1000 Years of Annoying the French

by Stephen Clarke

  Despite all their claims of total victory in the Hundred Years War, the occupation of Calais enraged the French, and not just because the English insisted on misspelling its name as ‘Caleys’, ‘Calleys’, or even ‘Kales’.

  In 1394, during a lull in the Hundred Years War, a French poet called Eustache Deschamps published a ballad lambasting King Charles VI for being at peace with England, ending every verse with the lament, ‘You will never have peace/Until they give back Calais.’ (It was very convenient for him that in French paix and Calais rhyme with anglais.)

  The English weren’t going to let France get away with a unilateral attack of poetry, and had their own rhyme carved over the town gates, in French so that enemy spies were sure to understand: ‘Never shall the Frenchmen Calais win/Until iron and lead like cork shall swim.’

  It is a rhyme that seems to pre-empt Shakespeare, whose Weird Sisters tell Macbeth that he will be King until Great Birnam Wood climbs Dunsinane Hill to attack him. Macbeth, of course, feels safe because trees can’t walk – until he is attacked by soldiers who have camouflaged themselves with branches cut from the forest. In the same way, residents of Calais would have to hope that they weren’t tempting fate.

  Pretty well every French king tried his own method of reconquering the town: Charles V unleashed constant quickfire attacks on the fortifications; Louis XI captured outlying towns and chipped away at the area controlled by the English; and Louis XII married an English princess in the hope that she’d put in a good word for him in London, a tactic that proved fatal – Louis was fifty-two, Mary was Henry VIII’s eighteen-year-old sister, and a teenage English girl was just too energetic for an ageing Frenchman. Louis died in bed, having, it was said, ‘exceeded his strength’.

  But none of these attempts had any lasting effect, because the English were too determined to cling on to their tiny colony. They didn’t even think of it as a colony – it was regarded as an integral part of England. Calais was represented in Parliament, and was home at one time or another to some very famous people. Geoffrey Chaucer worked there as a royal messenger in the 1360s. Dick Whittington of pantomime fame was simultaneously mayor of Calais and London in 1407. Kings Henry VII and VIII used to nip over to eat, drink and be merry. And for high-society girls like Anne Boleyn, it was the exotic getaway spot (the Caribbean had not yet been opened up for tourism).

  Highly valuable staplers

  Edward III made it clear right from the start that the English occupation was meant to be a long one – his instructions to his men after the siege of 1346–7 were to take possession of the town, imprison all the knights there, and send away any locals who might come along looking for work or trade, ‘for I wolle [will] repeople agayne the towne with pure Englysshemen’. Ethnic cleansing, some might say, but in fact Edward was just showing what a scholar he was, because this was the Ancient Greeks’ favourite model of colonization.

  He imported a governing class of 300 burgesses (upper- and middle-class merchants, mainly), and gave them either a house or permission to build themselves one. And soon a large English garrison was patrolling the most impregnable fortifications that (plundered French) money could buy. The town itself was protected by high walls, with a deep moat that was in some places 50 metres wide. Within this fortified citadel of some 2,000 buildings and 12,000 people stood a castle, surrounded by a deep ditch and armed with cannons that commanded a field of fire over the surrounding countryside and down into the town itself – if your house was captured by invading Frenchmen, your china ornaments would stand little chance of surviving.

  The sea entrance to the harbour was guarded by a notorious fortress called the Rysbank, which bristled with cannons and made it impossible for undesirable ships to get anywhere near the town. Only in herring season (the end of September to the end of November) were foreign boats allowed in the harbour in any numbers.

  Sluice gates were built so that the outlying marshes could be completely flooded with seawater in case of attack, though this line of defence could not always be depended upon – in 1530, for example, it was discovered that the English mayor of Calais had drained a vast area of marsh for his personal use as farmland, and he had to be forced by a Royal Commission to flood it again.

  But why all the fuss and expense? Surely it wasn’t just to infuriate France by hanging on to one last small chunk of their territory?

  Well, yes it was, but there were also much more pragmatic reasons for doing so.

  The first was financial. Calais was set up as a trading post, a self-financing marketplace for English wool. From 1359 to 1558, the town had a monopoly on exports of English wool, which was by far Europe’s most important raw material for clothing (cotton being rather exotic and Lycra a few centuries away from being invented). It was almost as if Italy had seized Saint-Tropez, peopled it with Neapolitans and declared that this was the only place Europe could buy spaghetti.*

  Calais’s merchants – known as ‘staplers’, because they belonged to the so-called Company of the Staple at Calais – had not only the continental buyers but also the English sellers by the throat, to put it politely, and took full advantage of the opportunity to put the squeeze on them. For example, according to a ruling of 1473, bundles of wool packed in England did not have to be unpacked in Calais before being sold on. Consequently, unsuspecting foreign buyers often found themselves to be the proud owners of large rocks and sandbags that had been sneaked in with the wool to make up weight. The victims of fraud had three months to make a compensation claim, after which any complaint was invalid. And who was in charge of the claims court at Calais? A stapler, of course.

  The merchants were required to give a cut of their profits to the central government in London, and at the height of the town’s success in the fifteenth century it was providing a third of government revenue. The occupation was all the more profitable for England as a nation because, in return for their monopoly, the merchants were expected to pay for the garrison and the upkeep of the fortifications. In peacetime there was a permanent force of around 500 men, in wartime 1,000.

  The staplers also had to make sure that a set of very specific rules for guarding the town were obeyed. There were four main gates, all of which were closed at noon, when the whole town seems to have taken a break for lunch. They reopened around one, and then closed for the night at 4 p.m., with a changing-of-the-guard-type ceremony that included a Mass to celebrate God’s kindness in continuing to let England annoy the French in this way.

  At night, one set of soldiers, the ‘scout watch’, patrolled outside the ramparts, while a second, the ‘stand watch’, guarded the town walls, and a third group, the ‘search watch’, guarded the guards. Any man found sleeping† at his post three times was suspended in a basket over the moat and given bread, water and a knife. When he got hungry and thirsty, his only choice was to cut the rope holding the basket, and hope that the other guards would fish him out of the moat before he drowned. If he survived, he was banished from the town for a year and a day. Any soldier who revealed the password to a civilian, or who started a fight while on guard duty, was executed. Yes, protecting Calais from surprise attack was taken very seriously indeed.

  The bling-bling king

  Royal visits to Calais were a great highlight, and they were frequent, because they made it clear to friends and enemies alike that this was English soil.

  In June 1500, Henry VII threw an immense party in Calais for an anti-French friend, Duke Philip IV ‘the Handsome’ of Burgundy. It was held in a church that was requisitioned for some highly unreligious goings-on. The holy building was divided into seven areas, including a bedroom for the Duke, which was strewn (according to a contemporary chronicler called Richard Turpyn) with ‘roses, lavender and other sweet herbs’, and a ‘secret chamber’ for the Queen. The belfry was used as a pantry, and Turpyn gives a mouth-watering account of the refreshments: wine, beer, venison pie, ‘the greatest number of lambs I ever saw’, an English ox, strawberries, cream and ‘seven horselo
ads of cherries’.

  Turpyn notes that the King’s guests were resplendent in ‘clothe of golde’, with a special mention for the Duke of Buckingham, whose gown was decorated with little golden bells. And halfway down the guest list was a certain ‘tresorier of France’, no doubt invited so that word of the fantastic opulence, and the relaxed way it was enjoyed, could be taken back to Paris.

  Twenty years later, Henry VII’s son Henry VIII went one better, and actually invited a French king, François I, to Calais to see for himself how cosy it was. The so-called Field of the Cloth of Gold was ostensibly a friendly meeting in the summer of 1520 between the two monarchs to seal a non-aggression pact that they had signed two years earlier. Everything was carefully arranged so that they would be seen as equals – they were to bring a similar number of soldiers and courtiers, and the valley where they met was even resculpted so that their two camps would be on the same level. Neutral ground was chosen for the gathering, just outside English-held territory. However, one glaring inequality could not be ignored: all this was happening on the French side of the Channel, which meant that the French King was a guest in his own home.

  François I seems to have decided that there was no point making a scene about this, and joined wholeheartedly in the fun. And fun there certainly was, because both sides went to unbelievable extremes to impress the other. We think we live in an age of bling-bling today, but our chrome-rimmed car wheels, chunky watches and glittery mobile phones would not even have registered on the blingometer in that summer of 1520.

  We know all the details of Henry’s preparations from Richard Turpyn’s chronicle; he tells us that the King imported 300 masons, 500 carpenters and 100 joiners, as well as painters, glaziers, blacksmiths and tailors to make a gigantic, 10-metre-tall marquee that was painted to look like a palace. A jousting stadium was built, with a gallery to seat all the noble spectators. Some 2,800 smaller tents were set up around the main palace, most of them made of silk interwoven with gold thread – a shimmering sight that gave the gathering its name.

  Henry brought his queen (it was still wife number one, Catherine of Aragon) and several dozen of her aristocratic girlfriends, as well as Cardinal Wolsey (the King’s right-hand man), two archbishops, a hundred or so knights with wonderful Harry Potter-style names like Sir Griffen Aprise and Sir Edward Bellknappe, ‘minstrels of all manner’, twenty-four trumpeters, and a few thousand ordinary soldiers – all of them, in the French King’s eyes, trespassers on his land.

  Henry was clearly worried about fitting everyone in, because strict rules were laid out governing the number of servants and horses that could be brought along: an archbishop could have 50 servants and 20 horses, a duke the same, whereas an earl could only bring 30 and 10 respectively. The total number of English guests (not including the soldiers) was 4,334 people and 1,637 horses.

  François I set up a similar camp on his side of the valley, and even managed to impress the over-the-top English. As Shakespeare notes in his play Henry VIII, the French were ‘all clinquant, all in gold, like heathen gods’.

  The two kings arranged a solemn meeting, at which it was agreed that each would ride down alone through his host of courtiers, who had been ordered on pain of death to remain totally silent. At the bottom of the valley, at a carefully calculated central point, the two monarchs embraced – still on horseback – and then dismounted and embraced again, with a great show of friendship and mutual respect.

  They were both young, active men – Henry was not yet thirty, a tall, fit redhead, François a well-built Latin lover – and had come to prove their manhood. There was jousting, with both kings breaking plenty of lances (the yardstick by which a knight’s prowess was judged). During one bout, François suffered a broken nose at the hands of the Earl of Devonshire.

  The rivalry between the two men was amicable but intense. To prevent diplomatic mishaps, neither king jousted against the other, and a story that Henry was disgruntled because he lost a wrestling match against François is usually discredited as a French fabrication. But they competed in other ways. Henry had had staggeringly expensive suits of armour prepared for the occasion – on one day he turned up for the jousting in a suit encrusted with 2,000 ounces of gold and over 1,000 pearls. François, meanwhile, played at the alpha male. At the first ball, he impressed everyone by going around the whole dance tent kissing all the ladies present, ‘except,’ one commentator noted, ‘four or five who were too old and ugly’. He proved himself a keen and elegant dancer, despite the fact that he apparently had bandy legs and flat feet.

  The games, dancing and feasting went on for two whole weeks, with each side inviting the other to increasingly lavish receptions. Henry’s camp consumed some 2,200 sheep, it is recorded, plus an equivalent amount of ‘other viands’, while a fountain kept up a permanent stream of red wine. These days, the newspapers are up in arms if a prince gets a free ticket to a nightclub party, but in 1520 no one dared criticize royal extravagance, especially when it was designed to dazzle the French.

  And it did more than just dazzle. Henry had to reach deep into his coffers to pay for the party, but François was forced to borrow to pay for his half of the bill. In short, by inviting François to the Field of the Cloth of Gold, Henry was daring the French King to live way beyond his means. And every penny spent on partying was one less penny available to pay an army to retake Calais. It was bling with a sting.

  Camping proves expensive for the French

  Not that the chance to party French kings into bankruptcy was the most important reason for keeping Calais. As well as a trading post, it was a vital stopping-off point for invading troops. The Hundred Years War was over, but this did not prevent English armies nipping over to do a bit of unofficial peacetime raiding. And possessing Calais made it ridiculously easy. Invading English forces did not have to worry about making a risky beach landing. They sailed into the protected harbour of Calais, and as soon as enough troops had been amassed there, they simply marched out of the town gates into France.

  Richard Turpyn describes some almost casual raiding by Henry VII in 1492. The King landed at Calais on 2 October, waited seventeen days while his fleet shipped over men and supplies, and then calmly went to besiege the nearby French town of Boulogne, completely unopposed.

  Hearing about the siege, the French sent an ambassador to sue for peace, ‘whiche’, Turypn says, ‘the kynge of England graunted upon a condition that the Frenche kynge shud paye every yere lii thowsand [52,000] crownes to the kynge of England during bothe theyr lyves’. The French agreed, Henry VII marched back to Calais and ‘toke his shipe and sayled to Dovar’. Never has a month’s camping holiday in France been so profitable.

  Henry VIII did pretty much exactly the same in 1513, personally leading an army of 30,000 men to grab the important French textile town of Tournai,* which he then sold back to France for a small fortune.

  It was a bubble that couldn’t last, however. As raw wool became less important than woven cloth, Calais’s merchants began to make less money. They couldn’t skimp on paying the garrison for fear that the soldiers would mutiny, but they became markedly less scrupulous about the upkeep of the town’s battlements, which started to look the worse for wear.

  When Henry VIII’s daughter Mary came to the throne in 1553, she provoked religious conflict which divided the citizens of Calais. The new French King, the swashbuckling Henri II, saw his opportunity and began to mount regular attacks …

  Comic failure to send relief

  When the inevitable fall came, it was completely farcical.

  In the dying days of 1557, Queen Mary’s government in London received word that the area around Calais was swarming with French troops, and Mary decided to raise an army to send across the Channel. Word was sent out for the ‘levies’ (reserve troops) to report for duty. However, no one told them to bring their own weapons, and most of them arrived unarmed. They were sent home to get their ironmongery, and when they returned, it was found that the fleet was too
unseaworthy to transport them.

  On 2 January 1558 the French attacked Calais. The logical thing to do was open the sluice gates and flood the marshes. However, the town’s deputy (the head stapler acting as governor) hesitated – as he later explained in a letter of apology to Queen Mary – because this would have meant ‘infesting the water wherewith we brew’ with salt water. Better to lose control of the town than spoil the beer.

  In the end, parts of the marshland were flooded, but the water was shallow and froze over, allowing the French to march across and attack the town walls. The prophecy carved over the town gate was coming true: iron guns and lead cannonballs were ‘swimming’ – on ice. The French began to fire on the town with seventy cannons, a bombardment that lasted for two days and nights.

  Meanwhile, Mary had finally gathered enough decent ships to transport her (now armed) troops across the Channel to Calais, but a storm blew up, scattering and partially destroying this new fleet, and the soldiers were sent home again.

  In any case, by now it was too late. On 7 January, Calais fell, and the evacuating English garrison failed to blow up the castle before they left because the fuse on their gunpowder was damp. All that remained in English hands was an outpost just inland, at Guînes, where a courageous knight called Lord Grey was holding out and refusing to surrender. In the end, though, fearing they would be killed if they resisted, his soldiers surrendered for him. They let the French in, and were rewarded by being sent home to England alive.

  With this debacle, English rule in the Calais area was simply snuffed out, and the nation slipped into mass depression at the loss of what some had called ‘the jewel of the realm’ (for its value, of course, not its beauty). Queen Mary proved she could empathize with the national mood of mourning by making her famously gruesome declaration that ‘When I am dead and opened, you shall find “Philip” [her husband] and “Calais” engraved on my heart.’ Perhaps it was this very early attempt at keyhole heart tattooing that killed her at the age of forty-two, only eleven months later.