In the early evening light of 7 June 1520, in a narrow field in northern France, two richly dressed horsemen spurred their mounts and set off towards each other. As they gathered speed, both men raised their right hands as if about to draw their swords to attack. Instead, each reached for his feathered hat and doffed it as their cantering horses closed rapidly together. Amidst the cheers of a crowd of onlookers, they saluted each other, then dismounted and embraced like brothers – for that is what their meeting that evening proclaimed them to be.

The men were two of...

Thus William Shakespeare evoked the spirit of the Field of Cloth of Gold. By the time they met, Henry VIII and Francis I had already done a great deal to gain reputations as exceptional monarchs. They had frequently compared themselves with each other and had, themselves, been compared by others. The Venetian ambassador Niccolò Sagudino, spoke for many. Writing from England in 1515 shortly after arriving there from the court of France, Sagudino had observed:

The like of two such courts and two such kings as those of France and England, have, I fancy, not been witnessed by any ambassadors...

With these words from ‘A Memoriall of such things as be requisite’, dating from early 1520, the English royal council began its detailed planning for Henry VIII’s meeting with Francis I.¹ Its first three items provide a remarkably succinct summary of the purpose and spirit of the Field of Cloth of Gold and show that, for both sides, the event was first and foremost about displaying its sovereign as a nobleman and warrior king as magnificently as possible.

The first item specified that Henry’s clothing for the Field was to be prepared as suited his ‘high pleasure’ and that Henry...

The idea of a personal meeting between Henry VIII and Francis I eventually became an international event that involved enough people to make a respectably large early-modern army. Transporting, accommodating, ordering, feeding and watering, protecting and entertaining this vast concourse of people was certainly akin to organising a royal military campaign. Participating in it may well have felt like one too.

In February 1520 Cardinal Wolsey drew up a treaty for both kings to ratify, which set out the prospective arrangements for their meeting. He also issued a proclamation declaring that the two sovereigns would come together and prepare ‘to...

As Cardinal Wolsey’s declaration in March 1520 made clear, the Field of Cloth of Gold was, first and foremost, a tournament held to inaugurate a state of peace and alliance between England and France. As signatories to the treaties of 1518, as the chief military officers of their kingdoms and as sovereigns of their respective national orders of chivalry, Henry VIII and Francis I led these celebrations and jointly hosted the tournament as allies. As the necessary prelude, they met each other for the first time on Thursday 7 June 1520, the Feast of Corpus Christi.

Dubois assures us that,...

The hospitality staged by Henry VIII and Francis I at the Field of Cloth of Gold was on a truly monumental scale. It was an absolutely central feature of the meeting. The feeding and watering of some 12,000 people for just over two weeks, together with several prodigious banquets, required serious expenditure by both kings and were vital aspects of the awe-inducing spectacle of royal power at the 1520 event.

Divided into the various service departments of the household, the accounts drawn up by the English court after the Field show the enormous quantities of food and drink consumed during...

Bishop Fisher has spoken for many down the centuries in expressing a certain disappointment in the apparent outcome of the Field of Cloth of Gold. The words quoted above come from a sermon he preached not long after the event. As he observed, the immediate circumstances of the Field certainly ‘did not abide’ for very long after, and all its extravagant gestures of friendship and promises of peace seemed rapidly to come to nothing. The fact that Henry and Francis were at war with each other within two years of the event invites an understandable scepticism about their expressed desire...

A capacity to make an honourable, ‘chivalric’ peace was essential in establishing the new concord between Henry VIII and Francis I in 1527 that became the Anglo-French ‘Eternal Peace’. For almost twenty years thereafter, virtually an eternity in the turbulent world of sixteenth-century European dynastic politics, the two kings sank their differences. As we have seen, Henry’s competitive relationship with Francis, expressed in extravagant claims of friendship and gift exchange, was given structure through the alliances of 1514 and 1518 and expressed most dramatically at the Field of Cloth of Gold. The many displays of friendship which followed in the...