When Henry VIII Wrestled the King of France—and Lost
If there’s one image of Henry VIII that lives on in the popular imagination it’s of a portly ruler with a bushy red beard, covered in furs and jewels and chowing down on a king-size turkey leg. (If we remember anything else about him, it’s probably that he had six wives and ordered two of their heads chopped off.)
In fact, biographers tell us that Henry was a remarkable athlete in his 16th-century day, adept at archery, jousting, bowling and, especially, wrestling. “In his youth, the King was always game for a wrestling match,” Alison Weir writes in her 2001 biography Henry VIII: The King and His Court, “even though this was not, strictly speaking, a sport for gentlemen.”
Henry’s passion for wrestling would lead to one of the most embarrassing episodes of his career. If, that is, it actually happened; some historians have their doubts.
The scene was a huge sporting tournament in June 1520 at a location near Calais, in what is now northern France. The event has come to be known as the Field of Cloth of Gold, in honor of the elaborate and expensive venue constructed for the occasion. “There were sham castles, temporary chapels, fountains running wine, great cellars full of wine free as water to all comers, silk tents, gold lace and foil, gilt lions and such things without end,” Charles Dickens wrote in his nonfiction chronicle A Child’s History of England. An estimated 12,000 people attended.
The purpose of the tournament was to cement relations between Henry and his French counterpart, Francis the First, to avert further wars between the two nations and to ally themselves against Charles V, another powerful ruler whose titles included King of Germany, King of Spain and Holy Roman Emperor. Shakespeare, writing in the early 1600s, considered the meeting of the two kings significant enough to open Act 1, Scene 1 of his play Henry VIII with it.
Days of jousting, archery, wrestling and other sports ensued, with both kings often suiting up and joining the fray personally—although usually not against each other. Feasting and drinking filled the evening hours.
One day, as the story goes, an enthusiastic and possibly intoxicated Henry issued a challenge to Francis, often quoted as: “Brother, let us wrestle!” Henry was 28 and the time, Francis 25.
It did not go well. As historian Glenn Richardson writes in The Field of Cloth of Gold (2014), “They grappled briefly before Francis overthrew the Englishman with a move called the ‘tour de Bretayne,’ a sort of rapidly executed hip throw… The Bretons were regarded as the best wrestlers in France and Henry does not seem to have appreciated just how well Francis, as their duke, had mastered their skills.”
Once he got up off the ground, Richardson writes, “Henry seems to have recovered his dignity somehow, but it must have been a rather embarrassing moment for a man so confident of his own masculine strength and dexterity.” After that, the two kings were said to have gone off to dinner together.