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Henry's Court
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The Tudors – Henry VIII and the English Reformation, 1509-47
In this course, Dr Tracey Sowerby (University of Oxford) explores the reign of Henry VIII, thinking in particular about the English Reformation. We begin by focusing on decision-making in the Henrician court, before looking at the reasons behind the break with Rome—was it simply because Henry had fallen in love with another woman, or were there greater issues at stake? In the third module, we think about the extent to which the changes made by Henry were Protestant in nature, before moving on in the final two modules to think about the opposition to the changes that Henry was making.
Henry's Court
In this module, we think about how politics worked in Henrician England, focusing in particular on: (i) John Foxe's assessment of Henry VIII that "according as hys Counsell was about him, so was he lead"; (ii) the view of historians such as David Starkey and Eric Ives that Henry's court was dominated by faction; (iii) David Starkey's definition of faction; (iv) the importance of the physical layout of Henry's court, especially the group of rooms known as the Privy Chamber; (v) the history of the institution known as the Privy Chamber, and the extent to which it evolves in the reign of Henry VIII; (vi) Henry VIII's creation of the formal position of Gentleman of the Privy Chamber; (vii) the other institutions that had access to the king, including the Secretariat and the Privy Council; (viii) Eric Ives' definition of faction, which differs from that of Starkey; (ix) the extent to which Henry VIII was influenced by his councillors; (x) the extent to which members of different factions could nevertheless form good working relationships, e.g. Thomas Howard and Thomas Cromwell; and (xi) the potential for individuals to have relationships with several different factions at the same time.
Hi, I'm Tracy Sowerby.
00:00:03I teach early modern history at Cable College Oxford,
00:00:04and I specialise in the Tudor period,
00:00:07and today we're going to have a series of lectures on Henry the Eighth Rain.
00:00:10I want to start by thinking about how politics worked in Henrich and England,
00:00:14John Fox wrote in his monumental work, the
00:00:19acts and Monuments
00:00:25that King Henry.
00:00:26So as his counsel was about him, so was he led.
00:00:27And this view that Henry was greatly influenced
00:00:30by the people had immediate access to him
00:00:33has had quite a profound impact on the way that we think about Henrich and politics.
00:00:35One consequence of this has been it has been a very dominant notion
00:00:39into the historic graffiti,
00:00:43led by people like David Starkey and Eric Ives,
00:00:45who put the ideas together in the 19 eighties and 19 nineties
00:00:48that, in fact, Henry's reign was dominated by groups that we might call factions.
00:00:51So it's worth us just stopping for a moment and thinking about what a
00:00:56faction might be and how these different historians have talked about it before,
00:00:59seeing if they actually existed in Henry's reign.
00:01:03So let's start with David Starkey is notion.
00:01:06For him, a faction was a group of people who came together for a short period of time
00:01:09to pursue a common
00:01:14mutual political personal goal for their mutual benefit.
00:01:16In other words, there fluid.
00:01:21They're very difficult to identify,
00:01:23and people might be in one faction with one group of people one day and a
00:01:25couple of weeks later be cooperating with an
00:01:29entirely different group to pursue a different political goal
00:01:31now.
00:01:35There was a further layer to what Starkey thought helped
00:01:36to contribute to factions at the Henry Schein court,
00:01:39not just people's personal interests,
00:01:43but also the very infrastructure of the Tudor court, he thought was instrumental
00:01:45in creating factions.
00:01:50And here he was talking about the architectural layout of the court.
00:01:51Now
00:01:55in particular,
00:01:56he was thinking about a group of rooms and institutional
00:01:57department that we call Henry the eight's privy Chamber.
00:02:00The Privy Chamber was not, in fact, Henry the eight's invention,
00:02:04but seems to have been created by his father, Henry, the seventh
00:02:07in response to a series of threats.
00:02:11So for Henry, the seventh,
00:02:13it was a way of sealing himself off from his potential political enemies.
00:02:14He was only surrounded by menial servants
00:02:19and their work guards at the door,
00:02:22and it became a sanctuary to which he restricted access.
00:02:23Now, that's not the way that Henry the eight's Privy Chamber was working.
00:02:27Certainly by the end of the 15 tens and probably much earlier,
00:02:30one of his first changes was to appoint his close, confident and jousting partner,
00:02:34William Compton,
00:02:40as what we call his groom of the stool.
00:02:41This meant that he was the most important
00:02:44menial servant slash administrator within the Privy Chamber,
00:02:46because Henry also gave him control of what we call a privy purse.
00:02:51In other words, the king's loose spending money.
00:02:55Now that might not sound very important,
00:02:57but actually the privy purses used to for an entire contingents
00:02:59in Henry's armies in France
00:03:02in the 15 tens and 15 twenties. So tens of thousands of pounds
00:03:04were going through William Compton's hands at various points.
00:03:08But if we go back to thinking about the way that the court is set out
00:03:13the whole space of the court and only some
00:03:18people have access to some areas of that space.
00:03:21Part of it is restricted so that only those who have a right
00:03:24to be there or who the king is allowed to be there,
00:03:28Um, can move around freely.
00:03:31And then this is even more restricted set of rooms called the Privy Chamber,
00:03:34where the access to thinking is very, very tightly controlled.
00:03:38And this is where Henry hangs out with
00:03:42his boon companions in the 15 tens and eventually
00:03:45by 15 18 gives them official positions as what
00:03:48he calls the gentleman of the Privy Chamber.
00:03:52Interesting.
00:03:54He does that largely in competition with the King of France, Francis, the first
00:03:55with the Treaty of London, 15 18.
00:03:59There's an agreement that members of Henry's household and
00:04:01then there's a Francis household will process together,
00:04:03and Henry realises that people who are serving
00:04:07Francis in his chamber are nobleman and aristocrats,
00:04:09whereas the people who are serving him are not even of gentle status.
00:04:13This kind of equalises the ranks, but it formalises an informal situation.
00:04:17And this, um,
00:04:22institutionalisation of the gentleman of the Privy
00:04:25Chamber continues throughout the rest of Henry's reign
00:04:27and beyond. Crucially for Starkey,
00:04:30if someone of gentle status had
00:04:33a position in the Privy Chamber that gave him unprecedented privileged
00:04:37access to the monarch so you could whisper in Henry's ear,
00:04:42influence them over who might be the next abyss of a particular
00:04:46nunnery or who might get a particular grant of land.
00:04:50And certainly, when it comes to obtaining patronage,
00:04:54we can see just how effective it might have been.
00:04:57William Compton,
00:05:00who's from gentle but not particularly exalted origins and who serves as Henry's
00:05:02first groom of the stool until his death,
00:05:06managed to accumulate an estate worth nearly £1700
00:05:09solely three rewards from the King.
00:05:13But there are two pieces of evidence that have come to
00:05:18light since Starkey wrote his books in the eighties and nineties,
00:05:22which lead us to severely qualify the picture that he
00:05:26put forward of the gentleman of the Privy Chamber,
00:05:31being able to manipulate Henry into doing what they wanted,
00:05:33and that actually comes when we think
00:05:38about the institutional infrastructure of the court.
00:05:40So for one thing,
00:05:44we now know that the Secretariat so the place
00:05:45where Henry's letters are being written and sent out,
00:05:49which is receiving information about what's happening in the country
00:05:51and in the world beyond,
00:05:55is on the borders of his suite of rooms known as the privy chamber.
00:05:56In other words,
00:06:00Henry's principal secretaries also had pretty much unmitigated access to him.
00:06:01And that obviously means that the people in the Privy Chamber
00:06:08couldn't control the amount of information that Henry was receiving.
00:06:12The other major qualifying factor is comes from if we consider
00:06:16the role of the main advisory body in Henry's reign,
00:06:21the Council or, as it became known in, um, the latter decade of his reign,
00:06:26the Privy Council.
00:06:30We know, for instance, that at least two of Henry's Alice is
00:06:31the room in which the Privy Council met was actually
00:06:35within the suite of rooms known as the Privy Council.
00:06:38And from at least 15 39
00:06:41Privy Councillors had the right to see Henry in his rooms whenever
00:06:43they so desired or needed to, which again
00:06:49largely qualifies any influence
00:06:52that we might think that the Privy Chambers
00:06:55would have without any qualification from anywhere else.
00:06:57But there's another way of thinking about faction,
00:07:01and this is the way that Eric Ives defines it,
00:07:04rather than it all being fluid and loose and
00:07:07nobody really having many principles apart from
00:07:10desiring their own profit and gain,
00:07:12I suggest that we should think of factions
00:07:16as being linked to specific individuals at court.
00:07:18So one way to think of it might be an extension
00:07:21of late mediaeval notions of client ege you might support.
00:07:24And Berlin you might support Katherine of Arrogant you might Support,
00:07:28and Thomas Cromwell or the Duke of Norfolk.
00:07:31You would remain fairly loyal to them and the policies that they were espousing, Um,
00:07:34so long as they continued to prove to be good patrons to you in return.
00:07:40So from that definition, factions are much more solid, much more easy to identify,
00:07:46much more longer lasting.
00:07:52But they're still not necessarily ideological.
00:07:53There's another difference between the way the
00:07:58eyes and Starkey thought about factions,
00:07:59which we should bear in mind.
00:08:02And that's the idea of
00:08:03it's like the character of Henry in all of this.
00:08:06A good way to think about David Starkey is Model is he's almost
00:08:08proposing that Henry is a puppet being manipulated by those around him.
00:08:13Woolsey might get him to do something because he offers
00:08:17him a nice new painting or set of jewels,
00:08:19and the Privy chambers might
00:08:23sway him by playing tennis or dice with him.
00:08:24Whereas an eye's view. Henry is very much a strong king,
00:08:28and actually, he in some cases, creates factions.
00:08:32At the very least, he plays them off against one another
00:08:35in order to maintain a political balance at court
00:08:38now. Needless to say,
00:08:43there are plenty of historians that disagree with both eyes and Starkey,
00:08:44and one way to start to think about whether not this model of faction,
00:08:49whether we take starkest view, arrives.
00:08:53This view actually works, So look at how politics works in practise.
00:08:55Both eyes and stocky would agree that Cromwell and the Duke
00:08:59of Norfolk can't stand one another in the 15 thirties,
00:09:02for instance,
00:09:05and would argue that they're constantly kind of
00:09:06plotting in different factions against one another.
00:09:08And yet when we look at how they operate in the 15 thirties,
00:09:11we see them consistently cooperating on the King's council.
00:09:15We see them frequently dining together.
00:09:19Now. That's not to argue that they are very good friends.
00:09:21But it's to argue that even though they disagreed,
00:09:24they still managed from a good
00:09:26working partnership that forwarded Henry's policies.
00:09:28We might also want to think about the ways that different sorts of relationships
00:09:33crisscrossed either against client Ege or other sorts of political bonds at court.
00:09:37So you might rent lands from someone
00:09:43but actually have to do military service with another nobleman at court.
00:09:46You might have a sister who's married to the Duke of Norfolk,
00:09:51um, one of the
00:09:55North Norfolk's relatives
00:09:57and a sister who's married to a client of Thomas Cromwell's.
00:09:59So actually,
00:10:02the political texture court is much more complex than
00:10:03these models of faction would have us believe.
00:10:08What we should,
00:10:10perhaps then think about is the extent to which Henry himself seems to picture.
00:10:12Now there's a famous story where Henry wants to
00:10:17know what to think about a controversial book,
00:10:22and he knows that there are two people are very divergent opinions.
00:10:24He gives the book to both of them and gets them to debate the book in front of him.
00:10:27That's not to suggest that Henry's lazy more to suggest that what he
00:10:32is very keen on doing is soliciting a broad range of opinions.
00:10:36And, of course,
00:10:39he goes on to read the book and make his mind up
00:10:40for himself in the light of the debate that he's already heard.
00:10:42So we might perhaps best think of Henry is a consultative king,
00:10:46one who was perhaps at times influenced by those around
00:10:49him and certainly listen to a broad base of extra concealer
00:10:53council.
00:10:56But we shouldn't necessarily see him as someone who has
00:10:58bounced into action on a whim or buy a gift,
00:11:00but someone who thinks quite deeply, particularly about issues
00:11:04that have profound repercussions,
00:11:08such as religious issues.
00:11:10
Cite this Lecture
APA style
Sowerby, T. (2018, August 15). The Tudors – Henry VIII and the English Reformation, 1509-47 - Henry's Court [Video]. MASSOLIT. https://massolit.io/courses/henry-viii-and-the-english-reformation-1509-47
MLA style
Sowerby, T. "The Tudors – Henry VIII and the English Reformation, 1509-47 – Henry's Court." MASSOLIT, uploaded by MASSOLIT, 15 Aug 2018, https://massolit.io/courses/henry-viii-and-the-english-reformation-1509-47