My Search for the 'Virgo Immaculata'

When I visited the Vyne in Basingstoke for the first time last year I saw the above image of HENRY VIII as a young man kneeling in prayer.  It was said he was praying to his favourite saint but this did not ring true, for the young Henry of History who was completely devoted to Our Lady.   I have no doubt then that a stained glass window of Mary would have been there when he visited with his first wife Catherine of Aragon and was still happily settled in the Catholic Church   Knowing his devotion to Mary it is inconceivable that at that time there would not have been a window to Mary.   However after the Reformation when his love for Mary had turned into hatred against her, it was understandable that Lord Sandys who lived in the Vyne would have removed  the window promptly since Henry continued his visits with Anne Boleyn.   But what happened to that window?

Henry, to be fair to him, did not start an iconoclastic search and smash of every window of Mary in every Church in England.   It was the Marian Shrines he could not stand and almost every statue of Our Lady in every English Shrine was brought to Chelsea to be burned and thrown into the Thames by Thomas Cromwell.   A couple did escape.    But back to the second window.    When you look you will become aware that Mary is sitting.   And if you are a student of history you will  realise she is sitting on a Saxon throne just like Our Lady of Walsingham.   There is also a date on the  pillar the image is sitting on.   Unfortunately my pixels do not allow me to make out the date.   So the Lady is a queen sitting on a throne but there is a snake at her feet.   Her right foot is on the neck of the snake crushing it, and an apple is coming out of its mouth.    What is this about?   The image is descriptive of the story in Genesis.   We are told the serpent tempted Eve with the forbidden fruit,  which many think of as an apple, but the Fruit really represents what Eve did to offend  God, the sin that caused human nature to move  from perfection to imperfection and made way for the sins of our fallen nature.    God nevertheless made a promise of Redemption.  "I will put enmity between thee and the Woman, and between her seed and yours, the Woman will crush your head and you will lie in wait for her heel"   In the Early Church there was much discussion about Mary as the new Eve the Woman the serpent failed to make commit sin.  Like Eve she was born Immaculate, with no sin and whenever the serpent  tempted Mary she overcame Him, "she crushed his head".   She became the mother then of all whom Jesus freed from sin, the new creation of people who would have Jesus as their brother and Mary as their mother.

So the image is called 'Virgo Immaculata", the spotless virgin, the sinless virgin.

Could this be an Image then of a shrine?   Certainly with the date, the stand, the inscription, it is easy to belleve that it is a stained glass window of something already in existence at the time.   When I first found it I was looking at the stained glass windows on the PC at the Vyne, there were many other images not in the Vyne but this one was so close to the Vyne images that I thought it belonged there.   Yet I have been unable to find it there or at Mottisfont in Winchester which has a connection with the Vyne.   But one thing is sure.   It exists, for someone took a photograph of it.   If you know its whereabouts do let me know.