The French king asked him in a loud voice by whom he had been sent and why. By the queen his mistress, Flower answered, and presented his commission. When it had been read aloud, Henri spoke again.
“Herald, I see that you have come to declare war on me on behalf of the queen of England. I accept the declaration, but I wish everyone to know that I have always observed toward her the good faith and amity which obtained between us.” “Now that she picks so unjust a quarrel with me,” he went on, “I hope that God will be pleased to grant me this grace, that she shall gain no more by it than her predecessors did when they attacked mine, or when they recently attacked me.”
Henri wanted there to be no mistake about the real instigator of war between England and France. “I trust that God will show his might and justice toward him who is the cause of all the evil that lies at the root of this war,” he added, making it clear that his magnanimous reception of the English herald was an acknowledgment of Mary’s subordinate role in the Hapsburg quarrel.
“I act thus because the queen is a woman,” he said irritably, “for if she were not I would employ other terms. But you will depart and leave my kingdom as quickly as you can.”
The herald rode back the way he had come, wearing around his neck a gold chain worth two hundred crowns—a present from the French king. He was instructed to “bear witness,” once he was back in England, “to the king’s virtue and generosity,” but in fact he took back intelligence about the military preparations of the enemy. The French, he told Mary and Philip once he returned, were lethargic and unfit for battle. From what he could see as he rode through the fields he judged the harvest to be scanty, especially near the border of the English pale where the troops would be massing. Overall the advantage lay with the king and queen’s forces, the herald said, and his good news spurred the English captains to fresh activity. Philip, his strategy taking shape just as he had planned, set off for Flanders with “great hope of victory.”
XLVIII
My paynes who can expres,
Alas they are so stronge;
My dolor will not suffer strength
My lyfe for to prolonge.
Philip did not go into battle right away. After landing at Calais he made his way to Brussels, where he informed himself of the status of his forces in Italy and on the Flemish border. At Gualtiero some imperial soldiers who were “wasting their time in ravishing some women” were cut to pieces by the outraged townspeople of Borscello, but to the south of Rome Alva had won a victory over the papal forces at La Paliario, and the Italian campaign of the duke de Guise ended in futility. In the north Philip’s commander the duke of Savoy was besieging St. Quentin. Toward the end of July Philip left Brussels for the border regions, along with Pembroke and his English fighting men. By the time the king and his English allies reached St. Quentin, however, most of the fighting was over. Savoy had taken the castle on August 10, overcoming a sizable relief force under the command of Montmorency, Constable of France. Thousands of footsoldiers and dozens of the most distinguished nobles of France, including the Constable himself, were taken prisoner. In two weeks the town itself was taken. Philip had won a major victory.
Mary pronounced the taking of St. Quentin “miraculous,” and was said to be especially pleased that the siege was accomplished with so little loss of life. (She was not told that, once the official military surrender had been negotiated, the Swiss mercenaries in the imperial army burned the town to the ground and many of the residents with it.) This initial success was followed up by the seizure of Ham and Catelet, and in Italy, Alva and the pope came to terms at the end of September. As far asPhilip was concerned, the war was over, at least for the time being, and he ordered most of his troops to disband.
But Henri II was not satisfied. He was still at war with Mary, and he saw in the aftermath of the Hapsburg successes the ideal moment to launch a surprise assault on Calais. Recovery of Calais had always been the secret longing of the French king. With its outlying fortresses of Guines and Ham it was the last remnant of the Plantagenet empire on the continent. Throughout the centuries that Calais had been in English hands it had always been seen as impregnable. The high, turreted outer walls were double, and each wall was many feet thick. The siege engines of medieval warfare could not have breached them, even if an opposing army could have gotten into position for an assault. But this was virtually impossible, as the bulk of the town and surrounding walls arced out into the sea and the low-lying marshes at its back could be flooded by locks which formed part of the defense network. A land assault was clearly impractical, but the French believed the fortress might be taken by warships whose cannon could bombard it from the sea. The entrance into the harbor proper was guarded by the small fort of Risbank, situated on a slip of land at its outer edge. If the French could seize Risbank, their ships could sail practically up to the walls of Calais and, if the reports of their engineers proved true, breach them with their artillery.
Calais’ vulnerability had been a matter of concern to Mary and her Council for some months. In May an extensive building program had been designed for the fortress, calling for new walls, including traverse walls “to stay the water,” three additional bulwarks and a new gate. Two new sluices were to be dug, and ditches sunk around the perimeter of the walls.1 Later in the summer, after Philip left, Mary requested the Deputy and Treasurer of Calais to send her a statement of the number of paid soldiers in the garrison, and corresponded with the commander, the earl of Pembroke, about the state of the defenses. Both Pembroke and his second in command, Wentworth, urged Mary to send five hundred more men to the region; it was never done, and the plans to strengthen the fortifications seem to have been laid aside, probably for lack of money to implement them.
Thus in December of 1557, as the French prepared to attack, Calais and its surrounding fortresses were ill equipped and undermanned. Calais itself had only half the number of men needed to defend its venerable ramparts, and Risbank was not only inadequately guarded but its food supplies were gone and its shore side so weak that an enemy could reportedly “come in a night to it.” The winter weather too was on the side of the attackers, for the marshes of the Pale froze over and made the way easier for the approaching army of the duke de Guise as it took the first of the outworks upriver from Calais on New Years’ Day.
The following day Guise’s men began a bombardment of Risbank. The fortress was abandoned almost at once, the captain “jumping out of it through a breach the French had made” and putting himself at the mercy of the enemy.2 At this point Wentworth—who was in command now that Pembroke was assisting Philip—should have summoned help from the nearest source, Philip’s diminished army. But for a variety of reasons he did nothing more than request a few hundred men from Philip, trusting in some “artificial fire, which an engineer had asserted he would be able to use to great effect,” to make up for the depleted ranks of his soldiers. He relied too on the country people who streamed into the town to escape the French. The men were little help, “absenting themselves in houses and secret places,” but the women labored diligently, reinforcing the walls and digging defense works. In all likelihood Wentworth mistrusted Philip almost as much as he did the French, for in his letters to Mary he asked for massive aid and left no doubt of the desperate situation of the town.
Mary responded as quickly as she could, sending dozens of letters to the landowners of the southeastern counties ordering them to put their servants and tenants in arms and dispatch them to Dover. The admiral was instructed to ready his fastest ships to be sent to Calais, and the Warden of the Cinque Ports was commanded to provide mariners. If need be, Mary wrote to him, he could open any letters intended for the royal court that arrived from the besieged town or the war zone—“except the king’s letters”—and adjust his preparations accordingly.8 The Council too bestirred itself and considered the tactics of relieving Calais, finally hitting on a plan for communicating with the besieged garrison by means of letters shot over the walls wit
h crossbows, sent in duplicate in case some were to “light on the tops of houses or other places where they may not be come by.”
As these hurried efforts were being made in England Guise’s ships were launching their first attack on Calais itself. The bombardment was under way before the captains realized that they had mistimed their assault. At high tide the ships in the harbor were dead even with the outer walls, but the attack began at low tide, when the cannon shot hit harmlessly five or six feet below them. At the same time Wentworth and his men were able to shoot down onto the decks of the French ships, and after a short time the attack was broken off. It was renewed two days later, however, and this time the tide was judged accurately. Within hours the French cannon opened a wide breach in the walls. The last line of defense for the English, the “artificial fire,” failed to ignite—the engineer claimed that the French soldiers wet the powder with their dripping clothes as they entered the town. The fall of Calais was soon followed by the French capture of Guines and Ham, both of which were razed, andwith their surrender the last foothold of the English on the continent was lost.
“We have felt great pain and anxiety on account of the fall of Calais,” Philip wrote to the English Council ten days after news of the surrender reached the court, “greater indeed than we can express in words.” Philip was heartened, though, to hear from Pole that Mary responded to the crisis by redoubling her efforts to send men and supplies across the Channel for an English counterattack. She put much of the blame for the loss on the unfortunate Wentworth, whose loyalty was much in doubt—he was officially charged with selling Calais to the French—and whose stupidity in failing to open the locks and flood the marshy hinterland at a crucial point in the siege had allowed the attackers clear access to the town. She accused Wentworth of “cowardice and want of spirit,” to give way so easily when he stood within the walls of such an impregnable fortress; she reproached him with “standing in fear of his own shadow.”4 She was encouraged by Lord Grey’s stalwart defense of Guines, however, and when he wrote her from the cell where the French kept him prisoner, in the top of a high tower in Suzain Castle, locked in with four locks and guarded by four archers day and night, she wrote back at some length. Grey had served her as well as Wentworth had served her ill, she said, and “exhorted him to be of good cheer.” Mary’s encouraging words had the effect of making Grey’s plight worse, for as soon as his captors heard her herald read out her message, they promptly raised his ransom by ten thousand crowns.5
On the same day that Philip wrote to the Council expressing his grief over the loss of Calais he wrote to Pole to declare his joy over the news of the queen’s pregnancy. Sometime in the fall of 1557 Mary had begun to believe, despite the odds against it, that she was expecting Philip’s child. Because of the ridicule the announcement was certain to produce—and also because she wanted to be very certain in her own mind—Mary waited until December to inform her husband. Then, having “very sure signs” that this time there was no mistake, she let it be known that she expected to be delivered in March. The news, Philip told Pole, “went far to lighten the sorrow he had felt for the loss of Calais,” and was “the one thing in the world he had most desired.”6
For Mary the impending birth seems to have had overtones of finality. In March she made her will. “Foreseeing the great danger which by God’s ordinance remain to all women in their travail of children,” she wrote, she thought it good, “both for discharge of my conscience and continuance of good order within my realms and dominions,” to declare her last will and testament. Mary’s bequests reflected the people and things she valued most in life. First among these was the unborn child, the “heir, issue and fruit of her body” to whom she left her crown and allother “honors, castles, fortresses, manors, lands, tenements, prerogatives and hereditaments.” Next was her lord, her “most dear and entirely beloved husband,” to whom she bequeathed her “chiefest jewel,” the love of her subjects, “to require the nobility of his heart” toward her. She also left Philip two enormous table diamonds, one her gift from Charles V and the other her wedding present from Philip himself, and with them the gold collar set with nine diamonds which Philip had given her on the Epiphany after their marriage and a very recent present from him, a ruby set in a gold ring. Monks and nuns were prominent on her list of bequests—the Carthusians of Sheen, the Observants of Greenwich and Southampton, the Benedictines of St. Bartholomew, the Brigittines of Sion and the “poor nuns of Langley.” To Cardinal Pole she left a thousand pounds to serve as one of her executors, and charged him with continuing his work of rehabilitating the English church and taking care of the additional crown lands she ordered her executors to restore to the churchmen from whom her father and brother had taken them.
Katherine of Aragon was much honored in Mary’s will. Besides the many masses to be said for her soul by the religious Mary supported, the royal executors were directed to exhume Katherine’s body from its undistinguished resting place at Peterborough and bury it next to her daughter’s. And, Mary added, she wanted “honorable tombs or monuments” made for them both, “for decent memory of us.” About her father Mary was eloquent by her silence. The Protestants claimed later that Mary and Pole had secretly ordered Henry VIII’s remains dug up and burned—a story too well documented to dismiss out of hand—but whether they did or not the late king was mentioned only briefly and impersonally in Mary’s testament. Presumably he was to be included among the “other progenitors” besides Katherine whose souls were to be commemorated in prayer, but his name appeared only in connection with the debts remaining unpaid from his reign: Mary ordered them discharged.
To her household, as always, Mary was very generous. Immediately after her death two thousand pounds was to be distributed among her “poor servants that be ordinary,” with special regard to those who had most need and had served her longest. Some thirty-four hundred pounds in personal benefactions were itemized, and the principal household officials were given two hundred pounds each. The queen meant to be generous, too, to many others of her subjects whom she would never see: the poor prisoners and the poor of London among whom a thousand pounds was to be distributed; the poor scholars of “Oxinford and Cambridge” who were to receive five hundred pounds; the sick in the hospital of the Savoy and all the royal creditors. If after her death there were to be found anyone she had “injured or done wrong”—“as to my remembrance willingly I have not,” she added—they were to be paid or compensated for the injury. And finally, Mary ordered a new charitable institution to be established in her name, a hospital for soldiers. “Forasmuch as presently there is no house or hospital specially ordained and provided for the relief and help of poor and old soldiers,” she wrote, “and namely of such as have been or shall be hurt or maimed in the wars and service of this realm, the which we think both honor, conscience and charity willeth should be provided for.” Mary was thinking not only of the wounded from the Calais garrison and the few who escaped the butchery of Guines, but of the aging men who had fought for her against Wyatt, and of those now mustering at Dover to join her husband in the spring campaign.
It may have been at Philip’s suggestion that Mary made her will. He was keeping a close watch on events in England in the early months of 1558 through his envoy the count of Feria. Feria arrived late in January, ostensibly to congratulate Mary on her pregnancy but more urgently to do all he could to persuade the queen and her Council to continue sending arms and money to the Hapsburg cause. The war, not the queen’s dubious pregnancy, was the important thing, especially since in Feria’s view Mary was only “making herself believe that she is with child, although she does not own up to it.”7 It was evident, though, that if Mary was not pregnant her swollen belly and amenorrhea, combined with her general ill health, were ominous signs. All things considered, Philip thought it prudent that she make her will.
In his letters to the king at Brussels Feria described the English court as a scene of confusion and bickering, with Mary imposing inte
rmittent order on her quarrelsome councilors, The Council meetings were a chaos of personal insults and accusations. There were no clear factions any more, only disgruntled men embittered by the loss of Calais and disheartened by the lack of strong leadership. Paget, Arundel, Pembroke and the others who had once been most sympathetic to imperial interests—and who had been receiving handsome pensions from Philip until his recent bankruptcy—were now the most vocal in their opposition to Philip’s pressure. “They do nothing but raise difficulties, whatever one proposes, and never find any remedy,” Feria complained to his master. Mary did her best to restrain them long enough to get the work of government done, and the count commended her “spirit and good will,” but by March the unceasing conflicts had become so impossible that she had to send a number of the Council members out to the shires to get rid of them while she tried to govern with the rest. By then Feria had lost all patience. “I am at my wits’ end with these people here,” he wrote, “as God shall be my witness, and I do not know what to do. Your Majesty must realise that from night to morning and morning to night they change everything they have decided, and it is impossible to make themsee what a state they are in, although it is the worst any country has ever fallen into.”8
The most acute problem was the financial extremity of the government. Late in February the situation became so desperate that Mary ordered all those charged with financial affairs to meet daily, and to report to Feria and Pole as soon as they could. Mary’s finances had always been precarious. She inherited from her father and brother a depressed economy, plagued by alarming fluctuations in wages and prices, plunging employment levels and the visible miseries of ruined villages and vagabonds lining the high roads. The bad harvests of 1555 and 1556 had sharpened these hardships, and while local justices of the peace were given broad powers to intervene to prevent hoarding and ensure that the available food was distributed as equitably as possible, the numbers of beggars grew every year and the weekly collection of alms in each parish was not adequate to feed all those who were without bread. At court too expenditures exceeded income by more and more each year, and the loans taken by Mary’s agents in Antwerp were left unpaid, their payment deadlines prolonged for months or years. As early as 1555 Mason had prayed that God would “put some good man in mind, whom the queen can be content to believe, to advise her to take the measure of her realm and to proportionate her receipts and expenses together.” But no such man appeared, although Gresham consistently did Mary good service in the money markets of Flanders.9 By the time Mason wrote Mary was considering recalling most of her ambassadors at foreign courts to save their cost, and ill-disposed foreigners at her court were remarking that her poverty was obvious even from the food on her table.
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