Great Harry
Page 10
Whatever the drawbacks of the English forces they were destined to carry on the work of the Holy League virtually alone. Emperor Maximilian upheld the commitment to make war, joining Henry's army and fighting alongside his fellow sovereign of England—albeit with few troops, and for pay. And his daughter Margaret of Savoy, ruler of the Netherlands, continued to defy the French king, daring him to "spit out all his venom and do his worst, for she was safe under the English arrows."^ But the other allies fell away before the campaigning began. The papal assault that was to have come through Provence or Dauphine was never launched; indeed it was said in Venice that the pope was neutral. And Ferdinand of Aragon, far from leading an assault from the south, had made a truce with the French even before his son-in-law set sail from England.
Ferdinand, now an asthmatic sixty-two, was reportedly "too old and crazy to endure war." Publicly he justified his betrayal of his allies by explaining that, feeling himself to be near death, he was reluctant to leave his lands to his heir in a state of discord.^ Privately he thought himself well rid of the expense of war, and of allies who, except for his idealistic son-in-law, would not hesitate to desert him whenever it served their interests.
This was not the first time Henry had been given reason to distrust Ferdinand's diplomatic integrity. A year earlier it had been arranged that England and Aragon would campaign jointly against the French. The English force arrived on schedule in Navarre, only to find that Ferdinand had abruptly decided not to wage war after all; stranded among the hostile peasants near Fuenterrabia, the Englishmen sickened, mutinied, and finally took themselves home without striking a blow. Ferdinand's reputation for duplicity was well established. He made a practice of representing his motives and actions differently to everyone he dealt with, and rarely if ever told the simple truth. To the pope he complained that Henry was insincere in his desire to make war on France, and had made a truce with Louis XII; to Louis he denounced Henry as a warmonger who refused to sign the truce that he, Ferdinand, had worked so hard to arrange. Nor was he modest about his accomplishments in deceit. Overhearing that one of his victims had accused him of cheating him twice, Ferdinand denied the charge vehemently. "He lies," insisted the king. "I cheated him three times."
Ferdinand followed Henry's every move with shrewd vigilance, glad enough to profit from the younger man's undertakings but skeptical about
their likelihood of success. He wrote at length giving Henry military advice—that he must rely on the pike and musket, and not on archers, who alone could not resist the stoutest mercenaries in a pitched battle— but confided to a friend that he "had no great confidence in any of the enterprises of the king of England." He was careful not to involve himself in the campaign of 1513, though to the end he kept Henry half convinced he might join in. Yet he kept himself minutely informed about the course of the fighting, about Henry's behavior and appearance and his relations with Maximilian, through fast ships that sailed continuously between Calais and Guipiizcoa, bringing him news.'*
To the pope, the emperor and the king of Aragon—all of them mature men of the world—war was one of a variety of diplomatic alternatives to be pursued or abandoned as political expediency dictated. To Henry it was a holy cause and a sacred duty. And he made certain his fellow sovereigns understood that, once pledged, he meant to go to war with or without their aid. Within the hearing of the Venetian ambassador he affirmed his belief that Ferdinand and the pope would never desert him, but added pointedly that if they did ''yet he would never withdraw from this war until that schismatical sovereign"—Louis XII—"be made an end of."^ Besides, the French campaign was only a beginning. Frenchmen were easily disposed of; the Swiss contemptuously called them "hares in armor," and they were known to fear meeting the English in battle. Once they were crushed, Henry boasted to the Venetians, he would take his army into Italy to win further glory. There was no end to his dreams of conquest. A military memorandum drawn up at this time contained the breathtaking pronouncement that "to win a battle against a whole world only twelve thousand footmen are requisite," provided they were armed with huge brass "pomegranates" which spewed stones and fire.^
With projects such as these churning in his head Henry led his men out of Calais in late July into the hostile territories of France. The army strung itself out for miles along the narrow road in three long "wards" after the medieval fashion. In the "king's ward" rode, first, Henry with his attendants and pages, his spears and six hundred guardsmen, his clerks, secretaries, heralds and pursuivants, and his thirty-one physicians and surgeons. His personal bowyer and fletcher rode near him, as did his trumpeters and minstrels and the thirty-five artificers who forged his armor and kept it and his weapons in good repair. The two hundred and fifty officers and servants of his stable and his chapel came next, and the grooms and pages and menials of his household, nearly a thousand strong. Directly behind them lumbered the great guns, each pulled by teams of a dozen or more oxen or tall draft horses. A small army of twelve hundred accompanied the ordnance—gunners and blacksmiths, miners and pioneers and "toyle setters" to raise the tents, masons, armorers, trench-makers and carpenters. Last of all came the great nobles and royal favorites whose honor it was to ride with their retinues in the king's ward: the duke of Buckingham with his five hundred men, William Compton with his six hundred. Fox and Ruthal with their hundred-odd and Wolsey with his two hundred and fifty, and, grandest of all, the marshal Charles Brandon with fifteen hundred archers and billmen and armored knights.^
Shortly after the march got under way it started to rain, and by midaftemoon great sheets of rain were making progress difficult. The soldiers took shelter in their tents, but as the storm grew more violent gusts of wind overturned the tents and men, beasts and equipment were drenched. It was an inauspicious beginning, and Henry, who had read how in adverse circumstances Henry V rode around his camp encouraging his men, was determined not to let the weather dishearten his troops. Through most of the night, as the storm raged on, the king rode in full armor from one miserable cluster of men to another, calling out to them to remember that better luck was sure to follow. "Now that we have suffered in the beginning," he told them, *'fortune promises us better things, God willing," and the sight and sound of him cheered the men and bound them to him more strongly than ever.^
A few days later the first brief encounter with the French roused them further. On the march toward St. Omer the English vanguard caught sight of several thousand French troops leaving the cover of a wood. After a minor skirmish the French withdrew, leaving the English eager to engage them again. Henry, who longed for a pitched battle, was very pleased, though he would have preferred to meet Louis XII in person. Louis, for his part, was attempting to stir himself into activity, but according to Henry's informants he *'had a better heart than legs" for warfare as his gout was painfully acute. The small-scale encounters continued. A party of French attacked an English contingent carrying supplies from Calais to the main English force, and three hundred English were killed; French raiders captured a hundred and fifty English wagons and killed many of the English who were escorting them, with the rest fleeing to take refuge in a nearby castle. And after a skirmish near Ardres the French gathered up all the enemy corpses they could find, stripped them, and mutilated their faces beyond recognition.^
It was Thomas More's melancholy observation that *'the common folk do not go to war of their own accord, but are driven to it by the madness of kings." What were the thoughts of Henry's troops as they followed him, admiringly yet surely somewhat reluctantly, toward the dangers to come? Immediate preoccupations aside (their soaking clothes, aching legs, and general discomfort), explicit and undefined fears must have tormented them. Rumor had it there was plague at Brest, brought there by sailors; English sailors, it was said, were certain to bring the sweating sickness to Calais, where it would spread to Henry's army. The king had brought fourteen wagons loaded with gold and silver coins on this expedition, but there was always the chance they might not be
paid their sixpence a day—eightpence for the archers and artisans, four shillings for the captains—or that, once paid, the money might be stolen or gambled away.
Even the most stalwart of fighting men knew and dreaded the hazards of battle. Sword or lance wounds, they knew, if not fatally deep would heal in time. Broken arms or legs could be set and splinted. But an arrow in the chest or abdomen meant certain death, if not at once then within a few agonizing days; the doctors could do nothing for severe blows to the head, or for men who broke their backs falling from their horses in full
armor. Camp fevers and other epidemics were an everpresent concern, diarrhea a universal aggravation. It would not be long, they knew, before the collective miseries of constant rain, filth, continual ill-temper and the cold fear of death would make them wish for the moment of truth, just before battle, when by custom all soldiers went down on their knees before a priest and took earth into their mouths in token of the death and burial they faced.
On August 1 the English arrived before the walls of Therouanne, known as "La Chambre du Roi," 'The King's Treasury," and the key of Picardy, and began to bombard it with their great siege guns. The bombardment continued day and night while the laborers set up camp— hundreds of tents and pavilions arranged "like a castle or little town." Each tent had a name: for the royal treasurer, "The Gold Ring," for the master of the armory, "The Gauntlet," for the chaplains, "The Chalice," and for the carpenters, a tent the size of a long hall called "The Hammer." The king had eleven tents, connected by covered walkways, including one for his master cook and one for his kitchen, "new made at Guinegate in the field." The royal tents were of blue waterwork and cloth of gold so fine the emperor's tailor estimated it to be worth thirty-three florins an ell. Inside, the grandest of Henry's pavilions was lined from floor to ceiling with money—gleaming ducats and golden florins—and displayed a huge gilded sideboard where wine and English beer were dispensed in golden drinking cups.^^
Henry also had a specially built wooden house with an iron chimney where he could take refuge from the answering fire of the besieged garrison of Therouanne. The precaution was justified, for if the incessant pounding of the "Twelve Apostles" was breaking down the walls and houses of the city the French guns were doing their share of damage to the English camp. Talbot, captain of Calais, lost a leg to the French fire, and other English knights were killed as they sat or walked about the city of tents. A Devonshire knight, Edward Carew, was hit by a French bullet as he sat in council in Lord Herbert's pavilion and died before the eyes of his dismayed comrades. "This is the chance of war," Herbert told them once the shock passed. "If it had hit me you must have been content; a noble heart in war is never a feared of death."^^
Certainly the king appeared to have no fear, disdaining to keep cover and riding in the open in his golden crusader's tunic wearing a rich jeweled cap and "a red shaggy hat with many red feathers" in place of his helmet. He was more energetic than ever, practicing with his archers, entertaining the emperor in his pavilion and giving him valuable presents, and, following the older man's advice, getting up hours before dawn to adjust the positions of his men and artillery for maximum effect. Everywhere he went he was escorted by fourteen young boys in golden coats, wearing scarlet mantles over them to keep out the rain; their horses were trapped in silver and adorned with silver bells which jingled sweetly as they rode. Bells of pure gold hung from the harness of the king's horse, and Henry liked to make his mount leap and bound until the bells flew off and the watching soldiers scrambled for them in the mud.
When the siege had been under way for ten days a herald arrived in the camp. He brought word from Henry's brother-in-law James IV, king of Scotland and ally of Louis XII. Henry listened, "standing still with sober countenance, having his hand on his sword," as the herald recited King James' message: Henry should withdraw from Therouanne; he should leave French territory entirely; in defense of his French allies, James summoned his brother-in-law home. It was nothing short of a challenge to battle, a clear warning that the perpetual fighting along the Scots border was about to erupt into full-scale war.
Henry's reply was thorough and defiant. "It becometh ill a Scot to summon a king of England," he began. "Tell him there shall never Scot cause me to return my face." James had been bribed with French coins to make this challenge, Henry added, and did ill to threaten the sovereign who was his natural ally by marriage. Growing more and more indignant, Henry sent the herald off with a challenge of his own. "Recommend me to your master," he concluded, "and tell him if he be so hardy 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."^^
Katherine and the captains who looked to her as regent would deal with the Scots; the immediate problem was the French. Therouanne was holding out too long. Helped by the persistent storms, the defenders were succeeding so well on their own that the French army besieging the nearby imperial town of Hesdin had not even bothered to send relief troops in force, only raiding parties which seized two of the great Apostles and managed to sink one of them in a deep pond. On August 16 the French commander Vendome decided to try to draw the English away from Therouanne and sent two companies of knights toward the town. Among their number were two men well known to the English: the Chevalier Bayard and his friend Richard de la Pole, "the great traitor of England." (As a precaution against rebellion in his absence Henry had ordered the execution of de la Pole's captive brother Edmund just before leaving for France.)
Contemporary accounts greatly exaggerate the numbers involved on both sides, but there were probably about eleven hundred English knights who rode up to meet some two thousand of the French near the town of Guinegate. By the time the French saw the English approaching it was too late to avoid an encounter, and the skirmishing began. According to one account, the English charged, sending one body of French horsemen back into the others and causing a panic. Within minutes all the French were galloping madly across the fields the way they had come, shedding their standards and lances and even the bardings of their horses as they rode. Henry, who at first had wanted to join the English charge, was restrained by his councilors and busied himself with the artillery. When the chase began, though, he threw aside all caution and set off, surrounded by his bodyguard, after the retreating French in the distance.^^
The exhilaration of that hour was unique. Never again in Henry's life would he savor the excitement of a breakneck chase after a hopelessly defeated enemy, knowing that total victory was his. For a brief span of
moments all his dreams of chivalric conquest took on form and substance; he entered the timeless realm of knighthood proven, of valor undisputed—the realm of legend.
A French eyewitness reported later that, had Henry stayed with his footsoldiers instead of dashing ahead of them, and reformed his horsemen for a fresh charge, he might have routed the entire French army. But his mind was on the glory, not the scale, of victory. And the glory of it was very great—nine standards taken, over a hundred notable prisoners seized for ransom, along with a fortune in forfeited arms and accouter-ments. Men would speak for hundreds of years of what the English had won that day, and they would credit Henry VIII with the triumph.
The remaining weeks of the campaign passed smoothly and swiftly. The English took Therouanne, then went on to Lille, where, after a minor alarm—it was reported that three gunners with handguns had sworn to assassinate Henry, but they were never found—the king enjoyed three days and nights of gallant amusements in the company of Margaret of Savoy, playing every musical instrument brought before him, demonstrating his archery, and dancing until morning in his shirt and stocking feet. From there they went on to besiege and reduce the "great, handsome and powerful" city of Toumai, the "Unsullied Maiden" whose thick double walls and ninety-nine fine towers made it an even richer prize than Therouanne. In all, seven walled towns were taken before the campaigning season ended and Henry and his army left for home in October, a respe
ctable achievement to set alongside the memorable day at Guinegate that was coming to be called the "Battle of the Spurs."
Only once during the campaign had there been a few hours of uncertainty. It was on the misty night the king left Lille, intending to make his way with a relatively small escort to the camp where the rest of the army awaited him. The camp had been moved during his three-day stay in the town, but he must have assumed that someone among his attendants knew where it was. About a mile outside the town he happened to ask which way the camp lay, and discovered that no one knew. None of his men had been given directions; there was no guide, and the night was so dark and foggy they could easily pass the sea of English tents without realizing it. Returning to Lille was impossible, for the town gates had been shut and secured for the night. Going on was dangerous; they could only become more hopelessly lost, and there might be French raiding parties in the area. Not knowing what else to do, the gunners shot off the loudest of the artillery pieces again and again, but they went unheard. "Thus the king tarried a long while," a chronicler wrote, "and wist not whither to go."
At last a figure emerged from the mist—a lone victualer bringing his cart from the English camp to Lille to fetch provisions. When he got over his astonishment the carter was persuaded to put aside his errand and lead the king safely to the camp.
He was lyvely, large, and longe,
With shoulders broade, and armes stronge,
That myghtie was to se: He was a hardye man, and hye, All men hym loved that hym se.
For a gentyll knight was he.