Henry VIII's Last Victim (42 page)

The chronicle of Elis Gruffydd confirms Surrey’s view of his footmen. ‘Lack of food’ and ‘lack of money’ had made them ‘miserable and reckless’. Indeed Gruffydd went much further than Surrey in his criticism: ‘Among them were many obstinate men who did not want to fight and were very sluggish in advancing to meet the enemy.’ But for Gruffydd these ‘ignorant, cowardly soldiers’ were ultimately not to blame. Their behaviour was merely a symptom of a failure of command. According to Gruffydd, the fault lay squarely with the Earl of Surrey:

When the time came, he called the soldiers suddenly, without warning, and without giving any reason, which could have raised their hearts, which had fallen from sadness and pity at their great poverty.

[Surrey] wanted nothing better than to turn on them [the French] and fight, but not like a saintly godly soldier, who would put his trust and hope in God and look to victory more from the intervention of God than from the strength of brutish men, as testified by John and Judas Maccabaeus and many other devout soldiers as recorded in the Holy Scriptures. No, the Earl paid no heed either to the hand of God and his favours, nor to the unwillingness and lassitude of his soldiers, but in the pride of his folly.

Most sensible men thought it [the defeat] happened because of the lack of any sense of the virtue in praying to God and trusting in him for the victory, but chiefly because of the Earl, their leader, whose head and heart were swollen with pride, arrogance and empty confidence in his own unreasoning bravery.
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Gruffydd’s commentary is not wholly convincing. He was at Calais at the time and did not witness the events before, during or after the battle. Nor was he possessed of all the facts. He castigated Surrey for not summoning reinforcements from Calais and Guisnes – ‘this his pride would not allow him to do, for he wanted the glory for himself alone’ – but Surrey had, in fact, asked for aid and consequently a division of troops from Guisnes did fight at St Etienne. Gruffydd assumed Surrey cared little for his men, but he had not seen the countless letters the Earl had written on their behalf throughout his command. He was a cantankerous old veteran who had regularly and mercilessly vented his spleen on many of the King’s former generals. He was an ardent religious reformer who resented the Duke of Norfolk for attempting to launch a heresy investigation into the Calais garrison in 1540, and he seemed to have been unaware that Surrey’s beliefs differed from his father’s. When Gruffydd attacks Surrey for not paying heed to God, his comments probably tell us more about his own zeal than Surrey’s lack of it.
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Nevertheless, his account cannot be dismissed. Events described elsewhere in his chronicle often correspond with the recollections of contemporary eyewitnesses.
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Although Gruffydd did not serve in the Boulogne garrison, he did visit it and he certainly maintained contact with some of the men who served there. Many of Gruffydd’s details about the Battle of St Etienne and its aftermath are corroborated by those given by Surrey himself. For example, both Surrey and Gruffydd relate how the Earl had tried to rally the troops during the chaos and both reveal too how Surrey immediately drew up a report of the battle for the King despite the Council’s later protestations to the contrary. The character sketch that Gruffydd gives of Surrey – the posturing and overweening
pride, the recklessness, the supreme confidence in his own ability – although exaggerated to the point of caricature, does accord with the impression that many people gained of Surrey. Elis Gruffydd was without doubt a harsh critic, especially of his superiors, but he gave praise where he felt it was due. In his eyes, Surrey’s predecessor, Thomas Poynings, about whom he wrote with admiration, deserved it; the Earl of Surrey emphatically did not. Against Gruffydd’s account, though, should be read the long Latin poem composed by Thomas Chaloner on the death of Captain Shelley at St Etienne. For the author, Surrey’s martial
vigor
was one of his greatest assets. He was ‘the hero’ who ‘bent the [French] empire under the power of the English’.
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Surrey’s approach to war, like his approach to all things, tended to divide opinion.

Was Gruffydd fair in attributing the defeat to Surrey’s ‘lack of patience’?
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Had Surrey blundered? Perhaps. His horsemen performed heroically, but in chasing their French counterparts beyond Hardelot, they withdrew their support from the footmen. Surrey had sensed disaffection among the common soldiers, but nevertheless ordered the attack, assuring the King of ‘the courage and good will that seemed in our men’. On the other hand, Surrey knew his King. Had he not presented the fight, not only would Fort Outreau have been rescued and Surrey’s past successes have been nullified, but Henry VIII’s honour would have been touched. Victory that day ‘might have imported no less success than the winning of the fortress’. Therefore, Surrey beseeched the King, ‘accept the good intent of us all considering that it seemed to us, in a matter of such importance, a necessary thing to present the fight.’
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Surrey had taken a risk, one that a less enterprising and more experienced commander might not have. But it was a calculated risk and had been paying off marvellously until the second line suddenly bolted. Had luck, or God, been with Surrey on 7 January 1546, the victory might have been his. As it was he was left flailing in the field, powerless to prevent the flight of his men and eventually, as the seventeenth-century historian Lord Herbert of Cherbury delicately put it, ‘also being constrained to save himself as he could’.
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Flight from battle was utterly reprehensible. It was one of the three ways (along with heresy and treason) by which a Knight Companion could be degraded from the Order of the Garter.
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For a man of Surrey’s sensibility and with his family history, nothing could be worse. Surrey
immediately knew that the shame of St Etienne belonged to him. In an echo of his grandfather’s cry at Bosworth, Surrey yelled out ‘like a man in a frenzy and he begged Sir John Bridges and some of the gentlemen who were with him to stick their swords through his guts and make him forget the day.’
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Surrey sent his letter to the King on 8 January, the day after the battle. He also determined to dispatch Ralph Ellerker to the King in person, but ‘the present tempest being such, we have thought it meet to send these before, and stay him for a better passage.’
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Letters sent from Boulogne usually took about three days to arrive at Hampton Court. In theory, though, an urgent letter could be sent and received on the same day. Surrey’s letter did not arrive at Court for over a week. The bad weather to which Surrey refers was probably the cause of the delay, yet some vessels evidently had managed to cross the Channel and by the night of 8 January, rumours of an English defeat had already begun to spread through the streets of London.
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On 13 January the Imperial ambassador reported that the English had lost twelve hundred footmen at St Etienne. ‘The Earl of Surrey has consequently lost greatly in reputation,’ he concluded, ‘and there is considerable discontent at these heavy losses.’
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Around the same time, Surrey received an angry letter from the Privy Council. Henry VIII, having heard about St Etienne, ‘cannot but marvel very much that in so many days you have advertised hither no part of that matter.’ If Surrey had triumphed, then the King would have ‘rejoiced with you’ and ‘tended to your further success and comfort’. If Surrey had suffered a setback, then the King, ‘who of his great clemency considereth the uncertainty and unstable chance of the wars’, would have helped Surrey redress the loss. ‘And therefore His Majesty hath specially commanded us to require you to advertise, without further delay, the very truth and whole circumstances of this chance; and that, from henceforth, as often as any such matter or worthy advertisement shall grow, that you fail not from time to time to advertise His Majesty of the full truth thereof accordingly.’
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By 15 January there was still no sign of Surrey’s report. Ralph Ellerker arrived later that day, but only after the Privy Council had written letters to the English ambassadors abroad, ordering them to quell any ‘vain and untrue’ rumours that might be circulating in the European Courts. The councillors, ‘advertised by some that were present’,
attempted to downplay the ‘skirmish’ at St Etienne, but ominously for Surrey, they seemed to imply that ‘overmuch courage’ was the real cause of the defeat and that had Surrey’s horsemen not chased the French so far from the field of battle, the disorder might have been prevented.
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Stephen Gardiner demonstrated his diplomatic nous in his response from Utrecht: although ‘somewhat troubled’ by the boldness of the horsemen, ‘we kept the ground of the truth of that was done and fashioned it with circumstances meet for the same.’
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That Surrey’s letter did eventually surface at Court is proven by the fact that it now sits in the National Archives. However, it is not clear if it had arrived by the morning of 17 January when William Paget wrote to Surrey from Hampton Court. ‘My good Lord,’ he began,

with most hearty commendations, these shall be to signify unto you that your skirmish with the Frenchmen being done the 7th of this present, in the evening upon Friday [8 Jan.] at night in the street, letters written of the same from some of that town were read & say in Lombard Street so lewdly written to your disadvantage and discouraging that all we here which saw the same were much dismayed therewith and much the more for that there was nothing written from your Lordship nor any others of the council there.

The bruit [rumour] brought it so terribly to our ears here that we rather lamented your chances there than were angry hoping yet still to receive better news from thence because I know the iniquity of our English nature to be such as commonly will report the worst of our own things. And so I wrote to the King’s Majesty from London where as at that time, with His Highness’ licence, I passed days two or three for the buying of my own things. But when 5 or 6 days together no word came, then we began to note some negligence for your silence still longing to hear the truth.

Following this rebuke, Paget proceeded to reassure Surrey that he was not to blame:

Albeit we had heard before the worst and as ill as might be, yet I promise you there was no displeasure in the world conceived, nor not one jot of fault arrected to any person, and so shall appear unto your Lordship by the report of Sir Ralph Ellerker and also by His Majesty’s letters of contentation and thanks to you and his council there for the honest meaning of the enterprise, which, I assure you, is not written for the manner sake but ever for that you be so thought worthy, His Majesty knowing like a Prince of wisdom and experience that whosoever playeth at any game of chance must sometime look to lose.

So as my Lord neither want of knowledge, neither in you, nor in no man there, nor lack of consideration for the enterprise, nor of foresight for the execution of it, is thought here but altogether laid upon the fondness of the footmen flying of whom, as I would wish, some few to be made an example to all the rest, so I would have wished that jointly you and all the rest of the council there had informed the truth where the great fault was to His Majesty.

Although Paget claimed to be ignorant of military matters – ‘By God, my Lord, I am no man of war’ – he was keen to provide counsel: ‘For God’s sake be ever plain with the King. Praise no further than your men be praiseworthy and praise no further than you may honestly, upon good cause, dispraise again.’ Surrey, Paget continued, should not be swayed by his more jingoistic colleagues in Boulogne (probably the ‘light ruffians’ to whom Paget had referred the previous September), for they will cause you ‘to hinder all the rest, to hinder yourself and to hinder also the King’s Majesty’s affairs.’

There are enough innuendoes in Paget’s letter to suggest that he believed that Surrey had not, in fact, executed his command satisfactorily:

‘I am sure, my Lord, that in the rearguard of the battle, you had placed some men of wit and experience, which, when against all order of flight and against the appointment of the chieftain, seeing the horsemen fly (as they took it), if they so thought and fled, so were not greatly to be blamed.’

‘If your horsemen had just executed their part and duty (which had been done if they either had experience or wit), the victory and the fort had been yours.’

Never mind, Paget concluded, ‘let it go. All is well.’

And learn the lesson, my Lord, that as long as you work . . . with the advice of his council (as I know you did this and agreed upon it together upon good ground and consideration) and that you have always a clear conscience, void of iniquity or fond affects, be never afraid nor discouraged. There can no more be had of a man than he can do. The King and all the Council think well of you . . . and I am your poor friend that will honestly stick to you. Give God thanks that hath beaten you with so soft a rod.
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A month later Surrey was demoted.

In response to Francis I’s redoubled efforts to seize the initiative in Northern France, Henry VIII made preparations for a new army and fleet to be sent there. Edward Seymour, Earl of Hertford, fresh from his successes in Scotland, was appointed Lieutenant General of the army and the Lord Admiral, John Dudley, was given control of all matters naval. Surrey retained the Captaincy of Boulogne, but he was no longer Henry VIII’s main man in France. There were fears that he would take the news badly and it was left once again to Paget to assuage his hurt pride.