THE BIRTH OF THE SOVEREIGN

On 28 October 1489, a royal order was issued to mint a new gold coin of 20 shillings. The new coin was to be called "sovereign", and it was set to permanently alter the image the English had of their king. On 24 November 2025, NGSA will auction a specimen of this iconic coin, which is of the utmost historical and monetary importance.

 

ABOVE: Henry VII. Gold sovereign, cross fitchee mint mark, no year (1492), Tower Mint. NGC AU50 (Top Pop). The best specimen known. Starting price: CHF 500,000. From NGSA auction 22 (24 November 2025), No. 231.))

BELOW RIGHT: Henry VII. 19th-century cast of his tomb sculpture on display at Westminster Abbey. Victoria and Albert Museum / Cambridge, King's College.

After the Battle of Bosworth, few in England would have believed that Henry's victory over his rival Richard III would bring an end to the civil war. After all, Henry's claim to the English crown was extremely tenuous, to the extent that he preferred not to speak of it at all. There were other men who could put forward much more compelling arguments to assert their right to the throne. One such man was Henry's fiercest rival, Edward Plantagenet, the nephew of Edward IV. Although he was imprisoned in the Tower of London, courageous men initiated conspiracies in his name time and again.

Henry VII, on the other hand, only had one argument in his favor: immediately after his coronation, he had married Elizabeth of York, fulfilling the express wish of the House of Commons. Being his daughter, Elizabeth was even more closely related to Edward IV than Edward Plantagenet, ensuring that her and Henry VII's children would be direct descendants of Edward IV. Henry married Elizabeth on 18 January 1486. On 20 September of the same year, the long-awaited heir was born. However, his father was unable to benefit from his legitimacy. Henry VII therefore had no choice but to drum into the whole world that he was king, lest they begin to doubt it.

The Treaty of Medina del Campo
An important step was therefore the Treaty of Medina del Campo, which was signed by the Spanish monarchs Ferdinand II of Aragon and Isabella I of Castile on 27 March 1489. In theory, it was a political, military and economic alliance. Henry's three-year-old son Arthur would marry the four-year-old Catherine of Aragon, and England and Spain would support each other in the event of war with France. Additionally, English merchants would benefit from significantly more favorable tariffs.

However, what was much more important to Henry was that the two Spanish rulers thus acknowledged him as the new King of England. It is this historical context that we must keep in mind when examining the sovereign coin that was created shortly afterwards.

The Great Model: Maximilian
A coin struck in the name of Maximilian of Habsburg on 20 April 1487 for the Burgundian Netherlands, served as a model for the sovereign. On the reverse, Maximilian's real d'or depicts the ruler as King of the Romans. He is seated on a throne with a high backrest and is adorned with all the imperial insignia: the closed crown, the scepter, and the globus cruciger. The reverse features the imperial eagle on a crowned shield. This issue was only minted for a very short time.

The design of this real d'or is so similar to those of the first sovereigns that it seems to be certain that the engravers worked with a real model. We know that the royal order of 28 October 1489 included a lead cast that unfortunately did not survive.1 Since the dies were only created based on this order, it seems plausible to assume that the lead cast was a replica of Maximilian's real d'or.

The Enthroned Ruler with Closed Crown and Royal Orb
Henry VII thus imitated the image of an undisputed ruler to make his own reign seem just as undisputable. The translation of the Latin circumscription reads: Henry, by the grace of God, King of England and France, Lord of Ireland.

Like Maximilian, Henry wears the closed crown. In his right hand, he holds the scepter; in his left he holds what was the globus cruciger in Maximilian's case. This coin type also features a lily pattern in the background.

While none of these insignia were actually new, no previous king had used them so prominently in his coinage as Henry VII. This caused a problem for his son, Henry VIII. We know from the Liber Regalis, that the royal orb did not play a role in English coronation ceremonies before Henry VIII. However, thanks to the sovereign, the orb had become part of the English perception of their king, to the extent that Henry VIII had no choice but to commission one for his coronation.

The Untouchable Messenger of God
The reverse depiction is only loosely based on the original model. This is where we get an impression of how important it was to Henry VII to present his own view. The reverse legend was addressed to the educated elite who could read. It is an infrequently used phrase from the Latin Vulgate translation of Luke 4:30. Translated into English, it reads: But Jesus walked right through the crowd and went on his way.

This line alludes to a passage in the New Testament which illustrates God's power to protect his people. It describes how Jesus was physically threatened by his listeners after delivering a sermon in Nazareth. However, human violence cannot harm God's messenger. Jesus walked through the crowd, completely unharmed.

By using this quote, Henry VII claimed the statement for himself, stylizing himself as God's messenger, invincible to his enemies.

 

An essential element of the architectural sculpture at King's College, Cambridge, which was strongly supported by Henry VII, is the Tudor rose, seen here in the center of the vault.

Inventing the Tudor Rose
However, at that time, only a small fraction of society could read, which is why the prominent display of the Tudor rose was so important. This emblem originated from an ingenious idea of Henry VII. The symbol he created has shaped our perception of this period so much that we have forgotten that Henry's contemporaries had never heard the term "Wars of the Roses". To them, it was just a civil war.

The first who described the events as The Wars of the Roses was the influential Scottish historian David Hume. He used the term in 1762 in the second volume of his History of England. Hume found an attentive reader in Walter Scott. Scott set one of his most successful novels during this period and popularized the term so much that we now consider it contemporary.

But it is not. The noble houses of York and Lancaster used a variety of coats of arms and symbols. Usually, these included the sun for Edward IV, the white boar for Richard III, and the antelope or the swan for the House of Lancaster. Both houses only occasionally(!) used roses, but Henry VII created a myth based on these symbols: the Tudor rose unites the red rose of the House of Lancaster with the white rose of the House of York – just as the marriage between Henry of Lancaster and Elizabeth of York did.

The actual coat of arms of England took a back seat to the message conveyed by the Tudor rose.

The Function of the Sovereigns
The sovereign offered by NGSA was minted at the Tower Mint in 1492 and has a weight of 15.23 grams. This is slightly less than the 240 grains (15.55 g) stipulated in the order of 28 October 1489. Minted from 23-carat gold, the coin was equivalent to one pound sterling in silver or 20 shillings. This made the sovereign the most valuable coin minted in England to that date and made the Carolingian unit of counting, the pound, which was also used in England, tangible for the first time.

The coin's purchasing power was very high for everyday circulation – probably even too high. Master builders earned between five and six pence per day. This was more than enough to comfortably buy all the food their family needed. It is estimated that the annual income of an ordinary worker was around four pounds. Therefore, an annual income could have been paid with four sovereigns, though of course this did not happen. Sovereigns played a marginal role in circulation.

 
Joanna, called "the Mad", in the Court Church Innsbruck.

Sovereigns as Diplomatic Gifts
Sovereigns were much more important as diplomatic gifts. We know of two instances in which Henry VII used sovereigns for this purpose. For example, on 1 May 1502, the Hungarian ambassador received sixteen sovereigns. Unfortunately, the purpose of this diplomat's visit to the English court is unknown.

The historical background of a second diplomatic gift is much better documented: In 1506, members of the Castilian court received 40 sovereigns during a court ceremony. The exact date of this ceremony is unknown. What we do know, however, is that the presence of Spanish courtiers in Windsor is linked to a highly adventurous episode in Anglo-Spanish relations. In January 1506, Philip the Handsome and his young wife Joanna were sailing from Brussels to Spain. Philip the Handsome wanted to assert his wife's claim to the Castilian crown there. However, the fleet encountered such a terrible storm that Philip was forced to land on the English coast. This presented an extremely favorable opportunity for Henry VII. He immediately had the royal couple and their court escorted to Windsor.

Philip and Joanna were in the English king's hands for six weeks. The result was an Anglo-Spanish treaty that gave English merchants significant advantages in the Burgundian Netherlands. However, Philip revoked it immediately upon leaving England.

For at some point in April 1506, Henry VII allowed the king and his entourage to leave. Were the 40 sovereigns given to the members of the Castilian court during the farewell ceremony? We do not know. Let us briefly conclude the story by saying that Philip landed in A Coruña, Spain, on 28 April 1506. He was recognized as King of Castile on 27 July, and died in Burgos on 25 September of the same year, aged only 28. His wife was devastated and went down in history as Joanna the Mad. Today, it is believed that her mental state was not the reason for this nickname. Rather, it was an opportunity to get her out of the way. This enabled her father, Ferdinand, and then her son, Charles, to rule the Kingdom of Castile in her name.

A Coin of Supreme Historical and Monetary Importance with a Long Provenance
The English sovereigns of Henry VII are among those coins that are significant not only in terms of monetary history, but also because their design encapsulates an entire era. In his brilliant article, Philip Grierson categorized them into five groups. He estimates that only a total of 20 to 30 specimens have survived. The rarest are the sovereigns of the second class, minted in 1492. Grierson is aware of only one surviving specimen, the very piece on offer at NGSA.

Its provenance can be traced back to 1872, when it was auctioned at Rollin & Feuardent as part of the Wigan Brothers Collection. Since then, it has passed through the collections of John Evans, J. P. Morgan, R. C. Lockett, R. Duncan Beresford-Jones and Thomas Law.

The piece is therefore the rarest variety of an already extremely rare coin type of the highest historical importance, and it was graded AU50 by NGS, making it the best-preserved specimen known today. The starting price of this rarity is CHF 500,000.

Literature
Philip Grierson, The Origins of the English Sovereign and the Symbolism of the Closed Crown. British Numismatic Journal 33 (1964), pp. 118–134

To visit the firm's website, see:
https://www.ngsa.ch/

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