Great Harry

by Erickson, Carolly, 1943-

  Then all at once the hazards of weather closed in. A frost so severe it

  crippled the entire camp prevented all movement for days. A hundred

  men froze to death in forty-eight hours, and many who escaped death lost

  their fingers and toes, the nails dropping off their frostbitten hands.

  Suddenly the air turned warmer, leaving the half-dead soldiers to founder

  in a sea of mud and to long mutinously for home. Brandon sent word to

  Henry "that his people which were in the French ground abode much

  misery, for the weather was wet, the ways deep, long nights and short

  days, great journeys and little victual, which caused the soldiers daily to

  die." Without waiting for a reply he broke up the camp and let his men

  return home, and when he and his captains followed them they "came not

  to the king's presence a long season, to their great heaviness and displeasure."^^

  Henry was irritated at this souring of his hopes, but soon convinced himself it was nothing more than a temporary setback. Brandon and the others regained the royal favor, and the king laid his plans to renew the war in the spring. First, though, he had to fill his empty coffers, and there was reason to think his subjects already grudged having paid heavily for a war which had brought no victories.

  Villagers complained of high taxes, and told one another the king meant to take half of every man's possessions. "And if every man would do as he would do," a Norfolk man was heard to say, "he would take him by the head, and pull him down." When asked whom he meant to pull down he said fearlessly, "Harry with the crown." Others named such talk treason, and spoke in the king's defense, but the voices of the dissatisfied

  were louder. "Better to take against king Harry," they said, than to pay what his tax commissioners asked.^^

  It was not only the amount of the tax that led to resentment: it was the use to which the money was put. One of Wolsey's agents received a report of a disturbance in Shaftesbury, where one John Brody called John Williams a "vagabond and thief." When Williams protested that he was no vagabond but a soldier in King Henry's armies, Brody's answer was sharp.

  "A, sir, have ye been with Master Henry King? A noble act ye did there! Ye spent away my money and other men's, like a sort of vagabonds and knaves!"

  Brody suffered for his "unfitting words," punished by two justices of the peace and the mayor of the town, yet no coercion could change his harsh judgment of the king's wars, and there were many who felt as he did.i^

  Parliament too resisted paying for the war. When two shillings in the pound was asked from the Commons, the issue was debated for over two weeks before assent was given; though the members were urged to consider the king's necessity, they took their own poverty more to heart, and said they could not remember ever giving half as much before at one grant.^^ No matter how high the rate was set, the amount actually collected was invariably much lower—too low to fill the king's needs. Something more than half of what was assessed was in fact paid, though the men who paid it were as bitter as if they had given their full share.

  Despite this opposition money was found to launch a spring campaign, and in the first weeks of 1524 a merchant was bribed to smuggle sacks of coins to mercenaries on the continent who were to fight for the English. The money was sewn into "coats of brigandines fashion"—light body armor—and carried on men's backs across several borders undetected, the merchant having been paid well "not to meddle with it."^^ At the same time plans were made known for a unique double offensive. Henry meant to send two armies to France this time, one a vast force of twenty thousand which he would lead himself and the other a smaller, secret army with an undisclosed destination.

  Yet even as his plans matured his Council and his chancellor undercut them. Wolsey was secretly negotiating with the French, while the Council members tried to restrain Henry's eagerness to prolong the war. Beyond the obvious hazard of battle for a king who had no son, they argued, they could see no clear advantage to be gained from another season of costly adventuring in France. Apart from Henry's idiosyncratic zeal for combat, it was difficult for outsiders to understand his aims. An Italian in the service of the bishop of Capua wrote to his employer in March of 1524 analyzing the motives and interests of all the European sovereigns. He found the aims of the emperor and the French king plain enough, but those of the English monarch baffled him. Why should he fight the French, a futile undertaking all but valueless even if successful? Did he want revenge against the allies of the Scots? Was it a personal vendetta against Francis? Had Henry been so deluded by the flattery of Charles V

  that he would do anything the emperor asked? Or did he cling to the vain hope that, if he fought the emperor's enemy, he might claim a part of France from him as a reward? There was no satisfactory answer; the Italian concluded that Henry "had no clear object in view."*^

  So far removed were Henry's true aims from the comprehensible logic of power. The locus of competition in Europe in the mid-1520s was not France but Italy, a fact Wolsey took full account of but which failed to arouse Henry's interest. As the Italian situation moved nearer to reaching a critical point he continued to look for the mounting of his dual assault on France, and as late as September of 52A —too late in the year for full-scale invasion—he was rousing the nobility to stand ready to aid him in the taking of France.^^

  In the follow ing February the French suffered a disastrous defeat—but at the hands of Charles, not Henry. A French army led by Francis himself besieged Pavia, then held by the imperialists, and did not retreat at the approach of troops commanded by Charles' ablest general Pescara. In the battle that resulted the French were crushed, and their king, dazzlingly and conspicuously dressed in a doublet of cloth of silver, was captured by the enemy.

  With Francis in captivity, his fighting men in leaderless confusion, the moment seemed ripe to fulfill Henry's desires. Among the demands the emperor made of his royal captive was that he surrender Normandy, Guienne and Gascony to the English; now all they had to do was to take possession of what had once been theirs.^^

  Once enough money was raised the assault could begin—an assault, this time, that could not fail. Wolsey could not go to Parliament again. He had just asked them for the unprecedented sum of four shillings on the pound, and to ask for more was futile. He would try a broader appeal. In medieval times kings had gone directly to their subjects for aid when they led their armies into battle in person. Making much of the fact that Henry meant to do this now, Wolsey asked Henry's subjects to make their king an '*Amicable Grant" of one-sixth of their incomes. Clergy were to contribute one-third. Within weeks of the victory at Pavia royal commissioners were dispatched throughout the country to collect the grant, and Henry, released at last from the frustrations of nearly eighteen months of peace, threw himself one last time into preparing his ships and men.

  Imperial envoys who called on him during these weeks found him in the highest spirits, his face lit with anticipation, his talk full of his hopes.^^ "Now is the time for the emperor and myself to devise the means of getting full satisfaction from France," he told them animatedly. The opportunity had arrived, the host was gathering, the means were all in hand. Speed was what counted, the king insisted. "Not an hour is to be lost!"

  Fortune my foe, why dost thou frown on me? And will thy favour never better be? Wilt thou I say for ever breed my pain, And wilt thou not restore my joyes again?

  In the same week that Wolsey sent out his commissioners to collect the Amicable Grant the emperor Charles V sat down to compose his response to his eager uncle in England. He sat a long while in thought before beginning it, his brow furrowed and his pale blue eyes squinting in a frown, his ungainly chin cupped in his hand. He had before him a letter from the imperial ambassador in England, the Flemish nobleman de Praet, warning him that further neglect of his commitments there would seriously harm his interests. Pensions promised to English noblemen close to the king had not
been paid for several years; worse still, the princely pension of nine thousand crowns promised to Wolsey was long in arrears, and Wolsey more than most men could be counted on to resent the slight. What made for even more urgency was that the cardinal was negotiating secretly with the French, and any further insult might send him irrevocably into their camp.^ For good relations to be restored, the emperor must give prompt attention to English affairs without delay.

  Charles had another letter before him as he wrote—^from Henry, who addressed his wife's nephew as "my most beloved son" and signed himself "your good father, brother and uncle." This miscellany of styles conveyed affection, deference and paternalism all at once, and in fact Henry was in some confusion about just how to address his precocious young in-law. At twenty-five, Charles had just defeated Henry's archenemy in battle; he had come a long way in the five years since he first came to England and appealed to Henry as his "good father" for advice. Charles had long since outgrown Henry's tutelage, if not his alliance, and his recent startling victory called for a reconsideration of their difference in status.

  As he thought over how to inform his impassioned kinsman in England that he meant to make peace, not war, Charles gave passing consideration, in his methodical way, to his aunt Katherine. He had been neglecting her too, causing her to complain in letters to him that she could not imagine any reason for his silence, and to remind him bluntly that "love —and consanguinity both demand that we should write each other oftener." She could say little, for Wolsey read her letters and looked on her with suspicion, as he would a foreign agent at court. But her feeling of abandonment was plain. "Nothing indeed would be so painful to me as to

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  think that your highness had forgotten me," she wrote, adding an entreaty that, at the very least, her nephew should send her occasional news of his health. 2

  Fondness for his aunt may have drawn Charles' attention away, momentarily, from the task at hand, but if so his concentration was quickly restored. The idea of Wolsey surely restored it—Wolsey the arrogant alter ego of the king, the shrewd diplomat and ceaseless intriguer who even as he wrote assuring the emperor of his undying loyalty was conniving against him with the wily Genoese Giovacchiono, or Joachim, an agent of the French. Bad feeling between the emperor and the cardinal had been growing at least since 1521, when at the Anglo-imperial conference at Bruges and Calais Wolsey spent three terror-stricken days in bed, believing the emperor's cook had poisoned him. (At the same conference Charles himself had feared poison. A small bladder filled with hair and foul-smelling powders and potions was discovered hidden in a platter of meat. The cook and four others were arrested, but released when the noxious mixture was found to be nothing more dangerous than a love charm. ^)

  And there were other grievances. Beyond the emperor's failure to pay Wolsey's pension, there was his failure to use his influence in raising the cardinal to the papal throne. Twice Charles had promised to support Wolsey's candidacy for the papacy, in 1521 and again in 1523, and twice he had at the last moment betrayed him. Though he protested that he had no interest in governing the church and was glad the elections had gone as they did Wolsey felt duped nonetheless; his ambition was not to be trifled with, certainly not by a boy nearly thirty years his junior, no matter what his title.

  Wolsey would be the first to shout betrayal now, Charles realized as he began to set down his instructions to de Praet. Yet his course of action was as clear and logical to his mind as Henry's expectations of aid were in his. The French were beaten. Pavia was in the hands of his generals, and the rest of Italy lay open to the imperial forces. He had no interest in conquering France, and no need of English aid in conquering the remainder of Italy. What troops he could spare from campaigning there would in any case be sent to the German states, where furious peasants unsettled by the apocalyptic preachings of the former friar Martin Luther were massing to attack their masters. He ordered de Praet to tell Henry, as diplomatically as possible, that if the English meant to go to war they would have to fight alone.^

  Henry was stunned when the message was delivered. Just as his hopes reached their zenith the inconceivable was happening. His staunch friend, the man he had chosen to be his son-in-law, the ally he had supported with nearly half a million crowns in loans, was going back on his word and turning against him. Bad faith of every kind—broken promises, violated treaties, even simple changes of mind invariably wounded Henry. In his chivalrous imagination every shift of purpose was recreancy, every equivocation disparagement. It made no difference that Charles sent assurances that despite his peace efforts he would not disarm, and that if he failed to make peace he would go to war as originally planned. To

  Henry the insult was as final and dishonorable as the repeated affronts of Charles' grandfather Ferdinand of Aragon more than a decade earlier. Spaniards, Flemings, Hapsburgs—none of them could be counted on to keep faith.

  Wolsey gave vent to his anger in a sweeping repudiation of the emperor and all his lands. All hope of future "amity and good feeling" between the two courts was dead, he announced to two Flemish envoys. "I know full well that we shall never get any assistance from you; but we shall do our best, either by contracting alliance with the Turk, or making peace with the French, by giving the princess' hand to the dauphin, or otherwise declaring against the emperor." Everything that could harm the imperialists would be done, he swore, "so that the war between us may last a whole century!"^

  It only remained for the last link—the dynastic link—to be broken. Now that Charles V no longer needed the English there was no reason for him to take an English bride, especially when a more attractive candidate was available. Whereas Mary Tudor was a fragile girl of nine, Isabella of Portugal was a marriageable nineteen, with a dowry of a million crowns besides. The betrothal to Mary was broken off, and Charles, in a letter that referred to the "almost indissoluble tie" between himself and Henry, now loosed that tie with a stroke of his pen.^

  Henry was still red-faced and reeling from the emperor's rebuff when he was startled by reports of rebellion against the Amicable Grant. Instead of eager generosity in support of the king's war the commissioners sent to collect the grant found wretchedness, ugly recalcitrance, and open criticism of royal policy. In Kent Thomas Boleyi^^s assaulted when he tried to collect what was owed; in Suffolk, Charles Brandon and his fellow commissioners had to defend themselves against hundreds of rioting villagers who rang the alarm bell and swore they would kill anyone who tried to take their money. Another collector recorded meeting a group of four hundred ragged men on the high road near Bury, many of them dressed only in their tattered shirts, who knelt before him and begged him, for the sake of the king's mercy, to relieve them of the tax. Elsewhere, taxpayers tried to clear their obligation by paying in goods instead of the scarce coins, bringing the royal commissioners cartloads of wheat and caged chickens and lowing cows; others told stories of how their bams and houses had burned to the ground, leaving them destitute, or how cattle disease had killed their herds and made them penniless.

  "It would have made a man sorrowful," one collector wrote, "though he had a right hard heart, to hear their lamentation—not only of the poor, but of those who were thought rich. Those who were before valued at £100 or £200 now make twenty nobles in ready money, and some scarcely forty shillings.''

  Unquestionably there was much real poverty in England, and a shortage of coins so widespread that goods were selling for half their worth in silver. One reason the villagers preferred to pay their tax in cows and wheat was that they could not sell either in the local markets, no matter how low the price they asked.^ But genuine scarcity was one thing, and articulate, determined opposition to royal policy another, and what

  alarmed the commissioners and dismayed the king was not the excuses and pleas for money but the obstinate, violent resistance of those who refused to pay on principle.

  Archbiship Warham, now a»^&£ptuagenarian retired from court and looking after his parishioners in Kent, wro
te down the arguments of those who grudged the tax in his county and sent them to London. Cursing the author of the tax, Wolsey, as vehemently as they did its misguided purpose, the men and women of Kent taunted the commissioners and reminded them that the last "loan" advanced to the king had never been repaid, and that too much English coin had already been exported abroad in the wars to the enrichment of the Flemish and French. With unassailable logic they harangued the royal servants sent to tax them, arguing that all the money paid toward the conquest of France in 1523 had not led to the capture of a single foot of ground, and that even if the coming campaign succeeded it would only mean more loans and grants to pay for the defense of the newly acquired territories. In their boldness the people went on to criticize the soundness of their king's judgment in seeking to conquer France at all, comparing him unfavorably to his father Henry VII, "who lacked no riches or wisdom to have won that kingdom if he had thought it expedient."^

  Such harsh words soon gave way to violence, and by May reports of assault and organized resistance were reaching the court from throughout the countryside. The most adamant of the resisters, having attacked and harassed the commissioners, began to turn on their fellow-villagers. Terrified of being "hewn in pieces," those country people who had not yet paid what they owed refused to, while those who had already pledged money or goods to the king took them back again.^ The exasperated commissioners did what they could, arming their household servants to patrol areas where opponents of the tax were massing, and riding many miles each day to confer with one another, but they were too few in number to contain the spreading disturbances. They sent urgent dispatches to the court, asking advice and complaining that the situation was beyond their power to control. If nothing was done, Norfolk and Brandon wrote jointly, the isolated rioting might grow into full-scale rebellion. And then "God knows what ill spirits might put in their minds."^^