Henry VIII: The King and His Court

by Alison Weir

  The Princess was to share her lessons with a handful of carefully chosen companions. All would be taught Latin, French, some Italian and Greek, grammar, music, traditional dancing, household management, and good manners, and were required to read selected passages from the Bible every day. Vives himself appears to have instructed Mary in Latin; all other subjects were taught by the devout, kindly Richard Fetherston, the Queen’s former chaplain, while Katherine regularly read with her daughter and helped with her translations. Like all the Tudors, Mary was gifted with musical ability. She had been taught from a very early age to play the virginals and lute,23 and her proud father loved to show off her precocious talent.

  In May 1523, there were more lavish entertainments when King Christian II of Denmark visited England with his wife, Isabella of Austria, sister of Charles V. Mary Tudor, Duchess of Suffolk, came to court to help Queen Katherine entertain her niece, and was given precedence over the Danish Queen at table.

  That summer saw “the high and mighty prince, Charles, Duke of Suffolk” dispatched to France with fourteen thousand men to assist Charles V in his bid to conquer French territory. Yet although Suffolk displayed “courage and forwardness,” his forces were defeated by appalling weather conditions. In December, wretched and demoralised, the Duke defied the King’s order to stay where he was and returned with his army to England. Henry, hearing at first hand of their misfortunes, decided to overlook his commander in chief’s disobedience.24

  Back in England, Anne Boleyn had rashly become romantically involved with Lord Henry Percy, heir to the Earl of Northumberland, who was a member of Wolsey’s household and would frequently “resort for his pastime unto the Queen’s chamber, and there would fall in dalliance among the Queen’s maidens.” Percy, unfortunately, was already precontracted to Lady Mary Talbot, daughter of the Earl of Shrewsbury and a better match for him than Anne was. Percy had the nerve to ask Wolsey if his betrothal could be broken, but received a dressing down for his temerity. The Cardinal sent at once for his father, who hauled his ungrateful son back up north and made immediate arrangements for his marriage to take place.

  George Cavendish, who relates this tale, asserts that Wolsey had acted on the orders of the King himself, who cherished a secret desire for Anne Boleyn. There is no other evidence of Henry pursuing her before February 1526, and a furious Anne was sent home from court in disgrace after the Percy affair, vowing to be revenged on Wolsey. Had Henry been so keen on her, he would surely not have allowed her to leave court. Furthermore, in Henry’s first letters to Anne, which date from 1527, he refers to having been in love with her for just over a year.

  During 1523, the King was much occupied with improving or acquiring property. He spent £500 (£150,000) on works at Greenwich, improving Henry VII’s riverside lodgings and enlarging the gardens. He acquired Parlaunt Manor, Gloucestershire, on the death without heirs of its owner, Sir Edward Stanley, and converted it into a keeper’s lodge. In 1524, he bought the fifteenth-century hilltop castle at Ampthill, Bedfordshire, which had a fine great hall leading off a central courtyard, and several stone towers. Ampthill was renowned for its “marvellous good health and clean air”25 and excellent deer park, and Henry used it fairly frequently as a progress house. Between 1533 and 1547, he built extensive new royal apartments there. 26

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  “All the Enemies of England Are Gone”

  In March 1524, Henry ordered from the Greenwich workshops “a new harness made of his own device and fashion, such as no armourer before that time had seen.” Eager to try it out, he arranged a tournament in which Suffolk was to be his chief opponent, but as they entered the lists, Henry forgot to lower his visor, and as the two charged towards each other, alarmed spectators screamed, “Hold! Hold!,” for Suffolk’s lance was pointed at the King’s exposed face. But the Duke, who was wearing a heavy helmet, could not see or hear much. As he crashed into Henry, his lance “struck the King on the brow right under the guard of the headpiece on the very skull cap or basinet piece to which the barbette [visor] is hinged for safety. The Duke’s spear broke into splinters and pushed the King’s visor so far back that all the King’s headpiece was full of splinters.” Henry emerged apparently unscathed, but Suffolk was badly shaken, and swore never again to run against his sovereign. Henry reassured him that “none was to blame but himself ” and then ran six more courses just to prove that he had taken no hurt, “which was a great joy and comfort to all his subjects present.”1 It has been suggested, however, that the headaches from which he suffered in later life resulted from the blow to the forehead that he sustained in this accident.

  The King had come literally within an inch of losing his life, and both he and his contemporaries were fearfully aware that, with no son to succeed him, England had come perilously near to civil war. For there were those who might well dispute the right of a mere girl to succeed, and several noblemen with Plantagenet blood who might attempt to enforce their claims to the throne.

  Henry and his advisers were becoming increasingly preoccupied with the problem of the succession. It was five years since the Queen’s last pregnancy and Katherine, at thirty-eight, was now going through the menopause. Since 1522, Henry, prompted by doubts raised by his confessor, John Longland, Bishop of Lincoln, had been questioning the validity of his marriage. The Biblical Book of Leviticus warned that a man who incestuously married his brother’s wife would be punished with childless-ness, and although Pope Julius II had granted a dispensation for his marriage to Katherine, the King had begun to see his lack of sons as a judgement on him for offending God. Yet for the moment he did nothing: the Queen was much loved by his subjects, and was a virtuous woman for whom he had a deep affection; above all Henry did not wish to prejudice the imperial alliance by putting away the Emperor’s own aunt.

  In private, however, the King and Queen were drifting apart. In 1531, Henry claimed that, by the spring of 1525, when Katherine’s periods finally ceased, although he occasionally shared a bed with her for form’s sake, he had stopped having sexual relations with her, apparently because she had a gynaecological condition that repelled him.2 However, in 1528, when he was still sleeping in the same bed with the Queen, he told Cardinal Campeggio that he had not had intercourse with her for two years. 3

  The age gap between the royal couple was never more obvious. Katherine, who had long since lost the prettiness of her youth and was now a dumpy, middle-aged matron, increasingly sought solace in the company of her daughter and in religious observances. Once, returning to Richmond with Vives by barge from Syon Abbey, whither she had gone to pray, the Queen expressed a desire for a more tranquil life than the one she now led. If she had to choose between extreme adversity and the great prosperity which she now enjoyed, she declared, she would prefer the former, since “real loss of spiritual integrity usually visited the prosperous.”4 Yet when called upon in the future to make such a choice, her response would be quite different.

  Henry celebrated St. George’s Day, 1524, at Beaulieu. The following month, he found himself mourning the death of one of his most eminent councillors, the Duke of Norfolk, who passed away at his castle of Framlingham in Suffolk. Henry had last seen Norfolk the previous year, when they had had a brief but obviously affectionate conversation.

  The office of Earl Marshal had been granted to Norfolk for life only, and Henry wasted no time in conferring it upon Suffolk, a thing which always rankled with the new Duke of Norfolk, another Thomas Howard, who had succeeded his father as Lord Treasurer in 1522 and served as Lord High Admiral until 1525. He was fifty-two.

  The third Duke of Norfolk was short, spare, and black-haired. 5 He was a dour, pragmatic, sometimes brutal man whose portrait by Holbein6 shows a face like granite with thin lips and a high-bridged, aristocratic nose. A martyr to rheumatism and indigestion, he was constantly grumbling or sighing, but he was an efficient and often ruthless military commander, and an able and polished courtier who could be liberal and affable, yet who had a nose for dange
r and a talent for survival. The guiding factor of his life was self-interest.

  Now that Buckingham was dead, Norfolk regarded himself as the chief representative of the older nobility at court, and had little time for the “new men”—a term he himself coined. “A prince may make a nobleman but not a gentleman,” he once said.7 He was fiercely anticlerical, and hated Wolsey, which made him Suffolk’s natural ally; in 1525, they joined forces in an unsuccessful attempt to bring down the Cardinal on the issue of taxation.8 The Duke was confident, unscrupulous, and, as a leading member of the Privy Council, one of the King’s most powerful and willing henchmen.

  Norfolk was typical of his caste in that he despised book learning, loved hunting, and was energetic in the administration of his landed interests in East Anglia. He was a connoisseur of jewellery, loved ceremonial and pageantry, and was zealous for the advancement of his family. In 1525, he rebuilt his father’s old manor of Kenninghall in Norfolk as a fine palace with two courts in chequered brickwork. Here he lived in great state in luxuriously appointed rooms above the chapel.9 His tastes were rather up-to-date for such a reactionary, for he favoured the antique and the classical in art and architecture.

  Norfolk was closely related to the Boleyns, with whom he also made common cause; his sister Elizabeth was married to Sir Thomas. Their son George, who was probably no more than twenty-two at this time, was now to share in his family’s advancement. This talented young man had first been brought to court by his father in 1514, when he took part in a mummery. Later he had begun his career as one of the King’s Pages.10 He was very good-looking11 and very promiscuous. In fact, according to George Cavendish, he lived in a “bestial” fashion, forcing widows, deflowering virgins, and apparently not even stopping at rape but taking women at will. At the end of his life, he refused to elaborate on his terrible sins because he did not wish to tempt anyone to imitate him.12 It has been suggested that he indulged in homosexual activity, but there is no evidence for this, although he may well have committed buggery with female partners.

  Boleyn’s other fault was his overweening pride, but for which— according to the poet Sir Thomas Wyatt—he would have been very popular, for he was both intelligent and witty. He was a respected poet, could compose ballads, and, like his father, spoke fluent French.

  Around 1524–1525, George Boleyn married Jane Parker, the daughter of the erudite scholar Henry, Lord Morley, a distant cousin of the King through the Beauforts, and the translator of Petrarch. Morley, who resided at Hallingbury Place in Essex, was a Gentleman Usher of the Privy Chamber and a member of Katherine of Aragon’s intellectual circle. He had been unable to meet Sir Thomas Boleyn’s demand for a dowry of £300 (£90,000), but the King generously made up the shortfall.13 He also granted George Boleyn the manor of Grimston in Norfolk, perhaps as a wedding gift.14

  At Christmas 1524 Henry, who was now nearly thirty-four, took part for the last time in a major tournament. It was to have formed part of a great pageant, The Castle of Loyalty, and a castle, twenty feet square and fifty feet high, was built to the King’s design in the tiltyard at Greenwich, “but the carpenters were so dull they understood not his intent, and wrought all thing contrary.” With the structure evidently not stable enough to withstand an assault, the pageant was abandoned, although the jousts went ahead. With echoes of happier times, the tournament began with the Queen seating herself in the model castle; there then came before her “two ancient knights” who “craved her leave to break spears.” When Katherine praised their courage in performing feats of chivalry at their advanced age, they threw off their disguises to reveal the King and Suffolk. 15

  A battle of a far more spectacular nature was about to take place in Italy. In February 1525, the Emperor inflicted a humiliating defeat on Francis I at the Battle of Pavia, and took him prisoner. The troublesome Yorkist pretender, Richard de la Pole, fighting for the French, was slain in the battle. When a messenger brought Henry the news, the King exclaimed, “All the enemies of England are gone!” He told the man he was as welcome as the Archangel Gabriel had been to the Virgin Mary, and ordered that bonfires be lit in the streets of London and free wine be distributed to the citizens. In March, the King went in state to St. Paul’s to give thanks for the Emperor’s victory. Later, he commissioned a painting of the Battle of Pavia to remind him of this great triumph.

  Henry might have gloated over the capture of King Francis, but he was still in thrall to French Renaissance culture and determined to rival it. In the autumn of 1526, Francis’s sister, Marguerite of Valois, sent Henry three framed portrait miniatures of Francis I and his sons by Jean Clouet, the French court painter.16 These were the first examples seen in England of a new art form called limning—the word “miniature” was not used until the seventeenth century—and they immediately set a trend at the Tudor court.

  The art of miniature painting had its origins in the intricate illustrations in illuminated manuscripts, for which similar techniques had been used, and also in Italian portrait medals. Circular miniature portraits had themselves appeared in manuscripts and on official documents; now they became popular in their own right. They were usually mounted on stiff card, painted in vivid colours against a blue background with gold lettering, and set in a frame or box, perhaps fashioned from gold or ivory. They were very expensive and therefore relatively rare and much prized.

  Many of the manuscripts from which limning derived were produced in Ghent and Bruges. The most celebrated illuminators came from a family called Horenbout (a name sometimes anglicized to Hornebolte in official documents), who had been established in Ghent since 1414 and had recently worked for Margaret of Austria. Around 1524,17 three of its members—father, son, and daughter—arrived in England, probably by royal invitation.

  The head of the family was Gerard Horenbout, a friend of Albrecht Dürer; Gerard had been court painter to the Regent Margaret, who commissioned him to replace the missing miniatures in the famous Sforza Book of Hours. 18 In England, he illustrated manuscripts for Wolsey, and married one Margaret Saunders, who died in 1529.19 From around 1528 to 1532, when he disappears from English records, Gerard worked for the King in the court scriptorium before returning to Ghent, where he died in 1540.

  His daughter, Susanna Horenbout, born in 1503, was also an artist, and is said to have painted miniatures, although none can now be identified. Her work must have been good because Dürer had admired it when she was just eighteen. Her connection with the court is proved by her marriages to two of its officers—John Parker, Yeoman of the Robes, and John Gylmyn, Serjeant of the Woodyard—and she remained in England until her death in 1545. There is, however, no certain evidence of her artistic activities in England, and the royal accounts do not record any separate payments to her.

  Gerard’s son, Lucas Horenbout, had been born around 1490/95 and trained in his father’s workshop. In 1512, he had become a member of the Painters’ Guild at Ghent. Lucas’s name first appears in the royal accounts in September 1525, when he was awarded a generous life pension of £33.6s (£9,990) a year,20 proof of the King’s high regard for his talent. Lucas Horenbout was the first major portrait painter of the reign, the artist responsible for developing and popularising the art of limning in England, and in so doing setting a fashionable trend that would endure for centuries.

  The King, impressed with Lucas’s work as an illuminator, appears to have commissioned him to paint miniatures in the style of those by Clouet, which Horenbout executed with skill and delicacy. In 1527, Henry was able to reciprocate Marguerite’s gesture and send her limnings of himself 21 and his daughter Mary, and these were probably by Horenbout. 22 In 1528, Lucas was promoted to King’s Painter.

  Until comparatively recently, Lucas Horenbout’s work received little recognition; now, at least seventeen important miniatures, dating chiefly from 1526–1535, have been identified as his: there are five portraits of Henry VIII,23 three of Katherine of Aragon, 24 two probably incorrectly identified as Anne Boleyn (which will be disc
ussed later),25 and single studies of the Duke of Suffolk, 26 the Princess Mary,27 Charles V,28 Henry Fitzroy, 29 Jane Seymour,30 Prince Edward,31 and Katherine Parr.32 It has also been suggested that the portrait of Margaret Pole33 from the so-called cast shadow workshop might be by Horenbout, and that thirteen other full-size portraits from this atelier, of lesser workmanship—with sitters including Henry V, Edward IV, Henry VIII, Jane Seymour, and Prince Edward—are from his studio. Horenbout is also said to have painted a portrait of William Carey, husband of Mary Boleyn. 34

  Little is known of Henry VIII’s miniature collection. Like his daughter Elizabeth I, he probably kept it in his privy lodgings. The King used miniatures as diplomatic tools—one was to play a grossly overinflated role in his courtship of Anne of Cleves—and he gave them to his courtiers as marks of high favour. The one of himself he later gave to Jane Seymour was hung round her neck on a chain, all too visible to her jealous mistress, Anne Boleyn, who ripped it off in anger.

  In 1525, Henry’s most famous fool, Will Somers, entered his service. Lean and “hollow-eyed,” and with a stoop, this Shropshire-born comedian is said to have come to the attention of Richard Fermour, a merchant of the Staple at Calais, who brought him to Greenwich to be presented to the King. Henry was immediately won over by Somers’s wicked sense of humour and offered him a place at court. An instant rapport was struck up between the two men, and soon it was being said that “in all the court few men were more beloved than this fool,” who for the next twenty years would rule the King with his merry prattle35 and be the constant companion of his leisure hours.

  Somers was very much in demand. He had monarch and courtiers in fits of laughter as his comical face was thrust through a gap in the arras; then, with his monkey on his shoulder, he would walk in a mincing way around the room, rolling his eyes. The monkey might perform tricks, and Somers would tell jokes, himself laughing uncontrollably at the punchlines, or mercilessly impersonating those who were the butts of his jests. He is also believed to have appeared in the ram’s horn helmet presented to Henry by Maximilian, which was for a long time traditionally associated with him. Yet Somers never sought to capitalise on his friendship with the King, kept in the background when not performing, and preserved his privacy.