Henry VIII and François I on Tour: Monarchy and Mobility in Renaissance England

What can we learn about Henry VIII’s progresses by comparing them with the provincial journeys undertaken by François I of France? There are good reasons to study these twin emblems of Renaissance kingship in tandem, in spite of historiographical and linguistic obstacles. François and Henry met twice and were intensely aware of one another. Their reasons for travelling around their territories have often been analysed in similar terms: to police the provinces, connect with a range of political communities, engage in visible acts of piety, and go hunting. In both England and France, royal travel has been conceived as an exercise in propaganda and the projection of power. If a culture of royal mobility was common to both kingdoms, however, its scale and meaning could also be quite distinct. A range of research on sixteenth-century royal journeys written in both English and French, this article brings these differing approaches into dialogue as a step towards establishing a comparative methodology, thereby helping to identify what was particular about Henry VIII’s progresses. The itineraries of Henry and François demonstrate the scale and ambition of their tours around their respective realms. For François, being on the move was an everyday and endless political necessity, which he also seems to have rather enjoyed. For Henry, his longer-range royal progresses were more of a disruption to a mode of government that was substantially settled at Westminster and Whitehall by the early Tudor period. For both rulers, however, mobility was essential to the practice of personal monarchy, asserting the real presence of the king within the shifting balance of power at the royal court and beyond.