Great Harry

by Erickson, Carolly, 1943-

  Among the worst abuses of court demeanor was that the courtiers were not satisfied to make use of their salaried underlings, but gave tips and odd jobs to a rabble of hangers-on who held horses, carried loads, delivered messages and fetched things from shops and inns outside the palace gates. Every smartly-dressed groom or guardsman was followed by a pack of little boys eager to touch his velvet coat or hold his poleaxe or run his errands. The men of Henry's personal guard, their numbers swollen by the recent military campaign, now jostled for space at the already overcrowded court. Some three hundred strong, they lounged and joked and quarreled throughout the palace when they were not standing at attendance in the great chamber, and each of them had several meanly-dressed attendants who slept at his feet and cleaned his boots. These, and

  the "vagabonds and vile persons" who enticed, accosted and occasionally robbed servants by offering to supply them with stolen goods or women, added to the existing "annoyance, infection and confusion" of court life and were left behind to cause trouble whenever the court moved.

  Regulating vice and petty criminality was the duty of the marshal and provost marshals, who rode herd on the "vile persons"—beggars, cut-purses, drunkards, prostitutes—who followed the king's household. Misbehaving servants too were brought before them: those absent from court for too long, those who were caught repeatedly wiping their hands on the tapestries, or carelessly laying dirty dishes down on the embroidered bedcoverings, or boys caught drawing huge phalluses on the walls. Swearing, fighting, drunkenness or "haunting bad houses" were punishable by public humiliation, loss of wages, or possible dismissal. The marshal could imprison any household employee who committed a more serious crime, but most wrongdoing could be kept under control by less drastic measures. Stealing food could be prevented by ordering the yeomen and grooms to serve without their cloaks; stripped to their coats, they were "the easier to be seen if they carried forth any meat that they ought not to do."

  In 1525, when Henry was thirty-four, he tried to take firmer control of the uncontrollable population of his court. Ordinances drawn up in that year referred to the "abuses" which had "crept up in his household" during his wars, which, "now that peace is established, he was determined to reform." The vice-chamberlain and others were hereafter to aid the marshal in assuring the "sufficiency and demeanor" of all servants; only "honest persons of good stature, gesture and behavior" were to be tolerated. Disobedience and incompetence were to be severely punished, with incorrigibles ordered to leave the palace at once. To prevent the "insufferable disorders" of the past, limits were put on the numbers of retainers visiting nobles could bring with them, and the king's guardsmen, also reduced in numbers, were forbidden to keep servants of their own. All animals but ladies' spaniels were outlawed, and the motley corps of boys and vagabonds were to be kept outside the court gate.

  The ordinances were issued, read and, perhaps, enforced. Or perhaps they stood as sterile embodiments of the royal will, noted or ignored at random by each of the men and women who served the king.

  To spend the daye with merry c he are, To drinke and revell every night, To card and dice from eve to morne, It was, I ween, his hearts delighte.

  To ride, to runne, to rant, to roare, To always spend and never spare, I wott, an' it were the king himselfe, Of gold and fee he mote be bare.

  "Within the past few days," the Venetian ambassador wrote to his superiors in May of 1519, "King Henry has made a great change in his court." He had dismissed some of his chief companions, "who had enjoyed very great authority in the kingdom, and had been the very soul of the king." Other officials had also been replaced by older, more experienced men. The incident was thought to be as vitally important as any that had taken place for many years, and as soon as the news became known all the ambassadors scurried to their usual sources of court gossip to try to uncover its deeper meaning.

  Dionysius Memo, Henry's favorite performer and close friend, told the Venetian ambassador that the courtiers were sent away because they had become partisans of the French and of French ways during their recent embassy to the court of Francis I. The same view prevailed at the French court itself. The French ambassador in England, relying in part on information from compatriots who were hostages at the English court and much in favor with the king, was convinced that Wolsey was behind the dismissals; Wolsey feared the power that Henry's intimates had over him, the hostages said, and thought they might use it to his detriment. That the men who replaced the ousted favorites were Wolsey's men lent weight to this view, but there was a third conjecture. The septuagenarian Thomas Howard, created duke of Norfolk for his valor at Flodden, offered the explanation that the favored courtiers had led their master into incessant gambling which left him thousands of pounds poorer. "Resolving to lead a new life," Norfolk maintained, Henry had put them from him.^

  According to the chronicler Hall, the six men—Francis Bryan, Nicholas Carew, John Pechy, Edward Poyntz, Edward Neville and Henry Guildford—were guilty of nothing more than overexuberant playfulness.^ "Not regarding his estate nor degree," they were "so familiar and

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  homely" with the king that they forgot who they were, and who he was. They failed to observe that deferential remoteness that served as a barrier between the anointed monarch and ordinary mortals. They behaved, in fact, the way they had at the French court, where every day King Francis had ridden with them through the streets of Paris, throwing eggs and stones and other things at his long-suffering subjects. In France they learned to admire French food, French wine, French gowns and French women; when they returned to England "they were all French," and found everything English, including their sovereign, ludicrously inadequate. Henry endured their disrespect patiently. Hall wrote, until his Council implored him to put an end to these "enormities and lightness." Then he gave his councilors permission to banish the six from court— which "grieved sore the hearts of these young men, which were called the king's minions."

  In itself the banishment of Bryan, Carew and the others was of only passing interest. All six were back at court within a year or so, and none permanently lost his standing with the king. But the excited reaction of court observers and the explanations advanced to account for the event are of the greatest interest, for they reveal the power that went with personal attendance on the king, and the difficulty of unriddling the shifting images of that power in the records of contemporaries.

  The court was a shadow-world of hidden motives, ambiguous gestures and elusive confrontations. Personal jealousies and rivalries took subtle forms; illusions of deference and domination, of calculation and ingenuousness were everywhere. The king, his nobles and officials were like carved pieces on a chessboard, their moves and countermoves forming an intricate puzzle often unfathomable to outsiders. Thus where the Venetian diplomat saw shrewd political awareness in the banished "minions" the chronicler perceived only puerile misbehavior. The royal councilors were dismayed by what they looked on as rowdy impropriety in the young men, while the French laid everything to the charge of the man they most feared and respected at court, Wolsey. These shifting views make it hard to see the king clearly amid the circles of his courtiers in the first decade of his reign.

  He was perhaps fondest of his minions, the dozen or so boon companions who made it easiest for him to forget he was a king. Of the six who were temporarily exiled, Poyntz and Pechy—the latter a knight in whose hunting parks Katherine loved to ride and hunt—appear infrequently in the records. Henry Guildford was both controller and master of the revels, much sought out by Henry and Katherine for the fairytale entertainments he designed and produced. With the tall, athletic Edward Neville Henry felt the shared bond of royal blood. Neville was of the Plantagenet line, like the Courtenays and de la Poles; though he and Henry were only distantly related they closely resembled one another, not only in height and build but in facial appearance as well. Having Neville at Henry's side was like having a twin brother, and the resemblance was put to good use to baffle the co
urt at disguisings and other entertainments. Beyond this the king, with whom exact gradations of nobility counted

  very much, thought of Neville as a particularly suitable as well as enjoyable companion for his leisure hours, and suitable too to fill the high office of sewer.^

  Nicholas Carew and Francis Bryan came to prominence as "young gentlemen" whom Henry chose to "set forth" and encourage in feats of arms by lending them horses and armor in the spring of 1515. Bryan went on to become a very capable jouster, Carew an extraordinary one, and the ties between them were strengthened when Carew married Bryan's sister Elizabeth. Both men were to enjoy long careers in the royal service, Carew as a soldier and Bryan as a cipherer, trusted diplomatic envoy and eventually ambassador to France. A clever, versatile and eagerly dissolute man, Bryan looked like a pirate; he had lost an eye in a tilting match, and wore an eyepatch to hide it. He had in fact been at sea, serving under Admiral Thomas Howard in the Margaret Bonaventure in 1513, and this combined with his skill at the tilt made him very popular with Henry. More than any of the other minions Bryan knew the art of retaining the king's favor, altering his loyalties as his master did and never allowing friendship or family ties to bring him into conflict with the king. He kept himself constantly at Henry's side, playing shovel board, bowls, primero and tennis with him while at the same time carrying out his duties as cupbearer, gentleman of the bedchamber and master of the toils. Bryan was a poet as well, an admirer of Erasmus and a chosen companion of Wyatt and later of Surrey—in short, a many-sided, highly capable man like the king himself, though without the king's charisma or brilliance.

  Others in the privileged circle of Henry's companions included Henry Norris, gentleman waiter and, in these years, the only man permitted to enter the royal bedchamber, and William Compton, once Henry's page and since risen to become, among a variety of offices and appointments, chief gentleman of the bedchamber and "usher of the black rod" at Windsor Castle. Knighted for his service in the campaign of 1513, Compton had begun to amass a large fortune, though his bid to gain the hand and wealth of the widowed Margaret Pole, countess of Salisbury, was unsuccessful. Compton was thought to have great influence with Henry in the earliest years of his reign. The Venetians, the French and representatives of papal interests in England all showered pensions and valuable gifts on him, and he was certainly noteworthy for the stature of his enemies. Wolsey was his rival, and Queen Katherine and the duke of Buckingham still resented him for his role in the affair of Anne Stafford. Buckingham too was frequently at Henry's side, though much less frequently than Compton. The duke's popularity, coupled with his fierce pride in his royal ancestry, made the king wary; it was said that if Henry died without a male heir Buckingham might easily take the throne.^

  These were the leading favorites, though there were background figures around the king waiting for fate or luck to cast them within his chosen circle: Thomas Boleyn, William Brereton, Henry's cousin Henry Pole, Henry and Anthony Knevet, Thomas and William Parr. All held enviable court offices, and lacked only the right opportunity to bring them into prominence. Then too there were the transient favorites such as the

  due de Longueville, lodged elegantly in the Tower along with his personal retinue of six attendants ever since his capture at the Battle of the Spurs. Another group of Frenchmen—the young and spirited hostages sent to England as pledges of Francis' good faith—found themselves constantly in Henry's company for as long as their visit lasted. And there were passing infatuations such as the king's great delight in a young lutenist brought to court by Memo in 1517. Henry could not hear the boy play often enough, and "never wearied of listening to him"; until the king's amazement at his skill wore off all the other lutenists were thrown into the shade.^

  These chosen companions were at the heart of the larger society of the court. The members of that society were drawn to the palace by obligations of service and rank, by political interests, family attachments and simple ambition, by a love of finery and gluttony and spectacle. Whatever their own motives, however, the courtiers existed primarily to serve particular functions for the king. They kept him company. They served as a vast pool of companionable associates, always eager to accompany him anywhere, to be his playfellows, partisans or friendly rivals in any of a dozen pastimes. They hunted with him in summer and fall, rising before dawn and joining him in the fields by five, then riding by his side until nine or ten at night. They kept up with him largely without complaint, though the exhausting regimen led some to sigh in agreement with Wolsey's humanist secretary Richard Pace that Henry "spared no pains to convert the sport of hunting into a martyrdom." They kept themselves in readiness to follow his every whim—to shoot, to run races, even to slip away from court, if invited, to join the king in a distant residence and share his solitude. He seldom craved solitude, though; more often he relished a great concourse of people to share his amusements and to serve as occasional targets of his bemused silliness. At banquets many hours long, when there was no dancing or music-making or masking to divert his boredom, he entertained himself by throwing sugarplums and comfits at his guests.^

  Banqueting at the court of Henry VIII was of gargantuan proportions. Nowhere was the food so plentiful and varied as in England. It was said English stomachs had need of more food than others, and the distinctive English habit of shameless belching at table was eloquent testimony to their capacity. Sumptuary laws passed in 1517 limited the number of courses a great noble or churchman could serve his hundreds of guests to seven or fewer, but as each course called for perhaps a dozen dishes, restraint was easily mistaken for excess. And the king himself was exempt from these restrictions. In one day of feasting his courtiers consumed eleven entire carcasses of beef, six sheep, seventeen hogs and pigs, forty-five dozen chickens, fifteen swans, six cranes, thirty-two dozen pigeons and fifty-four dozen larks, nearly six dozen geese and four peacocks. Three thousand pears and thirteen hundred apples went to flavor the meat and fowl, while the bakers provided three thousand loaves of bread and the buttery nearly four hundred dishes of butter.^

  Each of the dishes at a royal banquet was brought before the king in a

  setting of unparalleled magnificence, amid displays of gold and silver plate that not only conveyed an impression of wealth but served as a dazzling source of illumination. Candles were often set in the center of silver plates hung along the walls; the reflected light blazed out over the diners and shone on the dishes and goblets and cutlery. The heaping trays of meat and fish were served according to a strict order and following culinary and gastronomic traditions centuries old. First the sewer and his assistants brought in the large, whole-footed birds such as swans, geese and drakes, then the smaller birds, then baked meats and fish in their proper order, then fruit and sweets. Apprentice serving men memorized the names and serving order of hundreds of dishes, a task made complicated by the variety of names used for a single creature at different stages of its growth. Among fish, conger eels were called such only at maturity; if caught very young they were called griggs or sniggs; if half-grown, scafflings. Youthful sparlings were sprats, baby cods whitings; shrimps grew into sprawns and eventually into crevices.^

  Once the names were mastered, complex carving techniques had to be learned—which portions of each animal were to be discarded as inedible and which were delicacies. A skilled carver learned to slice brawn, splat a pike, unbrace a mallard and barb a lobster. He had to know that bitterns were not carved like turtledoves or plovers, and that there was a correct sauce for every meat—garlic for beef and goose, ginger for fawn, salt and cinnamon for woodcock and thrush, verjuice for veal and mullet, exotic sauces of amber, musk and rosewater for other dishes. With elegant meals a commonplace the demand for greater and greater delicacies grew. The royal cooks prepared minnows, sea-hogs (porpoises), green, dried or marinated neat's tongue, calves' heads and mugget (veal's entrails made into a pie). They salted the sweet-smelling livers of sturgeons and dolphins, and crowned their banquets with carefully spiced wh
ale meat, whaleflesh being known as the "hardest" and most unusual of all foods.^

  Between courses came pageantry in food. Subtleties—confectionery miniatures sculpted in sugar and wax—were made in the shape of figures, buildings, even elaborate natural landscapes, and were set in the middle of the table to round off each segment of the endless feasting. Often they were biblical: Gabriel greeting Mary, an angel announcing Jesus' birth to three shepherds, wise men from the East bringing gifts. Some were classical or literary, as with one cake made to resemble a mountain from which a poet emerged to recite verses. Others were metaphorical. At one English banquet four subtleties represented the four seasons and ages of mankind: the age of pleasure (a young man called spring, playing the pipes on a cloud), the age of quarreling (a man of war called summer, red-faced and angry), the age of melancholy (a tired man with a sickle, called harvest), and the age of aches and troubles (a gray-haired old man called winter, sitting on a stone).^^

  Wines in endless variety washed down every course and dish. By the end of the sixteenth century more than five dozen kinds of "small wines"—French and Rhenish—were known in England, and nearly as many sweet wines. All were new, harsh and very heady, but the courtiers

  drank copiously, disregarding the warning of physicians that too much wine made for black teeth, sagging cheeks and sodden brains. The English of Henry's time were especially fond of sugared wine—believed to be an aphrodisiac—and of dessert wines such as malmsey and hippocras, mixed with honey and spices. Named, according to one fifteenth-century writer, for the spice bag called "Hippocrates' sleeve" with which it was flavored, hippocras was a tempting blend of red wine spiced with cinnamon, ginger and sugar or sugar candy, strained through a fine cloth and served with wafers. ^^ When the feasting was over and the last of the scraps had been distributed among the servants, the food dealers and the alms tub, the weary courtiers took to bed a thick warming posset of sugared ale curdled with hot milk, eggs and grated biscuit.