by Linda Porter
For while Scotland suffered domestic upheaval and uncertainty as the long minority of James V continued, the young king’s English uncle (his nearest male relative, an uncomfortable reality for the Scots) was determined to cut a figure on the European stage. Best remembered for his six wives and for establishing the Reformation in England, the thirteen years of Henry’s reign between the ending of the French war in 1514 and the decision to seek an annulment of his marriage to Katherine of Aragon in 1527 are something of a lost period in the general perception of his reign. The long-held view that Henry was lazy in matters of government, preferring the company of a small circle of hangers-on and flatterers who hunted, jousted and caroused with him, has been challenged by recent historians. Henry undoubtedly liked the chivalric and physical aspects of kingship, the bravado and bonhomie of a clique of followers, as much as he liked to dabble in writing music and verse. He was also a good, if slightly pompous, son of the Church, keen to take up his pen against the renegade German monk Martin Luther. Henry’s 1521 treatise against the early stages of the Reformation in Europe, the Assertio Septem Sacramentorum (In Defence of the Seven Sacraments) was the first book published by a king of England. It won him plaudits from Rome and the title of ‘Defender of the Faith’ while also opening up an ongoing controversy with Luther and his supporters. Henry, who probably did not write all of the work personally, had established himself as a ruler who was not afraid to engage in theological debate, though he was, for the moment, on the side of the conservative religious forces in Europe.
But there was much more to him than intellectual aspiration and personal braggadocio. Henry was a man of formidable intelligence, closely engaged in political decision-making. He never abdicated the responsibility of rule for personal pleasure. It was during this time that the king’s style of government evolved and matured and foreign policy dominated. As such, the significance of these years should not be underestimated. While it is not necessary to rehearse the changing alliances and lengthy diplomatic proceedings that lay behind them, there are a number of constants. England was not irrelevant to what was going on in Europe but neither was it as important as Henry VIII liked to think.
The developing struggle between the Habsburgs, originally a German family but now ruling much of western Europe, and their enemies, the French Valois kings, defined the first half of the sixteenth century in Europe. England and Scotland both had a part to play in this contest but were not the major protagonists. Henry VIII, throughout his reign, saw himself as a new Henry V, a king who would restore England’s glory in France and regain at least some of the territories lost in the Hundred Years War. He had resurrected the old English claim to the throne of France when he went to war in 1513. But it was always a dream and only in his youth and then again in old age did the king make any effort to make the dream come true. This meant that his natural predisposition was to support the young Holy Roman Emperor, Charles V, the nephew of Katherine of Aragon, against France. Charles’s grandfather, the wily and unreliable Maximilian, died in 1519. In theory, the role of Holy Roman Emperor was elective and not hereditary and, for a while, both Henry VIII and Francis I harboured thoughts that it might come their way. But Maximilian had distributed enough money among the seven German electors that there was only ever going to be one outcome. He told his cautious grandson: ‘If you wish to gain mankind, you must play at a high stake.’ This cynical but prescient remark might be taken as a watchword for how diplomacy and politics have long been conducted.
Henry had never, realistically, stood any chance of gaining the imperial Crown so he and his advisers sought to maximize English influence by looking to their advantage as events unfolded. If this meant abandoning Charles for a while, they were perfectly happy to pursue a better relationship with France. The 1520s saw a succession of treaties in which the pendulum swung one way and then another. When relations with France improved, then there was less tension with Scotland, its natural ally in the British Isles. When they deteriorated, the prospect of a renewed outbreak of hostilities in the British Isles was never that far away.
Yet Henry was not solely preoccupied with being taken seriously as a European monarch, much as this appealed to his ego and sense of theatre. The Buckingham episode was intended to underline his kingly power at home. European rivals could be friends or enemies, depending on circumstances, but in England Henry would brook no opposition. Underneath this determination lay an uncomfortable reality. Henry’s only legitimate child was a daughter, Mary, born in 1516. Katherine of Aragon’s childbearing years were behind her as the new decade of the 1520s dawned. Both of Henry’s sisters had produced boys but the king himself had only an illegitimate son, Henry Fitzroy, born to Elizabeth Blount, one of Queen Katherine’s ladies, in 1519.7 Though this birth gave confidence that the king could produce boys, it did not alter the fact that Katherine of Aragon was now extremely unlikely to present the king with a male heir.
Her last pregnancy was in 1518 and the king’s anxiety about it gives us a glimpse of how seriously he regarded her situation. He wrote to Wolsey that he was fearful of Katherine miscarrying: ‘the chief cause why I am so loath to repair to London were, because about this time is partly of her dangerous times, and because of that I would remove her as little as I may now. My Lord, I write this unto you not as a ensured thing but as a thing wherein I have great hope … and because I do well know that this thing will be comfortable to you to understand.’8 Alas, for the king and queen, all Henry’s care came to nothing. The child was a stillborn daughter. There would be no more pregnancies, though a further nine years went by before the king resolved to end his marriage to his Spanish first wife.
Throughout this period, Henry was supported by his immensely able minister, Thomas Wolsey, archbishop of York and later cardinal. An experienced diplomat who had been on a mission to Scotland under Henry VII but who knew France better, Wolsey was undoubtedly the major figure of Henry VIII’s reign until he came unstuck when he failed to deliver a speedy annulment of Henry’s marriage to Katherine of Aragon. Before that, he had seemed the perfect servant, sharing Henry’s humanist agenda and interests while consistently striving to enhance the regal majesty of his sovereign. If Wolsey chose to live superbly as well, Henry did not mind; the sumptuous state and palaces of his adviser reflected the king’s own glory. The fact that Wolsey was the son of a tavern-keeper-turned-butcher from Ipswich in Suffolk did not bother Henry, though it raised eyebrows among the old aristocracy of England, who disliked Wolsey’s airs and graces. While he had the king’s favour, no one could touch him and many importuned him. And perhaps his greatest hour came in France in the summer of 1520.
Wolsey was given the task of organizing the meeting that took place between Henry VIII and Francis I that was known as the Field of Cloth of Gold. Today we would call this a summit, though its ostentatious magnificence certainly makes modern international gatherings look positively grey. The temporary encampment that was set up for Henry and Katherine at Guisnes, on territory that was still held by England, made contemporaries marvel and fall over themselves with superlatives. This was, of course, the intention. Henry VIII inherited his father’s belief in public display as a means of reinforcing the monarchy, but he exercised it on a far more lavish scale. As a statement of wealth, luxury and conspicuous consumption, the Field of Cloth of Gold surpassed expectations. Five thousand people, including almost all the high nobility, accompanied the king and queen across the English Channel. Henry was seeking to impress and to impose himself on his own aristocracy every bit as much as he wanted to demonstrate his power and wealth to his French rival.9
Strangely left behind, however, was the four-year-old Princess Mary, who, as the betrothed of the French dauphin, might have been expected to attend. Certainly Francis I was perplexed by her absence and sent a trio of French diplomats to London to ascertain whether the child had some impediment that the king of England wished to hide. Mary soon quashed any fears by handling her first international audience wi
th great aplomb for one so young. James IV’s old adversary, Surrey, by now elevated to the dukedom of Norfolk, was the most prominent noble left behind to attend to the business of government. He reported to the king that the princess ‘is right merry, and in prosperous health and state, daily exercising herself in virtuous pastimes.’ The reasons for her staying behind in London remain unknown but might possibly have had something to do with Katherine of Aragon’s known opposition to the meeting with Francis I.10
The temporary palace constructed at Guisnes was decked out with cloth of gold and precious stones. Fountains ran with red and white wine, prodigious quantities of food (over two thousand sheep were slaughtered) and drink were supplied and the ladies wore their richest clothes and costliest jewels. Indeed, the role of ladies at the meeting had been deemed important from the outset. Sir Richard Wingfield, Henry VIII’s ambassador to France, reported that a major search was underway at the French court to find the fairest women. He hoped that Queen Katherine ‘would bring such in her band that the visage of England, which hath always had the prize’ would be appropriately represented. Francis I himself told Wingfield that he hoped Henry would not be displeased if he brought a good number of ladies along, to which Wingfield, no doubt well aware of his monarch’s weakness for the fair sex, replied that he had never seen the English king ‘encumbered or find fault with an over great press of ladies’.11
The French court, encamped nearby at Ardres, which was on French territory, could not be seen because the valley between the two camps had been artificially widened. Great care was taken to ensure that one side could not intimidate or outdo the other. Francis, typically, had not held back in his own preparations. The French king’s tent was twelve feet high and covered with gold brocade and three wide stripes of blue velvet ‘powdered’ with gold fleur-de-lis, the symbol of France. It had taken one French official no fewer than seven visits to Florence to obtain the right cloth of gold. The sight of all this finery prompted one observer to say that it surpassed the pyramids of Egypt and an Italian commentator, who felt that the English camp actually outdid the French, noted that Leonardo da Vinci could not have done better than the design of Henry VIII’s tent.12
Proceedings started with the meeting of the monarchs in the vale of Ardres, where the two kings alighted from their horses and embraced, Henry telling Francis that ‘I never saw prince with my eyes, that might of my heart be more loved.’ These fair words were rendered somewhat hollow by the fact that, just before embarking from Dover, he had entertained the emperor Charles V with a similar outpouring of affection and pageantry. But Henry was not to be deterred from his immediate aim in France: to establish a personal rapport that might avoid an outbreak of war in the future. So he dined, jousted and wrestled, at one point throwing Francis to the ground in an exhibition of English prowess that had to be quickly hushed up. And while Queen Katherine entertained Francis in her quarters, Henry dined with the delicate but clever French Queen Claude in hers. Claude was no beauty (but then neither was the overweight and puffy Katherine of Aragon by this time) but she had borne sons and her husband, though consistently unfaithful, was actually rather fond of her. With his large nose and swarthy colouring, Francis was himself less handsome than the golden king of England, but a string of high-ranking mistresses bore witness to his other attractions and, of course, his supreme power in France.
Yet when all the festivities, lasting from 7 to 24 June, were over, there was no treaty of alliance and uncertainty still hung over the future of relations between England and France. There was never going to be more than a temporary respite in hostilities between Francis I and Charles V, and Henry was torn. His natural instinct was to side with his wife’s nephew but he did not wish to abandon the Treaty of London, the non-aggression pact signed by seven European powers, including France and the Holy Roman Empire, in 1518. But in the end even the largely pro-French Wolsey, the master of ceremonies at the Field of Cloth of Gold, knew that the treaty was doomed to failure. At Bruges in 1521, Wolsey signed a new alliance with Charles V on Henry’s behalf. It would lead to war with both Scotland and France within two years.
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THE DUKE OF ALBANY’S second period of residence in Scotland came at a time of heightened tension and was especially displeasing to Henry VIII. The duke’s standoff with the earl of Angus ended in submission by Queen Margaret’s estranged husband, who went off to exile in France, taking his daughter with him. There he stayed until 1524. The choice of France as opposed to England as his place of retreat has never really been explained but must, presumably, have been dictated by Albany. Angus was hardly known as a French sympathizer and his uncle, Gavin Douglas, was already in England trying to get more support for the Douglas family, so fleeing across the border would have been the more likely choice. Margaret had initially been a supporter of the elder Douglas, nominating him to the Highland bishopric of Dunkeld in happier times, but her rift with Angus had long since extended to the rest of the family. When Gavin died of the plague in London in 1522 he had already spread salacious rumours about Margaret’s relationship with Albany, rumours which Henry VIII was quite willing to believe.
The idea that his sister might now marry Albany (whose French wife did not die until 1524) was taken seriously by the king of England. In January 1522 he wrote to the three estates, the body politic of Scotland, in high dudgeon. Albany had, he asserted, given ‘the charge of [King] James to a stranger of inferior repute, intending to sever the queen from her husband and marry her himself, to the great danger of the king, the ruin of the queen, and Henry’s honour.’ Frustrated by the duke’s continued influence over Scottish affairs, Henry was ready to believe that Margaret was having an affair with Albany and he held forth on the subject in a letter delivered to the Scottish queen by the Clarencieux Herald the month after his separate missive to the Scottish government.
Margaret was, at first, reduced to tears by what she termed her brother’s ‘sharp and unkind letter’ but her considered response was feisty enough. She had written in favour of Albany only for the sake of peace and ‘could do no less’. ‘Nothing’, she stated, ‘is dearer to me than the weal and surety of my son.’ She accused Wolsey of slandering her in front of Henry’s council when he claimed that she ‘loved the Governor to my dishonor’. The idea that Albany intended to harm the king she dismissed as ridiculous and she chided her brother with his apparent intention to make war on herself and her son, while at the same time upbraiding him for his neglect of her personal interests: ‘As to her treatment in this country, which she had hoped Henry would have got remedied, she has found a better friend in Albany than any other.’ James V, she said, was being looked after ‘by as good and true lords as any in the realm’ and she demanded to know what greater security for the young king her brother thought he could offer. If his unreasonable demands and accusations continued, ‘the world will think he aims at his nephew’s destruction.’13
This war of words constituted the most bitter exchange of correspondence between the Tudor siblings. Their relationship, never tender, was permanently damaged. Henry’s mistrust of his sister, his willingness to believe that all her doings were really the result of feminine weakness and selfishness, took little regard of her situation. Perhaps, more than anything, the episode underlines Henry’s inability to see things from her perspective. But then, as God’s representative on the throne of England, why should he? And his anger was no doubt coloured by the fact that he was once more allied with the Habsburgs against the French and was planning a further invasion of northern France. His mood cannot have been helped by the uncompromising response of Chancellor James Beaton and the Scottish estates to Henry’s lecture, pointing out that ‘if as appears by Henry’s letters, the good done by Albany is taken in evil part by the king and the sinister reports of Scottish traitors easily believed, they see not what love can subsist between him and his nephew.’14
Albany shuttled between Scotland and France in the period 1521–4 but though he came w
ith four thousand soldiers, eighty-seven ships and six hundred horses in the autumn of 1523, he failed to persuade the Scots to give wholehearted support to his campaign. The memory of Flodden was too raw and even the Scottish lords who admired him were reluctant. At the end of October 1523, his only serious military endeavour against England ended ignominiously when he abandoned his siege of Wark Castle in Northumberland after just three days.
The final realization that the Scots wanted his presence but would not commit to fight for him struck the duke hard. At heart, he was always a servant of France, but he had done his best for a troubled land and its boy monarch. Now his thoughts turned to returning home for good. Even the pleas of Francis I’s mother could not keep him in Scotland for much longer. On 31 May 1524, he set sail from the port of Dumbarton for the last time, having, as he believed, ‘reduced the kingdom into excellent order’. Though he might have thought that he could always come back yet again if needed, his days of influence were gone. In July 1524 Queen Margaret, supported by the powerful Hamilton family and their senior representative, the earl of Arran, effectively engineered a coup d’état by declaring King James of age to rule. The lad had been chafing for some time under the restrictions of his life at Stirling Castle and, at twelve years old, was keen to assume at least some of the mantle of kingship. His mother, however, had every intention of exercising power through him, as she had tried to do more than a decade before.
