The early Tudor world Henry and Catherine inhabited can seem impossibly distant from our own. It is a place of arcane rituals, where January is greeted with processions of ploughs and summer with bonfires and giants. Its calendar is strange too: a litany of endless saints days and a new year that starts in spring. And let’s not even get started on the clothes, which are proscribed so strictly by law that wearing the wrong socks could land a servant in the stocks.

Henry VIII, whose bearded face and power-pose stance are so familiar to us, ruled over this world from the age of seventeen. But even he is curiously unrecognisable in the early years of his reign. His hair is long and frizzy. His chin is bare. And if he had a body below the shoulders in the years before 1536 – as the balance of probability suggests – portraits are very reluctant to show it. Kings in the early Tudor period were not like normal human beings. Their coronation made them semi-divine, even if they ruled as children or, as in Henry’s case, as a teenager.

But for all Henry’s sacral status, for all the oddness of Tudor ritual, one thing unites us across the centuries: you can always rely on the British weather to ruin a good summer day out.

Lavish preparations were made by the City of London that hosted the coronation and for the court that participated in it. For many of the king’s subjects the most exciting event came the day before the coronation, when the King and Queen made the traditional procession from the Tower of London to Westminster, surrounded by all the pomp and majesty imaginable.Tapestries and cloth of gold were hung from houses along the route. The streets were railed off to control the surging crowds, who jostled at windows to get a good view. All the guilds of London stood out in their red and white livery. The Duke of Buckingham, a proud and portly fellow who in 1509 was the senior nobleman in the country, made every effort to ensure that no one forgot his status. He had specially commissioned ‘a gown all of goldsmiths work’.

And he was not the only one wearing his wealth.

‘If I should declare,’ wrote the chronicler Edward Hall, ‘what pain, labour and diligence the Tailors, Embroiderers and Goldsmiths took, both to make and devise garments for lords, ladies, knights and esquires… it were too long to rehearse.’

But no one could outshine the King and Queen that day. Catherine was a vision in white satin, her long auburn hair hanging loose over her shoulders, a pearl-studded circlet on her head. She sat in a litter pulled by gleaming pale horses, while Henry rode in the midst of choristers and knights. He wore a gown of ermine and velvet over clothes studded with rubies, emeralds and pearls.

Amidst the crowds of citizens thronging the streets that day was John Middleton, a mercer with a straight-talking wife called Alice and two young daughters. As an important member of his guild, he proudly wore his red and white livery.

Perhaps somewhere among the cheering crowds, too, was Ralph Walker, an apprentice in the care of Thomasine Percyvale, a Cornish-born servant girl who had risen by 1509 to the heights of respectability in the tailoring trade.

We know that the lawyer Thomas More was in attendance because he wrote a poem in celebration of the occasion:

‘”The King” is all that any mouth can say,’ he wrote, describing how ‘the houses are filled to overflowing, the rooftops strain to support the weight of spectators… Nor are the people satisfied to see the king just once; they change their vantage points time and time again in the hope that, from one place or another, they may see him again.’

More’s coronation ode greeted Henry VIII’s accession as the dawn of a golden age, a release from the oppressive and suspicious regime of his father. In many ways, the mere fact of Henry’s accession was remarkable – it was the first succession of an adult king to his father in almost a century. He was a living embodiment of the peaceful conclusion to the Wars of the Roses, having inherited both Yorkist and Lancastrian blood from his parents. As his old tutor, John Skelton, expressed Henry’s unifying lineage:

‘The rose both white and red, in one rose now doth grow.’

Of course, there were still disaffected Yorkists lurking in the Tudor Court – one of them was in attendance on Catherine of Aragon. ‘Dame Margaret Pole’ was the daughter of the infamous Duke of Clarence who had been drowned in a butt of malmsey wine in the Tower. By rights she should have been Countess of Salisbury, but Dame Pole had been left an impoverished widow, and her brother had endured imprisonment and execution under the first Tudor king. Thomas More’s poetic claim that ‘every heart smiles to see its cares dispelled’ under King Henry was just a touch too optimistic. Still, he insisted that joy abounded, ‘as the day shines bright when clouds are scattered.’

Henry and Catherine probably could have wished for a few more clouds to be scattered before their coronation. One contemporary Venetian visitor to England had complained that ‘the rain… falls almost every day during the months of June, July and August’ and 23 June 1509 proved to be no exception. Just as Queen Catherine’s party were passing up Lombard Street the heavens opened. The magnificent canopy of her litter was no match for the downpour and the queen was forced to take shelter under the awning of a draper’s shop, the rain dripping from her unbound hair.

Fortunately the shower passed and the royal procession could continue on to Westminster for celebratory feasts ahead of the coronation day in the Abbey. But one has to feel sorry for the merchants whose precious tapestries were soaked, and for guild men like John Middleton who had to endure the wet-dog stink of their woolen livery for the rest of the day.

This sudden rain shower during the coronation festivities is a reminder that even in moments when Tudor pageantry was at its most ritualistic and awesome, their world was still recognizably like our own. It was made up of myriad varied experiences – the king and queen were only two people in a population of more than two million, and my book, So Great a Prince: England and the Accession of Henry VIII , explores royal lives, both public and private, alongside those of Henry’s subjects. High and low shared the same points of reference in a ritual year punctuated by periods of fasting, feasting sexual abstinence and delighted excess. It also serves to remind us that mighty though Henry VIII became – and transformative though his reign proved – he was still only human. Even a king cannot control the English weather.

So Great a Prince is out now. Buy your copy here.