A few days after Jane was laid to rest Henry was reported to be "in good health and merry as a widower may be." No record survives of how he coped with the turmoil of feeling occasioned by the loss of his wife and the gain of an uncommonly precious son. Both events, though, were calculated to make him feel his age, and in fact he had recently begun to refer somewhat pointedly to his advanced years. Earlier in 1537 a French merchant had come to his court with lace trimmings and velvet headgear and other costly ornaments of dress—in particular, some elaborate embroidery. Henry waved the embroidery away at a glance, announcing to the Frenchman that he was "too old to wear such things." (Apparently he was not too old to buy a rich collar and visor, an elegant hat, a strip of fur and some fine linen, together with a mirror to admire them in.'*)
At forty-six Henry was well into the time of hfe his contemporaries called old age, when "the body beginneth to decrease." Beyond this, after age fifty, lay the wasteland of decrepitude, a region of life reached by an unenvied few. Most sixteenth-century men (and women surviving the mortal penalties of childbirth) died before they reached fifty; at thirty-five they counted themselves aged, on the threshold of the season when "dried-up old age tires the body's strength." Outliving these conventional limits was a dubious advantage, for longevity brought feebleness, disease, and everpresent pain.^
To be sure, some men not only lived into their sixth decade and beyond but earned their bread combating others thirty or forty years their juniors. Sixty was the common upper limit for military service, and a handful of hardy veterans served on into their seventies. Venetian records of the 1520s told of a eighty-year-old Spanish seaman who was the sole survivor of a harrowing adventure. En route to the Spice Islands his ship was seized by the Portuguese. Many in its Spanish crew were killed, and the rest were marooned "at a desert place," with nothing to sustain life. All the younger men perished, but the elderly mariner not only kept himself alive in the desert but contrived in time to board a Portuguese ship and to make his way back halfway around the world to Portugal. Lest his feat be forgotten he wrote an account of his entire journey, and when the king of Portugal read it he set the man free and sent him home to Spain.®
What lifespan Henry may have hoped for is unknown, but he employed the finest apothecaries and physicians he could find to sustain his health and strength for as long as possible. So far he had been spared many of the ailments common in his day—intermittent fevers, jaundice, vertigo, rheumatism, stones, the "green sickness," or chlorosis, the "choking tonsil" disease, or quinsy, worms, "gnawings in the belly," coughs and agues. But he was increasingly tormented by his painful leg ulcers, and suffered from time to time with headaches and other transitory complaints. To treat these he relied on a series of apothecaries, first Richard Babham, then Cuthbert Blackeden, whose advice and herbs helped to bring the royal household through the sweat of 1528 and who
I
supplied many medicinal compounds for Henry's ''use and behoove" in the 1530s, and finally Thomas Alsop, who as gentleman apothecary after 1540 headed a staff of assistants and presided over an increasing volume of pharmaceutical activity/
Of the three classes of Tudor doctors the apothecaries stood midway between the physicians, who concerned themselves with the abstract theory and philosophy of medicine, and the surgeons, then thought of as vulgar manual laborers occupied "in staunching of blood, searching of wounds with irons and other instruments, in cutting of the skull in due proportion to the pellicules of the brain with instruments of iron, couching of cataracts, taking out bones, sowing of the flesh, lancing of boils, cutting of apostumes, burning of cankers, . . . letting of blood, drawing of teeth, with other such like."*
Physicians concerned themselves with Latin and Greek treatises on disease, with the theories of the four humors of mankind (sanguine, phlegmatic, choleric and melancholic) and with the astronomical lore governing the disease cycle and the taking of medicines. Henry's physician John Chambers, a dour octogenarian whose portrait by Holbein betokens grim senescence, informed the king that he was of sanguine temperament, cheerful and gamesome, insouciant and overly fond of women and drink; to avoid the constipation, headaches, restlessness and lustful dreams common to this temperament he must govern his eating and sleeping habits and take care not to put on too much weight. In addition to bleeding him five times a year as a preventive against sickness Henry's surgeons looked after his ulcerous legs, the condition having spread to both. One of the surgeons, Thomas Vicary, was credited with unusually efficacious treatment, but on the whole the court surgeons were of lower status than the apothecaries, whom Henry continued to patronize eagerly even though their medicines made him ill.^
In May of 1538 Henry very nearly died. The purulent fistulas in his legs became blocked, and "the humors which had no outlet were like to have stifled him." Perhaps a blood clot from the king's swollen legs traveled to his lungs, for he lay writhing and choking in agony, unable to speak and spending all his massive energy in gasping for breath. Time after time he came to the point of suffocation, his veins straining, his eyes protruding and his face turning red, then blue, then black. Then as his doctors looked helplessly on there came a gurgle of breath, then another, until finally the king's chest began to heave in a desperate rhythm and the deadly stranglehold was temporarily relaxed. For ten or twelve days this mortal torment continued. Henry was pronounced to be "in great danger," and the ambitious courtiers, expecting his imminent death, laid their political plans, some throwing in their lot with the party of the infant Prince Edward and others supporting Mary.^^
To their amazement the king's attack ceased as suddenly as it had come. His recovery was equally swift. By the end of the month he seemed as good as new, and two months later he was riding southward on progress "to visit his ports and havens," his wounded legs returned to normal and his hearty lungs free of congestion. But the specter of
mortality lingered, for even before the near-fatal incident in May an uncontrollable rumor had spread throughout the countryside that the king was dead.
From Nottinghamshire to Sussex, from Gloucestershire to Suffolk word of Henry's death went out, and neither the firm denials of his officials nor the punishing of those who repeated the rumor could gainsay it. Rumor-mongers were imprisoned, beaten, and forced to admit publicly that they had lied. A Reading man ''was punished and set upon a pillory, his ears cut off from his head, and afterwards whipped naked." Local magistrates and other men of substance tried in vain to trace the rumor to its origin. Yet such measures did little to discredit a story which had caught deep hold on the popular imagination, and the king's brush with death in the spring very nearly made it come true.^^
The eagerness with which courtiers and country folk seized on the possibility of his death confirmed Henry's distrust of their loyalty. He was particularly suspicious of the men and women of his court, who had been all too quick to look after their political interests in the face of a change of regime.
By now Henry and his courtiers—many of whom were as old as or older than he was—had lived together in uneasy equilibrium for nearly thirty years. They formed a family of sorts, if a perverse and rigidly patriarchal one. Opportunism, greed and political expediency held them together, but so also did familiarity and habit, and the shared bonds of experience formed during an era of tumultuous change. There was little unalloyed sentimentality between them, but there was a sense of commonality rooted in fearsome admiration for their awesome, dangerous sovereign.
It was a quarrelsome family. Privy councilors insulted one another; the king's gentlemen were full of "proud and opgrobrious words," and as often as not words led to blows. Sometimes the king was able to mediate the dispute before the bad feeling had gone too far. Announcing that he would "have no grudge among his gentlemen," he separated the combatants like misbehaving schoolboys until they could be reconciled.
Yet he could not forestall all conflict. In April of 1538 a series of violent altercations erupted. One of Edward Seymour's servants
fought a duel with a French dueling master, killed him, and took refuge in the Westminster sanctuary. Another assault, apparently unrelated to the first, left one of the lesser courtiers dead, and shortly afterward two of Fitzwilliam's servants came into conflict and one was found murdered. At this point Sir Gawen Carew and one of his retainers took on one of the sergeants of the household with his yeoman, and when the fighting ended the yeoman was dead and the sergeant gravely wounded. Carew was placed under arrest, but by this time the conflict had escalated to take in Cromwell's serving men, and the lords of the Council had become involved. A melee broke out, with some forty gentlemen and their servants warring with one another within the precincts of the court. The records are silent as to the final outcome, but it was almost certainly affrays of this kind that led Cromwell to undertake a complete reorganization of the royal household in the following year.^^
Intermittent violence was perhaps inevitable in the constrained atmosphere of the court, where natural emotions had to be hidden behind elaborate displays of gentility. The gilded life of lavish dress, frivolous pastimes and sugared rivalries cloaked deep bitterness and cankered hatreds. When Lord Hussey wrote Lady Lisle to tell her he had found places for her daughters as waiting maids, he cautioned her that "the court is full of pride, envy, indignation and mocking."^^ Continental influences had increased its sophistication as well; the chivalrous manners of the early years of the century were giving way to greater worldliness and sensuality.
Here the king set the tone to an extent, for though Henry's fondness for women was far less excessive than the gross lechery of Francis I or the unconventional indulgences of other contemporary kings he had come a long way from the boyish ruler of 1509 who "loved where he did marry." His chief companion in waywardness was the one-eyed Francis Bryan, reputedly the most dedicated philanderer in the realm and a familiar figure at the French court. Bryan's speech was as cheerfully earthy as his behavior; once while on a diplomatic embassy to Calais he wrote ahead about his lodging, telling his correspondent "to make more ready for me a soft bed than a hard harlot."
It was his aptitute for coarseness that led Henry to choose Bryan as his foil when he decided to put his elder daughter's reputation for purity to the test. The king had been told that Mary "knew no foul or unclean speeches." To prove her he told Bryan to approach her at a masque and find out whether or not she was truly innocent. Mary's genteel biographer did not record the details of the encounter—what Bryan said or did, whether Mary responded with modest blushing or angry dignity—but in the end Henry was convinced that what he had been told was true. The incident says much about the changed atmosphere of the court, once hearty in its carnality, now verging at times on decadence.
The sort of sordid trick Henry played on Mary was indicative of a community turned in on itself, where boredom bred overripe pleasures. To alleviate their boredom the courtiers sought out and devoured novelties of every sort—new fashions in kirtles and doublets, shoes and hats, new games and pastimes, new faces. Newcomers to court were received with eager scrutiny, especially if they were young and attractive. On one occasion a treaty was to be signed, and among the ambassadorial deputation that came to conclude the arrangements was a handsome young man of twenty-two. "He was of such appearance and beauty," an observer wrote, "that everybody ran to see him."^^ Curiosities from the New World also provided diversions. Exotic foods and plants, artifacts and written accounts of the explorers were passed from hand to hand, and live imports were especially sought after. In 1534 Lady Lisle received two marmosets from Brazil, with detailed instructions for their care. They were to be fed on nuts and apples, with a little warm milk, they were to be taken out of their cages every day, and they were to be kept warm—the smaller of the two "hung up at night near the chimney."^^
To fill the hours between dawn and midnight, the accustomed times of
rising and retiring, the courtiers ate. Breakfast, an early dinner, **drink-ings," supper, and a light evening meal were supplemented by **collations"—servings of food and drink that were less than hearty meals but more than mere refreshments. On feast days and other solemn occasions the banqueting went on without intermission for many hours; to celebrate a coronation or royal wedding or birth the feasting continued over several days. But even at the most modest court suppers the amount of food served and consumed was prodigious. When Henry Courtenay, marquis of Exeter, entertained the king and his hunting household at his manor of Horsley in 1533 his cooks prepared a simple meal: counting the ten desserts, there were more than twenty-five dishes. Henry himself was notably fond of game pies and haggis, and of artichokes. Intending to cross the Channel to Calais in 1534 he sent orders ahead to his provision-ers to ensure a supply of his favorite foods. **It is the king's special commandment," the dispatch read, that all the artichokes "must be kept for him."^«
Presiding over the turbulent, volatile community of courtiers and household staff was no small challenge, yet Henry achieved it year after year, relying as much on charm as on coercion and belying the fearsome menace of his displeasure by his disarming manner. To be at court for any length of time was to learn that the king had an astounding capacity for detail, and that he kept strict account of the comings and goings of each of his courtiers. If he gave anyone permission to leave the palace he set an exact time for his return, and made his irritation plain if the appointment was not kept. In the same way he paid attention to minute details of dress on ceremonial occasions, and a lady or gentleman who failed to wear the right color or ride the right mount in a procession risked a reprimand.^^
But if Henry was an exacting father to his courtly family he could be an ingratiating companion and host as well, and he had a talent for combining necessary duties with social occasions. When inspecting the Great Harry in 1540 he took a number of ladies with him, and gave a party for them on board. He took many of the lords of the court with him when he went to examine new ordnance recently arrived from Calais, pointing with special pride to a huge double cannon—so large no axletree could be found to move it—and telling them how he liked it "marvellous well."^^
Above all he kept his aristocratic retinue in mind when planning and remodeling his palaces. He enlarged Hampton Court until it extended to a thousand rooms, making it the largest structure to be built in England since Roman times. There were nearly three hundred beds with silken sheets and soft wool blankets to accommodate the courtiers, and to feed them a second kitchen was added to the huge one constructed in Wolsey's time. Building preoccupied Henry throughout the 1530s. He ordered new tennis courts and an arena for cockfights at Westminster, and a "sumptuous wall" around the palace park, and began construction of St. James's Palace, "a magnificent and goodly house," which would not be completed until 1540. Wolsey's former residence at York Place was transformed into Whitehall Palace following Henry's architectural designs. "What a great charge it is to the king," Cromwell complained, "to complete his build-
ings in so many places at once. How proud and false the workmen be; and if the king would spare for one year how profitable it would be to him."
To Cromwell's dismay Henry undertook yet another building project in November of 1538, the fanciful, extravagant palace of Nonsuch in Surrey. "One could imagine everything that architecture can perform to have been employed in this one work," wrote a traveler who saw it during Queen EHzabeth's reign. "It may well claim and justify its name of Nonsuch, being without an equal." In design a fantasy work of carved turrets and crenellated battlements, with flags flying from every tower and cupola as on a ship, Nonsuch was intended as a hunting lodge, and its well-stocked, spacious parks covered over a thousand acres. Yet Henry clearly planned to have the lords and ladies of his court at hand while he hunted, for the forecourt of the palace was huge, "capable to receive all the nobility of the king, and horsemen in great numbers." A large banqueting house rose amid the expanse of parkland, and there were remarkable gardens for guests to walk in, full of groves and hidden dells and trellised paths. A
"grove of Diana" showed the huntress in her bath. There were statues everywhere, and two fountains that spouted water "one round the other like a pyramid," while marble birds poured forth water out of their bills. Another marble device was "full of concealed pipes, which spurt upon all who come within their reach."^^
Now playing pranks, now admonishing, now dazzling them with the commanding splendor of his presence, Henry kept his courtiers well in hand. "The king has a way of making every man feel that he is enjoying his special favor," More once wrote of him, "just as the London wives pray before the image of Our Lady by the Tower till each of them believes it is smiling upon her."
Certainly John Hussey, Lord Lisle's servant, believed he was being singled out for special favor at the presentation of New Year's gifts in 1538. He wrote to his master describing the scene in the presence chamber, where Henry stood leaning against a cupboard accepting his gifts. Behind him were two of his chamber gentlemen, and beside him Edward Seymour and Cromwell. His secretary Brian Tuke stood at the other end of the cupboard, scroll in hand, writing down a description of each present and the giver's name. When Hussey entered Cromwell looked pleased.
"Here cometh my lord Lisle's man," he said to Henry, who gave a cheerful reply Hussey could not hear, then smiled broadly as he accepted the gift Hussey presented. It seemed to Hussey that Henry spent more time talking with him than with anyone else, expressing his thanks, asking after the health of Lord and Lady Lisle, inquiring about their lives and welfare. All the while the gifts continued to stream in, paintings and velvet purses, carpets, coffers, dog collars and a dog hook of fine gold, embroidered shirts and hawks' hoods and six Suffolk cheeses. Charles Brandon brought a book garnished with gold, "having therein a clock," one of the earls gave a gold trencher, someone else a marmoset; there were many, many purses of coins.^^
Great Harry Page 40