But on Knyvet’s codpiece appeared only the single word Desyre.27
After the dancing was over, the king – ‘in token of liberality’ – called on his principal foreign guests and their servants to help themselves to the gold ornaments on his costume. He had instructed his gentlemen ushers beforehand to tell the lucky recipients that ‘they should not fear to pull and tear the said garment from his body’. Nor did they. More guests soon joined in and quickly turned their attentions to the other performers. Knyvet leapt up on to a stage and made a show of resistance. But ‘for all his defence, he lost all his apparel’ and was stripped to his doublet and hose. So was the king and between the two of them they lost letters and other gold ornaments weighing 225 ounces.
Things now threatened to get out of hand and the guard were called in. But Henry, who had started the whole thing off, made light of it. He settled down to a great banquet with Catherine and the ladies ‘and all these hurts were turned to laughing and game, [with the] thought that all that was taken away was but for honour and largess’.
‘And so’, the chronicler Hall concludes, ‘this triumph ended with mirth and gladness.’28
Ten days later, on 23 February, the little Prince Henry died at Richmond. Something in Henry died too.
And he never went on pilgrimage to Walsingham again.
Notes - CHAPTER 24: MARRIED LIFE
1. Skelton, Complete English Poems, 110.
2. Carlson, ‘The Latin Writings of Skelton’, 44–5.
3. Byrne, The Letters of King Henry VIII, 11 (LP I i, 119).
4. CSP Sp. II, 20 (LP I i, 128).
5. TNA: OBS 1419; CSP Sp. II, 19 (LP I i, 112).
6. Byrne, The Letters of Henry VIII, 11–12 (LP I i, 220).
7. The dates of the king’s movements, as reported variously by Hall, The Chronicle, pp. 513–14, his itinerary (TNA: OBS 1419) and the revels account (LP II ii, pp. 1490–2), do not agree. I have followed the revels account, which alone is contemporary.
8. CSP Sp., supplement to vols I and II, pp. 35, 42–44.
9. CSP Ven. II, 52; LP I i, 381/95.
10. Ibid., 94/91, 132/29, 519/58.
11. The Chronicle, 513–14.
12. LP I i, 394/i; II ii, p. 1446.
13. LP I i, 394/ii.
14. CSP Sp., supplement to vols I and II, pp. 35, 42–44.
15. Loc. cit.
16. CSP Ven. II, 73.
17. CSP Sp. II, 43.
18. PPE Elizabeth of York, 41, 80, 99. LP I i, 82 (p. 41); Palgrave, Antient Kalendars III, 396, 7 item 24.
19. CSP Sp., supplement to vols I and II, pp. 39–41.
20. W. R. B. Robinson, ‘Henry VIII’s Household in the Fifteen-Twenties: the Welsh connection’, HR 68 (1995), 178–9 and n. 23; LP I i, 447/20, 640.
21. CSP Sp., supplement to vols I and II, pp. 35, 43.
22. TNA: OBS 1419; The Chronicle, 516; LP I i, 1463/v; II ii, p. 1448.
23. S. Anglo, ed., The Great Tournament Roll of Westminster, 2 vols (Oxford, 1968) I, 109–111 (LP I i, 670–1); CSP Ven. II, 95.
24. TNA: OBS 1419; The Chronicle, 516–17; C. R. Thompson, trans., The Colloquies of Erasmus (Chicago and London, 1965), 296–8; LP II ii, p. 1449.
25. Great Chronicle, 370.
26. Ibid., 373.
27. Anglo, The Great Tournament Roll I, 56.
28. Great Chronicle. 374; The Chronicle 519; LP II ii, 1495–7.
25
FRIENDS AND BROTHERS
THE WESTMINSTER TOURNAMENT OF FEBRUARY 1511 was a turning point in Henry’s life. He was only in his twentieth year. But it marked his coming of age.
The author of The Great Chronicle, an avid spectator at the event, was quite sure of this. And he puts it in straightforward terms of before and after. ‘At the beginning in that field’, he notes, ‘was many a fearful and timorous heart for [Henry]; considering his excellency and his tenderness of age.’ But his performance put all such fears to rest – for he could not only give, he could take as well:
Anon the king called for a spear and so ran six courses or he left [off]. And broke in those six courses four spears as well and as valiantly as any man of arms might break them. And such as were broken upon him, he received them as though he had felt no dint of any stroke.
A collective sigh of relief went round the lists. The king would survive – and thrive:
After they had seen the said courses run and his manful and deliver [agile] charging and discharging, he rejoiced so the people’s hearts that a man might have seen a thousand weeping eyes for joy. And then such as were in most fear saw by his martial feats that by the aid of God he was in no danger.
It was, the chronicler concluded, a sort of revelation: for the first time, Henry had demonstrated ‘the excellency of [his] person, which never before that day, as I think, was seen in proper person’.
The English is convoluted. But the meaning is clear. Henry had come out as himself – and as a man.1
He had also – in the ultimate boy’s dream – shown himself to be as good as, if not better than, the sporting heroes of his boyhood and youth; indeed, he now joined their ranks.
This was more than joining a club: it was initiation into a gang, a band of brothers – or rather brothers, half-brothers, brothers-in-law and blood brothers – who fought together, danced, drank and played together, did deals together and, in the end, showed themselves ready to die together.
The godfather was Sir Thomas Brandon, master of the horse. He had been the principal custodian of the chivalric tradition in the latter years of Henry VII’s reign; he had helped carry it through the dark days of the Suffolk conspiracy, when jousting and Yorkist treason seemed almost synonymous; and he had been at the heart of the revival of the tournament that followed Henry’s own move to court as prince of Wales.
He had even sung of the joys of jousts and jousters. The occasion was the tournament held in early March 1508 at Richmond. On the sixth, as André explains, there was a day’s interruption from the sport ‘while the horses were resting’. Brandon showed his versatility by stepping into the breach and entertaining the court and its guests with martial music and song: that ‘night’, André writes, ‘a very tuneful song in praise of warriors was repeatedly sung to the lyre [? lute] in melodious fashion by [Sir Thomas] Brandon’.2
Henry we know was at court; he may even have been in the audience. And now that he was king he would sing such songs himself – and write their words and music too.
The time of youth is to be spent,
But vice in it should be forfent.
Pastime there be I note truly
Which one may use and vice deny.
And they be pleasant to God and man:
These should we covet when we can.
As feats of arms, and such other
Whereby activeness one may utter.
As Falstaff to King Henry rather than Prince Hal, Brandon seemed destined for great things in the new reign. Under a connoisseur of hunting and horseflesh like Henry, his mastership of the horse assumed an inflated importance. He joined Sir Henry Marney as one of the new king’s men in the inner ring of the council, and he was given the immensely profitable office of warden and chief justice of the royal forests south of the Trent.3
Henry’s decision to joust publicly, if incognito, in the Richmond tournament of January 1510 was the culmination of all that Brandon stood for. The royal stables, of which he was departmental head as master of the horse, must have been in on the secret. But by then Brandon himself was probably past caring. Earlier that month, he had suddenly fallen ill. On the eleventh, the day before Henry and Compton ran in the Richmond tournament, Brandon wrote his will, and he died on the twenty-seventh.
Others would reap the harvest he had sowed. And the reapers got to work quickly. As the court regrouped at Westminster for the Shrovetide revels, Henry was lobbied to divide Brandon’s offices and grants among the participants. Charles Brandon, Thomas’s nephew and already one of Henry’s closest cronies, s
ucceeded his uncle as marshal of King’s Bench. The office was virtually a Brandon appanage: held by the Brandon family since the middle of the fifteenth century, it controlled the Marshalsea gaol, which lay in Southwark, on the east side of Borough High Street, opposite to the Brandons’ town-house on the west.4
But Charles, though close to Henry, by no means monopolized his favour at this stage and more of Thomas’s spoils went elsewhere. His valuable stewardship of the West Country lands of the duchies of Exeter and Somerset was given to Henry Bourchier, earl of Essex. Essex had been another mentor to the young bloods at the court of Henry VII and Henry had made this role official by appointing him captain of the greatly expanded band of spears that he had set up the previous autumn. The office of warden and chief justice of the royal forests was granted to Sir Thomas Lovell, one of the leading councillors to survive the change of reign. But the plum position – the mastership of the horse – was bagged by Sir Thomas Knyvet. Jouster, reveller, hunter and all-round hearty young man, he was probably closest of all to Henry in these earliest years of the reign.5
Newly enriched, all of the grantees (apart from the superannuated Lovell) took part with Henry in the Shrovetide revel on 28 February 1510, when they were disguised variously as Russians, Prussians or Turks. But the sensation of the show, which Essex had devised and supervised, was the appearance of the leading ladies of the court, including Henry’s own sister Mary, in oriental costume and ‘blacked up’: ‘their faces, necks, arms and hands were covered with fine pleasance black, some call it Lombardeen, which is marvellous thin, so that these same ladies seemed to be negroes or blackamoors’.6
Thomas Brandon had also made another, more personal, disposition in the legacies in his will. His nephew Charles naturally figures largely, getting ‘all my gowns not bequeathed’ and a valuable wardship. But the principal legatee was Lady Jane Guildford, the widow of another old colleague at the court of Henry VII, Sir Richard Guildford. Guildford, controller of the household and master of the ordnance and armouries, had acted as royal spy-master, naval, military and civil engineer and head of security. He had been forced to resign his offices in 1505 and had died on a face-saving pilgrimage to the Holy Land the following year, leaving Lady Jane, who was his second wife, ill-provided for. Did Brandon feel sorry for her? Was she perhaps an old flame? Either way, he left her a life interest in Brandon House in Southwark and the lands he had purchased in East Anglia.7
And Lady Jane takes us (and probably Henry) back into the heart of his own youthful experience. She had been one of his mother’s ladies and, as such, a familiar figure in his own childhood and that of his sister Mary. Lady Jane was possessive and fiercely loyal; she was also unusually cultured for a woman of her class, speaking French well (she had a French mother) and being able to hold her own in conversation with Erasmus ‘on one or two occasions’.8
All this and more she passed on to her son, Henry. Born in 1489, he was almost certainly Henry VII’s godson. He was also, from his earliest youth, in household service to Henry as prince of Wales. There he attended Henry as his ‘carver, cupbearer and waiter’ and got to know him as few others did.9
The new reign was Guildford’s opportunity too. He jousted from time to time, but his real speciality was the revel – both as participant and, increasingly, as pageant-master. He first appeared in this role in 1511 in the festivities for Twelfth Night, which were held at Richmond while Catherine was still in her chamber recovering from the birth of Prince Henry. The pageant consisted of a mountain, ‘glistering by night’, from which issued a Lady followed by Morris dancers. ‘The which mountain was with vices [screws] brought up towards the king … and then it was drawn back.’ This was typical of Guildford, who seems to have inherited his father’s engineering skills as well as his mother’s literary interests.10
It also provided another point of contact with Henry, who was likewise developing a strong amateur interest in mechanics and mathematics.
Alongside the Brandon circle there was another, even more powerful, grouping among Henry’s sporting friends. The service rendered to Richard III by the Howards, father and son, at Bosworth, when the former was killed and the latter captured, was regarded as exemplifying the highest contemporary ideals of chivalry and loyalty. Even Henry VII – who was not given to thinking charitably of his opponents – respected them for it. But, to judge from the surviving tournament records of Henry VII’s reign, neither Surrey himself nor any of his sons had shown much interest in the mock-war of the tournament.
The only member of the clan to do so was Sir Thomas Knyvet, who had married Surrey’s daughter Muriel, dowager Viscountess Lisle. The marriage took place before July 1506; the following year, Knyvet, who was in his very early twenties, was one of the four gentlemen (Charles Brandon was another) who had ‘parfinished and done’ the May Joust.11
Henry VII’s death and Henry VIII’s accession brought about a striking change in the Howard attitude to jousting and the whole paraphernalia of the chivalric cult. The explanation has to be that they read the runes about Henry and his attitude to chivalry and – pragmatic as ever – decided that they must follow suit. Knyvet’s established reputation in the tilt would have in any case acted as a passport to Henry’s favour. It is also striking that Surrey’s second son, Sir Edward Howard, was chosen to wear Henry VII’s armour at his funeral and, as it were, impersonate his knightly valour.
But it was Henry’s coronation that offered the opportunity for a grand gesture. Six knights acted as the ‘enterprisers’ or organizers-cum-challengers for the celebratory joust. And four of them belonged to the Howard clan: Thomas, ‘heir apparent to the earl of Surrey’, Edward, ‘his [second] brother’, Sir Edmund Howard, the third brother, and Thomas Knyvet, the brother-in-law of the other three. The other two challengers were Sir Richard Grey, younger brother of the marquess of Dorset (who was still imprisoned in Calais) and Charles Brandon. And Brandon was Edward Howard’s closest friend and had chosen him to act as witness to his wedding to Anne Browne and as godfather to their two daughters.12
A decade or so earlier, when Henry was still a boy, jousting had been more or less monopolized by a Yorkist family clique; now that he was king, it looked like becoming a Howard family preserve.
Or it would have done if it had not been for Henry himself. For the message was clear: it was Henry, not the Howards, who was in charge. Jousting, hunting and revelling might be what we would call pleasure and they called ‘pastimes’. But Henry took his pleasures very seriously. And, like everything else he was serious about, he flung himself into them with energy, passion and commitment.
‘The king of England’, the Spanish ambassador Caroz reported home on 29 May 1510, ‘amuses himself almost every day of the week with running [at] the ring, and with jousts and tournaments on foot, in which one single person fights with an appointed adversary.’ Then, as enthralled as he had been a few weeks earlier when he had seen Henry in armour for the first time, he goes into lavish detail about the foot combat:
Two days in the week are consecrated to this kind of tournament, which is to continue to the feast of St John [24 June], and which is instituted in imitation of Amadis [of Gaul] and Lancelot, and other knights of olden times, of whom so much is written in books.
The combatants are clad in breast plates, and wear a particular kind of helmet. They use lances of fourteen hands breadth long, with blunt iron points. They throw these lances at one another, and fight afterwards with two-handed swords, each of the combatants dealing twelve strokes. They are separated from one another by a barrier which reaches up to the girdle …
‘There are many young men who excel in this kind of warfare,’ Caroz concludes, ‘but the most conspicuous among them all, the most assiduous, and the most interested in the combats is the king himself, who never omits being present at them.’13
As it happens, this tournament is unusually fully documented: we have the original challenge and a list of the combatants, when they fought and who their op
ponents were, as well as another description in Hall’s Chronicle. And they confirm Caroz’s report at every point. Especially in terms of Henry’s own assiduity: he fought more often than anybody else, and seems to have outdone even his three star aids – Knyvet, Edward Howard and Brandon – in stamina and skill.14
* * *
But even Henry, it seems, got bored with devoting every Thursday and Monday for a month to the same kind of combat. Or perhaps he simply ran out of opponents. At any rate, just before the court left Greenwich for the summer progress, the king devised a new martial game: a fight with battle-axes in the presence of Catherine (newly emerged from her confinement for her false pregnancy) and her ladies. Henry kicked off, Hall notes, by taking on ‘one Guyot, a gentleman of Almain [Germany], a tall man and a good man of arms’. This is Sir Guyot de Heulle, one of the king’s spears. ‘And then after they had done, they marched [? matched] always two and two together, and so did their feats and enterprises every man very well.’
‘Albeit’, Hall concludes, ‘it happened the said Guyot to fight with Sir Edward Howard, which Guyot was by him striken to the ground.’15
There was always a risk with this sort of violent, one-to-one combat of hard feelings as well as hard knocks. Henry had shown himself alive to this at the time of the coronation joust. He did so again on this occasion. And he (or was it perhaps the presentational genius of Guildford?) turned the peacemaking to pageantry.
The day after the fight with battle-axes, the court had moved to the Tower, en route to Richmond and the start of the summer progress. ‘To the intent that there should be no displeasure nor malice’, Henry gave £133.6s.8d in gold to the combatants ‘to make a banquet among themselves’. The banquet took place at Fishmongers’ Hall in Thames Street and – to emphasize their unity and amity – all twenty-four were dressed in ‘one suit or livery’ of yellow satin slashed with white. Even their shoes, hat-feathers and scabbards were of the same colour.
Henry Page 28