry VI, who was then at Rouen, on his way to be crowned at Paris. Such notes, made in these later illuminated volumes, are interesting as far as they go, but there is so much left unsaid! In the present instance, how came the manuscript, a hundred years later, in the possession of Henri II and Catherine de’ Medici, of France? After being thus located, where was it for the next hundred years, before it was purchased by Edward Harley, 2d Earl of Oxford, from Sir Robert Worsley’s widow, to be presented to his daughter, the Duchess of Portland? These are questions that naturally arise in one’s mind as he turns the gorgeous pages, for it seems incredible that such beauty could remain hidden for such long periods. Now, happily, through purchase in 1852, the manuscript has reached its final resting place.
BEDFORD BOOK OF HOURS. French, 15th Century
Showing one of the superb Miniature Pages
(Brit. Mus. Add. MS. 18850. 10¼ × 7¼ inches)