History of the English People, Volume IV

by John Richard Green

War with France.

The king's wrath at this overthrow of his hopes showed itself in a brutal and impolitic act of vengeance. He was a skilful shipbuilder; and among the many enterprises which the restless genius of Cromwell undertook there was probably none in which Henry took so keen an interest as in his creation of an English fleet. Hitherto merchant ships had been impressed when a fleet was needed; but the progress of naval warfare had made the maintenance of an armed force at sea a condition of maritime power, and the resources furnished by the dissolution of the abbeys had been devoted in part to the building of ships of war, the largest of which, the Mary Rose, carried a crew of seven hundred men. The new strength which England was to wield in its navy was first seen in 1544. An army was gathered under Lord Hertford; and while Scotland was looking for the usual advance over the border the Earl's forces were quietly put on board and the English fleet appeared on the third of May in the Firth of Forth. The surprise made resistance impossible. Leith was seized and sacked, Edinburgh, then a town of wooden houses, was given to the flames, and burned for three days and three nights. The country for seven miles round was harried into a desert. The blow was a hard one, but it was little likely to bring Scotchmen round to Henry's projects of union. A brutal raid of the English borderers on Melrose and the destruction of his ancestors' tombs estranged the Earl of Angus, and was quickly avenged by his overthrow of the marauders at Ancrum Moor. Henry had yet to learn the uselessness of mere force to compass his ends. "I shall be glad to serve the king of England, with my honour," said the Lord of Buccleugh to an English envoy, "but I will not be constrained thereto if all Teviotdale be burned to the bottom of hell."

Hertford's force returned in good time to join the army which Henry in person was gathering at Calais to co-operate with the forces assembled by Charles on the north-eastern frontier of France. Each sovereign found himself at the head of forty thousand men, and the Emperor's military ability was seen in his proposal for an advance of both armies upon Paris. But though Henry found no French force in his front, his cautious temper shrank from the risk of leaving fortresses in his rear; and while their allies pushed boldly past Châlons on the capital, the English troops were detained till September in the capture of Boulogne, and only left Boulogne to form the siege of Montreuil. The French were thus enabled to throw their whole force on the Emperor, and Charles found himself in a position from which negotiation alone could extricate him.

Growth of Lutheranism.

His ends were in fact gained by the humiliation of France, and he had as little desire to give England a strong foothold in the neighbourhood of his own Netherlands as in Wolsey's days. The widening of English territory there could hardly fail to encourage that upgrowth of heresy which the Emperor justly looked upon as the greatest danger to the hold of Spain upon the Low Countries, while it would bring Henry a step nearer to the chain of Protestant states which began on the Lower Rhine. The plans which Charles had formed for uniting the Catholics and Lutherans in the conferences of Augsburg had broken down before the opposition both of Luther and the Pope. On both sides indeed the religious contest was gathering new violence. A revival had begun in the Church itself, but it was the revival of a militant and uncompromising orthodoxy. In 1542 the fanaticism of Cardinal Caraffa forced on the establishment of a supreme Tribunal of the Inquisition at Rome. The next year saw the establishment of the Jesuits. Meanwhile Lutheranism took a new energy. The whole north of Germany became Protestant. In 1539 the younger branches of the house of Saxony joined the elder in a common adherence to Lutheranism; and their conversion had been followed by that of the Elector of Brandenburg. Southern Germany seemed bent on following the example of the north. The hereditary possessions of Charles himself fell away from Catholicism. The Austrian duchies were overrun with heresy. Bohemia promised soon to become Hussite again. Persecution failed to check the triumph of the new opinions in the Low Countries. The Empire itself threatened to become Protestant. In 1540 the accession of the Elector Palatine robbed Catholicism of Central Germany and the Upper Rhine; and three years later, at the opening of the war with France, that of the Archbishop of Koln gave the Protestants not only the Central Rhineland but a majority in the College of Electors. It seemed impossible for Charles to prevent the Empire from repudiating Catholicism in his lifetime, or to hinder the Imperial Crown from falling to a Protestant at his death.

England and France.

The great fabric of power which had been built up by the policy of Ferdinand of Aragon was thus threatened with utter ruin, and Charles saw himself forced into the struggle he had so long avoided, if not for the interests of religion, at any rate for the interests of the House of Austria. He still hoped for a reunion from the Council which was assembling at Trent, and from which a purified Catholicism was to come. But he no longer hoped that the Lutherans would yield to the mere voice of the Council. They would yield only to force, and the first step in such a process of compulsion must be the breaking up of their League of Schmalkald. Only France could save them; and it was to isolate them from France that Charles availed himself of the terror his march on Paris had caused, and concluded a treaty with that power in September 1544. The progress of Protestantism had startled even France itself; and her old policy seemed to be abandoned in her promises of co-operation in the task of repressing heresy in the Empire. But a stronger security against French intervention lay in the unscrupulous dexterity with which, while withdrawing from the struggle, Charles left Henry and Francis still at strife. Henry would not cede Boulogne, and Francis saw no means of forcing him to a peace save by a threat of invasion. While an army closed round Boulogne, and a squadron carried troops to Scotland, a hundred and fifty French ships were gathered in the Channel and crossed in the summer of 1545 to the Isle of Wight. But their attacks were feebly conducted and the fleet at last returned to its harbours without striking any serious blow, while the siege of Boulogne dragged idly on through the year. Both kings however drew to peace. In spite of the treaty of Crépy it was impossible for France to abandon the Lutherans, and Francis was eager to free his hands for action across the Rhine. Henry on the other hand, deserted by his ally and with a treasury ruined by the cost of the war, was ready at last to surrender his gains in it. In June 1546 a peace was concluded by which England engaged to surrender Boulogne on payment of a heavy ransom, and France to restore the annual subsidy which had been promised in 1525.

The Peace.

What aided in the close of the war was a new aspect of affairs in Scotland. Since the death of James the Fifth the great foe of England in the north had been the Archbishop of St. Andrews, Cardinal Beaton. In despair of shaking his power his rivals had proposed schemes for his assassination to Henry, and these schemes had been expressly approved. But plot after plot broke down; and it was not till May 1546 that a group of Scotch nobles who favoured the Reformation surprised his castle at St. Andrews. Shrieking miserably, "I am a priest! I am a priest! Fie! Fie! All is gone!" the Cardinal was brutally murdered, and his body hung over the castle-walls. His death made it easy to include Scotland in the peace with France which was concluded in the summer. But in England itself peace was a necessity. The Crown was penniless. In spite of the confiscation of the abbey lands in 1539 the treasury was found empty at the very opening of the war: the large subsidies granted by the Parliament were expended; and conscious that a fresh grant could hardly be expected even from the servile Houses the government in 1545 fell back on its old resource of benevolences. Of two London merchants who resisted this demand as illegal one was sent to the Fleet, the second ordered to join the army on the Scotch border; but it was significant that resistance had been offered, and the failure of the war-taxes which were voted at the close of the year to supply the royal needs drove the Council to fresh acts of confiscation. A vast mass of Church property still remained for the spoiler, and by a bill of 1545 more than two thousand chauntries and chapels, with a hundred and ten hospitals, were suppressed to the profit of the Crown. Enormous as this booty was, it could only be slowly realized; and the immediate pressure forced the Council to take refuge in the last and worst measure any government can adopt, a debasement of the currency. The evils of such a course were felt till the reign of Elizabeth. But it was a course that could not be repeated; and financial exhaustion played its part in bringing the war to an end.