Henry VIII: The King and His Court

by Alison Weir

  Early sixteenth-century music was less sophisticated than that of later centuries. Few instruments survive, and sheet music is poorly annotated, so modern musicians have to “realise” each piece on reconstructed instruments, and this sometimes involves guesswork. Instruments were not as finely tuned, and modern scales not developed until later in the century. It was during Henry’s reign, in 1530, that the first book of music was printed in England, by Wynkyn de Worde; it contains various secular part-songs. 6

  Sacred music at court was the province of the highly trained, elite choir of the Chapel Royal, which sang mass daily and performed regularly for the King, especially when he wished to impress guests. Their first known performance for him was in 1510, in the White Hall at Westminster.7 In 1515, when Henry invited Giustinian to attend high mass in the chapel royal, the awestruck Italian reported that it was “gloriously sung by His Majesty’s choristers, whose voices are really rather divine than human. They did not chant but sang like angels, and as for the counter-bass voices, I do not think they have their equals in the world.”8

  There were about a dozen boy choristers, who were head-hunted by the King and William Cornish, Master of the Chapel. Since the reign of Richard III, promising boys had been impressed from cathedral schools and church choirs and expected to dedicate their lives to training their voices and learning at least one instrument. A child purchased by Henry from a stranger in 1516 for £40 (£12,000) may well have been chosen for his musical aptitude.9

  The choristers lodged with the Master, whose duty it was to instruct them in plainchant and harmony. Since the choir did not have a regular organist, the “Children” often sang unaccompanied. There were adult choristers, too, Gentlemen in Ordinary of the Choir, whose voices had survived the transition of puberty; they played the organ in turns. Boys who were unable to continue in the choir when their voices broke were found other posts or places at university. Every member of the Chapel Royal might be required to take part in court entertainments, or turn his hand to composing. Most of the music sung by the Chapel Royal was composed by its members, notably Robert Fairfax and Cornish, and later the great Thomas Tallis.

  There was to be friendly rivalry between the choir of the Chapel Royal and Wolsey’s choristers. The King, or perhaps Cornish, devised a contest after which Henry declared that Wolsey’s singers had “more surely handled it,” whereupon Wolsey felt obliged to release “young Robin,” the boy with the “craftiest descant,” to his master. 10

  The King employed twenty-five well-paid professional secular musicians and singers,11 several of them foreigners whom he had enticed to England. Their expertise set the musical standards for the court. The King also retained a number of traditional minstrels, who were under the direction of Hugh Woodhouse, Master of the King’s Minstrels. At least eighteen came from Flanders, Germany, France, or Italy, and were paid 4d (£5) a day. 12 One minstrel, Robert Reynolds, was Welsh; another, Hans Nagel, is known to have acted as a spy for the King in France.13 All royal musicians were members of the Chamber, but only a privileged few, who comprised “The King’s Musick,”14 had access to the privy chamber, where they entertained Henry in his leisure hours. The rest worked in the presence chamber.

  A drawing attributed to Hans Holbein shows five royal musicians playing on a balcony: one blows a trumpet, one a sackbut,15 and the others three recorders.16 Another contemporary illustration, from Henry’s illuminated psalter of about 1540,17 depicts a band of musicians playing a pipe and tabor, a trumpet, a harp, and a dulcimer; such a group was known as a consort—an Old English word for “concert,” meaning a band of usually four to six players playing in an ensemble. A whole consort was one in which all the instruments were of one kind, such as a set of viols; a broken consort had different instruments18 and was the type preferred for indoor court entertainments.

  Of approximately sixty musicians and minstrels on the royal payroll, sixteen were trumpeters,19 and in 1509, a Mr. Peter was Marshal of the Trumpets. Philip van Wilder, Zuan Piero of Venice, and the gifted Patrec were the King’s chief lutenists and “Blind More” his harpist, while one of his favourite singers was James Hill, whom he kept always about him later in the reign.

  The Dutchman Philip van Wilder was one of the most famous musicians of the period. In recognition of his skill, the King appointed him a Gentleman of the Privy Chamber and paid him a higher stipend than any other court musician. Van Wilder not only played but wrote songs, looked after Henry’s musical instruments, took charge of the other musicians of the Chamber, formed his own group of “singing men and children,” and still found time to teach the royal children.20

  Many musicians resorted to the court in search of patronage, and not all were lucky. There was the sad story of a Venetian, Zuan da Leze, who was skilled on the clavicembalo, a type of dulcimer. He was so certain that the King of England would want his services and remunerate him appropriately that in 1525 he purchased the best instrument money could buy and travelled to England, where he got the opportunity to play for the King. But Henry merely thanked him and sent him away with a small purse of money. Devastated, da Leze committed suicide.21

  No other English king ever displayed such musical talent as Henry VIII. That he had real ability is patently clear. He sang “fairly” (i.e., well)22 in a clear, high tenor voice. This high voice was remarked upon: in 1540, it was said that his daughter Mary “had a voice more man-like for a woman than he for a man.”23 In an age in which most people played music by ear, Henry “sang from the book at sight.”24 He once paid £20 (£6,000) to Robert Fairfax for a book of “prick-song,” or annotated music.25

  The King and his circle of amateur aristocratic performers would often while away their leisure hours by making music in the privy chamber, but they do not seem to have performed in public, because “a gentleman singing in a common audience appaireth his estimation.”26 Among the most popular turns were the King’s own compositions and the part-songs composed by Fairfax, especially “Behold the Sovereign Seed.” It appears that vocal music was more favoured than instrumental music, and that singers usually performed in groups, rather than alone.27 In the British Library there is a manuscript containing a two-part double canon written in 1516 in honour of Henry VIII.28 One favourite court song, “My Sovereign Lord,” celebrated the King’s prowess in the tiltyard. Henry was also fond of duetting with Sir Peter Carew on “freeman’s songs” such as “By the Banks as I Lay” and “As I Walked the Wood So Wild.”29

  The King was “a good musician”30 who, according to Sebastian Giustinian, played “on almost every instrument,” performing particularly well “on the lute and virginals.” 31 He also played the regal (a kind of portable organ), the recorder, and the cornett,32 and a picture in his Psalter shows him playing the harp.33

  Henry practised on his instruments “day and night.” 34 His large collection was looked after by the Keeper of the King’s Instruments. In 1515, Giustinian’s secretary, Nicolo Sagudino, was shown a room “containing a number of organs, virginals, flutes and other instruments.”35 At his death, Henry’s collection included 5 cornemuses, or drones (bagpipes), 19 viols, 20 regals, 14 virginals, 2 clavichords, 26 lutes, 65 flutes, 7 citterns,36 15 shawms, 37 10 sackbuts, and 154 recorders.38 Some instruments were adorned with precious metals and gems, and most had their own cases of leather or velvet. Henry was fascinated by the technology of instruments, and was always eager to try novel ones. In 1542, he sent to Vienna for a pair of Turkish-style drums that could be played on horseback, and he later acquired “a virginal that goeth with a wheel without being played upon,”39 which presumably worked on a barrel and pin mechanism. The King was also a “fair” composer.40 Thirty-three of his compositions, comprising thirteen instrumental pieces and twenty three- or four-part popular songs such as “Pastime with Good Company,” “Green Groweth the Holly,” “Alas, What Shall I Do for Love?” and “Whereto Should I Express My Inward Heaviness?” were collated in the so-called Henry VIII Manuscript, where each is inscribed
(not in Henry’s hand, but probably by one of his gentlemen), “the King, H.VIII.”41 The manuscript was once in the possession of Sir Henry Guildford, Comptroller of the Household. All these compositions are in the mediaeval tradition and probably date from the early years of the reign; research has shown that a number of them, including the popular Flemish tune “Taunder Naken,” are merely rearrangements of other composers’ works. Nowadays, opinion is divided as to their merit, modern ears being more critical than those of Henry’s courtiers. Nevertheless, in their own time Henry’s songs were applauded and enjoyed widespread fame; in 1521, Dr. John Longland, the Lord High Almoner, used “Pastime with Good Company” as the text for a sermon.

  The King’s “goodly masses” referred to by Edward Hall have sadly been lost. His only sacred work to survive is a three-part motet, “Quam pulchra es.” It was once thought that Henry had written the motet “O Lord the Maker of All Things,” but it was almost certainly composed either by William Mundy, a Gentleman of Queen Elizabeth’s Chapel Royal, or by John Shepherd, organist of Magdalen College, Oxford. Nor did Henry write “Greensleeves,” which is probably Elizabethan in origin and is based on an Italian style of composition that did not reach England until after his death.42

  From Windsor, Henry moved on to Woking, where “there were kept both jousts and tournaments.”43 Henry VII had acquired the fifteenthcentury Woking Palace from Margaret Beaufort in 1503, and had spent £1,400 (£420,000) converting it into sumptuous royal residence, which would be partially rebuilt and extended by Henry VIII in 1515–1516 and 1532–1534. The house was designed on a courtyard plan. It had a gallery with a cloister beneath, both facing the River Wey, a chapel, a gatehouse, extensive royal apartments with bay windows, and a great hall built in 1508 with windows completed by the King’s glazier, Bernard Flower, in 1511. There were privy gardens, orchards, and some fine hunting in the surrounding park. A bowling alley was constructed in 1537.44

  “The rest of this progress was spent in hunting, hawking and shooting”;45 it took the King into Hampshire, and to The Vyne, the house of Sir William Sandys, near Basingstoke. Sir William, now forty, was a popular and loyal courtier who had married the niece of Sir Reginald Bray, a staunch supporter of Henry VII before his accession. Sandys was one of the King’s favourite companions of the chase as well as being Keeper of the royal hunting lodge at Easthampstead, twelve miles away. Henry obviously liked him because he made two return visits in later years.

  From The Vyne, the King moved south to Southampton, and then east, in September, to the twelfth-century Augustinian priory at South-wick, where he made an offering at the shrine of Our Lady. This was the first of several pilgrimages Henry made to religious shrines, such as St. Thomas Becket at Canterbury, the miraculous black cross at Waltham Abbey, Our Lady of Walsingham, St. Edward the Confessor at Westminster Abbey, St. Bridget of Syon, and even the tomb of the uncanonised Henry VI at Windsor. His Book of Payments records huge sums donated in offerings to these and other shrines.46

  For more than half his reign, Henry was a faithful son of the Roman Catholic Church. His piety was conventional, his charitable works legion—his annual alms amounted to £156 (£46,800)—and he enjoyed the imagery, ritual, and liturgy of his religion. His rosary, made of box-wood with carved beads, one of which bears his arms, survives at Chatsworth.

  Like every sovereign from Edward II to Queen Anne, Henry VIII “touched for the King’s Evil”—a healing ritual believed to cure the skin disease scrofula. The divine powers conferred on an anointed King were also called into play every Good Friday, when he would bless “cramp rings” made from the coins he had offered that day in chapel, which were then distributed to those suffering from cramp, epilepsy, palsy, labour pains, or rheumatism, in the belief that the sovereign’s benediction would effect a cure. On Good Friday also, “the King’s Grace crept to the Cross from the chapel door upwards, and so served the priest to mass, his own person kneeling on His Grace his knees.”47 His attendants would smooth his path by laying down cushions.48

  On the day before Good Friday, the King would take part in the Royal Maundy ceremony, which dates from the Dark Ages and is first known to have been performed by King John in 1210. In imitation of Jesus Christ at the Last Supper, Henry, armed with a towel, a basin, and a nosegay to guard against infection, and wearing a voluminous white apron, would kneel to wash, dry, sign with a cross, and kiss the feet of a number of poor persons equal to the years of his age; to ensure that the royal nose would not be offended, the same feet had been previously well scrubbed by the Yeoman of the Laundry. The King would then give their owners gifts of bread, fish, wine, and clothing, and distribute red and white purses of money. Present at the ceremony were the Lord Chamberlain, the Gentlemen of the Chapel Royal, and the Yeomen of the Guard. Cardinal Wolsey often attended. The word “Maundy” derives from the mandatum that Christ gave to His disciples, commanding them to love one another. Henry’s queens also distributed Maundy charity in their own right.49

  Possessing the most sensitive of consciences, and wishing to set a virtuous example, Henry was assiduous about the welfare of his soul. He was “very religious and heard three masses daily when he hunted, and sometimes five on other days,” and he usually joined the Queen for Vespers and Compline.50 These services were conducted by his chaplains in his private closet; the King only took part in services in the chapel royal on Sundays, when he received the Eucharist,51 and feast days; during daily services, which he usually attended, he worked there, secluded in his private pew.52 In an arrangement dating from the time of Henry III, this pew was usually set in a gallery above the body of the chapel, facing the altar, and had a winding staircase at one end or leading from an adjoining “holyday” closet, which Henry could use when he wished to go down and participate in services.53 In the Black Book of the Garter (1534) there is an illumination of the King at prayer in his closet, kneeling before an altar on a cushioned prie-dieu beneath a canopy of blue and gold.54

  Henry was strictly orthodox. Always fierce against heresy, he had no qualms about burning those with subversive views. Nevertheless, he loved theological debate and discussion. Erasmus, who dedicated his New Testament in Latin to Henry and Katherine,55 tells us that “whenever he has leisure from his political occupations”—and presumably from hunting—“he reads, or disputes with remarkable courtesy and unruffled temper,” never standing upon his royal dignity. 56 Sometimes, however, Henry gave the impression that he thought he knew better than his bishops in matters of doctrine and interpretation of the Scriptures. Indeed, he was more than a match for them, being “the most learned of kings, not only in theology, but also in philosophy.” 57 He was well read in the Church Fathers and other pious works, and could cite texts; the extensive marginal notes he made in his books may still be seen in those that survive.

  The responsibility for religious observances and services at court belonged to the Chapel Royal, which was not a building but an institution comprising twenty-six chaplains and clerks, twenty Gentlemen, the Clerk of the Closet (who was responsible for preparing for private services in the King’s closet),58 the Serjeant of the Vestry, a Gospeller, an Epistoler, two Yeomen of the Chapel, thirteen minstrels, a watchman, and the twelve choristers and their Master.59 It had first been established in the twelfth century as the King’s Chapel, or the Household Chapel, its function being to provide for the spiritual welfare of the monarch, and from 1312 it was under the rule of a dean, who answered directly to the Archbishop of Canterbury. The Chapel Royal performed daily services for the royal household in the royal chapels, and when the King travelled on progress or to a lesser house, a small core of its members always went with him. It cost him £2,000 (£6 million) a year to maintain the Chapel Royal.

  All services were of course in Latin, and the only permitted version of the Bible was the Latin Vulgate. The calendar was full of saints’ days, which were observed with various degrees of solemnity or festivity. The Church recognised seven sacraments: baptism, conf
irmation, marriage, ordination, penance, the Eucharist, and viaticum (the last rites). Its bishops wore splendid vestments—such as the gem-encrusted mitre shown in Hans Holbein’s portrait of Archbishop Warham—and lived in princely style.

  To confuse matters, several of the royal chapels were known as the chapel royal, notably those at the Tower, Westminster, Eltham, Greenwich, Hampton Court, Whitehall, and St. James’s Palace. Each household chapel was beautifully decorated, with brilliant stained glass windows, wall paintings, statues of the Virgin and saints, and a rood screen bearing a large carving of the crucified Christ; the screen separated the nave from the chancel, which only the clergy were allowed to enter. On the altar, which was draped with an embroidered frontal, stood a crucifix and perhaps sacred relics in bejewelled reliquaries, while above hung a case called the pyx, which contained the Host. Most of the royal chapels had splendid organs, in which the King, who was fascinated by their workings, took an active interest. From 1514, he employed an organ-maker, William Lewes,60 and later set up a workshop for him at Bridewell Palace.61 It was probably Lewes who made the organ for the chapel royal at Hampton Court in 1538.62

  15

  “The Holy Innocent”

  The Queen’s second pregnancy progressed well, and in September 1510 preparations were made for “the King’s nursery.”1 A Lady Mistress, Elizabeth, daughter of Sir Robert Poyntz, was appointed to take charge of the birth and care for the new baby, and the room assigned her was decorated with new hangings. A purple velvet bearing pane (a strip of cloth) with a long train was made for the infant.2

  Following earlier precedents, Margaret Beaufort had laid down strict ordinances to be observed “against the deliverance of a queen,” 3 and these were faithfully observed throughout her grandson’s reign. “Her Highness’s pleasure being understood in what chamber she will be delivered in, the same must be hanged with rich cloth of Arras, sides, roof, windows and all, except one window, which must be hanged so as she may have light when it pleaseth her.” These tapestries were to depict innocuous scenes from romances, so that neither the Queen nor her newborn infant might be “affrighted by figures which gloomily stare.” The floor was to be “laid all over with carpets” before the great bed was brought in. This was made up with a mattress stuffed with wool, a feather bed, a bolster of down, sheets of fine lawn, two long pillows and two square pillows, all filled with fine down, and a counterpoint (embroidered quilt) of scarlet furred with ermine and trimmed with crimson velvet and cloth of gold. The tester and curtains were to be of crimson satin embroidered with golden crowns and the Queen’s arms, the tester being edged with a silk fringe of blue, russet, and gold. An altar was to be placed in the chamber, and a cupboard, covered with tapestry, for the birthing equipment. The “rich font of Canterbury” was to be brought in specially for the occasion, in case the child was weak and needed immediate baptism.