In 1511 the king’s mind began turning towards graver concerns of policy and war. The direction of his thoughts was fixed by his emerging conception of who and what he was. A convincing case has been made for regarding Henry as a practitioner of what has been called ‘Renaissance self-fashioning’: that is, the self-conscious construction of a public identity, or image as we would say. In the case of Henry VIII, that image was modelled on a royal predecessor, Henry V, as mediated for example through a biography translated from Latin and dedicated to Henry VIII in 1513. Henry V was one of the great exemplars of English, indeed of Christian, kingship, and Henry VIII had a lot in common with him. Each inherited the throne in the flush of youth from a middle-aged and unpopular usurper. Indeed, each inherited from a father who had outlived his usefulness through prolonged ill health. Thus each felt the need to establish his legitimacy and to secure his dynasty. Henry V pursued these ends through the zealous support of religious orthodoxy at home, and through a pro-papal ecclesiastical policy and a traditionally anti-French foreign policy abroad. Henry VIII did much the same. At home, he presided over renewed repression of the Lollards. Abroad, he looked to revive the glory days of the Hundred Years’ War through an invasion of France.
As a fit, strong youth, his head filled with dreams of glory and the great days of Agincourt, Henry was almost bound to enter upon war with France. Through the chronicles, and perhaps most of all through the ‘Agincourt Song’, Agincourt was still a living tradition, the ultimate testimony to the prestige of English arms. The myth of Agincourt was still potent when Shakespeare wrote his Henry V at the end of the Tudor century. When Henry VIII came to the throne, the battle was less than a hundred years past - as much part of the folk memory then as the Somme is now, if not more.
At first Henry faced an uphill struggle. His father had no taste for foreign adventures, having seen quite enough of France during his years of exile, and the conservative and clerical council which he and his mother had bequeathed to the young king was not the sort of grouping to fling itself headlong into continental conquest. Now twenty-one, Henry was not to be gainsaid, and one of the ablest of the clerics broke ranks with his colleagues. Thomas Wolsey had arrived on the scene as a junior diplomat in Henry VII’s latter years, on the coat-tails of Richard Fox, the Bishop of Winchester. He had a prodigious appetite for work, and seems in effect to have put his talents at the disposal of his new king, who in the company of his youthful jousting companions, men like Charles Brandon, William Compton and Edward Howard, looked forward to reviving the Plantagenet claims on French soil. Wolsey was the man who actually laid on the invasion, seeing to the tiresome details of supply and ordnance which were not the kind of thing gentleman-soldiers bothered themselves with. The emergence of Wolsey really marks Henry VIII’s arrival at political maturity. The old guard of inherited councillors was edged out. Richard Fox (Lord Privy Seal) and William Warham (Lord Chancellor) soon betook themselves into graceful retirement from politics.
If the driving force of the war with France was Henry’s ambition, the pretext on which the invasion was launched was not naked dynastic aggrandisement but the good of the Roman Catholic Church. Henry was able to combine self-interest with self-righteousness, making his invasion little less than a crusade. Louis XII of France, in pursuit of his own ambitions in northern Italy, had clashed with Pope Julius II, an enterprising reformer who believed that the renewal of the Catholic Church would be best served by a papal conquest of the Italian peninsula. In a quaint reversal of roles, while the Pope gathered armies to overcome the king, the king convened a council of the Church to depose the Pope. The Council of Pisa (1511) was something of wash-out - it was only attended by a handful of French bishops - but it gave Julius the chance to present his conflict with Louis as a religious war. His call for aid against France was a heaven-sent opportunity for Henry, and put his more peaceable clerical advisers in an impossible position. John Colet was a sufficiently representative figure of this party (though not at that time himself a member of Henry’s council). When he took it into his head to preach to Henry’s face on the subject of peace, the king took him aside and argued the case through with him, eventually persuading him to concede that the proposed conflict was indeed a just war. True or not, the story illustrates the problem for anyone who wished to oppose the war. It must have been very difficult for loyal churchmen to argue the moral or the pragmatic case against a war which had been authorised by the Pope.
The problems faced in early modern monarchies by well-intentioned councillors such as Colet were deftly sketched out by his friend Thomas More in the first book of his masterpiece, Utopia, which is of course not only a description of a fictitious transatlantic commonwealth but also a satirical commentary on European, and especially English, politics. The book’s protagonist, Raphael Hythloday, is invited by Thomas More to justify his refusal to join a royal council and thus place at the disposal of a prince his immense political wisdom, accumulated through years of study and travel. Hythloday explains that the sort of policies advocated by humanist philosophers such as him would be entirely unwanted in the councils of kings. While he would advocate peace and justice, a pastoral concern on the part of the prince for the common good or ‘commonweal’ of his people, the hearts of kings were set upon conquest and glory. The flatterers who surround kings would encourage them in their unrealistic ambitions, disregarding the fact that it was hard enough for a king to administer justice and promote virtue in one realm without adding another to his burdens. He illustrates his point with an imaginary account of a debate at a royal council table - tactfully making France rather than England his example. We should not mistake Hythloday’s cautionary tale for an account of debates at Henry VIII’s council table in 1512. Still less should we read them as an outright condemnation of the king and his policy. After all, Thomas More accepted a place on Henry’s council soon afterwards, putting into practice the principle which, in Utopia, he maintained against Hythloday: namely that those in a position to do so should accept service with a prince so that, even if they could not attain the best outcome, they could at any rate work for the ‘least worst’. But Utopia does offer us a fair reflection and assessment of the motives and interests which drove policies like Henry’s. In turn, the war in France vindicates the critique put forward in Utopia.
War with France was a traditional policy with a good pedigree. The nobility and gentry flocked to serve with their king, doubtless sharing his confidence that it would all be as easy as it had been for Henry V. Archers and knights were the key to Henry V’s success - along with the weakness of the French monarchy, where the king was a lunatic, and rival princely factions struggled for power. But the long French campaigns of reconquest against the forces of Henry VI offered a better lesson in warfare than the almost miraculous achievements of Henry V. The French reconquest had been a matter of long sieges, with artillery the decisive weapon. English troops began to cross the Channel in the early summer of 1513, and Henry VIII joined them in Calais at the end of June. Moving out into the Low Countries in July, they soon found that conquest meant the long hard slog of siege, not the short, sharp shock of battle. The ‘Battle of the Spurs’ (16 August) outside Therouanne, in which Henry ‘won his spurs’ in a glorious rout of French cavalry, was no contemptible feat of arms. But it was little more than a skirmish, repelling a force sent to relieve a besieged city. Therouanne was in due course taken and sacked, and nearby Tournai surrendered to avoid a similar fate. But at that rate the conquest of France was utterly impossible. It was only because the French king had ambitions of his own in Italy that the English made any impact at all. The sort of forces which Louis XII took into Lombardy in 1512, or which Francis I took over the Alps in 1515, would have made mincemeat of the English invaders. Nevertheless, Henry’s war was successful, and nobody criticises success in war.
Letter from Catherine of Aragon to the king’s almoner (Thomas Wolsey),
2 September 1513. Dated at Richmond, and signed ‘Katherine the Qwene’ the letter recommends that Louis d’Orleans, Duke of Longueville, who had been taken prisoner at the Battle of the Spurs fought on the 17 August, be conveyed to the Tower ‘as sone as he commethe’ for ‘it shuld be a grete combraunce to me to have this prisoner here.’
At this time Henry VIII was in France and Catherine of Aragon was ruling England as Regent in his absence. The Battle of Flodden was not fought until a week later.
If conflict between England and France was traditional, so too was amity between France and Scotland. The ‘auld alliance’ rested on the principle that your enemy’s enemy is your friend. Henry Vlll’s chief domestic concern once he had crossed the Channel was the prospect of a stab in the back from Scotland. To provide against this threat, he left Catherine of Aragon as regent in his absence, with Thomas Howard, Earl of Surrey, to provide whatever leadership in the field might prove necessary. Surrey, who had been one of the leading hawks on Henry’s council, had been devastated to be left behind. He need not have worried, as he seized his chance for glory. No sooner had serious campaigning commenced in the Low Countries than the expected Scottish invasion materialised. James IV led over the border one of the largest Scottish armies ever gathered. Surrey marched to intercept him, and on the slopes and ridges between Flodden and Branxton, the Scottish king’s tactical errors betrayed his forces to the greatest defeat the Scots ever met on English soil. James himself fell at Flodden Field (9 September), along with twelve earls and dozens of lairds and gentlemen. If we are to trust English estimates (which may in fact be inflated), then at 12,000 dead, Scottish losses were ten times those of England. Surrey’s reward was restoration to his father’s duchy of Norfolk the following year. The official English view of the Scottish king’s fate was that it represented God’s punishment upon him for taking arms against the cause of the Pope (and thus incurring excommunication). John Fisher was called upon to preach a sermon to this effect, lamenting James IV’s ‘ill death and perjury’, and it was not until absolution from the Pope was secured that he was granted Christian burial.
Letter from Henry VIII to Cardinal Wolsey, March 1518. The letter, which is a holograph, shows the affable side of Henry’s character.
The king addresses Wolsey as ‘Myne Awne good cardinall’, and continues on the same friendly note to thank Wolsey for ‘the grette payne and labour’ that he takes with regard to the king’s affairs. Henry sends the queen’s good wishes (‘most harty recommendations’), and concludes: ‘Wryttyn with the hand off your lovyng master, Henry R’.
Despite his victories for the honour of his crown and the defence of the Church, Henry found that he was unable to follow up his success owing to the collapse of the antiFrench alliance in Europe which had made his invasion possible. His chief ally (and father-in-law), King Ferdinand of Aragon, was manoeuvring for peace with France. The death of Queen Anne of France, though, gave Henry the chance for revenge, as he was able to offer his younger sister, Mary, to Louis XII as a far more attractive replacement. Ably assisted by Wolsey, who showed himself a consummate diplomat as well as a brilliant administrator, Henry certainly won the peace, though the value of his victory was reduced by the fact that the exertions of marriage to a demanding young bride brought the French king to the grave in a matter of weeks. On the whole, things had gone well enough, and Wolsey’s reward came in the form of a stream of ecclesiastical preferments. In 1514 he received in quick succession the bishoprics of Lincoln and Tournai, and then the archbishopric of York. The following year saw him add to this the Lord Chancellorship of England and a cardinal’s hat (at Henry’s request) from Pope Leo X. Wolsey was in the midst of the kaleidoscopic diplomacy of the next few years, alternately angling for war or peace at the lowest cost or the maximum profit for his king. The stunning victory of the new king of France, Francis I, at Marignano in 1515, which gave him control of northern Italy, threw Henry’s victories of 1513 into the shade and made peace the only realistic option. But at least the Treaty of London which Wolsey successfully negotiated in 1518, bringing together almost all the major international players, allowed Henry to pose as the peacemaker of Europe. Gestures like the recruitment of John Colet and Thomas More to his council enhanced this benevolent image, enabling him to present himself as an open-minded king prepared to give serious attention to the views of fashionable and at times critical intellectuals.
Not that peace was Henry’s real intention. He paid lip service to the treaty’s proposal for a European crusade against the Ottoman Turks, who were steadily extending their hold over the Balkans and the eastern Mediterranean. And peace between Christian nations was the theme of one of history’s most famous summit meetings, the Field of Cloth of Gold, near Calais, where Henry VIII met Francis I in person in June 1520. Yet beneath the genial gallantry and conspicuous consumption which filled three weeks of that summer so pleasurably, the real political tensions were building up. Henry’s mortification at being cleverly thrown by Francis in a wrestling bout said more about their relationship than all the outward show. Even as he was going through the motions of international peace and harmony at the Field of Cloth of Gold, he was secretly negotiating with the new Holy Roman Emperor, Charles V, for a renewal of hostilities. War recommenced for England with a raid from Calais into Normandy during the autumn of 1522, followed by a more substantial but no more successful campaign in Picardy in 1523. By now, the expenses of war were pressing heavily on the English people, and objections to taxation were voiced in the Parliament of 1523. Henry’s ally, Charles V, shouldered the burden of the war in 1524, but his stunning victory at Pavia in February 1525, which reversed the results of Marignano ten years before, aroused Henry’s martial spirit once more. Unfortunately for him, his people had reached the end of their
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