The Autobiography of Henry VIII_ With Notes by His Fool, Will Somers - Margaret George [243]
Dare I confess it? I wished to take the field again3™vst Francis, to do again what I had done so long ago, but this time do it as I wished, and not be balked and cheated of my spoils by a Ferdinand or a Maximilian. No, I was my own master now, and I would return to that place which had hung, unresolved and insulting to me, for thirty years. I would take the cities in Picardy I craved, add them to Calais, and expand the English holdings into a strip extending along the Channel coast.
I confided this to no one. I would wait for things to roll that way, as roll they would. I enjoyed the power it gave me, keeping my thoughts and plans to myself.
In the meantime, preparations for our chastisement of Scotland went ahead. That was no secret. We would wait until their grain was gathered in, until their livestock was wintered, and then we would strike.
In August I had sent troops across the Border, and they had been beaten at Haddon Rig, near Berwick. Nearly six hundred prisoners had been taken, including the commander, Sir Robert Bowes. This was, I must confess, a surprise. The Scots were ever full of surprises. Every time one thought they were quiet, quiescent, beaten—they struck and stung, like an adder.
In retaliation I dispatched Norfolk to persecute them. It was the first communication I had had with him, the first assignment I had given him, since the disgrace of—I cannot write her name again—his niece. He, and his hothead son Henry, managed to burn the lowland towns of Kelso and Roxburgh and about thirty others. But it was an inconclusive, womanish reprisal. I was most displeased. I had given them orders to defeat the Scot, not pinch his toe or tweak his nose.
But Jamie, for his own reasons, took the burnings as a call to arms. His honour must be satisfied. He gathered an army, but the nobility would not fight willingly for a King who excluded them from his councils; the Border lords, barons like Argyll and Moray, were smarting from harsh treatment from the unstable, fickle Jamie; and the outcome was that his army refused to march farther south than Lauder, where it disbanded itself.
Another army must be raised, and the industrious Cardinal Beaton managed to gather a force of ten thousand men in only three weeks. Oh, the Cardinal, the Scots Cardinal! He had been commissioned by Pope Paul III to publish the Papal bull excommunicating me, in Scotland. How I despised him! Cardinals, I believe, were created by Rome expressly to torment me in this life.
This Cardinal’s army was to be led by Oliver Sinclair, King Jamie’s “favourite.” He loved him more than he had ever loved any woman, thereby incurring the disdain and derision of his subjects. The hated Sinclair was no soldier. At the edge of the Solway River, in southwest Scotland, Jamie suddenly decided to leave his troops, declaring that he would cross into England from Lachmaben, when the tide ebbed. So that Sinclair could have the battle to himself, and thereby acquit himself? Who knew what he was thinking?
Across the Solway I had three thousand Englishmen, hastily drawn up under the command of the Deputy Warden of the Marches, Sir Wharton. Although outnumbered, Sir Wharton led boldly and scattered the Scots, driving them into the bog, where his men killed them with spear and sword, or left them to be sucked into the muck or drowned in the river. Twelve hundred were captured, including Oliver Sinclair. The Borderers—who had largely composed the Scots force—took a perverted pleasure in punishing their King by surrendering to us witht God had still a greater one reserved for us. When he heard of the defeat, King Jamie wilted and died. “Fie, fled Oliver?” he said. “Is Oliver taken? All is lost!”
He drooped at Falkland Palace whence he had crawled in abject defeat. His wife was in her last days