the month in snapshots

Chloe digs having a locker as a brand new Junior Higher in our
new series of pics, The Camera Shy and Elusive Junior Higher

Chloe's reading one of the first books I ever wrote and is enthralled

just a couple Wolfenstein Crazies

just being cute

Naomi's enjoying some Veggie Tales but curious as to why Dad isn't sitting with her.

the first day of school! Seventh Grade and First Grade!

naptime for my li'l nugget

that hair though...

Henry VIII, Part Eight

Henry VIII has a lot of accomplishments under his belt, not least in initiating naval revolution and spawning religious reformation, but if he hadn’t won infamy through his litany of wives, it’s unlikely that he would hold much interest for popular culture today. His father had returned England its prestige after the Wars of the Roses, but Henry plunged the country into bankruptcy. He’d hoped to win laurels and fame on the battlefield against England’s long-time nemesis, but his campaigns came to little – and when his last campaign won territory in France, he had to sell it to keep the country afloat. By the time Henry returned to England following the Treaty of Camp, he was getting along in years and his age was beginning to tell. 

Though Henry had always been secretive and suspicious, now he was paranoid (the paranoia accelerated following Catherine Howard’s adultery). One historian notes that though Henry was ‘convinced that he controlled everyone, he was in fact readily manipulated by those who knew how to feed his suspicions and pander to his self-righteousness. Full of experience and increasingly competent in the routine of rule, he [nevertheless] lacked the comprehensive vision and large spirit that would’ve made him a great man… Policy in the hands of a sick, unhappy, violent man was not likely to be either sensible or prosperous, and so it proved.’ The king struggled to keep his realm united amidst the volatile strife between Protestants, Anglicans, and Catholics, and all the while he esteemed himself the greatest monarch of the age and demanded that everyone acknowledge it to be so. 

In the prime of youth Henry had been a model of athleticism, but now – as happens to so many of us – he was grossly obese. His waist measured fifty-four inches, and he had to be moved about with the help of machines. He was covered with painful, pus-filled boils and likely suffered from gout. Historians believe his obesity wasn’t due to any changes in his diet but a change in his level of physical activity; though Henry loved athletics, the jousting accident that spurred Anne Boleyn’s miscarriage also opened an old leg wound that refused to heal. The wound became ulcerated, preventing him from enjoying his favorite athletic pastimes. Some historians have speculated that Henry suffered from syphilis; others that he suffered scurvy; others that he had acquired type II diabetes. Some have suggested that he may have been Kell positive or suffered from McLeod syndrome, resulting in so many failed pregnancies and degenerating mental health. Other historians speculate that he suffered a traumatic brain injury in the 1536 jousting accident, which then led to a neuroendocrine cause for obesity. 

It’s been said that marriage is a young man’s burden and an old man’s comfort, and so it was with his sixth and last wife. Catherine Parr was a wealthy widow, and he married her in July 1543. Their marriage wasn’t perfect – she bought into the Protestantism gaining ground on the Continent, and they had plenty of back-and-forth arguments over the nature of true religion – but it was a marriage with which Henry could be content. Catherine helped Henry reconcile with his daughters, Mary and Elizabeth, and in 1543 an Act of Parliament put them back in the line of succession after Edward, Prince of Wales. Catherine Parr was more of a mother to him than a wife, but he had finally found a measure of calm – and he’d secured the Tudor Dynasty. Thus when he died at the age of 55, he could die in relative peace: his greatest ambition, to secure an heir, had been realized.

Henry VIII and Catherine Parr

He died in the Palace of Whitehall on 28 January 1547. He was buried in a vault at St. George’s Chapel in Windsor Castle next to Jane Seymour, the one wife he’d not fallen out with. Henry had planned an elaborate and exquisite tomb for himself, but it wasn’t completed by the time of his death, and it never would be; the sarcophagus he’d designed would later be used for Lord Nelson’s tomb in the crypt of St. Paul’s Cathedral. Over a century later, Henry VIII would be joined in the vault by the late King Charles I. Though the crown now passed in solid succession to the Prince of Wales – crowned Edward VI – Henry had failed to make full arrangements for his son’s minority, which would result in a chaotic government. Edward VI would rule for just over five years; Henry’s first daughter, Mary, would rule for another five years, steering England back towards the Catholic fold; but Henry’s second daughter, Elizabeth, would retrench her father’s reforms, and her reign would be the longest – and the most glorious – of all the Tudor monarchs. 

Henry VIII is one of the most immortalized English monarchs, and perhaps for good reason. As one historian writes, ‘Henry VIII has always seemed the very embodiment of true monarchy. Even his evil deeds, never forgotten, have been somehow amalgamated into a memory of greatness. He gave his nation what it wanted: a visible symbol of its nationhood. He also had done something toward giving it a better government, a useful navy, a start on religious reform and social improvement. But he was not a great man in any sense. Although a leader in every fiber of his being, he little understood where he was leading his nation. But if he was neither statesman nor prophet, he also was neither the blood-stained monster of one tradition nor the rowdy bon vivant of another. Though cold, self-centered, ungiving, forever suspicious of the ways of the world, he could not descend to the second stereotype; despite a ruthlessness fed by self-righteousness, he never took the pleasure in killing required of the first. Simply, he never understood why the life of so well-meaning a man should have been beset by so many unmerited troubles.’

Henry VIII, Part Seven

Henry VIII has been called 'the father of the English navy,' and for good reason. The Tudor Dynasty as a whole advanced England’s nautical state-of-affairs, implementing changes that led to the establishment of a permanent navy and laying the foundations for the future Royal Navy. The full-rigged ship that appeared during the Tudor Era was one of the greatest technological advances of the 16th century, and it permanently transformed the nature of naval warfare. By 1573 English shipwrights were introducing innovative designs that enabled ships to carry heavy guns, maneuver better, and sail faster. During the Middle Ages, ‘warships’ – which were, for the most part, merchant ships seized by the crown for military operations – operated by coming alongside one another and pouring soldiers onto the opposing decks. The medieval goal of naval warfare was to simulate a land battle on the decks of ships; the early modern goal was to stand off at a distance and fire broadsides in the hope of crippling or sinking enemy vessels. By the end of Tudor Era in the early 17th century, Spain and France had stronger fleets, but England was catching up. 

The emergence of the Tudor Navy began during the reign of Henry VIII’s father. While Henry VIII’s naval reforms focused on warfare, his father’s priority was trade. Henry VII fostered sea power by building larger merchant vessels and investing in bigger dockyards. He supported an act from 1831 that stated goods could only be exported and imported in ships belonging to the king’s subjects, a rule that would prevail throughout early modern England (though rigorously enforced only at times). When Henry VIII became king, he inherited only seven small warships from his father; by 1513 he’d added two dozen more, building a naval fleet that had never been seen in the British Isles. That year he orchestrated a naval ‘parade’ down the Thames: twenty-four ships led by the 1600 ton Henry Imperial, the ensemble carrying five thousand combat marines and three thousand sailors. When Henry’s first war with France broke out, his newly-built fleet dominated the outnumbered French; the French were forced back to their home ports, and the English took control of the Channel while blockading Brest. This new fleet – Henry’s pride and joy – signaled a new era in English warfare, and the king kept up the pace: by the end of his reign, the English navy boasted nearly sixty ships (forty-six warships and thirteen galleys) equipped and ready to defend the English coast and exert control over the Channel.

The Dockyard at Deptford

Henry VIII took a more ambitious approach to the navy than his father. His father had increased the size and power of merchant vessels, but these ships weren’t primarily designed for fighting on the seas. As the French and Spanish increased their military navies, Henry knew it was time for England to follow suit. England, after all, was an island nation; it only made sense for them to have a powerful fleet to defend against attacks seaborne attacks. He preached the need for an ‘Army of the Sea’ to defend the English coast, and he initiated a daunting building of a proper navy by commissioning royal shipyards at Woolwich and Deptford. His main focus was maintaining control of the English Channel; whoever controlled the Channel, be it England or France, had the upper-hand in being better suited to both repelling and launching invasions. As Henry’s reign lengthened, the navy grew larger: twenty-six ships were purchased fully built, an additional thirteen joined the fleet due to being captured from enemy combatants, and he purchased others from premiere Italian and Hanseatic shipbuilders. Most of his ships could hold two hundred sailors, one hundred eighty-five soldiers, and thirty gunners. Beyond building and commissioning new ships, Henry organized the navy as a permanent force with a permanent administrative and logistical structure funded by taxes and overseen by the newly-minted Navy Board. He founded dockyards, planted trees for shipbuilding, and set up a school for navigation. He designated the roles of officers and sailors and closely monitored the construction of warships and their guns. He fostered naval architects who perfected the Italian technique of mounting guns in the waist of the ship, thus lowering the center of gravity and making a better platform. Henry also initiated cannon foundries in England; by the late Elizabethan age, English iron workers used blast furnaces to produce cast-iron cannons that, while nowhere near as durable as bronze cannons, were cheaper to make and thus able to be more easily outfitted in ships. Henry funded these measures by misappropriating taxes and using money seized from monasteries during the English Reformation. Henry’s burgeoning navy would pay dividends not only in repelling a French invasion at the Battle of the Solent but also by enhancing England’s prestige. 

Henry's flagship, The Mary Rose, which sank in 1544 at
The Battle of the Solent

Two particular ships of Henry’s navy are worth mentioning. The Mary Rose, built between 1509 and 1511, was Henry’s personal flagship and the first true English gunship of the royal fleet. She was Henry’s crown jewel, but he was unnerved when she was outdone by Scotland’s Great Michael, which displaced twice the tonnage of The Mary Rose. Henry countered Scotland’s rival ship by commissioning the Henry Grace a Dieu, later known as Great Harry. Launched in 1514, she was, like The Mary Rose, equipped with gunports and heavy bronze cannons. The Great Harry was the first English two-decker, and she carried an impressive compliment of firepower: twenty-one heavy bronze guns, one hundred thirty iron guns, and one hundred barrel guns. The shipbuilding tug-of-war between England and Scotland opened the door to a new kind of naval warfare; the Great Michael, Mary Rose, and Great Harry were the precursors to the ‘ship of the lines’ built in the 17th, 18th, and 19th centuries. 

a cutaway of The Great Harry, England's largest ship
during the reign of Henry VIII

Most of the Tudor Navy’s ships weren’t as grandiose as those mentioned above, and a ‘tour de force’ through the evolution of European fighting ships is telling. In 1470, fifteen years before Henry VII brought an end to the Wars of the Roses by seizing the English throne, the main ‘fighting ship’ was a design of Spain and Portugal called the Caravel. Caravels were basically enhanced fishing vessels with a small stern castle, a quarter deck, and a poop deck (but no forecastle); they displaced around eighty to one hundred tons and were traditionally used as merchant ships. Two of Christopher Columbus’ ships were Caravels. Another type of Caravel, the Redunda, differed from the typical Caravel by the use of square rather than lateen sails. At the same time as Spain and Portugal’s Caravels, the English were using Carracks. Carracks had high masts with a massive main sail; the hull was deep and round with a high forecastle and a framework for an awning. The stern castle was placed high with a poop deck supported on wooden pillars. A barrel on the side of the ship was used for storing salted meat. Five small cannons were placed in the stern castle, and a small swivel gun was placed in the mizzen top. The Great Mary was a Tudor Carrack. By 1520, during the early reign of Henry VIII, Carracks began to be outdone by ‘Tudor Galleons’ called ‘Great Ships.’ These were titanic, impressive ships with many decks, large sails with top- and gallant-sails, and numerous cannon ports (such as was the case with the Great Harry). Most nations with a coastline had a ‘Great Ship’ of some sort if only as a showpiece; over time, however, as technology advanced, ‘Great Ships’ became less about showing prestige than about carrying the battle. It’s during the emergence of the Great Ships that carrying heavy guns and firing through open ports originated in naval warfare. 

clockwise from upper left: a Spanish Caravel, a Spanish Caravel Rotunda,
a Tudor Great Ship, and a Tudor Carrack

Henry’s first two successors – his son Edward VI and first daughter Queen Mary – didn’t pay much attention to the English navy. They saw it merely as a deterrent of foreign invasion. When Mary married Philip II of Spain, English shipwrights were able to examine the infamous Spanish galleons and implement sophisticated Spanish shipbuilding techniques in the English navy. The lessons learned would play a crucial role for the reign of the last Tudor monarch, Elizabeth I. Queen Elizabeth shared her father’s belief that naval strength couldn’t be slighted; when she ascended the throne in 1559, the navy consisted of thirty-nine ships grouped into five categories (a foreshadowing of the rating system that would be used in the Royal Navy), and Elizabeth maintained a steady building rate to bolster those numbers higher. It was a good thing she did, too: her staunch Protestantism meant that the good relations between England and Spain during the reign of her predecessor were a thing of the past. Protestant England and Catholic Spain set their teeth against one another, and Elizabeth made waves by supporting the piratical ‘Sea Dogs’ who preyed on Spanish merchant ships carrying gold and silver from the New World. Tensions with Spain ratcheted up year after year until they boiled over in 1587: her support of English pirates and the Raid on Cadiz in 1587 – in which the infamous Drake destroyed dozens of Spanish ships – led to outright war. The Spanish resolved to invade England, and to this end they launched the Spanish Armada. In 1588 the English navy, built up and perfected by Elizabeth, foiled Spain’s plans. After a running battle that lasted a week, the Spanish ships (or, at least, those that remained) limped southward to return, battered and broken, to their home ports. Though many factors played a part in the Spanish disaster, the poor design of Spanish cannons meant they were much slower in reloading in a close range battle, allowing the English to seize the upper-hand.

the Battle of the Spanish Armada 1588

Henry VIII, Part Six

Victory at Boulogne was offset by the fact that Henry hadn’t joined Charles V for a march against Paris. Charles’ campaign against the French capital, weakened by the absence of his ally, fizzled, and he was forced to make peace with France. The Emperor and his armies were ousted from the conflict; Henry and his forces were alone against France, and now France could afford to shift more forces from Italy to oppose the English invaders. King Francis resolved to pay Henry back for his multiple incursions onto French soil by commissioning an invasion of England. He readied his navy, and the ships set sail for the English coast, determined to visit deprivations upon the English dogs. 

The Battle of the Solent

In 1545 Francis launched an invasion of England with thirty thousand soldiers in more than two hundred ships, an armada larger than the Spanish Armada that would attempt a similar invasion forty-three years later. The English seemed ill-prepared with a meager twelve thousand soldiers and eighty ships, most of which were refashioned merchantmen. The French campaign opened with a bad omen: the flagship Carraquon perished on 6 July in an accidental fire while at anchor in the Seine. Admiral Claude d’Annebault transferred his flag to La Maistresse, but this second flagship ran aground as the fleet set sail. Leaks were patched and the fleet carried on, crossing the Channel and entering the Solent with one hundred fifty warships, twenty-five galleys, numerous transports, and eager French troops ready to attack Portsmouth and the English coast. Henry and his Privy Council had moved to Portsmouth to oversee the defense from Southsea Castle. The outnumbered fleet sheltered in the heavily defended Portsmouth Harbour, but on 18 July the English fleet sailed forth to hammer the French at long range. The French Admiral’s flagship came close to sinking due to leaks sustained upon setting out across the Channel, and though she avoided floundering, he was forced to transfer to yet another ship (his third in the debacle). The French counter-attacked the long-range English by sending their oared galleys, each with a single cannon in the bow, towards the English fleet. The English responded with oared row-barges that forced the French galleys to seek shelter amid their warships. Little damage was done on the 18th, and Henry dined aboard the Great Harry with Admiral John Dudley to plan the next day’s engagement.

The Sinking of The Mary Rose

The 19th was calm, and the lack of wind made it difficult for the sailed English ships to maneuver. The French sent their oared galleys in once again; this time they could easily outmaneuver the English warships that were practically crippled by the lack of wind. The galleys fired rounds into the English fleet without causing much damage, and come evening a breeze sprang up that allowed the English sailed ships to maneuver. The Mary Rose, flagship of Vice Admiral George Carew, boldly advanced only to founder and sink; out of a crew of at least four hundred, fewer than thirty-five escaped. The French claimed credit for the sinking, adamantly stating that a cannonball fired from a galleon holed her under the waterline; most historians, however, believe The Mary Rose’s crew forgot to close the lower gunports after firing a broadside, so that when she heeled over in the breeze, water poured through the gunports and the ship sank. Though the wreck of The Mary Rose has been discovered and meticulously researched, it was so corroded that all clues to her demise were lost. The Mary Rose, raised from the Solent seabed in 1982, is now on display at the Portsmouth Historic Dockyard; artifacts from the ship are on display at the nearby Mary Rose Museum.

Despite the sinking of The Mary Rose, the English repelled the French attack, and the French Admiral decided to try a different tact: rather than vanquishing the English fleet to make way for the invasion force, he’d drop the invading French soldiers at different points along the Isle of Wight and hope they could make inroads the fleet could not. Though the island’s population numbered only about nine thousand, the occupants were well-versed in dealing with invaders. The oldest among them remembered the frequent French raids and invasions of the Hundred Years War, and those in the prime of their life had been raised in an environment catered to repelling invasion. All the men underwent compulsory military training, and even women were trained as archers. On 21 July the French attempted to divide the English defense by landing at three different sites, but they failed in that they didn’t venture far inland or link up. The largest French force landed at Bonchurch, and the invasion went well: the French advanced inland, and though they were checked for a moment by Bonchurch’s local militia, they were able to scatter the resistance – though they didn’t follow up victory by pushing farther inland, and when the English rallied, they were pushed back to their ships. The English commander at Bonchurch, Captain Robert Fischer, was too fat to run and reportedly offered a hundred pounds to anyone who could bring him a horse. He perished in the battle, and some speculate that his last words inspired William Shakespeare’s infamous line in Richard III, ‘A horse! A horse! My kingdom for a horse!’ The third landing site was at Sandown; the cannon at the small fort of St. Helens had bombarded the French fleet but was easily captured, and the remaining English forces retreated while the French laid waste to the villages of Bembridge, Seaview, St. Helens, and Nettleston. The English militia rallied and attacked the French before they could dig in on the beach; a fierce battle broke out on the beaches and cliffs around the fort of St. Helens. The French leaders were wounded, and the invading soldiers retreated to their ships. A plaque in Seaview reads, ‘During the last invasion of this country, hundreds of French troops landed on the foreshore nearby. This armed invasion was bloodily defeated and repulsed by local militia 21st July 1545.’ To the north of Sandown, a French force had ventured inland but was pushed back to the ruins of Bembridge. They dug in and held off the English, but they knew their position was futile: the other two invasions had been repulsed, and it was only a matter of time before they, too, suffered defeat. The French decided to retreat, and they returned to their ships. The next day, on the 22nd of July, the French Admiral decided to abandon the invasion. This was unfortunate for another group of French invaders who, on the 23rd, landed 1500 troops near the town of Seaford forty miles to the east. They attempted to pillage a nearby village but were repulsed by local militia armed by longbows. They returned to their ships, and thus ended the last foreign invasion of English soil.

Francis I’s plan to invade England was foiled by both sea and land at the Battle of the Solent. France and England made peace in June 1546 with the Treaty of Camp, in which Henry secured Boulogne for eight years. Henry then ransomed the city back to France for two million crowns; he needed the money more than the city, for the French campaigns had been costly and England was bankrupt. 

Henry VIII, Part Five

Henry's overriding obsession was acquiring a male heir, but he was forced to keep one eye on the government at home and the other on affairs across the Channel. While his bedchambers operated like a revolving door, so, too, were the relations between France and the Holy Roman Empire on the Continent. Henry’s foreign affairs were bent on playing the two rivals against one another, so when the King of France and the Emperor made peace in January 1539, Henry’s international politics collapsed like a house of cards in a stiff breeze. He used much of the money acquired through the dissolution of the Catholic monasteries to build up coastal defenses, and he set some aside to fund a defensive campaign in case of a Franco-German invasion. It was with much relief that Henry received news of the collapse of the Franco-German alliance, and Henry moved quick to rebuild trust and friendship with the Holy Roman Empire. 

The Battle of Solway Moss, 1542

His political machinations resulted in an alliance with the Emperor, and he vowed to throw in against France in the ongoing Italian Wars. Charles had a good track record in competing with France, and the Emperor had promised to give Henry the province of Aquitaine (lost during the Hundred Years War) following their defeat of France. Such a seizure of territory would cement Henry in the annals of English history, and he greedily raised an army of forty thousand men to throw in with the Holy Roman Emperor. Henry would play his part by launching an invasion of France’s west coast, forcing her to pull arms and material from the Italian front. The invasion was planned for 1543, but before he could launch his army across the Channel, he needed to secure his northern border against the ever-rambunctious Scots. Henry feared that Scotland’s king, James V, wouldn’t sit idly by with the Henry and his choice troops across the Channel; after all, Scotland and France were in continual cahoots. To neuter the Scottish threat, Henry tried to warn James V against making a move against the northern frontier. He tasked the Earl of Surrey – who, as a youth, had been repeatedly imprisoned for rash behavior – with warning James V of any foolish maneuvers. Surrey, in keeping with his brash nature, scattered the Scottish army on 24 November 1542 at the ‘Battle’ of Solway Moss. Like the ‘battle’ of the Spurs earlier in Henry’s reign, this was less of a battle than it was a rout – there were few casualties (only seven on the English side!) but more than a thousand Scottish soldiers were captured. King James V of Scotland died weeks later. Henry wanted to unite the crowns of England and Scotland by marrying the Prince of Wales to James’ successor, Mary, who was born just six days prior to her father’s death. The Scottish Regent agreed to the marriage in the Treaty of Greenwich, but the Scottish Parliament rejected it. Peace could not be secured, and the next eight years saw continual war between England and Scotland. Though numerous peace treaties were forged, warfare and Scottish unrest continued until well after Henry’s death and into the reign of his successor, Edward VI. This ‘rough wooing’ will be addressed in the next chapter, but suffice to say for the moment that Henry’s plans for Scotland didn’t come to fruition, and he was hesitant to disengage from his skirmishing in the north to rain hellfire and brimstone across the Channel. 

The English Invade France

His inactivity irritated his ally, Emperor Charles V, and eventually Henry made good on his promises and launched a two-pronged invasion of France in June 1544. One force, under the Duke of Norfolk, laid siege to Montreuil; the other, under the Duke of Suffolk, laid siege to the French Channel port of Boulogne. The latter siege lasted from 19 July to 18 September 1544, and it would be one of Henry’s major successes. Suffolk’s landward siege of Boulogne was reinforced by a seaward blockade by the English navy. Henry joined Suffolk early in the siege to oversee the developments. The French hid behind the city’s walls, believing them to be impregnable, but Henry unleashed his cannons that devastated the outer walls; though the walls could’ve stood up to medieval artillery, Henry’s cannon turned them to rubbish. As a section of the outer walls collapsed, English soldiers poured into the breach and managed to take the upper town; the central fortified castle, however, remained intact, and French artillery and crossbows made any approach akin to walking through a rain of death. When the French broke out beyond the southern gate in a desperate counter-attack, Henry sent Suffolk to guard all the gates as the Earl of Surrey repelled the advance. Suffolk reinforced Surrey, and they repelled the attack, forcing the desperate French to bunker down in their central lair. 

The Siege of Boulogne 1544

Henry’s cannons could only dent the central castle, so he turned to an engineer by the name of Girolamo de Treviso to put the finishing touches on the siege. Treviso spent two weeks undermining the city, and it was a costly two weeks: Henry lost nearly half his army to dysentery, known then as the ‘bloody flux.’ The flux was spread largely by French prostitutes catering to English soldiers, and two thousand men died while another three thousand were too weakened to fight. Henry refused to ship the sick away from camp, fearing on the one hand that to do so would be to weaken the seaward blockade of the city, and, on the other, he doubted that the men were truly sick. He claimed that their problem wasn’t disease but cowardice, and he ordered the chief surgeon to tear the feebly sick from their beds and post them on the front lines. As if disease weren’t enough, hunger rattled the troops. They’d stripped the French countryside clean, and French peasants begged the soldiers for loaves of bread to feed their dying infants – and all the while Henry and his generals dined lavishly, enjoying fruits and meats. French peasants, and especially children, starved, and soldiers were forced to share their meager rations with one another. When Treviso completed the undermining of the city’s last holdouts, he detonated the mine; the explosion brought down the last defensive positions and killed Treviso in the process. The English assaulted the starved French soldiers, and the city’s Governor hurriedly presented the city’s keys to the English king. Henry promised to allow Boulogne’s citizens and noncombatants to leave the city unmolested.

A Recreation of Henry's Artillery Train

Boulogne had fallen to the English, but the victory was costly: half of Henry’s besieging force was lost to disease or battle, and he lacked the strength to continue his planned march and rendezvous with Emperor Charles V in Paris. Nevertheless he insisted the victory be celebrated in every house, for Thanksgiving masses to be held, and for ‘Boulogne’ to be printed on every herald as if it were a victory on par with Agincourt (a rather generous comparison). Victory at Boulogne was balanced out by a frenetic abandonment of the siege of Montreuil; the Duke of Norfolk fled the French city as the Dauphin, with thirty-six thousand soldiers, marched to relieve it. Henry, already en route to England, ordered Norfolk to reroute to Boulogne and reinforce Suffolk to hold the captured city, now vulnerable with its demolished walls, against the Dauphin, who would undoubtedly head there after hearing of Montreuil’s salvation. Norfolk disobeyed his orders, instead heading to the safety of English-held Calais; Suffolk, losing his nerve in the vanquished city, hurried to join him behind Calais’ fortifications. The Earl of Surrey, with a meager four thousand men, was tasked with holding Boulogne against the vengeful Dauphin. Despite being weakened and outnumbered and absent the fortifications needed to resist a siege, the English managed to hold fast against the Dauphin’s army in early October. In all fairness, the French were asking for it: midway through their assault on English-held Boulogne, the French troops turned to looting; this gave the English an opportunity to push back, and they were able to force the French to abandon their assault. The French, wounded in both pride and men, limped away, leaving Surrey large and in charge. 

Surrey would’ve done well to focus on rebuilding Boulogne against another assault; Henry ordered him to do precisely this, putting his energy into rebuilding the city’s walls and being careful not to provoke a French attack. Surrey, ever impetuous (as was evidenced by his ‘battle’ at Solway Moss in Scotland), rashly attacked a large convoy of French supply forces at Saint-Etienne, just a stone’s throw from Boulogne. He lost six hundred men, including all his captains and gentlemen whom he’d foolishly (but in good medieval style) put on the front line. An enraged Henry announced the tragedy to his Privy Council and summoned Surrey to return to England and be examined by the court for disobeying his orders. Surrey would have his rank withdrawn, but a still greater fall awaited him: Henry, growing ever more paranoid with age, accused Surrey of planning to usurp the throne from the future Edward VI of England, and he had him executed in 1547.

Henry VIII, Part Four

Thomas Cromwell, architect of the English Reformation

The first order of business after Henry's marriage to Anne Boleyn was convincing the English people, who were generally pro-Catholic, that the king’s maneuvering was legitimate. A series of statutes were passed in the so-called Reformation Parliament to legitimize the king’s actions and the rulings of the special court that annulled the king’s marriage to Catherine (who was adored by the people) and upheld his marriage to Anne (who was viewed quite negatively by the populace). Spearheading the Reformation Parliament were Thomas Cromwell, Thomas Audley, and the Duke of Norfolk. This process was completed by 1532, at which point the pro-Catholic Thomas More was forced to resign as Lord Chancellor; the vacuum was filled by the Protestant Thomas Cromwell, who would remain in power for eight years. In the 1533 Act of Succession, Catherine’s daughter Mary was declared illegitimate; Henry’s marriage to Anne was declared legitimate; and Anne’s issue was decided to be next in the line of succession. Next year’s Acts of Supremacy recognized the king’s status as head of the church in England, and this – coupled with the 1532 Act in Restraint of Appeals – abolished the right of appeal to Rome. The papacy had been at loggerheads with England for the past several years, but it was the Act of Supremacy that resulted in Pope Clement’s excommunication of Henry and Cranmer. 

The English Reformation caused huge swathes of division among the English people, but Henry moved quickly to squash any dissension. A number of dissenting monks, including the first Carthusian Martyrs, were executed, and even more were pilloried (publicly humiliated in a device similar to the stocks). Those high-rolling politicians and government officials who refused to take the king’s oath over against the Catholic Church were blacklisted and even executed; Thomas More refused the oath and was executed in the summer of 1535. The next year, the Dissolution of the Lesser Monasteries Act – in which Parliament authorized the ‘despoiling’ of Catholic monasteries for the enrichment of England’s purse – led to a large uprising in northern England. Called the Pilgrimage of Grace, between twenty and forty thousand rebels took up arms against the king. Henry promised the rebels that if they relinquished their arms, he would pardon them for their treason and thanked them for voicing their concerns; the rebel leader, Robert Aske, took the king’s offer and told the rebels that they’d been successful and could return to their homes with their pride and dignity intact. Henry, however, saw the rebels and traitors and didn’t feel obliged to keep his promises; thus when further violence occurred after Henry’s offer of a pardon, he quickly broke his promise of clemency. Close to two hundred rebels, including Aske, were hunted down and executed. No one had the nerve to rebel after that.

In 1538 Cromwell led a crackdown on Catholic devotees; their insistence on clinging to the ‘old religion’ was viewed as idolatry. His clean-up reached a pinnacle with the dismantling of St. Thomas Becket’s shrine at Canterbury. The papacy had watched the English Reformation with much concern, but they’d practiced restraint in their reactions; this, however, was going too far, and King Henry was excommunicated (again) by Pope Paul III in December of that year. Henry didn’t back down, and in 1540 he authorized the complete destruction of all saints’ shrines. The ball was rolling downhill, and it gathered speed: in 1542 England’s last remaining monasteries were dissolved and their property transferred to the Crown. Abbots and priors lost their seats in the House of Lords; only archbishops and bishops held their place. 

The Pope had excommunicated Henry, but that didn’t bother anyone – England was under a different ‘higher power,’ as it were, and the King was at its center. He became, in essence, England’s new pope, the supreme headship on earth over the Church of England. Henry, of course, didn’t embark on the Reformation to attain such titles; he simply wanted to wiggle free of Queen Catherine, marry his sweetheart, and sire a male heir. Nevertheless, the fall-out of his machinations are regarded by historians as his greatest achievement. Henry didn’t resist the new title, as it consolidated his perception of kingship, his innate egotistical belief that he had no superior on earth. On the other hand, Henry had been opposed to the Protestant Reformation that was sweeping through continental Europe, and he had been a staunch critic of Martin Luther. In 1521 he’d written a book, Assertio septem sacramentorum adversus Martinum Lutherum, in which he denounced Luther and made clear his dedication to the papacy (remember that he’d been rewarded the title Defender of the Faith). It’s not surprising, then, that the Church of England didn’t embrace Protestantism’s tenets; it remained largely Catholic in outlook and practice, despite differences in theology regarding transubstantiation and clerical celibacy. 

Cromwell was vicious in his institution of the English Reformation, and dissenters were hunted down and mercilessly punished. Treason laws entrapped those who dared cling to papal allegiance, and between 1538 and 1541 the powerful Pole and Courtenay families were destroyed by execution after execution for their efforts to stem the tide of the English Reformation (though it stands to reason that their blood, with tints of royalty, didn’t help their case: because Henry lacked a male heir, the Tudor dynasty’s position was fragile, and rivals needed to be weeded out). As the Reformation unraveled, and as lives were lost in the balance, Henry’s reputation before the masses suffered. One historian writes, ‘As heads rolled, the king’s earlier reputation as a champion of light and learning was permanently buried under his enduring fame as a man of blood.’ His marital adventures wouldn’t help his case, and, as it were, things weren’t going smoothly for him and his new and pretty wife. 

Though it's the English Reformation that has lodged Henry VIII firmly in the history books, it is his marital adventures that has rooted him firmly in popular lore (and made him a barroom laughingstock among the English people of his time). His mistress-turned-second-wife, Anne Boleyn, was a hellfire spirit, and though she and Henry enjoyed moments of calm and affection, her headstrong personality chafed at Henry’s autocratic leanings. As is so often the case, those very things that drew Henry to love Anne – her feistiness, her cultured rebellious streak, and her stubbornness – are the very things that made marriage difficult – especially a royal marriage, where the wife was expected to be submissive to her lord and to curry friends at court. Henry grew weary of Anne’s irritability and explosive temper, but he held out hope that she could do her job and bear him a son. On 7 September 1533 she gave birth to their first child, but to Henry’s chagrin it was a girl. Henry now had two daughters: Mary, from Catherine, and Elizabeth, from Anne (Henry would later declare Elizabeth illegitimate, but after Mary Tudor’s death, Elizabeth would be crowned queen and would reign until her death in 1603). Anne conceived again, and Henry bit his tongue; but the pregnancy was either false, or a miscarriage, and Henry felt betrayed by her inability to bear him a son. As early as Christmas 1534, he was in talks with Cranmer and Cromwell about how to leave Anne without being forced to return to Catherine. A return was rendered impossible on 8 January 1536 when news reached Henry that Catherine of Aragon had died; he celebrated by dressing in all yellow and putting a white feather in his bonnet. If things didn’t work out with Anne, then he would have recourse to try his hand at yet another suitor without his first wife getting in the way. 

Jane Seymour

The die, however, remained yet to be cast; Anne conceived again. Things took another turn for the worse in January 1536 when Henry was unhorsed and injured during a jousting tournament. When the news reached pregnant Anne, she miscarried and delivered a stillborn son. The recuperating Henry was devastated by the news – he had been so close to having a male heir – and his disposition towards Anne soured beyond the point of return. Once a cheater, always a cheater, they say, and though Henry hadn’t stopped philandering during his marriage to Anne, he now turned the whole of his emotions upon the twenty-eight-year-old Jane Seymour, one of Anne’s ladies-in-waiting.

The Execution of Anne Boleyn

Anne had fallen out of the king’s favor – and she was also running against many loyalists in the king’s court. Though the Boleyn family still held key positions on the Privy Council, Anne had made enemies not only with the powerful Duke of Suffolk but also with her own uncle, the Duke of Norfolk. In the international sphere, the Boleyns favored friendship with France over the Holy Roman Empire; but under Cromwell’s direction, Henry had become friendlier with the Holy Roman Emperor. The king’s shift in favoritism damaged the Boleyns’ power. As Henry soured towards his second wife, Cromwell leapt at the opportunity to cast shade on his rival Boleyns, and it didn’t take a genius to see what the outcome would be. Signs of the end came when Jane Seymour was moved into new quarters and when Anne’s brother George was refused the Order of the Garter. Allegations of conspiracy, adultery, and witchcraft against Anne began to surface, first as whispers in the royal court and then as serious obstacles to be overcome. The hammer began to fall between late April and early May when five men, including Anne’s brother, were arrested on charges of treasonous adultery and accused of having sex with the queen. Anne was then arrested and accused of adultery and incest; though the evidence was lacking, and though Anne was calm yet defiant against the charges, all of the accused were found guilty and condemned to death. Evidence, of course, wasn’t important: this was a political culling, and the details didn’t matter. Four days later Henry’s marriage to Anne was declared null and void. The charged men were executed on 17 May 1536, and two days later, at eight in the morning, the late Queen Anne was executed on Tower Green.

Henry wasted no time: the day after Anne's execution, he and Jane Seymour were engaged; they were married ten days later. Much to Henry’s joy, on 12 October 1537 Jane gave birth to a son, Prince Edward, who would become the future Edward VI. Jane, however, was unable to share in her husband’s joy: due to complications from childbirth, she died later that month. Henry took her death in stride, at least at first, but soon he began to long for his late wife. Cromwell went on the hunt for a new wife and settled on the twenty-five-year-old sister of the Duke of Cleves. Henry’s marriage to the young Anne of Cleves would garner him a strong ally in case of a Catholic attack on England, as the Duke of Cleves fell between Lutheranism and Catholicism. Cromwell liked the marriage because it would strengthen his policy for a northern European alliance against dangers from France and the Holy Roman Empire. 

Anne of Cleves

An artist was sent to Cleves to paint a portrait of Anne for the king. Henry was impressed by the painting and by the favorable reports of her given by his courtiers, and he agreed to marry her. Shortly into the marriage, however, Henry became enamored with the seventeen-year-old Catherine Howard, first cousin to the late Anne Boleyn and a previous lady-in-waiting like Jane Seymour. Howard was also the niece of the Duke of Norfolk, and Henry looked for a way out of his marriage to Anne of Cleves so that he could marry Catherine Howard instead. Though legend has it that Henry accused the painter of Anne’s portrait of having painted her in an overly flattering light, it’s likely that this was just a rumor, as the painter remained highly esteemed in the king’s court. Anne of Cleves didn’t fight Henry’s desire for annulment; she knew what had happened to her predecessor. She confirmed that their marriage had never been consummated, and Anne’s previous betrothal to the Duke of Lorraine’s son added support in favor of annulment. The marriage was dissolved without fanfare, and Anne did much better in the offing than her predecessor: rather than meeting her death in the Tower Green, she was named ‘The King’s Sister’ and given two houses and a generous allowance. 

Catherine Howard

Cromwell wasn’t happy with Henry’s preoccupation with Catherine Howard, since her uncle, the Duke of Norfolk, was Cromwell’s opponent. His opposition to the marriage stoked Henry’s angst, and Cromwell began to fall out of favor. He had plenty of enemies in court, and Norfolk’s newfound power as Catherine Howard’s uncle shifted the balance of power against him. Though Cromwell was never accused of being responsible for Henry’s failed marriages, he was eventually charged with treason, selling export licenses, granting passports, and drawing up commissions without permission. He was soon stripped of all his lands and titles and beheaded.

That very day – 28 July 1540 – Henry married Catherine Howard. He awarded her the lands he’d stripped from the attainted Cromwell as well as a horde of jewelry. Catherine had the same promiscuous leanings of her husband, however, and she soon had an affair with a courtier named Thomas Culpeper. She made the bold choice of employing her former lover, Francis Dereham, as her secretary; when the court was informed of her ongoing affair with Dereham while Henry was away, they sent Cranmer to investigate. Cranmer brought evidence of Catherine’s affair to the king, but Henry refused to believe it, even when Dereham confessed. The council badgered the king about it, hoping to pull the wool from over his eyes, and when he finally came around, he went into a rage. He blamed the council for the affair before isolating himself on a hunt. When Catherine was questioned, she insisted that Dereham had forced her to enter into the affair; Dereham returned the favor by exposing Catherine’s affair with Culpeper. Both Culpeper and Dereham were executed, and Catherine went the way of Anne Boleyn and was beheaded on 13 February 1542. 

The Execution of Catherine Howard

Henry VIII, Part Three

The Scots had been decimated at Flodden Field, and the French had suffered numerous setbacks in 1513, so it shocked many when Henry decided not to continue his hunt for triumph the next year. It wasn’t that he wasn’t invested; he just couldn’t afford it. England had become rich off Henry VII’s financial measures, but much of the treasury’s abundance had been spent on supporting Ferdinand and Maximilian during the French campaign. These two English allies hadn’t carried their weight, and the English coffers were running on fumes. Coupled with this, the Holy League fell apart when Pope Leo X negotiated peace with France. Peace in the east meant that France would be able to siphon more men and material to the west, making Henry’s adventures significantly harder. Henry sued for his own peace with France, and in the ensuing agreement he pledged his sister Mary to the much-older French king. Thus peace with France was secured for another eight years.

Mary had been previously pledged to Charles, the grandson of both Ferdinand of Spain and Maximilian of the Holy Roman Empire. Had that marriage gone through, she would’ve found herself queen of a large tract of land. When both of Charles’ grandfathers died (Ferdinand in 1516 and Maximilian in 1519), Charles ascended to the thrones of both Spain and the Holy Roman Empire as King and Emperor Charles V. When Louis XII died in 1515, just two years after claiming Mary Tudor as his wife, the French throne passed to his son Francis I. Thus continental Europe had three young rulers and a clean slate: Henry VIII of England, Francis I of France, and Charles V of the joint Spanish and Holy Roman Empire could forge a different future for Europe than the constant squabbles that had marked their relations thus far. Henry’s trusted councilor, Thomas Wolsey, encouraged Henry to pursue not only peace but a wide alliance. The resulting Treaty of London in 1518 united the kingdoms of western Europe and set them against the rising threat of the expanding Ottoman Empire to the east. Wolsey hoped that, with such grand steps towards peace, a final and lasting peace could be secured – but Henry’s competitive streak would make such a hope ill-fated.

the field of the cloth of gold

The kings of France and England were set to meet in friendship in 1520 at the Field of Cloth and Gold near Calaise for two weeks of banqueting, dancing, and jousting. The idea was that Henry and Francis could strike up a friendship and lead their respective nations into a period of peace and alliance; but Henry and Francis were too much alike, and they mixed like oil and water. Both were good-looking, powerful, and competitive, and both wanted to outdo the other and establish an unofficial ‘dominance’ moving forward. Both monarchs left the festivities brooding, resentful, and scheming on how to establish superiority over the other. Henry liked Charles V much more than Francis, and Charles didn’t like Francis at all. Charles thrust the Empire into war with France in 1521, and though Henry offered to mediate, these proactive attempts at peace came to nothing. Henry had to take a stand somewhere, and he threw in with the more likable (not to mention more powerful) Charles. Henry hoped that this new alliance would enable him to restore more English lands in France. Though the English did well in biting off small portions of Francis’ western territories, Charles landed a killing blow at the Battle of Pavia, in which he captured King Francis. With the French king in chains, Charles had all the means to dictate peace – and he swept the English aside. Henry, incensed that he was being excluded despite the gains he’d made, decided to pull England out of the conflict and signed the Treaty of the More with France on 30 August 1525. 

Francis I is captured at Pavia

Henry's aspirations in France were put on hold, but he had enough to focus on at home: her name was Anne Boleyn. As far as mistresses go, there was nothing special about her; Henry was known for having mistresses, as was typical (and expected) of kings. As early as 1510, within a year of his marriage to Catherine of Aragon, Henry was having an illustrious affair with one of the sisters of the Duke of Buckingham, either Elizabeth or Anne Hastings. Beginning in 1516 Henry had a more permanent mistress, Elizabeth Blount. There were likely more affairs, so Anne Boleyn was by no means the first. Catherine, no doubt knowledgeable of the king’s infidelity, was nevertheless devoted to her husband, and historians consider their marriage unusually good for the climate of the times. Nevertheless, Henry yearned for younger flesh (Catherine, remember, was six years his senior), and he was disappointed that his wife wasn’t doing her job by giving him a son who could become heir to his throne.

This isn’t to say that Catherine didn’t bear him children. She gave birth to a stillborn daughter on 31 January 1510, and four months later she became pregnant again. This time she had a son, young Henry, who was born on New Year’s Day 1511. Henry was ebullient, and he turned the birth of his male heir into a festive occasion, even including a two-day jousting tournament. Sadly, the young heir died seven weeks later. Catherine bore two more sons, in 1514 and 1515, but both were stillborn. In February 1516 she gave birth to a second daughter, Mary, who surpassed the death-dates of her siblings. Relations between king and queen had been strained up to this point, but Mary’s vitality reintroduced vigor into the marriage. Two years later Catherine became pregnant yet again, but this third daughter was stillborn. The next year, 1519, Henry’s long-time mistress Elizabeth Blount gave birth to an illegitimate son, Henry Fitzroy. He couldn’t be Henry’s heir because he was born a bastard, so Henry made him Duke of Richmond in 1525. It’s likely Henry was maneuvering to build Fitzroy’s legitimacy in case Catherine didn’t bear him a son; this is evidenced that by the time of Fitzroy’s death in 1536, Parliament was enacting the Second Succession Act which could have allowed him to become king if Henry sired no legitimate heirs. The bastard son’s death, of course, annulled Henry’s hopes. 

Anne Boleyn

The birth of a son to Henry’s mistress soured the king’s relationship with Catherine. If other women could bear him healthy sons, why couldn’t his wife? Blount may have been Henry’s long-time mistress, but it certainly wasn’t a monogamous affair; at the same time he was sleeping with Mary Boleyn, Catherine’s lady-in-waiting. Henry was introduced to Mary’s sister, the twenty-five-year-old Anne who served in Catherine’s entourage. Henry tried to get an affair rolling, but Anne rejected his advances (whether out of initial repulsion, fear of betraying the queen, or because she was cleverly working an angle on Henry, historians are divided). While Anne was giving Henry the cold shoulder (though perhaps with a tantalizing wink or subversively sensuous teasing), the king tried to finagle a means of siring a legitimate heir outside the bounds of wedlock. 

Henry’s obsession with an heir – what became known as the king’s ‘great matter’ – consumed him. As he saw it, he had three options: he could legitimize his bastard son, the Duke of Richmond, which would require intervention by the papacy and would be open to considerable legal challenge; he could marry off his one surviving legitimate daughter Mary and hope for a grandson to inherit directly; or he could somehow wiggle free of his marriage to Catherine and remarry someone of younger stock who could bear him a son. His increasing desire for the tantalizing Anne drew him towards this third option, and it wasn’t long before Henry’s mind was obsessed with annulling his marriage to the forty-year-old Catherine. If he was able to do that, he could take Anne as his true wife and have her (hopefully) bear him male heirs. 

Henry’s quest for an annulment would result in one of the most history-altering innovations in English history: the break from the Catholic Church and the creation of the Church of England. Historians debate the king’s motivations in spearheading such a revolutionary move, but it seems apparent that the primary motivation wasn’t religious conviction but manipulating (or, one could say, outright rejecting) the status quo in order to procure an heir and stabilize the Tudor throne. Henry was raised as a faithful Catholic and underwent religious studies; he was eminent in his studies, devout and intelligent in his faith, and his 1521 Assertio Septem Sacramentorum (or ‘Defence of the Seven Sacraments’) earned him the title Fidei Defensor, or ‘Defender of the Faith’, from Pope Leo X. In searching for a way out of his marriage to Catherine, he became convinced – or, at least, pretended to be convinced – that his marriage was sinful: by marrying his brother’s wife, he was in violation of Leviticus 20.21. This text states that a man who took his brother’s wife would remain childless; though Catherine had conceived a daughter, Henry didn’t think it counted as proof of Catherine’s innocence because it was only male heirs who could be counted as ‘legitimate children.’ He surmised that Catherine’s inability to bear a son was because of this sin; God was punishing him for going against basic bible teaching in marrying his older brother’s widow. In 1527 Henry approached Pope Clement VII and insisted that because his marriage was outside the bounds of God’s law, it must be annulled. The papacy rejected Henry’s reasoning and refused to grant the annulment. Henry’s back-and-forth waggling with the papacy resulted in an ecclesiastical court sent to England, though Clement VII advised his legate, Lorenzo Campeggio, to resist Henry’s machinations. The ecclesiastical court lasted nearly two months; it ended when the pope called Campeggio back to Rome, and it became apparent that the court would lead nowhere. Henry, whose last hope for annulment had been dashed with the failure of the ecclesiastical court, blamed his advisor, Cardinal Wolsey, for the failure. 

Cardinal Wolsey

Cardinal Wolsey had been near and dear to Henry’s heart for a while, but even before the failure of the ecclesiastical court, the relationship was in decline. The friction between the two began to heat up in 1523 when Wolsey called a parliament and failed to get a tax hike authorized. The next year, he attempted to levy a special tax, but his attempts led to such public resistance that Henry rescinded the levy. Both he and Wolsey claimed credit for rescinding the levy (with neither willing to take credit for implementing it), but Henry held the real power and made Wolsey take blame for the fiasco. The government’s financial state was struggling, and Wolsey made matters worse by attempting to reverse alliances overseas. The English cloth trade with the Netherlands suffered, and the reversal of alliances cost the English spoils of victory that could’ve been had with Francis I’s defeat and capture at Pavia. These blunders made Henry question whether Wolsey was up for the task at hand, and the failure of the ecclesiastical court was the final straw that tightened the noose around Wolsey’s fragile neck. In late 1529 Henry charged Wolsey with praemunire, or siding with the papacy against the king, and Wolsey was blacklisted from the king’s court. Despite a brief reconciliation (with an official pardon) months later, Wolsey was subsequently charged with treason; he wouldn’t stand trial, dying in prison while waiting for his case to be heard.

Henry VIII, Part Two

Henry VIII made Scottish blood boil when he claimed to be the overlord of Scotland. When England went to war with France, Scotland was forced by the Auld Alliance (her mutual defense pact with France) to attack England from the north. Relations between Scotland and England were (and continue to be) tenuous at the best of times, and Henry’s pompous rhetoric didn’t incline James IV of Scotland to seek a peaceful solution to the present difficulties. The Scottish king declared war on her long-time nemesis, and Pope Leo X – in cahoots with England against France – threatened James with ecclesiastical censure if he didn’t relent in breaking the last Scottish peace treaty with England. Rather than budge, James stepped up his game: he sent Scottish ships to bolster Louis XII’s French navy. James was excommunicated for increasing the hostilities, but he was unfazed; a war was on, and he had an ace in his deck: the Great Michael, one of the largest oceangoing vessels ever built.

The Scottish Great Michael 

The four-masted Great Michael was named after the Archangel of the Bible, and it displaced one thousand tons, carried twenty-four guns on the broadside, one basilisk forward and two aft, and thirty smaller guns. Her oaken walls were ten feet thick, and she had a complement three hundred sailors, one hundred twenty gunners, and close to a thousand soldiers. The Great Michael was originally commissioned to support a Scottish crusade against the Ottoman Empire to reclaim Palestine for Christendom; a ship as mighty as the Great Michael would be needed to offset Ottoman dominance in the Mediterranean. These plans changed when their commitments in the Auld Alliance forced their hand in a renewed ‘crusade’ against England. The Great Michael – along with the Margaret and James – were tasked with raiding English shipping before saddling up with the French navy. The commander of the squadron, James Hamilton, the 1st Earl of Arran, decided on easier pickings in Ireland. After plucking good loot in the western isles, the Scottish convoy ignored English shipping and sailed straight for their French compatriots. 

Back in the British Isles, James was planning a land invasion of northern England. Henry was besieging Therouanne when a Scottish herald delivered a letter from the Scottish king. James implored Henry to back off from attacking France, which was a blatant violation of their previous treaty. Meeting the herald in his tent, Henry declared that James had no right to summon him; furthermore, he ought to be England’s ally rather than enemy, since James was married to Henry’s sister Margaret. He added, ‘And now, for a conclusion, recommend me to your master 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 a man that began any such business!’ Henry’s ego, bolstered by his recent victory at the skirmish of the Spurs, seethed in his response – but, as it were, if Scotland invaded, it would be left to his Regent, Queen Catherine, to deal with the threat. He’d set up a northern English army in case of any such eventuality, and he trusted the defense of England to their skills. Henry, for his part, wouldn’t dare leave French soil and jeopardize his lofty ambition of seizing the French crown.

an array of late medieval/early modern artillery

James used vengeance for the murder of a Warden of the Scottish East March who’d been killed by John ‘The Bastard’ Heron in 1508 as pretext for his invasion of England, and he gathered an army of thirty thousand men supplemented with artillery. His ‘artillery train,’ pulled by borrowed oxen, included five ‘modern’ cannons from Edinburgh Castle as well as twelve ‘vintage’ culverins. King James IV, flanked by the standards of St. Margaret and St. Andrew, spearheaded the invasion. England wasn’t unprepared: Henry had engineered an army with artillery in northern England to counter any such hostile movements, and James – according to a sense of outdated-but-not-yet-extinguished chivalry – gave the English a month’s heads-up of his planned invasion, giving the English time to dig out the banner of Saint Cuthbert from Durham Cathedral (the banner had been carried by the English in victories against the Scots in 1138 and 1346, and the soldiers considered it a good luck talisman). The Earl of Surrey, receiving news of the Scottish march, bolstered the defenses by assembling more troops and joining those already staged in the north. When Queen Catherine heard about the invasion, she ordered Thomas Lovell to raise an army in the Midland counties and instructed him to reinforce Surrey’s forces. 

The Scots took a string of lightly-defended English castles on their jubilant march south. At Ford Castle, the Scottish leaders parleyed with the English; neither were willing to turn tail and run, so they began planning an official Day and Time to decide the course of the campaign by feat of arms. As they were working to pin things down, the Earl of Surrey moved his forces north of the Scots, cutting off their retreat; the Scots had to move their camp two miles to Branxton Hill, where their route of retreat wouldn’t be jeopardized. The armies closed in on each other, and Surrey sent a messenger to James to inquire about his readiness to play; James answered that they’d start the game at noon. 

an artist's rendering of soldiers from both sides of Flodden

An hour before the allotted time, English soldiers and artillery crossed the nearby Twizel Bridge to get into position. James, ever chivalric, decried suggestions of firing his artillery against the vulnerable English trotting across the bridge. The Scots, divided into five formations atop Branxton Hill, allowed the English – divided into two ‘battles’ with two wings – to form up on the water-logged, marshy plain below. James patiently allowed the English to make themselves good and ready, and then he ordered the Scottish host to begin descending the hill – and thus abandoning a prime defensive position. The English, seeing the Scots marching their way, began moving across the plain to meet them. 

The Scottish host descends towards the English on the plain

Most of the Scottish soldiers, numbering around thirty thousand, carried pikes (basically long spears) into battle; the English, numbering a little less at twenty-six thousand, wielded bills (a polearm with a hooked blade at the end). As the armies marched towards each other, the artillery from both sides opened fire. Because the Scottish artillery was situated atop Branxton Hill, their shots flew over the heads of the incoming English; the English artillery, parked on the plain, was able to scour the hill with plunging fire – and they made a mess of the Scottish advance. Though English longbowmen fired into the enemy soldiers coming down the hill, by this point armor had evolved so that most arrows were deflected or neutered; only a well-placed shot could kill or maim. The advanced armor, however, stood no match against artillery fire, and the English cannonballs gouged the hillside in washes of blood and body parts. The Scottish, seeing their shots shooting over their enemies’ heads, and suffering the attrition of artillery fire amid their ranks, grew concerned – and concern is never a boost in battle. 

a vicious contest between Scottish pikes and English bills

When the two sides met at the base of the hill, the English had the edge – and they continued to have the edge, due in no small part to the fact that their bills were far more lethal in the melee than the Scottish pikes. The pikes – described by a contemporary as ‘keen and sharp spears five yards long’ – didn’t fare well in the hilly terrain. The pike’s lethality came by creating an organized ‘hedge’ or wall of spear-points against the enemy, not unlike the phalanx of the ancient world. When pikemen presented a united front, only the bravest and luckiest soldiers could get through them. At Flodden, however, the Scots had become ragged in their descent down the hill, and the artillery fire had thinned their ranks and broken their cohesion. As the two sides came together, the English with their bill-hooks had the distinct advantage; those pikemen who were able to get a hedge of spears up were dismayed when the bills’ hooked blades were used to knock the pikes aside or to even tear them from the hands of their wielders. 

The first Scottish soldiers, led by high-ranking Scottish earls, were quickly repulsed and slain. As the two sides melded into one, the artillery fire slackened: the Scottish cannon weren’t hitting anything regardless, and the English didn’t want to throw metal into their own ranks. The English chronicler Edward Hall describes the vicious hand-to-hand fighting at the foot of the hill, saying that it ‘was cruel, none spared other, and the King himself fought valiantly.’ The King he refers to, of course, was James IV, as Henry VIII was across the Channel in France; and though James fought valiantly, he couldn’t steal victory from the jaws of defeat, and those very jaws closed around him. James was fatally wounded by an English arrow and the strike of a bill, and he died within a spear’s length of the Earl of Surrey. At James IV’s death, the meager Scottish resistance broke. Because no clear lines of retreat had been marked out, and because most of the Scottish officers were dead or dying on the field, the retreat devolved into a rout, and many were slain by marauding English cavalry. The Scottish artillery was abandoned, the gunners fleeing for their lives, so the English claimed the cannon and culverins as their own. The Bishop of Durham, laying eyes upon the booty, claimed a group of culverins called the ‘seven sisters’ were the finest artillery pieces he’d ever seen. The army treasurer counted seventeen captured guns worth 1700 marks. Defeating the Scots and slaying their king was a good ending, but the booty made it all the more worth celebrating. The Scots, of course, weren’t celebrating; the council of Scotland sent a hurried plea for help to Denmark, where the Scottish ambassador was asked how such a crushing defeat happened. 

The ambassador blamed the late James IV for dislodging from a prime defensive position atop the hill to attack the English on marshy ground; lesser blame, but blame nonetheless, was given to Scottish inexperience (not, he made clear, English valor). The ambassador also noted, rather wisely, that James made a tragic blunder in following the chivalric medieval notion of putting leading officers in the front line; the English, in line with evolving Renaissance tactics, held their leaders back from the fray so as to better orchestrate the battle. The loss of so many Scottish officers resulted in the panicked retreat turning into a disorganized rout. The Scottish ambassador recognized that the tactics of war were changing as technology advanced, and the Battle of Flodden (or, as some call it, Branxton Hill) serves as a sort of ‘transitional piece’ between medieval and early modern warfare in the British Isles. Because the Scots and English fought in brutal hand-to-hand combat with medieval weapons, Flodden has been called the last great medieval battle in the British Isles; this was the last time that bill and pike would meet as equals on the field of battle. In 1515 Francis I of France defeated the infamous (and, according to some, invincible) Scottish pikemen at the Battle of Marignano by using a combination of heavy cavalry and artillery. The days of medieval warfare were truly drawing to a close.