A Journey Through Tudor England (12 page)

The King’s affection for Anne appears to have started around 1526. An ardent letter from Henry VIII to Anne, which can probably be dated to 1527, declares that he has been ‘for more than a year now struck by the dart of love’. He beseeches her to ‘give yourself body and heart to me’ and to become his ‘sole mistress’. Anne’s refusal of that position meant that by the summer of 1527, the couple had pledged to marry each other.

In fact, many of Henry VIII’s love letters to Anne, which survive by quirk of fate in the Vatican Library, were written in the late 1520s when the couple were parted by illness. Anne retired to Hever Castle when afflicted with the ‘sweating sickness’, a virulent and often fatal disease that the heirless Henry desperately needed to avoid. Originally written in French, one of these passionate letters can be seen in translation on the wall in the Book of Hours room at Hever. (Ignore the one from Anne to Henry, which is of dubious veracity.)

Nearby, two books of hours — beautiful, illuminated personal prayer books — bear Anne’s signature. Does her inscription: ‘
Le temps viendra / Je anne boleyn’
(‘The time will come / I Anne Boleyn’) refer to this period of longing and waiting while Wolsey and then Thomas Cranmer tried to work out how to free Henry from his marriage to Katherine of Aragon so he might marry Anne? Did Anne pace Hever’s Long Gallery in frustration?

As history shows, the Pope was unwilling to listen to Henry’s appeals to Leviticus 18:16 and 20:21 — that it was unlawful for him to be married to his brother’s wife. Ultimately, after seven years of
waiting and many Acts of Parliament enabling the break with Rome, Henry’s marriage to Katherine was annulled by Thomas Cranmer on 23 May 1533.

Henry had in fact already married Anne: once secretly in Dover in November 1532, and again privately but officially in January 1533. Their child, Elizabeth, was born in September 1533. Two of the best portraits of the many at Hever are of Anne herself (a late sixteenth-century portrait by an unknown artist) and of her daughter Elizabeth (a portrait from
c
.1580 by John Bettes the Younger).

Henry and Anne were frequently described as ‘merry together’, but after Anne miscarried a male child in January 1536, an accusation of adultery dislodged Anne from her place in Henry’s affections. Although Anne was almost certainly innocent of any sexual misdemeanours, her witty, flirtatious banter with the men of the court — the very quality that had attracted Henry to her in the first place — sealed her fate. Following the execution of the five men accused with her, including her brother, George Boleyn, Lord Rochford, Anne was beheaded at the Tower of London on charges of adultery, incest and conspiring the King’s death on 19 May 1536.

The disgrace of the Boleyns meant that Hever passed into the Crown’s possession, to be given away in turn to Anne of Cleves and, after her death, to the Waldegrave family. The Waldegraves were secretly recusant Roman Catholics, and they built a hidden Catholic oratory chapel at Hever in 1584 — that you can still see — and this in the childhood home of the proto-Protestant who caused the break with Rome.

‘The most noble and royal lodging … that passed all other sights before seen.’

I
n this green little corner of England, 6,000 people and 3,000 horses gathered one day in late May 1520. Imagine the hubbub: the frenetic activity of men rushing to erect tents to house everyone before nightfall, the whinnying and stamping of the horses, the impatient demands from the highest nobility in the land as lords and ladies wait around in their silks, velvets and furs, despite the spring sunshine. What could be further from what you now see at Leeds Castle? Peacefully set amidst its pretty Kentish gardens, romantically isolated on an island surrounded by a moat, it is like a miniature fairytale fortress. The only sounds to break the stillness are the cries of the peacocks and black swans that strut around the grounds, and the parrots and cockatiels chattering away in the aviary.

Much of the castle, it’s true, is not Tudor, either inside or out, but the historical pedigree of it is impeccable: six medieval queens, from Eleanor of Castile, wife of Edward I, to Catherine of Valois, Queen of Henry V, made this their home. After Henry V’s death, Catherine would go on to marry Owen Tudor, starting the Tudor
dynasty, and it is her great-grandson, Henry VIII, and his first wife, Katherine, whose visit to Leeds Castle secures this diminutive fortress an important place in the Tudor story.

In order for this royal couple to stay, certain architectural improvements were required in the original late thirteenth-century
gloriette
(the name given to any elevated garden building). Under Henry VIII’s orders, Sir Henry Guildford, the Master of the Revels, oversaw the installation of an upper floor, fireplaces and large windows in the newly created Banqueting Hall. Evidence of this renovation remains in the spandrels of the ragstone mantlepiece in the Queen’s Gallery, which are decorated with engravings of the castle of Castile and the pomegranates from Katherine of Aragon’s coat of arms and heraldic badge. There are early Tudor tapestries hanging on the walls, and a Latin service book said to have been owned by Katherine in the chapel, while the four marble busts in the Gallery representing the Tudor monarchs (with Henry VII and Queen Jane silently dropped) date from Elizabeth’s reign.

The central importance of this castle is, however, represented by a large, stunning painting that you can see in the Banqueting Hall. It probably dates from around 1550 (the fashions depicted suggest the date), which is a sister copy to a painting at Hampton Court. This is
The Embarkation at Dover
, painted by Vincenzo Volpé and his workshop, which depicts Henry VIII and his retinue — including the
Mary Rose
— setting sail from Dover on 31 May 1520, bound for a meeting with the French King just outside Calais. You can spot Henry VIII ornately dressed in gold; his ship has gold sails. All the architectural alterations at Leeds Castle had been made specifically so that several days earlier, on 22 May 1520, on their way to Dover, Henry and Katherine and their entourage of up to 6,000 could stay at the castle overnight. They were en route to the Field of Cloth of Gold.

The Field of Cloth of Gold was a magnificent party without parallel in the Tudor period. Cardinal Thomas Wolsey, Henry VIII’s astute Lord Chancellor, had arranged this first personal meeting between Henry VIII and the French King, Francis I, to inaugurate the Anglo-French alliance made in 1518 [see C
HRISTCHURCH
]. The alliance had been agreed under the international Treaty of Universal Peace, sworn between France, England and the Holy Roman Empire, to enable the European powers to focus their combined resources on resisting the Ottoman Empire.

As England was a puny country by comparison to the great might of France or the Holy Roman Empire, Wolsey had done well to give England such an important role in brokering the peace. Now, England and her King had an opportunity to prove that their peace-making was a choice, not a necessity, through a lavish display of wealth, culture, and sporting and military prowess.

For two and a half weeks, from 7 to 24 June 1520, 12,000 people (equivalent to the population of England’s second largest city at the time, Norwich) gathered in a field between Guînes and Ardres. As England had held Calais since 1347, the meeting technically took place on English soil in northern France.

Every aspect of the meeting was designed to demonstrate magnificence. If the improvements to Leeds Castle were noteworthy, the construction of a temporary palace, made of brick, timber, canvas and glass to house Henry VIII at Guînes was jaw-dropping. The chronicler Edward Hall described it as the ‘most noble and royal lodging … that passed all other sights before seen’. A full 300 feet square, it was covered with such ‘sumptuous work’ that it ‘[il]lumined the eyes of the beholders’. Everyone else, Francis I included, was housed in rich tents made of cloth of gold. Outside the palace, the English even constructed a gilt fountain crested by the figure of the god of wine, Bacchus, for the fountain ran with wine, not water, and one night a ‘flying dragon’ — probably a firework — was seen in the sky.

The company ate and drank their way through prodigious amounts of food and wine. The expenses for food during the whole trip, from 31 May to 16 July, run to many pages. A mere snippet from this shows that the English consumed: 373 oxen; 2,014 sheep; 51 pigs; 82 pheasants; 3,003 quail; 506 geese; 2 peacocks; 92 cygnets; 633 pigeons; 30,700 eggs; 5,500 oranges and at least 122 ‘tuns’ or 40,320 imperial gallons of wine! Over 210 gallons of beer were provided for the consumption of the English king alone.

The Field of Cloth of Gold was above all, though, a tournament. There was jousting every day (except Sundays), archery, wrestling and other feats of arms including combat on foot and horseback. It was designed so that the two kings would never meet directly in combat and both could be extolled as champions. ‘Course after course,’ Edward Hall notes, ‘the King lost none,’ and ‘the French king on his part ran valiantly breaking spears’.

Despite this, underneath everything ran a current of rivalry between the two monarchs. They were similar ages — Henry twenty-nine, Francis twenty-six — and had heard much about each other before their meeting. They were keen to know who was the tallest? Who could grow the best beard? And who had the finest calf?

In two important respects, Francis triumphed. Any comparison of the French Queen Claude, aged twenty, with a brood of three children and another on the way, and the thirty-five-year-old English Queen Katherine of Aragon, with her one daughter and lacking a son, must have been wretched for both Katherine and Henry. Also, if an account by one French eyewitness is to be believed, Henry defied the terms of the encounter by drunkenly challenging Francis to a wrestling match: Henry was heavier, but Francis threw him to the floor, using a famous Breton technique.

At the tranquil Leeds Castle, it may be a stretch to imagine the clamour, tumult and stench of the swarming throngs of people and horses amassed here in May 1520 to pitch golden tents across
the grounds. The huge logistical exercise of transporting 6,000 people from London to Calais — and all the food and materials needed to maintain and shelter them — is almost inconceivable — but here they were.

After such vast expense, it is chastening to consider that this extravagant celebration of military power and stupendous wealth in the name of peace, between two such great rivals, had few lasting political consequences. Within three years, England and France were once again at war.