The immediate family of a king maintained separate households, subordinate to the king's own but modelled on it. Within these households, princes, princesses and dowagers would be served under the same protocols and would maintain similar (though lesser) jewel houses. This had a multiplying effect on royal plate.

Plate and jewels feature in every aspect of Henry's dealings with his family and in each case they illuminate the relationship. Information varies from one individual to another but we know something even of the plate of Henry's mother and of his redoubtable grandmother, Lady Margaret Beaufort. Unsurprisingly, his long-awaited heir, Edward, accumulated an ever-growing stock of plate almost from the day of his birth. But this contrasts dramatically with Henry's use of gold and silver to manipulate the sense of obligation owed by his sisters, Margaret and Mary, and it contrasts even more starkly with his confiscation of it to humiliate Katherine of Aragon and their daughter Mary when they refused to bend to his will. Katherine had a well-stocked jewel house of her own when the divorce proceedings started; by the end she had very little. The story of Anne Boleyn's plate, enlivened by Holbein's wonderful designs, shows another side of the king's nature through his tendency to thrust greatness on his paramour by inundating her with plate and jewels. Some of her plate, pointedly, comprised the very things taken from Katherine, and some, following their owner, found their way back to the Tower after her fall.

This chapter does not discuss the plate and jewels of all of Henry’s family. The documentation is extensive and to tell all the stories would be repetitive. So I have been selective, focusing on his sisters, on Katherine of Aragon and her daughter, on Anne Boleyn, and on the two royal sons, Henry duke of Richmond and Edward prince of Wales. The interest of these stories lies less in the plate and jewels themselves than in what their ebb and flow tells us of Henry's impetuousness, and of his greed and cruelty, traits that we shall see increasingly clearly as the reign unfolds.