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and 1514 Lord Abergavenny, Sir Edward Neville, John
Neville, and Sir Thomas Boleyn were conspicuous.
In August 1514 the marriage contract of Princess Mary with Louis XIII
was signed in the presence of a brilliant assembly at Greenwich,39
and
before a year had passed the widowed girl queen was married at the same
place to Charles Brandon, Duke of Suffolk.
The reception of foreign potentates was found no small charge by the
county. Remonstrances were promptly forthcoming from the king if the
gentry did not attend in sufficient numbers upon these occasions, but on
the other hand the nobility had to beware of offending by the large
number of their retainers, and Lord Abergavenny, whose retinue was
surveyed at Canterbury on 17 May 1515,40
was in some danger on account
of his maintenance. His retainers contributed not a little to the
magnificence of the reception of Cardinal Campeggio, whose progress
through the county in July 1518 was accompanied by brilliant cavalcades.41
Much of the splendour of Archbishop Warham’s enthronement in 1504 was due to the magnificent train of horsemen with which Lord
Abergavenny’s father-in-law, the Duke of Buckingham, assisted at the
ceremony. The same magnificence was displayed when the duke entertained
Henry VIII at Penshurst in 1519, and when he with Sir William Scot and
other Kentish gentlemen attended the king of the Field of the
Cloth of Gold; this ostentation was doubtless one of the most weighty
reasons responsible for his execution in 1521, for the charges against
him were trivial and even if true did not justify his attainder.42
On their way to Guisnes in June 1519, the king and queen made a journey
from Greenwich to Dover of a solemnity befitting the meeting to which
they were proceeding. But, before they left England, a meeting more
productive of results than that of the Field of the Cloth of Gold took
place at Dover, where the politic young Emperor Charles paid a surprise
visit to the English king, to make his own position sure before that
event should take place. The king and queen had reached Canterbury on
the 25th, when they heard that the emperor was about to land,
and Wolsey was despatched in all haste to welcome him. He landed at
Hythe, and the king himself escorted him from Dover to Canterbury,43
where the sovereigns kept Whitsuntide ‘with much joy and gladness’
and together visited the shrine of St. Thomas. The emperor won the
hearts of the Kentishmen, who ‘rejoiced to see the benign manner and
meekness of so great a prince.’44
On 31 May, Charles sailed from
Sandwich for Flanders, and Henry from Dover to Calais. The emperor came
again in May 1522, when the cardinal conducted him from Dover to
Canterbury with a brilliant concourse of English lords, while Henry
himself went out with another gorgeous cavalcade to meet his guest.45
39 L.
& P. Hen. VIII, i, 5322.
40 Ibid. ii, pt. i, 471.
41 From Rochester to Otford he was accompanied by the archbishop and
1,000 horsemen, many in armour and gold chains. L. & P.
Hen. VIII, vol. ii, pt. ii, No. 4348.
42 His downfall involved the Neville family in disgrace, and Lord
Abergavenny, though he seems to have been opposed to him, was kept in
prison from May 1521 to 1522. Sir Thomas Boleyn, who had been sheriff of
Kent in 1517, was on the special commission for London and also for Kent
before which the case of Neville was brought (L. & P. Hen.
VIII, No.1284), as was also Sir Henry Guildford. Next year the
duke’s manor of Hadlow in Kent was granted to Sir Henry Guildford, and
in the same month (April) various offices at Tonbridge, Brasted, and
Penshurst were granted to Sir Thomas Boleyn and his son George,
afterwards Viscount Rochford.
43 L. & P. Hen. VIII, iii, No. 740.
44 Hall, Chron. 604.
45 L. & P. Hen. VIII,
iii pt. ii, no. 2288. |