Reel Heraldry: Anne of the Thousand Days, Part 1

As I have said before many times, and as recently as my last post before this one, "You can find heraldry everywhere!" And "everywhere" would include right in your own living room, sitting on your recliner, watching TV.

I recently had the opportunity to rewatch the old movie Anne of the Thousand Days, starring Richard Burton as King Henry VIII, Genevieve Bujold as Anne Boleyn, Irene Papas as Queen Katherine of Aragon, and Anthony Quayle as Cardinal Wolsey.

Unsurprisingly, at least to me, there was a lot of heraldry in the movie: some excellent, some okay, and some that made me go, "That's not right."

So today and through the next several posts here, we're going to look at a bunch of that heraldry and talk about, as they say, "the good, the bad, and the ugly."

To begin:

King Henry VIII's heraldry shows up a lot in the movie. As only a sampling:

But then we have this, well, I hesitate to call it an abomination, but it certainly isn't the arms of Henry VIII or any other English king. And this despite the fact that they give it pride of place early in the movie!

Admittedly, it's a very nice tapestry being hung by two pages, and they did get parts of the central coat of arms correct: those are the lion rampant guardant and dragon supporters (thought the dragon should be gules, or red, as you can see in the first and third photographs above); that is Dieu et mon droit [God and my will] on the motto scroll; and that is a Tudor crown above the achievement.

But whose arms are those? Quarterly: 1 and 4, Gules three fleurs-de-lys or; 2 and 3, Azure three lions passant guardant in pale or. They've reversed the tinctures of the quarters! The first and fourth quarters should be France, with a blue field; and the second and third quarters should be England, with a red field! It looks like a real tapestry, with even some Royal badges on it, so I'm guessing someone spent a lot of money to have it made. It's just a shame that they couldn't get the proper colors in the quarters of the shield.

Next time, some more Royal badges to be seen in the movie!