Henry VIII: The King and His Court

by Alison Weir

  We know something of Henry VIII’s collection of paintings because inventories of his pictures were drawn up in 1542 and 1547. In 1547, twenty pictures hung in the gallery at Hampton Court, while Whitehall housed 169 paintings. Many of these were portraits, but a considerable number were paintings and triptychs of religious subjects such as “the table of Our Lady with St. Elizabeth.”17 Henry was the first English King to collect art in the modern sense, even though his purpose was invariably to use it to enhance his own glory. That he realised the value of the works he collected is apparent from the fact that some of them were hung in a gallery to which only he kept the key. Those paintings he left behind him, whose excellence he certainly appreciated, form the core of today’s Royal Collection, of which he may with justification be accounted the true founder.

  18

  “Graceless Dogholes”

  As the year 1513 dawned, Henry VIII and his allies in the Holy League were poised to go to war against France. In March 1512, Pope Julius had withdrawn Louis XII’s title of Most Christian King and bestowed the kingdom of France upon Henry: all he had to do was win it. A campaign was mounted that June, under the Marquess of Dorset, but it had ended in ignominious failure and the death of Sir Thomas Knyvet. Now the King intended to lead an army himself against the French; it was his dream to reconquer the lands once held by Henry V but lost when the Hundred Years War came to an ignominious end in 1453. Only Calais and its Pale remained of that once vast Plantagenet empire, and Henry hoped to win glory for himself by another victory such as Agincourt. He was supported vigorously in this new enterprise by the young men of his Chamber, who, like their master, were fired by chivalrous ideals of valour in a glorious military pageant.

  When it came to preparing for war, Wolsey proved his worth, undertaking a multitude of tasks with good humour and efficiency. Foreign observers noted with astonishment the sheer volume of work that Wolsey was coping with, which was sufficient to keep busy “all the magistrates, offices and courts of Venice.”1

  Wolsey had already shown himself to be valuable in many other ways. He was willing to implement the royal policies, to work while Henry played, and to shoulder the many administrative tasks of government. He had flattered and praised his way into favour, and hastened to carry out the King’s every whim. He understood that Henry wished England to become a major European power alongside France and Spain, and was prepared to do everything in his power to make that come about. He perceived that the power and majesty of the Church and the law could be enlisted to boost Henry’s prestige and authority. No king could have had a servant more willing to please.

  Wolsey’s growing power alarmed others. The nobility considered him an upstart and deplored his arrogance and increasingly lavish lifestyle, while Gentlemen of the Privy Chamber such as William Compton resented his influence over Henry. Whereas the King was coming to rely increasingly on Wolsey and regarded him as a valuable adviser whose only desire was to serve him faithfully, others perceived the massive ego and ruthlessness of the man and his desire for self-aggrandisement. But the fact remained that Wolsey was the “most earnest and readiest among all the Council to advance the King’s mere will and pleasure.” Appreciating that Henry, being young, was bored by administrative matters, he readily took upon himself “to disburden the King of so weighty and troublesome business.”2 Wolsey also shared the King’s opulent and worldly tastes for building, art, music, learning, and revelry, so they had much in common as friends.

  Richard Foxe had pushed Wolsey forward to counter the influence of his rival Surrey, but by 1513 his own star was being eclipsed by the new favourite’s. This did not unduly worry him, for he was not in the best of health, had no sympathy with the King’s thirst for war, and was looking forward to a retirement spent looking after the spiritual needs of his diocese, which he had much neglected. He therefore encouraged Wolsey’s advancement, and acted occasionally as his mentor.3

  The King’s humanist friends did not approve of his appetite for war. On Good Friday, 1513, John Colet was invited to preach before Henry at Greenwich, and exhorted his martially inclined audience to follow the example of the Prince of Peace rather than that of heroes such as Julius Caesar or Alexander the Great. An unquiet peace, he told them, was preferable to a just war. The sermon led to an uproar, with some bishops accusing Colet of betraying the Holy League.

  The King, who feared that his captains might be influenced by Colet’s views, visited the Dean at the nearby convent of the Observant Friars, where he was lodging, and, dismissing his retinue, spoke with him in private. “I have come to discharge my conscience, not to distract you from your studies,” he was heard to say. What passed between them was never divulged in detail, but Colet allowed himself to be persuaded that Henry’s cause was a just one, and the King emerged beaming. Calling for wine, he raised his goblet in a toast to Colet, saying, “Let every man choose his own doctor. This is mine!”4

  Before he left for France, the King looked to the security of his kingdom. Rumour had it that Louis XII intended to acknowledge Edmund de la Pole, Earl of Suffolk, the Yorkist pretender imprisoned in the Tower, as King of England. On 4 May, Henry had Suffolk beheaded, and would have meted out the same fate to his younger brother Richard, save for the fact that that young troublemaker, who liked to call himself “the White Rose,” was an exile in France and beyond Henry’s reach.

  Suffolk’s former ducal seat, Ewelme Manor in Oxfordshire, had been in royal hands since 1504. It had been built in the 1430s by William de la Pole, the first Duke, and by 1518 Henry had converted it into a palace with a King’s Side and a Queen’s Side.5 The King visited occasionally, but between 1525 and 1535 it was leased to Charles Brandon.

  Henry was not unnecessarily cruel to his Yorkist relatives, and, provided they remained loyal, was often kind and generous to them. His cousin, Margaret of Clarence, widow of Sir Richard Pole, was “a lady of virtue and honour”6 and an intimate of the Queen. In 1513, Henry created her Countess of Salisbury, in right of her mother, whose forbears had been earls of Salisbury, and restored her ancestral lands. The new Countess’s country seat was Warblington Castle, Hampshire,7 where she kept the state of a mediaeval magnate and lived a life based on piety, study, and tradition.

  Margaret Pole’s eldest son, Henry, was at the same time raised to the peerage as Lord Montague. Her daughter Ursula was married to Henry, Lord Stafford, Buckingham’s heir. It was the Countess’s desire to dedicate her youngest son, the intellectual Reginald Pole, now aged 13, to the Church, and again the King was bountiful, helping to finance Reginald’s education at the Charterhouse at Sheen and the Universities of Oxford and Padua. Henry also granted him ecclesiastical benefices so that he could live in a state appropriate to his rank.

  Having put his house in order, Henry left Greenwich for Dover, accompanied by the Queen, who was to remain as Regent, and an entourage that included the Duke of Buckingham, twenty other peers, Bishop Foxe, Wolsey, heralds, musicians, trumpeters, Robert Fairfax and the choir of the Chapel Royal, six hundred archers of the Yeomen of the Guard, all in green and white liveries, and three hundred Household servants. He also took with him his bed of estate, several suits of armour, and a number of brightly coloured tents and pavilions. On 30 June, the King and his great army sailed for France.

  The Queen returned to Greenwich with a very depleted household. Archbishop Warham was there to offer wise advice, and she was kept “horribly busy with making standards, banners and badges,” as she wrote to Wolsey, and with her viceregal duties. In the midst of all this, she did not forget to ensure that her husband was supplied with clean body linen.

  On 24 July, Henry and his ally, the Emperor Maximilian I, laid siege to the town of Thérouanne. On 16 August the French were routed at the Battle of the Spurs—so called because of the haste with which they retreated—and Thérouanne fell.

  Charles Brandon served as Marshal of the King’s Army; as second in command, he led the vanguard during the fighting, acquitting himself br
avely and winning golden opinions. Henry Guildford proved his worth as the King’s Standard Bearer. The only major casualty of the war was Sir Edward Howard, who, having sworn to avenge the death of his friend Knyvet, was taken prisoner and stabbed to death during an attack on the French fleet off Brest, to the great grief of the King and Brandon. William Fitzwilliam, who distinguished himself as a naval commander, was wounded in that same battle. In 1514, Henry rewarded him by making him Vice Admiral of England.

  After his victory at Thérouanne, the King and his courtiers spent three days as the guests of Maximilian’s daughter, Margaret of Savoy, Regent of the Netherlands, at Lille. The Burgundian nobility hastened to be presented to Henry, and were delighted to find him “merry, handsome, well-spoken, popular and intelligent.”8 Although he was supposed to be taking his ease, he astonished everyone present with his energy. He jousted before the Archduchess and her young nephew, Prince Charles of Castile, in a tiltyard in which barriers of rough planks had been hastily erected. The King ran many courses against Brandon and the Emperor’s champion, Guillaume de Ghislain, and broke a great number of lances, to thunderous acclaim. The Milanese ambassador was amazed at his stamina: “He was fresher after this exertion than before. I do not know how he can stand it.” 9 The next day, a tournament was held indoors in a huge room with a black marble floor; the horses wore felt shoes to prevent them from marking it.10

  The King also excelled himself at archery. In the evenings, he played on a variety of musical instruments for the Archduchess; then, as the night wore on, he “danced magnificently in the French style” with Margaret and her ladies, and at one point got so hot that he was obliged to throw off his doublet and shoes. The next morning he was up early, “wonderfully merry.”11

  Some embarrassment was caused by Henry’s attempts to arrange a marriage between the widowed Archduchess and Charles Brandon. Brandon certainly entertained hopes in that direction, despite being contracted to Elizabeth Grey, and at one banquet playfully exchanged rings with Margaret. She treated the gesture as a joke, even though the King heartily recommended Brandon as a husband. When he heard, Maximilian was not pleased, and Margaret had to reassure him that the rumours about her so-called marriage plans were “base lies.” Nevertheless, the gossip persisted, and Henry was later obliged to write to Margaret to apologise for any annoyance it had caused, and order his envoys to put a stop to it.12

  Henry himself indulged in a flirtation with a Flemish lady, Étienne de la Baume, whom he met at Lille. According to a letter she wrote to him later, they laughed and joked together, he calling her his page, which has led to speculation that she dressed up as such so as to facilitate trysts with him. He certainly told her “many pretty things about marriage and other things,” and promised to give her 10,000 crowns when she found a husband. Soon afterwards, Étienne’s father did arrange a marriage for her, and she wrote to claim her dowry. There is no record of Henry paying it.13 In 1513, a Venetian envoy described how, “for love of a lady,” the King “clad himself and his court in mourning.” 14 Since there exists no reference to any other mistress in 1513, this statement perhaps relates to Henry staging some elaborate charade, either during his flirtation with Étienne, or on learning that she was to marry.

  Taking advantage of the King’s absence, James IV of Scotland, Louis’s ally, crossed the northern border and invaded England from the north, but was defeated and killed, along with the flower of the Scots nobility, by an army led by the septuagenarian Earl of Surrey at Flodden Moor on 9 September 1513. The Queen displayed the martial spirit of her mother Isabella the Catholic when she rallied the English troops with a rousing speech at Buckingham before they proceeded north. After the battle, when the body of James IV was brought south, Katherine was all for sending it to Henry in France as a trophy, but “our Englishmen’s hearts would not suffer it,” she told him, so she dispatched to him a piece of James’s bloodstained coat instead.15

  Flodden was a far more significant victory than anything Henry would achieve in France, where he was still playing the conquering hero. On 21 September, he took the town of Tournai, after which he knighted William Compton, Edward Neville, William Fitzwilliam, and two hundred other men who had distinguished themselves during the campaign. He then spent three weeks celebrating his victories with jousts and revels.

  Meanwhile, Queen Katherine, who was pregnant again, had gone to Our Lady of Walsingham, as she had promised the King she would do, to give thanks for the victory at Flodden and to pray for a son.16 But the baby was born prematurely and did not survive.17

  The campaigning season came to an end in the autumn, and on 22 October, the King returned to England in triumph, although in fact he had achieved very little. In return for a financial outlay of nearly £1 million (£300 million) he had taken two minor towns of little significance, which some of his ungrateful subjects referred to as “graceless dogholes.” Furthermore, he need not have gone to war at all, since Louis XII had made peace with the new Pope, Leo X, before Henry even set out. Nevertheless, Henry, who had his own political agenda, felt he had acquitted himself well, and he hoped that, with the help of his allies, Ferdinand and Maximilian, he would conquer France the following year.

  The King made haste to Richmond, where Katherine awaited him; he could not wait to lay at her feet the keys of the cities he had taken.18 Later he commissioned artists, whose names are unknown, to paint large-scale pictures of his triumphs in France. These are still in the Royal Collection. Executed around 1540–1545, they show Henry’s meeting with Maximilian (with the sieges of Thérouanne and Tournai in the background) and the Battle of the Spurs.

  As was customary in late mediaeval warfare, noble hostages were taken to ensure that their government kept faith with the terms of the truce. As the rules of chivalry decreed, they were treated as honoured guests until the time came for them to be allowed to return home. Henry’s chief prisoner was the Duc de Longueville, who was lodged comfortably in the Tower of London with six servants. The King became very friendly with him, and often invited him to court. Henry was a remarkably generous captor, even offering to pay half the Duc’s ransom himself.19

  Soon after their arrival in England, Queen Katherine entertained the King and his hostages at Havering, Essex. There was a feast, a masque, and dancing, with Henry distributing gifts “where he liked.” 20

  The King’s palace at Havering-atte-Bower had originally been built by Edward the Confessor in the eleventh century and had remained a favourite residence of English royalty ever since. The bower that gave it its name had been a garden created by King Edward on a nearby hill affording breathtaking views of the Thames Valley. Although he undertook no building works here, Henry VIII liked to visit because the palace, a great, rambling, old-fashioned building, was surrounded by an extensive deer park. A mile away, within the park, was a smaller, moated house called Pyrgo, which since the time of Eleanor of Castile (d. 1290) had been part of the jointure of the queens of England; Katherine of Aragon, Anne Boleyn, and Jane Seymour held it in turn, but it was not assigned to any of Henry’s later wives. It was, however, to the palace that Katherine invited the French hostages.21

  During their sojourn in France and the Low Countries, Henry VIII and his courtiers experienced at first hand the sophisticated culture of the Franco-Flemish Renaissance and were profoundly impressed. The cessation of hostilities therefore witnessed the beginning of a craze at the English court for all things French, which would last for most of the rest of the reign. Henry himself set the trend, slavishly imitating the French King and his court in style, etiquette, fashion, food, art, architecture, tournaments, and entertainment. The French language, which had recently been banned at the English court, again became a modish medium of communication for the upper classes. After seventy years, the long cultural dominance of Burgundy was at last drawing to an end.

  19

  “Obstinate Men Who Govern Everything”

  At the end of the year, “the King kept a solemn Christmas at G
reenwich to cheer his nobles.”1 The Wardrobe issued twelve yards of yellow sarcanet to Sir Henry Guildford and Nicholas Carew, a young gentleman who was of the King’s “own bringing up,” for a “mummery” in which Brandon and Mistress Carew also took part.2

  Nicholas Carew was rising to prominence through his expertise in the lists. The son of the Captain of Calais, whose forbears had been loyal servants of the Crown, he was a cultivated youth of about seventeen, “well-mannered and having the French tongue.”3 He had been placed in Prince Henry’s household at the age of six, and shared his education; the King thought very well of him, and often sought his company. Carew’s wife was Elizabeth, the beautiful daughter of Sir Thomas Bryan, Vice Chamberlain to the Queen; her sister Margaret was Guildford’s first wife.4

  Soon after Christmas, Henry went down with “a fever” which proved to be smallpox. “The physicians were afraid for his life,” but by the beginning of February he had risen from his bed, “fierce against France.”5 He could not wait to return to the field.

  The King was still convalescent when he rewarded those who had served him so well during the campaigns of 1513. At Candlemas, 1514, he created Charles Brandon Duke of Suffolk and restored to Surrey the dukedom of Norfolk. The King’s cousin and Lord Chamberlain, Charles Somerset, Lord Herbert, was at the same time made Earl of Worcester. He was the bastard son of the last Beaufort Duke of Somerset, and had acquitted himself with valour in France.

  The ceremony of ennoblement took place after high mass on 2 February in the great chamber at Lambeth Palace, and followed the form laid down in the fourteenth century when Edward III had advanced his sons to the peerage. Each Duke was invested with a crimson robe and cap of estate, a coronet and sword, and a gold rod. He now had the right to be styled the “right high and mighty Prince,” but was usually addressed as “Your Grace.”6 The ceremony was watched by the Queen and her ladies, the Duc de Longueville, and a host of peers who were in London to attend Parliament. The press of people “was somewhat great, notwithstanding the doors were straitly kept.”7