ABSTRACT
When the political and social uncertainties of the Wars of the Roses at last gave place under Tudor rule to conditions of comparative stability, the arts in England had lost so much ground to continental thought and practice that Henry VII and Henry VIII found themselves obliged to import foreigners if the balance was to be redressed. The commissions extended to Pietro Torrigiano to work on the new chapel at Westminster (Henry VII's), to Polydore Vergil to write the official history of England and to Hans Holbein to paint the portraits of the new dynasty and its officials, form one aspect of this determination to place the English Court on a level with its continental rivals. The contacts established in ecclesiastical and academic life between English and foreign philosophers and teachers resulting in friendships like those between Erasmus and Dean Colet and Sir Thomas More were based on a similar desire to recover lost ground and prepared the way for far-reaching reforms. Another example—outwardly perhaps the most spectacular—was a change in both the scale and cost of Court Revels. From Italy came the new masking costumes (not without fears of scandal), and from France a growing interest in the literary and scenic possibilities of Tournaments. 1 The marriage first of Prince Arthur and then of Prince Henry to Katherine of Aragon brought England into Europe again and restored a diplomatic prestige unknown since the days of Agincourt. The Emperor Charles V was welcomed to London in 1522 with spectacular Festivities. 2 Even at popular level foreign example did not go unnoticed, the stages of the Flemish Chambers of Rhetoric having as marked an effect upon the elaboration of civic pageantry in Tudor England as French and Italian example had on the affairs of the Court and its offshoots in ecclesiastical and scholastic life. 3
