(Pretend) Battles that (may...or may not...have) Changed History: Greenwich, 24 JAN 1536

 The Tilt of 24 JAN 1536

Location: The royal palace of Placentia (also known because of its location in what was then a village outside London proper, as Greenwich Palace).

Forces Engaged: Well...here's what we do know. 

We'll talk about this more in the "Campaign" section, but in 1536 Henry Tudor, eighth of that name to have been crowned King of England, Ireland, etc., was in the 27th year of his reign. He had been married to Anne, daughter of Thomas Boleyn and Elizabeth Howard, since 1533 and was probably very pleased, since Anne was pregnant again...this time with the son he was so freakish about (with some justification, as we'll discuss).

It's hard to be sure what prompted Henry to arrange a tournament in January of that year. 

Thames basin weather is generally mild, but the winters of 1535 through 1537 seem to have been cold: in 1534-35 frost is reported as lasting from November to February and the Thames froze, then in December 1536 to January 1537 the Thames froze so hard in London that the king and his new queen  Jane Seymour rode on the frozen river from London (probably the palace at Whitehall) to Greenwich.

So January would have been a pretty rotten time for riding around poking other people with sticks. Probably rainy and chilly if not flat-out freezing-ass cold. Why the hell have a combined horse show and battle practice in the nasty middle of winter?

We can guess. First, Henry had what I'm sure he was convinced was a son on the way. He was sort of strange that way; every kid he put inside some woman was going to be a son, and every time he got spun up about that.

And second - perhaps even more important - he was also finally free of the chiding spectre of his first wife. Catherine of Aragon had died 9 JAN at the castle of Kimbolton in the fens of Cambridgeshire.

It seems pretty vicious to throw a party to celebrate the death of your ex. But in some ways Henry Tudor was a pretty vicious guy.

We still have no official record of the details of the event, or the participants. Officers like Sir Henry Norris, Henry's groom of the stool and one of Queen Anne's faction, would have had to be there by virtue of their office. The other great houses of England, families like the Howards, Greys, Seymours, Stanleys, and Cecils, would all have had a contingent at the court the better to both jockey for royal favor and politically cock-block their rivals.

Nobles of the newly reformed Church, like the Archbishop of Canterbury Thomas Cranmer, would have been in and out of court looking out for their interests and would have surely been present at an event like a major tournament.

Ambassadors from the other European powers would have been in attendance, people like Eustace Chapuys representing the Holy Roman Empire, or Antoine de Castelnau the French ambassador.

Remember, too, that a Renaissance noble's worth included the size and grandeur of his retinue, so all of these big men, native and imported, would have had schools of remoras; proteges, aides, bodyguards and servants.

So there would have been a big colorful crowd - the wintertime Tudor court ran to over a thousand people - noisy, excited for the novelty and sport, coming and going on their own business, gossiping, intriguing, and schmoozing.

But about who entered the list that day, and, in particular, who ran a course or courses against the king, we have no knowledge.

 

Sources: This is where we have a bit of the struggle.

The Tudor court in general is well documented. Printing was widespread, and the study and writing of history was a well-established and respected vocation. Perhaps most importantly, the Tudors (beginning with the current Henry's father Henry VII) and their officials had begun to make a serious run at setting up an actual bureaucracy, meaning that official documents and correspondence were being preserved. Similar bureaucracies were evolving at the other European courts. 

These bureaucracies, like all the bureaucracies after them, squirreled away documents. Memos, letters, minutes, bills, reports...anything that came across the royal or imperial desk was billeted and filed. So they are available for researchers and historians.

But the actual paper trail? How those researchers and historians find these papers?

I don't know.

Good example; Chapuys account of the events of 24 JAN 1536 is contained in a letter to his boss, Nicolas Perrenot de Granvelle, one of Holy Roman Emperor Charles V's privy councilors. It's available online at the BHO website here.

There it's identified only as coming from the "Vienna Archives". How was it found? Who translated it (the BHO notes that the original was in French) and who deposited the translation in the British Public Records Office, which is where the BHO site found it?

I have no idea.

So that's a problem; we don't have a paper trail for these letters and records. Chapuys sent them to his imperial masters, there they were filed and...somehow, almost 500 years later they turn up in "British History Online". How - physically; who read them, who translated them (and decoded them - a lot of the originals are noted as having been "in cypher" since Chapuys and his handlers had to at least suspect that somewhere along the road to Vienna some Tudor agent would read or try to read them...), who copied them and then made sure that the copies were send to and filed in London?

And...what got missed? What was lost, or destroyed, between 1536 and today?

We just don't and can't ever know.

The other problem is that the historical record for the events of 24 JAN is very thin.

One of - if not the - best sources we have for the doings of the Tudor court is our boy Chapuys. He seems to have been a good spy; alert to the human interactivity, great and subtle going on around him.

It should be noted, however, that he was also human, and as such had his biases...in this case for the "dowager" Queen Catherine. He was fiercely partisan - unsurprising for a man serving the queen's relative who was also partisan towards her - and his letter-reports are colored by that bias.

Here's Chapuys, in a letter to Granvelle dated 29 JAN 1536:

"On the eve of the Conversion of St. Paul, the King being mounted on a great horse to run at the lists, both fell so heavily that every one thought it a miracle he was not killed, but he sustained no injury. Thinks he might ask of fortune for what greater misfortune he is reserved, like the other tyrant who escaped from the fall of the house, in which all the rest were smothered, and soon after died."

That's the bare outline, and seems to give us a baseline. Which is:

1) Henry mounted up for a "run at the lists" - that is, a jousting match.
2) Some sort of collision occurred; presumably as a part of the tilt or an accidental slip and fall of the king's horse.
3) However it happened Henry's horse was thrown down or fell, and Henry either fell with the animal or was knocked out of his saddle before (by a lance strike) or during the fall.
4) It was a bad fall - "every one thought it a miracle he was not killed" and we'll talk about this but many, probably most, of the courtiers and servants were experienced jousting fans so they could be expected to recognize a bad fall from a harmless one, and
5) Chapuys says that the king "sustained no injury".

Okay, so how else do we know about what happened that day?

Well, we have a second letter, this one written by Dr. Pedro Ortiz - Charles V's factor in Rome (representing Chuck's aunt Cathy's case before the Holy See) - to the Holy Roman Empress Isabella dated 6 MAR 1536:

"(Ortiz) (h)as received a letter from the ambassador in France, dated 15 Feb., stating that he hears from England that the King intends to marry the Princess to an English knight. The French king said that the king of England had fallen from his horse, and been for two hours without speaking."

This is the only source for the part of the story that insists that Henry was badly enough injured to be senseless - concussed or comatose - for more that a moment or two. 

You'll note, please, that this is not only not a firsthand account, but is Ortiz reporting a letter of the Imperial ambassador - so, secondhand - as recounted by Francis I, King of France that Francis - so third hand - telling him the story of the fall.

We don't know how Francis found that out, so we don't even know if his account is only third-hand or had gone through another couple of people before it got to Frankie. And, remember, at this time France and England were enemies, so Francis and his siderunners would be inclined to at least hope for bad news out of the Tudor court.

The final more-or-less primary account we have is in the chronicle of one Charles Wriothsley, lawyer and one of the heralds during the reigns of Henry VIII, his son Edward VI, and his daughter Mary I. 

This work, written during his lifetime, existed as a manuscript diary or codex in the possession of his family after his death in 1562.

Wriothsley seems to have had the notion to publish his writings; the first segment covering Henry VII and the first dozen or so years of Henry VII is a plagiarism of a work by someone called Richard Arnold. For whatever reason this never happened. The Dictionary of National Biography entry for Wriothsley says:

"The original manuscript is not known to be extant, the only existing copy being a transcript made early in the seventeenth century probably for Henry Wriothesley, third earl of Southampton. It passed into the possession of the Percy family by the marriage of Elizabeth, daughter of Thomas, fourth earl of Southampton, to Josceline Percy, eleventh earl of Northumberland, and belonged to Lord H. M. Percy in 1874, when it was edited by William Douglas Hamilton for the Camden Society."

The 1875 edition produced by the Camden Society is the first publication of Wriothsley, in which his account of the events of January 1536 reads:

 "This yeare also, three daies before Candlemass*, Queen Anne was brought abed and delivered of a man child, as it was said, afore her time, for she said that she had reckoned herself at that time but fifteen weekes gone with child; it was said that she took a fright, for the king ranne that time at the ring and had a fall from his horse but had no hurt..."

*Note: Candlemass is traditionally February 2. If the miscarriage was three calendar days earlier that would put it back to January 30, about a week after the date reported for the king's calamity. That seems...odd, given that Anne was probably with the king at Greenwich, that it would have taken a week for her to be get the news and be so shocked by the event that she miscarried her potential lock on Henry's favor. Hmmm.

So same general outline as Chapuy's account; the king (or both the king and his horse) fall but are unharmed. 

But (and this is a pretty critical difference - we'll talk about this...) not jousting against an opponent but "running at the ring", a form of mounted lance training that involved just what the name implies; a form of mounted target practice by spearing a suspended ring. 

What's interesting is that the Ortiz account could refer to either tilting or running the ring, which would square the French account  - which mentions a fall but not the circumstances - with Wriothsley while supporting Chapuys' report that the king was uninjured.

Perhaps the single most influential secondary source for Tudor times is Holingshead's Chronicle, and early history of England. We talked about him when we discussed Bosworth back in 2014. So it's a good place to repeat the observation I made then: "Holinshed should also be viewed with great caution; it was written during Tudor times when anything but fulsome praise of Tudors was a good way to end up getting a hot poker shoved up inconvenient places. Any sort of editorial judgement would have been weighted towards one side and against the other."

Here's what Holingshead says about the first month or so of 1536 (this from the 1577 edition):

"The Princes Dowager lying at Kimbalton, fell into hir laſt ſickneſſe, whereof the King being aduertiſed, appoynted the Emperours Ambaſſadour that was leger here with him, named Euſtachius Caputius..."

(that's our boy Chapuys)

"...to go to viſite hir, and to doe his commendations to hir, and will hir to bee of good comfort."

(I'm going to skip over the part where Holingshead describes Chapuys ministrations to the dying Queen...)

"This in effect was all that ſhee requeſt, and ſo immediately herevpon ſhee departed thys life the .viij. of Ianuarie at Kimbaltors aforeſaid, and was buried at Peterborow.

The fourth of Februarie the Parliamente beganne,Religious houſes gi [...] to the king. in the whiche amongſt other things inacted, all Religious houſes of the value of three hundred Markes and vnder, were gyuen to the King, with all the landes and goodes to them belonging."

That's it. We get the death of the ex-wife and then we jump over to Parliament doings in early February; no tournament, no fall, no injury, no miscarriage, no nothing.

Sir Richard Baker was a gentleman of Kent born in 1568 (ten years into the reign of Elizabeth Tudor) whose chronicle - probably written in the early 17th Century but not published until 25 years after his death, in 1670. Here's what Baker (1643) provides  in his account of the year 1536:

"Also in Ianuary, of this yeere, Katherine Princesse Dowager, fell into her last sicknesse; to whom the King sent the Emperours Embassadour Legier, desiring her to be of good comfort; but she finding her death to approach, caused onely one of her Gentlewoman to write a Letter to the King; commending to him her Daughter and his, and beseeching him to be a good Father to her; and then desiring him further, to have some consideration of her Servants. On the eighth of Ianuary, at Kimbolton, she departed this life, and was buried at Peterborough. A woman of so vertuous a life, and of so great obsequiousnesse to her husband, that from her onely merit, is grown a reputation to all Spanish wives. 

Also the nine and twentieth of Ianuary, this yeere, Queene Anne was delivered of a childe before her time, which was borne dead."

The death of Catherine on 8 JAN and the miscarriage, although on 29 JAN rather than a day later. No mention of any tournament in January, no mention of an injury, particularly a severe injury that would have left the royal victim senseless for two hours.

What are we to conclude from all this?

We have three primary sources - Chapuys, Wriothsley, and Ortiz - that report the king falling during some sort of mounted activity, at least two of them - Chapuys and Ortiz - suggesting a very serious injury accident. Two - Holingshead and Baker - that make no mention of the incident at all, suggesting that their sources did not consider it newsworthy.

So I think we have to make some educated guesses.

First, I think something that involved King Henry and his horse did happen on 24 JAN. Particularly because Chapuys describes it in detail. He's a reliable observer, and seems unlikely to have invented something for what was in effect an official diplomatic report.

However, while I think Chapuy's account is more likely I don't think we can be absolutely sure whether it was indeed a joust or a practice run at the ring. There's no court household records of, say, the material preparations for a tournament in the third week of January to confirm Chapuys.

But...the likelihood of a bad fall is much greater in the martial excitement of a lance-to-lance encounter with another armored rider compared to the more or less workaday setting of a day in the practice field.

So the king, or the king and his horse, took a bad fall, a fall bad enough that the knowledgeable jousting fans present thought that it was more likely that the king would be killed or really badly injured than not.

But - and this is where the "non-reportage" of Holingshead and Baker come in -  the king seems to have been either uninjured or not injured badly enough to been obvious to the crowd. The third- or fourth-hand report of several hours of unconsciousness seems very suspect, given that such a frightening possibility of the end of the Tudor line in 1536 would have been important enough to have made it into the secondary accounts.

But...something happened. We'll get to this in the "Campaign" section, but something that happens in January has an immense bearing on the events of May 1536 and the whole business of what was called at the time The King's Great Matter..

But, before we get to that...let's start by asking what seems like a simple question:

What the ever lovin' fuck was a Renaissance prince doing in full armor kit playing King Richard Lionheart with a lance in January of 1536, when that same morning his troops were falling in with matchlock or wheellock or snaplock muskets,whose bullets had already killed the charge of lance-armed armored cavalry as dead as the Lionheart himself?

 
The Campaign: In this section we're going to do something a little different than the usual "battle piece"

First, we're going to talk about what brought Henry Tudor to the tilt on a cold January day in 1536; the evolution of "jousting" or "tilting" as a luxury sport in the 16th Century.

And then we're going to talk a bit about Hank himself and why his addiction to sport was potential trouble - trouble for himself, his people, and Europe.

From the Battlefield to the Tiltyard

To get to the Greenwich tiltyard in 1536 we're going to have to ride a long road, one that begins nearly as early as horse soldiers themselves, with the invention of cavalry some time in the 8th or 9th Century BCE. That's when we have the first records of soldiers riding horses to fight.

Before that the hayburners were hitched to some sort of cart. Chariotry was the first horse-involved form of warfare, going back to the Hittites. The "Anitta text" from the 18th century BCE which says that this mook, king of Kussarea, had 40 teams of horses at the siege of Salatiwara.

A thousand or so years later the Assyrians had developed true light cavalry, moving from the older riding position back near the animal's butt to the place near the shoulders (withers, for you non-horsey folks out there...) where we ride today.

Better harness - especially better saddlery; you need a wooden frame rather than a simple cloth pad for a steadier seat - allowed someone in southwest Asia, either the Persians or Sarmatians, to start armoring up their horse soldiers by the middle 6th Century BCE or so.

On the other end of the continent the state of Zhao developed organized cavalry troops (from having had to fight Central Asian horse nomads) and used them effectively during the "Warring States" period of the consolidation of China between the 5th to 3rd Centuries BCE.

Our prototype of Henry VIII's jousting party appears in the 4th Century BCE, in the Achaemenid Empire of Sassanian Persia: the cataphract.

The bas-relief above is from Iran and shows Khosrow II (𐭧𐭥𐭮𐭫𐭥𐭣𐭩; Modern Persian: Husrō), "Khosrow the Victorious", the last great Sasanian shah of Iran from 590 to 628 CE.

He's got the full kit; full mail (or scale) armor, closed helmet, shield and long lance - notice that he's hefting it overhand, though, and there's a reason for that - and his horse is barded - that is, armored - at least forward of the saddle where it counts.

These guys were the tanks of the ancient world. They even had ranged weaponry like the tank's main gun; unlike their later European successors most cataphracts (or clibanarii - the names appear to be used interchangeably in Asia Minor and simply refer to an armored horse and rider) were mounted archers as well as armed with lance and sword or mace/handaxe.

Indeed; in the armies of Alexander that we talked about in November of last year the ἑταῖροι - "companions" - were perhaps the earliest true shock cavalry in history, trained and led to charge home using the 8- to 9-foot long ξυστόν (xyston) lance with both hands.

But.

These early heavy cavalrymen had two serious problems with using that pole to stick people with.

First was with their saddle. It didn't have stirrups. While the trope of the ancient cavalryman falling off his pony was more a creation of the early Victorian military historians who had never ridden without them, the lack of a steady footrest really was trouble when you tried to ram your spear into your enemy using your mass and velocity. You'd probably either lose your grip on the lance, or get pushed off your own saddle, before your lancehead did enough damage to your enemy's armor to be effective.

The other problem is one we don't often think about. The stirrups are, to a modern rider, obvious. But the other problem is that saddles are fastened to the horse's barrel using a simple girth - that's the strap that goes around the horse's chest from one side of the saddle to the other. 

That's fine for holding the saddle and pad down vertically, but not much good holding the saddle - and rider - in place horizontally when the rider is trying to stick a lance through someone else.

The solution to this was something similar to the collar used by plowhorses; a breast collar or breastband, a strap that ran from the saddle or girth around the front of the horse's barrel and attached to the saddle and girth on the other side. 

Typically this included additional straps that went up across the withers to the base of the neck, and often another strap that ran between the front legs and along the belly to the girth. 

That's why when you see contemporary pictures of armored horsemen using polearms they are as often as not used overhand, like the Normans shown here on the Bayeux tapestry:

You could probably couch - that is, tuck the lance under your arm - the thing if you were, say, riding down an infantryman. But head-on against a similarly-armed rider? You'd risk not contact but collision that would throw both of you down and probably injure you both.

The final piece of kit you needed to really shove your lance through someone was the lance rest, called an arrêt de cuirasse or just an "arret", which was a sort of flange or hook that stuck out from the right side of the cuirass - the chest armor - and would fasten onto the lance to spread the shock of impact across the rider's whole torso. 

It shows up around 1380 or so, at the height of the High Medieval. If you look close it's the little sticky-out-y thing on the left side (as you look at it) of the armored cuirass in the picture below

I mean, think of it; you're going to try and shove your lance through someone in armor while traveling twenty or thirty miles an hour (and they're going as fast, so your rate of closure is something like 40 mph...) and you're going to hang on to your lance with just the strength of your right hand and arm?

Christ, your arm will come off first.

But hook everything together; you locked into your saddle with high pommel and cantle - medieval saddles are more like bucket seats than modern flat saddles - and your legs straight and feet well down in the stirrups in the long stirrup leathers (to a modern rider the stirrups of a European medieval horseman look WAY too long, but they make sense if the point is to lock you into the saddle - you get more forward leverage from the "a la brida" straight-leg-toes-down style than the "a la gineta" bent-knee-heels-down modern style

Your saddle locked onto your horse with girth and breastband, and your lance hooked onto your armor.

You've just become a 2,000-pound steel-tipped projectile.

That's the big reason that the lance reaches it's longest length during the high medieval. If you're using it as a stabbing or thrusting spear it doesn't make much sense to make it much longer  or heavier than the xyston of Alexander's times. You couldn't use it effectively; too slow to handle and as likely as not to pull you off your horse if you got it stuck into someone.

But once you were locked into your horse and saddle? Sure! All you had to do was put the red dot - the tip of your lance - on target and your mass times velocity would do the rest.

All that made the armored horseman the King of Battle from roughly the late 4th or 5th Centuries CE until gunpowder made those steel avalanches suicidal in the 17th.

As you can imagine...all of this lance-charging took a lot of practice.

The practice field was called the quintain, which Wikipedia says is derived "...from the Middle English word quintaine by way of Old French from the Latin quīntāna, "fifth", in reference to a street between the fifth and sixth maniples of a Roman camp, where warlike exercises took place."

The practice field included the quintain itself, typically some sort of shield or sheet of wood mounted on a rotating crossarm, often with a pole projecting from the other arm - the idea being to hit the shield target and then avoid the swing of the pole as you passed.

Another piece of training equipment was the suspended ring we talked about above. Interestingly this has survived as a piece of fencing training (although usually a ball of some sort suspended on a string) that the fencer is supposed to hit with the tip of the foil or epee. I suspect that the ring was designed to tear free once pierced so that it didn't tear the lance out of the riders' hands.

So by 1400 you've got the table all set for what happened nearly a century later; an armored man on an armored horse riding towards another man and horse similarly equipped with the intention of shoving the pointy end of a long pole through the guy as the initial battle encounter of heavy cavalry.

 
Jousting - King of Sports, Sport of Kings

By Late Medieval times - specifically, around the 14th Century CE - this initial cavalry encounter with a lance had become the main event of what was called the hastilude, a congeries of martial arts that, before about 1300 or 1350 usually included closer simulations to actual armored warfare; the "melee" both mounted and on foot.

Much like fencing on foot became more formalized and less lethal as the sword itself became more of a fetish object and less of a weapon of war, as armored mounted combat became less and less likely the training or simulation of armored mounted combat became more ritualized and less lethal.

A big part of this had to be the social stratification of the business.

Jousting was the polo of martial arts. It took a lot of money to raise and keep the heavy horses needed to make a decent run at the tiltyard. It took even more to outfit the horse and rider, especially as what had been combat training became less about combat and more about sport. 

By the 15th Century CE the European nobility and royalty that were the main players of the jousting game had developed specialized armor just for sport. This devolved into two main branches.

The idea behind stechen was to simulate a combat headshot. In jousting practice it meant you aimed at your opponent's helm and tried to knock the elaborate crest off. This meant a hell of an impact to the head - probably a fair number of jousting addicts with TBIs there - so the so-called stechenzeug, stechen armor, was massive and held you practically immobile from the waist up.

BTW, a lot of Victorian authors were familiar with this sort of kit, which led to the common trope of the fallen knight unable to get up because of the weight of his armor.

Which, when you think about it for more than a moment, is utterly nuts. Nobody would go into a potentially fatal encounter with a similarly armed opponent if simply losing your footing made you helpless. Combat armor has always been designed for mobility at the expense of impenetrability.

But the danger of the stechen form of jousting was not from getting stabbed through the eyeslit whilst lying helpless on the ground, so it made sense to armor up as much as possible above the waist.

(Notice particularly the seamless transition from the base of the helmet into the chest and shoulders on the 1500-ish German stechenzeug in the picture. The other guy is gonna try and hit your dead square in the face, so if you don't want your neck broken you'd best have the armor equivalent of one of those neckroll things that football players wear.)

As far as I know the Tudor jousters hadn't adopted this form of the sport. We have several of Henry VIII's jousting armors, and they are much lighter than this, more similar to the other form of mounted lance sport common in the Renaissance, called rennen.

This involved a lighter armor and targeting the body, specifically the left side of the torso which was usually protected with a shield of some sort. So far as I can tell the sort of tilting that was likely to have happened on that day in 1536 was more similar to the rennen type.

Why?

Mostly from what we know of Henry's tilting armor. So far as I know we don't have an example from this later life, but here's his tilt armor from the Field of the Cloth of Gold in 1515:

Aside from the skirt (which is kind of awesome in a totally-not-girly-way) this kit doesn't look like what you'd wear if you knew your opponent was coming at your head.

But.

We know from the historical record that Henry had been hit in the head while jousting at least once before, in March of 1524. 

Hall's Chronicle (published in the middle of the 16th Century CE, probably around 1548 to 1550 during the reign of Henry's son Edward VI) says that one Charles Brandon, 1st Duke of Suffolk, nailed Henry on the helmet during a joust on 10 MAR.

The scary part was that the king for some reason hadn't dropped his visor in place. Brandon's lance shattered (tiliting lances, unlike combat gear, were often made with a hollow shaft to make them less lethal) on the king's helmet and the sharp splinters studded the king/s helmet and headpiece. Specifically, Hall says:

"For of a suertie the duke strake the kyng on the brow right vnder the deftce of y hedpcce on the verye coyflfe scull or bassenetpcce where vnto the barbet for power and defence is charneld, to whiche coyfte or bassenet neuer armorer takelh hede, for it is euermore couered with the viser, barbet and volant pece, and so that pece is so defended that it forseth of no charge

But when y spere on that place lighted, it was great Jeopardy of death insomnche that the face was bare, for the Dukes spere brake all to shyuers, and bare the kynges viser or barbet so farre backe by the countrebuflfe that all the kynges fccadpece was full of spleters."

(*Note: We often forget how random English spelling and grammar was prior to the publication of the first dictionaries beginning in the early 17th and more widely in the 18th Centuries CE. But even for the 1500's Hall is pretty random. Here's a transcription, from Sarah Bryson's good article about the incident:

"For most certainly, the Duke struck the King on the brow, right under the defence of the headpiece, on the very skull cap or basinet piece where unto the barbette is hinged for power and defence, to which skull cap or basinet no armourer takes heed of, for it is evermore covered with the visor, barbet and volant piece, and so that piece is so defended that it forceth of no charge. 

But when the spear landed on that place, it was great jeopardy of death, in so much that the face was bare, for the Duke’s spear broke all to splinters and pushed the King’s visor or barbet so far back by the counter blow that all the King’s headpiece was full of splinters."

It's hard to tell from that where Brandon had been aiming because the whole thing sounds like a total clusterfuck; the king forgetting to slap his visor down, his armorer - Thomas Grey, 1st Marquis Dorset - handing off Henry's lance without stopping his monarch from killing himself, and then Brandon himself not pulling his strike when he realized that his opponent was at risk.

(That he didn't also helps suggest the likelihood of the 1536 accident being more likely to have involved a true joust or tilt rather than the "running at the ring" scenario of the Ortiz letter. The whole tournament thing sounds more like it was a sort of Renaissance MMA wild brawl than the sort of highly formalized and safety-first practice that martial art schools of foot fencing had adopted even by the 16th Century CE.)

But my guess is - based on the armors we have and the descriptions of the tournaments - that these guys were running something more like a rennen-style joust.

That hasn't answered our question, though, has it?

Why was Henry Tudor running around trying to poke some other noble mook with a lance in 1536?

Well...that kind of goes back to Henry Tudor and who he was.

And that was a "sportsman".

Henry luuuurved his games and sports. Tennis, anyone? Yup. Hank was the Pete Sampras of European royalty; he loved the game, had tennis courts - which were indoors, by the way, seem more like modern squash than the lawn tennis we think of as "tennis", and included a sort of viewing shed with a sloping roof along one side and the receiving end of the court, all of which was in play - in his palaces and was known to roust out his courtiers to play as often as possible.

Hunting? Sure! Deer, boar, birds (with hawks...), if it moved it died if Henry and the gang could catch it.

But the biggest and boldest sports were the "martial sports" that were the central feature of the big tournaments. These included not just jousting - although it seems like jousting was considered the top card on the program - but other combat-training style events; fencing with swords, archery, even wrestling.

The "Historic Royal Palaces" site has a good little piece about how these fighting sports were important to Henry's - and other European monarchs, as well - image as fighting leaders. Charles Farris writes that:

"In the sixteenth century, kings were still expected to lead their troops into battle, and so a healthy and physically impressive king might be deemed to have a military advantage. Indeed, many sports favoured by medieval and Renaissance kings helped to hone the skills considered necessary for warfare. Hunting, riding and jousting, for example, refined their skills in the saddle: essential in an age when the heavily armoured cavalry charge was still a key set piece of warfare."

That's a bit misleading. Certainly the forces that the Tudor monarchy fielded at the only two actual general field engagements that were fought during Henry's reign (both in 1513) - the "Battle of the Spurs" in France and the Battle of Flodden in Scotland - were not significantly different from the medieval armies that had fought Henry's father's battle at Bosworth in 1485. And the English cavalry did charge - and rout - the French cavalry using the old-school lance tactics at the "Spurs" (so named because the French cavalry used their spurs to run away rather than their weapons to fight).

But by the 1530s that was changing. Longbows were getting swapped out for matchlocks, artillery was becoming mobile enough to be a genuine threat to formed troops - and horse soldiers are a hell of a big target for the gunners - and even the cavalrymen were adopting their own firearm tactic, the "caracole" that was a brief fad in the middle of the 16th Century CE.

The other thing that was changing was the notion that the king needed to be a warrior in the old Arthurian style. The idea died hard - George II was the last British monarch to lead troops in battle at Dettingen in 1743 - but the royals were starting to act more like modern officers and commanders, directing the carnage rather than getting stuck in at handstrokes. James IV of Scotland was the last British monarch to actually die in battle, at Flodden.

Still. The notion of being a "knight", of fighting in armor, was important to Henry and, because of that, a big part of how his own people and his foreign enemies and allies saw him.

I'm utterly both horrified and fascinated with this Tudor Renaissance love affair with the last vestiges of knightly combat.

First because of the general weirdness of the whole idea of taking a what must have been a chaotic and terrifying tactical move - a mounted attack intended to use mass and speed to spit an opponent on a polearm - and turning it into a sport.

And, second, because of the ridiculous amount of of collision force involved, either as warfare or sport..

Take a man; assume a fairly healthy adult 16th Century male, so maybe 150 pounds or so.

Add another 50-70 pounds of armor, including the lance and all the battle rattle.

Put him on top of a heavy horse - say, about 1,500 pounds - and add another 500 pounds or so of tack and horse armor. All together horse and rider come to about 2,200 pounds.

Then get them moving down the tiltyard track from a walk through a canter to a gallop at the moment of impact; say about 25 miles an hour or so.

The result is about 2,500 pound-foot per second of momentum...and, remember, this is all being directed into a lancehead that - assuming that the lance was tipped with a "coronal", a crown-shaped blunt head like the picture on the right - was maybe a couple or three inches in diameter.

Even throwing a factor of safety in there for loss of energy during the impact you've got to be looking at hundreds of pounds of force per square inch driving that lance-head.

As we mentioned, jousting lances were built to break rather than impale, and my understanding is that the rennen-type joust was designed to put the impact on the opponent's shield, where the momentum wouldn't be imparted directly into the target's body but to one side, at least in theory robbing the impact of some force and shoving the target sideways out of the saddle rather than straight back against the cantle (or, worse, in a stechen-style joust, snapping the head back...)

Still. The impact had to be fucking shattering, and we've already seen that rennen-style jousters could miss the body or shield and strike at the head.

I can't even think to summon a contemporary parallel unless you took the modern military rifle-fighting training (called "pugil sticks" in the U.S. Army and Marine Corps)...

...and replaced the padded sticks with a service rifle (while ensuring the sheath is firmly strapped to the bayonet, mind - can't afford to lose too many joes...) and then let the fighters whale on each other with rifle butt and blunted bayonet.

That'd hurt like hell but even that lacks the insane factor of the high-velocity impact of the jousters colliding. 

Imagine the sort of force you 'd have to impart to knock an armored man and an armored horse coming at you at residential street traveling velocity completely over, as the king is supposed to have fallen that day in January.

Goddamn.

So to me it seems completely nuts as a "sport"...but it was supposed to have been critically important to how Henry saw himself. And therein, seemingly, lies a big part of this tale.

But to get there we need to start with the history of the Tudor line and The King's Great Matter.

 
Royal Upstarts and Papal Bullshit

We met and discussed these Tudors back in 2014 when we discussed the Battle of Bosworth.

The line of William the Conqueror had sat on the throne for the previous 300 years and change in one form or another. 

It was nearly broken off completely in the 12th Century CE, when Henry I didn't spawn a (legit) male heir, but the eventual winner of the mess that was the English 12th Century (which is a story in itself and a nasty one, at that...) was the son of Henry's daughter Matilda, so the Angevins/Plantagenets that eventually split into the divisive Lancasters and Yorks of the 15th Century could claim at least a drop or three of the Conqueror's blood.

But the Tudors were rank outsiders. Here' how the Wiki entry for "Henry VII" describes the Tudor claim:

"Henry's mother, Margaret, provided Henry's main claim to the English throne...She was a great-granddaughter of ...(the) fourth son of Edward III and his third wife Katherine Swynford. Katherine was Gaunt's mistress for about 25 years. When they married in 1396 they already had four children, including Henry's great-grandfather John Beaufort. Thus, Henry's claim was somewhat tenuous; it was from a woman, and by illegitimate descent."

"Somewhat tenuous" is doing a lot of work there. Tudor's claim to the English throne was about as "tenuous" as the first William's - that is, he took the goddamn thing by force and kept it by force (the first twelve years of his reign Henry VII had to deal with six rebellions and by "deal" I mean "kill the fuck out of anyone who even looked at him sideways"). 

He killed a pantsload of Plantagenet pretenders, too, possibly, even probably, including the famous "Princes in the Tower" that are usually considered part of his predecessor Richard III's rap sheet.

The point of all this is to point out two salient points:

First, that the Tudor claim to the throne, even by Henry VIII's time, was pretty chancy on heredity grounds. Henry was pretty miserable about the whole "male heir" thing, as several of his wives would tell you if he hadn't divorced or killed them, but he did have at least some political reasoning behind his asshole-ish-ness.

And, second, the English experience with female rulers was not a good one. Remember the 12th Century mess? A lot of that was chalked up to the English great houses unwillingness to sit still under a Queen. They intrigued with a grandson of the Conqueror (through his daughter) and pitched the whole realm into civil war.

 

So.

Henry VIII was the "spare" of "the heir and the spare" back in 1491 when he was born, third of the elder Henry's kids. His older brother Arthur got all the king-training growing up, so it was sort of a panic when Arthur died in 1503 and then Henry VII followed him six years later, still having not really bothered to brief his remaining son on the business of ruling.

It was as a callow 17-year-old that Henry Tudor became Henry VIII in 1509, and immediately proceeded to marry his older brother's widow Catherine.

The Henry-Catherine marriage is sort of strange.

It was a political match, of course (royal marriages usually are) designed to pull England and Spain (along with the Holy Roman Empire and France - Henry VII was unusual for an English ruler in trying to ally with France rather than invade it...) into a coalition.

But there were problems even before it began.

The two main pushers were Henry VII on the English side and Catherine's mom Isabella on the Spanish (she's the Isabella of "Ferdinand and Isabella" of Columbus fame). But Isabella died in 1504 and her husband Ferdinand wasn't nearly as keen on the English connection.

Another issue was the whole "my brother's wife" thing. Arthur was only 15 when he died, a year younger than Catherine, and seems to have been at least "unwell" for most of the five months they were married. Catherine and at least one of her ladies claimed that the two had never mussed the sheets, and given their youth and the health problems Arthur seems to have had in the winter and early spring of 1501-02, I don't find that unreasonable.

That and Arthur's kid brother didn't seem to find the Spanish princess all that appealing. The parents managed to get them promised - "betrothed" - in 1503 right after Arthur croaked, but when Henry got his legal majority the following year he nixed the whole thing. That's where things stood five years later when young Henry Tudor suddenly became Henry VIII in April 1509.

And, equally suddenly, decided that Catherine really was a fascinating older woman (she was 23, he was 17) and married her that June.

The story of Henry and Catherine is a tale in itself. The young king seems to have been some sort of serial adulterer, screwing any and everyone he could nail while continuing to bed his bride; he had at least one bastard - Henry FitzRoy - in 1519 by a woman named Blount whose family was fairly pedestrian and thus unlikely to either expect much from the connection or to cause a massive scandal. 

Catherine is supposed to have said nothing about her husband's wandering pecker, whether from chagrin, self-preservation, or pride or some mixture of all three it's hard to say.

The magic was leaving their marriage - at least for Henry - because Henry and Catherine seemed to have had a problem with kids.

In order, Henry and Catherine had:
A stillborn daughter in 1510;
A son in 1511 - Henry - who lived only seven weeks (but was enough to get Henry excited enough to through the "Westminister Tournament" that produced a painted scroll that is one of our best glimpses of these Tudor jousts);
A stillborn son in 1513;
A stillborn son in 1515;
A daughter, Mary, in 1516 - their only child to survive to adulthood, and;
A son in 1518 who was either stillborn or lived less than two weeks.

Several modern theories have been posited for why the Tudor couple had so many problems with the whole "heir and a spare" project. One professional paper (Whitley and Kramer, 2010) suggests the issue was Henry's blood type, that he was positive for something called the Kell blood group, which would have caused problems if he engendered children with a woman or women who were Kell-negative.

Alison Weir, writing for the BBC's History Extra, rebuts this by pointing out that the patterns of both Catherine's and Blount's pregnancies don't fit the Kell model (where the first child is often fine but subsequent pregnancies fail) and suggests that the problems could have been genetic - both parents were one of seven siblings; only four of Henry's generation lived past infancy while two of Catherine's were stillborn - or just the sort of bad luck common to pregnancies in a time lacking both hygiene and understanding of human biology.

Regardless of the why, remember from above; the Tudor "dynasty" was not sturdily rooted in heredity and history, and the English royal record was pretty sketchy regarding ruling daughters, meaning that anointing Mary as Princess of Wales was taking a big risk.

Not to mention the risk and problem of marriage. A ruling Queen was still a woman; were Mary to marry her husband would presume to take lordship not just of her and her body but all her belongings, including the kingdom itself.

Were she not?

The Tudor line would end.

Again...we look at Henry VIII and see his obsession with sons and the generally shitty way he treated the women he expected to bear them through the lens of our modern lives and look at him as sort of the Donald Trump of his day; a bloated, greedy, entitled, adulterous, rotten sonofabitch and crap ruler.

But unlike The Donald, it's hard not to see the political and diplomatic problems Henry faced without the "heir and a spare".

By 1525 or so things were ugly in the royal marriage and in European politics.

After an initial continuation of his father's pro-French diplomacy Henry took England out of any sort of accommodation with France and into the so-called "Holy League" of the Holy Roman Empire, the Papal states, and Spain to oppose French ambitions. 

Things had briefly looked promising in the late Teens. Two other young rulers had succeeded their fathers; Charles V to the Imperial throne, and Francis I to the French. It seemed like the young Henry VIII might bond with his fellow party boys, but the hopes lasted only as long as the drunken wrestling match between the French and English kings at the "Field of the Cloth of Gold".

Henry lost, by the way (and Henry was generally not a good loser) but regardless of who pinned whom England had interests that were incompatible with what Francis wanted for France. Within a year the French and Imperials were at war and England - though not drawn in militarily - was pulled in diplomatically on the side of the Queen's nephew, Charles. The Imperials and the French then proceeded to fight what are now called the "Italian Wars" (because the bulk of the fighting was there) during the 1520s and into he 1530s.

We talked about one of the bigger fights in this war - Pavia in 1525 - back in 2009.

In the middle of all of this diplomatic and military maneuvering the Tudors were now officially on the outs. Henry had taken up with Mary Boleyn and is widely suspected of fathering two of her kids (tho he never officially or legally admitted to that the way he did his son by Blount) and that led him to the woman who was to become the center of "The King's Great Matter"; Anne Boleyn.

 
A Pair of Queens

So here was the situation in 1526.

The continent of Europe was nearly ten years into what would be known as the Protestant Reformation. German monk Martin Luther had declared his violent objection to several bits of doctrine central to the Roman Catholicism of the time - particularly that of clerical supremacy - and had begun to accumulate a religious and political following, principally in Germany.

This was, obviously, violently opposed by the Holy See and the orthodox Catholic rulers of the major powers in continental Europe; Charles V of Spain and the Empire, and Francis I of France.

Henry's England was still - through his marriage to Catherine to Spain and his anti-French diplomatic maneuverings to the Empire - on the side of the Catholic angels.

But...Henry was increasingly anxious that he had no legal male heir, and Catherine, by then 41, was both past safe childbearing age and even if she had a chance of bearing again had been desperately unlucky in her children.

Now throw into this volatile mix Anne, who was intelligent, strong-willed, and socially astute. She'd seen how Henry had used her older sister and had no intention of joining the Girl of the Month Club. She was willing to be wooed...but was going to be wed if Henry was going to get the groceries.

So that set Henry on a collision course with the Roman Catholic Church.

What eventually became known as "The King's Great Matter" has generated whole volumes of research and opinion, but let's try and pare it down to the essentials:

1) Henry VIII wanted to, as the phrase goes, "break his forty into two (well, okay, one) twenties". He had a bunch of reasons for this, but they boil down to a) Anne was smokin' hot, and b) he was - for the reasons we discussed - increasingly frantic for a legitimate male heir.

2) Standing directly in the way of this was the Roman church led by then-current Pope, Clement VII. The reasons for that opposition began with the church doctrine that forbid divorce. You could get a declaration of nullity - usually just called "annulment" - of marriage based on four main points. They're important, so we should consider them in detail. They were:

• Defect of form: If the marriage ceremony is invalid (e.g. two Catholic persons being married outside of the Catholic Church)
• Defect of contract: If it was not a marriage that was contracted, such as if there was a defect of intent on either side. This can occur if either party lacked the intent to enter into a lifelong, exclusive union, open to reproduction. In the Church's understanding, the marriage contract can only be between a woman and a man.
• Defect of will: Because of "mental incapacity, ignorance, error about the person, error about marriage, fraud, knowledge of nullity, simulation, conditioned consent, force or grave fear".
• Defect of capacity: If either party were married to another and thus unable to enter into the contract. Also, certain relationships of blood render the parties unable to enter into contract

Notice that there's nothing in there about "not bearing a son". Henry's notional argument - that the biblical passage Leviticus 20:21 made his marriage to Catherine null because she had been his brother Arthur's wife - was on shaky ground; it's contradicted by several other biblical references.

To make matters more difficult for Clement, there were two other major problems:

First, one of Clement's predecessors - Julius II - had provided an official "dispensation from the impediment of affinity" that made it legal under canon law for Henry to marry Catherine in the first place. To reverse that now made it obvious that the dispensation hadn't been a matter of genuine religious judgement but a purely political move at a time when the Roman church was under attack for its temporal politics, and

Second, Catherine was the Emperor Charles V's auntie, and the imperial armies sacked Rome in 1527, made Charles the effective ruler of the papal dominions, and Clement his pensioner. Charles was not going to sit idly by while some pissant English king disrespected his auntie, meaning that Clement had to walk reeeeeeal careful about this whole annulment business.

Henry tried and tried unsuccessfully to get Clement to cave. Several of his ministers of state were dragged into and destroyed by the Matter, including both his chancellors Wolsey and More.

To make matters more difficult Anne finally let Henry sow his royal seed, and they two were married in 1533 with Anne pregnant with the future Elizabeth I. To make that kid - and Henry being Henry assumed that she would be a he - Catherine had to go.

There's more to all that, of course, because we need to remember that the Roman church was in effect the WalMart, Microsoft, Amazon, and Apple of 16th Century England. It was the largest, richest, most powerful organization in the country, rivaling the civil government for size and power.

Back in 2012 we talked about how this had always chapped the English crown, all the way back to Henry II's time. The eighth Henry wanted to be "Supreme Head of the Church of England" not because he wanted a Church OF England but because he wanted to be head of the Church IN England; he wanted to have the ability to name high church officials of his choosing, he wanted to control the finances of the church - which were insanely huge - and he wanted to have the church say his kids with Anne were legit.

Long story short; he wasn't going to get that from Clement VII, so the result was a schism where the English king told the de-facto king of Catholicism that the latter's writ ended at the water's edge along the Channel.

There's obviously a crap-ton more to this - especially how the schismatic Church of England went from just a Catholic sect to a Protestant church and dragged the English into the religious wars of the late 16th and 17th Century CE - but the bottom line is that by 1536 Henry VIII was leading a breakaway from the official religion of both the European powers France and the Holy Roman Empire and was still desperately seeking that legal son when he entered the lists that day in January.

The Engagement: So, as I've mentioned, from the primary sources we don't have agreement of the details of that meeting other than the king took a heavy fall. It seems likely that his horse fell, too.

Unless Henry was actually unseated before the fall - and we have no way of knowing if he was, but the sources, particularly Chapuys, suggest that he wasn't - he was in real danger of suffering severe injuries to the leg on the falling side.

Henry VIII is reported to have had leg trouble before this. There's a good article in the Journal of the Royal Society of Medicine (Chalmers and Chaloner, 2009) that goes into this, but the tl:dr version is that in 1527 the king was reported to have a "sore leg".

I've read several explanations for this leg trouble, commonly described as an "ulcer". Supposedly Henry was vain about his legs and liked to wear tight garters to make his hose or leggings snug to show off the royal gams.

This, combined with the guy's appetite - he ate meat and drank wine like a B-movie barbarian - may well have caused circulatory problems, including varicose veins, which were complicated by his sports addiction. 

Henry is known to have hurt one foot playing tennis in 1527, and the leg ulcer may have been related to that or to another sports injury - riding is hard on the legs, jousting even harder - but the base condition was there for the fall in 1536 to have significantly worsened it.

There's no reliable primary source that describes the king's legs as having been "crushed" in January - Chalmers and Chaloner (2009) repeat that along with the assertion I've read elsewhere, that there may well have been some broken bones. 

I don't buy it; anything other than a tiny hairline fracture of the femur, tibia, or fibula would have made Henry unable to walk without violent pain, and there's nothing in the historical record to support that.

But having several thousand pounds of panicking horse fall on your leg would almost certainly have damaged a hell of a lot of tissue and blood vessels; that's what "bruising" is, after all. 

Chalmers and Chaloner (2009) suspect that the combination of obesity, diet - the authors suspect hypertension and even Type II diabetes related to all that wine and beef - tight garters, and the injuries of the 1536 fall may have resulted in deep vein thrombosis that then ulcerated:

"The wearing of a garter...and the references to the King's shapely calf make it unlikely that Henry had prominent primary varicose veins. However, he may have acquired venous hypertension as a result of deep vein thrombosis (DVT). History does not record how tightly the garter was bound around his upper calf and he had several injuries to his legs as a result of his sporting activities, both of which represent risk factors for DVT. The most severe injuries were sustained during the fall from his horse that rendered him unconscious and crushed his legs in 1536. 

Crush injury with or without associated fracture of one or more long bones with obesity and relative immobility would increase the risk of DVT damage to the deep venous system and subsequent venous insufficiency. Severe venous hypertension may therefore have resulted in ulceration. An untreated compound fracture may also result in diffuse infection with cellulitis, osteomyelitis, deep abscess formation and a persistently discharging sinus. A compound fracture may well have rendered Henry unable to walk and such a suggestion is absent in the records of the time. It is therefore much more likely that Henry suffered an extensive DVT as a result of his injuries and subsequent immobility resulting in the classical pattern of venous ulceration." (Chalmers and Chaloner, 2009)

We know that Henry VIII was increasingly unhappy during the winter and spring of 1536. His health seems to have been a big part of that, along with his dissatisfaction with his current spouse.

All of this seems to have come to a head at yet another joust, this one apparently a regularly-scheduled May Day meeting at the palace in Greenwich, 1 MAY 1536.

From what I can tell it appears that not only didn't Henry joust that day - unsurprising for someone with painful leg problems from a bad accident only three and a half months earlier - but that the May Day meeting was the beginning of the end; the king never jousted again after January 1536.

That can't have put him in a better mood. Jousting was his thing, the sport wherein he saw himself as a manly-man, a sportsman, a royal stud, and now here he was sitting in the stands like a soyboy nursing his aching leg while other guys got to show off their manly prowess.

He is described in Hall's Chronicle as suddenly getting up and leaving, not something you could simply and easily do if strapped into a suit of tilting armor, another point in favor of his sitting May Day out. 

Hall writes:

"...and sodainly from the Justes the kyng departed hauing not aboue vi. persons with him, and came in the euenyng from Grenewyche in his place at Westminster. Of this sodain departyng many men mused, but moste chiefely the quene."

Henry rode from Greenwich to Westminster, dragging Norris along all sweaty from the tilt and pestering him the whole way about his supposed adultery with Queen Anne.

George Constantine writes:

“Apon May daye Mr. Noryce justed. And after justinge the Kynge rode sodenly to Westminster, and all the waye as I heard saye, had Mr. Noryce in examinacyon and promised hym his pardon in case he wolde utter the trewth. But what so ever cowld be sayed or done, Mr. Norice would confess no thinge to the Kynge, where vpon he was committed to the towre in the mornynge.”

It wasn't only Norris. Three of the other jousters that day - George Boleyn, William Brereton, and Francis Weston- were subsequently arrested and executed for adulting with Henry's wife.

Norris seems to have had at least some connection with Anne's fidelity - she supposedly said something to him about his putting off his marriage because he had hopes of bagging her - but was also a serious Anne partisan and thus a target for a royal purge if the king was going to rid himself of Wife #2. Weston was another Boleyn faction member.

Brereton, though, was very definitely not a Boleyn supporter. Why was he tossed into this beheading party?

From there you have to wonder; here's the king, already pissed off at his wife. His legs hurt like sonsofbitches. And, perhaps worst of all, he can't play "joust", his favorite sport. 

He's sitting there like a cuckold while a bunch of his courtiers and friends get to be all manly knights getting the nubile ladies all sweaty and eager doing the one thing he'd give his left royal nut to be able to do again.

Would it be out of character for Henry to find that a reason to make sure those guys never jousted again, either, being short of a head?

Anne followed the jousting party to the scaffold within the month. 

(And it's worth noting that the headsman did a tidy job with Anne, taking off her head with a single stroke. Compare that with the appalling execution of 67-year-old Margaret Pole in 1541, where she was either hacked to death over ten or so blows of an axe or got loose from the scaffold and was cut down as she fled...)

Anne's successor, Jane Seymour, had been on the king's target list since at least February, and he wasted no time, marrying Jane before the end of May.

The Outcome: Just another day at the office for Henry Tudor, but likely to have had some troubling long-term implications.

The Impact: If you surf the 'Net you'll find any number of places where someone or someones claim that the fall of January 1536 somehow changed Henry for the worse. Whether it was a traumatic brain injury, concussion, or just general misery from injury the king is supposed to have been transformed from the handsome athletic prince into the overbearing old tyrant.

I don't buy it.

For one thing, Henry had been pretty overbearing before this. Hell, two days after he was crowned he nicked two of his father's least-well-liked officers - Richard Empson and Richard Dudley - who were shortened by a head the following year. His treatment of his first wife during the divorce was pretty damn miserable, hounding her into ever smaller and meaner quarters and finally into the fenlands where she died.

Our guys Chalmers and Chaloner (2009) disagree with me: 

"Execution for treason (by hanging, eviscerating, beheading, burning at the stake or boiling alive) had become increasingly commonplace in the latter part of Henry's reign. This king was responsible for more deaths than any monarch before or since. In a brutal age, Henry was known and feared for his cruelty."

Here's my rebuttal: what they elide is that during the last decade and a half or so of his reign - and all but five of the fifty-odd people executed under Henry VIII were topped between 1534 and 1547  - Henry was fighting a war against the Roman Church. 

Of the other 48 people on the Wiki list, 27 - more than half - were done in for the "treason" of fighting for Catholicism in one form or another. Remember, once Henry was the "Supreme Head of the Church of England" it was treason to insist that the Pope in Rome was his boss. That caught out Tom More and many others.

Make no mistake; this was a fight to the death, and these people were fighting for what they saw as God's will. Henry, like any Tudor, knew damn well that to play the Game of Thrones was to win or die and he was damn well going to win.

(And he did, or, at least, his successors eventually did, but the way was long, hard, and bloody. The resolution of the fight between Luther and the Holy See that Henry's Great Matter brought to Great Britain was still raging two hundred years later, which is why it's pretty sad to see the state of the CofE in the 21st Century. When you draw barely 1% of your nation to the national church? There's something very, very wrong there.)

Another 10 were involved in the two wives that Henry served with steel divorce papers; the two queens themselves, our three jousters, another two men accused with Anne and two men accused of messing around with Wife #5, Catherine Howard (and Jane Boleyn, Vicountess Rochford, for having something to do with Howard's End).

So was Henry dangerous to know? Yes. Was he unusually dangerous? Given his times and conditions, probably not.

I do think the fall caused problems for Henry, his court, and his country, though.

I think that the leg problems exacerbated by the fall in January did have an effect on the king, and that effect was not a good one. 

Inability to play his games and sports combined with his unchanged massive appetite soon produced the grossly bloated "Good King Henry" of cartoon and parody. Here's Chalmers and Chaloner (2009) again:

"Hypertension, hypercholesterolaemia and Type II diabetes are known to accelerate peripheral vascular disease and, more recently, abdominal obesity has been identified as a marker of arterial insufficiency^. The onset of peripheral vascular disease would seriously exacerbate venous ulceration, reducing the capacity for healing and causing difficulties in the fight against distal infection. Additionally, the grossly swollen legs that Henry suffered towards the end of his life may represent congestive cardiac failure in an arteriopath. Clearly, we are unlikely ever now to know the truth.

Persistent chronic leg ulcers have been shown to seriously adversely affect quality of life even in the age of modern medical treatment and analgesia. For Henry, racked with pain and repetitive infection, his ulcers regularly cauterized with red-hot irons, the situation must have been intolerable. The effect of chronic pain on the temperament is well recognized and the actions of many a historical figure have been linked to their personal physical misery."

The monarch who had been politically adroit and fiscally prudent in the 1510s and 20s became increasingly less adept in the 1530s and 40s. 

Part of that was his enmity with the Church of Rome, but mistakes like the ridiculous French campaign of 1544 and the continuous war (what was later termed the "Rough Wooing"...) with Scotland helped drain the privy purse and force an aggressive policy towards looting the church funds in England. 

Those religious houses and diocese were broken up as much to loot the cashbox as to weaken the Roman authority in England, but the result was continued enmity at home and poisonous hatred abroad that culminated in the bitter reign of Henry's older daughter Mary and drizzled on in rebellions and civil unrest that continued through the Tudor into Stuart, and even Hanoverian times.

At least some of this is likely to have been because the man was in pain...and as one who has some experience with chronic pain, it's both distracting and infuriating. I'm not shocked that the king was off his game after 1536.

All in all 1536 must have been a pretty bad year for the second of the Tudor kings. Losing his health and youth, losing his first adult son (Henry FitzRoy, the king's son with Bessie Blount, died in July of that year aged only 17...), losing his second wife with extreme prejudice.

Ouch.

That at least some of this toil and trouble was because the king of England was addicted to a weird anachronism of combat sports seems deeply, intriguingly fascinating to me but, then again, that's why history has always fascinated me. If there's one thing that runs true through humanity it's that the hairless ape can be assured of taking almost any situation, time, or place and doing something truly, madly, incredibly fucked up with it.

Thus endeth the lesson.

Touchline Tattles: I'm not sure if there's anything silly, fun, or whimsical about this tale of injury and loss. 

It's spun off about whole history books and more, though, from goofs like the little jingle ("divorced, beheaded, died, divorced, beheaded, survived") that you used to chant to remember the order of the wives back when I was a kid and kids learned actual history through "'Enery the Eighth I Am" to films, books, and television. 

It's hard to ignore the Tudors; they're just boffo box office.

And the thing about history is that the further away you get the less you get the little bits and pieces of life that are silly, fun, or whimsical. Surely there were moments at the Tudor court that raised a laugh. 

Somebody must have farted during some pompous royal goings-on that cracked everybody up - Henry was reputed to be a fun guy in his youth, remember - but it's that sort of stuff that never makes it into Chapuy's letters or Holingshead's Chronicle so we don't know about it.

So instead, just when you think it's all high drama there's always my new crush from the musical Six, Anna of Cleves.

And so I'll see myself out to the tune of her and her crew laying down how they want you to imagine that it was in the studio of the great scenester of the age, Hans Holbein...

"
You bring the corsets
We'll bring the cinches
No one wants a waist over nine inches
So what if the make up contains lead poison?
At least your complexion will bring all the boys in..!

 

...Oh, ja!