CHAPTER FOUR
‘Rejoice Boulogne in the rule of the eighth Henry! Thy towers are adorned with crimson roses, now are the ill-scented lilies uprooted and prostrate, the cock is expelled and the lion reigns in the invincible citadel.’
TRANSLATION OF A LATIN INSCRIPTION ON THE BLADE OF A SWORD MADE FOR HENRY VIII.1
After the Franco-Spanish truce of 1538 with its consequent threat of invasion, Henry’s attention turned to his northern border with the troublesome Scots in the early 1540s. The English border forces had launched frequent hit-and-run raids on Scottish villages across the frontier, burning and destroying homes and driving back captured livestock into England. After negotiations to secure the marriage between Prince Edward and the infant Mary, Queen of Scots, broke down and a dispute flared up over the English capture of some Scottish ships on the high seas, the king’s impatience boiled over. He ordered Suffolk to attack Edinburgh when the winter rains ended in March 1544, with his army of 8,000 men, based in Darlington. These plans were dropped when a much larger force under Hertford, drawn from Ipswich, King’s Lynn, London and Hull, was embarked in 114 ships at Tynemouth at the end of April for a punitive assault on the Scottish capital. The Privy Council cold-bloodedly told Hertford that Henry’s pleasure ‘was that you shall put to fire and the sword’ all the communities along the shores of the Forth Estuary and burn Edinburgh ‘without taking either the castle or town to mercy, though they would yield, for you know the falsehood of them all’. On 4 May, the English force successfully landed near the port of Leith, entering nearby Edinburgh three days later after blasting open its gates, and burnt the city – although the virtually impregnable castle, high up above on its sheer cliffs of volcanic rock, withstood Hertford’s assaults.
With the Scots now thoroughly cowed by this scorched-earth policy, the king could turn his martial attentions to his old enemy, France. In an unlikely diplomatic alliance between the Imperial Emperor Charles V and the heretic Henry, both sides pledged themselves to invade the realm of that ‘Most Christian’ king, Francis I. Imperial forces had been fighting the French in the Low Countries to further Spanish claims to Burgundy and in an effort to end France’s relations with the Turks, ‘the inveterate enemy of the Christian name and faith’. The Spanish were aided by 5,600 English troops under Sir John Wallop in the Siege of Landrecies, and by Henry’s subsidies for mercenaries. England and Spain were now committed to fielding armies, numbering 42,000 each, by 20 June 1544 in a twin-pronged offensive aimed at the French capital – the so-called ‘Enterprise of Paris’ – from the springboards of English-held Calais and the emperor’s lands to the north. War preparations began.
But Henry’s health had deteriorated, delaying his departure to Europe, and his army set out before him under the command of the experienced generals Suffolk and Norfolk. Through his sheer determination (if not bloody-mindedness) and the anxious ministrations of his physicians, Henry recovered and happily and enthusiastically prepared for war – his last great adventure as a military leader. Finally, on the evening of 14 July, he landed at Calais to take the field of battle at the head of his troops, proudly riding ‘a great courser’ or heavy-armoured horse, with an absurdly large wheel-lock pistol martially, if not nonchalantly, laid across the pommel of his saddle. The banner of St George flew bravely behind him. His great helm and lance were borne by William Somerset, Lord Herbert, son of the Second Earl of Worcester,2 riding ahead of the king. Henry’s final chance for military glory irresistibly beckoned.
It was the first time he had worn armour in the field since his campaign against France long ago in 1513; indeed, he may not have ridden in armour since a bad jousting accident in 1536.3 In preparation for the wars, an existing armour had to be enlarged to fit what was now his vast bulk, but Henry changed his mind4 about the alterations after work had begun. He probably ordered two new field armours to be made in his Almain (German) armoury at Greenwich, but settled on an Italian design imported by the Milanese Francis Albert. This beautifully etched, blackened and gilt three-quarter armour5 was almost certainly the one Henry wore on his journey to Boulogne.6
It is difficult not to compare and contrast Henry’s gamecock self-certainty with his bloated immobility: the Shakespearian caricature of Sir John Falstaff somehow lurks in the back of one’s mind, but the king clearly lacked his constant joviality. The violent thunderstorm and torrential rain that greeted him and his column of English troops when they arrived at Marquise, twenty miles from Calais, on 25 July may have considerably dampened Henry’s ardour for campaigning.
Before embarking for France, he had needed to ensure that England was secure and stable, particularly on the borders with Scotland, traditionally an ally of the French kings and potentially the source of a crippling diversionary attack that would disrupt the campaign across the English Channel. Like all responsible soldiers about to go into action, he prudently made a new will and, cannily, appointed Queen Katherine as regent to rule in his stead, with the Earl of Hertford as the military lieutenant or commander of all homeland forces. At the same time, as a mark of his especial favour, he settled the rich manors of Mortlake, in Surrey, and Chelsea and Hanworth, both in Middlesex, upon her.
The commission of regency signed on 7 July 1544 instructed that Prince Edward should be moved to Hampton Court for security and laid down that Katherine should use ‘the advice and counsel of the Archbishop of Canterbury, Lord Chancellor Wriothesley, the Earl of Hertford, the Bishop of Westminster and Sir William Petre, secretary of state, in her judgements’,7 a carefully balanced mix of conservative and radical members of the Council. A draft commission in the hand of Sir William Paget, newly appointed principal secretary to the king, dated 11 July, made arrangements for the financial running of the realm:
Commission to Queen Katherine and [blank] at the least8 of the councillors named in the commission of regency (which the king taking his voyage at the present time over the seas to invade the realm of France has made her) to address warrants to the king’s treasurers, receivers etc for the payment of money.9
Hard intelligence about what was going on within England was vital for its good governance, and Henry’s efficient civil servants instructed commissioners in every county to report regularly: ‘Once a month they shall certify to the Queen and council … upon the state of the county and their proceedings and all noteworthy occurrences.’10 One such report came from York, informing the queen that during the month-long assizes of oyer, terminer and gaol delivery11 at the castle there, seventeen persons had been convicted of murders and felonies, of which sixteen had been executed and one committed to the bishop’s prison. There was no mention of any acquittals.
Katherine revelled in her new-found power and demonstrated an extraordinary level of administrative competence as well as knowledge and expertise about military matters, particularly over issues in the dangerous Scottish border region.
Soon after Katherine assumed the regency, Francis Talbot – Earl of Shrewsbury and the king’s lieutenant in the North – and others wrote to her about the problem of Scottish prisoners held by the English12 who were not to be allowed to return home. Those able to pay for their upkeep were to be imprisoned ‘this side of the Tyne’ and the others consigned to gaols ‘as Hertford knows’. However,
It appears that with the Scottish prisoners being at least 100 and the prisoners already there, the gaols will be so pestered that they must die of hunger unless relieved at the king’s charge.
They begged her to decide with the Council whether to send the prisoners back to Scotland or to feed them at a cost to the exchequer,
for the gaols are so full that many die daily for lack of food and that number being so much increased, the penury and famine must needs be the greater.
Furthermore, the towns of Durham, Newcastle, Alnwick, Morpeth and Darneton were
infected with a very contagious disease of which two or three people die daily so that the writers may not lie here without danger.
Could they withdraw twenty or thirty miles south to Barnard’s Castle, for safety? The earl ended that they ‘did not think it convenient to remove without knowing her pleasure’.
Two days later, by command of the queen at Westminster, they were firmly instructed how to resolve the problem. Those prisoners ‘of the poorer sort’ who are ‘stout, busy or otherwise like to do any hurt being at liberty’ were to be sent to several prisons, and the others ‘if extreme necessity shall so require’ should be fed at the king’s charge. The remainder should be released upon a bond for good behaviour. The letter was signed ‘Kateryn the Queen Regent’.13
On 25 July, Katherine wrote from Hampton Court to Henry, who was directing the campaign against Boulogne, informing him that £40,000 was being sent to pay for the fighting and that the Council would be ‘diligent to advance to him, against the beginning of next month, as much money as possible’. Four thousand men were also being made ready to reinforce the English army ‘at one hour’s warning’, with arrangements in progress to transport them across the English Channel. She ends on a homely note: ‘The prince and the rest of the children are well.’14
Today, one can still sense the excitement Katherine felt about being at the heart of events in the surviving state papers and correspondence. On 31 July, she wrote again to the king to relate a report she had received that afternoon that the fishermen of Rye in Sussex had captured a Scottish ship ‘wherein were certain Frenchmen and Scots sent with letters and credentials to the French king and others’. The plain-speaking queen thought the lucky seizure was ‘ordained of God to shame the crafty dealing and juggling of that [Scots] nation’.15 She enclosed the most important of the letters, which clearly indicates that she had read all the papers and had decided their significance.
On 6 August, she informed Henry of rumours that Frenchmen had landed in England, adding – with a flash of humour – that ‘fearing that some seditious person had spread the rumour (for a landing of French about Gloucester was unlikely)’, she had instructed the justices of the peace in the region to quieten the excitement in the country and to make diligent inquiries. She had received replies that showed ‘all was well’ and that the rumour was founded merely on the departure from Bristol of English warships.16
There were more serious issues to tackle, such as the problem of deserters from the English army. On 9 September, she issued a proclamation from Westminster ‘for the examination of persons returned from the king’s army in France and punishing of such as have insufficient passports to do so’.17 There was another proclamation relating to the plague then raging in ‘sundry parts of London and Westminster’. This banned from the court those infected or living in infected homes and prohibited members of the household from visiting such places ‘to avoid danger to the prince, Queen Katherine and the other children’.18
Katherine was also adept at praising those who served the king well. In early September, she wrote to the Lords Evers and Wharton, Wardens of the Scottish Eastern and Western Marches, for whose
diligent service … in the defence of the realm and the chastising of the king’s enemies, we give you hearty thanks and require you to give the like in our name to the captains and gentlemen that have served you.19
The queen also required them to continue their diligence ‘especially now in the time of harvest, so as their [the Scots] corn may be wasted as much as may be’.
This new war leader did not forget Henry’s requirement for a humble, loving wife at home. From Greenwich, soon after his departure for France, she wrote to tell him that although he had not been long away, she could not be satisfied until she had heard from him:
The want of your presence, so much beloved and desired by me, makes me that I cannot quietly enjoy anything until I hear from your Majesty.
She knew Henry’s absence was necessary, she continued,
yet love and affection compels me to desire your presence … Love makes me in all things to set apart my own commodity and pleasure and to embrace most joyfully his will and pleasure whom I love.
God, the knower of secrets, can judge these words not only to be written by ink, but most truly impressed in the heart … I make account with your Majesty as I do with God for His benefits and gifts heaped upon me daily …
And even such confidence I have in your Majesty’s gentleness, knowing myself never to have done my duty as were requisite and meet to such a noble Prince, at whose hands I have received so much love and goodness that with words I cannot express it.
Lest I should be too tedious unto your Majesty, I finish this, my scribbled letter, committing you into the governance of the Lord, with long life and prosperous felicity here, and after this life to enjoy the kingdom of His elect.
She dutifully signed the letter:
By your Majesty’s humble, obedient loving wife and servant. Kateryn the Queen. K.P.20
Meanwhile in France, after a brief armed reconnaissance mission by Suffolk, the English forces, short of soldiers, had partially invested Boulogne, twenty miles from Calais, whilst others, under Norfolk, besieged Montreuil. Bad weather in the Channel and in Flanders delayed deliveries of gunpowder, shot and other supplies – Norfolk complained that his men had to drink water rather than beer – and Henry had to wait impatiently until early August before the full force of the English artillery could be brought to bear on the French defences at Boulogne. The chronicler Raphael Holinshed records the huge array of military earthworks thrown up by the besiegers:
Beside the trenches which were cast and brought around the town, there was a mount [artificial hill or earthwork] raised upon the east side and divers pieces of artillery planted aloft on the same. The which, together with the mortar pieces, sore annoyed them within [the town] and battered down the steeple of Our Lady’s church.21
For six weeks the deafening cannon roared, lobbing 100,000 gun stones into the town, and assaults were mounted on Boulogne’s outworks. The military operations were observed and directed by Henry, who was safely out of the range of French retaliatory fire on the north-east side of the town, near the sea and with easy access to fresh water. There was no shortage of that; no doubt he was also protected from the constant rains and high winds that afflicted operations that summer. In a postscript to a letter written to Queen Katherine on 8 September, Henry excitedly reported:
At the closing of these letters, the castle … with the dike [defensive ditch] is at our commandment and not like to be recovered by the Frenchmen. Castle and town are like to follow the same trade for this day we begin three batteries and have three mines22 going; besides one which has shaken and torn one of the greatest bulwarks. I am too busy to write more but send blessings to all my children and recommendations to my cousin Margaret23 and the rest of the ladies and gentlemen and to my Council.24
Three days later, the castle exploded spectacularly and those inside Boulogne knew the game was up. They sought the English terms for capitulation and negotiations for an honourable surrender began.
The chronicler Hall describes the king’s campaign against the town:
He so assaulted and so besieged with such abundance of great ordnance that never was there a more valiant assault made. Beside the undermining of the castle, tower and walls, the town was so beaten with the ordnance that there was not left one house whole therein …25
The English noted with delight that the beleaguered town was ‘in great necessity, for many eat horseflesh and some of the gentlemen Italians are glad to eat of a cat well larded and call it dainty meat’.26 Boulogne surrendered and Henry, who had been invigorated both in spirits and health during the siege, entered its gates in triumph on 18 September:
having the sword born [sic] before him by the lord marquis of Dorset, like a noble and valiant conqueror, he rode into Boulogne and the trumpeters standing on the walls of the town sounded their trumpets at the time of his entering to the great comfort of all the king’s true subjects.27
It was the crowning moment of a hitherto lacklustre military campaign.28
Ironically, that was the same day that Charles V, Henry’s ally, deserted him. The imperial emperor had attacked through Champagne and had advanced to within fifty miles of Paris before a logistical shortage of supplies forced his retreat. After secret negotiations with the French, a separate peace treaty was concluded at Crépy and announced on 18 September, surrendering Savoy and Milan to the Spanish, who in turn dropped their territorial claims on Burgundy. The Duke of Orléans was to marry Charles’ daughter. The Dauphin, heir to the French throne, now freed of an imperial threat to Paris, was able to concentrate a 36,000-strong army against the English and later in September he marched on Montreuil to relieve the garrison there, forlornly besieged by Norfolk and his starving troops. Henry, still supervising the extensive refortification of Boulogne, ordered Norfolk to withdraw and fall back to the main English force on the coast. Henry covertly left France on 30 September, and despite the desertion of his ally and the almost total failure of the allied war aims he returned in triumph to England. But in truth, he knew he was likely to face French retribution wreaked on his own realm.
By November, looking about him, Bishop Gardiner was downcast by the progress of the war and by Henry’s government’s problems at home and abroad. On the 13th, he wrote to Secretary Paget from Bruges:
I am very much troubled with the state of our affairs … I cannot forebear to hold my pen still … as my mind is [so] encumbered with the matters to be busy in writing and devising.
I consider we be in war with France and Scotland. We have an enemy [in] the Bishop of Rome.
We have no friendship assured here.
We have received such displeasure of the Landgrave, chief captain of the Protestants, that he has cause to think we are angry with him.
Our war is noisome to the wealth of our own realm and it is so noisome to all merchants that must traffic by us and pass the narrow seas, as they cry out here wonderfully.
Herewith we see at home a great appearance of lack of such things as the continuance of the war requires.
When we put away this war, we show ourselves content to make a peace, we may have it, but so miserable, to speak the truth, as the French men offer, that thereby the king’s majesty’s noble courage should be so touched as we ought to fear the danger of his person after so long [a] travail in honour, in rule and government of the world, to sit still with such a peace as to render Boulogne and let the Scots alone only for a little money, not paid but promised.29
Gardiner’s gloom was fully justified. In early February 1545, Henry launched a pre-emptive strike on Scotland to keep the Scots firmly in their box. Sir William Evers, Warden of the Eastern Marches, led a raid into the border country, successfully burning the town of Melrose. His mission accomplished, he was ambushed on the way back at Ancrum Moor, near Jedburgh, and heavily defeated (Evers was killed in the fighting), providing the Scots with ample revenge for Solway Moss.
Elsewhere, domestic and international problems burdened the king and his advisers. The year 1545 saw a famine in England – a ‘great dearth of corn and victuals’30 – which forced the purchase of cereals from Denmark and ‘Bremberland’, the country around Bremen in Germany. Four thousand quarters of corn31 were delivered to London in one month alone, paid for by a tax levied on the companies of the city. In the face of a new, more serious French threat, the military mobilisation necessary to maintain three armies in the field (in Scotland, at Boulogne and for defence of the south coast) as well as manning the navy32 meant that there were few men to maintain law and order in London. At midsummer, only constables kept watch in the wards of the city. However, bills had been pasted on to houses warning of ‘certain priests and strangers’ – a French fifth column – that would set fire to London. The king’s Council ordered the mayor to impose a curfew on strangers and set a special watch of citizens from nine at night until four the next morning. The blowing up of a ship, the Hedgehog, on the Thames at Westminster on 19 July must have raised levels of anxiety about enemy agents or saboteurs within the realm.33 It was a time of great anxiety, for the French were determined to take the war to England.
Francis I had earlier threatened invasion to force the surrender of English-held Boulogne. On 3 January 1545, Francis had written to Denmark about his powerful fleet now being formed
to invade England when the season arrives, as the best way to constrain the enemy to make restitution and satisfaction and perhaps with God’s grace, deliver the people of England from his tyranny.
With the assistance of the Danes and the Scots, Francis predicted that Henry
who is hated by his nobility and subjects for well known reasons and exhausted by two years of great expense, will like most of his predecessors, find himself deserted by his own subjects.
If the king of Denmark joined the enterprise,
it would cost him little, seeing that his ships are always ready and many of his subjects would [take part] … for their own profit, if he gave them permission.34
But much of this was empty posturing: France probably did not have the resources to mount a full-scale invasion nor the ability to resupply its forces’ bridgehead. Probably the French king envisaged a series of stinging hit-and-run attacks on the English coast to goad Henry into returning Boulogne.
As far as Henry was concerned, however, a landing was expected at any time that summer. In July, his spies reported a French army 40,000-strong to be ready to board their ships. A sophisticated system of beacons was hastily set up on the downs of southern England to provide warning of any French incursion. Three defending armies, totalling more than 90,000 men under arms, were based in Kent and Sussex under the command of the experienced Duke of Suffolk, in East Anglia under Norfolk and in the West Country under John, Lord Russell, the Lord Privy Seal.35 At Darlington, the Earl of Hertford had mobilised forces in preparation for countering any French attempt to invade the North of England in support of their Scottish allies.36 More soldiers had also been sent to Boulogne: 1,000 from London and another 4,000 from the Home Counties. The watchful defenders of England’s shores would not have long to wait for action.
In May 1545, the ailing Spanish ambassador Eustace Chapuys took his leave of London and the royal court. His last encounter with Queen Katherine further reveals her to have been an adept diplomat, as well as kind and discreet. The ambassador arrived early for his farewell audience at the Palace of Westminster:
When I entered the back door of the king’s apartments, having traversed the garden facing the queen’s lodgings and arrived nearly at the other end, close to the principal entrance of the king’s apartments, my people informed me that the queen and the princess [Mary] were following me quickly.
I hardly had time to rise from the chair in which I was being carried, before she [the queen] approached quite near and seemed from the small suite she had with her and the haste with which she came, as if her purpose in coming was specially to speak to me.
Katherine, accompanied by four or five women of her chamber, had been told the previous evening by the king of Chapuys’ retirement.
Whilst on the one hand she was very sorry for my departure as she had been told that I had always acted well in my office and the king had confidence in me; on the other hand she doubted not that my health would be better on the other side of the water.
The queen hoped that the friendship between England and Spain would be maintained. Chapuys wrote afterwards to Charles V:
She … begged me affectionately, after I presented to your majesty her humble service, to express explicitly all I had learned here of the good wishes of the king towards you … She asked me very minutely, and most graciously, after your majesty’s health and expressed great joy to learn of your … amelioration, adding many courteous and kind expressions.
The envoy asked to be allowed to salute Princess Mary, ‘which was at once accorded’, Katherine being anxious that Chapuys should not stand too long. Sensitively, the queen withdrew seven or eight paces so that she could not overhear his conversation with Mary.37
The ambassador then met with Lord Chancellor Wriothesley and Charles Brandon, Duke of Suffolk, and after dinner they asked if the emperor could supply ‘a few men, wagons and victuals’ to Henry’s army to ‘keep the French quiet’ outside the English enclaves of Calais and Boulogne. They also asked his opinion on how to bring about a peace or truce and begged him, perhaps significantly, to believe ‘that what they had said was entirely on their own account and without the king’s knowledge’.38 Chapuys was then called into Henry’s presence, who ‘received [him] most graciously and … said some kind things about my convalescence and my departure from England’. Then the king got quickly down to business, displaying a surprising grasp of detail about the issues raised: the question of an alleged French spy; complaints about the presence of the Scottish ambassador at Charles V’s court; and the welcome given to four French warships in Dunkirk harbour. Henry would prefer a settled peace to a truce with the French, he told the ambassador, but the enemy were short of men, money and food, so they could hardly resist him, ‘as had been proved by the successful exploits of the English on land and sea against them’. Henry bragged that during the past ten days
the English privateers, not in his service, had captured twenty-three French vessels and shortly before as many more had been sunk, burnt or captured. He calculated that his people had taken no less than 300 French ships since the beginning of the war.39
So the gossipy Chapuys departed, taking with him a ‘thorough-bred dog’ given to him by Sir William Paget, principal secretary to the king.
In June, Francis I inspected his assembled fleet of 324 warships under Admiral Claud d’Annebaut, near Rouen, before it set sail for England in the middle of the following month. On 18 July, a detachment of twenty-two galleys raided and burnt the fishing village of Brighton in Sussex. Forewarned by fishermen of the French approach, Henry began to concentrate his forces near the Hampshire coast. On the evening of 19 July, he dined aboard the flagship Great Harry at the important naval base at Portsmouth with Charles V’s new ambassador, Francis van der Delft, and angrily rejected his suggestion to surrender Boulogne. The next morning, a Sunday, the enemy fleet, deployed in a battle array of three squadrons, arrived off Portsmouth and anchored threateningly off St Helen’s Point on the Isle of Wight. The outnumbered English ships40 later sailed out in two lines to fight them, watched anxiously by Henry from the ramparts of nearby Southsea Castle with his land commander, Suffolk, alongside him. As both sides opened fire for the first time, one of the two leading English vessels, the seventy-one-gun Mary Rose,41 700 tons, her decks crowded with soldiers in armour, was caught by a freak gust of wind. Watched by the horrified onlookers on land, she heeled to starboard and the sea rushed in through her open lower gun ports. Within minutes she had disappeared beneath the waves. Only thirty of her 415-strong crew survived; the rest drowned horribly, ensnared beneath the netting spread across her upper deck to prevent attack by enemy boarders. The piteous cries of the trapped and dying men could be clearly heard on land, barely a mile away. Henry cried out loud: ‘Oh, my gentlemen! Oh, my gallant men!’ With surprising compassion, he limped over to where Lady Carew, wife of Sir George, the Vice-Admiral of the English fleet, was standing, tears streaming down her face. The king sought inadequately to comfort her: she had just watched her husband go down with the Mary Rosebeneath the blue waters of the Solent.
The French, triumphantly crowing at this great propaganda coup, landed 2,000 troops at Bembridge on the Isle of Wight on the evening of 21 July. Local militia forces skirmished with the invaders in the woods and on the slopes of Bembridge Down before retreating and destroying the bridge over the River Yar. A day or two later, a French party sent to fill their water casks at a spring in Shanklin Chine, on the island’s east coast, were attacked and cut to ribbons.42 The French fleet meanwhile mounted attacks on the English shipping in Portsmouth harbour at
every tide with their [oared] galleys and shot their ordnance at the king’s ships in the haven, but the wind was so calm that the king’s ships could not sail, which was a great discomfort to them.43
The City of London sent 1,500 hastily recruited men towards Portsmouth as reinforcements, but they turned back for home when they reached Farnham in Hampshire because the French had gone. Having been defeated by the militia on the Isle of Wight with great loss, including the French general, after twenty-four hours Admiral d’Annebaut retreated.44 Heading for home, he paused further east along England’s south coast only to sack the towns of Newhaven, recently granted a charter by Henry VIII, and Seaford before, once again, local forces drove his troops ignominiously back to their ships.45 The pursuing English vessels were becalmed off Beachy Head, Sussex, and the French escaped safely back to their home ports after only a brief and inconclusive skirmish at sea.
Henry sought the pleasures of hunting to distract him from the highly symbolic loss of one of his major warships and, characteristically, to flee the dangers of the plague now rampant amongst his fleet in Portsmouth harbour. But a second more terrible blow, this time a very personal one, afflicted him on 22 August: the sudden death of his old jousting comrade, the Duke of Suffolk, at Guildford, Surrey, where the court was staying. After the king heard the stunning news, he told his courtiers that Brandon had been the best of friends, generous and loyal as well as truly magnanimous towards his political enemies. Glaring, he pointed out that few of his Council could boast the same about themselves. Henry arranged for a sumptuous state funeral for his friend, who was buried, perhaps significantly, at St George’s Chapel, Windsor; the king, although in straitened financial circumstances, picked up the bill for the funeral.46
The Earl of Hertford had earlier been appointed commander of the English forces in Boulogne and had defeated a determined French attempt to retake the town in January 1545. Almost seven months later, Francis I had sent another large army against the town, resulting in daily skirmishes, and had built siege works near by, including the construction of a large tower at Basse Boulogne from the top of which French guns fired into the English fortifications. Hertford was then recalled to command the English forces on the Scottish borders and was replaced by the old soldier Norfolk. The French war was digging deep into the English coffers of both money and men, and Henry, always needful of cash anyway, was forced to raise funds from the Antwerp moneylenders, such as the Fuggers banking family, and had to resort to the expensive and troublesome hiring of foreign mercenaries.47 Spanish, Albanians, Italians, Clevois, Swiss and Germans had all been recruited to reinforce English forces in the Scottish borders and to augment the army in France. The Spanish in Newcastle complained about the local food and resorted to cooking their own meals in the kitchens of their billets, causing friction with their landladies.48
One episode assumed what would otherwise have been farcical overtones, if it had not also had serious diplomatic and fiscal implications for the king, who was perhaps unused to employing hard-nosed Continental mercenaries. Henry had hired the German soldier Captain Frederick von Reiffenberg after the mercenary, writing from Cologne, had offered his services, ‘moved by [the king’s] pre-eminence in kingly virtues’.49 In June 1545, Philip, Landgrave of Hesse, had provided von Reiffenberg with a letter of commendation and urged Henry to take up his services as he ‘may have cause to be grateful’. The German and his 8,000 war-hardened foot soldiers and 1,500 cavalry were hired for three months at the high cost of 52,000 florins or £15,550 a month (more than £5 million in today’s monetary value). Unfortunately, Charles V refused the freelances (or mercenaries in the modern expression) permission to enter Brabant en route to Boulogne and they caused mayhem. The emperor wrote complainingly that the mercenaries had caused ‘inestimitable damage’ in the Treves area and had then passed by Aix through his territories beyond the River Meuse and ‘forced their way into the Bishop of Liege’s town of Wesel’. The German commanders then began to argue about the precise terms and conditions of their contract with Henry, taking hostage their English liaison officers (Thomas Chamberlain, governor of the English court of merchants at Antwerp, and Sir Ralph Fane, lieutenant of Henry’s pensioners or bodyguard) until the disputed fees were paid. The English were furious and Henry’s principal secretary Sir William Paget wrote to von Reiffenberg on 2 November from Windsor complaining of the ‘disloyal and evil service’ done to the English king ‘and his strange usage of his commissioners’.
I am grieved both for the dishonour to yourself and the diminution of the credit of him who recommended you to his majesty. The king has commanded me in his name to charge you to observe your covenants with him and set his commissioners free to execute their [missions].50
Paget added a dire threat: ‘Or else, be assured that wherever you may be in all Christendom, it will cost you your life, even if his majesty pays 50,000 crowns for it.’51 His words remind us of the threats uttered by an American president nearly five centuries later: ‘You may run, but you cannot hide.’
But the English threats were easily shrugged off and the money was not returned, although the luckless English hostages were at least freed.52 Henry had learnt an expensive lesson regarding the unreliability of European mercenaries – beware Germans bearing arms – although his son later hired substantial numbers of them to help put down the insurrections in England in 1549. Stephen Vaughan, the king’s financial agent in Antwerp, wrote harshly of the German nation:
Happy is he that has no need of Almaines [Germans] for of all the nations under the heavens, they be the worst, most rudest and unreasonable to deal with.53
Philip, Landgrave of Hesse, was rather embarrassed by the behaviour of the mercenary he had recommended. On 16 December, he wrote to Henry of his indignation that von Reiffenberg and ‘his fellow soldiers did not deal uprightly’54 with the English king. But, after all, he pleaded, he had nothing to do with their decisions and this he had emphasized to Henry’s ambassadors. It was a somewhat lacklustre apology.
On 4 August, the City of London sent another 1,000 soldiers – gunners, bowmen and pikemen dressed in new white coats – off in barges from Tower Wharf to Dover for embarkation on to ships waiting to take them across the Channel.55 The king’s Council, stretched militarily on two fronts, ordered Cranmer ‘as victories come only at the appointment of God within the remembrance of man’ to organise prayers in English and religious processions throughout the kingdom on 10 August56 to seek a victory against the French.
It was also a year for bad weather: on June 25, there were tempests in Derbyshire, Lancashire and Cheshire, uprooting trees, damaging houses and the spires and towers of churches and producing hailstones ‘as big as a man’s fist [that] had prints [impressions] on them like faces and some like gun holes’.57 France was not spared, either. In Paris, too, in July lightning burnt down four of the great churches and the tower wherein was stored much of the army’s artillery.58 At Havre-de-Grace in Normandy, a major French warship, the oddly named carrack Rumpy le Conte, was also burnt and lost with all hands, together with £1 million in gold – payment for the sailors of Francis I’s battle fleet. At least destiny was even-handed in dealing out catastrophe to the two combatant nations.
Cornelius Sceppurus, a member of the imperial emperor’s Council, told Dr Louis Schore, President of the Council of Flanders, that he saw no fighting ships on the Thames in London during this period, ‘but many ships and small craft carrying soldiers to Boulogne. The people desire peace but must dance to their leader’s tune.’59
Well they might. The war was crippling England’s fragile economy and its people were burdened by taxation to pay for it. The campaign in France in 1544 had cost Henry’s exchequer a total of more than £700,000, well over £200 million at today’s prices, compared with the £250,00060budgeted for the war by his government. The armies and fleet consumed another £560,000, or £196 million, the following year up to 8 September. A ‘benevolence’ – a less than voluntary gift to the exchequer – was planned in early 1545, with the king writing to the commissioners for collection:
Our people … Be of so loving and kind disposition towards us that they will gladly contribute by way of benevolence that, for the necessity of the affair, shall be requisite as if the same was granted by Parliament.61
Richard Read, a London alderman, unpatriotically refused to pay up and for his pains was forcibly conscripted into the army and sent to fight on the Scottish borders. The Privy Council, writing to Sir William Evers, Lord Warden of the Eastern Marches, in January 1545, said that the vengeful Henry thought
that he [Read] should do some service with his body and for that purpose sends him to your school, as you shall perceive by such letters as he shall deliver unto you, there to serve as a soldier, and yet both he and his men at his own charge.
Read was dispatched ‘on pain of death’ to take part in
any enterprise against the enemy.
He is to ride and do as the other poor soldiers do in all things that he may know what pains other poor soldiers abide and feel the smart of his folly.
Use him after the sharp military discipline of the northern wars.62
Read was captured by the Scots in the disaster at Ancrum Moor. In December 1545, his wife entreated the Privy Council to agree to exchange a Scottish prisoner held in the Tower for her imprisoned husband, offering to pay cash in lieu of the Scot’s ransom. The Scottish prisoner was Patrick Hume, servant to Cardinal David Beaton, Archbishop of St Andrew’s, who had been seized by English forces earlier that year, in September. He was brought to the Council and after ‘a general declaration of his cruelty to Englishmen and namely the murder of Sir Bryan Layton, late captain of Norham, the king’s clemency was declared unto him for his return to Scotland, upon procuring Read’s release’.63
The clergy were also asked to pay the next instalment of their subsidy at 3s in the pound to the crown in June instead of at Christmas. But still Henry’s exchequer struggled to pay the mounting bills. In November 1545, Lord Chancellor Wriothesley had further gathered a meagre £20,000 to pay for the wars, but told Paget on 11 November:
I assure you master secretary, I am at my wits’ end how we shall possibly shift for [the] three months following and especially for the two next. For I see no great likelihood that any good sum will come in until after Christmas.64
Early in 1546, the MP Thomas Hussey wrote to the Earl of Surrey that ‘the king’s majesty is indebted at this time, four hundred thousand marks, to the levying … by subsidy and other practices at this Parliament, there is not to be received above £200,000’. In addition to sales of monastic lands, England’s coinage was being debased through the addition, by the Mint, of base metal, and Henry turned his attentions to dissolving the rich ecclesiastical chantries and hospitals as a means of raising extra cash. Henry was also borrowing heavily overseas, but later in 1546, Stephen Vaughan, his long-suffering financial agent in Antwerp, told his master in London that the cautious Fuggers’ Bank would part with no more money ‘unless your majesty would find the means by act of Parliament that all the subjects of your majesty’s ream shall be bound for the repayment thereof again’. The Privy Council said that Henry did not want to enter into such an agreement as required ‘by the Fuggers … for repayment’ as it would ‘seem to the world to be brought so low as he should need for that sum to give them assurance by act of Parliament’. Wriothesley cast around for other methods of raising cash, such as collecting debts owed to the government, but the money came in slowly.
Our daily travail is with such as appear here for the king’s … debts, and we send out letters in great number for more debtors … As for money, all the shift shall be made that is possible, but yet the store is very small. The contribution comes very slowly in.65
Plaintively, Wriothesley added: ‘The Mint is drawn dry.’
Eventually even Henry had to overcome his enormous ego and cave in to the financial pressures posed by his empty exchequer. Consequently, in April 1546, Paget, John Dudley – Viscount Lisle, Hertford and Dr Nicholas Wotton, Dean of Canterbury and York and Henry’s ambassador in Flanders, were commissioned to enter into peace talks with the French, with an agenda tucked into their doublets that included English insistence on holding on to Boulogne, demands for war reparations in cash and for the French to stop mischief-making in Scotland. Henry initially asked for eight million crowns in French payments: ‘Eight millions quoth they [the French envoys]. You speak merrily! All Christendom has not so much money. We may as well offer you again one hundred crowns.’66Backwards and forwards went the negotiations, with Henry inevitably interfering in the detail of the discussions. At times, the wrangling was almost more than the English delegation could bear. On 27 May, Paget, who had vowed that he and his colleagues would ‘show ourselves men of stomach and intend to be revenged on this proud nation’, wrote to Sir William Petre from Guines:
Instead of the grace and peace, which I sent you last, help to send unto us now on this side, fire and sword, for other things cannot bring these false dogs to reason.
God give them pestilence, false traitors!
The king’s majesty has been trifled [with] too long already and seeing these false, wicked men work after this fraudulent fashion, God shall revenge us upon their iniquity and falsehood.
So much for the polite niceties of diplomatic language! Fatalistically, he added: ‘All this is for the best. God’s will is fulfilled in all things.’67 At last, a peace treaty was signed on 7 June in a tent pitched at Campe68 between Ardres and Guines. The agreement stipulated that the town of Boulogne would be handed back to France in 1553, but only after payment of two million crowns (£13 million in today’s money) by the French69 in reparations for the war. That thirsty drain on England’s economy had finally been plugged.