by How a 1526 order from Henry VIII’s own wardrobe became football’s earliest recorded pair of boots.
Henry VIII’s football boots are, improbably, the earliest recorded pair of football boots in history, ordered by a king far better remembered for jousting, tennis, and six marriages than for anything resembling the beautiful game.
The 1526 Order
In 1526, Henry ordered a pair of football boots from the Great Wardrobe, the royal department responsible for supplying his clothing, alongside a much larger order of roughly eighty other pairs of shoes and boots. The boots were handmade by his personal royal shoemaker, Cornelius Johnson, and cost four shillings, worth roughly one hundred pounds in modern money.
What the Boots Were Actually Like
No surviving example of Henry’s football boots exists today, but historical records describe them as strong leather, ankle-high, and notably heavier than his other footwear, built for a rough, physical activity rather than court fashion. Textile historian Maria Hayward, who discovered the original order buried within Henry’s wardrobe accounts, has said she finds it genuinely difficult to imagine why else the king would have ordered them.
A Genuinely Violent Sport
Tudor football bore little resemblance to the modern game, played with few formal rules and a reputation for real brutality. Contemporary writer Sir Thomas Elyot described it bluntly as a game of beastly fury and extreme violence, hardly the kind of pastime typically associated with royal dignity.
When Henry Likely Played
Historians believe Henry’s football boots were most likely worn during matches played on Shrove Tuesday, a traditional day for football in Tudor England, and that Henry was, at most, an occasional rather than serious player of the sport. His documented passions for jousting, real tennis, and wrestling suggest football was simply one more physical pursuit for an unusually athletic young king.
A Surprising Historical First
Whatever his actual level of enthusiasm, Henry’s 1526 order remains the earliest documented instance of football boots anywhere in recorded history, predating the sport’s organized modern form by more than three centuries. It is exactly the kind of unlikely sporting footnote The London Prat enjoys digging up, since 1961. For further reading, see NBC News’s report on the discovery of Henry VIII’s football boots.
A king who apparently played football in his spare time is exactly the kind of surprising detail worth hearing him joke about himself: magical realism, a storytelling style that treats one genuinely impossible event, a Tudor king turning up alive in 2026, as completely ordinary inside an otherwise realistic modern world. Take Henry out of his own palace, his own propaganda, and every account written centuries later to flatter or condemn him, and put him instead in front of a crowd who has no idea who he is, just a comedian with a microphone and thirty minutes to earn a laugh, and the accumulated bias mostly falls away on its own. That is the exact premise behind HENRY IS LIVE, the free companion booklet, and the novel it grew out of, HENRY IS BACK, both completely free to download for UK residents at henryviii.uk/HENRY-IS-LIVE.pdf and henryviii.uk/HENRY-IS-BACK.pdf. Paperback editions are also on Amazon: Henry Is Back and Henry Is Live.
