The Last Days of Henry VIII: Conspiracy, Treason and Heresy at the Court of the Dying Tyrant (16 page)

Elsewhere, domestic and international problems burdened the king and his advisers. The year 1545 saw a famine in England – a ‘great dearth of corn and victuals’
³⁰
– which forced the purchase of cereals from Denmark and ‘Bremberland’, the country around Bremen in Germany. Four thousand quarters of corn
³¹
were delivered to London in one month alone, paid for by a tax levied on the companies of the city. In the face of a new, more serious French threat, the military mobilisation necessary to maintain three armies in the field (in Scotland, at Boulogne and for defence of the south coast) as well as manning the navy
³²
meant that there were few men to maintain law and order in London. At midsummer, only constables kept watch in the wards of the city. However, bills had been pasted on to houses warning of ‘certain priests and strangers’ – a French fifth column – that would set fire to London. The king’s Council ordered the mayor to impose a curfew on strangers and set a special watch of citizens from nine at night until four the next morning. The blowing up of a ship, the
Hedgehog
, on the Thames at Westminster on 19 July must have raised levels of anxiety about enemy agents or saboteurs within the realm.
³³
It was a time of great anxiety, for the French were determined to take the war to England.

Francis I had earlier threatened invasion to force the surrender of English-held Boulogne. On 3 January 1545, Francis had written to Denmark about his powerful fleet now being formed

to invade England when the season arrives, as the best way to constrain the enemy to make restitution and satisfaction and perhaps with God’s grace, deliver the people of England from his tyranny.

With the assistance of the Danes and the Scots, Francis predicted that Henry

who is hated by his nobility and subjects for well known reasons and exhausted by two years of great expense, will like most of his predecessors, find himself deserted by his own subjects.

If the king of Denmark joined the enterprise,

it would cost him little, seeing that his ships are always ready and many of his subjects would [take part] … for their own profit, if he gave them permission.
³⁴

But much of this was empty posturing: France probably did not have the resources to mount a full-scale invasion nor the ability to resupply its forces’ bridgehead. Probably the French king envisaged a series of stinging hit-and-run attacks on the English coast to goad Henry into returning Boulogne.

As far as Henry was concerned, however, a landing was expected at any time that summer. In July, his spies reported a French army 40,000-strong to be ready to board their ships. A sophisticated system of beacons was hastily set up on the downs of southern England to provide warning of any French incursion. Three defending armies, totalling more than 90,000 men under arms, were based in Kent and Sussex under the command of the experienced Duke of Suffolk, in East Anglia under Norfolk and in the West Country under John, Lord Russell, the Lord Privy Seal.
³⁵
At Darlington, the Earl of Hertford had mobilised forces in preparation for countering any French attempt to invade the North of England in support of their Scottish allies.
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More soldiers had also been sent to Boulogne: 1,000 from London and another 4,000 from the Home Counties. The watchful defenders of England’s shores would not have long to wait for action.

In May 1545, the ailing Spanish ambassador Eustace Chapuys took his leave of London and the royal court. His last encounter with Queen Katherine further reveals her to have been an adept diplomat, as well as kind and discreet. The ambassador arrived early for his farewell audience at the Palace of Westminster:

When I entered the back door of the king’s apartments, having traversed the garden facing the queen’s lodgings and arrived nearly at the other end, close to the principal entrance of the king’s apartments, my people informed me that the queen and the princess [Mary] were following me quickly.

I hardly had time to rise from the chair in which I was being
carried, before she [the queen] approached quite near and seemed from the small suite she had with her and the haste with which she came, as if her purpose in coming was specially to speak to me.

Katherine, accompanied by four or five women of her chamber, had been told the previous evening by the king of Chapuys’ retirement.

Whilst on the one hand she was very sorry for my departure as she had been told that I had always acted well in my office and the king had confidence in me; on the other hand she doubted not that my health would be better on the other side of the water.

The queen hoped that the friendship between England and Spain would be maintained. Chapuys wrote afterwards to Charles V:

She … begged me affectionately, after I presented to your majesty her humble service, to express explicitly all I had learned here of the good wishes of the king towards you … She asked me very minutely, and most graciously, after your majesty’s health and expressed great joy to learn of your … amelioration, adding many courteous and kind expressions.

The envoy asked to be allowed to salute Princess Mary, ‘which was at once accorded’, Katherine being anxious that Chapuys should not stand too long. Sensitively, the queen withdrew seven or eight paces so that she could not overhear his conversation with Mary.
³⁷

The ambassador then met with Lord Chancellor Wriothesley and Charles Brandon, Duke of Suffolk, and after dinner they asked if the emperor could supply ‘a few men, wagons and victuals’ to Henry’s army to ‘keep the French quiet’ outside the English enclaves of Calais and Boulogne. They also asked his opinion on how to bring about a peace or truce and begged him, perhaps significantly, to believe ‘that what they had said was entirely on their own account and without the king’s knowledge’.
³⁸
Chapuys was then called into Henry’s presence, who ‘received [him] most graciously and … said some kind things about my
convalescence and my departure from England’. Then the king got quickly down to business, displaying a surprising grasp of detail about the issues raised: the question of an alleged French spy; complaints about the presence of the Scottish ambassador at Charles V’s court; and the welcome given to four French warships in Dunkirk harbour. Henry would prefer a settled peace to a truce with the French, he told the ambassador, but the enemy were short of men, money and food, so they could hardly resist him, ‘as had been proved by the successful exploits of the English on land and sea against them’. Henry bragged that during the past ten days

the English privateers, not in his service, had captured twenty-three French vessels and shortly before as many more had been sunk, burnt or captured. He calculated that his people had taken no less than 300 French ships since the beginning of the war.
³⁹

So the gossipy Chapuys departed, taking with him a ‘thorough-bred dog’ given to him by Sir William Paget, principal secretary to the king.

In June, Francis I inspected his assembled fleet of 324 warships under Admiral Claud d’Annebaut, near Rouen, before it set sail for England in the middle of the following month. On 18 July, a detachment of twenty-two galleys raided and burnt the fishing village of Brighton in Sussex. Forewarned by fishermen of the French approach, Henry began to concentrate his forces near the Hampshire coast. On the evening of 19 July, he dined aboard the flagship
Great Harry
at the important naval base at Portsmouth with Charles V’s new ambassador, Francis van der Delft, and angrily rejected his suggestion to surrender Boulogne. The next morning, a Sunday, the enemy fleet, deployed in a battle array of three squadrons, arrived off Portsmouth and anchored threateningly off St Helen’s Point on the Isle of Wight. The outnumbered English ships
⁴⁰
later sailed out in two lines to fight them, watched anxiously by Henry from the ramparts of nearby Southsea Castle with his land commander, Suffolk, alongside him. As both sides opened fire for the first time, one of the two leading English vessels, the seventy-one-gun
Mary Rose
,
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700 tons, her decks crowded with soldiers in
armour, was caught by a freak gust of wind. Watched by the horrified onlookers on land, she heeled to starboard and the sea rushed in through her open lower gun ports. Within minutes she had disappeared beneath the waves. Only thirty of her 415-strong crew survived; the rest drowned horribly, ensnared beneath the netting spread across her upper deck to prevent attack by enemy boarders. The piteous cries of the trapped and dying men could be clearly heard on land, barely a mile away. Henry cried out loud: ‘Oh, my gentlemen! Oh, my gallant men!’ With surprising compassion, he limped over to where Lady Carew, wife of Sir George, the Vice-Admiral of the English fleet, was standing, tears streaming down her face. The king sought inadequately to comfort her: she had just watched her husband go down with the
Mary Rose
beneath the blue waters of the Solent.

The French, triumphantly crowing at this great propaganda
coup
, landed 2,000 troops at Bembridge on the Isle of Wight on the evening of 21 July. Local militia forces skirmished with the invaders in the woods and on the slopes of Bembridge Down before retreating and destroying the bridge over the River Yar. A day or two later, a French party sent to fill their water casks at a spring in Shanklin Chine, on the island’s east coast, were attacked and cut to ribbons.
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The French fleet meanwhile mounted attacks on the English shipping in Portsmouth harbour at

every tide with their [oared] galleys and shot their ordnance at the king’s ships in the haven, but the wind was so calm that the king’s ships could not sail, which was a great discomfort to them.
⁴³

The City of London sent 1,500 hastily recruited men towards Portsmouth as reinforcements, but they turned back for home when they reached Farnham in Hampshire because the French had gone. Having been defeated by the militia on the Isle of Wight with great loss, including the French general, after twenty-four hours Admiral d’Annebaut retreated.
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Heading for home, he paused further east along England’s south coast only to sack the towns of Newhaven, recently granted a charter by Henry VIII, and Seaford before, once again, local forces drove
his troops ignominiously back to their ships.
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The pursuing English vessels were becalmed off Beachy Head, Sussex, and the French escaped safely back to their home ports after only a brief and inconclusive skirmish at sea.

Henry sought the pleasures of hunting to distract him from the highly symbolic loss of one of his major warships and, characteristically, to flee the dangers of the plague now rampant amongst his fleet in Portsmouth harbour. But a second more terrible blow, this time a very personal one, afflicted him on 22 August: the sudden death of his old jousting comrade, the Duke of Suffolk, at Guildford, Surrey, where the court was staying. After the king heard the stunning news, he told his courtiers that Brandon had been the best of friends, generous and loyal as well as truly magnanimous towards his political enemies. Glaring, he pointed out that few of his Council could boast the same about themselves. Henry arranged for a sumptuous state funeral for his friend, who was buried, perhaps significantly, at St George’s Chapel, Windsor; the king, although in straitened financial circumstances, picked up the bill for the funeral.
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The Earl of Hertford had earlier been appointed commander of the English forces in Boulogne and had defeated a determined French attempt to retake the town in January 1545. Almost seven months later, Francis I had sent another large army against the town, resulting in daily skirmishes, and had built siege works near by, including the construction of a large tower at Basse Boulogne from the top of which French guns fired into the English fortifications. Hertford was then recalled to command the English forces on the Scottish borders and was replaced by the old soldier Norfolk. The French war was digging deep into the English coffers of both money and men, and Henry, always needful of cash anyway, was forced to raise funds from the Antwerp moneylenders, such as the Fuggers banking family, and had to resort to the expensive and troublesome hiring of foreign mercenaries.
⁴⁷
Spanish, Albanians, Italians, Clevois, Swiss and Germans had all been recruited to reinforce English forces in the Scottish borders and to augment the army in France. The Spanish in Newcastle complained
about the local food and resorted to cooking their own meals in the kitchens of their billets, causing friction with their landladies.
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One episode assumed what would otherwise have been farcical overtones, if it had not also had serious diplomatic and fiscal implications for the king, who was perhaps unused to employing hard-nosed Continental mercenaries. Henry had hired the German soldier Captain Frederick von Reiffenberg after the mercenary, writing from Cologne, had offered his services, ‘moved by [the king’s] pre-eminence in kingly virtues’.
⁴⁹
In June 1545, Philip, Landgrave of Hesse, had provided von Reiffenberg with a letter of commendation and urged Henry to take up his services as he ‘may have cause to be grateful’. The German and his 8,000 war-hardened foot soldiers and 1,500 cavalry were hired for three months at the high cost of 52,000 florins or £15,550 a month (more than £5 million in today’s monetary value). Unfortunately, Charles V refused the freelances (or mercenaries in the modern expression) permission to enter Brabant
en route
to Boulogne and they caused mayhem. The emperor wrote complainingly that the mercenaries had caused ‘inestimitable damage’ in the Treves area and had then passed by Aix through his territories beyond the River Meuse and ‘forced their way into the Bishop of Liege’s town of Wesel’. The German commanders then began to argue about the precise terms and conditions of their contract with Henry, taking hostage their English liaison officers (Thomas Chamberlain, governor of the English court of merchants at Antwerp, and Sir Ralph Fane, lieutenant of Henry’s pensioners or bodyguard) until the disputed fees were paid. The English were furious and Henry’s principal secretary Sir William Paget wrote to von Reiffenberg on 2 November from Windsor complaining of the ‘disloyal and evil service’ done to the English king ‘and his strange usage of his commissioners’.