Generous to a fault
At one door [of the English temporary palace] were two gilt pillars, bearing statues of Cupid and Bacchus, from which flowed streams of malmsey and claret into silver cups, for any to drink who wished.
L'Ordonnance et ordre du tournoy, fo. C ii
THE HOSPITALITY STAGED by Henry VIII and Francis I at the Field of Cloth of Gold was on a truly monumental scale. It was an absolutely central feature of the meeting. The feeding and watering of some 12,000 people for just over two weeks, together with several prodigious banquets, required serious expenditure by both kings and were vital aspects of the awe-inducing spectacle of royal power at the 1520 event.
Divided into the various service departments of the household, the accounts drawn up by the English court after the Field show the enormous quantities of food and drink consumed during the six weeks it was on the Continent, including during Charles V's visit to Calais. The final accounts of the expenses of the English royal household on food and drink from 31 May to 16 July survive and they total £8,839 2s. 4d. An estimate of the expenses drawn up, probably in the early spring of 1520, came to £7,409 13s. 4d. The relatively minor discrepancy between estimated and actual costs demonstrates how expert the Tudor household officers were in calculating the expense of large-scale events. As might be expected, the highest expenditure on both the estimate and the actual records was for beer and wine, red meat, poultry of all kinds and spices.1
The bulk of supplies were obtained through commercial contracts with merchants, but the English monarch and his French counterpart also had rights of ‘purveyance’, to which Wolsey had alluded in his instructions to Waren. When the court travelled or when a royal army was in the field, supplies could be raised locally at advantageous prices set by the crown. This practice minimised the problem of storage and transport of supplies over long distances, but it did not always work easily because it relied on there being sufficient resources in the localities into which the royal entourage travelled. This partly explains the sense of panic when it was realised that the English court could not be supplied from the Pale of Calais or surrounding territories alone. The usual incentive to traders was that they would be offered ‘reasonable’ prices, usually slightly below market rates. A seller could generally expect to make a modest profit based on high volume. Henry had used purveyance to supply the army of 1513 (not without problems) and did so again for the ‘army’ of 1520, but there is also ample evidence of direct sales from English, French and Flemish suppliers.
The English royal household accounts indicate that, as in the war of 1513, a good proportion of the equipment and provender needed was purchased or hired in the city of London and the south-east of England. Venison, for example, was brought from royal parks at Walden, at Eltham and Leeds Castle in Kent, from a number of private estates in these counties including that of the earl of Arundel, in Sussex. One of the king's purveyors, John Copeland, received 11s. for ‘riding into Flanders for poultry’. Stephen Cope was paid 4s. for the carriage of 40 dozen quails from Antwerp to Calais. One Julian Loder brought poultry from ‘The Haven’ to Calais and £12 14s. 8d was paid for poultry brought from ‘Brydges’ (Bruges). The names of certain suppliers, such as James Anderpoden, Julian Palyard and Basteau Albright, suggest that they were of Flemish or French origin. The search for food in the area went on even after Henry had arrived at Calais. On 5 June, he sent Thomas Palmer, one of the ushers of the chamber, to the mayor and aldermen of the town of Saint-Omer in Artois requesting their urgent assistance in obtaining provisions. Explaining that he was entertaining the king of France at nearby Guînes, the king promised that if they would encourage the food merchants of the town to come to Guînes with their wares, he would ensure that they were well received and recompensed. What sort of response this message received we do not know, but one John Byrling of Saint-Omer provided 160 quails at 2s. per dozen.2
The French authorities may have helped their English counterparts to some extent in securing supplies of grain and red meat at least. In April, Châtillon had assured the earl of Worcester that food, wine and fodder for horses would be available at a ‘staple’ or supply base to be set up at nearby ‘Merguyson’ (Marquise). The English could purchase what they needed at reasonable prices. Wolsey was informed of this and the French seemed to have honoured their undertaking.3 On 10 May, while he was at Amiens, the duc de Vendôme issued a proclamation that all merchants able to supply the king's camp with meat, fish, wine, wheat and other necessities were to convey them to the towns of Marquise and Fiennes in the Boulonnais (the latter about ten miles south of Calais). All those who did so would be provided with letters from the commissioners exempting them from all local taxes and tolls and declaring them to be under the king's special protection. A number of sellers were later reimbursed for costs incurred in conveying wheat and other commodities to Ardres. Merchants from other towns, such as Péronne and Boulogne, were also involved in providing supplies to the royal camp.4
Some 3,406 sheep and lambs were accounted for together with 842 veal calves, 373 oxen and sixty-nine whole pigs of various kinds. Most of these animals were transported near to Guînes and pastured there before slaughter. There are references in the accounts to water, cages, fodder and pasture for the animals and the thousands of birds also purchased by the Poultry department of the royal kitchen.5 Two houses, one at Guînes and one at Newnham Bridge, were rented for use as abattoirs. Indeed, each of the various departments of the English royal kitchens hired one or more houses at Calais, Guînes or other villages nearby. Here, and in other locations close by, were gathered the one and a quarter million ‘billets’ or planks of firewood consumed by the ovens of the English royal kitchens.6
Drink was required in vast quantities for the event. Wine and hippocras were enjoyed by the higher echelons of the royal party, but ale was the principal daily drink of the entire English entourage. An Italian observer in 1500 remarked on English drinking preferences:
The deficiency of wine is, however, amply supplied by the abundance of ale and beer, to the use of which these people are become so habituated, that at an entertainment where there is plenty of wine, they will drink them in preference to it, and in great quantities.7
Made from malt and water, without hops for flavouring, ale was partly supplied through London. The physician Andrew Boorde called it the ‘natural drink’ for Englishmen and no fewer than 48 tuns of ale were purchased through the capital. Brewing was also an important business in Calais, not least because of the large garrison there. In the south-west corner of the town was Bullen Well, a conduit whose water was used chiefly in brewing ale and beer, and more supplies would doubtless have come from the town. Beers were brewed in different strengths and the malt would be used several times. ‘Best beer’ was brewed with the first use of the malt, ‘small beer’ with the third. The latter is what servants (and children) commonly drank. It was very weak and not infrequently rather bitter – but safer than water. Ale did not keep well and had to be brewed fairly shortly before drinking.
With about 6,000 people to supply, a special brewing house was also established in a rented property at ‘Medelweye’ for thirteen weeks at 40s. rent. This hamlet is shown as ‘the medelve’ or ‘middle way’ on a survey map of the Pale of Calais made by a German surveyor in 1540 who labelled its features phonetically. It lay just east of the town along the road to Guînes and, together with the nearby hamlet of St Peter's, served as a storage and preparation area for a number of household departments. It is likely that ‘Middle Way’ is also the ‘Medelham’ noted in the accounts where one Jane Whitefield had a mill where wheat was ground for use by the bakery and perhaps for the buttery as well. The stream flowing through the hamlet powered the mill, supplied water for brewing and for the livestock and poultry penned nearby.8
At the highest social level of sixteenth-century society, that of the great nobles and the monarch, hospitality was a vital aspect of the noble virtue of ‘liberality’ or ‘magnificence’. Both these terms were used very precisely in the period, to encapsulate a range of qualities also summed up as ‘good lordship’. A monarch was expected to show ‘largesse’, which implied the giving of rewards without apparent expectation of return, immediate or otherwise. In England in particular, but in France too, hospitality was very consciously linked to the maintenance of the social hierarchy and order. Hence the elaborate concern for precedence in seating arrangements for dining at court feasts or public festivals.9
The kings offered hospitality mutually and reciprocally, according to a strict protocol of visits, in order to maintain a careful balance of honour between them. Neither king could be allowed to offer, or receive, from the other greater or lesser hospitality than he himself provided. It also meant that one could not directly upstage the other by the standard of feasting he offered, nor was there any intimation that in accepting food from each other, either acknowledged the other's ‘good lordship’ over him.10 This was particularly important because Henry's formal title still made a claim for him as ‘king of France’.
It was for this reason that, counter-intuitively perhaps to modern sensibilities, at none of the three splendid banquets did the two kings actually dine in each other's company. They did make relatively simple repasts together on four occasions. The first was after their meeting on 7 June. The second and third were after the respective early-morning visits to each other and the last was after High Mass on Saturday 23 June. Otherwise, Henry was entertained at Ardres by Queen Claude, Louise de Savoie and the other principal members of the French party while Francis was entertained at Guînes by Queen Katherine. Being received by each other's wife meant that each king was undeniably the highest-status person at the banquet and could accept food as a gift without danger to his reputation as at least equal to the other sovereign. Compare this with the meeting of Henry III of England and Louis IX of France for the confirmation of the treaty of Paris in 1259. There the two kings did eat together at a grand feast given by Henry at Saint-Germain-des Prés on 6 December, but two days earlier Henry had done homage to Louis for Gascony. Acknowledging Louis's lordship over him for these lands was the basis of peace between them and this was celebrated at the feast. The situation in 1520 was totally different; Henry and Francis only agreed to meet as allies and equals.11
The first banquet was held on Sunday 10 June and set the pattern for the two that followed on succeeding Sundays. Hall does not mention it at all but descriptions by French, Venetian and Mantuan observers survive. The two kings left their respective quarters at the same time in the early afternoon, cannons signalling their departure. They met each other briefly at the lists. On arriving at Guînes, Francis was formally received by Katherine and the English court at the temporary palace and dined under a cloth of estate in what, judging from Soardino's description of it as hung with tapestries ‘worth 15,000 ducats representing foliage’, was the queen's Presence Chamber. Beyond this, the long hall was divided to create two dining chambers. In the first there dined 134 ladies of the court, attended formally by about twenty young Englishmen of rank, who, as at the banquet for the emperor at Canterbury, stood behind or near the ladies, but did not themselves eat. Beyond them, in a second chamber the duc de Bourbon and the Admiral Bonnivet dined with about 200 gentlemen. Meanwhile, in his apartments on the other side of the palace, Cardinal Wolsey entertained Etienne Poncher, the Bishop of Paris, and attendant prelates and priests.
Francis was served on gold plate and each course consisted of fifty dishes. There would have been at least three, and perhaps more, courses for the banquet proper. These had little in common with the courses in a modern extended meal apart from a sense of progression through a display of different kinds of food and cooking techniques as the banquet went on. Savoury and sweet elements were often combined in dishes served alongside each other in a course. John Russell's Book of Nurture describes alternative dinners of flesh and fish. One description of the former, which may have been a Christmastide feast, has the first course consisting of dishes of pork brawn and mustard, potage, beef, mutton, stewed pheasant, swan, capon, suckling pig and venison pie or pasty. The course ended with the serving of ‘subtlety’ or table decoration made from a variety of materials such as spun sugar or marzipan. Russell describes one such decoration showing the Annunciation. The second course mixed a similar number and range of dishes as the first and concluded with a ‘device’ of an angel appearing to the shepherds on a hillside. The third course followed in similar manner and concluded with a ‘subtlety’ of the kings of Cologne being presented to the mother of Christ. The meal ended with apples, wafers and hippocras – the celebratory spiced wine drink.12 Such a meal could easily encompass fifty individual dishes as a whole, so the scale of the banquet for Francis on 10 June becomes readily apparent when we recall that each individual course alone consisted of fifty dishes.
Game, birds and fish, served in a variety of ways, were the principal dishes of both the English and the French royal banquets. The finest and rarest of these were reserved for the royal tables and those of the highest nobility. More mundane types of farmed meat, such as lamb, mutton and beef, together with geese, capons and pigeons and the like were served to the middling nobles, who accompanied the magnates and ate at the tables within the dining halls. Salt and freshwater fish figured largely on the English tables, judging by the amount and expense of that purchased. For example, two sturgeon were bought by the English kitchen officers in Antwerp for £3 18s. 8d. One of the fish was evidently presented whole to Francis as a gift from Henry. Total purchases for the English camp come to a staggering 29,518 fish including, among much else, plaice, flounder, conger eels, crayfish and turbot. There was also one dolphin. Perhaps it was used in some form of tribute to Princess Mary's betrothed, the dauphin of France? Although fish was a staple of the Tudor diet a fair way down the social scale, not least due to the necessity of eating it on Fridays, for the middling ranks this more usually meant salted, dried and smoked fish rather than fresh. A significant proportion of the fish accounted for in June 1520 would have been consumed on the three Fridays of the meeting, not just at the feasts.13
Large exotic birds were usually presented with great style by royal cooks, none more so than swans and especially peacocks. The feathers, skin and head removed in one operation, the bird would be cooked whole. Once cooled, its head would be reconnected and the bird re-dressed in its own plumage, its beak painted with gold, and it would be arrayed on a serving dish amidst foliage and other decorative touches.14 Storks, bitterns and egrets were sometimes served in similarly theatrical ways. Some 6,475 birds of various species were presented on the tables at the Field. The English kitchen accounts also record payments for no fewer than 98,050 eggs! Venison was of course the principal game meat of the royal table, and we have already noted how herds of deer, sheep and pigs were shipped from England and penned near Guînes before slaughter.15
The range, amount and expense of food on these occasions was astounding, even by royal standards, and quite out of proportion to that of the middling ranks of Tudor society. Compare the £3 18s. 8d spent on the two sturgeons from Antwerp in 1520 with 15s. 1d for the cost of the ‘chapter feast’ for ten senior members of Merton College, Oxford, on 11 July 1504. This sum furnished none of the kinds of food and spices served at the ‘top tables’ at the Field, but was enough for a good dinner of veal, goose, capons, beef, mutton and lamb together with some sort of dessert after the meat and poultry dishes.16
Soardino states that after the meal on 10 June, dancing began in the main hall with the music of tabor, pipe and viols. The duchess of Suffolk led the revels, dancing with a French nobleman. After this Francis, who had brought with him a band of fifers and trombones, had a dance ‘performed in the Italian manner’. Francis was as passionately committed to the dance as his English counterpart. It was he who took the initiative in the development of the masque in the Italian fashion north of the Alps. In 1515, after his conquest of the duchy of Milan, he spent approximately four months in his newly acquired territory, making himself known to his Milanese subjects and other Italian notables. Federico Gonzaga, the son of Francesco, Marquess of Mantua, and Isabella d'Este, lived at the French court between October 1515 and March 1517. Federico's correspondence with his parents, and that of his secretary, relate how Milanese and Mantuan music and dress (especially for women) were favoured by the king. According to the young Gonzaga prince, Francis held almost nightly entertainments featuring moresques and mascarades during the time he was in Italy and after his return to France in January 1516.17
The masque ‘in the Italian fashion’ was already known at the English court. It was at the Twelfth Night celebrations in January 1512 that this form of disguising was first performed there. Hall records the event thus:
On the daie of Epiphanie at night, the king with xi other were disguised, after the maner of Italie, called a maske, a thyng not seen afore in Englande, thei were appareled in garmentes long and brode, wrought all with gold, with visers and cappes of gold & after the banket doen, these Maskers came in, with sixe gentlemen disguised in silke bearyng staffe torches, and desired the ladies to daunce, some were content, and some that knewe the fashion of it refused, because it was not a thyng commonly seen. And after thei daunced and commoned together, as the fashion of the Maske is, thei tooke their leave and departed, and so did the Quene, and all the ladies.18
There has been much debate about the precise nature of the masque, but it is reasonably clear from Hall's account that, apart from the long robes as costumes, the crucial difference between this ‘Italian’ masque and the disguisings until then practised at the Tudor court was that the dancers invited members of the audience to join them in the dances that followed.19 Until then, men and women would dance in separate companies for the disguising – although they might dance together more informally later. Sydney Anglo has observed that the custom of masquers dancing with members of the audience added only one further element to the ‘multiform spectacle combining music, poetry débat, combat scenic display and dance’ common at the court since the last years of Henry VII's reign. He noted that its introduction to the English court in 1512 was ‘more noteworthy as an illustration of Henry's desire to increase the brilliance of his own court by introducing fashionable continental revels into England’.20 Soardino says nothing about the masquing costumes being worn on 10 June 1520, but he does specify that some twenty couples danced together and that Francis danced with the girlfriend of the seigneur de Montepezat, one of his younger courtiers who was then a hostage in England.21
Meanwhile Henry, accompanied by his senior nobles, had ridden over to Ardres on the bay charger that Francis had given him the previous day. He was received outside the town by the roi de Navarre, the duc d'Alençon and the cardinals of Bourbon, Lorraine and Albret. Chancellor Duprat escorted him through the town to the royal lodgings where he was greeted by Queen Claude, Louise de Savoie and the duchesse d'Alençon. Henry was led to a chamber ‘where he was to repose’ before entering the hall, covered in pink brocade for the occasion. He was served by noblemen of the French household supervised by the Grand Maître with twenty-four trumpeters playing the whole time that the courses were brought up from the kitchen in gold dishes with gold covers. There was also vocal and other music throughout the meal. Heraldic table decorations, called entremets, rather like the ‘subtleties’ described by Russell, were displayed on this occasion. The duc de Bourbon's painter received 25 livres tournois for preparing them for this banquet and they included salamanders, leopards and ermines bearing the arms of the French king and queen. We are told that there were so many courses at this banquet that the diners remained at table four hours and there followed dancing until the evening of that summer day. The time of Henry's departure from the banquet, one source says at 5p.m., was once again co-ordinated with Francis's departure, signalled by a cannon salvo. After bidding farewell to the principal ladies of the court, Henry left Ardres and met Francis again at the lists as he made his way back to Guînes.22
Much more is known about the second set of banquets, which took place a week later on Sunday 17 June. As on the previous occasion, Francis came to Guînes castle, but did so unexpectedly, very early in the day and with only a few companions.23 Having greeted Francis, the king of England escorted him to Mass and thence from the castle to the temporary palace, possibly via the covered gallery that connected the two buildings. While the household officials busied themselves preparing a banquet, Francis evidently remained at the palace as the guest of Queen Katherine and later in the day he was joined by his mother. When the meal was ready, Francis was served in Henry's Presence Chamber, dining off gold plate while noblemen were served on plate of silver gilt ‘and all other in silver vessell’, as Hall puts it. Soardino reports that the two queens dined together while Wolsey entertained the French princes who had accompanied the king. Another source maintains that Katherine and Wolsey entertained Louise de Savoie in Wolsey's apartments.24
At this and the other two banquets, the wine and other drinks flowed freely. Wine was bought in prodigious quantities. Purchases by the department of the Buttery in the English kitchens totalled not less than £744. Wine from the German lands, from the Balkans, Greece and the Ionian islands was served alongside that of France. Apart from Burgundy the precise types of these wines were not specified in the accounts. What was called ‘Gascon wine’ in 1520 is now, if red, ‘claret’, usually referred to as Bordeaux; and, if white, the Graves or Entre-Deux-Mers wines grown on estates immediately to the south and east of Bordeaux itself. The ‘French wine’ in the accounts is most likely to refer to that produced along the banks of the Loire, such as Sancerre, Touraine, Anjou, Saumur and the Pays Nantais. The total recorded cost of alcoholic drink (including beer and ale) for June–July 1520 was £1,568 1s. 11#fr3/4>d.25
On 17 June the hall of the temporary palace was once again divided into two dining spaces, the men in one and women in the other. Afterwards, the tables having been cleared away, there was dancing in which Francis participated, first ‘in the French fashion’. In the formal dances, usually the basse-danse and the pavane, dignified balance and control, elegance and ease of movement were demanded of the man. The pavane was often followed by the galliard, a pairing brought from France to England and known there as the double dance of France. In her recent book on Renaissance dance Margaret McGowan has described the galliard as
essentially a dance devised to display the choreographic powers of the male dancer who, having circled the room with his partner at least once, left her at the end of the hall while he executed difficult passages for her admiration, returning to her from time to time to ensure that she understood that his display of skills were for her particular pleasure.26
Then followed the entrance of ten masquers, including Francis, ‘dressed in long gowns of velvet and satin, with plumes and hoods’ and they danced in what was reputedly the ‘Ferrarese fahion’.27 Throughout his reign, Francis danced very athletically and with great speed and precision. Cardinal Ippolito d'Este praised his dancing of a galliard in January 1541 and in July 1546, at 51, the king distinguished himself at a masquerade held to celebrate the baptism of his granddaughter. Francis also danced in a variety of sometimes rather unexpected costumes designed by Francesco Primaticcio, such as a ‘man-beast’, a centaur, a tree, a bear and even as a lobster.28
On 17 June, Henry once again went to Ardres, this time accompanied by his sister, Mary, and her husband, Charles Brandon, Duke of Suffolk. Arriving at the French royal lodgings, he was greeted by Queen Claude and the French court. Queen Claude sat with the duchess of Suffolk on her left hand and nearly under the queen's canopy. As at Guînes, after dinner the women of the court readied themselves to dance. Hall then tells us that ‘the king the more to glad the quene and the sayd ladies, departed secretly and put himself with xxix persones more in maskers apparell’.29 This ‘secret’ disappearance was typical of Henry's participation in masques or disguisings.
As in the tournament, the king's role in masques was always carefully choreographed to focus maximum attention on his presence, both disguised and then at the moment of dramatic self-revelation.30 The following description from Hall's account of Twelfth Night 1511 is typical:
And in the moste of this pastyme, when all persones were most attentyve to beholde the daunsyng, the king was sodenly gone unknowen to the moste parte of the people there, onles it were of the Queen and of certayne other. Within a littel while after his departing, the trompettes at thende of the Hall began to blow.31
The king then entered, visored, dressed identically with his partners and apparently as anonymous as anyone else on the floor, but in fact by his physique, manner and movement recognisable to most people in the court. At Ardres on 17 June, Henry had three companies of masquers with him. They evidently prepared themselves in another house in the town because they were then escorted back to the royal hôtel by drummers. The first group comprised ten young noblemen dressed as visitors from ‘Ruseland or farre Estland’ whose costumes included ‘purses of seals skins and girdles of the same’.
Dressing as exotic foreigners was common at the Tudor court. The foreground of the Hampton Court painting The Field of Cloth of Gold depicts two characters dressed in what appear to be masquing costumes of yellow or gold, who are perhaps meant to be ‘Turks’. Evocations of the ‘great enemy’ of Christendom had appeared at several masques in 1518 in the celebration for the treaty of Universal Peace. The calf-length coats emblazoned with some sort of heraldic design worn by the figures in the painting, their high caps adorned with crescent-shaped feathers and the fact that they carry horns and have scimitars at their side are all suggestive of a westernised view of the dress of Ottoman janissaries.
The members of the second group of ten masquers were dressed in the theme of ‘adieu jeunesse’ – farewell youth – and wore gowns over their costumes of black velvet which, as Soardino observed, were ‘such as were worn of old by doctors in England’ and which were embroidered ‘with mottoes in English unintelligible to us’. The masks made them look like old men. The third company comprised the king and nine others in gowns which Soardino describes as in Milanese fashion and which Hall specifies further were lined with green taffeta. Their faces were visored with beards made of fine wired gold. In the Italian–English masquing custom, ‘these revelers toke ladies and daunced in passyng the tyme right honourably’.32
Once these formal dances were concluded and the masquers unmasked themselves, a sweet refreshment was served. Hall informs us that ‘spices, fruites, jellies, and banket viands wer brought’. Here he uses the word ‘banquet’ in its secondary sense, as a synonym for the older French word ‘void’ or ‘voidee’ used at both the Valois and Tudor courts to refer to a sweet course originally taken after the main meal. The highest-ranked guests left (or ‘avoided’) the hall while the trestle tables used for the majority of dinners were cleared away, often to make room for dancing or theatrical entertainments. By 1520 the ‘void’ had become a separate event in itself, which might well immediately follow the main meal, or be served, as at Ardres on this occasion, after the dancing, or even at another time altogether, without reference to a main meal. It became yet another form of status-enhancing entertainment offered by the royal host. At the Tudor court it might signal the formal end of the main banquet and its entertainments, but often it might also be followed by more informal dancing that continued sometimes for a short while and sometimes, apparently, for hours afterwards.
The young Henry was a noted and enthusiastic dancer. In September 1513, Paulo da Laude, the Mantuan ambassador at Henry's court, reported to his master that at a banquet given at Lille by Emperor Maximilian and his daughter, the king danced with Marguerite de Savoie, ‘from the time the banquet finished until nearly day, in his shirt and without shoes’. Dancing without a doublet was the Tudor equivalent of being stripped to the waist; the king's physique could not have been more overtly displayed without breaking the bounds of propriety. The same ambassador reported that a few days later, the king broke off a discussion with him, ‘as he was in a hurry to go and dine and dance afterwards. In this he does wonders and leaps like a stag.’33 At a banquet on 18 September the ambassador reported the king as having spent ‘almost the whole night in dancing with the damsels’. In October, in celebration of the conquest of Tournai from France, another banquet was held. The same ambassador wrote that he had seen Henry dance ‘magnificently in the French style, in his doublet and play the virginals and the flute in company most creditably, affording great pleasure to all those present’.34 On 17 June 1520, however, the banquet did end with the ‘void’ and then, once again at about 5p.m., the king bade farewell to his hosts. He and his companions replaced their visors. Horses were led into the courtyard and the English company rode out of the town and back to Guînes.35
We are relatively well informed about Francis I's personal expenditure on these banquets, thanks to one financial account not previously referred to. Now preserved in the Archives Nationales in Paris, this is the account prepared by Sebastian de Mareau, Master of the King's Chambre-aux-deniers, the officer who was responsible for regulating royal household expenditure. The account records payments made during the month of June 1520 while the king was at Boulogne and Ardres for the meeting with his ‘most dear and most loved good brother and ally, the king of England’. The preamble to the account, drawn up in September 1520, specifies that it records ordinary expenses for the whole month, together with
great and sumptuous expenditure for the feasts and banquets which were made at the order and command of the said lord [Francis] to the king of England, the queen his wife and to the princes, princesses, lords and ladies of the said country of England who had come to the said place of Ardres to accompany the king of England.36
It evidently covers some, though probably not all, the expenditure on entertaining the English at Ardres, certain ancillary expenses, those incurred during the king's journey back to Paris afterwards and the wages of the officers of the Chambre aux deniers. Some items of expenditure are specified to be for the king's privy kitchen and related departments (bouche) and others for what in England were called the ‘great’ kitchens (cuisine du commun). Total expenditure for the month comes to 30,484 livres, 10 sous, 5 deniers tournois (c. £3,048), for which the king authorised payment in September 1520.37
The largest individual items of expenditure were, as for the English, on meat and fish. Some 12,146 livres (c. £1,214), 19 sous and 3 deniers tournois was spent over the month on various kinds of meat, but principally venison, for the banquets, the king's privy kitchen and the great kitchens.38 The king's poissonniers supplied him with freshwater and saltwater fish to the total value of 4,986 livres, 1 sou, 11 deniers tournois (c. £498).39 His pâtissier provided delicacies which cost 741 livres, 9 sous tournois (c. £75). Purchases of various spices, condiments, other additives and fruit came to a total value of 3,210 livres tournois (c. £321).40
There are surprisingly few references to the cost of wine consumed at the banquets in Mareau's account. One total is given of 1,927 livres, 10 sous (c. £193) for various kinds of claret brought from Boulogne to Ardres and accounted for by the household stewards at the end of the month. A further amount of 400 livres, 1 sou (£40) was paid for wine consumed between 25 June, the day after the meeting concluded, and the end of the month. Some white wine was purchased, but nearly all of it is specified as ‘claret’, although it was evidently not from Bordeaux as we might expect; some was ‘claret beaune’, what we might call Burgundy, and the rest ‘claret auxerre’ or ‘auxerrois’.41 In the absence of further evidence, we might reasonably assume that something like three or four times as much would have been purchased for the previous fortnight.
A few items in the account allow us a glimpse behind the glamorous scenes. There were regular deliveries of wood, charcoal, candles and lights for use in the kitchens (and chapel) at Ardres. Around 700 livres (£70) was spent on table linen, pots, spoons, glasses and various dishes for both the privy and great kitchens, along with several lengths of canvas to cover or extend the area of the kitchens at the royal lodgings in Ardres. One Monsieur de Balanzac was reimbursed the 40 sous (4s.) he had paid for having an Englishman who had been wounded at Ardres taken back to Guînes. There is also an entry for 14 sous, 6 deniers (c. 1s. 1d sterling) paid for ‘tree stocks and leafy boughs’ supplied to the ‘maison de la ville’, probably the king's house or possibly the town hall, ‘where the gentleman of the chamber of the king of England dined’. None of the contemporary written descriptions record any kind of royal or civic reception for Henry's closest courtiers as a group but this item indicates that some such hospitality was offered during, or independent of, Henry's several visits to the town.42 Louis Lemaire, one of the sommeliers of the king's private service, was reimbursed the 4 livres (c. 8s.) he paid to one of the English heralds to act as a translator for the domestic officers who went with the king to Guînes.43 This item confirms the observation of one of the Venetian ambassadors that language was an issue at times during the meeting. The king and his immediate entourage may have spoken French, but clearly many of the gentry and their servants did not, or at least not sufficiently well to be able to socialise or work easily together.
On Sunday 24 June, the meeting concluded with a final round of banquets and masques. Whereas on the two previous occasions the assembled companies dined together and changed into masquing apparel afterwards, on this Sunday both the English and French kings were accompanied by their principal lords and ladies all in masquing costumes from the outset. Henry left Guînes for Ardres with his sister Mary, each accompanied by nineteen masquers, making a total company of forty, the whole divided into four groups. Hall describes only two of the four companies. The first was led by Hercules, presumably Henry himself, who was equipped with a club covered with green damask and a lion's pelt made of cloth of gold of damask and ears of flat gold. He led the Nine Worthies: three pagan heroes, three Hebrew kings and three Christian warriors. They were Hector, Alexander, Caesar, King David, Joshua and Judas Maccabeus, together with Charlemagne, King Arthur and Godfrey de Bouillon. By 1520 these figures were recognised representations of heroic chivalry throughout sixteenth-century Europe. They had preceded King Henry VI in his triumphal entry to Paris in 1431. In 1520 Lucas van Leyden produced a series of engravings of the nine, and a rather comical set of them appear in Shakespeare's Love's Labour's Lost. In France they were known as ‘les neuf preux’ or ‘valiants’, and Godefroy le Batave illustrated one volume of François Demoulins's Commentaires de la guerre gallique with depictions of Francis's generals at Marignano as ‘les neuf preux’.44
It is reasonably clear (without need of elaborate over-analysis) that the deployment of these well-known figures of royal soldierly courage and generalship at the concluding masque was intended to authenticate the meeting's overtly chivalric nature and to honour the ancient heritage of England and France as Christian nations led by chivalric warrior kings. Mary, Duchess of Suffolk, led nineteen of her fellow countrywomen, half of them dressed in Genoese fashion, half in Milanese. Riding side by side, these English nobles arrived at Guînes and were met at Ardres by Queen Claude. They removed their visors for the banquet that followed and afterwards danced until the end of the festivities, in the course of which those who had triumphed at the tournament were awarded their prizes.45 Meanwhile the French king and twenty-eight nobles passed in the other direction towards Guînes and were there welcomed by Queen Katherine. The dinner and dancing followed, after which Francis changed into his usual dress to take leave of the queen. Those English and French men present who had won the prizes in tournaments were named and they received jewels, rings, collars and similar gifts. After parting from Queen Katherine and the court, Francis set out for Ardres, escorted on his way by Wolsey and the duke of Buckingham as far as the lists where he and Henry met briefly and bade each other a final farewell.46
So the great feasts and banquets of the princes for which the Field is now famous came to an end. The accounts for food and drink show that beyond the banqueting halls, hospitality of a more basic but sustaining kind was extended to all members of the French and English entourages, but very little specific information about this more general ‘catering’ for the event survives. Meals were provided on a daily basis throughout the two weeks for both the high lords and the servants, gentry and commoners, who were part of the royal household – as was usual. Some meals at least may also have been provided communally for those in the entourage not there specifically as members of the household, men like Sir Adrian Fortescue, for example. Nevertheless, the establishment of ‘staples’ at Marquise and other places also suggests that there was an element of ‘self-catering’ among such nobles and gentry not directly attached to the royal household who had to pay for their own supplies. By the Eltham Ordinances of 1526, the Clerk of the Market was charged with ensuring when the court was on progress, as it was effectively in the summer of 1520, that there were sufficient supplies at
convenient and reasonable prices … soe as the noblemen and others attending on the court, and also the sewtors [suitors] and others following the same be not compelled in default of the said clerk to be put unto excessive charge for their expenses as they now be …47
We have already noted the practice of purveyance, by which both the French and English monarchs sought to provide supplies for their courts in the ordinary run of the year and while on progress. Nevertheless, Hall and the author of L'Ordonnance also indicate that hospitality was, at certain times, extended to anyone who came to the English temporary palace – and that people did so in significant numbers. As Hall puts it:
Duryng this triumph so much people of Picardie and west Flanders drew to Guysnes to see the kyng of England and his honor, to whom vitailes of the court were in plentie … there were vacaboundes, plowmen, laborers and of the bragery [rabble], wagoners and beggers that for drunkennes lay in routes and heapes, so great resort thether came …48
Hall and the Venetian observer, Donado, describe a fountain built outside the temporary palace surmounted by a figure of Bacchus, which ‘by the conduyctes in therth ranne to all the people’ red and white wine. Gioan Joachino described two fountains. Such a fountain is depicted in the Hampton Court Palace painting of the Field. Hall's description suggests that wine flowed under pressure along pipes and could be had in silver cups either throughout the event, at significant moments during it such as the banquets, or whenever a royal party arrived or departed from the palace – according to the various sources. The right-hand foreground of the painting shows people willingly accepting what was on offer and drinking at the fountain, from wooden or earthenware vessels rather than silver cups. They do not stint themselves and several are shown as much the worse for wear. Two men brawl and another leans unsteadily against the side of the temporary palace as he vomits against its walls. Hall's observation suggests that the sort of characters depicted in the painting were not alone!49
Gift-giving
When Henry and Francis jointly inaugurated the tournament at the Field on Saturday 9 June, each rode to the tiltyard on one of his finest horses. Henry was mounted on a Neapolitan courser and Francis on a horse named Dappled Duke from the stud of Francesco Gonzaga, Marquess of Mantua. Henry admired the Mantuan horse. Francis immediately offered it to him. Henry reciprocated with his own mount. Reporting this, Soardino, the Mantuan ambassador, tactfully told his master that Henry's horse was ‘far inferior to Dappled Duke’.50 Gift-giving was an important aspect of the Field. One monarch's gift to another was both a token of friendly affection and a gift of liberality intended to declare the sufficiency of his own material and human resources. It could also express an expectation of continued association and co-operation even as it demonstrated the giver's apparently spontaneous generosity and his gentlemanly prowess and honour as a prince. Gift-giving of this sort had the essential feature of reciprocity. A gift had freely to be given in order to be a gift, but it also carried obligations to its recipient. Assurances of gratitude and an affirmation of mutuality, or even the assurance of future help to the donor, were the appropriate responses to a neighbourly gift.51 Many of these kinds of exchange have been noted in recent studies of nobles' patronage networks in sixteenth-century France.52 The two kings gave each other more horses on Monday 18 June. Francis gave Henry six coursers, four of which were from the Gonzaga stables at Mantua. Galeazzo da San Severino rode them around the lists and Henry rode three of them after their presentation to him.53 In the course of the tourney, Charles, duc de Bourbon, and Marshal Lescun gave Henry their horses.
The Field of Cloth of Gold may have been the first occasion on which the two kings personally gave each other presents, but a pattern of extravagant gift-giving between them had been established in late 1518 with the initial celebrations for the signing of the treaty of London. Henry presented fifty-two large silver drinking cups to the members of the French embassy that came to London to agree the treaty. He gave his own cloak to its leader, Guillaume Gouffier, seigneur de Bonnivet.54 The French ambassadors left London on 11 October, Bonnivet laden with a further twenty-four items of gilt or pure gold and silver plate including ‘a standing cup of gold garnished with great pearl’. He and his fellow ambassadors also received richly lined and furred cloaks, plate, gold chains and horses with rich trappings.55 To Francis himself, Henry sent several horse bards of cloth of gold set with precious stones. He also sent a gold chaffron, which the French king liked very much. As Hall reports, ‘all this liberality the strangers much enjoyed’.56 The reciprocal English embassy was treated to similarly distinguished hospitality in Paris during the winter and returned with gifts of an equivalent kind and value.57
A few months later gifts were sent to the French court for the christening of Francis's second son, Henry, duc d'Orléans, in June 1519. Sir Thomas Boleyn presented the queen with a gold salt cellar, cup and dish of gold. Henry gave these presents as one of the child's invited godfathers. Cardinal Wolsey also sent £100 to be given to the child's nurse, his cradle-rocker and the gentlewomen of the Queen's Chamber. Francis's reaction to these gifts neatly encapsulates the ritual elements of gift exchange. Sir Thomas Boleyn reported him as saying that:
Whensoever it shall fortune the king's highness to have a Prince, he shall be [honoured] to do for him the like manner and that he is minded after his said son shall come to age and be able to … he purposeth to send to him to the king's grace into England to do him service.58
The focus on reciprocity and on the personal bonds between the giver and recipient and the honour accruing to the giver is instructive – as is Francis's dig at Henry's lack of a son to compare with the dauphin of France and his new younger brother. The notion of one day entrusting their sons to each other's care draws on the tradition common to England and France, of nobles placing their sons and daughters in the households of a near kinsman or important patron and indeed in the royal household itself, for service and training (or nourriture, as the French called it). Young noble men and women practised their genteel accomplishments and became part of the wider familial-client network of their host. Because of their vulnerability and impressionability, there is a sense in which these young people were both offered and received as gifts between the families concerned as well as investments in the future of good relations.59 Francis did not in fact send any of his three sons to England, but Henry eventually met them at Boulogne in 1532.60 The young French noblemen sent to England in 1519 as hostages for Francis's performance of the terms of the treaty of London were treated with particular generosity during the royal summer progress into Essex and Kent. Hall assures us, ‘the king did shote, hunte and ronne daily with the hostages to their great joy’.61
On or about 16 March, barely a week after his arrival as Henry's ambassador in France, Sir Richard Wingfield had presented Francis with a new kind of double-handed sword, a gift from his master. As it was much heavier than anything the king was used to, Francis was unable to handle it properly. Perplexed, he turned to the Admiral Bonnivet who explained that during his embassy in England in 1518, he had seen Henry using an even heavier sword ‘as delverly [dexterously] as could be devised’. The Admiral had been sworn to secrecy by Henry and would reveal only that this was done ‘by meane of a gauntlet’. Wingfield reported to Henry that Francis had immediately offered to swap one of these new gauntlets for a pair of cuirasses ‘such as your highness hath not seen’, to be ready at their forthcoming meeting. He would only say that their design enabled the weight of ‘such peces as reste upon the cuurasse’ to be taken off the shoulders. Henry should, as soon as possible, send one of his ‘arming dobletts’ so that his measurements could be taken. On the same day that Francis finally authorised Wolsey to prepare the meeting, Wingfield wrote from the French court reminding the king and Wolsey about the gauntlet and doublet.62
Although there is no direct evidence, an exchange of this kind may well have taken place at the Field of Cloth of Gold. Something very like the English gauntlet and the design of the French cuirass were later incorporated into several suits made by the Greenwich royal armoury.63 In April 1527, Henry entertained another large French embassy in London. He presented the leader of the delegation, François de La Tour d'Auvergne, the vicomte de Turenne, with a suit of Greenwich armour. It incorporated an inner ventral plate whose function is consistent with a ‘device … for the easy bearing and sustaining of the weight of such pieces as rest upon the cuirass’.64 This feature sounds very much like the cuirasses Francis had promised to give Henry in 1520. This suit is a superb example of the high standards of workmanship of the royal armouries.65 The ‘device’ on the Turenne armour consisted of a single trapezoidal stomach plate which sat behind the principal breastplate and was attached to it by a 1#fr1/2> inch bolt. It was also attached to the back plate by four leather straps, which could be tightened around the wearer, rather like a corset. The weight of the reinforcements used in tournaments – the manifer, pasguard and granguard – could thereby be more evenly distributed over the body. Exactly the same device is featured on a suit of Greenwich armour made for Henry himself in 1540.66
The most expensive individual gifts exchanged by the French and English parties were of jewellery and plate. From Francis, Wolsey received gold basins and ewers decorated with Francis's initials and one of his badges, of friars' knots. Soardino estimated them to be worth 20,000 crowns.67 From Louise de Savoie the cardinal received a jewelled crucifix said to be worth 6,000 crowns. Wolsey gave the king's mother, in return, a small cross of precious stones apparently containing a piece of the true cross.68 Wolsey's possessions, seized at his fall in 1529, were inventoried but none appear that are readily identifiable as the gifts from the French royal family in 1520. Nevertheless, an inventory of the royal Jewel House in April 1533 includes ‘two basins and ewers with friars girdles by the French king’ which may be those given to Wolsey in 1520 although they might have been given to Henry himself at his second meeting with Francis in 1532.69 An inventory of Louise de Savoie's personal possessions taken at her death in 1531 does not indicate that she still possessed the cross given to her by Wolsey.70 The cardinal gave the Admiral Bonnivet a large jewelled salt cellar with a figure of St George at the top. This figure may have looked something like the one that adorns the finial of the lid of the Howard Grace Cup which was made in 1525.71 From Henry, the Admiral received a jewel which the king had worn in his cap, worth 4,000 crowns, and cups worth 10,000 crowns. The French Master of the Horse was given a jewel and gold vessels to the value of 1,800 crowns. Bourbon was presented with a gold cup studded with jewels, worth about 6,000 crowns. Henry gave Francis's mistress, Françoise de Foix, a crucifix worth 2,000 crowns. He gave her brother, the Marshal Lescun, a gown of cloth of gold lined with sables.
These gifts were only part of an ostentatious display of gold and silver and other precious metals and jewels at the Field intended to demonstrate the high standards of royal artistic patronage.72 Henry's principal goldsmiths in 1520 were John Twisleton, William Holland and Robert Amadas, who between them are likely to have contributed the bulk of items which adorned the king and which he gave as gifts to the French. Amadas also worked for Cardinal Wolsey. In May 1520 Amadas received £414 for ‘mending and making gold stuff’ for Henry and he regularly received orders from the king and the cardinal for as much as £2,000 a time.73 Pierre Mangot and Jean Hotman were the two principal goldsmiths in French royal service in the 1520s. In 1532–3 Mangot made his most famous piece, a coffer which eventually became part of the earl of Chesterfield's collection.74 Jean Hotman made cups, plates and other vessels and gold chains used as diplomatic gifts for Francis to present to ambassadors during the 1530s.75
Each king also gave demonstrations of ‘largess’ to the other's entourage in the course of the tournaments and banqueting. A total of 2,500 crowns was given in general reward to the French royal household. Francis reciprocated. The amount he gave to the English household is unknown but is likely to have been very precisely calibrated to match what his own officers received. Several of the more prominent members of the French king's chambre were given cash and jewelled collars. The seigneurs de Morette, de Brosse and de Pecalvary, all gentilshommes de la chambre and former hostages in England, were among those who received no fewer than nine gold chains between them, most taken from members of Wolsey's household.76 We should also recall the golden ‘basil’ branches ripped off bards and bases of cloth of silver worn by Henry and his band in the field tourney on 21 June. Gibson's accounts record that, presumably on Henry's orders, Francis was given another eight horses' bards and bases of cloth of gold by ‘Assamus the king's armourer’.77 In the decade before 1520, the practice of giving away tournament and revel costumes at the conclusion of festive events was common at the English court. On Sunday 24 June the two kings met together at the lists for the last time and exchanged what Hall calls ‘gifts of remembrance’. Henry gave Francis a collar of jewels called ‘balastes’, diamonds and pearls. Francis gave Henry ‘a bracelet of precious stones, riche jewels and fayre’.78
The two sovereign ladies also made presents to each other. Queen Katherine presented Queen Claude with several hobbies and palfries with all necessary accoutrements, or ‘well trapped’ as Hall puts it. The hobby, an Irish or English horse of about fourteen hands, was favoured for long-distance travel by men and women because of its longer and smoother, ambling gait. These qualities meant that hobbies were exported to France and Italy even quite early in the sixteenth century where they were known as ‘haquenées’ or ‘hackneys’. ‘Palfreys’ were also amblers and thought particularly suitable for women to ride but the word fell out of use in the course of the sixteenth century.79 Louise de Savoie received a saddle and harness from Queen Katherine. Queen Claude gave Katherine a litter of cloth of gold, as well as mules and pages.80 At some stage in the proceedings, Katherine presented bonnets, which she and her ladies seem to have made, to Francis's youngest noble attendants, the enfants d'honneur.81
The ‘best’ gifts were given and received as spontaneous acts of generosity. On one occasion during the Field, Francis acted in so unexpectedly a spontaneous manner that he may be understood to have presented himself as a sort of gift to Henry. On the morning of Sunday 17 June, the French king rose early and, accompanied by a few courtiers, rode to Guînes castle. Met by the astonished governor of the castle and the archers of the royal guard, Francis demanded to be taken to Henry's chamber and was duly escorted there. According to the account by the seigneur de Florange, Francis first banged on the door, then opened it and entered the king's chamber unannounced. Henry had not long been out of bed. Francis grandly declared himself to be Henry's prisoner, while assuring him of his good faith. Francis was then asked, or allowed, to help Henry on with his shirt. The kings embraced and Henry gave Francis a collar of great value. The sources vary on this point but Francis apparently returned the compliment either with his own collar or with jewelled bracelets. As we have seen, Francis had wanted a mutual exchange of membership of chivalric orders at the meeting, something Henry had absolutely refused, so the giving and receiving of collars carried undertones of that debate.
The seigneur de Florange, one of Francis's childhood friends, who relates the story, was furious that anyone should have advised the king to do as he had done. Francis told him that he had acted entirely on his own initiative.82 That may well have been the case but Francis, consciously or otherwise, was playing upon the recent traditions of Anglo-French relations and on more remote traditions of medieval diplomacy and the law of arms. His gesture was redolent with paradox and double meaning. Francis deliberately characterised himself as a prisoner, actually a hostage, to Henry as an apparent demonstration of his own good faith. Florange noted that Francis was increasingly frustrated by the atmosphere of suspicion which had dominated the encounters of the previous ten days. This led him to upset the delicate balance of protocol and was in fact a considerable imposition on Henry, who was charged with Francis's protection and honourable treatment while he was on his lands. Francis's leaving his own territory and entering Henry's, apparently without agreement and even ostensibly as a ‘prisoner’, was a direct challenge to Henry's authority over his own realm – an extraordinarily provocative gesture. Helping to dress the English king, though apparently an act of great humility in Francis, was also a bold assertion of his right as one sovereign to behave familiarly towards another.
By 1520, Francis had something of a record in disregarding conventions just because he could. Hall disapprovingly recorded how, in late 1518, he had ridden through the streets of Paris with some young English courtiers there on embassy, ‘throwing eggs, stones and other foolish trifles at the people, which light demeanour of a king was much discommended at’.83 Nor was his visit to Henry that Sunday morning in June 1520 the last occasion on which Francis would upset carefully staged protocol in order to get what he wanted by a compelling display of his superiority over an erstwhile rival and putative friend and ally.
In July 1538, Francis met Charles V for the first time in twelve years at Aigues-Mortes on the south coast of France. The protocol for the meeting was as strict and as balanced as that for the Field of Cloth of Gold had been and for very similar reasons. Neither sovereign was, strictly speaking, the guest of the other in this encounter and there was little real trust between them.84 When the imperial fleet dropped anchor in the harbour at Aigues-Mortes, Francis commanded that he be rowed out with only a few great noblemen and no guard, to greet the emperor personally. They were not due to meet until Charles came ashore. The emperor was highly disconcerted by Francis's coming out to meet him, but, like Henry before him, was forced to respond. Charles took Francis's hand and helped the French king to board his own vessel. Francis's gesture simultaneously shocked and pleased contemporaries, just as his behaviour at Guînes had eighteen years earlier.85
The following day Charles landed and, after dining, retired for a siesta. Learning that the emperor had reawoken, Francis went to Charles's lodgings unannounced and burst in, greeting him effusively. Divested of the usual trappings of majesty and, in that sense at least, undressed, Charles leapt out of bed to be on terms with Francis. The king of France, who was splendidly dressed, gave him a diamond ring worth 30,000 écus, an obvious token of good faith.86 Charles ‘counter-attacked’ as best he could by placing a collar of the Order of the Golden Fleece around the French king's neck. Now Francis completed the rout by placing his own collar of the Order of St Michael upon the shoulders of the emperor. Charles had to accept the collar as he and Francis had each been members of the other's chivalric order since 1516. Yet Francis's gesture was, in effect, a renewed demand that Charles should recognise him as an honourable prince and treat him accordingly.
The 1538 episode is a useful retrospective comment on that of 1520. Francis was, on both occasions, apparently trying to demonstrate good faith and a willingness to trust an erstwhile enemy. Henry wanted Francis to accept that getting what he wanted depended upon keeping the terms of agreements they were making. Francis knew that, but in appearing at Guînes as he did, he also wanted to personalise peace between himself and the other man. Placing himself in an apparently vulnerable position, he broke through the physical and metaphorical boundaries of protocol. Once there, he made gestures of trustworthiness in expectation of the same from the other. His visit was intended simultaneously to impress and intimidate.
Whether in the longer term Francis's very confrontational approach to gift-giving worked quite as well as he hoped may be doubted. But in the short term, it paid off handsomely. The Mantuan ambassador reported from the Field that, two days later, the English king duly responded with a somewhat ponderous early-morning visit to Ardres, where there was another round of gift exchanges. Soardino's report neatly captures how competitive gift-giving between them worked. He observed:
The whole court of France rejoices, for until now, no mark of confidence had been displayed by the English king; nay in all matters he invariably evinced small trust; but the Most Christian King has compelled him to make this demonstration, having set the example by placing himself with such assurance in his hands last Sunday in the Castle of Guînes.87
Evidently aware of the way Francis was gaining esteem among the nobles for his visit, Henry had little choice but to reciprocate and simultaneously try to outflank Francis publicly by giving full weight to the latter's claim to have visited in order to do him honour. This seems to have been the message circulated throughout the English entourage, picked up by the royal council in England and fed back to the king in a letter to him of 23 June. The councillors praise Henry for the general success of the meeting as reported in his letters to them:
also of the speciall truste and confidence that the said Frenshe king haith in your highnes manifestly declared by his subdain repaire and commyng unto your grace into your said castell of Guysnes, and putting hymselfe hooly into your handes, which approveth his desirous and affectuous mynde to attaine your favour and amitie, and the moor specially because he canne not be satisfied till he have visited and seen your grace within this your realme.88
Even before the Field of Cloth of Gold had ended, similar efforts to explain and memorialise the two kings' actions were being made. The first of these came during the ceremonial climax of the Field, a High Mass sung on Saturday 23 June, the eve of St John's and Midsummer Day. The Mass solemnised the event and invested it with spiritual significance. As cardinal legate a latere and the most senior churchman present, Wolsey presided over the Mass and thus, to the end, he remained a powerful presence at the Field of Cloth of Gold.
On the night of Friday 22 June, the tiltyard between Guînes and Ardres was transformed into a public stage for the Mass. A temporary open timber chapel was built on wooden posts, opposite the viewing galleries from which the queens and their entourages had watched the tilting only days before. The galleries were turned for the occasion into temporary oratories for members of the royal parties, senior nobles from both nations and the many ambassadors of other realms present at the meeting. The chapel, which was erected at Henry's expense, was hung with rich hangings and tapestries and the altar was adorned with ten large silver-gilt images of religious subjects. It had two golden candlesticks and a large jewelled crucifix, probably all taken from the chapel of the temporary palace at Guînes.89
The Mass of the Trinity began at noon. Dressed in full vestments and with jewelled slippers on his feet, Wolsey sat enthroned as papal representative under a canopy to the right of the high altar. The legate to France, Cardinal de Boisy, sat opposite him under a canopy to the left of the altar but one step down from Wolsey. A further step down under a canopy on the same side were the three remaining French cardinals, Albret, Bourbon and Lorraine. Some twelve prelates of France sat near these cardinals and the eight or nine prelates of England sat on the opposite side below Wolsey. The bishops of Armagh and Durham assisted him directly at the Mass.
Below and in front of the altar was an area which corresponded to the choir stalls of a conventional sixteenth-century church, and here assembled the choirs of the Chapels Royal of France and England, probably supplemented by singers from Wolsey's own chapel. The two groups of singers and musicians performed alternately, ‘which was a heavenly hearing’ according to one witness, each accompanied by the organist of the other choir. The Mass began with Introits from each choir. The English choir sang the Gloria and Sanctus and the French sang the Credo and the Agnus Dei. The Kyrie was played by the French organist Pierre Mouton on the instrument brought from the chapel in the temporary palace, augmented with sackbuts (early trombones) and cornets.90
In 1520, as far as can be determined given the complete loss of its records for that year, the French Chapelle de Musique, as it was known, was directed by Antoine de Longueval. A minor composer in his own right and now overlooked, Longueval came from a powerful noble family whose members served the king in a variety of offices. Antoine had first joined the chapel under Charles VIII and later was made a valet de chambre to Anne Bretagne, then to Louis XII, and held the same office under Francis I. Longueval's staff comprised about twenty-three adult singers and six boys although these forces may well have been augmented at the Field by singers and musicians from the chapels of other nobles present.91
The English Chapel Royal in 1520 was formally headed by its Dean, John Taylor, assisted by the sub-dean Roger Norton, and had a total staff of about thirty-eight. A list of the staff who attended the Field of Cloth of Gold survives. It includes chaplains who were ordained clergy, some of whom assisted in the singing of services; gentlemen, choristers and boys who performed the choral polyphony that added to the aural magnificence of the great liturgical feasts and public occasions such as the Mass on 23 June. The identity of Pierre Mouton's counterpart as organist from the English court is not known precisely. Most commentators suggest that it was probably Benedictus de Opiciis (also known as Opitiis) who came to England from Antwerp and was in Henry's service from 1516. The most recent account of Henry's musical establishment disputes this, however, asserting that Opiciis served in the king's Privy Chamber only, and ordinarily had little connection with the Chapel Royal.92
During the Mass, and as was customary, both kings and queens kissed the Gospel carried to them by Cardinal de Bourbon. As a courtesy, Francis invited Henry to kiss the Gospel first. Henry declined and so Francis did. The same thing happened when they were presented with the ‘Pax’. The two queens also kissed the Gospel but declined the Pax and instead embraced clerically; arm in arm but with no other physical contact. Wolsey ritually washed his hands at three points in the Mass, assisted successively by three barons, three earls and finally by the earl of Northumberland and the dukes of Suffolk and Buckingham.93
At the moment of the elevation of the Host, the most sacred moment of the Mass (or just afterwards, according to one source) there occurred perhaps the most curious and certainly one of the most celebrated incidents of the Field of Cloth of Gold. This was the appearance in the sky above the tiltyard chapel, at a height of a crossbow bolt shot, of a ‘dragon’. A fanciful version of this creature is depicted in the Hampton Court painting. Dubois's poetical description of its appearance and movement is the fullest and is partly quoted as follows:
Lo! flying in great loops, a splendid and hollow monster stretched out in the sky, over the earth, a dreadful monster, of immoderate size, thanks to the cunning art of English constructed on the inside from hoops and on the outside woven from cloth. This shapeless monster is a dragon. From the skies of Ardres it flies to Guînes, this artificial dragon fashioned by the great skill of the English … Its eyes blaze, and with quivering tongue it licks its mouth, which opens wide; the dragon hisses through its gaping jowls … It makes a sound as it advances over the earth with rustling wings while with its grey body it cleaves a path through the air … Whether by means of the wind stirring in the hollow recess of its belly, wind which the dragon draws in through its gaping mouth, or by means of a wagon pulling from afar a thin cable, it already occupies the space next to Guînes.94
The full and surprisingly technical description of its construction and operation suggests very strongly that the object was a kite rather than, as has generally been thought until recently, a firework or line rocket of some kind which perhaps broke away from its moorings and drifted accidentally over the site of the tiltyard. Dubois's description also contradicts the prevailing assumption, probably derived from the Hampton Court painting, that the object was launched inadvertently or otherwise from Guînes. His observation that it was made of timber hoops within and covered with material and that it dipped and rose on the air currents but – most importantly – also followed a clear direction across the sky from Ardres to Guînes, and that it may have been drawn on a thin cable behind a wagon strongly suggests that it was a kite flown deliberately over the site of the Mass. Nevertheless, the blazing eyes and hissing mouth indicate pyrotechnics of some kind. Stephen Bamforth has suggested that there was indeed a fire inside, generating hot air and lift. Given its large size, at nearly four yards long, some sort of hot air principle might well have been required to keep it aloft and give it its dramatic appearance. As he notes, such kite devices, called ‘flying dragons’, were known in Italy at the time and evidently in England too where, as Anglo reminds us, fireworks and associated aerial pageantry were much used in celebrating the eve of St John's Day.95
The author of L'Ordonnance describes the object as ‘une grande salemandre ou dragon faicte artifciellement’. The salamander amidst flames was the principal emblem of Francis. While it was often depicted spitting water, fire-breathing salamander decorations featured at the 1518 Bastille banquet referred to above and on the illuminated frontispiece of another Anglo-French peace treaty signed in 1527.96 The description in L'Ordonnance raises the possibility that it was intended as a tribute either to Francis, or to Henry if it represented the Welsh-Tudor dragon. That it was made by the English is clear, both from Dubois's comment and the 20s. 4d paid to one Thomas Wright for ‘canvas for the dragon’, for which Robert Fowler accounted.97
Whatever it symbolised, given that it was an English creation, why was it launched from the French town of Ardres? If it was a salamander it may have been intended to evoke the journeys to Guînes, and to English territory, taken by Francis himself in pursuit of the peace with Henry being celebrated at the Mass. Such symbolic meaning is a possibility. More likely, however, is that simple aerodynamics determined its direction of travel. In the summer in northern France, as in southern England, the prevailing winds tend to come from a south-south-westerly direction. If the kite was launched from Ardres and pulled towards Guînes, it is likely to have been heading into the prevailing wind and thereby obtaining lift, just as an aircraft does as it takes off. Heading westward towards Guînes into the wind enabled it not only to gain height but to dive and weave in the currents in the manner of any kite and in exactly the way Dubois describes.
More puzzling still than the kite's identity, or even its direction of travel, is the timing of its journey. The appearance of ‘a dreadful monster, of immoderate size’ with its flames, blazing eyes and hissing noises, would surely have been at the very least a distraction from the ceremony on the high altar if not a cause of alarm among some spectators. Dubois asserts this with his customary poetic licence: ‘At first, their faces pale at the sight, and unaware of the trick involved, the crowd, terrified, scatters, seized with panic’.98 No other source confirms a terrified stampede from the galleries and the chapel, but the effect upon the congregation of the dragon's appearance was surely inconsistent with the reverential decorum usually expected at the high point of the celebration of the Eucharist. Being upstaged by a kite at such a moment surely cannot have amused Cardinal Wolsey!
Thus ended the extraordinary meeting of June 1520. What, then, did it all cost? Unfortunately, there can never be a full and final reckoning of the bill for all the labour, provisions and building of the Field. The ultimate financial cost for each side defies exact quantification because complete records of the many dozen heads of expenditure simply do not survive. What can be offered, however, is a general estimate based on ordinary expenditure of the royal households, estimates of expenditure drawn up by the royal councils at the time and of course the evidence of accounts already relied upon for information here.
On this basis, Francis is estimated to have spent around 400,000 livres tournois, or about £40,000, on the Field. He is known to have borrowed 200,000 livres from the bankers of Lyon, and this was spent on preparations including the costs of tents and rich cloths recorded in the artillery accounts. Their final costs may have been as much as 300,000 livres, and it took until 1543 for Francis's officials to get into the royal coffers the whole of the 124,099 livres made from the sale of those materials after the Field. We have seen that the surviving account for the king's banquet costs in June–July 1520 comes to 30,290 livres and the Estates of Normandy are known to have contributed 99,000 livres to the costs. Other regions and towns in Picardy may also have contributed proportionately to the total cost.99
Francis certainly knew how to entertain. The costs associated with the birth and baptism of the Dauphin François in 1518 (including a celebratory tournament) came to 18,647 livres. He spent 2,740 livres on a single banquet given at Cognac in February 1520. He gave three banquets for the English court in the course of the Field. Given the numbers of diners involved, the exceptional number of courses and the emphasis on the highest-quality food and entertainment on these occasions, each banquet is likely to have cost at least half as much again as the one at Cognac, giving a total of between 14,000 and 16,000 livres. This seems a reasonable proportion of the 30,000 accounted for by the chambre aux deniers for the king's expenditure on food and drink during his time in northern France in the summer of 1520.
If the estimate of 400,000 livres is reasonably accurate, it is quite an extraordinary amount to have spent, given the brevity of the event. In broad terms, it cost Francis almost as much to host the Field of Cloth of Gold for two weeks as it did to run the entire French court for a year. From surviving household records and estimates David Potter has shown that this cost around 500,000 livres a year by 1490, that it rose a little after Francis's accession and by 1523 stood at 543,800 livres tournois.100 This figure includes the costs of materials and wages in the king's and queen's separate households, those of the royal children and of Louise de Savoie. The figure compares, for instance, with just under 572,000 livres for the king's non-cavalry-related military expenses, the extraordinaire des guerres, for the whole of 1520 – admittedly a year when he was at peace and one of the lowest annual totals of the whole reign.101 Unfortunately the annual budgets drawn up for the king for the early 1520s do not survive so we have no way of knowing what proportions these amounts represent of his total projected expenditure for 1520.
Things are not much clearer on the income side of the ledger. During the first five years of his reign, the king's annual income is likely to have been about 3–4 million livres based on returns from the hearth tax or taille of about 2.4 million per year in 1515, the salt tax or gabelle of 400,000 livres and indirect taxes of various kinds which brought in about 1.5 million a year in the early part of the reign.102 On that basis, the Field cost the same amount as the king earned from the salt tax in a year or, in other words, approximately one-eighth to one-tenth of his notional annual income for 1520.
The amount Henry spent seems to have been of an equivalent order. In April, May and June 1520, the Treasurer of the Chamber disbursed a total of £41,614 on purchases, wages and other items. That sum approaches almost half the total expenditure of the Chamber for 1520 of £86,030.103 When items evidently unconnected to the Field are subtracted and £600 for shipping the king from Calais to Dover in July are added, we reach a total of about £36,000 expended through the Chamber for the Field during these months. Some of this expenditure was later accounted for through various household departments, such as over £8,000 laid out for victuals, but at least £1,452 was accounted for separately by Sir Edward Guildford on his horse-buying expedition. Ship-building and shipping costs, including those for the construction of the Katherine Pleasaunce, also accounted for elsewhere, come to at least £1,401.
The sums Henry spent on the Field represented a considerable proportion of his annual expenditure for 1520. It has long been acknowledged that Henry had ample liquid assets to pay for what he wanted, but that accurate figures on his income and expenditure in his first two decades as king are very hard to establish. It has been estimated from allocations made by the Exchequer that the wages and provisions of the royal household came to about £16,000 per annum at Henry's accession. By 1520 this assignment was no longer sufficient. The size of the court had grown significantly and the Treasurer of the Chamber began adding money to make up the deficit from the Exchequer assignments. Thereafter the annual cost of wages and provisions seems to have stabilised and inflation was low for the rest of the decade. Subjected to a major overhaul in 1523, direct household expenses were calculated at £25,000 as late as 1538. To the cost of wages and provisions must be added the expenditure of the Great Wardrobe which, in 1513, accounted separately to the Exchequer for about £4,000, a figure likely to have been exceeded in 1520. There were also the king's Privy Purse expenses, which could include those for household and other costs although records do not survive for 1520. On these figures, therefore, an overall basic estimate for the household and wardrobe expenditure of £22,000 per annum in 1520 seems reasonable.104
Henry had spent the great bulk of the wealth he had inherited from his father on his first war against Francis in 1512–13, which cost him around £1 million. Finances were tight in the early 1520s, and he is estimated to have had no more than £80–90,000 a year from his own resources (his ordinary income from the royal demesne). Estimates of his customs and other revenues in 1520 vary from about £42,000 to at least £50,000. Parliamentary subsidies and clerical tenths averaged about £30–40,000 a year in the mid-1520s but these were not collected in peacetime. From 1519, Henry also had £10,000 a year from Francis in part payment of a total French debt by that time of £257,300, including £105,000 for the resale of Tournai in February that year.105 If these estimates are relied upon, then the £36–£38,000 Henry spent on the Field would represent substantially more than an entire year's costs of the royal household. They amounted to a higher proportion of Henry's income than Francis had paid out of his, much larger, revenues.