Henry VIII's Last Victim (41 page)

But nothing could douse the flames of Surrey’s ardour, not separation from his wife and children, not the threat of bankruptcy and political marginalisation, not even the prospect of alienation from his father. Despite all the hardships and sacrifices, Surrey felt Boulogne was worth it. He was, according to the final lines of an oblique poem he composed in Boulogne,

as restless to remain,

Against my will, full pleased with my pain.
⁴⁷

Such was the extent of Surrey’s vainglory and so warm did he feel from the glow of the King’s favour that he continued to work on his controversial coat of arms. Quite openly, ‘in the presence of the King’s Highness’s Council there’, Surrey had the new quarterings painted into escutcheons and forwarded to his agent at Surrey House.
⁴⁸
Around the same time he commissioned a new portrait of himself. Hussey’s second letter makes reference to it, stating that its progress was being held up because the artist was working on a portrait of the Queen. If, as is probable, the artist was William Scrots, a Dutchman who had recently succeeded Holbein as the official Court painter, then the work mentioned by Hussey may be identified as Surrey’s famous last portrait, an early seventeenth-century version of which now hangs in Arundel Castle (plate 26).
^fn4
,
⁴⁹

Here Surrey is depicted in full-length, standing under an archway. He seems to have just emerged from a ruined landscape. His fur cloak is still billowing. He leans on a broken column (a symbol of suffering and endurance), his left hand casually resting on his hip, his right clasping a white glove (denoting wealth and power) and pointing towards his codpiece (a sign of virility). On the plinth of the column, Surrey instructed the artist to paint a miniature of the Duke of Richmond. The broken pillar topos had previously been adopted by Surrey’s two literary heroes, Francesco Petrarch and Sir Thomas Wyatt. ‘Broken is the high column and the green laurel that made shade for my tired thought,’ Petrarch wrote as he mourned the loss of his lover, Laura, and his patron, Cardinal Giovanni Colonna. For Wyatt, writing
on the occasion of Thomas Cromwell’s execution, ‘the pillar perished is whereto I leant / the strongest stay of mine unquiet mind.’
⁵⁰

Why would Surrey want to resurrect the painful memory of the Duke of Richmond almost ten years after his death? Was he drawing attention to the bond of honour that he had shared with Richmond and now thought he shared with the King? Under pressure from his father and the rest of the Privy Council to cede Boulogne, he may have drawn strength from the chivalric vision that Richmond represented for him. Or could Surrey have been advertising his suitability for a role as the King’s other son’s
incitateur
, even, perhaps, his Protector? The portrait is complex and full of esoteric symbols, but Surrey’s charisma is unequivocal. He stands there as a hero, dressed in sumptuous Italianate clothes, adorned in the insignia of the Order of the Garter, staring directly out of the canvas as if promising that through his agency good things will arise from the ruins behind him.

It never seemed to have occurred to Surrey that his confidence may have been misplaced or that the King’s favour could be anything but permanent. Like Aeneas, whose story he rendered into English blank verse, Surrey had a destiny to fulfil. Yet only divinely ordained kings had the right to indulge grand visions. As long as Surrey continued to report successes, Henry VIII would be pleased to claim them. But if anything were to go wrong, it was the King’s prerogative to absolve himself from blame. There would always be scapegoats, as Wolsey, Cromwell and a long line of other faithful servants had shown.

‘God hath given you much of his grace, courage, knowledge of the war, liberality and good luck,’ Paget had written to Surrey in September, ‘all which, if you shall join in one and use together, you shall serve well the King’s Majesty and go beyond all your ancestors in honour and renown and give great cause of joy to all your friends.’ ‘But,’ Paget continued – and it was an important but – ‘among all other things forget not to give the praise and glory to God of all good that cometh to you, and so shall you prosper.’
⁵¹
God had so far graced Surrey with the good luck needed by all great military leaders. But as the new year approached and Henry VIII and his Lieutenant resolved upon a more offensive approach towards the retention of Boulogne, Surrey, as Paget had warned, had better pray, and pray hard, for his luck to continue.

^fn1
Throughout the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries, Norwich was the largest and most affluent provincial city in England.

^fn2
Surrey House was sacked during Kett’s Rebellion of 1549 and later fell to ruin. There is nothing to visit today, but the view from what is now Gas Hill is worth the climb.

^fn3
Overseas garrisons were magnets for prostitution, especially the following spring when the King suppressed the Southwark brothels. According to one soldier, ‘shameless prostitutes came at every tide from England’ and ‘descended on Boulogne dressed as gallantly as they knew how in velvet and silk of the finest cloth and the soldiers took them up so that no one could call himself worthy without a whore or two following him from every house like the sheath after the dagger’ (Gruffydd II, pp. 13–14).

^fn4
Later versions of this portrait also exist at Parham Park, Knole and Castle Howard.

14

LOSS OF REPUTATION

The favours of great princes (which exceed all bonds of moderation) were never durable. The sun arrives no sooner to his height but he declines again. The waters ebb when the flood is past.

Henry Howard, second son of the Earl of Surrey, 1583.
¹

ON THE NIGHT
of Wednesday, 6 January 1546 smoke was seen curling up from the valleys before Montreuil. It came from the campfires of du Biez, who was marching towards Boulogne with a great force. His destination was Fort Outreau and he intended to escort over a hundred wagons laden with provisions safely into the fort. Surrey’s recent raids had necessitated such a measure. In the past sixteen days over four hundred Frenchmen had reportedly died in the fort, ‘partly for want of victuals, partly for want of wood, houses and other necessaries’.
²
Surrey had written to the King only the day before about the ‘misery’ of the French at Outreau and had forwarded a plan ‘to famish the same’ into submission by encamping ‘so strongly in the strait in diverse places, trenched the one from the other, as no relief of victuals may pass’.
³
There was no time now for Surrey to implement his stratagem. To prevent the convoy from reaching the fort, he would have to meet it head on.

At the break of the following day Surrey sent an advance guard of around six hundred footmen to occupy the hill and trenches of St Etienne, a small village on the other side of the river that the French would have to pass on their way to the fort.
⁴
Surrey also ordered Ralph
Ellerker, ‘with all the horsemen of this town’, and George Pollard, ‘with two hundred that he brought the night before from Guisnes’, to scout the area further south and monitor the progress of the French. As they passed Hardelot, a culverin was fired from the castle. Pollard was struck in the knee and died soon after from his wounds. It was an inauspicious start.

Once Surrey received news that the French had passed Hardelot, he raised his banner and led two thousand footmen out of the garrison. Linking up with the scouts and advance guard at St Etienne, Surrey set his troops in order of battle. The majority of his force consisted of pike and billmen. He also had one wing of archers and two armed with handguns, known as harquebuses. On the right flank, blocking the path to Fort Outreau, Surrey positioned his horsemen. As the evening approached, the enemy came into view: four thousand footmen and around five hundred horsemen, including two troops of German mercenaries and two wings of harquebusiers.

Surrey was outnumbered and, bizarrely, his front line contained many men of rank. According to Surrey, they had volunteered for such a vulnerable position ‘because they were well armed in corselets’. Another, equally plausible, reason is given by Elis Gruffydd, who claimed that Surrey’s underpaid, undernourished soldiers had balked at the thought of front-line duty and, despite much ‘beating and shoving’ by Surrey and his officers, had refused to advance, ‘so that the Earl ordered the captains to go forward’.
⁵

Surrey decided to risk all. He ordered his cavalry to attack. Thundering down the hill, they managed to break through the enemy’s harquebusiers and charge directly at the French horse. Then, Surrey tells us, ‘their horsemen fled and ours followed the victory and killed and slew till they came to the carriages, where they brake four score and ten.’ Surrey scented victory. Over four-fifths of the convoy had been destroyed and the French were in disarray. The English front line now charged ‘with a cry of as great courage and in as good order as we could wish’. The enemy countered fiercely, encouraged, if one French commentator is to be credited, by du Biez himself, who ‘leapt down from his horse’ and ‘threw himself all alone’ at one of the English battalions.
⁶
With the handgunners on both sides falling back to re-load, the footmen of the second line found themselves at ‘the push of the pike’. Suddenly some of the Englishmen panicked and bolted. Seeing this, the back lines also began to flee leaving the front line dangerously
exposed. The French then turned on them ‘as cruel as wolves among sheep’.

Surrey tried to rally the troops, riding up and down the lines, crying ‘loudly on the people to turn and fight in order to face the attack, but they would not listen and only retreated faster’. Instead of seeking sanctuary in the trenches around St Etienne, the Englishmen were now so terrified of the French army ‘which was pursuing and killing without quarter’, that they continued their flight towards the river. There was only one crossing here, a small bridge known as Pont de Brique, ‘where there was not much room for men to cross together’. Wave upon wave stormed the bridge, desperate man after desperate man bent only on making it to the other side. ‘Many of the footmen were forced off the bridge’; those in armour had mercifully swift deaths; others were left thrashing about in the deep water, clambering over each other, screaming for succour and gasping for air. The men that did survive traipsed back to the garrison, ‘which they reached about nine o’clock at night like defeated men, one after the other’.
⁷

As soon as Surrey and the surviving members of his council returned to Boulogne, they threw off their armour and hurried to the council house where they drafted letters to Henry VIII and the Privy Council. There was ‘loss and victory on both sides,’ Surrey informed the King; ‘the enemy took more loss than we.’ There are no accurate figures for the number of French dead (the Privy Council said three hundred; Gardiner heard six hundred
⁸
) and accounts vary wildly over the extent of the English casualties. Surrey recorded two hundred and five losses; the Frenchman, Martin du Bellay, said that between seven and eight hundred Englishmen had perished and the Spanish and Venetians heard from their sources that the figure was over a thousand.
⁹

Surrey’s claim that du Biez sustained heavier losses than he seems dubious, but even if this was the case, it was the quality of men lost rather than the quantity that provided the more accurate barometer of success. The common soldier was expendable, but an experienced officer was a rare commodity. Accordingly, Surrey had suffered a terrible defeat at St Etienne for the majority of the captains and gentlemen fighting in the front line had been slain. Surrey’s list of dead officers is a roll call of top-flight military talent: ‘Mr Edward Poynings, Captain Story, Captain Jones, Spencer, Roberts, Basford, Wourth, Wynchcombe, Mr Vawse and a man at arms called Harvy. Captain Crayford and Mr John Palmer and Captain Shelley and Captain Cobham, missed but not
found. All these were slain in the first rank.’ Their loss, Surrey admitted, ‘was much to be lamented’.
¹⁰

The rest of Surrey’s letter attempts to play down the loss. He points out that less than twenty wagons had entered Fort Outreau and they only contained biscuit:

And thus beseeching Your Highness to accept our poor service, albeit the success in all things was not such as we wished, yet was the enemy’s enterprise disappointed, which could not have been otherwise done; and more of their part slain than of ours; and the fortress in as great misery as before; and a sudden flight the let of a full victory. And if any disorder there were, we assure Your Majesty there was no default in the rulers, nor lack of courage to be given them, but a humour that sometime reigneth in Englishmen.

Surrey’s next sentence alludes to the cause of this ‘humour’:

Most humbly thanking Your Majesty that it hath pleased the same to consider their payment, which shall much revive their hearts to adventure most willingly their lives according to their most bounden duty in Your Majesty’s service to make recompense for the disorder that now they have made.
¹¹