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Henry rides in gold on a white horse, painted a head taller than his escort. The painter knew who was paying for the picture.

In June 1520, on a shallow valley between two castles near Calais, the kings of England and France met to become brothers. Henry VIII was 28; Francis I was 25; each had spies in the other's court and a new rival watching both, the 20-year-old Charles V, who had just added the empire to Spain. Cardinal Wolsey, who produced the event, understood that since neither king would visit the other's kingdom, a kingdom would have to be built between them: 5,000 people a side, 2,800 tents, and for Henry a temporary palace at Guînes of timber and painted canvas done up as brickwork, with real glass windows and gilded lions on the gates. Before it stood a fountain that ran claret and spiced wine to anyone holding a cup, which by the second week was everyone. For 18 days the two courts jousted, wrestled, danced, and outdressed one another with a unity of purpose their diplomats never matched. The field took its name from the fabric both sides wore into bankruptcy: cloth woven with actual gold thread, tents of it, doublets of it, horse trappings of it. Each crown spent roughly a year's income. The one unscripted event became the most famous: Henry, ahead on points in every arranged contest, seized Francis by the collar and challenged him to wrestle, and the king of France, trained in the Breton style, threw the king of England flat on his back in front of both courts. The chroniclers, English ones especially, moved briskly on. On the final Sunday the two kings heard mass together in a chapel of gold tissue, and something in the shape of a dragon, a firework or a kite depending on the account, sailed over the congregation and into the painting. As diplomacy it evaporated on contact. Within two years Henry had allied with Charles against France, and English armies were burning the country whose king he had sworn brotherhood with in a golden valley. The field produced no treaty that survived, only a display so total that no monarchy ever quite attempted it again, and a name that has meant gorgeous futility ever since. The great panorama at Hampton Court was painted around 1545, a quarter century later, as a memory palace of the whole affair at once: Henry rides in procession at the left, larger than his escort; the canvas palace stands at the right with its wine fountain working; the tent city goes back over the hills in gold and stripes; and the dragon hangs over everything, heading for Ardres. The painting takes the event at its own valuation, which is the correct way to paint a party.