Young Henry: The Rise of Henry VIII (25 page)

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Authors: Robert Hutchinson

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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.
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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.
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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.
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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.’
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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’.
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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’.
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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.
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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,
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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.
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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,
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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.
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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 its 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.
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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.’
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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.
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At last, on 21 July, Henry left Calais in the midst of 28,000 men, 3,500 of whom surrounded the king as close protection. On either side of the army were two wings of archers and soldiers armed with bills
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and at the front and rear of the straggling column were protective screens of field artillery.
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That night, the army huddled in damp tents, encamped near the small town of Fréthun, well fortified by nature with an impassable marsh on their left, and their artillery on the right. Taylor recorded: ‘Such heavy rains fell in the afternoon and night, that the tents could scarcely protect them.’ In conscious mimicry of Henry V’s actions in the small hours before Agincourt, the ‘King did not put off his clothes, but rode round at three in the morning comforting the watch – saying, “Well, comrades, now that we have suffered in the beginning, fortune promises us better things, God willing.”’
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Once again, it was ‘a little touch of Harry in the night’.
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Back home, Katherine of Aragon was worrying about her husband. She wrote to Wolsey, who was accompanying the expedition, begging him to report frequently on Henry’s health: ‘As he draws near the enemy, I will never be at rest till I often have letters from you.’ She was confident that the king would return ‘with as great a victory as every prince had’.
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Henry, of course, was thoroughly enjoying every minute of the campaign. On the afternoon of 25 July, he entered enemy territory near Ardres and at dawn the following morning, the camp was wakened by an alarm, falsely warning of the approach of enemy forces. The king’s
German mercenaries then ‘mischievously burnt’ some fortified houses and ‘did not respect the churches’. Henry led a detachment of his guard in clearing the town of his rioting and pillaging troops and hanged three of the Germans that night.
More serious was the loss of the cannon named ‘St John the Evangelist’ – one of the brand-new ‘Twelve Apostles’ artillery – which toppled over into a pond. One hundred pioneers were sent to dig the three-ton cannon out and set to work, stupidly without posting sentries. They were surprised by a French raiding party who killed or wounded most of them, using guns or crossbows, and seized a bombard (or siege mortar) called ‘the red gun’.
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The old English weakness of military ill-discipline and poor training had raised its ugly head again. Later the cannon was dragged out of the water by a team of Flemish mares and safely returned to the English artillery lines.
A few days later, the army reached Tournehem with its castle. The army’s passage was barred by the fast-flowing River Hem and when his officers hesitated to ford it, Henry impulsively led the way, wading into the waters and scrambling up the far bank.
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At last on 1 August the king reached Thérouanne. His columns of troops were welcomed by a violent rainstorm that turned the fields around the town into a sea of mire, forcing the soldiers to wade ‘up to their knees in mud’. Henry now took charge of the siege operations.
Ten days later the Scottish herald, Sir William Cumming of Inverallochy, Lyon King of Arms, arrived in the English camp and delivered an ultimatum from his master, James IV. The Scottish king demanded that Henry
desist from further invasion and utter destruction of our brother and cousin [Louis XII] to whom … we are bounden and obliged for mutual defence, the one of the other, like as you and your confederates be obliged for mutual invasions and actual war; certifying you we will take part in defence of our brother …
And we will do what thing we trust may cause you to desist from pursuit of him.
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The king instantly discarded the normal courtesies of chivalry and
diplomacy. Angrily, he rounded upon the startled herald, shouting:
I am the very holder of Scotland – he holds it of me by homage! And he to summon me, [who is] here for my right and inheritance!
Tell him there shall never [be a] Scot [to] cause me to turn my face.
Where he says the French king to be his ally, it would be much better agreed and become him, being married to the King of England’s sister, to count the King of England his ally.
Tell him if he be so hardy [as] to invade my realm or cause to enter one foot of my ground I shall make him as weary of his part as ever was man that began any such business.
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Then, in more measured tones, Henry declared he could not ‘easily believe that his brother of Scotland would break his solemn oath [to Ferdinand, not to invade] but if such was his intention, he doubted not that he would repent it’.
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He wrote a letter to James the next day, pointing out that the Scots alliance with Louis XII was ‘especially dishonourable’ but that he was confident, with his friends, of being able to ‘resist the malice of all the schismatics and their adherents by the General Council excommunicate’. Henry added ominously that James should note well the fate of the King of Navarre, who after helping Louis was ‘now a king without a realm’.
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On 15 August a riot broke out between the English troops and the German mercenaries in the camp – embarrassingly just as the Emperor Maximilian arrived for a meeting with the king. The disturbance escalated rapidly into furious fighting and the Germans seized some of the heavy siege guns and trained them threateningly on the English. In response, some archers, ‘greatly fumed with the matter’, loosed off a few arrows and the Germans regrouped into their traditional defensive wall of pikes. Senior officers managed to restore order quickly: Maximilian was impressed by their reaction and ‘was glad to see the discreet handling’ of the danger by these captains.
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That night came fulfilment of some of Henry’s boyhood dreams for battlefield renown.
The French planned to resupply the besieged city with sides of bacon carried by horsemen, protected by a force of cavalry. It seems likely that
the English were forewarned by spies and they had time to stage a deadly trap. Ever thirsting for action, Henry decided ‘at midnight to attack them in person [and] mounted [up], spear in hand, the emperor doing the same’.
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Dawn broke and the French had not appeared. Maximilian, courteously wearing the red cross of St George over his armour, suggested to Henry that some light guns be positioned on the crest of a small hill, near the village of Guinegatte, south of Thérouanne, protected by archers lining the hedges below. The king agreed and at four in the afternoon, after a long, boring and anxious wait, the trap was sprung.

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