Two Stars in One Firmament
And for as much as for the King's honour, it is behoofull [beneficial] and necessary to put everything in readiness, as well 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, therefore not only the specialities of everything his hereafter articled, but also the persons appointed to execute all and singular the said articles and charges be particularly named and expressed in form following.
WITH THESE WORDS from ‘A Memoriall of such things as be requisite’, dating from early 1520, the English royal council began its detailed planning for Henry VIII's meeting with Francis I.1 Its first three items provide a remarkably succinct summary of the purpose and spirit of the Field of Cloth of Gold and show that, for both sides, the event was first and foremost about displaying its sovereign as a nobleman and warrior king as magnificently as possible.
The first item specified that Henry's clothing for the Field was to be prepared as suited his ‘high pleasure’ and that Henry would himself decide on its design and look – to be the ‘divisor thereof’ as the ‘Memoriall’ puts it. The second specified that Guînes castle was to be refurbished and that lodgings where the English could entertain their French guests in appropriate splendour were to be built in or near the castle, according to a design drawn up in consultation with the king and Wolsey. The result was the famous temporary palace built for Henry just outside Guînes, acknowledged as the architectural masterpiece of the event. The third item specified that a site for a tournament was to be agreed with the French and that it should be located and ‘assigned in egall [equal] distaunce betwixt the said Guysnes and Ardre’. Achieving these things, getting the two kings and their retinues to the site and having somewhere for them to stay that fitted the grandeur of the occasion were the principal tasks with which the chief officers of the French and English courts occupied themselves throughout the spring of 1520.
Given the kind of status brinkmanship in which both sides were engaged, the atmosphere in the eight weeks that followed was fraught with tension and mutual suspicion. This was heightened still further as both sides began to expend huge sums of money on preparations while uncertain as to whether or not the other side was also preparing or instead leading them into a diplomatic – or even a military – trap.
Ardres: the French Royal Encampment
Formal French preparations for the Field of Cloth of Gold began on 22 February 1520 when, at Cognac, Francis signed letters patent authorising the preparation and transport to Ardres of tents and pavilions to house the French court. The two men charged with overseeing the French preparations were both high-ranking military officers: Gaspard de Coligny, seigneur de Châtillon, whom we have already met, and Jacques dit Galiot de Genouillac, the Great Master of the Royal Artillery. Genouillac was a member of a family who had served the French kings as Masters of Artillery since the reign of Louis XI. He became Great Master in 1512 and so was responsible for getting the artillery over the Alps for Francis's 1515 campaign for Milan and enabling it to play an important role in the French victory at Marignano.2 He was paid 2,000 livres tournois per annum and headed a complex network of officials. Guillaume de Saigne, the treasurer and receiver-general of the artillerie ordinaire, drew up accounts for the preparations now preserved in the Bibliothèque Nationale. These show that the artillery was called upon not simply for its manpower and logistics expertise, but also for its own proper function of defence – should this prove necessary.3
The town of Ardres is about 10 miles (17 km) south-east of Calais and just under five miles (7.5 km) east and slightly south of Guînes. In 1520 it stood on the border with the English territory around Calais known as ‘the Pale’ and was quite close also to Habsburg territory in the counties of Artois and Flanders. This area had witnessed near-constant military activity in the early sixteenth century and Ardres had been partially burnt by the English in the war of 1513. The town lay within the province of Picardy whose governor in 1520 was Charles de Bourbon, duc de Vendôme. He closely supervised preparations for the meeting.4
Perhaps the earliest evidence of French activity in connection with the Field of Cloth of Gold is the set of surveys of armaments and ammunition in Picard towns undertaken by officers of the artillery in March and April of 1519 or 1520 (the accounts are unclear). The artillery accounts record that one Jacques Doussel, commissaire ordinaire, was paid for costs in going from Montreuil to Amiens and from there conveying to Ardres equipment for some 2,000 infantrymen or guards including body armour, some 4,000 pikes or halberds and 100 arquebuses.5 Ardres was wrongly described by one observer in 1520 as ‘long ago destroyed’, but its fortifications were certainly degraded, as was its stock of housing. A letter which Francis sent to his ambassador in England in March 1520 is the first to mention the need for tents and pavilions to accommodate the king himself and his entourage at Ardres.6 Francis ordered the repair of the town's castle and its defensive ditches. It was also rearmed to some degree.
To the south of Ardres and Guînes was the county of the Boulonnais, whose principal town was the port of Boulogne, which Henry VIII would successfully besiege in 1544. It was to Boulogne that the materials and equipment needed for the French camp were brought in late May 1520. At the time its governor and sénéchal of the county was Antoine Motier de La Fayette who, having been captured at the Battle of the Spurs in 1513, was already known to the English. In the intervening years of peace La Fayette had frequently entertained English envoys arriving on missions to Francis.7 In 1517 the Council of Calais had reported that he was favoured by the king of France above other local gentry.8
To the south and east of Boulogne and Ardres on the route to Paris lay Montreuil, Hesdin, Abbeville, Péronne and Amiens. At Montreuil the governor was Antoine de Créquy, seigneur de Pont-Rémy. He had been captain of Thérouanne in August 1513 and had conducted a vigorous but ultimately unsuccessful defence against the English siege. Pont-Rémy would host the French king at Montreuil in the days immediately before his meeting with Henry.9 At Abbeville two generations of the Harcourt du Huppy family held the governorship and at Amiens three generations of the Lannoy family succeeded each other in the post between 1495 and 1562. At nearby Péronne, Jean II d'Humières, a royal favourite, had just been appointed as governor and his influence probably enabled the town to escape a financial contribution towards the Field of Cloth of Gold.10
Given their proximity to Ardres and the English Pale, the French evidently decided that these towns also needed reinforcements of arms and ammunition. The aforementioned Jacques Doussel was paid 150 livres tournois for costs in going to Troyes in Champagne and there obtaining 300 pack horses and then taking 12 canons serpentines (2–3 tonnes); 10 colverines bâtardes (1.2 tonnes); 10 colverines moyennes (0.6 tonnes) and 200 arquebuses à croq and other munitions to Saint-Quentin, Péronne and Amiens ‘for the fortification and defence of the same’.11 This number and range of weapons is akin to what, according to one military protocol from the 1520s, was the usual strength of an artillery company. What proportion of the total armaments brought to Picardy this particular shipment represents the records do not allow us to say, but it suggests a reasonably serious effort to enhance the military capacity of the towns closest to the border with the Calais Pale and imperial territory. Inventories of weapons were also taken of available supplies in Brittany, Normandy and Champagne, indeed as far away as Languedoc, Provence and Dauphiné.12 The French were clearly planning for all eventualities, including the possibility of an imperial attack during, or immediately after, the event itself.
The three English commissioners in Guînes kept a close eye on what the French were up to at Ardres and were unsettled by what they saw, or rather did not see, there. Informed by a network of observers and informants, they reported as late as mid-April that little preparation had so far been made in the town.13 On 21 May they reported that they were sure that Ardres was being fortified ‘secretly’ – not least because Marshal Châtillon had told them that it would be! They wondered whether, even now, the French were really serious about a meeting or planning a surprise attack on Henry and his entourage at Guînes or even in the open fields. They advised Henry to ship over ‘the ordnance lying on the Tower wharf’; thus both sides talked of peace but still prepared for a fight.14
Happily for the story of the meeting, the appearances at Ardres were deceptive because work to assemble the accommodation for the French court had in fact already begun in earnest some 320 miles (520 km) away in the city of Tours. At first sight, Tours seems an odd choice, given its distance from Ardres. Yet Tours, lying on the lower reaches of the Loire river at its confluence with the Cher, had long been an important cloth town. Its location provided it with the water supply, albeit one with considerable seasonal variation, that was necessary for the silk, cloth and leather industries. These had reached their zenith under royal patronage in the later part of the fifteenth century, at which point it has been estimated that 85 per cent of the manual workers in Tours were involved in its fabric and clothing industries. Thereafter, however, the city's production of luxury cloth rapidly succumbed to international competition, especially from Florence, but the production of more mundane fabrics expanded.15 In 1520, Tours's appeal as the venue for manufacturing the tents needed for the Field was almost certainly based on the availability at short notice of the materials and the skilled and semi-skilled labour needed for the tasks of dyeing, cutting and stitching canvas and other fabrics.
Preliminary work began in late February and the centre of operations was the palace of Christophe de Brillac, the Archbishop of Tours.16 It was evidently chosen for its size as a suitable work and storage area. The project was under the direction of Briçet Dupré, one of six royal tapestry-makers in 1520.17 He worked with the assistance of the officers and men of the artillery who supervised the gathering of materials and workers and maintained their security at Tours and Ardres. The scale of the operation was extraordinary. By May there were some 170 men and 120 women, described in the accounts as ‘tantiers et couturiers’, working in the great hall of the palace at Tours virtually around the clock in successive shifts in order to produce an estimated 300 to 400 tents, the tallest and largest of which were for the king and his immediate entourage. All the men were paid 5 or 6 sous a day, apart from those identified as ‘masters’ who received as much as 20 sous per day. Some of the women also received 5 sous, though others had only 3 sous. Although modest, these wages were in line with those paid for similar work across France at the time. Like their counterparts in Lyon, France's other great cloth manufacturing city, working women in Tours had a more limited range of trades open to them than their male counterparts. Training for work in stitching and sewing was comparatively easy for girls from poorer backgrounds to obtain and when times were good, as they were in the 1520s, large numbers made their living from day labour, although the scale of that offered on this occasion by the royal court was exceptional. During the French Wars of Religion the supply of silk, and with it the work of labourers and artisans, diminished severely. The years of Francis's reign would be recalled in Tours and Lyon as relatively good ones for day labourers in the cloth industries.18 Master tent-makers were in fact brought from Lyon, and were paid the same daily rate as those from Tours. Some of the workers then travelled north to set up the French camp. Others, paid the same rate, were engaged at Boulogne and still others were brought urgently, ‘en toute extreme diligence’, to Ardres to dress the tents in the first five days of June. The tent-makers were paid 4,600 livres out of the total wages bill for preparations of 5,788 livres tournois.19
Lit day and night by torches, the hall of the archbishop's palace would have been organised into different areas of production. Cartload after cartload of materials would have arrived in the courtyard with lengths of dyed canvas or with finer fabrics carefully wrapped in serge or buckram to protect them. Once accounted for, the materials were assigned to teams of cutters and stitchers, who worked up sections which were then labelled in a variety of related alphabetical sequences for assembly on site. Once prepared, the canvas panels and their covering fabrics were carefully packed and loaded for carriage up to Ardres.
Not less than some 35,143 aunes of canvas were required. Most of it was supplied to Dupré by eight merchants of Tours at a cost of 18 livres, 10 sous per 100 aunes. Further amounts were supplied directly to the site at Ardres from merchants in Boulogne and Saint-Omer at the slightly higher price of 20 livres per 100 aunes. The rich fabrics needed to cover and decorate the exterior and interior of the pavilions were also supplied in or through Tours. One merchant, Jean Richard, had the lion's share of sales, supplying hundreds of metres of silk, taffeta, satin and velvet in the royal colours and in violet and deep blue, which was used to dress the tents. His business with the crown earned him almost 4,500 livres (£450).20 The temptation to profiteer from the king's need for large amounts of expensive material evidently proved too much for some. In 1526 one Nicolas Lalemant and a number of fellow merchants and bankers were found guilty of fraud in the provision of pavilions at Ardres. Twenty years later, four councillors of the Parlement of Paris were commissioned to investigate allegations of fraud against ‘des marchands qui avient fourni les tentes, pavilions, draps d'or et fleurs de lis’ for the meeting with the king of England.21
After the Field, the canvas tents were stripped of their fine fabrics, retained by the artillery for military use and redeployed within twelve months. An inventory of those fabrics used to dress the king's pavilion and those of the queen and Louise de Savoie was drawn up as an appendix to De Saigne's account. This inventory, together with two of the royal ‘garde-meuble’ or warehouse in Paris made in 1542 and 1551, allows a significant number of items used at the Field of Cloth of Gold to be identified. The inventories list hundreds of aunes of cloth of gold, cloth of silver, damask, silk, satin, velvet and velour mostly of blue, violet and crimson, many of them ‘strewn’ (semez) with fleurs-de-lis, together with many lengths in the royal livery colours of white, tawny and black. The length of these items, most over three or four aunes long, indicates that they were used to cover the canvas walls and roofs of the pavilions. Some have specified purposes, such as twenty-three pieces of canvas faced with cloth of gold, used in the galleries of the king's pavilion or ten pieces of cloth of gold used on the walls and private chambers of the king within it.22
Similar entries present striking combinations of different fabrics stitched together or overlaid upon each other for decorative effect, just as they are described by contemporaries at the Field. One such piece combined cloth of gold with cloth of silver, overlaid with a band of violet velvet. Another piece combined lengths of cloth of gold and of silver backed with yellow buckram. Some 200 lbs of silk fringing of various lengths in the royal livery colours and others of white, black and violet were all stored in buckram wrappings. Many were apparently stored in the form in which they were used and not disassembled into their constituent elements afterwards. Even some of the streamers that flew from the masts of the tents and pavilions were stored. These included eighteen white banderolles painted with arms of Queen Claude and Louise de Savoie and another sixteen with those of the king's arms.23
A range of ancillary items were also purchased from merchants at Tours, including lengths of rope and cord, pegs, posts, various metal fastenings and pulleys, taffeta and leather for fastenings and straps of varying lengths and hundreds of large, medium and small nails. The purchase of these items alerts us to the fact that the French also required a good deal of timber for the king's accommodation at Ardres and for the pavilions. The largest individual items were great and smaller masts used to hold up the tents. One wood merchant in Tours, Bartélemy Grand, supplied some 412 feet (125.5m) of pine wood from the forests of the Auvergne.24 Oak and walnut trunks were also cut into shorter planks to be used to support the structure of the pavilions in the form of skirting and runner boards, roof frames, supports for doorways, window frames and the like.
Once assembled, the materials were taken by cart or packhorse to the island of Saint-Gracian on the Loire. From there the river might, theoretically, have provided convenient means to transport the material at least as far north as Orléans but the accounts make no mention of boats or barges being used. They do, however, specify that over 400 packhorses and some 120 carters were contracted for service at a rate of 5 sous per day per horse.25 They also specify the tax areas or élėctions from where these carters and the horses were contracted. They indicate that the route to Ardres was probably by land first to Blois and Orléans and from there along an established trading route via Chartres, Dreux and Evreux to Rouen, roughly in line with the present Route Nationale 154.26 At Rouen, more wood was evidently collected and then the expedition moved on to Boulogne, probably via Abbeville. Final preparatory work, possibly also repairs and the final repackaging of the material for the return journey to Tours, was done at Boulogne where the cloisters and grounds of the Franciscan convent and those of a hospital had been taken over. The prior of the convent was compensated with 25 livres for the inconvenience and as thanks for the prayers of the community for the king's health and prosperity. The nuns of the hospital received 8 livres.27 From Boulogne the finished tents were finally brought the relatively short distance to Ardres.
Two scraps of sentences in a mutilated section of a letter written by Sir Nicholas Vaux to Wolsey from Guînes on 18 May indicate that in addition to the tents prepared at Tours, Francis had taken over four houses in the town of Ardres and ‘a great peace [piece] of the abbaye there called Anderne’. Dillon's survey of the Pale indicates that there was an abbey anciently located somewhere between modern Andres and Balinghem which would appear to be the one to which Vaux referred. The abbey was destroyed by the English in the war of 1544 which suggests that, despite the confusing description of its location within the boundary of the Pale, it lay outside it and so on French territory. If this was the abbey to which Vaux refers, it was probably used to house the higher members of the French entourage beyond the immediate royal circle.28 Vaux was also informed that Francis intended to make ‘great buildings’ at Ardres. A large stock of timber, some of it ‘redye framed’, was waiting at Rouen. So, Vaux concluded, ‘by soche meanes they be in a greate forwardness of thier provisions’.29 Three days later the commissioners told Wolsey that their French counterparts ‘work better than they did at the beginning’ and now seemed convinced that the meeting would go ahead.30
In his description of the Field, Robert III de La Marck, seigneur de Florange, offers a little more detail, albeit somewhat confusing, about the king's accommodation. He states that:
the king of France at Guînes, [sic] made three houses, one in the town of Ardres which was completely newly built and was fine enough for a town house; it had fairly spacious lodgings and in that said place was feasted the king of England.31
The other two ‘maisons’ to which Florange referred were Francis's tented pavilions and a banqueting house, all outside the town.
It is not clear whether the house in Ardres was built from scratch or was a fundamental renovation of some one or more of the four houses identified by Vaux. One possibility is that several of the houses abutted each other and were converted into one very large residence. La Description says that a house was made of bricks but was never quite finished because the meeting was ‘so sudden’. Hall concurs: ‘there was at the same toune of Ardre buylded the Frenche kynges lodgyng full well, but not finished, muche was the provisions in Picardy on every part through all’. Jacques Dubois's poem commemorating the event boasts: ‘In the middle of the town he [Francis] establishes an immense, majestic, strong palace’.32
There is some evidence that the residence and/or the fortifications at Ardres were worked on by the Italian architect, Domenico da Cortona (c. 1465–1549), who had been brought to France by Charles VIII and remained in service throughout Francis's reign. A mandate from 1532 repaying expenses incurred over some fifteen years' work for the king mentions Ardres, alongside Tournai and Chambord, as one of the places at which he ‘built in wood, in the town as well as the castle’ – but gives no further details.33 There are only a few snippets of information about Francis's lodgings from contemporary documents. Dubois's modern editors have concluded that in the absence of substantive evidence, his further description of it as ‘magnificent with smooth- dressed stones’, whose interior, ‘in its entirety is of gold and gems’, is pure poetic hyperbole. An unidentified Italian observer thought it ‘very beautiful, but neither so beautiful nor so costly as that of England’.34 La Description notes that when Henry dined at the French residence on 10 June, Louise de Savoie came to greet him ‘a l'entrée de la grande cour de la maison’, and that they then walked together to a reception room, suggesting a residence of the required grandeur to accommodate the king, the queen and Louise herself. Hall describes the king of England being received by Queen Claude a week later in a reception hall hung with blue velvet embroidered with gold fleurs-de-lis. From there he was taken into a second chamber, evidently the French king's salle, hung with cloth of gold and cordelières or ‘friars' knots’, one of the personal emblems of Francis and a punning allusion to St Francis of Assisi and the Franciscans. This room also had two sideboards of silver gilt plate, and here Henry dined.35 Dubois describes a passage in the building adorned with arms of the kings and queens of France and England and the dauphin, in gold medallions.
Members of the king's close entourage also had accommodation in the king's house or elsewhere in the town. The journal of Louise de Savoie notes that at about 10.30 on the night of 17 June a suspicious fire broke out in the lodgings in Ardres of Jean d'Albret, seigneur d'Orval, then the governor of Champagne and a regular attendee in Francis's inner council.36
The location of the king's residence has never been established with certainty, but one suggestion may be offered. Several sources state that the residence was in the centre of the town. The 1832 survey map or cadastre of Ardres shows a street in the centre, then the rue du Château, now the rue de Lambert d'Ardres, which runs behind and to the west of the main town square, Place d'Armes, known in 1832 as La Grand-Place. On the west side of the square, and thus between it and the former rue du Château, the cadastre shows two blocks of abutting buildings. One is a long range terminated at each end by two short wings. The other block has six dwellings grouped around three central courtyards. Given its dimensions and central location, this block of buildings may have been the site of the royal residence in 1520. If the royal residence was here or hereabouts, it would have been reached via the town's principal street which, then as now, led to the Porte de Calais and the road to Guînes.37
Francis had also prepared a large banqueting house in the French camp to which his residence was connected, according to Dubois. From the left side at the back of the royal lodging, ‘a long gallery leads peacefully to a tower’. From here, a gallery made of elegantly cut box plants led to a ‘pavilion situated at the foot of the little town’. Hall described this pavilion as a ‘house of solas and sporte, of large and mightie compass’. It was held up by a huge central mast, ropes and tackle and featured a striking constellation ceiling which Hall described as: ‘all blewe, set with starres of golde foyle, and the Orbes of the heavens by crafte of colours in the roffe, were curiosly wrought in maner like the sky or firmament…’38
This banqueting house, the third of the ‘maisons’ to which Florange referred, reminded him of one built in the Bastille in December 1518 for the reception of the English embassy. Florange described it as being like a Roman amphitheatre, built on stone (Hall says brick) foundations, with rooms and galleries on three levels surrounding and above a central dancing floor. It may have looked something like the Globe theatre. Hall states that there was a ‘creasant’ or semicircular dais on the side of the rotunda closest to Ardres. Such a dais had also featured in the Bastille banqueting hall and, like it, the one in 1520 was decorated with ‘frettes and knottes made of Ive bushes and other thynges that longest would be grene for pleasure’. Dubois alludes to the same occasion when a temporary cover of canvas had been stretched over the courtyard of the fortress and under it was hung a ceiling featuring an elaborate constellation for a banquet on the night of the winter solstice. Dubois confirms the ivy decoration hanging from galleries around the 1520 pavilion, then makes the connection to 1518 explicit: ‘The French are wont to call it “festin”, such as was recently held at the gates of Paris for the English ambassadors’.39
Evidently common by then in Francis's Milanese dominions, such temporary banqueting structures had never been seen or used in France prior to 1518, but the custom of building them was rapidly established thereafter. For the baptism of the Dauphin François, on 25 April 1518, Domenico da Cortona built a banqueting pavilion in the courtyard of the royal château at Amboise to house the celebrations after the ceremony. It remained in place or was perhaps re-erected for 2 May when the court celebrated the marriage of Madeleine de La Tour d'Auvergne to Lorenzo de' Medici, the duke of Urbino.40 It seems that in 1520 Francis was ready to reprise his earlier successes with this kind of dramatic entertainment space but, perhaps because it was not finished in time, Florange tells us that the banqueting house was never used.41 The next occasion when a temporary banqueting house was used in Anglo-French diplomacy was at Greenwich in 1527. There, the astronomer royal Nicolaus Kratzer and Hans Holbein designed an astronomical ceiling for the space intended to make a very detailed and pointed English response to the French efforts of 1518 and 1520.42
Lesser nobles and their servants were accommodated in the camp Francis built which Edward Hall describes as ‘out of the toune of Arde in the territorie of an old castle, whiche by the war of old time had been beate[n]’. La Description indicates that the camp was near a little river or stream and the Mantuan ambassador Soardino states that Francis set up his camp of tents and pavilions ‘outside the walls of Ardres, near his dwelling house’.43 The camp would have to have been sited reasonably close to the ‘foot of the town’ in order for Francis to have reached the banqueting house via the gallery described by Dubois and, given the high levels of insecurity, in case of emergency. The 1832 cadastre shows the canalised ‘Riviere de la Fontaine de la Ferme’, likely to be the watercourse to which the Description refers, flowing across an area just beyond the western entrance to the town, the Porte de Calais and to the south side of the road.44
The general estimate from eyewitnesses is that there were between 300 and 400 tents erected on the site below the walls of Ardres. Some were single structures, but most were actually pavilions comprising a large central tent, square or round in shape and three or four additional sections, not unlike those provided for Henry's entourage at Guînes.45 Of these, the principal pavilions naturally belonged to Francis and his immediate family. The king's main tent was 120 feet (36.5m) high supported by the two ships' masts lashed together. It was dressed overall with cloth of gold and three broad stripes of blue velvet strewn with gold fleurs-de-lis. This was the centrepiece of a complex incorporating three more accommodation pavilions. Here were housed the king's private chambers, his chapel and garderobe. Some 1,055 aunes of cloth of gold were required for the exterior of these pavilions, in addition to that used on the main one. Seven sailors were paid 40 livres tournois (about £4) between them for erecting ‘with ropes and wooden ladders’ the masts of the royal pavilion and hauling the canvas tents into position so they could then be dressed with the rich outer fabrics and other decorative flourishes.46 At the pinnacle of the royal pavilion, standing on a large golden ball or ‘pinot’, was a statue of St Michael, six feet tall, carved from walnut, for which Guillaume Arnault was paid 70 livres tournois (about £7). In common with most depictions of the patron saint of the French monarchy and its order of chivalry, St Michael held a lance or dart in one hand and a shield in the other. At his feet was the overthrown Lucifer (described as in the form of a ‘serpent’), whom he trod down in defeat.47
Closest to the king's pavilions were those of Queen Claude and Louise de Savoie dressed predominantly with toile d'or and toile d'argent, both lighter and finer than cloth of gold. The queen's pavilion also featured fleurs-de-lis in gold thread strewn on violet together with heraldic ermines, her emblem as duchess of Brittany in succession to her mother, Anne. Louise de Savoie's pavilion had crimson rather than violet satin and, in addition to strewn fleurs-de-lis, also featured some 14,280 white crosses, the heraldic emblem of the house of Savoy. The accounts also list, but do not describe in such detail, smaller pavilions in appropriate livery colours provided for leading members of Francis I's entourage including the duc d'Alençon, his uncle René de Savoie, the Admiral Bonnivet, Anne de Montmorency and the king's chief financier Jacques de Beaune, seigneur de Semblançay.48
The figure of St Michael on the king's pavilion had been painted in gold and blue by the royal painter Jean Bourdichon, who also painted in fine gold 117 large apples carved from walnut which were used as pinnacles for the lesser masts of the royal tents and pavilions. From them flew banners, also painted in gold and blue with the arms of the king, the queen and Louise de Savoie. A further 211 smaller carved apples, also painted in fine gold, were used as decorative devices on the pavilions of other members of the entourage. Some of these painted wooden apples at least were retained and taken back to Paris where they were stored in Francis's garde-meuble and also appear in the inventories referred to earlier. One final statistic: a staggering total of 72,544 gold fleurs-de-lis on blue velvet were used in the decoration of the pavilions of the king, the queen and Louise de Savoie.49
Unfortunately for them, the French perhaps underestimated the changeability of the weather in the north-western part of what Shakespeare would later call ‘the best garden of the world’, and many of their tents came crashing down during a succession of squalls and storms in the middle days of June. Although sources are silent on this point, Francis and his immediate entourage presumably retreated to the royal hôtel and houses around it in Ardres for shelter. The tents and pavilions for the rest of the entourage had to be repaired and set up again as best could be.50
Guînes: the English Royal Encampment
On 13 April 1520, the earl of Worcester, who was responsible for overseeing English preparations,
landed at Calais, for to go to Guînes and the camp of the king's council of Calais, for to meet with divers lords of France for to appoint the ground at the camp, where the jousts and tournaments should be kept most convenient for such a triumph for so noble kings and queens.51
Guînes lay in the Pale of Calais, a piece of terrain conceded to England after the fall of Calais to Edward III in 1347. It remained in English hands until retaken by the French in the winter of 1557–8. It extended inland some 8 miles (13 km) from Calais and about 12 miles (19 km) along the coast south towards Boulogne. Its total area was about 86 square miles (c. 138 square km). The area's geological character is a transition from downland at the coast (in fact a continuation of Kent downland) to a large mixed area of peat fenland with marsh, woodland and very fertile arable land, settled with villages. Guînes was the second town of the territory, some six miles (9.5 km) south-east of Calais. To the north of Guînes lay large areas of open water, ‘plashes’ as the English called them, the pools left after the peat had been dug out during medieval times. They are shown clearly in a painting, The Field of Cloth of Gold, now in the Royal Collection and on display at Hampton Court Palace. Water was an important means of transport in this landscape. Guînes was linked to the centre of Calais, and thus to its port, by the river Guînes.52
Shortly after his arrival at Calais, the earl of Worcester met Marshal Châtillon. The two men had first encountered each other a little over twelve months earlier when the marshal handed Tournai over to Worcester. As on that occasion, each man was acutely conscious of representing the honour and reputation of his master. Neither ever missed an opportunity of scoring a point at the other's expense – even as they also tried to co-operate in order to achieve their appointed tasks. Very little of their correspondence to their respective masters survives, but what does attests to sometimes protracted and frequently heated discussions between them.
For the English commissioners, as for their French equivalents, time was of the essence. They had barely three months to oversee the construction of necessary facilities and accommodation. The first task was to repair and refurbish the walls and towers of the castle at Guînes where the king and queen would lodge during the event. It had been described by Sir Richard Wingfield on his way to the French court in March as not being fit to be seen.53 Their principal task was, however, to oversee the construction of a temporary palace ‘before the castle gate of Guînes’. This building was awe-inspiring to those who saw it, even if no two sources agree entirely about its appearance, decoration, spatial arrangements or use. To build a structure of its size and ingenuity for an event of just over two weeks' duration was a bold statement of Henry's ambition to be ranked among European princes of the first order. It was conceived in the spirit of ostentatious rivalry that characterised the whole event, and reports of it in English, French and Italian circulated widely throughout Europe.
The palace was built just outside the walls of Guînes quite close to the castle, near a bridge which crossed the town's defensive moat. Wolsey kept in close contact with the English commissioners about its progress and this has led to the suggestion that he actually designed the palace.54 The evidence for this, however, remains somewhat ambiguous and it is more likely that it was a joint project of king and cardinal. Wolsey had certainly taken a hand in the redesign of Bridewell Palace and by 1520 he was also working on renovations and extensions at both York Place, his London residence as archbishop, and at Hampton Court. Henry had made his debut as an architect with his designs for Newhall in Essex. On 26 March, Belknap and Vaux first reported to Wolsey their anxiety about its sheer scale, for according to the ‘platt’ or plan of it, evidently held by Wolsey and Henry, the building would be larger than Bridewell, Grenewiche or Eltham', the king's three principal metropolitan houses.55
When completed, the temporary palace at Guînes was 328 feet (100m) square and comprised four blocks, ranged around a central square court or atrium. It would have fitted snugly within the confines of Tom Quad at Christ Church, Oxford (another building associated with Wolsey), which is 382 feet (116m) square. The walls of Henry's palace were built on stone foundations and were of brick to a height of eight feet (2.5m). Above the brickwork, the timber-framed walls reached to a height of 30 feet (9.14 m). At the top of the walls was a cornice surmounted by frieze decorated in an Italianate classical style, or ‘antique work’ as it was known, featuring scrolls, strap work and leaf motifs. The palace was crenellated and had four brick-built towers at its outer corners. Its roof was of oiled canvas painted in lead colour to simulate slates.
The work on the palace began two days after the commissioners arrived but little progress was made in the first week. They lacked timber and sawyers. Nor, they told the cardinal, was there sufficient fallen or ready-sawn timber in London or near Dover to do the work before the end of May. Accordingly, they had sent William Lilgrave to Holland for timber and other necessities. Their panicky letter may be somewhat misleading, however, as wood was evidently found relatively quickly. Some or most of what was needed was apparently floated behind barges or ships along the coast to Calais and then transported to the construction site, probably along the river Guînes. One Henry Smith also supplied timber from England in April and May to a total value of £400.56
Even allowing for the fact that this was a temporary structure and that Tudor building projects could sometimes progress at speed, it seems unlikely that something the size of the Guînes temporary palace could have been made on site entirely from scratch in barely two months. Support for this view comes from Martin du Bellay's account of the meeting which states that Henry's palace was made in England and shipped across to Calais ‘all made’.57 This observation cannot literally be true of course, but what du Bellay probably meant was that sections of the building were prefabricated in England and transported to the site. Further support for this idea comes from an admittedly confusing phrase in the Chronicle of Calais immediately after it relates the floating of timber to Calais:
…all the tymbar borde that cowld be browght out of England, whiche palays was framed in many places, all the roves whereof was paynted canvas, and all the walls from the second plate downward.58
Partial prefabrication was in fact a common method of constructing a timber-framed building. It was used, for example, in the construction of the roof of Westminster Hall in 1395–6 when some 660 tons of the timber needed was worked at ‘the Frame’ near Farnham in Surrey, from where it was sent in sections by land to the Thames and then by barge to Westminster. It will be recalled that Sir Nicholas Vaux reported that the French had timber, some of it ‘redye framed’, at Rouen to be used in the king's residence at Ardres. The Chronicle of Calais's oblique phrase ‘whiche palays was framed in many places’ perhaps alludes to this practice. Du Bellay also states that at the end of the festivities the English temporary palace was dismantled and taken back to England. Some years ago, David Starkey suggested that boards of the tiltyard at the Field ended up in the ceiling of the chapel at Ightham Mote in Kent. Subsequent study of the boards means that this suggestion is no longer accepted but materials from the palace, the tents and tournament site itself were recycled in a variety of ways through the Revels and other court offices.59
Given that plans for a meeting were in hand as early as 1519, the royal carpenters would have had ample time to calculate the number of sections or ‘bays’ needed to constitute each of the four ranges that eventually comprised the palace and then to assemble the necessary timber-frame walls and the beams for the roof. The main members of the walls, almost certainly of green oak, would have been hewn and laid out in sections on the ground according to a ‘patten’ or building plan, in a yard somewhere in England. Shipped to the site, they would have been set into the stone and brick lower walls by their groundsills, then morticed and pegged into each other. The main elements thus assembled, window frames could be incorporated and the smaller timbers which constituted the lesser framing, normally called ‘studs’, could be inserted. In a permanent structure, the framing would then be bricked or wattled and daubed. At Guînes, the timbers were instead covered with canvas, painted to look like brick.60
That this is most likely to have been what was done is also suggested by the speed of construction once it began in April. By 10 April, the commissioners reported that the stone foundations had been laid and that some at least of the lower walls of the temporary palace had reached their full height.61 A month later, on 18 May, the commissioners reported that they anticipated finishing ‘all the building that shall stand in the square court at Guînes’ by the end of May.62 They evidently did so, because Richard Gibson, who was responsible for the canvas roof of the building and the decoration of the palace, arrived in the nick of time towards the end of May and was able to do the required work. Only a week earlier, Vaux had asked Wolsey to dispatch him with all speed, ‘so that the king be not disappointed of his roofs’.63
The preparatory work in England may well have been done in the vicinity of the Palace of Westminster. The office of the King's Works was located there under Henry VII, and although the palace was not used as an official royal residence after the fire of 1512, it was not totally destroyed. Many of the offices were repaired and the king still used it occasionally, such as on the eve of the Parliament of 1529. The workshops at Westminster may have been located within the precinct of Westminster Abbey where the tombs of Henry VII and Elizabeth of York were constructed and some work at least was carried out on designs for tombs of Cardinal Wolsey and Henry VIII.64 Certainly in April and May 1520 large items of wooden furniture for use during the king's visit were constructed in something identified as the ‘worke house’ at Westminster. They included display shelves for silver and gold plate, known as ‘cupboards’ and made from wainscot, a fine-quality oak imported from Russia, Germany and Holland. Folding tables, trestles and stools, made from ‘deales’, planks of pine or fir wood, were also made. Supplied by London merchants, the wood was loaded into lighters at Battle Bridge on the south bank of the river at Galley Key and the Vintery on the north bank (where a stevedoring crane was located) and carried down the Thames to Westminster. The furniture made there was then brought back and stored in a London cellar before being taken in a hoy to Sandwich. From there, it was moved in five carts to Canterbury for use during the emperor's visit at the end of May. It was then taken back to Sandwich and shipped across to Calais where it was used in Henry's banqueting house and possibly also in the temporary palace at Guînes. The total cost for materials, wages and labour, storage and transport was £48 7s. 4d.65
Those primarily responsible for constructing the temporary palace at Guînes worked under the direction of Robert Fowler, who gave them all advances, or ‘prests’ for which he accounted in May.66 They were William Vertue, the king's chief mason, and Humphrey Coke, the king's chief carpenter. Vertue had worked at St George's Chapel, Windsor. Coke was a member of the Carpenters' Company with a good reputation for imaginative and sound work. By 1520 he had worked for Eton College and at Corpus Christi, Oxford, whose founder, Richard Fox, described him as ‘righte cunnynge and diligent in his werkes … if ye take his advice … he shall advantage you large monee in the building thereof, as well as in the devising as in the werkinge of yt’.67 Vertue had assisted Coke at Corpus Christi and together they now led a team of many hundreds of craftsmen, artisans and labourers. In March the commissioners had asked that Vertue be accompanied to Calais by 150 bricklayers. They also required 250 carpenters, 100 joiners and thirty pairs of sawyers (to work double-ended saws) and forty plasterers. Henry Smith contracted 100 carpenters, fifty glaziers and twenty-four painters to contribute to the total. An unspecified number of labourers were brought from England and Flanders to work alongside the craftsmen.68
Relatively little specific documentation survives about who these people were or what they were paid at Guînes, so assessing their wages and conditions is fraught with difficulty. In general terms, however, these would have been similar to those on other prestigious royal building projects in the period. The commissioners and workers were accommodated at the king's charge, according to status, at inns within Guînes, probably within the habitable parts of the castle, even as they worked to repair it, or under canvas in its courtyards and at the foot of its walls. Under the terms of the 1495 Statute of Labourers, work was to begin at 5a.m. in spring and summer. There was to be a half-hour break for breakfast and one of an hour for lunch. For some of the period of construction, after mid-May, half an hour's sleep was also allowed. Thereafter work continued till between 7p.m. and 8p.m., perhaps with another short break about 4p.m.69
The majority of craftsmen in the building trade had no more than about £2–£5 in personal wealth per annum. The work of unskilled day labourers earned only half as much as that of a craftsman, at between 2d and 3d per day to a total of about £1 per annum.70 Master carpenters and masons on a prestigious project such as this would be paid about 12d per day, foremen received about 7d or 8d and a carpenter from London or Oxford could earn 6d, all higher rates of pay than prescribed by the 1495 statute. Such master craftsmen might have annual incomes as high as £10–£19. Extra money might be paid when a project demanded overtime – as we know this one did from the costs of torches used for work into the night.71 Allowances for the maintenance of specialist tools and clothing or ‘livery’ might also be included in remuneration. Particular industry might be further rewarded with incentives in cash – or drink.72
Demonstrating how far this money went for ordinary working people has perplexed economic historians for years. An authoritative study done in the 1950s established that 40d, or approximately seven days' pay for a building craftsman, was sufficient in the mid-fifteenth century to cover the food, fuel and clothing expenses for a week of a small household at Bridport in Dorset, of two priests and a servant. Extrapolating from that, the authors of the study showed that the purchasing power of a builder's daily pay had slipped a little by the 1520s, but it had collapsed catastrophically by the end of the century. The disparity between these workers' wage levels, estimated annual worth and conditions and the levels of income and expenditure among those attending the Field of Cloth of Gold is simply staggering.73
The basic structure and decoration of the temporary palace seems to have been as it is rendered in the Hampton Court painting.74 The most prominent feature of the elevation was the ornate gatehouse with its scallop-shell pediment surmounted by a figure of St Michael between two monumental roses and capped with another smaller figure of St Michael above the entablature. The appearance of the patron saint of French chivalry as a decorative feature on an English palace was certainly unusual, but it is most likely to have been intended as a compliment to the French king and his nobles who entered and left the palace through this gateway. The English were also aware that too dominant a display of St George, the patron saint of English royal chivalry, might have conveyed rather too strong anti-French sentiments on this most sensitive of occasions.
According to Hall, the gateway was also ‘set with compassed [that is, round] images of auncient Prynces as Hercules, Alexander and other by entrayled woorke, rychely limned with golde and Albyn colours’. They do not feature on the gateway in the painting but these polychrome figures of classical heroes evidently had some sort of interwoven or interlaced decoration about them.75
One of the most striking features of the palace beyond the gateway was the amount of high-quality glass with which it was lit; the French nicknamed the building ‘the crystal palace’. A series of double-paned clerestory windows lit the first floor, running all the way around the outer walls and the inner walls around the courtyard as well. Dubois's poem describes the palace as ‘flooded with light on every side from windows made of glass’ that ‘stretch to the very floor, displaying English sovereigns’.76 According to one source at least, there were also square windows at the ground floor level. This glass was supplied from Flanders. Although there was an established glass industry in the western Weald of Kent in the 1520s, good-quality window glass was not made in significant quantities in England until the mid sixteenth century.77 As much as 5,000 feet (1,524m) of high-quality glass was purchased from two merchants in Saint-Omer at a total cost of £48 15s. 4d under the direction of the king's Flemish-born glazier, Galyon Hone, who was paid a total of £88 for work ‘setting up the king's glass’. Florange and Du Bellay confirm that the palace was an extraordinarily well-lit and airy building, one for which there was no contemporary English equivalent, although Du Bellay considered that it had been modelled on what he called ‘the merchants house’ in Calais, by which he evidently meant the Staple.78
The internal arrangements of the palace are extremely difficult to reconstruct with any certainty due to the many inconsistencies in the observers' descriptions of them. Taken together, however, they indicate that the front range carried the gateway itself which gave access to the inner court and at the ground floor to an entrance hall. To the left of the ‘principal entry’ on the first floor level were three apartments for Cardinal Wolsey, ‘two halls and a chamber’ in lodgings which extended from the gatehouse around the angle of the building and about halfway along the left side wing. To the right of the main entrance were the same arrangements for Henry's sister Mary, Duchess of Suffolk.79 The remainder of the two ranges at right angles to the main façade contained the royal apartments. Henry had three chambers in the left-hand range and Katherine had the same number in the right-hand range. Their quarters were connected by a passageway under the floor. A gallery led from the king's side back to the castle which Hall noted was designed ‘for the secrete passage of the kynges persone into a secrete lodgying within the same castle the more for the kings ease’ and which the commissioners described to Wolsey in their letter of 26 March.80
The fourth range, opposite the gateway, housed a large hall on the upper level which Hall specifies to be 328 feet (100m) and occupying a quarter of the entire building space. One source describes the space as ‘two halls’, and another notes that it was sometimes divided in two by hangings. This became the palace's banqueting hall when it was eventually decided that there was not time to build both a separate banqueting house on the site as originally intended and also a chapel.81
The hall was reached from the ground floor by a wide staircase which Dubois says was made of oak and had ten steps. Its base can be glimpsed through the main gateway in the Hampton Court painting and it seems to have been the sort of broad, shallow-stepped, straight staircase found in the ducal palaces at Urbino, Ferrara and Venice, which were then starting to come into fashion in English palaces. Hall's description indicates that the staircase itself was highly decorated with ‘images of sore and terrible countenaunces, all armed in curious work of argentyne’. At the top of the stairs, according to Dubois, there was ‘the figure of an armed foot-soldier, with a great missile who threatens a mortal wound to all who would enter’. This figure may have been a statue or perhaps painted on the wall or ceiling above the stairs.82
Hall also specifies that the ground floor of the palace contained offices for household officials: the Lord Chamberlain, the Lord Steward, the Treasurer, Comptroller and the Board of the Green Cloth, together with those for the keepers of the wardrobes and the jewel house. It also housed the service departments: the Ewery, Pantry, Cellar, Buttery, Spicery, Poultry, Pitcher and Larder. All these offices, together with others in nearby villages and under canvas, served as the kitchens in which, Hall notes proudly, the staff ‘did marvels in the craft of viands’.83 Real stone chimneys rose from them and the living quarters of the palace.
The roof of the palace and its overall decoration were in the hands of Richard Gibson, Sergeant of the Tents, and the king's painter John Brown, who was paid £333 6s. 8d for his work. They were assisted by Henry Saddler, John Rastell and one ‘Clement Urmeston’ or Armstrong. Henry Saddler provided £700 worth of canvas and buckram, most likely to have been used for the roof. He, with Clement Armstrong, was paid £366 13s. 4d ‘for making buttons and other garnishing’ for the roof of the temporary palace. Armstrong was a London grocer and decorator, a friend of Rastell's, by whom he was almost certainly brought to work at Guînes. Armstrong worked with him on a number of royal decorative projects in the 1520s. John Rastell was a lawyer, known to Sir Edward Belknap, who had employed him to assist in organising the movement of royal artillery in the war of 1512–13. By 1520 Rastell was in London and married to Sir Thomas More's sister Elizabeth. He was also by then a printer, a publisher of legal textbooks, and a playwright.84
This trio seem to have worked not only on the canvas roof of the palace but in its main rooms and the halls as well. They painted decorative motifs, mottos and those cryptic sayings so beloved of the age, apparently provided by Alexander Barclay, the Benedictine monk and author, whom Vaux asked Wolsey to send over, in his letter of 10 April. Barclay wrote his most famous work, The Ship of Fools, when he was priest at Ottery St Mary in Devon, but from 1513 he was based at Ely Cathedral priory where he completed a number of works related to France. He wrote a critique or satire entitled Alex. Barclay his Figure of our Mother Holy Church Oppressed by the French King, now lost. It may have been directed against either Louis XII in 1512–13 or perhaps against Francis I following his invasion of Italy. At about the time of the Field, Barclay produced an English translation of Sallust's History of the Jurgurthine War, an edition of which was dedicated to Bishop John Veysey of Exeter. His appearance at the Field may indeed have been at Veysey's instigation. The bishop almost certainly knew Barclay from his time at Ottery St Mary, and Veysey was a patron of the revived interest in classical literature.85
In his letter, Vaux also asked to have sent over one ‘Master Mayuu’. Joycelyne Russell suggested this was Nicholas Maynwaring, a young man in the household (probably as a chaplain) of Bishop Veysey, although what his connection with the decoration of the palace was remains unclear.86 An alternative suggestion is that it was the Tuscan sculptor Giovanni da Maiano who was responsible for the classical figures which Hall described as decorating the gateway of the palace. The description of them certainly recalls the set of terracotta roundels of the so-called ‘Caesars’ now at Hampton Court, paid for by Wolsey in 1521. A number of them still bear evidence of painting in the colours which Hall describes.87 Garter King of Arms was also called upon to advise on the accurate rendering in a variety of forms of the arms, badges, beasts and devices of members of the Tudor and Valois royal families.
If the exterior of the palace was calculated to impress with its scale and ingenuity, its interior was intended to be nothing less than a spectacular showcase of Henry VIII's personal wealth and taste. The ornate rooms, galleries and hall on the upper floor of the temporary palace impressed all observers as much by their size as by their ingenuity but are confusingly described. The most evocative description is, not surprisingly, by Dubois and is usefully quoted in full:
The interior of the palace, for its part, brilliant with kingly pomp, is to be extolled above all triumphal palaces. Its suspended terrace is everywhere green with great quantities of rushes; the whole edifice is fragrant with the scent of flowers of every kind. The walls are everywhere cloaked with golden hangings, or else with every variety of embroidery an embroiderer has fashioned with skilful needle. With cloth of silk in lattice work, interspersed with golden rivets, the inner chambers of the English palace are magnificent.88
More prosaically, Hall informs us that the ceilings were sealed and covered in silk, white in the apartments, green in the hall. The ceiling space in the apartments was divided by patterned strips and bosses formed of silk ‘knitt and fret with cuttes and braides’. Some of the mouldings may have been supplied by the duke of Suffolk, and the ceilings are likely to have resembled those now to be seen in the ‘Wolsey rooms’ at Hampton Court, which date from 1526. Around the walls ran a wide cornice decorated in antique fashion, the elements of which were gilt and set against a background of blue material somewhat like enamel.89
Like Dubois, Hall emphasises how, in every room, the wall spaces below the cornice were decorated with woollen, silk and gold hangings and tapestries, featuring ‘many auncient stories’. Tapestries were the single most costly items of furnishing in sixteenth-century noble and royal houses, designed for ostentatious display. Portable, they could be used to divide, decorate and insulate large and small spaces as needed. The gold and silver threads with which they were woven reflected light from windows in the daytime and from candles at night. Their imagery and themes, usually theological or historical in inspiration, could be used as propaganda on particular occasions, associating the sovereign who owned them with the ideas and ideals represented by the classical or biblical episodes they depicted.
By 1520, prompted not least by the Field of Cloth of Gold, Henry had begun amassing what was, by his death, the largest collection of tapestries and hangings ever owned by a European monarch. In December 1517 he had paid £1,481 16s. 3d for sets of ‘arras’ of ‘King David and Saint John the Baptist’, purchased on his behalf by the earl of Worcester and probably woven in Brussels. In April 1520, £410 5s. 9d was paid to the Florentine merchant Giovanni Cavalcanti for another ‘David’ set. The following month, £971 5d was paid through Cavalcanti for 272 square yards of ‘arras’ from Pieter van Aelst.90 It is probable that the 1520 set of ‘David’ tapestries was the one noted as hanging in the great hall in Dubois's description of the temporary palace. Thomas Campbell has tentatively suggested that the David set at Guînes was an early weaving of an identical set also woven for Henry in 1528, now in the Musée de la Renaissance at Ecouen.91
The chambers of the other principal members of Henry's entourage were also decorated with an impressive array of new hangings. Queen Katherine's displayed nine tapestries of gold and silk in floral and foliage, or ‘millefleurs’, design estimated by a Venetian observer to be worth 7 ducats per yard.92 The duchess of Suffolk's rooms had tapestries that featured Louis XII's ‘porcupine’ emblem and ‘LM’ motifs, both allusions to her status as dowager queen of France. No detailed description of Wolsey's apartments survives beyond an observation that the first two chambers were hung with ‘silken tapestry without gold, of astounding beauty’. Campbell has suggested that these hangings may have been at least part of a set of the Triumphs of Petrarch that appear to have been made for the cardinal in 1520, to a design first presented to Louis XII by Cardinal George d'Amboise in about 1503.93
As the commissioners had reported, all of these living rooms and spaces were ‘caste aftyr a square courte’, that is contained within the main square of the building ‘except the chapel and oone gallery’. One Italian observer notes explicitly that the chapel was ‘behind the building, adjoining it’ and another describes it as ‘outside this palace’.94 Evidently the chapel projected from the range opposite the gateway and so was, in effect, at the back of the building, reached via a short gallery leading out from the middle of the banqueting hall in the range opposite the gateway.95 Nothing of the chapel is shown in the Hampton Court painting.
In its size and arrangements, the chapel of the temporary palace somewhat anticipated the Chapel Royal now at Hampton Court Palace, with the main liturgical space on the ground floor and two royal ‘oratories’ or ‘holyday closets’ upstairs overlooking it. The chapel and oratories were decorated in gold and silver and the high altar was dominated by a massive pearl-studded crucifix over four feet high. The chapel had its own organ which an anonymous Italian observer heard played admirably. Apart from daily and Sunday services, the chapel is likely to have been used for ceremonies marking two of the major annual Christian festivals which fell during Henry's time at the Field. The first was Corpus Christi on 7 June (the day the two kings first met) and the second was the Feast of St John the Baptist, on 24 June.96
The temporary palace was the major item of English expenditure on the Field. Unfortunately, the complete lack of records of the Office of the King's Works for these years means that we have only isolated items of expenditure on materials and some wages for work on the palace paid out by the Treasurer of the Chamber, who was exclusively responsible for financing the royal works from 1509 until the late 1530s. The work on the palace as specified in the Chamber accounts of 1520–1 comes to perhaps £2,000 but this cannot represent anywhere near the total cost. In May, Robert Fowler advanced £4,079 for materials and labour on the project. The comparison which the English commissioners at Guînes made with Bridewell Palace may be helpful here. Like the temporary palace at Guînes, Bridewell was a timber-framed structure standing on a brick base. A total estimated cost of around £21,000 was given for Bridewell in or about 1516, including £2,033 for the cost of foundations, £450 for timber and £1,083 for bricks. Glazing came to £686 13s. 4d. Wages of masons, bricklayers, carpenters, joiners and other workmen together came to at least £4,640. Although the temporary palace was larger, Bridewell was a more complex building. It had no hall but was set around two brick-built courtyards and it had a long gallery ending in a watergate on the Thames. The royal lodgings were stacked, rather than horizontally arranged as they were in the temporary palace at Guînes, but in both cases they were reached via a grand staircase.97 The upper parts of the walls of the temporary palace and its roof were made of timber and canvas rather than brick and slate as at Bridewell, and this would have greatly reduced the cost. Given these considerations, perhaps an estimate of £10,000 for the total cost of the temporary palace is not unreasonable.
The largest element of the English camp at Guînes was the estimated 300 tents erected in the area just outside its walls to accommodate members of the Tudor nobility. For the English tents we have nothing like the detailed accounts we have for the French. There are, however, designs for royal pavilions, now generally accepted to be those for the Field, in the British Library.98 These indicate that the pavilions consisted of a variety of square, rectangular and circular tents, laid out in a line or set at right angles to each other and linked by smaller galleries. The spaces thus created by the tents, or by hangings within them, provided a range of public and private areas and approximated the sequence of rooms in Tudor palaces and manor houses.
One of the surviving designs for a pavilion gives an indication of their size and layout. The pavilion is entered through a main rectangular tent marked as 40 feet long and 19 wide which acts as a kind of ‘great hall’. A short gallery then leads down to a second rectangular tent set at right angles to the first and measuring 30 feet long by 18 wide. This creates a second, semi-public, space something like a ‘presence chamber’ in a royal or noble manor house. A second short gallery leads from this room and is itself intersected by another gallery, at either end of which is a round tent each marked as 18 feet and serving probably as a private or ‘privy’ chamber or garderobe of some kind. A final short gallery along the main axis leads to a larger circular tent marked as 20 feet, which was probably the bedchamber and private space of the occupant.99
Among the most impressive of the surviving designs is one for a quadrilateral pavilion. It comprises no fewer than eight (and possibly as many as fourteen) large rectangular tents linked vertically and horizontally into six intersecting ranges. Some tents were dressed in blue or red silk embroidered with decorations in gold. The vivid colours in these drawings evoke the rich fabrics used to create visually impressive accommodation in the English camp, as in the French. The cost of these pavilions in total was considerable. An inventory of the possessions of William, Baron Sandys, taken at his death in 1541, lists a new pavilion consisting of three chambers, a hall, and appurtenances valued at £40. Henry spent large sums of money in the months before the Field on substantial amounts of material likely to have been used to decorate the palace and to dress these tents. These purchases include 1,050 yards of velvet at 12s. 8d the yard provided by Richard Gresham in June. In May he had also supplied sables to the value of £442, and £1,033 12s. 1d worth of velvet. In April, one Francis de Barde was paid £1,497 12s. 2d for cloth of gold and other fabrics, and Cavalcanti was paid £2,355 17s. 4d for cloth of gold and velvet.100
All the pavilions featured painted wooden ridge boards running along their tops decorated with carved fleurs-de-lis and Tudor roses. Many also sported polychrome ‘king's beasts’ such as lions, dragons, griffins, greyhounds, stags and royal antelopes seated on bases which covered the tops of the masts that held up the tents. The beasts held standards topped either with closed crowns imperial or fleurs-de-lis and flying pennants in a variety of heraldic designs which included the royal arms: the Beaufort portcullis and the Tudor rose. Tented pavilions dressed in the Tudor livery colours of green and white also feature in the Hampton Court painting of the Field of Cloth of Gold. Henry might well have smiled at the discomforture of the French when their tents blew down in the summer storms of mid-June, safe as he was in his sturdy temporary palace and his castle at Guînes, but many of the tents of his own entourage were also blown down in the wind and rains.101
The Tournament Lists
The English and French camps were the separate projects of each court. The preparation of the tournament field and the competition to be held there was, however, a joint enterprise.102 As already noted, Francis had agreed to come into English territory for the first meeting with Henry on the understanding that he could determine the arrangements for the tournament. This being the case, the site of the tournament field was the first controversial issue for the two leading commissioners. Marshal Châtillon expected that it would be sited ‘a little mile’ from Ardres and thus in the neutral place of the boundary of English and French territory, exactly where the kings were originally supposed to have met. However, the 1520 English ‘Memoriall’ of the meeting stated that the site was to be equidistant between Guînes and Ardres. Worcester nominated a site that answered that description, but this meant that it was still within the English Pale. Châtillon refused the suggestion outright. This action Francis endorsed on 20 April. He could defer to Henry in small things, but not on this point and no agreement had been reached as late as 26 April when Worcester wrote seeking immediate instructions.103 By 13 May, however, the English ambassador in France, Sir Richard Wingfield, wrote that Francis had now accepted the site originally suggested by Worcester. The immediate political context of this decision will be discussed in more detail in the following chapter, but it may be that practical considerations, such as the topographical suitability of Worcester's preferred site, were finally decisive.104
The place set out for the tournament, which the English called ‘the Field’, was rectangular in shape, covering an area 900 feet long and 328 feet wide (274.3m × 100m) roughly along an east–west axis, with Ardres at one end and Guînes at the other. The whole ‘camp’, as Worcester also called it, was surrounded on all four sides by an eight feet (2.4m) wide ditch. The earth dug from the ditch was then used to build a bulwark some nine feet (2.7m) high. In front of this bulwark was a railed area some eight feet across. Within this protected space was the ‘Field’ proper, laid out according to a ground plan or ‘platt’ designed by Henry himself, which was presented to the French commissioners by Worcester. The design included a proposed location, along the east–west axis, of the tilt, counter-lists and runs used for jousting. This also proved controversial. Given that the whole area was on English territory (and that Francis had already agreed to meet Henry initially on English soil), Châtillon wanted it to be located more towards the Ardres end, for his king's honour. Worcester understood the point and after a long discussion a compromise was reached in which the whole camp was extended 50 feet (15.2m) towards Ardres. Evidently satisfied with this, Châtillon then wanted the barriers to be used in the foot combats to be located nearer the Ardres end. This demand Worcester refused, saying that they would interfere with the location of the ‘tourney’ used in the tilting. Châtillon countered that the barriers would be removed when not required. As the whole camp was still on English territory, it would not diminish Henry's honour at all if the barriers were towards the Ardres end. Worcester refused to alter Henry's plan in this respect or even to seek further instructions on the point. He did, however, inform Henry of the conversation, noting that, this issue apart, the two sides were conscious of the time and were agreed on what now needed to be done.105
As it was eventually constructed, the tilt stood centrally along the main axis of the field. When this area was first marked out, it had been immediately realised that Henry's plan had put the tilt too far away from a proposed royal pavilion to allow those occupying it to get a good view of the action. It was therefore shifted back to the middle so that, on the right-hand side as one entered from Guînes, the stand contained within it a royal pavilion used sometimes by the kings, but mainly by the queens and ladies of the two courts. On the left was a larger stand, probably of some three tiers, used by general spectators. Henry wanted a ditch four feet deep and eight wide (1.2m × 2.4m) dug in front of this stand to prevent intrusions on to the field. In the end this was thought too time-consuming to excavate and a potential threat to the foundations of the stand in the event of rain. A railing in front of the gallery was built instead. At either end of the field stood a triumphal entry arch and Hall tells us that just inside the entrance at the Guînes end were two ‘arming chambers’ made of painted wainscot: one for each king with Francis's on the right and Henry's on the left.106
The area in which the Field of Cloth of Gold took place is still open space and farmland. It lies along the present D231 road between Guînes and Ardres although there is some doubt that the modern road follows the route between the two towns in 1520. A commemorative granite stela is located on the northern side of the road about a mile west of Ardres. This probably marks the site of the tournament lists, which contemporary sources indicate were on English territory but close to Ardres. Certainly this is the only section of the modern landscape between the two towns which is flat enough, long enough and wide enough to have contained the lists.
The work required was not begun properly until mid-May. Even as Châtillon and Worcester argued about the location of the camp in late April, they had agreed that the French would build ‘half the fortifications, scaffolds and tilts’ at Francis's charge. One thousand pioneers were at Ardres ready to start building the camp and Worcester agreed that he would also supply workmen and timber. On 26 April he asked Wolsey to instruct the three commissioners at Guînes to arrange timber, bricks and carpenters for the work. This raises the intriguing and likely prospect that English and French carpenters, bricklayers and pioneers worked alongside each other. They would have been able, so far as their different languages allowed, to share, and probably argue about, different materials and building techniques. This situation, unique in the history of early-modern Anglo-French dealings, where technicians and labourers of both nations worked together on a joint civil project, would not be repeated until the construction of the Concorde aircraft and the Channel Tunnel in the twentieth century.
Worcester doubted that all could be finished on time and thought that, if required, work on the general spectators' stand could continue at night after the tournament had begun – which it evidently did. Marshal Châtillon, too, was concerned that all would not be ready in time. On 23 and 24 May, he wrote to Worcester reminding him that the artificial ‘Tree of Honour’ for the tournament had yet to be constructed. The tree stood upon a stage shaped to look like a mound called a ‘perron’ and upon the tree hung a set of shields, each of which indicated a different competition in the tournament. Knights who wished to participate, who were already starting to arrive, had to indicate by touching with their lances the appropriate shields. Their personal armorial shields would also be hung there to signify their entry to the tournament.107 Originally two trees had been planned by the French but pressure of time simplified things.108 The reports of Venetian ambassadors and the fact that detailed records of the materials used survive in Gibson's Revels accounts, show that the English took responsibility for setting up what was, in the end, a single Tree of Honour. It was located at the Guînes end of the field, between the two royal arming chambers. From the ‘perron’ long spars of wood were fashioned to represent the trunk and branches of a hybrid raspberry and hawthorn tree – symbolic of France and England. It was festooned with hundreds of hawthorn and raspberry flowers made of silk and satin and, rather curiously, some 2,000 cherries made of crimson satin. Its role in the ceremonies of the tournament will be discussed in a later chapter.109
Worcester's brief reference in his letter alerts us to the fact that the ‘Franco-English’ encounter of the Field of Cloth of Gold permeated more social levels than might first be supposed. It also alerts us to the work required by thousands of ordinary men and women whose names are not, for the most part, recorded in accounts but whose skills were essential. Almost as many artisans, pioneers, bricklayers, carpenters, plasterers, painters, tailors, seamstresses and other cloth workers, carters, soldiers and labourers were employed in preparing the Field of Cloth of Gold as there were people attending the event itself.