Henry grew angry as he listened to the man, bursting at length into a storm of abuse. He himself had gone beyond such preliminary observations months before, and had found a way to overcome the logistical problems. Two thousand men were already at work at Guines, shoring up the walls and constructing new bulwarks; an entire settlement near the
town had been uprooted so that the ruins of its houses and churches could provide building materials for the fortifications. Henry had not committed his men to this labor to listen to an incompetent foreigner counsel despair. Calling the Portuguese a fool and an ass who knew nothing of his profession, he declared the interview to be at an end.'*
Henry delegated the work of fortress-building to others with some reluctance, and kept a close watch on the plans and progress of every major defense work. In the spring of 1542 he inspected his works at Dover, and would have crossed the Channel to view the corresponding fortifications within the Pale of Calais had he been able to keep his embarkation secret.^ Where possible he took a hand in the engineering of the works himself. Calais, which Marillac called in 1541 *'the strongest town in Christendom," owed some of its invincibility to the king, whose design for improved firing apertures giving a wider field of fire was adopted in its construction. At the seaside town of Ambleteuse between Boulogne and Calais his contribution was even more fundamental. He drew up a plan for a pentagonal fort to be built at Ambleteuse, and succeeded in convincing his chief English engineers John Rogers and Richard Lee that his design was feasible. The diagrams which illustrated his plan—possibly done by the king himself—reveal not only considerable expertise in military architecture but familiarity with the most up-to-date Italian models of fortress design.^
All the time he was strengthening his defenses Henry was striving for improvements in England's offensive power as well. He accumulated trunks and pots of wildfire, and materials for making it. He built oared ships '^according to a model of which he himself was the inventor." He brought Flemish and German armorers to England to devise new types of mortars and shells, and to cast huge guns that, with their iron bolts and chains, weighed two tons.^ And he eagerly sought out experimental devices, however fantastic, that might give him a tactical advantage.
A seventy-year-old Italian arrived at the English court with a plan for a marvelous invention. He would make a huge mirror, haul it to the top of Dover Castle and affix it there, then adjust it to reflect the French coast. Any ship leaving Dieppe harbor could be seen in the mirror, he assured Henry, long before it approached English shores. When he heard of this Marillac could not take it seriously, yet to the ambassador's amazement Henry not only seemed persuaded of the soundness of the project but was willing to back up his conviction with money. The old man left for Dover with full pockets, but no further word was ever recorded concerning his great mirror.^
Another invention was somewhat more practical. It was a mortar that shot a fearsome '^artificial bullet" which flew into the air "spouting fire on every side." On its descent the burning mass actively "leapt from place to place, casting out fire," and shot forth a hundred missiles with a noise like a volley of musket fire. The English envoys in the imperial camp who saw this incendiary device were unsure of what damage it inflicted, but they felt certain it would please the king, and engaged the master gunner who invented it to come to England as soon as Charles V could spare him.^
There had never been any doubt in Henry's mind that he would lead
the invading army himself. The joint agreement with the emperor signed in December of 1543 suggested tactfully that Henry "would wish to be in person in the said army" and that his presence "would be most important." Charles committed himself to lead his own troops, though he was gouty and beginning to age, and this commitment, coupled with the successes he had recently won on campaign in Italy, was enough to challenge Henry to do likewise.
As the campaigning season drew nearer, however, the emperor became alarmed that Henry's health might prove to be a liability. At the end of March his familiar complaint set in. His legs swelled and throbbed with pain, confining him to his bed. He developed a fever, and for two days his physicians worried over him until it passed. In all he was ill for eight days, and "a little indisposed" for some time afterward. How would he fare in France, facing the rigors of harsh weather and long marches, the sudden stresses of battle and the demands of leadership? To remind the emperor that he too had an agonizing complaint, and that its "proper season" was autumn, when the fighting would be at its height, did not alter the argument against Henry's taking the field. On the contrary, it made it all the more imperative that at least one of the armies should be led by a younger man, a vigorous commander in his prime, who if need be could assume leadership of the entire combined invasion.
But there was no dissuading Henry. His honor, his courage in arms, his memories of battlefield glory on the plains of Picardy thirty years earlier all impelled him to risk his health and go ahead. He was after all assembling the greatest expedition force in a century—contemporaries believed it to be the greatest ever—and his imperial ally too was strong. His people were docile, the Scots quiescent, the French ripe for defeat. He might not live to see such an opportunity again. He must rise to the challenge, heedless of his contrary legs and ungainly bulk.
At the end of June Suffolk crossed the Channel to join his men, who had been gathering for weeks in the vicinity of Calais. He and Norfolk would each command one body of the English forces, under Henry's overall generalship. Suffolk was now in his sixties, and looked elderly. His once splendid physique sagged with age, and like Henry he walked with a limp. Before he left for France he made his will, knowing he might never see his young wife Catherine again.
As Henry made ready to follow his venerable lieutenant a crowd of difficulties arose to delay him. French spies were abroad in England, counting ships and men, watching activity at the port cities and sending war news to Francis I; they had to be captured and relieved of their information on the rack. Despite her promises, the regent of Flanders, Charles V's sister Mary, had provided too few horses and wagons for the use of the English. Then, when Henry took matters into his own hands and purchased two hundred Flemish mares, she impounded them at Dunkirk. Finally, only days before the king's scheduled departure, she consented to release them. Other last-minute crises appeared: the bakers were unpaid and dissatisfied, there were too few munitions wagons with Norfolk's host already in France, and, most serious of all, money was becoming scarce.
With unusual dispatch the king and his privy councilors took action. Orders went out for the bakers to receive their wages immediately, and Norfolk was instructed to send to Flanders for a thousand wagons, and to bear the inconvenience patiently, seeing that *'it would be a much greater prejudice if there should be any lack at the coming over of the [king's] army." As to the shortage of money, the Antwerp loan would temporarily have to serve. Henry approached a number of merchants in secret, asking them to stand surety for him to borrow another huge sum from the Flemish bankers, and in the meantime he managed to raise twenty thousand pounds in London, using his rents as security.*^
To Chapuys these transactions—which were concluded at exorbitant rates of interest—seemed ominous, and in fact Henry's last days in England were clouded by fiscal difficulties. But by mid-July he put all worries behind him as he boarded the ship that would carry him to Calais, confident that no cost was too high for the winning of the highest prize of kings, victory in war.
Behoulde the figure of A Roy all Kinge, One whom sweet victory did ever attende: From every parte wher he his power did bringe, He homewarde brought ye Conquest in ye end.
Henry VIII, *'armed at all pieces upon a great courser," rode out of the gates of Calais into French territory on Friday the twenty-fifth of July, 1544. Across his saddle he carried a heavy musket with a long iron barrel; an officer riding behind him camecThTs headpiece and great lance. The gun and lance were afterward preserved in the Tower armory. A visitor who saw them there in Queen E
lizabeth's reign was impressed by their huge size, and marveled that merely to lift the lance took all his strength.
In the king's immediate company that day rode drummers and trumpeters to herald his coming, the officers of arms, and the royal henchmen. But these dozens of attendants were only a tiny part of his army, some forty-eight thousand strong. In an age of relatively small populations the army was almost incomprehensibly vast. It was an armed mass equal to two-thirds of the population of London, an itinerant community three times the size of any provincial English town. As in 1513, it was organized along feudal lines into three parts: the vanguard, rearguard and "king's battle." In the latter unit marched nearly thirteen thousand horsemen and footmen, with the hundreds of noncombatants—butchers, herdsmen, millwrights, bargemen, coopers, smiths, bricklayers, armorers, mortar makers, surgeons and priests—needed to feed and serve them and keep them battle-worthy.*
As Henry advanced southward toward Boulogne the main body of his army fell into place around him—the earl of Essex, chief captain of the men of arms, with a great number of horsemen, then the lightly armed horsemen, then the archers and gunners on foot, then a host of pikemen, '*the king being in the midst." At Sandingfield a body of guardsmen joined the host, bringing up the rear "with banners displayed," and behind them, strung out for miles along the line of march, were the heavy wheeled mills and bake ovens and brewing vats, the wagons of flour and malt, and the great herds of cows and bullocks and sheep whose mooing and lowing nearly drowned out the martial sound of the trumpets and drums. By the end of the day the entire force straggled into Marquison, near Boulogne, and made camp for the night.
Engravings made from contemporary paintings of the camp at Mar-
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quison survive, corroborating graphically the written records of the campaign. They show a hastily erected temporary settlement, a confusion of tents and wagons and milling soldiery, with little evidence of organization or command. Military textbooks of the time taught officers to draw up camp with ordnance and munitions in a large outlying circle, surrounding the vulnerable sleeping tents and beasts and provisions inside. At Mar-quison there were heavy guns and carts of pikes and cannon shot everywhere, with the mouths of the cannon pointing directly at the tents and barrels of gunpowder all too near the cooking fires. Instead of long, orderly rows of tents, separated by regularly spaced firebrakes and marked by banners, there was a jumble of large and small pavilions, some collapsing under the force of the wind. (Insubstantial as they were, tents were preferred quarters, for officers only; ordinary soldiers had to take refuge in whatever structures they could devise, or in peasant huts or woods or thickets. In winter campaigns, or in the storms and early frosts of a northern summer, they froze.)
Every soldier in Henry's army was entitled to at least a pound of biscuit, a pound of beef and a gallon of beer a day, if not more. But if the provisions wagons went astray, or if the camp animals died of disease or the supply route was blocked by the enemy, or if irresponsible purveyors failed to meet their quotas, food grew scarce. In the 1544 campaign the English soldiers ate their way through the countryside around Boulogne until everything edible had been consumed. They stole chickens and ducks, shot hares and wildfowl, drove pigs and sheep to the camp to be slaughtered. The Irish soldiers went after beef, tying up bulls and making them bellow until all the cows in the vicinity had been attracted within range of the camp. Within a very few weeks the thousands of soldiers brought famine to the peasants of Picardy. A veteran of the campaign who left an account of his experiences wrote how an old countrywoman came to the camp begging bread. A kindhearted soldier offered her a few coins.
"God in heaven!" she said, throwing up her hands, "what should I do with money, or anything else but bread, and only a little of that, so that we can eat it now, because we do not dare to store it for fear of the wild men, who, if any of them get any bread or money from any of us beat and batter us."2
The king himself ate well, indeed on a princely scale. Among the officers traveling with him "for the provision of his diet" were men to staff a bakehouse, cellar, buttery, wafery, confectionery, boiling house, pultry and acatery—the last a storage larder for fresh foods that spoiled easily. Two hundred people made up the itinerant kitchen and provisioning departments, all of them equipped to fight if needed. Another large contingent of serving men "appertaining to the King's Majesty's tents, hales and pavilions" saw to his housing; among them were bedmakers, coffermakers, and matmakers.^
Camp followers were in evidence in the engravings of Marquison, though not in the numbers they were later to achieve. By early September, when the campaign was seven weeks old, the camp was reportedly "troubled with a sort of light women which daily do repair out of
England." So that this population would cease to grow, the lord mayor of London was ordered not to permit any woman to leave the city for any port near the capital, and the officials of Dover and Portsmouth and other port towns were given similar instructions.^ Deserters were another sizable problem. The Marquison engravings show a soldier hanged, probably for desertion, within full view of his living fellows, a macabre reminder of each man's primary duty to his sovereign, to stay at his post.
The camp was under fire from the fortress of Boulogne, and men are shown scrambling to evade flying missiles and hugging fresh wounds. On the night of the twenty-sixth a party of French skirmished briefly with the English, creating work for the camp surgeons. Military surgeons in this period had developed considerable skill in amputating limbs—usually with one swift cut and three strokes with a saw—and could replace them with artificial substitutes, but severe chest or intestinal wounds were beyond their skill. There was little to be done for Treasurer Cheyney's son, wounded in the side by an arquebus shot "by reason whereof his guts do come out," but to make him as comfortable as possible while he lay "in great jeopardy of death." Given the low survival rate following treatment soldiers might be forgiven for preferring death to the excruciating pain of surgery without anesthetics (save for alcohol, and, possibly, herbal infusions to induce a drugged sleep). Still, many endured the digging and slicing of the crude pointed probes and tweezers and scissorlike instruments of the time, and the agony of cautery—the burning of the flesh around a wound thought to help prevent infection.
By the time Henry arrived in France his troops were already deployed, with two objectives. The majority of the men were besieging Boulogne, "the chief propugnacle of all France" whose strong ramparts and thick double walls the French considered invulnerable to artillery. A smaller force under Norfolk was besieging Montreuil several miles to the south. This was the lesser effort, with smaller likelihood of success; in the words of a contemporary the siege of Montreuil was a diversion made "so that the king and his host might take their ease and sleep more easily in their beds in the camp around Boulogne."^
In planning his strategy Henry was departing from the agreed battle plan arrived at by English and imperial negotiators months earlier. The ultimate goal, they had agreed then, was Paris; the English were to strike through Picardy, the troops of Charles V through Champagne, then a combined Anglo-imperial force was to seize the French capital. In besieging Boulogne and Montreuil, Henry said, he was reducing the two strongest Picard fortresses as a preliminary to marching on Paris. (The emperor was in fact doing the same thing on his front, besieging the fortresses of Luxembourg and St. Didier.) Yet in actuality Boulogne, not Paris, was the prize Henry sought, and the longer he stayed in France the more he wanted it. To the emperor's dismay, the "Enterprise of Paris" was transmogrified in Henry's mind to the "Enterprise of Boulogne," and as the campaigning season went on Charles' expansive territorial ambitions dwindled as his ally narrowed his aims.
Boulogne in the mid-sixteenth century was a hilltop town surrounded
by high walls and ramparts, with the castle commanding its eastern wall. Below the fortified settlement, between the hills and the harbor, was Basse Boulogne, a separate town with its own inferior fortificati
ons. High on a cliff at the harbor mouth was the most distinctive monument in the region: the "Tour d'Ordre," a Roman tower built by Caligula and equipped by the French with cannon. The English called the tower the "Old Man," and when Henry arrived they had just captured it and turned out its defenders, fourteen men and a boy. Suffolk, who was in command of the siege, pointed with pride to this success when the king made his appearance, and to the English seizure of Basse Boulogne as well. The French had left behind some treasure in military stores in Basse Boulogne; they had tried to bum the town to cheat the English of their spoils, but without success.
Henry threw himself tirelessly into the siege effort, spurred perhaps by the sight of the redoubtable old Brandon, who did not spare his aged body and was more courageous than many of the younger men. Suffolk was reportedly so heedless of his own safety that he leaped into trenches where men lay dead from recent enemy fire, and was so contemptuous of the artillery in the high town that "he enforceth others to be hardy whether they will or not."^ Henry now took charge of directing the offensive. He ordered earthworks erected, and deployed his ordnance and troops for a three-pronged assault.
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