1544.] WAR WITH FRANCE. 441 men of this period we must consider what was the standard of opinion; and thence find occasion to be thankful that a higher standard has gradually been created, by which public servants, not of individual compulsion but of a necessary conformity, regulate their actions. Familiarity with bloodshed, with treachery, with pecuniary corruption, no longer has any support in a common example. But the guilt of political agents may appear less flagrant, because more in accordance with a prevailing spirit, when we are informed that one of the most zealous of the Scottish reformers did not hesitate to sanction the assassination which a ferocious noble proposed. Henry directed that the Scottish earls, with whom he was treating in 1544, should “cause the word of God to be truly taught and preached among them, and in their countries, as the mere and only foundation from whence proceedeth all truth and honour." One of the most effective preachers was George Wishart. From a dispatch of Ralph Sadler, in 1544, it appears that "a Scottishman called Wyshert" brought him a letter, the object of which was to state that the Laird of Grange and the Master of Rothes "would attempt either to apprehend or slay the cardinal, at some time when he should pass through the Fife-land." The persons named in the letter were actually concerned in the murder. But Wishart had been seized while preaching in the town of Haddington; and being carried to St. Andrews, was tried for heresy before a special ecclesiastical commission, and was burnt on the 26th of March, 1546. There may be a doubt, however slight, whether Wishart the agent of assassination was Wishart the martyr. But the zealotry of those times would sometimes shut out the natural perceptions of "truth and honour," even from the eyes of the pious and enlightened. Knox speaks of the murder of Beaton in a tone of exultation; and Buchanan records it without any expression of disapproval. Beaton was murdered in the castle of St. Andrews. On the 29th of May, between five and six o'clock in the morning, armed men entered with masons and other workmen coming in to their labour. The workmen were thrust forth; the household servants driven naked from their dormitories; and the cardinal, hearing the din, came out of his chamber and was slain. The town-bell was rung; the provost and townsmen gathered round the castle; the murderers appeared on the wall, and "speered what they desired to see-one dead man?" They then brought the dead cardinal to the wall-head and hung him over the wall by one arm and one foot, and "bade the people see there their god." + To complete our rapid view of the foreign affairs of the kingdom we pass from Scotland to France. In 1544 Henry went to his parliament with a long tale of his griefs. Out of his inestimable goodness, and like a most charitable, loving, and virtuous prince, he had for a long time loved and favoured Francis, the French king. He had freed his children from thraldom; he had relieved his poverty by loans of money. ungrateful Francis had withdrawn the pension which he had been accustomed to pay; he had confederated with the Great Turk, common enemy of all Christendom; and he had stirred the Scots to resist his majesty, contrary to their duty and allegiance. The king, therefore, declares his intention to But now the * State Papers, vol. v. p. 387. + Ibid., p. 560. 35 Hen. VIII., c. 12. VOL II. G G 442 * FRANCE INVADED BY HENRY. [1544. go to war with France as well as with Scotland-" to put his own royal person, with the power of his realm and subjects, in armour.” But inestimable sums will be required for the maintenance of these wars. The faithful parliament, by this statute, again sanction the same species of robbery that the parliament of 1529 sanctioned; and for the alleviation of such charges, declare all loans made to the king in the two previous years of his reign to be entirely remitted and released, and all securities for the same to be utterly void. Thus, with the proceeds of this swindle in his pocket, king Henry goes to the wars. He had previously propitiated the emperor, Charles V., by a compromise as to the succession to the crown, which recognised some claims in the person of the princess Mary, the emperor's niece. This was the third act for regulating the succession to the throne, which all persons were to accept and swear to, under the penalties of treason. The princess Mary had been declared illegitimate under the act of 1534. The princess Elizabeth had been declared illegitimate under the act of 1536. By this act of 1544, they were restored to their place in the succession, in default of issue of the king and prince Edward, but without any declaration. of their legitimacy, which would have been to declare the divorces of their mothers unlawful. The emperor and the king of England were now joined in a treaty for the invasion and partition of France. Charles was to claim Burgundy; Henry the ancient possessions of the Plantagenets, unless Francis would agree to certain conditions. The chivalrous French king spurned their pretensions; and so, in July, 1544, Henry put on his armour, and with thirty thousand men crossed the channel. The emperor was to enter France by Champagne, and the king by Picardy; and their united armies were to march to Paris. But no plan of mutual operations could detach the vain-glorious Henry from the pomp and circumstance of some gorgeous personal exhibition. He crossed the seas in a ship whose sails were of cloth of gold. He advanced at the head of the English and Imperial forces, to assist in the siege of Boulogne, which the duke of Suffolk was investing. "Armed at all points upon a great courser,"-as he is now exhibited in the armoury at the Tower,―he paraded his huge body before the besiegers, for two months. In vain the envoys of the emperor urged him to move forward, according to their compact. The emperor, said Henry, had taken some frontier forts, and he, the king, would have Boulogne. The lower town surrendered on the 21st of July. The upper town held out till the 14th of September. There had been a brave defence by the French governor against that portion of the English troops that were in earnest; whilst the royal showman was conducting his part of the business of war with the safer parade of a tournament. At length the great day of triumph arrived; for which he had broken faith with his ally. On the 18th of September he made his triumphant entry into Boulogne, which pageant Hall describes with a corresponding magniloquence :-"The king's highness having the sword borne naked before him, by the lord marquis Dorset, like a noble and valiant conqueror rode into Bulleyn, and the trumpeters standing on the walls of the town, sounded their trumpets, at the time of his entering, to the great comfort of all the king's true subjects, the same * See antc, p. 328. + 35 Hen. VIII. c. 1. 1544.] BOULOGNE BESIEGED AND TAKEN. 443 beholding. And in the entering there met him the duke of Suffolk, and delivered unto him the keys of the town, and so he rode towards his lodging, which was prepared for him, on the south side of the town. And within two days after, the king rode about all the town, within the walls, and then commanded that our Lady church of Bulleyn should be defaced and plucked down, where he appointed a moat to be made for the great force and strength of the town." But whilst the "noble and valiant conqueror" was listening to the trumpeters on the walls, Francis and Charles, with great wisdom, had concluded a separate peace. Henry had constituted queen Catherine regent, during his absence; and her letters to him show that she attended to his affairs with diligence, by sending fresh supplies of money and men.* returned to England on the last day of September,-in no very placable humour, if we may judge from a letter of the dukes of Norfolk and Suffolk, *State Papers, vol. x. p. 12. 444 ATTEMPTS OF FRANCE TO INVADE ENGLAND. [1545. and others, in which they entreat the council to avert his majesty's wrath, "in our departing from Boulogne as we have done; whose displeasure is death unto us." * But if Henry was slow in his projected march to Paris, Francis was the more ready to contemplate a march to London. There is a most curious letter from Vaughan to the king of England, dated from Antwerp. February 21st, 1545, in which he enters into a minute detail of a discovery communicated to him by a Flemish broker, of the mission of three spies to England, who were paid by the French government, to report upon the practicability of a plan of invasion. Two of these, who were men of Antwerp, had sailed in a hoy, with eleven packs of canvass, to be sold in London; where the third man was to meet them, in the house of a Fleming dwelling by the Thames. The first two had charge "to view the Isle of Sheppey, Margate, and the grounds between them and London; what landing there may be for an army, what soils to place an army strongly in." For, said he, "The French king purposeth, with his army that he appointeth, to land in the Isle of Sheppey and at Margate; to send great store of victuals, which shall be laden in boats of Normandy with flat bottoms, which, together with galleys, shall there set men a-land. He will send with his army no great ordnance, but small; and set upon such frame of wood as neither shall be drawn with horses, nor yet have wheels. This army the French king purposeth shall go so strong that it shall be able to give the battle; and is minded, if the same may be able to go through, to go to London; where (said he) a little without the same is a hill from which London lieth all open; and, with their ordnance laid, from thence the said army shall beat the town." The ambassador adds, "Where this hill should be so near London he could not tell me; but, as I guess, it must be about Finsbury or Moor-field.” † This tale of the spies does not appear to have been altogether a delusion; for Paget, the secretary of state, when in Flanders in the following month, received corroborative information. This project of invasion seems altogether founded upon rather imperfect knowledge as to the topography of the country. But such a scheme was not utterly hopeless; for the English government was sorely straitened for money, and the means of defence were of the weakest kind. The religious dissensions, and the bad faith of their rulers in all pecuniary engagements, had made the loyalty of the nation a matter of doubt. That the people would have rallied round the king's standard the instant that an invader stepped upon the soil we may be nevertheless certain. In the summer of 1545, however, Francis was making strenuous efforts for the invasion of England; and the coasts had been specially surveyed for defence by the duke of Norfolk. New bulwarks were being constructed, and decayed ones repaired, along the coasts of the channel. But the commonest appliances were wanting for an effectual resistance on shore. At Portsmouth, the works could not be completed for want of tools. "As for shovels and spades," writes the duke of Suffolk, we have had some from London; but as for mattocks we have had none." Money was equally wanting for defence. Wriothesley, the chancellor, writes that it is no use telling him, "pay, pay, prepare for this, prepare for that." He cannot pay. + Ibid., p. 302. * State Papers, vol. x. p. 114. Ibid., vol. i. p. 796. 1546.] PEACE WITH FRANCE AND SCOTLAND. 445 The subsidy is gone; the lands are consumed; the plate of the realm molten and coined. Corn is scarce and excessively dear. The country will bear no more tax. The king had drained as much as he could under the old plea of a "Benevolence;" and so little was there of the voluntary principle in the matter, that an alderman of London had been compelled to serve in the Scottish war because he was stubborn in holding fast his money. But the true defence of England was not wanting in this season of peril. According to a return of this date, there was a fleet in the channel, of a hundred and four vessels, carrying more than twelve thousand men. This fleet contained every variety of craft, from the Henry Grace à Dieu, of one thousand tons and seven hundred men, to the Mary Winter of Plymouth, of forty tons and thirty-two men. But of these hundred and four vessels, only twenty-eight were above two hundred tons. The fleet was in three divisions, the Vanward, the Battle, and the Wing. The watchword and countersign point to the traditionary origin of our national song: "The watchword in the night shall be thus, ' God save King Harry; 'the other shall answer,' And long to reign over us.'"+ There was an indecisive action off Portsmouth, in July, 1545; and a serious misfortune in the accidental sinking of a large ship, with four hundred men, in the harbour of Portsmouth. The Mary Rose went down like the Royal George. The king was on shore, and saw his noble ship laid on her side and overset. "It was not in the battle, The danger of invasion was soon overpast. The French sent assistance to the Scots; devastated the neighbourhood of Calais; and made the most strenuous efforts to retake Boulogne. At length a peace was concluded in June, 1546; one of the articles of which was that Boulogne should be restored to France, at the expiration of eight years, upon the payment of two millions of crowns, and another that Scotland should be included in the pacification. The remainder of Henry's reign was not disturbed by foreign warfare. The marriage of Henry with Catherine Parr, in 1543, was probably brought about by the party of the Reformation, as far as any party could influence the king's personal inclinations. Unless the lady had been of singular discretion her own religious convictions might have been as dangerous to her as her light-heartedness was to Anne Bullen and her impurity to Catherine Howard. The persecutions for heretical opinions went fiercely on, whilst the solid principles of protestantism were gradually establishing themselves in the minds of the laity as the knowledge of the Holy Scriptures came to be more widely diffused. But the anti-reforming party had contrived to interpose a barrier between the people and the day-spring. In 1543 an act was passed which limited the reading of the Bible and the New Testament in the English tongue to noblemen and gentlemen; and forbad the reading of the same to "the lower sort "-to artificers, prentices, journeymen, servingmen, husbandmen, and labourers, and to women, under pain of imprisonment.‡ * State Papers, vol. x. p. 830. Ibid., p. 814. "The Order for the Fleet." August 10, 1545. |