In the letter, Wyatt reports that the then-current queen’s brother, the Duke of Cleves, was courting Christina, but that she was really in love with René of Chalon, the Prince of Orange, and, in an obvious attempt to stay on the good side of the mercurial and autocratic king, that Henry is lucky to have escaped that marriage:Īdde to this that it is here sayd, and the Duke of Cleves owne servant told it me to that he herd it of men of reputation that thei were abowt to gyve the Duke of Cleves a mariage of the Duchesse of Millan. But being aware of how Henry treated his wives, she had no interest in him and the negotiations fell through, and Henry ended up marrying, for a short while, Anne of Cleves. After the death of Jane Seymour, his third wife, Henry had attempted to marry Christina. Wyatt was in Flanders on a diplomatic mission and toward the end of the letter he reports on the status of Christina of Denmark, the Duchess of Milan. There is this letter written by the poet and diplomat Thomas Wyatt to Henry VIII on 9 March 1540. References to the principality can be found in English by 1540. Through him, the color became associated with Protestantism, particularly Protestantism in Northern Ireland. And King William III of England, of the duo William and Mary, was the prince of Orange. The Dutch royal family is descended from the princes of Orange in Provence, hence the association of the color with Holland. Over the centuries this came to be pronounced and spelled as orange. The town’s and associated principality’s name is from the Latin Arausio, named after a Celtic god. Orange is also the name of a town in Provence, southern France, but this name is etymologically unrelated to the fruit or the color-although it has since become associated with the color. John Baptist shall sell or put to sale within the realm of England any coloured cloth of any other colour or colours than are hereafter mentioned, that is to say, scarlet, red, crimson, morrey, violet, pewke, brown, blue, black, green, yellow, blue, orange, tawny, russet, marble grey, sad new colour, azure, watchet, sheeps colour, lion colour, motly, iron grey, friers grey, crane colour, purple, and old medley colour, most commonly used to be made above and before twenty years past. The 1577 appearance of the stand-alone orange, meaning the color, is in an English law limiting the colors in which woolen cloth could be made:Īnd moreover, be it enacted by the authority aforesaid that no person nor persons after the said feast of the nativity of St. I wonder if this 1502 appearance is of orange color as well, as opposed to an antedating of the stand-alone orange. Also, Wikipedia cites a 1502 appearance of orange, but only gives secondary sources as references and doesn’t not specify the document the word allegedly appears in. It’s not a name for the hue, but rather a description of it that uses the fruit. This is a neat example of the transition from the fruit to the color. The phrase orenge colour appears in a will dated 1512. The color orange is recorded by 1557, but there are some precursor appearances earlier in the century. Sweet oranges, like the Valencia, weren’t imported to Europe until the sixteenth century. They were the bitter or Seville orange ( Citrus aurantium). These medieval oranges weren’t the ones we usually find in grocery stores today. The fruit is first recorded in English in the fourteenth century in a Latin-English dictionary, the Sinonoma Bartholomei: And the Arabic comes from the Persian narang, a sequence that nicely portrays the relevant trade route through which the then-exotic fruit would pass. The English orange is borrowed from French, which in turn comes from the Italian arancio, which is from the Arabic naranj-and is a nice example of rebracketing, un naranj dropping the second and becoming un arancio. The color orange comes to us from the name of the fruit, which is recorded in English before the hue. In English, for example, orange is a relatively late addition to the language, dating to the mid sixteenth century. One would think that color terms are basic to the language and would be among the earliest words recorded, but this is not always the case.