Introduction

Why the Field of Cloth of Gold?

IN THE EARLY evening light of 7 June 1520, in a narrow field in northern France, two richly dressed horsemen spurred their mounts and set off towards each other. As they gathered speed, both men raised their right hands as if about to draw their swords to attack. Instead, each reached for his feathered hat and doffed it as their cantering horses closed rapidly together. Amidst the cheers of a crowd of onlookers, they saluted each other, then dismounted and embraced like brothers – for that is what their meeting that evening proclaimed them to be.

The men were two of the greatest kings of the European Renaissance, the 25-year-old King Francis I of France and King Henry VIII of England then aged 29. They met for just over a fortnight between the towns of Guînes and Ardres in what is now the Pas-de-Calais in northern France. Together, they hosted a tournament held to celebrate peace between England and France, which was, itself, part of a wider Universal Peace among all Christian princes that had been agreed in London in October 1518. The event which this meeting inaugurated soon assumed mythic status in the annals of English and French history. It is known as the Field of Cloth of Gold. This book explains why the meeting took place, how it was organised, who its participants were and why it is important in the history of Anglo-French relations and in the broader history of Renaissance Europe.

Written against the background of nineteenth-century conceptions of diplomacy, the prevailing view of the Field of Cloth of Gold is that it was a colossal waste of time and money. This is largely because Francis and Henry swore to be at peace in 1518, met as allies in 1520 and yet were at war by 1522. The event has been characterised as an entertaining instance of curious, theatrical medievalism of little ultimate significance. Nineteenth-century writers and artists exploited its dramatic and comic potential.1 Writing in the aftermath of two world wars, twentieth-century commentators have generally viewed the Field with deep scepticism, even disappointment, as it failed to bring about a genuine peace. They regarded it as explicable, if at all, only as a deceptive cover for ‘real’ plans for war on each side.²

This book offers a very different view. It argues that in 1520 war was the very thing that both sides hoped to avoid – and to profit immensely by doing so. It also shows why those hopes were to be disappointed. The Field of Cloth of Gold was, first and foremost, a tournament held to inaugurate peace and alliance between France and England, two ancient enemies. That being so, the event gave physical expression, as it were, to genuine hopes of peace between many other ‘ancient enemies’ among European rulers at a moment of crisis and profound change across the Continent.

Our knowledge of the Field of Cloth of Gold comes mainly from the voluminous diplomatic correspondence about it and from administrative records drawn up by French and English court officials. The first narratives of the Field appeared in France in the early autumn of 1520. Most were comparatively brief, but celebratory and optimistic. They presented the Field as exceptional and were avidly read in Western Europe and beyond.³ It is comparatively rare to find a major sixteenth-century event about which so much information survives. The Field of Cloth of Gold therefore provides important, and hitherto largely untapped, sources for the history of sixteenth-century material culture. It reveals much about subjects as varied as food preparation and banqueting, building techniques, tapestries and furnishings, horses, armour, transport and shipping. It also shows how royal courts worked and the effect of monarchy upon the lives of the gentry and working people of England and France. It offers striking insights into the mentality of the period, especially about ideas of masculinity and kingship and shows us how peace-making actually worked in an age of ‘personal monarchy’.

For it to reveal its true meaning, the Field of Cloth of Gold has to be seen against the background of nearly two centuries in which most European states, large and small, monarchical, princely and republican, had experienced prolonged periods of foreign or civil warfare. England and France had fought the Hundred Years War between 1337 and 1453. No sooner had that conflict ground to an unresolved halt than the internecine strife of the Wars of the Roses began in England and lasted, off and on, until the middle years of the reign of Henry VII, the first Tudor king. A generation of similar dynastic conflict in Iberia was only ended by the marriage of Ferdinand of Aragon and Isabella of Castile and their joint conquest of Granada by 1492. Meanwhile, the kings of France, having got rid of the English, had also to face down aristocratic challenges to their authority in the ‘War of the Public Weal’ in 1465 and ‘La Guerre Folle’ in 1485. They then turned their military might against the Italian states in pursuit of various dynastic claims to the duchy of Milan and the kingdom of Naples. Into these ‘Italian wars’ as they became known, the papacy and the king of Aragon were routinely and destructively drawn, to the despair of commentators like Machiavelli. As if all this were not enough from Christendom's collective point of view, in 1453 Constantinople fell to Mehmed II, called the Conqueror, Sultan of the Ottoman Turks.

For most late-medieval rulers, war was, first and foremost, a way of asserting personal power and military prowess in order to became famous. Few of the wars fought during these years were motivated by purely strategic considerations. Conflicts between monarchs pursuing dynastic territorial claims were often referred to as wars of ‘magnificence, honour and profit’, reflecting their very personal nature. As nobles and as crowned heads of state, kings were expected to fight in defence of their national patrimony and to do so successfully, sharing the profits of conquered lands with their leading supporters. Modern sensibilities shy away from rejoicing at most military victories and warfare in general, but in the early sixteenth century the defeat of an enemy in a decisive battle fought in an apparently ‘just’ (or at least reasonably justifiable) cause with a minimum of casualties and civilian trauma was the raison d'être of kings.

Yet this was not quite the whole story. There were a number of constraints upon the ambitions of rulers. Leaders had, at the very least, to be seen to respect Christian injunctions against lawless violence. War in any age is also astoundingly expensive. No sensible monarch would, without good prospects of success, jeopardise the lives and livelihoods of his subjects in a reckless war. Keeping the peace when there was no reason for war was as important as being a warrior. The resolution of the paradox between the duty to practise war and that to maintain peace lay in the ‘just war’ doctrine and in the code of chivalry. Chivalry defined a set of ideals and aspirational behaviours that regulated the expression of violence and hostility among those entitled to bear arms.4

Against the background of apparent danger from without, the ancient ideal of peace within Christendom brought about by rulers acting in concert began to be articulated anew. Somewhat ironically, the accession, within a few short years of each other, of three young and well-educated monarchs further stimulated these hopes. The great biblical humanist, Erasmus of Rotterdam, longed for an end to endemic European warfare. His plea for rulers to show leadership through peace rather than war was expressed in three of his most famous works. His Institutio principis christiani (The Education of a Christian Prince) was published in 1516. It argued that the true glory of princes lay in the peaceful stewardship of their lands rather than in expensive and destructive wars. More explicit condemnations of war followed in 1517: Dulce bellum inexpertis (War is sweet to those who know nothing of it) and Querela pacis (The complaint of peace). For Erasmus, war was profoundly sinful unless undertaken in the last resort to punish or restrain evil-doing. Sir Thomas More took a similar line in his book Utopia, which also appeared in 1516. In treatises directed towards Francis I, Guillaume Budé, France's leading biblical humanist, had emphasised the importance of peace and good government as proof of great monarchy. These publications were read in ecclesiastical, courtly and academic circles and the hopes they expressed were widely shared. The rhetoric of peace as a noble Christian virtue worthy of the greatest princes came into its own in 1518. In the late summer of that year, news of plans to create and maintain international peace and co-operation began to reach European courts and capitals.

The two men responsible for this attempt to create a European-wide peace were not secular rulers, but princes of the Church. They were Pope Leo X and Cardinal Thomas Wolsey. Giovanni de' Medici, the scion of the great Florentine house, became pope in 1513. He was alarmed at the Ottoman conquest of Persia, Syria and Egypt and the potential threat to Hungary. During a meeting with Francis I at Bologna in 1515, Leo asked him to attack Sultan Selim I, but received an equivocal reply. In November 1517, Leo first called for a campaign against the enemies of Christendom, just as Urban II had done at Clermont in 1095. This military campaign was to be led by the Holy Roman Emperor Maximilian and the king of France. England, Spain and Portugal were to supply ships for an attempt to reconquer Constantinople. For this to happen, however, the rulers of Europe had to be at peace with each other. On 6 March 1518, therefore, the pope published a plan for a Europe-wide five-year truce. He would arbitrate on all existing disputes between rulers and thus bring about a basis for co-operation. Papal legates were dispatched to proclaim the truce to the rulers of England, France and Spain and to Emperor Maximilian.5

Thomas Wolsey had first entered royal service in England under Henry VII and was made almoner to Henry VIII in 1509. His appetite for hard work, command of detail and his personal charm enabled him to become, within three years, the dominant force in Henry's council. By 1514, Wolsey was Lord Chancellor of England and Archbishop of York. He was made a cardinal by Leo X in 1515 and incorporated the pope's personal badge of the red lion in his own coat of arms. His intelligent insight and his high dignity in the Church gave Wolsey an international perspective and an awareness of interests beyond those of England and its king. Supported strongly by Henry, in 1518 Wolsey insisted that Leo make him a papal legate a latere (literally one sent from the pope's side) of equal status with Leo's appointed legate to England, Cardinal Campeggio. Wolsey then rather hijacked the papal plans brought by his Italian colleague. He made London, not Rome, the centre of attention. Instead of the planned five-year truce between princes that Leo envisaged, Wolsey wanted to create a multilateral treaty which would be the basis of a permanent European peace. Under this plan, all participants would commit themselves not to attack any other signatory to the treaty. Disputes likely to provoke war were to be referred to Henry, not Pope Leo, for arbitration and if no resolution could be arrived at, the rest of the signatories would attack the aggressor and prosecute war against him until peace had been restored and reparation made.

Incredible as it may seem to modern eyes, Wolsey's ambitious scheme was widely and rapidly accepted. By October 1518, all the major European sovereignties and a host of minor ones had committed themselves to the treaty of London, also known as the treaty of Universal Peace. The linchpin of the international league was a set of subsidiary treaties of peace and alliance between England and France, also formally sworn to in October 1518. The Anglo-French alliance was secured by the marriage of the Dauphin François to Henry's heir, Princess Mary. One of the terms of the treaty was that the two kings were to meet personally to affirm their alliance and their commitment to the Universal Peace. That is why the Field of Cloth of Gold was held and why Cardinal Wolsey was deeply involved in planning and organising every aspect of the event.

Given the important roles that Wolsey envisaged for Henry and Francis as chief maintainers of Christian peace, the way they related to each other as allies was to be the example to all the other adherents to the Universal Peace. Never before had a display of amicable Franco-English relations had such important implications for the rest of Europe. Never before had a meeting been required to be quite as spectacular, as impressive and compelling to the minds of fellow princes, as that in 1520. There were, nevertheless, several important precedents in medieval Anglo-French history that were drawn upon in preparing the Field of Cloth of Gold.

In 1254, King Henry III of England had crossed the Narrow Sea to meet his French counterpart, Louis IX, who was anxious to secure peace with England. He came to meet Henry at Chartres after Henry had visited the shrine of St Edmund Rich at the Cistercian abbey at Pontigny. From Chartres the two kings rode to Paris where Henry III gave a huge banquet in the Hall of the Old Temple. The chronicler Matthew Paris affirmed that it was one of the grandest ever held and one by which ‘the honour of the king of England and, in fact, all the English, was much increased and exalted’.6 In November 1259 Louis IX once more received Henry in Paris. After some last-minute wrangles, a treaty of peace was proclaimed at the royal palace in early December. Insofar as the 1259 treaty of Paris was designed to end Anglo-French conflict and secure French financial support for the king of England, it somewhat anticipates the 1518 treaty of London. The hospitality provided during its signing in Paris also anticipates that offered in 1520.⁷

Even closer in spirit to the Field of Cloth of Gold, and in virtually the same location in a large encampment made especially for the occasion, was the meeting on 27 October 1396 between Richard II and Charles VI. They met to confirm an Anglo-French peace agreed in March the same year which it was hoped would bring an end to over half a century of Anglo-French conflict precipitated by the failure of the 1259 treaty of Paris. It was secured by Richard's marriage to the six-year-old Princess Isabelle of France. He came to Ardres to meet his bride. Just as Henry and Francis would do in 1520, Richard and Charles advanced over an equal distance to greet each other before their assembled courts. They shook hands, kissed, and presents were exchanged. The meeting was characterised by the same strict reciprocity and protocol as that of 1520. There were no paramilitary games at the 1396 meeting, but the banquets and masques held were as lavish as any at the Field. Prompted by his love of personal display, in which Henry would prove to be more than his equal, Richard appeared in steadily more splendid outfits of velvet and presented yet more expensive gifts to Charles and his entourage. He spent nearly £15,000 on the event, almost as much, in relative terms, as Henry would spend in 1520. As Nigel Saul has observed of Richard, he ‘was determined to make a vivid and lasting impression on those present. Massive spending on gifts and fine clothing ensured that he did so.’⁸ Exactly the same thing was true of the two kings who met in the same place over a century later.

As these meetings demonstrate, peace could be a perfectly acceptable alternative to war for most rulers, provided that it, too, had a chivalric and ennobling quality about it. Whether at war or at peace, monarchs had always to respond to the demands of the ‘magnificence, honour and profit’ mentality. For this model of ‘chivalric’ peace to work, one thing was essential. Each king had to feel that his status had at least been protected, and may even have been enhanced by it. Despite the idealistic and somewhat abstract rhetoric with which it was enacted, peace-making between princes was never done for its own sake. It had always to result in peace ‘with honour’ or advantage. A successful peace treaty made room for each participant to assert his own status and power in activities other than war between them. In 1518, for example, Francis got back the city of Tournai lost to the English in war in 1513. For his part, Henry secured increased annual payments from Francis that he regarded as ‘tribute’ for ‘his’ kingdom of France. Thus, each monarch gained something from the other that strengthened his status among his fellow princes and the nobles of his own realm. In making peace with the king of France, Henry always strove to appear the magnanimous friend, bestowing peace upon his fellow sovereign. Francis responded in kind, as the great lord and even the patron of his English counterpart. Thus assured of his own status, each monarch could take part in a joint enterprise whereby they, together, displayed their power to the rest of the world.

In 1520, there was between Henry and Francis a deeply felt ambivalence, ambivalence in the true sense of countervailing strengths. Each man felt a mix of positive and negative feelings towards the other. He admired his rival but did not easily trust him. Each man could welcome the other as friend and ally while still resenting his potential as an enemy. At the Field of Cloth of Gold, this ambivalence expressed itself in a spirit of demonstrative masculinity, articulated through the chivalric code. At the heart of that code of male bonding and service to the honour of God and women was, paradoxically, aggressive competition between elite men for each other's approval.9 Displays of friendship and peace made between the two kings were, therefore, as much warnings against aggression as apparent invitations to co-operation.

Relatively rarely in the history of Western European monarchy have there been two sovereigns better able to use their own bodies, adorned and unadorned, as a means to express their personal power. The 1520 tournament acted as a metaphor for the agreement of peace and alliance between them. Thundering down the lists in full armour, displaying spectacularly colourful heraldic devices, Henry and Francis presented a compelling spectacle to the assembled elite audience, to the world beyond and to each other. Simultaneously celebrating his capacity to wage war while forsaking it in the interests of chivalric brotherhood, each knight gave what he considered to be manifest proof of his own exceptionality as man and monarch. Evidently, these kings knew how to act out war. Wolsey was determined that the Field of Cloth of Gold should teach all princes anew how to enact peace.

One European sovereign who Wolsey was most anxious should learn this lesson of glamorous peace-making was Charles, King of Aragon. He was the grandson of Ferdinand of Aragon and of the Habsburg Holy Roman Emperor, Maximilian. In June 1519, Charles was elected emperor in succession to his grandfather. Born in 1500, Charles was younger than either Henry or Francis and was still in the process of acquiring that immense collection of kingships and lordships in Germany, Austria and elsewhere that would finally constitute his empire at its widest extent. For ease of exposition in what follows, however, he will be referred to by his highest dignity as Emperor Charles V.10 Francis I and Charles V were keen rivals with many territorial claims against each other. Between them there was already deep and lasting suspicion and hostility, quite different from the ambivalence between Francis and Henry. This hostility was widely known throughout Europe, not least at the English court. Although by his marriage to Katherine of Aragon, Henry was Charles's uncle, he barely knew the younger man. For his part, Charles was happy to style himself ‘nephew’ in correspondence, but had hitherto paid only formal respects to his English relative. Charles was, however, genuinely alarmed at the Anglo-French reconciliation under the treaty of London and was extremely anxious about the proposed meeting. He was determined to wreck it if at all possible or, failing that, to make the other two kings take proper account of him and do nothing together to his prejudice. Knowing that the emperor's participation was vital to the success of the Universal Peace, Wolsey encouraged friendship between Henry and Charles as much as between Henry and Francis. While he could not prevent the Field, Charles ensured that he met Henry immediately before and after it. Throughout its duration, Charles remained within his Flemish territories, a little more than a day's ride from the scenes of luxury at Guînes and Ardres. His near presence effectively turned what was originally conceived as a meeting between two new allies into a tense encounter between three rivals.

As all these protagonists understood, one ruler could conduct a generous and equal friendship with another only if he had sufficient personal and material resources. Both Francis and Henry were determined that they should not be seen as inferior to their rival. The words and actions with which they interacted, either directly or through their courtiers, at the event were expressions of each man's sense of his own honour and ‘their need continually to be acknowledged as honourable by fellow nobles’, that is, each other.11 The stakes were high for both kings and with so many of their subjects involved, there was a palpable sense of excitement, but also danger, at the Field. Strict security arrangements were put in place by both sides to guard the two royal families. The very tight protocols agreed for every aspect of the Field were designed to reduce the potential for embarrassment, or worse, to be inflicted by one side upon the other. Tensions reached fever pitch in the days and hours immediately before the kings' first meeting on 7 June and barely subsided thereafter.

Kings were seen to be at their strongest and safest when in the midst of an impressive entourage. Each monarch eventually brought with him a retinue of around 6,000 people. The royal court was the institution designed to protect and display the king to his people and to his fellow sovereigns in ways that would compel acknowledgement of his honour. This, and the fact that the Field was a tournament, meant that it fell to high-ranking court and army officers to prepare and conduct it. French participation was overseen by Gaspard de Coligny, seigneur de Châtillon. As a Marshal of France and a knight of the Order of St Michael, Châtillon was one of France's most senior military commanders. He was commissioned to agree with the English representatives a place for the initial meeting of the kings and a site for the construction of lists for the projected tournament, and to oversee preparations to lodge Francis I and his court at Ardres.12

The English preparations were entrusted to a team headed by Charles Somerset, Earl of Worcester. Born Charles Beaufort in about 1460, Worcester became Lord Chamberlain in 1508. He fought in the war in France in 1513 and was made earl in February 1514. In October the same year he escorted Mary Tudor to France for her marriage to Louis XII. Four years later, he received Francis I's ratification of the Universal Peace. Worcester's status and recent experience in France made him the ideal man to arrange the meeting.¹³ Worcester was assisted by three men who arrived in Calais on 17 March 1520, nine days before Francis formally ratified an agreement to meet Henry. They were Sir Edward Belknap, Sir Nicholas Vaux and Sir William Sandys.¹⁴ All three were experienced administrators and soldiers who had served Henry VII in various capacities and gone on to senior positions under Henry VIII. Sir Edward Belknap had been Surveyor of Crown Lands and Master of Wards since 1514.¹⁵ Sir Nicholas Vaux was Lieutenant of Guînes in 1520. He had participated in the 1518 ratification embassy to France.¹⁶ Sir William Sandys had been Treasurer of Calais since October 1517. At the king's command, he worked with Wolsey at the Calais conference of 1521. In April 1523 he was made Baron Sandys. Three years later, he succeeded the earl of Worcester as Lord Chamberlain and exchanged the treasurership of Calais for the lieutenancy of Guînes. He is principally known for his fine manor house, ‘the Vyne’, near Basingstoke where the king visited him several times.¹⁷

The Field of Cloth of Gold set the tone for Anglo-French relations for the remainder of the reigns of Henry VIII and Francis I. During long periods in the 1520s and 1530s the rivalry between them was, paradoxically, expressed in extravagant demonstrations of ‘peace-making’ and of royal brotherhood. From Henry's initial point of view it seemed that the Field of Cloth had worked like a charm. After some years of political isolation, he was now allied to the two most powerful monarchs of Western Europe. He held the balance, or perhaps more accurately the imbalance, of power between them. Both Francis and Charles appeared respectful of his potential as an ally and the leader of a Europe-wide non-aggression compact. In championing Christian peace, Henry appeared at his strongest and seemed to have everybody where he wanted them. But this was something of a hope-filled delusion. For all their rivalry and suspicion, Henry and Francis did not lack peaceful intentions towards each other, but the emerging power of Charles V threatened to make a lasting equilibrium between them virtually impossible. This was because it was all too likely that, in pursuit of claims against each other, the king of France or Charles would take it into his head to test Henry's capacity to maintain the Universal Peace. This is, of course, exactly what both of them immediately proceeded to do, with profound and destructive consequences for the harmony of Christendom.

All that lay in the future. In the summer of 1520 the kings of England and France were intent upon making dramatic gestures and statements to show that they were exceptionally great kings. They sought thereby to secure the loyalty and affection of their own subjects and the respect and co-operation of their rivals. This approval and this respect were their greatest sources of security and energy and the intense desire for them resulted in the extraordinary display of human and material resources mounted between Ardres and Guînes at the Field of Cloth of Gold.