Young Henry: The Rise of Henry VIII (15 page)

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Authors: Robert Hutchinson

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Henry VII’s demise threw confusion and uncertainty into the smooth cogs of European diplomacy. Most directly affected was King Ferdinand in Spain who was fearful that Katherine’s marriage was now in the greatest danger of never being solemnised or consummated. After hearing French rumours of the king’s death, he sent off an urgent and desperate dispatch to Fuensalida in London:
If the King of England is really dead, the French, as well as others, will enter into all kinds of intrigues to prevent the marriage of the new king with the Princess Katherine …
[Fuensalida] must … by all the means in your power persuade the new king to marry the Princess without delay.
The marriage is of great importance, not only with respect to the Princess, but also on general political grounds …
Go to the new king, give him the enclosed letter and explain to him at length everything contained in it, making use of the best arguments that occur to you and the sweetest words you can imagine.
Tell the new King of England in my name that his age and position as king without heirs render it imperatively necessary to take a wife without delay and to beget children.
Ferdinand continued brazenly: ‘Should you think it expedient to corrupt some of the most influential councillors of the King, you may offer them money.’ He insisted: ‘All your ingenuity and all your industry must be brought to bear on the one affair of the marriage. All other transactions are to be postponed.’ Ferdinand added, almost as an afterthought: ‘The dowry will be punctually paid’ and the missing marriage portion would at last be provided.
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The Spanish king also dutifully sent his condolences to Henry VIII:
I have heard with great sorrow the news of the death of King Henry, your father.
The death of such a prince as he was is a great loss to his family and to
his friends. The only consolation is that he died a good Catholic. I have gained a son by losing a brother; I will consider you always as my son.
Raw political ambition lay behind this sanctimony. Ferdinand hoped fervently that Henry VIII had
ascended the throne unopposed. If that was not the case, and you need help, you have only to say so, and a powerful army, consisting of men-at-arms, infantry and artillery, ships and engines of war, will be sent without delay from Spain to your assistance.
I would even, if necessary, come in person to England at the head of a powerful army, and act in the same way as I would if the fate of my own dominions were at stake.
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A now galvanised, if not frenetic, Ferdinand also dashed off a letter in cipher to his daughter in London. She had become despairing of ever marrying her prince and was even now considering a life of chaste devotion to God within the walls of a convent. He promised Katherine that he had her welfare and ‘especially the speedy conclusion of her marriage more at heart than anything else on earth’. The Spanish king had intended to send one of his prelates as special envoy to England to conduct negotiations but now thought it ‘advisable not to change my ambassador, since such change would cause delay’.
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After all their procrastination in the final years of Henry VII’s reign, the Spanish now at last had the missing marriage portion lined up for payment. Within two days of his letter to Katherine, Ferdinand reported his successful negotiation of the 100,000 scudos with bankers in Spain and was sending their bills of exchange drawn on merchants in London, amongst them Dominico Lomelyn, Francisco Grimaldi and Luigi de Vivaldo. He had also heard whispers that the English ambassador in Spain, John Stile, had ‘sent unfavourable reports to England. I have spoken with him and have told him to write henceforth only good news.’
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In Venice, the Signory had yet more extreme problems: their Italian mainland territories were under fierce and successful attack by France.
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They received news of the king’s death from their expatriate traders in
London who claimed that Henry VIII had ‘sworn that immediately after his coronation [he would] make war on the King of France’. ‘Soon,’ the merchants claimed excitedly, ‘we shall hear that he has invaded France.’
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The Doge and Senate, clutching at these slender straws in the wind, instructed Andrea Badoer, their envoy in London, to urge Henry to launch ‘an immediate attack on the King of France … France being at present utterly ungarrisoned in the direction of England’.
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The accelerating pace of the French advance amplified the anxiety of the Venetian government. They decided to appeal directly to Henry VIII’s vanity: ‘The King of France [is] so elate [proud] and haughty … [he will] not only prepare to make himself emperor but to become monarch of all the world … Therefore his majesty [of England] should forthwith take steps to thwart such plans,’ urged a plainly rattled Doge.
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With a father to bury and a coronation to be planned, in their desperation they were hopelessly unrealistic to expect Henry to mount any kind of military adventure against the French – yet. Their ambassador could only comfort them with vague promises of military assistance in the future: ‘This new king is magnificent,’ he told the Venetian Signory, ‘liberal and a great enemy of the French and will be [your] friend.’
Henry VIII inherited enormous riches from his father: the Venetians were told that the old king ‘had accumulated so much gold that he is supposed to have more than well nigh all the kings of Christendom’.
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But what of his greater inheritance: the kingdom of England and Wales and lordship of Ireland?
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In 1509, his realm was a small damp country on the western fringe of Europe
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– merely a sideshow in the cut and thrust of continental politics.
A Venetian diplomat of the early 1500s has left us a vibrant, vivid description of what Henry’s England was really like and of the corporate personality of his people – ninety per cent of whom still worked in the fields of the countryside. In some aspects, the national character has not changed much in five hundred years.
The English are great lovers of themselves and of everything belonging to them.
They think that there are no other men than themselves and no other world but England. Whenever they see a handsome foreigner, they say that ‘he looks like an Englishman’ and that ‘it is a great pity that he should not be an Englishman’.
When they partake of some delicacy with a foreigner they ask him ‘whether such a thing is made in
their
country’?
The English enjoyed their food, remaining a long time at table, but were ‘very sparing of wine when they drink it at their own expense’ so that often ‘three or four persons drink out of the same cup’. The English appetite for food – particularly meat – was both prodigious and notorious and amounted to almost a vice. (Years later, Stephen Gardiner, that devious and vicious Bishop of Winchester, argued strongly for pious Lenten fasting
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to continue. ‘Every country has its peculiar inclination to naughtiness,’ the bishop wrote. ‘England and Germany to the belly – the one in meat, the other in liquor.’ The French vice, however, was always lechery: ‘France a little beneath the belly; Italy to vanity and pleasures devised.’ ‘Let an English belly have a further advancement,’ he warned, ‘and nothing can stay it.’)
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Few Englishmen kept wine in their own houses but when they planned to drink a great deal ‘they go to the tavern and this is done not only by the men but also by ladies of distinction’. With no domestic production, most wine was imported from France, Germany and Spain, but there was ‘an abundance of ale and beer’ which was drunk in ‘great quantities’ at entertainments.
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No greater honour can be conferred, or received, than to invite others to eat with them or to be invited themselves.
They would sooner give five or six ducats [roughly £10 – £12] to provide an entertainment for a person than a groat [four pence] to assist him in distress.
Some Englishmen wore fine clothes and were ‘extremely polite in their language’, which, despite being derived from ‘the old German’, was ‘pleasing enough as they pronounce it’. When talking together, they politely removed their hats – an ‘incredible courtesy’ – and were generally
‘quick at everything they apply their minds to’, being particularly diligent in mercantile trade. In one London street, The Strand, ‘there are fifty-two goldsmith’s shops, so rich and full of silver vessels, great and small, that in all the shops of Milan, Rome, Venice and Florence together, I do not think the[re] would be found so many of the magnificence that is to be seen in London’.
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Another Venetian, attached to the city state’s embassy in London, described in 1513 how all the London houses were built of wood – later the capital’s nemesis in the Great Fire of 1666. The homes clearly stank:
Over the floors they strew weeds called ‘rushes’ which resemble reeds and which grow in water. Every eight to ten days they put down a fresh layer.
Aloft at the window sills, they put rosemary, sage and other herbs.
The women are
very beautiful and good tempered: their usual vesture is a cloth petticoat over the shift lined with squirrel or some other fur.
Over [this] they wear a long gown lined with some choice fur. The gentlewomen carry the train under their arm: the commonalty pin it behind or before or at one side.
The head gear is of various caps of velvet with lappets [vertical bands of fabric] hanging down on their shoulders like two hoods. In front they have two others lined with silk.
Their stockings are black and their shoes doubly soled of various colours.
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The English were very devout and attended Mass every day. They said ‘many Paternosters in public, the women carrying long rosaries in their hands’. Those who could read Latin took the ‘office of Our Lady
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with them and with some companion recite it in the church, verse by verse, in a low voice, after the manner of churchmen’.
But when it came to war, the English were fearsome:
They have a very high reputation in arms and from the great fear the French entertain of them, one believes it to be justly acquired.
But I have it on the best information that when the war is raging most
furiously, they will seek for good eating and all their other comforts without thinking what harm might befall them.
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Rampant xenophobia percolated like venom through all levels of Tudor society. The English had a ‘great antipathy towards foreigners and imagine they never come into their island but to make themselves masters of it and to usurp their goods’ – folk memories of the Norman invasion of 1066, perhaps? The 50,000-strong population of London especially detested foreigners. Most believed that the alien merchants living in their city – the Germans of the Steelyard, the Spanish, Lombards, Burgundians and Venetians – damaged their trade and took bread from the mouths of honest, hardworking English citizens. Sometimes this hostility spilled over into riots and brutal violence against foreigners or their property, as in the extensive ‘Evil May Day’ riots by apprentices in 1517.
The second largest city was Norwich, with a population of 14,000, but it was in the process of rebuilding after a disastrous fire in 1506 in which a ‘great part’ was burnt.
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Other major conurbations were Bristol and Newcastle, each with about 10,000 citizens. Across the Channel, the English clung on to a toe-hold on the continent of Europe with the heavily fortified town of Calais and its immediate hinterland – the last vestige of huge possessions in France, progressively lost during the Hundred Years’ War of 1337 – 1453. To the north, the Venetians considered that Scotland was ‘situated at the end of the world’.
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One Venetian diplomat believed that the scant love the English showed their neighbours applied at home as well: there were few sincere friendships as ‘they do not trust each other to discuss either public or private affairs together’.
But what of romantic love? Were the English such cold fish in the sixteenth century?
Although [they] are somewhat licentious, I have never noticed anyone, either at court or amongst the lower orders, to be in love.
One must necessarily conclude either that the English are the most discreet lovers in the world or that they are
incapable of love
[emphasis added].
I say this of the men, for I understand it is quite the contrary with the women, who are very violent in their passions.
The English keep a very jealous guard over their wives, though anything may be compensated in the end by the power of money.
The want of affection in the English was also very strongly manifested in relationships with their children.
After having kept them at home until … the age of seven or nine years at the utmost, they put them out, both males and females, to hard service in the houses of other people. I believe they do it because they like to enjoy all their comforts themselves and that they would be better served by strangers than they would be by their own children.
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