by Linda Porter
The king’s goal in his dealings with his northern neighbour was a simple one. It was to fulfil his own father’s desire to unite the Scottish and English crowns, a quest begun in 1503 with the with the marriage of Margaret Tudor, Henry’s elder sister, to James IV. But several bloody battles and interminable skirmishes and raids during the first half of the century produced no clear result. This endemic warfare, punctuated by intense diplomatic efforts involving much mutual suspicion and threat, had not, in fact, allowed Henry to realize his aim. Margaret Tudor died in 1541 a disappointed woman, without either her son, James V, or her daughter, Lady Margaret Douglas, at her side, her father’s schemes apparently in tatters. But her brother had not given up and the death of James V the following year appeared greatly to strengthen his hand. For how could a small country, ruled by a baby girl who was at the mercy of brutish nobles, hope to survive without his direction? The treaty of Greenwich, betrothing Edward to Mary Queen of Scots, encapsulated his dreams not just for his heir, Edward, but for the British Isles as a whole.
Treaties, however, can be easily broken. And Henry’s heavy-handedness, coupled with his inability to occupy Scotland, meant that there would always be a third player in Scottish affairs. Mary Queen of Scots was half French, which made the appeal to the ‘auld alliance’ with France stronger than ever. Scotland may have been remote but it was by no means isolated on the international stage. James V’s widow was a member of one of the most politically adroit families in Europe. Her handling of a perilous, unstable situation was masterly. In her first year as Dowager Queen, Mary of Guise had given fair words (but no more) to the English ambassador, Sir Ralph Sadler, about allowing the little Scottish queen to be brought up in England with her fiancé, Prince Edward. But Mary Queen of Scots’ only move at the time was to the safety of Stirling Castle, where her mother continued to play off the pro-English interests against one another, with the help of Scotland’s premier churchman, Cardinal Beaton, an opponent of Henry VIII. The greedy and untrustworthy earl of Arran was fobbed off with the title of Governor to the infant Mary, and his rival, the earl of Lennox, was fooled by the twenty-eight-year-old dowager into thinking that she might seriously consider him as a prospective husband. All this was impressive enough, but Mary of Guise’s most important success in the year 1543 was to get her child crowned as queen at the age of nine months. As the adult Mary Queen of Scots would find out, not even an anointed queen was safe in Scotland, but for the time being her coronation bound the nobility to her, greatly strengthening her position and buying much needed time for Mary of Guise to shore up French support. It was a remarkable triumph and a blow to the ambitions of Henry VIII, who resorted to military means to force the Scots to honour the treaty of Greenwich. This torch-and-burn campaign along the Scottish border, known as the Rough Wooings, was led by the earl of Hertford. It began in May 1544 and was still continuing when Katherine Parr became regent.
Henry VIII had promised, with the kind of threat reminiscent of his fury at the rebels of the Pilgrimage of Grace, that he would raze Edinburgh and slaughter its inhabitants ‘to the third and fourth generations’. He was never able to make good on this bloodthirsty notion, but in one respect he could claim a victory that certainly meant he was still a player in Scottish politics. By late March, the earl of Lennox realized that Mary of Guise was never going to marry him. He took himself and his allegiance south and, on 29 June, he married Lady Margaret Douglas, the niece of Henry VIII and one of Katherine Parr’s chief ladies. This magnificent wedding at St James’s Palace, with both the king and queen in prominent attendance, was Katherine’s most important public event since her own marriage. The match was intended to send a message to the Scots that Henry would continue to take an active role in their affairs, by promoting the ambitions of one of their leading aristocrats and giving him lands and honours in England. Margaret’s chequered romantic past, which involved two amours with members of the Howard family and brief imprisonment in the Tower, not to mention reproofs from Cranmer for her continued giddy behaviour, was swiftly and completely put behind her. This lively and attractive woman of twenty-nine, who had been a companion of Katherine’s stepdaughter Mary since they were both girls, fell in love with the husband her uncle had chosen for her, and theirs was a very successful match. The new countess of Lennox, who was, by Tudor standards, well past the first flush of youth, counted herself lucky that she had finally found a handsome and politically ambitious husband and she wholeheartedly devoted herself to his interests. From the perspective of her uncle, Lennox was much more than just a suitable match for a prominent member of his family. He had a substantial number of men at his command and, having spent time at the court of Francis I, he had firsthand knowledge of French political and military affairs. And it was in France that Henry intended to achieve a victory that would set the seal on his reign.
KATHERINE’S APPOINTMENT as regent marked the end of a long period of preparation for the French campaign. Henry had declared war against France in the summer of 1543 and was engaged by the terms of his agreement with Charles V, made at the end of the year, to take up arms in France by 20 June 1544. He missed this deadline by a few weeks; the press of business, the continuing problems with Scotland, the settlement of the succession, as well as the need to organize and prepare a large force, all took time. Then there was an unwelcome return of the old trouble with his legs in the early spring. Chapuys reported to Mary of Hungary on 30 March: ‘For the last eight days the king has been ill of a sore in one of his legs, which during 48 hours has brought on a slight fever. He is now, thank God, free from it and yet he is still indisposed and keeps his room.’5 This development must have given Katherine cause for concern. Although it is impossible to say precisely how well briefed she was on international affairs, we know that Henry did talk to her about such matters and that he continued to do so for at least another year.6 Charles V himself was convinced that her influence was significant: ‘You are doing the right thing’, he told his ambassador in March 1544, ‘in keeping on good terms with the Queen; do not fail, whenever opportunity offers, to address her Our most cordial commendations.’7 Katherine’s continued warmth towards imperial visitors was noted once again when the Spanish duke of Albuquerque arrived and it was remarked that the queen’s reception of him had been even greater than the king’s. There had not been an English queen so supportive of Charles V or his representatives for twenty years.
Welcome as Katherine’s stance was, it could not disguise the fact that there was tension between Henry VIII and Charles V that did not bode well for the outcome of their cooperation. The two monarchs had different goals and an entirely contrasting attitude to the conduct of the war. For Charles, it was a chance to settle, once and for all, the relationship with France. He would do this through military defeat if he could, but he wanted the English army to be the main agent of such an outcome. Unwilling (and unable) to contemplate a march by his own armies as far as Paris, he nevertheless hoped that Henry might be induced to commit English forces in such an enterprise. But though a decisive outcome such as the burning of the French capital would be thrilling, Charles was wise enough to know that there was more than one approach to getting his way. A few losses here and there, indeed, even the mere fact of English involvement, might induce the king of France to sue for peace. And if he should follow such a course, then Charles, ever pragmatic, would engage in diplomacy that suited himself first and foremost. Perhaps he did not enter the war with the deliberate intent of double-crossing Henry VIII, but he was perfectly prepared to do so if he felt circumstances warranted it. Henry had known Charles for most of his life – they had met personally, years before – but he does not ever seem to have had the measure of this astute, complex and fundamentally untrustworthy man. He should, perhaps, have seen what was coming when, well before any English soldier had set foot in France, and though he had hoped for an imperial declaration of war against the Scots, Charles refused to support him in Scotland. The emperor knew that trade
in the Low Countries would suffer and so, he reasoned, ‘it would seem strange, inconvenient and almost dishonest for us to declare war to the Scots’. He went on to point out that Henry VIII had declined, for his part, to declare war on the German duke of Holstein. This kind of tit for tat, accompanied by any amount of specious excuses (Mary of Hungary excelled at the art of pettifogging justification), was a canker at the heart of the Angloimperial alliance.
Henry may not have cared about Holstein but he was determined to attack France. His dislike of Francis I, now riddled with disease himself, ran very deep. He must privately have scoffed at the letter belatedly addressed to him by the man he had wrestled with for his entire reign (quite literally, at the Field of Cloth of Gold more than two decades earlier), offering to ‘pay the arrears of pension due’. With superb disingenuousness, Francis I went on to appeal to old ties of amity: ‘I cannot persuade myself ’, he wrote, ‘that, on your part, the friendship and brotherhood, in which we have always lived, has suffered any diminution, for I can assure you that, so far as myself am concerned, it has not been impaired in the least.’8
Yet though Henry had always viewed Francis I as a rival, and undoubtedly wished to strike a telling blow against him, his motives were not entirely egotistical. It is easy to depict the king as a foolish old man, hell-bent on one last glorious military venture, but there was a rationale behind the course he took. The French king did, indeed, owe him a great deal of money in the form of reparations from earlier conflicts and it was quite clear that diplomacy alone would not bring about its repayment. There was no reason to trust the offer Francis made. Tellingly, it did not arrive until after the English forces crossed to northern France. Henry had seen the collapse of the treaty of Greenwich and the rise of French influence in Scotland. And Calais itself, England’s lone outpost on French soil, was under threat from the great French fortress at nearby Ardres. In Henry’s mind, the best way to defend English interests at Calais and the territory surrounding it (known as the Calais Pale) was to launch a twopronged attack. A force commanded by the duke of Norfolk would besiege Montreuil, a hilltop town girt with huge walls some twenty-five miles inland from Calais, while another army would attack Boulogne. This second assault Henry intended to lead himself. At the back of his mind there was also the memory that Wolsey and Charles V had dissuaded him from attacking Boulogne in 1523. He had been younger then, but in his mind it was not too late to take the town now. When it fell, he was determined to be there to receive its capitulation.9
This decision caused a huge collective intake of breath. Henry’s imperial ally, who had spent large parts of his life in the saddle at the head of his armies, was dismayed. Surely it was not necessary for the king, at his age, to wage war in person? The suggestion that he was too decrepit for the fight caused Henry great offence. His response was withering:
The reasons, moreover, which your majesty alleged for himself to remain at home, and not attend the expedition in person – such as his illness and so forth – were not sufficiently strong, and might, on the contrary, be brought to bear against your majesty, inasmuch as his [the king’s] present indisposition was accidental and transitory, whereas gout, from which your majesty had been suffering lately, was an awful disease, a return of which at the approaching autumn season would be extremely dangerous.
As the king went on to explain, he had no intention of making the heroic gesture that was hoped for by his gout-ridden ally: ‘It would be far better to lay siege to two or three large towns on the road to Paris, than to go on to the capital of France and burn it down. As to counting upon the rebellion and consequent assistance of the French people against their king, that was pure vanity, for never before had the French risen in rebellion against their king.’10
This was an astute and realistic assessment, demonstrating not just the contrast in personalities between Charles V (who, incidentally, never had the slightest intention of leading his troops personally into northern France) and Henry VIII, but also their expectations of what could be achieved. However, the misgivings about the king’s direct participation in the campaign were by no means all on the imperial side. There clearly was concern in London, as Chapuys reported during Henry’s spring illness:
the reason why many of those who are about the king’s person do not wish him to cross the Channel on this occasion is, among others, that they are afraid of his suddenly failing in health, and also that, if they have to take care of his person, all military operations will necessarily be delayed and the march of their army slackened through it; besides which the king’s chronic disease and great obesity require particular care lest his life should be endangered.11
Katherine, however, does not seem to have been one of those who tried to dissuade Henry from his purpose. She already knew her husband well enough to appreciate how important this was to him and, indeed, to her. He was ready to assign her the responsibilities of the regency and the safeguarding of his heir. Henry made a will in 1544 before he left England; although it has not survived, the assumption is that he nominated his wife to remain as regent in the event of his death. Probably he did not regard this as a serious possibility, despite the fears of his advisers described by Chapuys. In fact, the king’s health returned and actually improved as he busied himself for the departure. Margaret Douglas’s grand nuptials were a fitting statement of his power and confidence in the final days before he left. On 8 July he bade farewell to Katherine and travelled, via several of his Kentish manors, to Dover. Nearly a week later, he crossed the Channel, and, on Monday 14 July, as was reported by a steward who kept a diary of the campaign, ‘the king’s majesty came to Calais about the hour of seven of the clock at night, where he was royally received with a great number of horsemen and archers’.
Katherine made her own unique contribution to the war effort by writing a prayer for men to say entering into battle. It is one of the earliest of her religious writings and remained one of the most popular. Brief but elegantly expressed, the prayer is notably lacking in bloodthirsty sentiments:
O Almighty God and lord of hosts, which by thy angels thereunto appointed, dost minister both war and peace, and which didst give unto David both courage and strength, being but a little one, unarmed and unexpert in feats of war, with his sling to set upon and overthrow the great huge Goliath. Our cause now being just, and being enforced to enter into war and battle, we most humbly beseech thee, O Lord God of hosts, so to turn the hearts of our enemies to the desire of peace, that no Christian blood be spilt, or else grant, O Lord, that with small effusion of blood, and to the little hurt and damage of innocents, we may to thy glory, obtain victory. And that the wars being soon ended, we may all with one heart and mind, knit together in concord and unity, laud and praise thee, which livest and reignest world without end. Amen.12
It is not known whether Henry VIII took a copy of his wife’s prayer with him. His attention, in any case, was firmly on what needed to be done to move things forward in France. Once across the water, he reviewed plans and was briefed by the duke of Suffolk, commander of the army that would attack Boulogne. The king does not seem to have been greatly impressed by what he found out and decided that he would have to become more personally involved. Henry discovered there was a great deal that required his attention: ‘we be so occupied,’ he wrote, ‘and have so much to do in foreseeing and caring for everything ourself, as we have almost no manner of rest or leisure to do any other thing’.13 But he was in no hurry to move and did not come himself to Boulogne until 26 July. The main assault on the town with big guns began on 3 August. It seemed that all was proceeding broadly to plan.
But on the same day that Henry left his palace at Greenwich, Mary of Hungary wrote a long missive to Chapuys, in which she was at great pains to deny responsibility for any delay or dereliction in the supply of provisions for Norfolk’s army outside Montreuil. ‘If the English campaign happens to be in want of provisions, it will certainly not be the fault of the queen,’ she asserted, ‘who has not failed
to give all possible attention to the matter … In fact, the queen has hitherto acted in this affair in such a manner that the English ought to be perfectly satisfied.’ This despatch has mistakenly been assigned to Katherine herself (she and Mary were both known as ‘Queen Regent’) and cited as evidence of her ability to defend her handling of important military aspects of her regency; but it is nothing of the kind. Rather, it is further proof of the difficulties in the Angloimperial alliance that would only get worse with the passing weeks.14
KATHERINE AND the regency council moved to Hampton Court in late July, to escape the threat of plague. All three of Henry’s children soon joined her. Their company was welcome and it was during this period that Elizabeth observed her stepmother as a ruler, absorbing the realization that a queen could handle the mass of papers, participate in discussions with advisers and take decisions as well as any man. It must have been obvious to her that the pressure of work was inescapable for the queen and that Katherine was coping with it admirably. There were many letters and despatches to be read and answered daily, for Henry had his own council of advisers with him in France and the Council of the North was also actively involved in monitoring the Scottish situation. Initially, Scotland took up more of Katherine’s time than the war in France. One of her earliest interventions was in connection with the large number of Scottish prisoners in northern England, many of whom could not afford to pay for their own food in jail. What was to be done with these people, the queen and her council were asked, and would the king meet the costs of feeding them? Katherine’s reply was level-headed and humane. She commanded that ‘taking order for the bestowing of such as be able to bear their own charges’, the poorer prisoners, who were ‘stout, busy or otherwise like to do any hurt being at liberty’ were to be committed to several different prisons and ‘if extreme necessity shall so require’ be given some small relief until the king’s pleasure was otherwise known. The rest were to be released upon bond.15