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  • Dress at the Court of King Henry VIII
  • Dale Hoak
Maria Hayward. Dress at the Court of King Henry VIII. Oakville: The David R. Brown Book Company, 2007. xviii + 458 pp. + 8 color pls. index. illus. tbls. gloss. $96. ISBN: 978–1–905981–41–0.

Renaissance princes sought glory and honor, and since they equated princely virtue with magnificence, their courts naturally became centers of lavish, very [End Page 605] costly display. In The Governance of England (1470–71), an advice book for Edward IV, Sir John Fortesque, in reaction to Henry VI’s neglect of such display, formulated the chief requirements of royal magnificence. A magnificent prince, wrote Fortesque, must encourage building, furnish his palaces richly, receive foreign ambassadors generously, and dress splendidly. Fortesque’s contemporaries had criticized Henry VI for his shabby attire. Neither Edward IV nor Henry VII repeated this mistake (as Simon Thurley has said), for both understood that costly costume projected an illusion of personal grandeur: a truly magnificent king must wear the finest clothes, jewels, and furs. If Edward IV’s wardrobe was the model for Henry VII’s attire, Henry VIII surpassed them both. Henry VIII’s clothes were “the richest and most superb that can be imagined”; by 1519 the king of England had won acclaim as “the best dressed sovereign in the world,” according to Sebastiano Guistinian, the Venetian ambassador (125 and 95, respectively).

Maria Hayward has amply shown that Guistinian’s words were not hyperbole. Hayward, director of the Research Centre for Textile Conservation and Textile Studies at the University of Southampton, has written the first, and what will surely remain the fullest, history of early Tudor court dress. For the reconstruction of the wardrobes of Henry VII and Henry VIII and their wives, children, and household servants, she has drawn upon a massive amount of documentary evidence, including two inventories of the king’s clothes compiled in 1516 and 1521 by James Worsley, the keeper of Henry’s VIII’s wardrobe: in the British Library, these are Harley MSS 2284 and 4217, respectively, which she has transcribed and edited for this volume. In addition to warrants and account books, Hayward also cites the evidence of art and where relevant, the existence in British and European museums of original doublets, gowns, gloves, and hose resembling those listed in Worsley’s inventories. Thus, although none of the clothes in Henry VIII’s wardrobe has survived, Hayward is able to describe virtually every piece of clothing, or type of clothing, that he and his wives and great servants are known to have worn. Equally important, she has described in great detail the personnel and procedures of a neglected department of the royal household, the great wardrobe.

Hayward’s painstaking research yields raw data that will be of interest to anyone studying Renaissance kingship. Because clothing was central to royal image-making and Renaissance display, knowing what Henry VIII wore is essential to one’s understanding of his public conduct. When Henry met Emperor Charles V at Greenwich in June 1522, protocol required that the two dress identically in silver and white, thus preserving the king’s honor in what was otherwise a diplomatic show of Anglo-Imperial unity. If Hayward shows that historians of the early modern court will need to address more fully the politics of costume, she sometimes ignores the political context, and hence the significance, of what she describes. Thus the magnificent clothes of cloth of gold and crimson velvet that she notes Henry VII ordered for Prince Henry in October 1505 were to be worn at the festivities celebrating what Francis Bacon called the greatest marriage proposal in Christendom, the betrothal of Princess Mary to Charles of Ghent.

In order to advertise his magnificence to foreigners, Henry VIII always wore [End Page 606] the costliest fabrics. In a typical year he spent at least £3,000 on clothes, and often much more — £8,335 in 1511–12 and £7,263 in 1542–43 — or roughly £173,000 during the whole of his thirty-eight-year reign (1509–47). The total is based on my calculation of an annual average of £4,576, which I derived from...

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