Bloody Mary Read Free Page A

opposite end of the tiltyard to see the entry of the opponents, led by Henry’s closest friend Charles Brandon, duke of Suffolk, they fell silent. Instead of a fanfare and a procession of panoplied knights they saw a solitary figure ride toward the pavilion where Katherine sat, not a knightly figure but a man in the brown hooded cloak of a monk or recluse. Stopping his horse in front of the queen, he petitioned her to give him leave to joust in her presence, adding that if it pleased her he would begin at once, if not, he would leave as he had come. When she smiled and nodded he threw off his cape and signaled his attendants to bring his armor. The religious was none other than the strapping Brandon himself, and the spectators watched with delight as his armor was tied in place and his helmet and lance supplied. When his horse had been similarly barbed and arrayed, he rode to his assigned place. After Brandon came a small pageant car carrying a castle tower or turret, out of which rode Henry Guilford, principal defender for that day, in brown and silver. He and his liveried attendants also asked Katherine’s permission to joust, as did the marquis of Dorset and Thomas Boleyn, who made their appearance dressed as pilgrims returning from the Spanish shrine of St. James of Compostela, their pilgrim staves and the golden shells that symbolized the shrine their only ornaments. The earl of Wiltshire, entered in another pageant, called “The House of Refuge,” at the center of which was a huge golden pomegranate tree; the spreading branches of the tree covered the house and the knight, who was all in silver.
    When the defenders for the day were in place, the jousting began, and by the time it was over the king and his three companions had again prevailed. Whether because he broke the most spears or because—as we know he did at a joust in 1515—he accomplished the rare feat of forcing to the ground both a man and his horse, Henry “achieved valiantly,” and attained the prize.
    The prize of arms won at the prince’s tournament was only the capstone to the greater triumph of the prince’s birth. No kingdom was secure, no people’s loyalty guaranteed, until the ruler had provided a male heir to succeed him, and now that Henry had done that he could relax and congratulate himself for a while. He could even allow himself to look ahead to the future. The prince would in time be king as Henry IX, third Henry of the house of Tudor and ninth in a line of Henrys stretching back five hundred years: Henry I, son of William theConqueror; Henry II Plantagenet, friend and slayer of Becket and ruler of half of France; Henry III, saintly patron of learning and builder of cathedrals; Henry IV, adventurer and founder of the ill-fated Lancastrian line; Henry V, the beloved Prince Hal and legendary victor of Agincourt; Henry VI, whose long reign ended in madness and the chaos of the Wars of the Roses; the Tudor Henry VII, who ended those wars by his victory at Bosworth Field; and, finally, the exuberant Henry VIII, whose fame as a soldier or diplomat or ruler—indeed as anything but an expert jouster—was yet to be achieved.
    In the craft of kingship Henry was very much a novice. His fellow rulers on the continent were well over twice his age, and treated him with avuncular disdain. He had as yet taken no part in European politics, though his father-in-law, Ferdinand of Aragon, was urging him to throw the weight of English arms and money against the dominant French. The pope too, the bellicose Julius II, was a suitor for Henry’s support in his fight against the French in Italy. Nine months earlier he had sent Henry the traditional golden rose, anointed with the sacred coronation oil and sprinkled with pungent musk, that symbolized the long-standing sentimental alliance between the papacy and the English kings.
    With the dimwitted, bankrupt Emperor Maximilian, ridiculed throughout Europe as the “man of few pence,” Henry had had little