To save human life and to alleviate suffering is a meritorious act that brings its own reward; but in spite of this, and although the newly made Queen was thus enabled to realise her own influence, she must have found her honeymoon a season full of dread, revealing as it did the terrible insecurity of lives dependent on the fiat of so capricious a tyrant as her royal mate.
CHAPTER IV
THE KING’S HOUSEHOLD
Not Solomon in all his glory—nor Sultan Suleyman the Magnificent of Istambul—was lodged more sumptuously than Tudor King Henry VIII of England. When Katherine Parr espoused the much-married monarch, she found herself mistress of a score of royal palaces, each furnished in a manner not unworthy of the splendour of Aladdin after that fortunate youth had gained possession of his magic Lamp, and served by the most numerous retinue ever brought together in this ancient kingdom of ours. The Venetian envoys, accustomed to the luxury and artistic elegance of the Queen of the Adriatic, were fairly dazzled by the sight of the treasures Henry gathered about him. Although within the space of a few brief years he suffered vandal hands to rob his country of more noble abbeys, churches, libraries, and works of art than had been destroyed by time and foreign and civil war combined since William’s Conquest, the King’s own artistic sense was highly developed, and he revelled, with a glee that sometimes verged upon the childish, in pomp and luxury and all things rare and beautiful.[36] To the confiscated collections of Wolsey he added the spoils of a hundred monasteries, and the Inventory of his effects, taken a few days after his death,[37] fills two enormous folio volumes preserved among the Harleian Papers in the British Museum. It is written in a round, legible hand, on the finest paper of the period, and a glimpse of its contents cannot fail to excite the longing of the virtuoso and to stir the imagination as effectually as any brilliant page of description in the Arabian Nights. A perusal of these bulky tomes facilitates some partial conception of the extraordinary magnificence of the Court at which Lady Jane Grey figured as a child, and whence, no doubt, she derived that taste for “costlie attire, music and other vanities,” which was to evoke the unfavourable criticism of her Puritan friends at Zurich and Strasburg, who exhorted her, if she really desired to save her soul, to forswear all such trash, and imitate “the simplicity in dress and modesty in demeanour” practised by her cousin the Princess Elizabeth. We find hundreds of entries touching bedsteads, tables, card or playing tables, chairs, couches and footstools of carved ebony, cedar-wood, walnut, or oak, inlaid with mother-of-pearl, ivory, or rich metal wirework, and upholstered in silk, satin, velvet, or Florence brocade, fringed with gold, and even with strings of seed-pearls. Persian and Turkish carpets, silks and woollen, covered every available space in corridor, gallery, hall, and bedchamber, and there is mention of one especially wonderful carpet “of silk,” probably Persian, “nine yards long by two and a half wide.” One chamber was decorated with “101 yards of white satin embroidered and fringed with gold,” while the walls of another were panelled with purple cloth of gold, i.e. purple silk shot with gold.
There must have been some hundreds of complete sets of the costliest tapestries and arras in the various royal palaces. Wolsey, whose passion for tapestry as a mural decoration became quite unreasonable, collected scores of the finest specimens the looms of Italy and Flanders could produce and lavish outlay secure. After his fall these remained as he had left them at Hampton Court, where we still admire the splendid series representing the “Story of Abraham,” designed by Raphael’s pupil, Bernard van Orly, and another of yet earlier date illustrating the “Triumphs,” of which three, those of “Death,” “Renown,” and “Time,” occupy their original positions in Henry VIII’s Great Watching or Guard Chamber. As we gaze on their faded beauty, we should remind ourselves that the immense quantity of gold thread wrought with infinite care and taste into their composition, and now tarnished, glistened in King Henry’s time in all the glory of its freshness. In the Audience Chamber at Whitehall many a great Ambassador may have envied the arras hangings, representing the “Acts of the Apostles,”[38] from designs by Raphael presented to the King by Pope Leo X when he gave him the proud title of “Defender of the Faith.”
The walls of three State rooms at Hampton Court were hung “with cloth of gold, blue cloth of gold, crimson velvet upon velvet, tawny velvet upon velvet, green velvet figury, and cloth of bawdekin,” a regal material woven partly of silk and partly of gold. Some of the chief tapestries at Whitehall represented the “History of Our Lady,” the “Story of Ahasuerus and Esther,” the “Crucifixion,” the “Story of Apollo and Daphne,” “St. George and the Dragon,” “Hawking and Hunting Scenes,” the “Siege of Jerusalem,” and many other like episodes in sacred and profane history and in mythology. The King would order a score of sets of tapestry at once, and would spend a sum equal to £10,000 or £15,000 of our money upon them. The overflow of tapestries, “picture-hangings,” Oriental silks, Genoa velvets, Florence and Venice brocades, curtains of French lace, Chinese silks, and costly furniture, went to the State rooms of the stern old Tower; to Windsor—where a few remnants of Henry VIII’s belongings still remain; to Woodstock, to Richmond, to Greenwich, to Oatlands in Surrey—where Prince Edward often lived; to Newhall to Havering atte Bower—the chief country seat of Princess Mary; to Hatfield and Enfield Chase—where Princess Elizabeth spent her girlhood; to the Queen’s dower-houses at Hanworth and Chelsea; and above all, to that marvel of the age, the new Palace of Nonesuch, which Henry had built him at Cheam, Surrey.[39] At Whitehall there were scores of cupboards crammed with gold and silver plate, and there were ivory and ebony cabinets with crystal doors, in which glittered strange Italian jewels, and curiosities from all parts of the then known world. In none of Henry’s palaces does there seem to have been a gallery exclusively devoted to pictures, such as would be found in most contemporary Italian and French royal and princely residences; but there were plenty of pictures or “painted tables,” as the Inventory quaintly calls them, in nearly every chamber. In 1540 Holbein’s great fresco in the King’s Privy Council Room at Whitehall, representing King Henry VII and Queen Elizabeth of York in the background, with Henry VIII and Jane Seymour standing in front, was a comparatively recent work. The illustrious artist, who died in London of the plague in 1543, had also designed the ceiling of the “Matted Gallery,” and covered the walls of the Chapel Royal with frescoes and arabesques.
The King’s appearance, as he developed from boyhood to manhood and middle age, might have been studied in scores of presentments of him, to be met with at every turn: here, a plump little boy, by Mabuse; there, a singularly handsome fair-haired young man by Paris Bordone; and yonder, a full-length portrait by Hans Holbein, in which it was evident that His Majesty was beginning to “put on flesh.” In the Audience Chamber was a “table” of the monarch painted by Bartolomeo Penni, wherein the “peepy eyes” and the bloated cheeks of his latter years were only too faithfully portrayed. Though there were portraits of nearly all the King’s contemporaries, including one of Charles VIII of France and another of Charles V, besides a round dozen of Francis I, the likenesses of the five queens who preceded Katherine Parr had all been carefully removed, or, as in the case, of Anne Boleyn and Katherine Howard, destroyed. A cabinet full of relics of Queen Jane stood, however, in the anteroom of the King’s bedchamber at the Tower; and at Westminster, in a picture-book, there was a portrait of this Queen with another of the King facing it on the opposite page. Among the great “tables” at Whitehall were the “Virgin and Child,” by Leonardo da Vinci,[40] given to the King by Francis I in exchange for a picture by Holbein; “St. George and the Dragon,”[41] by Raphael; “Christina of Denmark,”[42] by Holbein, full length; a portrait, “Like unto Life,” of “Thomas, Duke of Norfolk,”[43] and “one table of the King’s Highness trampling upon the papal tiara, whence issues a serpent with seven heads snorting fire. In the King’s hand is the Bible, and a sword whereon is written Verbum Dei.”[44]
If the art of painting was well represented in the King’s many palaces, that of music was even more cherished. Page after page in the Royal Inventory is devoted to “double” and “single” virginals, with cases inlaid and encrusted with ivory and mother-of-pearl or adorned with arabesques of gold, studded with gems; while of lutes and flutes, rebecks and viols, there seems to have been a perfect arsenal. Then there was a library of over a thousand precious volumes, a sort of perambulating feast of reason, for in the Household Expenses we find various sums of money disbursed from time to time for the removal of boat-loads of books from one palace to another. The number of gold, silver, bronze, crystal, and glass chandeliers, sconces, and candlesticks distributed among the royal residences baffles belief. Each of the two hundred and eighty-four guest-chambers at Hampton Court boasted a bedstead hung with the richest silk and satin, with a gorgeously embroidered and wadded counterpane to match, an Oriental carpet, and a toilet set, ewer, basin, and candlesticks complete, of massive silver; while one closet at Whitehall was stored with an immense collection of the choicest German and Venetian glass. Such, in fact, was the King’s mania for collecting things rich and rare that, in spite of the hopeless and suffering condition of his health, he was still “buying,” down to the ultimate week of his life, and some of his last purchases seem never to have been paid for by his successors.
These contemporary accounts of the Household of Henry VIII strike the student by their marked resemblance to similar descriptions, by such writers as Sagrado and Knowles, of the quaint and numerous population of the Seraglio in the palmy days of the Ottoman Khaliphats. The Tudor King, like the Grand Turk, had four battalions of pages—pages of the Outer and of the Inner Court, of the King’s Antechamber, and of the King’s Presence Chamber; and yet a fifth contingent was attached to the service of the Queen. These lads, some hundreds in number, had their captains and even their school-masters; they were mostly of good family, and were apparelled, according to their rank, in wondrous State garments either of satin, green and white, the colours of the house of Tudor, or else of royal scarlet and gold. There was a legion of Grooms of the Wardrobe, Keepers of the King’s Horse, Sports and Pastimes, of his Harriers and Beagles, Sergeants-at-Arms, Sergeants of the Woodyard, Sergeants of the Bakehouse, Sergeants of the Pantry, Sergeants of the Pastry, Sergeants of the Trumpeters, Yeomen of the Wardrobe, Yeomen of the Armoury, Yeomen of the Buttery, Yeomen of the Chamber, Yeomen of the Chariots, of the Cooks, of the Henchmen, Stables, and Tents. The Royal Chapel was served by a full complement of chaplains, sub-chaplains, organists, and choir-boys. There were apothecaries, physicians, astronomers,[45] astrologers, secretaries, ushers, cup-bearers, carvers, servers, singing-boys, virginal players, Italian singers and English madrigalists, and a perfect orchestra of players on the lute, the flute, the rebeck, the sackbut, the harp, the psalter, and all manner of instruments.