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.