Great Harry

by Erickson, Carolly, 1943-

  To indulge this pastime he needed a large supply of horses, and the stables at Eltham were enlarged in 1513 to accommodate them. Good horses were scarce in England, however. Compared to Italians the English trained their horses too young and worked them too hard; to find suitable mounts the king had to send agents to the continent to bargain for the swift barbs, high-stepping Neapolitans, bounding Frieslanders and Spanish jennets he required. When young and well fed, and free of lameness, windgall, the staggers or "running imposthumes," riding horses were costly. Buyers such as Jacotyn de Bomemacker, empowered to acquire horses in Flanders for Henry's stable, had to pay thirty or forty pounds for choice mounts. No gift pleased the king more than the gift of a horse, and European sovereigns who hoped to win Henry's good will always sent fine animals to his stables. Ambitious courtiers did the same thing. In 1520 Edward Guildford gave Henry a handsome black pied horse and a young bay called "Byard Hays," with his grooming boy Jacquette. Byard Hays he kept; the black horse he gave to Carew to ride at the tilt.^^

  Henry treasured his horses as he did his companions, and arranged special care for his favorites. Ammonio wrote a poem about one of the king's best-loved horses, Canicida; another, the "Barbaristo" or Barbary horse, was a prized Arabian with its own keeper and its own account in the records of the stables. According to these records, Henry paid seven shillings for each "bath for the barbary horse."^^ As often as he could the king visited his horses, riding them for hours at a time and training them to respond to his commands. "Ha traitor! Ha villain!" he cried to correct them, "holla, holla, so boy, there boy" to encourage them and show his approval. They learned to jump at his "hey" and "now," to "fetch the capriole" when he clicked his tongue or cried "hup" and pressed his calves into their flanks. Following the Italian practice he taught them to seek his "cherishing" rather than to fear his spurs. When they did well he scratched their necks and withers with his riding wand, patting them and speaking softly and admiringly.

  One of Henry's happiest days was the day the Mantuan barb Gov-ematore arrived at his court.^^ He came, with three brood mares, as a gift from the marquis of Mantua, a renowned horse breeder whose stables were famous all over Europe. Their keeper and trainer Giovanni Ratto presented the horses to the king on a spring day in 1514, as he and

  128 ^ GREAT HARRY

  Katherine and some of the courtiers were walking through the stables. As soon as he saw them Henry exclaimed with delight, and wanted to try them out at once. Ratto rode the mares for him, one by one, saying as he did so that if they were less good than he deserved, he might choose any others from the marquis' stables, "together with his territories and children, and his own person."

  Henry could not have been more pleased if the marquis had given him a kingdom, an observer wrote. He went from one courtier to another asking "What think you of these mares? They were sent to me by my cousin the marquis of Mantua," and announcing that he had never seen better animals. The due de Longueville spoke up to say he was certain the French king had no horses to compare with these, and the others agreed they were extraordinary. Then, for Katherine's sake, Ratto brought out Govematore, a bright bay of incomparable beauty, and rode him "in the Spanish fashion." The marquis had been offered his weight in silver for this horse, it was said, but had preferred to send him to his brother monarch in England. Katherine and the others were unrestrained in their admiration, but the king was suddenly quiet. Here was the horse of his dreams. He went up to Ratto as he dismounted.

  "Is not this the best horse?" he asked. The trainer assured him he was. The king smiled in pleasure and nodded his head, and reached out to stroke Govematore's neck. "So ho," he said softly. "So ho, my minion."

  "The Man Most Full of Heart

  I

  i

  t

  ^

  // chanc'd the king upon a day Prepared a sumptuous feast: And there came lords, and dainty dames And many a noble guest.

  In the hot summer of 1520 officers of arms were dispatched to ride throughout England and France and even to the faraway courts of Flanders and Spain to summon all who claimed mastery of arms to a great tournament. Harry of England and Francis of France had pledged to meet on the windswept fields of Flanders to show their brotherly good will and test their prowess. Jousts would be held between the gentlemen of the English and French courts, *'for the honor and pastime" of the ladies, and all the knights of Christendom were invited to join in the feats of arms. Throngs of workmen were already turning the barren landscape of the Val Dore, the Golden Valley, into a fairyland of castles and pavilions, and crowds were gathering to watch them at their work and to anticipate the spectacle to come. Before the summer was over, accounts of the knightly splendor of this meeting of the kings at the Field of Cloth of Gold would be carried to every court in Europe, and those who had witnessed it would be calling it the eighth wonder of the world.

  The site of this celebration of Anglo-French brotherhood had only recently been a place of slaughter. The Golden Valley lay between the English-held town of Gumes and the French town of Ardres, and it was a scant four years since English soldiers had sacked Ardres and burned it to the ground. Now the silken tents and pavilions of the French jousters were being raised on its blackened ground, but French and English alike were skeptical of the newfound harmony between their sovereigns. To be sure, English merchants and sailors had made themselves at home in Bordeaux and its surrounding regions by the thousands, and their close and constant fraternization with the local population made Francis uneasy. If war broke out, his subjects in Bordeaux might forget their loyalty and let the English ships go on landing as they always did. But these good relations were exceptional; in other coastal regions the English raided and burned villages as they had Ardres, and French merchants in London were despised and cheated. Their movements severely restricted, French cloth merchants were not allowed to attend the English cloth fairs, and were imprisoned as spies if found walking the streets of London at night without a candle. Before leaving for home they were subjected to the

  131

  humiliation of a search, stripped to their shirts and examined for concealed valuables.^

  Certainly the English seemed prepared for war, if war came. Since 1514 German armorers had been working in London, in hired houses and cellars and in a newly built armory at Greenwich, forging arms and armor from iron imported from Innsbruck. Some of what they made was jousting armor, but not all, and they were forging guns as well as harness. One new gun, the Basilisk, was an immense project in itself. Many laborers were required to cast its iron shot, still more to cast the huge gun, working in a rented tenement that was nearly wrecked in the process. The building's owner, John Rutter, was paid thirty-three pounds as compensation for "hurts and damages by him sustained" while the king's armorers toiled under his roof.^ Thousands of pounds were paid out to armorers in the years following the English campaign of 1513, and thousands more to the shipbuilders who were enlarging the royal fleet. Should France attack, Wolsey boasted to the Venetians, "I tell you, that we have ships here in readiness, and in eight days could place sixty thousand men on the soil of France." As for Francis, "we are able to thwart any of his projects at our pleasure," Wolsey said curtly.^

  Wolsey's pronouncements were invariably heard and recorded, for it was he, many believed, who was the deciding voice in war and peace. No one stood higher in government or in the church; no one had greater ability. In the king's shrewd estimation, Wolsey's "singular diligence and high wisdom" were unmatched. Through the cardinal's unique powers, Henry said, he had accomplished more than all the kings of England before him.

  From royal almoner and junior Council member Wolsey had risen to become, successively, bishop of London, archbishop of York, chancellor and cardinal of the church—all in less than two years' time. The old powers in the royal Council. Warham and Fox, gave way before Wolsey and his deputy Thomas Ruthal, bishop of Durham, who when Wolsey became chancellor took the office of lord privy seal. In 1518 the pope made Wo
lsey papal legate, but even this lofty office did not cap his ambition: he wanted to be pope.

  Boundless ambition was certainly the mainspring of Wolsey's character, but it was his capacity for tireless, exacting labor and above all his awesome powers of mind that gave him strength and force. Admirers and enemies alike acknowledged his "wonder wit." and trembled under the penetrating scrutiny of his intellect. Impatient with lesser minds, grave and often pensive, Wolsey took a sardonic delight in bringing his vigorous intelligence to bear on a knot of problems and cutting through to a solution. "His chief study," a contemporary wrote, "yea, and all his felicity and inward joy, hath ever been to exercise that angel's wit of his.''-*

  And he had the unflagging discipline to focus his attention for many hours at a time, heedless even of his bodily needs. A member of his household, his gentlemen usher George Cavendish, told how on a diplomatic mission in France Wolsey rose at four in the morning and

  immediately sat down to write urgent letters to the king and others in England, stopping only to order his chaplain to prepare himself to say mass. Twelve hours later he was still at his desk, "all which season," Cavendish wrote, ''my lord never rose once to piss, ne yet to eat any meat but continually wrote his letters with his own hands, having all that time his nightcap and keverchief on his head."^ Finally toward evening he dispatched his correspondence, heard mass and took a little walk, then went right to bed after a light supper, ready to resume his labors the next day.

  The cardinal's hard work might have won him praise had he been a different sort of man. But he was arrogant, harsh and violent. He struck the papal nuncio Chieregato and bullied him in "fierce and rude language." He was haughty with ambassadors, and demanded from nobles and commoners alike the kind of deference usually reserved for royalty. He boasted of his wealth, and took every opportunity to display it, wearing ermine-lined cloaks and cardinal's robes of red silk, "the best that he could get for money," with sables at the neck. His cardinal's hats came from France, and were dyed with a special brilliant scarlet dye unobtainable in England. Gilt cardinal's hats adorned the bedsteads in his palaces, where hundreds of liveried servants reflected his magnificence; the master cook of his privy kitchen, it was said, "went daily in damask, satin, or velvet with a chain of gold about his neck."^

  Wolsey's grandiloquent vanity, along with his evident mastery of affairs, created the dangerous impression that he had taken over the government from the king. The unparalleled pomp that accompanied his comings and goings, the careless assurance with which he confused the royal will with his own, the near-regal fury of his displeasure convinced foreign envoys that the cardinal had become "ipse rex" —the king himself—and caused them to shift their diplomatic focus accordingly. "This cardinal is king," Giustiniani said simply, "nor does his majesty depart in the least from the opinion and council of his lordship."^ Henry spoke only through Wolsey's mouth, it was said, and Fox spoke for the other English councilors when he told Giustiniani that "We have to deal with the cardinal, who is not cardinal, but king."^ By 1518 Wolsey was so thoroughly in command, it seemed to More, that he was acting without Henry's full knowledge, while the Venetians had begun to address all correspondence to Wolsey first and then to the king, "lest he [Wolsey] should resent the precedence conceded to the king."^

  Narcissistic, ostentatious, outrageously presumptuous, Wolsey had few admirers. But there was more to him—and more to his relationship with the king—than his enemies and diplomatic colleagues saw. For if Wolsey was proud and disdainful, he was also capable of "rare and unheard-of affability." A bitter opponent called him "a gay finder out of new pastimes," and it was widely known that one of his strongest bonds to Henry was the extravagant hospitality he offered him, marked by lavish entertainments and imaginative diversions. Wolsey needed diversions, in fact, to offset the brooding preoccupations of high office, for he approached his work with the greatest seriousness, and found it hard to

  134 . GREAT HARRY

  relax. Giustiniani caught a glimpse of him one day in 1517, deep in thought, his features troubled and his forehead furrowed in "mental perturbation"; it was this reflective, untiring servant and not the offensive egotist that Henry saw in Wolsey, and made good use of.**^

  Those who confused the servant with the master were deceived largely by a difference of style; it was hard to believe that the boyish, jovial king was in command of the middle-aged, authoritarian churchman. Henry liked to hide the fact that he too worked hard, that like the cardinal he too had a taste for detail and exacting precision. It was Henry, not Wolsey, who went over the specifications for a new citadel at Toumai item by item, looking for ways to save money. He noted with care which towers and gates were to be completed and which abandoned, recommended the optimum thickness of the walls—fifteen feet thick at the top—and found a way to economize by letting many of the full-time soldiers go and hiring others who could double as laborers.^^ It was Henry too who scrutinized the accounts of all his ships and the lists of their crews, and kept clearly in mind from day to day the locations and dispositions of his soldiers. He was capable of guiding by letter the course of a legal dispute between rival ecclesiastical sees while conducting a military campaign, and of instructing his ambassadors—who ought to have known such things far better than the king did—on the exact natural boundaries and political jurisdictions of the European states.^^ Clearly the often-quoted statement of Louise of Savoy's envoy Baltasar Tuerdus, a hostile witness, that Henry ''cared for nothing but girls and hunting," distorted the truth.^^

  The exact nature of the partnership between Henry and his chancellor was elusive, but there can be no question that all major governmental decisions were the king's, and that his inclinations governed the minor ones. If management of the day-to-day continuity of affairs was left to Wolsey it was not without close royal supervision. Henry customarily read word for word all the long letters Wolsey sent him when he was away from court, sometimes more than once, and was always eager for news from Flanders and France. If he was hunting he read them as soon as he returned, letting his supper get cold while he sat and pored over his servant's daily reports. After supper Henry kept his secretaries and advisers up for hours reading dispatches to him and taking down his reactions, his plans and his directives to Wolsey and others.^^

  Pace described the way he and the king worked, with Henry calling Pace to bring pen. ink and Wolsey's letters into his privy chamber. Then Henry would read the letters through three times, marking every passage he meant to answer, and finally he would dictate his reply to the secretary. Often he ordered Pace "not further to meddle" with the replies to make certain his meaning was not diluted by secretarial rewording.^^ When fear of the plague made it necessary for the king to be away from court for many weeks in 1518, he made certain this written dialogue with Wolsey would continue without delays. A special post was set up between the two men, with riders standing by to carry messages back and forth every seven hours.*®

  Ambassadors found Henry to be minutely, indeed embarrassingly.

  well informed. When French envoys tried to boast to him that ten thousand Swiss mercenaries had been killed at the battle of Marignano in 1515, he observed that the figure was remarkable, since there were no more than ten thousand engaged.^^ He was always ready to take foreign envoys aside, to talk to them with disarming earnestness about his desire for peace, his sorrow over the bad faith of other princes and his concern for the welfare of Christendom. Not infrequently he out-talked even these professional talkers; one Venetian complained that the king held him in conversation for so long that he finally had to go away with a pain in his side.*^

  Now in the summer of 1520, however, Wolsey appeared briefly to eclipse his master as, almost singlehandedly, he carried forward the monumental exercise in logistics that made possible the Field of Cloth of Gold.

  The meeting between the two sovereigns called for planning on an unprecedented scale. Henry and Francis were eager to outdo one another in every detail, but their rivalry
had to be controlled; for the meeting to take place at all French and English negotiators had to agree on the size of the two royal retinues, how and where they would be lodged, where the kings would meet and, when they did, which of them would enter the building first. The numbers of nobles and their ladies, gentlemen, servants and guardsmen were set at over five thousand for the English and nearly as many for the French. Francis would bring, beyond his personal household, four dukes, fifteen counts, several princes and the king of Navarre, plus four hundred archers of his personal guard. Henry would have with him, besides Cardinal Wolsey and his immense retinue, the archbishop of Canterbury and five bishops, two dukes, one marquis, ten earls, and twenty barons; two hundred of his household guard would attend him. Katherine's following, which was nearly half the size of Henry's, included a duchess, ten countesses, twelve baronesses, and twenty knights' ladies, plus an earl, three bishops and four barons.

  The challenging task of reproducing the comfort and grandeur of a royal court on the barren coast of Flanders was sizable enough for the French but even greater for the English, who had to bring every horseshoe, tent stake and cushion to the Val Dore by ship. A mutual problem was the near-total lack of building materials in the area—the Golden Valley was a treeless waste—and both the English and the French had to import from elsewhere the huge tree trunks which, lashed together, held up the high tents and Francis' gorgeous, ill-fated pavilion.