1536: The Year That Changed Henry VIII (3 page)

P
rince Henry, later Henry VIII, was born on 28 June 1491 at Greenwich Palace. He was one of seven children born to Henry VII and Elizabeth of York, although only four survived infancy. As the second son, he was not destined for the throne. That honour and responsibility fell to his elder brother, Arthur, Prince of Wales. Yet, the renowned Desiderius Erasmus later wrote glowingly of Henry in these years, stating that even ‘when the King was no more than a child… he had a vivid and active mind, above measure to execute whatever tasks he undertook… you would say that he was a universal genius’.
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In May 1502, Arthur, who had recently married and taken on a position of responsibility in the Welsh Marches, died at the age of fifteen. As a result, the spotlight suddenly turned on the ten-year-old Henry, the next heir-apparent. Unlike Arthur, however, Henry was given no opportunity to practise ruling – the only surviving heir needed to be protected. His life remained the confined, secluded lifestyle of a lesser royal child, both indulged and frustratingly sheltered, and so when Henry came to the throne, he was unrehearsed in the art of sovereignty. The loss of his mother quickly followed that of his brother. In February 1503, Elizabeth of York died as a result of childbirth when Henry was eleven years old, and Henry’s later correspondence shows he took her death badly. In June, Henry also effectively lost his sister Margaret, who moved to Edinburgh to marry James IV.
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In June 1503, a year after Arthur’s death, Henry was betrothed to his brother’s widow, the seventeen-year-old Katherine of Aragon. In receipt of a papal dispensation to overcome the obstacle of the couple’s consanguinity (after Katherine’s marriage to Arthur), Henry and Katherine were scheduled to marry when Henry attained his fifteenth birthday. A condition of the marriage was that Katherine’s father, Ferdinand of Spain, should provide in advance 100,000 crowns in plate, jewels and coin as a marriage portion. Yet by 1505, this had not been received, and so the date for the wedding came and went; the solemnization of the marriage appeared to be indefinitely postponed. Henry VII began to toy with making another alliance for his son with Eleanor of Austria, Katherine of Aragon’s niece. In fact, the negotiations for a marriage between Henry and Eleanor were only stopped by Henry VII’s death on 21 April 1509 (later Eleanor would marry Henry’s rival, Francis I of France).
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So, on 22 April 1509, aged seventeen, Henry was proclaimed King Henry VIII. His coronation was greeted with rapture. William Blount, Lord Mountjoy wrote to Erasmus on 27 May:

When you know what a hero [the king] now shows himself, how wisely he behaves, what a lover he is of justice and goodness, what affection he bears to the learned, I will venture that you will need no wings to make you fly to behold this new and auspicious star. If you could see how all the world here is rejoicing in the possession of so great a prince, how his life is all their desire, you could not contain your tears of joy. The heavens laugh, the earth exults, all things are full of milk, of honey, of nectar. Avarice is expelled from the country. Liberality scatters wealth with bounteous hand. Our King does not desire gold or gems or precious metals, but virtue, glory and immortality.

One of his first acts as king was to marry Katherine on 11 June in the Franciscan church at Greenwich Palace. While it is possible that in doing so Henry was fulfilling his father’s deathbed wish, it seems likely to have been a match primarily based on affection. The sources state that Henry wrote to his father-inlaw in 1513 saying ‘the love he bears Katherine is such, that if he were still free he would choose her in preference to all others’. Other men may have commented that Katherine was ‘rather ugly than otherwise’ and ‘not handsome, though she had a very beautiful complexion’, but Henry chose her. The couple were jointly crowned in Westminster Abbey on Midsummer’s Day, 24 June 1509, four days before Henry’s eighteenth birthday.
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It is clear that in these early years, and indeed, for the first twenty years of his reign, Henry was truly quite brilliant, having been blessed by nature with all the attributes and qualities he might desire. The chronicler Edward Hall said as much:

The features of his body, his goodly personage, his amiable visage, princely countenance, with the noble qualities of his royal estate, to every man known, needs no rehearsal, considering that, for lack of cunning, I cannot express the gifts of grace and of nature that God has endowed him with all.

Reports from foreign observers at his court run into hyperbole. In 1515, Henry VIII was described as ‘not only very expert in arms and of great valour, and most excellent in his personal endowments, but... likewise so gifted and adorned with mental accomplishments of every sort that we believe him to have few equals in the world’. Two years later, Francesco Chieregato wrote that Henry was a ‘most invincible King, whose acquirements and qualities are so many and excellent that I consider him to excel all who ever wore a crown’. And in his final report on four years spent at Henry’s court between 1515 and 1519, the Venetian ambassador Sebastian Giustinian concluded that Henry was ‘much handsomer than any other Sovereign in Christendom… [and] the best dressed sovereign in the world’.
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The grounds for all this praise were that besides being exceedingly good-looking, Henry VIII appeared to be accomplished in every way. He was a talented linguist – he spoke French, Spanish and Latin, the latter to the point of being able to reply spontaneously to an oration in elegant Latin. He loved music and was a skilled musician and composer: when an embassy from France arrived in 1517, Henry entertained the visitors himself by ‘singing and playing on every musical instrument’ quite excellently. He danced beautifully, surpassed all the archers of his guard with his bowmanship (‘as’, adds this commentator, ‘he surpasses them in stature and personal graces’), and was ‘a capital horseman and a fine jouster’.
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From contemporary sources we can build up a composite picture of Henry’s character. He was full of spirit, vigour and energy, ‘young, lusty and courageous… [and] disposed to all mirth and pleasure’. As a man in his teens, twenties and thirties, he pursued pleasure – he loved entertainments, masques, banquets, hunting, dancing and other diversions. For example, on May Day 1515, the king and all his guard gathered in a wood near Greenwich to play at being Robin Hood and his merry men. Dressed all in green, with bows in their hands, and attended by 100 noblemen on horseback ‘gorgeously arrayed’, Henry and his court enjoyed an open-air banquet. Singers and musicians played from bowers, which had been purposely filled with sweetly-singing birds. Afterwards, they processed back to Greenwich, where a joust was held in very great pomp. Ambassadors often noted, perhaps with some frustration, that the king was off ‘taking his pleasure’, which normally meant hunting, a sport at which Henry would ride out all day, tiring eight or ten horses before retiring. Such exuberance was also displayed at the tiltyard. He was often reported as outshining all his noblemen at the joust. It was impossible for this athletic, ebullient and extrovert young man not occasionally to be something of a show-off. In 1517, at a great joust in honour of the French ambassadors, the king wanted to joust against all fourteen competitors, ‘but this was forbidden by the Council, which moreover decreed that each jouster was to run six courses and no more, so that the entertainment might be ended on that day’. Nonetheless, when he ‘presented himself before the Queens and the ladies’, he made ‘a thousand jumps in the air’, and after tiring out his horse, mounted one of those ridden by his pages, a pattern he repeated constantly over the course of the day until the end of the joust.
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The greatest example of such athletic extravagance, albeit with a serious diplomatic purpose, was Henry VIII’s meeting with the French king, Francis I, at the Field of the Cloth of Gold from 7 to 20 June 1520. This extraordinary summit between the two kings and their entire courts was a magnificent festival of feasting, jousting, dancing and entertainment held on the border between the two countries, in between the English village of Guines (in English Calais) and the French village of Ardres. For the occasion, a town was temporarily constructed, including a temporary palace of stone and timber, and a multitude of tents and pavilions made from cloth of gold (hence the name). The English retinue alone was 5,172 persons. For the 48-day trip, the quantities of food and drink consumed are astonishing – with a total cost of £8,839 2s 4d, the list included 2,014 mutton, 51 pigs, 82 pheasants, 9,100 plaice, 7,836 whiting, 30,700 eggs and 114,000 litres of wine, enough to fuel wine fountains that flowed freely for hours at a time.
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Such flamboyance and excess on special occasions was matched daily by the extraordinary sumptuousness with which Henry surrounded himself. One example is the constant finery of his clothing. There was great extravagance and not a little vanity in Henry’s glorious displays of magnificence, wearing one day royal robes of gold brocade lined with ermine, another a doublet of crimson and white satin with slashed scarlet hose and a mantle of purple velvet. He adorned himself in jewels: on one occasion, he was described as wearing a gold collar, from which hung a round cut diamond ‘the size of the largest walnut I ever saw’, and suspended from this, a very large round pearl, while his fingers were ‘one mass of jewelled rings’. His attachment to luxurious clothing would remain with him throughout his life. He carried off such opulence because of his considerable stage-presence and charisma. He received one ambassador while standing under his canopy of cloth of gold, and leaning against his gilt throne, almost as if the moment were posed simply so that the ambassador could marvel at his magnificence. His famous exchange with a Venetian ambassador, in which he asked after the height and figure of the king of France before boasting that he also had a good calf to his leg, suggests his own beauty led him to at least a little conceit. But such vainglory was compensated for by the young Henry’s warm and benevolent nature. Erasmus described him in 1529 as ‘a man of gentle friendliness, and gentle in debate; he acts more like a companion than a king’. Henry seems to have been light-hearted, merry and easily given to laughter. He could be upbeat, kindly and encouraging – a diarist records how, after rain had soaked the English troops near Calais in July 1513, the king rode round at three o’clock in the morning comforting the watch – saying, ‘Well, comrades, now that we have suffered in the beginning, fortune promises us better things, God willing.’ He was described in 1519 as ‘affable and gracious; [a man who] harmed no one…’; he was exceedingly generous in gifts and very affectionate – when Giustinian left his court after four years, Henry told him that ‘he had ever loved him as a father’.
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Although Henry assured his father-in-law that his love of jousting and hunting did not mean he neglected affairs of state, others demurred. It was said that while the king was away seeking amusement, ‘he did not choose to be troubled by anybody or to be saddled with any business’ and that he wanted only ‘to follow his desire and appetite, nothing minded to travail in the busy affairs of this realm’. Instead, until 1529, he delegated much power and responsibility for state affairs to Thomas Wolsey, who, from 1515, had been a cardinal and the king’s chief minister. Some therefore concluded the cardinal ‘governs everything alone’. Yet, while Wolsey was incredibly powerful, Henry VIII, if uninterested in the administrative detail of running the country, had strong views on many matters of state policy. Chiefly, in the first half of his reign, besides being preoccupied with fun and diversion, he was interested in foreign affairs, and above all, martial glory. The example of the great monarchs he had known of as a boy – Richard the Lionheart, Edward I, and especially, Henry V, and his early contemporaries, his father-in-law, Ferdinand of Aragon, Louis XII of France and Maximilian of Hapsburg – urged him to earn a reputation on the field of battle. He wanted to be a warrior and a hero, a knight of old, according to the ideals of chivalry and valour that his culture exalted. In this, he contrasted with the peaceful ambitions of his father: Henry VIII wanted a new age of virile, energetic, ambitious conquest. He launched a war against France in 1512, fighting at sea and in 1513, laying siege to the towns of Thérouanne and Tournai (a battle later dubbed the Battle of the Spurs, and commemorated in the 1540s with a glorious painting of the occasion). These battles won him glory, but little of lasting value. Although peace with France was negotiated in 1514 (a peace celebrated at the Field of the Cloth of Gold), Henry was at war with France once again between 1522 and 1525. His armies also fought against the Scots, most notably in the massacre at Flodden Field in 1513.
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Yet, despite all this evidence of pleasure-seeking, martial ambition and youthful zest, it would be wrong to conclude that this exuberant and boisterous young king was always happy-go-lucky. He could at times, even in his early years, be wilful, stubborn and obstinate. Wolsey wrote of Henry that ‘rather than… miss or want any part of his will or appetite, [the king] will put the loss of one half of his realm in danger’, and warned a potential member of the privy council to ‘be well advised and assured what matter ye put in his head; for ye shall never pull it out again’. He testified to having spent hours on knees pleading with Henry to dissuade him from one or other course of action, to no avail. Ironically in light of later events, one issue on which Henry was dogmatic in this period was orthodox Roman Catholic religion. In 1521, in response to Martin Luther’s
De Captivitate Babylonica
, Henry VIII, undoubtedly with some help, wrote a polemical book called
Assertio Septum Sacramentorum
(
In Defence of the Seven Sacraments
) defending papal authority and condemning Luther. This book, which sold remarkably well, earned him the title
Defensor Fidei
or Defender of the Faith.
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