Henry VIII: The King and His Court

by Alison Weir

  When Wolsey went forth in procession, he was accompanied by a large entourage, preceded by silver crosses and pillars, poleaxes and a mace, and noblemen bearing the Great Seal on a cushion and Wolsey’s cardinal’s hat, “raised up like some holy idol or other.”23 As he approached, his Gentlemen Ushers cried, “Make way for My Lord’s Grace!” The Cardinal, in robes of silk, velvet, and ermine, and holding a pomander or an orange stuffed with spices to his nose to ward off the smell of the unwashed populace, would ride by on a mule, as churchmen did, in emulation of Christ; yet this mule was trapped in red and gold. At Wolsey’s table, where he dined alone beneath a rich cloth of estate, there were more dishes than were permitted to a nobleman. He dispensed alms that were far more lavish than the King’s, and at New Year, he sometimes outlaid greater amounts than his master did on gifts. He danced, hunted, and kept—very discreetly—a mistress, one “lusty”24 Joan Lark, who bore him two children. 25 Queen Katherine in particular deplored his “voluptuous life” and “abominable lechery.”26 Many considered his lifestyle inappropriate for a man of the Church, but there is no evidence that Henry VIII resented the splendour in which his minister lived; on the contrary, it reflected well upon his greatness to have such a distinguished servant.

  Although there is evidence that Wolsey did his best to manipulate the King by distracting him with novelties,27 Henry VIII never fully relinquished power to him. He was happy to off load administrative affairs and routine state business onto his shoulders, but everything the Cardinal did was “by authority.”28 The King retained his royal prerogative in having the ultimate veto, and all important decisions were made by him. Sometimes he intervened when he did not agree with the Cardinal’s actions, and he frequently exhibited an incisive grasp of affairs. Wolsey kept his “loving master” well informed, writing out summaries of the letters and documents that the King did not have leisure to read in their entirety, and even drafting replies for him to sign. Jealous of his power, the Cardinal did his best to undermine the role of the royal secretaries who had to deal with these papers, whom he perceived as threats to his position. When crossed, he could be ruthless and violent: he once hit the papal nuncio, Chieregato, and swore at him. Most of the time, however, he exercised “rare and unheard of affability.”29

  Except on ceremonial occasions, king and minister met infrequently— during the legal term, Wolsey visited the court only on Sundays,30 and he usually stayed in London while the King moved from house to house— but they remained in daily contact by letter and messenger. Richard Pace described how Henry read each dispatch from Wolsey three times, sometimes letting his supper go cold as he did so; he would mark each item requiring attention, then dictate his responses to his secretaries, often keeping them up late in the process. He would remind Pace “not further to meddle” with his replies in case his meaning became distorted.31

  Wolsey laboured to a punishing schedule, often rising at 4 A.M. and sitting at his desk for twelve hours without stopping once to eat or relieve himself.32 Henry was aware of how hard and diligently Wolsey worked for him. “Mine own good Cardinal,” he wrote in 1518, “take some pastime and comfort to the intent that you may longer endure to serve us.”33 He was genuinely fond of Wolsey and enjoyed his company. When the Cardinal wrote to him, “Your realm, our Lord be thanked, was never in such peace and tranquillity,” Henry was aware of whom he had to thank.

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  “The Pearl of the World”

  Henry spent the Christmas of 1515 at Eltham Palace, which had been one of the most favoured mediaeval royal residences since 1305. Its crowning glory was the magnificent buttressed great hall, which was built by Edward IV in 1475–1483 and still survives today; it measures one hundred feet by thirty feet and has an impressive hammerbeam roof,1 bay and oriel windows, and a minstrels’ gallery. Around 1490, Henry VII refaced most of the palace with red brick, rebuilt “the fair front over the moat,”2 and added many features, including tiled floors and new glass in the windows. The royal lodgings, which dated from the reign of Henry IV, were in a donjon in the inner or Great Court, behind which were five smaller service courtyards, and there was a separate lodging for the Lord Chancellor and a tiltyard. The whole was surrounded by a forested deer park.3

  Eltham was one of Henry VIII’s greater houses, and he used it frequently during the first half of his reign. Between 1510 and 1522, he built a new chapel with two first-floor holyday closets, and made many improvements to the royal lodgings, enlarging the Queen’s Side, providing a study for himself, and safeguarding his privacy with high brick walls and hedges.4 He also had a hill flattened so as to improve the view from his windows.

  At Christmas 1515, the Chapel Royal performed a comedy, Troilus and Pandarus, in the great hall at Eltham. This was followed on Twelfth Night by a pageant, dancing, and a feast comprising two hundred dishes. 5 Temporary kitchens had had to be erected so that the Master Cooks could make jellies and gingerbread.

  There were outdoor pastimes as well. The King and Suffolk amused themselves by running at the ring, Henry wearing a wreath of green satin embroidered with the Queen’s pomegranate badge. He had provided all the clothes for the competitors at a cost of £142 (£42,600), and at the end of the day each man was told he might keep what he was wearing; Suffolk was also given the horse, armour, and saddle he was using. The courtiers watched from elaborate pavilions with chivalric names: Flower-delice, White Hart, Harp, Greyhound, Leopard’s Head, and Ostrich Feather.

  The King had recently acquired another house, New Hall, which stood in the village of Boreham, four miles from Chelmsford in Essex. It was a mediaeval hall house once owned by the Abbots of Waltham, and later acquired by Edward IV. Henry VII had granted it to Thomas Butler, Earl of Ormonde, who had entertained Henry VIII there in 1510 and again just before his death in 1515. His daughter Margaret, mother of Sir Thomas Boleyn, inherited it, and Boleyn, as Ormonde’s executor, sold it to the King before January 1516 for £1,000 (£300,000).

  Between 1516 and 1523, Henry converted New Hall into a sumptuous palace at a cost of £20,000 (£6 million), and renamed it Beaulieu, although the old name stuck. Faced with brick, his new residence had a gatehouse leading into a main courtyard with a fountain, a hall, gallery, integral tennis play, and chapel. A gilded and painted panel of the King’s arms that once adorned its gatehouse6 is now at Hampton Court.

  The only figural window to survive from Henry’s palaces was originally at Beaulieu. Crafted by Dutch glaziers, it depicts the Crucifixion with the crowned and kneeling figures of the King, Katherine of Aragon, and their patron saints, and is now in the east window of St. Margaret’s Church at Westminster, where it was moved in the eighteenth century.7

  The court was at Greenwich when, on 18 February 1516, after a difficult labour in which she clung to the holy girdle of her patron saint, St. Catherine, the Queen at last bore a healthy child. But it was a girl, not the hoped-for son. The King, however, was delighted with his daughter. “The Queen and I are both young, and if it is a girl this time, by God’s grace boys will follow,” he told Giustinian,8 and he gave a handsome reward to Dr. Vittoria, who had assisted at the birth.

  When she was three days old the infant Princess was christened in the church of the Observant Friars and given the name Mary. The ceremonial followed the procedure laid down by the Lady Margaret Beaufort in the Household Ordinances. The silver font had again been brought from Canterbury, rich carpets were laid along the processional route, and the church was hung with tapestries. The ceremony was conducted with great solemnity, the baby being divested of her rich robes and cloth of gold train furred with ermine in a specially erected closet furnished with a brazier and towels, then immersed naked into the font, which was set on a raised platform so that all the congregation could witness the baptism. After the baby had been anointed with holy oil, the white chrisom cloth was wrapped around her head to protect it. Then a lighted taper was put into the tiny fist and the child carried to the high altar, where she was confirmed by Archbi
shop Warham. While she was being dressed, refreshments were served to her godparents, Cardinal Wolsey, the Countess of Devon, and the Duchess of Norfolk, who then presented her with the usual gifts of plate. The procession re-formed, and the Princess was carried to the King and Queen, who were waiting in the latter’s presence chamber, to receive their blessing. Parents were not, by tradition, expected to attend their child’s christening: the mother would not yet have been churched, and it was the godparents who were central to the occasion.9 Afterwards, there were jousts to celebrate the event, and when the Queen was up and about again she made a pilgrimage to Walsingham to give thanks for her safe and successful delivery.

  The Princess Mary was immediately given into the care of a Lady Mistress, the widowed Lady Margaret Bryan, daughter of Lord Berners and mother of Francis Bryan and Lady Carew; Lady Bryan was granted £50 (£15,000) a year for life. Mary was not immediately assigned a separate household, but lived in her own apartments at court for the first years of her life, with her own servants, including four rockers.

  Henry enjoyed showing off his daughter, carrying her about in his arms and assuring courtiers and ambassadors that she never cried.10 She was his “pearl of the world,” he told them.11 Mary was a bright, precocious child, “joyous and decorous in manners”;12 she had inherited many of her parents’ intellectual and musical gifts and mastered the virginals by the age of four.

  By 1519, Mary had been given her own household, which cost her father £1,400 (£420,000) a year. It was based mainly at Ditton Manor in Buckinghamshire,13 and was presided over by Margaret Pole, Countess of Salisbury, with Lady Bryan remaining as Lady Mistress. The Princess had her own Chamberlain, Treasurer, Cofferer, Clerk of the Closet, chaplains, and gentlewomen. Ditton Manor, a large, moated house in a beautiful park, had been royal property since the time of Edward IV. Henry VIII had modernised it between 1511 and 1515, possibly with a view to using it as a nursery palace. 14

  Hot upon the heels of Mary’s christening there followed that of the Suffolks’ first son, who was born on 11 March 1516 at Bath Place in London. The King himself attended the lavish ceremony as a godfather, and the baby was named Henry in his honour. The other sponsors were Wolsey and the Countess of Devon. Henry gave his nephew a saltcellar and cup of pure gold.

  Eight weeks later, he played host to his elder sister, Queen Margaret of Scotland, widow of James IV and mother of the three-year-old James V. In 1514, Margaret had married her second husband, Archibald Douglas, Earl of Angus, but the following year, the little King’s cousin and heir, John Stewart, Duke of Albany, had been chosen as Regent by the Scottish Parliament and seized custody of young James. Margaret had been driven out of Scotland and sought refuge in England; just south of the border, at Harbottle in Northumberland, in October 1515, she had given birth to a daughter, the Lady Margaret Douglas.

  On 3 May 1516, Margaret arrived at Tottenham in an impoverished state and suffering from sciatica. She rested at Bruce Castle15 as the guest of Sir William Compton, until the King, whom she had not seen for thirteen years, came to escort her in a state procession into London, she mounted on a white palfrey, which had been sent by the Queen. Margaret was initially lodged at Baynard’s Castle.16 Later that year, Wolsey arranged for her to move to Scotland Yard, once the ancient London residence of the Kings of Scotland, but now incorporated into York Place. Margaret was formally received by the King and Queen at Greenwich, and reunited with her sister Mary; she was overwhelmed by the splendour of her brother’s court and “could not take her eyes off’ the gowns and gifts he showered upon her.17 Henry was very taken with his niece, Margaret Douglas, or “Little Marget,” as he called her, and arranged for her to be brought up at court with the Princess Mary.

  The rest of the month was given over to tournaments and festivities in honour of Margaret’s visit. On 19–20 May, there were “two solemn days of jousts” at Greenwich in the presence of the three queens. On the first day, although “every man did well, the King did best,” 18 while on the second day, Henry won applause when he succeeded in unhorsing Sir William Kingston, “a very tall, strong knight” whom few had excelled. In the evening, there was “a great banquet for the welcome of the Queen of Scots” in the Queen’s apartments. 19

  But the King was not happy. Although Suffolk had performed valorously as usual in the lists, the young gentlemen who had fought against Henry had been so incompetent that he had been unable to score many blows, which he considered detrimental to his honour and reputation. In future, he announced, he would “never joust again except it be with as good a man as himself.” 20 Thereafter, he usually chose proven men such as Suffolk or Carew as his opponents.

  That May, Bishop Foxe resigned as Lord Privy Seal and was replaced by Thomas Ruthall, Bishop of Durham. Foxe retired to his See of Winchester, “thinking of all the souls I never see.”21 Despite increasing blindness, he devoted the last years of his life to religion—making up for “eighteen years’ negliegence22—and education; he founded Corpus Christi College at Oxford and rebuilt the choir of Winchester Cathedral. He died in 1528.

  The worldly influence of Wolsey was counterbalanced by the rise to power of Thomas More. Much against his inclinations, More had been persuaded to enter the King’s service in 1515 after successfully completing two diplomatic missions for him. “You would hardly believe how unwilling I am,” he told Erasmus. More was unlike most courtiers in that he was an intellectual who understood the superficiality of court life and disdained the trappings of wealth and power. Henry liked and respected him, valued his opinions, and would often ask him to join him in his private apartments to discuss astronomy, geometry, divinity, and other subjects; sometimes at night he would take him up onto the leads of the palace, “there to consider with him the diversities, courses, motions and operations of the stars and planets.”23 On other occasions, the King and Queen would invite More to make merry with them, and Henry might tease him about his dislike of the court. More got on well with Wolsey, even though he may not have fully approved of him, but the contrast between the two men could not have been greater.

  In 1516, More’s Utopia was published. It described the ideal state: a neo-Platonic, quasi-fascist republic with laws based on the central tenets of humanism. It was a powerful critique of the political system in England and the vicious machinations of monarchs and courtiers, but such was More’s international reputation, and the eloquence of his Latin prose, that the book won him praise everywhere. More was already working as an unofficial secretary to the King, and in 1517, his admiring master preferred him to the Privy Council.

  In June, the Queen’s favourite lady-in-waiting, Maria de Salinas, left her service to marry William, Lord Willoughby d’Eresby, who was Master of the Royal Hart Hounds; Maria was granted letters of denization beforehand, and Katherine ensured that she was provided with a handsome dowry. The wedding took place in the church of the Observant Friars at Greenwich. After Maria had taken up residence at Parham Park in Sussex, Queen Katherine invited her frequently to court; she may have attended the christening of Maria’s son in 1517, and was probably a godmother to her daughter Katherine, who was born in 1519 and named in her honour.

  After a joust on 7 July in honour of the translation of the relics of St. Thomas Becket at Canterbury, the King set off on his summer progress, visiting Winchester and spending two nights at The Vyne, sleeping in a great bed hung with green velvet, which his host, Sir William Sandys, had bought for him; in commemoration of this visit, Sandys built a long gallery lined with linenfold panelling embellished with the royal arms and the devices of Queen Katherine, and a chapel lit by windows depicting Henry VIII, Katherine of Aragon, and Margaret Tudor at their devotions, with their patron saints. This glass, which was crafted in the Italian Renaissance style, appears to have been based on designs by Bernard van Orley, and was probably originally commissioned for the Chapel of the Holy Ghost at Basingstoke, which the King visited in 1516, and brought to The Vyne around 1522. 24

  Perhaps t
he greatest foreign musician to grace the royal musical establishment arrived at court in 1516 “to wait upon the King in his chamber.” He was Friar Dionysio Memmo, who had been organist at St. Mark’s Basilica in his native city of Venice. Henry VIII had invited him to England, and he brought with him a fine organ, “at great expense.”25 The King was enraptured at hearing him play—he has “a greater opinion of him than words can express”—and promoted him at once to chief musician. At Henry’s request, the Pope released Memmo from his vows of poverty, chastity, and obedience, and he became a royal chaplain. Memmo gathered about him a group of highly talented musicians, among them a young Venetian lutenist to whom the King “never wearied of listening,” and who would entertain Henry and his court for up to four hours at a time. Knowing his own worth, Memmo composed a song with lyrics hinting that an increase in salary would be welcome; Henry took the hint, and rewarded him with the lucrative benefice of Hanbury, Staffordshire. Memmo left England for Portugal in 1525, and died around 1533.26

  Another virtuoso organist, Benedict de Opitiis of Antwerp, joined the musicians of the Chamber at this time, at a salary of about £20 (£6,000) a year,27 which was much more than that paid to most court musicians. Together with Richard Sampson, the gifted Bishop of Chichester, he composed exceptional sacred music for the Chapel Royal.

  The Christmas of 1516, which was kept with the usual lavish festivities at Greenwich, was graced by the presence of the three queens. Margaret Tudor, who was unable to afford New Year’s gifts, was saved from embarrassment by Wolsey, who gave her £200 (£60,000) to pay for them. On Twelfth Night, there was a pageant entitled The Garden of Esperance,28 with an entire artificial garden on a pageant car.