Queen of Sheba and Solomon tapestry

The Queen of Sheba and Solomon tapestry is a former possession of Cardinal Wolsey that Henry VIII gives to Thomas Cromwell. Moving from Wolsey’s household into the king’s gift economy, it carries traces of Cromwell’s past even as its image invites new associations: first for Thomas Wyatt, who recognizes the woman in it as Anselma, and later for Thomas Avery, whose attention to the tapestry opens a conversation about beauty, proportion, and a finely made book. Its significance lies in this double life as a political gift and a screen on which its viewers project memory and meaning.

Ownership and the King’s Gift

The tapestry belongs to the material afterlife of Wolsey’s fall. Cromwell has once served the cardinal, and the tapestry that the king gives him had been Wolsey’s. Henry’s gift acknowledges Cromwell’s place at court while giving him an object marked by the household and authority of his former master. The object therefore carries more than monetary value: its ownership links Cromwell’s current standing to a political past that has not simply vanished.

Cromwell explains its history to Thomas Avery when Avery arrives from Antwerp. As Avery enters the room, he looks from the tapestry to Cromwell and back, asking who the lady is. Cromwell identifies the scene as Sheba visiting Solomon and says that the king gave him the tapestry, which had belonged to the cardinal. Avery’s immediate respect for the work includes an estimate of its worth, but the scene also establishes how the tapestry can draw attention beyond its price.

Anselma and the Memory Behind the Image

The tapestry has a personal association for Cromwell because he recognizes its female figure as Anselma. When Henry had the work sent to Thomas Wyatt, the king noticed Wyatt’s response to the image and asked whether he knew the woman depicted. Wyatt explained that he had known her before. Henry then made the tapestry part of the gift, telling Wyatt to make room for it at home and proposing that Anselma come to live with him. The connection turns the depicted woman into a reminder of an actual relationship and of the king’s knowledge of Wyatt’s past.

Cromwell later encounters that history indirectly through Wyatt. Wyatt speaks of his attachment to Anne Boleyn and of the uncertainty and frustration of loving someone whose attention he could not secure. The tapestry is not merely a decoration in this conversation: it belongs to the earlier moment when Henry recognized Wyatt’s feelings for Anselma and arranged for her to live with him. By joining a courtly image to a courtier’s private history, the object records how the king’s gifts could carry intimate knowledge as well as favour.

Avery’s Reading of the Tapestry

When Avery asks who the woman is, Cromwell identifies her as Sheba visiting Solomon. Avery’s gaze keeps returning to the image even while Cromwell presents him with another gift, a copy of Luca Pacioli’s Summa de Arithmetica. The tapestry holds his attention alongside the book, though Avery has never seen Anselma and could not know that she was associated with the figure. Cromwell recognizes this gap between what the viewer sees and what the image means to him: the same woman can draw Avery’s eyes without revealing the private history Cromwell attaches to her.

Cromwell uses Avery’s interest in both objects to speak about beauty and proportion. Recalling Pacioli’s ideas, he connects balance not only to mathematics but also to buildings, music, painting, justice, government, and the proper relation between a prince and his subjects. He extends the idea to the appearance of a printed page, the wording of a law, and the beauty of a face. His account makes the tapestry part of a broader meditation: visual beauty is not isolated from intellectual or civic order, but may prompt the viewer to consider how parts compose a whole.

Political and Narrative Significance

Across these episodes, the tapestry moves among distinct kinds of value. It is a prized possession passed from Wolsey to Henry and then to Cromwell; it is a royal gift to Wyatt associated with Anselma; and it is an image that prompts Avery’s wonder and Cromwell’s reflections on proportion. The same object thus holds public patronage and private memory together without making them identical. Its successive viewers see different things, and Cromwell alone possesses the full personal association.

The tapestry also gives the narrative a compact way to show how political relationships persist through objects after power changes hands. Wolsey’s former possession remains present in Cromwell’s room because Henry has chosen to give it to him; its history can then surface in conversations about Wyatt, Anselma, Avery, and the king. The work does not explain those relationships by itself. Rather, it gathers them around an image whose meaning shifts with each encounter, making the passage of an object a record of both favour and memory.