Henry VIII set

If you regularly read posts in this blog, you know the story by now: "saw this on eBay for not very much ..." The 'this' in this case is a lead (or, more likely, lead alloy) Henry VIII chess set.

First thing I needed to do was add some felt bases to the pieces, as the nibs that remain after pouring the lead hadn't been filed away (and I wasn't keen on doing that myself). But was an easy job! 

I felt a nice matching board was the leather board I got some time ago. 

Of course, one issue still remained .... the pieces were not painted or coloured in any way, so it would be hard to distinguish between 'white' and 'black'. I didn't want to loose the 'lead' effect of the pieces, so decided to paint them only partially, focusing on their clothes. Mostly blue and white for one side, and mostly red and black for the other.

And I think that partial painting worked well!

In Henry VIII's time, chess was going through the evolution from the old medieval forms to the modern unified form. So I thought it would be appropriate to set up the board for the short assize version of medieval chess. 

Note the very unusual starting position of the queen (which was one of the weakest pieces on the board back then, as this was before the emergence of the powerful queen we know now), and especially that it shares the field with the e-pawn in the initial array ....