Young Henry: The Rise of Henry VIII

by Robert Hutchinson

  Henry was stricken at the loss of one of his closest friends. Wolsey, in London, informed Bishop Fox of the loss of the English warship:

  At the reverence of God, keep these tidings secret to yourself, for there is no living man knows the same here, but only the king and I … It is expedient for a while to keep the matter secret.

  To see how the king takes the matter and behaves himself, you would marvel … [at] his wise and constant manner. I have not, on my faith, seen the like.

  All this with heavy heart and sorrowful pen, I make an end.45

  Sir Edward Howard swore to avenge his brother-in-law, vowing to God ‘he would never look the king in the face until he had revenged the death of [this] noble and valiant knight’.46

  On 19 March 1513 Henry appointed him Lord High Admiral of England, Ireland and Aquitaine in succession to the Earl of Oxford (who had died nine days before) and paid him £66 for his services.

  Howard was anxious not only to fulfil his oath but to provide the king with a swift, much needed victory. Within eight days, he sailed for the waters around Brest, running into fifteen enemy ships on 12 April. They ‘fled like cowards’ towards the port, which Howard then blockaded with his fleet.

  French reinforcements – six shallow-draught, oared galleys – arrived in mid-April and put in at Conquet, fifteen miles (25 km) west of Brest, protected by powerful shore batteries. Anxious for action, an impatient Henry had penned an acerbic, taunting letter, commanding Howard ‘to accomplish that which appertained to his duty’.

  That caustic goad was the admiral’s undoing. He planned a reckless assault in the face of superior firepower on 25 April. Because he could not deploy his large warships in the shallows near the shore, Howard decided to attack that morning using fifteen rowing barges, and accordingly transferred his flag to the eighty-ton Swallow, leaving his fleet to maintain their blockade further out to sea.

  In the teeth of furious and deadly fire from guns and crossbows, Howard came about under the bows of the French flagship, hurled grappling irons over her sides and secured one of the ropes to Swallow’s capstan. He clambered aboard over the forecastle accompanied by sixteen of his men and threw himself into the melee on the decks of the French galley.

  Disaster followed him. Either a French sailor severed the rope holding the two ships together with a boarding axe, or it was somehow let slip.

  The Swallow drifted away on the tide, leaving the English commander marooned and grievously outnumbered on the enemy foredeck.

  As the fighting and clamour raged about him, Howard faced imminent death and the dishonour of a failed mission. He lifted his admiral’s gold whistle from around his neck and calmly threw it into the sea. Then he followed his badge of rank into the water – either by jumping, or falling in the press of hand-to-hand combat. Encumbered by his armour and probably wounded, he sank quickly beneath the waves.47

  Howard’s elder brother Thomas, Lord Howard, that veteran of the sorry debacle in north-west Spain, was appointed in his place as Lord High Admiral. Seeking to placate Henry’s fury at the loss of both admiral and a naval victory, he wrote to the king from the Mary Rose, now safely at home in Plymouth:

  As to the actual feats of all such noblemen and gentlemen as were pr[esent when] my brother, the admiral, was drowned (whom Jesu pardon), I assure your [highness so] far … as I can … anyway understand, they handled themselves as … men did to obtain their master’s pleasure.

  It was the most dangerous enterprise [I have] ever heard of and the most manly handled.48

  Howard promised to punish the two men ‘who did their part very ill the day my brother was lost … Cooke the queen’s servant in a row[ing] boat [he was captain of Swallow] and Freeman my brother’s household servant’.

  The fleet was filled with sick, wounded and despondent men, their morale shot clean away. They were deserting in shoals. The new admiral, faced with Henry’s insistent demands to return to the fray, admitted to Wolsey that he had never seen ‘men in greater fear than all the masters and mariners be of the [French] galleys, insomuch that in a manner they were as lief [not unwilling] go into Purgatory [rather than] the Trade’ – the English name for the sea approaches to Brest.49

  In Edinburgh, James IV made an only half-serious offer of a truce to Henry, taking the opportunity to taunt him over the loss of Sir Edward Howard. He told his brother-in-law: ‘We think more loss is to you of your late admiral who deceased to his great honour and laud than the advantage which might have been of the winning of all the French galleys and the equipment.’ Days later, he decided to send a fleet of ships to reinforce France’s naval might.50

  Henry had earlier tried to disrupt the ‘Auld Alliance’ between France and Scotland. He suggested, rather disingenuously, to his elder sister Margaret, wife of the Scottish king, that he would, after four years, hand over her legacy bequeathed by their father – but only in return for a promise that the Scots would not invade England while he was away campaigning. Margaret contemptuously dismissed this unbrotherly offer:

  We cannot believe that [is] of your mind or your command that we are so [unfriendly] dealt with in our father’s legacy … Our husband knows it is withheld for his sake and will recompense us. We lack nothing – our husband is ever the longer the better to us.

  The letter was signed: ‘Your loving sister Margaret.’51

  With the exception of Poynings’ small-scale expedition to the Low Countries, all Henry’s military adventures had ignominiously and very publicly failed. His dreams of battlefield glory had faded like spectres at dawn; his ambitions had turned to ashes.

  At least he had acquired one item of matchless international kudos. On 20 March 1512 his ally Pope Julius II had stripped Louis XII of both his sobriquet of ‘Most Christian King’ and also his realm of France, which were immediately conferred on Henry. He and his heirs were invested with the title of King of France, with only the small catch that this should endure ‘for as long as they shall remain in faith, devotion and obedience to the Holy Roman Church and Apostolic See’.52 Henry was delighted – ‘Most Christian King of England, France and Lord of Ireland’ carried a superior ring and his claim to his outstanding inheritance now had the backing of papal authority.

  He became even more resolute to secure his kingdom across the sea in more than just name. Although James IV had promised Ferdinand ‘to be faithful to England’ he attacked Berwick in September 1512 and English forces were sent northwards to deter further aggression. Katherine of Aragon told Cardinal Bainbridge that Henry ‘has said openly he does not believe the Pope and the king her father will ever desert him, but if they were to do so, he himself would not desist from war until the schismatic king was removed’.53

  Two months later Henry suggested to the Spanish ambassador that English troops should invade northern France while Ferdinand simultaneously assailed Aquitaine from across the Spanish border. Henry would again supply assistance to his father-in-law – but this time only by paying for 5,000 German mercenaries to serve alongside the Spanish troops. Diplomatic efforts were also intensified to persuade Maximilian to launch an offensive from his dominions in the north and east, including the staged payment of handsome subsidies in gold from Henry’s exchequer.54 Finally, Julius agreed to attack the French provinces of Provence and Dauphiné.55

  All southern England became a vast armoury, ringing with the sound of hammer upon anvil as the blacksmiths and other craftsmen worked frantically to fulfil a mountain of orders for military equipment. The price of war was prodigious: gunpowder cost up to four pence per pound (0.45 kg), shoulder-fired handguns nine shillings each and a large brass cannon £35. Twelve huge pieces of field artillery – nicknamed the ‘Twelve Apostles’ for the figures embossed on their barrels – were cast in Flanders. Each fired an iron ball weighing twenty pounds (9.1 kg) and consumed the same weight of gunpowder each time they were fired.

  Wolsey, the king’s energetic almoner and now de facto Chief Minister, was at the heart of this frenzied a
ctivity. In May, Bishop Fox, the sidelined Lord Privy Seal, wrote to him from Southampton, concerned at his ‘outrageous charge and labour’. He warned Wolsey of overwork, ‘else you shall have a cold stomach, little sleep, pale visage and a thin belly’.56

  Much of the warlike stores were purchased from foreign merchants – the almoner, for example, bought 2,000 light armours from Florence at sixteen shillings apiece for the infantry, which included visored helmets.57 In January 1513, 3,000 harnesses were ordered at the same price from the London mercer Robert Bolt, for delivery at the Tower by 30 April.58 Wolsey also authorised payment of £6 13s 4d ‘in reward to a joiner which hath made certain secret engines [of war] for the King’ – probably wooden catapults or slings like the medieval trebuchets, designed to batter the walls of fortified towns with stone missiles to create breaches through which the besiegers could attack.59

  Henry’s troops would go into battle wearing white tunics, proudly emblazoned with the red cross of St George, over their armour. Arrangements were made to purchase ‘at reasonable price wheat, malt or oats and other victuals’ to feed them and a proclamation banned export of grain, on pain of forfeiture to the crown, as well as unlicensed provisioning. As a means of economic warfare, the importation of Gascon wine into England was also prohibited that December.60

  The soldiers of Henry’s ‘army royal’ were again fortified by another papal indulgence from Julius, provided they serve for at least six months, but its coverage this time was extended to all those who provided cash to pay for the expedition or prayed for its success.61 Unfortunately the Pope died from a fever in February 1513 and Giovanni de Medici was proclaimed his successor as Leo X the following month.

  During those early months of 1513, fears of a French invasion of England were whipped up by Henry’s government to create an aura of national danger. It was propaganda, pure and simple. Officially inspired rumours whispered of abortive French landings at undisclosed locations. A Venetian in London reported: ‘Lately a number of French ships sailed to attempt a landing in England, which would have been difficult enough, but they were overtaken by a storm and all swamped.’62 Now a proclamation declared that the king, with ‘a tender zeal to the wealth, surety and defence of this, his realm of England and of his subjects …’, had learnt ‘that his ancient enemy the French king, continuing in his perverse and malicious purpose, has prepared and put in readiness a great and strong navy to invade and enter this … realm’. Therefore, every man aged ‘between sixty and sixteen [should] be ready in harness [armour] at one hour’s warning to resort to such places as shall be assigned by the King’s commissioners’.63

  By May, final preparations for the invasion were underway and the vanguard of the army had crossed to Calais. The Milanese ambassador in Rome commented that Henry was ‘so eager over the enterprise that no one can put it out of his head, unless it be God Almighty’.64

  This time there were to be no mistakes. Henry was to lead his army himself, leaving his queen at home with full powers as regent of England in his absence.

  He had one piece of business to transact before happily going off to war. Edmund de la Pole, Earl of Suffolk, had been safely shut up in the Tower of London since 1506 and now Henry had heard that his fugitive brother Richard had taken up arms with Louis XII. It is difficult to believe that the king thought Suffolk could get up to any mischief within the walls of that grim fortress. But the earl still represented a Yorkist threat, however dormant or suppressed. Better to be safe than sorry, so Henry had Suffolk quietly beheaded on 4 May.65

  It was the first but by no means the last time that he had the blood of his nobility on his hands.

  The king had assembled a mighty army more than 40,000 strong to fight the French. This was split into three divisions – the vanguard, the middle ward and the rearguard, the latter commanded by Henry himself. This contingent consisted of more than 9,000 men and included 1,000 archers mustered by the Spears (the royal bodyguard), six hundred of the king’s own guard, and five hundred cavalry and pikemen paid for and commanded by the Duke of Buckingham.66 Milanese diplomatic reports talked of this ‘most formidable army’ which Louis XII recognised could overwhelm his dispersed forces, so the French king decided only to ‘defend the towns and abandon the country’ near Calais.67

  Henry’s fleet transported the first two divisions across the Channel, but before he departed Dover, the king had one last military appointment to make. He feared that James IV of Scotland would attack England from the rear while he and his army were away in France. Therefore, he made Thomas Howard, Earl of Surrey, the aging veteran of many a border skirmish, General of the Northern Marches.

  He took Surrey’s hand and told him: ‘My lord, I trust not the Scots, therefore I pray you not be negligent.’ Surrey replied: ‘I shall do my duty and your grace shall find me diligent and to fulfil your will shall be my gladness.’68 The earl marched north at the end of July, gathering troops en route.

  Henry was delayed at Dover, waiting for a favourable wind to carry him and his men across to France. He wrote to the diplomat William Knight, recounting how 30,000 Englishmen were now besieging the fortified town of Thérouanne, in the Île-de-France, ten miles (16 km) south-west of St Omer, and urging him to press Ferdinand to proceed with his own invasion, ‘according to the treaty lately passed betwixt us and him’.69

  One of the king’s chaplains, John Taylor, stood on the walls of Calais at seven o’clock on the evening of Thursday 30 June 1513 to watch the twenty-two-year-old king’s ships arrive. It was a stirring sight with a veritable forest of ships’ masts, all flying brightly coloured banners and pennons, approaching from the north. The four-hundred-strong fleet made landfall a little to the west of the English-held town, which galvanised the French garrison of nearby Boulogne into a full alert, as they feared they were under attack. Their anxiety was understandable: the fleet was so large – ‘such as Neptune never saw before’ – and the gun salutes from the ships and the answering salvoes from the Calais ramparts were so loud ‘you would have thought the world was coming to an end’.70

  Henry came ashore wearing a decorated harness of light German armour beneath a white tunic of cloth of gold and a hat on which was pinned a ‘rich brooch’ bearing the image of St George. After hearing a Mass and a Te Deum sung in the town’s cruciform church of St Nicholas, the king walked in procession to the Staple, or Prince’s, Inn where he ate his supper and retired for the night.71

  No doubt he had been immediately briefed on the latest military situation. There had been some minor setbacks. At the siege of Thérouanne, the defenders’ cannon fire had ‘done great hurt’ in the surrounding English camp. One of the English commanders, Sir Edmund Carew,72 had been killed by a cannon shot and was buried in the Resurrection Chapel of St Nicholas Church four days before. The next day, 27 June, a food convoy of one hundred wagons heading for the besiegers’ camp had been ambushed and two hundred of the English escort killed. Taylor recorded in his diary that the French

  had carried off their dead, whose number could not be ascertained, [and] had stripped the bodies and so mutilated their faces that it was difficult to tell which were English or which French.73

  It was not long before Henry’s sleep was disturbed. At about eleven o’clock, the town’s bells rang out a warning of an attack. Three hundred French from the nearby fishing port of Wissant (called ‘Whitesands’ by the English) and Boulogne had infiltrated the English lines under cover of darkness. At low tide, they waded past Fort Risbank, built on a promontory just outside the harbour of Calais,74 intent on burning the army’s supply tents. Vigilant sentries had spotted them and they were driven off by archers at the harbour, watched approvingly by Henry from his vantage point on the walls of the town.75 After waiting all his short life, this was his first exhilarating taste of military action.

  Swift revenge was exacted. On 4 July, Wissant ‘was almost entirely destroyed by fire’ after its inhabitants plundered an English transport ship wrecked nearby and sent it
s crew as prisoners to Boulogne.

  Henry tarried in Calais for three weeks with about a third of his army. Some complained this delay was symptomatic of an inexperienced general; it was the height of summer and a waste of the campaigning season. Moreover, his forces were divided and thus more vulnerable to French attack.76 Henry, however, had to meet visiting Imperial ambassadors and in his vanity could not resist treating them to a spectacle of his skill at arms. John Taylor, his chaplain, described enthusiastically how the king was ‘practising archery in a garden with the archers of his guard. He cleft the mark in the middle and surpassed them all, as he surpasses them in stature and personal graces.’77

  The king’s ordinances governing the conduct of his army in the field were published in Calais market so that ‘no manner of person should pretend ignorance of them’. They demanded absolute obedience to him and his commanders on ‘pain of hanging, drawing and quartering’. The same penalty would be imposed on any soldier who ‘irreverently’ touched the consecrated Host in a church and those who ‘enforced [raped] any woman, religious or other’ would be hanged. This was a holy war, after all. Gambling was banned, as was the keeping of bordellos, and those who quarrelled or ‘reproach[ed]’ comrades because of their country of origin (‘be he French, English, Northern, Welsh or Irish or of any other country’) risked imprisonment.78