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the minority, and most of the men were away from home, some sexual dalliance was inevitable. Yet the King would not permit any open display of wanton behaviour; he commanded his Knight Harbinger to banish lewd women from his household, 44 and foreigners were often impressed by the relative circumspection and dignity of his courtiers. Drunkenness, however, was common.
    A double standard certainly prevailed. While fornication or adultery could never tarnish a man’s honour—and many noblemen had complicated private lives—women were expected to be above reproach. Some considered the ladies of the English court to be of easy virtue. In 1536, Eustache Chapuys, the Spanish ambassador, was sceptical about Jane’s Seymour’s much vaunted chastity: “You may imagine whether, being an Englishwoman and having been long at court, she would not hold it a sin to be still a maid.” 45 That same year, when the King’s niece, the Lady Margaret Douglas, was caught in an illicit love affair with Lord Thomas Howard, an observer commented that it would not have been surprising if she had slept with him, “seeing the number of domestic examples she has seen and sees daily.” 46
    Foreigners did not rate the court ladies highly: the French admiral Bonnivet, preparing for an embassy to England, told his gentlemen to “warm up those cold ladies of England.” 47 In 1520, a Mantuan ambassador wrote disparagingly of the looks and attire of the ladies of Henry’s court, and asserted that they drank too much.
    The twin cults of chivalry and courtly love, which underpinned court life at this time, often acted as a brake on the passions that could flourish in the hothouse atmosphere of the court. Works of chivalry and romance, which had proliferated since the invention of printing, were the preferred reading matter of the nobility, and the code enshrined in them infiltrated every aspect of court life, from pageants to the decoration of palaces. Technological advances in warfare meant that the cult of chivalry was in its last flowering, but that was not apparent in 1509.
    Henry VIII himself, although a typical Renaissance prince, was passionately committed to the principles of the mediaeval knightly code, and he expected his courtiers to be so, too. He was fascinated by the legends of King Arthur and the Knights of the Round Table, although it was not until the Reformation that he used his imagined descent from Arthur to justify his definition of England as an empire.
    Henry’s view of himself as a knight errant had a profound effect upon his treatment of women. Since the twelfth century the art of courtly love had governed social interaction between aristocratic men and women, and it had enjoyed a revival at the court of Burgundy. A knight was permitted to pay his addresses to a lady who was usually above him in rank and perhaps married—in theory, unattainable. In the elaborate courtship dance that followed, she would be the mistress—not usually in the physical sense—and he the unswervingly devoted servant. He would wear her favour in the tournament, compose verses in her honour, ply her with gifts imbued with symbolic meaning, or engage in conversations rich with witty innuendo. Wordplay between lovers was very popular at the Tudor court, with each adopting ciphers composed of initial letters. When Henry VIII wrote to Anne Boleyn, he often ended his letters with a cipher, enclosing her initials within a heart. Jewellery in the form of ciphers was common.
    Simple courtly games such as Blind Man’s Buff, Post and Pillar, Prisoner’s Base, shuttlecock, and fortune-telling had a hidden code of their own in the game of courtly love, while love itself was a common theme in court entertainments, poetry, and songs. Every St. Valentine’s Eve, each lady of the court would hold a lottery to choose a partner for the next day, and he was supposed to buy her a gift. Being in love was the