10

“Innocent and Honest Pastimes”

During the summer of 1509, in the weeks after the coronation, Henry VIII indulged himself in the novel pleasures of kingship. “Our time is spent in continuous festival,”¹ Queen Katherine wrote to Ferdinand of Aragon, while the King informed his father-in-law that he was diverting himself “with jousts, birding, hunting and other innocent and honest pastimes.”² At eighteen, Henry was “young and lusty, disposed all to mirth and pleasure, nothing minding to travail in the busy affairs of his realm,”³ and—as some English bishops pointed out to the Spanish ambassador—did not “care to occupy himself with anything but the pleasures of his age; all other affairs he neglects.”⁴ In fact, Henry was so busy enjoying himself that he would only work during matins in the chapel royal, or late in the evenings,⁵ provided he had nothing better to do.

For the first four years of the reign, the young King relied upon the ministers he had inherited from his father. These were much older, wiser men, but this very fact placed them at a disadvantage, since Henry always preferred to surround himself with young people. The truth was, he could not bear to be reminded of old age, illness, or death.

Henry also had an aversion to paperwork. “Writing is to me somewhat tedious and painful,” he once told Cardinal Wolsey.⁶ He virtually had to be forced to write letters; Wolsey once insisted he pen a missive to his elder sister Margaret, Queen of Scots, because “women must be pleased.”

Henry was always ready with an excuse as to why he could not attend to business, be it a headache or the fact that he was removing to another house. When his Secretary, Richard Pace, wanted to go through some diplomatic correspondence with him, he made the excuse that he had to attend matins. The next morning he escaped to the chase, and when he got back to find Pace waiting for him, he insisted on having supper first. Only in the evening did he begrudgingly get down to work. In 1521, poor Pace was appalled when Henry refused to put his seal to letters because he had found out that the French King did not do so; Pace had to go along with this until Henry reverted to the traditional method of signing and sealing royal letters. In 1513, a Milanese ambassador was somewhat offended when the King “put off our discussion to another time, as he was then in a hurry to go and dine and dance afterwards.”⁷

Henry’s councillors found his lack of application to his duties disconcerting after having become used to the dedication and carefulness of his hardworking father. Fortunately, they were all experienced men who were perfectly capable of governing the country in their master’s name, although this did not stop them from trying to make Henry attend to his obligations as his father had done. Because they were concerned “lest such abundance of riches the King was now possessed of should move his young years to a riotous forgetting of himself,” they constrained him to “be present with them to acquaint him with the politic government of the realm, with which at first he could not endure to be much troubled.”⁸ But Henry was impatient with them, and showed much disgust at the time they took to deliberate on affairs.

For centuries, the seat of government had been the Palace of Westminster. Here were to be found the great departments of state: the Exchequer, under the rule of the Lord Treasurer; the Chancery, headed by the Lord Chancellor, who was also Keeper of the Great Seal of England; and the Courts of Common Pleas and the King’s Bench. Parliament, which was summoned and prorogued at the King’s pleasure, also sat at Westminster.

Power was centred, however, upon the court, where the King was, and increasingly upon his secretariat, which travelled around with him, and comprised the Lord Privy Seal and the King’s “Master Secretary” and their staffs. Together with the Lord Treasurer, the Lord Chancellor, the Lord Chamberlain, the Lord Steward, and the Lord High Admiral, these officers were the foremost members of the Privy Council.⁹ Next in importance came the Chancellor of the Exchequer, the Lord Warden of the Cinque Ports, and the Archbishop of Canterbury.

The Privy Council, which advised the King and implemented his policies, was based at Westminster. The Court of Star Chamber, through which it exercised its legal powers, sat in the palace. The Council’s seventy-odd members, who were all chosen by the King, were aristocrats, clerics, household officers, and professional lawyers, but attendance levels varied. Council meetings were held in private. The King did not always attend, preferring to discuss affairs privately with individual councillors, often while walking in his galleries or gardens, but all the Council’s business was done in his name. Throughout Henry VIII’s reign, thanks initially to the King’s political indolence and later to the dominance of Wolsey and Cromwell, the Council’s executive powers expanded, although it remained very much a consultative body. By 1530, it was meeting more and more at court.

In 1509, the most powerful force on the Council was Richard Foxe, Bishop of Winchester, who had been Lord Privy Seal since 1489. A sensible yet cunning lawyer and diplomatist, he seemed to the Venetian ambassador to be almost a king himself.¹⁰ “Here in England they think he is a fox, and such is his name,” the King told Luis Caroz, the Spanish ambassador,¹¹ with some truth. Foxe had enjoyed a distinguished career in the Church and was a notable patron of learning and a humanist, who corresponded with Erasmus.

Henry’s first Lord Chancellor was William Warham, Archbishop of Canterbury, who had held the post and the primacy since 1504. He too was a humanist and friend of Erasmus, who found him to be “witty, energetic and laborious [i.e., hardworking]” and recorded that, although Warham gave “sumptuous entertainments, he himself ate frugal meals and hardly ever tasted wine, but yet was a most genial host. He never hunted or played at dice, but his chief recreation was reading.”¹² Warham was a competent lawyer and diplomat; he and Foxe were typical career churchman who had neglected their ecclesiastical duties in order to further their political ambitions.

The Lord Treasurer was Foxe’s rival, Thomas Howard, Earl of Surrey. John de Vere, Earl of Oxford, was Lord Admiral. The chief Secretary was Thomas Ruthal, Bishop of Durham, a capable administrator who had been in post since 1500 and who was growing rich on the proceeds of his labours. John Fisher, Bishop of Rochester, was also a prominent councillor. There was therefore a strong ecclesiastical presence on the Council. By the end of Henry’s reign, that would no longer be the case.

In November 1509, the man who would be one of the chief causes of this change, Thomas Wolsey, was appointed Lord High Almoner to the King. Wolsey was then thirty-six. The son of an Ipswich grazier and wool merchant (not a butcher, as Skelton disparagingly asserted), he had been an outstanding scholar at Oxford, graduating at only fifteen. He had taken holy orders, then risen meteorically through the Church to become, in 1507, chaplain to Henry VII and secretary to Bishop Foxe, who thereafter did all he could to further Wolsey’s career. It was probably due to Foxe that Wolsey got the post of Almoner.

The Almoner’s chief duty was to distribute the King’s charity to the poor. Wolsey had a brilliant mind; he was “very handsome, learned, extremely eloquent, of vast ability and indefatigable.” ¹³ Above all, he was a prodigiously thorough and hardworking servant. Henry soon recognised his worth, and in quick succession appointed him Dean of Hereford and Lincoln, Prebendary of York, a canon of Windsor, and Registrar of the Order of the Bath. Wolsey was already acting as an unofficial royal secretary when, in 1511, Foxe secured him a seat on the Privy Council. All this suited the Almoner very well, for he was a proud, greedy, extravagant man with ambitions well beyond his station in life. Through flattery, charm, wit, and a convivial manner, he had gained the affection and respect of the King, and his fortunes were set to prosper.¹⁴

With the government in the capable hands of Foxe, Warham, Surrey, and Ruthal, Henry VIII considered himself free to enjoy the more pleasurable and visual aspects of sovereignty. In order to emphasise his magnificence, the King usually took his recreation in public, accompanied by appropriate ceremony. On feast days and state occasions, the Master of the Revels would devise lavish, large-scale entertainments for the court, in the manner of the festivities and pageants made popular by the Dukes of Burgundy. Many had mythical, allegorical, or chivalric themes, and most had some useful propaganda value: The King intended these entertainments not only to impress beholders but also to surprise them. Unlike his father, he often participated, and was almost childlike in his enthusiasm for revelry. By showing off his person and his prowess in pageants, dances, tournaments, and sports, he could present to the world the image he wanted it to see.

And the world took notice. The King’s subjects favourably contrasted him with Henry VII, who had been generally unpopular, and concluded that here was a monarch to be proud of. Ambassadors sent home glowing reports of the splendour of the English court and its ruler, and Henry’s reputation as a magnificent, liberal, and talented prince spread throughout Europe. At the same time, his treasury dwindled, for these entertainments were ruinously expensive, although the King no doubt felt them an expense well justified for their propaganda value alone.

Court entertainments were staged frequently during the first two decades of the reign; later on, as the King grew older and lost interest in youthful pleasures, he preferred to spend money on building or refurbishing his houses, and also became preoccupied with the religious issues of the Reformation. Later still, his deteriorating health and thickening girth increasingly precluded his participating in revelry.

On certain holidays the public were allowed into the court to watch the entertainments; if they became too enthusuastic, the King’s guard would intervene¹⁵—apart from one memorable occasion in 1511, of which more will be heard later.

The Master of the Revels and his staff were responsible for staging court entertainments. They had to devise the themes of pageants and masques; make all the costumes, scenery, and props; and arrange all the seating and lighting. This was all done in close consultation with the principal participants—there is evidence that some ideas came from the King himself—as well as the Lord Chamberlain and the Dean of the Chapel Royal, which provided choristers for the pageants.

Some costumes and props were made of the richest materials and even embellished with gold and jewels; others were improvised, such as the papier-mâché lions made for a pageant at Greenwich. Pages and pages of costumes and props were listed by the Revels Office, including “7 masking hats, Tartary fashion, of yellow and red sarcanet, . . . 8 satin mantles trimmed with silk, Irish fashion, . . . 8 short cloaks of scarlet with keys embroidered on the shoulders, 8 hats of crimson satin with scallop shells” (these were for “the Palmers’ masque”), and props such as foliage with leaves of green satin and flowers of silk, antique pillars, and statuary such as “the image of Hercules.”¹⁶ All this was a complicated operation involving a great amount of work, hundreds of craftsmen, and many hired hands. The Revels Office also maintained and stored all the “revels stuff,” and extra accommodation, such as the dissolved monastery at Blackfriars, had to be made available from time to time.¹⁷

Another of the Master’s duties was to censor any suggested entertainment that was likely to offend the King. By 1545, the post of Master of the Revels had become such an important one that the King decided to issue a patent conferring it for life; the first permanent Master was Sir Thomas Carwarden.

Early on in the reign, the chief deviser of court entertainments was William Cornish. Musician, composer, poet, playwright, actor, and a Gentleman of the Chapel Royal, Cornish was a versatile genius who wrote church music in the style of John Dunstable and secular songs such as “Ah, Robin!” and “Blow Thy Horn, Hunter,” and was also a virtuoso on the organ. The King was impressed by his talents, and put him in charge of court entertainments. It was Cornish who was responsible for the brilliant pageants and masques of the early years of the reign, and Cornish who constituted the Children of the Chapel Royal, of whom he was appointed Master in 1509, into a dramatic company for the purposes of court entertainments. The King was particularly fond of seeing his choristers perform in plays, and he often rewarded them;¹⁸ the boys sang, danced, and often acted the female roles. Sometimes, the adult choristers and Chamber servants also participated.

Early Tudor drama consisted chiefly of mediaeval miracle and morality plays, which were rarely performed at court and went out of fashion with the Reformation, and short interludes, which were the successors to morality plays, pageants, and masques; the last two relied on spectacle, music, and dance rather than plots. Hardly any play texts survive from before Elizabeth I’s reign, and sophisticated dramatic works were rare. Not until 1576 was a public playhouse built in London, and until then, most ordinary people could only watch plays staged by travelling players in inn yards and marketplaces. But theatrical entertainments were popular at court. Under Henry VIII, Eltham Palace seems to have acquired a reputation as a dramatic venue. When the King was in residence, there were frequent performances in the great hall, and Londoners were admitted to watch them. Eltham was also famous for the puppet show The Divine Motion of Eltham , which was performed in the palace in Henry’s reign and was later mentioned by Ben Jonson.

Interludes, as the name suggests, were short plays with popular themes performed during the intervals between court entertainments. The earliest surviving example is Fulgens and Lucrece, written by Henry Medwell in about 1486–1490 for John Morton, Cardinal Archbishop of Canterbury. Modelled on an Italian play about the Roman Republic, it was aimed at educated, aristocratic audiences likely to be open to humanist influences. The young Thomas More is known to have acted in interludes while serving in Cardinal Morton’s household.¹⁹ William Shakespeare’s A Midsummer Night’s Dream features a typical interlude, Pyramus and Thisbe. Interludes were meant to mix “mirth with modesty”;²⁰ characters were comic or allegorical, and plots might be satirical, moralistic, or farcical. The text was often written in doggerel verse.

Interludes were performed by small groups of itinerant players who visited the court, the great houses of the nobility, the universities, and the Inns of Court. Up to seven different groups might perform for Henry VIII in a single year, with many receiving rewards from him.²¹ Some companies, like the King’s Players and the Queen’s Players, were permanently employed by the Chamber.

Apart from John Skelton, one of the finest writers of pre-Reformation interludes was John Heywood, a Londoner who married Thomas More’s niece, Elizabeth Rastell, and worked for the court from 1519, initially as a singer. He also wrote music for the lute and keyboards²² and was no mean poet. Heywood’s most famous works were The Play of the Weather (1533) and The Four Ps (c. 1544). In the latter, four characters, a Palmer, Pardoner, ’Pothecary, and Pedlar, all compete to tell the biggest lie. The winner is the Pardoner, who claims he has never seen a woman out of patience. Heywood’s The Pardoner and the Friar derived from Chaucer, and was used as a model by Christopher Marlowe for The Jew of Malta. Heywood is said to have narrowly escaped being executed for treason in 1544 because the King so admired his work.

Heywood’s father-in-law, John Rastell, who was married to Thomas More’s sister, also wrote interludes for the court, the most famous being The Nature of the Four Elements (c.1520). Rastell was a multitalented lawyer who also worked as a printer, military engineer, and decorative artist; in 1520, the King employed him to help embellish the temporary palace built for the Field of Cloth of Gold. It was Rastell who, in 1517, helped launch the first English expedition to America for the purposes of colonisation; sadly, it got no further than Ireland.

Pageants (the word means “movable stage”) were entertainments involving mock battles (with knights and ladies bombarding each other with flowers, fruit, and sweets), allegorical figures, and the ideals of chivalry and courtly love. They were a Burgundian innovation and afforded an opportunity for mounting dazzling spectacles featuring impressive scenery, special effects, music, poetry, and dance. Pageants were performed at Christmas, Epiphany, Shrovetide, and other feast days, or for the entertainment of ambassadors, and might often be combined with tournaments. Indoors, they were usually mounted on giant wheeled pageant cars that conveyed the whole set into the great hall. The audience watched from tiered benches which had been set up in readiness along the walls.

“Disguisings,” much beloved by Henry VIII, were often incorporated into pageants or acted out as separate entertainments. They involved the participants dressing up in disguise, with masks, and either performing incognito or taking people unawares; the King was especially fond of bursting in upon Queen Katherine and her ladies in the Queen’s Chamber. The denouement came when the masks were removed and the players’ identities revealed. Henry took a boyish delight in these disguisings, and Katherine seemingly never tired of feigning astonishment that it was her husband who had surprised her.

Informal pleasures were often devised to break the tedium of courtier life and for “the eschewing of idleness, the ground of all vice.” ²³ Apart from daytime pastimes such as hunting, sports, and tournaments, which will be discussed later, there would be dancing, gambling, board games, and the antics of court jesters to while away the evenings. Many courtiers enjoyed writing poetry or making music, and there was always the intriguing game of courtly love to help pass the time.

Dancing was a popular pastime at court, if only because it afforded one of the few opportunities for men and women to enjoy physical contact in a social setting. However, one Spaniard found the English to be “not at all graceful” and their dances to consist “simply of prancing and trotting.”²⁴ Dancing was nevertheless an essential accomplishment for both men and women of gentle birth, and Henry VII had ensured that all his children were taught it well.

The dances favoured by the court were many and varied. Bransles, or brawls, were round dances of peasant origin that had been adopted by the aristocracy and had become especially popular in England. The basse dance was so called because the feet glided slowly across the floor and were hardly lifted. Sir Thomas Elyot refers to “bargenettes and turgions,” which seem to have been spirited measures. The most stately of all dances was the majestic pavane, from Italy; its slow pace was particularly appropriate to ceremonial occasions when the dancers would be encumbered with heavy robes and long trains. The passamezzo was a faster version of the pavane, and was often followed by a salterello, an early form of the lively, high-stepping galliard that became popular in Elizabethan times. Much Renaissance dance music survives to give us some idea of the diversity of the rhythms and forms of the dances of the period. It is clear that sixteenth-century dances were less stylised than those of later centuries and had room for improvisation; many dances were very energetic, there was much running and leaping, and in some dances—such as the ronde—the dancers sang. Nevertheless, all court dances began and ended formally with a reverence, with the dancers bowing or curtseying to the King and Queen.

Henry VIII was an expert and enthusiastic dancer. Aged ten, at the wedding of his brother Arthur, he energetically partnered his sister Margaret, and onlookers watched with delight as he flung off his coat and cavorted around in his doublet and hose.²⁵ As a young man, Henry “exercised himself daily in dancing,”²⁶ in which, wrote the Milanese ambassador in 1515, “he does wonders and leaps like a stag.” ²⁷ He “acquitted himself divinely” on the dance floor, enthused one Venetian,²⁸ while another, the envoy Sebastian Giustinian, commented that he danced well.²⁹

Katherine of Aragon also liked dancing, and often danced with her ladies in the privacy of her chamber, but in these early years she was frequently pregnant, and so Henry was usually partnered by his sister Mary, whose “deportment in dancing is as pleasing as you would desire.”³⁰

Not only the King, but the whole court, it seemed, was excessively fond of gambling: monarch, courtiers, and servants would bet on any pastime that had an unknown outcome—cards, dice, board games, tennis, dog races, and so on. All games of chance were organised by the Knight Marshal of the Household, who acted as a bookmaker, and the stakes would usually be high. Favourite card games—and there were many— included Mumchance, Gleek, Click-Clack, Imperial, and Primero. Chess, shovelboard, and tables (backgammon), were popular board games; in 1539, Henry bought new chess sets from “John the hardware man.”³¹

The King, who had been a great gambler since childhood³² would command the Knight Marshal to bring his cards and dice in a silver bowl, then play for hours, often with ladies of the court and sometimes with the Queen, who was especially fond of tables, cards, and dice. Giustinian states that Henry risked more money than anyone else at court;³³ as King, he could have done no less, but it appears that he gambled away much of his inheritance. His Privy Purse Expenses record only his losses, and they could amount to hundreds of pounds daily; in January 1530, while playing with his Gentlemen of the Privy Chamber, he lost £450 (£135,000) at dominoes and £100 (£30,000) at cards and dice; in 1532, he lost £45 (£13,500) at shovelboard to Lord Rochford. We do not know how much Henry won, but between 1529 and 1532, the only years for which records are complete, he lost a total of £3,243 (£972,900), and it is clear that thousands of pounds were routinely set aside for his “playing money.”³⁴

Needless to say, moralists thundered against the evils of gambling. In 1511, there were complaints that the King had been cheated of large sums in wagers by some Italian bankers, who were immediately barred from court. In 1526 Wolsey tried to ban Chamber servants from indulging in “immoderate and continual play of dice, cards and tables,” especially in the King’s presence.³⁵ In 1541, Henry himself forbade anyone with an income of less than £20 to “play any game for money,”³⁶ making it clear he preferred such people to practise archery.

Less contentious pleasures at court included watching the comical performances of the royal jesters. Henry employed fools called Martin, Patch, and Sexton, whose chief function was to make him laugh. They sang bawdy songs, made fun of anything and everyone with a nice disregard for rank or deference, and told outrageous jokes. A favourite opening line might be, “Sir, what say ye with your fat face?”³⁷ Often, the King permitted his fools familiarities that no one else would have dared to attempt, and occasionally, as we shall see, they overstepped the mark.

Henry’s fools wore the traditional motley-coloured livery of jesters, with horned hats, and bells tied around their knees; they carried wands with jester’s heads or pig’s bladders on strings, which they wielded to good effect, and they sometimes dressed up in ridiculous costumes. In 1529, Henry bought a periwig for Sexton,³⁸ and he also bought Patch some parti-coloured hose.³⁹ When Sexton retired in the 1530s, he was replaced by a youth with a wickedly inventive sense of humour.⁴⁰ Henry’s most famous fool, Will Somers, did not enter his service until 1525.

Many court pastimes were seasonal. On Midsummer Eve, it was traditional for a bonfire to be lit in the palace grounds: Henry paid 10s to his gardener for arranging this.⁴¹ In winter, the courtiers enjoyed snowball fights;⁴² in January 1519, the King joined in one, wearing a cap borrowed from a boy to keep his ears warm.⁴³

There were also occasional novelties and diversions, such as the man who rode two horses at once, or the German who brought a lion to court, or the fellow whose dog was trained to dance.⁴⁴ The court attracted acrobats, jugglers, performing monkeys, and even freaks, such as the “frantic man” who turned up at Woodstock.⁴⁵ In 1510, the King staged a fight with battle-axes in Greenwich Park to entertain the Queen and the ladies, and at the same time impress onlookers with the military skills of his Gentlemen. Then there was the sinister-sounding pastime known as the killcalf, in which a hapless beast appears to have been slaughtered “behind the cloth.”⁴⁶

The gentlest courtly pursuit was the art of poetry writing. The King having set the trend, there were several amateur versifiers, or “makers,” among the nobility and gentry, and poetry was one of the ways in which an accomplished knight could court his chosen lady. These poems were copied into manuscripts and circulated among the courtiers; some were later printed in Tottel’s Miscellany. However, little poetry of note was written in the early years of the reign; hardly any classical poetry found its way into England, the age of Chaucer, Lydgate, and Gower was long gone, and even Skelton’s works, for all their satire, were little short of doggerel. Indeed, Skelton and other court poets were busy making money from writing poems that lovestruck courtiers could claim as their own.

The King himself summed up the early mood of the reign, and his love of innocent courtly pleasures, in his own verses:

Pastime with good company
I love and shall until I die,
Grudge who lust, yet none deny,
So God be pleased, thus live will I.
For my pastance, hunt sing and dance,
My heart is set;
All goodly sport to my comfort,
Who shall me let [forbid]?

Youth must have some dalliance
Of good or ill some pastance;
Company methinks then best
All thought and fancies to digest;
For idleness is chief mistress
Of vices all;
Then who can say, but mirth and play
Is best of all.

Company with honesty
Is virtue, vices to flee;
Company is good or ill,
But every man hath his free will:
The best ensue, the worst eschew;
My mind shall be
Virtue to use, vice to refuse,
Thus shall I use me.