Henry VIII: The King and His Court

by Alison Weir

  English embroidery, once carried out mainly by nuns and chiefly on ecclesiastical vestments, had been famous for eight centuries. Elaborate embroidery was now a popular feature of upper-class dress, and was mainly produced by male professionals; by 1515, the Worshipful Company of Broderers had become rich enough to build their own hall in London. Before the end of the fifteenth century, black silk scrolled embroidery, used to decorate headdresses and the collars and cuffs of shirts and smocks, had been introduced into England from Spain and the Low Countries.21 Cutwork was an Italian form of highly detailed embroidery on delicate fabrics. Gold braid or cord interlaced with embroidery and even jewels became popular later in the reign.

  Cotton was not known in England until the late sixteenth century, and fine linen, or “Holland cloth,” which was imported from Scotland, Ireland, Flanders, and Germany, was expensive. It was used for undergarments, shirts, and coifs, which were usually made and embroidered by the women in a family, queens being no exception. Katherine of Aragon was an expert needlewoman who obviously enjoyed sewing. On one occasion, she gave an audience to Wolsey and the papal legate “with a skein of white thread about her neck.” 22 She made all Henry’s fine cambric shirts, and embroidered altar cloths and church vestments.

  There was a lively trade in courtiers’ cast-off garments, for no one wanted to be seen too often in the same clothes, and money had to be raised to pay for new ones. Very few items of sixteenth-century dress survive today: small fragments of embroidered material, shirts, gloves—such as the gilt-embroidered gauntlets said to have belonged to Henry VIII 23— coifs, and odd accessories are the only fragile testimonials to the splendour of an extravagant, long-gone era.

  During the reign of Henry VIII, mediaeval styles of jewellery gave way to Renaissance, or “antique,” designs, which featured classical cameos and engravings. The King’s own signet ring was of gold and had a seal backed by an intaglio, a gem (in this case a chalcedony) with an engraved design.24 Portrait heads appeared not only on cameos but also on medallions and in miniatures, which might be set in pendants, brooches, and rings. Much jewellery featured designs from nature—flowers, birds, fish, and leaves— and a lot was heavily symbolic, often embodying visual allusions or puns.

  Jewellery, ever a sound investment, was even more important than dress in defining status, which was why so many items of clothing were decorated with jewels. At court, both sexes indulged in a lavish display of jewellery, most of it made by London goldsmiths or imported from Italy, Paris, or Bruges. Officers of state and household wore heavy gold collars of SS-links with the Tudor badges of portcullises and roses and a pendant rose, as seen in Holbein’s portrait of Thomas More. Others bedecked themselves with gold chains, collars, pendants, rings and signets, carcanets, pectoral ornaments, bracelets, bejewelled girdles and buttons, aiglets, pins, brooches, pomanders, hat jewels, and double pendants known as tablets, which opened to reveal their contents. Some items were decorated with enamels, while others reflected the interests of the wearer: in his portrait by Holbein, Sir Henry Guildford sports a hat badge depicting mathematical instruments.

  Henry VIII owned a huge collection of jewellery, greater than that of any other English king. Some of it was inherited, but many items were made to order, sometimes to Henry’s own designs, by the King’s Jewellers, Peter van der Wale of Antwerp, Hans of Antwerp, and Cornelius Heyss (or Hayes), or his goldsmith, Robert Amadas, who later became Keeper of the Jewel House. Henry also sent agents abroad to seek out fine and rare pieces. Henry’s jewels were the first in England to feature classical motifs; among them were a pendant bearing an antique face, one tablet with a representation of Hercules, and another of gold antique work decorated with ten emeralds and white putti.

  Some of Henry’s jewels were highly detailed miniature works of art, such as the ship pendant with masts and decks of diamonds, an enamelled cap badge of St. George and the dragon,25 and “a brooch of gold wherein is wrought and devised a tennis play and men playing at tennis with rackets in their hands,” set with sapphires and rubies.26 Some of the pendants seen in his portraits are thought to have concealed watches, which were very rare luxuries at that time.

  Henry’s collars were exceptionally splendid, being studded with precious stones of great price; one collar weighed three kilograms. He also owned ninety-nine diamond rings. A fair number of his jewels were either stolen, “lost off the King’s back,” or “given away at pleasure.” 27 In 1546, the King bought the famous “Three Brothers,” an enormous diamond surrounded by three balas rubies and four large pearls, which had once been owned by the Dukes of Burgundy, for an undisclosed price from the Fugger bank in Augsburg, much to the disgust of his Council, who thought he already had enough jewellery and had tried to prevent him from finding out that it was for sale.

  A lot of the jewellery in Henry’s collection was of religious significance— reliquaries, hat badges, crucifixes, hearts, devotional girdle books, and IHS or “Jesus” pendants like that favoured by Jane Seymour—but with the Reformation, such things went out of fashion. The King also owned “a ring of gold with a death’s head,”28 which typified the contemporary fashion for jewels bearing reminders of mortality.

  Personalised jewellery was highly popular. Anne Boleyn owned at least three initial pendants: an AB and a B, which appear in portraits of her,29 and an A, which is worn by her daughter Elizabeth in the Whitehall family group. Henry VIII owned a chain with H’s between the links, and also several items of jewellery bearing his motto “Dieu et mon droit” and various royal badges.

  The King ensured that his successive wives were lavishly supplied with jewellery. The Queen of England owned two sets: her official jewels, which were inherited from her predecessors and included some very ancient and historic pieces, and her personal jewellery, which was worth a fortune.

  Few items of Tudor jewellery survive. As tastes changed, pieces were melted down and refashioned. Therefore, most information about jewellery comes from portraits and written records.

  The sixteenth century saw the design of armour reach its apotheosis. Each suit was made to be as flexible and comfortable as possible, and was beautifully engraved and damascened with precious metals. Different suits were worn for jousting, fighting on foot, and fighting on horseback, and all were very expensive.

  Henry VIII was passionately interested in the design of armour, and he amassed a large collection of it. Five of his suits of armour survive, four at the Tower of London and one at Windsor, as well as his horse armour, which is exquisitely chased with scrollwork.

  Henry’s interest in armour was fuelled in 1509, when the Emperor Maximilian gave him a splendid suit of gilded horse armour, “the Burgundian Bard,” which is now in the Tower. It was probably made by a Dutch craftsman, Martin van Royne, and engraved and gilded by Paul van Vrelant of Brussels, and was typical of the fine continental workmanship of the period. In 1514, the Emperor sent Henry a further gift, a handsome suit of jousting armour made by the greatest armourer in Europe, Conrad Seusenhofer of Innsbruck, from whom Henry had ordered two sets of armour in 1511; its grotesque helmet, with a snarling, grimacing face (said to resemble Maximilian himself) and outsize ram’s horn ears, survives in the Royal armouries; its brass spectacles are long lost.30

  Around 1514, Henry bought a beautifully made suit of silvered armour of very advanced design from craftsmen in Flanders. It is damascened in silver and chased in gold with the legend of St. George, with H’s and K’s engraved on the skirt hem; it is so well constructed that it must have fitted like a glove and allowed unprecedented freedom of movement.31

  England had nothing that could compete with such craftsmanship, but the King determined to rectify this. In 1511, he set up an armour workshop with Milanese craftsmen at Southwark, and in 1515 he established a more important armoury near the friary at Greenwich Palace, enticing Martin van Royne to come to England as Master Armourer and supervise the eleven armourers whom Henry had imported from Germany and Flanders;32 among them w
as Paul van Vrelant. This workshop, known as the Almain Armoury, produced superb armour of a standard to equal anything in Europe. It made for the King, among other things, two suits of foot armour, one dating from around 1515–1520, which was never completed, and the other, much larger, from around 1540, as well as an engraved, silver-embossed armour for the King and his horse. All are now displayed in the Tower. The armoury may also have made armour to Henry’s own designs, which were “such as no armourer before that time had seen.”33 Henry’s armour was stored at Greenwich, where it could easily be maintained. In 1521, “Old Martin” van Royne was succeeded as Master Armourer by Erasmus Kyrkenar.

  The King was fascinated by weapons, especially guns and cannon, and was keen to find ways in which their range and accuracy could be improved. He set up a foundry in Houdsditch to make firearms to new specifications, and restocked the arsenal at the Tower. He also designed new weapons for his bodyguards, including an early form of bayonet and a gunshield, both of which are in the Royal Armouries.

  The King enjoyed shooting with handguns; he shot duck on Plum-stead Marshes with a party of favoured companions, or practised firing at the wooden target shaped like a man that was made for him in 1538.34 Unfortunately, on one of his shooting forays in the 1530s at Greenwich, Henry underestimated the range of his firearm and blasted off the roof of the house of his Groom of the Stool, Sir Henry Norris.35

  Henry also collected weapons; he owned ninety-four swords, thirty-six daggers, fifteen rapiers, twelve woodknives, seven crossbows,36 and one hundred breech-loading arquebuses. Only one arquebus survives in the Royal Armouries; it bears his monogram and the date 1537. Henry’s wooden lance, painted red, gold, and black with motifs of leaves and latticework, is also in the Tower, as is a dagger etched with roses and pomegranates, which probably belonged to him. His crossbow, bearing the royal arms and dating from around 1527, is in Glasgow Art Gallery and Museum, while his sword and scabbard are in the Royal Collection at Windsor.

  22

  “This Cardinal Is King”

  In the summer of 1515, “the King took his progress westwards, and visited his towns and castles there and heard the complaints of his poor commons; and always, as he rode, he hunted and liberally gave away the venison. And in the middle of September, he came to his manor of Woking.” 1

  Here he was joined by Wolsey, who that month was made a cardinal by the Pope. The symbolic red hat arrived at Dover in November and was conveyed to London “with such triumph, as though the greatest prince of Christendom had come into the realm.”2 The new Cardinal was invested with it in a glittering ceremony in Westminster Abbey that approached in pomp “the coronation of a mighty prince or king.”3 Afterwards there was a sumptuous banquet at York Place.

  Wolsey aspired to a lifestyle rivalling that of the King himself. In the spring of 1515, he had begun building the most splendid palace yet seen in England. After consulting his physicians as to the most healthy site within a twenty-mile radius of London, he acquired from the Knights Hospitallers of the Order of St. John of Jerusalem a lease of their manor at Hampton by the Thames, fifteen miles from Westminster.4 It boasted a fifteenth-century courtyard house which had perhaps been built by the previous tenant, Giles, Lord Daubeney, Lord Chamberlain to Henry VII, who had visited him there with Elizabeth of York shortly before the latter’s death in childbirth in 1503.

  Wolsey demolished this building; the only remnant of it is the clock in the campanile above Clock Court, which bears the date 1479.5 In its place he raised a grand red-brick double-courtyard house with mullioned windows, turrets, tall chimneys, a moat,6 gardens, a large service complex, and an advanced system of conduits and sewers. It was designed by Ellis Smith on a collegiate plan, and decorated with antique work in terracotta: there are putti supporting Wolsey’s coat of arms above the clock-tower gateway, 7 and medallions of Roman emperors with exquisite decorative borders, which were carved in 1521 by the Florentine sculptor Giovanni di Maiano8 and based on those commissioned by the Cardinal of Amboise for his palace at Gaillon, near Rouen. Hampton Court was ready for occupation by 1517, when Wolsey first entertained the King and Queen there, and finally completed in 1525. By then, it was said to contain a thousand rooms. Wolsey lived there in princely magnificence.

  The palace was entered by an imposing five-storey gatehouse with octagonal towers surmounted by lead cupolas at the corners and a large oriel window.9 In the Base Court was accommodation for Wolsey’s household and forty-four guest lodgings;10 280 beds with silk hangings were kept made up in in readiness for visitors. A second gateway led to Clock Court, where the Cardinal’s great hall, banqueting chamber,11 gallery, and chapel were located.

  Wolsey spared no expense in making Hampton Court the most luxurious residence in England. His own apartments were panelled and sported moulded ceilings and rich friezes and paintings, while the outward chambers were adorned with priceless tapestries, sixty large carpets presented by the Venetian Senate,12 and furnishings of unprecedented splendour, including five chairs of estate; one tapestry owned by Wolsey, The Triumph of Fame over Death, based on a work by Petrarch, still hangs at Hampton Court in the great watching chamber. A special lodging in a three-storey donjon in Clock Court was reserved for the King and Queen. The palace lay within two thousand acres of parkland surrounded by a brick wall, part of which remains today. The Kingston Road divided the park into the Home Park and Bushy Park. 13

  Wolsey had begun building another house in 1515, on land he had been granted by the King near the Dominican priory of Blackfriars in London, in the parish of St. Bride. When, however, he started work on Hampton Court, he lost interest in this project and signed over the land to the King. Henry thereupon seized the opportunity of providing himself with a new residence in London to replace Westminster. He took over the building works and built the palace of Bridewell. Constructed of red brick with octagonal towers, it stood between Fleet Street and the River Thames,14 and was connected by a bridge across the River Fleet to the priory, which was used as an annexe whenever extra accommodation was needed. Bridewell Palace had two courtyards; in the inner one was the donjon housing the royal lodgings, which were accessed by a novel processional stair. A long gallery led to the river frontage and a watergate; a tennis play and terraced gardens were on the river side. There was no great hall or chapel, since both the lofty hall and the chapel in the Blackfriars’ convent were at the King’s disposal. The palace was completed by 1522, and cost Henry £20,000 (£6 million).

  On 29 October 1515, the King attended the launching of another new ship, The Virgin Mary, which became popularly known as the “Princess Mary” in honour of Mary Tudor. She was a huge vessel with 120 oars, 207 guns, and the capacity to carry one thousand men. Accompanied by the Queen, who was pregnant again, the Suffolks, and the whole court, Henry himself, dressed in a sailor’s coat and breeches of cloth of gold, piloted the ship along the Thames to the sea, blowing his large gold whistle as loudly as a trumpet. After Bishop Ruthall of Durham had celebrated mass, the vessel was formally named by the Queen. Then the King hosted a feast on board. 15

  Matters of state were pressing. Archbishop Warham, who had several times clashed with Wolsey, was finding it increasingly difficult to assert his authority as Lord Chancellor and Primate of England in the face of the Cardinal’s superior power and overt hostility. According to Thomas More, Warham was weary of public life and wished to retire to his diocese. On 22 December 1515, he resigned his office. On Christmas Eve, at Eltham Palace, the King appointed Wolsey Lord Chancellor in his place and delivered to him the Great Seal of England.

  No subject had ever before held so many high offices in both Church and state, nor commanded an income that enabled him to live like royalty. “The Cardinal of York is the beginning, middle and end,” commented Giustinian in 1516.16 Nevertheless, Wolsey worked hard for his rewards, being “constantly occupied with all the affairs of the kingdom.” The King, busy amusing himself “day and night,” was happy to leave all government busi
ness to the Cardinal, “who rules everything with consummate ability and prudence,” one observer noted. “It is essential to speak first of all serious matters to the Cardinal and not to the King.”17

  Soon, power seemed to be centred on the Cardinal’s household at York Place, where he resided during the legal term, rather than the King’s court, with visitors going to kiss Wolsey’s hand before they sought an audience with Henry. Wolsey’s increasing autocracy soon became evident to Giustinian, who noted that, whereas in 1515 the Cardinal would have told him, “His Majesty will do so and so,” within a year or so he was saying, “We shall do so and so,” and by 1519 it was “I shall do so and so.” The envoy concluded: “This Cardinal is king, nor does His Majesty depart in the least from the opinion and counsel of His Lordship.”18 Francis I thought that Wolsey “held the honour of his king in small account,” while ambassadors felt they were dealing “not with a cardinal but with another king.”19

  Court factions quickly found themselves disempowered. Wolsey dominated the Privy Council and the royal household, and exercised royal patronage on the King’s behalf. “He chooses,” wrote an imperial envoy, “to interfere in everything.”20 Yet he remained a remote figure with whom even noblemen found it hard to obtain an audience. So complete was the King’s confidence in him that none dared challenge his power. Naturally, it was bitterly resented by many.

  That bitterness was fuelled by Wolsey’s lavish lifestyle, which was financed by his ecclesiastical revenues and his fees as Lord Chancellor, which amounted to perhaps £35,000 (£10,500,000) a year. He lived like “a glorious peacock”21 in luxurious palaces attended by a thousand servants wearing a crimson velvet livery emblazoned with a cardinal’s hat; his cook was rumoured to dress “daily in damask, silk or velvet, with a chain of gold about his neck.”22