by Alison Weir
In 1518, Wolsey, on behalf of Henry VIII, negotiated the “Treaty of Universal and Perpetual Peace” between England, France, and the Papacy, which by its terms resolved to persuade Maximilian and Charles of Castile to agree to maintaining a unilateral peace in Europe. To cement the concord with France, the Princess Mary was to be betrothed to the Dauphin Francis, Francis I’s heir, and Henry and Francis undertook to meet the following year. Henry took the credit for arranging this ambitious alliance, even though Wolsey had done most of the negotiating—to the extent that “the King himself scarcely knew the state of affairs”3— and marked “his” achievement with a series of lavish celebrations in London, which cost him £9,600 (£2,880,000).
A French embassy, headed by Guillaume Gouffier de Bonnivet, Admiral of France, and comprising eighty fashionably dressed noblemen and their entourages, arrived in England on 25 September. When the King received them in audience, the two-year-old Princess Mary was brought in for their inspection. Catching sight of Dionysio Memmo, she cried, “Priest! Priest!” in an attempt to make him play for her. The King caught her up in his arms while Memmo obliged, much to her delight.4
On 3 October, St. Paul’s Cathedral was filled with a vast concourse of royalty, nobles, and dignitaries as the King and the ambassadors went up to the high altar, signed the Treaty of London, and swore to uphold its articles. Wolsey celebrated high mass, the solemnity being “too magnificent for description”5 and Richard Pace delivered “a good and sufficiently long oration” in Latin, praising his master, who was seated before him in a throne upholstered in cloth of gold.
Afterwards, the King hosted a dinner for the representatives of his new allies in the Bishop’s Palace, and in the evening, at York Place, Wolsey gave “a sumptuous supper, the like of which was never given, either by Cleopatra or Caligula.”6 When the feasting was over, Henry and his sister Mary led out a troupe of twenty-four masked dancers, among them Suffolk, Neville, Bryan, Carew, Guildford, Henry Norris—a popular newcomer— and the King’s mistress Elizabeth Blount:7 this was the last time she is recorded as appearing in public with Henry, although they were almost certainly having sexual relations at this time. After the masque, large bowls brimming with gold coins and dice were brought to the tables so that the company could settle down to some serious gambling. “Then dancing continued till midnight.”8
Two days later, the Princess Mary was formally betrothed to the Dauphin in the Queen’s great chamber at Greenwich, in the presence of the King and Queen, Cardinal Wolsey, the Pope’s representative Cardinal Lorenzo Campeggio, the ambassadors, and the lords and ladies of the court, who were all, reported Giustinian, “in such rich array that I never saw the like either here or elsewhere.”9 Mary herself wore a gown of cloth of gold with a black bejewelled hood. Admiral Bonnivet stood proxy for the future bridegroom, while Wolsey lifted up Mary and placed on her tiny finger a great diamond ring that was much too large for her. The little girl asked Bonnivet, “Are you the Dauphin of France? If you are, I want to kiss you!”—which lightened the solemnity of the occasion. The two Cardinals then blessed her and celebrated mass “with every possible ceremony.”10 At the banquet which followed, the King was served by three dukes—Norfolk, Suffolk, and Buckingham (who privately deplored this alliance with France)—and the Marquess of Dorset. 11 The Queen, who was heavily pregnant, retired early, but the festivities continued until 2 A.M.
On 7 October, there was a celebratory joust at Greenwich followed by a grandiose banquet and a pageant, in honour of the peace and the betrothal, which featured a lady, a dolphin, and the winged horse Pegasus who was to convey the glad tidings to Christendom. That evening, the King wore a long robe of stiff gold brocade lined with ermine; when Admiral Bonnivet admired it, Henry magnanimously threw it off and told him to keep it.12
A day or so later, the King took the visiting envoys hunting at Richmond, after which they rode to Hampton Court, where Wolsey entertained them at a banquet of breathtaking extravagance. Neither expense nor labour was spared to ensure that the French would “make a glorious report in their country, to the King’s honour and that of this realm.” 13 The Cardinal’s cooks had been at work “day and night” to prepare the huge number of dishes that were served in surroundings of awesome splendour, and luxurious accommodation was provided for the guests. The French, it was reported, were overcome, “rapt into a heavenly paradise.” 14 When they went home, laden with gifts, they left at Henry’s court four noble hostages as a pledge for their master’s good intentions.
In Bonnivet’s suite there had been several “fresh young gallants,” 15 court favourites upon whom Francis I had recently bestowed the title Gentilhommes de la Chambre—Gentlemen of the Chamber. During the festivities, they had been paired with the minions favoured by Henry VIII, who served in the same capacity in the Privy Chamber but had as yet no formal title. Henry, who wished to model his household according to “the same order and state that the French King’s court is at,”16 now hastened to rectify that, and in September 1518 instituted the formal post of Gentleman of the Privy Chamber.17 He bestowed it upon the influential young men who served him there, “who enjoyed very great authority in the kingdom” and were “the very soul of the King.”18 Wolsey, who controlled the court’s other power centre, the Privy Council, could not but be dismayed at the promotion of his rivals, who wielded influence in a sphere to which his jurisdiction did not extend and who enjoyed the special protection of the King. He feared “they might oust him from the government,”19 and at the first opportunity that presented itself he would bring them down.
Henry’s hopes of a son ended once more in disappointment. In November 1518, Queen Katherine bore a daughter, who died before she could be christened. Two months later there was another death, that of Maximilian, which meant that a new Holy Roman Emperor would have to be elected. Henry VIII was one of the candidates, and he dispatched Richard Pace to Germany to campaign on his behalf.
In February 1519, the King spent a week as the guest of Sir Nicholas Carew at the latter’s manor of Beddington Park, near Croydon in Surrey, a visit for which the local community had been preparing for a year. Carew’s house had an imposing great hall with a splendid hammerbeam roof, on which the one at Hampton Court was later said to have been modelled.20
Around this time, another minion, Sir William Compton, who for several years had been committing adultery with Buckingham’s sister, Lady Hastings, received the King’s permission to propose marriage to the Countess of Salisbury. That lady, however, turned him down, and a year or so later he was prosecuted in an ecclesiastical court for living openly in sin with a married woman.21
The King kept St. George’s Day, 1519, at Windsor, “with great solemnity.” Then he went to Richmond, “and so to Greenwich, and there stayed all of May.”22
While he was there, Wolsey seized his opportunity to purge the Privy Chamber of his rivals. He told the Privy Council that “young minions” such as Sir Nicholas Carew, Francis Bryan, Sir Edward Neville, Sir John Pechy, Sir Henry Guildford, and Sir Edward Poyntz were behaving in a manner that was not commensurate with the dignity and honour of the King. They gave him “evil counsel,” encouraged him to gamble away large sums, were “too homely with him, and played such light touches with him that they forgot themselves. Which things, although the King, because of his gentle nature, suffered them, [he] neither rebuked nor reproved them.” 23 But that was not all. Recently, during a diplomatic mission to Paris, Neville, and Bryan had publicly disgraced themselves, accompanying King Francis as he rode incognito through the streets “throwing eggs, stones and other foolish trifles at the people.” Back home, “they were all French in eating, drinking and apparel, and in French vices and brags”; they sneeringly compared the English court with the French, poked fun at older courtiers and household officers, and generally comported themselves in a reprehensible manner.24
Norfolk, Worcester, and Boleyn spoke for the rest of the councillors when they demanded that the King must put a stop
to such behaviour, since it reflected badly upon him; Henry must have seen the sense in this, as he agreed without equivocation to do what they asked. He may have been concerned himself about the overfamiliarity that he had himself permitted and even encouraged. Worcester, as Lord Chamberlain, summoned the worst offenders, dismissed them from their posts, and ordered them to leave court, “laying nothing particular to their charge.” Three, including Carew and Neville, were sent to Calais to help with its defences; the rest were told to attend to their official duties in their own counties. “Which dismissal from court sorely grieved the hearts of these young men,” but “their fall was little mourned among wise men.”25
In their place, Wolsey drafted into the Privy Chamber Sir William Kingston, Sir Richard Wingfield, Sir Richard Jerningham, and Sir Richard Weston, “four sad [serious] and ancient knights”26 who were liked by the King and could be relied upon to do the Cardinal’s bidding. One young man who was allowed to remain was Henry Norris, once a Page of the Chamber, now—thanks to Henry’s favour—a Gentleman Waiter. Norris, whose elder brother John was an Usher of the Chamber, 27 was a trustworthy, thoughtful, and discreet person who would become one of the King’s closest intimates.
Wolsey, Norfolk, and the other councillors were gratified to hear that, freed from the influence of his favourites, Henry was resolved to lead a new, more mature, mode of life,28 paying less attention to revelry and pastimes than to state business.
Buckingham might have made common cause with the minions against Wolsey but failed to take the initiative. The Howards were glad to see the back of the favourites, yet they would have been even more gratified to see the Cardinal cast down from his high place. Aristocratic resentment against Wolsey still festered. Norfolk was the patron of the King’s former tutor, John Skelton, who around this time wrote some particularly scurrilous verses attacking Wolsey, accusing him of being ambitious, shameless, and vicious, and sneering at his “greasy genealogy.” In one poem, entitled “Colin Clout,” all the evils in England are imputed to corrupt clergy. Another read:
Why come ye not to court?
To the King’s court, or to Hampton Court?
The King’s court should have the precedence,
But Hampton Court hath the pre-eminence.
Wolsey’s wrath was such that he ordered Skelton’s arrest, but the poet preempted him by seeking sanctuary at Westminster Abbey.
Skelton had never been afraid to speak his mind. Around 1516–1519 he wrote the morality play Magnificence, his only dramatic work to survive. In it, a king is heavily censured for immoderate indulgence in pleasure, and advised to seek a compromise between showy display and parsimony. But he is seen to fail because he dismisses his wise minister, Measure, and gives too much power to an extravagant one called Liberty. There was a none-too-subtle message here for Skelton’s former pupil.
Magnificence set the tone for the court drama of the 1520s, in which satire became a popular element. Wolsey himself commissioned such plays, and was also the butt of several others, although it is unlikely that these were performed at court while he was in power. Many plays were written on a classical theme, and in 1519 we have the first record of a Latin play—“a goodly comedy of Plautus”—being acted before the King.29 Soon afterwards, Wolsey staged a performance of Plautus’s Menaechmi 30 at York Place.
In 1519, the King commissioned Pietro Torrigiano to build him a tomb at Windsor31 that would suitably reflect the magnificence of his person and achievements. It was to be an enormous monument of white marble and black jasper, a quarter larger than Henry VII’s tomb and crowned with a triumphal arch bearing a statue of the King on horseback and surrounded by 142 life-size gilt bronze figures. Torrigiano undertook to complete the work within four years for the sum of £2,000 (£600,000).
It was in 1519 also that Henry invited the celebrated German mathematician and astronomer Nicolaus Kratzer to enter his service. Kratzer was a brilliant man who was “brimful of wit”32 and on good terms with both Erasmus and Albrecht Dürer. More called him “a great friend of mine,” and when Kratzer came to England in 1516 to lecture at Oxford, made him a tutor to his children. Kratzer soon came to the notice of Henry VIII, who appointed him his official Astronomer and Horologer—in which latter capacity he designed clocks and sundials. Kratzer remained in Henry’s service for the rest of the reign, although he never quite mastered English, telling the King that thirty years was not sufficient time in which to learn it.
Henry had awaited with impatience the outcome of the imperial election, which took place on 28 June 1519. He was being lavishly entertained once more by Buckingham at Penshurst Place when Richard Pace arrived with the news that Charles of Castile had been elected as the Emperor Charles V. Henry, who was playing tennis with the French hostages, received Pace “lovingly” and took his disappointment well. When Pace told him how much money Charles had spent bribing the electors, the King said he was “right glad that he had obtained not the same.” He insisted that Pace take supper with him, and, Pace recorded, “spake of me many better words than I can deserve.”33
Henry’s preoccupation with the imperial election had caused his meeting with Francis I to be postponed until the following year. In earnest of their good intentions, both monarchs agreed not to shave until they met, and Henry soon had “a beard which looks like gold.” Queen Katherine, however, so disliked it that she “daily made him great instance and desired him to put it off for her sake.”34 Henry capitulated, and a diplomatic incident was neatly averted by Francis’s mother, Louise of Savoy, who declared that the love the Kings bore each other was “not in the beards but in the hearts.”35
Katherine clearly still had some influence over Henry, but the six-year age gap was becoming more obvious. Francis I, who had heard reports from ambassadors, referred to Katherine in 1519 as “old and deformed,” 36 while the King, according to Giustinian, was still “much handsomer than any other sovereign in Christendom, very fair, and his whole frame admirably proportioned. Nature could not have done more for him.”37
Nature had in fact done more for Henry than Katherine had been able to do. Around June 1519, Elizabeth Blount bore him a son, “a goodly man child of beauty like to the father and mother.”38 The infant was given the name Henry Fitzroy. The birth took place at a house known as Jericho at Blackmore, near Chipping Ongar, in Essex. The house had been acquired by the King from the Augustinian Priory of St. Laurence, which had been established at Blackmore about 1160; around 1527, the King granted the priory to Wolsey.39 Jericho was a moated house screened by high brick walls; the moat was connected to the River Can, which was known locally as the River Jordan, hence the house’s name. Jericho had already acquired a reputation as being one of the King’s secret houses of pleasure, where he went for trysts with Elizabeth, or to visit her during her pregnancy, and where “the King’s Highness have his privy chamber and inward lodgings reserved secret, at the pleasure of His Grace, without repair of any great multitude.”40 While he was there, his courtiers euphemistically referred to him having gone to Jericho.
Once his son was born, however, Henry, who had perhaps felt that his lack of a male heir was a slur upon his manhood, abandoned all discretion and openly acknowledged him. Wolsey was a godfather at his christening, and was afterwards made responsible for his care. During his earliest years, the child seems to have remained with his mother.
Elizabeth Blount, who was from henceforth referred to as “the mother of the King’s son,” did not return to court, nor does she appear to have resumed her affair with the King. Instead, Wolsey arranged for her to be speedily married off to one of his wards, a well-to-do young gentleman called Gilbert Tailboys, whose father, Lord Kyme, “an lunatic,” 41 was in the custody of the Duke of Norfolk. His estates were being held in trust for his son by the Crown, but lands in Lincolnshire and Somerset were released to Gilbert on his marriage, while Parliament assigned Elizabeth a handsome dowry. The Cardinal’s enemies made political capital out of this, accusing him of
“encouraging our young gentlemen to become concubines by the well-marrying of Bessie Blount.” 42
Tailboys was knighted in 1525 and became the Member of Parliament for Lincoln, as well as its sheriff;43 the marriage produced three children before his death in 1530. Four years later his widow turned down a marriage proposal from Lord Leonard Grey and wed another royal ward, Edward Fiennes de Clinton, ninth Baron Clinton,44 who was about fourteen years her junior. She bore him three daughters and died in 1540.
Wolsey’s triumph over the minions was brief. By the autumn of 1519, Henry had overriden his protests and invited most of the dismissed gentlemen to return to the Privy Chamber, where they served side by side with the Cardinal’s protégés. Several of them were present when the King and Queen hosted two banquets at Beaulieu for the French hostages on 3 and 4 September. Thereafter, the favourites remained firmly entrenched at court.
On 4 February 1520,45 the King attended the wedding of Sir Thomas Boleyn’s daughter Mary and William Carey, aged twenty-four, who was an up-and-coming Gentleman of the Privy Chamber and—through his grandmother, Eleanor Beaufort—Henry’s distant cousin. Carey came from an established Devonshire family; his portrait, recently attributed to Hans Holbein, is in a private collection in Ireland. A portrait of a lady called Mary Boleyn, said erroneously to be by Holbein, is at Hever Castle, but probably dates from the seventeenth or eighteenth century.46 The newly married couple, whose country seat was Rochford Hall in Essex,47 were given a lodging at court near to that of the King and were shown every favour. Carey was well thought of by Henry, and there was every indication that he would go far.