The Silvered and Engraved Field Armour of King Henry VIII. Five hundred years ago a king's armour was a status symbol as well as a defence. This armour may be the earliest product of the royal armour workshop which Henry established at Greenwich Palace in 1511.

Armour for the horse's tail and for the front legs a hollow boss to protect the joint in motion. For the rider, different shoulder and breast protection related to weapons carried in sport or in battle, sword or lance.

Tonlet Armour of King Henry VIII for Foot Combat at the Barriers. This armour with a skirt or 'tonlet' was assembled from parts in three months after the French changed the rules. It was for Henry to wear in the foot combat at the Field of Cloth of Gold in June 1520. To protect the knees there is a cleverly shaped winged knee cap and for the toes, articulated metal shoes.

The kings were Henry VIII of England and Francis I of France. A joust at which Henry competed in foot combat.

France. Armour to protect the codpiece. 1520, Henry 28 years of age. Bacinet made in Milan.
Audio-visual, all text in capitals, too fast to read, blocked sightlines with passing visitors and standing ones. Six thousand people from England went over to France for the competition. They ate 1,200 capons, 700 conger eels, 337 oxen and one dolphin and drank 14,500 gallons of wine and ale.

The audio-visual includes two men jousting in full armour filmed with limited light in a black environment like shiny robots in a coal cellar. Real knights fought in daylight in a field in a landscape. This sort of audio-visual gets the industry a bad name! It's all effects and style but no content or truth. Shiny and cheap and shoddy.

Henry enjoyed Real Tennis and had a court at Hampton Court, but he didn't approve of lesser mortals playing tennis or football. He thought the common folk would play football and it would end in riots, how right he was!

A breech-loading gun is displayed and we learn that HR Henricus Rex owned it. In 1525 while in pursuit of a hawk Henry failed to pole vault over a ditch and landed head first in muddy water. He was rescued from drowning by a footman. In the same display we can see a football dated 1540-1570. It is a bladder ball made from an inflatable pig's bladder with a strong leather cover. Henry's football boots cost four shillings in his time, equivalent to about a hundred pounds nowadays. He was a skilled archer winning a contest at the Field of Cloth of Gold in 1520.

In jousting the king was injured several times and near misses, but he had "no respect or fear of anyone in the world." At the age of 44, in 1536, he fell heavily and was unconscious for two hours.

The Stowe Helm was displayed with a helm lining (helmhaube) and the Great Bacinet for Foot Combat. In jousting the right-handed knight must keep steady eye contact with his opponent and this helm shows that only one side is perforated with holes sufficient for viewing and breathing while the other half of the face is completely protected on the blindside.

Westminster in 1511 saw the Joust of Peace, the Joust Royal with a tilt yard and tilt barrier. Queen Katherine was among the royal hosts and the young Henry competed against Charles Brandon, the Duke of Suffolk, Henry's brother-in-law. The contest has a scoring system for strikes to the head, the shield or for shattering the opponent's lance.

A lifetime's hoard of Henry VIII's possessions is documented in The Inventory of 1547. Just a small number of the exceptional pieces are displayed, brought together in the Tower of London having been dispersed during the last 500 years in other museums and collections.

Henry received an armour gift from Emperor Maximilian I. It was made in Innsbruck. The Armet 'bellows' visor with a fluted skull in Maximilian style. Then saddle steels, the bow and the cantle giving protection to the seated knight on horseback. A horse bit. Fretted saddle steel: 'a Saddell covered with stele plate cutte owte with braunches graven and guilte' as described in the 1547 Inventory.

The King's Arms: dagger, shell guard fitted with quillons fashioned with acorns. And then a combination mace and gun described in the inventory: 'Holy water sprinkles wt gonnes in thende.'

The Wilton Armour created in the 1544 for the Siege of Boulogne with an 'anime' culrass of articulated overlapping plates, Italian. It was given to the Earl of Pembroke and remained at Wilton House until the early twentieth century when it was sold to the United States for a sillily small price. Now valued in the tens of millions, pounds or dollars, whichever way a huge amount.

The surprise exhibit was not Henry's personal armour, all grand and gilded and extravagant and funded by melting down monastic glitter. It was the rudimentary gun shields, small dishes of metal lined with laths of wood but mounted with primitive guns and small grilles serving as sights. Thirty-five of these were found on the Mary Rose which sank in sailing into battle against the French fleet in Spithead outside Portsmouth harbour. I have never found the time to go and see the Mary Rose, just last century risen from its long preservation in the mud of the Solent, the process of raising it, and washing, and spraying in watery mists and mysterious sprays for conservation. Next time I am in Portsmouth I will go.

And so more armour. The Parade Armet of King Henry VIII a gift from Emperor Maximilian I to Henry in 1514. And the matching armour of Archduke Charles. A peculiar, surreal, depiction in metal of a beak-nose, bespectacled man with a dew-drop under his nose and spiralling ram's horns. As close as I have ever seen in a European helmet to the startling and bizarre armour of the Japanese shogunate.

Emperor Maximilian was generous with his gifts of armour; for his grandson aged 14 a suit for a young man who would go on to be King Charles V of Spain.

And then another discovery from the mud of the River Thames found as recently as 1979 under Southwark Bridge, a basket hilted sword from the 1540s as depicted in a painting of Gentlemen Pensioners. Oh that such elegant accoutrements were still permitted.

Then an outstanding pollaxe. This fabulous weapon starts with a fine staff of knobbly dark brown wood crowned with a gilded steel weapon far superior to the Swiss Army knife. A sharpened axe blade is balanced and weighted by a studded hammer and the both topped with a strong steel spear blade called a topspike. Every part has its own efficient purpose yet refined and elaborated with grotesque gape-mouthed decorative details. What would the Bauhaus have made of this? Perhaps only Tapio Wirkkala could have done justice to such a design in the modern idiom.

King Henry VIII established an amoury at Greenwich, the Greenwich Workshop. He imported skilled craftsmen from the continent. One piece, an Armet, turns on the collar of the armour allowing the wearer to turn his head more freely. Henry is also generous in presenting armour to Robert III de la Marck, Maréchal de Fleuranges. On the Field of Cloth of Gold, Henry broke Fleuranges' pauldron or shoulder defence. Other exhibits include a corseque. And close helmets with ventilation.

Guns were of great interest to Henry and a snap matchlock Harquebus, made in Gardone is on display. One-thoousand-fiiiiive-hundred of these were purchased from the Venetian Republic in 1544. What a blast! Henry VIII's Infantry display contains the Almain Rivet. Next to it the Jack of Plates, a garment similar to a civilian doublet but with small square iron plates sewn between layers of thick canvas. Another 1,500 were purchased for the Navy in 1557.

But don't forget the horses. One horse-power is amplified with protection for the head, neck and the body including the shoulder joints and the rear. The crupper is the rear plate of horse armour. Despite some pleating and folding of metal the tail is a zone of weakness, it's the wrong metaphor but something like Achilles' heel.

The display of Henry VIII's Soldiers' and Sailors' weaponry, much associated with the Mary Rose, includes the Italian manufactured gun shields. There is an assortment of functional equipment including a wooden artillery ladle for muzzle loading cannon, a gunner's rule for measuring the shot in order to guage the quantity of powder required, several stone shot and a gunner's linstock for handling smouldering matchcord. Even the simple wooden meal plate and a two pint wooden tigg for ale were recovered from the Mary Rose.

It seems that naval humour is an enduring script. The Mary Rose sank in 1545 and was raised in 1982. One of the items on display is described as a Ballock Dagger Hilt. The ferrous blades had rusted away but left the impression all the more obvious of an erect penis and bollocks. Pardon my French. There was a six foot incendiary dart thrown like a javelin at the opposing ships. A vast chest of longbows for archers' skills honed to perfection at the butts. The exhibition has a few replica arrows with goose feathers for fletchings.

The exhibition is on several floors with transition by tightly spiralling staircases. If I find the peasant that desposited their chewing gum on the window sill I will be first volunteering gentleman pensioner to sharpen my basket-hilted sword, nay, I will borrow the pollaxe and do a deed as dirty as theirs. To the Tower ye filthy nave.

I overheard a couple of visitors asking each other where Henry VIII is buried. A good question. The answer is, in St. George's Chapel in Windsor Castle, next to his (third) wife Jane Seymour.

The January and May tournaments of 1540 would be the last at which Henry could participate. His Armour for Field is for a now overweight and unwell forty-eight-year-old. That grand inventory describes it as "Complete harness parcel graven and gilte with all manner of peces of advantage for the felde Tilte Turney and fote". It seems that there is a linguistic connection right down to modern day estate agents' descriptions of otherwise modest abodes. On goes the jargon with a garniture set of armour that could be assembled for various uses, sporting and military; joust, tourney, horseman and foot.

There is still more armour on display including that of Earl Coningsby who was imprisoned for speaking the truth in regard to the South Sea Bubble Company's demise of 1721. With the reign of James I and VI came presentation armour from Japan in 1610 brought back to England by Captain John Sars of the East India Company. Presented by Tokugawa Hidetada, the Shogun of Japan in 1613, it is of do-maru type, archaic 15th century style.

The souvenir shop, yet another of several, has something for everyone, and nothing essential for anyone.

And so on to see the Crown Jewels. The straggling crocodiles of inattentive students show little respect of what is offered and try taking short-cuts. I saw no-one making notes, no sketches either. Photography is not permitted though everyone seems to treat this World Heritage Site as they would Disneyland. Ears filled with downloads, shouting among themselves above their own noise. The oldest item on display is a 12th century gold Coronation spoon. Nearby is a 1661 Ampulla. The St. Edward's Crown of 1661, the Sovereign's Orb, the Sceptre with Cross. Cullinan I of 1910 and 530 carats. The Imperial State Crown as recent as 1937. When recalling the quote from Shakespeare's Merchant of Venice and "all that glisters is not gold" I can say that just for once, We are the miscellaneous unmemorable collection of tat on the travelator and everything on display is glistering and gold, precious and bejewelled.

Out in a minor exhibition, almost as an afterthought, there is a display of the Blue Peter Millennium Hedgerow Crown. The winning design by the eleven-year-old Georgina Elliott from Cheam in Surrey was produced by skilled craftsmen at Asprey and Garrard with 500 hours of labour. It makes it worth asking the question just how many hundreds by hundreds of hours and thousands of craftsmen did King Henry VIII employ, or exploit, in the progress of his reign. And how much does the alternative cost and compare? So many young American girls dived into the Tower Shop and came out wearing glittering plastic tiaras, and glittering orthodontic smiles. Bubblegum brains fit for cheerleading heading upmarket on par at least with a Playboy bunny outfit. Republicans and Democrats one and all yet with ambitions of a dynasty of their own. What's your favourite colour Lady Sov? Orange, or yellow gold? Over yonder in the United Chavdom of the British Isles, amblers progress slowly to the Wakefield Tower to deposit unwanted chewing gum on the window-shutter hinge.

No longer royal, elderly or injured enough to be carried in a litter but all armed with masticated gum to be discarded liberally everywhere as a trail of litter. That's what it means to go to The Tower of London. Come back King Henry VIII, all is forgiven. But beware, your fine King's Table Real Ale, artfully brewed in Petersfield, is under threat from an invading Special Brew. A tigg or two and I will be undone.

© Brian Marsh, 3 April 2009 email initiative.cafe@btinternet.com