Henry’s desire to sweeten the ‘time of his pleasure’ inspired the only major innovation in government before the late 1520s. In 1518 he followed the French court in creating a series of new positions in the royal household, those of gentleman of the privy chamber. The old king’s privy chamber servants had been lowly born valets, menial-status nonentities. Henry’s privy chamber would be staffed by handsome, high-spirited young gentlemen, his boon companions in the revels at court. These ‘minions’ were blamed for Henry’s ‘incessant gambling’, and for taking undue advantage of their familiar attendance upon him. Certainly, their intimacy with the king gave them a head start in the scramble for royal favour, particularly as Henry expanded their budget and remit to take in diplomatic missions and other secret affairs of state. The privy chamber men became Wolsey’s main rivals for the king’s ear, and though cardinal and council attempted to limit the privy chamber’s influence, they were largely unsuccessful, simply because of the personal esteem that these mostly high-born and elegant young men enjoyed in the eyes of the king. When Wolsey fell from power in 1529, he immediately submitted to arrest by the privy chamber man sent to apprehend him, without waiting to examine any formal warrant, since as the messenger was ‘oon [one] of the kynges privy chamber’ that was ‘sufficient warraunt to arrest the greattest peere of this realme’.39
Wars of magnificence
The young Henry VIII’s positioning of himself on the international stage represented a clear departure from his father’s handling of foreign affairs. Henry VII’s serpentine dealings with his fellow princes and the papacy were not for Henry VIII. Raised on stories of chivalric derring-do and English conquest in France, he dreamed of emulating his Plantagenet heroes Edward III and Henry V. By the time he became king he was determined to ‘create such a fine opinion about his valour among all men that they would clearly understand that his ambition was not merely to equal but indeed to exceed the glorious deeds of his ancestors’.40
A century later, when princely politics was guided more by reason of state than questing after chivalric glory, Henry’s foreign wars were criticised by Ralegh as ‘vaine enterprises abroade’.41 Yet to judge Henry’s foreign policy, as Ralegh and many since have done, in terms of territory gained or against some putative national interest is to miss the point. Although he never seriously troubled the French monarchy – hardly surprising given the disparity in resources between the two kingdoms – Henry certainly achieved his other main aim: to cut a dash as a warrior-king. Moreover, as with Henry VII’s Breton wars, there was a domestic rationale for his ‘enterprises abroade’. Even that most cynical of political theorists Niccolò Machiavelli (1469–1527) believed that nothing brought a prince more prestige, and therefore loyalty, than ‘great exployts, and rare trialls of himselfe in Heroicke actions’.42 Style counted as much as substance therefore; indeed, style was substance. As Henry himself put it: ‘the fame, glory reputacion, honnour, and strength of Princes depende upon exterior appearances, and opynyons of the worlde, which many tymes preveyleth and is better than trouthe, or at the lest standeth in more sted’.43
Yet Machiavelli also believed that a state’s capacity and readiness for war was what created civic virtue, and guarded against decadence. Henry too was well-read in the classical tradition that war was essential to the health of the state, and that long periods of peace could lead to softness and corruption. His enthusiasm for fighting the French may have owed at least something to a princely concern for fostering a properly warlike spirit in the English nation. Belligerence was not the antithesis to the studia humanitatis and a taste for classical literature; it was its complement.
Henry’s career as a warrior-king began as it would end, with an invasion of France. In 1513 he led a force of 30,000 men over to Calais, where it joined an army led by Emperor Maximilian and advanced towards the emperor’s territories in modern-day Belgium. On the way, the English cavalry surprised and routed a French supply column – a minor skirmish that Henry shamelessly extolled as a famous victory. The allied armies then took the French-held towns of Thérouanne and Tournai, and would have marched on Paris if the emperor’s Swiss allies had not deserted him.
Yet while Henry was casting greedy eyes over northern France, a more significant war was being fought in northern England. The resumption of hostilities with France, and bluster from Henry about his title to sovereignty over Scotland, had reactivated the ‘auld alliance’ between the French and the Scots. In August 1513, Henry’s brother-in-law, James IV of Scotland, crossed the Tweed at the head of one of the strongest Scottish armies ever to invade England. Facing him was a large English force led by the veteran soldier the earl of Surrey. When the two armies met at Flodden, in Northumberland, James deployed his troops Swiss-style in massed formations of pikemen. But the uneven ground and English artillery fire created gaps in the Scots’ ranks that Surrey’s billmen exploited to lethal effect. In four hours of carnage, 10,000 Scottish soldiers and virtually an entire generation of Scotland’s political leaders were killed. Most catastrophically of all for the Scots, the dead included James IV himself. Queen Katherine, who was leading a reserve army northwards when news of Flodden reached England, sent James’s blood-soaked tunic to Henry as a trophy. But Henry, flushed with the conquest of Tournai and obsessed with recovering ‘our kingdom of France’, failed to follow up on this victory with any urgency, and the chance to entrench English influence in Edinburgh, or to secure England’s vulnerable northern border, was lost.
Henry’s continental conquests, though meagre, were sufficient to establish him as a player of consequence in European affairs. Having humbled France – or so he imagined – he concluded a peace in 1514 that confirmed what he now regarded as his superiority over the French king, Louis XII. The enormous expense of the 1513 campaign rather took the shine off Henry’s ‘victory’, however, and his decision to retain and fortify the strategically irrelevant Tournai put further strain on crown finances. All the reserves that his father had accumulated over many years had disappeared in the pursuit of a single campaign. The cost of the war amounted to £992,000, as against an annual royal income of well under £150,000. Moreover, this expensively purchased reputation as Europe’s jeune premier was soon under threat: first by the accession of the young and dynamic Francis I (1494–1547) as king of France in 1515, and then in 1519 by the election of the equally formidable Charles V (1500–58) as Holy Roman Emperor in place of his recently deceased grandfather Maximilian. Charles V’s father, Philip the Fair, duke of Burgundy, had married a daughter of Ferdinand and Isabella, and had succeeded to the Spanish throne. Charles’s inheritance thus combined the kingdoms of Spain, the Spanish conquests in southern Italy and in the New World, the Habsburg lands in central and eastern Europe, and the Habsburgs’ Burgundian territories in eastern France and the Low Countries, in one massive dynastic conglomeration. The rivalry between Charles V and Francis I would dominate European politics for the next thirty years, and leave Henry with seemingly little room for manoeuvre. In effect, he had three choices: he could ally with Francis, ally with Charles, or remain in dangerous isolation. In typically audacious manner, he chose none of these options. If he could not head the league table in waging wars of magnificence, then the next-best thing was to arrange a magnificent peace. Skilfully stage-managed by Wolsey, the 1518 treaty of London – a non-aggression pact between the European powers in response to Ottoman advances in eastern Europe – allowed Henry to pose as the arbiter of all Christendom.
Henry’s ostentatious peacemaking climaxed in 1520 on the Field of the Cloth of Gold, near Calais. Anxious to assert the power of their crowns in the face of Charles V’s election as emperor, Henry