CHAPTER 2

Young Henry

Prince Henry, later Henry VIII, was born on 28 June 1491 at Greenwich Palace. He was one of seven children born to Henry VII and Elizabeth of York, although only four survived infancy. As the second son, he was not destined for the throne. That honour and responsibility fell to his elder brother, Arthur, Prince of Wales. Yet, the renowned Desiderius Erasmus later wrote glowingly of Henry in these years, stating that even ‘when the King was no more than a child… he had a vivid and active mind, above measure to execute whatever tasks he undertook… you would say that he was a universal genius’.1

In May 1502, Arthur, who had recently married and taken on a position of responsibility in the Welsh Marches, died at the age of fifteen. As a result, the spotlight suddenly turned on the ten-year-old Henry, the next heir-apparent. Unlike Arthur, however, Henry was given no opportunity to practise ruling – the only surviving heir needed to be protected. His life remained the confined, secluded lifestyle of a lesser royal child, both indulged and frustratingly sheltered, and so when Henry came to the throne, he was unrehearsed in the art of sovereignty. The loss of his mother quickly followed that of his brother. In February 1503, Elizabeth of York died as a result of childbirth when Henry was eleven years old, and Henry’s later correspondence shows he took her death badly. In June, Henry also effectively lost his sister Margaret, who moved to Edinburgh to marry James IV.2

In June 1503, a year after Arthur’s death, Henry was betrothed to his brother’s widow, the seventeen-year-old Katherine of Aragon. In receipt of a papal dispensation to overcome the obstacle of the couple’s consanguinity (after Katherine’s marriage to Arthur), Henry and Katherine were scheduled to marry when Henry attained his fifteenth birthday. A condition of the marriage was that Katherine’s father, Ferdinand of Spain, should provide in advance 100,000 crowns in plate, jewels and coin as a marriage portion. Yet by 1505, this had not been received, and so the date for the wedding came and went; the solemnization of the marriage appeared to be indefinitely postponed. Henry VII began to toy with making another alliance for his son with Eleanor of Austria, Katherine of Aragon’s niece. In fact, the negotiations for a marriage between Henry and Eleanor were only stopped by Henry VII’s death on 21 April 1509 (later Eleanor would marry Henry’s rival, Francis I of France).3

So, on 22 April 1509, aged seventeen, Henry was proclaimed King Henry VIII. His coronation was greeted with rapture. William Blount, Lord Mountjoy wrote to Erasmus on 27 May:

One of his first acts as king was to marry Katherine on 11 June in the Franciscan church at Greenwich Palace. While it is possible that in doing so Henry was fulfilling his father’s deathbed wish, it seems likely to have been a match primarily based on affection. The sources state that Henry wrote to his father-inlaw in 1513 saying ‘the love he bears Katherine is such, that if he were still free he would choose her in preference to all others’. Other men may have commented that Katherine was ‘rather ugly than otherwise’ and ‘not handsome, though she had a very beautiful complexion’, but Henry chose her. The couple were jointly crowned in Westminster Abbey on Midsummer’s Day, 24 June 1509, four days before Henry’s eighteenth birthday.4

It is clear that in these early years, and indeed, for the first twenty years of his reign, Henry was truly quite brilliant, having been blessed by nature with all the attributes and qualities he might desire. The chronicler Edward Hall said as much:

Reports from foreign observers at his court run into hyperbole. In 1515, Henry VIII was described as ‘not only very expert in arms and of great valour, and most excellent in his personal endowments, but... likewise so gifted and adorned with mental accomplishments of every sort that we believe him to have few equals in the world’. Two years later, Francesco Chieregato wrote that Henry was a ‘most invincible King, whose acquirements and qualities are so many and excellent that I consider him to excel all who ever wore a crown’. And in his final report on four years spent at Henry’s court between 1515 and 1519, the Venetian ambassador Sebastian Giustinian concluded that Henry was ‘much handsomer than any other Sovereign in Christendom… [and] the best dressed sovereign in the world’.5

The grounds for all this praise were that besides being exceedingly good-looking, Henry VIII appeared to be accomplished in every way. He was a talented linguist – he spoke French, Spanish and Latin, the latter to the point of being able to reply spontaneously to an oration in elegant Latin. He loved music and was a skilled musician and composer: when an embassy from France arrived in 1517, Henry entertained the visitors himself by ‘singing and playing on every musical instrument’ quite excellently. He danced beautifully, surpassed all the archers of his guard with his bowmanship (‘as’, adds this commentator, ‘he surpasses them in stature and personal graces’), and was ‘a capital horseman and a fine jouster’.6

From contemporary sources we can build up a composite picture of Henry’s character. He was full of spirit, vigour and energy, ‘young, lusty and courageous… [and] disposed to all mirth and pleasure’. As a man in his teens, twenties and thirties, he pursued pleasure – he loved entertainments, masques, banquets, hunting, dancing and other diversions. For example, on May Day 1515, the king and all his guard gathered in a wood near Greenwich to play at being Robin Hood and his merry men. Dressed all in green, with bows in their hands, and attended by 100 noblemen on horseback ‘gorgeously arrayed’, Henry and his court enjoyed an open-air banquet. Singers and musicians played from bowers, which had been purposely filled with sweetly-singing birds. Afterwards, they processed back to Greenwich, where a joust was held in very great pomp. Ambassadors often noted, perhaps with some frustration, that the king was off ‘taking his pleasure’, which normally meant hunting, a sport at which Henry would ride out all day, tiring eight or ten horses before retiring. Such exuberance was also displayed at the tiltyard. He was often reported as outshining all his noblemen at the joust. It was impossible for this athletic, ebullient and extrovert young man not occasionally to be something of a show-off. In 1517, at a great joust in honour of the French ambassadors, the king wanted to joust against all fourteen competitors, ‘but this was forbidden by the Council, which moreover decreed that each jouster was to run six courses and no more, so that the entertainment might be ended on that day’. Nonetheless, when he ‘presented himself before the Queens and the ladies’, he made ‘a thousand jumps in the air’, and after tiring out his horse, mounted one of those ridden by his pages, a pattern he repeated constantly over the course of the day until the end of the joust.7

The greatest example of such athletic extravagance, albeit with a serious diplomatic purpose, was Henry VIII’s meeting with the French king, Francis I, at the Field of the Cloth of Gold from 7 to 20 June 1520. This extraordinary summit between the two kings and their entire courts was a magnificent festival of feasting, jousting, dancing and entertainment held on the border between the two countries, in between the English village of Guines (in English Calais) and the French village of Ardres. For the occasion, a town was temporarily constructed, including a temporary palace of stone and timber, and a multitude of tents and pavilions made from cloth of gold (hence the name). The English retinue alone was 5,172 persons. For the 48-day trip, the quantities of food and drink consumed are astonishing – with a total cost of £8,839 2s 4d, the list included 2,014 mutton, 51 pigs, 82 pheasants, 9,100 plaice, 7,836 whiting, 30,700 eggs and 114,000 litres of wine, enough to fuel wine fountains that flowed freely for hours at a time.8

Such flamboyance and excess on special occasions was matched daily by the extraordinary sumptuousness with which Henry surrounded himself. One example is the constant finery of his clothing. There was great extravagance and not a little vanity in Henry’s glorious displays of...