Henry VIII: The King and His Court

by Alison Weir

  Foreigners did not rate the court ladies highly: the French admiral Bonnivet, preparing for an embassy to England, told his gentlemen to “warm up those cold ladies of England.”47 In 1520, a Mantuan ambassador wrote disparagingly of the looks and attire of the ladies of Henry’s court, and asserted that they drank too much.

  The twin cults of chivalry and courtly love, which underpinned court life at this time, often acted as a brake on the passions that could flourish in the hothouse atmosphere of the court. Works of chivalry and romance, which had proliferated since the invention of printing, were the preferred reading matter of the nobility, and the code enshrined in them infiltrated every aspect of court life, from pageants to the decoration of palaces. Technological advances in warfare meant that the cult of chivalry was in its last flowering, but that was not apparent in 1509.

  Henry VIII himself, although a typical Renaissance prince, was passionately committed to the principles of the mediaeval knightly code, and he expected his courtiers to be so, too. He was fascinated by the legends of King Arthur and the Knights of the Round Table, although it was not until the Reformation that he used his imagined descent from Arthur to justify his definition of England as an empire.

  Henry’s view of himself as a knight errant had a profound effect upon his treatment of women. Since the twelfth century the art of courtly love had governed social interaction between aristocratic men and women, and it had enjoyed a revival at the court of Burgundy. A knight was permitted to pay his addresses to a lady who was usually above him in rank and perhaps married—in theory, unattainable. In the elaborate courtship dance that followed, she would be the mistress—not usually in the physical sense—and he the unswervingly devoted servant. He would wear her favour in the tournament, compose verses in her honour, ply her with gifts imbued with symbolic meaning, or engage in conversations rich with witty innuendo. Wordplay between lovers was very popular at the Tudor court, with each adopting ciphers composed of initial letters. When Henry VIII wrote to Anne Boleyn, he often ended his letters with a cipher, enclosing her initials within a heart. Jewellery in the form of ciphers was common.

  Simple courtly games such as Blind Man’s Buff, Post and Pillar, Prisoner’s Base, shuttlecock, and fortune-telling had a hidden code of their own in the game of courtly love, while love itself was a common theme in court entertainments, poetry, and songs. Every St. Valentine’s Eve, each lady of the court would hold a lottery to choose a partner for the next day, and he was supposed to buy her a gift. Being in love was the fashion, but it was a world away from the realities of the marriage market.

  Courtly love did not always involve real affection, for it was sometimes the lady’s favour and kindness, expressed through profitable patronage, that the knight sought to attain. Although physical fulfillment was not its prime object, courtly love was often the occasion for adultery. Henry VIII’s courtships were conducted according to its rules, but the King was a man like any other and was governed by sexual imperatives.

  Katherine of Aragon exerted a civilising influence upon the social life of the court. Her presence preempted any vulgar behaviour. She expected her ladies to behave as decorously as she did, forbade any vain amusements in her household,48 and admitted to her circle members of the older nobility, who provided a counterbalance to the high-spirited young men of the King’s entourage. Together with the King, she worked hard to create the semblance, if not the reality, of a virtuous environment.

  5

  “A Perfect Builder of Pleasant Palaces”

  The setting for magnificence was the royal palaces. These were often built on a large scale and deliberately designed or refurbished with a view to emphasising the majesty and power of the sovereign, since any house where the King took up residence became, for the duration of his visit, the seat of government. The royal palaces also provided a suitable backdrop for court ceremonials and space for entertaining and lodging large numbers of people. 1

  Henry VIII was to own more houses than any other English monarch. Most were in London and the Home Counties, while the most important palaces were situated on the banks of the River Thames, so as to facilitate easy access by barge to London and Westminster. Many of the other houses were located near the royal parks or chases.

  Unfortunately, little remains today to testify to the sheer splendour of these Tudor palaces. The most extensive remains are at Hampton Court, where some of Henry VIII’s state rooms and service quarters remain, but even these have been remodelled over the centuries. During the last few years, however, detailed archaeological surveys of some of the palaces have been made, along with several comprehensive studies of the King’s building accounts, with the result that far more is known than hitherto about these vanished residences.

  In the sixteenth century, there were two kinds of royal house: the greater houses, which were the most magnificent and where “hall was kept,” meaning that the whole court could be accommodated, and its servants fed in the great hall; and the lesser houses, with smaller capacity, which were often used as progress houses or hunting lodges. Sometimes the King would set up court in one of the greater houses and then retreat with a few companions and servants to a nearby lesser house in search of privacy.

  From his predecessors, Henry inherited seven greater houses: Westminster Palace, the Tower of London, Greenwich Palace, Richmond Palace, Eltham Palace, Woodstock Palace, and Windsor Castle.

  He also inherited seventeen lesser houses. The only one in London was Baynard’s Castle. In Oxfordshire, there were four houses: two hunting lodges, Beckley Manor, at Otmoor, and Langley Manor, Shipton-under-Wychwood, once owned by Warwick the Kingmaker, which Henry VII had rebuilt and often visited;2 Minster Lovell Hall, confiscated from the Lovell family in 1485, but never used by Henry VIII;3 and Ewelme, which had been the property of the de la Pole dukes of Suffolk prior to the last duke’s attainder. In Surrey were Woking Palace and the manors of Wimbledon 4 and Byfleet, the latter once part of the duchy of Cornwall. Collyweston, Northamptonshire, had been a favourite residence of Margaret Beaufort, while Ditton, Buckinghamshire, was to become a nursery palace for Henry’s daughter Mary. In Windsor Great Park was Windsor Manor,5 and in Windsor Forest was Easthampstead Park, a house favoured by Katherine of Aragon and often used by Henry VIII as a hunting lodge.6 Hanworth in Middlesex was later greatly embellished and assigned in turn to Anne Boleyn and Katherine Parr. In Essex, on the border of Epping Forest, was a small hunting lodge at Wanstead, which Henry renovated before 1515;7 and not far away was Havering, a dower house of the queens of England, now assigned to Queen Katherine. The King’s House at Lyndhurst, Hampshire, was not used by any of the Tudor monarchs, but designated the headquarters of the Warden of the New Forest. Lastly, Tickenhill Manor at Bewdley, Worcestershire, was where Prince Arthur and Katherine of Aragon had spent much of their short married life.

  Henry VIII’s inheritance also included fourteen mediaeval castles. Berkhamsted Castle in Buckinghamshire had not been used since the death of Henry’s great-grandmother, Cecily Neville, Duchess of York, in 1495, and was falling into ruin.8 Rochester Castle in Kent dated from Norman times, but when the King stayed in the city en route for Dover, he preferred to stay at nearby Rochester Priory. Also in Kent was Leeds Castle, another dower house of the queens of England, and Dover Castle, fortified and refurbished by Edward IV, and boasting luxurious royal apartments decorated with painted royal leopards and fleursde-lys; Henry VIII stayed there several times. Higham Ferrers Castle, Northamptonshire, had been owned by the dukes of Lancaster, but Henry VIII pulled it down in 1533 and used its stones to embellish Kimbolton, whither Katherine of Aragon had been banished. Also in Northamptonshire was Fotheringhay Castle, a former stronghold of the House of York, but now decaying. At Hertford was a Norman castle which Henry VIII would renovate as a residence for his children, believing that the air there was healthy—something the King was very fussy about.9 Warwick Castle, built in the thirteenth century, was—and still is—a massive fortress;10 Henr
y never stayed there, but he had the fortifications strengthened. Four miles to the north was Kenilworth Castle, extensively rebuilt by John of Gaunt, Duke of Lancaster, in the fourteenth century; Henry V had built a “pretty banqueting house of timber” in a moated garden; 11 Henry VIII demolished it, replacing it with a timber “pleasaunce” in the base court.12 Nothing remains of this today. Ludgershall Castle in Wiltshire dated from the twelfth century, but the King maintained only a small hunting lodge there. The towering fortress of Ludlow in Shropshire served as the administrative centre for the government of Wales; Prince Arthur had died there in 1502. Likewise, fourteenth-century Sheriff Hutton Castle in Yorkshire was the administrative centre for the North of England. 13 Also in Yorkshire was Pontefract Castle, dating from the twelfth century, where Richard II had been murdered in 1400.14 Much of Sudeley Castle, Gloucestershire, dated from the fifteenth century, when it had been embellished by Richard III.15 Henry VIII showed little interest in most of these castles; they were old-fashioned, inconvenient, and largely redundant. He preferred his newer, unfortified residences with their emphasis on comfort and style.

  Henry also owned the remains of the old palace of the Plantagenets at Clarendon, Wiltshire, which was never used by any of the Tudors and was in ruins by the reign of Elizabeth. Another mediaeval palace was that of the Black Prince at Kennington, two miles south of London Bridge. Katherine of Aragon had stayed there briefly in 1501, but the palace was demolished in 1531, and its stones used to build Whitehall. Finally, there were the ruins of the Savoy Palace on the Strand, once a fabulous residence owned by John of Gaunt, Duke of Lancaster, but burned down by the mob in the Peasants’ Revolt of 1381 and never rebuilt. Henry VII had left funds for the building of a hospital on the site, but his plans were never carried out. The Savoy Chapel, like Westminster Abbey a royal peculiar, was completed in 1517 (it has since been rebuilt).

  Henry VIII was “a perfect builder of pleasant palaces,” 16 “the only phoenix of his time for fine and curious masonry.” 17 Such palaces “as he erected (for he was nothing inferior in this trade to Hadrian the Emperor and Justinian the Lawgiver), wrote sixteenth-century topographer William Harrison, “excel all the rest that he found standing in this realm; they are a perpetual precedent unto those that come after. Certes, masonry did never better flourish in England than in his time.” 18

  Henry was very interested in architecture and open to new ideas. There were no architects as such in those days, and most property owners designed their own houses with help from surveyors, master masons, and “masters of the works.”19 Henry appointed an Italian, John of Padua, to be deviser of his buildings at a wage of 2s a day, but it is clear that John was just one of many experts who had a hand in designing the palaces. Several other master craftsmen were employed by the King; they were provided with drawing offices at all the main royal building sites, notably Greenwich, Whitehall, and Hampton Court.20 Henry could draw up his own very competent building plans. He kept such plans and drawing instruments—scissors, compasses, drawing irons, and a steel pen—in his closet at Greenwich,21 and he would often ask for plans or reports while a house was being built.22 Sometimes Henry would visit a site to inspect work in progress, and he was active in managing the workforce. Any workman, be he carpenter, mason, plumber, or labourer, could be impressed to work for the King at any time, even if he was engaged upon another project.

  The King was a demanding employer. He was impatient to see his houses finished, and he often insisted that the men worked through the night by candlelight in order to keep to the punishing schedule he set. He had canvas tents erected over the scaffolding so that work could continue during bad weather.23 Once, at midnight, he provided beer, bread, and cheese to labourers standing deep in mud, digging foundations in wet weather. 24

  During the second half of his reign Henry was to embark on an extravagant programme of building and acquiring property: some of his houses came via Acts of Attainder (which confiscated a traitor’s property), exchange, or the Dissolution of the Monasteries, while most he purchased. When he died he owned more than seventy residences, on which he had spent over £170,000 (£51 million).25 A huge share of this money had paid for repairs and maintenance.26

  Henry’s houses were built essentially in the English late Perpendicular style with Burgundian-influenced embellishments, such as the use of brick or terracotta. Before long, the impact of the Italian Renaissance would manifest itself in “antique” ornamental motifs. The chief distinguishing features of the Tudor palace were the multi-storeyed gatehouse with crenellated turrets, bay windows with stone mullions, and tall chimney pots. Most were constructed on a courtyard, or multi-court, plan, like the Burgundian palaces. Glass was still mainly to be seen in well-to-do homes and churches: the proliferation of windows with decorated and stained glass in the King’s houses proclaimed his wealth and exalted status.

  Every palace was lavishly adorned with the royal arms, heraldic badges, initials, mottos, and other emblems in stone, terracotta, glass, and paint, in the manner of the period: on the exterior, these were to be seen above doorways, on walls and weather-vanes, and in windows. This was the great age of decorated glass; hardly any survives from Henry’s palaces, but the evidence suggests that figural glass was restricted to the chapels and heraldic glass was used for the other rooms.

  These motifs recurred in interior decoration also, and appeared on jewellery, plate, furniture, fabrics, and servants’ liveries. Heraldry was an international code, fully understood by the upper classes—Henry VIII was an expert in this field. In an age when many people could not read, such powerful symbolism proclaimed triumphantly to the world the identity of the owner of a house; in the case of the King, it served as architectural propaganda emphasising his ancient lineage and reinforcing the royal image and authority in the minds of his subjects. During this period, it became fashionable for the upper classes to proclaim their loyalty to the monarch by decorating their own houses with the royal arms and emblems, often in anticipation or commemoration of a royal visit. However, given Henry VIII’s frequent marriages, these decorations often had to be changed.

  The masons who built the Tudor palaces were Englishmen, but many of the craftsmen who adorned them were Flemings, or Doche (Dutch), as they were known, who usually worked as glaziers, and Italians, who were responsible chiefly for sculptural decoration. Foreign craftsmen were greatly resented; they were not allowed to join the English craft guilds, and three acts were passed in Henry’s reign limiting their activities. Members of the royal House were specifically exempted from observing these restrictions; therefore the King was free to employ whom he liked.

  The royal palaces were built to a set plan that changed during the course of Henry VIII’s reign in order to meet the King’s increasing desire for privacy and his conviction that familiarity bred contempt. Until the fourteenth century, kings had lived, eaten, and slept in the great hall and chamber; life had been communal, with little concept of privacy. Throughout the fifteenth century, however, these arrangements had gradually changed, as had the design of royal palaces in order to accommodate the changes, and it was now the custom for the King to act out his public role in a series of increasingly elaborate state rooms yet be able to retreat into smaller, more intimate rooms to eat and sleep or enjoy some privacy in the company of his wife or his favoured gentlemen. Even here, however, he was never alone, and his most intimate functions were attended to by his gentlemen. For other courtiers, and to a greater extent household servants, privacy was an elusive luxury or was nonexistent.

  The King and Queen had separate sets of apartments, often a mirror image of each other; these were known as the King’s Side and the Queen’s Side. Each included a presence (or audience) chamber, a privy chamber, a bedchamber, and usually further private chambers. Early in the reign, following the Burgundian precedent copied by Edward IV and Henry VII, these lodgings were stacked one above the other in a central donjon. The King’s apartments were often built on the south side o
f the palace, which enjoyed more sunshine.

  The King’s state apartments consisted of a sequence of three rooms: two outward chambers—the great watching chamber, or guard room, and the presence chamber—and one inward chamber, the privy chamber. The outward chambers were public, the inner private. To begin with, these state rooms were accessed from the great hall or approached by a processional or ceremonial stair, and entry to them depended on how much in favour a courtier was with the King. Only the most favoured courtiers ever got as far as the privy chamber.

  The great hall, although built to impress and sometimes used for large-scale entertainments, served first and foremost as a dining room for the household servants, who ate at trestle tables which were taken down after use. Only during the early years of his reign did the King feast here, at the great festivals of the year. By Tudor times, thanks to the increasing desire of monarchs and nobles for privacy, the great hall was declining rapidly in importance; Henry VIII’s magnificent hall at Hampton Court was the last one built in England.

  The great watching chamber often led off the great hall. In this room, hung with tapestries and furnished with buffets laden with gold plate, the Yeomen of the Guard stood on duty. Any courtier or servant was allowed to frequent this room, which also functioned as a venue for court entertainments or ceremonies; a dining room for the nobility, councillors, ambassadors, and chief officers of the household,27 and an antechamber for those awaiting an audience with the monarch. There was often a pages’ chamber attached to the great watching chamber, where courtiers could put on robes of estate before proceeding to the presence chamber to be ennobled by the King. At night, pages and Esquires of the Chamber slept on the floor of the watching chamber on straw pallets.