13

“Merry Disports”

In the summer of 1509, Henry informed King Ferdinand that he was about to visit different parts of his kingdom.¹ We know very little about this first progress, save that it was fairly extensive and included sojourns at Reading Abbey and the Old Hall at Gainsborough in Lincolnshire, seat of Edward de Burgh, Lord Borough, who later married Katherine Parr.

Henry went on progress almost every summer of his reign. His purpose was not only to see his realm and be seen by his subjects, but also to enjoy the hunting that was to be had in other parts. At that time of year, many courtiers had returned to their estates to oversee the harvest, so the King was usually accompanied by a smaller retinue and sometimes just by his riding household. The Queen usually, but not always, accompanied him.

As he travelled, Henry distributed alms and largesse to religious houses and individuals.² He always took his Chapel Royal with him, to conduct religious services and provide musical entertainment, and his hunting dogs, which were transported by cart.

Unlike his daughter Elizabeth I, Henry did not routinely seek lavish hospitality from his subjects, and his visits were never as financially ruinous to his hosts as hers were. Many of his lesser houses were progress houses, and he used them whenever possible. In the first half of the reign he lodged also in the guest houses, or in apartments especially reserved for him, at monasteries. At other times he stayed as the guest of one of his courtiers or some local worthy, becoming lord of the house for the duration of his stay, with his apartments taking on, as far as possible, the functions of the Chamber at court, and his servants having priority over the residents in the allocation of accommodation and billets.³ Those closest to the King were assigned the rooms nearest his. If there was not sufficient space for his retinue in the house, barns and stables would be pressed into service, or tents set up in the grounds.

The Knight Harbinger was responsible for allocating accommodation to everyone; this was done strictly according to rank.⁴ When the King stayed at a private residence, one of his Gentlemen Ushers would go ahead to check that the house was structurally sound, that the roof did not leak, and that there were locks on all the doors.

Progresses could last for up to two months; they usually took place between July and October, and were carefully planned in advance, with the itinerary being set out in detailed tables called giests. The King’s plans were altered only when plague broke out or the weather was bad. The Master of the Horse was responsible for organising the complicated travel arrangements required to transport the court on the move, and the Board of the Greencloth for the provision of food,⁵ although individual hosts would always lay on lavish hospitality for their monarch. Everything was done to make the King’s transition from one house to another as smooth as possible.

Once the progress was over, the King would return to London or his palaces in the Thames Valley, where he normally spent the winter. Late in 1509, he and Queen Katherine, who was in her first pregnancy, removed to Richmond Palace by the Thames in Surrey for the festive season.

Richmond was Henry VII’s masterpiece, a large, battlemented Perpendicular fantasy modelled on the ducal residences of Bruges and built—at a cost of £20,000 (over £6 million)—on the ruins of the mediaeval palace of Sheen, which had been destroyed by fire at Christmas in 1497. The new palace, built of red brick and stone between 1499 and 1503 and renamed by royal decree Richmond after the earldom held by Henry VII before his accession, was designed on a courtyard plan, and was distinguished by vast expanses of big bay windows, fairy-tale pinnacles, and turrets surmounted by bell-shaped domes and gilded weather-vanes. The palace was surrounded by an extensive deer park.⁶

A contemporary described Richmond as “an earthly paradise, most glorious to behold.”⁷ There were fountains in the courtyards, orchards, and “most fair and pleasant gardens” set with knots and intersected by wide paths and statues of the King’s beasts. Around the gardens were novel timber-framed, two-storey galleried walks, and nearby was the recreation complex. In the stone donjon housing the royal lodgings, the beamed ceilings were painted azure and studded with gold Tudor roses and portcullises; there were rich tapestries, panel portraits, and murals by Henry VII’s painter, Maynard the Fleming, of “the noble kings of this realm in harness and robes of gold, as Brutus, Hengist, King William Rufus, King Arthur [and] King Henry . . . with swords in their hands, appearing like bold and valiant knights.”⁸ There was a richly appointed chapel and a library established by Henry VII. A “mighty brick wall” surrounded the palace; it had a tower at each corner, and in the centre was the main gate “of double timber and heart of oak, studded full of nails and crossed with bars of iron.”⁹ Above it were the arms of Henry VII, supported by the red dragon of Wales and the greyhound of Richmond.

Henry VIII celebrated his first Christmas as king at Richmond. The occasion was marked by a joust before the palace gates, on what is now Richmond Green, where “many notable feats of arms were proved.”¹⁰ The festivities were directed by one Will Wynesbury, acting as Lord of Misrule, who impudently asked the King to lend him £5 on account. “If it shall like Your Grace to give me too much,” he added mischievously, “I will give you none again, and if Your Grace give me too little, I will ask more!” Henry thought this was hilarious.¹¹

Christmas in Tudor times was a twelve-day festival, with the celebrations reaching their climax on 6 January, or Twelfth Night, which was the Feast of the Epiphany. The Advent fast ended on Christmas Eve; then there were twelve days of feasting, banqueting, pageantry, disguising, and convivial merrymaking, all presided over by the Lord of Misrule, or Master of Merry Disports,¹² with his train of heralds, magicians, and fools in fancy dress; at court, this was a time when rank took second place to revelry. Henry VIII also observed the mediaeval custom of appointing a boy bishop to take the place of his senior chaplain: at Windsor, he once rewarded a lad called Nicholas with 10 marks for taking this role.

The court was always full at Christmas. The royal palaces, like many humbler homes, were decorated with “holly, ivy and bays, and whatsoever the season afforded to be green,”¹³ and the public were often allowed in to watch the “goodly and gorgeous mummeries.” ¹⁴ In the great hall or presence chamber, the mighty Yule log crackled on the hearth, and carols were sung and danced, “to the great rejoicing of the Queen and the nobles.”¹⁵

Great feasts were served at court over Yuletide. On Christmas Day, there was always the seasonal favourite, seethed brawn made from spiced boar or pork, and perhaps roast swans; the first course, however, was invariably a boar’s head, which was served “bedecked with bay and rosemary,” according to the old carol printed in 1521 by the King’s printer, Wynkyn de Worde. For the sumptuous banquet that marked Twelfth Night, a special cake containing dried fruit, flour, honey, and spices was baked. The cake contained a pea or a bean; whoever found it would be King or Queen of the Pea or Bean for the evening. From payments made beforehand, however, it appears that at court the lucky recipients were often selected in advance, just to be on the safe side. At the void on Twelfth Night, the choir of the Chapel Royal sang as the wassail cup, which contained spiced ale, was brought in by the Lord Steward and presented to the King and Queen and then passed around the table.¹⁶

Christmas was also a time for solemn religious observances. Each Christmas Day, the King would hear mass in his closet before going in procession to the Chapel Royal for matins, where he actually participated in the service. This was, observed a papal nuncio, a “very unusual proceeding,” since Henry usually attended to business during public services.¹⁷ The choir usually sang “Gloria in excelsis” on these occasions, for which the King once rewarded them with £2 (£600). On the Feast of the Epiphany, gold, frankincense, and myrrh were offered on behalf of the Queen.

Presents were exchanged, not on Christmas Day, but on New Year’s Day. Not only the Queen and the royal family, but also every courtier and servant gave the King a gift. Each gift was presented to him by the donor or his representative in a glittering ceremony in the presence chamber, where the gifts—which might be gold or silver plate, jewellery or money—were afterwards displayed on sideboards or trestle tables for all to see. Each was then listed by the royal secretaries before being stored away. Great lords vied with one another to give the most valuable or novel items: Cardinal Wolsey regularly gave his master a gold cup worth £100 (£30,000). In return, Henry distributed gifts of plate, such as cups and bowls chased with the royal cipher, each weighted according to rank, to every person at court, even the most menial members of the Household.

In January 1510, Henry staged the first of many disguisings. Early one morning, he and eleven companions dressed themselves as Robin Hood and his outlaws, donning short coats of green Kentish Kendal with hoods that concealed their faces. Then, armed with bows and arrows, swords and bucklers, they burst into the Queen’s chamber—at which Katherine and her ladies were much “abashed.” Nevertheless, they agreed to dance with their visitors, and only after the dancing was finished did the King and his fellows throw back their hoods and reveal who they were, to the astonishment of the ladies and the amusement of the men.¹⁸

Henry VIII’s reign witnessed the Indian summer of the age of chivalry. Tournaments in the Burgundian style were hugely popular, and were staged at almost every court festival or diplomatic visit, and as regular events during May and June to provide “honourable and healthy exercise” ¹⁹ before the hunting season began. They were essentially an aristocratic preserve, intended to keep fighting men in peak condition in peacetime, since the King was “not minded to see young gentlemen inexpert in martial feats.”²⁰Tournaments had also become glittering social events that afforded Henry and his courtiers the chance to show off their wealth and prowess before foreign ambassadors. Success in the lists was a sure route to royal favour.

There were different forms of combat: “barriers,” with opponents fighting on foot with swords across a waist-high wooden fence; hand-to-hand combats on foot with a variety of weapons, “in imitation of Amadis and Lancelot and other knights of olden times”;²¹the tourney, fought out on horseback with swords; and the dramatic tilt or joust between mounted knights with lances thundering towards each other at either side of a wooden palisade. In the tilt, competitors fought in pairs; in the joust, alone. Contestants had to be courageous and strong, with a good eye and a fine sense of timing because a high degree of risk was involved, and men sometimes did get killed or injured. Achieving honour in the joust was nearly as prestigious as attaining glory in battle.

The tournament was the ultimate theatre of chivalry. Lavish pageantry and allegory attended these events, which were watched by spectators in covered stands. The participants would enter their names on a “Tree of Chivalry,”²² and they might arrive in the lists in fancy costume—Henry once appeared as Hercules—riding on pageant cars. Usually there was a grand procession to the tiltyard, headed by the Marshals of the Joust on horseback, followed by footmen; drummers; trumpeters; then lords and knights, two by two, all splendidly dressed and mounted; pages; the jousters, fully armed; and finally “His Majesty, armed cap-a-pie, surrounded by 30 gentlemen on foot, dressed in velvet and satin.” ²³ Tournaments were often held over several days.

Surviving score sheets, kept by heralds, show that marks were awarded on a bar-gate system according to which parts of an opponent’s armour were hit: the helmet scoring highest, closely followed by the breast-plate. ²⁴ In the tilt, the ultimate aim was to unhorse an opponent or split his lance. Courtly love also had a role in these affairs. The winning knight would be proclaimed the champion of the day, and receive his accolade from the Queen or the highest ranking lady present. Jousts were usually held in honour of the ladies, who gave favours, such as scarves or handkerchiefs, to their chosen knights to wear in the lists.

“The King, being lusty, young and courageous, greatly delighted in feats of chivalry.”²⁵ When he was sixteen, he was reported to have exercised in the lists every day.²⁶ On 12 January 1510, Henry tilted in public for the very first time. He and William Compton appeared in disguise in the lists at Richmond, but it was a furious contest and when Compton, in combat with Edward Neville, was “sore hurt and like to die,” Henry deemed it politic to leave the field. As he rode away, someone in on the secret cried, “God save the King!” whereupon he had no choice but to “discover himself ”—at which there was general amazement, for within living memory English kings had been mere spectators at such events.²⁷

Compton fortunately recovered, and Henry went on to enjoy an illustrious career in the lists, much to the dismay of the “ancient fathers” on the Council, who worried that he might injure or even kill himself. To placate them, the King began using specially made hollow lances to reduce impact. But he still took fearful risks, “having no respect or fear of anyone in the world,”²⁸ and was nearly killed on two occasions, as we shall hear.

Henry was literally obsessed with jousting. He trained regularly, often charging with his lance to dislodge a detachable ring from a post, or tilting at the quintain, a dummy on a revolving bar. His favourite opponents were Compton, Neville, Buckingham, and above all Brandon, who was soon being made jousting clothes to match those of the King his partner.

As early as 1510 Luis Caroz observed, “There are many young men who excel in this kind of warfare, but the most conspicuous among them all, the most assiduous and the most interested in the combats is the King himself, who never omits being present at them.”²⁹ A Venetian reported in 1515 that Henry jousted “marvellously.” That afternoon the King had invited this envoy and his suite “to see him joust, running upwards of 30 courses, in one of which he capsized his opponent, who is the finest jouster in the kingdom [Brandon?], horse and all. He then took off his helmet and came under the windows where we were, and talked and laughed with us to our very great honour, and to the surprise of all beholders.” ³⁰ On another occasion, wearing “cloth of gold with a raised pile,” he “looked like St. George in person” as he entered the lists.³¹ Again in 1515, Giustinian watched enthralled as, for three hours, “the King excelled all others, shivering many lances and unhorsing one of his opponents.”³² A drawing of Henry armed for the tilt and on horseback is in the British Library.

Thanks to the King’s personal involvement and enthusiasm, the English tournaments became renowned throughout Europe, where such events were regarded as crucial to a kingdom’s international prestige.

Life was not all heroic pleasures. In January 1510, Henry went in procession to open his first Parliament at Westminster. He looked resplendent in his crimson and ermine robes of estate with their long train, walking beneath a canopy carried by the monks of Westminster Abbey, preceded by mitred abbots, bishops, heralds, Archbishop Warham, Garter King of Arms, the royal mace-bearer, and the Duke of Buckingham bearing the Cap of Estate; the Duke’s heir, Henry Stafford, carried the Sword of Estate. After sitting enthroned through mass in the Abbey, the King proceeded into the Parliament Chamber, where he put on the Cap of Estate. The Earls of Oxford and Surrey stood to the left of the throne as the Lord Chancellor addressed the assembly.³³

Henry was eagerly anticipating the birth of a son and heir. He ordered a new cover for the baptismal font and linen towels to be used at the christening, as well as a sumptuous cradle of estate padded with crimson cloth of gold embroidered with the royal arms, linen for the Queen’s bed, swaddling bands in which to wrap the baby, beds for the nurse and two rockers, and a “groaning chair” for the delivery. This was similar to a modern birthing chair, with a cut-away seat, but it was upholstered in cloth of gold and came complete with a copper-gilt bowl for receiving the blood and the afterbirth.³⁴ But the Queen’s pregnancy had not gone to term when, on 31 January, she went into labour; her pains were so agonising that she vowed to donate her richest headdress to the shrine of St. Peter the Martyr in Spain in return for a happy outcome. Crushingly, she was delivered of a stillborn daughter. No public announcement was made, and it was four months before Katherine could bring herself to inform King Ferdinand of her loss. Despite God’s failure to answer her prayers, she kept her promise to send the headdress to Spain.³⁵

The King swallowed his disappointment. On Shrove Tuesday, he astonished his courtiers by publicly taking part in a revel for the first time, and thereby setting a new precedent. The occasion was a banquet held in honour of all the foreign ambassadors at Westminster. The King and Queen led their ladies and nobles into the Parliament Chamber, where Henry personally showed his guests to their seats before taking his place next to Katherine at the high table. He was soon up again, walking around the tables and chatting with his wife and the ambassadors. Then he disappeared with the Earl of Essex. Some time later they returned dressed up “in Turkey fashion,” carrying scimitars and accompanied by six gentlemen dressed as Prussians, and torchbearers blacked-up as Moors. After play-acting in these roles for a time, the King withdrew again, then reappeared in a short doublet of blue and crimson, slashed with cloth of gold. He and the other gentlemen then danced with the ladies, Henry partnering his sister Mary.³⁶ From now on, the monarch was also a showman.

The feast day of St. George, the patron saint of England and of the Most Noble Order of the Garter, fell on 23 April. Henry had been proclaimed King on that date, and he used it as his official birthday. St. George was his hero, and he had been a Knight of the Garter since the age of four. Every year on 23 April, the King held a chapter of the Order, not always at Windsor, but wherever he happened to be; during the thirty-seven years of his reign, twenty-four chapters of the Order were held at Greenwich.

Founded in 1348 by Edward III, the Garter was England’s highest and most coveted order of chivalry, having been revived in imitation of the Burgundian Order of the Golden Fleece by both Edward IV, who had built St. George’s Chapel at Windsor, and Henry VII. Henry VIII, with his passion for ancient chivalric values and his policy of accentuating his own magnificence, would continue this tradition.

The Order comprised the sovereign and twenty-five elected Knights Companions, who were only replaced upon death or disgrace. Vacancies were filled at the annual chapter meeting. Each chapter was marked with a magnificent feast; at Windsor, this took place in St. George’s Hall. The Knights wore “a blue velvet mantle with a Garter on the left shoulder, lined with white sarcanet, [and] scarlet hose with black velvet around the thighs.”³⁷ Each sported a light blue³⁸ silk garter with a gold buckle and embroidered Tudor roses round his leg—the garter being the oldest item of the insignia—and the rich gold collar introduced by Edward IV or Henry VII. Henry VIII decreed in 1510 that the collar consist of twelve Tudor roses set within blue garters, interspersed with twelve tasselled knots; from it hung a “Great George”—a jewelled pendant of St. George slaying the dragon. The Knights were allowed to wear their insignia only on St. George’s Day and the great feast days of the court, so in 1521 Henry instituted a smaller pendant, the “Lesser George,” for everyday use. This was suspended from a gold chain or a blue ribbon, and might be set with a rare cameo. The King is known to have owned three such Lesser Georges.³⁹

In the roof of St. George’s Chapel, at the east end of the nave, is a roof boss bearing the arms of Henry VIII surrounded by the escutcheons of his Knights of the Garter; their shields also appear on stall plates in the chapel. Legend has it that the motto of the Order,“Honi soit qui mal y pense” (“Evil be to he who evil thinks”), was first uttered by Edward III in reproof to courtiers who laughed when the garter of his mistress, the Countess of Salisbury, fell to the floor during a court dance. Whatever the truth of their origin, the words were adopted as the personal motto of the sovereign. The Garter was bestowed as a mark of great honour and friendship on foreign princes such as the Emperor Maximilian I, who usually returned the compliment: Henry VIII had been admitted to the Order of the Golden Fleece in 1505, and was painted wearing its insignia by Hans Holbein for the Whitehall mural of 1537.

Although the first chapter of the Order had been held at Greenwich in 1509, the election of new members had been postponed until May because of the death of the late King. The first chapter proper and feast took place in April 1510.

May Day, originally a pagan fertility festival, was one of the great holidays of the year. It was the occasion of cheerful merrymaking at court, with the King going a-Maying with much triumph and the celebrations lasting up to four days. On “the morn of May,” everyone ventured “into the woods and meadows to divert themselves”⁴⁰—not always in ways of which moralists would have approved—and later there were sports, horse races, jousts, and dances around the maypole, after which it was customary for cakes and cream to be served.⁴¹ On 1 May 1510, “His Grace, being young and not willing to be idle, rose very early to fetch in the may and green boughs, himself fresh and richly apparelled, and all his knights in white satin, . . . and went every man with his bow and arrows shooting in the wood, and so returned to court, every man with a green bough in his cap.”⁴²

That month saw Henry back in the tiltyard at Greenwich. “The King of England amuses himself almost every day of the week with running the ring and with jousts and tournaments on foot. Two days in the week are consecrated to this kind of tournament, which is to continue till the Feast of St. John.”⁴³

Katherine was now pregnant again, but there is evidence that Henry was straying already from her bed. On 28 May, Luis Caroz, whose account, which seems to derive from court gossip, is the only one to refer to this incident, reported:

What lately has happened is that two sisters of the Duke of Buckingham, both married, lived in the palace. One of them is the favourite of the Queen, and the other, it is said, is much liked by the King, who went after her. Another version is that the love intrigues were not of the King, but of a young man, his favourite, by the name of Compton, who carried on the love intrigue, as it is said, for the King, and that is the more credible version, as the King has shown great displeasure at what I am going to tell. The favourite of the Queen has been very anxious in the matter of her sister, and has joined herself with the Duke her brother, with her husband and her sister’s husband, in order to consult on what should be done. The consequences [were] that, whilst the Duke was in the private apartments of his sister, who was suspected with the King, Compton came there to talk with her, saw the Duke, who intercepted him, quarrelled with him, and the end of it was that he was severely reproached in many very hard words. The King was so offended at this that he reprimanded the Duke angrily. The same night, the Duke left the palace, and did not return for some days. At the same time, the husband of that lady went away, carried her off, and placed her in a convent sixty miles from here, that no one may see her.

The King, having understood that all this proceeded from the sister who is the favourite of the Queen, the day after the one was gone turned the other out of the palace, and her husband with her. Believing that there were other women in the employment of the favourite such as go about the palace insidiously spying out every unwatched movement in order to tell the Queen, the King would have liked to turn all of them out, only that it has appeared to him too great a scandal. Afterwards, almost all the court knew that the Queen had been vexed with the King, and the King with her, and thus the storm went on between them. The Queen by no means conceals her ill-will towards Compton, and the King is very sorry for it.⁴⁴

Buckingham had two sisters: Anne, wife of Sir George Hastings, later Earl of Huntingdon, and Elizabeth, wife of Robert Ratcliffe, Lord FitzWalter, were both ladies-in-waiting to Queen Katherine. It is not clear from this account which of them was the object of the King’s affections and which the informer, but Compton is known to have lived for a time in an adulterous relationship with Lady Hastings, and at Compton he later founded a chantry where prayers were said daily for her soul and those of his family members, ⁴⁵ so it is reasonable to suppose that it was she who was at the centre of this scandal. According to Caroz’s account, though, it sounds very much as if Compton at this stage was acting as a go-between for the King and the lady. Caroz thought so, and had this not been the case, the Queen would surely not have reacted so angrily, even though she would naturally have been upset at a close attendant being so publicly disgraced, since it reflected upon her own honour and reputation. The fact that her ladies were going about the court spying on the King suggests that Katherine had already had her suspicions.

It appears also that the King had not gone as far as he would have wished with the lady when the affair came to light, which would account in part for his angry reaction. He was also characteristically touchy about the matter being exposed; in all his extramarital affairs, he went to great lengths to maintain the utmost discretion, which is why the surviving evidence for them is at best fragmentary. What little we do have suggests that Henry usually strayed when his wives were pregnant, when marital intercourse would have been taboo, especially as the future security of his dynasty was increasingly at stake. This evidence reinforces the view that Henry regarded sex within marriage as being chiefly for procreational purposes: pleasure was something men pursued outside the nuptial bed.

The Stafford affair taught Katherine a humiliating lesson, that it was useless to remonstrate with her husband in such cases. Like many men of his time, Henry regarded it as his prerogative to pursue other ladies, while at the same time expecting his wife to stay chaste, and she soon realised that, in order to preserve her dignity and avoid mortifying public rows, she should shut her eyes to his extramarital affairs and be grateful that he did not shame her by flaunting them.

That there were affairs we cannot doubt. Although the pieces of evidence are fractional, taken as a whole they are overwhelming. In 1515 Giustinian described Henry as being “free from every vice,”⁴⁶ yet in that same year a French ambassador in Rome stated that the King was “a youngling [who] cares for nothing but girls and hunting and wastes his father’s patrimony”⁴⁷—much to the distress of the English ambassador at the Vatican, who thought such words disrespectful to his sovereign. George Wyatt, the grandson of Sir Thomas Wyatt, Henry’s court poet, refers to the King abandoning his pursuit of a lady when his friend Sir Francis Bryan revealed an interest in her. Henry may also have enjoyed the favours of Bryan’s gorgeous sister Elizabeth, who was married to another favoured courtier, Sir Nicholas Carew; the King gave her “many beautiful diamonds and pearls and innumerable jewels” that were, strictly speaking, the property of the Queen.⁴⁸ When, sometime before 1528, the King had an affair with the volatile Mrs. Amadas, wife of Robert Amadas, the Master of his Jewel House, that lady, who was given to tantrums and strange visions, made no secret of the fact that William Compton had made his house in Thames Street available for their trysts ⁴⁹—a circumstance that gives credence to Caroz’s assertion that Compton had acted for Henry in the Stafford affair.

In 1533, Reginald Pole, the King’s cousin, declared that Anne Boleyn, in refusing to sleep with Henry, had borne in mind “how soon he was sated with those who had served him as his mistress.”⁵⁰ The King’s physician, Dr. John Chamber, described his master as being “overly fond of women” and given to “lustful dreams.”⁵¹ Even William Thomas, who wrote a laudatory biography of his master around the time of Henry’s death, admitted that “it cannot be denied but that he was a very fleshly man, and no marvel, for albeit his father brought him up in good learning, yet after he fell into all riot and overmuch love of women.”

Wolsey was accused by his enemies of being “the King’s bawd, showing him what women were most wholesome and best of complexions,” ⁵² and although he vigorously denied the charge, it is not entirely implausible. A later Catholic observer claimed that “King Henry gave his mind to three notorious vices—lechery, covetousness and cruelty, but the two latter issued and sprang out of the former.”⁵³ The Elizabethan courtier Sir Robert Naunton later stated what was by then well known, that Henry never spared a man in his anger nor a woman in his lust. ⁵⁴

For all this, Henry considered himself a paragon of virtue, and it is often said that, compared with other rulers such as Edward IV and Francis I, he was. But the truth is that he was an inhibited man who was far more discreet about his amours than most kings. The fact that he had separate apartments from the Queen, and visited her bed only at his own instigation, made covert infidelity that much easier. Despite what Pole claimed, some of Henry’s affairs went on in private for years, as will be seen. There is evidence that he used Greenwich Castle, the former Duke Humphrey’s Tower, which he refurbished in 1526 and renamed Mireflore, as a residence for his mistresses.⁵⁵

Henry was never coarse in speech, nor did he appreciate bawdy jokes. Once, when travelling by barge to Greenwich Castle to visit “a fair lady whom he loved and lodged in the tower of the park” (her identity is unknown), he was “disposed to be merry” and challenged Sir Andrew Flammock to complete a verse for him. Henry began it:

Within this tower
There lieth a flower
That hath my heart . . .

Whereupon the foul-minded Flammock added:

Within this hour
She pissed full sour
And let a fart.

Henry was so offended that he spluttered, “Begone, varlet!” and waved the man out of his sight.⁵⁶ In 1542, Sir William Paget felt he ought to apologise for having to report King Francis I’s “unseemly” declaration that he would rather “give his daughter to be a strumpet of the bordello” than face the Emperor in battle.⁵⁷

This innate prudishness manifested itself in other ways. Henry, who had three marriages annulled, angrily censured his sister Margaret when she divorced her husband in order to marry another man. He was harsh on the prostitutes who followed his armies, and rigorous in suppressing the brothels that had disfigured the Southwark shore of the Thames for centuries.

Henry could be openly demonstrative towards the women he loved, but never embarrassingly so. It has been suggested that he was not an inspiring or romantic lover, but his letters to Anne Boleyn, which will be quoted later, prove that he was capable of deep passion and sentimental feeling. The fact that Anne Boleyn held him off for at least six years proves not that Henry lacked ardour, but that he was too much of a knight and a gentleman to resort to rape.

The King acknowledged only one bastard, although rumour credited him with more; this was probably the result of luck or carefulness. Some writers have suggested that it implies a low level of fertility, but that does not take account of the fact that Henry repeatedly impregnated his first two wives. It has also been suggested that, given his assertion that two of his marriages were incestuous and therefore unlawful,⁵⁸ Henry was the victim of an Oedipus complex, but in fact this was a quite legitimate plea to make in each case, and not enough is known of Henry’s relationship with his mother to justify such a claim.

One tale told about the King was certainly apocryphal. Sir Thomas More’s nephew, William Rastell, and the Jesuit exile Nicholas Sander, who in 1585 wrote a Catholic treatise damning Henry and his second wife, Anne Boleyn, both claimed that Anne was the fruit of an early affair between the King and her mother, Elizabeth Howard. The story was certainly current at court, and in 1535 a Member of Parliament, Sir George Throckmorton, accused Henry to his face of “meddling” with both Anne’s mother and her sister Mary.

“Never with the mother,” Henry said.

“Nor never with the sister either,” lied Cromwell, ⁵⁹ who was standing by and must have been well aware that the King had had an affair with Mary Boleyn (of which more will be related later). But Henry was probably under ten when Anne was conceived, and could not possibly have been her father. Yet there may have been smoke without fire. Despite his denial, an early liaison, while he was perhaps in his teens, with Lady Boleyn cannot be ruled out.