The New World (Complete Edition). Winston Churchill

of the Spurs, so called because of the rapidity of the French retreat. Bayard, the most famous knight in Europe, was captured, together with a host of French notables. Tournai, the richest city of all North-East France, surrendered at the mere sight of the Imperial artillery, and was occupied by an English garrison. To crown all, Queen Catherine, who had been left behind as Regent of England, sent great news from the North.

      To aid their French ally the Scots in the King’s absence had crossed the Tweed in September and invaded England with an army of fifty thousand men. Thomas Howard, Earl of Surrey, son of Richard III’s Duke of Norfolk, slain at Bosworth, and still under the family attainder, was none the less entrusted with the command. This skilful veteran, the only experienced general left in England after Dorset’s failure, knowing every inch of the ground, did not hesitate to march round the Scottish army, and, although outnumbered by two to one, placed himself between the enemy and Edinburgh. At Flodden Field a bloody battle was fought on September 9, 1513. Both armies faced their homeland. The whole of Scotland, Highland and Lowland alike, drew out with their retainers in the traditional schiltrons, or circles of spearmen, and around the standard of their King. The English archers once again directed upon these redoubtable masses a long, intense, and murderous arrow storm. Moreover, the bills or axes in the hands of English infantry were highly effective against the Scottish spears in hand-to-hand assault, while the English cavalry awaited the chance of piercing the gaps caused by slaughter. When night fell the flower of the Scottish chivalry lay in their ranks where they had fought, and among them King James IV. This was the last great victory gained by the long-bow. Surrey was rewarded by the restoration of the Norfolk dukedom. In Scotland a year-old child succeeded to the throne as James V. His mother, the Regent, was Henry’s sister Margaret, and peace now descended on the Northern border for the greater part of the reign.

      Fitting celebrations were arranged in Brussels by the Emperor’s daughter, Margaret of Austria. Henry, now twenty-two, was permitted to spend whole nights dancing “in his shirt” with the leading beauties of the Imperial Court. “In this,” the Milanese Ambassador reported, “he performs wonders, leaping like a stag.” The Council had forbidden gaming and the presence of women in the English lines, but “for him,” the Ambassador added, “the Austrians provide everything.” His rewards were princely; he never sat down to the table without losing in a royal manner, and the chief personalities were gratified with rich presents.

      Chapter IV: Cardinal Wolsey

       Table of Contents

      During the autumn of 1513 the French were hard-pressed from all sides. Wolsey, through the Emperor, hired a Swiss army, which invaded Burgundy by way of Besançon, the fortress capital of Franche-Comté, a part of the Burgundian inheritance that had passed into Habsburg hands. Dijon was captured. The French had no troops of their own which could resist the Swiss, and doubled their taille to hire fresh mercenaries from abroad. Henry had every intention of renewing his campaign in France in 1514, but his successes had not been to the liking of Ferdinand of Spain. Ferdinand now set about making a separate peace with France, into which he also tried to draw the Emperor Maximilian.

      Faced with the defection of his allies, Henry was quick to launch a counter-stroke. First he looked to the defences of the realm, and took measures to strengthen his navy. Then he sought and obtained a favourable peace treaty with France, thereby securing exactly double the amount of annual tribute that had been paid to his father. The crowning event of the peace was the marriage between Henry’s young sister, Mary, and Louis XII himself. She was seventeen, he was fifty-two. The story runs that she extracted from her brother the promise that if she married this time for diplomacy she would be free next time to marry for love. Promise or no promise, that is what she did. She was Queen of France for three months; then, as Queen Dowager, and to Henry’s displeasure, she cut short her widowhood by marrying Charles Brandon, Duke of Suffolk. But in this case the royal wrath subsided and Henry VIII joined in the wedding festivities. The marriage ultimately bore tragic fruit: a grandchild was the Lady Jane Grey, who was for ten days to be Queen of England.

      Among those who had crossed with the bridal retinue to France was a young girl named Mary Boleyn. She was one of three nieces of the Duke of Norfolk, all of whom successively engaged the dangerous and deadly love of Henry VIII. Mary and her sister Anne had been educated in France at an expensive academy attached to the French Court. On her return to England Mary married William Carey, a Gentleman of the Bedchamber, and before long became the King’s mistress. Her father was upon this favour created Lord Rochford, while her sister, Anne, continued her studies in France.

      Wolsey was richly rewarded for the foreign successes. He received the Bishopric of Lincoln during the course of the negotiations; then, after the peace terms were settled, the Archbishopric of York; and, a year later, after long negotiation by the King on his behalf, in September 1515, a cardinal’s hat. This shower of ecclesiastical honours did not however give Wolsey sufficient civil authority, and in December 1515 Henry created him Lord Chancellor in place of Warham, whom he forced to resign the Great Seal.

      For fourteen years Wolsey in the King’s name was the effective ruler of the realm. He owed his position not only to his great capacity for business, but to his considerable personal charm. He had “an angel’s wit”, one of his contemporaries wrote, for beguiling and flattering those whom he wished to persuade. In the King’s company he was brilliant, convivial, and “a gay seeker out of new pastimes”. All this commended him to his young master. Other would-be counsellors of Henry’s saw a different side of the Cardinal’s character. They resented being scornfully overborne by him in debate; they detested his arrogance, and envied his ever-growing wealth and extensive patronage. At the height of his influence Wolsey enjoyed an income equivalent to about £500,000 a year in early twentieth-century money. He kept a thousand servants, and his palaces surpassed the King’s in splendour. He loaded profitable favours upon his relations, including his illegitimate son, who held eleven Church appointments, and their incomes, while still a boy. These counts against him gradually added up in the course of years. But for the time being—and it was for a long time, as Chief Ministers go—he successfully held in his grasp an accumulation of power that has probably never been equalled in England. The King’s popularity rose with the achievements of his reign. There were many of course who grumbled at the war taxes imposed during the previous two years; but while pouring money into pageantry and magnificence Wolsey managed to tap new sources of revenue. Henry’s subjects were taxed much as they had been under his father, which was more lightly than any other subjects in Europe. Indeed, the North of England, which had to support billeting and Border warfare, was excused taxation altogether.

      Successes abroad enabled Wolsey to develop Henry VII’s principles of centralised government. During the twelve years that he was Lord Chancellor Parliament met only once, for two sessions spreading over three months in all. The Court of Star Chamber grew more active. It evolved new and simple methods copied from Roman law, by which the Common Law rules of evidence were dispensed with, and persons who could give evidence were simply brought in for interrogation, one by one, often without even the formality of an oath. Justice was swift, fines were heavy, and no one in England was so powerful that he could afford to flout the Star Chamber. When a common soldier of the Calais garrison once sent his wife to complain of his treatment by the Lord Deputy of Calais she received a full hearing. The new generation grown up after the Wars of the Roses was accustomed to royal law and order, and determined that it should prevail.

      Thus it was that this system of arbitrary government, however despotic in theory, however contrary to the principles believed to lie behind Magna Carta, in fact rested tacitly on the real will of the people. Henry VIII, like his father, found an institution ready to his hand in the unpaid Justice of the Peace, the local squire or landlord, and taught him to govern. Rules and regulations of remarkable complexity were given to the Justice to administer; and later in the century Justices’ manuals were produced, which ran through innumerable editions and covered almost every contingency which could arise in country life.

      The Tudors were indeed the architects of an English system of local government which lasted almost unchanged until Victorian times. Unpaid local men, fearless and impartial,