On the evening of 6 May 1527, Henry VIII entertained an embassy from France at a lavish party in Greenwich. The festivities took place in a banqueting house and a theatre, both built for the occasion. At the feast’s end, Henry led his guests out through a great archway. After a moment, he invited the French to turn around and look at a painting which hung behind them.

It was a vast panorama of the 1513 siege of Thérouanne – ‘very connyngly wrought’, a chronicler reported. As Henry knew, the siege was a sour memory for his guests. Henry himself, in league with Maximilian I, the Holy Roman Emperor, had routed them there. So great had been their humiliation that it was known as the Battle of the Spurs, after the spectacle of the French cavalry fleeing the field.

The man Henry had to thank for this deliciously vindictive moment of political theatre – commissioned late and completed in just three weeks – was Hans Holbein. As Elizabeth Goldring notes in her superbly scholarly biography of the artist, we usually associate Holbein’s articulation of Tudor power with his role as King’s Painter, later in the 1530s; but his usefulness was apparent early. It was his first visit to England and he had been in the country barely six months.

He was born Johannes Holbein, in the late 1490s, in Augsburg, where his father, Hans Holbein the Elder, was a successful painter of devotional works. In Basel, to where the young Holbein moved prior to 1515, his first identifiable work was adding marginal illustrations to an edition........

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