We must save this Tudor masterpiece for the nation

Last month there was rejoicing that Joshua Reynolds’s ‘Portrait of Omai’ had been saved for this country at a cost of £50 million. My hat was in the air with everyone else’s. But much less attention has been given to another artwork that is in need of rescuing, one of far greater national and artistic importance: an object that proclaims the birth of the Church of England – and is available for less than a tenth of the cost of ‘Omai’.

It has been described as the ‘Holy Grail of Tudor tapestry’

‘Saint Paul Directing the Burning of the Heathen Books’ by Pieter Coecke van Aelst is a monumental tapestry, nearly 20ft long and 12ft high. It is the sole survivor of a series of nine tapestries that Henry VIII commissioned in the mid-1530s on the life of Saint Paul. Tapestries were the currency of culture in kingly circles at the time (a generation later, the taste had turned to Titians). Only the very wealthiest could afford them. Half a dozen gold-embroidered tapestries would set you back almost as much as a fully armed warship. Van Aelst’s piece became one of the Royal Collection’s most expensive objects. Today monumental woven marvels are not a curatorial must-have, and the institutions that possess them – the Historic Royal Palaces and the V&A in particular – have many in storage. In the battle for space, they are dreadnoughts, superannuated, off-message.

This one, though, is an orchid among the daffodils. The former head of New York’s Metropolitan Museum of Art Dr Thomas Campbell – whose expertise in this field led him to be nicknamed ‘Tapestry Tom’ – described it as ‘the Holy Grail of Tudor tapestry’. Though the subject matter of the tapestry is no bodice-ripper – indeed it is scarcely comprehensible to a modern audience – the work does directly concern Henry’s sex life.

The piece was a crucial element in the mosaic of Henry’s jettisoning of Catherine of Aragon, his first wife. When the Pope refused to grant a divorce, Henry sacked him, and declared himself head of the Church of England – an action that transformed the shape of our national church. But he was at pains to make it clear that the Church of England was still a Catholic church – i.e. unchanged, except for the headship. The tapestry was the King’s public statement as to the implications of the act of parliament in which this declaration was made. In St Paul, he found a fierce and pious biblical counterpart in his Defence of the Faith. The burning of the heathen books referred to Paul’s actions in Ephesus, and, in the propaganda of the tapestry, was echoed by Henry’s 1529 and 1534 proclamations against the protestant Tyndale Bible, which were publicly incinerated. At the same time it reminded the faithful of the lineage of the English Sarum liturgy, which was based on the theology of St Paul – in contradistinction to the Roman liturgy, which was based on St Peter. This tapestry was in essence the public certificate of the baptism of the Church of England.

Aesthetically the object represents the high watermark of royal tapestries, both in the superiority of the materials used and in its ambitious and innovative design. As with most tapestries, the work is woven in wool, but here it’s accompanied by silk and gold braid in such extravagance that the palette of colours had to be toned down further to showcase the opulence of the embroidery. The design was arguably Van Aelst’s masterpiece – and he was the greatest of all the tapestry designers, operating in Antwerp. The clouds of smoke – central in the scene and the crucial element in the narrative – have a rhythmic undulance of immateriality that defy belief: ‘With characteristic audacity of design, flames seem to take hold of the textile support, and books tumble from the bonfire as though out of the composition and into the viewers’ space,’ wrote Elizabeth Cleland in the catalogue of the Metropolitan Museum’s recent show The Tudors: Art and Majesty in Renaissance England.

Why is the tapestry not safe, tucked up in some public place, deep in England? Commissioned soon after the Act of Supremacy in 1534, it was delivered to Hampton Court in the late 1530s. It was subsequently moved to Windsor Castle – the last record of it was in an inventory there, dated 1770. After that, silence.

It turned up in Spain about 30 years ago, having been sold at an English auction house, unrecognised, some time previously. An image of it was seen by Campbell, who immediately recognised the tapestry for what it was, but by then the Spanish government had placed an export ban on it.

An export ban is dungeon country – few artefacts escape this catch-all imprisonment. It is, of course, a national treasure here, not in Spain, but export control is based on where the object is located. Only a hero can cut the knot, and – amazingly – there is a hero and that hero is Spanish. The ministry in Spain has indicated that it would be prepared to reconsider its position if there were an ‘appropriate institution’ in the United Kingdom prepared to take it on.

The design was Pieter Coecke van Aelst’s masterpiece, and he was the greatest of all the tapestry designers

Did Britain roar into life at this extraordinarily generous offer? Nope. It was made four years ago, and one-by-one the invitation to the feast has been rejected by UK institutions. It would have been reasonable for the ministry to say that we’d had our chance. Luckily, they haven’t – twice bless them!

Enter Auckland Project, which I founded. Auckland is an uncannily appropriate place for this work to live. One of the Prince-Bishops of Durham was Cardinal Wolsey, whose failure to win the Pope’s cooperation set in train the events that ended in the creation of our national church. Another, Cuthbert Tunstall, went on to become Bishop of London, in which capacity he became arsonist-in-chief of the Tyndale Bible. We also have one of the seemingly only 14 Tyndale Bibles to survive the holocaust. This provides the context, but, being fresh to the task, we have what none of the great institutions can bring to bear: the space to house such a magnificent object. For sure, the collective refusal by the metropolitan institutions has been based not on indifference but on a lack of space; by chance, we have a new building by Niall McLaughlin, whose design nods to medieval public spaces, and is made up of stone quarried from the same deposits as Durham Cathedral.

So a call to arms. If the National Heritage Memorial Fund (NHMF) – the patron saint of our country’s ‘last gasps’ – is to help, then the public must rally round, and show that the country has earned the right to it. This is a prior condition of public money, and it means, to put it bluntly, that many people giving a little is more powerful than a few people giving a lot. While you can have a baptism in an Anglican church for free, if you want a certificate it costs £18. I have a quixotic thought that if people of goodwill were to subscribe £20 – the cost of the certificate (plus £2 P&P) – to help buy this original woven certificate of baptism, we’d raise the last £1 million that we need for its purchase, and we would demonstrate to the NHMF that this is something that belongs in Britain, because it is our treasure.