The relationship between Henry VIII and Francis I is captured in two linked images in the English popular mind: the great 1545 painting of their meeting, which shows Henry riding in state with his retinue, golden tents in the background; and the fact that Francis won their impromptu wrestling match. Anyone who has ever wondered why a dragon flies in the skies overhead in the painting can find the answer in Glenn Richardson's new book: it was a pyrotechnic kite display, peculiarly coinciding with the High Mass to celebrate the Anglo-French peace. (The wrestling match is relegated to its proper place as a brief episode on page 139, although there is a lovely picture of a fallen Henry looking rather surprised and disgruntled.) A specialist in early sixteenth-century history, Richardson has focused his attention on the prime enactment of Renaissance monarchy, the Field of Cloth of Gold of 1520. The meeting between Henry VIII of England and Francis I of France—with a nervous Charles V hovering on the sidelines—has often been passed over or dismissed as gaudy show at best, or scandalous extravagance at worst. Reflecting the cultural turn in historiography, Richardson takes seriously chivalric display, gifts, architecture, and feasting. Henry and Francis each sought to show themselves as a “successful warrior, an effective governor, and a great patron” (ix)—exactly the themes of Richardson's earlier book, Renaissance Monarchy (2002).

In part Richardson and Yale University Press seem to be aiming at an audience beyond academia. The discussion of the construction of the temporary palaces and organization of the weaving of fabrics and eponymous cloth is personalized by mentions of the craftsmen involved and the phenomenal gap between their wages and the expenditure of those they served. Richardson briefly sketches some of the main noble participants in a few lines, but he also pauses to note the behavior of their retinues when the two monarchs disappeared for a private chat. Part of the detailed description of the festivities involves listing the types of food consumed and the masques and dances performed and explaining what the quasi-military tournament involved (this seems, from the relatively small number of lances broken, to have been rather an anticlimax). Explaining the structures of the English and French courts, the retinues each carefully calibrated to circa 6,000 men, how these followers were summoned and why they came and the presents their leaders exchanged demonstrates why the Field is a good example of the themes of court culture, patronage, and gift giving now so familiar to early modern historians. In explicating the production and meanings of these elements, Richardson's book reminds one of Carola Hick's account of the windows of King's College Chapel, The King's Glass (2012).

It is nevertheless the case that the Field has not been fully explored for some years, and Richardson's study is underpinned by solid archival work in French as well as English source material, with an appendix handily listing attendees. He also carefully nuances how a meeting to celebrate peace was undergirded with possible hostility: war and peace were in mutual dialogue, not mutually exclusive. Thus both sides refortified their base towns: the English were worried by the French artillery, the French by the English archers. Great caution was exercised when the kings rode to meet each other with embankments allowing each side to check the other was not entrapping them. And amid the banter and courtesy, each side was on the watch for opportunities to bounce the other into concessions, wrestling recognition from them. Richardson's book also reminds us how sophisticated and well-oiled the machinery of court life was in its ability to transport, house, and feed, as well as to entertain 12,000 people—and to remain within sight of the original budget. Most significantly, he argues that there was a serious attempt at, and credible possibility of, Anglo-French peace. Charles V certainly did not look on the meeting with a complacent sense of an inevitable alliance of Spain with England, and, as the sixth chapter shows, the diplomatic politics of the 1520s constantly shifted in unpredictable ways.

The closing third of the book hints at a sense of a Renaissance world lost in the 1530s, at least from an English perspective, as Henry VIII's “Great Matter” determined his European options. The chance of universal peace blessed by the papacy had vanished—but it had been, Richardson suggests, worth a try.