Henry's Court

Hi, I'm Tracy Sowerby.

I teach early modern history at Cable College Oxford,

and I specialise in the Tudor period,

and today we're going to have a series of lectures on Henry the Eighth Rain.

I want to start by thinking about how politics worked in Henrich and England,

John Fox wrote in his monumental work, the

acts and Monuments

that King Henry.

So as his counsel was about him, so was he led.

And this view that Henry was greatly influenced

by the people had immediate access to him

has had quite a profound impact on the way that we think about Henrich and politics.

One consequence of this has been it has been a very dominant notion

into the historic graffiti,

led by people like David Starkey and Eric Ives,

who put the ideas together in the 19 eighties and 19 nineties

that, in fact, Henry's reign was dominated by groups that we might call factions.

So it's worth us just stopping for a moment and thinking about what a

faction might be and how these different historians have talked about it before,

seeing if they actually existed in Henry's reign.

So let's start with David Starkey is notion.

For him, a faction was a group of people who came together for a short period of time

to pursue a common

mutual political personal goal for their mutual benefit.

In other words, there fluid.

They're very difficult to identify,

and people might be in one faction with one group of people one day and a

couple of weeks later be cooperating with an

entirely different group to pursue a different political goal

now.

There was a further layer to what Starkey thought helped

to contribute to factions at the Henry Schein court,

not just people's personal interests,

but also the very infrastructure of the Tudor court, he thought was instrumental

in creating factions.

And here he was talking about the architectural layout of the court.

Now

in particular,

he was thinking about a group of rooms and institutional

department that we call Henry the eight's privy Chamber.

The Privy Chamber was not, in fact, Henry the eight's invention,

but seems to have been created by his father, Henry, the seventh

in response to a series of threats.

So for Henry, the seventh,

it was a way of sealing himself off from his potential political enemies.

He was only surrounded by menial servants

and their work guards at the door,

and it became a sanctuary to which he restricted access.

Now, that's not the way that Henry the eight's Privy Chamber was working.

Certainly by the end of the 15 tens and probably much earlier,

one of his first changes was to appoint his close, confident and jousting partner,

William Compton,

as what we call his groom of the stool.

This meant that he was the most important

menial servant slash administrator within the Privy Chamber,

because Henry also gave him control of what we call a privy purse.

In other words, the king's loose spending money.

Now that might not sound very important,

but actually the privy purses used to for an entire contingents

in Henry's armies in France

in the 15 tens and 15 twenties. So tens of thousands of pounds

were going through William Compton's hands at various points.

But if we go back to thinking about the way that the court is set out

the whole space of the court and only some

people have access to some areas of that space.

Part of it is restricted so that only those who have a right

to be there or who the king is allowed to be there,

Um, can move around freely.

And then this is even more restricted set of rooms called the Privy Chamber,

where the access to thinking is very, very tightly controlled.

And this is where Henry hangs out with

his boon companions in the 15 tens and eventually

by 15 18 gives them official positions as what

he calls the gentleman of the Privy Chamber.

Interesting.

He does that largely in competition with the King of France, Francis, the first

with the Treaty of London, 15 18.

There's an agreement that members of Henry's household and

then there's a Francis household will process together,

and Henry realises that people who are serving

Francis in his chamber are nobleman and aristocrats,

whereas the people who are serving him are not even of gentle status.

This kind of equalises the ranks, but it formalises an informal situation.

And this, um,

institutionalisation of the gentleman of the Privy

Chamber continues throughout the rest of Henry's reign

and beyond. Crucially for Starkey,

if someone of gentle status had

a position in the Privy Chamber that gave him unprecedented privileged

access to the monarch so you could whisper in Henry's ear,

influence them over who might be the next abyss of a particular

nunnery or who might get a particular grant of land.

And certainly, when it comes to obtaining patronage,

we can see just how effective it might have been.

William Compton,

who's from gentle but not particularly exalted origins and who serves as Henry's

first groom of the stool until his death,

managed to accumulate an estate worth nearly £1700

solely three rewards from the King.

But there are two pieces of evidence that have come to

light since Starkey wrote his books in the eighties and nineties,

which lead us to severely qualify the picture that he

put forward of the gentleman of the Privy Chamber,

being able to manipulate Henry into doing what they wanted,

and that actually comes when we think

about the institutional infrastructure of the court.

So for one thing,

we now know that the Secretariat so the place

where Henry's letters are being written and sent out,

which is receiving information about what's happening in the country

and in the world beyond,

is on the borders of his suite of rooms known as the privy chamber.

In other words,

Henry's principal secretaries also had pretty much unmitigated access to him.

And that obviously means that the people in the Privy Chamber

couldn't control the amount of information that Henry was receiving.

The other major qualifying factor is comes from if we consider

the role of the main advisory body in Henry's reign,

the Council or, as it became known in, um, the latter decade of his reign,

the Privy Council.

We know, for instance, that at least two of Henry's Alice is

the room in which the Privy Council met was actually

within the suite of rooms known as the Privy Council.

And from at least 15 39

Privy Councillors had the right to see Henry in his rooms whenever

they so desired or needed to, which again

largely qualifies any influence

that we might think that the Privy Chambers

would have without any qualification from anywhere else.

But there's another way of thinking about faction,

and this is the way that Eric Ives defines it,

rather than it all being fluid and loose and

nobody really having many principles apart from

desiring their own profit and gain,

I suggest that we should think of factions

as being linked to specific individuals at court.

So one way to think of it might be an extension

of late mediaeval notions of client ege you might support.

And Berlin you might support Katherine of Arrogant you might Support,

and Thomas Cromwell or the Duke of Norfolk.

You would remain fairly loyal to them and the policies that they were espousing, Um,

so long as they continued to prove to be good patrons to you in return.

So from that definition, factions are much more solid, much more easy to identify,

much more longer lasting.

But they're still not necessarily ideological.

There's another difference between the way the

eyes and Starkey thought about factions,

which we should bear in mind.

And that's the idea of

it's like the character of Henry in all of this.

A good way to think about David Starkey is Model is he's almost

proposing that Henry is a puppet being manipulated by those around him.

Woolsey might get him to do something because he offers

him a nice new painting or set of jewels,

and the Privy chambers might

sway him by playing tennis or dice with him.

Whereas an eye's view. Henry is very much a strong king,

and actually, he in some cases, creates factions.

At the very least, he plays them off against one another

in order to maintain a political balance at court

now. Needless to say,

there are plenty of historians that disagree with both eyes and Starkey,

and one way to start to think about whether not this model of faction,

whether we take starkest view, arrives.

This view actually works, So look at how politics works in practise.

Both eyes and stocky would agree that Cromwell and the Duke

of Norfolk can't stand one another in the 15 thirties,

for instance,

and would argue that they're constantly kind of

plotting in different factions against one another.

And yet when we look at how they operate in the 15 thirties,

we see them consistently cooperating on the King's council.

We see them frequently dining together.

Now. That's not to argue that they are very good friends.

But it's to argue that even though they disagreed,

they still managed from a good

working partnership that forwarded Henry's policies.

We might also want to think about the ways that different sorts of relationships

crisscrossed either against client Ege or other sorts of political bonds at court.

So you might rent lands from someone

but actually have to do military service with another nobleman at court.

You might have a sister who's married to the Duke of Norfolk,

um, one of the

North Norfolk's relatives

and a sister who's married to a client of Thomas Cromwell's.

So actually,

the political texture court is much more complex than

these models of faction would have us believe.

What we should,

perhaps then think about is the extent to which Henry himself seems to picture.

Now there's a famous story where Henry wants to

know what to think about a controversial book,

and he knows that there are two people are very divergent opinions.

He gives the book to both of them and gets them to debate the book in front of him.

That's not to suggest that Henry's lazy more to suggest that what he

is very keen on doing is soliciting a broad range of opinions.

And, of course,

he goes on to read the book and make his mind up

for himself in the light of the debate that he's already heard.

So we might perhaps best think of Henry is a consultative king,

one who was perhaps at times influenced by those around

him and certainly listen to a broad base of extra concealer

council.

But we shouldn't necessarily see him as someone who has

bounced into action on a whim or buy a gift,

but someone who thinks quite deeply, particularly about issues

that have profound repercussions,

such as religious issues.