Henry VIII (4 page)

Plans were soon in hand for the new King's coronation, which was to be the first of the many displays of magnificent pageantry that would characterise Henry's reign. Stocks of the scarlet, white, and green fabrics required for kitting out the entire court ran out, and the Keeper of the Great Wardrobe had to send to Flanders for further supplies. Tailors, embroiderers, and goldsmiths could hardly keep pace with the demand.
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On 21 June, King and court moved to the Tower of London, where sovereigns traditionally stayed before being crowned. The Tower proper, or central keep—it became known as the White Tower in 1234, when it was whitewashed—had been built to defend London by William the Conqueror around 1080. The royal apartments had then occupied the upper floors of the keep. Successive kings had built further towers and a ring of outer fortifications, and in the thirteenth and fourteenth centuries every monarch from Henry III to Richard II had helped to create a lavishly appointed palace.

Henry III built a great hall and chambers on the east side of the inner ward between the White Tower and the Wakefield and Lanthorn Towers. The great hall had a steeply pitched timber roof, tall windows, and stone pillars (it was crumbling into ruin by the late sixteenth century). Edward I had constructed the original royal watergate beneath St. Thomas's Tower; it has been called Traitors' Gate since the sixteenth century. By then, the court was using the gate built by Edward III by the Cradle Tower. The Wardrobe Tower was used from mediaeval times to store royal robes and hangings.

The Tower was a favourite residence of Edward IV, who divided Henry III's great chamber into an audience chamber, privy chamber, and bedchamber. Henry VII added a gallery to the Cradle Tower and converted the Lanthorn Tower into a royal lodging with a bedchamber and a privy closet; Henry VIII would have a Renaissance-style altar in here, “wrought round about the edges with antique.”
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These rooms were later hung with tapestries depicting Antiochus, King of Syria, which are said to have been the work of Katherine of Aragon, Katherine Parr, and Mary I. Henry VII also built a tower to house a library next to the King's Tower, in which was the bedchamber used by Henry VIII and from which projected a gallery traversing the garden below.
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For centuries the Tower had housed a royal menagerie (in the sixteenth century lions were actually kept in the Lion Tower), the royal armouries, the royal mint, and the royal treasure. Until 1661, the crown jewels were housed at Westminster Abbey, not at the Tower.

Although it had not yet acquired a sinister reputation, the Tower held unhappy associations for Henry. His mother had died in childbirth there, and her brothers, “the Princes in the Tower,” were widely reputed to have been murdered in the fortress by Richard III. Henry would rarely visit the Tower, although he carried out works there; it was he who added the decorative caps on the White Tower and who first had ordnance placed along the Tower wharf. As a royal residence, the Tower was old-fashioned, cold, damp, and malodorous: its moat was now a squalid refuse dump. Nevertheless, Henry had had the royal lodgings refurbished for his coronation, and they were gaily hung with cloths of red, green, and white—the last two being the Tudor colours.

On 22 June, the King, in a ceremony instituted by Henry IV at his coronation in 1399, dubbed twenty-six new Knights of the Bath,
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many of whom were his closest friends and attended upon him in his privy chamber. All had been purified in the requisite ritual baths, served the King at dinner, and kept vigil throughout the night in the Norman Chapel of St. John in the White Tower, the earliest-surviving royal chapel. Prior to the Reformation, it boasted brilliant wall paintings, stained-glass windows, and a colourful rood screen (all had disappeared by 1550).

The next day, 23 June, saw London rejoicing as the King and Queen went in a glittering procession through Cheapside, Temple Bar, and the Strand to Westminster Palace. London was still a walled, mediaeval city, although its suburbs were rapidly sprawling out beyond the walls: along the Strand, for example, were to be found the great houses of the nobility, with gardens leading down to the river. The city's skyline was dominated by the spires of the Gothic cathedral of St. Paul and eighty other churches. London was prosperous, lively, and very congested, due to its narrow streets and crammed-in, jettied buildings; most citizens, therefore, used the Thames as the main thoroughfare.

In honour of the coronation, buildings along the processional rouute were hung with tapestries, and free wine flowed from the conduits. Henry rode beneath a canopy borne by the barons of the Cinque Ports, with his heralds going before him. He was resplendent in a doublet of gold embroidered with precious stones beneath a robe of crimson velvet furred with ermine; across his shoulder was slung a baldrick of rubies. Katherine, in embroidered white satin and ermine, followed in a litter hung with white silk and golden ribbons. Her ladies, in blue velvet, rode behind on matching palfreys.
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Margaret Beaufort, watching from a window in Cheapside, wept for joy, overcome by the occasion.

In the late afternoon, the King and Queen arrived at the Palace of Westminster, which had been the seat of royal government and the monarch's chief London residence since the eleventh century. The palace was a sprawling complex of mediaeval stone and timber buildings that covered six acres. Much of it had been rebuilt in the thirteenth century by Henry III, although the magnificent Westminster Hall had been erected by William Rufus in 1097–1099; its impressive hammerbeam roof was installed by Richard II in 1394. The law courts of King's Bench, Chancery, and Common Pleas sat here during the legal term, while the House of Lords met in the great hall—called the White Chamber—of the palace itself. There was therefore limited space for large-scale court ceremonials.

The royal apartments, which had been refurbished by Edward IV and Henry VII, still bore signs of the faded splendour of a bygone age. Like his father, Henry VIII used as his bedchamber Henry III's vast Painted Chamber, which measured eighty-six feet by twenty-six feet. Above the King's bed was a thirteenth-century mural in red, blue, silver, and gold portraying the coronation of St. Edward the Confessor, and on the adjacent walls were vivid depictions of Old Testament battles. Being so close to the river, the palace was damp and difficult to heat; tapestry hung over the doors to keep out the draughts. Beggars thronged the rubbish-strewn forecourt with its clock tower and fountain. Yet Henry spent much time here in the first years of his reign.

Throughout the night before their coronation, the King and Queen kept vigil in the Chapel of St. Stephen, founded by King Stephen in the twelfth century (Edward III had remodelled it in the fourteenth century and commissioned murals of himself and his large family).

On Midsummer Day, Sunday, 24 June, Henry and Katherine, wearing royal robes of crimson and preceded by the nobility in furred gowns of scarlet, walked to Westminster Abbey along a carpet of striped cloth strewn with herbs and flowers.
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As soon as the King disappeared into the Abbey, the crowds ripped the carpet to pieces for souvenirs.
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“This day consecrates a young man who is the everlasting glory of our age,” exulted Thomas More. “This day is the end of our slavery, the fount of our liberty, the beginning of joy. Now the people, liberated, run before their king with bright faces.”
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After being acclaimed by the peers, Henry swore his coronation oath and was anointed with holy oil. He was then crowned by Archbishop Warham with the crown of St. Edward the Confessor.
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The choir burst into the Te Deum as the newly consecrated monarch was led by thirty-eight bishops to his throne to receive the homage of his chief subjects.

Chief among the choristers that day was Dr. Robert Fairfax, who was to become renowned as “the prime musician of the nation.”
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A Cambridge graduate, Fairfax was the first man to take a degree in music at Oxford. Henry had heard of his fame as organist and choirmaster of St. Albans Abbey, and had already persuaded him to become a Gentleman of the Chapel Royal. Fairfax was to write grand polyphonic masses and motets for the Chapel, as well as delightful secular ballads for the court. He was paid only £9.2s.6d (£9.12) a year, less than a royal gardener would earn, but he was handsomely rewarded each New Year's Day for composing anthems and copying out music.

In a much shorter ceremony, the Queen was crowned with a heavy gold diadem set with sapphires, rubies, and pearls.
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When the royal couple emerged from the Abbey, the King was wearing his lighter “imperial” or arched crown and a purple velvet robe lined with ermine. As the crowds cheered, the organ and trumpets were sounding, drums thundering, and bells pealing to signify that Henry VIII “had been gloriously crowned to the comfort of all the land.”
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The King and Queen led the great procession back to Westminster Hall for the coronation banquet, which was to be “greater than any Caesar had known.”
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When all were seated, a fanfare sounded, and the Duke of Buckingham and the Earl of Shrewsbury rode into the hall on horseback to herald the arrival of the “sumptuous, fine and delicate meats [in] plentiful abundance.”
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When the second course was finished, the King's Champion, Sir Robert Dymmocke, paraded up and down the hall on his courser before throwing down his gauntlet with the customary challenge to anyone who dared contest the King's title. Henry rewarded him with a gold cup. After the banquet, “a tournament was held which lasted until midnight.”
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The celebrations continued for several days:

To further enhance the triumphal coronation, jousts and tourneys were held in the grounds of the palace of Westminster. For the comfort of the royal spectators, a pavilion was constructed, covered with tapestries and hung with rich Arras cloth. And nearby there was a curious fountain over which was built a sort of castle with an imperial crown on top and battlements of roses and gilded pomegranates. Its walls were painted white [with] green lozenges, each containing a rose, a pomegranate, a quiver of arrows or the letters H and K, all gilded.

The shields of arms of the jousters also appeared on the walls, and on certain days red, white and claret wine ran from the mouths of the castle's gargoyles. The organisers of these jousts were Lord Thomas Howard, heir to the Earl of Surrey, Admiral Sir Edward Howard, his brother, Lord Richard Grey, Sir Edmund Howard, Sir Thomas Knyvet and Charles Brandon esquire. The trumpets sounded and the fresh young gallants and noblemen took the field. All the participants were magnificently attired.
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The challengers, wearing plumed gold helmets and calling themselves the Knights of Diana, included Edward Neville, Edward Guildford, and John Pechy, while the defenders were the Knights of Pallas. Charles Brandon distinguished himself at barriers against a huge German challenger, when “he so pummelled the German about the head” that his nose bled and he was led away defeated.
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On the next day, in honour of Diana, goddess of the hunt, deer were hunted and slaughtered in a miniature park and castle which had been created in the tiltyard, and their bloody carcasses, hung on poles, were presented to the Queen and the ladies.
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The festivities were brought to an end by the death of Margaret Beaufort, who passed away on 29 June, the day after the King attained his majority. She died urging him to take as his mentor the austere and devout John Fisher, Bishop of Rochester, her confessor, fellow humanist, and associate in her educational projects. Fisher, who had enjoyed a distinguished academic career and had a reputation for being “the most holy and learned prelate in Christendom,”
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was a man of firm principle and deep sincerity; he wore a hair shirt beneath his clerical robes, slept on hard straw matting, scourged himself regularly, and ate mainly bread and pottage. His patroness felt he was the right man to guide a young and inexperienced king, being no flatterer as bishops often were, but there is no evidence that Henry paid much attention to him.

The King ordered the church bells to toll for six days to mark the Lady Margaret's passing. Bishop Fisher paid tribute to her virtues in an oration preached at her funeral at Westminster Abbey, and Erasmus, a friend of Fisher, wrote her epitaph.

Having attained his majority, Henry VIII now began ruling his kingdom.

3

“A Prince of Splendour and Generosity”

In 1509, with remarkable prescience, a Venetian wrote of Henry VIII, “for the future, the whole world will talk of him.”
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In an age when monarchs ruled as well as reigned, a king's personality could have a profound effect upon the land he governed, and few sovereigns have left a more indelible imprint on national institutions and the national consciousness than Henry. He inspired in his contemporaries “a pleasant and terrible reverence.”
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Sovereigns in the sixteenth century were perceived as semidivine beings; a king was not just a normal man but also the Lord's Anointed, His deputy on earth, called “by divine right” to hold dominion over his subjects. Since mediaeval times, the King had been seen as two bodies in one: a mortal entity and “the King's person,” representing unending royal authority; monarchs therefore referred to themselves in the plural form as “we.” A king was thus set apart from his people,
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and was invested with an insight into the subtle mysteries of state denied mere mortals. “Kings of England,” Henry told his judges, “never had any superior but God.”
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So sacrosanct was the institution of monarchy that it was seen as near-sacrilege for a subject to question or criticise the acts of his sovereign. “Princes ought to be obeyed by the commandment of God; yea, and to be obeyed without question,” wrote Stephen Gardiner, Bishop of Winchester.
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A king was entitled to expect the same devotion and obedience from his people as he himself rendered to God, for there was a presumption that the King's law was God's law.
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The royal prerogative was the will of God working through the will of the King, and the King could do no wrong. This explains why treason was regarded as the most serious of crimes, and why it was punished so harshly.

The normal penalty for treason was hanging, disembowelling, and quartering, although the King usually commuted the sentence to beheading for peers of the realm. Traitors, as Henry declared, had to be punished severely “for the example and terror of others.”
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In 1541, the King angrily censured his councillors for not committing to the Tower some felons who had robbed Windsor Castle, “as though you made no difference between the enterprise of robbing His Majesty and the attempting of the same towards any mean subject.”
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The thieves were forthwith sent to the Tower.

Since he governed “by the grace of God,” the King bore a weighty moral responsibility towards his subjects, of which Henry VIII was well aware, “being in the room that I am in.”
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Henry saw God as his ally; early on, he told a Venetian ambassador that no one kept faith in the world save him, “and therefore God Almighty, who knows this, prospers my affairs.”
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Kings were guaranteed a special place in Heaven, and were therefore expected to set a good example. The King's chief duties, enshrined in his coronation oath, were to defend his realm, uphold the Church, and administer justice fairly. The King was also the fount of honour and, in times of war, the military leader of his armies.

Although they were not, strictly speaking, absolute monarchs, the Tudor sovereigns bore the entire responsibility for the government of the kingdom. Parliament, the Privy Council, the officers of state, judges, sheriffs, and mayors all exercised authority in the King's name. Royal power was therefore the unifying force within the realm.

The Tudors elevated the English monarchy to unprecedented heights while extending the royal authority. Their prestige was enhanced by the increasingly elaborate ceremonial that attended every aspect of their highly public lives, as well as by pageantry and symbolism, calculated to enhance the royal image. The development of royal palaces and progresses were just two aspects of this policy: a king needed to be visible and to be in touch with his subjects, and also to impress them and foreigners with a display of magnificence. Henry VIII was the first English king to adopt the style “Your Majesty,” rather than the traditional “Your Grace” or “Your Highness”; foreign ambassadors were addressing him as such before 1520. Like other European sovereigns, Henry was influenced by humanist teachings on sovereignty, which emphasised strong, centralised rule, dynastic continuity, and the consolidation of royal power.

“The Prince is the life, the head and the authority of all things that be done in England,” wrote Sir Thomas Smith.
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More than a century before Louis XIV, the King was seen as the embodiment of the state.
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At the foundation of the Tudor monarchy was the concept of princely magnificence. The outward show of power and status, displayed by both king and court, was extremely important in an age of widespread illiteracy, and also in a culture that valued the trappings of rank, and it had the advantages of impressing foreigners and attracting talented and able men to the royal service. Magnificence, or
majestas
, was calculated to dazzle the beholder; it could create an illusion of wealth and power that might belie the reality, and was therefore very effective as a propaganda tool.

Mediaeval monarchs had certainly understood the value of outward display, but it was not until the reign of Edward IV (1461–1483) that the promotion of princely magnificence became official policy and the focus of Edward's household ordinances. Edward IV had “the most splendid court that could be found in all Christendom.”
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Edward and his successors were merely emulating the fifteenth-century Valois dukes of Burgundy, who had created the cult of grandeur and set standards in taste, ceremonial, and culture for the rest of Europe. The Burgundian dukes impressed the services of architects, artists, musicians, and scholars, and in so doing enhanced their own prestige.

By Henry VIII's reign, the court of Burgundy was no more,
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but its influence was everywhere to be seen. The Italian writer Baldassare Castiglione, in his book
The Courtier
, stated that the perfect ruler “should be a prince of splendour and generosity, giving freely to everyone. He should hold magnificent banquets, festivals, games and public shows.”

Henry VIII exemplified this ideal. His court was the most magnificent in English history. Henry was rich enough to lavish extravagant sums of money on his palaces, clothes, entertainments, and lifestyle, and on the open-handed hospitality that was expected of a great prince. He was determined from the first to outshine his European rivals, the King of France and the Holy Roman Emperor, each of whom had at least four times the resources he did. By clever bluffing, he managed to achieve this aim.

Henry himself embodied the virtues of magnificence. He was a big, impressive man and had a natural authority and assurance. He looked and acted like a king.

Henry made the most of his opportunities. He had a genius for choosing talented men to serve him, notably Cardinal Wolsey and Thomas Cromwell. But while Henry delegated much of his power to these ministers, and left them to work out the details of his policies, he remained very much in control, and kept his own counsel. “If my cap knew my counsel, I would throw it in the fire,” he once said.
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It was indisputably he who directed the course of his reign. If any dared cross him, he threatened, “there was no head in his kingdom so noble but he would make it fly.”
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Court factions might seek to influence the King, for he was not averse to intrigue, but he was not so suggestible as to let them utterly usurp his prerogative. He never forgot that his was the ultimate authority.

Many historians have claimed that Henry grew more ruthless and bloodthirsty only as he got older, yet in 1510 he coolly executed his father's hated ministers, Richard Empson and Edmund Dudley, in the interests of political expediency, and similarly eliminated the Earl of Suffolk in 1513. John Stow claimed that during his reign he executed seventy thousand people, although this is certainly a gross exaggeration. It proves, however, that Henry had gained a reputation for cruelty by the end of his life, and it is true that he did not scruple to remove—often by savage means—those who opposed him.

Henry had an eye for detail. “He wants to have his feet in a thousand shoes,” commented a Milanese envoy.
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Little escaped his scrutiny. His encyclopaedic knowledge was an advantage when it came to briefing ambassadors or intervening in disputes, and he made sure he was kept up-to-date on events. When told by French envoys that ten thousand Swiss troops had been killed at the Battle of Marignano in 1515, the King replied that that was remarkable, since only ten thousand soldiers had fought in the battle.
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Henry had international ambitions, and he was determined to play a prominent role in Europe. He was “rich, ferocious and greedy for glory,”
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desiring nothing more than to display his knightly skills at the head of an army and win honour and renown for himself by reopening the Hundred Years War and winning back the lands his predecessors had lost in France, lands Henry believed to be his by right. “The new King is magnificent, liberal, and a great enemy of the French,” commented a Venetian ambassador in 1509.
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At this time, Ferdinand of Aragon was Henry's ally, but time would prove Ferdinand untrustworthy.

Henry's hatred of the French festered. In 1510, learning that his councillors had written in his name to Louis XII offering friendship and peace, he shouted: “Who wrote this letter? I ask peace of the King of France, who dare not look me in the face, still less make war on me?” Then he stormed out of the room and proceeded to insult the French ambassador by inviting him to watch a tournament but making sure he had nowhere to sit. Eventually a cushion was provided, and the envoy had to watch the King displaying his martial prowess.
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Henry was a focus for the growing nationalism of his people, and he enjoyed an instinctive rapport with many of his subjects. “Love for the King is universal with all who see him, as His Highness does not seem a person of this world but one descended from Heaven,” observed a Venetian.
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In 1513, another Italian wrote, “He is very popular with his own people, and indeed with all, for his qualities.”
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Henry's hearty charm and affability won him golden opinions, although he was never referred to as Bluff King Hal in his lifetime, only later. Erasmus found him to be “more of a companion than a king.”

Henry revelled in his popularity; he was a consummate showman who understood the value of being accessible to his subjects, and who made sure, in his early years, that he had a highly visible profile. The public were allowed into his palaces to watch tournaments, processions, or the great court entertainments, and it was not unheard of for Henry to go into London in disguise to mingle among them. And of course a large number of his subjects saw him when he went on progress.

Many of those subjects brought the King gifts in the expectation of a reward; indeed, such largesse, or tipping, was expected of a monarch. Lots of the offerings were humble, such as herbs, green peas, or live foxes, and many were foodstuffs, such as orange pies, fruit, pheasants, salmon, or baked lampreys, which were known to be one of his favourite foods. The King gave 6d to a gardener who gave him a drink of water, £1 to a priest who preached before him, a total of £4.17s.4d to divers poor people who brought him “capons, hens, books of wax and other trifles,” and £2 to a man who won a wager by eating a whole buck at one sitting.
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Wherever he went, the poor waited for his charity, and he would patiently listen to their tales of woe. One William Kebet had lost his job and was “fallen in poverty and decay,” and Henry succoured him with £5 on one occasion and £4 on another. He donated £5 to another man “like to be lost,” £3.6s to a needy father of thirteen, and a further sum of money so that a poor woman could redeem her husband from debtor's prison. He also gave funds to his jester “for his surgery when sick in London,” and to his groom, Thomas, “to relieve him in his sickness.”
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Henry VIII's popularity did not wane with time, and it survived his reforms and his cruelties: his subjects generally revered him as a great king who had England's interests at heart.