Great Harry

by Erickson, Carolly, 1943-

  Foreigners found Henry's courtiers magnificent, and wrote at length about their finery. The handsome gold chains the men wore, thick links of gold as much as a hand's breadth wide, and so long they were sometimes looped several times around the neck, were especially impressive. At a ceremony in 1514 the Venetian ambassador Badoer was struck by the display of these imposing ornaments. All the English nobles present, he wrote, "bore such massive gold chains that some might have served for fetters on a felon's ankles, and sufficed for his safe custody, so heavy were they, and of such immense value."^^

  In their gorgeous array the courtiers formed a spangled, bejeweled backdrop against which the figure of the king moved in majestic splendor. Encompassed by their elegance he shone all the more brilliantly, his suits more luxuriant, his jewels more dazzling, his person more exquisite in every way than those around him. He dripped gold. Gold ornaments hung from his doublets and caps and sleeves; gold aglets and roses trimmed his gowns. His buttons were of gold with inset pearls, the embroidery on his sleeves was of damask gold. His goldsmiths wasted more of the precious metal in satisfying his requests than most men saw in their lifetimes. In 1516 two of these metalworkers, Amadas and Rowlet, were paid nearly eight pounds ' 'for the waste of gold"; sometimes garments of cloth of gold would be begun, then permanently laid aside "as the king's purpose changed," the glittering fabric spoiled.^'*

  The smallest details of his raiment were works of art: the embroidered branches on his doublets bearing flowers made of pearls; the "Morisco work" on his sleeves trimmed in knots of Venice gold; the ship pendant he wore at his throat, its masts and decks outlined in diamonds. The overall effect, observers agreed, could hardly have been surpassed. Impressed as he was with the English courtiers Badoer was taken aback completely on one occasion by the breathtaking beauty of the king posing regally in their midst, his gown a dramatic fall of white damask closely studded with diamonds and rubies.

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  My minde to me a kingdome is; Such perfect joy therein Ifinde Asfarre exceeds all earthly blisse, That God or Nature hath assignde

  King Henry, his close friend Thomas More once wrote, had the rare gift of making everyone around him believe he was speaking to him or her alone. While remaining the center of every circle he entered he adapted rapidly to the interests and preoccupations of that circle, showing different sides of his protean temperament and varied talents to different groups of courtiers. To his minions he was the carefree, fun-loving companion who on a snowy day in January, 1519, rushed outside to join his nobles in a snowball fight, borrowing a cap from a boy to keep his ears warm. To the gentlemen of his chamber he was the high-spirited amateur musician who sang "By the bank as I lay" and "As I walked the wood so wild" and other two-part songs with Peter Carew by the hour. To his French hostages he was a serious gambler, to his ship captains an amateur pilot who loved ships and the sea. And to More, Erasmus and the dozen or so men of profound learning who knew him well and observed his mind and thoughts at close range, he was a man of brilliantly keen intellect who took deep pleasure in the exercise of his wits.

  An elite of the learned surrounded the king, less conspicuous than his other favorites but no less prized. They provided the special sort of companionship his own restless intelligence craved—the communion of minds and the exchange of ideas. They came to his court gladly, not only because, as More wrote, "the king's majesty our sovereign has himself more learning than any English monarch ever possessed before him," but because, after a decade as a king, he was more than ever their ideal ruler made flesh. Neither the burdens nor the temptations of his office had dissuaded him from his commitment to learning, or from the respect for the life of the mind he had expressed to Mountjoy soon after his coronation. Henry brought to his studies the same effortless talent, the same grace and natural excellence which made him admired as a musician and dancer. Since boyhood he had had the sort of mind that learned almost anything quickly; once he was conversant with a subject he moved about with ease within it, shifting nimbly from one argument to another and fastening eagerly on controversial points.

  The range of his linguistic accomplishments was wide. He spoke excellent French, and understood Italian well. Latin was so comfortable a

  medium of expression for Henry that he used it in all his diplomatic discussions with foreign ambassadors, and had the fluency even to make impromptu speeches. When in August of 1518 Cardinal Campeggio came to England to preach a crusade against the Turks, he made a long Latin oration before the king and his assembled courtiers. Henry listened with interest, standing before his throne while the cardinal unraveled his carefully prepared discourse. When he had finished the king replied at length in equally elegant Latin, omitting none of the rhetorical nuances or elaborate turns of phrase in the humanist lexicon.^ His written style was equally well developed, and distinctive; whether he wrote in English, French or Latin, the result invariably betrayed his own unmistakable stamp.

  Beyond this, he was exceedingly well read, not only in the works of literature and piety appropriate to a cultivated gentleman but in the thorny treatises and summas of the medieval scholastics. Erasmus called attention to the depth of his reading, and the theologians against whom he tested his knowledge were often forced to concede his superiority in citing texts. He kept himself surrounded by books of every sort; the ''highest library" at Greenwich contained well over three hundred volumes, and he was soon to add to their number an important work of his own.^

  Henry was happiest, though, in bringing the weight of his learning to bear on a dilemma of philosophy or theology, preferably in an informal discussion. He found the battle of wits as stimulating as the breaking of lances in a joust, and prepared himself to meet his intellectual opponents as carefully as he did his partners in the lists. As often as he could get away from the affairs of state, Erasmus said, the king either read or engaged in debate. He often arranged "little combats" — conflictatiunculae —and shut himself away with the works of Aquinas or Scotus or Gabriel Biel to make ready for them. No matter how impassioned the contest he never grew heated, however; "amazingly courteous and calm," he maintained the tone of a friendly rival and never of a sovereign.^

  One of these disputations pitted Henry against a well-known churchman. They argued the proposition "Whether a layman is obliged to say his prayers in words," and one of the courtiers who was present found the encounter worthy of record. At other times the issue was more controversial—the correct understanding of transubstantiation, a point of canon law or the meaning of a passage from the decretals. Often the king served as arbiter in the disputations of others. On one occasion a court preacher turned his sermon into a raging diatribe against humanist studies—chiefly against Greek, which had recently come under attack at Oxford as harmful to piety—and against Erasmus, denouncing him by name. As the harangue continued Richard Pace gave the king a significant look; Henry laughed quietly in reply. After the sermon the theologian found himself summoned into the royal presence to debate his opinions with Thomas More. Henry joined in the disputation on More's side, "speaking most eloquently in defense of the study of Greek." When it came time for the offending theologian to reply his nerve broke, and he

  went down on his knees, begging to be forgiven for having been so *'carried away by a spirit" that he misspoke himself.

  "Nevertheless," Henry told him, "that was not the spirit of Christ, but of foolishness." As for his condemnation of Erasmus, had he read any of the great man's works? The theologian acknowledged that he hadn't. "He is an evident fool," the king concluded, "who condemns what he hasn't read."

  In a last effort to redeem himself the churchman said he had read Erasmus' satire The Praise of Folly —"Which has a great deal to do with the case, your majesty," Pace broke in sarcastically—and admitted, on second thought, that Greek might not be so dangerous to piety after all, since it was derived from Hebrew. This final absurdity brought the interview to an end. Henry sent the man away, with instructions
never to preach before his court again.'*

  Katherine played a conspicuous role in the king's intellectual life, if not in the "little combats." In her knowledge and "excellence" the queen was a match for her husband, "a rare and fine advocate" of the New Learning, according to Erasmus. Like Henry she had been an apt pupil as a child, and had never lost her taste for letters. She had even asked the great Erasmus himself to be her teacher, and though his itinerant life made that impossible—he had left England in 1514—he saluted her as "miraculously learned for a woman." Katherine was as outspoken as she was learned, and did not hesitate to challenge Erasmus' scholarly activities. Talking with another of the court scholars one day she questioned Erasmus' greatest undertaking: his edition of the Latin New Testament, the first such effort since the Vulgate of Saint Jerome in the fourth century.

  "Was Jerome not a learned man?" she asked.

  "Yes, certainly," the scholar told her.

  "And is he not in heaven?"

  "Indeed," came the reply.

  "Why then," the queen insisted, "does Erasmus correct Jerome? Is he wiser than Jerome?"

  The question was often posed. The most distinguished humanist associated with the English court, Erasmus nonetheless made enemies readily and was attacked by critics wherever he went. Those who were put off by his work The Praise of Folly were enraged at his New Testament. Many condemned it unread—or so the author claimed—on no better evidence than a tavern rumor that a new work had been published "which was to pluck out the eyes of theologians like crows."^ Others found the attempt to improve on the age-old version of Jerome presumptuous and possibly heretical. Once the accusation of heresy was made it became widespread among his critics. "Heresy is held a deadly crime," Erasmus wrote to a friend, a canon at Bruges. "So if you offend one of these gentlemen they all rush on you together, one grunting out 'heretic,' the rest grunting in chorus, and crying for stones to hurl at you."® Assaulted from all sides he longed to return to England, to the friends who appreciated and sheltered him, to the king who wrote him affection-

  ate letters and the queen who, despite her championing of Jerome, wanted Erasmus for her tutor. Above all he wanted to make his home amid the ''galaxy of distinguished men" that surrounded Henry VIII, making his court ''a very museum of knowledge.

  Erasmus' letters describe a court populated by earnest thinkers serving a philosopher king. In place of the uproar of dogs and servants and the babble of gossip the humanist heard only "grave and modest conversation on points of morals or knowledge" in Henry's halls. The king himself sought out companions who shunned the dissolute pastimes dear to other courtiers, he claimed, preferring their society "to that of silly youths or girls, or the rich, or the dishonest, who might tempt him to foolish indulgences or injurious courses."^ So great was his desire to avoid the dissolute life and improve his mind that he all but coerced the most capable men in his realm to live at court, "that they may be in a position to watch all that he does, and share his duties and his pleasures." There were enough men around him who praised his every act; he relied on men such as More, Pace and Colet to speak their minds plainly, and enjoyed the give and take of their exchanges. In their midst he gained new stature; he joined that elite company of rulers remembered for their civilized virtues. He became "Ptolemy Philadelphus in his enthusiasm for good letters, Alexander the Great in felicity, Julius Caesar in force of mind, Augustus in sane judgement, Trajan in mildness, Alexander Severus in integrity, Antoninus Pius in doctrine, and Theodosius in piety."*

  The humanists who lent such luster to the king included Mountjoy, once his informal tutor in the gentlemanly arts and now head of Queen Katherine's household, the aged ex-chancellor Warham, John Fisher, bishop of Rochester, to whose enlightened care Margaret Beaufort had entrusted her grandson on her deathbed, Pietro Carmeliano, an old-fashioned versifier ridiculed by Erasmus for mixing up his long and short syllables, Henry's Latin secretary Andrea Ammonio and the latter's kinsman Peter Vannes. One of Henry's physicians was a noted humanist; Thomas Linacre, whom Erasmus called "as deep and acute a thinker as I have ever met with"; John Stokesley, a theologian and Hebraist, was a politician who sat on the Privy Council along with More.

  In the constellation of brilliance around the king three figures stood out. One was Richard Pace, a winsome, ingenuous and thoroughly likable young courtier taken from Wolsey and employed as a royal secretary and diplomatic envoy. For wit and sweetness of disposition he bore comparison with More; much in demand by Wolsey and the queen. Pace was even dearer to Henry, who looked on him "as his very self." Educated at the University of Padua, a lecturer at Oxford and an exceedingly promising Greek scholar. Pace became a valued negotiator at foreign courts. Before he was forty it was being said that, if the king lost Wolsey to Rome, Pace would be the one to fill his offices, becoming the most powerful man in England next to Henry himself.^

  The dean of St. Paul's, John Colet, also stood out from the others. Tall, handsome and utterly absorbed in his learning—he never went walking without a book in his hands—Colet was conspicuous for the

  neatness and austerity of his dress. Where other priests went in purple gowns of costly fabrics he wore plain gray wool, and surrounded himself with only the simplest of furniture, food and books. He used his large inherited fortune to found a school for boys, disapproving of the English universities as encouraging idleness rather than scholarship, and refused to follow the conventional practice of giving to monasteries. The religious houses did not deserve his charity, Colet said; on the whole he found clerics to be more prone to dishonesty and avarice than laymen, with monks and bishops worst of all.

  Colet's "immensely learned earnestness" was offset by his sunny nature and laughter, but when he lectured or disputed his words carried unparalleled authority. "When Colet speaks, I might be listening to Plato," Erasmus said. He described his friend sitting among his colleagues, speaking "with a sacred fury" about the book of Genesis while they listened in rapt attention.^^

  It was a measure of Henry's respect for Colet—and of his tolerance for views which conflicted sharply with his own—that when on the eve of the military campaign of 1513 the dean had the temerity to preach against war the king listened attentively to his sermon. The immediacy of war was upon the entire court; Colet's impassioned denunciation could not have been more pointed. Yet Henry followed his arguments one by one, hearing him contrast Christ's teachings of gentleness and brotherly love to the butchery and fratricide of warfare. Better to imitate the Prince of Peace than Caesar or Alexander, the preacher concluded in a final challenge directed to the king himself.

  The sermon caused a furor. Colet's episcopal colleagues, already incensed at him for condemning their overly comfortable lives, now denounced him as a traitor to the cause of the Holy League. It was feared that the soldiers might lose heart, or be confused about where their Christian duty lay. Henry too was slightly bewildered: he believed Colet to be a man of sound doctrine, yet this doctrine condemned the pope's own crusade, a fight to which the king was wholeheartedly committed and which he had undertaken not out of sheer battle lust or greed but from the most sincere motives. He sent for the dean and called him into the garden at Greenwich. Sending everyone else away he talked with Colet quietly and earnestly, admitting that the sermon had brought on inner doubts he needed to work through.

  "I have summoned you," Henry said, "in order to resolve my scruples of conscience, so that guided by your counsel I can fulfill my office rightly." Nearly two hours later, their private disputation at an end, they rejoined the waiting churchmen and other courtiers. A solution had been found. War was unchristian, but some wars were justified by a higher ethic. Henry embraced Colet in front of his mortified colleagues, calling for wine to pledge him with a toast. "Let every man choose his own doctor," he said exuberantly. "Dean Colet shall be mine!"^'

  The approval of men such as Colet was important to Henry. He wanted badly to believe that he was doing the right thing; he wanted that belief reinforced b
y others untainted by fear or flattery. He sought

  120 GREAT HARRY

  unfeigned consent to his undertakings, and was willing to spend whatever time it took to earn it.

  Henry valued no one's approval more than Thomas More's. A highly successful lawyer. More was unpretentious and kindly in manner, though his adroitness in argument was unsurpassed. It was said he could annihilate theologians even when debating the subjects they knew best, and his skill in weighing and judging complex issues made him especially valuable in the Council chamber.

  More was the most reluctant of courtiers. The velvets and gold chains of high office left him indifferent; intrigue he found tiresome and the labor of government a continual burden which robbed him of his peace and kept him from his family. According to Colet, More had more genius than any man in England, yet his preferred pastimes were modest. He liked to walk along the riverbank at his country house—sometimes the king walked with him—and he enjoyed watching his tame ferret and weasel and fox. His principal labor was the leading of a sane and balanced life; his principal companions were his wife and four children, who lived together in extraordinary harmony. ''His whole house breathes happiness,'' declared his frequent houseguest Erasmus.