Mary Tudor (38 page)

The campaign was not over, however, and the first reaction, both in London and Brussels, was to mount a counterattack. On 11 January the Earl of Rutland was again commissioned to lead such an expedition. A treasurer and captains were appointed and forces began to muster. On the 16th the Duke of Savoy announced that he was on his way to the relief of Guisnes. However, the Duke of Guise was too quick at every turn, and was favoured by good fortune. On 10 January the garrison at Hammes mutinied, and that put an end to resistance there. Finally, on the 21st, Guisnes was battered into submission; Lord Grey, its captain, was the only English soldier to emerge with any credit from the whole fiasco. Savoy never reached him, and after a storm had scattered and damaged the English fleet, Rutland’s orders were countermanded.

THE FALL OF CALAIS, 1558

MICHIEL SURIAN, VENETIAN AMBASSADOR WITH KING PHILIP, TO THE DOGE AND SENATE, 8 JANUARY.

The French have not attacked Gravelines, as was feared, but remain at Calais, battering it from the castle of Ruysbank, and although at this court Calais is held to be a strong and secure fortress, I nevertheless remember that on my going to see it internally, when I crossed over to England,
*
I found it very thinly inhabited, most especially by soldiers, and the place being large requires many; nor do 1 know whether they can put them in at their pleasure, having the sea between them. Besides this, towards the harbour, where the French are now battering it, it seemed to me very weak, as the walls are high in the ancient fashion, and there is no platform,
†
the moat also being small, and it is ill flanked; nor has this ever been remedied because those who have the care of it rely on the opinion current all over the world, that it is an impregnable fortress. It is possible that in other parts it may be more scientifically constructed, and that in this quarter no great care was taken, it seeming secure by reason of its being so very near the sea. The Earl of Pembroke, Governor of Calais, is not there, and the whole charge of the defence is vested in the Governor of the Town, styled Deputy,
‡
and the soldiers of the garrison are all Englishmen, as they do not trust any other nation; but the moment it was heard in England that the French had taken the castle of Ruysbank, they commenced sending troops to Dover, where the Earl of Pembroke also arrived on his way to Flanders, and at this hour it is heard that he crossed with 5,000 infantry, and landed at Dunkirk, six leagues from Calais.
§

It has been determined by this side to send the Duke of Savoy towards those frontiers, with an army drafted from several garrisons, including that of St Quentin, about which places it seems that there is nothing to fear, the French now being at a great distance thence, but this might prove to be a second mistake added to the first, which was that of disbanding the army, when the enemy were intent on reinforcing themselves. Brussels, 8,January

[
Calendar of State Papers, Venetian
, VI, pp. 1415-16. The original MS in Italian, partly in cipher, is in the Vienna Staatsarchiv ]

*
On 28 March 1557, before the reinforcement of the summer.

†
Terrapieno, a mounting for artillery.

‡
Lord Wentworth.

§
This seems to be false information.

‘When I am dead and opened you shall find Calais lying in my heart’ Mary is famously supposed to have later said, according to John Foxe. But in the long run the loss of Calais was a positive development. Not only was it vastly expensive to maintain, it was also a standing temptation to interfere in France. The days of Anglo-French dynastic states were over, and Calais was a relic. Neither Mary (nor indeed Elizabeth) saw it in that light, but its surrender drew a line under an obsolete system, and encouraged England to look to the Atlantic rather than to Europe for the next phase of its development.
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At the time, however, it was a subject of anguish and recrimination. Surian, the usually well informed Venetian, had heard nothing of the matter when he wrote on 30 December.
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Perhaps the warning from Flanders, although issued in Philip’s name, did not actually come from him. Whatever the truth, the English instinctively blamed Philip for the loss of their treasure; while he pointed out (with truth) that if the English council had not been so penny-pinching and parsimonious, the crisis need never have arisen. However, there was one explanation upon which both could agree: Calais had been sold out by wicked heretics. A generation earlier, the town had been something of a refuge for various Protestant hues (the ‘evangelicals’) escaping from the attentions of zealous bishops in England, and there was certainly a Protestant, or crypto-Protestant, element there during Mary’s reign.
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However, there was also a sizeable French population, and as far as the evidence goes it was with them rather than with the Protestants that the various plots against Calais since 1553 had been associated. When he returned from his French prison, Wentworth was charged with treason, not heresy, but it seems that both accusations were mainly intended to save the faces of the council, and to paper over its rift with the king. These accusations also, of course, provided another reason to go on persecuting Protestants. In Rome the ‘heretical conspiracy’ was naturally believed, one Spanish cardinal writing that: ‘The governor of Calais was a great heretic, like all those who were with him there … so I am not at all surprised at its fall.’
^[365]

In the immediate aftermath of the disaster, Philip’s attitude seems to have been ambivalent. On 25 January Ruy Gomez wrote to the king that the quality of the troops assembled was so poor that there was no point in retaining them. Philip took this information at its face value and ordered them to be disbanded. At the same time, however, he sent Feria across the Channel again to discuss with the council a longer-term plan for a counteroffensive, deploying the whole army of the Netherlands.

This would have been a major commitment, but the English were not keen. They still feared attack from Scotland, they said, and the Danes and the Hanseatic League were reported to be preparing a fleet against them.
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They would also have to hire mercenaries for the defence of the realm, as the sickness had so depleted their reserves of men. Their whole response (according to Feria) was apologetic:

… we do consider that if we should send over an army, we cannot send under 20,000 men … whereof will ask a time, before which time, considering also the time that the enemy hath had … to fortify and victual the place, it is thought that the same will be of such strength as we shall not be able alone to recover it.

Such an army would cost £170,000 for five months, which, with all the other expenses of the war, would far outrun the kingdom’s resources. The realm was in great poverty; ‘the Queen’s Majesty’s own revenue is scarce able to maintain her estate’, and so on. ‘We see not,’ they concluded, ‘how we can possibly (at least for this year) send over an army.’
^[367]
Philip was not pleased. England’s lacklustre war effort was not the only cause of strain between the king and his subjects at this time. The English were bitterly angry about the licences for provisioning Calais, arguing that this was yet another example of Philip putting Flemish interests before their own, and this time as Feria reminded the king on 22 February – they were right. In addition, the English merchants were suffering losses owing to the wartime embargo on their trade with France, while Flemish merchants were being given safe passage. To make matters worse, on 4 February Philip ordered Feria to prohibit, in his name, a proposed London trading voyage to the Portuguese Indies, on the grounds that it was prejudicial to the King of Portugal’s subjects, ‘which narrowly concern me’. The Londoners were outraged – and ignored the ban. Quarrels between the English traders of the Merchant Adventurers and the Hanseatic League over trading privileges were also endemic. Edward VI’s council had cancelled the whole Hanseatic privilege in response to pressure from the Adventurers, but Mary had restored it to please Charles V, whose subjects the Hanseatic merchants mostly were.
^[368]
Early in 1558 there was another deadlock, with the English council supporting the Adventurers and Philip supporting the Hansa. The league’s ambassadors spent four fruitless months in England, and frustration was high on all sides.

The low priority that Philip gave to the interests and feelings of his English subjects can be demonstrated over and over again. In February he gave permission for Mary’s servants to raise 3,000 German mercenaries for the Scottish Border. They were duly raised in March and April, and paid an advance of about £2,000. Then, when they were on the point of sailing from Gravelines, Philip suddenly announced that he needed them himself, and would pay them henceforth. In fact he disbanded them soon after, blandly informing the English council that he had saved them an unnecessary expense.
^[369]

During these months Feria was virtually a resident ambassador in England, and his jaundiced reports are one of our main sources of information. His presence was unfortunate, partly because, as a Spanish grandee, he felt at liberty to speak his mind to the king, and partly because he had no understanding of how English politics operated. Just as Renard had judged the privy council during the first year of the reign by the extent to which it satisfied the Emperor’s requirements, so now Feria judged the English government by its responsiveness to his master. ‘I am at my wit’s end with these people,’ he wrote on 10 March, ‘… they change everything they have decided, and it is impossible to make them see what a state they are in.’ ‘Numbers,’ he wrote on another occasion, ‘cause great confusion.’
^[370]
There is no need to take these jeremiads at face value. Attendance at council meetings averaged 13.5 for January and February 1558, but fell away to 9.2 thereafter, and that was not excessive by anyone’s standards. Of course the whole council was large – over forty members – but it was organised into a number of standing committees and commissions upon which many councillors served without ever attending the privy council proper at all. From the fact that Feria never mentions it, it would seem that the select council, created by Philip as his link with the privy council from abroad, had virtually ceased to function. Only one letter to it from the king survives, dated 6 April, acknowledging another that does not survive.
^[371]
In a formal sense, it clearly continued, but seems to have become no more than a hat that the inner ring of the privy council donned when it was convenient to do so. By this time Sir Robert Rochester was dead, and had been replaced as controller of the household by Sir Thomas Cornwallis. Cornwallis also seems to have replaced Rochester on the select council, but whether by Philip’s appointment or
ex officio
is not clear.

Fearing a French invasion in the wake of the loss of Calais, the council put itself and the country on a war footing. A memorandum to Philip outlining the scheme was enclosed with Feria’s despatch of 10 March – not, it will be noted, in any direct communication from the select council. The more vulnerable parts of the country were divided into ten military lieutenancies, each under the command of a nobleman: Devon and Cornwall under the Earl of Bedford, Wiltshire and Somerset under the Earl of Pembroke, and so on. At the same time a council of war and a council of finance were established, adding to the list of standing committees.
^[372]
Philip approved these measures, but seems to have had no part in drafting them.

All in all, Philip was losing interest in England. He had been consistently frustrated in his attempts to become a ‘real’ king, in spite of the rhetoric that had accompanied his second visit; and the triumph of bringing England into the war had turned to bitterness and recriminations after the loss of Calais. Payments to his English pensioners were months, sometimes years in arrears, and Feria commented as early as February 1558 that none of those noblemen who had previously favoured the king were now prepared to do anything for him. Feria specifically mentioned Paget, whose enthusiasm for the war had evaporated and been replaced with complete disillusionment.
^[373]
The fleet was indeed mobilised, but did not achieve very much beyond some desultory raiding of the Brittany coast. When Philip’s trusted adviser Bishop Antoine Perrenot de Granvelle suggested to Lord Admiral Clinton in May that the English fleet was quite capable of landing 5,000 men and causing real damage, Clinton agreed, but showed so little enthusiasm that the bishop commented: ‘if this man is the keenest of the Englishmen, the rest must indeed be slack’.
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Although they were supposed to be allies, it was not safe to place English and Spanish ships in proximity to each other. There was a fray at Plymouth among the seamen, and another at Falmouth involving the townsmen and servants of the Marquis of Verlanga.
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Only a successful intervention in Kintyre against Scottish interference in Ulster partially redeemed an otherwise futile campaigning season. Part of the problem was that all parties were financially exhausted. By the autumn of 1558 the English crown debt was approaching £300,000, and was costing £30,000–40,000 a year to service. Both Philip and the French king were in much worse conditions, Philip being actually bankrupt and Henry virtually so. It was all very well for Feria and Granvelle to rail at the English for lack of effort – the Continental allies were achieving almost nothing themselves.