She said, ‘I thank you for everything, Master Shardlake. But I am on my own path now; let it lead where it will.’
I took her hand. The rough calluses formed by the years of archery practice were fading. I watched as Emma Curteys walked back down the path, to all appearances a young gentleman with a firm tread, a fine coat, short brown hair under a black cap. The dead yellow leaves swirled around her feet.
HISTORICAL NOTE
HENRY VIII’s French war of 1544–6 was probably the most disastrous policy decision that even he ever made. Henry has sometimes been portrayed as a ‘modernizing’ monarch, but his attitude to war harked back to medieval times. From the beginning of his reign he wanted the glory of the conquests in France that had garlanded his medieval predecessors. France, however, was now a united and prosperous state, with a far larger population than England’s.
Learning nothing from the failure of two previous attempts, in 1544 Henry invaded northern France in a shaky alliance with the Holy Roman Emperor Charles V. The objective was for Henry’s and Charles’s forces to converge on Paris, but Henry diverted his army to attack Boulogne, which he hoped to link to England’s remaining French possession of Calais to form an enlarged English territory. But when, after a long and bloody siege, Henry took Boulogne, his own forces were besieged there by the French army. Charles and the French King, Francis I, made a separate peace and the English forces were to remain bottled up in Boulogne for the next eighteen months, supplied with difficulty from England. Henry now faced the weight of France alone; and in addition France sent troops to its ally Scotland, against which Henry was already waging war.
The war was extraordinarily, ruinously expensive – to pay for it Henry sold off much of the monastic land he had taken from the Church in the 1530s, bled England white with taxation, and even debased the coinage through reducing its silver content, starting an unprecedented spiral of inflation. All sections of society were affected, but it was the poor, who had no power to raise the price of their labour, who suffered most.
In the summer of 1545 the French decided to dispose of the problem by invading England. This was a real and very serious threat; the French gathered a fleet with perhaps three times the number of warships England could command, carrying around 30,000 soldiers. The Pope contributed a ship. The enterprise was larger in scale than the Spanish Armada of forty years later. To meet the threat Henry ordered a massive levy of soldiers from the civilian population. Including militia and naval forces, over 100,000 men were put under arms – as a proportion of the population the equivalent of well over a million men today; a proportion of the male population comparable to that mobilized to resist Hitler’s threatened invasion in 1940.
Fortunately for England the French were poorly led by their commander, Admiral d’Annebault – like the English, the French always had aristocrats rather than professionals to lead their forces. If d’Annebault had concentrated his resources, it is possible the French could have gained control of the Isle of Wight, or, had they managed to land on Portsea Island, besieged Portsmouth as the English had besieged Boulogne. Large-scale amphibious landings are notoriously difficult, but there would have been, at the very least, serious fighting in southern England.
In the end, however, after the inconclusive Battle of the Solent described in the book, the war simply petered out and most of those levied went home to the harvest – though some were sent to the continuing siege of Boulogne. At the peace treaty of 1546 England was allowed to hold Boulogne – which by then had been reduced to a heap of rubble – for ten years. Henry was also awarded an indemnity that was a drop in the ocean of the vast sums he had wasted.
The war achieved absolutely nothing save the loss of the lives of thousands of soldiers and sailors; English, Scottish, Irish, Welsh, French, and men from other European nations. To that number must be added many French and Scottish civilians.
Six months after the peace treaty Henry VIII died. He left his children a legacy of isolation in Europe, continuing war with Scotland, religious conflict, inflation, national penury, and incipient social revolt. In the 1550s Boulogne was handed back to France and in 1558 Calais, England’s last possession on the continent, was lost.