|
|
In Our Time - transcript BBC Radio 4 |
|
|
|
Print This Page |
|
|
|
06 October 2005 Listen to the In Our Time for 06 October 2005 For a trial period In Our Time will offer an edited transcript of each edition. THIS WEEK'S PROGRAMME: THE FIELD OF THE CLOTH OF GOLD MELVYN BRAGG: Hello. In the spring of 1520, six thousand English men, women and servants followed their King across the sea to France . They weren't part of invasion force but were attendants to King Henry VIII, travelling to take part in the greatest and most conspicuous display of wealth and culture and courtly sports that Europe had ever seen. They were met by Francis I, King of France, and six thousand French noblemen, women and servants, on English soil in Northern France . The English erected a temporary palace. There were elaborate tents, jousting, pavilions, and golden fountains spouting perpetual claret. For just over two weeks they created a temporary town the size of Norwich, then England's second most popular city, on the Camp du Drap d'Or, or the Field of the Cloth of Gold. What drove the French and the English to create such an extraordinary event? What did the two sides do when they got there, and what if anything was achieved? With me to discuss the Field of the Cloth of Gold is John Guy, Fellow of Clare(?) College, University of Cambridge; Stephen Gunn, Fellow and Tutor in History at Merton College, Oxford University, and Penny Roberts, Senior Lecturer in History at the University of Warwick. Stephen Gunn, can we start with an outline of the European geopolitics of the time, around 1520? Where are the main powers? STEPHEN GUNN: Well there were three leading powers in Western Europe in the early sixteenth century, and of those three England was the smallest. England had been quite an aggressive political power in the fourteenth and fifteenth centuries, had a well established system of government, but its population was only about two and a half million. France on the other hand was much larger, population something like sixteen million, had expanded dramatically over the previous seventy years - places like Brittany, Gascogny, Normandy, Provence being taken under the control of the French Crown. France had a tax system which was able to raise taxes without the consent of Parliament, of a parliament the kind the English Kings had to go to, and France had a standing army. And then the most unpredictable in a way of the European powers was the new multiple monarchy being put together by Charles of Hapsburg. Charles of Hapsburg had been ruler of the Netherlands since he was six, and when he was sixteen he became King of the Spanish kingdoms, which he inherited from one of his grandfathers, and when he was nineteen he inherited the Hapsburg hereditary lands in Austria, Southern and Western Germany, from his other grandfather, and he was then elected Holy Roman Emperor - Emperor of Germany. So Charles of Hapsburg had put together the biggest empire in Europe for seven hundred years, and nobody knew quite what he was going to do with it. Clearly he was a rival of France, there were territorial disputes along the Pyrenees, in Italy, in the border between what's now Belgium and France, and one of the big questions at the Field of Cloth of Gold was which side would England find itself on in that dispute. MELVYN BRAGG: So in 1518 there was a Treaty of London . That was what we might call now an international treaty, run mainly not by kings but by ambassadors. Can you briefly Stephen tell us what happened there and how significant it was? STEPHEN GUNN: Well the idea of the Treaty of London was to make peace between all the European powers, to enable them to resist the expansion of the Ottoman Empire . It started really as a papal initiative but taken over by the King of England, that's why it becomes the Treaty of London. So it's outward-looking, but it's also inward-looking amongst the European powers because it's a non-aggression pact. The idea is that none of the European powers will start a war against any other, and if one of them does, then the other powers who are signatories to the Treaty will combine to back the person who's being attacked. But of course the problem with that is working out who's the aggressor and who's the offended party when things start to break down between any of those powers. MELVYN BRAGG: Let's bring in Cardinal Wolsey here, because he's important, John Guy. Can you tell us why? JOHN GUY: Wolsey is a genuinely international figure, he's not just Henry VIII's chief Minister. He's a Renaissance Cardinal, and he's a special legate, a plenipotentiary legate who has powers that almost make him, if you like, the Pope of Northern Europe. And by the time of the Treaty of London he's actually riding high. MELVYN BRAGG: Now let's make that clear. He can actually not only... he's not only representative of the Pope, he can speak for the Pope, he can make decisions as... JOHN GUY: And he does. I mean one of the complaints that the Pope has actually about the Field of Cloth of Gold is that Wolsey doesn't tell him what's happening and you know just carries on and doesn't answer his letters. So he's exercising tremendous, tremendous power here. I mean at the Field of Cloth of Gold too he's not simply representing Henry VIII, he's also representing Francis I in terms of organising it. MELVYN BRAGG: But he's just get... - sorry just I rushed you there, my fault - Wolsey is immensely wealthy, he's a butcher's son from Ipswich, but he's become Archbishop and the a Cardinal, and in great power with Henry VIII and a great power in Rome as well - Alto Rex in Rome, Alto Papa in London. Where did that wealth and power come from, or what was his relation, what was his grip on Henry VIII? JOHN GUY: Well his grip on Henry VIII really is his charisma, and of course he bolsters that by obtaining a series of wealthy bishoprics. He becomes Archbishop of York, he uses his position as a papal legate to, if you like, extract money from the English Church, and you know quite a bit of that comes towards him - for example things like the Probate of Wills. But the trick is it's really oratory. I mean Wolsey's a master diplomat, he's a great personality, he's charismatic, but he's a master of rhetoric - persuasion. You know he's his own public relations consultancy. It was said of him that he had a special gift of natural eloquence with a filed tongue to pronounce the same - that he was able to persuade and allure all men to his purpose. He'll sell you anything, he'll talk you into anything. MELVYN BRAGG: Penny Roberts, did Wolsey instigate the Field of the Cloth of Gold? PENNY ROBERTS: I think that would be a fair comment, and as John said, he clearly had influence, or at least he had a good relationship with Francis I as well, so he was able to act as a very effective broker between the French and English Kings. So I think it would be fair to say that he is very much the architect of the Field of the Cloth of Gold. MELVYN BRAGG: We can see, we've heard from Stephen and John enough to know what the English were hoping to get out of it - well a little intimation - prestige, being on equal terms, being a player and so on - how did Wolsey persuade Francis I that there was something in it for France? PENNY ROBERTS: It's very interesting isn't it to consider this idea of an alliance between England and France, the traditional enemies. France of course has traditionally also encouraged the Scots in their hostilities towards the English, so there was a great deal of sort of latent suspicion between the English and the French. It's what, only some seventy years since the end of the Hundred Years War, when English armies had come in waves, devastating the French countryside in the name of upholding the claim of the English King to the French throne. MELVYN BRAGG: Which Henry VIII still thought he had, a valid claim to the French throne. PENNY ROBERTS: Oh indeed, indeed. MELVYN BRAGG: Yes, yes. PENNY ROBERTS: And indeed Henry had himself invaded France in 1513, won the Battle of the Spurs, taken the towns of Touraine and Tournai, and wanted to sort of recreate the great days of Henry V - Henry was very much his role model. Of course these weren't victories on the scale of Agincourt or anything of that type, but it did sort of establish Henry's reputation as a military leader. For Francis, at the same he was establish his prowess, already... MELVYN BRAGG: They're both in their twenties, these young men. PENNY ROBERTS: That's right, that's right, and Francis comes to the throne six years after Henry. But very early on in his reign he establishes his military reputation in his Italian campaign, winning a very famous battle at Marignano in 1515, after which the French actually captured the important city of Milan . This is a victory on a far greater scale than what Henry had achieved, and I think both sides are sort of aware of this. So Francis isn't concerned about England as the threatening force it had been in earlier centuries, and France was a very much bigger and more powerful player by this time. MELVYN BRAGG: But there's a narrower personal dimension as well isn't there? I mean Henry was always asking, 'How tall is Francis? Is he as tall as I am? Are his legs as strong as I am. I'm not going to shave off my beard until I meet him.' He saw this chap over there winning victories, the victories he wanted, both they had imperial ambitions in terms of wishing to be Caesars. You got glory through war. And how far did that I've got to meet this man and test myself and show that I'm as big as he is? PENNY ROBERTS: Well I think that's right, there are two parts in this. There's the wider political context, which is clearly very important. England is able to act as a broker between the Empire and France and it's very nice for the English to feel they're being wooed by these two great powers. But as you say there's this very personal element in... and this I think is very persuasive in terms of the actual meeting between the kings rather than the actual treaty itself, which is obviously negotiated by ambassadors. So Francis and Henry have a mutual curiosity about each other. As you say, they both have very similar reputations - tall, very physically strong, very athletic, they have great reputations in the joust and in those sort of military pursuits. They both have a shared interest in hunting, in the ladies. They're very much sort of men of their time. They like to surround themselves by the latest Renaissance fashions, humanists, and also to be great patrons of the arts. They have a lot in common, and it's clear that this mutual curiosity is one of the driving forces behind them actually agreeing to this meeting. MELVYN BRAGG: Right well just to end this introductory passage, just very briefly, John Guy, the man who wasn't there was the powerful man in Europe by a long chalk indeed, as we said the most powerful man for seven hundred years, the very young Charles V. But he made sure that he had a little pincer movement on it didn't he? JOHN GUY: Well he's the absent presence, because in fact he meets Henry VIII just the month before Henry VIII sets out for Calais on the way to the Cloth of Gold, and in fact Henry goes to meet Charles V and crosses the border to the Netherlands, brings Charles to Calais and entertains him there after the Field of Cloth of Gold. So in a way, you know the idea of this being bilateral is only achieved by looking narrowly at the Field of Cloth of Gold. If you extend the context it's actually multilateral between these great powers. But again you see Wolsey I think is the key figure behind the scenes, in fact orchestrating this sequence of meetings. MELVYN BRAGG: Stephen Gunn, they're set and they go - how did they decide on the location? That must have been a lot of fuss. What's the distances and so on, English soil, French soil - it was English - and can you get us to the Field of Cloth of Gold? STEPHEN GUNN: Well as soon as they begin talking about where to meet, it's obvious that they're going to meet somewhere around the edge of the English territory in France . The English had held Calais since 1347, and Calais is the main English military and trade base in France . But the question is, how far will the English come away from Calais , and how far in this calculation of Royal honour will the French condescend to go into English territory? And so they end up meeting as near the edge of English territory as they can, but still inside English territory because the English insist that because their King has had to come across the sea he's put more effort into the meeting and so he should be just inside his own territory. MELVYN BRAGG: As we said, these are massive forces, John, I mean six thousand people - it's the size of Henry V's army at Agincourt, six thousand on the French side - and they're there for a fortnight. Can you just give us some idea of the accommodation? They built a town as second most popular... as I said in the introduction, Norwich , twelve thousand, something like that. JOHN GUY: Well on the English side of course the English built a special palace, a temporary palace, especially for the occasion. And actually what's really interesting about that is it's on a classical design, it's an exact model, replica, of the sort of palace that you build as is recommended in the De Cardinal Artu. So we know Wolsey, who actually designed the plan of this, you know was the mastermind. But there was a quadrant, each side was over three hundred feet long. At the entrance was a classical pillar. There were these fountains that you've already mentioned, that were spouting wine you know for much of the time. MELVYN BRAGG: (DURING ABOVE) Perpetual claret? What a thought! JOHN GUY: Then you came in. And the palace was eight feet high of brick, and then the rest was temporary - timber, canvas. The canvas was painted with brick, but you came into the courtyard and you were immediately struck because there was five thousand feet of clear glass. It must have been stunning, with bay windows, and then the apartments laid out on a quadrant for Wolsey, for Henry VIII, for Catherine of Arragon, and for Mary Tudor, the sister of Henry VIII, the former Queen of France. Beyond that was a chapel, and then there was a gallery which led to Guine castle, which was where a lot of the other English were staying. So the English trumped the French in the accommodation. This was stunning. The French relied on essentially tents, royal tents. Francis had a special tent built with a couple of you know almost like ships' masts in the middle, holding it together. Wonderful decoration, and astronomical symbols all over the... all through the roof. The English too needed tents, they said the French had four hundred tents to sort of back up the royal tents for this number of people. The English had what they said was eight hundred and twenty lodgings in tents, and I think there must have been three or four people to each lodging. MELVYN BRAGG: What's really fascinating is that you seek peace through magnificence. That's a thing that took my imagination, which when I read all this stuff years and years ago I hadn't got that, that you did it not through being let's sit down and have a peaceful time with a bit of muesli - I mean you went for it with palaces and everything. Penny can you give some idea of what programme they'd worked out? I mean you hear of chivalric jousting and so on and so forth - can you just fill that in? PENNY ROBERTS: As you say this is very much about magnificence enforcing peace, and as I've said before, the idea of monarchy as sort of universal peacemakers is very important. But there's always this slight tension, because at the same time they're supposed to be presenting themselves as very much important military figures, and this is where the jousting and the feats of arms come in. At the same time as they're making peace, this is seen to be a sign of their strength. They're making peace because they wish to make peace, not because they're in a position of weakness. So they're also having these other combats which demonstrate that they are very forceful, and if they wanted to go to war they could do and they could cut a figure in that sense. So the actual occasion and all the events are very carefully planned, because there's also this need to have absolute balance between the two sides. MELVYN BRAGG: So everywhere they met, the two kings met, they had to come precisely the same distance to it and all that? Must have been a wonderful time for people who like working out those sort of figures. PENNY ROBERTS: Absolutely. When they came to the actual meeting they had to actually elevate the two sides of the valley so that when they saw each other they were exactly the same height, so that there wouldn't be any kind of sense of pre-eminence. A fanfare was sounded so that they would leave their entourages at exactly the same time, and go down with their horses to meet at an appointed meeting place. MELVYN BRAGG: Was this a one to one meeting? PENNY ROBERTS: Yes this was the one to one meeting that took place on 7th June. And it was all very carefully mapped out. It's very interesting as well, they ride towards each other as if they're going to actually have combat, but just at the last moment they turn their horses and they embrace. And so right underlying each act of peace is a sort of sense of rivalry, a sense that they could be in combat if they wish to be. MELVYN BRAGG: Splendour runs into gluttony at one stage, from my reading of it anyway, Stephen. Can you give us some idea of the amount drunk and eaten and so on? STEPHEN GUNN: Well keeping the fountains running with wine was obviously a major requirement because the English had forty thousand gallons of wine with them, which works out about four pints per person per day. They also, being English, had fourteen thousand five hundred gallons of beer and ale, and they had the material with them to brew a lot more ale when they needed it. Now obviously the French enjoying English hospitality may have been consuming some of that, but it's still an impressive scale of consumption. MELVYN BRAGG: But what about food? I mean did they take all their own food or did they live sort of as it were off the land? STEPHEN GUNN: They took all their own food. In a way this, as we've said, is something half the size of the size of English army you might send to France, so in effect they move into army supply mode, except that because it's a grand display you don't only do quantity, you also do variety. So for example we know from the Royal Household accounts their fish - they've got nine thousand one hundred plaice, seven thousand eight hundred and thirty-six whiting, five thousand five hundred and fifty-four soles, two thousand eight hundred crayfish, seven hundred conger eels, three porpoises and a dolphin. And to have a proper banquet you've got to have a range of things like that. JOHN GUY: And that was just the fish menu, because I mean didn't they have three hundred and thirty-seven oxen and two thousand chick... PENNY ROBERTS: Twelve hundred capons yeah. JOHN GUY: And I read somebody was boiling beef for six weeks beforehand. MELVYN BRAGG: What about the clothes. The Field of the Cloth of Gold - was that the dress code? I mean did everything have to be gold? STEPHEN GUNN: There's clearly a sense that you dress in the most spectacular fashion you can. And one of the French memoirists who writes about it talks about seeing noblemen walking round with their estates on their backs, because they had mortgaged their lands or sold off their woods in order to buy the best clothes they possibly can. MELVYN BRAGG: And they took furniture as well. It's a big display. Can we just go into this a bit? JOHN GUY: Absolutely, well... MELVYN BRAGG: I mean we're talking about display aren't we? JOHN GUY: I mean the Royal palaces were virtually, the standing palaces were emptied and all the silver, gold, Westminster Abbey's copes and you know and ornaments were taken. I mean and of course I mean the nobles took their own kit. I mean the displays of plate, I mean the jewels, the imagery, and the chapel. And the chapel was very important in the Royal Palace too, I mean these were just you know spectacular. MELVYN BRAGG: What about, what sort of diplomacy? Was there diplomacy going on around the edges? When the thing was going on was it a cover for little bits of diplomacy? PENNY ROBERTS: Absolutely, and after the Kings had their initial first one to one meeting, they then go into a tent with Cardinal Wolsey and the Admiral Bonivais, who were the two individuals who'd mainly negotiated the Treaty of London, in order to sign a new Treaty which agrees to the marriage of the Dauphin to the Princess Mary, and to the handing over of money of the Royal pension to the English Crown. And so there are these various meetings, but also all the time there are ambassadorial meetings, negotiations going on between the two sides. MELVYN BRAGG: So imagine these people swirling around in that place, as we say at the time. Must have been extraordinary. The site was big as... Second time - I can't keep repeating it too often because it is an extraordinary thing. If you imagine as it were taking Birmingham to... So towards the end there was a great Mass, again engineered by and conducted by Cardinal Wolsey himself. It was Corpus Christi , which is a great event in the Catholic calendar, and he must have known that when he set the dates. Can you just tell us the significance of that Mass, Stephen Gunn, and how he conducted it? STEPHEN GUNN: Well in some ways the mass reproduces the kinds of competitive magnificence between the two courts that we've seen all the way through the meeting. So the French King's chapel choir sings parts of the service, the English King's chapel choir sings other parts of the service, and presumably there's a sense of competition between the two. But Wolsey again demonstrates his central role in the whole thing by the fact that he's the priest who sings Mass and he has attending on him, holding the bowls and the towels and so for when he washes, the highest English noblemen. So these are people who certainly would have despised his father, as the butcher from Ipswich , and pretty clearly come close to despising him, and yet are having to be his servants for the purposes of singing Mass. MELVYN BRAGG: And there was an unexpected inter... This is the worst prompt I've ever known in my life. Right, let's go onward. There's an unexpected interruption in the Mass isn't there Stephen? STEPHEN GUNN: There was an unexpected interruption, which remains rather obscure. Something which must have been part of the entertainment appears flying over the crowd. No-one's quite clear whether it's a firework or quite what else it is. Some people report it as being like a flying dragon, it may be like a flying salamander. There are particular heraldic problems here because France , the first personal badge is a salamander, whereas the red dragon from their Welsh ancestry is part of the Tudor arms. And it looks as though it may well have gone off early, but it's supposed to happen at some later point, and it becomes untethered or fireworks go off or whatever. MELVYN BRAGG: It's nice as well isn't it because the Mass is the ultimate ritual which brings people together, it's always seen as a uniting ritual. And so it's very important for symbolism of peace, and up to this point the Kings mostly have been having their own Masses in their own chapels in their own pavilions and palaces and so on. Except on one occasion when Francis actually bursts into Henry's chamber, bedchamber, early one morning, hands him his shirt and says, 'I'm your prisoner' and accompanies him to Mass. And I think there's a very nice sort of breakdown of the etiquette, but very much reinforcing the friendship and the unity and the wish for peace. Making himself sort of completely vulnerable to him. PENNY ROBERTS: Yes. MELVYN BRAGG: Because there were, there must have been hints behind. There had been assassinations before. I mean in a sense Henry was being very bold going into line with his traditional ferocious enemy, still on English soil but right on the edge of theirs wasn't it? He was taking his life in his hands to a certain extent, and those two, they kept showing each other that they weren't. PENNY ROBERTS: Yes, and I think Francis was very disarming, he was very magnanimous, allowing them to meet on English soil. He was quite prepared... he didn't, he went along with the etiquette but he was a very spontaneous kind of character and he often got himself into all kinds of scrapes and accidents, and it's very characteristic of him to turn up in the bedchamber in this way, a performance which Henry repeated a few days later, which was... so he wasn't offended. It demonstrated that he went along with it. MELVYN BRAGG: Was it... Let's talk about the sources for a minute because they might throw a lot out of joint that we've been talking about. But was it thought at the time to be, by the chroniclers and the diarists, to be a great spectacular, extraordinary event, John Gunn? JOHN GUY: Oh, I mean absolutely, and I mean there were newsletters in France - that's one of the ways that we know about this so much. The Venetian Ambassador was enormously you know impressed with all this and wrote a very long account of it. It is true that the sources are actually contradictory. You know I mean take for example you know the fountains with the wine. I mean you know one account says that you know one fountain was claret, the other one was malmsey, another one says one was wine, another one was beer. You know one accounts says that they were flowing all the time, another... and everybody got sozzled. You know another accounts says that they were only actually switched on you know during the banquets when one of the Kings was entertaining you know one of the Queens . So the sources are actually you know rather confused. STEPHEN GUNN: But there are also printed accounts that you could actually buy, an account of the jousts and the meeting between the Kings and so on, printed in a pamphlet... MELVYN BRAGG: Like a programme? STEPHEN GUNN: ...on the streets of Paris . And this is the first great age of European news printing and clearly this is a big even that people want to read about. PENNY ROBERTS: And I think both sides are very much checking each other out as well, and I think it's very interesting... I mean I mentioned about the fashions of the ladies, but the Venetian Ambassador not only reports on the provocative fashions of the French ladies but also the excessive drinking of the English ladies, and that they're passing round cups and sharing them, which is seen as... And these are reinforcing all kinds of stereotypes about one another, but it's very much about matching up these forces and it makes an impression across Europe . MELVYN BRAGG: Are there significant differences, Stephen - or John, whichever of you can reply best - significant differences in the accounts? Is there something that there's a real clash on? STEPHEN GUNN: Well there's significant difference in terms of how we understand the meeting, because of the fact that the English administrative accounts survive much better than the French ones do because of the various fires in archives and so on in the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries. So really don't know much about what the French take with them, whereas in France there's a much stronger tradition of memoir-writing, so we have people who were there later on writing their memories of what happened in a way that people don't really do on the English side. So it gives a rather different quality to the two kinds of information. MELVYN BRAGG: And this wrestling business, Penny, between Francis I and Henry VIII, it comes from a French source doesn't it? But can you tell us about that? PENNY ROBERTS: That's right, it comes from the memoir of de Florange, a close childhood friend of Francis, who'd grown up with him and was one of his gentlemen of the chamber. And he recounts this tale of after the Kings have been watching some wrestling, between as I mentioned before the Bretons and the English. MELVYN BRAGG: At which the English had won in that case? PENNY ROBERTS: That's right. STEPHEN GUNN: But of course the Bretons didn't turn up I think - is that right? PENNY ROBERTS: I think that could well be the account. And they come... MELVYN BRAGG: Well they can't wrestle, nobody... I mean the Bretons either wrestled the English or they didn't. JOHN GUY: They wrestled with non-Breton wrestlers. MELVYN BRAGG: Oh, non-Breton, I see, right okay. PENNY ROBERTS: Yes, Bretons are the best. And the two Kings are drinking together and having, you know bantering and sort of exchanging comments, and Henry it is who challenges Francis, you know, let's have a wrestle, grabs him by the shoulders. They're both very tall, as I mentioned, physically strong. I think Henry was hoping, as the rather heavier figure, that he would be able to outdo Francis, but Francis was rather more agile, a bit lighter, and was able to bring him down with what was termed a tour de Bretagne - a Breton term which was clearly the best way to sort of wrestle somebody to the ground - which was very humiliating for Henry of course. It is only reported in one source, so there's this great question about whether or not it's apocryphal and in fact it never actually occurred, and there's great silence from the other sources. Maybe good reasons for that, because obviously this is an occasion where there is supposed to be this equality, and they're not supposed to sort of have any direct sort of combat. What's nice about it I think, even if it's not true, it just signals how there this intense rivalry which is sort of bubbling under the surface at all times. MELVYN BRAGG: And the sources was Francis's best friend. Actually the interesting thing about the Breton throw, is that Breton wrestling and Cornish wrestling and Cumberland wrestling are very similar. They are derived from a Celtic link. PENNY ROBERTS: That's right, yes, yes. MELVYN BRAGG: It means that he probably did a 'buttock', as we call it in the North-West, but we can go into that another time. PENNY ROBERTS: I think it's a crook of the leg behind, yes. MELVYN BRAGG: In Our Time on 'the buttock'. It was probably a 'cross buttock' actually....If it was a competition in dazzle, Stephen Gunn, who won? STEPHEN GUNN: I think they both won, because I think the economy of magnificence is something where, if you've displayed in the right way, then you've shown how kingly you both are, and so there's a sense, there's one sense in which it's a competition but there's another sense in which all the kings win because you've shown what magnificent kings you are. After all, you're talking to each other and to the international audience but you're also talking to your own subjects, and both kings can say look how seriously I'm taken, look what a great ruler I am. MELVYN BRAGG: It seems like a magnificent folly, because three years later they were at war again these two, weren't they? And Henry's forces got very near Paris . JOHN GUY: Well I mean the thing breaks down really because of what happens in Italy, because of course within months of the Field of Cloth of Gold in fact Charles and Francis are actually at war over Italy, Milan and Naples, which I mean are obviously key goals for Francis. So I mean it shows how, if you like how fragile all of this was. On the other hand you see you could look at it in their... if you look at it in their terms you see this Renaissance spectacle, this dazzling... For Henry, I mean I think, I disagree with a little bit with Steve, I mean I think both sides won but I think England won more, because England now seemed to be you know right at the forefront of the Renaissance, of Renaissance diplomacy, of Renaissance ideas. England the weaker state, the weakest of all these three great powers, is now able to tip the balance. And so the question is, when Charles and Francis fall out after the Field of Cloth of Gold, which side is England going to back, and probably at that moment Henry and Wolsey have never been more powerful. MELVYN BRAGG: Thank you very much to Penny Roberts, John Guy and Stephen Gunn, and next week we'll be talking about the rise of the mammals. Thanks for Listening. Back to the In Our Time homepage The BBC is not responsible for external websites |
| About the BBC | Help | Terms of Use | Privacy & Cookies Policy |