Henry (26 page)

O
N
11 J
UNE, THE DAY OF
H
ENRY’S WEDDING
to Catherine of Aragon, the formal preparations for his coronation also began with the issuing of a commission to Surrey, Shrewsbury and the chief justice to convene the ‘court of claims’ to decide on who had the right to offer the king honorific services at his coronation. Since the government did not wish to be bothered with the course of the seals for its own business, the commission was warranted by a signed bill. But, as was the new practice, the bill was counter-signed by a powerful trio of councillors: Privy Seal Foxe, Lord Chamberlain Herbert, and Sir Thomas Lovell.
1

Did Henry reflect, a little wryly, that he could not even initiate his coronation on his own authority?

* * *

In point of fact, the real business of organizing the ceremony had begun some weeks earlier with the drawing up of a briefing paper known as the ‘device for the manner and order of the coronation’ of King Henry VIII and Queen Catherine. The ‘device’ was closely modelled on the similarly titled paper for Henry VII’s coronation in 1485 and, even more closely (since that too was a double coronation), on the ‘device’ for the coronation of Richard III and Queen Anne in 1483.
2
And, like those earlier papers, Henry’s ‘device’ provided for an entirely traditional ceremony.

The celebrations proper got under way on 21 June, when Henry came on horseback from Greenwich and entered the Tower via London Bridge and Gracechurch Street. The following night, the ceremonies of the creation of knights of the Bath began. Fifteen years earlier, Henry himself had been one of the postulant knights. Now he stood in his father’s shoes. He made the sign of the cross on each knight’s shoulder and kissed it. Many of the knights had close personal ties with the young king. Sir Thomas Knyvet was his jousting hero. Sir Henry Clifford, who was only two years younger than Henry, had been brought up with him as both duke of York and prince, ‘which ingrafted such a love in the said prince towards him, that it continued to the very end’.
3
But closest of all was Mountjoy.

Did Henry’s kiss linger a little longer on his friend and mentor’s shoulder?

* * *

The eve-of-coronation procession, from the Tower, through the City and thence to Westminster, did not set off till almost 4 o’clock on Saturday, 23 June. But no matter, for it was brilliant sunshine and the long summer evening stretched ahead. First rode the newly created knights of the Bath, in long blue gowns with white laces on their left shoulders. These they were supposed to wear until a noble lady removed them after they had undertaken a feat of arms. Edward Stafford, duke of Buckingham and the greatest and richest noble in the land, preceded the king. In 1501 he had been touted as a possible candidate for the throne. Now he wore a long gown of needlework, ‘right costly and rich’, and carried a little silver baton in token of the fact that he was constable of England. The duke claimed this – the most ancient and powerful surviving great office of state – by hereditary right, and never ceased to press his entitlement to it.

But letters patent conferred the office on Buckingham for a single day, and even then in carefully circumscribed terms: ‘on 23 June only, viz., the day preceding the coronation’. Henry signed this bill alone: even without the countersignature of his councillors he knew when it was dangerous to be indiscriminately generous.
4

Then came Henry. He wore his parliament robe of red velvet furred with ermine over a coat of cloth-of-gold, thickly set with precious stones and surmounted with a collar of great ballas rubies. His horse was trapped with cloth-of-gold and
ermine, and a canopy, also of cloth-of-gold, was held over his head by four barons of the Cinque Ports.

Henry, now almost fully grown and approaching six feet in height, cut an impressive figure. And it was intensified by his dress and the magic of his royal status.

But – perhaps ominously – the London chronicler seems to have had eyes only for Buckingham.

Henry was followed by mounted attendants wearing surcoats of arms. In pride of place came the arms of England’s royal saints – St Edward, St Edmund and St George – and then the arms of England and France.
5

Henry, who was as conventionally religious as he was royal, was, at this supreme moment, invoking the intercession of his saintly predecessors in governing England and – it soon became clear – in reclaiming France.

Then came another of Henry’s boyhood heroes: Sir Thomas Brandon, the master of the horse, who had kept the torch of chivalry burning in the last years of Henry VII’s reign. He led the king’s richly caparisoned charger and wore ‘traverse his body a great baldric of gold, great and massy’, which he had been given by Henry’s father a year previously as a recognition of ‘his loyalty and prowess in feats of arms’ (
propter fidem ac ipsius in duellando dexteritatem
).
6

After this triumphant display of royal chivalry, the cavalcade took on a different character with the queen’s procession. Catherine of Aragon reclined alone in a horse litter. She
was dressed in a ‘rich mantle of cloth of tissue’; her hair, a lustrous dark auburn, was let down (as was also traditional) and hung round her shoulders, and on her head she wore a simple ‘circlet of silk, gold and pearl’.

She had already won the hearts of Londoners at Arthur’s wedding. Now she confirmed her hold. And – whatever the vicissitudes of her life – she never lost it.

In her train was the woman who had been the key figure in her husband’s early life: Anne Luke, Henry’s wet-nurse. Did Anne’s heart swell with pride as she saw the child she had suckled as man and king?

Her purse certainly did, since Henry confirmed and augmented the ample grants she had received from his father.
7

The queen’s procession had just reached The Cardinal’s Hat, a well-known tavern on the north side of Lombard Street, when a sudden, violent shower broke out of a seemingly clear sky. The downpour was so heavy that it threatened to overwhelm the decorative canopy that was carried over the queen. Instead, with all her finery, she had to take shelter under the awning of a humble draper’s stall.

It was the only blemish on an otherwise perfect day. And, in any case, the summer shower passed as quickly as it came and the procession, only a little ruffled, continued its stately progress to Westminster.

The next day, the twenty-fourth, was Midsummer’s Day, and the day chosen for the coronation itself. It was a day of
rejoicing and mystery: bonfires burned on Midsummer’s Eve and the fairies were abroad. And Henry and Catherine, as they processed on foot through the great hall towards the Abbey church, seemed indeed to be another Oberon and Titania: their magic spell would knit up old wounds and end ancient hatreds, and all,
all
would live happily ever after.

Or so it seemed at eight o’clock on that brilliant summer morning as, preceded by no fewer than twenty-eight bishops in copes and mitres, the couple set out for the solemn ceremony. For hour after hour, Archbishop Warham’s voice echoed round the crossing or coronation theatre of the Abbey, in solemn invocation and admonition. First he presented Henry to his people, who acclaimed him four times with cries of
Vivat, vivat rex
, Long live the king! Then Henry swore the traditional oaths of an English king. He was anointed nine-fold with the holy oils of chrism. He was invested with the regalia and crowned and acclaimed. Finally the process was repeated for Catherine.

Henry was now king indeed. Beside the magic and the mystery of the ceremony, his earlier creations, as duke of York and prince of Wales, must have faded into nothing.

Two aspects of the service in particular seem to have made a powerful impression on him: the oath-taking and the anointing. Theologically, the anointing, not the crowning, was the heart of the ritual. This is clearer in French, where the service is known as
le sacre
or ‘consecration’. At its most elevated, the anointing could be seen as a sacrament – a
unique eighth sacrament by which kings were called to serve God and were marked out, indelibly, from the rest of creation.

There is no doubt, it seems to me, that, with all the switchbacks of Henry’s religious belief, he held firmly to this high view of the royal station. Indeed, as other certainties lapsed,
this
loomed larger and larger in his mind until it filled it with an overweening sense of his own importance and manifest destiny.

But there was more to it even than that. For the oil lay at the heart of the foundation legend of Henry’s own Lancastrian dynasty. According to this, the Virgin had revealed herself to St Thomas Becket in a vision; handed him the holy oils in an
ampulla
in the form of a golden eagle; and instructed him that this was to be the coronation unction of the kings of England. ‘But not those wicked ones who now reign,’ she warned. ‘But kings of the English,’ she went on to promise, ‘
shall
arise who will be anointed with this oil … the first to be anointed with this oil … shall recover by force the land lost by his forefathers, that is to say, Normandy and Acquitaine.’
8

The
ampulla
and its mystically revealed oil had first been used for the coronation of the Lancastrian usurper, Henry IV. And his son, Henry V, had indeed come within a whisper of fulfilling the prophecy and recovering France.

Henry, it is clear, was determined to be another, greater Henry V. And how – with the magic of the oil and the patronage of Becket – could he fail?

* * *

The oath too ground itself into Henry’s mind as a foundation charter of his kingship, even as a sort of contract. It took a quasi-liturgical form of verses and responses, as Warham put a series of questions and injunctions to Henry and Henry replied to each with a brief and unequivocal commitment.

‘Will ye grant,’ Warham began, ‘and keep to the people of England, the laws and customs to them as of old rightful and devout kings granted and the same ratify and confirm by your oath, and specially the laws, customs and liberties granted to the clergy and people by your noble predecessor and glorious king Saint Edward?’

‘
I grant and promise
,’ Henry replied,

‘Ye shall keep,’ Warham continued, ‘after your strength and power, to the church of God, to the clergy, and the people, holy peace and goodly concord.’

‘
I shall keep
.’

‘Ye shall make to be done, after your strength and power, equal and rightful justice in all your dooms and judgments, and discretion with mercy and truth.’

‘
I shall do
.’

‘Do you grant the rightful laws and customs to be holden, and promise ye, after your strength and power, such laws as to the worship of God shall be chosen by your people by you to be strengthened and defended?’

‘
I grant and promise
.’

As if all that were not enough, another assisting bishop now took over the task of interrogation and – in painstaking
detail – required the king to promise to respect the particular privileges of church and churchmen and church or canon law. ‘With good will and devout soul,’ Henry replied, ‘I shall keep the privileges of the law … canon and of holy church … and I shall … by God’s grace defend you, and every each of you, bishops and abbots, through [out] my realm.’

‘
So help me God
,’ he concluded, ‘
and these holy evangelists, by
me bodily touched upon this holy altar
.’
9

Henry, we know, like all conventional Christians at the time, believed profoundly in the force of oaths. He had sworn. And he fully intended to keep his word.

At the time.

The celebratory joust for the coronation took place at Westminster on the Tuesday and Thursday of the following week, the latter of which happened to be Henry’s birthday. There was of course no question of the king taking part himself; instead, rather as he had done as an impatient teenager, Henry had to sit out the sport alongside Catherine in their richly hung and decorated viewing stand.

Heaven knows what his thoughts were. For, in a curious way, the theme of the joust seems to have been intended to dramatize the tensions between the different aspects of the young king’s character. Probably it was devised by William Cornish, the master of the children of the chapel royal, who was the main impresario and dramaturge of court entertainment in these years.

If so, he did his work well.

On the first day of the joust, the ‘home’ team of knights were presented to Henry and Catherine by a lady dressed as Pallas Athene, the Greek goddess of wisdom. She bore a crystal shield and proclaimed the knights to be her ‘scholars’. Then their opponents entered and a gentleman dressed in blue and bearing Cupid’s golden dart announced that they would challenge Wisdom’s scholars in the name of the Love of Ladies. He also bandied some sharp words. His knights, he said, had heard that ‘Dame Pallas had presented … her scholars to the king, but whether,’ he added tartly, ‘they came to learn or to teach feats of arms, they knew not.’