lustrous afterglow of Philip’s visit. Following the latest Burgundian fashions, they had been framed by a dramatic tableau, the first of its kind in England. Introducing the tournament, Lady May, the servant of Dame Summer, breathlessly recounted how she had heard tell of a recent joust honouring her ‘great enemy’ Lady Winter and her servant Dame February – a direct reference to the tournament at Richmond put on in Philip’s honour three months previously.3 This, then, was more about keeping up with chivalric fashions; or, rather, it showed how they mixed with international power-politics, underscoring the new special relationship between England and the Habsburgs that had been concluded during Philip’s stay: Henry’s own projected marriage to Philip’s sister, Margaret of Savoy, and that of Princess Mary to Philip and Juana’s young son Charles, heir to the Habsburg lands – including Castile. The focal point of these jousts, too, had been the eleven-year-old Mary herself. As the games opened, Lady May, curtseying deeply, petitioned her to ‘licence my poor servants’ to defend her honour ‘in exercise of chivalry’. The jousts seemed to go down very well indeed.
So when, in spring 1507, Henry lay convalescing, it was only natural that he should leave the tournament plans in the hands of the prince and his friends. That year there would be two tournaments, in May and June. Both would take place at the prince’s manor of Kennington, and they would highlight the group of jousters who had featured in the previous year’s tournaments in honour of Philip and the new Anglo-Habsburg entente cordiale.4
As the prince grew and began to present that focus for loyalties that Henry had hoped he would, courtiers and counsellors placed their sons where they could best impress him: in the tiltyard. Younger sons of the nobility like the belligerent Sir Edward Howard, Henry Stafford and Sir Edward Neville – a man with an uncanny physical resemblance to the prince – jostled for favour with the offspring of Henry’s financial advisers and diplomats. There were, inevitably, tensions. Personal rivalries and political faction compounded nobles’ dim view of the pushy lower orders muscling their way up the social order via the tiltyard. Sir Edward Neville, son of the Kentish nobleman Lord Bergavenny, was a talented improviser of ‘merry songs’ and apparently had a taste for ripe political ballads about knaves being put down and lords reigning.5 This tangled skein of interests was evident in the team of challengers chosen for the May jousts to take on all comers: William Hussey, Giles Capel, a newcomer called Thomas Knyvet, and the man who seemed the tournament’s guiding spirit, Charles Brandon.
William Hussey was the son of the royal counsellor Sir John, who as the king’s master of the wards was intimately associated with the king’s financial exactions. Sir John had bought himself into the nobility, marrying the sister of Richard Grey, earl of Kent, and had married William off to Ursula Lovell, the niece of Sir Thomas. Marriage had also provided Knyvet, an athletic twenty-one-year-old and superb horseman, with his big break: in July 1506, his wedding to the earl of Surrey’s daughter brought him into the fold of the most influential noble clan in Henry’s court and council. Capel’s father, meanwhile, was Sir William, the rich, influential London draper and former mayor who was fighting a running battle with the king’s informers, in particular his nemesis John Baptist Grimaldi.6
Like most aspiring courtiers, Giles Capel had been packed off to be educated in a noble household, to serve and learn manners. As befitted the son of one of London’s most affluent businessmen, he had been sent to the best: the household of Henry Bourchier, earl of Essex, which had an unrivalled reputation as a chivalric finishing school, and whose London house was in Knightrider Street, a short walk from Lord Mountjoy’s.7 In November 1501, Essex’s men, with their fancy horsemanship and fabulous costumes, had wowed the crowds during Catherine of Aragon’s procession through London. But by that point Essex was already a watched man. Of all the guests at Suffolk’s fateful supper in Warwick Lane, he had been the only one to escape Henry’s wrath. Essex, though, had had the good sense to keep his head down and demonstrate his unswerving loyalty to the regime. He stayed at court, cultivated his friends close to the king, like Arthur Plantagenet, and supplied to the royal household a steady stream of gentlemen trained in ‘feats of arms’ – including Capel, who became a member of the king’s spears. Another familiar face in Essex’s household was Charles Brandon.
Brandon had an impeccable pedigree as far as Henry VII was concerned. Back in 1484, his father, William, and his uncle Thomas had fled to join Henry in France after an abortive uprising against Richard III in their native East Anglia; later that year they had spearheaded the special-forces-style raid on Hammes that had liberated the earl of Oxford. Henry’s standard-bearer at Bosworth, William Brandon had become one of the regime’s first martyrs. Thomas had gone on to become one of the king’s intimates: royal counsellor, master of the horse, and a trusted diplomat. His nephew Charles, meanwhile, had grown up in the royal household, working as a sewer, or waiter. A job in which you needed to have your wits about you – ‘full cunning’ and ‘diligence’ – it involved descending into the ‘veritable hell’ of the royal kitchens to liaise with cooks, taste the innumerable dishes, and supervise their presentation. It was also a role that needed an awareness of the minutiae of precedence, as well as ‘courtesy’ – impeccable manners, charm and good looks: attributes that Charles Brandon had in spades. In his spare time, he had ready access to the royal stables through his uncle and had, evidently, become an exceptional horseman.8 By the age of seventeen, when he jousted at Arthur and Catherine’s wedding, Brandon was already the consummate courtier; in 1505, around the time he became one of the king’s spears, he landed the prestigious post of Essex’s master of horse. Seven years older than the prince, Brandon was frequently around him at court, in the tiltyard and, probably, his own small household, where Brandon’s uncle was the prince’s treasurer.
Brandon, though, had inherited a distinctly unchivalrous approach to women. His father’s own behaviour made contemporaries wince: on one occasion, William Brandon had raped an ‘old gentlewoman’ and, ‘not therewith eased’, moved on to her older daughter and was only narrowly prevented from doing the same to the younger. Charles, it seemed, was a chip off the old block – though his behaviour was altogether more calculating. Some time around 1503, he confided to a friend and fellow servant that he was in love with one of Queen Elizabeth’s gentlewomen, Anne Browne – the daughter of Sir Anthony Browne of Calais Castle and the troublesome Lady Lucy – to whose company he ‘much resorted’. His resorting was so enthusiastic that she was soon pregnant. In the ensuing scandal, Brandon was hauled in front of the earl of Essex’s council, where he pledged to marry her. Shortly after, though, he broke off the engagement, instead marrying Anne’s aunt Dame Margaret Mortimer, twenty years older than him, a shock which apparently induced Anne to miscarry their child. Charles, however, only wanted to get his hands on Dame Margaret’s assets. Selling off his wife’s portfolio of property, he pocketed the proceeds to fund his extravagant life at court – clothes, horses and, undoubtedly, the organization for the spring 1507 jousts, into which the participants ploughed their own funds.9
For all its fancy ritual and style, jousting remained an extreme sport. It was one that called for a cool head and precision, particularly when executing the flashy techniques which Brandon, Knyvet and their friends performed, and which they were teaching the prince. Even with blunted lances and filed-down or ‘rebated’ blades, grave injury and death were all too frequent, and tended to ‘disturb the cheerfulness of such events’, as a contemporary Spanish herald understatedly put it. Edmund Dudley echoed the prevailing opinion at Henry VII’s court: ‘beware of dangerous sports, for casualties that might fall’, he later wrote, emphasizing that in his son’s ‘only person dependeth the whole wealth and honour of this your realm.’10 So, although the prince’s skills were obvious to all who had seen him in practice, he would not be given the chance to show them off in public. While his friends charged each other in plate armour either side of the wooden tilt, and fought on foot with axes and swords across knee-high barriers, he would sit and watch.
None of this was intended to belittle the prince – in fact, quite the opposite. As Henry increasingly preferred to shun the limelight, so he thrust his son into it, as the visible face of the regime. An enthusiastic sponsor of her grandson’s chivalric pretensions, Lady Margaret Beaufort paid for ‘a saddle making and harness’ for his appearance in the accompanying ceremonies. Ultimately, though, the prince was not where he wanted to be, in the tiltyard, but in the stands, presiding over the jousters – he was playing not his own role, but his father’s. In the May jousts, moreover, he was not even the main focus of attention. Rather, the jousts were all about his younger sister Mary.11
On each Sunday and Thursday in May, as late spring shaded into summer, people flocked to the tournament from all over the country. Among the crowds filing into Kennington was Lady Margaret’s cultivated young cupbearer, Henry Parker, to whom she had given expenses to travel down to London for the occasion.12 Above the din of anticipation, the food- and drink-hawkers shouting their wares, and the musicians – lutenists, flutes and the dry percussive crack of taborins – trumpet fanfares heralded the start and conclusion of each round of jousting. From two in the afternoon until church bells struck six, charging plate-armour-clad horses raised clouds of dust. The action was so vivid that to one observer, it was as though it happened in slow-motion: ‘it seemed to a man’s eye/ That they would have hanged still in the sky’. Presiding over the jousts in a flower-strewn pavilion, alongside a
