Who shall record, or even refer to the hopes, and feelings, and wishes, and thoughts, and reflections of the thousands congregated thither; each one with feelings as intense, with hopes as individually important as those which influenced the royal King of France, or the majestic monarch of England! The loftiest of Christendom’s knights, the loveliest of Christendom’s daughters were assembled here; and the courteous Bayard, the noble Tremouille, the lofty Bourbon, felt inspired more gallantly, if possible, than was even their wont, when contending in all love and amity with the proudest of England’s champions, in presence of the fairest of her blue-eyed maidens,—the noblest of her courtly dames.
Nor were the lofty and noble alone there congregated. After the magnificent structure for the king and court, after every thing in the shape of a tenement in, out, or about the little town of Guisnes, and the neighbouring hamlets, were occupied, two thousand eight hundred tents were set up on the side of the English alone. No noble or baron would be absent; but likewise knights, and squires, and yeomen flocked to the scene: citizens and city wives disported their richest silks and their heaviest chains; jews went for gain, pedlars for knavery, tradespeople for their craft, rogues for mischief. Then there were “vagaboundes, plowmen, laborers, wagoners, and beggers, that for drunkennes lay in routes and heapes, so great resorte thether came, that bothe knightes and ladies that wer come to see the noblenes, were faine to lye in haye and strawe, and hold theim thereof highly pleased.”
The accommodations provided for the king and privileged members of his court on this occasion were more than magnificent; a vast and splendid edifice that seemed to be endued with the magnificence, and to rise almost with the celerity of that prepared by the slaves of the lamp, where the richest tapestry and silk embroidery—the costliest produce of the most accomplished artisans, were almost unnoticed amid the gold and jewellery by which they were surrounded—where all that art could produce, or riches devise had been lavished—all this has been often described. And the tent itself, the nucleus of the show, the point where the “brother” kings were to confer, was hung round with cloth of gold: the posts, the cones, the cords, the tents, were all of the same precious metal, which glittered here in such excessive profusion as to give that title to the meeting which has superseded all others—“The Field of the Cloth of Gold.”
This gaudy pageant was the prelude to an era of great interest, for while dwelling on the “galanty shew” we cannot forget that now reigned Solyman the magnificent, and that this was the age of Leo the Tenth; that Charles the Fifth was now beginning his influential course; that a Sir Thomas More graced England; and that in Germany there was “one Martin Luther,” who “belonged to an order of strolling friars.” Under Leo’s munificent encouragement, Rafaello produced those magnificent creations which have been the inspiration of subsequent ages; and at home, under Wolsey’s enlightened patronage, colleges were founded, learning was encouraged, and the College of Physicians first instituted in 1518, found in him one of its warmest advocates and firmest supporters.
A modern writer gives the following amusing picture of part of the bustle attendant on the event we are considering. “The palace (of Westminster) and all its precincts became the elysium of tailors, embroiderers, and sempstresses. There might you see many a shady form gliding about from apartment to apartment, with smiling looks and extended shears, or armed with ell-wands more potent than Mercury’s rod, driving many a poor soul to perdition, and transforming his goodly acres into velvet suits, with tags of cloth of gold. So continual were the demands upon every kind of artisan, that the impossibility of executing them threw several into despair. One tailor who is reported to have undertaken to furnish fifty embroidered suits in three days, on beholding the mountain of gold and velvet that cumbered his shop-board, saw, like Brutus, the impossibility of victory, and, with Roman fortitude, fell on his own shears. Three armourers are said to have been completely melted with the heat of their furnaces; and an unfortunate goldsmith swallowed molten silver to escape the persecutions of the day.
“The road from London to Canterbury was covered during one whole week with carts and waggons, mules, horses, and soldiers; and so great was the confusion, that marshals were at length stationed to keep the whole in order, which of course increased the said confusion a hundred fold. So many were the ships passing between Dover and Calais, that the historians affirm they jostled each other on the road like a herd of great black porkers.
“The King went from station to station like a shepherd, driving all the better classes of the country before him, and leaving not a single straggler behind.”
Though we do not implicitly credit every point of this humorous statement, we think a small portion of description from the old chronicler Hall (we will really inflict only a small portion on our readers) will justify a good deal of it; but more especially it will enlighten us as to some of the elaborate conceits of the day, in which, it seems, the needle was as fully occupied as the pen.
Indeed, what would the “Field of the Cloth of Gold” have been without the skill of the needlewoman? Would it have been at all?
“The Frenche kyng sette hymself on a courser barded, covered with purple sattin, broched with golde, and embraudered with corbyns fethers round and buckeled; the fether was blacke and hached with gold. Corbyn is a rauen, and the firste silable of corbyn is Cor, whiche is a harte, a penne in English, is a fether in Frenche, and signifieth pain, and so it stode; this fether round was endles, the buckels wherwith the fethers wer fastened, betokeneth sothfastnes, thus was the devise, harte fastened in pain endles, or pain in harte fastened endles.