The Penguin History of Britain: New Worlds, Lost Worlds:The Rule of the Tudors 1485-1630 (20 page)

At Christmas 1529 Henry VIII was at Greenwich, designing a royal palace to be built at Whitehall; a palace vast in scale and novel in conception, a display of his magnificence and an emanation of his power. That October, two days after the fall of Cardinal Wolsey, Henry had taken Anne Boleyn to survey York Palace. The seizure of this palace of Wolsey’s and the eviction of hundreds of hapless lesser subjects from a whole Westminster suburb made way for Henry’s grand design, which was built at great speed and cost. At its centre was the Privy Gallery, where the King would live and rule apart in his privy lodging, his bedchamber and closets. At its west end the Gallery joined the Great Hall, the Great Chamber, and the Presence Chamber, which was dominated by the throne and its canopy. Here Henry’s subjects were symbolically – but not actually – in the royal presence. The King himself was guarded and watched behind a series of doors locked by master keys. No one who entered this painted palace and passed through the two great courtyards and three outer chambers and on to the Privy Gallery could doubt the power of this king. On the walls of the chambers hung splendid tapestries, including a series acquired in 1528 of the
Story of David
, the godly king of Zion, with whom this king of England so strongly identified. In the Privy Chamber, the most intimate inner sanctum of royal rule, Hans Holbein would in 1537 paint a great mural in
which Henry VIII dominated the foreground, with his father behind. This was a manifesto in art of the power of the Tudor kings. Intended to awe, it did. Yet very few were allowed into the royal presence, the source of all ‘favour, glory or might’.

Next to Whitehall on the river, but a world apart, lay Westminster. Westminster was the old palace of medieval kings, built beside the Benedictine Abbey. Here were the law courts of King’s Bench, Chancery and Common Pleas; here was the Exchequer. The Lords of Parliament met at Westminster in the White Chamber. This was an official world of laws, precedents, parchment rolls and tallies, ordered by men robed in black. It was not Westminster which Henry VIII inhabited, but the world of the royal court, which had its being wherever the king was. The court was the royal household where the king’s servants served him; the scene of public ceremonial and of private life. It was also the centre of policy and of politics.

All power rested in the will and person of the king and was quintessentially personal. Access was all. Courtiers, circling and crowding, constantly in competition, sought always to penetrate the private world of power, to gain access to the king and influence over him. The most private affairs of a king were also inescapably matters of state. Letters tell of ‘privy’ communications in the inner spaces and private recesses of the court, of whispering at windows. Leaning against a window, his hand over his mouth, Thomas Cromwell explained, disingenuously, to Eustace Chapuys, the ambassador for the Holy Roman Emperor in April 1536 that it was only recently that he had learnt the frailty of human affairs, especially those of the court, ‘of which he had before his eyes several examples that might be called
domestic
’. The king never had privacy; he was never alone; he did not sleep alone, nor wake alone, nor dress, eat, bathe, or attend the garderobe alone. Courtiers were always, endlessly, in attendance. When Sir Francis Bryan addressed Sir Thomas Heneage as ‘bedfellow’, he meant it literally for, as Gentlemen of the Privy Chamber, they slept together at the foot of the royal bed.

The succession of each new monarch brought a new world, for the character of a king determined not only policy but also the style of government, the nature of his court and of those he had about him. A king so secret and distant as Henry VII had sought secrecy and distance at his court also. He devised ways to live and rule apart. Traditionally, the later medieval royal household had been divided into the service side of hall and kitchens, served by ranks of yeomen of the larder and buttery,
pastry chefs and scullery boys, presided over by the Lord Steward; and the king’s private apartment or chamber, under the Lord Chamberlain. But even the division of the chamber into the Great or Guard Chamber, Presence Chamber and Privy Chamber was not separation enough for Henry VII. In about 1495 he made an institutional change at his court, an innovation little remarked at the time, but of great political consequence: he set the Secret or Privy Chamber apart from the others, establishing a frontier for access, and gave it its own tiny staff of grooms and pages. Only they could enter. From this Secret Chamber Henry VII excluded all those whom he did not regard as essential for his service; he especially excluded those who regarded themselves as essential: his nobles. Fearing, and with reason, conspiracy within as well as conspiracy without; wishing to devote himself uninterruptedly to dispatches, accounts and high policy, and to be free of the insidious counsels and tiresome ceremonial which attended his greater subjects, he chose, unusually, to have menial servants instead of lordly pages to perform menial service. So he guarded himself and his secrets. Henry VIII believed that he could keep his own secrets – ‘If I thought my cap knew my counsel, I would cast it into the fire and burn it’, he said. But he was often deceived and he deceived himself. Kings were prisoners of the courts they made, and Henry VIII created a court in his own image, quite different from his father’s.

The accession of a new prince is often welcomed with jubilant expectation – especially when the passing of the old prince is a relief – but the joy which greeted the second Henry Tudor in April 1509 was unusual. ‘Heaven and earth rejoice… Our King is not after gold or gems… but virtue, glory, immortality’: such was the promise. Thomas More celebrated the new King’s accession as the ending of a tyranny. When he wrote that his new prince had ‘a character which deserves to rule’ it was true, or partly true. Henry had a powerful, if unoriginal mind; he was educated and cultivated; he had courage, charm, even humour. He was well versed in theology and pious. Qualities of mind and character, his splendid physical presence, and his chivalry seemed to make him the ideal Christian knight, and would have impressed, and maybe captivated, even if he had not been king. But he was a king, of commanding will. Thomas More warned, even as the reign began, that unlimited power tended to weaken good minds.

Henry VIII’s reign began, as it would end, with a comprehensive deception practised for high political purposes, as a courtier with a
‘smiling countenance’ concealed the news of the old King’s death. This courtier was a Groom of the Privy Chamber, and courtiers colluded with some of Henry VII’s councillors to secure the succession and organize a coup. Two days after his father died the new King was being served as though he were still Prince of Wales and Henry VII still alive. On the first day of the new reign, Henry VII’s hated councillors Edmund Dudley and Sir Richard Empson were sent to the Tower, to the delight of the people, who saw them as agents of Henry VII’s oppression rather than as victims of his son’s. (They died traitors’ deaths at Tower Hill in August 1510.) Already the ruthlessness of the young King seemed apparent, but it was, and always would be, uncertain how far Henry directed what was done in his name. At one moment he claimed that his dying father had urged him to marry Catherine of Aragon, and so he must obey; at another, he expressed doubts about the propriety of marrying his brother Arthur’s widow. He did marry her in June 1509, and they were jointly crowned on Midsummer Day.

The young and chivalrous King – whose accession day was, fittingly, the eve of St George, England’s martial patron – sought to be king in the image of the great kings of the English past and to rival foreign princes of far greater kingdoms. At home, he aspired to lead a noble order of chivalry; abroad, to pursue honour. Reading chivalric romance, especially Thomas Malory’s
Le Morte d’Arthur
, Henry saw his court as a chivalric fellowship united in a quest for honour and loyal service to their prince. The mottoes of courtiers vaunted their loyalty: ‘Loyaulte me oblige’, promised Charles Brandon. Henry VII, too, had seen the political necessity of magnificence; had followed Edward IV in emulating the chivalric courtly culture of the dukes of Burgundy; had encouraged his courtiers to joust; had judged their tournaments. But he had been spectator, not participant. Henry VIII was the glittering champion of the tournament. He ran in the tilt-yard, despite all the dangers, and the courtiers with whom he jousted became his closest companions, recipients of his confidence and favour. Valour in the tilt-yard became a way to high military position, to wealth and ennoblement, as Charles Brandon, created Duke of Suffolk, found. Here chivalry and politics met. But chivalric values did not easily accord with the competitiveness of life at this court.

Chivalry was the training for war. Henry’s guiding ambition, as his reign began and still as it ended, was to assert the ancient claim to dominion of France, to regain a lost kingdom and a lost throne. War
against France was half a chivalric crusade. He determined to emulate Henry V’s victories of a century before; his goal was glory before commercial advantage. At his accession Henry was seventeen – not even of age. He was, for a while, governed by his father’s councillors, his father’s policies. The doves in the Council opposed his plans; the humanists, who had hoped for a pacific king and universal peace, lamented. No matter. The French King Louis XII’s support for a schismatic General Council of the Church against the Pope provided the cause for war, and by the end of 1511 Henry, horrified by Louis’ rebellion against papal authority, had persuaded his Council that the truce with a perfidious France must be broken, and an invasion prepared. This was his first venture as papal champion, and one which would look strange thereafter.

Henry wanted freedom from an obstructive Council, he wanted freedom from the infinite boredom of administration, and he wanted conquest in France. His liberator, and the mastermind of a policy designed to be glorious in peace and war was Thomas Wolsey, royal almoner from 1509, Bishop of Lincoln, and successively Archbishop of York, Cardinal, Lord Chancellor, and papal legate. In 1513 Wolsey planned Henry’s invasion of northern France. The small episcopal city of Thérouanne, and Tournai, a French enclave within the Burgundian-Habsburg Netherlands, were besieged and occupied between July and September. According to Thomas Cromwell, speaking in Parliament a decade later, these were ‘ungracious dog-holes’. But any English visitor to the Netherlands was more likely to report that English towns were dog-holes by comparison. For Henry, the importance of capturing these towns lay in their status as part of his dominion as ‘King of France’. His standing among European princes was enhanced by this conquest, and by his simultaneous victory in Scotland. In September, the Earl of Surrey inflicted desperate defeat upon the Scots with whom Louis XII of France had concluded a league. The King of Scotland, three bishops, eleven earls, fifteen lords and 10,000 men lay dead in the mud of Flodden Field.

When the old guard among his councillors complained that the new king was too wedded to pleasure and urged that he attend Council meetings more often, Wolsey counselled the contrary. Here, for him, was the way to exceptional favour and power. Wolsey determined, according to his gentleman-usher George Cavendish, to show himself keenest ‘to advance the King’s only will and pleasure
without any respect to the case
’. From 1514 or so Wolsey came to hold a seemingly
unassailable supremacy in the counsels of the King; he was ‘the beginning, middle and end’. He might be challenged, but for fifteen years he was not overthrown. As long as he could find the means to advance the King’s will and pleasure – whatever it happened to be; Wolsey minded little – the rest of the Council was almost redundant; its corporate political role usurped. The Council was still consulted, but only after Wolsey and the King, in a kind of partnership, had determined policy. Wolsey would first ‘move’ Henry towards some idea; the King ‘dreamed of it more and more’; and only then would the Council be informed. Wolsey’s influence seemed supreme, and his household, in its magnificence, looked a rival to the royal court. So completely did he see himself as
alter rex
, it was alleged, that he would say: ‘The King and I would ye should do thus: the King and I do give you our hearty thanks.’ His pride and splendour were legendary: crosses, pillars and poleaxes, hated symbols of his authority, were carried before him; earls and lords served him. But Wolsey was a prince only in the Church, never in the secular realm. He held authority only so long as he held royal favour, and he knew how precarious that was. It was the King’s will that was implemented, not Wolsey’s. Otherwise Wolsey, whose own aspiration was for peace in Europe, would not have had to prosecute war. Wolsey’s Anglo-French peace of 1514 was evanescent, for it died with the French King Louis XII in 1515.

The happy prospect of perpetual peace would have seemed more likely of achievement had Henry been content to leave England withdrawn from the Continent. But he was not. Henry’s determination, supported by Wolsey, to play a part in Continental power politics and win international renown, led ineluctably to entanglement in the European war which always threatened, especially once Francis I had come to the French throne in 1515. Francis was a king, according to Henry, more dangerous to Christendom than the Great Turk (with whom, indeed, Francis, ‘the most Christian king’, was intermittently allied). Henry’s relations with Francis, whose appetite for glory and whose tastes he shared (though without the means to emulate them), remained ambivalent through three decades.

Wolsey constantly sought ways to win for England a leading part in European affairs without recourse to war. In 1516 he schemed with the Swiss and the Holy Roman Emperor Maximilian against French domination in North Italy, thinking, like More’s Utopians, that if fighting were necessary to secure peace, it were better that others did the
fighting. In 1518 he seemed to achieve his ambition to be seen as arbiter of Europe when, in the Treaty of London, he united all Christendom. It was a precarious peace, and one that England played the leading part in securing. When in 1519 the Habsburg Charles V added the Holy Roman Empire to his estates in the Netherlands and Spain, the configuration of power in Europe shifted: the houses of Habsburg and Valois were more nearly balanced, and their dynastic rivalry grew accordingly. Henry earnestly proclaimed friendship to both these rivals, as the Treaty of London bound him to do, but would become their enemy if either of them broke the peace. England’s alliance with either power would give it dominance over the other: her neutrality might guarantee peace.