II. CHAP. the heralds cried "Largesse! Largesse!" in the streets, the ambassadors of England were brought in to dinner and "spoke of high and glorious feats of arms and honourable joys". The marriage between the two interesting allies of England was celebrated by proxy, and the handsome Wolfgang von Polhain inserting his leg into the bride's bed in the presence of the German ambassadors and the lady-in-waiting, was deemed to have completed the ceremony. Yet this high-sounding alliance availed nothing; d'Albret, now abandoned by the marshal, sold himself to France and betrayed Nantes to the enemy. In face of this important defection the coalition was impotent. Henry, indeed, sent soldiers who disembarked in May, 1491, but little aid could be expected from Maximilian, who was wrestling for the Hungarian crown; and when a diet at Nuremburg voted 12,000 lances for the Breton campaign it was too late. There was no resisting the French advance: they took Redon; they recaptured Guingamp and Concarneau; then revictualled their garrisons in Lower Brittany and sat down before Rennes. Henry sent ships to Brittany offering the duchess an escape to her Maximilian, but though her rings and jewels were pawned, and she was at the mercy of her English, Spanish, and German hirelings, she refused, with a true instinct, to quit her capital. The siege of Rennes began in the old chivalrous manner, with a tilting match between a Breton and a French champion, followed by refreshments of spiced hypocras, provided at the expense of the Queen of the Romans. But the serious work had hardly begun when mutinous grumblings arose from the English and German garrisons, who demanded a month's pay in advance. Charles was full of seductive proposals. He offered Anne three alternative husbands and a revenue, but she refused; then he turned to the mutinous foreign troops, promising to pay their arrears if they would march out of Rennes. They accepted his offer and the King of France entered the Breton capital, and asked for Anne's hand. Orleans, released from prison with politic clemency, seconded the request. The girl's confessor vanquished her last scruples. Yet she had already been married by proxy to Maximilian, and Charles had already been affianced and married to Maximilian's daughter when he was a boy of twelve and Margaret was an infant of three. 1491 WARLIKE PROPOSALS. 43 II. On December 6, 1491, the wedding of the King of France and CHAP. the Duchess of Brittany took place at Langeais in Touraine. Papal dispensations waived aside all inconvenient objections of consanguinity or precontract. Anne was Queen of France and Brittany was for practical purposes a French province. Brittany then was gone, and gone for ever; yet the war could not be suddenly wound up without dishonour. Henry had raised a benevolence in July and had summoned parliament in October, telling his lords and commons that it was now his intention to make war upon France in person, not as before to defend Brittany, but to recover the ancient rights of England, and parliament had responded to the appeal with a liberal grant. Understanding that it was the king's purpose to hazard his own most noble person in a war against the ancient enemies of England, the commons, with the consent of the lords spiritual and temporal, granted two whole fifteenths and tenths with a deduction of £12,000 in favour of decayed and impoverished cities; and a third fifteenth and tenth was promised, with similar deductions and exceptions, in the event of the king being abroad for a space exceeding eight months. It was necessary to make some martial show in return for such liberality, and while warlike preparations were being pushed forward Henry hoped to rivet Spain more closely to his cause. In September he proposed so to amend the treaty of Medina del Campo that neither party should be able to make peace with France without the consent of the other; and in November he drew up some articles to the effect that the two powers should bind themselves to declare war upon France before April 15 next ensuing, and that the two kings should invade France in person and bind themselves to conquer all the provinces usurped by the King of France. Spain was then in the last throes of her struggle with the Moors, and Henry must have drafted his propositions rather to content his council than with any serious hope of their acceptance. Indeed the complexion of European politics did not encourage any hope that England would receive any substantial measure of support in the forthcoming struggle. Maximilian had every reason for hating Charles, who had repudiated his daughter and robbed him of his wife, and he promised to serve Henry for two years with 10,000 men; but when Henry's envoys, Christopher Urswick II. CHAP. and John Risley, came to apprise him of the English preparations, they found that he was unprepared to help. Civil war had again flamed out in Flanders and Holland, and raged through the spring and early summer of 1492, and the diet of princes at Coblentz refused to forward the enterprise against France. Henry had made a treaty with the Duke of Milan, on July 27, 1490, and now appealed to Ludovico Sforza to effect a diversion. But that astute politician was weaving a tissue of a very different nature, and in the end the King of England was thrown back upon his own resources. The spring and summer of 1492 were spent in active military preparations. A plot was hatched in January with some disaffected Bretons for the surrender of Brest to an English fleet, but the news leaked out, and it came to nothing. In the middle of the summer an army was collected at Portsmouth, and three great breweries were built to provide for its liquid refreshment. The fleet actually set sail in June, but returned with nothing accomplished. In August there seems to have been some apprehension of a French landing, for the inhabitants of Kent and Sussex were told to be ready at an hour's warning to serve the king in their harness. Autumn came and still there was no war. Though Granada had fallen, though its fall had been celebrated by rejoicings in London, though Spanish plenipotentiaries had been appointed to discuss the proposed changes in the treaty, there was no Spanish sail to be descried in the Channel, and barely a hint of possible Spanish help. Yet Henry had obtained supplies from parliament and wrung a benevolence from the opulent on the faith of the war. Every alderman of London had been compelled to lend him £200, and every alderman of London expected that at that price there could be some pretty fighting against the ancient enemy. The king could no longer avoid a campaign. At the beginning of September he marched towards the coast. For a brief spell the inactivity of England was broken. Philip of Cleves, Maximilian's old antagonist, had seized upon the seaport town of Sluys, and was enriching himself by systematic piracy. Complaints of his dealings reached Henry alike from the merchant adventurers employed in the cloth trade and from the Duke of Saxony, who had begun the investment of the town as early as May 18. At last, at the beginning of August, a small English fleet with 2,500 men on board was 1492 THE INVASION OF FRANCE. 45 II. despatched under Sir Edward Poynings to assist Maximilian's CHAP. general in the blockade. The defence and the taking of Sluys formed an important and striking episode in the eyes of contemporaries, and it proved to be the concluding act in the long and turbulent drama of the Flemish civil war. The skirmishing was spirited, and the Danish mercenaries of the rebel leader were conspicuous for their cruelty, their courage, and their resource. The besieging force, like that which invested Ilium of old, included many races-English and Germans, Brabanters, Hainaulters, and Flemings. At last, on October 13, the town capitulated on terms, and the castle was ceded to the English admiral, who had largely contributed to the success of the operations. Some days before the fall of Sluys, Henry crossed over to Calais, the strains of minstrels and the jests of a Spanish fool relieving the tedium of the passage. The English army, which was recruited by a system of indenture, and paid at the rate of eighteen-pence a day for the men-at-arms, ninepence a day for the demi-lances, and sixpence a day for the archers, numbered 25,000 foot and 1,600 horse. The Earls of Oxford, Shrewsbury, Devonshire, Sussex, and Essex, Lords Grey, Strange, Powis, Hastings, Audley, Latimer, and Dudley, were among the nobles who contributed contingents. The king had drawn up a code of rules to determine their duties, to regulate discipline, and to apportion the spoils taken from the enemy; and Prince Arthur was appointed regent during his absence. All through the summer negotiations had been proceeding at Calais and Etaples between French and English commissioners, and Henry was well aware that his absence from England need not be unduly protracted. On October 22 the English army settled down before Boulogne, which had been provisioned for two years, and was defended by 1,800 men-at-arms. The sound of the English guns was heard as far as Grammont in Flanders, and we are assured that some impression was made upon the walls. But the siege was never seriously intended, and in the words of the patriotic Hall, who wrote in the succeeding reign, "when every one was prest and ready to give the assault, a sudden rumour arose that the commissioners had concluded peace-which bruit as it was pleasant and mellifluous to the Frenchmen, so was it to the English nation bitter, sour, and dolorous".1 1 1 Hall, Chronicle, 7 Henry VII., f. xxvii. CHAP. II. The proposals for peace, however, which D'Esquerdes submitted on behalf of the French government were by Henry laid before the captains of the English army, and the captains presented a petition, the spirit and argument of which was probably inspired by the king, in favour of coming to terms with the enemy. They spoke of the long nights, of "the great and outrageous cold of the winter season," of the difficulty of provisioning the camp, seeing that food and ammunition must be transported from England through "the great rage and tempest of winds and weather". The idea that Boulogne was feebly fortified had been rudely shaken; they had already lost one valued life; they could not hope for aid from allies, and in the capture of the town and castle of Sluys enough had been done for English honour. King Edward IV. had made a descent upon France not twenty years ago; he had the assistance of the Dukes of Burgundy and Brittany, and he was favoured by the summer season; yet he retreated upon terms without entering pile or fortress.1 The offers now made by the King of France were far more favourable than those which Edward had accepted, and were indeed unprecedented in French history. Charles agreed to pay the whole debt due to Henry from Anne of Brittany for his defence of the duchy, a sum amounting to 620,000 crowns, or £124,000 sterling, in addition to two years' arrears of the pension promised by Louis XI. at the peace of Amiens, or 125,000 crowns. This indemnity, equal perhaps to £3,500,000 or £4,000,000 sterling of our money, was to be paid in half-yearly instalments of £25,000. Both parties undertook not to assist the enemies of the other, and Henry specially promised that he would not assist Maximilian should he determine to continue the war. In a separate document Charles undertook that he would give no countenance to Henry's rebels. On November 3, 1492, the peace was signed at Etaples. So ended Henry's one and only foreign war. It has been the custom to censure his lack of chivalry and to regard the peace of Etaples as a stain upon England's honour. The English knights and squires who had borrowed money and mortgaged lands, in order that they might raise retinues for the war and recoup their losses from the plunder of France, were chagrined at so meek and ungainful a conclusion. The Rymer, xii., 490-94. |