Henry (31 page)

T
HE
W
ESTMINSTER TOURNAMENT OF
F
EBRUARY
1511 was a turning point in Henry’s life. He was only in his twentieth year. But it marked his coming of age.

The author of
The Great Chronicle
, an avid spectator at the event, was quite sure of this. And he puts it in straightforward terms of before and after. ‘At the beginning in that field’, he notes, ‘was many a fearful and timorous heart for [Henry]; considering his excellency and his tenderness of age.’ But his performance put all such fears to rest – for he could not only give, he could take as well:

A collective sigh of relief went round the lists. The king would survive – and thrive:

It was, the chronicler concluded, a sort of revelation: for the first time, Henry had demonstrated ‘the excellency of [his] person, which never before that day, as I think, was seen in proper person’.

The English is convoluted. But the meaning is clear. Henry had come out as himself – and as a man.
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He had also – in the ultimate boy’s dream – shown himself to be as good as, if not better than, the sporting heroes of his boyhood and youth; indeed, he now joined their ranks.

This was more than joining a club: it was initiation into a gang, a band of brothers – or rather brothers, half-brothers, brothers-in-law and blood brothers – who fought together,
danced, drank and played together, did deals together and, in the end, showed themselves ready to die together.

The godfather was Sir Thomas Brandon, master of the horse. He had been the principal custodian of the chivalric tradition in the latter years of Henry VII’s reign; he had helped carry it through the dark days of the Suffolk conspiracy, when jousting and Yorkist treason seemed almost synonymous; and he had been at the heart of the revival of the tournament that followed Henry’s own move to court as prince of Wales.

He had even sung of the joys of jousts and jousters. The occasion was the tournament held in early March 1508 at Richmond. On the sixth, as André explains, there was a day’s interruption from the sport ‘while the horses were resting’. Brandon showed his versatility by stepping into the breach and entertaining the court and its guests with martial music and song: that ‘night’, André writes, ‘a very tuneful song in praise of warriors was repeatedly sung to the lyre [? lute] in melodious fashion by [Sir Thomas] Brandon’.
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Henry we know was at court; he may even have been in the audience. And now that he was king he would sing such songs himself – and write their words and music too.

As Falstaff to King Henry rather than Prince Hal, Brandon seemed destined for great things in the new reign. Under a connoisseur of hunting and horseflesh like Henry, his mastership of the horse assumed an inflated importance. He joined Sir Henry Marney as one of the new king’s men in the inner ring of the council, and he was given the immensely profitable office of warden and chief justice of the royal forests south of the Trent.
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Henry’s decision to joust publicly, if incognito, in the Richmond tournament of January 1510 was the culmination of all that Brandon stood for. The royal stables, of which he was departmental head as master of the horse, must have been in on the secret. But by then Brandon himself was probably past caring. Earlier that month, he had suddenly fallen ill. On the eleventh, the day before Henry and Compton ran in the Richmond tournament, Brandon wrote his will, and he died on the twenty-seventh.

Others would reap the harvest he had sowed. And the reapers got to work quickly. As the court regrouped at Westminster for the Shrovetide revels, Henry was lobbied to divide Brandon’s offices and grants among the participants. Charles Brandon, Thomas’s nephew and already one of Henry’s closest cronies, succeeded his uncle as marshal of King’s Bench. The office was virtually a Brandon appanage:
held by the Brandon family since the middle of the fifteenth century, it controlled the Marshalsea gaol, which lay in Southwark, on the east side of Borough High Street, opposite to the Brandons’ town-house on the west.
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But Charles, though close to Henry, by no means monopolized his favour at this stage and more of Thomas’s spoils went elsewhere. His valuable stewardship of the West Country lands of the duchies of Exeter and Somerset was given to Henry Bourchier, earl of Essex. Essex had been another mentor to the young bloods at the court of Henry VII and Henry had made this role official by appointing him captain of the greatly expanded band of spears that he had set up the previous autumn. The office of warden and chief justice of the royal forests was granted to Sir Thomas Lovell, one of the leading councillors to survive the change of reign. But the plum position – the mastership of the horse – was bagged by Sir Thomas Knyvet. Jouster, reveller, hunter and all-round hearty young man, he was probably closest of all to Henry in these earliest years of the reign.
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Newly enriched, all of the grantees (apart from the superannuated Lovell) took part with Henry in the Shrovetide revel on 28 February 1510, when they were disguised variously as Russians, Prussians or Turks. But the sensation of the show, which Essex had devised and supervised, was the appearance of the leading ladies of the court, including Henry’s own sister Mary, in oriental costume and ‘blacked up’: ‘their faces, necks, arms and hands were covered with fine pleasance black, some call it Lombardeen, which is
marvellous thin, so that these same ladies seemed to be negroes or blackamoors’.
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Thomas Brandon had also made another, more personal, disposition in the legacies in his will. His nephew Charles naturally figures largely, getting ‘all my gowns not bequeathed’ and a valuable wardship. But the principal legatee was Lady Jane Guildford, the widow of another old colleague at the court of Henry VII, Sir Richard Guildford. Guildford, controller of the household and master of the ordnance and armouries, had acted as royal spy-master, naval, military and civil engineer and head of security. He had been forced to resign his offices in 1505 and had died on a face-saving pilgrimage to the Holy Land the following year, leaving Lady Jane, who was his second wife, ill-provided for. Did Brandon feel sorry for her? Was she perhaps an old flame? Either way, he left her a life interest in Brandon House in Southwark and the lands he had purchased in East Anglia.
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And Lady Jane takes us (and probably Henry) back into the heart of his own youthful experience. She had been one of his mother’s ladies and, as such, a familiar figure in his own childhood and that of his sister Mary. Lady Jane was possessive and fiercely loyal; she was also unusually cultured for a woman of her class, speaking French well (she had a French mother) and being able to hold her own in conversation with Erasmus ‘on one or two occasions’.
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All this and more she passed on to her son, Henry. Born in 1489, he was almost certainly Henry VII’s godson. He was
also, from his earliest youth, in household service to Henry as prince of Wales. There he attended Henry as his ‘carver, cupbearer and waiter’ and got to know him as few others did.
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The new reign was Guildford’s opportunity too. He jousted from time to time, but his real speciality was the revel – both as participant and, increasingly, as pageant-master. He first appeared in this role in 1511 in the festivities for Twelfth Night, which were held at Richmond while Catherine was still in her chamber recovering from the birth of Prince Henry. The pageant consisted of a mountain, ‘glistering by night’, from which issued a Lady followed by Morris dancers. ‘The which mountain was with vices [screws] brought up towards the king … and then it was drawn back.’ This was typical of Guildford, who seems to have inherited his father’s engineering skills as well as his mother’s literary interests.
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It also provided another point of contact with Henry, who was likewise developing a strong amateur interest in mechanics and mathematics.

Alongside the Brandon circle there was another, even more powerful, grouping among Henry’s sporting friends. The service rendered to Richard III by the Howards, father and son, at Bosworth, when the former was killed and the latter captured, was regarded as exemplifying the highest contemporary ideals of chivalry and loyalty. Even Henry VII – who was not given to thinking charitably of his opponents – respected them for it. But, to judge from the surviving tour
nament records of Henry VII’s reign, neither Surrey himself nor any of his sons had shown much interest in the mock-war of the tournament.

The only member of the clan to do so was Sir Thomas Knyvet, who had married Surrey’s daughter Muriel, dowager Viscountess Lisle. The marriage took place before July 1506; the following year, Knyvet, who was in his very early twenties, was one of the four gentlemen (Charles Brandon was another) who had ‘parfinished and done’ the May Joust.
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Henry VII’s death and Henry VIII’s accession brought about a striking change in the Howard attitude to jousting and the whole paraphernalia of the chivalric cult. The explanation has to be that they read the runes about Henry and
his
attitude to chivalry and – pragmatic as ever – decided that they must follow suit. Knyvet’s established reputation in the tilt would have in any case acted as a passport to Henry’s favour. It is also striking that Surrey’s second son, Sir Edward Howard, was chosen to wear Henry VII’s armour at his funeral and, as it were, impersonate his knightly valour.

But it was Henry’s coronation that offered the opportunity for a grand gesture. Six knights acted as the ‘enterprisers’ or organizers-cum-challengers for the celebratory joust. And four of them belonged to the Howard clan: Thomas, ‘heir apparent to the earl of Surrey’, Edward, ‘his [second] brother’, Sir Edmund Howard, the third brother, and Thomas Knyvet, the brother-in-law of the other three. The
other two challengers were Sir Richard Grey, younger brother of the marquess of Dorset (who was still imprisoned in Calais) and Charles Brandon. And Brandon was Edward Howard’s closest friend and had chosen him to act as witness to his wedding to Anne Browne and as godfather to their two daughters.
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A decade or so earlier, when Henry was still a boy, jousting had been more or less monopolized by a Yorkist family clique; now that he was king, it looked like becoming a Howard family preserve.

Or it would have done if it had not been for Henry himself. For the message was clear: it was Henry, not the Howards, who was in charge. Jousting, hunting and revelling might be what we would call pleasure and they called ‘pastimes’. But Henry took his pleasures very seriously. And, like everything else he was serious about, he flung himself into them with energy, passion and commitment.

‘The king of England’, the Spanish ambassador Caroz reported home on 29 May 1510, ‘amuses himself almost every day of the week with running [at] the ring, and with jousts and tournaments on foot, in which one single person fights with an appointed adversary.’ Then, as enthralled as he had been a few weeks earlier when he had seen Henry in armour for the first time, he goes into lavish detail about the foot combat:

‘There are many young men who excel in this kind of warfare,’ Caroz concludes, ‘but the most conspicuous among them all, the most assiduous, and the most interested in the combats is the king himself, who never omits being present at them.’
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