Henry VIII's Last Victim (37 page)

To his office appertaineth the administering of justice, the punishing of abuses, the correcting of all disorders and to give every man his right. The High Marshal is to appoint the camping place, wherein he must have this ordinary consideration for wood, water and forage. He is to quarter the camp, assigning to the Quarter Master where the regiments of footmen shall be lodged and where the horsemen shall likewise have their places. He must appoint the watch and, surveying the places of greatest peril, he must give order to his inferior officers to have them furnish with requisite guard, directing the scout to places of most convenience . . .

When the camp shall remove, he is first to appoint the Scout Master to send out discoverers which way the army must pass, that must warily survey straits, copses and all places fit to hide ambushments and according as they find occasion, so to give intelligence. He must then signify to the Master of the Ordnance, and in like manner to the Carriage Master, that the artillery, munitions and all other carriages may be made ready and set forwards. He must then give order to the Sergeant Major in what form he will have the battle to march, wherein he hath to consider both of straits and otherwise of the nature of his passage, assigning both guides to conduct them and pioneers [sappers] to mend or make ways for the carriages and army the easier to pass.
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Co-ordinating the movements of two divisions comprising almost twenty thousand footmen and a thousand horsemen was no mean feat.
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Carts and wagons were needed to transport the ammunition, gunpowder, axle-grease, spades, shovels, scythes, crowbars, horseshoes, nails, rope, candles, tents (for the officers; the rest had to sleep in the open), harness, horse armour, the forges for the smiths, vessels for brewing ale and all the other baggage and paraphernalia required for the maintenance of an effective fighting force. The larger sections of the siege train were conveyed by gun carriages that sometimes needed as many as twenty-four horses to draw them. Ovens were crucial for baking bread, but those sent over from England were faulty and the horses ‘so evil that they be not able to draw one of them under fourteen or fifteen horses’.
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The marching pace was slow. Wagons and carriages were frequently held up or overturned by the rough terrain and there was the constant threat of ambush.

Planning the route to Montreuil and finding night quarters presented further challenges to Surrey. He had no detailed maps and had to rely on the advice of de Buren, who sought to preserve the border territories in the Low Countries from the ravages of a marching army. ‘We might have been at Montreuil three or four days past,’ Surrey, Norfolk and the war council complained on 4 July,

but we, knowing no part of the country, nor having no guides but such as they gave us, have been brought such ways as we think never army passed, up and down the hills, through hedges, woods and marshes, and all to cause us to lodge upon the French grounds, saving their own friends.

These practices invariably bred resentment and mistrust. Only yesterday, the letter continued, de Buren had recommended a spot within a couple of miles of Montreuil: ‘Whereupon, being often deceived, we, the Earl of Surrey, Lord Warden and Poynings went to view the ground, where was neither grass nor forage for horses and such hills and passages that it was impossible for the army to pass that way; and therefore [we] are enforced this day not to go so far, but to take another [site] near hand.’ The English had no choice but to liaise with their Imperial allies, who not only provided a division of troops, but also supplied them with food and drink from Flanders. ‘Though we speak quickly,’ the English acknowledged, ‘we must of force handle them with gentle words, or else they may displease us at their pleasure in keeping victuals from us.’
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Even when Surrey’s scouts did manage to locate suitable camping ground, the ‘strange and horrible’ weather conspired to disrupt their progress. Writing from Wymminghen, ‘this 5th foul night of July’, the English command reported that ‘by our own search, without help of guides sent unto us by the lords of those parts, we found yesterday (as we thought) a good way to bring us thither, yet this excessive rain hath so moisted the ground that we doubt very much (though the weather break up this day or night following) that we shall not [
sic
] be able to reach the place of a good time where we determined to have lyen tomorrow.’
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Nor were their problems alleviated when they finally arrived at Montreuil, for it was immediately apparent that the plans of the town that Norfolk had been given were wholly misleading. Far from being an easy town to approach, Montreuil rose on a high mound above the River Canche and was surrounded by flat lands that offered very little cover. The French had anticipated the siege well. The Governor of Boulogne, Marshal du Biez, had tracked the progress of the allied host and foreseen that the intended target was Montreuil. Accordingly he had hastened there with four thousand men from the Boulogne garrison and set to work on external defences and bulwarks. When the English finally arrived, the town was well fortified and
supplied. On 8 July 1544 Norfolk viewed Montreuil with the Imperial generals. The following morning he reported succinctly that ‘none of us ever saw so evil a town to make approach unto.’
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His misgivings were brushed aside by Henry VIII. The figure of four thousand Frenchmen defending the town was bound to be an exaggeration, he said. ‘My Lord of Norfolk knoweth well enough the counts the French make of their number which vaunt always commonly two for one.’ Norfolk, Henry argued, should have been neither surprised nor cowed by his findings. Montreuil was a frontier town and all such towns were well fortified. If ‘no man have courage to essay the winning of them’, then little good would be achieved in France.
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In other words, if Norfolk wished to preserve his honour and his favour with the King, he would just have to get on with it.

The following day the siege began, ‘but to say truth,’ Norfolk wrote, ‘not like a siege for they have two of their gates open and in manner one other at their liberty to go in and out all the night through’. Lord John Russell and the rearguard were encamped ‘in a little vale within two flight shots of the town, being continually visited with their ordnance very quickly’, while Norfolk, Surrey and the vanguard were lodged a little further away, ‘half a mile from Abbeville Gate, because,’ Norfolk explained, ‘I can find no place to lay my company out of danger of the shot of the town, nor scant sure there, for often they shoot into my camp.’ In the same letter Norfolk lamented the fact that while the town was well manned and armed, ‘we have but 4 cannons, 8 demi-cannons and 4 culverins, which the Burgundians do say is too little to make one battery.’ They were also short of victuals, ‘specially of drink’, and only had enough powder and shot for ‘8 or 10 days’ battery at the most’.
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Nevertheless, Norfolk promised to do his best and immediately set his sappers to work on trenches and a mount from which he hoped to batter the defences along Abbeville Gate. By 2 August he could report that work on the mount was progressing well:

We think it hath not been seen more diligence than made in raising our mount. There is neither lord nor gentleman but doth continually (as their time cometh about) labour in their own person to give example how the soldiers should travail. And there is ever both forenoon and afternoon four hundred men working thereupon and 600 other soldiers making of faggots in the forenoon and as many at afternoon. And all day 160 carts carrying of faggots to raise the said mount. The Burgundians do wonder to see the great diligence [that] is made here and the great pain taken of every part as well great personages as small.
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According to a Welsh infantryman called Elis Gruffydd, though, it was simply a face-saving operation. The English works were ‘as profitless as rowing against the wind and the tide’.
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The French pounded the English with up to a thousand shot a day, while at night they attacked the trenches in person.
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Montreuil never looked like falling. Too many gates remained open, making it easy for the French to reinforce the town, and although Norfolk heard that some of the enemy were reduced to eating horse-flesh and were ‘glad to eat of a cat well larded and call it dainty meat’, it was in fact his own men who were more likely to starve.
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The sheer size of the army, its distance from English territory and the length of the campaign meant that the English had to rely on a steady supply of foodstuffs from Flanders. Frequently, however, the promised provisions never arrived and even when they did, they were sold at such inflated prices that few English soldiers could afford them. Even before they had reached Montreuil, Norfolk was complaining that ‘we cannot get drink to serve our men by the twentieth part that we do need and yet that little we have, sold at so unreasonable price that no soldier can live off their wages unless they live with water.’
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,
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As the siege progressed, matters grew steadily worse. Demand within the camp rose, but supply dwindled as French troops, led by the Duke of Vendôme, executed a series of devastating attacks on the allied convoys.
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With provisions so scarce, Norfolk was forced to send raiding parties deep into French country where Vendôme and his men held sway. On the night of Saturday, 30 August Surrey rode out of Montreuil with a band of noblemen. They burned the walled towns of St Riquier and Rue and only had to advance upon Crotoy before its terrified citizens burned it themselves. On the outskirts of Abbeville, they had ‘a right hot skirmish’ with the French, but fought well and were able to withdraw ‘without loss of any man slain’. They returned to the camp before Montreuil at seven o’clock on Tuesday evening with ‘a very great booty of all sorts of cattle’. Norfolk, who reported these events to the Council three hours later, praised the ‘very honest journey’ made by
Surrey and his men. They have, Norfolk wrote, ‘made such an excourse that the like hath not been made since these wars began’.
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But it was a rare triumph and the spoils of their raid did not stretch far. Many of the soldiers were so hungry that they went foraging without escort. The Welshman Gruffydd kept a chronicle of his experiences at Montreuil. ‘I often saw,’ he wrote, ‘a dozen able-bodied lusty men seven or eight miles from the camp in orchards and fields without three weapons among them to face their enemies with; and sometimes one could see forty men without even six weapons to protect them.’ In one orchard not far from the camp, the bodies of some of them were later discovered hanging grotesquely from the trees, ‘after the French had crammed their jaws and bosoms with cherries’.
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The obstacles facing the English camp might yet have been surmounted had Henry VIII fully committed to the siege. This, however, he refused to do. The King’s priority was always Boulogne. Success there would almost double the size of the Calais Pale and effectively cut France off from the Low Countries, thereby reviving some of England’s early dominance in Europe. According to ambassador Chapuys, Henry VIII valued Boulogne above Paris itself and, on 14 July 1544, he crossed the Channel in order to prosecute the siege in person.
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Not only did Norfolk’s petitions for reinforcements fall on deaf ears, but he was actually ordered to transfer some of his own men to Boulogne. While the besiegers at Boulogne were given ‘enough cannons to conquer hell’, Norfolk and his men were left to suffer the purgatory of Montreuil alone. As Gruffydd noted shrewdly and with justifiable bitterness, ‘the King did not intend to capture Montreuil but only set them to lie there so that he and his host might take their ease and sleep more easily in their beds in the camp round Boulogne.’
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On 11 September Surrey and his half-uncle Lord William Howard set out for Boulogne with their servants in one last attempt to convince the King of the desperate state of their camp. As they travelled through the scarred countryside, peasants rushed towards the road and ‘cried piteously in God’s name for the help of a piece of bread to keep alive some of the little ones who were dying for want of food’. As Gruffydd, who made the same trip four days later wrote:

Their words and appearance would have made the hardest heart melt into tears from pity at seeing as many as a hundred people, old and young, with not one healthy man among them, but all shivering with ague, and death in their faces from the scarcity and lack of bread to strengthen them.
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Surrey arrived in Boulogne just in time to accompany Henry VIII to his viewing platform. Together they stood and watched as an English mine was detonated under the castle.
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The following day the acting Governor of Boulogne, Seigneur de Vervins, offered to surrender. It was, perhaps, with a tinge of regret that Surrey took his leave of the conquering party and returned post-haste to Montreuil. But he had encouraging news. Henry VIII had finally promised to send men and provisions to the camp. As Norfolk wrote in his dispatch of 14 September, the news was as welcome as it was timely: ‘The corn, now growing on the ground, doth begin to shake out of the ear . . . Also, our soldiers fall daily so sick, and in such numbers, that we remaining here shall have need of good reinforce[ments] as well of footmen and of horsemen, for our horses do daily die in great number.’
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