Antony was duly dazzled, and he and Cleopatra were soon partners in statecraft and in bed. But they continued to party hard, forming a drinking club known as the “Society of the Inimitable Livers,” whose members, according to Plutarch, “entertained one another daily in turn, with an extravagance of expenditure beyond measure or belief.” Even as the walls closed in, leading to both of their suicides, they kept partying, now calling their drinking society “Companions to the Death.”
Perhaps the most elaborate diplomatic party ever thrown was the legendary Field of Cloth of Gold, an 18-day summit (June 7–24, 1520) of King Henry VIII of England and King Francis I of France, meant to cement peace between the two countries after centuries of war.
Held in Northern France, Henry stayed in the English-controlled town of Guînes, which was kitted out with a magnificent temporary timber structure called the “crystal palace” for its number of expensive windows, and hundreds of tents for his retinue of over 5,000. Meanwhile, Francis stayed nearby in the French village Ardres, with his over 5,000 courtiers, in another tent city topped by a 120-foot-tall tent covered in gold, which blew away before festivities began.
In the countryside between the two cities were more tents and competition fields. The weeks were filled with jousts, banquets, balls, masques (including one where Henry appeared as Hercules, complete with a lion pelt made of gold thread), sporting events, and diplomatic meetings. The kings jousted, the queen threw balls where everyone, including the monarchs, danced energetically, and hundreds of gallons of beer (made from a special temporary brewery) and wine were imbibed.
Commoners were also supplied with all the alcohol they could handle. “There were vacaboundes, plowmen, laborers and of the bragery [rabble], wagoners and beggers that for drunkenness lay in routes and heapes, so great resort thether came,” one chronicler wrote.
During one drinking party, Henry VIII almost caused an international incident when he challenged Francis to a wrestling match. Francis, using a maneuver called the “tour de Bretayne,” quickly pinned Henry, much to his embarrassment. “So decisive was Francis’s win,” Glenn Richardson writes in The Field of Cloth of Gold, “that according to the conventions governing these things, he was not obliged to offer Henry a second go when asked to, and chose not to do so.”
On the last day, mass was celebrated, when a great dragon kite made by the English flew through the sky, amazing those below, as fireworks exploded from its nostrils. But despite these wonders, the expensive extravaganza accomplished very little. “What should have been a politically advantageous meeting quickly degenerated into a mere masque for the prodigal entertainment of two extravagant courts,” Alison Weir writes in The Six Wives of Henry VIII, “whose sovereigns postured in new outfits of increasing splendor every day and ended up barely able to conceal their jealousy of each other.”
Sometimes royal parties could be not only purposeless, but deadly. In 1398, Queen Isabeau of France threw a masque to celebrate the marriage of her lady-in-waiting. Her husband, the mentally ill Charles VI, arrived at the party in disguise with a group of friends. Dressed as wild mountain men, they announced their arrival with howling, cursing, and frenetic dancing.
