The wife of a servant of King Henry VIII

In 1534 Henry VIII pushed the Act of Supremacy through Parliament and made himself supreme head of the church in England. That same year his court painter, Hans Holbein, made this small round portrait of a woman whose name we no longer know. What places her is its companion piece: her husband, painted in a matching roundel, wears the red livery of the royal household, its collar embroidered with the letters H and R, for Henricus Rex. So this is the wife of one of the king's servants, recorded at household scale in the year the king remade the English church. Holbein gave her the same exact, unsparing scrutiny he brought to dukes and ambassadors. The two panels are small and were comparatively cheap to commission, and they were almost certainly meant to be kept and seen together as a pair.