Meanwhile Charles V, having ceased to be an ally of the English, began behaving like an enemy. He ordered all English ships and property in the Low Countries to be seized—including crown merchandise intended to be used as repayment to Antwerp merchants for Henry's large loans. And he refused to come to England's aid even when, by the late spring of 1545, it looked as though the French might invade the island in force.
By now the English residents of the coastal towns were accustomed to setting out and tending the beacons that were to warn of enemy approach and to summon "all gentlemen, burgesses and peasants to be ready with arms to join the standards." The watch fires were laid, at three-mile intervals, all up and down the coast, with three beacons in every valley near the sea and two on adjoining hills, visible to seaward and landward. ''Wise and vigilant persons" kept watch. If enemy ships were sighted, one lowland beacon was to be set alight. At the sight of ships carrying soldiers and making for shore two lowland and one hilltop beacon were to be fired—the signal for a general muster. And if the landing force was evidently more numerous than the men assembled to resist it, all three lowland fires were to be lit "in haste," and every man was to run to the nearest high place, prepared to fight for his king and his life.^
This year the dreaded invasion came. On the afternoon of July 18, as Henry sat at dinner aboard his venerable flagship the Great Harry in Portsmouth harbor, a French fleet "in great force" sailed menacingly into view at the harbor mouth. The king hurriedly left his ship, and the English fleet weighed anchor at once and began to fire on the enemy. Though the French were too wary of the English cannon to approach very closely the English ships too were at a disadvantage. They were windbound, and could not leave the harbor to give chase.
But though there was no engagement there was a major catastrophe. The huge English ship the Mary Rose, having fired all her cannon on one side, hove about to fire those on the other. All her gunports were open, and when a sudden gust of wind caught her sails and rolled her over the lowest row of openings dipped below the water line. The ship foundered and sank, too quickly for the crew of five hundred mariners and the captain, Vice-Admiral George Carew, to escape. It was a sobering loss, for besides her large crew and skilled captain the Mary Rose had carried much "goodly ordnance" and other valuable equipment. Attempts were made to raise her, with heavy cables tied to her masts, but the foremast broke under the strain and in the end the ship could not even be dragged up into shallow water.^
As soon as the French fleet was sighted the warning beacons were lit, and men mustered in expectation of a landing. Two days later some
French troops were landed on the Isle of Wight, where they burned some houses and skirmished with the English, yet when the number of defenders reached three thousand or so the Frenchmen retreated, and finally took ship again the next day. Fifteen hundred French arquebusiers and pikemen came ashore farther eastward along the coast at Seaford, confirming the English judgment that an invasion in force was imminent (the French fleet was very large, and carried both soldiers and hundreds of horses, with provisions for two months), but this contingent too embarked after burning a few poor cottages. Three hundred Englishmen of the neighborhood, including twenty archers, gathered to oppose them, and so *'plucked up their courage" that they slew a hundred of the French.'*
As it turned out there was no large-scale confrontation either by land or by sea. The two fleets faced one another in mid-August, but bad weather prevented the English from attacking and gave the French the cover they needed to retreat homeward, satisfied to have disrupted the sending of supplies to Boulogne and to have forced Henry to the expense of maintaining some thirty thousand men under arms and twelve thousand mariners at sea over several months. To the English it seemed a dubious victory. They spoke sarcastically of the weather as the "French God," and grumbled at the damage to their ships and to their disease-ridden crews. A mysterious epidemic struck nearly every English vessel, seemingly the result of "the great heat and the corruption of their victual," which rotted uneaten in the steaming holds. The sailors suffered from swollen heads and limbs and from diarrhea, and many who came to collect their pay bore in their faces the marks of plague. As the common mariners died the officers neglected them and quarreled among themselves, and on the whole the navy "decayed very sore," as the admiral expressed it.^
The king, who had watched the first naval engagement and the fighting on the Isle of Wight from his vantage point in Portsmouth, was pleased with his subjects' stouthearted valor and talked expansively of his "great joy that he had been able to measure his strength against that of his enemy." So great was his confidence in the "valor and affection of his subjects" (and in God's favor in his just quarrel) that he had kept up his accustomed summer pastimes throughout the conflict, Henry told the imperial ambassador, but his cocksure unconcern was only a pose.^ If he hunted during the day he read letters and dispatches and conferred with his advisers when he returned from the chase, and kept himself perfectly informed about the course of the war.
He watched with particular interest the activities of Ludovico da TArmi, a roguish adventurer and nephew of Cardinal Campeggio whom he had sent to Italy to recruit a force of six thousand mercenaries for the coming campaigning season. Da TArmi was on the whole unsuccessful (and ended his life the following year on a Venetian scaffold), and another venture of Henry's in Italy also went awry. He had sent a man there to buy a number of arquebuses, and to send them to England disguised as a shipment of sugar, packed in barrels. The guns got as far as Antwerp, but there a customs official opened one of the barrels, discovered the fraud, and confiscated them all.
If the military consequences of the 1544 campaign brought further
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hazard to England, its economic consequences brought disaster. By one estimate the expedition cost some £800,000—three times what had originally been calculated and many times the annual income of the crown. Boulogne had been won at a cost of £600,000; to defend and supply it, during the first two years following its capture, cost another £400,000 and more.^ When the costs of the Scots wars are added to expenses in France the total amounts to well over two million pounds, a sum all but incalculable in an age when an ordinary subject of the king could get by on five pounds a year. And given the inefficiency of sixteenth-century warfare it was inevitable that much of this money should be wasted—on mercenaries who performed badly or not at all, on fortifications that at best stood intact for a few years, then had to be rebuilt, on paying grasping ingraters. Food spoilage was exceptionally costly; the Boulogne accounts for September, 1545, listed the sum of £11,191 for "waste and loss of victuals.''^
For a king forced to finance his government, as his feudal predecessors had done, from a fixed income to find such sums was impossible. Higher taxes were one answer, but an inadequate one; though the English paid much more in taxes during the 1540s than ever before, the gap between the king's debts and his income grew wider every year. "Benevolences"— money gifts made to the crown by wealthy subjects without expectation of repayment—brought in perhaps one quarter of the needed income, but they led to much grumbling. It was said that Henry had to leave the capital to "avoid hearing those who would complain that they are assessed too grievously."
Every possible expedient was attempted. Lands which came to the crown from the dissolving of the monasteries were sold off, raising revenues by some £90,000 a year, and the lead from their roofs was used as collateral for loans. Foreign borrowing, at interest rates as high as thirteen percent, brought in about another £100,000. Since the late 1520s Henry had been subsidizing the search for precious metal within England. A German expert was brought in to conduct mining operations in 1529, and in the 1540s English miners were licensed to seek out and work "mines of silver, gold and copper" throughout Cornwall.^
If precious metals could not be found, perhaps they could be created. In 1539 Henry licensed two alchemists, John Misselden and his son Robert, to transmute "unperfect metal"
into the "perfect metal" from which he could make coins. Having lived for many years abroad, Misselden claimed to have acquired the "craft or science of philosophy" called alchemy, through which he could replicate any ore the king desired. The two men set to work, keeping in mind Henry's command that they must not use "necromancy," but only "plain science of philosophy." Had they succeeded at their task the 1540s might have been a very different decade.'^
Short of bankruptcy, only one workable solution presented itself: debasement of the currency. The coining of money could be turned to profit in several ways. The price of gold could be raised, and the coins made smaller and lighter. (Wolsey had adopted both these measures in the 1520s.) Or the amount of base metal in each coin could be increased, with
the excess precious metal going into the royal treasury. It was this policy that Henry and his councilors adopted, first to a small extent in 1542 and, in 1544, on a massive scale. New mints were set up to increase the output of the new coins, and before long the expedient was working so well that Thomas Wriothesley, lord chancellor, was referring to the mint as "our holy anchor."
Total collapse of government finance was forestalled—but at immense cost to the people. As the coins were lowered in value, prices rose (though more slowly than the coins lost worth), until by 1547 they had gone up some twenty-five percent and were continuing to mount rapidly. The sudden and, to most people, inexplicable dislocations in their economic lives were unsettling. No one could foresee what lay ahead; perhaps the current fluctuations were only a foretaste of worse to come.
To rural laborers on the margin of subsistence, for whom coins were an incidental and occasional means of exchange, the fluctuations brought only indirect harm. Those with plots of earth ate what grew in them, and dressed in cloth made at home. Merchants, particularly cloth merchants, and the thousands dependent on them actually prospered for a time, for the falling value of English coins meant that English wool was in greater demand than ever in Flanders. But such short-run prosperity was more than undercut later on, while to even modest landowners dependent for their income on their rents the inflation was punishing.
Bad money made everyone insecure, and from the early 1540s on the pennies and groats and shillings looked less and less like good silver and more and more like the copper it was mixed with. When they first left the mint the coins were given a thin coat of silver, yet the disguise was ineffective. The silver wash wore away unevenly but unmistakably from the design stamped on the coins—King Henry's face—leaving his prominent nose a coppery red. **01d Copper-Nose" became at once a royal nickname and a byword for popular mistrust of the king and his money.
In Henry's later years the disaffection of his angry, unruly people reached new heights. For twenty years they had lived with the consequences of their ruler's desires and aspirations, suffering war when he sought a knightly challenge, enduring economic hardship when his coffers were empty, shifting their religious beliefs to answer to his theology. His taxation and his costly warmaking made them indignant; his treasured prize Boulogne they called ''the new Milan," referring to the city that caused such futile conflict between the emperor and the French king. His multiple marriages embarrassed them, while the uncertain health of his only male heir made them uneasy. His vengeful executions filled them with both fear and sorrow, and did much to numb the natural allegiance he called forth from them as king.
In tampering with their faith Henry had won particular opprobrium from his people. The ordinances, injunctions and oaths of allegiance he had imposed on them had attempted to uproot their traditional beliefs without substituting any firm, consistent doctrines in their place. Instead there had been a series of royal prescriptions for belief, each contradicting the one that came before. The most recent of these formulations, the "King's Book" of 1543 (A Necessary Doctrine and Erudition for Any
Christian Man), turned the faith still further in the direction of Catholic orthodoxy—a direction very evident in the Six Articles of 1539—though it stopped short of restoring the Catholic doctrines and practices Henry's most conservative advisers wanted. Outwardly Catholic, the King's Book contained Lutheran phraseology and left room for compromise on matters the Protestant reformers considered essential; like all pronouncements of the Henrician church, it was both eclectic and ambivalent.
In this it was a mirror of the king's own ill-assorted faith. Henry himself wrote the preface to the King's Book, and its contents grew out of discussions he held with his theologians. As usual, drafts of the document were covered with Henry's amendments and Archbishop Cranmer's annotations on them.^^ Any attempt to determine the nature of the king's faith from his actions in the 1540s comes up against contradictions. To judge from the King's Book, he was moving further and further away from reform, while retaining his Erasmian distaste for "superstition." The ascendancy of religious conservatives—chiefly Norfolk and Bishop Gardiner—in the Privy Council gave added evidence of this, as did the Act for the Advancement of True Religion, which restricted to upper-class men the reading of the English Bible. To the reformers Bible-reading was a cornerstone of true doctrine, necessary for all believers, yet to religious conservatives such as Norfolk it mattered little. "I have never read the Scripture, nor never will read it," he told an exchequer clerk in an argument over clerical marriage. "It was merry in England afore the New Learning came up; yea, I would all things were as hath been in times past."
Yet if in some respects Henry was Catholic and conservative, in other ways he seemed to side squarely with the Protestants. He sanctioned the use of Cranmer's English liturgy (though not his English communion service) in 1544, and in the following year a book of prayers in English was authorized by royal proclamation. He turned over the education of his son Edward to the reformers Richard Cox and John Cheke, thereby all but ensuring a Protestant inclination at court in the next reign. And, if Cranmer is to be believed, he even contemplated the radical step of abolishing the mass.
According to the archbishop, in 1546 Henry and Francis I negotiated an alliance whose terms called for nothing less than "within half a year to have changed the mass into a communion," and Francis agreed to deny the authority of the pope within his realm as well.^^ There were even plans to include the Catholic emperor in the scheme, though the negotiations never reached this stage. Nothing whatever came of these discussions, which were after all diplomatic, not theological. Probably they were no more in earnest than the hints of a reconciliation between Henry and the pope recorded at about the same time. In all, the evidence about the king's belief points in contradictory directions, and his subjects were understandably baffled about the nature of their own and England's faith.
A Warwickshire curate summed up the frustration his parishioners felt at the king's ever changing doctrine and the overly wordy official documents that proclaimed them. "By God's bones I have read this out to you a hundred thousand times," he cried out as he was reciting the Injunctions
of 1538 to the faithful, "and yet ye be never the better." The Injunctions were not only ineffectual in promoting virtue, they were needlessly enmeshed in verbiage. "By God's flesh," the priest swore, "here is a hundred words in these Injunctions where two would serve, for I know what it meaneth as well as they that made it." To ask learned churchmen to puzzle out the royal doctrinal formulas was one thing, but to expect ordinary men and women to be instructed by the same longwinded prescriptions was another. "A vengeance upon him that printed these Injunctions!" the angry curate concluded. "By God's bones there is never one in Westminster Hall that would read thus much for twenty nobles!" 13
Henry's subjects were conspicuously devoted to the outward forms of religion—to hearing daily mass, to saying their rosaries and Paternosters, to reciting the holy offices. Many were anticlerical, a tiny minority were completely alienated from religion. But the vast majority—including most of those who hated the clergy—were believers, though their belief consisted chiefly of memorized teachings and semi-mystical lore. They learned the fourteen art
icles of faith, the Ten Commandments, the two precepts of the gospel, the seven works of mercy, the seven deadly sins and the seven sacraments of grace. They envisioned God the way he was portrayed in the mystery plays—as a bearded cleric in a tiara, a white cope and gloves. They came to know the names and wonder-working virtues of dozens of saints, and they mastered the prayers and other time-honored formulas thought to trigger release of divine benefits.
When in the 1530s this pious scaffolding began to be dismantled these comfortable habits of belief were lost. To be sure, efforts at understanding the new formulas were made. One humanist preacher sent out from the court to familiarize the people with the king's doctrines told how, after his sermons, parishioners crowded around him "lamenting their long ignorance," and desiring him to repeat the arguments he had made.^^* Yet if some arrived at newfound certainty in the 1530s (as many who adopted the doctrines of the reformers did), others remained in confusion and uncertainty. The overriding verities which had once governed their lives were now in flux; even the religious conventions accompanying birth and death were being redefined. Now when they made their wills English men and women added to the number of masses to be said for their souls the cautious proviso "if the law will suffer it," hoping all the while that the law would not imperil their salvation.
An investigation of the religious practices of Archbishop Cranmer's Kentish parishioners in 1543 revealed an odd combination of traditional Catholicism, radical reform doctrines, superstition and occult lore. One vicar, nine years after the Act of Supremacy was made law, had yet to inform his flock that the king and not the pope was head of the English church. Another vicar neglected to read out from his pulpit the royal injunctions and proclamations, and allowed the people of his parish to continue in their old ways, ignorant of the changes decreed by the court. Protestantism had taken deep root in Kent, and many men and women influenced by reform teachings protested loudly against the old-fashioned ceremonies—creeping to the cross, showing special devotion to the
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