Summary
Thus far we have neglected a detailed look at Henry VIII's
foreign policy on its own terms. While he was king, Henry went
to war with France three separate times, fought Scotland with similar
regularity, and fought his on-again, off- again friend the Emperor
Charles V at the close of the 1520s.
At the beginning of his reign, Henry joined with Venice,
Spain, and the Holy Roman Empire under Maximillian I in an allaince called
the Holy League. At the time, Louis XII's France was preoccupied
with wars in northern Italy, and the Holy League was formed expressly
to defend the Papacy against French aggression. Cardinal Thomas
Wolsey was an important factor in Henry's involvement with this
conflict. Henry personally invaded France with an army of 30,000
in summer 1513, capturing the towns of Therouanne and Tournai, small
but personally rewarding victories for the king, who, in the spirit
of his medieval ancestors, still believed the English had a right
to rule over the north and west of France. This same year saw a
renewal of conflict with the Scots, who were allies of the French.
The Duke of Norfolk won an impressive victory for Henry against
the Scottish forces at the battle of Flodden in September. The
Scottish king James IV fell at this battle and was succeeded by
his very young son, James V.
Cardinal Wolsey helped conclude a treaty with the French
in 1514. When Louis XII was succeeded by Francois I in France, Henry
and Wolsey watched with annoyance as the French renewed their wars
in northern Italy and stirred up more trouble in Scotland by supporting
the false claims of the Duke of Albany to the Scottish throne.
The picture of European power altered dramatically with the 1519
election of Charles V as Holy Roman emperor, and for the next several
years, Henry and Wolsey positioned themselves between the Emperor
and King Francois by courting the friendship of both powerful and
mutually hostile rulers. 1521 brought the Treaty of Bruges between
Henry and Charles, and a renewal of English hostility toward the
French. This alliance with the Emperor was reversed during the
years of Henry's divorce controversy. The Treaty of Cognac was
signed with the French in May 1526, and within two years England
was at war with Charles.
After Henry's break with Rome, European politics began
to see some reallignments along religious lines, and by the close
of the 1530s, Henry's new chief minister, Thomas Cromwell, was
urging Henry to ally himself with northern German Protestant territories which
were hostile toward both the Papacy and the Habsburg emperor. This
was the purpose behind Henry's 1540 marriage alliance with the
duchy of Cleves, a strategically important German state on the north
side of the Rhine. Within the next five years, however, Henry was
fighting once again alongside the Emperor Charles, invading France
in the summer of 1544. By this time Henry was aging and very fat,
and could not lead his men into battle on horseback as he did as
a young man. Instead, he was carried along the battle lines in
a litter. His army captured the French city of Boulogne in September,
but was left somewhat in the lurch by Charles, who concluded a
separate peace with the French that same month. The English ended
their hostilities with the French with the Peace at Ardres in June
1546.
Near the time of Henry's last war with the French, hostilities with
the Scots also raged. In November 1542, 3000 English troops won
a great victory over 18,000 Scots under James V at the battle of Solway
Moss. James V died in December, and was succeeded by his six-day-old
daughter, Mary Queen of Scots. To pacify relations between the
two countries, Henry received a promise from the Scots that Mary
would marry his son Edward, the surviving child of his third marriage
with the late Jane Seymour. The Scots affronted Henry when Mary
was subsequently betrothed to the dauphin of France, and the two
nations were once again at eachother's throats. English armies
devastated the Scottish borderlands in 1543, and they moved into
the Scottish capital of Edinburgh in May 1544 and burned the city.
These hostilities ended the following year.
Analysis
Some historians have been harsh in their appraisal of
Henry's military engagements and successes. Henry was doubtless
hungry for sheer personal glory in the field, and the only moderate
successes of his armies–capturing small towns such as Tournai and,
later, Boulogne–would not seem to merit the blood spilt for them.
In this regard, however, Henry was very much a man of his time:
many kings fought wars for reasons of personal distinction; warfare
was, for some, very much like a sport. Henry's eagerness to recapture
the French lands once held by his Plantagenet ancestors made him
very popular with his people, whose anti-French feeling was strong indeed.
