Henry VIII: The King and His Court

by Alison Weir

  In the roof of St. George’s Chapel, at the east end of the nave, is a roof boss bearing the arms of Henry VIII surrounded by the escutcheons of his Knights of the Garter; their shields also appear on stall plates in the chapel. Legend has it that the motto of the Order, “Honi soit qui mal y pense” (“Evil be to he who evil thinks”), was first uttered by Edward III in reproof to courtiers who laughed when the garter of his mistress, the Countess of Salisbury, fell to the floor during a court dance. Whatever the truth of their origin, the words were adopted as the personal motto of the sovereign. The Garter was bestowed as a mark of great honour and friendship on foreign princes such as the Emperor Maximilian I, who usually returned the compliment: Henry VIII had been admitted to the Order of the Golden Fleece in 1505, and was painted wearing its insignia by Hans Holbein for the Whitehall mural of 1537.

  Although the first chapter of the Order had been held at Greenwich in 1509, the election of new members had been postponed until May because of the death of the late King. The first chapter proper and feast took place in April 1510.

  May Day, originally a pagan fertility festival, was one of the great holidays of the year. It was the occasion of cheerful merrymaking at court, with the King going a-Maying with much triumph and the celebrations lasting up to four days. On “the morn of May,” everyone ventured “into the woods and meadows to divert themselves”40—not always in ways of which moralists would have approved—and later there were sports, horse races, jousts, and dances around the maypole, after which it was customary for cakes and cream to be served.41 On 1 May 1510, “His Grace, being young and not willing to be idle, rose very early to fetch in the may and green boughs, himself fresh and richly apparelled, and all his knights in white satin, . . . and went every man with his bow and arrows shooting in the wood, and so returned to court, every man with a green bough in his cap.”42

  That month saw Henry back in the tiltyard at Greenwich. “The King of England amuses himself almost every day of the week with running the ring and with jousts and tournaments on foot. Two days in the week are consecrated to this kind of tournament, which is to continue till the Feast of St. John.”43

  Katherine was now pregnant again, but there is evidence that Henry was straying already from her bed. On 28 May, Luis Caroz, whose account, which seems to derive from court gossip, is the only one to refer to this incident, reported:

  What lately has happened is that two sisters of the Duke of Buckingham, both married, lived in the palace. One of them is the favourite of the Queen, and the other, it is said, is much liked by the King, who went after her. Another version is that the love intrigues were not of the King, but of a young man, his favourite, by the name of Compton, who carried on the love intrigue, as it is said, for the King, and that is the more credible version, as the King has shown great displeasure at what I am going to tell. The favourite of the Queen has been very anxious in the matter of her sister, and has joined herself with the Duke her brother, with her husband and her sister’s husband, in order to consult on what should be done. The consequences [were] that, whilst the Duke was in the private apartments of his sister, who was suspected with the King, Compton came there to talk with her, saw the Duke, who intercepted him, quarrelled with him, and the end of it was that he was severely reproached in many very hard words. The King was so offended at this that he reprimanded the Duke angrily. The same night, the Duke left the palace, and did not return for some days. At the same time, the husband of that lady went away, carried her off, and placed her in a convent sixty miles from here, that no one may see her.

  The King, having understood that all this proceeded from the sister who is the favourite of the Queen, the day after the one was gone turned the other out of the palace, and her husband with her. Believing that there were other women in the employment of the favourite such as go about the palace insidiously spying out every unwatched movement in order to tell the Queen, the King would have liked to turn all of them out, only that it has appeared to him too great a scandal. Afterwards, almost all the court knew that the Queen had been vexed with the King, and the King with her, and thus the storm went on between them. The Queen by no means conceals her ill-will towards Compton, and the King is very sorry for it.44

  Buckingham had two sisters: Anne, wife of Sir George Hastings, later Earl of Huntingdon, and Elizabeth, wife of Robert Ratcliffe, Lord FitzWalter, were both ladies-in-waiting to Queen Katherine. It is not clear from this account which of them was the object of the King’s affections and which the informer, but Compton is known to have lived for a time in an adulterous relationship with Lady Hastings, and at Compton he later founded a chantry where prayers were said daily for her soul and those of his family members, 45 so it is reasonable to suppose that it was she who was at the centre of this scandal. According to Caroz’s account, though, it sounds very much as if Compton at this stage was acting as a go-between for the King and the lady. Caroz thought so, and had this not been the case, the Queen would surely not have reacted so angrily, even though she would naturally have been upset at a close attendant being so publicly disgraced, since it reflected upon her own honour and reputation. The fact that her ladies were going about the court spying on the King suggests that Katherine had already had her suspicions.

  It appears also that the King had not gone as far as he would have wished with the lady when the affair came to light, which would account in part for his angry reaction. He was also characteristically touchy about the matter being exposed; in all his extramarital affairs, he went to great lengths to maintain the utmost discretion, which is why the surviving evidence for them is at best fragmentary. What little we do have suggests that Henry usually strayed when his wives were pregnant, when marital intercourse would have been taboo, especially as the future security of his dynasty was increasingly at stake. This evidence reinforces the view that Henry regarded sex within marriage as being chiefly for procreational purposes: pleasure was something men pursued outside the nuptial bed.

  The Stafford affair taught Katherine a humiliating lesson, that it was useless to remonstrate with her husband in such cases. Like many men of his time, Henry regarded it as his prerogative to pursue other ladies, while at the same time expecting his wife to stay chaste, and she soon realised that, in order to preserve her dignity and avoid mortifying public rows, she should shut her eyes to his extramarital affairs and be grateful that he did not shame her by flaunting them.

  That there were affairs we cannot doubt. Although the pieces of evidence are fractional, taken as a whole they are overwhelming. In 1515 Giustinian described Henry as being “free from every vice,”46 yet in that same year a French ambassador in Rome stated that the King was “a youngling [who] cares for nothing but girls and hunting and wastes his father’s patrimony”47—much to the distress of the English ambassador at the Vatican, who thought such words disrespectful to his sovereign. George Wyatt, the grandson of Sir Thomas Wyatt, Henry’s court poet, refers to the King abandoning his pursuit of a lady when his friend Sir Francis Bryan revealed an interest in her. Henry may also have enjoyed the favours of Bryan’s gorgeous sister Elizabeth, who was married to another favoured courtier, Sir Nicholas Carew; the King gave her “many beautiful diamonds and pearls and innumerable jewels” that were, strictly speaking, the property of the Queen.48 When, sometime before 1528, the King had an affair with the volatile Mrs. Amadas, wife of Robert Amadas, the Master of his Jewel House, that lady, who was given to tantrums and strange visions, made no secret of the fact that William Compton had made his house in Thames Street available for their trysts 49—a circumstance that gives credence to Caroz’s assertion that Compton had acted for Henry in the Stafford affair.

  In 1533, Reginald Pole, the King’s cousin, declared that Anne Boleyn, in refusing to sleep with Henry, had borne in mind “how soon he was sated with those who had served him as his mistress.”50 The King’s physician, Dr. John Chamber, described his master as being “overly fond of women” and given to “lustful dreams.”
51 Even William Thomas, who wrote a laudatory biography of his master around the time of Henry’s death, admitted that “it cannot be denied but that he was a very fleshly man, and no marvel, for albeit his father brought him up in good learning, yet after he fell into all riot and overmuch love of women.”

  Wolsey was accused by his enemies of being “the King’s bawd, showing him what women were most wholesome and best of complexions,” 52 and although he vigorously denied the charge, it is not entirely implausible. A later Catholic observer claimed that “King Henry gave his mind to three notorious vices—lechery, covetousness and cruelty, but the two latter issued and sprang out of the former.”53 The Elizabethan courtier Sir Robert Naunton later stated what was by then well known, that Henry never spared a man in his anger nor a woman in his lust. 54

  For all this, Henry considered himself a paragon of virtue, and it is often said that, compared with other rulers such as Edward IV and Francis I, he was. But the truth is that he was an inhibited man who was far more discreet about his amours than most kings. The fact that he had separate apartments from the Queen, and visited her bed only at his own instigation, made covert infidelity that much easier. Despite what Pole claimed, some of Henry’s affairs went on in private for years, as will be seen. There is evidence that he used Greenwich Castle, the former Duke Humphrey’s Tower, which he refurbished in 1526 and renamed Mireflore, as a residence for his mistresses.55

  Henry was never coarse in speech, nor did he appreciate bawdy jokes. Once, when travelling by barge to Greenwich Castle to visit “a fair lady whom he loved and lodged in the tower of the park” (her identity is unknown), he was “disposed to be merry” and challenged Sir Andrew Flammock to complete a verse for him. Henry began it:

  Within this tower

  There lieth a flower

  That hath my heart . . .

  Whereupon the foul-minded Flammock added:

  Within this hour

  She pissed full sour

  And let a fart.

  Henry was so offended that he spluttered, “Begone, varlet!” and waved the man out of his sight.56 In 1542, Sir William Paget felt he ought to apologise for having to report King Francis I’s “unseemly” declaration that he would rather “give his daughter to be a strumpet of the bordello” than face the Emperor in battle.57

  This innate prudishness manifested itself in other ways. Henry, who had three marriages annulled, angrily censured his sister Margaret when she divorced her husband in order to marry another man. He was harsh on the prostitutes who followed his armies, and rigorous in suppressing the brothels that had disfigured the Southwark shore of the Thames for centuries.

  Henry could be openly demonstrative towards the women he loved, but never embarrassingly so. It has been suggested that he was not an inspiring or romantic lover, but his letters to Anne Boleyn, which will be quoted later, prove that he was capable of deep passion and sentimental feeling. The fact that Anne Boleyn held him off for at least six years proves not that Henry lacked ardour, but that he was too much of a knight and a gentleman to resort to rape.

  The King acknowledged only one bastard, although rumour credited him with more; this was probably the result of luck or carefulness. Some writers have suggested that it implies a low level of fertility, but that does not take account of the fact that Henry repeatedly impregnated his first two wives. It has also been suggested that, given his assertion that two of his marriages were incestuous and therefore unlawful,58 Henry was the victim of an Oedipus complex, but in fact this was a quite legitimate plea to make in each case, and not enough is known of Henry’s relationship with his mother to justify such a claim.

  One tale told about the King was certainly apocryphal. Sir Thomas More’s nephew, William Rastell, and the Jesuit exile Nicholas Sander, who in 1585 wrote a Catholic treatise damning Henry and his second wife, Anne Boleyn, both claimed that Anne was the fruit of an early affair between the King and her mother, Elizabeth Howard. The story was certainly current at court, and in 1535 a Member of Parliament, Sir George Throckmorton, accused Henry to his face of “meddling” with both Anne’s mother and her sister Mary.

  “Never with the mother,” Henry said.

  “Nor never with the sister either,” lied Cromwell, 59 who was standing by and must have been well aware that the King had had an affair with Mary Boleyn (of which more will be related later). But Henry was probably under ten when Anne was conceived, and could not possibly have been her father. Yet there may have been smoke without fire. Despite his denial, an early liaison, while he was perhaps in his teens, with Lady Boleyn cannot be ruled out.

  14

  “Rather Divine Than Human”

  In July 1510, Henry stayed at Windsor Castle on the first stage of his annual progress. Windsor was one of the most ancient of royal residences; it had been built by William the Conqueror around 1070 and reconstructed as a formidable stone fortress by Henry II in the twelfth century. The Plantagenet royal lodgings, laid out around three courtyards in the Upper Ward (on the site of the present state apartments), were still in use, although they had been extended and modernised in the fourteenth century by Edward III, who built the imposing St. George’s Hall (then half its present length) with its steep timber roof and private chapel at one end. Edward IV had modernised the royal lodgings, adding a Great Watching Chamber, among other improvements. Henry VII had added a tower with more luxurious accommodation, featuring oriel windows and flat battened ceilings decorarated with quatrefoils and rose bosses; its first floor, much remodelled, now houses the Royal Library. In the room next to the King’s bedchamber was a wall painting depicting the Knights of Malta besieging Rhodes in 1480 and 1522.1 The adjacent Queen’s range boasted a privy chamber with a ceiling studded with tiny mirrors. 2 Outside there were gardens, of which details are scarce, and a vineyard.

  Windsor was still essentially a mediaeval castle rather than a Tudor palace, and for this reason Henry used it less than his more modern houses, and then only in the warmer months, when he came for the hunting in Windsor Great Park and Windsor Forest. The only major work he carried out here would be the rebuilding of the main gateway to the castle in 1510–1511; it bears his arms with the pomegranate of Katherine of Aragon. He also built a tennis court, perhaps the one at the foot of the Round Tower shown in seventeenth-century views of the castle.3

  St. George’s Chapel, begun by Edward IV in 1475, continued by Henry VII, who rebuilt the adjoining Lady Chapel, and completed by Henry VIII in 1528, is one of the finest examples of late Perpendicular architecture in England. It boasts magnificent stone vaulting and outstanding stained-glass windows, one featuring seventy-five figures of saints, kings, and princes. In the choir are the fine stalls of the Knights of the Garter. Those great protagonists of the Wars of the Roses, Henry VI and Edward IV, lie buried here. Henry VIII erected a richly carved timber closet with an oriel window above Edward IV’s chantry chapel, from which Queen Katherine could watch services and Garter ceremonies; her pomegranate badge features in the carvings.

  While at Windsor the King expended his energies in “exercising himself daily in shooting, singing, dancing, wrestling, casting of the bar, playing at the recorder, flute [and] virginals, and in setting of songs, making of ballads, and did set two goodly masses, every one of them five parts, which were sung oftentimes in his chapel and afterwards in divers other places.”4

  Like all the Tudors, Henry was passionate about music, which was by his time a necessary adjunct to royal magnificence. It dominated his life: wherever he went, in public or in private, at state occasions, at his entrance and departure, and especially at mealtimes, minstrels played, choirs sang, or fanfares sounded. Making music was also a essential accomplishment for his courtiers, many of whom were competent composers, players, or singers; a fine voice could be decisive in gaining a gentleman a post in the Privy Chamber. Many nobles employed their own bands of musicians, who performed in the minstrels’ galleries above their dining halls.

  Foreigners we
re ecstatic about the music they heard at the English court, the beautiful voices of the choristers and the virtuoso playing of the musicians, which they compared very favourably with the music at the French court, where the singing master could not read music, even when he was sober.

  Much music was composed under the auspices of the Church, and it was in the sixteenth century that sacred music reached new heights of grandeur and artistic intricacy in the hands of a few gifted composers under royal patronage. Many compositions took the form of motets, Latin choral pieces in several parts, which were precursors of the anthem.

  There were advances, too, in secular music, which was growing in popularity; yet although the Tudor age was to witness the birth of chamber music, little secular music of note survives from the period before the development of the madrigal in Elizabeth’s reign. At the beginning of the century, English music still imitated the stately style of the fifteenthcentury composer John Dunstable. Yet thanks to the incalculable effect of Henry’s interest and his generous patronage of foreign musicians such as the Italian Bassano family 5 and the lutenist Philip van Wilder, it was changing, becoming increasingly influenced by newer forms from Flanders, France, and Italy. Under Henry VIII, English music progressed from the formal mediaeval style to one more florid and versatile. Most early Tudor music was polyphonic, having many voices or sounds. But traditional ballads were still very popular, and Henry himself composed them, although he disapproved of their use as a political propaganda tool.