from the king to enable him to repay a loan of 2,000l. In that year he embarked at Southampton with the army that invaded France, and was one of the commanders of ‘the middle ward,’ having been appointed on 28 May the king's standard-bearer in the room of Sir Edward Howard, the admiral, who was drowned. His own standard is described heraldically as follows: ‘Per fess White and Black. The device the trunk of a tree couped and ragulée Or, inflamed Proper. Motto, “Loyallté n'a peur.”’ (Nichols, Collectanea Topographica et Genealogica, iii. 65). He commanded a hundred men when he passed out of Calais on 30 June. He and Sir Charles Brandon [q. v.], afterwards duke of Suffolk, had five shillings a day each as joint captains of the Sovereign, in which they crossed the Channel. At the winning of Tournay he was created a knight-banneret, and as master of the revels he celebrated the victory by an interlude, in which he himself played before the king.
On 1 Jan. 1515 his name appears for the first time on the commission of the peace for Kent. On 6 Nov. he was appointed master of the horse with a salary of 40l. a year, an appointment which he surrendered seven years later in favour of Sir Nicholas Carew [q. v.] On the same day he had an annuity of fifty marks granted to him as squire of the body. In the same year he became an executor of Sir Thomas Cheney of Irthlingborough, Northamptonshire, and before Christmas we find him writing to a minstrel in the Low Countries named Hans Nagel, to allure him over to England, not, however, for the sake of his music, but as a spy who could make reports about the fugitive, Richard De la Pole. On 11 Aug. 1518, in anticipation of a splendid embassy from France, he and Sir Nicholas Carew had each some liveries of cloth of gold from the wardrobe to prepare for jousts at Greenwich. On 2 Oct. he signed the protocol of the treaty of London with the rest of the king's council, and two days later the treaty of marriage between the Princess Mary and the Dauphin. In 1519 he received two letters from Erasmus in praise of the court of Henry VIII. Next year he attended the king to the Field of the Cloth of Gold, and also to the meeting with the emperor at Gravelines. On 12 Feb. 1521 he had a grant of the custody of the manor of Leeds in Kent, and of the lordship of Langley, near Maidstone, for forty years, at the annual rent of 27l. 15s. 8d. In May following he was one of the justices both in Kent and in Surrey before whom indictments were found against the unfortunate Duke of Buckingham. Next year, on 24 April, the duke's manor of Hadlow in Kent was granted to him. In the autumn of 1521 he accompanied Wolsey to the Calais conferences, but on 21 Sept. Pace wrote to the cardinal to send him and Francis Brian home, as the king had few to attend him in his privy chamber. In May 1522 he went again in Wolsey's train to meet the emperor at his landing at Dover. On 1 Sept. following he obtained from the crown a forty years' lease of the manor of Eltham, with a house called Corbyhall, and the stewardship of the manor of Lee, or Bankers, near Lewisham in Kent.
In 1523 he became, on the Earl of Kildare's return to Ireland, one of the earl's sureties that he would come again on reasonable warning and present himself before the king. On 30 Aug. in that year he was named one of the commissioners for the subsidy in Kent; and on 1 Sept., on the death of his uncle, Nicholas, lord Vaux of Harrowden, he and three other executors received orders to deliver up Guisnes Castle to Lord Sandes. About the same time he had the duty of bringing into the Star-chamber the books of ‘views and musters’ for the districts of Maidstone, Calehill, and Eythorne in Kent. His rapidly advancing fortunes may be traced by the fact that he was assessed for the subsidy in February 1524 at 300l., and in May 1526 at 520l. On 6 Feb. 1524 a license was granted to him and his half-brother, George Guildford, esquire of the body, to export yearly one thousand woollen cloths. On 15 July he had a grant in tail male of Northfrith Park, a further slice of the lands of Buckingham in Kent. In November his name was returned, as it had already been once before, as one of three persons competent to serve the office of sheriff for that county, but he was not selected. On 20 Dec. he had a license to export three hundred quarters of wheat, and about this time he is said to have surrendered his office of standard-bearer, which was conferred upon his brother, Sir Edward, in conjunction with Sir Ralph Egerton. In April 1525 Archbishop Warham wrote to him about the discontent created by the demand for a benevolence in addition to the subsidy. On 18 June he witnessed at Bridewell the grant of the earldom of Nottingham to the king's bastard son, Henry Fitzroy. On 15 Aug. he writes to Wolsey from Barnet, in answer to a request to send him the new book of statutes for the royal household signed by the king. This referred to a set of regulations which came into force in January following, under which Sir Henry was one of the select number who were assigned lodgings in the king's house, he being one of a council appointed to hear com-
