Henry was twenty-eight, Francis twenty-five. Both were striding, athletic, theatrically charismatic monarchs who fancied themselves Renaissance princes; both ruled kingdoms exhausted from the Hundred Years' War; both knew that the real coming power in Europe was twenty-year-old Charles V, who had just inherited Habsburg Spain and the Holy Roman Empire in one breath. The 1518 Treaty of London had bound the Christian princes against the Ottomans. Henry's chief minister, Cardinal Thomas Wolsey, wanted to bind England and France a step closer with a dazzling, choreographed display of friendship. The site was Balinghem, a flat green stretch between Ardres on the French side and Guînes inside the English Pale of Calais. Engineers literally regraded the ground so the two royal parties could meet on perfectly equal elevations. Nothing was incidental. Everything was theater.

In front of the castle of Guînes, English carpenters threw up a temporary palace covering nearly 12,000 square yards. Each of its four wings was 328 feet long. Only the brick footing, eight feet high, was solid. Above that, 30-foot walls were canvas stretched on timber and painted to look like stone. The roof was oiled cloth painted to mimic lead. Vast panes of real glass made visitors feel as if they were standing in the open air inside their own building. Galyon Hone supplied stained glass. The ceiling of one tent may survive today in the New Chapel at Ightham Mote in Kent, its colours faded but its provenance traceable. In the surrounding fields stood 2,800 more tents for the lesser participants, an instant linen city against the green. Henry's retinue alone numbered nearly 4,000 people and 2,000 horses.

There were Masses said by Wolsey under cloth-of-gold canopies. There were jousts: Henry rode for ten days running, breaking lance after lance. There were archery contests, which Henry won, and music led on the English side by William Cornysh the Younger, master of the Royal Chapel. And then, in a moment scrubbed from no chronicle and from every legend afterward, Henry slung an arm around Francis after dinner and proposed an impromptu wrestling bout. Francis, the leaner and quicker man, threw Henry to the ground. The English king laughed it off, then did not, then never wrestled him again. Both monarchs were used to deference. Neither was used to being put on his back. The brief flash of real competition between two real men, costumes and all, may have been the most honest moment of the seventeen days.

The numbers are staggering and well attested. English supply records list 250,000 fish, 98,000 eggs, 2,000 sheep, 700 conger eels, thirteen swans, three porpoises, and 66,000 litres of beer. Sir Thomas More was there. So was Anne Boleyn's mother and her older sister Mary, with whom Henry was having an affair that summer. So, in the French retinue, was the king of Navarre and four marshals of France. Thomas More watched, Bishop Fisher disapproved, French chroniclers wrote Francis up as the gallant centerpiece. Contemporaries agreed the spectacle had been unmatched. Few thought it had achieved anything. A month after the tents came down, Henry was already meeting Charles V again at Calais, and within a year Wolsey had quietly arranged an English alliance with the emperor against France. By 1521 the two kings who had embraced at Balinghem were at war.

Today, a stone plaque on the D231 road, the old Route de Marquise, marks the spot where Renaissance Europe spent itself in cloth and gold. The cloth is gone, of course. The painted-canvas palace was struck within weeks; the gilded monkeys disappeared into history; the regraded valley settled back into pasture; the 2,800 small tents folded and went home. What survives is a phrase. Field of the Cloth of Gold. Marcel Proust dropped it into Swann's Way, comparing a snowy lawn lit by sunset to a Field of the Cloth of Gold. The Showtime Tudors dramatized it. A Richard Rodgers musical set it to song. Even Magnus Mills used the title for a 2015 novel about strangers pitching tents in an English meadow. The diplomacy failed in months. The image lasted half a millennium.