Mary Tudor (37 page)

On 12 September Pope Paul was finally forced out of the war. His resources were quite inadequate to resist Alba’s armies, and the French were unable to offer sufficient assistance. The peace was greeted with bonfires and a
Te Deum
in London, but it made very little difference to the pope’s attitude to England, and none at all to his perception of Pole. Carne found it increasingly difficult to secure any audience at all, and the only positive result of months of diplomatic pressure was to recover the legatine status of the see of Canterbury. This eased the problems of the Church, and perhaps explains why Pole’s servants continued to refer to him as ‘legate’; but it was no consolation to the man himself. He continued to remonstrate in letters, and even invoked the intercession of Cardinal Carlo Carafa, the nuncio in Brussels, and a man for whose personal qualities he can have had little respect. Paul, however, was convinced that the Cardinal of England was a long-standing heretic, and had for years been the mastermind behind a great conspiracy against the Church in which Morone, Priuli, Pate, Flaminio and Vittoria Colonna had all been involved. It was a paranoid and quite unjustified vision, which lent every episode of Pole’s career a sinister twist, but, in spite of numerous representations to the contrary, the pope remained implacable.
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Because Pole was never formally arraigned, we do not know what the actual charges against him may have been, but they seem to have focused on his alleged Lutheran sympathies over justification. As long as Pole remained out of reach in England, however, there was little the pope could do. William Peto died in March 1558, and no attempt was made to replace him. By that time Paul had accepted, although with a very bad grace, that he was not going to get his way over the English mission. From April to June 1558 he was in retreat at the Belvedere. All papal business was hopelessly in arrears, and those in England who had looked expectantly to Rome to infuse new life into the Church were becoming increasingly disillusioned.

In the past, war with France had automatically meant trouble with Scotland, and since Mary Stuart’s French mother, Mary of Guise, had been regent north of the Border since 1554, the same was anticipated on this occasion. Mary, however, was not entirely in control of the situation, and the French ascendancy was not popular in Scotland. There is some evidence that the two governments considered themselves to be belligerents, and on 1 August the council in London informed the wardens of the marches that the Scots ‘have already entered into wars with us’ but nothing happened.
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Almost at the time of the formal declaration of war, the commissioners for the settlement of the endemic minor disputes of the border were in session. Hearing the news of the breach, the Earl of Westmorland said to his Scottish counterpart, the Earl of Cassilis: ‘My lord I think it but folly for us to treat now together, we having broken with France, and ye being French for your lives.’ That provoked the unexpected response: ‘By the mass, I am no more French than ye are a Spaniard.’ Westmorland replied carefully that he was indeed ‘a Spaniard’ as long as Philip was king, but the point was taken.
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Although Mary made careful provision for the defence of the north, even resurrecting the earldom of Northumberland for Sir Thomas Percy to that end, and a mobilisation was ordered in Scotland, there was no incursion. Instead, Mary of Guise was soon facing a rebellion that effectively tied her hands.
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The significance of Scotland in the ensuing conflict was rather different. Having exposed England to the danger of war in the north, the English council was of the opinion that the least that Philip could do as King of Spain was to declare war on Scotland himself. This the king consistently refused to do, to the embarrassment of Feria and the detriment of his relations with England. His Flemish subjects had considerable trading interests in Scottish ports such as Leith, and the only incentive for such a declaration would have been to gratify the English – which he was not inclined to do.

When Philip left England early in July, he was accompanied by an English expeditionary force under the command of the Earl of Pembroke. This was reported to number 10,000, and that may have been its theoretical strength, but the muster rolls disclose only 7,221 actual ‘effectives’.
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Pembroke did not have much experience, but he was high in the king’s confidence. His officers were a much more dubious bunch. Many of them were only recently reconciled to the regime, and Surian had probably been right when he wrote that the war was being used as an excuse to get them out of England. On the other hand, they all had something to prove, and that could have its advantages. As soon as they reached Calais, the king pressed on to join his army at the siege of St Quentin. Pembroke, however, did not go with him, because his commission also included a general oversight of Calais and its environs. For several weeks he was occupied there, reorganising and reinforcing the garrisons.

At the beginning of August both Philip and Pembroke were making progress slowly, Philip probably because he wanted his army to take the town before he appeared for a triumphal entry, and Pembroke (apparently) because his artillery train had been delayed and he was reluctant to advance without it. By 10 August he had reached Cambrai. That same morning, the constable of France, advancing incautiously to the relief of St Quentin, was ambushed and routed by the besieging army. This was a thumping victory, which left many French nobles and over 5,000 soldiers as prisoners of war. Philip himself (to his great chagrin) could claim no personal credit as he was still several miles off at the time. The town held out until 27 August, which gave the tardy English time to arrive, but after the defeat of the constable its fall was inevitable. Even so, it did not surrender, but was stormed, the English troops doing something to redeem their reputation by fighting conspicuously well.
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It would have been ungracious, in the wake of such victories, to criticise his allies publicly, but privately Philip blamed Pembroke severely for the tardiness of his advance.

The French field army having been temporarily destroyed, and the winter not far off, Philip was not interested in further campaigning, but rather in consolidating his hold upon the environs of St Quentin, which embraced several lesser but strategically important towns. The English could now go home. They mustered on 15 September and began to leave piecemeal soon after. By 10 October only 500 were left, and they departed within a few days. The treasurer of the campaign was William Whightman, the receiver of the office of augmentations for south Wales, and it is from notes that he left that we learn that this campaign cost £48,000, the whole of which was found by Philip, £37,000 from his Continental revenues and £11,000, rather mysteriously, from the ‘King’s moneys in England’. Because of this, Whightman never accounted through the English system, and if his original account now survives, it has not been found.
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It was probably the defeat at St Quentin that forced the pope out of the war a few days later, because he now knew that he could expect no further help from Henry. By October 1557, although his finances were in a bigger mess than ever, Philip had every reason to be satisfied. Not only did he have the upper hand both in Italy and the Low Countries, but the anticipated ‘second front’ from Scotland had not materialised, which eased the pressure for any decisive action there. On 15 August the news of the first victory was greeted in London with
Te Deums
, processions and so forth. The Archdeacon of London (John Harpesfield) preached a ‘godly sermon’, in the course of which he declared ‘how many were taken, and what noblemen they were’.
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Perhaps the decisiveness of this victory reconciled some of the doubters to the war. The number of soldiers required had not been enormous, and all those who responded seem to have been volunteers. There was also a certain amount of bonding among the military gentry from which Philip benefited. On the other hand there was a mutiny of unknown seriousness in the fleet, and orders were issued to magistrates in the south-west to round up men who had been pressed to serve and who had then run away.
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The late summer weather was bad again, and the harvest, although not as disastrous as those of the two preceding years, was again inadequate. It was perhaps inevitable that these acts of God should be blamed by official preachers on the people’s faithlessness, but there was good mileage in the counterargument that the Almighty was obviously displeased with the government itself.
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Moreover, in spite of the fact that Philip had borne the cost of Pembroke’s army, the government was swiftly in financial difficulties. By heroic efforts over the previous three years, the crown debt had been reduced from about £180,000 to under £100,000. Now all those gains were to be jettisoned. On a war footing, the fleet alone was costing £70,000–£80,000 a year, to say nothing of the escalating costs at Berwick in the north and at Calais. In September a privy seal loan was launched, which raised nearly £110,000 over six months, but there was plenty of resistance and a procession of gentlemen were hauled before the council for attempting to refuse their assessed contributions. In virtually every case the intimidation seems to have worked – but it did not make the regime any more popular. Moreover the shortage of money betrayed the council into a false economy that it was soon to regret. Having decided that the campaigning season was over for that year, and that in any case the French were in no condition to make any ‘attempt’, the extra troops who had been sent to Calais and Guisnes in July were withdrawn, leaving the garrisons seriously depleted.

In fact the weakness of France, although real enough in September 1557, did not last very long. Aware that his north-eastern flank was dangerously exposed, Henry decided to cut his losses in Italy and recalled the Duke of Guise to the north. They were both suffering from reputation fatigue, and on the lookout for some feasible counterstroke. By the end of October Philip had mopped up the small towns around St Quentin, and although his field army was in winter quarters, his position there was rightly judged to be too strong to be attacked. There was, however, Calais. Henry had good agents there, and was not short of information about its condition. Most of the fortifications had been extensively repaired during Henry VIII’s last war, just over ten years earlier, and although little had been spent on them recently, they were in reasonably good condition. This was not, however, true of the castle, which was less exposed to attack from the landward side, but whose condition was close to ruinous. When he learned in November that the garrison had been reduced, the French king could hardly believe his luck.

As November turned to December, French troops began to filter into Picardy. This was noticed by Philip’s spies, but the weather was exceptionally cold, and there was a general reluctance on the Imperial side to believe that any serious campaign was intended. Nevertheless Philip also picked up a warning that the target was Calais, a warning that he duly passed on to London, at least as early as 22 December. Lord Wentworth, the governor of Calais, also had his own independent sources of information, and these convinced him that the French objective was Hesdin – a suspicion that he duly passed on to Philip.
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He did, in fact, ask for assistance before Christmas, and then withdrew the request, causing considerable confusion. By 27 December the council at Calais was at last convinced that an attack was imminent, and that it did not have sufficient force to defend the whole Calais Pale. If (or when) the attack came they would have to pull all the available troops back to the town itself, and even then would have barely enough to defend it. On the 29th the council in London decided to send the Earl of Rutland to Wentworth’s assistance, with whatever force could be immediately available.
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The country had been for several months in the grip of a serious influenza epidemic, and this meant not only that fit men were hard to find, but also that there was a reluctance to summon them together for fear of spreading the infection. It was not until 2 January that Rutland had enough men to embark a relief expedition, and by then it was too late. Having ignored Philip’s earlier warnings, on 31 December Wentworth had finally sent an urgent plea to Philip for assistance. Philip duly despatched 200 arquebusiers, but by the time they reached Calais the town had fallen. Thus ended English control of any part of mainland France.

The French campaign had been meticulously planned by the Duke of Guise and his brother, the Cardinal of Lorraine, and it may well be that Wentworth’s complacency was fed by disinformation from the French commanders. Realising that the big threat to their success lay in the last minute arrival of English reinforcements by sea, on 4 January the duke took advantage of the fact that the marshes on the seaward side of Calais were frozen to make a lightning strike to seize Rysbank at the entrance to the harbour. They were only just in time. Rutland’s ships arrived the next day, and the earl was minded to force a passage, but his seamen refused to face the fort’s guns, which were now in French hands. The fortresses of Guisnes and Hammes were still under English control, but apart from them the Calais Pale was swiftly overrun. On the morning of 7 January, bombardment having breached the walls, Calais itself surrendered and Wentworth and 2,000 of his men became prisoners of war.
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