Play at crystal palace
Was The Field of Cloth of Gold, the meeting between Henry VIII and Francis I 500 years ago this month, the greatest party ever thrown?
The Field of Cloth of Gold – the meeting between Britain’s Henry VIII and Francis I of France – took place 500 years ago this month. Allan Mallinson explains its significance
According to Sellar and Yeatman’s 1066 And All That, King Henry VIII played tennis with the King of France on the Field of Cloth of Gold, and this was the origin of the motto of the Prince of Wales: “Ich dien.” It’s a good joke but the motto Ich dien – German for “I serve” – was adopted by the Prince of Wales nearly 200 years earlier, after the Battle of Crécy (1346), along with the famous three feathers supposedly plucked from the crown of the King of Bohemia, killed in the battle fighting on the French side. There is no record of Henry playing tennis with King Francis at the Field, although they famously wrestled.
The Field of Cloth of Gold (sometimes ‘of the Cloth of Gold’) was a summit conference under sumptuous canvas, Tudor glamping on a scale never surpassed. It was a fortnight’s tournament during the summer of 1520, a friendly but serious mutual display of power, wealth and martial arts to cement the nascent friendship between England and France. For there had been little but enmity between the two for centuries.
The Field was the idea of Henry’s Lord Chancellor, Cardinal Thomas Wolsey. England in pre-reformation Europe was a
Catholic power to be wooed by other powers, notably France, Spain and the Holy Roman Empire, and the meeting would give Wolsey and the King not only an opportunity to cement the peace but also to decide which horse to back if it came to war again.
Voltaire famously quipped that the Holy Roman Empire was “neither holy, nor Roman, nor an empire”. It was in fact a strange conglomerate, mostly German, in central Europe, and its emperor was elected. In AD800, Pope Leo III, hardpressed by rivals in Rome, had turned for help to Charlemagne, King of the Franks, and in gratitude had crowned Charlemagne Imperator Romanorum.
In 1519, King Charles V of Spain, nephew of Henry’s wife, Queen Katherine (of Aragon), was elected to the Imperial throne. The major part of Europe was now ruled by three young men, for Henry was barely 28, Francis, who had come to the French throne in 1515, was just 25, and Charles was a mere 19. Henry had been on the throne for 10 years, however, and Wolsey had repeatedly urged him to try to improve relations with the Continent, arguing that Christian nations should not war with each other, particularly with the threat of Islam from an expanding Ottoman Empire. His efforts came to fruition in 1518 with a ‘Treaty of Universal Peace’ – the Treaty of London – between Burgundy, France, England, the Holy Roman Empire, the Netherlands, the Papal States and Spain, all of which agreed not to attack one another and to come to the aid of any of the signatories that was under attack. It was during the negotiations that he proposed the grand meeting of Henry and Francis in the English Pale of Calais, inviting other European notables, too, including the Emperor Charles. It seemed a perfect appeal to the youthful virility of the two kings.
Francis was willing but wished instead to meet on neutral ground. Wolsey, however, insisted that as it was to be at Henry’s invitation, the event must take place on English soil – which Calais had been since Crécy. Despite strong objections by the Conseil du Roi, Francis gave way and agreed to make his own camp on the frontier of the Pale, and the dates were set for 7 to 24 June.
The Pale extended inland from Calais some eight miles, and along the coast for about 12 miles towards Boulogne. The places chosen for the two royal camps were Guînes, six miles south-east of Calais, and Ardres, five miles further south-east, where Francis would set up his court. The tournament ground was to be roughly midway between the two, just inside the Pale.
But Guînes castle turned out to be in too dilapidated a state for Henry’s purposes. Sir Richard Wingfield, formerly Lord Deputy of Calais, and Henry’s ambassador to Francis, described it as “not fit to be seen”. Wolsey decided that a temporary palace would be built instead, with as few bricks as necessary and as much painted canvas as possible. Accordingly, early in 1520, the royal council set out its instructions:
“And for as much as for the King’s honour, it is behoofull [beneficial] and necessary to put everything in readiness, as well as for the apparell of his noble person as for the garnishing of his lodgings, tents, pavilions and preparations of all other things requisite to so great an act and triumph.”
It gave the organisers extraordinarily little time. However, as the meeting had been mooted at the peace conference in 1518, some work had already begun. Besides, Henry was almost as much a peripatetic king as his medieval forebears, and regal tentage
A temporary palace would be built with as much painted canvas as possible
and camp stores were part of the paraphernalia of the Tudor court.
Designed personally by Henry and Wolsey, the temporary palace would comprise four blocks with a central court or atrium, set on stone foundations, with four brick-built towers at the outer corners. Brickwork 8ft high would support the timber framing on which was stretched canvas painted to look like brick. This was to be topped by an Italianate frieze and crenellated cornice, with a roof of oiled canvas painted to look like slates. In all, it would stand some 30ft high and cover two and a half acres.
It wasn’t until mid-april, however, when the man responsible for overseeing the event arrived, Henry’s Lord Chamberlain, the Earl of Worcester, that work on site began in earnest. Meanwhile, the upper part of the palace was being fashioned in Westminster under supervision of the Office of the King’s Works, to be shipped across the Channel ‘all made’ by the end of May.
Progress at Guînes gave the Earl of Worcester much anxiety, however, especially when it was realised there wasn’t enough timber for the outer works, or sawyers to cut it. William Lilgrave, the surveyor of works at Calais, was sent to Holland for more timber, which was floated down the coast behind barges and then upstream to Guînes. More craftsmen and labourers were hired locally, and others brought hastily from Kent. By early May there were some 350 carpenters, 100 joiners, 30 pairs of sawyers, 250 bricklayers, 50 glaziers and 24 painters on site, and innumerable labourers. As the date for completion approached, work continued into the night, lit by hundreds of torches.
The glass for the palace was Flemish and there was lots of it. Clerestory windows on both the outer and inner walls lit the whole of the first floor of each block, while below other windows, in the words of one awed observer, “stretch to the very floor”. The French would dub it ‘the crystal palace’.
The furnishings inside were equally lavish, especially the Flemish and Florentine tapestries. Gold thread everywhere reflected both daylight and candlelight: “The interior of the palace, for its part, brilliant with kingly pomp, is to be extolled above all triumphal palaces…” wrote one of the French. “With cloth of silk in lattice work, interspersed with golden rivets, the inner chambers of the English palace are magnificent.”
Outside, a gilt fountain spouted claret, hippocras (spiced wine) and water through separate runlets.
A CRYSTAL PALACE
The cost of the ‘crystal palace’ alone has been estimated at £10,000 – perhaps as much as a 10th of the Crown’s annual income. But beyond the walls of the castle were a further 300 tents for the royal retinue – some 3,000 men and women (the figure agreed with the French, whose numbers were the same) – though the cost of these fell in part to their occupants, the Tudor nobility, some of whom had to mortgage their houses to meet the expense of attending.
The French pavilions were scarcely less impressive, numerous or costly. Twenty years later the Conseil du Roi was still investigating allegations of fraud among contractors and officials. But Francis seems to have been determined to give the meeting his best efforts, for a ‘Universal Peace’ was much to his advantage, too. In the weeks before he and Henry met, Francis spent much time with the English ambassador, Sir Richard Wingfield, often in the hunting field. After one boar hunt in the forest of Blois, Sir Richard sent Henry an account of French hunting techniques and Francis’s skill in the chase. The King, he wrote, killed his quarry with the spear, dismounted and cut off its right foot, as was the custom. He then remounted to follow the flight of falcons against a heron, but did so with less enthusiasm, however, telling the ambassador that “hunting by force” – mounted pursuit of the boar or stag – was the only true sport, and that the French were the only true masters of
The interior of the palace, for its part, brilliant with kingly pomp, is to be extolled above all triumphal palaces
it. Sir Richard assured Henry that he’d replied that “in which all sortes of huntynge I shewed to know Your Grace to have no fellow”.
On the morning of 31 May, the preparations at last complete, Henry and Queen Katherine went aboard the new royal barque Katherine Plesaunce at Dover. They were followed by the dukes of Buckingham and Suffolk, the Marquess of Dorset, 11 earls, 25 barons, 118 knights, and all their ladies, two archbishops, six bishops and numerous chaplains; and all these with their own servants. The horses numbered 3,200 – 150 in Wolsey’s retinue alone. The weather was fine and the crossings were swift. Indeed, the weather would stay fine, with just occasional showers, for the next three weeks.
As agreed, Henry and Francis met at the tournament ground, the Val Doré, at 6pm on 7 June, embracing warmly. Their meetings over the next fortnight, and the tourneys (mock battles), jousting, mummery, masques, acrobatics, feasting and dancing were by all accounts just as cordial, although “many persons present could not understand each other”.
The only discordant note appears to have been the famous wrestling match. On the third day, Henry beat Francis in an archery contest. Some accounts have it that Henry offered Francis his own longbow, which proved too heavy for the French king to draw. Francis congratulated him good-humouredly, but Henry then challenged him to a true hand-to-hand contest – wrestling. Henry was a tall man, standing over 6ft (the average height at the time was probably around 5ft 4in), and far from the bloated figure of later years. Indeed, he was something of an all-round athlete and a keen practitioner of Cornish wrestling, in which the participants wore short, loose jackets that could be grabbed, held, and used to throw an opponent to the ground, at which point the match would end. Francis, on the other hand, was a little shorter but also athletically built and excelled in Breton wrestling, similar to the Cornish but the jacket worn tighter.
Francis was at first reluctant to accept the challenge, not wanting to risk their newfound amity, but Henry persisted and so the two set out in their velvet to a flat, grassy arena. Reliable details of the bout are few but Francis eventually managed to overthrow Henry using a technique known as the ‘Breton trip’. Henry was less than pleased. English accounts are, unsurprisingly, silent on the matter.
Nevertheless, the Field continued with all due chivalry, both kings ‘fighting’ on the same side in the tourneys. In the foot combats, Henry wore his new suit of armour made at the Royal Armoury at Greenwich, which can be seen today at the Royal Armouries in Leeds. Francis fought in almost identical armour, with a liveried smock of
black, white and gold. According to one chronicler, “this same two kings safe in body and lymmes ended battail for that day at the barriers with great honor”.
PRODIGIOUS FEASTING
Certainly the feasting was prodigious. Henry’s hospitality required the slaughter of 3,000 sheep and lambs, 800 calves and 300 oxen, many of which had been brought from England. Some six and a half thousand birds of various species were presented on the tables at the Field, and the English kitchen accounts record payments for nearly 100,000 eggs.
On the final day, solemn high mass was celebrated in a chapel on the tournament ground, “a fathom and a half high on pillars”, with two organs, one English, one French, and two choirs, the English one that of the Chapel Royal, with Cardinal Wolsey, as papal legate, the celebrant. Gifts were exchanged afterwards, including fine Italian-bred horses, and presents for the royal ladies and nobles. Henry gave a jewelled crucifix to Francis’s mistress, Françoise de Foix, while the French Queen Claude gave Queen Katherine “a litter of cloth of gold”. The two kings parted on warm terms.
On his way back to England, however, Henry met the Emperor Charles at Gravelines in the Spanish Netherlands, and both agreed to make no fresh alliance with Francis for two years.
Yet even before the two years were out, Henry and the Holy Roman Emperor would join forces to declare war on France.
The Field of Cloth of Gold was a marvel of planning and logistics, even by today’s standards. Though, ultimately, an expensive failure in cementing peace, it remains famous for being perhaps the greatest party ever thrown.