The story of a mysterious Ottoman dagger lengthy believed to have been owned by Henry VIII—and stolen in a dramatic Twentieth-century heist—shall be informed at an exhibition opening in London on Saturday (1 November).
The article was purchased within the mid-18th century by the politician and Gothic horror author Horace Walpole, who stored it at his residence, Strawberry Hill Home—which is now a museum. The museum’s curator Silvia Davoli has uncovered the weapon’s historical past, which shall be one of many tales explored in Henry VIII’s Misplaced Dagger: From the Tudor Courtroom to the Victorian Stage.
Walpole believed the dagger belonged to Henry VIII, after an attribution by George Vertue, the 18th century engraver and Tudor skilled. Walpole was additionally satisfied by drawings and work of the king with a jewelled dagger, by Hans Holbein the Youthful.
In reality, nevertheless, “it by no means was the king’s”, reveals Davoli. After finding out 18th-century drawings of the weapon by John Carter within the museum’s archive and after speaking to Tim Stanley, the V&A’s Center East skilled, Davoli concludes that the dagger was made within the late sixteenth century in Istanbul. But Henry had died in 1547.
Regardless of the fact, intrigue across the dagger solely grew after Walpole’s dying. His daughters finally bought their late father’s possessions, together with the dagger. By the mid-Nineteenth century it was owned by the famend Shakespearean actor Charles Kean earlier than, in 1898, being purchased by artwork connoisseur George Hunt Heigham after which a supplier known as Lascade. Its subsequent proprietor was William Waldorf Astor, who paid £400 in 1911 for the dagger to affix his assortment of Tudor objects at Hever Fort, the place Henry had wooed Anne Boleyn.
Throughout the night time of 21 April 1946 a chauffeur-driven Rolls Royce entered Hever after being nodded via by a policeman, who assumed it contained John Jacob Astor—who had succeeded his father because the fort’s proprietor. But inside had been robbers, who stole greater than 20 very worthwhile objects, together with the dagger, a prayer guide of Elizabeth I, Anne Boleyn’s E-book of Hours and jewelry.
The Hever archives include a police report that the theft was most likely masterminded by the sixth marquess of Bristol, Victor Hervey, who had beforehand been imprisoned for different heists. Unusually, nevertheless, he was by no means questioned. “My suspicion is that the jewels had been melted or bought as worthwhile uncooked supplies,” says Alison Palmer, Hever’s curator.
The lacking dagger won’t, subsequently, be within the Strawberry Hill exhibition. Davoli has, nevertheless, discovered six different comparable jewel-encrusted Ottoman daggers, together with one within the Kremlin. Two of them, from Welbeck Abbey in Nottinghamshire and Vienna’s Kunsthistorisches museum, shall be displayed within the Henry VIII’s Misplaced Dagger exhibition. Or ought to it now be re-named Walpole’s Misplaced Dagger?
