Authors: Linda Porter
Mary Tudor (73 page)
The English military contingent of nearly 18,000 men, commanded by the earl of Pembroke, landed in July in France.They managed to miss the decisive battle on 10 August, when Montmorency tried to relieve St Quentin. His force was scattered by troops commanded by the man who might have been Elizabeth’s husband, the duke of Savoy. Montmorency was captured, along with many others, but the town held out. When Philip arrived, tactfully placed at the head of the English force, he found that St Quentin had still not fallen. Coligny put up desperate resistance for more than two weeks. On 27 August a massive assault was made by Philip’s troops, who won a famous victory. Mary was gratified to learn that 2,000 of her Englishmen were among the first through the breach. The news was received as a triumph in London, with more street parties and rejoicing than had been seen for a good while. The self-esteem of Henry II suffered a blow, but Philip had not the men or money to follow up his victory by advancing on Paris. Henry was left to sulk and to plot his revenge.
During the course of the autumn, the pope made peace with Philip, though the Holy Father nearly lost England all over again when he announced his intention to remove Pole as papal legate. He also proposed to try the cardinal for heresy. Mary wanted to be a good daughter of the Church but she was infuriated by this display of papal interference in her domestic affairs. For a while, it seemed that the woman who had so desired to heal the breach with Rome might be moving towards her own schism. It did not come to that, but Mary’s uncompromising tone to Paul IV shows her willingness to consider such a possibility: ‘she again prays and supplicates the Pope to restore the legation of Cardinal Pole, and to pardon her if she professes to know the men who are good for the government of her kingdom better than His Holiness’.
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But elsewhere, the queen’s position seemed strong. Any fears that the war would draw in Scotland, France’s traditional ally, were allayed when the Scottish lords refused to fight. Mary of Guise, the regent, was humiliated but there was nothing she could do. Mary Tudor, however, ended the year 1557 on a positive note.
During that year, Philip had been with her for barely four months. Once England committed to fight the French, there was no reason for him to stay. Mary was, by this time, realistic enough to accept it with, apparently, none of the distress of their parting in 1555. As king, Philip must command his troops. She knew he could not fight a war at her side in London. But she was in much better health and spirits than two years earlier, and so she accompanied him as far as Dover. They parted in the darkness of the small hours of 3 July, in the expectation that, if the war went to their advantage, they would certainly see each other again.
Perhaps during their brief reunion Mary found occasion to wear some of the dresses she had ordered back in the winter. One of these was the most extravagant gown in the French style Mary ever ordered. It was of white tissue with a round kirtle and sleeves also of tissue. Her husband might, though, have been more pleased with the Spanish-style gown of black velvet described in the April 1557 wardrobe accounts. It was furred with 23 sables, rather warm, one would have thought, for spring.
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Philip was not the only one to take his farewell of Mary in 1557.Two people she had been close to in difficult times, Anne of Cleves and Robert Rochester, died in that year. HenryVIII’s fourth wife was buried in Westminster Abbey on 4 August. She had lived quietly except for her appearance at Mary’s coronation. Anne, who had been comfortable rather than wealthy over the past 20 years, left small bequests of items of jewellery to her stepdaughters. Her relationship with them was one of the pleasanter aspects of the long twilight of her years as an ex-queen in England.
In Robert Rochester, Mary had been fortunate to have a dedicated servant with great organising ability, who was faithful to her from the moment he entered her employment. In his will, he left her
£
100, with the poignant comment that it was ‘a poor witness of my humble heart, duty and service’. Though he had benefited financially from Mary’s continued generosity to those who helped make her queen, there is, in his last words to her, a trace of the wistfulness of a man who knew that, in opposing her choice of husband, something intangible in their own relationship was lost permanently. Most of his estate he left to the Carthusian order, in memory, no doubt, of his brother martyred by Henry VIII 22 years earlier.
£
100, with the poignant comment that it was ‘a poor witness of my humble heart, duty and service’. Though he had benefited financially from Mary’s continued generosity to those who helped make her queen, there is, in his last words to her, a trace of the wistfulness of a man who knew that, in opposing her choice of husband, something intangible in their own relationship was lost permanently. Most of his estate he left to the Carthusian order, in memory, no doubt, of his brother martyred by Henry VIII 22 years earlier.
The successes of the summer campaign in northern France were very expensive for England, even if they did inflict on Henry II the most humiliating military defeat suffered by France in the 16th century. Mary’s government knew that the French king would strike back when he could.Yet no one in London wanted to think too much about the implications.The English contingent returned home and Philip’s force, reduced for the season, retired across the border into Artois (a region that later became part of northern France). Philip was desperately short of cash to pay his soldiers and could not afford to maintain a large army.There would, in any case, be a breathing space.Winter was not a time for warfare.
The French believed otherwise. Throughout the autumn of 1557, they prepared their revenge. Then, on the morning of New Year’s Day 1558, Nicholas Alexander, commanding a tiny force of 13 men at Newnham Bridge, awoke to find a force of more than twenty thousand Frenchmen approaching him across the frozen marshes. His fort was situated on a causeway, the main defence on the land side of Calais. It was well stocked with arms, but Alexander knew it could not be defended without reinforcements. He consulted Lord Wentworth, the lord deputy of Calais, and the decision was taken to abandon Newnham Bridge and to fall back into the town.
Meanwhile Duke Francis of Guise, commanding the French army, divided his force, sending one part out to the coast, with orders to proceed through the sand dunes to the fort of Rysbank, which protected Calais on the seaward side. It surrendered, again without a fight, on 2 January. The next day, a few miles to the east at Hammes, another of the forts in the Pale of Calais, Edward Dudley, brother of the man whose dreams of invading England had come to naught in 1556, wrote desperately to Wentworth: ‘and surely if I had been better appointed with horsemen and footmen, I would have trusted … to have been the deaths of many more [Frenchmen]’.
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He, at least, had tried to put up resistance. But the tone of his dispatch makes it quite clear that he did not expect that help would arrive.
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He, at least, had tried to put up resistance. But the tone of his dispatch makes it quite clear that he did not expect that help would arrive.
The town of Calais itself was now at the mercy of the French artillery. For five days after the fall of Rysbank, the guns bombarded the old, badly fortified castle. In the town, the English fought with more conviction, but the loss of life and overwhelming numerical superiority of the French merely delayed the inevitable.Wentworth surrendered, and on 7 January Guise wrote to the mayor of Amiens, the town responsible for supplying the French army with food, to tell him the great news.‘It has’, he said, ‘pleased God to favour so greatly the enterprise that the king commanded … that He has restored to the crown that which was taken by the English’. The French then ransacked the town, house by house, and turned its inhabitants out into the countryside to fend for themselves as best they could in the dire weather. Calais had been in English hands since 1340. No wonder the French court was beside itself with joy when the news reached Henry II on 9 January. It looked as if his confidence in a bold strike at this most inauspicious time of the year had paid off, despite the initial misgivings of Duke Francis himself.
But all was not quite over yet. A third major fortress, Guisnes, was commanded by Lord Grey of Wilton, and he was determined not to surrender. He was also the only commander in the Pale of Calais to receive any help from King Philip’s troops in the nearby Habsburg-held town of Gravelines. Grey defied the French until 21 January, when his troops threatened to throw him over the walls, telling him that ‘for his vain glory they would not sell their lives’. Grey capitulated, and he eventually became the prisoner of the count de la Rochefoucauld, who demanded 25,000 crowns for his release. Elizabeth loaned him
£
8,000 in 1559 and he regained his freedom, but struggled to repay his debt. He was, however, the only commander to emerge from the debacle of the fall of Calais with his reputation intact.
£
8,000 in 1559 and he regained his freedom, but struggled to repay his debt. He was, however, the only commander to emerge from the debacle of the fall of Calais with his reputation intact.
The loss of Calais is one of the greatest reproaches that history has aimed at Mary. England had a presence in France for centuries; this woman, so nationalist historians have lamented, presided over nothing less than the final demise of an empire. It was also, as tradition goes, the major regret of her life. But there is no evidence that she ever spoke the words attributed to her - ‘When I am dead and opened you will find Calais lying in my heart.’ At the time, the loss of this last piece of English territory in France was blamed on treason and cowardice. This was a convenient explanation, and perhaps contains elements of the truth, but it is far from being the whole story. For Calais had been nothing more than a token of English territory on the European continent for many years. And it was an expensive and potentially dangerous one at that.
The Pale was a small area, 20 miles by six.The town of Calais was not well fortified but the outer forts were in reasonably good shape, though woefully undermanned. Keeping up the defences of the area and ensuring an adequate food supply for the more than four thousand people who lived there cost a great deal of money and, as the trading status of Calais declined, successive English governments were reluctant to commit the necessary funds. By 1540, the rising price of raw wool and instability in the international markets meant that there were only 150 Merchants of the Staple still operating in Calais. The town had never been totally anglicised and was, in the 1550s, home to a considerable population of French religious dissenters who did not like Mary any more than they liked Henry II. Their numbers, and their disaffection, were swelled by English Protestant exiles. After Boulogne was returned to the French by Edward VI, the restoration of Calais became a priority for Henry II. The defeat at St Quentin in 1557, far from securing the town’s future, meant that its survival as an English possession was actually to be counted in mere months.The French king committed himself tirelessly in the autumn of that year to planning his campaign of recapture. General rumour and more specific information from spies warned the council in London and the garrison in Calais that it was only a matter of time before the French moved against them. Philip was also well aware of these intentions. But nobody did anything. Instead, there was a collective reliance on the impossibility of a serious campaign in winter.This proved to be a disastrous miscalculation.
Part of the blame must attach to Lord Wentworth, at 33 comparatively young and untried for what turned out to be such a demanding role as the last lord deputy of Calais. His undoubted Protestant leanings made him a dubious choice for the job and it is impossible to say how much they may have influenced his behaviour. Probably, though, he was simply lulled, like everyone else, into a false sense of security. Wishful thinking convinced him that though there were reports of large numbers of French forces in the area, Calais was not the target. It was more comforting to believe that Guise would attack the imperial enclave at Hesdin, just to the south of Boulogne. Back in London, a relieved group of privy councillors, who probably saw the Scottish campaign as a priority, rather naively accepted this view. Not till the last day of 1557 does Wentworth really seem to have embraced the threat he faced. Even then he did not use his most potent weapon, which was to open the sluice gates and flood the marshes around Calais completely. He explained his reluctance to do this in a letter to Mary on 2 January: ‘I would also take in the salt water about the town, but I cannot do it, by reason I should infect our own water, wherewith we brew; and notwithstanding all I can do, our brewers be so behindhand in grinding and otherwise, as we shall find that one of our greatest lacks.’
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Nor, despite his subsequent claims, does he seem to have requested help from Philip until the French were besieging him.
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Nor, despite his subsequent claims, does he seem to have requested help from Philip until the French were besieging him.
Back in England, the Christmas period saw a number of absences from the privy council, which failed to take decisive action until the meeting of 1 January, when the earl of Rutland was ordered across to France with 500 men from Kent. But the sailors, hearing that the fortress at Rysbank had fallen by the time they arrived, refused to land. On 5 January, with the leading earls, such as Arundel, Pembroke and Shrewsbury, returned to London, the council ordered mass levies of soldiers nationwide and the impressment of all shipping. This action could not have got a significant force to Calais before Wentworth surrendered, though it might have made it difficult for the French to hold the town. But the weather had one devastating trick still to play. On the night of 9/10 January one of the worst storms in recent memory howled through the Channel, scattering the English fleet. All hope of immediate re-invasion was abandoned and Henry II made a triumphant entry into the town on 24 January.There was still talk of recovering Calais a year later but the French were adamant that they would never part with it, no matter what diplomatic seductions were offered.
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