Play at crystal palace

Was The Field of Cloth of Gold, the meeting between Henry VIII and Francis I 500 years ago this month, the greatest party ever thrown?

- ALLAN MALLINSON

According to Sellar and Yeatman’s 1066 And All That, King Henry VIII played tennis with the King of France on the Field of Cloth of Gold, and this was the origin of the motto of the Prince of Wales: “Ich dien.” It’s a good joke but the motto Ich dien – German for “I serve” – was adopted by the Prince of Wales nearly 200 years earlier, after the Battle of Crécy (1346), along with the famous three feathers supposedly plucked from the crown of the King of Bohemia, killed in the battle fighting on the French side. There is no record of Henry playing tennis with King Francis at the Field, although they famously wrestled.

The Field of Cloth of Gold (sometimes ‘of the Cloth of Gold’) was a summit conference under sumptuous canvas, Tudor glamping on a scale never surpassed. It was a fortnight’s tournament during the summer of 1520, a friendly but serious mutual display of power, wealth and martial arts to cement the nascent friendship between England and France. For there had been little but enmity between the two for centuries.

The Field was the idea of Henry’s Lord Chancellor, Cardinal Thomas Wolsey. England in pre-Reformation Europe was a Catholic power to be wooed by other powers, notably France, Spain and the Holy Roman Empire, and the meeting would give Wolsey and the King not only an opportunity to cement the peace but also to decide which horse to back if it came to war again.

Voltaire famously quipped that the Holy Roman Empire was “neither holy, nor Roman, nor an empire”. It was, in fact, a strange conglomerate, mostly German, in central Europe, and its emperor was elected. In AD800, Pope Leo III, hardpressed by rivals in Rome, had turned for help to Charlemagne, King of the Franks, and in gratitude had crowned Charlemagne Imperator Romanorum.