Henry VIII and the Court: Art, Politics and Performance 9781409411857, 2012026019

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henry viii and the court

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Henry VIII and the Court Art, Politics and Performance

Edited by Thomas Betteridge and Suzannah Lipscomb

ROUTLEDGE

Routledge Taylor & Francis Group

LONDON AND NEW YORK

First published 2013 by Ashgate Publishing Published 2016 by Routledge 2 Park Square, Milton Park, Abingdon, Oxon OX14 4RN

711 Third Avenue, New York, NY 10017, USA Routledge is an imprint of the Taylor & Francis Group, an informa business Copyright © Thomas Betteridge, Suzannah Lipscomb and the Contributors 2013

All rights reserved. No part of this book may be reprinted or reproduced or utilised in any form or by any electronic, mechanical, or other means, now known or hereafter invented, including photocopying and recording, or in any information storage or retrieval system, without permission in writing from the publishers. Notice: Product or corporate names may be trademarks or registered trademarks, and are used only for identification and explanation without intent to infringe. Thomas Betteridge and Suzannah Lipscomb have asserted their right under the Copyright, Designs and Patents Act, 1988, to be identified as the editors of this work. British Library Cataloguing in Publication Data Henry VIII and the Court: art, politics and performance. 1. Henry VIII, King of England, 1491–1547. 2. Henry VIII, King of England, 1491–1547–Influence. 3. Great Britain–Court and courtiers–History–16th century. 4. Royal households–Great Britain–History–16th century. 5. Great Britain–Politics and government–1509–1547. 6. Great Britain–History–Henry VIII, 1509–1547. 7. Arts, Tudor. 8. Material culture–Great Britain–History–16th century. 9. Great Britain–History–Henry VIII, 1509–1547–Historiography. I. Betteridge, Thomas. II. Lipscomb, Suzannah. 942’.052-dc23 The Library of Congress has cataloged the printed edition as follows: Henry VIII and the Court : art, politics and performance / edited by Thomas Betteridge and Suzannah Lipscomb. p. cm. Includes bibliographical references and index. ISBN 978-1-4094-1185-7 (hardcover : alk. paper) 1. Henry VIII, King of England, 1491–1547. 2. Great Britain–History–Henry VIII, 1509–1547. 3. Art–Great Britain– History–16th century. 4. Reformation–England. 5. Great Britain–Politics and government–1509–1547. I. Betteridge, Thomas. II. Lipscomb, Suzannah. DA332.H465 2012 942.05’2--dc23 2012026019 ISBN 9781409411857 (hbk)

Contents

List of Plates   List of Abbreviations   Notes on Contributors   Acknowledgements   Introduction: Suzannah Lipscomb and Thomas Betteridge

ix xi xiii xvii 1

Part I: Writing about Henry VIII 1

Reflecting on the King’s Reformation   G.W. Bernard

9

Part II: Material Culture 2

Rich Pickings: Henry VIII’s Use of Confiscation and its Significance for the Development of the Royal Collection   Maria Hayward

29

3

‘As presence did present them’: Personal Gift-giving at the Field of Cloth of Gold   Glenn Richardson

47

4

Cultures of the Body, Medical Regimen, and Physic at the Tudor Court   Elizabeth T. Hurren

65

Part III: Images 5

Architectural Culture and Royal Image at the Henrician Court   93 Kent Rawlinson

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6

Wishful Thinking: Reading the Portraits of Henry VIII’s Queens   Brett Dolman

115

7

Henry VIII and Holbein: Patterns and Conventions in Early Modern Writing about Artists   Tatiana C. String

131

Part IV: Court Culture 8

Inscribed in Memory: The Prison Poems of Sir Thomas Wyatt   145 Ruth Ahnert

9

Receiving the King: Henry VIII at Cambridge   Susan Wabuda

163

10

Performing Henry at the Court of Rome   Catherine Fletcher

179

Part V: Reactions 11

Hampton Court, Henry VIII and Cardinal Pole   Eamon Duffy

197

12

Henry VIII and the Crusade against England   Susan Brigden

215

13

One Survived: The Account of Katherine Parr in Foxe’s “Book of Martyrs”   Thomas S. Freeman

235

Part VI: Performance 14

Gender and Status in John Heywood’s The Play of the Weather   255 Eleanor Rycroft

15

Dramatic Genre and the Court of Henry VIII   Peter Happé

271

16

The Fall of Anne Boleyn: A Crisis in Gender Relations?   Suzannah Lipscomb

287

contents

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Part VII: Afterword 17

Index

Henry VIII: The View from 2009   Steven Gunn

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List of Plates

The Plates are located between pages 142 and 143.

1 2 3 4 5 6 7 8 9 10 11 12

A hone-stone plaque depicting Henry VIII standing on an Ionic capital (possibly of German manufacture, probably mid-sixteenth century). © The Trustees of the British Museum, with thanks to the Fiorencia Foundation Design for ‘A Castle for the Downes’ (produced by the Royal Office of Works, 1539). © The British Library Board (Cotton MS Augustus I i 21) Illustration of a fantastical fountain from the Hypnerotomachia Poliphili (Venice, 1499). Supplied by Royal Collection Trust / © HM Queen Elizabeth II 2012 Henry Howard, Earl of Surrey (unknown artist, c.1546). © National Portrait Gallery, London (NPG 5291) Copy of the Whitehall Mural (Remigius van Leemput, 1667). The Royal Collection © 2011 Her Majesty Queen Elizabeth II Donato Bramante’s design of the Interior of a Ruined Church or Temple (engraved by Bernardo Prevedari, 1481). © The Trustees of the British Museum Henry VIII as ‘David penitent’ from The Psalter of Henry VIII (Jean Mallard, 1540). © The British Library Board (Royal MS 2 A xvi, f. 79) The Family of Henry VIII (unknown artist, c.1545). The Royal Collection © 2011 Her Majesty Queen Elizabeth II The Embarkation of Henry VIII (unknown artist, c.1520–40). The Royal Collection © 2011 Her Majesty Queen Elizabeth II The Field of the Cloth of Gold (unknown artist, c.1545). The Royal Collection © 2011 Her Majesty Queen Elizabeth II The Apotheosis of Henry VIII (Robert Pyte, 1546). © Victoria and Albert Museum, London Katherine of Aragon (unknown artist, early eighteenth century). © National Portrait Gallery, London (NPG 163)

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Katherine of Aragon (unknown artist, c.1531–6). © Philip Mould Ltd Anne Boleyn (unknown artist, late sixteenth century). © National Portrait Gallery, London (NPG 668) Anne Boleyn (unknown artist, late sixteenth or early seventeenth century). © The Trustees of the 16th Viscount Mountgarret Will Trust Anne Boleyn (attributed to Lucas or Gerard Horenbout, c.1525–7). © The Trustees of the 9th Duke of Buccleuch’s Chattels Fund Anne of Cleves (attributed to Barthel Bruyn the elder, c.1538–9). © The Master and Fellows of Trinity College Cambridge Kateryn Parr (unknown artist, late sixteenth century). © Philip Mould Ltd Graffiti in Beauchamp Tower, Tower of London. © Historic Royal Palaces Graffito by Adam Sedbergh, Beauchamp Tower. © Historic Royal Palaces Graffito by Thomas Abell, Beauchamp Tower. © Historic Royal Palaces

List of Abbreviations

A & M AA AGR AGS ANG, 1 APC ASF ASMo, CD ASPr, CFE ASV BAV BL BL Add. MS CPR CRP CS CSP CSPD CSPFor CSPSp CSPVen

J. Foxe, Acts and Monuments of these latter and perilous days (London, 1570) The examinations of Anne Askew, ed. Elaine V. Beilin (Oxford, 1996) Archives générales du Royaume, Brussels Archivo general, Simancas Correspondance des Nonces en France: Carpi et Ferrerio, 1535–1540, ed. J. Lestoquoy, Acta Nunciaturae Gallicae, 1 (Rome and Paris, 1961) Acts of the Privy Council of England, ed. J.R. Dasent (32 vols, 1890–1907) Archivio di Stato, Firenze Archivio di Stato, Modena, Cancelleria Ducale Archivio di stato, Parma, Carteggio Farnesiano Estero Archivio Segreto Vaticano Biblioteca Apostolica Vaticana British Library British Library, Additional Manuscripts Calendar of Patent Rolls The Correspondence of Reginald Pole (4 vols to date, Ashgate 2002–) Camden Society Calendar of State Papers Calendar of State Papers, Domestic series of the reigns of Edward VI, Mary, Elizabeth, 1547–80 (London, 1856–71) Calendar of State Papers, Foreign (21 vols, London, 1863–1950) Calendar of State Papers, Spanish, ed. P. de Gayangos, G. Mattingly, M.A.S. Hume and R. Tyler (15 vols n 20, London, 1862–1954) Calendar of State Papers, Venetian, ed. R. Brown, C. Bentinck and H. Brown (9 vols, London, 1864–98)

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CWTW The Complete Works of Sir Thomas Wyatt the Elder, ed. Jason Powell (Oxford, forthcoming) EHR English Historical Review HJ Historical Journal HMC Historical Manuscripts Commission JIH Journal of Interdisciplinary History L & P J.S. Brewer, J. Gairdner and R.H. Brodie, eds., Letters and Papers, Foreign and Domestic, of the Reign of Henry VIII (21 vols in 36, 1862–1932) Lisle Letters, ed. Muriel St. Clare Byrne (6 vols, Chicago and LL London, 1981) ODNB Oxford Dictionary of National Biography (Oxford, 2005) OED Oxford English Dictionary Pole’s Correspondence The Correspondence of Reginald Pole, 1. A Calendar, 1518–1546: Beginnings to Legate of Viterbo, ed. T.F. Mayer (Aldershot and Burlington, Vermont, 2002) PP Past and Present Ribier Lettres et mémoires d’Estat, des roys, princes, ambassadeurs, et autres ministres, sous les règnes de François premier, Henry II & François II, ed. G. Ribier (2 vols Paris, 1666) SP State Papers published under the authority of His Majesty’s Commission, King Henry VIII (11 vols, London, 1830–52) STC A Short Title Catalogue of Books printed in England, Scotland, and Ireland and of English Books Printed Abroad before the year 1640, ed. A.W. Pollard and G.R. Redgrave, revised by W.A. Jackson and F.S. Ferguson and completed by K.F. Pantzer (3 vols, London, 1976–91) The National Archives TNA TNA, PRO The National Archives, Public Record Office TRHS Transactions of the Royal Historical Society TRP Tudor Royal Proclamations, ed. P.L. Hughes and J.F. Larkin (3 vols, New Haven and London, 1964-69) Ven. Dep. Venetianische Depeschen vom Kaiserhofe (Dispacci di Germania), ed. G. Turba (3 vols, Vienna, 1889–1901)

Notes on Contributors

Ruth Ahnert is a Lecturer in Early Modern Studies in the School of English and Drama at Queen Mary, University of London. Her interests lie at the intersection of religious history, literary form and book history. Recent publications have been focused on literature and texts associated with imprisonment, from writings produced in prison, to representations of incarceration on the early modern stage. She is currently completing a monograph entitled The Rise of Prison Literature in the Sixteenth Century (Cambridge University Press, forthcoming) which charts innovations in English prison literature following the Reformation. G.W. Bernard is Professor of Early Modern History in the University of Southampton and Leverhulme Major Research Fellow. His books include The King’s Reformation: Henry VIII and the remaking of the English Church (Yale University Press, 2005) and Anne Boleyn: Fatal Attractions (Yale University Press, 2010). He served for ten years as Editor of the English Historical Review and three as Vice-President of the Royal Historical Society. Thomas Betteridge is Professor of English and Drama at Oxford Brookes University. He has published numerous books, chapters and articles on the English Reformation and the Tudor Court. He has just published with Dr Thomas S. Freeman a collection entitled Henry VIII and History (Ashgate, 2012). Susan Brigden is Paul Langford Fellow and Tutor in History at Lincoln College and Reader in the University of Oxford. She is the author of London and the Reformation (Clarendon Press, 1989), New Worlds, Lost Worlds: The Rule of the Tudors, 1485–1603 (Allen Lane, The Penguin Press, 2000) and Thomas Wyatt: The Heart’s Forest (Faber and Faber, 2012). Brett Dolman is a sixteenth- and seventeenth-century art historian; he is also Curator (Collections) at Historic Royal Palaces, and in 2009 curated the exhibition ‘Henry’s Women’ at Hampton Court Palace. He has a particular

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interest in the iconography of Tudor, Stuart and Baroque royal iconography and the historiography of portraiture in general. Eamon Duffy is Professor of the History of Christianity, Cambridge University, and former President of Magdalene College. He is the author of many prizewinning books, among them The Stripping of the Altars (Yale University Press, 1992), The Voices of Morebath: Reformation and Rebellion in an English Village (Yale University Press, 2001), Marking the Hours (Yale University Press, 2006) and Fires of Faith (Yale University Press, 2009). Catherine Fletcher is a Lecturer in Public History at University of Sheffield. She has published several essays on Renaissance diplomatic practice, and has recently completed a book entitled Our Man in Rome: Henry VIII and his Italian Ambassador (Bodley Head, 2012). She has held research fellowships at the Institute of Historical Research, the British School at Rome and the European University Institute. Thomas S. Freeman is currently a Senior Lecturer at the University of Essex and a Research Fellow with the Faculty of Divinity at Cambridge University. He is the co-author of Religion and the Book in Early Modern England: The Making of Foxe’s “Book of Martyrs” (Cambridge University Press, 2011) and the co-editor of five books, including The Myth of Elizabeth (Palgrave, 2003), Mary Tudor: Old and New Perspectives (Palgrave, 2011), and, with Thomas Betteridge, Henry VIII and History (Ashgate, 2012). Steven Gunn teaches History at Merton College, Oxford. He is the author of Charles Brandon, Duke of Suffolk (Wiley-Blackwell, 1988), of Early Tudor Government, 1485–1558 (Palgrave Macmillan, 1995) and, with David Grummitt and Hans Cools, of War, State and Society in England and the Netherlands, 1477– 1559 (Oxford University Press, 2007). He has edited four other books and is completing a study of Henry VII’s ‘New Men’. Peter Happé, a Visiting Fellow in English at Southampton University, has published on medieval and renaissance drama, specializing in John Bale, John Heywood and Ben Jonson. He has contributed an edition of A Tale of a Tub to the Cambridge Edition of the Works of Ben Jonson, and has recently edited George Wapull’s The Tide Tarrieth No Man for the Malone Society, as well as co-editing and contributing to a volume of essays on the Mystères. Maria Hayward is a Professor of Early Modern History at the University of Southampton. Her area of specialism is the material culture of the Tudor and Stuart courts. Her books include Dress at the Court of King Henry VIII (2007) and Rich Apparel: Clothing and the Law in Henry VIII’s England (2009).

notes on contributors

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Elizabeth T. Hurren is Reader in Medical Humanities in the School of Historical Studies at the University of Leicester, and is an expert on the history of anatomy and the body from Tudor birthing room to modern incubator. She researches hidden histories and life stories overlooked in the social history of medicine: a conceptual approach that features in her latest book, Dying for Victorian Medicine: English Anatomy and its Trade in the Dead Poor (Palgrave, 2011) and in a forthcoming biography, Lady Margaret Cholmley’s Secret Medical Skills (1533-1570). Suzannah Lipscomb is Senior Lecturer and Convenor for History at New College of the Humanities, London, and also holds a post as Lecturer in Early Modern History at the University of East Anglia. She is the author of 1536: The Year that Changed Henry VIII (2009) and A Visitor’s Companion to Tudor England (Lion Hudson, 2012). Kent Rawlinson is the Curator of the Historic Buildings at Hampton Court Palace, where he helps to lead the research, conservation and interpretation of the palace. His academic interests and published research encompass the architecture of English royal palaces in the medieval and early-modern periods, the history and architecture of the medieval household chapel, and court ceremony in the late medieval and early-modern period. He is currently writing a book on the subject of English architecture during the reign of Henry VIII. Glenn Richardson is Reader in Early-Modern History at St Mary’s University College, Strawberry Hill. He is the author of Renaissance Monarchy: The Reigns of Henry VIII, Francis I and Charles V (Bloomsbury, 2002) and co-editor with Susan Doran of Tudor England and its Neighbours (Palgrave Macmillan, 2005). He also edited ‘The Contending Kingdoms’: England and France, 1420–1700 (Ashgate, 2008). Eleanor Rycroft is a Research Fellow at Edinburgh University. Her research concerns the Tudor and Stuart stage, gender, the social and political contexts of drama, and practice-based research into the theatre. She was the Research Assistant on Staging the Henrician Court at Hampton Court from 2008 to 2010, and has worked at Lancaster, Sussex, Oxford Brookes and Reading Universities. Tatiana C. String is Associate Professor of Art History at the University of North Carolina, and was previously Senior Lecturer in the History of Art at the University of Bristol. She is the author of Art and Communication in the Reign of Henry VIII (Ashgate, 2008) and co-editor of Tudorism: Historical Imagination

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and the Appropriation of the Sixteenth Century, Proceedings of the British Academy (Oxford University Press, 2011). Susan Wabuda is Associate Professor of History at Fordham University and a Fellow of the Royal Historical Society. Her speciality is the history and theology of the Reformation. In addition to numerous essays, she is the author of Preaching during the English Reformation (Cambridge University Press, 2002).

Acknowledgements

The ‘Henry VIII and the Tudor Court: 1509 to 2009’ conference could not have been succeeded without the support at Historic Royal Palaces of Michael Day, John Barnes and Rod Giddins; curators Dr Lucy Worsley and Dr Kent Rawlinson; conference administrator Maura Davies; the Functions and Events team, Trevor Dunford, Jo Jennings and Daniel Smith; in Communications and Development, Jessica Bellringer and Michaela Rogers; in Operations, Pat Sweeny and all the State Apartment Warders; in Education, Will le Fleming, Chloe Sims, Suzanne Cooper, and Katie Newton; at the Chapel Royal, Father Denis Mulliner, Carl Jackson and the Chapel Choir; caterers Digby Trout; and all the kind and generous Historic Royal Palaces (HRP) volunteers, ably marshalled by Sarah Levine and Sarah Searle. Thank you to you all for all your help. Thank you too to Gale Cengage Learning State Papers Online for funding a much-enjoyed drinks reception. The intellectual scope and vision of the conference and, as a result, of this book, drew much on the suggestions of Hampton Court Palace’s Research Advisory Panel in the run-up to marking the 500th anniversary of Henry VIII’s accession in 2009. Many have contributed a chapter to this volume, but we would like to acknowledge the work of the full Panel: Prof. G.W. Bernard, Dr Andrea Clarke, Dr Tarnya Cooper, Brett Dolman, Dr Thomas S. Freeman, Dr Steven Gunn, Dr Maria Hayward, Dr Erica Longfellow, Dr Kent Rawlinson, Dr Stephen Rice, Dr Glenn Richardson, Polly Schomberg, Dr Tatiana C. String, Prof. Greg Walker, and Dr Lucy Worsley. In 2009, we also organized, with Peter Furtado, a series of lectures and panel debates, ‘The Henry VIII talks’ in association with History Today. Our thanks go to Peter and to all our speakers: Jessie Childs, Dr Susan Doran, Prof. Eamon Duffy, Dr Thomas S. Freeman, Margaret George, Philippa Gregory, Dr Steven Gunn, Dr John Guy, Prof. Eric Ives, Paul Lay, Prof. David Loades, Hilary Mantel, Prof. Diarmaid MacCulloch, Dr Glenn Richardson, Dan Snow, Dr David Starkey, Gregory Thompson, Prof. Greg Walker, and Derek Wilson.

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We are grateful to all the contributors to this book for their co-operation and forbearance, and our editors at Ashgate, Tom Gray and Barbara Pretty, for their patience and professionalism.

Introduction Suzannah Lipscomb and Thomas Betteridge

A.F. Pollard’s biography of Henry VIII can claim with some legitimacy to be the first modern historical account of Henry and his reign. For Pollard, Henry may have been the man who had set England on the path of greatness, but this did not excuse the king’s lapses of behaviour. In a memorable phrase Pollard wrote: ‘Every inch a King, Henry VIII never attained to the stature of a gentleman.’1 In many ways this quote says as much about Pollard’s lateVictorian sense of what it meant to be a gentleman as it does about Henry’s kingship. But despite this, Pollard was right to suggest that there is a tension running through the Henrician period that has its roots in the contradictory nature of Henry and his reign. Henry was a man of learning and superstition, a generous king and patron whose acquisitive attitude towards the goods and possessions of his subjects seems at times to border on the avaricious. The Henrician court was a place of high art and low drama, where sophisticated paintings occupied the same cultural space as bawdy plays. It is perhaps as regards Henry’s religion that the contradictions are most apparent. Henry appears to have been a devout Catholic but was also the man who dissolved the monasteries and banished the Pope. His attitude to people who resisted his religious changes, such as Reginald Pole, seems at times to be closer to the world of The Godfather than that of Renaissance Europe. It is the contradictory nature of Henry’s kingship and his reign that determined the scope and range of the chapters that comprise this collection. Henry, a king but not a gentleman, demands an interdisciplinary approach from those who study him. He refuses to be decorous or good mannered, demanding to remain the centre of attention. In 2007 and 2008, in the run-up to Historic Royal Palaces’s opening of a new exhibition and visitor experience at Hampton Court Palace to mark 1 A.F. Pollard, Henry VIII (London, 1966 – first published 1902), p. 268.

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the 500th anniversary of Henry VIII’s accession in 2009, Dr Kent Rawlinson, Curator of Historic Buildings at Hampton Court, suggested gathering an interdisciplinary panel of sixteenth-century scholars to discuss current directions in Tudor studies and to ensure that the new interpretation at the palace was academically credible and up-to-date. The Research Advisory Panel consisted of academics, curators and scholars from a range of institutional contexts (Prof. G.W. Bernard, Dr Andrea Clarke, Dr Tarnya Cooper, Brett Dolman, Dr Thomas S. Freeman, Dr Steven Gunn, Dr Maria Hayward, Dr Erica Longfellow, Dr Kent Rawlinson, Dr Stephen Rice, Dr Glenn Richardson, Polly Schomberg, Dr Tatiana C. String, Prof. Greg Walker, Dr Lucy Worsley), and was chaired by the two of us. Among other things, this Research Advisory Panel discussed new directions and upcoming themes in Henrician studies, and in subsequent years, their thoughts have proved to be prescient. Many books were written for 2009 and subsequently on the topics and figures the Research Advisory Panel identified as worthy of further scholarship. They suggested, for example, that Henry VIII himself would receive considerable attention (and a slew of new biographies by Robert Hutchinson, Suzannah Lipscomb, David Starkey, Derek Wilson and Lucy Wooding, among others, duly followed in 2009).2 They suggested that there would be renewed interest in Henry VIII’s queens and children as individuals, and we have seen new biographies on Kateryn Parr (by Susan E. James and Linda Porter) and on Catherine of Aragon (by Giles Tremlett).3 Similarly, they felt more work should be done on the posthumous image and reputation of Henry VIII, and in 2012, three books on this subject (edited by Mark Rankin, Christopher Highley and John N. King; Tatiana C. String and Marcus Bull; and Thomas S. Freeman and Thomas Betteridge) emerged.4 Other themes such as the education of the princesses Mary and Elizabeth; symbolic ritual at court, especially in the coronation ceremony; and Henry VIII’s military history, ought also, they suggested, to receive scholarly attention, and they have subsequently been the subject of major new studies in, for example, a volume edited by Alice Hunt and Anna Whitelock, and monographs by Alice Hunt and David Potter.5 Finally, another subject 2 David Starkey, Henry: Virtuous Prince (London, 2008); Lucy Wooding, Henry VIII (London, 2009); Derek Wilson, A Brief History of Henry VIII: Reformer and Tyrant (London, 2009); Suzannah Lipscomb, 1536: The Year that Changed Henry VIII (Oxford, 2009). 3 Susan E. James, Kateryn Parr: The Making of a Queen (Aldershot, 1999); Linda Porter, Katherine the Queen: The Remarkable Life of Katherine Parr (London, 2010). Giles Tremlett, Catherine of Aragon: Henry’s Spanish Queen (London, 2010). 4 Mark Rankin, Christopher Highley and John N. King, eds., Henry VIII and his Afterlives: Literature, Politics and Art (Cambridge, 2009); Tatiana C. String and Marcus Bull, eds., Tudorism: Historical Imagination and the Appropriation of the Sixteenth Century (Oxford, 2011); Thomas S. Freeman and Thomas Betteridge, eds., Henry VIII in History (Farnham, 2012). 5 Alice Hunt and Anna Whitelock, eds., Tudor Queenship: The Reigns of Mary and Elizabeth (New York, Basingstoke, 2010); Alice Hunt, The Drama of Coronation: Medieval

introduction

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identified by the Research Advisory Panel as deserving investigation, Henry VIII and the arts, has featured in a major broadcasting series since this date (notably, BBC4 Henry VIII: Patron or Plunderer, as well as a special Channel 4 Time Team programme on Henry VIII’s Lost Palaces). Beyond historical fortune telling, the purpose of this experiment was to create a blueprint for a major international academic conference on Henry VIII and his court to focus on these new areas of research. This volume is a product of some of the best papers heard at that conference, held at Hampton Court Palace in July 2009. The chief distinction of this collection is its genuinely interdisciplinary nature – driven by a desire to capture the capricious and indecorous nature of Henry’s reign. As well as drawing on the traditional areas of Henrician religion and politics, the chapters explore aspects of material culture at the court, the performative and event-led nature of court life, the cultural and artistic context of the court, issues of gender, and the international context, and in so doing, expand the range of sources and paradigms through which Henry VIII and his court should be considered. Like the discussions of the Research Advisory Panel, this volume is bookended by autobiographical and historiographical reflections on the state of research into Henry VIII and the Tudor court. In the first chapter, a historian responsible for some of the most thought-provoking studies in the field – notably his The King’s Reformation: Henry VIII and the Remaking of the English Church, which mounts a strong challenge to Eltonian orthodoxies about the respective roles of Henry VIII and Thomas Cromwell in the development of the early Anglican church – reflects on his own path towards seeing Henry as the dominant force in the politics of his reign.6 G.W. Bernard protests (and reclaims) the adjective that reviewers have often used to label him – ‘contentious’ – and explains how his intellectual journey has convinced him that we have, for too long, taken at face value the image that Henry created of himself: we have, he suggests, been deceived, as his subjects were, into thinking well of him. Surely, Bernard reasons, this was a king, if ever there was one, who did not need to read Machiavelli. Steven Gunn’s afterword uses the events of the anniversary year of 2009 to reflect on the changing historical landscape around Henry VIII, his court and reign. He notes that attention is now being paid to the personal and the material life of Henry himself, and observes the links being drawn between political history and the literary and visual culture of the court. Gunn reminds us of the major historiographical changes of recent years, noting, for example, Ceremony in Early Modern England (Cambridge, 2008); David Potter, Henry VIII and Francis I: The Final Conflict, 1540-47 (Leiden, Boston, 2011). 6 G.W. Bernard, The King’s Reformation: Henry VIII and the Remaking of the English Church (New Haven, London, 2005).

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the shift of focus from court politics to popular politics. He also highlights avenues for further research, including England’s international relations and the continuities between the reigns of Henry VIII and his father. In between, the chapters are grouped into the themes of material culture, images, court culture, reactions and performance. The section on material culture begins with a chapter by Maria Hayward, whose thorough research into the royal inventories allows her to explore Henry VIII’s use of confiscation and plunder to acquire plate, furnishings, books and other goods. She uses this evidence of material culture, in turn, to gain insight into the political culture of the court. Glenn Richardson examines the use of the gift at the Field of Cloth of Gold as a ‘weapon’ in the rivalry between Henry VIII and Francis I. He suggests that the literal and metaphorical messages conveyed by such ostentatious generosity established a personal bond, a debt of honour, and a competitive need for reciprocity. Gift-giving between kings, therefore, he contends, shaped both the cultural transmission between the kingdoms and the interactions of the monarchs themselves. Finally, Elizabeth Hurren considers the interest of Henry VIII and Tudor courtiers, specifically Lady Margaret Cholmley, in the medical life of the court, and the ways in which the welfare and well-being of the body politic were played out through domestic medicine. The theme of material culture neatly intersects with that of art and imagery at the Tudor court. Kent Rawlinson analyses the long-overlooked architectural culture of the early Tudor court through its appearance as settings or architectural details in images. He contends that architecture was as self-consciously patronized in the Henrician court as in the Elizabethan, and challenges the way that historians have unproblematically equated buildings with wealth and display. Instead, he suggests important literal, abstract and political meanings behind the inclusion of architecture in art. Brett Dolman picks up the theme with his examination of the portraits of Henry VIII’s queens. He disputes the ‘lazy’ tendency of historians to use these portraits for psychological profiling, and argues that attempts to glimpse the inner lives of the queens through their portraiture rest on a lack of understanding about why portraits were painted and the uncertainties surrounding their creation. Tatiana C. String, in her chapter on Holbein’s famous depiction of Henry VIII, also stresses the importance of not using the portrait to read the thoughts and feelings of Henry the historical actor, but instead to explore the tradition of art and artistic practice at the time. She also successfully removes the possibility of anyone ever quoting Karel van Mander’s alleged comment on seeing this picture of Henry (‘abashed, annihilated …’) again. The section on court culture begins with a chapter by Ruth Ahnert, who reflects on naming devices in graffiti in the Tower of London and their function as ‘sites of memory’ for those who were incarcerated. She uses this insight into memoralization and the fear of being forgotten to explore the

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use of names in the otherwise anonymous poetry of Sir Thomas Wyatt, with fascinating results. In her chapter, Susan Wabuda investigates the courtly culture of ceremony by analysing the purpose of Henry VIII’s progresses and pilgrimages. She explores the mechanisms of these ‘exercises in royal theatre’ through the evidence of the Grace Books, or expenditure accounts, of the University of Cambridge, which chart the specific ritual of reception at one of the country’s great universities. The refrain of performance in the maintenance of courtly culture is reprised by Catherine Fletcher in her chapter on Henry VIII’s pre-Reformation ambassadors to Rome. She explores the hitherto under-studied Italian aspect of Tudor diplomatic practice and examines the role of ceremony and gift-exchange in the service of the English king at a foreign court. It is with Henry VIII’s relations with foreign powers and courts that Eamon Duffy and Susan Brigden’s complementary chapters on reactions to Henry are focused. Eamon Duffy tells the story of the embitterment of Henry VIII’s once-warm relationship with his cousin, Cardinal Reginald Pole, and the circumstances of Pole’s creation of De unitate. In so doing, he highlights the importance of Pole to an understanding of Henry VIII’s reign, as well as to long-lasting perceptions of Henry throughout Counter Reformation Europe. Such European perceptions of Henry VIII are also the starting point for Susan Brigden’s chapter. She examines in detail the dramatic moment at which, faced with the threat of the Turkish infidel and the English heretic, the French king and Imperial Emperor seemed poised to embark on ‘the enterprise of England’, a holy war against Henry VIII. By contrast, Thomas S. Freeman considers the depiction of a particular English reaction against Henry VIII and his last wife, Katherine Parr, in Foxe’s Book of Martyrs. His careful reconstruction of events challenges the orthodoxy that Stephen Gardiner, Bishop of Winchester mounted a series of plots against evangelicals, chiefly Katherine Parr, in the last year of Henry VIII’s reign, and instead directs the attention to Henry’s style of rule. Our final set of chapters considers performance at the court. Eleanor Rycroft uses John Heywood’s The Play of the Weather, probably performed as an interlude at court in the early 1530s, to examine how the lower orders and women were perceived in the Tudor period. She elucidates how power is constituted by access to, and performance in, spaces in proximity to the king and, yet, how Heywood depicts the lowest of the court as eloquent, witty and rational performers. Peter Happé further considers the details and themes of dramatic courtly interludes and entertainments, and the development of the revels over the reign. He examines how the writers of interludes, including John Heywood, attempted to influence royal policy through politically significant drama – some of which subtly made Henry VIII the butt of their critical wit. Finally, Suzannah Lipscomb considers the performative nature of gender and honour at the Tudor court. She suggests that the fall of Anne

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Boleyn in May 1536 was the product of a crisis of competing ideals of courtly femininity and masculinity. The collected chapters in this volume remind us that historians interested in the political culture of Henry VIII’s court and the political narrative of Henry VIII’s reign ignore analyses of art, architecture, material possessions, literature, performance, gender and international relations at their peril. It is our contention that the following chapters should change our very ways of thinking about Henry VIII and his court. The printed version of John Heywood’s drama Witty and Witless concludes with three verses that it informs its readers are void in the King’s absence. The third of these verses can be read as a typical piece of Henrician court flattery: Prayng that pryns, whome owr pryns hys grett grace gave To gawnt hym longe lengthe of encres in estate, At full fyne wherof hys most hy gyfts to have As ys promysyd in scrypture alegyd late: The joyes not allonely inestymabyll But more the degre of joyes incomparabyll.7

It would be easy to miss the slightly edgy, even hysterical, nature of this verse. The use of the words ‘inestimable’ and ‘incomparable’ suggest a level of hyperbole beyond what is imaginable. The increase in estate that Heywood wishes Christ to grant Henry is perhaps a reference to the Henry’s relative lack of royal heirs but it also hints at material wealth that seems potentially problematic. Does the King need to be wealthy, to have greater estates? Heywood was an experienced courtier. He knew what Henry wanted to hear. As a number of chapters in this collection make apparent, Henry clearly did desire a greater estate, even if it came at the considerable expense of his subjects. Heywood’s verse is a reminder of the conflictual nature of Henrician kingship. The void left by the king does not mean that the drama is not performed; indeed the printing of the three verses suggest that they have a meaning in print, if not in performance, even without Henry’s presence. This collection seeks to grasp an aspect of the essential ambiguity of the Henrician period – its violence, despair and, at times, horror alongside great art, drama and literature. Henry was no gentleman but perhaps this is why the history of his reign remains so captivating.

7 John Heywood, ‘Witty and Witless’, written 1525, published in The Plays of John Heywood, ed. Margaret Aston and Peter Happé (Cambridge, 1991), p. 72, ll. 690–96.

part i: writing about henry viii

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1 Reflecting on the King’s Reformation G.W. Bernard

What was remarkable about Henry VIII was his evident personal charm. He had a Tony Blair-like ability to make those who spoke to him feel that he sympathized with them. The most extraordinary example was at Christmastide 1536 when Henry invited Robert Aske, the leader of the Pilgrims of Grace, to spend ten days at court. In October a huge rebellion had arisen in the north of England, with some 30,000 men assembling not just in October but again at the beginning of December, protesting not, I maintain, against taxation or for other economic grievances, but rather against the king’s religious policies, especially the dissolution of the smaller monasteries. Outnumbered, the king’s lieutenants, Thomas Howard, third duke of Norfolk, and George Talbot, fourth earl of Shrewsbury, made a deal on 6 December with those whom he saw as rebels. The insurgents would receive free pardons for the offences they had committed in assembling illegally, a parliament would meet in the north, and until that parliament met, abbeys would stand. At that point the Pilgrims must have thought they had won: why else would a parliament be called except to repeal recent legislation that they detested, especially the act dissolving the smaller monasteries?1 Henry then invited Robert Aske, the one-eyed lawyer who had emerged as the leader of the Pilgrims in Yorkshire, to spend Christmastide at court. In correspondence to his military commanders Henry had fiercely denounced Aske. But now he treated him as his honoured guest. Aske was invited to declare how he had come to be involved in the disturbances.2 More strikingly still, Henry clearly succeeded in giving Aske the impression that he would honour the promise that the duke of Norfolk had made that a parliament would be held in the north. Henry, we know from the instructions he would send the duke 1 G.W. Bernard, The King’s Reformation: Henry VIII and the Remaking of the English Church (London and New Haven, 2005), ch. 4. esp. pp. 293–373. 2 TNA, PRO, SP1/112 fol. 197v (L & P, XI, 1306; SP1/112 fol.199v (L & P, XI, 1306 [2]).

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of Norfolk, had not the slightest intention of honouring those concessions.3 But astonishingly Aske returned to the north in January full of confidence that Henry would do so.4 Nor was Aske the only rebel leader to be deceived.5 When some of the northern commons began to suspect that Henry did not mean what he had said, Aske and others who had led the rising now stood firm against the new disturbances.6 By dividing the rebels, Henry was then able to summon Aske and other leaders to London again – but this time to send them to the Tower.7 It was a remarkable achievement by the king. If only we had some description of those Christmastide feasts that Aske enjoyed in Henry’s company. Henry was quite ready to allow those with whom he talked to believe that they had got the better of him. Eustace Chapuys, the imperial ambassador, repeatedly informed his master, Charles V, of how he had won an argument with Henry over the details of diplomacy or the fine points of Henry’s justifications for his divorce. But what Chapuys did not realize, I suspect, was that Henry was playing him along.8 Henry as king was skilled at allowing his leading ministers to shoulder the responsibility for unpopular policies, at maintaining his ‘deniability’. Nowhere was that more evident than over the Amicable Grant of 1525. That was a huge financial demand, not sanctioned by parliament. It ran into refusals and outright resistance, not least because it came hard on other exactions, a great loan in 1522–23, and parliamentary taxation granted in 1523 on the basis of fresh valuations of wealth and income made in 1522. According to a famous story told by Edward Hall, the lawyer who wrote a Chronicle published in 1548, Henry, on hearing of the troubles, summoned his councillors, and demanded to know who was responsible for the demand. Wolsey stepped forward. But Hall did not intend us to take that at face value. And the chance discovery of the instructions sent to the commissioners for the Amicable Grant in Gloucestershire has revealed that Henry was intimately involved, assembling the commissioners at court, and telling them ‘by his own mouth’ 3 TNA, PRO, SP1/114 fols 103–116v (L & P, XII i, 98 [1]); E36/118 fol. 173 (L & P, XII i, 302). 4 TNA, PRO, SP1/114 fols 49, 50 (L & P, XII I 43 [1,2]; SP1/114 fol. 51 (L & P, XII i, 44); SP1/118 fol. 39 (L & P, XII i, 848 I [13]); SP1/114 fol. 18 (L & P, XII i, 20); SP1/118 fol. 40v (L & P, XII i, 849 [1] [43]), SP1/120 fol. 34 (L & P, XII i, 1175 [1]). 5 L & P, XI 1397; TNA, PRO, SP1/114 fol. 52 (L & P, XII i, 45); L & P, XII i, 234; TNA, PRO, SP1/114 fol. 68 (L & P, XII i, 66). 6 TNA, PRO, SP1/114 fol. 166 (L & P, XII i, 137); SP1/119 fol. 79v (L & P, XII i, 1087); E36/119 fol. 21 (L & P, XII i, 201 [i]); L & P, XII i, 201 (iii); i, 202; TNA, PRO, SP1/114 fol. 64 (L & P, XII i, 64) and fo, 69 (L & P, XII i, 67); SP1/114 fol. 160 (L & P, XII i, 134); SP1/114 fol. 142 (L & P, XII i, 115); E36/122 fol. 36; SP1/114 fol. 162 (L & P, XII i, 135); SP1/114 fols 192–92v (L & P, XII i, 135). 7 TNA, PRO, SP1/117 fols 75–75v (L & P, XII i, 698); SP1/117 fol. 94 (L & P, XII i, 170); cf. SP1/115 fol. 176v (L & P, XII i, 319); SP1/115 fol. 173 (L & P, XII i, 321); L & P, XII i, 353. 8 L & P, VI 351 (16 April 1533); cf. 235 (15 March 1533); 1018 (23 Aug. 1533); 1222 (5 October 1533).

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why he needed the money. Not the least of the function of leading ministers was to serve as lightning conductors for kings: a practice Henry shrewdly exploited.9 Much of Henry’s personal charm was surely genuine. He was hailed as a model renaissance prince at his accession, and his talents were real. He was a skilled jouster, he spoke several languages, he wrote music and sang, he manifestly appreciated architecture and painting, and his education had been rigorous, to judge by the theological knowledge he would display.10 Judging from accounts of what he said on public occasions, as in the example from 1525, he had a flair with words and an instinctive judgement of what should be said. But as my examples of Henry’s charm show, there was a ruthless and cynical streak in the man. We do not know whether Henry read Nicolo Machiavelli and especially Machiavelli’s rather cynical analysis of what rulers must do. But if Henry had not read Machiavelli, the truth is that he did not need to. There is an intriguing letter he sent to his ambassadors at the court of Francis I, the king of France, in July 1531. Henry was ready, he wrote, to do what he could for the French king without overmuch detriment to himself. But, he continued, benefits to be done and hoped for are much more effectual in preserving goodwill than those already received, which men lightly pass over and which are then forgotten. Therefore Henry thought it better to put the French king in hope of his request being granted, but not so firmly that he no longer doubted it. Rather than suddenly giving Francis a determinate and certain answer, they should leave such an impression that Francis neither despaired of the king’s answer, nor conceived such hope that he would have just cause to complain if only part is granted.11 That betrays a shrewd and deep-seated cynicism. Most remarkable about Henry’s reign, indeed unparalleled, is how many of those who at some point were close to him and served him well suddenly found themselves not just out of favour but on trial for their lives and condemned to death.12 Blood stains the pages of any history of Henry VIII. On his accession to the throne, two of his father’s ministers, Edmund Dudley and Richard Empson, associated with Henry VIII’s financial exactions, were sent to the Tower and tried and executed for treason. The chronicler Polydore Vergil, usually swift to understand politics in terms of faction, here presents Henry as taking the initiative, consulting with his councillors on his wish to have them tried as savage extortioners: ‘everyone was grateful to the monarch

9 G.W. Bernard, War, Taxation and Rebellion in early Tudor England: Henry VIII, Wolsey and the Amicable Grant of 1525 (Brighton, 1986); G.W. Bernard and R.W. Hoyle, ‘The instructions for the levying of the Amicable Grant, March 1525’, Historical Research, lxxvii (1994), pp. 191–202; E. Hall, Chronicle (London, 1809), pp. 697–8, 700–01. 10 J.J. Scarisbrick, Henry VIII (New Have, London1968), esp. pp.11–20 for a vivid evocation. 11 L & P, V, 363. 12 Peter Gwyn first emphasized this to me long ago.

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for the punishment of the evil pair’.13 In 1513, just before he embarked on his invasion of France, Edmund de la Pole, son of a sister of Edward IV, a prisoner in the Tower since 1506, was summarily executed, not for anything he had recently done, but simply as a precaution: there is nothing to prove the king’s direct involvement but it does seem highly likely.14 In 1521 Edward Stafford, third duke of Buckingham, was executed for treason when disaffected members of his household revealed that he had listened to a monk who had prophesied that he would one day be king. That Henry was closely involved is suggested by the despatch of Sir William Compton, Henry’s closest body servant, as the messenger who was to summon Buckingham to court and then to the Tower. And Henry was involved in the interrogation of witnesses. A monarch other than Henry might well have fined Buckingham for his unwise behaviour: Henry had him executed.15 Thomas Wolsey, Henry’s devoted minister for many years, was not only dismissed as Lord Chancellor on absurd charges of breaking the statute of praemunire in 1529 but had he not died on the way to London in 1530 he would undoubtedly have been tried and executed too.16 In 1535 Thomas More, long Henry’s secretary, and Wolsey’s successor as Lord Chancellor, and someone who was as close to a friend as a king could have – Henry would ‘for the pleasure he took in his company’ sometimes unexpectedly come to More’s house in Chelsea ‘to be merry with him’, even after dinner walking with him in his garden for an hour ‘holding his arm about his neck’ – was executed when he refused to swear the oath of succession and was tricked into revealing what he thought about the king’s new supremacy.17 In 1536 Anne Boleyn, Henry’s second wife, was executed for treason: I shall return to this. In 1540 Thomas Cromwell, Henry’s leading minister in the 1530s, was executed for treason.18 In 1542 Catherine Howard, Henry’s fifth wife, was executed after she was found to have been committing adultery.19 At the very end of the reign, Thomas Howard, third duke of Norfolk, who had so skilfully resisted and ultimately defeated the Pilgrimage of Grace,20 and his son, Henry Howard, earl of Surrey, were arrested and convicted of 13 Polydore Vergil, The Anglica Historia, ed. and trans. D. Hay, Camden Society, 3rd series, 74 (London, 1950), pp. 150–52. 14 Ibid., pp. 202–3. 15 P. Gwyn, The King’s Cardinal (London, 1990), pp. 159–72 for a full account. L & P, III i, 1233 for Henry and witnesses. 16 Gwyn, King’s Cardinal, pp. 587–98 (Wolsey’s downfall), pp. 634–6 (Wolsey’s arrest); Bernard, King’s Reformation, pp. 30–37. 17 Bernard, King’s Reformation, pp. 125–51; William Roper, The Lyfe of Sir Thomas More, knight, ed. E.V. Hitchcock, Early English Text Society, orig. ser., 197 (London, 1935), pp. 20–21. 18 Statutes of the Realm, iii, 12v (London, 1810–28). 19 L.B. Smith, A Tudor Tragedy: the Life and Times of Catherine Howard (London, 1961), pp. 178–205. 20 Bernard, King’s Reformation, pp. 206, 333–40, 351–7, 359–65, 373, 375–8, 381–400, esp. 392–400.

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treason after Surrey had unwisely quartered his arms with those of the king.21 Surrey was duly executed. Norfolk was due to be executed a few days later. But Henry died the night before. Norfolk’s life was then spared: he spent the reign of Edward VI in the Tower. That Norfolk’s life was spared after Henry died strongly suggests to me that it was indeed Henry who was responsible for the shedding of all that blood. If the Howards had been brought down by some political faction, as many historians have claimed, then why was Norfolk not executed too? There might have been some legal complications arising from Henry’s death, but it is hard to see why they could not have been overcome if the will were there. It would be impossible to compile a similar catalogue of executed queens, noblemen and councillors for any other reign: and it is important to emphasize that none of these convicted and attainted traitors had actually raised their swords against the king. Yet Henry is often – wrongly, as I shall maintain – thought to have been lazy, quickly bored with business, not very intelligent, easily manipulated. Geoffrey Elton, the most influential historian of Tudor England in the twentieth century, notoriously presented Thomas Cromwell, Henry’s minister in the 1530s, as a great revolutionary. If, as Elton once remarked, ‘Cromwell, not Henry VIII, was really the government’,22 that significantly diminished the part played by Henry, whom Elton memorably characterized as ‘a bit of a booby and a bit of a baby’.23 And when Elton examined the fall of Cromwell in 1540, he explained it in terms of faction: Cromwell was brought down by his supposed long-standing rivals, Thomas Howard, duke of Norfolk, and Stephen Gardiner, bishop of Winchester.24 Elton’s factional interpretation of Cromwell’s fall was followed in the 1970s by complex elaborations by Eric Ives and David Starkey. Starkey, a pupil of Elton, studied Henry VIII’s privy chamber, that part of the royal household responsible for the private life of the king. And the young David Starkey built up his reputation by arguing that Henry was the plaything of factions. In 1985 he declared that his study of The Reign of Henry VIII: Personalities and Politics ‘presents a new view of the King and the most important event of the reign: the Reformation. Henry was not the archetypal strong king. He was not weak either, but he was manipulable.’ And the Reformation ‘was not 21 J. Loach, Edward VI (New Haven, London, 1999), pp. 20; P.R. Moore, ‘The Heraldic Charge against the earl of Surrey, 1546–1547’, English Historical Review, 116 (2001), pp. 557–81; E.W. Ives, ‘Henry VIII’s Will: a forensic conundrum’, Historical Journal, 35 (1992), pp. 779–804; R.A. Houlbrooke, ‘Henry VIII’s wills: a comment’, Historical Journal, 307 (1994), pp. 891–9; Ives, ‘The Protectorate Provisions of 1546–7’, Historical Journal, 307, pp. 901–14. 22 G.R. Elton, The Tudor Revolution in Government (Cambridge, 1953), p. 175. 23 G.R. Elton, ‘The King of Hearts’, Historical Journal, 12 (1969), p. 161. 24 G.R. Elton, ‘Thomas Cromwell’s decline and fall’, Historical Journal, 10 (1951), pp. 150–85 (reprinted in Elton, Studies in Tudor and Stuart Politics and Government (4 vols, Cambridge, 1974–93), vol. 1. 189–230.

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simply a great popular movement; it was also the work of court faction’. It was Thomas Cromwell whom Starkey then presented as the ‘architect of the reformation’.25 Very many historians have elaborated such a factional view of politics in the reign of Henry VIII: Eric Ives, Diarmaid MacCulloch, John Guy, Susan Brigden and many more.26 I have come to take a very different view, presenting Henry VIII in The King’s Reformation as very much the dominant force in the politics of his reign. But I did not begin with that view. I studied as an undergraduate and began my researches under the shadow of Geoffrey Elton’s interpretations, which I then found more persuasive than I did later. And from my undergraduate study of early modern European history I had absorbed something of a factional view of politics. Historians of the kingdoms of France and Spain saw constant struggles between factions as the key. One of the first things I did when I started research was to sketch for my own benefit an outline of English politics in the 1530s in terms of factional struggles. In the mid-1970s I read David Starkey’s thesis and was struck by his claims for the importance of the privy chamber. And when I wrote up my DPhil in 1978 I could still write ‘Henry VIII was a weaker man than is often believed and was many times the prisoner of factions’.27 What changed my mind? Maybe a characteristically acute question by Keith Thomas lit a slow-burning fuse. After as a third-year graduate student in March 1974 I had read a seminar paper on ‘George Talbot, fourth earl of Shrewsbury, and the Pilgrimage of Grace in 1536’, showing how crucial Shrewsbury’s loyalty to the king had been in defeating that rebellion, Keith Thomas noted that I had given the impression of Henry VIII as a weak king, fearful and uncertain. Now the response of the king had not been central to my investigations of the rebellion, and that question did not play to my strengths. So all I could do was to agree that Henry did appear frightened by the rebellion – and, I might have added, any king would have been. Fortunately I was able to recall the episode at the Field of Cloth of Gold, the Anglo-French summit in 1520, when news that the French were present in much greater numbers than the English seemingly made Henry hesitate: it was the fourth earl of Shrewsbury who then found 25 D.R. Starkey, ‘The king’s privy chamber 1485–1547’ (University of Cambridge PhD thesis, 1973); Starkey, ‘Representation through intimacy: a study in the symbolism of monarchy and court office in early modern England’, in Symbols and Sentiments, ed. I.M. Lewis (London, New York, 1977), pp. 187–224; Starkey, ‘From feud to faction: English politics c.1450–1550’, History Today (November 1982), pp. 16–22; Starkey, The Reign of Henry VIII: Personalities and Politics (London, 1985), esp. pp. 9, 125. 26 E.W. Ives, Faction in Tudor England (London, 1979); Ives, Anne Boleyn (Oxford, 1986); D. MacCulloch, Thomas Cranmer (New Haven, London, 1996); J. Guy, ‘Henry VIII and his ministers’, History Review, 23 (1995), pp. 37–40; S. Brigden, ‘Popular disturbance and the fall of Thomas Cromwell and the reformers 1539–1540’, Historical Journal, 34 (1981), pp. 257–78. 27 G.W. Bernard, ‘The fourth and fifth earls of Shrewsbury: a study in the power of the early Tudor nobility’, (University of Oxford DPhil thesis, 1978), p. 416.

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words of encouragement for the king and advised him to march forward. Joy Russell, historian of the Field of Cloth of Gold, was in the audience and readily backed me up.28 If I had parried Keith, nonetheless his question, as you can see, has remained with me, and, who knows, maybe made me more receptive to those influences that changed my thinking later. The first of these was when after completing my doctorate I turned to look at the royal court, the privy chamber and, in particular, the life of Sir William Compton (d.1528), groom of the stool 1509–26, one of Henry’s closest servants. I expected to find that Compton, whose name I had kept coming across while pursuing the Talbots earls of Shrewsbury, was the eminence grise of early Tudor politics, and I looked forward to writing some iconoclastic debunking paper diminishing the importance of Cardinal Wolsey. But I uncovered little to suggest that Compton played any significant political role at all: nothing to suggest that he had views about foreign policy or taxation or the king’s divorce. What Compton did was to enrich himself, building up a landed patrimony that would be the foundation of a noble dynasty that endures to this day: the fifth marquess of Northampton lives in Compton Wynyates, the dream early Tudor house near Banbury that Sir William Compton built. In the words of Lord Herbert of Cherbury in the mid seventeenth-century, Compton was ‘more attentive to his profit, then publique affairs’.29 It was around this time that I met Peter Gwyn, in the early stages of what would become his magisterial study of Wolsey, The King’s Cardinal (1990). Peter Gwyn had already worked out his interpretation in broad outline, epitomized in his title. And over many conversations I found myself agreeing with his line, with few exceptions (notably over the Amicable Grant).30 That was also when I came to Southampton. There I inherited the Special Subject on the Henrician Reformation, which I still teach, from the late David Lowe. David Lowe’s widow allowed me to have his notes. And so, guided by the course he had set up, not least his selection of documents, I worked systematically through Letters and Papers, Foreign and Domestic, of the Reign of Henry VIII, increasingly often going to the Public Record Office and the British Library to read the originals. And the more I studied, the more Henry VIII appeared to me to be central in the divorce, in the pressures against churchmen, in the break with Rome. Elton once remarked to me that when he began research he told John Neale, his supervisor, that he would ‘do Henry VIII, Sir’; Neale told him to read through L & P; Elton had gone to L & P and 28 J.G. Russell, The Field of Cloth of Gold: Men and Manners in 1520 (London, 1969), p. 101; Edward Hall, The vnion of the two noble and illustrate famelies of Lancastre (London, 1548), fol. lxxvi. 29 G.W. Bernard, ‘The rise of Sir William Compton, early Tudor courtier’, English Historical Review, 96 (1981), pp. 754–77; E. Herbert of Cherbury, The Life and Reigne of Henry VIII (London, 1649), p. 8. 30 Compare Bernard, War and Taxation and Rebellion, with Gwyn, King’s Cardinal, pp. 397–407.

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there, he said, he had found Thomas Cromwell, implying that it was all very straightforward and that anyone who worked as he did would find the same. I could counter that I too had gone to L & P but that I instead had found Henry VIII. Yet it was rather more complicated than that. I came to it at a later stage. Nor did I come to it with an empty mind: I brought conclusions and preconceptions. Yet as often happens, ideas that seemed sophisticated and well-founded had to be discarded when the sources, carefully read, did not back them up. What I found striking was that what was I was reading did not fit what I had absorbed about a weak king readily preyed on by his councillors and courtiers. I came to wonder whether Elton had not become the prisoner of his sources – with his view of Cromwell’s importance the consequence of the seizure of Cromwell’s papers in 1540, leaving an exaggerated impression of Cromwell’s influence. I also came to think that the fashionable factional interpretation of Henrician politics may have owed not a little to Henry VIII’s deliberate use of his ministers as lightning conductors. As I have already noted, the king made them take public responsibility for actions and policies that were, in fact, his own. Have modern historians of faction been taken in by taking at face value the image that Henry created of himself? All that took time to work through in detail, not least since the implications of these interpretations are wide-ranging. I naturally agree with one of my reviewers who wrote that if I am right, all the textbooks of Tudor England will need rewriting. If, however, you seek to overturn conventional wisdom, not everyone will agree with you. And I have been intrigued how several reviewers have called me contentious or disputatious. There is a real difficulty here. I dislike reading histories in which the historian simply sets out his or her views, flatly ignoring any other interpretations. That strikes me as bad manners at best. I am struck how little impression the British Library Henry VIII: Man and Monarch exhibition in 2009 gave that historians have disagreed, often vehemently, over many aspects of the king’s reign. That is a pity since close attention to the arguments of those who disagree with you can be a powerful stimulus to further thought. But I cannot help wondering if labelling someone whose arguments challenge yours as ‘contentious’ is not itself a polemical tool. How do you deal with such a charge? If you say nothing, you seem to accept its validity. If you counter by defending yourself, that shows that you are indeed contentious. Maybe all this is how orthodoxies defend themselves. I am struck how tenacious such orthodoxies can be. The image of Henry VIII as part bluff King Hal, part half-educated, with his theology merely ‘a ragbag of emotional prejudices’, dies hard.31 My Henry VIII is more skilful, more aware, more intelligent than that. But I am not emphasizing Henry in

31 D. MacCulloch, ‘Henry VIII and the Reform of the Church’, in The Reign of Henry VIII: Politics, Policy and Piety, ed. MacCulloch (London, 1985), p. 178.

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some nostalgic glorification of traditional English virtues: I see Henry as more a tyrant, even a monster.32 And perhaps that leads those who are committed to a factional interpretation of politics to dismiss my claims by attacking what (let me be contentious) I would see as a caricature of them. In claiming that Henry VIII was the dominant figure in the politics and policy-making of his reign and that his methods were all too often those of a tyrant, I have not been saying that Henry was some despot who could do what he wanted without restriction or that he was in ‘total control’ or that ‘Henry thought, Henry decided, and it happened’. The King’s Reformation would have been a slim volume if it indeed had been so simple. And I entirely agree with Chris Haigh – who evidently thinks he is making a point against me – that ‘Henry had to take account of politicians, prelates and princes, their opinions, their usefulness and their power. He lived in the real world of Machiavellian politics, not a Hobbesian dream-world where a sovereign could do as he liked.’33 That is exactly what I see Henry as doing over the break with Rome, over the making of religious policy afterwards. Henry, I argue, knew more or less what he wanted (and on the divorce, or the royal supremacy or the dissolution of the monasteries no one could influence or manipulate him) but could not at once impose it: he had indeed to persuade, to bargain, to cajole, to threaten or worse. And my case is that, drawing on the inherited authority of his position as king, drawing on inherited conventions of loyalty and obedience to the king as God’s lieutenant, Henry got much of what he wanted through a combination of his political intelligence, charm, guile, and ruthlessness. What I want to go on to do is to highlight the principal claims I have made and look at them in more detail. But just before I do that, a brief, possibly contentious, aside. Interestingly, David Starkey seems now to have moved on to a position much closer to mine, a position the young Starkey would have mocked. In the catalogue to the British Library exhibition Henry VIII: Man and Monarch, singing a very different tune from that in his earlier publications, Starkey asserts that Henry ‘became one of England’s most important kings: perhaps the greatest’. ‘Claims for revolutionary change under Henry have been made before’, Starkey notes, ‘but their author was supposed to have been the King’s minister, Thomas Cromwell, and not the king. Here [in this exhibition] we use the unmistakeable evidence of Henry’s handwriting to show, beyond doubt, I think, that the real – if most unlikely revolutionary was Henry himself.’34 While I should hesitate to call Henry ‘great’, otherwise that chimes well with what I have been arguing. Yet the exact thrust of Starkey’s 32 G.W. Bernard, ‘The tyranny of Henry VIII’, in Authority and Consent in Tudor England, ed. G.W. Bernard and S.J. Gunn (Aldershot, 2002), pp. 113–30. 33 C. Haigh, review in English Historical Review, 121 (2006), pp. 1456–7. 34 D. Starkey, ‘Introduction’, in Henry VIII. Man and Monarch, ed. S. Doran (London, 2009), p. 11.

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claims remain uncertain. Where Starkey deals with these questions briefly in the first volume of his projected biography of Henry VIII, the impression he leaves is unclear. At times Starkey endorses the view that Henry was a king in his own right, taking the most important decisions. It was Henry who determined on his marriage to Catherine of Aragon. It was Henry who chose William Compton his groom of the stool, his most important body servant. Yet in other places Starkey plays down Henry’s independence and intelligence. Most strikingly he compares Henry and Compton to Don Juan and Leporello and even to a pantomime horse in which Compton ‘had, simultaneously to play the rear legs and be the brains of the enterprise’.35 That is to revert to the young Starkey’s claims of the 1980s. Again, in his latest book, Starkey presents counsellors at the very beginning of the reign competing with each other to influence the king: Bishop Richard Foxe pushed Thomas Wolsey forward, and Wolsey in turn then ruled the king.36 In advancing such an interpretation Starkey avowedly relies heavily on Polydore Vergil’s Anglica Historia. Vergil, a papal tax-collector who settled in England and wrote the history of his adopted country, projected a view of politics as factional struggles and was very hostile to Wolsey. All too often, close study shows that his grandiose conspiracy theories are hard to square with more contemporary sources, especially letters. Starkey makes no attempt to scrutinize them in detail: very reasonably, since this is not an academic monograph but a biography intended for the general public. And since this book stops in 1511, when Henry was just twenty, no attempt is made to reconcile the largely manipulated king that Starkey presents for these years with the revolutionary king of the 1530s that he asserts in the catalogue of the British Library exhibition. We must await Volume 2 to see how far and by what reasoning Starkey has moved away from his earlier views. I would value an autobiographical account of how David Starkey’s views have evolved similar to what I am doing here now. But before I become too contentious, let me return to how my own ideas developed. As I taught my Special Subject and studied the break with Rome more intensively, I became increasingly sceptical about the purity of Henry’s motivation for his divorce: it seems to me more persuasive that he fell in love with Anne Boleyn and looked for justification, rather than the other way about. Wolsey would in December 1527 lengthily maintain that it was by assiduous study and discussions with theologians that Henry had come to find his conscience somewhat burdened by his marriage to Catherine but we need not accept that entirely at face value.37 Of course Henry wanted a son and heir, but I am not convinced that that desire determined his actions. Men and women in the sixteenth century were much more providential, believing that 35 D. Starkey, Henry: Virtuous Prince (London, 2008), p. 321. 36 Ibid., pp. 365–6. 37 L & P, IV ii, 3641; cf. 3767 (2); 3913; iii, 5156.

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what happened, and what did not happen, was God’s wish, to be endured.38 And if Henry was as concerned by the succession as he claimed, to divorce Catherine and then to marry again was an excellent way of complicating the succession. It was sure to provoke Catherine’s nephew, the Emperor Charles V, and it might have damaging consequences in the long run. Henry got away with it, but his caution, the slow pace with which he set about it, show how risky even he thought it all was. Henry sought much advice over the divorce but he was clearly thoroughly involved in the details of canon law and scripture.39 I think he knew right from the start, in 1527, what he might do40 – but he was wary of opposition; his preference was for an annulment granted by the pope because that would be unimpeachable; and as late as 1532 he might well have accepted it.41 All along he was ready to accept a technical solution, for example a flaw in the dispensation that had allowed him to marry Catherine of Aragon;42 but he was, I suspect, aware that the church took the view that if in good faith a man and a woman had entered into a marriage without technically perfect authority, the right course of action was supplet ecclesia, let the church provide.43 Henry, of course, did not want the technical deficiencies of his marriage made good, he wanted an annulment. From the start he invoked the absolute prohibition in Leviticus on a man marrying his brother’s widow, not least because that principled stand would, if the technical arguments failed, allow him to proceed anyway.44 And taking his stand on Leviticus was already to call into question the authority of popes.45 I have long given a great deal of weight to the threats that were made against the papacy in these years. Wolsey, in summer 1529, implored the pope not to transfer the king’s divorce to Rome, warning that if he did, it would lead to the destruction of the pope’s authority in England.46 Most historians still dismiss all this as bluff. I agree that Henry was invoking 38 What I have in mind here is a ‘banal’ providentialism (I have in mind Colin Kidd’s use of ‘banal’ in the sense of ‘unthinkingly accepted as normal’) rather than the more theologically informed providentialism characteristic of the later sixteenth century surveyed by K. Thomas, Religion and the Decline of Magic (1971), ch. 4 and A. Walsham, Providence in Early Modern England (Oxford, 1999). 39 L & P, IV ii, 3913; 4120, 4409, 4597. 40 E. Surtz and V. Murphy, eds, The Divorce Tracts of Henry VIII (Angers, 1988), p. iii. 41 Bernard, King’s Reformation, ch. 1. 42 Ibid., pp. 22–4. 43 J. Scarisbrick in The Tablet, 25 January 1986. 44 Bernard, King’s Reformation, pp. 17–24. 45 Ibid., pp. 26–30. 46 B[ritish] L[ibrary], Cotton MS Vitellius B xi fol. 169 (L & P, IV iii, 5703); fol. 166 (L & P, IV iii, 5715); fol. 192 (L & P, IV iii, 5761); fol. 194 (L & P, IV iii, 5762); fol. 203 (L & P, IV iii, 5780); TNA, PRO, SP1/54 fol. 96v (L & P, IV iii, 5711); SP1/55 fols 5–8 (L & P, IV iii, 5897); L & P, IV iii, 5848; Calendar of State Papers, Spanish, IV i, no. 83 pp. 132–3; R. Scheurer, ed., Correspondance du Cardinal Jean du Bellay (2 vols, Paris, 1969–73), i. no. 7 p. 19 (L & P, IV ii, 5582); cf. V.L. Bourilly and P. de Vaissiere, eds, Ambassades en Angleterre de Jean du Bellay (Paris, 1905), p. 543 (L & P, IV iii, 5210); L & P, IV ii, 3913, 4120, 4166, 4481, 4977.

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principles because he wanted his divorce, rather than campaigning against the pope because he had come to think that the papacy was illegitimate. I agree that the principles might well have been forgotten if Henry had been granted his divorce. I agree with Jack Scarisbrick that such hopes may well explain why so many bishops went along with Henry in these years.47 But I think that Henry was already thinking that repudiating papal authority might prove the only way to secure what he wanted. He was very much aware that to discard Catherine, marry Anne, and break with Rome was by no means welcome: accordingly he inched forward, making his case, threatening churchmen, securing the neutrality of Francis I, king of France, in order ultimately to act as boldly as he did. On Anne Boleyn I make three unconventional propositions, now fully developed in my biography Anne Boleyn: Fatal Attractions. First, I do not believe that she held Henry back and would not sleep with him until he married her. It strikes me as implausible that she could have stopped a man Henry’s size (look at his armour, in the Tower of London) from going further once they were in each other’s arms. Would she have dared to deny Henry once their relationship had become so intimate? Much more likely it was Henry who held back – because he wanted his new marriage, and any children, to be seen as fully legitimate; doubtless he expected everything would be achieved within months, not years.48 Secondly, I do not think that Anne was evangelical in religion or that she pushed religious reform on Henry. She and her brother were interested in French religious writings but none of them were explicitly Lutheran and their authors remained within the Catholic Church. The sources on which claims are made that Anne introduced Henry to the writings of Tyndale are thin.49 Just before Anne fell her almoner John Skip preached a remarkable sermon denouncing feared religious changes, especially involving ceremonies;50 and once in the Tower, Anne asked her gaoler Sir William Kingston, ‘shall I go to heaven, for I have done many good deeds in my life’: not exactly justificationby-faith alone.51 Thirdly, I suspect that Anne may well have been guilty of at least some of the adulteries with which she was charged; certainly Henry seems to me to have been genuinely and sincerely convinced that she was guilty. There is no need to invoke faction to explain her fall.52 As I pressed on with what would become The King’s Reformation, I experienced two further epiphanies. The first was in reaction to Eamon Duffy’s 47 48 49 50 51 52

For the acquiescence of bishops, Fisher apart, see Bernard, King’s Reformation, pp. 172–98. G.W. Bernard, Anne Boleyn: Fatal Attractions (New Haven, London, 2010), pp. 23–36. Ibid., pp. 92–124. TNA, PRO, SP6/1 fols 7–10v; SP6/2 fols 1–3. BL Cotton MS, Otho C x fol. 224v (L & P, X 797). Bernard, Anne Boleyn, pp. 150–92.

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The Stripping of the Altars. From my earliest years as a graduate student I had begun to doubt the orthodoxy, most stylishly developed by Geoff Dickens in The English Reformation that celebrated the advent of the Reformation as entirely justified by the abuses of the late medieval church. It was then when contemplating the glories of perpendicular church architecture – the subject of my new research project – that I first found myself wondering how one could reconcile what were manifestly substantial donations for the rebuilding of parish churches with supposed lay disaffection to all things clerical. So I readily went along with the wave of writing in the 1970s and 1980s, including most powerfully work by Chris Haigh and Jack Scarisbrick, that offered a much more positive view of the late medieval church.53 But reading Eamon Duffy’s book gave me pause. It made me rethink my ideas. Let me say at once that my criterion of a good history book is not one whose arguments I agree with or that persuade me but rather a book that makes me think; a great book is one that is still making me think many years after it was written, even if the direction in which those thoughts lead me is not the direction in which the author has gone. And let me add that what I see as the great insight of The Stripping of the Altars remains for me as convincing as ever, namely that against Keith Thomas’s presentation of the religion of the late medieval laity as comically ignorant and more or less magical, Eamon Duffy powerfully argues that the liturgy of the church effectively taught the laity the essential truths of the Christian religion.54 But my engagement and my rethinking, stimulated by The Stripping of the Altars, have led me to a position that I can best summarize in the provisional title of a book I have largely drafted, Vitality and Vulnerability in the Late Medieval Church. Yes, there was a great deal of vitality in the church; but that was not the whole story. Important and central aspects of the church were open to criticism. The practice of pilgrimage to the shrines of saints ultimately rests on an act of faith. There were those who criticized the practice at the time, notably Erasmus. A good many of the bishops who bore daily responsibility for the church were also acutely aware that much in the church needed reform, from the parish clergy to the monasteries. There was nothing inevitable about all this; such criticism might have led to housekeeping-style reforms, new religious orders within the church, or simply have disappeared. In Mediterranean countries I often feel that traditional Catholicism has perdured. But if the critics came to include those who held power, then the position of the church could become much more difficult. And as I worked out my ideas on this, I came to realize that Henry VIII, pupil of Erasmus, was much influenced by just such criticisms of 53 E. Duffy, The Stripping of the Altars (2002); A.G. Dickens, The English Reformation (1964, 2nd. ed., 1989); J. Scarisbrick, The Reformation and the English People (Oxford, 1984); C. Haigh, The English Reformation Revised (Cambridge, 1987); Haigh, The English Reformations (Oxford, 1993). 54 Thomas, Religion and the Decline of Magic, esp. ch. 2.

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the church. In calmer times that might have led to reforms sponsored by the king.55 In the fortuitous circumstances of a royal jurisdictional quarrel with the pope, that came to have much larger consequences. Henry, I contend, was very conscious that the church needed reform well before the divorce and break with Rome. I am sceptical about Henry’s devotion to traditional religion. In the British Library exhibition Henry VIII: Man and Minister, much is made by David Starkey of a bede or prayer roll dated to c.1505–09 but this does not dispose of the matter. It is indeed wholly orthodox, including illuminations of saints and a series of devotions; it bears Henry’s inscription, directed to one of the grooms of his privy chamber: ‘William Thomas, I pray you pray for me your loving master’. Does this in itself prove that it was not until his divorce that he came to harbour doubts about the church? I think it is too early in date, too much of the time of Henry’s adolescence, too much the words of a very young man, to be compelling evidence.56 There are, by contrast, many hints once Henry became king, both from his actions, and, perhaps more tellingly from his inactions, that he was part of quite a groundswell of contemporary opinion that the church needed reform. Henry was much influenced by Erasmus, who was for a while his tutor. He shared the conviction held by Wolsey and several other bishops that the monasteries, in particular, needed reform, and that monastic wealth would be usefully redistributed to endow grammar schools and colleges at the universities whose purpose would be to educated priests who would serve in parishes rather than monks who were deliberately set apart from the world.57 I agree with Peter Gwyn that Cardinal Wolsey was, in important respects, a reformer of the church and that Henry fully supported his reforming efforts.58 And from such reasoning came my second epiphany in this area, the realization that Henry was not a conservative and that the church after the break with Rome should not be described as ‘Catholicism without the pope’. Certainly Henry never adopted the key religious teachings of Martin Luther on justification of faith alone nor of Huldrych Zwingli on the Eucharist as a remembrance.59 Henry was not intentionally preparing the way for a protestant England. Henry remained devoutly committed to the Mass, which 55 P.S. and H.M. Allen, eds, Letters of Erasmus (12 vols, Oxford, 1906–58), vii, 179–81 (L & P, IV ii, 3438) for an appeal in 1527/8 by Henry VIII to Erasmus to assist him in restoring the faith and religion of Christ to its pristine dignity. 56 Doran, ed., Henry VIII: Man and Minister, p. 46. 57 G.W. Bernard, ‘The piety of Henry VIII’, in The Education of a Christian Society: Humanism and the Reformation in Britain and the Netherlands, ed. S.N. Amos and H. van Nierop (Aldershot, 1999), pp. 62–88. 58 Gwyn, King’s Cardinal, pp. 464–80, cf. 53–5, 350–53. 59 See Henry’s debate with Cranmer in the margins of the Bishops’ Book (Thomas Cranmer, Writings and Letters, ed. J.E. Cox, [Cambridge, 1846], pp. 83–114, 358–60; BL Royal MS 7 C xvi fols 199–20), and the king’s fierce response to the sacramentarian John Lambert: L & P, XIII ii, 834, 842, 851.

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he heard daily, often more than once. But it strikes me as perverse to describe as Catholic a ruler who dissolved the monasteries, demolished shrines and in effect abolished the practice of pilgrimage, devotional journeys to holy places and holy objects.60 Henry did not dissolve the monasteries for financial gain. He did indeed spend the proceeds of the dissolution on fortifications in 1538–39 when he feared invasion and then on the wars of the 1540s, but if he had been seriously intent on transforming the finances of the monarchy he would not have treated monastic lands as a one-off windfall to be cashed in at once. By holding on to the monastic lands and the rents they produced, he could permanently have increased the crown’s income. It is possible that from the moment he broke with Rome, Henry planned to dissolve all the monasteries and that the way he went about it should be seen as salami-tactics.61 More probable is that Henry’s first intention was to continue the work that Wolsey had begun of reforming the monasteries. Potent also was Henry’s fear that the monasteries, answerable to heads of their orders abroad, and ultimately the pope, might prove fifth columns of papal resistance and intrigue, fears immediately provoked by the criticisms and resistance of the Observant Franciscans, the Charterhouses and the nuns and priests of Syon.62 Henry was consequently determined to exert his royal supremacy over the monastic houses. The Valor Ecclesiasticus of 1535 would allow the monasteries to be taxed efficiently. The visitation overseen by Thomas Cromwell, vice-gerent in spirituals, was intended to make it plain that monasteries were answerable to the king. The lapses, especially the sexual misconduct, confessed by monks and nuns, though by no means widespread, may well have shocked the king and his advisers, and reinforced their doubts about the effectiveness and value of monasteries. All the same, the purpose of the dissolution of the smaller monasteries in 1536 was to reform, rather than to destroy. Monks and nuns who wished to continue in religion were allowed to transfer to larger houses; and because so many wished to do so, around a quarter of the smaller houses were exempted from dissolution.63 If Henry was already hell-bent on dissolving all the monasteries, such a provision would not have made sense. What changed everything was the Pilgrimage of Grace, the rebellion against the dissolution. Not everyone shared the doubts about monasticism harboured by the clerical elite; and many feared, however wrongly, that parish churches would be next. The rebellion provoked Henry 60 G.W. Bernard, ‘Vitality and vulnerability in the late medieval church: pilgrimage on the eve of the break with Rome’, in The End of the Middle Ages: England in the fifteenth and sixteenth centuries, ed. J.L. Watts (Stroud, 1998), pp. 199–233. 61 That is the implication of R.W. Hoyle, ‘The origins of the dissolution of the monasteries’, Historical Journal, 308 (1995), pp. 275–305. 62 Bernard, King’s Reformation, pp. 151–72. 63 G.W.O. Woodward, ‘The exemption from suppression of certain Yorkshire priories’, English Historical Review, 76 (1961), pp. 397–8.

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into violent denunciation of monks.64 And after the rebellion was pacified, at some point towards the end of 1537, it was decided to dissolve all the religious houses.65 That was done by asking abbots and monks voluntarily to surrender their houses to the king, a procedure of doubtful legality that was confirmed by act of parliament in 1539.66 When they surrendered their houses, abbots and monks were required also to subscribe to statements, presumably prepared for them, in which they not only confessed to particular abuses but repudiated monasticism as a way of life.67 And as monasteries surrendered, the shrines of saints, to which pilgrimages were made, were dismantled by the king’s commissioners, and the superstitious customs practised there made public and mocked.68 This was much more than the spoliation of monastic wealth: it was something of a religious revolution. A society in which there are no monks and nuns and no pilgrimage to holy places is qualitatively different. So what emerged in the mid/late 1530s was a church that was a middle way between Rome and Wittenberg, Rome and Zurich, an idiosyncratic yet not incoherent blend, a church that now embraced both those still preferring traditional devotions and those who wanted reforms to go much further, a church that was, more than ever, a monarchical church whose beliefs and practices were set out by the king.69 The provision of the Bible in English translation illustrates the ambiguities. Often seen as an important step towards Protestantism, the English Bible can be seen with as much validity as an exemplification of Erasmian Catholic reform. There is nothing inherently Protestant about the Bible. Tyndale’s translation had included translations of certain key words in a Lutheran direction, but that could readily be avoided. Of course the availability of the Bible to people at large, and not just university 64 TNA, PRO, SP1/108 fols176–8 (L & P, XI 783); SP1/109 fols 224–224v (L & P, XI 894); SP1/108 fol. 187 (L & P, XI 787), SP1/112 fol. 48 (L & P, XII i, 1212 [2]). 65 Bernard, King’s Reformation, pp. 447–8. 66 J. Youings, The Dissolution of the Monasteries (London, 1971), esp. pp. 81–5. 67 I infer a general policy from the survival of very similar denunciations by the Greyfriars of Aylesbury (TNA, PRO, E322/10; T. Rymer, Foedera [2nd ed., London, 1728], xiv. 611; L & P, XIII ii, 501), Bedford (TNA, PRO, E322/19; Rymer, Foedera, xiv. 610–11), Coventry (TNA, PRO, E322/62; Rymer, Foedera, xiv. 611), Reading (TNA, PRO, E322/279; copy drawn on by L & P, XIII ii, 340) and Stamford (TNA, PRO, E322/223; Rymer, Foedera, xiv. 611; Eighth Report of the Deputy Keeper of Public Records (London, 1847), app. II p. 4;); the Whitefriars of Stamford Whitefriars (TNA, PRO, E322/224, Rymer, Foedera, xiv. 612; L & P, XIII ii, 565); the abbot and convent of Biddlesden, Buckinghamshire (TNA, PRO, E322/22; L & P, XIII ii, 421; Rymer, Foedera, xiv. 610–11), and the prior and convent of St Andrew’s Northamptonshire (TNA, PRO SP1/129 fols 143–7; L & P, XIII i 396). 68 Boxley (Kent): L & P, XIII i, 173, 195, PRO SP1/129 fols 12–12v (L & P, XIII i, 231), fol. 89 (L & P, XIII i, 339), L & P, XIII i, 348, 754; T. Wriothesley, Chronicle, i. 74–6; Camden Miscellany, Camden Society, lxxiii (1859), pp. 11–12). Bury St Edmunds (Suffolk): L & P, XIII i, 192. Bermondsey: Wriothesley, Chronicle, i. 77. Ipswich and Walsingham: Wriothesley, Chronicle, i. 83; L & P, XIII i, 1376, 1407, 1501. Caversham (Oxfordshire): L & P, XIII ii, 328. Hales (Gloucestershire: Wriothesley, Chronicle, i. 75–6, 90; L & P, XIII ii, 347, 409, 709, 710. 69 Bernard, King’s Reformation, pp. 475–594.

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theologians, could lead to diversity of interpretations and disorder, as Henry sometimes feared.70 But equally the English Bible with its striking frontispiece showing Henry presenting the Bible to his bishops who in turn distributed it to the people who cry ‘vivat rex’ vividly portrayed the royal supremacy in action. Henry’s religious settlement was fragile. As Cliff Davies remarked, ‘the question must be whether there were any Henricians other than the king himself’.71 And once he was dead it was quickly overturned in the reign of his son. Henry would doubtless have been horrified – but also amazed that Thomas Cranmer, archbishop of Canterbury, the churchman who had faithfully done his bidding, now boldly steered a very different course.72 Yet it is in the nature of tyrants, or those in authority more widely, to underestimate how much of the obedience they secure comes from fear, or at least from resignation, and to overestimate how much of their apparent support comes from genuine conviction. In Edward VI’s reign the apparent fragility of Henry VIII’s Reformation was revealed; yet it was the Edwardian Reformation that proved to be the more short-lived, and it was Henry VIII’s remade church that resurfaced in significant ways in the church of his daughter Elizabeth. Strikingly, many features of the religious settlement of Elizabeth’s reign – ambiguities and even contradictions in doctrine and in religious practice, concurrent fear of papists and fear of religious radicalism – can be found embryonically in the church that Henry remade in the 1530s and 1540s.73 Yet troubling, nonetheless, is the way in which the monasteries were dissolved. How fearful and how shocked the monks and nuns were can only be wondered at.74 A few years before that bishops and leading churchmen had been placed under immense pressure to acquiesce in Henry’s divorce and the break with Rome.75 Wolsey had pleaded guilty to offences under the statute of praemunire, charges that were absurd because nothing he had done had been done without the broad approval of the king who had wanted him to be appointed a papal legate so that he could cut through vested interests and reform the church. Once Wolsey had admitted his guilt, all the clergy were legally vulnerable to the same charges.76 And the pressure which that enabled 70 P.L. Hughes and J.F. Larkin, eds., Tudor Royal Proclamations, i. no. 186 pp. 273–5, no. 191 p. 286 (BL Cotton MS, Cleopatra E v. fols 313–26v). 71 C.S.L. Davies, English Historical Review, 111 (1996), p. 168. 72 D. MacCulloch, Thomas Cranmer; MacCulloch, Tudor Church Militant: Edward VI and the Protestant Reformation (London, 1999). 73 G.W. Bernard, ‘The Church of England, 1529–1642’, History, 83 (1990), pp. 587–607; Bernard, ‘Thomas Cromwell and Calais’ (http://eprints.soton.ac.uk/48792/1/Bernard.pdf). 74 P. Cunich, ‘The Ex-Religious in Post-Dissolution Society: Symptoms of PostTraumatic Stress Disorder?’, in The Religious Orders in Pre-Reformation England, ed. J. Clark (Woodbridge, 2002), pp. 227–38. 75 J.J. Scarisbrick, ‘The Conservative Episcopate in England, 1529–1535’ (University of Cambridge PhD thesis, 1955); Bernard, King’s Reformation, pp. 43–50, 101–24, 172–98. 76 Bernard, King’s Reformation, pp. 36–7, 44–9.

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Henry to put on churchmen significantly furthered his campaign for a divorce. Soon churchmen and Henry’s councillors realized that the divorce, Henry’s marriage to Anne Boleyn, the break with Rome and the royal supremacy, and then the dissolution of the monasteries were all non-negotiable. Increasingly, those who opposed the king’s policies might find themselves condemned, not in a court of law, but by an act of attainder passed by parliament without the need for any proof.77 Every adult male was required to swear an oath accepting the succession and implicitly accepting the divorce and the break with Rome.78 Speak out and you risked being hauled before Thomas Cromwell. By twentieth-century standards all this was small beer in terms of numbers; but tyranny is not just a matter of numbers. When we remember Henry VIII we should not lose sight of the methods by which he secured compliance. And one could add to the case against Henry the costs of the pointless wars of the early 1510s, early 1520s, and mid-1540s. Did Henry VIII really believe he could win the crown of France? Was that a sensible objective? Or were the wars he fought just the sport of kings?79 Those of the 1540s were especially costly and left an appalling financial and economic legacy for those who ruled under his son.80 A century later Charles I would be seen as a man of blood, and continues to be criticized by historians with lone dissenters such as Kevin Sharpe and Mark Kishlansky marginalized;81 yet it seems to me that of the two monarchs, Henry far more readily deserves to be called a tyrant. For much too long, Bluff King Hal has – remarkably – succeeded in deceiving the world, and getting people to think well of him. Some rethinking would be in order.

77 S.E. Lehmberg, ‘Parliamentary attainder in the reign of Henry VIII’, Historical Journal, 18 (1975), pp. 675–702. 78 G.R. Elton, Policy and Police (Cambridge, 1972), pp. 227–30. 79 C.S.L. Davies, ‘Henry VIII and Henry V: the Wars in France’, in The End of the Middle Ages?, ed. Watts, pp. 235–62. 80 R.W. Hoyle, ‘Taxation and the mid-Tudor Crisis’, Economic History Review, 2nd ser., 51 (1988), pp. 649–75. 81 K. Sharpe, The Personal Rule of Charles I (New Haven, London, 1992); M. Kishlansky, ‘Charles I: a case of mistaken identity’, Past & Present, 189 (2005), pp. 41–80, and debate between Clive Holmes, Julian Goodare, Richard Cust and Mark Kishlansky, Past & Present, 205 (2009), pp. 175–237.

part ii: material culture

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2 Rich Pickings: Henry VIII’s Use of Confiscation and its Significance for the Development of the Royal Collection1 Maria Hayward

In 1516 Sir Thomas More mused on the acquisition of wealth and possessions in his book Utopia and made the following observation: When I consider and weigh in my mind all these commonwealths which nowadays anywhere do flourish … I can perceive nothing but a certain conspiracy of rich men procuring their own commodities under the name and title of the commonwealth.2

By 1547 Henry VIII could be seen as just such a rich man but with one important caveat. He was not only ‘procuring his own commodities’ to use More’s words, he was actively procuring those of others. The king’s covetous attitude to other people’s property subsequently led W.G. Hoskins to dub Henry VIII’s reign The Age of Plunder.3 With plunder in mind, this chapter will consider how Henry VIII exploited the crown’s powers of confiscation, so greatly boosting his monetary reserves, as well as his holdings of plate, furnishings, books, and other ‘household stuff’. The discussion begins by considering the context for Henry VIII’s use of confiscation. It then looks at how Henry VIII used confiscation, against whom, and with what benefits to him. As such it will shed new light on the political culture of the Henrician

1 I am most grateful to Krista Kesselring, Mark Stoyle and Suzannah Lipscomb for their very helpful comments on an earlier draft. 2 J. Warrington, ed., More’s Utopia and A Dialogue of Comfort (London and New York, 1951), p. 132. Much of the first half of this chapter draws upon M.A. Hayward, ‘The possessions of Henry VIII: A study of inventories’ (PhD thesis, University of London, 1998), pp. 73–80. 3 W.G. Hoskins, The Age of Plunder: King Henry VIII’s England, 1500–1547 (London, 1976).

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court. Finally, it will assess how significant the items were that Henry VIII acquired by confiscation in shaping the king’s possessions.4

Context The 1547 inventory lists Henry VIII’s worldly goods at the time of his death and shows that he acquired them by four means: inheritance, purchase, gifts and confiscation.5 While these means of acquisition were open to all but the very poorest members of Tudor society in varying degrees, it was the scale of the confiscations that set Henry VIII apart from his contemporaries. Or rather, while the monarch had a right to claim the forfeited land, goods and money of convicted traitors, a much wider swath of Tudor society could benefit from the practice of felony forfeiture.6 English law stipulated that the property of individuals convicted of a felony would pass to the king while their land passed to their lord.7 The variety of people who could benefit and the potential value of the goods involved is made very clear in a case from 1547. In this year, Thomas Mitchell of Somerset committed suicide, after having murdered John and Eleanor Sydnam. Nicholas Sarger, under-sheriff of the county, tried to claim Mitchell’s goods for the king, while Henry VIII’s chief almoner, Nicholas Heath, sought to make a case in his own name via Star Chamber. Meanwhile Mitchell’s neighbours took matters into their own hands and liberated various items from his home.8 Henry VIII’s actions can therefore be seen as in keeping with those of his contemporaries and his confiscations took three main forms: confiscation from institutions, namely the Church and chiefly during the dissolution of the monasteries during the late 1530s and 1540s; confiscation from individuals, most of whom were convicted traitors, for instance in 1521, 1529–30, 1536, and 1540, and a small trickle of trade confiscations that took place throughout his reign.9 Henry VIII was not the first English monarch to use confiscation as a means of simultaneously boosting his resources and dealing with political 4 Society of Antiquaries MS 127 and BL Harley MS 1419 published as D.R. Starkey, ed., The inventory of King Henry VIII: The transcript (London, 1998). When an object from the inventory has been cited, its number has been given in square brackets. 5 See Hayward, ‘Possessions of Henry’, pp. 56–80; also M.A. Hayward, ‘Gift giving at the court of Henry VIII: The 1539 New Year’s gift roll in context’, Antiquaries Journal, 85 (2005), pp. 125–75. 6 K.J. Kesselring, ‘Felony forfeiture and the profits of crime in early modern England’, The Historical Journal, 53/2 (2010), pp. 271–88. 7 Ibid, p. 273. 8 Ibid, p. 271. 9 A further example of how society at large could benefit from confiscations can be seen in E.H. Shagan, ‘Selling the sacred: Reformation and dissolution at the Abbey of Hailes’, in Popular Politics and the English Reformation (Cambridge, 2003), pp. 162–96.

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opposition. Indeed, Caroline Barron has gone as far as to describe Richard II as the ‘first Tudor monarch’ because of the similarities in the style of his kingship, citing his confiscation of the goods of the Lords Appellant in 1397, which appears to have been intended partially as a political statement.10 Even so, Henry VIII’s use of confiscation stands out because of the frequency with which he deployed this tactic and because of the series of royal inventories that have survived, which make it possible to chart the development of the king’s personal property and the royal collection as a consequence of these confiscations. Henry VIII’s personal property, as recorded in and defined by the 1547 inventory, encompassed all of his moveable goods. They can be divided into three main groups. First, there were paintings, maps, Venetian glass, books and musical instruments, which had a relatively low financial value but significant cultural cachet – the markers of a renaissance intellect and humanist education. Second, there were the ordnance, weapons, and ships that were essential to the defence of the realm but classed as belonging to the sovereign. Third, there were textile furnishings, plate, jewellery (including the regalia), armour, tents, chapel stuff, clothing and horses, which were expensive and the essential markers of royal magnificence according to writers such as Sir John Fortescue and Sir Thomas Elyot. Henry VIII was well aware of what was desirable and the messages that they conveyed about his kingship and he went about acquiring these objects with a ruthless acquisitiveness.11 Unlike Isabella d’Este, the marchionesses of Mantua, who articulated in her letters her reasons for the acquisition of particular objects to fill gaps in her collection, Henry VIII did not leave a record of what his motivation was.12 However, his actions are quite telling in their own way.

10 C. Barron, ‘The art of kingship: Richard II, 1377–1399’, History Today, 35/6 (1985), pp. 31–7; Hayward, ‘Possessions of Henry’, p. 49. For a more recent discussion see J. Stratford, ‘Richard II’s treasure and the forfeitures of 1397’, in People, places and perspectives: Essays in later medieval and early modern Tudor England, ed. K. Dockray and P. Fleming (London, 2005), pp. 29–46. 11 For example, for an analysis of the how and why Henry VIII developed his tapestry collection see, T.P. Campbell, Henry VIII and the art of majesty: Tapestries at the Tudor court (New Haven and London, 2007). 12 For an analysis of her letters, her collecting and her grotta, see C.M. Brown and A.M. Lorenzoni, ‘The grotta of Isabella d’Este, part 2’, Gazette des Beaux Arts, 91 (1978), pp. 72–82.

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Corporate Confiscations: The Dissolution of the Monasteries13 In 1538 Henry VIII established a Commission for the Destruction of Shrines. The work of this group resulted in the smashing up of many relics and culminated with the destruction of St Thomas Becket’s tomb at Canterbury Cathedral. This act was greeted with shocked disapproval at home and abroad but Henry VIII was unrepentant and according to Stow he wore the tomb’s famous ruby, known as the Regale of France, in a thumb ring.14 This action is symbolic of the dissolution of the monasteries and the resulting confiscation of their assets, which brought the king land, property, moveable goods, and money in the form of coinage and debts. While much of the monastic land was sold, some remained in royal hands. On 8 June 1537 Sir Arthur Darcy wrote to Thomas Cromwell about the estates belonging to Jervaulx abbey in Yorkshire: The king’s highness is at great charges with his studs of mares at Thornbury and other places, which are fen grounds, and I think that at Jervaulx, and in the grounds adjacent … the king’s highness with good overseers should have there the most best pasture that should be in England.15

Monastic land was granted to several of the Gentleman Pensioners in order to establish royal studs. Sir Francis Knollys received Caversham Manor and park in Berkshire, previously owned by Reading Abbey, and Ralph Fines was granted several parks near to Tonbridge, Kent, including land formerly held by the knights of St John.16 In addition to acquiring monastic land, Henry VIII acquired a number of monastic properties, including the house of the knights of St John of Jerusalem at Sion, just near London.17 In 1540 the knights’ goods were seized and divided up: some items were delivered to the king, while some stuff remained at St John’s and was charged to the new keeper Sir Henry Knevett, the wine was reserved for the household and some goods were sold.18 Other monastic buildings were retained for royal use and were 13 It is important to note that some monastic confiscations were achieved via the attainder of the abbot, see K. Kesselring, ‘Felony forfeiture in England, c.1170–1870’, The Journal of Legal History, 30 (2009), p. 212, n. 58. 14 R. Lightbown, Medieval European Jewellery (London, 1992), p. 75; J. Stow, Annales, (London, 1631), p. 155. The ruby was sent to decorate the tomb in 1179 by Louis VII of France. Mary I had the same stone set in a collar. 15 C.M. Prior, Royal Studs of the Sixteenth and Seventeenth Centuries (London, 1935), p. 3; (L & P, XII ii, 59). 16 R.H.C. Davis, The Medieval Warhorse: Origin, Development and Redevelopment (London, 1989), pp. 109–10. 17 Two entries hark back to the previous owners: a celure and testor with the arms of the head of the order [13869] and a pair of maps, one of the world and the other of Rhodes [13838]. 18 BL Cotton MS App. XXVIII, fol. 52 (L & P, XV, 646). The 1547 inventory named Sir Anthony Denny as keeper, BL Harley MS 1419, fol. 368r.

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employed to store the king’s possessions. For example, the White Friars, Black Friars and the Charterhouse in London were all used by the Offices of the Tents and Revels in the 1540s.19 The fifth clause of the act for the dissolution of the lesser monasteries stated: that the King’s Highness shall have and enjoy to his proper use, all the ornaments, jewels, goods, chattels and debts, which appertained to any of the chief governors of the said monasteries or religious houses.20

Most monastic goods were sold but a few select items were retained for the king’s use, including a ‘chaire of wood, couerde with crimsyn vellet tissued, the pommelles and handles garnisshed with siluer, parcell of the goodes of Chrystis Churche’, which was delivered on 27 April 1540 to the king.21 However, the English church did not have a tradition of tapestry-collecting, unlike churches in Europe, so Henry acquired relatively few pieces by this route.22 In 1539, Richard Pollard and John Williams wrote from Reading monastery noting that: as we were to certify what stuff was meet for the King, there is a little chamber hanged with meetly good tapestry, which would hang a mean little chamber in the king’s house.23

Reading was not unique. On 27 May 1538 Richard Leyton described Battle Abbey as being ‘so beggary a house [as] I never [saw], nor so filthy stuff’.24 He valued the wall hangings at less than 20 shillings, the plate at approximately 400 marks and added, disdainfully that only four copes were worthy of consideration and even two of these were ‘rusty and soiled’. Particularly fine vestments were reserved for the king’s use including three copes of silver tissue, two of gold, and one of blue from St Peter’s, Gloucester and fourteen copes of gold velvet patterned with gold portcullises from Westminster Abbey.25 However, none of the vestments and chapel goods recorded in the inventory were attributed to any of the former monasteries. 19 W.R. Streitberger, Court Revels, 1485–1559 (Toronto, 1994), pp. 162–3, 172–6. 20 A.G. Dickens and D. Carr, eds, The Reformation in England to the Accession of Elizabeth I (London, 1967, 1993), p. 100. 21 W.B. Turnbull, Account of the monastic treasures confiscated at the dissolution of various houses in England, Abbotsford Club (Edinburgh, 1836), p. 50. 22 This view is confirmed by Thomas Goldwell, prior of Christchurch, Canterbury, in a letter to Lord Lisle. Lisle, or rather his wife, wished to borrow arras and carpets from Goldwell who replied ‘As for arras cloths, I have none; nor I never knew none in this church sith I came unto it. And as for carpets, such as I have of them, they were burned when the king’s visitor lay here with us’, M. St. Clair Byrne ed., The Lisle Letters, IV (Chicago, 1981), 871a. 23 L & P, XIV ii, 136. 24 L & P, XIII i, 1085. 25 Gasquet, Henry VIII and the English monasteries (London, 1906), pp. 414–15. L. Monnas, ‘The vestments of Henry VII at Stonyhurst College: Cloth of gold woven to shape’, CIETA

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Many of the houses had reserves of plate, most of which was sent to the Mint. The declaration of the account of Sir John Williams, master of the jewel house, referred to: the waight of all the plate commynge and growinge of breaking [and] defacing of diuerse and sondrie mitors, together with ther pendentes, labelles, certeyne bawdrickes, a shipp of mother of perle, gloves, ringes, caled pontifycalles, and two gospell bookes.26

This process yielded 203¾ oz of gold plate and 2288 oz of silver gilt plate. A few items were retained from Christchurch monastery: two small crosses of silver both with a crucifix weighing 2¼ oz, a silver-gilt cross of 2¾ oz and ‘one rodd or verge of wood tipped at thone end with gold and at thother with Siluer and gilte’.27 Although there are no hints in the 1542 Whitehall inventory as to the origin of the books and manuscripts, a number of monastic books did enter the royal libraries.28 These included approximately a 100 from Rochester Abbey, 30 from St Albans, eight from Merton Priory, six from Worcester, and five each from Gloucester and Sempringham.29 John Leland actively visited monasteries and priories searching for books for Henry. A list of just less than a 100 books from monastic houses in Lincolnshire, possibly compiled by Leland, was annotated to indicate which volumes should be brought into the king’s library.30 The dissolution contributed to the defence of the south coast between 1539 and 1547, both in cash and in kind. It has been estimated that the dissolution of the monasteries brought £415,005 6s 10½d into the Court of Augmentations between Michelmas 1536 and Michelmas 1547.31 Many bells were melted down to provide gun metal, which was recast as cannon. The inventories of the Valor Ecclesiasticus recorded large numbers of bells: for example 1753 in Lincolnshire (excluding Holland in the south east of the county), 1608 in Devon and 544 in Berkshire.32 This sudden availability of metal fortunately coincided with the programme to protect England’s coastline from an European invasion threat. While it is not possible to pick out specific guns made from this metal in the Bulletin, 65 (1987), pp. 69–80; L. Monnas, ‘New documents for the vestments of Henry VII at Stonyhurst College’, The Burlington Magazine, 131 (1989), pp. 345–9. 26 Turnbull, Account of the monastic treasures, p. 48. 27 [205–207]. 28 TNA E315/160, fols 107v–120r; M.A. Hayward, The 1542 inventory: The palace and its keeper (London, 2004), nos 2398–3305. When an object from the inventory has been cited, its number has been given in round brackets. 29 F. Wormald and C.E. Wright, eds, The English library before 1700: Studies in its history (London, 1958), pp. 163–4. 30 J.P. Carley, ‘John Leland and the contents of English pre-dissolution libraries: Lincolnshire’, Transactions of the Cambridge Bibliographic Society, 9 (1989), p. 331. 31 D. Gasquet, Henry VIII and the monasteries, p. 397. 32 J.J. Scarisbrick, The Reformation and the English people (Oxford, 1984), p. 96.

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1547 inventory, it may well have been used to make the cannons, culverins, sakers, and other ordnance at the new forts and bulwarks such as those at Deal, Higham, Queenborough, Sandown and Walmer. The overall picture of the dissolution would suggest that a limited number of monastic goods directly entered Henry VIII’s possession. Rather it was the increase in disposable income that the king received as a consequence that greatly enhanced his ability to purchase other goods. Much of this, upward of £376,500, was spent on the fortification of the south coast, a further £23,000 was spent on the construction of Nonsuch Palace prior to 1545, but some must have been spent buying plate, tapestries, ordnance and the other trappings of magnificence.33

Confiscation from Individuals While the dissolution of the monasteries had a significant bearing on the development of the king’s goods, it was the contribution made by traitors that was most important in terms of specific items passing into Henry VIII’s possession. We should note that while there were important changes to the legal position concerning traitors’ land during the reign of Henry VIII, the position with regards to moveable goods did not change.34 In 1509 the treason law strongly resembled the act passed in 1352 by Edward III.35 Although ten additional statutes were enacted between 1352 and 1485, they did not fundamentally alter Edward III’s act.36 In November 1534 the definition of treason was modified by the first Succession Act and the Treason Act and the king gained greater powers to seize property. Under the 1352 act the crown could only take land that a convicted traitor held in his own name: to take enfeoffed land the government had to seek an act of attainder in parliament. Consequently Sir Thomas Audley, the king’s lord chancellor, inserted a clause into the 1534 act that bypassed the act of attainder.37 Elton observed that 883 people in England, Wales and Calais were tried between 1532 and 1540 according to the treason law. Of these 308 (38%) were executed. (A significant percentage of the remainder were convicted and then 33 D.R. Starkey, ed., Henry VIII: A European Court in England (London, 1991), p. 8. 34 Kesselring, ‘Felony forfeiture in England’, pp. 211–12. 35 25 Ed. III, st.5 c.2. The five treasons were (1) to contemplate the death of the king, his consort or his heir; (2) to rape the king’s consort, eldest daughter if unmarried or the consort of his heir; (3) to levy war against the king or support his enemies; (4) to forge the great seal or the coinage; (5) to kill the chancellor, treasurer or justiciar of the bench of Eyre, Assize, or Oyer and Terminer. 36 J.G. Bellamy, The Tudor law of treason: An introduction (London, 1979), p. 12. Between 1485 and 1603, a further 68 statutes were passed. 37 G.R. Elton, Policy and police: The enforcement of the Reformation in the age of Thomas Cromwell (Cambridge, 1972), pp. 269–70.

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pardoned, although their property was still seized.)38 However, not all of those convicted of high treason had possessions that would have interested the king. The ‘Nun of Kent’ had little to offer Henry VIII, for example. Equally, the practice to provide maintenance for each traitor’s wife and children reduced the quantity of land, goods and money that came to the crown.39 Thus, in 1540, Lady Elizabeth Carew was granted land worth £120 after the execution of her husband.40 Only 34 of the 883 alleged traitors whom Elton identified were at court and twenty of them were executed. It is this group, which included Anne Boleyn, Sir Nicholas Carew and Thomas Cromwell, who are of particular interest in this context because many of their possessions featured in the 1547 inventory.41 Indeed, Henry VIII chose to retain a surprisingly high number of the confiscated goods that fell due to him. It was more usual for most of the spoils to be sold off. For instance, in 1532 Robert ap Reynolds claimed that Thomas Cromwell still owed him 47 angels for some of the goods of Edward Stafford, third duke of Buckingham, which Cromwell had bought from him following the duke’s execution in 1521.42 The policy was continued by Edward VI and Mary I because the royal coffers were empty. After Sir John Gate’s arrest and conviction for treason in 1553, for example, his goods at Pyrgo Park and St Stephens were sold and the buyers included Sir Francis Inglefold, Sir Edward Walgrave and Sir Thomas Warton.43 On 14 February 1521 the archbishop of Armagh, the deacon of Eastleigh and Sir William Kingston were appointed to inventory the contents of the Tower Jewel House. By May the process was completed and in the same month the duke of Buckingham was executed for treason at Tower Hill. Buckingham was well known for his extravagant clothes (his finery was commented on, for example, at Prince Arthur’s wedding to Catherine of Aragon in 1501 and at the Field of the Cloth of Gold in 1520) and it seems likely that his other goods were of a similar quality.44 A large amount of his plate, as well as a variety of his other household goods, were acquired by the king. The king’s new plate was entered in the jewel house inventory under the relevant categories on 31 December 1521 according to the marginal notes. The late duke contributed 38 Ibid. pp. 388–90. 39 Only property that the wife held in her own name or as a jointure was safe. Otherwise, any maintenance was a discretionary gift by the king. I am most grateful to Krista Kesselring for this observation. 40 L & P, XIV, 9. 41 H. Miller, Henry VIII and the English nobility (Oxford, 1986), ch. 2. 42 L & P, V, 896. 43 TNA LR2/119, fols 52r–62v. Gates had 27 oz of plate and his goods realized £321 4s 10d. This volume also lists the goods of the duke of Northumberland, the marques of Northampton, Sir Andrew Dudley, Sir Thomas Palmer and Thomas Cranmer. 44 For example, in 1501 Buckingham wore a gown to the wedding valued at £1500 and ‘wrought of nedyll work and sett upon cloth of tyssu furrid with sablys’, A.H. Thomas and I.D. Thornley, eds, The Great Chronicle of London (London, 1938), pp. 50–51.

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plate weighing a total of 17,442¾ oz to the king (65½ oz of gold, 15,587¾ oz of silver gilt and 1146½ oz of white plate). In addition, a further twenty-six items were listed separately, which ‘was for the seruice of the saide Duke at his being prisonner in the towre’.45 Little of Buckingham’s plate remained by 1547 although there were still caches of tapestry and napery.46 Their presence in the royal household, including a bed with black velvet hangings ‘with the duke of Buckingham his Armes’ at Oatlands, must have acted as a salutary reminder of the king’s power to all that saw them.47 On 23 June 1540 Charles Marillac wrote to Anne de Montmorency with details of Thomas Cromwell’s arrest, for supposed treason, adding that: they made an inventory of his goods, which were not of such value as people thought although too much for a ‘compaignon de telle estoffe’. The money was 7000l. sterling equal to 28, 000 crowns, and the silver plate, including crosses, chalices, and other spoils of the Church might be as much more. These moveables were before night taken to the king’s treasury – a sign that they will not be restored.48

Several inventories of Cromwell’s goods have survived from this period but they are in very poor condition.49 His possessions included a selection of paintings and a globe. An earlier inventory taken in June 1527 cannot be seen as a fair reflection of the wealth he would have acquired by 1540, when he had risen to the rank of earl of Essex. The furnishings and holdings of plate are very modest in comparison to the pieces recorded at Henry’s death, although there were reasonable quantities of clothes, small pieces of jewellery, and lengths of cloth.50 Even so, some of Cromwell’s plate, tapestries, and other furnishings can be identified in the 1547 inventory by the presence of his arms and badges.51 One item that Stephen Vaughan encouraged Cromwell to buy in 1529 being, according to the former, ‘the netest pece of worke that I haue 45 E. Trollope, ‘King Henry VIII’s jewel book’, Associated Architectural Societies Reports and Papers, 17/2 (1884), pp. 215–16. 46 The following items can be identified as having belonged to Stafford in BL Harley MS 1419: two pieces of arras [8995–96], a mattress [9061], a furnished bed [12649], three table clothes [11442–23, 11445] and ten towels [11470, 11474, 11477–79]. For details of his plate being recycled, see LP VI, 338. 47 [12649]. 48 L & P, XV, 804. 49 TNA SP1/162, fols 93r–106r (L & P, XV, 1029.6). This document is undated but it is calendared in L & P in 1540. A continuation of this inventory appears in TNA SP1/243, fols 85r–102v (L & P, App. I ii, 1467). Cromwell’s house at Mortlake was also inventoried, see TNA SP1/242, fols 103r–107v (L & P, App. I ii, 1468). 50 TNA SP1/ 42, fols 104r–116r (L & P, IV ii, 3197). 51 There were 427¼ oz of Cromwell’s plate as well as five pieces of tapestry [9123], two pieces of arras [9015–6], six window pieces [9125–6], a chimney piece [9124], seven celures and testors [9171–7], one mattress [9181], five quilts [9182], three beds [9183], a cushion [12101], a chair [13072], a mirror [12307], a counterpoint [9180], a canopy [9179] and a sparver [9178].

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seyn’ also appealed to Henry.52 This ‘Table of Cipres with a bordre rounde abowte of beyonde See elme coloured blacke with [a] playne frame of Oke’ was ‘recyvid from the late Erle of Essex house in London’ and by 1547 formed part of Denny’s charge.53 Other pieces, including the group of books ‘had into the King’s library’, cannot be traced in the 1547 inventory. However, not everything came to the king. Other sources reveal that a selection of armour and weapons owned by Cromwell were acquired by Nicholas Bristow (the king’s clerk), Edmund Pigeon (Bristow’s servant) and Sir Thomas Cawarden (Keeper of the Revels).54 Two men who fell outside Elton’s survey of alleged traitors were Henry Howard, earl of Surrey, executed on 21 January 1547 and his father Thomas, third duke of Norfolk, who was saved by Henry VIII’s death seven days later. Thomas Howard had owned thirty-seven copes, twelve sets of vestments for deacons and sub-deacons, four canopies, seven lengths of cloth for the sepulchre and six full sets of vestments.55 Edward VI also retained some napery, cushions, and bed hangings.56 However, many of the furnishings from Kenninghall went directly to the duke of Somerset. Although the furnishings at Somerset house in 1549 were reserved to the use of the king, the majority passed to the new protector, Northumberland, and his followers.57 The name that appeared most frequently in the 1547 inventory was that of Thomas Wolsey. Wolsey had been very wealthy. He had also been a man of taste and discernment who had been very aware of the artistic styles fashionable in Europe. He expressed this in a range of ways including his collection of tapestries.58 When Wolsey fell from favour in 1529 he had had his possessions inventoried and then presented both the goods and the lists to the king.59 The pieces still at Cawood when Wolsey died at Lincoln on 29 November 1530 were forfeit to the crown. Unfortunately the inventories that Cavendish referred to have not survived and so it is not possible to assess the full extent of Wolsey’s possessions. However, several inventories have survived including a survey of Wolsey’s Wardrobe of the Beds and inventories taken 52 TNA SP1/55, fol. 68r (L & P, IV iii, 5860). 53 [10821]. TNA E315/160, fol. 127r (3472). 54 The Surrey History Centre (formerly known as the Guildford Muniment Room), Loseley MS 59/150. 55 [8937–85]. There were also two desk cloths, a veil, a sepulchre cloth, two corporas cases, a cushion, a cloth for a church, two altar frontals and a folding lectern. 56 The pieces were napery [17624–36] (seven new tablecloths, five old tablecloths, three old towels), three celures and testors [9396–8], a sparver [9399], two counterpoints [9400–1] and four cushions [9404–5]. 57 The inventory of Kenninghall, along with Castle Rising and St Leonard’s by Norwich survive as TNA LR2/115; also D.R. Starkey, ed., Rivals in power: Lives and letters of the great Tudor dynasties (London, 1990), p. 131. 58 T.P. Campbell, ‘Cardinal Wolsey’s tapestry collection’, Antiquaries Journal, 76 (1996), pp. 73–137. 59 R.S. Sylvester ed., The life and death of Cardinal Wolsey, EETS, 243 (London, 1959), pp. 98–9.

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at Cawood after the cardinal’s death.60 A number of the cardinal’s belongings were still in royal hands by 1547 and they reveal the quality and quantity of his possessions, including: eight chairs, seven carpets, eighty-seven pieces of arras and tapestry, eleven window pieces, a post piece, and 861 oz of plate.61 Although Wolsey’s chapel rivalled Henry VIII’s, none of the vestments in the 1547 inventory are identified as having been his.62 The seizure of Wolsey’s property and goods gave the single greatest boost to both the quality and quantity of Henry VIII’s possessions of any of the ‘confiscations’. The 1547 inventory suggests that Beddington and The More were kept much as they had been under their previous owners. Sir Nicholas Carew had lost Beddington in 1539 when he had been implicated in the activities of the marquis of Exeter. None of the furnishings at Beddington have either Carew’s arms or those of the king, although the original ownership of ‘oone peace of Arras with Sir Nicholas Carow is half picture sett in waynescot’ is without doubt.63 Whoever bought them, many of the pieces of tapestry depicted kings and queens, a subject very suited to a property in royal hands. In the same way, a number of the furnishings at The More, one of Wolsey’s former properties, were still decorated with his arms in 1547 or they were described as being of ‘the late cardinals stuffe’. The same could be said for fifty-seven of the 126 pieces of tapestry, one of the three tapestry window pieces, seven of the thirty-one carpets and six of the twenty-four chairs. However, the furnishings identified as having been Wolsey’s can be set alongside items marked with HA and HR: namely, two of the nine beds, four chairs and one cushion. Henry VIII made five visits to Beddington over eight years, while he visited The More eleven times in the seventeen years he owned it. In both cases nearly all of the visits were made shortly after their acquisition.

Trade Confiscations Customs duties were an important source of income for Henry VIII’s government. Non-payment of the duties, if detected, resulted in the seizure of the affected goods. These were normally valued and sold, with part of the profit going to the exchequer and the rest given as a reward to a servant of the crown, usually a member of the household. However, some goods were taken for the king. These could include items suitable for the king’s personal 60 BL Harley MS 599 (L & P, IV iii, 6184); TNA E36/171 (L & P, IV iii, 6748.12). 61 The pattern of patronage and accumulation of plate by the cardinal is discussed by P. Glanville, ‘Cardinal Wolsey and the goldsmiths’, in Cardinal Wolsey: Church, state and art, ed. S.J. Gunn and P.G. Lindley (Cambridge, 1991), pp. 131–48. 62 R. Bowers, ‘The cultivation and promotion of music in the household and orbit of Thomas Wolsey’, in Wolsey, ed. Gunn and Lindley, pp. 178–218. 63 [13985].

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use. For instance, it was noted on 15 October 1523 that ‘20 skins of fur called Lusardes late of the goods and chattels of one John Balevett merchant stanger unto us for divers causes forfeited’ had been taken by two Port of London waiters ‘to our wardrobe unto our use’.64 More mundane goods were also of interest. In September 1543, 734 ells of Normandy canvas were ‘brought into the king his Maiestie by Sir John Gresham knight taken owte of sundry Shippes at Portsmouth’ and delivered to Sir Anthony Denny.65 Goods acquired by these three methods of confiscation possibly account for between 25 and 30 per cent of the objects in the 1547 inventory. However, an assessment of this kind is problematic in two ways. First, it is not possible to match all of the evidence relating to acquisitions with items in inventory evidence. For example, while there is evidence of books coming into the king’s possession, the library at Whitehall was inventoried in 1542 but not in 1547. Second, while raw materials acquired by the king as a result of confiscation may well feature in 1547, it is not possible to identify which pieces of ordnance had been made from monastic bells and much confiscated plate was recycled.

The Consequences of Confiscation Having established the types of goods that Henry VIII seized and from whom, we may now turn to consider why the king behaved as he did, what parallels there were for his behaviour, and how the use of confiscation influenced the development of the king’s collection. Henry VIII’s character was the key both to what he possessed and how he acquired it. Henry VIII was undeniably acquisitive and according to Polydore Vergil, Wolsey carefully exploited this, for: every time he wished to obtain something from Henry, he introduced the subject casually into his conversation; then he brought out some small present or another, a beautifully fashioned dish, for example, or a jewel or ring or gifts of that sort, and while the king was admiring the gift intently, Wolsey would adroitly bring forward the project on which his mind was fixed.66

But Henry VIII could be equally manipulative, relying on his status to acquire something he coveted. During the celebrations of the Field of Cloth of Gold he admired, and was given, the courser ridden by the duke of Bourbon. He took possession of Marshal Lescun’s horse in the same manner.67 At Henry VIII’s accession William, Lord Mountjoy wrote enthusiastically to Erasmus that ‘Avarice has fled the country … [for] our king is not after gold or gems 64 65 66 67

TNA E404/94, no. 110. TNA E315/160, fol. 128r. Polydore Vergil, Anglica Historia, ed. D. Hay, Camden Society, 74 (London, 1950), p. 194. J.C. Russell, The field of the cloth of gold: Men and manners in 1520 (London, 1969), p. 119.

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or precious metals but virtue’.68 However, the 1547 inventory reveals a very rich accumulation of plate and jewellery, along with his other worldly goods, which belies this comment. The contents of the jewel house and the removing coffers accounted for 24.1 per cent of the entries, making the view of Charles de Marillac, the French ambassador, more pertinent. In 1540 he described Henry VIII as being: so covetous that all the riches in the world would not satisfy him. Hence the ruin of the abbeys … Hence too, the accusation of so many rich men, who whether condemned or acquitted, are always plucked.69

A year earlier Eustace Chapuys, the imperial ambassador, had expressed similar sentiments when he informed Charles V that: Master Carew was taken prisoner to the Tower, and the moment his arrest was ordered the commissioners went to seize all his goods in his house. It is presumed the king will not have forgotten to charge them to take the most beautiful diamonds and pearls and innumerable jewels which he formerly gave to the said Escuyer’s wife, the greater part of which he had taken from the late good queen.70

These high profile confiscations had a negative impact on the king’s reputation at home and abroad, and by the 1540s Henry VIII had an ever burgeoning reputation for avarice and ruthlessness. So much so that he came to resemble his father. According to Polydore Vergil: The king [Henry VII] wished (as he said) to keep all Englishmen obedient through fear, and he considered that whenever they gave him offence they were actuated by their great wealth … All his subjects who were men of substance when found guilty of whatever fault he fined … which especially deprives [them] of their fotunes.71

However, there were hints of this acquisitive streak earlier in his reign, too. First, he took things he wanted from people while they were still living and in favour as in the case of the chorister whom Wolsey retained in 1518 and whom Henry VIII wanted – and got – for the chapel royal.72 On 1 April Pace assured Wolsey that ‘Cornysche doth greatly laud and praise the child of your chapel sent hither, not only for his sure and cleanly singing, but also for his good and craft descant’.73 Henry VIII also acquired Wolsey’s fool, Sexton 68 P.S. and H.M. Allen, eds, Epistolarum Des. Erasmi Roterodami (Oxford, 1906), I, no. 214; (L&P I.i, 51). 69 L & P, XV, 954. 70 L & P, XIV i, 37. 71 Vergil, Anglica Historia, pp. 127–9. 72 L & P, II ii, 4024, 4025, 4044. 73 L & P, II ii, 4055.

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or Patch. Second, a very similar trend can be seen in the king’s approach to foreign merchants who were bringing new goods into the country. They were offered tax concessions on the understanding that the king would get first sight of the goods and the first chance to buy, so ensuring that he got the best of what was on offer.74 Third, Henry VIII actively recruited foreign craftsmen into his service offering them high salaries and favourable conditions so that they would provide him with skills that were lacking in England, for instance the development of specialist armouries at Greenwich.75 During his reign Henry VIII also demonstrated a fairly fluid attitude to his own possessions and those of his wives and children. Catherine of Aragon was forced to surrender her property as a consequence of failing to give Henry VIII a living son. He took her goods and gave most of them, including her furnishings, barge and jewels, to her successor Anne Boleyn.76 The transfer of these goods from woman to woman helped to stress Anne’s new-found status as Henry VIII’s queen consort. Equally significant is the way that Henry VIII seized clothes, plate and household goods from Anne Boleyn and Catherine Howard at their fall as a mark of their loss of status. The significance of the office of queen consort was emphasized over the individual who held the position by Henry VIII’s habit of passing goods from wife to wife including pieces with their predecessor’s initials and badges. Indeed, it may be noted that Henry VIII was fortunate in selecting three wives named Catherine and two called Anne. Yet with many other aspects of his reign, Henry VIII could be inconsistent in his approach as was demonstrated by his retention at Whitehall of the clothes and goods of Jane Seymour, the wife who provided him with his son and heir.77 Once an individual had been arrested, the king could decide which of their assets he wanted to retain for his own use. In many cases Henry VIII would have been very familiar with what the individual in question owned. For example, the king had visited Wolsey on many occasions at York Place and Hampton Court and must have had a very shrewd idea of the splendid items that the cardinal possessed. However, George Cavendish noted that Wolsey, ever helpful to the king, had had his goods inventoried and he gave the document to the king when he handed over his possessions:

74 For example, in April 1522 John Cavalcanti received a licence to import cloths of gold, silver and damask and all other cloths wrought with gold with just such a caveat, L & P, III ii, 2214.20. 75 K. Watts, ‘Henry VIII and the founding of the Greenwich armouries’, in Starkey, Henry VIII: A European court, pp. 42–6. 76 For the transfer of the queen’s jewels see M.A. Hayward, Dress at the Court of King Henry VIII (Leeds, 2007), p. 188. 77 This point is developed further in M.A. Hayward, ‘Dressed to rule: Henry VIII’s wardrobe and his equipment for horse, hawk and hound’, in The Inventory of King Henry VIII: vol. 2: Textiles and Dress, ed. M.A. Hayward and P. Ward (London, 2012), pp. 67–108.

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And bokes conteynyng the valewe & wayte of euery parcel layed by them / redy to be sen / And so was also bokes sett by all maner of Stuffe conteynyng the contentes of euery thynge / Thus euery thing being in good order & furnysshed he gave the charge of the delyuere therof (vnto the kyng).78

Inventories were the easiest way to keep track of one’s own possessions or to make an assessment of somebody else’s. This was made clear at the start of Mary I’s reign when inventories were compiled of the goods of Lady Jane Grey’s supporters so that the queen could make her selection of the goods before the remainder was sold.79 Seizing other people’s possessions resulted in a series of random additions being made to the royal collection, enhancing it in terms of quantity and quality, but not with guaranteed acquisitions in specific areas. That said, the individuals whose goods were seized by the king owned and valued similar types of goods to him: namely household furnishings, vestments, plate, books, money, wine, horses and clothes. Many of these were imported luxury goods and all of them could act as markers of social status, piety, disposable income, intellect and taste. Consequently it is not surprising that the royal Wardrobe, Jewel House, Library and Stable were all augmented with items seized during this series of confiscations, while other areas of the Royal Collection, such as the King’s pictures were not. First, the standing Wardrobes of the Beds located at fourteen of the king’s houses benefitted. Some gained more than others, but there were significant additions in terms of tapestry, arras and verdure, pieced textile wall hangings, and carpets produced using a variety of techniques, as well as table and bed linen. All of these things were very expensive and possession of such items represented was one of the key ways to emphasize wealth. Second, the vestry that served the royal chapel and the king’s closet was augmented with suits of vestments and other liturgical items from the duke of Norfolk and Westminster Abbey, highlighting the king’s conservative approach to his personal religion.80 While Henry VIII rejected Papal authority, he was keen to retain the textiles, plate and images of saints that were essential appurtenances of traditional worship. Perhaps the most important acquisition in this area was the set of vestments commissioned by Henry VII for use in his chantry chapel at Westminster Abbey.81 The qualities that made them desirable to Henry VIII are readily apparent: their cost, size, rich materials, rarity, family associations and their 78 Sylvester, Life and death of Wolsey, p. 99. 79 TNA LR2/119. 80 See F. Kisby, ‘Religious ceremonial at the Tudor Court: Extracts from royal household regulations’, in Religion, Politics and Society in Sixteenth-Century England, ed. I. Archer et al., Camden Society, Fifth Series, 22 (2003), pp. 1–33. 81 L. Monnas, ‘The splendour of royal worship’, in The Inventory of Henry VIII, ed. Hayward and Ward.

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ability to emphasize the king’s magnificence. Third, plate and jewels that were retained would have gone to the jewel house and the king’s coffers, while plate to be melted down went to the Mint. Fourth, books were transferred from the monastic libraries to the king’s palaces. This was less a question of financial gain and more a reflection of the volumes’ intellectual value, especially in the religious and political climate of the 1530s and 1540s.82 Fifth, when an individual’s assets were seized, everything came to the crown including debts owed and money. It is likely that Henry VIII acquired large quantities of coinage from Wolsey but there are no records of this. What the 1547 inventory makes clear is that substantial sums of money had been seized from Thomas Howard, duke of Norfolk, for there was a reference to d ‘a Canvas bagg of the late Duke of Norffolkes money … M l Cxxxviij li xxij  [£1138 22d]’ and ‘a bagge of white lether of the money of the saide late Duke [containing] iiij  c xx li [£420]’.83 Sixth, Henry VIII was taking a growing interest in horse breeding and regularly sought to augment his blood-stock. While horses were often given to the king as gifts, confiscation also played its part in developing the royal stud. When the king’s horses were listed in 1547 there were four ‘Coursers of the late Erle of Surrey’ and two ‘Stallens that were the late Duke of Norffolk’.84 Finally, Henry VIII also took goods of a much more practical nature but with financial value – such as wine, grain, livestock, wood and coal as well as equipment for cooking, brewing and laundry – that would be absorbed into the relevant departments of the king’s household for his personal use. He also acquired family papers that reduced the likelihood of the king not receiving all the goods he should and ensured that he had the documents that he would need to take control over lands and other assets. However, the significance of confiscation should not be over-emphasized in terms of how the royal collection developed. A comparison of the entries for the glass house at Whitehall in 1542 and 1547 suggest that this strand of the king’s collection was built up by purchase.85 In addition, there were some groups of objects that the king would seize but not retain. The most notable of these were the clothes of his victims. While the king did wear clothes he was given as gifts, he did not opt to wear dead men’s clothes. Apart from the whole question of fit, this would have been beneath his dignity, as the king’s wardrobe was seen as being a level above those of his courtiers and nobles.86 Consequently, the clothes were taken by the officers of the Wardrobe of the Robes and then given away along with the king’s own clothes in the regular purges of the wardrobe. For example, 82 83 84 85 86

See J.P. Carley, The Books of Henry VIII and his Wives (London, 2004), pp. 80–99. [2559] and [2560]. [8482] and [8486]. Hayward, ‘Possessions of Henry’, pp. 214–15. Hayward, Dress, pp. 9–11, 95.

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in 1540, the clothes of Thomas Cromwell, late earl of Essex were given to a range of individuals including Sir Edward Baynton, Nicholas Bristow and Robert Radcliffe, first earl of Sussex.87 By giving these items, Henry VIII was able to demonstrate royal generosity using goods that had cost him nothing.88 In addition, the distribution of these goods would stress to his courtiers that power at court was very much dependent on the king’s support and that if they did not watch their step it might be their own goods that were being shared out in the future. Many of the goods that Henry VIII took from those convicted for treason were used within the royal apartments at Greenwich, Hampton Court, Whitehall and Richmond, and so they acted as a display of the king’s taste and power. In some cases, initials, badges, coats of arms and other ownership marks were removed, so eradicating evidence of the previous owner. For example, the king’s arras workers quite often replaced the initials of former owners of tapestries with his own.89 In other cases the initials were retained, as in the case of twenty-four silver trenchers ‘with the late Mr Henry Norrys armes of the previe Chambre’ weighing 193½oz.90 Displaying objects decorated with the badges of a former courtier stressed the king’s authority, especially in the months immediately after their execution.

Conclusion The circumstances of Henry VIII’s reign, including the dissolution of the monasteries and the ever changing political situation at court, allowed him to make significant use of confiscation against the church and individuals. While there is no evidence to suggest that from the outset he initiated a campaign designed to get his hands on their impressive private wealth, his actions led some of his contemporaries to believe that this was the case. Forfeitures resulted in a significant increase in the goods owned by the crown (a minimum of 25–30%) in all key areas ranging from artillery to vestments, from books to beds. The inclusion of these goods in the king’s possessions indicates that while the Tudors did not particularly value goods for their antiquity, they did not attach any particular stigma to old, inherited or secondhand possessions.91 Indeed, more importantly, in many instances the original marks of ownership, including the badges, ciphers, coats of arms and initials of Henry VIII’s former friends, wives and cardinal, were left on objects that 87 L & P, XV, 917. 88 Hayward, Dress, p. 123. 89 For example, TNA LC9/51, fol. 247r. 90 [1692]. 91 For example, in relation to plate, see A.J. Collins ed., Jewels and plate of Queen Elizabeth I: The inventory of 1574 (London, 1955), p. 82.

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the king acquired through confiscation as a warning to others. The king could give his favour but he could also take it away, and when he did so he could strip their estates to his own advantage.

3 ‘As presence did present them’: Personal Gift-giving at the Field of Cloth of Gold Glenn Richardson

The two kings, equal in lustre, were now best, now worst, As presence did present them; him in eye, Still him in praise: and, being present both ’Twas said they saw but one; and no discerner Durst wag his tongue in censure. (Shakespeare, Henry VIII, Act I scene i)

Thus Shakespeare described the first meeting of Francis I of France and Henry VIII of England at the Field of Cloth of Gold in June 1520. As these lines from the play have it, not only did the two kings present themselves on that occasion as splendidly as possible, but were keen rivals in their personal adornment and demeanour, each striving to show himself the superior monarch and man. This chapter considers gift-giving as an aspect of the ostentatious display at the 1520 meeting, setting it within the context of the personal rivalry between Francis I and Henry VIII since 1515. It also examines an incident at the Field of Cloth of Gold where Francis I can be said to have made a present or gift of his own presence to Henry VIII. On New Year’s Day 1515, Francis I became king of France. Young, ambitious and flamboyant, Francis made his court a new centre of conspicuous consumption and, through it, compelled the attention of the French nobility. He sought the plaudits of observers at home and abroad and wished to create for himself a reputation as a ‘magnificent monarch’ as that term was understood in sixteenth-century Europe. In pursuit of this aim, he soon went to war. A mere nine months after his accession Francis I made good on his claim to the duchy of Milan by victory in the battle of Marignano in September 1515. This conquest disconcerted nobody in Europe more than Henry VIII of England whose own place since 1509 as the dashing young soldier-king of Europe was taken by the new French monarch. Henry’s first military successes against

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Louis XII of France in a war in 1513, the capture of the town of Thérouanne and the city of Tournai, now looked modest in comparison. Furthermore, Francis outmanoeuvered and isolated Henry diplomatically in the wake of Marignano, securing his hold on Milan through agreements with Pope Leo X, with the Emperor Maximilian, and with Ferdinand of Aragon, the latter two of whom had been Henry’s allies in the 1513 war. Fortunately for Henry VIII, he had, in the person of Cardinal Thomas Wolsey, a servant whose diplomatic skills equalled or exceeded those of the French king and council. It was Wolsey who first saw that if Henry could not make his name through magnificent war against France then he would have to make peace in a way as compelling and magnificent as warfare. Wolsey first negotiated an Anglo-French peace in 1514 sealed by the marriage of Henry’s sister Mary to Louis XII. Now, in 1518, he hijacked Pope Leo X’s plans for a European-wide peace and a crusade against the Ottoman Turks and placed them under Henry VIII’s aegis. Wolsey presided over the conclusion of an international non-aggression pact under the Treaty of London, also known as the Treaty of Universal Peace. Henry was made its protector and the arbiter of international conflict under the blessing of the pope.1 The international peace agreement was secured by a new Anglo-French alliance. This alliance, under which Francis got back the city of Tournai, was itself underpinned by the French king’s agreement to pay Henry a huge annual sum of money, which Francis regarded as a ‘pension’ – such as to make him Henry’s ally but also paymaster – but which Henry VIII regarded as ‘tribute’ for ‘his’ kingdom of France. Whatever military, economic or other limitations were placed upon his freedom of action from time to time, in Henry’s mind at least, his dominance over France was acknowledged and his international profile enhanced by receipt of these payments. Francis could not pursue his Italian ambitions further without the risk of Henry’s turning the whole of Europe against him. That, at least, is how Henry and Wolsey saw the situation. They had done by diplomacy what they could not do by arms, curbing Francis I’s vaunting ambition and restoring Henry to European prominence.2 The alliance agreement stipulated that Henry and Francis were to meet personally. This meeting finally took place in June 1520 and became known thereafter as the Field of Cloth of Gold. Contrary to popular belief, it was not a peace conference as such, nor a celebration of peace for its own sake in any modern sense. It was a tournament at which Henry and Francis personally inaugurated their alliance agreed under the 1518 Treaty of London. As was 1 J.J. Scarisbrick, Henry VIII (London, 1968), pp. 70–79. 2 G. Richardson, ‘Eternal Peace, Occasional War: Anglo-French Relations under Henry VIII’, in Tudor England and its Neighbours, ed. G. Richardson and S. Doran (Basingstoke, 2005), pp. 44–73; P. Gwyn. The King’s Cardinal: The Rise and Fall of Cardinal Wolsey (London, 1990), pp. l45–7.

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customary among late-medieval elites, the tournament was held to celebrate military power as the best way of achieving, or maintaining, peace. It was dominated by the kind of ostentatious reciprocity that had characterized dealings between Henry and Francis since 1515. Their rivalry had already become so intense that in order for them to meet at all, Wolsey had to enable both monarchs to indulge what was something of an illusion, but a very important illusion, namely, that each met the other on his own terms. Each could then celebrate the possibility of peace between them as a token of his own political and personal superiority over the other and a warning to the other not to upset the status quo that each was there to affirm, to his own advantage. The formal protocols for the event provided that every visit, every entertainment, every gift, and every compliment made by one monarch to the other was to be matched in kind and value. After nervous last-minute negotiations, the two kings met for the first time about halfway between the towns of Guînes and Ardres, within the Pale of Calais, in the early evening of Thursday 7 June 1520. On Saturday 9 June, the tournament proper began. The nobles and knights on both sides divided themselves into fourteen teams of answerers who met the challenge issued in the name of the two kings who jousted as each other’s associates. Henry’s tournament costumes proclaimed his dynastic fervour. On Saturday 16 June he wore a garment while jousting at the lists, decorated with ciphered letters spelling the phrase ‘God willing, my realme and I may …’, left pointedly unfinished. Five days later during the field tourney, Henry’s costume displayed little mountains planted with branches of golden basil. On the borders were the words ‘Breake not these swete herbes of the richemounte, doute for damage’.3 The ‘richemounte’ was an allegory of England deployed from time to time in pageants at the English court. It symbolized the country’s wealth, stability and potential under the leadership of the Tudor dynasty whose founder, Henry VII, had been earl of Richmond. Francis’s costumes, by contrast, played out a series of courtly love themes, focusing on the king’s romantic desire and desirability. He seems to have been presented not as a political master of the moment in the way Henry was, but as a chivalric philosopher-king, whose heart and mind were centred on the highest ideals of love. The observer Guillaume Du Bellay noted that at their first meeting, Henry expressed a wish that they personally settle the formal details of their agreement between them. Francis waved aside the suggestion, pointing out that this was what clerks were for and saying they should dedicate themselves to princely chivalric pleasures.

3 E. Hall, The Union of the Two Noble and Illustre Famelies of Lancaster and Yorke, ed. H. Ellis (London, 1809), pp. 613, 617.

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At the Field of Cloth of Gold, the rivalry between the two kings was thus expressed, paradoxically, and as it had been for the previous five years, through ostentatious displays of friendship, generosity and mutual regard. For the reasons outlined above, it was important for both sides to glamorize the ideal of chivalric peace between them; to make it appear to themselves and to all observers that peace was a statement of power and strength, not weakness. Gift-giving was an essential part of this competitive extravagance.

Gift Exchange in Anglo-French Relations to 1520 A pattern of gift-giving between Henry and the French king had been established by 1514 and reinforced in the autumn of 1518 when Henry entertained a huge French embassy for the signing of the Treaty of London. He personally oversaw preparations for its arrival and paid for the necessary preparations and provisions of the Merchant Taylors’ Hall in London where many of the French visitors were accommodated.4 These entertainments were focused upon the principal members of the French embassy and on Francis I’s personal friends and close attendants, the gentilshommes de la chambre du roi. The culmination of the festivities was a tournament and banquet on Thursday 7 October 1518. Henry showed particular favour to one Michel de Poysieu-Capdorat, seigneur de SaintMeme. Described by the observing Venetian ambassador as ‘the very boon companion of his Most Christian Majesty’, Poysieu-Capdorat had been ‘very facetious and jesting with the king about many matters’. He complimented Henry on the cloak he was wearing, which was worth 1000 ducats. Henry immediately took it off and gave it to him and called for another of equal value.5 At a banquet towards the end of the visit, Henry also presented fifty-two large silver drinking cups to the members of the embassy and once again gave the cloak he was wearing, ‘of stiff gold brocade’ to its leader, Guillaume Gouffier, seigneur de Bonnivet, the Admiral of France.6 The French ambassadors left London on October 11, Bonnivet laden with a further twenty-four items of gilt or pure gold and silver plate including ‘a standing cup of gold garnished with great pearl’, and each man rewarded according to his degree. As the English commentator Edward Hall noted, ‘which liberality the strangers much praised.’ A reciprocal English embassy then crossed the channel to receive

4 TNA, SP1/17, fols 150–55 [L & P, II ii, 4549]. 5 Rawdon Brown, Four Years at the Court of Henry VIII: The Despatches of Sebastian Giustinian (2 vols; London, 1854), II, pp. 233–4. 6 CSPVen II, 1088.

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Francis’s ratification of the treaty and was treated to similarly distinguished hospitality in Paris during the winter.7 From 1518 onwards, the two kings habitually referred to each other not only as ‘ally’ and ‘compeer’ but as ‘good friend and brother’. Great effort was thereafter made by both sides to imbue these terms with genuine, if still rather tentative, significance, and gift-giving was important in this ‘familial’ mode of relating. One early instance occurred at the christening of Francis’s second son, Henri, duc d’Orléans in June 1519. Sir Thomas Boleyn, the father of a famous daughter and Henry VIII’s first resident ambassador at the French court, presented the queen with a gold salt cellar, a cup, and a layer of gold. Henry gave these presents as one of the child’s invited godfathers. Cardinal Wolsey also sent £100 to be given to the child’s nurse, his cradle rocker, and the gentlewomen of the queen’s chamber. Francis’s reaction to these gifts neatly encapsulates the ritual elements of gift exchange. Sir Thomas Boleyn reported him as saying that: Whensoever it shall fortune the king’s highness to have a Prince, he shall be [honoured] to do for him the like manner and that he is minded after his said son shall come to age and be able to [ ] he purposeth to send to him to the king’s grace into England to do him service.8

Boleyn also commented to his correspondent, Cardinal Wolsey, that the gifts and the money given in reward to the prince’s attendants were ‘sufficiently honourable and largely enough for the king’s honour’. The focus on reciprocity and on the personal bonds between the giver and recipient and the honour accruing to the giver is instructive – as is Francis’s dig at Henry’s lack of a son to compare with the dauphin of France. The notion of one day entrusting their sons to each other’s care draws on the tradition common to England and France, of nobles placing their sons and daughters in the households of a near kinsman or important patron and indeed in the royal household itself, for service and training (or nourriture as the French called it). Young noble men and women practised their genteel accomplishments and became part of wider familial–client network of their host. Due to their vulnerability and impressionability, there is a sense in which these young people were both offered and received as gifts between the families concerned as well as investments in the future of good relations.9

7 Rawdon Brown, Four Years at the Court of Henry VIII, II, pp. 231–2; Hall, Union of the Two Noble and Illustre Famelies, p. 596. 8 BL Caligula D VII, fol.125 [L & P, III i, 289] Sir Thomas Boleyn to Wolsey, Paris 7 June 1519. 9 K.B. Neuschel, Word of Honor: Interpreting Noble Culture in Sixteenth Century France (Cornell, 1989), pp. 85–92 for a discussion of this phenomenon.

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Francis did not in fact send any of his three sons to England but Henry eventually met them at Boulogne in 1532.10 During 1518–20 there were, however, about sixteen young French noblemen sent to England as hostages for Francis’s performance of the terms of the Treaty of London. When the first group was sent in 1519 Henry had insisted that the hostages had to be men of high status with Francis, ideally his chamber servants, and recognized internationally as such, so that their being sent as hostages honoured him sufficiently.11 The young men were treated as honoured guests and were a means of indirect communication with Henry’s rival. The royal progress of that summer into Essex and Kent was particularly splendid and focused on entertaining the hostages and showing off Henry’s houses, including New Hall, then his pride and joy. According to the English chronicler Hall, throughout the summer, ‘the king did shote, hunte and ronne daily with the hostages to their great joy’.12 Some of the younger hostages sent were only in their mid to late teens and this fact brought their stay in some sense within the tradition of nourriture noted above. The younger hostages were certainly being educated, at least about Henry and his regime in England and Henry correctly trusted that they would give a good report of him in France. A number of them later served as ambassadors to the English court. During 1519 there were also young Englishmen at the court of Francis I. Although they were not there as hostages, they were to some extent received as counterparts to the Frenchmen in England. They were George Gifford, Percival Hart and Anthony Browne. Browne’s letter of introduction recommended him to Francis as a ‘young gentleman from a good family and of our own upbringing’. Henry asked Francis to take him into his court ‘to the intent that he may see and learn the way, manner and honourable arrangements of the same, the better to serve us in time to come’.13 These young men on both sides of the Channel helped to build a certain rapport between the two kings and, as Hall reports, the French hostages ‘moved stirred and required the king to pass the see and to mete with the French kyng their master’.14 One final group of people exchanged as a form of gift between the kings were those ambassadors who were the gentilshommes de la chambre du roi and their English equivalents, the Gentlemen of the King’s Privy Chamber. The privileges 10 W. Sessions, Henry Howard, Earl of Surrey (Boston, 1986). In the months that followed the 1532 visit, the dauphin François, Henri duc d’Orléans, and Charles duc d’Angoulême together hosted a prolonged stay in France by Henry’s natural son, the duke of Richmond and his friend Henry Howard, the earl of Surrey. 11 BL Cotton MS Caligula E I, fol. 209 [L & P, III i, 15] Wolsey to West, dated c.12 January 1519. 12 TNA, SP1/19, fols 5–6 Richard Gibson’s account for the New Hall masque. Hall, Union of the Two Noble and Illustre Famelies, p. 599. 13 B[ibliothèque] N[ationale de] F[rance], MS Dupuy 33, fo. 65. Letter dated Greenwich 9 November 1518; ‘jeune gentilhome extrait de bonne maison and de nostre nourriture’. 14 Hall, Union of the Two Noble and Illustre Famelies, p. 600.

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of free access to their own sovereign and the opportunity to serve him personally gave these men a kudos that both Francis and Henry acknowledged when they appeared before them as ambassadors. Treating each other’s ‘chamber’ servants as they did their own, and allowing them to enter the private royal apartments whenever they wished to do so was a carefully calibrated gesture of hospitality that asserted each sovereign’s own honour and increased the competitive stakes between them. Ambassadors of chamber status were thereafter exchanged between the kings to cut through, or sometimes to augment, the formalities of international relations still largely entrusted to clerical and aristocratic representatives. It is also noteworthy that such a pattern of exchange of personal servants and friends was not instituted by either king with their common rival and occasional ally, the Holy Roman Emperor Charles V.15

Gift-giving at the Field of Cloth of Gold Having overcome an initial reticence, Sir Richard Wingfield, Henry’s second resident ambassador in France and the first of privy chamber status, availed himself of Francis’s invitation to enter the royal apartments fairly frequently. In the month before the Field of Cloth of Gold he used his time with the king to stimulate Francis’s obvious curiosity about Henry and his regime. He frequently hunted with Francis and would introduce into his conversation information about Henry or items of English technology and discuss Henry’s hunting and jousting abilities and his knowledge of architecture and shipbuilding. He then reported, as did all his successors, on such conversations with Francis. From time to time the monarchs themselves would offer or request specific items that they knew the other would appreciate. This took gift-exchange between them a step beyond the standard gift-giving observable in the usual diplomatic context. Once received, these items were then studied, imitated or improved upon and the results then offered back some months or years later, as gifts. Thus gift exchange had an important role to play, here as elsewhere, in ‘cultural transmission’ between the nations. On or about 16 March 1520, Wingfield, presented Francis I with a new kind of two-handed sword. Much heavier than anything Francis was used to, he was unable to handle it properly. Perplexed by this, he turned to the French Admiral Bonnivet who said that during his time in England he had seen the king handling an even heavier sword ‘as delverely as could be devised’. He had been sworn to secrecy at the time and would only reveal that this was done ‘by the meane of a gauntlet’.16 As Wingfield told Henry, Francis immediately 15 G. Richardson, ‘The Privy Chamber of Henry VIII and Anglo-French Relations, 1515–20’, The Court Historian, 4 (1999), pp. 119–40. 16 BL Cotton MS Caligula D VII, fol. 187 [L & P, III i, 685] Wingfield to Henry VIII, 16 March; BNF MS français 5761, fol. 30. In a letter to Suffolk of 5 December 1519, Bonnivet

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offered to swap one of these new-fangled gauntlets for a pair of cuirasses ‘such as your highness hath not seen afore’ to be ready at their forthcoming meeting. He would only say that their design enabled the weight of ‘such peces as reste upon the curasse’ to be taken off the shoulders. Henry should, as soon as possible, send one of his ‘arming doublets’ so that his measurements could be taken and one of these cuirasses be made for him. Francis repeated the offer several times over the ensuing months and Wingfield pressed for the gauntlet to be sent. An exchange of new armour evidently did take place at the Field of Cloth of Gold because something very like the English gauntlet and the design of the French cuirass were later incorporated together into armour produced by the royal armoury at Greenwich.17 The evidence for this comes from a later period of Anglo-French peacemaking. In May 1527 Henry entertained a large embassy of Frenchmen for his ratification of the second great alliance agreed between himself and Francis under the Treaty of Westminster. At the end of festivities, which were even more splendid than those of 1518 and which were, incidentally, in several important respects a direct response to those provided for the English embassy to Paris at the end of 1518, Henry presented the leader of the delegation, François de La Tour d’Auvergne, the vicomte de Turenne with a suit of Greenwich armour.18 This suit of armour is a superb example of the high standards of workmanship by then attained by the Greenwich armouries, established by Henry VIII in the first years of his reign.19 The armour incorporated an inner ventral plate whose function is consistent with a ‘device … for the easy bearing and sustaining of the weight of such pieces as rest upon the cuirass’.20 This sounds very much like what Francis had promised to give Henry in 1520. The ‘device’ on the Turenne armour consisted of a single trapezoidal stomach plate that sat behind the principal breastplate and was attached to it by a 1½ inch bolt. It was also attached to the back plate by four leather straps that could be tightened on in the manner of a corset. The weight of the reinforcements used in tournaments, the manifer, recalled how he had with the king ‘a grenwys en une gallorie ou il me montra quelques avantbras et gauntlez servans pour manyer le pesante epee’. 17 St. P. VI, p. 54; BL Cotton MS Caligula D VII, fol. 216 [L & P, III i, 749] Wingfield’s request addressed to Wolsey on 18 April. Francis looked ‘dayle to receive fro hym as well hys measure for the makynge of the curasse as also to receve the vauntbrasse and gauntlet’. On the gauntlets see H.A. Dillon, ‘Arms and Armour at Westminster, the Tower and Greenwich 1547’, Archaeologia, 51 (1888), pp. 219–80 esp. p. 260. 18 BL Add. MS 12,192, fol. 53. 19 T. Richardson, The Armour and Arms of Henry VIII (Leeds, 2002), pp. 23–4. But see also V. Ganscay, ‘The armour of Galiot de Genouilhac’, Metropolitan Museum Papers, 4 (1937), pp. 1–38; Genouilac, the Grand Ecuyer of France was thought to be the first owner of the armour but after further study and the identification of a similar suit of Greenwich armour made for Henry VIII in 1540, Turenne was identified as the original recipient. See H. Nickel ‘“a harness all gilte”’, Metropolitan Museum Journal, 5 (1972), pp. 75–124. 20 BL Cotton MS Caligula D VII, fol.187 [L & P, III i, 685].

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pasguard and granguard, could therefore be more evenly distributed over the body. Exactly the same device is found on the famous suit of Greenwich armour made in 1540 for Henry VIII himself.21 The first gifts given at the Field of Cloth of Gold itself were horses. On 9 June when the two kings first went to the lists to inaugurate the tournament, Henry rode a Neapolitan courser and Francis a horse from the stud maintained by Federico Gonzaga, marquis of Mantua. No sooner had Henry admired the Mantuan horse than Francis offered it to him and Henry naturally reciprocated with his own mount.22 In the early sixteenth century the term ‘courser’ referred not to a specific breed but to a type of large horse used specifically at the tilt and the name was generally associated with those bred in the kingdom of Naples. They were strong, well proportioned, tractable and brave animals, physically and temperamentally suited to the demands of cavalry warfare and the tournament. A shortage of such horses in England led Henry to make considerable efforts during the years prior to 1520 to acquire, by gift or purchase, a stock of Neapolitan horses. Francis looked more readily to Mantua where coursers were also bred but they were lighter than the Neapolitan ones, being cross-bred on the Gonzaga stud with Barbary and Turcoman breeds. On Monday 18 June, the penultimate day of the jousts, Francis gave Henry six coursers, four of which were from Mantua. These were ridden in display around the lists by Galeazzo da San Severino and Henry rode three of them immediately they were presented.23 In the course of the tourney Henry admired horses ridden by Charles, duc de Bourbon and by Marshal Lescun and was immediately given them by their owners. The other main type of horse used in display at the Field was the jennet or ginete, a smaller, lighter Andalousian breed renowned for its agility and speed. On 20 June, San Severino demonstrated his skills on a ginete before the two kings, both of whom owned numbers of the breed imported from the Habsburg stables at Cordoba and from Mantua.24 The giving of horses and their accoutrements was not confined to the kings and their male companions. Queen Katherine presented Queen Claude with several hobbies and palfries ‘well trapped’. The king’s mother, Louise de Savoie, was presented with a saddle and harness. Queen Claude gave presents of a litter of cloth of gold, mules, and pages to the queen of England.25 21 Ganscay, ‘The armour of Galiot de Genouilhac’, pp. 13–14 and Plates X and XI. Ganscay’s attribution of the 1527 armour to Louis de Lacque, ‘dit Merveiller’, the Milaneseborn master armourer to Charles VIII, Louis XII and Francis I is no longer accepted. However, Ganscay was probably right to identify Merveiller as the producer or, even the designer, of the ventral supporting plate on the cuirass given to Henry by Francis in 1520. 22 CSPVen III, 81, 90, 94 Letters of Soardino to the Marquis of Mantua. 23 CSPVen III, 50 (p. 27). 24 P. Edwards, Horse and Man in Early Modern England (London, 2007), p. 11. 25 L & P, III ii, p. 1554. Revels accounts for June 1520 lists the saddle and harness presented to Louise.

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The hobby was an Irish or English horse of about 14 hands with a longer and smoother, ambling gait than that of a hunting or war horse. They were used for long-distance travel by men and women. They were compact, strong horses and these qualities meant that English and Irish hobbies were exported to France and Italy even quite early in the sixteenth century. ‘Palfreys’ were also amblers and thought particularly suitable for women to ride but the word fell out of use in the course of the sixteenth century.26 Jewellery and plate were exchanged by the principal members of the French and English parties in the course of the meeting. Francis gave Wolsey gold basins and ewers decorated with Francis’s initials and one of his badges, of friars’ knots. They were said by Soardino to be worth 20,000 crowns.27 Louise de Savoie gave him a jewelled crucifix estimated to be worth 6000 crowns. In return, Wolsey gave her a small cross of precious stones apparently containing a piece of the true cross.28 While there are no items in the inventories of Wolsey’s possessions seized at his fall in 1529 that are readily identifiable as the gifts from the French royal family presented in 1520, a number of items inventoried in Henry’s Jewel House in April 1533 as having belonged to the cardinal may be. These include most obviously ‘two basins and ewers with friars girdles by the French king’.29 Unfortunately, an inventory of Louise de Savoie’s personal possessions taken at her death in 1531 does not indicate anything that might be the gift from Wolsey.30 The cardinal gave Admiral Bonnivet a large jewelled salt cellar with a figure of St George at the top. It may have looked something like the Howard Grace Cup that was made in 1525 and features a figure of St George and the dragon on the finial of its lid.31 Henry VIII gave the Admiral a jewel that he had worn in his cap, worth 4000 crowns and cups to the value of 10,000 crowns. San Severino also received a jewel and gold vessels to the value of 1800 crowns. Henry gave Bourbon a gold cup studded with jewels, worth about 6000 crowns. To Francis’s mistress, Françoise de Foix, Henry gave a crucifix worth 2000 crowns. She is known to have been at court by 1516 and was married to the rather older Jean de Laval, seigneur de Châteaubriant. Her husband and brothers Odet, Thomas 26 L & P, I i, 941; J. Thirsk, Horses in early modern England: for Service, for Pleasure, for Power. The Stenton Lecture 1977 (Reading, 1978), p. 26. I am grateful to Peter Edwards for his advice communicated privately about the various types of horses owned by the two kings. 27 J. Finot, Inventaire Sommaire des Archives Départementales du Nord (Lille, 1895), p. 178. 28 CSPVen III, 90–94 Giovanni Badoer and Antonio Giustinian, Venetian Ambassadors in France, to the Signory, 21 June 1520, Soardino, the Mantuan Ambassador to the Marquis of Mantua, 26 June 1520. 29 BL Harley MS 599, fols 1–116 [L & P, IV iii, 6184] Inventory of Wolsey’s Household Stuff; L & P, VI, 338. Plate to be broken by the king’s command 13 April 1533. 30 Archives Nationales de France, J 947: 2, ‘Inventaire fait à Compiegne après le decese de Louise de Savoie, mere de Francois I er des meubles de sa chambre, garderobbe, chappelle et offices’. Dated 3 November 1531. 31 P. Glanville, Silver in Tudor and Early Stuart England (London, 1990), pp. 344–5 for the Howard Grace Cup.

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and André de Foix, were all in favour with the king in 1520. Little more is known of her except that she was displaced as Francis’s mistress on his return from captivity in Spain in 1526 by Anne de Pisseleu who became duchesse d’Etampes.32 Henry gave Thomas de Foix, Marshal Lescun, one of those who had given Henry his horse, a gown of cloth of gold lined with sables. At their final departing from each other on Sunday 24 June, the two kings exchanged what Hall calls gifts of remembrance. Henry gave Francis a collar of ‘balastes’, diamonds and pearls. Francis gave Henry ‘a bracelet of precious stones, riche jewels and fayre’.33 At some stage in the proceedings, Katherine of Aragon also presented bonnets that she and her ladies seem to have made to Francis I’s youngest attendants, the enfants d’honneur.34 Apart from the sheer cost of the precious metals and jewels they contained, the gifts were opportunities in themselves to display the high standard of craftsmanship patronized by the two kings. Gifts were only part of an ostentatious display of a vast amount of gold and silver plate on all occasions when each king hosted members of the other’s entourage.35 Little evidence remains, however, of how all this plate and these gifts were made or acquired for presentation. Henry’s principal goldsmiths in 1520 were John Twisteton, William Holland, and Robert Amadas. All three had contributed to preparing the king’s New Year’s gifts for his courtiers in 1519 and 1520. Amadas also worked for Cardinal Wolsey. In May 1520 Amadas was paid £414 for ‘mending and making gold stuff’ for Henry. This was a substantial sum (the previous summer Henry paid £500 for 18 Neapolitan coursers) but Amadas regularly received orders from the king and the cardinal for as much as £2000 a time. Amadas went on to become acting master of the king’s jewels from 1524 and was officially confirmed in the office two years later. He died in early 1532.36 Francis I’s principal goldsmiths in the 1520s were Pierre Mangot and Jean Hotman. Much less information survives for either of them than for their English counterparts but Mangot is known to have been in royal service as early as 1514. His hallmark was a Gothic ‘M’ surmounted by the royal fleur-de-lys. His most famous piece was a coffer made in Paris in 1532–33, 32 R.J. Knecht, Renaissance Warrior and Patron: The Reign of Francis I (Cambridge, 1994), pp. 116–17; M. Walsby, The Counts of Laval: Culture, Patronage and Religion in Fifteenth and Sixteenth Century France (Aldershot, 2007), p. 87; Raffaele Tamalio, Federico Gonzaga alla Corte de Francesco I di Francia (Paris, 1994), pp. 256–7 Federico Gonzaga to Francesco Gonzaga, Chambéry, 17 June 1516 and pp. 277–8 Stazio Gadio to Isabella d’Este, L’Arbresle, 11 July 1516. 33 Hall, Union of the Two Noble and Illustre Famelies, p. 620. 34 On the bonnets see L & P, III i, 852. Account of material supplied to Katherine in April and May 1520 including ‘2 doz. silk points for the French henchmen, 12d; ribbon and aglets for their bonnets, 16d’. 35 T. Schroder, ‘“Rich, fierce and greedy for glory”: Court goldsmiths’ work in the early years of Henry VIII’, Silver Society Journal (Autumn 1996), pp. 435–44. 36 P. Glanville, ‘Cardinal Wolsey and the goldsmiths’, in Cardinal Wolsey: Church, state and art, ed. S. Gunn and P. Lindley (Cambridge, 1991), pp. 131–48.

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which eventually ended up in the collection of the earl of Chesterfield.37 Jean Hotman made a large number of diplomatic gifts for Francis I to present to ambassadors during the 1530s. These included cups, plates and other vessels, and gold chains.38 Each king also gave gifts of ‘largese’ to the members of his counterpart’s entourages in the course of the tournaments and banqueting. Henry gave 2500 crowns to the French royal household but the amount Francis gave its English equivalent is unknown. Henry also made specific presents of cash to several of the more prominent members of the French king’s chambre. Anne de Montmorency, seigneur de Rochepot received £200. Olivier de La Vernarde, seigneur de La Bastie, at the time the resident French ambassador in Henry’s court, received £133 6s 8d. ‘Bryan, a gentleman of the French court’ who received £100 was almost certainly the future admiral Philippe de Chabot, seigneur de Brion who, with Montmorency, had jousted as part of Henry’s team in the tournament. No fewer than nine gold chains, most taken from members of Wolsey’s household, were distributed to gentilshommes de la chambre, including the seigneurs de Morette, de Brosse and de Pecalvary, all former hostages in England.39 More incidental display and gift-giving were involved in the costumes for the tournament. As noted above, bards with bases of cloth of silver decorated with golden basil branches were worn by Henry and his band in the field tourney on 21 June. The French observers seem to have entirely missed the literal and metaphorical message they were intended to convey about not harming the ‘richemount’ of Tudor England. Richard Gibson’s revels accounts reveal that the golden basil branches were all ripped off by the Frenchmen and then traded and worn within the English and French entourages. Gibson’s accounts also record that, presumably on Henry’s orders, Francis was given another eight horses’ bards and bases of cloth of gold by ‘Assamus the king’s armourer’.40 As Hall’s many descriptions from the decade before 1520 make clear, giving away tournament and revel costumes at the conclusion of festive events was common practice at the English court. In her study of gift exchange in sixteenth-century France, Natalie Zemon Davis, drawing on a wide range of anthropological studies of gift-giving by Marcel Mauss, Bronislaw Malinoswki and Claude Levi-Strauss, identified four main modes of present-giving.41 These were: Christian charity across and 37 I. Toesca, ‘Silver in the time of François Ier: A New Identification’, Apollo, 90 (1969), pp. 292–7. 38 M. Bimbenet-Privat, Les Orfèvres Parisiens de la Renaissance (1506–1620) (Paris, 1992), pp. 508–9 and pp. 544–5. 39 L & P, III ii, p. 1541. King’s Payments for June 1520. 40 L & P, III ii, p. 1556. Revels Accounts for 1520. 41 N.Z. Davis, The Gift in Sixteenth-Century France (Oxford, 2000), pp. 17–35.; M. Mauss, Essai sur le don (Paris, 1925).

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down the social scale; neighbourly generosity; tokens of friendly affection; and gifts of liberality or literal ‘munificence’, usually given by wealthy individuals to others of their social status or their clients and servants.42 The last two types are most relevant to the present discussion. Within families and in the upper levels of the social hierarchy, the different modes of giftgiving and responding frequently overlapped. A nobleman’s gift of food, such as a haunch of venison or a brace of pheasants to a younger cousin living in reasonable proximity might be at once an act of familial and friendly affection and also gift of liberality from a patron to a client. Such a gift could express an expectation of continued association and co-operation even as it demonstrated the giver’s apparently spontaneous generosity and, incidentally, his gentlemanly hunting prowess. Many of these kinds of exchanges have been noted by Sharon Kettering, Kristen Neuschel, Mark Greengrass and David Potter, among others, in their studies of family patronage networks in sixteenth-century France.43 In the same way, one monarch’s gift to another, his generous treatment of another, or of another’s high ranking servants was both a token of friendly affection and a gift of liberality intended to declare the sufficiency of his own material and human resources and to redound to his own reputation and honour as a prince. These modes of gift-giving shared with the others the essential feature of gift exchange in late medieval understanding, namely the quality of reciprocity. A gift had freely to be given in order to be a gift but it also carried obligations to its recipient. Gratitude and prayerful thanks were usually all that could be expected from a beggar or an indigent housewife receiving a parishioner’s charity. Assurances of gratitude and an affirmation of mutuality, or even the assurance of future help to the donor were the appropriate responses to a neighbourly gift. Monarchs, as nobles, exchanged gifts that were expected to secure the gratitude, friendship but, above all, the respect of the recipient. The ‘best’ gifts in this respect were spontaneous acts of generosity and on one occasion Francis I did act in an unexpectedly spontaneous manner and may be understood to have presented himself as a gift to Henry. On the morning of Sunday 17 June, Francis rose early and taking with him just a few companions, rode to Guînes and to the castle where Henry was lodged. When he was met by the governor of the castle and the archers of the royal guard, Francis demanded to see Henry. The governor had little choice but to comply with this royal request and Francis was duly taken to the door 42 Davis, The Gift, pp. 17–35. 43 S. Kettering, ‘Patronage in Early Modern France’, French Historical Studies, 17 (1992), pp. 839–62; M. Greengrass, ‘Noble Affinities in early modern France: The case of Henri I de Montmorency, Constable of France’, European History Quarterly, 16 (1986), pp. 275–311; D.L. Potter, War and Government in the French Provinces: Picardy 1470–1560 (Cambridge, 1993); T. Rentet, ‘Network Mapping: Ties of Fidelity and dependency among the major domestic officers of Anne de Montmorency’, French History, 17 (2003), pp. 109–126.

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of the king’s chamber, which he first banged on. He then opened the door and entered the king’s chamber unannounced, surprising Henry who had not long been out of bed. Francis declared himself to be Henry’s prisoner and assured him of his good faith. He then apparently assisted Henry to dress, helping him on with his shirt. They then embraced and Henry gave Francis a collar of great value. According to various sources, Francis returned the compliment either with his own collar or with jewelled bracelets. His choice of a collar was conventional but carried particular overtones. Francis had actually been pushing for a mutual exchange of chivalric orders at the meeting; something Henry had absolutely refused. The two then rode together to Ardres to meet the Queen of France and a banquet and masque followed.44 Francis’s visit drew praise and censure in equal measure. His friend the seigneur de Florange upbraided him, calling him a madman to have done as he did and wished to the devil those who had so advised him. To which Francis replied that he well knew nobody would have advised such a course; it was his idea alone.45 That may well be but in acting as he did, Francis drew upon several quite recent traditions in his dealings with Henry that themselves had antecedents in medieval diplomacy and the law of arms. The first of these was the idea of making himself a prisoner, actually a hostage, to Henry as a demonstration of his own good faith. Going to meet Henry personally and if the reports are accurate, behaving like a gentilhomme de la chambre, by helping to dress the king, was simultaneously an act of great humility in a king and an assertion of his right as one sovereign to behave familiarly towards another. Breaking conventions just because he could, because of who he was, seems to have been characteristic of Francis I. As the chronicler Hall rather disapprovingly recorded, in late 1518 he had ridden through the streets of Paris in the company of his own close friends and several of the younger members of the English embassy there at the time, ‘throwing eggs, stones and other foolish trifles at the people, which light demeanour of a king was much discommended at’.46 Nor was his visit to Henry that Sunday morning in June 1520 the last time Francis upset protocol in order to show his personal and social ‘virtus’ and superiority over an erstwhile rival and putative friend and ally. In July 1538, Francis met the emperor Charles V for the first time in twelve years at Aigues-Mortes on the south coast of France. Neither sovereign was, strictly speaking, the guest of the other in this encounter. Both had agreed to meet to resolve the future of the duchy of Milan, the suzerainty of which had been disputed between them since Francis’s accession. The protocol for the meeting was as strict and as balanced as that for the Field of Cloth 44 CSPVen, III, 91 Giovanni Badoer and Antonio Giustiniani, to the Venetian Signory. 45 Mémoires du maréchal de Florange dit le jeune adventureux, ed. R. Goubaux and P-A Lemoisne (Paris, 1913), pp. 268–70. 46 Hall, Union of the Two Noble and Illustre Famelies, p. 597.

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of Gold had been and for very similar reasons. There was little real trust between the two men.47 No sooner had the imperial fleet dropped anchor in the harbour at Aigues-Mortes than Francis had himself rowed out in a small galley with an escort of only a few great noblemen and no guard, to greet the emperor personally on his galley. This gesture of putting himself in a vulnerable position as an apparent statement of trust was the prelude to a ritualized reconciliation between two former enemies. The emperor was in fact somewhat disconcerted by Francis coming out to meet him in the way he did, but, forced to respond, he took Francis’s hand and helped the French king to board his own vessel. Francis’s gesture simultaneously shocked and pleased contemporaries, just as his behaviour at Guînes had eighteen years earlier. It also compelled Charles V to disembark and greet Francis on land (something he would apparently have preferred not to do) in order to keep a symmetrical balance of honour between them and avoid being suspected of bad faith.48 The next day Francis and Charles dined together on land and the emperor retired to his private lodgings for a siesta. As soon as he learned that the emperor had re-awoken, Francis went to the emperor’s rooms unannounced and burst in, asking Charles how he was and whether he had slept well. Charles was still in bed as Francis entered, divested of the usual trappings of majesty. He jumped out of bed but before he could say more than a few words, Francis, who was splendidly dressed, presented him with a diamond ring worth 30,000 écus, an obvious token of faith. Charles, still partly undressed after his sleep, accepted the gift saying, ‘my brother I have nothing at present with which to reciprocate[revenger] for [this present]’. The word revenger which Charles used, was deeply ambiguous.49 As Xavier le Person has noted, it meant both to reciprocate but also to exercise the right to revenge oneself on another. The emperor’s use of such a word captures well the underlying tone of challenge he felt in the encounter. Of course he had to reciprocate somehow. Grabbing the first thing that came to hand, he placed a collar of the Order of the Golden Fleece around the French king’s neck. But it was Pyrrhic retaliation, for the collar’s presentation, even in this impromptu and unofficial way, carried with it the implication that the recipient, Charles’s bitter enemy, was worthy of it as a gentleman of honour equal to himself. No sooner had Charles counter-attacked as best he could than Francis completed the rout. His took off his own collar of the Order of Saint-Michel and placed it around the emperor’s neck. Both sovereigns had in fact been members of each other’s orders since 1516 and Charles had to accept the collar, but in doing so he 47 Knecht, , Renaissance Warrior and Patron, pp. 386–97 for the wider context of the 1538 entente agreed between Francis and the Emperor. 48 X. Le Person, ‘A Moment of ‘Resverie’: Charles V and Francis I’s encounter at AiguesMortes (July 1538)’, French History, 19 (2005), pp. 1–27, at p. 13. 49 Ibid, p. 25.

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recognized anew that he was bound by the honour codes of their respective orders to treat Francis as an equal in all matters. The 1538 episode therefore offers a useful retrospective on that of 1520. In both encounters, Francis was apparently trying to demonstrate good faith, to make a new start with an erstwhile enemy. The strategic issue which informed his very personal approach to diplomacy on both occasions was Milan. In 1520 he wanted Henry effectively to recognize his imperial status as duke of Milan and to help him keep it from Charles, and in 1538 he wanted Charles to give it back to him – or at least to his dynasty. Both Henry and Charles wanted Francis to accept that getting what he wanted depended upon his keeping to the terms of agreements they were making. Francis did not dissent from the proposition but, for him, the formal terms of treaties were evidently not where the compelling heart of princely agreement lay. In making the impromptu visits he did, Francis was trying to personalize peace between himself and the other man. In both instances he placed himself in an apparently vulnerable position in order to break through the physical and metaphorical boundaries of protocol that separated him from the other. Once there, he sought to demonstrate his own evident trustworthiness and his expectation of the same in the other. His visits were intended simultaneously to impress and intimidate. To make his point, Francis used the behaviour and language of chivalric generosity, presenting his enemy with highly symbolic gifts and with his own presence as a sovereign prince, a knight and a royal brother. Visiting, apparently as a supplicant to honour the other man, he also trapped him in his own private space, from which there was only one way out – a reciprocal declaration by word and gesture of mutual generosity and faith with Francis that could then be used against his counterpart in the future if necessary. By visiting as a servant and an enquiring friend, Francis really wanted to show that he was the boss. At the Field of Cloth of Gold, the gift, whether it was a physical object or the physical presence of the other sovereign, was used as a weapon in the competitive rivalry between the two kings. At the heart of this competition lay a very ancient ideal; that of the monarch as a magnificent warrior, patron, and judge or governor. From 1518, if not 1514, relations with France were one of the principal vehicles used by Henry VIII to fulfil or incarnate this ideal of monarchical strength. Politically he was not always really in control of these relations, and sometimes he was merely following where Francis led, but he took his turn to lead as well, particularly in the years when he was assisted by the imagination, energy and sharp political instincts of Cardinal Wolsey. Gift-exchange between the two kings themselves and between them and each other’s servants at the Field of Cloth of Gold was an important aspect of these relations. Through extravagant giving and receiving of gifts, from jewellery, to horses and armour and each other’s friends, each king asserted

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his honour as a prince. The competition between the two kings in the years after the meeting stimulated intellectual and artistic patronage, particularly in England, and later helped to keep Henry’s court in touch with continental developments in the fine arts, decorative design, military technology, and architecture. This was important when other avenues of cultural transmission were closed or restricted due to the break with Rome. Whether in the longer term Francis I’s very personal and confrontational approach to gift-giving and dealing personally with his rivals wherever possible worked quite as well as he hoped may be doubted. Henry VIII was preparing for war against him, in alliance with Charles V, a little more than a year after the Field of Cloth of Gold and Francis never got Milan back from the emperor. But in the short term, his beaux-gestes paid off handsomely. As Soardino, the Mantuan ambassador, reported from the Field of Cloth of Gold, two days after Francis’s visit to Henry, the English king duly responded with a somewhat ponderous early-morning visit of his own to Ardres, culminating in another round of gift-exchanges. Soardino’s report on the perception of Henry’s visit to Ardres neatly captures how competitive gift-giving between them worked. He observed: The whole court of France rejoices, for until now, no mark of confidence had been displayed by the English king; nay in all matters he invariably evinced small trust; but the Most Christian King has compelled him to make this demonstration, having set the example by placing himself with such assurance in his hands last Sunday in the Castle of Guînes.50

50 CSPVen II, 90 Soardino to the Marquis of Mantua, ‘Lisien’ [Licques], 19 June 1520. My italics.

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4 Cultures of the Body, Medical Regimen, and Physic at the Tudor Court Elizabeth T. Hurren

Tudor Medicine on the European Stage In the summer of 1516, Leonardo da Vinci moved permanently to France. King Francis I invited the famous artist to become his ‘Paintere du Roy’.1 It was a lucrative and prestigious appointment. The position of Court Painter paid a generous pension of ‘1000 scudi per annum’. For health reasons, Leonardo needed better patronage. Entries in his private notebooks reveal that the famous artist had been ill with mild paralysis on the right side of his body. In France he was seeking better climes, financial security, and improved medical care. On arrival Leonardo adopted a new medical regimen to aid his recuperation. He copied down ‘a recipe for better physic’ that was in circulation at the fashionable centres of European medical education at Bologna, Padua, and Paris. Before long the regimen had crossed the English Channel and was being promoted by the medical fraternity of Tudor London too. Its translation advised courtiers: If you want to be healthy observe this regime. Do not eat when you have no appetite, and dine lightly. Chew well, and whatever you take into you Should be well cooked and of simple ingredients. He who takes medicine [self-doses] is ill advised. Beware anger and avoid stuffy air. Stay standing a while when you get up from a meal. Make sure you do not sleep at midday. Let your wine be tempered [mixed with water], taken a little and often, Not between meals, nor on an empty stomach. 1 C. Nicholls, Leonardo da Vinci: The Flights of the Mind (London and New York, 2005), pp. 486–93.

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Neither delay, nor prolong your visits to the privy. If you take exercise, let it not be too strenuous Do not lie with your belly upward and your head Downward. Be well covered at night, And rest your head and keep your mind cheerful. Avoid wantonness and keep to this diet.2

This type of dietary advice was well known during the reign of King Henry VIII (1509–47). Contemporary accounts confirm that the monarch was fascinated by humanist learning and the latest early modern physic.3 But Leonardo’s cautious regimen was not for Henry. The English monarch loved all of the physical pleasures that the doggerel sonnet recommended a European courtier should avoid. The Venetian ambassador wrote in 1531 that the king: is accomplished in every manly exercise, sits his horse well, tilts with the lance, throws the quoit, shoots with the bow excellently well, is a fine tennis player, and practices all these gift with the greatest industry … He is kind and affable, full of graciousness and courtesy, and is liberal, particularly to the men of science, who is never weary of obliging.4

Henry was, according to these diplomatic reports, renowned for his romantic nature and a ‘superabundance of nervous energy’.5 The Milanese ambassador, Paolo da Lodi, likewise reported of the young king that: ‘He is never still or quiet … He does wonders and leaps like a stag’ at dancing.6 Henry believed in vigorous exercise on the hunting field; he often jousted dangerously risking grave personal injury; and hawked despite his failing eyesight into old age.7 His appetite, like that of most noble families who celebrated being fatter as a sign of wealth, was nonetheless notable. Henry snacked between meals, ate huge portions and consumed rich ingredients. Accounts from the kitchens of the royal palaces show that Henry relished red meat. He could not have known the modern science of nutrition but he did physically experience how difficult a high-protein diet is to digest and hard for his blocked bowels to expel (unlike Leonardo, a famous vegetarian). In the Calendar of State Papers detailed 2 Ibid., p. 477–8. 3 Seen in the famous Hans Holbein painting in which ‘King Henry VIII gives a new charter to The Company of Barber Surgeons in 1540’ – for context on this and the large physic garden that the monarch patronized, see the website of the Worshipful Company of Barber Surgeons today at www.barberscompany.org/hall.html. 4 See CSPVen, I, 176. 5 See Allen B. Hinds, ed., Calendar of State Papers and Manuscripts, Existing in the Archives and Collections of Milan (London, 1912) and cited in, for instance, Carolly Erickson, Great Harry: The Extravagant Life of Henry VIII (London and New York, 2004), p. 91. 6 Erickson, Great Harry, pp. 90–91. This account still provides one the best summarises of Henry’s physical condition and medical profile; the latter has tended to be understudied, see also, chapter 44, pp. 359–67. 7 Ibid., pp. 362–3.

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records survive of the food served to those that ate in the Privy Chamber. An entry in 1526, for example, attests that Henry personally ordered a ‘flesh day’ each week ‘frome Estir [Easter] untyll Mychellmes [Michalemas]’, and that when he brought his illegitimate son, Henry Fitzroy, duke of Richmond and Somerset, to court (around June 1525) he decreed his diet to be: An ordinary diet by estimation for my Lord’s persone, his bords ende, and for his chambre and household … First course:-Pottage; boiled meat, 12d.; beef and mutton 8d.; 4 green geese, 20d.; 3 roast capons, 3s.; 1 q. of roast veal, 9d.; fryaunce or custard, 16d. Second course:-Half a lamb or kid, 12d.; 6 rabbits, 10d.; 14 pigeons, 6d.; a wildfowl, 2s.; ‘tairt or bakenmete,’ 16d.; fructor, 2d.; … trenchers, for his dener with wayters, 8d.; 4 gal. ale, 4d.; 2 pitchers of wine, 16d.; fruits, 6d. = 17s. 1d.8

Ten portions of meat in two courses took their toll on the royal digestive system (despite the pudding fruit). Small wonder perhaps that Henry VIII’s suits of armour kept expanding in size. Those on display at the Tower of London today reveal his torso measurements:

Age Height Chest circumference Waist circumference

1514

1536

1541

23 6 feet 2 inches 42 inches 35 inches

45 Ditto 45 inches 37 inches

50 Ditto 57 inches 54 inches*

* The second suit of armour in 1536 was made just before his last jousting accident; and by 1541 the Royal armourer wrote that he was ‘very stout’, see J.F.D. Shrewsbury, ‘Henry VIII, a Medial Study’, Journal of the History of Medicine and Allied Science, 7 (Spring, 1952), pp. 141–185, quote at p. 176.

In middle age the royal apothecaries were often summoned to cure the king’s painful constipation. Being overweight necessitated prolonged visits to the privy.9 Henry’s thirst was said to be ‘unquenchable’. Naturally he drank lots of red wine, since local water supplies were considered a health hazard, but then he needed to urinate frequently. At night he suffered restless sleeping patterns, cat-napping in the day to try to cure his insomnia. Taken 8 The National Archives, Calendar of State Papers, Part I, State Papers Domestic, 1509–93, SP 1/35 f.149. 1526. 9 See J.S. Brewer, R.H. Brodie and James Gardiner, eds, Letters and Papers, Foreign and Domestic of the Reign of Henry VIII, 21 volumes (London, 1862–1910), L & P, XII ii, 394 for his apothecaries and their cures in 1546–47; Blaxland Stubbs, ‘Royal Recipes for Plasters, Ointments and Other Medications’, The Chemist and Druggist, 114, Special Medical Issue (June 1931), pp. 792–4, also gives one of the few detailed accounts of the Royal apothecary’s work for Henry’s constipation and ulcers.

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together, contemporary evidence strongly suggests that Henry was neither a perfectly balanced man, nor someone who followed strict medical advice. The handsome prince needed to adopt a healthier lifestyle before middle age slowed his metabolism. Instead Henry’s medical regimen was an idiosyncratic reflection of his changeable personality.10 Henry nonetheless took a prestigious interest in the reconstitution of the Tudor medical world for two reasons. Disease was very common and people expected to be sick more often. He also had important intellectual and political motivations for paying attention to the latest cures. The king was a keen scholar and studied famous humanist texts on the body as an expression of his authority. Henry likewise recognized that the dissolution of the monasteries destroyed not only the religious power of the Catholic church, but a pivotal system of community healthcare too.11 In times of necessity and social upheaval this had to be replaced with alternative lay medical services. That process entailed a fundamental reorganization of the traditional medical fraternity (physicians, barber-surgeons and apothecaries) that served the court, metropolis and provincial English towns. How this transition in expertise was managed in the light of Henry’s personal medical preferences has occupied historians of medicine.12 They have been keen to unravel to what extent the monarch’s medical mentality extended, or limited, his royal influence during a crucial phase of the early Reformation process. Key questions remain unanswered about the ways in which Henry directly, and indirectly, influenced the medical regimen of daily life in Tudor England. More archive work is needed to establish how popular his official reach was when it came to managing illness, reforming doctoring standards, and what part those new lay services (regular and irregular) played in maintaining his royal authority. This chapter thus explores three medical perspectives of Henry’s kingship. It begins by briefly setting Henry’s medical mentality in its historical context. The first section explores common Tudor beliefs about better physic. 10 A viewpoint established by Henry’s first Royal biographer, Edward, Lord Herbert of Cherbury, The life and raigne of King Henry the eighth (London, 1649), subsequently developed in Charles Oman, ‘The Personality of Henry VIII’, Quarterly Review, 269 (July 1937), pp. 88– 104, and recently expanded upon in David Starkey, Henry: Virtuous Prince (New York and London, 2009). 11 See context in Peregrine Horden and Richard Smith, The Locus of Care: Families, Communities, Institutions and the Provision of Welfare since Antiquity, Routledge Studies in the Social History of Medicine Series (London, 1997). 12 Refer to Francis Romeril Madison, Margaret Pelling, Charles Webster, Linacre Studies: Essays on the Life and Work of Thomas Linacre, 1460–1524 (Oxford, 1977); Margaret Pelling, The Common Lot: Sickness, Medical Occupations and Urban Poor in Early Modern England (London, 1988); Margaret Pelling, Medical Conflicts in Early Modern London: Patronage, Physicians and Irregular Practitioners, 1550–1640, Oxford University Press Studies in Social History Series (Oxford, 2003); Margaret Pelling and Scott Mandelbrote, The Practice of Reform in Health. Medicine and Science, 1500–2000 (London, 2005).

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The second section engages with some of the support staff connected to the daily life of the court. We are introduced to the extended retinue of staff in the pay of a minor noble landed family, the Cholmleys of Yorkshire who lived both at court and in the North of England: an area often neglected in the social history of medicine. Using contemporary household accounts overlooked in local archives can help us start to illuminate the shadowy social spaces of royal palaces such as Hampton Court. Those servants played vital medical roles in the birthing rooms, kitchens, stillrooms and herb gardens of court life. In the third section the influence of elite women and their practical medical care is re-examined. It will be shown that female kinship helped to maintain basic doctoring and nursing standards at court too. Often regimen was passed amongst educated females that connected together larger noble households. Those links were maintained and managed through regular conversations between contemporaries, a method of sharing knowledge about better physic termed talking ‘chest-to-chest’ in Tudor times.13 It often happened inside birthing suites where close relations and wider kinship ties congregated in a private female medical space. This family physic had a privileged medical discourse. It spoke of the need for the strong physical presence of certain bloodlines at court. It was those birthright claims that came to symbolize the resilience of the body politic of the Tudor court and, by association, King Henry VIII’s physical power and medical well-being on the English throne.

Physic at the Court of Henry VIII Antiquarianism was a fashionable pursuit at the Tudor court for dynastic and medical reasons.14 Establishing a family’s bloodline was imperative for all noble families.15 Precedence dictated access to the physical body of the monarch at court. The dukes of Norfolk were, for instance, renowned for their proud bearing.16 They occupied lavish suites of rooms in the royal palaces by virtue of their birthright claims and vast wealth. The head of the Howard family (cousins of the Boleyns) was one of the richest men in Europe. In battle he had also earned his position as hereditary Earl Marshal of England, responsible for calling men of noble birth to arms in time of war. This gave the family unique access to patronage and the centre of power. The duke of 13 For an important overview, see David Cressy, Birth, Marriage and Death: Ritual, Religion and the Life Cycle in Tudor and Stuart England (Oxford, 1997). 14 Thomas Woodcock and John Martin Robinson, The Oxford Guide to of Heraldry (Oxford, 1990); W.H. St John Hope and Antony R. Wagner, A Grammar of English Heraldry (Cambridge, 2011). 15 See for example, J.P.D. Cooper, Propaganda and the Tudor State: Political Culture in the West Country (Oxford, 2003). 16 See. notably, on the Norfolk Nobility, Jessie Childs, Henry VIII’s Last Victim: The Life and Times of Henry Howard Earl of Surrey (London, 2008).

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Norfolk thus played a prominent heraldry role in courtly life. He managed the Royal Court of Chivalry with the Garter King of Arms. This remains even today one of the oldest civil courts, governed by heraldry statutes dating from 1066. It has the legal responsibility for monitoring the legitimacy of noble birthright.17 In the collection of the Royal College of Arms many disputed bloodline claims survive in the antiquary books of heralds. Most are filled with family trees. They also contain important, little appreciated, medical and religious doggerel. It is common to find medical recipes amongst the folios because better physic was essential if a family’s bloodline was to survive into adulthood. Regeneration depended on good regimen advice. It often had a strong religious element too. A typical entry for the heraldry book of Lord Mountjoy, leading member of the Privy Chamber and Henry VIII’s ‘socius studiorum’ (companion in studies), has survived in the Vincent Collection.18 It reads: I am confessest I trust the Priest I beat my Backe and Brest my Fyst With Holy Water to be Present

And with contrition I all recant

I pray to God and Heavenlie Host I crosse myself at every Post I eate my Maker in the Breade I deale my Dole when I am Deade And thus I think that well I may My very all Sinnes soon put away.19

In many respects, Mountjoy’s doggerel summarized Henry’s basic medical and spiritual beliefs. During the early part of his reign, the Catholic church was the mainstay of his religious outlook, with its creed of transubstantiation, charity to the poor, confession to a priest, followed by penance and absolution.20 Canon law also decreed that it was sometimes necessary to bear physical pain as a punishment for mortal sins such as fornication. If good health was God-given, then devilish behaviour could bring about lifethreatening illness. The Tudors believed that divine judgement should ideally

17 The most comprehensive account of its workings is still found in G.D. Squibb, The High Court of Chivalry: A Study in the Civil Law of England (Oxford, first published 1959, reissued 1997). 18 David Starkey, Six Wives: The Queens of Henry VIII (London, 2004: Vintage), pp. 106–7 describes in detail the close relationship between Mountjoy, scholar and mentor to Henry (thirteen years younger). 19 The Royal College of Arms, MS Vincent Collection, folio 403, Lord Mountjoy family doggerel. 20 There is a large historiography on the early Reformation in Tudor England. For an important overview, see Eamon Duffy, The Stripping of the Altars: Traditional Religion in England, 1400–1580 (Yale, New Haven, 2005).

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be borne with stoicism.21 Nonetheless during sickness a family priest was called to provide daily solace in the form of regular prayers for the penitent sinner. A trusted family apothecary co-ordinated pain management since the fate of the patient was believed to be finely balanced in the heart. The sincere repentant who had access to medical skills could survive the deathbed scene, but many believed that self-dosing remedies were never effective without the power of contrite prayers. For Henry VIII religious ritual and better physic were always intimately connected to the actual bodily function of court life. Henry had been brought up to believe in the power of divine intervention and that a monarch was closer to God than his subjects: a theme reiterated in several chapters of this book. From a medical standpoint, this also placed him in a unique position at the head of the body of the court. In his Latin studies he read in First Corinthians Chapter 12 that the scripture reaffirmed this social order with physical metaphors. Verse 14 advised that the ‘body is not one member, but many’.22 The foot it stated needs the hand, just as the ear needs the eye (verses 15–16). Likewise all five senses were essential for the whole body of mankind to function healthily (verses 18–19). In the body of the Tudor court there were, the Bible said, multiple talents. Verse 28 reminded each subject that ‘God hath set some in the church, first apostles, secondarily prophets, thirdly teachers, after that, miracles, then gifts of healings, helps, governments, diversities of tongues’. The king commanded them all, but he also had a duty to ‘care for the sick, and the comely’, like natural fools (verse 23).23 Henry knew that ‘God hath tempered the body together, having given more abundant honour to that part which lacked’. He could not therefore in good conscience be a tyrant and destroy at will because in so doing, he would hurt his physical command of the whole body of the kingdom. In the Tudor imagination, a balanced nation depended on a level-headed king who ruled with good heart. In his personal habits, Henry, like his Tudor subjects, followed a standard Galen regimen, espousing the balance of the four bodily humours.24 He did so for medical and political reasons. A people must look to their king, but 21 See, for example, Christopher Haigh, English Reformations: Religion, Politics and Society under the Tudors (Oxford, 1993). 22 All quotations are taken from the King James Version of the Bible, Corinthians 1:12 even though Henry would have read the Vulgate in Greek or Latin Scripture. 23 For recent scholarship on the history of Natural Fools, see Suzannah Lipscomb, ‘All the King’s Fools’, History Today, 61/8 (2011), and ‘All the King’s Fools’, a public engagement project and theatre production at Hampton Court Palace in partnership with Foolscap and the Misfits Theatre Company (October 2011) sponsored by the Wellcome Trust with Suzannah Lipscomb, Thomas Betteridge and Elizabeth Hurren (historical consultants), Oxford Brookes University. 24 For context, see Carole Rawcliffe, Medicine and Society in Later Medieval England (London, 1995); Mary Lindemann, Medicine and Society in Early Modern Europe: New Approaches to European History (Cambridge, 1999); Andrew Wear, Knowledge and Practice in English Medicine, 1550–1680 (Cambridge, 2000).

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a monarch must also mirror his subjects. A Christian sovereign was dutybound to take the moral and physical lead by being of a balanced body and sound mind. If he did otherwise his royal tree might not endure the ravages of two dread words, disease and death. Noble families often echoed this medical mentality in their family shields. One such for the Cholmondley family of Cheshire prayed: ‘Our Handy work, like to Ye fruitful Tree, Blesse Thou, O Lord; Let it not Blasted be.’25 Those sentiments expressed the fact that the fates could be cruel, medical misfortune destroying a family line in one generation. It was for this key reason that from birth the court soothsayers eagerly studied Henry’s birth chart. At the time, Henry was the second son and not due to inherit, but life was unpredictable for everyone, especially royal children. The heir and spare, Prince Arthur and Henry, were crucial for the line of succession. What the soothsayers cast in Henry’s case was a complicated medical future. A child such as Henry born under the astrological sign of cancer, on the 28 June 1491, was said to be governed by the watery and maternal cycles of the moon.26 The court soothsayers predicted that the baby prince would suffer from common diseases normal for his birth sign. These included agues, coughs, chlorosis, general fevers, green sickness, quinsy, rheumatism, smallpox and gallstones. The heavenly planets on the day of his birth were then plotted in two ways.27 On the sinister side of his mother’s heraldry and bloodline there were said to be favourable family attributes. Henry would inherit a cheerful, frivolous and flirty disposition, growing into a man of action. On his father’s dexter side, however, the soothsayers forewarned of excessive personality traits. They saw a short-temper, someone over-sensitive to personal criticism, a person inclined to over-eat and drink too much alcohol. The prince would be troubled in adulthood by restless sleeping patterns, excessive wet dreams, inclined to blinding headaches, painful constipation and a tendency to worry from his paternal line. These predictions proved to be remarkably prescient. Henry’s ‘maladies of the mind’, described by the soothsayer, were above all to

25 Sir Hugh Chomley, Some Passages from a History of the Cholmley Family (York and London, 1652), p. 16. 26 On the practice of astrology and medicine, see, notably, Gerhild Scholz Williams and Charles, D. Gunnoe, Paracelsian Moments: Science, Medicine and Astronomy in Early Modern Europe: Sixteenth Century Essays and Studies (Turman, USA, 2003). 27 Links between heraldry, astrology, and medicine have been understudied during Henry’s reign. For a recent appraisal of popular trends during the later Tudors, see Lauren Kassell, Medicine and Magic in Elizabethan London: Simon Forman, Astrologer, Alchemist and Physician (Oxford, 2007) and Louise Hill Curth, English Almanacs, Astrology and Popular Medicine, 1550–1700 (Manchester, 2007).

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trouble his romantic history.28 It was for this reason that music would be his chief medicine, a traditional cure for love sickness and melancholy.29 The royal soothsayers saw that the key to Henry’s medical future lay in his heart.30 This delicate instrument they forewarned would need to be tempered otherwise he could pay excessive attention to lovemaking and courtly romance.31 To appreciate fully why Henry proved to be such a predictable romantic character, it is important to delve deeper into his family psyche. Margaret Beaufort, Henry’s grandmother, bequeathed a terrible medical standard to her grandson.32 At just thirteen years old she gave birth to King Henry VII (Henry’s father). The birth was painful and prolonged. The court records suggest that her womb prolapsed, but she had done her duty and fulfilled her destiny.33 In the childbirth room her only male heir secured the Tudor line of succession. Margaret Beaufort forfeited her future fertility for dynastic ends. Henry VIII could not fail where his grandmother had sacrificed her womb to succeed. This meant that with age Henry became an obsessive husband. Diplomatic reports from court all agreed that the king was believed to be an affectionate and skilful lover, but few also failed to notice that Henry harassed his wives for a male heir in the bedchamber.34 Frequent miscarriages and stillbirths beleaguered his six marriages. In this he may have been no different from the noble families and subjects that staffed the court, but his medical failures seemed to symbolize a deeper malaise in his dexter (paternal) bloodline. Henry’s physic threatened to be unbalanced by the carnal desires of the flesh versus a ruthless sexual drive for dynastic ends. At court the midwives connected to the birthing chambers watched and waited to see what destiny had in store for Henry Tudor.35 And they were not alone, for the court was a crowded medical space. It was peopled by a complex array of 28 Erickson, Great Harry, p. 22, outlines his childhood profile. 29 See, notably, Peregrine Horden, Music as Medicine: The History of Music Therapy since Antiquity (London, 2001). 30 See, for example, contemporary thinking in, Andrew Rawdon, A Compendyous Regyment or a Dyetary of Helth, in Early English Text Society, Extra Series, X, ed. F.J. Furnivall (London, 1870). 31 A useful summary can still be found in, John Stevens, ed., Music at the Court of Henry VIII: Musica Britannica, Volume XVIII (London, 1962). 32 On her life story, see Michael K. Jones and Malcolm K Underwood, The King’s Mother: Lady Margaret Beaufort, Countess of Richmond (Cambridge, 1993). 33 For Tudor birthing, refer, Boyd. M. Berry, ‘The First English Paediatricians’, Journal of the History of Ideas, 35/4 (October–December 1974), pp. 561–77. 34 The reliability of Tudor diplomatic exchanges has been questioned by early modern historians. General trends and common observations are therefore referred to in this chapter for reasons of accuracy. 35 Refer to Hector MacLennan, ‘A Gynaecologist Looks at the Tudors’, Medical History, 11/1 (January 1967), pp. 66–74; There has recently been an attempt by an anthropologist and bio-archaeologist to rethink the medical problems of Henry VIII and his wives from a genetic standpoint, see Catrina Banks Whitley and Kyra Kramer, ‘A New Explanation for the Reproductive Woes and Midlife Decline of Henry VIII’, Historical Journal, 53/4 (2010), pp. 827–48.

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support staff that cared for the well-being of the body politic. Recent research on the medical archives of noble families will be used in the next section as an historical prism to illuminate this shadow world in which copious historical actors played their parts in the everyday physic of Tudor life.

Nobles, Bloodlines, and Household Medicine In the fifth year of King Henry VIII’s reign, Sir Roger Cholmley, a native of Cheshire, rode on a fast horse to court to be knighted. On arrival, he was described by one chronicler as a ‘black, proper, and stout man’.36 Through a judicious marriage he had been enriched by landed estates in Yorkshire. He had also earned a fearsome reputation for brutality and military prowess in the Northern Lands. This, though, was tempered by loyalty to his large retinue who lived in ‘great port’ at Roxby near Pickering close to Scarborough. Like many ambitious landed magnates, Sir Roger Cholmley understood the importance of making an impressive entrance at court. He always travelled with a large extended household ‘comprising at least fifty or sixty men-servants’.37 They were employed to feed, protect and boast of his noble standing. In this he copied the modus operandi of his noble patron, the Percys of Alnwick Castle in Northumberland. The family later became closely tied to the Howards of Henderskelfe, known today as Castle Howard, near Malton in Yorkshire.38 Misfortune meanwhile struck Sir Roger on 28 April 1538. He died at court from a summer fever, a condition greatly feared by King Henry VIII. The court was such a crowded and contagious medical space that few could escape the ravages of disease in noxious years when the weather was stagnant and the river water flowed with effluent. Sir Roger Cholmley was succeeded by his eldest and only legitimate son, Sir Richard Cholmley.39 The heir was said to be ‘tall of stature and withal big and strongly made, having had in youth a very ably body’. When Sir Richard arrived at court in some style in 1539 the family chronicler noted that ‘his hair was black, his eyes the same hue, and his complexion a clear brown’. He was soon 36 Family history reconstructed from record linkage work on Sir Hugh Chomeley, Some Passages from a History of the Cholmley Family (York and London, 1652), pp. 1–16; Buxton MS, Family Papers, Cambridge University Library Manuscript Department; The Cholmley MS, Family Probate and Wills, Borthwick Institute for Archives, York; Cholmley and Strickland of Whitby MS, Family papers, North Yorkshire County Record Office, Durham. 37 Sir Hugh Cholmely, Some Passages, p. 388. 38 An excellent appraisal of the Tudor peerage and their noble standing can be found in, G.W Bernard, ed., The Tudor Nobility (Manchester, 1992). 39 There was also an illegitimate son who lived in Essex and famously founded in 1565 by Royal Charter Sir Roger Cholmley’s School at Highgate in London, which is still educating children today. The illegitimate Sir Roger did not inherit the Yorkshire landholdings that were entailed to the legitimate line of Sir Richard.

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known by his fellow courtiers as ‘the Black Knight of the North’, a tribute to his physically imposing appearance and robust ancestry. There were, though, other important reasons for his notoriety at court, and these illuminate the pivotal role that family physic played in courtly life. Sir Richard Cholmley was said to be ‘extraordinarily given to the love of women’.40 He married ‘when young Margaret, the daughter of Lord Conyers’ from Norton Conyers near Ripon in North Yorkshire. Like many females she died in childbirth and before long Sir Richard had courted and won the hand of a noted beauty, Lady Catherine Clifford in 1533. Catherine was the ‘beautiful widow of Lord Scrope of Bolton Castle’ and her mother was Lady Margaret Percy, Countess of Northumberland. It was an ambitious and important blood alliance for the Cholmleys. This, however, was when the family troubles began and what brought their kinship ties to the personal attention of the Privy Chamber and King Henry VIII. Sir Richard’s new wife, Lady Catherine, held strong opinions. It was said by the Cholmley family recorder that she was ‘not a woman to be gainsaid in love’.41 After the birth of their first child, she found out that Sir Richard had strayed during her long confinement in the birthing rooms at court. The same family history records that a long and bitter dispute arose about the sexual conduct of Sir Richard. Husband and wife became a warring faction. As a beautiful woman, Catherine expected, if not total fidelity, at least discretion and loyalty in public. Sir Richard, on the other hand, did not see why he should limit his affections or wandering eye to one woman. At court, the Cholmley marital dispute was attention seeking. Sir Richard paraded his affronted manhood rebuffed by Lady Catherine’s chiding; she cleverly was said to have withdrawn conjugal rights in the bedchamber until his sexual conduct mended. When affronted, she flirted and flouted her renowned beauty inflaming his desire. Eventually, they reconciled for reasons of birthright. Their first child was a girl and Sir Richard was desperate for a male heir to secure the noble standing of his bloodline.42 To do otherwise would make a mockery of his dynastic marriage to Catherine. Birthright was pointless without the correct birthing, and for this reason Sir Richard maintained a large medical retinue at court. Sir Richard Cholmley, like his father, was said by his family chronicler to ‘always like to have a great train of menials about his person’.43 This suited his generous, gregarious and genial personality. There were cooks to prepare his meals and apothecaries to watch his diet. Herbalists prepared medicinal remedies and barber surgeons bled the extended family retinue in the spring 40 Sir Hugh Cholmley, Some Passages, pp.388–9. 41 Ibid. 42 They had three girls and two male heirs that survived to adulthood. The heir was Sir Henry Cholmley of Whitby who married Margaret Babthorpe and the spare brother was styled John Cholmley of Yorkshire. 43 Sir Hugh Cholmley, Some Passages, p. 388–9.

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(pregnant women and young children were excluded on health grounds). So many people surrounded Sir Richard that the household accounts show that ‘there used to be as often as many as twenty four pieces of beef put in the morning in the pot, yet sometimes it so happened that but one would be left for Sir Richard’s own dinner’.44 It was a family custom, maintained at court, to provide physic and good food to family servants as part of their daily medical regimen. A chronicler described how ‘the idle serving men, it appears, were accustomed to having their breakfast … and going into the kitchen would use their liberty to stick their daggers into the pot and take out the beef without the leave or privacy of the cook’. Sir Richard remained, by all accounts, good humoured when served small portions at mealtimes. It was said that he ‘would merely laugh and cry out, What! Would not the knaves leave me one piece for my own dinner’. Evidence like this alerts historians of medicine to the complexities of household regime and the number of historical actors that were in both temporary and permanent residence at court by the 1530s. Looking closer at the medical records and reading material of the Chomley retinue is instructive. Commonplace and conduct books in the sixteenth century were popular amongst those that managed households connected to noble families.45 This was especially true of ambitious magnates like the Cholmleys. Many hoped to raise the social standing of their bloodlines to the first ranks of the peerage. It was necessary, however, to first study in detail what some early modern historians have called a ‘silent language’ of nobility.46 Richard Verstegan looked back at this private discourse and the close-knit circle of people that physically surrounded the Tudor monarchs in his treaty A Restitution of Decayed Intelligence published in Antwerp in 1605. He elaborated what contemporaries called the ‘etymology of social degrees’. There was a subtext of medical meaning behind the tacit language of each noble family’s bearing in the Tudor world. Verstegan explained: Now was it usual in long foregoing ages, that such as were endued with great wealth and means above others, were chiefly renowned … for their housekeeping and good hospitality, that is for being able and using to feed and sustain many men, and therefore were particularly honoured with the name and title of HLAFORD, which is as inasmuch to say, An afforder of laf, that is a bread-giver.

44 Ibid. All quotations taken from the family history have been verified from record linkage work on family papers, see n. 36 above. 45 See David R. Parker, The Commonplace Book in Tudor London (New York and London, 1998). 46 See, notably, Mary Hazard, The Elizabethan’s Silent Language (New York, 2000).

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And if we duly observe it, we shall find that our nobility of England, which generally do bear the name of Lord, have always, and as it were of successive custom (rightly according to that honourable name) maintained and fed more people to wit, of their servants, retainers, dependants, tenants, as also the poor, than the nobility of any country in the continent, which surely is a thing very honourable and laudable, and most well befitting noblemen, and right noble minds … .47

Verstegan then revealed that the title of ‘Lady’ was derived from LEAFDIAN, that is bread-server: Whereby it appeareth that as the LAFORD [Lord] did allow food and sustenance, so the LEAFDIAN [Lady] did see it served and disposed to the guests, which custom of ladies carving and serving continue to the present.48

He elaborated that the food of the stomach, the mind, and the womb were all intrinsic aspects of the etymology of noble titles, ‘Lord’ and ‘Lady’. This was the spirit, as well as the letter, of the law of nobility. It was derived from the Royal Court of Chivalry overseen by the College of Arms. Importantly if birthright was its basis, then birthing created a strong sense of connected communities, what noble contemporaries often called ‘our college’. Bloodlines were nourished in the womb by spiritual sustenance and the physic of ages past, just as the breaking of the bread was central to religious ritual and at physical mealtimes was medicine for the corporeal body.49 This type of commentary suggests that although patriarchy and primogeniture inheritance structured the Tudor nobility, medical regimen broadly defined was pivotal too. Returning to the Cholmley retinue, the females connected to the extended household played crucial roles in this private world of medical meaning. Sir Richard’s mother, the former Lady Katherine Constable of Flamborough Castle, had a remarkable medical history in an era of death, dearth and disease.50 She bore successfully eight children who all survived to adulthood and made successful marriages to the Cliffords (Bolton Castle), Percys (Alnwick Castle), Gascoignes (Ravensworth Castle), Conyers (Conyers Norton) and the junior branch of the Cholmleys (Whitby Abbey). These family ties reiterate that the dichotomy of court life – centre and periphery – is too simplistic.51 There were a northern circuit of families that connected to 47 Richard Verstegan cited in, Hazard, Elizabethan’s Silent Language, p. 129. 48 Ibid. p. 129. 49 This medical mentality is elaborated further in an important essay collection by P. Crawford, Blood, Bodies and Families in Early Modern England (London and New York, 2004). 50 There are a lot of references to this Constable family line in, for instance, J.S. Brewer, ed., Letters and Papers, Foreign and Domestic, Henry VIII, Volume 1, 1509–1514, Pardon Roll, Part 3 (London, 1920) pp. 234–256 and online at http://www.british-history.ac.uk/report. aspx?compid=102634. 51 An historical trend is exemplified in recent literary studies on this topic; see, for example, T. Betteridge and A. Riehl, Tudor Court Life (Sussquehanna, USA, 2010); for change

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the main southern court, and these intersected both in the capital and during the monarch’s summer visitations to the provinces. What this meant was that from a medical standpoint, there was a complex household geography in operation. Large circles of kinship enabled females to converse and pass on their medical expertise ‘chest-to-chest’ at home; amongst their neighbours when sharing herbal cures; and on arrival at court. These observations accord with Barbara Harris’s recent work on the human abilities and fascinating hidden lives of English aristocratic woman in early Tudor times.52 They had to navigate complex legal standards when it came to retaining property rights for their progeny, yet, proved to be more than capable of efficient household management. Most females developed good communication skills with each other, especially during risky childbirth, even if they remained competitive in the marriage game.53 This meant that the Cholmley women that reproduced successfully, surviving childbirth on a regular basis, were known by repute, and this makes their physic an important historical prism for historians of medicine. In this article the life of one elite member of the family, Lady Margaret Cholmley, sets in context the role that many women played in the medical sphere of the court, and elsewhere.

Courtiers and Female Medical Regime: The Cholmeys and the Neville Families Raby Castle near Staindrop in the Palatinate of Durham was the powerhouse of the Neville family in the North of England.54 It was a fortress that protected their kin and household from the ravages of warfare in the ‘diabolical lands’ bordering Scotland. The landscape had a rugged beauty, reflected in the grey-coloured worsted-wool clothing of the local populace. Lord Henry, fifth earl of Westmorland lived at Raby and commanded loyalty from the minor landed gentry stretching as far down as Middleham in mid-Yorkshire across to Scarborough. It was a sizeable inheritance.55 On 3 July 1536, aged eleven, over time, see also, David Loades, Intrigue and Treason: The Tudor Court, 1547–1558 (London and New York, 2004). 52 Barbara J. Harris, English Aristocratic Women, 1450–1550: Marriage and Family, Property and Careers (Oxford, 2002). 53 This historical approach using new archive work on the Cholmley females builds on recent gender studies by exploring the pragmatic ways in which women navigated and expressed their identity together in the private and public spheres in Tudor times, refer, Ulricke Tancke, Bethinke Thyself in Early Modern England: Writing Women’s Identities (Amsterdam, 2010). 54 Charles R. Young, The Making of the Neville Family in England, 1166 –1400 (Woodbridge, Sussex, 1996). 55 Henry Neville (1525–64), fifth earl of Westmorland, succeeded to his family title in 1550. He was a Privy Councillor and Ambassador to Scotland, and was appointed a Knight of the Garter in 1552. At Edward VI’s and Mary’s coronation he bore the second sword of

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Lord Henry Neville was bequeathed in marriage to Lady Anne Manners at court. She was the daughter of the earl of Rutland who resided at Haddon Hall in Derbyshire and Belvoir Castle near Grantham in Lincolnshire. Like many Tudor courtiers they were contracted in marriage early but their physical union was not consummated until puberty.56 They then had in quick succession three girls and so there was a lot of anxiety about securing the Neville bloodline with a male heir. Anne became pregnant for a fourth time at the end of Henry VIII’s reign and gave birth to a longed for boy, christened Charles in 1547–48. Unfortunately like many early modern women, Anne died soon after giving birth from a ‘discharge of her womb’ (the same fatal condition as Jane Seymour, Henry VIII’s third wife). The most likely cause was sepsis, or its common name, childbed fever. Henry Neville was a delighted and downcast man. He had a precious male heir, but had lost a wife. Like many noble families with just one male child it was a priority for him to marry to secure an heir and spare. Meantime Sir Richard Cholmley, through his marriage to Lady Catherine Clifford, had raised his family’s standing at court. This placed him in the social ambit of those nobles of the first rank close to the dying king. Through those intimate bloodline connections he proposed a dowry for his eldest sister, Jane, to marry into the Neville family. Jane was delighted to be bequeathed to one of the premier earldoms but her pre-marital joy proved to be short-lived. Family histories recount that Jane Cholmley was a loving stepmother to the four Neville children, but Henry, their father, was a boisterous man.57 Many at court blamed him for the death of his first wife – though she died in childbirth – others said that she was worn out with his philandering ways. Henry Neville was certainly wild in his youth. He loved the intrigue and high spirits of court life, by birth being intimately connected to the inner circle of the Privy Chamber. Like Henry Norris, he ran with the king’s crowd. He was a fortunate young man in a privileged position. Importantly, he never lost favour with Henry VIII because for a key family reason he was protected from the worst ravages of court politics. Following the Pilgrimage of Grace, successive Tudor monarchs needed a strong presence in the Northern lands.58 The failure of the rough wooing by King Henry VIII of Mary (later Queen of Scots), proposed for a short time as a future wife of Prince Edward, meant that the Neville estates were in a convenient location to protect the monarch’s territorial interests bordering Scotland. If Henry Neville misbehaved, it was state and cap of maintenance. He married three times, Anne in 1536, Jane in 1550, Margaret in 1559, and held the title of Lord Lieutenant of the North. 56 For further context, refer, Sara Mendleson and Patricia Crawford, Women in Early Modern England, 1550–1720 (Oxford, 2000). 57 Sir Hugh Cholmley, Some Passages, p. 388–9. 58 R. Hoyle, The Pilgrimage of Grace and the Politics of the 1530s (Oxford, 2003), recounts the position of the Cholmleys and Neville clans in the north.

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judged prudent to tolerate his noble foibles. His second marriage to Jane meanwhile was fraught with medical difficulties because she could not conceive. This made her a bad marriage bargain in the eyes of the court. Jane turned to the comfort of her mother, the former Lady Katherine Constable who had been remarkably successful in childbirth. She also consulted her younger sister, Margaret, who was said within the family ‘to have a gift of healing’.59 The circumstances of Margaret’s life and her skills in physic came to light at several church court hearings because of her respected medical knowledge. In so doing, her life represents a new trend in the history of medicine. The recent research project of Peregrine Horden on the household medicine of the Cecil family has reconstructed the functional roles that many elite women played in Tudor physic.60 It has established that the Cecil women were learned in Greek and Arab medical books, and that they were more handson than had previously been documented.61 The meticulous records kept at Hatfield House and several Oxford colleges have revealed a fascinating private world of physic. Lady Mildred Cecil (nee Cooke), Sir William Cecil’s second wife, for instance, was connected to a network of educated females who shared their expertise in physic, as well as material goods. These connections tended to be with the head of a noble family that also held a powerful political position at court. There was also usually a neighbourly connection in terms of nearby country estates.62 A lot of noble women returned from court via landholdings in Northamptonshire, for example, because of its central location in the Midlands on the Great North Road. This made it an ideal stopping-off point between the court and elsewhere. Throughout Tudor times the county was filled with gentry holding high office. Major new houses would be built by ambitious courtiers such as Sir Christopher Hatton at Holdenby or refurbished by the Mildmays who acquired Apethorpe Hall. As Linda Pollock has documented in some detail, the Elizabethan females of the Mildmay family were known for their medicinal skill.63 This was the social ambit of Lady Margaret, too, since she was skilled at childbirth.

59 This claim was made in family histories and, as we shall see below, was verified in several court cases during her lifetime. 60 I am grateful to Professors Peregrine Horden and Pauline Croft, and Dr Caroline Bowden, ‘The Health of the Cecils Research project sponsored by the Wellcome Trust, 2003– 2007’, for permitting me to share their medical findings at an academic symposium held at All Souls College in Oxford, 2008–09. 61 Many of their books were discovered in various college libraries in Oxford, and one key aim of the project has been to document their book collections and medical ephemera. 62 Elizabeth Mazzola, Women’s Wealth and Women’s Writing in Early Modern England: ‘Little Legacies’ and the Materials of Motherhood (London, 2009), details how Bess of Hardwicks’s female line shared a similar form of intellectual, material and practical household knowledge. 63 Linda A. Pollock, With Faith and Physic: The Diary of a Tudor Gentlewoman – Lady Grace Mildmay, 1552–1620 (London and New York, 1993).

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The consistory court records suggest that Lady Margaret may have inherited basic birthing skills from her mother, Lady Katherine Constable.64 This meant that with her small, narrow hand she could feel inside the womb in the last stages of labour if the newborn got stuck in the birth canal. The court testimony indicates that the hand was a very important medical instrument for women who experienced painful births; the most likely explanation being that they had a narrow pelvis or they did not dilate fully in labour. Lady Margaret was not labelled a midwife, because that would have been socially unacceptable, but she did act as a birthing partner, the early modern equivalent of a doula. The court evidence and a family portrait that survives in Whitby museum also indicate that Lady Margaret carried a small birthing book, which hung from a chain around her waist. The suggestion is that it looked like a traditional girdle book that Lauren Kassell has described in regular use by the seventeenth century.65 Contemporary accounts indicate that it contained words and pictures to show women frightened by birthing what sort of practical help Lady Margaret could provide in an emergency.66 Herbs for example for pain relief, such as mandrake, were described. Anatomical images showed the physical stages of childbirth in a rudimentary manner presumably to calm a worried female frightened by the experience of painful labour. A Sarum court record towards the end of her life thus described Lady Margaret as ‘a pious woman but in the habit of pitying others and doing God’s work amongst them to rescue their souls’.67 She was ‘modestly and Godly attired and disposed respectably to all in her neighbourhood’. This phraseology needs to be carefully set in its historical context. There was selfevidently an intimate connection between her nobility (as Bread-Server, the Leafdian household role, referred to above) and Lady Margaret’s charitable duties expected of her sex and social class. She also had a strong religious belief, and this she practised in the care of the sick, especially as an elite woman who attended birthing chambers. Often a midwife registered with a bishop would have to quickly christen a newborn whose life was in danger, or send for a priest to give the last rites to a dying mother.68 Lady Margaret would have been on hand to assist. There was, though, a dangerous side to this work too. To appreciate the difficult position that Lady Margaret found 64 The birthing and healing skills of Lady Margaret are documented in some detail in Wiltshire Record Office, Sarum Diocese Consistory Court Records, Instant Books, D39/1/16 and the corresponding Deposition Books, D1/42/6 and D1/42/7. 65 Lauren Kassell, ‘Secrets Revealed: Alchemical Books in Early-Modern England’, History of Science, 48 (March 2011), pp. 1–27. 66 Recently in the cultural history of the body, these herbal activities have started to be appreciated from a medical standpoint, see, recently, Rebecca Larouche, Medical Authority and Englishwomen’s Herbal Texts, 1550–1650 (London, 2009). 67 See n. 64 above. 68 For an important book on this aspect of birthing, see Mary Fissell, Vernacular Bodies: The Politics of Reproduction in Early Modern England (Oxford, 2004).

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herself in, it is necessary to return to the sad circumstances of her sister Jane’s barren marriage. In 1558, Jane Neville, countess of Westmorland, was found dead in bed. Death was not an uncommon experience for elite women because everyone had a lower life expectancy, but there was a medical mystery surrounding her fatal symptoms. After all, it was well known that Jane could not conceive so she did not die in the birthing room. Nor were there any local reports that she suffered from a contagious disease or accidental injury. Instead the gossips said that Henry had poisoned his barren wife to free himself from the bonds of an infertile marriage. These accusations came to light because Henry quickly proposed to Lady Margaret. Church doctrine, however, forbade close blood ties in marriage, and so there was a scandal about the ‘sororate marriage’ in the Neville clan, as described below: A sororate marriage is a preferential marriage, the union of a widower with a sister of his deceased wife; the custom by which a man may marry one or more of sisters-in-law, especially when his first wife has died, or has proven to be barren. A widower who marries his sister-in-law can be said to enter into sororate marriage, only if that kind of marriage already exists as a preferential or institutionalized norm in society. The sororate marriage existed in Biblical times, but was outlawed by the Christians, so most of the examples we encounter in European history should be classed as incest. Henry Neville (1524–1563), 5th Earl of Westmorland, married Jane Cholmeley and Jane’s sister, Margaret Cholmeley, and this rare example of sororate marriage provoked an investigation of His Lordship’s sexual life.69

The question being asked was did Lady Margaret use her healing skills to practice the ‘darker arts of physic’. Did she collude to poison her sister? Maybe she tempted Henry Neville with a love potion? Perhaps it was Henry that administered the fatal physic? Many courtiers thought that the earl’s sex life should be investigated more closely. John Hales, the radical pamphlet writer from Kent, claimed that there were dangerous secrets lurking in Henry Neville’s sexual past. He alleged these stretched back to his wild youth. It is worth recalling that Henry Neville was born in 1525 and first got married in 1536 just several months after Henry VIII had ordered the beheading of Anne Boleyn. He was closely associated with the youthful excesses of the Privy Chamber. It was a time of headstrong romantic storms, with their serious political fallout, that seemed to beleaguer the Tudor Nobility surrounding the king. By the time Henry Neville’s second wife Jane died from poison, he had grown into a thirty-three-year-old widower who still seemed to symbolize debauchery. Lady Margaret meanwhile was just twenty-five and soon the subject of suspicion. John Hales thought there was no smoke without fire. 69 See http://www.arapacana.com/glossary/si_ss.html. For a recent academic appraisal, see F. Heritier, Two Sisters and their Mother: The Anthropology of incest (Massachusetts, 2002).

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He circulated a forty-one-page tract written in Latin, later published in 1562 – John Hales’s ‘Comes Westmerlandiae ducit in uxorem sororem uxoris demortuae, Eritur an naseat Matrimonia’ [concerning the Earl of Westmorland’s marriage to his late wife’s sister].70 It was excoriating. So much so that a Cholmley family history recalled that: There was a great feud between Sir Richard Chomley and his brother-in-law the Earl of Westmorland, who had married successively two of Richard’s sisters, the retainers of the gentleman never met, whether in London streets, or elsewhere, but a fight took place. Their brawls were however attended with less danger to life and less bloodshed than they would have been in succeeding times – for the men fought with buckler and short swords, and it was counted unmannerly to make a thrust.71

By 1563, Lady Margaret’s life had become an open book. She was the subject of an ecclesiastical commission; her sex life was part of a new lewd print culture; and she was threatened by rumour and condemned by intrigue. But she was not shunned at court. The Nevilles were for one thing too powerful and, besides, her medical skill was still much in demand. There might have been accusations of poison in the air but most could see that she was someone to consult when in dire medical need. Her reputation for visiting landed families grew, for she was valued as a healer and therefore, despite intrigues, a discrete person to trust. And it is worth remembering that her private medical visits made her a keeper of secrets. These help early modern historians see into the corners of court life where elite women congregated. For women like Lady Margaret practising physic was a compelling and dangerous humanist endeavour in the Tudor world. Despite her evident skills, it was easy to be accused of ‘darker arts’. Lady Margaret might save a life in the birthing or sick room, but she could just as easily be party to an unexplained death. It was necessary to be circumspect because the line between life and death was fragile. As a healer she was skilled in medical etiquette but also sensible to bring a witness with her to the sickroom. This seems to explain why Lady Margaret’s book-collecting activities were monitored from time-to70 University College London, Manuscript Department, John Hales’s ‘Comes Westmerlandiae ducit in uxorem sororem uxoris demortuae, Eritur an naseat Matrimonia’ [Concerning the Earl of Westmorland’s marriage to his late wife’s sister] (London, 1562). John Hales of Coventry and Kent was known at the Henrician Court as ‘Club-Foot Hales because in his younger days he had got that deformity by a wound from his own dagger at the bottom of his foot ... he had a happy memory accompanied by incredible industry, well skilled in Latin, Greek and Hebrew tongues, and at length in the municipal laws and antiquities ... In the reign of Henry VIII he was clerk of the hamper (or hanaper, a profitable office of chancery that sealed deeds, now defunct) for several years and obtained a fair estate in Warwickshire where he wrote The Highway to Nobility and translated Precepts for the Preservation of Health’, see John Burke, A genealogical and heraldic history of extinct baronetcies (London, 1842), p. 222. 71 Sir Hugh Cholmley, Some Passages, pp. 390–91.

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time by the church courts. One case accused her of ‘sometimes despatching another girl, so avoiding any taints for the Lady and hiding her meaning from her family’.72 Another witness claimed that she owned ‘profane books’. At one bitter hearing, after she had been called to a woman too late to save either her or the dead infant, she was mocked for her friendships with ‘witches and healers’. These were life-threatening accusations that she seems to have withstood by virtue of ‘the protection of the Westmorland family’, according to the Sarum diocese court scribe. Lady Margaret is known to have acquired a library of books at Raby that were either destroyed or sold on after the Nevilles fled to Spain following the failure of the Northern Rebellion in 1569. Surviving inventories describe some of her physic books such as A Philosophical discourse of the Body and Soule together with a disposition of them both, which was said to contain ‘A Hundred Aphorisms conteyning the whole body of Natural Magicke’.73 When questioned about her sister’s untimely death she quoted a key passage from this text: ‘Out of the Apothecaries Shoppe wheare tricks and restoratives are solde men buy the poisons that are the most pestilence.’ Lady Margaret liked word play (as many Tudors did) because it disguised uncomfortable truths in a climate of political intrigue at court. One interpretation of her guarded statement is that she took the same view of self-dosing as the medical doggerel of Leonardo da Vinci that opened this chapter. It was a dangerous business to take physic cures prepared by an unskilled, irregular practitioner, or perhaps from the hand of a disappointed husband. When pressed for more details about whether her sister out of desperation to conceive had taken a potion supplied by a medical quack connected to Henry Neville she replied: ‘Emptie vessels sound loudest and barren braines are most audacious – A leaking vessel can never fill, nor a person that is ever talking gain knowledge.’ It is unclear whether Henry Neville was a dunderhead but he was known as a man of limited intellect at court. Sadly, Jane’s womb may have been a ‘leaking vessel’ but this cannot be elaborated since no medical records survive of miscarriages or stillbirths, just that she was barren. Perhaps Jane lacked discretion, talking too much about her condition and consulting too many people in her birthing predicament. Other family sources point to Henry, as ‘ever-talking’, loud, not very bright, but basically a moral man, and one with powerful connections at court. In 1563, after just three short years of marriage, Lady Margaret was widowed. She had no natural Neville children. Curiously the historical record is silent about this outcome, perhaps because of the sad circumstances 72 See n. 64 above. 73 An inventory of these books was purchased by Sir Christopher Hatton of Holdenby after the Nevilles of Raby fled to Spain and had all their land, titles and property confiscated in 1569. See Northamptonshire Record Office, Finch-Hatton Collection, Box 4020, folio 494, ‘A Catalogue of Artis Cabalisticae he reconditae Theologiae et Philosophiae Scriptorium Tomus ex Pistorii Bibliothea Basilea unbound, pp. 1–136’.

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surrounding her sister’s death. Given Henry’s past sexual history, there is nothing to suggest that his third marriage was not consummated. Nonetheless, it may have been more of a marriage of convenience for the sake of his four children, especially as it was sororate, and for appearances sake he always had the option of taking a mistress. The Nevilles were nonetheless very fond of Lady Margaret. As the dowager she withdrew to Lamesleydale, where she lived at Ravensworth Castle. She was now just thirty years old and a good catch in the marriage stakes. There seems, though, to have been no sense of urgency on her part to remarry. After all, as dowager she had the protection of the first rank of nobility by marriage with the Nevilles, and their cousins the Arundels, Cliffords and De Vere families. Lady Margaret, however, between 1563 and her untimely death in 1570, was to experience the quick erosion of her protection and security. And again this may also have been connected to her physic skills. Since the accession of Elizabeth I to the throne in 1558, the Northern landed families had been unhappy about her legitimate claims to the throne of England. Memories were long and Lord Henry Neville, a devout Catholic, was a keen enemy of Anne Boleyn’s bastard child. He had, after all, witnessed first-hand in 1536 the final scenes of her mother’s downfall. The Catholic north now rallied to a new cry, to get rid of Elizabeth I. These political stirrings would culminate in 1569 in the Great Rising in the North led by the Neville family.74 Lady Margaret’s stepson, Charles, sixth earl of Northumberland, would be roundly defeated, flee to France and thence to Spain as an exile. All the Neville property would be confiscated and redistributed to the Mildmays and Vanes, who changed their name to Fane, eventually becoming the earls of Westmorland by the seventeenth century. Though complex, this context, proved very serious for Lady Margaret. In character, she was a forthright and passionate woman. She spoke her mind, though tempered by discretion. Soon after her widowhood in 1563, she began to lose support because, as the Nevilles weakened their political might in rumbles of rebellion, she too lost ground at court. Increasingly she appears in church court records but now charged with misdemeanours mainly related to her book learning and art of physic. She sent, for instance, an almanac and some herbal remedies to Oxford University but the dons evidently took exception to her healing gift and knowledge: We of Oxford, the Chancellor and his Vice, can with the doctors and masters, all to a man assembled, inform, [you] … But after a grave and maturer debate we moved hereunto by Reason of State, Care at length and agree one and all t’would be better to take it [her almanac] and seem thus to thank you by letter.

74 For context, see K.J. Kesselring, The Northern Rebellion of 1569: Faith, Politics and Protest in Elizabethan England (Basingstoke, 2010).

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This done for we hope you, are herewith content since further than this, nothing by us is Meant. Our minds we speak plain, without flattering, Preamble, Not skilled, like our sister of Cambridge to dissemble. We scorn to profess, the least loyal affection to One who against our will, gives us protection we neither wish we nor Pray for, Prince’s at Home, Having sent all our Prayers and wishes to Rome, assure yourself therefore We shall find we ever shall hate you, be so ever so kind in token therefore, Our names we conceal you these Presents, under our Seal.75

There are multiple ways to read this letter and so it remains a mystery why the dons of Oxford were so offended by Lady Margaret’s gift of an almanac. There is a suggestion in some family papers that Oxford dons were divided over who should refuse to offer their allegiance to Elizabeth I (despite appearances to the contrary). It is noteworthy that Lady Margaret was a widow from a leading Roman Catholic family. The fact that some dons thought fit to remind her that they prayed to Rome seems to suggest that she was not a practising Catholic, may in fact have had Protestant tendencies, or she mixed her Catholicism with a form of natural magic that they disliked. Whatever the reason, she inspired strong feelings and was increasingly rebuffed in the public sphere. This may explain why she retreated from court for a time. Regrettably, she then disappears from view by 1569. A single entry in the burial register of St. Dunstans-in-the-West Church on Fleet Street contains parish records that state that she died at Candlemas in 1570. 76 The healer was unable in some way to heal herself. By then, the Westmorlands had fled England. The pope had ex-communicated Elizabeth I and conspiracy was in the air. Many men and women would recede into the shadows of court life, retiring to the country until the political carnival had gone full circle again.

Conclusion Throughout Henry VIII’s reign the survival of noble bloodlines was a medical game of chance and yet vital for the regeneration of Tudor court life. Ambitious families had to overcome daily mishap from disease and misfortune in birthing rites. The evidence in this chapter suggests that the welfare and well-being of the body politic was expressed in family heraldry written into commonplace books with medical doggerel. Thus Henry Peacham in the Complete Gentleman (1622) recalled that at the Henrician Court:

75 Northamptonshire Record Office, Westmorland Collection, Box 4, Parcel 4, folio 4, ‘ A letter from the University of Oxford addressed to the Countess of Westmorland’. 76 Guildhall Library, London, MS 10343, Parish Register of Deaths, St. Dunstan-in-theWest Church, 1570.

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heraldry presents mysterious, quasi-magical correspondences with the planets, nature, times, seasons, and the virtues, so that a character may be read off from a coat of arms.77

Others claimed that Tudor heraldry was ‘the most refined part of Natural Philosophy’, having ‘close affinities with Neo-Platonism and Hermeticism which together found expression in the court masques and spectacles’ commanded by Henry VIII.78 At those performances there was a subtle but nonetheless popular understanding that ‘vile blood’ must not corrupt the body politic of the court. This was one reason why Henry VIII’s Commission on Heraldry in 1530 stated that there would be: tests of gentility, underwritten by the state, which the heralds were to enforce. Those of ‘vile blood’ (that is, of unfree descent) together with rebels and heretics were excluded. As far as the laity was concerned, the test was to be ‘service done to us or to another’, which had resulted in ‘possessions and riches able to maintain the same’. In the case of the clergy, arms were to be given to those advanced ‘by grace, virtue or cunning to rooms and degrees of honour and worship’. Bishoprics, abbacies, deaneries and priories seem to have been the preferment’s meant.79

Enforcing this, however, was no easy matter because large noble households were self-governing when not at court. This was why Henry encouraged so many families to be physically present in such large retinues in London. It also explains his strong support for the visitations of heralds around the country or on his summer progress. In more traditional communities, notably amongst the northern families, there was resentment that royal authority could contravene local customs. In 1533, William Fellows, for instance, noted that visiting gentry acting as heralds encountered what he called: ‘downright hostility. Several were not at home; others refused to have any note taken of their arms and pedigrees … in Lancashire local people believed strongly that gentility was a matter of traditional standing and local opinion, which needed no prying inquiry on the part of a king’s herald.’80 It would be a mistake, however, to conclude that heralds suffered a concerted backlash in the provinces. In many respects heraldry was more highly prized because of royal interference. Larger noble households maintained long-held family customs of belonging and birthright. They disliked the state enquiring into their elevated status. But once raised or reaffirmed by a grant of arms they stubbornly held onto their privileged position. Henry was thus assured of their loyalty because degree and rank gave him the means to divide and rule. He consequently raised 77 Henry Peacham, The Complete Gentleman (London, 1622), p. 408. 78 Mervyn James, Society, Politics and Culture: Studies in Early Modern Culture (Cambridge, 1986), p. 408. 79 Ibid., p. 336. 80 Ibid., p. 338.

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much-needed revenue from families anxious to renew their official claims to noble standing at the Royal College of Arms after the Commission on Heraldry of 1533. Against this backdrop, the gossips of the birthing room pronounced the physical resurgence of noble bloodlines and the regeneration of the body politic in its actual medical performance at court. Lady Margaret Cholmley’s blood ties by birth and marriage reiterate that women played key roles in the medical life of the court, at its centre and margins. She travelled between large families to assist at their birthing rites, arguably one of the most important aspects of the functioning interior of the Tudor world. Birthing and physic underpinned primogeniture inheritance. Walking with the Cholmley clan and Lady Margaret through the archives is therefore enlightening from a medical standpoint. The fall of the Westmorland clan explains why women who were healers have been historically neglected. Lady Margaret was someone who made a contribution in ways that deserve a more considered historical appreciation of her gender. Her betrothal was not out of the ordinary, but a sororate marriage was contrary to the church’s teachings. Her contacts with Oxford University are shrouded in mystery, but one thing is certain: she stirred up strong feelings, even hatred. Lady Margaret stood in the shadows for reasons of expediency but not because she was bashful. Her footfall in history is there – bread giver, healer, friend, compassionate, learned, shrewd, kindly, attending, feeding and nourishing her kin. In many respects Lady Margaret reflected the broader changes that were happening in wider Tudor society after the dissolution of the monasteries. Contemporary standards of physic would take new scholarly directions. Physical knowledge of the body slowly divorced from church doctrine. Medical education embraced an anatomical book culture published in the vernacular. In an era of death, death and disease, it was the art and skill of the healer, the performance of better physic that gained popularity. We end this chapter therefore by coming full circle in the writings of Andrew Boorde who wrote a famous Dyetary of Health published in 1542. He advised that good regime was a household duty performed daily in Tudor England: A good coke is half a physicyon. The chief physic does come from the kitchen wherefore the physicyon and the coke for sycke men must consult together … Myrth is one of the chiefest thynges in Physicke … There is no man or woman the which hath any to them selfe than can be a better physicyon for their owne safeguard than their own selfe can be, to consider what thing the which doth them good. And refrain from such things that doth hurte or harme. And let every man beware of care, sorrowe, thought, pencyfulness, and of inward anger. Beware of surrfettes, and use not to muche veneryouse actes. Breake not the usual custom of sleep in the night. A mery heart and minde, the which is in

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rest and quyetness, without adversyte and to mouche workdly business causes a man … care and sorrowe, bringing in old age and death.81

This medical regime (like that of Leonardo da Vinci which opened this chapter) was neglected by King Henry VIII until ill health forced him to pay more attention to its advice. He did patronize a male-medical fraternity of regular physic (physicians, barber-surgeons and apothecaries). The language of patriarchy thus dominated the body of the Henrician court. Yet physic was being administered by a complex array of new medical actors, irregulars, and many were female. In 1542, Andrew Boorde advised such women ‘to nurse the sicke man’ but to ‘have few words or none’ except the ‘Testament [Bible]’ if the person is very ill.82 The fact that he addressed the female healer unambiguously reiterates their physical presence, medical skills and spiritual duties at the heart of the crowded Henrician court. In that world, Lady Margaret’s skill served changing cultures of the body. She personifies the medical proficiency acquired by many elite women bequeathed in marriage to elderly husbands, exemplified by Queen Katherine Parr the nursemaid of a dying King Henry VIII in 1547.

81 Andrew Boorde, The First Book of the introduction of Knowledge: A Compendious Regiment or a Dietary of Health, Made in Montpellier, Barnes in the Defense of the Berde (London, 1543), p. 300. 82 Ibid, p. 301.

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part iii: images

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5 Architectural Culture and Royal Image at the Henrician Court Kent Rawlinson

Henry VIII was recognized as an enthusiastic builder during his own lifetime and the architecture of his royal estate has been studied by generations of antiquaries and historians.1 In recent scholarship, Henry VIII has also come to personify the concept of ‘the royal image’; of ‘art’ as a consciously employed tool of cultural and political communication.2 A small hone-stone plaque that depicts Henry VIII standing in a pseudo-Holbein pose on an Ionic capital, probably of mid-sixteenth-century German manufacture, evokes both perceived facets of this monarch: the builder king and the manufacturer of royal images (Plate 1).3 Images of Henry VIII and of architecture are likewise associated or juxtaposed in many contemporary portraits or depictions of the king. However, despite the extensive study of early Tudor royal portraiture, the architectural settings or details that commonly occur in such images have prompted little analysis, certainly in comparison with physiognomy, posture or dress. This is remarkable since, as shall be argued here, architectural imagery was often intrinsic to the composition of many familiar images of Henry VIII. Indeed, the intent of this study is to demonstrate that a closer examination of the role of architectural settings and imagery in early Tudor royal portraiture can aid a fuller understanding both of purpose of these portraits

1 The key works on this subject remain: The history of the king’s works. Volume III. 1485–1660 (Part I) and Volume IV. 1485–1660 (Part II), ed. H.M. Colvin (London, 1975; 1982); M. Howard, The Early Tudor country house. Architecture and politics 1490–1550 (London, 1987); S. Thurley, The royal palaces of Tudor England: Architecture and court life, 1460–1547 (London, 1993). 2 For a recent discussion of this subject see T.C. String, Art and communication in the reign of Henry VIII (Aldershot, 2008). 3 Horace Walpole’s Strawberry Hill, eds M. Snodin and C.E. Roman (London, 2009), p. 303, no. 122.

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themselves and, in turn, of the intellectual role or status of architecture at the Henrician court. The architectural settings and details encountered in images of Henry VIII did not exist in isolation; rather, they were aspects of what may be termed the ‘architectural culture’ of the Henrician court. Tatiana C. String has recently argued that a widely held view of English ‘art’ in the early sixteenth century as passively derivative of that of renaissance Italy has limited an appreciation of the development and sophistication of ‘Henrician artistic culture’, in particular ‘a culture of art appreciation at the centre of English elite life by the 1540s at the latest’.4 As with ‘art’, the vernacular term ‘architecture’ was not current in Henrician England. However, this study proposes that a concept of ‘architecture’, in the sense of an art-form or a conscious means of cultural expression, existed amongst the elite of the Henrician court. Selfconscious patronage of architecture and cultural engagement with it as an intellectual subject are phenomenon long associated with the latter decades of the sixteenth century. By contrast, the buildings of the early Tudor elite are still commonly considered in terms of basic paradigms, in particular that of ‘display’; be it of material wealth, of political power or of cultural sophistication. Kevin Sharpe has recently suggested that: ‘Henry regarded his palaces as a display of the virtue of magnificence but also as a representation in stone of the solidity and durability of the Tudor dynasty … Henrician royal palaces were the advertising hoardings for, as well as monuments to, the virtues and powers of the new Tudor brand.’5 Such statements provoke many questions regarding the extent to which such messages were indeed intended or understood by those who commissioned and experienced buildings. They also tend to limit broader examination of the social and political context of early Tudor architecture by equating buildings more-or-less simplistically with wealth. Certainly, building on any scale requires significance finance, but architectural patronage, design and appreciation are also informed, in any period, by numerous other cultural, political and social factors. This study takes an alternative approach towards the study of what may be termed the ‘architectural culture’ of the Henrician court by considering architecture as it was to be encountered in images produced, or which circulated, at court, as well as in contemporary literary and scholarly texts. This examination of early Tudor architectural imagery is divided into two parts. The first consists of a necessarily brief survey of the various types of such image, as well as their relationship to literary accounts of architecture. The second focuses more closely on the relationship between architectural imagery and contemporary portraits or images of Henry VIII. In so doing, this 4 T.C. String, ‘The concept of ‘art’ in Henrician England’, Art History, 32/2 (2009), pp. 209–306, at p. 302. 5 K. Sharpe, Selling the Tudor monarchy. Authority and image in sixteenth-century England (London, 2009), pp. 147–8.

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study argues that architectural imagery was a consciously employed element of the rhetorical or iconographic programmes created and encountered at the Henrician court, in particular those associated with royal portraiture and image making.

Architectural Images at the Henrician Court An architectural image, in the sense employed here, may be any depiction of a building or an architectural detail. Images of such details, in particular forms of gothic tracery and ornament, were commonplace in the late-medieval period, being routinely incorporated in manuscript illuminations, drawings, sculpture and paintings. Fuller architectural depictions also occur, such as the elaborate drawings of the Beauchamp Pageants, produced after 1483, which depict domestic and religious interiors, as well as town and cityscapes.6 Northern European altarpieces are a rich source for both architectural settings and building portrayed within landscapes, such as the gothic interior and architectural vista of Jan van Eyck’s Virgin and Child with Chancellor Rolin (c.1410). In this late medieval tradition buildings or architectural landscapes were often symbolically associated with the biblical or literary texts they illustrated. Castles in romances might, for instance, be encountered as manifestations of emotions to be conquered or overcome. In a copy of the Roman de la Rose produced around 1490–1500, ‘Fair Welcome’ is imprisoned in the ‘Castle of Jealousy’ guarded by ‘Danger’. The accompanying illumination depicts a forbiddingly tall tower surrounded by turrets, curtain walls and a moat. On the tower is written, ‘Jalousie’ and over the gate and portcullis, ‘dangier’.7 Similar symbolic depiction of buildings was commonplace in heraldry. The ubiquitous portcullis adopted by Henry VII as a royal badge was a visual pun on the name of his mother’s family, Beaufort (a good or well-guarded fort), while his rebuilding of Sheen Palace and his decision to rename it ‘Richmond’ involved a similar pun, identifying this new building not only with his ancestral dynasty, but praising it as a ‘rich mount’.8 Visual depictions and literary descriptions of castles might, thereafter, evoke the badge and house of Richmond, an association made explicit in a drawing of the palace by Anthonis van den Wyngaerde, of c.1558–62, which incorporates a heraldic shield depicting a rich mount alongside a view of the buildings themselves.9 The panel painting, The Family of Henry VII with St George and the Dragon (c.1505–09), is situated within a well-established late medieval devotional 6 The Beauchamp Pageant, ed. A. Sinclair (Donington, 2003). 7 BL Harley 4425, fol. 39. 8 King’s works, ed. Colvin, IV, p. 223. 9 Ashmolean Museum, LG IV.10a; The Panorama of London circa 1544 by Anthonis van den Wyngaerde, eds H.M. Colvin and S. Foister (London Topographical Society 151; 1996), p. 1.

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tradition and may be compared, for instance, with the wall painting of St George and the Dragon in St Gregory’s church, Norwich (c.1500).10 Both depict a fantastical castle or citadel, but this similarity need not negate the possibility that the buildings in The Family of Henry VII might be recognized as a ‘rich mount’ and might serve as an architectural evocation of the nascent Tudor dynasty.11 Early in Henry VIII’s reign the symbol of a castle was further associated with his queen, Katherine of Aragon, the daughter of Isabella of Castile, whose house also employed a castle (castillo) as a badge. The frontispiece of a volume of polyphonic music of c.1516, produced for Henry VIII, depicts England as an island encompassed by a redbrick wall provided with a series of stone towers and defended by a strong gatehouse and a golden lion.12 In turn, the badge adopted by Jane Seymour as queen (1536–37) was a phoenix rising from a castellated mount.13 The symbolic use and appreciation of architectural imagery was, then, a significant aspect of the cultural inheritance of the Henrician court. Although architectural images were by no means an innovation of the early-sixteenth century, the quantity and variety of the images that survive from the reigns of Henry VIII and his father appear to markedly exceed those of previous centuries. Improved rates of survival may account for this in part. However, significant cultural developments, in particular the decorative use of renaissance architectural forms, developments in architectural drawing technique and the use of print, appear to have prompted a material increase in the production of architectural imagery. These images may be considered in two broad categories: those in which buildings or architectural details are complementary or incidental to the principal subject or scheme; and those in which architecture is itself the primary subject. No doubt the most common form of early sixteenth-century architectural imagery was the use of architectural details as decorative ornament. This practice occurs across all classes of contemporary decorative art, both those produced in England and those imported from the continent.14 Significantly, much renaissance ornament derived from classical architecture, both its three-dimensional forms and its painted decoration. Henry VIII’s Clocksalt, of 10 Gothic: Art for England 1400–1547, eds R. Marks and P. Williamson (London, 2003), pp. 408–9, no. 297. 11 F. Hepburn, ‘The portraiture of Prince Arthur and Katherine of Aragon’, in Arthur Tudor, Prince of Wales. Life, death and commemoration, ed. S. Gunn and L. Monckton (Woodbridge, 2009), pp. 31–49, at pp. 32–4 and pl. II. 12 BL Royal MS 11 E. xi, fol. 2; J. Backhouse, The illuminated page. Ten centuries of manuscript paintings in the British Library (London, 1997), pp. 228–9, no. 206. 13 T. Willement, Banners standards and badges from a Tudor MS. In the College of Arms (London, 1904), p. 19. 14 The potential significance of decorative ornament as a means of transmitting architectural style is suggested by J. Summerson, Architecture in Britain 1530–1830 (5th edn, Harmondsworth, 1970), p. 51.

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c.1530–35 and probably a gift of Francis I, is a goldsmith’s intricate confection of miniature pilasters, columns, pediments and candelabras.15 Classical architectural devices occur, as do their gothic counterparts, as framing devices in manuscripts and the frontispieces of printed books. The frontispiece of Thomas Berthelet’s first edition of Henry VIII’s own, A necessary doctrine and erudition for any christen man,16 takes the form of a richly decorated classical window supported by two terms. A similar window is employed as the elaborate frame for the opening folio of the copy of the ratification of the Treaty of Camps presented to the French in 1546.17 The monumental size of this portal is implied by the diminutive scale of the symbolic figures that sit beneath it and the small portrait of Henry VIII that occurs in the opening initial. Depictions of buildings that complement, or provide a setting for, the primary subject of an image occur with great frequency throughout Henry VIII’s reign. A well-furnished English domestic interior appears in Holbein’s preparatory drawing, Design for the More Family Group (1526–27).18 The narrative scenes of major tapestry series are commonly set in richly detailed renaissance interiors or against bold architectural backdrops. The Blessing of Esau, part of the Story of Jacob series woven before 1539 from the same cartoons as a set acquired by Henry VIII in the early 1530s, depicts the interior of a fantastically decorated classical palace.19 The scale of these images, often near to or greater than life-size, is such that they constitute windows onto virtual, but nevertheless immediate and vivid, architectural spaces. The Story of Abraham tapestries, probably delivered to Henry VIII in 1543–44, are particularly noteworthy, since in addition to the elaborate architectural settings of the narrative scenes, their borders are composed of ornate classical niches, canopies and pedestals that frame personifications of vices and virtues.20 The role such images played in exposing members of the Henrician court to the architectural language or conventions of renaissance classicism is a matter for significant conjecture. Alongside incidental or complementary images of architecture, the early sixteenth century is particularly notable for the increasing production of architectural images that took buildings as their principal subject.21 The most straightforward of these are architectural drawings, or plats, produced in association with the design and construction of actual buildings. Such drawings 15 S. Foister, Holbein in England (London, 2006), pp. 78–9, no. 82. 16 A necessary doctrine and erudition for any christen man (London, 1543). 17 Henry VIII. A European court in England, ed. D. Starkey (London, 1991), p. 86, no. V.39. 18 Foister, Holbein, p. 34, no. 23. 19 T.P. Campbell, Henry VIII and the art of majesty. Tapestries at the Tudor court (New Haven and London, 2007), pp. 218–21. 20 Ibid., pp. 281–9. 21 For later sixteenth-century architectural illustration see M. Howard, The building of Elizabethan and Jacobean England (New Haven and London, 2007), pp. 165–80 (Chapter 5, ‘Representing buildings’).

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survive and are documented in unprecedented numbers from the first half of the sixteenth-century.22 They include both ground plans and elevations, and range from the schematic, such as the sketch plan and elevation of a building included in Richard Gibson’s accounts for work at Greenwich Palace in 1527, to the technically detailed, such as ‘The platt of my Lorde Curssons howse at Empswch [Ispwich]’ drawn to a marked scale of ‘16 fote to an inche’.23 Such plats were often complemented by perspective views that provided a fuller impression of the building and might serve as presentation drawings for clients or their officers. Henry VIII’s office of works was at the forefront of a technical revolution in drawing, led by surveyors and engineers such as John Rogers and Richard Lee who worked both as designers and draughtsmen.24 Related innovations in cartography and architectural drawing were driven, in large part, by the re-fortification of the English coastline and border regions in response to the threat of invasion from the late 1530s. Alongside detailed maps and plans of forts and civic defences, bird’s-eye views of forts were made for presentation to Henry VIII. Notably, some of these, despite advances in drawing technique, are reminiscent of the idealized castles or towers of latemedieval manuscript illumination. A prototype design for the forts at Walmer and Sandown, is identified by the text, ‘A Castle for the Downes’, written on the building itself in the manner of the ‘Castle of Jealousy’ considered above (Plate 2).25 Such images seem tailored for a king not only personally engaged with the design of modern fortifications, but also inspired by the romantic notion that his defence of England echoed the chivalric legacy of his predecessors. Drawn schemes for elaborate interior decoration were likewise produced, such as the well-known designs for a colonnaded fireplace by Holbein, and for a royal gallery decorated with classical sculpture and friezes in the Fontainebleau style attributed to Nicholas Bellin of Modena.26 Henry VIII’s reign also saw the production of the first true topographical views of London, including a panorama by Wyngaerde probably drawn in 1543–34 and what may be an earlier view of Westminster Palace ascribed to Lucas Cornelius de Cock.27 Indeed, Henry VIII appears to have collected and displayed images

22 J.H. Harvey, ‘Early Tudor draughtsmen’, in The Connoisseur coronation book, 1953, ed. L.G.G. Ramsey (London, 1953), pp. 97–102. 23 BL Egerton 2605, fol. 43, illustrated Performance and spectacle in Hall’s Chronicle, ed. J. Dillon (London, 2002), p. 124; BL Cotton Augustus I.ii.48, L & P, XXI Part 2, p. 457, no. 15. 24 A. Gerbino and S. Johnston, Compass and rule: Architecture as mathematical practice in England, 1500–1750 (New Haven and London, 2009), pp. 31–44. 25 BL Cotton Augustus I.i.21; European court, ed. Starkey, p. 148, no. XI.10. 26 Foister, Holbein, p. 90, no. 102; O. Kurz, ‘An architectural design for Henry VIII’, The Burlington Magazine, 82/481 (1943), pp. 81–83, illustrated Thurley, Palaces, p. 217. 27 Panorama, ed. Colvin and Foister, p. 5; A. Saunders, ‘Westminster Hall: A sixteenth century drawing?’, The London Journal, 12/1 (1986), pp. 29–35. I am grateful to Jane Spooner for drawing the Cock view to my attention.

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of noteworthy buildings in their own right.28 The 1542 inventory of Whitehall Palace describes a set of four views of notable European palaces, including Henry’s own Hampton Court: foure tables of Parchement sett in frames of wodde with figures in them and in every oone of them a manor place videlicet in oone of them is written Hampton Courte and in another of them is written Amboyse [Amboise] in another is written Cognat [Cognac] and in thother is written Gandit [Ghent].29

Buildings were also represented in three dimensions. An architectural model is listed in the same inventory: ‘the discription of dover made of erth sett in a boxe of wodde’; probably a sculpted terracotta landscape laid in a flat box.30 The discrete nature and comparatively small scale of monumental tombs permitted their treatment as micro-architectural showpieces, as exemplified by those at Layer Marney (Essex) and Oxburgh (Norfolk) composed of repeating terracotta panels of classical ornament.31 On a slightly larger scale, miniature buildings were constructed as theatrical centrepieces for court festivals and tournaments.32 In a similarly playful manner, certain of the cannons produced for Henry VIII’s navy were cast to imitate classical columns. A three-barrelled bronze gun, made before 1540 by the Frenchman Pierre Baude, takes the form a pilaster,33 while a demi culverin recovered from the Mary Rose is cast like a fluted column, an architectural conceit emphasized by a blind classical arcade that runs around the chase of the barrel.34 Such pieces were no doubt intended as much for display as for functional purpose and it is difficult not to suppose that they were intended to appeal to a monarch whose related interests in architecture and ordnance were well known. Illustrations of architectural subjects occur in a great variety of manuscript treatises and printed books. Henry VIII’s post-mortem inventory lists in his ‘little study’ at Westminster, ‘a booke of parchement conteyninge diverse patterns’, in all likelihood an architectural or design manual.35 The royal library also contained a manuscript treatise entitled Geometria, or La science de Geometrie. The dedicatory inscription of this volume extols geometry as 28 Inventory, ed. Starkey, p. 238, nos 10778–9. 29 The 1542 inventory of Whitehall. Volume II. The transcripts, ed. M. Hayward (London, 2004), p. 93, no. 742; Inventory, ed. Starkey, p. 238, no. 10647. 30 Inventory of Whitehall, ed. Hayward p. 98, no. 859. 31 A.P. Baggs, ‘Sixteenth-century terra-cotta tombs in East Anglia’, Archaeological Journal, 125 (1968), pp. 296–301. 32 Many temporary structures created for court festivals are described in S. Anglo, Spectacle, pageantry, and early Tudor policy (2nd edn, Oxford, 1997). 33 G. Rimer, T. Richardson and J.P.D. Cooper, Henry VIII: Arms and the man, 1509–2009 (Leeds, 2009), pp. 251–3, no. 52. 34 M. Rule, The Mary Rose: The excavation and raising of Henry VIII’s flagship (Leicester, 1982), pp. 165–8. 35 J.P. Carley, The books of King Henry VIII and his wives (London, 2004), p. 34; J.P. Carley, The libraries of King Henry VIII (London, 2000), p. 286, no. 136.

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an architectural tool and its final five illustrations are geometric sections, elevations and plans of the orders of classical architecture.36 The treatise is introduced as a practical guide for ‘all great craftsmen’ and ‘all manner of masons and carpenters’, and Henry VIII is reminded that Alexander, Julius Caesar and other emperors conquered many countries by means of ‘this noble art’ as described in the works of Euclid and Vitruvius.37 The architectural figures of this Geometria are more sophisticated versions of the engravings of the orders that illustrate Sebastiano Serlio’s Regole generali di Architetura sopra le cinque maniere de gli edifici, first published in Venice in 1537. This, along with editions of Serlio’s subsequent books, published in Italy and France, as well as Italian editions of Vitruvius’s De architetura libri decem (such as that published in Como in 1521) appear to have circulated in England soon after their publication. Their illustrations were to have a direct influence upon the design of English buildings in the late sixteenth century and may have informed the detail of certain buildings and decorative schemes during Henry VIII’s reign.38 Architectural illustrations also occurred in literary works. A remarkable example is the Hypnerotomachia Poliphili (Poliphilo’s Strife of Love in a Dream) published in Venice in 1499, a romance whose text is accompanied by woodcuts of classical buildings, ruins and architectural ornament.39 It includes an illustration of a fantastical fountain whose design appears to prefigure that of an actual fountain constructed within the disguising house at Greenwich Palace in late 1527 (Plate 3): This fountayn was al of whyte Marble graven and chased, the bases of thesame were balles of golde supported by rampynge beastes wounde in leaves of golde. In the first worke were gargilles of gold fiersly faced with spoutes running. The second receyt of his fountain was environed with wynged serpentes al of gold, which gryped the second receit of the fountain, and on the sommit or toppe of thesame was a fayre lady, out of whose brestes ran aboundantly water of merveilous delicious saver.40

That this fountain, and possibly other elements of the temporary furnishings for the 1527 revels, may have been inspired by the illustrations of the Hypnerotomachia Poliphili is suggestive of the means by which classical architecture and ornament were becoming established elements of the cultural vocabulary of the Henrician court.

36 BL Add. MS 34809, illustrated Thurley, Palaces, p. 94. 37 BL Add. MS 34809, fol. 1v. 38 Thurley, Palaces, pp. 89–98; A. Wells-Cole, Art of decoration in Elizabethan and Jacobean England: The influence of continental prints, 1558–1625 (London, 1997), pp. 9–14. 39 J. Godwin, The pagan dream of the Renaissance (London, 2002), pp. 21–37. 40 Hall’s Chronicle, ed. H. Ellis (London, 1809), p. 735; F. Colonna, Hypnerotomachia Poliphili. The Strife of Love in a Dream, trans. J. Godwin (London, 1999), pp. 53–5.

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Few scholarly works on the particular subject of building or architecture were composed by English authors during Henry VIII’s reign. A significant exception is The book for to learn a man to be wise in building of his house for the health of body, anonymously published in London in 1540.41 This work, probably composed by the physician Andrew Boorde, is principally concerned with the setting and management of a house or estate and is the precursor of later works by English authors on surveying and architecture, such as Leonard Digges, A boke named Tectonicon … (London, 1562) or John Shute’s The first and chief grounds of architecture … (London, 1563).42 The cultural milieu in which these later works were composed and read was one in which architecture was increasingly recognized as a subject of professional and elite interest.43 Such literary engagement with architecture arguably had its origins in scholarly and literary reflection upon architecture or building in works associated with the Henrician court. John Skelton’s verses in Colin Clout (1521–22) concerning the pride of worldly prelates are well known and have provided historians with an appealing illustration of architecture perceived as an expression of power or wealth: Building royally / Their mansions curiously, / With turrets and with towers, / With halles and with bowers, / Stretching to the stars, / With glass windows and bars; / Hanging about the walles / Clothes of gold and palles, / … / From worldly wantonness, / Their chambers thus to dress / … / Howbeit they let down fall / Their churches cathedrall.44

Architecture is more than simply a manifestation of power or vanity, however, and a broader critique of the roles of expense, inter-generational relationships and personal taste with respect to architectural patronage occurs in Thomas More’s Utopia (1516): the erection or repair of buildings requires the constant labor of so many men … because what a father has built, his extravagant heir allows gradually to fall into ruin. As a result, what might have been kept up at small cost, his successor is obliged to erect anew at great expense. Further, often even when a house has cost one man a large sum, another is so fastidious that he thinks little of it. When it is neglected and therefore soon becomes dilapidated, he builds a second elsewhere at no less cost.45

41 Howard, Country House, pp. 19–21. 42 Gerbino and Johnston, Compass, pp. 45–64. 43 For late sixteenth-century architectural discourse see: Howard, Building, in particular in Chapter 3, ‘A language for architecture’, pp. 95–119; and M. Girouard, Elizabethan architecture. Its rise and fall, 1540–1640 (New Haven and London, 2009). 44 The complete poems of John Skelton, ed. P. Henderson (2nd rev. edn, London and Toronto, 1948), pp. 277–8. 45 Utopia, ed. E. Surtz and J.H. Hexter (The complete works of St. Thomas More, 4; New Haven and London, 1965), pp. 132–33.

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Ongoing royal and aristocratic building projects, in particular those incorporating classical forms or ornament – whose avant-garde nature to contemporary eyes should not be under-estimated – no doubt served to heighten cultural awareness of architecture at court. In an undated sermon, the humanist cleric and sometime household chaplain of Archbishop William Warham, Henry Gold (d.1534), lambasted the preoccupation a certain class of ecclesiastic with architectural experimentation: we see now-a-days that many religious men do so diligently apply themselves to worldly faculties and crafts that divers of them be accounted the chief devisers that be in England of new and strange fashions in building; insomuch that some of them, for this their policy and worldly wisdom, be in great favor with earthly princes and with other noble temporal men.46

The cultural prevalence of architectural images and discourse in court circles is likewise implied by the introduction to an anti-papal treatise, possibly composed for Thomas Boleyn, earl of Wiltshire, around 1534, which employs an architectural metaphor to introduce its scholarly programme: Here shall ye have drawn, and in manner painted, a model of my building, where I present unto you that it may please you to show me whether ye like this fashion, and whether that ye will have it made of such stuff, and whether ye like the foundation that I have begun.47

Literary descriptions of buildings further exemplify courtly engagement with architecture. The Receyt of the Ladie Kateryne, composed in 1502–03, includes an entire chapter entitled ‘of the huntyng in the Kinges parke and of the descripcion of the Place of Rychemont’, a minutely detailed word picture that praises: ‘this erthly and secunde paradise of oure region of Englond … the lantirne spectacle and the bewtyouse examplere of all propir lodgynges’.48 In his The Union of the two noble and illustrious families of Lancaster and York, composed during Henry VIII’s reign, Edward Hall incorporates many similar architectural descriptions. One such is the lengthy account of the English camp and temporary place constructed at Guînes in 1520: ‘the most noble and royall lodgyng before sene … the outward parte of the palace lumyned the eyes of the beholders, by reason of the ye sumptuous woorke’.49 John Leland’s Itinerary, composed 1539–45 and dedicated to Henry VIII, contains innumerable pen-portraits of buildings of all types and ages:50

46 L & P, VII, p. 210, no. 523 (ii) (my italics). 47 L & P, VII, pp. 268–9, no. 691 (1). 48 The Receyt of the Ladie Kateryne, ed. G. Kipling (EETS 296; Oxford, 1990), pp. 70–71. 49 Hall’s Chronicle, ed. Ellis, p. 605. 50 Howard, Building, pp. 110–11; John Leland’s Itinerary. Travels in Tudor England, ed. J. Chandler (Stroud, 1998), pp. xxvii–xxxi.

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I haue so traueled in your domynions both by the see coastes and the myddle partes … that there is almost neyther … cyties, burges, castels, pryncypall manor places, monasteryes, and colleges, but I haue seane them, and noted in so doynge a whole worlde of thynes verye memorable.51

Buildings were, in turn, the subject of personal and official correspondence. Henry VIII’s own personal interest in architecture is strongly implied by the descriptions of buildings and their decoration (especially those associated with court ceremony) that his ambassadors chose to include in their correspondence with him. In late 1540, John Wallop, the resident English ambassador in France, had an interview with Francis I.52 The French king questioned him regarding Henry’s palaces at Hampton Court, Richmond and Windsor, Wallop ‘declaring to hym at length the magnificence of them all three and specially of hampton court, of whiche he was very desierous to here’.53 Francis subsequently granted Wallop a personal tour of Fontainebleau to ‘showe me his chambres, and specially his gallerey to knowe howe I shuld like them, to thentent I myght advertis your majesty thereof’.54 Wallop was particularly concerned with the possibility that Henry VIII might wish to emulate Francis’s gallery and he twice suggests that the king should consult directly with Nicholas Bellin of Modena who had worked on the gallery before entering Henry’s employment: And after … I had wel beheld the saide gallerey, me thought it the most magnifique that ever I sawe, the length, and bredthe no man canne better shewe your majestie than modon, who wrought there in the begynnyng of the same, being at that tyme nothing in the perfection, as it is nowe … the forthe part is all antique of suche stuff, as the said modon makith your majestis chemenyes, And betwixt every windowe standes grete Anticall personages, entier … the said modon can muche better declare the perfytnes of the hole to your majeste then I, And in the gallerey as of [St] James the like wold be wel made, ffor it is bothe highe and large yf your pleasure be to have the patern of this here I knowe … right wel the Frenche king well gladly geve it me … .55

Henry VIII, in like manner, entertained ambassadors with tours of his own buildings. In late 1532, the Imperial ambassador reported to Charles V that ‘the French ambassador went to see the King at the Tower, whither he had gone to view the buildings. The King showed him all the treasure’.56 This shared royal interest in architectural projects was remarked to William Paget 51 52 53 54 55 56

Ibid. p. 9. TNA, SP 1/163, fols 228r –233v; L & P, XVI, pp. 117–9, no. 276. TNA, SP 1/163, fol. 230r. Ibid. fol. 230v. TNA, SP 1/163, fols 231v–2r. L & P, V, p. 679, no. 1633; King’s works, ed. Colvin, III, pp. 265–7.

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in 1542 by a French courtier who noted how Francis and Henry both delighted ‘in hunting, in hawking, in building, in apparel, in stones, [and] in jewels’.57

Architecture, Portraiture and the Royal Image The culture of visual and intellectual engagement with architecture at the Henrician court, examined above, prompts questions regarding the role of the architectural imagery frequently encountered in contemporary portraiture. More specifically, in the context of this present study, it raises questions regarding the significance of the visual associations created in portraits of Henry VIII between images of the king and images of architecture. The extent and nature of architectural imagery in early sixteenth-century portraiture was dictated, in part, by long-standing artistic convention and, in turn, by the practices of reproduction. Nevertheless, where architectural settings or elements occur in contemporary portraits each instance represents a deliberate artistic choice. However, unlike other aspects of composition, such as dress or posture, the architectural elements or settings of early Tudor portraits have received comparatively little scholarly attention. This architectural emphasis might vary greatly. Many portraits, such as Holbein’s Christina of Denmark, Duchess of Milan (1538), locate their subjects in only the barest physical settings.58 One version of Holbein’s Erasmus, of c.1532, depicts the scholar against a plain blue background, whilst an earlier version, dated 1523, places him in a fictive architectural space dominated by an elaborated decorated classical pilaster. This pilaster, Matthias Winner has argued, ‘must surely allude to the “Pillars of Hercules” (Columnae Herculis), for Erasmus is described as Herculean in the Greek inscription on the book which he rests in his hands’.59 A comparable column occurs in the composition of Holbein’s portrait of Mary, Lady Guildford (1527) of which a very different reading has been proposed; that the ‘suspended head [which decorates the column] with an open mouth … comments (like an ironic witticism) on the lady’s fixity and restraint of facial expression’.60 Such distinct, yet plausible, interpretations serve as a reminder of the inherently veiled or suggestive nature of such symbolism or visual metaphor. However, to consider the case of these related columns further, it is noteworthy that Holbein’s portrait of Mary’s husband, Henry Guildford, painted the same year, incorporates no comparable 57 L & P, XVII, p. 53, no. 128. 58 Foister, Holbein, pp. 144–45, no. 157. 59 M. Winner, ‘Holbein’s Portrait of Erasmus with a renaissance pilaster’, in Hans Holbein: Paintings, prints, and reception, ed. M. Roskill and J.O. Hand (New Haven and London, 2001), pp. 154–73, at p. 161. 60 M. Roskill, ‘Lady with a Squirrel and a Starling by Holbein: Incursions of the figurative in his portraits’, in Hans Holbein, ed. Roskill and Hand, pp. 175–85, at p. 179.

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architectural features, but instead depicts him wearing an enamelled cap badge decorated with images of a clock and surveying instruments: the tools of practical geometry and astronomy.61 Given the close association of geometry with architecture, this badge and the column in Mary’s portrait, may have been devices intended to associate this couple intellectually. Holbein’s use of the same architectural conceit of a dominant column or pilaster in his portraits of both Mary Guildford and Erasmus may, in turn, have been intended as a visual allusion to a relationship between the couple and the scholar, of whom Henry Guildford was a correspondent.62 More generally, in each of these portraits Holbein appears to employ architectural devices, or visual allusions to architectural practice, as deliberately conceived elements of his compositions that might be understood both literally and potentially symbolically. The contemporary portrait that most directly associates its subject with architectural imagery is arguably that of Henry Howard, Earl of Surrey (c.1546), in which fantastical classical devices and ornaments frame the entire composition. The courtier and poet appears leaning on a gilded pillar and standing in a portal festooned with idealized figures, groups of putti, grotesque masks and boukrania (Plate 4).63 Although the architectural composition of this image, as shown by Anthony Wells-Cole, derives from a printed design by an artist of the Fontainebleau school, this does not diminish the significance of the particular choice of this architectural fantasy to frame Howard, or the possibility that it was intended to reflect a scholarly interest in classical literature otherwise exemplified by his translation of the Aeneid.64 This portrait, which may have been intended for a specific setting in the earl’s house of ‘Mountsurrey’ (Norfolk), exhibits many characteristics of the contemporary architectural culture considered above: the influence of printed images, the relationship between literature and architectural appreciation, and the development of a court culture that derived pleasure from both the novelty and intellectual associations of classical architecture. This portrait and those considered above are sufficient to argue the case that the architectural imagery encountered in early Tudor court portraiture was intended, at least in some instances, to serve a visual purpose beyond that of simple scene-setting. In turn, such culturally sophisticated use of architectural imagery prompts questions regarding the status or the role of similar images encountered in portraits and other depictions of Henry VIII himself. Much of the architectural imagery encountered in portraits or images of Henry VIII takes the form of richly ornamented pseudo-classical or renaissance buildings, such as the audience chamber depicted in Holbein’s Solomon 61 Foister, Holbein, p. 28, no. 18. 62 ‘Sir Henry Guildford (1489–1532)’, in ODNB. 63 K. Hearn, Dynasties. Painting in Tudor and Jacobean England 1530–1630 (London, 1995), pp. 50–52. 64 Wells-Cole, Decoration, p. 35. Hearn, Dynasties, pp. 50–52, no. 14.

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and the Queen of Sheba (c.1534),65 or the classical gallery shown in Lambert Barnard’s mural depicting Henry VIII confirming a grant to Chichester Cathedral (c.1526).66 These classicized settings appear to have contrasted with the architectural reality of Henry VIII’s own houses and palaces, many newly built, which tended to combine late-medieval forms of planning, construction and gothic ornament with a vivid veneer of renaissance decoration. In general terms, the illusory classical interiors inhabited by Henry VIII in contemporary images appear to have served as a means of associating the king with the cultural sophistication and authority of Imperial Rome and the wider ancient world. Temporary architectural fantasies created for court festivals might operate in a similar manner, but in three dimensions. The ‘halls built with triumphal arches’ and provided with other classical furnishings at Greenwich in 1527 caused the Milanese ambassador to report that Henry VIII had ‘surpassed all the splendour of modern or ancient kings’.67 It is, however, also possible to argue for more specific interpretations of the architectural imagery encountered in certain portraits or images of Henry VIII, six of which will now be examined briefly in turn.

The Whitehall Mural, Hans Holbein the Younger (Composed c.1536–37) The elaborate architectural setting incorporated within the Whitehall Mural has received surprisingly little attention, although in many respects it defines the character and composition of the entire image (Plate 5). First, this fictive architectural elevation may have served to relate the lost mural to the architecture of the chamber onto whose walls it was painted.68 The drawn architecture in the surviving portion of cartoon (over two and half metres in height) is dramatic and hints at a significant illusionistic effect lost in Leemput’s small-scale copy. Second, as elsewhere, the rich classical setting no doubt served to evoke the cultural sophistication and authority of the ancient or classical world. Third, the architectural setting spatially controls the composition. This, despite the iconic legacy of Holbein’s image of Henry VIII, is focused not upon the king himself, but upon an architectural device, an inscribed altar or plinth, which dominates the foreground. The two generations of the Tudor dynasty that flank this altar, and the architectural emphasis and perspective of the space in which they stand, both serve to

65 Foister, Holbein, p. 136, no. 146. 66 J. Woolfson and D. Lush, ‘Lambert Barnard in Chichester Cathedral: Ecclesiastical politics and the Tudor royal image’, The Antiquaries Journal, 87 (2007), pp. 259–80. 67 CSPMilan, I, pp. 512–13, nos 803–4. 68 This point is developed by Starkey in D. Starkey and B. Grosvenor, Lost Faces. Identity and discovery in Tudor royal portraiture (London, 2007), pp. 43–51.

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frame it and to focus the attention of the viewer; an effect, again, presumably more powerful at its original scale than it is in Leemput’s painting. The Whitehall Mural is, then, remarkable for its controlled combination of group portraiture, text and architecture. However, a more specific reading of the architectural setting is also possible. The design of this architectural space is purely fictive and transposes elements from a drawing by Donato Bramante of the Interior of a Ruined Church or Temple, engraved as a large print in 1481 by Bernardo Prevedari (Plate 6).69 The setting is more than ‘closely copied’; rather Holbein selectively quotes from and completely recasts Bramante’s design.70 Particularly significant is the round-headed recess that forms the apex of the triangular composition formed by the full-length portraits of the Tudor dynasty. This frames an oculus containing a bust viewed from behind, which in Bramante’s design is bareheaded, but which in the mural (as recorded by Leemput) Holbein modifies with the addition of a laurel wreath and a wreathed frame. Similar laurel-wreathed ‘antique heads’ were a favoured form of architectural and decorative ornament at the Henrician court; indeed, eight adorned the exterior of the ‘Holbein Gate’ elsewhere at Whitehall Palace (1531–32).71 Such heads were associated not only with emperors and imperial authority, but also with military heroes and marital victory. A series of similar heads displayed at Greenwich in 1527 represented ‘Scipio, Iulius, Pompei & such other conquerours’.72 This particular head – turned away from the viewer, but occupying the focal point of the composition – can be understood as representing the heroes of antiquity now eclipsed by the Tudor dynasty, a visual metaphor complemented by the inscription on the altar directly beneath: If it pleases you to see the illustrious images of heroes, look on these: no picture ever bore greater. / The great debate, competition and great question is whether father or son is the victor. / For both indeed were supreme. / The former often overcame his enemies and the conflagration of his country, and finally brought peace to its citizens. / The son, born indeed for greater things, removed the unworthy from their altars and replaced them by upright men. / The arrogance of the Popes has yielded to unerring virtue, and while Henry VIII holds the sceptre in his hand religion is restored and during his reign the doctrines of God have begun to be held in his honour.73

Returning to the architectural composition as a whole, it is noteworthy that Holbein has, here, deliberately transfigured an image of a ruined temple into 69 Holbein’s use of Bramante’s design was first recognized by P. Ganz, The paintings of Hans Holbein (London, 1950), pp. 289–90; L. Aldovini, ‘The Prevedari Print’, Print Quarterly, 26/1 (March 2009), 38–45. 70 Starkey and Grosvenor, Faces, p. 47. 71 The ‘antique heads’ produced by the Florentine sculptor Giovanni da Maiano for the Henrician court are the subject of ongoing research by the present author. 72 Hall’s Chronicle, ed. Ellis, p. 723. 73 Foister, Holbein, p. 94, no. 103.

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that of an intact and magnificent architectural monument. This architectural transformation may, in itself, be intended to reflect the national renewal and restoration of religion evoked in the altar’s inscription. An appreciation of this visual conceit would reply upon a knowledge of Bramante’s design and would, no doubt, have been limited to select number of viewers. With this in mind, however, it is particularly noteworthy that Bramante’s design was employed as the source for a further image of Henry VIII produced only three or four years subsequent to Holbein’s painting of the Whitehall Mural.

The Psalter of Henry VIII, Jean Mallard (1540) The miniature that accompanies Psalm 69 in The Psalter of Henry VIII, painted in England by the French émigré Jean Mallard, shows Henry VIII as ‘David penitent’ beseeching divine punishment of his enemies, the tools of which are held aloft by an angel, in illustration of verse 25: ‘Pour out thy indignation upon them: and let thy wrathful anger take hold of them’ (Plate 7).74 Versions of this subject commonly occur as illustrations of this psalm in works of the preceding decades; however, two aspects of this particular composition appear unique.75 The first is the architectural setting of a ruined temple or basilica; the second, the position of David (or Henry) himself, turned almost fully away from the viewer. Both are directly drawn from Bramante’s design; indeed, the entire setting appears to be a simplified version of Prevedari’s print. The temple is more ruinous, without a vault, but the apse, to the midleft, and the colonnaded aisle, on the mid-right, are both retained, as is the diminishing pattern of floor slabs or tiles. The unusual posture of David (or Henry) imitates that of Bramante’s bearded and cassocked figure kneeling in veneration, although in the miniature the king’s arms are altered to stretch out in supplication.76 Bramante’s drawing appears to show the conversion of a classical temple into a place of Christian worship.77 Mallard’s choice of this subject as his model for a setting of ‘David penitent’ was no doubt intended to illustrate verse 26 of the same psalm: ‘Let their habitation be made desolate: and let there be none to dwell in their tabernacles’.78 This miniature thus illustrates the appeal of a divinely anointed king for the righteous destruction of the religious buildings of his own, but ultimately God’s, enemies. Put 74 BL Royal MS 2 A. xvi, fol. 79; Henry VIII: Man and monarch, ed. S. Doran (London, 2009), pp. 198–9, no. 194, and Andrea Clarke, personal communication. 75 P. Tudor-Craig, ‘Henry VIII and King David’, in Early Tudor England: Proceedings of the 1987 Harlaxton Symposium, ed. D. Williams (Woodbridge, 1989), pp. 183–205. 76 For David dressed in similar golden armour and a blue cloak see: BL Harley 5328, fol. 77; and BL Add. MS 35318, fols 69v–70, illustrated Backhouse, Illuminated Page, p. 230, no. 208. 77 D. Landau and P. Parshall, The Renaissance Print (New Haven and London, 1994), p. 104. 78 Psalm 69:26 (‘fiat commoratio eorum deserta in tabernaculis eorum non sit qui habitet’).

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differently, in this architectural allegory, the contemporary ruins of England’s gothic monasteries are transmuted into the image of a decaying classical temple, and the act of their destruction into a subject of devotional focus for Henry VIII. That Bramante’s design, whose subject appears to be the renewal of a religious building, was the visual inspiration for two images of Henry VIII so different in size, medium, composition and character (the one overt and triumphant, the other private and devotional) is remarkable. Prevedari’s print was the largest engraving produced from a single plate in the fifteenthcentury (it measures 71 × 51 cm) and only two impressions are now known.79 It is possible that copies of this print were independently owned, or known, to Holbein and Mallard, but it is also conceivable that a copy was in Henry VIII’s own possession, or otherwise known at his court. Were this the case, it is plausible that the architectural setting of Holbein’s Whitehall Mural might well have been recognized, or conceived by artist and perhaps royal client, as a renewed version of Bramante’s ruined temple. Certainly, in their composition both the Whitehall Mural and Mallard’s miniature were inspired by the same remarkable architectural image and, in turn, both appear to employ architectural imagery as a metaphorical expression of Henry VIII’s political and religious achievements.

The Family of Henry VIII, Unknown Artist (c.1545) The basic composition and architectural setting of The Family of Henry VIII appears to be original, although its debt to the figural arrangement of latemedieval altarpieces has long been established (Plate 8).80 Henry VIII sits, as a Madonna might, under a canopy of estate and on an oriental carpet, flanked by his family who stand in the mode of saints or pious donors.81 In turn, Raphael’s design for the tapestry The Healing of the Lame Man has been adduced as a potential source for the colonnaded architectural setting.82 However, other potentially significant exemplars remain to be explored. Lorenzo Costa’s mural, Madonna and Child with Giovanni II Bentivoglio and his Family (1488), in S. Giacomo Maggiore in Bologna, has a similar colonnaded setting and a series of full-length portraits that strikingly prefigure those of The Family of Henry VIII. The framing effect produced by the gallery is, likewise, reminiscent of the colonnaded bays of earlier Italian altarpieces, such as Andrea Mantegna’s San Zeno Altarpiece of 1456–59. 79 Aldovini, ‘The Prevedari Print’, p. 45. 80 R. Strong, Gloriana. The portraits of Queen Elizabeth I (London, 1987), p. 49. 81 S.E. James, The feminine dynamic in English art, 1485–1603. Women as consumers, patrons and painters (Farnham, 2009), p. 98. 82 Strong, Gloriana, p. 49.

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The status of the architectural setting of The Family of Henry VIII is expressed by the comparatively small scale of the royal figures who inhabit its tall, colonnaded gallery. In contrast to the sometimes dominant and busy groupings of earlier altarpieces, such as Hans Memling’s The Donne Triptych (c.1478), the figures here occupy only a fraction of the composition, which is otherwise filled by expanses of richly depicted architectural ornament.83 The four columns in the foreground, together with the entablature they support, define a distinct frame through which the whole composition is viewed. With their counterparts in the mid-ground, these columns also create a threedimensional space whose focal point (or centre of perspective) is the king himself. In turn, these pairs of columns divide the gallery into five bays: the central bay occupied by Henry VIII, Prince Edward and Jane Seymour; the two bays immediately adjacent occupied by Princesses Mary and Elizabeth; and an outer pair of bays, only partially shown, through the doorways of which a final pair of figures are glimpsed, one William Somer, Henry VIII’s fool, the other, in all likelihood, Jane, Princess Mary’s female fool.84 Mary and Elizabeth both stand in the same position with respect to the grid of panels that adorn the back wall of the gallery. Thus the geometrical setting-out of the architecture is intrinsic to the entire conception and composition of this painting. Indeed, the manner in which the columns are depicted recalls the architectural diagrams in Henry VIII’s Geometria. Roy Strong has identified the exterior view, glimpsed through the arched doorways of the gallery, as ‘a topographical record rare at this period’ of the gardens and various buildings at Whitehall Palace.85 In turn, he has suggested that the gallery itself may be a record of the palace’s interior decoration. However, both the highly controlled use of the perspective in this interior and its rich classical style suggest that this is more probably a fictive or idealized architectural space. This juxtaposition of fictive and real spaces reflects the architectural experience of the Henrician court: of real buildings and of buildings encountered in images or in the literary imagination. This distinction appears to be expressly recognized and exploited in this image. The impossible royal party of the king, his children and long-dead third wife are grouped motionless, perhaps eternal, in an idealized setting defined by architectural order and controlled magnificence; in contrast, two royal fools are glimpsed, in transitory motion, walking in a real garden against the asymmetric forms and vernacular materials of real buildings. The Family of Henry VIII appears, in summary, to have been conceived as much as an architectural image, as it was a group portrait; and one, moreover, that anticipated an audience familiar

83 Gothic, eds Marks and Williamson, p. 337, no. 213. 84 J. Southworth, Fools and Jesters at the English Court (Stroud, 2003), pp. 96 and 132–3. 85 Strong, Gloriana, p. 49; O. Millar, The Tudor, Stuart and Early Georgian pictures in the collection of Her Majesty the Queen (2 vols, London, 1963), I, p. 64.

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with architectural imagery as both as a literal means of representing buildings and as vehicle for abstract cultural or political discourse.

The Embarkation of Henry VIII and The Field of the Cloth of Gold, Unknown Artists (c.1520–40 and c.1545) Whereas the images considered above make symbolic or metaphorical use of their architectural settings, others associate Henry VIII more simply with actual buildings. Two such images are the well-known ‘history paintings’: The Embarkation of Henry VIII and The Field of the Cloth of Gold (Plates 9 and 10).86 In the former, a royal fleet, with Henry VIII aboard the flagship, departs from Dover (when and for what purpose is uncertain). In the foreground and constituting approximately a third of the composition are two artillery forts linked by a causeway, both manned and firing a salute. These modern defensive structures are implicitly contrasted with their medieval predecessor, Dover castle, shown in the upper-left corner of the painting, and their depiction is immediately reminiscent of the presentation drawings of coastal forts produced for Henry VIII. The visual prominence given to these forts, together with the associated fleet, must raise the possibility that, in addition to representing a particular event (or even rather than so doing), this painting was intended as a celebration of the king’s joint renewal of the architectural and naval infrastructure of England’s coastal defences. Comparable prominence is given to Southsea Castle, an artillery fort at Portsmouth Harbour constructed in 1544, in the lost mural The Encampment of the English Forces near Portsmouth, commissioned by Sir Anthony Browne to decorate his house at Cowdray (Sussex), and recorded in a print of 1778.87 The fort commands the foreground and Henry VIII is shown approaching it on horseback with a small retinue. This association may consciously reflect the king’s particular interest in this particular building and others of its kind. During the construction of Southsea, Anthony Knyvet reported to the lord chancellor, Thomas Wriothesley: ther was never such a pese of worke brought up of … [such] compass and heith [with] so lytle money … And when the kinges magestis pleasure shalbe to se the saide pese of work, [which] was of the kinges magesties owne devyse, I do trust that … we that be here shall have thankes for the spedye [fortification] thereof … [Give] me leve … that I maye com and se his magestie … [and] I will bryng wt me the plat of all the fortificacions that hath byn down syns I cam hether … .88

In this lost mural, as well as in The Embarkation and The Encampment, buildings that were conceived and devised by means of drawn plats are celebrated in 86 O. Millar, Tudor, Stuart and Early Georgian, I, pp. 54–6. 87 Henry VIII, ed. Doran, p. 249, no. 254; King’s works, ed. Colvin, IV, pp. 557–63. 88 TNA, SP 1/193, fol. 78 (my italics); L & P, XIX ii, p. 220, no. 385.

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subsequent architectural images that visually and physically associate Henry VIII with significant royal buildings. The Field of the Cloth of Gold, despite its subdivided visual narrative, may at its simplest be ‘read’ as a similar pictorial celebration – not of the meeting itself – but of the temporary palace and camp constructed for Henry VIII at Guînes in 1520. The English palace with its remarkable Italianate gatehouse, attended by its beer and wine fountains in the style of Roman Imperial monuments, and by its tented encampment, kitchens and tiltyard, is the dominant element of the composition.89 The palace is visually balanced in the composition by the mounted figure of Henry VIII, at the centre of his retinue and court, processing towards it. Although intended neither as a precise factual nor technical record, The Field of the Cloth of Gold is remarkable for being the earliest full-scale painting that takes an English royal palace as its principal subject, and also as a unique record of the temporary, yet lavish, architectural conceits commonly constructed for royal and civic festivals. Its commissioning again suggests the existence of a courtly audience that might be impressed and influenced, not only by actual royal buildings, but also by the visual evocation of an earlier architectural tour de force.

The Apotheosis of Henry VIII, Robert Pyte (1546) It is fitting to conclude this brief survey with one of the last images commissioned by or for Henry VIII (Plate 11). This is a large, finely detailed, pen and ink drawing of a three-storey ‘visionary classical palace’ or triumphal arch, at the centre of which Henry VIII is depicted kneeling in prayer.90 It is dated 1546 and signed by Robert Pyte, then deputy engraver of the Mint.91 Maurice Howard has argued that this was intended as an artwork in its own right, rather than as an architectural design, and has identified the basic iconographic programme: ‘it represents a form of apotheosis’ where Henry VIII is ‘spiritually re-enacting’ the vision of St John recorded in the Book of Revelation.92 The gateway is inscribed with a series of heavily edited passages from Tyndale’s biblical translation of 1526, most from Revelation, and Howard’s interpretation can, arguably, be taken further and the entire

89 S. Anglo, ‘The Hampton Court painting of the Field of the Cloth of Gold considered as an historical document’, The Antiquaries Journal, 46 (1966), pp. 287–307; S. Anglo, Spectacle, pp. 141–3. 90 Summerson, Architecture in Britain 1530–1830, pp. 51–2. 91 M. Howard, ‘A drawing by “Robertus Pyte” for Henry VIII’, Architectural History, 44 (2001), pp. 23–8, at p. 24. 92 Ibid. p. 26.

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gateway associated with ‘the seat of God and the lambe’ in the Heavenly Jerusalem from which proceeds ‘a pure ryver of water of lyfe clere as cristall’.93 The lower storey of the gate is populated by small groups of figures, most of whom turn away from the viewer to focus their attention on the empty zone beyond the colonnaded passage at the centre of the image, an area further emphasized by a dramatic use of perspective. Some figures strike anticipatory poses: a man leans in wait upon his walking stick; a naked boy appears to be on the verge of passing his water. Some of the figures hold water vessels, such as jugs or amphora, while two ewers rest on the steps in the immediate foreground. Taken together, the posture and accoutrements of these figures suggests that they are all waiting for the imminent bursting forth of the river of life, which will stream through the empty colonnade and down the steps at the centre of the image. The central inscription on the gate, immediately beneath Henry VIII, heralds this same event or river: receve ye the water of lyfe yt ys / comyth frome the seate of god /and wyth the levis of the wod / of lyfe heale owr people for the / lord comyth shortly revela xxii

The close relationship between the water of life and the biblical word of life is, in turn, emphasized by an angel who offers Henry VIII a book, beneath whom is the text: ‘eate the boke of lyfe’. This angel, who offers the book of life to be eaten, occurs in Revelation 10 and is probably an allusion to Henry’s sanctioning of an English Bible (from which the drawing’s inscriptions quote) and its semi-prophetic promulgation: And I went vnto the angell and sayde to him: geve me the lytle boke and he sayd vnto me: take it and eate it vp and it shall make thy belly bytter but it shalbe in thy mouth as swete as hony … And he sayde vnto me: thou muste prophesy agayne amonge the people and nacions and tonges and to many kynges.94

Pyte’s drawing, like the Whitehall Mural, is an image that combines architecture, text and portraiture to complex visual and symbolic effect. In his drawing a portrait of Henry VIII is reduced to become the central element of an entire building, which in turn, appears to be nothing less than an architectural manifestation of the king’s religious or spiritual persona. During his sermon at the funeral of Henry VII, John Fisher praised the king’s ‘treasour and rychesse incomparable, his buyldnges mooste goodly and after the newest cast all of pleasure. But what’, he continued, ‘is all this now as unto him, all be but Fumus & umbra. A smoke that soone vanyssheth, and a 93 Revelation 22:1. 94 Revelation 10:9–11.

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shadowe soone passynge awaye.’95 The early Tudor royal estate has now, for the main, quite literally passed away. However, during Henry VIII reign, the expansion of this estate, the introduction into England of aspects of renaissance classicism, and the refortification of England’s coastline and borders, together with the physical process of the dissolution of the monasteries, all generated near-continuous architectural activity within the immediate orbit of the royal court. This architectural commotion was, and in part remains, reflected in the wealth of architectural images that were produced or circulated at the Henrician court: technical, decorative, illustrative and symbolic. Buildings and architecture elements, both real and purely fictive, were depicted and might be encountered in many different forms of media and context. The manner in which architecture was deployed in contemporary images of Henry VIII is likewise unprecedented. Arguably, no group of portraits of any previous or subsequent monarch exhibits such variety or originality in its treatment of architectural composition, depiction and exegesis. Images such as the Whitehall Mural and The Apotheosis of Henry VIII combine royal portraiture, architecture and textual inscriptions in a manner that not only communicated the religious and political concerns of the king and his court, but also reflected and relied upon a well-established and sophisticated architectural culture. In the production of these images, architecture took its place alongside other forms of political and courtly discourse. The rich and varied architectural imagery briefly surveyed here reflects a contemporary appreciation of architecture far more complex and subtle than prevailing characterizations of early Tudor architecture in terms of power or branding yet allow.

95 The English works of John Fisher, bishop of Rochester. Part I, ed. J.E.B. Mayor (EETS, Extra series 27; London, 1876), pp. 269–70.

6 Wishful Thinking: Reading the Portraits of Henry VIII’s Queens1 Brett Dolman

This chapter will explore what is and what is not known about the portrait commissions of Henry VIII’s queens. It will seek to understand: why royal queens (and prospective royal brides) had their portrait taken; what such portraits were used for; how they were circulated; why they were copied, and consequently what such artistic histories can tell us about the cultural and political interests of each queen and her supporters. Panel portraits provide the focus for this investigation, but other figurative expressions of identity will also be considered. The chapter will look at the documentary record, but will also analyse the pictorial record through the surviving portraits of the queens. The chapter will also review the existing arguments about identity surrounding the surviving portraits of Henry’s wives, on a number of different levels: how certain we can be of identity in the first place; how accurate a likeness we have, even if the identity can be established; and what such a likeness can meaningfully tell us about each queen. This analysis will be offered against a backdrop of examples of how portraits are used, and misused, to support historical arguments about the character and identity of Henry’s wives. So little is documented about Tudor portraiture, and so much has not survived, that it is difficult and often misleading to draw conclusions from 1 This chapter emerged as a direct result of curating the exhibition, ‘Henry’s Women’, at Hampton Court Palace (9 April to 3 August 2009). I would like to thank Tarnya Cooper, Julia Dudkiewicz, Bendor Grosvenor, Frederick Hepburn, Susan James and Paul Simm for their advice and for freely offering their opinions on the portraiture of Henry VIII’s queens; I would also like to thank all the lenders to the exhibition for their generosity and support, as well as the conservators Francis Downing and Rupert Featherstone for their work, respectively, on the Mountgarret portrait of Anne Boleyn and the Trinity College, Cambridge, portrait of Anne of Cleves.

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the limited evidence available. There are indeed very good reasons why this is the case: good reasons in 1536 and again in 1542, for example, to dispose of a portrait of Anne Boleyn or Catherine Howard after their executions. Moreover, the very function of Tudor portraiture was limited in scope: portraits were used for very specific political reasons, as part of negotiations surrounding a marriage, or as a gesture of loyalty (to a king, queen, or patron) or a statement of dynasty. They were signifiers of status, as gifts offered between clients within a patronage circle, or hung on the wall as part of a figurative family tree. More than anything else, they were simple records of presence, a likeness of someone who was not there, and they were valued primarily for that quality. However, this has not stopped Tudor portraits of Henry VIII’s queens being used by historians as a route towards understanding the psychological profiles of Henry’s matrimonial victims. This historiographic laziness is subjective at best, wholly unreliable at worst. It makes assumptions about identity, about likeness, and about the talent, technique, and interests of a Tudor portrait artist. It rejects what has been recognized, by Tatiana String and others, as the mechanistic copying process of producing portraits in the sixteenth century and the subsequent quality of much of what survives, and overstates the case for Henry VIII’s knowledge of and interest in the potential of portraiture to support a propaganda programme around the public image of kingship.2 This tendency to illustrate a royal biography with an apparently suggestive portrait, interpreted to support the author’s conclusions about the personality of one of Henry’s queens also ignores the lack of certainty surrounding the identity of many of the portraits in question. There is no immovable canon of portraits of Henry VIII’s wives; there is only a wide argument of opinion circulating around a small number of datable and identifiable works, of varying quality, and little supporting documentary evidence to understand the circumstances or reason behind their commission. Roy Strong identified one authentic and contemporary half-length portrait of Katherine of Aragon, which survives in two near-identical versions, at the National Portrait Gallery in London (Plate 12) and at the Museum of Fine Arts in Boston.3 The former has now been re-dated as ‘early eighteenth-century’, and the Boston version, attributed there to Johannes Corvus, remains undated; it is therefore perfectly possible that neither portrait is datable to Katherine’s lifetime, and that both pictures are instead part of a family of later 2 Tatiana C. String, Art and communication in the reign of Henry VIII (Aldershot and Burlington, VT, 2008) and ‘The transmission of artistic conventions/visual vocabulary in Tudor portraits’, unpublished research from the Making Art in Tudor Britain project (National Portrait Gallery, London, 2007–12). 3 Roy Strong, Tudor and Jacobean portraits (2 vols, London, 1969), I, pp. 38–40. The portraits are National Portrait Gallery, inv. 163, and Boston, inv. 48.1142.

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paintings of Katherine that survive in many other locations.4 Nonetheless, the multiplicity of versions of this portrait type that survive, partly because interest in Katherine’s image was revived during the reign of her daughter, Mary I, and later as part of historic sets of kings and queens that decorated courtiers’ homes from the late 1500s, has meant that this image of Katherine has acquired a certain authenticity.5 It is tempting to assume that all such paintings ultimately stem from a supposed original portrait of c.1530, based on the costume, which may indeed survive at Boston. All of these paintings, however, including the Boston Katherine, are relatively crude, ‘mechanical and workshop’ as Strong noted, and hardly a reliable likeness.6 However, there is a similar half-length portrait, showing Katherine with her pet marmoset, that has been dated to the 1530s (Plate 13).7 This painting (now in a private collection) is itself drawn from a surviving miniature in which Katherine is feeding a peanut to the marmoset, a statement perhaps of exotic ownership.8 In the larger portrait, the peanut has been replaced by a coin, which is rejected by the marmoset who reaches instead for the crucifix around Katherine’s neck. The iconography has been, it seems, deliberately adapted; this is, then, a painting with a message: piety and eternal salvation is more important than earthly reward. Bendor Grosvenor has suggested that encoded within this message is a more specific allusion to Katherine’s position at court during the annulment proceedings; this is a portrait commissioned, not probably by her, but in support of her, and in support of her own belief in the sanctity of her marriage to Henry.9 Katherine may never, of course, have seen the painting, still less been involved in the re-imagination of its iconography, even if the painting intended such a specific reading. Grosvenor goes on to claim that the artist also attempted to idealize and beautify Katherine, as the portrait is ‘far more flattering than Katherine actually looked toward the end of her marriage’. This is difficult to demonstrate pictorially, given the lack of any other surviving half-length portrait of Katherine from this date: indeed, the miniature of Katherine with her marmoset, which has by this argument no iconographic message, is remarkably similar. The temptation to provide a definite context for a painting’s commission has, in this case, influenced the reading of the portrait further to justify and ‘prove’ the argument. We simply do not know 4 Making Art in Tudor Britain project, unpublished research. 5 Examples in accessible collections include: Hardwick Hall, Derbyshire, inv. P/65; Hever Castle, Kent; Merton College, Oxford; National Museums and Galleries of Wales, Cardiff, inv. NMW A 1607; the Dean and Chapter of Ripon Cathedral, Yorkshire, inv. 500/13; Royal Collection, inv. RCIN 404746. 6 Strong, Tudor and Jacobean portraits, I, p. 40. 7 Bendor Grosvenor, ‘Henry VIII’s queens’, in Lost faces: Identity and discovery in Tudor royal portraiture (London, 2007), pp. 56–7. 8 Duke of Buccleuch collection. 9 Grosvenor, Lost faces, p. 57.

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for whom this portrait was painted, nor when, nor why. Nonetheless, the rarity of this painting’s potential relative eloquence serves to underline how infrequently portraiture of Henry’s queens seems to have been used as a means of political expression at all. There may be two earlier portraits of Katherine before she was queen. The first is argued to be a portrait of her painted as a prospective Tudor bride, before she travelled to England.10 The second, attributed to Michael Sittow, is now suspected not to be her at all, but to be a representation of St Katherine.11 Katherine is recorded in miniature on the Westminster tournament roll of 1511, and in miniature paintings that either draw on the standard portrait type we have already seen, or present us with an alternative, French-styled Katherine in one of the first English miniature paintings attributed to Lucas Horenbout of c.1525.12 There are also images representing Katherine as Henry’s consort in the stained glass windows of The Vyne, Hampshire, possibly in the east window at St Margaret’s at Westminster, and in a drawing recording the lost Chapel Royal stained glass at Hampton Court.13 Finally, double portraits of Katherine with Henry are recorded in the collection of Maud Parr in 1529, in the 1536 inventory of Katherine’s own effects, and in the 1542 and 1546 inventories of Princess Mary; another portrait of her is recorded in the 1524 inventory of her sister-in-law Margaret of Austria.14 We also have Katherine’s reported word on the portrait of Margaret of Austria, presented to Henry VII in 1505, that ‘the artist Michel would have managed a better, more exact and perfect painting’.15 For Katherine, like all other Tudor patrons, a portrait’s success was measured by its ability to record likeness, to stand in for the real thing. Unfortunately, no contemporary has left behind any record of whether portraits of Katherine were any more successful. The ubiquity of one portrait-type of Anne Boleyn is also usually argued to represent an accepted, even official, authentic portrait of her as queen, rediscovered and repeatedly copied once interest in Anne resurfaced during 10 Attributed to Juan de Flandes, c.1496, Museo Thyssen-Bornemisza, Madrid, inv. 141. 11 Kunsthistorisches Museum, Vienna, inv. 5612. Frederick Hepburn, ‘The portraiture of Prince Arthur and Katherine of Aragon’, in Arthur Tudor, Prince of Wales, ed. Steven Gunn and Linda Monckton (Woodbridge, Suffolk, 2009), pp. 31–49. 12 National Portrait Gallery, London, inv. 4682. 13 Hilary Wayment, ‘Twenty-four vidimuses for Cardinal Wolsey’, Master Drawings, 23 (1985–86), pp. 503–7, 569–87. 14 TNA PROB 11/24; ‘Item, one table peyntid representing the pictours of the King and the Princesse Dowgier’, Camden Miscellany (1854), III, p. 38; F. Madden, ed., The privy purse expenses of Princess Mary (London, 1831), pp. 178, 194; H. Michelant, ‘Inventaire ... de Marguerite d’Autriche ...’, Compte rendu des séances de la Commission royale d’histoire, ou Recueil de ses Bulletins / Bulletin de la Commission royale d’histoire, third series, 12 (1871), pp. 77–8. 15 ‘Mejor y mas cierta y perfectamente las pintara Michel’. As reported by Roderigo de Puebla, the Spanish Ambassador, to Ferdinand of Aragon, 12 August 1505, CSPSp, I, p. 370. Michael Sittow was painter to the court of Castile from the 1490s until the 1520s.

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the reign of her daughter Elizabeth I. Almost all of the surviving versions display the B-shaped pendant that apparently asserts the sitter’s identity and which has become an inseparable part of the Boleyn image in film (Plate 14).16 The difference between these images and those of Katherine is that there is no surviving, dated portrait of Anne from her lifetime. All of these paintings, except one version at Hever Castle, Kent, which alone retains the sitter’s hands and a red rose, give the impression of mechanistically copied and simplified ‘head and shoulders’ portraits. It has recently been suggested that all versions of this portrait type are actually derived from a portrait of Mary Tudor, Henry VIII’s sister, as no authentic portrait of Anne herself survived from which to draw her image in the later 1500s. There are superficial similarities, certainly, between these portraits of Anne and the apparently reliable identification of the marriage portrait of Mary with Charles Brandon, Duke of Suffolk, by an unknown artist after 1515; there is no documentary evidence of Anne owning a B-shaped pendant, and it is at least possible that the ‘B’ stood for ‘Brandon’, or that the pendant has been invented by later artists keen to distinguish their pretended image of Anne with a recognizable label.17 Alternative images of Anne have been published but none have been universally accepted. A portrait in the collection of the Mountgarret family (Plate 15) has been suggestively offered as an older Anne but may in fact be drawn from a portrait type of Jane Seymour, which remained in circulation throughout the sixteenth century.18 It certainly resembles the engraving of Anne by Reynold Elstrack early in the 1600s, which does seem to have taken Holbein’s later portrait of Jane Seymour from the Whitehall Mural, directly or indirectly, as its source: the jewellery and costume are similar.19 On the other hand, jewellery was portable and the royal jewels were passed from queen 16 National Portait Gallery, London, inv. 668, is often reproduced as the primary example of this type of portrait, but its materials and technique are consistent with it being a later sixteenth-century artwork whilst dendrochronological analysis has proved impossible due to the thinness of the panel (Making Art in Tudor Britain project, unpublished research). Other examples of this portrait type in accessible collections include: Dulwich Picture Gallery, London, inv. 534; Hever Castle, Kent; Loseley Park, Surrey; National Portrait Gallery, London, inv. 4980 (15); the Dean and Chapter of Ripon Cathedral, Yorkshire, inv. 500/14; Royal Collection, inv. RCIN 404742; the Château de Beauregard, Cellettes, France; National Gallery of Ireland, Dublin, inv. 549. Miniatures based on this portrait type also survive. Strong, Tudor and Jacobean Portraits, pp. 5–7; Eric Ives, ‘The queen and the painter’, Apollo, 140, new series (1994), 389, pp. 36–45; G. W. Bernard, Anne Boleyn: fatal attractions (New Haven and London, 2010), pp. 196–200. 17 Susan E. James, The feminine dynamic in English art, 1485–1603 (Farnham and Burlington, VT, 2009), pp. 126–8. There are at least three surviving copies of the ‘marriage’ portrait of Mary Tudor with Charles Brandon, including versions in the collections of the Duke of Bedford at Woburn Abbey and the Earl of Yarborough at Brocklesby Park. 18 The ‘Nidd Hall’ portrait, named after the erstwhile Mountgarret family estate, is still in the family’s private collection. 19 Renold Elstrack, line engraving, 1618, National Portrait Gallery, London, inv. D24936.

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to queen. The Mountgarret portrait was conserved in 2009: the treatment elicited little fresh data, and dendrochronology proved impossible due to the thinness of the panel; the ‘AB’ pendant, confirmed as part of the original paint layers, may be, like the B-pendant in the more familiar portrait-type of Anne, a later artist’s attempt to label an otherwise unfamiliar portrait image. There is no direct link between the Elstrack engraving and the Mountgarret painting, so whilst both may well draw on a separate tradition of Boleyn portraiture, there is little evidence for the authenticity or inauthenticity of either. The two versions of a miniature by Lucas, or possibly Gerard, Horenbout, previously known as both Katherine of Aragon and Jane Seymour, have been offered as an early image of Anne before her marriage (Plate 16).20 The heraldic iconography is suggestive but not conclusive, and Anne’s date of birth still contested, and so the identity of the sitter remains open to debate.21 There are also two, very different Holbein drawings, that have been identified as Anne, in the Royal Collection and in the British Museum.22 The former has a sixteenth-century inscription recording the sitter as ‘Anna Bollein, Queen’, but this is not original to the drawing, and this identification seems to have been rejected in 1649 when Wenceslaus Hollar chose instead to engrave the British Museum version as his image of Anne.23 Neither drawing has been unequivocally identified as Anne. This should not, of course, imply that such an identification is wrong, merely unprovable, and importantly should not then be used outside the context of its own debate to advance any particular theory about the likeness or personality of the sitter. The only authentic image of Anne as queen is in fact not a portrait at all but a commemorative medal from 1534.24 This does offer at least a physiognomic clue toward accepting that the familiar portraits of Anne and possibly even the Mountgarret portrait are derived from a common source; the latter portrait in particular retains the English headdress and costume of this 1534 Anne. It also remains probable, of course, that Anne did have her portrait painted as queen, possibly by one of the Horenbouts, and quite possibly by Holbein. Ives has advanced the arguments for Anne’s early patronage of Holbein, 20 The two miniatures are in the collections of the Duke of Buccleuch, and of the Royal Ontario Museum, Toronto, inv. 978.357. Roy Strong first suggested the sitter as Anne Boleyn in The English Renaissance Miniature (London, 1983), p. 189; the argument was developed by David Starkey, Henry VIII: a European court in exile (London, 1991), p. 92. Susan James suggests the artist is Lucas’s father, Gerard (Feminine Dynamic, p. 124). 21 Ives, ‘The queen and the painter’, pp. 36–8. 22 Royal Collection, inv. RL 12189; British Museum, inv. 1975, 0621.22. 23 Hollar, etching, 1649, National Portrait Gallery, London, inv. D21018. The arguments for and against both drawings being representations of Anne Boleyn appear in: John Rowlands and David Starkey, ‘An old tradition reasserted: Holbein’s portrait of Queen Anne Boleyn’, The Burlington Magazine, 125/959 (1983), pp. 88–92; Ives, ‘The queen and the painter’, pp. 40–42. 24 British Museum, inv. M.9010.

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during the early years of his second trip to England, through the evidence within Holbein’s Ambassadors portrait, his designs for jewellery, plate, and the triumphal designs for the coronation pageant.25 Ives has also suggested that Holbein’s miniature representing Henry VIII as a thinly disguised King Solomon, receiving the homage of Queen Sheba, and thereby underscoring the submission of the clergy, may also represent Anne as Sheba: a coded gift perhaps from the new queen intent on furthering the cause of religious reform.26 Whether Holbein’s putative lost portrait is represented through either of the surviving drawings or through the work of the Elizabethan copyists remains open to question. With Jane Seymour, we are on more certain ground. Holbein drew her and painted her in 1536 as queen and again the following year, drawing on the same portrait likeness, as part of the mural that graced one side of Henry VIII’s Privy Chamber at Whitehall (Plate 5).27 This was both a piece of Tudor political persuasion, designed to ram home in image and word the merits of the Tudor dynasty, and a powerful statement of presence. Jane’s appearance is usually trumpeted as representing her immortalization as the mother of Henry’s son and heir; David Starkey has also suggested that her inclusion was a reposte designed to extinguish conservative hopes for Jane as an apologist for the Catholic orthodoxy.28 Alternatively, it is tempting to see her presence in the mural as little more than a requirement for artistic balance. To make his dynastic statement, Henry VIII required the presence of both his parents; Elizabeth of York represented the legitimization of Henry’s claim to the throne. Jane Seymour, however, was of little importance beyond her fecundity. The fact that Jane survives in another piece of Tudor dynastic theatre, however, is suggestive of her image being embraced by Tudor portraitists after her death as a way of communicating the continuing potency of the Tudor dynasty. If The Family of Henry VIII (Plate 8) was painted for Henry (and we do not know that it was), then it suggests that Henry had learnt to use art and portraiture in a less literal, more symbolic way by the end of his reign.29 This is a more complex painting than the Whitehall Mural, one that is bound to recall in the observer the layout and structure of a devotional altarpiece. It is usually read as a statement about Henry’s rapprochement with all three of his children at the end of his reign, and his inclusion of all three in the succession. The centrality of Henry and Edward, however, as a 25 Ives, ‘The queen and the painter’, pp. 38–40. 26 Royal Collection, inv. RL 12188; Ives, ‘The queen and the painter’, pp. 38–9. 27 The drawing survives in the Royal Collection, inv. RL 12267; the Holbein painting is Vienna, Kunsthistorisches Museum, inv. GG 881. The ‘Whitehall Mural’ was destroyed by fire in 1698; it survives in two 1667 copies by the artist Remigius van Leemput, one in the Royal Collection, inv. RCIN 405750, and a second in the collection of Lord Egremont at Petworth House, Sussex. 28 David Starkey, ‘Holbein and Henry VIII’, in Lost faces, pp. 43–51. 29 Royal Collection, inv. RCIN 405796.

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Holy Family adored by the two princesses, arranged as donors to each side, is very clear. Jane’s presence may also be explained by something we do not yet know about the painting’s commission. Perhaps this was a Seymour painting, fashioned to underscore Edward’s seniority over his half-sisters, and their own familial importance in looking after him. Certainly, Holbein’s portrait of Jane was copied by the Seymours. In 1539, Anne Stanhope paid Holbein himself for a smaller version of his portrait of her sister-in-law.30 Another very close panel copy, ascribed to the circle of Holbein, suggests that this event was not unique.31 Meanwhile, the variant portrait believed to be Jane Seymour, owned by the Society of Antiquaries of London, suggests the possibility of a separate sitting, as does a miniature attributed to Lucas Horenbout at Sudeley Castle.32 Princess Mary owned a round black enamelled tablet containing portraits of the king and Queen Jane in 1542, and another double portrait is recorded in the Whitehall inventory of the same year.33 The accession of Jane’s son in 1547 seems to have quickly catalysed further copies as gestures of support and allegiance; many copies dependent on the Holbein original survive. Unlike their three predecessors, Anne of Cleves, Catherine Howard and Kateryn Parr left no royal children, and consequently very different artistic legacies. In 1539, Henry VIII commissioned Holbein to paint a portrait of Anne of Cleves because of the unique circumstances of his fourth marriage (Henry knew all of his other brides-to-be in the flesh).34 This painting is still almost universally described as the portrait that persuaded Henry to marry her, and therefore the root cause behind his subsequent appalled revulsion when he met the real thing.35 This is unfair: to Holbein, to Anne and to the painting. A direct link between the expectation engendered by Holbein’s portrait and Henry’s later distress is largely the creation of later historians, following the infamous interpretation of the episode by Tobias Smollett: ‘The king … found her so different from her picture, which had been drawn by Hans Holbein, that in the impatience of his disappointment, he swore they had brought him a Flanders mare.’36

30 ‘Item, reward to Hance that made quene Janes pycture ... 10s’, 10 September 1541, from the account book of the household of the Earl of Hertford [1536–50], HMC, Bath, IV, Seymour papers (London, 1968), p. 338. 31 A portrait of Jane Seymour at the Mauritshuis, The Hague, inv. 278, is considered to be ‘Studio of Holbein’. 32 Society of Antiquaries of London, inv. Scharf XXXVI. 33 Madden, The privy purse expenses of Princess Mary, p. 178; M. Hayward, ed., The 1542 inventory of Whitehall: The palace and its keeper, ed. Maria Hayward (2 vols, London, 2004), II, p. 91. 34 For a proper account of the circumstances of Holbein’s commission, see Susan Foister, Holbein and England (New Haven and London, 2004), pp. 200–04. 35 Louvre, Paris, inv. 1348. 36 Tobias Smollett, A complete history of England (4 vols, London, 1757–58), II, p. 634.

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Henry’s marriage to Anne of Cleves was a political gambit and it was a politician, Thomas Cromwell, who bore the eventual blame for the failure of the matrimonial alliance. Holbein, who continued to receive a royal salary after 1540, was the most reliable artist available for capturing likeness: he was the ‘master of that science’ as he is revealingly described by Sir John Hutton in 1538.37 The painting is neither an idealized evocation of beauty, nor an absolute and infallible statement of the truth, but is, probably, more an accurate likeness than many other Tudor portraits. Nicholas Wotton, the English envoy, described it as ‘very lively’ (i.e. lifelike).38 Henry, however, was a capricious ruler when it came to choosing a bride and ultimately felt no attraction to Anne in the flesh. This does not suggest that Holbein’s portrait lied, it merely reaffirms the impossibility of reproducing through a flat twodimensional representation, particularly within the artistic conventions of the sixteenth century, the entirety of a sitter’s personality and character, or even, more prosaically, her profile, her figure, or the way that she smiled. The Louvre portrait resembles the miniature that Holbein also painted, as well as the paintings of Anne, attributed to Barthel Bruyn the elder and his workshop, which are assumed to be versions of an official Cleves portrait of Anne, circulated and exchanged before her marriage.39 The most commonly reproduced of these, surviving at St John’s College, Oxford, is often argued to be the portrait rejected by Henry before the Holbein commission, but there is no firm evidence of this. When x-rayed, the St John’s portrait suggested that the sitter’s nose had been shortened in the final paint layers, which could suggest an attempt to improve on a physical shortcoming.40 It might also, however, imply the opposite, that the final version was corrected to record a more faithful likeness than the initial sketch. Significantly, we do know that Henry was originally offered portraits of both Anne and her sister Amelia; Holbein also apparently painted both sisters. Six portraits of Anne, similar to the St John’s portrait, have been documented, but none of Amelia.41 All of these portraits can only be internally identified through the Cleves motto in the headdress and the similarity of the dress and jewellery with Holbein’s portrait of Anne. The version from Trinity College,

37 John Hutton to Thomas Cromwell, 14 March 1538, L & P, XIII, i, p. 190. 38 Nicholas Wotton to Henry VIII, 11 August 1539, BL Cotton MS Vitellius B XXI, f. 186 (L & P, XIV, ii, p. 9). 39 The miniature is Victoria & Albert Museum, London, inv. P.153:1, 2–1910. Versions of the Bruyn portrait survive at: St John’s College, Oxford; Hever Castle, Kent; Trinity College, Cambridge, and at the Museum Kurhaus, Cleves (inv. 04-XI-I). 40 Peter Hacker and Candy Kuhl, ‘A portrait of Anne of Cleves’, The Burlington Magazine, 134/1068 (1992), pp. 172–5. 41 As well as the surviving examples in Cambridge, Oxford, Hever and Cleves, two more can be traced through old auction records (present whereabouts unknown). Wotton described Holbein’s portraits of both Anne and Amelia, 11 August 1539, L & P, XIV, ii, p. 9.

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Cambridge (Plate 17) has the same headdress and motto but a very different costume; this might imply that this is a portrait of Amelia, not Anne. We know little of Anne’s own interest in portraiture. Correspondence survives recording the promise of portrait exchanges with Queen Marguerite of Navarre, whilst it is potentially significant that Susanna Horenbout (sister of the court painter Lucas, and a painter in her own right) was sent to accompany Anne on her journey to England, and remained in her household during her short reign as queen.42 There have been no successful attempts at identifying a portrait of Anne after her marriage to Henry, although we are perhaps guilty of not looking in the right place. Anne’s place in the art historical narrative has been fixed by the popular mythologizing around Holbein’s portrait and by her fantastic foreign clothes. The fact that she absorbed English fashions soon after her arrival in England suggests that any English portrait of Anne is likely to look very different.43 Holbein died in 1543; this means that he did have time to paint Catherine Howard, but there is no documentary evidence that he did. Even if he did, no contemporary image of Catherine may survive; the identity of all portraits alleged to be of her remains open to question. This uncertainty applies to the three related panel portraits to be found today at the Toledo Museum of Art, Hever Castle in Kent and the National Portrait Gallery in London.44 The Holbein prime version is in Toledo but its identification as Catherine only dates back to the early 1900s when Lionel Cust, correctly, linked it to a late seventeenth-century version of this painting acquired by the National Portrait Gallery and which he had identified as Henry’s fifth queen.45 Cust also pointed out the similarity between the portraits and a Holbein miniature that had been identified as Catherine in the 1700s and which survived in two versions, as well as a drawing of an unknown lady in the Royal Library.46 42 John Wallop to Thomas Cromwell, 18 April 1540, L & P, XV, p. 244. Susan E. James, ‘The Art of Susanna Horenboult’, in Feminine dynamic, pp. 263–85, is an attempt to define an oeuvre for Susanna, but argues that she became inactive as a painter after her first marriage in the 1520s. It was shortly after her second marriage to John Gilman, a vintner and later Sergeant of the King’s Woodyard, that Susanna was sent to accompany Anne of Cleves to England, presumably because she was able to speak in a Dutch or German dialect that Anne would have understood. Lorne Campbell and Susan Foister, ‘Gerard, Lucas and Susanna Horenbout’, The Burlington Magazine, 128 (1986), 1003, pp. 719–27. 43 ‘As for her who is now called Madame de Cleves, far from pretending to be married, she is as joyous as ever, and wears new dresses every day’. Charles de Marillac to Anne de Montmorency, 15 August 1540, L & P, XV, pp. 490. Anne’s wardrobe accounts show that she acquired new English dresses from Henry, TNA E 101/422/15–16. 44 National Portrait Gallery, London, inv. 1119; Toledo Museum of Art, Ohio, inv. 1926.57. 45 Lionel Cust, ‘A portrait of Catherine Howard, by Hans Holbein the younger’, The Burlington Magazine, 17 (1910), 88, pp. 193–9. National Portrait Gallery 1119 is now dated to the late seventeenth century from dendrochronological results and technical analysis (Making Art in Tudor Britain project, unpublished research). 46 Royal Collection, inv. RCIN 422293; another version of this miniature survives in the collection of the Duke of Buccleuch. The drawing is Royal Collection, inv. RL 12218.

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Unlike Holbein’s drawing of Jane Seymour, which is clearly one and the same likeness as the finished portrait, there is no obvious artistic link here. Nonetheless, there have been forthright recent attempts to argue more forcibly for this identification based on the jewellery worn by the sitter in both the miniature and the portrait being identifiably described in a surviving list of the Queen’s jewels dating from 1540.47 However, the jewels used to advance this argument for the miniature are relatively generic: a ‘habulyment’ of diamonds, rubies and pearls; a square of rubies and pearls, and an ‘ooche’ of gold with a table diamond, ruby and pendant pearl. The argument for identifying the panel portrait as Catherine is still less clear-cut, relying on a subjective analysis of physiognomic congruence with the disputed miniature, and an assumption that the same jewellery list is incorrect or incomplete. The central pendant jewel clearly depicts the story of Lot, and a drawing for the design of this very jewel, by Holbein, survives.48 It is either missing from the 1540 list (because, it is argued, its gift predates Catherine’s marriage) or it is inaccurately described. Equally tenuous, on the other hand, are the opposing attempts to identify the miniature and the panel portraits as somebody else. The fact that two out of three of the panels derived from a Cromwell family provenance suggested to Roy Strong that these portraits were of Elizabeth Cromwell, née Seymour, sister to Jane.49 Antonia Fraser reproduced the late London copy of this portrait next to the Holbein original of Jane Seymour and argued that the two must be sisters.50 More recently, Susan James has argued that the miniature represents Lady Margaret Douglas, and that Catherine Howard’s likeness survives elsewhere, in a little-known portrait at the Metropolitan Museum in New York, and in a miniature in the Yale Centre for British Art in New Haven (traditionally called Elizabeth I, but recently re-identified as Lady Jane Grey), and finally in the stained-glass of King’s College Chapel in Cambridge, where she appears, like perhaps Anne Boleyn before her, as Queen Sheba.51 James emphasized again the physiognomic similarities between the glass and the Metropolitan portrait, but ultimately all such reductive arguments are

47 Bendor Grosvenor, David Starkey and Alasdair Hawkyard, Lost faces, pp. 70–75. The 1540 inventory is BL Stowe MS 599, ff. 55–68. 48 British Museum, inv. SL,5308.25. 49 Strong, Tudor and Jacobean portraits, I, pp. 41–4. 50 Antonia Fraser, The six wives of Henry VIII (London, 1992), between pp. 242–3. 51 Susan E. James, ‘Lady Margaret Douglas and Sir Thomas Seymour by Holbein: Two miniatures re-identified’, Apollo, 147, new series (1998), 435, pp. 15–20; Susan E. James and Jamie S. Franco, ‘Susanna Horenbout, Levina Teerlinc and the mask of royalty’, Jaarboek Koninklijk Museum voor Schone Kunsten (Antwerp, 2000), appendix: the Metropolitan panel portrait is inv. 49.7.30, and the Yale miniature is B.1974.2.59. For the alternative identification of the Yale miniature as Lady Jane Grey: Bendor Grosvenor, David Starkey and Alasdair Hawkyard, ‘The search for Lady Jane Grey’, Lost faces, pp. 79–83.

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seductive but inconclusive.52 Clearly, all these images (apart from possibly the stained glass) are portraits, but the temptation to ‘find’ a portrait of a particularly fascinating young queen may exert a prurient pull not supported by the assembled evidence. Catherine left no documentary proof that her portrait was ever painted during her lifetime, and, perhaps, we are searching for the impossible.53 Henry’s last queen did show a particular interest in portraiture. As Susan James has shown, Kateryn commissioned a cameo portrait from Giles Gering, portraits from John Bettes and Hans Eworth, miniatures from Lucas Horenbout and, possibly, his sister Susanna and his widow Margaret Holsewyther, as well as from Lievine Teerlinc; Kateryn’s own chamber accounts demonstrate that it was she, not Henry, who commissioned these.54 A portrait in tapestry is recorded in Henry VIII’s 1547 inventory, miniatures of her are mentioned in the collections of Katherine Willoughby, Thomas Seymour, Edward Seymour and Edward VI, whilst another near-contemporary reference to a portrait of the queen is recorded in 1553 at Westminster Palace.55 Inventories also suggest that Kateryn not only commissioned her own portrait but arranged for copies to be provided for her relations and close friends; most revealingly, her fourth husband Thomas Seymour wrote to her in 1548, requesting ‘one of your small pictures, if you have any left’.56 All of this is compatible with Kateryn’s wider tastes and cultural interests; she has also been recently credited with commissioning new portraits of Henry’s daughters: the earliest recorded panel-size portraits of Mary and Elizabeth to survive.57 There is also surviving visual evidence of Kateryn’s own portraiture. Most now accept the full-length portrait attributed to Master John as Kateryn Parr.58 The portrait was discovered at a house with Parr connections in the early eighteenth century but, for three decades at the end of the last century, the portrait was known as Lady Jane Grey, as a version of the painting had been engraved with this identity in 1620.59 There are two apparently later copies of 52 James, Feminine dynamic, p. 27; for the argument that the stained glass does not represent Catherine Howard: Carola Hicks, The King’s glass (London, 2007), p. 187. 53 Queen Marguerite of Navarre attempted to obtain portraits of Henry and Catherine (as well as Prince Edward, Mary and Elizabeth) on four occasions, but it is unclear whether the portraits were ever executed: 27 October, 5 November, 1 and 24 December 1540, L & P, XVI, pp. 89, 105, 146, 160. 54 James, Feminine dynamic, pp. 27–32. Kateryn’s chamber accounts are TNA E 315/161. 55 The tapestry is recorded in BL Harley MS 1419, f. 281; miniatures are listed in James, Feminine dynamic, p. 31; the portrait is found in HMC, Salisbury, I (London, 1883), p. 131. 56 TNA SP 10/4, f. 41. 57 James, Feminine dynamic, pp. 31–2. The portraits in question are: National Portrait Gallery, London, inv. 428; Royal Collection, inv. 404444. 58 National Portrait Gallery, London, inv. 4451. 59 Strong, Tudor and Jacobean portraits, I, pp. 75–9; National Portrait Gallery, London, inv. D19952.

reading the portraits of henry viii’s queens 127 the portrait that add to the confusion: one, probably late seventeenth-century version, which has traditionally been called Jane Grey, and one, with an older face-mask, that has been called Mary I.60 More recently, Susan James traced the crown-headed brooch that appears in all three paintings to a list of Kateryn’s jewels, retained by the Crown after Henry’s death (and later inherited by Elizabeth I) and reaffirmed the Master John portrait’s earlier identification as Kateryn.61 A second contemporary portrait of Kateryn Parr also survives, whilst a later sixteenth-century portrait (Plate 18) may be a copy of another original commission, perhaps by Hans Eworth.62 The earliest so-called portrait of Kateryn, from c.1520–30, at Lambeth Palace, London, and known also through versions at Hever Castle and elsewhere, is more probably a portrait of Katherine of Aragon. Kateryn’s recorded interest in miniatures is borne out by the survival of two, different, miniature portraits of her: one, in a private collection, attributed to Lucas Horenbout, and one, at Sudeley Castle, recently argued to be the work of Margaret Holsewyther.63 In summary, there is little evidence for any of Henry’s first five queens showing a specific interest in portraiture beyond its capacity to record likeness. Four were probably represented by one portrait-type, which may or may not have been accepted at the time as an officially sanctioned image, but there is no direct evidence for this. These portraits were not widely circulated at the time beyond their exchange as personal gifts, usually through copies in miniature. They were later copied through a mechanistic workshop practice that could quite easily and quickly impoverish authenticity. The message of the portrait was limited, normally, to a representation of likeness and a statement of power and wealth, evidenced by dress and jewellery; there was no complex iconographic programme. A queen’s image continued to be defined and promulgated through the traditional forms of heraldic device and cipher, through literary panegyric and allegorical performances at pageants and festivals, and through the stage-management and performance of daily life at court, as Kevin Sharpe has most recently detailed.64 60 The former painting is in the collection of Lord Hastings, Seaton Delaval Hall, Northumberland; the latter painting was in the collection of the Earl of Jersey but was destroyed in a warehouse fire in 1949. Hope Walker, www.hanseworth.com, the website for the Hans Eworth catalogue raisonée project, states that unpublished research on this painting is ‘in press’. 61 Susan E. James, ‘Lady Jane Grey or Queen Kateryn Parr?’, The Burlington Magazine, 138/1114 (1996), pp. 20–24. 62 National Portrait Gallery, London, inv. 4618, dated to c. 1545, with at least one inferior copy in a private collection; the later sixteenth-century version of the supposed Eworth portrait, from a private collection, was exhibited in Henry’s Women at Hampton Court in 2009. 63 James, Feminine dynamic, p. 281. 64 Kevin Sharpe, Selling the Tudor monarchy: Authority and image in sixteenth-century England (New Haven and London, 2009), pp. 157–76.

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Kateryn Parr can claim to be the first English queen to include large-scale portraiture commissions as a common act of artistic patronage, alongside the more usual royal interests in devotional images inside illuminated manuscripts and elsewhere. Kateryn, it has been argued recently, was indeed the first English queen that saw and embraced the potential of portraiture as a way of projecting her own image and importance at a time when Henry was opting to represent her predecessor, Jane Seymour, in the dynastic portraiture of the end of his reign: Kateryn ‘distinguished herself by her aggressive pursuit of visual self-justification’65 that pre-figured the intense artistic activity under Elizabeth I. Attempts to make portraiture work harder, and in particular to give us a glimpse into the inner lives of Henry’s queens, are bound to fail. It is impossible to deduce meaning from such a portrait without making a series of assumptions. The survival of a recognized portrait likeness is compromised by a lack of knowledge about its date, its commission and its accuracy. Without these pieces of the jigsaw, it is impossible to say that a portrait of Katherine of Aragon, for example, shows her at the end of her reign looking ‘haggard and bloated after a decade of child-bearing’,66 or to describe her nemesis Anne Boleyn through the marks left on the face of the disputed Mountgarret portrait, evincing ‘the frustration, sadness and stress she had suffered’ during her reign as queen.67 This is particularly the case when the majority of portraits that survive are copies two or three times removed from an original sitting. Most of the time we are also uncertain as to the identity of the sitter. It is, as we have seen, difficult to establish an unchallenged likeness for at least two of Henry’s queens. Indeed, opinions about identity often lead to a very partial interpretation of a portrait to bolster the case for a particular identification. Holbein’s miniature in the Royal Collection of a lady that may be Catherine Howard has an expression, we are told, ‘that was at once quizzical and comehither’.68 This is a very subjective reading of an image, dependent on the accuracy of the identification and informed by a preconceived notion of the personality of the sitter. This is not the same as evidence assembled through analysis of a portrait as a historic document. Even if an identity can be established independently, and the likeness can be pinned down to a year, and to an artist, as in the case of Holbein’s Anne of Cleves and Jane Seymour, any further analysis of the sitter’s inner life remains elusive. The painting is in this sense quite silent. Even if Holbein knew Anne or Jane well enough to paint their character as well as their likeness, this was not something that would have necessarily occurred to him to do. Even if it had, and there is little evidence outside the portraits themselves to argue for 65 66 67 68

James, Feminine dynamic, p. 145. Lost faces, p. 57. Alison Weir, The six wives of Henry VIII (London, 1991), p. 274. David Starkey, Six wives: The queens of Henry VIII (London, 2003), p. 651.

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Holbein’s interest in, for example, humanist diffusion of theories about the relationship between physical appearance and the soul, such insight would have been vitiated by the identity of the sitter, the context of the sitting and the royal commission. Whilst Holbein did not overtly idealize his sitters, he did not criticize them either, and certainly not here. This understanding also helps to position Holbein’s Anne of Cleves as a portrait produced as a faithful and individualized likeness but one that was also uncritical and not designed to highlight or exaggerate aspects of Anne’s physiognomy to second-guess Henry’s tastes. To fill the gap left by artists such as Holbein, historians have habitually painted their own prejudices and opinions on to portraits. The Holbein portrait of Jane Seymour, more than most, has been described in any number of revealingly inconsistent ways. For Antonia Fraser, the portrait shows ‘a woman of calm good sense’; a similar opinion is offered by Alison Weir, who describes Jane’s ‘large resolute face’. In contrast, David Starkey claims that Holbein, with ‘characteristic unsparing honesty’, has revealed a woman ‘with mousy, peaked features and mean, pointed chin’. S.H. Burke was even less kind: reflecting his generally negative assessment of Jane, he described the portrait as ‘a coarse, apathetic looking woman with a large face and small features. Her eyes are blue, with a sinister expression; the mouth very small; the lips thin, and closely compressed … (the) expression cold and hard.’ On the other hand, Susan Foister finds Jane’s expression simply ‘still and remote’.69 All of these conclusions may be justified and reasoned pronouncements on Jane’s character based on an analysis of the written record, but none of them are conclusions that can be drawn from the painting alone. It is one thing to read a Tudor portrait through what we know of Renaissance symbolism, through the choice of dress, jewellery, attribute, inscription or background, but another to sentimentalize or romanticize a work of art to discover the inner characters of Henry’s queens who remain, in portraiture at least, enigmatic and elusive.

69 Fraser, Six wives, p. 236; Weir, Six wives, p. 340; Starkey, Six wives, p. 584; S.H. Burke, Historical portraits of the Tudor dynasty and Reformation period (4 vols, 1879–83), I, p. 465; Foister, Holbein and England, p. 186.

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7 Henry VIII and Holbein: Patterns and Conventions in Early Modern Writing about Artists Tatiana C. String

At their best, landmark anniversaries of historical figures and events can prove to be opportunities to quicken the beat of scholarly interest in a given subject, to explore the connections and disjunctures between academic and popular engagements with the past, and generally to revisit with a critical eye the clichéd language and easy assertions that especially accrete around those parts of the past in which scholarly and popular interests most obviously converge. So it proved with the 2009 celebrations that marked the quincentary of Henry VIII’s accession to the English throne; these provided multiple occasions for reflecting on Henry’s complex life and no less complex afterlives. Numerous exhibitions and their catalogues, tightly themed academic conferences, highend television documentaries with aspirations to academic weight, scholarly and popular books, and articles all took up the theme of reassessing Henry VIII as both ‘man and monarch’.1 With that burst of reassessment and commemorative activity now in the recent past, though in some cases still ongoing, it would seem timely to take the opportunity to reflect on the state of the scholarship on Henrician England, and more specifically on its art, to ask whether the heightened interest in Henry and his world promises to catalyse new approaches or bids fair to reaffirm existing interpretive paradigms. 1 To list just a few will give some idea of the wall-to-wall coverage Henry’s quincentary engendered: Henry VIII: Man and Monarch, the British Library’s monumental exhibition of art and artefacts, guest curated by David Starkey, catalogue edited by Susan Doran; Historic Royal Palaces organized The Young Henry (Hampton Court), Henry VIII: Heads and Hearts (Hampton Court) and Dressed to Kill (Tower of London) exhibitions; the BBC produced the two-part television series Henry VIII: Patron or Plunderer? presented by Jonathan Foyle; the University of Bristol and the British Academy supported the three-day conference Tudorism: Historical Imagination and the Appropriation of the Sixteenth Century; and Henry VIII and the Tudor Court, a major conference at Hampton Court, Historic Royal Palaces.

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In this connection, it is undeniable that we have become stuck in some persistent orthodoxies about English culture in the first half of the sixteenth century that need to be revisited, especially as they relate to the art of that period. One encounters a great number of old-fashioned yet persistent clichés about the artistic climate in sixteenth-century England, the effect of which is to block the flow of new ideas and methodologies; they militate against enabling the scholarship to move forward. How often has it been repeated, for example, that Tudor England was an artistic ‘backwater’ and that it was marginal to the Renaissance, even the Northern Renaissance? 2 Or, in a similar vein, how often are we told that there was no appreciation of art as art by even the elites of the English realm, that this was off their cultural radar (and would remain so until at least the seventeenth century)? 3 Despite much new evidence and new thinking, these positions remain stock truisms.4 These particular truisms are of a piece with a tendency to treat the art history of the period as no more than an adjunct to the objects of historical enquiry, and thereby to deny its distinctive conceptual, methodological, and substantive parameters as well as its disciplinary coherence. In those areas in which art history has longer academic traditions and higher disciplinary status, this sort of appropriation is far less commonplace: few historians of fifteenth-century Italy, for example, would be so bold in making the same colonizing move, however much cultural history opens up spaces in which historians and art historians can bring contiguous – but not identical – questions to bear. In Britain, however, such has historically been the status of the study of pre-modern English art that the balance of disciplinary power is far more uneven. The result is that Henrician art is regularly wheeled out by non-art historians to function as the visual reinforcement of, or the cultural-historical ‘wash’ upon, contributions to historical debates that are 2 ‘You don’t need to be an art historian to know that, by comparison with the Europe of Titian, Rubens, Rembrandt, Velazquez, and Bernini, painting and sculpture in sixteenth- and seventeenth-century England were provincial and undeveloped … When people say that the Reformation killed English art, they forget that, by European standards, England had been artistically backward, even before the Reformation,’ Sir Keith Thomas, The Medlicott Lecture, published in Historian, 78 (Summer 2003), pp. 6–17. 3 ‘It does not appear that English patrons were as yet connoisseurs to any appreciable extent. They had none of that delight in beauty which caused the Renaissance princes of Italy to commission illustrations of classical legend. They required simply an accurate likeness and the ability to do detailed justice to their finery of dress and accessories’, William Gaunt, A Concise History of English Painting (2nd edn; London, 1976), p. 16; ‘The Tudors and the new class they created had little use for an artist’s services. Their huge palaces and houses were not filled with paintings, and the work they had to offer was of a more utilitarian and ephemeral nature – the painting of shields and pennants for tournaments, and the decoration of triumphal arches,’ John Woodward, Tudor and Stuart Drawings (London: 1951), p. 11. 4 For recent revision of these persistent negative assessments, see Tatiana C. String, ‘The Concept of “Art” in Henrician England’, Art History 32/2 (2009), pp. 290–306; and Susan Foister, Holbein and England (New Haven and London, 2004), esp. pp. 73–119.

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themselves often locked into rehearsals of old questions and paradigms, while additionally satisfying a sort of craving for direct access to supposedly larger-than-life historical personalities, of whom Henry VIII serves as the type par excellence. By way of a reaction against these tendencies, this chapter will concentrate on what has always been an important element within the stock approaches, that is, the configuring of the relationship between Henry VIII and Hans Holbein. According to the general orthodoxy, Holbein’s images of Henry were exercises in ‘propaganda’.5 ‘Propaganda’, in fact, is a term that is deeply sedimented in scholarly discourse, to the extent that it is the primary piece of target language in discussion of Henrician art. It is, however, a severely limited and inadequate concept when applied to sixteenth-century communicative culture.6 Moreover, so the orthodoxy goes, Holbein’s portraits were so well executed that they call forth the ‘real’ Henry. To view a Holbein portrait of Henry VIII (in these terms) is to read off the attributes of the man himself and all that he brought as an individual historical actor to his political and social roles, much as one might read these qualities off from an item of royal correspondence, the household accounts, or palace inventories. Such an approach should seem deeply problematic for any historian who chooses not to conflate the nature of the signifier of their sources with the signified of human activity in the past. It is doubly problematic for art historians in that it calls forth an old-fashioned notion of art as a mirror of reality and as a resource in direct and subordinate service to the extradiscursive world ‘out there’ that subtends and explains it. A good way to demonstrate this problem, and in the process to open up a space for art historical discourses that are not just or mainly in the service of political or social history, is to consider the accounts of reactions to the Whitehall Mural, painted by Holbein in 1537. This route into the interrogation of Henrician art will also permit us to scrutinize anew aspects of the art historical scholarship, in particular the still influential, indeed dominant paradigm-forming, views of Sir Roy Strong on the mural’s purposes and reception.7 What we will find is that the reactions to the Whitehall Mural, which are typically supposed 5 For two recent examples, see Derek Wilson, ‘Was Hans Holbein’s Henry VIII the Greatest Piece of Propaganda Ever?’ Daily Telegraph, 23 April 2009; and Kevin Sharpe, Selling the Tudor Monarchy: Authority and Image in Sixteenth-Century England (New Haven and London, 2009). 6 For attempts to revise the embedded notion of ‘propaganda’ in modern scholarship, see Sydney Anglo, Images of Tudor Kingship (London, 1992); Greg Walker, Persuasive Fictions (Aldershot, 1996), esp. pp. 72–98; Dougal Shaw, ‘Nothing but Propaganda? Historians and the Study of Early Modern Royal Ritual’, Cultural and Social History, 1 (2004), pp. 139–58; and Tatiana C. String, Art and Communication in the Reign of Henry VIII (Aldershot, 2008), esp. pp. 13–44. 7 Here we are mainly concerned with Strong’s Holbein and Henry VIII (London, 1967); the book was recently republished (without revision) in Strong, The Tudor and Stuart Monarchy (3 vols; Woodbridge, 1995), I, pp. 1–54. References are to the original.

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to affirm propositions about the thoughts and feelings of Henry the real historical actor, in the process necessitating and validating art history’s absorption within historical discourses, are, in fact, more securely locatable within traditions of talking about art and artists in and of themselves, not as they subserve political actuality. Our investigation may usefully begin with a common overstatement that originates in Strong’s evocation of the effects upon a contemporary or nearcontemporary viewer of an encounter with the Whitehall Mural. In his 1967 study of the final years of Holbein’s life, which coincided and engaged with England’s ‘greatest politico-religious upheaval since the Norman Conquest’,8 Strong writes of the mural that: ‘Henry alone communicates with the onlooker and the effect on visitors to the palace was such that they “were abashed, annihilated” in his presence.’9 Three observations are in order. First, one notes how readily Strong detaches the figure of Henry VIII from the compositional and narrative complexity of the image as a whole. As is well known, the Whitehall Mural, as we can reconstruct it from a seventeenth-century painting of it by Remigius van Leemput, depicted four figures arranged to the sides of a central plinth: to the left Henry himself and his father Henry VII, to the right his mother Elizabeth of York and his third wife Jane Seymour. True, the figure of Henry VIII invites a privileging of the viewer’s gaze by alone looking straight out of the image, while the other three figures, in quarterprofile, direct their own gazes along diagonals. But the greater import of the composition lies in its presentation of a tightly framed dynastic unit in the ascendant. This theme is emphasized by the text inscribed on the central plinth, which speaks of Henry VIII’s defeat of the pope as a surpassing of his father’s achievement in ending what we know as the Wars of the Roses, and by the balancing figure of Jane Seymour, opposite Henry, who when Holbein created the mural was either pregnant with a hoped-for male royal heir or had just given birth to the future Edward VI, herself dying soon thereafter. Second, and following on from this, one notes how easily Strong places a particular configuration upon the viewing of the mural as a communicative act by collapsing the distance between Henry the historical agent and Henry the image on the wall (‘Henry alone communicates’), in the process sidelining Holbein as the principal contributor to the mural’s locutionary programme. In this conflation of subject and representation, viewing the image is not a metaphor for being spoken to by the king; it is being spoken to by him. Third, there is the question that Strong foregrounds of the impact upon the viewer. Strong’s footnote in support of the quotation ‘were abashed, annihilated’, is to ‘C. van Mander, Livres des Peintres, translated by Henri Hymans (Paris, 1884), I, p. 218’. His note continues, ‘This presumably, but 8 Strong, preface to Holbein and Henry VIII. 9 Strong, Holbein and Henry VIII, p. 39.

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not certainly, refers to the lost wall-painting. Van Mander would have derived his information from his master, Lucas de Heere, who was in England c. 1567–1576.’ The ultimate source of this quotation, it is therefore suggested, is the biography of Hans Holbein in Het Schilderboek [The Book of Painting] by the Dutch artist and theorist Karel van Mander, published in 1603–04.10 Van Mander’s full text vis-à-vis the Whitehall Mural actually reads as follows (quoting Hessel Miedema’s first-rate modern translation): ‘Concerning Holbein’s works for the King: he made an excellent full-length portrait of King Henry VIII, life-sized and so lifelike that anyone who sees it gets a fright [verschrickt]; for it seems as if it is alive [het schijnt dat het leeft] and that one might see the head and all the limbs moving and functioning naturally. This is still on display at Whitehall, a work which recommends its master and testifies to his having been a second Apelles.’11 The fact that van Mander draws his description of the image towards an appreciation of the skill of Holbein (it is een werck dat zijn Meester prijst), and in particular his reference to Apelles, are key to the reading of the text. We shall come back to this point later in the chapter. For now, suffice it to observe that Strong’s wording has no secure warrant. The Dutch verb verschrikken (in its modern spelling) as an intransitive means ‘to get a shock’, ‘to become frightened’, some semantic distance from ‘abashed, annihilated’. The plot thickens, however, for the immediate source cited by Strong, Hymans’s translation of van Mander into French, actually dilutes the force of the original: ‘tous ceux qui le voient en sont frappés’. The viewer is simply ‘struck’ by the image. If Strong had another source for his translation, he does not cite it. The implication, therefore, is that the formulation ‘abashed, annihilated’ represents a markedly exaggerated rendering of a locution only known via its imprecise wording in an interjacent translation into a third language, the effect being significantly to overstate the impact upon the viewer that van Mander ascribes to the mural. This exaggeration serves Strong’s agenda of eliding the image and the person of the king, for the strength of the verbs in the English rendering suggests an effect more readily made by a real man than an image: the impression is thus reinforced that the viewer is abashed and annihilated by none other than Henry himself. This might seem at first glance to be simply nit-picking about a detail of translation, but in fact much more is at stake, for the formulation has become a central element within the stock discourse concerning Henry and Holbein, no doubt reinforced by the patina of period authenticity introduced by the rather elevated register of 10 Karel van Mander, The Lives of the illustrious Netherlandish and German painters, from the first edition of the Schilder-boeck (1603–1604): preceded by the lineage, circumstances and place of birth, life and works of Karel van Mander, painter and poet and likewise his death and burial, from the second edition of the Schilder-boeck (1616–1618), with an introduction and translation, ed. Hessel Miedema (6 vols; Doornspijk, 1994). 11 Ibid., fol. 222r.

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the verbs ‘to abash’ and ‘to annihilate’, their alliterative force, and the slightly literary note sounded by the asyndeton in the absence of a connective. This formulation has become a truism in numerous discussions of the mural since Strong’s remarks were published, nothing less than the quintessential articulation of Henry’s effect upon the beholder.12 Van Mander’s comments about the mural, however, are far better understood in the context of generic conventions and story-making tropes.13 For what we are dealing with here is an example of what art historians would term ‘artist anecdotes’, capsule narratives that have as their central theme the naturalism of a painting, in particular as this quality emerges from the image’s appearing to be alive and capable of movement.14 In discussions of the Whitehall Mural, mobilizations of the phrase ‘abashed, annihilated’, or even, rarely, the more accurate ‘gets a fright’, are seldom centrally concerned with the power of Holbein’s virtuosity; rather, they focus exclusively upon Henry and the supposed menace of his gaze. Van Mander, it must be emphasized, was calling attention to the effect produced by the painting – ‘it’, het – not the king. Although Strong has taken this quotation out of context and distended its meaning, the authority of his book Holbein and Henry VIII (1967), has meant that it has been regularly recycled as in some way capturing the historical veracity of the effect of Henry’s powerful and domineering physicality, appearance and gaze – in real life, that is, not just as the subject or communicative loading of an image. Anecdotes about the virtuoso artist whose skill was so great that he could render paintings in such a way that his subjects appeared alive are conventional and commonplace, even predictable, clichés in early modern art historical texts, especially art historical biographies. Their ultimate source and grounding authority is Pliny the Elder’s first-century ad biographical accounts of the famed Greek artists Apelles, Zeuxis and Parrhasius. Pliny’s narratives about artists in his Natural History abound with stories of virtuoso displays and competitions staged to decide which artist could best deceive his viewers. The best known of these stories is Pliny’s telling of a contest between 12 See, as just one recent example, Xanthe Brooke and David Crombie, Holbein’s Portrait and its Legacy, exhibition catalogue, Walker Art Gallery (Liverpool, 2003), p. 27, which cites Karel van Mander, but quotes Roy Strong’s ‘translation’. 13 For a discussion of van Mander’s use of these types of motif, see Hessell Miedema, ‘Karel van Mander: Did He Write Art Literature?’, Simiolus, 22/1–2 (1993–94), pp. 58–64, esp. p. 64 in which he briefly outlines the reactions to paintings, including Holbein’s Whitehall Mural, described by van Mander, and refers to them as ‘rhetorical topoi’. For a wider ranging discussion of the ways in which early Renaissance writers commented on works of art, see Michael Baxandall, Giotto and the Orators: Humanist Observers of Painting in Italy and the Discovery of Pictorial Composition, 1350–1450, (revised edn, Oxford, 1988), esp. pp. 51–3. 14 The most important and influential study of the ‘artist anecdote’ is Ernst Kris and Otto Kurz, Legend, Myth, and Magic in the Image of the Artist: An Historical Experiment (New Haven and London, 1979) (first published in Vienna in 1934 as Die Legende vom Kunstler: Ein historischer Versuch).

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Zeuxis and Parrhasius: Zeuxis first painted a bunch of grapes that was so realistic that birds came to peck at his work; Parrhasius then told Zeuxis that he had painted something even more realistic… which was to be found behind a curtain. But when Zeuxis went to pull back the curtain, he found that it was the painted illusion itself and that he had been deceived.15 The competition between these artists was won by Parrhasius, because Zeuxis had to concede that his artistry had merely fooled some simple creatures, whereas his opponent had managed to deceive a great artist – an artist himself alive to the illusion-effecting power of virtuoso painting. Along much the same lines, Pliny tells of a horse that neighed at the painted image of a horse by Apelles,16 and Strabo writes of quails who flew at a painting by Protogenes that realistically depicted a fellow-quail in the background.17 Similarly, Pliny relates the story of a painted representation of a snake quieting the twittering of birds.18 When the genre of the artist biography was revived and extended in the fifteenth century, and in an attempt both to emulate the classical artists and to appropriate the memory of their status and virtuosity, Renaissance painters and sculptors were routinely portrayed in the same terms, with the result that the plot device of the hyper-naturalistic image and the fooled viewer became a familiar means to satisfy readers’ expectations. Most famously and influentially, Giorgio Vasari, in his Lives of the Most Eminent Painters, Sculptors and Architects (first published in 1550, then revised and expanded in 1568), which was directly inspired by Pliny’s accounts of ‘Eminent Artists’ in the Natural History, confected a great number of variations on this one theme. For example, in his account of the artist Bramantino (Bartolommeo Suardi), Vasari includes a story of a painting of a horse that was so naturalistic that another horse attacked and kicked at it;19 another anecdote describes how a portrait of Pope Paul III by Titian was left in a window to dry, whereupon passers-by doffed their caps to it;20 and, in the Life of Raphael, the artist’s portrait of Pope Julius II is described as so true and lifelike that everyone who saw it trembled as if the pope were standing there in person.21 The particular affinities of this last story with van Mander’s assessment of the impact of the Whitehall Mural are striking. It should be noted that this plot trope was not an idiosyncrasy of Vasari’s anecdotal style. Other writers exploit the same opportunities for setting up situations full of dramatic irony: 15 Pliny the Elder, Natural History, xxxv, 65–6. 16 Ibid., xxxv, 95; cf. Kris and Kurz, Legend, Myth, and Magic, p. 62. 17 Strabo, Geography, xiv, 652; cf. Kris and Kurz, Legend, Myth, and Magic, p. 62 (who confuse Pliny and Strabo at this point). 18 Pliny, Natural History, xxxv, 121. 19 Giorgio Vasari, Lives of the Painters, Sculptors and Architects, trans. Gaston du C. de Vere, Introduction and Notes, David Ekserdjian (2 vols; London, 1996), Part II, p. 399; cf. Kris and Kurz, Legend, Myth, and Magic, p. 63 n. 2. 20 Vasari, Lives of the Painters (1550), vol. 8; cf. Kris and Kurz, Legend, Myth, and Magic, p. 63. 21 Vasari, Lives of the Painters, p. 297; cf. Kris and Kurz, Legend, Myth, and Magic, p. 63.

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Aretino writes that the lamb in a depiction of John the Baptist by Titian ‘provoked joyful bleating in a mother ewe’;22 Christoph Scheurl records that a dog mistook the portrait of his master by Dürer for the real thing;23 and Zuccaro tells of a cardinal who handed a pen and ink to Raphael’s portrait of Pope Leo X with the aim of getting his signature.24 One might note in passing how it is both humans and animals who function almost interchangeably as the dupes in such stories, for what hyper-naturalistic images succeed in frustrating is the capacity for immediate and intuitive visual apprehension, the sort of reaction that humans and animals might be supposed to share in some fundamental way, as well as the higher powers of cognition and spatial awareness of which humans alone would be considered capable. It is evident, therefore, that Karel van Mander, whose Het Schilderboek was self-consciously an attempt at producing a northern European version of Vasari’s Lives, was straightforwardly recycling these same thematic tropes and types of vignette.25 His indebtedness to Vasari as a model is confirmed by the fact that he deploys the Vasarian theme of the importance of naturalism and close approximation to reality throughout his work. Precisely this emphasis, in fact, emerges at one point in his biography of Holbein, when he writes that ‘upon seeing the Holbein portraits hung in the home of Thomas More, King Henry, who had never seen such outstandingly artistic paintings [soo uytnemende constighe schilderijen], was astonished beyond measure [was uytermaten seer verwondert] when he saw, there in front of his eyes, various people whom he knew – not as if they were painted, but as if they were alive [levende].’26 In other words, the reader is left to infer, the relationship between King Henry and Holbein, which more than any other defines Holbein’s reputation, was from its very first informed and animated by a powerful appreciation of Holbein’s skill. In sum, we are in the presence here of a genre-specific topos. Ernst Kris and Otto Kurz, in their groundbreaking study Legend, Myth, and Magic in the Image of the Artist (1979), call attention to the prevalence of these ‘stereotyped episodes’ in artists’ biographies from this period, and warn that, because these anecdotes attach themselves to the narratives of so many artists, ‘their truth would need to be rigorously checked if one seriously wanted to use them in the biography of an individual artist’.27 This is, if anything, an underestimation 22 Pietro Aretino, Il primo libro delle lettere (1531), I: xxviii; cf. Kris and Kurz, Legend, Myth, and Magic, p. 63. 23 Christoph Scheurl, Libellus de laudibus Germanie (1508), p. 111v.; cf. Kris and Kurz, Legend, Myth, and Magic, p. 63. 24 Federigo Zuccaro, L’idea de’ pittori, scultori ed architetti (Turin: 1607), p. 99, cf. Kris and Kurz, Legend, Myth, and Magic, p. 63. 25 For an extensive analysis of Karel van Mander’s text, see Walter S. Melion, Shaping the Netherlandish Canon: Karel van Mander’s Schilder-Boeck (Chicago, 1991). 26 Fols 221r–221v. 27 Kris and Kurz, Legend, Myth, and Magic, p. 11.

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of the discourse’s fundamentally rhetorical, not factual, underpinning, as if there might be some basis in fact in at least a few cases. This sort of belief in a vestigial link to lived reality is, however, unnecessary. It would be missing the point to speculate whether there might be some residual biographical actuality buried beneath some instantiations of the topos, provided that there were some sort of independent corroborating evidence (which, of course, there never is). This trope is simply a discursive strategy, a generic metaphor, into which qualitative assessments of the virtuosity informing an artist’s work are succinctly packed. The fact that Karel van Mander availed himself of these same narrative possibilities when constructing artists’ biographies, and approached his choice of story content in primarily rhetorical, emblematic terms is further demonstrated by his recounting of what became the best-known anecdote associated with Holbein: the story of Henry’s defence of the artist against the accusation of a hostile courtier. This episode occupies, in fact, the single largest portion of the biography.28 It also acquired an enduring resonance for artists as a parable about the status of their craft. So it is, for example, that a mid-nineteenth century painting by the Austrian-American history painter Emmanuel Leutze, the artist best known for his depiction of George Washington crossing the Delaware, illustrates the moment in van Mander’s narrative at which Holbein, palette in hand, appeals to Henry for mercy after he has allegedly thrown the nosey nobleman down a flight of stairs for having dared to invade the privacy of his studio in order to take a peek at the great man at work. In this image Holbein’s creative sanctum is indicated by the easel, and by the (extant) portraits of Anne Cresacre and Joan, Lady Mewtas, visible in his antechamber. The nobleman points accusingly at the artist, but Henry, in a great moment of intertextual play, strikes the familiar legs-astride pose of the Whitehall portrait and sides with the painter, in van Mander’s text declaring, and in the picture effectively miming, that he could create seven earls from seven peasants but could not make one Holbein.29 Both the story and the painting inspired by it attest to the powerful narrative economy of such anecdotes. It does not greatly matter whether van Mander concocted the story whole cloth or was reporting what he had heard from his informant about English matters, Lucas de Heere, for what both animates the incident as told and guides the reader’s understanding of it is the fact that it is a capsule narrative that conforms to a set of powerful generic expectations, thereby situating Holbein securely within a tradition of virtuosity and princely appreciation. 28 Fols 221v–222r. 29 It was fascinating to see this episode singled out in a recent episode of the Showtime television series The Tudors. In that case, however, the offence largely attached to the nobleman’s objection to Holbein painting a portrait of the man’s fiancé in the nude; the resulting portrait was a wholly anachronistic version of the much later Rokeby Venus by Velazquez.

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The deep roots of the sort of discursive device that we are considering should be noted, for van Mander’s emphasis upon Henry VIII’s estimation of Holbein ultimately stems from Pliny the Elder’s description of the close relationship between the painter Apelles and his master Alexander the Great. As Pliny’s narrative in the Natural History has it, Alexander was a frequent visitor to Apelles’ studio, and Apelles was singled out for royal favour by becoming the only artist Alexander permitted to paint his portrait.30 In van Mander’s treatment Holbein thus becomes the ‘Apelles of our time’, or a ‘second Apelles’, as we have seen; it is precisely in the context of the naturalism of the Whitehall portrait that van Mander feels best positioned to justify the comparison. It is clear that the grateful estimation of an artist by his enlightened patron served as a particularly effective device to speak to the artist’s special status and skill, and it is therefore unsurprising that it crops up in biographies of many other Renaissance painters: for example, the emperor Maximilian was supposed to have held a ladder for Albrecht Dürer to facilitate the completion of a work in progress; and the emperor Charles V is said to have stooped to retrieve a paintbrush dropped by Titian. Note the particular potency in these vignettes of the temporary but willed suspension – or inversion – of the proper social positioning of the two principals. The artist’s skill and accomplishment transcend matters of status and protocol, and rulers themselves enact a willingness to ‘break character’ in order to demonstrate this very point. In the same vein, Francis I of France reportedly held the dying Leonardo da Vinci in his arms, according to Vasari – the apotheosis of the narrative conceit that only persons of the highest status, kings, emperors and popes, could fully recognize and commune with the genius of artists, while artists’ quality and fame uniquely permit them to traverse and suspend social stratifications. To return to the particular case of Holbein, a couple of further remarks are in order. First, it is important to note that Holbein himself was not simply the object of others’ constructions: he was himself clearly alive to and willing to participate in discourses bearing upon the artist’s self-fashioning. He frequently gestured to an image of himself as the heir of Pliny’s ‘Eminent Artists’, Apelles, Zeuxis and Parrhasius, by making reference to each of them, and by extension to Pliny’s anecdotes about their artistic merit, in various of his paintings and prints. The illusionistic green curtains and/or grape vines that appear in the portraits of Henry Guildford (London, National Gallery) and his wife Mary Wotten, Lady Guildford (St Louis Museum of Art), of Erasmus (London, National Gallery), and the Lady with the Squirrel and the Starling (sometimes tentatively identified as Ann Lovell; also London, National Gallery) would seem to serve no function, beyond the superficially decorative, other than to evoke the story of the grapes and curtain painted by 30 Pliny, Natual History, xxxv, 85.

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Zeuxis and Parrhasius. The frequency with which these visual motifs recur in Holbein’s portraits suggests some programmatic and self-reflexive purpose. That is to say, these inclusions amount to self-referential affirmations and performances of the illusionism of Holbein’s paintings that his viewers are invited to foreground in their appreciation and understanding of his works. Van Mander was correct to suggest a particular connection with Apelles, for Holbein’s work makes many references to this artist, thought to be the greatest of all classical painters, especially esteemed for the naturalism of his portraits; this self-conscious assimilation on Holbein’s part is best exemplified in his representation of Laïs of Corinth, Apelles’ lover (Basel, Kunstmuseum).31 Second, one further theme within the artist anecdote corpus neatly encapsulates an important aspect of the dynamics at work: this is the ability, first ascribed by Pliny to Zeuxis when painting Helen for the Temple at Croton, and then extended by Vasari to Raphael, to construct a perfect human from the parts of many. As a metaphor for the constructedness and artifice behind depictions of the apparently all-too-real, this image of a perfect form confected from discrete sources could scarcely be bettered. This helps us to recognize the fact that Holbein’s Henry is not a record of a biographical moment frozen or a particular likeness captured, but a confection, a construction of many parts that coheres around the themes of royal masculinity and dynastic vigour.32 In this way, the creation of the artist’s subject mirrors and mimics the fashioning of the figure of the artist himself. Once one becomes aware of the patterning and conformity subtending the artist anecdotes that we have considered, one cannot read the biographies or even extracts from them that purport to have a factual basis without realizing that these are first and last literary exercises. Their primary reference is not extra-textual reality, the world outside the words. To look for extractable historical data in these texts is consequently to fail to situate them in their proper discursive context.

31 For more on Holbein’s references to Apelles, see Oscar Bätschmann and Pascal Griener, Hans Holbein (London, 1997), pp. 13–35; and Bätschmann and Griener, ‘HolbeinApelles. Wettbewerb und Definition des Kunstlers’, Zeitschrift für Kunstgeschichte, 57 (1994), pp. 625–50. 32 See Tatiana C. String, ‘Projecting Masculinity: Henry VIII’s Codpiece’, in Henry VIII and his Afterlives: Politics, Literature and Art, ed. Mark Rankin, Christopher Highley, and John N. King, Cambridge: 2009, pp. 143–59.

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•ŠŽȱŗȳȱ‘˜—ŽȬœ˜—Žȱ™•ŠšžŽȱŽ™’Œ’—ȱ Ž—›¢ȱȱœŠ—’—ȱ˜—ȱŠ—ȱ˜—’ŒȱŒŠ™’Š•ȱ ǻ™˜œœ’‹•¢ȱ˜ȱ Ž›–Š—ȱ–Š—žŠŒž›Žǰȱ™›˜‹Š‹•¢ȱ–’Ȭœ’¡ŽŽ—‘ȱŒŽ—ž›¢Ǽǯȱ Țȱ‘Žȱ›žœŽŽœȱ˜ȱ‘Žȱ›’’œ‘ȱžœŽž–ǰȱ ’‘ȱ‘Š—”œȱ˜ȱ‘Žȱ’˜›Ž—Œ’Šȱ˜ž—Š’˜—

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•ŠŽȱřȳ••žœ›Š’˜—ȱ˜ȱŠȱŠ—Šœ’ŒŠ•ȱ˜ž—Š’—ȱ›˜–ȱ‘ŽȱHypnerotomachia Poliphili ǻŽ—’ŒŽǰȱŗŚşşǼǯȱž™™•’Žȱ‹¢ȱ˜¢Š•ȱ˜••ŽŒ’˜—ȱ›žœȱȦȱȚȱ ȱžŽŽ—ȱ•’£Š‹Ž‘ȱȱŘŖŗŘ

•ŠŽȱŚȳHenry Howard, Earl of Surreyȱǻž—”—˜ —ȱŠ›’œǰȱŒǯŗśŚŜǼǯȱ ȚȱŠ’˜—Š•ȱ˜››Š’ȱ Š••Ž›¢ǰȱ˜—˜—ȱǻ ȱśŘşŗǼ

•ŠŽȱśȳCopy of the Whitehall MuralȱǻŽ–’’žœȱŸŠ—ȱŽŽ–™žǰȱŗŜŜŝǼǯȱ ‘Žȱ˜¢Š•ȱ˜••ŽŒ’˜—ȱȚȱŘŖŗŗȱ Ž›ȱŠ“Žœ¢ȱžŽŽ—ȱ•’£Š‹Ž‘ȱ

•ŠŽȱŜȳ˜—Š˜ȱ›Š–Š—ŽȂœȱŽœ’—ȱ˜ȱ‘Ž Interior of a Ruined Church or Temple ǻŽ—›ŠŸŽȱ‹¢ȱŽ›—Š›˜ȱ›ŽŸŽŠ›’ǰȱŗŚŞŗǼǯȱȚȱ‘Žȱ›žœŽŽœȱ˜ȱ‘Žȱ›’’œ‘ȱžœŽž–

•ŠŽȱŝȳ Ž—›¢ȱȱŠœȱȁŠŸ’ȱ™Ž—’Ž—Ȃȱ›˜–ȱThe Psalter of Henry VIII ǻ ŽŠ—ȱŠ••Š›ǰȱŗśŚŖǼǯȱȚȱ‘Žȱ›’’œ‘ȱ’‹›Š›¢ȱ˜Š›ȱǻ˜¢Š•ȱȱŘȱȱ¡Ÿ’ǰȱǯȱŝşǼ

•ŠŽȱŞȳThe Family of Henry VIIIȱǻž—”—˜ —ȱŠ›’œǰȱŒǯŗśŚśǼǯȱ‘Žȱ˜¢Š•ȱ˜••ŽŒ’˜—ȱȚȱŘŖŗŗȱ Ž›ȱŠ“Žœ¢ȱžŽŽ—ȱ•’£Š‹Ž‘ȱ

•ŠŽȱşȳThe Embarkation of Henry VIIIȱǻž—”—˜ —ȱŠ›’œǰȱŒǯŗśŘŖȮŚŖǼǯȱ‘Žȱ˜¢Š•ȱ˜••ŽŒ’˜—ȱȚȱŘŖŗŗȱ Ž›ȱŠ“Žœ¢ȱžŽŽ—ȱ•’£Š‹Ž‘ȱ

•ŠŽȱŗŖȳThe Field of the Cloth of Goldȱǻž—”—˜ —ȱŠ›’œǰȱŒǯŗśŚśǼǯȱ‘Žȱ˜¢Š•ȱ˜••ŽŒ’˜—ȱȚȱŘŖŗŗȱ Ž›ȱŠ“Žœ¢ȱžŽŽ—ȱ•’£Š‹Ž‘ȱ

•ŠŽȱŗŗȳhe Apotheosis of Henry VIIIȱǻ˜‹Ž›ȱ¢ŽǰȱŗśŚŜǼǯȱ Țȱ’Œ˜›’ŠȱŠ—ȱ•‹Ž›ȱžœŽž–ǰȱ˜—˜—

•ŠŽȱŗŘȳKatherine of Aragon ǻž—”—˜ —ȱŠ›’œǰȱŽŠ›•¢ȱŽ’‘ŽŽ—‘ȱ ŒŽ—ž›¢ǼǯȱȚȱŠ’˜—Š•ȱ˜››Š’ȱ Š••Ž›¢ǰȱ˜—˜—ȱǻ ȱŗŜřǼ

•ŠŽȱŗřȳKatherine of Aragonȱǻž—”—˜ —ȱŠ›’œǰȱŒǯŗśřŗȮŜǼǯȱȚȱ‘’•’™ȱ˜ž•ȱ

•ŠŽȱŗŚȳAnne Boleynȱǻž—”—˜ —ȱŠ›’œǰȱ•ŠŽȱœ’¡ŽŽ—‘ȱŒŽ—ž›¢Ǽǯȱ ȚȱŠ’˜—Š•ȱ˜››Š’ȱ Š••Ž›¢ǰȱ˜—˜—ȱǻ ȱŜŜŞǼ

•ŠŽȱŗśȳAnne Boleynȱǻž—”—˜ —ȱŠ›’œǰȱ•ŠŽȱœ’¡ŽŽ—‘ȱ˜›ȱŽŠ›•¢ȱœŽŸŽ—ŽŽ—‘ȱ ŒŽ—ž›¢ǼǯȱȚȱ‘Žȱ›žœŽŽœȱ˜ȱ‘ŽȱŗŜ‘ȱ’œŒ˜ž—ȱ˜ž—Š››Žȱ’••ȱ›žœ

•ŠŽȱŗŜȳAnne BoleynȱǻŠĴ›’‹žŽȱ˜ȱžŒŠœȱ˜›ȱ Ž›Š›ȱ ˜›Ž—‹˜žǰȱ ŒǯŗśŘśȮŝǼǯȱȚȱ‘Žȱ›žœŽŽœȱ˜ȱ‘Žȱş‘ȱž”Žȱ˜ȱžŒŒ•ŽžŒ‘Ȃœȱ‘ŠĴŽ•œȱž—

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•ŠŽȱŗŞȳKateryn Parrȱǻž—”—˜ —ȱŠ›’œǰȱ•ŠŽȱœ’¡ŽŽ—‘ȱŒŽ—ž›¢ǼǯȱȚȱ‘’•’™ȱ˜ž•ȱ

•ŠŽȱŗşȳ ›ŠĜ’ȱ’—ȱŽŠžŒ‘Š–™ȱ˜ Ž›ǰȱ˜ Ž›ȱ˜ȱ˜—˜—ǯȱȚȱ ’œ˜›’Œȱ˜¢Š•ȱŠ•ŠŒŽœ

•ŠŽȱŘŖȳ ›ŠĜ˜ȱ‹¢ȱŠ–ȱŽ‹Ž›‘ǰȱŽŠžŒ‘Š–™ȱ˜ Ž›ǯȱȱȚȱ ’œ˜›’Œȱ˜¢Š•ȱŠ•ŠŒŽœ

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part iv: court culture

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8 Inscribed in Memory: The Prison Poems of Sir Thomas Wyatt1 Ruth Ahnert

It has long been noted that Thomas Wyatt’s poetry demonstrates a preoccupation with the self. His verse is punctuated with insistent firstperson pronouns; and, even in his adaptations of Petrarch’s verse, Wyatt repeatedly transforms an address to a third person into a poem about the self. The result is that his poetry appears to be confessional, leading many scholars to interpret his verse biographically. It has become something of a critical tradition, for example, to argue that Wyatt’s sonnet ‘The pillar perisht’ (a translation of Petrarch’s Rima 269) expresses his sorrow concerning the fall and execution of Henry VIII’s chief minister, Thomas Cromwell. Recently, however, a number of critics have argued that his poems, whilst hinting at biographical readings, ‘also prove resistant to them, eluding readers who try and pin them down to historical event, place, or person’.2 Such criticism emphasizes that the expression of loss in ‘The pillar perisht’ is generically conventional, fitting equally well under Richard Tottel’s heading for the poem, ‘The louer lamentes the loss of his loue’.3  Moreover, as Cathy Shrank observes, the commemorative function of Petrarch’s opening line, ‘Rotta è l’alta colonna e ‘l verde lauro’ (‘Broken are the high Column and the green Laurel’), which records the names of his patron, Cardinal Giovanni Colonna,

1 I would like to thank Joanna Craigwood, Edward Wilson-Lee, Daniel Wakelin and Oliver Wort for their comments on earlier versions of this chapter. 2 Cathy Shrank, Chatterton lecture on poetry: ‘“But I, that knew what harbred in that hed”: Sir Thomas Wyatt and his Posthumous “Interpreters”‘, Proceedings of the British Academy, 154 (2008), pp. 375–401, at p. 392. 3 Songes and sonettes, written by the right honorable Lorde Henry Howard late Earle of Surrey, and other, ed. Richard Tottel (London, 1557; STC 13861), sig. K.1v.

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and beloved muse, Laura, – both of whom died in the plague that swept across Italy – has no equivalent in Wyatt’s poem.4 The refusal to name the subject of his poem – a politically judicious move if it does refer to the convicted traitor Cromwell – is, in fact, part of a larger trend towards anonymity in the body of verse attributed to Wyatt, which was shared by many of his contemporaries. A crude measure of this anonymity can be ascertained by counting the number of poems that feature names within the Wyatt-corpus as a whole. Of the 268 poems attributed to Wyatt (with varying levels of certainty) by the editors of The Collected Poems of Sir Thomas Wyatt, only six poems unequivocally name contemporary figures.5 These are the poem ‘In mournyng wyse’, which contains a roll-call of the names of the five so-called lovers of Anne Boleyn who were executed together on 17 May 1536; ‘Who lyst his welthe and eas Retayne’, another prison poem associated with Wyatt’s 1536 imprisonment, which is headed by a rebus containing the Latin form of Wyatt’s name, ‘Viat’ (the only poem in which Wyatt’s name certainly appears); the two satires addressed to John Poyntz, ‘Myne owne John Poyntz’ and ‘My mothers maydes’, probably dating from the period of house-arrest following Wyatt’s first imprisonment in 1536; and the two poems addressed to Francis Bryan, the satire ‘A spending hand’, which may have been written at the same time as Wyatt’s other two satires, but was more plausibly produced following his ill-fated embassy to the imperial court, and ‘Syghes ar my foode’, which is usually dated to Wyatt’s 1541 imprisonment. If we consider, however, that Wyatt lived in what has been described as a ‘world of surveillance’, his caution about naming is unsurprising.6 Those associated with the court of Henry VIII lived in an environment where a relationship with the wrong person, or words apparently spoken in confidence, could put them in danger of death. Wyatt knew this from personal experience, for his 1536 imprisonment was reputedly on account of his association with Anne Boleyn, and his 1541 incarceration on charges of having treasonously slandered the king with intemperate words. Critics such as James Simpson and Greg Walker have pointed out that as the accepted conventions of political life and cultural exchange collapsed around them, writers were forced to invent or rediscover new ways of writing, which could sustain and justify public writing outside the mores of courtly counsel and beyond the direct gaze of the monarch who had hitherto been the ultimate

4 Shrank, ‘“But I, that knew”‘, p. 392. 5 The other seventeen poems to contain names employ either fictional names (as in the case of ‘Phyllis’ and ‘Brunet’ in ‘If waker care if soddayne pale Coulour’), characters from scripture, ancient history and myth, or classical writers. 6 Shrank, ‘“But I, that knew”‘, p. 396; see also James Simpson, Reform and Cultural Revolution, 1350–1547 (Oxford, 2002), p. 561.

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patron and arbiter of literary activity.7 Under these new conditions it was vital that they neither incriminate themselves nor others by naming those with whom they were allied or opposed. Such a covert approach was made possible, in part, by the fact that Wyatt’s poems were coterie poems, written for circles of acquaintances with privileged knowledge. In such circles marks of authorship and other identifying symbols were rendered unnecessary.8 Full recognition of this powerful tendency towards anonymity in Wyatt’s poetry is necessary to appreciate the significance of the few occasions on which Wyatt does name his poem’s subjects. Notably, all six of Wyatt’s overt biographical acts of naming occur either in his satires, or in the verse associated by critics with his 1536 and 1541 imprisonments. Given the absence of naming elsewhere, it cannot be an accident that these examples cluster around specific dates and locations in Wyatt’s life and conspicuously those where he was taken out of the courtly environment. Focusing primarily on the prison poems, this chapter will suggest that the naming in these verses can be seen as a direct response to his incarceration. Having faced the prospect of his own death it is unsurprising that Wyatt should consider issues of posterity; but that he should begin to record names, against all his previous instincts, is something that particularly associates these works with the prison. For recording names or initials was a common act among prisoners, as the densely inscribed walls of the Tower of London testify. What these graffiti do, in their most basic form, is to provide the prisoner with a defence against obscurity. The prison walls, therefore, take on a secondary function: they not only confine the prisoner, but also provide a site for him to ensure his existence is recorded for posterity. By first examining contemporary examples of this graffiti and the mnemonic strategies they employ, we can see how Wyatt’s prison poems are engaged with analogous processes of memorialization – both in terms of creating records, and reflecting on the processes by which memories are made.

‘Tagging’ Just as Wyatt’s prison verse departs from the tendency towards anonymity that characterizes the rest of his work, early modern prison graffiti differs significantly from the wall-writing found in other early modern interiors. Usually, early modern graffiti found in houses, churches and public houses constituted generalized sentences of wisdom (equally applicable to their authors, copyists and readers), which were written on walls in ephemeral 7 Greg Walker, Writing Under Tyranny (Oxford, 2005), pp. 414–6; Simpson, Reform, pp. 152–60. 8 Marcy L. North notes the striking rarity of marks of authorship in coterie manuscripts dating from this period in her book The Anonymous Renaissance: Cultures of Discretion in Tudor-Stuart England (Chicago, 2003), pp. 159–210.

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materials such as chalk, charcoal, marking stone, smoke or blood. Juliet Fleming has compellingly argued that this writing-art had a different status from that held by modern graffiti, which is usually seen as individualistic and socially disaffected. Rather, because the early modern intellectual economy was predicated on ‘a socially constituted subject and on the notions of authorship that were collective, aphoristic and inscriptive’, graffiti tended towards ‘non-subjectivity – that is, towards a writing that requires no subjective position of enunciation’.9 However, prison graffiti is an important exception to Fleming’s thesis: rather than illustrating non-subjectivity, prison inscriptions demonstrate an obsession with naming. Examples of inscriptions in the Tower of London dating from the latter part of the sixteenth century tend to feature names alongside self-penned verses, sentences of wisdom, images, decorations or crests; but those dating from the reign of Henry VIII demonstrate this tendency in its essence – most of the graffiti from this earlier period simply constitutes a dated name or monogram.10 Whilst Fleming eschews comparisons with modern graffiti, there is a clear analogy between these inscriptions and the modern practice of ‘tagging’ among graffiti artists.11 More importantly, however, the atypical obsession with names in the prison inscriptions parallels Wyatt’s uncharacteristic emphasis on naming in his prison verse. The ‘tag’-like prison inscriptions found in the Tower of London tend to cluster in individual locations rather than being evenly distributed throughout the prison, just as modern graffiti tends to proliferate in certain areas of the city. The walls of the Beauchamp Tower contain the majority of examples from the Henrician period, which might suggest either that it was one of the main holding places for prisoners at this time, or else that Henrician prisoners who were held there were given the idea to inscribe their names by the existence of earlier examples, such as that of ‘Thomas Talbot, 1462‘. As Plate 19 shows, the inscriptions in this tower are not isolated marks, but rather crowd the walls, in some places interlocking. On the right-hand side of this image are a number of Henrician examples, starting with ‘Saro Fidell [I will be loyal], Inggram Percy, 1537’, which appears about half way down. The next but one below reads, ‘Frances Owdall, 1541’ alongside a shield featuring the arms of the Uvedale family, which is followed by ‘Ravlef Bvlmer, 1537’, and, right at the bottom (and only partially visible), ‘George Ardern, 1538’. Also, near the top 41.

9 Juliet Fleming, Graffiti and the Writing Arts of Early Modern England (London, 2001), p.

10 For a basic list of these inscriptions, see Brian A. Harrison, The Tower of London Prisoner Book: A complete chronology of the persons known to have been detained at Their Majesties’ pleasure, 1100–1941 (Leeds, 2004), Appendix 2. 11 The ‘tag’ is a stylized signature, which might be written alone, or beside a more complex piece of graffiti, like an artist’s signature. For further discussion, see Gregory J. Snyder, Graffiti Lives: Beyond the tag in New York’s urban underground (New York, 2009), pp. 23–6.

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of the left-hand side we can read the slightly longer inscription: ‘Repren[d]: le / sage et il te avmera [rebuke a wise man and he will love you], IC, 1538’ probably made by John Collins.12 But it is not just the pre-existence of graffiti that inspires people to add their names to walls; individuals may have added their mark because they saw their companions making inscriptions. Of those mentioned above, Ralph Bulmer, Ingram Percy, and Father John Collins were imprisoned for their involvement in the 1536 uprising, the Pilgrimage of Grace, and therefore must have shared a cell. And they were not alone. Others imprisoned for their participation in this rebellion include the makers of the following inscriptions in Beauchamp Tower: ‘Adam Sedbar, Abbas Iorevall, 1537’ (see Plate 20, Adam Sedbergh, the last Abbot of Jervaulx, executed at Tyburn, 26 May 1537; ‘Doctor Cook, 1540’, Lawrence Cook, Prior of Doncaster, executed at Tyburn, 4 August 1540; ‘William Belmalar’, Sir William Bulmer, brother to Ralph, pardoned; and ‘Marmaduke Nevile’, probably pardoned, perhaps as a direct result of the letter he sent to Cromwell.13 The inscription ‘Lancaster Herald’, accompanied by an armorial shield bearing milrinds (irons on which a millstone turns) suggests this inscription was written by Thomas Miller/Milner, the Lancaster Herald accused of betraying the king’s plans to the pilgrims. The whole body of inscriptions, then, represents both a real community of people who occupied the cell together because of their shared crimes, and a textual community, a roll call of the people who occupied that cell at different times. Like graffiti ‘tags’, Henrician inscriptions employ mnemonic tactics. In some cases the name and date is accompanied by additional words or symbols that either help them to be memorable, or aim to shape the way in which the individual is remembered. One example is the inscription of Thomas Abell, a Catholic priest imprisoned first in 1532 for writing in favour of the validity of Katherine of Aragon’s marriage, and again from 1534 until 30 July 1540, on a charge of misprision of treason in connection with the prophecies of Elizabeth Barton, which resulted in his execution. His graffito takes the form of a rebus, with the name ‘Thomas’ carved above an image of a bell inscribed with the letter ‘A’ – thus making his name eminently memorable (Plate 21). John Collins uses the tactics of repetition and association. His monograph appears a number of times alone, and twice more appended to biblical verses. 12 It is unclear why this biblical inscription should be in French. It may be a family motto, but I have been unable to find any records confirming this. 13 Marmaduke Neville’s inscription bears the date 1569. However, from the letter that he wrote to Cromwell from prison, dated 1537, we know that his incarceration was much earlier than this (TNA, SP 1/114, fols 30–31). Harrison hypothesizes that the date was altered or added by nineteenth-century renovators, because when the prisoner and poet John Augustus Bonney recorded the graffiti in 1794, he saw two inscriptions by Neville, both dated 1537 (Harrison, Tower of London, p. 139).

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The first of these (as mentioned above) is Proverbs 9:8, ‘Repren[d] le sage et il te avmera’ (Plate 19). The other inscription reads ‘Lerne to feare God. I.C. 1538’, which probably derives from either Deuteronomy 6:3, Leviticus 25:7, or Proverbs, where the phrase ‘fear the lord’ recurs many times. While one might interpret these inscriptions as self-reminders, instructions to think on God in the face of death, they also necessarily have an effect on how Collins is remembered by others. For he need not have added his initials if it were a private prompt to remember; rather, by adding his monograph he suggests to subsequent viewers that I.C. was a pious individual. However, whilst the appearance and mnemonic techniques of these prison inscriptions do suggest an analogy between early modern prison graffiti and modern ‘tagging’, the inscriptions on the walls of the Tower of London go beyond mere self-promotion. By adopting strategies to ensure one’s name is remembered as one’s own existence was potentially about to end, the viewer is invited to see these inscriptions as proleptic memorials. The very act of chiselling into the stone, rather than scratching or writing in ephemeral materials, blurs the line between graffiti and tomb inscriptions in the eye of the viewer. Like the prison inscriptions, funeral monuments employ mnemonic techniques to help the deceased to be remembered.14 And they also share the aforementioned feature of prolepsis implied by the prison inscriptions, for while early modern funeral monuments are conventionally seen as tributes by the living to the memory of the dead, in practice many were set up by the people commemorated in accordance with their detailed instructions.15 They thereby demonstrate the sentiment that would be so aptly summed up by Benedick in Shakespeare’s Much Ado About Nothing: ‘if a man do not erect in this age his own tomb ere he dies, he shall live no longer in monument than the bell rings and the widow weeps’ (Act 5, scene ii, ll. 69–72). Funeral monuments and the inscribed prison walls alike can be described as lieux de mémoire or ‘sites of memory’, the term used by Pierre Nora to describe all those objects, practices, and ideas that encapsulate, contain or 14 See, for example, William Lambe’s epitaph in St Faith’s chapel at St Paul’s Cathedral, quoted in Peter Sherlock, Monuments and Memory in Early Modern England (Aldershot, 2008), p. 211: ‘O Lambe of God, which sinne didst take away; And as a Lambe was offred up for sinne, Where I (poor Lambe) went from thy flock astray, Yet thou, good Lord, vouchsafe thy Lambe to winne Home to thy folde, and holde thy Lambe therein; And at the day, when Lambes and Goates shall sever; Of thy choice Lambes, Lambe may be one for ever.’ 15 Ralph Houlbrooke, Death, Religion, and the Family in England, 1480–1750 (Oxford, 1998), p. 369. Nigel Llewellyn estimates that at least 30 percent of funeral monuments in the early modern period were erected in the lifetimes of their subjects. See Llewellyn, ‘Honour in Life, Death and in the Memory: Funeral Monuments in Early Modern England’, Transactions of the Royal Historical Society, 6 (1996), pp. 179–200, at p. 191.

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encourage particular ways of thinking about the past. Nora’s lieux de mémoire ‘originate with the sense that there is no spontaneous memory, that we must deliberately create archives, maintain anniversaries, organise celebrations, pronounce eulogies … because such activities no longer occur naturally’.16 This justification for the creation of lieux de mémoire has special relevance for the prisoners inscribing their names: the risk of being forgotten or misremembered was something the prisoners rightly feared, for their very name was under attack due to the charges attached to it. Moreover, in the specific context of the Henrician period, prisoners may have doubted the permanence of more traditional kinds of memorial. The period witnessed a wholesale attack on existing monuments as part of the dissolution of the monasteries: brasses were ripped up and sold for profit, graves plundered for valuables and tombs left to decay in obsolete monastic churches.17 Moreover, the nature of how people responded to memorials was also problematized by the Reformation. Prior to Henry VIII’s reforms, memory had not been an end itself in the production of funeral monuments, but rather a means of eliciting prayers of intercession. However, as Peter Sherlock has demonstrated, as people’s beliefs about the afterlife and means of attaining salvation changed, ‘the tight nexus between intercession for the dead and monumental commemoration’ was broken.18 In breaking this, mourners and other visitors to monuments lost their chief model of how to respond to the person being commemorated. In light of growing uncertainties about how people would be remembered, the wall of the prison provided prisoners with a place they could be certain their name would be recorded, where it would not be censored, destroyed or otherwise undermined. Wyatt’s prison poems, I will argue in the remainder of this chapter, are another kind of lieux de mémoire that also respond to the sense that what they defend – the remembrance of the individual – is under threat.

The Poem as Memorial A number of poetic forms explicitly style themselves as lieux de mémoire. The elegy and the epitaph, for example, are both designed to commemorate the dead; and the epitaph seeks to give itself a concrete site for remembrance by being inscribed, or purporting to be inscribed, upon a tomb. Wyatt’s three prison poems can each be seen to share features with the epitaph because of their emphasis on commemoration, the mnemonic techniques they employ or their concern with the act of inscription. Only one of them, however, is a poem that honours the dead; in the other two the acts of memorialization are 16 Pierre Nora, ‘Between Memory and History: Les Lieux de Mémoire’ [1984], tr. Marc Roudebush, Representations, 26 (1989), pp. 7–24, at p. 12. 17 See Sherlock, Monuments, p. 102. 18 Sherlock, Monuments, p. 98.

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associated with the prison, thereby aligning these poems with the inscriptions found in the Tower of London. ‘In mournyng wyse’, a poem that appears in Dublin, Trinity College MS 160 (more commonly known as the Blage manuscript), records the executions of the five men accused of the treasonous act of committing adultery with Anne Boleyn: Mark Smeaton, Sir Henry Norris, Sir Francis Weston, Sir William Brereton and her brother George Boleyn, Viscount Rochford. The poem was attributed to Thomas Wyatt by Kenneth Muir due to the numerous other Wyatt poems that appear in the manuscript and its subject matter, although this has subsequently been questioned on account of the ‘crudeness’ of the poem’s style and the ambivalence of its contents.19 A.C. Spearing writes that ‘if indeed the [poem] is by Wyatt, the unctuousness with which it concedes the failings of those it purports to mourn makes me hope that it is not’.20 However, the tension created between the apparent drive to record these men’s deaths, and the terms in which it does so, creates an impression of caution and circumspection that is typical of Wyatt’s verse. As Walker has noted, this poem ‘defies expectations of either the encomium or the moralized epitaph’.21 In so doing, it brings into question our assumptions about what a memorial should do. As stated earlier, this poem provides a roll-call of the names of each of the executed ‘lovers’: Some say: ‘Rochefford, hadyst thou benne not so prowde, Ffor thy gryt wytte eche man wold the bemone; Syns as yt ys so, many crye alowde: Yt ys great losse that thow art dead and gonne.’ A! Norrys, Norres, my tearys begyne to Rune To thynke what hap dyd the so led or gyd, Wherby thou hast bothe the and thyn vndone. That ys bewaylyd in court of euery syde; In place also wher thou hast neuer bene Both child and man doth petusly the mone. They say: ‘Alas, thou art ffar ouer seene By there offences to be thus ded and gonne’. A! Weston, Weston, that pleasant was and yonge; In actyve thynges who myght with the compayre? All wordis exsept that thou dydyst speake with tonge; So well estemyd with eche wher thou dydyst fare. And we that now in court dothe led our lyffe 19 Patricia Thomson, Sir Thomas Wyatt and his Background (London, 1964), p. 42. For further objections to the ascription, see Richard C. Harrier, The Canon of Sir Thomas Wyatt’s Poetry (Cambridge, MA, 1975), p. 72. 20 A.C. Spearing, Medieval to Renaissance in English Poetry (Cambridge, 1985), p. 356. 21 Walker, Writing, p. 291.

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Most part in mynd doth the lament and mone; But that thy ffaultis we daylye here so Ryffe All we shuld weppe that thou art dead and gone. Brewton, ffarwell, as one that lest I knewe. Great was thy love with dyuers as I here; But common voyce dothe not so sore the Rewe, As other twayne that dothe beffore appere. But yet no dobt but thy frendes thee lament And other her ther petus crye and mone. So dothe eche hart ffor the lykwyse Relent, That thou gevyst cause thus to be ded and gonne. A! Mark what mone shuld I ffor the mak more? Syns that thy dethe thou hast deseruyd best, Save only that myn eye ys fforsed sore With petus playnt to mone the with the Rest. A tym thou haddyst aboue thy poore degree, The ffal wherof thy frendis may well bemone. A Rottyn twygge apon so hyghe a tree Hathe slepyd thy hold and thou art dead and goonn.22

With the exception of Rochford, each of the men is given a full stanza, which opens with an invocation of their name. Based on this structure, each stanza gives the initial impression of being an epitaph, but the content seems illsuited to such a purpose. While some contain laudatory sentiments, such as the lines assigned to Weston, the others received more mixed treatment. For one, the comments on the figures are often refracted through public opinion, as with the final three lines of the stanza set aside for Norris, which report the laments at his loss, or the accusations that Rochford was too proud. The passage concerning Rochford also illustrates that the poem contains a large measure of statements about the men’s failings: as well as the accusations against Rochford, the poem refers to the suspicion that Norris, the first to be questioned, was the one to implicate the other men, and it represents Mark Smeaton as an over-reacher. As Greg Walker has pointed out, these sins – of ambition, pride, misfortune – are the conventional engines of ruin in the fallof-princes tradition. But this is not the kind moralizing epitaph we would expect from the execution of the so-called lovers of Anne Boleyn. Wyatt does not mention directly the crimes for which these men were executed, or even allude to the charges by accusing them of sexual immorality.23 The poem is thus wrought with tension and ambiguity. It has the qualities both of an epigram and tale of caution, but conforms to neither tradition. 22 The Collected Poems of Sir Thomas Wyatt, ed. Kenneth Muir and Patricia Thomson (Liverpool, 1969), CXLVI, lines 21–56. All further quotations are from this edition and will be cited within the text by poem and line numbers. 23 Walker, Writing, p. 294.

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Moreover, Wyatt’s use of report and hearsay, alongside more straightforward statements about the executed men, means that he neither aligns himself unproblematically with the executed men nor the authorities that put them to death. For these reasons it remains ambiguous whether he wishes his readers to mourn the men’s loss or not. The uncertainty this creates, however, does not undermine remembrance; rather, it allows the poem to deliver a profound message about how people remember. If readers ask themselves what really strikes them about the poem, or what they remember about it after giving it a preliminary reading, the chances are that the names (which open four of the eight stanzas), and the refrain ‘dead and gone’ (which concludes each stanza), will be at the top of this list. This insistent patterning renders the following message: ‘Rochford […] dead and gonne. / A! Norrys, Norres […] ded and gone. / A! Weston, Weston […] dead and gone. / Brewton […] ded and gone. / A! Mark […] dead and goonn’. This repetition does a number of things. First, it boils down the message of the poem to its simplest possible form: these men existed, but now they are no more. Second, the repetition implies a kind of anxiety about leaving no memory or mark, the same kind of anxiety that we might assume was behind the inscriptions in the Tower of London. The beautiful irony of this anxious repetition, as we saw with John Collins’s replication of his monograph on the walls of Beauchamp Tower, is that it functions to burn their names into our brains. Third, then, the poem demonstrates the mnemonic power of meter and repetition. In this way, the structure of the poem pulls against its content by foregrounding the boiled-down message, which necessarily pushes the ambivalent statements about the men – the criticism and hearsay at court – into the background, preventing it from sticking so easily in the reader’s mind. The poem therefore suggests that if we ask ‘how will these men be remembered?’ we are in fact making two separate enquiries. While ostensibly we might think we are asking what they will be remembered for – their qualities, achievements, actions, and reputation – we are also necessarily asking about the ways in which these things are made memorable for other people – their actions, whether that be intercessory prayers, or the making of poems, that will fix their names in the public consciousness. Wyatt’s use of mnemonic strategies implies that he shares Nora’s lack of faith in people’s intrinsic ability to create memories without the creation of archives, anniversaries or other lieux de mémoire. Patricia Thompson makes an apt conclusion when she states that, while no one dared publicly affirm that the traitor’s deaths were undeserved, Wyatt defied the opinion they should not be mourned.24 Whilst ‘In mournyng wyse’ fails to fulfil the expectations of a traditional epitaph, Wyatt’s other poem associated with his 1536 incarceration, ‘Who lyst

24 Thomson, Sir Thomas Wyatt, p. 42.

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his welthe and eas Retayne’, also found in the Blage manuscript, is headed by a rebus that would be fitting for a tomb: V. Innocentia Veritas Viat Fides Circumdederunt me inimici mei

The Latin form of Wyatt’s name is placed at the centre; surrounding it on the left, the right, and above, are the words ‘truth’, ‘innocence’ and ‘faith’. Below his name is an adaptation of Psalm 17:9, ‘my enemies have surrounded me’.25 This arrangement – of name, virtues and biblical verse – employs techniques of memorialization that are common both to funeral monuments and to the prison inscriptions described above. Like the biblical verses copied alongside Collins’s monograph, or the rebus featuring Abell’s name, the heading to Wyatt’s poem provides a mnemonic device to remember the poet’s, and it seeks to influence how that name should be remembered. On first reading, we might think we are being led to remember Wyatt as one who should be associated with innocence, truth and faith, and as one whose enemies surrounded him. Such an assumption would be supported by the tendency of prisoners – such as Henry Howard, the earl of Surrey, Thomas Smith, and John and Robert Dudley – to turn to the Psalms as a conduit for their complaints of persecution.26 Another reading of Wyatt’s rebus, however, is also possible. The arrangement of the virtues, ‘Innocentia’, ‘Veritas’ and ‘Fides’, around Wyatt’s name invite us to see innocence, truth and faith as the enemies that prey on the poet. In light of this tantalizing, and probably calculated, ambiguity, it seems safe to assume that Wyatt was the author of this rebus, and not the manuscript’s compiler. Only two other ascriptions to ‘T.W.’ occur in the Blage manuscript, despite there being as many as eighty poems attributed to Wyatt. Both the scarcity of other ascriptions, and their simplicity, suggest that the complex rebus is unlikely to have been added by the compiler. Furthermore, there is considerable evidence to suggest that the rebus was specifically composed to head this poem, and to interact with the verse that follows. The main body of the poem opens with generalized sententiae regarding the dangers of court life, derived from a chorus in Seneca’s tragedy Phaedra from which the Latin refrain is also taken.27 However, from the third stanza onwards 25 The significance of the ‘V’ that precedes ‘Innocentia’ is ambiguous. It could be a Roman numeral, but it may also be Wyatt’s initial. One of Wyatt’s signet rings bore a ‘V’ on a leaf of English ivy. For a discussion of this ring, see Jason Powell, “Thomas Wyatt’s Ivy Seal’, Notes and Queries, 54 (2007), pp. 242–4. 26 See Rivkah Zim, English Metrical Psalms: Poetry as Praise and Prayer, 1535–1601 (Cambridge, 1987), pp. 81–111. 27 Martin Buzacott argues that Book 2 Metre 4 of Boethius’ De Consolatione is also an analogue for these sententiae. See ‘A Boethian Analogue for Sir Thomas Wyatt’s “Who List His Wealth”’, Notes and Queries, 31 (1984), pp. 163–4.

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we are provided with details and sentiments that seem much more personal and specific, and in the fourth stanza, as Elizabeth Heale has noticed, the generalized locations of the Senecan original, the high seats and a humble cottage, also give way to the specific location of the Bell Tower in the Tower of London:28 The bell towre showed me suche [a] syght That in my hed stekys day and nyght Ther dyd I lerne out of a grate, Ffor all favore, glory and myght, And yet circa Regna tonat. (CLXXVI, 16–20)

The use of the definite article to open this stanza shows that Wyatt expected his readers to know to which bell tower he referred. It is invoked here as a lieu de mémoire: the poem’s sentiments are rendered memorable by virtue of the definite and recognizable location. But what precisely is the poem memorializing? Wyatt is believed to have been held in the Bell Tower during his 1536 imprisonment, and so generations of scholars have argued for a biographical reading of the events narrated in this stanza: that, during his imprisonment, he looked out of his cell’s grate and saw a ‘syght / That in my hed stekys day and nyght’. While it is traditionally maintained that this ‘syght’ was the execution of Anne Boleyn, others have argued that it must have been the deaths of Anne’s so-called lovers because, whilst we know that Tower Hill, where the five men were executed on 17 May 1536, is visible from the Bell Tower, it is less clear if the location where Anne’s scaffold was erected, on the north side of the White Tower, would have been.29 In giving so much emphasis to what it was that Wyatt might have seen, the implication is that this poem is intended as a kind of memorial either to the death of Anne or the five men – a suggestion that is no doubt supported by the existence of ‘In mournyng wyse’. However, at the very moment the poem seems to be about to describe an execution, it doubles back on itself and describes the impact of the sight on the poem’s narrator. In so doing Wyatt is not merely disguising the subject of his poem, he is actually shifting the subject of the poem from the ‘syght’ to the viewer – a move that John Kerrigan describes as ‘the poem’s secretive self-centredness’.30 This change in the expected trajectory of the verse demonstrates that the poem is not commemorating a death, but rather memorializing Wyatt’s witnessing of the event. Given the prominence of Wyatt’s name in the heading to this poem, the reader should not have expected anything else. The opening rebus, however, 28 Elizabeth Heale, Wyatt, Surrey and Early Tudor Poetry (London, 1998), p. 124. 29 Arguing the case for the five men’s execution, see Thomson, Sir Thomas Wyatt, p. 41; Walker, Writing, p. 289. 30 John Kerrigan, ‘Wyatt’s Selfish Style’, Essays and Studies, 34 (1981), pp. 1–18, at p. 8.

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acts as a warning about the content in more ways than one. Crucially, the virtues surrounding Wyatt’s name in the rebus pre-empt their appearance in the body of the poem proper. In stanza three we find ‘truth’: These blodye dayes haue brokyn my hart; My lust, my youth dyd then departe, And blind desyre of astate Who hastis to clyme sekes to reuerte: Of truthe, circa Regna tonat. (CLXXVI, lines 11–15)

Unlike the rebus’s ‘Veritas’, which the reader takes to stand for the abstract concept of Truth, the word here connotes the acceptance of a truth: the truth that there is a storm to weather because ‘circa Regna tonat’ [‘Jupiter thunders through the realms’, or, as Colin Burrow has it, ‘lightening strikes around the court’].31 The debasement of the abstract noun is paralleled by the treatment of ‘innocence’ in the stanza following that set in the Bell Tower: By proffe, I say, ther dyd I lerne: Wyt helpythe not defence to yerne, Of innocence to pled or prate; Be low therfor, geve God the sterne, Ffor sure circa Regna tonat. (CLXXVI, 21–25)

The phrase innocence occurs here with something of the same ambiguity it has in the rebus. There it may be representing one of the virtues that Wyatt holds, or else one of the very enemies that surround him, as suggested by Psalm 17:9 and the arrangement of the words ‘Innocentia’, ‘Veritas’ and ‘Fides’ around his name. For, although the implication in the stanza quoted above is that Wyatt may be innocent, he says that such a virtue is of no use to him: ‘Wyt [Wyatt?] helpythe not’. Innocence, he says, is no defence against the lightning bolts. However, whilst the content of the poem asserts that Innocentia and Veritas are not useful allies in the courtly environment, Fides seems to remain valuable. The word ‘faith’ does not appear in the main body of the poem as the other virtues do, but the concept of a leap of faith is implied by the phrase ‘geve God the sterne’. This is the only defence the courtier has. To my knowledge, no one else has observed the reoccurrence of all three of the virtues in the body of the poem, although Kerrigan does note the return of ‘innocency’ in stanza 5. He argues that this functions to link the end of the poem back to its beginning, thereby forming ‘the largest circle described … by 31 Colin Burrow, ‘The experience of exclusion: literature and politics in the reigns of Henry VII and Henry VIII’, in The Cambridge Companion to Medieval English Literature, ed. David Wallace (Cambridge, 2002), pp. 793–820, at p. 811.

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a poem which with its circling refrain about circling (‘circa regna tonat’), begins with a motto which rings the ‘I’ (‘Viat’) with its virtues, and then laments its further encirclement by its foes’.32 This is a neat point; but in failing to note the recurrence of the virtues of Veritas and Fides as well, he does not see that, just as the three virtues encircle Wyatt’s name in the rebus, in the body of the poem they frame the fourth stanza set in the Bell Tower. This encircled stanza can be seen to equate with Wyatt’s name in the heading: just as a name expresses subjectivity, this stanza is a notably personal moment in the poem. The precise relationship between the ‘Viat’ and this stanza, however, might usefully be compared to the relationship between a memorial and the process of making memories. The rebus, by mimicking the kind of inscription one might find on a tomb, aligns itself with the finished product, something that has been inscribed. By contrast, the Bell Tower stanza narrates the process of incising, which is implied by the word ‘stekys’. Whilst the recollection of looking out of the grate is rendered in the past tense, the present-continuous tense of ‘stekys’ suggests that the process by which this event is being written into his ‘hed’ is ongoing. The obsession with the act of incising is what links the final prison poem to the graffiti in Beauchamp Tower, a strambotto addressed by Wyatt to Sir Francis Bryan: Syghes ar my foode, drynke are my teares; Clynkinge of fetters suche musycke wolde crave; Stynke and close ayer away my lyf wears; Innocencie is all the hope I have. Rayne, wynde, or wether I iudge by myne eares. Mallice assaulted that rightiousnes should have. Sure I am, Brian, this wounde shall heale agayne, But yet, alas, the scarre shall styll remayne. (CCXLIV, 1–8)

A number of the concerns explored in this poem are familiar from ‘Who lyst his welthe and eas Retayne’. Like the previous poem, this verse announces Wyatt’s innocence; and the complaint that ‘Mallice assaulted that rightiousnes should have’ is reminiscent of Psalm 17:9 (‘my enemies have surrounded me’). The poem, then, might have been written during Wyatt’s 1536 incarceration. However, the image of the unfading scar, which closes the poem, has led critics to date this poem to his latter imprisonment, in 1541. The reason for this is that Wyatt’s prose defence, written during his latter incarceration, against the charges of exchanging treasonable words with the king’s enemies at Nice and Villa Franca (now in BL, Harley MS 78), contains the very same image: ‘These men thynkethe yt inoughe to accuse, and as all 32 Kerrigan, ‘Wyatt’s Selfish Style’, p. 11.

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these sclaunderers vse for a generall rule: whome thou lovest not, accuse. For tho he hele the wounde, yet the scharre shall remayne’.33 This contextual information has, unsurprisingly, led to biographical speculations. Susan Brigden has suggested that the reference to the scar was to be taken by Bryan as an allusion to Ecclesiasticus 27:21 (‘As for woundes, they may be bounde up agayne, and an euell worde maye be reconcyled: but who so bewrayeth the secretes of a frende, there is no more hope to be had unto him’), and that the poem therefore functions as a covert ‘warning’ not to betray the secrets they shared concerning their dealings whilst abroad together as ambassadors to Henry VIII’s court.34 Walker, however, has established a persuasive case for it deriving from Bryan’s own ‘Proverbes of Salmon’, and suggests that Brigden misinteprets Wyatt’s closing couplet, which is in fact about the stigma of imprisonment, and the impact of the malicious allegations brought him there, upon his reputation: it will leave a mark that will outlast even a formal vindication.35 They are both right, albeit in different ways. Whereas the heading to ‘Who lyst his welthe and eas Retayne’ demonstrates Wyatt’s attempt to shape his own epitaph, this poem expresses the poet’s anxiety about being written upon. There is good reason to suggest that the image of the scar in Wyatt’s poem would have been interpreted as a deforming kind of writing. Wyatt re-uses his image of the scar once again in a double sonnet, which is also sometimes associated with his 1541 imprisonment, ‘The flaming Sighes that boile within my brest’. Here Wyatt writes: ‘The wound, alas, happ in some other place / Ffrom whence no toole away the skarr can race’. What is interesting about this reconfiguration of the image is the introduction of the action of ‘racing’, which simultaneously associates scarring with writing and tattooing. The verb race was commonly used at this time to mean ‘scrape out, erase (a word, etc.); to remove by scraping’.36 In this context the scar becomes a piece of text that cannot be erased. But, as Juliet Fleming has shown, race was also one of a range of words used to describe what we now would now call tattooing, which included: ‘listing’, ‘pinking’, ‘pouncing’, ‘pricking’ and ‘rasing’.37 In this context the verb race means ‘scratch or tear with something sharp; to cut or slash’.38 In the line ‘Ffrom whence no toole away the skarr can race’, then, the word ‘race’ might signify an even more violent or deforming kind of marking. As Fleming notes, the doubleness of the word proposes a ‘logic of the mark whereby one can mark

33 Kenneth Muir, Life and Letters of Sir Thomas Wyatt (Liverpool, 1963), p. 193. 34 Susan Brigden, ‘The shadow that you know: Sir Thomas Wyatt and Sir Francis Bryan at court and in embassy’, The Historical Journal, 39 (1996), pp. 1–31 (pp. 1–2). 35 Walker, Writing, p. 321. 36 Oxford English Dictionary (OED), ‘race’, v.2, 2. b. 37 Fleming, Graffiti, p. 90. 38 OED, ‘race’, v.2, 3. a.

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by detraction, detract by addition’.39 This is precisely Wyatt’s anxiety in both of the poems which mentions scars: that the metaphorical incising of his skin will take away from him, that it will detract from his name and his reputation. Fleming’s history of early modern tattooing also demonstrates that, even beyond the word race, scarring would have been understood as a means of writing. The Jerusalem tattoo was a common sight in Europe in the fifteenth and sixteenth centuries. Those on pilgrimage to Jerusalem during this period would have been rased and inked with the names of Jesus, Mary and ‘sundry other characters’ as evidence both of their journey and their commitment to God.40 The scarring process of the tattoo was thus associated both with names, and with the outward demonstration of a person’s spirituality. In this way, the early modern tattoo was not dissimilar to the wallinscriptions of John Collins in providing a lasting record of faith. But whereas the graffiti found in the Tower and Wyatt’s rebus both assert the individual’s power to create lieux de mémoire, the poem ‘Syghes ar my foode’ focuses upon the superior power of others to determine how Wyatt will be remembered. It is for this reason that Bryan’s name appears in the poem, despite the fact that it is Wyatt’s name and mutilated reputation that is the poem’s central concern. In addressing the poem to Bryan, Wyatt not only makes him the recipient of his laments, but also implies that he may be able to have some bearing on how Wyatt’s wound will ‘heale’. Wyatt is seeking out aid through his poetry: the poem is involved in a kind of intercession on the poet’s behalf, a function that connects it with the role of tomb inscription, as discussed above. More importantly, by naming the subject of his petition for help, Wyatt also puts his appeal for sympathy and support into the mouths of other readers of his poem, and therefore ensures that Bryan is not answerable to him alone. Wyatt’s lament about his lack of control over his reputation should not, however, be read as a statement of utter helplessness. In recognizing how others have the power to inscribe and ‘rase’ his name, he implicitly asserts his ability to re-write other people’s reputations, as he had in the case of the five so-called lovers of Anne Boleyn. By addressing his statement ‘Sure I am, Brian, this wounde shall heale agayne, / But yet, alas, the scarre shall styll remayne’ to a specific recipient, he is informing Bryan that he too is subject to the threat of a permanent scar. A similar threat underlies Wyatt’s satire on courtly life, ‘A spending hand’, of which Bryan is both the intended recipient and subject. There is much disagreement concerning the message that this satire delivers to its addressee. Ostensibly, Bryan is represented as an innocent: he condemns the cynical advice that Wyatt ironically propounds, and thus stands as a spokesperson for the values of godliness and honest name. However, as numerous critics have observed, Bryan practised a number of the dubious 39 Fleming, Graffiti, p. 91. 40 Fleming, Graffiti, p. 107.

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ruses recommended by Wyatt’s narrator. As Walker has noted and helpfully explained, by the time Wyatt penned his satire Bryan had already married one wealthy widow, Phillipa, Lady Fortescue and would subsequently marry another. His two sisters had married members of the King’s privy chamber, ‘thus adding an additional “bitchiness” to the reference to pandaring “Thy nece, thy cosyn, thy sister or thy doghter”’. And, as Wyatt had learned to his cost, not only did Bryan not lend money freely, but he also borrowed without offer of interest or, indeed, true intent to repay the loan.41 Whilst outwardly celebrating Bryan, Wyatt’s satire demonstrates the ease with which he might turn his satire against his associate and thereby scar his name and standing within courtly society. Henry VIII’s court, of course, was the place in which reputations were ultimately made and destroyed. Whilst a member of that court, Wyatt participated in the kinds of social interaction and literary self-reflection that followers of Stephen Greenblatt would describe as archetypical selffashioning; but, as discussed at the beginning of this chapter, none of Wyatt’s poems written during this time mention contemporary figures by name. The naming in Wyatt’s prison poems, by contrast, is a response to his exclusion from the court, and demonstrates his pessimism concerning the power of memory without the creation of lieux de mémoire. Each of the poems discussed, and the several examples of contemporary graffiti found on the walls of the Tower of London, exhibit a fear that what they defend – the remembrance of the individual – is under threat, whether it be through false or biased record, or by being utterly ‘rased’. These incarcerated forms of self-fashioning had much more modest aims than their courtly counterparts. Those incising their names on the walls of the Beauchamp Tower could only have realistically expected their marks to be read by subsequent prisoners; Wyatt’s poem ‘Syghes ar my foode’ sought, in the first instance, only to gain the sympathy and support of Bryan. Today, however, Wyatt’s name is both better-known and held in better favour that Bryan’s; and over a million tourists each year see the prisoners’ names on the Tower of London’s walls. In Wyatt’s other prison poems the impetus to memorialize is equally effective: his roll-call of names in the poem ‘In mournyng wyse’ prompts us to meditate again on the deaths of Anne Boleyn’s so-called lovers; and through the rebus in the Blage manuscript we can deduce Wyatt’s authorship of ‘Who lyst his welthe and eas Retayne’. They show to us clearly that, whilst in life anonymity can be a useful device, in death man just wishes to be remembered.

41 Walker, Writing, p. 330.

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9 Receiving the King: Henry VIII at Cambridge Susan Wabuda

Of all of the episodes in Henry VIII’s crowded life, none of his appearances at either of his ancient universities have received much attention, even though they were closely bound up with the perception of his role as king.1 He is usually associated with Oxford or Cambridge through events that he managed from a distance, from Westminster or London: like canvassing the universities about his ‘Great Matter’ in discarding Katherine of Aragon; or his seizure of Cardinal College in Oxford from Thomas Wolsey; or his refoundation, in the final weeks of his life, of smaller colleges to make Trinity College, Cambridge.2 For scholars at the universities, Henry VIII was seldom present, but he was never out of mind. It may be difficult to think of Henry as being present in his own person at the universities, though visit them he did, and more often than is usually appreciated. The king came through Oxford frequently, especially in deep summer and early autumn, when he went on his progresses, and during the hunting trips that he continued to make even late into his life. Henry’s appearances at the universities, in keeping with the rituals of his progresses, were elaborate pageants that combined many purposes. They were dynamic exercises in royal theatre. Magnificence mingled with piety. They were important opportunities for exchange between the king and his subjects, as the fealty and the gifts that they offered him were meant to elicit 1 In this chapter, I have relied on the innovative work of Jennifer Loach, ‘The Function of ceremonial in the reign of Henry VIII’, Past and Present, 142 (1994), pp. 43–68; Neil Samman, ‘The Progresses of Henry VIII, 1509–1529’, in The Reign of Henry VIII: Politics, policy and piety, ed. Diarmaid MacCulloch (New York, 1995), pp. 59–73; and Simon Thurley, The Royal Palaces of Tudor England: Architecture and court life 1460–1547 (New Haven, 1993). For the progresses of Henry’s younger daughter, see Mary Hill Cole, The Portable Queen: Elizabeth I and the politics of ceremony (Amherst, 1999), pp. 13–34, 97–134, 138–41. 2 J.J. Scarisbrick, Henry VIII (Berkeley, 1968), pp. 255–8, 517–23; Peter Gwyn, The King’s Cardinal: The Rise and fall of Thomas Wolsey (London, 1990), pp. 341–50, 612–13.

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his continued interest and protection. Henry merged his progresses with pleasure-seeking as he enjoyed the hunt or the exercise of horses. His energy was astonishing. He long maintained a youthful ability to move rapidly across the countryside with courtiers and servants following in his train. Most especially, his progresses displayed his fitness to rule, and they were meant to instill a sense of awe among the people.3 The first visit to Cambridge that the young Henry ever seems to have made occurred when he was prince of Wales in August 1507, when he was brought by his father Henry VII and his grandmother the Lady Margaret Beaufort, countess of Richmond, to watch the degrees ceremony.4 Their hopes were now centered on the young prince in the wake of the loss, four years earlier, of his elder brother Arthur, who was mourned at the university, as elsewhere.5 Arthur’s death threatened to undo many of the dynastic and political settlements that the Lady Margaret and her son had built to secure the new dynasty. Prince Henry was sixteen, and this visit to Cambridge marked one of his very first appearances in public.6 For neither Henry VIII nor his father was Cambridge fully a destination in itself. From the earliest days of his surprising triumph over Richard III, Henry VII maintained a public and abiding devotion to the Blessed Virgin,7 and he was as frequent a pilgrim to the shrine of Our Lady of Walsingham as his heavy burden of responsibilities allowed. Cambridge made a convenient stopping-place on the route. When the king and his mother made a pilgrimage to Walsingham in April 1506, Henry ‘took Cambridge in his way thither’.8 Initially, Henry VIII, like his father before him, appreciated Walsingham’s reputation, or at least he seemed to share in the popular devotion to the Virgin Mary that the shrine intensified. Walsingham’s main feature was a re-creation 3 Scarisbrick, Henry VIII, pp. 19–20, and I am grateful to Professor David Cressy for discussion on this point. 4 Grace Book B Part I: Containing the Proctors’ Account and Other Records of The University of Cambridge for the Years 1488–1511, ed. Mary Bateson, Cambridge Antiquarian Society (Cambridge, 1903), pp. 219–20, 223; Malcolm Underdown, ‘John Fisher and the promotion of learning’, in Humanism, Reform and the Reformation: the Career of Bishop John Fisher, ed. Brendan Bradshaw and Eamon Duffy (Cambridge, 1989), pp. 25–46, at p. 29. 5 Grace Book B Part I, p. 173; Michael K. Jones and Malcolm G. Underwood, The King’s Mother: Lady Margaret Beaufort Countess of Richmond and Derby (Cambridge, 1992), pp. 76–8. 6 Scarisbrick, Henry VIII, pp. 6–7; David Starkey, ‘An Attendant Lord? Henry Parker, Lord Morley’, in ‘Triumphs of English’: Henry Parker, Lord Morley: Translator of the Tudor Court, ed. Marie Axton and James P. Carley (London, 2000), pp. 1–25, at pp. 3–4. 7 MacCulloch, ‘Introduction’, Reign of Henry VIII, p. 2. 8 Elias Ashmole, The Institution, Laws and Ceremonies of the Most Noble Order of the Garter (London, 1672), p. 558; and here I am in the debt of H.C. Porter, ‘Fisher and Erasmus’, in Humanism, Reform and the Reformation: the Career of Bishop John Fisher, eds. Brendan Bradshaw and Eamon Duffy (Cambridge, 1989), pp. 81, 96 (n. 5). Henry VII and the Lady Margaret together: Grace Book B I, p. 213; Damian Riehl Leader, A History of the University of Cambridge, vol. 1, The University to 1546 (Cambridge, 1988), p. 292; P.S. Allen, Lectures and Wayfaring Sketches (Oxford, 1934), pp. x–xi; Porter, ‘Fisher and Erasmus’, p. 81.

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of the house in Nazareth where the Angel Gabriel greeted the Virgin with the news that she would conceive by the Holy Ghost a son she would name Jesus. Over the centuries, as its formidable reputation for its curative powers developed, the shrine also acquired an impressive assortment of meanings, as well as new accessories, including a statue of the Virgin and Child in one of its chapels, a Franciscan convent, and holy wells. One layer of sacred context was added to the next through time, and the array contributed to the satisfaction of the pilgrims who resorted there to seek the Virgin’s aid. To go on pilgrimage to Walsingham, in addition to all of the health and spiritual benefits that the shrine conferred, had a substantial social cachet. The statue of the Madonna became the object of veneration for its own sake. The steady progression of pilgrims lavished gifts of every description, from gold rings and coral rosary beads, to gowns and more esoteric gifts.9 When Erasmus paid his visit to Walsingham in May 1512, he gave the Virgin a poem saluting her in Greek.10 To the mélange of holy allusions that the shrine attracted, Henry VII added his own reputation for military prowess. Holiness through association was a quality that the Tudors needed to encourage in order to strengthen their grasp in their realm. In addition to putting himself under the Virgin’s protection, his royal pilgrimages were testaments to Henry’s essential kingliness: assertions that were necessary in the shadow of the lingering resentments, especially at Cambridge, that his defeat of Richard had occasioned. As late as 1506, Cambridge’s chaplain could note that it was now twenty-two years since Henry’s ‘conquestum anglie’.11 The first Tudor king also faced regular challenges from pretenders such as Perkin Warbeck or Lambert Simnel. According to Polydore Vergil, when threatened by the Simnel rising in 1487, Henry ‘came to the place called Walsingham, where he prayed devoutly before the image of the Blessed Virgin Mary’, so that ‘he might be preserved

9 Of this chapel se here the fundacyen (London, 1496?), not paginated; J.C. Dickinson, The Shrine of Our Lady of Walsingham (Cambridge, 1956), pp. 41–2; Eamon Duffy, Stripping of the Altars: Traditional Religion in England c. 1400–c. 1580 (New Haven, 1992), pp. 256–65; Marina Warner, Alone of All Her Sex: The Myth and the Cult of the Virgin Mary (New York, 1976), p. 295; Alexandra Walsham, ‘Holywell: Contesting sacred space in post-Reformation Wales’, in Sacred Space in Early Modern Europe, ed. Will Coster and Andrew Spicer (Cambridge, 2005), pp. 211–36; and the same author’s ‘Reforming the waters: holy wells and healing springs in Protestant England’, in Life and Thought in the Northern Church, c. 1100–1700, ed. Diana Wood, Subsidia 12, Studies in Church History (Woodbridge, Suffolk, 1999), pp. 246–55. 10 Desiderius Erasmus, ‘Peregrinatio Religionis Ergo’, in Opera Omnia (Amsterdam, 1792), III, pp. 470–94; Erasmus to Andreas Ammonio, 9 May [1512], in Opvs Epistolarvm Des. Erasmi Roterodami, ed. P.S. Allen, H.M. Allen, and H.W. Garrod (12 vols, Oxford, 1906–58), II, no. 262, and translated in Collected Works of Erasmus: The Correspondence of Erasmus, ed. R.A.B. Mynors and D.S.F. Thomson (Toronto, 1975), II, pp. 229–30. 11 Grace Book B I, p. 215; Christopher Brooke, ‘Urban Church and university church: Great St Mary’s from its origin to 1523’, in Great St Mary’s: Cambridge’s University Church, ed. John Binns and Peter Meadows (Cambridge, 2000), pp. 7–24.

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from the wiles of his enemies.’12 The king returned to Walsingham twice in the following year, at Easter and again later that summer,13 and he gave the shrine the military standard that had been flown in battle, to offer it as part of his thanks for the victory, as a testament to the divine favour he had received.14 In the mid 1490s, one of Lady Margaret’s favourite printers produced a story of the shrine’s ‘fundacyon’ that helped to continue the process of making an essential pairing between saintliness and the monarchy. The shrine had come into being around ‘A thousande complete syxty and one’, in the ‘tyme of sent Edward kyng of this region’: the same St Edward the Confessor whose tomb in Westminster Abbey became the supreme focus for the building of Henry’s chapel.15 For all pilgrims to see, Henry ‘offred and sette before our Lady at Walsingham’ a tablet or ‘table’ made of silver and gilt, written with ‘large letters’ in black enamel: ‘REX HENRICUS SEPTIMUS’ with a likeness of himself, probably in armour, kneeling in prayer. He ordered something similar for the altar of his chapel in Westminster Abbey.16 In effigy, the king meant to be a perpetual witness to the miracle of the daily Mass and the story of the life of the Virgin. Henry VII represented himself to all observers as her eternal client.17 For Henry VIII as king, Cambridge was no more a destination in itself than for his father, but he was not the frequent pilgrim that the elder Henry had been. As a result, his visits to Cambridge were rare. The young king went on an accelerated pilgrimage to Walsingham following the birth of his son 12 The Anglica Historia of Polydore Vergil A. D. 1485–1537, ed. and trans. Denys Hay, CS, 74 (1950), pp. 21, 27. Henry presented the standards that had he had fought under at Bosworth to St Paul’s Cathedral. Sydney Anglo, Spectacle Pageantry, and Early Tudor Policy (2nd edn, Oxford, 1997), pp. 20–21. 13 Dickinson, Our Lady of Walsingham, p. 42; The Paston Letters, ed. James Gairdner (Edinburgh, 1910), no. 908. Henry VII also travelled through Cambridge on his way to Lincoln, York, and Bristol on his first progress in 1486. Anglo, Spectacle Pageantry, pp. 21–46. 14 Anglica Historia of Polydore Vergil, pp. 21, 27. Henry presented the standards that had he had fought under at Bosworth to St Paul’s Cathedral. Anglo, Spectacle Pageantry, pp. 20–21. 15 Of this chapel se here the fundacyen, not paginated; Dickinson, Walsingham, pp. 41–2; Richard C. McCoy, Alterations of state: Sacred kingship in the English Reformation (New York, 2002), pp. 24–54; MacCulloch, ‘Introduction’, Reign of Henry VIII, p. 2. For the printer Richard Pynson, see Jones and Underwood, The King’s Mother, pp. 183–6. 16 Following the installation of his gilded image at Walsingham, Henry ordered in his will a similar tablet for the shrine of St Thomas à Becket in Canterbury, and also a gilded statue of himself in prayer for his chapel at Westminster Abbey. The Will of King Henry VII (London, 1775), pp. 35–7. Cf. the shrine of Henry VI at Windsor: Duffy, Altars, p. 198; McCoy, Sacred kingship, pp. 24–54. 17 For a discussion of ‘surrogate’ or ‘virtual’ pilgrimage, see Eamon Duffy, Marking the Hours: English People and Their Prayers 1240–1570 (New Haven, 2006), p. 41; and the same author’s Altars, pp. 190–200. For examples of royal effigies and their use in funeral processions: Loach, ‘Function of ceremonial’, pp. 56–62.

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at Richmond on 1 January 1511. The birth of this first child, a future Henry IX, promised to satisfy many of the anxious imperatives of the new reign: the stability of the realm; the continuation of the dynasty through securing the succession; and the fitness of Henry’s calculated decision to maintain the precarious European balance of power through his marriage to Arthur’s widow Katherine.18 Bonfires were lit in London, and casks of wine were poured forth in celebration. Cambridge’s processional cross was brought out to mark the birth, wine was distributed, and the university gave 40s. to the queen’s servant who brought the letters of announcement.19 At Epiphany, the entertainments at court were particularly brilliant, and they included an elaborate morris dance, where revellers emerged from a glittering artificial mountain that was capped by a tree of gold decorated with resplendent devices of the Tudor rose combined with Katherine’s pomegranate. In the midst of the celebrations, in the narrow period between Epiphany and the queen’s churching, Henry rode all the way from Richmond to Walsingham and back again, at what must have been a hard gallop across the cold countryside. Barefoot, the king walked the last two miles to the shrine, where he presented a costly necklace to the statue of Our Lady.20 On his return, the court moved to Westminster to start on 13 February one of the most famous tournaments of the reign, when the king and his steed were emblazoned with golden love-knots linking his initials with Katherine’s.21 But the baby died only nine days later. With the lamentations, the uncertainties that marked his succession had begun. Henry VIII showed less interest than his father had done in grafting the reputation of the dynasty on his predecessors. He ignored the saintly reputation of Henry VI. Richard III had translated his body from Chertsey to Windsor in a bid to boost his own popularity, and Henry VII had steadfastly promoted his namesake’s canonization, though neither he nor his son brought Henry VI’s body to Westminster, as they might have done.22 The accounts of Henry VIII’s pilgrimages are sketchy at best. Instead, his movements were defined by his progresses and they were dominated by the hunt. Part military exercise, part pleasure excursions, Henry’s late summer 18 For Henry’s disavowal in 1505 that he would marry Katherine, see Scarisbrick, Henry VIII, pp. 9–10. 19 Grace Book B Part I, p. 250. 20 Edward Hall, The Vnion of the two noble and illustre families of Lancastre & Yorke (London, 1550), Henry VIII section, fol. 9r; Judith M. Richards, Mary Tudor (New York, 2008), p. 31. See also Hasting Robinson’s footnote 4, pp. 609–10 in vol. 1 of Original Letters Relative to the English Reformation (Cambridge, 1847).; and Anglo, Spectacle Pageantry, p. 118. For dancing at court, see also Eric Ives, The Life and Death of Anne Boleyn: ‘The Most Happy’ (Oxford, 2005), pp. 20, 29–30, 37–9, 160. 21 See Arthur L. Schwarz, Vivat Rex!: An Exhibition Commemorating the 500th Anniversary of the Accession of Henry VIII (New York, 2009), pp. 72–3. 22 Anglo, Spectacle Pageantry, pp. 37–46, 201; S.B. Chrimes, Henry VII (Berkeley, 1972), pp. 240–44; Duffy, Altars, pp. 161, 164–5, 169, 180, 183, 187–8, 195–6, 198, 200, 327; McCoy, Sacred kingship, pp. 24–54.

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progresses coincided with the best weeks of the year for hunting deer and other game, from August to October. He had a fine residence near Oxford in one of the royal forests at Woodstock, which was large enough to house his entire court. From 1511, he went on progress there no fewer than ten times during his reign, well into the 1540s, and he often rode out from Woodstock to his hunting lodges at Langley and Ewelme.23 Edward Hall, in his Vnion of the two noble and illustre families of Lancastre and Yorke, wrote that in 1520, following the exertions of entertaining the Emperor Charles V in Kent, and meeting King Francis I in France at the Field of Cloth of Gold, Henry spent the rest of the summer hunting at Windsor and pursuing other sports ‘honourably’.24 Cambridge, lying in undrained ‘fenny country’ rather than among forests, meant that it was not as well suited for the sport of coursing to the hounds that was enjoyed by aristocratic men and women alike.25 For good hunting, they had to go further eastward, past Bury St Edmunds and Stowmarket to Framlingham, where Thomas Howard, third duke of Norfolk kept a wellmaintained deer park below the castle.26 Henry’s sister Mary, queen dowager of France, who resided nearby in Suffolk, took particular pleasure in hunting. In 1516 she killed a buck, and when ‘the Quene cam again’ she killed four more.27 When Wolsey made a pilgrimage to Walsingham in 1517, a buck was killed at Framlingham in anticipation of his visit. When the cardinal ‘cam trow the parke’ he killed a buck and a doe himself.28 Archbishop Thomas Cranmer ‘when tyme served for recreation after studie he wolde both hawke and hunte’, and the game was ‘preparid for hym beforehand’, as it was for the king. Many times, as an early biographer related, Cranmer killed ‘his

23 Ives, The Life and Death of Anne Boleyn, p. 291; Samman, ‘Progresses’, pp. 64–5. I am also deeply indebted to here to Thurley, Royal Palaces, who mentions that Henry went on progress to Woodstock in 1511, 1518, 1520, 1523, 1529, 1531, 1532, 1534, 1539 and 1543. The Royal Palaces of Tudor England, pp. 67–9, 267, n. 109. 24 Hall, The Vnion of the two noble and illustre families, Henry VIII section, fol. 85r. For ‘giests’, see Thurley, Royal Palaces, pp. 67–8. Also, Samman, ‘Progresses’, pp. 62–3; Scarisbrick, Henry VIII, pp. 76–88. 25 For a later period, see The Illustrated Journeys of Celia Fiennes 1685–c. 1712, ed. Christopher Morris (London, 1982), pp. 82, 169. 26 In this same deer park, local gentlemen and justices assembled in July 1553 to honour Mary Tudor and to lend their support in securing her succession to the throne. The park and castle had entered her possession in early 1553 after the third duke of Norfolk was disgraced. ‘The Vita Maria Angliae Reginae of Robert Wingfield of Brantham’, ed. and trans. Diarmaid MacCulloch, Camden Miscellany XXVIII, 4th series, 29 (London, 1984), pp. 208, 209, 256–7; Judith M. Richards, Mary Tudor (New York, 2008), pp. 85–6, 115–17. 27 See the Framlingham Park Game Roll, kept by the duke’s parker, Richard Chambyr, for 1515–19, printed in John Cummings, The Hound and the hawk: the Art of medieval hunting (London, 1988), Appendix 2, pp. 260–65. 28 Wolsey’s pilgrimage to Walsingham in 1517: Gwyn, King’s Cardinal, pp. 345–6; the Framlingham Park Game Roll in The Art of medieval hunting, p. 264.

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dere with the crosebow’,29 a weapon that parliament restricted to those with an income of over £100 in the desire to ensure that Englishmen were well exercised in the use of the longbow for the defence of the realm.30 But also hunting was also inseparable from the rituals of gift-giving and hospitality as they were practised then.31 At Framlingham, a dozen bucks were killed for Wolsey, probably to feed his extensive household, and others were bestowed on the duke of Norfolk’s dependents at Christmastime.32 In the summer after he became archbishop, Cranmer sent a buck to the master of Jesus at Cambridge, where he had been a fellow, to feed the entire college.33 As a present, venison rated high in terms of status. It reflected the eminence of the donor, who had the lands, the servants, the horses, the hounds and the good shooting that were all required to produce the kill. And it flattered those who received it. Among his papers, Matthew Parker saved Henry’s warrant that permitted him to receive a doe from the forest of Weybridge, which was a gift to him in 1535 as the ‘trustie and welbeloued’ chaplain of Queen Anne Boleyn.34 Under certain circumstances, venison might be indispensable for large gatherings and celebrations, at least among great men and women who were successful in the hunt.35 It was also an expensive food to prepare, and baking their buck would cost Jesus College a noble (or 6s 8d), a sum that 29 From Ralph Morice’s account of the ‘lyf’ of Cranmer, Parker Library, Corpus Christi College, Cambridge, MS 128, p. 406 and printed in Narratives of the Days of the Reformation, ed. John Gough Nichols, CS, original series, 77 (1859), pp. 239–40. Cf. Latimer’s comment that princes should not sacrifice study for the sake of hunting and hawking, but they should use sports only when they were ‘weary of waighty affayres: Fruitfull Sermons (London, 1584), especially fols [37r]–[37v]; reprinted in Sermons of Hugh Latimer, ed. George Elwes Corrie, Parker Society (Cambridge, 1844), pp. 120–21. See also the work attributed to Dame Juliana Berners, prioress of Sopwell, a perennial favourite that was reprinted many times in the sixteenth century: The boke of hawkynge huntynge and fysshynge with all the propertyes and medecynes that are necessarye to be kepte (London, [1547?]). It included suggestions for the kinds of birds appropriate for emperors, kings, priests, and ladies (fol. E4v). 30 For the laws passed late in Henry VII’s reign and early in his son’s against the crossbow, see 19 Hen. VII c.4; 3 Hen. VIII c. 3; 3 Hen. VIII c. 13; 6 Hen. VIII c. 2; 6 Hen. VIII c. 13, 14/15 Hen. VIII c. 7, printed in Statutes of the Realm (12 vols, London, 1810–28), III. See also Alec Ryrie, The Sorcerer’s Tale: Faith and Fraud in Tudor England (Oxford, 2008), p. 83. The contemporary reference book par excellence on the ‘love of the bow’ was Roger Ascham’s Toxophilvs: The schole of shotinge (London, 1545). 31 Felicity Heal, Hospitality in early modern England (Oxford, 1990), pp. 312–13, 323, 328. 32 The Framlingham Park Game Roll in The Art of medieval hunting, Appendix 2, pp. 264–5. 33 BL Harley MS 6148, fol. 24v; printed in Miscellaneous Writings and Letters of Thomas Cranmer, ed. John Edmund Cox, Parker Society (Cambridge, 1846), p. 247; Diarmaid MacCulloch, Thomas Cranmer: A life (New Haven, 1996), p. 99. 34 Parker Library, CCCC MS 114A, p. 8. 35 In 1552, Katherine, Duchess of Suffolk, regretted that she did not have a buck that she could send for the churching of Latimer’s niece. TNA, SP 10/14/47, fols 103r–104r; Susan Wabuda, ‘Shunamites and Nurses of the English Reformation: the Activities of Mary Glover, Niece of Hugh Latimer’, in Women in the Church, 27, Studies in Church History, ed. W.J. Sheils and Diana Wood (Oxford, 1990), pp. 335–44, at n. 20.

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Cranmer could not immediately afford to send with his present.36 Thinking of Christmas, and mindful of the necessity to seize joy despite life’s persistent sorrows, Hugh Latimer was reminded of the expression: ‘a doe is as good in winter, as a buck in summer’.37 When Hall described how Henry spent his time ‘honourably’ in the hunt, he meant with lavish magnificence on a grand scale, worthy of a king who could impress his brother monarchs and their courts whenever they entertained each other.38 Not all observers approved. Latimer in his sermons began to broach the idea that Henry’s courtiers, if not the king himself, flirted with gross excess. This was a theme that was safer to pursue in the next reign. ‘Many horses are requisite for a king’, Latimer preached, but constant movement by the court could pose a dangerous drain on the resources of the realm. Kings should not spend all their time in hawking and hunting. The king and other great nobles should not have more than necessary to defend the realm and to conduct its business. Citing Deuteronomy, Latimer warned that it cost too much to maintain superfluous dogs and horses when there were so many poor people who went unfed. ‘In a king God requireth faith, not excess of horses.’ Horses were not to be preferred over the poor. To impoverish the people through excess was an assault against the real honour of the king. But Latimer’s persistence in inveighing against royal horses and hunts brought him more failure in his career than success.39 Henry’s progresses brought him to the streets of Oxford with greater frequency than he or his father ever rode to Cambridge, but it was at the younger university that England’s kings were saluted with a spectacular ritual. Some of the details we know from a description preserved by Elias Ashmole in his seventeenth-century history of the Order of the Garter.40 Many otherwise undocumented allusions to royal visits were also noted by the proctors in Cambridge’s Grace Book B, the intimate record of the university’s expenses. Welcoming the king called for a procession featuring the ‘vnyuersyte Crosse’: a silver and gilt masterpiece that symbolized Cambridge’s identity. On certain holy days or moments of the academic year, processions were part of the regular life of the university, but a royal visit was always an extraordinary

36 BL Harley MS 6148, fol. 24v; printed in Miscellaneous Writings and Letters of Thomas Cranmer, p. 247; MacCulloch, Cranmer, p. 99. 37 Sermons and Remains of Hugh Latimer, ed. George Elwes Corrie, Parker Society (Cambridge, 1845), p. 334. 38 Hall, The Vnion of the two noble and illustre families, Henry VIII section, fol. 85r. 39 Latimer’s 1536 Paul’s Cross sermon was reported by Thomas Dorset, curate of St Margaret Lothbury: BL Cotton MS Cleopatra E. IV, fols 131r–132v (L & P, X, 462). See also Latimer’s court sermons during the reign of Edward VI: Deuteronomy 17: 16–20; Fruitfull Sermons, especially sigs E4v–E5r; reprinted in Sermons of Hugh Latimer, pp. 85–128; Susan Wabuda, Preaching during the English Reformation (Cambridge, 2002), pp. 133–4, 137. 40 Ashmole, Most Noble Order of the Garter, p. 558.

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event. Every time the university brought out its processional cross, the bearer was paid 4d.41 The members of the university met Richard III when he passed through Cambridge on progress soon after his usurpation. They had good reasons to be grateful to him, for Richard was a generous patron to the university church. The members of the university were relieved that he spared the life of its chancellor Archbishop Thomas Rotherham of York as he seized the throne in 1483.42 When Henry VII came to Cambridge in 1506, he hosted on St George’s Day the elaborate ceremonials of the Grand Feast of the Order of the Garter. The still-incomplete King’s College Chapel, which Fisher pleaded Henry to finish, was specially ‘furnished’ with the escutcheons of the knightscompanions of the order.43 The university’s cross was brought out to lead a procession, and the king offered a drink to senior scholars.44 That Henry VII was eager to present himself forever as a soldier-king may have been an apt reminder to disappointed members of the university that he had vanquished the interloper who had so disturbed the tranquility of the realm.45 Whenever a king approached Cambridge, he was met while he and his retinue were still two or three miles out of the city. The sheriff of Cambridgeshire, with his rod of office, and the mayor and aldermen, rode out as an advance party to receive him. When they were within a quarter mile of the university, outside Cambridge’s gates, in what was then fields (near the present-day Botanical Gardens, or the church of Our Lady and the English Martyrs, or past Jesus College), the king was met by a long welcoming 41 Cambridge University Library, University Archives, Grace Book B, p. 441, printed in Grace Book B Part II, p. 109. Further details concerning the university’s processional cross will be found in my forthcoming book, Hugh Latimer and the Reformation in England: Man and Myth. Grace Book B Part I, pp. 219–20; Malcolm Underdown, ‘John Fisher and the promotion of learning’, in Humanism, Reform and the Reformation, pp. 25–46, at 29. 42 Grace Book A: Containing the Proctors’ Accounts and Other Records of the University of Cambridge for the Years 1454–1488, ed. Stanley Mordaunt Leathes, Cambridge Antiquarian Society (Cambridge 1897), pp. 171–2, 186; John Lamb, ed., A Collection of Letters, Statutes, and Other Documents from the MS. Library of Corpus Christi College, Illustrative of the History of the University of Cambridge (London, 1838), pp. 7–8; Christopher Brooke, ‘Urban Church and university church: Great St Mary’s from its origin to 1523’, in Great St Mary’s: Cambridge’s University Church, ed. John Binns and Peter Meadows (Cambridge, 2000), pp. 7–24. 43 Ashmole, Order of the Garter, pp. 487–8; Porter, ‘Fisher and Erasmus’, p. 81. Limitations of space here prevent any discussion of the well-known intellectual gifts that Henry VII and his mother bestowed on the university. Many of the details are discussed in Maria Dowling, Fisher of Men: a Life of John Fisher, 1469–1535 (London, 1999), pp. 7–29; Michael K. Jones and Malcolm G. Underwood, The King’s Mother: Lady Margaret Beaufort Countess of Richmond and Derby (Cambridge, 1992), pp. 202–31; Leader, Cambridge, pp. 264–319. 44 Grace Book B Part I, p. 213: ‘pro portacione crucis in generali processione ante potacionem regis’. 45 Fiona Kisby, ‘“When the King Goeth a Procession”: Chapel Ceremonies and Services, the Ritual Year, and Religious Reforms at the Early Tudor Court, 1485–1547’, Journal of British Studies, 40 (2001), pp. 44–75.

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procession of members of the university, who were arranged in a formation, as Ashmole explained, that recognized social rank and level of academic attainment, with the most lowly standing towards the front, rising in age and degrees to the most important personages in the rear. First were the friars from Cambridge’s four mendicant houses, and after them were the ‘odir Religious’, the monks and canons of the regular orders. Without alighting from his horse, the king passed down the line of men. In 1506, Henry VII was now nearly fifty, and no longer in the best of health, but in a great feat of horsemanship, he kissed the processional cross of each order as he passed. After the regular orders came the graduates, ‘in all their Habitts’, whom the king passed until ‘at the end of them’ there was a ‘Forme and a Cushin’ for him to use to dismount. Here the king was greeted by clouds of incense, and he was blessed with the university’s cross. Then came Cambridge’s most eminent worthies: its new chancellor, Bishop John Fisher, with ‘odir Doctors’: including, in April 1506, Europe’s greatest scholar, Desiderius Erasmus.46 Most of the references to royal visits in Grace Book B are terse. A similar type of reception may have been given to Katherine or the French queen when they arrived in Cambridge on their way to Walsingham, though many of the precious details we would like to learn are lacking. Elegant presents that were given to increase the Lady Margaret’s comfort during her stay at Christ’s College appear in the university’s accounts.47 We know that Cambridge blessed Katherine in absentia with its great cross when the news arrived of the birth of the Princess Mary in February 1516.48 The finest details of a royal visit that were ever recorded in Grace Book B were made for an appearance by Henry VIII, though the dating of the event leaves something to be desired. The academic year began at Michaelmas, when the two proctors, newly elected, began the duties of their offices. Their 46 Ashmole, Order of the Garter, p, 558; Porter, ‘Fisher and Erasmus’, p. 81; H.P. Stokes, The Chaplains and the chapel of the University of Cambridge, 1256–1568, Cambridge Antiquarian Society, Octavo Series, 45 (Cambridge, 1911), p. 79. See also Henry Bullock’s oration of welcome to Cardinal Wolsey: Henry Bullock, Oratio ad Thomā cardinalem archiepiscopum Eboracensem (Cambridge, February 1521). Grace Book B Part I, pp. 219–200; Malcolm Underdown, ‘John Fisher and the promotion of learning’, in Humanism, Reform and the Reformation, pp. 25–46, at p. 29. 47 The university supplied both Margaret and her son with rose water in 1507: Grace Book B Part I, p. 220. Also, Grace Book B Part II, ed. Mary Bateson (Cambridge, 1905), p. 53 (for Mary, the French queen in 1517), 76 (for Katherine’s pilgrimage to Walsingham in 1519); Leader, Cambridge, p. 214. 48 ‘Item baiulatori crucis in processione facta pro regina.’ For this birth, red wine and sweet muscatel were provided, but the university spent only 26s 8d for the delivery of the announcement letters. Grace Book B Part II, p. 46. The cost of carrying the cross in procession each time was 4d. The cross was also brought when Elizabeth born in September 1533 when a Mass was celebrated for a total expense to the university of a derisory 8d. Grace Book B Part II, p. 176. When Prince Edward was born in September 1537, the bearer of the letters was rewarded with 6s 6d, but the cross was not brought out. Grace Book B Part II, p. 210.

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accounts, labelled for 1523, ran the entire year’s business together: ‘Item to the clarke off the scollys for beryng off the vnyuersyte Crosse twys att the kynges beyng heyr and in aduent and att the grett cessacyon xvjd.’49 If the king’s ‘being heyr’ occurred before Advent (which started at St Andrew’s Day on 30 November), then Henry came to Cambridge in the autumn of 1522. Henry’s movements were usually planned for the court long in advance in special sets of travel preparations called ‘giests’.50 In June 1522, Henry again entertained the Emperor Charles for a month in London with ostentatious spectacles, pageants, tournaments, receptions, dinners and hunts.51 Following the emperor’s departure, Henry once more withdrew to the countryside. In September, the king was at New Hall in Essex.52 The nearest house that Henry had to Cambridge was a lodge at Hitchin, but he had others at Hunsdon, Hertford, Hatfield and St Albans.53 Windswept and damp though Cambridge may have been, the proliferation of game birds in the vicinity redeemed it for the sport of hawking. Edward Hall recorded that on 15 October in the fourteenth year of Henry’s reign, in 1522, while the king was at Hitchin to see ‘his Haukes flye’, his lodge caught on fire. The king was ‘in greate feare’, though in fact he was ‘in no ieopardie’.54 We cannot be certain that it was after this accident that the king arrived in Cambridge, though the evidence is suggestive. The records of royal grants indicate that Henry and his entourage were at Hitchin at the beginning of December, when they were moving southwards rapidly towards London, where the king met with the mayor and aldermen. The court kept Christmas at Eltham that year.55 Despite careful preparations due to dangers or unexpected events, Henry’s travel plans could be overthrown. Neil Samman notes that local gentlemen met the king on his way to Walsingham in October 1522.56 Perhaps he set out for Walsingham and Cambridge from New Hall, rather than Hitchin. What is certain is that Henry approached Cambridge from the east, and with such suddenness that its senior members were caught by surprise. A rumour alerted the university to the king’s intention to appear. The senior proctor, Nicholas 49 Cambridge University Library, University Archives, Grace Book B, p. 441, printed in Grace Book B Part II, p. 109. 50 For ‘giests’, see Hall, The Vnion of the two noble and illustre families, fol. 85r; Samman, ‘Progresses’, pp. 62–3; Thurley, Royal Palaces, pp. 67–8. 51 Anglo, Spectacle Pageantry, pp. 170–206. 52 See Sir Thomas More’s letters of 14 and 21 September 1522 in The Correspondence of Sir Thomas More, ed., Elizabeth Frances Rogers (Princeton, 1947), pp. 258–65. 53 Thurley, Royal Palaces, pp. 69, 74. 54 Hall, The Vnion of the two noble and illustre families, fol. 105r. 55 L & P, III ii, grants: no. 2749 (12) at Hitchin for 2 December, 14 Hen. VIII (i.e. 1522), and at Bishop’s Hatfield for 3 December, no. 2749 (14); Hall, The Vnion of the two noble and illustre families, fol. 105r. 56 Samman, ‘Progresses’, pp. 71–2.

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Rowley, sent his servant John to ride out ‘to brandon ferry for certificate of trewthe of the kynges commynge’, for Henry was making his way across the low-lying fens to cross the Little Ouse. Brandon Ferry was farther away to the north and east, past Newmarket.57 Moreover, the members of the university seem to have had an insufficient idea of what was now expected of them in welcoming and entertaining the king. Once John returned with confirmation that the king would indeed arrive, Rowley sent a senior theologian to Bishop Nicholas West at Ely to ask ‘his aduyce and counsell aboute receuynge of the kynge’. He also dispatched Peter Cheke, the esquire bedell of the Faculty of Theology, to Newmarket ‘to knowe the owre of the kynges commynge and the maner of his receuynge’.58 So frequently had the king’s father passed through Cambridge that Queens’ College, where he lodged, was decorated with coats of arms as ‘as ys yerely accustomed’.59 But Henry VIII may not have returned in all the years since he was prince of Wales, unless he swung through Cambridge in 1511 on his pilgrimage to Walsingham. The reference then in Grace Book B to the payment for the processional cross may refer merely to the university’s celebration at the birth of the prince, rather than the king’s actual presence among them. Perhaps no one at Cambridge now in 1522 really knew how to conduct some of the details of a royal visit. The university had marked two previous great moments in late 1520 and in early summer 1521. Wolsey had come to Cambridge in autumn 1520, straight from the glamour and the intense negotiations of the Field of Cloth of Gold, to refresh himself yet again by a pilgrimage to Walsingham. The university made extensive building preparations ‘in aduentu cardinalis’. They bought wine, beef, fish and other food. They purchased a penny’s worth of frankincense for Mass, and an altar had to be carried out as part of the reception.60 Wolsey lodged at Queens’ and he was greeted with an elegant oration by Erasmus’s friend, the mathematics professor Henry Bullock, who praised the memory of Henry VII for his generosity towards the university, just as he saluted Wolsey for building Cardinal College at Oxford. This was meant as a gracious tribute to the fact that the cardinal was beginning to draw a number of Cambridge men to his new foundation, and Bullock probably hoped that Wolsey would remember to reward Cambridge in its turn. His address has the distinction of being one of the first books that that was ever

57 Cambridge University Library, University Archives, Grace Book B, pp. 438–40, printed in Grace Book B Part II, pp. 107–9. 58 Cambridge University Library, University Archives, Grace Book B, pp. 438–40, printed in Grace Book B Part II, pp. 107–9. 59 Ashmole, Order of the Garter, 558. The payments for carrying the cross during the king’s visits in 1506 and 1507 are recorded in Grace Book B Part I, pp. 213, 219. 60 Grace Book B Part II, pp. 82–3.

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printed in Cambridge. Cranmer owned a copy.61 The other great event that preceded the king’s arrival occurred early in 1521, when Fisher presided over the burning of Martin Luther’s books.62 While the proctors bore the brunt of the responsibility for making arrangements to receive the king in 1522, some of the details had to be handled by Latimer, who was the university’s chaplain. He was responsible for the keeping of Cambridge’s processional cross. Latimer probably brightened the university chapel in the Schools with silken ‘Curtens’ of ‘orynge colour’ and a ‘grene’ cloth ‘for the aulter’. In addition, a new key had to be made for the part of the Schools where the king’s wardrobe was to be kept, and four loads of fresh sand were spread to make its court clean.63 Following the advice that they had received, the members of the university, in procession, went out ‘in to the feldes’ to greet the king, and a ‘standynge aulter’ was carried out in advance, with all of the necessary copes, candlesticks, and censers ‘for a redynes of the kynges receuynge’.64 In late 1522, Henry VIII was 31 years old. He was of a towering build, bearded, and strong. He was still, as an observer noted slightly later, ‘in the vigour of his age: indeed you never saw a taller or more noble looking personage’.65 Two years earlier, he had jousted and wrestled with King Francis at the Field of Cloth of Gold. In 1521, Pope Leo X had accorded him the title of Defender of the Faith for his denunciation of Luther in the Assertio Septem Sacramentorum. Now in 1522, Henry travelled with a select company of courtiers whose names were listed in the Grace Book: Sir Thomas More, then Henry’s secretary; ‘the kynges chaplens’, including Dr Edward Lee, the future archbishop of York; Thomas Grey, marquis of Dorset; and one of the king’s closest friends, William Compton, soon to be knighted. They arrived with their retinue of servants.66 61 Henry Bullock’s oration was printed first with his translation of Lucian, and then reprinted on its own as Oratio … Ad reuerendiss. D. Thomā Cardinalem (Cambridge, February 1521/2), sig. B1r. Leader, Cambridge, pp. 292–3; Otto Treptow, John Siberch: Johann Lair von Siegburg, trans. Trevor Jones, ed. John Morris and Trevor Jones (Cambridge, 1970), p. 23. For Cranmer’s copy of Bullock’s Oratio, see D.G. Selwyn, The Library of Thomas Cranmer, Oxford Bibliographical Society, occasional series (1996), no. 319 (BL, shelfmark C. 38.d.3213). Wolsey’s 1520 pilgrimage: Scarisbrick, Henry VIII, p. 79. 62 Cambridge University Library, University Archives, Grace Book B, p. 416, printed in Grace Book B Part II, pp. 92–3. Fisher: Christopher L. Brooke, ‘The University Chancellor’, in Humanism, Reform and the Reformation, pp. 47–66, 242. 63 Cambridge University Library, University Archives, Grace Book B, p. 438, printed in Grace Book B Part II, p. 108. 64 Cambridge University Library, University Archives, Grace Book B, p. 438, printed in Grace Book B Part II, p. 108. 65 Simon Grynaeus to Heinrich Bullinger, Original Letters Relative to the English Reformation, ed. Hastings Robinson, Parker Society (1847), II, no. 256. 66 Cambridge University Library, University Archives, Grace Book B, p. 438, printed in Grace Book B Part II, 108. For Compton, David Starkey, The Reign of Henry VIII: Personalities and Politics (London, 1985), pp. 47–8.

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The speed with which the university’s reception was put together may explain the curious character of Cambridge’s gift to the royal visitor. While the members of the king’s party were refreshed with four gallons of sweet hippocras wine and four boxes of fine ‘wafers’ or biscuits, the university had had no time to prepare an elegant address of the kind that Bullock offered to Wolsey two years previously. Now the vice chancellor and the proctors turned to their waters for the university’s presents, as they had at other times. When the French queen came to Cambridge on her way Walsingham in early 1517, she was offered wine and fish.67 Katherine made a pilgrimage to Walsingham in 1519, when the manciples of King’s Hall and St John’s obtained fish ‘in aduentu regine’.68 The members of the university gave large fishes to the duke of Norfolk.69 So they gave Henry VIII not orations, but fish: a dozen pike and another dozen eels, with eight ‘grete’ tench and also bream. A Davy Coke was paid 6s 8d for the costs he incurred over three days ‘for purvyans off the kynges present’. In terms of hospitality, though large and generous, Cambridge’s gift was not on the same scale as the duke of Norfolk’s lavish offering of venison to Wolsey. The gift of fish placed the Cambridge University members in a position of humility, representing them as devout churchmen who were careful with the university’s finite resources. Latimer’s mature court sermons were a reflection of this same ethos. Their gift was as much a testament to their piety as well as their need for continued royal favour. Perhaps they thought that on this occasion their present was simple to the point of inadequacy, for they also added some swans to their present, and for good measure, a few cranes (both ‘wylde’ and tame: the tame birds cost more). The cost of delivering so much fish to the provost of King’s College, where the king lodged, was as much as 20d. After the royal party took their leave, fresh repairs were needed to the ‘desks and formes’ in the schools, and the bars that had safeguarded the king’s possessions there had to be removed. For his sustaining advice, Bishop West was thanked with the gift of a ‘greyt pyke’.70 Who came to meet the king in 1522? If they assembled to greet Henry VIII as they had done for his predecessors, among those who represented their respective religious orders, colleges and hostels were Thomas Cranmer, Richard Croke, Edward Crome, John Bale, Robert Barnes, Thomas Bilney, Henry Bullock, Stephen Gardiner, Nicholas Heath, Nicholas Shaxton and John Watson. They were then all fellows or regular clergy at Cambridge. Some of them, such as Bullock or Watson, were already widely recognized for their 67 Grace Book B Part II, p. 53. 68 Grace Book B Part II, p. 76. 69 Grace Book B Part II, pp. 204, 239. 70 Grace Book B Part II, p. 108. While doubtless a splendid fish, the duke of Norfolk was able to offer the bishop two does for his table. Cummings, Art of medieval hunting, Appendix 2, p. 262.

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friendships with Erasmus. Croke followed on from Erasmus in the teaching of Greek. Many were future bishops. All of them would have stood ahead of the vice chancellor Dr John Edmundes, who would have presided, as Bishop Fisher was either in London or Rochester.71 Complemented by More and Lee, on this occasion in 1522, nearly every male figure who would later play an important role during the deepening divides of the English Reformation, including the two future archbishops, were likely to have been together, at this single place and at this time, to receive the king. Cambridge’s scholars were the same men upon whom Henry would have to depend only a few years later to end his marriage to Katherine, and to secure his supremacy over the Christian Church in England. We do not know how many visits Henry ever made to Walsingham after 1511, but we cannot doubt that his feelings about the shrine were initially strong and genuine. But Hall’s account of his pilgrimage in 1511 is remarkable for what it did not mention. It contains no explanation of why Henry should wish to go to Walsingham to mark the birth of his first son, nor did it convey any word about the shrine or the Virgin or pilgrimage.72 His work was first printed during the reign of Edward VI, and by then the doctrinal changes brought about at Henry’s instance had already overshadowed our evidence. Early in his reign, Henry stopped at religious houses while he was on progress.73 At least until autumn 1538, he believed that the celebrated relic of the Blood at the Cistercian Abbey of Hailes in Gloucestershire preserved some of the precious drops of blood that Christ actually sweated on the night he was betrayed in the Garden of Gethsemane, and that it promoted the salvation of the pilgrims who came to reverence it. Not until the Blood was removed from its crystal vial and tested in front him could Henry be persuaded that a belief in the Blood’s power to confer salvation was what Latimer termed a ‘great abomination’ because it detracted from the actual sacrifice of Christ.74 In July 1538, the king ordered the statues of Our Lady of Walsingham and Our Lady of Ipswich to be brought to London ‘with all the jewelles that honge about them’ as part of a great rush of iconoclasm that was advanced by his

71 Edmundes: Grace Book B Part II, p. 111; Grace Book Γ: Containing the records of the University of Cambridge for the years 1501–1542, ed., William George Searle (Cambridge, 1908), p. 204. Fisher: see Appendix 2 in Humanism, Reform and the Reformation, p. 243. 72 Hall, The Vnion of the two noble and illustre families, Henry VIII section, fol. 9r. 73 Samman,’Progresses’, pp. 60, 63, 67, 69. 74 For Henry’s opinion concerning the Blood of Hailes, see Hugh Latimer, Fruitfull Sermons, fols 169r–177r (reprinted in Sermons, pp. 231–2); Latimer, Remains, p. 364. Also, Charles Wriothesley, A Chronicle of England during the Reigns of the Tudors, ed. William Douglas Hamilton, CS, new series, 11 (1875), p. 90. For the background on the Abbey and its relic, see Ethan H. Shagan, ‘Selling the Sacred: Reformation and Dissolution at the Abbey of Hailes’, Popular Politics and the English Reformation (Cambridge, 2002), pp. 162–96.

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Lord Privy Seal, Thomas Cromwell.75 Now, in a ferocious break with the past, all of England’s most revered statues became targets of the king’s supremacy over the English Church. Luther told his friends of the fate of a statute of a weeping Christ in the west of England. People flocked to collect the healthgiving water that flowed from its eyes and feet. But in actuality, it was a hollow piece of statuary, filled with water on purpose, and Bishop Latimer smashed it while he was on visitation.76 Latimer wrote to Cromwell that it would be ‘a jolly muster’ if all of the statues of the Virgin that had been the objects of pilgrimage in England and Wales could be publicly burnt, because they were ‘the devil’s instrument to bring many (I fear) to eternal fire’. It would not take a day to burn them all he thought.77 At Cromwell’s orders, the Madonna of Walsingham was burnt in autumn 1538 with others, at Chelsea, near Sir Thomas More’s residence, perhaps as part of the campaign to further denigrate his reputation following his execution three years earlier.78 The rest of the shrine in Norfolk was dismantled.79 In succeeding years, Cambridge and Oxford discovered that they were menaced with closure through some of the same pressures that suppressed England’s religious houses and great pilgrimage places. The universities were fortunate to survive Henry’s supremacy. The early Tudors, Henry VII and his mother, needed to borrow the holiness of the Church to secure their grasp on power. Thus they established the cult of the Holy Name of Jesus; they paid for the printing of books of hours; they perfected Westminster Abbey with their chapel; and they paid their addresses to the Virgin at Walsingham. Their heir discovered that in order to keep his inheritance, he had to discard some of those same instruments. His daring and dangerous gamble has made Henry VIII the most famous of all of England’s kings.

75 Wriothesley, Chronicle, p. 83; Nicholas Partridge to Heinrich Bullinger, 12 April 1538, printed in Original Letters, II, no. 279. 76 Martin Luther, Table Talk, in Luther’s Works, ed. and trans. Theodore G. Tappert, ed. Hemut T. Lehmann, 54 (Philadelphia, 1967), no. 4355. 77 Latimer, Remains, p. 395. 78 Wriothesley, Chronicle, p. 83. 79 Duffy, Altars, p. 378.

10 Performing Henry at the Court of Rome1 Catherine Fletcher

Given the obvious significance, in retrospect, of Henry VIII’s break with Rome in 1533, it can be easy to forget that for the first 24 years of his reign England was a part of Catholic Europe and Henry was one of the Christian princes who contended symbolically for precedence at the papal court. When his ambassadors to Rome acted out their roles on the grand liturgical occasions, as bearers of the papal canopy or of water to wash the Pontiff’s hands, they were playing the part of their prince in the ‘theatre of the world’. Outside the ceremonial context they would cultivate a lifestyle to reflect their master’s princely honour. An examination of Henry’s representation in Rome, therefore, offers a means to rediscover his early persona as Defender of the Faith and to track developments in Tudor diplomatic practice. Despite the wealth of Italian source material, the question of Henry’s diplomacy in Rome (and in Italy more generally) has received surprisingly limited attention from historians, with the exception of D.S. Chambers’s classic study of Cardinal Bainbridge.2 Some recent articles have begun to address that lack,3 but Anglo-French diplomacy, by comparison, has been 1 This article draws on doctoral research undertaken at Royal Holloway, University of London, UK, supervised by Professor Sandra Cavallo and funded by the Arts and Humanities Research Council (AHRC) and a Scouloudi Fellowship at the Institute of Historical Research. It was completed with the help of a Rome Fellowship at the British School at Rome and a Max Weber Fellowship at the European University Institute. 2 D.S. Chambers, Cardinal Bainbridge in the court of Rome, 1509 to 1514 (Oxford, 1965). 3 For example, Jessica Sharkey, ‘Between king and pope: Thomas Wolsey and the Knight mission,’ Historical Research, 84 (2011), 236–48; Susan Brigden, ‘“The shadow that you know”: Sir Francis Bryan and Sir Thomas Wyatt at court and in embassy’, HJ, 39 (1996), 1–31; Susan Brigden and Jonathan Woolfson, ‘Thomas Wyatt in Italy’, Renaissance Quarterly, 58 (2005), 464–511; Cinzia M. Sicca, ‘Consumption and trade of art between Italy and England in the first half of the sixteenth century: The London house of the Bardi and Cavalcanti company’, Renaissance Studies, 16 (2002), 163–201 and ‘Pawns of international finance and

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rather better treated.4 There remains much to do to challenge the perception that English representation in the Rome of the later 1520s was, in Scarisbrick’s description, ‘feeble’.5 Moreover, the view persists that Henry’s diplomatic representation was in general poorly organized. Gary M. Bell has argued that prior to the reign of Elizabeth I English diplomacy was largely the preserve of the ‘talented amateur’.6 However, his analysis has been questioned by Luke MacMahon, who argues that most of the innovations attributed by Bell to Elizabeth can be ‘readily identified’ in her father’s diplomacy, and by Tracey Sowerby, whose analysis of Henrician polemic similarly casts doubt on Bell’s thesis.7 It is all too easy, with hindsight, to construct a narrative implying (whether consciously or not) that the inadequacy of Henry’s representation in Rome contributed to the failure of king’s campaign to ‘divorce’ Catherine of Aragon, and to elide the real difficulties arising from the lack of a curia cardinal with broader questions of Anglo-Papal diplomacy. This chapter will suggest, in contrast, that the trajectory of English representation in Rome was – until the massive dislocation of 1533 – quite different. It was a trajectory towards substantially improved diplomatic structures at the papal court. Drawing on a range of sources from both England and Italy, including ambassadors’ correspondence and unpublished manuscripts from the papal office of ceremonies, this chapter surveys first the background to English representation at the curia, putting changing English diplomatic strategies in context and assessing the shift towards long-term lay diplomacy in the mid1520s. It then turns to discuss what ‘performing Henry’ entailed in practice for the king’s ambassadors in Rome, focusing on two symbolic aspects of diplomatic representation: the liturgical ceremonies of the curia, and princely gift-exchange. That is not, of course, to diminish the importance of the diplomat’s bread-and-butter work of negotiating and gathering information, politics: Florentine sculptors at the court of Henry VIII’, Renaissance Studies, 20 (2006), pp. 1–34. 4 Charles Giry-Deloison, ‘La naissance de la diplomatie moderne en France et en Angleterre au début du XVIe siècle’, Nouvelle revue du seizième siècle, 5 (1987), 41–58 and ‘Le personnel diplomatique au début du XVIe siècle. L’exemple des relations franco-anglaises de l’avènement de Henry VII au Camp du Drap d’Or (1485–1520)’, Journal des Savants (July– December 1987), 205–53. Glenn J. Richardson, ‘Anglo-French political and cultural relations during the reign of Henry VIII’, (doctoral thesis, University of London, 1995). D.L. Potter, ‘Diplomacy in the mid-sixteenth century: England and France, 1536–1550’ (doctoral thesis, University of Cambridge, 1973). 5 J.J. Scarisbrick, Henry VIII (London, 1968), p. 206. 6 In his ‘Elizabethan diplomacy: The subtle revolution,’ in Malcolm R. Thorp and Arthur J. Slavin (eds), Politics, religion and diplomacy in early modern Europe: Essays in honor of De Lamar Jensen (Kirksville, 1994), pp. 267–88, at p. 272. 7 Luke MacMahon, ‘The ambassadors of Henry VIII: The personnel of English diplomacy, c.1500–c.1550’ (doctoral thesis, University of Kent, 1999), p. 280. Tracey A. Sowerby, ‘“All our books do be sent into other countreys and translated”: Henrician polemic in its international context’, EHR, 121 (2006), pp. 1271–99, at pp. 1298–99.

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nor the many other ways in which he might portray the magnificence of his prince (though his dress or his entertaining, for example).8 Those, however, fall outside the scope of this chapter. Diplomatic representation at the papal court had been established, over a long period, as a consequence of European rulers’ need for a mechanism to facilitate the transaction of church business through the complex structures of the curia. New impetus was given to the process in the fifteenth century by two factors: the end of the Great Schism and the system of diplomatic relations that had grown up in Italy after the Peace of Lodi (1454).9 The popes initially resisted the presence of resident diplomats, and rules were imposed first by Martin V (1417–31) and subsequently by Pius II (1458–64) that effectively limited the tenure of any ambassador at the papal court to six months.10 By the end of the century, however, the restrictions had withered away and in 1490 Innocent VIII, despite threatening to do so, was in practice unable to enforce the sixmonth rule.11 As early as 1478, England under Edward IV had an accredited resident diplomat at the curia, John Shirwood.12 In 1484, the year in which he became bishop of Durham, Shirwood attended the conclave that elected Pope Innocent VIII; in February 1485 he, along with Thomas Langton, bishop of St David’s, and John Kendal, procurator-general of the Knights of St John of Jerusalem, attended a public consistory to pledge obedience to the new pope.13 At the latter event the English and French clashed when the English described Richard III as ‘king of England and France’, and the French ambassador predictably objected. Such jousting for status was a fundamental aspect of the ambassador’s role. Indeed, in his handbook on curia diplomacy, written in the early years of the sixteenth century, the papal master-of-ceremonies Paride

8 On diplomatic hospitality see my ‘“Furnished with gentlemen”: The ambassador’s house in sixteenth-century Italy,’ Renaissance Studies, 24 (2010), 518–35. On ambassadors’ dress: Maria Hayward, Dress at the court of King Henry VIII (Leeds, 2007), pp. 228–30. 9 On the papal court see Court and politics in papal Rome, 1492–1700 eds Gianvittorio Signorotto and Maria Antonietta Visceglia (Cambridge, 2002), and Henry Dietrich Fernández, ‘The patrimony of St Peter: The papal court at Rome c.1450–1700’, in The princely courts of Europe: Ritual, politics and culture under the Ancien Régime 1500–1750 ed. John Adamson (London, 1999), pp. 141–63. 10 Betty Behrens, ‘Origins of the office of English resident ambassador in Rome’, English Historical Review, 49 (1934), pp. 640–56, at p. 650. Peter Barber says that it was under Pius II that ‘the earliest known rules for diplomats as a body of men, a “corps diplomatique”, were drawn up’ in his Diplomacy: The world of the honest spy (London, 1979), p. 19. 11 Behrens, ‘Origins’, p. 651. 12 Ibid., p. 645. 13 Fasti Ecclesiae Anglicanae 1300–1541 (12 vols, London, 1962–67), VI, pp. 107–09; XI, pp. 53–56, www.british-history.ac.uk. Johann Burckard, Liber notarum, ed. Enrico Celani (2 vols, Città di Castello, 1906), I, pp. 21 fn, 110.

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Grassi advised new ambassadors to be prepared for such challenges, citing Anglo-French disputes as his example.14 An important side-effect of Rome’s status as international centre of church business was that it became, in Garrett Mattingly’s term, the continent’s ‘chief gossip shop’.15 In the decade 1490–1500 there were over 243 diplomats accredited to Rome, but just 161 to the Holy Roman Emperor and 135 to France, an indication of the papal court’s relative importance.16 The new Tudor regime duly despatched diplomats, too. An embassy of ten led by Thomas Millyng, bishop of Hereford, went in May 1487 to pledge obedience to Pope Innocent VIII on behalf of the new King Henry VII.17 From 1490, Giovanni Gigli, member of a Lucchese merchant family, acted as resident orator for the English in Rome and held the bishopric of Worcester as compensation for his services.18 He hosted visiting envoys and in 1492 pledged Henry’s obedience to the newly elected Pope Alexander VI (Rodrigo Borgia) alongside John Shirwood.19 Gigli died in 1498 and his duties and benefice were taken over by his cousin Silvestro who, among other responsibilities, was to be found attending the baptism of Lucrezia Borgia’s son and welcoming the likes of Cesare Borgia and Cardinal d’Este into town.20 In December 1502, Silvestro Gigli celebrated a mass for the feast of St Thomas of Canterbury in the chapel of the English Hospice.21 Being seen to honour such national saints was part of the resident’s role in Rome, and underlined in symbolic fashion the Christian devotion of the prince he represented. In May 1504 an English embassy of three – Sir Gilbert Talbot, a relative of the earl of Shrewsbury, Robert Shirborn, dean of St Paul’s, and Richard Bere, abbot of Glastonbury – went to Rome to pledge allegiance to the new Pope Julius II.22 The appointment of Talbot, a layman, to this embassy is notable, marking as it does a departure from the employment of clerics as principal ambassadors, a trend discussed further below. 14 Paride Grassi, De oratoribus romanae curiae, Biblioteca Apostolica Vaticana, MS Vat. Lat. 12270, fol. 47r. For a discussion of this important but unpublished manuscript: Marc Dykmans, ‘Paris de Grassi II’, Ephemerides liturgicae 99 (1985), pp. 383–417 (pp. 400–403). 15 Garrett Mattingly, Renaissance diplomacy (Harmondsworth, 1973), p. 151. 16 Paolo Prodi, The papal prince. One body and two souls: the papal monarchy in early modern Europe, trans. Susan Haskins (Cambridge, 1987), p. 165n, citing W. Höflechner, ‘Anmerkungen zu Diplomatie und Gesandtschaftswesen am Ende des 15. Jahrhunderts’, in Mitteilungen des Österreichischen Staatsarchivs, 32 (1979), pp. 1–23. 17 Burckard, Liber Notarum, I, pp. 195–6. 18 The more Latinate term ‘orator’ was largely interchangeable with ‘ambassador.’ Gary M. Bell, ‘Tudor-Stuart diplomatic history and the Henrician experience’ in State, sovereigns and society in early modern England: Essays in honour of A.J. Slavin, ed. Robert L. Woods et al. (Stroud, 1998), pp. 25–43, at p. 35. Behrens, ‘Origins’, p. 654. C.H. Clough, ‘Three Gigli of Lucca in England in the fifteenth and early sixteenth century: Diversification in a family of mercery merchants’, The Ricardian, 13 (2003), 121–47, at p. 138. 19 Clough, ‘Three Gigli’, pp. 138–9. 20 Burckard, Liber notarum, II, pp. 175, 204–5, 307–8. 21 Ibid., II, p. 342. 22 Ibid., II, p. 450.

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In parallel to these diplomatic representatives, England employed a series of cardinal-protectors including, from 1492, Cardinal Francesco Todeschini Piccolomini and subsequently Cardinals Galeotto Franciotti and Francesco Alidosi.23 On Henry VIII’s accession in April 1509, therefore, about two decades after the normalization of resident diplomacy at the curia, the new king inherited a diplomatic system at Rome consisting, essentially, of an established ‘family firm’ of agents in the form of the Gigli of Lucca, plus a cardinal-protector and ad hoc special embassies used for important one-off negotiations and to make the expected pledge of obedience on the election of a new pope. Diplomacy at the court of Rome reflected the dual character of the early modern papacy: simultaneously temporal and spiritual. When Henry dealt with the pope he dealt on the one hand with the temporal ruler of the Papal States, with a fellow prince; on the other he dealt with the Vicar of Christ – no temporal equal but rather a spiritual superior, to whom a Christian prince ought to demonstrate his fealty.24 In one sense, therefore, when Henry was symbolically performed in Rome, the king appeared as one of the pope’s Christian subjects. The court of Rome, however, was also a theatre of power in which Henry hoped his ambassadors would upstage those of peers like François I and Charles V. Furthermore, for much of his reign Henry was dealing with the Medici popes Leo X (1513–21) and Clement VII (1523–34) – rulers with dynastic ambitions of their own. Diplomatic image-building in Rome was a complex and multi-layered enterprise. In late September 1509, Henry and his ministers made a first move to enhance the king’s representation at the curia, despatching Christopher Bainbridge, archbishop of York, with a general commission to promote Henry’s business. Bainbridge had studied law at Bologna and had lived for a while in Rome, becoming chamberlain of the English Hospice there in 1493. Later he served as Master of the Rolls and in the months immediately following Henry’s accession spent time around the court. Well-qualified, therefore, to serve Henry at the curia, Bainbridge – promoted to the cardinalate in March 1511 – was the king’s principal representative in Rome until his death in 1514.25 (His appointment rather marginalized Silvestro Gigli; their rivalry – concluding in allegations of poisoning, no less – is well-known and will not concern me here.26) Like his predecessors, Bainbridge took appropriate opportunities to assert his precedence at Rome: he challenged the French in December 1509, 23 William E. Wilkie, The cardinal protectors of England: Rome and the Tudors before the Reformation (Cambridge, 1974), pp. 10, 34–7. 24 Prodi, Papal prince: this should, however, be read alongside the critique in Anthony D. Wright, The early modern papacy (Harlow, 2000), which also gives a useful Englishlanguage summary of the development of Prodi’s thought. 25 Chambers, Cardinal Bainbridge, pp. 15–22. 26 Ibid., pp. 131–40.

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and following his promotion claimed special status in the cardinals’ order of precedence on account of his representing Henry.27 The king did not send a special embassy to pledge obedience to Leo X on that pope’s election in 1513, relying instead on Bainbridge’s offices. This does appear something of an omission, given the number of other European powers that did so,28 but it is probably to be explained by Henry’s preoccupation with war in France (the French did not send an embassy either). There was, as we will see, an exchange of gifts between the newly elected Leo and the victorious king, and this may have functioned as something of a substitute for a formal embassy. In these early years, therefore, much was invested in Bainbridge. However, whatever his qualities as a diplomat in terms of negotiation and news-gathering, as a cardinal he was excluded from appearing as Henry’s immediate substitute in the ritual world of liturgical ceremony. That was a role restricted to laymen. In relation to Rome, among the significant events of Henry’s early years in power was the Lateran Council, a general council of the Church that was Leo X’s riposte to the efforts of a group of cardinals to hold their own council in Pisa. In February 1512, Silvestro Gigli was accredited as ambassador to the Council, along with two other clerics: Thomas Docwra, Prior of St John’s and Robert, Abbot of Wynchcombe. That commission was superseded by a new one, in April 1512, for Gigli and Sir Robert Wingfield (member of a Suffolk gentry family who had previously served as ambassador to the Emperor Maximilian). Gigli, however, arrived in Rome only in October of that year, and Wingfield does not seem to have gone at all.29 A letter of December 1511 from Henry’s father-in-law, King Ferdinand of Spain, concerning England’s representation at the Lateran Council sheds light on Wingfield’s non-appearance and, in the context of Bainbridge’s status as Henry’s resident ambassador, raises important issues regarding laymen, clerics and the order of precedence at the papal court. The context for Ferdinand’s letter was that England and Spain, then allies, were in dispute over precedence, and Ferdinand was anxious to avoid a scene of open contention at the Lateran Council.30 He instructed his 27 BL, Add. MS 8439, summary of Paride Grassi’s diary, 1506–12, fols 147, 182. 28 BL, Add. MS 48071, Paride Grassi diary, 1513–21, gives details of those powers that did send embassies in the year following Leo’s election: Lucca, fol. 25r; Mantua, fol. 31v; Florence, fol. 32r; Poland, fol. 33r; Siena, fol. 33v; Milan, fol. 55v; Brandenburg, fol. 57v; Monferrato, fol. 57v; the Emperor, fol. 60r; and Portugal, fol. 71v. 29 MacMahon, ‘Ambassadors’, p. 328; L & P, I, 511. Clough, ‘Three Gigli,’ p. 145: ‘[Gigli] reached Rome late in October during the second session [of the council], thereafter attending only sporadically’. ‘Sir Robert Wingfield’, in ODNB. 30 The papal master-of-ceremonies Paride Grassi, in a contemporary handbook on ambassadors in Rome, De oratoribus romanae curiae, noted the existence of two alternative orders of precedence. According to one order, England was engaged in a dispute over precedence with Aragon, Portugal and Spain (Castile). This list begins with the Holy Roman Emperor, then the king of the Romans, king of France, king of Spain, king of Aragon, king of Portugal and king of England (who is ‘in discord’ – discors – with the preceding three). The second, marginal list, headed ‘alibi legitur’ (‘elsewhere one reads’), gives the Emperor,

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ambassador to propose to Henry three options: that the two rulers might empower one another’s ambassadors, and then alternate their attendance; that England might give powers to Ferdinand’s own diplomat; or that England could accredit Cardinal Bainbridge, who would sit not with the other ambassadors but among the cardinals.31 Ferdinand’s request demonstrates a nuanced understanding of curia protocol. Essentially, the liturgical ceremony of the papal court was constructed so that the Christian princes could display their status on the Roman stage. If a prince happened to be present in person, he could, and would, take part himself.32 In his absence, he was symbolically represented by his ambassador. There was one order of precedence for lay rulers and their diplomats; clerics such as Bainbridge who held the title of ambassador were excluded and took their place in the separate clerical order of precedence.33 Thus, by avoiding the dispatch of a lay ambassador, England could avoid conflict with Spain. In this context, Wingfield’s non-attendance at the Lateran Council takes on a new meaning. In fact, Henry also took up the second option proposed by Ferdinand: in May 1512 he sent the Spanish ambassador a power to announce his entry into the Holy League.34 In the short term, avoiding the dispatch of lay representatives to Rome enabled Henry to avoid conflict, but it also placed limits on his ability to engage fully in the ceremonial world of the papal court. While it is tempting to imagine that churchmen would be the preferred candidates for diplomatic roles in Rome, in fact practice at the curia reflects the more general European transition in this period towards the appointment the king of the Romans, king of France, king of Castile and León, king of England, king of Aragon, king of Sicily and Jerusalem, king of Hungary and king of Portugal. Grassi, De oratoribus, fols 98r–99r. The inherent uncertainty about the correct order of precedence created plenty of space for conflicts between princes to be dramatically played out in the space of the court by their ambassadors. On papal ritual and diplomatic ceremonial: Peter Burke, The historical anthropology of early modern Italy: Essays on perception and communication (Cambridge, 1987), pp. 168–82; William Roosen, ‘Early modern diplomatic ceremonial: a systems approach’, Journal of modern history, 52 (1980), 452–76; Maria Antonietta Visceglia, ‘Il cerimoniale come linguaggio politico’, in Cérémonial et rituel à Rome (XVIe–XIXe siècle), ed. Visceglia and Catherine Brice (Rome, 1997), pp. 117–76, with extensive bibliography but, I think, underestimating the malleability of the order of precedence (p. 126); Michael J. Levin, ‘A New World Order: The Spanish campaign for precedence in early modern Europe’, Journal of early modern history, 6 (2002), pp. 233–64. 31 ‘y como los cardinales alcunque sean embaxadores no se assientan en el lugar de los embaxadores sino en el lugar de los cardenales sera quita la quistion’. BL, Add. MS, 28,572, fol. 101 (L & P, I, 501–2). 32 If a prince was present, his ambassador lost his status, and the prince acted for himself within the ceremonies. Behrens, ‘Origins’, p. 647, fn. 3. 33 For example, in the procession entering Consistory. Grassi, De Oratoribus, fol. 58v. 34 Marin Sanuto, I diarii, ed. Rinaldo Fulin, Federico Stefani, Nicolò Barozzi, Guglielmo Berchet and Marco Allegri (59 vols, Bologna, 1969), XIV, cols 224–5. ‘A dì 17 si farà la 3a sessione et si publicherà l’intrar di la liga che à fato il serenissimo re de Ingaltera, qual, per sue letere di 26 april, à mandato in ampla forma a l’orator yspano sotoscrivi a la liga per suo nome, et si farà fuogi e feste.’ (L & P, I, 557).

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of lay resident ambassadors instead.35 This is well illustrated by the indecision on the subject in a treatise on ambassadors by Étienne Dolet, who served as secretary to the French ambassador to Venice in 1528–29.36 Dolet wrote that in general the clerical or secular status of a proposed ambassador made ‘no difference’: now that the nobility took the study of letters seriously the need to send clerics because of their superior learning was a thing of the past; he did, however, concede that ‘perhaps’ it would be more appropriate to send a secular ambassador to a secular court, and an ecclesiastical ambassador to an ecclesiastical one.37 This tendency can only have increased in the early years of the sixteenth century, when the popes became more and more concerned to control their image through strict ceremonial management,38 and it is possible to see in the early selections of Talbot in 1504 and Wingfield in 1512 some awareness at the English court that laymen could be both appropriate and, indeed, desirable ambassadors to Rome. Exemptions to the rules like that made in 1487, under Innocent VIII, so that a clerical member of Henry VII’s grand obedience embassy could carry the papal train at the Ascension Day ceremony39 may well have become harder to obtain. Following Bainbridge’s death in 1514, Silvestro Gigli survived accusations of poisoning his colleague, and reassumed his role as principal English agent at the Curia until his death in 1521. For the next four years, until 1525, Richard Pace, Thomas Hannibal and John Clerk (all three clerics) in various combinations acted as English representatives in Rome. Jessica Sharkey has argued that on account of Clerk’s ‘intimacy with the King and, more notably, the Cardinal [Wolsey]’, his appointment ‘signalled a new era in relations between England and the Papacy and also between Wolsey and Leo’.40 However, in 1525 Clerk would be replaced, and at first glance English 35 Gary M. Bell, A handlist of British diplomatic representatives, 1509–1688 (London, 1990), p. 12 and MacMahon, ‘Ambassadors’, p. 177. 36 Étienne Dolet, De officio legati (Lyons, 1541), published in translation as ‘Étienne Dolet on the functions of the ambassador, 1541’, ed. Jesse S. Reeves, American journal of international law, 27 (1933), pp. 80–95. References are to this translation. On Dolet see Richard Copley Christie, Étienne Dolet: The martyr of the Renaissance (London, 1880). In the introduction to his translation of the treatise (p. 81), Reeves suggests it was composed some years before its printing in 1541, perhaps during or shortly after Dolet’s time in Venice, which Reeves dates to 1528–29. 37 Dolet, De officio legati, pp. 83–4. 38 Jennifer Mara DeSilva, ‘Senators or courtiers? Negotiating models for the College of Cardinals under Julius II and Leo X’, Renaissance studies, 22 (2008), 154–73. 39 ‘SS. D. N. hoc mandavit mihi quod caudam pluvialis sui darem portandam priori ordinis sanctis Joannis hierosolymitani, oratori regis Anglie, licet consuetum non esset quod milites dicti vel’ cuiusvis ordinis, sed laici tantum digni illam portarent.’ Burckard, Liber notarum I, 202. Celani’s edition suggests this person was John Weston, but it may have been John Kendal. There were two lay members of the embassy, but according to Burckard they ranked only eighth and ninth out of ten. Ibid., I, 196. 40 Jessica Sharkey, ‘The politics of Wolsey’s cardinalate, 1515–1530’ (doctoral thesis, University of Cambridge, 2008), pp. 75–6.

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diplomacy at the curia still looks, in these first years of the 1520s, a little ad hoc in its organization. That said, in terms of ambassadorial representation, the tenure of these shorter-term residents, serving no more than a year or two each, was much the same as that of a typical Venetian resident in Rome (the ambassadors of republics, in general, served shorter terms).41 Furthermore, Clerk and Pace had ample experience at the curia, having acted as Bainbridge’s secretaries. The difficulties of this period are perhaps best attributed to the absence of a curia cardinal, which in the medium term proved decidedly unfavourable to Henry, who lobbied for the promotion of one or more of his Italian agents in Rome.42 In September 1525 there was a notable stepping up of English diplomatic representation in Rome, with the appointment of two new resident ambassadors to replace Clerk: the Italians Girolamo Ghinucci, the new bishop of Worcester, and Sir Gregorio Casali, who had been knighted by Henry when he visited England in Cardinal Campeggio’s entourage back in 1519.43 (Clerk went on to an important appointment as ambassador to France, a posting that might well be conceived of as a promotion, albeit no easy one in the stormy aftermath of François I’s capture at the Battle of Pavia.) The selection of Ghinucci, a member of a Sienese banking family who was already well established in a curial career and had been a papal nuncio to England, followed the pattern set by the Gigli cousins. However, the choice of Casali, an Italian layman, diverged from past English practice. He was the son of a Bolognese merchant and a Roman noblewoman; had been a ward of Cardinal Raffaele Riario; had good relationships with the Medici and Gonzaga families; and by the time of his appointment had already spent six years on a variety of 41 Tessa Beverley, ‘Venetian ambassadors 1454–94: An Italian elite’ (doctoral thesis, University of Warwick, 1999), pp. 218–26. 42 Chambers, Cardinal Bainbridge, pp. 148, 151. 43 On Ghinucci: Mandell Creighton, ‘The Italian bishops of Worcester’, in Historical essays and reviews (London, 1911), pp. 202–34, and Dizionario biografico degli italiani (Rome, 1960–), ‘Girolamo Ghinucci’. On Casali see my ‘War, diplomacy and social mobility: the Casali family in the service of Henry VIII,’ Journal of early modern history, 14 (2010), 559–78 and Our man in Rome: Henry VIII and his Italian ambassador (London, 2012). Casali and Ghinucci were accredited on 20 September 1525. L & P, IV, 740; Vetera monumenta hibernorum et scotorum: Historiam illustrantia, ed. Augustinis Theiner, (Rome, 1864), pp. 550–51, prints Archivio Segreto Vaticano, Archivum Arcis, Arm. I–XVIII, 2380. Ghinucci was sent on embassy to the Holy Roman Emperor in Spain in late 1526, and was re-accredited to Rome on 5 October 1529 (Theiner, Vetera Monumenta, pp. 565–6, which also confirms Casali’s continuing status as ambassador); Bell, Handlist, p. 45 gives an approximate date of 23 November for the beginning of Ghinucci’s embassy to Spain, but does not mention his return to Rome. Casali’s embassy should be regarded as continuous from 1525 until the break with Rome in the summer of 1533, after which he continued to act in an unofficial capacity until his death in late 1536 (the date is on his memorial in the Chiesa di San Domenico, Bologna and corroborated by his testament in the Archivio Casali di Monticelli). The suggestions by Bell and MacMahon that he was active until 1540 or 1538 (respectively) are wrong.

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missions – from horse-buying in Mantua to troop-raising in France – for Henry VIII. His brother Giambattista went on to become England’s ambassador to Venice. Casali had many assets that probably contributed to his selection – military expertise, an extensive family network, ability as a horseman. His identity as a ‘cavalier’ may also have appealed to Henry in terms of the image he wanted to cultivate in Rome. Why did these two replace Clerk? Louis de Praet, an Imperial ambassador, assessed the appointment of Casali and Ghinucci in wartime context, describing the selection of two Italians as Cardinal Wolsey’s tactic to ‘embroil’ Italian affairs.44 Casali’s military expertise was much praised by Wolsey, and undoubtedly a factor in his appointment. As Charles Giry-Deloison has highlighted in the case of Anglo-French diplomacy, it was precisely at times of conflict that diplomats with military experience were most commonly employed.45 However, given the importance of lay representation in asserting precedence at the papal court, there must also have been an incentive for Henry, serious about his newly won title of Defender of the Faith, to ensure that he had at least one accredited lay ambassador available there on an ongoing basis. It seems likely that someone in England – perhaps Wolsey, perhaps prompted by Clerk or Pace or Hannibal – had realized that to keep up appearances at Rome one needed a lay diplomat. Moreover, an important consideration at the curia was to ensure that whoever was employed as ambassador was well versed in the ceremonial etiquette, and would not embarrass his prince with careless errors. The detailed advice that Grassi said should be given to ambassadors in advance of their first public audience suggests that many new arrivals were poorly prepared for the occasion.46 Men such as Casali, who had grown up in this environment and enjoyed access to Roman noble circles, would consequently be an advantageous choice. While a significant proportion of Henry’s clerical diplomats had enjoyed an Italian education,47 the same cannot be said of his gentry ambassadors. Employing an Italian layman – as did other European princes – was probably the best option.48

44 ‘puisque le cardinal a icy envoye deux Italiens pour ambassadeurs pourroit sembler quil vouldroyt de rechief tacher a embroiller les affaires de ladte Italye’. Correspondenz des Kaisers Karl V, ed. Karl Lanz (3 vols, Leipzig, 1844), I, p. 177 (L & P, IV, 756). 45 Giry-Deloison, ‘Personnel diplomatique’, p. 225. 46 Grassi, De oratoribus, fols 39r–47v. 47 MacMahon, ‘Ambassadors’, p. 81 notes that nine out of the thirty-one clerics employed by Henry as ambassadors were either Italian or had studied in Italy, to whom can be added a further four: William Knight (educated at Ferrara), Richard Sampson (Perugia) John Stokesley (Rome) and William Benet (Bologna). ‘William Knight’, ‘Richard Sampson’, ‘John Stokesley’, in ODNB. For Benet: Edward Surtz, Henry VIII’s Great Matter in Italy: An introduction to representative Italians in the king’s divorce, mainly 1527–1535 (Ann Arbor, MI, 1974), p. 501, citing L & P, iv, 2749. 48 For other examples of Italians in foreign service and a more detailed discussion of Casali’s appointment see my ‘War, diplomacy and social mobility’, p. 568.

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* * *

The Renaissance diplomat had something of a dual persona. On the one hand he might act ‘as of him self’; on the other he might personify his prince, although the line between the two was never sharp. The latter persona is well illustrated in a letter of 1528 from the English diplomats Stephen Gardiner and Edward Fox, addressed to Henry on their arrival in the Italian city of Lucca. They wrote: ‘The citizens of this citie having understanding of our commyng, presented us with a marvelous goodly and coostly present in a solempne maner and facyon, not as our personnages, but as Your Graces honnour, did requyre.’49 They, the ambassadors, were treated as if they were their prince: it was a matter of honour that those welcoming them should do so. The emphasis on honour is a repeated motif in the diplomatic correspondence of the period, and is no mere matter of courtesy but relates to a central concern in the antagonisms between Renaissance princes. In the English context, Peter Gwyn has argued that in the conduct of diplomacy Cardinal Wolsey believed it his duty to promote Henry VIII’s ‘greater glory’, while the idea of a competition for honour between Henry and François I underlies much of Glenn Richardson’s thesis on their relationship.50 The maintenance of the prince’s honour in turn became a task for his ambassadors, in both symbolic and practical terms. In Betty Behrens’s phrase a king’s ambassador would ‘personify his dignity’.51 Having dispatched his lay envoy, how was Henry honourably personified, or performed, by his ambassador at Rome? To take an example, on 2 February 1531 the papal court celebrated the Feast of the Purification of the Blessed Mary. Clement VII came into chapel, with the English orator, Gregorio Casali, bearing the train of his cope. The Venetian and Milanese orators carried candles, while the French ambassador brought water for the pope to wash his hands.52 There is a notable parallel between the service to the pope ritually performed by the ambassadors on their masters’ behalf and that expected by princes themselves from their gentlemen attendants. In Rome, the ambassador’s proximity to the papal body symbolized his prince’s 49 State papers published under the authority of Her Majesty’s Commission: King Henry the Eighth (11 vols, London, 1832–50), VII, p. 60. On the ambassador as personification of his prince’s dignity: Betty Behrens, ‘Treatises on the ambassador written in the fifteenth and early sixteenth centuries’, EHR, 51 (1936), pp. 616–27, at p. 620. 50 Peter Gwyn, The king’s cardinal: The rise and fall of Thomas Wolsey (London, 1990), p. 100. Richardson, ‘Anglo-French political and cultural relations’. 51 Behrens, ‘Treatises’, p. 620. 52 ‘Die 2 Februarij que fuit Jovis in festo Purificationis beatae Mariae Sanctissimus D. N. venit in capellam precedentibus cruce, et Cardinalibus caudam pluvialis portavit orator Angliae Eques de Casali … Duo magni cerei dati fuerunt Veneto, et Mediolanensis oratoribus. Papa lavit manus quam Dux Albaniae portexit, et inde facta Processio, Oratores cum duobus militibus Sancti Petri portaverunt baldachinum.’ Biagio Martinelli da Cesena, Diario, Biblioteca Apostolica Vaticana, MS Vat. Lat. 12276, fol. 153r.

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intimacy with, and devotion to, the pope.53 The competition among courtiers to perform such duties was mirrored at the curia in the competition between princes for status, and within the curia ceremonies, each duty was allocated according to the order of precedence. There were three regular ceremonial duties carried out by laymen at the papal mass (carrying the baldacchino or canopy, carrying the pope’s train, and bringing water for the pope to wash his hands during mass), and the ceremonies were structured in such a way that it was immediately apparent to all present which of the princes took precedence. For example, the water would be brought by the four most senior laymen present in reverse order.54 On Easter Sunday 1532, these were the Venetian ambassador, the English ambassador, the Senator Urbis (Rome’s most senior lay government official) and the Imperial ambassador, in that order.55 Without lay representation in Rome, a prince was simply excluded from participation in this ritual world – and it is significant that in the mid-1520s the English took the opportunity to ensure they would henceforth take part. That Henry took his honourable appearance at the papal court seriously is also evidenced by the series of gifts he presented to and received from the popes. In the early part of the sixteenth century, all sorts of gifts were exchanged between European princes. Their importance might lie in symbolizing the friendship that existed between the respective courts, but they might also play a part in the process described by Richardson as ‘competitive magnificence’.56 Presentations of gifts occurred in a variety of contexts: in formal occasions at court, as diplomats travelled to their postings, and at the conclusion of a particular ambassador’s service.57 In gift giving, as in the liturgical ceremonies of the curia, the ambassador often acted in the persona of his prince. A well-known example is the presentation of Henry VIII’s pamphlet against Martin Luther, the Assertio Septem Sacramentorum, to Pope Leo X on 2 October 1521.58 The English resident ambassador in Rome, John Clerk, accompanied the formal presentation at a special meeting of Consistory with a sermon against Luther. (He had been denied the chance to do so at a public consistory on account of papal concern that it would attract 53 On royal body service at the Henrician court see David Starkey, ‘Representation through intimacy: A study in the symbolism of monarchy and Court office in early modern England’, in Tudor monarchy, ed. John Guy (New York, 1997), pp. 42–78. 54 Grassi, De oratoribus, fol. 95r. 55 ‘De aqua ad manos, orator Venetorum Primus, Orator Angliae secundus, Senator Urbis tertius, Quartus Maius Orator Imperatoris.’ Martinelli, Diario, fols 172v–173r. 56 Richardson, ‘Anglo-French political and cultural relations’, p. 312. There is an extensive literature on early-modern gift-giving. For a recent contribution, with bibliography, see Felicity Heal, ‘Food gifts, the household and the politics of exchange in early modern England’, PP, 199 (2008), 41–70. 57 I discuss illicit diplomatic gifts in ‘“Those who give are not all generous”: Tips and bribes at the sixteenth-century papal court,’ EUI Working Papers MWP 2011/15. 58 Martinelli, Diario, fol. 14v.

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unwarranted attention to Lutheran doctrine.59 ) Although as a cleric he was excluded from taking Henry’s place in liturgical ceremony, in the context of this event, Clerk would have been understood to personify both the king’s honour and his commitment to the Christian faith. Moreover, the reciprocal nature of this exchange is clear: later the same month, Henry was granted the title of Defender of the Faith.60 This formed part of a much longer series of gift exchanges between the Tudors and the papacy. Henry VIII received a Golden Rose from Julius II in 1510, and in 1513, following his victory against the French at Tournai, he was given the Holy Sword and Cap of Maintenance by Leo X (Giovanni de’ Medici). In return, Henry gave Giulio de’ Medici (the future Clement VII) the cardinal-protectorship of England, and made Giuliano de’ Medici, Pope Leo’s brother, a member of the Order of the Garter.61 This series of gifts draws attention to the spiritual significance that might be attached to papal presents, although, of course, such gifts also contributed to a process of military, political and dynastic alliance building. Popes and kings also made presents of luxury items: in 1511 Julius II dispatched some cheese and wine to Henry VIII, while Leo X was involved in commissioning a tomb design for the king.62 These gifts further highlight the lack of distinction in this period between personal/family and state interests: were they presents from the Medici to the Tudors or from pope to king? This ambiguity is confirmed by the fact that the key facilitator of many of these exchanges was the London-based Florentine merchant Giovanni Cavalcanti, who held no official diplomatic position in the papal service, but rather acted as a representative of Medici family interests.63 Those gifts despatched directly between princes were complemented by gifts that diplomats received in the persona of their masters, most notably the presents that were customarily given in the course of journeys to and from a posting. For example, while en route to Rome in 1528, Sir Francis Bryan received a ‘present off wyne’ from the mayor of Boulogne;64 this was an opportunity for the mayor to demonstrate his friendship towards France’s ally England. The following year, during their voyage to the coronation of the Holy Roman Emperor, Sir Nicholas Carew and Richard Sampson received 59 Ellis, ed., Original letters, 3rd series, i 262–69 (L & P, III, 690); ASV, Arch. Concist., Acta Misc. 31, fol. 130r. 60 L & P, III, 692; ASV, Arch. Concist., Acta Misc. 31, fol. 131r. 61 Margaret Mitchell, ‘Works of art from Rome for Henry VIII. A study of Anglo-Papal relations as reflected in papal gifts to the English king’, Journal of the Warburg and Courtauld Institutes, 34 (1971), 178–203, at pp. 179–80. On the Golden Rose, see Burke, Historical anthropology, p. 170. 62 Mitchell, ‘Works of art’, p. 179; but for a more recent treatment of the tomb project see Sicca, ‘Pawns of international finance’. 63 Sicca, ‘Consumption and trade of art’ and ‘Pawns of international finance and politics’, and Mitchell, ‘Works of Art’. 64 State papers, VII, p. 93 (L & P, IV, 2026).

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wine in a number of towns, including Boulogne, Abbeville and Nevers.65 On their final day in Turin, the duke of Savoy sent Carew and Sampson ‘a goodly present of Rawe wyldfoule that is to wytte. vj capons iiij. fesant[es] / xij wodcock[es] / xij partriches / xij qwayles. and vj rabett[es]’.66 On their arrival at Reggio nell’Emilia they received from the duke of Ferrara ‘xx. capons xx. pertryches / foure hares / two cheses parmesanes / xij botteilles of wyne / two barylles of olyues / vj boxes of marmelade and comfitures / vj torchett[es] and xxiiij ca[n]del[es] of virgin waxe’.67 This was competitive magnificence (or ducal one-upmanship) in practice. Likewise, on their arrival in Lucca in 1528 Stephen Gardiner and Edward Fox received a hugely lavish ‘presente’ including twenty ‘gret pykes’, confectionary and wines. It came with considerable ceremony, the fish alone on four men’s heads in basins of silver, and filled a ‘gret chambre’.68 This was the gift ‘not as our personnages, but as Your Graces honnour, did require’. The cases underline the function of the ambassador as embodiment of the king’s person and honour. In this period, at least, the acceptance of such formal presents by English ambassadors seems to have aroused little anxiety. Venice, in contrast, barred its diplomats from accepting gifts, and in Basel gifts received by envoys had to be handed over to the city, although in the latter case the city council eventually relaxed the rules.69 In the context of princely diplomacy, however, strict rules about the acceptance or registration of gifts were rare. The sort of detailed recordkeeping of diplomatic gifts that Groebner describes in later fourteenth- and fifteenthcentury Basel was not established in England until the seventeenth century.70 On the whole, republican governments were rather quicker to standardize and regulate diplomatic practices than were principalities, which relied for longer on a more personalized form of representation based on a relationship of service between ambassador and prince. From selection of ambassadors to strategies to avoid unwelcome disputes, to gift exchange, Henry emerges as a monarch whose curia diplomacy was very far from neglectful. While it is undoubtedly true that following Bainbridge’s death the lack of an English cardinal in Rome was problematic, that is by no means the whole story. Henry’s subsequent curia diplomats were knowledgeable and capable men with considerable experience of Italian 65 Thomas Wall, The Voyage of Sir Nicholas Carewe to the Emperor Charles V in the year 1529, ed. R.J. Knecht (Cambridge, 1959), pp. 46, 47, 51. 66 Ibid., p. 56. 67 Ibid., p. 58. 68 State papers, VII, p. 60n.; TNA, SP 1/47, fols 117–18 (L & P, IV, 1805). 69 Beverley, ‘Venetian ambassadors,’ p. 90. Valentin Groebner, Liquid assets, dangerous gifts: Presents and politics at the end of the Middle Ages, trans. Pamela E. Selwyn (Philadelphia, 2002), pp. 117, 126. 70 Groebner, Liquid assets, p. 18; Maija Jansson, ‘Measured reciprocity. English ambassadorial gift exchange in the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries’, Journal of early modern history, 9 (2005), 348–70, at p. 369.

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affairs. The 1525 selection of Girolamo Ghinucci and Gregorio Casali, Italian diplomats well prepared for the exigencies of war that followed the Battle of Pavia, should not be interpreted as a resort to second-best local agents. Henry’s employment of Italians was not untypical among European princes, and the shift to lay diplomacy evident in Casali’s appointment indicates a considerable appreciation of how best to display Henry effectively in the ‘theatre of the world’. In Rome, Henry’s ambassadors sought to present him not only as Defender of the Faith, a Christian prince devoted to papal service, but variously as the rightful claimant to the throne of France and a thoughtful ally of Spain. As the negotiations for the king’s divorce began in Rome in 1527, the need for an English curia cardinal was more keenly felt, but by his ambassadors Henry VIII was by no means poorly served.

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part v: reactions

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11 Hampton Court, Henry VIII and Cardinal Pole Eamon Duffy

Use the phrase ‘Henry VIII and the Cardinal’, and hearers or readers are almost certain to assume that the allusion is to Cardinal Wolsey. Reginald Pole, Henry VIII’s Plantagenet cousin and protégé, barely features in most accounts of the reign of the most formidable of the Tudors. Yet in the wider history of sixteenth-century Catholicism, Cardinal Pole looms far larger than Cardinal Wolsey. Pole’s European celebrity is now widely recognized. While still in his twenties, his piety, learning and royal antecedents won him the golden opinions and the friendship of the remarkable circle of ‘spirituali’ who formed the heart of the Catholic reform movement in sixteenth-century Italy. As Governor of the Papal state of Viterbo he would encourage and protect some of the most daring thinkers of the age, and he presided as Cardinal Legate over the opening stages of the Council of Trent. Despite wellwarranted suspicions of his sympathy with Lutheran teaching on justification, in the Conclave of 1549, Pole even came within a single vote of the papacy. His posthumous writings and the records of his Legatine activities in Marian England would play a crucial role in shaping the reform programme adopted in the final sessions of Trent. But Pole also played a significant role in the religious politics of Henry’s reign, and he had a decisive effect on subsequent English and European understanding of that reign. Cultivated and patronized by Henry as a future ecclesiastical lieutenant, he was to turn against his royal cousin and benefactor and launch a potentially deadly literary attack on Henry’s wisdom, integrity and morals. Rewarded for his defence of papal authority against Henry by promotion to the Cardinalate, Pole was despatched by Pope Paul III first to exploit the Pilgrimage of Grace against the schismatic king, and then to persuade the Emperor Charles V to a Crusade against England. Both ventures failed ignominiously, but there were real fears at Henry’s court that Pole might make a dangerously plausible alternative to Henry if he were to

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renounce the ecclesiastical state and marry his cousin the Princess Mary in the event of a successful rebellion or a papalist coup. And in the 1550s, as chief religious adviser and ally of the same Mary, now queen, Pole propagated a savagely hostile portrayal of Henry as the father and fautor of schism and heresy, a portrait that shaped European perception of the English reformation and its origins for generations to come. This chapter seeks to recover Pole’s importance for an understanding of Henry’s reign by examining that sequence of events. Sometime in the early 1590s two English Catholic exiles in Spain fell into talk about the evils of the reign of Henry VIII. The older man, Sir Francis Englefield, had been Master of the Court of Wards and a privy councillor under Queen Mary. He told his interlocutor, the Jesuit activist Robert Parsons, that during Mary’s reign he had been one of a group of hand-picked courtiers who, at the Queen’s command, and at the instigation of Cardinal Pole, had exhumed Henry’s body from its resting place in Jane Seymour’s grave at Windsor, and had burned it to ashes.1 Though there are all sorts of reasons for doubting Englefield’s astonishing story, it is not hard to see why Parsons might have believed him. Englefield had been a key member of Mary’s regime and, more to the point, both constable of Windsor Castle and an active heresy commissioner. Even before Pole arrived in England, Philip’s Spanish advisers had been voicing their uneasiness about celebrating Catholic rites in churches polluted by the burial of notable heretics. Pole agreed that the burial of ‘I capi degli heretici et scismatici’ in churches had indeed polluted them, and ruled that as part of the process of reconciliation of the buildings all such corpses should be removed.2 Accordingly, during Archdeacon Harpfield’s Kentish visitations the bodies of Kentish heretics such as Christopher Nevinson were duly exhumed. The burning of Bucer and Phagius’ bones in Cambridge marketplace in February 1557 was therefore simply the most notorious example of a wider phenomenon. As the source of the break with Rome, Henry, of course, was ‘capo degli heretici et scismatici’ with a vengeance, so despite the breath-taking lese majeste involved, however secret the deed might have been kept, it is by no means impossible that Pole could have pressed Mary for so extreme a measure. In any case, Englefield’s story, whether or not it is true, has a piquant symbolic resonance. Si non e vero, e ben trovato. For whether or not Cardinal Pole presided over the cremation of Henry’s corpse, he certainly did all that he could to blacken his memory. As early as 1536 Henry had come to symbolize for Pole all that was evil and destructive in the reformation, and that sense deepened with Henry’s destruction of Pole’s family. He spent a 1 Robert Persons SJ, Certamen Ecclesiae Anglicanae, ed. Jos. Simons (Assen 1965), pp. 272–3. 2 Thomas F. Mayer, ed., The Correspondence of Reginald Pole (4 volumes to date, Ashgate 2002–) [cited as CRP], II, nos, 941, 946, 954.

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lifetime brooding over the King’s actions, and his last years were devoted to undoing them. Though Pole conceded that Henry was never a heretic himself except on the issue of papal authority, he insisted that he was a tyrant, who by pursuing his unbridled lusts and appetites had murdered God’s prophets and priests, separated an entire nation from the unity of Christendom, sealed up the channels of grace so that tens of thousands of his people had died in their sins, and opened the floodgates of the heresy that had devastated England in the reign of his son Edward. Pole’s account of Henry, refined, elaborated and embellished over the course of more than twenty years, would be adopted wholesale into Counter Reformation historiography, and would shape European perceptions of the King and his reign for centuries to come. Yet that embittered relationship had begun in sweetness, gratitude and mutual admiration. Reginald Pole was the third son of Margaret Plantagenet, and grandson of George Duke of Clarence, ‘false, fleeting, perjured Clarence’. His father was Sir Richard Pole, nephew of the Lady Margaret Beaufort and chamberlain to Prince Arthur and Catherine of Aragon. But Pole’s father died in 1504, leaving a family impoverished through the cumulative effects of the attainder of Margaret’s father and, in 1499, of her brother Edward. The Pole fortunes were rescued by Henry VIII who, apparently in fulfilment of his father’s remorse-stricken death-bed request, backed by the advocacy of Queen Catherine, reversed Edward Plantagenet’s attainder, restored Margaret to her lands, and in 1513 permitted her to succeed in her own right as Countess of Salisbury.3 Henry went on to cement his ties to his Plantagenet cousins even more closely. When Princess Mary was born, Margaret was made her godmother and governess, and Henry took a close personal interest in Reginald, the ablest of Margaret’s children. Henry paid for Pole’s education, first at Oxford and then from 1521 at Padua. More than money was involved: Pole’s reverential reception everywhere he went in Italy owed a good deal to advance letters from Henry and Wolsey to the Signori of the cities Pole visited: Pole’s earliest surviving letter to Henry is a request for an enlargement of his pension in Padua, so he could live in the style expected from the King of England’s nepote – and he got the money! 4 Pole proved a brilliant scholar, and his circle soon numbered some of the most distinguished figures in the Italian renaissance. Henry relished this evidence that the earnest and slightly priggish young man was turning out a good investment, and he took his usual proprietorial pride in including him among the humanist luminaries he liked to surround himself with.5

3 Pole attributed the restoration of his family to Henry VII’s deathbed remorse enjoining restitution on Henry VIII, and to Catherine’s intercession, CRP II, no. 555, pp. 37–8, 49–50. 4 CPR I, nos. 5, 9. 5 John Strype, Ecclesiastical Memorials, relating chiefly to Religion and the Reformation of it under Henry VIII, Edward VI and Mary (Oxford 1822), III, Part 2, p. 493.

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This relationship of patronage and obligation was undoubtedly intended by Henry to culminate in Pole’s promotion to high office in the English church, probably as Archbishop of Canterbury, thereby keeping the reins of church as well as state in the family. In the event, it foundered on the divorce question, which surfaced just as Pole returned to England. Pole’s family links to Catherine and her daughter Mary inclined him to the Queen’s cause: his indebtedness to Henry pulled him in the other direction. But Pole’s cosmopolitan education and international network of influential churchmen and intellectuals seemed the perfect qualification for an advocate of the King’s cause in the European universities: in October 1529 he was duly despatched to Paris to secure the backing of the Sorbonne for the divorce. Understandably, Pole would later play down his role in promoting the divorce: he was to claim that his primary purpose in going to Paris was precisely to avoid being drawn into the campaign, and he protested to Henry himself in 1536 that ‘may God be my witness – I cannot remember anything at all in my life that was more painful to me than that famous legation offered to me at your command when I was residing in Paris’.6 There was wishful thinking here. At the time, Henry himself made no secret of his delight in having his learned cousin’s support.7 Pole’s own final despatch from Paris in July 1530 dismisses the ‘crafts and inventions’ by which the adversaries of the divorce in the Paris Faculty had sought to ‘embecyll the hole determination’, and the phrasing hardly suggests any misgivings about the King’s cause. At any rate, Henry’s court gave most of the credit for the successful outcome of the mission to Pole’s ‘politic and wise handling’,8 and he returned home in 1530 in high favour with the king.9 He arrived in an England in which, however, the terms of the debate were rapidly changing, and in which men were increasingly forced to take sides. In March 1530 Clement VII had summoned Henry to Rome, forbidding him to remarry in the meantime under pain of excommunication and interdict. Rumours of Imperial invasion began to circulate, and known opponents of the divorce were being increasingly marginalized or removed from the centres of power. The ideological basis for the Royal Supremacy and the whole course of the Henrician reformation was being put in place: in August 1530 the Papal Nuncio at Brussels was told that ‘they cared neither for Pope or Popes in this kingdom, not even if St Peter should come to life again’. And over against this 6 Reginald Pole, Defence of the Unity of the Church, ed and trans. J.J. Dwyer, (Westminster, Md. 1966) [cited as De Unitate], p. 191–2. 7 L & P, IV iii, 6252. 8 Pole to Henry, 7 July 1530, printed in N. Pocock, Records of the Reformation, the Divorce 1527–1533 (Oxford, 1870), pp. 563–4: calendared CRP I, no. 57, pp. 66–7. 9 Pole’s biographer, Thomas Mayer, demolishes Pole’s claims to innocence in Cardinal Pole in European Context (Aldershot 2000), ch. XI ‘A Fate Worse than Death: Reginald Pole and the Parisian Theologians’.

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increasingly focused royal campaign, an Aragonese party of opposition was forming round More, Fisher and Tunstall.10 Pole’s own constitutional caution and his gratitude and affection for Henry probably held him back from overt support for this emergent opposition. But his sympathies were undoubtedly with the devout humanists in the queen’s party, and he distrusted the brutal pragmatism of Cromwell and others round the king. Matters came to a head between him and Henry in November 1530, when, predictably despite his youth – he was still only 30 – he was offered the Archbishopric of York, vacant by Wolsey’s death. The price for this glittering preferment, however, was to declare himself publicly for the divorce. Pole was ambitious at this stage of his life, and, on his own account went to see Henry determined to comply, or at any rate to avoid any kind of confrontation. In the event, his prepared speech deserted him, and to Henry’s fury he revealed that he felt unable after all to support the divorce.11 Pole was later to claim that Henry became so enraged during this interview that he had reached convulsively for his dagger. It seems clear all the same that Pole presented his opposition to the divorce sufficiently tactfully to avoid an open breach. He is conspicuous by his absence from the group of clergy opposing the king’s proceedings in 1531, in Convocation and elsewhere.12 But although he was evidently still anxious to keep lines open between himself and the king, by June 1531 Pole had nevertheless sent Henry a lengthy memorandum, setting out in detail why he thought the divorce a bad idea, urging the king to set aside the unreliable and often venal opinions of the universities, and to ‘commit his great cause to the judgement of the pope’. This memorandum, ‘much contrary to the king’s purpose’, was nevertheless, according to Thomas Cranmer, ‘of such eloquence that, if it were set forth and known to the common people, I suppose it were not possible to persuade them to the contrary’.13 Pole’s most recent biographer, arguing that the future cardinal at this stage was still a wholehearted supporter of royal policy, has gone so far as to suggest that not only were Pole’s later accounts of his York House interview with Henry a tissue of lies, but that this summary by Cranmer of Pole’s memorandum was also largely fictional, a smear prompted by rivalry, designed to discredit Pole at court by representing him as an opponent of the divorce.14 But the notion that Cranmer falsified Pole’s argument will not bear scrutiny, and 10 The situation in 1530–31 is well analysed in John Guy, The Public Career of Sir Thomas More (Brighton 1980), pp. 113–74. 11 CRP II, no. 601, pp. 109–12 (Preface to Edward VI). 12 For which see Guy, Public Career of Sir Thomas More, pp. 175–6. 13 J.E. Cox, ed., Miscellaneous Writings and Letters of Thomas Cranmer (Cambridge 1846), pp. 229–30. 14 This is one of the central arguments of Mayer’s, ‘A Fate Worse than Death’, and is reiterated briefly in his ODNB article on Pole.

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Pole’s remarks on the problems of obtaining favourable judgements from the universities have the ring of experience about them. The request from Thomas Starkey in 1535 that Pole should declare his opinion of the divorce question leaving aside all pragmatic and prudential arguments also strongly suggests that this was indeed the tenor of the 1531 memorandum. Cranmer’s précis, attributing to Pole the claim that ‘he could never find it in his heart’ to be ‘ a setter forth’ of the divorce case, also tends to confirm Pole’s minimalizing account of his own role in securing the support of the Paris theologians. And despite his recommendation that Henry should submit the whole matter to the pope, it is notable that Pole carefully avoided any open statement of principle. He had confined himself to political and prudential arguments against repudiating Catherine, including the danger of an Imperial blockade, the alienation of the common people, who loved Catherine, the bastardizing of Mary, and the dishonour to the king of the suggestion that he had lived in sin for twenty years. At this stage, it seems, he believed that Henry might still be deflected by prudential considerations from pushing his Great Matter to its conclusion. Whether or not such hopes were unrealistic, Pole was undoubtedly increasingly uneasy at the direction of royal policy, while remaining anxious to avoid an open breach. By the end of 1531 he thought it prudent to sidestep mounting royal pressure for acquiescence in the divorce by going abroad once more, and in January 1532 he returned to Italy.15 The king was doubtless glad to be rid of this high-profile dissident within the royal family, whose deafening silence about the divorce threatened to become a major embarrassment. Pole’s departure to Italy in January 1532 turned out to be the start of an exile that would last for twenty-two years: it was also the commencement of a glittering ecclesiastical career that would see him a cardinal within four years, governor of the papal state of Viterbo within ten, presiding legate at the opening of the Council of Trent within fifteen, and which, in 1549, would bring him within one vote of the papacy. But the trigger for all that was Pole’s slowly arrived-at decision to speak out against the divorce, and the schism that the divorce had precipitated. But to begin with he still held his peace. He resumed his studies first at Avignon, then once more in Padua, and we do not know what he thought of the rout of the Aragonese party signalled by the Submission of the Clergy and the resignation of More as chancellor on 16 May 1532, nor his reaction to the unexpected promotion of Cranmer to Canterbury in January 1533, a preferment that, in other circumstances, might well have been offered to him. 15 L & P, V, 737: The Imperial ambassador thought that Pole had extracted permission to leave England from the king by warning that if he remained he would be bound to speak out against the divorce in Convocation: in fact Chapuys thought Pole had said he would speak in parliament. But as Dean of Exeter, he had a seat in Convocation which, of course, met alongside parliament.

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Through all the mounting radicalism of Henry’s reformation, the break with Rome in 1534, even the executions of Fisher and More in June and July 1535, Pole kept his counsel, and along with that, his royal pension and the revenues from his many benefices. But Henry’s patience with the taciturnity of his protégé was now exhausted: the consuming urgency that in the summer of 1535 would lead to the execution of Fisher and More, demanded an end to Pole’s silence. It may also be that rumours that Henry’s opponents were considering a possible marriage between Pole and the Princess Mary, as a prelude to some sort of imposed regency, determined the king on a reckoning. One of Pole’s former clients and chaplains, Thomas Starkey, had now returned to England and moved into Cromwell’s service. From February 1535, Starkey became the regime’s main line of communication to Pole. He began pressing Pole for a clear statement of his views on papal supremacy and the standing of the King’s first marriage. The King, he reported, had specifically demanded this, stipulating that Pole should not send another ‘great volume or book’ giving prudential or political arguments against the divorce, as he had done in 1531, but ‘disregarding all affections and leaving possible dangerous results to the King’s wisdom and policy’ should state his opinion, ‘truly and plain, without colour or dark of dissimulation’. Starkey made it clear that explicit support for the divorce and the break with Rome was the price Henry expected for Pole’s education, and the condition of any return to England: the king, he reported, had ‘lately said to me he would rather you were buried there [in Italy] than you should for any worldly promotion or profit to yourself dissemble with him in these great and worthy causes’.16 In April 1535 Pole agreed to put his opinions on all these issues into writing, and Starkey was optimistic that Pole would satisfy Henry: he should have known better. By now, More and Fisher languished in the Tower awaiting execution: the very letter in which Starkey acknowledged Pole’s promise to speak out contained a strident justification of Henry’s execution of the Carthusians of Shene and of Richard Reynolds of Syon. These were men whose intellectual and religious priorities Pole shared, and for whom he had the greatest reverence.17 Yet still Pole gave no inkling of his real opinions: prompted by a letter from his elder brother urging him to satisfy the king’s demands, he wrote to Thomas Cromwell, assuring him of his relief that no alienation had sprung up between himself and Henry, and asking Cromwell to assure the King ‘of my readiness to do him service at all times, for I count whatever is good in me, next to God, to proceed of his Grace’s liberality in my education’.18 16 CRP I, nos 73, 74: Martin Haile, Life of Reginald Pole (London, 1910), pp. 137–8. 17 CRP I, nos 76, 78. 18 CRP I, no. 82: L & P, IX, 701. Cromwell responded by sending Pole copies of Richard Sampson’s pamphlet against papal primacy, and Stepen Gardiner’s De Obedientia, to guide

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Slowed by a hot summer and recurrent bouts of illness, Pole began work on what would turn into a lengthy treatise on the Primacy and the Divorce, De Unitate, in June 1535. As he worked, he kept the book’s content secret from all but his most intimate friends, the aristocratic Venetians Alvise Priuli and Gasparro Contarini, both of whom read draft sections, and both of whom were alarmed by Pole’s vehemence. Pole’s own household were under the impression that the book would be everything Henry desired, a prelude to a triumphal return home. But they were also aware that work on the book was proving to be some kind of a spiritual and intellectual watershed for their master. In December Pole’s servant John Friar told Starkey that as he worked, ‘our Lazarus’ had turned his thoughts heavenwards, ‘despising things merely human and transitory. He is undergoing a great change, exchanging man for God.’19 This was certainly so: Pole had begun the book sharing the widespread conviction that papal primacy was a human construct, devised for the good order of the church. As he wrote, however, he became convinced that it was in fact of divine origin. In this transformation, the witness of More and of Fisher were decisive. Under an impassive exterior, he had been traumatized by the executions of Fisher, and especially of More, whom he knew well and considered the wisest living Englishman. Reflecting on their martyrdoms, he became convinced that these deaths for the unity of the Church in obedience to the See of Peter, the first such deaths in Europe, were a direct message from God, written in blood, and confirming that papal primacy was a matter of divine and not human ordinance. He also became convinced that Henry had shown himself to be, purely and simply, a tyrant, who would stop at nothing to gratify his appetites. Those who flattered and served him, such as Cranmer and Cromwell, were jackals to a lion out of control. The resulting book, written with a pen dipped in vitriol, is verbose and repetitious by modern standards. But it offered a formidable defence of an exalted doctrine of papal authority, and a contemptuous dismissal of the regime’s anti-papal propaganda. More strikingly, it was also a savagely personal attack on the King himself, as a tyrant who had separated his people from the unity of Christendom, all for the love of a worthless harlot. Despite opening protestations of love for Henry – ‘No child has ever cherished parent with an affection greater than mine for you’20 – Pole went on to declare the his thinking. Sampson’s book would become the chief whipping boy for Pole’s book: CRP I, no. 85: Richardi Sampsonis, regii sacelliae decani oratio, … regiae dignitati cum primis ut obediant quia uerbum dei pr[in]cipit episcopo Romano ne sint audientes, qui nullo iure diuino …. Londini : In aedibus Tho. Bertheleti, [1535?] STC (2nd edn) / 21681: Stephani VVinton. Episcopi de vera obedientia oratio , [Londini : In aedibus Tho. Bertheleti regii impressoris excusa, An. M. D. XXXV. Cum priuilegio] [1535] STC (2nd edn) / 11584. 19 L & P, IX, 917. 20 De Unitate, p. 6.

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king to be spiritually and mentally diseased. He was a tyrant worse than Nero or Domitian, a rebel against God, and his priests in the mould of King Uzziah, who had been struck with leprosy for his temerity,21 or like Dathan, Abiron and the sons of Korah, who had been swallowed alive into Hell for opposing Moses and Aaron. Pole berated Henry’s demonic usurpation of the spiritual role of the successor of St Peter in particular, and he denounced especially the murder of God’s prophets, More and Fisher. The axe that had decapitated More and Fisher, he wrote, had inflicted a deadly wound on Henry’s own soul. ‘Heaven is closed to you: it is closed to your soul. Through these years since you lapsed into this impiety no heavenly shower has poured into your soul … as one completely bereft of the spirit of God, you have turned to plunder and slaughter’, the murder of the saints and the pillage of the church.22 The root of all this was Henry’s infatuation with Anne Boleyn. At the outset of his reign, Henry had been a byword for beauty, talent, wealth and virtue, the most promising prince in Europe. ‘All proposed themselves a happy life with you as King, all looked forward to a golden age during your reign.’ 23 But lust had ruined him, plunged him into adultery and even incest, in marrying Anne Boleyn, the sister of his concubine. This new Jezebel, a new Herodias, had seduced him into a bogus marriage, having learned from her sister’s example how quickly Henry tired of his mistresses. As a result Henry had divorced the Catholic Church along with his wife, and brought on himself the horrified contempt of Europe, ‘you, a man of your age and with such experience, miserably burning with passion for the love of a wench’.24 The penultimate section of the book consisted of an imaginary address to the Emperor Charles V at the gates of Constantinople, urging him to abandon plans for a crusade against the Turks, and to intervene instead to liberate England from a greater tyranny than the Turk. Pole reminded Henry that Charles was currently in Rome, conveniently placed for consultation with the pope about how to resolve the English schism. Exactly what Pole had in mind here is not clear: in practical terms he seems to have thought this would lead first to formal excommunication and then an imperial blockade, closing European markets to English trade, which would turn an already oppressed people against a king who had exhausted their good will. For Henry had disgraced his nation and despoiled all his subjects: ‘You always looked on the nobility with scorn. You never loved the people, you plundered and molested the clergy and … most recently … like a raging animal you have murdered 21 Pole elaborated the comparison with King Uzziah in a letter to Priuli in February 1536: CRP I, no. 90: Epistolarum Reginaldi Poli (ed. Angelo Maria Quirini, Brescia 1744–57), I, no. 26, pp. 438–9, where the leprosy is glossed as the spread of anti-papal teaching through the whole of England. 22 De Unitate, p. 69. 23 Ibid., p. 193. 24 Ibid., p. 185.

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the men who were…the glory of your kingdom, the pillars of the Church of God, the flower of mankind.’25 Pole’s book concluded with a lengthy and emotional appeal to the king to repent.26 In private, however, Pole thought there was little likelihood of any such change of heart without some drastic external intervention. But he feared that Charles V was not to be relied on: he had been appalled to learn that the death of Catherine of Aragon in January 1536 had provided the Emperor with the excuse he had been seeking to take no action against England, and that it had also forestalled Henry’s excommunication. Was the well-being of Christ’s church to depend upon the little life of one woman? Somehow Pope and Emperor must be brought to see the need to deal decisively with the English schism before it became chronic and ingrained. Surgery, not physic, was needed. If Henry was to be returned to the Church, he must first be excommunicated. Someone, maybe Gasparro Contarini, must confront Charles V, as Ambrose had confronted Theodosius, to persuade him to cast aside prudence and political calculation, and act.27 De Unitate is suffused by a sense of Pole’s own noble status. He felt able and bound to write so harshly since, for fear of the king, Henry’s lesser advisers had acquiesced in every enormity. ‘Blanditas’ infused all the counsel Henry had received, it was time now for astringency and plain dealing. Noblesse oblige: if Pole did not speak out, who would? More and Fisher, those true counsellors, were dead. Soft speech was not loyalty but collusion. ‘How many years be past, when every man hath used that way with the King in those innovations of laws and customes, and what have they profited, but set him more forward?’28 Pole finally sent the text of De Unitate to Henry at the end of May 1536, his decision to do so coming hotfoot on news of the execution of Anne Boleyn. As he wrote with breathtaking candour to Henry later that year, he now had renewed hope for the king’s repentance and recovery, ‘seeing God hath rid you of that domestical evil at home, which was thought to be the cause of al your errors; and with her head, I trust, cut away al occasion of such offences as did separate you from the light of God’.29 We can only speculate about Henry’s immediate reaction to De Unitate, and indeed the book’s early reception in England is in general a bit of a mystery. In fact it is not clear how much of it Henry himself ever read, though it was clearly enough to make him very cross indeed. Pole himself suggested that, since the text was so long, Henry should delegate consideration of it to a committee of learned men headed by Cuthbert Tunstall. Intriguingly, Henry 25 26 27 28 29

Ibid., p. 287 (adapted to clarify the translation). Ibid., p. 336. CRP I, nos 92, 94 (to Priuli); Epistolarum I, pp. 449–54. CRP I, no. 110; Strype, Memorials I/II, pp. 310–11. CRP I, no. 102: Strype , Memorials I/II, p. 304.

hampton court, henry viii and cardinal pole 207 did so. Thomas Starkey told Pole that he had exerted himself to ensure that all those who vetted the book should be Pole’s friends – the group included himself, Tunstall, John Stokesley, the conservative bishop of London, with Richard Moryson, another former Pole client, as secretary. Moryson’s official summary of the book, presumably intended for King and Council, survives: it is headed ‘Abbreviations of a certain evill-wylled man … wryt against the Kynges doings’, 30 and Moryson was soon to become Pole’s implacable enemy. But his summary omitted some of Pole’s harshest invective against the king, and it may have been designed at this stage to shield him from the worst of Henry’s anger. Yet if Tunstall and his colleagues seem genuinely to have tried to ensure that Pole’s ‘plain fashion of writing’ should be ‘taken in the best part’,31 they also hastened to establish clear blue water between themselves and his ‘bloody book’,32 writing to deplore Pole’s ‘corrupt judgement’ and ‘detestable unkindness’ towards his prince and greatest benefactor.33 And on 14 June, before he can have done much more than glance at its contents, Henry, claiming to write more in sorrow than in anger, himself summoned Pole home to explain himself. Quite evidently, however, the central concern of all the English respondents to the book was to prevent Pole publishing it. And that autumn, as the north of England erupted into rebellion, such a fierce a denunciation of Henry’s entire religious policy from so exalted a figure came to seem even more fraught with danger. This desire to fend off publication at all costs probably accounts for the fact that Pole’s friends rather than his enemies were chosen to deal with him. His panic-stricken family were also mobilized to persuade him to suppress his book, and return to England. But alarm about his activities escalated with the news that Paul III had summoned him to Rome in July to represent the English nation in a consultation to prepare a General Council. And alarm turned to something approaching panic with the naming of Pole as a Cardinal in December, and his despatch in February as legate to Flanders. Here indeed was cause for concern. Henry’s regime was now in the midst of the greatest crisis of the reign. The outbreak of the Pilgrimage of Grace in October marked the most serious internal threat the Tudor dynasty was ever to face, and Pole’s legation, which masqueraded as a generalized peace mission, was, of course, designed to harness the Pilgrimage in the cause of Roman obedience. Before his appointment as legate, Pole himself drafted a shrewd position paper for Paul III, on the need for a swift response to maximize the effect of this ‘virile et Christiana dimostrazione che hanno quei populi’: Pole asked for extensive powers to negotiate with parliament and the Pilgrims, 30 31 32 33

Haile, Pole, p. 175. CRP I, no. 101. Ibid., no. 116. Ibid., no. 115.

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for detailed instructions on the process of reconciliation for Ireland as well as England, and above all for enough money to keep the disintegrating protest together, backing words with deeds. The bull of appointment to his legation was explicit that regrettably the Pilgrims might be forced to overthrow and kill Henry, though the better outcome would be to compel Henry to return to ‘the way of truth’.34 It was, of course, all too late. To have any hope of success, Pole’s mission should have been mounted weeks earlier, it was desperately underfunded, Charles V declined to back it, and Henry and Cromwell pulled out every diplomatic stop to persuade Francis I to refuse recognition of Pole’s legation. For good value, Cromwell initiated a series of comic-opera plots to have the legate trussed up and conveyed to Calais to be dealt with as a traitor: all failed, revealed to Pole by double agents. Nevertheless, Pole spent humiliating months in a diplomatic limbo before abandoning the legation and returning to Italy in August 1537. But if Pole’s first legation ended in frustration, it sealed the fate of his family. In September 1537 Cromwell wrote a savage letter to Michael Throckmorton, the messenger who had brought De Unitate to Henry, and whom Cromwell had tried and failed to turn into a spy against his master. Henry well knew, Cromwell told Throckmorton, ‘the godly enterprises that this scely cardenall went aboute’. He was ‘a defender of iniquiytie and pryde, a merchaunte and occupier of all deceyte’, a traitor. And if now he should be persuaded by the pope and his minions to publish ‘his detestable booke, where one lye lepeth in every lyne’, his relatives would bear the consequences of his ‘wyse dealings’. ‘Pity it is, that the follye of one braynesick Polle, or to say better, of one witless foole, shuld be the Ruyn of so great a famylie.’35 This was no idle threat, and in the event Henry did not wait for the publication of De Unitate. In the late summer of 1538 Henry and Cromwell moved to annihilate the Plantagenet threat, arresting Pole’s brothers on the pretext of the largely fabricated Exeter Conspiracy. Pole’s eldest brother Henry was among those executed that December, and the despatch of the cardinal on a second and equally futile legation to the court of Charles V at Toledo in 1539 to promote a crusade against Henry, together with the long-delayed appearance of Pole’s book in a limited edition in Rome, were the triggers for an Act of attainder in April 1559 against Pole and his mother. The Countess followed her eldest son to the block two years later. The regime’s official justification of these measures was written by Pole’s former client, Richard Moryson, inevitably much of it devoted to a jeering diatribe against Pole himself:

34 Ibid., nos 150, 151: fullest treatment of the Legation and its failure, Thomas Mayer, Cardinal Pole in European Context (Ashgate 2000), ch. 7. 35 R.B. Merriman, Life and Letters of Thomas Cromwell (Oxford 1902), vol 2 pp. 87–8.

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What greater shame can comme to the, then to be the dishonour of all thy kynne, a comforte to al thyne enmies, a deathe to all thy frendes? O Pole, o hurle pole, full of poyson, that woldest haue drowned thy countrey in bloudde, thou thoughtest to haue ouerflowed thy prynce and soueraygne lorde, thou thoughteste with thy traiterous streames to haue ouerrounne all to gether. But god be thanked, thou arte nowe a Poole of lytel water, and that at a wonderfull lowe ebbe.36

Pole continued brooding on Henry. But for the next fifteen years, his energies were focused on Italian concerns, and the reform of the Roman Catholic Church in general. His centrality in the history of the incipient Italian reformation, his dismay at the Council of Trent’s rejection of justification, and the growing suspicion he and his circle attracted from the zelanti within the Roman curia are well known, but they are not part of our story.37 Pole’s preoccupation with Henry became a live issue again with the accession of Mary in the summer of 1553. He was named at once as legate to England, and the queen immediately entered into correspondence with him to negotiate England’s return to papal obedience. That reconciliation would be delayed more than a year by the political elite’s refusal to countenance any settlement that involved disgorging ecclesiastical lands, by the Emperor’s suspicion of Pole’s anti-Spanish bias, and by Pole’s own determination that the renunciation of the schism and acceptance of papal authority must precede all other measures whatever. In practice, Pole was more accommodating, authorizing the appointments of bishops and the celebration of Catholic rites even before the reconciliation had taken place. But from the outset, he was determined that England’s religious restoration must involve the repudiation of Henry and all his works. This was a tall order. In Edward’s reign, as religious policy had radicalized and the mass and other sacraments had come under attack, religious conservatives led by Gardiner, Bonner and Tunstall had rallied around the Henrician religious settlement and doctrinal formularies such as the 1543 King’s Book. The West-Country Prayer-Book rebels in 1549 had demanded the retention of all things as they had been in King Henry’s time until Edward reached his majority. Good King Harry became the benchmark against which 36 An inuectiue ayenste the great and detestable vice, treason wherein the secrete practises, and traiterous workinges of theym, that suffrid of late are disclosed. made by Rycharde Morisyne. [Londini : In aedibus Thomae Bertheleti typis impress. Cum priuilegio ad imprimendum solum, Anno. M.D.XXXIX. [1539]], STC (2nd edn) / 18112, sig B ix– B ix (v). 37 With the accession of Edward VI, Pole wrote to Somerset, reviewing the Tudor dynasty’s relations with his own family and warning the new regime against following in the steps of Henry, who had been abandoned by God and died in his sins. In the early 1550s, he had composed a preface for a proposed reissue of De Unitate, addressed to the young Edward VI, urging a radical change of direction over religion, but insisting that Henry’s murder of his family had never extinguished Pole’s love for him or prayers for his repentance. Like most of Pole’s literary projects, the edition never appeared: CRP II, nos 555, 601.

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the overturning days of Edward and his protectors were measured, and found wanting. So initially, the aim of the Marian Council was to turn the clock back to Henry’s last years, confident that the country at large would rally behind an appeal to the good old days. All this was anathema to Pole: as he told the queen in his very first letter to her in August 1553, it was Henry’s lust for Anne Boleyn that had sown the ‘iniquitous and pestiferous seed’ that had corrupted the kingdom, and banished justice and truth: there was need now for a new beginning.38 Later the same month he wrote to Stephen Gardiner, rejoicing in his preservation from heresy in Edward’s reign, and attributing his fall into schism under Henry to subservience to ‘a Prince of such a sort as was all too plainly shown to the world by his deeds’.39 But his detestation of Henry became explicit when Mary wrote in November 1553 to inform Pole that parliament had restored religion to the condition it had been in ‘tempore mortis Henrici regis, piisimae recordationes patris nostrae’, ‘our Father of most blessed memory’. Her letter had also mentioned Edward, ‘bona memoriae fratris nostri charissimi’, but Pole ignored that, and swooped instead on the queen’s unguarded reference to her father. How could she speak in this way, he asked her, about a king ‘knowen of all men the onely author of the hole schisme’? To speak well of Henry, however conventionally, was to condone his acts. Pole knew, he told her, that she did not in fact approve of Henry’s ‘impietie in this act of schisme’, but had written unguardedly out of ‘pietie naturall’ for a parent. If she had Henry for a father, however, she could have neither ‘partem aut patrem’ [neither part nor parent] in Heaven. Had she not read Christ’s own precept that those who did not hate father and mother for the sake of the Gospel were not worthy of eternal life? ‘Whiche if it be to be understande of those fathers that be infidels, and lett not their children to come to the fayth, muche more is it to be understand of those that being incorporate within the body of the churche, wherein is taught the trew fayth, doeth pluck them out thereof.’ Henry was the ruin of his people, the murderer of More and Fisher. Mary’s mother was indeed of blessed memory, but her father ‘had no such grace’. On her fidelity to Christ, therefore, Mary must never again use such language about Henry, whether in public or in private, ‘so that yff yow wyll not speak yll of him, let hym alone, speake no good off him’.40 I have shown elsewhere that Pole’s injunctions were henceforward obeyed to the letter: the official religious acts of Mary’s reign from this point onwards withhold even conventional praise of Henry, and her bishops were emboldened to speak of the old king as Herod, and publicly to pray for delivery

38 CSP Venetian vol. 5 no. 766; CRP II, no. 649. 39 CSP Venetian vol. 5 no. 777; CRP II, no. 665, p. 57 (paraphrased in English p. 67). 40 Bodleian Library Microfilms, Vat Lat 5968 fols 172–3; CRP II, no. 765: Pole had issued a similar warning to Somerset against speaking well of Henry.

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from ‘Henry and all his works’.41 And Pole himself had the opportunity to elaborate his reading of Henry’s reign in the most public possible setting when, in November 1554, he finally addressed both Houses of Parliament. It is a remarkable programmatic speech, which elaborated the analysis he had first offered in De Unitate, recast now in the light of his own family tragedy and the religious revolution carried through in Edward’s reign, the poisoned harvest that Henry had sown. Pole painted an idealized picture of the peace and tranquillity of the country in Henry’s early years, the king himself ‘beatified and adorned … with all giftes of nature bodily, [and] … excellent virtues of the mynde’, and the people living under him ‘in Libertie and freedome of conscience and perfecte securitie of bodie and goodes, and in most assured expectation of indifferente iustice’. But Henry’s breach with Rome had ended all that. Carnal council and avarice, starting with the robbery of the church, had plunged England into nightmare. ‘For … what man in these last yeres might safely use his conscience or bee free to live as his herte would serve him upright towardes God, when all religion was overturned and changed from the antient institution of the Church, all holy rites and observances neglected and held for superstitions and abominations.’ And reflecting on the fate of his own family, as well as those of More, Fisher and the other Henrician martyrs, he insisted that not only religion but also civic justice had foundered: ‘Neither was any man so sure of his goodes and possessions, but he stood continually in abjecte daunger and hazard of his life too’, and ‘the beste sorte, and the moste innocente’ had most to fear.42 Henry’s ‘fleshly wille full of a carnal concupiscence’ had forced his people into an utterly un-English schism, from which all the evils of the last generation had flowed. It was true that the consent of parliament had implicated the whole nation in Henry’s guilt. And yet, ‘I will and maie truly excuse you and saie, that this deliberacion came first of one alone, and afterward of a few, which by renouncing of that obedience thought to have the waie more open and free, yea and also more safe for the following and accomplishing of their carnall appetites, and for none other purpose.’43 This searing indictment of Henry as the one and only ‘capo degli eretici et scismatici’ became one of the foundations of Marian policy, and was reflected in a variety of ways. Till Pole arrived, the Marian establishment had been silent about More, Fisher and the Carthusians, the greatest of Henry’s victims: with Pole’s arrival and the establishment of his priorities for the renewal of the English church, the Henrician martyrs begin to be appear in official propaganda, More’s works were reissued, his biography written, and a recognizable cult 41 E. Duffy, Fires of Faith: Catholic England under Mary Tudor (New Haven and London 2009), pp. 46–50. 42 Vat Lat 5968, fols 309–11. 43 Vat Lat 5968 fols 335v–45.

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began. The annual St Andrew’s days celebration commemorated nationwide the end of the schism with sermons that recounted the evil effects of Henry’s breach with Rome, and the benefits of reconciliation. And in Pole’s circle, a new narrative of the reformation was created, in which Henry featured as Pole saw him, a ruined archangel whose early promise had been turned to avarice and tyranny by lust for the harlot Anne Boleyn. As Pole’s right-hand man, Nicholas Harpsfield wrote in his Treatise on the Pretended Divorce: Now, as this carnal sensuality drowned and defaced the sincerity of his faith, so did it also all his other commendable ornaments. And whereas for twenty years and more he had been a benign gentle and mild prince, he was now turned to a tiger or ramping lion, raging and roaring after blood, sparing neither kinsman – no, not the worthy Marquess of Exeter, nor the good lady the Countess of Salisbury, nor any other; no, not those I trowe, the very Turk would have reverenced, I mean the angelical Carthusians, and the most notable, virtuous, learned men, the Bishop of Rochester and Sir Thomas Moore … .44

As that reference to the destruction of Pole’s family suggests, Harpsfield’s treatise gave formal historical expression to Pole’s distinctive perspective on Henry. Harpsfield’s book would remain unpublished, but its central emphases and many of its details were incorporated wholesale into one of the most influential historical works of the later sixteenth century, Nicholas Sander’s Origin and Growth of the Anglican Schism, published posthumously in Latin in 1585. Sander’s book, denounced by generations of protestants as the ‘pestilent and seditious book of Dr Slanders’, rapidly established itself as the standard account of the English reformation for European readers, and remained so for the next 300 years. In the generation after its first publication it went through an astonishing six Latin editions and was translated into French, German, Spanish, Portuguese, Italian and Polish. It would be endlessly replicated, recycled and retold by other authors. Through Sander’s book, Pole’s Henry was given permanence. It was the picture not merely of a tyrant, but of a lost soul, for as Sander told it, Henry had died in desperation. ‘It was said’, Sander wrote, ‘that he had no blood left in his body, that it was corrupted into humours. When he was told he was at the point of death, he called for a goblet of wine, and turning to one of his attendants, said, “All is lost”.’ Sander evidently had not heard the story of Pole’s exhumation and burning of Henry’s corpse: but he did reflect at the end of his account of Henry on the absence of any monument to this most terrible of the Tudors. Mary had wanted to raise one, he reported, but piety prevented her, ‘for she could not hand on to future generations the name of a schismatic’. There was, in any case, he thought, a certain fitness to the absence of such a memorial: ‘all this came to pass by the just judgement of God, that a man who scattered to the winds the 44 Nicholas Harpsfield, A Treatise of the Pretended Divorce, ed. Nicholas Pocock (London, 1878), p. 285–6.

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ashes of so many saints, and who plundered the shrines of so many martyrs, should himself lie unhonoured in his grave’.45 From his own honoured tomb in Canterbury Cathedral, near Becket’s plundered shrine, Pole would surely have applauded.

45 Nicholas Sander, Rise and Growth of the Anglican Schism, trans. David Lewis (London 1877), pp. 164–6.

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12 Henry VIII and the Crusade against England Susan Brigden

Henry VIII saw himself as Solomon, the Lord’s elect, receiving the homage of his Church, a new David for Israel, but at the papal Curia and in the courts of Christendom he came to be seen as ‘that rebel’, ‘that enemy of the Church’, that ‘lost King’, ‘that perfidious’, ‘impious’ King, ‘a tyrant so cruel’. The great and growing ‘cruelty of a most wicked tyrant’ was constantly lamented.1 ‘So wicked an enemy of God and of justice’, could not escape punishment. Eternal damnation in the next world was already foretold, for he was ‘that lost King’ – a lost soul.2 If Henry was the enemy of God, it was virtuous and a Christian duty to fight him, and holy war was justified.3 By the end of 1538 Pope Paul III was convinced that England’s schismatic king posed the gravest threat to the papacy and to Christendom, and he summoned Christian princes to a crusade. Through the early months of 1539, Henry and his realm faced the prospect of invasion and consequences terrifying to imagine. When Henry ‘rent the mystical body of Christ which is His Church’4 he invited war in Christendom. As Innocent III had once told the King of Portugal, God particularly dislikes attacks on the Holy See.5 In the past, popes 1 For Henry as Solomon, see Jane Roberts, Holbein and the Court of Henry VIII: Drawings and Miniatures from the Royal Library, Windsor Castle (Edinburgh, 1993), 29. For the comminations against Henry, see inter alia, AGR, Papiers Gachard, 643, fols 47, 158, 213; ASV, SS, Principi, 13, fols 91, 210v, 213; 14A, fol. 115; L & P, XIV i, 199. 2 ASV, SS, Principi, 14A, fol. 215v; Cardinal Farnese to the nuncio at the French court, 30 March 1539; SS, Principi, 13, fols 91, 213; Cardinal Farnese to the nuncios with the King of the Romans, 28 October 1538; the nuncio with the Emperor to Cardinal Farnese, 13 January 1539, Toledo. 3 For this crusade, within a wider history, see C. Tyerman, England and the Crusades, 1095–1588 (Chicago and London, 1988), ch. 13. 4 ‘Il corpo mystico di christo cioe de la chiesa sua’: Cardinal Contarini to Charles V, 5 June 1535, Venice; AGS, Estado, legajo 1311/137. 5 C.R. Cheney, ‘Alleged Deposition of King John’, in The Papacy and England, 12th to 14th Centuries: Historical and legal studies (London, 1982), XII, p. 101.

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had laid interdicts on Christian realms as punishment for the resistance of their kings and had excommunicated contumacious rulers. They might do so again. Discussing with Cardinal Farnese the remedy for Henry’s indurate disobedience, Francis I, King of France, recalled how ‘ten or twelve kings’ had been driven from their realms; recalled them but did not name them.6 A pope’s excommunication of a king was a spiritual weapon, but also a political and a diplomatic one. A king under an anathema, outlawed from the community of the Church, was separated from the faithful within his realm. Canonists might make a distinction between a king’s deposition by a pope and a papal declaration that the king’s subjects were released from their fealty, but excommunication was as if a sentence of deposition. Though it did not compel subjects to abjure their allegiance, it protected their consciences if they disavowed their oaths and repudiated their loyalty. It seemed an encouragement to rebellion. In the reign of King John, England had lain under papal interdict between 1208 and 1213 and in November 1209 John had been solemnly excommunicated. The King of France had threatened holy war to take John’s crown.7 Three hundred years later, a papal anathema against Henry VIII would in the same way invite his subjects to relinquish their allegiance and summon Christian princes to avenge the wrong to Holy Church. In 1528 in The obedience of a Christen man William Tyndale reminded Henry’s subjects: Sent not the Pope also vnto the kynge of France remission of his synnes to goo and conquere kinge Jhons realme. So now remission of synnes cometh not by fayth in the testamente that God hath made in Christes bloude: but by fyghtinge & murtheringe for the popes pleasure.

And Tyndale warned: ‘I se no other lykelyhode but that the lond shalbe shortly conquered’. In the margin a reader of the next generation, knowing what followed, marked a pointing arrow with a note: ‘a prophesie of a conquest’.8 The pope could never countenance the English king’s disobedience, and only with hindsight does Henry’s reconciliation seem impossible. Since he could not be allowed to remain in schism, ‘alienated from God, from the Church and from the Holy See’, ways must be found to ‘reduce’ him to obedience.9 What those ways would be was a matter of intense debate, especially in the Curia. 6 ASV, Fondo Pio, 56, fols 116v–117; Cardinal Farnese to Pope Paul III, 9 February 1540, Amiens. 7 C.R. Cheney, Innocent III and England (Stuttgart, 1976), ch. 3 & 4; W.L. Warren, King John (London, 1961), pp. 168–73. 8 William Tyndale, The obedience of a Christen man and how Christen rulers ought to goveerne (London, 1528), fols clvii–clviii. Since the reader mentioned the foundation of St John’s College, Oxford, he wrote after 1555. 9 ASV, AA, Arm. I–XVIII, 6530, fol. 137; Nuncio in France to Farnese, 20 February, 1539, Mélun. The verb always used to describe the forced return to obedience is ‘ridurre’: to bring back, to reduce.

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In 1535 Pope Paul III had prepared a sentence of excommunication against the king of England. At the papal consistory in December a group of reforming cardinals questioned the wisdom, the extremity of excommunicating a prince, but the pope insisted that he ‘would not spare emperors, kings or princes, as God had put him over them … “I called you to condemn, not to consult”’.10 The bull of excommunication was prepared, but not yet proclaimed. In England, some who feared for the faith had foreseen that it might have to be restored by force. Bishop Fisher, Queen Katherine of Aragon’s champion, had called Charles V to arms to enforce papal censures, ‘a work as pleasing to God as to go against the Turk’. Since the Holy Roman Emperor wielded the temporal sword his was the first duty to defend the papacy and the unity of Christendom.11 In 1529 Charles was advised that he ‘could very easily, with the assistance of the English themselves, have their King dethroned’; ‘that the very English would help … in dethroning their King’. ‘Your Majesty might make a new king of England’.12 Two years later Reginald Pole analysed the political difficulties in the way of the Divorce, particularly the opposition of Christian princes: Then he extolleth the power of the emperor … saying, that the emperor, without drawing of any sword, but only forbidding the course of merchandise into Flanders and Spain, may put this realm into great damage and ruin.

‘And what if’, he asked, the emperor ‘will thereto draw his sword, wherin is so much power?’13 On June 1535 Pole wrote to Charles of England’s great spiritual danger. By the same messenger, Cardinal Contarini also summoned Imperial aid for the Church in England ‘cut off and separated’ from the mystical body of Christ.14 De Unitate, the letter that became a book, which was written and addressed to Henry between September 1535 and March 1536, principally by Pole, called on Charles to fulfil his Imperial duty by attacking England.15 The pen, if not mightier than the sword, might unsheathe the sword. In the autumn of 1538 English exiles reported the king’s alarm that Pole would publish books in revenge, ‘which (they reckon) he fears more than all the world besides’. Pole ‘had books lying by him, which if they came forth would cause heaven and earth to quake’.16 10 L & P, IX, 207, 1007. 11 L & P, VI, 1164; Chapuys to Charles V, 27 September 1533. M. Dowling, Fisher of Men: A Life of John Fisher, 1469–1535 (Basingstoke, 1999), ch. 7, especially pp. 150–51. 12 L & P, IV iii, 5177. 13 Records of the Reformation: the Divorce, 1527–1533, ed. N. Pocock (2 vols, Oxford, 1870), i, p. 133; Thomas Cranmer to the Earl of Wiltshire, 13 June 1531. 14 AGS, Estado, legajo 1311/137; Pole to Charles V, 17 June 1535, Venice. Professor Mayer explains this letter’s significance: Pole’s Correspondence, pp. 81–3. AGS, Estado, legajo 1311/138; Cardinal Contarini to Charles V, 5 June 1535, Venice. 15 T. Mayer, Reginald Pole, Prince and Prophet (Cambridge, 2000), ch. 1, especially p. 28. 16 L & P, XIII ii, 507.

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The return of Pole to his native country, so Charles had been promised in August 1534, might do more than the invasion of 40,000 foreigners to deliver England from tyranny, and the people would receive him ‘as if he had come from heaven’.17 In De Unitate Pole assured Charles that when his forces arrived to relieve Henry’s realm from schism ‘whole legions, lurking in England’ would rally.18 When the Pilgrimage of Grace began the Catholic powers saw it as the providential rising for which they had had prayed. In France, the Grand Master believed that the censures could be published, and that the English people ‘will in the end kill the King if he persist in his errors’.19 Paul III created Pole a cardinal and prepared to make him his legate, and Pole sent an emissary to England, yet Pole did not come in time to bring papal grace to the Pilgrims and they sought the emperor’s help too late.20 The Pilgrims’ failure was Christendom’s loss, but the pious hope remained – in Rome at least – that the English would rise again, and that when they did their king would be overthrown. A crusading indulgence was offered to them, promising full remission of sin if they rose to return their king to ‘the way of truth’. ‘It may be’, stated the papal bull of April 1537, ‘that the Enemy of mankind has such a hold upon the King that he will not be brought to reason except by force of arms.’ Better that Henry ‘and his adherents should perish than be the cause of perdition to so many’.21 Cardinal Pole was sent as legate with the mission to restore England to obedience. This first legation failed when the French king refused to receive him. While Francis and Charles V were poised to make war, their perpetual enmity meant that neither could afford to alienate Henry, however deeply they deplored his actions. ‘Never before was Christianity in such turmoil as today’, judged Gianmatteo Giberti, who accompanied Pole in his mission: ‘the King of England now triumphs in his ruin’.22

17 L & P, VII, 1040; Martin de Cornoça to Charles V, 4 August 1534. 18 Mayer, Reginald Pole, p. 28. 19 ANG, 1, pp. 217–18; L & P, XI, 1250. 20 L & P, XI, 1143, 1353(2), 1354. For Throckmorton and his dramatic mission, see A. Overell, ‘Cardinal Pole’s Special Agent: Michael Throckmorton, c. 1503–1558’, History, 94 (2009), pp. 265–78. R.W. Hoyle, The Pilgrimage of Grace and the Politics of the 1530s (Oxford, 2001); Tyerman, England and the Crusades, pp. 343–5, 360, 363–6. 21 L & P, XII i, 779. This bull is discussed by T. Mayer: Cardinal Pole in European Context: A via media in the Reformation (Aldershot, 2000), pp. 296, 311–13. For Pole’s legation of 1537, see T.F. Mayer, ‘If martyrs are to be exchanged with martyrs: The kidnappings of William Tyndale and Reginald Pole’ and ‘A Diet for Henry VIII: the failure of Reginald Pole’s 1537 legation’ in Cardinal Pole in European Context, ch. vi–vii, and Reginald Pole, pp. 62–70; C. Höllger, ‘Reginald Pole and the Legations of 1537 and 1539: diplomatic and polemical responses to the Break with Rome’ (unpublished University of Oxford DPhil thesis, 1989); C. Capasso, Paolo III, 1534–1549 (2 vols, Messina, 1924), i, pp. 387–97; G.M. Monti, ‘La legazione del Polo e del Giberti in Francia e in Fiandra nel 1537’, Archivio Storico Italiano, ser. vii, 12 (1929), pp. 293–309. 22 ASV, SS, Principi, 12, fols 187v–203; cited Höllger, ‘Reginald Pole and the Legations of 1537 and 1539’, p. 42. L & P, XII i, 923.

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The pope had already vowed to crusade against the Turk. Vows to crusade against both infidels and heretics raised pressing questions of priorities. Did the greater danger to Christendom lie in the threat from the Turk, or in the threat from the heretic, from the enemy without, or the enemy within? At the moment that Henry challenged the Church the Ottoman Turks posed an imminent threat. In the Tower, Sir Thomas More wrote that ‘the Turk is in few years wonderfully increased, and Christendom … very sore decayed’.23 Khaireddin Barbarossa, no longer a pirate, but beylerbey of Algiers and esteemed admiral of the Sultan, menaced the entire western Mediterranean. At Tunis in July 1535 the emperor’s crusading armada had won a great victory that left Charles dreaming of leading a great ‘impresa Turchesca’ to his ‘eternal fame’, and Sultan Süleyman determined to avenge his defeat.24 At the end of 1536 when the Sultan made massive preparations for a campaign in Apulia in the following spring, such was the terror that the pope contemplated leaving Rome. While the emperor and the French king remained at war there was no counter to the Sultan, this spectre of absolute power, and the alliance of the French king with the Sultan, his enemy’s enemy, made the danger to Christendom the greater.25 When in the autumn of 1537 Süleyman declared war on Venice and attacked Corfu, the emperor, the Most Serene Republic and the papacy formed a league for defensive and offensive war against the Turk. In Spain, as solemn celebrations were held for the Holy League on 18 October, the nuncio hoped that within the year there would be Mass in Constantinople.26 In the Turkish threat lay Henry’s safety and his chance. He had hoped ardently for a crusade against the Turk, though he always feared that treachery and divisions amongst Christian powers would prevent it.27 From the Holy League he was excluded, to his dishonour. But two of the League partners still hoped for his participation. For the emperor, the ending of England’s schism was part of his Imperial duty to defend Christendom, but he was also desperate to effect reconciliation so that Henry might aid the League’s crusading armada. The Venetians, in direct danger from the Turk, also anxiously sought English help. From Rome, Cardinal Contarini wrote that ‘God has opened a way’, whereby the king of England, sharing the ‘pious desire’ for a crusade against the Turk, might enter the Holy League and be 23 St Thomas More, The Dialogue of Comfort against Tribulation, ed. F. Manley (New Haven and London, 1977), p. 8. 24 Ven. Dep, i, p. 202; K.M. Setton, The Papacy and the Levant, 1204–1571 (4 vols, Philadelphia, 1976–84), iii, pp. 395–7, 406. 25 E. Charrière, Négociations de la France dans le Levant (3 vols, Paris, 1848), i, pp. 321–4; Setton, The Papacy and the Levant, iii, pp. 406–7. 26 ASV, AA, Arm. I–XVIII, 6533, fol. 45; Poggio to [Cardinal Farnese], 30 October 1537, Monzón. For the making of the League, see Setton, The Papacy and the Levant, iii, pp. 422–30. 27 G. Parker, ‘The Political World of Charles V’, in Charles V, 1500–1558, and his Time, ed. H. Soly (1999), p. 124.

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‘united with the Pope’.28 Such hopes were evanescent. It would need an extraordinary casuistry for Henry to ally with the pope as temporal ruler, and he would never ally with him as spiritual leader. The pope, however worldly, could hardly join this schismatic king in any league purporting to be holy.29 Yet Henry’s promises to aid the ‘impresa Turchesca’ were never made more emphatically than when he faced a crusade against himself. Since a king who defended Christendom must be safe from the assaults of fellow Christian princes, Henry might hide behind the Cross and seek the crusader’s privilege of protection, as King John had done before.30 For all the terror of the Turk, in the Curia there was general agreement that the heretics were a greater danger to the Church than the infidel.31 The pope believed that ‘the enterprise against the Turk cannot be successfully undertaken unless the house is first cleansed’.32 The heretic was the enemy within: the infidel, the enemy without. The danger the infidel posed was to temporal power, and to religion only as a consequence of the temporal threat, while the heretic threatened religion and the unity of the Church.33 Gravely alarmed by Henry’s moves against the Holy See, some began to compare this danger to the threat from the Turk. In November 1533 Katherine of Aragon, thinking of an epithet grave enough to describe the ‘Great Matter’, had called it ‘this second Turk’ and hoped for ‘the defeat and death by the Pope’s hands of this second Turk’.34 In The Dialogue of Comfort against Tribulation the correspondence between the tyranny of the Great Turk and of More’s own king is apparent, for those who would read it so. Cardinal Pole had no doubt that Henry, ‘this enemy … could harm Christendom worse than the Turk’, and that ‘these hidden snares and this internal enemy’ must be overthrown before turning to combat the Turk.35 Because Henry invaded the temple from inside in order to subvert its foundation, he was worse than the Turk, judged Pole.36 In his ‘Apology to Charles V’, drafted in the first part of 1539, Pole insisted that this English tyrant posed a greater danger to Christendom than the Turk, and must be punished.37 Contemplating the pope’s meeting with the emperor and the king of France in the summer of 1538, a Bristol friar, 28 Regesten und Briefe des Cardinals Gasparo Contarini, ed. F. Dittrich (Braunsberg, 1881), p. 296; Cardinal Contarini to the Papal nuncio in Venice, undated. 29 ANG, 1, p. 330; Ricalcati to the nuncio in France, 7–8 January 1538, Rome. 30 Tyerman, England and the Crusades, pp. 134–6. 31 Setton, The Papacy and the Levant, iii, p. 413. 32 CSPSp, viii, 1545–1546, p. 605. 33 For example, Giovanni Boitero, The Reason of State, trans. P.J. and D.P. Waley (London, 1956), p. 221. 34 CSPSp, iv(2), 1531–1533, p. 843; cited Tyerman, England and the Crusades, pp. 359–60. 35 TNA, PRO 31/9/65 (L & P, XIV i, 603); Pole to Cardinal Farnese, 25 March 1539, Carpentras. 36 BAV, MS Vat. Lat. 5970, fols 303v–305v (Pole’s Correspondence, pp. 209–211). 37 BAV, MS Vat. Lat. 5970, fols 303–311v (Pole’s Correspondence, pp. 209–213); Mayer, Reginald Pole, pp. 78–100.

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lamenting the religious changes in England, made an exact identification: ‘the Imperowr was raising an army to invade the Great Turk, by which he meant the King’.38 ‘If England had not a scourge in time, they would all be infidels’, so Gregory Botolf would tell a fellow conspirator in Calais early in 1540.39 In August 1538 the truce made between the French king and the emperor halted their constant warfare and shifted all the balances in Christendom. The prospect of peace between the great antagonists isolated Henry, whose friendship neither now needed, and threatened to make England – as Thomas Wriothesley acutely put it – ‘but a morsel amonges thise choppers’.40 At Aigues-Mortes, the old enemies, now sworn friends of friends and foes of foes, discussed the ‘public evils now disturbing Christendom’; the danger from the Turk, but also the threat from ‘desviati’, those who separated from the faith. They agreed to urge the heretics – ‘amicably and without violence’ – to return to the Church.41 But events in England, as well as peace in Christendom, compelled the pope to call for a ‘remedy for England’ and the ‘reduction’ of heresy there, which might indeed involve violence. This threatened war was the ‘impresa d’Inghilterra [the ‘enterprise of England]’ – no less than a crusade. In the Curia they sometimes chose to see England’s schism as the aberrant rebellion of a tyrant on the edge of Christendom, yet they knew that if England was not returned to obedience schism could hardly be prevented elsewhere. The spectre haunting the papacy was of the heretic king of England allied with the heretic princes of Germany. Henry’s rapprochement with the Schmalkaldic League in 1537–38 made that nightmare real, and the Catholic powers began to live in fear of massed heretic forces.42 A crusade against Henry became more necessary late in 1538, not only because he lost the politic amity of the emperor and the French king, but also because of his sacrilege and violence. The plan to hold a General Council of the Church to heal the schism was never abandoned, though it had faltered in 1537, but the news reaching the pope and Christian princes convinced them that more urgent, forceful remedy was needed. In 1535, learning of the execution of Bishop Fisher, Francis had declared that the English king was damned, beyond hope, and news of successive acts of tyranny reverberated through the Curia and the Imperial court.43 In Cardinal Pole’s family they foresaw that ‘the King would go so far that all the world would mislike him’.44

38 L & P, XIV ii, appendix 2; John Babington to Cromwell, 12 January 1539. 39 L & P, XV, 478, p. 198. 40 SP, viii, p. 166; Wriothesley to Cromwell, 3 March 1539. 41 CSPSp, v(2), 1536–1538, pp. 550–4, 561–6. 42 R. McEntegart, Henry VIII, the League of Schmalkalden, and the English Reformation (Woodbridge, 2002), ch. 3. 43 ANG, 1, pp. 46–7; Nuncio at the French court to Ricalcati, 4 July, 1535. AGS, Guerra Antigua, legajo 9/95, 105; Conde de Cifuentes to Charles V, 4 August and 8 October 1536, Rome. 44 L & P, XIII ii, 804(7).

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From Rome in October 1538 the Cardinal Secretary of State sent to the nuncios appalled accounts of events in England that would ‘sicken a statue’. ‘That damned King’ had destroyed the shrine of St Thomas of Canterbury, the ‘friend of God’, sanctified by ‘infinite miracles’ over 400 years. Its jewels were seized, and the martyr’s bones burnt and scattered to the winds. Religious houses were turned into royal palaces and their lands given over to hunting parks. ‘And a thousand other things, so impious and horrible that it was better to keep silent than to tell them.’ The pope ordered the nuncios to demand swift retribution from Christian princes for these scandals to God, and at a consistory in Rome on 25 October commissioned a group of cardinals to consider a remedy.45 In Toledo the papal nuncio urged vengeance for the relics of St Edward and St Thomas of Canterbury, and the emperor was ‘totally sickened by that enemy of the faith’.46 The French king, observing Henry’s growing wickedness, regretted that he had failed to persuade from his evil ways.47 News of the arrest and imminent destruction of the Marquis of Exeter and of Cardinal Pole’s family was lamented as further proof of Henry’s tyranny.48 At the end of 1538 the question was not whether there would be an ‘enterprise of England’, but when and how. What form should the ‘impresa d’Inghilterra’ take? In Padua that autumn there was a revealing conversation between Michael Throckmorton, Cardinal Pole’s agent, and an English scholar. The pope and Pole would ‘make the King and Council … weary of the realm in half a year, without sending an army, by excommunication and interdicts’, so Throckmorton promised.49 Earlier Pole had argued that ‘without drawing of any sword’, the prevention of commerce into Flanders and Spain would cause ‘great damage and ruin’ to Henry’s realm, and now he urged that a stop of trade and confiscation of the goods of English merchants would ‘stir the commons against the King and Council’.50 The potential chaos in international commerce and dangers to navigation were widely foreseen, but although some thought economic warfare a weapon too blunt in its application, it was far easier to begin and to end than other forms of war.51 English merchants trading in Spain were all vulnerable to charges of being ‘luterano’. Arriving at Cadiz in September 1538, Richard Abbis discovered that the English were ‘all takyn in derycion and hattyde as torkes & cowllyde eretykes & lutaryos’. According to the 45 ASV, SS, Principi, 13, fol. 91r–v; also BAV, MS Vat. Lat. 5970, fols 306v–307 (Pole’s Correspondence, p. 210). L & P, XIII ii, 684. 46 Ribier, i, p. 287; AGR, Papiers Gachard, 643, fol. 158; Poggio to Cardinal Farnese, 20 November 1538, Toledo. 47 ANG, 1, p. 438; Latino Giovenale to Cardinal Farnese, 21 January 1539, Paris. 48 AGR, Papiers Gachard, 643, fol. 145; Poggio to Cardinal Farnese, 4–13 November 1538, Toledo. 49 L & P, XIII ii, 509. 50 Records of the Reformation, i, p. 133; L & P, XIII ii, 509. 51 See, for example, L & P, IX, 566, 601, 1007.

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principle that the heretic had no rights, the merchants’ goods were seized, their cargoes impounded.52 Such provocation might in itself have led to war, but the pope now summoned Christian princes to holy war. On 17 December 1538 the papal censures against the king of England were at last published in Rome.53 The pope demanded remedy for ‘such great evils, murders and martyrdoms’ as the English king ‘daily executes upon the forsaken Christians of that unhappy realm’. A crusade was the emperor’s duty, as protector of Christendom, as much as the pope’s.54 To Francis, the pope sent Latino Giovenale Manetti as legate on a mission that was vital, and ‘secretissimo’.55 To Charles, he sent Cardinal Pole. The legates were to take the bull of excommunication and demand its execution. In the Curia and the French court, they imagined spectacular consequences. Once, French kings had been content to drive the English out of France; now, so Francis believed, there was a chance to drive the king out of England, his ‘den of cruelty and heresy’. With financial aid, the king of Scotland could marshal 60,000 men and march south. The emperor would invade the island with an army from Flanders, and Francis himself would advance from Picardy. Against these invading armies, Henry would be powerless, defenceless. After Henry’s deposition, so Francis proposed, the realm could be divided: the parts north of the Thames to be given to the emperor, the eastern part to Francis, and the northern borders to the king of Scotland. The people of Wales and Cornwall, natural enemies to the rest of England, had affinities to France. Even in prospect, there was confusion about the division of the spoils, about who would gain what. Giovenale replied to Francis that it would better to elect a new king of England, one who was, of course, a good Christian.56 In Toledo, Sir Thomas Wyatt, learnt that Pole came to ‘devise’ with the mperor for the provision of ‘seven or eight thousande Almaynes into the Lowe Cuntryes, and abowte foure thowsande Italiens’, in the sure hope that ‘the wounded myndes in England, with that fame, might have resorted to them’.57 ‘Wounded myndes’. The threat from the great Catholic powers was immeasurable, because Henry could not know how many ‘holowe hartes’ in England, ‘secret papists, who would like to restore things to their first state’, would find a higher allegiance to the pope than to their king, and turn to aid

52 BL Cotton MS Vespasian C vii, fol. 87r–v (L & P, XIII ii, 429). P. Marshall, ‘The Other Black Legend’, in Religious Identities in Henry VIII’s England (Aldershot, 2006), pp. 103–24. 53 L & P, XIII ii, 1087. 54 AGS, Estado, legajo 867/138 (LP, xiii(2). 1148); Marqués de Aguilar to Charles V, 26 December 1538, Rome. 55 ANG, 1, pp. 419–20, 423–5. 56 ANG, 1, pp. 437–40, Latino Giovenale, 21 January 1539, Paris; Ribier, i, p. 350; AGS, Estado, legajo 868/1; Marqués de Aguilar, 14 February 1539, Rome. 57 BL Cotton MS Vespasian C vii, fol. 24r (CWTW, i, letter 14); Wyatt to Cromwell, 15 March 1539, Toledo.

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a papally sponsored crusade.58 The memory of the Pilgrimage of Grace was vivid. Central to the ‘enterprise of England’ was the Curia’s belief that once the publication of the censures absolved Henry’s subjects from their allegiance they would rise again. Driven to desperation by the stop of commerce, the ‘islanders’ would turn against their tyrant king and even assassinate him.59 By April 1539 the pope would claim that his first intent was not to take up arms directly against Henry, but to stop trade with England, ‘which I consider of as much importance as a declaration of war’, for ‘his subjects are sure to rise in revolt, expel him from his kingdom and perhaps also kill him’.60 But he spoke retrospectively. In the winter of 1538 he did plan to take up arms, to wage holy war against England. Papal hopes of the continuing allegiance of the English people to the Holy See and of their king’s eventual reconciliation had been encouraged by Henry’s own ambassadors. By the autumn of 1538 Henry was deeply suspicious of his envoys at the French court, with more reason than he knew. In March 1536 the papal nuncio had reported that Bishop Gardiner yearned to see his king return to the true path, and that only Gardiner’s lack of the courage for martyrdom had impelled him to write in favour of the royal supremacy.61 Reporting how Sir John Wallop often came to seek him through the autumn and winter of 1536, the nuncio praised him as a ‘buon gentilhuomo’, ‘buon cristiano’, and devoted to Cardinal Pole.62 When reports spread of Pope Paul’s vaunting dynastic ambitions in April 1537, it was Gardiner who sprang to his defence: ‘it could not be true, for the Pope was a man of virtue’.63 In March 1537 letters were sent directly from Rome to Gardiner and Wallop.64 When Pole’s first mission failed, and Henry’s attempts to have the traitor Cardinal brought to England to join the ‘catalogue of martyrs’ were thwarted, there were suspicions that the sympathies of Sir Francis Bryan, the king’s special ambassador, and of Gardiner, were with Pole and the papacy.65 ‘A tragedie and a suspecte’ befell Gardiner when the king learnt of his scheme – perhaps conceived with Bryan – ‘to devise a way how the kynges maiestie myght have all thynges up right with the … busshope of rome’.66 As Francis and 58 Thomas Wriothesley wrote of ‘holowe hartes’: SP, viii, p. 189. L & P, XIII i, 205. 59 See, for example, ASV, Carte Farnesiane, 11, fol. 80v; Nuncio at the French court to Cardinal Farnese, 13 December 1536, Mélun; AGR, Papiers Gachard, 643, fol. 196v; Poggio to Farnese, 20 December 1538, Toledo. 60 CSPSp, vi(1), 1538–1542, p. 141; Marqués de Aguilar to Charles V, 13 April 1539, Rome. 61 ASV, AA, Arm. I–XVIII, 6529, fol. 201 (L & P, X, 570). 62 ASV, Carte Farnesiane, 11, fols 57, 62, 64, 76v. 63 ASPr, CFE, Francia, busta 7; Nuncio at the French court to Cardinal Farnese, 15 April 1537, Amiens. 64 L&P XII i 705; ANG, 1, p. 247. 65 ANG, 1, p. 253 (L & P, XII i, 996); BL Cotton MS Caligula E i, fol. 46 (L & P, XII i, 953); Peter Mewtas to [Cromwell], 16 April 1537. 66 BL Harley MS 78, fol. 14v; Cotton MS Titus B i, fols 94v–95.

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Charles made peace in the summer of 1538 and Henry stared into the abyss, he suspected that his ambassadors had deceived him.67 In Spain, successive English ambassadors had assured the emperor in secret audience that they regretted the Divorce and their king’s moves against the Church.68 At the courts of the Most Catholic King of Spain and the Most Christian King of France it was, naturally, politic overtly to regret Henry’s challenge to Rome, yet the Curia was assured that some English envoys longed for the end of the schism. A papal nuncio at the Imperial court reported that he was ‘working on’ Richard Pate, who was ‘truly a man of good will, who laments continually the error of his King’.69 Pate dared to write to Henry from Rome in April 1536 – ‘with tears I beseech, on bended knee, I plead’ – asking that Princess Mary be restored to the succession, and declaring that ‘all in the court of Rome desireth to have your love again’.70 In November, as the Pilgrims rose and failed, Pate entertained exiled Englishmen and listened to treasonable conversations at his table, and another of Henry’s ambassadors, Cavaliere Gregorio Casali, offered Pate sanctuary in Rome.71 Pate did not flee then, but when he did defect his treason would convulse English diplomacy and the court. As the enterprise of England loomed at the New Year of 1539, Henry’s ambassadors faced threats beyond even their king’s displeasure. One of the consequences of Henry’s excommunication would be the breakdown of diplomatic relations with him. On 2 January the pope called on the emperor to withdraw his ambassador from the court of ‘that impious and heretical tyrant’.72 If the French and Imperial ambassadors were called home, what would be the status of Henry’s ambassadors at the French and Imperial courts? Would the ambassadors of Charles and Francis be safe at the court of a king whom they believed to be beyond the constraints of reason and justice? In theory, ambassadors were inviolate, protected within the sanctuary of the laws of nations, even in the midst of armies, even if their masters were at war.73 But the ‘enterprise of England’ brought a crisis in diplomacy. Ius gentium might be revoked: indeed, lex talionis – the law of retaliation – might apply. Throughout Christendom a papal legate was sacrosanct, but no longer in England. Henry had sent assassins after Cardinal Pole in 1537, and might do so again.

67 L & P, XIII ii, 77. 68 P. Friedmann, Anne Boleyn: A chapter in English history, 1527–1536 (2 vols, London, 1884), i, pp. 150–52, 179. 69 Giovanni Guidiccioni: Le Lettere, a cura di M.T. Graziosi (2 vols, Roma, 1979), ii. p. 115. 70 L & P, X, 670, pp. 269, 274. 71 TNA, SP 1/132, fol. 164; SP 1/111, fol. 189r–v (L & P, XIII i, 1104; xi, 1131). 72 CSPSp, vi(1), 1538–1542, p. 97. 73 E.R. Adair, The Extraterritoriality of Ambassadors in the Sixteenth and Seventeenth Centuries (London, New York, 1929).

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In Spain, when Wyatt argued that the papal patrimony and primacy were usurped, and that the emperor should repudiate the Donation of Constantine, Charles ordered him to be silent, or be silenced. This was to threaten the Inquisition.74 At Christmas 1538 the papal nuncio unleashed the Inquisitors of Toledo against Wyatt to discover the ‘mala doctrina’ that this ‘maligno spirito [evil spirit]’ was spreading. So great was the danger to the faith from this ‘diabolical’, ‘possessed’ English ambassador that the pope himself commanded the Holy Office to investigate him.75 In France, the nuncio sought and received the French king’s permission to proceed against the English ambassador, Edmund Bonner.76 In Brussels, Thomas Wriothesley was detained as hostage for the safe return of the Imperial ambassador from England, and he lived in terror, for he knew that once Chapuys was returned, the way would be clear for them ‘to serche our beleaves more famyliarly’. ‘I am nowe here taken for a yong dyvel’. ‘We that be here may peradventure broyle a fagott’: that is, burn for heresy. ‘I shal surely to the potte’.77 At the moment that Wyatt and his household were under investigation in Spain, and as one of his servants languished in the Inquisition’s fearful secret prison, a public auto da fe was held at Bilbao. An Englishman was burned as a relapsed heretic, the first foreigner to suffer under the Spanish Inquisition.78 Henry VIII’s disobedience to the Holy See was justification enough for a crusade against him. Yet there was another reason, a compelling one. In the Curia they watched his seizure of the monasteries with horror, not only because of the sacrilege, but also because of the vast access of wealth it brought him: new wealth that might be used to raise an army for martial, evangelical purposes. Henry’s negotiations with the princes of the Schmalkaldic League gave substance to all the Curia’s fears, and by the end of 1538 rumours spread in Paris that Henry was raising 15,000 to 20,000 landsknechts.79 With so vast an army he could lead ‘some great action’. By early 1539 Pope Paul feared an English ‘enterprise’ against him. If the English king is not damaged, he will damage us, not only by spreading his heresy but with arms, and he will not cease fomenting the Lutherans and leading them in some great action, as is already known … .80

74 CSPSp, v(2), 1536–1538, pp. 421, 498–500; CSPFor, 1547–1553, p. 321. 75 For the pursuit of Wyatt by the Spanish Inquisition, see my Thomas Wyatt: The Heart’s Forest (London, 2012), ch. xiv. 76 ASV, AA, Arm. I–XVIII 6530, fols 135–136v. 77 SP, viii, pp. 150–1, 173–91 [the quotations are at pp. 151, 182]. 78 W. Monter, Frontiers of Heresy: The Spanish Inquisition from the Basque Lands to Sicily (Cambridge, 1990), pp. 37, 146. 79 ANG, 1, p. 425; nuncio at the French court to Cardinal Farnese, 26 December 1538. 80 ASPr, CFE, Roma, busta 422; Cardinal Farnese to Poggio, 27 January 1539, Rome (cited in Capasso, Paolo III, i, p. 687 n. 4).

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This ‘great action’ would be in Italy and would threaten not only pax Italiae but the Holy See itself; it would ‘kindle a fire in Italy’. Many feared a political conflagration in Italy that winter, but some saw the Farnese pope himself – ‘tyranissimo’81 – as the instigator. In such circumstances, princes threatened by the papal tyrant might make common cause. At mass at the New Year of 1539 Thomas Cromwell declared that the pope ‘had now thrown off the mask of hypocrisy and … sought to kindle a fire in Italy and sow war and discord there’.82 The death – the assassination – of Francesco Maria della Rovere, Duke of Urbino, on 21 October 1538 had laid Italy open to Farnese ambitions. ‘By this mannis dethe it may be that many thinges wil innovate in Italye’, so Cromwell’s agent in Venice foretold.83 One of Paul III’s first moves as pope had been to intervene in the disputed succession of Camerino, a principality in the Marches, where the precariousness of the Varano dynasty had offered an occasione for neighbouring princes. When Guidobaldo della Rovere, heir to the duchy of Urbino, married the heiress of Camerino without papal consent, he invoked the pope’s comminations. In 1535 – the same year in which he prepared censures against Henry – the pope placed Camerino under interdict. This dispute, as any dispute in Italian politics, sparked rivalry between the emperor and the French king, and the emperor gave his support to della Rovere. When Guidobaldo succeeded to the dukedom, the pope prepared war against him as a rebellious vassal, war not only in Camerino but in Urbino also.84 If Guidobaldo were driven from his principality, no other prince of Italy was secure, and some now appealed to the emperor for aid against papal tyranny, especially the pope’s rebels, those whom he had anathematized. The papal ‘enterprise of Camerino’ offered a great chance for English diplomacy, and Henry’s envoys took it. This was the moment to unsettle the fragile peace between the French king and the emperor, the chance to disrupt papal neutrality, and to divert the enterprise against England. At the French and Imperial courts, the English ambassadors stirred trouble. In France, they insinuated that it was the emperor, not the pope, who pursued war against Camerino, because he aimed to be monarch of all Italy.85 In Toledo at the end of November Wyatt urged the king to seize this opportunity offered by the ‘division of the potentates of Italy with the Bishop of Rome’:

81 So Cromwell described the pope to Henry VIII by 16 April: SP, i, p. 608. 82 L & P, XIV i, 37. 83 SP, viii, p. 81; Edmund Harvel to Thomas Cromwell, 25 October 1538, Venice. 84 J. Law, ‘The Ending of the Duchy of Camerino’, in Italy and the European Powers: the Impact of War, 1500–1530, ed. C. Shaw (Leiden and Boston, 2006), pp. 77–90. 85 This episode is described in more detail in my Thomas Wyatt: the Heart’s Forest.

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Concerning the Bishop of Rome, never better time to inflame malice against him than now; and in especial with the potentates of Italy; for all they are already moved against him and would fain have some good quarrel against him.86

By mid-December there were rumours that Wyatt had promised his king’s aid to the duke of Urbino, not only to defend his patrimony, but to drive the pope from Rome. Still in March 1539 Wyatt was hoping to sabotage the shaky alliance between Francis and the emperor, and pursuing a shadowy ‘practice’ that would ‘sett these grete frendes both in jelosy, and may fortune furder’.87 A ‘practice’ to ‘kindle a fire in Italy’ was wild and adventitious diplomacy, pursued in the press of circumstance, with no certain royal sanction. Conceived in the desperate weeks as the pope called for the enterprise against England, the ‘practice’ proposed offence as the best form of defence. Such a plan was not entirely implausible. Only a decade after the Sack of Rome, Italians were haunted by the memory of Bourbon’s army marching, unopposed, on an undefended Rome, and still remembered in despair how easily foreign armies had invaded in 1494. In 1527 Thomas Wyatt had been in the papal camp with Machiavelli and Guicciardini as they watched, helplessly, the impending disaster.88 A decade later, he saw that the divisions of Italy might, as before, allow a foreign army to enter and begin the Italian wars all over again. ‘His king will go with an army into Italy, and will have good intelligence there and a great following of Germans’, so he boasted at the Imperial court. This was fantasy, wrote Nuncio Poggio.89 Perhaps, but in Rome the prospect of thousands of landsknechts invading from the north was terrible and real. Henry could ‘with his money and the Lutherans’ men, light such a fire in Italy as would be difficult to repair’.90 The army that Charles VIII had led had, after all, not been huge. Hearing of English promises to provide military assistance to thwart Farnese ambitions in Italy, the nuncio in Spain warned darkly that before Henry’s money could reach Italy he would need it to defend himself at home. The Venetians, most fearful of Turkish attack, constantly urged that the League take action, that the Turkish crusade be prepared. England’s safety, too, lay in the ‘impresa Turchesca’, and at a desperate moment – for Venice, for England, and for himself – Wyatt had promised that his King would

86 BL Add. MS 5498, fol. 14v (L & P, XIII ii, 974(2)). 87 BL Cotton MS Vitellius B xiv, fol. 25v (L & P, XIII ii. 1068); Harley MS 282, fols 44–5 (L & P, XIV i, 92); BL Cotton MS Vespasian Cvii, fol. 32v (CWTW, i, letter 14); Wyatt to Cromwell, 16 March 1539, Toledo. 88 Carteggi di Francesco Guicciardini, a cura di P. Ricci (Roma, 1968–9), 13, p. 140; S. Brigden and J. Woolfson, ‘Thomas Wyatt in Italy’, RQ, 58 (2005), pp. 464–511. 89 Ven. Dep, i, p. 249; TNA, PRO 31/9/65, fol. 253 (L & P, XIV i, 561); Poggio to Cardinal Farnese, 18 March 1539, Toledo. 90 L & P, XIV ii, 1168; Cardinal Farnese to Pope Paul III, 27 June 1539.

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finance ten 10,000 troops to come to its aid.91 Everything seemed to wait on the emperor’s response to the pope’s legate. Cardinal Pole arrived in Toledo on 11 February 1539. Accounts of his audience with the emperor on the following day reveal a chasm between the pope’s demands and Imperial interests. For the pope, the crusade against England was more necessary than the crusade against the Infidel, with the consequence that the Holy League must make a truce, or even a universal peace, with the Turk to allow war against the heretic.92 Yet Charles countenanced no enterprise except the holy crusade against the Turk. The ‘paladin of Catholic Christendom’, he had vowed that this was the ‘time and the moment to make himself immortal … and for the salvation of all Christendom’.93 Contemplating a direct attack on Istanbul by sea, he was determined to lead the fleet of the Holy League in the spring of 1539. On 12 February all the Cardinals in Toledo signed a letter to their ‘Most Holy Father’, his ‘humble creatures’, assuring him of their devotion to the Holy See, but perhaps knowing already that this Holy Roman Emperor would not answer the papal summons to crusade against the heretic.94 To Pole the emperor insisted that war against England would be easy to begin, far harder to end. Habsburg dominions in Italy and the Balkans were endangered by the Turk, by land and sea, and war against England would leave them vulnerable. If the Lutheran princes rallied to Henry’s defence, there would be a ‘great flood’ of Germans in rebellion. Marvelling that the pope, the leader of the Holy League against the Turk, would abandon it, he asked two questions. If the Turk came to Italy, as far as Ancona, as he surely would, whether the pope would regard this as an extrinsic or an intrinsic evil? Whether, if the papal lands were as close to England as were the Imperial dominions in Flanders, he would be so eager to threaten war against the English king? 95 Charles believed that the tragic history of Pole’s family compromised Pole’s legation, and reading his Apologia had led him to suspect that Pole was a ‘subverter of princes’.96 Even though he was supposedly at peace with Francis, Charles was never sufficiently sure of him to risk alienating Henry. The most 91 Setton, Papacy and the Levant, iii, p. 440. Ven. Dep, i, p. 277; Mocenigo to the Doge, 16 January 1539, Toledo. 92 ANG, 1, p. 444; LP, xiv(1). 536. CSPSp, vi(1), 1538–1542, p. 141. 93 The description of Charles is James D. Tracy’s Emperor Charles V, Impresario of War: Campaign Strategy, International Finance, and Domestic Politics (Cambridge, 2002), p. 307. Ven. Dep, i, pp. 198, 202. 94 AGS, Estado, legajo 868/112. 95 Ven. Dep, i, p. 287; Mocenigo to the Doge, 18 February 1539. ASV, SS, Principi, 12, fols 16v–17v; Pole to Cardinal Farnese, 22 February 1539. AGR, Papiers Gachard, 643, fols 211–12; Poggio to Cardinal Farnese, 28 February 1539. For another account of this audience, see Höllger, ‘Reginald Pole and the Legations of 1537 and 1539’, pp. 147–8. 96 AGR, Papiers Gachard, 643, fol. 212; Ven. Dep, i, p. 288. Pole denied that his family’s sufferings impelled him to act: Pole’s Correspondence, pp. 221–3. The phrase is Professor Mayer’s: Reginald Pole, pp. 95–6.

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compelling, though unstated, reason not to answer the papal summons was the refusal of the Cortes to grant the emperor money, and the resistance of his nobility to any Imperial ambition that would take him away from his Spanish kingdoms.97 Cobos and Granvelle, Charles’s councillors, told Pole that once they knew the mind of the French king they would publish the censures. An earlier promise to stop commerce they admitted, but could not now fulfil.98 Letters from Rome in the first week of January, perhaps already received in Toledo, had brought assurances that Francis would act against England, if Charles acted in concert with him.99 Now, characteristically, the emperor delayed, he temporized. By 11 March he confessed that he could not do ‘what God wanted’: ‘Even though I am Emperor, I can only do what is humanly possible, because I am only a man.’100 On the 17 March the pope’s ‘humble son’, ‘El Rey’, wrote in his own hand of Pole’s legation, promising not to fail in his Christian duty, but never mentioning the ‘impresa d’Inglaterra’.101 His fear was always that ‘in cutting off the head of this serpent [Henry] … there might not grow up seven’.102 The great Christian princes failed to answer the papal call for a crusade against Henry in the spring of 1539. The French king was always an unlikely crusader, despite his promises. In the end, Charles committed himself neither to the enterprise of England nor the enterprise of the Turk. The Holy League dissolved and the ‘impresa Turchesca’ was abandoned when, in desperation, Venice made a truce with the Turk. With the rebel princes of Germany, too, Charles made a truce, whereby there would be a cessation of hostilities while a religious colloquy was convened.103 But the reconciliation of the English king – by persuasion or by force – remained the ardent hope of the pope and Curia. In May 1539 when Cardinal Farnese travelled to Castile to bring the pope’s condolences for the death of the Empress, he carried secret instructions. Charles and Francis must send special envoys – ‘protestanti [protestants]’ – to Henry to induce him to return to obedience to the Church and to God. If he refused, they must warn him that the Catholic monarchs would fulfil the commands of the Holy See ‘to execute by force the sentence of 97 Tracy, Emperor Charles V, Impresario of War, pp. 296–8. 98 ASV, SS, Principi, 12, fol. 17; C Höllger, ‘Reginald Pole and the legations of 1537 and 1539: diplomatic and polemical responses to the break with Rome’ (University of Oxford D.Phil. thesis, 1990), p. 130. 99 AGS, Estado, legajo 867/132, 138, 140. ASV, AA, Arm. I–XVIII, 6530, fol. 133. 100 Ven. Dep, i, pp. 293–8; Mocenigo to the Doge, 12 March 1539, Toledo. ASF, MP, 4296, fols 394, 408–9; Giovanni Bandino to the Duke of Florence, 10, 18 March 1539. The Emperor’s words were reported by Alfonso Rossetto to the Duke of Ferrara on 14 March: ASMo, CD, Ambasciatori, Spagna, busta 4. TNA, PRO 31/9/65, fols 246–52 (L & P, XIV i, 561). 101 AGS, Estado, legajo 868/118. 102 L & P, XIV ii, 761. 103 McEntegart, Henry VIII, the League of Schmalkalden, and the English Reformation, pp. 146, 151–2.

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excommunication and deprivation against him’.104 Again, as the pope sent Farnese to France at the end of 1539 with Marcello Cervini, their mission was partly to end the English schism, and the sending of ‘protestanti’ was again proposed.105 But even spiritual diplomacy had its dangers. A memorandum written by Cervini described his prospective spiritual embassy to the king of England. It was ‘dark’ and doubtful and ‘most strictly secret’, for ‘it is quite possible’, so Cervini feared, that Henry ‘will make sport’ of him, ‘and of his Holiness as well’, or worse. ‘The King of England must be moved to promise’ that Cervini’s life ‘shall not be in peril during his stay in England’.106 Cervini never went. In audience with Farnese in Amiens in February 1540, the French king confirmed the pope’s fears of Henry’s martial threat: so insecure and fearful of the dangers within his realm, he would save himself by ‘kindling a fire’ far from England. It would be easier, Francis believed, to invade and conquer England than to make war on the German Lutherans. The emperor, more cautious by far, told Farnese as he had told Pole, that war was easy to begin, but far harder to end, just as a great conflagration grew from a tiny spark.107 When reports of the threatened invasion first reached England they were too terrible to be believed. But by the New Year of 1539 there was acute awareness of the danger to the realm. Belated military preparations began, none of which could have been ready in time to protect England if any of the invading armies had come. In December the King marshalled a personal bodyguard of ‘Spears’ – the gentlemen pensioners – to defend himself; whether against invaders, or against his own people.108 A proclamation at the end of February 1539 made unlicensed shipping punishable by death, and orders came for the arrest of all Spanish ships in English ports, to act as hostages in case of Spanish reprisals against English shipping.109 Henry reviewed his navy, and armour was urgently purchased.110 When Thomas Cromwell displayed his armoury to the French ambassador, boasting that twenty nobles in the kingdom had greater ones, he revealed desperation

104 ASV, Misc. Arm. II, 49, fol. 210v; L & P, XIV i, 1081, 1110, 1142–3, 1149, 1168, 1203; CSPSp, viii, 1545–1546, p. 605. 105 ASV, Fondo Pio, 56, fols 34–142. 106 ASV, Fondo Pio, 56, fol. 91v; Cardinal Farnese to Pope Paul III, 30 January 1540; CSPSp, viii, 1545–1546, pp. 606–9; memorandum from Marcello Cervini to Cardinal Farnese. The memorandum was dated before Cervini was created cardinal in December 1539. 107 ASV, Fondo Pio, 56, fols 116v–17v, 148; Cardinal Farnese to Pope Paul III, 9 February 1540, Amiens; 24 February 1540, Ghent. 108 L & P, XIV ii, 548–50, 726, 745–6, 783. 109 TRP, i, 190. 110 J.R. Hale, ‘The defence of the realm, 1485–1558’, in The History of the King’s Works, iv, 1485–1660 (part ii), ed. H.M. Colvin, J. Summerson, M. Biddle, J.R. Hale and M. Merriman (London, 1982), pp. 367–76. H. Cripps-Day, Fragmenta Armentaria (Frome, 1934–5), I, iii, p. 12; cited in S. Anglo, The Great Tournament Roll of Westminster (2 vols, Oxford, 1968), i, p. 14.

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more than preparation.111 Hurried mapping showed England undefended. Even London, though walled, and guarded by the Tower, lay open, only feebly protected by its outlying sandbanks. Many fortifications marked in a contemporary map of the southwest were all in prospect – ‘not made’ or ‘half made’ – rather than existent.112 The chain of fortresses and bastions that began to be built along the English coast – from Berwick in the north to Falmouth and St Mawes in the far south-west – are testament in stone to the King’s alarm. In London on 8 May there were musters of all the City troops, to the number of 16,000, and so in every town, to prove a military strength more apparent than real.113 Henry’s enemies saw Calais, his last bridgehead on the Continent, as the weak point in England’s defences, and were devising ways to overthrow it, from within as well as from without. At the height of the invasion scare the Earl of Hertford went ‘to view the strength of Calais’. He discovered not only Calais’s vulnerability but also the religious divisions that undermined it.114 Looking back with a complacency he cannot have felt at the time, Thomas Chaloner, who had been in Wyatt’s household in Toledo during the crisis, asked ‘what circumstances have ever assailed our state that were more to be feared, in view of the magnitude of the danger, or less to be feared, inasmuch as they were warded off under such a king?’115 In England the religious atmosphere was radically changed. The genesis of Henry’s reaction in religion remains obscure, for it lay in his conscience as well as in political expediency. Did the prospect of crusade against him condition his religious strategies for his Church? In the Curia, naturally, they believed so, and thought his moves to halt reform were a pretence, intended to ‘cool down’ the fury of Christian princes and avert war against him.116 It was true that Henry was without allies, for the truce between the emperor and the princes of the Schmalkaldic League barred him from its membership. At Easter 1539 traditional ceremonies returned. Although attempts were made to persuade reformers that these ceremonies were adiaphoristically acceptable, no one could miss the change. The king crept to the cross on Good Friday, to the delight of traditionalists. He began to woo conservative opinion at home and abroad.117 In the summer the reactionary Act of Six Articles was 111 SP, i, p. 593; Cromwell to Henry VIII, 5 February 1539. 112 Henry VIII: Man and Monarch, ed. S. Doran (London, 2009), 210, 211. 113 L & P, XIV i, 400, 652, 940–1. 114 For the troubles in Calais, see LL, 5, ch. 12. 115 Thomas Chaloner’s In Laudem Henrici Octavi (Latin edition and English translation), ed. J.B. Gabel and C.C. Schlam (Lawrence, Kansas, 1979), ll. 649–51, pp. 68–9. The editors propose instead that Chaloner referred to the attempted French invasion of 1545: pp. 11, 105. 116 ASV, Carte Farnesiane, 11, fol. 169; AA, Arm. I–XVIII, fol. 175. 117 TRP, i, 188. For the religious reaction and the genesis of the Act of Six Articles, see McEntegart, Henry VIII, the League of Schmalkalden, and the English Reformation, pp. 149–67; D. MacCulloch, Thomas Cranmer: A Life (New Haven & London, 1996), ch. 7; G. Redworth,

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passed, and in the next year it began to be implemented. As the emperor and the French king met in Paris at the New Year of 1540, a ‘duumvirate’ who might rule the world between them and save Christendom from heresy, Henry became – or believed himself to be – highly vulnerable. The fall of Thomas Cromwell was a necessary sacrifice, the pledge that Henry was a true Christian prince.118 The ‘impresa d’Inghilterra’ failed. The great Catholic powers declined to answer the papal call for crusade, and the English people did not rise against their king. Yet the terrors for England in 1539–40 were real, and one part of Henry’s dominions did rebel. In Ireland, in the spring of 1539, the ‘comon reporte’ was ‘with Odonell and Oneile and all Irishemen, that the Bishop of Rome, the Emperor, and Frenche King shall invade Inglande, and the King of Scottes shall invade Ireland, and shall come through Ulster’. The War of the Geraldine League confronted the English crown with new dangers as the O’Neill and the O’Donnell swept down from Ulster with their underlords, in united Gaelic resistance, and priests denounced Henry VIII as ‘the most heretique and worst man in the world’.119 In 1535 the pope had offered support to the rebel earl of Kildare, and four years later ‘Young Gerald’, heir of the dispossessed Fitzgeralds, fled to the Continent and to Cardinal Pole, and Geraldine hopes with him. He would remain a pawn in continental conspiracy against the English king.120 Armadas threatened again throughout the century, in the name of the old religion, sponsored by the papacy, and most would come via Ireland. The pope sent an invasion fleet against Elizabeth in 1579 to the west of Ireland, a crusade.121 Thereafter, the papacy provided the impetus, and Spain the military might. We remember the enterprises against England of 1588, 1596, 1601, how nearly Elizabeth lost Ireland, how unprepared was England, had the Armadas landed. ‘The most heretique and worst man in the world’. In a few years Henry VIII had become a sacred monster, a spectre of tyranny and irreligion. The emperor’s envoys returning from the English court in the summer of 1540 urgently sought absolution, and from a cardinal, for the sin of communing with the heretic king.122 His malign reputation grew through the century, until Henry and the Great Turk, whom Pole had juxtaposed, insensibly became fused in the Catholic imagination. In an early seventeenth-century fresco in ‘A study in the formulation of policy: The genesis and evolution of the Act of Six Articles’, JEH, 37 (1986), pp. 42–67; G. Bernard, The King’s Reformation: Henry VIII and the Remaking of the English Church (New Haven and London, 2005), pp. 497–505. 118 For the diplomatic advantage that came with Cromwell’s fall, see Bernard, The King’s Reformation, pp. 556–69. 119 SP, iii, pp. 132–63 (the quotations are at p. 140); SP, i, pp. 589, 601. 120 Capasso, Paolo III, i, p. 389. 121 Tyerman, England and the Crusades, ch. 13. 122 AGR, Papiers Gachard, 644, fols 198–9; Marcello Cervini to Cardinal Farnese, 23 July 1540, Dordrecht.

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the Charterhouse of San Martino in Naples, Henry is portrayed overseeing the martyrdom of the English Carthusians. He wears the turban of the Great Turk into whom he has metamorphosed.123

123 This fresco, the work of either Domenico Gargiuoli (1612–1679) or Belisario Corenzio (1558–1643), is based on illustrations of the martyrdoms of the Carthusians by an unknown artist, published in Rome in 1555 and dedicated to John, Cardinal Bishop of Albano: Dom Maurice Chauncy, The Passion and Martyrdom of the Holy English Carthusian Fathers, A.D. 1570, ed. G.W.S. Curtis (London, 1935), illustration facing p. 38.

13 One Survived: The Account of Katherine Parr in Foxe’s “Book of Martyrs” Thomas S. Freeman

Many people are familiar with the slightly callous rhyme summarizing the most colourful royal marital career in English history: Henry VIII to six wives was wedded,

One died, one survived, two divorced, two beheaded.

This chapter concerns Katherine, the wife that survived, and examines the occasion on which this survival was supposedly threatened. According to John Foxe, the only source for this episode, Katherine, accustomed to discussing religious topics with her husband, began to debate with him. In particular she prodded Henry: that as he had to the glory of God, and his eternall fame, begun a good and godly worke in banishing that monstrous Idoll of Rome, so he would thoroughly persiste and finish the same, clensing and purging his Churche of England cleane from the dregges therof, wherin as yet remayned great superstition. But albeit the king grew towardes his latter ende very sterne and opinionate so that of few he could be content to be taught, but worst of all to be contended withall by argument.1

And while Henry had, at first, enjoyed these discussions, as his health grew worse, Katherine’s assertiveness began to annoy him. As Henry’s health deteriorated, he abandoned his former practice of calling upon his wife. 1 John Foxe, The ecclesiasticall history contayning the Actes and monuments (London, 1570), STC 11223, p. 1422. Hereafter this work will be referred to as A &M [1570]. The entire story of Katherine’s altercation, and reconciliation, with Henry is on A&M [1570], pp. 1422–5. I would like to thank Susan Doran, Aysha Pollnitz, Richard Rex, Judith Richards, Alec Ryrie, Susan Wabuda and the editors of this book for their very instructive and valuable comments on earlier drafts of this chapter.

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Instead Katherine would visit him, either after dinner or after supper. During one of these visits, Stephen Gardiner, the bishop of Winchester, happened to be present. A sharp argument on religious topics – possibly exacerbated by Gardiner’s presence – ensued. Although Henry gave no sign of his vexation while Katherine was present, after the Queen had departed he exclaimed, ‘A good hearing … it is when women become such Clerkes and a thing much to my comfort, to come in myne old dayes to be taught by my wife.’2 Gardiner, hearing this, began to stoke the king’s anger. He secured authorization from Henry to draw up articles charging Katherine with heresy and planned to have the rooms of three ladies searched. These women – Lady Anne Herbert, Katherine’s sister, Lady Maud Lane, her cousin and childhood friend and Lady Elizabeth Tyrwhit – were all intimates of the queen and had pronounced evangelical sympathies. Gardiner was confident that the search would uncover heretical books and that this his would justify arresting Katherine, transporting her from Whitehall (where these events took place) to the Tower and there charging her with heresy. Testimony obtained from Herbert, Lane and Tyrwhit, who were also to be arrested, could be used to buttress further the charges against the queen. Katherine suspected nothing and continued to visit, and argue with, Henry. According to Foxe, Henry allowed this situation to develop, ‘not upon any evill minde or mislykyng’ of the queen, but rather simply to see how far Gardiner would dare to go. On the eve of Katherine’s planned arrest, Henry confided the scheme ‘unto one of his Physicians, either Doct. Wendie, or els Owen, but rather Wendy, as is supposed’.3 Yet, this physician did not inform the queen of her impending arrest. Instead ‘the bill of Articles drawen against the Quene and subscribed with the kinges owne hand’ was mislaid and brought immediately to Katherine by ‘some godly person’. On seeing the bill of articles with Henry’s signature on it, Katherine, quite understandably, ‘for the sodayne feare therof, fell incontinent into a great melancholy and agony, bewailing and taking on in such sorte, as was lamentable to see; as certayne of her Ladies and gentlewomen being yet alyve, which were then present about her, can testifie’.4 Katherine took to her bed and Henry sent his physicians to treat her. While treating the queen, Thomas Wendy revealed the full details of the plot against her. He advised her to submit promptly to Henry and to ’frame and conform herself unto the King’s mind’. Hearing of her illness, Henry came to visit her. (Given Henry’s well-known aversion to visiting the sick and his equally wellknown refusal to confront those he was determined on destroying, this must have been encouraging). Katherine told Henry that her illness was caused by her fear that she had displeased him. Henry was somewhat mollified and 2 A&M [1570], p. 1423. 3 Ibid., p. 1424. The two physicians referred to are Thomas Wendy and George Owen; there will be further discussion of them shortly. 4 Ibid., p. 1424, my emphasis.

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Katherine, pressing her advantage, obtained permission to visit the king on the following day: And so first commandyng her ladies to convey away their bookes, which were against the law, the next night followyng after supper, shee (wayted upon only by the Lady Herbart her sister and the Lady Lane, who carried the candle before her) went unto the kynges bead [i.e., bed] chamber, whom she founde sitting and talking with certeine Gentleman of his chamber.5

Henry received her courteously and began to discuss theological matters. Wisely, Katherine did not rise to the bait. Instead she sat on Henry’s lap and expatiated on the inferiority of women to men, particularly in their reasoning ability. She further declared that she would defer to the king’s wisdom in all matters. Henry, however, was still wary. ‘Not so by Saint Mary, quoth the King. You are become a Doctor, Kate, to instruct us (as we take it) and not to be instructed or directed by us.’6 The queen protested that if she had seemed to dispute with Henry, it was only to distract from the pain his infirmities were causing him and also because she hoped to learn from his sage answers. Henry exclaimed: ‘And is it even so sweete heart … Then perfect frendes are we nowe againe, as ever at any time heretofore.’7 He then began kissing her. The following day, when Katherine’s arrest had been scheduled, Henry went into the garden at Whitehall Palace and summoned the queen to join him. She came, accompanied only by Lady Herbert, Lady Lane and Lady Tyrwhitt. While the royal couple were strolling in the garden, Thomas Wriothesley, the Lord Chancellor, entered, with 40 members of the royal guard, to arrest the queen. Henry led Wriothesley aside. The chancellor knelt and spoke certain words to the king, ‘but what they were (for that they were softly spoken and the king a good pretty distance from the queene) is not well knowen’. Henry’s response to Wriothesley was, however, perfectly audible as Henry shouted at him, calling him a beast, a knave and a fool. After ordering Wriothesley to leave, Henry returned to Katherine and her ladies. The queen tried to intercede for Wriothesley, whereupon Henry gently chided her, telling her that she did not know how little charity he deserved from her. Foxe triumphantly concludes: To this the Queene in charitable manner replying in few wordes, ended that talk, having also by Gods only blessing, happely for that tyme and ever, escaped the dangerous snares of her bloudy and cruell enemies.8

5 6 7 8

Ibid., p. 1424. Ibid., p. 1424. Ibid., pp. 1424–5. Ibid., p. 1425.

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So, at least, runs Foxe’s account. Is it accurate? Our understanding of Henry VIII’s character, of the role and influence of his sixth wife and of the religious and political climate of his court in the last years of his life rest on the answer to this question. Moreover, a full understanding of this episode – if it occurred – also helps to explain what happened at the beginning of Edward VI’s reign. It should also be kept in mind that a proper analysis of this episode does not only consist of an examination of the veracity of Foxe’s story, but also the assumptions on which it was based: that there was a carefully planned campaign to destroy Katherine and other evengelicals and that this campaign was led by Stephen Gardiner. In fact, scholarly opinion has been divided on the question of whether Foxe’s story should be believed. J.J. Scarisbrick, the author of an acclaimed biography of Henry, and Susan James, the biographer of Katherine, both accept Foxe’s story; although Scarisbrick is puzzled by Henry’s behaviour. James has vigorously championed the authenticity of the story.9 David Starkey has done likewise.10 G.R. Elton and Susan Brigden, in their magisterial surveys of the period, and Janel Mueller, in her edition of Katherine’s writings, all repeat the tale without reservation.11 Lucy Wooding, in her recent biography of Henry VIII, is inclined to believe Foxe’s account on the grounds that there ‘is no obvious propagandist point achieved by this story, which suggests that it may in essentials be accurate’.12 Yet the notes of caution in Wooding’s wary endorsement of Foxe’s tale, have been sounded by other scholars. Diarmaid MacCulloch mentions the episode, describes the account of Parr’s near-arrest as ‘circumstantial’, and moves on to more fertile fields of investigation.13 George Bernard warns that ‘perhaps we should be sceptical’ of this story, while Alec Ryrie goes further, declaring that ‘We cannot be certain that it happened at all, much less in the melodramatic form that we have it’.14 Glyn Redworth has lodged a number of objections against the veracity of the tale. He observes that Foxe’s account, written decades later, is the first mention of these events and wonders why contemporaries were silent about them. In particular, Redworth finds it 9 J.J. Scarisbrick, Henry VIII (London, 1968), pp. 479–81; Susan James, Kateryn Parr: The making of a queen (Aldershot, 1999), pp. 274–80. 10 David Starkey, Six wives: The queens of Henry VIII (London, 2004), pp. 760–64. 11 G.R. Elton, Reform and Reformation: England, 1509–1558 (London, 1977), pp. 329–30; Susan Brigden, New worlds, lost worlds: The rule of the Tudors, 1485–1603 (London, 2000), p. 138; Katherine Parr: The complete works and correspondence, ed. Janel Mueller (Chicago, 2011), pp. 22–4. 12 Lucy Wooding, Henry VIII (Abingdon, 2009), p. 269. 13 Diarmaid MacCulloch, Thomas Cranmer: A life (New Haven and London, 1996), p. 354 n.12. 14 George Bernard, The king’s Reformation: Henry VIII and the remaking of the English Church (New Haven and London, 2005), p. 592; Alec Ryrie, The gospel and Henry VIII: Evangelicals in the early English Reformation (Cambridge, 2003), p. 56.

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curious that these events were not brought up at Stephen Gardiner’s trial, especially since great play was made there of his intrigues against Cranmer in 1543. Redworth also maintains that Foxe did not cite any sources for his account of Katherine Parr, in contrast to his usual practice.15 Redworth argues that Foxe invented this story and advances a theory as to how and why this reconstruction occurred. He speculates that Foxe saw an entry in the Privy Council register for May 1546, recording that Lord Thomas Howard was examined by the Privy Council for indiscreet talk about the Scriptures held in the Queen’s chamber. Redworth suggests that: ‘Once we accept that in the Privy Council’s register Foxe saw the essential ingredients of another plot against the queen, it is easy to see how he was tempted to compose a fuller script.’16 Ingenious as this hypothesis is, it sinks upon colliding with an iceberg compounded of two cold, hard facts: Foxe first wrote the account of Katherine Parr in the 1570 edition of the Acts and monuments, but he did not consult the Privy Council registers until sometime after 1576, when two of his patrons, Sir Thomas Heneage and Micheal Heneage became joint keepers of the Tower records, and Foxe thereby gained access to them. All of Foxe’s citations of, and quotations from, the Privy Council registers first appear in the 1583 edition of the Acts and monuments.17 Moreover, the only material Foxe drew from the Privy Council registers concerns the reign of Mary I; there is no indication that he consulted them for the reign of Henry VIII. Some of Redworth’s other objections can be dismissed. While Foxe often cited the names of his informants, he did not do so invariably. For example, Foxe does not relate his sources for the stories of Henry VIII pardoning George Blagg for heresy or of Henry presenting Thomas Cranmer with his signet ring, allowing the archbishop to forestall his arrest by the Privy Council.18 And, in fact, as we have seen, Foxe does state that certain of Katherine’s ladies, who were present, could testify to her ordeal.19

15 Glyn Redworth, In defence of the Church Catholic: The life of Stephen Gardiner (Oxford, 1990), pp. 233–4. 16 Redworth, Church Catholic, p. 234. 17 See Elizabeth Evenden and Thomas S. Freeman, Religion and the book in early modern England: The making of Foxe’s ‘Book of Martyrs’ (Cambridge, 2011), p. 297. Also see Thomas S. Freeman, ‘Foxe, John (1516/17–1587)’, in ODNB; J.D. Alsop, ‘Heneage, Michael (1540–1600)’, in ODNB and Micheal Hicks, ‘Heneage, Sir Thomas (b. in or before 1532, d. 1595)’, in ODNB. 18 A&M [1570], pp. 1427 and 2040–41. Foxe’s informant for the Blagg story may well have been Francis Russell, the second earl of Bedford. (See Thomas S. Freeman and Sarah E. Wall, ‘Racking the body, shaping the text: The account of Anne Askew in Foxe’s “Book of Martyrs”’, Renaissance Quarterly, 54 (2001), p. 1185). It is virtually certain that Ralph Morice was the source for Foxe’s story of Cranmer and the ring; it is also told in a biographical sketch of Cranmer which remained unprinted until the nineteenth century (Corpus Christi College Cambridge MS 128, pp. 420–5, printed in Narratives of the days of the Reformation, ed. J. G. Nichols, Camden Society, original series 87 (London, 1859), pp. 254–8). 19 A&M [1570], p. 1424.

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The point that contemporaries were silent about Parr’s near arrest is a much stronger objection. One reason why the issue may not have come up at Gardiner’s trial was that he might not have played as prominent a role in plotting against Katherine as Foxe maintains. But that still doesn’t explain why there was no mention of, or even reference to, this episode before 1570. It is striking, and curious, that some word of the dramatic confrontation between Henry and Katherine did not reach any of the ambassadors at Henry’s court. This is probably because it was not in the interests of anyone to leak it. Evangelicals – including Katherine’s ladies – would not have wanted to disseminate a story that called into question the queen’s standing with her husband. Allies of Wriothesley and other conservatives would have been similarly reluctant to spread a tale in which the Lord Chancellor was humiliated in the course of hunting heresy at court. It is also surprising that Foxe did not mention it in the first edition of the Acts and monuments, printed in 1563, as Foxe had lived in the palace of John Parkhurst, bishop of Norwich and Katherine Parr’s former chaplain, from 1560–62.20 There would have been ample opportunity for Parkhurst to relate the incident to Foxe, had he known of it. But Katherine may not have confided in her chaplain – if the events Foxe described did happen they must have been traumatic for Katherine. They may have been mortifying as well; after all, the queen was brutally slapped down for voicing her beliefs. It is possible, perhaps even to be expected, that Katherine kept silent about what transpired between her and Henry. David Starkey has, in contrast, pointed out a crucial piece of evidence supporting Foxe’s account. He observes that on 24 October 1546, Thomas Wendy was granted a valuable manor and rectory for his services as the queen’s physician. Starkey plausibly suggests that this was a reward to Wendy for his aid to Katherine during her time of crisis with Henry.21 What is even more significant, however, is that Foxe knew the names of the court physicians, and of Katherine’s ladies, a quarter of a century later. This detail suggests that the story was not Foxe’s invention. Conversely so do the points of the story that Foxe states that he does not know, such as his uncertainty as to whether Henry disclosed the queen’s arrest to Wendy or to Owen or his ignorance of what Wriothesley said to Henry in the garden at Whitehall. (The former is something that one of Katherine’s ladies would not know at first hand and Foxe explicitly states that what Wriothesley said to Henry was out of earshot of Katherine and her ladies). If Foxe had invented the story why didn’t he fabricate these details? A further point about which Foxe is uncertain, or more accurately, inconsistent, is when Katherine’s fateful, and potentially fatal, disagreement 20 See Freeman, ‘Foxe, John’, in ODNB. 21 Starkey, Six wives, p. 764.

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with Henry took place. At one point Foxe declares that it happened ‘about the year after the kyng returned from Bulleyne’.22 As Henry returned from Boulogne in October 1544, this would place the incident in the autumn of 1545. However, on the same page of the Acts and monuments, Foxe states that the incident occurred after the execution of Anne Askew, which took place on 16 July 1546. Such chronological confusion is typical with Foxe, but, fortunately, his account provides some clues as to when Katherine’s near arrest actually occurred. Foxe states repeatedly that Katherine’s falling out with Henry, and its immediate aftermath, took place at Whitehall.23 Henry spent the summer of 1545 touring the southern coast and the royal couple then stayed in Windsor from mid-September through October. They were in Whitehall throughout November and the first part of December before spending Christmas at Hampton Court. At the beginning of 1546, Henry and Katherine were still staying at Hampton Court. They then proceeded to Greenwich where Henry was laid up with a fever from late February onwards. On 28 March 1546 the royal couple moved from Greenwich to Whitehall where they remained until the first week of August 1546, when they departed for Hampton Court.24 The king and queen would not be together again at Whitehall until 10 January 1547, when Henry was near death and Katherine was not permitted to see him.25 Thus the incidents that Foxe recounted almost certainly would have taken place either in November or early December 1545 or between the end of March and the beginning of August 1546. These dates can be narrowed by examining the movements of the people named in Foxe’s account. William Butts, who had been Henry’s physician since 1528, died on 22 November 1545 and was replaced by George Owen on 24 November.26 On 8 March 1546, a messenger was paid the lavish sum of £4 for riding up to Cambridge to summon Thomas Wendy to court.27 As Starkey has observed, the unusually high fee paid to the messenger suggests that the summons was urgent.28 Both Wendy and Owen then were present at court from 8 March 1546 onwards. (Both attended Henry at his death.) Curiously, Foxe does not mention Robert Huicke, physician to both Henry and Katherine, in his account. This might be because Huicke was preoccupied with his own problems at the time. Sometime in the spring of 1546, Huicke became embroiled in a nasty dispute with his wife, expelling her from his house for alleged lewd conduct. (Interestingly, Huicke obtained 22 A&M [1570], p. 1422. 23 Ibid., pp. 1423 and 1424. 24 L & P, XX (ii), pp. 166, 254, 258, 271, 354, 402, 434 and 479. 25 L & P, XXI (i), p. 187, Starkey, Six wives, p. 761 and James, Kateryn Parr, pp. 278 and 284–5. 26 L & P XX (ii), p. 451; also see C.T. Martin and Rachel E. Davis, ‘Butts, Sir William (c. 1485–1545)’, in ODNB. 27 APC I, pp. 470–71. 28 Starkey, Six wives, p. 762.

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Henry’s permission for this; perhaps this was necessary since the Huickes were living at court.) The Privy Council examined Huicke about the matter on 11, 12 and 14 May 1546 and – strikingly, given the patriarchal culture of early modern England – the councillors reported that Huicke’s wife had been falsely accused and denounced the physician for his cruelty to her.29 It is even possible that Wendy was brought in to replace Huicke and that the urgency with which Wendy was summoned may have had something to do with a sudden eruption in the Huicke household. Finally Stephen Gardiner was on the Continent from October 1545 and only returned to court on 21 March 1546.30 Although much of what Foxe declares about Gardiner’s alleged plotting against Katherine may well be baseless, there is no reason to doubt his claim that Gardiner was present at a meeting of Henry and Katherine just before Henry ordered her arrest. Therefore Gardiner’s movements, as well as those of Wendy and Owen, indicate that the queen’s brush with danger would have taken place during the royal couple’s stay at Whitehall in 1546. Moreover the consistent accuracy of these details of Foxe’s story further suggests that it was not his invention, but that it was based on the report of an informed source. Who was this informant? One scholar has maintained – in the course of suggesting that Foxe’s account of Parr is fictitious – that ‘It is hard to imagine a verifiable route for a story that Foxe publishes nearly a generation after the alleged events had taken place’.31 Actually a plausible, if not absolutely verifiable, route can be navigated, beginning with Foxe’s statement that certain ladies and gentlewomen, ‘being yet alive, which were then present about her’ could testify about the events he describes.32 Foxe relates that two women (Anne Herbert and Maud Lane) accompanied Katherine on her nocturnal visit to Henry and that three women (Herbert, Lane and Elizabeth Tyrwhit) were present with the queen when Wriothesley came to arrest her. (Foxe 29 APC I, p. 417., L & P, XXI i, p. 407 and Gordon Goodwin and Rachel E. Davis, ‘Huicke, Robert (d. 1580/81)’, in ODNB. In March 1547, Huicke appealed unsuccessfully against a divorce granted to his wife (CPR, 1547–48, p. 138). 30 Redworth, Church Catholic, pp. 224 and 232. 31 John King, ‘Fiction and fact in Foxe’s “Book of Martyrs”’ in John Foxe and the English Reformation, ed. David Loades (Aldershot, 1997), p. 32. 32 A&M [1570], p. 1424, my emphasis. Linda Porter, the author of a popular biography of Katherine Parr, has confused this issue by asserting that Foxe obtained his information about Parr from an unnamed person who ‘heard from archbishop Cranmer’s own mouth’ (Katherine the queen: The remarkable life of Katherine Parr (London, 2010), p. 259). Porter is misquoting a passage that Foxe placed after the account of Katherine, stating that the plot against her reminded him of another instance of Gardiner’s evil scheming. Foxe then states that he is about to relate the story (concerning Gardiner’s thwarting various ecclesiastical reforms at the beginning of 1546), ‘according as I have it recorded and storyed by him, which it heard of Cranmer’s owne mouth declared’ (A&M [1570], p. 1425). It was the story of Gardiner’s blocking the reforms, not the story of Katherine Parr, which Foxe claimed originally came from Cranmer.

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states that on the latter occasion, Herbert, Lane and Tyrwhit were Katherine’s only attendants).33 Anne Herbert, Katherine’s sister and the wife of Sir William Herbert (later the first earl of Pembroke), died in 1552.34 Maud Lane, Katherine’s cousin and the widow of Sir Ralph Lane, died in 1558 or 1559.35 It is, of course, possible that they might have told someone about the queen’s narrowly averted destruction, and that this person related the story to Foxe. But I think that this is unlikely in view of both Foxe’s insistence that his informant was alive and in view of the secrecy that seems to have surrounded the affair. Elizabeth Tyrwhit, a confidante of Katherine’s and the wife of Sir Robert Tyrwhit, Katherine’s master of horse and later her comptroller, survived until 1578.36 Admittedly Tyrwhit does not seem to have been present during Katherine’s submission to, and reconciliation with, Henry. But it is very likely that Katherine and the other ladies would have told her what happened. Moreover, there is a strong connection between Tyrwhit and Foxe. In November 1577, John Field, a fiery London cleric and writer, dedicated one of his less controversial works, a translation of a devotional work by the Huguenot minister Jean de l’Espine, to Elizabeth Tyrwhit.37 A decade previously Field had been acting as a sort of research assistant for Foxe, collecting and verifying material that would appear in the 1570 edition of the Acts and monuments.38 It is thus more than probable that the story of Katherine Parr’s ordeal was transmitted, through Field, from Tyrwhit to Foxe.39 Foxe’s account of Katherine came from an informed source and a number of its details are verifiable. Others are vividly, if circumstantially described, and much of it is plausible. I would suggest, however, that there is an important aspect of the account that is neither verifiable nor plausible: its depiction of Stephen Gardiner as the architect of a plot against the queen. This has become a virtual article of faith with some scholars, one, for example declaring that 33 A&M [1570], pp. 1424 and 1425. 34 See Narasingha P. Sil, ‘Herbert, William, first earl of Pembroke (1506/7–1570)’, in ODNB. 35 See Susan E. James, ‘Lane [née Parr], Maud [Matilda], Lady Lane (c. 1507–1558/9)’, in ODNB. 36 See Patricia Bruce, ‘Tyrwhit [née Oxenbridge], Elizabeth, Lady Tyrwhit (d. 1578)’, in ODNB. For Tyrwhit’s life also see Elizabeth Tyrwhit’s Morning and Evening Prayers, ed. Susan M. Felch (Aldershot and Burlington, VT, 2007), pp. 1–17. 37 Jean de l’Espine, An excellent treatise of christian righteousnes, trans. John Field (London, 1577), sigs A2r–A3v. For the identiciation of Lady Elizabeth Tyrwhit – rather than a younger kinswoman and namesake – as the deicatee of Field’s translation see Felch, Prayers, p. 16 and Patrick Collinson, ‘John Field and Elizabethan Puritanism’, in Godly people: Essays on English Protestantism and Puritanism (London, 1983), p. 350. 38 BL, Harley MS 416, fols 185r and 188r. 39 There may well have been additional testimony involved; Foxe speaks of the testimony of ladies (in the plural). If this not a rhetorical flourish, then Foxe (or Field) may have unearthed some corroborating details from others serving Katherine at the time. But, in all probability, the main narrative of what happened came from Tyrwhit.

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‘Bishop Gardiner failed in a more desperate ploy; no less than to destroy the Queen by persuading the King that she was a heretic’.40 G.R. Elton and Susan James both go so far as to assert not only that Gardiner was the mastermind behind a conspiracy to unseat the queen, but that the failure of the scheme led to Gardiner’s fall from royal favour at the end of the reign.41 Yet Gardiner’s very involvement in a plot against Katherine, much less his heading it, is open to question. Admittedly, Foxe unequivocally accuses Gardiner of leading a conspiracy to destroy Katherine. Yet Foxe also accuses Gardiner of having orchestrated the fall of Anne Boleyn (even though Foxe acknowledges that Gardiner was in France at the time), of subverting Henry’s marriage to Anne of Cleves and of conspiring to have the Princess Elizabeth assassinated during her sister’s reign.42 More evidence is needed, beyond Foxe’s rounding up of the usual suspect, to demonstrate Gardiner’s involvement. Furthermore, Glyn Redworth has observed that Gardiner had several reasons for not wanting a renewal of factional warfare. Gardiner’s attempts to topple Cranmer in 1543 had backfired, endangering his own life and resulting in the execution of his nephew Germain Gardiner. Having been so badly burned, Gardiner may well have been reluctant to place his hand near the fire again. Moreover, by 1544, Gardiner had struck up ‘a friendship of sorts’ with Edward Seymour, the earl of Hertford. Any investigation of heresy at court ran a serious risk of incriminating the countess of Hertford, if not her husband.43 Sentiment aside, Gardiner might well have balked at imperilling a potentially valuable connection with Hertford who was, after all, the uncle of the heir apparent to the throne. This is conjectural and it is possible to maintain that Gardiner, whether from religious zeal or a desire for revenge, was driven to destroy the evangelicals no matter what the cost. Yet the bishop does not seem to have been particularly active in the heresy hunts of 1546. When he was involved, as in examining Anne Askew, it was in his capacity as a member of the Privy Council. In fact, despite Susan James’s exaggeration of his role in Askew’s ordeals, Gardiner’s

40 Brigden, New worlds, p. 138. Janel Mueller also takes Foxe’s assertions about Gardiner at face value and emphasizes Gardiner’s alleged role as the mastermind of a conspiracy against Katherine (Mueller, Katherine Parr, pp. 22–4 and 47 n.86). 41 Elton, Reform and Reformation, p. 330 and James, Kateryn Parr, p. 279. Redworth, on the other hand, provides strong evidence for Gardiner’s continued favour with Henry through the summer and autumn of 1546, with the two only falling out in November 1546 over Gardiner’s principled, if impolitic, resistance to a proposed ‘exchange’ of diocesan lands with the Crown (Church Catholic, pp. 237–40). 42 A&M [1570], pp. 1233, 1296, 1952 and 2294. For the vilification of Stephen Gardiner by Foxe and by previous evangelicals and Protestants, see Michael Riordan and Alec Ryrie, ‘Stephen Gardiner and the making of a Protestant villain’, SCJ, 34 (2003), pp. 1039–63. 43 Redworth, Church Catholic, pp. 236–7.

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involvement was limited to a few brief, although sharp, exchanges with her, in which he was joined by other members of the council.44 Thomas Wriothesley, on the other hand, was heavily involved not only in the plot against Katherine Parr and the interrogations of Anne Askew (he literally lent a hand to racking her) but in the persecution of other evangelicals in 1546 as well. (For example, even Foxe does not blame Gardiner for the arrest and condemnation of George Blagg – which will be discussed shortly – but places the responsibility squarely on Wriothesley’s shoulders.) 45 Wriothesly also had much to gain from embarrassing (or worse) the earl of Hertford; there was a long-standing animosity between them.46 In fact, a desire to weaken Hertford and his allies, and thus abort or, at the least, limit their influence in the next reign was probably a major reason for Wriothesley’s actions. And, while Gardiner’s involvement in them may be exaggerated, there is no doubt that the plot to destroy Katherine was one of a number of efforts made to discover heretics at court, including those close the king. These in turn took place against a backdrop of larger drives against heresy in London. Scholars have tended to view these events as absolutely linked, and part of a grand strategy of incriminating and destroying leading evangelical sympathizers at court as well as silencing prominent evangelical clerics. The attempted arrest of Parr has usually been seen as a crucial battle in an overall campaign against evangelicals. I would certainly agree that the plot against the queen was connected to these other heresy hunts, but I would suggest that the relationship between them was not as close as many scholars have claimed. Rather than a carefully planned campaign against evangelicals, there were instead a series of desultory firefights initiated through both happenstance and opportunism rather than calculation. Examination of the place of Katherine’s crisis in the events of 1546 turns on the question of exactly when it took place. Almost unanimously scholars have followed one of Foxe’s inconsistent declarations and placed the plot against Katherine after the burning of Anne Askew.47 In this interpretation, the effort to topple the queen is the culmination of a series of efforts to destroy the evangelicals at court. Askew’s interrogation – under torture – is also seen 44 The examinations of Anne Askew, ed. Elaine V. Beilin (Oxford, 1996), pp. 93–6. (Herafter this work will be referred to as AA). James describes Gardiner as directing the interrogations and torture of Askew (Kateryn Parr, pp. 271–3). Neither Akew or her editor, John Bale, suggest or state this. James goes so far as to declare that Askew herself charged Gardiner with complicity in the plot against Katherine Parr (Kateryn Parr, p. 261). James does not supply a reference for this assertion and I have been unable to find any such statement by Askew – or Bale. 45 A&M [1570], p. 1427. 46 CSPSp IX, pp. 91–2. 47 James also thinks that the last two weeks in July were when Katherine’s near-arrest took place, because leading evangelicals, such as the earl of Hertford, who might have protected the queen, were absent from court at his time (James, Kateryn Parr, pp. 275–85).

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as an attempt to get her to incriminate Katherine, prior to a direct attack on the queen. David Starkey, however, has suggested that the crisis took place in late March 1546 and has constructed a persuasive scenario of the events that triggered it. Starkey suggests that the Princess Elizabeth’s New Year’s gift to her father, a translation of Katherine’s Prayers or meditations, actually displeased the king by reminding him of the extent to which the queen had been poaching in the traditionally male preserves of theology and also encouraging his daughters to do so.48 Worse came with a forceful letter (Susan James has called it a ‘manifesto’) that Katherine wrote to the University of Cambridge on 26 February 1546, in response to a request for her intercession with the king on the university’s behalf.49 Katherine chided the worthies of the university for writing to her in Latin and instructed them that the purpose of learning was only to set forth Christ’s teachings, all else was vanity. The queen went on to declare that she had pleaded with the king on behalf of the university and that he had assured her that not only were the colleges safe but that he would erect new ones.50 There is little doubt that Katherine accurately described her mediation with Henry on behalf of Cambridge and that she was sending the message that Henry had told her to deliver. Yet the tone of the letter is striking; as one scholar remarks ‘In effect, the queen put herself forward as an instrument of royal authority for advancing the highest knowledge.’51 Starkey further observes that ‘The confidence and assurance of this letter is astonishing. And its contents … probably astonished and troubled Henry. For here was a woman who not only strayed into the territories of sacred and profane learning but presumed to redefine their respective frontiers as well.’52 In fact, even before he learned of the letter, Henry might have been vexed, if Katherine put these views to him when she interceded for the university. (Foxe’s report that Gardiner was present when Katherine had her fateful discussion with the king takes on additional significance in this context. Gardiner was the vice-chancellor of the university and it is likely that he would have discussed Katherine’s recent letter with the royal couple.) The next day the Imperial ambassador reported to Charles V that there were rumours circulating that Henry would discard Katherine and marry again. The ambassador also reported, however, that Henry’s public demeanour towards

48 Starkey, Six wives, pp. 752–8. 49 James, Kateryn Parr, p. 248. The university was worried about the impact of acts passed in Parliament allowing the king to dissolve colleges, chantries and hospitals. 50 Correspondence of Matthew Parker, ed. John Bruce, Parker Society (Cambridge, 1853), pp. 34–7. 51 Mueller, Katherine Parr, p. 21. 52 Starkey, Six wives, p. 759; also see James, Kateryn Parr, pp. 248–9.

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Katherine had not altered.53 These rumours apparently spread rapidly; on 7 March 1546 an English agent reported to William Paget, the king’s secretary, and to Wriothesly that people in Antwerp were placing wagers on whether or not Henry would remarry. Rumours of Henry discarding Katherine and taking another wife were still circulating in early April.54 There are also indications that Katherine felt vulnerable during the period from mid-March to mid-April of 1546. Her uncle, Lord William Parr, was recalled from an extended convalescence at his manor in Northamptonshire to resume his post as chamberlain of her household. (The queen’s high regard for her uncle’s guidance is indicated by his admission to her council when she was regent during Henry’s absence in France.) At the same time Katherine dispatched a flurry of letters to friends and potential allies.55 Yet after mid-April no further rumours are reported and the letters taper off.56 Was this because the crisis had broken and the queen was safe? Prince Edward was placed in Katherine’s care from midsummer 1546 until the beginning of winter.57 It is difficult to believe that Henry would have entrusted his precious heir to a woman he suspected of heresy or intended to destroy. In October 1546, Sir William Herbert, Katherine’s brother-inlaw (and the husband of the ‘Lady Herbert’ mentioned in Foxe’s story) was promoted to chief gentleman of privy chamber – another sign of Katherine’s renewed royal favour.58 However, the opportunities to incriminate Katherine that arose in May and July, but were not exploited, are the most telling signs of the security of Katherine’s position. On 2 May, Lord Thomas Howard, the second son of the duke of Norfolk, was summoned before the Privy Council ‘for disputing indiscreetly of Scripture with other young gentlemen of the Court’.59 On 7 May the Council examined Howard and promised him a royal pardon ‘if he did frankly confesse what words he hath uttered, as well in disprove of the sermons this last Lent preached in the Court, as also his other talke at large in the Quenes Chambre, and other places of the Courte, concerning Scripture’. Howard acknowledged his fault, but he did not supply the Council with the specifics of what he had 53 CSPSp. VIII, p. 318. 54 L & P, XXI (i), p. 169; CSPSp VIII, p. 373. 55 James, Kateryn Parr, pp. 167, 193 and 265. 56 Katherine’s biographer makes a great deal of ‘dangerous prophecies’ of the demise of Katherine circulating ‘during June and July’, which she sees as the work of Gardiner and Wriothesley (James, Kateryn Parr, p. 274). Actually all her cited source – L & P, XXI (i), pp. 514–15 – states is that two Londoners admitted, under examination, on 9 June 1546 that they had predicted that Katherine might no longer be queen but also that there would be civil wars and that Henry VIII would be driven from his kingdom. These wild prophecies are in no way a barometer of Katherine’s position or the result of a conspiracy against her. The two ‘prophets’ also admitted that they had been making these predictions for about a year. 57 James, Kateryn Parr, p. 280. 58 For Herbert’s promotion see Sil, ‘Herbert, William, first earl of Pembroke’, in ODNB. 59 L & P, XXI (i), p. 336; also see APC I, p. 400.

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said and was remanded into custody.60 The next day Howard apparently satisfied the Council since he was released with a warning and on his promise to reform.61 Despite the fact some of Howard’s dangerous remarks were made in Katherine’s chamber, there is no indication of any attempt being made to further investigate this potentially damning evidence. Immediately afterwards, on Sunday 9 May, the outspoken evangelical preacher Edward Crome set off multiple explosions when, in a sermon in which he was supposed to recant his earlier statements that the mass was only a commemoration of Christ’s death, he publicly withdrew his recantation.62 George Blagg, Henry VIII’s esquire of the body and a favourite with the king, incautiously expressed his agreement with Crome in a conversation following the sermon. The conversation was reported and would soon cause Blagg a great deal of trouble.63 Meanwhile, Crome had been summoned before the Privy Council on 10 May. The Council not only wanted Crome’s submission, they also wanted the names of his supporters, in particular those who had encouraged his latest act of defiance. Advised of his peril, Crome accused ‘divers persons as well of the court as of the cittie’.64 One of those named was the physician Robert Huicke, who had close ties to Katherine. On 14 May, the Council, who had just been investigating his marital misadventures, now questioned him about his theological beliefs and his association with Crome. In a letter to William Petre, the Privy Councillors complained that Huicke, under interrogation, provided ‘long writinges and small matter’ and that Huicke requested that ‘two or three of the gentlemen of the pryvy chamber may declare his writinges to the Kings Majestie’.65 Robert Huicke’s circumspection seems to have ended his involvement in the heresy hunt. (On 17 May a ‘Dr. Huicke’ was sent to the Tower for having encouraged Crome, but this was almost certainly Robert’s 60 APC I, p. 408 (my emphasis); also see L & P, XXI (i), pp. 377–8. James maintains that Howard was pressured by the Council ‘to give damaging testimony against members of the queen’s household’ (Kateryn Parr, p. 266) but there is no evidence of this in any contemporary document. The Council was apparently pressing Howard to confess precisely what he had said and he was reluctant to do this. 61 APC I, p. 411 and L & P, XXI (i), p. 382. 62 Susan Wabuda, ‘Equivocation and recantation during the English Reformation: The “subtle shadows” of Dr. Edward Crome’, Journal of Ecclesiastical History, 44 (1993), pp. 234–5. 63 A&M [1570], p. 1427 and Charles Wriothesley, A chronicle of England during the reigns of the Tudors, ed. W.D. Hamilton, Camden Society, new series 11 and 20 (2 vols, London, 1875–77), II, p. 169. 64 Wriothesley, Chronicle, I, p. 167; also see Susan Brigden, London and the Reformation (Oxford, 1989), pp. 366–7. 65 L & P, XXI (i), p. 407. As will shortly be discussed, Robert’s brother William, another physician, was also brought before the Privy Council in connection with Crome. Therefore it should be observed that while the letter describing Huick’s interrogation on 14 May refers to him only as ‘Dr. Huick’, reference to his marital difficulties makes it certain that this was Dr Robert Huicke. For Robert Huicke’s ties to Katherine Parr see James, Kateryn Parr, pp. 148, 250, 329, 331 and 332.

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brother William – also a physician – rather than Robert himself.) 66 Once again a potential trail leading to the queen and an opportunity to tie her to heresy was not exploited. On 24 May, Anne Askew, a Lincolnshire gentlewomen who had been examined and arraigned for violation of the Six Articles, the previous year, was examined by the Privy Council.67 On 28 June she was arraigned for heresy and the next day she was sent to the Tower.68 Soon after her arrival at the Tower, Askew was racked. The torture, personally conducted by Lord Chancellor Wriothesley, was an egregiously illegal attempt to extract information. Askew was closely interrogated as to who her supporters were and she was specifically asked if they included Katherine Brandon, the dowager duchess of Suffolk, Anne Radcliffe, the countess of Sussex, Anne Seymour, the countess of Hertford (and wife to Edward Seymour) and the wives of Sir Anthony Denny and Sir William Fitzwilliam.69 Askew courageously refused to talk and Wriothesley resolved on an audacious move. He had Blagg suddenly arrested on 11 July for the remarks the courtier had made after Crome’s sermon. Blagg was arraigned, tried and sentenced to death all on the same day, 12 July. Fortunately for Blagg, friends reported the matter to the king, who (according to Foxe) was ‘sore offended’ that Blagg had been arrested without his knowledge and ordered his release. Blagg was pardoned a few days later.70 Wriothesley appears to have been hoping to terrorize Blagg into talking about evangelicals at court before Henry learned of the courtier’s arrest. If so, the plan failed and Blagg’s pardon, along with Askew’s execution on 16 July, marked an end to the heresy hunting at court. Katherine Parr does not appear to have been the target of Wrothesley’s exertions in the summer of 1546. There is no trace of a connection between the queen and George Blagg. Significantly, Askew was not interrogated about the queen or about Anne Herbert, Maud Lane or Elizabeth Tyrwhit, who had been the targets of the earlier plot against Katherine Parr. Katherine’s biographer maintains that ‘all of the women’ about whom Askew was questioned ‘were of the queen’s inner circle’.71 This claim might be made for the countess of Hertford and the duchess of Suffolk (although I think that it is stretching a point to call them members of Parr’s inner circle), but it can hardly be made for the countess of Sussex or Lady Denny and there are no discernible ties at all between the queen and Lady Fitzwilliam. 66 On 29 May, William Huicke was released from the Tower; his recognisance clearly gives his name as William (L & P, XXI (i), p. 463). For Robert and William Huicke being brothers see John Parkhurst, Ludicra sive Epigrammata iuuvenalia (London, 1573), p. 47. I am grateful to Scott Lucas for this reference. 67 APC I, p. 424; also see AA, p. xxii. 68 Wriothesley, Chronicle, I, pp. 167–8. 69 Askew, Examinations, pp. 186–7. 70 A&M [1570], p. 1427 and Wriothesley, Chronicle, I, pp. 169–70. 71 James, Kateryn Parr, p. 272.

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Katherine Parr’s position 1546 can be summarized as follows. By the end of February Henry, probably annoyed by Katherine’s ‘meddling’ in theology (notably in her dealings with Cambridge but also perhaps in encouraging Elizabeth’s translation of Katherine’s own Prayers or meditations), openly displayed his irritation. This set off rumours that Katherine was in danger and the queen seems to have been aware of her vulnerability. Sometime at the very end of March or in early April, matters came to a head in the episode recounted by Foxe. After that, having been exposed to danger and having survived it, Katherine seems to have been immune. Lord Thomas Howard’s indiscreet remarks could have led to further investigation of her household; instead the affair ended with Howard being reprimanded by the Privy Council. Similarly, although her physician was almost instantly caught up in the heresy hunt triggered by Crome’s non-recantation sermon, no attempt was made to implicate, or even investigate, the queen. When Wriothesley interrogated Askew about supporters at court, he significantly failed to ask her about Parr or those closest to her. Katherine’s ordeal, however, in some ways epitomizes the heresy hunts of 1546, at least as they affected the court. On the one hand, their extent and even ferocity is striking. Not only did they reach the queen and her household, but they also penetrated Henry’s privy chamber, while the torturing of Askew for information about evangelicals at court was savage, illegal and potentially very risky for her interrogators. (Sir Anthony Knevet, lieutenant of the Tower, initially carried out the torture but soon refused to continue with it. Knevet defied Wriothesley and alarmed, hurried up river to court. Having informed the king of what was done to Askew, Knevet received royal absolution from any blame in the matter.) 72 Yet Wriothesley was never penalized for his high-handed (to put it mildly) treatment of either Askew or Blagg. Clearly his pursuit of heresy had Henry’s support and it is probable that Wriothesley’s zeal may well have been motivated not only by a desire to hurt personal enemies such as the earl of Hertford, but also by an eagerness to impress and please the king. But why did Henry want these heresy hunts? The king’s horror of sacramentarianism was deep-rooted but more than religious motivations seem to have been at work. After all, Henry reconciled with Katherine and pardoned Blagg. Askew’s resolute silence prevented any action against her prominent supporters, but Henry also refused to purge the inner circles of his court of evangelicals or evangelical sympathizers. As Alec Ryrie has observed, ‘In the end, the conservative attacks of 1543 and 1546 both came up against the same obstacle: Henry VIII’s reluctance to let a heresy-hunt turn into a rout that might alter the balance of political power, or, worse, tread on his own toes’.73 72 A&M [1570], p. 1419; also see BL, Harley MS 419, fol. 2r. 73 Ryrie, Gospel, p. 56.

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But then why did the king not only countenance, but apparently encourage, the pursuit of heresy among his courtiers and, indeed, his wife and her household? A possible answer is that Henry governed by juggling factions and pitting them against each other. The heresy hunts of 1546 provided him with a means of continuing this policy from beyond the grave. The hatreds stirred up by Wriothesley’s zeal made it that much more difficult for evangelical and conservative courtiers to set aside their differences and unite to overawe and subordinate the next king, Henry’s under-age son. (Ironically, Henry’s destruction of the Howards at the very end of his reign also destroyed his carefully maintained balance of power and allowed Edward Seymour to dominate the king. But Henry Howard’s reckless arrogance hit Henry’s paranoia like a dentist’s drill striking an exposed nerve and provoked the king into a destructive, unthinking, rage.) A policy of divide and rule, however, does not explain the elaborate and dangerous game of cat and mouse that Henry played with Katherine. (Perhaps Henry intended from the beginning to ‘forgive’ his queen if she submitted. But what would have happened if she did not submit? Or if she had failed to convince him of her submission?) A number of scholars have commented on the resemblance of Katherine’s submission to similar ordeals experienced by both Thomas Cranmer and Stephen Gardiner.74 It has been suggested that this pattern indicates that Henry’s behaviour was calculated and intended to serve pragmatic ends. Lucy Wooding, for example, has claimed that: ‘By allowing the conservatives to proceed against Katherine, but making sure that she knew of the plot against her, Henry was delivering a warning to both his wife and his councillors, that they should not try to influence him, and that religious policy proceeded from his authority alone.’75 Lacey Baldwin Smith has explained Henry’s treatment of Cranmer, Gardiner and Parr as the king’s testing the loyalty and tractability of those around him.76 Others have suggested more personal motivations, such as Henry indulging a cruel streak and a desire to control others or the king repressing a wife who had grown too assertive for his comfort.77 All of these explanations are plausible and none are contradictory; they may well all contain a degree of truth. Taken in totality these incidents demonstrate an important aspects of Henry’s kingship at the end of his reign. The similarity between the different incidents indicates a pattern and a pattern suggests that there was premeditation in all three cases. Henry may have been acting, to a greater or lesser degree, out of rage or suspicion or some other emotion, but there was always an element of calculation in these confrontations. 74 For example, Scarisbrick, Henry VIII, pp. 481–2, Wooding, Henry VIII, pp. 269–70 and Lacey Baldwin Smith, Henry VIII: The mask of royalty (London, 1971), p. 34. 75 Wooding, Henry VIII, p. 270. 76 Smith, Henry VIII, p. 34. 77 James, Kateryn Parr, p. 275, Starkey, Six wives, pp. 763–4.

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Henry’s actions, however, are easier to establish than the reasons for them. While his motives for the treatment of Katherine are ultimately unknowable, I believe that it is demonstrable that the story that Foxe related about Katherine Parr is substantially correct. Examining the accuracy of this story reveals a great deal about the reliability of the Acts and monuments, itself a major source for Henry’s reign. In particular, in drawing on Elizabeth Tyrwhit’s memories, it provides an excellent example of how extensive Foxe’s harvesting of individual testimonies was. Yet Foxe’s suspect depiction of Stephen Gardiner as the mastermind of an elaborate plot against the queen, also provides a reminder that Foxe cannot be read uncritically. While Katherine’s quarrel and reconciliation with Henry almost certainly took place as Foxe describes, that does not mean that every detail of his narrative is accurate. For example, it is quite possible, even likely, that Katherine’s clever, dignified speech of submission to Henry is Foxe’s invention. What I have done in this chapter is make the case that Katherine’s neararrest and subsequent reconciliation actually happened and to make an argument that they happened in the early spring, rather than the summer, of 1546. Furthermore, I maintain that while the pursuit of heresy in London and at court were significant factors in Katherine’s ordeal, her narrowly averted destruction was not part of, much less the culmination of, a co-ordinated series of attacks by Stephen Gardiner in particular, or conservatives in general, against evangelicals. Instead Katherine’s near downfall was a product of her husband’s style of ruling and the tensions at his court as the setting of his life cast long shadows of doubt and fear over the political landscape.

part vi: performance

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14 Gender and Status in John Heywood’s The Play of the Weather Eleanor Rycroft

The Play of the Weather was probably performed at Greenwich between Christmas 1532–23 and Easter 1533. It was nominated as an ‘enterlude’ when it was published in the same year and yet, unlike contemporaneously published Heywood texts such as A Play of Love (1534) and The Pardoner and the Friar (1533), the play seems generically mixed when compared to interludes from the same period. The long declamatory sections spoken in rhyme royal by Jupiter at the opening and closing of the play militate against the staged debate of the theatrical ‘dialogue’, for instance, seeming more reminiscent of the lengthy monologues of the Henrician pageant. Yet, between Jupiter’s speeches at the beginning and end of The Play of the Weather, the audience are treated to an array of English types – a Gentleman, a Merchant, a Ranger, a Wind Miller and Water Miller, a Gentlewoman, a Laundress, and finally a Boy – typologies who provide access to how persons from the lower orders and women may have been perceived in the early Tudor period, at least within the courtly milieu in which the play was performed. The secular body of the play is thus in conflict with the elevated dramatic form of its beginning and end. Nevertheless, a close textual analysis of The Play of the Weather combined with a less monolithic notion of how courtly audiences were composed might provide a way of accounting for the apparently mixed modes of Heywood’s dramaturgy. While the connection between Henry VIII and Jupiter has been established by literary historians such as Greg Walker, the notion that this play would have required his presence during the performance is one that is increasingly being questioned by scholars such as Jeanne H. McCarthy.1 The seeming conflation of differing dramatic forms only adds to the confusion of whom 1 Greg Walker, Plays of Persuasion: Drama and Politics at the Court of Henry VIII (Cambridge, 1991), pp. 133–68.

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its intended audience might have been. However, the focus on the working class in this predominantly dialogue-based play, produced by a dramatist at a court whose monarch, McCarthy has argued, favoured theatrical modes that involved courtiers as performers - that is, pageants, masques and disguisings as opposed to dialogues and interludes - challenges the assumption that to play at the court of Henry VIII would necessarily mean to play before the king.2 Magnificence of theatrical form may be the allusion when Jupiter/Henry takes to the stage, but it seems that Heywood’s play is equally concerned to celebrate members of the court usually excluded from the entertainments privileged by the monarch. For while Heywood’s assortment of characters are obviously dramatic representations, they are not allegorical in the same way as characters in other Tudor interludes – for instance, the Widow who is England in Bale’s King John, or the priest who embodies Cloaked Collusion in Skelton’s Magnificence. As representations of Tudor Englishmen and women, the portrayal of social estates in this particular interlude facilitates interpretation of the potential occupational and social concerns of elements of the populace previously underrepresented in printed sources of the era (with the notable exception of Chaucer’s Canterbury Tales). Moreover, as I shall argue, a number of the characters in Heywood’s play can be seen to be directly affiliated to the court. Gender and social status in The Play of the Weather impact heavily on which supplicants are, and which are not, granted an audience with Jupiter to sue for their ideal weather. Such distinctions between suitors are textually evident. What is perhaps more elusive in the printed play, but concretised by a production of The Play of the Weather in the Great Hall of Hampton Court Palace in August 2009, was the extent to which spatial relations in the play were determined and negotiated according to the gender and status of the character.3 To demonstrate this, I am less concerned with providing an interpretation of the play than with bringing to the fore aspects of the text that arguably become clearer in performance than they are on the page, and to highlight the possible sources of meaning informing the estates represented by Heywood.

Background to The Play of the Weather A brief survey of some of the interpretative work on The Play of the Weather reveals the variance in how it has been seen, from Greg Walker’s view of the play as a plea for religious tolerance from a Catholic Heywood to a pre2 Jeanne H. McCarthy, ‘The emergence of Henrician drama “in the Kynges absens”’, English Literary Renaissance, 39/2 (2009), pp. 231–266. 3 Viewable on the ‘Staging the Henrician Court’ project website (www. stagingthehenriciancourt.org).

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Reformation Henry VIII, to Candace Lines’s understanding of Heywood’s Jupiter as a corollary to the tyrant of the cycle drama as opposed to a benevolent and just monarch. Locating the similarities in representation and language between Jupiter and the tyrant figures of Herod, Caesar, Pharaoh and Pilate, Lines writes that ‘The Play of the Wether not only sharply criticizes the Henrician supremacy, it appropriates a key Protestant trope, the characterization of the pope as tyrant and antichrist. Through the cycle plays, Heywood turns this accusation back against a Protestantizing king.’4 In sharp contrast, Walker argues that the canon of Heywood plays ‘written and performed in and around the royal court’ starting with Witty and Witless and culminating in The Play of the Weather and The Four PP, set out ‘to address the problems of a commonwealth divided by dissension and threatening to slide into chaos.’5 In writing such plays, Heywood urges a programme of reconciliation upon a monarch he represents as benign and all-powerful, a healer of division and promoter of his subjects’ best interests. Jupiter’s magnificence, good judgement and absolute power render him a symbol of Henry VIII’s position as head of state.6 Heywood was able in The Play of the Weather not only to appropriate Henry’s modelling of his own power, for instance his posing ‘as an impartial judge between the contending commons and the spiritual peers during the opening session of the Reformation Parliament in 1529’, but was also to seize ‘the licence afforded the good counsellor, [to offer] the King clear advice on how to use his power once he has intervened’.7 While recent scholarship has questioned the extent to which Henry VIII was involved with, or even in the audience of interludes, there is still little doubt that Astington’s view of artistic patronage constituting ‘a deliberate programme of royal propaganda’ continues to pertain to drama of the Henrician era.8 That Heywood’s representation of kingship is satirical in the way advocated by Lines is not necessarily borne out by other linguistic dimensions of the play. One of the first verbally insistent aspects of the dialogue which became patent during rehearsals for the staging of the play in 2009, and lends weight to Walker’s analysis, was the text’s focus on the attainment of the mean, 4 Candace Lines, ‘To Take on Them Judgemente”: Absolutism and debate in John Heywood’s plays’, Studies in Philology, 97 (2000), pp. 401–32, at p. 429. 5 Greg Walker, Writing under tyranny (Oxford, 2005) p. 102. 6 In support of an elision between Jupiter and Henry VIII is the fact that Merry Report, Jupiter’s appointed officer and the play’s Vice, is advised by the god to publish his desire to receive complainants ‘to every nacyon’ (165), but no foreigners arrive at Jupiter’s makeshift court. Jupiter’s concern for mortals seemingly extends solely to the English. All references to the play are taken from John Heywood, The Play of the Weather, in Medieval drama: An anthology, ed. Greg Walker (Oxford, 2000), pp. 455–78. All line numbers from the play are given in parentheses. 7 Walker, Writing under tyranny, p. 102. 8 John H. Astington, English court theatre, 1558–1642 (Cambridge University Press, 1999), p. 5.

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moderate and the meet in contrast to the enormities and disproportionateness that instigate the narrative. Indeed a linguistic concern with the reining in of the surplus and excessive is a defining feature of the play, with Jupiter’s initial report of heavenly discord involving descriptions of how the warring gods, ‘Have longe tyme abused ryght farre out of frame / The dew course of all theyr constellacyons’ (33–4) and a reference to Phebe’s ‘showres superfluous’(53). Jupiter’s method of amending the excessive weather caused by Saturn, Phebus, Eolus, and Phebe’s disagreement is to, ‘From all extremytees the meane devydynge / To pease and plente eche thynge attemperynge’ (69–70). The focus on the middle way as the solution to the problem of the weather peppers the text in terms such as ‘mean’, ‘moder’ (or moderation), ‘temperance’, and ‘mete’ or ‘metely’ on nine further occasions.9 An interesting contemporary deployment of the term ‘mete’ that indicates its significance for a courtly context riven by self-interest is found in The Eltham Ordinances of 1526, tautologically bound up with viands in the item concerning ‘Fresh Acates’: ‘and the king rightly chargeth, that all favour and affection, corruption and partiallity, be sett aside; the said viewers admit no manner of meate, but such onely as shall be meete and seasonable’.10 Like Jupiter’s descriptions of heaven and earth of The Play of the Weather, the Eltham Ordinances obsess over the recuperation of a court seen to be descending into disorder and selfishness, figured in the latter as a disease of ‘unmeete persons, as of rascals and vagabonds, now spred, remaining and being in all the court’.11 A drama so enmeshed in a discourse of restraint and control could, of course, reveal the anxiety that Henry might turn tyrant as a result of his burgeoning powers, but much of this language is directed towards curbing the indulgences of the play’s mortal characters, just as the Eltham Ordinances are directed at the court’s excesses rather than the king’s: and if Jupiter is Henry, the cast of characters can be seen to signify his subjects. In this way, the difference between the play’s ‘subjects’, Henry’s actual subjects, and the subject of the play is elided. At times, the dramaturgical features of The Play of the Weather are idiomatically expressed so as to have specific significance for the auditors in moments that reveal the tension between the dual theatrical and didactic purposes of Heywood’s work. For instance the notion of a parliament having convened, as it does in the fourth stanza of Jupiter’s expositional opening speech ‘For the redres of certayne enormytees’ (25), would have had particular and political resonance for an audience of 1532 given the directive of the parliament of 1529 to curtail the privileges of 9 ‘Meane’ or ‘meanly’ occurs at lines 69 and 1105, ‘moder’ at 687, ‘mete’ or ‘metely’ at 16, 89, 113, 169, 304 and ‘temperate’ or ‘temperance’ at 159 and 1134. 10 A collection of ordinances and regulations for the government of the royal household, made in divers reigns. From King Edward III to King William and Queen Mary. Also Receipts in ancient cookery, ed. Society of Antiquaries (London, 1790), p. 139. 11 Ibid, p. 146.

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the clergy. Undeniably, a legal and parliamentary framework dominates the play, with much talk of the ‘matter’ which Jupiter must resolve, ‘process’ and ‘experiment’, and an overarching dramaturgical structure of supplication to Jupiter, necessarily invoking the ‘Supplication against the Ordinaries’ of 1532. The solution is perceived to be the submission of reasonable arguments in a (verbally and spatially) organized fashion by the petitioners, with a desired outcome of restored hierarchy and due order after a period of instability and disarray. In this way, The Play of the Weather establishes a mandate for the resolution of factionalism at Henry’s court.

Power, Space, and Class The traces of the political context in which the play was written result in a focus upon the laity in the text. Unusually for the early Tudor drama, there are no clerical characters in the play and it could be argued that the forthright political message at a moment of such extreme partisanship is assuaged by the lack of direct representation of religious types. The first layperson the audience encounters is the Vice, Merry Report, appointed in courtly fashion to be Jupiter’s crier upon earth. Jupiter selects his officer from among the audience at the curia regis among whom the player might have been secreted. This ‘internal’ appointment again correlates with the historical evidence found in the Eltham Ordinances that the king only wants to be served substantially, ‘by such persons as be both honest in their gesture and behaviour’ in the item concerning the ‘Appointment of Officer and Ministers in the Household of Good Qualitie’. The item dictates that Henry Guildford shall: make view, search, report, of the sufficiency, abillitie, demeanour, and quallityes, of all such persons as be officers, mynisters, and servants in the said household and chambers to the intent that such of them as shall be found impotent, sicklie, unable, or unmeete persons, to occupie the same roomes, may be knowne

and replaced with ‘other able, meete, honest, and sufficient persons, to be subrogate and put in their roomes and places’.12 Throughout the restructuring imperatives of the Eltham Ordinances, there is a strong sense that power is space; that political status consists of the occupation of, or access to, certain rooms and offices, as in the order that those deputed to seek out the infecting influences at court will be of a certain calibre: none other to be admitted into any roome, office, or place, within the King’s said household or chamber, and especially those which, beginning in low roomes, be accustomed by course to ascend unto higher; but such as be of 12 Ibid.

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good towardnesse, likelyhood, behaviour, demeanour, and conversation; and as nigh as they can, to have respect that they be personages of good gesture, countenance, fashion, and stature; soe as the King’s house, which is requisite to be the myrrour and example of all others within this realme, may be furnished of mynisters and officers, elect, tryed, and picked for the King’s honour.13

Jupiter initially dismisses the idea that Merry Report is suitable for the job, arguing that his ‘lygt behavour and araye’ render him ‘no mete man in our bysynes’ (110, 113). Indeed, the onus placed by the Ordinances on a physical assessment of personal worth is interrogated by a play in which Merry Report’s ‘indyfferency’ (161) – a quality not unlike the capacity to ‘put aparte all favour, affection, hate, and partiallity’ in those chosen to select ministers of good quality in 1526 – is the key condition to the performance of his office, and not his appearance. From the instant of Merry Report’s presence on stage, this quality of indifference as well as his specific ability to elude social categorization and so to level hierarchy becomes apparent. When questioned about his identity by Jupiter as he approaches the throne (too closely in fact, supporting the notion of power being maintained through bounded space), Merry Report says simply, ‘it is I’ (102). ‘What I?’ presses Jupiter, initiating three lines of enigmatic wordplay by Merry Report, concluding with his assertion, ‘I am I’ (103, 106). Impatiently, Jupiter repeats his question, ‘What maner man arte thou, shewe quyckely’ (107) and Merry Report finally designates himself to be a ‘poore gentylman dwellyth here by’ (108), thereby evading any specifics of his economic standing and geographical location. He goes on to counter Jupiter’s charge that his clothing does not speak of a noble status by arguing, that it is ‘wysdome, syns no man for-bad it / Wyth thys to spare a better, yf I had it’ (135–6) equivocating at the moment of its assertion that he might have superior apparel. Merry Report thus locates himself in a hinterland in both topographical and cultural senses, divesting himself of the primary Tudor loci of identity station and region - to become a cipher in the text. This is, however, not an unconventional aspect of the fool or jester figure in literature and history. Vicki K. Janik claims that, ‘Appearance and action reflect the overall undefinable and mixed roles of fools. They seem consciously to defy placement within the perceived order of society, ritual, and art.’14 Outlining the six common characteristics of fools, Janik notes the confounding of personal definition inherent to the figure, including their refusal to identify their place in time and space, their age, and the fact that, ‘fictional fools are on the margin of their

13 Ibid. 14 Fools and jesters in literature, art and history: A bio-bibliographical sourcebook, ed. Vicki K. Janik (Greenwood Press, 1998), p. 8.

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worlds’.15 Such blurring of identification and non-adherence to hierarchy enables Merry Report’s irreverence towards the characters of The Play of the Weather that forms the comic substance of the play. And yet, having left the dramatic space to complete the first part of his charge to publish Jupiter’s proclamation, with an exhortation to the audience as ‘Frendes, a fellyshyppe’ to let him pass (176), he returns to the stage within a space of a few lines to call them ‘carterly keytyfs’, thus degrading the spectators, and attacking their lack of decorum: ‘Not one of you that wyll make curtsy / To me that am squyre for goddes precyous body / Regarde ye nothynge myne authoryte?’ (190–92). The episode serves as precursor to the enjoyment he will take in his official elevation over the petitioners who are about to enter Jupiter’s temporary court Merry Report’s dissident challenges of the supplicants start with The Gentleman, whose entrance is heralded by the blowing of a horn, leading to Merry Report’s scatological joke; ‘this was a goodly hearing! / I went yt had ben a gentylwomens blowynge’ (216–17). The lines seemingly refer to something ineffectual about the volume of noise produced by The Gentleman’s horn but also serve to feminize the character before he has entered the dramatic space. When The Gentleman enters with the generalized welcome, ‘Stande ye mery, my frendes, everychone!’ (220), Merry Report reorganizes the relations of power between them with the admonishment, ‘Say that to me and let the reste alone’ (221), thereby dictating the ceremony and procedure that will define the act of suing to Jupiter. He then proceeds to elicit details of the social status of the petitioner, which will enable him to decide, according to Jupiter’s instructions and in line with the aforementioned duties of Henry Guildford in 1526, which, ‘to the[e] may seme moste metely / We wyll thow brynge them before our majeste / And for the reste, that be not so worthy; / Make thou reporte to us effectually’ (169–72). However, when The Gentleman confirms that he is an aristocrat, Merry Report undermines his statement with the ironic riposte, ‘A goodly occupation, by Saint Anne!’ (233). The inference permitted is that being noble and having a ‘mery lyfe’ (234) is not in itself an identity; that other cultural contributions should be made by a subject other than simply having a status conferred by birthright. The temporary position of power occupied by Merry Report legitimizes his mockery of a person who would normally be his superior and he launches into a cuckold joke based on the horns blown at The Gentleman’s entrance, ‘But who maketh al these hornes, your self or your wife?’ (235). The continuance of the cuckold jokes made at his expense prove too audacious for The Gentleman, however, and when he is eventually granted access to Jupiter and Merry Report’s official function as the negotiator of the space between himself and the god can be dispensed with, he reinstitutes the master/servant relationship between them with the stark line, ‘I am no horner, knave, I wyll 15 Ibid., p. 9.

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thou know yt’ (252). This, however, does not forestall further references to The Gentleman’s fundament by Jupiter’s deputy. That The Gentleman’s life is predominantly ‘merry’ is confirmed by his petition for clement and temperate weather from the god to pursue his recreational pleasure in the form of hunting. The justification The Gentleman offers for his plea hinges on the fact that his well-being and contentment will benefit the commonwealth at large, given that he is at the head of it. Having had his suit heard, however, Merry Report continues to engage The Gentleman in degrading banter, asking ‘whose hed be you?’ to which the aristocrat gives the frustrated reply, ‘Whose hed am I? Thy hed! What seyest thou now?’ (297–8). Merry Report goes on to make comparisons between the head and the tail of the body, presumably involving some contorted physical comedy with The Gentleman. As The Gentlemen leaves, Merry Report promises to do all he can to promote his suit on his behalf and, once again beholden to the god’s officer, The Gentleman resituates himself in a reciprocal relationship with the Vice, vowing, ‘And yf for my sake any sewt thou do make / I promise thy payne to be requyted’ (322–3). Perhaps significant on The Gentleman’s exit is Merry Report’s evocation of ‘Saint Eve’ or Ive (326): the patron saint of lawyers, but also a parish in Cornwall that forfeited lands to Henry in 1522 following the execution of Edward Stafford in 1521, who had interests there and who figureheaded the disaffected nobles during the time of Wolsey. The sort of nobility represented, therefore, by The Gentleman might be more dissident than his title indicates. While aristocratic, the suggestion is that this does not necessarily make him a man of the court. When The Gentleman is followed onstage by The Merchant, the only other character permitted access to Jupiter, Merry Report arranges this swiftly with very little derision of the petitioner during the intercession, bar an obscure reference to The Merchant’s wife (330). This preference for The Merchant could stem from the fact that Merry Report expects any future reward from him for favouring his suit is likely to be financial in nature, given his trade in valuable goods. Or perhaps Merry Report – following his perception of The Gentleman’s idleness – anticipates that The Merchant’s plea will concern his actual occupation and the good of the commonwealth. Indeed, he asks for windy, non-stormy weather to mobilize his ships across the seas safely, not only for the increase of his own fortune, but for the wealth of the entire realm. His proposed contribution to the commonwealth is therefore substantially more material than merely being born into a position of power within it. The Merchant’s speedy access to the god’s ear could also speak of the tense dialectic of power at the time between the monarch and the civic authority of the City of London Corporation, the Merchant Taylors having had their incorporation confirmed by Royal Charter in 1503. The particular importance of the Merchant Taylors was in flux during this period, for, while they had taken ceremonial precedence over the Mercers at Henry’s coronation, when

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the order of precedence was settled in 1515 the Mercers topped the list, while the Merchant Taylors were established in sixth place (causing a conflict to this day with The Skinners and a tradition of alternating sixth and seventh place between them). It is also known that the Merchant Taylors were not the most prosperous of the Livery Companies during the Tudor and Stuart period, which might inform The Merchant’s promise to Merry Report to requite if ‘not all’ then at least ‘some’ (395) if the Vice does promote his suit to Jupiter. What was perceived during the staging of the play to be Merry Report’s repeated forestalling of The Merchant’s exit by engaging the character in small talk was interpreted by the ‘Staging the Henrician Court’ team as arising from The Merchant’s lack of understanding of courtly protocol and etiquette of tipping god’s officer, strengthening the thesis of the uncertain attachments between the court and the emergent merchant class during this period. Another source of meaning for Heywood’s representation of The Merchant might be indicated by the brief reference to the island of Syo at line 385, otherwise known as the Aegean island of Scio or Chios. The importance of this island to early modern European history has perhaps been underplayed. Its advantageous position on the trade route between the East and West, combined with the expense of defending the island, led the Genoese Republic to grant the administration of Chios to a Chartered Company known as the Maóna or Mahóna Guistiniani in 1364, which controlled the revenues of the island independently of Genoa until it fell to the Turks in 1566.16 Chios was therefore the first European mercantile state run by a private trading company with all taxes and commercial dues distributed equally among the members of the Maóna. While the Maóna was formed purely to exploit the natural resources and location of Chios, it is worth noting the island’s appearance in other contemporary documents. Clement Urmeston or Armstrong, a wiredrawer and producer of revels at Henry’s court, mentions Chios in relation to trade in ‘A treatise concerning the staple and the commodities of this realm’, writing that Sir John Crosby, a fifteenth-century importer of Italian textiles was; ane of the first that adventured into Spayn, so as upon fourty four yere ago Spayn was called a farre adventure, and abowt a thirty six yere agoo was first occupieng to Turkye, Scio, and to all thos partes, alle which now are cowntid but as common resources … .17

16 The occupation began in 1346 but the twelve members of the Maóna all took the surname Giustiniani in 1364, ‘although none of the original Mahónesi were members of that family’ (Philip P. Argenti, The Occupation of Chios by the Genoese and their administration of the island, 1346–1566 (3 vols, Cambridge, 1958), I, p. 134). The history of the shareholders of Chios is outlined by Argenti on pp.106–73. 17 Clement Armstrong, ‘A treatise concerninge the staple and the commodities of this realm’, in Tudor Economic Documents, ed. R.H. Tawney and Eileen Power (3 vols, Longmans, Green and Co.,1924), III, p. 91.

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The depiction of the mercantile class in Armstrong’s tract is considerably less magnanimous than The Merchant’s description, portraying the self-interest and monopolization of imports and exports by traders as destructive to the commonwealth rather than formative. However the invocation of John Crosby is significant because it is in his house, Crosby Hall, that Thomas More is thought to have written Utopia. When the facts that the naturally abundant island of Chios was, under the Maóna Giustiniani, a mercantile state whose shareholders were either elected or selected on a rotating basis to positions of power, that there was financial equality among them, and that, most crucially of all, the island is crescent-shaped, the question is raised as to whether elements of the governance, organization and topography of Chios served as a model for More’s Utopia.18 In the overdetermined nexus of relations between More, the Rastells, John Heywood and Henrician theatrical personnel such as Clement Armstrong, the potential recurrence of the island of Chios in their discussions is surely worthy of further research, especially with regard to More’s seminal literary work. The contrast in Merry Report’s reception of The Ranger compared to The Merchant is marked. The Ranger’s Protestantized greeting to the audience when he enters the space, ‘God be here! Now Cryst keep thys company!’ is met with the unenthusiastic reaction from Merry Report, ‘In fayth, ye be welcome evyn very skantely’ (400–01). His request to speak with Jupiter is rejected out of hand by the Vice who says, ‘That wyll not be, but you may do thys / Tell me your mynde, I am an offycer of hys’ (404–5). Whether it is the lowliness of The Ranger’s mien or the provocative nature of his speech that forecloses his passage to Jupiter is undecidable, but significant to their encounter is Merry Report’s precision about the code of behaviour to which The Ranger must adhere, telling him, ‘Ye shall putte on your cappe when I am gone’ (433), thus insisting that he remains bareheaded and servile during their dialogue. After the Ranger has delivered his suit to the god’s officer, he persists in trying to force his way through to Jupiter, saying, ‘But let me speke wyth the god yf it maye be / I pray you lette me passe ye’ (437–8). Merry Report’s heightened (and Catholic?) response, ‘Why, nay syr, by the Masse, ye[a]!’ (439) may indicate something of a scuffle between the two men. Despite these breaches of conduct, it becomes clear from Merry Report’s treatment of the first three 18 Argenti writes that, ‘The system of the distribution of the major offices by lot among the principal shareholders meant that in every thirteen years each duodenarius held every office for the period of one year’ (The Occupation of Chios, p. 411) but that the Podestà, or governor of the island, was elected from among and by the Maóna and held his office for a period of one year (The Occupation of Chios, pp. 371–2). In this sense he is unlike More’s Utopian Prince who is elected but holds the office for life. In common with More’s text, however, a combination of merit and election rather than hereditary right is used to determine who holds power. Women also enjoyed a greater degree of freedom under the Maóna and could be both citizens and burgesses, and unlike in England, could both make and execute wills (The Occupation of Chios, p. 445–9).

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characters in The Play of the Weather that those who perform useful social work are less subject to his ribaldry than those who act indulgently (such as The Gentleman) or accumulate personal wealth (such as The Merchant). And yet, when women enter the dramatic space later in the play, a discourse of class in which busyness/business is privileged over idleness regardless of social status, is complicated by gender and the bawdy function of the Vice.

Gender, Virtue, and Age The Ranger sets the precedent in the text for characters being debarred direct access to Jupiter, who must then direct their petitions to his officer so that they can be relayed to the god at a later point. After The Millers’ sequence, the first female takes to the stage in the form of The Gentlewoman, who assumes, presumably on account of her noble status, that she will have the ear of the god. As with The Gentleman, The Gentlewoman is subjected to Merry Report’s more extreme form of bawdy from the instant she appears in the dramatic space: her pleas to talk with the god facilitate jokes about her back passage, front passage, and a revelation of Merry Report’s control of platea space in his attempts to coax her away from the main performance area for a private chat in the corner of the room (770–75). Yet, unlike the cases of The Ranger and The Millers, Merry Report does sue on the lady’s behalf for passage to the god. Unfortunately, Jupiter too assumes her motives are sexual rather than political and tells Merry Report, ‘Sonne, that is not the thynge at this tyme ment’ (786), with the familiar pun on the term ‘thing’. However, Merry Report and Jupiter’s assumptions are proved correct to the extent that The Gentlewoman does prize her physical charms and sexual allure above all other qualities, and to preserve her beauty asks for neutral weather that does not burn or chap or blow her about when she walks the streets. In line with an idealized femininity, The Gentlewoman proceeds to sing and dance with Merry Report, but her encounter with the Vice is marred when he tries to force a kiss upon her, at which point the Laundress enters and inquires, ‘Why, have ye always kyst her behynde?’ (868), possibly referring to the physical position in which she has found them. The Laundress is then herself situated in terms of her relation to patriarchal structures by Merry Report’s imperious riposte, ‘To whom dost thou speke, foule hore, canst thou tell?’ (872). Significantly, however, The Laundress reacts in the same terms by which she is addressed in her answer, ‘to an olde baudy knave’ (875) the first instance since The Gentleman that a petitioner has offered a retort to Merry Report. The washerwoman also expects that she will be placed in direct competition with The Gentlewoman when the time comes for the Vice to sue on her behalf, and in a way that might impinge on her political effectiveness,

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but this is construed within an erotic framework rather than one of social class when she urges Merry Report not to ‘leane … to myche to yonder gyglet’ (890). The Gentlewoman’s counter-argument is conducted in similarly sexual terms when she attributes The Laundress’s anger to jealousy of her appearance. In fact, by suing for hot sun to dry her clothes, the concept of the recreational versus the occupational that has informed the arguments of The Gentleman and Merchant is mirrored and repeated in the dialogue between The Gentlewoman and The Laundress. The washerwoman elucidates that her job is not a response to having fallen from chastity but a cultural strategy to pre-empt poverty when the looks she had once possessed faded. She calls this an ‘honest besynes’ (923) and contrasts it to The Gentlewoman’s economically dependent position, deriding her dancing, singing, eating, drinking, and apparelling because, ‘nought of all this doth thyne owne labour get’ (919). As reasoned and socially radical as her argument is, it is immediately demeaned by Merry Report, who exclaims, ‘Such a raylyng hore … / I never herde in my lyfe tyll now!’ (937–8). His mode of equalizing cultural difference manifests in the reduction of both women to sexual objects when he asks them, ‘can I medyl wyth you both at ones?’ (954), causing The Gentlewomen to vacate the stage instantly. But his audacity is met on equal terms by The Laundress who reacts to Merry Report’s attempt to outsmart her by riddling with a series of corresponding isocolons at lines 960–69 before she also takes her leave. The key aspect of Heywood’s representation of courtly femininity in this play is that it is The Laundress who is attributed with virtue in The Play of the Weather, not The Gentlewoman, who eschews any mention of religion in her dialogue, asserting that those, ‘Who bosteth in vertue are but daws’ (842). This is significant. If we compare the representation of women in The Play of the Weather to the anonymous contemporary interlude Calisto and Melibea, it is the young noble female in the latter who is virtuous but led astray by the amoral bawd and working woman, Celestina. This is a typical pattern found in the plays of the sixteenth century in which nobility, femininity and virtue are consistently connected with each other. Heywood’s reversal of this expectation exposes a secular radicalism at the heart of his play; a concern for those males and females at the bottom of the courtly heap who he endows with eloquent and rational arguments. In doing so Heywood inverts the morally dubious medieval reputation of laundresses, one that Carol Rawcliffe has demonstrated frequently led to their denouncement as prostitutes, writing: ‘The equation between laundry work and sexual licence seemed axiomatic to many authors, in part because washerwomen enjoyed unusual freedom of movement, “gadding about” unsupervised from one place to another.’19 The fact that The Laundress enters the performance space solus indicates that she 19 Carole Rawcliffe, ‘A marginal occupation? The medieval laundress and her work’, Gender and History, 21/1 (2009), pp. 147–69, at p. 157.

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is in the process of doing exactly that, and yet in the dialogue that ensues, her lifestyle is represented as distinctly more virtuous than that of the aristocratic employer for whom such a character would work. Heywood’s representation of a virtuous Laundress may well be a comic device on the part of the playwright: a humorous reversal of traditional expectations of femininity and class. However, the fact that dining hall drama audiences were frequently a mix of persons from the higher and lower echelons does raise the issue of the reception of The Gentlewoman and The Laundress during the original performance. Did a female cheer go up for the Laundress on her exit, as it did when the play was performed in August 2009? How extensive would sympathy for the character have been? How dissident was the suggestion – particularly in light of the association frequently made between The Gentlewoman and Henry’s queen-in-waiting, Anne Boleyn – that idle, aristocratic women were amoral, and that busy, ‘business’ women were virtuous: that to work rather than be married was a more honest option? There is certainly no doubt that the play was popular beyond its courtly performance context, not only printed in the same year as it was performed, but reprinted a further three times, and The Laundress emerged during the ‘Staging the Henrician Court’ project as central to the play’s appeal.20 It should be noted that the roles were cast with female actors in 2009, which may have suppressed some of the satire in Heywood’s representation of femininity, but was not thought to be inappropriate for a court in which women were frequently part of theatrical spectacle. Female courtiers appear in the historical record as both contributors (with Henry’s sister, Mary, ‘regularly the chief female participant in masks and disguisings at the English court from 1510 to 1514’ according to Janette Dillon) or picked out of the audience for special attention, as when Merry Report ‘poynteth to the women [in the audience]’ (249, s.d.), a stage direction we took to mean that the audience could be segregated into male and female halves.21 The final suitor to appear onstage is specified by Heywood’s textual instruction as being not only a boy, but also ‘the lest that can play’ (1001, s.d), 20 The Plays of John Heywood, ed. Richard Axton and Peter Happé (Cambridge, 1991) p. 287. The latest edition was published c.1573. 21 Janette Dillon, Performance and spectacle in Hall’s Chronicle (London: Society for Theatre Research, 2002), p. 185. This is not to suggest that women would have performed these actual parts but rather that the ‘Staging the Henrician Court’ project was keen to test the assumption of the ‘all-male stage’ with regard to courtly performance. Admittedly, this can lead to the sense that The Laundress is proto-feminist, as suggested by the female half of the audience’s response to the character during the performances of August 2009. Lynn Forest-Hill warns against this interpretation, arguing that in Tudor interludes women earn their right to speak, ‘through their mastery of the (male) rhetoric of disputation, legal jargon, and classical authority’ (‘Maidens and matrons: The theatricality of gender in the Tudor interludes’, in Interludes and Early Modern Society: Studies in Gender, Power and Theatricality, ed. Peter Happé and Wim Hüsken, Ludus: Medieval and Early Renaissance Theatre and Drama (Amsterdam and New York, 2007) pp. 44–69, at p. 62).

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suggesting that he was the smallest of the Chapel Royal child players who in all likelihood originally performed The Play of the Weather. However, his very presence in the space of the curia regis is a breach of conduct according to the Eltham Ordinances, which sought to exclude ‘boys and vile persons ‘… for little shall it prevale the court of unable or unmeete persons or servants, if vagabonds, and such others as shall be expelled and lack masters, may remaine in or about the same’.22 The audience might be expected to feel nervous for such a vulnerable character given the verbal drubbing Merry Report has administered to his social and financial superiors during the course of the play, but Merry Report is remarkably straightforward with The Boy who appears before him to ask for wintry weather to aid his laying of traps and making of snowballs. Merry Report shows concern and compassion for the child, asking, ‘Alas, pore boy, who sent the[e] hither?’ (1022). Little Dick (the only character designated a forename in the text) may suffer the possibility of having his suit heard ridiculed by the Vice on account of his social lowliness, but, interestingly, when Merry Report summarizes the petitioners’ cases for Jupiter he does see fit to include The Boy’s. In this sense, Merry Report fulfils Jupiter’s command to act with ‘indyfferency’ in the ultimate instance of his equalizing of the statuses of the characters. A complicating issue of status in the exchange between Merry Report and The Boy is that the figure of the fool can no longer confuse his age and collude in his own infantilization, as when Jupiter calls him ‘sonne’ at other moments in the play (161, 342, 786, 1123).23 The diminutive stature of the boy player necessitates Merry Report’s assumption of the paternal role, and he calls after the departing Little Dick, ‘farewell, good sonne, wyth all my harte’ (1050). The innocence of The Boy appears to guard against the acerbity of the Vice, despite the undesirability of his presence in curial space. Nevertheless, hegemony is instantly restored once Merry Report has completed his office. Jupiter orders the Vice to bring, ‘the Gentylman and all other sewters’ (1128) before him, elevating the nobleman above the other represented occupational and gendered positions and so re-establishing a body politic that is governed by a head. However, there is one final occurrence of the destabilizing of class and gender privilege in The Play of the Weather. As the suitors consecutively give thanks to the god for his judgment, the washerwoman qualifies her ‘And such as I am’ with a barbed reference to The Gentlewoman, ‘who be as good as you’ (1233), thereby reopening the matter of the relativity of rank in the very closing moments of the play. Partial economic interests are shown to be subordinate to the duty of the subject in Jupiter’s closing speech; however, the appeals of the estates in The Play of the Weather consistently connect social usefulness with the play’s lower classes, 22 A collection of ordinances, p. 150. 23 Fools and jesters in literature, art and history, p. 8.

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and indolent leisure with the nobility. In his portrayal of a Boy who also seeks apt weather for his hobbies, Heywood ultimately infantilizes the aristocracy he represents in the play. After all, it is The Boy’s ‘job’ to play, but it is not theirs; a message, perhaps, for the noble spectators at a court whose concerns have changed from the largely recreational to the rather more serious in the wake of religious schism and the development of Henry’s monarchical identity from the ‘player king’ figure he once cultivated. So while the play endorses the absolute power of the monarch at the same time as it advises moderation, such counsel is balanced against an instruction to his subjects concerning their performance as loyal and obedient subjects too. The Play of the Weather is therefore certainly a play of and for the court, but it is also a play of and for the courtiers; and perhaps one in which inheres the carnivalesque intent to undermine hereditary power (which would associate the play with the potentially Heywood authored or co-authored Of Gentleness and Nobility) whilst simultaneously ideologically validating those who maintain the spectacular surface of the curia regis through their manual labour. Of course, The Gentleman gets speedy access to the king’s ear, but only by running the gauntlet of the more dubiously socially positioned Merry Report. There is also a sense that members of the court at all levels are being inducted by the play into the correct way to behave during the transition of queens between Christmas 1531 and 1532, and that perhaps the New Moon speech (lines 793–817) delivers a piece of news to the court about Henry’s intention to replace Catherine with Anne. The Great Hall is exactly the sort of mixed status courtly space in which such messages could be conveyed, and it could be argued that the scope of the ‘New Moon’ speech might even include Anne’s pregnancy, giving another dimension to the multivalent use of the word ‘matter’ throughout the play. However, precise historical location of this play is problematized by frustrating archival omissions, such as the missing Revels Office accounts of 1528–34. Ultimately the Staging the Henrician Court project challenged the assumption that, though The Play of the Weather contains a message for the king, that he was also necessarily its primary audience. It revealed that the didactic lesson of the play was aimed at all levels of the court, and foregrounded that this is a play in which the working class are frequently privileged over the nobility. In recent scholarship a picture has emerged of Henry VIII as a monarch more concerned with the expensive and magnificent end of the theatrical spectrum than with the dialogue-based drama. Indeed, alongside the highly choreographed and formal moments of the Henrician court such as the May Day revels, ambassadorial visits and elaborate Christmas entertainments, a corollary picture of some rather more ad-hoc playing practices also emerges. Whilst pertaining to Edward VI’s reign, this is intimated by a letter sent to Sir Thomas Cawarden the eve of Twelfth Night, 1551, in which Lord Darcy asks him to supply ‘John Birche and John Browne, the king’s entrelude players … suche

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garments as you shall think meete and necessarye for them and ther fellowes to playe an entrelude in before his highness to morowe night’ – effectively giving the Master of the Revels only twenty-four hours to apparel the actors and raising the issue of how much attention was spent on interludes compared to the lavishly costumed masques.24 That certain forms of courtly drama were produced less ceremoniously than those specified in such official sources as Hall’s Chronicle is almost certainly suggested by the ‘stadge for the players’ erected in Henry’s own chamber on Candlemas evening, 1540.25 Inversions of class and gender status in The Play of the Weather might indicate that its auspices are to found among these more informal playing practices. However it is the normative formality of the court that produces the play’s subversive force, and it is through the medium of performance that solutions must be found for what is only indicated in language. Producers of The Play of the Weather, therefore, need to establish a logic of space in the venue of performance to determine the spatial bounds of propriety, in order that the frequent challenges to such limits by the suitors and Merry Report become theatrically evident. Questions remain as to how the characters enter and from where; how they leave the stage and when; how they interact with both the audience and with Merry Report; what behaviours they display when they are not speaking; their appearance; their ages (especially pertinent for The Laundress, perhaps, given the particulars of her contrast with The Gentlewoman), and a host of other unknown variables contingent upon casting and performance. What is moderate and fitting may be linguistically predominant in Heywood’s play, but this is undermined by the frequently dissident and challenging content that must be taken into account when it comes to staging. Definitive details of The Play of the Weather’s performance history remain elusive because of a lack of historic evidence and a general under-representation of dramatic dialogues in extant sources. It should also not be discounted that the printed version may have been altered or amended from the original performance text. However, producers of The Play of the Weather today must still attempt to find contemporary theatrical solutions for that which is either textually enigmatic or obscured by history.

24 The Loseley Manuscripts, ed. A.J. Kempe (London, 1835), pp. 58–9. 25 Clifford Davidson, Festivals and Plays in Late Medieval Britain (Aldershot, 2007), p. 20.

15 Dramatic Genre and the Court of Henry VIII Peter Happé

I My main purpose in this chapter is to consider the differing contexts of a number of interludes in or around the court of Henry VIII with regard to performance. In order to do so I shall review some aspects of the extensive details available on the entertainments provided for the king’s pleasure or needs, especially in the early years of his reign. I shall then turn to some details apparent in interludes that may be considered close to the court. Before doing so, however, there are two concepts that need initial exploration. The first is that the court was hardly a single entity. Court entertainment did not take place in one location, because, habitually and over many years, Henry VIII moved between a number of palaces in and around London, including Greenwich, Richmond and Eltham, as well as Hampton Court, which he acquired after the fall of Wolsey in 1529. At this time he took over Wolsey’s York Place, which was renamed Whitehall, and this became the most frequently used, followed by Greenwich and, in later years, Hampton Court.1 There were also some occasions when entertainments were provided for the king when he went to France. The scale of these could be spectacular and the cost very large. There were many more of them than can be comprehended in this account. There is also a regularity about such provision in that the entertainments were seasonal and it was often the case that a number of different forms were associated with one another.

1 Simon Thurley, The Royal Palaces of Tudor England: Architecture and Court Life (New Haven and London, 1993), p. 50. For extensions to Greenwich in the 1520s, see pp. 48–9.

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The second aspect is the terminology used. The information we have comes from a variety of sources. These include Hall’s Chronicle,2 George Cavendish’s The Life and Death of Cardinal Wolsey, correspondence, some of it by diplomats, as well as records of expenses that are indeed not always complete, and many surviving state papers.3 In them we find that a series of words are used for court entertainment including pageant, mumming, disguising, mask and masking, interludes and plays. Since the function of many of the records, in particular, was primarily to record expenditure on materials and labour, many of the references are frustratingly incomplete and must remain imprecise. Taking advantage of what we have, it is possible, however, to reconstruct some aspects quite convincingly, including some details of performance and the long-term involvement of a number of individuals such as Sir Henry Guildford, William Cornish and Richard Gibson, who were concerned with entertainments collectively often known as revels. Indeed this word became more significant late in the reign when the appointment of Sir Thomas Cawarden to the office of Master of the Revels was made with effect from 16 March 1544,4 catching up and consolidating on existing practices and facilitating new developments for this role that had been intermittently fulfilled beforehand. We can, however, find some revealing details about entertainments in Hall’s Chronicle. This work is rather more positive and systematic as a source because the author sets out to describe what went on, albeit from a standpoint many years after the events described, but he has his own interests and purposes, and he often glides over details that might give a fuller picture. His interest in display, particularly by means of costumes, many of which were elaborate and costly, leads him to an abundance of detailed descriptions of costumes that themselves became part of the performance. For example, on Shrove Tuesday 1510 at Westminster the king caused the queen to keep the estate (remain in a position of honour in his absence) while he and others came in attired in a sequence of clothing described as a Turkey fashion, the fashion of Russia and then that of Prussia, while the torchbearers appeared like ‘Moreskotes’ with black faces.5 Hall was unquestionably sensitive to performative aspects and he owed much to the work of Richard Gibson who served as Yeoman of the Revels from 1510 until his death in 1534.6 For example, Hall refers to ‘commoning’, which seems to indicate conversation and social interaction without telling us what actually happened; and he also 2 Edward Hall, The Union of the two noble and illustre Famelies of Lancastre and Yorke, ed. Henry Ellis (London, 1809): hereafter Hall’s Chronicle. 3 CSPD. 4 W.R. Streitberger, Court Revels 1485–1559 (Toronto, 1994), p. 163 and n. 20. 5 Janette Dillon, Performance and Spectacle in Hall’s Chronicle (London, 2002), p. 32. 6 Janette Dillon, ‘Hall’s Rhetoric of Performance’, English Literary Renaissance, 34 (2004), pp. 3–17, at p. 13. Gibson was originally an interlude player under Henry VII, Sydney Anglo, Spectacle Pageantry and Early Tudor Policy (Oxford, 1969), p. 64.

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mentions dancing frequently, another activity difficult to envisage fully.7 Both these activities must have taken up a considerable amount of time while the revels were taking place and they must have embodied much of the substance, the significance and presumably the pleasure of these events. Such exchanges reveal the fluidity of the boundaries between performers and audiences, and it is clear that the court entertainments cannot be adequately circumscribed by the term ‘dramatic’. The presence of King Henry is critical to the significance and function of the revels. They were devised for his pleasure and that could have come in a number of ways. At times he was a spectator, at times a participant. But his participation as a young man differed markedly from that later on. To begin with, his interest in chivalry and courtly love, emblems of young manhood for a prince, determined the nature of the entertainment.8 As George Cavendish records: The kyng was yong and lusty, disposed all to myrthe and pleasure and to followe his desier & appetyte, no thyng myndyng to travell in the busy affayres of this Realme.9

This disposition was matched by his sense of himself as a military king. The manifestation of the king’s physical prowess was a leading aspect of what Sydney Anglo has described as the ‘neo-Burgundian feats of arms’.10 Although he was not allowed to take the risk of giving and taking blows during his father’s time, he quickly became an active participant once he was king.11 Later in life, and after a number of events during which the risks became manifest, culminating in a fall in the tilt yard (24 January 1536), which left him unconscious for two hours,12 he withdrew from the action. In fact he had severely reduced his participation in the lists after a two minor incidents in 1524.13 The subject matter of the entertainments was strong on courtly love and often an allegory was presented in terms of this tradition. This was a marked difference from the court entertainments provided at his father’s court.14 One example is found in the celebrations for the birth of the short-lived Prince Henry 7 Skiles Howard, ‘“Ascending the Riche Mount”: Performing Hierarchy and Gender in the Henrican Masque’, in Rethinking the Henrican Era: Essays on Early Tudor Texts and Contexts, ed. Peter C. Herman (Chicago and Urbana, 1994), pp. 16–39. 8 For Henry’s interest in chivalry, see J.J. Scarisbrick, Henry VIII (2nd edn, London, 1997), pp. 42–3. 9 The Life and Death of Cardinal Wolsey by George Cavendish, ed. Richard S. Sylvester, EETS 243 (London, 1959), p. 12. 10 Sydney Anglo, ‘The Evolution of the Early Tudor Mask’, Renaissance Drama, 1 (1968), pp. 26–44, at p. 19. 11 David Starkey, Henry: Virtuous Prince (London, 2008), pp. 320–24. 12 ‘Henry VIII’, in ODNB. 13 Streitberger, Court Revels, p. 117. 14 Ibid., p. 91.

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on New Year’s Day 1511. Such material may indeed suggest that we should describe it as medieval rather than humanist. On 13 February, a solemn joust was held in honour of Queen Katherine at Westminster. The king took part as Cure Loial, accompanied by three courtiers bearing the knightly names Bon Voloire, Bonespoir and Valiaunt Desire. These titles were displayed on a table hanging in a tree and they were there designated ‘Les quater Chivalers de la forrest salvigne’ who were to run at the tilt against all comers.15 The knights appeared in a wheeled pageant that resembled a forest with trees inhabited by birds and animals and it contained a castle. The pageant was pulled by two great beasts, a lion covered in gold damask and an antelope in silver, and these were led into the presence of the queen by wild men with bodies, heads, faces, hands and legs covered in green, whereupon the foresters blew their horns and the challengers rode out from within the pageant fully armed.16 Hall’s narrative also indicates that the masking activities themselves were further developed early in the reign. On the evening of Epiphany 1512 there was an innovation involving the king and eleven others who were ‘disguised, after the maner of Italie, called a maske, a thing not seen afore in Englande’.17 Henry’s presence in the revels showed itself in another remarkable way. The jousting itself often involved a group of noble male participants while the ladies, including the queen, were only spectators, sometimes exercising a kind of presiding authority that gave permissions.18 Once this was over, and honour had been satisfied, the ladies became more directly involved by their participation in the dancing. But there was also the exploration of identity that manifested itself in disguises. This often occurred during the actual jousting in fictional characterization derived from motifs in the courtly love tradition.19 But once the revels after the martial activities had begun, the king often withdrew and reappeared in a disguise. Although this became something of a routine, in at least one early instance this apparently came as a surprise to the queen. In January 1510 the King and eleven noble companions disguised as Robin Hood’s men, together with a woman as Maid Marian, burst into the queen’s chamber. Hall’s account suggests that there was surprise and at least some initial uneasiness: ‘Wherof the Quene, the Ladies, and al other there were abashed as well for the straunge sight as also for their sodain commyng.’20 The disguising must have been intriguing on a number of counts. Even if it became a routine there would still be anticipation of when and in what 15 Hall, Chronicle, pp. 516–7. 16 Streitberger, Court Revels, pp. 74–5; Hall, Chronicle, p. 520. 17 Dillon, Performance and Spectacle, p. 43; Hall, Chronicle, p. 525. 18 ‘An audience for his chivalric posturing’, ODNB, ‘Henry VIII’. 19 Mock sieges had been a feature of court entertainment for Henry VII, Streitberger, Court Revels, p. 87. 20 Hall, Chronicle, p. 513. Perhaps the queen’s feelings were all the stronger because she was five months pregnant; Starkey, Henry: Virtuous Prince, p. 330.

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form it might come. There would be the king’s own pleasure in timing his revelation and it looks as though he enjoyed creating surprise. This may have been increased when he adopted a number of disguises in one evening. In November 1510 he appeared as one of fifteen gentlemen disguised as ‘Almains’, and after dancing, he reappeared as one of six gentlemen in garments of white and green satin accompanied by six ladies in Spanish garments.21 The expenses recorded show that the disguising costumes were costly and there must have been satisfaction at the magnificence as well as the ingenuity with which the disguise was contrived. There are times when the physical scenery – the pageant, as it was often called – was also part of the revelation. Here again surprise and ingenuity would be significant elements. Moreover there is a striking feature in that the action of the disguise involved separation, revelation and then reunion. Because there were so many of these events the quasi dramatic rhythm, involving impersonation and an accepted structure, must have become familiar and an established pattern that could be repeated and variations upon it developed. But Henry was not the only participant, and the revels were significant for others taking part or witnessing them. The main implication may well have been an emphasis upon the values of chivalry and honour enshrined in Henry’s early expectations and assumptions about his kingly role. The primary participants were the nobles who were part of the king’s order, and whom Henry needed to keep in their appointed places in the court’s hierarchy. They were indeed a selected few. Similarly, the ladies had specific roles, and they could be placed as recipients of the endeavour shown before them and that they were expected to approve. But such conformity by both men and women would also imply dissent, even if it were to be circumscribed by the outward rituals. Thus, whilst some parts of the revels involved single-sex dancing, there was also a pattern of both sexes dancing together as a consummation.22 In some of the disguises the mimetic element was marked, producing dramatic effects. At New Year 1512 for a pageant called Le Fortresse Dangerus in the banqueting hall at Greenwich there were six ladies in a castle that was assaulted by the king and six others. The ladies yielded the castle, danced with the lords and then re-entered the castle, which suddenly vanished.23 It would appear then that in some ways the revels were a closed concept aimed at the participants who were themselves part of the court. But the variety of events over many years suggests that wider audiences were also targeted. The scale of events for the festival at Greenwich in May 1515, for example, involved an athletic contest, a disguise, pageants and a procession. 21 Marie Axton, ‘The Tudor mask and Elizabethan Court Drama’, in English Drama: Form and Development, ed. Marie Axton and Raymond Williams (Cambridge, 1977) , pp. 32–47 (25); Streitberger, Court Revels, pp. 68–9. 22 Skiles Howard, ‘“Ascending the Riche Mount”’, p. 25. 23 Streitberger, Court Revels, p. 81.

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Much of this took place in the open air and although the court was the focus there would have been a much wider impact. There were singing birds and much music and Anglo suggests that the events were watched by as many as 25,000 persons.24 Moreover, the adaptation of revels procedures, including the jousting as well as the disguising and the use of elaborate pageants was also adapted for foreign consumption for ambassadors to the English court and for prestigious display during Henry’s excursions to France. One particularly revealing feature lies in the fact that ambassadors thought it desirable or indeed necessary to send, sometimes extensive, accounts home, and these do help to fill out our awareness of details of what was on show. The development of this wider audience is an indication of the growing perception of the efficacy of the revels as a polemical medium. Another feature that must have affected the impact of the revels is the frequency and variety of what was on show. In the first part of the reign, up to about 1527, there were many such events. The Christmas season, for example, might have days of differing revels in a sequence. Those at court at least, and perhaps others outside as well, might have had the means of comparison and reflection as one event followed and contrasted with another from day to day. This comparative effect could also have worked from year to year in season. A picture emerges here of a coherent and developing culture of performance; one that was not complete to begin with but that became more effective and ambitious as the years went by and perceptions of its efficacy developed.25 It was probably not foreseen, however: the realization of what could be achieved by such entertainment grew with experience, and the king’s disposition to spend extensive resources must have contributed greatly to the possibility of larger impact. The strong emphasis upon feats of arms and the concepts associated with romance, chivalry and courtly love remained significant for many years, but there gradually seems to have developed a sense of broader possibilities and functions for the revels. We can identify two aspects here: the interest in spectacular display of kingly wealth and authority, and a realization of the political possibilities. The former was probably already a feature before the time of Henry VIII, but the latter became a major element in the English drama of the Tudor period. The increase in splendour was probably associated with Henry’s desire for the conquest or re-conquest of ‘English’ France. It is not surprising that this began to manifest itself early in the reign when ambition was high and Henry still only just past the age of twenty. War with France was declared in April 1512. In October 1513 Henry entered Tournai in triumph and held 24 Anglo, ‘The Evolution of the Early Tudor Mask’, p. 25. 25 However, as we shall see, the emphasis did change later in the reign when the crisis over the divorce took effect.

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further revels at Lille that included jousting and mummery. The campaign also involved a meeting with the Emperor Maximilian at Aire, a sign that Henry was now negotiating on a European scale and he needed to widen his audience. By this time Wolsey had become a major figure in the conduct of public affairs.26 During the campaign in France he was the effective manager of the war and he became increasingly concerned with diplomatic initiatives. From this point his impact upon the revels increased remarkably. To some extent he was no doubt echoing the interest of his master and yet it also appears that as he took greater initiative in public and especially foreign affairs he realized and sought to exploit the importance of the political aspect of the revels. To an extent this process also worked towards the glorification of Wolsey’s own diplomatic achievements.27 Indeed, Hall’s accounts of the entertainments he provided often imply that he was rivalling the king’s magnificence in prestige and power, and in this way critical comment upon Wolsey is generated. These large-scale events were often closely related to political circumstances. In 1518, for example, the treaty with France was celebrated at Greenwich with Report and Pegasus, an allegorical, political disguising showing that the proposed royal marriage between the Princess Mary and the Dauphin would ensure a strong Christian Europe against the Turk. It is also striking that Wolsey actually hosted court entertainments at his residences and the king attended them. This occurred, for example, on 5 January 1520 at York Place when the king and nineteen gentlemen appeared in ‘meskellyng apperell’.28 On another occasion in 1521 Wolsey provided disguising and interludes at court.29 However, there does seem to have been a shift of emphasis in Wolsey’s entertainments for the king and for the diplomats who attended. Instead of chivalry and courtly love the allegories turned towards political themes. This may suggest that Wolsey was more alert to the political efficacy of court entertainment than his master. During the 1520s both Henry and Wolsey would have seen themselves as protectors of Catholic values and supporters of the pope against Luther. There seems little doubt that Henry’s interest in polemic was to develop further, but it is quite difficult to judge how far Wolsey was the leading influence. A conclusion must be based upon our perception of the changing dynamic between the two men. To celebrate another Anglo-French treaty in November 1527 at the time of the Hapsburg sack of Rome, a Latin play called Cardinal Pacificus written by John Rightwise at Wolsey’s instigation was performed by the Children of Paul’s at Greenwich. It was accompanied 26 Scarisbrick notes that in 1513 he rose from dean to archbishop, p. 66. 27 Streitberger, Court Revels, p. 92. 28 Ibid., p. 267. 29 Ian Lancashire, Dramatic Texts and Records of Britain: A Chronological Topography to 1558 (Cambridge, 1984), no. 993.

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by jousting and a pageant with a fountain together with four masks, in one of which the king appeared.30 The wider dramatic interest in Wolsey’s revels was further developed by his promotion of classical comedy. He is thought to have promoted the comedy by Plautus performed, possibly by his Gentlemen, at Greenwich on 7 March 1519 for the French hostages. In January 1527 at York Place there was jousting, masking and the dicing game of mumchance played by the king and his fifteen companions. During the ensuing banquet Plautus’ Menaechmi was performed by the Cardinal’s Gentlemen. This long sequence of entertainment then continued with a pageant and disguising on the subject of Venus and her elderly lovers. Wolsey was a promoter of, and contributor to, court entertainment: his political influence was strong for more than fifteen years. During that time performances became more diversified and shifted significantly towards political intentions. The records show that there were many interludes played at court and the context was the same for these as for other revels: a king who was excited by extravagant display and who became more and more politically involved. I want to suggest that this context leads directly into the development of the political interludes that became current in the later part of his reign, partly, but not solely, under the influence of Wolsey’s successor, Thomas Cromwell. The extent to which such activities developed an antipapal content may be illustrated by the water pageant on the Thames in 1539. Played before the palace of Westminster this comprised a sea battle in which the pope and his cardinals were seen to be cast into the river by the occupants of the king’s barge.31

II In considering interludes it is important to notice that although the term had currency in the sixteenth century it is not easy to define, except perhaps for two recurrent aspects: interludes were primarily dramatic entertainments, and the texts were usually relatively short in length. Granted this we can nevertheless observe that the word does occur a number of times during the reign of Henry VIII. There are at least seventeen occasions when interludes were performed. These run from 1511 to 1538.32 It may well be that the idea of an interlude became clearer as the years went by, especially in relation to the political contexts considered below. There are a surprisingly large number of references to what appear to have been dramatic performances during the reign even if we cannot be 30 Streitberger, Court Revels, p. 274. 31 Lancashire, Dramatic Texts and Records, no.1031. 32 1511, 1514, 1515, 1516, 1517, 1518, 1519, 1520, 1521, 1521–22, 1525, 1527 (2), 1529, 1538 (2): compiled from Streitberger, Court Revels, pp. 424–5, and Lancashire, Dramatic Texts and Records.

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certain as to exactly what type of play was involved. I believe this has been seriously underestimated in the past. I have noted at least 65 items, some of which probably refer to more than one play. In many years groups of players were rewarded in January for performances that had taken place over the Christmas period, and for several years more several groups were paid at the same time, suggesting that more than one performance was undertaken over the holidays. Both Wolsey and Cromwell were active in the support and recognition of dramatic performances. For Cromwell in particular his accounts in the years 1537 to 1539 show regular outlay on dramatic performance and he seems to have supported them for ideological reasons. This data will come become more notable when we come to consider known plays. We can make some guesses at the subject matter of these lost interludes, but for the rest of this chapter I should like to concentrate upon those interludes that survive from the remaining years of King Henry’s reign. None of them, however, can actually be identified with any of the known performances at court. We do not know exactly what Henry actually saw. A minor exception occurs in the manuscript of John Heywood’s Witty and Witless where three stanzas are marked for inclusion if the king is present. These assert that rulers should show the glory of God and deal charitably with subjects of all ranks.33 Nevertheless we shall see that a considerable number of these plays have a bearing on what was actually happening at court and they should undoubtedly be regarded as part of its ambience. I think we need to appreciate that plays were more and more perceived as political weapons and that to perform a play near the court, as much as within it, might be a significant and effective political act. One important development noted by Streitberger is that in 1515 King Henry divided the King’s players into two groups. The old players remained at court, while the new group became itinerant, though it was also rewarded at court in some years afterwards.34 We also need to take some account of one further development: the growing significance of the printing and publication of interludes that complemented their actual performance in a number of ways. If we compare the development of interlude printing with the revels discussed earlier, it is apparent that there were very few interludes printed before 1520 and that very few attempts were made to make printed versions of any court entertainments.35 Among the extant printed plays, John Rastell was responsible for Medwall’s Fulgens (1512–16, but derived from an earlier period, probably 1491) and for his own Four Elements (?1520). We have seen 33 The Plays of John Heywood, ed. Richard Axton and Peter Happé (Cambridge, 1991), ll. 676–96. 34 Streitberger, Court Revels, pp. 44–5, and his ‘Court Performances by the King’s Players’, Medieval English Theatre, 14 (1994), 95–101. 35 Pynson printed some of the verses for the entry of Charles V in 1522, Anglo, Spectacle, 189, n. 2.

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that for most of the 1520s the revels continued vigorously, but with a growing political import particularly under the influence of Wolsey. During that decade Rastell continued to publish plays and John Heywood, his son-in-law, became involved in writing interludes. They collaborated in the composition of Gentleness and Nobility (printed by Rastell in 1525). It is noticeable that at this time the revels we have been discussing had begun to change or indeed to slacken off.36 After about 1530, we have rather less information about the revels. This may just be accidental because fewer records survive, but there is a contrary impression that things were indeed changing. Perhaps as Henry was now past forty his interest in chivalric display was declining. Such a change might have been prompted or enlarged by his altered feelings for Katherine of Aragon. The break with Katherine also meant that Henry had less incentive to play to the international stage in the interests of the Empire and the papacy. He was now much more focused upon Anne Boleyn and upon internal politics.37 As diplomatic efforts were concentrated upon the international negotiations about the divorce there may have been less need for the previously desirable conspicuous martial display. This may also account for one important exception to this tendency. When Henry did achieve what he desired over the coronation of Anne Boleyn in 1533 there was indeed a return to triumphal and extravagant demonstration in the arrangements that were then undertaken in celebration.38 At that point it might well have seemed appropriate to make a magnificent display. By this time Wolsey had disappeared and Henry had greater personal need to attend to the political dimension of the divorce. In the light of these possibilities I would like to suggest that interludes thus began to take over part of the function of the revels as it now became possible or desirable for writers of interludes to influence royal policy internally and externally. In pursuing this line of thought I follow and acknowledge the work of a number of critics who have located political significance in specific interludes.39 Even if the king did not see them they reflect matters of court and to an extent they are demonstrably the work of people associated with it. John Rastell, for example, was never a courtier, but he was associated with revels in the pageant in Cornhill for Charles V in 1522, and the pageant of the Father of Heaven at Greenwich in 1527.40 Sir Edward Belknap, his patron 36 Anglo, Spectacle, pp. 261–2. 37 Streitberger, Court Revels, p. 141. 38 Gordon Kipling, Enter the King: Theatre, Liturgy, and Ritual in Medieval Civic Triumph (Oxford, 1998), pp. 260–62, 297, 323, 330–33. Kipling draws attention to dramatic aspects of civic pageantry: see also his The Receyt of the Ladie Kateryne, EETS 296 (London, 1990), pp. xiv–xvii. 39 Greg Walker, Plays of Persuasion: Drama and Politics at the Court of Henry VIII (Cambridge, 1991), and Writing under Tyranny: English Literature and the Henrican Reformation (Oxford, 2005): Janette Dillon, ‘Powerful Obedience: Godly Queen Hester and Katherine of Aragon’, in Interludes and Early Modern Society: Studies in Gender, Power and Theatricality, ed. Peter Happé and Wim Hüsken (Amsterdam and New York, 2007), pp. 116–39. 40 Anglo, Spectacle, pp. 188–9, and 221–2.

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and a privy councillor, had originally engaged him for royal service during the French campaign of 1512–14. John Heywood was much closer to the king and the court in his capacity as an entertainer, singer, dramatist and actor. He was frequently rewarded and in 1528 he received a royal pension, as well as receiving the king’s support for advancement in the Mercers’ Company within the city of London. Another dramatist to be considered is John Skelton, who was the king’s tutor for part of his boyhood (1498–1502). In general, his court career was not as successful as Heywood’s. He was dropped when Henry became heir apparent after the death of Prince Arthur and he spent much effort trying to gain or regain advancement over the next twenty years. Amongst his efforts after he lost his position at court was his interlude Magnyfycence, an exploration of the topic of the use of wealth as part of the self-display of kingship, apparently written 1516–18. The contexts for this play include the dismissal of the king’s minions, who were considered to have distracted the king, and the need to show wisdom in the exploitation of royal wealth. The play concentrates upon ways in which courtiers bring the royal protagonist to despair by trickery and their crafty exploitation of royal resources. But there is also a positive side to the play, in spite of its despairing near-tragedy for the protagonist at one point. It advocates the use of right judgement in the characters of Measure and Sad Circumspection who seek to demonstrate that there can be a proper use of wealth to further the royal state. If the play was indeed written in 1516– 18, it is the very time when Henry’s interest in courtly games and displays is apparent to us. Skelton’s position, excluded now from court and still, perhaps nostalgically, seeking to influence his former pupil, gives an extra dimension to the proper use of the appropriately royal exploitation of magnificence. But this play was not printed until after his death in 1530. John Rastell, after bringing out a number of plays in the 1520s, had it printed at a critical moment when the struggle over the divorce was vigorous and consuming. In doing, so Rastell may have given a lead to Heywood, his son-in-law, with whom he was already collaborating. In the next few years Heywood wrote several plays that commented wittily and obliquely upon the position of King Henry, embroiled in the divorce and the development of royal supremacy in order to facilitate it. These include The Pardoner and the Friar, The Play of the Weather, Johan Johan, A Play of Love and probably The Four PP.41 The first of these stages a competitive encounter between religious hypocrites. Weather indirectly offers advice to the king, who is represented on the stage as Jupiter, about the exercise of personal authority, at a time when there was much political dissent. Johan Johan, an adaptation and translation of a French farce, is pointedly modified to draw attention to the phenomenon of a miraculously short pregnancy and it was 41 This first surviving printing of this play is by Middleton in 1544, but it is likely that it was written at the same time as the plays printed by William Rastell.

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printed in the year when Henry finally married the pregnant Anne Boleyn. Love discusses and dramatizes the nature of love, earthly and spiritual. Thus we have a group of plays, printed in quick succession in the years 1533–34, and in a folio format that was remarkably similar, aimed at expressing a Catholic point of view in an attempt to bring influence to bear. We have no direct information about when and indeed whether any of these plays were actually performed. Even if they were, we do not know whether such performances were at court or perhaps at some other place in London where the audience might have contained people who were directly involved with court matters. But the very pointed decision by Heywood and William Rastell to print them is significant in itself. It was at this time that Sir Thomas More, whose niece was Heywood’s wife, having resigned from the Chancellorship, was vigorously pursuing his defence of Catholic values against Protestant heretics. Instead, Heywood’s response to these circumstances is much more emollient, based upon comedy that is sometimes stinging but also ingeniously funny. He seems to have had a reputation for wit and it may be that tolerance could be extended to him by those who knew him at court. It was, for example, outrageous to suggest in The Four PP that the devil celebrating his birthday in hell by playing tennis in his shirt was reminiscent of the king himself at play. He does not say as much explicitly but the inference is surely unmistakable. Similarly, as Greg Walker has pointed out, the figure of Jupiter about to hear petitions from all comers in Weather invites comparison with Henry, and yet he was presumably played by a schoolboy, comically endowed with pompous speeches.42 Moreover there seem to be bawdy references to Anne Boleyn in both Weather and Johan Johan that apparently Heywood assumed that he could get away with.43 He does not seem to have fallen out of favour at this time, and in the next few years he was secure, even when he became a conspicuous supporter of the now discredited and disinherited Princess Mary, who was declared illegitimate. When he was found guilty of implication in a plot with John More against Cranmer in 1544 the death sentence was commuted, and he was allowed to make a public recantation. Perhaps Heywood, renowned for his wit, had a special status at court. But it may be, as has been proposed, that the king was indeed suggestible and that he did not at this point necessarily discourage views that were opposed to his own.44 At the time when he wrote the plays, the ‘worst’ had not yet happened from Heywood’s point of view. Nor should we assume that Henry’s political will was set in stone. It seems much more likely that Henry was driven to take steps away from an essentially 42 Walker, Writing under Tyranny, pp. 107–8. 43 Such passages are those about wetness and making a new moon in Weather (ll. 795–811) and the presentation of Tib, the adulterous wife in Johan Johan, who seems to be suffering from morning sickness (ll. 126, 130, 145: these are not in the French original). 44 Greg Walker, Persuasive Fictions: Faction, Faith and Political Culture in the Reign of Henry VIII (Aldershot, 1996), p. 23.

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Catholic position by the way things turned out. He manifestly did not wish to take Church reform too far and in all probability responded to opportunities and necessities as he perceived them, rather than having a master plan. This did not stop Henry destroying people, but somehow Heywood survived in or near the court in spite of, or perhaps because of, his critical wit. Alongside this group of interludes generated by Heywood and his relatives there survives other information about interludes that might have a bearing upon the court. One of these is the anonymous Godly Queen Hester. The surviving printed edition dates from 1561, but there is little doubt that it was written much earlier. This can be partly supported by some bibliographical features, including the arrangement of the title page, which does not present the play for doubling as was to become customary by the 1560s. But there is also the possibility that the struggle of Queen Hester against the evil counsellor Aman is a figure for Wolsey’s incipient policy of reform within the Church that threatened the religious houses. It would seem that the author was seeking to influence a policy that might have had royal backing, and that came to be implemented towards the end of the 1530s. It is striking that Wolsey had begun to attempt the suppression of minor monastic houses as early as 1524 and this is another aspect that may have had a bearing upon this playwright’s approach. It seems that this play was created towards the end of the decade and that one of its objectives was to promote or encourage the downfall of Wolsey. Some details in the text point towards Wolsey’s exercise of authority as a papal legate and there is also criticism of his supposed arrogance.45 The author inserts an allegorical episode that embodies Pride to this end in a play in which the characters are for the most part historical or biblical persons rather than personified abstractions. This interlude is also remarkable for ways in which the female protagonist is managed. Hester is a virtuous queen and her position is ultimately vindicated. As a figure for Queen Katherine, she is very articulate and she is given theatrical emphasis. Her role is much stronger than that of King Assuerus. At times she challenges his authority, although as Janette Dillon has pointed out she is always made to show respect for his royal status.46 If the play was indeed written about the time of Wolsey’s fall, its relationship to the court is a matter of some interest. The stage directions in the text do suggest that there was indeed some consideration of stage practicalities. It must have been conceived in support of the queen and thus there is a strong possibility that if there were a performance it would have taken place in her ambience rather than the king’s. The deferential attitudes to the king embodied in the play, however, imply that at least there was no intention to attract censorship 45 Walker, Plays of Persuasion, pp. 116–17. 46 Janette Dillon, ‘Powerful Obedience: Godly Queen Hester and Katherine of Aragon’, pp. 132–5.

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or royal displeasure and it may well be that the playwright’s ultimate purpose, like Heywood’s, was to offer the king advice in an acceptable form. In this case, if the play was written earlier than Heywood’s, it would seem that the emphasis was upon Katherine’s qualities and her potential to share royal authority. Using the character of Hester, the dramatist draws attention to Katherine’s assumption of royal authority during Henry’s absence in France at the war with France in 1512–14. The implications of excessive ambition by Wolsey are an oblique commentary upon her qualities. It is noticeable that the king in this play is treated as a more benign figure than he had been in Youth. Perhaps the unknown author was being careful to present a virtuous king as a means of persuasion towards these political objectives. It is particularly ironic that at Christmas 1526 Wolsey had suspected that a play at Gray’s Inn by John Roo was aimed at him personally and he had taken measures against the author, sending him and one of the actors to gaol.47 Hall’s brief details of the play suggest that it employed abstract characters whom we might identify as typical of an interlude allegory: they included Lady Public Weal, who was rescued by Rumour Populi, Inward Grudge, and Disdain of Wanton Sovereignty to expel Negligence and Dissipation. A comparison with the characterization of the author of Hester with Heywood’s method is interesting. The former uses a biblical allegory and biblical names, whereas Heywood tends to use social types or designations associated with occupations. His management of allegory is markedly different from the method using moral abstractions found generally in interludes. There is not much doubt about the date of Roo’s play and that suggests that it is a further example of how plays were taking over a political intention in the 1520s. In the absence of a copy, however, we cannot go far in judgement, and yet Hall’s readiness to exculpate Roo is notable, coming perhaps from some hostility towards Wolsey for usurping the king’s true function. Even if Hall is right and the play was by now twenty years old, its emergence at this point could still be a political act. After the publication of Heywood’s group of plays there is a further shift in the function of interludes and one of the most influential figures at this time is Thomas Cromwell. He saw William Rastell in 1535, and it does seem that he might have warned him off. Maybe this was a response to the plays, but there is a specific reference to one of More’s Catholic polemics that William had printed.48 As far as we know Rastell did not print any more plays and it looks as though he may have given up printing altogether. If Cromwell had not already grasped the power of plays as polemic at this point, it was not long before it was drawn to his attention. Sir Richard Morison, who worked for 47 Hall, Chronicle, p. 719, claims that the play was devised twenty years before this and that Wolsey was mistaken and unjust. 48 CSPD, 7, no.149.

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him for several years, advocated in 1536 that plays about Robin Hood should be replaced by those that could show ‘the abhomination and wickedness of the Bishop of Rome’.49 At almost the same time John Bale, accused of heresy and writing from prison, mentions that Cromwell had supported him in the immediate past on account of ‘comedies’ he had produced.50 Bale was never at court, as far as we know, and yet there is no doubting that his link with Cromwell and also his work for John Leland, the king’s antiquary, in the late 1530s might have made him aware of court matters. In 1538 there was also the performance of King Johan at Cranmer’s house in Canterbury, paid for by Cromwell. The surviving manuscript evidences an original text, and a second embodying many revisions in Bale’s hand. In the original version the virtues of King Johan in standing up to the pope and in resisting Sedition are a figure for King Henry, and Bale’s purpose is in part to influence him towards a further embrace of Protestantism. Although Bale intended this, he is careful to adopt an entirely sympathetic approach to the king personally: he is not taking risks. His presentation of King Johan is approving in defiance of traditional (and Catholic) evidence that criticized him. Once again there is nothing definite to suggest that the king saw this play, but it is interesting that he expressed approval of one of the play’s sources, William Tyndale’s The Obedience of a Christian Man (1529), which was shown to him by Anne Boleyn. It is hardly surprising therefore that both Cranmer and Cromwell supported the performance. There is also the very strong possibility that the some of Bale’s lost plays dealt directly with matters that were of some importance to the court. These include plays on the king’s two marriages and on Thomas Becket that may have been performed at Canterbury in 1538 when the king was there at the time of the destruction of Becket’s tomb.51 These two titles are to be found in a manuscript autobiography of about 1536 and it is likely that they were written some time before.52 If we move beyond the plays whose texts have survived we encounter evidence that there were frequently plays of some kind performed for the 49 BL Royal MS 18.A.1: see G.R. Elton, Policy and Police: The Enforcement of the Reformation in the Age of Cromwell (Cambridge, 1972), p. 185. For a prompt about polemical plays see the hints in A Discourse touching the reformation of the lawes of England attributed to Sir Richard Morison in Sydney Anglo, ‘An Early Tudor Programme for Plays and other Demonstrations against the Pope’, Journal of the Warburg and Courtauld Institutes, 20 (1957), pp. 176–9. 50 The Complete Plays of John Bale, ed. Peter Happé, (2 vols, Cambridge, 1986–87), I, p. 4. 51 Peter Roberts, ‘Politics, drama and the cult of Thomas Becket in the Sixteenth Century’, in Pilgrimage: The English Experience from Becket to Bunyan, ed. Colin Morris and Peter Roberts (Cambridge, 2002), 221–22. Bale gives the lost play two titles: De Traditione Thome Beckett (‘Anglorum Heliades’ c.1536) and De Thomas Becketi Imposturis (Summarium, 1548). ‘Tradition’ refers to the ways in which Bale believed the Church had distorted truth over many years. ‘Impostor’ implies a quasi-dramatic pretence. 52 ‘Anglorum Heliades’ in BL Harley MS 3838, fols, 112r–v.

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king’s entertainment. We shall probably never know the details of what was performed, but it is clear from the work of the writers of interludes here that there is a strong possibility that many plays were devised. The individual playwrights I have mentioned saw in the drama various ways of exploiting its potential for commenting upon and perhaps influencing royal affairs. If Wolsey and then the King had come to exploit a political dimension for the revels, it is also likely that others had come to see that much could be achieved provided that the King was treated with careful respect. Heywood, Bale and the author of Hester seem to have been aware of this in their different ways. Thus King Henry became not only a participant in the revels, but also a kind of target for dramatists. The information I have presented here suggests that the revels at court provided a basis upon which dramatists could build. It seems to me that the interludes written in the reign of King Henry have links with the revels that show how the two kinds of entertainment were related.

16 The Fall of Anne Boleyn: A Crisis in Gender Relations?1 Suzannah Lipscomb

The fall of Anne Boleyn is well-trodden ground: it has been analysed, discussed, negotiated, disputed and contested almost ad infinitum.2 The purpose of this chapter is not primarily to rehash this debate, but to suggest that the events of the fall can be better understood if situated in the gender and honour culture of the period, and that in return, notions of gender and honour can be elucidated through the events of April–May 1536. Gender historians have long debated whether the notion of a crisis of gender relations in sixteenth-century Europe is useful or accurate.3 The consensus is now not to identify a specific late sixteenth- or early seventeenth-century decisive moment of crisis, but to acknowledge that the great difficulties and insecurities of the early modern period led to tensions over gender roles and 1 The author wishes to thank Prof. Greg Walker for reading an earlier draft of this chapter. 2 E.W. Ives, ‘Faction at the court of Henry VIII: the fall of Anne Boleyn’, History, 57 (1972), pp. 169–88, ‘Debate: The fall of Anne Boleyn reconsidered’, EHR, 107, (1992), pp. 651–64 and The life and death of Anne Boleyn ‘The most happy’ (Oxford, 2004); G.W. Bernard, ‘The fall of Anne Boleyn’, EHR, 106 (1991), pp. 584–610, ‘The fall of Anne Boleyn: a rejoinder’, EHR, 107 (1992), pp. 665–74, Anne Boleyn: Fatal attractions (New Haven and London, 2010), pp. 125–92; David Starkey, Six wives: The queens of Henry VIII (London, 2004), p. 554; Retha M. Warnicke, ‘The fall of Anne Boleyn: a reassessment’, History, 70 (1985), pp. 1–15, ‘Sexual heresy at the court of Henry VIII’, HJ, 30 (1987), pp. 247–68 and The rise and fall of Anne Boleyn: Family politics at the court of Henry VIII (Cambridge, 1989). 3 Anthony Fletcher, Gender, sex and subordination in England, 1500–1800 (New Haven, 1995); D.W. Underdown, ‘The taming of the scold: The enforcement of patriarchal authority in early modern England’, in Order and disorder in early modern England, ed. Anthony Fletcher and John Stevenson (Cambridge, 1985), p. 122; Heide Wunder, ‘What made a man a man? Sixteenth- and seventeenth-century findings’, in Gender in early modern German history ed. Ulinka Rublack (Cambridge, 2002), p. 22; Martin Ingram, ‘“Scolding women cucked or washed”: A crisis in gender relations in early modern England?’, in Women, crime and the courts in early modern England, ed. Jennifer Kermode and Garthine Walker (Chapel Hill and London, 1994), pp. 48–80.

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fraught sexual politics.4 Within this context, this chapter contends that the notion of a crisis in gender relations does have validity in specific instances, namely, here, in one highly significant, if micro-historical event: the accusation and execution of Anne Boleyn, queen of England. My understanding of the evidence closely follows Greg Walker’s reading, and I have considered it at some length elsewhere.5 Nevertheless, of necessity, because the events are so hotly debated, a working interpretation of events will be stated briefly.

The Fall of Anne Boleyn Most scholars agree that there is very little evidence to indicate that Anne was guilty of the charges laid against her. Even G.W. Bernard, the sole scholar asserting Anne’s likely guilt, will only finally suggest the Scottish verdict of ‘non proven’, concluding that whilst there is insufficient evidence to prove definitively that Anne and those accused with her were guilty, this does not mean they were innocent.6 We can probably go further. As Eric Ives has demonstrated, even at a distance of 500 years, three-quarters of the accusations made against Anne in her trial can be discredited.7 Anne declared herself innocent, saying to Sir William Kingston, constable of the Tower, ‘I am clere from the company of man as for sin as I am clear from you, and am the Kynges trew wedded wyf’.8 The night before her execution, she swore on peril of her soul’s damnation, both before and after receiving the Eucharist, that she was innocent and had never been unfaithful to the king.9 These were serious acts in this religious age. Nor did most of her co-accused plead guilty. Sir Edward Baynton reflected that ‘no man will confess any thing against her, but only Mark [Smeaton] of any actual thing’, and even Eustace Chapuys, the Imperial ambassador and Anne’s arch-enemy, would finally conclude that everyone besides Smeaton was ‘condemned upon presumption and certain indications, without valid proof or confession’.10

4 Fletcher, ‘Men’s dilemma: the future of patriarchy in England, 1560–1660’, TRHS, 6th series (1994), pp. 61–81, at p. 62; Alexandra Shepard, ‘From anxious patriarchs to refined gentlemen? Manhood in Britain, circa 1500–1700’, Journal of British Studies 44 (2005), pp. 281– 295, at p. 283. 5 Greg Walker, ‘Rethinking the fall of Anne Boleyn’, HJ, 45 (2002), pp. 1–29; Suzannah Lipscomb, 1536: The year that changed Henry VIII (Oxford, 2009), pp. 65–89. 6 Bernard, Anne Boleyn, p. 183. 7 L & P, X, 876; Ives, The life, p.345; Walker, ‘Rethinking’, 25. 8 L & P, X, 793; George Wyatt, ‘Extracts from the Life of the Virtuous Christian and Renowed Queen Boleigne’, in The life of Cardinal Wolsey ed. S.W. Singer (London, 1925), p. 451. 9 Singer, Wolsey, p. 461; L & P, X, 910; CSPSp V (ii), 55. 10 Ibid., p. 458; L & P, X, 908.

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Nor do I accept that the evidence suggests convincingly that Anne’s fall was the result of a court coup or political cull staged by Thomas Cromwell and the Seymours. This idea rests on seeing Henry as a dupe who could, to quote Ives, be ‘bounce[d] … into decision’.11 The reasons given for Cromwell’s newlysprung enmity of Anne – which are thought to rest primarily on questions of foreign policy and how to dispose of funds from the dissolved monasteries – seem unconvincingly robust issues on which to execute a queen, whilst the alleged factional allegiances of the victims seems implausible. The crucial piece of evidence for suggesting there was a coup led by Cromwell is a remark made by Cromwell to Chapuys after Anne’s death in which he claimed ‘he set himself to devise and conspire the said affair’.12 This has been rendered to suggest that Cromwell planned and arranged the plot against Anne.13 Yet, although Cromwell clearly arrogates a certain amount of initiative and responsibility – probably to impress the ambassador with his power and influence, as Bernard has suggested – the context of this phrase is that the king had given Cromwell the authority to discover and bring to an end the affair of the ‘concubine’.14 It seems likely that the ‘affair’ in question was the matter of investigation, trial and execution. Yet, even though Henry VIII cannot be removed from the critical Cromwellian account that is given as evidence for a coup, a scenario in which Henry simply and monstrously decided to rid himself of Anne is also questionable.15 This interpretation rests on Henry’s alleged newfound hatred of Anne in early 1536. Some historians have blamed Anne’s miscarriage of January 1536. Whilst undoubtedly profoundly disappointing, there is no need to conclude, following an unreliable 1585 account by the Catholic Nicholas Sander, that Anne miscarried a deformed foetus, a ‘shapeless mass of flesh’.16 Nor does it seem plausible that Henry believed he had located his next wife. His interest in Jane Seymour seems likely to have been to pursue her according to the conventions of courtly love – she is notably described as the lady whom ‘he serves’, a telling phrase – but it is possible that he meant to make her his mistress.17 There is no evidence, before Anne’s accusation, that Henry had plans to marry Jane. Finally, although Henry and Anne had what Bernard has described as a ‘tumultuous relationship of sunshine and storms’, they were 11 Ives, The life, p. 321. 12 CSPSp V (ii), 61, especially citation of original French in note: ‘il se mist a fantasier et conspirer le dict affaire’ L & P, X, 1069. See Randle Cotgrave, A dictionarie of the French and English Tongues (London, 1611), for a near-contemporary translation of ‘fantasier’. 13 Ives, The life, p. 318. 14 CSPSp V (ii), 61. 15 J.J. Scarisbrick, Henry VIII (2nd edn, London, 1997), p. xii. 16 Warnicke, ‘Sexual heresy’, and The rise, ch. 8; Nicholas Sander, The rise and growth of the Anglican schism, ed. D. Lewis (London, 1877), p. 133. For the dismissal of this theory, see Walker, ‘Rethinking’, p. 15 and n. 66; Bernard, ‘The fall’, p. 586; Ives, The life, pp. 296–7. 17 L & P, X, 601.

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also frequently described as being ‘merry’ together, including throughout the autumn of 1535.18 Most importantly, even after Anne’s miscarriage, his actions suggest he still favoured her. Bernard has shown that Henry spent considerable time and effort contriving a situation in which Chapuys would formally recognize Anne as Henry’s queen, culminating in Chapuys’s bow to her on 18 April 1536.19 Far from hating her, it seems that Henry was very much committed to his marriage to Anne well into April 1536.20 So, if Anne was not guilty, and Henry did not maliciously set out to get rid of her, nor was manipulated into acting against her by Cromwell, the case pivots on why the investigation started in the first place, the confession that tainted everything following it, and the evidence that could be used to suggest Anne’s guilt. According to Lancelot de Carles, secretary to the French ambassador in London, whose poetic account of Anne’s death from June 1536 is the earliest detailed record of the events by one who would have been witness to a number of them, the investigation began because rumours about Anne’s behaviour were being spread in self-defence by one of her ladies, Elizabeth Browne, Lady Worcester.21 Elizabeth’s brother, Anthony, reported these rumours to Cromwell, who in turn told Henry. Henry blanched in shock and though he remained doubtful, gave permission for the matter to be investigated.22 Crucially, de Carles notes that Henry remarked that ‘if it turns out that your report, which I do not wish to believe, is untrue, you will receive pain of death in place of [the accused]’.23 This statement is not verifiable by any other source, but if the king was prepared to apply the lex talionis principle, then Cromwell’s success in finding evidence of Anne’s guilt becomes unsurprising. As a result, Cromwell arrested Marc Smeaton on Sunday 30 April.24 Smeaton was musician in the queen’s household; Walker suggests that as a commoner,

18 Bernard, ‘The fall’, p. 585; L & P, VI, 1054, 1069; VII, 126, 682, 823, 888, 1193; IX, 310, 525, 566, 571, 663. 19 L & P, X, 699; CSPSp V (ii), 43a; Bernard, ‘The fall’, pp. 589–590, 593. 20 Walker, ‘Rethinking’, p. 9. 21 Lancelot de Carles ‘Poème sur la mort d’Anne Boleyn’, in La Grande Bretagne devant l’opinion Française depuis la guerre de cent ans jusqu’à la fin du XIVe siècle, ed. Georges Ascoli (Geneva, 1971), ll. 339–458. Bernard identified Elizabeth and Anthony Browne, ‘The Fall’, pp. 597–9. 22 This is supported by Cromwell’s account to Gardiner and Wallop on 14 May 1536, ‘The Queen’s incontinent living was so rank and common that the ladies of her privy chamber could not conceal it. It came to the ears of some of the Council, who told his Majesty, although with great fear’ (L & P, X, 873). Ives contends that both sources present the English government’s version of events (‘Debate’, p. 659). 23 de Carles, ‘Poème’, lines 456–8: ‘Mais s’il advient qu’il ne soit veritable / Votre rapport, ce que croire ne veulx, / Peine de mort recevrez au lieu d’eulx.’ 24 Thomas Aymot, ‘A memorial from George Constantyne to Thomas, Lord Cromwell’, Archaeologia: or, miscellaneous tracts relating to antiquity, 23 (1831), pp. 50–78, at p. 64.

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he was a relatively easy target.25 He was interrogated, probably under torture (the accounts vary), and confessed to having had sexual intercourse with the queen three times – a confession he never retracted.26 The reason for his confession is unclear, but the abrupt, inappropriate, and slightly disturbed nature of a conversation between him and Anne, recalled by Anne herself, suggests the sort of imaginative fantasy one might associate with the stalkers of modern-day celebrities.27 Perhaps confessing to adultery with the queen might have, in Smeaton’s mind, conveyed associated glory on him: the false confession, whether voluntary, coerced-compliant or coerced-internalized, is well known to psychologists.28 His confession catapulted the investigation into a different order of magnitude.29 Whatever the subsequent evidence – only the indictment and the evidence of Anne’s conversations with the men of the court recalled in Kingston’s letters to Cromwell have survived – it was all tainted with an irresistible presumption of guilt. Henry VIII’s intimate questioning of Sir Henry Norris and promise of ‘pardon in case he would utter the truth’ must be understood in this light. Whatever Norris said or refused to say, it confirmed Henry’s conviction of his guilt.30 On 2 May 1536, Norris, Anne and her brother, George Boleyn, Lord Rochford, were arrested and taken to join Smeaton in the Tower.31 A couple of days later, more courtiers were arrested – William Brereton, Sir Francis Weston, Richard Page and Sir Thomas Wyatt. By 19 May, six of the accused, including Anne, had been executed. This is all, so far, familiar territory. A fresh way to understand the circumstances of Anne’s fall is to consider it as a crisis of gender relations, chiefly the failure to conform to competing gender ideals. Gender ideals were intimately bound up with the idea of honour – men and women at this time were ‘intoxicated’ with honour.32 Yet, as anthropologists have found, one’s 25 Walker, ‘Rethinking’, p. 18. 26 Aymot, ‘Constantyne’, p. 64; L & P, X, 908; de Carles ‘Poème’, l. 480. 27 Singer, Wolsey, p. 455; L & P, X, 798; Walker, ‘Rethinking’, p. 20 also reflects on Smeaton’s evident emotional instability. 28 See the extensive research on false confessions, e.g. S.M. Kassin and L.S. Wrightsman, ‘Confession evidence’, in The psychology of evidence and trial procedure, ed. Kassin and Wrightsman (Beverly Hills, CA, 1985), pp. 67–94 and Richard P. Conti, ‘The psychology of false confessions’, The journal of credibility assessment and witness psychology, 2 (1999), pp. 14–36. 29 Walker, ‘Rethinking’, p. 20. 30 Aymot, ‘Constantyne’, p. 64. 31 L & P, X, 782; Charles Wriothesley, A chronicle of England during the reigns of the Tudors, from A.D. 1485 to 1559, ed. William Douglas Hamilton, CS (London, 1875), p. 36. 32 C.B. Watson, Shakespeare and the renaissance concept of honour (Princeton, 1960); Faramerz Dabhoiwala, ‘The construction of honour, reputation and status in late seventeenth- and early eighteenth-century England’, TRHS, 6th series, 6 (1996), pp. 201–13, at p. 201; Ingram, ‘Scolding women’, p. 49; Pieter Spierenburg, ‘Masculinity, violence and honor: An introduction’, in Men and violence: Gender, honor and rituals in modern Europe and America, ed. Spierenburg (Ohio, 1998), p. 2.

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honour is deeply vulnerable and unstable – even, as we shall see, for someone of the standing of Anne Boleyn or Henry VIII.33

Womanhood For a sixteenth-century woman, honour was primarily located in her sexual conduct and reputation, that is, in her pre-marital chastity and later restriction of sexual relations to her husband. Women were also held culpable for sexual sin, as has been widely reported.34 At a popular level, work on slander and defamation before the Church courts has shown how the intersection of these two ideas made women’s sexual chastity both fiercely important and highly exposed.35 These codes also applied to elite women. Conduct and courtesy books were sure to advise their elite readers of the fact. Juan Luis Vives in his The instruction of a Christian woman, published in Latin in 1523 and translated into English in 1529, noted, ‘First let her understand that chastity is the principal virtue of a woman, that she that is chaste is fair, well favoured, rich, fruitful, noble and all best things that can be named: and contrary, she that is unchaste is a sea and treasure of all illness.’36 These ideas had an inherent contradiction. The requirement of female chastity had a passive quality; the chaste woman was modest and nonparticipative, submissive and docile.37 Yet, women’s culpability for sexual sin also demanded her constant resistance of her transgressive impulse – an active quality that required her to controvert her own naturally ungoverned irrationality, according to medical opinion of the day. It was the intersection of these contradictory realities that made female chastity so fragile, and so prized. 33 Peter J. Wilson, “Filcher of good names: An enquiry into anthropology and gossip’, Man, 9 (1974), p. 100. 34 For example, Ian Maclean, The renaissance notion of woman: A study in the fortunes of scholasticism and medical science in European intellectual life (Cambridge, 1980), pp. 16, 22; Laura Gowing, Domestic dangers: Women, words and sex in early modern London (Oxford, 1996), pp. 2, 4, 65, 112; Ulinka Rublack, The crimes of women in early modern Germany (Oxford, 1999), pp. 15, 158–162; James R. Farr, Hands of honor: Artisans and their world in Dijon, 1550–1650 (Ithaca and London, 1988), p. 82; Ingram, ‘Scolding women’, p. 49; Keith Thomas, The ends of life: Roads to fulfilment in early modern England (Oxford, 2009), p. 169; Elizabeth S. Cohen, ‘Honor and gender in the streets of early modern Rome’, JIH, 22 (1992), pp. 597–625, p. 597, etc. 35 J.A. Sharpe, Defamation and sexual slander in early modern England: The church courts at York, Borthwick Papers 58 (York, 1980); Gowing, Domestic dangers; Kermode and Walker, Women, crime and the courts; Bernard Capp, When gossips meet: women, family and neighbourhood in early modern England (Oxford, 2003). 36 Vives, The instruction of a Christian woman (1540 edition), trans. Richard Hyrde, book 1, ch. 8 – cited in Renaissance woman: Constructions of femininity in England, ed. Kate Aughterson (London and New York, 1995), p. 70. 37 Spierenburg, ‘Masculinity’, p. 5.

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It is no surprise, then, to find references to the necessity for, and frailty of, female chastity featuring in the words of Anne Boleyn’s indictment. It states that Anne ‘did falsely and traitoroysly procure by base conversations and kisses, touchings, gifts and other infamous incitations, divers of the King’s daily and familiar servants to be her adulterers and concubines, so that several of the King’s servants yielded to her vile provocations’.38 The fault is all Anne’s. It goes on, she ‘procured and incited her own natural brother, Geo[rge] Boleyn, Lord Rocheford … to violate her, alluring him with her tongue in the said George’s mouth, and the said George’s tongue in hers’, and the same terminology is used to describe her interactions with the other accused gentlemen of the privy chamber: ‘the Queen … procured one Will[iam] Bryerton … to violate her’. With Sir Francis Weston and Marc Smeaton, each specific accusation begins ‘she allured …’.39 The indictment fits entirely into contemporary ideas about women and sexual propriety. Contemporary comment about the event also agreed. John Hussey wrote to Lady Lisle on 13 May 1536 that Anne’s ‘alluring, procurement, and instigation, is so abominable and detestable that I am ashamed that any good woman should give ear thereunto’.40 It is Anne’s role in alluring her alleged lovers that spells her downfall – a ‘good woman’ should not even have to hear of Anne’s crimes. Anne was almost certainly not guilty of the crimes with which the indictment and Hussey charge her. Anne was guilty, however, of failing to meet another gender code. For at the same time, as a female courtier, especially as queen, Anne also needed to conform to the ideal of being the lady at the centre of a world of courtly love. This lends great weight to the theory that it was actually what Anne carelessly said that sealed her fate, rather than what she did, as Walker has suggested.41 Several historians have alluded to courtly love at the Henrician court and its possible role in Anne’s downfall.42 Yet, the recent dismissal of courtly love by Retha M. Warnicke as ‘an outdated literary model’ of which there is little evidence of its occurrence in real life, requires its reappraisal, especially as at the heart of Warnicke’s argument is the assumption that Anne could not have indulged in courtly love and been, nonetheless, virtuous and innocent

38 L & P, X, 876. 39 Ibid. 40 TNA, SP 3/12 fol. 64; L & P, X, 866. 41 Walker, ‘Rethinking’, p. 26. 42 Ives, The life, pp. 63–80; David Starkey, The reign of Henry VIII: Personalities and politics (London, 1985), p. 113; Alistair Fox, Politics and literature in the reigns of Henry VII and Henry VIII (Oxford, 1989), pp. 5–6, 257, 261; Steven Gunn, ‘Divorce and reformation in the reign of King Henry’, in Rivals in power: Lives and letters of the great Tudor dynasties, ed. Starkey (London, 1990), p. 77; Antonia Fraser, The six wives of Henry VIII (London, 1992), pp. 127, 248, 290–91; David Loades, The politics of marriage, Henry VIII and his queens (Stroud, 1994), p. 42.

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of the charges against her.43 It was precisely in her attempt to be both that Anne faltered. Courtly love was a chivalric code of conduct for regulating male and female relationships at court; indeed, Nicola Shulman has described courtly love as the ‘indoor, or feminised division of chivalric games’.44 In this rarefied environment, filled with striving young men, and where the only women were those of the queen’s small household, male courtiers would channel their sexual energies and bored hours into choosing a ‘mistress’ whom they would serve faithfully and exclusively, courting her through dances, revels, amorous poems, gifts and songs.45 Thomas Whythorne’s Autobiography tells, for example, how he began his suit to a lady by singing ‘pretty ditties made of love’ to her, whilst playing on the virginals and the lute.46 A central element of this stylized, ‘ritual flirtation’ was, as coined by Sir Gawaine and the green knight, ‘luf-talkyng’, which consisted of exchanging riddles, aphorisms, jokes and verses, and engaging in debates and talking games, all on the subject of love.47 The courtly code did not expect this to be one-sided: the lady too was to be the source of witty repartee about love; the court lady, as Ann Rosalind Jones has put it, ‘had to speak of sex’.48 Yet, this was very carefully circumscribed. Courtly love was a playful way of passing the time and of sublimating eroticism and desire, but such relationships needed to remain platonic. The lady was free to choose whether or not to acknowledge her ‘suitor’: he could hope, at best, for kindness, but love was service, and her servant could also anticipate that he might experience her disdain.49 The themes of unrequited love, longing, discontent, and

43 Warnicke, ‘The conventions of courtly love and Anne Boleyn’, in State, sovereigns and society, ed. Charles Carlton, Robert L. Woods, Mary L. Robertson and Joseph S. Block (Stroud, 1998), pp. 103–18. Warnicke constructs a straw man in which courtly love need be lowly bachelor knights seeking patronage from the wives of their lords and masters and in which the rejected men felt utterly miserable, according to the literary model described by C.S. Lewis. This is to fail to acknowledge the evidence that courtly love at the sixteenth-century court was a game, conducted among elite men and women, whether married or unmarried. 44 Nicola Shulman, Graven with diamonds: The many lives of Thomas Wyatt (London, 2011), p. 66. 45 Ives, The life, p. 70. 46 Thomas Whythorne (1528–1596), Autobiography ed. James M. Osborn (Oxford, 1962), p. 64. 47 Ives, The life, p. 72, Fox, Politics and literature p. 257; Sir Gawayne and the green knight, ed. I. Gollancz, EETS No. 210 (London, 1940), l. 927; John Stevens, ‘The “game of love”’, in his Music and poetry in early Tudor court (Cambridge, 1961, rep. 1979), pp. 159–62. 48 Ann Rosalind Jones, ‘Nets and bridles: early modern conduct books and sixteenthcentury women’s lyrics’, in The ideology of conduct: Essays on literature and the history of sexuality, ed. Nancy Armstrong and Leonard Tennenhouse (New York and London, 1987), pp. 39–72, at pp. 43 and 45. 49 Ives, The Life, p. 70; Thomson, Sir Thomas Wyatt and his background (London, 1964), p. 13; Stevens, Music, p. 162.

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suffering are conventional in men’s writings about their courtly beloveds.50 This scorning helped retain the appearance of chastity, even if the beauty of the game lay in its inherent ambiguity.51 Courtly love and chivalry were central features of the culture of Henry VIII’s court. Warnicke’s question of whether courtly love was ever ‘an actual, social phenomenon’ can be amply answered by a proliferation of examples of the Tudor court at play.52 From the construction of a Great Hall at Hampton Court with a central hearth, there purely for show, to suggest a medieval lord’s hall, or the numerous masques and tournaments where knights would compete to capture the ‘Castle of Love’ (1522) or the ‘Castle of Loyaltie’ (1524–25), through to the hyperbolically miserable longings of Thomas Wyatt’s poetry, chivalry and courtly love seem integral to the culture of the Henrician court.53 Henry VIII himself jousted as ‘Cuer Loyall’ in 1511, loved disguising and masques, and was reported by the chronicler, Edward Hall, to have entertained visiting French ambassadors in 1518 with ‘a sumptuous banket with many ridelles and muche pastyme’.54 John Heywood’s Play of love, a staged debate, probably written for a court performance and printed in 1534, reflects again the culture of ‘luf-talkyng’ with its characters the Lover Loved, the Lover Not Beloved, Neither Lover nor Loved, and a Woman Beloved not Loving, the latter being the conventional disdainful lady, who is given witty words to express her rejection of her lover.55 Anne’s own court too was a veritable hive of courtly lovers and ladies. Helen Baron and Elizabeth Heale have suggested that the Devonshire Manuscript was probably produced in 1533–36 by women of Anne’s circle, namely Lady Margaret Douglas, Henry VIII’s niece; Mary Shelton, Anne’s cousin and maid-of-honour, and probably Henry VIII’s mistress for a time; and Mary Howard (or Fitzroy), duchess of Richmond, sister of the poet, Surrey, and

50 See Thomas Wyatt’s poetry, e.g. ‘Ye know my heart, my lady dear’, ‘Though I cannot your cruelty constrain’, in Sir Thomas Wyatt: The complete poems, ed. R.A. Rebholz (Harmondsworth, 1978), pp. 183–4, 141–2, Henry VIII’s letters to Anne Boleyn (‘Je suffre’) in The love letters of Henry VIII, ed. Henry Savage (London, 1949). 51 Ives, The life, pp. 70–72. 52 Warnicke, ‘The conventions’, p. 103. 53 See Shulman, Graven with diamonds, pp. 66–81 for an excellent analysis of how the world of courtly love influenced Wyatt’s poetry. Paint analysis of the ceiling in the Great Hall in 1924 revealed no evidence of soot: if the hearth had been used even once, some trace would have remained. 54 Edward Hall, Hall’s chronicle; containing the history of England, during the reign of Henry the fourth, and the succeeding monarchs, to the end of the reign of Henry the eighth, in which are particularly described the manners and customs of those periods. Carefully collated with the editions of 1548 and 1550 (London, 1809), p. 592. 55 John Heywood, A Play of love (1534), in The plays of John Heywood, ed, R. Axton and P. Happé (Cambridge, 1991).

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wife of Henry VIII’s illegitimate son.56 The circulation of this manuscript of teasing love poetry and riddles among her women strongly suggests that the culture of courtly love was thriving in Anne’s household.57 This impression is strengthened by reports of Anne’s court. Baynton, writing in June 1533 to Anne’s brother, Rochford, uses the language of courtly love to describe the festivities: As for passe tyme in the queens chambers, [there] was never more. Yf any of you bee now departed have any ladies that ye thought favoured you and somwhat wold moorne att parting of their servauntes, I can no whit perceyve the same by their daunsing and passetyme they do use here, but that other take place, as ever hath been the custume.58

Lancelot de Carles’s biography of Anne substantiates this.59 He describes Anne’s court as a place of dancing, games and ‘unsurpassed pleasures’ in which Anne took enjoyment where she pleased.60 De Carles also depicts Anne herself as a ready partaker in the game of courtly love: She could go anywhere she liked Whether accompanied or alone And if by chance she was taken By some sort of love for a chosen person She was absolutely allowed To treat her friends according to The great licence given to her By the public defence That no one dared say Anything bad about the Queen For fear of being martyred.61

This is no surprise. The interactions of courtly love offered women another way to win honour for themselves other than simply by remaining sexually 56 Helen Baron, ‘Mary (Howard) Fitzroy’s hand in the Devonshire Manuscript’, Review of English Studies, 179 (1994), pp. 318–35, at p. 327; Elizabeth Heale, ‘Women and the courtly love lyric: The Devonshire Manuscript (BL Additional 17492)’, Modern Language Review, 90 (1995), pp. 296–313, at p. 299. Mary Shelton is likely to have been Henry VIII’s mistress, according to the rumours in L & P, VIII, 263 and L & P, XIII.i, 24, not Madge (Margaret) Shelton, as Ives suggests, The life, p. 194. 57 Fox, Politics, p. 257. 58 TNA SP 1/76, fol.168 (L & P, VI, 613). 59 M. Dowling, ed., ‘William Latymer’s cronickille of Anne Bulleyne’, Camden miscellany, 30, CS, 4th series, 39 (1990), pp. 23–65, at p. 38. 60 de Carles, ‘Poème’, ll. 117–20, 261–4, ‘plaisirs non pareilz’, l. 118. 61 de Carles, ‘Poème’, ll. 265–74, my translation of: ‘Elle povoit aller en toute part, / En compaignie ou bien seulle a l’escart, / Et s’elle estoit par fortune saisye / De quelque amour de personne choisye / Il luy estoit entierement permis / A son plaisir de traicter ses amys, / Par le moyen de la grande licence / Que luy donnoit la publicque defence / Que nul n’osast, sur peine de martire, / Aucunement de la Royne mesdire.’

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chaste – through kindness, generosity, beauty, wit, modesty and social graces.62 One of Anne’s gifts, and something that had made her attractive to Henry, was her excellence at this game, from her graceful embodiment of the courtly life in dance, through to her cosmopolitan glamour and sophisticated conversational wit.63 Yet it is also in her playing of this game that she came unstuck. Lady Boleyn said to Anne in the Tower, that ‘Seche desyre as you have had to such tales hase browthe you to thys’, after Anne ruminated over her conversations with men of the court.64 According to Kingston’s letters, Anne recalled a loaded conversation with Sir Francis Weston. Anne had teased Weston ‘because he did love hyr kynswoman [Mrs. Skelton, sayd] he loved not his wyf’. Weston had replied that he ‘loved one in hyr howse better then them bothe’. When Anne had fished, ‘Who is that?’ Weston had replied, ‘It ys yourself’, then ‘she defied him, as she said to me’, remarked Kingston dubiously.65 The opening phrases of this conversation seem to reflect the standard stylized flirtation of the courtly love encounter, where the queen was also the queen bee, around whom all men were supposed to flock. It was also normal for Anne, in her role as the disdainful ‘Woman Beloved not Loving’ then to have ‘defyed him’ – that is, to have rebuked Weston and turned him down.66 Yet, Anne had, in a small but significant way, also inappropriately pursued and encouraged Weston’s compliment.67 The same is true of Anne’s interactions with Sir Henry Norris. In fact, in light of the Treasons Act of 1534 that held that even words that wished harm to the king were unlawful, Anne’s conversation with Norris was even more charged and reckless than that with Weston.68 Again according to Kingston’s version of Anne’s recollections, Anne had asked Norris why he did not go through with his marriage, and he had replied that ‘he wold tary a time’. Anne had then taunted him with the fateful words, ‘you loke for ded men’s showys; for yf owth cam to the King but good, you would loke to have me’. Norris’s flustered response – that ‘yf he should have any such thought, he wold hys hed war of’ – provoked her further, and she retorted, ‘she could undo him if she would’, and ‘ther with thay felle yowt’.69 In this conversation, Anne’s 62 Thomas V. Cohen and Elizabeth S. Cohen, Words and deeds in renaissance Rome: Trials before the Papal magistrates (Toronto, London, 1993), p. 24. 63 Stevens, Music, p. 167; Ives, The life, pp. 2, 45. 64 L & P, X, 798; Singer, Wolsey, p. 453. 65 Mrs. Skelton here is presumably ‘Mrs Shelton’, that is Margaret (Madge) or Mary Shelton. L & P, X, 793; Singer, Wolsey, p. 453. 66 Singer, Wolsey, p. 453; L & P, X, 793. 67 Patricia Thomson, ‘Courtly love’, in her Sir Thomas Wyatt, pp. 34–5. 68 Statutes of the Realm (London, 1817), III 26 Henry VIII, c. 13, 508–9 stated that all who ‘do maliciously wish, will or desire, by words or writing, or by craft imagine’ the King’s death were guilty of treason. 69 Singer, Wolsey, p. 452; L & P, X, 793.

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challenge to Norris was provocative, unseemly, and indiscreet. Anne again hungrily sought the affirmation and admiration that courtly love offered her, in a rash, unrestrained, and careless way. For, whilst female courtiers were supposed to be witty persifleurs in debate, they were also required to demonstrate a strict balance between receptivity and restraint in their courtly love role.70 Baldesar Castiglione’s The book of the courtier of 1528 expressed this need to maintain a middle way between engaging in entertaining banter and straying into improper presumption: Now, in her wish to be thought good and pure, this Lady must not be so coy, or appear to so to abhor gay company or any talk that is a little loose … Yet, on the other hand … she must not utter unseemly words or enter into any immodest familiarity … .71

She must instead ‘observe a certain mean’, though ‘difficult to achieve, and, as it were, composed of contraries’.72 Heale has described this as the ‘dangerous tightrope that courtly women had to tread between wit and scandal, pastime and offence’.73 It was Anne’s part as the lady to receive men’s devotion, and to win honour by her wit and kindness: there was no part for her to pursue their affections and indulge in over-familiarity. In these exchanges Anne thus transgressed the boundaries of courtly love. The fact that in her encounter with Norris she did so to the extent that she also contravened the Treasons Act means that it is no surprise that it was this conversation that Baynton thought pivotal and preoccupying: he wrote, ‘I think much of the communication which took place on the last occasion between the Queen and Master Norres.’74 It was also this conversation that was referenced, indirectly and in exaggerated terms, by her indictment, ‘the said Queen and these other traitors … conspired the death and destruction of the King, the Queen often saying she would marry one of them as soon as the King died’.75 In these interactions, we see the two competing ideals of womanhood being brought into conflict. There was an inner tension between these ideals for elite women – in courtly love, a woman was to be desired, but she was not to be enticing. She needed to be receptive, but know when to temper her participation with restraint and passivity. Yet, women were also thought 70 James A. Schultz, Courtly love, the love of courtliness and the history of sexuality (Chicago and London, 2006), p. 162. 71 Baldesar Castiglione, The book of the courtier, trans. Charles S. Singleton, ed. Daniel Javitch (New York, 2002), p. 151. (Sir Thomas Hoby’s translation of 1561 notes the courtly woman ought not to use ‘a certein familiaritye without measure or bridle’, The book of the courtier, ed. Virginia Cox (London, 1994), p. 215). 72 Castiglione, The book, p. 151. 73 Heale, ‘Women’, 298. 74 L & P, X, 799. 75 L & P, X, 786. In fact, this is the only piece of evidence to suggest why Anne was charged with ‘conspiring the king’s death’.

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hungry for sexual attention, and could not help but entice. Heale puts this succinctly: ‘the dalliance prescribed by courtly codes of female behaviour was seen to threaten the chastity prescribed by domestic codes’.76 ‘The prevailing model of sexual desire placed the court lady in a double bind.’77 This is precisely the bind in which Anne Boleyn was caught. In trying to do what was required of her in terms of courtly love, Anne was vulnerable to being dishonoured by the expectations of how womankind would always react. Her thoughtless remarks crossed the very thin line between approved and necessary courtly love behaviour to win honour, and perceived and dishonouring sexual unchastity. This realization is made all the more stark by evidence alleging that Anne had tried to adhere to both these conflicting codes. Anne de France warned her daughter, Susanne de Bourbon, in 1504 that any misbehaviour by her women would make courtiers suspect her of secret vice.78 If we are to believe William Latymer’s rehabilitating ‘Cronickille’, Anne ‘wonderful rebuked’ her cousin Mary Shelton (who was so deeply associated with the content and circulation of the Devonshire Manuscript) for writing ‘certeyne ydill poeses’ in her prayerbook, chiding her ‘that wold permitte suche wanton toyes in her book of prayers’.79 Latymer, who had a purpose in making Anne appear virtuous but who also served and knew her, understood this to be one of Anne’s frequent attempts to ‘move them [her gentlewomen] to modestye and chastertie’.80 It seems that Anne may have sought to control the behaviour of her court, but she had also herself, fatally, sought affirmation through her flirtations with the men of the court. As such, she had fallen foul of Castiglione’s advice to the female courtier to be ‘circumspect, and … careful not give occasion for evil being said of her, and conduct herself to that she may not only escape being sullied by guilt but even by the suspicion of it’.81 In practice, Anne erred by seeking what courtly love should only willingly have bestowed. This was her real crime.

Manhood Anne’s alleged behaviour also threatened Henry VIII’s honour, with which he was greatly preoccupied. He commented as much in August 1544 in a letter to

76 Heale, ‘Women’, p. 300. 77 Armstrong and Tennenhouse, The ideology, p. 7. 78 Les enseignements d’Anne de France Duchesse de Bourbonnois et d’Auvergne à sa fille Susanne de Bourbon …, ed. A.-M. Chazaud (Moulins, 1878), pp. 80–81. 79 Dowling, ‘Latymer’s cronickille’, pp. 62–3. 80 Dowling, ‘Latymer’s cronickille’, p. 62. 81 Castiglione, The book, p. 151.

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Francis I, king of France, ‘thus touching our honour, which, as you know, we have hitherto guarded and will not have stained in our old age’.82 Honour, as we have seen, was chiefly a measure of one’s ability to conform to the ideals demanded of one’s gender. The ideals of ‘manhood’ (the contemporary term for qualities of manliness) have been debated by historians, who have chiefly questioned whether there were distinctions of age and status, and whether these ideals changed over the course of the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries.83 Research is still too nascent to analyse this range of meanings conclusively, but a common thread appears to be that manhood was displayed through substantiality, whether this was manifested in physical prowess on the tiltyard for the elite, prodigal drinking for the unmarried plebeian youth, or respectable householding for the older middling sort. A man needed to be noticed. Crucially, though, manhood was also characterized by its distinction from womanhood or effeminacy, which was demonstrated through the imposition of patriarchal control, especially of a wife’s sexuality.84 In addition, in contrast to suggestions by Mervyn James and Laura Gowing that male honour was unaffected by their own private or sexual behaviour, manhood was also rooted in male sexual prowess.85 This links to the notion of substantiality: the ‘figure who epitomized masculinity’ was the ‘man of excess’ in terms of dominance, strength, courage, display – and sexual desire.86 Young, single men may have been the only ones boasting of their sexual conquests, as Bernard Capp noted, but wilfully controlling an energetic sexual appetite was

82 L & P, XIX ii, 19. 83 The term ‘masculinity’ dates from 1748 whereas the use of ‘manhood’ to mean the qualities of manliness can be dated back to 1393, OED; Shepard, ‘Manhood, credit and patriarchy in early modern England, c.1580–1640’, Past and Present, 167 (2000), pp. 75–106, at pp. 102–6; Shepard, ‘From anxious patriarchs’; Capp, ‘The double standard revisited: Plebeian women and male sexual reputation in early modern England’, Past and Present, 162 (1999), pp. 70–100, at p. 71; Dabhoiwala, ‘The construction’, p. 203; Merry Wiesner, ‘Wandervogels and women: Journeymen’s concepts of masculinity in early modern Germany’, Journal of Social History, 24 (1991), pp. 767–82, at p. 776. 84 Anthony Fletcher, ‘Manhood, the male body, courtship, and the household in early modern England’, History, 84 (1999), pp. 419–36, at p. 421. 85 Mervyn James, ‘English politics and the concept of honour, 1485–1642’, in his Society, politics and culture: Studies in early modern England (Cambridge, 1986); Gowing, ‘Language, power and the law: women’s slander litigation in early modern London’, in Women, crime and the courts, pp. 29–30, though Gowing does elsewhere acknowledge that ‘women’s adultery dishonoured their husbands’, Domestic dangers, p. 94; Fletcher, Gender, p. 93. 86 Lyndal Roper, ‘Blood and codpieces: masculinity in the early modern German town’, in her Oedipus and the devil: Witchcraft, sexuality and religion in early modern Europe (London, 1994), pp. 119–20; Vern L. Bullough, ‘On being a male in the middle ages’, in Medieval masculinities: Regarding men in the middle ages, ed. Clare A. Lees, Thelma Fenster and Jo Ann McNamara (London, 1994), p. 41.

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a fundamental feature of manhood.87 Sir Thomas Elyot, in 1531, identified the ‘natural perfection’ of man to be one who was ‘fierce, hardy, strong in opinion, covetous of glory, desirous of knowledge, appetiting by generation to bring forth his semblable’.88 Older married men were expected to demonstrate their appetite – their sexual assertiveness and performance – through spousal satisfaction and procreation.89 Not only young, single men, therefore, could be harmed by the suggestion that they were sexual failures. The trial of Anne and her brother Rochford was held at the Tower of London on 15 May 1536, before a crowd of 2,000. They were charged with adultery, incest and conspiring the king’s death, and were judged by 26 peers of the realm, with Thomas Howard, duke of Norfolk, ‘in the King’s place and judge’.90 The very suggestion of adultery implied Henry VIII’s sexual shortcomings, but the matter was left in no doubt. According to Chapuys, at the trial, Anne and her brother were accused of ‘having ridiculed the King, and laughed at his manner of dressing’ and his poetry, and for the various other ways in which Anne ‘showed … she did not love the King, but was tired of him’.91 The ridicule concerned one particular flaw. Accusations were made to Rochford secretly, written on a piece of paper, and he was specifically warned not to read them aloud – but he did.92 Anne, the crowd heard, had told her sister-in-law, Rochford’s wife, that the king ‘was not skilful in copulating with a woman, and that he had neither prowess nor potency’.93 Rochford did also not deny having suggested that Princess Elizabeth might therefore not be Henry’s child. This evidence of Henry’s failings denoted two things: it indicated Henry’s inability as a man, and by extrapolation, as a monarch. Contemporary thought made a clear link between a man’s sexual potency and his wife’s fidelity – men who were cuckolded were those whose ‘lack of sexual dominance led their wives to adultery’.94 The court of good counsell, published in London in 1607, exemplifies this in its text: if a wife offended, her husband was told to examine his own life and ‘finde how the occasion came from himselfe, and

87 Capp, ‘The double standard’, p. 71; Fletcher, ‘Manhood’, p. 423; Roper, ‘Blood’, pp. 119–20. 88 Sir Thomas Elyot, The book named the governor, ed. D.W. Rude (New York, 1992), I, xxi. 93, cited by Fletcher, ‘Manhood’, p. 422. 89 Fletcher, ‘Manhood’, pp. 422–5; Elizabeth A. Foyster, Manhood in early modern England: Honour, sex and marriage (London and New York, 1999), pp. 5, 148–64; Roper, ‘Stealing manhood: capitalism and magic in early modern Germany’, in Oedipus, p. 138. 90 L & P, X, 876; Aymot, ‘Constantyne’, p. 66; Wriothesley, Chronicle, I, pp. 37–8; note that witchcraft is not mentioned and is a ‘red herring’ in gender analysis of Anne’s fall. 91 L & P, X, 908. 92 CSPSp, V (ii), 55; L & P, X, 908. 93 CSPSp, V (ii), 55; L & P, X, 908, ‘n[‘]estoit habile en cas de soy copuler avec femme, et qu[‘]il n[‘]avoit ne vertu ne puissance’ (translation of ‘vertu’ from Cotgrave, A Dictionarie). 94 Foyster, Manhood, p. 5.

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that he hath not used her, as he ought to have done’.95 The term ‘used’ her is, of course – at least in part – a euphemism for satisfying her sexually. Sexual prowess and performance were a crucial test of manhood, and the deep shame of cuckoldry was precisely that it implied sexual impotence.96 ‘To be a man’, writes Lyndal Roper, ‘was to have the power to take a woman’.97 Manhood, as we have seen, was equated with appetite and potency. A wife’s adultery therefore profoundly challenged her husband’s honour.98 Mark Breitenberg and Elizabeth Foyster have characterized masculinity in early modern England as inevitably and perpetually anxious at the ‘specter of … cuckolding’, and Breitenberg has further identified cuckroldry anxiety as an encoded fear of castration.99 The term ‘cuckold’ did not only criticize a woman’s lack of sexual propriety, but imperilled her husband’s honour: there was a clear link between a husband’s action and sexual ability, and a wife’s behaviour – blame and fault for female adultery lay squarely with her spouse.100 Anne’s very behaviour, if assumed to be true, testified to the king’s lack of manliness, and as if this were not sufficient, Anne and Rochford’s ridicule of the king, on this very matter, drove the point home. Women’s adultery also upset the social order and gender hierarchy upon which society was based, suggesting that the social order itself rested on male potency.101 Men needed to demonstrate their masculinity through their patriarchal control of their household – their wives, children, and servants.102 At a popular level, cuckolded men who had lost control of their wives were subject to the charivari, where a husband was paraded around in a woman’s clothes, symbolizing his lost manhood, to remind the audience that where male control failed, the social order would soon crumble.103 Felicity Heal’s study of reputation and honour in the 1600 charivari against Sir Thomas Posthumous Hoby noted how this ritual could also be played out against the elite, and the deep impact that a husband’s supposed sexual failings could have for the upper ranks too. Hoby was mocked that his wife was childless after four years of marriage, with one reveller suggesting it would be better that the stags’ horns on the hall wall were ‘as hard nailed or hard fastened 95 Stefano Guazzo, The court of good counsell (London, 1607), ch. 6. 96 Foyster, Manhood, p. 72; Fletcher, Gender, p. 93 and ‘Manhood’, p. 432. 97 Roper, The holy household: Women and morals in reformation Augsburg (Oxford, 1989), p. 86; see also Fletcher, Gender, p. 101. 98 Fletcher, Gender, p. 110 and ‘Manhood’, p. 432. 99 Mark Breitenberg, Anxious masculinity in early modern England (Cambridge, 1996), pp. 2–3, 15; Foyster, Manhood; Shepard, ‘From anxious patriarchs’, p. 282. 100 Gowing, ‘Language’, pp. 29–30 and Domestic dangers, p. 63. 101 Fletcher, Gender, p. 101; Foyster, Manhood, p. 9; Gowing, Domestic dangers, p. 94. 102 Fletcher, ‘Manhood’, pp. 431–2. 103 Foyster, ‘Male honour, social control and wife-beating in late Stuart England’, TRHS, 6th series, 6 (1996), pp. 215–24, at pp. 215–16; Ingram, Popular culture in seventeenth century England (Basingstoke, 1987), pp. 125–67.

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upon Sir Thomas his head’.104 There were huge repercussions if such a failure were found in a king. Early modern thinking linked the governance of a house with the governance of a realm, as John Dod and Robert Cleaver wrote in 1612, ‘it is impossible for a man to understand how to govern the commonwealth, that doth not know how to rule his own house … so that he that knoweth not to govern, deserveth not to reign’.105 If Henry could not control his own household, how could he rule the realm? Nor was it something that went unnoticed in the kingdom. Sir Nicholas Porter, the parson of Freshwater, was reported to have said in 1538, that ‘Lo, while the King and his Council were busy to put down abbeys and pull away the right of Holy Church, he was made cuckold at home’.106 Anne’s alleged adultery, therefore, had a profound impact on Henry’s honour. Thomas Cranmer, archbishop of Canterbury, in his letter to the king concerning his disbelief at Anne’s guilt wrote that he could not ‘deny but your grace hath great causes … of lamentable heaviness; and also, that … your grace’s honour of every part is so highly touched’.107 A similar sentiment was expressed by the reformer Philipp Melancthon, when he wrote in June 1536, ‘see how dreadfully this calamity will dishonour the King’.108 In light of this context, it is little wonder that Henry reacted to his apparent cuckolding with such swiftness, seeking to restore his standing as a patriarch and a ‘man of excess’. Henry had initiated and even personally pursued the investigation up until his interview with Norris, when, persuaded of Anne’s guilt, his responses changed dramatically. Evidently traumatized, he reacted with hyperbolic self-pity. He wept over his two children, Mary and Henry Fitzroy, the duke of Richmond, assuring them that Anne was ‘an accursed whore, who had determined to poison them’; was overheard saying that he believed ‘upwards of 100 gentlemen’ had known Anne carnally (presumably suggesting her insatiability to detract from his failing to satisfy her), and even composed a tragedy, presumably about his life.109 He also became ‘morbidly concerned’ about the plans for Anne’s execution, including ordering an expensive French executioner from Calais, who used a sword and could behead a person whilst s/he knelt.110 Finally, Henry channelled his rage and upset into ego-appeasing interactions with women. He was reported to be ‘going about banqueting with ladies, sometimes remaining after midnight 104 Felicity Heal, ‘Reputation and honour in court and country: Lady Elizabeth Russell and Sir Thomas Hoby’, TRHS, 6th series, 6 (1996), pp. 161–78, esp. pp. 171, 172, 177. 105 John Dod and Robert Cleaver, A Godlie Form of Householde Government (London, 1612), p. 16. 106 L & P, Viii i, 493. 107 Cox, Cranmer, pp. 323–4 and L & P, X, 792 (the texts differ slightly and I quote both). 108 L & P, X, 1033. 109 L & P, X, 908; CSPSp v (ii), 54; Hall, Chronicle, fol. 228r. 110 Ives, The life, p. 351; L & P, X, 902; see also Ives, ‘Debate’, p. 664.

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and returning by river’.111 A day before Anne’s trial, he lodged Jane Seymour within a mile of his palace, and provided her with cooks and officers from the royal household. On 18 May, a unperceptive Chapuys wrote, ‘already it sounds ill in the ears of the people, that the King, having received such ignominy, has shown himself more glad than ever since the arrest of the whore’, and that ‘you never saw a prince or husband show or wear his horns more patiently and lightly than this one does’.112 As soon as Anne was dead, Cranmer, at the king’s behest, issued a dispensation for Jane and Henry to marry, and they were betrothed just one day after Anne’s execution, and married 10 days later.113 Such a rush was not simply, as Charles V explained it, because ‘the king is of an amorous complexion’, nor was it just, as Alexander Alesius later hypothesized, that Henry was ‘openly insulting’ Anne: in the light of Anne’s devastating assault on his masculinity, Henry did it to restore the patriarchal order, and to prove his manhood.114 Tatiana String has demonstrated how Holbein’s pictures painted of Henry in this and the following year, project masculinity in a way that Henry’s previous portraits never had. The Whitehall Mural shows Henry with extraordinarily broad shoulders, legs astride, a ‘thrusting elbow’, a beard (a symbol of potency, according to Will Fisher’s research), and a large, bulging codpiece where the two triangles of his body meet: it is a picture of virility, strength and power.115 Crucially, it was painted as a mural in the Privy Chamber at Whitehall to be seen by the very audience that had heard Henry’s manhood so undermined. ‘With few exceptions’, says Allan G. Johnson in his study of patriarchy, ‘men look to other men – not women – to affirm their manhood’.116 It was in the eyes of other men that Henry had been most dishonoured, and in the eyes of other men that he sought a restoration of his honour.

Conclusion Anne Boleyn’s fall reveals a host of competing and sometimes contradictory impulses in gender thought in the period. Women were thought to be the source of sexual lustfulness and sin, and voracious in their pursuit of sex, but simultaneously, men were shamed for their failure to satisfy their wives, 111 L & P, X, 908. 112 L & P, X, 908; CSPSp, V (ii), 54. 113 L & P, X, 915, 926, 993, 1000; compare Wriothesley, Chronicle, I, pp. 43–4. 114 L & P, X, 888; CSPFor 1558–89, 1303. 115 Tatiana C. String, ‘Projecting masculinity: Henry VIII’s codpiece’, in Henry VIII and his afterlives, ed. John N. King, Mark Rankin and Christopher Highley (Cambridge, 2009); Will Fisher, ‘The Renaissance beard: Masculinity in early modern England’, Renaissance Quarterly, 54 (2001), pp. 155–88; also see Lipscomb, 1536, pp. 95–103. 116 Allan G. Johnson, The gender knot: Unraveling our patriarchal legacy (Philadelphia, 1997, 2nd edition 2005), pp. 54–6.

the fall of anne boleyn: a crisis in gender relations? 305

which demanded that men be both sexual quarry and sexually dominant. To be a man was to be able to have the power to rein women’s wild natural concupiscence to one man alone: to fail was to bring social order into jeopardy. This was true even for elite men. A nobleman did not find his honour solely in what James called the ‘language of the sword’, or in a combination of steadfastness and aggression.117 As it was for the man in the street, sexual honour was also important for the highest ranking of men. Elite women had to balance their role as desired courtly beloved with their need to preserve sexual honour and chastity, and it was always finely poised. A vivacious, flirtatious woman such as Anne Boleyn could easily shift from the accepted position as desirable but passive into the unacceptable desiring and active. Understanding these inner tensions in ideas of masculinity and femininity helps explain both why Anne fell – why she appeared guilty when she was not – and also why, in the light of her apparent guilt, Henry acted so ruthlessly and rapidly to exterminate her. At the heart of the matter was the fragile and vulnerable notion of honour – the estimation of one’s worth in the eyes of others – an intangible quality one can never grasp or own but which, in Tudor times, could literally mean life or death.118 Anne’s fall showed gender relations in full crisis.

117 James, Society, p. 308. 118 Spierenburg, ‘Masculinity’, p. 2.

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part vii: afterword

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17 Henry VIII: The View from 2009 Steven Gunn

The conference at Hampton Court from which the chapters in this volume derive was one among many exhibitions, publications and events to mark the quincentenary of Henry VIII’s accession in 2009. It would be rash to claim to sum them all up here. What I hope to do instead is to reflect on what these chapters and some of the other commemorations tell us about how and why historians’ views of Henry have been changing in and around his anniversary year. Commemorations naturally focus attention on one individual or event. Henry the man dominated proceedings, larger than life – literally so in the case of the huge portrait draped over Hampton Court’s scaffolding as the palace prepared itself for its year en fête – and more complex than often imagined. One characteristic genre of 2009 was the collection of surprising facts about the monarch whom everyone thought they knew so well. Time came up with a snappy ‘Top 10 Things You Didn’t Know About Henry VIII’, while BBC Radio 4 gave us the more sedate Hidden Henry, in which ‘Five academics present portraits of unknown, intimate and surprising aspects of Henry VIII’s character’.1 This was not just a phenomenon generated by the need to brand the commemorations with a single personality. Henry spent much of the twentieth century in the background of his own reign, being swept along by the general will in reformation or nation-building, bypassed by the rise of capitalism, instructed by ministers more able than himself, or manipulated by courtiers more cunning. From the late 1980s the king fought back, working consciously in partnership with Wolsey and Cromwell, seeking chivalrous glory in war and diplomacy, designing his own idiosyncratic brand of church reform, 1 See http://www.time.com/time/specials/packages/article/0,28804,1906657_1906662_1906678,00. html; http://www.bbc.co.uk/programmes/b00kj03k; both accessed 12 April 2011.

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disposing of queens as seemed best to his needs.2 G.W. Bernard, a leading player in this recovery of royal agency, gives us in his chapter here both a wide-ranging account of the style of rule revealed by Henry’s restoration to a central place in the history of his times and an account of the rationale for that restoration. By 2008–09 the king’s comeback was producing biographical studies that explained the reign in terms of Henry’s personality and the forces that shaped it: childhood for David Starkey, masculinity for Suzannah Lipscomb, a perspective further developed in her chapter in this volume, which adds in the conflicting demands that ideals of femininity placed on Anne Boleyn.3 The powerful Henry of recent scholarship is also a material Henry, surrounded by objects that expressed his personality and power but also formed an environment within which he lived and ruled. While it chimes with a wider academic interest in the history of material culture, this was a perspective given an enormous boost, first by the display of objects from Henry’s court in the 1991 Greenwich exhibition to mark the quincentenary of his birth, and then by the publication of the inventories of his goods taken in 1542 and after his death.4 Wider studies of many aspects of Henry’s material surroundings, from his palaces and tapestries to his clothes, have been a major feature of work on the reign in the last two decades.5 A concern with Henry’s material world, from musical instruments to food, characterized Lucy Wooding’s 2009 biography of the king, but there is room for yet more re-interpretation along these lines.6 The king’s medical history, as one of the Hidden Henry programmes showed, drew together his physical and mental state with the herbal and chemical resources of his realm and the intellectual currents of the day.7 As Elizabeth T. Hurren shows in her chapter here, parallel investigations of the flux of medical ideas, materials and practice can be pursued for some of Henry’s subjects, and they may yield surprises 2 Peter Gwyn, The king’s cardinal: The rise and fall of Thomas Wolsey (London, 1990); Steven Gunn, ‘The French wars of Henry VIII’, in The origins of war in early modern Europe, ed. Jeremy Black (Edinburgh, 1987), pp. 28–51; George Bernard, The king’s reformation: Henry VIII and the remaking of the English church (New Haven and London, 2005); George Bernard, Anne Boleyn: Fatal attractions (New Haven and London, 2010). 3 David Starkey, Henry: Virtuous prince (London, 2008); Suzannah Lipscomb, 1536: The year that changed Henry VIII (Oxford, 2009). 4 Henry VIII: A European court in England, ed. David Starkey (London, 1991); The inventory of King Henry VIII: Society of Antiquaries MS 129 and British Library MS Harley 1419: The transcript, ed. David Starkey (London, 1998); Maria Hayward, The 1542 inventory of Whitehall: The palace and its keeper (London, 2004). 5 Simon Thurley, The royal palaces of Tudor England: Architecture and court life 1460– 1547 (New Haven and London, 1993); Thomas P. Campbell, Henry VIII and the art of majesty: Tapestries at the Tudor court (New Haven and London, 2007); M.A. Hayward, Dress at the court of King Henry VIII (Leeds, 2007). 6 Lucy Wooding, Henry VIII (London and New York, 2009). 7 See http://www.bbc.co.uk/programmes/b00kj039, accessed 12 April 2011.

henry viii: the view from 2009 311 about the hierarchies of medical expertise. Viewed through his goods, as Maria Hayward shows, Henry’s policies towards the Church, his ministers and his nobility look as much like a monstrous kind of collecting mania as anything else, while the turbulent history of the reign was there for all at court to read in the possessions that had fallen into royal hands. An appreciation of the objects involved in international gift exchanges, similarly, helps us to understand their true diplomatic significance, as Glenn Richardson’s chapter explains. The exhibitions of 2009 naturally took this exploration further. Hampton Court Palace itself, taken from Wolsey, developed by Henry, both marked by and shaping the life of the court, was presented afresh to the public as a place to encounter the king. Henry’s armour and weaponry, on display at the Tower of London, gave an impression both of the very material man – 54 inch waist and all – and of his fascination with the military innovations of his day, from three-barrelled breech-loading cannon to shields with integral handguns.8 Henry’s intellectual interests were evident from the books and maps that formed the core of the British Library’s exhibition. Here the king’s mental journey could be tracked though volumes of all shapes and sizes: the educational works presented to him as a young man, his first public effort at authorship with the Assertio septem sacramentorum, the collections of material in support of his divorce and repudiation of papal authority, the drafts of doctrinal formulations under his supreme headship of the church. Time and again his trenchant engagement with the key debates of his reign was demonstrated by his annotations on the books he read.9 Here the exhibition brought to public attention the benefits scholars had begun to draw from the painstaking recreation of Henry’s libraries carried out in the last two decades.10 Consideration of the material and literary culture of courtly life and of the wider intellectual currents within which political attitudes were formed has been characteristic of the diverse but pervasive set of approaches to explaining early modern politics through characterization of early modern political culture.11 In practice this tendency has been less prevalent among those writing about the early sixteenth century than about the Elizabethan and early Stuart age, but work on the relationship between the political careers and cultural interests of powerful individuals around Henry VIII or on the political significance of poetry, drama and building has clear affinities

8 Henry VIII: Arms and the man, ed Graeme Rimer, Thom Richardson and J.P.D. Cooper (Leeds, 2009). 9 Henry VIII: Man and monarch, ed. Susan Doran (London, 2009). 10 The libraries of King Henry VIII, ed. James P. Carley, Corpus of British Medieval Library Catalogues, 7 (London, 2000); James P. Carley, The books of King Henry VIII and his wives (London, 2004). 11 Tudor political culture, ed. Dale Hoak (Cambridge, 1995); The Tudor monarchy, ed. John Guy (London, 1997); Culture and politics in early Stuart England, ed. Kevin Sharpe and Peter Lake (Basingstoke, 1994).

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with the more fully articulated project of those studying the later period.12 In this vein Suzannah Lipscomb shows here how poetry, chivalry and politics came together in the crisis of Anne Boleyn’s fall. Where the political culture project touches art history it chimes with the urge to reconstruct whole visual cultures rather than study artistic genres individually in the traditional way, as Kent Rawlinson brings architecture, portraiture, manuscript illumination, book design and contemporary discussion of renaissance style together in his contribution to this volume. In literary scholarship, likewise, the exploration of political culture has had much in common with the subtler ventures of the new historicist critics. Attention to political context and to the significance of printing texts at a time of public debate can help to explain the development of genres such as the interlude, as Peter Happé’s chapter argues. For Ruth Ahnert it is the very constraints of court life that make it hard to pin down biographical and autobiographical allusions in Wyatt’s poetry, and the extraordinary context of imprisonment that explains the candid naming practices both of prison graffiti – a good example of the kind of non-canonical text drawn into literary discussion in recent decades – and of prison verse. Historicism meets material culture in Eleanor Rycroft’s exploration of how the experience of performing Henrician interludes in Henrician courtly spaces with an eye to Henrician codes of gender, status and orderliness sheds light both on texts and on their probable reception. Rapprochement between literary scholars and historians, each touched by cultural anthropology, has increased interest in the idea of life, politically significant life in particular, as communicative performance. At Henry’s court, where the king might joust, dance, appear in disguise, spectate, preside and welcome ambassadors in a single sequence of entertainments, the boundaries between performance, leisure and governance were particularly fluid, as Peter Happé shows. At other courts where Henry’s interests needed to be looked after, as Catherine Fletcher explains for Rome, the ambassador needed to represent the king’s person in liturgical ritual and gift-exchange as well as his mind in diplomatic negotiation. Henry himself on his travels needed to perform kingship to his subjects, though, as Susan Wabuda suggests, he seems to have been less concerned to do so at Cambridge than his father had been. Henry was also represented to his subjects by the dissemination of the royal image in paintings, coins, seals and prints. This is a process much debated between those who think it of major benefit in persuading the populace to 12 Cardinal Wolsey: Church, state and art, ed. S.J. Gunn and P.G. Lindley (Cambridge, 1990); A.L. Boyle, ‘Hans Eworth’s portrait of the earl of Arundel and the politics of 1549–50’, EHR, 117 (2002), pp. 25–47; Greg Walker, John Skelton and the politics of the 1520s (Cambridge, 1988), Plays of persuasion: Drama and politics at the court of Henry VIII (Cambridge, 1991) and Writing under tyranny: English literature and the Henrician reformation (Oxford, 2005); Maurice Howard, The early Tudor country house: Architecture and politics 1490–1550 (London, 1987).

henry viii: the view from 2009 313 acquiesce in the will of so impressive a monarch and those who think its impact feeble, a disagreement that forms part of a wider discussion of the reach and cogency of Tudor propaganda.13 Two recent twists in the argument have urged us to think more carefully about what different kinds of persuasion or communication works of art were capable of and how far it was the very corporeality of the king, ‘physical, commanding, fertile’, that was a major part of the message.14 There is more of significance still to be found in the royal portraits of the reign, as Kent Rawlinson shows here with his analysis of the architectural features depicted in them. But those interpreting them must bring to the task maximum sensitivity not only to the visual language of the images themselves, but also to the assumptions about how art was experienced and discussed at the time of creation and since, as Tatiana C. String explains; and, as Brett Dolman warns, the psychological and political conclusions often drawn from portraits may rest on shaky foundations of identification, attribution and dating. In the more traditional fields of politics and religion too Henry and his historians may have felt the ground moving under their feet in 2009. The great debates that ran from the 1950s to the 1980s about the nature and significance of change in the institutions of central government have run out of steam. So too, more or less, have the disputes about the degree of the king’s control over policy and the influence of factional divisions at court that succeeded them. The exhibitions and conferences of 2009 did not tell us much about the Court of Augmentations or the groom of the stool. Where they did shed light on court politics, they suggested that the king was unavoidably central in the politics of his reign and yet thought by contemporaries to be open to influence. The British Library displayed letters to ministers and queens, and notes on diplomatic exchanges, marital problems and treason charges, all in the king’s own hand, hardly the work of a monarch uninterested in business; they also showed us letters to those around the king by outsiders – Martin Luther to Thomas Cromwell for instance – hopeful that Henry might be swayed.15 Thomas Freeman’s re-examination of John Foxe’s account of the conservative attack on Katherine Parr, similarly, suggests both the religious and political polarization at court in Henry’s last years and the king’s calculated determination to master it. In religion the great wave of revisionist scholarship that overwhelmed traditional accounts of the reformation in the 1970s and 1980s has been 13 Christopher Lloyd and Simon Thurley, Henry VIII: Images of a Tudor king (London, 1990); Sydney Anglo, Images of Tudor kingship (London, 1992); J.P.D. Cooper, Propaganda and the Tudor state: Political culture in the Westcountry (Oxford, 2003). 14 Tatiana C. String, Art and communication in the reign of Henry VIII (Aldershot, 2008); Kevin Sharpe, Selling the Tudor monarchy: Authority and image in sixteenth-century England (New Haven and London, 2009), quotation at p. 137. 15 Doran, Henry VIII: Man and monarch, nos 83–4, 99, 106, 162, 191, 208, 222, 228, 231, 264.

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absorbed into a consensus that the late medieval English church was by and large popular and effective and that to most of his subjects Henry’s attacks on it came as an unwelcome shock. In its wake attention has turned to the suddenly surprising proposition that there were none-the-less some Protestants in Henry’s England – though they might not have called themselves that – and that they survived even the king’s flourishing of his theological orthodoxy in the years after 1539 to press on with change under Edward VI.16 Meanwhile politics and religion have been drawn together in the study of popular politics. Henry’s reformation, it has been argued, could not have been accomplished without the complicity of at least a significant minority of his subjects, whatever their motivations.17 Here the study of the politics of reformation joins hands with the growing debates over the forms and formats of public debate available in later medieval and early modern England.18 It connects with the trend to see the pilgrimage of grace as a movement organized from below to challenge the king’s policies, whether primarily in religion or in taxation and other intrusions on local society.19 And it opens the possibility that other aspects of royal policy might be tested for their public reception or even for their genesis not in the minds of royal ministers, but in the concerns of village and small-town elites.20 A different political theme has been much debated since the 1990s but did not make much of a showing in 2009, presumably because neither its analytical complexities nor its sensitive implications for the current state of relations between the constituent parts of the United Kingdom made it suitable for public commemoration. The ‘new British history’ with its stress on the complex interaction of peoples and polities within the British Isles and Ireland has stimulated reassessment not only of the ‘first English empire’ of the high and later middle ages and of the Stuart multiple monarchy, but also of the age of Henry VIII, who declared himself king of Ireland, remodelled Welsh government along English lines and tried to take over Scotland by 16 Alec Ryrie, The gospel and Henry VIII: Evangelicals in the early English reformation (Cambridge, 2003); Diarmaid MacCulloch, Tudor church militant: Edward VI and the Protestant reformation (London, 1999). 17 Ethan Shagan, Popular politics and the English reformation (Cambridge, 2002). 18 John Watts, ‘The pressure of the public on later medieval politics’, in The fifteenth century IV: Political culture in late medieval Britain, ed. Linda Clark and Christine Carpenter (Woodbridge, 2004), pp. 159–80; The politics of the public sphere in early modern England, ed. Peter Lake and Steven Pincus (Manchester, 2007). 19 Richard Hoyle, The pilgrimage of grace and the politics of the 1530s (Oxford, 2001); Michael Bush, The pilgrimage of grace: a study of the rebel armies of October 1536 (Manchester, 1996); Bush and David Bownes, The defeat of the pilgrimage of grace: A study of the postpardon revolts of December 1536 to March 1537 and their effect (Hull, 1999). 20 Steven Gunn, ‘War, dynasty and public opinion in early Tudor England’, in Authority and consent in Tudor England: Essays presented to C. S. L. Davies, ed. George Bernard and Steven Gunn (Aldershot, 2002), pp. 131–49; Marjorie McIntosh, Controlling misbehaviour in England, 1370–1600 (Cambridge, 1998).

henry viii: the view from 2009 315 dynastic marriage enforced at the point of the sword.21 At its most ambitious, this perspective suggests we should reconsider Henry’s realms not as an English kingdom with its Welsh appanage and a separate Irish lordship, but as a series of intensively governed lowland zones interspersed with areas of highland landscape, pastoral farming, military insecurity and indispensable noble lordship; indispensable at least to everyone except Henry, who crippled his own governance of Ireland and the North of England by his refusal to accept the service of the Percies, Dacres and Fitzgeralds on terms they found workable.22 The legacy of Henry’s approach would mark the development of all his realms far into the future. Already in the 1530s, as Susan Brigden shows here, Ireland was taking on its role as the prime bridgehead for European Catholic opposition to the English reformation. For all the attractions of the archipelagic approach, recent studies remind us that the politics of Henry’s reign and reformation were also a matter of international politics. This was true for those advising the king, whose debates were intricately bound up with England’s official and unofficial negotiations with Lutheran Germany.23 It was true for those writing the king’s propaganda pamphlets, who found their work sent to English embassies abroad, as Henry kept Europe informed of his latest position, and published in translation as the king sought to sway wider opinion to his side.24 It was true for churchmen as different as Thomas Cranmer, whose alertness to the currents of international Protestantism has been convincingly emphasized, and Reginald Pole, whose embittered relations with his royal cousin, as Eamon Duffy shows here, took him from Paris to Rome, Flanders and Spain, onwards in his imagination to Istanbul to turn Charles V aside to a crusade against England, and, at last and in vengeful mood, back to Canterbury.25 It was true for those international statesmen who, as Susan Brigden shows, feared Henry might lead war in Italy against the pope and aspired to organize just such a crusade as Pole desired to rid Christendom of ‘that lost king’. An appreciation of Henry’s international context has also led to a vein of comparative study in which the peculiarities of the king and his realm are brought out by setting him alongside his contemporaries on the thrones of Europe. Comparing Henry to Francis I and examining their personal encounters sheds light on both kings, as Glenn Richardson explains here, 21 R.R. Davies, The first English empire: Power and identities in the British Isles 1093–1343 (Oxford, 2000); Conquest and union: Fashioning a British state, 1485–1725, ed. Steven Ellis and Sarah Barber (London, 1995); The British problem, c.1534–1707: State formation in the Atlantic archipelago, ed. Brendan Bradshaw and John Morrill (Basingstoke, 1996). 22 Steven Ellis, Tudor frontiers and noble power: The making of the British state (Oxford, 1995). 23 Rory McEntegart, Henry VIII, the League of Schmalkalden, and the English reformation (Woodbridge, 2002). 24 Tracey Sowerby, ‘“All our books do be sent into other countreys and translated”: Henrician polemic in its international context’, EHR, 121 (2006), pp. 1271–99. 25 Diarmaid MacCulloch, Thomas Cranmer: A life (New Haven and London, 1996).

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contrasting Francis’s spontaneity to Henry’s more ponderous approach. Various other modes of comparison have been tried. The kingship of Henry and Francis has been subjected to general analysis alongside that of Charles V, and to the assembly of a team of scholars to explore different aspects of their rule in parallel.26 A second approach focuses closely on one theme in government, such as the role of bishops as councillors or the effects of war on the state.27 Equally important in seeing Henry clearly is to compare him with his own father. As Susan Wabuda shows, setting Henry VIII’s visits to Cambridge alongside those of Henry VII explains why the university looked back on them so differently and underlines the instrumentalist nature of Henry’s dealings with the scholars of his realm. For various reasons – differences in sources as well as contexts – it is harder to compare the two in other aspects of their reigns, but it is none the less necessary. One recent step forward is a study of Henry VII’s parliaments that makes it easier to judge how different the age of Cromwell and Audley really was from what had gone before.28 It has also been suggested that the co-operation of the lay elites of Henry’s realm in his attack on the church is made easier to understand by an appreciation of the combination, evident in some of his father’s leading ministers, of conventional piety, aggression towards the church’s jurisdiction, rapacity towards its wealth, and a preparedness to tell the clergy firmly that they were not living up to their pastoral calling.29 Renewed biographical attention to Henry VIII, meanwhile, has naturally included appreciation of his political apprenticeship and the degree to which he consciously associated himself with those who resented aspects of his father’s rule.30 A significant study of the last years of Henry VII’s reign has just appeared, and I hope to illuminate the continuities and changes of the reigns of the two Henries by a study of the father’s lowly born councillors, many of whom survived to serve his son.31 Yet we cannot avoid one of the great lessons of 2009. It was, of course, the quincentenary of Henry VII’s death as well as that of his son’s accession; but hardly anyone noticed. Loyal students of the reign produced a special issue of the journal Historical Research, 26 Glenn Richardson, Renaissance monarchy: The reigns of Henry VIII, Francis I and Charles V (London, 2002); François Ier et Henri VIII. Deux princes de la renaissance (1515–1547), ed. Charles Giry-Deloison (Lille and London, 1996). 27 Cédric Michon, La crosse et le sceptre. Les prélats d’état sous François Ier et Henri VIII (Paris, 2008); Steven Gunn, David Grummitt and Hans Cools, War, state and society in England and the Netherlands, 1477–1559 (Oxford, 2007). 28 P.R. Cavill, The English parliaments of Henry VII: 1485–1504 (Oxford, 2009). 29 Steven Gunn, ‘Edmund Dudley and the church’, Journal of Ecclesiastical History, 51 (2000), pp. 509–26. 30 Starkey, Henry: Virtuous prince. 31 Tom Penn, Winter king: The dawn of Tudor England (London, 2011); Steven Gunn, Henry VII’s new men and the making of Tudor England (forthcoming).

henry viii: the view from 2009 317 containing valuable studies of various aspects of the first Tudor’s kingship, but exhibitions, conferences, internet factoids and radio series there were none.32 Even standing by – or, as in the Whitehall Mural, rather in front of – his own father, Henry looms disproportionately large. Working out why, and how far it is justified, may keep us all busy for another five centuries.

32 ‘Who was Henry VII?: The 500th anniversary of the death of the first Tudor king (1509–2009)’, ed. Mark Horowitz, Historical Research, 82 (2009), pp. 375–592.

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Index

Abell, Thomas, 149, 155 Abbis, Richard, 222 Ahnert, Ruth, 4, 312 Alexander VI, 182 Alexander the Great, 140 Alidosi, Francesco, 183 Amadas, Robert, 57 Anglo, Sydney, 273, 276 Anne Boleyn (Queen), 5–6, 12, 18, 20, 26, 36, 42, 82, 85, 116, 119, 120, 125, 128, 146, 152, 153, 156, 160, 161, 169, 205, 206, 210, 212, 244, 267, 269, 280, 282, 285, 287, 288, 292, 293, 297, 299, 304, 305, 310, 312 Anne of Cleves (Queen), 122–4, 128, 129, 244 Apelles, 135–7, 140, 141 Aragon, Ferdinand of, 48 Ardern, George, 148 Aretino, 138 Armagh, Archbishop of, 36 Arthur Tudor (Prince), 36, 72, 164, 167, 199, 281 Ashmole, Elias, 170, 172 Aske, Robert, 9, 10 Askew, Anne, 241, 244, 245, 249, 250 Astington, John H, 257 D’Auvergne, François de La Tour, 54 Audley, Thomas, 35, 316

Bainbridge, Christopher, 179, 183–7 Bale, John, 176, 256, 285, 286 Balevett, John, 40 Barbarossa, Khaireddin, 219 Barnard, Lambert, 106 Barnes, Robert, 176 Barron, Caroline, 31 Barton, Elizabeth, 149 Baude, Pierre, 99 Baynton, Edward, 45 Beaufort, Margaret, 73, 164, 166, 172, 178, 199 Becket, Thomas, 32, 213, 285 Behren, Betty, 189 Belknap, Edward, 280 Bell, Gary M., 180 Bellay, Guillaume Du, 49 Bellin, Nicholas, 98, 103 Bere, Richard, 182 Bernard, G.W., 2, 3, 238, 288–90, 310 Berthelet, Thomas, 97 Betteridge, Thomas, 2 Bettes, John, 126 Bilney, Thomas, 176 Birche, John, 269 Blagg, George, 239, 245, 248–50 Blair, Tony, 9 Boleyn, George (Lord Rochford), 152–4, 291, 293 Boleyn, Thomas, 51, 102

320 henry viii and the court

Bonner, Edmund, 209, 226 Bonnivet, Admiral, 53, 56 Boorde, Andrew, 80, 101 Borgia, Cesare, 182 Borgia, Lucrezia, 182 Bourbon, Charles duke of, 40, 55, 56 Bramante, Donato, 107, 108, 109 Brandon, Charles, 119 Brandon, Katherine, 249 Brereton, William, 152, 154, 291 Brigden, Susan, 5, 14, 159, 238, 315 Bristow, Nicholas, 38, 44 Browne, Anthony, 52, 111 Browne, John, 269 Bruyn, Barthel, 123 Bryan, Francis, 146, 158, 159, 160, 161, 191, 224 Bucer, Martin, 198 Bull, Marcus, 2 Bullock, Henry, 174, 176 Bulmer, Ralph, 148, 149 Bulmer, Wiliam, 149 Burke, S.H., 129 Burrow, Colin, 157 Butts, William, 241 Caesar, Julius, 100 Campeggio, Cardinal Lorenzo, 187 Canterbury Cathedral, 32, 213 Carew, Elizabeth, 36 Carew, Nicholas, 36, 39, 41, 191, 192 Casali, Gregorio, 187–9, 193 Castile, Isabella of, 96 Cavalcanti, Giovanni, 191 Cavendish, George, 38, 42, 272, 273 Cawarden, Thomas, 38, 269, 272 Cecil (nee Cooke), Mildred, 80 Cervini, Marcello, 231 Chabot, Philippe de, 58 Chaloner, Thomas, 232 Chambers, DS, 179 Chapuys, Eustace, 10, 41, 226, 288–90, 301, 304

Charles I, 26 Charles V, 10, 19, 41, 53, 60–63, 103, 140, 168, 173, 183, 197, 205, 206, 208, 217–20, 223, 225, 226, 229, 230, 246, 280, 304, 315, 316 Charles VIII, 228 Cheke, Peter, 174 Chichester Cathedral, 106 Cholmley, Jane, 79, 80, 84 Cholmley, Margaret, 4, 78, 80–86, 88, 89 Cholmley, Richard 74–7, 79, 83 Cholmley, Roger, 74 Clarke, Andrea, 2 Claude (Queen of France), 55, 60 Clement VII, 183, 189, 191, 200 Clerk, John, 186, 187, 190, 191 Cleves, Amelia of, 123, 124 Clifford, Catherine, 75, 79 Cobos, Francisco de los, 230 Cock, Lucas Cornelius de, 98 Coke, Davy, 176 Collins, John, 149, 150, 154, 155, 160 Colonna, Giovanni, 145 Compton, William, 12, 15, 18, 175 Constable, Katherine, 77, 79, 81 Contrarini, Gasparro, 204, 206, 217, 219 Conyers, Margaret, 75 Cook, Lawrence, 149 Cooper, Tarnya, 2 Cornish, William, 272 Corvus, Johannes, 116 Costa, Lorenzo, 109 Cranmer, Thomas, 25, 168–70, 175, 176, 201, 202, 204, 239, 244, 251, 282, 285, 303, 304, 315 Cresacre, Anne, 139 Croke, Richard, Crosby, John, 263, 264 Crome, Edward, 176, 248, 250 Cromwell, Elizabeth, 125 Cromwell, Thomas, 3, 12–14, 16, 17, 23, 26, 32, 36–8, 45, 123, 145, 146,

index 321

149, 178, 201, 203, 204, 208, 227, 231, 233, 278, 279, 284, 285, 289, 290, 291, 309, 313, 316 Cust, Lionel, 124 Darcy, Arthur, 32 Darcy, Thomas, 269 Davies, Chris, 25 Davis, Natalie Zemon, 58 Denny, Anthony, 40, 249 D’Etampes, duchesse, 57 Dickens, Geoff, 21 Digges, Leonard, 101 Dillon, Janette, 267, 283 Docwra, Thomas, 184 Dolet, Étienne, 186 Dolman, Brett, 2, 4, 313 Douglas, Margaret, 125 Dover Castle, 111 Dudley, Edmund, 11 Dudley, John, 155 Dudley, Robert, 155 Duffy, Eamon, 5, 20, 21, 315 Dürer, Albrecht, 138, 140 Edmundes, John, 177 Edward III, 35 Edward IV, 12, 181 Edward VI, 13, 25, 36, 38, 110, 121, 122, 126, 134, 177, 199, 209–11, 238, 247, 269, 314 Edward the Confessor, St, 166 Elizabeth I (Elizabeth Tudor), 2, 25, 85, 86, 110, 119, 125–8, 180, 233, 244, 246, 250, 301 Elstrack, Reynold, 119, 120 Eltham Palace, 271 Elton, G.R., 13, 16, 36, 38, 238, 244 Elyot, Thomas, 31 Empson, Richard, 11 Englefield, Francis, 198 Erasmus, Desiderius, 21, 22, 40, 104, 105, 140, 165, 172, 174, 177

d’Este, Cardinal, 182 d’Este, Isabella, 31 Euclid, 100 Eworth, Hans, 126, 127 Eyck, Jan van, 95 Farnese, Cardinal, 216, 230, 231 Fellows, William, 87 Ferdinand (King of Spain), 184, 185 Fidell, Saro, 148 Field, John, 243 Fines, Ralph, 32 Fisher, John, 113, 171, 172, 175, 177, 201, 203–6, 210, 211, 217, 221 Fisher, Will, 304 Fitzgerald, Thomas, 233 Fitzroy, Henry, 67 Fitzwilliam, William, 249 Fleming, Juliet, 148, 159, 160 Fletcher, Catherine, 5, 312 Foister, Susan, 129 Foix, Andrew de56, 57 Foix, Françoise de, 56 Foix, Odet de, 56, 57 Foix, Thomas de, 56, 57, Fontainebleau Palace, 103 Fortescue, John, 31 Fortescue, Philipa, 161 Franciotti, Galeotto, 183 Francis I (King of France), 4, 11, 20, 47–63, 65, 97, 103, 104, 140, 168, 175, 183, 187, 189, 208, 216, 218, 221, 223–5, 228–31, 315, 316 Fraser, Antonia, 125, 129 Friar, John, 204 Fox, Edward, 189, 192 Foxe, John, 235–47, 249, 250, 252, 313 Foxe, Richard, 18 Freeman, Thomas S., 2, 5, 313 Gardiner, Germain, 244

322 henry viii and the court

Gardiner, Stephen, 5, 13, 176, 189, 192, 209, 210, 224, 236, 238–40, 242–6, 251, 252 Gate, John, 36 George, Duke of Clarence, 199 Gering, Giles, 126 Ghinucci, Girolamo, 187, 188, 193 Giberti, Gianmatteo, 218 Gibson, Richard, 58, 98, 272 Gifford, George, 52 Gigli, Giovanni, 182 Gigli, Silvestro, 182–4, 186 Giry-Deloison, Charles, 188 Giustiniani, Maóna, 264 Gold, Henry, 102 Gonzaga, Francesco, 55 Gouffier, Guillaume, 50 Granvelle, Antoine Perrenot de, 230 Grassi, Paride, 182, 188 Greenblatt, Stephen, 161 Greengrass, Mark, 59 Greenwich Palace, 98, 100, 271 Gresham, John, 40 Grey, Jane, 43, 125, 126, 127 Grey, Thomas, 175 Groebner, Valentin, 192 Grosvenor, Bendor, 117 Gwyn, Peter, 15, 22, 189 Guildford, Henry, 104, 105, 140, 259, 261, 272 Gunn, Steven, 2, 3 Guy, John, 14 Haigh, Chris, 17, 21 Hales, John, 82, 83 Hall (Halle), Edward 10, 50, 52, 58, 60, 102, 168, 173, 177, 270, 272, 273, 277, 284 Hampton Court Palace, 1–3, 69, 99, 103, 118, 197, 241, 256, 271, 311 Hannibal, Thomas, 186, 188 Happé, Peter, 5, 312 Harpsfield, Nicholas, 198, 212

Harris, Barbara, 78 Hart, Percival, 52 Hatton, Christopher, 80 Hayward, Maria, 2, 4, 311 Heale, Elizabeth, 156 Heath, Nicholas, 30, 176 Heere, Lucas de, 135, 139 Helen, 141 Heneage, Michael, 239 Heneage, Thomas, 239 Henry VI, 167 Henry VII, 43, 49, 73, 95, 113, 118, 134, 164–7, 171, 172, 174, 178, 182, 316 Herbert, Anne, 236, 237, 242, 243, 247, 249 Herbert, Lord of Cherbury, 15 Herbert, William, 243, 247 Hever Castle, 119, 124, 127 Heywood, John, 5, 6, 255–8, 263, 266, 267, 269, 270, 279, 280–84, 286 Highley, Christopher, 2 Historic Royal Palaces, 1 Holbein, Hans, 4, 93, 97, 98, 104–9, 119–25, 128, 129, 133–6, 138–41, 304 Holland, William, 57 Hollar, Wenceslaus, 120 Holsewyther, Margaret, 126, 127 Horden, Peregrine, 80 Horenbout, Gerard, 120 Horenbout, Lucas, 118, 122, 126, 127 Horenbout, Susanna, 124, 126 Hoskins, W.G., 29 Hotman, Jean, 57, 58 Howard, Catherine (Queen), 12, 42, 116, 122, 124–6, 128 Howard, Henry, 12, 38, 105, 155, 251 Howard, Maurice, 112 Howard, Thomas, 9, 10, 12, 13, 38, 44, 168, 169, 239, 247, 248, 250, 251, 301 Huicke, Robert, 241, 242, 248, 249 Huicke, William, 249

index 323

Hunt, Alice, 2 Hurren, Elizabeth T., 4, 310 Hutchinson, Robert, 2 Hutton, John, 123 Hymans, Henri, 134, 135 Inglefold, Francis, 36 Innocent III, 215 Innocent VIII, 181, 182, 186 Iulius, 107 Ives, Eric, 13, 14, 120, 121, 288, 289 James, Susan E., 1, 125–7, 238, 244, 246 Jane (fool), 110 Janik, Vicki K., 260 Jesus, 160 John, King, 216, 220 John, Master, 126 Juan, Don, 18 Julius II, 182, 191 Kassell, Lauren, 81 Katherine of Aragon, (Catherine of Aragon) (queen), 2, 18–20, 36, 42, 55, 57, 96, 116–20, 127, 128, 149, 163, 167, 172, 176, 177, 180, 199, 200, 202, 206, 217, 220, 269, 274, 280, 283, 284 Kendal, John, 181 Kerrigan, John, 156, 157 Kettering, Sharon, 59 King, John, N, 2 Kingston, William, 20, 36 Kishlansky, Mark, 26 Knevet (Knyvet), Anthony, 111, 250 Knevett, Henry, 32 Knollys, Francis, 32 Kris, Ernst, 138 Kurz, Otto, 138 Laïs of Corinth, 141 Lambeth Palace, 127 Lane, Maud, 236, 237, 242, 243, 249

Langton, Thomas, 18 Latimer, Hugh, 170, 175–8 Laura (muse), 146 Laval, Jean de, 56 Lee, Edward, 175, 177 Lee, Richard, 98 Leemput, Remigius van, 107, 134 Leland, John, 34, 102, 285 Leo X, 175, 183, 184, 190, 191 Leporello, 18 Lescun, Marshal, 49, 55, 57 Leutze, Emmanuel, 139 Levi-Strauss, Claude, 58 Leyton, Richard, 33 Line, Candace, 257 Lipscomb, Suzannah, 2, 5, 310, 312 Lodi, Paolo da, 66 Longfellow, Erica, 2 Louis XII, 48 Lovell, Ann, 140 Lowe, David, 15 Luther, Martin, 22, 190, 313 McCarthy, Jeanne H., 255, 256 MacCulloch, Diarmaid, 14, 238 Machiavelli, Nicolo, 11 MacMahon, Luke, 180 Malinoswki, Bronislaw, 58 Mallard, Jean, 108, 109 Mander, Karel van, 4, 134–41 Mangot, Pierre, 57 Manners, Anne, 79 Manetti, Latino Giovenale, 223 Mantua, Marquis of, 55 Margaret of Austria, 118 Marillac, Charles, 37, 41 Mary (the virgin), 160 Mary, Queen of Scots, 79 Mary Tudor (Queen of France and Duchess of Suffolk), 48, 119, 267 Mary I (Queen, Mary Tudor), 2, 36, 43, 110, 117, 118, 122, 126, 127, 172,

324 henry viii and the court

197, 200, 202, 203, 209, 210, 212, 225, 239, 277, 282 Martin V, 181 Mattingay, Garrett, 182 Mauss, Marcel, 58 Mantegna, Andrea, 109 Maximillian, Emperor, 48, 140, 184, 277 Memling, Hans, 110 Mewtas, Joan, 139 Miedema, Hessel, 135 Miller (Milner), Thomas, 149 Millyng, Thomas, 182 Mitchell, Thomas, 30 Montmorency, Anne de, 37, 58 More, John, 282 More, Thomas, 12, 29, 101, 138, 175, 177, 178, 201, 202, 204–6, 210, 211, 219, 220, 264, 282, 284 Morette, de, 58 Moryson, Richard, 207, 208, 284 Mountgarret, 119, 120, 128 Mountjoy, William, 40, 70 Mueller, Janel, 238 Muir, Kenneth, 152 Navarre, Marguerite of (queen), 124 Neale, John, 15 Neuschel, Kristen, 59 Nevile, Marmaduke, 149 Neville, Charles 79, 85 Neville, Henry, 79, 82, 84, 85 Neville, Jane, 82 Nevinson, Christopher, 198 Nonsuch Palace, 35 Nora, Pierra, 150, 151, 154 Norris (Norrys), Henry, 45, 79, 152, 153, 154 O’Donnell, Manus, 233 O’Neill, early of Tyrone, 233 Orléans, Henri, 51 Owdall, Frances, 148

Owen, George, 236, 240–42 Pace, Richard, 186–8 Paget, William, 103, 247 Parker, Matthew, 169 Parkhurst, John, 240 Parr, Katherine (Queen, Kateryn), 2, 5, 89, 122, 126–8, 235–50, 251, 313 Parr, Maud, 118 Parr, William, 247 Parrhasius, 136, 137, 140, 141 Parson, Robert, 198 Patch, 42 Pate, Richard, 225 Paul III, 197, 207, 215, 217, 218, 224, 226, 227 Peacham, Henry, 86 Pecalvary, de, 58 Percy, Ingram, 148, 149 Percy, Margaret, 75 Person, Xavier le, 61 Petrarch, 145 Petre, William, 248 Phagius, 198 Piccolomini, Francesco Todeschini, 183 Pisseleu, Anne de, 57 Pius II, 181 Plantagenet, Edward, 199 Plautus, Titus, 278 Pliny the Elder, 136, 137, 140, 141 Poggio, Nuncio, 228 Pole, Edmund de la, 12 Pole, Margaret, 199, 208, 222 Pole, Reginald, 1, 5, 197–213, 217, 218, 220–23, 225, 229, 230, 233, 315 Pole, Richard, 199 Pollard, A.F., 1 Pollard, Richard, 33 Pollock, Linda, 80 Pompei, 107 Pope Julius II, 137 Pope Leo X, 48, 138 Pope Paul III, 137

index 325

Porter, Linda, 2 Potter, David, 2, 59 Poyntz, John, 146 Poysieu-Capdorat, Michel de, 50 Praet, Louis de, 188 Prevedari, Bernardo, 107–9 Priuli, Alvise, 204 Protogenes, 137 Pyte, Robert, 112, 113 Radcliffe, Anne, 249 Radcliffe, Robert, 45 Rankin, Mark, 2 Raphael, 109, 138, 141 Rastell, John, 279–81 Rastell, William, 282, 284 Rawcliffe, Carol, 266 Rawlinson, Kent, 2, 4, 313 Redworth, Glyn, 238, 239, 244 Reynolds, Richard, 203 Reynolds, Robert ap, 36 Riario, Giambattista, 188 Riario, Raffaele, 187 Rice, Stephen, 2 Richard II, 31 Richard III, 164, 165, 167, 171, 181 Richardson, Glenn, 2, 4, 189, 190, 311, 315 Richmond Palace, 103, 271 Rightwise, John, 277 Robert, Abbot of Wynchombe (Winchcombe), 184 Rogers, John, 98 Roo, John, 284 Rotherham, Thomas, 171 Rowley, Nicholas, 174 Rovere, Francesco Maria della, 227 Russell, Joy, 15 Rycroft, Eleanor, 5, 312 Ryrie, Alec, 238, 250 Samman, Neil, 173 Sampson, Richard, 191, 192

San Severino, Galeazzo da, 55, 56 Sander, Nicholas, 212 Sarger, Nicholas, 30 de Savoie, Louise, 55, 56 Scarisbrick, J.J., 20, 21, 180, 238 Scheurl, Christoph, 138 Schomberg, Polly, 2 Scipio, 107 Scrope, Lord, 75 Sedbar, Adam, 149 Seneca, 155 Serlio, Sebastiano, 100 Severus, Alexander, 100 Sexton, 41 Seymour, Anne, 249 Seymour, Edward, 126, 232, 244, 245, 249–51 Seymour, Jane, (queen) 42, 79, 96, 110, 119–22, 125, 128, 129, 134, 198, 289, 304 Seymour, Thomas, 126 Shakespeare, William, 47, 150 Sharkey, Jessica, 186 Sharpe, Kevin, 26, 94, 127 Shaxton, Nicholas, 176 Shirborn, Robert, 182 Sheba, Queen, 121, 125 Sheen Palace, 95 Sherlock, Peter, 151 Shirwood, John, 181 Shrank, Cathy, 145 Shrewsbury, J.F.D., 67 Shute, John, 101 Simnel, Lambert, 165 Simpson, James, 146 Sittow, Michael , 118 Skelton, John, 101, 256, 281 Skip, John, 20 Smeaton, Mark, 152–4 Smith, Lacey Baldwin, 251 Smith, Thomas, 155 Smollett, Tobias, 122 Soardino, 56, 63

326 henry viii and the court

Solomon, King , 121 Somer, Will, 110 Southsea Castle, 111 Sowerby, Tracy, 180 Spearing, A.C., 152 Stafford, Edward, 12, 36, 262 Stanhope, Anne, 122 Starkey, David, 2, 13, 14, 17, 18, 22, 121, 129, 240, 241, 246, 310 Starkey, Thomas, 202–4, 207 Stokesley, John, 207 Strabo, 137 Streitberger, WR, 279 String, Tatiana C., 2, 4, 94, 116, 313 Strong, Roy, 110, 116, 125, 133–6 Suardi, Bartolommeo, 137 Sudeley Castle, 122, 127 Süleyman, Sultan, 219 Sydnam, John and Eleanor 30 Talbot, George, 9, 14 Talbot, Gilbert, 182, 186 Talbot, Thomas, 148 Teerlinc, Lievine, 126 Thomas, Keith, 14, 15, 21 Thomas, William, 22 Thompson, Patricia, 154 Throckmorton, Michael, 208, 220 Titian, 137, 138, 140 Tottel, Richard, 145 Tower of London, The, 4, 10–13, 20, 36, 59, 67, 104, 147, 148, 150, 152, 154, 156, 160, 161, 203, 219, 232, 236, 239, 248–50, 288, 291, 297, 301, 311 Tremlett, Giles, 2 Tunstall, Cuthbert, 201, 206, 207, 209 Twisteton, John, 57 Tyndale, William, 20, 112, 216, 285 Tyrwhit, Elizabeth, 236, 237, 242, 243, 249, 252 Tyrwhit, Robert, 243 Urbis, Senator, 190

Urmeston, Clement, 263, 264 Vasari, Giorgio, 137, 138, 140, 141 Vaughan, Stephen, 37 Vergil, Polydore, 11, 18, 40, 41, 165 Verstegan, Richard, 76, 77 Vernarde, Olivier de La, 58 Vinci, Leonardo da, 65, 66, 84, 89, 140 Vitruvius, 100 Wabuda, Susan, 5, 312, 316 Walgrave, Edward, 36 Walker, Greg, 2, 146, 152, 153, 159, 161, 255–7, 282 Wallop, John, 103, 224 Warbeck, Perkin, 165 Warham, William, 102 Warton, Thomas, 36 Washington, George, 139 Watson, John, 176 Weir, Alison, 129 Wells-Cole, Anthony, 105 Wendy, Thomas, 236, 240–42 West, Nicholas, 174, 176 Westminster Palace, 98, 126 Weston, Francis, 152, 153, 154 Whitehall Mural, The, 119, 121 Whitehall Palace, 99, 107, 110, 237 Whitelock, Anna, 2 Williams, John, 33, 34 Willoughby, Katherine, 126 Wilson, Derek, 2 Windsor Castle, 103, 168, 198, 241 Wingfield, Richard, 53, 54 Wingfield, Robert, 184–6 Winner, Matthew, 104, Wolsey, Thomas, 10, 12, 15, 18, 19, 22, 23, 25, 38–41, 44, 48, 49, 51, 56, 57, 62, 163, 168, 169, 174, 176, 186, 188, 189, 197, 199, 201, 262, 271, 277–80, 283, 284, 286, 309, 311 Wooding, Lucy, 2, 238, 251, 310 Worsley, Lucy, 2

index 327

Wotten, Mary, 104, 105, 140 Wotton, Nicholas, 123 Wriothesley, Thomas, 111, 221, 226, 237, 240, 242, 245, 247, 249–51 Wyatt, Thomas, 5, 145–7, 151, 152, 154–61, 223, 226, 226–8, 232, 312 Wyngaerde, Anthonis Van den, 95, 98

York, Elizabeth of, 121, 134 Zeuxis, 136, 137, 140, 141 Zuccaro, 138 Zwingli, Huldrych, 22