War, State, and Society in England and the Netherlands 1477-1559

WAR, STAT E, AND SOCIET Y IN ENGL AND AND THE NETHERLANDS 1477–1559

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War, State, and Society in England and the Netherlands 1477–1559 S T EV E N G U N N , D AV I D G RU M M I T T, AND HANS COOLS

1

1

Great Clarendon Street, Oxford   Oxford University Press is a department of the University of Oxford. It furthers the University’s objective of excellence in research, scholarship, and education by publishing worldwide in Oxford New York Auckland Cape Town Dar es Salaam Hong Kong Karachi Kuala Lumpur Madrid Melbourne Mexico City Nairobi New Delhi Shanghai Taipei Toronto With offices in Argentina Austria Brazil Chile Czech Republic France Greece Guatemala Hungary Italy Japan Poland Portugal Singapore South Korea Switzerland Thailand Turkey Ukraine Vietnam Oxford is a registered trade mark of Oxford University Press in the UK and in certain other countries Published in the United States by Oxford University Press Inc., New York  Steven Gunn, David Grummitt, and Hans Cools 2007 The moral rights of the author have been asserted Database right Oxford University Press (maker) First published 2007 All rights reserved. No part of this publication may be reproduced, stored in a retrieval system, or transmitted, in any form or by any means, without the prior permission in writing of Oxford University Press, or as expressly permitted by law, or under terms agreed with the appropriate reprographics rights organization. Enquiries concerning reproduction outside the scope of the above should be sent to the Rights Department, Oxford University Press, at the address above You must not circulate this book in any other binding or cover and you must impose this same condition on any acquirer British Library Cataloguing in Publication Data Data available Library of Congress Cataloging in Publication Data Gunn, S. J. (Steven J.) War, state, and society in England and the Netherlands, 1477–1559 / Steven Gunn, David Grummitt, and Hans Cools. p. cm. Includes bibliographical references and index. ISBN 978-0-19-920750-3 1. Great Britain—History, Military—1485-1603. 2. Great Britain—History, Military—1066-1485. 3. War and society—Great Britain—History. 4. Politics and war—Great Britain—History. 5. Netherlands—History, Military—16th century. 6. War and society—Netherlands—History. 7. Politics and war—Netherlands—History. I. Grummitt, David, 1971–II. Cools, Hans. III. Title. DA66.G86 2007 942.05—dc22 2007028206 Typeset by Laserwords Private Limited, Chennai, India Printed in Great Britain on acid-free paper by Biddles Ltd, King’s Lynn, Norfolk ISBN 978–0–19–920750–3 1 3 5 7 9 10 8 6 4 2

Preface This book began with a research project funded between 1999 and 2002 by the then Arts and Humanities Research Board. We are very grateful to the Board for their support, to Nigel Berry and Wim Blockmans for their assistance in setting the project up, and to Merton College, Oxford, for hosting our regular meetings. From its inception the venture’s life has been uncommonly troubled and we owe thanks to many friends and colleagues who have helped us along the way. The Department of History of Leiden University, the Netherlands Research School for Medieval Studies, the Royal Netherlands Institute at Rome, and the Leverhulme Trust provided additional funding. Ian Archer, Marc Boone, Cliff Davies, Alastair Duke, Jord Hanus, Hannes Kleineke, David Parrott, Andrew Pettegree, Judith Pollmann, Louis Sicking, Hans Smit, Arjo Vanderjagt, and John Watts read drafts and provided helpful comments and references. David Eastwood and Paul Slack gave us advice at moments of difficulty. Geoffrey Parker provided invaluable encouragement and critical stimulus at a vital stage, reading through the entire draft of the book while a visiting professor in Oxford. We are grateful for all the assistance we have received from the staffs of the libraries and archives in which we have worked and from our editors at OUP. We thank Her Majesty Queen Beatrix of the Netherlands and Their Graces the dukes of Northumberland and Norfolk for allowing us access to their private archives. Lastly we should thank our families for their constant love and support: Jacquie, Sarah, and Eleanor; Clare and Emma; Marie-Charlotte, Judith, and Tobias. We dedicate this book to our children.

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Contents Note on Currency and Conventions List of Abbreviations Maps

I

ix x xii

WA R A N D T H E S TAT E

1. Polities at War

3

2. Military Institutions and Fiscal Growth

II

20

TOW N S AT WA R

3. Introduction

41

4. Urban Military Resources

51

5. Life During Wartime

74

6. War and Urban Government

87

7. Towns in the Polity

105

8. War, Towns, and the State

122

III

N O B L E S AT WA R

9. Introduction

127

10. The Military Resources of the Nobility

138

11. Nobles in Command

155

12. Costs and Rewards

177

13. War and Noble Power

193

14. War and Noble Identity

215

15. War, Nobles, and the State

232

IV

S U B J E C TS AT WA R

16. Introduction

237

17. Obligations

240

viii

Contents

18. Information and Response

257

19. The Trials of War

273

20. War and Identity

294

21. War, Subjects, and the State

323

V War, State, and Society Bibliography Index

C O N C LU S I O N 329 335 375

Note on Currency and Conventions The currency systems of England and the Netherlands in our period were formidable in their complexity. For most purposes we have quoted figures for England in pounds sterling, rendered thus: £10; and for the Netherlands in Flemish pounds of 40 groats, rendered thus: 10£. Each pound contained 20s (shillings or stuivers) and each 1s contained 12d (pence or penningen). One Flemish pound of 40 groats was equal to one livre tournois or one gulden.¹ At the exchange rate of the mid-1480s, one pound sterling was equal to between eight and nine Flemish pounds of 40 groats and this rate still pertained in 1544, but by the mid-1550s debasement of the English coinage had made one pound sterling equal to between six and seven Flemish pounds of 40 groats.² All quotations from other languages have been translated into English and the spelling and punctuation of English quotations have been modernized. Dates are old style, with the year taken to begin on 1 January. ¹ Maddens, Beden, xii.

² Spufford, Handbook, 201, 217; Gould, Great Debasement, 89.

Abbreviations AGRAEP APAE APC BCRH BCRMS BFPLUL

´ Archives g´en´erales du royaume et archives de l’Etat dans les provinces Anciens pays et assembl´ees d’´etats Acts of the Privy Council Bulletin de la Commission Royale d’Histoire

BG BGZN BT CLGS

Bulletin de la commission royale des monuments et des Sites Biblioth`eque de la Facult´e de Philosophie et Lettres de l’Universit´e de Li`ege Bulletin of the Institute of Historical Research Bijdragen en mededelingen betreffende de geschiedenis der Nederlanden Bijdragen tot de Geschiedenis Bijdragen tot de Geschiedenis van het Zuiden van Nederland Belgica Typographica Chronologische lijsten van de Ge¨extendeerde Sententi¨en

CNRS CPR CRH CS CSP EETS

Centre Nationale de la Recherche Scientifique Calendar of Patent Rolls Commission Royale d’Histoire Camden Society Calendar of State Papers Early English Text Society

EHR GS HHB HHR HJ HMC HMGOG HS ICC ILC ISN

English Historical Review Grote Serie Household Books of John Howard Hollandse Historische Reeks Historical Journal Historical Manuscripts Commission Handelingen der Maatschappij voor Geschiedenis on Oudheidkunde te Gent Hollandse Studi¨en Inventaire des archives des Chambres des comptes Incunabula printed in the Low Countries Inventaire sommaire des archives d´epartementales. Nord

JMG

Jaarboek voor Middeleeuwse Geschiedenis

BIHR BMGN

Abbreviations JMRS KHGGU KNAWVAL

xi

KS LP NH NK

Journal of Medieval and Renaissance Studies Kronijk van het Historisch Genootschap Gevestigd te Utrecht Koninklijke Nederlandse Akademie van Wetenschappen. Verhandelingen. Afdeling Letterkunde Kleine Serie Letters and Papers, Foreign and Domestic, of the Reign of Henry VIII Northern History Nijhoff, Kronenberg, Nederlandsche bibliographie

ODNB PCEEB QFG RBHM RBPH RCHM

Oxford Dictionary of National Biography Publications du Centre Europ´een d’Etudes Bourguignonnes Quellen zur Frankfurter Geschichte Revue belge d’histoire militaire Revue belge de philologie et d’histoire Royal Commission on Historical Monuments

RGP RN ROPB SCJ

Rijks geschiedkundige publicati¨en Revue du Nord: histoire & arch´eologie: Nord de la France, Belgique, Pays-Bas Recueil des Ordonnances des Pays-Bas Sixteenth-Century Journal

TRP TvSG SHF TB TRHS TvG VCH

Tudor Royal Proclamations Tijdschrift voor Sociale Geschiedenis Soci´et´e de l’histoire de France Typographia Batava Transactions of the Royal Historical Society Tijdschrift voor Geschiedenis Victoria County History

VKAWLSKBKL

YCR

Verhandelingen van de Koninklijke Academie voor Wetenschappen, Letteren en Schone Kunsten van Belgi¨e, Klasse der Letteren Verhandelingen van de Koninklijke Vlaamsche Academie voor Wetenschappen, Letteren en Schone Kunsten van Belgi¨e, Klasse der Letteren Verhandelingen van de Maatschappij voor Geschiedenis en Oudheidkunde te Gent York Civic Records

YHB

York House Books

VKVAWLSKBKL

VMGOG

Abbreviations for archives are to be found in the Bibliography.

xii

Maps

Mechelen

R

The Roermond quarter (Overkwartier) of Gelderland

T

Tournai and the Tournaisis

N

EN

WF

GR ON I

G

M

FRIESLAND

Walloon Flanders The Prince-bishopric of Liège

DRENTHE

LINGEN

AN

D

O

VE

Amsterdam

HO

LL

Haarlem

RI

Leiden

UTREC

JS

SE

L

HT

IJsselstein Buren Waal

G ELD

ERLAND

Maa

s

Grave , s-Hertogenbosch

ZEELAND Middelburg

R

M

LIMBURG

Ghent

ine

ND

NT Rh

FLA

BRA BA

Antwerp

ERS Brussels

Le Roeulx

T

T INAU

AR Contes

IS

HA

T WF

O

Douai

NAMU R

Lille

Valenciennes

CAMBRAI

LUXEMBOURG FRANCE

Map 1. The provinces of the Netherlands in the age of Charles V

Maps

xiii

The Tudor territories

SCOTLAND

GAELIC IRELAND (CONQUERED, 1534–1603)

Dublin

WALES Principality

KINGDOM OF ENGLAND

LORDSHIP OF IRELAND (BOUNDARIES AS AT 1525)

Pale of Calais

Marcher lordships

(LOST. 1558)

(SHIRED, 1536)

Boulogne (ENG. 1544–50)

Channel Islands

NETHERLANDS Tournai (ENG. 1513–18)

FRANCE

Map 2. The Tudor Territories c. 1525 After Steven G. Ellis and Sarah Barber, eds., Conquest and Union: Fashioning a British State, 1485–1725, Longman, 1995

xiv

Maps

English Counties 21 Lincoln 1 Bedford 22 Middlesex 2 Berkshire 3 Buckingham 23 Monmouth 4 Cambridge 24 Norfolk 25 Northampton 5 Cheshire 26 Northumberland 6 Cornwall 7 Cumberland 27 Nottingham 28 Oxford 8 Derby 29 Rutland 9 Devon 30 Shropshire 10 Dorset 31 Somerset 11 Durham 32 Stafford 12 Essex 13 Gloucester 33 Suffolk 14 Hampshire 34 Surrey 35 Sussex 15 Hereford 36 Warwick 16 Hertford 17 Huntingdon 37 Westmorland 38 Witshire 18 Kent 19 Lancashire 39 Worcester 20 Leicester 40 Yorkshire

SCOTLAND

Berwick

Alnwick 26 Newcastle 11

Carlisle 37

York

40

Beverley Hull

19

IRELAND

5 Chester

21

27

8

Norwich 24

32 30

29

20

ENGLAND 36 39 Worcester

WALES

13

Kenninghall 33

4

1

15 23

17

25

Oxford 3 28

16

12 London

22

2 Bristol

38 Salisbury

9 Exeter 6

Map 3. The Counties of England

34 14

31

18 Canterbury 35

10 Southampton

Rye

PA RT I WA R A N D T H E S TAT E

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1 Polities at War It is hard to ignore the impact of war on fifteenth- and sixteenth-century Europe. War was frequent and widespread. It mobilized armies the size of large cities, spread disease, devastated the countryside, and interrupted trade. It moved political borders to the extent that whole provinces changed hands. It was the test of princely leadership, the hereditary occupation of noblemen, and the last chance of employment or adventure for the rural and urban poor. It drove on the growth of military and fiscal institutions to the extent that some historians would claim that ‘war made the state, and the state made war’, as a ‘coercion-extraction cycle’ led states to take resources from their subject populations and in the process strengthen their powers to extract further resources.¹ War shaped the age so much that for half a century scholars have debated the thesis that a ‘military revolution’, originating in sixteenth-century tactical and technological changes, gave European states and societies a form and a place in the world they would keep for centuries to come.² Yet it is hard to keep the impact of war in focus. Most Europeans were not fighting in wars, paying for wars, even thinking about wars much of the time. Many other forces shaped social, economic, and cultural developments, most obviously population growth and changing religious ideas. Drivers other than war, notably the demand for justice and princes’ sense of duty to the state of their subjects’ souls, promoted political integration and the growth of state power. Indeed, distinguished studies have suggested that the experience of sixteenth-century France and Spain was that war left governments with military institutions incapable of suppressing internal dissent, or broke down political and administrative structures rather than forced their consolidation.³ Studies inspired by the ‘military revolution’ debate have delivered an equally mixed verdict and have in any case tended to concentrate on the military input rather than the state-forming output of the original equation. Understandably, most studies of how governments and societies coped with war have concentrated primarily on the development of military and fiscal institutions. Some scholars, such as Michael Mallett and John Hale in their study of Venice, have set their findings in a commendably deep social, political, ideological, and diplomatic context.⁴ But few have tried to examine not how military institutions related to the rest of society, but how relationships of power throughout society were shaped by war. Here David Potter’s analysis of the impact of war on Picardy from its conquest ¹ Tilly, ‘Reflections’, 38–44. ² Rogers (ed.), Military Revolution Debate. ³ Wood, King’s Army; Thompson, War and Government. ⁴ Mallett, Hale, Military Organisation of a Renaissance State.

4

War and the State

under Louis XI to the eve of the French Wars of Religion stands as a model. On the one hand war served to knit this border province tightly into the French state through intertwining networks of military command, fiscal extraction, merchant contracting, noble service, and court patronage. All developed through complex triangular negotiation between kings, noble governors, and urban oligarchies. On the other hand, war blighted the lives of the local peasantry, preyed upon as much by French troops as by those of the Habsburgs, and ruined by scorched earth policies despite expressions of royal concern for the poor. War cut seigniorial revenues and destroyed towns unfortunate enough to be captured. It broke down systems of supply and administration and pushed state finances to the point of collapse in the 1550s, generating political tensions that would feed into civil war.⁵ Our aim is to explore such developments not in one province but in two polities, England and the Habsburg Netherlands. They were in some respects similar and inter-related, even sharing the same rulers in 1554–8, but in other ways were very different. Neither fits happily into conventional narratives of the growth of state power, being distinctive amongst the larger European states in the degree of consultation between rulers and subjects they preserved through this period and into the ‘age of absolutism’ beyond. Recent work has argued that this was not a sign of aberrant development or even non-statehood. Rather it suggests the effectiveness of military-fiscal systems forged in the negotiation of complex contractual relationships between rulers, subjects, bureaucrats, and armed forces, negotiation of the sort possible in the Dutch Republic after the Revolt and in England after the Civil War and, more comprehensively, after the Glorious Revolution.⁶ We shall investigate how far such processes can be traced in our period and how far such negotiations modified not only the broad balances of the constitution but also the social power of different groups at local level. Our study aims not to weigh up the relative importance of war and other factors in the development of the state in yet another sweeping overview, but rather to undertake the more fundamental task of exploring as subtly as possible how two comparable polities were mobilized for war and how that process affected them.⁷ ENGLAND AND THE NETHERLANDS The English and the Burgundian-Habsburg realms were comparable in size, the first some one and half times the area of the second, or more if the parts of Ireland under variable English control are counted, but both much smaller than their neighbour France. They were also similar in population: recent estimates place the Netherlands at 2.2 million in 1500 and 2.9 million in 1550, England and Wales at 2.3 million and 3.1 million at the same dates.⁸ The distribution of that population, however, differed widely. The Netherlands was one of the most highly urbanized areas of Europe, ⁵ Potter, War and Government. ⁶ Glete, War and the State; Braddick, State Formation; Brewer, Sinews of Power. ⁷ Gunn, Grummitt, Cools, ‘War and the State’. ⁸ Vries, ‘Population’, 13. The figure for the Netherlands may not include the population of those areas now in northern France.

Polities at War

5

with some 18.5 per cent of its population in towns of over 10,000 in 1500 and 19.5 per cent by 1550; in comparison England was a country of small towns and villages, with only 3.1 per cent of its people in 1500 and 3.5 per cent in 1550 living in such towns.⁹ The density of rural population also varied widely from region to region within each realm. In the mid-sixteenth century the countryside of Brabant, Flanders, Holland, and Zeeland had forty to fifty inhabitants per km2 , that of Friesland and Limburg fifteen to twenty-five, that of Luxembourg, Drenthe, Overijssel, and the Ommelanden around Groningen less than ten.¹⁰ The distinction between the core maritime provinces, in which most of the large towns also lay, and the emptier periphery was clear. England was equally varied, but in a more complex pattern. In the 1520s, areas of fen, mountain, and moorland, even large parts of the West Midlands and the central southern counties, similarly had half as many people or less per km2 than the more densely populated parts of the countryside. But these heavily populated areas lay scattered alongside the barren parts, in the South-West, South-East, East Anglia, and parts of the Midlands.¹¹ Northern England, Wales, and Ireland were less densely populated than most of England, but again there were internal contrasts. South Wales was more heavily settled than North Wales, the English Pale around the sizeable city of Dublin much more populous and intensively farmed than the areas of Ireland under Gaelic control.¹² The core around London, then, was less clearly distinguished from its periphery than that around Antwerp and Brussels. England and the Netherlands alike had comparatively prosperous and diverse agricultural economies in which areas best suited to pastoral farming exchanged their products with those better suited to grain. Where they differed was that urbanized Holland and Brabant met a significant part of their need for grain by imports from the Baltic, whereas England exported its pastoral surplus in wool and cloth. Many parts of the Netherlands also had cloth industries, including those in and around Antwerp that finished roughly woven English textiles for onward sale to consumers in the Netherlands, Germany, and beyond. Both countries mined and worked metals for domestic use and export, in particular Cornish tin and Namur iron, but the Netherlands had a wider range of other export industries from brewing and tapestryweaving to printing and map-making. Both had lively fishing industries, though only the Dutch exported their North Sea herring on a large scale. This was symptomatic of their general patterns of trade. England exported and imported to meet its own needs, but the Netherlands was the great entrepˆot of northern Europe. At Antwerp, rising around 1500 to clear predominance over its rival Bruges, German metals and English cloth met Portuguese spices and French wines to give the Netherlands, it has been estimated, commerce worth five times as much for every head of population as that of England or France.¹³

⁹ ¹¹ ¹² ¹³

Vries, Urbanisation, 39. ¹⁰ Lesger, Handel in Amsterdam, 24. Hoskins, Age of Plunder, 14–20. Williams, Renewal and Reformation, 407–8; Ellis, Ireland, 31–50. Lesger, Handel in Amsterdam, 23–64; Hoskins, Age of Plunder, 149–206.

6

War and the State ENGLAND BEFORE 1477

Medieval England was by most tests a precociously developed state.¹⁴ By the eleventh century, before the Norman Conquest, it covered most of the English-speaking area it has occupied ever since and administered that area with powerful and uniform institutions. In the twelfth and thirteenth centuries its kings and nobility harnessed the resources of that area to the conquest of Wales, parts of Ireland and, temporarily, much of Scotland. In the fourteenth and fifteenth centuries its Plantagenet rulers redirected its predatory efforts towards France in search of the lands lost by their Angevin ancestors and ultimately in search of the French crown. Conquering kings such as Edward III (1326–77) and Henry V (1413–22) became models for generations to come, but their legacy was a dangerous one. Royal leadership in successful war bound the nobility together under the king. While militias of all able-bodied males were used for local defence, armies for offensive operations were raised by the nobility as contractors for the king and paid from taxation. Ransoms and booty, when added to pay, made war, in K. B. McFarlane’s phrase, ‘a speculative, but at best hugely profitable trade’, a joint-stock enterprise for king and nobility.¹⁵ Taxation, whether direct taxation on the goods and incomes of the wider population or indirect taxation on the profits of England’s exports of raw wool and manufactured cloth, was agreed in parliament, the national representative institution consolidated in the later thirteenth and earlier fourteenth centuries. English identity and political cohesion was fostered by the presentation of justifications for war in parliament and in wider public fora, by prayers for the king’s campaigns, and celebrations of his victories. By and large, when wars went well, parliaments voted taxes, people paid taxes, and the nobility followed the king. When wars went badly, as at the end of Edward III’s reign and under his grandson Richard II (1377–99), nobles became factious, parliament became a vehicle for criticism of the king’s advisers, and popular revolt loomed. To equate successful war with successful government is of course to over-simplify. It neglects the fact that rulers successful in war generally had the skills necessary to perform the other tasks of kingship well, above all to do justice and thus maintain peaceful relations between great men and their local followings within England. It also neglects the way in which both war and justice operated within the context of an intensification of governance drawing the nobility and the lesser landed elites, the gentry, into an increasingly complex institutional nexus administering the king’s rule through a combination of public authority delegated by the king with the private power of the gentry and nobility as landlords and local social leaders. Yet it is clear that many contemporaries argued that war was good for England. As the argument was presented in parliament in 1472 it ran thus: ‘And be it well remembered how that it is not well possible, nor hath been since the Conquest, that justice, peace, and ¹⁴ This section is based upon a range of general works such as Ormrod, Political Life; Harriss, Shaping the Nation; id., ‘Political Society’; Carpenter, Wars of the Roses. ¹⁵ McFarlane, English Nobility, 21.

Polities at War

7

prosperity hath continued any while in this land in any king’s days but in such as have made war outward’.¹⁶ From Edward III’s time that outward war was overwhelmingly war against the French. Campaigns against the Scots were recurrent, but after the 1330s the armies involved were smaller than those in France and the independence of Scotland, so hard won in the wars against Edward I (1272–1309) and Edward II (1309–26), was never seriously threatened. State-funded campaigns in Ireland—as opposed to the interminable raiding of English areas by Gaelic lords and vice versa—were rarer still and equally indecisive. The French war reached its apogee in 1422, as the infant Henry VI became king of England in succession to his father Henry V and king of France in succession to his grandfather Charles VI, under the terms of the treaty of Troyes of 1420. Thirty-one years later the double monarchy lay in ruins. Adverse circumstances and extreme royal incompetence had combined to lose the English all their lands in France save Calais. Failure abroad brought breakdown at home: uproar in parliament and popular revolt in 1450, open warfare among leading nobles from 1455, and Henry’s deposition in 1461. What the breakdown of Henry VI’s kingship exposed was that the internal coercive force of the English state at a time of aristocratic dissension and popular unrest bore no relation to its external coercive force in times of political consensus. It was a parallel lesson to that of later medieval Ireland, where England’s greater resources of population, wealth, and military technology could never be brought to bear to subjugate the Gaels, not only for reasons of geography, but also for lack of political will amongst the mainland English. Civil war in England from 1455 prompted debate about how to strengthen the crown. Some advocated external war to reconstruct the political and social coalition led by Edward III or Henry V. Others advocated a more law-bound path, strengthening the institutions of justice and the influence of the common-law jurists. Some advocated financial restructuring, basing the crown’s income and local influence on a much expanded set of royal landed estates rather than the volatile proceeds of taxation. Some saw the benefit in an expanded royal affinity, a personal political following for the king based on service at court and suitable for military mobilization at times of revolt or dynastic challenge. All these remedies were implemented in some measure by Henry VI’s Yorkist supplanter Edward IV (1461–83), especially after he regained the throne in 1471 following Henry’s brief ‘Readeption’ as the puppet of Edward’s disenchanted ally Warwick the Kingmaker. All were to be applied more comprehensively by Edward’s Tudor successors. While Edward lived they undoubtedly strengthened the crown. But at his death in 1483 the displacement of his young son Edward V by his uncle Richard III (1483–5) brought renewed instability. Richard’s defeat by the obscure Lancastrian claimant Henry Tudor might have seemed to offer little better, though Henry’s marriage to Edward’s daughter Elizabeth was advertised by their supporters as an end to dynastic strife and the dawn of a more peaceful age. It is tempting to argue that the English system was too precocious for its own good. The very power of its centralized systems of justice and taxation made it unstable ¹⁶ Literae Cantuarienses, iii. 282.

8

War and the State

under medieval conditions. Centralized power misapplied to partisan ends under a weak king might drive into opposition significant members of those powerful classes on whom the operation of that power ultimately depended; centralized power applied to unsuccessful ventures overseas might alienate the political nation and the populace alike. Such problems rarely if ever troubled a decentralized kingdom such as Scotland, which was, it can be maintained, more stable as a result.¹⁷ Whatever the appeal of such arguments to historians, it is not clear that they would have appealed to later medieval kings of England, or for that matter later medieval kings of Scots. It is highly unlikely that they would have appealed to their contemporaries, the Valois dukes of Burgundy.

T H E BU RG U N D I A N N E T H E R L A N D S Where England was famously centralized and uniform by the standards of the day, the Burgundian polity was the opposite.¹⁸ The seventeen provinces (a rather notional number) into which contemporaries divided its Habsburg successor and the seven hundred or so law codes in operation there give a statistical flavour of its diversity.¹⁹ Diversity was only to be expected in a collection of territories assembled by marriage, inheritance, purchase, and conquest over four generations in little more than a century. Philip the Bold, a son of King John II of France, was created the first Valois duke of Burgundy in 1363. He began the process of accretion by his marriage to Marguerite de Male, daughter of Louis, count of Flanders. At her father’s death in 1384 Flanders, Artois, the county of Burgundy or Franche-Comt´e, and several smaller territories were added to his complex of lands. In 1396 he added Limburg, by grant from its lady in gratitude for military assistance. In 1403, just before his own death, he secured the inheritance to the duchy of Brabant for his second son Anthony, who became duke there in 1406. Philip’s eldest son John the Fearless (1404–19) devoted most of his efforts to war and politics in France, but prepared the way for further acquisitions. These came thick and fast under his son, Philip the Good (1419–67). The county of Namur, purchased in reversion in 1421, fell into his hands in 1429. Brabant was taken over in 1430 on the extinction of the junior Burgundian line, though concessions on the terms of ducal rule had to be made in negotiations with the wary Brabantine States. Three years of war in 1425–8 against Jacqueline of Bavaria, heiress to Hainault, Holland, and Zeeland, forced her to make over her rights to Philip, who assumed control there in 1433. In return for abandoning his alliance with England, Philip received much of Picardy from Charles VII of France in 1435. Luxembourg was ceded to him by its duchess in 1441, but had to be invaded in 1443 to drive off rival claimants. The 1430s were thus a vital decade in the construction of the Burgundian polity, ¹⁷ Grant, Independence and Nationhood, 87, 196–9. ¹⁸ This section is based upon a range of general works such as Prevenier, Blockmans, Burgundian Netherlands; Schnerb, ‘Burgundy’; Vaughan, Charles the Bold; Paravicini, Karl der K¨uhne. ¹⁹ Parker, Dutch Revolt, 31, 34.

Polities at War

9

in which the size of the conglomerate roughly trebled and Philip’s withdrawal from French politics reinforced his independence as an actor on the European stage. These firm territorial acquisitions were surrounded by a penumbra of Burgundian influence. Marriage alliances were forged with the princes of north-west Germany and the great lords of France. The construction of local parties of ducal followers made principalities such as Brabant ripe to fall into Philip’s hands. Clients and ducal bastards were installed as bishops in the landed ecclesiastical principalities of the Netherlands, at Cambrai, Utrecht, and Li`ege. Armed Burgundian interventions supported these and other friends of the dukes against local rivals or rebellious subjects. At first sight the Burgundian lands were a ramshackle collection of territories. They had three languages of local government and elite culture, French, Dutch, and, in eastern Luxembourg, German. They lay on either side of the historic border between the kingdom of France and the Holy Roman Empire, a border which did not coincide with the linguistic boundary, so that the duke was a vassal of the French king for Dutch-speaking Flanders but of the emperor for French-speaking Hainaut. The economies of industrial and commercial Flanders, Brabant, Holland, and Zeeland—which between them had more than half the population of the Netherlands by the last quarter of the fifteenth century—were very different from, and not much interdependent with, those of rural Picardy, Burgundy, or Luxembourg. Though many provinces had strong traditions of consultation between rulers and subjects, the composition, powers, and frequency of assembly of their representative assemblies varied widely. Some of these differences were less important than they might seem. The language issue does not seem to have impeded effective government, economic homogeneity was not a feature of many fifteenth-century polities, and by skilled negotiation or well-judged defiance Philip the Good managed to keep both his overlords at arm’s length most of the time. From the 1430s he began to call together delegations from the provincial States in a States-General, at first to discuss matters of common economic interest, then, by the very end of his reign, to request taxation. Nor was integration starting from scratch. Previous unions between Flanders and Artois, between Hainaut, Holland, and Zeeland and between Brabant and Limburg, together with the similarity of government institutions built in imitation of the French model in different principalities, eased the path towards unification. On the other hand, these were not easy places to rule. Flanders and Brabant had strong traditions of urban selfassertion against princely government, while Holland was troubled by deep-rooted feuds between parties of nobles and towns which reached out into the adjoining provinces. Philip the Bold and Philip the Good both fought full-scale wars against Ghent, part of a much longer process of fiscal and political subjugation, and other towns defied the dukes periodically. With Philip’s son Charles the Bold (1467–77), Burgundian state-building changed gear. Philip and his courtiers seem generally to have thought of the Burgundians as French princes. He had tried to interest the emperor in giving him a royal title to match the realities of his regional power and European standing, but nothing had come of it. Charles negotiated for specific terms for a kingdom, though they were never fulfilled, and took on many of the prerogatives of kingly status. He set

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up judicial and financial institutions based at Mechelen with sovereign powers over all his territories in the Netherlands, abrogating the emperor’s and the French king’s rights alike. These bodies showed as little respect for provincial privileges as for the claims of his overlords. The ducal court, which had always been a centre of magnificent display and a means to cultivate a following amongst nobles and townsmen, was expanded and militarized. A standing army of heavy cavalry on the French model, with attached gunners, pikemen, and archers on foot, was established in place of the feudal levies, town militias, and mercenary companies that had made up previous Burgundian forces. Taxation was sharply increased and in 1473 the States-General agreed to a six-year programme of annual taxation. Charles’s internal aggression was matched by external adventurism. War in France in 1465, as he took control of his father’s government, forced Louis XI to confirm Burgundian tenure of the lands in Picardy whose return he had sought from Philip the Good. Renewed war against France in 1470–2 was less decisive, but war in Li`ege in 1465–8 visited terrible punishment on the bishop’s restive subjects and turned the bishopric into a Burgundian province in all but name. By mortgage Charles acquired parts of Alsace in 1469; by armed intervention in a feud amongst its ruling family he acquired the duchy of Guelders in 1473. A siege of Neuss in support of his ally the archbishop of Cologne failed in 1474–5, but in 1475 he overran Lorraine. This combination of territorial expansion and internal centralization threatened to forge total Burgundian dominance of the wider Netherlands and perhaps even a single territorial bloc from the two Burgundies to the North Sea via Alsace and Lorraine. It awoke the opposition of the Swiss and South Germans, encouraged from a distance by the French. The Swiss were Charles’s nemesis. Three defeats at their hands culminated in his death at Nancy on 5 January 1477. His heir was his as yet unmarried daughter Mary. Edward IV’s brother George, duke of Clarence aspired to her hand, but it was won by the son of the Emperor Frederick III, Maximilian of Habsburg. They married at Ghent on 19 August 1477, Mary having already conceded to her subjects a Grand Privil`ege confirming the liberties her father had overridden. For Maximilian, Mary, and their successors, the maintenance of Charles the Bold’s inheritance would be an arduous task.

T H E WA R S O F 1 4 7 7 – 1 5 0 9 Neither the Tudors nor the Habsburgs found it easy to keep control of the realms they had won. Predictably, given what had gone before, the Tudors faced rival claimants to the throne of a united England, while the Habsburgs faced the dismemberment of the Burgundian block by external rivals or internal dissent. Yet at length both dynasties not only maintained their rule, but presided over considerable strengthening of the powers of central government in their respective polities.²⁰ These changes were driven ²⁰ Gunn, Government; Schepper, ‘Burgundian-Habsburg Netherlands’; for comparisons see Gunn, ‘State Development’; id., ‘Henry VII and Charles the Bold’.

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by the imperative to consolidate power in the wake of civil strife, the demand for justice, and the attempt to implement or to resist religious change. They were made possible by glittering courts, brilliant ministers—Thomas Wolsey, Thomas Cromwell, Mercurino de Gattinara, Antoine Perrenot de Granvelle—and bureaucratic administrations built around centralizing councils, the privy council in England and the Geheime Raad in the Netherlands. But they were also connected in various ways to the demands presented by war. Wars came in many shapes and sizes.²¹ Most easy to identify—and most easy for contemporaries to define as just—were wars between the forces of sovereign political entities, such as those between the kings and kingdoms of England, France, and Castile. The ambiguities of its constitutional position made the Netherlands hard to fit into this schema. Thus wars between successive Burgundian-Habsburg counts of Holland and the dukes of Guelders might be seen as civil wars within the Holy Roman Empire or private wars between imperial noblemen; wars between Burgundian-Habsburg counts of Flanders and the kings of France might be seen as revolts by vassals against their lords. But contemporaries, even in the fifteenth century, seem to have accepted the Netherlands’ role as a distinct polity within the developing European system of international relations. As its princes acquired an ever larger dynastic monarchy, so its wars became increasingly part of conflicts that ranged across Europe and beyond, and its men and money were at times deployed far from its borders. Yet individual towns, provinces, and noblemen in the Netherlands continued to prosecute wars in defence of their security or economic interests which were, sometimes at least, of more importance to them than were their rulers’ dynastic rivalries. These international wars overlapped with what were by modern criteria civil wars, in which locally powerful authorities, urban or noble, fought against the political control of what claimed to be the sovereign power and in extreme cases might even overthrow the ruler. Such conflicts might be sharp but limited in duration, or piecemeal but protracted. At the smaller end civil wars shaded into mere revolts, but some distinctions might be made. Revolts might raise very large forces—the Pilgrimage of Grace in 1536 mobilized at least as many men as Henry VIII did for his largest campaign in France in 1544—but were generally shorter, more limited in aim, and less violent than civil wars. They tended to dispute particular decisions or policies of the ruler rather than the legitimacy of his or her rule. They might be mounted by wideranging social coalitions, but often were not, pitting town against countryside or peasants against landlords. Their relation to state formation was more complex than that of international or even civil wars. They not only stimulated development or crisis in the fiscal, military, and political power of the state; they were also often the result of the pressures placed upon the subject population by the state’s quest for the resources ²¹ The following sections rely on such general works as Wernham, Before the Armada; Phillips, Anglo-Scots Wars; Scarisbrick, Henry VIII ; Ellis, Ireland; Knecht, Renaissance Warrior and Patron; Koenigsberger, Monarchies; Blockmans (ed.), Le privil`ege g´en´eral; id., ‘Autocratie ou polyarchie?’; Wiesflecker, Maximilian; Cauchies, Philippe le Beau; Soly (ed.), Charles V ; Tracy, Emperor Charles V ; Gorter-van Royen, Maria van Hongarije; Rodr´ıguez-Salgado, Changing Face of Empire.

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needed to make war. They were thus both occasions for the state to deploy its military power and symptoms of the difficulties experienced in assembling that power. All three types of war interacted throughout the period. Already in the months following the death of Charles the Bold, a wave of unrest in the territories he had ruled so harshly coincided with French invasions. Picardy was overrun by the French, Flanders, Artois, Hainaut, the duchy of Burgundy, and Franche-Comt´e partially so. Some leading Burgundian noblemen and military commanders defected to the French while others, too close to Charles, were lynched. At Guinegatte in 1479 Maximilian halted the French advance, but the war continued. Meanwhile Guelders and Utrecht threw off Burgundian supremacy, stimulating the revival in neighbouring Holland and Zeeland of the old factional feud between the Hoeks and Kabeljauws, and the French stirred trouble in Li`ege. Mary of Burgundy’s sudden death on 27 March 1482 at the age of 25, following a fall from her horse, made matters much worse for Maximilian, as some of Mary’s subjects contested his claim to act as regent for their 3-year-old-son Philip the Fair. By the treaty of Arras in December 1482, under pressure from his war-weary subjects, he consented to a settlement by which Artois and Franche-Comt´e would pass under French control through dynastic marriage. In 1481 his partisans had taken control of Guelders and in 1483 he successfully intervened in Utrecht and Li`ege. But his inability to cooperate with the States of Flanders and Brabant, led by their principal towns, soon brought civil war in both provinces and renewed French intervention in 1484–5. Open war with France ran from 1486 to 1489 and from 1492 to 1493, in parallel with devastating civil wars in Flanders and parts of Brabant, Holland, and Zeeland and renewed secession in Guelders, led by Charles of Egmond as duke of Guelders from 1492. At Maximilian’s nadir in 1488 he was held prisoner by the townsmen of Bruges for three months. Yet from 1489 his lieutenant, Albert of Saxony, gradually subdued his enemies until Ghent submitted at the treaty of Cadzand in July 1492 and Philip of Cleves, the leading noble dissident, surrendered his privateering base at Sluis in October. In 1492–3 Maximilian himself managed to reoccupy Franche-Comt´e. Peace with France followed, the treaty of Senlis of May 1493 restoring Artois and Franche-Comt´e to the Habsburgs, and domestic stability was consolidated with the establishment of Philip’s majority in 1493–4. England’s wars were in many respects part of this tangle of Franco-Burgundian conflict. Edward IV had sought to revive the Hundred Years War in 1475, but had settled with the French on generous terms and returned home when Charles the Bold failed to assist him. Some of Edward’s captains seem to have been disappointed and pressed unsuccessfully for English intervention to save the Netherlands from the French in 1477. What compensation they got came from the war against Scotland in 1481–3, in which Edward’s brother Richard captured Berwick. Edward’s death and Richard’s usurpation of his nephew’s throne brought civil war, first in the failed rebellion of the duke of Buckingham in 1483, then in Henry Tudor’s successful invasion of 1485, and finally in the Yorkist invasion of 1487 defeated by Henry at the battle of Stoke. Henry had been backed by the French against Richard, but was steadily drawn into supporting the independence of Brittany against his former friends. Meanwhile his troops played occasional, but significant, parts in supporting Maximilian’s forces

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in Flanders. His war taxation prompted a revolt in Yorkshire in 1489, but the army it funded could not save Brittany. He invaded France in 1492 and besieged Boulogne, but, as in 1475, help promised from the Netherlands did not materialize and he made peace at Etaples in November. The peace treaties of 1492–3 heralded a quieter period in western European politics, as from 1494 the ambitions of Charles VIII and Louis XII of France were channelled southwards into the Italian wars. Philip the Fair’s regime abstained from war, facilitating economic revival in Flanders and Brabant, but leaving Maximilian to fight unavailingly against Charles of Egmond over Guelders. Only towards the end of his life did Philip start to oppose the duke’s ambitions, invading Guelders successfully in 1505 but then leaving on a fatal trip to Spain to claim the Castilian crown in right of his wife. Margaret of Austria, Philip’s sister, fought Guelders more consistently from 1507 as Maximilian’s lieutenant in the regency for Philip’s young son Charles. She worked with the towns of Holland and northern Brabant and local nobles in wars that ran with periodic interruptions to 1528 and beyond. Cooperation was less easy in the Baltic, vital for Holland’s trade. The province used naval forces to drive its ships through the Sound in 1511 and 1523 during wars between Denmark and L¨ubeck, but it could not be brought to back Habsburg plans to restore Charles V’s brotherin-law, the deposed King Christian II, to the Danish throne. The thorn in England’s side was Scotland. Henry VII’s irritation with James IV of Scots mounted as James supported Perkin Warbeck, the latest Yorkist claimant to the English throne, invading England twice in 1496–7. Henry had already sent forces to Ireland in 1494–5 to strengthen English control there and prevent Anglo-Irish lords from sponsoring Warbeck as they had done Lambert Simnel in 1487. In 1497 he planned a crushing invasion of Scotland to punish James and eliminate Warbeck’s threat. But his taxes again sparked revolt, this time in south-west England, and his army had to turn south to defeat the rebels outside London at Blackheath. Warbeck was soon captured and, after a short campaign by the English forces left in the north, James made peace. T H E WA R S O F 1 5 0 9 – 1 5 3 0 The deaths of Philip the Fair in 1506 and Henry VII in 1509 brought new young princes onto the European stage. Philip’s son Charles, though just as much steeped in chivalry as Henry VIII, was less instinctively aggressive, certainly while under the influence of the survivors of his father’s court. None the less, the wars against Guelders continued and troops from the Netherlands served in Italy in 1509 as part of the general alliance formed under the League of Cambrai to dismember the Venetian mainland empire. Henry rapidly set out to test his subjects’ martial mettle, sending contingents in 1511 to Spain on crusade, to the Netherlands to fight against Guelders and to sea to tackle Scottish pirates. Next year he entered war against Louis XII of France with an ineffectual expedition to invade Guienne from Spain, which did nothing but distract the French from the Castilian conquest of Navarre. Naval exploits brought little but the destruction of one of his greatest ships, The Regent, and the

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death ofhis admiral Sir Edward Howard. He made very sure that his own first campaign, in northern France in 1513, was more impressive, leading a large army to batter first Th´erouanne and then Tournai into surrender. Though Charles’s territories remained neutral, Henry hired troops led by Netherlands nobles and Maximilian himself came to fight in his army at Henry’s expense, a boost both to Henry’s fragile pride and Maximilian’s fragile finances. In Henry’s absence James IV paid his debt to the traditional Scottish alliance with France by invading northern England. At Flodden on 9 September he was met and killed, along with many of his nobles, by an English army. Henry planned further French campaigning for the following year, but under financial pressure and uncertain of his allies he made peace in August 1514, keeping Tournai for a further four years before it was sold back to the French. Withdrawal from continental warfare enabled him, as it had enabled his father, to increase his military commitment in Ireland in 1520–2, but as ever his troops there numbered in the hundreds rather than the thousands used against Scotland or the tens of thousands taken to France and his interest soon waned. In 1518–21 Henry and his first great minister, Cardinal Wolsey, enjoyed presiding over grand European peace initiatives, but when war on the continent revived they were more than happy to rejoin the fray. Between 1515 and 1519 Charles of Habsburg’s accumulation of an astonishing collection of titles and territories—making some twenty-eight million people, perhaps 40 per cent of all the inhabitants of Central and Western Europe, his subjects in one way or another—transformed European politics.²² In 1515 he was declared of age to rule in the Netherlands and in 1516 he inherited from his grandfather Ferdinand the Aragonese throne and with it the ability to realize his claim to Castile in right of his grandmother Isabella. In 1519 he was elected Holy Roman Emperor in succession to his other grandfather Maximilian. As his new responsibilities drew him away from the Netherlands, he once again entrusted them to his aunt Margaret of Austria. Charles appeared ever more of a threat to Francis I of France, who had already established his martial reputation with victory over the Swiss at Marignano in 1515, but who now found his resources outclassed and his territories surrounded. War broke out in 1521 as peace conferences brokered by the English faltered. Luxembourg and the Ardennes, Hainaut, and Artois saw early fighting; Hesdin was lost to the French but Tournai taken from them. In 1522 Henry entered the war as Charles’s ally, sending a fleet to raid the Breton coast and an army to cooperate with Charles’s commanders in a failed siege of Hesdin. The next year saw a much more promising campaign, in which a larger English army under the duke of Suffolk joined Charles’s troops to thrust across the Somme and threaten Paris, but then retreated without permanent gains. Desultory fighting on the Anglo-Scottish frontier did as little as these campaigns to alter the balance of power between Habsburg and Valois, which was being settled on the battlefields of Italy, above all with Francis’s defeat and capture at Pavia on 24 February 1525. Henry, short of money and perhaps wary of Habsburg hegemony, settled with France in August 1525. ²² Blockmans, Emperor Charles V, 34–8.

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More significant for the Netherlands were concurrent campaigns to the north and east. Habsburg commanders had fought intermittently in Friesland and Groningen since 1514 to establish Charles’s overlordship and security for the towns of Holland in the face of opposition from local noblemen and town guilds stirred up by the duke of Guelders. In Friesland they were finally successful in 1523. War in Italy revived in 1527, as Francis repudiated the peace terms on which he had been released by Charles in the previous year. Henry rather reluctantly backed the French, more likely to help his developing campaign to secure a divorce from Charles’s aunt Catherine of Aragon. He employed economic sanctions against the Netherlands and even threatened an invasion against which Margaret made defensive preparations, but unrest at home forced a truce on him in June 1528. Margaret of Austria and Francis I’s mother Louise of Savoy built on the truce to negotiate a general peace at Cambrai in August 1529. There Francis I surrendered French sovereignty over Flanders and Artois and returned Hesdin to Charles, but did not, as Charles had made him agree to do in 1526, hand back the duchy of Burgundy. In the meantime renewed fighting in the east, including the plundering of The Hague by the feared Guelders captain Maarten van Rossum, had led to the defeat of the rebels against the bishop of Utrecht whom Charles of Egmond had chosen to support. With the bishop’s acquiescence, Charles V was recognized as lord of Utrecht and Overijssel and in October 1528 at Gorinchem even Charles of Egmond made peace. Slowly but surely Charles the Bold’s hegemony over a greater Netherlands was being re-established and indeed surpassed. As Margaret wrote to Charles from her death-bed in 1530, she had ‘not only kept’ his lands, ‘but greatly augmented’ them.²³ T H E WA R S O F 1 5 3 0 – 1 5 5 9 The 1530s saw less intensive general warfare, but widespread military activity continued. An inconclusive war troubled the Anglo-Scottish border from 1532 to 1534 and in the latter year rebellion in Ireland by the Fitzgerald earls of Kildare—who had served as the king’s deputies for much of the preceding six decades—brought the largest English army since 1399 to Ireland. Much of northern England rebelled against the king’s religious changes in the Pilgrimage of Grace in 1536–7. Charles left the Netherlands in the capable hands of his sister Mary, dowager queen of Hungary, and turned his attention away from France to the threat from the Ottomans, whose sultan S¨uleyman saw him both as a rival for world domination and as an obstacle to the expansion of his realm in the Balkans and Mediterranean. In 1532 Charles marched to relieve Vienna and in 1535 he successfully attacked Tunis. Netherlanders served in both of these expeditions, just as some had accompanied Charles on his armed progress through Italy in 1530 to be crowned Holy Roman Emperor by the pope. Meanwhile Holland first waged war against L¨ubeck without effective support from the other provinces, then denied the use of its warships for a Habsburg campaign to place Charles’s candidate on the Danish throne. ²³ Iongh, Margaret of Austria, 211.

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The temptation to attack Italy while Charles seemed distracted was too much for Francis, and in 1536 war recommenced as Francis invaded Savoy. In response Charles invaded Provence and Hendrik III, count of Nassau, invaded Picardy, capturing Guise but failing before Saint-Quentin and P´eronne. In 1537 the French attacked in Artois, capturing Saint-Pol and Hesdin, but Charles’s forces retook SaintPol and besieged Th´erouanne before a truce was settled at the end of July. War on two fronts had exhausted the resources of both rulers, and peace followed in 1538. Henry had been courted by both sides but, preoccupied with troubles at home, had not joined the war. Peace left him isolated, fearing joint operations by Francis and Charles against his schismatic realm. He responded with a disastrous marriage alliance with Charles’s German rivals—Anne of Cleves proving not to his taste as a wife—and a more successful campaign of coastal fortification and defensive musters. Meanwhile Charles of Egmond was restless as ever. Attempts to increase his influence in Groningen in 1536 brought on Habsburg intervention and the submission to Habsburg rule of Groningen, its surrounding territories the Ommelanden, and neighbouring Drenthe. By his death in 1538 Charles of Egmond’s power was once again confined to the two territorial blocks of his own duchy of Guelders, but the more northerly of these still lay threateningly between Brabant to the south, Holland to the west, and the new Habsburg territories to the north. Charles V took the opportunity of peace with France to deal with other opponents. The first was the city of Ghent, which had been defying the authority of his regent Mary of Hungary since its refusal to pay taxes in the war of 1537. Without fighting, but with a large armed force, Charles entered the town in February 1540 and imposed a humiliating settlement. Next came the Ottoman admiral Barbarossa, whose city of Algiers Charles attacked unsuccessfully in 1541. Meanwhile the final confrontation with Guelders drew on as the Habsburgs prepared to assert their claims against Charles of Egmond’s nominated heir, Duke William of J¨ulich-Cleves, who was duly backed by the French. In 1542 Francis and William attacked Charles on several fronts and another general war began. At first Charles’s territories reeled. Antwerp and Leuven were nearly surprised by Maarten van Rossum and Luxembourg was overrun. The duke of Vendˆome invaded Flanders and French garrisons raided all along the southern frontiers. Mary of Hungary and her generals in the Netherlands did their best to stabilize the situation and in February 1543 an alliance with Henry drew English auxiliary forces into the war. But it was Charles himself, invading first J¨ulich and then Guelders from Germany in the summer and autumn of 1543, who struck the decisive blow. Duke William submitted to Charles and surrendered Guelders to the Habsburgs. Charles then crossed Hainaut to confront Francis I, who was marching to relieve the besieged town of Landrecies. A battle between the monarchs was avoided when Francis withdrew. Charles took the opportunity to assume military and political control of the bishopric of Cambrai, a further step in the consolidation of the Netherlands. Charles and Henry planned simultaneous invasions of northern France for the summer of 1544. Charles, whose troops had already reconquered Luxembourg, thrust deep into Champagne, but Henry contented himself with a half-hearted siege of Montreuil and a much more determined siege of Boulogne. Boulogne fell just as

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Charles, whose invasion had slowed to a halt, made peace with Francis at Cr´epy in September. Charles was freed to confront the princes and cities of Protestant Germany, who had been defying for twenty years and more his attempts to assert imperial authority and maintain the Catholic faith, and Henry was left to fight the French alone in defence of his prized conquest. Yet French attempts to recover Boulogne were repeatedly defeated, even when in summer 1545 they distracted Henry by threatening to invade England. Huge levies of militiamen were prepared to defend the coasts, but only the Isle of Wight saw significant French landings and the French fleet withdrew after a confrontation in the Solent in which The Mary Rose sank. Henry was fighting on two fronts, as an aimless war of raid and counter-raid on the Scottish border, begun in summer 1542, had turned into something much more significant following the Scottish defeat at Solway Moss in November and the death of James V soon afterwards. Around the nobles captured at Solway Moss, Henry built a party prepared to marry James’s daughter Mary, queen of Scots, to his son Edward, an agreement sealed at the Treaty of Greenwich in July 1543. Yet Henry’s clients could not keep the Scots to this treaty, and his commanders were soon fighting to impose its terms by force, burning Edinburgh in 1544 and ravaging the borders in 1545. They were checked by defeat at Ancrum the following year, but when Henry made peace with Francis I, keeping Boulogne for ten years, in June 1546, the Scots were included on ambiguous terms that left it open to Henry to try to hold them to the treaty of Greenwich.²⁴ Henry died in 1547, leaving the throne to his 9-year-old son Edward VI. For the boy’s councillors, led by Lord Protector Somerset, the man who had burnt Edinburgh in 1544, peace with France was an invitation to continue the war in Scotland. At Pinkie in September 1547 Somerset won a crushing victory over the Scots. He built on it by planting English garrisons throughout the Lowlands to protect those ‘assured’ Scots who favoured the marriage. But by 1549 the garrisons had been worn down by French-backed Scottish resistance, hunger, and disease. In that year social and religious unrest in England boiled over into revolts in the South-West and Norfolk which were repressed with full-scale military campaigns. Simultaneously the French resumed their attacks on Boulogne. Somerset fell from power and his successors cut their losses, returning Boulogne to the French and withdrawing from Scotland under the treaty of Boulogne of March 1550. The one commitment they continued from Somerset’s regime was the increased military presence in Ireland. Troops there were partly devoted to a garrisoning policy like that in Scotland, but in Ireland this was a matter not only of forestalling French intervention but also of extending plantations of Gaelic areas with English settlers. With the deputyship of the earl of Sussex in Mary’s reign, this policy and the concomitant English military commitment would increase further. Charles’s triumph and eventual disappointment were if anything sharper than Henry’s and Somerset’s. In 1546, leading troops from Spain, Italy, Germany, and the Netherlands, he challenged the German Protestants of the League of Schmalkalden in a series of campaigns crowned by victory at M¨uhlberg in March 1547. He ²⁴ Merriman, Rough Wooings, 195–205.

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then moved not only to settle the religious and political problems of Germany, but also to consolidate the Habsburg state in the Netherlands, drawn together in the Burgundian Circle of the Holy Roman Empire and forged into a single heritable unit by the Pragmatic Sanction of 1549. The ageing Francis I had stood aside from the war of 1546–7, though he had often enough encouraged the Germans against Charles. Francis’s son Henry II was bolder. By late 1551 he had allied himself with another coalition of German Protestant princes, the League of Torgau, and in 1552 he conquered Metz, Toul, and Verdun, while they chased Charles out of Germany and French partisans in Italy contested Spanish control of the peninsula. Charles settled reluctantly with the Germans in order to concentrate on Metz, but his desperate three-month siege of the city had to be abandoned in January 1553. The Netherlands now became the main focus of the Habsburg–Valois struggle. As incessant raids and counter-raids aimed to pillage and burn undefended settlements, this was a war more devastating for the countryside than any Charles had yet fought. As his armies grew ever larger and campaigning seasons longer, it was also more burdensome for state finances than any previous conflict. Hesdin and Th´erouanne were taken for the Habsburgs in 1553, but Charles ordered their defences destroyed, so unconfident was he of holding them. In 1554 it was the French who enjoyed successes, taking Mariembourg and Dinant in a threepronged invasion but failing before Renty. That year brought achievement of a different kind for Charles and his son Philip, who married Mary Tudor on 25 July. Mary had succeeded to the English throne in 1553, after a brief and bloodless confrontation with the Protestant claimant Lady Jane Grey, and had then overcome the more substantial military challenge of Wyatt’s rebellion in January 1554. Under the marriage treaty England was not bound to enter the current war against France, but it was plain that the Habsburgs saw the match in the longer term as a means to bring England into the struggle. In 1555 neither peace nor war made much progress. Peace talks under English mediation foundered at Marcq. Meanwhile famine, disease, mutiny, and indecisive combat broke down French and Habsburg armies alike. Charles’s only significant achievement was the construction of new frontier fortresses at Charlemont and Philippeville, and even they were far from finished. It was amidst such frustrations that Charles resolved to abdicate his Spanish and Netherlandish territories in favour of his son Philip in 1555, dividing them from the ancestral Habsburg lands and the imperial title, which passed to his brother Ferdinand. With Charles’s departure came the resignation of Mary as regent and the appointment as governor of the abrasive Emmanuel Philibert, duke of Savoy. The war paused with the truce of Vaucelles in February 1556, but resumed in January 1557. By June French support for a doomed invasion of England by Thomas Stafford had brought England in, and English troops took part in Philip’s capture of Saint-Quentin in August, though not arriving in time for the victory in battle that preceded it. The French response was swift and shattering, as in January 1558 the duke of Guise, recalled from campaigning in Italy, took Calais. Meanwhile the Scots, bolstered with French reinforcements, opened a second front in the north of England. In June Guise defeated Habsburg forces at Thionville in Luxembourg, but in July at Gravelines a French army was caught between English

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ships and Netherlandish troops and heavily defeated. Later that month a joint AngloDutch fleet landed troops in Brittany, but they met firm resistance and failed to attack Brest. Financial exhaustion and military stalemate drove on peace talks which began in October 1558. At length terms were agreed that settled almost all the outstanding issues between Habsburgs, Valois, and Tudors and their respective clients. The treaties of Cateau-Cambr´esis, signed on 3–4 April 1559, promised international peace for a generation. In one sense that promise was fulfilled. But in place of dynastic war the coming decades were characterized not by peace but by civil conflicts, the French Wars of Religion and the Dutch Revolt. These were struggles driven by religious division, but nurtured by political breakdown amidst the legacy of international war: breakdown in government finance, breakdown in the relationships amongst political elites, breakdown in the coordination of constituent parts in multiple monarchies, breakdown in royal leadership. In some respects, then, war had broken the state rather than built it up. Yet in other ways the state formation processes characteristically attributed to war had been very evident over the preceding eight decades. In later chapters we shall examine their impact on towns, on nobles, and on the broader relationship between subjects and rulers. First we shall focus on the growth of military institutions and the development of state finance.

2 Military Institutions and Fiscal Growth Historians and sociologists who have given war a central place in their accounts of state development have often concentrated on armed forces and fiscal power. Their growth can be quantified and they are visibly central to the ‘coercion-extraction cycle’. What does their development in our period tell us about the impact of war on the states and societies we are studying?

R E C RU I T M E N T A N D T H E G ROW T H O F A R M I E S The military institutions of England and the Netherlands shared features common to many European polities, but the relative importance of different elements in their armed forces differed widely. In this period each saw developments of the sort usually characterized as part of the ‘military revolution’ or of state formation—principally the rise of permanent, trained forces under state control—but these varied in their scale, their timing, and the areas of military activity they affected. The military role of the nobility was central to their self-image and noblemen remained the most important military commanders throughout the period. They were still expected to fight valiantly in person when required, but were also expected to master the changing technicalities of gunpowder warfare and ever more sophisticated fortification. Their role as recruiters of troops was changing more dramatically. In England the ‘quasi-feudal’ system used to raise armies from the 1470s to the 1540s, by which peers, gentlemen, bishops, and towns were summoned to provide retinues of their tenants and servants which could be combined into an army, was increasingly found wanting. Royal attitudes to the retinue system had in any case become increasingly ambiguous, as followers retained for service in war might be used for purposes of local violence or political faction-building. Henry VII’s scheme for the licensed recruitment of retinues of named men by those he trusted and Wolsey’s great survey of landholding, wealth, and military preparedness of 1522 were both attempts to refurbish the system, but neither could do more than slow its decay. Rapid turnover in landholding prompted by the dissolution of the monasteries in the 1530s and an apparent decline in tenants’ willingness to serve their lords in war made it inefficient and it was partially replaced by a ‘national’ system based on the county militias. These, comprising every able-bodied man bearing the arms he was obliged to maintain under the Statute of Winchester of 1285, were mustered with increasing frequency from the 1530s. Their primary duty was to defend their locality

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under the leadership of gentry muster commissioners, but from 1544 drafts of militiamen were sent to join armies abroad. In 1558 commissioners were instructed to include lords’ and gentlemen’s tenants in such levies and an Act of Parliament prescribed the arms to be held in readiness by individuals of different levels of wealth and by parish communities to equip those sent to serve. Retinues did not disappear—they were particularly important in furnishing cavalry, for which the militia system was not well-suited—but they no longer took the central role they had once had.¹ In the Netherlands noble retinues and retaining were overshadowed rather earlier. Charles the Bold summoned his nobles to serve him with their followers and some certainly did so, producing around 500 men from Holland in 1470–1 for example. He also tried to document more clearly the feudal obligations on which his summons rested. But he still found the troops provided by his vassals insufficiently effective and the feudal obligation a poor means to mobilize his subjects’ resources: many Holland nobles sent a substitute to serve for them and even the greatest produced companies smaller than many English knights or esquires. Charles resolved instead to build his army around permanent compagnies d’ordonnance of heavy cavalry and supporting troops, of the sort maintained by the French crown since 1445. These were manned by such of his nobles as wished to serve—the heavy costs of their armour and horses now supported by pay funded through taxation—reinforced by Italian and English mercenaries.² Though they failed to win Charles the victories he craved, Maximilian reinstated them before 1477 was out. They survived on a reduced scale, four companies rather than Charles the Bold’s twenty or so, through the reign of Philip the Fair and the minority of Charles V. As Charles’s wars intensified, he increased their number to eight companies in 1522 and fifteen in 1545–7, though ten of these were smaller than the standard complement of fifty fully armoured men-at-arms and a hundred more lightly equipped, but still mounted and armoured, archers. Throughout they were captained by the leading noblemen of the Burgundian-Habsburg court, who were commissioned to raise extra companies or bandes de crue to provide more cavalry when needed.³ England only briefly had any real equivalent to the ordonnances. These were the companies of men-at-arms, totalling around 1,000 men, led by the trusted noble colleagues of John Dudley, duke of Northumberland in 1550–2. Disbanded because their cost was unbearable, they were not available to prevent Mary’s taking the throne in 1553.⁴ Henry VIII’s more modest experiments in creating a permanent cavalry force based at court failed with the king’s spears, made redundant to save money in 1515, but succeeded with the company of fifty gentlemen pensioners set up in 1539. These added to the guard of yeomen archers established by his father to give England a minor version of the military establishments developing at continental courts.⁵ Here Charles the Bold had led the way with a highly militarized entourage, of ¹ ² ³ ⁴ ⁵

Goring, ‘Social Change’, 185–97; Gunn, Government, 38–42. Vaughan, Charles the Bold, 211–19; Janse, Ridderschap, 297–302. ´ Guillaume, Bandes d’ordonnance, 53–65; Sablon du Corail, ‘Les Etrangers’, 389–90. Norris, ‘Rutland’s Band’. Gunn, ‘Chivalry and Politics’, 116–18; Cruickshank, Army Royal, 188–9.

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which vestiges survived in the Walloon Guard notorious under Maximilian and the archers of Charles V’s bodyguard in which the memoirist Ferry de Guyon served.⁶ Permanent forces were also maintained in a limited number of strategically important fortresses. For the English these were Calais, Berwick, Carlisle, and, briefly, Tournai and Boulogne. Calais and its garrison, of 551 men in 1502, provided the best reservoir of military experience available to the English kings, and indeed the key personnel for the temporarily larger garrisons at Tournai and Boulogne.⁷ Berwick and Carlisle had smaller complements—a hundred or fewer—and the individual garrisons of the chain of coastal fortifications built by Henry VIII in the 1530s and 1540s were tinier still, though combined they totalled several hundred.⁸ In Ireland small permanent armies of 200–700 men came and went with the individual governors who retained them until the rebellion of 1534 initiated a more coercive regime which came to rely on a standing force of at least 1,000. From the 1530s to the 1560s old fortifications were repaired and new ones constructed and garrisoned. Ambitious captains soon found that in the Irish military establishment they could win lands and office more readily than in England’s intermittent continental wars and the scene was set for the militarized private-enterprise colonialism that characterized parts of Elizabethan Ireland.⁹ Garrisons multiplied even faster in the Netherlands, until, it has been estimated, they totalled 10,000 men by 1555.¹⁰ Many of these were located at the borders of the realm, where new fortifications were built in the 1540s and 1550s, for example in Luxembourg.¹¹ Often such garrisons in newly assimilated provinces—Friesland, Utrecht, Cambrai—served a double purpose of deterring invasion from outside and sedition from within and were maintained even when the theatre of war moved away from the province.¹² The repressive aim was clearly predominant when a citadel for 2,500 men was built in Ghent following its revolt in 1540.¹³ When these garrisons were combined with the ordonnances, the effect was that permanent armed forces were stationed in proximity to far more Netherlanders than to any Tudor subjects except perhaps those on the borders between the Englishry and Irishry in Ireland. Yet significant parts of the Netherlands, in particular Holland after about 1528, were largely untouched by this militarization. Foreign mercenaries played a larger part in the Habsburgs’ military arrangements than in those of the Tudors, though never to the entire exclusion of native troops. This was partly because of the perceived deficiencies of the Flemish and Brabantine urban militias which had traditionally provided the main infantry forces in the Netherlands. Charles the Bold had become disillusioned with them, and, although Maximilian of necessity deployed them in 1477–9, he soon came to depend instead on companies of landsknechts, mercenary pikemen and handgunners hired from ⁶ ⁷ ⁹ ¹⁰ ¹²

Vaughan, Charles the Bold, 221; Nell, Landsknechte, 223–5; Guyon, M´emoires, 81–111. Grummitt, ‘ ‘‘Surety of the Towne’’ ’, 189. ⁸ Phillips, Anglo-Scots Wars, 44. Ellis, ‘The Tudors’, 116–35; Brady, ‘The Captains’ Games’, 136–59. Rooms, ‘Corps de l’infanterie’, 825. ¹¹ Petit, ‘Luxembourg’, 88–9. Domeingoederen, 320, 330. ¹³ Hemelrijck, Vlaamse krijgsbouwkunde, 141–3.

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Swiss or South German captains.¹⁴ By the mid-sixteenth century the mercenary business had spread to North, or Low, Germany too and had come to provide well-armed cavalry, reiter, as well as infantry. Contractors ranged from lesser nobles or old soldiers of even humbler origins who could raise a single company to princes of the Empire, such as Margrave Albert Alcibiades of Brandenburg-Kulmbach, who could deliver a small army.¹⁵ Equally strange to Netherlanders, though recruited and organized more closely under the regulation of their monarch and his officials, were the thousands of Spanish troops who served in the armies of Charles V and Philip II.¹⁶ Between them Germans and Spaniards made up the largest part of the great field armies deployed in the Netherlands in the war of 1551–9, outnumbering Netherlanders by up to four to one.¹⁷ For the bulk of their manpower the Tudors were happier to rely on native levies than were the Habsburgs, but they still recruited mercenaries as elite troops. In 1497 Henry VII hired experienced German and Swiss captains and artillerymen from the Netherlands.¹⁸ They totalled less than a hundred, but Henry VIII hired some 6,000 landsknechts and 1,000 Netherlandish horse, raised by leading noblemen, for the 1513 campaign, and some 6,000 foot and horse, mostly Germans but some Netherlanders, Italians and Spaniards, for 1544. The following year he moved over 3,000 Spaniards, Italians, Germans and Albanians from Calais to the border with Scotland, while 9,000 or so served in Calais and Boulogne. More still were recruited in 1546 and, though most were paid off when peace was made with the French, Edward VI’s armies in Scotland and the forces used against the rebels of 1549 included significant foreign elements.¹⁹ Increasingly those hired were expert handgunners or heavily armed horsemen, both of which the English felt they lacked in comparison with their continental rivals. Though their skills developed during the 1540s, in the international competition to recruit mercenaries the English found themselves a poor third behind the Habsburgs, who held significant political influence in prime recruiting areas, and the French, who had far more experience in building the relationships with the German and Italian nobility necessary for mutual trust and successful business dealings.²⁰

A R S E N A L S A N D N AV I E S Artillery arsenals formed another increasingly important part of permanent military establishments. Edward IV and Henry VII expanded and modernized their holdings of gunpowder weapons both at the Tower of London and in Calais, and Henry VIII accelerated the process. All three bought much of their artillery from gunfounders in ¹⁴ Vaughan, Charles the Bold, 219–20; Nell, Landsknechte, 90–240. ¹⁵ Redlich, German Military Enterpriser, i. 30–141; Burschel, S¨oldner, 99–100, 145–50, 154–5, 199–206. ¹⁶ Fagel, Hispano-Vlaamse wereld, 383–407. ¹⁷ Emanuele Filiberto, Diari, 50, 135–6. ¹⁸ Arthurson, ‘King’s Voyage’, 7–9. ¹⁹ Millar, Tudor Mercenaries, 43–8, 65–96, 133, 146, 152, 162, 175–7. ²⁰ Potter, ‘International Mercenary Market’.

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the Netherlands, though Henry VII brought foreign experts to work at the Tower and Henry VIII encouraged the development of a cast-iron cannon industry in the Weald of Kent and Sussex. Meanwhile the Ordnance Office, based at the Tower and responsible for the procurement, maintenance, and storage of cannon, smaller weapons, and stores, expanded. By the 1560s its complement of staff had risen to around fifty and it had taken over new premises for extra warehouse space.²¹ The equivalent for supplies of armour, older established but with a much smaller staff, was the royal armoury.²² In the Netherlands both functions were combined in the arsenal at Mechelen. Established in 1520, it built on the tradition of large artillery forces established by the Burgundian dukes and Maximilian, but aimed to reduce the bewildering dispersal and variety of artillery evident in the early part of Charles V’s reign.²³ Demolished in an explosion in 1546, it was re-established in 1551 with new buildings, better-defined administrative procedures, and more centralized control over the emperor’s artillery throughout the Netherlands.²⁴ Its staff was larger than that of the English Ordnance Office, but more seasonal in its employment. Both artillery institutions were headed by lesser noblemen with some expertise in gunpowder warfare, such as Sir William Skeffington, Sir Thomas Seymour, or Filips van Stavele, lord of Glajon. Both came increasingly to coordinate the deployment of cannon and stores in the fortresses ringing the coasts of England and the borders of the Netherlands.²⁵ In one area of institutional military development England was well ahead of the Netherlands. Henry VII and Henry VIII created a navy larger and more permanent than that of any previous English king. It had dockyards and storehouses at Portsmouth and Deptford and large, purpose-built, and heavily gunned warships. By his death Henry VIII owned nearly sixty ships and the administrative demands of running such a complex enterprise had given birth to a new institution, the Council for Marine Causes. Henry’s legacy was preserved by succeeding regimes and the navy was thus established as an important part of the English state apparatus. It cost some £20,000 p.a., perhaps a tenth of the state budget, in peacetime in 1551–3 and accounted for a fifth or even a quarter of England’s expenditure in the war of 1557–9. It took a full part in English wars against Scotland and France, patrolled the Irish Sea, and took action against pirates, enabling the elaboration by the 1560s of a strategic vision of Britain insulated by the English navy against intervention by the continental powers. Meanwhile the admiral—generally a great nobleman with military experience—and the admiralty courts exercised jurisdiction over wrecks, privateering prizes, and other maritime issues.²⁶ ²¹ Grummitt, ‘Defence of Calais’, 253–72; Fissel, English Warfare, 43–5; Stewart, Ordnance Office, 6–7. ²² Stewart, Ordnance Office, 122–3. ²³ Rooms, ‘Corps de l’artillerie’, 855; Vaughan, Charles the Bold, 222–3; Wiesflecker, Maximilian, v. 556–7; ADN, B3534/125682. ²⁴ Roosens, ‘Arsenaal’; id., ‘Artillerie’. ²⁵ Roosens, ‘Artillerie’, 122, 125–30; Bindoff, Commons, iii. 297–301, 319–20; Stewart, Ordnance Office, 7. ²⁶ Loades, Tudor Navy, 1–175; Dawson, ‘William Cecil’.

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In comparison the naval institutions of the Netherlands were fragmented and transitory. By the Admiralty Ordinance of 1488 Maximilian and Philip the Fair tried to build on Burgundian precedents and extend their authority over the maritime activities of their subjects, but their admirals never managed to make such authority fully effective. Holland, which often organized its own naval expeditions to the Baltic, never recognized the admiral’s powers. Coordination between its efforts and those of the other provinces was only made possible by appointing the then admiral, Maximiliaan van Bourgondi¨e-Beveren, provincial governor in 1547. Flanders accepted the admiral’s authority but nevertheless went ahead with raising its own provincial fleets for fishery protection, while its Dunkirk vice-admiralty court for maritime disputes became a largely independent institution. Only in Zeeland, where successive admirals’ private influence was strongest, was their control readily accepted. As for newly acquired provinces such as Friesland and Groningen, they were just told in the 1540s to protect their shipping as best they could. From 1536 the admiralty was better linked to the central administration through the activities of Cornelis de Schepper, commissioner of the fleet and a member of the central councils at Brussels. His effective cooperation with the admiral and regent made the elaboration of a more coherent naval strategy possible, but the means to execute it did not really exist. In 1550 a fleet of ships belonging to the ruler, rather than hired from his subjects for a single campaign, was established at Veere, backed by an arsenal and a small administration. Yet at its peak the fleet numbered only ten converted merchant ships and these were far inferior to Henry’s in size, cost, and armament. In the war of 1550–9 the navy accounted for only 3.7 per cent of military expenditure in the Netherlands, costing little more in war than the English fleet did in peacetime. In 1561 the fleet was broken up and the ships sold off.²⁷ Of these various developments, navies and arsenals provide the best examples of the growth of bureaucratic institutions as a means to wage war. This was presumably because of the nature of the weapons they had to care for. Ships and guns represented a large capital investment: some £8,000 for The Henry Grace a` Dieu, nearly 97,631£ for 282 cannon delivered to the Mechelen arsenal in 1552–9.²⁸ They needed regular maintenance by specialized craftsmen and took large crews and multifarious ancillary stores to deploy on campaign. The institutions that dealt with them were perhaps especially vulnerable to the kind of confusion between overlapping officers displayed by Charles V’s master, lieutenant, controller, and receiver of the artillery before the placing of the keeper of the Mechelen arsenal in clear charge of its affairs.²⁹ Some of the new or reformed institutions met modern criteria for efficiency better than others. By 1550, when it added a surveyor for the victuals of the seas, the Council for Marine Causes was a board with collective responsibility for all aspects of the navy, comprising seven officers each with a clearly defined remit, a convincingly bureaucratic body.³⁰ The admiralty bureaucracy in the Netherlands was not dissimilar, with a superintendent, a master-carpenter, an artillery constable, and so on managing the naval base at Veere, while a deputy to the admiral led the eight to ten ²⁷ Sicking, Zeemacht. ²⁸ Loades, Tudor Navy, 67; Roosens, ‘Arsenaal’, 194–5. ²⁹ Roosens, ‘Arsenaal’, 178–80. ³⁰ Loades, Tudor Navy, 81–4, 150.

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members of the admiralty court there. On closer examination, however, it becomes clear how dependent these institutions were on the private power of Admiral Maximiliaan and his relationship with the town of Veere, of which he was lord. Two out of three successive deputy-admirals were his bailiffs of Veere and the third was his bastard brother. The admiralty court was staffed by the Veere town elite and in the 1550s included Maximiliaan’s receiver. The superintendent was an Antwerp merchant but had married into a leading family of Veere and the constable came from Mechelen, but had been Veere town gunner since 1541.³¹ In sixteenth-century conditions the cultivation of such personal relationships may well have been the best way to make institutions work. Jehan du Boys, first keeper of the Mechelen arsenal, must have thought so. When he died in 1558 two of his executors were officers of the Grote Raad, members of the official cadres developing in Brussels and Mechelen, while the third was the king’s gunfounder, Remy de Hallut.³²

T H E A D M I N I S T R AT I V E C H A L L E N G E O F G ROW T H Armies in the field and in garrison were much harder to regulate than arsenals or dockyards. Though directed by councillors and royal household officers appointed ad hoc for individual campaigns and troubled by some corruption, English pay and victualling arrangements seem to have worked fairly well.³³ Provision for Spanish troops in the Netherlands was less successful. Despite the construction of a special network of Spanish officials to arrange their payment and supply, the soldiers often resorted to plundering friendly territory and were sometimes left to starve.³⁴ Arrangements for German or local troops seem to have had similar inadequacies.³⁵ Garrisons raised particular problems and disgruntled soldiers accused their commanders of all kinds of abuses. In the case of Philibert de Marigny, governor of Mariembourg in the 1550s, these included selling beer, beans, and wheat to his soldiers and forbidding them to buy from other merchants, demanding a cut of the takings of the butcher who sold them meat, using his men as agricultural labourers on his nearby estate, and peculating their wages.³⁶ In the case of the captains at Calais in the late 1540s, the charges were of peculating wage money to spend on drinking, gambling, gluttony, and fornication.³⁷ At least Calais had a council which was supposed to supervise the captains. Ireland, which succeeded Calais as the home of the Tudors’ largest standing force, was much worse regulated: captains were largely left to their own—often corrupt—devices and what central military organs existed were in chaos.³⁸ At the top of each system sat treasurers of war. In the Netherlands this became a permanent office under Maximilian, while in England an experienced financial officer was ³¹ ³² ³³ ³⁴ ³⁵ ³⁶ ³⁸

Sicking, Zeemacht, 59–60, 209–10, 225–6, 293. Roosens, ‘Arsenaal’, 182–3; id., ‘Artillerie’, 127–8. Davies, ‘Supplies for Armies’, 234–48. Fagel, Hispano-Vlaamse wereld, 389–90, 395, 399–407. Rooms, ‘Tr´esorier des guerres’, 863; Baes, ‘Les Arm´ees’, 81–5. Wellens, ‘Le Proc`es’, 33–9. ³⁷ Gruffudd, ‘Boulogne and Calais’, 27–8, 75. Brady, ‘The Captains’ Games’, 147–51.

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appointed afresh for each campaign.³⁹ Neither system availed much when there was simply not enough money to meet the military commitments taken on by governments, a situation more common in the Netherlands than in England. The Habsburgs’ more central engagement in the mainstream of European politics made them more susceptible than the Tudors to the ratchet effects on army size and expenditure of competition with other powers, in particular France. These effects, a central part of the ‘military revolution’, were amplified in the Netherlands by the way in which the focus of the Habsburg–Valois struggle shifted northwards in the 1540s and 1550s. From 1494 both sides had deployed much larger forces in Italy than in the Netherlands and northern France, but once Charles and Philip began to campaign in the north in person that naturally changed. Now forces of 40,000 or more operated in a region which had in the 1520s supported armies only a quarter of the size.⁴⁰ When he chose to intervene in person, Henry VIII felt obliged to match such figures, producing a steady increase in the size of armies led to France by English kings: some 14,000 in 1492, perhaps 30,000 in 1513, and 48,000 in 1544. When faced with invasion by French forces temporarily free of the struggle with the Habsburgs, he drew even larger reserves from the militia of the southern counties, holding 100,000 men ready in 1545.⁴¹ For all their deficiencies and their dependence on medieval antecedents, the armed forces of Habsburgs and Tudors alike made an ever greater impact on society as their interwoven wars ground on towards the exhaustion of 1559.

WA R A N D S TAT E F I N A N C E It is hard to doubt that it was military needs that drove up taxation levels and dragged competing European states at various times through the transition from a demesne state, in which the ruler’s revenues mostly came from landholdings and judicial profits, to a tax state, in which the government more or less efficiently taxed the wealth of its subjects. The case is proven both by the high proportions of expenditure dedicated to war and the coincidence between lasting innovations in taxation and desperate military need.⁴² The records generated by the financial institutions of the Tudors and Habsburgs do not enable us to give wholly reliable total figures for their incomes, expenditures, and debts, but we do have a mixture of precise figures for some aspects of government finance and contemporary and later estimates for global figures. What they suggest is that government expenditure was rising inexorably in real terms and that war was a major factor. Kings did spend money on other magnificent projects. Henry VIII spent about a tenth the cost of his first war with France and Scotland on Hampton Court and Whitehall, admittedly two of the greatest of his fifty-odd ³⁹ ⁴⁰ ⁴¹ ⁴²

Rooms, ‘Tr´esorier des guerres’, 862; Gunn, Government, 150. Hale, War and Society, 62–3; Gunn, ‘March on Paris’, 597. Currin, ‘ ‘‘To Traffic with War?’’ ’, 126; Davies, ‘English People and War’, 1–4. Bonney (ed.), Fiscal State.

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palaces, while his son’s household in the 1550s cost more than the navy and the Calais garrison put together.⁴³ But all other expenses were swamped by the demands of war. Charles V’s budget in the Netherlands roughly doubled from peaceful 1516 to war-torn 1522, from about one million to two million £, 70 per cent of the latter figure being devoted to military charges.⁴⁴ By 1543, eight months of fighting was reckoned to cost the Netherlands government 2,765,658£ and by 1558 a campaign of six months cost 5,377,421£.⁴⁵ Henry VIII, whose inherited annual income was of the order of £100,000, spent something like £1 million on war in 1512–14, half that in 1522–4, and £2 million in 1542–7.⁴⁶ The impact of war is equally evident in the accounts of the navies and arsenals we have examined. In the 1550s the Mechelen arsenal spent roughly ten times monthly in wartime what it spent in peace and the navy at Veere seven times, even when the peacetime figures include the capital cost of ships.⁴⁷ The cost of war rose ahead of other costs because of the increasing complexity of fortifications and weapons, the increasing premium paid for skilled troops, and the increase in the size of armies necessary to compete with France. For the Habsburgs this brought a struggle to concentrate the resources of their various realms on the key areas of conflict. For Habsburgs and Tudors alike it brought a search to increase existing revenues and locate new ones wherever their subjects might permit them to be found. D E M E S N E R EV E N U E S In England and the Netherlands the distinction between demesne revenues and taxation was in some ways blurred. In the Netherlands demesne revenues often included the tolls levied on the trade of towns directly subject to the prince, while in England a small but significant part of the king’s taxation of the landed incomes of his greater subjects came in the feudal dues he levied as overlord of his tenants-in-chief. Further confusion arose in England from the degree to which Henry VII and Henry VIII treated their landed income as a mainstay of public finance while drawing nonlanded income into the system of financial management based in the royal household with its large cash deposits held in the secretive ‘privy coffers’ in the royal palaces.⁴⁸ In the Netherlands the proportion of total government income derived from the demesne was in decline from the mid-fifteenth to the mid-sixteenth century, as taxes rose and princely estates were alienated or mortgaged to raise short-term cash. Yet the decline was not as drastic as it might seem. Under Philip the Good the demesnes supplied some 61 per cent of income, in 1481 49 per cent and in later years of low taxation like 1534 or 1551 24 or 25 per cent; it was high-tax years like 1545 or 1559 that made the demesne’s contribution look puny, at 5 per cent or 4 per cent respectively.⁴⁹ The demesne’s regular contributions were important for the standing charges ⁴³ ⁴⁴ ⁴⁶ ⁴⁸ ⁴⁹

Gunn, Government, 111–13; PRO, E351/534–5. Cauwenberghe, Vorstelijk domein, 343, 345. ⁴⁵ Tracy, ‘Taxation System’, 91. Hoyle, ‘War’. ⁴⁷ Roosens, ‘Arsenaal’, 180–1; Sicking, Zeemacht, 184. Gunn, Government, 144–56; Grummitt, ‘Henry VII’; Jack, ‘Henry VIII’s Attitude’. Cauwenberghe, Vorstelijk domein, 286–7.

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of government, such as the payment of officers, while taxes paid for emergencies such as war. Careful management enabled income to be increased in response to economic prosperity like that developing around Antwerp, while mortgages formed a roughand-ready way to tap the wealth of landed and mercantile elites largely untouched by the tax system.⁵⁰ As its cash contribution declined in importance, moreover, the demesne took on a new role as security for the ever larger loans raised by the Habsburgs against their Netherlands income. In peaceful interludes efforts were made to free the demesne from the burden of debt and mortgaging. Only at the end of our period was it crippled by a wave of irrevocable alienations in 1558–60.⁵¹ The English demesne faced some of the same pressures, as kings alienated land to reward their supporters or raise cash, but it held its role in overall crown finance better: except in the years of heaviest taxation it produced about half of royal income throughout the period. This was made possible by two large expansions in the crown lands, first under the Yorkists and Henry VII, who held onto inherited or confiscated estates rather than distribute them, and then by Henry VIII at the dissolution of the monasteries. Demesne revenues were raised to tap agrarian prosperity around 1500, though their ability to do so seems to have declined as the sixteenth century went on. Though insufficient to fund war without taxation, they made significant contributions to war finance when drafted into reserve treasuries and released in wartime, as Henry VIII seems to have done with his father’s reserves in 1512–14. Sales of land were also crucial in funding war from the 1540s.⁵² TA X AT I O N Taxes on trade were better established and less controversial in England than in the Netherlands, probably because a significant proportion of them were borne by the continental consumers of English wool and cloth. Though subject to parliamentary approval, the English customs were voted to kings for life and collected year in, year out. Reviving trade and tight collection under Henry VII raised them to a level comparable with his demesne income, though they fell back under Henry VIII and Edward and had to be reformed under Mary to return them to rough parity with the demesne.⁵³ In the Netherlands the urban interests well represented in the States of the richest provinces were very reluctant to agree to any taxes that might drive away the trade central to their prosperity. Attempts to tax Holland’s grain trade were consistently opposed in the States and at length defeated.⁵⁴ Taxes on specific commodities were voted for specific purposes—on imported wine to fund the navy in the 1550s for example—but often failed to raise the sums intended.⁵⁵ A 1 per cent general levy on exports was part of a package of new taxation measures proposed in 1542–3, but in Holland it had to be imposed against the will of the States and raised little; elsewhere it was more successful but was still withdrawn in 1554.⁵⁶ ⁵⁰ ⁵² ⁵⁴ ⁵⁶

Ibid. 342, 385. ⁵¹ Ibid. 385–8; Baelde, ‘Financial Policy’. Gunn, Government, 113–21; Hoyle, ‘War’, 84–6. ⁵³ Gunn, Government, 122–4. Tracy, Holland, 94–105. ⁵⁵ Sicking, Zeemacht, 182; Tracy, Holland, 139–40. Tracy, ‘Taxation System’, 86; Blockmans, ‘Finances publiques’, 79–82.

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In both England and the Netherlands, direct taxation assessed on the individual incomes and wealth of subjects was the most productive variety of levy and the most responsive to growing prosperity. For those very reasons it was hard to persuade subjects to assent to it. In England the fifteenth and tenth was the standard form of parliamentary taxation in 1485. It always raised £31,000 because it rested on quotas for each town and village fixed in 1334. Experiments with more efficient replacements stirred parliamentary opposition and popular rebellion under Henry VII; but under Henry VIII they produced the lay subsidy, a remarkably effective and progressive tax by contemporary standards. It was assessed on incomes and wealth in goods by gentry commissioners appointed by the king and clearly under political pressure to make realistic ratings. Often combined with fifteenths and tenths, it raised an average £48,000 in 1512–17, £69,000 in 1524–5, and £89,000 in 1541–6, with a peak of £194,000 in 1546. Under the weaker regimes that followed, over-use and collusive under-assessment, aided by inflation, ate away at its value. Comparisons of subsidy assessments with probate valuations suggest that while people were taxed on about half of their real wealth in 1524–42, this was little more than a quarter by the 1550s and just over a fifth in the 1560s.⁵⁷ Even in its heyday, moreover, it was insufficient to fund war and a series of other direct taxes were added to it, including benevolences (effectively subsidies not voted by parliament) and forced loans, again rated on individuals’ assessed wealth, the king’s failure to repay which was subsequently given parliamentary blessing.⁵⁸ In the 1520s these more than matched the yield of parliamentary taxes even without the Amicable Grant of 1525, a demand withdrawn amidst general refusal to pay; in the 1540s they added more than half again to the heavier subsidies then being levied.⁵⁹ Government pressure in the Netherlands was likewise able to secure increases in direct taxation in the face of military need. The peaceful reign of Philip the Fair saw average taxes in Flanders dip to 60 per cent of those paid in 1472–82, but in 1515–30 taxes recovered to 139 per cent of the 1472–82 level.⁶⁰ Where the Habsburgs were much less successful was in changing the basis of assessment. Although several provinces had been persuaded in the fourteenth and fifteenth centuries to institute annual grants of taxation whether or not there was a military emergency—an enviable position from the point of view of English kings—these were insufficient for the needs of war and therefore needed to be topped up with extraordinary levies. When these were requested, provincial States, at least in Holland, Brabant, and Flanders, which between them were responsible for about three-quarters of taxes raised, much preferred to vote beden or aides of predetermined value divided between towns and rural districts according to quota systems. Unlike the quotas for the English fifteenth and tenth, these schedules—the heerdtelling of Brabant, the transport of Flanders, the schiltal of Holland—were recalculated in our period after investigations of population and sometimes land use.⁶¹ Such attempts at equitable ⁵⁷ Schofield, Taxation. ⁵⁸ Gunn, Government, 137–9. ⁵⁹ Hoyle, ‘War’, 89, 93. ⁶⁰ Prevenier, Blockmans, Burgundian Netherlands, 193. ⁶¹ D´enombrements Brabant, pp. xxxix–xli; Maddens, Beden, 41–67; Tracy, ‘Taxation System’, 72–3.

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assessment were overshadowed, however, by the habit of the great towns with influence in the States reducing their contributions by negotiating grati¨en or rebates for themselves in return for agreeing to each tax grant. Already early in Charles V’s reign these reduced the yield of every tax voted in Holland by 15 per cent, in Brabant by 27 per cent, and in Flanders by 32 per cent. By 1532 five of the six leading Holland towns had bargained their way to rebates of half or even two-thirds of their taxes, cutting the net value of many of the province’s grants by one-third or more.⁶² In Flanders the story was similar, such that Ghent, Bruges, and Ypres paid 8 per cent of the county’s beden between 1515 and 1550 instead of the 35.5 per cent they were supposed to produce.⁶³ In both these provinces the greater nobles and clerics whose important estates were islands of independent jurisdiction defended their tenants’ freedom from provincial taxation equally effectively, against pressure from the great towns rather than from the Habsburgs, who valued the nobles’ loyalty too much to strip them of their privileges.⁶⁴ Thus towns and nobles threw the weight of taxation onto the non-exempt countryside. In Holland it should have paid 42 per cent of all beden under the schiltal; in 1543–60 it paid 62 per cent.⁶⁵ Inside the towns, meanwhile, the money to pay the beden was usually raised by levying excises on sales of alcoholic drinks and other consumables, a highly regressive form of taxation, and by selling renten, bonds paying annuities out of future revenues. The emergency of 1542–3 saw the government’s most concerted effort to transfer the tax burden more equitably and profitably onto landed and commercial income: each, it was proposed, was to be taxed at 10 per cent in addition to the hundredth penny on exports. Even after months of haggling, the best that could be done was an assortment of the proposed levies and alternative taxes on land and trading capital, varying from province to province, successful in mixed degrees and mostly abandoned after 1545. Thereafter the core provinces raised ever higher sums—in Holland 152 per cent of the average annual level of 1519–66 in 1542–4 and 212 per cent in 1552–60—but did so by taking ever more independent control of tax administration, issuing renten, elaborating their own financial bureaucracies, and increasing the burden of land taxes on the countryside and excises on the urban poor.⁶⁶ Away from the core provinces the story was often the same. The Walloon provinces played a significant part in the overall tax yield of the Netherlands, though well behind their northern neighbours: in 1540–8 Artois, Hainaut, Namur, Tournai, and Walloon Flanders, with perhaps 18 per cent of the population of the Netherlands in 1500, together generated some 16 per cent of its taxes.⁶⁷ In general they seem to have followed a similar track to Holland and Flanders, avoiding direct taxes and ⁶² Tracy, ‘Taxation System’, 78–83, 108. ⁶³ Maddens, Beden, 209–46; Blockmans, ‘Low Countries’, 287. ⁶⁴ Maddens, Beden, 302–12; Tracy, Holland, 135–8. ⁶⁵ Tracy, Holland, 142. ⁶⁶ Tracy, ‘Taxation system’, 88–92; Maddens, Beden, xvii. 349–416; Augustyn, ‘Staten van Brabant’, 111–12, 116–17; Rodr´ıguez-Salgado, Changing Face of Empire, 57–8. ⁶⁷ Maddens, Beden, 10–11; Prevenier and Blockmans, Burgundian Netherlands, 392.

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using urban excises and renten whenever possible. ⁶⁸ Only Walloon Flanders levied ever heavier taxes—173 per cent by 1553 of what they had been in 1473 when measured in wheat equivalents—but tried to spread the burden of taxation onto landlords rather than tenants using increasingly precise and complex investigations of rural society.⁶⁹ By and large the most peripheral provinces were lightly taxed in proportion to their population, though perhaps not in proportion to their wealth: Friesland, Gelderland, Overijssel, Utrecht, and Luxembourg, with some 12 per cent of the population of the Netherlands in 1500, paid less than 3 per cent of its taxes in 1540–8.⁷⁰ Matters were not improved by the repeated deadlock in the States of Friesland, Gelderland, and Overijssel in the 1550s over breaches of local judicial privileges and the disruptive pursuit of heresy.⁷¹ Yet even at the fringes taxation saw successes as well as failures, especially where war was an immediate danger. Gelderland, safely far from France, insisted its tax grants cover only expenditure within the province, voting nothing in 1555 and less in 1559 than in 1547.⁷² Beleaguered Luxembourg, in contrast, seems to have been more open to direct taxes without fixed yields than other provinces, voting them regularly from 1492.⁷³ The efficiency of taxation increased steadily across Charles V’s reign—admittedly from a low base—and treaties with the great nobles in the 1540s and 1550s exposed their tenants to taxation.⁷⁴ Clerical wealth attracted the attention of governments in both England and the Netherlands. Through pressure on the provincial convocations of the clergy that met in parallel with parliament, Henry VII and Wolsey drove up taxation of the clergy so that it probably bit harder than the subsidy did on the laity. This was merely the overture to the assault of the 1530s which introduced a permanent 10 per cent annual levy on clerical incomes, to which occasional subsidies and forced loans were soon added. Many bishops paid a quarter of their gross income to the crown in 1540–7.⁷⁵ Developments in the Netherlands were by no means so drastic. Clerical tax exemptions varied from province to province, but the clergy were rarely fully subject to taxation voted by the States.⁷⁶ Several times between 1532 and 1552 Charles secured papal agreement to general taxation of the clergy in the Netherlands at heavily progressive rates. The first levy made an important contribution to his finances, more than the beden in any province outside the richest three, but no subsequent grant raised as much.⁷⁷ As with the tax privileges of feudal enclaves, the most effective assault on clerical tax exemptions came from the town-dominated provincial States, which extended the taxes they controlled from the 1540s to cover the clergy.⁷⁸

⁶⁸ Derville, ‘Fiscalit´e’, 34, 38–9; D´enombrements Hainaut, 14–19, 133–5, 509–10, 547–8, 628; Koenigsberger, Monarchies, 162; Tracy, Emperor Charles V, 269. ⁶⁹ Derville, ‘Fiscalit´e’, 42–50. ⁷⁰ Maddens, Beden, 10–11; Prevenier and Blockmans, Burgundian Netherlands, 392. ⁷¹ Israel, Dutch Republic, 133–4; Kalma et al. (eds.), Friesland, 264–6. ⁷² Pas, ‘Tussen centraal en lokaal gezag’, 144–6. ⁷³ D´enombrements Hainaut, 12. ⁷⁴ Petit, ‘Luxembourg’, 89, 92. ⁷⁵ Gunn, Government, 141–2. ⁷⁶ Hommerich, ‘Gouvern´es et gouvernants’, 113–16; Maddens, Beden, 13–14, 247–53, 259–72; Tracy, Holland, 60; Blockmans, Volksvertegenwoordiging, 162; D´enombrements Hainaut, 98–9. ⁷⁷ Baelde, ‘Kerkelijke subsidies’. ⁷⁸ Koenigsberger, Monarchies, 165.

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A final expedient of princely finances, reserved for the deepest emergencies, was to debase the coinage. Maximilian did so to fund civil war in the 1480s, at the peak drawing about a fifth of his total income in the Netherlands from the mints.⁷⁹ Henry VIII and his son’s councillors did so in 1544–51, raising about a third of the costs of their wars by reducing the silver content of English coins from 92.5 to 25 per cent.⁸⁰ The economic and social effects of each bout and of the drastic stabilization measures necessary to conclude them were so severe that governments stuck to sound coinage for several generations afterwards.

B O R ROW I N G A N D T R A N S F E R S All these measures drove up government income towards the level demanded for effective warfare, but there was never quite enough money and it never arrived fast enough. Thus governments had to borrow. Here England and the far more commercialized Netherlands developed differently. Throughout the period English kings took short-term loans from their own subjects, principally through the corporation and livery companies of London, but always either paid them back or retrospectively converted them into taxes. From 1544 to 1574, domestic credit did not suffice, and Henry VIII and his children contracted large loans from Antwerp bankers, at the peak in 1560 owing £279,000. These were still short-term loans, which made for high interest rates by commercial standards—between 12 and 18 per cent—and frequent negotiations to replace one loan with another. But at least this meant that interludes of peace and retrenchment enabled them to be paid off.⁸¹ Habsburg governments also took short-term loans. Charles V built up a burden of debt at Antwerp that rose from little more than 10,000£ in 1515 to some 7,000,000£ in 1556, perhaps four times the size of the peak English debt. Part of this consisted of more or less forced loans, interest-free from his leading subjects or at low rates from the municipality of Antwerp, but the majority was borrowed at market rates from German and Italian bankers. Each new war in the 1520s and 1530s roughly doubled what he owed, each in the 1540s tripled it, that in the 1550s multiplied it by twelve or more. Between wars the debt fell back, though after the mid-1520s never to its level of 1515. While some of the loans were completely repaid, others had to be consolidated into long-term debt by the issue of renten secured on future revenues from the demesnes or taxation. In crises such long-term debts were also contracted to raise immediate military funds.⁸² Thus the government of the Netherlands built up a burden of long-term debt that could not be shaken off. Already on 8 January 1537 Mary of Hungary could inform Charles that ‘all revenues until 1539 are eaten up and consumed in advance’.⁸³ In intervals of peace the regents attempted to reduce ⁷⁹ ⁸¹ ⁸² ⁸³

Spufford, Monetary Problems, 133–43. ⁸⁰ Gunn, Government, 129–30. Gunn, Government, 142–4. Braudel, ‘Les emprunts’, 191–201; Tracy, Emperor Charles V, 256–9. Baelde, ‘Financial Policy’, 210.

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the long-term as well as the short-term debt, redeeming the estates they had mortgaged and the renten they had sold, but they were never able to do more than stabilize the total volume of long-term debt, which perhaps tripled in the 1530s, stayed steady throughout the 1540s, and then exploded in the 1550s.⁸⁴ Meanwhile Charles’s bankers placed ever less trust in his credit-worthiness. Early in his reign great noblemen had had to guarantee his loans by their own personal credit; then, from the 1520s, the receivers of the beden had been called in to do the same; finally in the 1540s and 1550s corporate obligations from the provincial States were required.⁸⁵ Hidden elements and hard bargaining in emergencies raised real interest rates well above the nominal 12 or 15 per cent.⁸⁶ As the Habsburgs’ credit became poorer, that of the States of Holland, Flanders, and Brabant became stronger. In these provinces towns, rural districts, and eventually provincial States had taken to issuing renten of their own to raise the cash to pay their taxes to the government. At first, in 1515–33, the States of Holland found it hard to sell these renten: they often had to force provincial notables to buy them, thus in effect taking a forced loan, while of those bought freely, many went to Flemings. In the 1540s and 1550s, however, as the States won greater control of taxation, their ability to meet their obligations improved and sales of renten to Holland’s own political and economic elite, above all the leading magistrates of the six greatest towns and the officials based at The Hague, improved.⁸⁷ Thus in a kind of devolved state formation, the effective management of funded debt which would characterize later states was developed not at the level of central government, but at that of the individual provinces. Tudors and Habsburgs alike ruled in composite monarchies, but war finance in one was much simpler than in the other. Tudor England subsidized the increasingly militarized government of Tudor Ireland from the Kildare rebellion of 1534 onwards, the costs rising to a peak of £34,700 in 1552 but then falling back.⁸⁸ The inhabitants of the Habsburg Netherlands thought they were subsidizing Habsburg military ventures in Italy and Spain and intermittently complained about it.⁸⁹ Sometimes, as in the case of Charles’s coronation expedition of 1530 or war for Parma in 1551, they were right.⁹⁰ In general, however, the reverse was the case, at least from the 1540s. Partly thanks to the skill of Mary of Hungary in commandeering the resources of other parts of her brother’s realms, Naples, Sicily, and, above all, Castile subsidized the Habsburg war effort in the Netherlands, both by providing revenues against which loans could be raised at Antwerp and by providing coin and bullion which could be shipped directly into the theatre of war.⁹¹ By the mid-1550s the various Habsburg rulers and regents were engaged in a dangerous game of brinkmanship in ⁸⁴ Baelde, ‘Financial Policy’, 216–20. ⁸⁵ Tracy, ‘Taxation System’, 76–7. ⁸⁶ Braudel, ‘Les emprunts’, 196. ⁸⁷ Tracy, ‘Taxation System’, 73–5, 83; Tracy, Holland, 116–35; Maddens, Beden, xvii. 349–65; Augustyn, ‘Staten van Brabant’, 116–17. ⁸⁸ Gunn, Government, 113. ⁸⁹ Maddens, Beden, 410–11; Koenigsberger, Monarchies, 175–6. ⁹⁰ Tracy, Emperor Charles V, 129, 243. ⁹¹ Tracy, Emperor Charles V, 197–203, 225–8, 243–8; Rodr´ıguez-Salgado, Changing Face of Empire, 59–62.

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which each tried to avoid provoking unmanageable resistance in the realm in his or her charge by shuffling off their obligations onto other territories. It was in this context that Philip was deeply frustrated by England’s failure to make what he saw as its proper contribution to the war against France in 1557–8.⁹² Like his father, he had to pile ever heavier burdens on Castile until it could bear no more. The events of 1557–9 forced him to abandon the embryonic centralized financial machinery devised for his realms, default on his obligations, make peace, and return to Spain.⁹³ He left a Netherlands in which the States General had taken the opportunity of the government’s desperation in 1557–9 to take control of the administration of taxation and in effect of government finance.⁹⁴ AC H I EV E M E N TS A N D C O S TS Under the pressure of war, both England and the Netherlands shared in this period in the predictable movement away from a demesne state towards a tax state, though it was more pronounced in the Netherlands. Both saw fiscal pressure driven strongly upwards to reach roughly similar per capita levels. The sum of 800,000£ per annum voted in the novennial aide of 1557 was not far off the £140,000 or more a year Henry VIII was levying in direct lay taxation in 1542–6.⁹⁵ In England this level of taxation had been foreshadowed by the very heavy direct taxes levied by governments in the late thirteenth and early fourteenth century, admittedly taken from a population nearly twice the size; it was certainly dwarfed by the startling increase in per capita levies achieved in the later seventeenth and early eighteenth centuries.⁹⁶ Yet when local levies to fund national activities—such as the outfitting of soldiers for foreign expeditions—are added in, the burden of taxation on London has been shown to have leapt upwards in the 1540s to levels not matched again in the sixteenth century.⁹⁷ Such taxation was harsh enough to cause economic disruption, especially when combined with the currency manipulation of the years of greatest military spending. The subsidies of the 1520s and 1540s, it has been argued, were so successful in tapping urban wealth that they drained the capital and damaged the credit networks on which the urban economy rested and contributed strongly to England’s mid-century economic crisis.⁹⁸ In this phase the landed interest in parliament agreed to taxation, but skewed its impact away from the countryside towards the towns. For the next century or so after 1559, political society would limit taxation further, through parliamentary resistance and collusive under-assessment. The fiscal growth achieved by the mid-Tudor state was real, but neither unprecedented nor sustainable. That it was not accompanied by the accumulation of a major burden of debt enabled governments after 1559 to accept lower levels of taxation and thereby help to preserve political stability amidst further economic and religious change. ⁹² ⁹³ ⁹⁵ ⁹⁶ ⁹⁷

Rodr´ıguez-Salgado, Changing Face of Empire, 172–88 and passim. Ibid. 223–52, 339–56. ⁹⁴ Koenigsberger, Monarchies, 184–92. Rodr´ıguez-Salgado, Changing Face of Empire, 193; Hoyle, ‘War’, 93. O’Brien and Hunt, ‘England, 1485–1815’, 58–64. Archer, ‘Burden of Taxation’, 623–4. ⁹⁸ Hoyle, ‘Taxation’.

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In the Netherlands the levels of taxation reached in the 1550s probably were unprecedented. Yet the distribution of the tax burden was considerably more uneven than in England, for the nobility and clergy were largely exempt and urban elites paid remarkably little tax.⁹⁹ Moreover, the conditions placed on grants of taxation by political society represented in the States were such as to cause a partial breakdown in the state, at least in its centralized form, as power was devolved onto provincial institutions. The accumulation of a large debt, meanwhile, did not allow the Habsburgs to return to a low-pressure fiscal regime after 1559 and restricted the government’s room for manœuvre when religious discontent combined with resentment at the role of Spanish ministers and Spanish troops to bring on the crisis of the 1560s.¹⁰⁰ Ironically it would be the success of the dissident northern provinces after 1572 in constructing a much more effective fiscal system, based in their experience of fiscal management in the 1540s and 1550s, that would provide the model for the reform of English state finances in the later seventeenth century.¹⁰¹ If neither England nor the Netherlands constructed in this period the kind of bureaucratized, standing, professional armed forces seen as characteristic of modern states, they both moved a certain distance towards them, with arsenals and garrison forces in both polities, the navy in England and the ordonnances in the Netherlands. Mercenaries and militias made up the numbers in ever larger Tudor and Habsburg armies, as governments weighed the greater expertise of the former against their greater cost and more troubled relations with the civilian population. The resulting armed forces were able to meet some but not all of their masters’ strategic aims. The English achieved limited expansion against the Gaelic Irish and individual victories against the French and Scots, but did not realize any of their grander plans of conquest. The Habsburgs failed to recover Picardy and the duchy of Burgundy from the French, but successfully expanded the area under their control to the north and east. Both states defended themselves against aggression from their neighbours and succeeded in suppressing internal opposition, even when it manifested itself on a large scale. Yet just as the French army forged in the wars of 1477–1559 found itself incapable of defeating the Huguenots in the French Wars of Religion, its Habsburg equivalent proved insufficient in the long run to maintain the power of the dynasty against its opponents in all parts of the Netherlands as religious and localist discontents multiplied from the 1560s. In both England and the Netherlands, then, war had forged stronger military and fiscal systems. But the lines of development along which circumstances had forced their development were not such as to make them a permanent increment in the growth of state power or an uncomplicated means for rulers to control their subjects. Even the most apparently straightforward equation between war and state development proves to be considerably more complex than it looks once tested against the course of events. In the chapters that follow we shall test the effects of war on many other relationships in English and Netherlandish society, between towns and other parts of the polity; between town magistrates and those over whom they exercised ⁹⁹ Tracy, ‘Taxation System’, 89. ¹⁰⁰ Koenigsberger, Monarchies, 193–219. ¹⁰¹ Tracy, Emperor Charles V, 272–3; O’Brien and Hunt, ‘England, 1485–1815’, 60–3.

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power; between nobles, their followers, and wider provincial society; between individuals and communities and the prince, his armies, his agents, and the patriotic duty to which they made increasing appeal. War was a much more complex process than mere narratives of campaigns or tables of army sizes or tax revenues can suggest. Our aim is to analyse that process in as many aspects as we can.

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PA RT I I TOW N S AT WA R

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3 Introduction Towns were islands of political and economic autonomy within princely states, yet centrally engaged in the processes of political development and mobilization for war. Though all towns except those in terminal decay shared the economic functions of a central market for the surrounding countryside, in other respects they varied widely. Some were great centres of manufacturing or of international trade, others centres of regional distribution or service industries. Such trades or manufactures could expand or collapse with frightening speed. All towns were centres of wealth, credit, manpower, transport, and food marketing that war-making rulers would need to tap, as the role of town representatives in the provincial States and parliament testified. Some were under close supervision by the prince, others under the control of a great lord or prelate, others much more autonomous. Tudors and Habsburgs alike strove for greater power over the towns they ruled, but in parts of the Netherlands, above all in Flanders, the confrontation between princes and towns was the mainspring of political conflict in a way it had never been in England.¹ In the core provinces of the Netherlands not only did a large proportion of the population live in towns, 30 per cent or more, but many individual towns were large. Antwerp, at some 90,000 inhabitants by 1550, outstripped but did not dwarf Amsterdam (30,000), Bruges (35,000), Brussels (40,000), and Ghent (50,000). Not far behind them came towns with populations of between 10,000 and 30,000 such as Delft, Dordrecht, Gouda, Haarlem, ’s-Hertogenbosch, Leiden, Leuven, Mechelen, or Ypres. Towns of this size were also present in some of the southern provinces or those added by the Habsburgs: Arras, Groningen, Lille, Maastricht, Mons, Nijmegen, Tournai, Utrecht, and Valenciennes. In contrast, while London rivalled Antwerp for size, only Bristol, Norwich, and perhaps Newcastle reached 10,000–12,000. By these criteria, most of England’s six hundred or more chartered boroughs were very small towns indeed, mere local centres like the towns of Luxembourg, with populations reckoned in hundreds rather than thousands. ¹ For what follows, see Nicholas, Later Medieval City; Vries, Urbanisation, 270–4; Dobson, ‘General Survey’; Rigby and Ewan, ‘Government’; Rosser, ‘Urban Culture’; Kermode, ‘Greater Towns’; Kowaleski, ‘Port Towns’, Dyer, ‘Small Towns’; Archer, ‘Politics and Government’; Prevenier and Blockmans, Burgundian Netherlands, 28–34; Israel, Dutch Republic, 60–9, 113–28; Stabel, ‘Stedelijke instellingen’; Decavele, ‘Bestuursinstellingen van Gent’; Mertens, ‘Bestuursinstellingen van Brugge’; Trio, ‘Bestuursinstellingen van Ieper’; Uytven, ‘Bestuursinstellingen Leuven’; Honacker, ‘Bestuursinstellingen Brussel’; Nieuwenhuizen, ‘Bestuursinstellingen Antwerpen’; Jacobs, ‘Bestuursinstellingen ’s-Hertogenbosch’; Eycken, ‘Instellingen in de kleine Brabantse steden’; Jacobs, ‘Ambachten’; Tracy, Holland, 13–19, 61–2.

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Towns’ relations with princely power depended on a wide range of variables and interacted both with the contest among groups of citizens for control of civic politics and with the town’s ambition for power over the surrounding countryside. Princely charters defined towns’ degree of administrative and judicial autonomy and the constitutional arrangements through which they might exercise it. New charters might grant proper urban status for the first time, to seal a town’s rise to economic significance, its escape from lordly tutelage, or its need to act as a legal corporation, as in the incorporation of many English boroughs in the 1540s and 1550s. New charters to old towns might make significant alterations in favour of or against particular groups, empowering oligarchs or sidelining guilds. They might reduce the autonomy of the town as a whole. At worst they might cut popular participation, autonomy, and the town’s grip on its rural hinterland, as did Ghent’s charters of 1453, 1492, and 1540, each imposed following an unsuccessful armed confrontation with the prince. Conversely, charters might grant the trading privileges towns needed to thrive in reward for political loyalty or military assistance. Towns were governed by myriad combinations of permanent and rotating officers and councils, representing in different measure the authority of the prince or lord, hereditary patrician families, wealthy—usually merchant—oligarchs, leaders or members of craft guilds, and ordinary freemen or citizens of the town. A significant proportion of the population of most towns did not hold citizenship, which was often linked to guild membership, and thus took no part in town government. Nonetheless urban institutions engaged more subjects of modest social rank in regular political activity than did those of the countryside: citizenship could reach around a third of adult males, as at Lille, or even two-thirds, as at mid-sixteenth-century London.² Permanent princely or lordly officers—schouten, maı¨eurs, or bailiffs—were prominent as legal executives in the Netherlands but rarer in England, except in seigneurial towns. Boards of magistrates, known as schepenen, ´echevins, or aldermen, were common to both countries. In addition to their judicial role they formed, alone or with additional members, a council for the day-to-day government of the town. Annually elected chief executives, sometimes in pairs or foursomes—mayors, burgemeesters, and so on—led these councils and represented the town in internal ritual and external negotiation. In the latter task they were often assisted by lawyers in town service, pensionaries in the Netherlands, recorders or town clerks in England, who could lend continuity to governing bodies of fluctuating composition. Financial officials—chamberlains, treasurers, rentmeesters —collected and dispensed money. Finally some kind of wider council, often composed of guild representatives, was generally consulted over major decisions. Several key variables determined the exact balance between these elements found in different towns. Hereditary non-mercantile patriciates might have a fixed role in the constitution, as at Brussels or Leuven, or just take a large role in an elective oligarchy, as at Antwerp; in England they did not exist. Where appointment to inner councils was for life and through co-optation by the existing members, as happened in the vroedschappen of most Holland towns or the English ‘close corporations’ of Bristol, ² DuPlessis, Lille, 20; Brigden, London, 138.

Introduction

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Exeter, and Lynn, tight oligarchic control was the result. Looser and more permeable regimes resulted when offices were held for limited terms and rules forbade frequent re-election or the simultaneous election of kinsmen, or when the guilds could nominate to some or all positions, or when officers were elected by wide assemblies of the citizenry. Though magistracies in most provinces of the Netherlands were renewed by princely commissioners, they worked from lists of nominations compiled in different ways in different towns, just as English kings appointed as justices of the peace those aldermen elected within the town; so towns’ internal electoral arrangements still mattered. Guilds held most power in Flanders, less in Brabant, little in Walloon Flanders, and least (Dordrecht excepted) in Holland. In England guilds took a less prominent role, but did have a place in the constitution of cities such as York. In any case those propelled into power by the guilds were usually not mere craft workers, but prosperous merchants affiliated to the appropriate guild. In some places ordinary freemen held office in the local government of town districts, wards or wijken, but the vitality of such institutions varied greatly from town to town. In many English seigneurial boroughs, meanwhile, shadow administrations run by the richer townsmen grew up on the basis of religious confraternities or manorial court juries to take over many of the functions of urban government from the lord’s officials. These balances were changing in the fifteenth and sixteenth centuries. In response to popular agitation power might be spread more widely, as it was in several English towns in the later fifteenth and earlier sixteenth century or in many Flemish and Brabantine towns in 1477. More frequently the response to trouble was to strengthen oligarchical control. In the Netherlands every opportunity seems to have been taken by the Burgundians and their Habsburg successors to do just that, at Antwerp, Brussels, Ghent, ’s-Hertogenbosch, Leuven, Maastricht, and elsewhere. The policy was a conscious effort to ‘withdraw authority from the hands of the people’, as Charles V told Margaret of Austria.³ As new provinces were acquired, so guild power was reduced and oligarchy advanced at Tournai, Utrecht, Deventer, and Groningen and in the towns of Gelderland. In England the process was less blatant, but it still seems that kings preferred to consolidate power in the hands of trustworthy urban elites and that such consolidation advanced from the later fifteenth century. Towns’ autonomy might extend into judicial, fiscal, economic, and military matters. Ten English towns by 1477 and twelve by 1537 were counties in their own right, the mayor acting as sheriff and the mayor and aldermen as justices of the peace and subsidy commissioners, but many more towns had lesser versions of these privileges. The major towns of the Netherlands similarly exercised full powers of criminal and civil justice over their inhabitants. Seigneurial towns, on the other hand, might be large but still very much under the thumb of their lord, as were Bury St Edmunds, eleventh largest town in England in 1524–5, or Bergen op Zoom and Breda, both among the top twenty towns in Brabant.⁴ Towns legislated to regulate economic life and social relations amongst their inhabitants and enforced these regulations through their courts. Yet towns’ autonomy was often compromised by the existence of ecclesiastical or seigneurial enclaves within their walls and many struggled constantly to tax ³ Peteghem, Raad van Vlaanderen, 31.

⁴ Ham, ‘Semi-soevereine heerlijkheden’.

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the clergy or their servants or tenants and to exercise jurisdiction around monasteries and cathedrals. Threats to that autonomy might come from noblemen empowered by the prince to act as provincial governors, grand baillis, or lords lieutenants, or from the provincial councils set up to oversee the far north of England and the Welsh marches and increasing their judicial power in most provinces of the Netherlands. Towns’ power over the surrounding countryside was generally much greater in the Netherlands. In different ways Coventry, Gloucester, and York achieved administrative control of adjoining rural areas, but these were small compared with the quarters or meierijen dominated by the great towns of Flanders and Brabant. Local courts were often obliged to consult the magistracies of large towns in difficult cases: for this purpose Valenciennes was judicial head of half the villages in Hainaut. Flemish and Brabantine towns often had citizens living outside their walls, buitenpoorters, whose exemption from legal or fiscal jurisdictions other than the town’s they would defend with vigour. The Burgundian dukes struggled to restrict this practice and it declined from the late fifteenth century. Even such changes left the powers of Flemish towns over their rural neighbours very large compared with those of most English towns, many of which had no jurisdiction even over their own suburbs. Wide economic control was also exercised by Ghent through its grain staple and Groningen through its sweeping monopoly rights; it was at least aspired to by Holland towns in their partially successful attempts to suppress rural brewing and other industries. English town budgets were smaller than those in the Netherlands not only because towns were smaller, but also because their relationship with princely fiscal systems was different. At least once the lay subsidy was introduced, taxation for the prince in England was levied by special commissioners—though in greater towns they were often the mayor and aldermen—and kept separate from the financial resources of the corporation. Towns in the Netherlands, in contrast, paid their contribution to the beden out of the town treasury, raising the money for this and other purposes by any means they chose. Usually this involved excises—at ’s-Hertogenbosch those on beer and wine alone provided nearly half the town’s income in 1510–11—though at times of need direct taxes were levied on the townsmen’s wealth.⁵ English towns did levy tolls on trade or occasionally taxes on property to pay for wall, street, bridge, and quay repairs, but were mostly dependent on property rents, court fines, and citizenship fees for regular income. For special projects they too levied direct taxes on the wealth of their citizens. When income did not match expenditure, they raised apparently interest-free loans from—or neglected to repay debts to—their leading citizens. In the same situation many towns in the Netherlands sold renten to raise cash. This was a system favourable to the urban elites who invested in them. But the burden of interest payments could become too great for civic income to bear, necessitating wholesale restructuring of town finance. By 1498 ’s-Hertogenbosch was in arrears to the tune of three times its normal annual income and what turned out to be a forty-eight-year programme of financial reform was introduced.⁶ The equivalent response for English towns in crisis, like Coventry from the 1520s, was to abandon much of the hierarchy of civic office-holding and the attendant duties that bore so ⁵ Blond´e, Sociale structuren, 2, 6–11.

⁶ Ibid. 2–11.

Introduction

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heavily on the purses of candidates for office that three men had refused the mayoralty in 1524.⁷ With the smaller budgets of English towns went smaller staffs of officials than the extensive secretariats and public works organizations of the larger Netherlands towns. With a few exceptions English towns’ public works—market buildings, guildhalls, water conduits, and so on—were unimpressive in comparison with the belfries, town halls, cloth halls, waterways, and more thorough paving schemes and defences of the Netherlands, where a number of towns even had their own brick factories. Only in the development of port facilities and the rush to build new town halls from about 1540 did English towns start to catch up; but they could produce nothing to match the building of a splendid exchange, a completely new set of fortifications, a whole new geometrically planned suburb, and a renaissance town hall at Antwerp between the 1530s and 1560s.⁸ All town governments took large responsibility for the regulation of economic and social life and they were at times encouraged by central governments to take more, for example in the quality control of manufactured goods. Craft guilds often regulated trading and manufacturing activity, though they did so under the supervision of town councils. As population pressure and economic dislocation made urban poverty a more pressing problem, town authorities increasingly developed and centralized control over poor relief. In the Netherlands at least fourteen major towns from Mons and Ypres in 1525 to Mechelen in 1545 banned begging and combined their resources into a central fund. In England towns paid more attention than in the Netherlands to national legislation in making such changes, but English legislation was more directly shaped by urban interests in parliament, and in any case several towns in each polity anticipated measures later prescribed in general legislation. Both systems remained under local control and indeed in the hands of the same sort of leading local laymen who had managed fifteenth-century provision for the poor through craft guilds, religious confraternities, almshouses, small hospitals, parish stocks for the poor in England and the distribution of food, clothing, and cash by Tables of the Holy Ghost in the parishes of towns in the Netherlands. The most significant distinction was the wider use of rates payable by the better-off to fund poor relief in England.⁹ Towns’ military independence was meaningful in both England and the Netherlands, but less meaningful than it had been. Throughout the period English towns raised contingents of soldiers when summoned by the monarch, but as the county militia structure grew in importance from the 1530s it became a matter of selfassertion, not always successful even in larger towns, to muster the town’s inhabitants separately and not at the general county musters. On the rare occasions when English towns were attacked, the mayor and aldermen would try to organize the inhabitants to defend the town, but with a few exceptions the record even of large towns in ⁷ Phythian-Adams, Desolation of a City, 250–2, 265, 269–74. ⁸ Schofield and Stell, ‘Built Environment’, 372–9, 470–1; Tittler, Architecture and Power; Lombaerde, ‘Antwerp’. ⁹ Blockmans and Prevenier, ‘Armoede’; Tits-Dieuaide, ‘Tables des pauvres’; Soly, ‘Economische ontwikkeling’; Slack, Poverty and Policy, 8–13, 113–24; McIntosh, ‘Local Responses’, 209–45.

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holding out against rebels from the surrounding countryside was not good. Urban militias had a proud history in the Netherlands, but by the fifteenth century their contribution to expeditionary forces was unimpressive, whether fighting for or against their princes, and they were increasingly confined to self-defence. In England and the Netherlands alike militias were usually organized on the basis of the town’s division into wards, but sometimes through craft guilds. What England did not have were the shooting guilds, schutterijen or serments, in which selected citizens practised their archery or gunnery. These bodies, manned by master-craftsmen and officered by the town elite, could be called upon to defend the town or maintain order.¹⁰ Towns were also important as centres of communication. Books were printed, sold, and, for the most part, read in towns, where much more schooling was available than in the countryside. People came to towns not only to buy and sell necessities and luxuries or to appear in courts of law, but to see the prince on progress, visit shrines, hear sermons, and see religious plays. Urban society spawned social institutions for the exchange of texts, information, and opinion, whether informal like the stationers’ and scriveners’ shops of London or more formal like the chambers of rhetoric organizing poetic and dramatic competitions within and between many Netherlands towns. At the simplest level many people must have heard the latest news, learnt new popular songs, or seen cheap pamphlets and prints in urban inns or alehouses. Such functions were amongst the attractions of towns for the nobility. Urban social and cultural institutions, from the confraternities of Stratford upon Avon and the horse races of York to the chambers of rhetoric and schutterijen of Mechelen, drew together local noblemen and town elites.¹¹ Great noblemen often kept town houses and some lesser noblemen in the Netherlands or ‘urban gentry’ in England, particularly those in office-holding careers, were mainly resident in towns. Towns might also provide reserves of military manpower and English lords and gentry were sometimes in trouble for retaining urban followers. Towns would pay well for protection at court, either in irregular gifts, or through an annual fee or office such as the high stewardship of an English town. Posts in the town’s gift—in England often a seat in parliament—might advance the careers of a nobleman’s followers. In some ways, then, noblemen were in competition with princes for influence over towns, though in others—particularly persuading towns in the Netherlands to agree to tax grants—princes might be glad of such noble influence as a means to extend their own power. Towns might also develop beneficial relationships with individual rulers, as York did with the future Richard III during his time as northern lieutenant for his brother Edward IV, or as Mechelen did with Margaret of Austria when she kept her court there, but these might not help them much when their patrons were gone. The role of towns and their ruling elites in state formation was thus complex. As autonomous units that might be brought into line by encouraging the growth of smaller ruling elites, they were open to princely exploitation of the oligarchs’ will to power and fear of disorder, yet the oligarchs might gain more from the alliance than ¹⁰ Knevel, Burgers, 18–61. ¹¹ Carpenter, Locality and Polity, 70, 238–9, 306; Palliser, York, 15–16; Autenboer, Volksfeesten, 85, 177, 186, 191.

Introduction

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did the prince, and pressure to govern their town in its corporate interest might lead them to deny the prince what he needed. As centres of wealth they were certainly under fiscal pressure, though as we have seen they evaded that pressure more easily in the Netherlands than in England. As centres of education, information, litigation, and upward social mobility they provided personnel and media through which the state might regulate its subjects, but in some places, like Holland, the formation of a provincial elite composed of urban governors and princely officials complicated rather than simplified the local implementation of orders from Brussels.¹² Wars, with their threat of the ultimate disaster of siege, storm, and sack, might affect towns and their relationship with central government in four main ways. The commitment of urban resources—men, weapons, fortifications, ships—to meet the needs of war tested both the strength of urban authorities and their devotion to the prince’s cause. Less dramatic, but equally stressful at times, were the demands war placed on other urban structures, for the supply of food, billeting, arms manufacture, information, and care for prisoners, refugees, and the wounded. Both these types of participation in the war effort might generate changes in towns’ internal structures of power and in their relations with neighbouring noblemen and the rural population. And on the larger scale they might change the terms and level of communication between town authorities and the centre, as rulers and their councillors sought to coordinate the activities of different parts of the polity in common military enterprise. These four types of change might vary with the scale and type of war being fought and, as we shall see, varied from town to town. None of them need represent a simple subjection of urban autonomy to the dictates of the central state. Military demands might be as much a matter of self-defence as of pleasing the prince. Those within towns who saw how to use the military imperative to their own advantage might benefit from the changes war brought. Communication brought on a process of negotiation in which towns might seek to exploit the ruler’s military needs to realize their own corporate interests. Thus coordination for military purposes might be part of a wider drawing of towns into the state’s embrace; increased command over urban wealth and manpower might mark an increase in the state’s disposable resources; the reshaping of towns and their repositioning within the local political landscape might form part of a remodelling of society as state formation advanced; but such changes were unlikely to be simple, unambiguous, or identical in the different polities and different circumstances of England and the Netherlands. The towns on which we have concentrated our research varied in size and location. In England we have examined five of the nine largest towns in the period. One of these, York, was in effect the capital of the North, one, Exeter, was a significant port, and the others, Canterbury, Norwich, and Salisbury, were also wealthy regional economic centres. Estimates of their population in the 1520s place Norwich as the largest town after London with some 9,000 inhabitants, Exeter at some 7,000, Salisbury and York at around 6,000, and Canterbury at about 5,000. In contrast Hull, though the second richest seaport of the North after Newcastle, was only the fortieth largest town at something over 2,000, and Rye, though a vigorous enough south-coast port, was ¹² Tracy, Holland, 133–5, 208–17.

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a similar size, though expanding to perhaps double that by the 1550s. Beverley, our third northern town, was somewhere between these groups at a population of 3,000 or more.¹³ In the Netherlands we have concentrated our archival research on two towns in Brabant, two in Holland, and two in the Walloon provinces, Valenciennes in Hainaut and Douai in Walloon Flanders. Of the Brabantine towns, Antwerp was the largest city of the Netherlands and a leading port, its population climbing steeply from some 33,000 in 1480 to near 100,000 by 1565; ’s-Hertogenbosch lay inland on the borders with Guelders and just about made the top dozen towns by size at around 17,000. In Holland, Leiden and Haarlem were slightly smaller at about 14,000 each. Valenciennes was similar in size to these and Douai perhaps a little smaller again, but all were amongst the top twenty towns of the Netherlands.¹⁴ These towns also present contrasts in their political structure and economic life. Norwich and Salisbury, though presided over by a mayor and council of aldermen or other councillors who had held civic office, retained some role for wider common councils in nominating office-holders and advising on major issues: at York, Beverley, and Hull the role of the wider body of freemen or their representatives was even strengthening in the late fifteenth and early sixteenth centuries.¹⁵ At Canterbury and Exeter structures were superficially similar, but the Canterbury common council was made smaller under a new charter in 1498 and at Exeter Henry VII made the ruling council of Twenty-Four self-perpetuating.¹⁶ Rye was small enough to operate with a smaller executive body, a mayor and twelve jurats, but it governed in dialogue, sometimes fractious, with the whole body of freemen.¹⁷ Beverley differed from the others in being a seigneurial town, under the lordship of the archbishop of York rather than the king, though the archbishop’s authority was contested by some groups in the town’s troubled politics.¹⁸ Rye differed in being part of a confederation of towns with common consultative and judicial institutions, the Cinque Ports, to oversee which the king appointed a lord warden.¹⁹ Of our Netherlands towns, ’s-Hertogenbosch had the most open constitution. The involvement of the guild deans in civic government was cut back by princely intervention in 1498 and 1525, but in the 1550s the guilds were still consulted about important matters, and while the rate of turnover amongst the schepenen and other senior office-holders slowed down between the mid-fifteenth and mid-sixteenth centuries, the governing elite was more open than most to new talent and wealth.²⁰ At Antwerp, while there was some room in the elite for newcomers from the merchant plutocracy, the magistracy was more heavily dominated by resident noble families and the powers of guildsmen and other popular representatives were steadily reduced.²¹ The Walloon towns were like those of Brabant in their maintenance of some institutions of ¹³ Dyer, ‘Ranking Lists’, 761–5; Mayhew, Rye, 20–3. ¹⁴ Limberger, ‘Antwerp’, 43; Israel, Dutch Republic, 114; Vries, Urbanisation, 271–4. ¹⁵ Bindoff, Commons, i. 152, 230, 245, 252; Kermode, ‘Obvious Observations’. ¹⁶ Ibid. i. 69, 114. ¹⁷ Ibid. i. 260. ¹⁸ Hoyle, Pilgrimage, 179–82. ¹⁹ Bindoff, Commons, i. 253–4. ²⁰ Jacobs, ‘Bestuursinstellingen ’s-Hertogenbosch’, 514–26; Schuttelaars, Heren van de Raad, 90–106, 184–5, 199–200, 230–6. ²¹ Nieuwenhuizen, ‘Bestuursinstellingen Antwerpen’, 463–9, 483–7; Marnef, Antwerp, 14–21.

Introduction

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popular representation. Douai’s ´echevins were chosen by a complex procedure which ensured both the representation of different areas of the town and the ability of the elite to perpetuate its power; in major matters an arri`ere-conseil including some nonoffice-holding citizens was consulted and in 1519 the populace backed the ´echevins’ opposition to grants of wider powers to the prince’s bailiff in the town.²² Valenciennes extended rights of citizenship very widely amongst the adult male population and kept a grand conseil of guild representatives, street constables, and others to consult on major issues, though in 1487 it instituted a narrower conseil particulier of twenty-five to assist the thirteen ´echevins drawn from a restricted circle of leading families.²³ Power in the Holland towns was yet more concentrated. Haarlem’s brewers dominated its vroedschap, while after the factional turmoil of the fifteenth century, culminating in a coup by the Hoeks and a siege by Maximilian’s forces to restore Kabeljauw control in 1481, Leiden’s self-perpetuating vroedschap, dominated by great clothiers and brewers, settled down to run the town, distilling its political and financial experience into an even narrower secrete vroedschap manned by former burgemeesters.²⁴ Of our English towns, Norwich and Salisbury were major centres of cloth production whose economies survived the changes of the later Middle Ages well.²⁵ York and Exeter were regional centres of commerce, services, cloth finishing, and craft manufacture with some engagement in long-distance trade, especially involving the lead and tin mined in their respective hinterlands; in the later fifteenth and early sixteenth centuries York was troubled economically, but Exeter was steadily on the rise.²⁶ Canterbury was a centre for diverse markets and manufactures and, like these other cathedral cities, benefited from being the seat of a bishopric, a centre of ecclesiastical administration and expenditure.²⁷ Hull was a long-distance trading port but one whose main export, wool, was in a steady decline for which fish imports could not compensate; it was an index of the town’s economic fortunes that property rents there fell by 1530 to about half their 1450 level.²⁸ Beverley’s cloth manufacture had been declining steadily from its thirteenth-century heyday and it dropped thirty or more places in the hierarchy of urban wealth and population across the fourteenth and fifteenth centuries.²⁹ In contrast Rye rose powerfully throughout our period as the harbour of its neighbour Winchelsea silted up, to become a leading fishing port and the base for the largest merchant fleet on the south coast, exporting the timber, cloth, and iron produced in its Wealden hinterland.³⁰ The economic fortunes of our towns in the Netherlands were equally mixed. Antwerp flourished spectacularly, combining international trade in cloth, metals, and spices with high finance, processing industries, and luxury production to become ²² ²³ ²⁴ ²⁵ ²⁶ ²⁷ ²⁸ ²⁹

Rouche (ed.), Douai, 53–5, 94–5. Platelle (ed.), Valenciennes, 62–6; Servant, Artistes, 53–5, 64–73. Brand, ‘Urban Elites’; Zuijderduijn, ‘Secrete vroedschap’; Israel, Dutch Republic, 108. Dyer, Decline, 26. Bindoff, Commons, i. 69; Palliser, York, 146–200; Dyer, Decline, 26, 35. Ibid. i. 114; Dyer, Decline, 26, 62. Ibid. i. 244; Dyer, Decline, 38. Dyer, Decline, 12–13, 15, 56, 63. ³⁰ Mayhew, Rye, 18–19, 235–44.

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the economic pole of northern Europe.³¹ Valenciennes continued to benefit from its trading position at the junction of the river routes of Flanders and Brabant with the road routes of northern France, from the adaptability of its cloth industry and from its ability to make and sell a wide range of high-quality craft products.³² Douai did well from grain trading but saw its cloth manufacturing falter and asked in 1530 to become the seat of a university on the grounds that, unlike Valenciennes or Lille, it had large empty areas inside its walls, a wish granted in 1562.³³ Woollen clothmaking also failed at ’s-Hertogenbosch but the growth of linen weaving partly compensated, while transit trades in fish and cattle held up well and new industries tied into Antwerp’s networks—leather goods, pins, knives, soap—also grew, though they left the town and individual workers poorer overall.³⁴ Most troubled were the Holland towns. Leiden’s cloth industry flourished in the fifteenth century but declined steeply from about 1530. Haarlem’s brewing followed a similar trajectory.³⁵ In addition to these towns, we have drawn in others where they illustrate particular themes. These include many of the other significant towns of each polity: ports like Bristol and Middelburg, industrial towns like Coventry and Ghent, regional centres like Leicester, Nottingham, Mons, and Saint-Omer, even on occasion—though their status as administrative capitals makes their experience unique—London and Brussels. Together with our main sample, they should give us a balanced picture of the range of urban experience in the face of governments at war. ³¹ ³² ³³ ³⁴

Limberger, ‘Antwerp’, 39–62. Platelle (ed.), Valenciennes, 69–79, 97–103; Servant, Artistes, 28–48, 105–94. Rouche (ed.), Douai, 73–7, 91–2, 95–7. Blond´e, Sociale structuren, 94–130. ³⁵ Tracy, Holland, 24–6.

4 Urban Military Resources During war princes demanded a wide variety of contributions from the magistrates and people of their towns. Some, such as the maintenance of fortifications and artillery, related to the safekeeping of the town itself and might be seen to be in its interest. Others, such as the supply of contingents of men and ships, related to campaigns further afield and might have benefits indirectly at best. A few, such as the fitting out of ships for privateering, might offer profit to towns or at least to individuals within them.

T RO O P L EV I E S I N E N G L A N D English towns played an important role in the mobilization of the realm for the king’s wars by providing contingents of soldiers to royal armies from the early fourteenth century.¹ During the Wars of the Roses they faced heavy burdens, York claiming to have had 400 men at Wakefield, 400 at St Albans, and 1,000 at Towton.² Crown demands for troops both for foreign war and during domestic rebellion continued throughout our period. In general towns north of the Trent contributed men for the Scottish wars and those in the south of England for service in France, though there were exceptions, particularly as the scale of war increased in the 1540s. Occasionally demands for troops—for Sir Thomas Everingham’s company in Burgundy in 1480 or Thomas, Lord Darcy’s crusade in 1511—tested towns’ relationships with other lords, but overwhelmingly their levies were a matter of duty to the crown.³ Canterbury’s experience was fairly typical of large, inland towns in the south of England. It provided soldiers to serve at sea in 1480–1 and 1513–14, in France in 1513–14, 1542–4, 1549–50, and 1557–8, and perhaps against Scotland in 1496–7. It sent contingents to the coast to resist threatened invasions in 1495, 1523, and 1538–40 and supported the crown against rebellion in 1483 and 1553–4. In general, service in England produced larger levies than campaigns overseas—eightynine men went against Buckingham’s Rebellion in 1483 but only ten to France in 1513—but demands grew heavier as the period went on and the three contingents ¹ Goring, ‘Military Obligations’, 179; Prince, ‘English Armies’, 356–8. ² Goodman, Wars of the Roses, 145–8, 202–3, 219–20; YHB i. 390–1. ³ Coventry Leet Book, ii. 426, 428; YCR iii. 35.

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of 1557–8 totalled 183 men.⁴ Meanwhile Canterbury men may well have served outside the contingents furnished by the city, in the companies repeatedly raised by the archbishop of Canterbury and Christ Church Priory.⁵ The demands made upon northern towns similarly reflected England’s relationship with Scotland and the incidence of revolt. Hull provided soldiers for the Scottish campaigns of 1480–2 and 1513, sent men against Buckingham, and was asked to muster against the Pilgrimage of Grace, though the town itself soon fell to the rebels.⁶ Its contingents were small—two companies of thirteen men, led by the mayor, in 1481—but York’s were much more substantial. Against Buckingham it sent 200 men from the city and 100 from the adjoining Ainsty wapentake, for the Bosworth campaign it produced eighty and it raised companies to fight the Scots in 1480–2, 1488, 1496, 1497, 1513, and 1522 as well as to resist Perkin Warbeck in 1493.⁷ York was also drawn into the national mobilization needed for Henry VIII’s invasion of France in 1513.⁸ The frequency and weight of the crown’s demands reached new heights during the 1540s in the long war with Scotland, culminating in five contingents totalling 250 men in fifteen months in 1548–9, as the English struggled to maintain their garrisons across the Lowlands.⁹ What proportion of the urban population did such drafts represent? The typical contingent from York during the reign of Henry VIII was between sixty and 100 men. York’s population probably numbered about 6,000; 100 soldiers, then, accounted for some 1.67 per cent of the total population, as much as 6.67 per cent of the adult male population or 7.63 per cent of the 1,310 able men mustered from the city and Ainsty in February 1548.¹⁰ Exeter and Norwich, in comparison, though larger and wealthier than York, raised contingents of just thirty men in 1513 and forty men in 1542, 1543, and 1546 respectively.¹¹ These represented perhaps 1.7 per cent and 1.8 per cent of adult males, or in Norwich’s case 6.5 per cent of the 613 able men mustered before the mayor and aldermen in June 1535.¹² Especially amid the frequent demands of the 1540s, it is clear that the burden of providing soldiers fell disproportionately on northern towns. These variations in the size of town contingents must have depended not only on the size of the town but also on other factors: the greater militarization of northern society, the degree of political control the crown could exert in the town, through a royal steward for example, and the willingness of the magistrates to harness their own military resources to the crown’s service. Nevertheless, the numbers of soldiers ⁴ CCA, FA6, fo. 23, FA7, fos. 216, 230v , FA10, fos. 89, 90v –91, FA11, fo. 178v , FA13, fos. 27v –28, 70v , 106v , 149v , 193, 275, FA14, fo. 156–156v, FA15, fo. 75, FA16, fo. 33v ; PRO, E101/56/29, mm. 1d, 6d. ⁵ Goring, ‘Military Obligations’, 132. ⁶ HCA, BRB1, fos. 129, 130v –131, 133v –34; Tickell, Hull, 164–5; Bush, Pilgrimage, 37–40. ⁷ YHB i. 220–1, 232, 239, 256–7, 284–5; YCR i. 118, ii. 34, 100–2, 128, 132, iii. 42–3, 85. ⁸ PRO, E101/61/31/21–2. ⁹ YCR iv. 82–5, 102–5, 177–9, 181, v. 1, 4, 15, 18–19. ¹⁰ Dyer, ‘Ranking Lists’, 761, 765; YCR iv. 170; for population ratios see Phythian-Adams, Desolation of a City, 199–201, 222. ¹¹ DRO, EABI, fo. 38v ; NRO, PMA 1491–1553, fos. 130, 200v , 211v ; LP I. ii. 1176/3. ¹² PRO, E101/59/3.

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provided by towns to royal armies in this period remained small in comparison with those raised by rural landlords and crown office-holders. In 1514, the thirty men provided by Salisbury or Exeter for the ‘army by sea’ equalled the contingents supplied by middling gentry such as William Bonham of Wiltshire or John Chichester of Devon, while the 100 men of Catherine, dowager countess of Devon, outnumbered the companies levied in even the largest towns.¹³ For the sake of urban pride and to maintain royal favour, towns made efforts to ensure that the men they set forth were suitable. In the 1540s, the mayors and aldermen of Norwich and York held regular musters on their own initiative to identify those fit to serve.¹⁴ In 1544 Norwich levied sixty men to serve in France, but then ‘xx of the worst . . . were shifted out and discharged’, and such quality control measures were repeated in 1545 and 1558.¹⁵ Norwich’s contingents were based around a cadre of experienced men who served in successive campaigns: nineteen fought in both 1541 and 1542, ten in 1543 and 1544; four of this second group went again in 1546, together with four others who had first served in 1544.¹⁶ York, similarly, noted eight of the men it sent out in 1543 as ‘tried archers’: four of them had served in 1542 or would do so again in 1545, 1546, or 1547. At the head of York’s military community was the mace-bearer, Percival Selby, who captained the city’s contingents in 1542, 1543, 1546, and 1548.¹⁷ In York and Norwich the administrative machinery of wards and parishes was used to organize the towns’ inhabitants for war, and at Canterbury the selection, clothing, and payment of soldiers was further devolved onto individual parishes.¹⁸ Other towns such as Ludlow and Salisbury organized and equipped contingents through the system of trade guilds, the larger or richer guilds responsible for finding more men than the lesser crafts: in 1489 the Salisbury mercers sent nine men to Brittany with Sir John Cheyney and the brewers four, but the barbers, bakers, and several other guilds sent only one each, while in 1545 it was the tailors’ turn to provide thirteen harnessed men, the members contributing to their costs according to their various means.¹⁹ Whichever system was employed, it has generally been assumed that it was the poorer male members of the urban community who were sent out.²⁰ They may even have been outsiders, as few of those in Norwich’s contingents appeared in the city’s muster certificate for 1535.²¹ Yet the York evidence qualifies this picture. Twenty-eight of the sixty-eight men chosen from the city to serve in 1542 can be identified in the 1545 subsidy assessment. All but five were assessed on goods worth less than £5 per annum, so they were not wealthy, but they were not the sweepings ¹³ PRO, E101/56/10, fos. 86, 98, 100, 113 (LP I. ii, p. 1518), E101/56/29; Miller, Henry VIII, 142–3. ¹⁴ YCR iv. 81; NRO, MCB 1540–9, 56, 65, 120, 203, 500. ¹⁶ NRO, MCB 1540–9, 116, 190, 206. ¹⁵ NRO, NCAI, fos. 160, 192v , NCAII, fo. 130. ¹⁷ YCA, E 41, fo. 8; HBXV, fos. 4v –7v , HBXVII, fos. 92, 98–105v ; PRO, E101/62/34, fo. 4r–v . ¹⁸ CCA, FA15, fo. 75. ¹⁹ PRO, E101/62/3, m. 1; WSRO, G23/1/2, fo. 121a (misdated to 1475 in Hoare, Modern Wiltshire, 195), fo. 226v ; G23/1/251, fo. 32. ²⁰ Goring, ‘Military Obligations’, 207. ²¹ PRO, E101/59/3.

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of the streets either; and their leaders were more substantial men.²² There may, indeed, have been advantages in sending those capable of equipping themselves well. Of the thirty-nine York men sent to Scotland in 1545, twenty-nine were taxed on £10 or more and eight at between £4 and £10 and most were expected to meet their own expenses, though in the richer parishes their neighbours were urged to contribute.²³ Ambiguities of wording make it possible that such men were allowed to find substitutes to serve in their place, but they still felt sharply the financial burdens recruitment placed on towns. Towns frequently taxed their inhabitants to meet the cost of raising soldiers. For the wars against Scotland in the early 1480s, York overrode unrest to levy a tax on its citizens parish by parish and Hull taxed its resident aliens, mainly Scots.²⁴ The York parishes paid again and again in the 1540s and raised substantial sums, £33 6s 8d to fund fifty footmen in August 1549, for example.²⁵ At times the poorer parishes could not cope, as in 1559 when the city chamberlains agreed to meet half the costs of furnishing soldiers in the parishes of St Lawrence and St Peter in the Willows.²⁶ Southern towns used various systems to raise such sums. Canterbury worked through the parishes, Norwich through the wards, and Salisbury by taxing the wealthiest individuals. ²⁷ By the 1540s Norwich adapted parliamentary taxation mechanisms to levy a fifteenth and tenth, or a fraction of one.²⁸ The burden can best be assessed in Exeter, where £58 6s 3d was raised in 1513 to pay for thirty men sent to sea. In all some 240 men paid sums ranging from 4d to 20s; a handful of others were required to provide military equipment; and city councillors were assessed separately at sums ranging from 26s 8d to 13s 4d. Though this levy hit only a quarter as many inhabitants as the 1524 subsidy, it seems to have underassessed the richer citizens, some of whom paid double or triple in the subsidy what they paid in 1513.²⁹ If the civic elite were deliberately passing the burden of local taxation on to less prosperous men, the greater fiscal and military demands and poor economic conditions of the 1540s forced them to stop. In June 1546 the councillors gave a collective loan for the purchase of ordnance and ‘any other need for the defence of the said city’, at individual rates closely reflecting their assessments for the 1544 subsidy.³⁰ They felt the same imperative, announced by the mayor and aldermen of Norwich 1545–6, that in military levies ‘the poor men’ were ‘in anywise not to be charged to the same’.³¹ Towns dressed their men in ways that marked them out not only as English soldiers—white coats with red crosses—but also as the men of their town, with badges of ‘Cornish choughs for the arms of the city’ at Canterbury in 1514 and red, green, ²² ²³ ²⁴ ²⁵ ²⁶ ²⁷ ²⁸ ²⁹ ³⁰

PRO, E179/217/108, 109; YCA, HBXV, fos. 4v –7v . PRO, E179/217/108, 109; YCA, HBXVII, fos. 98r–v , 100v . YHB i. 242, 295, 298; HCA, BRB1, fos. 129, 133v –134r , 135v –136r . Churchwardens’ Accounts, ii. 323–4, 335; YCR v. 18. YCA, CC5, fos. 74–74a. CCA, B/A/N1; WSRO, G23/1/2, fos. 230, 249–51; NRO, PMA 1491–1553, fos. 21, 42v . NRO, PMA 1491–1553, fos. 200v , 207v , 211v . DRO, EABI, fos. 35–8; Tudor Exeter, 35–44. DRO, EABII, 135; Tudor Exeter, 45–54. ³¹ NRO, PMA 1491–1553, fos. 207v , 211v .

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and yellow livery badges at Beverley in 1522.³² Departing soldiers were seen off with beer at Canterbury in 1523, ale at the town hall in Nottingham in 1544, and a civic breakfast at Norwich in 1558.³³ Urban communities hoped to be proud of what their soldiers did, and accusations of poor service were matters for report to the authorities. In December 1482 John Lam was in trouble at York for claiming ‘that the soldiers of this city was ill worthy to have their wages, for they did nothing for it but made whips of their bow strings to drive carriage with’.³⁴ Lam’s words smacked of the reluctance some townsmen showed to take their part in military ventures. Urban authorities sometimes gave in to those who would only serve if their wages were paid in advance or other demands were met.³⁵ At other times they took a hard line. Norwich imprisoned several soldiers who would not serve in 1497, as York did a tailor for his ‘parlous example’ in refusing to serve in 1547, and the standard-bearer appointed for York’s company in 1542 was deprived of the freedom of the city when he declined.³⁶ Urban authorities were not always so eager to meet the crown’s demands. Rye consistently denied requests it regarded as ‘contrary to the great charter of the [Cinque] Ports’.³⁷ Repeatedly the magistrates of York asked for reductions in the number of soldiers required of them, arguing in July 1558, for example, that even ‘when it was better inhabited and far more wealthy than it is now’ the city had not provided more than half the 200 men now being demanded.³⁸ Such arguments cut little ice with Protector Somerset, who lambasted the city in 1549 for its ‘negligence’ in not providing fifty handgunners, ‘not only a great slander to the city but also an evil example to all others’.³⁹ Rye suffered for its refusals; York, under the noses of the Council in the North, found it hard to evade its obligations. Other towns were subtler. Hull was in full economic decline by the early sixteenth century and troubled by the military costs of the Wars of the Roses and the 1480s.⁴⁰ In 1524 it was resolved that no more than twelve soldiers should ever be provided by the town and its surrounding vills, but in 1539 the authorities hit on an altogether more successful way of limiting future military demands.⁴¹ Comparison of the list of able men and equipment prepared by the mayor and the town’s other commissioners of array and kept in the borough archives with that certified to the royal government in March 1539 shows the deliberate omission of half or more of the men liable for service in the version sent up to Westminster.⁴² The commissioners were not slow to enforce the obligations of the Statute of Winchester on individuals, ordering several to provide themselves with jack, sallet, bow and arrows, or steel bonnet and bill as appropriate, but even some of those thus equipped were left out of the formal return.⁴³ Thus the magistrates limited the crown’s ³² ³³ ³⁴ ³⁶ ³⁸ ⁴⁰ ⁴¹ ⁴³

YHB i. 220–1; YCA, CC4, fos. 113–117v ; CCA, FA10, fo. 89; Poulson, Beverlac, i. 281. CCA, FA11, fo. 178v ; Records Nottingham, i. 385; NRO, NCAIII, fos. 130–4. YHB i. 273. ³⁵ Ibid. 263; NRO, MCB 1540–9, fo. 116. NRO, PMA 1491–1553, fo. 44; YCR iv. 81, 156–7. ³⁷ Mayhew, ‘Defence’, 111, 117. YCR v. 185. ³⁹ Ibid. 12. Allison (ed.), VCH Hull, 90–3; Gillett and MacMahon, Hull, 67, 98. HCA, BRB1, fo. 172v . ⁴² HCA, CAM 1–5; PRO, E101/60/1. HCA, CAM 2; PRO, E101/60/1, rot. 3.

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expectations of their military resources while successfully exerting the powers the commission gave them over the inhabitants of their town. Others took less ingenious but perhaps equally effective routes, bribing anyone who might lessen the burden upon them. At Dover in 1525 it was a dinner worth 4s 8d for John Copuldike, lieutenant of Dover castle, ‘to ease us that we were not much charged to find soldiers out of the town with our warden’; at Ipswich in 1545 it was a mere 8d to Sir Thomas Tyrrell’s clerk ‘for a reward to make means to his master to be good in the assignment for the soldiers’; at weary York in 1558 it was a whole £10 in gold to Sir Oswald Wilstrop, who might ‘do much with my Lord Lieutenant in easing the importable charges that is like to happen in setting forth of men by this city’.⁴⁴ Thus the crown’s pressure for men empowered brokers great and small to profit from the desperation of magistrates.

T RO O P L EV I E S I N T H E N E T H E R L A N D S The standard view of Netherlands towns’ contributions to the raising of armies has been that, in Paul Knevel’s words, ‘The towns’ part in war-making took on above all a financial character. They provided the money with which the central government paid the bandes d’ordonnance and landsknechts.’⁴⁵ This is an over-simplification. Towns in the Netherlands raised troops in widely varying ways and continued to do so throughout our period. It is true that towns kept their select citizen militias, wellequipped and regularly trained, at home. Though Ghent’s witte kaproenen, very active in the wars of 1477–92, were abolished under the terms of the peace of Cadzand, many towns kept up their schutterijen or serments.⁴⁶ These companies originated in Flemish and Brabantine towns in the late thirteenth century, spreading to Holland and other provinces from the fourteenth. At first they were crossbowmen and archers, but handguns and even artillery became common amongst them in our period.⁴⁷ They were officered by patricians and their members, amounting to perhaps one in six of the adult male population of many Holland towns by 1514, were typically master-craftsmen. They doubled as religious confraternities and, though they trained regularly with their weapons, they used them most often in shooting competitions and smart parades at princely entries into towns.⁴⁸ Though their grants of privileges often specified that they should be prepared to serve the prince in his armies for reasonable wages, the same grants’ stress on the necessity to defend frontier towns or the increasing importance of defensive firearms in sieges was more relevant to their real purpose.⁴⁹ ⁴⁴ BL, Egerton MS 2092, fo. 309r ; SROI, EE2/L1/4a; YCR v. 172. ⁴⁵ Knevel, Burgers, 51. ⁴⁶ Nicolay, ‘Kalendrier’, 214, 225, 227–8, 324; Dadizeele, M´emoires, 87; Blockmans, ‘Autocratie ou polyarchie?’, 305. ⁴⁷ Knevel, Burgers, 18–44, 53–61; Arnade, Realms of Ritual, 65–94; Jacobs, Justitie en politie, 160; Lampo, Vermaerde Coopstadt, 103; Ville de Cambrai, 320–3; ROPB, iv. 481–4; AMD, EE17; DuPlessis, Lille, 162; AMV, BB34, fos. 111v –112v . ⁴⁸ Smit, Vorst en onderdaan, 274–7; Inventaris ’s-Hertogenbosch, 24. ⁴⁹ ROPB i. 120, 198–200, 270–1, 290–2, 434–6, 651–2, ii. 319–20, 387–90, 460–1, 475–8, iii. 254–8, 337–8, iv. 403, 477–8, v. 150–2, vi. 266–9, vii. 135.

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In Holland schutters left their towns increasingly rarely, staying behind to provide against external attack and, more pressingly most of the time, internal unrest.⁵⁰ In Brabant and the Walloon provinces they ventured out from the 1470s to the 1530s to guard outlying fortresses or sweep the surrounding countryside for enemy raiders or disorderly soldiers, but not for distant campaigns.⁵¹ Thereafter they were even more immobile. At Antwerp it was the schutters’ necessity for the town’s ‘tranquillity, conservation, and welfare’ that was endorsed by princely decree in 1559 and tested by the troubles of 1554, when the companies helped restore order in the end but twelve of their officers were tried for insurrection.⁵² Only artillery guilds remained a partial exception, providing master-gunners for Habsburg armies and fleets throughout the period as well as caring for the defensive artillery of their towns.⁵³ Yet schutters were not the only soldiers towns could muster. A militia consisting of all adult male inhabitants could be summoned under the traditional emergency powers of urban governments to defend the town when besieged or to meet its enemies in the field.⁵⁴ Such militias were organized through wards or craft guilds. In some places they were required to possess arms according to their wealth, as in the fivepoint scale used at Leiden in 1477; in others they were assigned different parts of the walls to defend in case of attack, as at Douai in the same year.⁵⁵ The larger towns appointed captains from the local lesser nobility or urban patriciate to take operational command of these bodies, such as successive members of the van Ranst dynasty at Antwerp.⁵⁶ In emergency anyone who seemed competent would do: at Arras in July 1554 a minor nobleman and former infantry captain passed through the town and the citizens wanted to appoint him ‘some kind of leader amongst us . . . for we had no one to whom to defer’.⁵⁷ Despite their captains’ best efforts, such forces were often riven by tensions between patricians and guildsmen and woefully unsuccessful in open battle. The militias of Bruges, Lille, and Oudenaarde were trounced by the French in 1477–8 and those of Brussels and Leuven did little better in 1488–9.⁵⁸ Thereafter they rarely served in the field, but for defensive purposes they continued in use much longer. General militias helped defend IJsselstein in 1511 and Antwerp in 1542 and were prepared for action elsewhere in invasion years such as 1543 and 1554.⁵⁹ For campaigns of more than a few days’ duration it was more practical to draft only a proportion of the citizenry. Antwerp did so in the civil and international wars ⁵⁰ Knevel, Burgers, 51–2. ⁵¹ SAA, Pk1559/3; AMD, EE15; Inventaris ’s-Hertogenbosch, 36–7, 62; Os, Kroniek, 350–1; Surquet, ‘M´emoires’, 564; Willems, ‘Militaire organisatie’, 274; Lusy, Journal, 314; AMV, CC750, fo. 235r . ⁵² Soly, ‘Economische vernieuwing’, 528; Weert, ‘Chronycke’, 155, 163; ROPB vii. 446–8. ⁵³ ROPB ii. 331–3, iv. 481–4; AMV, CC750, fos. 234v , 237v ; Vinchant, Hainaut, v. 263. ⁵⁴ ROPB iv. 462; Soly, ‘Economische vernieuwing’, 524; Schuttelaars, Heren van de raad, 54. ⁵⁵ Knevel, Burgers, 47–8; AMD, EE93. ⁵⁶ Dadizeele, M´emoires, 6; Willems, ‘Militaire organisatie’, 282; Kokken, Steden en Staten, 238, 290; Prims, Antwerpen, xvi. 18, 33, 116, 175–6, 189, xviii. 356–7; Weert, ‘Chronycke’, 113. ⁵⁷ Thieulaine, ‘Extraits’, 186. ⁵⁸ Nicolay, ‘Kalendrier’, 81, 94–5, 171–5, 233; Willems, ‘Militaire organisatie’, 266–7, 274–5. ⁵⁹ ‘Berijmd verhaal’, 677, 681–3; Weert, ‘Chronycke’, 114; ROPB iv. 462–3; vi. 362–3.

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of 1477–93 and for the siege of Tournai in 1521, when its men joined some 10,000 Flemings led by patrician captains.⁶⁰ The Holland towns sent contingents of their citizens to fight Frans van Brederode’s men in 1489, Leiden’s being led by its noble vroedschap member Willem van Bosschuysen, and in March 1515 they drafted one man in every four to tackle a body of plundering soldiers.⁶¹ In the protracted wars against Guelders, companies raised in ’s-Hertogenbosch and its hinterland, sometimes through the craft guilds, repeatedly campaigned under leading townsmen until at least the 1520s.⁶² A contingent of 300 men from the town plus 1,700 from the surrounding countryside, like that heavily defeated while plundering in the Bommelerwaard in January 1512, represented a higher proportion of the population than those sent out by York; no wonder the magistrates cancelled the 1512 carnival in mourning.⁶³ It can be hard to distinguish between such partial mobilizations of a citizen militia and the recruitment of companies of soldiers among those who happened to be present in a town. The recruits may have been townsmen—they were often led by urban patricians and in 1554 ’s-Hertogenbosch explained that many of its able men were away in the emperor’s army because trade was bad—but may equally have been rural refugees or disbanded soldiers spending their pay and waiting for another chance to enrol.⁶⁴ Either way large towns found it easy to raise companies within their own walls by announcing that ‘whoever wished to come at the town’s wages should immediately come and enrol and they would be paid’.⁶⁵ In 1521 and 1536 Mons raised companies of 500 men or more in this way, apparently shouldering a burden proportionally twice as heavy as that on York.⁶⁶ With 3,000 of its men in the field in the 1550s, ’s-Hertogenbosch may have been more heavily burdened still, though many of these may have come from its administrative hinterland, the meierij.⁶⁷ Antwerp repeatedly sent out companies, though its levy of 400 men in 1554, equipped at the cost of the citizens, was less than a triumph.⁶⁸ Those not taken on formed the core of an insurrectionary crowd and Mary of Hungary deflected the Antwerp troops from joining Charles’s army lest they spread disaffection.⁶⁹ When they finally did join the camp, they refused to join in the digging at the new fortress of Hesdinfert. Their commander, the count of Arenberg, wanted to hang some of them for mutiny, but instead they were sent home without pay, ‘back to their mothers and to go and keep their shops’ as a scathing soldier put it.⁷⁰ For all that urban recruits might prove disappointing, captains directly commissioned by central government also enrolled men ⁶⁰ Prims, Antwerpen, xvi. 18–22, 33, 66–7, xviii. 356; Weert, ‘Chronycke’, 87; ROPB ii. 250–1; Decavele, Dageraad, i. 80. ⁶¹ Kokken, Steden en Staten, 237–8, 290; NHA, SAHI/397, fo. 57r–v . ⁶² Inventaris ’s-Hertogenbosch, 30, 36–7; Schuttelaars, Heren van de raad, 57, 460, 465; Os, Kroniek, 308, 311; Rapport Lille, 368; SSH, OA3800; OA8601, fos. 27r , 32, 47r ; Struick, Gelre en Habsburg, 287–9, 355; Molius, Kroniek, 275. ⁶³ Os, Kroniek, 322; Vries, Urbanisation, 271. ⁶⁴ Kuijer, ’s-Hertogenbosch, 334. ⁶⁵ Lusy, Journal, 194. ⁶⁶ Ibid. 194, 332; Vries, Urbanisation, 272. ⁶⁷ Kuijer, ’s-Hertogenbosch, 317. ⁶⁸ Prims, Antwerpen, xvi. 78–9, 85; Rapport Lille, 378; Weert, ‘Chronycke’, 113; Soly, ‘Economische vernieuwing’, 524. ⁶⁹ Weert, ‘Chronycke’, 152–3, 162. ⁷⁰ ‘Dagverhaal’, 297.

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in towns, as at Tournai in 1542, when many young townsmen led by a magistrate marched joyously out of the city as though they ‘were going to a church festival’, only to be killed or captured by the French days later.⁷¹ Towns also hired companies of troops raised outside their walls for a wide range of purposes. Cavalrymen, infantry recruited in other towns, and even German and English mercenaries might stiffen civic militias.⁷² Troops levied but unpaid by the central government might clear the countryside of enemy troops, rather than continue to plunder the local peasantry, if taken into towns’ pay.⁷³ Small detachments might garrison strongpoints vital to urban security, such as ’s-Hertogenbosch’s blockhouses on the Maas.⁷⁴ Men were also sent to reinforce the defences of threatened neighbours, Valenciennes sending to Bouchain in 1482, Leiden to Woerden in 1511, and Ghent to Douai in 1521, or so Douai hoped.⁷⁵ Lastly, towns supplied pioneers to construct, besiege, and destroy fortifications. ’sHertogenbosch, like Douai, usually raised them from its rural hinterland; but it sent craftsmen contributed by the guilds for particularly important jobs like the demolition of the Guelders fortress of Oijen in June 1511, when its task force returned with thirty-six carts loaded with ironwork.⁷⁶ As trace italienne methods spread and huge quantities of earth needed to be moved at short notice, pioneers were needed in ever larger numbers and with ever greater urgency. Town magistrates’ one consolation may have been the opportunity such requests gave to send ‘vagabonds and useless persons’ away to labour for the prince on the town’s behalf.⁷⁷ Demands for men in the Netherlands, then, followed a course rather different from that in England, but not diametrically opposite. Though the proportion of townsmen in Habsburg field armies undoubtedly fell in the second half of the period as Germans and Spaniards proliferated, towns continued to demand military service from their inhabitants and troops continued to be raised in towns. At least into the 1520s, some towns raised and directed their own troops with much more freedom than any in England and those that did not do so individually—notably the Holland towns—may not have needed to, because they had developed effective means to do so collectively through their provincial States. As in England, finally, towns sought ways to evade requests for men without offending the prince. In 1511 troops from Guelders attacked Gorinchem and the count of Nassau asked Middelburg to send troops, ships, and guns to help repel them, but nothing was sent. To avoid recriminations the town bombarded Nassau and those around him—the admiral, the president of the council, the audiencier, Nassau’s secretary, the chamberlain of ⁷¹ Macqu´ereau, Histoire, 47–8; Barre, Journal, 303–4. ⁷² NHA, SAH/I/392, fo. 51; SSH, OA3800; OA8601, fo. 32; Inventaris ’s-Hertogenbosch, 439; Dadizeele, M´emoires, 70–2; Willems, ‘Militaire organisatie’, 269, 271; ‘Stadsrekeningen Middelburg ii’, 148; SAA, Pk1559/17; Gent, ‘Pertijelike saken’, 292; Vinchant, Hainaut, iv. 409; Inventaire Bruges, vi. 293, 296–302; Surquet, ‘M´emoires’, 584–6. ⁷³ Os, Kroniek, 325. ⁷⁴ SSH, OA3800; ‘Stadsrekeningen Middelburg ii’, 114, 148, 150; ‘Stadsrekeningen Middelburg iii’, 272; Ville de Cambrai, 144. ⁷⁵ Lettres in´edites, i. 29–30; GAL, SAI/383, fo. 90; AMD, CC238, fo. 64v . ⁷⁶ Os, Kroniek, 311, 318; Inventaris ’s-Hertogenbosch, 40, 42–3, 52, 446; AMD, CC235, fo. 57v . ⁷⁷ ROPB vi. 262–3, vii. 338–9; Inventaire Courtrai, ii. 95.

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the lord of Fiennes, and so on—with presents. So far as we know, it worked, and it was probably cheaper than sending troops.⁷⁸ Yet it entangled the town in the state’s systems of power just as much as compliance would have done. S H I P S A N D P R I VAT E E R I N G The confederation of the Cinque Ports in Kent and Sussex had been obliged to provide ships to serve the English king in wartime since the twelfth century and was often called on to do so in our period. Rye provided several ships, usually to transport troops, in 1481, 1491–2, 1513–14, 1544, and 1556–7. The cost, including the mariners’ wages, victuals, and hire of the ships from their civilian owners, rose from about £20 in 1492 to £32 in 1544.⁷⁹ For other coastal and river ports such as Hull and York, however, the corporate obligation to supply the king with ships that seems to have developed in the fourteenth and fifteenth centuries was not applied by the Yorkists and Tudors.⁸⁰ Instead the crown offered inducements to individual owners to build or equip ships suitable for war and put them at the king’s disposal, merely requiring ports to encourage their citizens to take them up.⁸¹ Thus in 1524, the fleet sent against the Scots was led by The William of York and included two Hull ships, The Thomas and The Edmund, but there is little sign that the municipal authorities were directly involved.⁸² What towns, or merchant companies like the merchant adventurers of Newcastle, did organize and fund through local taxes on shipping was the provision of ‘wafters’ to escort fishing or trading boats.⁸³ In the 1540s the formal situation remained the same, but civic leaders were expected to be increasingly assertive in encouraging service to the crown. In February 1544 the Bristol merchant, John Wynter, was called to London and provided with £1,000 to fit out the Bristol merchant fleet to serve the king. Within weeks four of Bristol’s eleven ships were patrolling the Irish Sea and by the middle of the year it seems that most of the town’s fleet was in the crown’s service.⁸⁴ In November the earl of Shrewsbury rebuked the York authorities for their citizens’ slowness to send out ships into the North Sea to protect English trade and prey on enemy shipping ‘to the honour of His Majesty and much to your own benefits’.⁸⁵ Three months later the Privy Council urged the earl to press the inhabitants of Newcastle to imitate those of Hull, who at the persuasion of Sir Michael Stanhope had ‘set forth at their own charges three ships and three shallops’.⁸⁶ ⁷⁸ ‘Stadsrekeningen Middelburg ii’, 394. ⁷⁹ Murray, Cinque Ports, chs. 1–3; Page (ed.), VCH Sussex, ii. 143–4, 150; ESRO, RYE60/3, fos. 15–16; Mayhew, ‘Defence’, 117–19. ⁸⁰ Allison (ed.), VCH Hull, 22; Tillott (ed.), VCH York, 56–7. ⁸¹ PRO, C76/165, m. 8, 166, m. 19; Jones, ‘Bristol Shipping Industry’, 116–17. We are grateful to Dr Jones for a copy of his thesis. ⁸² LP IV. i. 691; Gillett, MacMahon, Hull, 99. ⁸³ Great Yarmouth Assembly Minutes, 53–4, 66; Stephens, ‘Great Yarmouth’, 151; Extracts Merchant Adventurers, ii. 169–70. ⁸⁴ Jones, ‘Bristol Shipping Industry’, Ch. 4. ⁸⁵ YCR iv. 118. ⁸⁶ LP XX. i. 189, 243.

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The major incentive for ship owners to comply was the profitability of privateering. The Cinque Ports had long benefited from it, but a wider boom came only in the 1540s, as Henry VIII sought to expand the number of armed English ships at sea to attack the French and Scots and punish the subjects of Charles V for their prince’s abandonment of his cause. On 20 December 1544 a royal proclamation ordered crown officials and town magistrates to assist privateers, removed the need for privateers to obtain formal letters of marque and suspended the admiral’s right to one-tenth of the value of all prizes.⁸⁷ This could only increase the huge profits already being made. The earl of Shrewsbury was told that twelve or sixteen West Country ships had made around £10,000 in 1544 and disputes about prizes make such figures credible.⁸⁸ Between March 1544 and February 1545 John Furseman of Kingswear, Devon, and John Hull, a wealthy Exeter merchant and ship-owner, made nine voyages in which they took ships, French or neutral but trading with France, laden with grain, Gascon wine, and Newfoundland fish. They spent £450 or so on wages, victuals, and gunpowder; their prizes were worth over £11,000.⁸⁹ Privateering was so profitable that it was hard to stop when hostilities ended in 1550 and town authorities were drawn into its suppression.⁹⁰ When war resumed in 1557, the interests of government and town elites again coincided: at Hull it was the richest man in the borough, the wine merchant, mayor, and MP Walter Jobson, who received a royal commission to equip privateering ships.⁹¹ At Rye the benefits of privateering were so great that it may well have been the crown’s decision to suspend the privateering licence in the southern ports in May 1558 that made the town reluctant to meet the military and fiscal demands placed upon it in that year.⁹² Yet even privateering should be put in perspective: the English crown could afford to encourage free enterprise amongst private ship-owners because it had an increasingly large and effective state navy and did not need to call on towns for fighting ships as it did for soldiers on land. Privateering offered similar opportunities to well-situated towns in the Netherlands and by 1552 it was estimated some fifty or sixty ships were operating.⁹³ From the Flemish coast the Dunkirkers and Nieuwpoorters preyed on French and other shipping, but Ostend and Sluis also played their part.⁹⁴ The Flemings seem to have operated as individuals, as did captains from many Holland, Zeeland, and Brabant ports sailing the North Sea and Zuider Zee.⁹⁵ But Holland towns also sent out ships corporately, running the risk of town magistrates being sued or arrested by those demanding compensation for captured ships.⁹⁶ Privateering affected towns in ⁸⁷ TRP i. 243; Mayhew, ‘Defence’, 121; Jones, ‘Bristol Shipping Industry’, 111. ⁸⁸ Hamilton Papers, ii. 355. ⁸⁹ PRO, HCA24/15/64, 89; APC i. 495; Bindoff, Commons, ii. 407–8. ⁹⁰ PRO, HCA14/13/86, 90–2. ⁹¹ Bindoff, Commons, ii. 446–7. ⁹² Mayhew, ‘Defence’, 122. ⁹³ Sicking, Zeemacht, 220. ⁹⁴ CLGS i. 145, 152, 166–7, 180, 227, 247, 253, 261–2, 271, 351, ii. 4, v. 172, 209–10, 265–6, 329, 341. ⁹⁵ CLGS i. 201–2, 223, 264, 423, ii. 125, iv. 129, v. 124, 355–6, 372–3, 386–7, 423–4, 454, vi. 16, 64, 66–7, 78; Sicking, Zeemacht, 236. ⁹⁶ CLGS i. 146, 154–5, 162, 163–4, 172, 420–2, 453, ii. 125, 215–16, 231.

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other ways. The sale of goods taken by foreign captains could fuel port economies, while Veere merchants sold food to the rebel privateers at Sluis until forced to desist.⁹⁷ Magistrates, such as those at Middelburg and Veere, exercised some power over privateering and piracy despite the development of admiralty courts and appeals to superior jurisdictions.⁹⁸ Yet privateering was never as economically significant to towns or to the Netherlands as a whole as trade or fishing and the central government’s comparative neglect of it reflected this fact.⁹⁹ Towns in the Netherlands set out ships individually or collectively for a wider range of purposes than their English equivalents and with greater independence from central government direction. Fisheries protection or action against privateers might be pursued by individual towns, but could also be managed by provincial States or even the States of several provinces in cooperation.¹⁰⁰ Holland, Zeeland, and Flanders put out joint fleets in 1477–82, individual provinces took such measures later in the 1480s, and Flanders, where the States arbitrated successfully between the interests of the maritime towns and those inland, regularly set out fishery protection fleets under Charles V.¹⁰¹ On fishing Holland towns had to act more individually or in small groups, as the fishing ports’ interests were not well reflected in the States; but the mastery of the Zuider Zee against privateers and coastal raiders from Guelders, Friesland, and Utrecht was in the interest of Hollanders in general, so the States regularly kept ships there in wartime until the danger passed in 1543.¹⁰² Most of these schemes operated with minimal guidance from the admirals or other Habsburg authorities, and when grand plans for coordinated fisheries protection were formulated in the 1550s they foundered on differences in provincial priorities and resistance to a general herring tax, so towns continued to equip their own escort ships.¹⁰³ Even in offensive campaigns and long-distance convoys, different towns pursued their different interests in negotiation with other towns or with the central government. Towns such as Antwerp and Middelburg did contribute ships to Habsburg ventures such as the siege of Sluis in 1492 or the Friesland campaign of 1515, but they did so on their own terms.¹⁰⁴ Antwerp, with its commitment to long-distance trade, was heavily involved in centrally promoted schemes for large convoys to the Iberian Peninsula in 1552–3.¹⁰⁵ The Holland towns, in contrast, resisted convoying but sent armed ships at their own cost to maintain their trading interests in the Baltic whether it suited Habsburg dynastic policy or not.¹⁰⁶ Only in hungry 1557 did they think it worthwhile to convoy Baltic grain and then they largely organized ⁹⁷ CLGS ii. 337, 534, iii. 483, iv. 321; Zeeuwsche oudheden, 134–7; ADN, B1706, fo. 26r–v . ⁹⁸ CLGS i. 237, iii. 309, 463, 483, v. 171. ⁹⁹ Sicking, Zeemacht, 214–21. ¹⁰⁰ ‘Stadsrekeningen Middelburg ii’, 143. ¹⁰¹ Sicking, Zeemacht, 31–2, 44–5, 80–6; ‘Stadsrekeningen Middelburg ii’, 143–5; Jongkees, ‘Armement et action’, 302–18; Kokken, Steden en Staten, 233–4. ¹⁰² Sicking, Zeemacht, 86–8, 147–51. ¹⁰³ Ibid. 96–105. ¹⁰⁴ ‘Stadsrekeningen Middelburg ii’, 152, 403; Lampo, Vermaerde Coopstad, 105. ¹⁰⁵ Sicking, Zeemacht, 130–9. ¹⁰⁶ Ibid. 107–23; Tracy, Holland, 105–14; NA, ASH2413; GRk4991, fos. 166v–168r , 225r ; NHA, SAHI/394, fos. 63r , 68r .

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matters themselves.¹⁰⁷ The same self-sufficiency applied even to the boats used by ’sHertogenbosch to patrol the Maas and the Waal. In 1528 the town worked closely both with nearby villages and with Dordrecht to protect river trade and maintain warships on the rivers in support of the siege of Tiel.¹⁰⁸ Even single towns, of course, did not have monolithic economic or strategic interests: Antwerp’s insurers were not keen on convoying because it would reduce the demand for their services.¹⁰⁹ But in general towns in the Netherlands kept control of their own naval resources and deployed them to their own benefit, in the process hampering the Habsburgs’ efforts to construct any kind of wider naval policy around their small permanent fleet.

A R M O U R I E S A N D A RT I L L E RY Every Englishman was in theory expected to maintain arms in keeping with his social status and towns tried to ensure that their citizens did so. At Norwich in 1548, for example, the aldermen were ordered to see what harness everyone had and the widows of JPs and aldermen were told to keep armour for two men and one man respectively.¹¹⁰ Meanwhile corporate stocks were also maintained. These might be kept in central armouries, at parish level, as in Exeter or York, or by trade guilds, as at Ludlow.¹¹¹ Central holdings were usually sufficient to equip one or two dozen men at most, so private holdings and parish stocks were also drawn on when troops were raised.¹¹² Routine maintenance of central stocks, oiling armour, renewing buckles and straps, was a constant, but small, expense, costing a few shillings a year.¹¹³ Buying new equipment cost much more and it was war or the imminent threat of it that forced it on town councils. Norwich spent over £3 on bows, arrows, bowstrings, and so on for the soldiers it sent to sea in 1513, Leicester rather more than that on bills, swords, and daggers in 1555–6, but armour was the most expensive part of traditional equipment: in November 1521 the council of Exeter took the difficult decision to purchase ten pairs of Almain rivets, German armour for footmen, ‘here or else in London if they may be had for x s a pair’.¹¹⁴ By the end of the period more modern infantry weapons were being bought, twelve dozen pikes at Rye in 1558 for example.¹¹⁵ Such costs were put in the shade by those required by the artillery and handguns increasingly deployed in the defence of English towns from the fifteenth century. Guns, gunpowder, and lead shot were expensive. Canterbury paid £1 10s 11d for a firkin of gunpowder in 1483 and half as much again to service its guns and keep them in powder in 1513.¹¹⁶ By the 1530s it was buying the special ‘corned’ powder needed ¹⁰⁷ ¹⁰⁹ ¹¹¹ ¹¹² ¹¹³ ¹¹⁴ ¹¹⁵

Sicking, Zeemacht, 141–5. ¹⁰⁸ Inventaris ’s-Hertogenbosch, 438–9, 443–7. Sicking, Zeemacht, 131. ¹¹⁰ Records Norwich, ii. 174. Tudor Exeter, 7–33; Churchwardens’ Accounts, ii. 326; PRO, E101/62/3. CCA, FA15, fo. 75; Records Leicester, no. 103; YCR iv. 156, v. 188. DRO, EABI, fo. 7; Records Leicester, nos. 73, 88, 112, 122, 130. NRO, NCAR 1512–13; Records Leicester, no. 104; DRO, EABI, fo. 93. Mayhew, ‘Defence’, 115. ¹¹⁶ CCA, FA7, fo. 10; FA10, fo. 42.

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for handguns.¹¹⁷ Rye spent constantly from the 1480s on small guns and powder to defend its ships.¹¹⁸ Unless donors played their part—like the man who gave Salisbury an iron serpentine in 1483—larger pieces could not be purchased without special financial levies or help from the crown. The ‘community of Canterbury’ shared the cost of a new gun in 1495, a general assessment was raised throughout Norwich for a new gun in 1512, and York and Great Yarmouth got total or partial remission of the fee-farms they owed the king in 1492 and 1512 so they could spend the money on guns.¹¹⁹ In 1522 Norwich city council agreed on a levy totalling £60 to fund the purchase of a dozen brass guns on wheels, together with powder and shot.¹²⁰ At least the order for six falconets in 1544–5 was made easier by the fact that the borough already owned the metal it needed, probably bell-metal from dissolved religious institutions.¹²¹ The expertise needed to maintain and fire the new weapons also came dear, especially as experts tended to be foreigners. Southampton hired ‘John Ducheman’ to make gunstones in 1482–3 and had four Swiss gunners plus ‘Dyrycke’, ‘Baltazar’, and ‘Iggelbyrd Smith’, presumably Netherlanders or Germans, by 1512–14; in 1510–11 the single gunner’s salary was 13s 4d, but by 1557–8 the wartime team of town gunners cost £23 a year.¹²² By the 1550s Rye, Hull, and Exeter all had specialist gunners too, often Dutch.¹²³ Where towns stored their armouries is often unclear, but by the end of our period there was a move towards dedicated rooms in town halls or, as at Rye and Exeter, the use of parts of churches as ordnance stores.¹²⁴ Help was at hand from the crown, as Henry VII moved to imitate his continental peers and centralize control of large guns.¹²⁵ Between 1487 and 1491, York, Rye, and Winchelsea were all sent guns from the royal stores.¹²⁶ Henry VIII’s reign confirmed the trend, as large modern guns became so expensive that the crown enjoyed a virtual monopoly of them. Royal guns and gunpowder were entrusted to coastal towns such as Hull and Rye for their own defence, demonstrating the king’s confidence in their magistrates.¹²⁷ Even inland towns asked for guns, as Canterbury did in the rebellions of 1549.¹²⁸ But the pieces supplied were to be available for royal expeditions when needed, and so were guns owned by towns themselves. Norwich’s wheeled guns were probably sent to France in 1523 with the duke of Suffolk, who came that spring to inspect the city’s artillery.¹²⁹ While five large guns were sent from the Tower to Great Yarmouth in 1545 for the defence of the town under the supervision of the duke of ¹¹⁷ CCA, FA12, fos. 78v , 217v ; Hall, Weapons and Warfare, 95–106. ¹¹⁸ ESRO, RYE60/3, passim. ¹¹⁹ WSRO, G23/1/2, fo. 148v ; CCA, FA7, fo. 230v ; NRO, PMA 1491–1553, fo. 96v ; YCR ii. 88; LP I. i. 1494 (7). ¹²⁰ Records Norwich, ii. 160. ¹²¹ Rye, ‘Old Cannon’, 87–90. ¹²² SAO, SC5/1/18, fo. 24v , SC5/1/27B, fo. 8v , SC5/1/30, fo. 1v , SC5/1/31, fos. 22r , 29v , 30v , SC5/1/43, fo. 12v . ¹²³ Mayhew, ‘Defence’, 115; PRO, E101/60/1; Stoyle, Circled with Stone, 80. ¹²⁴ Tittler, Architecture and Power, 33; Mayhew, ‘Defence’, 115; Stoyle, Circled with Stone, 75. ¹²⁵ Grummitt, ‘Defence of Calais’, 253–72. ¹²⁶ YCR ii. 9–10, 12–13; ESRO, RYE60/3, fo. 90; PRO, E405/77, rot. 6d. ¹²⁷ HCA, BRF/9/2(M.37); Mayhew, ‘Defence’, 115; APC i. 163. ¹²⁸ CCA, FA14, fo. 114v . ¹²⁹ NRO, NCAR 1522–3; PMA 1491–1553, fo. 136.

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Norfolk, six guns ‘belonging of the goods of the commonalty’ there were deployed on the Privy Council’s orders for the defence of the fleet victualling the army in Scotland in 1549.¹³⁰ Exeter spent £39 3s 4d on new guns in 1545, but had to seek help from Francis, earl of Bedford, in 1556. He deposited some of his own ordnance with them, but on condition he should have it back ‘at all times reasonably . . . upon reasonable request’. In 1558 he called for his guns, though he graciously let the city keep one.¹³¹ English towns were improving their defences, but often at the cost of a loss of control over their gunpowder weaponry to the crown and its noble commanders. In the Netherlands as in England, schutters and members of urban militias were meant to provide their own equipment, though it might at times be confiscated by governments wary of urban insurrection.¹³² The cost of weaponry was one of the reasons for the social exclusivity of schutterijen.¹³³ Yet some companies and towns had common stocks of weapons or bought them for troops they were raising, as the Flemish towns and magistrates bought corselets, pikes, and halberds for the infantrymen sent to besiege Tournai in 1521.¹³⁴ Among town stocks, handguns and later arquebuses were much commoner than in England. Many towns bought several dozen at a time and in 1542–3 Leiden used bell-metal and old copper to make 100.¹³⁵ Towns also defended themselves with larger guns. Douai bought six culverins and two serpentines in 1512–13, the latter costing over 187£.¹³⁶ Middelburg bought a total of thirty serpentines, slings, and curtalls on six separate occasions between 1466 and 1550: the last two double-serpentines and four half-serpentines with wheeled carriages cost 250£ from the emperor’s gunfounder at Mechelen, Remy de Hallut.¹³⁷ Most town guns were large enough for defensive purposes, but not really for fullscale siege warfare.¹³⁸ ’s-Hertogenbosch tried to do better. In 1510 it already had a few large bronze and iron cannon, but it attempted to build a ‘supergun’ big enough to shoot across the Maas at Zaltbommel. Its expert designer produced it eighteen months late and on testing it achieved nothing except to break many of the town’s windows. The maker fled to his native Cologne, successfully sued the magistrates for his arrears of wages, and left the useless weapon to grace the town’s fortifications to this day. ¹³⁹ For the siege of Tiel in 1528 ’s-Hertogenbosch was left to ask Dordrecht if it had any guns suitable to send.¹⁴⁰ ¹³⁰ NRO, MCB 1534–1549, fos. 49v , 57; MCB 1540–9, 288; Great Yarmouth Assembly Minutes, 66–7. ¹³¹ Stoyle, Circled with Stone, 188–9, 192; DRO, EABII, 294, 324. ¹³² Barre, Journal, 180–2, 200. ¹³³ Knevel, Burgers, 35. ¹³⁴ Inventaire Courtrai, i. 248, ii. 80, 85; ROPB ii. 127. ¹³⁵ Willems, ‘Militaire organisatie’, 270–1; AMAL, CC, Comptes de l’argentier 1499, fo. 11r ; ‘Stadsrekeningen Middelburg ii’, 148; ‘Stadsrekeningen Middelburg iii’, 271; ‘Stadsrekeningen Middelburg iv’, 96; Inventaire Courtrai, ii. 85; GAL, SAI/625, fo. 56. ¹³⁶ AMD, CC235, fo. 108r . ¹³⁷ ‘Stadsrekeningen Middelburg ii’, 56–7; ‘Stadsrekeningen Middelburg iii’, 270–2; ‘Stadsrekeningen Middelburg iv’, 15. ¹³⁸ ‘Stadsrekeningen Middelburg iii’, 270; GAL, SAI/625, fo. 56; Willems, ‘Militaire organisatie’, 271. ¹³⁹ SSH, OA3800; Glaudemans, Tussenbroek, De Moerasdraak, 24–5. ¹⁴⁰ Inventaris ’s-Hertogenbosch, 447.

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Habsburg regimes seem rarely to have entrusted the ruler’s cannon to town authorities, though Douai and other towns begged Charles V for a share of the artillery captured at Tournai in 1521.¹⁴¹ The 1550s saw a little more topping up of town arsenals on the frontiers with large pieces: one half-cannon to Saint-Omer in 1552, three cannon to Valenciennes in 1555, and so on. Otherwise centralization was more informal, as ever more towns bought their guns from the Mechelen founders who also supplied the emperor.¹⁴² More commonly the Habsburgs borrowed guns from towns, especially for naval or amphibious operations such as those in 1515–17, when smaller cannon were needed in larger numbers.¹⁴³ Such demands imperilled towns’ ability to defend themselves and might be met with evasion or refusal. Douai pleaded its needs as a frontier town to escape the demands of 1515 and, fearing attack from Guelders, several Holland towns declined to arm Charles’s fleet in 1535–6.¹⁴⁴ As the government’s stocks in its arsenals at Mechelen and Veere increased, such borrowings became less necessary, but they were a delicate subject in the relationship between the Habsburgs and their towns, especially so when guns were painted or cast with the town arms or other designs, bearers of civic identity like the tents that Philip the Fair and Charles V also tried to borrow for their campaigns.¹⁴⁵ Towns such as Douai, Middelburg, and ’s-Hertogenbosch also bought or milled large quantities of gunpowder, Middelburg seeking to upgrade the treadmill it used to make powder by sending the town carpenter to look at Antwerp’s mill in 1531.¹⁴⁶ Storage was more of a problem. In 1488 there was a gunpowder explosion in one of the towers of Middelburg’s northern Dampoort, apparently the same gate used as a lock-up for the dangerously insane.¹⁴⁷ In 1546 a gunpowder house was constructed for the town, but in 1549 it caught fire and the gunpowder-maker was paid to make a new one outside the town.¹⁴⁸ For major campaigns rulers tried to borrow powder from towns, but Charles V and Philip II in the 1550s were more successful than Philip the Fair in 1504, turned down flat by ’s-Hertogenbosch; by the 1550s town gunpowder production was in any case built into a complex market coordinated by the Mechelen arsenal, in which the master-gunners of Antwerp and other towns supplied the emperor’s needs as well as their own.¹⁴⁹ To look after their guns Netherlands towns had long employed such master-gunners: Douai, Middelburg, and Valenciennes all had one by 1470.¹⁵⁰ As in England, ¹⁴¹ AMD, CC243, fo. 65r–v . ¹⁴² Roosens, ‘Arsenaal’, 196–8, 205–6. ¹⁴³ NHA, SAH, Vroedschapsresoluties 1501–16, fo. 158r–v ; ‘Stadsrekeningen Middelburg iii’, 404; AMV, AA149. ¹⁴⁴ AMD, CC238, fo. 142r ; Sicking, Zeemacht, 121. ¹⁴⁵ Sicking, Zeemacht, 144; ‘Stadsrekeningen Middelburg iii’, 271, 404; ‘Stadsrekeningen Middelburg iv’, 15; Barre, Journal, 194, 286; Inventaris ’s-Hertogenbosch, 73–4; Inventaire Ypres, vii. 218–19, 226–7. ¹⁴⁶ AMD, CC233; ‘Stadsrekeningen Middelburg ii’, 56–7; ‘Stadsrekeningen Middelburg iii’, 271–2; Inventaris ’s-Hertogenbosch, 54; SSH, OA3800. ¹⁴⁷ ‘Stadsrekeningen Middelburg ii’, 51–2. ¹⁴⁸ ‘Stadsrekeningen Middelburg iii’, 272; ‘Stadsrekeningen Middelburg iv’, 15. ¹⁴⁹ Roosens, ‘Arsenaal’, 213, 216–17, 232–3, 236; Inventaris ’s-Hertogenbosch, 73–4. ¹⁵⁰ ‘Stadsrekeningen Middelburg ii’, 76, 78, 148; Rouche (ed.), Douai, 56–7; Platelle (ed.), Valenciennes, 65.

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their expertise was valuable. The Leiden magistrates could not meet the salary demands of the artillery master and gunpowder-maker they tried to hire from Leeuwarden in 1512—he wanted as much as the town pensionary—so they made do with a man from Dordrecht. He cost half as much, but within months complaints about him caused them to consider his dismissal.¹⁵¹ ’s-Hertogenbosch did better, hiring Dirk van der Elst as master of the artillery in 1498 at a higher salary than his predecessor and with explicit powers of command over the town workmen.¹⁵² The alternative to paying top rates for experienced staff was in-service training. Douai sent some of its gunners to watch the siege of Tournai in 1521 and Middelburg tried similar secondments.¹⁵³ Staffs expanded in wartime, ’s-Hertogenbosch hiring ten extra gunners in summer 1542.¹⁵⁴ The largest and most belligerent towns already had dedicated arsenal buildings by the start of our period, like the well-stocked engienhuis at Ghent.¹⁵⁵ Others, such as ’s-Hertogenbosch, Douai, and Leiden still kept their artillery in their town halls or in the houses and practice grounds of their schutterijen, dragging it out onto the market place to prepare it for action or outside the walls to test it.¹⁵⁶ When towns did decide they needed an arsenal, the search for the ideal site could be troublesome. In 1525 the magistrates of Kortrijk asked the Sion Convent for its cloth-drying house, offering to pay the price set by appraisers plus an indemnity, but the convent’s unwillingness to sell had to be overridden by the provincial governor.¹⁵⁷ In general Netherlands towns were better able to absorb the costs of gunpowder weapons without extraordinary measures than their English counterparts. Occasional expedients came into play, as at ’s-Hertogenbosch where it was ordained in 1511 that each new alderman should give the town a serpentine or a double arquebus and each new guild master an arquebus.¹⁵⁸ In crisis years artillery expenses could absorb large proportions of civic budgets, more than 25 per cent at Douai in 1521–2, but in general even years of especially heavy provision such as 1542–3 at Leiden or 1508–10 at ’s-Hertogenbosch accounted for no more than 3 per cent of the budget and in normal times, as at Haarlem in the early 1530s, the proportion was tiny.¹⁵⁹ Fortification was quite another matter. F O RT I F I C AT I O N S Town walls in medieval Europe were badges of urban identity and guarantees of the security of townsfolk and their wealth. Developments in artillery in the fifteenth century made conventional walls increasingly vulnerable, but from Italy came a response ¹⁵¹ GAL, SAI/383, fos. 128, 131, 141r , SAI/591, fos. 66, 68v , SAI/595, fo. 66. ¹⁵² Inventaris ’s-Hertogenbosch, 36. ¹⁵³ AMD, CC243, fo. 152; ‘Stadsrekeningen Middelburg iii’, 405. ¹⁵⁴ Jacobs, Justitie en politie, 106, 216. ¹⁵⁵ Gaier, Industrie des armes, 92, 97, 297. ¹⁵⁶ Inventaris ’s-Hertogenbosch, 35; SSH, OA3800; AMD, CC235, fo. 108r ; GAL, SAI/625, fo. 56. ¹⁵⁷ Inventaire Courtrai, ii. 45–6. ¹⁵⁸ Os, Kroniek, 317. ¹⁵⁹ AMD, CC243, fo. 149; GAL, SAI/625; SSH, OA3800; Inventaris ’s-Hertogenbosch, 186, 202; NHA, SAH/I/414–16.

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in the form of the trace italienne system. This provided polygonal fortresses with massive but low walls, deep ditches, and bastions mounting defensive artillery. The construction of such fortifications consumed money, manpower, and urban space on an unprecedented scale. Yet princes and their engineers saw them as the best way to strengthen borders against invasion and individual towns against enemy seizure. They provided much encouragement to towns to build them, but rarely sufficient practical help. Those town authorities that tried would face considerable challenges to their financial stability and to their relations with their populace and rural neighbours. Princely encouragement and intervention might begin to threaten their political freedom of manoeuvre; worse still, princes might adopt another Italian device, the citadel fortified in this new fashion and garrisoned by loyal troops, to bridle civic liberty by force. In England, while the crown undertook massive fortification projects from the 1530s to the 1550s, very few towns saw serious modification to their built defences. Inland towns faced little threat except from domestic insurgents without modern artillery trains. That Exeter successfully withstood sieges in 1497 and 1549 whereas Hull and York fell in 1536 and Norwich in 1549 was more a matter of the resolution of their citizenries than the quality of their walls. Town walls were also not indispensable for urban constitutional and economic privileges. Beverley and Grimsby no longer had walls and Salisbury had never had them; earthen banks or ditches and wooden gates sufficed to demarcate their boundaries.¹⁶⁰ Northern towns, faced with rebellion and possible Scottish attack, put more effort into maintaining their defences under Henry VII than their southern counterparts. York continued to maintain its walls by the medieval device of collecting murage and made special reconstruction efforts after the rebel attacks of 1487 and 1489 on Bootham Bar, Walmgate Bar, and Fishergate Bar. The first set of works was funded personally by the mayor and the second by the city, while the king urged on further improvements in the early 1490s, paid for by a royal grant of £98 and remission of the fee-farm. Between then and 1509 two towers, three sections of wall, and a postern were rebuilt at a cost of at least £70, but thereafter royal pressure and civic enthusiasm waned, such that by 1536 Robert Aske could claim the town’s defences were neglected.¹⁶¹ Norwich’s efforts to keep its medieval walls in repair were less a matter of military necessity and more one of civic identity. Residents made bequests for the upkeep of the walls and taxes were periodically levied on the inhabitants for the same purpose because, as the city tax ordinance of August 1527 put it, as ‘an ancient city fortified with ditches surrounded with walls gates towers and turrets’, it was ‘the strength and comfort of all the country adjoinant’.¹⁶² Canterbury, too, spent regular small sums on repairs to its walls and towers, but did not respond ¹⁶⁰ Turner, Town Defences, 99, 119; Ancient Monuments in Salisbury, p. xxxviii. ¹⁶¹ Inventory of Monuments in York, 19; YHB i. 390–1; YCR iii. 390–1; Palliser, York, 42–3; Dodds and Dodds, Pilgrimage, i. 175–8. ¹⁶² NRO, PMA 1491–1553, fos. 77v , 147r–v , 147r –8v , 238v ; MCB 1534–49, fo. 34.

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to changes in military technology.¹⁶³ When Kent was threatened by French attack, as in 1512–13 or 1544–5, more was spent ensuring that the walls were secure, but no major new works were begun and the proportion of municipal spending involved was still small: £1 12s 4d, some 2 per cent of the total, in 1512–13.¹⁶⁴ Only in the 1550s, with the scare of the 1549 and 1554 rebellions, did expenditure reach significant levels, with £43 10s 1d, 24 per cent of the annual budget, spent on the walls in 1553–4 from the city’s coffers, proceeds from sales of municipal grain stores, and contributions by the cathedral dean and chapter.¹⁶⁵ Exeter retained its medieval walls, though it repeatedly repaired them in response to rebellions and invasion scares, rebuilding its East Gate in 1511–14 and North Gate in 1558–63 and spending the equivalent of more than a year’s normal income on defensive works every decade from the 1530s to the 1550s. These measures were funded from a mixture of reserves, sales of civic land, and contributions from the magistrates, cathedral clergy, and other wealthy inhabitants.¹⁶⁶ For coastal towns royal encouragement and civic enthusiasm to fortify were much stronger. At Rye Henry VII’s reign saw not only maintenance of the fourteenthcentury walls and gates and scouring of the ditches, but the construction of a stone and timber bulwark at the Strandgate (the western entrance to the town), reinforced in the wars of 1513 and 1522–4.¹⁶⁷ Even these works represented a much higher proportion of civic expenditure than at most inland towns: in 1512–13 Rye spent £17 13s 10d, some 18 per cent of its total budget, on its defences. In 1544–5 a more thorough scheme was carried out, strengthening the old bulwark and the town walls to take ordnance, adding new stone-filled timber bulwarks, a ‘gun garden’, and a ‘new fortress’ for which suburban shops had to be demolished. The work was surveyed and inspected by royal commissioners including Sir Thomas Seymour, master of the ordnance, but funded and overseen by the mayor and jurats of the town.¹⁶⁸ The cost of £200 was met by a monthly ‘cess’ of 1d in the pound on richer English-born residents and 1/2d for the poorer, aliens paying at double rate; the tax was unpopular and the town council had to appeal to the Privy Council for help in enforcing it. Further works on the ditch and new portcullises for the Landgate and Strandgate followed in 1558–9. Other large coastal towns such as Southampton and Great Yarmouth saw similar works between 1545 and 1559, raising local taxes to add shot-proof bulwarks in earth or timber, artillery platforms, and batteries to their old walls.¹⁶⁹ The most significant refortification of an English town in this period was that of Hull in 1542–3. This was a royal initiative, paid for almost entirely by the crown at a cost of £21,056 5s 6d, directed by the crown’s leading military engineer John Rogers, and probably inspired by Henry VIII’s visit to the town in October 1541.¹⁷⁰ The ¹⁶³ CCA, FA6–16. ¹⁶⁴ CCA, FA10, fos. 33v , 46, FA14, fo. 111. ¹⁶⁵ CCA, FA15, fos. 36, 43. ¹⁶⁶ Stoyle, Circled with Stone, 69–82, 103, 197–200. ¹⁶⁷ Mayhew, ‘Defence’, 110–14; ESRO, RYE60/3, fos. 80v , 88v . ¹⁶⁸ APC i. 197. ¹⁶⁹ Great Yarmouth Assembly Minutes, 16, 64; Stephens, ‘Great Yarmouth’, 152; Third Book of Remembrance, ii. 21–2, 56; SAO, SC5/1/41, fos. 7r –9v , SC5/1/42, fos. 7r –9r , 22r –25v . ¹⁷⁰ Colvin (ed.), King’s Works, iv(ii), 472–7.

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existing fourteenth-century walls and towers were temporarily taken out of the town council’s hands while they were repaired and backed with earthen ramparts and the ditches scoured.¹⁷¹ Meanwhile a castle and two blockhouses or bulwarks were built to command the harbour and the town approaches with artillery fire and to house a royal garrison; the work perhaps aimed to prevent any repetition of the townsfolk’s equivocal reaction to the Pilgrimage of Grace, as well as to control the strategic North Sea routes to Scotland. The impact on the townsfolk might be imagined from the fact that there were 1,235 labourers at work in March 1543, perhaps twice the adult population of the town.¹⁷² The mayor and aldermen soon began a long struggle, crowned with success in 1552, to take control of the castle and blockhouses, only to find them a terrible burden on their finances in the decades to come, a vivid illustration of the inability of English towns even to maintain, let alone to build, modern artillery fortifications.¹⁷³ The next English town to face thorough refortification at the town’s cost, Berwick, had much more experience than Hull of service as a frontier garrison, but still faced unwelcome costs in the demolition of houses and of its only parish church.¹⁷⁴ In many ways English towns were fortunate to be spared the full impact of the trace italienne. Towns in the Netherlands, always more open to attack, were active in developing their fortifications from the start of our period. ’s-Hertogenbosch kept its fourteenthcentury brick walls in repair and from about 1500 extended them to cover a new quarter of the town, the Hinthamereinde, while adding a twin-towered forward extension to one of its gates, the already massive four-towered Vughterpoort, in 1498.¹⁷⁵ Middelburg maintained a steady programme of repairs and new works from the 1470s to the 1510s.¹⁷⁶ Valenciennes tried to keep its ditches clear and was spurred by French attack in 1477 to build a bulwark of brick and earth with gun casemates outside one of its gates and a barbican outside another.¹⁷⁷ Arras and Antwerp were planning artilleryproof fortification schemes around 1510.¹⁷⁸ It was thus into an active tradition of urban fortification and refortification that Italian ideas began to penetrate in the reign of Charles V. The first town in the Netherlands to begin a full scheme of refortification on the Italian model was Breda. From 1531, under the influence of its cosmopolitan lord Hendrik III of Nassau, the town was refortified in parallel with the adjoining castle. Walls, bastions, gates, and external blockhouses began to be constructed, but the scheme was never completed and much was built in earth rather than stone or brick.¹⁷⁹ What started as a complete remodelling ended as an updated version of the old tendency for towns to add new works to vulnerable or conspicuous parts of their defensive systems. Middelburg likewise consulted both foreign experts and local power-brokers about its refortification from 1546–7, but ¹⁷¹ ¹⁷³ ¹⁷⁵ ¹⁷⁶ ¹⁷⁷ ¹⁷⁹

Allison (ed.), VCH Hull, 21–3, 413. ¹⁷² CUL, Hengrave MS 88, ii, no. 67. Allison (ed.), VCH Hull, 415. ¹⁷⁴ Colvin (ed.), King’s Works, iv(ii), 636, 647. Glaudemans, Tussenbroek, De Moerasdraak, 13–19. ‘Stadsrekeningen Middelburg ii’, 52–6; ‘Middelburg iii’, 267–9. Mariage, Fortifications, 56–9, 69 n. ¹⁷⁸ Heuvel, Roosens, ‘Administration’, 413–15. Brekelmans, ‘Aanzien en luister’, 161–3.

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seems to have ended up with just two new stone platforms or bulwarks, built in 1549–51.¹⁸⁰ Valenciennes and ’s-Hertogenbosch were still more pragmatic in their adaptation to the world of artillery warfare. From the 1520s to the 1540s, pressed by its governor the duke of Aarschot, by Margaret of Austria, and by Charles V himself, Valenciennes steadily cut the tops off its towers and filled its old gates with earth to form artillery platforms, backed its curtain walls with earth ramparts and added to its defences first a square bulwark, then a low, straight-sided artillery tower with a rounded end, then a bastion with vaulted casemates and finally another bastion; but the last was still unfinished twenty-one years after it was started.¹⁸¹ ’s-Hertogenbosch similarly started in 1518 to pile up river mud and street sweepings behind its upright walls, to cut down its towers and fill them with earth to make better artillery platforms. In the early 1540s it was instructed by the central government to line all its walls with earth platforms over 6m wide, thus doing away with the houses which had been built against the inside of the walls. Bulwarks before two of the gates followed, but only one was a full-blown Italian enterprise, designed by the count of Buren’s engineer Alessandro Pasqualini in 1542; its cost nearly bankrupted the town and with the elimination of the threat from Guelders the impulse to further effort faded.¹⁸² By the 1550s many towns were adapting their walls or adding single new batteries or bastions, but of the twelve that possessed a complete bastioned circuit by 1572—complete in earth, not necessarily in stone—four were new towns founded as strategic fortresses and seven were comparatively small commercial centres in sensitive military locations. Only Antwerp, as one of the great cities of the Netherlands and indeed of Europe, really did have a complete set of modern walls.¹⁸³ Unique factors drove Antwerp to become ‘one of the best fortified [cities] in Europe’.¹⁸⁴ Maarten van Rossum’s near-capture of the town in July 1542 scared the magistrates badly and they knew that foreign merchants needed security if trade were to thrive.¹⁸⁵ Pride joined fear as Antwerp’s grand scheme, designed by the emperor’s engineer Donato Boni di Pellizuoli, began to be shown off in printed views of the city in the 1550s.¹⁸⁶ The city’s economic expansion was harnessed to the project through the entrepreneurship of Gilbert van Schoonbeke, who took over the hitherto slowmoving works in 1549–52. He simultaneously completed the five monumental gates and nine and a half stone-faced bastions, built the six kilometres of walls and developed an entirely new residential, commercial, and industrial quarter, arranged on a geometric plan around three parallel canals, expanding the total street frontage of the city by some 31 per cent. To do so he established fifteen brickworks with a staff of ¹⁸⁰ ‘Stadsrekeningen Middelburg iii’, 269–70; ‘Stadsrekeningen Middelburg iv’, 12–13; Heuvel, ‘Papiere Bolwercken’, 26–7. ¹⁸¹ Mariage, Fortifications, 70–88. ¹⁸² Glaudemans, Tussenbroek, De Moerasdraak, 21–5. ¹⁸³ ROPB vi. 202–3, 440–2, vii. 39–40; Inventaire Ypres, vi. 58; Hemelrijck, Vlaamse krijgsbouwkunde, 167–84; Brulez, ‘Gewicht van de oorlog’, 386, 394–5; Heuvel, ‘Papiere Bolwercken’, 28–9, 74–7. ¹⁸⁴ Lombaerde, ‘Antwerp’, 99. ¹⁸⁵ SAA, Pk915, fo. 31v . ¹⁸⁶ Lombaerde, ‘Antwerp’, 102–3.

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500 in Brabant, several lime-kilns in Namur, and enterprises for forestry in Flanders and turf-digging in Utrecht. He made himself extraordinarily rich and did well for the many Antwerp magistrates who invested in his projects, or who accepted bribes to facilitate his schemes.¹⁸⁷ But his achievement was beyond the reach of other towns. Even Antwerp found the cost of refortification painful. Excises and town debts had mounted from 1542 until the brede raad refused the magistrates’ proposals for further tax increases in 1548. Mary of Hungary then intervened to order attacks on peculation in the town’s financial administration and back more moderate tax increases and Van Schoonbeke’s imaginative proposals.¹⁸⁸ For towns without Antwerp’s prosperity or Breda’s sympathetic lord, Hendrik of Nassau, who made sure that the civic chest met only 32 per cent of the cost of works there, things were harder still.¹⁸⁹ Most met fortification costs by some combination of princely tax remissions, grants of rebel goods, market privileges or tolls, and issues of renten secured on new civic taxes, usually wine or beer excises.¹⁹⁰ A practical alternative was to levy fines in the town courts in terms of bricks or stones.¹⁹¹ The effects of such vast public works on urban government were complex. They might distract towns from other projects, like Middelburg’s town hall.¹⁹² They might ease the problems of wartime unemployment and poverty, raising wages at Antwerp in 1543 and providing work for women at Middelburg in 1497–8.¹⁹³ They might draw the citizenry together in emergency defence works, as at Maastricht in 1552 or Cambrai in 1554.¹⁹⁴ But they might swamp towns with huge gangs of navvies, 1,500 at Bapaume in 1554, doubling the population of the town. At Utrecht a gallows and pillory were set up to keep the workers in line, necessarily so if they were as unruly as the labourers at Th´erouanne in 1553 who got into a fatal brawl when one threw cement over the cherries the other was eating.¹⁹⁵ Compulsory purchase powers over urban or suburban properties needed for the sites of new defensive works or to clear a field of fire for defensive artillery were sweeping: 1,500 properties were destroyed at Antwerp in 1542.¹⁹⁶ Compensation was payable, sometimes at rates set by princely commissioners, and princely courts would enforce its payment; but they would also back town governments’ judgement of military necessity against those who resisted.¹⁹⁷ Suburban religious institutions in particular were subjected to the ¹⁸⁷ Soly, Urbanisme en kapitalisme, 149–94, 198–203, 205–393, 425–55. ¹⁸⁸ Ibid. 203–11. ¹⁸⁹ Brekelmans, ‘Aanzien en luister’, 162. ¹⁹⁰ ISN iii. 28; ROPB i. 32, 298–9, 499–500, 660–1, ii. 121–2, 553–5, iii. 489–90, iv. 412–13, 472–3, 478–9, vi. 202–3, 382–4; AMD, EE57; Thieulaine, ‘Extraits’, 189–90; Ville de Cambrai, 47, 250; Inventaire Courtrai, i. 235, 237–8, 247, ii. 3, 5, 9, 11, 13–14, 21, 25, 30; Inventaire Louvain, ii. 157–8; CLGS, iii. 259, 404; ‘Stadsrekeningen Middelburg iii’, 270. ¹⁹¹ Ville de Cambrai, 47–8, 129; Hemelrijck, Vlaamse krijgsbouwkunde, 226. ¹⁹² ‘Stadsrekeningen Middelburg ii’, 67. ¹⁹³ Soly, Urbanisme en kapitalisme, 203; ‘Stadsrekeningen Middelburg ii’, 55. ¹⁹⁴ Morreau, Bolwerk der Nederlanden, 56; Thieulaine, ‘Extraits’, 183. ¹⁹⁵ Hoekstra, ‘Vredenburg Castle’, 147–8; Thieulaine, ‘Extraits’, 175; Blockmans, Prevenier, Burgundian Netherlands, 391; Muchembled, Violence, 151–2. ¹⁹⁶ ROPB i. 202–3, iv. 6–10, 400–1, v. 486–91, vi. 26. ¹⁹⁷ ROPB i. 202–4; Inventaris ’s-Hertogenbosch, 350; SSH, OA3802a; AMD, CC248, fo. 144; CLGS ii. 205–6, iii. 233, iv. 93, 168, v. 325–6.

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needs of town defence, displaced, restricted, or swept away at Antwerp, Valenciennes, and elsewhere.¹⁹⁸ Yet destruction of the suburbs must also have had negative economic effects, as they were often the most vibrant areas of urban economic development.¹⁹⁹ The bastioned citadels built at Utrecht, Ghent, and Cambrai, from 1529, 1540, and 1543 respectively, had a more clearly negative effect on civic power. Though built at princely command to forestall insurrection, or at Cambrai to forestall French takeover, much of their cost still fell on the townsfolk; at Ghent through the massive fine imposed by Charles to punish its rebellion, at Cambrai through a new tax on property and merchandise, which threw the municipality into debt to Antwerp money-lenders and into the hands of Mary of Hungary as she settled quarrels over the distribution of the tax burden.²⁰⁰ The economic benefits of building were deliberately denied to Ghent, where workers were brought in from neighbouring provinces and the powerful shippers’ guild was denied a monopoly on the delivery of materials.²⁰¹ Even the displacement of religious institutions to make way for the citadels was a matter not of urban but of princely power.²⁰² Yet even building projects aimed against external enemies and directed by magistrates must have been unsettling at a time when patterns of fortification were changing so dramatically. Already in 1512, Maximilian was telling the burghers of Tienen to defer to ‘good notable men who understand wars and the fortification of towns’ and the awe of the ’s-Hertogenbosch accountant before Pasqualini was tangible: with his ‘very good knowledge and understanding . . . of bulwarks and other strongholds to be made and ordained for towns’, the Italian had made his drawing ‘very artistically and subtly’ and then his wooden model ‘subtly and very artistically’.²⁰³ There were drastic solutions for townsmen who felt they were dealing with forces beyond their understanding or control: at Groningen in 1550 a confrontational Italian engineer sent from Brussels was killed over his beer by disgruntled citizens.²⁰⁴ However, as in meeting so many of the demands we have considered, most townsfolk had to find more complex and less final means of evasion, cooperation, or surrender. ¹⁹⁸ ROPB iv. 401; CLGS iv. 168; Thieulaine, ‘Extraits’, 175; Ville de Cambrai, 263; Molius, Kroniek, 295–9; Mariage, Fortifications, 71, 73. ¹⁹⁹ Lamberini, ‘La politica del guasto’. ²⁰⁰ Hoekstra, ‘Vredenburg Castle’, 145–57; Hemelrijck, Vlaamse krijgsbouwkunde, 141–2; Decavele and Peteghem, ‘Ghent’, 110–12; Guicciardini, Descrittione, 477–8; Ville de Cambrai, 30, 276, 294. ²⁰¹ Soly (ed.), Carolus, no. 35; ROPB iv. 164–5, 197–8. ²⁰² Ville de Cambrai, 498; Relations des troubles, 100–10. ²⁰³ ROPB i. 202; Heuvel, ‘Papiere Bolwercken’, 77–8. ²⁰⁴ Heuvel, ‘Papiere Bolwercken’, 27, 154; Eppens, Kroniek, i. 118–19.

5 Life During Wartime Governments at war also made demands on towns more indirect than those we have so far considered. Towns were centres of information and arms manufacturing capacity. They were able to provide armies with accommodation, stocks of food, and means of transport. They were places of refuge for those impoverished by war and of safekeeping for prisoners. The fulfilment of these roles might be beneficial to the town or might be resented, might strengthen urban autonomy or override it. Most critically, the defence of the town itself called into question the duties of citizens to urban authorities and, all too often, the relationship between citizens, magistrates, and the prince’s troops.

WATC H E S , B E AC O N S , A N D P O S TS By keeping watches, towns both ensured their own safety and discovered enemy plots against the wider realm. Though English towns were more rarely exposed to attack than those in the Netherlands, governments still stressed the necessity that ‘in every great walled town . . . watch be made as of old time it hath been used and accustomed’, and towns prepared watches of householders like Salisbury’s, ‘at all hours, as well by night as by day, ready in defensible array to attend at their callings to await upon the king and to defend the city’.¹ Though proclamations ordered watches in wartime, it was at times of rebellion that such provisions were observed with special urgency: constables or aldermen organized ‘honest householders’ or ‘sad persons and substantial householders’ into teams to watch the walls and gates at Salisbury in 1483, at Exeter in 1549 and 1554, and at London, where there was special concern over potentially disruptive elements inside the city, in 1527, 1536, 1549, 1553, and 1554.² The mayor and aldermen of York similarly met Thomas Stafford’s occupation of Scarborough Castle in 1557 with orders for a watch of ‘honest and able’ freemen at each of the city’s gates.³ English towns also played their part in the series of beacons and watches that spread news of invasion. The maintenance of beacons was ordered in 1513 and 1523, for instance, and on both occasions men from Canterbury were sent to the coast to man ¹ TRP i. 63; WSRO, G23/1/2, fo. 275a. ² TRP i. 101–2, 137; WSRO, G23/1/2, fo. 152; DRO, EABII, 206; Stoyle, Circled with Stone, 81; Hall, Chronicle, 721; Brigden, London, 249, 493–6, 521, 526, 537–45. ³ YCR v. 159.

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the beacons and watch for enemy shipping.⁴ York maintained a beacon at Bilborough in Ainsty wapentake, part of a network throughout the north of England.⁵ Coastal towns were particularly important in this regard. Rye and Plymouth were periodically busy keeping watch and firing beacons and sent news to the king of enemy naval preparations, a matter on which the mayor and jurats of Rye regularly interrogated French prisoners captured by the town’s ships.⁶ Coastal towns played a key role in naval defence in the Netherlands too, Middelburg paying an all-night mounted watch when there were French galleys off the coast.⁷ Individual towns’ efforts were drawn together in 1546 by the establishment of a network of fifty-three beacons, able to transmit messages from Gravelines to the Holland coast in an hour and funded by a tax on shipping.⁸ Rivers had to be watched too, and shipping searched for storming parties or weapons, as at Antwerp in June 1542.⁹ Keeping watch was also an urgent matter for land-locked towns. Many employed watchmen or gatekeepers amongst their paid staffs, but war demanded special measures.¹⁰ Lookouts watched from belfries, hired soldiers manned the gates, and schutters patrolled the walls.¹¹ But everyone had to take their turn. The watch was supervised by senior townsmen, at least at times of crisis, aldermen at Antwerp in 1542 and ’s-Hertogenbosch in 1554.¹² Care even of one gate was a responsible job. Antoine de Lusy recorded proudly in his journal his appointment as head of the eight-man night watch at Mons’s Porte de Bartemont on 19 May 1521, ‘which was the first time I had the keys of the said gate’.¹³ Under such leadership, keeping watch drew the citizenry together in a disciplined body, following strict regulations and suspicious of outsiders. At Douai and Antwerp peddlers and countryfolk coming to market were to be watched closely.¹⁴ Participation in the watch was an obligation urban authorities made efforts to enforce on those who tried to plead exemption as the prince’s servants.¹⁵ Keeping watch absorbed a good deal of effort, but it was effort that amplified the powers of urban authorities over their citizens and exercised the bonds between towns, princes, and polities. GARRISONS AND BILLETING Where towns seemed vulnerable, princes were eager to place garrisons in them; even when they did not, towns with their concentrations of accommodation and food ⁴ CCA, FA10, fo. 42, FA11, fo. 178v . ⁵ YCR v. 169. ⁶ ESRO, RYE60/3, fos. 56r , 61r ; Mayhew, ‘Defence’, 123; Calendar Plymouth, 89, 94, 97, 100, 101, 104, 109, 112–13, 115. ⁷ ‘Stadsrekeningen Middelburg iv’, 129. ⁸ Sicking, Zeemacht, 154. ⁹ SAA, Pk1560/2. ¹⁰ Rouche (ed.), Douai, 56–7; Jacobs, Justitie en politie, 162. ¹¹ AMD, CC232, fo. 78r , CC261, fo. 127; AMV, CC749, fo. 52r , CC750, fo. 240r ; Inventaris ’sHertogenbosch, 36–8, 63; ‘Stadsrekeningen Middelburg ii’, 135, 142; ‘Stadsrekeningen Middelburg iii’, 273. ¹² Inventaris ’s-Hertogenbosch, 37; Schuttelaars, Heren van de raad, 464; Jacobs, Justitie en politie, 161–2; SAA, Pk1560/2. ¹³ Lusy, Journal, 178. ¹⁴ Trenard (ed.), Lille, ii. 27–8; AMD, EE93; SAA, Pk1560/2. ¹⁵ Lusy, Journal, 209–10; AMD, CC270, fo. 118; CLGS, iv. 166.

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seemed a convenient place to billet troops. Towns’ relationships with soldiers were deeply ambivalent. Soldiers were demanding, disruptive, and might prove a tool of princely coercion of the citizenry. They might take the opposite side from the townsfolk in a civil war.¹⁶ They might mutiny and take over the town, forcing the inhabitants to give them food and money, breaking open granaries and leaving the town so stripped that they might as well have plundered it, as the Spanish garrison did at Cambrai in spring 1553.¹⁷ That autumn Spaniards did the same at Lens and were only forestalled at Arras and Douai by popular resistance to their attempts to take control of the town gates.¹⁸ When confident of their ability to defend themselves, therefore, towns would take pains not to receive garrisons, as Middelburg and Leiden did in 1484 and 1513.¹⁹ In 1542 a scheme for the coordinated defence of the Zeeland coast was dented by the refusal of Middelburg and Zierikzee to admit garrison troops raised in Brabant and in 1543, much to Charles V’s disgust, ’s-Hertogenbosch refused entry to a garrison of reiter once it realized Maarten van Rossum was no longer heading in its direction.²⁰ In November 1553 Douai was asked by Mary of Hungary to take in an additional company of Spanish light horse. The councillors responded with a letter to Charles himself, opening with a ninety-word peroration describing their humble obedience to him in all matters and especially in meeting the needs of his wars, but going on to explain how their town was too small, too poor, and too full of refugees to accept any more soldiers, especially not Spaniards.²¹ When threats were sufficiently immediate, however, garrisons were welcome. At times in 1553–4 Arras went unprotected against French raids, because its garrison had been withdrawn to join the field army and other troops just passed through on the way to Lens. Finally, on 9 July 1554, one company of foot stopped in the suburbs and ‘gave a little courage and consolation’ to the frightened townsfolk.²² Urban authorities were resourceful in negotiating the problems garrisons and other troops presented, but all too often their hand was weak. Sometimes resolute action could keep soldiers out, as Middelburg hired men to do in 1491 and 1557.²³ Sometimes adroit use of regulatory powers could keep soldiers happy: town officers organized billeting at Valenciennes in 1554 and Cambrai drastically cut the price of beer supplied to the German garrison in 1558, just in time for Christmas.²⁴ Towns might organize supplies to soldiers in their midst, as ’s-Hertogenbosch channelled fodder to cavalry companies in 1557, splitting the costs with the surrounding countryside.²⁵ They might lend money to the soldiers so they could afford to pay the townsfolk, or pay innkeepers to house the soldiers in the hope of recovering payment when the ¹⁶ ¹⁷ ¹⁸ ¹⁹ ²⁰ ²¹ ²³ ²⁴ ²⁵

Surquet, ‘M´emoires’, 545–6. Thieulaine, ‘Extraits’, 147–9; Ville de Cambrai, 144; Vries, Urbanisation, 274. Thieulaine, ‘Extraits’, 162. ‘Stadsrekeningen Middelburg ii’, 146; GAL, SAI/383, fo. 141r . Sicking, Zeemacht, 153; Molius, Kroniek, 305–7. AMD, EE99. ²² Thieulaine, ‘Extraits’, 158, 186. ‘Stadsrekeningen Middelburg ii’, 150; ‘Stadsrekeningen Middelburg iv’, 43. AMV, CC751, fos. 279r , 281r ; Ville de Cambrai, 49. Inventaris ’s-Hertogenbosch, 706–7.

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soldiers’ pay came through, but the line between such deals and outright extortion was a fine one.²⁶ Unpaid or mutinous troops plundering the surrounding countryside for long periods, as at Lille in 1488–91, or blockading vital harbours, as at Delfshaven in 1512, were just paid off at the towns’ expense.²⁷ Often towns found it easiest to keep captains sweet and hope they would control their men. Middelburg paid one captain in 1527 to thank him for ‘that orderly life lived by him and his soldiers in this town’ and another in 1548 in gratitude that his men ‘passed through this town quietly and peacefully’.²⁸ In the 1550s Cambrai, Douai, Valenciennes, and ’s-Hertogenbosch regaled the captains of garrisons and billeted troops with wine, dinners, and even plays acted by local schoolboys.²⁹ Magistrates had to be alert to the constant problems between townsfolk and the strangers in their midst. Short-term difficulties might be met by keeping townsmen and soldiers apart, charging the nightwatchmen to protect the citizens, or even using curfews and all-night torchlit watches.³⁰ In 1553–4 Valenciennes offered compensation to gentlemen soldiers plundered by townsfolk, as Douai did to townsfolk mistreated by soldiers.³¹ More permanent garrisons demanded tactful negotiation over two issues in particular. The arrest of soldiers by town officers and, more rarely, of townsfolk by captains brought up thorny questions of jurisdiction which were best met with elaborate courtesy on both sides.³² Soldiers’ claims to exemption from tolls and taxes, especially drink excises, were a more constant irritation. Disputes at Kortrijk in 1478, Ghent in the 1540s, and Valenciennes in the 1550s brought intervention from princes and provincial governors.³³ Cambrai was regularly troubled over the issue and Saint-Omer blamed its financial crisis in the 1550s on the refusal of its German and Spanish garrisons to pay the excises on beer and wine which were the mainstay of its income.³⁴ England had fewer garrison towns and smaller armies in need of billets on home soil, but where troops were present they caused similar problems for town authorities. Carlisle and Berwick saw recurrent, if minor, conflicts between garrison captains and townsfolk and the installation of a garrison at Portsmouth in 1559 began a protracted jurisdictional dispute in which the governor’s soldiers allegedly enforced his orders in the High Street in armed bands forty strong.³⁵ Change was most dramatic at Hull. Henry VIII assured the mayor and inhabitants that the appointment of a captain for his new fortress with power to muster the townsfolk for military service was not intended to ‘abridge you of any liberties custom or usage . . . but rather to devise how to do ²⁶ CLGS iv. 350; Inventaris ’s-Hertogenbosch, 707; Thieulaine, ‘Extraits’, 148. ²⁷ Derville, ‘Pots-de-vin’, 456–9; Ward, ‘Cities and States’, 236–8. ²⁸ ‘Stadsrekeningen Middelburg iii’, 273. ²⁹ AMV, CC751, fo. 282r – v ; AMD, CC271, fos. 110r , 208, CC273, fo. 108, CC274, fo. 120; Kuijer, ’s-Hertogenbosch, 317; Ville de Cambrai, 140, 142–5, 148. ³⁰ AMD, CC263, fo. 125; Inventaris ’s-Hertogenbosch, 706. ³¹ AMV, CC751, fo. 280v ; AMD, CC272, fo. 128. ³² Ville de Cambrai, 46–7; ROPB v. 392–3, 575. ³³ Inventaire Courtrai, i. 242; Maddens, Beden, 256–7; AMV, CC751, fo. 291v . ³⁴ Ville de Cambrai, 46–8; Brulez, ‘Difficult´es financi`eres’, 219–20. ³⁵ Summerson, Medieval Carlisle, ii. 480, 526–7; BTRO, GM(D)1, fos. 2v , 6r ; LP. I, ii. 2740; Records Portsmouth, 422–34.

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that thing that may be more to your advancement and commodity’.³⁶ That was not how it looked as Sir Michael Stanhope established himself as governor, overseeing tax assessment in the town as well as the building of the fortifications and tightening his military control in Hull’s hinterland with the grant of various estate stewardships.³⁷ Stanhope’s supremacy humiliated the town council, who had to hand him the keys of the town gates every evening and found themselves summoned to London in 1546 to answer for their ‘lewd behaviour’ towards him.³⁸ Only the fall of his brother-inlaw, Protector Somerset, in 1549 brought any relief. In 1550–1 the Privy Council reined him in and ordered that the townsmen should ‘enjoy their privileges as largely as they did before’, in matters both ceremonial and jurisdictional, though with a month’s grace for the governor to remedy complaints against soldiers before they were pursued in the town’s court.³⁹ Stanhope’s own execution in February 1552 allowed a further reassertion of Hull’s liberties in a charter granting the mayor and burgesses custody of the new castle and blockhouses.⁴⁰ This outcome was desperately financially burdensome for the corporation, but politically sound: in the 1569 rebellion the town, so equivocal during the Pilgrimage of Grace, remained firmly loyal to the crown.⁴¹ In England and the Netherlands alike, then, the presence of garrisons repeatedly challenged magistrates’ control over their towns and yet encouraged them to exercise their powers over the townsfolk to organize urban society’s response to the challenge. With patience, political skill, and good fortune they could even exploit princes’ and generals’ need for their cooperation to consolidate their relationship with those in power, as Mechelen did with a new grant of privileges from Maximilian in October 1489. He was generally grateful for their support in the recent civil war, but he was especially grateful because at all times, without refusal or difficulty, they have opened and daily do open the gates of our said town to all men of war, who, both from the lands of Germany and from other lands and countries, have come . . . to serve and succour us against our said rebels and disobedient subjects of Ghent and Bruges and their said adherents.⁴²

Garrisons could have uses to the towns they occupied beyond the merely defensive.

P R I S O N E R S O F WA R Prisoners came into town custody by two different routes. Those captured by townsmen themselves were usually a source of profit both to the town and the individual captor. Those lodged in towns by princely governments more often proved a burden. English town contingents serving on land seem rarely to have taken prisoners, though ³⁶ HCA, BR(L.15); LP XVII. 130. ³⁷ Bindoff, Commons, iii. 368–9; PRO, E179/203/216, 226; LP XVII. 140, 358(3), 800, XIX. i. 643, 80(47, 67–8), XX. i. 189, 243, 306, 338. ³⁸ LP XVII. 358; APC i. 553–4. ³⁹ Bindoff, Commons, iii. 369; APC ii. 393, iii. 102, 121–2, 196, 202; HCA, BR(L.16). ⁴⁰ CPR 1550–3, 334; PRO, C66/847, mm. 1–2. ⁴¹ HCA, BRF3/76(M.22). ⁴² ROPB i. 551.

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ransoms may have featured among the ‘spoils of war and other booty’ that John Egglesfeld, captain of York’s contingent in Scotland, was ordered to hand over to the city chamber in August 1480.⁴³ War at sea, in which town authorities took some responsibility for negotiations with foreigners about ships and men captured by their townsfolk, was more profitable.⁴⁴ The Devon privateer John Furseman took at least eighteen Frenchmen and others in 1544–5, their ransoms totalling more than £100.⁴⁵ From the 1480s Rye drew systematic profit from the prisoners captured by its ships through a tax called ‘head money’, fixed at a rate of one French crown per prisoner. Takings peaked at 465 prisoners worth £ 145 14s 4d in 1557–8, over half the town’s total income.⁴⁶ Rye also made use of French prisoners as labourers in its fortification projects in 1545.⁴⁷ Canterbury in the 1540s, conversely, found prisoners of war a burden. Sixty French prisoners were committed to the town in 1546 by William Paulet, Lord St John, for imprisonment in the West Gate. Despite Privy Council orders to disperse them amongst the Kent gentry or to ransom all but ‘iiij or vj of the best’ for 20s each, some remained for up to five years, fed at the city’s expense, though at least earning some of their keep by working on the city walls.⁴⁸ While prisoners of war could be a great source of profit to individuals and to privateering ports, then, urban communities charged with prisoners by the king found them to be unwelcome guests. Though prisoners were commoner in the Netherlands, the balance of advantage was similar. Between profitable townsmen’s prisoners and burdensome princely prisoners came prisoners captured for their own benefit by troops in the prince’s employ. Like captured goods, they could generate a lively market in towns whose normal economic activities were curtailed by war. Though prisoners and booty sometimes flooded into the towns of Hainaut from large raids by their garrisons, the best evidence comes not from a Habsburg town but from a predator upon Habsburg towns, Tournai, whose market place throve on the sales of captives and loot taken by its French garrisons, more than 3,000 prisoners in 1477–8 alone.⁴⁹ Yet such prisoners could cause disputes between townsmen and soldiers if they escaped and for this reason, or for the security risk posed by prisoners and their servants, some towns were reluctant to accommodate prisoners even at the cost of their captors.⁵⁰ Towns’ own prisoners also needed looking after, but they were valuable for sale or exchange. Middelburg took prisoners at sea in 1477–8, keeping them in the town castle, and selling some to a Sluis man who wanted to exchange them for his brother in French captivity.⁵¹ In autumn 1487, the inhabitants of Douai took a French captain, whom the French were prepared to exchange for several captured members of the Douai militia.⁵² On the other hand, a border town like ’s-Hertogenbosch had to be careful that its subjects did not capture the inhabitants of Guelders at moments that might invite reprisals.⁵³ ⁴³ ⁴⁶ ⁴⁸ ⁴⁹ ⁵⁰ ⁵¹ ⁵³

YHB i. 221. ⁴⁴ HMC Ninth Report, appendix, 311. ⁴⁵ PRO, HCA24/15/89. ESRO, RYE60/3, fo. 39; Mayhew, ‘Defence’, 121–2. ⁴⁷ Mayhew, ‘Defence’, 113. v CCA, FA13, fo. 187, FA14, fos. 68, 111, 114, 151 ; APC i. 406, 443. Macqu´ereau, Chronicque, 155; Nicolay, ‘Kalendrier’, 59, 267–8; Barre, Journal, 107. Lusy, Journal, 222; CLGS v. 292; Stein, ‘Saint-Quentin’, 17–18; Thieulaine, ‘Extraits’, 189. ‘Stadsrekeningen Middelburg ii’, 142–4. ⁵² AMD, EE56bis. Inventaris ’s-Hertogenbosch, 59, 73.

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Princely prisoners were an unwelcome burden for towns in the Netherlands as in England. After Saint-Quentin in 1557, 975 prisoners were divided into contingents of between ten and forty to be housed in forty-one towns spread over eight provinces. Towns accommodated them in various ways—in the bishop’s palace at Cambrai, in a specially strengthened cellar under the town hall at ’s-Hertogenbosch—and had to feed them, only to see a number die and a number escape and then be told in April 1559 that mere infantrymen should be let go without even paying for their keep.⁵⁴ Mechelen collected enough in ransoms and lodging charges that it may have made a good profit, while other towns at least tried to recoup their losses from those whose negligence made escapes possible. But ’s-Hertogenbosch’s experience was probably most characteristic, spending on food for the living and burials for the dead without any apparent recompense and finding it impossible to rent out its cellars after the prisoners left them tainted with plague.⁵⁵ It matched Middelburg’s troubles in winter 1557–8 with its party of prisoners from Le Chˆatelet: twenty-six died and the town constable had to be paid extra for keeping them ‘since’, being infected with gangrene, ‘they produced great stench and filth’.⁵⁶ No wonder tax allowances had to be granted in 1558 to communities that had borne higher charges than in previous wars for the maintenance of captured Frenchmen.⁵⁷

F O O D A N D T R A N S P O RT Like privateering, the supply of food and transport to armies offered opportunities to some townsfolk, though it placed burdens upon others. The supply and victualling of English armies was a mixture of government and private endeavour. The crown purchased some supplies from English and foreign merchants, especially for the navy, while individuals were encouraged to trade with the armies in the field, receiving legal protections as victuallers in the retinues of noble commanders.⁵⁸ During wars with France, merchants from the Low Countries were encouraged to sell to English armies, while Hull and Newcastle merchants supplied northern armies under royal licence.⁵⁹ In 1513, for example, Hull merchants supplied fish and wheat for the earl of Surrey’s army and in 1522–3 they were supposed to be keeping the army on the borders in beer, though the troops became restive when they failed to do so.⁶⁰ Even in the large campaigns of 1546–9 provisions from Hull, supervised by the town’s governor, Sir Michael Stanhope, were outnumbered only by those from London and the grain-producing areas of East Anglia.⁶¹ ⁵⁴ Stein, ‘Saint-Quentin’, 8–25; Ville de Cambrai, 147; Inventaris ’s-Hertogenbosch, 705; Barre, Journal, 397–8. ⁵⁵ Inventaris ’s-Hertogenbosch, 707, 712–13. ⁵⁶ ‘Stadsrekeningen Middelburg iv’, 130–1. ⁵⁷ ROPB vii. 357. ⁵⁸ Cruickshank, Army Royal, 54–67; Loades, Tudor Navy, 84–6; Critchley, ‘Writ of Judicial Protection’. ⁵⁹ Davies, ‘Supply Services’, ch. 5. ⁶⁰ PRO, E315/4, fos. 1–16; Bindoff, Commons, ii. 559. ⁶¹ PRO, E351/327; Hamilton Papers, ii. 403, 527.

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Hull’s role may well have provided a boost to the town’s troubled economy, but little if any victualling seems to have been carried out by towns acting corporately. The exception may have been Newcastle, where the mayor was reimbursed in 1513 for food ‘spoiled stolen and destroyed’.⁶² Some degree of coordination might also be required. In 1512–13 Southampton had to send out messengers to surrounding towns ‘in a wet night in the war time for bread for the army’ and it did something similar in 1522.⁶³ In 1542 the authorities of Hull and York were required by the duke of Norfolk, perhaps remembering his experiences in 1522–3, to supervise the brewing of the army’s beer.⁶⁴ A more important and onerous corporate requirement in the North was the provision of carts with which to supply the army in the field. From the 1520s to the 1540s the shortage of transport had hampered one border campaign after another and in 1549 it was resolved to demand carts and carters systematically from northern towns.⁶⁵ In May 1549 York and the Ainsty were charged to find six carts between them, paid for by a levy on the city’s parishes, and in September 1557 the city was asked to provide seven carts, each with at least six horses and two armed men, a request the city claimed was unprecedented.⁶⁶ Southern towns were usually spared such burdens, as carts for campaigns in France were hired by English commissioners in the Netherlands.⁶⁷When carts and oxen were levied on southern England, as in 1545 for Boulogne, it was done through county purveyance commissioners rather than borough authorities.⁶⁸ The normal pattern of supply in the Netherlands too was for individual merchants, innkeepers, and others to bring food to the army for sale, encouraged by exemption from tolls and protection against arrest.⁶⁹ This was a precarious business, as victuallers found when armies moved away without warning or unpaid soldiers plundered their wares.⁷⁰ But there were opportunities for profit, as an Antwerp company set up in 1556 by associates of the metropolis’s greatest entrepreneur Gilbert van Schoonbeke showed. Their exclusive contract to supply thirteen large garrisons along the border with France needed huge capital but realized nearly 60 per cent profit on one deal in 1557. Some benefit even trickled down to smaller merchants in smaller towns, like the company’s oxen supplier Gommaer Puttaert of Lier.⁷¹ Various circumstances drew urban authorities into the business of supply. Middelburg showed its loyalty by sending food to Habsburg camps and garrisons in 1488–90 and the guilds of ’s-Hertogenbosch sent food out with their militia contingents.⁷² Causes close to towns’ hearts brought efforts to direct food from their rural hinterlands to keep the armies going.⁷³ As field armies grew larger from the 1530s, so inland towns ⁶² PRO, E101/56/27. ⁶³ SAO, SC5/3/1, fo. 38r – v , SC5/1/32, fo. 30r . ⁶⁴ LP XVII. 771. ⁶⁵ Phillips, Anglo-Scots Wars, 141–5, 159; LP XVII. 771, 820, 969. ⁶⁶ YCR v. 17, 20, 163. ⁶⁷ Davies, ‘Supply Services’, 168, 223. ⁶⁸ HMC Seventh Report, 603. ⁶⁹ ROPB ii. 89–90, 110–11, 230–1, vi. 308–9, 362, 456–7, vii. 190–2. ⁷⁰ Thieulaine, ‘Extraits’, 156; ROPB vi. 474, vii. 173, 348. ⁷¹ Soly, ‘Antwerpse compagnie’, 350–62. ⁷² Inventaris ’s-Hertogenbosch, 37; ‘Stadsrekeningen Middelburg ii’, 149–50. ⁷³ ‘Stadsrekeningen Middelburg iii’, 272; Inventaris ’s-Hertogenbosch, 447; Ville de Cambrai, 144, 147.

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were called to gather supplies and send them to the camps in the borders, setting reasonable prices for victuals and carts to prevent profiteering.⁷⁴ More deeply engaged still were the towns nominated as staples for the concentration of food supplies: Douai and Valenciennes in 1537, Valenciennes again in 1543, and so on.⁷⁵ At these towns the emperor’s commissaries would receive food for the army, pay reasonable prices for it, and arrange its onward transport. The influx of business and food from the surrounding countryside may have been welcome, but in other respects a town lost control of its own affairs when a centre of consumption and political power much larger than itself became parasitic upon it. In 1557, for example, the lieutenant of the superintendent of victuals, equipped with six halberdiers to enforce his will, was given power to override the magistrates of the staple town in matters of food supply.⁷⁶ The challenge to urban autonomy, foreshadowed in earlier troubles over tax exemptions for those selling food and drink to nearby encampments, was very evident.⁷⁷ Towns had to use what administrative means they could command to manœuvre their way through the difficulties, Valenciennes rewarding its sergeants of the peace for the ‘great hardship and care’ they endured in escorting captains and victualling officials to and from the town.⁷⁸ By the 1550s, as in northern England but on a far larger scale, towns were also under pressure to supply horses and wagons. Their responses varied, approximately depending on their proximity to the French border. Douai and Ghent complied and Mons reckoned it had spent 34,117£ 7s 8d doing so in 1557 alone.⁷⁹ Breda got its lord, William of Orange, to plead its special status, while ’s-Hertogenbosch haggled interminably and sent one wagon in 1557 and none in 1558. The towns of Holland, Zeeland, and Utrecht denied any obligation to contribute.⁸⁰ In addition to the sheer cost of such demands came the submission to central authorities involved in their implementation, as towns fought out disputes with their rural neighbours over the division of responsibility for providing carts through central lawcourts and arbitration by officials.⁸¹ In such matters, whatever the profits available to individual merchants, the years of war brought for towns an increasing subjection to the will of their prince and the authority of his servants. THE ARMS TRADE The manufacture and supply of armaments potentially offered opportunities to towns, but the English arms trade was woefully inadequate in meeting demand. Even securing longbow staves in sufficient numbers required statutes compelling Italian merchants to bring in yew staves with their Mediterranean wines.⁸² Armourers and other military craftsmen certainly worked in English towns, and their proportions apparently reflected the varying degrees of militarization we have noted. ⁷⁴ ⁷⁷ ⁷⁹ ⁸⁰ ⁸²

ROPB iv. 25–6. ⁷⁵ Ibid. 25–6, 398–9, 473–4, vi. 232–3. ⁷⁶ Ibid. vii. 174. Inventaire Courtrai, i. 244; ROPB ii. 115–16, iv. 478–9. ⁷⁸ AMV, CC750, fo. 235r . AMD, EE99; Inventaire Gand, 79; D´enombrements Hainaut, 618. Verhofstad, Regering, 126–7. ⁸¹ Inventaire Courtrai, ii. 101; CLGS iv. 209, 265. 1 Richard III c. 11, 6 Henry VIII c. 11.

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Thus thirty-four armourers, twenty-five bowyers, and twenty fletchers were admitted as freemen of York between 1477 and 1558, but at Bristol the one armourer apprenticed between 1532 and 1552 was outnumbered by twenty bowyers and twenty fletchers.⁸³ Much of these armourers’ work probably consisted in repairing old armour and weapons or making cheap items. Few English merchants traded in arms and armour in any quantity: Thomas Grafton, who sold gunpowder to the Calais garrison in the 1480s, seems to have been exceptional and Gregory Isham, whose warehouse stock in 1558 included armour and weapons to the value of 14s 4d among goods worth £ 1,237 10s 4d, more typical.⁸⁴ Corporate dealing, like the sale of bows and arrows to soldiers going north in the 1540s by the mayor of Newcastle, was also highly unusual.⁸⁵ Antwerp was the place where Englishmen bought armour of ‘the most best fashion’, as one discerning customer noted in 1551, and London, as Antwerp’s English trading partner, was where various English towns and religious houses sent for military supplies.⁸⁶ Rye purchased guns from English merchants in the town in the 1490s, but these were almost certainly imported rather than locally made, just as Plymouth bought guns from Spain and Flanders.⁸⁷ As early as 1513 the crown had recognized the need to arm many of the men it recruited from its own stores and by the 1540s royal agents were stocking these with huge purchases in the Netherlands, so some of the imported arms and armour bought by towns to equip their men may well have been sold on by royal agents.⁸⁸ The one need English townsmen were well able to meet was that for soldiers’ clothing. At Exeter in 1513–14 one William Peryham supplied the cloth for uniforms for the town contingent and John Hatmaker eighteen hats for 10s, but again London played an important role: in 1544 the duke of Norfolk told all his troops, even those from Norwich, to buy their caps from a London capper.⁸⁹ Whether such business compensated those who dealt in cloth for wartime interruptions to exports is much harder to say. The only towns likely to have benefited unequivocally from military expenditure were those ports where the expanding naval budget was spent; the shipwrights, carpenters, brewers, and sailmakers of Portsmouth and Deptford in particular seem to have been assured of steady business.⁹⁰ The Netherlands had a much better established arms industry, though even it imported a good deal of weaponry from Germany and Italy. While Antwerp became a major centre of international arms dealing, a number of towns developed as centres of production. For places like Antwerp, Amsterdam, and Brussels, and even for centres in the south-eastern iron-founding region like Maastricht and Namur, it was one trade amongst many, but for Mechelen it became a central ⁸³ Register of Freemen, 199–279; Calendar Apprentice Book, i. 199, ii. 153. ⁸⁴ PRO, E101/198/13, fo. 20; John Isham, 159. ⁸⁵ Hamilton Papers, ii. 314. ⁸⁶ HMC Sackville, i. 2; Register of Thetford Priory, ii. 425, 430; Smith, Poole, ii. 36; Calendar v Plymouth, 113; ESRO, RYE60/3, fo. 82 . ⁸⁷ ESRO, RYE60/3, fo. 113r ; Calendar Plymouth, 97, 99, 109. ⁸⁸ Davies, ‘Supply Services’, 51–2, 59; NRO, NCAI, fos. 93, 161. ⁸⁹ DRO, EABI, fos. 81, 155; NRO, MCB 1540–9, 205. ⁹⁰ Loades, Tudor Navy, 41–2, 52, 54, 80, 85–9, 106, 149–51, 153–5, 160.

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feature of the town’s economy.⁹¹ When other towns bought cannon, small firearms, or gunpowder they most often looked to Mechelen, which also became the site for the emperor’s central arsenal.⁹² Mechelen’s success, however, had a large price. On 7 August 1546 the Zandpoort, packed with gunpowder, exploded, killing perhaps 170 townsfolk and devastating the surrounding streets in an accident so terrible that the German Protestants with whom Charles V was at war took it as a providential punishment on his subjects.⁹³ Mechelen excepted, few towns seem to have made major corporate gains from arms manufacturing in this period.

P O O R R E L I E F, R E F U G E E S , A N D D E M O B I L I Z AT I O N War threatened towns’ regulation of their internal affairs indirectly but powerfully through its effects on the rural population and the discharged soldiery. From the fifteenth century and particularly between 1525 and 1545, at a period of population growth and economic change, a number of towns in the Netherlands were taking closer control of existing charitable institutions and establishing more integrated poor relief systems. In most towns where long-term developments have been analysed, it seems that the direct effects of war were less important in stimulating change than wider economic developments, though war in turn played a role amongst these through its recurrent disruption of trade and agricultural production.⁹⁴ Near the front line against France, however, Lille’s poor relief measures made recurrent reference to the effects of war, from the orphanage foundations of 1477 through the provision for the honest poor driven out of Artois in 1527 and 1537 to the attempt to distinguish in 1557 between vagabonds fit for expulsion and genuine refugees from the ravaged countryside.⁹⁵ In many other towns war brought short-term crises as refugees flooded in, at Arras in 1477 bringing so many dogs that a dog-catcher was specially called in from Douai to kill 653 of them.⁹⁶ At Valenciennes the magistrates had to allocate extra funding to the poor relief system in April 1554 to cope with the wartime burden.⁹⁷ Even at ’s-Hertogenbosch, where the old parish-based Table of the Holy Ghost worked so well that no grand reform was needed, the amount of food distributed to each pauper declined steadily as the wars with Guelders dragged on between ⁹¹ Gaier, Industrie des armes; Roosens, ‘Arsenaal’, 175–247. ⁹² AMD, CC233, CC243, fo. 59r , CC264, fo. 240, CC272, fo. 193; NHA, SAHI/394, fo. 60r – v ; ‘Stadsrekeningen Middelburg iii’, 270–2; ‘Stadsrekeningen Middelburg iv’, 15; SSH, OA3800; Kuijer, ’s-Hertogenbosch, 314. ⁹³ Install´e, ‘Verwoesting’, 157–65; Catalogus pamfletten-verzameling, viii, no. 99d. ⁹⁴ Blockmans and Prevenier, ‘Armoede’, 501–38; Tits-Dieuaide, ‘Tables des pauvres’, 562–83; Soly, ‘Economische ontwikkeling’, 584–97; Blockmans and Prevenier, ‘Openbare armenzorg’, 21–78; Platelle (ed.), Valenciennes, 97–9; Ligtenberg, Armezorg, 13–14, 289–98. ⁹⁵ Trenard (ed.), Lille, i. 385–6, ii. 21, 60–5, 99. ⁹⁶ Inventaire Ypres, v. 242–3, 307; Muchembled, Violence, 160; Thieulaine, ‘Extraits’, 158. ⁹⁷ AMV, CC751, fo. 281v .

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1481 and 1498.⁹⁸ War produced individual tragedies that gave magistrates the chance to exercise mercy: at Valenciennes the impoverished widow of a municipal tenant killed at the siege of P´eronne was pardoned his rent arrears.⁹⁹ It also generated large-scale population movements that tested urban adaptability. Chroniclers’ reports of French beggars crossing the borders in hordes might seem implausible until we realize that in the first half of the sixteenth century the French made up 9.3 per cent of those punished for begging and vagrancy at Brussels and 3 per cent even at Amsterdam.¹⁰⁰ Yet sometimes war offered solutions as well as problems: Douai sent ten incorrigible vagabonds to serve in the emperor’s galleys in 1536–7.¹⁰¹ War threatened to bring not just poverty but famine, as enemy troops destroyed standing crops, supposedly friendly troops ate up what was stored in the countryside, and government pressure channelled imported grain into the hands of the large merchants supplying the army and forced stocks of food out of towns towards camps and border strongholds.¹⁰² From the 1520s, towns took ever closer control of the grain trade in and around their walls and bought up municipal stocks of grain to fend off starvation in crises.¹⁰³ In the 1550s, some had to beg for licences to evade the ban on the re-export of Baltic grain from Holland in order to keep their populations fed.¹⁰⁴ From May to July 1557 ’s-Hertogenbosch even mounted a special watch on the town gates to prevent any bread from leaving the town.¹⁰⁵ In such circumstances the celebration of peace treaties by distributing bread to the poor, as at Middelburg in 1559, was a matter of dire practicality as well as symbolic joy.¹⁰⁶ Wartime injuries and illnesses, even accidents on fortification building sites, further increased the burden on charitable institutions, just at a time when their rental income and buildings were suffering damage.¹⁰⁷ Meanwhile war inhibited the usual urban response to epidemics for those who could afford it, flight into the countryside.¹⁰⁸ Troops spread disease: death rates rose in Arras in December 1552 when soldiers from the dissolved imperial camp moved into its suburbs.¹⁰⁹ Camps near towns sent in a steady stream of sick and wounded, sometimes at princely command, filling up the hospitals of ’s-Hertogenbosch in 1528 and overwhelming the Hˆotel-Dieu at Valenciennes in 1543 and 1554.¹¹⁰ In provision for the sick, the hungry, and the displaced poor, war tested the charitable capacities of towns to the limit, but thereby encouraged the assumption of greater powers and the elaboration of administrative systems by town governments. ⁹⁸ ⁹⁹ ¹⁰⁰ 120. ¹⁰¹ ¹⁰³ ¹⁰⁴ ¹⁰⁵ ¹⁰⁷ 326. ¹⁰⁸ ¹¹⁰

Blockmans, Prevenier, ‘Openbare armenzorg’, 45. AMV, CC750, fos. 234v –235r . Macqu´ereau, Histoire, 169, 176; Vanhemelryck, Criminaliteit, 334; Boomgaard, Misdaad, AMD, CC256, fo. 229. ¹⁰² Thieulaine, ‘Extraits’, 156; Cools, ‘Impact’, 318. Kuijer, ’s-Hertogenbosch, 327, 332–3; Ligtenberg, Armezorg, 294–8. Inventaris ’s-Hertogenbosch, 702; Ville de Cambrai, 509. Inventaris ’s-Hertogenbosch, 706. ¹⁰⁶ ‘Stadsrekeningen Middelburg iv’, 131–2. Blockmans and Prevenier, ‘Openbare armenzorg’, 51–2; ROPB vi. 485–6; Ville de Cambrai, Derville (ed.), Saint-Omer, 101. ¹⁰⁹ Thieulaine, ‘Extraits’, 147. Kuijer, ’s-Hertogenbosch, 289; AMV, CC751, fo. 288r ; ROPB vii. 279.

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Refugees were not a problem in England, but war did have other effects. Town authorities might be ordered to arrest soldiers leaving their units without permission, as at Rye in 1481 and 1489.¹¹¹ Large bodies of discharged troops, like those in London after the surrender of Boulogne in 1550, constituted a real threat to order if they could not be dispersed or found work.¹¹² Those returning from plague-stricken garrisons might bring devastating disease, while those sent off to war might leave behind families in need of poor relief.¹¹³ On the other hand fortifications might be used to set the poor to work, as Rye and Plymouth paid beggars to work on the town walls and clean the castle in 1491 and 1508–9.¹¹⁴ The expansion of schemes for poor relief and control of the grain trade in the 1540s and 1550s in towns such as Exeter, Norwich, and York was a response to high food prices and economic disruption, but the link between these problems and war was less clear in England than in the Netherlands.¹¹⁵ One contemporary argued in the 1520s that ‘Dearth . . . was never seen but in time of outward war’ and the activities of royal purveyors, buying up grain for the army and the fleet at artificially low prices, may well have drawn supplies out of the market and forced up the price of what remained.¹¹⁶ In most war years the price of wheat was indeed higher than the decennial average, though 1522–3 and 1546–7 bucked the trend. Yet the overriding factors here were the quality of the harvest and the state of the coinage, and while the second was related indirectly to war through the mid-Tudor debasement, the first was not, for the English countryside was never ravaged like the Netherlands.¹¹⁷ War’s direct economic impact in England was a weak shadow of that in the Netherlands. But like the need to keep watch, to deal with soldiers and prisoners, to supply food and weapons, it nevertheless tested and stimulated urban systems of relief and control. ¹¹¹ ESRO, RYE60/3, fos. 16v , 76r . ¹¹² Hale, War and Society, 87–8. ¹¹³ Records Portsmouth, 609–17; Selections Abingdon, 124–5. r ¹¹⁴ ESRO, RYE60/3, fo. 91 ; Calendar Plymouth, 98. ¹¹⁵ Slack, Poverty and Policy, 123; MacCaffrey, Exeter, 85. ¹¹⁶ PRO, SP1/46, fos. 58–61 (LP, IV, ii. 376); Davies, ‘Supply Services’, 330. ¹¹⁷ Davies, ‘Supply Services’, 195–9, 326–8, 330; Brenner, ‘Prices and Wages’, 140–1; Wordie, ‘Deflationary Factors’, 33–70, esp. 56–7.

6 War and Urban Government War placed both the economic and the political structures of urban life under strain. Magistrates had to face new challenges in managing the urban economy and civic finances, where failure might lay them open to the imposition of tighter controls from above. Yet war could in turn license their assumption of greater powers over the urban population and over the inhabitants of the surrounding countryside, while in civic politics it could promote either pretensions to oligarchy or to popular control.

THE URBAN ECONOMY War cost towns money. It also disrupted trade and devastated rural hinterlands. Clearly it posed threats to the health of the urban economy. At worst it threatened capture and devastation or even permanent elimination, as visited upon Th´erouanne following its recapture from the French in 1553.¹ Yet quite how serious threats short of destruction were, in comparison with other difficulties towns faced, is hard to say. In England new or declining industries or changing internal and overseas trade routes seem to have done more to promote rising towns and trouble declining ones than did war. Industrial crisis, exacerbated by dearth and disease, could effect change with startling speed, as at Coventry and, while war did play a part in Coventry’s fate through the trade dislocation and heavy taxes of the 1520s, its malaise had deeper causes.² English towns were not shy of telling the king their problems and asking for help, but war played only a small part in their complaints and generally featured as the cause of excessive taxation or military expenditure rather than as a direct effect on the urban economy. In 1485 the citizens of York ‘humbly and piteously’ lamented to Henry VII the poverty due to the costs they had incurred during the Wars of the Roses; seventy years later the mayor was painting a sad picture of townsfolk selling their pots and pans to meet their tax demands, continuing ‘there is no man glad to inhabit within the precincts [of the town] . . . for that the payment of one year tax is double and treble more than their whole year rent’.³ Such pleading did secure York subsidy rebates in 1553, 1555, and 1558, but across the period as a whole ¹ Stabel, ‘Verwoestingen’, 111–13, 126; Delmaire, ‘Th´erouanne’, 131–6; Baes, ‘La guerre’, 188–96. ² Britnell, ‘Economy’, 315, 317, 328–9; Phythian-Adams, Desolation of a City, 33–67. ³ YHB i. 390–1; YCR v. 133.

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more of its complaints and more of its magistrates’ proposed remedies concentrated on the decay of its trade and its cloth industry than on war and taxation.⁴ At Norwich, similarly, it was the state of cloth manufacture that preoccupied the magistracy, at Exeter the city’s marketing and trading functions.⁵ Even when war did cause problems they were most often addressed at the individual rather than the corporate level: five northern merchants taken prisoner by the Scots in 1480 were licensed by Edward IV to trade in grain to Scotland in order to pay their ransoms and secure their release.⁶ For some English towns war was a boon, Rye doing well out of privateering and out of supplying food, firewood, and building timber to Calais and Boulogne.⁷ For others it was at least an opportunity to negotiate economic privileges in return for fulfilment of the crown’s demands. At Bristol in 1543 the town council secured the banning of the Candlemas Fair, held outside its control, as part of a wider negotiation of Bristol’s obligation to provide the king with ships, and seems even to have achieved tacit acceptance of the town elite’s engagement in contraband trade.⁸ Yet even in such exchanges war was not the predominant factor for most English towns. York gained more from the establishment of the Council in the North in the city than from its role as the base for a treasury and mint to supply the northern garrisons.⁹ Almost everywhere it was the Reformation and the concern to equip towns to weather economic and social disruption that drove changes to the powers of urban government.¹⁰ In the Netherlands war played a larger part in the economic fate of towns than in England, but again neither the most decisive role nor one wholly negative in its effects. Major centres of cloth manufacture faced challenges from rural competition, the increasing import of cheap English cloth and the decline of traditional markets in Germany as well as periodic disruptions to trade caused by war in the Baltic, the Channel, and the Low Countries. Of our towns Haarlem and ’s-Hertogenbosch seem to have responded most effectively, developing new textile specialities and diversifying into ship-building and leather and metal wares respectively. In both cases town councils took extensive powers to encourage such reorientation, as they did with less successful results at Douai.¹¹ In some respects war aided these efforts at industrial revival. The ravaging of the countryside on the borders with Guelders and France suppressed rural industrial competition, while the stream of refugees from the countryside kept up a labour force prepared to work for low wages, provided magistrates made it easy for them to settle in town.¹² Only when the proximity of war encouraged ⁴ Palliser, York, 53, 201–25. ⁵ McClendon, Quiet Reformation, 91–4; MacCaffrey, Exeter, 72–89. ⁶ PRO, C76/164, m. 11. ⁷ Mayhew, ‘Defence’, 121–4; id., Rye, 252–3. ⁸ Thomas, ‘Bristol Shipping Industry’, 121–3. ⁹ Palliser, York, 51–2, 220–3, 261–4. ¹⁰ Tittler, Reformation. ¹¹ Kuijer, ’s-Hertogenbosch, 294–5, 327–30; Kaptein, Hollandse textielnijverheid, 84–181, 200–34; Hoppenbrouwers, ‘Van waterland tot stedenland’, 143–5; Brand, ‘Crisis, beleid en differentiatie’, 53–65; id., ‘Medieval Industry’, 121–47; Rouche (ed.), Douai, 95–6; DuPlessis, Lille, 85–96. ¹² Tracy, Holland, 61–2; Derville (ed.), Saint-Omer, 102; Blockmans and Prevenier, ‘Openbare armenzorg’, 56–9; Tr´enard (ed.), Lille, i. 266–7, ii. 22, 54.

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entrepreneurs or other significant individuals to move away did urban authorities become concerned.¹³ Urban trade was more directly affected by war than was industry. Wars civil and external were a central ingredient in the deep general crisis of 1477–93, while the effects of war on Antwerp’s international trade were sufficient to slow down its rise as an entrepˆot and dent the prosperity of the entire urban network of the Netherlands in the 1520s and again in the 1550s.¹⁴ Frontier towns suffered most. Valenciennes’s grain trade declined after 1477.¹⁵ ’s-Hertogenbosch’s trade to Cologne and other German centres was repeatedly interrupted, but it responded both by reorientating itself towards Antwerp and by doing its best to maintain its contacts with Venlo even when central government disapproved.¹⁶ War was bad for business in general, but good for some trades, dockers handling war supplies or wine merchants profiteering from shortages.¹⁷ War closed down opportunities for investment in trade but opened up the chance to lend to governments desperate for cash or rural landowners keen to repair damage.¹⁸ And just as Antwerp built its success on the privileges it gained for loyalty to the Habsburgs in the 1480s and was still invoking its devotion in the search for ever more extensive advantages in the 1550s, so in 1540 ’s-Hertogenbosch’s cattle trade received a major boost from the emperor’s grant of market privileges in recognition of its faithful suffering in the Guelders wars.¹⁹ Many more towns across the Netherlands were granted fairs or tolls in recognition of their loyalty or their sufferings in war, sometimes narrated in harrowing detail or confirmed by princely officers.²⁰ War could also offer a comparative advantage to those towns less affected by it than their competitors. The towns of Brabant and Holland apparently took advantage of the greater sufferings of those in Flanders in 1477–92, Antwerp most deliberately so.²¹ Later Amsterdam profited from wartime interruptions in the trade in grain from France and the southern Netherlands to establish the dominance of its Baltic grain over much of the Netherlands market.²² Similarly the Holland ports outstripped those of Flanders and Zeeland in the herring fishery partly because the defeat of Guelders made the Zuider Zee safer for their boats than were the Channel coasts where French privateers still prowled.²³ Even ’s-Hertogenbosch found its cattle trade ¹³ Brulez, ‘Difficult´es financi`eres’, 221; Kuijer, ’s-Hertogenbosch, 269; Henne, Histoire, i. 165; ‘Stadsrekeningen Middelburg iv’, 51; CLGS i. 182; Brand, ‘Medieval Industry’, 136–7, 142. ¹⁴ Uytven, ‘Politiek en economie’; Wee, Antwerp Market, ii. 96–111, 144–61, 213–22; Harreld, High Germans, 179–80. ¹⁵ Platelle (ed.), Valenciennes, 77. ¹⁶ Kuijer, ’s-Hertogenbosch, 136–53, 282, 294; Thurlings, Maashandel, 99–103. ¹⁷ Wee, Antwerp Market, ii. 100–1 n.; Lusy, Journal, 290. ¹⁸ Wee, Antwerp Market, ii. 399; on credit at ’s-Hertogenbosch, we are grateful for access to the unpublished work of Jord Hanus. ¹⁹ Prims, Antwerpen, xx. 267; Kuijer, ’s-Hertogenbosch, 324. ²⁰ ISN iii. 34, 37; ROPB i. 69–71, 148, 298–9, 549–54, 560–4, 568–9, 572–4, 647, 660–1, ii. 111–13, 452–3, iii. 155–6, 194–5, 489–90, v. 424–5, vi. 467–8; Inventaire Ypres, iv. 243–4. ²¹ Wee, Antwerp Market, ii. 99–104. ²² Tielhof, Hollandse graanhandela, 11–33, 86–150. ²³ Sicking, Zeemacht, 104–5, 147–51.

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benefited from the interruption of that between towns further south and France.²⁴ Magistrates’ first priority in wartime was the survival of their town, its manufactures, and its commerce, but often enough they saw the opportunity to advance their interests in wartime circumstances. In so doing they exercised and consolidated their own powers over the urban economy and built their relationship with princely power. CIVIC FINANCES War both increased towns’ expenditure and, by damaging their economic life, cut their income. Potentially it posed a grave challenge to magistrates’ financial management. Yet the degree of that challenge and its effects on towns’ place in the polity varied widely. Unfortunately the state of English towns’ financial records makes it hard to investigate these variations in detail. For York, Salisbury, and Beverley the series of chamberlains’ accounts are very deficient; for Hull, Exeter, and Norwich surviving accounts mostly lack the detail necessary to distinguish the costs of war from other costs, while Canterbury kept separate accounts of military expenditure which rarely survive. Only in Rye do the chamberlains’ accounts appear to give a comprehensive statement of money raised during wartime and its expenditure. Nevertheless, it is possible to suggest from these records both the similarities and the differences in the experiences of English towns. At most towns, war visibly increased costs and challenged the magistrates to raise extra income. For Hull, which had never recovered from the expenses incurred during the Wars of the Roses and drew declining income from its property rents as its trade decayed, the wars of the 1540s increased the chamberlains’ accumulated debt from £93 in 1537–8 to £291 in 1547–8.²⁵ At York in 1542–3, £36 4s 11 1/2d was spent by the chamberlains on the town’s contingent serving against the Scots; additional costs may have been met by individual parishes, as they were in 1559–60.²⁶ This represented some 14.5 per cent of total civic expenditure that year, a proportion regularly matched or exceeded in the 1540s and 1550s by Norwich, which hit 24 per cent in 1544–5. These were no mean figures—the city-state of Geneva, with modern fortifications and permanent troops, spent only 8 per cent of its budget on defence in 1544—but they were put in the shade by the sums raised from within English towns by the mechanisms of national taxation, beyond the control of the civic budget.²⁷ At Norwich these exceeded the city’s total expenditure on its own account most years between 1541 and 1549 and again in 1556–8 (Figure 6.1), and the same must have been true at York, as it was at London.²⁸ As we saw in examining troop levies, towns helped to meet wartime costs by levying extraordinary local taxation, shifting the burden onto the rich as it increased in ²⁴ Blond´e, Sociale structuren, 96–9. ²⁵ HCA, BRF/2/427–34; Rentals and Accounts, 17. ²⁶ YCA, CC4, fos. 98–101v , 113–117v , CC5, fos. 74–74a. ²⁷ NRO, NCAI-III; Naphy, ‘Price of Liberty’, 390. ²⁸ PRO, E359/42, rots. 2, 22, 45d, 53, E359/44, rots. 30d, 57d, E359/45, rots. 11d, 53d, E359/47, rots. 3, 20, 34d, E179/151/372, E179/151/375, E370/2/23; Palliser, York, 135; Archer, ‘Burden of Taxation’, 603–8.

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1600 1400 1200 1000 800 600 400 200

–7 1547 –8 1548 –9 1549 –50 1550 –1 1551 –2 1552 –3 1553 –4 1554 –5 1555 –6 1556 –7 1557 –8 1558 –9 1559 –60

1546

1537 –8 1538 –9 1539 –40 1540 –1 1541 –2 1542 –3 1543 –4 1544 –5 1545 –6

0

Non-military expediture

Military expenditure

National taxation

Figure 6.1. Military and non-military expenditure at Norwich, 1537–60 (pounds sterling) Source: NRO, NCAI-III; PRO, E359/42, rots. 2, 22, 45d, 53, E359/44, rots. 30d, 57d, E359/45, rots. 11d, 53d, E359/47, rots. 3, 20, 34d, E179/151/372, E179/151/375, E370/2/23.

the 1540s. By that means and by the deployment of new resources gained at the Reformation, most towns probably avoided the kind of crisis experienced by Hull. Norwich’s receipts exceeded its expenses in fifteen years out of the twenty-one for which records survive between 1537 and 1560, and while four of the years of deficit fell in wartime, the shortfall was never more than £20.²⁹ No wonder royal grants to towns impoverished by war were rarer than in the Netherlands, though they did occur. Newcastle, for example, was granted £20 a year out of customs revenues towards repairs to its bridge and walls in recognition of its role in the Flodden campaign.³⁰ The more alarming prospect was that civic taxation of the wealthy would accentuate the paralysing economic effects of a system of national taxation skewed against mercantile wealth; hence York’s requests in the 1550s for rebates on its citizens’ subsidy payments, a remedy for a shortage of capital evident in the urban elite’s failure to invest in land to the same extent between 1510 and 1549 as they did before or after.³¹ Rye presents a contrast in some respects (Figure 6.2). As one of the Cinque Ports it was exempt from national parliamentary taxation, yet it was in the front line of war against France even more than was York against the Scots. Its expenditure showed much more dramatic increases in wartime than those of inland towns and the proportions devoted to military matters were much higher, reaching 79 per cent in 1543–4 and 56 per cent in 1557–8, yet its income from the ‘head money’ tax on prisoners and the sale of captured goods sufficed to cover these costs.³² For all these differences, the similarities with other English towns are also striking. Rye levied extraordinary direct taxes on its citizens whenever necessary to meet the demands of war. Its civic ²⁹ Tittler, Reformation, 103–36. ³⁰ LP II. ii. 4602. ³¹ Hoyle, ‘Taxation’, 649–75; Alexander, ‘Rural Landholding’. ³² Mayhew, ‘Defence’, 110, 121–2.

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700 600 500 400 300 200 100

1485 – 1487 6 – 1489 8 –9 1491 0 – 1493 2 – 1495 4 – 1497 6 –8 1499 –150 1501 0 – 1503 2 – 1505 4 – 1507 6 – 1509 8 –1 1511 0 –1 1513 2 –1 1515 4 –16 1517 –1 1519 8 –2 1521 0 – 1523 2 – 1525 4 – 1527 6 – 1529 8 –3 1531 0 – 1533 2 – 1535 4 – 1537 6 – 1539 8 –4 1541 0 – 1543 2 – 1545 4 – 1547 6 – 1549 8 –5 1551 0 – 1554 2 – 1557 5 –8

0

Non-military expenditure

Military expenditure

Total only

Figure 6.2. Military and non-military expenditure at Rye, 1485–1559 (pounds sterling) Source: Mayhew, ‘Defence’, table 2; id., Rye, appendix 2.

budget, expanding steadily from the 1480s with the growth of its trade, was generally in surplus even in war years and its deficits, when they came, were manageable.³³ The years of heaviest demand were roughly identical at Norwich and Rye, as they were, so far as we can tell, at other English towns. Unsurprisingly they were the years of largest royal military effort and of the mid-sixteenth-century inflation in the costs of war. This was partly a product of the standardized national taxation system and partly of the fact that wars with Scotland and with France tended to coincide. For all that their strategic situations and civic budgets were very different, the per capita burden of war on the populations of different towns was also similar once national taxation was added in: Norwich’s population was more than twice Rye’s and so was its total expenditure on the king’s wars. In the Netherlands matters were very different, as a comparison of total expenditure figures from contrasting towns suggests. Douai’s pattern was most like that of the English towns, rising with each wave of dynastic war to peak in the 1540s and 1550s (Figure 6.3). ’s-Hertogenbosch’s expenditure also rose dramatically in wartime, but for different wars (Figure 6.4). The campaigns against Guelders in the 1520s matched and at times exceeded the emperor’s grander campaigns of the 1540s and 1550s, and all were outdone by the struggle to extinguish the threat from Charles of Egmond’s stronghold at Poederoijen in 1506–8. Leuven, more exposed in civil wars than in those against France or Guelders, spent more in the worst years between 1477 and 1493 than in any subsequent period, though the Guelders wars of the 1510s and 1520s again loomed large (Figure 6.5). Leiden was similar, though it spent freely in its last confrontation with Guelders in 1542–3 (Figure 6.6). Where princely taxation ³³ Mayhew, Rye, 24, 271–2.

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70000 60000 50000 40000 30000 `

20000 10000

1478 1480–9 1482–1 1484–3 1486–5 1488–7 1490–9 1492–1 1494–3 1496–5 1498–7 1500–9 1502–1 1504–3 –5 1506 1508–7 1510 –9 1512–11 1514–13 1516–15 1518–17 –1 1520 9 1522–1 1524–3 1526–5 1528–7 1530–9 1532–1 1534–3 1536–5 1538–7 1540–9 1542–1 1544–3 1546–5 1548–7 1550–9 1552–1 1554–3 1556–5 1558–7 –9

0

Figure 6.3. Total annual expenditure at Douai, 1478–1559 (pounds of 40 groats) Source: D´epartement du Nord. Ville de Douai. Inventaire analytique, CC232–78.

120000 100000 80000 60000 40000

`

20000

1500 –1 1502 –3 1504 –5 1506 –7 1508 –9 1510 –11 1512 –13 1514 –15 1516 –17 1518 –19 1520 –1 1522 –3 1524 –5 1526 –7 1528 –9 1530 –1 1532 –3 1534 –5 1536 –7 1538 –9 1540 –1 1542 –3 1544 –5 1546 –7 1548 –9 1550 –1 1552 –3 1554 –5 1556 –7 1558 –9

0

Figure 6.4. Total annual expenditure at ’s-Hertogenbosch, 1500–59 (pounds of 40 groats) Source: Inventaris ’s-Hertogenbosch, passim.

and military expenditure can be separated out, the results are also an instructive contrast with England. In peak years direct military expenditure could form a higher proportion of the total budget than at any English town except Rye: at Leiden 57 per cent in 1477, 28 per cent in 1526; at Leuven 29 per cent in 1479–80 and 1489–90. Yet the moneys paid in taxation to the prince rarely equalled the funds spent directly on all purposes and did not rise in parallel with the scale of princely campaigns. Military expenditure was much more clearly under the control of individual towns in the Netherlands than in England, but with such independence came dangerous liabilities. These patterns of expenditure help to explain both the contrasting overall health of different towns’ finances and the chronology of their attempts at financial reform.

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100000 90000 80000 70000 60000 50000 40000 30000 20000 10000 0

1476 1478–7 1480–9 1482–1 1484–3 1486–5 1488–7 1490–9 1492–1 1494–3 1496–5 1498–7 1500–9 1502–1 1504–3 1506–5 150 –7 15108–9 1512–11 1514–13 1516–15 1518–17 –19 1520 1522–1 1524–3 1526–5 1528–7 1530–9 1532–1 1534–3 1536–5 1538–7 1540–9 1542–1 1544–3 1546–5 1548–7 1550–9 1552–1 1554–3 1556–5 1558–7 –9

`

Non-military expenditure

Military expenditure

Princely tatxation

Figure 6.5. Military and non-military expenditure at Leuven, 1476–1560 (gulden of 54 plakken) Source: Uytven, Stadsfinancien, 257–8.

100000 90000 80000 70000 60000 50000 40000 30000 20000 10000 0

–5 1493 –4 1496 –7 1497 –8 1498 –9 1499 –150 0 1501 –2 1503 –4 1504 –5 1505 –6 1506 –7 1512 –13 1513 –14 1515 –16 1526 –7 1537 –8 1542 –3 1547 –8 1556 –7

1484

1477

–8

`

Renten

Other expenditure

Princely taxation

Total only

Military expenditure

Figure 6.6. Military and non-military expenditure at Leiden, 1477–1557 (pounds of 40 groats) Source: Blok, Hollandsche stad, 280–3; GAL, SAI/576–87, 591, 625.

Southern towns such as Saint-Omer and Lille, like Douai, were under increasing pressure by the 1550s, not only from the direct costs of their own defence but also from the larger sums in taxation agreed by the States of the provinces most threatened by France.³⁴ Inland towns such as Leuven and Leiden were driven into deficit ³⁴ Brulez, ‘Difficult´es financi`eres’, 219–25; DuPlessis, Lille, 41–5.

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by the heavy military costs and taxation of the civil war years and occasionally thereafter, but, aided by the firm line taken by the States of Brabant and Holland in tax negotiations, found the years from the 1530s to the 1550s more comfortable than those at the end of the previous century.³⁵ On the border with Guelders, ’s-Hertogenbosch apparently had the worst of both worlds, in financial crisis by the 1490s following the wars unleashed in 1477, recovering a little around 1500 and then under such continual pressure that it returned a deficit in twice as many years as a surplus between 1520 and 1550 and every year between 1541 and 1546.³⁶ No wonder it was wary of tax grants in the 1550s.³⁷ Yet it had learnt the hard way not to push its opposition to princely demands too far. Twice its fiscal burden was increased by huge fines, 35,000£ for refusing entry to Albert of Saxony’s troops in 1488 and 12,000£ for arming itself in defiance of Margaret of Austria’s tax demands in 1525.³⁸ It was not alone in paying dearly to re-enter the prince’s grace. In the 1480s Leiden, Leuven, and many other towns had to do so and in 1513 a comparatively minor incident at Leiden—the riotous exclusion of some soldiers who tried to pass through the town on its annual procession day—was construed as ‘a kind of disobedience or rebelliousness against our most gracious lord’ and cost the town in fines, legal costs, and other expenses a staggering 275,000£.³⁹ Towns manipulated five main sources of income to meet these demands. The magistrates’ first preference was usually to increase excises, but popular opposition might make this impossible and such indirect taxes could not be raised so high that they drove the urban economy into recession.⁴⁰ An alternative was direct taxation, sometimes in the form of forced loans which might never be repaid. Such taxation was favoured by the wider citizenry as less regressive than excises, was repeatedly used at ’s-Hertogenbosch between 1497 and 1514 and again in 1547 and 1552, and was similarly deployed at times of need at Antwerp, Leuven, Leiden, and Haarlem.⁴¹ Fees for citizenship might be increased, as at ’s-Hertogenbosch in 1547–8.⁴² Lotteries could not be tried too often, but plugged shortfalls at ’s-Hertogenbosch and Leuven.⁴³ The great panacea for most urban administrations, however, was one quite unknown in England, the sale of renten. It raised cash for short-term needs at the cost of mortgaging future revenue, but to pay for war in the hope of future peace that seemed not unreasonable. Like the sale of lottery tickets, it drew in money from outside the town itself—many Holland town renten were bought by Flemings, for example—and if insufficient buyers could be found on the open market it might readily be turned into a forced loan by compelling leading citizens to buy. Its only ³⁵ Uytven, Stadsfinanci¨en, 181, 244–7; Blok, Hollandsche stad, 132–8, 280–3. ³⁶ Kuijer, ’s-Hertogenbosch, 274–5, 323, 326; Blond´e, Sociale structuren, 9–10. ³⁷ Blond´e, Sociale structuren, 15–16; Koenigsberger, Monarchies, 183. ³⁸ Kuijer, ’s-Hertogenbosch, 266, 323. ³⁹ Blok, Hollandsche stad, 84; Uytven, Stadsfinanci¨en, 222; Ward, ‘Cities and States’, 244–51. ⁴⁰ Jacobs, Justitie en politie, 170–8. ⁴¹ Blond´e, Sociale structuren, 6–15; Wee, Antwerp Market, ii. 96 n., 106; Uytven, Stadsfinanci¨en, 252–3; Dam, ‘Factietwist of crisisoproer?’, 152–4; Blok, Hollandsche stad, 134–6. ⁴² Schuttelaars, Heren van de raad, 40. ⁴³ Kuijer, ’s-Hertogenbosch, 299–300; Uytven, Stadsfinanci¨en, 231–5.

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drawback was that it threatened to overwhelm civic finances with an impossible burden of interest and thereby to cripple a town’s trade as its merchants were arrested by the corporation’s creditors. Leiden, for example, owed more than its total annual income in interest by 1494 and more than double that in arrears, while by the 1530s it was again devoting between 42 and 71 per cent of its income to interest payments.⁴⁴ Saint-Omer hit similar problems in the 1550s, as it issued ever more renten but found the excise revenues needed to pay them fell away as townsfolk bought drink from the soldiers of the garrison.⁴⁵ Civic bankruptcy as the burden of renten became unmanageable invited princely intervention in urban government, less spectacular than that in the wake of rebellion but potentially more far-reaching. The usual pattern was for the prince to extend his protection to townsmen against arrest for corporate debt and a moratorium on payment of arrears, in exchange for the town’s submission to his direction of its affairs. At Leiden two princely commissioners took charge of key nominations to office and dictated policy from 1494 to 1535 to implement a financial recovery plan of tax increases and spending cuts; one, Floris Oem van Wijngaerden of the Council of Holland, even resided in the town for six years to assist and oversee the burgemeester.⁴⁶ At Haarlem two princely officials took charge of financial affairs in 1492 and commissioners directed the town’s business from 1497 to 1519, permanently changing the appointment process for the magistracy in favour of the Council of Holland.⁴⁷ At Leuven princely commissioners, some from the Council of Brabant, repeatedly intervened in the magistrates’ financial management in the 1490s.⁴⁸ At Valenciennes in 1498, Philip the Fair prescribed a sixty-one point set of regulations devised by three of his officials to increase his control and that of the grand bailli while remedying the town’s financial problems over ten years; the town’s troubles were attributed above all to the recent years of war, but most of the measures were still in place twenty years later.⁴⁹ Predictably ’s-Hertogenbosch suffered intervention at each end of the period. In 1494 Philip the Fair’s commissioners dictated changes to the constitution to lessen the guilds’ power and facilitate financial reform, a process they reviewed again in 1499. In 1547 Mary of Hungary took matters in hand herself, ordering the magistrates and guildsmen as she passed through on the way to Guelders to produce a drastic recovery plan by the time she returned: they did so, increasing the excises and farming them out to secure a guaranteed income.⁵⁰ For most towns, then, it was the combination of civil and international war of 1477–92 that struck the clearer blow for the subjection of urban authorities to princely authority, not the grander dynastic wars of the 1540s and 1550s.⁵¹ It was a ⁴⁴ Kuijer, ’s-Hertogenbosch, 326, 334; Blond´e, Sociale structuren, 5–6; Uytven, Stadsfinanci¨en, 196–231; Tracy, Financial Revolution, 14–16, 110–13; Vijftiende-eeuwse rentebrieven, 15–16, 71. ⁴⁵ Brulez, ‘Difficult´es financi`eres’, 219–21. ⁴⁶ Blok, Hollandsche stad, 99–103, 133–8; Brand, ‘Medieval Industry’, 126–9. ⁴⁷ Kaptein, Hollandse textielnijverheid, 88; Steensel, ‘Giften’, 3. ⁴⁸ Uytven, Stadsfinanci¨en, 224–9; Mecheleer, ‘Leuven, Antwerpen’, 157–8. ⁴⁹ Cauchies, ‘R`eglement de tutelle’, 75–107. ⁵⁰ Kuijer, ’s-Hertogenbosch, 271–5, 326; Jacobs, Justitie en politie, 72–4. ⁵¹ Cauchies, Philippe le beau, 79–84.

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subjection perpetuated in the decades that followed, through the need for repeated princely permission to sell renten, repeated protections from creditors, repeated rebates or postponements of taxation payments, repeated recitations of the prince’s gratitude for towns’ service in his wars and the towns’ obligation to support him in them.⁵² More gradually it was also realized in the subordination of town magistrates to superior judicial authorities as they struggled to steer the urban economy and budget through the demands of war.⁵³ Warfare, economic change, and the judicial pretensions of the prince and his officers worked together both to develop magistrates’ claims over the life of their towns and to develop princely powers to direct magistrates.

I N T E R N A L C O N T RO L If war stimulated magistrates’ efforts to manage the economy and budgets of their towns, did it also extend their control over the towns’ inhabitants in more specific ways? In England the crown certainly supported the enforcement of individual military obligations upon townsmen by magistrates, an enforcement facilitated by increasingly frequent musters. In Norwich the power of the aldermen over their portions of the city was increased in the 1540s and 1550s, as they were frequently charged to make certificates of the military capabilities of their wards in a muster system more regulated than that of the 1520s.⁵⁴ Magistrates’ ability to impose extraordinary local levies to meet wartime costs was backed by the Privy Council at Rye in 1545 and at Exeter in 1549.⁵⁵ Coastal towns such as Yarmouth seem also to have been able to deploy the forced labour of their inhabitants for their fortification projects.⁵⁶ Moreover, the powers granted to magistrates to enable them to meet military obligations created the administrative procedures needed to make non-military demands on the inhabitants. Many towns, for example, had long-established procedures for taxing their own inhabitants, most commonly to pay the wages of their MPs, but the frequency of military demands, especially during the 1540s, regularized local taxation and made it a readier recourse for magistrates funding many other projects. At Norwich, these ranged by the 1550s from maintaining the river and dykes and cleaning the streets to paying the waits, buying property for the civic portfolio, and relieving the poor.⁵⁷ Magistrates also used the pressures of war to exert their influence over their fellow townsmen in more subtle ways. Many English towns had annual or bi-annual ⁵² Kuijer, ’s-Hertogenbosch, 323, 326; Blok, Hollandsche stad, 137–8; ROPB ii. 145, 250–1, 277–9, iv. 409, 472–3, 478–9, and the many grants in aid of fortification cited above. ⁵³ CLGS v. 28, 82, 103, 108–9. ⁵⁴ NRO, PMA 1491–1553, fo. 131, MCB 1534–49, fo. 40v , MCB 1540–9, 56, 65, 115, 203, 288, 500, 532. ⁵⁵ APC i. 190; Cotton, Woollcombe, Gleanings, 192. ⁵⁶ Stephens, ‘Great Yarmouth’, 152. ⁵⁷ NRO, PMA 1491–1553, fos. 145, 149, 201, 239v , 248–9, 253v ; MCB 1540–9, 532.

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marching watches, often organized by craft guilds, in which the townsmen paraded in arms, usually on the feast day of the local saint. From the 1530s, at times pleading the demands of war, mayors and councillors took closer control of such events, stripping them of religious pageantry and guild influence and using them to emphasize obedience, hierarchy, and the town’s duty to the king.⁵⁸ In the Netherlands war posed potentially much greater challenges to the control exercised by magistrates, as the pressure of troops or taxes caused serious popular unrest. As we shall see, however, these incidents tended in the long run to consolidate the power of elites as central government intervened in their favour. So did the more regular measures necessary to organize urban society for war. Musters were held to check the defensive preparedness of the citizenry.⁵⁹ They involved considerable effort: listing the several thousand men liable to militia service at ’sHertogenbosch took a clerk seventeen days in 1527.⁶⁰ And they were intrusive. A muster at Delft in 1551 exposed one man as an Anabaptist when the schout asked why he had no sword. He answered that his master would not let him carry one. When asked who that master was, he replied ‘Christ’.⁶¹ The threat of attack heightened the drive for control. At Leiden in 1513 and repeatedly at Lille in the 1550s, innkeepers were ordered to report the names of all their guests to the magistrates and at ’s-Hertogenbosch in summer 1542 a town clerk spent a fortnight registering every inhabitant born outside the town and taking an oath of loyalty from them.⁶² That same year the schepenen even toured the town enquiring from door to door into householders’ domestic metalware in the effort to gather enough copper for a new cannon.⁶³ A particular target for magistrates was the immunity of clergy and clerical institutions from town taxes and here the pressures of war enabled them to make occasional progress. At Leiden disputes festered from 1484 to 1517, until it was agreed that the clergy should pay a tax towards the cost of the town walls but retain their immunity from excises.⁶⁴ At Haarlem clerical minds were concentrated in 1511 by the magistrates’ threat that they would have to do manual work on the town walls if they would not pay towards their repair.⁶⁵ At ’s-Hertogenbosch, the uncommonly large clerical proportion of the population made the problem pressing. From 1516 to 1521 the canons of the collegiate church of St John defended their sales of excisefree liquor to third parties, responding to threats with an episcopal interdict on the town. Matters got worse in 1525, when the clergy’s refusal to contribute to the costs ⁵⁸ Sheppard, ‘Canterbury Marching Watch’, 32–4; CCA, AC2, fos. 48, 117, FA14, fo. 157v , FA15, fo. 77v ; Douglas, ‘Midsummer in Salisbury’; WSRO, G23/1/2, fos. 247, 248, 254, 257, 268v , 275a, 279v , 295, 299v , G23/1/251, fo. 32; Phythian-Adams, ‘Ceremony’; Clark, ‘Reformation and Radicalism’, 115; DRO, EABII, 86, 228; Goring, ‘Military Obligations’, 200; Hall, Chronicle, 750; NRO, PMA 1491–1553, fo. 188v , MCB 1540–9, 296. ⁵⁹ ‘Stadsrekeningen Middelburg ii’, 273; Knevel, Burgers, 48. ⁶⁰ Schuttelaars, Heren van de raad, 55 n. ⁶¹ Stayer, Anabaptists and the Sword, 321 n., 323. ⁶² Ward, ‘Cities and States’, 373–4; Tr´enard (ed.), Lille, ii. 99; Schuttelaars, Heren van de raad, 34–5. ⁶³ Kuijer, ’s-Hertogenbosch, 314. ⁶⁴ Blok, Hollandsche stad, 160. ⁶⁵ Ward, ‘Cities and States’, 156–9.

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of the town’s defence or the large taxes demanded by Margaret of Austria sparked popular attacks on the most uncooperative institutions, dangerously reminiscent of the German Peasant War.⁶⁶ Only visible emergencies could bring drastic change. In 1506, as French attack loomed, Leuven university agreed its members should for once contribute to the cost of the town’s fortifications; in 1542, as Maarten van Rossum approached, the clergy of Antwerp were subjected to municipal taxation and the religious houses of ’s-Hertogenbosch finally paid towards the town’s defence.⁶⁷ The greater independence of urban military action in the Netherlands gave rein to the cultivation of urban solidarity by the annual celebration of the townsfolk’s military achievements. Princes were wary of watch night parades, abolishing Ghent’s and finding the socially restricted sacrament processions of the schutters more acceptable.⁶⁸ But general festivities on St Apollonia’s day marked Hoorn’s resistance to capture in 1479, on St George’s day Antwerp’s capture of the blockhouse at Kallo in 1486; Douai, Nieuwpoort, and Saint-Omer instituted annual processions to commemorate their repulse of the French in 1479 and 1489; and from the end of our period Visitation day was remembered for Dunkirk’s liberation in 1558.⁶⁹ At Douai the new procession drew the clergy, guilds, and magistrates together in a festivity far more orderly than the town’s other great annual ritual, the carnivalesque Fˆete des Anes.⁷⁰ In facilitating such celebrations of civic identity, war provided some compensation for the dents it made in more concrete expressions of civic pride: at ’sHertogenbosch, for example, it was the strains of war that prompted the decision made in the 1490s or early 1500s to build the church of St John two bays shorter than originally intended.⁷¹

RU R A L H I N T E R L A N D S War gave town magistrates opportunities to exert their control not only over their fellow townsfolk but also over their immediate rural neighbours. The central issue for English towns was the right to muster the inhabitants of surrounding villages and include them in the contingents they sent to serve the king. Hull, for example, included within its county of Kingston-upon-Hull eight rural vills yielding a total of 212 able men in the 1539 musters.⁷² York’s pretensions were wider still, covering some twenty-five small vills in the Ainsty wapentake adjacent to the city. Between 1487 and 1493 Henry VII had several times to confirm that its inhabitants should attend on the mayor of York when summoned, but in doing so he asserted the superior claims of his own wardens of the marches and lieutenants in the North.⁷³ ⁶⁶ Kuijer, ’s-Hertogenbosch, 182–5, 302–5. ⁶⁷ Uytven, Stadsfinanci¨en, 87; Weert, ‘Chronycke’, 114–15; Kuijer, ’s-Hertogenbosch, 314. ⁶⁸ Knevel, Burgers, 53–66; Arnade, Realms of Ritual, 61–3, 205; AMV, CC749, fo. 45r . ⁶⁹ Weert, ‘Chronycke’, 81; Aurelius, Cronycke, R5v ; Rouche (ed.), Douai, 93; ‘Vlaamsche kronyk’, 269, 332; Derville (ed.), Saint-Omer, 100. ⁷⁰ Rouche (ed.), Douai, 100. ⁷¹ Kuijer, ’s-Hertogenbosch, 296–7. ⁷² PRO, E101/60/1, rot. 2. ⁷³ YCR ii. 88, 101–3; TRP i. 14; Attreed, ‘King’s Interest’, 42–3.

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When problems arose again in the 1540s, the civic authorities called in those royal representatives to bolster their position. In 1542 the city sheriffs investigated the failure of some parts of the Ainsty to prepare their men for war as required and distrained the inhabitants’ goods to pay for soldiers to make up any shortfall in the city’s contingent.⁷⁴ In 1545 further refusals to serve led the mayor to report to the earl of Hertford how the defaulters had ‘disappointed both the king and us at this time to our great damage, breach of our liberties and . . . parlous example’ and ask the earl to provide ‘speedy remedy’.⁷⁵ The appeal seems successfully to have tied the strengthening of the magistrates’ authority to royal military needs. Many towns in the Netherlands traditionally exercised much larger judicial and fiscal control over the surrounding countryside than their English equivalents. War caused such power to expand or contract in various ways, most dramatically through punishment for rebellion, as at Ghent.⁷⁶ Loyalty, conversely, might be rewarded with the confirmation of judicial supremacy, as at Valenciennes, or the chance to take control of adjacent villages by mortgage or purchase from the princely demesne, as Antwerp did.⁷⁷ Many towns counted their rural neighbours in the pool of manpower on which they could draw if they needed to levy troops. They also sought labour in the countryside for their fortification projects, arguing, as Landen did in 1512, that if ‘the poor country people’ expected ‘in time of need to be able to leave for the same town and shelter there with their goods’ then it was reasonable they should help build the walls.⁷⁸ Those with horses and carts were particularly welcome, ordered to work free of charge for various towns up to two days a month on pain of fines, but such powers were a brittle instrument of urban tyranny. Leuven’s orders in 1542 were to be pinned up on churches and town halls in all the surrounding villages, so none could plead ignorance of their duty. But Tienen’s grant of 1512 soon became ineffective as the prescribed penalties were eroded by inflation and defaulters multiplied.⁷⁹ Towns’ power over the economic life of their neighbours might also be enhanced by war. Fair or market privileges, as we have seen, might be granted in reward for loyalty or compensation for damages. Bans on the sale of excise-free alcoholic drinks just outside the town walls were also much sought after. Often the justification was explicitly to sustain fortification projects, stock armouries, or repair wartime destruction.⁸⁰ Antwerp’s grant in aid of its fortifications in 1556 was so grandiose, entirely suppressing the brewing industry of nearby Borgerhout, that it was successfully contested before the Council of Brabant.⁸¹ The more ingeniously such petitions could be linked to war, the better their chance of success. Kortrijk asserted that the density of taverns around the town facilitated ambushes and thus imperilled its security, as convincing a case in its way as that made by the authorities of Virton in Luxembourg that they should be allowed to control the working hours of Jean Ponchelet’s new ⁷⁴ ⁷⁶ ⁷⁷ ⁷⁸ ⁸⁰ ⁸¹

YCR iv. 82; YCA, CC4, fo. 103. ⁷⁵ YCR iv. 132. Blockmans, ‘Autocratie ou polyarchie?’, 306; Decavele and Peteghem, ‘Ghent’, 112. Platelle (ed.), Valenciennes, 67; Prims, Antwerpen, xvi. 82, xix. 22. ROPB i. 204. ⁷⁹ Ibid i. 172–3, 202–4, iv. 17–18, 401–2, vii. 39–40. Kuijer, ’s-Hertogenbosch, 194; ROPB iii. 19–20, 194–5, 414, iv. 151, 409–10, v. 185–7. Prims, Antwerpen, xix. 8–9.

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ironworks because they made so much noise that warning shots could not be heard and the town might thus be surprised.⁸² The most intense relationship between one of our towns and its hinterland was also the most balanced. The magistrates of ’s-Hertogenbosch engaged in constant dialogue with the small towns and villages of its meierij and the rural nobility to ensure effective defence against Guelders. The town expected the meierij’s inhabitants to work on its fortifications and regularly levied cash contributions on villages that did not do so.⁸³ Town and meierij together raised raiding forces and garrisons for defensive strongpoints.⁸⁴ To pay for them they contributed to a common fund administered by four deputies from the town and one from each of the four districts of the meierij.⁸⁵ Repeatedly the town sent out warnings to threatened villages, held discussions with rural representatives to discuss the military situation and passed on the concerns of the countryside to the ruler.⁸⁶ Even peremptory-sounding orders, such as those to Eindhoven to repair its gates against raiders from Guelders in 1528, were meant for the general good.⁸⁷ Military cooperation was, it is true, part of a wider relationship between town and countryside carefully defined by a thirty-one-point agreement made in 1495 to secure their ‘welfare, policy, common weal and peace’. But it was a sufficiently important part of their exchange of interests that the relationship crumbled once the threat from Guelders was removed: the town’s dominance looked less justified thereafter and in 1567 the meierij repudiated it.⁸⁸

O L I G A RC H S A N D C I T I Z E N S The development of urban oligarchy in the course of the later fifteenth and sixteenth centuries was the product of economic and social change, of the ambitions and fears of urban elites, and of the preferences of central governments, but how did war interact with these various forces? It seems that the process was both less convulsive and generally less contested in England than in the Netherlands. At York, Exeter, and Newcastle, it is true, there was disorder over attempts to exclude wider bodies of freemen from elections to office, but even at York the common council created in 1517 to avoid such difficulties provided a real voice for the lesser freemen in urban affairs.⁸⁹ At Salisbury the two councils of twenty-four and forty-eight of the city’s wealthiest male citizens seem to have engaged the city’s freemen as a whole in all the major decisions of the early sixteenth century and held the townsmen together in their ongoing struggles with the bishop.⁹⁰ Even at Norwich, where the aldermen governed in more exclusive fashion, urban life in the mid-sixteenth century was not characterized by disputes between the magistrates and the city’s other inhabitants.⁹¹ ⁸² ⁸³ ⁸⁴ ⁸⁶ ⁸⁷ ⁸⁹ ⁹⁰

ROPB ii. 44; CLGS iii. 396. Kuijer, ’s-Hertogenbosch, 196, 314; Inventaris ’s-Hertogenbosch, 40, 42–3, 52, 64, 429–30. Kuijer, ’s-Hertogenbosch, 255, 289, 312–13. ⁸⁵ Jacobs, Justitie en politie, 169–70. Inventaris ’s-Hertogenbosch, 33, 42–3, 50, 67–8, 74, 437; SSH, OA3800. Inventaris ’s-Hertogenbosch, 437. ⁸⁸ Kuijer, ’s-Hertogenbosch, 195. Clark and Slack, English Towns, 55–6; Palliser, York, 67–70. Carr, ‘Urban Patriciates’, 118–35. ⁹¹ McClendon, Quiet Reformation.

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In so far as political change was encouraged by economic change, recession narrowing the circle of prosperous men suitable for office or prosperity separating out a wealthy elite like Exeter’s merchants or Rye’s fishmongers, war with its comparatively small economic impact on English towns cannot account for much.⁹² Nor did war stand behind the popular disorder against which central authorities nerved magistrates; this was more often a response to the enclosure of suburban land, imperilling livelihoods already under threat from industrial decline.⁹³ Even the crown’s desire to deal with ‘small groups of reliable men’ and empower them to carry out its policies locally had less to do with military needs than with social policy, industrial regulation, and the implementation of the Reformation.⁹⁴ Whether the crown’s interventions outweighed internal developments and whether it got what it wanted might also be questioned. At Rye the narrower franchise for mayoral elections imposed by the lord warden of the Cinque Ports in 1526 broke down within two years, but the evolved system of self-government by a dozen or fewer jurats serving for life stood the test of time. When necessary, the leaders it produced would face down royal demands in defence of the town’s privileges: one ex-mayor was locked up in Dover castle in 1525 for the town’s refusal to raise troops and the current mayor went to prison for six days in 1557 for refusing to assess the town for a forced loan.⁹⁵ The role of war was more significant at the level of individual careers. Ports in particular provided men who could make themselves of great use to the king in providing ships and naval intelligence. Both the profits they made and the contacts they forged with central government might then advance their careers in civic politics. At Hull we might pick out Edward Madison, who prospered protecting the wool fleet sailing to Calais and victualling the northern army in 1522–3 and became twice mayor and twice MP.⁹⁶ At Rye John Fletcher, mayor in 1524 and three times MP, built on his reputation as a source of news about Channel shipping movements to secure the post of royal fish purveyor in the town, a position he then used to discredit his main rival in civic politics.⁹⁷ He was also the town’s leading privateer from 1513 to his death in 1546, a path followed by his sons, who each went on to serve as mayor. Robbing the king’s enemies made Fletcher rich, benefited the town through its taxes on prisoners, and gave him the information he needed to make himself the king’s man in the town.⁹⁸ The pressures of war were much more important in reshaping the political balance inside towns in the Netherlands. This was partly because war did more to shape the economic fates of towns and individuals. At Antwerp and elsewhere it gave opportunities to the greatest merchants to capitalize on wartime trading licences and army supply contracts.⁹⁹ At ’s-Hertogenbosch it favoured those who adjusted best ⁹² Rigby, ‘Urban ‘‘Oligarchy’’ ’, 77–8; Hoyle, ‘Urban Decay’, 103–8; Youings, Early Tudor Exeter, 8; Mayhew, Rye, 111–26. ⁹³ Palliser, York, 45–9; Phythian-Adams, Desolation of a City, 182–3, 254–7. ⁹⁴ Tittler, Reformation, 20–1, 179–80, 182–7; id., ‘Urban Policy’, 74–93. ⁹⁵ Mayhew, Rye, 51–2, 75, 91–6. ⁹⁶ Bindoff, Commons, ii. 559–60. ⁹⁷ Mayhew, Rye, 114. ⁹⁸ Mayhew, ‘Defence’, 122–4. ⁹⁹ Craeybeckx, Grand commerce, 215–16, 228–9; Soly, ‘Antwerpse compagnie’, 350–62.

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to changing circumstances, notably the linen merchants.¹⁰⁰ At Douai it gave those with capital the chance to buy themselves civic office as the corporation tried to raise money for its defence.¹⁰¹ Yet in most Netherlands towns the wealth elite and the political elite were less congruent than in most English towns. At Antwerp some successful merchants entered the magistracy in the first half of the sixteenth century, but their influence was much less than that of the ruling dynasties established a century or more earlier.¹⁰² At ’s-Hertogenbosch and Leiden the political elite were wealthy, but might live from property and investments rather than trade or manufactures; by no means all the wealthy joined the political elite and at Leiden the wider group of rich citizens was sufficiently distinct from the magistracy to be separately consulted over some financial decisions.¹⁰³ War had more dramatic effects on urban constitutions through the triangular negotiation between oligarchs, guilds, and the prince. Princes wanted money; oligarchs were prepared to raise at least some of it, but preferred to tax popular consumption rather than their own wealth; guildsmen resisted excise increases and argued instead for direct taxation, taxation of the clergy, or defiance of the prince. The more disorderly the opposition, the more it invited princely intervention to dictate restrictions on the guilds’ political power, in favour both of the oligarchs and of princely taxation. The power of guilds or other popular forces revived in many towns in the reaction against Charles the Bold’s rule in 1477.¹⁰⁴ In Flanders a struggle ensued which would bring civil war to the province in the 1480s and reach its conclusion in the humbling of Ghent in 1540. In Hainaut elite dominance was sooner restored. At Valenciennes, where the people, pleading the loyalty of their militia against the French, claimed the right to choose the new magistrates themselves in 1477, the oligarchy aligned itself with princely power against popular unrest in 1478 and 1497 to regain its control.¹⁰⁵ At ’s-Hertogenbosch and Antwerp matters were more evenly balanced. There was less violence in 1477 than in the towns of Flanders and the magisterial elite soon regained supremacy, though at ’s-Hertogenbosch the guilds had won real constitutional concessions. Antwerp by and large cooperated with Maximilian from then on, but he still took the opportunity to reduce the guilds’ powers in 1486.¹⁰⁶ ’s-Hertogenbosch was more troublesome, resisting taxes in 1485 and the passage of imperial troops in 1488 as the guilds asserted themselves. The town’s financial difficulties gave Philip the Fair the chance to neuter the guilds’ political representation in 1494, but guild involvement proved necessary for financial restructuring and the new system disappeared. Only the dramatic events of 1525 produced lasting constitutional change, as the guilds mobilized the militia against tax demands. One week after ¹⁰⁰ Blond´e, Sociale structuren, 69–71, 112–14, 128–9, 199. ¹⁰¹ AMD, CC243, fo. 29. ¹⁰² Wouters, ‘Verwantschap’, 29–56. ¹⁰³ Schuttelaars, Heren van de raad, 312–20; Brand, ‘Urban Policy’, 21–4; Lamet, ‘Vroedschap of Leiden’, 17–21 . ¹⁰⁴ Arnould, ‘Lendemains de Nancy’, 25–6; Blockmans, ‘Breuk of continuiteit?’, 97–121; Uytven, ‘1477 in Brabant’, 253–68. ¹⁰⁵ Arnould, ‘Lendemains de Nancy’, 25; Platelle (ed.), Valenciennes, 61, 66; Servant, Artistes, 76–7. ¹⁰⁶ Lampo, Vermaerde coopstadt, 97–105.

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the populace were persuaded of the futility of a sortie to attack the count of Buren’s encircling troops and a hundred and fifty townsmen knelt in black to beg Margaret of Austria’s forgiveness, a new constitution increased the magistracy’s power over the guilds and ensured the guild deans’ assimilation to the oligarchy by prescribing property qualifications for the office high enough to exclude mere craftsmen. The guilds were still a force in civic politics in the 1550s and the ruling group more open than in many towns, but viewed in the long term the 1490s and 1520s were phases of decisive narrowing in ’s-Hertogenbosch’s political elite.¹⁰⁷ Antwerp’s turn for further change came with the unrest of 1554, met with a cutback in popular representation on the brede raad.¹⁰⁸ In Holland towns such as Leiden, where guild power was weak, the terms of negotiation were rather different, but again the crises induced by war empowered narrower oligarchies. The Leiden vroedschap wished to entrench its position and saw in princely penury a chance to do so. It first played on the Habsburgs’ need for taxes to obtain confirmation of its privileges in 1477–81 and did so again in 1510, 1518, and 1531; though episodes of remodelling of the magistracy by Philip the Fair and Margaret of Austria intervened, it gradually secured itself as a self-perpetuating group.¹⁰⁹ However, the Holland towns also suggest complications to the model of oligarchs sacrificing their towns’ interests to state power in exchange for princely endorsement of their own local supremacy, or as the ’s-Hertogenbosch guildsmen bitterly put it in 1525, agreeing to ruinous taxes because they were keener to get offices for their children from the emperor than to maintain the welfare of the town.¹¹⁰ Like the Rye jurats, the magistrates of towns such as Leiden were quite prepared to face arrest and detention for their defiant withholding of tax revenues from the central authorities in order to spend them on local defence. So often did this happen between 1507 and 1513 that it impelled Holland’s move towards a financial system based on renten issued by the province and managed by the States.¹¹¹ At length this gave considerable political autonomy to the urban oligarchs acting collectively in the States and provided a secure investment which the leaders of the five richest towns—troubled Leiden being the exception—took up with enthusiasm by the 1550s.¹¹² Here, as so often, war drove on the consolidation of the structures of power, but not quite in the way princes might have chosen. ¹⁰⁷ Kuijer, ’s-Hertogenbosch, 250–4, 266–8, 271–4, 300–9, 327, 335; Schuttelaars, Heren van de raad, 90–106, 149, 230–5, 256–8. ¹⁰⁸ Soly, ‘Economische vernieuwing’, 520–35. ¹⁰⁹ Blok, Hollandsche stad, 110–16. ¹¹⁰ Schuttelaars, Heren van de raad, 96. ¹¹¹ Ward, ‘Cities and States’, 283–99. ¹¹² Tracy, Holland, 115–35; id., Financial Revolution, 127, 156–77, 250.

7 Towns in the Polity War necessitated better articulation of the different parts of the polity. Central government needed to communicate with towns in particular, to see that their men, money, supplies, and information were deployed as effectively as possible in the common effort. At times towns needed to communicate their own military needs urgently to the prince, his ministers, or his commanders. But direct contact might not be the best way to achieve such ends and local noble intermediaries between prince and town, or regional administrative or representative institutions, might gain in prominence from their roles in linking prince to town and town to prince. C O M M U N I C AT I O N W I T H C E N T R A L G OV E R N M E N T Throughout our period English towns were in direct and frequent contact with royal government at a variety of levels, as a stream of writs and letters were delivered by royal messengers. This reached its height when parliament was summoned, usually to vote war taxation, and when military campaigns were being prepared. Letters under the royal signet were used to instruct towns to raise troops and by the 1540s the king’s requirements in terms of the ability and weaponry of the men supplied were specified in increasingly exact detail.¹ Meanwhile the letters, which had in the Wars of the Roses been individualized appeals from the king, became mass-produced items signed with the dry stamp of the king’s signature and containing blanks for the names of towns and number of troops.² The rare occasions when fighting drew near English towns produced fulsome letters of royal thanks for ‘true services’, like those from Henry VII to Canterbury and Sandwich after the failed Yorkist landing of 1495.³ War also intensified the rate of issue of proclamations, the most formal means of communication between the crown and urban communities.⁴ Such communication was a two-way process. Towns might send deputations of magistrates to speak with the king, as York did in 1485, though this seems to have been rarer in England than the Netherlands.⁵ More regular was the role of towns as intelligence gatherers, warning of foreign naval movements or domestic subversion.⁶ ¹ Goring, ‘Military Obligations’, 17; NRO, MCB 1540–9, 203. ² WSRO, G23/1/2, fo. 46v ; PRO, C115/101/7599, fo. 1. ³ Arthurson, Perkin Warbeck Conspiracy, 118. ⁴ Heinze, Proclamations, 5, 57. ⁵ YCR i. 123. ⁶ Mayhew, ‘Defence’, 123–4; PRO, SP1/218, fo. 75 (LP XXI. i. 803); Arthurson, Perkin Warbeck Conspiracy, 80, 117, 189, 197; Elton, Policy and Police, 83–170.

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In the 1540s and 1550s war further developed the momentum of communication between towns and the centre, building on the more intensive oversight established under Thomas Cromwell and the Privy Council from the 1530s.⁷ At York the wars of 1541–50 generated much more intense contact between the city, the crown and its regional institutions than ever before.⁸ At Canterbury increasing numbers of messengers were paid for bringing missives about coastal security, prisoners of war, victualling, the king’s works and the preparation of soldiers.⁹ And as the war ended, the rate of communication remained at a higher level than before: in 1550–1, Canterbury paid rewards to the bearers of eleven proclamations, three letters and a writ on subjects ranging from ‘poor soldiers and execution of Mistress Arden’ to a request ‘to be certified how many were dead of the sweat’.¹⁰ Though royal visits were infrequent and became more so as more sedentary monarchs succeeded Henry VII and the Yorkists, they provided special opportunities for negotiation. Visits might be linked to external warfare, like Henry VIII’s to Canterbury on his way to France in 1513, but were more commonly associated with rebellion.¹¹ Kings visited to assure themselves of urban loyalty, as at Canterbury in 1483 or Salisbury in 1486, to reward it, as at York in 1487 or Exeter in 1497, or to receive apologies for its failures, as at York in 1541.¹² Visits were rarely linked with specific military demands, but when they were the desired effect was usually achieved. Henry VII visited Salisbury on 2 March 1496, when a Scottish invasion seemed imminent. On 31 March the city council ordered a search to identify able men in each ward ‘according to the king’s will’.¹³ Success was by no means guaranteed, however. Henry VII’s visit to the city in 1486 failed to secure York’s compliance with his requests that it admit his servant, Robert Langston, as its swordbearer and commander of its troops.¹⁴ Urban interests might be represented to the monarch on such occasions, as on Henry VII’s first progress in 1486, but pageantry was less elaborate and negotiation less formal than in the Netherlands.¹⁵ Whatever the outcome, visits raised the intensity of the exchange between town and prince: Exeter in 1497 was rewarded with a sword and cap of maintenance to be borne before its mayor, but also saw its governance overhauled by a king unimpressed with what he heard of the ‘tumults and disorders’ of its elections.¹⁶ Payments to messengers testify that the princes and regents of the Netherlands were as keen as the kings of England to communicate by letter with their towns.¹⁷ These letters show the same concerns to justify princely policy and make specific demands for men, money, and moral support as their English counterparts.¹⁸ Where they can be analysed systematically, as at Saint-Omer, they suggest the centrality of war to relations between towns and those above them: two-thirds of the magistracy’s ⁷ ⁸ ⁹ ¹⁰ ¹² ¹³ ¹⁵ ¹⁷

Davies, ‘Cromwellian Decade’, 177–95; Hoak, King’s Council, 112, 190–230. YCR iv. 43–182, v. 1–44. CCA, FA13, fos. 27v –28, 106v , 149v , 150v , 237, 275, FA14, fo. 156v . CCA, FA14, fos. 197v –198. ¹¹ CCA, FA10, fos. 34–9. CCA, FA7, fo. 11v , 13v ; WSRO, G23/1/2, fo. 161; Palliser, York, 44, 50. WSRO, G23/1/2, fos. 193v , 198, 201v . ¹⁴ YCR i. 138, 159–60. Anglo, Spectacle, 21–46. ¹⁶ Hooker, Description of Excester, iii. 789–90, 793. As in 1523: ADN, B2315, fos. 222–78. ¹⁸ Inventaire Ypres, iv–vii. passim.

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correspondence there in our period concerned military affairs.¹⁹ The slowness of such communications is striking. In the 1510s and 1520s, orders from the court took between five days and five weeks to reach Valenciennes.²⁰ Correspondence probably became more efficient as first Mechelen, then Brussels, emerged as administrative capitals. In 1512–14 Douai sent out seventy-nine messengers, of whom only four went to Brussels or Mechelen and six to Margaret, Maximilian, or Charles when they were closer at hand.²¹ In 1536–8 Valenciennes sent out 125 messengers, of whom forty-eight went to Brussels or Mechelen and one to Mary of Hungary at Mons; in 1553–4 ten of its forty-three missives went to Brussels, one to Mechelen and eight to that other focus of central power in war years, the emperor’s camp.²² Communication was at its most effective when intense military threats drove the stream of information, instructions, and requests for assistance. ’s-Hertogenbosch’s flow of letters to Philip the Fair, Hendrik of Nassau, Margaret of Austria, and Mary of Hungary intensified at times of danger and was answered in kind.²³ The Holland towns corresponded intensively with Margaret and her officials at the hottest period of their war with Guelders.²⁴ Most satisfactory were exchanges in which rulers could thank magistrates for their obedient goodwill in taking actions which in any case contributed to the town’s safety, Douai’s resisting the French or Valenciennes’s improving its fortifications.²⁵ Towns in the Netherlands used their correspondence with central authorities to lobby for their strategic interests much more forcefully than their English counterparts. In 1489 Albert of Saxony had to explain to the States of Hainaut that he must attack Geertruidenberg before Nivelles at the insistence of the Antwerpers, ‘who pay the troops’.²⁶ ’s-Hertogenbosch badgered Margaret of Austria to make peace at one moment, to prosecute war vigorously at another.²⁷ Towns sought to exploit the overlapping jurisdiction of princes and regents, ’s-Hertogenbosch appealing to Maximilian over Margaret’s head in 1508 and 1510 and its populace protesting in 1525 that Charles would think their refusal of her taxes just.²⁸ Strategic realities also made Netherlanders readier to take independent action and seek retrospective approval. In January 1528, on the death of Philip of Cleves, ’s-Hertogenbosch sent its schutters to occupy his castle of Ravenstein and then tried to persuade Charles V to take it over.²⁹ Princely visits in the Netherlands were both more frequent and more formalized than in England. At the accession of a new ruler, even sometimes at the installation of a new regency, formal entries, exchanges of oaths, and confirmations of privileges bound princes to towns and vice versa. Thus Leiden met Maximilian in 1478 and ¹⁹ ²¹ ²² ²³ ²⁴ ²⁶ ²⁷ ²⁸ ²⁹

Derville (ed.), Saint-Omer, 100–1. ²⁰ AMV, AA149, 151, 152. AMD, CC235, fos. 54r –59r , CC236, fos. 59r –63r . AMV, CC749, fos. 56r –62v , CC750, fos. 244r –251v , CC751, fos. 288r –291v . Inventaris ’s-Hertogenbosch, passim; SSH, OA3800; ADN, B2315, fo. 266v . Ward, ‘Letters’, 134–5, 142–3, 148–9. ²⁵ AMD, EE49; Mariage, Fortifications, 73. Lettres in´edites, ii. 36. Henne, Histoire, i. 253, 287–90; Ward, ‘Cities and States’, 230–3, 250. Kuijer, ’s-Hertogenbosch, 281, 306; Correspondance de Maximilien et Marguerite, i. 328–9. Ibid. 288–9, 311.

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1508, Philip the Fair in 1497, Charles V in 1515, and the future Philip II in 1549.³⁰ The pageants put on by towns on such occasions communicated urban concerns to the prince, though negotiation gradually gave way to adulation.³¹ The prince’s arrival also gave the chance to forge links with potential patrons among his entourage.³² Such visits helped shape the general relationship within which wartime demands would be made, but other visits were much more closely linked to war.³³ Princes and regents directing campaigns based themselves in towns near the front line. Maximilian came to ’s-Hertogenbosch in 1479, urging on the townsfolk’s siege of Grave and extracting a large loan from them, and again in 1481 and 1483.³⁴ Philip the Fair planned his war in Guelders from ’s-Hertogenbosch in 1504–5 and Margaret of Austria waited anxiously there while Venlo was besieged in autumn 1511.³⁵ Rulers making large tax demands would likewise arrive to press their case. At Antwerp Maximilian came in 1485 for funds to fight the Flemings, in 1509 for funds to fight in Italy, and in 1510 for funds to fight in Guelders.³⁶ Philip and Charles toured the Holland towns in search of taxes in 1497, 1515, and 1540.³⁷ Fortifications too were a subject of princely concern. Mary of Hungary’s visits were associated with refortification programmes at Brussels, Flushing, and Groningen, Charles’s at Lille, Valenciennes, Bapaume, and ’s-Hertogenbosch.³⁸ As in England, the most alarming visits were those in the wake of rebellion. Maximilian came to Leiden in 1481 to confirm its new Kabeljauw government and presided over the execution of six leaders of the ousted Hoek regime.³⁹ In 1486 ’s-Hertogenbosch received Maximilian with two fat steers and two vats of Rhine wine to excuse its recalcitrance over taxation, but much more abject submission was needed for Margaret in 1525.⁴⁰ In spring 1555, Mary of Hungary came to Antwerp escorted by thousands of German troops to do justice on the ringleaders of the previous summer’s disorder.⁴¹ Visits always brought access to the prince for individuals and magistracies and might bring significant rewards. In 1481 ’s-Hertogenbosch had the honour of hosting the chapter of the Order of the Golden Fleece because Maximilian needed to be near his armies and in 1508 he came to thank the town for its consistent support against Guelders with a grant of the imperial double-headed eagle to add to its arms.⁴² Frederick III came to Antwerp in 1485 to thank the citizens for their loyalty to Maximilian and reward them with a new imperial charter.⁴³ Yet visits also opened towns to unwelcome intervention, Maximilian ordering the magistrates of ’s-Hertogenbosch ³⁰ Smit, Vorst en onderdaan, 226–32, 243–4, 246–50, 257. ³¹ Soly, ‘Plechtige intochten’, 342–54; Smit, Vorst en onderdaan, 311–17; Arnade, ‘Emperor and the City’, 65–92. ³² Smit, Vorst en onderdaan, 279. ³³ Ward, ‘Cities and States’, 117–18. ³⁴ Kuijer, ’s-Hertogenbosch, 255, 268. ³⁵ Ibid. 276–7; Henne, Histoire, i. 271, 277; Os, Kroniek, 321. ³⁶ Prims, Antwerpen, xvi. 42, 83–4. ³⁷ Smit, Vorst en onderdaan, 243–4, 248–51. ³⁸ Heuvel, ‘Papiere Bolwercken’, 27, 126; Hemelrijck, Vlaamse krijgsbouwkunde, 250–1; Tr´enard (ed.), Lille, ii. 21–2; Mariage, Fortifications, 77–8, 83; Thieulaine, ‘Extraits’, 175; Kuijer, ’s-Hertogenbosch, 313. ³⁹ Smit, Vorst en onderdaan, 233–4; Blok, Hollandsche stad, 84. ⁴⁰ Kuijer, ’s-Hertogenbosch, 266, 306. ⁴¹ Soly, ‘Economische vernieuwing’, 527. ⁴² Kuijer, ’s-Hertogenbosch, 256–61, 281. ⁴³ Prims, Antwerpen, xvi. 44.

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to compensate the laagschout who had appealed to him against their mistreatment, Mary of Hungary delivering them an ultimatum to implement financial reforms, and banished criminals and political exiles everywhere capitalizing on the prince’s presence to reinsert themselves into civic life.⁴⁴ Larger towns in the Netherlands might send delegations of magistrates to see the prince. With the help of sympathetic courtiers, Leiden’s delegates to Brussels in 1485 and ’s-Hertogenbosch’s to Ghent in 1545 talked Maximilian and Charles into tax reductions.⁴⁵ From the 1530s the centralization of government at Brussels led towns to keep representatives there to lobby the regent, her court, the Council of Finance, and the Geheime Raad. Antwerp rented a house for its deputies at Brussels, while Haarlem and ’s-Hertogenbosch stepped up their gift-giving to officials there.⁴⁶ Attendance was not always voluntary: in the 1540s, deputations of Flemish magistrates were regularly summoned to Brussels for a dressing-down from Lodewijk van Schore, president of the Geheime Raad.⁴⁷ In the Netherlands, with their protracted civil wars and aggressive neighbours, it was not only with the Habsburg government that towns had to negotiate, but also with parties that were formally their adversaries, Flemish towns in revolt against Maximilian, or Charles of Egmond and towns loyal to him.⁴⁸ Such negotiation went beyond practicalities, to attempts to influence opinion. Both ’s-Hertogenbosch and the Holland towns regularly received letters from Charles of Egmond explaining his side of his ongoing conflict with the Habsburgs. The loyal response was to send a copy straight to the regent, as ’s-Hertogenbosch did in May 1509, but such letters clearly affected towns’ attitude to war, most obviously when the States of Holland appealed to Margaret of Austria for peace with Guelders in April 1514 in terms that echoed the letters Charles had sent them in March.⁴⁹ P ROV I N C I A L C O U N C I L S In England, provincial councils were more or less a substitute for local noble supremacy in problematic areas of the realm, their justice replacing the arbitration of a regional ‘good lord’, their role in military coordination bolstering the command of noblemen unable to lead the community by dint of their private resources. This complicated towns’ dealings with them. The Council in the West did not last long enough to trouble Exeter, but York found the Council in the North a more persistent and awkward presence, particularly after its reconstruction in 1537 based it in the city and made it the chief executive authority north of the Trent.⁵⁰ ⁴⁴ Jacobs, Justitie en politie, 22–3; Kuijer, ’s-Hertogenbosch, 326; Smit, Vorst en onderdaan, 280–2; Platelle (ed.), Valenciennes, 102. ⁴⁵ Kokken, Steden en Staten, 222–3; Kuijer, ’s-Hertogenbosch, 326. ⁴⁶ SAA, Pk313, Pk2402–2410; Steensel, ‘Giften’, 5, 16–17; Kuijer, ’s-Hertogenbosch, 326. ⁴⁷ Peteghem, Raad van Vlaanderen, 192–3. ⁴⁸ AMD, EE55; SSH, OA3800; Inventaris ’s-Hertogenbosch, 51, 442; Henne, Histoire, iii. 349. ⁴⁹ SSH, OA3800; GAL, SAI/383, fo. 75; Ward, ‘Cities and States’, 252–3, 315; NHA, SAHI/396, fo. 40r – v ; Henne, Histoire¸iv. 178. ⁵⁰ Gunn, Government, 71; Reid, Council in the North, 149–59.

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At first the remodelled council took a clear role in supervising the city’s military arrangements. In March 1540, York presented its muster certificate to Archbishop Holgate and the council.⁵¹ But in the ensuing war with the Scots, though the council provided a useful reservoir of military advice, strategic directives tended to come either from the noblemen acting as the king’s lieutenants in the North or from the semi-permanent councils of war that advised them.⁵² York used its relations with these peers to contest its subjection to the council, appealing to Protector Somerset and his brother-in-law Sir Michael Stanhope in 1548 against Holgate’s attempts to bypass the mayor and aldermen with military instructions.⁵³ Holgate’s successor as president, Francis Talbot, earl of Shrewsbury, blurred the lines between the council’s authority, his lieutenancy, and his private influence, often writing letters under the royal signet but sending them from his house at Sheffield.⁵⁴ When war revived in 1557, the mayor and aldermen exploited this ambiguity, denying the right of the president and council to call and certify musters in the city, but obeying the earl’s demand for troops in his capacity as lieutenant-general. From then on they controlled their own musters, demonstrating by their loyalty in the rebellion of 1569 that they had no need of the council’s leading-strings to keep their armed force at the disposal of the crown.⁵⁵ Provincial councils in the Netherlands likewise combined administrative with judicial functions, but the precise nature of these varied widely from region to region.⁵⁶ The Council of Holland at The Hague was probably the most administratively and politically active of all the provincial councils. It passed on central government commands to the towns and negotiated with their representatives in the States. Town magistrates maintained intensive correspondence with it, visited The Hague often, and sent regular gifts to the councillors. Deputations of councillors toured the towns, presiding over the annual renewal of boards of magistrates and in wartime also discussing military initiatives, presenting princely tax demands, and auditing the accounts of the towns’ joint military enterprises.⁵⁷ Military supervision continued in some respects to the end of our period. In 1543, Leiden’s defensive preparations included correspondence with first councillor Gerrit van Assendelft, in 1547 the council helped smooth disputes about the admiralty’s jurisdiction in Holland and in 1558 it sent a commissioner to inspect the newly rebuilt fortifications of Middelburg.⁵⁸ By the 1550s, however, the council’s political and military role had declined, weakening its usefulness as a flexible and well-informed interpreter of central policy to urban magistracies. The regents and their advisers were ever happier to ⁵¹ YCR iv. 43. ⁵² YCR iv. 90, 100, 111–13, 151, 152–5, 158–9, 171–2, 177–8, 181–2; YCA, HBXIX, fo. 63 (not calendared in YCR). ⁵³ YCR v. 1, 12–13. ⁵⁴ YCR v. 45–6, 49, 69, 108, 121–2, 152, 160, 162. ⁵⁵ Reid, Council in the North, 325; Tillott (ed.), VCH York, 141–2. ⁵⁶ Schepper and Cauchies, ‘Legal Tools’, 250. ⁵⁷ Damen, Staat van dienst, 39–43; Kokken, Steden en Staten, 101, 218, 240–3; Ward, ‘Cities and States’, 63, 254–7; ADN, B2315, fos. 229v –230r , 242r–v ; Ward, ‘Letters’, 135–6; Steensel, ‘Giften’, 14–18; NA, GRk349, fos. 136–63; GAL, SAI/586, fo. 30. ⁵⁸ GAL, SAI/625; Sicking, Zeemacht, 230–2; ‘Stadsrekeningen Middelburg iv’, 13.

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confine the council to judicial matters and the towns became wary of its intervention in their affairs as the States’ self-confidence increased.⁵⁹ In other provincial councils the concentration on judicial business came earlier, but war still intensified their contact with towns. The Council of Flanders disseminated information about the prince’s military demands; the Council of Brabant settled disputes between towns about their military costs and tried the leaders of the 1554 unrest at Antwerp, making an example of them to discourage future opposition.⁶⁰ Individual provincial councillors brought the priorities of central government home to town elites, commissioned to inspect fortifications, arbitrate political disputes, or oversee financial reforms.⁶¹ Yet they were never purely the prince’s men. Already in the late fifteenth century, the Oem van Wijngardens of the Council of Holland were prominent members of Dordrecht’s elite, as their colleagues the Van Zwietens were of Leiden’s.⁶² By the mid-sixteenth century the process by which the officials at The Hague were blended with the leaders of the Holland towns in an increasingly self-confident provincial elite had gone further.⁶³ The result was that, whatever the precise relationship between towns and councils, it remained no easy task to draw the urban elites of the Netherlands into line with centrally prescribed policy. P ROV I N C I A L G OV E R N O R S A N D OT H E R N O B L E M E N In the later Middle Ages communication between the English crown and its towns was often made effective through the use of noble intermediaries, who counselled the king on local issues, maintained order, and mobilized the country for war.⁶⁴ Their power to command townsmen rested on their wider prestige in local society, rather than any formal authority. Towns might reply as Salisbury did in 1491, when asked for twelve armed men by Sir John Cheyney, their patron at Henry VII’s court, that they ‘would not to no such desire agree, unless that they had any commandment from the king or any other by the king’s commandment’.⁶⁵ But when a suitable nobleman was available, it suited both king and townsfolk to let him broker their relationship. Even Norwich, the second largest city in the kingdom, rarely communicated directly with the royal government about demands for troops before the 1540s. In the 1490s it was John de Vere, thirteenth earl of Oxford, who repeatedly asked the city for men to serve Henry VII. To reinforce his requests he sent them by his senior gentry ⁵⁹ Ward, ‘Cities and States’, 182; Tracy, Holland, 98–9, 145–6, 156–60, 167–75, 189–92; Koopmans, Staten van Holland, 57–60. ⁶⁰ Peteghem, Raad van Vlaanderen, 17–18, 57–8, 117, 196–7; ADN, B2315, fos. 232v –333r ; AMD, CC235, fos. 54r –59r ; Uytven, Stadsfinanci¨en, 229–30; Soly, ‘Economische vernieuwing’, 528. ⁶¹ Ibid. 131–8; Kuijer, ’s-Hertogenbosch, 292; Schuttelaars, Heren van de raad, 256–8; Blok, Hollandsche stad, 99–100. ⁶² Damen, Staat van dienst, 393, 479–80, 500–2. ⁶³ Tracy, Holland, 133–5. ⁶⁴ Carpenter, Wars of the Roses, 34–44. ⁶⁵ WSRO, G23/1/44, G23/1/2, fo. 174v . Salisbury did send soldiers with Cheyney in 1493 and 1495: ibid., fos. 181, 193.

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followers, themselves important figures in East Anglian political society and sometimes named as commissioners to levy troops among the townsfolk.⁶⁶ When necessary Oxford could write sternly, as when in 1497 he heard that some of Norwich’s soldiers chosen to serve in Scotland ‘feign such unreasonable excuses so as they in no wise will serve the king in the said voyage’, but his use of men such as James Hobart, the city’s recorder, in dealing with Norwich suggests his sensitivity to its relations with its own friends and the gentry of the surrounding countryside.⁶⁷ Oxford’s local authority was less natural than that of the greatest nearby landowners, the Howards, who followed him as Norwich’s point of contact with the king in military matters. Their fall in 1546, however, made for a more decisive change, as the Privy Council dealt directly with the mayor and aldermen.⁶⁸ York also moved from the acceptance of noble direction in its military affairs to a more independent relationship with the crown. From the mid-1470s Richard, duke of Gloucester, was influential in the city and York responded favourably to frequent calls for men from ‘our full good and gracious lord the duke of Gloucester’, to the extent of supplying part of the force that put him on the throne as Richard III in 1483.⁶⁹ Thereafter York resisted the claims of another local family, the Cliffords, later earls of Cumberland, to the ‘captainship’ of the city. In 1489 the townsfolk refused to allow Lord Clifford and his men into the city to defend it and, although the magistrates seemed to acknowledge his son’s and grandson’s rights in theory several times in the 1540s, they ignored them in practice.⁷⁰ To a renewed claim in 1557 the mayor and aldermen responded politely but firmly that the city’s ‘old registers and books’ did not show ‘that the said earl nor his ancestors ought to have any such conduction of our men by inheritance as he doth claim’ and that in any case the city’s muster certificate had already been made to the earl of Shrewsbury, the queen’s lieutenant of the North, and the soldiers put at his disposal. Thus they avoided the ‘danger and servitude’ they foresaw if once they complied with the Cliffords’ wishes.⁷¹ Canterbury likewise became less dependent over time on its resident magnate, the archbishop. In the 1490s the city several times consulted Archbishop Morton about the king’s military demands, but later they sought no such advice.⁷² In some towns, however, the aristocracy did remain central to the mobilization of urban military resources. At Leicester the townsfolk went on mustering before the Hastings earls of Huntingdon, royal stewards of the town, to the end of our period, the earl counting them his ‘assured friends’ when he tried to raise men to relieve Boulogne in 1549.⁷³ At Exeter, John, Lord Russell, from 1550 earl of Bedford, and his son Francis established themselves as the city’s patrons in military matters as in others. Russell was deliberately made a regional magnate by Henry VIII to fill the vacuum left by the ⁶⁶ NRO, PMA 1491–1553, fos. 20, 44, 45, 46v , 57v –58; Virgoe, ‘Recovery of the Howards’, 224–5. ⁶⁷ NRO, PMA 1491–1553, fo. 45. ⁶⁸ NRO, PMA 1510–50, fos. 246v –247, MCB 1534–49, fo. 57. ⁶⁹ Tillott (ed.), VCH York, 61–2; YHB i. 256–7, 260–1, 284–5. ⁷⁰ YCR ii. 47, iv. 87, 100, 103, 123. ⁷¹ YCR v. 154. ⁷² CCA, FA7, fos. 138, 216. ⁷³ Records Leicester, iii. 1–3, 20–1, 58, 60, 63, 84, 86, 92–3; Patterson, ‘Leicester and Lord Huntingdon’, 45–62.

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destruction of Henry Courtenay, marquess of Exeter, in 1538.⁷⁴ At Exeter he certainly stepped into the Courtenays’ shoes. Just as Edward Courtenay, earl of Devon, had praised the city’s loyalty to Henry VII in 1497, so Russell repeatedly lauded its resistance to the rebels of 1549, promising in 1550 that his colleagues on the Privy Council would favour the magistrates’ petitions ‘for that your faithful constancy and defending of the late rebels in those parts from your city’.⁷⁵ Just as the corporation had frequently given gifts to Earl Edward, so Francis was regularly presented with wine and sugar loaves and welcomed as ‘lord president of all the West Countries’ with an elaborate entry on 18 April 1558.⁷⁶ The regional authority of selected noblemen, such as the Russells in Devon and Cornwall, was formalized with their appointment as lords lieutenant from 1550, but urban authorities were often unwilling to submit themselves to it. The problem was not the simple communication of the crown’s demands, as performed for example at Canterbury by the lord lieutenant of Kent.⁷⁷ It was the overriding of the town’s right to muster its own inhabitants, as defended against county muster commissioners by various towns in the 1540s and 1550s.⁷⁸ Norwich was quite prepared to defy not just gentry commissioners but the earl of Sussex, lord lieutenant of Norfolk. When he demanded to know the city’s military strength in 1554, the town council recorded its surprise that ‘there came no commission to this city, being a county of itself, whereby the musters of able men might be taken’.⁷⁹ In emergencies such as the attempt to save Calais in 1558 the government could order commissioners not to spare ‘any liberties or franchises or any city or town a county of itself ’, but in general it respected corporate towns’ rights in such matters and they were written into several new town charters in 1553–6 and confirmed by the Militia Act of 1558.⁸⁰ Noble domination was not to be the means by which townsmen were subjected to the crown’s military needs. Nor were English towns driven into the arms of noble captains by the immediacy of military threats. Coastal towns had to stay on the right side of naval commanders, the Rye authorities condemning a woman to a spell in the cucking stool ‘for scolding with the vice-admiral’ over the loss of one of the town’s ships in 1514.⁸¹ Some corporations sought the favour or counsel of lords who happened to be nearby organizing military ventures, as the mayor of Canterbury rode to William Paulet, Lord St John, at Dover in 1544 ‘for business of the city concerning the setting forth of soldiers’.⁸² York found itself most often in this position, sending substantial gifts to successive royal commanders in the North.⁸³ But none faced the dilemmas of Lille in 1477–93, at one moment paying noblemen sums much larger than any they had given as gifts before 1477 to hand over the town’s castle or to move their plundering troops away, at the next paying them to leave a garrison in the castle to save the town from the French.⁸⁴ ⁷⁴ ⁷⁵ ⁷⁶ ⁷⁷ ⁷⁹ ⁸¹ ⁸⁴

Willen, Russell, 62–81. Cotton and Woollcombe, Gleanings, 54–5; Willen, Russell, 74; HMC Exeter, 22. DRO, ERA 1501–2, 1502–3, 1503–4, 1504–5; EABII, 324; MacCaffrey, Exeter, 208. CCA, FA16, fo. 33v . ⁷⁸ Goring, ‘Military Obligations’, 197–8; APC v. 8. NRO, PMA 1553–85, fo. 3v . ⁸⁰ CSPD 1553–8, no. 681; Tittler, ‘Urban Policy’, 87. Mayhew, Rye, 221. ⁸² CCA, FA13, fo. 275. ⁸³ YCA, CC4, fos. 83–83v . Derville, ‘Pots-de-vin’, 455–60, 466–9.

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The proximity of campaigning in the Netherlands made any noble commander of potential importance to a town. The recipients of Lille’s gifts ranged from the greatest generals, such as Albert of Saxony and Engelbrecht of Nassau, through the captains of notorious forces, such as Maximilian’s guard, to nearby garrison commanders.⁸⁵ Douai’s messengers went to assorted captains in the field and town governors and in 1513–14 it spent heavily on appeasing Hendrik of Nassau, who was angry that it wished to billet only half his troops.⁸⁶ Nobles passing through Haarlem on the way to war in Friesland were regaled with wine, sometimes explicitly in the hope that they would promote the town’s beer exports to the newly conquered province.⁸⁷ But such connections were fleeting. Noblemen who commanded troops raised by towns might develop more substantial links, as we shall see from the relationship between the counts of Buren and ’s-Hertogenbosch. More predictably still, warfare increased the influence held by town captains or governors. At Lille and Saint-Omer it was they, Baudouin de Lannoy-Molembaix and Philippe de Bourgogne-Beveren, who emerged from the turmoil of 1477–92 as the towns’ patrons.⁸⁸ Most powerful and persistent were the bonds between border towns and provincial governors. For Valenciennes in the 1520s and 1530s the key figure was Philippe de Cro¨y-Aarschot, governor both of the town and of Hainaut. His friendship with the town was woven from a series of celebrations such as the triumphant christenings of his daughter and second son in 1525–6, events in which the magistrates took an enthusiastic part.⁸⁹ But military matters were also central. His house in the town was a nodal point in the intelligence system of the Hainaut borders.⁹⁰ Aarschot inspected the town’s defences regularly and ordered work at vulnerable points in 1521 and 1526.⁹¹ When attack threatened in 1528, the council begged him not to leave and offered him the money to garrison Bouchain, situated between Valenciennes and the border, with 500 men.⁹² Aarschot was also an important intermediary between the town and the regent. In April 1528 he rode post-haste to Margaret of Austria for instructions and then returned to gather men for Bouchain; in June 1529 he entertained Margaret at his nearby castle of Qui´evrain and then rode with her into Valenciennes on her way to the peace talks at Cambrai.⁹³ No wonder the town sent messengers to him fifteen times in 1537–9.⁹⁴ In Holland the years of most intensive warfare coincided with the stadholderate of Jan, count of Egmond, from 1483 to 1515. He was important both as a commander—in 1489 and 1491 he was in Leiden when it was attacked and led the town’s defence—and as a military organizer, corresponding with town councils and sometimes issuing general orders such as that for all adult males to arm themselves on the ⁸⁵ Derville, ‘Pots-de-vin’, 454, 457–8, 467–9. ⁸⁶ AMD, CC235, fos. 55v –59r , CC236, fos. 59r –65v, CC243, fos. 64v –73r , CC244, fo. 123. ⁸⁷ Steensel, ‘Giften’, 14. ⁸⁸ Derville, ‘Pots-de-vin’, 460–2, 468–70. ⁸⁹ Macqu´ereau, Chronicque, 145, 173–4. ⁹⁰ Ibid. 126; id., Histoire, 48. ⁹¹ Ibid. 152; Mariage, Fortifications, 70–3. ⁹² Macqu´ereau, Histoire, 65. ⁹³ Ibid. 75–6, 184. ⁹⁴ AMV, CC749, fos. 56r –62v , CC750, fos. 244r –251v .

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news of Philip the Fair’s untimely death.⁹⁵ At meetings of the States, he negotiated with the towns’ representatives not only over taxation, but also over the practicalities of provincial defence.⁹⁶ For Leiden he acted as a patron at court, helping to persuade Maximilian to reduce his tax demands in 1485.⁹⁷ His help was appreciated. Songs glorified his heroism at the conquest of Dordrecht in 1481, the towns collectively presented him with a gift in 1484 and Haarlem and Leiden regularly gave him wine.⁹⁸ His successors did not evoke the same enthusiasm. Antoine de Lalaing-Hoogstraten in particular was accused of wasting Holland’s time and money in the wars of the 1520s—at one stage he was reduced to admitting to the town deputies assembled in the States that he knew some of them did not want him as stadholder—and his successors seem to have neglected the province.⁹⁹ Haarlem, unsurprisingly, did not establish close relations with any stadholder after Egmond.¹⁰⁰ It seems clear that Holland’s comparatively peaceful state after the 1520s weakened the towns’ dependence on the governor compared with that of towns in areas still threatened by the French.¹⁰¹ Even lords who were not active captains could make themselves useful to towns at war, speaking up at court for the softening of a tax demand, the protection of a trading interest, the virtues of a fortification scheme, or pardon for rejecting a garrison.¹⁰² But we should not think that war simply enabled an alien noble clique to interpose themselves between townsmen and the prince. Bureaucrats too did well out of war: at Middelburg gifts to captains in the wars against the Flemings were matched by those to the chancellor, the treasurer of war, and even the dean of Meissen and ‘doctor with the beard’ who intervened to halve Albert of Saxony’s demands on the town.¹⁰³ Many town elites were in any case increasingly entangled with the rural nobility, through intermarriage, through oligarchs’ purchase of fiefs and appointment to princely office in the surrounding countryside, through noble appointment to urban judicial offices and investment in urban public debt.¹⁰⁴ When those most engaged in this process became important brokers between town and prince—as when Jan van Vladeracken, lord of Geffen and thirteen times a schepen of ’s-Hertogenbosch, persuaded the town to submit to Margaret of Austria in 1525 and was then named first president of the reformed schepenbank —what was in train was the consolidation of a provincial elite ⁹⁵ Blok, Hollandsche stad, 87, 89–90; Ward, ‘Letters’, 134; id., ‘Cities and States’, 224; NA, GRk340, fo. 222v . ⁹⁶ Kokken, Steden en Staten, 135, 198–9, 243–4; Ward, ‘Cities and States’, 40–1, 65. ⁹⁷ Ibid. 222–3. ⁹⁸ Gent, ‘Pertijelicke saken’, 423–4; Smit, Vorst en onderdaan, 338; Steensel, ‘Giften’, 8, 10; GAL, SAI/585, fo. 33v . ⁹⁹ Tracy, Holland, 76–89, 102–3, 159–71, 187. ¹⁰⁰ Steensel, ‘Giften’, 20. ¹⁰¹ Ibid. 187–99; Steensel, ‘Giften’, 22. ¹⁰² Derville, ‘Pots-de-vin’, 456–7; Hirschauer, Artois, i. 63, 76; Macqu´ereau, Histoire, 175; Gorter-Van Royen, Maria van Hongarije, 256; Morreau, Bolwerk der Nederlanden, 53–7; Molius, Kroniek, 305–7. ¹⁰³ Ibid. 456–7; ‘Stadsrekeningen Middelburg ii’, 81–5, 123, 146, 151. ¹⁰⁴ Steensel, ‘Giften’, 7 n.; SSH, OA1496; Schuttelaars, Heren van de raad, 252, 270–2; Dijck, Bossche optimaten, 186; Derville, ‘Pots-de-vin’, 457, 464 n., 466, 469; Wouters, ‘Verwantschap’, 35–6, 48–50; Platelle (ed.), Valenciennes, 80–2; Rouche (ed.), Douai, 330–1; Derycke, ‘Public Annuity Market’, 171–3; Tracy, Financial Revolution, 250.

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to which urban dynasties made their own contribution.¹⁰⁵ War in the Netherlands, then, built noble brokerage into the negotiations between town and state more powerfully than in England, but in changing forms, with geographical variations, and by no means to the exclusion of other dynamics of change.

R E P R E S E N TAT I V E I N S T I T U T I O N S The English parliament provided an important forum in which towns could pursue their interests. This was particularly the case for larger boroughs such as Canterbury, Exeter, Hull, Norwich, and York, which felt able to resist the pressure to elect neighbouring gentry or the clients of great noblemen to their seats and instead sent members of the civic elite to Westminster.¹⁰⁶ Towns like Salisbury or Rye compromised under pressure from noble patrons or royal officials, in their case Protector Somerset and the lord warden of the Cinque Ports, choosing a mixture of such men’s nominees and their own magistrates.¹⁰⁷ This was still far preferable to the situation of a town such as Beverley, which received no summons to parliament in our period, though perhaps a hundred smaller and poorer towns did.¹⁰⁸ Where parliament’s tax-granting functions were concerned, borough members could negotiate collectively over the form and intensity of levies. They did so more effectively earlier in the period, when parliament placed substantial checks on royal fiscal ambition, than towards the end, when taxation not only rose in real terms but also bit more heavily into urban than rural wealth.¹⁰⁹ While the nature and rate of taxation was fixed in parliament, the actual amounts payable by urban populations were settled by local commissioners, displacing part of the process of negotiation into local forums. While smaller towns were assessed by local gentry, those enjoying county status and other large towns generally had their own commissions. This left the civic elite assessing one another, a factor that helps to explain why the subsidy assessments of the rich matched other valuations of their wealth less well than did those of the poor; but before Elizabeth’s reign the combination of external supervision, mutual suspicion, the binding power of the assessor’s oath to return true valuations, and general commitment to (or fear of ) the king kept the parliamentary subsidy remarkably effective by contemporary standards in tapping the wealth of English towns.¹¹⁰ In meeting the priorities of individual towns, the legislative opportunities afforded by each session of parliament—evident in the instructions and draft bills with which many of our towns equipped their MPs—were more important than their ability to influence taxation levels. Many efforts failed, but York managed between 1532 and 1547 to ban the fish-weirs that obstructed its river trade, annul a royal grant to Hull that limited York merchants’ business there, secure a monopoly of coverlet-making ¹⁰⁵ ¹⁰⁶ ¹⁰⁷ ¹⁰⁹ ¹¹⁰

Schuttelaars, Heren van de raad, 98. Bindoff, Commons, i. 70, 115, 152–3, 245, 253. Ibid. i. 231, 260–1. ¹⁰⁸ Hasler, Commons, i. 285. Schofield, Taxation, 15–19; Hoyle, ‘Taxation’, 649–74. Ibid. 93–8, 207–18.

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in Yorkshire, dissolve various chantries and small parish churches to the benefit of civic finances and secure inclusion in a statute empowering corporations to redevelop vacant properties. Exeter obtained one act to help clear the River Exe and another extending the city’s jurisdictional liberty. Rye secured an act to preserve its harbour, Norwich several to assist its textile industries, and Canterbury one clarifying its charter; Hull modified one act to protect its fishmongers and got another enabling it to charge higher duties on fish sales to pay for its fortifications.¹¹¹ Equally useful was the chance for town representatives to lobby the king and his ministers for other measures in their favour while they were in London for parliamentary sessions. York’s MPs in 1523 secured a monopoly on Yorkshire wool exports with the help of Cardinal Wolsey and in 1548–9 petitioned Protector Somerset about the city’s relationship with the Council in the North and other matters.¹¹² Exeter’s conducted negotiations for a new charter increasing the powers of their magistrates in 1523, 1529, and 1534 and finally got it in 1535, having secured the assistance of Thomas Cromwell.¹¹³ They were also expected to negotiate with other towns’ MPs about Exeter’s trading relations with them.¹¹⁴ The frequency of parliamentary meetings in this period was not of course wholly due to war, as from 1529 sessions were needed to legislate on issues of religion and succession; but granting war taxation remained a major task of parliament, and in that sense the crown’s wartime needs enabled towns to secure their interests through parliament both by formal and informal means. For all the structural differences, some of the same principles applied in the Netherlands. War increased towns’ opportunity to voice their opinions in the States, for they met more intensively in wartime.¹¹⁵ Town deputations generally included one or more magistrates and their pensionary, those best equipped to express the town’s interests and to deal in the legal terms increasingly dear to those in central government.¹¹⁶ In addition to the formal proceedings, meetings might give them the opportunity to petition the prince or regent, lobby their courtiers, or pursue other business for the town, such as suits in central or provincial courts.¹¹⁷ Leiden made all this easier for its deputies by retaining large lodgings for them at The Hague from 1530.¹¹⁸ From the 1510s, the States of Artois took to sending deputations to court after every formal meeting to petition the prince or regent with the help of such patrons as the ¹¹¹ Bindoff, Commons, i. 71, 115, 153, 245–6, 261; Hoyle, ‘Urban Decay’, 98–103; Palliser, York, 48, 51, 58, 210, 215, 218, 240; MacCaffrey, Exeter, 225–7; Mayhew, Rye, 53–4. ¹¹² Hoyle, ‘Urban Decay’, 95; YCR v. 1–2, 7–10. ¹¹³ Youings, Early Tudor Exeter, 13–18. ¹¹⁴ MacCaffrey, Exeter, 226. ¹¹⁵ Koenigsberger, Monarchies, 86–7; Kokken, Steden en Staten, 129–30; Koopmans, Staten van Holland, 283; Blockmans, Volksvertegenwoordiging, 197–202. ¹¹⁶ Schuttelaars, Heren van de raad, 119–28, 264–9; Augustyn, ‘Staten van Brabant’, 104–5; Kokken, Steden en Staten, 156–91; Ward, ‘Cities and States’, 88–96; Koopmans, Staten van Holland, 247–72; Blockmans, Volksvertegenwoordiging, 569–83. ¹¹⁷ Smit, Vorst en onderdaan, 43, 232, 235, 248–51; Ward, ‘Cities and States’, 41, 64–6, 76, 86, 117–18, 271–2, 290; GAL, SAI/585, fo. 26, SAI/594, fos. 31–3, 47; NHA, SAHI/394, fos. 59v –60r , 62r , I/395, fos. 67–84, I/396, fos. 34–49, I/397, fos. 45–63; Hirschauer, Artois, i. 47, 54; Kuijer, ’s-Hertogenbosch, 301, 311; SSH, OA3800; SAD, SA2/151. ¹¹⁸ Blok, Hollandsche stad, 26–7.

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provincial governor and the bishop of Arras, from 1538 the influential Granvelle; in some cases these secured drastic concessions, amounting in 1544 to the cancellation of the taxes they had just granted.¹¹⁹ Such deals were commonplace because detailed discussion of government proposals was usually devolved from the States-General to provincial States and often to individual towns. In Brabant all fiscal decisions were referred back to the four great towns, while Holland towns gave their deputies such tight mandates that they regularly returned home to discuss matters with the magistrates, a process that continued until the last one or two of the six voting towns could be persuaded to concur with the majority.¹²⁰ These procedures gave intermediaries between prince and town a greater role than in England; often provincial governors or other high nobles, as we shall see in examining the counts of Buren and Roeulx, but at times other officials, courtiers, or provincial councillors.¹²¹ Town delegations might feel under pressure at Brussels, where Hendrik of Nassau in November 1516 forcefully told the two Leiden deputies in a side room of his palace that Dordrecht and Delft had already consented to the proposed tax, so they should do the same.¹²² On the other hand magistrates cannot have liked being watched by representatives of the prince, whom they wished to convince of their orderly rule, while they were thwarted by popular opposition, as happened at ’s-Hertogenbosch in 1522 and 1556.¹²³ Often it was best to ease matters by gifts to the prince’s commissioners, explicitly tied to tax negotiations or, from about 1510, absorbed into general relationships between towns and their patrons, whether noblemen or bureaucrats.¹²⁴ States collectively did the same, those of Holland discussing quite cheerfully the benefits of ‘corrupting the great lords’.¹²⁵ Sometimes, as in the defeat of a proposed tax on Holland’s grain exports, they achieved demonstrable success by this route, though on other occasions they got no more for their money than a laconic explanation of failure like Hoogstraten’s in 1528: ‘the court is like an eel’.¹²⁶ The weaker legislative role of States in the Netherlands made them a less direct vehicle than parliament in England for towns to promote their economic interests, but this was counterbalanced by the strong tradition in some provinces that the towns met in the States to discuss matters of mutual concern.¹²⁷ The Holland towns used their States to debate with one another and with central government such matters as the supply of alum for the cloth industry, the suppression of rural manufacturing, the state of brewing, fishing, drapery, drainage, the grain trade, and the coinage.¹²⁸ The States-General of 1557 produced a memorandum touching on alum and usury ¹¹⁹ Hirschauer, Artois, i. 80–2. ¹²⁰ Kokken, Steden en Staten, 192–6, 218; Tracy, Holland, 82; Koopmans, Staten van Holland, 90; Ward, ‘Cities and States’, 119–20. ¹²¹ Hirschauer, Artois, ii. 41–57; Kokken, Steden en Staten, 218; Tracy, Holland, 76–87, 98–100; Henne, Histoire, iii. 272–3; Verhofstad, Regering, 96, 153–60. ¹²² Ward, ‘Cities and States’, 64–6. ¹²³ Verhofstad, Regering, 73–4, 93–104, 117; Schuttelaars, Heren van de raad, 198–200. ¹²⁴ Hirschauer, Artois, i. 63, 76 n. ¹²⁵ Tracy, Holland 50, 100, 102–5, 185–6, 251. ¹²⁶ Ibid. 99. ¹²⁷ Blockmans, Volksvertegenwoordiging, 436–552. ¹²⁸ Kokken, Steden en Staten, 257–64; Ward, ‘Cities and States’, 264–78; Tracy, Holland, 61–2, 81, 90–105; Koopmans, Staten van Holland, 73–5, 81–5.

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as well as piracy, tolls, and other obstacles to trade.¹²⁹ Towns also used their consent to tax grants to secure specific benefits, such as the release of arrested citizens.¹³⁰ More general conditions, such as exemption from lodging soldiers or earmarking of tax revenues for local garrisons, were harder to enforce.¹³¹ When Holland towns tried to do so, for example by deliberately withholding part of their tax payments to spend on local defence in 1511–13, the result was an inconclusive mess of lawsuits and repeated detentions of magistrates.¹³² Towns’ interests might need to be protected against other towns and here the structure of the States advantaged some over others. In the States of Walloon Flanders, Douai was overshadowed by Lille, whereas Valenciennes made deft use of its constitutionally anomalous status to bargain separately from the States of Hainaut.¹³³ In Holland, the six great towns steadily reduced the role taken in the States by their smaller neighbours in the decades after 1477.¹³⁴ There and in Brabant towns wrangled constantly over the funding of defence, Haarlem, Leiden, Delft, and ’s-Hertogenbosch claiming to be over-taxed or under-protected. In practice towns made less headway by arguing with each other than by trading their consent to taxation for grati¨en in negotiation with the central authorities, a market in which, as the secretary of Amsterdam complained in 1531, ‘each town looks after itself without thought for the welfare of the land’.¹³⁵ Taxation was a primary concern of the States as of parliament. Towns such as those in Holland pursued complex agendas, seeking consensus and the good of the province as a whole, while each defending their own interests and those of urban society in general as they offloaded taxation onto the countryside.¹³⁶ When it came to it they would, as Leiden’s magistrates graphically put it in 1513, ‘bite into the sour apple’ and pay for their defence, but they wanted value for money.¹³⁷ All in all the Holland towns were successful in using their tax-granting powers to advance projects in the province’s, rather than the dynasty’s, strategic interest. The years of heaviest taxation before the 1550s—1513, 1522–3, 1528, 1543—were not those of the great campaigns against the Valois, but those of the Delfshaven mutiny, with its threat to throttle Holland’s seaborne trade, and the conquest of Friesland, Utrecht, and Guelders; and while the 1550s brought swingeing taxation to Holland as to most other provinces, it was levied and administered in forms dictated by the towns in the States.¹³⁸ By the 1540s, moreover, Holland and Zeeland had managed to reduce the proportion of all taxation they paid in the Netherlands from the heavy 25.4 per cent ¹²⁹ Verhofstad, Regering, 125–6. ¹³⁰ Kokken, Steden en Staten, 154–6. ¹³¹ Hirschauer, Artois, i. 72–4. ¹³² Ward, ‘Cities and States’, 283–99. ¹³³ DuPlessis, Lille, 47–8; D´enombrements Hainaut, 100–1. ¹³⁴ Kokken, Steden en Staten, 111–20; Ward, ‘Cities and States’, 68–9, 101–9. ¹³⁵ Ibid. 223–5; Ward, ‘Cities and States’, 145–8, 150–5, 159–62, 195–209, 233; Tracy, Holland, 53–4, 105–14; id., ‘Taxation System’, 73, 78–80; Kuijer, ’s-Hertogenbosch, 284, 291; Koenigsberger, Monarchies, 113. ¹³⁶ Ibid. 153–5, 210–11, 217–25; Ward, ‘Cities and States’, 59–61, 66–9, 227–30; Tracy, Holland, 33–63, 135–8, 259. ¹³⁷ Ward, ‘Cities and States’, 263–4. ¹³⁸ Ibid. 150, 155, 236–8; Tracy, Holland, 74–89, 115–24; Tracy, ‘Taxation System’, 91–6, 108–9.

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of 1473 and startling 41 per cent of 1497 to 17.8 per cent, throwing off their role as milch-cow of the Burgundian state.¹³⁹ Towns might bend strategy to their needs more precisely still if the States themselves managed the war effort. In Flanders, 1477–92 marked a highpoint in the States’ autonomy in raising, mustering, and paying troops, whether to resist Habsburg power or defend it against the French.¹⁴⁰ In Holland the 1480s saw deputies from the States accompany armies in the field, armed with unusually full mandates by town magistrates conscious of the exigencies of war. They hired, mustered, and paid soldiers and bought supplies, while other delegates handled war funds or audited accounts.¹⁴¹ In the 1510s and 1520s they again audited war accounts, checked muster rolls, organized billeting and even went behind the back of their stadholder Hoogstraten in 1528 to persuade other members of the Council of State to dismiss his ineffectual deputy.¹⁴² Such arrangements gave the leading towns the responsibility they desired for the defence of their own quarters of the county, without inhibiting coordinated defence or proactive campaigning.¹⁴³ In naval matters the States of Flanders and Holland were more vigorous still.¹⁴⁴ Provincial States provided one framework for collaborative urban military enterprise, but there were others. Pairs of towns within a province might agree to fund particular campaigns.¹⁴⁵ Towns from different provinces might cooperate, with the blessing of the central authorities, to set up campaigns that met their mutual interests. Antwerp, ’s-Hertogenbosch, and the Holland towns did so to eliminate the threat from Poederoijen in 1507–8, ’s-Hertogenbosch sending repeated deputations of magistrates to The Hague, to meetings elsewhere in Holland, and to the camp of Rudolf of Anhalt to deliver money and discuss progress.¹⁴⁶ In 1528 they combined again to put an army of nearly 12,000 men in the field, dictating where it was to operate and sending commissioners to accompany its commander Floris van EgmondBuren; they failed to take Tiel but helped to win the favourable treaty of Gorinchem.¹⁴⁷ Such ventures did not evade supervision and financial auditing by central government, but they gave towns much greater purchase over strategy than they normally enjoyed.¹⁴⁸ When central power was weak, an entire war effort might be designed and managed by States in combination. In February 1477 the States-General agreed quotas for the different provinces to raise an army of 34,000 men and laid down detailed ¹³⁹ Maddens, Beden, 7–11; Blockmans, ‘Low Countries’, 302–5. ¹⁴⁰ Blockmans, Volksvertegenwoordiging, 447–50. ¹⁴¹ Kokken, Steden en Staten, 196–9, 236–44. ¹⁴² Ward, ‘Cities and States’, 126–33; Tracy, Holland, 85, 88–9. ¹⁴³ Blok, Hollandsche stad, 127–8; Ward, ‘Cities and States’, 37–9, 229, 234–43, 262. ¹⁴⁴ Sicking, Zeemacht, 83–5, 109–10, 114–17, 144–5, 149–51; Kokken, Steden en Staten, 233–4. ¹⁴⁵ Os, Kroniek, 325; SAA, Pk1559/60; Ward, ‘Cities and States’, 150–2, 239–40. ¹⁴⁶ Kuijer, ’s-Hertogenbosch, 280–1; Ward, ‘Cities and States’, 223–5; Inventaris ’s-Hertogenbosch, 114–15, 120, 129–33; SSH, OA3800. ¹⁴⁷ Ibid. 289; Tracy, Holland, 86; NA, ASH61; SAA, Pk1559/4; Inventaris ’s-Hertogenbosch, 428–9, 436–50. ¹⁴⁸ SAA, Pk1559/4; ADN, B3534/125691.

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regulations for its conduct. Quite how far these plans were carried out is hard to say, but the States of Holland, Zeeland, and Flanders did manage to set out a large fleet to defend trade and fishing against the French.¹⁴⁹ The price of the deputies’ defence of the Burgundian inheritance was the guarantee of their liberties, above all urban liberties, in the Grand Privil`ege. Thereafter princes took the initiative in the war effort and it became dangerous for towns to attempt too much. In 1508 Leiden’s deputies to the States-General were arrested and its magistrates investigated for l`ese-majest´e when it tried to call together representatives from other towns to discuss opposing the regent’s tax demands.¹⁵⁰ In the paralysis of 1557, however, the States-General showed themselves again prepared to bid for control. As campaigns had grown larger and less susceptible to local management, the States’ efforts had gone into the construction of their own financial machinery. These arrangements brought urban deputies—the same people who voted the taxes—into power over their levying and to some extent their expenditure. The trend has been most fully studied in Holland, but seems to have happened in most of the larger provinces. Among Arras’s nominees to Artois’s body of d´eput´es g´en´eraux overseeing tax levies in the province in 1542–3, for example, was the chronicler Jean Thieulaine, who by 1554 thought it a sign of ‘great liberality’ in the States to grant any taxes at all, given the ravaged state of the province.¹⁵¹ Such men were being built into the fiscal-military machinery of the Habsburg state, but once there they injected the perspective of the urban elites into war planning. In 1557–9, licensed by the government’s gamble of treating the entire States-General as a single decision-making body rather than as a means to initiate discussion with the separate provincial States, they demanded native troops and trusted commanders. They attempted to set a budget for the war, though the naval part, prepared by the Holland deputies with their recent experience of devolved maritime enterprise, was more credible than that for the army. They extended to the scale of the whole Netherlands the principle that taxes granted by the States, and debts secured upon them, should be administered by the States’ own officials, though their machinery proved insufficient to the task. Granvelle surely exaggerated when he saw in their action a conspiracy by grasping merchants, egged on by ambitious nobles, to take control of government from the king.¹⁵² But it did amount to the refashioning of the prince’s war and the means to fight it along lines designed by the towns, not quite the outcome princes would have hoped for from the development of increasingly effective channels of communication and negotiation between princely and urban interests. ¹⁴⁹ Koenigsberger, Monarchies, 51–2; Arnould, ‘Lendemains de Nancy’, 19; Jongkees, ‘Groot Privilegie’, 167–8; Kokken, Steden en Staten, 53–6; Jongkees, ‘Armement et action’, 302–18. ¹⁵⁰ Ward, ‘Cities and States’, 41–6. ¹⁵¹ Hirschauer, Artois, ii. 141; Thieulaine, ‘Extraits’, 176. ¹⁵² Koenigsberger, Monarchies, 184–92, 199–200; Verhofstad, Regering, 67–70, 108–82.

8 War, Towns, and the State War undoubtedly accelerated the communication between central governments and urban authorities in both England and the Netherlands. This was not merely a matter of orders sent down from above, but also of communication from below, whether the provision of intelligence or pleas for help. These developing structures of communication were more informal in England than in the Netherlands, not least because there was less direct confrontation between the interests of towns and princes. War was not the sole cause of such intensification, yet in England the wars of the 1540s do seem to have raised the frequency of communication to a new level which was also exploited by central authority to pursue closer direction of urban policy in other matters. Habsburg provincial governors and their English equivalents tried to insert themselves as intermediaries between towns and central governments, but their success varied. In England noble intermediaries between town and centre steadily lost influence as many towns entered into increasingly direct negotiation with king and Privy Council over military demands. Even when the provincial responsibilities of selected noblemen were consolidated by their appointment as lords lieutenants, towns were often reluctant to accept their authority, though some continued to see the benefits of a noble military patron. In the Netherlands, provincial governors kept a more clearly defined authority over towns throughout the period, but it was far more frequently exercised in military matters when towns were near the frontiers than when they were far from the strains of war. In some areas of England provincial councils took over part of the supervision of towns that had been conducted by locally dominant noblemen, but at times towns, central authorities, and local commanders all found it easier to bypass these mechanisms. In the Netherlands, the livelier provincial councils such as the Council of Holland remained active in supervising towns’ military preparations for much of the period, yet complex changes were at work. On the one hand, the Holland towns steadily colonized the council to create a self-confident organ of provincial government attentive to their needs as well as those of the prince; on the other, the prince and central institutions sought to reduce the council to a more judicial and less political role. In the Netherlands the States of Flanders, Brabant, and Holland-Zeeland evolved through negotiating and administering wartime taxation and funded debt, even at times managing military enterprises in collaboration with local noble commanders, into an effective means to express urban interests. Here war produced a consolidation of political and administrative power at the level of provincial rather than central government, a level at which the terms of negotiation between subjects and prince were rather different from what they were at the centre. When opportunity presented itself,

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as in 1477 or 1557, towns tried to use the States-General to take overall charge of key aspects of war policy in the same way, but they never succeeded in doing so for long. In contrast the English parliament, while effective in expressing some urban interests, gave towns little opportunity to direct policy. These various means of communication were used to mobilize rather different kinds of urban resources in the two polities. English towns regularly raised and equipped men to fight in the king’s armies and took care to send competent soldiers, though the proportion of their adult male population each contingent represented varied widely and towns took steps to limit their commitments. Some towns in the Netherlands, notably ’s-Hertogenbosch on the border with the aggressive duchy of Guelders, likewise sent their citizens out to fight in large numbers, proportionately larger than in England, though most towns used militias less often after the civil wars of 1477–92. Though most town governments in England did not directly provide ships for wartime service, they were a conduit for appeals to individuals to join in the lucrative privateering trade, while on the coasts and rivers of the Netherlands towns acting alone or through the States often managed fisheries or trade protection or more aggressive campaigns. The larger field armies of the 1540s and 1550s brought demands for carts and carters in both polities, but only in the Netherlands the kind of thoroughgoing subjection to temporary military government imposed on frontier towns nominated as staples to supply the Habsburgs’ armies. Urban poor relief and food supply systems too were placed under more pressure in the Netherlands, beset with refugees and disbanded or mutinous troops. Relations with garrison troops were a much more telling concern than in England. Fortification with bastions in brick and stone, sometimes from the 1530s in the latest trace italienne style, was attempted by many towns in the Netherlands at the cost of large debts or heavy taxes, but with the compensation of increased powers of compulsory purchase, suburban clearance, and enforced labour by their rural neighbours. Safe from the threat of major sieges, no English towns tried such ambitious schemes, but many inland towns kept their medieval walls in repair and some on the coasts added bulwarks or artillery platforms in earth and timber, costly in proportion to the smaller annual budgets of English towns. All towns were expected to tighten their watch arrangements at times of danger and often to contribute to national systems of warning beacons or to keep prisoners of war. The need to keep up with developments in gunpowder weapons was felt everywhere in the rise of town stocks of guns and powder and the employment of town gunners, though control of large cannon seems to have been centralized earlier in England than in the Netherlands. Though townsmen’s cash contributions to central war funds were levied through standardized national taxation in England but drafts on excises or other taxes controlled by town councils in the Netherlands, towns everywhere devised forms of local taxation to enable themselves to meet their military obligations in men or fortifications. The recognition of such efforts by central government enabled towns to increase their economic and judicial privileges, provided they cooperated in meeting the demands of war. Urban elites in both polities all too often loaded the burden of war taxation onto the poor, but in England, with its stronger central government and smaller towns, they did not also succeed in increasing the relative burden on the

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countryside as in the Netherlands; rather the opposite, as over-taxation contributed to an urban crisis by the mid-sixteenth century. Everywhere the things local taxes bought—gatehouses, guns, uniforms—were garnished with town arms and badges, as towns marked out their contribution to the prince’s wars and their own self-defence. Urban communities and the power of their magistrates over them might thus be consolidated at the same time as the prince’s ability to deploy urban resources for war. Sometimes wartime conditions could likewise strengthen town councillors’ hands in the triangular interplay between towns, princes, and the local nobility, or in their aspirations to subject the surrounding rural population more effectively to their control. War played a more direct part in the rise and fall of urban economies in the Netherlands than in England, though changes in long-distance trade and the rise of rural industry posed threats to urban prosperity on both sides of the North Sea as great as those brought by war. Towns in the Netherlands were in many ways more independent than their English equivalents. They negotiated directly with their prince’s enemies and hired mercenary troops on their own account in a way English towns would never have done. Yet in some respects war brought them more directly under princely tutelage, most evidently in the constrictions placed on their financial freedom of manœuvre in the aftermath of the wars of 1477–92. Towns driven into rebellion by mounting tax pressure saw their constitutions deliberately remodelled in a way that consolidated the power of a plutocratic oligarchy. In England too, holding musters or enforcing drafts for service and labour on fortifications strengthened magistrates’ control over the wider urban population and contributed to the consolidation of oligarchy. Yet in England that consolidation was convenient for central government as much because of concerns about social unrest or urban economic decay as to secure military cooperation. In the internal governance of towns as in their relationships with noblemen, provincial institutions, and the monarch and his ministers, war played a key role in shaping the structures of the developing state, but it was one greatly shaped by differing circumstances economic, strategic, constitutional, and political.

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9 Introduction Noble power is a central issue for understanding the development of early modern states. Was it an obstacle to state formation which had to be overcome through confrontation between king and over-mighty subjects? Was it a necessary support for primitive state power which could be dispensed with once more modern means and more specialized agents of rule were found? Or was it a means to extend princely control through judicious management of noblemen and their own clientage networks? War was fundamental to the relationship between king and nobility in any of these analyses. The degree of noblemen’s independent military power determined their capacity to resist princely coercion. The degree to which noblemen were essential to the military functioning of early-modern regimes determined how far they were or might be replaced by military bureaucrats and low-born professional soldiers. The ability of noblemen to increase their own power through service to the prince in war was fundamental to the exchange of benefits between ruler and aristocrat, all the more so as war remained important to the self-image of noblemen and of the nobility as a caste. Contemporaries thought that noblemen liked war: the English ambassadors in the Netherlands reported in July 1521 that the nobles were preparing for war against France with as much joy as they would go to a wedding.¹ Statistics suggest that they were heavily committed to it: in 1513 only one of the thirty-four fit adult English peers was not fighting the French or Scots or serving at sea.² But how did war manifest and modify their power, wealth, and prestige?

T H E A N ATO M Y O F N O B L E P OW E R Noblemen played a central part in the government of England and the Netherlands both through the formal offices they held and through the exercise of their private power.³ In both societies the nobility formed a pyramid. Twenty or fewer great families at the top held extensive landholdings—worth some £1,000–£6,000 a year in England and comparable sums in the Netherlands—and senior titles as counts, earls,

¹ LP III. ii. 1419. ² Miller, Henry VIII, 136–7. ³ Except where otherwise indicated, what follows is based on general works such as Miller, Henry VIII ; Bernard (ed.), Tudor Nobility; Heal, Holmes, Gentry; Win, ‘Lesser Nobility’; Uytven, ‘Brabantse adel’; Nierop, Nobility; Cools, Mannen met macht; Baelde, Collaterale raden.

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marquesses, and occasionally dukes or even princes.⁴ This hierarchy was more clearly defined in England than in the Netherlands, where it was Charles V who first created significant numbers of such titles. In England the peerage, who sat among the lords in parliament, numbered around fifty individuals, the majority mere barons rather than the higher ranks. Beneath them came the gentry, some of them as rich and locally powerful as the parliamentary barons, others lords of only one or two estates with incomes taxed at £5 or little more. The Netherlands had no strict equivalent to the parliamentary peerage, though the Knights of the Golden Fleece, the Burgundian order of chivalry, were used as a consultative body at times. Leading nobles might also sit in provincial States. In the Netherlands too these top families were surrounded by a large number of lesser noblemen of much more restricted landed wealth and political influence. In both polities, promotions to the upper ranks depended partly on the recognition of landed wealth but more on the blessing of princely favour and reward for service. Access to the lower end of the gentry or nobility likewise came most effectively though service to the prince, in court, war, or administration, or through success in law or trade. Though noble lifestyles demanded conspicuous expenditure, most noblemen were well able to take advantage of the favourable conditions for landlords provided by sixteenth-century population growth. Both polities saw wide geographical variations in noble wealth and power. English taxation documents suggest that, while the lay peers and gentry combined held about 40 per cent of land by value in most counties, the proportion of this held by peers might be four times greater in some counties than others.⁵ This varying balance of landed wealth affected the balance of local power between great noblemen and gentry. So did the proximity of a military frontier: the far north of England and the English borderlands in Ireland, homes to the Percies, Dacres, and Fitzgeralds, lent themselves to a more militarized and unfettered exercise of noble power than did lowland England. When Henry VIII tried to do without these great lords in the 1530s and 1540s, he threw the government of their provinces into chaos.⁶ Even away from these frontier zones, by and large the greatest magnates dominated counties distant from London: the Stanleys in Lancashire, the Talbots in south Yorkshire and Nottinghamshire, the Courtenays in Devon and Cornwall, the Somersets and Herberts in South Wales. Yet many of these were also great office-holders or royal intimates at court, and even in East Anglia, among rich gentry and with easy access to court and capital, the De Veres, Howards, and Brandons managed to lead local society by a combination of landed influence and power about the king.⁷ While engagement in the central politics of court and royal council varied according to individual ability or inclination, the heads of all these families took significant part in their monarch’s wars against France or Scotland. Thus different noble clienteles were constructed through ⁴ Stone, Crisis, 760; Gegevens betreffende bezit, 15–16. Halving the latter’s gross figures to produce approximate net values brings all except William of Orange within the range of English aristocratic incomes. ⁵ Payling, Political Society, 12; Cornwall, Wealth and Society, 140–7. ⁶ Ellis, Tudor Frontiers. ⁷ Gunn, Government, 42–8.

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different combinations of landed might, hospitality, kinship connections, access to court patronage, military leadership, and influence over local administration. The office of lord lieutenant, introduced only in 1550 to command the county militia and exercise some oversight over local administration, was less important in empowering noble rule than comparable offices in France and the Netherlands. Meanwhile court politics from the 1520s to the 1570s were dangerous enough to bring the permanent or temporary destruction of a number of leading noble houses, just as civil war had done between the 1450s and 1480s. Together with the accidents of heredity and the rise of royal favourites, this generated a recycling of aristocratic wealth sufficient to prevent the concentration of estates into ever fewer hands. Among the new peers from the 1530s were men promoted for bureaucratic or legal rather than courtly or military services to the crown. Though less martial in background or aspiration than their more traditional fellows, their quest for landed wealth and local influence necessarily tied them into the broader mechanisms of noble participation in war. Conventionally, noble power in the Netherlands is depicted as strong in the south and weak in the north. Certainly in urbanized Holland, with its countryside of entrepreneurial peasant farmers, noblemen’s share in landholding was unimpressive, at less than 10 per cent a quarter that of the peasantry and half or a third that of the urban bourgeoisie. Only the lords of Brederode were resident great nobles, many of what noble estates there were belonged to great men based in other provinces, and the native nobility’s representation at court was thin. To the east, in Gelderland, Overijssel, and Utrecht, the nobility were influential in local affairs, but apart from the counts Van den Berg, great lords were few and pursued their interests as much by asserting their jurisdictional independence and relationship with the Holy Roman Empire as by constructive engagement with Brussels.⁸ Further north, in Friesland, Drenthe, and the Ommelanden, noble status was less well-defined, though a rich elite of interconnected jonker families was powerful and remained so whether feuding over local hegemony, fighting Groningen, or first resisting and then accommodating itself to Saxon and Habsburg control.⁹ Contrast this with Artois, Hainaut, and Walloon Flanders, home to the great houses of Cro¨y, Lalaing, and Lannoy. They dominated the Burgundian-Habsburg court, providing respectively ten, five, and seven knights of the Golden Fleece between 1430 and 1520, and many of Charles V’s leading household officers at the outset of his reign. In the provinces they presided over a mass of gentry who dominated village life: Antoine de Cro¨y, favourite of Philip the Good, was said to have 900 knights and esquires sworn to his service, such that he held Artois ‘in his obedience’.¹⁰ Even in the countryside around Lille, one of the seven biggest towns in the Netherlands, noblemen held 67 per cent of fiefs by value in the late fifteenth century and ⁸ Israel, Dutch Republic, 66–9; Marshall, Dutch Gentry, 117–57; Nieuw Nederlandsch Biografisch Woordenboek, viii. 71–84. ⁹ Israel, Dutch Republic, 58–60, 65–6; Faber, Drie eeuwen Friesland, ii. 316–36, 390; Noomen, ‘Friese vetemaatschappij’; Baks, ‘Saksische heerschappij’; Kist, ‘Centraal gezag en Frise vrijheid’; Hartgerink-Koomans, Ewsum. ¹⁰ Boulton, Knights of the Crown, 380; Cools, Mannen met macht, 191–201, 243–7, 249–52; Duke, ‘Loyalty and Treason’, 178–9; Derville, ‘Pots-de-vin’, 463 n.

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urban patricians only 9 per cent.¹¹ Luxembourg combined a similar density of noble settlement and strength of seigneurial authority with pretensions to immediate subjection to the Empire by six comital families.¹² In Franche-Comt´e, where only the conditional loyalty of the great noble houses of Vergy and Chalon-Orange stood between rule by the Habsburgs and conquest by the French, there was noble independent-mindedness sufficient to drive Charles V’s future chancellor Mercurino de Gattinara to resignation as president of the parlement at Dole.¹³ Yet the differences between provinces can too easily be exaggerated and they were in any case reduced by the growth of an inter-provincial aristocracy, beginning under the Burgundians but accelerating under the Habsburgs. Within each province, natural concentration as heirs married heiresses combined with the effects of princely favour to gather noble estates in the hands of a circle of ever greater magnates. In Brabant fifty-five lordships held by different lords in 1415 were in the hands of forty-four men by c.1490 and of thirty-six by c.1565.¹⁴ Meanwhile great lords gained estates in multiple provinces, as princely patronage actively reconstructed the nobility of each province to increase support for central policy. Nor was this cycle broken by political calamity, as in England. In 1477–92 the Habsburgs were not strong enough to do other than pardon those noblemen who opposed them and then submitted; thereafter political turbulence was not so extreme as to threaten the life of any nobleman until the counts of Egmond and Horn were executed in 1568. As in England, some noblemen showed more ambition than others to engage in political life at the centre of government, but they did not risk life and limb in so doing. The result was the creation of a network of intermarried great magnates, usually based in Brabant, but with lands, offices, and influence running northwards into Holland and beyond or southwards into the Walloon provinces. Such were many of the men who served on the Council of State or acted as leading military commanders from the 1520s to the 1540s, the Brabanters Hendrik III of Nassau, Antoine de Lalaing-Hoogstraten, Jan III van Glymes-Bergen, and Philippe de Cro¨y-Aarschot, the Flemings Lodewijk van Vlaanderen-Praat and Jacques III de Luxembourg-Fiennes-Gavere, the Zeeland-based admirals, Adolph and Maximiliaan van Bourgondi¨e-Beveren, lords of Veere, and the Egmond counts of Buren, with titles derived from Gelderland and South Holland but lands and influence in Brabant. Such too were the men who took similar roles in the next generation, William of Orange-Nassau, Jan IV van Glymes-Bergen, and the counts of Egmond and Horn. Though noblemen based in the Walloon provinces remained important—one has only to think of Charles de Lalaing and Charles de Berlaymont in the 1550s—the centre of gravity had clearly shifted since Burgundian times. We know less about how noblemen constructed political followings in the Netherlands than in England. Private resources of land, household, hospitality, and kinship were plainly important, as for the successive generations of lesser noblemen from ¹¹ Cools, ‘Le Prince et la noblesse’, 398. ¹² Petit, ‘Luxembourg’, 69–76. ¹³ Headley, ‘Conflict’; Cools, ‘Nobles comtois’, 167–82. ¹⁴ Uytven, ‘Brabantse adel’, 85–6.

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around Breda who served its Nassau, Chalon, and Orange lords, but so were military command, provincial office-holding, and the ability to act as a broker for princely patronage.¹⁵ The placement of brothers and nephews as bishops and abbots, encouraged by princes who saw in this a means both to reward loyal nobles and to ensure the church’s influence was used in ways congruent with Burgundian-Habsburg policy, was much more important than in England, where prelates of aristocratic origin were increasingly rare.¹⁶ Relations with towns, centres of wealth and power independentminded but vulnerable to the depredations of enemy forces or central government, also loomed larger than in England, and in the chaos after 1477 virtual protection rackets might be established. It has been suggested, on the basis of an examination of William of Orange, that by the 1550s opportunities for the deployment of government patronage in lordly interests were narrowing.¹⁷ A key issue was the latitude given or denied to provincial governors in the exercise of their powers. The Burgundian dukes had often appointed provincial governors and the Habsburgs continued to do so, such that by 1543 there were eleven more or less permanent governorships: Artois, Walloon Flanders, Tournai, Hainaut, Namur, Luxembourg, Limburg and Overmaas, Flanders, Gelderland, and two groups of northerly provinces, Holland, Zeeland, and Utrecht, and Friesland, Drenthe, Groningen, and Overijssel. Only Brabant and Mechelen had no governor. Though their detailed powers varied from province to province, each governor’s primary responsibility was for defence. They oversaw urban government, the administration of justice, and negotiations with the provincial States. They were recruited from the greatest noble houses, Glymes-Bergens, Cro¨ys, Egmond-Burens, Lalaings, Lannoys, Nassaus, and so on.¹⁸ Governors were indispensable agents of Habsburg rule, but there was recurrent concern among the regents and their advisers that they abused their influence to increase their private power to the detriment of princely control, so much so that the abolition of the governorship of Flanders, for example, was contemplated in 1509, 1532, and 1554.¹⁹ Certainly governors struggled to defend and amplify their powers at every turn, while Margaret of Austria and, more successfully, Mary of Hungary strove to contain them. Mary put an end to the transfer of governorships between family members, defined governors’ powers more narrowly, especially over appointments to offices, and aimed to override their military powers by appointing a commander-in-chief to coordinate military effort across provincial boundaries. Her success was thrown into sharp relief by the failure of Margaret of Parma to deal with the renewed self-assertion of the governors after 1559.²⁰ ¹⁵ Nierop, ‘Willem van Oranje’, 671; Delen, Hof, 89–105. ¹⁶ Cools, Mannen met macht, 131–40; Thomson, Early Tudor Church, 48–9, 209–13. ¹⁷ Nierop, ‘Willem van Oranje’, 651–76. ¹⁸ Cools, Mannen met macht, 43–5; Rosenfeld, ‘Provincial Governors’, 16–24; Peteghem, Raad van Vlaanderen, 100–17; id., ‘Gouverneur van Vlaanderen’, 95–110; Tracy, Holland, 74–89, 163–9. ¹⁹ Peteghem, ‘Gouverneur van Vlaanderen’, 101. ²⁰ Rosenfeld, ‘Provincial Governors’, 25–56; Gorter-van Royen, Maria van Hongarije, 166–77, 268–70.

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Noble power thus stood in complex relationship to that of princes. They were interdependent in that princely authority was most effectively exercised by harnessing and, especially in the Netherlands, consolidating the social and political power of great lords.²¹ Chivalric codes of loyal service and reward, expressed most glitteringly in the orders of the Garter and the Golden Fleece, justified such cooperation.²² Yet interdependence did not preclude tension between noblemen, rulers, regents, and ministers. Princes sometimes wished to be served on terms different from those on which noblemen wished to serve them. The advance of princely authority came at times at the expense of noble authority, as in encroachments on private jurisdiction or interventions in disputes between lords and their tenants. Those who served the prince, great clerical ministers like Wolsey and Granvelle or lawyers like those around Henry VII or Mary of Hungary, might stir resentment among those whose position they challenged and perhaps envied.²³ And the very individuality and competitiveness of noble conceptions of honour made it all too easy for skilful princes to divide and rule, even as they built their regimes on loyal and well-rewarded noble service.

PE RC I E S , H OWA R D S , E G M O N D S , A N D C RO Y¨ S We shall examine in detail two noble houses in England and two in the Netherlands, selected, as with our towns, to represent a range of geographical and political experience. Once again we shall use evidence about other noblemen drawn from secondary literature or printed sources to amplify our arguments or investigate themes for which our chosen families are unsuitable. In England we shall concentrate on the Percy earls of Northumberland from the north and the Howard dukes of Norfolk and earls of Surrey from the south; in the Netherlands on the Egmond counts of Buren from the borders of Holland, Brabant, and Guelders and the Cro¨y counts of Roeulx from Hainaut and Artois. The Percies, a Yorkshire knightly family, rose to prominence through the AngloScottish warfare of the fourteenth century, being summoned to parliament as barons from Edward I’s reign and raised to the earldom of Northumberland in 1377.²⁴ The family lost its estates twice in the turbulent politics of the fifteenth century, but restoration always followed and in our period the Percies were among the richest families of the kingdom with an annual income of some £3,000 or £4,000. Besides the Northumberland estates around their great castle at Alnwick, they had concentrations of land and residences in Yorkshire and Cumberland in the north and in Sussex and other southern counties. Henry, the fourth earl (c.1449–89), survived

²¹ Cools, Mannen met macht, 143; Miller, Henry VIII, 257. ²² Rosenfeld, ‘Provincial Governors’, 10–19; Gunn, ‘Chivalry’, 107–28. ²³ Cools, Mannen met macht, 144; Gunn, Government, 14–22, 43–5; Petit, ‘Luxembourg’, 76, 81, 85; Postma, ‘Granvelle, Viglius en de adel’. ²⁴ Key studies of the Percies include Hicks, ‘Dynastic Change’; James, ‘Tudor Magnate’; id., ‘Concept of Order’; Hoyle, ‘Henry Percy’; Bean, Estates.

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the change of dynasty in 1485, probably by holding his troops back from supporting Richard III at Bosworth. Henry VII renewed his appointment as warden of the east and middle Marches towards Scotland, but he was killed by tax rioters in Yorkshire. His son the fifth earl, Henry Algernon (1478–1527), never held such important offices but remained powerful to his death. His son the sixth earl, another Henry (c.1502–37), weakened by illness and in dispute with his brothers, resigned the succession to his estates to the king and died childless. The Percies’ fluctuating fortunes have provoked historical debate. Some have seen them as representative of a nobility too independent-minded to settle easily to serving the Tudors and too powerful to be trusted by kings bent on a closer control of the North. Others have sought the explanation of their difficulties in more personal shortcomings. Whatever their troubles, each earl had served the king in war against the Scots and it was renewed war in 1557 that led Henry’s nephew Thomas to be restored to the earldom and appointed joint warden of the marches. Thomas was to lose his head in 1572 after involvement in the rebellion of 1569, but the Percies live on at Alnwick to the present day. The Howards rose to prominence later and faster than the Percies.²⁵ William Howard established the family among the Norfolk gentry through a successful legal career in the years when the Percies first entered the parliamentary peerage. Only a century and a half later did the Howards join them, when Sir John Howard (d. 1485), an able courtier and captain of Edward IV, was made Lord Howard. In 1483 he backed Edward’s brother Richard in his bid for the throne and was rewarded with the duchy of Norfolk, a title to which he had some claim through his mother’s descent from the Mowbray dukes. At the same time his eldest son Thomas Howard I (1443–1524) was made earl of Surrey. John was killed leading Richard’s vanguard at Bosworth, but Thomas survived to work his way slowly back into favour, first as Henry VII’s lieutenant in the North, then as his lord treasurer, and finally as English commander at the great victory of Flodden in 1513. This won Thomas restoration of the ducal title in 1514, while his eldest son, Thomas Howard II (1473–1554), another promising commander, was made earl of Surrey. Gradually the old Howard and Mowbray lands in Suffolk, Norfolk, Sussex, and elsewhere were recovered and extended until the Howards enjoyed wealth to match their ducal rank, their income approaching £3,000 a year in the 1520s and perhaps double that by the 1550s. When the king’s favourite Charles Brandon, duke of Suffolk, transferred his landed interests to Lincolnshire in the 1530s they were left as indisputably the dominant noble house of Norfolk and Suffolk. New houses at Kenninghall and Mount Surrey outside Norwich marked their power. The younger Thomas served as lieutenant of Ireland in 1520–1, led expeditions against France on land and sea in 1522, and commanded on the northern border in 1523–4 before succeeding his father in 1524. Against the Pilgrimage of Grace in 1536–7, the Scots in 1542, and the French in 1544, he remained one of Henry VIII’s leading generals. He was also an occasional diplomat and prominent councillor, marrying two of his nieces to the king. His son Henry, earl of Surrey (1516–47), ²⁵ Key studies of the Howards include Tucker, Thomas Howard; Vokes, ‘Thomas Howard’; Head, Ebbs and Flows; Sessions, Surrey; Williams, Thomas Howard.

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a brilliant poet, was groomed for a similar career and led the defence of Boulogne in 1545–6, but his hot-headedness ruined the family amidst the desperate politics of Henry VIII’s dying months. Surrey was executed for treason a week before the king’s death and Norfolk was imprisoned until 1553, when Mary released and restored him. He lived long enough to fight an inglorious last action against Wyatt’s rebels in Kent and died in August 1554, being succeeded by his grandson Thomas Howard III (1538–72). The new earl was probably the richest nobleman in England and followed in his ancestors’ footsteps as Elizabeth’s commander against the Scots in 1559–60, a leading councillor and courtier, and the dominant figure in East Anglian politics. Yet he succumbed to similar perils, executed in 1572 after a plot to marry Mary, queen of Scots which threatened Elizabeth’s hold on the throne. His descendants eventually recovered the duchy of Norfolk, but in the mean time other branches of the Howard dynasty were forging political and military careers. Of the numerous sons of Thomas Howard I, Edward became lord admiral but was killed at sea in 1513 and William served as deputy of Calais in 1552–3 and lord admiral in 1553–8, being created Lord Howard of Effingham in 1554, while a younger son of Thomas Howard II, knighted after the battle of Pinkie in 1547, became Viscount Howard of Bindon in 1559. Thus the judge’s descendants entrenched themselves among the English nobility for centuries to come; like the Percies they remain to this day. Though they liked to claim descent from King Bela III of Hungary, the Cro¨y family originated among the traditional lower nobility of the border region of Artois and Picardy.²⁶ The family owed its rapid rise to the amorous relationship between Agnes Cro¨y and the Burgundian duke Philip the Bold. Various Cro¨y courtiers were granted widespread possessions by successive dukes, at first above all in Picardy, Artois, Walloon Flanders, and Hainaut, later in Brabant and other provinces. Crisis struck in 1465, when the young Charles the Bold banished Antoine and Jean de Cro¨y and confiscated their estates until they broke their links with Louis XI of France, but the family slowly recovered the trust of the Burgundian-Habsburg princes. They held fiefs in most provinces of the Netherlands and maintained a particularly widespread patronage network. They also managed to forge marriage alliances with numerous leading families of the Netherlands north and south: Brimeu, Glymes-Bergen, Horn, Lalaing, Luxembourg-Fiennes, and Melun. Inside two generations they produced bishops of Arras, Cambrai, Th´erouanne, and Tournai, an archbishop of Toledo, and a claimant to the see of Li`ege. Maximilian of Austria neither could nor would alienate the Cro¨ys, who in turn backed him in civil war. To their loyalty, some members of the clan added extraordinary talents. Guillaume de Cro¨y-Chi`evres (1458–1521), a younger son of Philippe de Cro¨y-Aarschot (d. 1511), emerged in 1501–6 as a highly skilful president of the regency council which governed the Netherlands in the absences of Philip the Fair and went on to be the leading councillor of Charles V. During Charles’s first journey to Spain in 1517–20, Chi`evres clashed with his first cousin Ferry de Cro¨y-Roeulx (d. 1524). Ferry had been a chamberlain to Philip the Fair, was named a knight of the Golden Fleece in 1505, and led a band of the ²⁶ Key studies of the Cro¨ys include Lejeune, ‘Roeulx’; Cools, Mannen met macht; Born, Les Croy.

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ordonnances from 1507.²⁷ He had become master of Charles’s household as Chi`evres’s prot´eg´e, but the dispute made him leave the court and return to the Netherlands. There he exercised the governorship of Artois, which he had held since 1513 and used together with many other offices to lay the basis of the dominance of his dynasty in the province. The ambition was furthered by his marriage to Lamberte de Brimeu, a daughter of Guy, lord of Humbercourt, one of Charles the Bold’s most powerful courtiers, and by the search for ecclesiastical patronage characteristic of the Cro¨ys. When Ferry died, his eldest son Adrien (c.1492–1553) succeeded him as governor of Artois. Charles V also named him commander of his father’s ordonnance company and in 1530 created him count of Roeulx. Adrien had been at court regularly from his youth, accompanying Charles as chamberlain during his first journey to Spain. Adrien was an intimate of the young emperor and kept Charles’s trust for the whole of his life, becoming great master of the emperor’s household. That trust was reinforced by Adrien’s qualities as a soldier. He led troops from the Netherlands to Charles’s Italian coronation in 1530 and in his expedition against the Turks in 1532. He led the force that broke the Ghent revolt in 1540, then supervised the building of the Ghent citadel and was its first captain. In the same year Charles appointed him governor of Flanders, a distinction he had held in Walloon Flanders since 1532 when he pressed Mary of Hungary to appoint him.²⁸ His three governorships made him answerable for the defence of the whole south-western part of the Netherlands in the wars of 1536–53, a role he carried out with great success. Between bouts of strenuous campaigning, he also sat regularly in the councils of war convened by Mary. In 1552–3, he led the army at the conquest of Hesdin but fell ill and died at the ensuing siege of Th´erouanne. Adrien perpetuated the grip of his family on the south-western provinces, building on the power provided by his estates. Like other nobles in the southern provinces, the Cro¨y-Roeulx exercised considerable judicial prerogatives in their lordships, but these did not include any towns of significant size.²⁹ What influence they did exercise in towns came from their positions as governors or town captains. The clan’s power, extended geographically through the tenure of Adrien’s second cousin Philippe de Cro¨y-Aarschot as governor of Hainaut from 1521 to 1549, was also perpetuated over time. Adrien’s son Jean took over command of his bande d’ordonnance, leading it at Saint-Quentin and Gravelines, and eventually became governor of Flanders in 1572. The Cro¨ys knew well that noble power depended on the ability of individuals to exploit the family’s inherited position effectively in each successive generation. In contrast to the Cro¨ys, the lords of Egmond-Buren were of high noble descent.³⁰ By our period the Egmonds had been one of the leading dynasties of Holland for centuries and since 1423 the senior line had provided the dukes of Guelders. However, Jan III, lord of Egmond (1438–1516), and his brother Frederik, lord of IJsselstein (c.1440–1521), supported the Burgundian-Habsburg cause against their Guelders ²⁷ Rapport Lille, 364. ²⁸ Gorter-van Royen, Maria van Hongarije, 170–6. ²⁹ Lejeune, ‘Roeulx’, 146–9. ³⁰ Key studies of the Egmonds include Cools, Mannen met macht, 202–8; id., ‘Aristocraten in de polder’, 177–81.

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cousins. For this they were amply rewarded with hereditary grants of land, local offices, and leases of princely demesne lands. Maximilian owed to them the end of the disputes between Hoeks and Kabeljauws in Holland, the reinstatement of Bishop David of Burgundy’s authority in the Sticht of Utrecht, and the conquest of great parts of the duchy of Guelders. No wonder they provided four Knights of the Golden Fleece in the decades around 1500. Yet the position of the IJsselstein branch in particular was a delicate one. They were not only relatives of the Egmond dukes of Guelders but also, through Frederik’s marriage to Aleida van Culemborg, landowners within the duchy; it was not clear that their interests in the region were identical with those of the Habsburgs. By the start of the sixteenth century, the Egmonds had become the mightiest noble family in Holland, with two comital titles to prove it: Jan was made count of Egmond in 1486, Frederik count of Buren in 1498. In August 1483, Maximilian had named Jan governor of Holland, Zeeland, and West Friesland, the first Holland nobleman to occupy this position in his native province. He did so to the visible satisfaction of successive Habsburg rulers and remained in post for thirty-two years, longer than any other governor before the coming of the Republic. In the last decade of his life, Jan left much of the practical work of administration to his nephew Floris van EgmondBuren (1469–1539). Though he had been in effect a vice-governor, Floris was not named as Jan’s successor. By way of a consolation prize, Floris was able to keep the (rather notional) governorships of those areas of Guelders and Friesland under Habsburg allegiance, which he had obtained in 1510 and 1515. Floris took on many other functions, both political and military, in a career more high-flying than that of any other Holland noble of his generation. Thus he sat from 1507 in the councils advising successive regents, including periodic councils of war, and often acted as the promoter of Holland’s concerns at central government level. From 1507 he led a bande d’ordonnance.³¹ He campaigned regularly against Guelders and helped negotiate the peace treaties of 1524, 1529, and 1536. He was captaingeneral of the Habsburg army ordered to occupy Friesland in 1515 and in 1523 led the Habsburg contingent in the promising but ultimately futile march across the Somme towards Paris. In his last campaigns in 1536–7 he forced Francis I’s withdrawal from Artois and then captured Saint-Pol. Even more than his father, Floris’s son Maximiliaan (1509–48) made his name as a soldier. Yet while his education was impressive—in 1521 he was able to translate Homer from the Greek to the satisfaction of Erasmus—his military career began unspectacularly, as Mary of Hungary appointed him to unimportant commands.³² He owed his lasting fame to the emperor’s need for troops from the Netherlands for the campaign on the Danube against the Schmalkaldic League in 1546. He marched through Germany with spectacular success, crossing the Rhine at Neuburg, near Mainz, and joining Charles at Ingolstadt in one of the decisive moments of the war. Like his father, Maximiliaan filled only provincial governorships of secondary importance, in Friesland, Drenthe, and Groningen from 1540; though a member of the ³¹ Rapport Lille, 365. ³² Bietenholz and Deutscher (eds.), Contemporaries of Erasmus, i. 423.

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Council of State, he was apparently little engaged in central politics. After a life of hard campaigning and, reputedly, hard drinking, he died young in 1548. From his marriage with Marie de Lannoy he had only one daughter, Anna van Egmond. With her death in 1558 this line of the Egmonds died out, all her possessions passing to her husband William of Orange and to their children. Yet the Egmond family went on providing outstanding soldiers. Lamoraal van Egmond (1522–68), Jan’s grandson, was a second cousin of Maximiliaan. In 1557–8 he won important victories over the French at Saint-Quentin and Gravelines, but Philip II’s gratitude did not extend to sparing him from execution in 1568 when his initially lukewarm reaction to the iconoclasm of 1566 was taken for treason. The most important estates of the Egmond-Buren family lay in the Rivierenland of Holland and Guelders. Among them were a number of seigneurial towns such as IJsselstein, Buren, and Leerdam. IJsselstein was a particular bone of contention as its lords claimed to hold it immediately in fief from the emperor, excluding it from the county of Holland and freeing its inhabitants from Holland’s taxes. Naturally this assertion led to conflicts with the Holland States and these ran out of control. The character of IJsselstein as immediately subject to the empire also raised the prestige of its lords within the noble hierarchy of the Netherlands: they were, for example, allowed to mint their own coins.³³ Their governorships afforded less influence over towns than did those of the Cro¨ys, but as we shall see, they built relations with towns in other ways. Though descended from a more important dynasty than the Cro¨ys, they never managed to dominate an area of the Netherlands as completely as the Cro¨ys did, and they were less versatile, more valued as soldiers than as administrators. Yet just as the contrast between the Percies, long ensconced on their border estates but fluctuating in their relationship with central power, and the Howards, newer-made but entrenched at the heart of government, will tell us much about the wider conditions of English noble power, so the contrasts between the houses of Cro¨y-Roeulx and Egmond-Buren will shed much light on the nobility at war in the Netherlands. ³³ Inventaris Buren, iii. 1416.

10 The Military Resources of the Nobility The roles noblemen played in war and the effects of war on their political position were determined in part by the resources they could contribute to the war effort. They raised troops and supplied weapons and ships, kept up private fortresses and cultivated military entrepreneurs. But how did these contributions differ in England and the Netherlands, and how did they change over time?

R A I S I N G T RO O P S I N E N G L A N D The nobility’s social power was channelled into military service most obviously when they raised and led troops. In later medieval England the king entered into formal written agreements with the nobility—indentures for war—for specific enterprises, be it raising contingents of men or the custody of fortresses. They then retained men to serve under them by similar agreements. By the late fifteenth century, however, the use of such indentures was in terminal decline. The king still relied upon the nobility to mobilize and lead the realm’s military resources, but on changing terms and through changing structures. Like other English noblemen, the Percy earls of Northumberland received letters from the king under the ‘quasi-feudal’ arrangements inherited from the later Middle Ages, ordering them to ready able, armed men ‘of such as be within your rules, authorities or your tenants’.¹ They then wrote to their followers to join them with ‘all such persons as ye may make in their most defensible array’, charging them to come ‘as ye love me, and will answer to the king at your peril’.² This appeal came from the fourth earl, but the Percies continued to employ such direct written requests for soldiers into his grandson’s time. In 1533, for example, the bailiff of Beverley was paid for organizing the delivery of some thirty letters to individual gentlemen and communities, requesting them to attend upon the sixth earl to make raids into Scotland.³ The Percies also raised men by means of the ‘national system’, as commissioners to muster and array the crown’s adult male subjects for defensive service. The fourth earl was named to such commissions in the 1480s and the fifth earl in 1511–14.⁴ The sixth earl’s commission as warden of the east and middle Marches empowered him to muster the inhabitants, as when, in October 1528, he put the inhabitants of ¹ ‘Letters of the Cliffords’, no. 10. ² Plumpton Letters, 32, 33, 35. ³ ACM, C.VI.5b, m. 47. ⁴ CPR 1476–85, 213–14; LP I. i. 804(29), 1365(3), ii. 3408/37.

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Northumberland on an hour’s warning to resist invasion.⁵ These powers transcended the limits of the earls’ private lordship and perhaps compensated for its failings by the 1530s, when the border counties began to join in the periodic musters that characterized the military organization of the rest of the country.⁶ The potential of this means to raise troops was demonstrated during the Pilgrimage of Grace, when the sixth earl’s brother, Sir Thomas Percy, led 10,000 Pilgrims assembled from the North Riding of Yorkshire by rebels using the local system of muster and array.⁷ The earls’ servants provided the backbone of the Percy war retinue. In 1480–1 the men who led it, such as Christopher Curwen and John Pennington, were recipients of fees from the fourth earl, served in his household, or held office on his estates.⁸ In 1523 the fifth earl’s household provided the core of his retinue, mustered at Newcastle to campaign against the Scots, sixty-four men out of 732. Household servants who held office on the estates, such as Robert Leke, keeper of the Great Park at Topcliffe, and Cuthbert Binks, keeper of the park at Leconfield, acted as captains.⁹ Estate officers without household posts too, such as Richard Stevenson and William Procter, the grieves or bailiffs of Topcliffe and Thurstanby, led the tenantry to war.¹⁰ The sixth earl also relied on his household servants, explaining to the king in 1533 how they had led a raid into Scotland.¹¹ Similar patterns revived with the restoration of the seventh earl. On 10 March 1558 he was licensed to retain for life 200 persons besides those who served in his household or who held office on his estates.¹² The earls recruited heavily among their tenants. Some of their gentlemen followers were bound to them by feudal ties, through their honour of Cockermouth and barony of Alnwick.¹³ More numerous were their estate tenantry. The Newcastle muster roll of 1523 was arranged by manors, containing, for example, a list of fifty-three men drawn from ‘my lord’s tenants in Langstrothdale’.¹⁴ In 1533–4 the sixth earl even drew men from his southern estates.¹⁵ The earls could also expect to draw upon the tenants of other lords, both spiritual and temporal, who had appointed them as stewards of their lands. In 1523, 170 of the men mustered were from the earl’s stewardships of Holderness, Kirkbyshire, and Whitby Strand.¹⁶ In the earl’s absence, his estate officers were expected to raise his tenantry.¹⁷ In 1532–3 George Johnson, steward of the barony of Beverley, was paid for calling the earl’s tenants there before him in order that some might be chosen to serve against the Scots.¹⁸ Yet the assumption that tenants owed military service to their landlord was under threat, as lords looked to exploit the economic rather than the military potential of their estates. Lord Dacre seems to have been unique in his insistence that vacant tenements be let to good archers for lower entry fines than other tenants might offer.¹⁹ Surveys of the Percy estates in 1537 suggested in contrast that high entry fines had ⁵ ⁷ ⁹ ¹¹ ¹³ ¹⁵ ¹⁸ ¹⁹

LP VI. 4882. ⁶ PRO, E101/61/33, 549/13; ‘Muster for Northumberland’, 157–206. Hoyle, Pilgrimage, 224–7, 291–2. ⁸ Hicks, ‘Dynastic Change’, 81, 106–7. PRO, E36/226, fos. 123–4. ¹⁰ PRO, E101/531/34, E36/226, fos. 134–7. LP VI. 125; ACM, Grant Book, 178–9, 192. ¹² CPR 1557–8, 306. James, ‘Tudor Magnate’, 68–70. ¹⁴ PRO, E101/531/34 (Langstroth, Yorks). LP VI. 145. ¹⁶ James, ‘Tudor Magnate’, 77. ¹⁷ LP IV. i. 278. ACM, C.VI.5b, m. 47. Ellis, Tudor Frontiers, 100; Hoyle, ‘Ancient and Laudable Custom’, 36–43.

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made their border tenants too poor to fulfil their military obligations.²⁰ The fifth earl had driven fines upwards, introducing the harsher terms of customary tenure from his Cumberland estates to those in Northumberland and Yorkshire, and the sixth earl continued his father’s practice, despite being resident on the borders and hoping to lead his tenantry to war.²¹ Ironically, he probably felt the need to maximize his estate income because of the financial demands of the wardenship. The consequences of this erosion of the traditional link between land tenure and military service were already apparent in 1524, when Northumberland’s tenants refused to serve against the Scots without wages. Lord Dacre pointed out that ‘in times past all the inhabitants of the West Marches were at the warden’s commandment to serve the king; but now it is not so’.²² By 1534–6 the sixth earl was seeking a solution by including an explicit obligation in some of his leases to supply a mounted, armed man when called on by the earl or his officers and making others on favourable terms that may have carried an implicit military obligation.²³ The value of such arrangements was appreciated by the crown, which was still cultivating a militarily able tenantry on the Percy estates in the months before the family’s restoration in 1557.²⁴ What number of men or ‘power’ did these arrangements enable the earls of Northumberland to muster? In 1482 the fourth earl commanded a retinue of 6,700 men and five years later he mustered 4,000 against Lambert Simnel’s rebellion.²⁵ In 1513 the fifth earl accompanied the king to France with 103 demi-lances and 400 footmen; in 1522 his servants assembled a retinue of 559 men to serve under the king’s lieutenant-general, the earl of Shrewsbury.²⁶ The following year the earl’s retinue was 732 strong when it mustered at Newcastle on 21 October; six days later at Alnwick, further Northumberland contingents had swollen it to 876.²⁷ A survey of the military potential of the Percy estates made in the early 1530s suggests that the sixth earl should have been able to call upon 849 horsemen and 1,118 foot from his estates in Northumberland, 2,280 horsemen and 3,953 footmen in Yorkshire, and 1,030 horsemen and 2,011 footmen in Cumberland.²⁸ No numbers are available for the size of the war retinues he actually raised, but the fact that he drew men from his southern estates to serve on the borders was ominous. The decline in the Percies’ military strength in the sixty years after 1477 suggests that they were not exploiting their estates to their full military potential. At first the Howards, too, principally employed the manpower resources of their own household and estates to raise men for war. When John, Lord Howard, indented with Edward IV in 1481 to raise a force of 1,210 men to keep the seas during the Scottish campaign, members of his household and tenantry were prominent. John Williams, for example, with whom Howard indented to contribute forty men to the force, had accompanied him into exile with Edward IV in 1471.²⁹ In 1484, when ²⁰ ²³ ²⁴ ²⁵ ²⁶ ²⁷ ²⁸

Bush, ‘Far North’, 57. ²¹ Bean, Estates, 51–67. ²² LP IV. i. 278. ACM, Grant Book, 45, 86, 205; PRO, E314/55/1–7d. PRO, E314/55/1d; CPR 1555–7, 485–6. Hicks, ‘Dynastic Change’, 102; Bennett, Lambert Simnel, 79. Miller, Henry VIII, 138, 146–7. PRO, E101/531/34; SP1/28, fos. 324–32 (LP III. ii. 3475). James, ‘Tudor Magnate’, 60, 76. ²⁹ HHB i. 548; ii. 4–9, 13.

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Howard agreed to provide 1,000 able men to serve Richard III at his own cost, the men were listed manor by manor, while the household provided the captains and the administrative structure to mobilize this following for war.³⁰ Interlocking with the household and estates were Howard’s kinship network and his connections with the king’s household servants, an important framework for the military mobilization of Yorkist England. In 1481 a dozen or more royal household men served under him: two, Edmund Gorges and John Timperley, were his sons-in-law.³¹ Military organization based upon the Howard household, estates, and kindred persisted into the sixteenth century. In 1512, as the king’s lieutenant in the North, Thomas Howard I, earl of Surrey, led a force which included tenants from his southern estates and was accompanied by his step-son, Lord Berners, and various Howard servants. Matters were similar the following year, for the Flodden campaign, when Surrey’s brother-in-law, Sir Philip Tilney, served as treasurer of war, and 500 men of the earl’s retinue came from East Anglia and Sussex.³² Similarly, when Lord Thomas Howard II went to Guienne in 1512 he did so with a retinue of 400 men drawn from his father’s East Anglian lands and Norwich, the family estates in Sussex, and, possibly, his wife’s estates in Humberside.³³ In 1536 Thomas Howard II also probably drew men from his estates to make up his contingent sent against the Pilgrims. His forces mustered at various places in East Anglia, overseen by his son, before making for Cambridge.³⁴ By the 1540s, however, the Howards’ household and estates had become less important in raising the soldiers that they commanded. Frequent service on the Scottish borders and in Ireland devalued their traditional means of raising men. In October 1523, for example, the retinue of 211 men which the earl of Surrey mustered as lieutenant of the North comprised mainly northerners.³⁵ More importantly, nearconstant war in the 1540s, fought on two or three fronts with ever larger armies, drove the Tudors to look beyond the traditional resources of the aristocracy to ‘national’ methods of recruitment, principally the use of county commissions of array. This produced armies led by noblemen, but neither organized by their households, nor representing their personal affinities at war.³⁶ Thomas Howard II’s efforts to raise troops in the 1540s illustrate this subtle, yet important, transformation. On 2 September 1542 he wrote to the mayor and aldermen of Norwich informing them that the king had appointed him ‘his lieutenant northward to resist the malice of the Scots and to have the rule and leading of all the able men within the shires of the county [of ] Norf. and Suff. and the City of Norwich’ and asking them to provide soldiers for the expedition.³⁷ Ostensibly this letter followed the ‘quasi-feudal’ method of recruiting armies, the duke as the city’s noble patron calling on the magistrates’ help in recruiting the retinue the king had ³⁰ HHB ii. 480–92. ³¹ HHB i, p. viii, ii. 3; Wedgwood, Commons, 223–4, 857; PRO, E405/69, rot. 1; Morgan, ‘King’s Affinity’. ³² PRO, E101/56/27 (LP I. ii. 2651); Vokes, ‘Thomas Howard’, 89–90. ³³ Vokes, ‘Thomas Howard’, 91. ³⁴ LP XI. 671, 727, 737–8. ³⁶ Grummitt, ‘Court’, 145–55. ³⁵ PRO, SP1/28, fos. 248–249v (LP III. ii. 3401). ³⁷ NRO, MCB 1540–9, 109.

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asked him to raise. For the same campaign he called the gentlemen of Norfolk before him at Kenninghall to ask them to muster men to serve under him, just as in 1544 his vanguard in France included contingents raised by twenty-nine individuals in the county, including prominent Howard servants, summoned to raise men by individual letters from the king.³⁸ Yet alongside these traditional procedures the duke was also part of the developing ‘national’ system. His authority in 1542, as he pointed out, sprang from his royal commission over the whole county and the city, and in 1544 he summoned men to the vanguard from the county musters in Herefordshire, far from his natural sphere of influence.³⁹ His son’s position as captain-general of Boulogne between September 1545 and March 1546 was a more extreme example of the new trend. His forces were almost exclusively recruited on a county basis and his command would be judged entirely on his abilities as a general, rather than on his ability to provide the men to defend Boulogne and the social influence to make them cohere.⁴⁰ By the time Thomas Howard III, fourth duke of Norfolk, was raising troops in the late 1550s the ‘national’ system clearly predominated over the ‘quasi-feudal’. In 1557 he had to write to the muster commissioners in Surrey asking for his tenants and servants to be exempted from the ‘common musters’ so that he might call them to serve in his own contingent, making a special case for what had once been the norm.⁴¹ In 1558–9 he raised troops from Norfolk and Suffolk as lord lieutenant of the two counties and, while his steward at Kenninghall still oversaw musters in 1558, it was as his deputy-lieutenants that Sir Edmund Wyndham and Sir Christopher Heydon called out thirty men from Norwich in 1559.⁴² In 1559, as lieutenant-general of the North, he commanded an army raised by commissioners in various parts of the kingdom, and while away from East Anglia he was replaced in the lieutenancy there, only to be restored on his return and muster men in this capacity in 1561–2.⁴³ It was no longer his personal authority which was paramount in raising men and commanding armies, but the office he held from the queen.

R A I S I N G T RO O P S I N T H E N E T H E R L A N D S Netherlands noblemen differed from English in their command over permanent military units paid by the government, the bandes d’ordonnance. The greatest noblemen each commanded a band, indeed in a sense the leadership of a band was one of the distinguishing marks of the high nobility. Such a command afforded noblemen wide possibilities for patronage over desirable posts. The warnings given in captains’ commissions against unsuitable appointments to the bands—of valets, secretaries, clerks, cooks, butlers, and so on rather than ‘men wise and experienced in matters of ³⁸ ³⁹ ⁴¹ ⁴² ⁴³

LP XVII. 731; PRO, SP1/184, fos. 109–12, 233v –234 (LP XIX. i. 273(1), 274). PRO, C115/101/7599, fo. 1. ⁴⁰ APC i. 572. HMC Seventh Report, appendix, 613. CSPD, Mary I, 682, 699, 702, 713–14; NRO, NCA 1551–1567, fos. 176, 178v –179. Williams, Thomas Howard, 77–8; PRO, C115/100/7421.

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war’—suggest the temptations to which they were thought to be prey.⁴⁴ Some historians have argued that these bands must have been important in building up the clienteles of the noblemen who commanded them, but examination of William of Orange suggests otherwise. While the lieutenants appointed by Orange did show great loyalty to him during the Revolt, most of his band was broken up among other captains and fought for Philip II.⁴⁵ It is hard to know how typical Orange was. His reserves of private patronage were so vast that he may have had less need than other noblemen to sustain a following using the resources of the state, and the circumstances of the Revolt put loyalties to such extreme test that they may not tell us much about normal clientage relations. Analysis of other companies does suggest that they incarnated great lords’ followings among the lesser nobility. Many of the personnel were noble. Men-at-arms were occasionally knights and quite often seigneurial lords, esquires, gentlemen, or noble bastards; archers generally of lower status, but sometimes esquires.⁴⁶ Some captains explicitly desired homogeneity of origin in their bands, Philibert de Chalon, prince of Orange, asking Charles in 1518 ‘that it might please him to give the said prince charge of men-at-arms who were all natives of the county of Burgundy’.⁴⁷ Governors recruited in their provinces: Mansfeld led Luxembourgers, Berlaymont Namurois, Bugnicourt Artesians, and so on; Adrien de Cro¨y-Roeulx, governor of Artois and Walloon Flanders, drew on those two provinces.⁴⁸ Local landed influence without the reinforcement of a governorship underpinned recruitment by Ferry de Cro¨y-Roeulx and others in Hainaut, the Meluns in Artois and Walloon Flanders, and Hendrik III of Nassau in the border zone where Brabant met Guelders.⁴⁹ While Walloon nobles, often thought to man the bands almost exclusively, did predominate in many and featured strongly even in Maximiliaan van Egmond-Buren’s, he led northerners too, and the northward extension of Habsburg control drew into the companies former opponents of their rule in Holland and Guelders.⁵⁰ Stronger links between captains and men can be demonstrated in the case of our chosen families. The lieutenant of Floris van Egmond-Buren in 1522–3, Dierick van Batenburg, and the captain of his archers, Roelman van Bijlant, were long-serving followers of his family in local war and politics.⁵¹ Maximiliaan’s ensign from 1543 and lieutenant by 1546 was Christoffel van Oest, already an old servant in 1542.⁵² ⁴⁴ KHA, ODL/A2/608; ROPB, v. 197, 392; Nierop, ‘Willem van Oranje’, 658, 660; Cools, Mannen met macht, 46; Henne, Histoire, iii. 82. ⁴⁵ Enno van Gelder, ‘Bailleul, Bronkhorst, Brederode’, 55; Nierop, ‘Willem van Oranje’, 659–62. ⁴⁶ ISN iii. 31–127. ⁴⁷ KHA, Orange/C1/61. ⁴⁸ ISN iii. 44, 48, 56, 67, 77, 96, 102, 112, 118, 119, 124–5, viii. 304, 306; Petit, ‘Luxembourg’, 74–6; Mansfeld, Journal, 53, 61, 98 n.; Rapport Lille, 364; Cools, ‘Met raad en daad?’, 170–2, 200; Br´esin, Chroniques, 148. ⁴⁹ ISN iii. 65, 107, 117; ROPB ii. 169. ⁵⁰ ISN iii. 42, 44, 56, 60, 66, 77, 83, 87, 99, 106, 112, 119, 125; Zwichem, Tagebuch, 259; Inventaris Buren, iv. 219; NA, NDRII/1045/5, 1045/9; ARA, RSA119/3; Fouw, Philips van Kleef, 351; Cools, Mannen met macht, 176–7; Urkundenbuch des Niederrheins, iv. 665. ⁵¹ ROPB ii. 169; ADN, B2318/81870; Inventaris Buren, iv. 171, 304, 307, 340, v. 1300. ⁵² Zwichem, Tagebuch, 259; Inventaris Buren, iv. 982, 988, v. 1035.

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The lord of Warluzel, a friend of at least nine years’ standing, and Robert, bastard of Arenberg, half-cousin to Maximiliaan’s brother-in-law, mustered among his menat-arms in 1543.⁵³ Kinship links between members strengthened the internal cohesion of the bands: Maximiliaan had two Godenoels, two Marechins, two Menhems, two Walhains, and four Dabins in his company.⁵⁴ And long service strengthened the mutual obligations of captain and men. In July 1539 Floris supported from his deathbed a petition by the men of his company, pointing out that their wages were two and a half years in arrears and begging to be paid so that they might ‘do service to the emperor and his countries when need shall be’.⁵⁵ Maximiliaan wanted to be present in person when his men were mustered and paid in January 1545.⁵⁶ Such bonds were made visible by the way the bands wore the livery colours and badges of their lords, Adrien de Cro¨y-Roeulx’s men sporting blue, yellow, and red.⁵⁷ The bands were not exclusive private armies. Members and officers moved between them with their captains’ blessing and kept close links with noblemen other than their captains, as Lubert Turck, lord of Hemert, successively lieutenant of Nassau’s, Ren´e de Chalon’s, and Lamoraal van Egmond’s companies, did with Floris and Maximiliaan.⁵⁸ But they were surely more the product and vehicle of noble lordship than the example of Orange suggests. In wartime the bandes d’ordonnance were augmented by bandes de crue, raised by the captains for more temporary service. Considerable haggling sometimes resulted from the invitation to raise such bands, as captains saw the chance to dictate advantageous terms. In 1523, as Margaret recounted wearily to Charles, the lords of Licques and Aimeries, who solicited me to have men, wrote to me when it came down to business that their people did not wish to serve if they were not assured of being maintained for some reasonable time, at least for three months, and that with their horsemen they would have some good number of foot, both to put in their houses and to lead in the field.⁵⁹

Raising such bands at short notice could present difficulties to the most dedicated captains, as Roeulx found in June 1542. He had little problem in finding 200 willing men ready with their equipment, but horses were much harder to come by.⁶⁰ Various schemes provided for captains to retain horsemen ready to serve for wages whenever called upon—1,000 men for Hendrik of Nassau in March 1536, for example—but none seems to have taken permanent root.⁶¹ Nevertheless, bandes de crue could be impressive. Floris van Egmond-Buren’s ‘great band, all fully armed’ and dressed in white and blue livery, paraded splendidly when the young Charles V came to Tournai to meet Henry VIII on 10 October 1513.⁶² ⁵³ NA, NDRII/1045/9; Inventaris Buren, iv. 407; ISN iii. 95; Cools, Mannen met macht, 202. ⁵⁴ NA, NDRII/1045/5. ⁵⁵ ARA, RSA1583/283, 284. ⁵⁶ Inventaris Buren, v. 1285. ⁵⁷ Macqu´ereau, Histoire, 247–8. ⁵⁸ Guyon, M´emoires, 111–12, 130, 133–4; ISN iii. 61; Guillaume, Bandes d’ordonnance, 79, 205, 227; ROPB. ii. 169, v. 391–2; ADN, B2318/81792; Zwichem, Tagebuch, 259; Inventaris Buren, iv. 52, 89, 174, 186, 204, 207, 234, 289, 330, 351, 359, 374, 582, 589. ⁶⁰ ARA, RSA119/7. ⁵⁹ HHSA, PA14/1, fo. 335r . ⁶¹ Henne, Histoire, iii. 114–17; KHA, ODL/A2/620. ⁶² Macqu´ereau, Chronicque, 53.

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How were such bandes de crue assembled? A muster roll of Floris’s 727 cavalry at Saint-Omer in February–March 1514 gives some precious indications. It shows first the predominance of northerners among his troops, from Brabant above all, but also from Holland, Zeeland, Guelders, Overijssel, and adjacent parts of the Rhineland, confirming reports that he and other captains raised their bands in 1513 in Brabant, Cleves, and adjoining areas.⁶³ Many came from families with traditions of military service to the Egmond-Burens stretching across two or even three generations, some of them leading small sub-contingents: Aldenbouckens, Baexens, Belderbusches, Berchems, Bijlants, Deventers, Gulpens, Kalderbachs, Leys, Rostinnes, Veells, and Zuylens.⁶⁴ Some were their kin: presumably Bartholomeus d’Egmond, certainly the Pallants, relatives by marriage among the Rhineland nobility.⁶⁵ Others were tied to the counts through their estates and seigneurial towns. Gerrit van der Bosch was an IJsselstein patrician, Emont van Buchel was a long-serving bailiff of Buren, van Wijks held office at Buren, and van Baexens held such senior posts as captain of Buren, bailiff of Grave, and steward of the feudal court of IJsselstein.⁶⁶ Others again came from towns in the counts’ orbit, like Pieter Borgraef, patrician of ’s-Hertogenbosch.⁶⁷ Others were young noblemen of distinguished background, serving Floris to gain experience, the lord of Kats from Zeeland, or Philippe de Veyr´e, lord of Corroyle-Chˆateau in Brabant.⁶⁸ A small but noticeable group were noble bastards, of the Nevele, Oostkerke, and Vaudrey families. Lastly there were Germans, most prominently the count of Salm-Reifferscheidt, who led the largest sub-contingent in 1514 with twenty-eight horse and remained in intermittent contact with Floris and Maximiliaan for the next three decades.⁶⁹ The raising of infantry by noblemen seems to have moved through a transition more like that in England, from the intimacy of the retinue to the formality of the commission. In 1479, Jan, lord of Dadizele kept lists of the forty-eight inhabitants of his village who escorted Maximilian’s artillery in June, the eighteen of them who fought with him at Guinegatte on 7 August and the three he sent home the day before the battle. Several were his kinsmen from cadet and bastard lines and others were his tenants. All were his neighbours and their fates in battle clearly mattered to him, from the wounded legs of Pieter van Houte, Joos Baert, and Martin vander Hulst through the capture and immediate escape of his 9-year-old page Petit-Bon to the death from wounds of Willem Drubbele, back at Dadizele, sixteen days after the battle.⁷⁰ Other noblemen who raised infantry locally for provincial defence—as many did, for example, in 1506–7—presumably drew on similar ties.⁷¹ The garrisons ⁶³ NA, NDRII/1005/1; Macqu´ereau, Chronicque, 26–7. ⁶⁴ Inventaris Buren, i. 969, iv. 25, 852, 924, 1003, v. 1150, 1354; ROPB ii. 169; NA, NDRII/1045/4. ⁶⁵ Noordam-Croes, Antoon van Lalaing, 15. ⁶⁶ Inventaris Buren, i. 402, iii. 1363, 1598–9, 1665, 1684, 1729, 1867, 1918, iv. 68, 77–8. ⁶⁷ Schuttelaars, Heren van de raad, 452. ⁶⁸ Reygersbergh, Cronijcke, N1v ; ADN, B2321/81955; Lusy, Journal, 47, 116, 141, 164, 188, 238. ⁶⁹ Inventaris Buren, iv. 145, 367, 973. ⁷⁰ Dadizeele, M´emoires, 158–61, 187, 193. ⁷¹ Rapport Lille, 368, 375, 378–9.

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noblemen maintained as town governors, like Ferry de Cro¨y-Roeulx’s at Hesdin, may also have drawn upon their local connections.⁷² Infantry recruitment for field armies in the 1550s, in contrast, seems to have been delegated to captains or commissioners who did not exploit the influence of the commanding nobleman in any very specific way. William of Orange was congratulated for his exceptional zeal when he went to Gelderland to oversee the musters of his infantry regiment in 1552.⁷³ Noble power still percolated through the infantry, influencing appointments and inspiring captains to seek service under a distinguished leader like Floris van Egmond-Buren, but large bodies of infantry were not personally bound to their commanders as cavalrymen still were.⁷⁴ Probably the only infantrymen William of Orange knew by name were the halberdiers of his guard, as he used these posts to provide summer jobs for his household porter, his tentmaker, and other servants.⁷⁵ So far we have been considering troops raised on the instructions of the prince or the regent, but in the Netherlands noblemen also raised troops under various other circumstances. Governors of threatened provinces gathered men on their own initiative and asked permission of the regent afterwards, as Floris van Egmond-Buren did to secure the defence of Holland and Overijssel in 1537.⁷⁶ At other times noblemen assembled forces on the instructions of gatherings of States or groups of towns.⁷⁷ On occasion, lastly, they raised troops for their own purposes, loosely if at all connected to those of their prince. In the wake of the Egmond-Burens’ support for Bishop David of Burgundy in the civil war in Utrecht in 1481–3, they were drawn into repeated confrontations with the city and States of Utrecht over the debts owed to them and the fate of their troops, left to garrison one of the city gates but bloodily expelled in 1489. In 1491 and 1493, Frederik and Floris besieged the city with forces of up to 3,000 men. In January 1511, as relations broke down again, Floris issued a personal declaration of war against the city and again besieged it, prompting the Utrechters to attack IJsselstein that summer. Hendrik III of Nassau helped Floris rescue his town and peace was made in September, but throughout the war Margaret of Austria and the authorities in Holland disowned Floris’s activities and tried to arbitrate a settlement.⁷⁸ Floris was opposed by Charles of Guelders and his partisans in most of these campaigns, so he may perhaps have viewed them as part of his championing of Habsburg authority in the region. But they were in effect private war, just as was his loan of a few hundred men to a Frisian friend in 1485 to conduct a feud against a neighbouring abbot.⁷⁹ Such campaigns are a reminder that, if the southern Netherlands was becoming part of a clearly delineated border between the kingdom of France and the Habsburg principality, in the north-east matters were very different. Floris van Egmond-Buren, reichsunmittelbar lord of Buren, IJsselstein, and Leerdam, was behaving much like any other German prince. We might contrast the experience of his Walloon counterpart, Antoine de Ligne, count of Fauquembergues. He raised troops at his own ⁷² ⁷⁴ ⁷⁷ ⁷⁸

Rapport Lille, 376. ⁷³ Rachfahl, Wilhelm van Oranien, i. 169–70. Inventaris Buren, iv. 401, 418, 424. ⁷⁵ Delen, Hof, 47. ⁷⁶ ARA, RSA1583/277. SAA, Pk1559/4; ADN, B6786, fos. 20, 52v –53; Maddens, Beden, 375–6. Kalveen, Bestuur, 30–60, 169–90. ⁷⁹ Mol, ‘Hoofdelingen en huurlingen’, 78–9.

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cost in 1521 to try to recover the castle of Mortagne, which he had bought from the English in 1513, but lost when they returned Tournai to the French. He found the captain would not surrender to him, only to Margaret of Austria’s representatives.⁸⁰ His attempt at private conquest petered out in a dribble of lawsuits over the coming four decades.⁸¹ In the English realms perhaps only an earl of Desmond or Kildare in the extraordinary conditions of the Irish borderlands could do anything of the sort Fauquembergues tried; the grand schemes of the Egmonds were quite out of the question.

R E L AT I O N S W I T H M I L I TA RY E N T R E P R E N E U R S The prominence in Habsburg warfare of troops hired from outside the Netherlands made relations with mercenary captains an important aspect of command for Netherlands noblemen. Building on his father’s connections, Maximiliaan van EgmondBuren maintained a network of correspondents in the recruiting grounds of North and West Germany.⁸² His contacts, generally lesser noblemen, reported to him about the availability of troops and raised them on request. Such men were much to the fore in the army Maximiliaan led in the Schmalkaldic War and some, such as Georg von Holle and Hilmar von M¨unchhausen, went on to distinguished careers as recruiters and commanders in Habsburg service, investing their considerable profits in the Renaissance castles of the Weserland.⁸³ Captains seem to have been particularly eager to serve under Maximiliaan and he built up ties of service and protection with them similar to those with his clients in the Netherlands. Geurt van Bocholtz begged his help when extortionately ransomed by the French and when unpaid by the English. Georg von Holle asked him to intervene with Mary of Hungary for the Cleves captain, Klein von Kalkar, unjustly accused of taking too much pay. Adriaan, count of Bijland, even asked him to deflect Mary’s insistence he should swear an oath to serve the emperor exclusively.⁸⁴ These German captains manœuvred in a complex world in which kinship links, private warfare, and confessional alignments interacted kaleidoscopically with service to German princes, the Danes, or the Habsburgs.⁸⁵ A number of those who led troops under Buren against the Schmalkaldic League had earlier served Philip of Hesse or the League itself.⁸⁶ Others had fought for Duke Henry the younger of Brunswick-Wolfenb¨uttel, the leader of a league of North German Catholic princes who was in correspondence with Maximiliaan in 1544–5 in the hope he would support him in reconquering his lands.⁸⁷ For those caught up in these turbulent events, a great man in the Netherlands and a trusted general of Charles V was a useful friend indeed. ⁸⁰ Macqu´ereau, Chronicque, 105; Cruickshank, Tournai, 254–60. ⁸¹ CLGS iii. 11–12, 318, v. 347. ⁸² ARA, RSA1583/285; Henne, Histoire, iii. 180 n. ⁸³ Zwichem, Tagebuch, 267; Inventaris Buren, v. 1330, 1354, 1361, 1405; QFG 316, 318–19, 321, 337–43; ISN viii. 282, 307; Wallthor, ‘Bauherrn’, 274–5. ⁸⁴ Inventaris Buren, v. 1248–50, 1255–6, 1281, 1284, 1290, 1297, 1299, 1231, 1351, 1405. ⁸⁵ Lammert, ‘Franz von Halle’, 94–7. ⁸⁶ Politisches Archiv, 529, 564, 566, 613, 659, 660. ⁸⁷ Ibid. 779, 808.

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The tangled world of the captains sometimes facilitated, sometimes hindered, Maximiliaan’s recruitment. Networks of kinship and friendship intertwined as captains rotated and families sometimes provided whole series of contingents, most obviously the M¨unchhausens: in 1546 Burchard led 250 cavalry, Johann 400, and Hilmar a company of infantry.⁸⁸ Yet these networks were cross-cut by other obligations. Other lords’ prior claims made two captains politely decline to recruit for Buren, though one suggested instead his friend Dietrich von Streithagen, who duly served in 1546 and long afterwards.⁸⁹ Even willing recruiters could not always deliver on their offers. In one list Buren noted Pelgrum van Tye among those who could raise cavalry, but in May 1544 Pelgrum had to admit that he could not bring the men he had promised because everyone fit to ride had already hired himself out.⁹⁰ Hermann van Melsthede repeatedly raised cavalry for Buren in the 1540s, but in 1542 the articles of service on which he was recruiting were returned to him by his subcontractors, who insisted their men would serve only on more favourable terms.⁹¹ Familiarity with this fluctuating market in military talent made mercenary commanders valuable experts. In 1543 Maximiliaan offered to raise German mercenaries for the English, and in 1544 he did so.⁹² In 1546, conversely, he was able to recruit men disbanded by the English for service against the League of Schmalkalden.⁹³ In the slippery world of mercenary service, however, good relations with captains were sometimes not enough. In 1537 Maximiliaan foiled a scheme by some of his landsknechts to sell the town of Arras to the French only by forbidding any of them to go out and skirmish until they had all been paid.⁹⁴ Adrien de Cro¨y-Roeulx was perturbed to find in 1552 that, while the captains of his Germans were trustworthy, some of their men were plotting to defect to the French.⁹⁵ Great lords flattered ordinary mercenaries by taking up spades to dig fortifications alongside them at Hesdinfert in 1554 and Ham-en-Vermandois in 1557, ‘making themselves very familiar with the men’.⁹⁶ But one man’s skilled professional was another’s depraved soldier of fortune. Adrien was scathing about the Germans in French service who occupied his estate at Beaumont during the French siege of Boulogne in January 1545, shooting cattle, cutting down fruit trees, and scaring away the peasants.⁹⁷ In contrast most English noblemen had little experience of dealing with mercenary captains. When the English used large numbers of foreign troops in the 1540s and 1550s, commanders had to learn to do so and sometimes found it hard. In 1545 at Calais, Lord Cobham and his Italian captains blamed the Clevelanders for their defeat by the French, and at Boulogne Surrey had to settle disputes between Spaniards and Albanians.⁹⁸ Meanwhile in Scotland, the earl of Hertford was deploying the differing talents of Spanish arquebusiers and stradiot raiders more effectively, and turning a spade alongside his men just like the Habsburg lords.⁹⁹ By the time Lord Russell ⁸⁸ ⁸⁹ ⁹¹ ⁹² ⁹⁵ ⁹⁷ ⁹⁹

Inventaris Buren, iv. 750, v. 1210, 1214, 1227, 1402. Ibid. v. 1203, 1356–7; ICC vi. 353. ⁹⁰ NA, NDRII/1045/4; Inventaris Buren, v. 1213. NA, NDRII/1045/4; Inventaris Buren, iv. 932, 998–9, v. 1285. Millar, Tudor Mercenaries, 73, 87–90. ⁹³ Ibid. 166. ⁹⁴ Br´esin, Chroniques, 145. Henne, Histoire, ix. 253. ⁹⁶ ‘Dagverhaal’, 296–7; ‘Veldtogt’, 331, 334–5. ARA, RSA119/43. ⁹⁸ Millar, Tudor Mercenaries, 152–5; Sessions, Surrey, 312 n. Millar, Tudor Mercenaries, 149 ; Merriman, Rough Wooings, 249.

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and the earl of Warwick led various mercenary companies against the rebellions of 1549, the English were making deft use of many types and nationalities of soldier.¹⁰⁰ However, these were matters of temporary command, not of recruitment and military clientele-building: apparently the closest the English came to that was the gift of a horse from one German captain to the duke of Suffolk.¹⁰¹ Some parallel with continental commanders’ engagement with mercenaries might be seen in the dealings of English wardens of the Marches with the clans or ‘surnames’ of the northern borders.¹⁰² These groups could field significant military forces—391 horsed and harnessed men from North Tynedale in 1538, 185 from Redesdale—and their usefulness as scouts, guides, and raiders was enhanced by their knowledge of the border terrain and familiarity with their Scottish counterparts.¹⁰³ Yet the crown regarded them as lawless, indeed rebellious, subjects. The resulting tensions helped ruin the third Lord Dacre, when his close links with the surnames and his inability to control them brought his dismissal from the wardenship in 1525.¹⁰⁴ The Percies and their gentry servants had long-established connections with the surnames of Tynedale and Redesdale and the circumstances of the sixth earl of Northumberland’s appointment as warden of the east and middle Marches in 1527, as raids by borderers kept Northumberland in uproar, made it imperative they use them well.¹⁰⁵ The earl made a good start. The leading raiders soon submitted to him and he rewarded his constable of Langley castle with a rent-free farm for killing one who remained outlawed.¹⁰⁶ He granted a £5 fee to Edward Charleton, head of one of the most influential and disruptive families in Tynedale, for taking outlaws and recovering stolen goods; he also appointed him under-bailiff of Tynedale, with William Charleton as his deputy.¹⁰⁷ The policy paid off militarily. In 1533 the earl was able to report to the king how the footmen of Tynedale and Redesdale had raided fourteen miles into Scotland.¹⁰⁸ But in time his control crumbled. In September 1535 he had to take bonds for the delivery of offenders from the headsmen of Tynedale, Edward Charleton included.¹⁰⁹ That the earl had to bind over his own servant is stark testimony to the failure of his lordship. Sir Ralph Fenwick, Percy’s keeper of Tynedale, was murdered, and his replacement Sir Reynold Carnaby, though he arrested Edward Charleton for the murder, could think of no better course than to appoint first one of Charleton’s servants and then his brother William as keeper of Hessleside Tower in Tynedale.¹¹⁰ To make effective military use of the surnames while disciplining their thievery remained a challenge for English commanders in the North to the end of our period and beyond, and even the expedient of recruiting them to serve as light cavalry in France in 1543–4 did not fulfil the aim Henry VIII expressed in 1537: ‘We do ¹⁰⁰ Millar, Tudor Mercenaries, 176. ¹⁰¹ Gunn, Charles Brandon, 222. ¹⁰² Robson, English Highland Clans. ¹⁰³ ‘Muster for Northumberland’, 168–9, 181–3. ¹⁰⁴ Ellis, Tudor Frontiers, 152–70. ¹⁰⁵ Tuck, ‘War and Society’, 51–2; James, ‘Tudor Magnate’, 56–62. ¹⁰⁶ LP IV. ii. 3816, 3914; ACM, Grant Book, 169. ¹⁰⁷ ACM, Grant Book, 33; Ellis, ‘Border Baron’, 269; PRO, SP1/238, fo. 55v (LP, Addenda i. 828). ¹⁰⁸ LP VI. 125. ¹⁰⁹ State Papers, v. 31; LP XII. i. 220. ¹¹⁰ LP XI. i. 1207, XII. i. 351, 799, ii. 650, 732, 823, 1076, 1231.

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rather desire their reformation than their utter destruction’.¹¹¹ In their way they were as troublesome and as indispensable as the landsknechts and reiter in the Netherlands, but more problematic, as kings and nobles could not wash their hands of them when war came to an end. P R I VAT E A R M O U R I E S How far were noblemen able to equip armies from their own resources? At the start of our period the English king expected noblemen to provide men ready armed for war, as indentures such as that for Thomas Howard I’s service in France in 1492 show.¹¹² Nobles expected their servants to attend them in the same way, the fourth earl of Northumberland requesting Sir Robert Plumpton in April 1489 to meet him at Thirsk with a company of trusted men ‘having bows and arrows and privy harnessed’.¹¹³ To ensure the military effectiveness of his retinue, however, a nobleman might also provide his followers with weapons and armour. The accounts of the steward of Alnwick in 1533–4 show the movement of carts of bows, bills, and harness from Alnwick castle to Warkworth castle; presumably these were drawn from the earl’s own armoury, which was still kept up under the seventh earl.¹¹⁴ There are no inventories of the earls of Northumberland’s military equipment, but some of their contemporaries seem to have had at least enough to arm their households and some of their tenantry. John Howard made regular small purchases of weapons from local suppliers—twenty-six black bills and twenty bows in May 1481, for example—and in 1524 the Howard armoury was sufficient to equip 100 footsoldiers, similar to that of the earl of Oxford in 1513.¹¹⁵ English noblemen also had gunpowder weapons. John Howard had his own ordnance by the early 1480s, the sixth earl of Northumberland sent six guns ‘of my own’ to Lord Dacre in February 1528, and for the war of 1533–4 he had his guns sent up from Alnwick and Beverley to the borders, though gunpowder for them had to be obtained from the royal stores in Berwick.¹¹⁶ From the 1540s the founding of iron cannon in Sussex and Kent made them readily available to noblemen such as the fourth duke of Norfolk.¹¹⁷ Yet from the same decade there were significant changes in the relationship between noble armouries and royal government. For all the military prominence of the Howards, the armouries inventoried at their fall in 1546 were unimpressive. At Kenninghall there was equipment for eighteen demi-lances and armour but no arms for footmen: seventy-three sets of ‘almain rivets’, forty-six pairs of splints, thirty-nine sallets, and ‘divers pieces of old broken harness’. No armouries were recorded at Mount Surrey, Castle Rising, or Mendham.¹¹⁸ By the 1540s the increasing size of armies and sophistication of weaponry and the rise of the ‘national’ system of recruitment were leading to a centralization in the ¹¹¹ Robson, English Highland Clans, 149, 174–7. ¹¹² PRO, E101/72/5/16. ¹¹³ Plumpton Letters, 74. ¹¹⁴ ACM, C.VI.5b, mm. 4–5; Estate Accounts, 43. ¹¹⁵ HHB ii. 60–1; Stone, Crisis, 219; PRO, SP1/4, fo. 37 (LP I. ii. 1905). ¹¹⁶ HHB ii. 60–1; PRO, SP1/46, fo. 237 (LP IV. ii. 3914); ACM, C.VI.5b, mm. 4–5, 20, 47, 56. ¹¹⁷ Stone, Crisis, 220. ¹¹⁸ PRO, LR2/115, fos. 54r –v; LR2/117.

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supply of arms and armour. For the French campaign of 1544 the crown bought much of what was needed, the king’s agent in Flanders, William Daunsell, spending £85,685.¹¹⁹ Noble armouries survived, but increasingly they were replenished not by individual purchase, but by the distribution of weapons and armour from the Ordnance Office. In April 1549, for instance, equipment and saddles for thirty demilances were sold to the earl of Rutland.¹²⁰ Rutland needed such supplies. In 1551 he was one of the thirteen noblemen chosen to maintain a band of men-at-arms at the crown’s expense. Whilst thirty-seven of Rutland’s band of fifty-three horsed and equipped themselves, the earl had to purchase armour for others out of the money he received from the crown.¹²¹ The Howards were similarly dependent: in 1554 the duke of Norfolk received 100 jacks and 100 morions with which to equip his men sent against Wyatt’s rebels, ‘all which’, the clerk noted, ‘were lost in the said journey’.¹²² Noblemen worked the system—by 1561 five earls, eight lords (including William, Lord Howard of Effingham) and twenty-one knights had neither paid for nor returned the arms issued to them since 1547—but it paved the way for the establishment of county armouries and a decline in private arsenals from the 1570s.¹²³ Netherlands noblemen maintained larger and more modern private arsenals than their English equivalents, as was wise given the vulnerability of their castles to enemy attack. Philip of Cleves at Wijnendale, Antoine de Lalaing at Hoogstraten, and Maximiliaan van Bourgondi¨e-Beveren at Tournehem stockpiled serpentines, falconets, cannon, arquebuses, and pikes.¹²⁴ Floris van Egmond-Buren had cannon cast at IJsselstein and his son did the same at Buren.¹²⁵ By 1553 the duke of Aarschot was able to lend Charles V three siege cannon, cast by the emperor’s own founder Remy de Hallut, while Maximiliaan van Bourgondi¨e-Beveren loaned him 2,207 lb of powder.¹²⁶ Permanent master-gunners were retained to oversee the maintenance and deployment of such arsenals. The Egmond-Burens had them at IJsselstein in 1517, at Buren in 1540, at Leerdam in 1544, and at Grave in 1545.¹²⁷ Maximiliaan even employed a military engineer, Alessandro Pasqualini, to buy powder and shot on the Antwerp market and test the siege cannon he ordered from Mechelen.¹²⁸ By the 1550s, the Netherlands did see the same trend as England towards the issue of standard weapons from government stores, but the context was one of substantially more powerful and independent noble arsenals.¹²⁹

P R I VAT E F O RT R E S S E S Most English noblemen paid little attention to the construction or maintenance of private fortifications in this period. Where the Howards did work on a castle, at ¹¹⁹ ¹²¹ ¹²³ ¹²⁴ ¹²⁵ ¹²⁷ ¹²⁸

Davies, ‘Supply Services’, 53–9. ¹²⁰ BL, Harley MS 7547, fo. 4v . Norris, ‘Rutland’s Band’, 100–16. ¹²² BL, Harley MS 7547, fo. 6. BL, Harley MS 7547, fos. 14–15v ; Stone, Crisis, 218–23. ISN viii. 424; Gegevens betreffende bezit, 48; ‘Dagverhaal’, 330. Inventaris Buren, iv. 353, v. 1262, 1418. ¹²⁶ ISN viii. 281–2. Inventaris Buren, i. 342, iii. 89, iv. 668, v. 1303. Ibid. v. 1222, 1251, 1265; NA, NDRII/1034/12. ¹²⁹ Henne, Histoire, iii. 54–5.

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Framlingham in Suffolk, it was to build a brick mansion inside the old walls, and when they built new houses at Kenninghall and Mount Surrey they were unfortified. The Percies’ favourite residences at Leconfield and Wressle in Yorkshire were no more than fortified manor houses.¹³⁰ In Northumberland, the great strongholds at Alnwick and Warkworth stand to this day, but nothing was done to make them proof against artillery, a symptom of the wider English failure to develop gun-proof lordly residences of the kind seen on the continent.¹³¹ The constableships of these castles were significant posts for the Percy followers among the Northumberland gentry, but the Scots never came far enough over the border to test their defences.¹³² In Cumberland, where Lord Dacre had lands right on the border, the Scots did need to be stopped, and Dacre built small fortresses at strategic points to hinder their raids. Yet all paled into insignificance compared with the campaign of tower-building and castle-strengthening and the maintenance of small but permanent private garrisons pursued by the earls of Kildare in the conditions of near-constant warfare on the edges of the English Pale in Ireland.¹³³ English noblemen also seem not to have employed specialist master-gunners or military engineers. Unlike Charles Brandon, the Howards did not even correspond with specialists or take them on campaign.¹³⁴ Though he was trusted to survey fortifications such as those at Berwick in early 1541, Thomas Howard II’s career in siege warfare was undistinguished, one particularly low point being the refusal of his Cornish miners to dig trenches at Doullens in 1522 on the grounds that ‘their faculty is to work under ground, not above’.¹³⁵ Although Henry Howard, earl of Surrey’s interest in military technology was sufficient for him to risk his life in straining to observe the French fortifications at Boulogne, there is no evidence that engineers or gunners entered his personal service either.¹³⁶ Noblemen throughout the Netherlands put much more effort into the construction of private fortresses. In the late fifteenth and early sixteenth centuries the Egmond-Burens at Buren and the Glymes-Bergens at Wouw were adapting their castles to cope with artillery by the construction of huge surrounding earth ramparts with brick gun towers at the corners.¹³⁷ In the next generation individual nobles were as fast as the Habsburgs to employ Italian engineers. In the 1530s Tommaso Vincidor da Bologna was involved in the fortification of Hendrik of Nassau’s castle and seigneurial town of Breda and Alessandro Pasqualini carried out projects for Floris and Maximiliaan van Egmond-Buren at IJsselstein, Buren, and Leerdam.¹³⁸ ¹³⁰ Howard, Country House, 207, 211, 214–15. ¹³¹ Thompson, Decline of the Castle, 17–42, 71–102. ¹³² James, ‘Tudor Magnate’, 60–1, 79–80. ¹³³ Ellis, Tudor Frontiers, 94, 118–21, 129–30. ¹³⁴ Gunn, Charles Brandon, 120, 126, 205; Gunn, ‘March on Paris’, 599. ¹³⁵ Head, Ebbs and Flows, 193–4; LP III. ii. 2560, XV. 560. ¹³⁶ LP XX. ii. 738; Sessions, Surrey, 293–4. ¹³⁷ Janssen, Hoekstra, Meierink, ‘Castles’, 126, 134. ¹³⁸ Heuvel, ‘Papiere Bolwercken’, 25–7; Roosens, ‘Guerres, fortifications et ing´enieurs’, 256–67; Inventaris Buren, v. 1107–8.

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His works gained such fame that the magistrates of many towns asked Maximiliaan, mostly in vain, to lend them his ‘master of fortifications’.¹³⁹ Noblemen were expected to provide for the defence of their fortresses. Wherever they were serving, Frederik, Floris, and Maximiliaan van Egmond-Buren had constantly to be aware of the needs of Buren, IJsselstein, and Leerdam, front-line strongholds against Guelders or Utrecht.¹⁴⁰ The Cro¨y-Roeulx similarly aimed to use their castles on the borders of Artois as forward points for the Habsburg cause.¹⁴¹ Contes in particular was crucial, its garrison eliminating a nearby French stronghold in January 1552 and holding up a French invasion for two vital days that August by fighting almost to the last man when besieged and stormed.¹⁴² In wartime, admittedly, noblemen were given considerable assistance in these tasks, powder from the prince’s artillery stores, and wages for garrison soldiers like the eighty or so Frederik van Egmond kept at Buren, IJsselstein, and Leerdam in 1506–9.¹⁴³ Yet such arrangements had drawbacks. The townsfolk who had to put up with these garrisons were also the lord’s subjects or clients and he might find himself caught between his unpaid troops’ need for food and lodging and the impoverishment caused to the citizenry by the garrison’s demands.¹⁴⁴ While private fortresses helped to give Netherlands noblemen a more independent role in wartime than their English counterparts, such independence also brought awkward responsibilities.

S H I P S A N D P R I VAT E E R I N G What English noblemen lacked in castles some of them made up for in ships. John Howard was one of the greatest English private ship-owners of the late fifteenth century and this brought him both trading wealth and a leading role in war at sea. In 1481 he was appointed to keep the seas during the Scottish campaign, supplying nine of the sixteen vessels in the fleet. He sold ships to the crown and constructed others either on royal commission or on the basis of joint ownership with the king.¹⁴⁵ His son and grandsons continued the tradition. Early in Henry VIII’s reign, Thomas I offered technical advice on the construction of the king’s warships and in 1511 his two sons, Thomas II and Edward, using hired merchant ships to protect a fleet bound for Zeeland, intercepted and captured two ships belonging to James IV’s favourite sea-captain, Andrew Barton.¹⁴⁶ When Sir Edward was appointed admiral the following year, he employed many of the Howards’ sea-faring East Anglian contacts, notably the squadron commander Edward Echyngham of Ipswich.¹⁴⁷ ¹³⁹ ¹⁴⁰ ¹⁴¹ ¹⁴³ ¹⁴⁵ ¹⁴⁶ ¹⁴⁷

Inventaris Buren, iv. 809, v. 1359–60; Heuvel, ‘Papiere Bolwercken’, 26–7. Aurelius, Cronycke, fos. 385v , 386r ; Inventaris Buren, v. 1107–9, 1124. CSPS 1542–3, 358. ¹⁴² Henne, Histoire, ix. 168–9, 276–8. ISN viii. 268; Rapport Lille, 372. ¹⁴⁴ ARA, RSA1583/283. HHB i, pp. x, xx–xxii; PRO, E405/69, rot. 1. Vokes, ‘Thomas Howard’, 72, 75–6; Hall, Chronicle, 525; Head, Ebbs and Flows, 28. Vokes, ‘Thomas Howard’, 87.

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When Lord Thomas II succeeded his brother as admiral in 1513 he too demonstrated a practical understanding of war at sea.¹⁴⁸ He continued to be active in naval affairs, and the exercise of the admiral’s profitable powers over ships wrecked on the English coast, until forced to give up the office in favour of the king’s bastard son, the duke of Richmond, in 1525.¹⁴⁹ Thereafter he retained a reputation as a naval expert in government.¹⁵⁰ There is no evidence that he or his son Surrey provided ships themselves for the wars of the 1540s, but the next generation of English noblemen and gentlemen to make successful careers as naval commanders included his clients Sir John Clere and Sir William Woodhouse and his half-brother William, Lord Howard of Effingham, who served as lord admiral in 1553–8.¹⁵¹ The Cro¨y-Roeulx and Egmond-Buren families showed only intermittent interest in privateering or naval warfare. Adrien de Cro¨y-Roeulx did own a warship, the Draak, by 1547. It must have been a vessel of some quality, the most expensive in the Habsburg fleet when he sold it to the government in 1550, durable and heavily gunned.¹⁵² However, when he had to have ships built as governor of Flanders to defend local vessels against Scottish pirates he deferred to the knowledge of those more expert than himself.¹⁵³ There is no sign that the Burens owned any seagoing ships, though they hired warships for use on the Zuider Zee and mounted shipborne attacks in their campaigns in Friesland.¹⁵⁴ Whether such experience was sufficient to justify the appointment of Floris to the command of the fleet that escorted Philip the Fair to Spain in 1506 by way of shipwreck on the English coast is another matter.¹⁵⁵ Far more centrally engaged in matters maritime were the admirals of the Netherlands. On occasion they set out fleets at their own expense, hoping for a profit from captured enemy ships and goods. They also had the right to issue privateering letters in wartime and successive admirals of the house of Bourgondi¨e-Beveren did so enthusiastically. Though it fomented quarrels and was taken under closer control by central government in 1540, this right could be profitable, as we shall see.¹⁵⁶ In civil wars such powers could be turned against the prince. Philip of Cleves sheltered privateers who operated out of Sluis during his revolt in the years 1488–92, just as William of Orange would later license the sea-beggars.¹⁵⁷ In more normal times the patronage of the admirals helped build naval careers for their servants, relations, and neighbours among the lesser nobility of Zeeland and Flanders.¹⁵⁸ England and the Netherlands equally provided opportunities for noblemen acquainted with the sea to serve their princes to good effect. ¹⁴⁸ PRO, SP1/3, fo. 200 (LP I. ii. 1852); SP1/229, fo. 168 (LP I. ii. 1894); LP I. ii. 1851. ¹⁴⁹ Bodl. MS Douce 393, fo. 104; Head, Ebbs and Flows, 46, 50, 279–80. ¹⁵⁰ LP XVII. 731. ¹⁵¹ Bindoff, Commons, i. 651–2; Rodger, Safeguard of the Sea, 226; Loades, Tudor Navy, 101–2, 158, 162–3, 168. ¹⁵² Sicking, Zeemacht, 188–9, 193, 289. ¹⁵³ CSPS 1550–2, 94. ¹⁵⁴ Aurelius, Cronycke, fos. 422r , 432v –433v ; Henne, Histoire, i. 289; Inventaris Buren, v. 1152. ¹⁵⁵ Sicking, Zeemacht, 160. ¹⁵⁶ Ibid. 214–21, 232–6. ¹⁵⁷ Fouw, Philips van Kleef, 237–8; Meij, Watergeuzen, 102–8. ¹⁵⁸ Sicking, Zeemacht, 61, 99, 116–17, 132, 134–45, 168–71; Reygersbergh, Chronijcke, Q1r , Aa2r .

11 Nobles in Command All noblemen had tenants and arms and many had fortified houses or ships, but not all were chosen to take a major role in their prince’s wars. For those magnates who were also leading commanders, a range of new demands and opportunities beckoned.

G OV E R N O R S H I P S Provincial governorships and similar institutions had the potential both to focus the social power and military ambition of the nobility in the service of the prince and to reinforce noble power with a framework of public authority; but how effectively did they do so? In the Netherlands each governor or stadholder exercised the authority of the ruler in his absence, as did the king’s lieutenant in the North of England or his deputy in Ireland. Though governors had a wider range of functions than most of their English equivalents, their primary responsibility was for local defence and martial qualities were important in securing appointment.¹ In civil war their functions could be remarkably broad: when Maximilian nominated Engelbrecht of Nassau governor of Flanders and Walloon Flanders in 1491, he was to ‘treat and settle’ for pardon and remission ‘with those who are rebels and disobedient subjects towards us’.² In the calmer conditions of 1515, the military tasks of Hendrik of Nassau as governor of Holland, Zeeland, and West-Friesland were limited to ‘the keeping, security, and defence’ of the provinces.³ Decades of war thereafter produced an elaboration in the military tasks of governors evident in the instructions of the 1540s, with their concern for protecting civilians against unruly soldiers, expelling unlicensed gatherings of troops, preventing Netherlanders’ service to foreign rulers, completing half-built fortifications, and hiring troops only with the express consent of the emperor or his regent and as cheaply as possible.⁴ Most of the high noblemen who occupied provincial governorships also held the governorships of individual towns or fortresses. Often these were the most important fortresses of the province in question: for Adrien de Cro¨y-Roeulx the Chˆateau de Courtrai at Lille, with its many posts in the governor’s gift, and the Ghent citadel.⁵ He oversaw the construction of the latter and stayed there when in Ghent; no wonder he could reassure Mary of Hungary in 1542 that he had known many of the soldiers ¹ Gorter-van Royen, Maria van Hongarije, 163–77. ² KHA, ODL/A2/462. ³ KHA, ODL/A2/607. ⁴ ROPB iv. 361–6, v. 164–70. ⁵ Domeingoederen, 172; Henne, Histoire, vii. 72–5, 104–6, 110–11, 342.

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of the garrison for a long time and trusted them as much as he trusted himself.⁶ For Adrien’s father Ferry, governor of Artois, the key stronghold was Hesdin, once a favoured princely residence, but now exposed to French attack.⁷ In 1513 Ferry shut himself up inside ‘so that if it is lost, he might be lost with it’.⁸ It fell in his absence in 1521, but attempts to retake it alternated with doubts about its strategic value throughout his son’s career until its final capture and destruction in the year of his death.⁹ Even when other noblemen held such captaincies, the governor had the last word in any dispute between them and the urban authorities, as Adrien did when the councillors of Kortrijk tried to build cottages on the town’s common pasture that the captain thought compromised the castle’s security.¹⁰ Provincial governors often also held town or castle governorships outside their province, with powers to command not only their garrisons but also the officers and inhabitants of the town.¹¹ Adrien de Cro¨y-Roeulx was governor of Brielle on the island of Voorne in Holland and of Braine-le-Comte in Hainaut.¹² The EgmondBurens’ most important captaincy was that of Grave, on the Maas in Brabant between ’s-Hertogenbosch and Nijmegen, and thus a strategic stronghold in the Guelders wars, with a garrison fifty strong in peacetime but much expanded in emergencies.¹³ Floris and Maximiliaan followed Floris’s father-in-law Cornelis van GlymesZevenbergen as captains of the town and mortgage lessees of the lordship. All three resided there often, overseeing improvements to the fortifications and ensuring the garrison was well paid and fed; in their absence their deputies referred all matters of importance to them by letter.¹⁴ Multiple appointments made it normal to appoint such deputies, and commissions gave them the same powers as the governor himself.¹⁵ This was a useful aspect of noblemen’s clientage, but one that caused concern for the central government, as complaints were all too frequent that the deputies chosen were not fit for the job.¹⁶ Provincial governors too had deputies, though these were sometimes limited to well-defined judicial and administrative duties like those of Adrien de Cro¨y’s two lieutenants in Walloon Flanders; by the 1540s they were everywhere coming under closer control from the centre, appointed by the prince, named in the governor’s instructions and steered by the Geheime Raad.¹⁷ Earlier matters had been freer, and though Floris van Egmond-Buren was never governor of Holland he carried out many of the functions of his uncle Jan van Egmond after 1500. Such was the towns’ confidence in his military abilities that they offered him cash inducements to take command in 1508 and 1514 and asked that he, rather than the duke of Brunswick, ⁶ ARA, RSA119/5, 7. ⁷ Rapport Lille, 376. ⁸ Henne, Histoire, ii. 26. ⁹ Delmaire, ‘Th´erouanne’, 132, 136–9; ARA, RSA119/47; Henne, Histoire, iv. 188, ix. 204–5, 248–55, 342–64. ¹⁰ Inventaire Courtrai, ii. 90–1. ¹¹ KHA, ODL/AS/461. ¹² Cools, Mannen met macht, 192; Lejeune, ‘Roeulx’, 264. ¹³ Inventaris Buren, iv. 103a, v. 866; Aurelius, Cronycke, y1r ; Henne, Histoire, vii. 314, 324. ¹⁴ Inventaris Buren, i. 672, iii. 1471, iv. 63, 177, 181, 183, 225, 443–4, 446, 507, v. 1007, 1013, 1030–1, 1303; ICC iv. 272; ARA, RSA1583/278, 283. ¹⁵ KHA, ODL/A2/454. ¹⁶ Gorter-van Royen, Maria van Hongarije, 167. ¹⁷ Foucart, Institution baillivale, 91–3, 108–9, 130; ROPB, v. 166–7, 170; Postma, ‘Mislukte missie’.

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be appointed to defend them in 1513.¹⁸ In 1511, to reinforce his powers as commander of the army in Guelders, Margaret of Austria officially named him lieutenant and coadjutor of his uncle.¹⁹ Again in 1528 he took over the military responsibilities of the governor Antoine de Lalaing-Hoogstraten, whose absences at Mechelen and inability to coordinate the province’s defences had frustrated the provincial States.²⁰ The governor’s most fundamental obligation was to protect his province against attack. We may follow Adrien de Cro¨y-Roeulx’s measures to that end as war loomed from autumn 1541. In a joint meeting Mary of Hungary and the various provincial governors decided to prepare for any eventuality by inspecting the borders, checking fortresses, and levying troops in limited numbers.²¹ The mounting tension in spring and early summer 1542 is tangible from the letters that Adrien exchanged thick and fast with Mary, passing on the information gained by his network of spies. Watchfulness, quick decision-making, and careful cooperation with the regent and with the president of the Council of State, Lodewijk van Schore, were vital in dealing with the exposure of French plots for the betrayal of Ghent and preparations to meet any possible threat from his base at B´ethune, chosen carefully ‘to be near Flanders, at a good day’s journey from the sea and more or less in the middle of Artois’.²² In the wars of 1536–8, 1542–4, and 1551–3 Adrien repeatedly raised troops in the provinces of which he was governor: volunteers for the field army or garrison service, at times of emergency even the militias of the Flemish towns.²³ With whatever resources in men and money he could get, he was remarkably successful at defending both Artois and Flanders, thus steadily reinforcing the bond between himself and Charles’s subjects in carrying out what he called ‘the duty I have to the emperor and to the country’.²⁴ Because Artois was always open to French raiders, his policy was to combine strong garrisons and well-maintained fortifications with frequent and devastating incursions into France to keep the enemy on the defensive.²⁵ Flanders, in contrast, was vulnerable only to French invasions of significant scale, and these he met with the strategic vision and tactical speed that made his own invasions of France so hard to counter. Three times, on the Lys in 1537 and on the Aa in 1542 and 1552, he prevented French armies from crossing into Flanders and saved the otherwise defenceless province.²⁶ Coastal defence and fishery protection also formed part of his responsibilities. In 1542 he sent the Flemish vice-admiral Gerard van Meckeren on an inspection tour of artillery, gunpowder, and master gunners along the Flemish coast. Though that ¹⁸ Ward, ‘Cities and States’, 50, 224–5, 242; GAL, SAI/383, fo. 186. ¹⁹ Henne, Histoire, i. 272 n. ²⁰ Noordam-Croes, Antoon van Lalaing, 91–6. ²¹ Gorter-van Royen, Maria van Hongarije, 237. ²² ARA, RSA119/1–3, 5, 7, 10; Gorter-van Royen, Maria van Hongarije, 244–6; Domeingoederen, 347; Henne, Histoire, vi. 186 n., vii. 354. ²³ Henne, Histoire, iii. 44 n., vi. 126, 186–7, ix. 254–5, 354–5, x. 29. ²⁴ Ibid. ix. 351 n. ²⁵ Ibid. vi. 174, vii. 330–1, 341, viii. 5–8, 40–2, 96–8, 104–6, 115, 158, 219, 221, 168–71, 203–4, 247–53, ix. 266–7, 271–8, 281–6, 348–67. ²⁶ Ibid. vi. 116–22, 185, 192, viii. 253–4, ix. 280–1, 337–48; Gorter-van Royen, Maria van Hongarije, 262–3.

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year’s feared Danish assault from the sea never came, Flanders was well prepared to meet it. At other times his success was more mixed. In 1547 he oversaw the construction of a network of warning beacons along the coast and secured the promise that Calais would send advance warning of approaching French ships. But his attempts to convince the States of Flanders to fund an inter-provincial herring fishery protection force failed: only the three fishing towns, Dunkirk, Nieuwpoort, and Ostend, would contribute. His position, caught between the central government and its admiralty machinery and the community of Flanders, was more awkward than that of the governors of Holland, where the towns recognized only the governor as a maritime coordinator and successive governors took effective steps to organize and fund coastal defence along the Zuider Zee and self-defence by Holland’s fishing boats.²⁷ In 1541–3 Maximiliaan van Egmond-Buren was as active in his north-eastern provinces as Roeulx was in Flanders. In autumn 1541 he put all the towns of Friesland and Overijssel in a state of defence while watching carefully for hostile troop movements in Guelders or northern Germany. In June 1542 he asked Mary of Hungary for powers to raise extra troops locally and was granted them, though told there would not be the money for any more. One month later, as Maarten van Rossum burst into Brabant, he was summoned south, but left only when urgent pleas from Mary outweighed the protests of the locals. After a hectic summer’s marching through Brabant, Namur, Luxembourg, and J¨ulich-Cleves, he returned to his post in the autumn and stayed there for most of 1543, though called away once to lead troops from Brabant to the defence of Hainaut.²⁸ As the Netherlands were drawn into the sweeping campaigns of the later Habsburg–Valois wars, combining a governorship with command in the field was no easy task. England’s equivalents to the provincial governors of the Netherlands, the lords lieutenant, were not established until near the end of our period. As we have seen with the fourth duke of Norfolk, noblemen did use their powers as lieutenants to raise troops when ordered to do so. They were also expected to coordinate local defence, but the political and military duties and opportunities presented by the post were much less than those of a governor in the Netherlands. Norfolk was breaking new ground when he wrote to the leaders of Suffolk society in 1559 requesting their cooperation in the task, with which he had been entrusted as lord lieutenant, of enforcing the laws lately made ‘for the advancement of religion and uniformity [of ] common prayer’.²⁹ The governors of Holland, by comparison, had been manœuvring between the central government and urban authorities for decades in the effort to implement Habsburg religious policy.³⁰ More similar to Habsburg governorships were the powers conferred on the wardens of the Marches and the king’s lieutenants in the North. The wardenship of the east and middle Marches towards Scotland, with its powers to muster men, enforce the law of the Marches and conclude truces with the Scots, had become, by the end of the fifteenth century, something of a family heirloom ²⁷ Sicking, Zeemacht, 93, 97–8, 140–51, 155, 282; ARA, RSA119/7, 12. ²⁸ Henne, Histoire, vii. 314, 322–4, 335–6, 348, 374–5, viii. 7–8, 27–32, 36–7, 97, 142; Inventaris Buren, v. 1018, 1028, 1040, 1054, 1075, 1088–9, 1101, 1126, 1128. ²⁹ CUL, Hengrave MS 88(iii), no. 84. ³⁰ Tracy, Holland, 147–75.

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for the Percies.³¹ The fourth earl of Northumberland was appointed to the post in 1470 and reappointed under Edward V, Richard III, and, after a few months’ imprisonment and on more restrictive terms, under Henry VII.³² His son, the fifth earl, however, never served as warden. To Mervyn James, this was stark evidence of the Tudors’ hostility to the great northern magnates. Henry VIII deliberately excluded this ‘great lord . . . from the great offices . . . which had been held by his ancestors’, until by countenancing disorder the earl ‘successfully imposed his will on King Henry VIII’ and forced the appointment of his son to the wardenship.³³ More recent historians have attributed the earl’s exclusion less to Henry’s and Wolsey’s fears of an ‘over-mighty subject’ than to his own unstable temperament and failure to develop the personal relationship with Henry so necessary for high office.³⁴ Contemporaries went further, claiming that the earl, who had after all been given other responsibilities in the defence of the North since 1510, was offered the wardenship in October 1522, but refused it.³⁵ In the following year the frustrations of the king’s commanders on the border with the earl’s absence and their inability to mobilize the Percy retinue were such that it seems to have been planned to send his son north instead: the earl himself sent out instructions to his servants, tenants, and friends to ‘wait and give their attendance upon my . . . dearest son and heir the Lord Percy [who] shall lie and abiding at my castle of Alnwick’.³⁶ In the event Lord Percy was not sent north in 1523. But when he was appointed warden in 1527, this marked not the triumph of the Percies over a hostile crown, but the conclusion drawn from a review of those who had had ‘the rule of the country of Northumberland’ since 1483. It pointed out that the fourth earl ‘ruled the country very substantially and well’, always residing locally, unlike the fifth earl with his fondness for Yorkshire and Sussex. Various substitutes for the Percies had failed, until under Lord Dacre ‘the country [was] out of good order and evil ruled’.³⁷ In December 1527, despite being ‘terribly young and little experienced in arms’, the sixth earl was sent to the borders to fulfil the expectations of both the crown and northern society.³⁸ Sadly, the sickly new earl, who claimed as early as December 1528 to be so ill of his ‘old disease’ that he had had the last rites administered, proved unequal to the task.³⁹ James V complained that his subordinates defaulted on cross-border meetings and the redress of grievances; when war came in 1532, one of the earl’s councillors complained that the king’s money was wasted, the earl was idle, and his lands in Northumberland should be transferred to his servant Sir Thomas Wharton, better able to secure ‘the safeguard of his borders and subjects here’.⁴⁰ The Pilgrimage ³¹ Storey, ‘Wardens’, 593–615. ³² Rotuli Scotiae, ii. 422–3, 428–9, 470–1, 479, 484–6; BL Harleian 433, iii. 12–14; CPR 1485–1494, 40; Hicks, ‘Dynastic Change’, 92–5; Cunningham, ‘Henry VII and Rebellion’, 51–3. ³³ James, ‘Tudor Magnate’, 48, 56–62. ³⁴ Gwyn, King’s Cardinal, 221–5; Bernard, Power, 11–16, 201. ³⁵ Hall, Chronicle, 651–2; LP III. ii. 2412. ³⁶ LP III. ii. 2412, 2636, 2645, 2875, 3072, 3306, 3322, 3384, IV. i. 278; Ellis, ‘Border Baron’, 268; State Papers, iv. 39; Antiquarian Repertory, iv. 350–1, misdated to 1528. ³⁷ LP IV. ii. 1460; PRO, C81/589/41–2; C81/595/158–9 (LP IV. ii. 3628–9). ³⁸ LP IV. ii. 3691. ³⁹ Ibid. 5055. ⁴⁰ Ibid. iii. 5706, VI. 107, 174; PRO, SP1/77, fo. 229 (LP VI. 829).

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of Grace in 1536 was the final straw. Unable to oppose the rebels, unwilling to join them, mentally and physically broken, the earl surrendered his castle at Wressle to the Pilgrims, who included his brothers and many of his servants, and retired to York. His removal from the wardenship ushered in two decades of crisis on the borders as the crown tried to govern them without a ‘great and substantial governor . . . and leader of wars having experience thereof ’.⁴¹ It was not until 1557 that the Percies regained the wardenship, the culmination of a two-year process of restoring Thomas Percy to his ancestors’ titles and offices as he demonstrated his competence and loyalty and as war with Scotland loomed.⁴² He was confirmed as warden by Elizabeth on 18 January 1559, but his independence was severely limited. In November 1558, for example, ‘for the better meeting of such fraud as is used at the musters’, the Privy Council ordered ‘certain discreet gentlemen, not being Northumberland men or borderers’ to muster his garrisons.⁴³ In August 1559 the privy councillor and border commissioner Sir Ralph Sadler stated that he considered the earl ‘very unmeet’ for the wardenship.⁴⁴ The problem was not military incompetence or the undesirability of a mighty lord as warden, but religious inclination. In November 1559 the earl resigned his office in protest at the queen’s aid to Scottish Protestants and ten years later he would rebel.⁴⁵ The Percies’ final term in the wardenship showed that the crown and the people of the North still looked to them as the natural leaders of political society on the borders, but that intervention from the centre and religious polarization had made the terms on which noblemen might exercise such office more complex than those in the heyday of the fourth earl. Although their natural power-base was far away in East Anglia, the Howards also operated periodically as royal lieutenants in the North. In May 1489, Henry VII sent Thomas Howard I to crush the rebels who had murdered the fourth earl of Northumberland, then appointed him deputy-warden of all three Marches under his son, Prince Arthur.⁴⁶ He triumphantly proved his loyalty to the Tudors, putting down a minor rebellion at Ackworth near Pontefract in 1492 but seeking clemency for most of the rebels, then conducting a successful campaign against the Scots in 1497, capturing Ayton castle in full view of an impotent James IV.⁴⁷ Such activity increased his standing both with the king and as a leader of northern political society, building credit he would draw on years later in the Flodden campaign. Thomas Howard II’s appointment as lieutenant-general of the army against Scotland in February 1523 came in very different circumstances.⁴⁸ Henry VIII was determined to eliminate the Scottish threat to England before invading France and chose Surrey as a commander with experience of the borders and, thanks to Flodden, ⁴¹ Bush, ‘Far North’, 40–63; PRO, SP1/75, fos. 155–6 (LP VI. 543). ⁴² CPR 1555–7, 479–80, 1557–8, 194; APC 1554–6, 206, 248–9; ACM, Letters and MSS 1314–1563, no. 67; Fonblanque, Annals, ii. 7. ⁴³ APC 1558–1570, 10. ⁴⁴ CSP Scotland, i. 534. ⁴⁵ Cokayne, Complete Peerage, ix. 729. ⁴⁶ Tucker, Thomas Howard, 51–74. ⁴⁷ Weever, Ancient Funeral Monuments, 556; Plumpton Letters, 105, 107; Tucker, Thomas Howard, 65–7. ⁴⁸ LP III. ii. 2875.

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standing in the North.⁴⁹ Surrey remained at Newcastle for thirteen months and showed himself an efficient military administrator and diplomat, an impartial dispenser of justice, a skilled border warrior, and a shrewd manager of men.⁵⁰ In particular, he defused the tensions arising from the failure of the fifth earl of Northumberland to fulfil his responsibilities: tensions between Dacre and Northumberland and between Dacre and the Percy followers of the east March who were reluctant to serve under him.⁵¹ Surrey also won honour in battle, raising the duke of Albany’s siege of Wark Castle in November 1523. Surrey bragged to Henry and Wolsey of Albany’s shameful defeat: ‘how cowardly he fled this day, when I came to present him battle’, his fleeing men tearing the duke’s badge from their breasts in disgust.⁵² Surrey’s lieutenancy, like that of his father, confirmed him as a commander of the front rank, and one able to operate not on the basis of local landed power or traditional ties of service, but from the force of his reputation and his embodiment of royal authority amidst the failure of local noble leadership.

A D M I N I S T R AT I O N A N D D I S C I P L I N E The increasing size of armies, the greater length of campaigns and the diversity of theatres of war in our period had important consequences for the role of noble commanders. They placed a new emphasis on administrative and logistical skills, such that, for example, Lamoraal van Egmond’s impatience with detail held him back from the highest commands despite his verve in battle.⁵³ The fourth earl of Northumberland had to make his own arrangements to supply the armies operating on the northern borders in 1481–3. To do so he built up relationships with merchants, for whom he secured letters of protection from legal process in return for supplying his retinue.⁵⁴ By the 1530s the sixth earl did not have to make such private contracts to ensure the victualling of his forces, as supply was increasingly taken over by the crown.⁵⁵ Yet the new system still demanded noble supervision, as the Howards learnt. Thomas Howard I’s northern campaigns in 1489, 1492, and 1496–7 were small affairs that could be sustained from local resources, and the Flodden campaign, though larger, was similar. Surrey used the traditional northern staging posts of Newcastle and Alnwick to supply his army, while the admiral, sailing to join his father with 1,241 soldiers, dropped anchor at Hull to victual his force. Such arrangements could keep large armies in the field for a short time, while sustaining prolonged low-level border warfare; but the need to fight before his food ran out conditioned ⁴⁹ Vokes, ‘Thomas Howard’, 239–41; Head, Ebbs and Flows, 61–2. ⁵⁰ Ibid. 239–65; Head, Ebbs and Flows, 62–7. ⁵¹ BL, Add MS. 24965, fos. 43, 45 (LP III. ii. 3310, 3322); PRO, SP49/2, fo. 11r – v (LP III. ii. 2960). ⁵² State Papers, iv. 52 (LP III. ii. 3509); PRO, SP49/2, fo. 46 (LP III. ii. 3509); LP III. ii. 3508. ⁵³ Arnold, Renaissance at War, 87, 90; Verhofstad, Regering, 36. ⁵⁴ Critchley, ‘Writ of Judicial Protection’; PRO, C76/155, m. 13, C76/159, m. 24, C76/160, m. 11, C76/164, m. 7, C76/165, m. 4, C76/166, mm. 10, 17–8, C81/1327/39–40, 55. ⁵⁵ Davies, ‘Provisions for Armies’, 134–48; Fissel, English Warfare, 26.

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Surrey’s decision to engage James IV at Flodden.⁵⁶ Naval warfare demanded a more systematic approach, and, as admiral, Thomas Howard II learnt the benefits of securing large stocks of victuals in advance and mastering the details of cables and stores.⁵⁷ In the Scottish campaign of 1542, supply was the overriding theme of his correspondence with the Privy Council in London. The shortage of carts and beer barrels was a constant worry: in September he ordered each captain to bring two carts laden with barrels to ease the problem.⁵⁸ Again in 1544, his letters from France mixed reports of chivalrous exchanges with foreign commanders with detailed complaints about victualling.⁵⁹ In both years he signed and annotated warrant after warrant for military payments and in 1544 he organized the evacuation and medical care of sick and wounded men.⁶⁰ The need to exercise discipline over troops was a more unchanging concern. English commanders such as Charles Brandon sought the power to do exemplary justice, but had trouble keeping their armies in order even when provided with an official executioner.⁶¹ Polyglot forces operating on home territory made discipline an even hotter issue in the Netherlands, where the regents often spurred commanders to impose it, as Margaret of Austria did Floris van Egmond-Buren in September 1511.⁶² Strict justice tempered with mercy was the course most likely to keep troops orderly but loyal. Thus Floris imprisoned five captains when their troops misbehaved in 1493 but released them when they pledged future obedience; thus the great lords intervened for the lives of reiter condemned to death by their colleagues after abandoning their watch posts on the freezing night of 29 October 1554.⁶³ When troops were completely out of control, however, attacking them was the only option. In 1515 Ferry de Cro¨y-Roeulx in Brabant and Floris in Holland used their bandes d’ordonnance, urban militias, and even artillery to disperse ravaging troops.⁶⁴ One of the marked features of Maximiliaan van Egmond-Buren’s occupation of Frankfurt in 1546–7 was the ‘strict discipline and punishment’ which, as one of the town’s pastors noted, he exercised over his men.⁶⁵ Executions of those who mistreated civilians were a frequent occurrence, and one soldier was burnt for forging coins. The pastor was particularly impressed that Buren paid his footsoldiers half in money and half in cloth, so that their health improved as they replaced the rags in which they had ended the long campaign of 1546, and they had less to squander on gambling and drink.⁶⁶ In occupied towns noble commanders also exercised justice over the civilian population. Thus Buren had two men tortured and executed as traitors for conspiring to let Hessian troops into Frankfurt, ⁵⁶ 116. ⁵⁷ ⁵⁸ ⁶⁰ ⁶¹ ⁶² ⁶⁴ ⁶⁶

Vokes, ‘Thomas Howard’, 110; Tucker, Thomas Howard, 110; Phillips, Anglo-Scots Wars, Ibid. 106; PRO, SP1/24, fo. 315 (LP III. ii. 2236); LP III. ii. 2237, 2342. LP XVII. 719, 754, 771, 820. ⁵⁹ LP XIX. i. 738, 873, 919–20. Ibid. 922, 954, 1003, XIX, i. 271, 272(13), 632, 635; Phillips, ‘Mutiny’, 321. Gunn, ‘March on Paris’, 599, 623–5, 628; Gunn, Charles Brandon, 16–17. Inventaris Buren, iv. 39. ⁶³ Ibid. iii. 1337; ‘Dagverhaal’, 304. Henne, Histoire, ii. 135, 144. ⁶⁵ QFG 333. QFG 313, 315, 333, 345–8, 355–9.

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printing and distributing their confessions to discourage similar attempts.⁶⁷ Justice had been a prime role of medieval noblemen and continued to be exercised in their seigneurial courts, but noble justice was in retreat as princely institutions drew business out of private courts and noblemen’s role in those centralizing tribunals simultaneously declined. Military jurisdiction was important in preserving an arena in which noblemen could wield the sword of justice. Given the deficiencies of Habsburg supply services compared with those of the Tudors, even after Mary of Hungary’s council of war began to estimate the quantities of victuals required and appoint commissioners to provision the troops, the regulation of foraging was a particularly delicate area.⁶⁸ Starving troops might be mutinous or unfit to fight. Yet troops given free rein to exploit friendly civilian populations might alienate them dangerously. Enemy civilians might be plundered more freely, but they were best not driven into diehard resistance.⁶⁹ Rebels who might yet submit to princely authority were a further complication. A little burning and extortion might well convince civilians of the benefits of cooperation, but commanders had to be able to rein the troops in for this to work. Maximiliaan, who had the reputation of ‘a great burner’ on the frontier with France, threatened to burn the villages around Frankfurt if the town council would not feed his men in August 1546; when they did not reply, he burnt one village and let his men ransack the rest. In December, he let his troops plunder Darmstadt and extract vast sums in protection money from the surrounding peasantry before descending on Frankfurt, which decided that this time it had better cooperate.⁷⁰ Meanwhile competition between units for the best resources had to be controlled if the army’s cohesion were to be maintained. Disputes over plundered food in the huge camps of 1554 led one reiter to level his gun at Emmanuel Philibert and others to jostle William of Orange almost off his horse; the second time order was restored only when Emmanuel Philibert shot dead one young German count.⁷¹ Within the Netherlands, provincial governors were expected to coordinate supplies for nearby armies even if they were not in command of them, a frequent responsibility for governors of Artois in particular.⁷² Defensive campaigns like those of Adrien de Cro¨y-Roeulx in 1542–3 likewise demanded careful planning to avoid exhausting horse forage and, if possible, to intercept enemy food supplies.⁷³ And for all the attempts at central provisioning, commanders like Maximiliaan van Egmond-Buren were still dependent on their own planning and contacts to keep their troops fed.⁷⁴ Habsburg commanders also found that they had constantly to badger the central authorities for money to pay their men. It was the case for Floris in 1523 and again and again for Adrien, despite his attempt in 1552 to persuade men who would not be content with one month’s wages when they were owed three that ‘I have in the past served the emperor with men who were owed eighteen months but still didn’t at ⁶⁷ QFG 315 n., 336–7. ⁶⁸ Baes, ‘Les Arm´ees’, 82–5. ⁶⁹ Gunn, ‘March on Paris’, 616–19. ⁷⁰ QFG 301–4, 311; Brantˆome, Œuvres, i. 314. ⁷¹ ‘Dagverhaal’, 284–6, 298–300. ⁷² Gunn, ‘March on Paris’, 602; Emmanuele Filiberto, Diari, 3, 15–18, 52, 54–5, 61–2, 65–6, 76, 82, 85, 88–9, 95, 147–9. ⁷³ ARA, RSA119/5; CSPS 1542–3, 348. ⁷⁴ Inventaris Buren, v. 1259, 1262, 1271.

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all talk about it like they did’.⁷⁵ Fortunate was the commander who had the regent nearby and working to channel money to him, as Floris had in 1511, or who could persuade local financial officials to divert money to the frontier for his troops, as Adrien did in 1542.⁷⁶ Noblemen’s conduct in such matters had implications not only for their military success, but also for their reputations. Hence their eagerness to defend themselves against accusations such as that made against Jan van Dadizele in 1479 that he had deliberately withheld payment from his troops; to clear Jan as decisively as possible, the Ypres authorities sentenced his detractor to make a public apology and do penance at Dadizele church on Christmas Day.⁷⁷ Reputation was a matter of honour, but also a matter of effectiveness, since men were more likely to obey a captain they respected. The inability of the Habsburgs’ military machinery to cope with the size of their campaigns made it harder for their noblemen to match efficiency with glory.

C O M M A N D E R S AT WO R K Noblemen were surrounded by counsellors; decisions on estate and household management, political action and war were not taken in a vacuum but were made with their advice. An English nobleman’s senior household men comprised a nearpermanent council, which might be afforced by estate officers, lawyers, and other servants and friends. His war council was in essence an extension of this personal council to include the leading captains of the host and selected military experts.⁷⁸ The fourth and fifth earls of Northumberland were served by councils of this sort. The fourth earl’s councillors included prominent northern gentry, such as Sir William Eure and Sir John Pickering, whereas the fifth, more detached from military action on the borders, seemed more dependent on his receiver-general, local receivers, and retained legal counsel.⁷⁹ The sixth earl had a private council to attend to his estate business, but he was also provided with a council by the crown to bolster his performance as warden of the Marches.⁸⁰ This ‘council in household’ included the key military commanders under the earl’s wardenship—his brothers Thomas and Ingram, Sir William Eure, Sir Ralph Fenwick, Sir Roger Gray, Robert Collingwood and Sir John Heron—existing Percy servants such as Roger Lascelles and John Lampleugh, and more independent figures, such as the chancellor of Durham, Robert Bowes, and Sir William Ellerker. It also included the Dacre followers Leonard and Cuthbert Musgrave, experienced borderers from Cumberland.⁸¹ The ‘council in household’ resembled that set up in 1525 to govern the North under the nominal leadership of the duke of Richmond and Northumberland was ⁷⁵ ⁷⁶ ⁷⁷ ⁷⁸ ⁷⁹ ⁸⁰ ⁸¹

Gunn, ‘March on Paris’, 622–3; Henne, Histoire, ix. 355 n., x. 7. Inventaris Buren, iv. 37, 40; ADN, B6807, fos. 46v –47. Dadizeele, M´emoires, 102–3. Rawcliffe, ‘Baronial Councils’; Walker, Lancastrian Affinity, 8–18. Hicks, ‘Dynastic Change’, 87; PRO, E36/226, passim. Hoyle, ‘Henry Percy’, 210–11. PRO, SP1/238, fo. 56 (LP Addenda i. 828); LP IV. ii. 5085.

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almost as much under tutelage as his 9-year-old predecessor.⁸² The councillors not only advised him what raids to make into Scotland and how to defend the borders in time of truce but vetoed raids he proposed.⁸³ In 1533 the earl’s appointment as president of the Council in the North merely brought the imposition of further councillors, including the meddling George Lawson, who kept nagging him to perform some ‘notable act’ against the Scots.⁸⁴ The council told the earl when to go to the borders and how long to stay there, and made sure he did not recruit more men than the king wished.⁸⁵ Northumberland was vital as a figurehead on the borders, but the real direction of military affairs was out of his control as his counsellors tried to hold together a system under strain because of the warden’s military inadequacy and the determination of the Tudors to manage the financial and strategic priorities of border defence.⁸⁶ In their campaigns in the 1510s and 1520s the Howards followed traditional practice more closely. Thomas Howard II served on the council of his kinsman the marquess of Dorset during the Guienne campaign of 1512, a council that conducted genuine debates on the conduct of the campaign.⁸⁷ In the Flodden campaign Thomas Howard I also sought counsel widely. The core of his war council consisted of those relatives who accompanied him northwards—his son, Thomas II, and his treasurerat-war and brother-in-law, Sir Philip Tilney—but when it came to the major decision of where to cross the River Twizzle on the approach to battle, ‘it was concluded by the earl and his council and most part of the army thereto agreed’.⁸⁸ By the 1540s matters were more closely circumscribed. For the 1542 Scottish campaign Norfolk was issued with two detailed sets of instructions constraining his diplomatic and military freedom of action and he was expected to keep in close contact with king and Privy Council.⁸⁹ At Montreuil in 1544, Lord Russell and Sir Thomas Cheyney functioned as his chief war counsellors, but their advice and Norfolk’s decisions had again to be referred back to Henry and his councillors.⁹⁰ Less subject to change was the need for noble commanders to live like noblemen, for the magnificence and liberality that underpinned noble power in everyday life had to be exercised on campaign in order to bolster noblemen’s power to command. Margaret of Austria was wise when she advised Floris van Egmond-Buren to win the loyalty of the gentlemen of the court and the army so that they would serve him more readily.⁹¹ English captains marked their presence with heraldic standards and banners and slept in splendid tents, Northumberland’s in France in 1513 being decorated with thirty shields with ‘my lord’s whole arms’.⁹² After the 1523 campaign the duke of Suffolk even suggested that commanders should have a sword borne before them to symbolize their status as the king’s lieutenant.⁹³ Philibert of Chalon’s daily expenses in Italy in 1526–30 included violet velvet, cloth of gold, and pickled mushrooms, ⁸² ⁸⁵ ⁸⁷ ⁸⁹ ⁹¹ ⁹² ⁹³

Reid, Council in the North, 109. ⁸³ LP V. 1635, VI. 332, 1187. ⁸⁴ LP VI. 124. PRO, SP1/74, fos. 163–5, 173 (LP VI. 145, 155). ⁸⁶ Etty, ‘Tudor Solution’, 220–4. Vokes, ‘Thomas Howard’, 90; Original Letters, 2nd ser. i. 194. ⁸⁸ Hall, Chronicle, 561. LP XVII. 764, 800. ⁹⁰ LP XIX, i. 654, 672, 700, 738, 786, 976; State Papers, x. 9–10. Inventaris Buren, iv. 40. Cruickshank, Army Royal, 42–9; Antiquarian Repertory, iv. 363; Gunn, ‘March on Paris’, 599. Gunn, ‘March on Paris’, 629.

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and Floris, count of Culemborg, prepared to go on campaign in 1558 by buying six silver beer mugs and a silver salt pot with three naked putti on its foot.⁹⁴ At Frankfurt in 1546–7, Maximiliaan van Egmond-Buren gave banquets for his captains and used the same methods on the town elite, entertaining thirty tables full of them to dinner.⁹⁵ Emmanuel Philibert gave a dinner for 135 to celebrate the capture of Hesdin in 1553 and rounded off the 1557 campaign with a grand banquet for all his captains and a final skirmish with the French, fired up by the food and drink. Too much wining and dining had its dangers, however. Emmanuel Philibert feared his colleagues discussed the secrets of the council of war so freely over dinner that eavesdropping servants were able to pass them on to the enemy.⁹⁶ Military command was a collective enterprise in the Netherlands as in England, but councils of war did not guarantee harmony. On campaigns against France in 1522 and 1553–4 there were sharp debates over strategy, once so sharp that nearby soldiers began to panic.⁹⁷ Experts might prove particularly awkward, like the master of the artillery at the siege of Tiel in 1528, who apparently rushed Floris van Egmond-Buren into a costly and unsuccessful assault by his threat to return to Mechelen because he thought the battery had gone on long enough.⁹⁸ Otherwise the balance between commanders and their counsellors varied with personalities and situations. Even Emmanuel Philibert sometimes conceded to majority opinion.⁹⁹ The inexperienced, like William of Orange in 1555, found the backing of expert subordinates in a council of war could justify their decisions to rulers frustrated by their caution.¹⁰⁰ Veterans were bolder in overriding their counsellors: Adrien de Cro¨y-Roeulx tried to ignore his colonels’ advice that the army was too exhausted to end its campaign in 1552 with an attack on Le Chˆatelet, only for Mary of Hungary to veto his plan.¹⁰¹ Rulers’ and regents’ expectations of regular correspondence with their commanders increased in the Netherlands as in England, particularly for important campaigns. In 1511, during the siege of Venlo, Margaret of Austria stayed at ’s-Hertogenbosch for months on end and bombarded Floris with advice.¹⁰² Mary of Hungary faced the crisis of 1542 from Brussels, but harassed Adrien de Cro¨y-Roeulx with more or less daily orders.¹⁰³ Charles V followed the capture of Tournai in 1521 from Oudenaarde, then, from Tunis in 1535 to Metz in 1552, took to commanding his armies in person, only to lapse thereafter into the sort of intermittent engagement with events at the front that would characterize his son.¹⁰⁴ This was probably the worst arrangement of all from the general’s point of view, forcing Emmanuel Philibert to correspond constantly with Charles and Philip and their other ministers and commanders, sometimes to have to argue against other noblemen’s views in councils ⁹⁴ Chalon, Giornali, 10–30; Gegevens betreffende bezit, 108. ⁹⁵ QFG 346, 349. ⁹⁶ ISN viii. 307–8; ‘Dagverhaal’, 336–7; Emmanuele Filiberto, Diari, 155. ⁹⁷ LP III. ii. 2511, 2517; Emanuele Filiberto, Diari, 7–8, 14, 54–5, 139, 147, 150–3, 156, 158, 163–5, 172–4. ⁹⁸ Macquereau, Histoire g´en´erale, 105–7. ⁹⁹ Emanuele Filiberto, Diari, 152–3, 156. ¹⁰⁰ Rachfahl, Wilhelm von Oranien, i. 195–6. ¹⁰¹ Henne, Histoire, ix. 347–8. ¹⁰² Inventaris Buren, iv. 36–40. ¹⁰³ Henne, Histoire, viii. 5–10. ¹⁰⁴ Tracy, Emperor Charles V, 114–248.

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chaired by the prince, and on occasion even to await his monarch’s decision when choosing campsites.¹⁰⁵ S E RV I C E FA R A F I E L D The relationship between war and noble power was partly dependent on where that service took place: defending the area where a nobleman resided was a very different matter from journeying far away in the service of an empire-building or crusading prince. The Percy earls of Northumberland seldom served away from the borders with Scotland. In 1513, however, the fifth earl was called to accompany Henry VIII to France with 100 demi-lances, 300 archers, and 100 billmen, led by such stalwart Percy followers as Roger Lascelles, John Heron, and George Swinburn from Northumberland, John Lampleugh and Thomas Horsley from Cumberland, and Sir John Normanville, John Hothom, Cuthbert Musgrave, and Thomas Eryngton from Yorkshire.¹⁰⁶ His affinity was thus, as Robert Sandall of Tadcaster put it in the will he made on 5 June, ‘proposing by the grace of God to visit the borders of France with the noble lord Henry, earl of Northumberland’.¹⁰⁷ They were probably expected to bring the special skills of warfare on the northern borders to France, scouting as ‘scourers’ and ‘fore-riders’.¹⁰⁸ Wearing black and red hats in the Percy livery colours and white Percy crescents on their coats, the soldiers proclaimed the family power, while the green and white Tudor cloth of their coats together with the red cross of St George and Tudor rose on their breasts made clear that their lord’s might was being channelled into a royal enterprise.¹⁰⁹ The Howards served usually in France and sometimes against the Scots. However, in May 1520 Thomas Howard II, earl of Surrey, arrived in Dublin as the king’s lieutenant of Ireland. His appointment testified to the king’s and Wolsey’s increasing faith in what Henry called his ‘accustomable politic, valiant and circumspect manners’, but also to their disenchantment with the government of Ireland under the ninth earl of Kildare. Surrey was charged to employ all ‘politic practices’, which ‘may do more good than exploit of war’, to subjugate the Gaelic chiefs and remodel Irish government, increasing its efficiency and excluding Kildare’s ubiquitous family and clientele.¹¹⁰ Unfortunately he was expected to do it on the cheap, deploying a force of 1,000 men but funding them himself under an indenture with the crown. He was clearly unhappy about the arrangement and had still not agreed to it when he arrived in Ireland: the result was that his few English troops went underpaid, he had about half the projected Irish soldiers and in the first winter he kept his force together only ‘by force of character’.¹¹¹ His military expeditions and attempts at administrative reform met with equally limited success and he became disenchanted with royal strategy, arguing for a thorough and well-funded conquest of Gaelic Ireland and asking to ¹⁰⁵ ¹⁰⁶ ¹⁰⁸ ¹¹⁰ ¹¹¹

Emanuele Filiberto, Diari, 13–14, 66–8, 75–6, 91–2. Antiquarian Repertory, iv. 348, 355–6. ¹⁰⁷ ‘Testamenta Leodiensia’, 81. Fonblanque, Annals, i. 339. ¹⁰⁹ Antiquarian Repertory, iv. 365–6. State Papers, ii. 34; Ellis, Ireland, 119–26; Vokes, ‘Thomas Howard’, 186–212. Vokes, ‘Thomas Howard’, 195.

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be recalled when his proposals were rejected. The posting brought no great benefit either to him or to English policy in Ireland, but it did demonstrate the Tudors’ ability to command their noblemen to serve them wherever they chose and the concern of nobles to fulfil the prince’s will in war wherever it took them. Netherlands noblemen similarly served the Habsburg princes in war outside the core area of the Netherlands. Ferry de Cro¨y-Roeulx set the trend for his family, journeying to Italy for six months in 1509 as captain-general of 433 horsemen sent by Maximilian to fight the Venetians under the League of Cambrai. His subordinates were among the most able captains of the Low Countries: Jan van Wassenaar, Jan van Bergen-Walhain, Philippe, lord of Bellefourri`ere. Unfortunately the expedition ended less than gloriously for Ferry, as the ‘virtuous knight and good captain’ was captured by Venetian stradiots.¹¹² Adrien’s foreign ventures were more successful. In August 1529 he led his bande d’ordonnance to Italy, via Franche-Comt´e, through various tests of his vigour and powers of command, to parade at Charles’s entry into Bologna and again at the imperial coronation on 24 February 1530.¹¹³ Scarcely had he returned from the peninsula than he set off to confront the Ottoman march on Vienna in 1532. In July he was marching through Mons; by September he was fighting Tatars in Austria. The invaders were thrown back, though Roeulx, marshal of the emperor’s army, argued bitterly with the dilatory Count Palatine Frederick and the Spanish and Italian generals with their ill-disciplined men.¹¹⁴ Still, he had played his part in the defence of Christendom, ‘such a momentous and sacred enterprise’, as he called it, and he could settle down to look after Artois and Flanders.¹¹⁵ Floris van Egmond-Buren travelled less. Campaigns against the dukes of Guelders and their allies often took him outside areas under full Habsburg control—to occupy parts of Guelders, to pacify Friesland in 1515–17, to invade the bishopric of Utrecht repeatedly and France on four occasions—but left little time or energy for Italy or Austria. His trip to an imperial coronation took him not to Bologna, but to Aachen.¹¹⁶ Maximiliaan was freer to travel while his father was alive, serving at Charles V’s court in Spain and nastily wounded on the unsuccessful invasion of Provence in 1536.¹¹⁷ But his greatest moment came in 1546–7, when he led an army of 12,000, mostly Netherlanders, down the Rhine to join Charles’s army on the Danube, fighting his way past the forces of the Schmalkaldic League. Once he had joined the emperor on 15 September he became one of his leading advisers, accompanying him to reconnoitre enemy positions and reputedly telling him to move his fortified camp to a healthier spot.¹¹⁸ Like Roeulx in 1532, he seems to have been more eager for an attack on the retreating enemy than some of his colleagues or, ultimately, Charles himself.¹¹⁹ Perhaps things were easier when he resumed independent command in mid-December, heading back from ¹¹² Rapport Lille, 380, 382; Cools, Mannen met macht, 157–8, 193, 219, 303; Lejeune, ‘Roeulx’, 261; Henne, Histoire, i. 242 n. ¹¹³ Lusy, Journal, 296; Macqu´ereau, Histoire, 230, 233, 247, 272, 289. ¹¹⁴ Ibid. 305; Lejeune, ‘Roeulx’, 269. ¹¹⁵ Rosenfeld, ‘Provincial Governors’, 11. ¹¹⁶ Macqu´ereau, Chronicque, 91. ¹¹⁷ Inventaris Buren, iv. 155, 291, 397, 435, 439. ¹¹⁸ Zwichem, Tagebuch, 94, 96, 171; QFG 308. ¹¹⁹ Ibid. 133, 143; Avila, Comentaries, G2v .

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Rothenberg towards the Netherlands and north-western Germany via Boxberg, Darmstadt, and Frankfurt, compelling Protestant princes and cities to submit to the emperor’s rule.¹²⁰ Buren stayed at Frankfurt from 29 December to 19 April, though he made two fortnight-long trips to Ulm and Nuremberg to consult with Charles.¹²¹ At Frankfurt he wisely calmed the population’s fears of enforced Counter-Reformation by publicly standing godfather to the son of a town councillor on his second day, but in other respects he made the town a bulwark of imperial influence in a hostile region, swearing the citizens to obey the emperor and sending his cavalry to raid the Hessian countryside.¹²² Given that he stayed nearly five months, having promised to stay only five or six days, and that the diseases brought by his troops made the year of occupation one in which 368 persons were baptized in the town but 2,617 were buried, it is remarkable how generously the Frankfurt chroniclers recorded his time in their midst.¹²³ He returned home via Mainz, Bonn, and Overijssel.¹²⁴ Whether he crowned his expedition by rooting disloyalty and Anabaptism out of far northwestern Germany as planned at Rothenberg seems unlikely, but he had done enough to make himself famous as one of the great commanders of his generation.¹²⁵ The wide sweep of Habsburg interests placed more complex demands on their noble captains, but offered correspondingly glittering opportunities. R E L AT I O N S W I T H F O R E I G N P R I N C E S A N D C O M M A N D E R S Noblemen’s military careers naturally brought them into contact with the allies of their prince. Such contacts gave them further opportunities to advance their masters’ service, but also the chance to cultivate their own interests and reputation. At times the two priorities were not easy to reconcile. The Tudors’ dependence on aid from the Habsburg Netherlands for their campaigns in France gave English military commanders frequent contact with their counterparts from the Low Countries, but the Howards’ relations with Netherlandish nobles were often tense. In 1522 Thomas Howard II and his colleagues found Ferry de Cro¨y-Roeulx and other captains reluctant to besiege French towns, burn French countryside, or do anything other than use the English to defend Habsburg territories.¹²⁶ In 1544 disagreements arose again. This time it was Adrien de Cro¨y-Roeulx and Maximilaan van Egmond-Buren who held Howard back because, he suspected, they feared French attacks on the emperor’s dominions.¹²⁷ When Norfolk insisted on a siege of Montreuil, it was Roeulx’s default in providing victuals and soldiers that angered him: the resulting failure to do any ‘honourable exploit’, he warned them, ‘should not be only contrary to your promise but also much dishonour should thereby rebound to both our masters’.¹²⁸ It was ¹²⁰ ¹²¹ ¹²³ ¹²⁵ ¹²⁷ ¹²⁸

Zwichem, Tagebuch, 212, 214–15, 229, 235, 247–8; Avila, Comentaries, K8r . QFG 304, 334–6, 349. ¹²² QFG 316, 332, 334–6, 354. Ibid. 312, 331, 350. ¹²⁴ QFG 337; Inventaris Buren, v. 1395. Zwichem, Tagebuch, 229. ¹²⁶ LP III. ii. 2451, 2499, 2500, 2517, 2541. PRO, SP1/189, fos. 116–7 (LP XIX. i. 786); Head, Ebbs and Flows, 212–13. v Ibid. fo. 234 (LP XIX. i. 873); LP XIX. i. 919–20.

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probably fortunate that Norfolk’s embassies took him to the French court rather than Brussels.¹²⁹ Roeulx himself was a much more versatile diplomat than Norfolk, charged with a run of important missions in the 1520s and 1530s.¹³⁰ Yet he never seems to have much impressed the English. In 1522, he reconnoitred Hesdin and announced it could easily be taken, but was proved comprehensively wrong. For all that he wrote to Henry full of zeal for the king’s service, Sir William Sandys, the treasurer of Calais and captain of Guines, was left spluttering about the ill effects of paying attention to ‘young counsel’.¹³¹ Later he was frequently in touch with English commanders at Calais and Boulogne, but cooperation over wartime raids or warning of French attacks was balanced by complaints about English mistreatment of Flemish ships or provocatively sited fortifications.¹³² Once indeed, in 1528, Adrien had to prepare troops for an attack on England, and in 1536 he was engaged in the equally unfriendly action, from Henry VIII’s point of view, of trying to arrange Princess Mary’s escape to the Netherlands.¹³³ In contrast, Floris van Egmond-Buren was a keen ally to the English, who nominated him as chamberlain to the young Charles V in 1513.¹³⁴ He championed their cause at the Habsburg court and maintained particularly close relations with Sir William Sandys.¹³⁵ In 1513 he raised and led a company of men-at-arms in Henry VIII’s invasion of France and was rewarded with £333 6s 8d at the end of the campaign, more than twice his annual pension from Charles.¹³⁶ In 1522–3 he was praised by Surrey and worked well with Suffolk, whom he sought to treat ‘like my own son and best friend in the world’. ¹³⁷ Writing, he said, not by the advice of Margaret of Austria or her council, but of those who wished well to Henry and Charles, he even asked Henry to pay his troops as they advanced across the Somme, coming dangerously close to admitting that the Habsburgs could not or would not commit what they had promised to the campaign; in the end he narrowly avoided recriminations by waiting until the English camp broke up before dismissing his own men.¹³⁸ He repeatedly pledged his loyalty to Henry, ‘the prince living today to whom I most desire to do service’, wishing that he and Suffolk ‘might shortly crown him king at Paris at his pleasure’.¹³⁹ He remained a lifelong friend to the English, horrified at the prospect of war with them in 1528 and 1533.¹⁴⁰ Maximiliaan was less wholeheartedly anglophile. In 1544 he led Charles’s contingent in Henry VIII’s army and, though haggling over the price, raised more than ¹²⁹ Head, Ebbs and Flows, 43–4, 116–18, 124–5, 165–8. ¹³⁰ LP III. ii. 3030; Macqu´ereau, Histoire, 244–5, 270; CSPS 1534–5, 361–72, 446–8. ¹³¹ LP III. ii. 2556, 2560. ¹³² CSPS 1542–3, 82, 249–50, 280, 356–9; CSPS 1545–6, 361–2; CSPS 1547–9, 420; CSPS 1550–2, 4, 308, 391, 499–500. ¹³³ Henne, Histoire, iv. 173; CSPS 1536–8, 27, 41–2, 44. ¹³⁴ Cools, Mannen met macht, 202–4. ¹³⁵ LP III. ii. 2326, 2352, 2367–70; Gunn, ‘March on Paris’, 603. ¹³⁶ BL, Stowe MS 146, fo. 105; Rapport Lille, 303. ¹³⁷ LP III. ii. 2451, 2457, 2511; Gunn, ‘March on Paris’, 604, 607–8, 614–16, 629. ¹³⁸ Ibid. 3462; Gunn, ‘March on Paris’, 620–5. ¹³⁹ Ibid. 2466, 3462; PRO, SP1/28, fo. 317 (LP III. ii. 3430); HHSA, PA14/2, fo. 496r . ¹⁴⁰ LP IV. ii. 4036–7; 1, 195–211; Letters of Hackett, 349.

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700 additional cavalry and 2,000 landsknecht infantry on contract for the English.¹⁴¹ Once on campaign, however, he and Adrien argued for a march on Paris to match Charles’s incursion along the Marne, while Norfolk and Russell insisted on besieging Montreuil. The town was never properly surrounded, supplies were poor, and disease rife, conditions for which, as we have seen, Norfolk blamed Roeulx. When Charles made peace with the French, the siege dissolved amidst mutual recriminations, though Maximiliaan honourably agreed to see his English colleagues back safely to Boulogne. This earned a warm commendation from Henry to Charles: the king thought Buren one of the best lords and princes that one might ever speak of, and duly followed his march down the Rhine in 1546 with great interest.¹⁴² Maximiliaan’s stronger connections always lay in Germany, where he built on the links with Cleves, J¨ulich, East Friesland, Brunswick, and Hesse his father had developed in promoting Habsburg interests in Guelders and the Rhineland.¹⁴³ It was symptomatic that when Maximiliaan escorted Henry VIII’s bride Anne of Cleves into Antwerp, the English merchants entertained her but he feasted her German attendants.¹⁴⁴ Kinship links with the counts of Nassau and long involvement with German captains fitted him to be a broker in the War of the League of Schmalkalden not only between Charles and well-disposed Lutherans, but even between the emperor and his leading opponents.¹⁴⁵ Late in 1547 Charles brought him into play again, summoning him to the Diet of Augsburg with 1,000 cavalry from the Netherlands.¹⁴⁶ In this period before the polarization of the 1560s, Buren’s German connections, like those of William of Orange, were a means to serve his Habsburg masters more effectively.¹⁴⁷ The context for such relations was the courtly and chivalric culture shared by the princes and nobilities of western Europe. Knightly orders, such as the French order of Saint-Michel to which Norfolk was elected in 1532, institutionalized it most clearly, but it found expression in many other ways.¹⁴⁸ Antoine de Lusy did not find it strange that Henry VIII should wish to retain the bastard of Aimeries as a captain in the Tournai garrison, because he found him ‘very much a gentleman and because he was a good musician’.¹⁴⁹ Nor did Adrien de Cro¨y-Roeulx find it hard to praise the death of his enemy the chevalier Bayard, ‘the finest of which I ever heard men speak’.¹⁵⁰ Disagreements between allies could also be tempered by chivalrous admiration, as when Adrien told Henry VIII in 1522 he had never seen ‘a more brave or excellent captain general’ than Surrey.¹⁵¹ It also seems from Adrien’s correspondence with Anne de Montmorency, his counterpart as governor in Picardy, that their shared values ¹⁴¹ Millar, Tudor Mercenaries, 87–90. ¹⁴² Ibid. 98–100, 112–14; Willen, Russell, 9, 46–8; CSPS 1544, 376–7, 385; CSPS 1545–6, 487. ¹⁴³ Henne, Histoire, i. 256; Gachard, Rapport, 310; Inventaris Buren, iv. 287, 308, 328, 347, 447, 478, 485, 534, 547, 551–2, 556, 575, 583. ¹⁴⁴ Warnicke, Marrying of Anne of Cleves, 115–19. ¹⁴⁵ Rachfahl, Wilhelm von Oranien, i. 156–7; Cools, Mannen met macht, 205, 274; Avila, Comentaries, J4r ; Durme, Granvela, 78. ¹⁴⁶ Henne, Histoire, viii. 315. ¹⁴⁷ Rachfahl, Wilhelm von Oranien, i. 235. ¹⁴⁸ LP V. 1474, 1484. ¹⁴⁹ Lusy, Journal, 51. ¹⁵⁰ Rosenfeld, ‘Provincial Governors’, 10. ¹⁵¹ LP III. ii. 2556.

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eased their negotiations.¹⁵² At times of crisis these common understandings could save a nobleman’s life. At Saint-Pol in 1537 Maximiliaan van Egmond-Buren rescued Martin du Bellay, who had surrendered to him, by holding off his own soldiers at sword-point.¹⁵³ Shared expectations could also count against individuals who did not live up to them. In 1515 the English ambassadors at the French court tried to discredit Hendrik III of Nassau, Charles V’s envoy there, by reporting that he had taken Henry VIII’s wages of war in 1513 but performed no great service in return.¹⁵⁴ The festivities to celebrate the peace of Cateau-Cambr´esis in 1559 gave international aristocratic culture free rein, free enough for Henry II to be killed in a jousting accident and William of Orange to learn from conversations with the French king while out hunting, so he claimed, that Henry and Philip II had secret plans to root out the Protestants in their kingdoms.¹⁵⁵ Such intimacies were becoming unusual in a period in which the lines between service to the French and Habsburg monarchies were increasingly clearly drawn. William’s ancestor Engelbrecht was a central figure in the relations between Charles VIII, Louis XII, Maximilian, and Philip the Fair, profiting by pensions from Charles VIII and his rivals Ferdinand and Isabella, as well as in presents from various provincial States delighted at the Habsburg–Valois marriage treaty of 1501.¹⁵⁶ In Engelbrecht’s generation noblemen from the Netherlands could happily fight in Italy in French service, join crusades under French auspices, or even accept the governorship of Italian towns from the French king.¹⁵⁷ Thereafter the Habsburgs did not allow their noblemen such freedom of action. Honour, wherever it was won, was to be won in the service of their natural prince, and the benefits to be gained from interaction with other kings and lords served mostly to equip noblemen better for such service.

N E G OT I AT I N G A N D C O L L E C T I N G TA X AT I O N Noblemen’s contribution to military enterprise went well beyond what they did on the field of battle or even in raising troops. One important way in which they helped to mobilize society for war was in facilitating taxation. In the Netherlands, powerful noblemen were often appointed as princely commissioners to negotiate with provincial States for tax grants. This might be in the province of which they were governor, as Maximiliaan van Egmond-Buren was set to work on the States of Friesland, Groningen, Drenthe, and Overijssel or Adrien de Cro¨y-Roeulx on the Four Members of Flanders.¹⁵⁸ Deputy governors might play the same role, as Floris van

¹⁵² ¹⁵⁴ ¹⁵⁵ ¹⁵⁶ ¹⁵⁷ ¹⁵⁸

ADN, B19260/46618. ¹⁵³ Henne, Histoire, vi. 194. Rachfahl, Wilhelm von Oranien, i. 87. Orange, Apologie, 61; Klink, Opstand, politiek en religie, 87–94. Rachfahl, Wilhelm von Oranien, i. 56–7, 68–74. Fouw, Philips van Kleef, 283–329; Dansaert, Chi`evres, 25–7, 29. Gorter-van Royen, Maria van Hongarije, 237; Maddens, Beden, 238; ARA, RSA67, fo. 501.

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Egmond-Buren did with the States of Holland in 1508–15.¹⁵⁹ Others were directed to a province in which they were not governor but held estates and family influence, or even to places where they counted as little more than a great man from the court, as when Ferry de Cro¨y-Roeulx was sent to address the States of Namur in 1508 and those of Hainaut in 1517.¹⁶⁰ Quite how much influence most noblemen, even popular heroes like Lamoraal van Egmond, had with States is in the end hard to judge.¹⁶¹ Their persuasion was most effective when the governorship, local landed influence, and the confidence of the court were combined in one man, as Adrien de Cro¨yRoeulx found in Artois. Adrien dealt with the States of Artois on behalf of Charles V at least fourteen times between 1527 and 1549. He set out the government’s needs to the assembled clerics, nobles, and townsmen, but he often went much further. He acted as an honest broker between estates or individual towns and an intermediary between the States and the regent, backing up their delegates at Brussels, briefing them before meetings, and reporting back on discussions in the States-General. When the States set up their own financial machinery to control taxation, he accepted the posts of superintendent over it and of imperial audit commissioner. When the States had to borrow cash at Antwerp, he supplied a letter of credit. When six successive grants of taxation were needed to resist French invasions in 1542–3, he led the troops it paid for and kept the province safe. Two incidents exemplify his success in mediating between the interests of central government and the provincial community and the powerful commitments to each that made it possible. When the States protested against the surrender of Hesdin to France at the treaty of Cr´epy in 1544, he told Mary of Hungary he agreed with their disquiet, although he had not encouraged it. When told the surrender must be accepted, he pressed his fellow nobles repeatedly to fall into line. And when the States, asked for four aides in November 1544, pleaded the devastation of their province but were persuaded by Roeulx to offer two, he then put their case for relief to Charles V, who agreed to exempt them from any payment.¹⁶² The most complex situation was that in Brabant. The States there had a reputation for awkwardness, and Floris van Egmond-Buren felt the rough edge of the deputies’ tongues in summer 1528.¹⁶³ Tax discussions were protracted because the representatives of the four towns withdrew from the States once the clergy and nobility had formulated a proposal and each town government then consulted its own hierarchy of councils and guilds. There was no provincial governor, so different noblemen might be sent to negotiate with each town, but effective influence with urban governments was at a premium.¹⁶⁴ Here Floris’s special relationship with ’s-Hertogenbosch came ¹⁵⁹ SAR, SAW, Stadsrek. 1513–14, fo. 5v ; NA, ASH113; NHA, SAHI/396, fos. 44v –45r , SAHI/397, fos. 50v –52r ; Inventaris Buren, iv. 31; Ward, ‘Cities and States’, 41, 181. ¹⁶⁰ Lusy, Journal, 116; Henne, Histoire, i. 191. ¹⁶¹ Troeyer, Egmont, 19, 52. ¹⁶² Hirschauer, Artois, i. 54–9, 69, 81–2, 95–6, 100, 161, 168, 231–2, ii. 54–7. ¹⁶³ Koenigsberger, Monarchies, 120; Macqu´ereau, Histoire, 109–10. ¹⁶⁴ Verhofstad, Regering, 73–5, 93–104.

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into play: he could be found there in December 1522, September 1523, and September 1538, for example, persuading the town to contribute to the common cause.¹⁶⁵ Maximiliaan later did the same and in the following generation the role passed to his son-in-law William of Orange.¹⁶⁶ Nobles themselves sat in provincial States, where they might be urged to attend and support the government’s cause, as Charles asked Maximiliaan to do in the States of Brabant in November 1544.¹⁶⁷ In general, however, great lords took little part in discussions, which were frequented by noblemen with more local horizons. Of fifty-five meetings of the States of Holland in 1525–30, Floris attended only one.¹⁶⁸ When they did take part, moreover, great men often defended their own tax privileges, or claimed new ones to reward their sacrifices in the prince’s service.¹⁶⁹ Such claims left noblemen as often obstructing the collection of taxes as promoting it. Floris and Maximiliaan fought a long struggle against the States of Holland to have the inhabitants of their seigneurial enclaves freed from taxes voted by the States. When the magistrates of Leerdam refused one levy in 1544 and were placed under arrest at The Hague, Maximiliaan embarrassed the Council of Holland into releasing them by turning up to share their imprisonment.¹⁷⁰ Meanwhile, concerned ‘to show himself a good subject and a willing servant’ of the emperor and ‘not wishing to hold back his affairs’ he petitioned Charles to accept the sum due as a gift from himself rather than as a tax, in order to preserve the ‘ancient privileges’ of his seigneurial ‘subjects’. Mary of Hungary graciously declined this offer, suggesting his people should pay up but not count it a precedent.¹⁷¹ In other ways noblemen, especially provincial governors, were involved more positively in the levying of taxation. They had an incentive, since the troops under their command and even their own salaries were paid out of provincial tax levies and at times lords claimed their share of taxes vigorously.¹⁷² Noblemen helped audit tax accounts and recalculate the distribution of provincial tax burdens.¹⁷³ And when opposition to taxation turned into revolt, they led troops to confront the rebels. In June 1524 Floris van Egmond-Buren took 2,000 foot and 400 horse to Limburg when the populace refused to pay an aide voted by the States and assembled in large numbers.¹⁷⁴ At ’s-Hertogenbosch in 1525 and Ghent in 1539 he and Adrien de Cro¨y-Roeulx would again threaten resisters with force. Though England generally lacked provincial representative institutions, noblemen were still called upon to negotiate with local communities about the money kings needed for war. The frequent, innovative, and diverse taxation of the early Tudors ¹⁶⁵ Os, Kroniek, 350; Molius, Kroniek, 231–3; Gunn, ‘March on Paris’, 604; ARA, RSA1583, fos. 278–80. ¹⁶⁶ Schuttelaars, Heren van de raad, 200; Verhofstad, Regering, 96; Rachfahl, Wilhelm von Oranien, i. 174. ¹⁶⁷ Inventaris Buren, v. 1280. ¹⁶⁸ Nierop, Nobility, 168. ¹⁶⁹ Verhofstad, Regering, 75–6, 157; Tracy, Holland, 135–8, 197; Nierop, Nobility, 166–75. ¹⁷⁰ Tracy, Holland, 137. ¹⁷¹ NA, NDRII/49/1711. ¹⁷² Maddens, Beden, 342–3; ARA, RSA36, fos. 277–8. ¹⁷³ Ibid. 42–3, 403–4, n. 1330; D´enombrements Hainaut, 547–8. ¹⁷⁴ Henne, Histoire, iv. 22.

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required nobles to communicate the crown’s demands to the local community and in return represent its grievances to the centre. For parliamentary lay subsidies, commissioners were appointed in every county, usually headed by the leading resident nobleman: dividing themselves into groups of four or five, they would assess taxpayers hundred by hundred and appoint collectors. Noblemen with ambitions to local hegemony were themselves active as subsidy commissioners and saw their followers appointed too, increasing their own grip on county administration while visibly serving the king’s financial interests.¹⁷⁵ That said, the Howards were seldom involved, for their campaigns often took them away from Norfolk and Suffolk in wartime and the large number of active gentry in East Anglia, some of them Howard servants, seem to have managed the subsidy without much noble guidance.¹⁷⁶ Taxation not granted by parliament or requests for payments in anticipation of the due date were more likely to spark resistance. At such times it was noblemen’s task to ensure that dissent did not spawn general rebellion. In 1545, for example, the earl of Huntingdon and the marquess of Dorset were instructed not to coerce those who refused to pay their subsidy early, but rather to let them go quietly provided they did not discourage others from paying.¹⁷⁷ In 1525 Thomas Howard II and Charles Brandon, duke of Suffolk, were faced with potentially the most dangerous tax rebellion of their generation: the refusal in East Anglia and elsewhere to contribute to the so-called Amicable Grant. So sensitive was this tax that Howard himself was involved in ‘practising’ with local communities to raise the money: in March, for instance, he met personally with the merchants of Norwich. When it became clear that the grant could not be collected without serious unrest, the dukes represented local grievances to the crown, whilst assembling men to confront the assembled protesters. The demand was abandoned, but as George Bernard has observed, their behaviour was ‘a shining example of the service nobility of later medieval England at work’, combining loyalty to the crown with their duty to local political society as regional magnates.¹⁷⁸ Sometimes attempts to play this role went badly wrong. On 28 April 1489 the fourth earl of Northumberland went to South Kilvington, near Thirsk, Yorkshire, in the attempt to reconcile the commons there to the unpopular and innovative subsidy recently voted by parliament. His efforts failed and he was murdered while his servants and retainers stood by. Open resistance had begun at Ayton in Cleveland eight days earlier, amidst lobbying from the city of York and elsewhere to mitigate the burden of the subsidy. The earl, as the king’s lieutenant in the North and the greatest regional magnate, was sent to put down the rebellion and persuade the country to pay. Northumberland probably aimed to win over the rebels by demonstrating his noble power, evident in the size and demeanour of his retinue, and offering his good lordship as a mediator with the king. What went wrong is open to debate, some suggesting that the king deliberately put the earl in an impossible position, others that ¹⁷⁵ ¹⁷⁶ ¹⁷⁷ ¹⁷⁸

Gunn, Charles Brandon, 5, 219; id., ‘Henry Bourchier’, 155, 161. PRO, E179/150/269, 150/310, 151/317, 151/325, 151/349; Moreton, Townshends. HL, HA13886. Bernard, War, Taxation and Rebellion, 92 and passim; Head, Ebbs and Flows, 77–81.

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the earl tried and failed to coerce the commons into payment.¹⁷⁹ The key issue is why his followers let him be murdered in circumstances which should have displayed his lordly power. As we shall see, this reflected wider problems in the earl’s political and military position. Noblemen who could not bring their power to bear when it was needed could not play the part expected of them in the prince’s efforts to fund his wars, any more than they could raise troops or lead armies. ¹⁷⁹ James, ‘Murder at Cocklodge’, 80–7; Hicks, ‘Yorkshire Rebellion’, 39–62.

12 Costs and Rewards Noblemen’s participation in war involved profits and losses of many sorts. Those that came in terms of enhanced power over others or enhanced prestige we shall examine later, but even the material side of the balance sheet was complex. Service to princes involved commitments of money, time, and effort and the fortunes of war threatened loss of life, limb, and livelihood. Yet there were profits to be made from defeated enemies and grateful rulers. Some historians have even argued that war presented a form of state income support for noblemen facing difficulties as landlords. What range of costs and rewards did war offer and how significant were they to the noblemen of England and the Netherlands? T H E C O S TS O F M I L I TA RY S E RV I C E In the late Middle Ages English noblemen were, to some extent, expected to finance their military service and that of their retinue from their own resources, as large arrears often built up in the pay they were supposed to receive under the terms of their indentures of war. Despite the revitalization of royal finances, military service still proved expensive under the Tudors. In the 1490s Thomas Howard I frequently laid out his own money on repairs to his base as royal lieutenant in the North, Sheriff Hutton castle, while his wages as warden of the Marches were more than £220 in arrears by 1494.¹ In Ireland in 1520–1 Thomas Howard II found local resources insufficient to pay the inflated retinue he had been told to maintain. He asked to have his men waged directly from England lest his service cost him ‘more than I receive from the king and all revenues of my lands in England’.² Years later he faced similar problems, complaining that the Scottish campaign of 1542 had ‘plucked the bottom out of his purse’.³ His son Henry Howard, earl of Surrey, was forced to mortgage the furnishings of Mount Surrey House in 1545 to John Spencer, a Norwich merchant, to meet the costs of his service in Boulogne.⁴ And when Thomas Howard III went to the northern borders as the queen’s lieutenant in 1559, he borrowed £2,000 from the Exchequer and contracted a short-term loan of £3,000 from the London merchant Anthony Strynger.⁵ Such short-term illiquidity turned into steady strain for those who held military office for long periods. Successive deputies of Calais sold land or fell into debt to ¹ PRO, E404/80/227–8, 81/5, 7, 26. ² PRO, SP1/20, fo. 112 (LP III. i. 889). ³ LP XVII. 855. ⁴ Sessions, Surrey, 146. ⁵ Williams, Thomas Howard, 107.

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maintain themselves there.⁶ As wardens of the Marches, the Percies also faced financial difficulties. Although the fourth earl of Northumberland’s wages were notionally increased each time he was reappointed, peaking in 1483 at around £1,000 in peacetime and nearly £2,000 in wartime, this was already less than his mid-fifteenthcentury predecessors had been paid, and the payment of those parts of the salary not secured on local customs and crown lands receipts was unreliable.⁷ Unable to pay the gentry who defended the North from his crown wages, Percy instead granted them fees payable from his estates. By 1489 Northumberland’s estates were charged with £1,096 4s 6d of extraordinary fees—fees not linked to positions in his household or estate management—and £612 10s 1d in ordinary fees, some 70 per cent of them charged on his lands in Cumberland, Northumberland, and Yorkshire. Of the earl’s revenues 42 per cent went in the payment of fees, over half of it in the burdensome form of cash annuities. This remarkably high expenditure on fees—at least double and perhaps four times the norm for fifteenth-century English noblemen—was the product of the crown’s failure to provide adequate resources to maintain a military retinue.⁸ The fifth earl was spared this expense by his refusal to serve as warden. His service in France in 1513 may have been burdensome, but fitted a pattern of magnificent expenditure on courtly duties rather than his family’s traditional military role.⁹ By scaling down extraordinary retaining fees on his northern estates to less than onefifth the level of 1489, he was able to restore solvency while forfeiting local political and military influence.¹⁰ Under the sixth earl the Percy estates were once again geared towards maintaining the defence of the borders. In the war of 1532–4 they provided fuel, fodder, and building materials in Northumberland, reducing their cash yield.¹¹ Annuities and fees increased too, perhaps to double his father’s levels, to ensure the service of the border gentry and yeomanry. In 1538 royal commissioners reported that the sixth earl had given fees amounting to £658 5s per annum, while favourable and rent-free leases cost him £267 11d and £119 3s 3 1/2d respectively.¹² Early in his wardenship the earl was already pleading for help with the burdens it brought. He may have taken loans from the king and in October 1528 he asked for a grant of the castles of Wark and Dunstanburgh, arguing that ‘if I shall continue these rooms I must have something to bear out my charges’.¹³ In financial terms the worst that could happen to a nobleman on campaign was to be captured, like Lord Grey de Wilton, taken by the French at the fall of Guines in January 1558; his ransom, of some £6,000, was raised by selling his family’s ancient seat at Wilton.¹⁴ Death in action was also a real possibility, since the need to act honourably on the battlefield ensured that noblemen were often at the forefront of ⁶ Miller, Henry VIII, 182; Lisle Letters, i. 22–4, 240–1. ⁷ Rotuli Scotiae, ii. 423, 428–9; BL Harleian 433, iii. 12–14, 119, 195; Storey, ‘Wardens’, 604–6, 608; PRO, E401/902-54, passim. ⁸ Bean, Estates, 129–30, 133; id., From Lord to Patron, 164–74. ⁹ Antiquarian Repertory, iv. 346–7, 356–73; LP II, ii. 3209, 3278; PRO, E36/226, fo. 48. ¹⁰ Bean, Estates, 135–43. ¹¹ ACM, C.VI.5b. ¹² Bean, Estates, 129, 147. ¹³ PRO, SP1/50, fo. 276 (LP IV. ii. 4907); LP IV. ii. 5021; Bean, Estates, 142. ¹⁴ Commentary of the Services of Lord Grey, p. ix.

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combat. Lord Morley was killed at Diksmuide in 1489, Sir Edward Howard at sea in 1513, Lord Sheffield serving against Kett’s rebels in 1549, and Lord Ogle may well have died from wounds received in battle against the Scots in 1545.¹⁵ Noblemen, like other soldiers, also succumbed to disease. In August 1545 Thomas, Lord Poynings, died of a ‘bloody flux’, or dysentery, whilst governor of Boulogne.¹⁶ Sickness on campaign was a constant complaint of Thomas Howard II. In September 1521 he wrote to Henry from Ireland: ‘This country is so much disposed to flux of the body, with which disease I have of late been so sore vexed, and yet am, that I fear, if Your Grace should command me to remain this winter coming, I should be in right great danger of my life.’¹⁷ From the North in November 1523 he wrote Wolsey a vivid account of the physical and emotional strains of military service. If not relieved of his post, the earl feared: I shall consume and waste away: . . . the little flesh that I had is clean gone; and yet I am not sick, but in manner I eat very little, and these five weeks day, I never slept one whole hour without waking, my mind is so troubled for fear that any thing should frame amiss: which lack of sleep doth take away the stomach, and for lack of sustenance the flesh doth go away.¹⁸

Netherlands noblemen, like English, complained that war cost them far more than they were paid for it. William of Orange splendidly commented that his salary of 300£ a month when he was captain-general in 1555 ‘was not sufficient to pay the servants that pitched my tents’.¹⁹ Knowing from his household accounts that just putting his tents up to test them out took twelve men two days makes the claim slightly less incredible.²⁰ Since commanders’ honour rested upon the successful prosecution of campaigns, they found themselves compelled to advance money to their troops when government finances faltered. Floris van Egmond-Buren needed to do so, for instance, in 1508 and 1538–9 and doubtless on many other occasions, sometimes, like other noble captains, contracting long-term debts by selling renten secured on his estates to raise the money he needed.²¹ Merely preparing for war was an expensive business and often prompted noblemen to borrow, as Maximiliaan van EgmondBuren did to the tune of 4,000£ from merchants, two of them members of the Schetz family of Antwerp, in 1544.²² Yet, as in England, the cumulative effect on noble finances is hard to judge. Lamoraal van Egmond does seem to have got himself seriously into debt by advancing pay to his troops and other expenses.²³ Others managed their affairs more deftly. The very fact that noblemen could advance such great sums was a sign that they disposed of great reserves and strong credit. Their precious possessions—like the cup and four gold chains pawned by Antoine de Lalaing-Hoogstraten to pay troops in 1522 or the ¹⁵ Miller, Henry VIII, 159. ¹⁶ LP XX. ii. 162, 200. ¹⁷ PRO, SP60/1, fo. 65; State Papers, ii(3). 84. ¹⁸ State Papers, iv. 55. ¹⁹ Orange, Apologie, 36. ²⁰ Delen, Hof, 47. ²¹ Gedenkstukken, ii. 113–14; ARA, RSA1583/278, 283; CLGS iii. 505, iv. 450, v. 405, vi. 10; Inventaris Buren, iii. 1492–5, 1586–90, 1658, iv. 87a. ²² CLGS iii. 52, 248, 273, 291–2, v. 262–3; NA, NDRII/1034/5, 9; Inventaris Buren, i. 1039, iii. 1680, 1691. ²³ Troeyer, Egmont, 15–17.

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rings he used in the same way in 1523—were ideal security for loans.²⁴ Those who understood things well, like Hoogstraten, could command much better terms on the Antwerp money market than the emperor himself.²⁵ Provincial governors were also able to make sure their own debts were repaid from taxation ahead of those of others: again Hoogstraten was a past master.²⁶ However they managed it, both Frederik and Floris van Egmond-Buren were in a position to buy estates from other noblemen.²⁷ Capture was a more constant risk for Netherlands noblemen than for English. Frederik van Egmond-Buren was held by the town of Nijmegen from 1478 to 1481, Ferry de Cro¨y-Roeulx taken by Venetian stradiots in Italy in 1509, and Mansfeld and Philippe III de Cro¨y-Aarschot captured by the French in 1552–3.²⁸ Even Ferry de Cro¨y-Roeulx’s wife was taken prisoner when Hesdin surrendered to the French in his absence in 1522; their son Adrien had to negotiate her release.²⁹ Capture and ransom could be a major financial disaster. Occasionally it sufficed to drive families, such as the lords of Jauche, out of the nobility.³⁰ Greater men faced greater ransoms but had more flexibility in providing for them: Engelbrecht of Nassau had to find 54,000£ after Nancy and 84,000£ after his capture at B´ethune in 1487, but mortgaged his estates for rapid payment.³¹ There were ways to avoid paying a ransom, through exchanges of prisoners, contributions from princes or provincial States, or simple side-changing.³² Such decisions were in any case steadily taken out of the hands of great nobles, as princes kept hold of their leading prisoners until the end of hostilities and bargained over their fate in peace negotiations.³³ Noble estates were also under greater threat from war in the Netherlands. Those who held fiefs in border areas often saw them confiscated by enemy governments for years on end until peace treaties brought their restitution.³⁴ Armies wantonly devastated the estates of prominent opponents. The troops of Guelders and Utrecht regularly burnt the possessions of the Egmond-Burens and besieged IJsselstein itself in 1482 and 1511.³⁵ Roeulx’s castle of Contes was burnt by the French in 1522 and 1552 and occupied by them in 1537; his castle at Croix went up in flames in 1537 and Le Roeulx castle, which he had rebuilt, in 1554.³⁶ Goods were lost when houses were plundered and because noblemen campaigned in some state, capture too might bring the loss of substantial wealth. Mansfeld reckoned he lost 15,000£ in goods and money at the surrender of Ivoix in 1552. ³⁷ ²⁴ Noordam-Croes, Antoon van Lalaing, 67, 74. ²⁵ Ehrenberg, Zeitalter der Fugger, 317. ²⁶ Noordam-Croes, Antoon van Lalaing, 68; Tracy, Holland, 63. ²⁷ Inventaris Buren, iii. 1469, 1499, 1535, 1641. ²⁸ Cools, Mannen met macht, 204, 303; Lejeune, ‘Roeulx’, 261; Massarette, Mansfeld, i. 41; Emanuele Filiberto, Diari, 146. ²⁹ Lejeune, ‘Roeulx’, 263. ³⁰ Uytven, ‘Brabantse adel’, 83. ³¹ Ibid.; KHA, ODL/A2/458, 459. ³² Cools, Mannen met macht, 104–5; KHA, ODL/A2/655; Barre, Journal, 294; CLGS i. 305, 443; Vekene, Reliures, 14–15. ³³ Cools, ‘Philibert de Chalon’, 124. ³⁴ Cools, ‘Noblemen on the Borderline’. ³⁵ Aurelius, Cronycke, T3v, U4r–v , Ee1r–v ; Os, Kroniek, 317; Kalveen, Bestuur, 195. ³⁶ LP III. ii. 2457; Br´esin, Chroniques, 107, 139, 202–3, 225, 277; Thieulaine, ‘Extraits’, 145; Lejeune, ‘Roeulx’, 132. ³⁷ Macqu´ereau, Histoire, 97–8; Mansfeld, Journal, 93–4.

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War also brought extreme physical risk, again greater than in England. Surprisingly large numbers of army leaders in Habsburg service died in the field. Arnold of Guelders in 1477 and Charles de Bourbon in 1527 were killed outright, Jan van Wassenaar in 1523, Philibert de Chalon in 1530, and Ren´e de Chalon in 1544 died of their wounds, and Adrien de Cro¨y-Roeulx succumbed to disease in 1553 just after withdrawing from the siege camp at Th´erouanne. Nobles further down the chain of command were equally likely to be killed. Hendrik, count of Brederode, lost one brother fighting in Italy, a second at Saint-Quentin, and a third in Hungary.³⁸ Wounds were the small change of battle: seven of Wassenaar’s teeth knocked out at the storming of Padua in 1509, two pistol bullets for Mansfeld at Saint-Quentin, a head wound for Jean de Cro¨y-Roeulx in December 1553 when he omitted to wear his helmet on a raid into France.³⁹ Even the artillery train could be as dangerous as the skirmish or the storming-party: Filips van Stavele, lord of Glajon, master of the artillery, was shot through the left arm while directing fire at the siege of SaintQuentin.⁴⁰ Beside wounds the physical discomforts of campaigning ranged from infectious diseases to freezing cold.⁴¹ Imprisonment might be worse. Jan van Wassenaar was kept in a cage suspended by a pulley from the ceiling of a tower in the castle of Hattem for two years after his capture by Guelders troops in 1512.⁴² Prison was not always so dire—while languishing in France, Peter Ernst of Mansfeld built up an outstanding collection of books luxuriously bound with his arms in the latest Parisian style and had his cook, his fool, several greyhounds, and a parrot to entertain him—but it was always frustrating and humiliating.⁴³ Yet all these hardships do not seem to have deterred noblemen from pursuing military activity into their old age. Just as Thomas Howard I was 70 at Flodden and Thomas Howard II was 71 at Montreuil, so Floris van Egmond-Buren was 68 on his last great campaign in 1537 and Adrien de Cro¨yRoeulx fought on into his early sixties, though by 1552–3 his old leg wound often caused him to follow his men in a coach, horse-litter, or portable chair.⁴⁴ He blamed the trouble on a crossbow shot, though whether this is the whole story one might wonder. In August 1520 the young courtier came to see his father at Le Roeulx and made his horse jump to impress the old man. It fell on him and broke his leg in two places, leaving him unable to walk for a long time.⁴⁵ In fact the greatest strain may have been placed not on noblemen themselves but on their loved ones. Noblemen’s long absences and the dangers to which they were exposed certainly worried their families. Franc¸oise de Lannoy expressed her concerns to her husband Maximiliaan van Egmond-Buren about the risks he was running at the siege of Th´erouanne.⁴⁶ The correspondence of their daughter Anna with her husband William of Orange shows that each missed the other bitterly when he was ³⁸ ³⁹ ⁴⁰ ⁴² ⁴³ ⁴⁴ ⁴⁵

Rosenfeld, ‘Provincial Governors’, 12. Cools, Mannen met macht, 303; Massarette, Mansfeld, i. 49; Thieulaine, ‘Extraits’, 164. ‘Veldtogt’, 320. ⁴¹ Robert, Philibert de Chalon, i. 394; Gunn, ‘March on Paris’, 625. Cools, Mannen met macht, 303. Vekene, Reliures; Mansfeld, Journal, 70–2, 77–9, 147. Henne, Histoire, vii. 7, ix. 347, 349 n., x. 27–8. Henne, Histoire, viii. 41n; Lusy, Journal, 169. ⁴⁶ Inventaris Buren, iv. 430.

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away on campaign.⁴⁷ Henry Howard wrote poems at Boulogne set in the mouth of his wife mourning his absence.⁴⁸ The wars that brought fame to the individual nobleman and honour to the noble house may have been less welcome to the sisters, wives, and mothers left at home.

D I R E C T P RO F I TS The Howards made little profit from cash payments for military service, ransoms of prisoners, and booty. Their greatest triumph, Flodden, was an exceptionally bloody struggle, made worse—and less profitable—by Thomas Howard II’s promise to take no Scottish prisoners.⁴⁹ Some English nobles at the battle of the Spurs did better, as the king bought out their rights over their prisoners at generous rates: £133 6s 8d went to Lord Bergavenny for one man-at-arms.⁵⁰ But such victories were few and far between. Prisoners may have been more profitable for those permanently employed on the borders, some compensation for the debts they incurred in the crown’s service. Sir John Wallop, captain of Guines, asked in his will that his executors might be paid for the ransoms of French prisoners worth over £200 whom he had surrendered to the king.⁵¹ Even for commanders-in-chief, daily rates of pay were insignificant compared with their income from estates and court offices. In 1523 Suffolk was paid £5 a day, perhaps some £500 in total, but he must have spent much of this during the campaign and what was left fell far short of his annual landed income of some £1,500 and probably even of the fees he received for his offices at court and on the crown estates.⁵² Plunder, likewise, seems to have been more a matter of individual objects picked up and kept as mementoes than of profitable resale. The libraries of England’s country houses were stocked in part with volumes such as the manuscript of Cicero’s letters which Edmund Withypoll ‘found in the library of Our Lady’s church in Boulogne’ on 25 September 1544 or the treatise on Scottish history that John Thynne ‘found in Edinburgh at the winning and burning thereof’ on 7 May the same year.⁵³ Matters were different in the Netherlands. Captaincies of bandes d’ordonnance or fortresses all carried pensions and commanders-in-chief got additional payments.⁵⁴ When added together, such sums could give leading noblemen a major share in the state’s budget. Adrien de Cro¨y-Roeulx received a 1,000£ pension as marshal of the army in the last years of his life in addition to his 3,000£ as governor of Flanders and his 1,000£ each as governor of Artois and of Walloon Flanders, making, with his 1,200£ as a captain in the ordonnances and his fees for town captaincies at Lille and elsewhere, more than 8,000£ in total.⁵⁵ In comparison the total income of his ⁴⁷ ⁴⁹ ⁵¹ ⁵² ⁵³ ⁵⁴ ⁵⁵

Rachfahl, Wilhelm von Oranien, i. 173, 198–200. ⁴⁸ Sessions, Surrey, 212–16. BL, Add MS 29506, fo. 6. ⁵⁰ Cruickshank, Army Royal, 124–5. Testamenta Vetusta, ii. 734. ‘Sir John Daunce’s Accounts’, 329; Gunn, Charles Brandon, 19, 56. Catalogue of Christ Church, Canterbury, 16; HMC Third Report, appendix, 184. KHA, ODL/A2/608, 610; Domeingoederen, 351; Rapport Lille, 377. Domeingoederen, 172, 339.

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main lordship of Le Roeulx was some 1,573£ in 1467 and 6,211£ in 1565.⁵⁶ Floris van Egmond-Buren’s fees probably totalled even more, as he received on top of his payments for provincial governorships and town captaincies 1,200£ for his ordonnance captaincy, a further 1,200£ as captain-general of all the ordonnances, 5,000£ as captain-general of the army in peacetime, and 1,000£ a month as commander of the army against France in 1537.⁵⁷ Such salaries were not by any means regularly paid, but when they did come cash payments must have been welcome. Noblemen’s landed income was often hard to realize in ready money and when noble captains hired themselves to States or towns they certainly pressed hard to secure their payment in cash.⁵⁸ Prisoners were the most prominent source of extraordinary profit. They ranged from the dukes and marshals taken at great battles like Saint-Quentin and extortionately ransomed to the individual mercenaries and parties of Nijmegen militiamen taken by Frederik van Egmond-Buren in the 1490s.⁵⁹ Profits are hard to calculate, but even minor French noblemen commanded an attractive price, at around 400£ in 1553, and the poorest infantryman, not worth ransoming, might have some portable wealth and would be frisked for money before release.⁶⁰ Sometimes opportunism went too far as lords tried to ransom gentlemen protected by terms of surrender, but quick thinking on the battlefield paid off.⁶¹ At Saint-Quentin Ferry de Guyon bought a wounded French nobleman from a German reiter at the Frenchman’s request— ‘Hey captain, save my life, these Germans are going to kill me’ the poor man had called out to him—and charged him much more in ransom than he had cost.⁶² Captains claimed a share of their subordinates’ takings from prisoners and would pursue it through the courts if needs be.⁶³ Even civil wars produced a flow of prisoners valuable enough to be litigated over.⁶⁴ When troops took plunder, commanders got their rightful portion. Individual soldiers may often have gambled away their takings, but especially in civil wars and along the borders captains seem to have taken and sold booty sufficiently systematically to enrich themselves.⁶⁵ Though the Cro¨y-Roeulx returned from some expeditions into Picardy richly laden, it was probably the constant raiding of the Egmond-Burens into Guelders that was more consistently lucrative. In 1512, for example, Floris returned to IJsselstein leading a train of prisoners and numerous wagons loaded with plunder, while his local officials kept accounts of cattle and payments extracted from the Guelders countryside.⁶⁶ When pickings were rich, friends and relations claimed their share. In June 1537 Anna van Egmond, countess of Horn, asked her brother Maximiliaan van Egmond-Buren to select from the great booty taken at the fall of Saint-Pol a comfortable hackney for her husband and a small horse for ⁵⁶ Lejeune, ‘Roeulx’, 202. ⁵⁷ Henne, Histoire, iii. 175–6. ⁵⁸ Uytven, ‘Vorst, adel en steden’, 109; CLGS ii. 26, 97; Cools, Mannen met macht, 169. ⁵⁹ ‘Veldtogt’, 316–17; Massarette, Mansfeld, i. 53; Inventaris Buren, iv. 6; Aurelius, Cronycke, Cc2r . ⁶⁰ CLGS, vi. 47; Guyon, M´emoires, 143. ⁶¹ KHA, ODL/A2/648. ⁶² Guyon, M´emoires, 138–9. ⁶³ CLGS i. 201. ⁶⁴ CLGS i. 257–8, 356, 430, 435. ⁶⁵ Guyon, M´emoires, 66–7; Reygersbergh, Cronycke, H1v –2r . ⁶⁶ Henne, Histoire, i. 298–9, vii. 331; Inventaris Buren, i. 339a, 384–5, 672, iii. 1386.

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her young son Floris, to cheer him up since his dog had died.⁶⁷ The independence of command and rights over booty and prisoners enjoyed by provincial governors were jealously guarded even in the face of Mary of Hungary’s complaints that they hindered her efforts to coordinate strategy. A particular object of her wrath was Jean de Hennin-Li´etard, lord of Boussu, whose demand to keep the guns, powder, and brandschattingen or protection payments he had taken in J¨ulich in 1542 finally tested the limits of noble claims; it was rejected by a special meeting of the Council of State afforced by the Knights of the Golden Fleece and followed by a decree denying commanders any right to brandschattingen or to artillery, munitions, or provisions found in captured towns.⁶⁸ Booty taken at sea came under the jurisdiction of the admiral in the provinces to which his authority extended, if needs be through the appointment of special commissioners, elsewhere under that of provincial governors. Under orders of 1544 the admiral could claim one-tenth of prizes, or more when he led the fleet in person. These were serious sums. In 1557–8 Admiral Maximiliaan van Bourgondi¨e-Beveren’s share of prize money brought in about 9,000£ in sixteen months, a third or more of his total income.⁶⁹ In 1543 Maximiliaan van Egmond-Buren as governor of Friesland had a score of neutral ships and their cargoes captured and sold off, though it took him nearly five years of litigation and political manœuvring to secure the profits.⁷⁰ Other means to make money were open to unscrupulous captains. In the terrible years from 1477 to 1492 noblemen extracted large sums of money from town administrations in return for not quartering troops in the town or its vicinity, negotiating neutrality pacts, or garrisoning their own castles nearby to afford some local protection.⁷¹ Such self-help was harder once anarchy subsided, but as the power of government revived so did the fortunes of those able to tap into its resources. The equation must have been especially clear to Philip of Cleves, who gave up his career as pirate captain of Sluis in 1492 in return for 4,000£ cash in hand, 2,000£ within six weeks, and 500£ a year for the next eight years, the money to be paid by Bruges as part of its own fine to re-enter the prince’s grace.⁷² Adrien de Cro¨y-Roeulx substituted for his predecessors’ illicit depredations on the food supplies of Tournai during the truce of 1478 the sale of safe-conducts to trade with the enemy, earning substantial sums such as the 800£ due from one Arras merchant after his death.⁷³

I N D I R E C T R EWA R D S In addition to pay, plunder, and prisoners, success in war could bring honour, political influence, and material rewards from grateful princes. For the Howards, titles ⁶⁷ Inventaris Buren, iv. 429. ⁶⁸ Gorter-Van Royen, Maria van Hongarije, 266, 268–9; ROPB v. 1. ⁶⁹ ROPB v. 50–1; Sicking, Zeemacht, 236. ⁷⁰ Inventaris Buren, i. 1060, ii. 1723, 1734, iii. 1723, iv. 1229–30, 1716, 1734, v. 1152, 1169, 1171, 1173–4, 1179–80, 1187–8, 1390. ⁷¹ Derville, ‘Pots-de-vin’, 457–60, 466–9. ⁷² KHA, ODL/A2/463. ⁷³ Nicolay, ‘Kalendrier’, 347; CLGS v. 181–2.

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of honour were the clearest rewards for military service, above all Thomas Howard I’s creation as duke of Norfolk in 1514 following the battle of Flodden. According to the sympathetic account in Thordre and behauyoure of the right honourable Erle of Surrey, the king decided considering the good service done by the said earl in the business foresaid, and to encourage as well all noble men as others whatsoever they be hereafter semblably to acquit themselves against the king’s enemies, to give unto him the name style and title of duke of Norfolk like as his ancestors have been in time passed.⁷⁴

The letters patent of creation of the duke and of his son as earl of Surrey made the link with Flodden explicit. Howard received a special augmentation of his arms—‘a demilion gules, pierced in the mouth with an arrow, and coloured according to the arms of Scotland, as borne by the said King of the Scots’—to commemorate the death of James IV, as well as an annuity and lands to support his new dignity.⁷⁵ Henry VIII often created or promoted peers to reward military service or equip noblemen for senior military office and in the same way Mary made William Howard Lord Howard of Effingham in 1554, rewarding him for his support at Calais during the succession crisis and against Wyatt’s rebels and fitting him for the admiralship.⁷⁶ Each of the Howard peers, like the Percy earls of Northumberland, was also elected to the Order of the Garter. Though the order retained some pretensions to reward chivalrous distinction, their dates of election do not seem to have been directly related to military service and were more a matter of recognizing their rank.⁷⁷ The Howards received many grants of lands and offices, but it is hard to separate military from political service in accounting for them. Richard III augmented John Howard’s landed income by some £1,000 per annum for his successful defence of London and the Home Counties against the duke of Buckingham in September 1483, but Howard was also one of his leading counsellors.⁷⁸ Thomas Howard I’s grants from Henry VII were part of a slow rehabilitation both military and political. By 1546, Thomas Howard II had amassed grants of annuities totalling some £672 per annum and monastic lands probably worth more than £1,000 per annum, but these were the expected spoils of Henry VIII’s attack on the church for his most powerful magnate.⁷⁹ Henry Howard, whose private resources were notoriously meagre, did receive more specific benefits from military service with a grant of Wymondham Priory in Norfolk in April 1546 in recognition of his services in Boulogne, just as other leading noble commanders in 1544–6 received grants of land or sales on highly preferential terms.⁸⁰ Nevertheless, as we shall see, the political consequences of his failure at Boulogne far outweighed the material benefits of this grant. ⁷⁴ BL, Add. MS 29506, fo. 13v . ⁷⁵ PRO, C82/401 (LP I. ii. 2684(1, 2)); Tucker, Thomas Howard, 122–3. Thomas Howard II also received a £20 annuity and sixteen manors to support the dignity of an earl. ⁷⁶ Miller, Henry VIII, 17–19, 32–4; Loades, Reign of Mary Tudor, 41, 52; id., Two Tudor Conspiracies, 79. ⁷⁷ Gunn, ‘Chivalry’, 109–16; Fonblanque, Annals, i. 316–17. ⁷⁸ CPR 1476–85, 363, 365, 479; Vokes, ‘Thomas Howard’, 12. ⁷⁹ Head, Ebbs and Flows, 274–8. ⁸⁰ Sessions, Surrey, 329; Miller, Henry VIII, 250–2; Gunn, Charles Brandon, 194–5.

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For the Percies, grants of land and office in the North might be rewards for service but were also bound up with their ability to mobilize border society for war. Richard III gave the fourth earl the lordship of Holderness in Yorkshire, confiscated from the rebel duke of Buckingham, in ‘consideration of good gifts and laudable services to us both in our taking up of our reign and crown and in the defence of our kingdom of England against Scotland’, plus castle constableships and stewardships of considerable military importance at Dunstanburgh and Knaresborough.⁸¹ In the same way the seventh earl’s restoration to the earldom and the wardenship in 1557 rewarded his loyalty against Thomas Stafford’s rebels and rested on the collection of Percy lands and border offices he was given to equip him to serve against the Scots.⁸² In the Netherlands, too, great noblemen served their princes in many ways, making it hard to resolve how closely the rewards they were given were related to their military service. The award of the Golden Fleece, for example, was part of the normal expectation of a career as a high nobleman in Habsburg service. Adrien de Cro¨yRoeulx, Floris and Maximiliaan van Egmond-Buren all entered the order well before they were 40, and it also welcomed noblemen whose military careers were less than glittering.⁸³ Other rewards were more explicitly linked to military achievement. Maximilian, Philip the Fair, and Charles V all ennobled men who had served in their own wars and those of Charles the Bold, sometimes—as for Ferry de Guyon—reciting the actions in which they had fought and the wounds or captivity they had suffered.⁸⁴ Adrien de Cro¨y was promoted to be count of Roeulx in 1530 for the services performed by him and his ancestors to Philip the Fair and Charles V ‘in voyages and great charges of war and armies by sea and by land and chivalrous acts’ and in great offices, deeds so great that ‘the fame and renown of them is notorious through the whole world’, deeds that involved ‘exposing their persons and goods without sparing anything’.⁸⁵ Appointments to office could also be the reward for military virtue: not just provincial governorships, where Engelbrecht of Nassau’s ‘great services and exploits of prowess and chivalry’ or Peter Ernst of Mansfeld’s ‘prudence, virtues, valour, dexterity and experience in deeds of war’ might be called for, but also offices at court.⁸⁶ Some grants of pensions cited military services and damage inflicted by the enemy on the petitioner’s estates.⁸⁷ Under civil war conditions political and military support were inextricably linked, and Maximilian alienated some of his estates and jurisdictions in Brabant to win both from noblemen.⁸⁸ Military service blended with political service and friendship with the prince in bringing about Charles V’s grants of principalities in Naples to Charles de Lannoy and Guillaume de Cro¨y-Chi`evres.⁸⁹ At least ⁸¹ PRO, C66/554, m. 20 (CPR 1477–85, 409); Horrox, Richard III, 204–5; BL Harleian 433, ii. 39–40, iii. 201–2. ⁸² CPR 1555–7, 479-80, 1557–8, 194; Cokayne, Complete Peerage, ix. 728–9. ⁸³ Cools, Mannen met macht, 191–2, 202–3, 245, 301; Baelde, Collaterale raden, 258–9. ⁸⁴ ISN iii. 36, 44, 50, 86; Guyon, M´emoires, 111–12. ⁸⁵ Lejeune, ‘Roeulx’, 380. ⁸⁶ KHA, ODL/A2/462; ROPB v. 165; Dadizeele, M´emoires, 105. ⁸⁷ Baelde, Collaterale raden, 232. ⁸⁸ Uytven, ‘Brabantse adel’, 86 ⁸⁹ Cools, Mannen met macht, 200–1, 252.

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such grants were easier to capitalize on than Charles’s grant of an island in the New World to Admiral Adolf van Bourgondi¨e-Beveren, an island the ships Adolf sent out never succeeded in locating.⁹⁰ Some grants of land were very obviously won in war. Several of Frederik van Egmond-Buren’s were properties forfeited by those he had defeated.⁹¹ His grandson Maximiliaan was granted in October 1546 the German county of Tecklenburg and other lordships confiscated from the count including Lingen, a town of local strategic and economic importance on the River Ems. It is unclear whether Charles V meant him to keep them in the long term, as the counts of Tecklenburg, allies both of Charles of Egmond and of Philip of Hesse, had been targets of Habsburg territorial ambition in the past. For the moment, Maximiliaan was encouraged, Wallensteinlike, to make good his possession by force. He failed with Tecklenburg, but occupied Lingen in person in July 1547. Though his daughter Anna was forced to sell it back to Charles in 1551, Lingen was a valuable acquisition: in 1551, its total yield was 8,840£ 1s, though much of this was then being spent on a garrison.⁹² For those with landed claims to pursue in the area where a war was fought, there was a strong incentive to participate. William of Orange complained that his cousin Ren´e of Chalon, while ‘pursuing so courageously the war of Cleveland’, was promised by Charles V that any peace settlement would recognize his inherited claim to onethird of the duchy of J¨ulich. Once victory was secured, however, Charles failed to carry out his promise, ‘forgetting that this victory was obtained to his hands by the travail and valiantness of my said lord and cousin’.⁹³ Equally noblemen might expect favour from their princes in return for not pursuing awkward claims of their own, such as that of the Egmond-Burens to the duchy of Guelders. On the borders, meanwhile, princes might intervene in inheritance disputes in favour of those best able to use landed power for purposes of regional defence. Thus the lord of Beauchamp, while not being the nearest heir to Louis Rolin, lord of Aimeries, was allowed to inherit his lands in Hainaut, ‘knowing the good service that Beauchamp had done to the emperor during the wars’, service to ‘his late kinsman the good lord of Aimeries in his military and other affairs’.⁹⁴ In wartime confiscated enemy lands and debts were used to compensate those who had suffered, whether in service or through confiscation of their lands on the far side of the border.⁹⁵ For the greatest these payments were on a suitably grand scale, Hendrik of Nassau receiving 6,000£ from the proceeds of the lordship of Enghien in September 1537.⁹⁶ And as the English crown sold monastic land to pay for war, so the Habsburgs regularly mortgaged or sold large parts of their demesnes. Leading noblemen were in a good position to know what was available and make advantageous purchases.⁹⁷ Participation in war, then, enabled noblemen to advance their fortunes in many ways beyond the simple profit and loss of wages ⁹⁰ Sicking, Zeemacht, 161. ⁹¹ Inventaris Buren, iii. 1208, 1293, 1437. ⁹² Mohrmann, ‘Lingen’; Zwichem, Tagebuch, 213, 229; Inventaris Buren, iii. 1768, v. 397; Domeingoederen, 330–2. ⁹³ Orange, Apologie, 37–8. ⁹⁴ Macqu´ereau, Histoire, 132. ⁹⁵ CLGS ii. 293–4, 303, 477; Macqu´ereau, Chronicque, 91. ⁹⁶ KHA, ODL/A2/622. ⁹⁷ Cauchies, ‘Voyage d’Espagne’; Baelde, ‘Financial Policy’, 209–10, 216, 219–23.

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and plunder; but at every turn war service blended into other aspects of service to the prince.

T H E P O L I T I C A L C O N S E QU E N C E S O F M I L I TA RY S E RV I C E War might increase noblemen’s political influence in at least four ways. Because noblemen were thought to understand war better than clerics or low-born administrators, princes were expected, at least by Philip of Cleves, to listen to their advice more in wartime.⁹⁸ Secondly, war necessitated the concession of control to individual noble captains and governors over considerable areas of the execution of policy and the allocation of government resources. Thirdly, great victories might win the prince’s gratitude and future trust for the man who brought them off. Lastly, the chance to campaign with the prince in person was the chance to gain his favour by conspicuous service and shared danger. The other side of the coin was that failure could bring humiliation and loss of influence. Sometimes the risks and costs of high command seemed just too great: thus Hendrik III of Nassau asked to be relieved of command in 1512 after two years’ campaigning against Guelders because his financial means were exhausted and he felt too inexperienced to continue the war.⁹⁹ When the Netherlands were threatened, noblemen were called to ad hoc councils of war to advise the regent: Adrien de Cro¨y-Roeulx, for example, served in those of 1542–3 and 1553, while governors such as Maximiliaan van Egmond-Buren were added for particular meetings. Roeulx was an honourable exception to Mary of Hungary’s general disgust at the conduct of the nobility in wartime.¹⁰⁰ Even before his father’s death his combination of military brilliance and court connections advanced his career. When he captured Th´erouanne by surprise in 1521, Chancellor Gattinara advised Charles to reward him, ‘to give an example to others to do well’.¹⁰¹ For Mary, who scorned noblemen’s ‘ambition to have a big company’ and insubordination, he was the ideal captain, prepared to turn down the offer of reinforcements if he did not need them and accept her judgement when she told him there were none to be had. ‘Your Majesty knows better than I what needs to be done for the advancement of affairs’, he told her in 1552.¹⁰² The Egmond-Burens’ position was always more complex. They were suspected of wishing to play too independent a hand in the triangular struggles of Burgundy, Guelders, and Utrecht, so much so that, in 1542, Mary feared that neither Floris nor Maximiliaan really wanted the Habsburgs to take over Guelders.¹⁰³ In 1510 Frederik wrote to complain bitterly to Margaret of Austria that she was negotiating with Charles of Egmond without reference to him or to Habsburg loyalists in Guelders; she might as well release them from their oaths of loyalty and let them look after ⁹⁸ Cleves, Instruction, 5–6. ⁹⁹ Rachfahl, Wilhelm von Oranien, i. 83–4. ¹⁰⁰ Gorter-Van Royen, Maria van Hongarije, 237, 247 n., 269; Henne, Histoire, ix. 221, 245, 258–60, x. 26–8. ¹⁰¹ Henne, Histoire, ii. 367. ¹⁰² Ibid. viii. 7, ix. 259 n., ix. 204–5. ¹⁰³ Gorter-Van Royen, Maria van Hongarije, 269.

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themselves, ‘for we intend to keep our goods and our honour as best we can’.¹⁰⁴ In 1510–11 Floris’s aggressive behaviour over his estates in Guelders sparked trouble between Duke Charles and the Habsburg lands, and in February 1511 Charles of Egmond explicitly blamed ‘those IJsselsteiners’ for his eighteen years of war with the Habsburgs.¹⁰⁵ Floris’s bold and self-interested intervention in the Utrecht war of 1510–11 was disowned by Margaret and she sent arbitrators to settle his dispute with the city. At length they succeeded in arranging a truce and then, in September 1511, a treaty. But tensions persisted and the Habsburg authorities continued to have to rein in Floris and his men.¹⁰⁶ War also constantly affected the interrelationships of the Egmond-Burens, the regents, and the Holland towns. In 1516 Floris’s closeness to Margaret, together with the towns’ resentment at his tendency to offload the financial and commercial consequences of war onto them, cost him the governorship of Holland. The States asked Charles for his confidant Hendrik of Nassau instead and Charles, happy to have freed himself from Margaret’s tutelage, readily agreed.¹⁰⁷ Meanwhile the counts found ways to make war with Guelders both more profitable and less painful for themselves than the regents or the States of Holland thought it should be. Floris sold costly licences for neutrals to trade in the war zone and concluded local truces to protect his lands inside Guelders from devastation. At times he even avoided raiding the enemy lest his own estates suffer retaliation.¹⁰⁸ Finally their wide connections in the military community of the German-Dutch borderlands also laid the counts open to suspicion. It cannot have reassured Mary of Hungary or the magistrates of her threatened towns that the captured leader of the vanguard of the duke of Cleves in November 1542 turned out to be Buren’s former ensign-bearer; nor that a captain executed at Ghent in 1544 for plotting with the French, who confessed under torture to having betrayed D¨uren to William of Cleves and advised Maarten van Rossum, was a former servant to Floris.¹⁰⁹ In any case the structures of government in the Netherlands made it harder than in England for noblemen to make political capital out of military success. Charles’s determination to command in person from the 1530s did open up the possibility that he might take note of able lords. William of Orange was keen to join Charles at the siege of Metz rather than be sent to Artois in 1552, so as to advance his family’s case in their long-running inheritance dispute over Katzenelnbogen.¹¹⁰ But Charles was often away from the Netherlands. Maximiliaan van Egmond-Buren certainly impressed Charles in 1546, the emperor noting Buren’s ‘courage and activity’ and ‘good speed’ in his Commentaries.¹¹¹ Yet it was Mary of Hungary with whom Buren had to work, and she had a poor relationship with most of her captains, berating them alternately for over-caution or rashness.¹¹² ¹⁰⁴ Henne, Histoire, i. 235–6. ¹⁰⁵ Ibid. 234, 238, 257–9. ¹⁰⁶ Kalveen, Bestuur, 169–95. ¹⁰⁷ Ward, ‘Cities and States’, 50–1, 257; Iongh, Margaret of Austria, 161–70; Kalveen, Bestuur, 182–3; Tracy, Holland, 71–2; GAL, SA383, fo. 194. ¹⁰⁸ Henne, Histoire, iv. 8–9, 192–3; Tracy, Holland, 85–8. ¹⁰⁹ Henne, Histoire, viii. 38, 170. ¹¹⁰ Rachfahl, Wilhelm von Oranien, i. 172–3. ¹¹¹ Charles V, Autobiography, 109, 111. ¹¹² Rachfahl, Wilhelm von Oranien, i. 111–12, 120–1.

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Really large victories could hardly go unrewarded. Lamoraal van Egmond, who had been asking to be governor of Flanders and Artois since at least 1556, was granted the offices in August 1559 in recognition of his deeds at Saint-Quentin and Gravelines.¹¹³ Yet the Netherlands noblemen most influential with the Habsburg rulers and their regents once the crisis of 1477–92 was passed were not those of greatest military skill and experience. Maximilian needed and trusted the men of war: Engelbrecht of Nassau, Jacques de Luxembourg-Fiennes-Gavere; Philip of Cleves and Jacques de Savoie-Romont, until they deserted him.¹¹⁴ Philip the Fair’s confidants Jean de Luxembourg-Ville and Philibert de Veyr´e, in contrast, were more notable as courtiers and diplomats than soldiers.¹¹⁵ The young Charles’s trust rested above all in Chi`evres, who had a competent rather than distinguished military record and certainly stood for peace rather than war.¹¹⁶ After Chi`evres’ death, the Netherlands noblemen closest to Charles were Hendrik III of Nassau and Lodewijk van Vlaanderen-Praat: Nassau held a number of military commands but achieved only mixed success and was twice criticized for withdrawing when he could have pressed on with an invasion of France, while Praat was much more prominent as a diplomat than as a soldier.¹¹⁷ Praat held more of Mary of Hungary’s confidence than did any of the provincial governors and generals, while Margaret of Austria’s leading noble adviser was Hoogstraten, a man whose military aptitude was neatly summed up by an English ambassador: he had ‘greater mind to handle money than courage to wear harness’.¹¹⁸ It is striking that both Floris van Egmond-Buren and Ferry de Cro¨y-Roeulx made a formal complaint to Charles in 1522 that Margaret was not paying sufficient attention to their advice, while in 1529 Adrien too was out of favour with her.¹¹⁹ In the Council of State it was administrators and courtiers such as Hoogstraten, Praat, and Antoine de Cro¨y-Sempy who were the most regular attenders, while campaigns or provincial duties kept men with stronger military reputations away.¹²⁰ Perhaps, indeed, it was the military single-mindedness that made them inspiring generals that handicapped men like Floris as statesmen. Mary of Hungary told Charles V in 1532 that he would make a bad head for the Council of Finance because ‘he never does anything but talk of selling your demesne’.¹²¹ And Floris, like his father before him, had to be reminded by his friends of the importance of going to court in order to keep up his standing there.¹²² In England things were easier for political generals, but still complex. The Howards clearly expected military service to bring them greater political power. John Howard’s influence with Edward IV and Richard III arose principally from the military assistance he had rendered both kings, from Barnet and Tewkesbury to Buckingham’s ¹¹³ ¹¹⁴ ¹¹⁵ ¹¹⁶ ¹¹⁷ ¹¹⁸ ¹¹⁹ ¹²⁰ ¹²²

Rosenfeld, ‘Provincial Governors’, 17, 19; Troeyer, Egmont, 9. Cools, Mannen met macht, 240–2, 257–8, 269–72, 290–1. Ibid. 259–60, 298–9. Dansaert, Chi`evres, 20–2, 25–7, 29, 37–42, 82–6, 95, 101–24. Cools, Mannen met macht, 272–3, 301; Rachfahl, Wilhelm von Oranien, i. 80–113. Gorter-Van Royen, Maria van Hongarije, 233, 239, 269, 272; LP III. ii. 2671. Henne, Histoire, iii. 320–1; Potter, Homme de guerre, 101. Baelde, Collaterale raden, 70–2. ¹²¹ Ibid. 257. Inventaris Buren, iv. 32, 154.

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rebellion.¹²³ Under the Tudors, as civil war subsided, the link between military achievement and political influence remained, but became less direct. Thomas Howard I regained favour by his service in the North and victory against the Scots in 1497, but the sign of his increasing role in government was to be recalled to court and appointed treasurer of England in 1501.¹²⁴ Both Thomas Howards were frustrated at their allocation to commands away from the king’s own military ventures. In grumbling at being left behind to face the Scots in 1513 or sent off to besiege Montreuil in 1544, they showed their understanding of the danger that rivals who campaigned alongside the king might capitalize on the camaraderie of campaign life with the prince.¹²⁵ Thomas Howard II was similarly eager to return to court from the northern borders in 1523.¹²⁶ Yet his experience of service in Ireland and the North gave him a claim to expert status in the king’s councils, enabling him to bargain for more influence there.¹²⁷ Whatever the ups and downs of his relationships with Wolsey and Cromwell, he remained both one of Henry VIII’s leading generals and one of his leading noble councillors for four decades. The situation facing the earls of Northumberland was rather different. Military leadership in the North demanded a commitment to local society that did not match well with attendance at court and in councils, while the cultivation of local power needed to make such leadership effective could lead to political tension. Even the fourth earl’s support for Richard III’s usurpation in 1483 did not pay the dividends that might have been anticipated. Richard gave political supremacy in the North not to Northumberland, but to a council under the leadership first of the king’s son, then of his nephew the earl of Lincoln.¹²⁸ It may have been Northumberland’s sense that he had been ill rewarded that led him to desert Richard at Bosworth, but he soon found himself paying fees to Henry VII’s courtiers to keep himself well in with the new king.¹²⁹ His son shaped himself more as a courtier than as a border captain, but did none the better for that: doubts about his suitability for high office dogged him from his riotous dispute with Archbishop Savage of York in 1504 to his commitment to the Fleet prison for contempt of the jurisdiction of the king’s council in 1516 and beyond.¹³⁰ The sixth earl had the opportunity to become an important national figure as warden of the marches and president of the Council of the North, but his incapacity delegated him to the role of a figurehead. The Howards’ success was balanced by their demonstration that military failure might destroy political influence. The octogenarian Thomas Howard II’s defeat by Wyatt’s rebels in 1554 marked the final eclipse of his political power.¹³¹ More dramatically, on 7 January 1546, Henry Howard, earl of Surrey, was beaten by the French at Saint-Etienne beside Boulogne. The soldier-chronicler Ellis Gruffudd considered the defeat to be ‘chiefly because of the earl their leader, whose head and heart were swollen with pride, arrogance and empty confidence in his own unreasonable ¹²³ ¹²⁵ ¹²⁶ ¹²⁸ ¹³⁰ ¹³¹

Tucker, Thomas Howard, 28–9, 33–46. ¹²⁴ Chrimes, Henry VII, 108. Head, Ebbs and Flows, 33, 212–16; Gunn, Charles Brandon, 16–18, 191–5. Head, Ebbs and Flows, 67-9. ¹²⁷ Ibid. 89–90, 123; State Papers, iv. 62. Reid, Council in the North, 56–66. ¹²⁹ SROB, Ac449/E3/15.53/2.7, 2.8. Hoyle, ‘The Earl, the Archbishop and the Council’; Guy, The Cardinal’s Court, 27. Head, Ebbs and Flows, 238–42.

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bravery’.¹³² Although of little strategic importance, the skirmish at Saint-Etienne was a devastating blow to Surrey, who had defined his nobility and claims to future political influence through his military abilities. His excuses to the king were ignored and he was recalled to England, replaced at Boulogne by his rival Edward Seymour, earl of Hertford. Hertford’s political star was rising, together with that of John Dudley, Viscount Lisle, through their victories against the French and Scots; they, and not Surrey, would dominate the government of the young Edward VI.¹³³ At the end of Henry’s reign as at its beginning, military commanders were amongst the most powerful noblemen at court: Surrey’s problem was that such military command had to be successful. ¹³² Davies, ‘Surrey at Boulogne’, 339–48.

¹³³ Sessions, Surrey, 319–29.

13 War and Noble Power Noble power was power over men. It sprang from their landownership, the deference paid to their social rank, and the recognition that they were the prince’s natural counsellors and local agents. War gave them opportunities both to exercise and to increase their power, as it modified their relationships with those around them.

G R E AT N O B L E S War demanded that great nobles cooperate in the service of their prince, yet it was also an arena for intense competition between them for power, honour, and political influence. Successive Percy earls of Northumberland managed these relationships with some difficulty. The fourth earl came into conflict in the early 1470s with Edward IV’s brother, Richard, duke of Gloucester, who had been sent north to take the place of the disgraced Neville family.¹ An agreement between them had to be arbitrated by the king’s council in 1474, the earl binding himself by indenture to be Gloucester’s ‘faithful servant’, while Gloucester promised him good lordship and undertook not to retain any Percy servants or seek any office of the earl’s without his consent.² Relations were easier thereafter, but the earl’s subordination was clear. In the campaigns of 1481–2 he served as Gloucester’s deputy, while even Percy estate officers fought in the duke’s retinue rather than the earl’s.³ In raising men to help Richard against his rivals in 1483, Northumberland acted just like any of the duke’s other retainers.⁴ The fifth earl’s failure to fulfil his military responsibilities in the North poisoned his relationship with Thomas, third Lord Dacre. Dacre, warden of the west March from 1486, was forced for much of the period 1511–25 to take on the defence of the east and middle Marches, where, as he himself complained, his ‘power was not so good’.⁵ Dacre’s anger at his inability to compel the Percy affinity to aid him made him terse with Northumberland. Twice he refused to lend the earl money, pointing out that he was defending all the Marches at his own cost.⁶ Thomas Howard II was equally ¹ ² ³ ⁴ ⁶

Ross, Richard III, 44–59. Horrox, Richard III, 61–2; Dunham, Indentured Retainers, 140. Horrox, Richard III, 62–4, 214–7; Hicks, ‘Dynastic Change’, 83. YCR, i. 73–5; HCA, BRB1, fo. 133v . ⁵ Ellis, ‘Border Baron’, 253–77. LP III, ii. 3078, 3106, 3603.

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cutting about Northumberland’s lack of enthusiasm for his expedition against the Scots in October 1523.⁷ Relations between the Percies and the Cliffords, the third great family of the borders, were altogether more cordial, partly because Henry Clifford, first earl of Cumberland, was married to the fifth earl’s daughter, Margaret. Clifford helped in the administration and military mobilization of the Percy tenantry in Cumberland and Craven, compensating for the weaknesses of the fifth and sixth earls.⁸ Yet their correspondence suggests little active cooperation in border matters, and, as war loomed in 1532, a desire to limit their commitments rather than an enthusiasm to win glory in the defence of the North.⁹ In the fifteenth century, the Howards too used indentures to define their relations with other lords. John, Lord Howard, indented in 1471 with William, Lord Hastings, lieutenant of Calais, to serve as his deputy, though this did not lead him to side with Hastings in 1483.¹⁰ Howard’s bonds with John, Lord Cobham, were apparently stronger. In February 1482 Cobham indented to serve in Howard’s retinue on the seas and the following year Cobham fought under Howard’s instructions against Buckingham’s rebellion.¹¹ In the sixteenth century, war shaped the Howards’ friendships in more subtle ways, as shared experiences in the king’s campaigns interacted with service at court and in the council. Thomas Howard II knighted John Russell in 1522 after the siege of Morlaix, in recognition of his ‘hardiness and noble courage’. In 1529 Wolsey thought Russell a good intermediary with the duke, and they cooperated closely against the Pilgrimage of Grace in 1536. Russell and Norfolk served together again in 1544, though their disagreements at Montreuil did lead Russell to express misgivings to the king about Norfolk’s handling of the campaign, perhaps a sign that religious politics were driving them apart.¹² Howard’s relationship with his neighbour, Charles Brandon, duke of Suffolk, was also influenced by war. Their natural rivalry in East Anglia as well as at court, particularly in the 1510s, was to some extent offset by their shared chivalric outlook and their experience of war in the king’s service.¹³ Service in war, however, could also sour relationships. The rise of Edward Seymour, earl of Hertford, in the 1540s was marked by his criticism of the Howards’ military abilities. In autumn 1542 he succeeded Norfolk in command against the Scots and immediately began to question the efficiency of the duke’s victualling and the wisdom of his advice, claiming the credit for any successes for himself.¹⁴ In 1545–6 Surrey’s rise and fall at Boulogne were bound up with his rivalry with the Seymours.¹⁵ Seymour’s career in turn would fail in 1549 amidst the bickering of his colleagues in a losing war against Scotland and France. ⁷ State Papers, iv. 44; LP III, ii. 3412. ⁸ ‘Letters of the Cliffords’, 88–90; Hoyle, ‘First Earl of Cumberland’, 79–83. ⁹ ‘Letters of the Cliffords’, nos. 43–5, 49. ¹⁰ Grummitt, ‘Hastings’, 154. ¹¹ HHB ii. 9–10; Gill, Richard III, 72. ¹² Willen, Russell, 8, 26–8, 32–3, 48; Head, Ebbs and Flows, 97, 212–5; PRO, C115/101/7599. ¹³ Gunn, Charles Brandon, 38–54, 196–8; Head, Ebbs and Flows, 43–5; Vokes, ‘Thomas Howard’, 135–51. ¹⁴ LP XVII. 1000, 1001, 1031, 1069, 1084, 1086. ¹⁵ Sessions, Surrey, 288–90, 325–9.

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In the Netherlands, debates over foreign policy were naturally related to rivalries amongst the great lords. As francophiles rose at court, so anglophiles fell, as they did in 1502.¹⁶ Arguments over strategy and tactics could embitter the relations between great men, especially when they came close to accusing one another of cowardice, folly, or the kind of self-interest that suggested the whole army should defend their province.¹⁷ In the tense campaigns of 1542–3 relations amongst the nobility soured on all sides and the French boasted that they would easily defeat Roeulx because he was no longer on friendly terms with Aarschot.¹⁸ In the heat of battle tempers frayed still more quickly. In the war of manœuvre on the Danube in November 1546 Jean de Ligne-Barbenc¸on, serving as Maximiliaan van Egmond-Buren’s lieutenant in command of the heavy cavalry, thought he saw a chance to attack the enemy rearguard and capture John Frederick of Saxony and Philip of Hesse. Buren, on orders from Alva and perhaps from Charles V himself, refused permission to attack. Barbenc¸on, frustrated and perhaps humiliated, protested against the ruling before two hundred gentlemen.¹⁹ Noblemen passed comment on one another’s performance and fortunate was the captain who, like Floris van Egmond-Buren in 1511, had friends to report to the regent.²⁰ They might recommend their colleagues for promotion, Floris telling Margaret of Austria that Jan II van Wassenaar was ‘a man fit to be a commander’.²¹ Noblemen in prison relied even more on the help of their friends.²² The order of the Golden Fleece was an important vehicle for collective action by noblemen and its discussions might be used to pass verdicts on individuals. Twice his friends tried to rehabilitate Philip of Cleves as a true enough Burgundian to wear the order, but in vain.²³ In contrast the reputation of Peter Ernst of Mansfeld, whom Charles V suspected of having surrendered Ivoix too easily to the French, was cleared, though only at the second attempt.²⁴ The mutual criticism sessions of the order may also have been a chance for noblemen to work off their resentment against those more successful at court than themselves, like Lodewijk van Vlaanderen-Praat, crisply damned in 1545 as ‘haughty, ambitious, brutal, irreligious, avaricious and knowing wives other than his own’.²⁵ The post of commander-in-chief was the particular object of ‘partiality or envy’, as Philip of Cleves warned it might be.²⁶ In 1511 Ferry de Cro¨y-Roeulx complained to Margaret of Austria at Maximilian’s choice of the duke of Brunswick and in 1522 Jacques de Luxembourg-Fiennes-Gavere and Antoine de Lalaing-Hoogstraten were each said to be intriguing to replace Floris van Egmond-Buren.²⁷ In 1536 Mary of Hungary was worried that appointing Hendrik of Nassau to invade France might offend Floris, but Charles V pointed out they were friends.²⁸ When Emmanuel Philibert of Savoy took charge in 1553–8, his rank, bearing, work-rate, and military ¹⁶ ¹⁸ ¹⁹ ²¹ ²³ ²⁵ ²⁷

Cools, ‘Les Fr`eres de Glymes-Bergen’, 130–1. ¹⁷ Emmanuele Filiberto, Diari, 152–3. CSPS 1542–3, 287; Gorter-Van Royen, Maria van Hongarije, 268–70. Zwichem, Tagebuch, 174, 200, 267. ²⁰ Inventaris Buren, iv. 37–8. Correspondance de Marguerite d’Autriche, ii. 62. ²² Mansfeld, Journal, 170. Fouw, Philips van Kleef, 349–50, 368–82. ²⁴ Massarette, Mansfeld, i. 41–2, 47–8. Baelde, Collaterale raden, 327. ²⁶ Cleves, Instruction, 5. Henne, Histoire, i. 308–9n; LP III. ii. 2678. ²⁸ Henne, Histoire, vi. 106–7.

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expertise won him respect, but his high-handed and independent manner put noses out of joint and he was again and again at loggerheads with the Netherlanders in a command riven by multiple disagreements.²⁹ Bishop Granvelle also thought his roistering with young colleagues—Orange, Egmond, Horn, and others—lessened their deference towards him, though arguably it won their loyalty.³⁰ In these contexts the relationships between great men were central to the execution of Habsburg policy in the Netherlands, but fluctuated over time. Hendrik III of Nassau and Floris van Egmond-Buren seem to have been close in 1510–11, accused of pressing unnecessarily for war against Guelders, while themselves complaining that they were being undermined by rivals around Margaret of Austria. They cooperated closely in the ensuing war, and, apparently, in a campaign of satirical attacks on their opponents at court.³¹ In 1515–16 relations were tenser, as Hendrik rather than Floris took the governorship of Holland and had to pay Floris 6,000£ in compensation.³² Yet their cooperation resumed thereafter. In 1526 Hendrik was said to be devoted to Floris and in December 1537 he urged him to sustain Nijmegen in its opposition to the attempts of Charles of Guelders to transfer his lands to the French, inviting Floris not only to press Mary of Hungary for action but also, before any orders arrived from her, to assemble his compagnie d’ordonnance ready to intervene.³³ In 1536, similarly, Floris had combined with Antoine de Lalaing-Hoogstraten to resist Mary’s pressure to send their troops north from Brabant and Utrecht to join Tautenburg’s campaign in Groningen, a demand they felt threatened both their honour and the security of the borders in their charge.³⁴ Habsburg politics were more decentralized than English, but the military rivalries and alliances of noblemen were equally important in them.

NOBLE HOUSES Lineage was certainly more important to noblemen than to their lower born contemporaries, kinship arguably so. Both were central to the way noblemen approached war. Members of the Howard clan often fought together, bringing cohesion to the military forces under their command and reinforcing familial ties. John Howard, duke of Norfolk, and his son, Thomas Howard I, fought side by side at Bosworth.³⁵ In 1497 Thomas knighted his sons Thomas II and Edward at the relief of Norham castle and at Flodden he was backed by Thomas II and Edmund.³⁶ Henry VIII would not let Henry Howard accompany his father against the Pilgrims in 1536, ²⁹ Emmanuele Filiberto, Diari, 14, 142, 147, 152–3, 156–8, 163–5, 170–4; Verhofstad, Regering, 34–5. ³⁰ Verhofstad, Regering, 21–3, 31–2, 36–8. ³¹ Henne, Histoire, i. 237, 248–9, 264–5, 289. ³² KHA, ODL/A2/607bis. ³³ Inventaris Buren, iv. 159; ‘Brief van Hendrik van Nassau’, 365–7. ³⁴ Inventaris Buren, iv. 389. ³⁵ Weever, Ancient funerall monuments, 833. ³⁶ Vokes, ‘Thomas Howard’, 23–4, 113–14.

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conceivably because of doubts about the duke’s loyalty, but father and son were together in Scotland and France in 1542 and 1544.³⁷ Surrey’s first independent command at Boulogne in 1545 caused a rift, however, the cautious Norfolk warning his son unavailingly ‘animate not the king too much for the keeping of Boulogne’ and swearing he would rather bury the earl and all his other children than ‘consent to the ruin of this realm’.³⁸ The Howards’ extended family also played an important part in their campaigns. From the 1470s to the 1510s they were often joined by their kinsmen the Gorges, Timperleys, and Tilneys, John Bourchier, Lord Berners, and Sir Francis Bryan.³⁹ Bryan went on to be knighted by Thomas Howard II in 1522 and accompany Surrey to Charles V’s camp in 1543.⁴⁰ Howard companionship in arms continued into the 1540s, as Lord William Howard, uncle of the disgraced Queen Catherine Howard, was released from prison in 1542 and allowed to join his half-brother Norfolk in Scotland.⁴¹ But the coherence of the family at war was a thing of the past. When George Howard, the third son of Lord Edmund Howard, built a military career, he did so in the service of Edward Seymour and John Dudley, though he did serve under Norfolk against Wyatt’s rebels and acted as chief mourner at his funeral.⁴² The Percies likewise made war as a family, junior representatives often serving in the absence of the head of the house to perpetuate the family’s reputation and ensure the cooperation of the Percy following. In 1513, while the fifth earl was in France, his brother Sir William Percy fought at Flodden in the company of the old Percy retainer Sir Marmaduke Constable.⁴³ In summer 1523, while the fifth earl stayed at Wressle, Sir William took charge of the Percy estates and led 200 men to serve under Lord Dacre.⁴⁴ The sixth earl depended still more systematically on members of his family, granting a stream of offices first to his uncle, Sir William, and then to his younger brothers, Sir Thomas and Sir Ingram.⁴⁵ They had begun their military careers much earlier than the earl, raiding Scotland in 1522.⁴⁶ Between 1528 and 1532 he made them stewards of his key border estates and military leaders of the tenantry—Thomas in Tynedale and at Prudhoe, Ingram at Alnwick and eventually in all Northumberland—adding generous fees to fund their service.⁴⁷ In the war of 1532–4 they played key roles: Ingram, for example, organized the system of posts and the transport of ordnance from Alnwick to Warkworth and Cockermouth.⁴⁸ Yet tensions between the brothers and other Percy followers were evident as early as 1532 and in November 1534 the earl effectively excluded Sir Thomas from the defence and government

³⁷ Head, Ebbs and Flows, 136–7. ³⁸ LP XIX. ii. 27, 176, 307; Howard, Works, i. 174–8; Sessions, Surrey, 310–17. ³⁹ Wedgwood, Commons, 857; HHB i, p. viii; PRO, E101/56/27; Vokes, ‘Thomas Howard’, 90–1. ⁴⁰ Bindoff, Commons, i. 527–9; Hall, Chronicle, 643; Sessions, Surrey, 292–5. ⁴¹ Head, Ebbs and Flows, 201. ⁴² Bindoff, Commons, ii. 399–401. ⁴³ Fonblanque, Annals, i. 341; Hicks, ‘Dynastic Change’, 106. ⁴⁴ LP III. ii. 3078, 3097, 3135; BL, Add. MS. 24965, fo. 19v (LP, III, ii. 3110). ⁴⁵ ACM, Grant Book, 69. ⁴⁶ LP III. ii. 2816. ⁴⁷ ACM, Grant Book, 3; PRO, E315/327, 144, E314/55, 1a, 2, 5, 20, 23, 35. ⁴⁸ ACM, C.VI.5b, mm. 8, 40.

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of the borders.⁴⁹ In February 1535 the earl lamented to Cromwell the ‘debility and unnaturalness of those of my name’.⁵⁰ In Sir Thomas’s view the earl’s mind had been poisoned against him by schemers in his household, notably Sir Reynold Carnaby, to whom the earl had granted lands in Corbridge that Sir Thomas ‘with nightly and continual watch in the time of the late wars anent Scotland hath saved and defended . . . from burning and spoiling of the Scots’. While the earl remained childless, Sir Thomas was his heir, but he feared (rightly) that the earl was contemplating ‘disherison of his blood’.⁵¹ Sir Thomas broke irrevocably with his brother by becoming a leading captain of the Pilgrimage of Grace, ending in execution at Tyburn in 1537.⁵² Sir Ingram remained in favour long enough to be made vice-warden of the east March and under-sheriff of Northumberland in 1534 and constable of Alnwick castle in 1535, but was removed from the vice-wardenship in the summer of 1536.⁵³ The earl’s failure to appreciate his brothers’ efforts between 1527 and 1534 to uphold the family’s military authority on the borders was symptomatic of the comprehensive breakdown in Percy power as the sixth earl’s career drew to its unhappy close. In the Netherlands, families sought to consolidate their military power through continuity in the tenure of provincial governorships. Adrien de Cro¨y-Roeulx’s succession to his father in Artois in 1524 was typical of the success of such aspirations under Margaret of Austria. Under Mary of Hungary, in contrast, they were increasingly blocked: Adrien’s governorships were split up at his death and neither passed to a Cro¨y.⁵⁴ Sons were trained through wide-ranging military adventure—for Adrien, for example, in Friesland and Luxembourg—and service alongside their fathers.⁵⁵ In 1521–2 Adrien led raids into France while his increasingly overweight father guarded Artois.⁵⁶ In 1537 Floris described to Mary of Hungary how Maximiliaan had led the triumphant storming of Saint-Pol.⁵⁷ In 1552 Adrien’s son Jean led his father’s bande d’ordonnance into action against the French and soon his father had a greater test for him.⁵⁸ Having captured Hesdin in November, he installed Jean to defend it, reckoning to inspire the defenders and educate his son, whom he promised ‘great punishment if he surrendered with dishonour and reproach’. After a thirteen-day siege, one failed storming, and a bombardment with 4,066 cannonballs, Jean’s men mutinied and he had to surrender on terms. He had held out in a half-destroyed stronghold twice as long as the French had resisted his father’s siege, but that was not good enough for Adrien, who hanged the mutineers and refused to see his son until he had explained himself to Mary of Hungary.⁵⁹ ⁴⁹ ⁵¹ ⁵² ⁵³ ⁵⁴ ⁵⁶ ⁵⁸ ⁵⁹

PRO, SP1/69, fos. 54–5 (LP V. 727). ⁵⁰ LP VIII. 166. PRO, SP1/94, fos. 243–43v (LP VIII. 1143(4)); Hoyle, ‘Henry Percy’, 191–2, 202. LP XII i. 1086, 1090; Hoyle, Pilgrimage, 224–7, 444; Dodds, Dodds, Pilgrimage, i. 31–3. PRO, SP1/86, fo. 147 (LP VII. 1358); E315/92, fo. 60r – v ; Priory of Hexham, p. cxxxviii. Rosenfeld, ‘Provincial Governors’, 35–40. ⁵⁵ Lusy, Journal, 100, 177. LP III. ii. 1562, 1787, 2511; Lusy, Journal, 232. ⁵⁷ Henne, Histoire, vi. 193. Thieulaine, ‘Extraits’,144. Henne, Histoire, ix. 349–64; Lejeune, ‘Roeulx’, 285–6; Thieulaine, ‘Extraits’, 145–7.

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Brothers, cousins, and wider kin might cooperate to great effect. The four sons of Jan II van Glymes-Bergen deployed their complementary talents as captains, councillors, and churchmen in the service of Maximilian and Philip the Fair.⁶⁰ For the ramified Cro¨y dynasty the conduct of local government and war was very much a family affair. In 1521 it was Ferry de Cro¨y-Roeulx’s brother, Jean de Cro¨y-Cr´esecques, who commanded his castle at Contes.⁶¹ In his governorships Adrien de Cro¨y-Roeulx worked together with such relatives as his brother Eustache, bishop of Arras from 1523 to 1538, and his cousins Philippe de Cro¨y-Aarschot, governor of Hainaut from 1521 to 1541, and Antoine de Cro¨y-Sempy, courtier, commissioner for the renewal of magistracies in Flanders and governor of Le Quesnoy.⁶² With Aarschot in particular Adrien coordinated vital campaigns and frontier defence against the French.⁶³ The Cro¨y kinship network extended down into the lower nobility, Aarschot extending special welcome to Adrien’s subordinate Jean de Vaulx in 1528 because ‘the said Jean was of his house’.⁶⁴ Kinship by marriage formed useful bonds for the Egmond-Burens. Floris worked with his father-in-law Cornelis van Glymes-Zevenbergen in military ventures and the making of foreign policy and Maximiliaan entrusted a cavalry company in 1546–7 to his young nephew Philippe de Montmorency, count of Horn.⁶⁵ Closest of all was Maximiliaan’s alliance with Jean de Ligne, lord of Barbenc¸on, his first cousin, who fought under him in 1543 and 1546–7.⁶⁶ Ligne was married at Grave to Buren’s niece and ward Marguerite, sister of Robert III de la Marck, last count of Arenberg.⁶⁷ Maximiliaan made Jean, his ‘brother-in-arms’, executor of his will, asking him to call together his captains on his deathbed and entrusting him with his collar of the Golden Fleece for return to the emperor.⁶⁸ Jean became Maximiliaan’s political heir, succeeding him in the north-eastern governorships and in command of his bande d’ordonnance.⁶⁹ Finally, noble bastards, raised with noblemen’s military aspirations but without the inherited resources to fulfil them, had their own parts to play. The bastard of Roeulx served as a diplomatic courier.⁷⁰ The garrison Hendrik of Nassau put into Mouzon in 1521 was headed by his bastard Alexis.⁷¹ At least two bastards of IJsselstein were captains: Christoffel, bailiff of Sint Maartensdijk for the counts of Buren, led men under Floris in 1504, while Arend fought the Hoeks in 1488 under the patronage of his ⁶⁰ Cools, ‘Les Fr`eres de Glymes-Bergen’, 123–33. ⁶¹ Potter, Homme de guerre, 65–6. ⁶² Cools, Mannen met macht, 193, 196; Macqu´ereau, Histoire, 46, 155. ⁶³ Henne, Histoire, viii. 42–3, 68, 105, 141–8, ix. 342–3. ⁶⁴ Macqu´ereau, Histoire, 68–9. ⁶⁵ Cools, Mannen met macht, 204, 216, 269; Zwichem, Tagebuch, 267. ⁶⁶ Cools, Mannen met macht, 202, 216; Henne, Histoire, viii. 142; Zwichem, Tagebuch, 267; QFG, 337, 347, 349. ⁶⁷ Laloire, G´en´ealogie d’Arenberg, 20–1; Cools, Mannen met macht, 263–4. ⁶⁸ Brantˆome, Oeuvres, i. 314–17. ⁶⁹ Biographie Nationale, i. 370. ⁷⁰ CSPS 1529–30, 716, 770, 775–6. ⁷¹ Rachfahl, Wilhelm von Oranien, i. 98.

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nephew Jan, count of Egmond.⁷² In the Netherlands as in England, it was expected that every member of the house would stand together.

CLIENTELES IN ENGLAND Nobles built up clienteles or affinities to serve their purposes in local government and court politics as well as in war, but military service was often important in shaping these followings. The Howards’ experience suggests that nobles prominent as military commanders, office-holders, and local magnates developed different followings in these different capacities, but that these followings overlapped and might each support the lord in war. The creation of knights with royal permission was a particularly important means for noblemen to bind existing followers to them or to forge new allegiances. Knighting confirmed the lord’s role as a chivalric leader, recognizing the deeds of arms performed by those in his retinue, while increasing the status of the individual follower and binding the affinity together in a fellowship of arms. From the 1490s to the 1520s Thomas Howard I and Thomas Howard II knighted men prolifically—thirty on the borders in 1497, thirty-six at Flodden, at least ten at Morlaix, and thirty-two in Scotland in 1523—whereas by the 1540s it was not the Howards, but Hertford at whose hands men sought to be dubbed.⁷³ The Howards’ power in East Anglia rested first on their relatives, tenants and household servants, who, as we have seen, played an important role in their military enterprises. Beyond them Thomas Howard II cultivated links with such Norfolk and Suffolk gentry families as the Rouses, Wyndhams, and Southwells.⁷⁴ Their importance lay primarily in local politics and government rather than war, but Howard campaigns could draw many East Anglians together. At the siege of Morlaix in 1522, for example, Thomas Howard II was accompanied by his neighbours Robert, Lord Fitzwalter, Sir John Cornwallis, Sir Richard Wingfield, Sir Richard and Robert Jerningham, and Anthony Knyvet.⁷⁵ The importance of these connections declined as the nature of army recruitment changed, but as late as 1542–4 Edmund Wyndham accompanied the Howards to war and in 1559–60 Thomas Howard III led more of his neighbours to Scotland.⁷⁶ The Howards’ power spread beyond East Anglia through office in central institutions and on the crown estates. As treasurer of England Thomas Howard I controlled much patronage in the Exchequer. He certainly promoted East Anglians to positions there, but few served him in war with the exception of John Millet, whom Howard had appointed to a tellership in the Exchequer in 1509 and who in 1512 served as comptroller of the earl’s army on the Scottish borders.⁷⁷ Estate office may ⁷² 200. ⁷³ ⁷⁴ ⁷⁶ ⁷⁷

Inventaris Buren, iii. 1393, 1444, iv. 17; Gent, ‘Pertijelicke saken’, 377, 381; GAL, SAI/199, Shaw, Knights of England, ii. 31–2, 37–8, 43–4, 54–7. Bindoff, Commons, iii. 222, 353, 675–6. ⁷⁵ Hall, Chronicle, 642. Bindoff, Commons, iii. 676; Williams, Thomas Howard, 55. Vokes, ‘Thomas Howard’, 90, 152–3.

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have provided more suitable channels for recruitment. Sir Richard Houghton, for example, Thomas Howard II’s deputy as steward of the hundred of Amounderness, Lancashire, was probably among those knighted by the earl during the Scottish campaign of 1523.⁷⁸ Meanwhile high command gave the Howards a specifically military clientele. At Morlaix in 1522 were many captains from other parts of England who served with the Howards from time to time in the course of distinguished military careers.⁷⁹ Sir Edward Bray, for example, served with the Howards in 1512 and 1522 but under other commanders in 1513 and 1523; his links with the family were sufficient to see him elected MP for their borough of Lewes in 1529.⁸⁰ Such recurrent contacts enabled Thomas Howard II to provide a degree of political leadership in the 1530s to those whose record of military service contrasted with the legal and administrative skills prized by Thomas Cromwell. It was Calais office-holders like Sir John Wallop and Sir William Sandys who drew Norfolk’s attention to Cromwell’s failure to control religious radicals in the Calais Pale and, as the crisis of Cromwell’s fall developed, others such as Sir William Fitzwilliam and Sir William Kingston, a veteran of Flodden and of Surrey’s 1523 campaign, became involved.⁸¹ Yet this set of contacts did not add up to a coherent or long-lived military following. Political allegiances determined largely by religious persuasion cut across military networks to draw away Bray and others in the 1540s.⁸² Wallop stayed closest to the Howards, leading a company of Norfolk’s men in 1542 and accompanying Surrey in 1543 as his principal military adviser, yet his career survived the family’s fall.⁸³ From the mid-1540s it was not to the Howards, but to new military clienteles led by the Seymours and Dudleys that captains, even those from Norfolk, looked for promotion.⁸⁴ The Percy following was less complex than that of the Howards, for the same northern gentry who administered their estates and gave them influence in local government were expected to defend the borders under their leadership. Knightings were a key index of the Percies’ lordship. In the Scottish campaigns of 1481–2 the fourth earl of Northumberland dubbed at least twenty-one knights. Most were or soon became his retainers, including such Percy stalwarts as Ralph Widdrington, Robert Plumpton, Christopher Curwen, and Roger Heron. Yet the faltering of the earl’s power was suggested by the way in which other Percy servants, such as William Eure, William Gascoigne, and Henry Percy, were knighted by the duke of Gloucester rather than Northumberland. Their companionship in arms and loyalty, like those of many others, may well have lain more with Gloucester than with the earl. Hence, it has been suggested, their disgust at Northumberland’s lack of wholehearted support for Richard in 1485 and their failure to protect the earl in 1489.⁸⁵

⁷⁸ Bindoff, Commons, ii. 399. ⁷⁹ Hall, Chronicle, 642. ⁸⁰ Bindoff, Commons, i. 490–2. ⁸¹ Grummitt, ‘Calais 1485–1547’, 70–87; Bindoff, Commons, ii. 470–1. ⁸² Bindoff, Commons, i. 491–2. ⁸³ LP XVII. 552, XVIII. i. 667, 793; ODNB. ⁸⁴ Adams, ‘English Military Clientele’; Bindoff, Commons, i. 326. ⁸⁵ Hicks, ‘Dynastic Change’, 99–100, 103–7; Horrox, Richard III, 129, 205, 216–18; Bennett, Bosworth, 90, 94.

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The fifth earl’s failure to fulfil the traditional military role of the Percies on the east and middle Marches also presented Percy followers with difficult choices. While many disliked Lord Dacre, the defence and good government of the country was in their best interests as much as his and the crown’s. The Percy affinity, led by the earl’s relatives, estate officers, and gentry followers—Carnabys, Danbys, Ellerkers, Herons, Herwoods, Lisles, Ogles, and Whartons—continued to act as a war retinue, leading the Percy tenantry on raids into Scotland under Dacre and Dorset in 1522–3.⁸⁶ Yet those on the borders recognized that, in the absence of Percy leadership, order and defence were unusually dependent on the goodwill of these men: Surrey urged Wolsey in April 1523 that they should be punctiliously thanked, lest they be reluctant to serve in future.⁸⁷ The sixth earl sought to bind the Northumbrian gentry to his service by traditional means, appointing Herons, Ogles, Horsleys, and Widdringtons to castle constableships and other offices.⁸⁸ He also tried to give chivalric cohesion to his affinity, requesting the authority to create knights in wartime, as his ancestors had done, for ‘the encouraging the hearts of gentlemen to serve me the better’.⁸⁹ With the crown’s help, his military following was reinforced by more artificial measures. The ‘council in household’ set up to advise him comprised the leading gentry of the North.⁹⁰ A survey of borderers, their incomes, residences, personal qualities, and mounted followings, led to the selection of seventy or so to be paid fees by the king for their service under the warden.⁹¹ These policies paid dividends: when invading Scotland in 1533, Northumberland was accompanied not only by Widdrington and other Percy servants but also by many other prominent northerners.⁹² However, as the earl’s personal insufficiencies became increasingly apparent, more drastic steps became necessary. Between 1530 and 1535, grants of office and favourable leases gave control of large parts of the Percy estate into the hands of his servants Reynold Carnaby and Thomas Wharton and their families, Carnaby in Northumberland, and Wharton in Yorkshire and Cumberland.⁹³ These grants have variously been seen as acts of gullibility on the earl’s part, a royal encroachment on Percy power, or an attempt to equip Wharton and Carnaby as ‘independent forces’ for northern defence, but they were most likely an attempt to empower them as leaders of the Percy affinity during the incapacity of the earl.⁹⁴ Yet Northumberland’s advancement of Wharton and Carnaby could not compensate for his own shortcomings. By mid-1535 his lordship was visibly crumbling as he proved unable to control his tenants in Yorkshire or settle disputes in ⁸⁶ LP III. ii. 2186, 2545, 2955; BL, Add. MS. 24965, fo. 10 (LP III. ii. 3097); James, ‘Tudor Magnate’, 60–1, 76–82; PRO, E36/226, fos. 78, 123; ACM, Grant Book, 106, 158. ⁸⁷ PRO, SP49/2, fo. 11v (LP III. ii. 2960). ⁸⁸ Hoyle, ‘Henry Percy’, 186–7. ⁸⁹ State Papers, iv. 629 (LP V. 1635). ⁹⁰ PRO, SP1/238, fos. 55–6 (LP Addenda, i. 828). ⁹¹ PRO, SP1/45, fos. 111–14 (LP IV. ii. 3629); LP, IV ii. 5085. ⁹² LP VI. 322. ⁹³ Carnaby: ACM, Grant Book, 27, 39, 45, 178, 179, 181; Bateson et al. (eds.), History of Northumberland, x. 117–8, 397; PRO, E314/55/1–1d, 5d; ‘First Minister’s Account’, 8–10; LP VII. 80, IX. 142, XI. i. 449, 529. Wharton: ACM, Grant Book, 51, 136, 150, 191, 192, 196, 237, 305; PRO, E315/92, fos. 3, 40, 76v –77; E314/55/1; James, ‘Change and Continuity’, 105–7. ⁹⁴ Bean, Estates, 157; Dodds, Dodds, Pilgrimage, i. 31–3; Hoyle, ‘Henry Percy’, 190–1.

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Northumberland, let alone provide military leadership.⁹⁵ The more he empowered Carnaby and Wharton, the less their rivals within the wider Percy following—not just his brothers, but men such as Alexander Shaftoe in Northumberland or Sir John Lampleugh in Cumberland—found it possible to submit to his authority.⁹⁶ Matters had to be removed from his jurisdiction as local political society lost confidence in him and the Percy interest dissolved as a coherent body of political and military power. This was amply demonstrated during the Pilgrimage of Grace, when his brothers and many of his servants became captains amongst the Pilgrims, while the earl tried but failed to muster his following against the rebels and then told the revolt’s astonished leaders they might ‘strike off his head whereby they should rid him of much pain, ever saying he would be dead’.⁹⁷ Amidst the chaos of the Pilgrimage, Percy power disappeared from the North for the next twenty years. CLIENTELES IN THE NETHERLANDS Conditions in the Netherlands gave war an even more central role in most great noblemen’s relations with their followers. Military leadership played an intrinsic part in high noble status for provincial governors and captains of the bandes d’ordonnance. In 1477–92 warfare was endemic in most parts of the Netherlands and noble lordship and protection could only be exercised in the context of war. After 1492 stability returned to the core areas, but until 1543 parts of every province were within range of an active military frontier. The proximity of war made the role of castle captains especially important. Men such as Willem Turck, the Burens’ castellan, bailiff, and receiver at IJsselstein in the 1520s and 1530s, Gijsbert van Baexen, bailiff of Grave in the 1520s and later at IJsselstein, and Pauwels van Esseren, castellan and lieutenant at Buren in the 1530s and 1540s, were in constant correspondence with their lords. They supervised estate administration, fortification, defence, troop-raising, and the local implementation of treaties and they sent on news from beyond the frontiers.⁹⁸ The work took its toll, as they pledged their own credit to pay soldiers and workmen or faced local opposition or government tax demands.⁹⁹ The compensation was their position as power-brokers of comital authority. Each recommended to the counts candidates for appointments in the church or the army, for introductions to others in authority or other forms of lordly grace.¹⁰⁰ Lesser noblemen also deputized for the great in ⁹⁵ LP VIII. 946, 991, 1013. ⁹⁶ PRO, SP1/94, fo. 237r – v (LP VIII. 1143); LP IX. i. 371; State Papers, v. 31; PRO, C1/866/40–1; ACM, Grant Book, 81; James, ‘Change and Continuity’, 100–1; Bush, Pilgrimage, 370. ⁹⁷ Reid, Council in the North, 133–5; LP XII. i. 1086; Tickell, Hull, 164–5; Fonblanque, Annals, i. 455; Hoyle, Pilgrimage, 307. ⁹⁸ Inventaris Buren, i. 116, 399, iii. 1598–9, 1665, 1684, iv. 116, 238, 261, 309, 329, 332, 353, 364, 427, 668, 715, 721, v. 1017, 1047, 1081, 1109, 1124, 1128, 1136, 1163, 1230, 1262–4, 1418. ⁹⁹ Ibid. i. 117–18, iii. 1665, iv. 238, 276, 505, 770, v. 1047, 1109, 1155, 1182, 1191, 1288. ¹⁰⁰ Ibid. iv. 671, 701, 718, 797, 1078, 1081; NA, NDRII/1082/403.

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the captaincies they held from the prince. Jan van der Aa, lord of Bokhoven near ’s-Hertogenbosch, was linked with Frederik van Egmond-Buren as early as 1494, raided Guelders under Floris’s direction in 1504, and was recommended by Floris for appointment as bailiff of the Tielerwaard and the Bommelerwaard in 1508.¹⁰¹ As bailiff and probably deputy-captain of Gorinchem he cooperated with other Buren followers to organize raids and defences, transmit news, and deal with garrison mutinies.¹⁰² Like his colleagues he sought favours from the counts for his dependants.¹⁰³ When necessary such followers could serve further afield. In summer 1542 Van Baexen was posted to Vollenhove to coordinate troop movements in the provinces where Maximiliaan was governor. The towns of Overijssel and Groningen were instructed to report to him and Goswin van Raesfelt, bailiff of Twente, a leading captain and local lord, was firmly told to obey his instructions.¹⁰⁴ The States of Overijssel, which insisted they were at peace, protested against his orders to man ships.¹⁰⁵ The experience seems to have left him sour about the loyalty of his new colleagues in the Burgundian-Habsburg enterprise. In August 1543 he wrote to Maximiliaan that he had heard the Overijsselaars would now show themselves good subjects of the emperor; about time too, he added.¹⁰⁶ Some lieutenants were more versatile still. Jacques de Sucre, lord of Bellaing, a Hainaulter like his masters, was right-hand man to Ferry and Adrien de Cro¨yRoeulx. In 1509 he served under Ferry in Italy and in 1517–22 was lieutenant of his bande d’ordonnance.¹⁰⁷ In 1521 Ferry put him in command of Hesdin and in April 1528 he was sent Adrien’s instructions ‘for the affairs of Monsieur du Roeulx in the county of Artois’, where he had been left in charge of provincial defence.¹⁰⁸ Dierick van Batenburg played a similar role for Floris. He was lieutenant of his bande d’ordonnance in 1522, served as his deputy in command at ’s-Hertogenbosch in 1528 and raised cavalry in the county of Mark and the Rhineland bishoprics at his command in 1532.¹⁰⁹ Household service and estate office interacted with kinship and warfare to tie lesser nobles into magnate followings. Jonker Bernard van den Boomgaert, master of Floris’s household in the 1530s and a relation by marriage of the Turcks, campaigned with Maximiliaan in 1536 and later raised cavalry for him.¹¹⁰ Frederik Noorney, an estate officer of Frederik at Leerdam, claimed to have lost his horses, his weapons, and much of his health in serving the count.¹¹¹ Jan van den Wijngaerde asked Maximiliaan for a post in the new fortifications at Grave, having been in the service of his father Floris and his grandfather Zevenbergen.¹¹² The van den Corenhuyses combined household ¹⁰¹ ¹⁰² ¹⁰⁴ ¹⁰⁶ ¹⁰⁸ ¹⁰⁹ ¹¹⁰ ¹¹¹

Inventaris Buren, i. 948, 1002, iii. 1347, iv. 15–17. Ibid. i. 340, iv. 88, 111, 122, 255, 259, 522–3, 576, 580. ¹⁰³ Ibid. v. 1438. Ibid. iv. 934, 938–9, 941–2, 945, 950, 955, 959. ¹⁰⁵ Ibid. iv. 944. Ibid. v. 1136. ¹⁰⁷ Henne, Histoire, i. 228; Lusy, Journal, 125; ROPB ii. 170. Macqu´ereau, Chronicque, 105; id., Histoire, 47, 69–70. ROPB ii. 169; Aurelius, Cronycke, x4v ; Inventaris Buren, iv. 304, 307. Inventaris Buren, iii. 709, iv. 359, v. 1304; NA, NDRII/1045/4. Inventaris Buren, iv. 44. ¹¹² Ibid. v. 1079

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and military service to the Cro¨y-Roeulx.¹¹³ Similar intersections can be seen in the affinities of the Lannoy, Cro¨y-Aarschot, and Bourgondi¨e-Beveren.¹¹⁴ Great nobles also acted as patrons with the central authorities for their subordinates. Adrien de Cro¨y-Roeulx both commended men to Mary of Hungary in general terms, like the lord of Halloy, ‘a man of substance, diligent and understanding in war’, and sought her intervention in specific disputes.¹¹⁵ They do not seem to have knighted those serving under them as frequently as English nobles did, though Floris did dub a number of Frisian noblemen loyal to the Habsburgs in 1515.¹¹⁶ But their recommendations may have lain behind knightings such as that of Maximiliaan’s Ommelander captain Hidde van Ewsum by Charles V at Utrecht in 1546.¹¹⁷ By whatever means, they forged the loyalty they needed, the sort of loyalty Willem Turck expressed to Maximiliaan in 1537: though troubled with deafness, ‘none the less, noble lord, I shall offer any service to your lordship with my poor goods and blood and willingly devote myself with my poor service at all times by day and night, so that your lordship can at all times be assured of my poor service’.¹¹⁸ As a clientele-builder Maximiliaan found himself in a special position as governor of Overijssel, Drenthe, Friesland, Groningen, and the Ommelanden from 1540.¹¹⁹ These were provinces only recently brought under Habsburg rule after bitter struggles against the partisans of Charles of Guelders. They were prime areas for raising troops and adjoined other recruiting grounds—Utrecht, Gelderland, Cleves, Mark, M¨unster, Cologne, and East Friesland—in which, as we have seen, Maximiliaan had links with military entrepreneurs. All shared overlapping networks of noble kinship along which political alliances and military contracts might be arranged. For a lord who aspired to exercise power in the region, relations with the leading gentry who acted as recruiters and captains were of fundamental importance. Such relations Maximiliaan established with a vengeance. It was the army he led across Germany in the Schmalkaldic War that best displayed Maximiliaan’s ability to draw together the noble military resources of the north-eastern provinces, as he had already begun to do earlier in the 1540s.¹²⁰ From Friesland, Feiko Hesslinga of Hitsum led a company of infantry.¹²¹ From the Ommelanden, Hidde van Ewsum led 500 cavalry and Johan van Ewsum an infantry company. From Overijssel, Goswin van Raesfelt led 300 horse and Herman van Westerholt another 300. Jan van Ittersum, Wolter van Deventer, and Wilken van Dinther led infantry companies and Frederik van Reeden also participated. From Drenthe, Egbert van Deveren brought a company of infantry. From just inside ¹¹³ ¹¹⁴ ¹¹⁵ ¹¹⁶ ¹¹⁷ ¹¹⁹ ¹²⁰ 1285. ¹²¹

ISN iii. 108 ; ARA, RSA119/5; Henne, Histoire, viii. 158 n. Lusy, Journal, 188; Macqu´ereau, Histoire, 48; Sicking, Zeemacht, 59–60. Henne, Histoire, iii. 363; ARA, RSA119/103, 119/256. Kist, ‘Centraal gezag en Friese vrijheid’, 119. Hartgerink-Koomans, Ewsum, 137–8. ¹¹⁸ NA, NDRII/1082/428. Rosenfeld, ‘Provincial Governors’, 41 n. Zwichem, Tagebuch, 256, 267; Inventaris Buren, iv. 739, 852, 932, 950, 963, 996, v. 1236, Faber, Drie eeuwen Friesland, ii. 693.

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Gelderland came Reinier van Aeswijn, lord of Brakel, who took over Ewsum’s cavalry after his death. From just the far side of the border between Overijssel and M¨unster came Jakob von Gronau with his infantry. From the county of Mark came Franz von Bodelswing with his 500 horsemen.¹²² With 210 horsemen from further south, but still in the German borderlands of the Habsburg Low Countries, came Friedrich von Sombreffe, erfvogt of Lontzen, on the edge of Overmaas near Aachen. Several of these captains were leading local office-holders on whom the consolidation of Habsburg authority in their provinces rested: Jan van Ittersum at IJsselmuiden, Goswin van Raesfelt in Twente, Frederik van Reeden at Diepenheim, Herman van Westerholt at Vollenhove, the Ewsum brothers at Vredewold.¹²³ Such men’s loyalty to the Habsburgs might well have been doubted. Many came from families once in the service of Charles of Guelders and some had recently accepted offices from him or pledged themselves to William of Cleves.¹²⁴ Military service under Maximiliaan provided a way into Habsburg grace, as it did even for Charles, bastard of Guelders.¹²⁵ The count used his reciprocal bonds with these men to make his local power more effective and to favour their careers. Raesfelt and Westerholt presented his demands for cavalry to serve the emperor to the States of Overijssel in 1542.¹²⁶ Raesfelt, Westerholt, and the Ewsums sent him local news, birds of prey, and stallions for his men; they asked for appointments and favours for themselves and their friends and neighbours; they secured his arbitration and intervention in their disputes.¹²⁷ His clients visibly prospered, the Ewsums consolidating their position as the richest family in the Ommelanden and Raesfelt rebuilding his home, Huis Twikkel at Delden.¹²⁸ Military service did not do much for their financial position, for Buren did not pay the captains of 1546 until June 1548 and some debts remained until 1558, while the diseaseridden 1546–7 campaign killed Hidde van Ewsum and nearly killed Johan. But war must have appealed, for Johan fought in several further campaigns.¹²⁹ As in England, the leadership of an affinity in war and peace demanded both reciprocal loyalty and firm judgement. Contemporaries were critical of those who let themselves be led by those around them, like Charles de Cro¨y-Chimay, but recorded with admiration both Philippe de Cro¨y-Aarschot’s affection for his men and his fury when they failed to defend the borders.¹³⁰ On noble lordship and client loyalty depended the ability of great noblemen to offer the protection demanded of them by local society. When that protection worked, as Aarschot’s did in Hainaut in much of the 1520s, then respect for the magnate and his men—‘strong, and valiant, and ¹²² Urkundenbuch des Niederrheins, iv. 592, 666. ¹²³ Inventaris Buren, i. 1065; Zwichem, Tagebuch, 256; Marshall, Dutch Gentry, 85; HartgerinkKoomans, Ewsum, 123. ¹²⁴ Gedenkwaardigheden, vi (i), 206, 322, 349, 546 , 601, vi (ii), 981, 1289, 1436, 1489, vi (iii), 1562, 1607, 1837; Urkundenbuch des Niederrheins, iv. 665; Hartgerink-Koomans, Ewsum, 101–21. ¹²⁵ Inventaris Buren, iv. 627, 873, 931, 950, 959, v. 1054. ¹²⁶ Ibid. iv. 848, 951. ¹²⁷ Ibid. i. 1066, iv. 640, 679, 746, 844, 917, 946, 1019; v. 1073, 1215, 1228, 1242. ¹²⁸ Hartgerink-Koomans, Ewsum, 64–77, 127–34, 141–2; Eppens, Kroniek, i. 112–13; Vries, Dutch Rural Economy, 37–8; Kuile, Nederlandsche monumenten, 10–12. ¹²⁹ Hartgerink-Koomans, Ewsum, 139–41. ¹³⁰ Macqu´ereau, Chronicque, 123, 127; id., Histoire, 45–6, 71–2; Lusy, Journal, 279.

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always on their guard’—was unbounded.¹³¹ When it failed, as it did both in Holland and along the border with France in 1528, there was ‘great murmuring’ against the lords, so much so that Aarschot thought it best to leave Valenciennes for his own safety until the town councillors talked him out of it.¹³² Such was the power of lordship to draw together the local political and military community that disgruntled magnates might threaten the prince and his councillors with sabotage: in 1557, in a row with Granvelle, Charles de Lalaing warned that if he retired to his castle it would cause a dozen noblemen in Hainaut, who would serve only under him, to withdraw in the same way.¹³³ In the Netherlands as in England, much more than noble reputations hung upon the effective lordship of noblemen at war.

TOW N S We have already examined the relationship between towns and noblemen from the point of view of the towns. Relations were just as important to the noblemen involved. For English noblemen, towns were reservoirs of manpower and centres of communication vital to their martial reputations, but the military aspects of relations between towns and nobles were part of a much wider pattern of patronage and influence visible in the growing tendency for towns to appoint noblemen to the post of high steward and for nobles to seek to influence towns’ parliamentary elections. Their large tenantry and the comparative scarcity of urban centres in the northernmost counties made towns less important to the Percies than to some other nobles, but they sometimes called on urban military resources. They had a close relationship with the town of Beverley, initially as the archbishop of York’s stewards, and in 1522 Henry, Lord Percy led troop musters there.¹³⁴ Both the fourth and sixth earls made requests for men to the magistrates of Hull on the basis of their authority as wardens of the Marches.¹³⁵ Their relationship with the greatest city of the region, York, was heavily conditioned by wider political circumstances. In 1481 York sent several aldermen to consult with the fourth earl about the contribution of the neighbouring Ainsty wapentake for the war in Scotland, but as the city’s magistrates drew closer to Richard of Gloucester as royal lieutenant and then king, so they began to bypass the earl.¹³⁶ After 1485, he tried to exercise influence again as the ‘hearty lover’ of the city, but his position had been compromised.¹³⁷ In 1489 the city admitted the rebels the earl had tried to suppress and a York alderman, Thomas Wrangwish, was indicted for his part in the rebellion.¹³⁸ Disapproval of the earl was so great that his authority collapsed even in Beverley, where two of the four governors of the town were indicted for his death.¹³⁹ ¹³¹ ¹³² ¹³⁴ ¹³⁵ ¹³⁶ ¹³⁸ ¹³⁹

Macqu´ereau, Chronicque, 122, 130, 144, 152. Macqu´ereau, Histoire, 51, 65. ¹³³ Verhofstad, Regering, 48–9. HMC Beverley, 169–72, 174, 180–1. HCA, BRB1, fos. 129, 130v –131; Tickell, Hull, 164–5. YHB i. 241; Reid, Council in the North, 68–70. ¹³⁷ YCR i. 131. Hicks, ‘Yorkshire Rebellion’, 41, 45; Palliser, York, 44. Hicks, ‘Dynastic Change’, 78.

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Howard power in East Anglia necessitated engagement with a range of towns. Norwich was the regional metropolis: the Howards had a large house there and were often sent presents—wine, fish, swans, porpoises—by the magistrates and sent them venison in return.¹⁴⁰ From 1512 onwards Norwich contingents served in Howard expeditions.¹⁴¹ In the 1540s the crown’s military demands on the city were still channelled through the duke of Norfolk, under whose command its troops were sent to serve. He was the ‘Right high and mighty prince our undoubted gracious good lord’, whom the magistrates addressed ‘humbly with all our hearts intending our bounden duties to your grace’, while they were his ‘very loving friends’.¹⁴² The Howards’ fall in 1546, however, allowed Norwich to develop more direct links with the crown. Contacts with the Howards resumed after their restoration—in 1558 the fourth duke headed a commission to survey the armour stocks held in the city—but their control over Norwich’s military resources was at an end.¹⁴³ The Howards’ links with the other major towns of Norfolk, Lynn and Great Yarmouth, were less close, especially under Henry VIII when each sought out Charles Brandon, duke of Suffolk, as a patron.¹⁴⁴ In the 1480s and 1550s the Howards held rather more sway. In 1481 John Howard drew a ship and men from Yarmouth into his force to defend the seas.¹⁴⁵ In 1553 Thomas Howard II was appointed high steward by the town: musters were to be certified to Howard and his grandson and successor was able to call upon the town for men in August 1557 and appoint one of his servants, Sir Thomas Woodhouse, its captain.¹⁴⁶ The new duke was also courted by Lynn, but in each case electoral influence may have been more important to him than an ability to draw on military resources, just as it was in the thinly populated Sussex boroughs of Bramber, Horsham, and Lewes.¹⁴⁷ When the Howards were at their peak, the Norwich authorities were anxious to see their reputation maintained in the city. In 1515 a priest from Lancashire was called before the mayor’s court, accused of defacing a book commemorating their exploits at Flodden, probably a copy of the Thordre and behauyoure of the right honourable Erle of Surrey. He had been stung by local jibes about the poor performance of the Lancashire contingents at the battle: they had not fought, but stolen ‘other men’s horses, wherefore they were worthy to be hanged’. So he had crossed out the words ‘right honourable’ replacing them with ‘right horrorable’, defaced the Howard arms on the front of the book, and claimed that ‘Lord Edmund Howard fled from the said field’ and that ‘Sir Edward Stanley knight and other gentlemen company ¹⁴⁰ Vokes, ‘Thomas Howard’, 64, 315; Williams, Thomas Howard, 68–70; NRO, NCA 1479–88, fos. 51, 51v , 60v , 66v , NCAR 1509–10, m. 7, 1512–13, m. 19, 1513–14, mm. 8–9, 1514–15, m. 24, 1518–19, mm. 15–16, 1522–3, m. 20, 1523–4, m.18, NCA 1537–47 fos. 11r , 34r , 101r , 130v , 132v , 150*v , NCA 1541–9, fos. 12r – v , 25v , 61v –62r , 88r , 93r , 115r , 156r , 194r – v . ¹⁴¹ Vokes, ‘Thomas Howard’, 90. ¹⁴² NRO, PMA 1491–1553, fo. 130, MCB 1540–9, 115, 203, 289. ¹⁴³ NRO, Phi/624/578x6. ¹⁴⁴ NRO, KL/C7/5, fos. 262–3; Bindoff, Commons, i. 149; Gunn, Charles Brandon, 39, 79–82, 113, 166–7, 178. ¹⁴⁵ HHB i. 478. ¹⁴⁶ Bindoff, Commons, i. 149; NRO, Y/C19/1, fos. 36r – v , 108–9, 118, 182v , 192, 203. ¹⁴⁷ NRO, KL/C7/6, fos. 330, 344v ; Bindoff, Commons, i. 201–9.

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with Lancashire men had used themselves right valiantly against the Scots’.¹⁴⁸ We do not know the priest’s punishment, but his prosecution suggests how controversial his action was. Yet reputations depended on more than war. Henry Howard, earl of Surrey, was unpopular in Norwich, notoriously bad at paying his bills and suspected of ambitions to overawe the city by building his Renaissance palace, Mount Surrey, overlooking it: the house was gleefully defaced when order broke down in the rebellion of 1549.¹⁴⁹ War was not of overwhelming importance in the relationships between nobles and towns in England because war so rarely came close to English towns. When it did so, noble roles changed. In invasion scares like those of 1539 and 1545, noblemen toured the coasts advising towns on their defences. At Great Yarmouth, the duke of Norfolk visited twice in 1545, praising the townsfolk’s diligence in following his instructions for backing their walls with earth and making sure they were issued with five cannon from the Ordnance Office.¹⁵⁰ Similarly after rebellions towns threw themselves at the feet of their conquerors or liberators. Louth and Lincoln cultivated Charles Brandon after 1536 and Norwich worshipped John Dudley, earl of Warwick, in 1549, putting his ragged staff badge in silver paper on every gate of the city and ordering all the shops to close on 27 August every year in memory of how he had ‘delivered this city from the great danger, trouble and peril it was in’.¹⁵¹ Such prostration was more frequent in the Netherlands because of the greater incidence of civil war, revolt, and conquest. Engelbrecht II of Nassau marched into Bruges as a triumphant conqueror in 1489 and was given a life annuity of 300£ by the town for his intercession with Maximilian. After his triumphal entry into Tournai in 1521, Hendrik III of Nassau was presented with 5,000£ by the magistrates, scared that the Flemings would insist on the demolition of their walls. No wonder he laughed when he reassured them that demolition was out of the question, as it would cost too much.¹⁵² The greater proximity of war shaped relations between towns and nobles in the Netherlands at every turn. The Egmond-Burens’ relationship with ’s-Hertogenbosch paralleled that of the Howards with Norwich. It was the nearest large town to their estates, conveniently situated between Brussels and Mechelen and their own centres at Buren, IJsselstein, and Grave, and they owned a large house there from 1492.¹⁵³ They provided far more members of the Brotherhood of Our Lady, the religious and social focus of the civic elite, than any other noble house and Frederik, Floris, and Maximiliaan all participated in, and supplied swans for, the guild’s annual swan feasts.¹⁵⁴ Floris was the Habsburgs’ chosen agent in dealing with ’s-Hertogenbosch: in tax negotiations, as we have seen, but also in the renewal of the town’s bench of magistrates, for which he served as chief commissioner at least nine times in the 1520s and ¹⁴⁸ NRO, MCB 1510–32, unfoliated. ¹⁴⁹ Sessions, Surrey, 143–9, 168–74. ¹⁵⁰ Great Yarmouth Assembly Minutes, 16, 66–7. ¹⁵¹ Gunn, Charles Brandon, 153–4, 219; Blomefield, Norfolk, iii. 256 n.; McClendon, Quiet Reformation, 109, 147. ¹⁵² Rachfahl, Wilhelm von Oranien, i. 101; Barre, Journal, 196–7, 206–11. ¹⁵³ Kuijer, ’s-Hertogenbosch, 256. ¹⁵⁴ Dijck, Bossche optimaten, 71, 86, 185–6, 196, 221, 297–8.

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1530s.¹⁵⁵ A martial edge to his engagement with the town came from his involvement with the shooting confraternities. Town chronicles recorded how Floris wore the livery of the schutters with pride, how he or his nominee shot the parrot target of the young crossbowmen twice, and how in 1534 he gave the handgunners a new silver parrot.¹⁵⁶ But real war was a more significant force still. In the wars against Guelders from 1477 to 1543 ’s-Hertogenbosch was consistently in the front line, and the Egmond-Burens were consistently its protectors. Frederik used to parade his horsemen reassuringly on the marketplace, Floris’s men once saved the town from ambush, and again and again they led the town militias or garrisons in defensive campaigns or on raids across the Maas. ¹⁵⁷ Repeatedly the magistrates asked them to reinforce their garrison at Grave to protect the meierij, or to advise on the town’s own military ventures such as the garrisoning of Oijen on the Maas in 1508–9.¹⁵⁸ Repeatedly magistrates and counts exchanged news of threatening troop movements and other events. Repeatedly they cooperated to urge the needs of local defence on the central government: hence the streams of messengers from ’s-Hertogenbosch to the Burens’ house at Brussels.¹⁵⁹ And the greater the counts’ landed power, the better they could protect the town: hence the magistrates’ preparedness to back Floris’s purchase of the castle and lordship of Boxmeer with an issue of renten in 1533–4.¹⁶⁰ The Egmond-Burens further strengthened their influence in ’s-Hertogenbosch through their military interventions at times of internal turmoil. In 1477 Frederik entered the town at a key moment in the struggle between guildsmen and patricians and helped to mediate a settlement.¹⁶¹ In 1525, when opposition to taxation set off popular unrest, Floris had to intervene in more threatening manner. He was sent with over a thousand troops to neighbouring Vught to put pressure on the town, but with orders that his men were not to attack it or plunder its surroundings unless provoked. The town remained defiant, so he began a full-scale siege. The authorities rapidly sued to Margaret of Austria for a settlement, and Floris was sent in with two other councillors to negotiate a treaty of submission. He accompanied Margaret when she made her entry to the chastened town.¹⁶² The Egmond-Burens were not the only noblemen who sought influence with ’s-Hertogenbosch. Floris’s father-inlaw and predecessor as castellan of Grave, Cornelis van Glymes-Zevenbergen, and Hendrik of Nassau, lord of Breda, who regularly commanded against Guelders, also took an interest there.¹⁶³ Even Ferry de Cro¨y-Roeulx was feted when he accompanied ¹⁵⁵ Schuttelaars, Heren van de raad, 213–14; ARAB, RSA1583/285. ¹⁵⁶ Molius, Kroniek, 175; Verzameling ’s-Hertogenbosch, 106–7, 109; Kuijer, ’s-Hertogenbosch, 285. ¹⁵⁷ Molius, Kroniek, 191, 195, 233; Kuijer,’s-Hertogenbosch, 294; Henne, Histoire, i. 59, 181, ii. 353. ¹⁵⁸ Kuijer, ’s-Hertogenbosch, 312; Os, Kroniek, 254–5. ¹⁵⁹ Kuijer, ’s-Hertogenbosch, 312; ‘De stad ’s-Hertogenbosch’, 99–100; SSH, OA3800; Inventaris ’s-Hertogenbosch, 263, 439, 491–2, 532–3. ¹⁶⁰ SSH, OA4870–5. ¹⁶¹ Kuijer,’s-Hertogenbosch, 252. ¹⁶² Henne, Histoire, iv. 64–6; Kuijer, ’s-Hertogenbosch, 306; Molius, Kroniek, 249, 251, 265. ¹⁶³ Os, Kroniek, 284, 287–8; SSH, OA1496; Schuttelaars, Heren van de raad, 213, 270; Inventaris ’s-Hertogenbosch, 25, 28, 38–9, 50, 66, 67–8; Kuijer,’s-Hertogenbosch, 255; Dijck, Bossche

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Charles at his entry in 1515 and led troops to clear away plundering mercenaries later that year.¹⁶⁴ But none received such consistent tokens of the magistrates’ confidence: whenever they visited between 1477 and 1548, the Egmond-Burens were presented with wine—an average of 70 litres a visit—and other presents, including significant sums in cash, that showed just how much ’s-Hertogenbosch valued their friendship and protection.¹⁶⁵ For Adrien de Cro¨y-Roeulx the equivalent command centre was Saint-Omer. He kept a house in the town large enough for the States of Artois to receive Prince Philip there in 1549 and, like his father, kept up a constant correspondence with the magistrates about military events, soldiers, artillery, money, and food.¹⁶⁶ His powers over towns were much strengthened by his provincial governorships. He was first commissioner to nominate magistrates in the towns of Flanders and Walloon Flanders, though his other commitments meant he rarely appeared in person to carry out the function.¹⁶⁷ He held Douai on an especially tight rein, sending a blistering letter when the magistrates tried to arrest one of his officers.¹⁶⁸ The necessities of defence in border provinces doubtless authorized a certain high-handedness. But other factors too came into play. Towns such as Saint-Omer and Lille had become used under the Burgundians to having a great lord to represent their interests at court and Adrien was well placed to fill this role.¹⁶⁹ Meanwhile his landownership equipped him to influence towns in other ways, for example making citizens of Mons who invested in rural estates his feudal tenants.¹⁷⁰ Rebel towns lay particularly open to Adrien’s power. In 1539 he was sent ahead of Charles V to prepare for Ghent’s exemplary subjection to the emperor. Received with joy in the hope that he brought news of pardon, he bravely rebuked the town council for their disobedience and tried to split the elite from the populace before offering his services as an intermediary with the wrathful prince, with whom he returned in massive armed force. Left in charge of Charles’s troops after his departure and charged with building the citadel which was to ensure the town’s future quiescence, he was ideally placed to make himself the protector of the chastened magistracy.¹⁷¹ In the wake of the revolt Adrien had a reputation worth maintaining by town authorities who wished to stay on the right side of him. The magistrates of Kortrijk reacted sharply when one Michiel Cauwe spread through the town ‘injurious words about my lord the count of Roeulx’, imprisoning him on bread and water for three days and then banning him from the town for three years.¹⁷² Philibert de Chalon was optimaten, 93, 186, 221; Rachfahl, Wilhelm von Oranien, i. 80, 83, 90–1, 109; Molius, Kroniek, 227. ¹⁶⁴ Inventaris ’s-Hertogenbosch, 301; Henne, Histoire, ii. 135. ¹⁶⁵ Inventaris ’s-Hertogenbosch, passim. ¹⁶⁶ Hirschauer, Artois, ii. 57; Derville (ed.), Saint-Omer, 100–1. ¹⁶⁷ Peteghem, Raad van Vlaanderen, 104–7. ¹⁶⁸ Foucart, Institution baillivale, 115–16, 202–3; AMD, EE93bis. ¹⁶⁹ Derville, ‘Pots-de-vin’, 453–4, 459–62. ¹⁷⁰ Lejeune, ‘Roeulx’, 198. ¹⁷¹ Henne, Histoire, vii. 5–10, 13–20, 33, 37–43, 72–5, 90, 104–6, 109–11, 342; Relations des troubles, passim. ¹⁷² Henne, Histoire, vii. 107 n.

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even better served by the councillors of Besanc¸on, who marked the death of the ‘good lord, protector, friend and defender of this city’ with a eulogy of his ‘so many high and virtuous deeds of arms and prowess, more excellent than Hector and Achilles ever did’.¹⁷³ Yet urban opinion could never be taken for granted. Floris was no longer the hero of ’s-Hertogenbosch in 1528, when his costly siege of Tiel failed and there were nasty rumours he had been bought off by the besieged townsfolk. So bitterly was he criticized on the streets of the town that he came to address the councillors and deans of the guilds to justify his conduct and demand an end to the defamation of his honour. He was met with open defiance by the dean of the shoemakers. The elite had hurriedly to send the guildsmen home, soothe Buren’s wounded pride, and proclaim strict punishment for any future defamation of the count.¹⁷⁴ War could strengthen noble power in towns as elsewhere, but its effects were never easy to channel.

T H E C H U RC H In the Netherlands and, particularly before the dissolution of the monasteries, in England, the church was a leading landowner, in some areas the leading landowner. With land went considerable jurisdiction and a powerful place for churchmen in representative institutions. Religious institutions and great churchmen thus played an important part in local government and in mobilization for war. Lay nobles’ relations with them were an element in their own exercise of political power, all the more so when so many bishops and abbots in the Netherlands were drawn from the families of the high nobility. In England bishops and abbots, like other landowners, were routinely called upon to provide men for the king’s wars and some ecclesiastical contingents rivalled those of the lay peerage in size.¹⁷⁵ Spiritual lords appointed laymen to serve as stewards of their estates and their tenants then served in noblemen’s retinues in war. Throughout England such stewardships were used by noblemen to expand their military followings.¹⁷⁶ Even when, like the earls of Westmorland, they lost stewardships to lawyers influential in central politics, they might still be called on to lead the bishop’s men to war.¹⁷⁷ The fourth earl of Northumberland held stewardships from the archbishop of York, at Ripon and Beverley in Yorkshire and Hexham and Hexhamshire in Northumberland, and from the Northumberland monasteries of Alnwick and Alnmouth. These offices were considered effectively hereditary in the Percy family and Archbishop Savage’s grant of those in his gift to Henry, duke of York, in 1499 was an important factor in the fifth earl’s dispute with him.¹⁷⁸ The fifth earl gathered other ¹⁷³ Robert, Philibert de Chalon, ii. 560–1. ¹⁷⁴ Molius, Kroniek, 273, 275. ¹⁷⁵ Goring, ‘Military Obligations’, 130–7. ¹⁷⁶ Clark, English Provincial Society, 14–16; Smith, Land and Politics, 67; Miller, Henry VIII, 140; Coward, Stanleys, 96–7. ¹⁷⁷ James, Family, Lineage and Civil Society, 43–n., 45. ¹⁷⁸ Hoyle, ‘The Earl, the Archbishop and the Council’, 240–1.

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ecclesiastical stewardships, including that of the Cumberland estates of the abbot of St Mary’s, York, and that of the White Friars of Whitby, forty-seven of whose tenants served in his retinue in 1523.¹⁷⁹ These clerical neighbours were drawn into the Percy clientele in other ways too. The sixth earl made the abbot of Alnwick one of his commissioners in Northumberland and granted him the keepership of Rugley Woods, though the abbot may have been less gratified that the earl stored some of his guns at the abbey.¹⁸⁰ Together with the stewardships of such mighty East Anglian abbeys as that at Bury St Edmunds, the Howards also held the high stewardship of the university of Cambridge.¹⁸¹ The university authorities were careful to separate the troops they supplied and the funds to support them from those produced by the town. In 1542 they sent ten men to Scotland with Norfolk and in 1544 he asked for another contingent to accompany him to France.¹⁸² Universities could supply not only men but highly polished admiration for their military patrons. Norfolk’s successor the duke of Somerset was congratulated by Cambridge after Pinkie on the grounds that ‘in the war God entrusted to you the sword of Gideon and gave you a victory in no way common to the everyday princes of the world, but one like those Joshua once won over the kings of Madon and Asur and Judas over great Antiochus and Nicanor’.¹⁸³ In the Netherlands religious houses were not expected to raise troops, but were often in the forefront of war. At times noblemen protected monasteries from enemy attack, as the Egmond-Burens allowed the Cistercians to rebuild their house at IJsselstein inside the town walls after its destruction in 1482.¹⁸⁴ At other times they commandeered their resources, as Floris stabled his cavalry horses in the religious houses of ’s-Hertogenbosch in 1528.¹⁸⁵ Piety vied with expediency for a commander like Hendrik of Nassau, who ordered the restitution of plundered cattle to one abbey and billeted himself on another, but presented some of his plunder before its image of the Virgin.¹⁸⁶ Both the Egmonds and the Cro¨ys were deeply engaged with ecclesiastical institutions more independently powerful than any in England. Frederik and Floris van Egmond-Buren repeatedly intervened militarily in the bishopric of Utrecht in support of bishops allied with the Habsburgs but opposed by their own subjects. To increase his influence Floris regularly tried to get relatives and clients appointed to the Utrecht chapters. The family’s position there was finally secured in 1534, when his first cousin Joris, already a canon of Li`ege and abbot of Saint-Amand in Walloon Flanders, became bishop.¹⁸⁷ The Cro¨ys held a stunning array of bishoprics in the southern provinces: in 1525–38 Adrien’s brother and two of his second cousins occupied Arras, Cambrai, and Tournai simultaneously. They were equally ¹⁷⁹ PRO, C1/866/41, E101/531/34. ¹⁸⁰ ACM, Grant Book, 44, 256, C.VI.5b, mm. 4–5, 20. ¹⁸¹ MacCulloch, Suffolk, 66. ¹⁸² Cooper, Annals of Cambridge, i. 404, 412. ¹⁸³ Collection from Corpus Christi College, 80–1. ¹⁸⁴ Aurelius, Cronycke, U4r – v . ¹⁸⁵ Verzameling ’s-Hertogenbosch, 100. ¹⁸⁶ Inventaris Buren i. 1017; Henne, Histoire, ii. 187. ¹⁸⁷ Cools, Mannen met macht, 203–7, 316; Hoven van Genderen, Heren van de kerk, 287, 330, 363–4, 464.

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successful in securing the headships of major abbeys and nunneries in Hainaut and Brabant.¹⁸⁸ Such connections were exploited by the Habsburgs, Mary of Hungary sending Philippe de Cro¨y-Aarschot to persuade Robert de Cro¨y, bishop of Cambrai, to let her troops occupy his city.¹⁸⁹ They also helped the laymen of the dynasty: Adrien’s negotiations with the States of Artois must have been easier when his brother was first member of the first estate.¹⁹⁰ There were dangers for the clerics, but they presumably accepted them as their duty to the family enterprise. It was only the benignity of Henry II of France, recorded Rabutin, that stopped him destroying Bishop Robert’s ‘magnificent and triumphant pleasure house’ on his campaign of 1553; destruction would have been warranted by Robert’s kinship with Adrien, who had burnt Henry’s palace at Folembray in the previous year.¹⁹¹ Netherlands noblemen could not plunder the church quite as directly as their English peers, but they still found many ways to exploit ecclesiastical wealth and power to facilitate their military enterprises or take reward for their exploits.¹⁹² ¹⁸⁸ Cools, Mannen met macht, 138–9, 197, 311–13. ¹⁸⁹ Henne, Histoire, viii. 43–4. ¹⁹⁰ Hirschauer, Artois, i. 41. ¹⁹¹ Rabutin, Commentaires, i. 238. ¹⁹² Head, Ebbs and Flows, 272–6.

14 War and Noble Identity How important was war in constituting noble identity and thus sustaining noble power? In both polities the nobility had never been purely a military caste and was in some ways becoming less militarized in the later Middle Ages, yet chivalry was strong at both the Burgundian-Habsburg and Yorkist-Tudor courts and, as we have seen, military service was an important aspect of many noblemen’s lives, especially in the upper ranks of the nobility. This importance was reflected in many aspects of noble cultural life and self-expression.

S E RV I C E , H O N O U R , A N D R EWA R D The exercise of martial prowess in loyal service to the prince was the high road to honour and just reward for late medieval aristocrats. Thomas Howard II felt particularly sharply that such service defined his nobility. In October 1523, he claimed that if he were not already on the Scottish borders he ‘would not fail to kneel upon my knees before the king’s grace to have licence to come hither in post to be at the day of battle’.¹ In October 1536, ordered to remain in East Anglia rather than proceed against the northern rebels or join the king, he burst out ‘Alas, Sir, shall every noble man save I only either come to your person or else go towards your enemies? Shall I now sit still like a man of law? Alas, Sir, my heart is near dead as would to God it were.’ He could not bear to ‘remain at home with so much shame as I shall do’.² When he left Ireland the king’s councillors there duly praised ‘the active prowess and great policy of the said lord lieutenant, which hath right substantially and wisely demeaned himself in feats of war’, though they also added praise for his impartial justice.³ The Howards also aimed to inspire martial virtues in those around them. They punished cowardice in the sailors who ‘did their part very ill’ the day Sir Edward Howard was killed.⁴ They glorified the loyalty of Henry Howard’s brother-in-arms Sir Thomas Clere, who died of the wounds he received at Montreuil, perhaps saving Howard’s life, through burial in the Howard chapel at St Mary’s Lambeth and a sonnet epitaph: ¹ Original Letters, 1st ser. i. 225–6. ² PRO, SP1/107, fos. 81–2 (LP XI. 601); Head, Ebbs and Flows, 136–7. ³ State Papers, ii. 92 (LP III. ii. 1888). ⁴ Head, Ebbs and Flows, 32.

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Nobles at War . . . Surrey for lord thou chose; Aye me, while life did last that league was tender, Tracing whose steps thou sawest Kelsal blaze, Landrecies burnt, and battered Boulogne render.⁵

War was equally central in defining the identity of the earls of Northumberland. In their border location, an inability or refusal to become actively involved in war could shake the very foundations of noble power. The sixth earl of Northumberland had some taste for the chivalric exercises of the court, but when it came to real war he fell short of expectations.⁶ Even when leading large and destructive raids across the border like that of December 1532—the most notable winter foray performed for 200 years, according to one participant—he failed to describe any signal feats of arms, and he soon gave up active command.⁷ Northumberland was as deficient in martial rhetoric as he was in martial action. The same language of self-sacrificial but glorious service in war came readily to the lips of Netherlands noblemen. In 1553 the dying Adrien de Cro¨y-Roeulx apologized to the regent for his illness at the siege of Th´erouanne: ‘God knows how much I regret to be unable to serve Your Majesty as I should wish’.⁸ Floris van EgmondBuren wrote from his sickbed in 1522 in similar terms.⁹ It was a code to which Maximilian and, at times, Charles V gave a personal lead. In November 1552 Mary of Hungary could tell William of Orange, when he asked to go home to his young wife from a rainswept Artois, that he should do as Charles had done at Metz and stay with his men.¹⁰ At times the pursuit of honour by noble commanders wore Mary of Hungary’s patience thin, as in 1542–3 when their taste for what she called ‘insignificant heroics’ repeatedly impeded her attempts to conduct a coordinated strategy for the defence of the Netherlands.¹¹ Yet perhaps she was a little too cynical. In the Order of the Golden Fleece in particular, nobles did try to uphold and apply principles of chivalrous behaviour.¹² Maximiliaan van Egmond-Buren more or less echoed Thomas Howard’s sentiments of 1536 when, in June 1542, he asked to be allowed to leave the provinces of which he was governor if the enemy attacked elsewhere. He wished ‘to be there where the business will take place, for he would be sorry to stay at home, if some good business came about’.¹³ And when congratulations were forthcoming for noblemen’s efforts, they were genuinely pleased. The young William of Orange wrote excitedly to his wife about the letters Mary sent him praising his zeal in 1552.¹⁴

⁵ Sessions, Surrey, 301–4. ⁶ ‘Letters of the Cliffords’, no. 47. ⁷ State Papers, iv. 627–30 (LP V. 1635); PRO, SP1/71, fo. 155 (LP V. 1638); BL, Cotton MS Caligula BVII, fos. 22–3 (LP VI. 125). ⁸ Rosenfeld, ‘Provincial Governors’, 11–12. ⁹ LP III. ii. 2466. ¹⁰ Rachfahl, Wilhelm von Oranien, i. 172. ¹¹ Gorter-Van Royen, Maria van Hongarije, 255–80. ¹² Fouw, Philips van Kleef, 368–82. ¹³ Henne, Histoire, vii. 336. ¹⁴ Rachfahl, Wilhelm von Oranien, i. 169–70.

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T H E L I T E R AT U R E O F WA R The language of knightly honour deployed by noblemen did not preclude a considerable military professionalism amongst those who aspired to senior command. Thomas Howard II argued that young courtiers should want to fight because ‘men without experience shall do small service, and experience of war will not be had without it be sought for and the adventure given’.¹⁵ His son was duly sent to Charles V’s siege camp at Landrecies to ‘acquire that experience in military affairs that will make him the true heir and successor of his ancestors’. There he acquitted himself so well that Charles assured the English king that ‘with so noble a heart and such dexterity there has been no need for him to learn anything’.¹⁶ Adrien de Cro¨y-Roeulx was well aware of the weight of experience he could bring to bear on military problems by 1543. When the English proposed an operation he replied that ‘The success of all warlike enterprises depends not so much on men themselves as on good fortune, yet people experienced in warfare can easily conjecture whether a military undertaking is likely to succeed or not, and my opinion of this one is that it can’.¹⁷ One Netherlands nobleman in our period sought to crystallize such experience in a military treatise, Philip of Cleves’s Instruction de toutes manieres de guerroyer. Its scope was broad, covering not only the practical aspects of war on land and sea but also the moral and political. War for Philip was a matter for the nobility, not councillors of the long robe, a matter of honour for those who commanded and for noblemen who followed their prince.¹⁸ Yet his vision of war was not one of chaotic derring-do. Preparation should be made against surprise attacks and soldiers kept in strict discipline, not only for tactical effectiveness but ‘also for the public good’.¹⁹ Glimpses of his own colourful career appear at many turns: the obsessiveness of Charles the Bold, the danger of mutiny in winter amongst under-dressed German infantry, the varying powers of Dutch and Italian admirals, the effects of climate on the campaign season, the utility of English archers and Mediterranean galleys.²⁰ Others wrote not treatises, but memoirs or journals. Ferry de Guyon’s memoirs covered his campaigns from the 1520s to the 1550s and his odyssey from the FrancheComt´e to Pecquencourt near Douai via the court of Charles V.²¹ The journals of Emmanuel Philibert of Savoy during his commands in the Netherlands set down his thoughts and actions day by day as he manœuvred against the French and quarrelled with the Netherlanders. Self-justification was a primary purpose: one well-polished section was composed ‘of our spontaneous will’ so that ‘the things worthy of praise and memory’ done in the campaign ‘should not continue to be defrauded by tellers of false tales’.²² Noblemen wrote about war to teach by experience, but also to record worthy deeds in an age when it was no longer so clear that history valued them.²³ ¹⁵ ¹⁷ ¹⁹ ²¹ ²³

Original Letters, 1st ser. i. 225–6. ¹⁶ Sessions, Surrey, 292–5. CSPS 1542–3, 357. ¹⁸ Cleves, Instruction, 2–3, 6, 70. Ibid. 10, 46. ²⁰ Ibid. 23, 69–70, 81, 132–3, 140–1, 151. Guyon, M´emoires, passim. ²² Emanuele Filiberto, Diari, 167. Harari, Renaissance Military Memoirs.

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Other generals may not have written manuals, but they certainly read them. Antoine de Lalaing-Hoogstraten had a copy of Philip of Cleves’s work, of Jean de Bueil’s Le Jouvencel, and of an unidentified Livre des batailles.²⁴ In his captivity Peter Ernst of Mansfeld bought a number of treatises on warfare, ancient and modern, and after dinner in his prison he read such books, preparing himself to do what he most wanted, ‘to get out of here and do service to my prince’. ²⁵ Orange, Egmond, and Horn likewise bought the latest works of Italian military engineering.²⁶ English noblemen were less given to writing their experiences down, but equally keen to read about war. John Howard had a copy of Honor´e Bonet’s L’Arbre des batailles, one of Philip of Cleves’s sources.²⁷ His son commissioned a translation of Sallust’s War against Jugurtha from Alexander Barclay in 1519, joining the growing body of Renaissance military commanders who looked to classical, rather than medieval or chivalric, military models.²⁸ In the next generation William Herbert, earl of Pembroke, was presented with a manuscript life of Scipio and a translation of Avila’s account of the Schmalkaldic war was dedicated to the earl of Derby.²⁹

FA M I LY H I S TO R I E S Family histories perpetuated the martial and chivalric reputations of noble houses and called individuals to live up to their ancestors’ deeds. In Holland, they were rare until the late fifteenth century, when several were composed describing the Trojan or Frisian origins of the three great families of Arkel, Brederode, and Egmond, and their great deeds of knighthood, crusading, and war. The Brederode chronicle, commissioned by the widow of Reinoud II van Brederode, aimed to inspire his heirs to emulate the ‘noble works and victories’ of their ancestors and to justify Reinoud’s own controversial career.³⁰ Further south such texts were more abundant, but equally focused on heroism. Amidst the mass of genealogical material owned by Antoine de Lalaing-Hoogstraten were two books about the icon of Burgundian chivalry Jacques de Lalaing and two epitaphs upon him.³¹ Family chronicles were produced into the mid-sixteenth century. Jean de LigneArenberg commissioned a splendidly illustrated history of the heroic deeds of his Wassenaar forebears. It presumably drew on earlier family traditions, such as those that inspired Jan II to order excavations at the castle of Brittenburg, sunk in the dunes, to explore his distant ancestors’ careers as guardians of the Roman frontier.³² An Egmond family history was written soon after the death of Lamoraal van Egmond. ²⁴ ²⁵ ²⁶ ²⁷ ²⁸ ²⁹ ³¹ ³²

Gegevens betreffende bezit, 21, 25–6. Vekene, Reliures, 76, 104, 106; Mansfeld, Journal, 76, 111. Martens, ‘Mansfeld et les ing´enieurs’, 478. Sessions, Surrey, 28 n.; Contamine, ‘L’Art de guerre’, 367. Barclay, Famous cronycle; Sessions, Surrey, 74–5; Arnold, Renaissance at War, 90. Maule, ‘Morley’, 120; Avila, Comentaries, A1v . ³⁰ Janse, Ridderschap, 275–89. Gegevens betreffende bezit, 21, 23–4, 30–1. Gent, Janse, ‘De Wassenaers’, 59–60.

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It celebrated ancestors of martial bent: tenth-century Dodo, who won fame by his prowess and valour against the Saracens, thirteenth-century Willem, ‘who loved nothing but war’, fifteenth-century Jan, much loved by men of war for his prowess and virtues. In more recent times it told of sacrificial service to the Habsburgs through several generations. Lamoraal, fighting at Algiers ‘against the infidels for his first war’ and winning his victories at Saint-Quentin and Gravelines, where two horses were killed under him, fitted into his family’s past and must have drawn inspiration from it.³³ Such histories enabled noblemen to turn their heritage to political argument. Antoine de Lalaing-Hoogstraten assured one English ambassador that it could not be shown by chronicle or otherwise that any of his name had been French in their loyalties, and neither was he.³⁴ William of Orange’s Apology of 1581 contained a circumstantial and rather piqued account of the great and undervalued services rendered to the Habsburgs by Engelbrecht of Nassau, Hendrik III of Nassau, Philibert de Chalon, Ren´e de Chalon, and himself.³⁵ Private heralds probably acted as coordinators of family memory and honour. Floris van Egmond-Buren had IJsselstein herald in his company at Saint-Omer in 1514 and Philibert de Chalon had half a dozen heralds and pursuivants, named for his various lordships. ³⁶ In the same way the Howards had Norfolk herald and White Lion pursuivant, the Percies Northumberland herald and Esperance pursuivant, just as many other militarily active English noblemen had private officers of arms.³⁷ In some cases material survives to show the roles such men played. Those of Charles Brandon accompanied him on campaign and kept notes on his military career; one who followed John Dudley, duke of Northumberland, composed a list of his master’s military exploits.³⁸ A newer way for English noblemen to commemorate their deeds was through print. Thordre and behauyoure of the right honourable Erle of Surrey tresour and Marshal of Englande ayenst the kynge of Scottes and the Inuasions howe the same kynge at the Batayle of Brakston was slayne by the sayd erle was printed by Richard Pynson, the king’s printer, in 1514. Rather than an official version of events, it was clearly a Howard production, written by ‘one unworthy whom it pleased the said earl to have nigh about him’ and adorned with the Howard badge of the white lion. The work portrayed Surrey as an exemplar of generalship, skilful, well-organized, and determined, but also stressed the chivalrous valour of his son’s pledge to meet the king of Scots in the vanguard ‘by the grace of God and Saint George and as he was true knight’.³⁹ It deliberately contradicted poetic accounts of Flodden emanating from the Stanley household that glorified Sir Edward Stanley and blamed Lord Edmund ³³ ‘Chronique d’Egmont’, 26, 33, 46, 55, 57–67. ³⁴ LP III. ii. 2527. ³⁵ Orange, Apologie, 30–41. ³⁶ NA, NDRII/1005/1; Robert, Philibert de Chalon, ii. 447, 449–50. ³⁷ Godfrey et al., College of Arms, 154–5, 236, 251–2, 258–9, 266, 270, 272, 275, 285, 288–9, 313–14. ³⁸ Gunn, ‘March on Paris’, 599, 628–9; id., Charles Brandon, 41,121–2, 140; Letters and Memorials of State, i. 27–8. ³⁹ The text now only survives in manuscript in BL, Add. MS 29506, but printed texts were clearly circulated widely: Gutierrez, Erler, ‘Print into Manuscript’.

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Howard for the flight of the Cheshire and Lancashire troops under his command.⁴⁰ The Howards sorely needed to control the narratives of the battle that had secured their elevation to the duchy of Norfolk. Their reputation as hammers of the Scots was still being promoted forty years later, when Richard Grafton dedicated his edition of John Hardyng’s chronicle to Thomas Howard II, a ‘captain right worthy and adventurous’. Briefly Grafton ran through the campaigns between 1497 and 1542 in which Thomas and his father had punished the faithlessness of the Scots, concluding that Your house in his right is appointed by God To be to the Scots a sharp scourge and rod.⁴¹

Perhaps the Howards did not need private family histories when they were so publicly acclaimed. For the Percy family the expectations generated by the past weighed more heavily. They were exemplified in the metrical history written by the priest William Peeris, the fifth earl’s secretary, between 1516 and 1523.⁴² Peeris was well equipped for such a task, as he maintained an archive of material relating to the Percies’ military exploits. It contained documents from the fifth earl’s journey to France in 1513, as well as notes on sums paid to previous earls for their keeping of the Marches, instructions for musters in the northern counties, and ‘a bill in paper with a draught of order and apparel of a prince when he goeth to war’.⁴³ Peeris’s brief biographies of the earls suggest the virtues which those within the Percy household deemed to define the family. The first was the loyalty to the crown that led three of the four previous earls to be slain in defence of their masters; a loyalty the fifth earl himself, with his emblem of the Percy moon taking its light from the Tudor sun, gladly accepted.⁴⁴ The second defining feature of the earl’s ancestors, however, was military prowess. Deeds such as the capture of the earl of Douglas at the battle of Homildon Hill in 1402 by Henry Hotspur, who ‘did many notable acts as became his noble blood’, found no echo in the life of the fifth earl. All Peeris could find to say of him was that, like his ancestors, he was generous to religious houses. By such contrasts the poem perhaps acted as a plea to the earl from within his affinity to fulfil his martial heritage.

POEMS AND SONGS Several poets celebrated the Howards’ martial deeds. Some worked at the family’s behest, as Alexander Barclay did in his 1514 elegy on the heroic death of Sir Edward ⁴⁰ Scotish Ffeilde, ll. 266–7; English and Scottish Popular Ballads, vi. 351–62; Scattergood, ‘Defining Moment’. ⁴¹ Chronicle of Jhon Hardyng, A2r –4v . ⁴² There are a number of versions of this poem with slight differences, suggesting some breadth of circulation. The best known is that in BL, Royal MS 18Dii, fos. 186–99, printed in Reprints of Rare Tracts. There is another version in ACM from which these quotations are taken. The verses on Hotspur are also printed in Antiquarian Repertory, iv. 381–2. ⁴³ CUL, Hengrave MS 88(iii), 7. ⁴⁴ Dickens, ‘Tudor-Percy Emblem’.

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Howard, matching the admiral’s virtues with those of his father, ‘a worthy governor’ and the ‘flower of chivalry’.⁴⁵ Others, such as John Skelton, spread the Howards’ military renown more independently, as did popular ballads such as that on the capture of Andrew Barton and those which may have lain behind Sir John Beaumont’s later poem on the battle of Bosworth.⁴⁶ Humanists found resources in the classical tradition to praise their martial patrons. The Howards’ tutor, Hadrianus Junius, wrote stylish Latin letters in praise of Surrey’s heroism in the 1540s, while the future bishop of Norwich John Parkhurst displayed his scholarship with poems likening Charles Brandon to Mars.⁴⁷ Welsh gentlemen were particularly fortunate in that praise for military glory was a staple feature of the lively Welsh poetry of the period, such that Sir Rhys ap Thomas’s role in the campaigns of 1485, 1492, 1497, and 1513 was lauded by half a dozen bards.⁴⁸ In contrast John Skelton reflected the general disappointment with the fifth earl of Northumberland. In his epitaph on the fourth earl he praised him as a ‘valiant lord and knight’ and encouraged his son, the ‘young lion, but tender yet of age’.⁴⁹ However, by 1522 Skelton was scathing: The Earl of Northumberland Dare take nothing on hand. Our barons be so bold, Into a mouse hole they would Run away and creep.⁵⁰

Skelton’s attack is a useful reminder that poetry could satirize noblemen for their shortcomings as well as praise them for their achievements. In the Netherlands too poets paid tribute to noblemen’s martial deeds. A Mons poem on the campaigns of 1536–7 showed Charles V entrusting the defence of his ‘lovely little garden called Hainaut’ to Adrien de Cro¨y-Roeulx. ‘The noble count . . . showed himself such a good man’ that he took five towns, the last, SaintPol, stormed after he gave a stirring speech in full armour.⁵¹ Floris van EgmondBuren got his due in Jan Smeken’s poem on the meeting of the Golden Fleece at Brussels in 1516, when he was introduced as ‘Courageous Floris van Egmond, lord of IJsselstein, victorious in feats of arms’.⁵² More extensive praise was lavished on Philippe de Cro¨y-Aarschot with a seven-stanza poem at a shooting contest at Mons in 1525. It told the town how fortunate it was to be defended with ‘prowess and deliberate skill’ by such a victorious ‘flower of nobility’.⁵³ New cultural forms were readily turned to the same ends. Cipriano da Rore wrote a madrigal in praise of Lamoraal van Egmond, ‘deadly thunderbolt of war’, whose ⁴⁵ Barclay, Eclogues, 171. ⁴⁶ Walker, Skelton, 23–31; Volume of English Miscellanies, 64–75; Beaumont, ‘Bosworth Field’; Bennett, Bosworth, 9–10. We are grateful to Michael K. Jones for discussion of Beaumont. ⁴⁷ Sessions, Surrey, 204; Gunn, Charles Brandon, 200. ⁴⁸ Griffiths, Rhys ap Thomas, 82–5. ⁴⁹ James, ‘Tudor Magnate’, 89–90; Skelton, Poems, 29–35. ⁵⁰ Skelton, Poems, 286, 481; Walker, ‘Border Crisis’. ⁵¹ Bocquet, Ballades, 126–9. ⁵² Smeken, Gedicht, 13. ⁵³ Vinchant, Hainaut, vi. 298–9.

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victory at Saint-Quentin had brought him ‘eternal fame’ and ‘immortal honour’.⁵⁴ Dutch humanists were as ready as their English colleagues to praise their patrons’ deeds. Gerard Geldenhauer glorified Philippe de Bourgogne-Blaton’s admiralship and Cornelius Aurelius the conquest of Friesland by Jan van Wassenaar, a second Hercules and worthy descendant of the courageous Batavian freedom fighter Julius Civilis.⁵⁵ Though Christophe Plantin complained that topical material such as funeral orations on great men had to be sold fast or it would lose its market, such works did find their way into print.⁵⁶ The 1540s saw an epitaph and short biography of Philibert de Chalon, stressing his victories and virtues, printed at Basel, and a lamentation for Ren´e of Chalon by Renown, Fortune, Time, and Eternity, published at Antwerp.⁵⁷ Robert du Triez, an archer of Philip II’s bodyguard, published a lengthy poetic epitaph on Maximiliaan van Egmond-Buren some eleven years after the great man’s death. He held Buren up as a model not only to his descendants but to all Netherlanders desirous of martial honour. Buren, ‘this great hero’, was ‘a second Mars in human form’. His qualities were displayed in the German campaign of 1546 when ‘this gentle and so chivalrous prince’ struck down men, horses, trees, and towers like thunder and lightning, and again at his famous deathbed. For Du Triez they were such as to make Maximiliaan an exemplar of the triumph of fame over death, a triumph the description of which, it must be admitted, occupied considerably more of his poem than any actual deeds of the count.⁵⁸

C H RO N I C L E S The discussion of noble careers by chroniclers is important in several ways. Most simply it shows us what some contemporaries knew or thought of a nobleman’s deeds. From this we may try to extrapolate the reaction of a wider audience. The accounts with the widest potential circulation were printed chronicles and especially when these appeared in the nobleman’s lifetime they had a significant ability to shape his reputation. Lastly, accounts produced outside England and the Netherlands were also available to readers there and these might set noble careers in a rather different light. A story told by Gerard Geldenhauer suggests that Floris van Egmond-Buren was well aware of the ambiguities of a place in the historical record: A certain man set before Floris van Egmond, count of Buren, a man of perfect judgement, a book entitled The War of Guelders and Holland. When he had read in it many falsehoods, many vain things and nothing pertaining to the present history, he asked the good man whether he had written of what he had seen or what he had heard. He said, what he had ⁵⁴ ⁵⁵ ⁵⁶ ⁵⁷ ⁵⁸

Rore, ‘Da l’estrem’orizonte’, in his Quinto libro. Sicking, Zeemacht, 57; Gent, Janse, ‘De Wassenaers’, 58. Voet, Golden Compasses, ii. 415–16. Melguitius, Philiberti a Chalon rerum gestarum commentariolus; BT 8. Triez, Chantz funebres.

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heard; then the count said, ‘Heard from whom?’ At this the historian was silent, while the count, truly smiling, as was his habit, said this: ‘I’, he said, ‘was in charge of this war’ (for he was then chief of the emperor’s army) ‘and if I had to write about this war, it would require no little labour for it to be transmitted truthfully and usefully to posterity’.⁵⁹

Chroniclers who dedicated their work to individual noblemen understandably presented the dedicatees well, but noble valour in defence of the province loomed larger in Robert Macqu´ereau’s 1520s Hainaut than in Jan Reygersbergh and Marcus van Vaernewyck’s 1550s Zeeland and Flanders.⁶⁰ Others were freer to air their opinions. The gunner Jacob van den Borg waxed lyrical about Lamoraal van Egmond, who displayed at Saint-Quentin ‘such great valour and boldness that it shall become a perpetual memory in his life and shall be written down to his great praise and honour after his death’.⁶¹ The Arras lawyer Jean Thieulaine noted more dryly which noblemen had acquitted themselves well in the border warfare of the 1550s, but lacked the bite of the Mons chronicler Antoine de Lusy.⁶² Most telling was Lusy’s account of Hoogstraten’s defence of Holland in 1523 against Charles of Guelders: ‘he was so valiant that he did not come within twenty leagues of him, but stayed shut up in a strong town, then soon returned to Mechelen to pay court’.⁶³ Like Skelton’s comments on Northumberland, such criticism is significant because it shows the wide expectation of noblemen’s martial vigour. Frederik, Floris, and Maximiliaan van Egmond-Buren were a constant military presence in a wide range of chronicles. Their deeds in and around ’sHertogenbosch were naturally recorded by the town secretary Peter van Os and his anonymous continuator: Frederik’s defeat of the men of Nijmegen in 1499, when a thousand of the enemy fell, or Floris’s destruction of the hostile stronghold at Maasbommel in 1504.⁶⁴ Their campaigns were likewise a thread through the Divisiekroniek of Cornelius Aurelius, printed in 1517 and extended in 1530. They were not praised as explicitly as the stadholder Jan van Egmond, and their defeats were included as well as their successes, as when Floris was shot and many of his companions killed in an encounter in 1508.⁶⁵ Yet again and again from the 1480s to the 1520s they were shown leading Hollanders and Brabanters in repelling their enemies, rescuing prisoners, and capturing enemy strongholds, while Floris’s great campaigns in Friesland in 1516–17 and Guelders and the Sticht in 1528 were given detailed treatment.⁶⁶ Their fame spread further afield. Reygersbergh often mentioned their campaigns, remembering Maximiliaan as ‘a bold and brave captain, who served his lord the Imperial Majesty truly in divers wars and assaults’.⁶⁷ Macqu´ereau at Valenciennes and De Weert at ⁵⁹ Bomelius, Bellum Trajectinum, 3. ⁶⁰ Macqu´ereau, Histoire, 1, 16; id., Chronicque, 3, 107; Reygersbergh, Cronijcke, A2v –4r , N3r , U1v , U4v , Y1r –3r ; Vaernewyck, Cronijcke, A2r – v , Ll2r –4v . ⁶¹ ‘Veldtogt’, 314. ⁶² Thieulaine, ‘Extraits’, 155, 180, 184; Lusy, Journal, 206, 291. ⁶³ Lusy, Journal, 222. ⁶⁴ Os, Kroniek, 290, 298, 318, 347. ⁶⁵ Aurelius, Cronycke, fos. 381v –382r , 429v , Q1v , S3r . ⁶⁶ Aurelius, Cronycke, fos. 384r – v , 418v , 421r , 422r , 425v –426r , 428r – v , 430r – v , 432v –433v , 435v , X4r – v . ⁶⁷ Reygersbergh, Cronijcke, N1v , S1r – v , T3r , U4v , X1v , Y4v , Bb4v , Cc1r .

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Antwerp noted their victories.⁶⁸ Other qualities, of mercifulness or mild government, passed into the contemporary historical record, but war was central, for good or ill.⁶⁹ Manuscript chronicles in Holland suggest suspicions that they left the province undefended to teach the Hollanders a lesson for stinting on their support for war, while some in the north-eastern provinces resented the disruption caused by Maximiliaan’s musters there.⁷⁰ Adrien de Cro¨y-Roeulx too struck contemporaries as a great captain. For one Flemish chronicler he was a good governor, who ‘did his duty in protecting the land’.⁷¹ For Robert Macqu´ereau he was ‘the good’, ‘the noble’ count, a man of action ready to hold Artois, burn Guelders, surprise Th´erouanne, spy out French manœuvres, or dash through Italy to find Charles V in 1530, calming mutinies on the way.⁷² A decade after his death memory of Adrien was still fresh at Watten, near Saint-Omer, where Louis Br´esin praised him as ‘endowed with magnanimity, of invincible courage and eager to do service to his prince, following in the footsteps of his ancestors’.⁷³ Adrien’s campaigns, like those of his son Jean, were also recorded in the contemporary narratives published at Paris in 1555 and 1559 by Franc¸ois de Rabutin.⁷⁴ Though Rabutin, a man-at-arms in the French army, naturally did not praise enemy noblemen’s victories, he did comment favourably on their magnanimous or humane conduct.⁷⁵ Even such accounts from the other side of the lines could amplify noblemen’s fame, just as mockery could bring down terrible revenge. Roeulx ordered eighty Frenchmen massacred in 1544 because when summoned to surrender they had made insulting remarks about his failed siege of Landrecies the previous year.⁷⁶ The military reputation of the Howards was similarly perpetuated through chronicles. The manuscript Great Chronicle of London recorded the Howard brothers’ deeds of ‘knightly prowess’ against Andrew Barton.⁷⁷ Much more detailed and adulatory was Edward Hall’s printed chronicle. Hall’s account of Flodden, based on Thordre and behauyoure, made it very much a Howard victory, prepared for by Surrey’s speech before battle with its exhortation to ‘do like Englishmen this day’ and its pledge ‘rather to die honourably . . . than to live in shame’.⁷⁸ In the wars of the 1520s Thomas Howard II was portrayed as a model captain, inspiring valour amongst his captains, patriotism amongst his men, and fear amongst his enemies.⁷⁹ Hall did not live to complete the later sections of his work, so it is hard to know what he would have made of the debacles at Montreuil and Boulogne, but when his continuator Richard Grafton published Hall’s work in 1548 and 1550, the exemplary accounts of the Howards remained despite their fall.⁸⁰ Polydore Vergil’s Anglica Historia, ⁶⁸ Macqu´ereau, Chronicque, 53, 66, 115, 124, 147–8, 196; id., Histoire, 31–2, 105–7, 108–9, 128; Weert, ‘Chronycke’, 95–6, 120, 127. ⁶⁹ Bomelius, Bellum Trajectinum, 31, 40, 42; Winsemius, Chronique, 518. ⁷⁰ Tracy, Holland, 70–2; Eppens, Kroniek, i. 92. ⁷¹ ‘Vlaamsche kronyk’, 294. ⁷² Macqu´ereau, Chronicque, 166, 168, 205; id., Histoire, 68–70, 77–8, 108–9, 122, 135–6, 186, 233, 273, 287. ⁷³ Br´esin, Chroniques, 208. ⁷⁴ Rabutin, Commentaires, i. 157–9, 167–9, 192. ⁷⁵ Ibid. i. 101, ii. 57. ⁷⁶ Br´esin, Chroniques, 180. ⁷⁷ Great Chronicle, 242. ⁷⁸ Hall, Chronicle, 561. ⁷⁹ Ibid. 642–3, 646, 665–6. ⁸⁰ Bindoff, Commons, ii. 281–2.

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published on the continent six times between 1534 and 1570, also recounted the deeds of Thomas Howard I, ‘a venerable old man and an experienced soldier’ who ‘diligently performed fine service to the state’ and of Thomas II, a commander who was ‘spirited and aggressive’ yet campaigned ‘with the utmost care’.⁸¹ Chroniclers’ treatment of the Percies again suggests that war in large part defined nobility, in their case often to negative effect. Henry Machyn the London diarist noted the seventh earl’s raid into Scotland in November 1557, but the Great Chronicle of London attributed the murder of the fourth earl in 1489 to the ‘deadly malice’ which the commons bore him ‘for the disappointing of King Richard at Bosworth Field’.⁸² Most tellingly, Hall proclaimed to posterity how, for refusing the wardenship of the east and middle Marches, the fifth earl was ‘was not regarded of his own tenants which disdained him and his blood and much lamented his folly, and all men esteemed him without heart or love of honour and chivalry’.⁸³

P O RT R A I TS , PA I N T I N G S , G I F TS , A N D BU I L D I N G S Portraiture was another means for noblemen to define their nobility. The military content of painted portraits of Netherlands noblemen varied according to genre. Noblemen kneeling in prayer were depicted in armour, whether in panel paintings or stained glass.⁸⁴ Head-and-shoulders panel portraits or manuscript illuminations, even of leading military commanders such as Floris van Egmond-Buren or Adrien de Cro¨yRoeulx, showed them in civilian dress, following the conventions of Burgundian court portraiture.⁸⁵ Exceptions suggest noblemen uniquely identified by their military role: the memorial portrait of a fully armed Jan II van Wassenaar, marking out his battle wounds, or that showing Georg Schenk von Tautenburg, the governor of Friesland who had, as he put it, ‘won and reduced’ the province ‘by the sword’.⁸⁶ By the 1550s, however, fashions were changing under Italian influence and leading young commanders such as Orange, Egmond, and Horn had themselves depicted standing and in armour.⁸⁷ More contrived, but equally significant in linking noble identity to military function, was the portrait Jan Gossaert painted in 1516 of Philippe de Bourgogne-Blaton. The admiral was represented as Neptune in the company of a naked Amphitrite, with only a sea-shell to preserve his modesty.⁸⁸ ⁸¹ Vergil, Anglica Historia, pp. xv–xvii, 99–101, 175, 183, 185, 199–203, 217–23, 297–9, 309, 317–19. ⁸² Great Chronicle, 341, 378; Machyn, Diary, 157. ⁸³ Hall, Chronicle, 631–2. ⁸⁴ Cools, Mannen met macht, 12, 242; Thiel, Rijksmuseum, 628–9; Bueren, W¨ustefeld, Leven na de dood, 41; Williamson, Stained Glass, no. 63. ⁸⁵ Cools, Mannen met macht, 64, 91, 97, 107, 111, 115, 126, 203, 244, 273; Soly (ed.), Carolus, nos. 45, 48–9; Thiel, Rijksmuseum, 85, 181, 652, 674; Pauwels (ed.), Mus´ees royaux, 344–5, 390; Hoetink (ed.), Mauritshuis, pl. 34. ⁸⁶ Nierop, Nobility, 3; Cools, Mannen met macht, 291; Vries, ‘Friesland’, 137–8. ⁸⁷ Thiel, Rijksmuseum, 396; Pauwels (ed.), Mus´ees royaux, 396–7, 400; Rachfahl, Wilhelm von Oranien, i. 237–8. ⁸⁸ Sicking, Zeemacht, 57–8.

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Portraits of armed noblemen were produced in other media too, occasionally in tapestry and latterly in medals, as Jacob Jonghelinck of Antwerp diversified his clientele from German captains in Philip II’s service in 1556–8 to native noblemen in the 1560s.⁸⁹ All these works would have presented noblemen only to themselves, their households and guests, though medals might have been distributed to friends or followers. Wider dissemination of their martial image was possible through prints. Adrien de Cro¨y-Roeulx could be seen with his liveried troops at Charles V’s coronation at Bologna in the commemorative prints produced at Mechelen and Antwerp.⁹⁰ Maximiliaan van Egmond-Buren featured, admittedly after his death, in Maarten van Heemskerck’s engraved series depicting Charles V’s victories.⁹¹ Other noblemen might find their names, or a banner or tent bearing their arms, in the prints depicting sieges and battles which proliferated from the 1530s.⁹² Greater opportunities beckoned in the war of 1542–4, when the woodcut printers of Antwerp began to extend their repertoire of portraits from rulers and historical figures to include the emperor’s leading generals, Adrien and Maximiliaan among them. The prints were hand-coloured and featured the nobleman’s arms and a caption in Dutch or French, which in Buren’s case included a prayer that his life might be long and victorious. In one series they were depicted mounted in civilian clothes, in another mounted and in armour, Maximiliaan carrying a mace and bearing on his horse-trapper a picture of Venus and Cupid.⁹³ Such prints were produced in immense quantities and marketed by pedlars, shopkeepers, and market traders at very low prices, perhaps what an unskilled worker could earn in twenty minutes.⁹⁴ They clearly had the potential to bring the military image of the nobleman home to a wider audience than ever before. English visual culture was more limited in range than that of the Netherlands. Non-royal portrait prints were unheard of and medals almost so. Yet painted portraits showed very similar trends. Stained-glass images, like that of John Howard once at Tendring Hall in Suffolk, showed armoured noblemen. Panel portraits showed peers in civilian dress, like those by Holbein of Thomas Howard II, by Holbein and William Scrots of Henry Howard, and by Hans Eworth of Thomas Howard III.⁹⁵ Of Holbein’s surviving English portraits only that of Sir Nicholas Carew, better known as a jouster than a general, shows him in armour.⁹⁶ By the years around 1550 things were changing, most conspicuously in a group of portraits painted by the Netherlander Hans Eworth. These depicted distinguished English captains in military contexts, whether striding through the sea in front of a sinking warship, ⁸⁹ Salet, Souchal (eds.), Chefs-d’oeuvre de la tapisserie, no. 44; Baudson (ed.), Van Orley, 22–3; Smolderen, Jacques Jonghelinck, 208–10, 218–22, 228–31, 235–7, 260–2, 269–75, 284–7. ⁹⁰ Hogenberg, Procession, 25–8, pls. 22–3, 33; Nijhoff, Nederlandsche houtsneden, iv, pls. 49–69. ⁹¹ Rosier, ‘Victories’, 31–2. ⁹² Stock, Printing Images, 147–51; Nijhoff, Nederlandsche houtsneden, iii, pls. 216–19. ⁹³ Hoop Scheffer and Klant-Vlielander Hein, Vorstenportretten, 35–7, nos. 74–5, 78. ⁹⁴ Stock, Printing Images, 59–60, 115–17, 122–3, 128–34, 227. ⁹⁵ Sessions, Surrey, 24, 81–2, 154–5, 172, 185, 286–7, 333–51; Hearn (ed.), Dynasties, 70. ⁹⁶ Starkey (ed.), Henry VIII, 63.

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defending Haddington, or fighting at Pinkie in a mail shirt with a gun and powderbox.⁹⁷ They paved the way for portraits like that of 1560 which may depict Cuthbert Vaughan, another veteran captain, with a collection of richly decorated armour and weapons.⁹⁸ The reviving vigour of martial portraiture in England and the Netherlands at the end of our period certainly suggests that the courtier had not banished the warrior from the heart of noble identity. English noblemen readily decorated their homes with representations of their military careers. The most comprehensive known collection was assembled at Cowdray Park by William Fitzwilliam, earl of Southampton, and his half-brother and heir Sir Anthony Browne. They had ten panel paintings depicting major military and diplomatic events of Henry VIII’s reign, half of them showing Fitzwilliam as a central figure, and a series of murals in which Browne was given similar prominence in the campaigns of 1544–5.⁹⁹ Others used different media. The thirteenth earl of Oxford had a stone relief of the battle of Bosworth and Sir Rhys ap Thomas a bed carved with scenes from the 1513 campaign.¹⁰⁰ Edward Seymour and John Dudley used maps to commemorate their victories over the Scots and Kett’s rebels.¹⁰¹ At Kenninghall the third duke of Norfolk had twenty-eight portraits of great contemporaries, doubtless including some he had met on his campaigns and embassies.¹⁰² In the Netherlands various foreign captains had tapestries woven on military themes and it seems likely that resident noblemen did the same.¹⁰³ Others collected paintings to record their campaigns, Philip of Cleves his crusading ventures and Peter Ernst of Mansfeld his many battles and sieges.¹⁰⁴ Surviving Netherlandish paintings depict military events from the siege of Neuss in 1475 to Charles V’s capture of Tunis in 1535 and may have been painted for those who were there.¹⁰⁵ Printed depictions and maps of battles and sieges were collected by Viglius Zwichem van Aytta and Antoine de Lalaing-Hoogstraten among others.¹⁰⁶ Hoogstraten, who could not boast of feats in battle, could at least contemplate through his large collection of plans and drawings the fortifications funded through his stewardship of state finances.¹⁰⁷ More objects commemorating noblemen’s achievements came as gifts. After the Schmalkaldic War a grateful Charles V presented Maximiliaan van Egmond-Buren with a silver-gilt ceremonial cup, marked with Buren’s arms, engraved with his crossing of the Rhine and arrival at the emperor’s camp, and capped by a statuette of Mars.¹⁰⁸ Splendid swords and decorated cannon were also thought to be fitting ⁹⁷ Hearn (ed.), Dynasties, 65–6; Boyle, ‘Hans Eworth’s Portrait’, 31–6. ⁹⁸ Hearn (ed.), Dynasties, 92–3. ⁹⁹ Lloyd, Thurley, Henry VIII, 54–6. ¹⁰⁰ Jones, Bosworth, pl. 25; Griffiths, Rhys ap Thomas, 53–6, pl. 6. ¹⁰¹ Barber, ‘England I’, 40; MacCulloch, Tudor Church Militant, 55. ¹⁰² Sessions, Surrey, 219–20. ¹⁰³ Hijum, Grenzen aan macht, 170 n.; Parker, ‘Maps and Ministers’, 148, 152; Salet (ed.), Chefs-d’œuvre de la tapisserie, no. 17; Delmarcel, Flemish Tapestry, 92–4. ¹⁰⁴ ISN viii. 426–7; Fouw, Philips van Kleef, 293–306; Massarette, Mansfeld, ii. 176. ¹⁰⁵ Pauwels (ed.), Mus´ees royaux, 211, 394, 397, 406; Thiel, Rijksmuseum, 633; Hale, Artists and Warfare, 189. ¹⁰⁶ Bagrow, ‘Old Inventories of Maps’, 19–20; Gegevens betreffende bezit, 30–1. ¹⁰⁷ Gegevens betreffende bezit, 20, 30–1. ¹⁰⁸ Soly (ed.), Carolus, no. 158.

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princely rewards for successful commanders.¹⁰⁹ Plate and gold coins came to Maximilaan from submissive German town councils and Philip of Cleves’s life story could be told from the goods on show at his castles of Wijnendale and Enghien, from a scimitar and Turkish book, through the keys, seal, and mace of Genoa, to Spanish swords and daggers and a book about the Garter.¹¹⁰ English noblemen had similar keepsakes, often gifts from the Netherlands. Sir Edward Poynings returned from leading the English auxiliaries at the siege of Sluis in 1492 with silver plate from Albert of Saxony and damask cloth from Bruges.¹¹¹ At the end of the 1523 expedition, Margaret of Austria gave the duke of Suffolk plenty of malmsey and a splendid horse.¹¹² It was presumably Philip II who gave the earl of Pembroke his ‘trencher of estate curiously wrought with the siege of St Quentin, with a salt and dragon on the top’.¹¹³ Presents blended into plunder, like the splendid possessions of Richard III taken by the Stanleys at Bosworth or the gilt pots from Flodden, emblazoned with James IV’s arms, proudly displayed by the Howards.¹¹⁴ Impressive fortifications clearly testified to noble builders’ martial interests, but might the architecture and decoration of less defensible houses also suggest military aspirations? The leading military commanders of the Netherlands were often great builders, but their houses carried few warlike references, just the occasional statue of Mars or of an armoured warrior.¹¹⁵ Only at Mansfeld’s palace at LuxembourgClausen, built from 1563, do we know of a marble inscription recording his campaigns and a triumphal archway announcing in Latin, German, and French that immortal glory came only through effort.¹¹⁶ Henry Howard’s military ambitions were on display at Mount Surrey outside Norwich, where he built banqueting houses in the shape of towers on mounds decorated with cannon, leading to charges that he was seeking to intimidate the city.¹¹⁷ Predictably, matters were different with the fifth earl of Northumberland. The verses which he had written on the walls and ceilings of his houses at Leconfield and Wressle suggest a withdrawal from many of the worldly values and responsibilities of nobility. One set, expounding the Percy motto ‘Esperaunce en dieu’, rejected hope in ‘exaltation of honour’ or ‘blood and high lineage’, while others questioned dependence on family reputation, chivalric honour, largesse, and loyalty, dismantling the principles that underpinned the noble affinity in favour of ‘meditation in things celestial’.¹¹⁸ The sentiments may have pointed forwards to the aristocratic neo-stoicism of the later sixteenth century and offered the earl comfort in troubled times, but they suggest why he failed to live up to the expectations of his servants and the crown in leading the Percy affinity in war and peace.¹¹⁹ ¹⁰⁹ ¹¹⁰ ¹¹¹ ¹¹³ ¹¹⁴ ¹¹⁵ ¹¹⁷ ¹¹⁹

ADN, B20160/155979; Orange, Apologie, 33. QFG 337 n.; Politisches Archiv, 930; ISN viii. 429, 432, 435–6. Gunn, ‘Poynings’, 168. ¹¹² Gunn, ‘March on Paris’, 626–7. VAM, MSL30/1982, fo. 15v . We are grateful to Chris Skidmore for this reference. Bennett, Bosworth, 121; Vokes, ‘Thomas Howard’, 115. Kuyper, Triumphal Entry, i. 85–7, 192. ¹¹⁶ Massarette, Mansfeld, ii. 173–4. Sessions, Surrey, 170. ¹¹⁸ Antiquarian Repertory, iv. 338–9, 401–5, 411–21. James, ‘Tudor Magnate’, 90.

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D E AT H , BU R I A L , A N D C O M M E M O R AT I O N Death in battle in the service of their prince was an end for which Netherlands noblemen declared themselves ready.¹²⁰ When it came, it brought posthumous honour to the individual and credit to the family. Maximilaan van Egmond-Buren’s panegyrist imagined his regret that he could not die ‘happily amongst high feats of arms’.¹²¹ William of Orange capped his account of the ‘so many duties’ rendered by Ren´e de Chalon to Charles V with the point that ‘in fine he himself yielded up his spirit at the emperor’s feet, and that for his service’.¹²² Such notions would have been equally familiar in England, though as we have seen death in battle was a less frequent occurrence. What the English seem to have had less idea of was the chivalrous way to die at home. Two Netherlands noblemen recorded as making such exemplary ends were Louis de Rolin-Aimeries in 1528 and Maximiliaan van Egmond-Buren twenty years later. Both Aimeries and Buren had reputations as great commanders, feared enemies of the French, and beloved servants of their master Charles V. As death approached, both made their peace with God and then called their captains and companions in arms to them. Aimeries gave ‘fine admonitions’ to his followers, paid the weeping captains their back wages, and gave some money to every soldier in his bande d’ordonnance. Two weeks later he was buried at the Charterhouse outside Valenciennes, his sword and helm borne before his coffin with four standards, a sermon preached recalling the virtues with which God had endowed him.¹²³ Buren’s end, ‘the finest death of which anyone in the world has ever heard tell’ according to Brantˆome, was both more spectacular and more complex. He was taken ill in his house at Brussels and told by the great humanist physician Andreas Vesalius that he had only hours to live.¹²⁴ He had himself dressed in his finest clothes and armour, and carried in a chair into his hall, where he took leave one by one of his weeping household servants and of the landsknecht colonels and Flemish and Spanish lords and captains who had served with him. Then he called for the rich drinking cup with which he used to carouse with the German captains and drank the health of his master the emperor, thanking him in a fine speech for the honours he had given him. At this point he felt the need to protest that he had never desired to join the Protestant princes or betray his master, though often urged to do so. Whether his loyalty to Charles was really under suspicion we do not know, but his loyalty to the church certainly was. His lordship of IJsselstein had a reputation as a tolerant haven for Anabaptists and at Frankfurt he had stood godfather at a Lutheran christening.¹²⁵ At the Golden Fleece chapter in 1546 he had been rebuked not only for ‘excesses in drinking and eating’ and ‘frequent swearing’ but also for ‘speaking of religion with little respect and discretion, scorning its most essential duties, often missing mass on ¹²⁰ Rosenfeld, ‘Provincial Governors’, 10–14. ¹²¹ Triez, Chantz funebres, B1r . ¹²² Orange, Apologie, 34. ¹²³ Macqu´ereau, Histoire, 121–4. ¹²⁴ Brantˆome, Œuvres, i. 313–19. ¹²⁵ Waite, ‘Dutch Nobility’, 464–6; QFG 332, 354.

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Sundays and holidays’ and ‘publicly eating meat in Lent’.¹²⁶ As he bade a final adieu to his companions in arms and asked to be laid on his bed, where he died still fully armed, some must have asked themselves whether his brand of loyalty—loyalty to his Habsburg masters, but not to their religious policies—could survive in the decades to come. Noble funerals were an opportunity to display the achievements of the deceased and, by the role of his servants and family in the proceedings, to affirm the continuation of the house. The fourth earl of Northumberland was accompanied to the grave in 1489 by two officers of arms, twenty-four lords and knights, sixty esquires and gentlemen and 200 yeomen; his funeral cost over £1,000 and its chivalric rituals ended with his helmet hung over his tomb in Beverley minster.¹²⁷ The second duke of Norfolk’s funeral in 1524 was similarly grand, with 900 mourners, a mounted man to ride into the church with the duke’s armour and battle-axe, and an hour-long sermon on the text ‘Behold, the lion of the tribe of Judah triumphs’ to celebrate his heroism.¹²⁸ The duke’s tomb at Thetford priory bore a long inscription reciting his many, primarily military, services to his monarchs and rejoicing that those who fell at Flodden died ‘in so high a service done to their prince’.¹²⁹ On it his armoured effigy was surrounded with the heraldry of his distinguished descent. Yet even such solid memorials were vulnerable at a time of upheaval. The tomb lasted less than twenty years after his death, destroyed at the priory’s dissolution.¹³⁰ Other English noblemen with distinguished military records were interred in the same style, with loyal followers bearing war-banners and presenting armour in church.¹³¹ Tomb monuments, whether effigies or brasses, almost universally represented noblemen and gentlemen in armour and were often decorated with helmets and other arms.¹³² Tomb inscriptions might make explicit the ideals to which the deceased aspired, like that prescribed by Charles Blount, Lord Mountjoy, to inspire his children ‘to continue and keep themselves worthy of so much honour as to be called hereafter to die for their master and country’.¹³³ Changes in visual style modified rather than transformed this tradition. Though his tomb was full of italianate motifs, the third duke of Norfolk still lay in armour and guarded by lions.¹³⁴ His funeral in September 1554 had all the trappings of chivalric nobility, his helm and banners borne by heralds and household men.¹³⁵ As so often, it was the fifth and sixth earls of Northumberland who diverged significantly from the norm. The fifth earl’s funeral was a paltry affair, symbolic of his resignation of his wider political role.¹³⁶ The sixth earl’s burial, at Hackney not Beverley, and mourned by courtiers rather than Percy retainers, suggests the degree to which he had forfeited the allegiance of his servants.¹³⁷ ¹²⁶ ¹²⁷ ¹²⁹ ¹³¹ ¹³² ¹³³ ¹³⁴ ¹³⁶

Baelde, Collaterale raden, 258–9. Fonblanque, Annals, i. 550–1; Smith, ‘Armour’, 123. ¹²⁸ Sessions, Surrey, 18–19. Marks, ‘Howard Tombs’, 256–7. ¹³⁰ Blomefield, Norfolk, ii. 120–5. James, ‘Two Tudor Funerals’, 176–83; Gunn, Charles Brandon, 204–6. Llewellyn, Funeral Monuments, 79, 313–14. Testamenta Vetusta, ii. 721; Stow, Survey of London, i. 253. Marks, ‘Howard Tombs’, 258–64. ¹³⁵ CA, MS I.11, fos. 34v –35. Fonblanque, Annals, i. 358–60. ¹³⁷ Broce, Wunderli, ‘Funeral of Henry Percy’.

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In the Netherlands too the funerals and monuments of martial noblemen made reference to their feats. Noble friends and knightly followers sent Adolf van KleefRavenstein and Jan II van Wassenaar to their graves amidst the panoply of arms, armour, battle standards, and sermons on their deeds.¹³⁸ The double tomb of Ferry and Adrien de Cro¨y-Roeulx at the abbey of Saint-Feuillien was topped by an alabaster effigy of Ferry in rich armour. The inscription detailed their governorships and membership of the Golden Fleece and recorded that Ferry had ‘served the house of Austria, Spain, and Burgundy in good grace and honourable commendation and as a good and loyal knight’.¹³⁹ Floris’s and Maximiliaan’s tombs at Buren do not survive, but Floris’s grand tower at IJsselstein church and Maximiliaan’s splendid funeral suggest their posthumous fame was assured.¹⁴⁰ Lesser noblemen’s tomb inscriptions sometimes recited their military careers and chivalrous rituals and sculptural allusions to war, fashionably in the form of classical warriors, remained commonplace among the great.¹⁴¹ All these commemorations were outshone by the funeral in October 1530 of Philibert de Chalon, killed in his prime at the moment of victory at Gavinana. His body was taken home to the Franche-Comt´e for burial at Lons-le-Saunier. Nine local towns were represented in his cort`ege, and there were envoys from half a dozen princes and several great lords of the Netherlands. Ren´e de Chalon, his nephew and heir, Claude de Vergy, marshal of Burgundy, three archbishops and five abbots were there in person amidst a host of local gentlemen. His guard of twenty-four halberdiers accompanied the coffin, dressed in mourning, halberds lowered. The heraldry of Philibert’s many lordships, his armour, and weapons were all on display, his collar of the Golden Fleece and sceptre as viceroy of Naples. But most remarkable was the parade of banners witnessing to his magnificence at war: the great standard with the imperial arms and the pennon with the Plus Oultre device that marked him out as Charles V’s captain-general; his banners as captain-general of Italy and papal commander-in-chief; his own great war ensign, borne by the Franc-Comtois lord of Vertamboz, who had always borne it valiantly in battle; and, captured in the field and carried dragging along the ground to signify his humiliation of his enemies, one cavalry standard, thirty-seven infantry standards, a hundred other ensigns, and the banner of the people of Rome.¹⁴² His tomb, dripping with antique ornament, was to be graced by statues not only of Renown and of the Four Cardinal Virtues but also of Pallas, goddess of war, and of the Nine Worthies.¹⁴³ His was the ultimate commemoration of a Renaissance nobleman at war. ¹³⁸ Vale, ‘Burgundian Funeral Ceremony’, 930–6; Nierop, Nobility, 1–6. ¹³⁹ Lejeune, ‘Roeulx’, 281–2. ¹⁴⁰ Kuyper, Triumphal Entry, i. 134–6; Triez, Chantz funebres, B8v –C1r , E2v –3r . ¹⁴¹ Vinchant, Hainaut, vi. 340, 363, 375–6; Beaune, ‘Mourir noblement’, 136–41; Bueren, W¨ustefeld, Leven na de dood, 43–4, 55, 58–9, 66–7; Kuyper, Triumphal Entry, i. 95–6. ¹⁴² KHA, Orange C1/69. ¹⁴³ Robert, Philibert de Chalon, ii. 584–91.

15 War, Nobles, and the State War, it seems, did play a part in defining the social and political position of many leading noblemen in both England and the Netherlands in this period, just as noblemen’s social authority played an important part in mobilizing society for war. Though their systems for raising troops were very different, both polities gave noblemen a central role in the process. England began with the more direct method of harnessing noble influence to raise armies, but public authority steadily, but by no means entirely, supplanted private influence in raising men over the period. The Netherlands had a superficially more ‘modern’ system, but in practice noble power ran deep both in the standing army and in the arrangements for raising mercenaries; neither format decisively removed armed force from the control of native noblemen, while nobles’ ability to raise forces for private war, at least on the northern and eastern borders of the Netherlands, seems to have been larger than in England. Private arsenals were larger in the Netherlands and private fortresses more formidable, both the result of a greater exposure to invasion and the guarantee of a somewhat larger freedom of action for noblemen than in England. Private shipping in noble ownership was perhaps more important to naval warfare in England, but in both polities noble captains and privately owned vessels were important in navies in a way which again modifies their reputation as burgeoning institutions of state. Office-holding interacted with war in complex ways. Military ability could win noblemen offices, particularly the provincial governorships in the Netherlands, which offered not only wide military powers but also considerable influence in local politics and administration. In England such opportunities were more limited except at the borders of the kingdom, in the wardenships of the Marches, the lieutenancy of the North, and the deputyship of Ireland. In the Netherlands, more threatened from without and within, even town governorships were an important part of noblemen’s portfolio of office. Yet such offices carried considerable responsibilities and failure to execute them effectively could ruin a career. William of Orange may have been calculating carefully when he declined the governorship of Luxembourg in 1555 on grounds of his youth and inexperience.¹ If he knew the sorry story of the sixth earl of Northumberland it would have increased his hesitation. Balancing military effectiveness against the maintenance of law and order was a particular problem for men in such posts, as those who had to deal with mercenaries or other marauding troops in the Netherlands or the border surnames in England found to their cost. Lawyers’ ¹ Rosenfeld, ‘Provincial Governors’, 18.

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stress on the princely duty to see justice enforced and subjects’ attempts to bargain taxes for better control of the soldiery made noblemen’s position all the more uncomfortable. Army command demanded considerable skill, all the more so as armies grew larger, but also reliance on a set of relationships characteristic of wider noble culture. Keeping armies fed, especially in the Netherlands where government provisioning services were weaker, was not merely a matter of calculating food requirements, but of securing supplies from towns and peasants without alienating them irrevocably. To this end the mixture of courtesy and threat that underpinned many of the nobility’s social dealings had to be deployed. Troop discipline, an extension of noblemen’s activity as private and public judges, was fundamental to a nobleman’s reputation and in turn to his ability to control his army. Command in war, like lordly power in peacetime, was dependent on the ability to take counsel from clients and other experts to form wise policy which could then be put into practice with all the force of one’s lordly might, backed by the display of wealth and power evident in rich tents, plate, and banquets. Service in the defence of a nobleman’s own local community naturally reinforced his relationships there and strengthened his power by exercising its muscles in military mobilization. Service in distant parts, especially in the company of the prince or in the military government of some important outpost, might build up reputation and ties with central authority in equally beneficial ways. Service to foreign princes as a means to glory and influence was increasingly constrained by the limits of princely diplomacy, but within these limits—wider in the Netherlands than in England—could bring real enough rewards. Meanwhile noblemen contributed to the war effort in less direct ways, again both deploying and building up the connections that bound them into local society. They negotiated with local communities for war taxation in more or less formal ways and, when taxation was resisted, they supplied the armed force with which to confront protesters. As at so many other points, if the bases of their power were found wanting in situations such as that facing the fourth earl of Northumberland in 1489, the consequences could be dire. In general both the costs and the direct rewards of war seem to have been higher in the Netherlands. Death, capture, and the destruction of estates were more frequent, but plunder and captives were more often won from the enemy. English and Netherlandish nobles alike spent money equipping themselves for war which they often could not recoup in cash; they alike won titles and lands from grateful princes, though by no means only for their military service. Both inside and outside the Netherlands the Habsburgs’ nobility seem to have had more chance to help themselves to rewards, whether by conquest of the sort practised by the Egmond-Burens or by negotiating with towns or provincial estates to see their debts met ahead of those of others. On the other hand, military success seems to have been a surer route to political favour in England, at least in the England of Henry VIII, than in the Netherlands of the regents. The corollary seems to have been that power was also more easily lost through military failure in England, though in both polities war readily became bound up with the alliances and rivalries of great men. At lower levels war was important in constituting and animating the clienteles led by great noblemen; though like other manifestations of noble power, they rested not

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only on war but also on landed wealth, friendship with the prince at court, and participation in princely councils and in other administrative and judicial institutions both central and local. These clienteles, like noble kinship groups, were in turn central to noblemen’s military activities, providing troop captains, castle commanders, and wartime counsellors. When they became dysfunctional, the government of a whole region could be thrown into turmoil, as the sixth earl of Northumberland showed. When they were successfully forged in war and deployed in peace, like the following of Maximilaan van Egmond-Buren in the north-eastern provinces, they could win the loyalty of disputed regions and facilitate provincial government. War was again important but not all-important in the relations between noblemen and towns. The greater threat of enemy attack made the military protection offered by noblemen more important in the Netherlands than in England, but then towns in the Netherlands were more powerful independent forces than in England. Religious institutions in both polities also saw their relations with noblemen partly shaped by and partly turned to meet the needs of war. Given all this it is no surprise that war retained central importance in noble identity in both polities. New bureaucratic skills were bringing individuals into the nobility, but in a few generations the descendants of new nobles might themselves be great captains: the Howards and Rolin-Aimeries, after all, were the offspring of a judge and a chancellor of Burgundy. Noblemen and those who wished to court them expressed their military function in many media. Chroniclers, poets, and heralds held up a knightly mirror to compliment or, at times, criticize them. Printed histories, popular songs, and cheap images spread their martial reputation to a wide audience. Once again, war was not the sole key to nobility—painted portraits and buildings generally did not show the nobleman as a soldier—but in most respects the image of nobility reflected the leading part that noblemen took in the state’s military efforts. The relationship between war, nobles, and state formation, then, was complex. In some respects the independent military power of the nobility in both polities declined over the period. Yet their princes could not make war without them, and in the process of serving their princes in war they developed their own power within the political frameworks needed to mobilize resources in men and money: provincial governorships and the developing lord lieutenancy, the provincial States, naval establishments, and standing armies. The noblemen we have examined do provide some justification for the view that nobles steered their princes into wars from which they might profit, but equally for the view that their freedom of action to do so was reined in as central governments took closer control of regional government and military effort. Noble power helped war to make the state, but in so doing it made a state in which war helped preserve and develop noble power.

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16 Introduction Urban liberties and noble power were fundamental elements in the framework of early modern states. Yet to understand the full impact of war we must go beyond them, to examine how it served to modify the relationships between rulers and subjects in general, to constitute individuals as subjects of the state, a term which first came, tentatively, into use in this period under the influence of Machiavelli. War was not the only force at work in this process. The growing ambition and intensity of the prince’s provision of justice, both as judge and legislator, drew ever more of his subjects within the reach of his institutions and treated them increasingly as standardized subjects.¹ Meanwhile the Reformation and Counter-Reformation gave the prince both new means and sharper motivation to regulate, however incompletely, his subjects’ beliefs and moral conduct, though they stirred repeated rebellion in England and foot-dragging resentment in the Netherlands long before the revolt of 1566.² Justice, religion, and war all helped shape identities dynastic, local, and national, at a time when classical conceptions of the patria and respublica were joining with printdriven linguistic standardization and political consolidation to forge polities more like modern national states than anything seen before.³ Here royal policy sought to harness the forces of cultural change to cultivate religious docility and political integration. Henry VIII, for example, attempted to prescribe a single primer, prefaced with praise of his break with Rome, from which to teach reading, and across the sixteenth century efforts intensified to promote English culture in Ireland.⁴ The Habsburgs sought to suppress religious unorthodoxy in the chambers of rhetoric, but encouraged supra-provincial competitions between chambers, especially in the peaceful interludes when rulers turned to internal consolidation, under Philip the Fair and around the time of the Pragmatic Sanction.⁵ Princes also made wider attempts to win over their subjects’ minds, encouraging cooperation in their military and fiscal projects as well as in the exercise of their judicial and religious authority. Many means were deployed to persuade subjects that the Habsburgs and Tudors were great princes who had their true interests at heart. Printed propaganda was developed steadily and interacted with a semi-autonomous ¹ Gunn, Government, 72–108, 173–5, 188–90; De Schepper and Cauchies, ‘Legal Tools’, 250, 253–6. ² Peteghem, ‘Antoine Perrenot’, 189–90; Duke, ‘Introduction’, p. xiii; id., ‘Salvation’, 152–74; Haigh, English Reformations. ³ Shrank, Writing the Nation; Groenveld, ‘ ‘‘Natie’’ ’; Stengers, Racines, 81–100. ⁴ Gunn, Government, 172; Ellis, Ireland, 150, 220–1, 227–8, 272. ⁵ Waite, Reformers on Stage; Bruaene, ‘Sociabiliteit en competitie’, 50–4.

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market for printed news, though the Netherlands, as one of the greatest centres of European printing, naturally ran ahead of England. Pageantry and didactic drama, especially in the Netherlands at princely entries into towns, taught even the illiterate what to think of their prince. Impressive visual images of the ruler were spread on coins, medals, stained-glass windows, paintings, and prints. Splendid palaces and other buildings overawed the beholder with the might of their builders. Bonfires and processions were organized to celebrate victories and royal births. How thorough an effect such efforts had is, of course, open to doubt. Many subjects could not read and many others lived far from the centres of princely display. The classical style fashionable at European courts generated celebrations of the ruler’s virtues ever more elaborate and sophisticated and ever more inaccessible to the ordinary viewer, while cynicism about superficial splendour was a strong strand of humanism itself.⁶ Nevertheless, many subjects must have felt by 1559 that they knew more of what they were supposed to think of their ruler and his policies and that in itself is a measure of the growing reach of the state. Princes also engaged with their people through economic policy, though its extent, rationale, and coherence are controversial. In favouring some industrial, agricultural, or commercial developments by monopolies, fiscal protectionism, or other forms of intervention, rulers built relationships with powerful economic interests—most obviously merchants who could lend them money and provide them with information from other countries—but also took power over new aspects of the lives of many of their subjects. Military and fiscal aims loomed large in their calculations.⁷ Such economic policy blended into social policy. New industries were intended to provide employment for the workforce generated by (poorly understood) population growth. Attempts to investigate and reverse the enclosure of open fields and conversion of arable to pasture in England were intended to raise food production and restore employment in tillage. Poor relief schemes were intended not merely to feed the incapable, but to set the poor to work. Social policy had a religious aspect, driven by the ruler’s responsibility for the welfare of his subjects and intensified by both the moral vision of northern humanism and the godly imperatives of the Reformation. It promoted political stability by defusing popular unrest. But it also sought both to palliate the ill effects of war and to strengthen the body politic for armed struggle.⁸ In these chapters we shall examine the part war played in all these developments. War exercised, amplified, and tested the mutual obligations of prince and people. War promoted the cults of the warrior prince and the citizen in arms. War stimulated the production and dissemination of propaganda and the organized celebration of victory. War confronted the church with contradictory demands to lend moral support to the prince and his embattled people and to preach peace. War inflicted on local communities marauding soldiers and intrusive commissioners in search of ⁶ Gunn, Government, 190–202; Soly, ‘Plechtige intochten’, 341–54. ⁷ Palliser, Age of Elizabeth, 373–9; Tracy, Holland, 51–2, 98–105; Schepper, ‘BurgundianHabsburg Netherlands’, 523–6. ⁸ Slack, Poverty and Policy; Blockmans and Prevenier, ‘Armoede’, 501–38; Soly, ‘Economische ontwikkeling’, 584–97.

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food and transport. It threatened increased levels of crime, economic disruption, and religious tension. All these troubles might alienate subjects from the ruler who seemed to cause them, but whom did people really blame for war and were its effects wholly negative? Some drew economic advantage from war, and what the ruler lost in goodwill he might gain in the assumption of emergency powers. War might shape identities in complex ways, demonizing the enemy, defining nationhood, and displaying princely protection in reassuringly solid fortifications, but also opposing local identity to that of the prince’s foreign troops in ways that undermined princely power. Strategic complexities might make war consolidate individual provinces rather than whole nations, while civil war and rebellion simultaneously testified to war’s power to break the bonds of subjects to prince and threatened to construct alternative identities that legitimized such opposition in future. Such issues are elusive, yet of central importance in the underlying processes of state formation; by addressing a wide range of sources we shall shed what light on them we can.

17 Obligations War exercised the mutual obligations of prince and people; it amplified and tested those obligations as princes sought their subjects’ military and fiscal support and subjects sought their princes’ protection. In the process, war promoted the cult of the warrior prince and raised the stakes in the quest for absolute loyalty and soldierly obedience.

T H E O B L I G AT I O N S O F S U B J E C TS TO RU L E R S The obligation of Englishmen to fight for king and country was composed of different elements combined in changing proportion over time. The contractual reciprocity of the indenture system used in the Hundred Years War had always had an admixture of more traditional obligations, of tenant and estate officer to landlord, of household man to master, and of able-bodied man to the defence of the community, and these obligations were more strongly insisted upon from the later fifteenth century under the pressure of civil conflict. Indentures were last used wholesale in 1492 and last used for any campaign force in 1512.¹ The principal means of raising troops between the 1490s and 1540s, royal signet letters to noblemen, gentry, and towns, played instead on personal duty to the ruler, urging the recipient ‘fail ye not thus to do as we specially trust you’.² The growing prominence of the Statute of Winchester, reissued in 1511, emphasized the obligation of every subject to serve his prince with appropriate equipment. The military survey of 1522 revealed widespread disregard of its provisions, but from the 1530s subjects were often made to purchase new arms and armour in accordance with them and fined by muster commissioners for non-compliance.³ Alongside individual obligations came a development of communal obligations, as townships—generally coincident with parishes—were expected to maintain arms with which to equip soldiers sent out from their midst.⁴ Meanwhile repeated statutes and proclamations for the maintenance of archery ordered men to keep bows and practise with them and there is widespread evidence that they did so.⁵ ¹ Curry, ‘English Armies’; Goodman, Wars of the Roses, 119–52; Morgan, ‘King’s Affinity’, 1–25; Luckett, ‘Crown Office’; Currin, ‘ ‘‘To Traffic with War?’’ ’; PRO, E101/72/3–6; C54/379, mm. 6d, 13. ² ‘Letters of the Cliffords’, no. 10. ³ TRP i. 63; Goring, ‘Military Obligations’, 14–16, 33–5; id., ‘General Proscription’. ⁴ Boynton, Elizabethan Militia, 22–3. ⁵ Gunn, ‘Archery Practice’.

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Legislation of the 1540s and 1550s further defined the subject’s duties. As disputes spread over whether tenants were bound to serve in contingents raised by their landlords at the king’s command, a clause in the 1549 Act against Unlawful Assemblies made refusals of military summons by leaseholders or copyholders punishable by the loss of their lands.⁶ Much more important were two statutes of 1557–8. The first, ‘An Act for the having of Horse and Weapon’, superseded the Statute of Winchester and laid down a ten-point sliding scale of weapons, horses, and armour required according to income or wealth in goods, with the extra refinement that those whose wives wore velvet or silk should be liable to equip a light horseman. The minimum requirement, for those with just £10 in goods, was a longbow, a sheaf of arrows, a steel cap, and a halberd or black bill. Justices of the peace were given powers to fine for non-observance, though the Act’s uncertainty about the overlap between individual and communal responsibilities for stocks of arms made it hard to implement.⁷ The second Act, following on earlier proclamations, addressed the taking of musters. The preamble explained how the ‘most ablest and likeliest’ to serve in the wars had been commonly substituted at musters ‘through friendship or rewards’. Firm penalties were prescribed—ten days imprisonment or a 40s fine for substitutions, ten times the sum received for taking bribes—and Star Chamber was soon in action to investigate offences.⁸ The obligation to defend the realm extended beyond service in the army. Sailors could be impressed to serve in the king’s ships and as the navy grew in the 1540s and 1550s this became increasingly necessary.⁹ Impressment was extended beyond the skilled maritime workforce and bent to serve the needs of social policy when vagabonds were conscripted for the king’s galleys in 1545 and rumour-mongers in 1549.¹⁰ Labourers and skilled craftsmen could be impressed for royal building projects, and were used for the major defensive works of the 1540s.¹¹ On occasion impressment also provided skilled labour for weapons manufacture and for naval shipbuilding.¹² The duty of subjects to pay taxes for defence was an accepted commonplace in England well before 1500, but the subsidy statutes of Henry VIII’s reign, printed in hundreds of copies for public display, contained lengthy preambles rehearsing it to the nation at large.¹³ None of these powers was novel in this period, but most were exercised more intensively. With these practical measures came a variety of expositions of military obligation. The most explicit was the humanist Richard Morison’s An Exhortation to styrre all Englyshe men to the defence of theyr countreye (1539). ‘So is it the bounden duty of all subjects, of what degree so ever they be’, stated Morison, ‘to serve their country in such sort, as their prince and head shall appoint them’.¹⁴ Proclamations reinforced the theme, two in 1545 ordering first all northerners and then all lords and gentlemen ⁶ ⁷ ⁸ ⁹ ¹¹ ¹² ¹³

Goring, ‘Social Change’, 189–90; 3 & 4 Edward VI, c. 5. 4 & 5 Philip and Mary, c. 2; Smith, ‘Militia Rates’, 94–100. TRP i. 325; 4 & 5 Philip and Mary, c. 3; HL, MS Ellesmere 2652, fo. 15r . Rodger, Safeguard of the Sea, 313–14. ¹⁰ TRP, i. 250, 329. Colvin (ed.), King’s Works, iv(ii). 69, 127, 129–30, 183, 207, 306–7, 350, 430. Records Northampton, i. 204–6; PRO, E36/5, fos. 179–88. Gunn, Government, 188. ¹⁴ Morison, Exhortation, A3.

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at parliament home for the purposes of defence.¹⁵ The Reformation added a new emphasis. Morison’s Exhortation reminded Englishmen of their obligation to defend Christ’s religion from the onslaughts of the bishop of Rome, a duty reiterated in the oath required of soldiers at Calais in the 1540s. They swore to recognize Henry as the supreme head of the church and work to uphold the statutes of the Reformation parliament and, in a patriotic turn, to keep the town and marches ‘true English’.¹⁶ Subsidy preambles spoke the same language. In 1540 the Subsidy Act added to the costs of defence that of the ‘abolishing also of the Bishop of Rome and his usurped authority’. By 1549 subjects were urged to ‘leave father mother brethren sistern wives children lands goods, yea and this mortal life also’ rather than deny God’s word or fail to defend the imperial crown of England.¹⁷ The heady mix of patriotic and confessional duty that would characterize Elizabethan and Stuart England was born under Henry and Edward. In the Netherlands feudal obligation retained more strength than in England. Though a few more specific duties survived, most feudal service was that owed by noble tenants-in-chief and their sub-tenants.¹⁸ The Habsburgs followed Charles the Bold’s precedent in carrying out intensive surveys of feudal land tenure and using the information to compel service from all fief-holders.¹⁹ In Hainaut, Flanders, and Brabant the feudal tenantry was called out to face invasions from the 1480s to the 1540s and even in Holland nobles were summoned to face raiders from Guelders in 1517.²⁰ Those unable to serve—including many non-nobles who had bought noble fiefs—were assessed to pay for substitutes, but some noblemen certainly joined up in person.²¹ By the end of our period, however, feudal obligation was changing, blending first into the wider duty of the noble estate, then into wider appeals to the citizenry. In the 1540s, intending to fill up the bandes d’ordonnance, Charles began to summon ‘all noblemen, living nobly’, not just those who happened to be his feudal tenants. In a parallel to the English system, what was to be assessed was not formal status but visible wealth: those who wore velvet, satin, or damask, or whose wives did so, were to serve as men-at-arms or provide suitable substitutes.²² By the 1550s Mary of Hungary was asking the towns of Flanders, Brabant, and Hainaut to muster their substantial rural neighbours as well as their citizens and to send in the names of local noblemen ‘disobedient and defaulting in the defence of their fatherland’; with the names, inevitably, came excuses: great age, extreme debility, a son already serving, or the distractions of public office.²³ ¹⁵ TRP i. 252, 261. ¹⁶ PRO, SP1/174, fos. 185–6. ¹⁷ 32 Henry VIII, c. 50, 2 & 3 Edward VI, c. 36. ¹⁸ ICC iv. 192–3; ROPB i. 358–60, iii. 200–1. ¹⁹ Janssens, Noblesse belge, 117–18; ROPB ii. 116–18; ICC i. 304–18, v. 248; Koenigsberger, ‘Property and the Price Revolution’, 145–6. ²⁰ Lettres in´edites, i. 9–10, 25–6, 54–5; Janssens, Noblesse belge, 117–19. ²¹ ROPB ii. 99–100, 102–3, 106–7, iii. 545–6, 551–3; Janssens, Noblesse belge, 120; Henne, Histoire, iii. 120. ²² Janssens, Noblesse belge, 118; ROPB iv. 343–4, 357, 381–2, 390–1, 395, 410–11, 463, v. 23, vi. 362. ²³ ROPB vi. 258–9, 261–2, 362–3.

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This wider obligation to defend the country in emergency applied, as in England, to all adult males fit to fight. In Hainaut, Flanders, and Walloon Flanders men between 18 and 50 or 70 were stood ready several times in the 1480s, 1520s, and 1540s and punishment was threatened for those who would not serve.²⁴ On occasion clothworkers and other civilians were mustered in their hundreds and marched off to battle, sometimes with disastrous effects.²⁵ In Friesland all adult males were periodically mustered and enrolled and one-third of those fit for war might be picked to serve.²⁶ In Flanders and Hainaut in the 1520s there were also signs of a communal responsibility to arm troops, the more prosperous countrymen supplying weapons to the poorer.²⁷ In practice such general service at the prince’s command blended into locally organized self-defence. All along the borders with France and Guelders, and elsewhere in the civil wars of 1477–92, peasants, sometimes but not necessarily led by local nobles or reinforced by soldiers, banded together to defend church towers, forts, abbeys, and castles, or to attack plundering or fleeing enemy troops. They faced massacre if their strongholds fell, especially if they had caused casualties to professional enemies who seemed to think they had no business defending themselves, but on occasion their resistance was highly effective.²⁸ As in England, impressment advanced across the period. From the vagabonds, heretics and brigands repeatedly sent for galley service from 1534–5, conscription extended to meet the labour demands of the vast fortification works of the 1550s.²⁹ First volunteers were to be gathered, then vagabonds and other ‘useless people’, and then anyone else suitable, ‘constraining to this, if needs be, those amongst them who are unwilling’.³⁰ Such coercion was the practical outworking of the principle enunciated in Charles’s publications that subjects had a duty to defend not just their homes but ‘the authority of their princes’.³¹ Netherlanders had other general obligations in wartime, to pay the taxes agreed by their representatives and to keep the peace treaties and truces made by their prince, though the threat of hanging was not always sufficient to ensure they did so.³² But the clearest statements of the duties of subjects towards princes at war came in the frequent bans on Netherlanders serving foreign rulers in war without the prince’s permission. Such service deprived the prince of his proper reservoir of military talent and might even turn it against him, all ‘to the prejudice of the public weal of our

²⁴ Vinchant, Hainaut, v. 39; Lettres in´edites, 51–4; Lusy, Journal, 177–8; ROPB ii. 99 n., iv. 462–3. ²⁵ ISN iii. 54; ROPB ii. 452–3. ²⁶ Faber, Drie eeuwen Friesland, i. 24–6. ²⁷ ROPB ii. 127; Lusy, Journal, 227. ²⁸ Nicolay, ‘Kalendrier’, 51, 57–8, 67, 107, 113, 147, 150, 196–7, 209, 226, 235, 254–6; Schaumburg, Geschichten, 84; Lusy, Journal, 40, 201; Macqu´ereau, Chronicque, 104; ISN iii. 81; Thieulaine, ‘Extraits’, 153–4, 162, 186–7; ‘Vlaamsche kronyk’, 328–9; Br´esin, Chroniques, 262–4; Molius, Kroniek, 301–3. ²⁹ ROPB iii. 452–3, 470, iv. 90–1, vi. 391–3, vii. 81–3, 370–3, 418. ³⁰ ROPB vi. 262–3, vii. 338–9. ³¹ Assertio iuris imperatoris Caroli, fo. 2r . ³² Tracy, Holland, 48; ROPB vii. 59–60; Macqu´ereau, Histoire, 108–9, 130; Nicolay, ‘Kalendrier’, 269, 320–1, 330–1, 337, 341–2, 348–9.

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said lands’.³³ At times when a fleet was being assembled, the ban was extended to mariners.³⁴ By the 1550s these bans, like the summonses to the nobility, were making very general arguments, that Netherlanders should ‘acquit themselves in the defence of their fatherland’, or that ‘subjects are obliged to serve and stand by their own natural prince and fatherland before all other lords’.³⁵ These announcements penetrated the furthest reaches of the Netherlands, from Friesland and Groningen to Namur and Luxembourg, and from Holland to Namur individuals were prosecuted for contravening them.³⁶ Strikingly, Viglius put them ahead of the heresy edicts in the central government’s priorities for enforcing its legislation in the recalcitrant Ommelanden in 1555.³⁷ In raising their armies the Habsburgs were less dependent on the individual subject’s obligation to fight for prince and country than were the Tudors; but that did not stop them asserting and enforcing the principle increasingly boldly. In the process they claimed greater powers to direct the lives of individual subjects, just as the Tudors did.

T H E O B L I G AT I O N S O F RU L E R S TO S U B J E C TS In England the king’s obligations to defend and do justice to his subjects were expressed in the coronation oath, discussed in works of political theory such as those of Sir John Fortescue and made visible in the sword and sceptre and the royal seals.³⁸ None of these changed substantially in this period, but debate about the king’s performance of his obligations became more extensive. Criticism of policies that appeared to undermine the prince’s duty to the commonwealth was a constant theme in early Tudor rebellions. Resistance to war taxation was a factor in the revolts of 1489, 1497, and 1525 and the demands of the Pilgrims in 1536 showed a willingness to assert constitutional propriety when the king seemed to have broken his trust by religious change and novel exactions.³⁹ From the 1530s the crown mounted a concerted campaign to highlight the king’s defensive efforts, similar to the case made by monarchs such as Edward III and Henry V, but exploiting new media to provide more detail.⁴⁰ In the preambles to taxation statutes and the justifications offered for the collection of loans and benevolences, the pains to which the king had gone to ensure the defence of the realm were repeatedly stressed.⁴¹ Richard Morison elaborated further. In his Exhortation he listed the defensive works undertaken in the past year and, in a direct retort to the Pilgrims, ³³ ROPB i. 424–5, 589–90, 639–40, 676–7, ii. 499, iii. 1–2, 148–9, 458, 494, iv. 14, 28, 335–6, v. 58, 408–9, 521, vi. 127–8. ³⁴ ROPB iv. 107–8, 406–7, vi. 231–2. ³⁵ ROPB vi. 206–7, 346. ³⁶ Boomgaard, Misdaad, 79; Henne, Histoire, x. 198 n. ³⁷ Postma, ‘Mislukte missie’, 18. ³⁸ Richardson, ‘Coronation Oath’; Coronation of Richard III, 13–17; Chrimes, Constitutional Ideas, 14–21; Watts, Henry VI, 20–1. ³⁹ Bush, ‘Tax Reform’; id., Pilgrimage. ⁴⁰ Harriss, ‘Management of Parliament’. ⁴¹ 26 Henry VIII, c. 19, 32 Henry VIII c. 50, 34 & 35 Henry VIII c. 27, 35 Henry VIII c. 12, 37 Henry VIII c. 24, 25; LP XVII. 194, XX. ii, app. 4.

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described the fortification of the northern borders and coastline, ‘that ye may know His Highness careth for all and not for some’. Morison ended with a reminder of the reciprocity of subjects’ and ruler’s obligations: ‘If His Highness thus diligently watch, that we may safely sleep, spend his treasure thus largely, that we may surely keep our goods, were it not our great shame, to suffer His Highness to travail alone?’⁴² Similarly, in the introduction to his translation of Frontinus’s Stratagemes, Sleyghtes and Policies of Warre, Morison painted a picture of Henry travelling the length of the country personally inspecting fortifications and devising new weapons, ships, and armour.⁴³ Meanwhile Henry’s new cathedral foundations of the 1540s helped meet his obligation towards those who had suffered in his service, with places to maintain ‘old serving men decayed by the wars or in the king’s service’.⁴⁴ Only the docile might expect such gratitude, however: in 1537 Henry ordered the execution of an elderly Lancashire rebel despite pleas that he had often served the king against the Scots.⁴⁵ Edward VI reflected deeply on his martial obligations, whether in defence of his subjects or of reformed religion.⁴⁶ In his memorandum to the council in October 1552 the young king included a section ‘For the Strength and Wealth of the Realm’. This contained notes not only on the strengthening of castles and manufacture of guns, but also on the establishment of marts in England and the introduction of new industries, both calculated to increase England’s economic independence in times of war.⁴⁷ His government debated such matters with his subjects, stressing in a reply to the western rebels of 1549 the charges Edward and Henry had had in national defence against Scotland and France.⁴⁸ The accession of women in 1553 and 1558 reshaped this debate. The gender of Mary and Elizabeth made their military obligations less clear. Though the duty to maintain England’s defences did feature both in Protestant criticism of Mary and in early justifications of Elizabeth, and though Mary for example followed her father in encouraging hospital provision for ‘poor, impotent and aged soldiers’, discussions of the prince’s obligations to his or her subjects began to concentrate less on war than on religion and the common weal.⁴⁹ In the Netherlands the inauguration oaths taken to towns and provinces were vaguer than the English coronation oath about the ruler’s defensive duties. Beyond general undertakings to keep the land in peace came promises not to declare war without the subjects’ consent, which were omitted when possible and ignored when not.⁵⁰ Whatever the formal position, near the beginning of his personal reign Charles expressed his desire to ‘keep and maintain our said lands in good peace, tranquillity and repose’ so that ‘everyone should know the love that we bear them, and that we do ⁴² Morison, Exhortation, D4. ⁴³ Morison, Stratagemes, A2r –3r . ⁴⁴ King Henry’s Scheme, 2–27; Peterborough Local Administration, 101, 104; Documents illustrating Education, 118, 150. ⁴⁵ Hoyle, Pilgrimage, 403. ⁴⁶ Jordan, Threshold of Power, 411–14; Loach, Edward VI, 153–8, 181, 184. ⁴⁷ Edward VI, Chronicle, 180. ⁴⁸ CSPD, Edward VI, 122–4. ⁴⁹ Ponet, Short Treatise, E2r –E3v ; MacCaffrey, ‘Parliament and Foreign Policy’, 74–81; McLaren, Political Culture; Loades, Mary Tudor, 373–4. ⁵⁰ Smit, Vorst en onderdaan, 356–90; ROPB i. 11, 311, 316, 541–51, v. 555, 562–3; Blockmans, ‘Signification ‘‘constitutionelle’’ ’, 510; Koenigsberger, Monarchies, 54, 141–2, 253.

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not wish to abandon them or let them be crushed, but to guard, preserve and defend them’; at its end he spoke of ‘the journeys and . . . the pains and labours which are required, and which we have up to the present taken, for the good, preservation, safekeeping and defence’ of the Netherlands ‘and of our good and loyal subjects there’.⁵¹ The ruler’s defensive exertions featured as much as in England in negotiations between prince and people. When Charles risked his person to defend his subjects, as in 1537 or 1554, the point was carefully expounded, and some tax grants recognized ‘the very great work done by His Majesty to guard, maintain and assure’ the Netherlands ‘and put his subjects finally in peace, repose and tranquillity’.⁵² Regents too might promise in tax negotiations that they would ‘spare neither care nor work to provide everything needed for the defence of the lands’, or cite specific fortification projects as evidence of such effort.⁵³ Again and again taxes and demesne sales were justified by the need for defence.⁵⁴ By the 1540s all manner of instructions related to the war repeated the same message, that even apparently offensive efforts—as against J¨ulich in 1543 or France in 1544—were ‘to the great welfare, relief, security, preservation and protection of our subjects’.⁵⁵ Reciprocity was enforced at times by conditions placed on grants of taxation of a sort unknown in Tudor England. Commonest were assignments of money to particular fortification projects and promises that no soldiers would quarter themselves on the countryside; well-calculated promises, since peasants were unable to pay taxes if troops were living off them, though often made in vain.⁵⁶ The prince’s obligation to defend his people and bring them peace was also conspicuous in his ceremonial entries into towns. At his entry into Antwerp in 1494, an angel descended from heaven to present Philip the Fair with a sword, symbol of his duty to govern and defend his subjects, and at Haarlem in 1504 he was confronted with a tableau-vivant character holding the slogan ‘Come, prince who brings us peace’.⁵⁷ While the growing fashion for classical triumphs eroded the vigorous dialogue between urban liberties and princely power still evident in the early entries of Charles V’s reign, as late as 1549 Antwerp, Ghent, Leuven, and the Brugse Vrije all reminded him of his duty to provide the peace that secured their welfare.⁵⁸ As in England, war evoked the prince’s compassion in more specific ways. Pardons for crimes and respites from paying debts and taxes were regularly given in his name to those who had served loyally in war.⁵⁹ Philip was concerned to secure good care for the numerous soldiers falling sick in his army in February 1558, ‘not wishing to forget ⁵¹ ROPB i. 581, vi. 489. ⁵² ROPB iv. 25–6, vi. 362; Weert, ‘Chronycke’, 148–51; ROPB v. 109. ⁵³ SAG, OA143, 28/11/1542; Inventaire Gand, no. 1105. ⁵⁴ ROPB ii. 295, iv. 422, 446, 454, 474, v. 15, 581, vi. 250, 364, 368, 377, 396, 402, vii. 127, 158, 219, 272, 381, 442, 515–16. ⁵⁵ ROPB iv. 468, v. 51–2. ⁵⁶ ROPB i. 22, 376–7, ii. 298–9, iv. 29–30, v. 5, vii. 97; Verhofstad, Regering, 103, 149, 160. ⁵⁷ Blockmans, ‘Dialogue imaginaire’, 161; Smit, Vorst en onderdaan, 312. ⁵⁸ Soly, ‘Plechtige intochten’, 343–7, 352–3. ⁵⁹ Mecheleer, ‘Officier du prince’, 358; CLGS i. 280, 293, ii. 80, iii. 187; ISN iii. 24–125; Vrolijk, ‘Recht door gratie’, 225, 357.

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or abandon the good soldiers who have fallen ill in our service’.⁶⁰ Charles took pity on those fleeing the French invasion of July 1542 and allowed them to pasture their animals in his forests.⁶¹ Philip magnanimously excepted those driven into poverty by being burnt out of their homes on the frontiers from being drafted for the galleys as vagabonds.⁶² Yet the larger issue of how well prince and people met their reciprocal duties in war and peace remained more troublesome in the Netherlands, as the peace of 1559 brought only wrangling over the distribution of the tax burden and the continuing presence of Spanish troops.

WA R R I O R P R I N C E S The perfect prince was more than just a warrior: just judge, defender of religion, father of the fatherland, instrument of the public good, God’s chosen ruler. Yet young princes in particular seem to have felt a pressure to prove themselves in war. How important, then, was success in war to the identity of the Tudors and Habsburgs? In the Netherlands formal political thought did not place much stress on the military functions of the prince, except to grant him a right to wage just war in defence of his people or against rebels, sometimes a duty to crusade, and, for occasional extreme proponents of imperial power, a mission to conquer.⁶³ Yet other sources suggest that his activity in war and peace remained central to his reputation. All the male Habsburg rulers of this period made a point of campaigning in person. Maximilian told the States-General in 1499 how he had always, boldly and generously, exposed our most noble person, without dissembling or sparing ourself, or having fear or doubt of death or danger which might happen to us . . . such that often we have found ourself in very great adventure and peril, and have therein used up, lost and consumed the flower and manhood of our youth; and, by the travails and deprivations of sleep, with the other pains that our body has so often suffered, beyond measure, and more than our nature could bear and endure, we have found ourselves in such extremity of illness as to be near the agony of death.⁶⁴

Charles too took pains to be seen amongst his men even under murderous artillery fire, taking breakfast in the trenches in 1546, reviewing his army dressed in full armour three times in July 1554.⁶⁵ The emperor in his army was a sight to remember, the resolute conqueror of Titian’s M¨uhlberg portrait.⁶⁶ For Jean Thieulaine, Charles was a rather distant, almost irrelevant figure, until 7 August 1554. That day the emperor camped near Arras and Jean saw him and his host, ‘an infinite thing to see’.⁶⁷ Philip II played the general too, despite his inexperience and abhorrence of war, because, as one ambassador commented, he had to show the world that he had the ⁶⁰ ROPB vii. 279. ⁶¹ ROPB iv. 397–8. ⁶² ROPB vii. 371. ⁶³ Hijum, Grenzen aan macht. ⁶⁴ Lettres in´edits, ii. 92–3. ⁶⁵ Avila, Comentaries, D5r , D6r , E2v , E3r ; Thieulaine, ‘Extraits’, 185, 190–1; ‘Dagverhaal’, 282–3, 286. ⁶⁶ Checa Cremades, Carlos V, 269–73; Avila, Comentaries, P4v –5r . ⁶⁷ Thieulaine, ‘Extraits’, 150, 161, 165, 192.

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heart and strength to avenge wrongs done to him.⁶⁸ At the storming of Saint-Quentin he rode out triumphantly in his costliest attire and six years later Antonis Mor was still painting him as he appeared then, in half-armour with a baton of command.⁶⁹ Some moments were of special significance for princely reputation. One was the first campaign: 1521 for Charles, when he ‘put . . . his first harness on and marched on France with all his forces’; 1557 for Philip, his ‘first war’ in which the stakes were ‘my states, as well as my honour and reputation, which I value above all else’.⁷⁰ Another was the triumphal entry into a conquered town. Maximilian rode into Utrecht in 1483, to meet eighty burghers kneeling bare-headed in submission; Philip the Fair into Arnhem in 1505, in full armour except for the scarlet bonnet on his head, to receive the keys of the town and the citizens’ oaths of loyalty; Charles into rebel Ghent in 1540 with 5,500 troops.⁷¹ A third set-piece was dubbing to knighthood. Maximilian knighted supporters on ceremonial occasions and on the eve of battle.⁷² Charles and even Philip held knighting ceremonies around the Netherlands, though they were mostly further from the front line than the dubbing of the five captains of the Renty garrison who had resisted the French in 1554 until Charles arrived to relieve them.⁷³ The crusade held a special place in the duty of the Christian prince, amplified for the Habsburgs by the imperial mission to defeat barbarians and infidels and the christianized mythology of the Burgundian Golden Fleece.⁷⁴ Maximilian and Philip the Fair professed some enthusiasm, but it was Charles who was the great crusader of his line, and not just because it enabled him to denounce Francis I for attacking him when ‘all good Christians should be preparing to resist the Turk’.⁷⁵ Charles and his subjects alike counted Tunis as his greatest victory and the chance to confront the Turkish threat as an important product of peace with France.⁷⁶ Peace-making was also part of the prince’s care for his subjects and duty to God. Philip the Fair and Margaret of Austria especially were hailed as peace-makers, Margaret’s efforts a sign she was ‘always adhering to the public good’.⁷⁷ As Elizabeth was to find in England, sixteenth-century notions of femininity made it easier to present oneself as a peacemaker than as an Amazon. Yet warriors could fight for peace, as Maximilian, Charles, ⁶⁸ Relations des ambassadeurs v´enitiens, pp. lvi–lvii, lxii. ⁶⁹ ‘Veldtogt’, 320–1; Campbell, Renaissance Portraits, 203. ⁷⁰ Rodr´ıguez-Salgado, Changing Face of Empire, 169–70; Weert, ‘Chronycke’, 88. ⁷¹ Gent, ‘Pertijelicke saken’, 364–6; Macqu´ereau, Chronicque, 8; Decavele and Peteghem, ‘Ghent’, 111. ⁷² Smit, Vorst en onderdaan, 342; Surquet, ‘M´emoires’, 556. ⁷³ Weert, ‘Chronycke’, 111, 121; Smit, Vorst en onderdaan, 342; CLGS iii. 387; Barre, Journal, 269, 365–6; Br´esin, Chroniques, 232; Bruaene, Gentse memorieboeken, 87. ⁷⁴ Macqu´ereau, Chronicque, 93; Checa Cremades, Carlos V, 64–70. ⁷⁵ Lettres in´edites, ii. 99–100, 107–10; ROPB i. 4, iv. 397. ⁷⁶ Checa Cremades, Carlos V, 227–34; Everaert, Spelen, 119, 227, 556; Bocquet, Ballades, 125; Thiry, ‘L’Honneur et l’Empire’, 305; Carmina scholastica, 7–8, 19. ⁷⁷ Macqu´ereau, Chronicque, 8, 15–16; Collection des voyages, i. 124; Gollut, M´emoires historiques, 1051; Bocquet, Ballades, 166; Recueil de chansons, iii. 81.

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and Philip claimed to do, or make truces like that of 1556 ‘for the zeal we have always had for the good of the Christian republic, the rest and quietness of the same and for the relief of our subjects’.⁷⁸ The prince’s martial qualities were represented to his subjects in many ways. Maximilian’s romanticized knighthood and real deeds formed a major strand of his selfpresentation; epitaphs and chronicles stressed his ardour and skill in war.⁷⁹ Charles’s image combined knightly and dynastic elements with Erasmian ideals of princely virtue, classical models of imperial power and apocalyptic visions of world monarchy.⁸⁰ From the 1530s the classical mode became dominant, giving plenty of scope to glorify his victories as adulatory Roman triumphal arches took over civic entries.⁸¹ In classical vein Charles was Alexander the Great, Scipio Africanus, Constantine the Great, and, most often, Julius Caesar.⁸² When mortals paled he was compared with the heroes of pagan mythology, suitably moralized, Neptune or Hercules.⁸³ When crusading victories, whether against Muslims or Protestants, were to be stressed, as they often were after 1540, he might be paralleled with Godefroy de Bouillon, Ferdinand and Isabella, or, most frequently and elaborately, Charlemagne.⁸⁴ The visual arts of the Habsburg Netherlands also glorified princes at war. At court there were tapestries and paintings of Pavia, Tunis, and M¨uhlberg, a rock-crystal picture of Pavia, and medals for M¨uhlberg and Saint-Quentin.⁸⁵ Such items were rarely on public display, but inventories show that some individuals owned paintings of Charles’s victories, while prints and engravings, culminating in Hieronymus Cock’s twelve-print series of Charles’s victories, designed by Maarten van Heemskerck in heavily classicized style and printed three times in 1556–63, spread their themes more widely and in turn probably inspired the battle paintings displayed at civic entries.⁸⁶ Literary celebrations of victory were equally varied. Poems about Pavia ran the gamut of rh´etoriqueur forms, from popular songs through heraldic allegories and complaints placed in the mouth of Francis I to bilingual parodies in Latin and French.⁸⁷ Tunis ⁷⁸ Macqu´ereau, Chronicque, 149; Checa Cremades, Carlos V, 291–5; ROPB i. 42, vii. 168, 228. ⁷⁹ M¨uller, Gedechtnus, 211–38; Hale, Artists and Warfare, 97–105; Macqu´ereau, Chronicque, 35, 65, 84; Reygersbergh, Chronijcke, G4v , P2v . ⁸⁰ Checa Cremades, Carlos V ; Burke, ‘Presenting Charles V’. ⁸¹ Soly, ‘Plechtige intochten’, 345–54; Snoep, Praal en propaganda, 18–21; Arnade, ‘The Emperor and the City’. ⁸² Checa Cremades, Carlos V, 140–77, 196–215; Avila, Comentaries, T7r ; Brutus, De rebus a Carolo V gestis oratio; Soly, ‘Plechtige intochten’, 351. ⁸³ Checa Cremades, Carlos V, 238–44; Snoep, Praal en propaganda, 16–17. ⁸⁴ Snoep, Praal en propaganda, 16–17; Soly, ‘Plechtige intochten’, 351–2 ; Jacquot, ‘Panorama’, 449–50, 453–4; Checa Cremades, Carlos V, 144, 250; Avila, Comentaries, T7r ; Aventinus, Panegyrica oratio, A1v –B2v ; Burke, ‘Presenting Charles V’, 418–21. ⁸⁵ Checa Cremades, Carlos V, 226–7, 228–34; Eichberger, Leben mit Kunst, 175–6; ISN v. 154; Soly (ed.), Carolus, no. 138; Hill and Brooke, Guide, 96–7; Hill and Pollard, Medals, 124–5. ⁸⁶ Burke, ‘Presenting Charles V’, 445 ; Checa Cremades, Carlos V, 227, 233–4 ; Stock, Printing Images, 149–51, 347–8, 369 ; Rosier, ‘Victories of Charles V’, 24–38 ; Soenen, ‘Fˆetes a` Bruxelles’, 53; Snoep, Praal en propaganda, 15. ⁸⁷ Thiry, ‘L’Honneur et l’Empire’, 305–6.

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inspired a play from the rhetoricians of Valenciennes and, in answer to the question set by the Dordrecht chamber in 1552, ‘Who were the most victorious in times past?’, the Leiden rhetoricians wrote loyally about Charles.⁸⁸ Visual images of the ruler as a warrior were widely available. Admittedly the dissemination of the printed depictions of Maximilian and his victories seems to have been late and limited.⁸⁹ Medals cannot have circulated far, even when reproduced in scholarly printed collections.⁹⁰ Book-bindings may not have reached much further, though Antwerp binders from the 1530s often stamped them with a portrait of Charles V in armour and his Plus Oultre device.⁹¹ Statues, carved reliefs, and painted portraits, however, were widely displayed, for example on town halls and in some churches, and often seem to have shown Charles armed or even parading in triumph.⁹² Woodcut portraits produced at Antwerp and Amsterdam, the proliferation of which was encouraged by official refusal to grant copyright in them, showed him as often in armour as in civilian clothes.⁹³ Most widespread of all were coins. Every ruler from Maximilian to Philip II appeared crowned and in armour on larger denomination issues and the habit became more ingrained—and the armour more Roman—as time went by.⁹⁴ In their purses and all around them, Netherlanders were reminded of the martial calling of their princes. The image of the prince as a warrior was a familiar one in England too. In the Middle Ages good kings had been those successful in war—Edward I, Edward III, and Henry V—whilst those deposed were military failures.⁹⁵ Edward IV and Henry VII could both point to their repeated victories in battle as justifications for their kingship and both staged triumphal entries to London in celebration of them, Henry processing through the city to offer thanksgiving at St Paul’s cathedral in 1485, 1492, and 1497.⁹⁶ Henry VIII took things further. Early in his reign he planned war with France, resolving, in Polydore Vergil’s words, that it behoved him to enter upon his first military experience in so important and difficult a war in order that he might . . . create such a fine opinion about his valour among all men that they would clearly understand that his ambition was not merely to equal but indeed to exceed the glorious deeds of his ancestors.⁹⁷

Henry consciously modelled himself on Henry V, commissioning an English translation of his biography and apparently re-enacting some of his deeds.⁹⁸ At Tournai ⁸⁸ Livre de conduite, p. xix; Hummelen, Repertorium, 36. ⁸⁹ Colombier, ‘Triomphes en images’. ⁹⁰ BT 1300–2, 1304. ⁹¹ Voet, Golden Compasses, i, pl. 97; Biblioth`eque royale: reliures, i. 122–3. ⁹² Checa Cremades, Carlos V, 106–7, 177, 244, 281–7; Schuttelaars, Heren van de raad, 160; CLGS iii. 421; Bueren and Verbij-Schillings, ‘Een rijksgeschakeerde cultuur’, 235. ⁹³ Hoop Scheffer and Klant-Vlielander Hein, Vorstenportretten, nos. 4, 51–2, 55–6; Nijhoff, Nederlandsche houtsneden, iii, pl. 348–9, iv, pl. 319, 373; Stock, Printing Images, 347. ⁹⁴ Enno van Gelder, Hoc, Monnaies des Pays-Bas, 34, 41–2, 45, 48, 77, 83, 85, 87–8, 104–18, 124, pl. 6, 15, 17–18. ⁹⁵ Ormrod, Political Life, esp. 62–7. ⁹⁶ Ross, Edward IV, 41, 175; Guth, ‘Richard III’, 185–204; Great Chronicle, 247–8, 277, 283. ⁹⁷ Vergil, Anglica Historia, 197. ⁹⁸ First English Life of Henry the Fifth; Gunn, ‘French Wars’, 36–7.

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Henry acted the part of the triumphant conqueror, riding into the city in splendid armour under a silken canopy in a grand procession to knight his followers in the cathedral.⁹⁹ The events of the 1513 campaign were frequently recalled. In recounting English victories in France, Richard Morison picked out the battle of the Spurs, ascribing it to the ‘most noble and victorious King Henry the eighth’.¹⁰⁰ Paintings of the battle of the Spurs and other events of the campaign decorated Henry’s palaces.¹⁰¹ They set the tone for verses composed by Henry’s subjects in celebration of his ‘martial acts’.¹⁰² Henry was concerned his wars should be just: in 1512–14 tracts, Subsidy Act preambles, and instructions for musters all expounded the king’s duty to defend the church against the schismatic Louis XII and at various points he reflected carefully on his claims in France.¹⁰³ He also expressed enthusiasm for crusading in 1518—‘To strike a blow for Christendom has ever been the summit of our ambition’, he told the pope—and promised the Habsburgs £10,000 to help fight the Turks in Hungary in 1543.¹⁰⁴ But it was victory in France that made him an English warrior king, victory he sought again in 1544 to the acclaim of his subjects.¹⁰⁵ Yet even for Henry the martial image of kingship seems not to have been as important as for his Habsburg contemporaries. The most widely available portraits of him, on his coins and on the Bibles placed in parish churches from the 1530s, did not depict him in armour.¹⁰⁶ Jousting and other martial exercises loomed large in court life early in his reign, but the pageantry of his entries into London made little reference to war and the peace treaties of 1518 and 1527 called out more by way of pageants and orations than any of his victories. One triumphal arch with a depiction of the siege of Th´erouanne, aimed to tease the French ambassadors in 1527, seems to have been all Henry’s court could offer to rival Charles’s run of Roman triumphs. Henry’s later concerns were better represented by the battle staged on the Thames in 1539 in which the king’s barge overcame the pope’s.¹⁰⁷ The accession of a minor and two women to the English throne after 1547 limited martial kingship further. Edward VI, an enthusiastic archer and runner-at-thering, might have been presented as his father’s successor, smiting the Scots if only by proxy.¹⁰⁸ Instead, the paradigm adopted was that of the Old Testament: Edward became the reforming young Josiah, as religious imagery eclipsed the chivalric model of kingship.¹⁰⁹ Mary’s gender limited the martial exercises of her court and, while tournaments increased after her marriage, the English were unimpressed by Spanish martial sports.¹¹⁰ From 1556 Philip took on the military attributes in their dual ⁹⁹ Cruickshank, Army Royal, 150–1. ¹⁰⁰ Morison, Exhortation, C4. ¹⁰¹ Lloyd, Thurley, Henry VIII, 44–51, 120. ¹⁰² Gunn, ‘War, Dynasty’, 141. ¹⁰³ 4 Henry VIII, c. 19; TRP i. 65; BL, Add. MS 5758, fo. 165; Gunn, Government, 191; Gunn, ‘French Wars’, 37–9. ¹⁰⁴ LP III. i. 432; Scarisbrick, Henry VIII, 105–6; Ayris, ‘Last Crusade’; Kitching, ‘Broken Angels’. ¹⁰⁵ Gunn, ‘War, Dynasty’, 137–41. ¹⁰⁶ Lloyd, Thurley, Henry VIII, 32–6. ¹⁰⁷ Anglo, Spectacle, 108–280. ¹⁰⁸ Loach, Edward VI, 156–7. ¹⁰⁹ MacCulloch, Tudor Church Militant, 14–20, 35; Aston, King’s Bedpost, 26–36. ¹¹⁰ Machyn, Diary, 76, 84; Loades, Mary Tudor, 333–4.

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portraits and from 1557 his command in war transformed his relationship with the English aristocracy, but the gap between his strategic priorities and those of the English council presented problems.¹¹¹ Nor did Elizabeth, for all her Accession Day tilts, entirely succeed in reconciling female monarchy with the martial aspects of kingship. Despite her posing as her father’s heir, most notably at Tilbury in 1588, military leadership fell to the nobility, a process culminating in Essex’s rebellion.¹¹² The very survival of Tudor monarchy under such circumstances suggests that personal military credentials were not as central to English kingship as they seem to have been for the Habsburgs.

O B E D I E N C E , M U T I N Y, D E S E RT I O N , A N D T R E A S O N Military service brought subjects into a special relationship with their prince, one specified both by their receipt of his wages and by their subjection to martial law. Mutiny and desertion broke this relationship, but were they seen as the soldier’s response to a breach of contract by his employer or as a defiance of the prince’s authority? War also provided opportunities for betrayal of the subject’s obligations to prince and country in assisting their enemies, but how important was the punishment of such treason in asserting the prince’s control over his subject’s hearts and minds? The contractual nature of military service in fifteenth-century England made mutiny a recognized, if rare, means for soldiers to secure payment of their wages.¹¹³ Mutinies in early Tudor armies were another matter. The crown’s changing attitude is evident in the two mutinies of the English garrison in Tournai in 1515.¹¹⁴ The first, in February, was a negotiation of the traditional kind, ending with reassurances over new pay arrangements and the removal of an unpopular officer. The second, in October, was treated very differently. The leaders were arrested, six executed and two banished, the rank and file formally pardoned by the king: mutiny was being classed as treason. Soldiers seem to have grasped this. In the Guienne campaign of 1512, poor food and sickness made the troops uncontrollable, but in 1523 unrest stopped short of full-blown mutiny. The men evidently knew how seriously it would be taken, some arguing that ‘it was no worse being hanged in England than dying of cold in France’.¹¹⁵ Only in Ireland, over pay in 1536, did significant mutiny recur among English troops.¹¹⁶ Desertion too was harshly treated. In June 1513 Thomas Howard II planned to hang two deserters from his army at Portsmouth and advised the execution of others currently locked up in Hereford gaol.¹¹⁷ The poor victualling and irregular pay of the Scottish garrisons made things much worse by 1548–9, when nearly threequarters of Sir James Wylford’s 400 border horsemen deserted and the earl of Rutland ¹¹¹ ¹¹² ¹¹³ ¹¹⁵ ¹¹⁶

Redworth, ‘ ‘‘Matters Impertinent to Women’’ ’; Richards, ‘Mary Tudor’. McLaren, Political Culture, 143–50; Green, ‘ ‘‘I My Self ’’ ’. Grummitt, Calais Garrison, ch. 5. ¹¹⁴ Cruickshank, Tournai, 68–73, 77–80. Cruickshank, Army Royal, 4; Gunn, ‘March on Paris’, 623–5. Bradshaw, Irish Constitutional Revolution, 106–17. ¹¹⁷ LP I. ii. 1978.

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had to stage exemplary executions.¹¹⁸ Such incidents account for the proclamations and statutes on military discipline issued in the late 1540s and 1550s. In 1548, for example, an Act prescribed imprisonment for those who sold horses and harness provided for their service in the king’s wars and made desertion a felony without benefit of clergy.¹¹⁹ A series of proclamations in 1548–9 ordered soldiers and sailors to join their units or face arrest.¹²⁰ Mary’s reign brought further problems and drastic solutions. One East Anglian man refused to lead a company of local levies, whilst in Canterbury a man was hanged for saying ‘he would serve the French King before he would serve the Queen’s Majesty’.¹²¹ Proclamations of 1558 ordered captains to their posts and invoked martial law against those deserting service after they had been enrolled or those evading naval impressment.¹²² Little is known about the exercise of discipline within early Tudor armies, though ordinances of war were printed and distributed to captains at the start of each major campaign and presumably implemented by the marshals and their staffs; oaths to obey the ordinances seem to have been introduced about the middle of the sixteenth century.¹²³ In practice it was neither harsh punishments nor statutory provisions that held units together, but the sense of camaraderie vital to all armed forces. The chivalric concept of the ‘fellowship in arms’ persisted into this period in noble affinities and among men who had shared defining experiences such as the defence of Haddington castle in 1548–9.¹²⁴ It embraced those who proved themselves worthy of their fellows’ trust, but rejected those who did not. In 1523 Lord Berners had to explain to Wolsey that he could not appoint a servant of the cardinal to a post in the Calais garrison, because when his ship boarded a French vessel in the Channel, Wolsey’s man would not fight alongside the Calais soldiers present but ‘ran under the hatches and durst never look up till all was done’.¹²⁵ Wartime treason seems rarely to have been an issue in England beyond a few conspicuous cases. William, Lord Dacre, warden of the west March towards Scotland, was tried for treason in 1534 on the grounds that in the recent war he had made private truces with certain Scottish lords and communities. He was acquitted but still paid heavily for a pardon. In fact such agreements had been known in the past, but had not been treated as treasonable. What made Henry VIII sensitive about Dacre’s conduct was its coincidence with the crisis over the break with Rome.¹²⁶ A plot to surrender Calais in 1540 was likewise driven by loyalty to the papacy rather than affection for the French.¹²⁷ Yorkist conspiracy and religious dissent produced far more treason trials and executions under Henry VII and Henry VIII than did sympathy for Scotland and France. Even the show trial of Thomas, Lord Wentworth, after his surrender of Calais to the French in 1558 resulted in acquittal.¹²⁸ As we shall see, ¹¹⁸ ¹¹⁹ ¹²¹ ¹²³ ¹²⁴ ¹²⁵ ¹²⁶ ¹²⁸

Philips, Anglo-Scots Wars, 185–6; Kesselring, Mercy and Authority, 154. 2 & 3 Edward VI, c. 2; Bush, Government Policy, 132. ¹²⁰ TRP i. 298, 314, 350. Davies, ‘England and the French War’, 179–83. ¹²² TRP ii. 438, 442, 444, 449. Cruickshank, Army Royal, 94–104. Walker, Lancastrian Affinity, 55–7; Fulwel, Flower of Fame, fos. 51–4. PRO, SP1/18, fo. 18r – v (LP III. ii. 2803). Miller, Henry VIII, 51–7; Ellis, Tudor Frontiers, 198–205. ¹²⁷ Smith, Treason, 5–11. Bindoff, Commons, iii. 585–6.

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seditious words that undermined the war effort were an issue in early Tudor England, but aiding the enemy more directly was scarcely ever so. Service in the armies of the Habsburgs imposed a special relationship with the prince on significant numbers of their subjects in the Netherlands. To ensure that they fulfilled their duty to maintain ‘the honour and reputation of their prince’, and not to abandon him to danger ‘for the sake of their private affairs and pleasures’, cavalrymen, infantrymen, and even pioneers and carters were sworn to serve him loyally and obey their captain and the ordinances of war, then entered on muster rolls with their names, nicknames, places of origin and details of their horses or equipment.¹²⁹ An exasperated captain might simply take his sword to wayward subordinates, but behind him stood the marshal of the army and his executive officer, the provost marshal.¹³⁰ Provost marshals and their lieutenants were constantly active, chasing deserters and pillagers and following the bandes d’ordonnance around their billets enquiring about their conduct, but their staffs were small and their job demanding.¹³¹ In July 1554 Thierry de Herlaer hanged seventeen plundering Spaniards and six Germans in one day. The next unit he visited shot at him and lodged a complaint with the emperor. He was duly arrested and imprisoned, Mary of Hungary explaining to Charles that they must act against him, given ‘the need Your Majesty has of his men of war’.¹³² Arrangements more suitable to the Habsburgs’ polyglot armies were introduced thereafter, with captains of justice to arrest offenders, backed by four lieutenants of different nationalities, separate German and Spanish disciplinary hierarchies, and dedicated provost marshals for several frontier provinces.¹³³ In the Netherlands mutiny seems to have been a problem primarily with German and Spanish units. Non-payment was the commonest cause, when soldiers’ patience ran out and Germans in particular, used to a culture of feud to redress private debt, took what was owed them from the lands and subjects of their employer.¹³⁴ It was in the prince’s interest to return mutinous troops to the military task in hand and end their embarrassing demonstration of his impotence in the face of organized defiance; it was in mutineers’ interest to forget their mutiny once its aims were met; yet in a sense mutiny served both their purposes in demonstrating the power of the state’s military arm to harm its civilian subjects if they did not provide the wherewithal to keep it in good order.¹³⁵ Prevention was better than cure: hence the instructions of the 1550s for Rottmeister, leaders of small groups of men within landsknecht companies, to be selected by muster commissioners rather than chosen by their comrades, to ‘improve the obedience of the men of war’ and avoid ‘any recalcitrance, murmuring, or mutiny’.¹³⁶ Cure tested the skills of the most experienced commanders, left ¹²⁹ ROPB ii. 169–70, v. 391, vi. 366, 469, vii. 179–80, 198, 206–9, 248–9, 266, 348. ¹³⁰ ISN iii. 35, 128. ¹³¹ Smolar-Meynart, Justice ducale, 357–61; Nicolay, ‘Kalendrier’, 348–9, 382–3; Lettres in´edites, i. 18–19; Macqu´ereau, Chronicque, 58; ROPB i. 581, ii. 405–7, vi. 353, vii. 38, 62, 397. ¹³² ‘Dagverhaal’, 280–1; Weert, ‘Chronycke’, 156. ¹³³ ROPB vi. 474, vii. 197–200, 418–19; Domeingoederen, 350; ISN iii. 119. ¹³⁴ Schaumburg, Geschichten, 144; M¨oller, Regiment der Landsknechte, 80–4. ¹³⁵ Guyon, M´emoires, 45, 55. ¹³⁶ M¨oller, Regiment der Landsknechte, 50–1; ROPB vii. 266–7.

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to choose between exemplary punishment and exhortation, appeasement, even flight.¹³⁷ Rather than mutiny, native Netherlanders tended to ‘privily . . . depart’, perhaps to sign on with another captain, an offence checked by the issue of passports and regular musters.¹³⁸ Pioneers in the 1550s were especially susceptible, making off with tools and building materials.¹³⁹ Absconding was punishable by death or, for the cavalry, more sensitive to points of honour, ritual degradation, but soldiers were more useful back with the colours than hanged and public beatings of deserters seem to have been much commoner than executions.¹⁴⁰ General recalls were often ordered, but the response was apathetic—at Mons in 1521, ‘no one took much notice of the said publication, for no one moved’—and special measures were sometimes taken to remove fugitives from Antwerp, Brussels, or the Zeeland ports.¹⁴¹ Much worse was desertion to the enemy by those who had sworn loyalty to the Habsburgs and taken their wages. Renegades were regularly hanged or beheaded if caught, both on the northern and southern borders.¹⁴² Fortunate indeed was the prisoner about to be hanged for side-changing in 1525 who was pardoned by the marquis of Aarschot to celebrate the news of Pavia.¹⁴³ Passing information to the enemy or joining enemy forces attacking the Netherlands also brought execution.¹⁴⁴ In September 1542 Adrien de Cro¨y-Roeulx advised Mary of Hungary to order local authorities to execute ‘as many Low Germans as may be found returning home, principally those speaking the Brabantine or Flemish tongue’, for it was likely they had been with Maarten van Rossum; in Brabant men from Mechelen, Limburg, and Zeeland were duly put to death.¹⁴⁵ Even soldiers from Guelders caught raiding Habsburg territory in 1511 were treated as bandits and hanged, sometimes after torture, for the Habsburg claim to overlordship of Guelders accounted them rebels.¹⁴⁶ Plots to betray towns or fortresses brought arrests and executions throughout the period and usually involved civilians as well as soldiers.¹⁴⁷ At Tournai in 1527 sixteen plotters were decapitated in the marketplace. One old man died for his failure to report his son’s saying the town would soon be French.¹⁴⁸ In 1542 at Antwerp more than a hundred inhabitants were arrested on suspicion of planning to betray the town. Once the siege was over, some were quartered in the marketplace and others banished.¹⁴⁹ Spying or acting as a guide for the enemy brought regular executions of civilians along the border with France, nine in Flanders and Artois in autumn ¹³⁷ Schaumburg, Geschichten, 88, 127–8, 140–50, 196; Massarette, Mansfeld, i. 38, 40–1. ¹³⁸ LP IV. i. 187; ROPB ii. 110, 118, iii. 539, 544, iv. 459–60, v. 391–2, vi. 256, 315–16, 366–8, 431–2, vii. 391–3. ¹³⁹ ROPB vi. 486–7, vii. 248–9, 348–9, 353–4, 365–6. ¹⁴⁰ ROPB vi. 473; Henne, Histoire, iii. 66 n., 156 n. ¹⁴¹ ROPB iv. 414, vii. 252–3, 417–19; Lusy, Journal, 190. ¹⁴² Henne, Histoire, i. 181, iii. 66 n.; Lusy, Journal, 370; ISN viii. 305. ¹⁴³ Macqu´ereau, Chronicque, 144 ¹⁴⁴ ‘Veldtogt’, 331. ¹⁴⁵ Henne, Histoire, vii. 359 n., 362. ¹⁴⁶ Ibid. i. 279, 287. ¹⁴⁷ Br´esin, Chroniques, 15–16, 60, 73; Lusy, Journal, 28, Macqu´ereau, Chronicque, 196, 200, 205, 207; ‘Vlaamsche kronyk’, 295–6; Thieulaine, ‘Extraits’, 177, 180. ¹⁴⁸ Macqu´ereau, Histoire, 15; Barre, Journal, 253–6. ¹⁴⁹ SAA, Pk1560/1; Weert, ‘Chronycke’, 114.

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1542 alone.¹⁵⁰ In August 1526, drunkenly shouting ‘long live the king of France’ was enough to earn a public beating at the crossroads of Namur.¹⁵¹ Occasionally there was mercy for those caught helplessly between rival forces, but more often exemplary punishment—the display of severed heads or quarters, hanging corpses upside-down, scaffold speeches by notable traitors, the proclamation of sentences abusing enemy kings—aimed to internalize an abhorrence for treason.¹⁵² Perhaps such internalization produced unbearable remorse in the Valenciennes priest who drowned himself in June 1528 after selling the castle of Solre-le-Chˆateau to the French.¹⁵³ The Netherlands’ extensive land borders and many jurisdictional uncertainties make it no surprise that wartime treason was a much more significant issue there than in England. But two additional factors drove on these violent assertions of the Habsburgs’ claims on their subjects’ loyalties. The first was the widespread if intermittent civil war of 1477–92. Both sides readily executed or massacred their opponents, who could for example be seen as traitors against Philip the Fair and his Flemish regents if fighting for Maximilian and traitors against Philip the Fair and his guardian Maximilian if fighting for the Flemings.¹⁵⁴ Holland too saw treason executions for captured combatants, while fines, banishments, and confiscations of goods chastised those who were too powerful, insignificant, or innocent to execute.¹⁵⁵ Those who opposed Maximilian’s troops were liable to execution even when the soldiers were in the wrong.¹⁵⁶ In such conditions civil and military justice began to overlap and the practices of foreign captains added to the ferocity with which disloyalty was punished. In 1489 at Bergues, a Piedmontese captain had three soldiers who had plotted to sell the town to the French laid naked on a table. Their genitals were cut off and thrown to the dogs, their hearts likewise and then they were beheaded. That, he said, was what they did to traitors where he came from.¹⁵⁷ Secondly, Habsburg claims were driven throughout the period by competition with the French monarchy. At French-garrisoned Tournai, in ten months in 1477–8, there were twelve executions of renegades, spies, enemy guides, and men making derogatory comments about Louis XI, many of them natives or residents of the Netherlands.¹⁵⁸ At Lille, one of the towns most closely engaged in the war against Tournai, there were twelve beheadings in one day of soldiers who had deserted to the French.¹⁵⁹ Such figures make it quite possible that in our period the authorities in the Netherlands executed more of their subjects for wartime disloyalty than for heresy.¹⁶⁰ It would be hard to find a clearer demonstration of the role of war in the attempt to consolidate the power of the prince over his people. ¹⁵⁰ Lusy, Journal, 192, 351–3; Henne, Histoire, iii. 221 n., vii. 359 n., viii. 92–3, x. 198 n. ¹⁵¹ Henne, Histoire, iv. 121 n. ¹⁵² Muchembled, Violence, 107–8; Macqu´ereau, Histoire, 30; CSP Spanish 1534–5, 404. ¹⁵³ Macqu´ereau, Histoire, 86. ¹⁵⁴ Willems, ‘Militaire organisatie’, 277–8. ¹⁵⁵ Aurelius, Cronycke, fos. 401r , 404r ; CLGS i. 192–3, 200, 225–6, 231, 233, 272, ii. 465, iv. 77. ¹⁵⁶ Vinchant, Hainaut, v. 71–2. ¹⁵⁷ Ibid. 104. ¹⁵⁸ Nicolay, ‘Kalendrier’, 53, 65–6, 92, 107, 112, 185, 213, 226. ¹⁵⁹ Ibid. 184. ¹⁶⁰ Israel, Dutch Republic, 100.

18 Information and Response If subjects were to be stirred up to support their prince in war, they had to be told of his military activity. The reception of such news and the celebration it evoked may tell us much about how military activity was mediated to public opinion and how that opinion responded. P RO PAG A N D A , N EW S , A N D I N F O R M AT I O N In England in the fourteenth and fifteenth centuries rulers often sent out manuscript newsletters describing their wars and this tradition persisted into our period.¹ Henry VII circulated accounts of his campaigns and lists of his armies in the 1490s and Philip and Mary apparently did the same in 1557–8, while private newsletters from Henry VIII’s campaigns were circulated by the recipients.² Printed news was added to this repertoire from the 1540s. In 1542 the commanders of the Scottish campaign were told to send news quickly to London for wider dissemination. By 1544 the crown was sponsoring the printing of official news sheets and banning independent ones.³ Some of the pamphlets produced were, as on the continent, printings of private letters, amplifying manuscript circulation.⁴ None the less, it was not until the Northern Rising of 1569–70 that anything stimulated the sort of torrent of publications in England that major events produced in France, Germany, or the Netherlands before 1559.⁵ Rather more impressive was the developing range of printed vernacular chronicles, above all Edward Hall’s publication of 1548 with its detailed accounts of Henry VIII’s campaigns. A more targeted use for information was to encourage tax-paying and to this end taxation statutes and proclamations often echoed one another closely. In 1496, for instance, Henry VII’s proclamation declaring war on Scotland denounced the ‘great cruelty to man, woman and child’ done by the Scottish king and the preamble to the Subsidy Act explained that he had ‘done great hurt . . . murdering of your liege people and true subjects, men, women and children’.⁶ Such material was increasingly often printed for wider circulation.⁷ The beginning of Henry VIII’s reign brought a more ¹ Allmand, Hundred Years War, 139. ² Great Chronicle, 247, 278–81; YCR ii. 94–6; NUL, MiDc7, fos. 75v –76r ; CUL, Hengrave MS 88(iii), nos. 93, 93B; SHC, LM1943; LP I. ii. 2102, 2227. ³ LP XVII. 1016; TRP i. 229. ⁴ LP XIX. 533. ⁵ Shaaber, Forerunners of the Newspaper, 114–16. ⁶ 12 Hen VII, c. 12; TRP i. 34. ⁷ Elton, ‘Sessional Printing’; Heinze, Proclamations, 21–4.

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comprehensive print campaign. In 1512 the Subsidy Act, including a long preamble denouncing Louis XII, was printed and issued as a proclamation.⁸ The same year two tracts were printed by the king’s printer justifying war with France, one a scholarly argument in Latin portraying Louis as a schismatic usurper, the other in English verse playing on popular dislike of the French.⁹ Government printing faltered in the 1520s, however, as the crown, perhaps constrained by the comparatively low capacity of the English press, returned to oral communication of its needs by well-briefed tax commissioners.¹⁰ When official publication expanded again, the great stimulus was not war, but the religious and political crisis of the 1530s.¹¹ Even when Henry and Somerset embarked on a concerted campaign to justify their newly aggressive Scottish policy in the 1540s, the intended audience was as much the Scots as the English.¹² The Habsburgs were equally concerned that their subjects should know what was happening in their wars. Town councils were informed by letter of campaigns near at hand and far away, from Austria in the 1480s through Hungary and Italy in the 1520s to Italy in the 1550s.¹³ Sometimes detailed information was included, such as the list of French prisoners taken at Pavia.¹⁴ Requests for taxation and other public announcements related to war also contained some justification of the conflict.¹⁵ Printed polemical material justifying wars or exhorting subjects to support the ruler was produced in ever increasing volume, exploiting the extensive printing facilities available in the Low Countries. Already in 1477–8 Maximilian and Mary were able to have a 40-folio tract in French printed at Bruges, reviewing Franco-Burgundian relations from the murder of John the Fearless to the cruelty, perfidy, and ambition of Louis XI.¹⁶ A Latin tract from Leuven, an acrostic song based on Mary’s name, and a Dutch play were part of the same wave of material.¹⁷ The next great burst of propaganda publishing in the Netherlands was occasioned by Charles V’s need to justify his quarrels with Clement VII and Francis I in 1527–9. The resulting pamphlets operated in a range of registers from humanist Latin in crisp italic typeface to vernacular works in small gothic, even French and Dutch abridgements of the exchange between Charles and Francis in 1528 boiled down from twelve leaves of text to four.¹⁸ The Habsburgs clearly wanted to sway not only international but also domestic, vernacular public opinion: one Dutch translator commented that those now able to read official documents for themselves would be astonished at how dishonourable they showed Francis to be.¹⁹ The war of 1536 produced further ⁸ 4 Hen VIII, c. 19; TRP i. 65. ⁹ Gardyners Passetaunce, 18–20, 27–8. ¹⁰ Thornton, ‘Propaganda’, 49; Anglo, Images, 120–1; PRO, E34/1B/1; Bernard, Hoyle, ‘Instructions’. ¹¹ Gunn, Government, 190–3. ¹² Merriman, ‘War and Propaganda’; Compleynt of Scotland. ¹³ Inventaire Ypres, iv. 180, v. 256–7, vii. 205, 230–1, 294; Lusy, Journal, 201–2, 204, 229, 313; ROPB iii. 7–8. ¹⁴ Inventaire Ypres, vii. 231. ¹⁵ ROPB ii. 128–9, iv. 25–6, 468, 473–4, v. 51–2; Inventaire Gand, no. 1109; AMV, AA304. ¹⁶ Recueil de pi`eces historiques, i. 213–62. ¹⁷ Ibid. i. 347–8; Van de dood van Karel de Stoute, 52; Duyse, Rederijkkamers, ii. 124. ¹⁸ NK 582–3, 700, 1263–7, 1269, 1352, 1483, 1624–5, 3297, 3384, 3495–6, 3978, 4268. ¹⁹ Den ontsegghe vande[n] Coninck van Vranckrijck, A1v .

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material, but it was the quarrel over Guelders in 1541–3 and the accompanying war with France that gave rise to Charles’s most sustained campaign of self-justification.²⁰ Parallel editions in Latin, Dutch, and French were produced even of lengthy expositions of Charles’s title to Guelders, backed with appendices of historical documents, and once again shorter versions were also available.²¹ The presses rolled on through the Schmalkaldic War, the Interim, and Charles’s last war with the French and the German Protestants, with some shift eastwards from Antwerp and Leuven to Deventer, Leeuwarden, and Nijmegen, nearer to the scene of these events.²² Alongside official publications came a growing market for popular newsprint. Between 1500 and 1540 Antwerp became a major European news publishing centre, printing mainly in Dutch but also in French and Latin.²³ The conflict with the Ottomans was a significant theme, especially the campaigns in Austria and Hungary of 1526–32 and the Tunis expedition of 1535.²⁴ Pavia first made the Habsburg– Valois struggle a major topic.²⁵ But it was the interconnected wars of 1542–4, covered in very frequent low-quality four-leaf octavo pamphlets by a few specialist printers, that brought a new intensity.²⁶ The immediacy of events in and around the Netherlands added particular interest.²⁷ Maarten van Rossum’s repulse from Leuven in 1542, for example, was hailed in a range of publications from popular songs through news pamphlets to Latin works laden with classical parallels.²⁸ Popular anger and anxiety were readily focused in such publications on ‘the tyrannous wolf Maarten van Rossum’.²⁹ As Charles marched to save the Netherlands, expectations and gratitude were readily focused on ‘the Imperial Majesty with great armies on foot and on horseback’ whose approach was ‘true, happy news’.³⁰ Even the cheapest pamphlets displayed fervent if unsophisticated loyalty to Charles, ‘that noble blood who has always victoriously had victory’, and urged readers to pray for his success against his enemies.³¹ Though it is hazardous to judge the market by surviving copies, which are often unique, and while sales may have been depressed by the poor economic situation of the 1550s, it seems the excitement of 1542–4 was not recaptured in the following decades.³² Even the conquests of Hesdin and Th´erouanne in 1553 and the battle of Saint-Quentin in 1557 only gave rise to one surviving news pamphlet each, a ²⁰ NK 1781–3; Recueil oft verhael van sommige brieven, A1r . ²¹ BT 42, 179, 204, 226–8, 309, 416, 2045–6, 4051, 4068, 5139–40, 5187, 7141, 7809, 7823, 8604. ²² BT 826, 1691, 1693–6, 3936, 4832, 6046, 6114, 8607–9; TB 332, 2634, 3852, 4080, 5167, 5398, 5469, 5477. ²³ Voet, ‘Abraham Verhoeven’, 11–14. ²⁴ Mout, ‘Turken’, 371–6; ILC 502–3, 894; NK 1268, 2077, 3301–2, 3324, 3329. ²⁵ NK 234, 258, 1960, 2384–5, 4413. ²⁶ Voet, ‘Abraham Verhoeven’, 29–37; BT 1016, 1182, 2263, 4067, 4300, 5764, 6400, 6404–7, 7163, 7951, 8079bis, 8090, 8353–4, 8396–7, 8419, 8474, 8494, 8618, 8811, 8813, 8820, 8825, 8858, 9055, 9236, 9376, 9379, 9382–4, 9388, 9412–13; TB 5477. ²⁷ BT 247, 1006, 2045–6, 2219, 4849, 4854, 6399, 6408, 6975, 7164, 7166, 8395; TB 5469. ²⁸ Wissing, ‘ ‘‘Kinders’’ ’, 239–43; BT 1899, 2187, 4547, 6715. ²⁹ BT 1325, 6408. ³⁰ BT 9376. ³¹ Sekere nieuwe copie vanden Coninck va[n] Vrankerijck, A2r , A4v . ³² BT 1154, 2142, 2212, 2213, 3943, 4554, 4921, 5674, 6403, 8814, 8823, 8826, 8840, 9164.

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remarkable contrast with the booming expansion of French current affairs publishing in the same period.³³ Many genres beside news pamphlets dealt with war and peace. The texts of peace treaties were often printed, as sometimes were mere summaries of the main points.³⁴ Poems and songs celebrated Pavia and other battles and even Francis I’s declaration of war in 1528 was rendered into dramatic verse.³⁵ Latin prose histories dealt with military events in Hainaut, Holland, Guelders, Italy, and North Africa from the 1510s to the 1550s.³⁶ The Schmalkaldic War could be relived through Luis de Avila y Zu˜niga’s account, printed in 1550 at Antwerp in Spanish, French, Dutch and Latin.³⁷ Vernacular chronicles of various lengths tackled recent events, while for those in need of a rapid revision course, Willem Vorsterman of Antwerp offered in 1527 abridged chronicles of the last fourteen years of war between Christian princes plus a song in praise of the emperor, all in only four leaves.³⁸ Less immediate, but still relevant, were the conflicts of 1477–82 recounted in the narrative of Maximilian’s ‘wonderful wars’ printed in 1531 and 1540: though critical of Maximilian at times, this wholeheartedly endorsed his struggle to preserve the Burgundian legacy against the machinations of the French.³⁹ Finally, depictions of besieged towns from Algiers and Parma to SaintQuentin and Th´erouanne multiplied in the 1540s and 1550s.⁴⁰ Compared with their neighbours across the North Sea, literate Netherlanders had access to an astonishing range of information about their princes’ wars, generally presented so as to set those princes and wars in the best possible light. The impact made by such material is what we must now try to investigate. RECEPTION Historical debate on the effectiveness of communication between prince and subject in the Netherlands has centred on the civic entry. As hero-worship of the prince swept away the old moral dialogue, it has been argued, so town elites vaunted their superiority by stuffing their pageants with obscure classical allusions defined by Latin inscriptions. The populace could not be expected to learn much from tableaux like that described at Valenciennes in 1549 as ‘an infinity of personages and inscriptions concerning several significations . . . truly to awaken curious minds’. Commoners’ role was to work on the displays or walk in the procession if required, avoid drunkenness and insolence, and refrain from damaging the decorations on pain of having a ³³ BT 2215, 8827–8; Seguin, Information en France, 123–7. ³⁴ Recueil de pi`eces historiques, i. 286–9; ILC 1715–16, 2107–8; NK 3887, 3943, 4281, 01281; BT 694, 8088. ³⁵ Thiry, ‘L’Honneur et l’Empire’, 322; BT 247, 1006, 3995, 4485, 4558, 4849; Recueil de chansons, i. 47–53, iv. 22–7; Wissing, ‘ ‘‘Kinders’’ ’, 235–6. ³⁶ NK 518–19, 1037; BT 675, 2042, 4151–2. ³⁷ BT 215–18. ³⁸ NK 161, 651–60, 1296; BT 253–5, 1740, 4156, 4656; TB 2964–71. ³⁹ Vlaenderen, ‘Verhalende bronnen’. ⁴⁰ Nijhoff, Nederlandsche houtsneden, iii, pls. 94–5, 216–19; Riggs, Hieronymus Cock, 280–7; Tooley, ‘Maps in Italian Atlases’; Pognon, ‘Plans des villes grav´es’, 13–19; Voet, ‘Abraham Verhoeven’, 25.

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hand cut off.⁴¹ Yet this view may be too pessimistic. Wide sections of the population must have been able to grasp the basic messages about the God-given power and victories of the prince. Some elites did make efforts to bring more complex lessons home. At Tournai in 1549 the parallel between David, anointed by Samuel, and Charles, crowned by the pope, as victors over God’s enemies, was brought home by French verse inscriptions in letters half a finger high ‘to give the people understanding of the said story’.⁴² The message of the entries was diffused more widely by the printing of programmes and descriptions of pageants, sponsored by towns from at least 1508.⁴³ Here such works joined the large corpus of local publications about more distant Habsburg ceremonial—a riot of coronations, marriages, funerals, obsequies, and triumphs, in which Charles V’s spectacular progress around Europe in the 1530s loomed large— and the other genres we have discussed.⁴⁴ Such works were affordable, if not cheap, to those likely to be literate: Albrecht D¨urer paid one stuiver for the programme of Charles V’s entry to Antwerp in 1520 and a pamphlet has been variously reckoned to cost one-third or one-eighth the daily wage of a skilled worker.⁴⁵ They could still be read years after the event, chroniclers referring their readers to them and noblemen keeping them in their libraries, while illustrated programmes or etchings such as Frans Floris’s Victory surrounded by prisoners of 1552 might perpetuate the entries’ visual impact.⁴⁶ Printed news material of all sorts was copied into manuscript collections, sent to relatives in distant provinces, and held in stock in bookshops decades after publication.⁴⁷ Chroniclers and rhetorician poets often drew on it and occasional annotations and underlinings in surviving copies suggest close reading and engagement with the argument.⁴⁸ The reception of government publications was further facilitated by their calculated accessibility. Some printed ordinances were explicitly designed for posting in public places such as church doors, town halls, court houses, market halls, and town gates.⁴⁹ Most concerned the coinage and heresy, but some, increasing from the early 1540s, expounded the reasons for war and taxation or regulated military obligations, fortifications, wartime food supplies, shipping and trade, the assembly and behaviour

⁴¹ Soly, ‘Plechtige intochten’, 349–54. ⁴² Barre, Journal, 339–40. ⁴³ Soly, ‘Plechtige intochten’, 353; Elslander, ‘Chambres de rh´etorique’, 282. ⁴⁴ ILC 454, 489, 491, 1001, 1564; NK 48, 52, 429, 552–4, 606, 617, 629, 661–2, 745, 761–3, 965, 979–80, 1100, 1162–3, 1166, 1634, 1650, 1959, 2027–8, 2074–6, 2079, 2522, 2724–5, 2840, 3215, 3327–8, 3376–7, 3606, 3981, 3983; BT 2021, 6273. ⁴⁵ Voet, ‘Abraham Verhoeven’, 19; Soly, ‘Plechtige intochten’, 348; Duke, ‘Dissident Propaganda’, 124. A stuiver was one-twentieth of a Flemish pound of 40 groats. ⁴⁶ Reyggersbergh, Cronijcke, S3v ; Gegevens betreffende bezit, 22–3; Riggs, Hieronymus Cock, 134, 151. ⁴⁷ Recueil de pi`eces historiques, i. 214–15, 348; Bocquet, Ballades, 14, 28; Hartgerink-Koomans, Ewsum, 137; Gegevens betreffende bezit, 549, 554, 558. ⁴⁸ Lusy, Journal, pp. xcvii–cii; Macqu´ereau, Chronicque, 156–7, 164, 171–2; id., Histoire, 66–7, 86–8, 198–9, 234–5; Mout, ‘Turken’, 374; Reygersbergh, Cronijcke, U3r ; Recueil de pi`eces historiques, i. 216, ii. 143–81. ⁴⁹ ROPB ii. 106–7, 274, 376, 426, iv. 25–6, 390–1, v. 23, 51–2, vi. 233, 457, vii. 192, 211.

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of troops and carters, or the expulsion of foreign subjects.⁵⁰ And from the later 1540s such material was being printed in separate editions at Leeuwarden and Nijmegen, drawing the newer provinces into a more uniform world of Habsburg textual authority.⁵¹ Yet any material, even accounts of Habsburg triumphs, could take on a life of its own in the hands of readers. Some referred back in later decades to the ‘great books’ describing Philip’s reception at Antwerp in 1549 with ambivalence or even revulsion at its extravagance and the way the king was treated ‘almost like a god . . . as the pictures and descriptions show’.⁵² Printed material blended with other sources of information to shape people’s views of current events. Declarations of war, truces, and peace treaties were publicly proclaimed, sometimes simultaneously in every frontier town, sometimes in the presence of local notables with trumpets to attract attention.⁵³ Town councils were told that good news from the Italian front was to be ‘propounded to the people’, disseminated through the parish clergy ‘so that everyone might take courage’, while word of distant victories was also announced to the army on campaign.⁵⁴ The hopeful list of 6,400 German horsemen sent to help Maximilian, found on a Flemish peasant captured by the Tournai garrison in October 1477, presumably also came from an official source.⁵⁵ Such material might confirm or correct the rumours that circulated about battles, reinforcements, or the deaths of commanders and princes.⁵⁶ For wars, even distant wars, seem to have been a frequent topic of discussion and reflection. Provincial chroniclers followed Charles V’s crusading efforts and events in Italy and Germany as well as in other provinces of the Netherlands.⁵⁷ Chronograms, fashionably encoding the date of significant events, were composed in Latin and Dutch not only for local victories in 1542–3 and 1553 but also for Pavia, Algiers, and the Schmalkaldic War.⁵⁸ At Antwerp the story circulated that Charles had miraculously found a bountiful spring of fresh water at Tunis beneath a gilded wooden cross.⁵⁹ At B´ethune in 1537, an argument between youths about the size of the French army encamped before Hesdin ended in a killing.⁶⁰ At Lille in 1543, men argued ⁵⁰ BT 2347–8, 2350–61, 2370, 2379–80, 2385–6, 2392–3, 2403–13, 2419, 2431–3, 7243–4, 7246, 7248, 7250–2, 9433–4, 9447–8, 9453; TB 5794–5, 5829, 5835, 5840, 5871–4. ⁵¹ TB 5811, 5826–7, 5830, 5832–4, 5836, 5839, 5843–4, 5848, 5851–2, 5857, 5863–4, 5870, 5875–6, 5878, 5885. ⁵² Weert, ‘Chronycke’, 128; Eppens, Kroniek, i. 107, 119. ⁵³ AMV, AA148, 276; Lusy, Journal, 256, 258; Thieulaine, ‘Extraits’, 143; ROPB iv. 396, 402–3, vi. 457. ⁵⁴ Inventaire Ypres, vii. 230; AMD, EE60; Gailliard, ‘Processi¨en generael’, 1885–6; ‘Veldtogt’, 318. ⁵⁵ Nicolay, ‘Kalendrier’, 151–2. ⁵⁶ Weert, ‘Chronycke’, 117, 125; Thieulaine, ‘Extraits’, 181, 190; Macqu´ereau, Chronicque, 215. ⁵⁷ Aurelius, Cronycke, Bb1r –Bb3r , Cc1v , Dd6r –Ee1r , q1v , r3v , r4v , s3r –t4r , u1r –x1v ; Reygersbergh, Cronijcke, T3v , U2v –3r , Y2r ; Macqu´ereau, Histoire, 89; Lusy, Journal, 315, 332; Thieulaine, ‘Extraits’, 144–7, 151–3, 160, 165, 167–8, 170, 171–3, 175–7, 180, 182–3; ‘Vlaamsche kronyk’, 289–90. ⁵⁸ Recueil de chansons, iii. 21, 100; Reygersbergh, Cronijcke, Q4v , Y4r , Aa2r , Aa4v ; Soly (ed.), Charles V, 180. ⁵⁹ Weert, ‘Chronycke’, 106. ⁶⁰ Muchembled, Violence, 236.

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outside the town weigh-house about the defeat of the army of Cleves.⁶¹ But it was dangerous to spread bad news. Jean Finet, brewer at the sign of the Elephant in Tournai, was arrested in 1537 for making ‘remarks unfitting for a subject of His Imperial Majesty’: telling people that Charles’s army in Provence was short of food and the emperor’s fate unknown and that everyone knew the siege of Th´erouanne would fail. He was repeatedly interrogated, at one point under torture for an hour and a half, but would not confess and was at length released.⁶² In a society as cosmopolitan and an economy as widely connected as that of the Netherlands, it would never be easy to exclude the enemy’s point of view from such discussions. Around 1500 the dense urban network of the French borderlands provided pathways along which rhetoricians and their texts passed between neutral Cambrai, French Tournai, Saint-Pol, and P´eronne and Habsburg Arras, Douai, Lille, and Mons.⁶³ Tournai in particular carried on a lively dialogue with the towns in Habsburg obedience all around it. In 1477–9 poems came in denouncing Louis XI’s tyranny and celebrating Guinegatte, but poems came out mocking Maximilian and the exchanges continued through the Flemish civil war and Breton succession crisis.⁶⁴ In 1511 the Tourn´esiens were at it again, putting on a play about uncatchable lapwings—vanneaux —to mock the Habsburg failure to take Venlo. That hit raw nerves in England too, as Tudor forces were involved in the siege. When Tournai was taken in 1513, Henry called the townsfolk ‘incorrigible and ill-conditioned people, making farces, ballads and songs about their neighbours’ and Maximilian rebuked the surrender delegation over their ‘plays, ditties, farces, and ballads’.⁶⁵ Similar problems occurred in the north. German news publications covered events in the Netherlands in ways unsympathetic to the Habsburgs.⁶⁶ A panegyric on Charles’s rival William of Cleves was even printed inside the Habsburg Netherlands, at Kampen in Overijssel, in 1539.⁶⁷ Official tracts might give the enemy’s case publicity in the course of refuting it. One surviving copy of the Latin edition of Charles V’s claim to Guelders, printed at Antwerp in 1541, has annotations, underlinings, and marginal numbers to indicate the stages of the argument only where it reproduces the manifesto stating William’s claim to the duchy.⁶⁸ Visual material might be equally subversive. Prints of Jan of Leiden, Anabaptist king of M¨unster, were circulating at Antwerp in 1536, when all were ordered destroyed within three days.⁶⁹ At times of conflict the many prints of foreign rulers available in the Netherlands may similarly have served to glorify the Habsburgs’ enemies.⁷⁰ The images on foreign coins too, flooding a vibrant trading economy, could be the means to stimulate or display dangerous loyalties. In November 1545 a Ghent innkeeper was fined for kissing a coin of John Frederick of Saxony three times before ⁶¹ ISN iii. 91. ⁶² Barre, Journal, 294–5. ⁶³ Ville de Cambrai, 117–18, 122; Dumoulin and Pycke (ed.), Grande procession, 43–7, 52–8. ⁶⁴ Nicolay, ‘Kalendrier’, ii. 14–55. ⁶⁵ Macqu´ereau, Chronicque, 22, 40, 45. ⁶⁶ Catalogus pamfletten-verzameling, i, nos. 6, 41, 63, 89–90. ⁶⁷ NK 3800–1. ⁶⁸ Assertio iuris imperatoris Caroli, CUL, X.15.39, fos. 4v –9r . ⁶⁹ Stock, Printing Images, 54. ⁷⁰ Hoop Scheffer and Klant-Vlielander Hein (eds.), Vorstenportretten, 13–14, 41–7, 49–50, 61, 63–4; Nijhoff, Nederlandsche houtsneden, iv, pl. 177.

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handing it over in change, telling his customers that the elector was a ‘good evangelical’.⁷¹ While access to the government’s point of view was widespread—indeed, ready access to alternative views may have been a stimulant to the government’s production of self-justificatory material—it is clear that it need not have been and was not accepted unconditionally. News culture and political debate in our period paved the way for the events of 1565–6, when dissident pamphlets were printed in thousands, sold for low prices, and interacted with a wider campaign of songs, satires, and visual tokens to undermine Habsburg rule.⁷² In England, too, written, spoken, and visual material in support of the king’s wars was widely disseminated but not always tamely absorbed. Proclamations were read out with some ceremony and reports from those present show that some—though by no means all—of the relevant information could be gathered from listening to such readings.⁷³ Many towns constructed notice boards on the town gates or in market squares between the 1510s and the 1550s on which printed proclamations and statutes could be consulted.⁷⁴ Fleeting evidence suggests that printed material was circulated, read, and copied out, like the two printed accounts of Flodden that now survive only in contemporary manuscript transcriptions.⁷⁵ One reader of a copy of the ordinances of war issued for Henry’s army in 1513 went through the explanation of the war’s causes that prefaced them, numbering the two principal causes of the war in the margin and underlining the point that French activities were to ‘the manifest danger’ of Henry and his realm.⁷⁶ Chroniclers such as Edward Hall drew pamphlet accounts of battles into their works almost verbatim, just as earlier chroniclers had used manuscript newsletters.⁷⁷ Printed material was being incorporated into a news culture which was steadily developing from the compilation of volumes of documents and chronicles by fifteenth-century Londoners to the geographically and socially wide-ranging news networks, combining print, manuscript, and oral elements, of the early seventeenth century.⁷⁸ The oral element of that culture remained of great importance in our period and governments tried hard to control it. Those passing on inappropriate news or views about war were regularly investigated: a soldier spreading word through East Anglia of the death or capture of Henry VII’s forces in Brittany, a tinker at Hereford claiming the Scots had not lost at Flodden, a Norwich man belittling the English sack of Edinburgh.⁷⁹ In the particularly tense circumstances of 1549, a proclamation against ‘lewd persons’ who ‘hath not ceased to spread abroad and tell vain and false tales’ about the ⁷¹ Decavele, Dageraad, i. 257. ⁷² Duke, ‘Dissident Propaganda’, 121–4. ⁷³ Heinze, Proclamations, 27–9; Gunn, ‘War, Dynasty’, 134–5. ⁷⁴ BRO, 04026(2), 69, 225, 305, 04026(3), 71, 04026(4), 46, 04026(5), 51; DCL, MS Bowtell 1, fos. 193v , 195r , 297r – v , 298v , 344r ; BL, Egerton MS 2092, fos. 58r , 218r ; Stoyle, Circled with Stone, 39; EKA, Fa Z/33, fo. 75v ; SRO, LB8/1/37/3/1, LB8/1/39/4, LB8/1/41/7, 3365/438, fo. 19v ; HRO, W/E1/66, m. 3, W/E1/71, m. 3, W/E1/73, m. 3, W/E1/76, m. 4. ⁷⁵ ‘Contemporary Account of Floddon’; Gutierrez and Erler, ‘Print into Manuscript’, 187–230. ⁷⁶ Statutes and Ordenaunces of warre, HL, HEH61101, A2r . ⁷⁷ Scattergood, ‘Defining Moment’, 65–6; Gransden, Historical Writing, 65, 69, 77, 109 n., 111–12, 239. ⁷⁸ Politics of Fifteenth-Century England; Bellany, Court Scandal. ⁷⁹ Red Paper Book of Colchester, 146–7; HMC Rye & Hereford, 306; Depositions Norwich, 93–4.

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wars with France and Scotland ordered them to be put to work as galley slaves ‘to the example and terror of all other’.⁸⁰ Investigations could lead to full-scale treason trials. In Cornwall in 1543 a miller was tried for adhering to the king’s enemies, though in the end reprieved. His crime had been to point to a nearby weakling and joke ‘Yonder is a doughty man; I would there were never a doughtier man in England, then this war would be soon ceased’.⁸¹ Yet such cases were few compared with those initiated against suspected Yorkist conspirators or, from the 1530s, against those questioning the king’s supremacy over the church.⁸² England’s more peripheral position in European economic and cultural life left her less exposed than the Netherlands to currents of rival opinion, but not wholly insulated. The Merchant Adventurers easily brought back unsuitable material from Antwerp and Bergen op Zoom, satirical songs, pictures, and papal sentences against Henry VIII, while intellectuals acquired items of Habsburg propaganda.⁸³ Foreigners in England presented alternative views. At Norwich in 1512 a Frenchman was in trouble for words spoken against the king and at nearby Thorpe in 1553 another argued vigorously that Henry II and not Edward VI was the true king of France.⁸⁴ At Dover in June 1539, a drunkard from Flushing reportedly told another Dutchman that ‘he trusted once to see the day that the king of England should be under subjection of the emperor and the pope of Rome’. Producing from his purse ‘a piece of gold of the bishop of Rome’s coin’, he ‘kissed it with great reverence, saying also that he did not set a fig by the king our sovereign lord’.⁸⁵ In England, as in the Netherlands, religious and dynastic issues blended with military and diplomatic in the political discussions of natives and foreigners alike. Yet the impression is unavoidable that what concerned English governments was much less often a challenge to England’s international claims or the king’s military reputation than the undermining of domestic rule and the church settlement.

C H U RC H , WA R , A N D P U B L I C O PI N I O N Traditionally the English church supported the king’s wars in three ways. As royal ministers, leading churchmen were actively involved in the planning, justification, and administration of war, and under the Tudors Richard Fox, Thomas Wolsey, Stephen Gardiner, and others kept up such activity.⁸⁶ Clerical taxation made a significant contribution to royal war finance; this too continued.⁸⁷ Thirdly, in organizing prayers for the success of wars and celebrations of victory, the church helped structure the popular response to war.⁸⁸ This also persisted, for example, with orders for prayers and processions for the success of Henry VII’s campaigns in 1489 and ⁸⁰ ⁸² ⁸³ ⁸⁴ ⁸⁶ ⁸⁷ ⁸⁸

TRP i. 329. ⁸¹ Cooper, Propaganda, 95. Arthurson, Perkin Warbeck Conspiracy; Gunn, Charles Brandon, 40; Elton, Policy and Police. LP VI. 518, 1100, VII. 650; Carley, ‘Religious Controversy’, 238. Records Norwich, i. 317; Depositions Norwich, 43. ⁸⁵ BL, Egerton MS 2093, fo. 166v . Gwyn, King’s Cardinal, 6, 13–14; Redworth, Church Catholic, 208–14. Gunn, Government, 141–2. Jones, ‘English Church and Propaganda’; McHardy, ‘Liturgy and Propaganda’.

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1492.⁸⁹ In 1544–5, indeed, it was intensified, as Henry VIII ordered continual processions in every parish to pray for his wars using a new litany in English, of which 10,000 copies were printed.⁹⁰ Some scholars have seen in this period mounting opposition to war inspired by Christian humanism, first among Erasmus’s English friends and then among the ‘commonwealth men’ of the mid-sixteenth century.⁹¹ Yet the novelty or thoroughness of either generation’s critique of war might be doubted. Archbishop Warham preached on the text ‘Righteousness and peace have kissed each other’ at the opening of parliament in February 1512, but he stressed the need for war to be just and the dependence of victory on virtue, rather than the iniquity of war in general.⁹² John Colet, preaching before the king in 1513, did, according to Erasmus’s later account, condemn bloodshed and exhort Henry to make Christ rather than Caesar his example, but these, though boldly stated, were commonplaces.⁹³ In any case, part of the Erasmians’ attack focused on the war-mongering of the pope, a line of argument which issued in the Protestantism of William Tyndale rather than any restraint on Henry.⁹⁴ From the 1530s writers such as Richard Morison, John Cheke, and Thomas Becon did describe war as prejudicial to the commonwealth, Becon in The New Pollecy of Warre (1542) even seeing it as a punishment sent by God to chastise those who had not embraced His Word. Becon, however, exhorted his readers to assist in the ‘public affairs of their country’ by unquestioning obedience to the prince, even in fighting his wars.⁹⁵ Other preachers joined in, to develop a new theory of just war based upon submission to the prince’s God-given authority. John Hooper told subjects to follow the magistrate’s direction ‘when he resisteth unjust force, whether it be of foreign enemies, or of his own rebellious subjects’, condemning corrupt captains with their ‘robbery and spoil’ but concluding that ‘true men . . . prepared themselves with the fear of God to live and die for their magistrate and country’.⁹⁶ Hugh Latimer was characteristically more direct still: when thou art commanded by the king or his officers to go to war, to fight against the king’s enemies; go with a good heart and courage, not doubting but that God will preserve thee . . . Peradventure God hath appointed thee to die there, or be slain; happy art thou when thou diest in God’s quarrels. For to fight against the king’s enemies, being called unto it by the magistrates, it is God’s service.⁹⁷

In this context the ‘commonwealth men’s’ stress on the desirability of peace was less a criticism of official policy than an echo of its repeated claims that Henry VIII’s objective was the peace and prosperity of his realm. In the Netherlands, too, the church was deeply implicated in the mobilization of society for war. Its financial contribution to Charles V’s campaigns was significant, ⁸⁹ Register of John Morton, i. 33, 74–5. ⁹⁰ Bowers, ‘Vernacular Litany’. ⁹¹ Adams, Better Part of Valor; Baker-Smith, ‘ ‘‘Inglorious Glory’’ ’; Lowe, ‘War and Commonwealth’. ⁹² LP I. i. 1046. ⁹³ Baker-Smith, ‘ ‘‘Inglorious Glory’’ ’, 136–7. ⁹⁴ Tyndale, Expositions, 26–7, 267–8, 294–319. ⁹⁵ Becon, Early Works, 233–7. ⁹⁶ Hooper, Early Writings, 474–6. ⁹⁷ Latimer, Sermons, i. 416–17.

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a feat facilitated, in the face of opposition from many of the clergy, by senior clerics who were also Charles’s ministers: Jean Carondelet, Filips Nigri, Antoine Perrenot de Granvelle. The largest levies were licensed by papal bulls to support the emperor’s crusades, but the Habsburgs thought it legitimate to spend them fighting the Ottomans’ French allies.⁹⁸ At the local level, meanwhile, attempts to tax clerical incomes for military purposes prompted disputes in which clerics’ claims to immunity from lay jurisdiction had to be weighed against their duty to the common good.⁹⁹ During and after conflict, the church dealt with its spiritual and psychological effects. Pious foundations might discharge the consciences of captains for the excesses their men had committed or give thanks for victories won, just as princely pilgrimages might plead for victory.¹⁰⁰ Great battles such as Pavia were met with prayer for the dead on both sides.¹⁰¹ As in England, orders to pray for the success of princely campaigns, usually in general processions carrying the sacrament and often with supporting sermons, were regularly sent out; so were commands to thank God for victories.¹⁰² Admittedly the aim of victory was to be, as Charles V put it in 1521, ‘rest and welfare for all Christian people . . . that we and our . . . subjects might live in peace and serve Almighty God’, and prayer and thanksgiving were indeed invited for peace talks and treaties.¹⁰³ In practice it seems there were more processions for peace than for victory, perhaps reflecting the priorities of parishioners: weekly at Valenciennes in 1516–17 and Mons in 1528, often at Cambrai in 1554–6.¹⁰⁴ Individuals and chambers of rhetoric prayed for peace in their journals and poems, the latter sometimes linked to the processions.¹⁰⁵ The rate at which processions were ordered increased as Charles’s wars intensified, as did the insistence with which civic authorities reinforced the call to prayer, banning work in procession time, closing drinking establishments, and requiring the attendance of all heads of households.¹⁰⁶ This may have made them unpopular occasions, but some at least drew the lesson from the successes Charles gained after such frequent intercession that God was on his side.¹⁰⁷ One Dutch churchman was an outspoken critic of war. From his annotations on Cicero’s De officiis (1501) through the Panegyricus (1504), Moriae encomium (1511), Adagia including Dulce bellum inexpertis (1515), Institutio Christiani Principis (1516), Querela Pacis (1517), and beyond, Desiderius Erasmus increasingly denounced and ⁹⁸ Baelde, ‘Kerkelijke subsidies’, 1243–71. ⁹⁹ CLGS i. 229, iii. 284, iv. 383. ¹⁰⁰ ISN iii. 34; Inventaris Buren, iii. 1555; Cools, Mannen met macht, 286–7; Kamen, Philip of Spain, 91; Os, Kroniek, 318–321. ¹⁰¹ Everaert, Spelen, 98, 100–1; AMD, CC246, fo. 90. ¹⁰² Weert, ‘Chronycke’, 118; Rapport Lille, 191–4, 423–4; ADN, B2315, fos. 240v –241v ; Gailliard, ‘Processi¨en generael’, 1168–79, 1192–8; ROPB i. 42, vii. 61, 365, 373–4; Thieulaine, ‘Extraits’, 188–9. ¹⁰³ ROPB ii. 109; Macqu´ereau, Chronicque, 67, 164; id., Histoire, 177, 218; ROPB vii. 61, 231, 420–1; AMV, AA151; Inventaire Gand, no. 935; Gailliard, ‘Processi¨en generael’, 1131–6, 1143, 1162–4, 1179–82, 1186–9, 1198–1200. ¹⁰⁴ AMV, AA151; Lusy, Journal, 280; Ville de Cambrai, 145–6. ¹⁰⁵ Lusy, Journal, 290; Thieulaine, ‘Extraits’, 143; Bocquet, Ballades, 147, 157; Oosterman, ‘Brugge’, 152–8. ¹⁰⁶ Soly, ‘Plechtige intochten’, 349; Ramakers, Spelen en figuren, 144–5. ¹⁰⁷ Everaert, Spelen, 126; Bocquet, Ballades, 156.

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satirized war as unchristian, irrational, inhuman, economically destructive, and morally degrading.¹⁰⁸ Philip the Fair and Charles V, addressed directly by the Panegyricus and the Institutio Christiani Principis, were perhaps better able to claim that they sought peace than were other rulers of their day. The same was true of Erasmus’s patrons amongst the nobility and his neighbours in the towns of Holland.¹⁰⁹ But Erasmus’ relationship to his context remains problematic. It has been assumed either that Erasmus wrote for peace because he lived amongst the Dutch, or that the Dutch loved peace because they read Erasmus, or indeed both, yet we know little of the local reception of his works.¹¹⁰ While his Latin works, including those against war, were often reprinted and widely owned in the Netherlands, early translations into Dutch concentrated on his devotional writings.¹¹¹ Dutch versions of the Moriae encomium (1560) and Querela pacis (1567) appeared long after translations of these works into French, German, and English, while the Institutio christiani principis and Dulce bellum inexpertis never appeared in Dutch in the sixteenth century.¹¹² The vernacular public opinion reached by official documents and news pamphlets could not be directly informed by the pacifism of Erasmus. Even Erasmus accepted that defensive war against the Ottomans, led by Charles as the secular head of Christendom, might be justifiable.¹¹³ The combined efforts of church and state gave considerable publicity to the Habsburgs’ efforts to oppose Ottoman expansion, with general indulgences, drafts for the galleys, and licensed levies of troops.¹¹⁴ Much more hostile language was used about the Ottomans than about any Christian enemy. In 1530 Margaret of Austria reported to Bruges on the ‘execrable evils, murders and other inhuman outrages and acts of force and violence’ done by S¨uleyman and his men.¹¹⁵ Charles’s march to Vienna in 1532 in particular seems to have produced a fever of crusading interest. The year saw the publication of more news pamphlets about the Ottomans than any other in the century and the only known printed edition of Jean Molinet’s Complaincte de la terre saincte.¹¹⁶ At Cambrai a man claiming to be ‘the king of Cyprus, unfortunately ejected from his realm’ managed to beg 10£ out of the town authorities.¹¹⁷ In Antwerp excitement peaked in August, as it was said Charles and the Great Turk were about to meet in battle. A converted Jew was arrested on charges of sending food to the Turks and ‘some of the sons of the lords of the town’ set out for Vienna ‘to win praise and honour’.¹¹⁸ At ’s-Hertogenbosch there was even a grand procession with the town church’s relics and miraculous image of the Virgin to celebrate wildly exaggerated news of Charles’s success.¹¹⁹ The contrast with the minuscule response to the English church’s appeal for money to help Charles against the Ottomans in 1543 is telling.¹²⁰ ¹⁰⁸ ¹⁰⁹ ¹¹¹ ¹¹² ¹¹³ ¹¹⁴ ¹¹⁶ ¹¹⁷ ¹¹⁹

Adams, Better Part of Valor; Tracy, Politics of Erasmus, 20, 23–38, 55–7, 59–66. Tracy, Politics of Erasmus, 11–22, 49–57, 78–9. ¹¹⁰ Mout, ‘Erasmianism’. NK 784, 831–2, 860, 2856–7, 2971–2; BT 1052–3. Bijl, Erasmus in het Nederlands, 179–85, 245–6, 259–60, 319–20, 359–61, 407. Adams, Better Part of Valor, 107–8, 174–5, 209, 298–9. Lusy, Journal, 298; ROPB iii. 9–10, 452; iv. 388. ¹¹⁵ ROPB iii. 8. Mout, ‘Turken’, 374–5; NK 158, 267, 604–5, 713, 1533, 1603, 2033, 3061. Ville de Cambrai, 133. ¹¹⁸ Weert, ‘Chronycke’, 100. Verzameling ’s-Hertogenbosch, 235. ¹²⁰ Kitching, ‘Broken Angels’, 209–17.

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Piety and loyalism met in this enthusiasm for Charles’s crusades in a way they could never quite do over his struggles with France and Guelders; only at Vienna or Tunis could he bask in a blessing as straightforward as that the English preachers of the 1540s offered to the Tudors’ wars.

C E L E B R AT I O N Subjects were expected to show their joy at the successes of their rulers. During the Hundred Years War news of victories or peace treaties had been greeted in England with processions, bell-ringing, and sometimes Te Deums. From Henry VII’s reign such celebrations became more widespread and more elaborate, adding bonfires, free food and drink, and occasionally drama or gunfire to make what contemporaries called a ‘triumph’.¹²¹ London always took the lead, but subsidiary centres of royal authority were important too: York, Calais, Ludlow, Darlington, Dover, and Plymouth. Official letters instructed town authorities to demonstrate that the king’s ‘people be glad and joyous’ at the latest news, using ‘fires and other convenient ceremonies of congratulation’, but exactly how much to celebrate was left to local initiative.¹²² Different events evoked very different responses. Peace treaties were certainly celebrated at London and in provincial towns, especially in 1546 and 1550. The suppression of rebels was met with moderate enthusiasm. But the great triumphs were reserved for victories in battle. Several towns celebrated Flodden, Th´erouanne, and Tournai, rather more Pavia, perhaps because of the death of the Yorkist claimant Richard de la Pole, or perhaps because celebration was linked to the efforts to raise the Amicable Grant.¹²³ Edinburgh, Pinkie, and Saint-Quentin also brought bonfires and bells, but the most widespread triumphs were held for Henry VIII’s capture of Boulogne in 1544. They ran from Norwich and Cambridge in the east to Bristol, Ashburton, and Plymouth in the west, from London and Reading in the south to Darlington and ‘all other places in these north parts’.¹²⁴ They also outstripped those for other victories in size: Norwich spent more than three times as much celebrating Boulogne as Edinburgh. In some cities they replaced traditional civic religious festivals made problematic by the Reformation.¹²⁵ The conclusion is inescapable that English enthusiasm for war, at least amongst the town elites who organized these festivities and perhaps amongst the poor who gathered around the bonfires to drink the beer and eat the bread, exceeded that for peace. The exception that proves the rule is mercantile Bristol, which spent more celebrating the return to peaceful trading conditions in 1546 than it did the conquests of 1544. Yet enthusiasm for domestic political and dynastic stability exceeded that for either war or peace. The triumphs for the birth of Henry VIII’s short-lived son Henry in 1511 easily outshone those for the battles of 1513. The most spectacular festivities of ¹²¹ For what follows, see Gunn, ‘War, Dynasty’, 131–43; Cooper, Propaganda, 29–33. ¹²³ Bernard, Hoyle, ‘Instructions’, 194. ¹²² BL, Egerton MS 2093, fo. 91r . ¹²⁴ Hamilton Papers, ii. 327. ¹²⁵ McClendon, Quiet Reformation, 106–10.

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all met the birth of Henry’s long-awaited heir Prince Edward in 1537, adding fruit, nuts, music, and pageants to the repertoire of celebration, bringing the mayor and aldermen of London out onto the streets ‘thanking the people and praying them to give laud and praise to God for our prince’, reaching market towns such as Lewes and Louth that otherwise kept their joy confined.¹²⁶ The Habsburgs’ subjects were likewise expected to make their joy at the successes of their princes publicly evident and celebrations seem to have been ordered even more regularly than in England.¹²⁷ Alongside processions and bonfires, many towns deployed a wide vocabulary of celebration which could be calibrated according to the enthusiasm they felt—or thought they ought to feel—for the event being celebrated. Torches, tar-barrels, even giant candles on church towers might be used in a general illumination of the town. Food and drink might be distributed and banquets held for the town elite. Chambers of rhetoric, neighbourhood groups, craft guilds, or individuals might be invited to present tableaux-vivants, perform plays, or compose poems; prizes might be given for the best productions. Indeed, a significant proportion of the work of leading rhetorician dramatists such as Cornelis Everaert of Bruges and poets such as Matthijs de Castelein of Oudenaarde was written for these occasions.¹²⁸ Battles near and far were marked by such means, from Guinegatte and Maximilian’s Italian wars to Charles’s and Philip’s victories over the French: Saint-Quentin was celebrated as near at hand as Douai and Oudenaarde and as far away as Antwerp and Besanc¸on.¹²⁹ Crusading victories also won attention, Tunis at Mons and ’s-Hertogenbosch, M¨uhlberg at Antwerp and Ghent.¹³⁰ But the triumph which really caught the imagination of Charles V’s subjects was Pavia. The joy of Antwerp, Bruges, Douai, Haarlem, Mechelen, Middelburg, Mons, Oudenaarde, and countless other towns burst forth in bonfires, gunshots, bells and trumpets, plays, poetry contests and tableaux-vivants, processions, torches, masses and singing, bread for the poor, and wine in the streets.¹³¹ At Haamstede the celebration was so unrestrained that the bonfires burnt the castle down.¹³² Dynastic events—births, marriages, coronations, and imperial elections—were widely celebrated too.¹³³ But in town after town peace treaties or truces produced ¹²⁶ Wriothesley, Chronicle, i. 66–7 ¹²⁷ Correspondance de Maximilien et Marguerite, i. 211, 235; AMV, AA276. ¹²⁸ Everaert, Spelen, pp. xxxvii, 89, 119, 252, 265, 567, 587; Ramakers, Spelen en figuren, 131. ¹²⁹ Inventaire Bruges, vi. 189; Kuijer, ’s-Hertogenbosch, 257; Prims, Antwerpen, xvi. 32, 84, xix. 8; AMD, CC275, fo. 218; AMB, BB28; Macqu´ereau, Chronicque, 99; id., Histoire, 3, 36, 187, 221, 292; LP III. ii. 1421, 1428; Ramakers, Spelen en figuren, 149 n. ¹³⁰ Bocquet, Ballades, 27; Verzameling ’s-Hertogenbosch, 240; Weert, ‘Chronycke’, 125; Inventaire Gand, no. 1044. ¹³¹ Smet, Excellente Cronike, second foliation fo. xxviiir ; Gailliard, ‘Processi¨en generael’, 1182–5; AMD, CC246, fo. 122; Smit, Vorst en onderdaan, 300, 309 n.; Autenboer, Volksfeesten, 67–8; ‘Stadsrekeningen Middelburg iii’, 405; Lusy, Journal, 240; Bocquet, Ballades, 27, 38; Ramakers, Spelen en figuren, 149 n., 152; LP IV. i. 1167. ¹³² Dijckmeester-de Brauw and Dijckmeester, Slot Haamstede, 11. ¹³³ ‘Stadsrekeningen Middelburg ii’, 141–2, 157; ‘Stadsrekeningen Middelburg iii’, 390–1; Lusy, Journal, 127, 162, 167; Vinchant, Hainaut, v. 237; Macqu´ereau, Chronicque, 214; id., Histoire, 292; Ramakers, Spelen en figuren, 113, 125, 149 n.; Autenboer, Volksfeesten, 63–4; Gailliard, ‘Processi¨en generael’, 1147–58.

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more frequent triumphs than any other cause: five at Bruges between 1483 and 1498, twelve at Oudenaarde between 1482 and 1559, and so on.¹³⁴ The rhetoricians of many more towns are known to have celebrated the treaty of Cambrai than the battle of Pavia.¹³⁵ Plays and poems for peace gloried in their subject more fully than those celebrating victory.¹³⁶ And as wars became more stressful in the 1540s and 1550s, so the celebration of peace became ever more heartfelt, until in 1559 Cateau-Cambr´esis got the welcome it deserved.¹³⁷ There were bonfires at Mons, plays at Amsterdam, poems at Oudenaarde.¹³⁸ At Douai there were pageants of Samson and Delilah and Hercules and his pillars and at Tournai the streets were lined with tapestries.¹³⁹ At Middelburg there were bells, trumpets, tableaux-vivants, and bread for the poor.¹⁴⁰ At Mechelen there were poems, plays, and a banquet for the magistrates.¹⁴¹ At Ghent there was ‘great triumph’ and at Antwerp the celebrations lasted three days.¹⁴² The spontaneity and inclusiveness of these demonstrations of joy varied. They were organized and funded by town councils, sometimes through special rates.¹⁴³ The chambers of rhetoric, populated by magistrates, clergy, master-craftsmen, and, in towns like Mechelen, courtiers and bureaucrats, steadily took away control of the dramatic elements from wider neighbourhood and craft groups, yet peace and victory celebrations retained wider popular participation than civic entries or most other general processions.¹⁴⁴ Macqu´ereau may have been right to think that at the news of Pavia ‘the people in general were greatly delighted with it’.¹⁴⁵ Celebration did not necessarily produce harmony. At Douai and Dole celebratory bonfires caused arguments over whose wood was to be used and a (presumably drunken) fight.¹⁴⁶ At its most effective, on the other hand, celebration drew townsfolk together with those in authority over them, not just councillors but noblemen, regents, and princes. At Valenciennes it was Aarschot who announced the news of Pavia and helped carry the canopy over the sacrament in the ensuing general procession.¹⁴⁷ Mary of Burgundy took part in thanksgiving processions at Bruges, Margaret of Austria in peace ¹³⁴ Inventaire Bruges, vi. 230–1, 335–6, 367; Smet, Excellente Cronike, fo. 270r – v ; Doppere, Fragments, 38, 43, 73; ‘Stadsrekeningen Middelburg ii’, 146–7, 152; ‘Stadsrekeningen Middelburg iii’, 406; ‘Stadsrekeningen Middelburg iv’, 131–2; Lusy, Journal, 71, 107–8; Bocquet, Ballades, 27; Ramakers, Spelen en figuren, 113, 149 n.; Smit, Vorst en onderdaan, 300, 313 n. ¹³⁵ Smit, Vorst en onderdaan, 301; Elslander, ‘Chambres de rh´etorique’, 284; Waite, Reformers on Stage, 141; Autenboer, Volksfeesten, 66–7; ‘Stadsrekeningen Middelburg iii’, 406; AMD, CC249, fo. 133. ¹³⁶ Ramakers, Spelen en figuren, 151; Bocquet, Ballades, 27. ¹³⁷ Elslander, ‘Chambres de rh´etorique’, 284; Vinchant, Hainaut, v. 245; Ramakers, Spelen en figuren, 149; Herpener, ‘Factie’, 241; Autenboer, Volksfeesten, 131, 217. ¹³⁸ Vinchant, Hainaut, v. 266; Waite, Reformers on Stage, 80; Ramakers, Spelen en figuren, 150. ¹³⁹ AMD, CC277, fo. 123; Barre, Journal, 397. ¹⁴⁰ ‘Stadsrekeningen Middelburg iv’, 131–2. ¹⁴¹ Autenboer, Volksfeesten, 68. ¹⁴² Weert, ‘Chronycke’, 138–9; Bruaene, Gentse memorieboeken, 232. ¹⁴³ Inventaire Gand, no. 1044; Ramakers, Spelen en figuren, 131; Autenboer, Volksfeesten, 68. ¹⁴⁴ Ramakers, Spelen en figuren, 148–52; Autenboer, Volksfeesten, 160–246. ¹⁴⁵ Macqu´ereau, Chronicque, 145. ¹⁴⁶ ISN iii. 62, 73. ¹⁴⁷ Macqu´ereau, Chronicque, 145.

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celebrations at Antwerp and Valenciennes, Charles himself in victory festivities at Ghent.¹⁴⁸ The culture of celebration embraced the newest parts of the Habsburg conglomeration and contributed to their integration. Utrecht and Tournai rejoiced at the peace treaties of 1529 and 1538 and at Coevorden, in Drenthe, cannon were fired off to celebrate M¨uhlberg loudly enough to crack windows.¹⁴⁹ South and North were drawn together as Hainaut and Flanders marked successes against Guelders and Cleves and Holland towns celebrated landmarks in the struggle with France.¹⁵⁰ Yet within such integration lay the potential for disintegration of another kind. The festival of rhetoric at Ghent in 1539 was authorized by Charles to celebrate the peace recently concluded with France, yet the plays performed were so reformist in religious content that they prompted a campaign of censorship against rhetorician drama.¹⁵¹ At Kortrijk in 1559 the singing of songs in the streets, which had been banned for fear of religious disruption, was permitted to celebrate the coming of peace, but the authorities clamped down again within months because of the dangerous biblical content of the songs being sung.¹⁵² Even celebrations of victory and peace were far from unequivocal in consolidating the power of the state. ¹⁴⁸ Gailliard, ‘Processi¨en generael’, 1106; Weert, ‘Chronycke’, 92; Macqu´ereau, Histoire, 216–17; LP III. ii. 1428. ¹⁴⁹ Elslander, ‘Chambres de rh´etorique’, 284; Barre, Journal, 298; Heringa et al. (ed.), Geschiedenis van Drenthe, 283. ¹⁵⁰ Macqu´ereau, Histoire, 117; Gailliard, ‘Processi¨en generael’, 1192–3; Ramakers, Spelen en figuren, 152 n.; Smit, Vorst en onderdaan, 300–1, 309 n., 313 n. ¹⁵¹ ROPB iv. 105; Waite, Reformers on Stage, 145–66. ¹⁵² Decavele, Dageraad, i. 223–4.

19 The Trials of War Beside recruitment and taxation, several mechanisms drove on wartime government intervention in the daily lives of non-combatants. Military activity had all sorts of economic and social side-effects and these might alienate suffering subject from princely warlord. Yet in calling on princes to alleviate these ill effects, subjects intensified their mutual obligations and invited the exercise of princely power. Meanwhile attempts to control the economy in the interests of the war effort or to the detriment of the enemy added to the range of powers claimed by princes and perhaps built interest groups seeking the opportunities for profit and influence offered by an alliance with the state. T RO O P S A N D C I V I L I A N S Were soldiers a welcome presence in local society, promising protection against external enemies, or a resented and threatening intrusion? Our examination of town garrisons has already suggested that the answer for the Netherlands is complex. When setting out regulations for his soldiers, Charles V stressed that they were intended for the ‘defence, security, preservation and protection of our lands and subjects’ and expressed high hopes for their virtuous conduct.¹ His hopes were sadly disappointed. That his soldiers’ ‘infamous, indecent, and abominable’ swearing was imitated by ‘young people and children’ to the great scandal of their parents was the least of his worries.² Soldiers, it is true, squabbled readily amongst themselves and were, as in France, less likely to seek pardon for killing civilians than for killing one another, in myriad brawls over booty, drink, gambling, boasts, insults, women, and even priority claims on the services of hired musicians.³ Yet in an age before barracks, they were billeted in ordinary inns or civilian homes—five companies of Spanish foot demanding 400 beds in the suburbs of Arras in November 1553—or were camped in the open countryside.⁴ They wanted food, drink, money, and sex and all too readily extracted them from the civilian population by force. Regulation was in theory meticulous. Edict after edict forbade soldiers, whether in service or demobilized, to live off the peasantry.⁵ By the 1540s and 1550s prices were ¹ ROPB v. 58–9, 578. ² ROPB vi. 388–9. ³ Potter, ‘ ‘‘Rigueur de justice’’ ’, 289; ISN iii. 62, 63, 80, 81, 83, 94, 101, 105, 107, 110–11, 111–12, 117, 129; Muchembled, Violence, 110–11, 285, 305. ⁴ Thieulaine, ‘Extraits’, 161. ⁵ ROPB i. 38–9, 61–2, 171–2, ii, 125, 130–1, 230, 298–9, 317, 515–16, 567–8, 575, iii. 541–2, 563–4, iv. 12, 29–30, v. 5, 86, 92–3, vi. 353.

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set for the purchase of food and fodder and the smallest details of the negotiation between soldier and civilian were prescribed: the set price for mutton did not include the sheepskin; soldiers might warm themselves at their host’s hearth free of charge, but must pay if they wanted a separate fire; to avoid disputes, they were to pay for their wine before they became drunk.⁶ Practice was far different. In the early 1550s from Artois to Luxembourg soldiers bought food but failed to pay, threshed and took away whole harvests, or abandoned any semblance of negotiation, killing peasants who tried to stop them taking chickens or oats.⁷ Soldiers’ treatment of women also caused trouble throughout the period with rapes, abductions, and assaults by German, Spanish, and native troops.⁸ Depredations of all sorts peaked in the civil wars of 1477–92 and the vast campaigns of the 1550s. The earlier phase saw garrisons and punitive expeditions in almost every part of the Netherlands. Many simply maintained themselves at the expense of the nearest peasants and the best Maximilian could do was offer to take more troops into his pay, little comfort when his most prized forces, such as the Walloon Guard, had the worst reputation for rapacity.⁹ The punishment of rebellion licensed ghastly brutality: when his troops retook the town of Hoorn from the Hoeks in 1482, those who bought the plunder found dead children among the bedding.¹⁰ In the 1550s the sheer size of armies made their impact devastating, especially when combined with systematic destruction by the enemy. In 1553–4, almost all distinction between friend and foe seemed to have disappeared. As Jean Thieulaine put it, ‘in the countryside the emperor’s men pillaged and did everything enemies do, except that they did not burn the villages’.¹¹ The States of Hainaut echoed Thieulaine’s description in remonstrating with Philip in 1558.¹² Only peace or truce seemed to offer relief, yet neither availed much if they left unpaid soldiers living off the countryside or troops notionally in English or French service still roaming the Netherlands.¹³ Soldiers’ crimes did not always go unpunished. Town authorities and noblemen tried and executed a steady trickle of soldiers who practised violent extortion on villagers, usually involving murder or rape.¹⁴ Provost marshals were empowered to impose discipline on troops, to ‘conserve and comfort the poor people of the countryside’, but they often failed.¹⁵ The real hope for effective discipline lay with the captains, and respect was accorded by civilians to commanders who kept their men in good order and did exemplary justice.¹⁶ Equally there was disgust at those who could ⁶ ROPB v. 58–9, 162, 390–3, vi. 230–1, vii. 173. ⁷ Thieulaine, ‘Extraits’, 157, 159–60; ISN iii. 111; Muchembled, Violence, 75–6. ⁸ Vinchant, Hainaut, v. 71; Reygersbergh, Cronijcke, M1v ; Henne, Histoire, iii. 220–1; Weert, ‘Chronycke’, 85; Thieulaine, ‘Extraits’, 148, 154, 156; ISN iii. 59, 94, 121–2. ⁹ Lettres in´edites, i. 22–3, 69–70; Vinchant, Hainaut, v. 84; ‘Vlaamsche kronyk’, 269; D´enombrements Brabant, i, p. ccxii; Muchembled, Violence, 111–12. ¹⁰ Dam, ‘Factietwist of crisisoproer?’, 143. ¹¹ Thieulaine, ‘Extraits’, 191. ¹² D´enombrements Hainaut, 618. ¹³ ADN, B18824/23742; ROPB i. 220–1, vi. 24–5; Lusy, Journal, 43–5, 49; Macqu´ereau, Chronicque, 51. ¹⁴ Lusy, Journal, 352–6, 363–4; ISN iii. 40, 52, 110, viii. 307; Henne, Histoire, iii. 74, 156. ¹⁵ ROPB vi. 353. ¹⁶ Reygersbergh, Cronijcke, M1v; Barre, Journal, 177; Weert, ‘Chronycke’, 134–5.

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not, or would not, restrain their men. Jean Thieulaine was bitter about Emmanuel Philibert who ‘tolerated and permitted’ the conduct of the Spaniards in Artois in 1553 ‘against the will of the lords of this land’.¹⁷ His outrage was tinged with pity in the case of Pontus de Lalaing-Bugnicourt, who despite being marshal of the army in 1554 could not prevent the pillaging of his own villages.¹⁸ Edicts against pillaging prescribed, as the most desperate remedy, that local officers summon a crowd by ringing bells and fight back; plundering troops were duly repelled at various times in Flanders, Zeeland, and Artois.¹⁹ Yet resisters had to be careful. Magistrates were removed and rioters heavily fined after fifteen or so of Maximilian’s men were killed at Haarlem in 1482; three years later, eight Ghenters were beheaded for rallying the townsfolk against miscreant Germans.²⁰ Did such resistance spread into a generalized hostility to soldiers? The frequency of pardons issued to those who attacked them in Artois suggests it.²¹ The plays of the chambers of rhetoric show a fear of military men that went beyond the standard mockery of the miles gloriosus: for the occasional character given the chance to praise the spectacle of war, ‘a noble sight’ with its fine armour and flying banners, there were many more violent, spiteful, cowardly soldiers, with names like Murderous Work.²² Prints of landsknechts produced in the Netherlands hinted at the powerful moral critique of soldiering in German and Swiss art.²³ The division between soldier and civilian bit deeply into families: one woman told her brother-in-law ‘All soldiers are thieves and wicked men. You’ll be the same.’²⁴ Soldierly attitudes inflamed such breaches, especially amongst the noble men-at-arms of the ordonnances, who would kill passers-by for mocking or murmuring at them.²⁵ Soldiers stuck together in fights and caused trouble when they tried to join in weddings and other village festivities.²⁶ Soldiers were not completely alien. Those serving in permanent garrisons integrated with the local population.²⁷ When peace or truce came, disbanded recruits were expected to return to their homes and trades, and as the economy recovered from the pressures of war perhaps they did.²⁸ Some veterans settled back into society as lieutenants to judicial officers, sergeants of the watch, or castle porters, but others entered domestic service or set up as brewers.²⁹ Enlistment did not guarantee death or destitution. There were also times when soldiers were welcome. Towns under threat—Aire in 1479, Douai in 1521—witnessed popular rejoicing at the ¹⁷ Thieulaine, ‘Extraits’, 154. ¹⁸ Thieulaine, ‘Extraits’, 191. ¹⁹ ROPB v. 5, vi. 25, vii. 62; Dadizeele, M´emoires, 16–17, 74–6; ISN iii. 27, 31; Reygersbergh, Cronijcke, Q3r ; Thieulaine, ‘Extraits’, 154. ²⁰ Dam, ‘Factietwist of crisisoproer?’, 141–59; Vinchant, Hainaut, v. 71. ²¹ Muchembled, Violence, 40 ²² Everaert, Spelen, 182, 185, 210–11, 264; Bescheiden in Itali¨e, 283–4; Waite, Reformers on Stage, 193–5; Hummelen, Repertorium, 29–30; Herpener, ‘Factie’, 243–6. ²³ Nijhoff, Nederlandsche houtsneden, iv, pls. 170–4, 367; Hale, Artists and Warfare, 1–67. ²⁴ Muchembled, Violence, 114–15; ISN iii. 112. ²⁵ ISN iii. 70, 111. ²⁶ Muchembled, Violence, 111, 115–16; ISN iii. 115; ROPB vii. 96. ²⁷ Berckmans, ‘Mariembourg et Philippeville’, 125–6; Delmaire, ‘Th´erouanne’, 147. ²⁸ Macqu´ereau, Histoire, 79. ²⁹ ISN iii. 50, 77, 79, 80, 117; Muchembled, Violence, 109–10; Inventaris Buren, iv. 470.

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arrival of troops.³⁰ The southern provinces saw soldiers and peasants repeatedly fighting together against French raids.³¹ Yet tensions remained. Near Neuville-St-Vaast, north of Arras, in the early 1520s, a soldier sent to provide protection found that the farmer who was meant to be billeting him shot at him instead.³² Civilians could not live with soldiers, but in wartime they could not live without them. Those in power faced corresponding dilemmas. Charles V pointed out to Mary of Hungary in July 1554 that, while assembling the States would invite a torrent of complaint about their troops’ behaviour, without the States there would be no pay for the troops and their behaviour would only get worse.³³ Erasmus could afford to denounce soldiers in general and mercenaries in particular, ‘the scum of the earth’, because he argued Christians should dispense with war.³⁴ Charles, Mary, and most Netherlanders might have wished to dispense with war but were unable to do so; and with war came soldiers and all their attendant problems. Matters were much less tense in England. During the Hundred Years War, illdisciplined or disbanded soldiers, like those who caused unrest in several English ports following the loss of Normandy in 1450, were a byword for civilian suffering.³⁵ Thereafter, however, the small size of the permanent English military establishment, the comparative effectiveness of English victualling, and the fact that war was rarely fought on English soil except on the thinly populated northern borders made the impact of soldiers on the civilian population small. Armies for France were apparently marched to their ports of embarkation in small bodies under the strict control of their captains and there is no evidence of widespread disturbance. A soldier from the Berwick garrison was pardoned for murder in 1522, but he seems to have been playing his part in a family feud.³⁶ Those fined for affrays at Southampton included ‘two strange men of war’ in 1491–2, a sailor from the warship The Sovereign in 1493, a soldier in 1512–13, a gunner and a soldier in 1513–14, and two soldiers fighting each other in 1523–4.³⁷ Yet these were rare incidents: the total number of affrays punished in the years in question varied between eight and twenty-six and the years when there was most trouble seem not to have been those when large English forces passed through, but those when large Italian trading fleets were in port. English troops were quite prepared to loot friendly towns and oppress friendly peasants, as they did in Brittany in 1489, but they did not do it in England.³⁸ Only in the 1540s did England play host to large numbers of soldiers, native and foreign, for prolonged periods. The results were predictable. In 1545 Spaniards at Newcastle refused payment for food, demanded that the citizens do their laundry and took casualties in fighting with local men over their attentions to local women.³⁹ In the same year horsemen from Cleves sparked a riot in Islington and other mercenaries ³⁰ ³¹ 325. ³² ³⁴ ³⁵ ³⁷ ³⁹

Dadizeele, M´emoires, 100–2; Macqu´ereau, Chronicque, 104–5. Macqu´ereau, Histoire, 71; Thieulaine, ‘Extraits’, 153–4, 186, 188; Br´esin, Chroniques, 257, ISN iii. 61. ³³ Weert, ‘Chronycke’, 160, 164. Adams, Better Part of Valor, 82, 85, 101–2, 106, 199–200, 215–17, 256. Harvey, Jack Cade’s Rebellion, 131. ³⁶ LP III. ii. 2415(26), III. ii. 3670. SAO, SC5/3/1, fos. 10v , 13v , 37v , 39r , 53r . ³⁸ Currin, ‘ ‘‘The King’s Army’’ ’, 393, 398. Gruffudd, ‘Boulogne and Calais’, 46.

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destroyed images in Canterbury cathedral.⁴⁰ In 1549 Irish kerne rioted on their way through Chester and a landsknecht clubbed a gentleman fatally over the head at Huntingdon in an act of highway robbery. ⁴¹ Concern at the concentration of soldiers in and around London in 1549–50 brought official tariffs for meal prices for billeted soldiers, though much less elaborate than those in the Netherlands, and proclamations ordering soldiers not to wear armour or carry guns near the court, or even to leave London entirely.⁴² But trouble remained comparatively rare and inside English armies discipline seems still to have been tight. In 1547, for instance, a gallows was erected in Berwick market place and a soldier hanged for brawling ‘for example’s sake’.⁴³ Wounded or weary soldiers evoked charity as often as resentment from English civilians.⁴⁴ Standing garrisons could cause problems, but even these were not severe. In Calais there was thorough integration of the civilian and military populations and even in recently conquered Tournai there was some; only in the 1540s, with the influx of foreign mercenaries, did soldiers cause trouble at Calais.⁴⁵ Fortunately, the new garrisons established in England from 1539 were mainly in coastal areas away from centres of population. The English had less cause than Netherlanders either to complain to the prince about his soldiers, to urge him to increase his powers to control them, or to take remedy into their own hands.

WA RT I M E C R I M E In Weber’s classic formulation of the state’s aspiration to monopolize violence, the regulation of the use of the means of violence inside the state’s territory was as important as its ability to apply violence against external enemies. Under sixteenth-century conditions, however, the two aims were not mutually complementary, as the availability of weapons for national defence facilitated their use for private purposes.⁴⁶ Poaching by soldiers and schutters was a concern of legislation in the Netherlands, Philip II lamenting in 1559 that the game in his forests had suffered ‘great depopulation . . . during this last war’.⁴⁷ Fears for public safety made central government restrict the carrying of guns in some towns from the 1500s, a measure extended throughout Flanders in 1541, and in 1556 in Brussels there was a scare over nocturnal pistol-shooting.⁴⁸ Provision for self-defence in border areas put swords, arquebuses, and crossbows ready to hand when arguments escalated.⁴⁹ And despite attempts at proscription, duelling flourished in the armies of the Habsburgs by the 1540s among ⁴⁰ Millar, Tudor Mercenaries, 134–5; Clark, English Provincial Society, 66–7. ⁴¹ Thornton, Cheshire, 230; PRO, KB8/18/119. ⁴² TRP i. 320, 325, 330, 346, 363. ⁴³ Patten, ‘Expedition into Scotland’, 78. ⁴⁴ Gunn, ‘March on Paris’, 627; NRO, PMA 1491–1553, fo. 232v . ⁴⁵ Gruffudd, ‘Boulogne and Calais’, 15–18; Cruickshank, Tournai, 281–3, 288–9; Grummitt, ‘Calais 1485–1547’, ch. 4. ⁴⁶ Ruff, Violence, 44–52. ⁴⁷ ROPB i. 379–83, ii. 540–1, 588, vii. 62–4, 81, 494. ⁴⁸ ROPB i. 546–7, iii. 405–6, iv. 296, vii. 121–2; Vanhemelryck, Criminaliteit, 298. ⁴⁹ ISN iii. 102, 119; Potter, ‘ ‘‘Rigueur de justice’’ ’, 289–90.

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nobles who thought that, as one put it, to be given the lie was ‘an intolerable thing to men like him who follow the military art’.⁵⁰ It has been argued that warfare bred criminals, by habituating restless young men to violence and then releasing them in small groups, desperate through disbandment or desertion. The soldiers who turned to robbing in the woods around Brussels following the campaigns of 1475 and 1492, or those terrorizing the Brabant countryside by the threat of arson using gunpowder in the 1520s, seem to substantiate this view.⁵¹ The radical insecurities of combat zones stimulated many offences: food theft in rural Brabant in 1489, plundering in the wake of the enemy at Tienen in 1507, violent crime in Artois from the 1520s to the 1550s.⁵² Equally, however, war provided catharsis when those who had killed in hot blood left home to redeem themselves in combat and earn their pardon.⁵³ And its effects were localized: in Luxembourg the judicial system often collapsed in wartime but soldiers still outnumbered beggars two to one amongst those convicted of theft; in Amsterdam, conversely, war’s impact was negligible.⁵⁴ The criminal offence most explicitly linked to war in the Netherlands was vagabondage. Earlier edicts tended not to identify vagabonds closely with disbanded soldiers or blame war for their proliferation, but from the 1520s wartime actions against vagabonds, discharged soldiers, camp-followers, and pillaging troops increasingly blended into one.⁵⁵ At their worst the authorities’ fears were truly apocalyptic: in December 1541 arsonist bands of ‘vagabond companions of war’ were feared to be planning to join Anabaptists to ‘make war on all good Christians, as in the past . . . in the city of M¨unster’, aiming at the ‘ruin and destruction of Christendom and the confusion of all princes, estates and government of the commonweal’.⁵⁶ Prosecution rates do suggest that war bred vagrancy, though probably as much among refugees as ex-soldiers. At Brussels between 1499 and 1550, more natives of the border provinces of Artois and Hainaut than Brabanters were punished for begging and vagrancy.⁵⁷ Amsterdam prosecuted nearly twice as many beggars and vagrants from exposed Brabant in 1524–52 as from increasingly safe Holland.⁵⁸ Habsburg regimes had little to offer their subjects to help them deal with this menace. Provost marshals were supposed to deal with vagabonds but had their hands full with soldiers.⁵⁹ Special measures were sometimes taken at provincial level against vagabonds or poachers.⁶⁰ Generally the best that could be offered was licensed self-help: powers to arrest vagabonds with indemnity for those who injured them, even from 1541 permission ⁵⁰ Vanhemelryck, Criminaliteit, 122–3; Zwichem, Tagebuch, 55–6, 77; ISN iii. 55, 89, 100, 102. ⁵¹ Vanhemelryck, Criminaliteit, 212–13, 219; Ruff, Violence, 223–5. ⁵² Vanhemelryck, Criminaliteit, 306, 371; Henne, Histoire, i. 161 n.; Muchembled, Violence, 20. ⁵³ ISN iii. 108, 110. ⁵⁴ Boomgaard, Misdaad; Dorban, ‘Criminalit´e’, 37, 44. ⁵⁵ ROPB i. 1–3, 94–6, 101, 210–11, 457–8, 630, ii. 93, 245–6, 330–1, 487, iii. 84–5, 291–2, iv. 29–30, 49–50, 140–1, 147–8, 296–7, 388, 404–6, 427–8, v. 209, 267, 378, 518, vi. 24–5, 88, 340–1, 357, vii. 101–3, 335. ⁵⁶ ROPB iv. 343–4. ⁵⁷ Vanhemelryck, Criminaliteit, 334–7. ⁵⁸ Boomgaard, Misdaad, 120. ⁵⁹ ROPB ii. 405–7, vi. 353. ⁶⁰ ROPB iv. 75, vii. 335–6, 354–5.

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to torture vagrants who could not give ‘sufficient and credible answers’ to questions about their life and livelihood.⁶¹ Those on the receiving end of such measures were exposed by the crisis conditions of wartime to extreme, if highly devolved, assertions of state power. In England war does not seem to have led to an epidemic of crime, though one merchant thought it wise to keep off the roads when disbanded soldiers were on their way home in 1543.⁶² Even on the northern borders, though conflict in the early 1480s gave the opportunity for theft and cross-border raiding, the outbreak of war in 1496 did not prevent the wardens of the English and Scottish marches from holding days of march and other local courts.⁶³ Concerns about handguns and poaching animated the Tudors as they did the Habsburgs, with statutes restricting gun ownership in 1523, 1533, and 1542 and repeated proclamations; the policy was briefly reversed and gunnery encouraged amid the invasion fears of 1539–41 and 1544–6.⁶⁴ Duelling was perhaps aimed at in a proclamation of 1557 against swords of excessive length.⁶⁵ Vagabondage and discharged soldiers were linked in England by the end of the period. Some of the seditious vagrants responsible for popular disorder were said in a proclamation of July 1549 to have ‘run from the wars’ or ‘departed from the king’s garrisons’.⁶⁶ Orders of August 1560 warned local authorities against allowing unemployed ex-soldiers to live ‘idly or suspiciously’, to lodge in inns except when travelling, or to carry handguns, since in doing so they threatened an epidemic of ‘notable felonies and burglaries’.⁶⁷ Yet neither in the minds of the authorities nor in economic reality were war and vagrancy as strongly linked in England as in the Netherlands, at least before the 1590s.⁶⁸ Both polities, lastly, shared the potential for corruption to creep into all manner of wartime activities. Army clerks in the Netherlands were punished for encouraging captains to claim extra wages for non-existent troops, for levying money unjustly for the emperor’s artillery, for writing false passports.⁶⁹ Soldiers in frontier garrisons were suspected of collusion with smugglers.⁷⁰ In England the massive victualling efforts of the 1540s spawned corruption on a corresponding scale, with suspicions that thousands of pounds’ worth of surplus food was being disposed of at a profit by unscrupulous officials at Calais and Boulogne.⁷¹ The powers of captains and officials over the English populace were also sometimes exploited for illicit gain. In November 1546 several captains were called into the Star Chamber ‘for taking money at musters’ and in November 1557 the same court ordered John Adlington, a purveyor, set on the pillory ‘for taking up horses without commission’.⁷² War’s interaction with the judicial mission of the prince was thus complex. The more severe wartime disruption of the Netherlands fostered general crime, in response to which laws and institutions ⁶¹ ROPB vi. 25; Vanhemelryck, Criminaliteit, 279; ROPB iv. 296. ⁶² Hale, War and Society, 87. ⁶³ Neville, Violence, Custom and Law, 160–9. ⁶⁴ 14 & 15 Henry VIII c. 7, 25 Henry VIII c. 17, 31 Henry VIII c. 8, 33 Henry VIII c. 6; TRP i. 107, 121, 171, 194, 271, ii. 459, iii. 225.5. ⁶⁵ TRP ii. 432. ⁶⁶ TRP i. 337. ⁶⁷ BL, Egerton MS 2094, fo. 195r . ⁶⁸ Beier, Masterless Men, 93–5. ⁶⁹ ISN iii. 45; Lusy, Journal, 353; ‘Dagverhaal’, 302. ⁷⁰ ROPB vi. 318–19. ⁷¹ LP XX. ii. 558, XXI. ii. 666; APC i. 189, 197, 559–60. ⁷² HL, MS El2652, fos. 8r , 18v .

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were strengthened, but often insufficiently to address the problem. Meanwhile military institutions bred their own kinds of defiance or misappropriation of princely authority, from the crooked victuallers of English Boulogne to the duellists of the ordonnances.

E C O N O M I C D I S RU P T I O N The destructive effects of war were particularly marked in early modern economies in which so much effort went into agricultural production. Crops were easily ruined by hostile troops, livestock taken or killed, stores of food and infrastructure—barns, mills, sheds—destroyed.⁷³ Tit-for-tat burning was common on the border between France and the Netherlands from 1477, and from the 1520s its impact increased decade by decade with the length of wars and the size of armies.⁷⁴ The capture and ransoming of civilians, more than three thousand in thirteen months at Tournai in 1477–8, must also have drained money out of local society.⁷⁵ More systematic still was the practice of brandschatting, whereby communities on the southern and eastern borders of the Netherlands were forced to pay regular sums to soldiers to be spared burning.⁷⁶ It was sufficiently unlike anything known in England that ambassador Sir John Hackett had no word for it, writing of soldiers ‘brandscattyng the emperor’s subjects’.⁷⁷ Lastly, in areas dependent on drainage, the breaking or neglect of dykes in wartime could damage farming for years to come.⁷⁸ Surveys from Artois show that such depredations might cost villages 80 per cent or more of their livestock or harvest, or two-thirds of their population; Holland villages suffered too, though on a smaller scale.⁷⁹ The general effect on agricultural production was predictably dire. Military operations, alone or combined with bad weather, caused two in every three grain production crises in the Cambr´esis and war could turn crisis years into medium-term depressions as peasants fled their villages or let their fields lie waste.⁸⁰ The long-term result was depopulation in border areas—southern Hainaut in the repeated wars against France, northern Hainaut and southern Brabant in the civil wars of 1482–92—and the selective economic decline that robbed the Cambr´esis of its role as a grain provider for Brabant by the 1560s.⁸¹ Rulers could do little to help, and what measures they did take—aiming to restore the normal conditions of access to timber, pasture, and game when these were disrupted by war—may ⁷³ Thoen, ‘Oorlogen en platteland’, 363–76. ⁷⁴ Nicolay, ‘Kalendrier’, 64, 69, 77–8, 85, 89, 98, 106–7, 114; Macqu´ereau, Chronicque, 102, 104, 155; id., Histoire, 69; Thieulaine, ‘Extraits’, 158; ‘Dagverhaal’, 287, 307; Potter, War and Government, 215–19. ⁷⁵ Nicolay, ‘Kalendrier’, 209, 231, 267–8; Macqu´ereau, Chronicque, 152, 155; id., Histoire, 71, 85. ⁷⁶ Nicolay, ‘Kalendrier’, 225, 286; Potter, War and Government, 225; CLGS i. 469, iv. 289; Molius, Kroniek, 299–303; QFG 301, 303. ⁷⁷ Letters of Hackett, 333. ⁷⁸ CLGS i. 346. ⁷⁹ Potter, War and Government, 206–12; Vries, Dutch Rural Economy, 62. ⁸⁰ Neveux, Vie et d´eclin, 118–21, 125–9, 344–6. ⁸¹ D´enombrements Hainaut, 189–92, 283, 285–6, 295; D´enombrements Brabant, i, pp. ccv–ccxvi, ccxxxiii–ccxxvi; Neveux, Vie et d´eclin, 346–7.

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not have aided the neediest in their search for food, fuel, and building materials.⁸² Lawcourts could try to judge what was fair in the settlement of wartime debts and rents, but near the front line licensed self-help—like the confiscation of victuallers’ horses by those whose crops had been trampled by them—might be the only option.⁸³ Remission of taxes was the remedy of widest benefit, but was reluctantly granted when war crippled government finance.⁸⁴ Industrial production and marketing were also disrupted by war. Small towns might be captured, sacked, or burnt, with drastic effects on their manufactures and local trade, or even erased from the map entirely.⁸⁵ Border industries—Tourcoing’s weaving, Namur’s rural ironworks—faced obvious dangers.⁸⁶ Further inland, the constant complaint of urban poets and playwrights was that war produced general commercial and industrial depression. Cornelis Everaert’s play Hooghen Wynt en Zoeten Reyn was performed at Bruges on 12 March 1525 to celebrate the victory of Pavia. It mocks Francis I as High Wind, pompous, threatening, and destructive. It praises his conqueror Charles V as the Sweet Rain who will make prosperity grow again. But its main characters, Somebody the merchant and Many the artisan, concentrate on bemoaning the effects of four years’ war on the economy.⁸⁷Everaert’s play for the peace of Madrid and Pieter de Herpener’s for the truce of Vaucelles, with its memorable image of the angel of truce reopening the house of trade amidst rejoicing stevedores and its engaging promise to beat armour into frying-pans, took the same line.⁸⁸ Governments tried to alleviate the effects of war on the industrial and commercial sectors of the economy, especially in the 1550s, but most of the time Habsburg policy steered uneasily between the reluctance of merchants to fund convoys or other effective trade protection and the grandiose plans of the Hollanders to make their ruler ‘master of the sea’.⁸⁹ Less ambitious schemes included lowering the customs rates on alum imports needed by the cloth industry and encouraging, through the general legislation of 1531, the systematization of urban poor relief schemes.⁹⁰ The sovereign remedy was peace and subjects’ best hope was to plead with princes to restore it. In contrast the direct effects of war, though real enough for the English communities at Calais, Boulogne, and in the Pale in Ireland, were rarely experienced on the English mainland. On the Scottish marches, where destruction was a recurrent problem in the fourteenth and fifteenth centuries, the bishop and prior of Durham’s estates do not seem to have suffered widespread damage in the early sixteenth century, even when Norham fell in 1513.⁹¹ French coastal raids similarly caused much less damage than they had done in the Hundred Years War.⁹² English merchants did lose ships ⁸² ⁸³ ⁸⁴ ⁸⁵ ⁸⁶ ⁸⁷ ⁸⁹ ⁹⁰ ⁹¹ ⁹²

ROPB iv. 2–5; v. 24, 162–3,; vi. 351–3; Thieulaine, ‘Extraits’, 165. ROPB vi. 257; CLGS i. 262, 297, 331, ii. 450, iii. 53, 453, iv. 64, vi. 5–6, 13. D´enombrements Hainaut, 194–5, 509–10, 628. Stabel, ‘Verwoestingen’; Delmaire, ‘Th´erouanne’; Baes, ‘La Guerre’. Nicolay, ‘Kalendrier’, 103; Gillard, Industrie du fer, 89–91, 93, 107, 146, 166. Everaert, Spelen, 87–102, 567. ⁸⁸ Ibid. 181–96; Herpener, ‘Factie’, 242–58. Sicking, Zeemacht, 127–39, 141–6; 173–5. ROPB vi. 377; Bonenfant, ‘Bienfaisance publique’. Lomas, ‘Border Warfare’; PRO, DURH3/21, 23; LP I. ii. 2394. Laughton, ‘Burning of Brighton’, 167–73.

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and goods to privateers in wartime and ran the risk of capture and ransom.⁹³ To judge from customs revenues, the main export trade in cloth to the Netherlands also suffered heavily from Henry VIII’s wars, in part because the wars also depressed the market into which English cloth was sold.⁹⁴ English traders did sometimes complain about the effects of war, but truth is difficult to distinguish from exaggeration in their woeful tales of urban decline, interruption of trade, and personal misfortune.⁹⁵ The merchants of the staple, for example, blamed the decline of the English wool export trade in 1527 on the role of their staple town, Calais, as a ‘town of war’, but other evidence suggests their business was still profitable and their petition aimed at a more favourable arrangement with the crown over the payment of the Calais garrison’s wages.⁹⁶ In practice the most serious effects of war on the English economy were mediated through the state’s demands for taxation. The 1540s saw proportions of the nation’s wealth extracted in direct taxation higher than any since the mid-fourteenth century or any achieved again before the mid-seventeenth. For a brief period, already fading in the 1550s, an unprecedented partnership between the crown and the political classes enabled relatively accurate assessments of wealth to be made both for parliamentary taxation and for prerogative loans and benevolences.⁹⁷ Local military taxation compounded the burden, until Londoners were paying three times as much each year in the 1540s as they had in the 1520s and thirteen times as much as in the peaceful 1530s.⁹⁸ Even the rural Devon parish of Morebath felt the burden of taxation acutely in the mid-1540s, with levies for building a nearby coastal bulwark and for coat and conduct money and a concerted attempt to spread the burden of the fifteenth and tenth more equitably.⁹⁹ By contemporary standards most of these taxes were remarkably progressive, but the wider economy paid a price for this, as capital drained out of the mercantile and manufacturing sectors and credit networks were damaged.¹⁰⁰ Thus the debate between subject and ruler in England was less about war in the round than about taxation. Even the literary response to the trials of war was more muted than in the Netherlands, John Heyward’s 1549 play The Spider and the Flie restricting itself to pointing out that the flies, representing the commons, suffered in war at the whim of their social superiors.¹⁰¹

T H E R E S P O N S I B I L I T Y F O R WA R Whom did subjects blame for the many trials of war? They might be seen as a scourge of God to punish sin. In the Netherlands some diarists, playwrights, and on occasion ⁹³ ⁹⁴ ⁹⁵ ⁹⁶ ⁹⁷ ⁹⁸ ¹⁰⁰

Winchester, Tudor Family Portrait, 243–6, 281, 283–4. Hoskins, Age of Plunder, 182–5. Ramsey, ‘Overseas Trade’, 175; Dobson, ‘Urban Decline’. Tudor Economic Documents, ii. 26; Hanham, ‘Profits’; Grummitt, ‘Calais 1485–1547’, ch. 5. O’Brien and Hunt, ‘Fiscal State’; Schofield, ‘Taxation’; Braddick, Nerves of State, 150. Archer, ‘Burden of Taxation’. ⁹⁹ Duffy, Voices of Morebath, 112–14. Hoyle, ‘Taxation’, 649–75. ¹⁰¹ Jones, Tudor Commonwealth, 45.

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even rulers took this line, but it was perhaps too bleak for general acceptance.¹⁰² In England it took on a sectarian twist by the 1550s. One Protestant writer, Robert Pownall, prophesied in 1557 that Calais’s rejection of God’s Word and the improvidence of its impious queen Mary would lead to its fall and after the event another, Bartholomew Traheron, confirmed the diagnosis.¹⁰³ Meanwhile as classical culture revived, it became easier to blame war on war itself, personified by Mars. The bloodthirsty deity appeared in printed editions of Jean Molinet’s Le temple de Mars and in several plays, pageants, and poems of the 1550s: most dramatically, Mars on his throne was set on fire at Mechelen in the peace celebrations of 1559.¹⁰⁴ The Habsburgs neatly blamed all wars on their enemies, successive kings of France and the troublesome Charles of Guelders.¹⁰⁵ Francis I and Henry II were regularly denounced for their breaches of treaties and truces, treacherous surprise attacks, pillaging and burning, and unholy alliance with the Ottomans, charges repeated in proclamations, requests for taxation, and other legislation.¹⁰⁶ The masterpiece of this genre was the 325-word denunciation of Henry II included in the announcement in March 1557 that he had broken the truce of Vaucelles.¹⁰⁷ The Tudors took the same line. In 1496 Henry VII declared war on the Scots because of the ‘wilful headiness’ of their truce-breaking king, James IV; forty-eight years later Henry VIII justified his war against the Scots in similar language, speaking of the ‘sundry invasions usurpations incurses murders slaughters burnings spoils robberies and other notable hurts and injuries’ committed by James V.¹⁰⁸ Wars against France tended to be justified by the French king’s unjust detention of English lands in France, but the French were also accused of planning to invade England: in 1513 a proclamation assured Henry VIII’s subjects that they were ‘intending to burn, slay and destroy all that they may overcome in their most cruel manner’.¹⁰⁹ The Habsburgs’ subjects, it seems, generally accepted their case. Robert Macqu´ereau denounced the ‘perverse intentions’ of the ‘inhuman tyrant’ and ‘so-called Most Christian’ King Francis I with particular venom.¹¹⁰ Poems on Pavia likewise blamed Francis’s pride and Turkish alliance for his downfall.¹¹¹ Plays at Bruges and poems at Mons, even Christmas songs in the schools of Amsterdam, heaped blame on the Valois kings.¹¹² Chroniclers and poets saw Charles of Guelders ¹⁰² Waite, Reformers on Stage, 193–5; Everaert, Spelen, 185; Lettres in´edites, i. 33; Nicolay, ‘Kalendrier’, 61, 267–8. ¹⁰³ [Pownall], Admonition to the Towne of Callays; Traheron, Warning to England. ¹⁰⁴ Recueil de pi`eces historiques, i. 13–44; Bocquet, Ballades, 192; ‘Factie of spel’, 242–3; Ramakers, Spelen en figuren, 195; Autenboer, Volksfeesten, 68. ¹⁰⁵ Lettres in´edites, i. 62–3, ii. 120, 124; Recueil de pi`eces historiques, i. 233–52. ¹⁰⁶ ROPB ii. 128–9, 137–8, 500, iv. 397–8, 422, 446, 454, v. 15, 35, vi. 187, 250, 283; Inventaire Gand, no. 1091. ¹⁰⁷ ROPB vii. 168–9. ¹⁰⁸ TRP i. 34; 34 & 35 Henry VIII, c. 27. ¹⁰⁹ Doran, England and Europe, ch. 2, esp. 14–15; TRP i. 69. ¹¹⁰ Macqu´ereau, Chronicque, 21, 89, 96, 102, 110, 140; id., Histoire, 81. ¹¹¹ Thiry, ‘L’Honneur et l’Empire’, 298–9, 301. ¹¹² Everaert, Spelen, 92–6, 551; Bocquet, Ballades, 52, 124–5, 151–9, 164–5; Carmina scholastica, 19, 54.

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as a dissembling, truce-breaking tyrant.¹¹³ Popular songs denounced William of Cleves as a trouble-maker, just as the government did.¹¹⁴ Even a playwright such as Cornelis Everaert, whose work was censored for complaining that war hurt the poor and not the rich, even poets who craved peace, could thank God for Charles’s victories over his recalcitrant enemies.¹¹⁵ Sometimes, however, those afflicted by war blamed not the enemy but those who were supposed to be defending them. Antoine de Lusy several times criticized the lords of the land for their failure to protect the people and burst out in 1523: ‘While nothing is done daily but to raise money from the people, giving out that it is to pay the soldiers on the frontier, one sees quite the contrary; for it is to put into and fill up the coffers of the thieves who have the management and government of these lands.’¹¹⁶ In Holland, Brabant, and Hainaut intellectuals, chroniclers, town politicians, and ordinary townsfolk suspected from time to time that princes or their ministers were exposing the provinces to attack for their own devious reasons, or that their captains and the enemy’s were ‘playing games with each other’.¹¹⁷ At Ghent, Bruges, and Mechelen, Margaret of Austria and her councillors were repeatedly slandered in songs and written bills, some at least complaining about their policy in war.¹¹⁸ Englishmen too found scapegoats other than the enemy. These might be perfidious allies, such as the Spaniards in 1512, or unreliable mercenaries, such as the Clevelanders defeated at Oye Sluice in 1545.¹¹⁹ They might be incompetent predecessors, Northumberland blaming the crown’s poverty in 1552 on the ‘unhappy and unskilful government’ of the duke of Somerset, who had brought the realm ‘suddenly into open hostility and wars against two puissant realms at once, considering neither the ability to begin, nor means to continue them’, Elizabeth blaming the fall of Calais on Marian improvidence.¹²⁰ These were official explanations, but subjects had their own views. Ellis Gruffudd blamed the Oye Sluice disaster on the incompetence of the English commanders, particularly Lord Cobham, the deputy of Calais.¹²¹ In 1539 the master of a London tavern claimed as one ‘who knew the country’ that he knew Ireland ‘would never be quiet till two captains with 10,000 men each’ were sent there.¹²² Some came very close to denouncing the king. In an argument in Shaftesbury in 1521 John Brode called John Williams a vagabond and thief; when Williams replied that he had served the king in his wars, Brode reportedly ranted: ‘Ah, Sir, have ye been with Master Henry King? A noble act ye did there! Ye spent away my money and other men’s, like a sort of vagabonds and knaves!’¹²³

¹¹³ Macqu´ereau, Chronicque, 9, 18, 20; Lusy, Journal, 29–30; Os, Kroniek, 314; Bocquet, Ballades, 114. ¹¹⁴ Wissing, ‘ ‘‘Kinders’’ ’, 237. ¹¹⁵ Everaert, Spelen, 2, 97, 119, 129–30, 186, 247, 252, 283–96, 551; Thiry, ‘L’Honneur et l’Empire’, 302–5; Carmina scholastica, 1–24, 52–9. ¹¹⁶ Lusy, Journal, 214–15, 271, 282–3. ¹¹⁷ Tracy, Holland, 66–74, 77–80; Macqu´ereau, Histoire, 79–80. ¹¹⁸ ROPB i. 37–8, 524–5, v. 6–7; Pleij, ‘Despisers of Rhetoric’, 164; Tracy, Holland, 74. ¹¹⁹ Scarisbrick, Henry VIII, 29–31; Millar, Tudor Mercenaries, 151–5. ¹²⁰ 7 Edward VI, c. 12; PRO, KB8/38, 8/39/1–2. ¹²¹ Gruffudd, ‘Calais and Boulogne’, 29–36. ¹²² LP XIV. ii. 11. ¹²³ LP III. i. 1165.

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Some subjects took more direct action. Englishmen regularly attacked tax collectors in response to the more penetrating taxation of Henry VII’s reign and, as we have seen, taxation was a major issue in popular rebellions.¹²⁴ Yet the combination of parliamentary approval for taxation and the insistent teaching of subjects’ duty to obey and sustain their prince created a climate by the 1540s in which individual opponents could be isolated and punished, as one London alderman was sent to serve in person on the Scottish borders for refusing to pay the benevolence of 1545.¹²⁵ In the Netherlands likewise there were assaults on those sent to assess or collect taxes.¹²⁶ Whole communities—most obviously Ghent in 1537–40—refused to pay taxes that the prince and their neighbours thought had been legitimately agreed. Yet outside the civil wars of 1482–92, there seems to have been, as in England, surprisingly little criticism of the prince for conducting his wars. Perhaps this was because it was, as ever, safer to criticize ministers than princes, perhaps because Charles’s and Philip’s wars, whether against France or against Guelders, could credibly be presented as defensive. In the Netherlands the ill effects of war were far more serious than in England, but were also more readily blamed on agents other than the prince, an enemy close at hand and a soldiery out of control. At worst the reaction to broken promises of defence or lighter burdens was a weary cynicism like that of Andries Jacopszoon, town secretary of Amsterdam, who summed up the complaints of the Leiden deputies to the States of Holland in 1523 in the view ‘that princes are liars, promising much but doing nothing’.¹²⁷

E C O N O M I C S T I M U LU S Military effort had positive effects on some sectors of the economy. Wages paid to the noble men-at-arms of the ordonnances, the States-General of the Netherlands were told in 1514, would benefit ‘all people who make things . . . and other good merchants too’.¹²⁸ Merchants in border towns did indeed sell things to soldiers, whether silk flags from B´ethune or fish from Dunkirk, but like masons or carpenters working on fortifications, repairing damaged buildings or converting ships for war, they probably did well to equal their peacetime earnings.¹²⁹ The arsenal at Mechelen and naval base at Veere provided steady business for the craftsmen of those towns, but they were not uniquely dependent on war.¹³⁰ More clearly advantaged were those whose competitors were damaged by war: the fishing industry of Holland overtook that of Flanders once the threats from Guelders and Friesland had been removed but that from France remained.¹³¹ Others again, as we shall see, exploited the government’s control over wartime trade to their own advantage. But in none of these cases would ¹²⁴ Bush, ‘Tax Reform’, 379–400. ¹²⁵ Wriothesley, Chronicle, i. 151. ¹²⁶ ISN iii. 105, 107–8. ¹²⁷ Koenigsberger, Monarchies, 116. ¹²⁸ Lusy, Journal, 56. ¹²⁹ ROPB viii. 304–5; ‘Vlaamsche kronyk’, 331; Sicking, Zeemacht, 190–3; Stabel, ‘Verwoestingen’, 119. ¹³⁰ Roosens, ‘Arsenaal’, 200–2; Sicking, Zeemacht, 207–8. ¹³¹ Sicking, Zeemacht, 105.

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it be reasonable to think that such circumstances created interest groups wholeheartedly committed to supporting the prince and his wars because of the benefits they conferred upon them. In modern times the prime site for such developments has been the arms industry. Arms manufacture and trading was an important economic activity in the fifteenthcentury Netherlands and developed further in the sixteenth, as Mechelen established itself as the dominant centre of large-scale gun-founding and housed a princely arms depot, formalized in 1550–1 as the arsenal of the emperor.¹³² Meanwhile the province of Namur tripled the number of its known blast furnaces between 1500 and 1545, heading for a shot-casting and armour-making boom from the 1570s, and international arms trading flourished at Antwerp.¹³³ No wonder the Antwerp rhetoricians showed arms makers lamenting the cessation of war in their play for the truce of 1556.¹³⁴ Yet the economic and political significance of these changes is hard to pin down. Even the greatest of the Mechelen bronze gun-casting firms, run first by Hans Poppenruyter and then by Remy de Hallut, had neither a monopoly on supplying the Habsburgs nor an exclusive relationship with them. In wartime other founders in Mechelen and elsewhere were called into action, while the smaller forged-iron artillery used on the fleet was made in coastal towns.¹³⁵ Poppenruyter and Hallut sold to customers other than the Habsburgs—Louis XII, Henry VIII, John III of Portugal—and kept an export warehouse at Antwerp.¹³⁶ Shot for the Habsburgs’ guns was ordered indiscriminately from the foundries of Namur, Hainaut, and Li`ege, and the large orders of the 1550s boosted above all the arms industry of the neutral prince-bishopric, which would grow to be the greatest in the region.¹³⁷ For gunpowder there were attempts to create a monopoly in the 1560s for the state-owned mills at Mechelen, yet they failed; not surprisingly when the mills, where the main workforce consisted of a mere nineteen women, had the capacity to supply only 11 per cent of the arsenal’s requirements in 1552–7, leaving the rest to independent manufacturers and importing merchants.¹³⁸ Tellingly, the establishment of the prince’s own mills in 1553–4 seems to have been stimulated by fears that circles of interconnected merchants, first around the Schetz family and then around Christoffel Pruynen and Karel Crol, aimed at a stranglehold over gunpowder supply.¹³⁹ The Habsburgs were as much the victims as the patrons of the arms merchants. The arms business must also be set in two larger contexts. At its high-value end it was a luxury court industry, so that patterns of princely residence and political centralization had more effect than war on the decline of armour production at Lille and ¹³² Gaier, Industrie des armes, 97, 117–24, 131–8, 142–5, 148; Roosens, ‘Arsenaal’, 175–6, 178–85. ¹³³ Gaier, Li`ege Gunmaking, 19; Gillard, Industrie du fer, 53–4, 56–7, 136–7, 187; Gaier, Industrie des armes, 139–41, 163, 170, 187. ¹³⁴ Herpener, ‘Factie’, 244. ¹³⁵ Roosens, ‘Arsenaal’, 187–8, 195, 198–200, 206; Henrard, ‘Documents’, 250–1. ¹³⁶ Ibid. 187–8, 197–8. ¹³⁷ Gaier, Industrie des armes, 149–54; Gaier, Li`ege Gunmaking, 27–35; Henrard, ‘Documents’, 278; Roosens, ‘Arsenaal’, 239–42; Lejeune, Formation du capitalisme moderne, 180–1. ¹³⁸ Roosens, ‘Arsenaal’, 213, 216–37. ¹³⁹ Ibid. 212–15, 234–7.

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its flowering at Mechelen and Brussels.¹⁴⁰ In its commercial aspects, meanwhile, it was one among many long-distance trades that came together first at Bruges and then at Antwerp. In the sixteenth century, mass-produced armour was a South German and North Italian product, traded at Antwerp like any other import and re-export.¹⁴¹ By the 1550s, some merchants there specialized in gunpowder and lead shot, others in military ironware or even the wholesale equipping of infantry companies, but most dealt in arms as part of a larger portfolio: the merchant bankers Gaspar Schetz, Christoffel Pruynen, and Lazarus Tucher, the cloth merchants Galiotto Magalotti and Thomas Gresham, and the woad merchant Karel Cocquiel.¹⁴² These were men who did well out of their ability to meet the government’s needs in wartime, but did equally well by other means in peace. They did not constitute anything approaching a military-industrial complex. Not until the days of Jean Curtius, who became the richest man in Li`ege as munitions contractor to Parma and Spinola, could an individual make or mar his fortune primarily by feeding Mars.¹⁴³ More typical of our period was Thomas Reynsberger’s gunpowder mill at Bouchain, which, made unviable by the peace of 1559, was quietly turned into an olive press.¹⁴⁴ England too saw some economic activities furthered by war. As we have seen, West Country merchants and ship captains made huge profits from privateering, an activity that shaded easily into the sort of piracy patronized by Admiral Thomas Seymour in 1546–9.¹⁴⁵ Military industries also prospered, above all iron-founding in the Sussex Weald. First established in the 1490s, it grew rapidly after 1543 when Henry VIII invited a French gun-founder and a Dutch gunsmith to establish a forge. By 1547 there were thirty French ironworkers resident in the Weald and a year later fifty, operating three furnaces. A major industry, making domestic ironware as well as cannon, developed thereafter, its inception a direct result of the crown’s need for domestic iron production facilities to meet the demands of war.¹⁴⁶ Shipbuilding was encouraged by the payment of bounties by the crown to private owners constructing ships large enough to be used in war and by repeated statutory attempts to confine English trade to English ships.¹⁴⁷ The manufacture of sail-cloth and other import substitutes necessary for war was encouraged by the grant of monopolies to entrepreneurs in the 1540s and 1550s.¹⁴⁸ Generally, war must have created local demand for weapons, uniforms, and armour to equip local contingents. We can only surmise the profits made by the London capper, William Taillor, from whom the men of the vanguard were ordered to purchase their hats at 8d each in 1544, or the Sheffield hardwareman, John Bayly, from whom the king’s fletcher took delivery of 180,012 arrowheads in 1514, but as ¹⁴⁰ Gaier, Industrie des armes, 123–5, 131–6, 138–9. ¹⁴¹ Roosens, ‘Arsenaal’, 177. ¹⁴² Gaier, Industrie des armes, 183, 187; ROPB viii. 281, 284; Roosens, ‘Arsenaal’, 189–91, 212, 215, 234, 235–6, 239–41; Ramsay, City of London, 6, 14, 51, 118. ¹⁴³ Lejeune, Formation du capitalisme moderne, 279–304. ¹⁴⁴ Roosens, ‘Arsenaal’, 196. ¹⁴⁵ Winchester, Tudor Family Portrait, 246–50. ¹⁴⁶ Thirsk, Economic Policy, 24–6. ¹⁴⁷ Loades, Tudor Navy, 52–3, 92; Hoskins, Age of Plunder, 183; 7 Henry VIII c. 2, 23 Henry VIII c. 7, 32 Henry VIII c. 14. ¹⁴⁸ Thirsk, Economic Policy, 34–41.

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so often it is hard to see that they or their trade more generally received a special fillip from war that they would not have had from a flourishing domestic economy.¹⁴⁹

F O O D A N D T R A N S P O RT The most immediate powers of economic intervention taken by wartime governments in our period were those to control supplies of food and transport to meet the needs of their armed forces. In England purveyance, the king’s right to send out commissioners to take provisions for his army at a price set by himself, was used only intermittently by Henry VII, but Henry VIII returned to the practice in 1512 and it remained the principal means of supplying royal armies into the 1540s.¹⁵⁰ The navy too made extensive use of it, at least in wartime.¹⁵¹ Some contemporaries argued that it drove up the price of grain, causing hardship for the civilian population, and in 1549 it was temporarily abolished as part of Protector Somerset’s social reform programme, though modern analysts have found the link between war and high prices far from clear.¹⁵² Concern to regulate the food supply more generally, preventing profiteering or forbidding exports, brought proclamations in 1491, 1512, 1522, and 1544–6. These, focusing mostly on grain but sometimes on other foodstuffs too, were explicitly made to help meet the needs of the army and navy, but such measures, enforced from 1527 by local commissioners checking stocks of grain, were also taken in peacetime when harvest failures drove prices up.¹⁵³ Purveyance was also used to secure carts and horses for royal armies, with more disruptive effects in the North than in the South, where the domestic horse and cart trade may indeed have benefited from the wartime diversion of coastal shipping into royal service.¹⁵⁴ Earlier in the period, Habsburg governments generally hired transport on the open market, but by the 1520s this was proving painfully slow and expensive.¹⁵⁵ By the 1550s contingents of carts and horses owed as feudal service or borrowed from abbeys were drawn together with those levied on towns and provinces, with or without consent, under the control of a commissary-general of the carts.¹⁵⁶ Requisitioning was a controversial matter, provoking disputes and lawsuits between individuals, between parts of villages, between communities and the waggoners who served on their behalf; but one way or another the prince’s claims were met and his powers extended into

¹⁴⁹ NRO, MCB 1540–9, 205; LP I. ii. 2832(49). ¹⁵⁰ TRP i. 12, 66; Cruickshank, Army Royal, 60–4. ¹⁵¹ Loades, Tudor Navy, 84–5, 203–4. ¹⁵² LP IV. ii. 3761; Bush, Government Policy, 49–50, 52–3; Davies, ‘Supply Services’, 194–9, 326–8; Brenner, ‘Prices and Wages’, 140–1. ¹⁵³ TRP i. 26, 66, 94, 225, 258–9, 262–3; Williams, Tudor Regime, 185–95. ¹⁵⁴ Phillips, Anglo-Scots Wars, 206; Davies, ‘Supply Services’, 168; Edwards, Horse Trade, 3. ¹⁵⁵ Gunn, ‘March on Paris’, 602–3. ¹⁵⁶ Inventaire Courtrai, i. 243, ii. 101; ROPB i. 358–60, iii. 200–1, vii. 202–3, 362–3.

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another area of life.¹⁵⁷ For food supplies Habsburg armies and navies remained more dependent on private enterprise, though encouraged by inducements such as favourable excise rates.¹⁵⁸ The scale of campaigns and the devastation of the frontiers in the 1550s drove on central coordination, until in 1557 a senior councillor, Charles de Berlaymont, was appointed as superintendent of victuals with wide-ranging powers and various commissioners under his direction bought up food for the camp even from distant provinces.¹⁵⁹ When such expedients could be avoided, however, the government’s preference was to contract out supply services to merchants, such as those in the Antwerp syndicate victualling major garrisons from 1556.¹⁶⁰ Policy focused instead on the wider food supply, a sensitive matter in an area dependent on imports of grain even in peacetime. From the 1520s, the export of grain and later of all foodstuffs from the Netherlands was repeatedly forbidden and restrictions placed on internal movement and marketing.¹⁶¹ In part their purpose was to facilitate taxation of Holland’s re-exports of Baltic grain, but they were also justified by high prices and, on occasion, the threat of popular unrest.¹⁶² In those made in wartime the need to feed garrisons or field armies and the enemy’s destruction of crops and herring boats were cited with increasing prominence.¹⁶³ These food export regulations were enforced vigorously if unevenly. In Hainaut, Antoine de Lusy thought their impact was short-lived but Robert Macqu´ereau thought it severe.¹⁶⁴ Flanders saw surveys of grain stocks and special watches to monitor grain movements in the 1520s and the confiscation of grain sent to Antwerp in the 1550s.¹⁶⁵ In Holland some grain merchants evaded export bans but others suffered sharp enforcement, and even cheeses sent to the English army in 1544 were sequestrated.¹⁶⁶ Food supplies were always vulnerable to confiscation in wartime, but through these regulations princely power was asserting itself where the whims of captains had ruled in 1477–92.¹⁶⁷ The measures also had wider connotations of loyalty and unity. Sending food to the enemy was explicitly forbidden and could be a matter of life and death: Guelders noblemen resident at The Hague were beheaded for supplying food to their compatriots and one Zeeland merchant killed another for suggesting he traitorously victualled French warships.¹⁶⁸ By the 1550s export bans and appeals to merchants to victual the army were proclaimed as far away from the French frontier as Friesland and Utrecht and sending food to other parts of ¹⁵⁷ ISN iii. 69; CLGS v. 164–5, 313. ¹⁵⁸ CLGS v. 319. ¹⁵⁹ ROPB vii. 172–5; Thieulaine, ‘Extraits’, 165; ICC iv. 208, 210, vi. 373. ¹⁶⁰ Soly, ‘Antwerpse compagnie’, 350–62. ¹⁶¹ ROPB ii. 43, 131–2, 238, 247–8, 315–16, 481–2, iv. 458, 467, v. 26–7, 117–18, v. 182–5, 269–72, 345–7, 582, vi. 77–8, 184–6, 286–7, 317–18, 334, 341–2, 380, 437–8, 461–2, vii. 46–9, 130–2, 141–6, 204–6, 253–8, 380–1. ¹⁶² Tielhof, Hollandse graanhandel, 132–8; Tracy, Holland, 98–105; ROPB ii. 228. ¹⁶³ ROPB ii. 228–9, 247–8, v. 26–7, 117–18, vi. 341–2, 357–8, 387–8, 462, vii. 47, 253–4, 380–1. ¹⁶⁴ Lusy, Journal, 282; Macqu´ereau, Histoire, 40. ¹⁶⁵ Henne, Histoire, iii. 18; ROPB ii. 246–7, 254–6, 315–16; CLGS v. 311. ¹⁶⁶ Tielhof, Hollandse graanhandel, 33, 68–70; CLGS iv. 460–1. ¹⁶⁷ CLGS i. 220–1, 321; Nicolay, ‘Kalendrier’, 317. ¹⁶⁸ Prims, Antwerpen, xvi. 85; Henne, Histoire, ii. 187; ISN iii. 103.

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the Netherlands was praised as a fitting token of the provinces’ mutual interdependence.¹⁶⁹

E C O N O M I C R E G U L AT I O N In England and the Netherlands alike, war shaped the wider aims of princely economic policy. One intention was to secure supplies of arms and deny them to the enemy. In the Netherlands export bans were long-established and oft-repeated.¹⁷⁰ Sometimes they aimed at specific enemies, Guelders in 1504, France in 1536, sometimes at specific commodities, such as gunpowder and saltpetre in 1511.¹⁷¹ By the 1550s they covered a wide and carefully enumerated range of munitions.¹⁷² The resultant controls were tightly enforced. In 1553 alone, 98,162 lb of gunpowder was taken from Englishmen trying to export it from Amsterdam without licence, and later even the considerable ingenuity of Sir Thomas Gresham was hard pressed to get German arms, armour, and powder through the Netherlands to England without export licences.¹⁷³ As England was a net importer of armaments, its restrictions were more focused, but repeated statutes and proclamations from 1529 forbade the export of bell-metal, flooding the market from the dissolution of the monasteries and readily recast into guns, and white ashes, used in the making of gunpowder.¹⁷⁴ English arms controls, fitting the crown’s dependence on a well-armed citizenry, concentrated on regulating the internal market in arms and armour, fixing maximum prices for different items by proclamation in 1542 and 1544.¹⁷⁵ Horses were also indispensable for war. Netherlands governments banned their export from at least 1495 and justified the ban by the need to equip the ordonnances and deny the enemy from 1522.¹⁷⁶ Measures to control the trade in horses became increasingly elaborate, involving the registration of dealers, the identification and measurement of individual animals and the prevention of re-exports from neutral countries to hostile powers, and increasingly harsh: after 1551, selling a horse to the French in time of war carried the death penalty for the second offence.¹⁷⁷ Lawsuits, correspondence, and pardons show that these measures were actively enforced.¹⁷⁸ England imposed equivalent bans on selling horses to the Scots, though without such elaborate monitoring systems.¹⁷⁹ Its rulers were more concerned with the failure of domestic supply evident in the musters and wars of the late 1530s and early 1540s, ¹⁶⁹ ROPB vi. 286, 461–2, vii. 364. ¹⁷⁰ Gaier, Industrie des armes, 170; ROPB i. 218, 271–2, 283–4, 439–40, ii. 4, 25. ¹⁷¹ Aurelius, Cronycke, Dd2v ; ROPB i. 170–1, iii. 526–7. ¹⁷² ROPB vi. 191. ¹⁷³ Roosens, ‘Arsenaal’, 216; Ramsay, City of London, 116–17. ¹⁷⁴ 21 Henry VIII c. 10, 2 & 3 Edward VI c. 26, 37; TRP i. 285, 306, 361. ¹⁷⁵ TRP i. 213, 235. ¹⁷⁶ Cauchies, Philippe le beau, 88; ROPB i. 282–3, ii. 226–7. ¹⁷⁷ ROPB iii. 272, 459, 493, 522, iv. 65, 165–6, 386–7, 391, v. 118–19, 155–6, 254–5, 287–91, 362–4, 564–5, vi. 129–31, 186–7, 191, 331–3, vii. 89–92, 419–20, 443–4. ¹⁷⁸ CLGS iv. 258, v. 63, 162; ARA, RSA119/1–3; ISN iii. 108. ¹⁷⁹ 23 Henry VIII c. 16, 32 Henry VIII c. 6, 1 Edward VI c. 5, 1 Elizabeth c. 7.

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prompting statutes in 1540 and 1542 to encourage the breeding of great horses by prescribing the numbers to be maintained by landowners of varying status.¹⁸⁰ The immediacy of war in the Netherlands prompted the assertion of a variety of emergency powers. Bridges might be broken or the countryside flooded to impede invading armies. ¹⁸¹ In Hainaut in 1528 and 1552 farmers were ordered to save their produce from the French by threshing their grain immediately and sending it to local towns.¹⁸² In Flanders in 1544 and 1551, the blowing of post-horns at night was forbidden lest they be used to secure entry to town gates for spies or storming parties.¹⁸³ Many other attempts at social and economic regulation interacted with the military needs of the state. In England the ambitious attack on the conversion of arable land to pasture mounted by Protector Somerset was motivated partly by the argument that the decline of tillage was weakening the military fibre of the rural populace, for ‘shepherds be but ill archers’.¹⁸⁴ Sumptuary regulation was encouraged but also restricted by the demands of war: the size of permissible wedding parties was limited in Hainaut in 1555 to conserve food stocks amidst wartime ruination, but soldiers in this era of flamboyant military dress were allowed to wear clothes above their station in England and the Netherlands alike.¹⁸⁵ Coinage regulations in the Netherlands were sometimes tightened to confront the effects of large-scale military spending, but more often relaxed under wartime stringency.¹⁸⁶ Yet such measures met many concerns other than military efficiency and some policies later identified with strategic planning seem to have had no military connotations in this period. The Habsburgs legislated frequently on the need to keep roads in good repair, even appointing a general surveyor of roads in Brabant in 1509, yet this was never justified by the need to move troops, but rather by the importance of trade for provincial welfare and princely income and communications.¹⁸⁷ A further set of wartime measures offered scope for what have been called ‘increasingly national and rational commercial policies’, some ‘already clearly mercantilist’.¹⁸⁸ These were general bans on trade and safe-conducts for fishing. English governments generally used economic warfare as a substitute for military campaigns. Henry VII suspended trade with the Netherlands three times, usually to deter Habsburg support for Yorkist pretenders, but Henry VIII tried it only once in 1527–8 and had to back down when the effects on England were much worse than those on the Netherlands.¹⁸⁹ Anglo-French trade was regularly interrupted by war, but it was of small importance compared with the great London–Antwerp axis and English governments do not seem to have felt the need to license it to continue.¹⁹⁰ The rulers of ¹⁸⁰ Thirsk, Horses, 10–11; 32 Henry VIII c. 13, 33 Henry VIII c. 5. ¹⁸¹ Lettres in´edites, i. 56; Macqu´ereau, Histoire, 47; ROPB v. 106–8, 177–8. ¹⁸² ROPB ii. 497, vi. 272. ¹⁸³ ROPB v. 39, vi. 201. ¹⁸⁴ Bush, Government Policy, 44–5; Tudor Economic Documents, iii. 55. ¹⁸⁵ ROPB vi. 81–2, 424–5; 24 Henry VIII c. 13 s. 3. ¹⁸⁶ ROPB i. 269–70, ii. 97–8, 271–4, vi. 210–11, 327, 479. ¹⁸⁷ ROPB i. 44–6, 56, 109–11, 132, ii. 395–7, 450–1, iii. 521–2, 524–6, iv. 121, v. 316–18, 436–9, vi. 418–19, 475–8, vii. 67–70. ¹⁸⁸ Craeybeckx, Grand commerce, 207, 221. ¹⁸⁹ Gunn, ‘Wolsey’s Foreign Policy’. ¹⁹⁰ TRP i. 68, 224, ii. 434, 439.

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the Netherlands proclaimed thoroughgoing bans on their subjects’ much more significant trade with France in every war from 1470 to 1559. Efforts were made to block trade that used neutral ships or passed through third countries and the effects were substantial: Holland’s grain imports from Normandy and Picardy, for example, were choked off to be replaced by Baltic grain.¹⁹¹ Yet licences to break these embargoes were available to those prepared to pay. The Habsburgs used the licensing of wartime trade as a fiscal device to tap the liquid capital of the great merchant houses, above all those of Antwerp; the merchants in turn exploited the arrangement to consolidate their commercial dominance. Wine imports, which made up some 40 per cent by value of peacetime imports from France, were central to these schemes, though woad imports and various exports and reexports also featured: cloth, fish, metalware, sugar, spices, and so on. The result was that in some war years the wine trade continued at about 80 per cent of its peacetime level. The great merchants were happy and so were the social and political elites who drank the wine: Jean Thieulaine recorded the relief of his friends in Arras when French vintages arrived in April 1554 to replace the Rhine wine they had had to drink since war broke out.¹⁹² The fiscal benefits, for a government struggling to tax commercial wealth, were obvious. In 1542–4, more than a quarter of the value of the wine trade went to pay for the war, 20 per cent or so of the wine’s value paid for the licences plus the 6 per cent wartime import tax. The licensing regime could even be shaped to cushion the effects of war on employment in the Netherlands, for the levy on manufactured exports, such as the 87,000 items of Namur metalware sent to France in 1542–3, was much lower than that on wine.¹⁹³ Like licences for trade, safe-conducts for fishing were part of a complex calculation of government power and economic advantage. Flanders, Zeeland, and Holland each operated a hundred or more herring boats throughout our period. In wartime, the cheapest way to protect them from French privateers was to establish a truce protecting fishermen on both sides, the next cheapest to buy safe-conducts from the French, the most expensive to fund escort ships. Successive admirals negotiated with the French for truces or safe-conducts, but their efforts met with suspicion, especially in Holland. Some feared that only the richest would be able to afford the safeconducts, others that the only real benefit would accrue to the admiral’s purse. The Flanders fishermen, most exposed to French attack, were happier to pay for provincially controlled escorts. Those of Holland, plagued by Scottish pirates, sometimes did the same, though the ports found the inland towns reluctant to help with the cost. Sometimes the Hollanders just armed their fishing boats as licensed counterprivateers. The Zeelanders, more open to the influence of the admirals who were the great lords of their province, were most likely to do whatever they were advised. In the end, the safe-conduct regime petered out in the 1550s as the maritime provinces were temporarily herded together by Mary of Hungary into supporting a system of ¹⁹¹ ROPB ii. 225–6, iii. 546–7, iv. 404, 407–8, v. 5–6, vi. 187–92, 389–91; CLGS i. 235, 431–2, iii. 168, 302, v. 129–30, 221, 382–3; Tielhof, Hollandse graanhandel, 20–7. ¹⁹² Thieulaine, ‘Extraits’, 165, 178. ¹⁹³ Craeybeckx, Grand commerce, 40–3, 75–6, 207–18, 226–9, 234–49, 273–7.

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coordinated but separate fishery protection fleets, but the whole story suggests the complexities of protecting a vital trade in a polity as diverse as the Netherlands.¹⁹⁴ Trade bans and fishing licences are instructive about the ambitions and limitations of wartime economic policy. In their wide-ranging assertion of princely power and their potentially great economic impact they are, even more than the other measures we have considered, redolent of the economic controls and aspirations to autarky characteristic of twentieth-century states and foreshadowed in the age of Sully and Colbert. Yet they were riddled with the social and political compromises characteristic of so many aspects of early-modern states at war. ¹⁹⁴ Sicking, Zeemacht, 44–5, 80–5, 88–105; Tracy, Holland, 91–4.

20 War and Identity Accounts of the rise of national sentiment in the monarchies of the Hundred Years War or eighteenth and early nineteenth-century Britain give war a significant role in drawing together national communities around war-making rulers.¹ If social groups define themselves by distinguishing those inside from those outside, then war with its demonization of the enemy and its appeal to the notion of the citizen in arms and the historic military virtues of a people might have been expected to play such a part in our period too. Yet we must proceed with care, for the most sophisticated studies of the formation of national identity suggest a complex picture in which ethnicity, language, class, and the ideologies of rule have interacted with local appropriation of the state’s authority to produce subtle changes in the balance between local, provincial, and national identities; a process in which war has played a comparatively minor role.² M I L I TA RY I D E N T I T I E S The traditional military identity of the English, victorious over the French and Scots in great battles if not in long wars, proved persistent and the Hundred Years War was a vivid presence for early Tudor readers.³ John Bourchier, Lord Berners, Henry VIII’s deputy of Calais, translated Froissart’s chronicles into English for printing in 1523–5, knowing ‘the great pleasure that my noble countrymen of England take in reading the worthy and knightly deeds of their valiant ancestors’.⁴ Richard Morison duly referred his audience to Froissart to learn from Sluis, Cr´ecy, Poitiers, and Naj´era how a few Englishmen could beat many Frenchmen or Spaniards.⁵ Italian humanist ideas of a citizen militia were not widely disseminated in England, Machiavelli’s Art of War not being published in translation until 1562, but Englishmen were well aware of the classical military heritage on which the humanists drew. Vegetius had been available in English since the first half of the fifteenth century and Morison translated Frontinus.⁶ English military arrangements fitted easily with classicizing language about citizens serving their country and the limited use of foreign ¹ Allmand, Hundred Years War, 136–50; Colley, Britons. ² Armstrong, Nations before Nationalism; Sahlins, Boundaries. ³ Giry-Deloison, ‘ ‘‘Une haquen´ee’’ ’, 145–6; Thornton, ‘Identity and Community’; Neville, ‘Local Sentiment’. ⁴ Sir John Froissart’s Chronicles, ii, p. iii. ⁵ Morison, Exhortation, C3r –4r . ⁶ Anglo, Machiavelli, 129–57; Allmand, ‘Vegetius’, 30–45, esp. 34–5.

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mercenaries in England posed no threat to English self-confidence in their inherited martial virtues. Foreigners such as Giovanni Michiel, Venetian ambassador to England in 1557, agreed that, though the English might be short of guns and strong horses, ‘everybody knows that there is not a nation in the world that fights with less regard for danger and death than the English’.⁷ In contrast, it has been conventional to argue that the military traditions of the Netherlands were allowed to wither by the Habsburgs. In the words of James Tracy, ‘For reasons that have never been fully understood, Habsburg rulers did not employ Dutch-speaking troops to defend their Dutch-speaking provinces. The few compagnies d’ordonnance that were maintained on a year-round basis were recruited from the francophone provinces, while mercenary companies were hired as needed by military contractors from north or south Germany.’⁸ This view fits with Erasmus’s complaint that Hollanders were not allowed to defend themselves, but forced to fund troublesome mercenaries, and with the grumbling of his contemporary Cornelius Aurelius that Hollanders had lost the martial vigour of their Batavian ancestors.⁹ However, as Alexandre Henne demonstrated a century and a half ago, it does not entirely fit with the realities of military recruitment in the Habsburg Netherlands.¹⁰ In the 1470s and 1480s troops raised in every province joined in wars civil and external, matching the reputation for bellicosity among Artesians, Brabanters, Flemings, Hainaulters, Hollanders, Namurois, and Zeelanders appealed to in a tract of 1477–8.¹¹ From the 1520s to the 1550s Flanders and Brabant were still active recruiting grounds, troops from the southern border provinces fought in northern campaigns as well as in local defence and troops from the North—Friesland, Gelderland, Utrecht—fought against the French.¹² Everywhere, as we have seen, towns raised contingents from amongst their own citizens and noblemen from amongst their own relations, servants, and tenants. Pardon letters do partly confirm the stereotype that Walloons predominated in the armies and garrisons fighting in the South: often individuals were driven to enlist by the economic disruption caused to border areas in war.¹³ But the troubled urban economies of the North were also productive of marginal young men, as German princes recruiting in the area found, and many northerners fought in northern wars, up to and including that of 1546–7.¹⁴ Throughout the period Zeelanders, Hollanders, Flemings, and Frisians served the Habsburgs in war at sea.¹⁵ And the younger generation was not short of mettle: Leiden schoolboys in 1517 and Douai youths in 1523–4 had to be banned from ⁷ CSP Venice 1556–7, 1046–9. ⁸ Tracy, Financial Revolution, 37–8, 74–7. ⁹ Tracy, Politics of Erasmus, 71–107; Knevel, Burgers, 52. ¹⁰ Henne, Histoire, iii. 35–48. ¹¹ Commynes, Memoirs, 338, 379; Molinet Chroniques, passim; Gent, ‘Pertijelike saken’, 226–7, 363; Nell, Landsknechte, 141–3, 149–50; Recueil de pieces historiques, i. 244–5. ¹² Barre, Journal, 181; ROPB iv. 335, 388; ‘Vlaamsche kronyk’, 313–14, 318; Macqu´ereau, Chronicque, 107, 129, 152; id., Histoire, 53–4, 62–3, 82, 105–7; ISN iii. 57, 93, 107, 109, 110–11; Henne, Histoire, iii. 350 n.; Domeingoederen, 349–51; Thieulaine, ‘Extraits’, 144–5, 150, 156, 160, 164; ‘Stadsrekeningen Middelburg iii’, 273; ‘Veldtogt’, 120; Massarette, Mansfeld, i. 39–41. ¹³ ISN iii. 81, 92, 93–4, 97, 98, 104, 105, 107, 108, 110, 111–12, 114, 118, 119. ¹⁴ Burschel, S¨oldner, 155–6; Zwichem, Tagebuch, 110, 127, 174, 256, 259, 267; QFG 345. ¹⁵ Sicking, Zeemacht, 200; Vrolijk, ‘Recht door gratie’, 225.

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imitating soldiers and fighting with each other and in 1489 in Bruger 500 boys played a game of Flemish civil wars in which several were killed.¹⁶ Some provinces clearly did have stronger military reputations than others. Hollanders were written off by some contemporaries as better drinkers than fighters and some towns found it hard to get their own citizens to enrol for service even at inflated wages.¹⁷ Some thought the Flemings valiant, though there were blots on their record like the failed siege of Calais in 1436, and Hainaulters felt they had a name to fight for.¹⁸ But the Namurois stood out. In 1507 they performed a feat of arms so noteworthy, completely surprising a plundering French force at Saint-Hubert and taking a rich haul of booty, that Jean Lemaire de Belges immediately celebrated it in a printed poem. Lemaire gloried in the humiliation of the proud and over-dressed French by ‘our free shepherds, our noble peasants’ of the Ardennes, ‘each one a little Hercules’, led by local squires in the mould of Alexander, Hector, and Scipio.¹⁹ Chroniclers from Brabant and Holland noted their ‘undying name of valour’ and Robert Macqu´ereau recalled more prosaically how the Namurois charcoal-burners and carters went about in the cloth of silver coats they had captured from the French camp.²⁰ The Namurois fought on, close to home and further away, to the end of our period.²¹ In August 1557 it was ‘the valiant Namurois’ who held their part of the siege lines around Saint-Quentin against a French relief force and ‘won great honour’ in the storming of the town.²² Commentators’ verdicts on Netherlanders in general were more mixed. Even the Venetian ambassadors could not agree. ‘The Flemings’, reported Bernardo Navagero in 1546, are naturally little good as men of war for various reasons, of which, for brevity, I shall give only some. They have lost that manliness for which this nation was in ancient times reputed strong and warlike; because then Gallia Belgica was without any trade at all and was full of forests, so they had savagery and intrepidity enough. But now every possible trade having been brought into these parts, and all this tract of land being full of very lovely and very crowded cities, those things have also been introduced that have enervated their ancient strength and valour.²³

Yet he admitted that Netherlanders had fought well under the inspiring leadership of Ren´e de Chalon and he perspicaciously noted the reputation of ’s-Hertogenbosch as a border town with ‘many men apt for war’.²⁴ Federigo Badoaro in 1557 likewise thought that even the bandes d’ordonnance were not to be called good troops by nature, art, experience, or armament and that footsoldiers from the Netherlands ¹⁶ Ward, ‘Cities and States’, 366; AMD, CC245, fo. 238; Surquet, ‘M´emoires’, 573. ¹⁷ Molius, Kroniek, 197; Ward, ‘Cities and States’, 353–4, 366. ¹⁸ Macqu´ereau, Chronicque, 105–6; id., Histoire, 53–4, 95; ‘Veldtogt’, 339; Bruaene, Gentse memorieboeken, 143–5, 169–72, 206; Bocquet, Ballades, 126–7. ¹⁹ Lemaire de Belges, Œuvres, iv. 293–306. ²⁰ Macqu´ereau, Chronicque, 20; Os, Kroniek, 309; Aurelius, Cronycke, Dd6r – v . ²¹ ISN iii. 97; Lusy, Journal, 247; Macqu´ereau, Chronicque, 147–8; id., Histoire, 17–18; Weert, ‘Chronycke’, 85; Lusy, Journal, 337; Thieulaine, ‘Extraits’, 156. ²² ‘Veldtogt’, 319, 322. ²³ Relazioni degli ambasciatori Veneti, 314–15. ²⁴ Ibid. 297, 315.

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were as poor as one would expect from a nation whose real talents lay in manufactures and trade.²⁵ Only two years later, however, and perhaps inspired by Saint-Quentin and Gravelines, Michel Suriano thought the men-at-arms of Flanders the best in the world and the Walloon infantry admirable for their good order and ability to fight in open country.²⁶ It would be wise, then, to take the comments of Erasmus and Cornelius Aurelius with a pinch of salt. Aurelius’ unfavourable comparison between the society of his own day and the ancient past was one of the commonest topoi of humanist social comment. If Erasmus denounced mercenaries while his friend Thomas More praised the Utopians for their use of them, that may be because Holland was afflicted with disorderly Germans in 1517 whereas England in 1515 had just lost many of her young men at Flodden and in France. Some populations in the Netherlands apparently were becoming less militarized than others in our period. Those who led troops for the Habsburgs were aware of it. Mary of Hungary commented after the defeat at Sittard in 1543 that Hollanders needed large forces to accompany them, ‘for loyalty or courage is no longer as great in them as it used to be’.²⁷ Similarly Adrien de Cro¨yRoeulx suggested in 1552 raising companies in Antwerp, Mechelen, and Flanders but letting the enemy think they were Frisians, because they were more feared.²⁸ The rapid economic growth of Brabant and Holland drew in military labour from outside as it drew in labour of other kinds, all the more easily as the Habsburgs presided over an empire including major centres of mercenary recruitment and military emigration. Thus the growth in the size of the armies they deployed in the Netherlands was not matched by the growth in the numbers of native troops serving in those armies. Yet since the expansion in army size was much greater than the population increase of the provinces themselves, it is far from clear that there was a steep decrease in the proportion of the total population of the Netherlands mobilized for war. Thousands of Netherlanders were still fighting for the Habsburgs in the 1550s and felt they could be proud of it.

S E RV I C E A B ROA D Netherlanders also served the Habsburgs in many distant theatres of war. It must have given some of them fine tales to tell: Antoine Langonesse, sergeant of the Arras watch, served Charles V and Philip II in the Netherlands, Italy, Tunis, Corfu, Crete, and Slavonia.²⁹ It must have given some of them nightmares, recalling Buren’s occupation of Frankfurt, when the Main froze over and soldiers stinking with disease slept in the streets in rags awaiting the carts that drove around ceaselessly collecting corpses.³⁰ The wider effects of such service are ambiguous. To be part of a common enterprise with their prince’s other subjects, especially when that prince was present, may have ²⁵ Relations des ambassadeurs v´enitiens, 85–6. ²⁶ Ibid. 114–15. ²⁷ Henne, Histoire, viii. 80–1. ²⁸ Ibid. ix. 350. ²⁹ Muchembled, Violence, 109–10. ³⁰ QFG 312–13, 330–2, 344, 353.

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drawn them into a closer loyalty to ruler and dynasty. Yet to be marked out as Netherlanders in a strange land and a polyglot army may well have consolidated some identity beyond that of their town or province, as it seems to have done for students and travellers in Italy, who moved during our period from describing themselves as natives of their town, through describing themselves as natives of their province, to describing themselves as ‘Belgae’ or ‘Fiamminghi’.³¹ The fullest account we have of an individual’s odyssey is that of Ferry de Guyon, a Franc-Comtois who campaigned in Burgundian, Spanish, and Walloon companies in Italy, France, Austria, North Africa, Germany, and the Netherlands, where he settled down at Pecquencourt near Douai. He thought of the armies he fought in as ‘the emperor’s men’ or ‘the Burgundians’, yet he remained a Franc-Comtois at heart, happiest when serving in a Burgundian light cavalry company, proud that it was a gentleman of Burgundy who fought his way into Tunis in 1535, horrified to be served beer rather than wine with his dinner at Cambrai in 1540.³² Like others who followed Charles, he found particular satisfaction in his role against ‘the infidels’, in the ‘rebuttal of the enemy of Christendom, the Turk’.³³ Yet even crusading campaigns allowed the affirmation of local identity. Charles sent Ghenters home from Tunis with lions and granted special privileges to the ships of Arnemuiden and Zierikzee battling the storms off Algiers.³⁴ Chroniclers describing the deeds of Netherlanders abroad seem to have been able both to spot heroes from their own town or province and to be proud of Netherlanders in general.³⁵ Certain units stuck out: the Burgundians and Hainaulters of Maximilian’s Walloon Guard, famed for plundering in Flanders but for heroism at the battle of Dornach in the Swabian War of 1499; the three bandes d’ordonnance marching splendidly in Charles’s coronation procession at Bologna in 1530; ‘the men of arms of Flanders’ who distinguished themselves in Luis de Avila’s account of the Schmalkaldic War.³⁶ Infantrymen caught chroniclers’ eyes less than cavalry, Avila’s twenty-four banners of ‘good soldiers of the Netherland’ blending into the ‘Almains of the Overland and of the Netherland’, but this need not reflect the experience of those who fought.³⁷ The infantrymen of 1546–7 may well have felt more part of a common Habsburg Netherlands in Charles V’s army on the Danube than they did at home. And disputes with locals anywhere, like those between hungry soldiers and sailors from the Netherlands and the townsfolk of Cadiz in 1552–3, must have made Netherlanders draw together.³⁸ English campaigns were less wide-ranging but offered similar opportunities for bonding. English troops in Spain in 1511–12 and in France in 1523 marked ³¹ Groenveld, ‘ ‘‘Natie’’ ’, 55, 79–80. ³² Guyon, M´emoires, 11–12, 17, 75, 84, 89–90. ³³ Ibid. 59, 88; ISN iii. 75, 79, 80, 97, 103–4, 106, 111. ³⁴ Fagel, Hispano-Vlaamse wereld, 409 n.; Reygersbergh, Cronijcke, Y2r – v . ³⁵ Reygersbergh, Cronijcke, T3v , U2v –3r ; Macqu´ereau, Chronicque, 196; id., Histoire, 136, 139, 160–1, 176, 224–5, 238, 274–6. ³⁶ Nell, Landsknechte, 223–5; F¨urstenbergisches Urkundenbuch, iv. 242, 245, 248, 267–8, 273, 275, vii. 335–6; Guillaume, Bandes d’ordonnance, 80–1; Macqu´ereau, Histoire, 143, 168, 187, 222; Avila, Comentaries, E6r, H6v –7r , J5v , P8r – v . ³⁷ Avila, Comentaries, E6r , H8r . ³⁸ Fagel, Hispano-vlaamse wereld, 421.

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themselves out by their inability to handle the local food and drink.³⁹ Garrisons in particular cultivated their Englishness, the Calais soldiers holding an annual celebration of Agincourt, egging the king on to war against France, falling out with the French even at peace celebrations, and lapping up stories that the French thought they had lost Boulogne as divine punishment for their lust, gluttony, drunkenness, and swearing.⁴⁰ More sophisticated and occasional campaigners held themselves back from stereotyping the enemy, William Patten commenting after the Pinkie campaign that, while Scots did seem to be in the habit of breaking their promises, ‘I would be loath here to be counted so unadvised as to arrect the faults of many to the infamy of all’; but in the garrisons of 1547–50, isolated among Scots of increasingly uncertain allegiance, suspicion of foreigners found free rein.⁴¹ F O R E I G N T RO O P S A N D LO C A L I D E N T I T Y How much difference did it make that many thousands of the soldiers serving the Habsburgs in the Netherlands were foreign, from Maximilian’s Germans to Philip’s Spaniards?⁴² In defining themselves with reference to foreign troops, Netherlanders might have been pushed together into a closer identification with one another. In the same way within Habsburg armies, much attention had to be paid to preventing quarrels between soldiers of ‘diverse nations’, as Charles put it in 1555, always likely because of ‘diversity in language and way of life’, not to mention ‘reproach for things in the past’; things in the wars between Guelders and the Netherlands or the Schmalkaldic War, perhaps.⁴³ In the very act of enjoining harmony amongst its soldiers, the Habsburg regime helped codify ideas of nationhood that were not wholly congruent with its multinational polity. Meanwhile resentment against foreign troops could easily become resentment against the ruler who introduced them, and Maximilian’s Flemish opponents played on this strongly, a particularly dangerous development for a prince who might himself be rejected by Netherlanders as a disruptive foreigner.⁴⁴ Philip the Fair and Charles V were in a stronger position, but the political traditions of their Spanish realms, ‘where there is very much of dominion and servitude, and very little of liberty and equality’, as Erasmus put it in 1504, raised concerns that would interact alarmingly with the local response to Spanish troops under Philip II.⁴⁵ It may be begging the question to call soldiers German, Spanish, or indeed foreign when records show that companies were of very mixed composition.⁴⁶ Yet contemporaries, whether bureaucrats or chroniclers, did speak of Spanish, High German, ³⁹ Hall, Chronicle, 521, 529; Gunn, ‘March on Paris’, 618. ⁴⁰ Gunn, ‘French Wars’, 41; Davies, ‘Calais and Boulogne’, 12–13, 79. ⁴¹ Patten, ‘Expedition into Scotland’, 146–7; Phillips, Anglo-Scots Wars, 214–17, 221–2, 240–1, 244–6, 251–5. ´ ⁴² Sablon du Corail, ‘Les Etrangers’; Fagel, Hispano-Vlaamse wereld, 379–403. ⁴³ ROPB vi. 471, vii. 346; Emanuele Filiberto, Diari, 51. ⁴⁴ Lettres in´edites, i. 139, 144; Wiesflecker, Maximilian, i. 170, 206. ⁴⁵ Tracy, Politics of Erasmus, 19. ⁴⁶ Burschel, S¨oldner, 146–9; Henne, Histoire, iii. 74; Ward, ‘Cities and States’, 360–1; ISN iii. 63, 103–4.

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Low German, and English companies, and where detailed figures are available they suggest that the sprinkling of outsiders was not large enough to alter their fundamental identity. Thus a Spanish company mustered near Brussels in July 1546 included twenty-eight Frenchmen, thirteen Italians, eleven Low Germans, five High Germans, seven Burgundians, and a Lorrainer, but this left it 92 per cent Spanish.⁴⁷ Certainly contingents could identify one another clearly enough to fall out bloodily, Germans against English, Germans against Spaniards, High Germans against Low Germans, Germans against Picards and Hollanders, Spaniards against Mechelenaars.⁴⁸ No wonder Emmanuel Philibert planned the storming of Hesdin in 1553 in such a way as not ‘to cause more enmity than there is between the nations’.⁴⁹ Chroniclers and poets were prepared to praise some Spaniards and Germans for their courage and foreign troops were welcome when they helped desperate Netherlanders defend their homes.⁵⁰ Chroniclers recorded stories of German loyalty to the emperor and of the captains who wept when little Philip the Fair asked them to rescue his father.⁵¹ Yet many Netherlanders after 1477 bore suspicions about the loyalty of German mercenaries, inflamed when some deserted to the French and others boasted of their role in the death of Charles the Bold.⁵² Though the loyalty of the Spaniards was harder to doubt, their priorities were bitterly questioned when pay or plunder seemed to come ahead of duty.⁵³ It must have been galling to native soldiers that it seemed to be foreigners, foreigners who sometimes cast doubt on their own commitment or competence, who won their prince’s victories on their own soil.⁵⁴ Such feeling perhaps lay behind the insistence of the Netherlanders that they wished to ´ mount the disastrous cavalry raid of 1553, in which Epinoy was killed and Aarschot captured, ‘without any company other than of their own nation’.⁵⁵ Foreign troops were regarded as especially rapacious: first Maximilian’s Germans, then, in the 1540s and 1550s, the Spaniards.⁵⁶ The Spaniards’ looting was spectacular—they supposedly took more than two tons of gold in Saint-Quentin alone—but the problem was that they looted friends as thoroughly as foes.⁵⁷ More distinctive stereotypes were soon added to rapacity. Already in the 1520s Antoine de Lusy noted that ‘Spaniards are presumptuous and vainglorious’ and in 1553, ⁴⁷ Fagel, Hispano-Vlaamse wereld, 397 n. ⁴⁸ Dadizeele, M´emoires, 24; ‘Dagverhaal’, 298; ‘Veldtogt’, 324–5; Nell, Landsknechte, 141–3; Fagel, Hispano-vlaamse wereld, 379 n. ⁴⁹ Emanuele Filiberto, Diari, 139. ⁵⁰ Macqu´ereau, Chronicque, 115, 144; Bocquet, Ballades, 126–7; Nicolay, ‘Kalendrier’, 168–9, 195; Weert, ‘Chronycke’, 114; ‘Vlaamsche kronyk’, 318, 322; Br´esin, Chroniques, 236. ⁵¹ Surquet, ‘M´emoires’, 527; Macqu´ereau, Chronicque, 135; Thieulaine, ‘Extraits’, 145. ´ ⁵² Sablon du Corail, ‘Les Etrangers’, 405–7; Nicolay, ‘Kalendrier’, 236, 307–8; Schaumburg, Geschichten, 100; CLGS ii, 158; Macqu´ereau, Chronicque, 99, 109; Lusy, Journal, 181, 183. ⁵³ Macqu´ereau, Chronicque, 115; Thieulaine, ‘Extraits’, 154. ⁵⁴ Emanuele Filiberto, Diari, 145, 155; Fagel, Hispano-Vlaamse wereld, 390. ⁵⁵ Emanuele Filiberto, Diari, 145. ´ ⁵⁶ Sablon du Corail, ‘Les Etrangers’, 406–7; Br´esin, Chroniques, 40; Fagel, Hispano-Vlaamse wereld, 395, 400; Thieulaine, ‘Extraits’, 146–9, 154–7, 161–2, 177; D´enombrements Hainaut, 606. ⁵⁷ ‘Veldtogt’, 325.

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the Douai magistrates told Mary of Hungary that Spaniards were ‘above all intractable and unbearable, behaving in a town in a superior manner’.⁵⁸ The reputation coincided with their lack of respect for the local civilian authorities, treating them, as Charles’s troops in Germany in 1546 were said to do, as ‘not worth a louse’.⁵⁹ In 1488 Spanish soldiers killed the bailiff of Arnemuiden, prompting ‘a great uproar’.⁶⁰ In later decades what attempts there were to control the Spaniards tended to subject them to their own separate institutions, making them yet more alien. It was Spanish commissioners who investigated their offences; Spanish officials who transferred their pay between Spanish merchants in Antwerp and Spanish captains; the judicial system of the court, rather than that of the town, that regulated their misdeeds in Brussels.⁶¹ Foreign soldiers must have been especially unwelcome when directed against rebels. Maximilian’s menacing Germans helped turn opinion against him in Flanders and Brabant in the 1480s.⁶² Reading Wilwolt von Schaumburg’s recollections, one can imagine how the locals felt about his men’s role in this war of burning, sacking, plundering, capturing peasants, and taking horses and cattle. When outnumbered by ‘a large but completely unskilful people’ in the Holland peasant rebellion of 1491–2, they responded with ruthlessness, to avoid being overwhelmed but also to make themselves ‘lords’ of the Hollanders’ ‘rich land’.⁶³ In 1540, when he brought German troops to suppress Ghent, Charles had to order his subjects to ‘treat them as our good and true servants and subjects’.⁶⁴ The tax disturbances of 1554 at Antwerp suggest again the dangerous association of foreign troops with the repression of internal dissent. Partly prompted by fears that Spaniards were to be billeted in the town, they ended with executions on a marketplace lined with two companies of German infantry.⁶⁵ Netherlanders in the 1480s often asked to be defended not by foreigners but by those more familiar to them.⁶⁶ At the States-General of 1557, this desire was generalized into a request that the majority of troops maintained by the Habsburg regime should be native. Practical reasons were cited—they would know their way around, their pay would stimulate the local economy—and it was argued that if local troops were not hired, the inherited bellicosity of the ‘subjects over here’ might be ‘bastardized’, making them ‘totally incompetent for war’.⁶⁷ Yet the continued presence of Spanish troops after the coming of peace, albeit under the cosmetic control of Orange and Egmond, brought other issues to the fore.⁶⁸ In 1559–60 the continual irritation at the troops’ misconduct fused with the idea that they were to be kept in the Netherlands to keep the natives in ‘perpetual servitude’, no fantasy when both Emmanuel ⁵⁸ Lusy, Journal, 188; AMD EE99. ⁵⁹ Zwichem, Tagebuch, 146. ⁶⁰ Reygersbergh, Cronijcke, H1v . ⁶¹ Henne, Histoire, viii. 204–5; Fagel, Hispano-Vlaamse wereld, 395–6, 399, 400–7; ROPB vii. 429–32. ⁶² Nell, Landsknechte, 226–36; Lettres in´edites, i. 174. ⁶³ Schaumburg, Geschichten, 79, 112–15. ⁶⁴ ROPB iv. 149, 162. ⁶⁵ Weert, ‘Chronycke’, 134–5, 152. ⁶⁶ Surquet, ‘M´emoires’, 546; Dadizeele, M´emoires, 118–19. ⁶⁷ Koenigsberger, Monarchies, 188; Verhofstad, Regering, 133. ⁶⁸ Troeyer, Egmont, 36–7.

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Philibert and Granvelle wrote of the possible need for loyal troops to hold the country down. Such fears were sufficient to cause the first great quarrel between an absent Philip II and his Netherlands subjects.⁶⁹ Few such issues arose in England, because so few foreign troops served there. Even at Calais they were a rarity outside the 1540s, when Ellis Gruffudd denounced the ‘depraved, brutish soldiers from all nations under the sun . . . who had come here . . . to have a good time under the king of England’. He was even-handed enough to include the Welsh and the English, the Cornish, Irish and Manx, alongside the Scots, Spaniards, Gascons, Portuguese, Italians, Albanians, Greeks, Turks, Tatars, Almains, Germans, Burgundians and Flemings in his list, though he did find the Spaniards particularly proud and quarrelsome and the Dutch drunkards. His greatest concern was that such mercenaries might change sides to the French, despite the fact that they were much better paid and fed than their English comrades-in-arms.⁷⁰ In contrast Nicander Nucius, who visited the north of England in the company of a Greek captain in 1545–6, found Englishmen, apart from their hatred of the French, generally well-disposed to foreigners.⁷¹ When foreign soldiers did cause trouble, the civilian authorities were quick to act against them. Feuds were rife amongst the Spanish captains in English service, and in January 1550 two fought in London with their followers and one was killed. Despite his hopes of pardon for his good service, the killer was rapidly tried, condemned, and hanged at Smithfield, his hand having been ceremoniously struck off at the site of the crime.⁷² Only when foreigners were used to suppress domestic discontent did they evoke special hatred. The Western rebels of 1549 reportedly ‘abhorred’ the ‘Burgundians’ sent against them and slew many.⁷³ At Norwich in the same year Kett’s rebels captured an Italian captain; they rejected ransom offers, stripped him of his splendid clothes and armour, and hanged him.⁷⁴ Even when the English did have a foreign prince under the Spanish match of 1554, his tyrannous troops were never more than a spectre raised by those stirring up opposition to the regime.⁷⁵ External enemies past and present were much more important in the self-definition of the English than were the foreign troops that troubled the Netherlands.

T H E M E A N I N G S O F F O RT I F I C AT I O N S The most visible markers war left on the landscape were fortifications, but how did they shape people’s understandings of the communities in which they lived? In England, as we have seen, most fortifications were locally maintained and served as symbols of urban loyalty, strength, and liberty. Larger, royal fortifications had long ⁶⁹ Wesenbeke, M´emoires, 96–7; Koenigsberger, Monarchies, 194–5; Troeyer, Egmont, 29–53. ⁷⁰ Gruffudd, ‘Boulogne and Calais’, 14–18, 22, 24–7, 37, 41, 74. ⁷¹ Nucius, Travels, 14, 89–90. ⁷² Chronicle of the Grey Friars, 65; Chronicle of King Henry VIII, 123–31, 139–42, 196–203, 206–14. ⁷³ Hooker, Description of Excester, ii. 96. ⁷⁴ Cornwall, Revolt of the Peasantry, 171. ⁷⁵ Loades, Two Tudor Conspiracies, 29, 56.

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marked the frontiers of the realm against Scotland, Gaelic Ireland, and France: in the mid-1430s The Libel of English Policy identified Dover castle and Calais as the ‘twin eyes’ of the kingdom.⁷⁶ Official rhetoric increased the symbolic charge on such fortifications from the 1530s, as Henry VIII’s building programme along the south and east coasts and along the Scottish borders was trumpeted as tangible evidence both of the dangers confronting the realm and of the king’s desire to protect his subjects. Where Subsidy Acts spoke in general terms, Richard Morison detailed Henry’s works and asked ‘what king, since kings ruled first this realm of England, hath made greater provision for the safety of our bodies?’⁷⁷ Andrew Borde and John Leland followed him in praising Henry’s walling-in of his island kingdom.⁷⁸ Henry’s fortifications were expositions of his majesty, garnished with the royal coat of arms, Tudor badges, and inscriptions celebrating his rule.⁷⁹ But by location and design—coastal forts with large guns but small garrisons—they did not suggest an ambition to repress his people. Admittedly, citadels like those of Ghent or Utrecht were not beyond the imagination of the Tudors or their subjects. In the wake of the revolt of 1536 Henry talked of a possible citadel at Lincoln on the site of the cathedral close, to keep down the population in future and remind them that their fathers were traitors.⁸⁰ In Mary’s reign her opponents conjured up visions of Spanish garrisons subjugating the country from such unlikely bases as Scarborough castle.⁸¹ But the reality, even at Hull where the construction of the citadel may have been influenced by the town’s conduct in 1536–7, fell well short of these nightmares. Only in Ireland were significant internal fortifications constructed, starting with Fort Governor and Fort Protector in 1548. Their aim was to hold down Gaelic resistance but also, and increasingly, to protect English colonists.⁸² In the Netherlands, too, town walls and gates had long embodied civic pride and featured strongly in the urban topography to which chroniclers related political events.⁸³ As princes, regents, and governors increasingly directed or restricted town and noble fortification programmes, however, they could take on wider significance.⁸⁴ Chimay and Tienen claimed their refortification would benefit their respective provinces, while Groningen, which rebuilt its walls, ditches, and bulwarks at its own cost in a ten-year programme from 1545, saw itself as ‘a fortress . . . for the whole Netherlands and the gate of Germany’.⁸⁵ On their new fortifications in the 1540s and 1550s Maastricht and Antwerp combined inscriptions commemorating town magistrates with gates and bastions glorifying Charles V and Mary of Hungary, in some cases echoing Roman triumphal arches.⁸⁶ In the 1540s Deventer, Flushing, ⁷⁶ Libelle, 2. ⁷⁷ 26 Henry VIII, c. 19, 32 Henry VIII, c. 50; Morison, Exhortation, D3. ⁷⁸ Shrank, Writing the Nation, 46–7, 95–6. ⁷⁹ Cooper, Propaganda, 44, 130, 176–8, 260. ⁸⁰ LP XI. 717 ⁸¹ Ecclesiastical Memorials, iii(ii). 342–3, 516. ⁸² Ellis, Ireland, 266–9. ⁸³ Bruaene, Gentse memorieboeken, 164–9, 223–5, 251–2. ⁸⁴ ROPB iv. 363, v. 169, vii. 350, 459, 495–507. ⁸⁵ ROPB i. 573, ii. 553–5; Eppens, Kroniek, i. 117–18. ⁸⁶ Morreau, Bolwerk der Nederlanden, 46, 48, 127–30, 137–8; Hemelrijck, Vlaamse krijgsbouwkunde, 279–80; Weert, ‘Chronycke’, 117, 122, 129, 133.

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and Le Quesnoy all built new bulwarks named for the emperor.⁸⁷ Yet even bastioned defences decorated with princely badges still belonged to the townsfolk, protecting them and their descendants, providing space for an evening stroll and adaptable through new inscriptions to commemorate heroic defenders.⁸⁸ Citadels belonged more unequivocally to the prince, as Charles V made clear when he laid the first stone of the Ghent citadel on 12 May 1540.⁸⁹ By the 1570s they were hated symbols of oppression, subject to popular destruction.⁹⁰ That followed the systematic building of citadels for occupation by Spanish garrisons in the years following 1566, but they smelt of tyranny long before.⁹¹ Sited and named, as at Ghent, to emphasize the disloyalty of humiliated towns, citadels drew on notorious Italian precedents and developed in the local context from the urban castles which had been controversial in earlier centuries and the heavily fortified town gates used to compel the obedience of the citizenry in the civil wars of 1482–92.⁹² Even the edge of foreign domination so sharp after 1566 was present at times, at Leeuwarden in the 1480s, when the blockhouse was built by Wilwolt von Schaumburg’s Germans, or at Brussels in 1556, when a Spanish-manned citadel was suggested to overcome tax resistance.⁹³ William of Orange’s instructions as governor of Utrecht in 1559 suggest that its dangers were evident to the government: the keeping of the castle there should only be given to ‘long-standing subjects of the king from these Low Countries’.⁹⁴ Yet even citadels could be read as acts of princely beneficence. An ode in praise of Utrecht described the new, square, bastioned, citadel, built by Charles V, as ‘the refuge of our city’.⁹⁵ The new fortified towns of the 1540s and 1550s were as much products of princely will as the citadels, but their contribution to the common good was easier to expound as they were strategically sited to defend whole provinces against invasion. ⁹⁶ Jean Thieulaine accepted the argument that Mariembourg was built to ‘serve as a bulwark for the lands of Namur, Brabant, Li`ege, and Hainaut’; Louis Br´esin thought similarly of Hesdinfert, Charlemont, and Philippeville. But the corollary was that Mariembourg’s fall in June 1554 ‘marvellously shook up all the Netherlands’.⁹⁷ Once such bulwarks were in place, failure to maintain them could weaken confidence in the ability of the prince to defend his subjects. Coastal fortifications were rarer in the Netherlands than in England, but could also speak of princely care and power and provincial pride. In his chronicle, published in 1551, Jan Reygersbergh praised the ‘strong impregnable ⁸⁷ Heuvel, ‘Papiere Bolwercken’, 150; Hoff, Chronicle of Deventer, 22–3; ISN viii. 332. ⁸⁸ Morreau, Bolwerk der Nederlanden, 57–8; Eppens, Kroniek, i. 80, 117. ⁸⁹ Hemelrijck, Vlaamse krijgsbouwkunde, 141. ⁹⁰ Ibid. 143, 147; Vries, ‘Staatsvorming’, 26; DuPlessis, Lille, 265–6. ⁹¹ Heuvel, ‘Papiere Bolwercken’, 107–27. ⁹² Hemelrijck, Vlaamse krijgsbouwkunde, 141–2; Law, ‘Citadels’; Pepper and Adams, Firearms and Fortifications, 27–8, 58–72, 158; Mariage, Fortifications, 41–6; Reygersbergh, Cronycke, I1v ; Kalveen, Bestuur, 32, 34, 43–4. ⁹³ Schaumburg, Geschichten, 175–6; Koenigsberger, Monarchies, 182. ⁹⁴ ROPB vii. 498. ⁹⁵ Bomelius, Bellum Trajectinum, 65. ⁹⁶ Heuvel, ‘Papiere Bolwercken’, 99; Wellens, ‘Forteresse de Marienbourg’, 344; ROPB vii. 516. ⁹⁷ Br´esin, Chroniques, 233; Thieulaine, ‘Extraits’, 184.

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castle’ of Zeeburg near Rammekens, built under Mary of Hungary’s encouragement and graced with the same imperial styling as the Keiserspoort at Antwerp.⁹⁸ The names of the new fortress-towns—Philippeville, Charlemont, Mariembourg—linked them intimately with the princes for whom they were constructed.⁹⁹ Mariembourg even suffered the indignity of being rechristened Henribourg after its capture in 1554.¹⁰⁰ Yet it was not just the Habsburgs who used such fortifications to write their names across the landscape of the Netherlands. The replacement for the devastated Hesdin in 1554 ended up not as the projected ‘Carlo Quinto Borgo’ but as Hesdinfert, dubbed with the acrostic family motto FERT of its builder Emmanuel Philibert of Savoy.¹⁰¹ Individual bastions in these fortresses were named for the commanders of the troops responsible for their construction. The aim was to encourage competition amongst the captains and their men to make their work as strong as possible. Thus Hesdinfert, Mariembourg, Philippeville, Luxembourg, Ivoix, and Ham-en-Vermandois got bastions named for Aarschot, Arenberg, Boussu, Bugnicourt, Egmond, Glajon, Horn, Lalaing, Mansfeld, Orange, and Savoy.¹⁰² At least Savoy was a cousin of the Habsburgs and his colleagues were Netherlands noblemen by birth or adoption. At Philippeville two bastions were named after the German colonels Georg von Holle and Lazarus von Schwendi.¹⁰³ The German garrison troops installed in 1556 may have felt at home in them, but one wonders how the names sounded to the civilian residents—who had to be tempted to come and settle with rent-free twenty-seven-year building leases—and even to the permanent garrison set up in 1558, apparently recruited from local men.¹⁰⁴

WA R A N D R E L I G I O U S C H A N G E In 1559 Philip II complained that religious deviance had increased ‘by means of the late wars, the heretics and those erring from our holy faith and religion having used this opportunity to spread their errors and poison’.¹⁰⁵ In both England and the Netherlands the rise of religious division coincided with the frequent wars of 1521–59, but in what senses were they connected? At the most general level, historians of early Protestantism in both the southern and northern provinces of the Netherlands have argued that the strains of war in the 1530s and 1550s bred social and spiritual disenchantment and hence contributed to the rise of unorthodoxy.¹⁰⁶ ⁹⁸ Bruijn, Reinders, Nederlandse vestingen, 79; Sicking, Zeemacht, 154; Reygersbergh, Cronijcke, Bb3r – v . ⁹⁹ Heuvel, ‘Papiere Bolwercken’, 102; Berckmans, ‘Mariembourg et Philippeville’, 130. ¹⁰⁰ Berckmans, ‘Mariembourg et Philippeville’, 109. ¹⁰¹ Heuvel, ‘Papiere Bolwercken’, 94–5, 199; Barre, Journal, 376. ¹⁰² ‘Dagverhaal’, 296–7, 302; ‘Lettres de Philibert de Marigny’, 41; Massarette, Mansfeld, i. 39, 44; ‘Veldtogt’, 331. ¹⁰³ Berckmans, ‘Mariembourg et Philippeville’, 113. ¹⁰⁴ Heuvel, ‘Papiere Bolwercken’, 102; Berckmans, ‘Mariembourg et Philippeville’, 109, 125. ¹⁰⁵ ROPB vii. 507–10. ¹⁰⁶ Deyon and Lottin, Casseurs, 135; Moreau, Tournai, 138; Decavele, Dageraad, i. 586–7; Waite, David Joris, 36–7, 45; Welcker, ‘Het dagelijks brood’, 196–8.

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The Anabaptist pacifism of David Joris and Menno Simons, whose followers would not even carry weapons to town musters, might be seen as a more specific reaction against the pressures of war, though it was shaped by complex engagement with Erasmian humanism, German spiritualism, and the attempts of the M¨unsterites and the Batenburgers to bring in the kingdom of God by force.¹⁰⁷ Religious change was also stimulated by the presence of large numbers of troops of very different religious traditions in Habsburg armies and garrisons. In 1555 soldiers were specifically forbidden to quarrel over matters of faith and the campaigns of the 1550s suggested how the Germans, who destroyed all the altars and tombs in the church at Forest-Montiers, might fall out with the Spaniards, who did special reverence to a statue of Mary preserved from the flames at the siege of Ham.¹⁰⁸ German troops at Antwerp in 1554 ate meat in Lent with impunity, while their evangelical preachers ‘announced the word of God to all comers and enjoyed the exercise of their religion with the princes’ knowledge and without reproof ’.¹⁰⁹ Some German Protestant soldiers proselytized deliberately. Count Wilhelm von F¨urstenberg had already introduced the Reformation into his own lands when he led thousands of landsknechts in the recapture of the town of Luxembourg on 6 June 1544. He immediately installed a Protestant preacher there, only for the Habsburg authorities to expel him.¹¹⁰ Meanwhile the campaign in Germany in 1546–7 exposed troops from the Netherlands to Lutheran preaching. One Frankfurt pastor recalled that they came to sermons with enthusiasm and, alarmingly for the Habsburgs, some said after hearing the Lutherans preach that they wished they had never fought for the emperor.¹¹¹ We might also wonder whether the experience of war inured soldiers to the destruction of holy things. In the devastating campaigns of the 1550s the Habsburg forces regularly destroyed churches and religious houses on French territory, though they of course accused the French of doing worse, blaspheming horribly, hanging monks, and raping nuns.¹¹² When Th´erouanne fell, the cathedral was thoroughly sacked and repeated orders had to be issued for the return of relics, plate, crosses, tapestries, and books.¹¹³ When Saint-Quentin fell, two soldiers from Hainaut quarrelled over a relic of the Holy Blood in a monstrance supported by two angels. They agreed to split it like a wishbone, pulling on one angel each until the winner got the relic.¹¹⁴ No wonder it was the Spaniards whom Philip set to guard all the churches in Saint-Quentin, while he tried to gather relics and ornaments into his tent and have mass said before them every day.¹¹⁵ It may be no coincidence that it was in 1558 that harsh legislation against thefts from churches was first found necessary in the Netherlands.¹¹⁶ ¹⁰⁷ Waite, David Joris, 100–3, 116–17, 119–20, 145; Stayer, Anabaptists and the Sword, 309–24; Verheus, ‘Beleden vrede’, 163–5. ¹⁰⁸ ROPB vi. 471; ‘Dagverhaal’, 305; ‘Veldtogt’, 332. ¹⁰⁹ Wesenbeke, M´emoires, 76–7. ¹¹⁰ Wagner, Wilhelm von F¨urstenberg, 180–242, 254. ¹¹¹ QFG 332–3. ¹¹² Thieulaine, ‘Extraits’, 160, 186, 188; ‘Vlaamsche kronyk’, 323; ‘Dagverhaal’, 287, 291–2, 294–5, 303, 305; ‘Veldtogt’, 325. ¹¹³ ROPB vii. 60–1. ¹¹⁴ Vinchant, Hainaut, v. 225. ¹¹⁵ ‘Veldtogt’, 325. ¹¹⁶ Vanhemelryck, Criminaliteit, 190.

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Peace rather than war, it has been suggested, bred spiritual disenchantment in the nobility, with the closing of avenues of advancement, even a loss of vocation, which predisposed them to religious dissent.¹¹⁷ Some contemporaries such as Florent vander Haer, a canon of Lille, did link the post-war crisis and the rise of heresy to the nobles’ exhaustion in princely service and the problem that ‘they could no longer maintain their nobility and greatness without war’.¹¹⁸ Yet, as in France, noble Protestant militancy was statistically uneven and came as much from urban intellectuals as from soldiers, as much from resentment at Habsburg centralization or guilt at the massacre of M¨unster as at martial unemployment.¹¹⁹ Whatever the reasons, peace did bring religious crisis. At Antwerp it was said that Philip’s release from dependence on the taxes and loans of his subjects enabled him to introduce a stricter inquisition.¹²⁰ William of Orange claimed repeatedly that for Philip, Alva, and Henry II the peace was deliberately designed to facilitate the destruction of heresy.¹²¹ Meanwhile peace readied Protestants for confrontation, especially in the South, where it facilitated contacts with the more numerous and organized French Huguenots.¹²² Circumstances in England were very different. Religious change promoted by the crown served, as we have seen, to justify war and strengthen the military obligations of subjects to princes. Religious debate could, it is true, prove divisive, most evidently at Calais, where rival conservative and evangelical preachers fomented turmoil in the late 1530s and, as Ellis Gruffudd recalled, religious passions made soldiers forget their obedience to their captains.¹²³ Soldiers denounced as sacramentarians appealed to their evangelical patrons in the garrison and at court and the ramifications contributed to the fall of Thomas Cromwell. In 1539 Cromwell himself stressed to Lord Lisle, the deputy of Calais, the need to restore religious peace, ‘which is one of the strongest fortresses that can be in any such town of war as the same is’.¹²⁴ As late as 1546, reformist captains at Boulogne were being displaced by conservative patrons.¹²⁵ Calais Protestants became a problem again under Mary, when several fled to Wesel and Aarau and wrote against her government and others were arrested in 1555 under suspicion of plotting to betray the town.¹²⁶ Yet Mary’s reign also demonstrated war’s potential for suppressing religious differences. Service on the Saint-Quentin campaign allowed the political rehabilitation of the sons of the disgraced duke of Northumberland and of men such as Sir James Croft and Sir Peter Carew who had taken leading parts in Wyatt’s rebellion. Likewise Francis Russell, earl of Bedford, ¹¹⁷ Deyon and Lottin, Casseurs, 138. ¹¹⁸ Vinchant, Hainaut, v. 266–7. ¹¹⁹ Deyon and Lottin, Casseurs, 158–9, 161–2; Decavele, Dageraad, i. 555; Waite, ‘Dutch Nobility and Anabaptism’; Constant, ‘Protestant Nobility in France’, 73–7; Nierop, ‘Nobility and the Revolt’, 91. ¹²⁰ Wesenbeke, M´emoires, 96. ¹²¹ Orange, Apologie, 61; Duke, ‘Elusive Netherlands’, 34 n. ¹²² Decavele, Dageraad, i. 322, 331–2, 426–7; Moreau, Tournai, 152–67. ¹²³ MacCulloch, Thomas Cranmer, 110–15, 140–4; NLW, Mostyn MS 158, fo. 524v , quoted in Morgan, ‘Government of Calais’, 209. ¹²⁴ PRO, SP1/152, fos. 209–10 (LP XIV. i. 1298). ¹²⁵ Davies, ‘Calais and Boulogne’, 50–1. ¹²⁶ Garrett, Marian Exiles, 34, 52, 74, 100, 176, 315–16; Morgan, ‘Government of Calais’, 234–6.

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shortly to be one of the leading Protestant peers of Elizabethan England, returned from exile to serve at Saint-Quentin and organized the West Country against invasion in 1558.¹²⁷

ENEMIES AND ALLIES Netherlanders were encouraged by the Habsburgs to blame the troubles brought by war not just on the Valois kings but on the covetousness, tyranny, perjury, and ‘insatiable ambition’ of the French in general.¹²⁸ They seem to have followed this lead. Robert Macqu´ereau and Louis Br´esin thought duplicity, fraud, and deception characteristic of the French.¹²⁹ Anonymous poems on Pavia followed Burgundian poetic traditions in turning their fire from the presumptuous Francis I to his ‘proud nation/ That claimed to surmount the world’ and his army of cowardly braggarts.¹³⁰ In the border provinces, repeated war made for generalized francophobia. In Artois and West Flanders ‘wicked Frenchman’ was an insult to fight over; the civic entries of 1549–50 concentrated on lauding Charles’s victories over the French, and anti-French feeling was sufficiently well-established by 1559 to doom hopes of cooperation with the Valois monarchy in the ensuing revolt against Spain.¹³¹ In Valenciennes the townsfolk had to be sternly forbidden to insult the French when Charles V made his ceremonial entry in the company of the dauphin in 1540.¹³² Enmity might be sharply expressed when Netherlanders and Frenchmen met in a neutral country in time of war. At Southampton in 1536–7 three swords had to be confiscated after ‘a fray made at the West Quay between the Frenchmen and the Flemings’.¹³³ Further north ‘the enemies and disobedient people of Guelders’ as they were known at ’s-Hertogenbosch, were in a more ambiguous position, blamed for the rapacity of their raiders, but acceptable as rebellious neighbours whose eventual submission to Charles V could be celebrated.¹³⁴ The English were if anything clearer about the faults of their enemies. The description of the French as the realm’s ‘greatest and ancient adversaries’ held as good in the 1550s as it had in the 1470s.¹³⁵ Stereotypes of cowardly, untrustworthy ‘French dogs’ persisted despite the political and cultural rapprochement of 1515–39.¹³⁶ The accusation of being a Scot or acting like a Scot was as terrible an insult in northern England in the mid-sixteenth century as it had been in the late fourteenth.¹³⁷ The ¹²⁷ Davies, ‘England and the French War’, 162–3; Adams, ‘Dudley Clientele’, 247–53. ¹²⁸ Recueil de pi`eces historiques, i. 252–3; Lettres in´edites, i. 115; Inventaire Gand, no. 1155. ¹²⁹ Macqu´ereau, Chronicque, 140, 153; id., Histoire, 220, 245; Br´esin, Chroniques, 200, 241, 265. ¹³⁰ Lemaire de Belges, Œuvres, iv. 293–6; Thiry, ‘Rh´etoriqueurs de Bourgogne’, 102–4 ; Thiry, ‘L’Honneur et l’Empire’, 299, 301. ¹³¹ Muchembled, Violence, 86–8; ISN iii. 50; Jacquot, ‘Panorama’, 474; Duke, ‘Loyalty and Treason’, 182. ¹³² Collection des voyages, ii. 591–2. ¹³³ SAO, SC5/3/1, fo. 75r . ¹³⁴ Wissing, ‘ ‘‘Kinders’’ ’, 238, 243; Aurelius, Cronycke, Bb5v ; SSH, OA3800. ¹³⁵ Literae Cantuarienses, iii. 276; 4 & 5 Philip and Mary, c. 11. ¹³⁶ Grummitt, ‘War, Diplomacy’, 16–21. ¹³⁷ Neville, ‘Local Sentiment’, 434–5.

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‘wild Irish’, attractive though some of their ways were to the Anglo-Irish who had to exercise power in negotiation with them, were always regarded as barbarous by mainland Englishmen and came in the sixteenth century to be identified in some quarters with the savages in the New World, ripe for conquest and civilization.¹³⁸ From the 1530s, English governments also began to identify their cause with that of the gospel and condemn their opponents as those who fought ‘against religion, against God’s word, and so against God himself ’, as Richard Morison put it in 1539.¹³⁹ This perspective was especially important in justifying Protector Somerset’s campaigns in Scotland, which claimed to forge a united godly Britain.¹⁴⁰ Englishmen and Netherlanders also defined themselves by distinguishing themselves from their allies. In the abstract, poets in the Netherlands were positive about the English, ‘valiant in battle’ and symbolized by the ‘strong leopard of England’ who might rescue them from the French.¹⁴¹ But real Englishmen—Henry VIII’s Tournai garrison, ‘worse than brigands’, the bickering allies of 1522–5, the plunderers from Montreuil in 1544, the auxiliaries of 1489 and 1557, horribly inclined to massacre women and children, the individuals at Hesdinfert and Gravelines in the 1550s, suspected of spying for the French—were another matter.¹⁴² English captains brought up on the chivalric reputation of the Valois Burgundian court could think happily of their allies as ‘Burgundians’, but their troops still quarrelled with Habsburg soldiers they thought obsessed with plunder.¹⁴³ ENEMY ALIENS The clearest way in which wars made Englishmen and Netherlanders define themselves by defining what they were not was the arrest of enemy subjects and the confiscation of their goods. In England these measures built on the general xenophobia noted by foreign visitors, manifested in anti-alien riots like those of 1517 and institutionalized in higher tax rates for aliens and Acts like that of 1490 blaming the lawlessness of northern England on its many Scottish inhabitants and ordering their expulsion.¹⁴⁴ Such legislation generally distinguished those born in English-held or friendly areas of France and the Low Countries from ‘dangerous’ aliens, French, Scottish, and Irish, but war repeatedly sharpened government measures and their local implementation.¹⁴⁵ In 1496–7 the Scots were the target, many paying fines and one expelled from the citizenship of Norwich.¹⁴⁶ In 1513 Scotsmen were to be banished and their goods ¹³⁸ Ellis, Ireland, 21–4, 284–5. ¹³⁹ Morison, Exhortation, B3. ¹⁴⁰ Dawson, ‘Protestant Culture’; Merriman, ‘Assured Scots’; Bush, Government Policy, 21–2. ¹⁴¹ Recueil de chansons, iii. 129, 134. ¹⁴² ISN v. 194; ‘Vlaamsche kronyk’, 322; Gunn, ‘March on Paris’, 618–30; Smet, Excellente Cronike, fo. 261v ; ‘Dagverhaal’, 324; Br´esin, Chroniques, 274–334; Lusy, Journal, 44–5, 208, 241. ¹⁴³ LP III. ii. 2499, 2541; Gunn, ‘March on Paris’, 619. ¹⁴⁴ Relation of England, 20–1, 23–4; Historical Collections, 237–8; Holmes, ‘Evil May-Day’; 7 Henry VII, c. 6; Neville, Violence, Custom and Law, 167–8; Alien Communities of London. ¹⁴⁵ Griffiths, ‘English Realm’. ¹⁴⁶ BL, Add. MS 59899, fo. 196r ; Records Norwich, ii. 105.

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sold off; Frenchmen living near the coast faced imprisonment and forfeiture of goods, while those inland were to find sureties for their good behaviour.¹⁴⁷ At Canterbury canvas worth 32s 9d was duly confiscated from one Scot and sold for the king’s profit, while French residents had their goods seized and were set to work repairing the city walls.¹⁴⁸ Coastal towns drew up lists of Frenchmen and Scots and ordered all Frenchmen to wear a white cross on their left arm; at Southampton castle a French chaplain was expelled as a spy.¹⁴⁹ In 1522, seventeen Scots were found in and around Dover—unlike some later suspects, they could not show they were really born in Northumberland—and Oxford University’s esquire bedel of arts had to prove he was born in Calais to secure his release from arrest.¹⁵⁰ In 1544 Frenchmen who would not leave the realm or sue out letters of denization—giving them residence rights and the crown an attractive fee—could even be consigned to the king’s galleys.¹⁵¹ In practice the fate of aliens depended on local fears and on individuals’ relationship with the host community. Those, especially in inland towns like Norwich or Oxford, with local friends or employers who would stand surety for their loyalty were released, but more nervous towns like Bristol and Canterbury arrested those they suspected and even sent them up to London.¹⁵² Worst of all was Calais, where security alarms and economic rivalry with the English burgesses combined to produce a series of anti-alien campaigns from 1483 to the pitiless expulsion of refugees in 1543, ‘crueller than the treatment of the Christians by the Turks’ in the words of Ellis Gruffudd.¹⁵³ In the Netherlands the confiscation of enemy lands, goods, and debts was standard practice throughout the period, applied against domestic rebels and northern enemies from Guelders or Cleves as well as against the French.¹⁵⁴ Enemy goods were to be reported to commissioners and informers rewarded with one-fifth of their value; those detaining such goods might be examined on oath.¹⁵⁵ The process was an intrusive manifestation of the prince’s power, administered by great councillors and central and provincial institutions, interfering with landlord–tenant relations, business relationships, and even ecclesiastical privilege, as livings, advowsons, and lands held by French clergy, patrons, and religious houses were regularly confiscated.¹⁵⁶ Numerous lawsuits show both the widespread implementation of the policy and the acrimony or confusion to which it gave rise, as victims of confiscation, their tenants, creditors and heirs squabbled with those to whom the government had granted their possessions, ¹⁴⁷ LP I. ii. 2207, 2222/16; NRO, MCB 1510–32, unfoliated. ¹⁴⁸ PRO, E101/518/1; CCA, FA10, fo. 33v . ¹⁴⁹ EKA, NR/FAc 3, fo. 123r – v ; SAO, SC5/1/29, fo. 24v ; LP I. ii. 2684/85. ¹⁵⁰ BL, Egerton MS 2093, fos. 38v –40v , 106v , 179r ; Epistolae Academicae, 141–2. ¹⁵¹ TRP i. 227, 233–4, 238; Heinze, Proclamations, 187 n.; Griffiths, ‘English Realm’, 103–4. ¹⁵² CCA, FA13, fo. 187; BRO, 04026/4, 99; Records Norwich, ii. 170–1; Selections Oxford, 274–5. ¹⁵³ Grummitt, ‘Calais and the Crown’, 56–7. ¹⁵⁴ ROPB ii. 98–9, 500, vi. 187–8; Aurelius, Cronycke, Bb5v ; SAD, SA2/151; ICC iii. 309–16, 329, 446, vi. 262–4, 266, 423. ¹⁵⁵ ROPB ii. 98–9, iii. 540; Macqu´ereau, Histoire, 78–9. ¹⁵⁶ CLGS i. 285–6, ii. 426, iii. 444, 466–7, iv. 252; ROPB iii. 540, vi. 187, vii. 217; ICC iii. 340, vi. 263.

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usually as compensation for their own wartime losses.¹⁵⁷ Remedy for such confusion was tried in 1557, with thorough provision for registration of confiscations, a fixed scale for compensation for war damage, and punishment for those making false claims.¹⁵⁸ What began with goods moved on to people. Merchants and ships’ crews might be arrested suddenly when peace or truce broke down.¹⁵⁹ French clergy were vulnerable to arrest or expulsion as spies.¹⁶⁰ More thoroughgoing expulsions of the French, the Scots, and those from Guelders were also attempted, but proved hard to implement. Soldiers had to be restrained from arresting those who had a right to stay; townsfolk limited expulsions to protect such business interests as the schooling of boys from Guelders at ’s-Hertogenbosch; the duke of Aarschot even put in a good word for Maarten van Rossum’s sister, a well-behaved nun at Mons.¹⁶¹ As with property, arrangements became more complex over time. On 16 October 1551 it was decreed that, outside the border areas, where some provincial governors had decreed wholesale expulsions of the French, non-resident French subjects were to leave within eight days, short-term residents within a month. Those resident for more than a year were to register their place of birth, current abode, and occupation with the authorities and swear loyalty to Charles. At Antwerp the effects were clearly felt. Many French subjects had doubtless left soon after the outbreak of war in late September. In eighteen days in late October and early November, seventy-four more were registered as departing imminently. Most were young men, but two, a Parisian dentist and a Lyonnais lacemaker, were heads of families who had lived in Antwerp some years.¹⁶² At least they obeyed the rules successfully. Some unfortunate ‘rustics and others, by ignorance, simplicity, and failure to understand the said ordinance’, failed to register and found they were being captured and ransomed by unscrupulous soldiers. Since this was ‘more damaging than profitable to the republic’, they were granted an extension.¹⁶³ Invasions produced the most extreme measures. The French were given six days to leave Hainaut in March 1537 and by the end of April, as spy fever spread, towns were under orders to question all those entering and leaving about their identity, movements, and business.¹⁶⁴ In June 1542 at Antwerp, all those born subjects of William of Cleves, whether citizens of Antwerp or not, were to present themselves for registration within twenty-four hours, swearing loyalty to emperor, duchy, and town and revealing any threats to the town or Charles’s other territories. Those not registering were to be punished as rebels; those registered were not to receive any visitors from William’s lands and were placed under curfew. Strangers were to stay indoors in case ¹⁵⁷ ROPB ii. 214; AMD, EE57; CLGS i. 139–40, 159, 163, 170–1, 181–2, 185, 191, 253–4, 256, 287, 292, 361, 390–1, ii. 41–2, 65, 298–9, 307–8, 346, 358–9, 378, 395, 405, 423, 426, 448–9, iii. 20, 73, 112–13, iv. 31, 206, v. 230, 401. ¹⁵⁸ ROPB vii. 215–17. ¹⁵⁹ Macqu´ereau, Histoire, 170; ICC iii. 314. ¹⁶⁰ ROPB ii. 295–6; ADN, B2315, fo. 261; AMD, CC242, fo. 177. ¹⁶¹ Ibid. ii. 132, 225–6, iii. 548; CLGS ii. 537; Henne, Histoire, i. 290, viii. 55; Molius, Kroniek, 295. ¹⁶² Roey, ‘Ordonnantie tegen de Fransen’. ¹⁶³ ROPB vi. 192–3, 218–19. ¹⁶⁴ ROPB iv. 18–19, 24–5.

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of fire or other emergency and leave the town each evening, so that hostile troops might not smuggle themselves in for a night attack disguised as casual labourers.¹⁶⁵ It seems clear that war did force people to identify themselves and others more sharply. But individuals could outmanœuvre the system, like the Flemish merchants who got their goods released from arrest at Paris in 1544 by arguing that they could not be foreigners if the French crown claimed their province were within the kingdom.¹⁶⁶ And, as in England, the implementation of all such measures depended on local circumstances. In 1482, Pierre Dufour, clerk of the gouvernance of Walloon Flanders, was arrested at Douai as a French spy. Maximilian assured the magistrates that Dufour had been asking questions at his request, to test sentiment in the town. Unconvinced, the magistrates, who resented Dufour’s refusal to let their men search his house for grain, tried, executed, and quartered him anyway.¹⁶⁷

N AT I O N A L , R E G I O N A L , A N D LO C A L LOY A LT Y Local, provincial, dynastic, and national loyalties coexisted for Englishmen and Netherlanders alike, but in changing proportions. Recent analyses of the Netherlands suggest that provincial and dynastic loyalties predominated throughout our period, as we might expect from the comparatively rapid changes in the territorial composition of the Burgundian–Habsburg Low Countries, and that there was no agreed name for a nation inhabiting those lands; yet by the 1550s terms suggestive of a single body politic including all the Habsburg provinces—le pays (rather than les pays) de pardec¸a; patrie, patria, or vaderlant; Belgium or Belgica—came into more frequent usage, suggesting an underlying change in attitudes.¹⁶⁸ Matters were certainly complex. Identity and its obverse, xenophobia, existed at many levels in an Artois where people picked fights with adherents of the wrong king but also with speakers of the wrong language and residents of the wrong village.¹⁶⁹ Except in princely appeals to patriotic duty, the language of nationhood was far more often used of provinces or small groups of provinces than of any larger unit.¹⁷⁰ High noblemen and princely bureaucrats thought more readily in terms of larger allegiances than did those with less to gain from the exercise of princely power.¹⁷¹ Those in the more recently acquired provinces felt less part of a common enterprise than those in the core Burgundian territories, leaving Abel Eppens able to write of the 1550s, ‘whatever wars went on in Germany, in France and elsewhere, Friesland remained in rest and quietness’.¹⁷² Trajectories of change are particularly hard to plot, when for some Netherlanders attachments to prince and province began to contradict each other in the years after ¹⁶⁵ SAA, Pk1560/2. ¹⁶⁶ ROPB v. 63–4. ¹⁶⁷ AMD, EE54, AA65. ¹⁶⁸ Stengers, Racines, 55–88; Duke, ‘Elusive Netherlands’, 10–38; Tilmans, ‘Vaderland-begrip’, 32; Groenveld, ‘ ‘‘Natie’’ ’, 63–4; Schepper, ‘Introduction’, 28. ¹⁶⁹ Muchembled, Violence, 86–95. ¹⁷⁰ Tilmans, ‘Vaderland-begrip’, 16–22, 25–31, 39–40, 51–2; Stein, ‘Nationale identiteiten’; Macqu´ereau, Histoire, 126, 266; Thieulaine, ‘Extraits’, 156. ¹⁷¹ Groenveld, ‘ ‘‘Natie’’ ’, 63–4. ¹⁷² Schepper, ‘Introduction’, 28; Eppens, Kroniek, i. 125.

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1566.¹⁷³ But what did war contribute to the changing balances of identity and allegiance? It was certainly the Habsburgs’ conviction that war should drive their Netherlands provinces into a closer union. Maximilian, Charles, Margaret of Austria, and Mary of Hungary told their subjects so again and again, harping on ‘the common welfare and profit of all our lands over here’, the mutual obligations of prince and subjects and the need to defend not just individual provinces but the ‘lands over here’ as a whole.¹⁷⁴ In the crisis of multiple and coordinated invasions in 1542–3, what Mary told the States of Hainaut was ‘the urgent necessity in which the lands over here find themselves, surrounded with enemies on all sides’, the message seems finally to have got home.¹⁷⁵ Thereafter the States of Flanders, Zeeland, and Holland began to vote taxes explicitly for the defence of the Netherlands in the plural rather than their province alone and even Brabant, which stuck firmly to singular self-defence in votes of taxation, admitted that the Pragmatic Sanction of 1549 would make the provinces ‘so much the stronger, in order to be able to resist the enemies of the land in times to come’.¹⁷⁶ For most of the period, the idea of the Burgundian legacy was more current and more powerful than the idea of the Netherlands and perhaps particularly relevant to war.¹⁷⁷ The historical identity of Burgundy as an independent and anti-French entity, though contested by Maximilian’s opponents, was defined in the period 1490–1530 by the editing and circulation of manuscripts of Chastelain’s chronicle in Habsburg court circles in Flanders, Artois, and Brabant and was strongly appealed to by Maximilian.¹⁷⁸ The term bourguignon or bourgoens was used by chroniclers, poets, and pamphleteers to describe the Habsburg cause, very widely from 1477 to the 1530s but often beyond into the 1550s, in southern and northern provinces alike.¹⁷⁹ The Burgundian cause deftly combined dynastic loyalty with attachment to a collection of provinces that did not have to be precisely defined as a constitutional unit. It also had clear aural and visual tokens. ‘Vive Bourgoigne’ served as a war cry and a loyal acclamation.¹⁸⁰ The Burgundian diagonal cross of St Andrew, readily contrasted with the straight cross of France, was cut into the skin of a French herald’s horse at Valenciennes in 1477, chalked on their clothes by the citizens as Arras was retaken in 1492, hung out by peasants in W¨urttemberg in 1546 to show ¹⁷³ Duke, ‘Loyalty and Treason’, 184–97. ¹⁷⁴ Lettres in´edites, i. 64, 119–20, 126; HHSA, PA13/4, fo. 158v ; ROPB iii. 479, iv. 422, 454, v. 573, vi. 250, 286, 364, 368, vii. 515–16. ¹⁷⁵ D´enombrements Hainaut, 597. ¹⁷⁶ SMH, SAG, OA143, 3/2/1543; ROPB ii. 295, v. 109, 536–7, 561, 581, vi. 219, vii. 272, 382, 442; Maddens, Beden, 367–71. ¹⁷⁷ Duke, ‘Elusive Netherlands’, 14. ¹⁷⁸ Small, Chastelain, 197–227; Lettres in´edites, i. 122–6, 144, ii. 93; Lusy, Journal, 145. ¹⁷⁹ Macqu´ereau, Chronicque, 210, 215, passim; id., Histoire, 81–2, passim; Barre, Journal, 195, 294; Br´esin, Chroniques, 44, 46, 55–6, 69, 109; Recueil de chansons, iv. 22–4, 89–120; Bocquet, Ballades, 44–52; Reygersbergh, Cronijcke, F2r , G4v ; Weert, ‘Chronycke’, 86, 95, 107; Eppens, Kroniek, i. 60–78, 120–4; Vaernewyck, Cronijcke, Gg3r , Ii3v , Kk2r , Ll2v ; ‘Dagverhaal’, 290, 293–5, 301; BT 2219; Sekere nieuwe copie vanden Coninck va[n] Vrankerijck, A1v . ¹⁸⁰ Br´esin, Chroniques, 56, 125; Barre, Journal, 192–3; Macqu´ereau, Histoire, 105–6.

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their sympathies with Charles V’s troops.¹⁸¹ At Tournai in December 1521, some soldiers from the new garrison taunted a man undressing in the bath-house about the cross hanging round his neck. They pulled it off, saying it was ‘a French cross’, and he was lucky to escape with his life having, as the chronicler put it with fine understatement, ‘replied foolishly that he had another in his belly’.¹⁸² Loyalty to the person of the prince and his hereditary authority readily combined with attachment to Burgundy, especially in Flanders and Brabant.¹⁸³ For Charles V the attractions of a ‘natural prince’, born at Ghent, were amplified by the majesty of his imperial title, allowing chroniclers, playwrights, and poets to laud the victories of ‘Charles our emperor’ and the deeds of ‘the emperor’s men’.¹⁸⁴ ‘Vive l’empereur’ was a clear thing to shout, as Charles’ troops did, firing off their guns, when he inspected them outside Namur in July 1554.¹⁸⁵ Charles’s heraldic devices provided a fund of imagery for the expression of loyalty in drama and verse. The eagle could be represented overpowering the French lily or Francis I’s salamander, outranking other birds, taking flight to overawe his enemies; his device, ‘Plus Oultre’ expressed the rightful spread of his rule.¹⁸⁶ Such personal loyalty, however, was not necessarily transferable to his son. An appeal to the subject’s duty to the prince was one of the most straightforward means to mobilize money and men for war, but the prince was often coupled with the public good and later with the fatherland.¹⁸⁷ By the last years of Charles’s reign, the ideas of loyalty to prince and dynasty and attachment to the Netherlands were blending together, at least in the rhetoric of government, where the fusion was encapsulated in the term ‘our hereditary Netherlands’.¹⁸⁸ War provided important contexts for the exercise of such ideas. In 1555, for example, the inhabitants of Bouvignessur-Meuse, sacked the previous year, were granted tax exemptions and other benefits. Some of them, reported the grant, had had to take refuge outside ‘our patrimonial lands over here’, presumably in the bishopric of Li`ege, but the new privileges would enable them to achieve their ambition, as ‘our loyal subjects, as they have always been to their natural prince’, to resettle Bouvignes.¹⁸⁹ National sentiment in the sixteenthcentury Netherlands, it has been suggested, was ‘a product of the state’, and the needs and effects of war played a key role in its generation.¹⁹⁰ Much of the time, however, war strengthened provincial or local identities rather than anything wider. As we have seen, the men of certain provinces or towns enjoyed clearer military reputations than Netherlanders in general.¹⁹¹ Even when persuaded ¹⁸¹ Mariage, Fortifications, 60; Schaumburg, Geschichten, 132; Zwichem, Tagebuch, 245. ¹⁸² Barre, Journal, 195. ¹⁸³ Tilmans, ‘Vaderland-begrip’, 38–9, 44, 51–2. ¹⁸⁴ Everaert, Spelen, 89; Lusy, Journal, passim; Bocquet, Ballades, 43–4; Macqu´ereau, Chronicque, 210; id., Histoire, 64, 115, 125–6, 139; Br´esin, Chroniques, 147–8, 152, 154, 165–7, 176, 201–4, 209, 213, 216, 220, 222, 225–6, 229, 231–2, 234, 239. ¹⁸⁵ ‘Dagverhaal’, 282–3. ¹⁸⁶ Everaert, Spelen, 97, 102, 128, 555; Bocquet, Ballades, 128, 148, 158, 189; Thiry, ‘L’Honneur et l’Empire’, 300. ¹⁸⁷ Recueil des pi`eces historiques, i. 247; Duke, ‘Loyalty and Treason’, 184–5. ¹⁸⁸ Duke, ‘Elusive Netherlands’, 21; ROPB v. 536–7, 541, vi. 127–8. ¹⁸⁹ ROPB vi. 440–2. ¹⁹⁰ Stengers, Racines, 232. ¹⁹¹ Guicciardini, Description, fos. 41r , 112v –113v .

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of their duty to the Netherlands as a whole, provincial States considering tax grants and military priorities put their own province first. As the States of Holland bluntly put it in December 1542, they would desire to help other provinces defend themselves when war ceased on their own frontiers.¹⁹² When the provinces were drawn together to discuss fiscal matters, as in 1558, each tried to lessen its burden in proportion to others’ or secure expenditure that met its own priorities.¹⁹³ In Baltic policy too Holland managed to pursue a line of its own, sometimes incongruent with Habsburg dynastic interests.¹⁹⁴ Like Flanders, Holland steadily developed from the 1520s the administrative means to make sure that its money was only spent on wars it approved.¹⁹⁵ The irony of the large sums it supplied for the general war effort in the 1550s was that they could only be made available by entrusting the collection and administration of tax revenues so completely to the provincial States that the central government was helpless if the States withdrew their cooperation with its wider fiscal projects, as they did after 1560.¹⁹⁶ Popular comment on war, as expressed in songs, proverbs, and the satirical sculpture in the Brussels snow festival of 1511 of the threatening Guelders stronghold Poederoijen and its hated captain Sneewint, fouling himself with fear at his enemies’ approach, focused on immediate threats to individual provinces or groups of provinces.¹⁹⁷ Chroniclers noted the valiant deeds of men of their province, whether on land or at sea, and could be scathing about the failure of other provinces to play their part.¹⁹⁸ Throughout the period armed contingents from different provinces fell out, Flemings against Walloons or Gelderlanders, Hollanders against Walloons, Hollanders and Brabanters against Picards.¹⁹⁹ Yet provincial difference was not necessarily provincial disunity. The kindness of neighbours to refugees might be long remembered, or the deeds of one province might be held up for emulation by others.²⁰⁰ The claim of a border province such as Hainaut to special status or exceptional loyalty implied the significance of its relationship to a larger whole.²⁰¹ War consistently brought into play attachments to units smaller even than the province. Robert Macqu´ereau was a proud citizen of Valenciennes as well as a good Hainaulter and a good Burgundian, carefully noting a gunner from Valenciennes who shot well at the siege of Th´erouanne, a cavalryman from Valenciennes who took a French standard-bearer at the battle of the Spurs, a soldier from Valenciennes who did well at the siege of Tournai.²⁰² Army contingents from different towns could quarrel as readily as those from different provinces.²⁰³ Border towns like Amsterdam or ’s-Hertogenbosch could advertise their special status or resent their inland ¹⁹² SMH, SAG, OA143, 19/12/1542. ¹⁹³ Verhofstad, Regering, 143–50. ¹⁹⁴ Tracy, Holland, 105–14. ¹⁹⁵ Ibid. 64–89; Maddens, Beden, 365–411. ¹⁹⁶ Tracy, Holland, 115–24, 180–7. ¹⁹⁷ Pleij, Sneeuwpoppen, 294–7; Vinchant, Hainaut, v. 262. ¹⁹⁸ Aurelius, Cronycke, R2r – v ; Reygersbergh, Cronijcke, O1v –2r , Q3r , U4v , X1v , Y4r – v , Aa1v , Aa2r ; Eppens, Kroniek, i. 80; Lusy, Journal, 217; Molius, Kroniek, 197. ¹⁹⁹ Nicolay, ‘Kalendrier’, 77; Dadizeele, M´emoires, 9; Nell, Landsknechte, 141–3; Henne, Histoire, vii. 385. ²⁰⁰ ‘Vlaamsche kronyk’, 330; Lemaire de Belges, œuvres, iv. 304. ²⁰¹ ROPB vii. 18; Lettres in´edites, ii. 36. ²⁰² Macqu´ereau, Chronicque, 33, 35, 44. ²⁰³ Nicolay, ‘Kalendrier’, 77; Dadizeele, M´emoires, 13.

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neighbours’ reluctance to defend them, much as border provinces did.²⁰⁴ In the more urbanized parts of the Netherlands, war in the first half of the period often felt as much like a struggle between individual towns as between dynastic or territorial units. Poets and chroniclers focused on the rivalries of ’s-Hertogenbosch with Zaltbommel and Tiel, the victories of loyal Antwerp over rebel Ghent and Sluis, the antipathy between IJsselstein and Utrecht, or the taunts of Valenciennes, Ath, and other towns that Tournai would be so destroyed that it would be called ‘tour n’ay’, ‘I have no tower’.²⁰⁵ Something of this world survived in the sarcastic poems written about the fall and destruction of Th´erouanne in 1553.²⁰⁶ By then, too, it fitted with the growing application of classical city-state models to the towns of the Netherlands by the humanists of Bruges and Ghent.²⁰⁷ Regular processions and festivals, as we have seen, understandably commemorated events of special local significance. Victory trophies presented to local churches or displayed in town halls—French standards, church bells, even relics—had a similar effect.²⁰⁸ Yet even such local memorials fitted into wider frameworks. At the annual shooting match of the Mons artillery guild, children led the competitors into town, banging joyfully on basins to recall the feats of three Mons gunners at Saint-Quentin and the celebrations that spread through the Netherlands as news of the battle arrived.²⁰⁹ Commemorations, like the battles they remembered, could be read in different ways by different people. At Guinegatte in 1479, Maximilian’s men went into battle shouting ‘vive Oostenrijc ende Bourgoengne’, the Flemings ‘Vlaendren den leeu’, and the Brabanters ‘Brabant’; afterwards Maximilian’s Latin secretary Lodovico Bruni wrote up the battle as a victory for ‘the most brave hero Maximilian’, a commander so inspiring that his soldiers ‘rejoice to die with their prince’, while the Flemings, summoned to fight the ‘enemies of the land’, sang of Guinegatte as a triumph for the claws of the lion of Flanders.²¹⁰ Loyalties were both multivalent and susceptible to change. In 1526, rumours of French plots against Tournai led the captain to order all soldiers who had served the French to leave the Tourn´esis on pain of death. Some, however, came to him to explain that they had been French when Tournai had been French, but now they were determined to ‘be for the emperor, to serve him all their lives; and thus they swore’, so they were allowed to stay.²¹¹ That the choice at Tournai was a straight one between France and the Habsburgs is significant, for the possibility of asserting local identity through neutrality was steadily being eliminated. The neutrality practised by Lille, Douai, and Orchies in 1488–92 or ’s-Hertogenbosch in 1488–9 avoided the practical ill effects of war at the cost of ²⁰⁴ Smit, Vorst en onderdaan, 295; Tracy, Holland, 74; Ward, ‘Cities and States’, 28–33; Os, Kroniek, 321. ²⁰⁵ Os, Kroniek, 239–43, 303, 318, 321; Prims, Antwerpen, xviii. 356–8; ‘Berijmd verhaal’, 672–93; Nicolay, ‘Kalendrier’, ii. 14–15, 19–20, 48–9, 52–5. ²⁰⁶ Recueil de chansons, iv. 13–27. ²⁰⁷ Tilmans, ‘Republican Citizenship’, 115–24. ²⁰⁸ Macqu´ereau, Histoire, 77–8; Bocquet, Ballades, 130; Vinchant, Hainaut, v. 255; Prims, Antwerpen, xvi. 21–2; Reygersbergh, Cronijcke, Aa1. ²⁰⁹ Vinchant, Hainaut, v. 263. ²¹⁰ Wonderlijcke oorloghen, 81–2; Recueil de pi`eces historiques, i. 263–8, ii. 185–9; Van de dood van Karel de Stoute, 95; Inventaire Bruges, vi. 189–90. ²¹¹ Macqu´ereau, Chronicque, 192–3.

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denying that all a ruler’s subjects ought to defend his cause together.²¹² A separate truce with the enemy, like Middelburg’s in the same period, was another option, less suggestive of disloyalty.²¹³ In the larger context of Habsburg policy, this was what many Netherlanders sought and gained in 1525–6 and 1528–9, when truces brokered by Margaret of Austria kept the Netherlands out of the war with France, while matters were settled on the battlefields of Italy and at the negotiating table. Yet as the centre of dynastic warfare moved northwards and the Habsburg insistence on common effort grew more forceful, neutrality or separate truce became ever less viable. Even areas of recognized neutrality such as the county of Saint-Pol, the Cambr´esis, or the prince-bishopric of Li`ege were sooner or later overrun by troops, often pleading the need to forestall enemy intervention.²¹⁴ Safeguards from attack might be negotiated directly with the enemy, but these too were subject to increasingly frequent breach or revocation.²¹⁵ The remorseless logic of strategy could thus shape loyalties as much as swift dynastic conquest or steady political consolidation. In England, with traditions of nationhood stretching back to the Anglo-Saxons, local, regional, and national identities were for the most part more easily synchronized.²¹⁶ Local loyalties were an important factor in preparing the English for war as men were mustered under local noble captains and then as part of county militias. Noble and town badges on uniforms and historic local symbols reinforced identities as armies came together. On the Flodden campaign the contingents from Cheshire and Lancashire wore the Stanley badge of the eagle’s foot and the army marched under the banner of St Cuthbert, first carried against the Scots at the battle of the Standard in 1138 and kept in Durham cathedral.²¹⁷ At times, admittedly, local identities fostered conflict. After Flodden the debates about who really won the battle brought stereotypes of thieving northerners, cowardly Cheshire men, and incompetent East Anglians into play and in 1522 the Cheshire contingents were again accused of reluctance to fight.²¹⁸ Even in the midst of France distinctive identities in English armies were strong, setting men of one county against another, dividing Englishmen from Welshmen as they blamed each other for mutinies, and permitting the Welsh soldier-chronicler Ellis Gruffudd to note the ingenuity and distinction of his fellow Welshmen at every turn and shed doubt on the martial abilities of the English.²¹⁹ Yet in most circumstances appeals to local loyalty were readily combined with more national sentiments. Whilst the Cheshire and Lancashire men drew upon a long tradition of local hatred of the Scots celebrated in popular songs and ballads—a tradition continued in our period with ballads on Flodden and Pinkie—the earl of Surrey appealed to their captains to fight as ‘true Englishmen’ on the eve of Flodden.²²⁰ ²¹² Koenigsberger, Monarchies, 67; CLGS i. 338; Willems, ‘Militaire organisatie’, 266. ²¹³ ‘Stadsrekeningen Middelburg ii’, 149. ²¹⁴ Thieulaine, ‘Extraits’, 147, 184; Potter, War and Government, 227–8. ²¹⁵ Potter, War and Government, 226–30. ²¹⁶ Campbell, ‘United Kingdom of England’. ²¹⁷ Hall, Chronicle, 557; Barr, Flodden, 56–8, 70. ²¹⁸ Thornton, Cheshire, 188, 232–3. ²¹⁹ Gruffudd, ‘Suffolk’s Expedition’, 35–7, 40–1; id., ‘Calais and Boulogne’, 12, 24, 33, 54, 67–8, 88; id., ‘Paris and Boulogne’, 62–4. ²²⁰ Hall, Chronicle, 561; Thornton, ‘Identity and Community’, 61–3.

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The crown recognized and exploited local military identities. ‘Cornish miners’ and lightly armed ‘northern horse’ were constant features in English armies into the 1550s and the Welsh served in large numbers, allowing bards to praise their gentry patrons for living up to the heroic reputations of their ancestors.²²¹ The South-West had long been acknowledged as a base for English pirates and the crown’s licensing of highly profitable privateering from 1544 laid the foundations for the central role of southwestern seafarers such as Drake, Grenville, and Hawkins in Elizabethan naval enterprise.²²² Even Irish kerne, raised by Gaelic lords drawn into the orbit of English authority by the ambitious policies of Deputy St Leger, were incorporated into English armies in France and Scotland in the 1540s, though their distinctive military traditions distressed the French, who complained that they beheaded their prisoners.²²³ Some contemporaries, admittedly, saw England as rigidly divided into two military provinces. The Venetian ambassador observed in 1551 that ‘if they make war on the French, the northern counties do not stir; if opposed to the Scots, the southern provinces are not mustered’.²²⁴ Common sense made it usual for counties to mobilize against the nearest enemy: thus Cheshiremen tended to fight the Scots, and sometimes the Irish, rather than the French.²²⁵ Political rhetoric followed the trend, as privileges were claimed for York, for county Durham, for the North in general on the grounds of their special responsibility to ‘defend the land against the Scots’.²²⁶ However, in our period the composition of English armies was never exclusively regional. Contingents came to Boulogne in 1492 from as far north as Bewcastle, Brancepeth, Carlisle, and Newcastle, while thousands of southerners marched north in 1497.²²⁷ In 1513 Henry VIII took men to France from Newcastle and Kendal and northern horse were recruited widely for the French campaigns of the 1540s.²²⁸ Norwich, as we have seen, regularly sent companies against the Scots. Similarly, local circumstances and the weight of the crown’s demands, rather than simple particularism, underlay the revolts of Yorkshire against taxation for war in Brittany in 1489 and of the SouthWest against taxation for war in Scotland in 1497.²²⁹ As we have seen in comparing towns’ troop-raising and noble affinities, there were differences in the degree of militarization of different parts of England, the North broadly more militarized than the South and the extreme borders thoroughly attuned to war. In the later fifteenth century, these differences were reflected in the degree of attachment to traditional martial ideals amongst the gentry.²³⁰ Yet it seems that by the 1540s the demands of large-scale warfare on two fronts were eroding these ²²¹ Cooper, Propaganda, 194–5; Phillips, Anglo-Scots Wars, 86–7; Williams, Renewal and Reformation, 98–102, 247–8, 358–9, 441–4. ²²² Rodger, Safeguard of the Sea, 239, 294, 344–5. ²²³ Ellis, Ireland, 156. ²²⁴ CSP Venice 1534–1554, 350. ²²⁵ Goring, ‘Military Obligations’, 53–9; Thornton, Cheshire, 224–31. ²²⁶ Pollard, North-Eastern England, 15, 21. ²²⁷ PRO, E36/285, fos. 26r , 34r , 45v , 49r ; Arthurson, ‘King’s Voyage’, 16–22. ²²⁸ PRO, E 101/56/25, fos. 7v , 37, 44v , 47; LP XIX. i. 273, 274, 276. ²²⁹ Fletcher, MacCulloch, Tudor Rebellions, 14–17; Arthurson, ‘Rising of 1497’, 3–4, 8–9. ²³⁰ Pollard, North-Eastern England, 208–16, 398.

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differences. Clearly, the northern marches were still the most militarized region of mainland England, but the Scottish wars of the 1540s brought the demands of war south into Yorkshire and Cheshire.²³¹ Similarly, in the South the greater demands for taxes, supplies, and men in the 1540s combined with the invasion scares of 1539, 1540, and 1545 and Henry VIII’s great campaign of fortification to bring war into every community. Such thorough mobilization fitted the sense of a national community at war and continued the English tradition of incorporating local identities and loyalties within a unifying national purpose.

R E B E L L I O N A N D C I V I L WA R Few, if any, of the developments we have been considering were easily steered from above. If the prince’s power over his subjects were advanced too forcibly in wartime it might provoke a violent response, while the survival or development of the capacity to wage war amongst more localized political units might equip those units to resist the prince. In the Netherlands it is clear that towns and nobles retained a capacity for effective self-government and independent warfare sufficient to cause serious problems for Maximilian in 1482–92, funding campaigns, raising troops, including foreign mercenaries, deploying artillery, and building fortifications.²³² In the end these problems were not insurmountable for the Habsburgs, because the effort to wage civil war was undermined by the same problems that faced their own efforts to corral these provinces into military enterprises: fiscal resistance, towns’ desire to dictate strategic priorities to their noble captains, tensions between troops and civilians, and social divisions between the urban populace and parts of the elite.²³³ In Flanders these events also showed the difficulty of exploiting the power of the French crown to weaken the Habsburgs while not falling under excessive and equally unwelcome French control.²³⁴ The comparative weakness of Ghent’s military efforts in 1539 might be taken as evidence that Habsburg power was now too well established for military challenge, were it not for the powerful capacity to organize against the prince shown by the rebel provinces after 1572. In England, too, rebellions revealed the potential for local military systems to escape the crown’s control. The Pilgrimage of Grace in particular showed how rebels could activate the machinery of warning beacons, bells, and local musters to raise well-equipped armies larger than those the king could put into the field against them. Contingents were led by the local gentry who would have commanded them and paid by the local communities that would have supported them in the king’s service. Spearheaded by thousands of men experienced in fighting the Scots, the Pilgrim army ²³¹ Thornton, Cheshire, 225–32. ²³² Willems, ‘Militaire organisatie’, 261–83; Blockmans, ‘Autocratie ou polyarchie?’, 268–71, 276–7; id., Volksvertegenwoordiging, 197, 391–400, 447–50; Fris, Gand, 152–3, 157–8; Smet, Excellente Cronike, fos. 264r – v , 266r –267r . ²³³ Willems, ‘Militaire organisatie’, 276–82; Fris, Gand, 152–60; Blockmans, Volksvertegenwoordiging, 449–50. ²³⁴ Commynes, Memoirs, 394.

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represented, as the duke of Norfolk told the king, ‘all the flower of the North’.²³⁵ The major risings of 1549 broke out in less famously militarized areas, but they too showed that local mechanisms could, temporarily, sustain armed opposition to the king.²³⁶ The more that detailed investigation of Tudor rebellions has demonstrated that they were mostly popular movements in response to government policies rather than the mobilization of aristocratic followings for partisan ends, the more their military organization has testified to the deep way in which English military arrangements mobilized society for war. Civil wars and rebellions left shadows of many kinds, for all that rulers made conscious efforts to eradicate them.²³⁷ Princes and their opponents justified their causes and denigrated their enemies in printed works and public letters and announcements.²³⁸ They also tried to deny their enemies a hearing, Maximilian forbidding the reception of letters from the Flemish lords in Hainaut and the magistrates of Bruges dismissing, banning, and condemning to public penance town councillors who had publicly thanked God for the Habsburg recovery of Saint-Omer.²³⁹ Much of the language normally used to stimulate loyal military effort could be turned against the prince in situations like that of 1491–2, when the Ghenters argued that Maximilian’s supporters were against God, the ‘natural prince’ Philip the Fair, ‘his good and loyal subjects and against the public good’.²⁴⁰ The same noble honour codes that justified service to the prince might justify opposition, as they did for Philip of Cleves, sworn to maintain Maximilian’s peace with the Flemings even against Maximilian himself.²⁴¹ Sarcastic denunciations of a prince and dismissals of his victories, ‘great acts of prowess against poor peasants and unarmed folk’, might live on to dent his reputation years after rebellion had subsided.²⁴² Subtler critiques perhaps survived in printed works critical of past Habsburg actions and paintings like that at Ghent of the siege of Jerusalem by an army carrying Habsburg banners.²⁴³ Fortifications gave more solid testimony to defiant values: at Ghent the Rabot, built to oppose Maximilian, bore an inscription recording that it was there that the Holy Roman Emperor and his 20,000 Germans had been driven off after their fruitless siege in 1488.²⁴⁴ England showed similar signs, though the balance of the argument perhaps lay more with the prince. In 1536 the Pilgrims’ oath and recruiting letters were being circulated at London and the magistrates confiscated what copies they could find; in 1549 there were arrests of those spreading the message of Kett’s rebels in the capital.²⁴⁵ Traditional martial symbols could be appropriated to opposition, as the banner of St Cuthbert was deployed in the Pilgrimage of Grace.²⁴⁶ English rebels appealed to ²³⁵ ²³⁶ ²³⁸ ²⁴⁰ ²⁴² ²⁴³ ²⁴⁴ ²⁴⁶

Bush, Pilgrimage, 56–8, 113–18, 182–4, 223–5, 271–3, 376–7, and passim. Cooper, Propaganda, 68. ²³⁷ Boone, ‘Karel V en Gent’, 55–7. ILC 644, 1012–13. ²³⁹ Lettres in´edites, i. 47–8; Surquet, ‘M´emoires’, 573. Ibid. ii. 66. ²⁴¹ Blockmans, ‘Autocratie ou polyarchie?’, 355–7. Lettres in´edites, i. 118–44. ILC 1002; Lemaire (ed.), Cinqui`eme centenaire, 316–17; Decavele (ed.), Ghent, 254–5. Hemelrijck, Vlaamse krijgsbouwkunde, 232. ²⁴⁵ Brigden, London, 251, 494–5. Bush, Pilgrimage, 182, 376.

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notions of the common weal as much as did their princes.²⁴⁷ Thomas Lord Darcy in the Pilgrimage of Grace, like Philip of Cleves, pledged his knightly honour, won in the king’s service, to resist the king’s will in keeping the rebel oath.²⁴⁸ But much of the most vigorous propaganda printed by Henry’s, Edward’s, and Mary’s governments was produced as answers or rebukes to specific groups of rebels, while the government’s general response to mid-Tudor unrest, the Homily on Obedience first issued in 1547, was probably the most successfully broadcast political statement of the entire Tudor period.²⁴⁹ The legacy of civil war in local memory might also obstruct the common effort princes sought. In Zeeland bitter fighting against the troops and privateers of Sluis sixty years earlier permeated Reygersbergh’s chronicle of 1551 and even place-names perpetuated the memory of civil strife, as the waterway used by Frans van Brederode to by-pass the guns of Arnemuiden and attack Rotterdam was scatologically christened the ‘Jonker Frans Gat’.²⁵⁰ In Holland it was only the passage of time that eroded the bitter factionalism of Hoeks and Kabeljauws.²⁵¹ For newly conquered provinces, memories of conflict were fresher still. The Tourn´esiens remembered how the States of Flanders had pressed for their walls to be dismantled even after they had submitted to Charles V.²⁵² Utrecht had to send a pig to The Hague every year to be publicly mocked and slaughtered in commemoration of Holland’s role in the annexation of 1528.²⁵³ Richard Morison thought the memory of internecine slaughter at Towton and Blackheath should warn the English to stick together and obey the king, but he had to admit that amid the tensions of 1536 Englishmen were calling each other ‘these northern men, these southern, these western’, and other sources back him up.²⁵⁴ The Wars of the Roses had created a powerful myth that northerners were itching to ‘rob, despoil and destroy’ the southern parts of the kingdom, and it was one southerners had to overcome whether they sympathized with the rebels of 1536 or served with northerners under the king.²⁵⁵ Some communities, finally, cherished memories of their own independence of mind. Ghent revived itself as the city-state of the van Arteveldes not only in 1539–40 but again in the 1570s, though the town’s elite were clearly divided over how far they should forget their rebel past and how far celebrate it.²⁵⁶ In Cornwall and in Suffolk some parishes seem to have developed traditions of taking the lead in one rebellion after another.²⁵⁷ Such traces of self-assertion are harder to interpret than the clarion calls of princely propaganda, but they are a ²⁴⁷ Fletcher and MacCulloch, Tudor Rebellions, 11–12, 26, 37, 66, 79–80. ²⁴⁸ Ibid. 31. ²⁴⁹ Elton, Policy and Police, 199–205; Cooper, Propaganda, 221–6, 237–45; Loach, ‘Marian Establishment’, 142–3. ²⁵⁰ Reygersbergh, Cronijcke, G3v , G4r , H1v , H2r , H3v , I1r – v . ²⁵¹ Gent, ‘Pertijelicke saken’, 407–28. ²⁵² Barre, Journal, 206–10. ²⁵³ Pollmann, Religious Choice, 121. ²⁵⁴ Morison, Humanist Scholarship, 90, 132; Brigden, London, 251–2. ²⁵⁵ Pollard, North-Eastern England, 25–7. ²⁵⁶ Decavele and Peteghem, ‘Ghent’, 108–26; Bruaene, Gentse memorieboeken, 131–2, 139–43, 150–4, 161–2, 198–202, 245–58, 261–7. ²⁵⁷ Fletcher and MacCulloch, Tudor Rebellions, 120.

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reminder of the counter-currents swirling in the tides of state formation. War forced Englishmen and Netherlanders alike to declare their loyalties, but not even in England, let alone in the Netherlands where local, provincial, dynastic, religious, and national identities cut across one another again and again, did that make war an uncomplicated driver for the development of a recognizably national state.

21 War, Subjects, and the State War strengthened the claims of princes over their subjects in many areas and often did so by invoking the interest of an impersonal native land or commonwealth. In the military obligations of subjects to rulers, bastard feudal contractualism in England and feudal obligation in the Netherlands faded into a larger duty to defend the polity, whether by fighting or by paying taxes. Individuals were bound into a tighter relationship with the prince’s power by service in his armies and were on occasion forcibly conscripted to serve. Attempts to enforce the ruler’s duty to pay his troops through mutiny or to evade service through desertion were repressed as forcefully as circumstances allowed. Yet rulers too had duties, to defend their subjects and give them peace. Increasingly insistent public statements stressing the prince’s beneficent activity in these areas were met with some scepticism amongst English rebels and Netherlands States alike. Military success was an important reinforcement of princely power and great efforts were made to present princes as triumphant conquerors. That such efforts were most conspicuous in the Netherlands under Charles V may reflect only the availability of more suitable media there than in England, or perhaps the fact that English subjects, less exposed to war’s ill effects, needed less persuading of the benefits of having a warrior prince. One might draw the latter conclusion from the fact that English towns mounted more enthusiastic public celebrations of victories than of peace treaties, while Netherlands towns did exactly the opposite. In both polities female rulers and regents found some difficulties in appropriating models of authority based on knightly prowess. Both governments sought to intervene in a developing culture of oral, manuscript, and printed news to justify their wars. They could not determine the ways in which the material they produced would be received and they struggled to exclude the expression of alternative points of view, but there is evidence that they conveyed their arguments successfully to some at least of their subjects. General persuasion and common celebration both acted as integrating forces in diverse polities. War raised the stakes in contests for loyalty and the laws of treason and sedition were regularly exercised against those betraying the war effort or undermining it by defeatism. Officially the ill effects of war were blamed on the enemy and many seem to have accepted this argument, though incompetent commanders or even, occasionally, princes, were blamed by weary subjects and may have lost authority as a result. The church was drawn in to support the prince’s wars in ways both practical and ideological. Some of its thinkers produced sharp critiques of war, though the breadth of dissemination even of Erasmus’s views might be questioned. More preachers,

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particularly in the climate of Protestant nationalism developing in England, stressed the subject’s Christian duty to fight for his prince. War also led governments to assert greater powers over areas of their subjects’ lives more indirectly related to military activity. The regulation of food supplies, farming and fishing practices, and transport on land and sea was stimulated by wartime needs. So was intervention in trade to deny supplies to the enemy, though licensing regimes with fiscal benefits often took the place of unenforceable outright bans. In each of these areas, governments were engaged in complex negotiations with powerful social interests, but contemporaries recognized the state-building trends at work. In 1567 Lodovico Guicciardini grouped the Habsburg bans on trade with the enemy and military service to foreign princes as ‘many other good ordinances, for conservation of His Majesty and of the republic’; by the time his work was translated into English in 1593 these had become ‘certain statutes made by the prince for the preservation of the State’.¹ New industries were encouraged for military production, though it is not clear that this produced coherent commercial interest groups in favour of war. In building projects and food supplies, as in the payment of troops, these expansions in state activity opened the way to corruption where those entrusted with the exercise of new power abused it for personal gain. The geographical, political, and economic circumstances of the Netherlands made many of these developments different in scale or even wholly different in nature from those in England. Commercial questions were much more complex and prominent in the calculations of those ruling over Antwerp and Amsterdam than those ruling over London, though Charles V did not pay the attention to preserving commerce that his subjects thought he should. Soldiers native and foreign were a much more visible and disruptive presence in the Netherlands, threatening to alienate subjects from the prince or his councillors and to break down judicial and administrative systems. Disbanded soldiers and those whose livelihood had been destroyed by war played a larger role in criminal activity and vagabondage than in England. In England the economic disruption caused by war came primarily through taxation, where in the border areas of the Netherlands it came through enemy raiding and uncontrolled Habsburg armies and in the commercial hinterlands through interruption to trade and industry. Entry into foreign military service, spying, and plots to betray towns to the enemy were far larger issues in the Netherlands. The volume of printed political material, official and unofficial, was far larger in the Netherlands, as was natural given its role as a centre of European printing, but equally it was harder to insulate Netherlanders against exposure to the arguments of the Habsburgs’ enemies. War served in part to construct common identities coterminous with the boundaries of political units, though in the Netherlands these focused less on nationhood than on dynastic loyalty, or perhaps some sense of federative common interest. Hostility to foreign rulers held responsible for war and by extension to the peoples they governed was given clearer focus by repeated identification and arrest of enemy aliens and their goods. The English preserved better their sense that they were a martial nation with a victorious past and a mission to fight the French and Scots; in any ¹ Guicciardini, Description, fo. 21r; id., Descrittione, 184.

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case, classical ideas of a citizen militia were not so much at odds with their own military arrangements as to cause the kind of questioning Erasmus and others indulged in when they saw Holland ineffectively defended by foreign hirelings. Yet Holland was not the whole Netherlands and many groups from the northern and southern provinces sustained and increased their military reputations in the service of the Habsburgs in the Netherlands and much further afield. The nature of warfare in the Netherlands combined with the greater diversity of the provinces assembled by the Habsburgs to make the impact of war on identity more complex than in England, sometimes stoking up rather than smoothing away inter-urban and inter-provincial rivalries. These were present in England, but obstructed a national military enterprise less. Circumstances also complicated the relationship between war and religious change far more in the Netherlands. In both polities new fortifications were significant symbols of princely power and care but they were ambiguous when, as citadels in Netherlands towns, they bridled urban liberties. In part Netherlanders defined their common interests in opposition to those of the foreign troops in the service of their princes in a formulation subversive of princely power in the 1480s and 1550s and far more so in the 1560s and 1570s. In England it seems that the dynastic challenges of Henry VII’s reign and the ongoing effects of Henry VIII’s break with Rome were in general more prominent tests of royal authority and stimuli to the assertion of closer control of subjects’ lives than was external warfare. Indeed, the royal supremacy changed the context in which wars were planned, funded, and fought. In the Netherlands, in contrast, Charles V’s campaigns against heresy were probably less significant assertions of state power than his attempts to corral his subjects into support for his wars. It was the reversal of this situation after 1559 that threw the Netherlands into crisis. In both polities wartime demands interacted with other forces for growing state power over individuals, judicial, political, and ideological, sometimes amplifying their effects, sometimes interfering with them. War constrained the subject to serve the state but also helped make the subject a citizen engaged, however indistinctly, in dialogue with the prince about the aims and effects of war.

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PA RT V C O N C LU S I O N

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War, State, and Society Latterly historians of early-modern Europe have grown shy of crediting war with a clear and predictable role in shaping the state. One recent account concluded that war’s ‘effects upon the growth of the state were both more complex, and more variable, than Tilly and others would allow’, another that ‘it is . . . unclear that war led to the development of more ‘‘modern’’ state forms’, a third that the ‘relatively rare political coalitions’ on which ‘the foundations of enforceable territorial sovereignties’ rested were built more on ‘the common bond of religious ideology’ than on princely war-making.¹ Our findings support the view that the ways in which war shaped the state were complicated and often contradictory. Nonetheless they suggest that war did shape the state, and did so to considerable effect. Though taxes did not bear equally on different parts of society and though their rise hit certain ceilings, taxation clearly did increase and did so to meet the growing cost of war. Though they did not always prove permanent and they rarely matched ideal types of bureaucratic efficiency, new military institutions were created and often aimed to secure princely control of the most powerful new weapons of the age, large cannon and gunned sailing ships. War was not only the supreme test of military and fiscal capacity; it also stimulated the expression and practical outworking of ideas about the mutual obligations of rulers and subjects and the individual’s duty to the fatherland that might otherwise have remained abstractions. In different ways towns, noblemen, and subjects in general found their relationships with princely authority modified by war. Most of the time change was negotiated rather than imposed, necessarily so as rulers sought the collaboration necessary for effective war-making, but both the terms and the outcome of the negotiation were shaped by the pressures and opportunities of war. Most of the time princely control was tightened, but only by empowering those prepared to cooperate in its execution and broker the negotiations between central government and local society. Contemporaries expected as much. Machiavelli thought war-making the prime object of the best princes: it kept their subjects ‘in a state of suspense and wonder’, engaged the nobility so they had ‘no mind for causing trouble at home’, facilitated the raising of money, provided for a standing army and drew subjects and ruler together against marauding enemy troops.² Erasmus saw the same process from a more negative angle, suspecting that princes feigned enmity in order to increase their powers over their subjects in the emergency conditions of war.³ Mid-sixteenthcentury English statesmen reflected with increasing clarity on the need to build up the kingdom’s strength to meet the challenges of competition with its neighbours.⁴ In his instructions for Philip, Charles V expressed from his own bitter experience the ¹ Tallett, War and Society, 188; Black, European Warfare, 212; Brake, Shaping History, 183. ² Machiavelli, The Prince, 73, 87, 119–20. ³ Tracy, Politics of Erasmus, 38. ⁴ Potter, ‘Mid-Tudor Foreign Policy’.

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complex mixture of strains and strengths brought by war. While the French threat legitimated the construction of new fortifications and the maintenance of permanent armed forces, including a fleet that would inhibit piracy, these measures all too easily offended his subjects, not surprisingly when the troops so readily fell into disorder and when Charles himself thought of the fortifications as a means to intimidate the disaffected. While war was to be avoided to spare his realms and vassals, he saw that territorial consolidation through the conquest of Guelders, Friesland, Overijssel, and Utrecht had actually given the Netherlands greater strength and security.⁵ Some contemporary analyses, on the other hand, suggest why the findings of detailed research do not all fit easily with modern models. Quite apart from the fact that Charles thought of war in terms not of planned state-building but of ‘performing some great action to serve as a monument to my name . . . to cover myself with glory’, he contradicted some of the main assumptions of modern analysis.⁶ While he thought tax surpluses should be built up to provide for future military expenditure, the attractions of turning a demesne state into a tax state passed him by, for he urged Philip and indeed his financial administrators to recover demesne revenues alienated or mortgaged to fund war.⁷ His general Emmanuel Philibert, likewise, thought in terms rather different from those of the coercion–extraction cycle, arguing in 1557 that the States-General should not be called while a campaign was in progress, for fear that it would appear that consent to taxation was being compelled with armed might.⁸ More complex still was the situation of the following year, when the threat that unpaid troops might plunder the citizenry if taxes were not granted was considered, though realistic, not only inappropriate to be put to Philip’s subjects but also unusable because of the encouragement it would give the French to be unreasonable in their demands in the current peace negotiations.⁹ The political impact of war was different at different times, in different places, for different people, but what variables made for these differences? Geopolitical factors have been stressed as a determinant of war’s varying impact on different polities since at least the time of Otto Hintze.¹⁰ Their importance emerges clearly both from the comparison between our two polities and from the internal contrasts within each polity. The greater prominence of the navy in the development of English military institutions and England’s persistence with the recruitment of a mainly native army afresh for each campaign fitted its geography and the rarity of invasion by any enemy other than the Scots. Within England, northern towns and coastal towns were more militarized than those further south and inland. Within the Netherlands, the military efforts of towns in Hainaut and Walloon Flanders fitted the rhythm of major dynastic warfare more closely than did those of towns in Holland or Brabant. Even within Brabant, eastern towns were more militarized than western. The northern English nobility built more powerful affinities, but had less ready access to the court-based world of Renaissance generalship, than their southern counterparts. In the Netherlands too the northern nobility showed greater freedom of action, indeed propensity for private ⁵ Corpus documental, ii. 33–4, 580–3, 591. ⁶ Brandi, Emperor Charles V, 219–20. ⁷ Corpus documental, ii. 572, 583; ROPB iv. 243, v. 217. ⁸ Verhofstad, Regering, 111–12. ⁹ Ibid. 151–2. ¹⁰ Hintze, ‘Formation of States’; id. ‘Military Organisation’.

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warfare, than their southern colleagues. Similarly the Netherlands’ vulnerability to invasion made the difference between the urban and rural experience of war much larger than in England. In England urban refortification neither demanded so many resources nor promised such vital protection and wartime rural refugees neither burdened poor relief systems nor provided cheap labour. Except perhaps for privateering ports, English towns had no need to take the initiative in campaigning in the way ’s-Hertogenbosch or the Holland towns, acting through their States, did. Frequent invasion also increased the economic impact of war in the Netherlands, raising the stakes where the ruler’s defence of the borders, control of his troops, and emergency measures to alleviate food shortage and forced migration were concerned. The implications of geopolitics for the development of military formats led to other divergences. England’s dependence on native troops made easier the adoption of notions that it was natural to fight for the fatherland and its prince, whereas the prominence of mercenaries in the Netherlands sharpened issues of national identity and alienation. Exposure to invasion made urban garrisons a far more serious issue between towns and rulers in the Netherlands than in England. The need to counter and the desire to imitate the military institutions developed by threatening neighbours gave the Netherlands bandes d’ordonnance like the French, and these facilitated the symbiosis of royal power and aristocratic clientage in the Habsburg polity as in the Valois.¹¹ If we think of the construction of effective military forms in terms of entrepreneurship in the market for protection, as Jan Glete has suggested we should, then geopolitics shaped the opportunities available to entrepreneurs: the ship-captains of Rye were better placed than many others to exploit privateering, the counts of Buren better placed than many other noblemen to exploit plunder, prisoners, protection payments, and private truces.¹² Inherited political traditions of the sort stressed by some historical sociologists were clearly also important in shaping different polities’ responses to war.¹³ The effects of England’s tradition of precociously centralized administration are evident in the greater ease with which its princes coordinated the military efforts of its towns and nobles alike and its need for much less thoroughgoing devolution of authority to noble provincial governors and much less confrontational interventions in urban politics than were needed to make Habsburg power effective in the Netherlands. In both England and the Netherlands, the negotiation between rulers and subjects necessary to mobilize society for war took place in many forums beside representative institutions, but the continued utility to rulers and subjects alike of those representative bodies inherited from earlier periods preserved them for their central role in two of the most effective fiscal-military states of the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries.¹⁴ Yet the differences between these institutions were also significant. The dominant position of urban elites in many of the provincial States in the Netherlands diverted the burden of taxation onto the countryside and the urban poor, while in England it was disproportionately richer townsmen that suffered from higher taxes. ¹¹ Potter, War and Government, 161–3. ¹² Glete, War and the State, 61–3. ¹³ Ertman, Birth of the Leviathan, 6–10. ¹⁴ Glete, War and the State, 145–55; Braddick, State Formation, 253–80.

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Such inherited political cultures interacted with geography, strategy, and dynastic fortune in determining the place of each polity in the Habsburg and Tudor multiple monarchies. England’s situation, assimilating Wales and seeking under very different military and political conditions to do the same to Gaelic Ireland, was straightforward compared to that of the Netherlands, with their sudden unions with Austria and Castile and their problematic debates over the destination of taxes and the role of Spanish and German troops. Briefly in 1554–8 a new dynastic dispensation promised to unite England and the Netherlands without Spain under the children of Philip and Mary, a union some contemporaries cannot have found unpalatable since the Dutch rebels urged it again in the 1570s, offering Elizabeth sovereignty over their provinces. This is a reminder that inherited traditions did not set developments on a rigidly predetermined path. The English tradition that external war maintained the polity’s inward health, the Burgundian-Imperial tradition that the crusade was the prince’s highest duty, the Burgundian-Habsburg reality that the Netherlands consisted of a recently assembled set of provinces ready to bargain with their ruler in competition with one another over their respective rights and responsibilities, all helped condition developments in our period. Yet such pre-existent or recurrent tendencies could take on a new significance when combined with other influences. In the same way political practices and institutions developing in our period in support of the ruler’s wars—in the Netherlands, the interaction between printing and the public discussion of war and politics, or the financial machinery established by the provincial States—might in future be diverted to other purposes, as these were in the dissident campaign of 1565–6 and the defence of the rebel provinces after 1572. Another line in historical sociology has placed more stress on economic differences between the societies with which states engaged in explaining different paths in statebuilding.¹⁵ The comparatively greater urbanization of the Netherlands clearly did place the relationship between princes and towns more in the foreground of military coordination and political debate than in England. The Netherlands’ greater dependence on long-distance trade made public opinion much more vocal in favour of the peace that brought prosperity and gave rulers more opportunities and more anxieties than in England in their dealings with merchants over wartime trade, convoy protection, and armaments supply. Their much more developed capital markets enabled the use of mercenaries and under favourable circumstances created a field of collaboration between rulers and the town elites who invested in public debts. When things went badly, however, they might license princely dictation in urban financial and political affairs or threaten confrontation between a debt-ridden prince and war-weary economic elites like that after 1559. The relationship between the landed nobility and the prince showed more similarities across the two polities, noble interests being broadly congruent with those of the prince and war a prime opportunity to exercise those interests. In methods of recruitment and command noblemen were drawn more closely under the supervision of rulers and their ministers, but they found in war the means both to extend their social power and to maintain their social identity. At least they did so when, ¹⁵ Tilly, Coercion, Capital and European States.

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unlike Henry Howard or the sixth earl of Northumberland, they had the requisite skills, a reminder of the role we should allow to agency and personality even when analysing states in terms of systems and structures. The higher nobility of the Netherlands, consolidated in their landholding, office-holding, and relationships with towns by princely favour, also suggest that social structures were not fixed determinants of political development, but themselves changed under the impact of state policy, and sometimes in directions opposite from those the models of confrontation between noble and princely power might lead us to expect. Economic and social differences also underlay some, but not all, of the cultural differences between England and the Netherlands that gave variety to the impact of war. English discussion of political affairs was not necessarily less intense than that of the Netherlands, but its forms were different in the absence of a highly developed printing industry and local centres of literary production like the chambers of rhetoric. If the Renaissance revival of the idea of the patria took hold more easily in England, that of the city-state did so more easily in the Netherlands. Contingency is more evident in the impact of the Reformation, where the choices of individual rulers made war one more chance to exercise the subject’s God-given duty to obey the prince rather than any external authority in England, but one more factor breeding disruption, discontent, and heresy in the Netherlands against the will of the prince. This leads us to the vexed question of the relationship between war and other forces in the development of state power. Alternative narratives of state formation in England and the Netherlands might reasonably stress the demand for princely justice, the need for government to respond to population growth and economic integration, the development of the idea of the modern sovereign state and of institutions suitable for its administration, or the processes of confessional social and political discipline unleashed by Reformation and Counter-Reformation. Distinguished historians have indeed put each of these at the centre of their accounts of state development in England or the Netherlands or both.¹⁶ Our findings do not lead us to posit in contradiction to these arguments an explanation of state growth driven entirely by war, but to suggest that war interacted with these other drivers of state formation, sometimes reinforcing them, sometimes contradicting them, sometimes nuancing their effect in ways constructive for the negotiation of princely power. In this sense our model of state formation is closest to Michael Braddick’s quadripartite analysis of England in the period just after that we have examined, which distinguishes the fiscal-military state from the patriarchal, confessional, and dynastic aspects of statehood, all developing at different speeds and in response to different stimuli.¹⁷ Reinforcement and contradiction can be seen in the contrasting relationships between war and religious policy we have just noted, in the way war inhibited the operation of justice in combat zones but bred disputes that demanded resolution by princely tribunals, or in the way that war disrupted economic life, but the integration of Guelders with the Habsburg ¹⁶ Schepper and Cauchies, ‘Legal Tools’; Harding, Medieval Law; Hindle, State and Social Change; Elton, Tudor Revolution; Baelde, ‘De Nederlanden’, 48–50, 57–9; Collinson, Birthpangs of Protestant England ; Muchembled, Popular Culture, 183–278. ¹⁷ Braddick, State Formation.

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lands through conquest promoted economic growth there.¹⁸ Nuancing is evident, for example, in the way in which military discipline preserved a judicial role for noblemen otherwise undermined by the growth of princely jurisdictions. In most of these interactions war played a larger part in the Netherlands than in England. This was a matter of geopolitics and of political traditions, sometimes perhaps surprising, such as the greater stress among the Habsburgs than the Tudors on the warrior qualities of the prince. It fitted with the recent and ongoing assembly of the Netherlands as a political unit, still being pursued through war in a way far more central to princely priorities than the occasional lurches of expansion in English control in Ireland. It also arose from the prominence of the Reformation in England as an act of state and a test of allegiance, even more capable than war of ruining a noble career or prompting royal intervention in a town. Yet we should pause to ask whether even in the Netherlands external war was overshadowed in effect by the civil wars of 1477–92, more radical in their economic ravages and opportunities for extreme assertions of princely power, more fertile in breeding new compromises between princes, noblemen, and urban elites. And we should remember that trends culminating in the formation of twentieth-century nation states may well not be the only or even the most important processes of political consolidation stimulated by war. The consolidation of political power and administrative competence at the level of the individual provinces of the Netherlands, in particular Holland, has rightly been highlighted by James Tracy.¹⁹ In the sweeping campaigns of the 1540s and the career of a Maximiliaan van Egmond-Buren we might also see the consolidation of power at the supra-national level of the Habsburg monarchy. As the twentyfirst century sees national states in retreat before free markets, supra-national unions of states, and international groups from lobbyists to terrorists, it should be easier to analyse the development of early modern polities without the teleology of national state formation.²⁰ From whatever perspective we approach these large issues, it seems clear that the impact of war must feature largely, but not exclusively, as an explanation of political change; and war not merely as the begetter of larger armies and higher taxes, but war as a process with deep social and political ramifications. ¹⁸ Driel, ‘Gelre v´oo´ r 1543’, 99. ¹⁹ Tracy, Holland. ²⁰ Creveld, Rise and Decline of the State, 336–421.

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Index Places in England and the Netherlands are given in their sixteenth-centuries counties or provinces.

Aa, Jan van der 204 Aa, River 157 Aachen 168, 206 Aarau 307 Aarschot, duke of, see Cro¨y Achilles 212 Ackworth, Yorks 160 Adlington, John 279 admiralties 24–5, 62, 110, 153–4, 158, 184, 217, 292 Aeswijn, Reinier van 206 Agincourt, battle of 299 agriculture 5, 280–1 Aimeries, bastard of 171 Aimeries, lord of, see Rolin Ainsty wapentake, Yorks 44, 52, 81, 99–100, 207 Aire, Artois 275 Albany, duke of, see Stewart Albert, duke of Saxony 12, 95, 107, 114–15, 129, 228 Albert Alcibiades, margrave of Brandenburg-Kulmbach 23 Aldenboucken family 145 ale 55 Alexander the Great 249, 296 Algiers 16, 219, 260, 262, 298 aliens 54, 69, 85, 262, 308–12, 324 Alnmouth, Northumb 212 Alnwick, Northumb 132–3, 139–40, 150, 152, 159, 161, 197–8; Abbey 212–13 Alsace 10 alum 118, 281 Alba, Fernando Alvarez de Toledo, duke of 195, 307 Amazons 248 ambassadors: English 127, 133, 170, 172, 190, 219; French 251; Netherlandish 170, 190; Venetian 247–8, 295–7, 318 Amicable Grant 30, 175, 269 Amounderness, Lancs 201 Amphitrite 255 Amsterdam, Holland 85, 119, 285, 315; economy 41, 83, 89, 278, 290, 324; entries and celebrations 271, 283; publications at 250 Anabaptism, Anabaptists 98, 169, 229, 263, 278, 306

Ancrum, battle of 17 Andrew, St 313–14 Angevin dynasty 6 Anhalt, Rudolf, prince of 120 Anne of Cleves, Queen 16, 171 Anthony of Burgundy, duke of Brabant 8 Antiochus Epiphanes 213 Antwerp, Brabant 41–3, 66, 99–100, 107–9, 111, 250, 255, 262, 268, 301, 306–7, 311, 316; economy 5, 29, 33–4, 48–50, 63, 81, 83, 89, 173, 179–80, 265, 286–7, 289, 292, 324; entries and celebrations 246, 261–2, 270–2, 286; finances 72, 95, 99; fortifications 45, 70–3, 303, 305; publications at 222, 226, 250, 259–60, 263; ships 62; siege (1542) 16, 57, 71, 75, 255, 311; troops 57–8, 297; urban government 48, 102–4 archers 10, 21, 53, 56, 217, 291 archery 240, 251 Arden, Mistress 106 Ardennes 14, 296 Arenberg, count of, see Ligne; Marck Arenberg, Robert, bastard of 144 Arkel family 218 armour 24, 55, 240–1, 245, 247–8, 250–1, 253, 275, 277; beaten into frying-pans 281; noble holdings 21, 149–51, 181, 221, 225–7, 229–31; town holdings 63, 65, 208; trade in 83, 286–7, 290 armourers 82–3 armoury, royal 24 Arnemuiden, Zeeland 298, 301, 321 Arnhem, Guelders 248 Arnold of Egmond, duke of Guelders 181 arquebuses 65, 67, 151, 277 Arras, Artois 57, 76, 148, 247, 263, 273, 292, 297, 313; bishops of 134; economy 41, 84–5, 184; fortifications 70; treaty of 12 arsenals 23–6, 28, 36, 329; see also Mechelen arson 278 Artevelde family 321 Arthur, prince of Wales 160 artillery 23–4, 145, 157, 162, 166, 245, 272, 319; noble holdings 66, 150–2, 184, 209, 213, 227; town holdings 51, 54,

376 artillery (cont.) 56–7, 59, 64–72, 83, 98, 123, 211; trade in 286–7 Artois 8, 12, 14–16, 129, 134, 163 and passim; governor, see Adrien de Cro¨y-Roeulx; Ferry de Cro¨y-Roeulx; Pontus de Lalaing-Bugnicourt; States 31, 117–18, 121, 173, 211, 214 Ashburton, Devon 269 Aske, Robert 68 Assendelft, Gerrit van 110 Asur 213 Ath, Hainaut 316 Augsburg, Diet of 171 Aurelius, Cornelius 222–3, 295, 297 Austria 168, 258–9, 298, 332 Avila y Zu˜niga, Luis de 218, 260, 298 Ayton castle 160 Ayton, Yorks 175 Badoaro, Federigo 296–7 Baert, Joos 145 Baexen family 145 Baexen, Gijsbert van 203–4 bakers 53 Balkans 15 Baltic 5, 13, 25, 62, 88, 292, 315 bandes de crue 21, 144–5 bankers 33–4, 73 banners, flags, pennons, standards 226, 229–31, 285, 316–17, 320 Bapaume, Artois 72, 108 Barbarossa 16 Barbenc¸on, lord of, see Ligne barbers 53 Barclay, Alexander 218, 220 Barnet, Herts, battle of 190 Barton, Andrew 153, 221, 224 Basel 222 Batavians 222, 295 Batenburg, Dierick, lord of 143, 204 Batenburgers 306 Bayard, Pierre du Terrail, lord of, 171 Bayly, John 287 beacons 74–5, 158, 319 Beauchamp, lord of 187 Beaumont, Hainaut 148 Beaumont, Sir John 221 Becon, Thomas 266 Bedford, earl of, see Russell beer 26, 55, 76–7, 80–1, 114, 162, 269, 298 beggars, begging 45, 85–6, 278 Bela III, king of Hungary 134 Belderbusche family 145 Bellay, Martin du 172 Bellefourri`ere, Philippe, lord of 168

Index bells 316; bell-metal 64–5, 290; bell-ringing 269–71, 275, 319 benevolences 30, 244, 282, 285 Berchem family 145 Berg, counts van den 129 Bergavenny, Lord, see Neville Bergen op Zoom, Brabant 43, 265 Bergen, Jan van, lord of Walhain 168 Bergues, Flanders 256 Berlaymont, Charles, count of 130, 143, 289 Bernard, George 175 Berners, Lord, see Bourchier Berwick upon Tweed 12, 22, 70, 77, 150, 152, 276–7 Besanc¸on, Franche-Comt´e 212, 270 B´ethune, Artois 157, 180, 262, 285 Beverley, Yorks 116, 138–9, 150, 207, 212; economy 48–9; finances 90; fortifications 68; troops 55; urban government 48; Minster 230 Bewcastle, Cumb 318 Bibles 251 Bijland, Adriaan, count of 147 Bijlant family 145 Bijlant, Roelman van 143 Bilborough, Yorks 75 billeting 75–7, 114, 119–20, 254, 276–7 bills 55, 63, 150, 241 Binks, Cuthbert 139 Blackheath, battle of 13, 321 Blount, Charles, Lord Mountjoy 230 Bocholtz, Geurt van 147 Bodelswing, Franz von 206 Bologna 168, 226, 298 Bommelerwaard, Guelders 58, 204 Bonet, Honor´e 218 bonfires 238, 269–71 Bonham, William 53 Boni di Pellizuoli, Donato 71 Bonn 169 book-bindings 181, 250 Boomgaert, Bernard van den 204 Borde, Andrew 303 Borg, Jacob van den 223 Borgerhout, Brabant 100 Borgraef, Pieter 145 borrowing, government 29, 33–6, 89, 108, 238, 307, 332; see also forced loans; renten Bosch, Gerrit van der 145 Bosschuysen, Willem van 58 Bosworth, Leics, battle of 7, 133, 191, 196, 221, 225, 227–8 Bouchain, Hainaut 59, 114, 287 Bouillon, Godefroy de 249 Boulogne 13, 299, 318 ; English occupation, 16–17, 22–3, 81, 86, 88, 112, 134,

Index 142, 148, 152, 170–1, 179, 182, 216, 224, 269, 279–81, 307; treaty of 17 Bourbon, Charles, duke of 181 Bourchier, John, Lord Berners 141, 197, 253, 294 Bourgogne, Philippe de, lord of Beveren 114 Bourgogne, Philippe de, lord of Blaton 59, 222, 225 Bourgondi¨e, Adolf van, lord of Beveren 130, 154, 187 Bourgondi¨e, Maximiliaan van, lord of Beveren 25–6, 130, 151, 154, 184, 205 Boussu, lord of, see Hennin-Li´etard Bouvignes-sur-Meuse, Namur 314 Bowes, Robert 164 bows 55, 63, 82–3, 150, 240–1 bowyers 83 Boxberg 169 Boxmeer, Brabant 210 Boys, Jean du 26 Brabant 8–9, 130, 134, 145, 330 and passim; civil war 12, 57, 78, 92, 280; economy 5, 13, 72, 297; Council of 96, 111; States 8, 12, 30–1, 34, 95, 118–19, 173–4, 313 Braddick, Michael 333 Braine-le-Comte, Hainaut 156 Bramber, Suss 208 Brancepeth, Durh 318 Brandon, Charles, duke of Suffolk, 128, 133, 175, 194, 208–9, 219; 1523 campaign 14, 64, 162, 165, 170, 182, 228; clientele 149, 152; reputation 221 brandschatting 184, 280 Brantˆome, Pierre de Bourdeilles, lord of 229 Bray, Sir Edward 201 bread 81, 85, 269–71 Breda, Brabant 43, 82, 131; fortifications 70, 72, 152 Brederode family 129, 218 Brederode, Frans van 58, 321 Brederode, Hendrik, count of 181 Brederode, Reinoud II van 218 Br´esin, Louis 224, 304, 308 Brest 19 brewing 5, 44, 49–50, 53, 81, 83, 100, 118, 263, 275 Brielle, Holland 156 Brimeu family 134 Brimeu, Lamberte de 135 Brimeu-Humbercourt, Guy de 135 Bristol 88, 310; economy 41, 50, 83; entries and celebrations 269; ships 60; urban government 42 Brittany 12–14, 19, 53, 263–4, 318 Brittenburg (Katwijk), Holland 218 Brode, John 284

377 Brooke, George, Lord Cobham 148, 284 Brooke, John, Lord Cobham 194 Browne, Sir Anthony 227 Bruges, Flanders 31, 228, 268, 284, 296, 316; economy 5, 41, 287; entries and celebrations 209, 270–1, 281, 283; opposes Maximilian 12, 78, 184, 320; publications at 258; troops 57 Brugse Vrije, Flanders 246 Brunswick 317 Brunswick-Wolfenb¨uttel, Duke Henry the elder of 157, 195 Brunswick-Wolfenb¨uttel, Duke Henry the younger of 147 Brussels, Brabant 221, 229, 255, 277–8, 304; as capital 5, 25–6, 47, 50, 73, 107, 109, 118, 129, 166, 170, 173, 209–10, 301; economy 41, 83, 85, 287; entries and celebrations 315; fortifications 108; troops 57; urban government 42–3 Bryan, Sir Francis 197 Buchel, Emont van 145 Buckingham, duke of, see Stafford Bueil, Jean de 218 Bugnicourt, lord of, see Lalaing buitenpoorters 44 Buren, Holland 137, 145–6, 151–3, 209, 231; counts of, see Egmond Burgundian Circle 18 Burgundy 8–10, 12, 15, 36, 313–14 and passim; see also Franche-Comt´e Burgundy, David of, bishop of Utrecht, 136, 146 Bury St Edmunds, Suff 43, 213 Byrne, David 74–86 Cadiz 298 Cadzand, Flanders, treaty of 12, 56 Calais 7, 23, 88, 148, 158, 281, 296, 302–3, 310; deputies 134, 170, 177–8, 185; economy 102, 282; entries and celebrations 269, 299; fall of 18, 113, 253, 283–4; garrison 22, 26, 28, 83, 201, 242, 253, 277, 279, 307 Cambrai, 80, 263, 267; bishopric of 16, 280, 317; bishops of 9, 134; fortifications 22, 72–3; league of 13, 168 ; treaty of 15, 114, 271 Cambridge 141, 269; university 213 Canterbury, Kent 74–5, 105–6, 116–17, 253, 310; archbishops 52; armaments 63–4; cathedral 277; chapter 69; Christ Church Priory 52; economy 47–9; fortifications 68–9, 79; troops 51–5, 112–13; urban government 48 Carew, Sir Nicholas 226 Carew, Sir Peter 307

378 Carlisle, Cumb 22, 77, 318 Carnaby, Sir Reynold 149, 198, 202–3 carnivals 58, 99 Carondelet, Jean 267 carpenters 83, 285 Castelein, Matthijs de 270 Castile 11, 13–14, 34, 332; see also Spain Castle Rising, Norf 150 Cateau-Cambr´esis, treaty of 19, 172, 271–2, 283, 307 Catherine of Aragon, Queen 15 Catherine Howard, Queen 197 Catholics, Catholicism 147; see also Counter-Reformation cattle trade 50, 81, 89–90 Cauwe, Michiel 211 cavalry 10, 21, 23, 255; see also demilances; men-at-arms; northern horse; reiter; stradiots Chalon family 130 Chalon, Philibert de, prince of Orange 165, 219; clientele 143; death and commemoration 181, 212, 222, 231 Chalon, Ren´e de, prince of Orange 187, 219, 231, 296; clientele 131, 144; death and commemoration 181, 222, 229 chambers of rhetoric 46, 237, 249–50, 261, 263, 267, 270–2, 275, 286, 333 Champagne 16 chantries 117 Charlemagne 249 Charlemont, Namur 18, 304–5 Charles the Bold 9–10, 12, 15, 21, 103, 134–5, 186, 217, 242, 300 Charles of Egmond, duke of Guelders 12–13, 15–16, 92, 146, 187–9, 196, 205–6, 223; attitudes towards 109, 283–4 Charles V, Holy Roman Emperor and king of Spain 5–18, 21 and passim; reputation 245–50, 258–63, 267–72, 284, 303–4, 308, 314, 323 Charles VI, king of France 7 Charles VII, king of France 8 Charles VIII, king of France 13, 172 Charleton, Edward 149 Charleton, William 149 Chastelain, Georges 313 Chˆatelet, Le, Hainaut 80, 166 Cheke, John 266 Cheshire 220, 317–19 Chester 277 Cheyney, Sir John 53, 111 Cheyney, Sir Thomas 165 Chichester, John 53 Chi`evres, lord of, see Cro¨y Chimay, Hainaut 303

Index chivalry 13, 132, 162, 171–2, 178–9, 185–6, 194, 215–16, 221, 225, 231, 249, 253, 309; see also knighthood Christian II, king of Denmark 13 chronicles 222–5, 234, 249, 257, 260–2, 264, 284, 296, 298–300, 303–4, 313–17, 321 chronograms 262 Cicero, Marcus Tullius 182, 267 Cinque Ports 55, 60–1, 91, 102, 116 civic entries 56, 106–9, 238, 246, 259–51, 260–1, 308 civil wars 7, 11–12, 76, 89, 183, 186, 239–40, 243, 256, 274, 285, 304, 319–22, 334; see also Brabant; Flanders; Hoeks and Kabeljauws; Wars of the Roses Civilis, Julius 222 Clarence, George, duke of 10 Clement VII, Pope, 258 Clere, Sir John 154 Clere, Thomas 215–16 clergy 212–14, 256, 262, 265–9, 310–11; taxation of 32, 36, 43–4, 98–9, 265, 267 Cleves, Philip of 107, 151, 188, 195, 217–18, 227–8; opposes Maximilian 12, 154, 184, 190, 320–1 Cleves 145, 148, 158, 171, 205, 263, 272, 276, 310 Clifford, Henry, Lord Clifford 112 Clifford, Henry, first earl of Cumberland 112, 194 Clifford, Henry, second earl of Cumberland 112 cloth 5–6, 29, 49–50, 83, 88–9, 116–18, 281–2, 292 Cobham, Lord, see Brooke Cock, Hieronymus 249 Cockermouth, Cumb 139, 197 Cocquiel, Karel 287 coercion-extraction cycle 3, 20, 330 Coevorden, Drenthe 272 coinage, coins 34, 88, 118, 137, 162, 228, 238, 250–1, 291; debasement 33, 35, 86; kissing 263–5 Colbert, Jean-Baptiste 293 Colet, John 266 Collingwood, Robert 164 Cologne 65, 89, 205; archbishop of, 10 commissions of array 55, 138–9, 141 ‘commonwealth men’ 266 compagnies d’ordonnance 21–2, 36, 56, 134–6, 142–4, 162, 168, 182–3, 198–9, 203–4, 229, 242, 254, 275, 280, 285, 290, 295–6, 298, 331 confraternities 43, 45–6, 56

Index Constable, Sir Marmaduke 197 Constantine 249 Contes, Artois 153, 180, 199 convoys 62–3, 281, 332 copper 65, 98 Copuldike, John 56 Corbridge, Northumb 198 Corenhuyse family 204–5 Corfu 297 Cornwall 5, 128, 302, 318, 321 Cornwallis, Sir John 200 coronations 15, 34, 135, 168, 226, 244, 261, 270, 298 corruption 26, 72, 266, 279–80, 324 Council for Marine Causes 24–5 Council in the Marches of Wales 44 Council in the North 44, 55, 88, 109–10, 117, 165, 191 Council in the West 109 Council of Finance 109, 190 Council of State 120, 130, 137, 157, 184, 190 councils of war 110, 135–6, 163–7, 188 Counter-Reformation 3, 11, 169, 237, 333 Courtenay family 128 Courtenay, Catherine, countess of Devon 53 Courtenay, Edward, earl of Devon 113 Courtenay, Henry, marquess of Exeter 113 courts of law 10, 46, 72, 82, 97, 117, 163, 183, 281; see also justice courts, princely 4, 7, 10–11, 21–2, 28, 238, 271, 277, 286–7, 307, 313; and the nobility 128–9, 134–5, 165, 168, 170–1, 173, 178, 182, 186, 188, 190–2, 194–6, 199–200, 217, 330; and towns 46, 107–9, 111, 115–18, 211 Coventry 44, 50, 87 Cowdray Park, Suss 227 Craven, Yorks 194 Cr´ecy, battle of 294 Cr´epy, treaty of 17, 173 Crete 297 crime 239, 274–80, 324 Croft, Sir James 307 Croix, Walloon Flanders 180 Crol, Karel 286 Cromwell, Thomas 12, 106, 117, 191, 198, 201, 307 crossbows 56, 181, 210, 277 Cro¨y family 129, 131, 134–5 Cro¨y, Adrien de, count of Roeulx 135, 153–4, 166, 168–70, 180–3, 188, 190, 195, 216–17, 221, 255, 297; clientele 143–4, 204–5; death and commemoration 181, 231; as provincial governor 155–8, 163–4, 172–3, 182, 184, 198–9, 211, 213–14; reputation 224–6

379 Cro¨y, Agnes 134 Cro¨y, Antoine de, count of Porcien 129, 134 Cro¨y, Antoine de, lord of Sempy 190, 199 Cro¨y, Charles de, prince of Chimay 206 Cro¨y, Eustache de, bishop of Arras 134, 199, 213 Cro¨y, Ferry de, count of Roeulx 134–5, 153, 162, 168–9, 173, 180, 190, 195, 210–11; clientele 143, 146, 204; death and commemoration 231; as provincial governor 156, 198, 211 Cro¨y, Guillaume de, lord of Chi`evres 134–5, 186, 190 Cro¨y, Jean de, count of Chimay 134 Cro¨y, Jean de, count of Roeulx 135, 181, 198, 224 Cro¨y, Jean de, lord of Cr´esecques 199 Cro¨y, Philippe I de, lord of Aarschot 134 Cro¨y, Philippe II de, duke of Aarschot 130, 195, 214, 255, 271, 311; clientele 205–7; as provincial governor 71, 114, 135, 199; reputation 207, 221 Cro¨y, Philippe III de, duke of Aarschot 151, 180, 300, 305 Cro¨y, Robert de, bishop of Cambrai 134, 213–14 crusades 13, 51, 168, 172, 218–19, 227, 247–9, 251, 262, 267–70, 298, 332 cucking stool 113 Culemborg, Aleida van 136 Culemborg, Floris, count of 166 Cumberland 132, 152 Cumberland, earl of, see Clifford Cupid 226 curfews 77, 311 Curtius, Jean 287 Curwen, Sir Christopher 139, 201 Cuthbert, St 317, 320 Cyprus 268 Dabin family 144 Dacre family 128 Dacre, Thomas, Lord Dacre 140, 149, 152, 159, 161, 193, 197, 202 Dacre, William, Lord Dacre 139, 150, 164, 253 Dadizele, Jan van 145, 164 Danby family 202 Danube, River 136, 168, 195, 298 Darcy, Thomas, Lord Darcy 51, 321 Darlington, Durh 269 Darmstadt 163, 169 Daunsell, William 151 David 261 De la Pole, John, earl of Lincoln 191 De la Pole, Richard 269

380 De Vere, John, earl of Oxford 111–12, 128, 150, 227 defamation 164, 211–12 Delden, Overijssel 206 Delfshaven, Holland 77, 119 Delft, Holland 41, 98, 118–19 demesne revenues 7, 28–9, 33; demesne mortgages 28–9, 34, 100, 156, 187; demesne state 27, 35, 330 demilances 150 Denmark 13, 15, 147, 158 Deptford, Kent 24, 83 Derby, earl of, see Stanley desertion 86, 252–3, 255, 278, 323 Desmond, earl of, see Fitzgerald Deventer family 145 Deventer, Wolter van 205 Deventer, Overijssel 43, 145, 259, 303 Deveren, Egbert van 205 Devereux, Robert, earl of Essex 252 Devon 128; earl of, see Courtenay Diepenheim, Overijssel 206 Diksmuide, Flanders 179 Dinant, Li`ege 18 Dinther, Wilken van 205 dogs 84, 181, 184 Dole, Franche-Comt´e 271; parlement 130 Dordrecht, Holland 63, 67, 111, 115, 118, 250; armaments 65; economy 41; urban government 43 Dornach, battle of 298 Dorset, marquess, marchioness of, see Grey Douai, Walloon Flanders 59, 75–7, 79, 99, 107, 114, 119, 211, 263, 275, 295–6, 301, 312, 316; armaments 65–7; economy 48–50, 82, 84–5, 88; entries and celebrations 270–1; finances 92–4; troops 57, 79; urban government 49, 103 Douglas, Archibald, earl of 220 Doullens, Picardy 152 Dover, Kent 56, 265, 269, 310; castle 56, 102, 303 Draak 154 drainage 118, 280 Drake, Sir Francis 318 Drenthe 5, 16, 129, 136; governor, see Maximiliaan van Egmond-Buren; Jean de Ligne-Barbenc¸on; States 172 Drubbele, Willem 145 dry stamp 105 Dublin 5, 167 Ducheman, John 64 Dudley, John, Viscount Lisle, earl of Warwick, duke of Northumberland 21, 149, 192, 209, 284, 307; clientele 197, 201; reputation 219, 227

Index duelling 277–80 Dufour, Pierre 312 Dunkirk, Flanders, 99, 285; naval affairs 25, 61, 158 Dunstanburgh, Northumb 178, 186 D¨uren 189 D¨urer, Albrecht 261 Durham: bishop 281; cathedral 317; chancellor 164 Dutch language 9, 258–60, 262, 268, 295 Dutch Revolt 4, 19, 36, 143, 237, 308, 312–13, 319, 325, 332 East Friesland 171, 205 Echyngham, Edward 153 Edinburgh 17, 182, 264, 269 Edmund of Hull 60 Edward I 7, 132, 250 Edward II 7 Edward III 6–7, 244, 250 Edward IV 7, 10, 12, 23, 46, 88, 133, 140, 190, 250 Edward V 7, 159 Edward VI 17 and passim; reputation 245, 251, 270 Egglesfeld, John 79 Egmond family 135–7, 331 Egmond, Anna van, countess of Horn 183 Egmond, Anna van, wife of William of Orange 137, 181, 187 Egmond, Batholomaeus de 145 Egmond, Floris van, count of Buren 130, 136, 151–4, 162–6, 168, 179–81, 183, 186, 188–90, 195–6, 198–9, 213, 216; clientele 143–6, 203–4, 219; death and commemoration 231; and England 170; and ’s-Hertogenbosch 104, 120, 145, 173–4, 204, 209–12; and Holland 156–7, 162, 172–4, 189, 224; as provincial governor 136; reputation 221–5; and Utrecht 146, 168, 180, 189, 213 Egmond, Frederik van, count of Buren 135–6, 153, 180, 183, 187–9, 213; clientele 204; and ’s-Hertogenbosch 209–10; reputation 223 Egmond, Jan, count of 135–6; clientele 200; as provincial governor 114–15, 156–7; reputation 115, 223 Egmond, Joris van, bishop of Utrecht 213 Egmond, Lamoraal, count of 130, 137, 161, 179, 196, 218–19, 301, 305; clientele 144; as provincial governor 190; reputation 173, 219, 221–3 Egmond, Maximiliaan van, count of Buren 71, 130, 136–7, 152–3, 163, 169–72, 174, 179, 181, 183–4, 186–9,

Index 198–9, 334; campaign of 1546–7 147–8, 162–3, 166, 168–9, 189, 195, 199, 297; clientele 143–5, 147–8, 151, 203–6; death and commemoration 229–31; and ’s-Hertogenbosch 174, 209–10; as provincial governor 158, 172, 184, 188, 199, 205–6, 216, 234; reputation 222–4, 226 Eindhoven, Brabant 101 Elizabeth I passim; reputation 245, 248, 252 Elizabeth of York, Queen 7 Ellerker family 202 Ellerker, Sir William 164 Elst, Dirk van der 67 Emmanuel Philibert, duke of Savoy 18, 163, 166, 195–6, 217, 275, 300–2, 305, 330 Ems, River 187 enclosure 102, 238, 291 Enghien, Hainaut 187, 228 English Civil War 4 English language 6, 258, 266, 268 ´ Epinoy, Hugues de Melun, prince of 300 Eppens, Abel 312 Erasmus, Desiderius 136, 249, 266–8, 276, 295, 297, 299, 306, 323, 325, 329 Eryngton, Thomas 167 Esseren, Pauwels van 203 Essex, earl of, see Devereux Etaples, Picardy, treaty of 13 Eure, Sir William 164, 201 Eure, Sir William, later Lord Eure 164 Everaert, Cornelis 270, 281, 284 Everingham, Sir Thomas 51 Eworth, Hans 226–7 Ewsum, Hidde van 205–6 Ewsum, Johan van 206 Exchequer 177, 200 excises 31–2, 44, 72, 77, 82, 95–6, 98, 100, 103, 289 Exe, River 117 Exeter 74, 106, 109, 112–13, 116–17; armaments 63–5; cathedral chapter 69; economy 47–9, 86, 88; fortifications 68–9; troops 52–4, 83; urban government 43, 48, 97, 101–2, 106 famine 18, 62, 85, 280 Fenwick, Sir Ralph 149, 164 Ferdinand, king of the Romans, Holy Roman Emperor 18 Ferdinand of Aragon 14, 172, 249 feudal dues 28 feudal obligations 10, 21, 139, 242, 288, 323 Fiennes, lord of, see Luxembourg fifteenth and tenth 30, 54, 282 Finet, Jean 263

381 fish, fishing 5, 49–50, 61, 80–1, 89, 102, 116–18, 208, 285; fishery protection 25, 60, 62, 121, 123, 157–8, 291–3, 324 Fitzgerald family 15, 34, 128, 147 Fitzgerald, Gerald, earl of Kildare 167 Fitzwalter, Lord, see Radcliffe Fitzwilliam, William, earl of Southampton 201, 227 Fitzroy, Henry, duke of Richmond 154, 164 Flanders 8–9, 16, 41, 131, 296–7 and passim; civil war 12, 103, 108–9, 263, 296, 299; Council of 111; economy 5, 13, 72, 89, 285, 292; French sovereignty 9, 11, 15, 312, 319; governor, see Engelbrecht of Nassau; Adrien de Cro¨y-Roeulx; Lamoraal van Egmond; naval affairs 25, 62, 120, 158; States 12, 30–1, 34, 62, 120–1, 158, 172, 313 Fletcher, John 102 fletchers 83 Flodden, Northumb, battle of 14, 91, 133, 182, 197, 200–1, 208–9, 224, 230, 264, 269, 297, 317; see also Thomas Howard I Floris, Frans 261 Flushing, Zeeland 108, 265, 303 fodder 76, 163, 178, 274 Folembray, Picardy 214 food supplies 26, 41, 47, 80–2, 88, 102, 106, 123, 161–3, 169, 194, 211, 233, 239, 261, 276, 279, 288–90, 324, 331 forced loans 30, 33–4, 95, 102, 244, 282 Forest-Montiers 306 forests 247, 277 Fortescue, Sir John 244 fortifications 20, 285, 302–5, 319, 330; citadels 22, 68, 73, 303–4, 325; on English coasts 16, 22, 24, 241, 244–5, 277, 282, 303, 319; in Ireland 22, 152, 303; on Netherlands borders 18, 22, 24, 71, 157, 227, 243, 246; noble 151–3, 203–4, 228, 232; urban 45–7, 57, 67–73, 79, 97–101, 107–8, 111, 117, 123, 209, 320, 331; see also trace italienne Fox, Richard, bishop of Winchester 265 Framlingham, Suff 152 France 3–19, 21, 27, 129, 172, 257, 260, 273, and passim; attitudes towards 308–9; see also aliens; French Wars of Religion; Hundred Years War Franche-Comt´e 8, 12, 130, 143, 168, 217, 298 Francis I, king of France 14–18, 136, 258, 260, 314; attitudes towards 248–9, 281, 283 Frankfurt 162–3, 166, 169, 229, 297, 306

382 Frederick III, Holy Roman Emperor 9–10, 108, 320 Frederick, Count Palatine 168 French language 9, 228, 249, 258–61, 268 French Wars of Religion 4, 19, 36, 307 Friesland 5, 22, 25, 129, 131, 146, 158, 184, 285, 297, 312, 330; campaigns in 15, 62, 114, 119, 154, 168, 198, 205, 222–3; governor, see Floris van Egmond-Buren; Georg Schenk von Tautenburg; Maximiliaan van Egmond-Buren; Jean de Ligne-Barbenc¸on; States 32, 172 Froissart, Jean 294 Frontinus 245, 294 funerals 229–31 Furseman, John 61, 79 F¨urstenberg, Count Wilhelm von 306 galleys 75, 85, 217, 241, 243, 247, 265, 268, 310 gambling 26, 162, 183 games, children’s 295–6 Gardiner, Stephen, bishop of Winchester 265 Garter, Order of the 132, 185, 228 Gascoigne, Sir William 201 Gattinara, Mercurino Arborio de 11, 130, 188 Gavinana, battle of 231 Geertruidenberg, Holland 107 Geffen, Brabant 115 Geheime Raad 11, 109, 156 Geldenhauer, Gerard 222 Geneva 90 Genoa 228 gentlemen pensioners 21 gentry, lesser nobility 6, 21, 30, 57, 116, 128–31, 154, 318–19 geopolitics 330–1, 334 German language 9, 228, 268 Germany 5, 9–10, 16, 83, 158, 257, 262–3, 275, 287, 290, 298, 301, 303, 312; Protestants 16–18, 84, 169, 229, 259; see also soldiers Ghent, Flanders 9, 10, 31, 99, 157, 189, 263, 275, 284, 314, 316; armaments 67; citadel 22, 73, 135, 155–6, 211, 303–4; economy 41, 44, 50, 82; entries and celebrations 246, 270–2; finances 77; fortifications 320; opposes Maximilian 12, 78, 320; revolt (1539–40) 16, 22, 42, 73, 100, 103, 135, 174, 211, 248, 285, 301, 319, 321; troops 59, 298; urban government 43; witte kaproenen 56 Gideon 213 Glajon, lord of, see Stavele

Index Glete, Jan 331 Glorious Revolution 4 Gloucester 44; duke of, see Richard III Glymes family 131, 134 Glymes, Cornelis van, lord of Zevenbergen 156, 199, 204, 210 Glymes, Jan II van, lord of Bergen op Zoom 199 Glymes, Jan III van, lord of Bergen op Zoom 130 Glymes, Jan IV van, lord of Bergen op Zoom 130 Godenoel family 144 Golden Fleece, Order of the 108, 128–9, 132, 134, 136, 184, 186, 195, 199, 216, 221, 229, 231, 248 Gorges, Edmund 141, 197 Gorinchem, Holland 59, 204; treaty of 15, 120 Gossaert, Jan 225 Gouda, Holland 41 Grafton, Richard 220, 224 Grafton, Thomas 83 grain 5, 26, 29, 50, 61–3, 69, 80–2, 85–9, 88–9, 118, 280, 288–9, 291–2, 312 Grand Privil`ege 10, 121 Granvelle, Antoine Perrenot de, bishop of Arras 11, 118, 121, 132, 196, 207, 267, 302 Grave, Brabant / Guelders 108, 145, 151, 156, 199, 203–4, 209–10 Gravelines, Flanders 75, 309; battle of 18–19, 135, 137, 190, 219, 297 Gray, Sir Roger 164 Great Yarmouth, Norf 64–5, 69, 97, 208–9 Greek language 136 Greenwich, treaty of 17 Grenville, Sir Richard 318 Gresham, Sir Thomas 287, 290 Grey, William, Lord Grey de Wilton 178 Grey, Henry, marquess of Dorset 175 Grey, Lady Jane 18 Grey, Thomas, marquess of Dorset 165, 202 Grimsby, Lincs 68 Gronau, Jakob von 206 Groningen 5, 16, 129, 136, 204; economy 41, 44; fortifications 73, 108, 303; government 43; province 25, 131, 244, see also Ommelanden; province, campaigns in 15–16, 196; provincial governor, see Maximiliaan van Egmond-Buren; Jean de Ligne-Barbenc¸on; States 172 Grote Raad 26 Gruffudd, Ellis 191–2, 284, 302, 307, 310, 317

Index Guelders, Charles, bastard of 206 Guelders 10–13, 15–16, 135–7, 145, 156, 187, 255, 259–60, 263, 272, 285, 289, 308 and passim; as Gelderland, under Habsburg rule 32, 43, 96, 129, 143, 146, 205–6, 295, 308, 330, 333–4; States 32; dukes of see Arnold; Charles; William; see also ’s-Hertogenbosch Guicciardini, Lodovico 324 Guienne 13, 141, 165, 252 Guilds 42–3, 45–6, 53, 57–9, 63, 81, 98, 103–4, 212, 270–1; see also confraternities Guinegatte, battle of 12, 145, 263, 270, 316 Guines 178, 182 Guise, Franc¸ois, duke of 18 Guise 16 Gulpen family 145 gunfounders 23–4, 65–6, 286–7 gunners 23, 57, 151–2, 157, 316; town gunners 26, 64, 66–7, 123 gunpowder 61, 63–7, 84, 151, 157, 184, 286–7, 290 Guyon, Ferry de 22, 183, 186, 217, 298 Haamstede, Zeeland 270 Haarlem, Holland 109, 115, 119, 275; economy 48–50, 88, 114; entries and celebrations 246, 270; finances 95–6; urban government 49, 96, 98 Hackett, Sir John 280 Hackney, Middx 230 Haddington 227, 253 Haer, Florent van der 307 Hague, The, Holland 34, 110–11, 117, 120, 174, 289, 321; attack on 15 Hainaut 8–9, 12, 14, 79, 129, 134, 280, 286, 296 and passim; governor, see Philippe II de Cro¨y-Aarschot; grand bailli 96; States 31, 107, 119, 173, 274, 313 halberdiers 146, 231 halberds 65, 241 Hale, John 3 Hall, Edward 224–5, 264 Halloy, lord of 205 Hallut, Remy de 26, 65, 151, 286 Ham-en-Vermandois, Picardy 148, 305–6 Hampton Court, Surr 27 handgunners 10, 22–3, 55–6, 210 handguns 63–5, 84, 277, 279, 295; see also arquebuses Hardyng, John 220 Hastings, Francis, earl of Huntingdon 112, 175 Hastings, William, Lord Hastings 194 Hatmaker, John 83 Hattem, Guelders 181

383 Hawkins, Sir John 318 Hector 212, 296 Heemskerck, Maarten van 226, 249 heerdtelling 30 Henne, Alexandre 295 Hennin-Li´etard, Jean de, lord of Boussu 184, 305 Henry Grace a` Dieu 25 Henry II, king of France 18, 172, 214, 283, 307–8 Henry V 6–7, 244, 250 Henry VI 7 Henry VII 7, 12–13 and passim; reputation 250 Henry VIII 13–17 and passim; as duke of York 212; reputation 244–5, 250–1, 284, 303 Henry, Prince, son of Henry VIII 269 heraldry 108, 167, 185, 226–8, 231, 249, 303–4, 313–14 heralds 219, 230, 234, 313 Herbert family 128 Herbert, William, earl of Pembroke 218 Hercules 222, 249, 271, 296 Hereford 252, 264 Herefordshire 142 heresy 32, 158, 243–4, 256, 261, 272, 305–7, 325, 333 Herlaer, Thierry de 254 Heron family 202 Heron, Sir John 64, 167 Heron, Sir Roger 201 Herpener, Pieter de 281 Hertford, earl of, see Seymour ’s-Hertogenbosch, Brabant 76–7, 80, 107–9, 118–20, 156, 209–11, 308, 315–16, 331; armaments 65–7; boats 63; economy 41, 48–50, 81–2, 84–5, 88–90, 311; entries and celebrations 268, 270; finances 44, 92–6, 98–9; fortifications 70–1, 73, 108; and Guelders 48, 58–9, 71, 79, 84, 89, 92, 95, 101, 108, 123, 210, 311; meierij 44, 58, 101, 210; St John’s church 98; troops 58–9, 79, 101, 296; urban government 43, 48, 75, 98, 102–4, 115–16 Herwood family 202 Hesdin (now Viel-Hesdin), Artois 14–16, 18, 135, 146, 166, 170, 173, 180, 198, 204, 259, 262, 300 Hesdinfert (now Hesdin), Artois 58, 148, 156, 166, 304–5 Hesse 162, 171 Hessleside, Northumb 149 Hesslinga, Feiko 205 Hexham, Northumb 212

384 Heydon, Sir Christopher 142 Heyward, John 282 Hintze, Otto 330 Hobart, James 112 Hoeks and Kabeljauws 9, 12, 49, 108, 136, 143, 199, 274, 321 Holbein, Hans 226 Holderness, Yorks 139, 186 Holgate, Robert, archbishop of York 110 Holland 5, 8–9, 82, 129, 136–7, 297 and passim; Council of 96, 110–11, 122, 174; demilitarization 22, 59, 115, 278, 285, 296–7; governor, see Jan, count of Egmond; Hendrik III van Nassau; Antoine de Lalaing-Hoogstraten; Maximiliaan van Bourgondi¨e-Beveren; naval affairs 13, 15, 25, 61–3, 121; States 29–31, 34, 47, 59, 62, 95, 104, 109–11, 115, 118–21, 137, 157, 174, 189, 285, 313, 315, 331; wars against Guelders 11, 13, 15, 66, 107, 109, 119–20, 136; see also Hoeks and Kabeljauws Holle, Georg von 147, 305 Holy Roman Empire 9, 11, 14–15, 18, 129–30, 137 Homer 136 Homildon Hill, battle of 220 homilies 321 Hoogstraten, count of, see Lalaing Hooper, John 266 Hoorn, Holland 99, 274 Horn family 134 Horn, count of, see Montmorency horses 21, 81–2, 100, 144, 151, 163, 181, 204, 208, 213, 219, 240–1, 254, 279, 281, 288, 295, 301, 313; as gifts 149, 183, 228; races 46; trade in 253, 290–1 Horsham, Suss 208 Horsley family 202 Horsley, Thomas 167 hospitals 45, 85, 245 Hothom, John 167 Houghton, Sir Richard 201 Houte, Pieter van 145 Howard family 112, 128, 133–4, 137, 151–2, 219, 234 Howard, Lord Edmund 196–7, 208, 219–20 Howard, Sir Edward 14, 134, 153, 179, 196, 215, 220–1 Howard, George 197 Howard, Henry, earl of Surrey 133–4, 141, 196–7, 215–17, 333; at Boulogne 142, 152, 177, 182, 185, 191–2, 194, 197; reputation 209, 226, 228

Index Howard, John, first duke of Norfolk 133, 150, 153, 185, 190, 194, 196, 218; clientele 140–1, 208; reputation 226 Howard, Thomas I, second duke of Norfolk 133, 150, 153, 185, 218, 220; clientele 141, 196, 200; death and commemoration 230; early northern campaigns 160–2, 177, 191, 196; Flodden campaign 80, 141, 160–1, 165, 181, 185, 191, 196, 219–20, 317; reputation 224–5 Howard, Thomas II, third duke of Norfolk 64–5, 133–4, 152–4, 165, 175, 182, 185, 191, 194, 196–7, 208–9, 215, 217, 252, 320; 1522 campaign 169, 171; 1523 campaign 81, 141, 160–1, 179, 191, 193–4, 202; 1542 campaign 81, 162, 165, 177, 194, 197, 213; 1544 campaign 83, 162, 165, 169–71, 181, 191, 194, 197, 213; clientele 141–2, 151, 197, 200–1; death and commemoration 230; and Ireland 167–8, 177, 179, 191, 215; reputation 220, 224–8 Howard, Thomas III, fourth duke of Norfolk 150, 158, 177, 208, 226; clientele 142, 200 Howard, Thomas, Viscount Howard of Bindon 134, 151, 154, 185, 197 Howard, William 133 Howard, William, Lord Howard of Effingham 134, 151, 154, 185, 197 Huguenots 36, 307 Hull, John 67 Hull 77–8, 116–17, 161; armaments 64; economy 47–9, 55, 80–1; finances 90; fortifications 68–70, 78, 303; ships 60–1; troops 52–5, 99, 207; urban government 48, 102 Hulst, Martin van der 145 humanism, humanists 221–2, 229, 238, 241, 258, 266, 294, 297, 306, 316 Humberside 141 Hundred Years War 6–8, 240–1, 269, 276, 281, 294 Hungary 181, 251, 258–9 Huntingdon 277; earls of, see Hastings iconoclasm 137, 277, 306 IJsselmuiden, Overijssel 206 IJsselstein, Arend, bastard of 199–200 IJsselstein, Christoffel, bastard of 199 IJsselstein, Holland 57, 137, 145–6, 151–3, 180, 183, 189, 203, 209, 229, 231, 316; Cistercian house 213

Index impressment 241, 243, 247, 253, 323 indentures 138, 150, 167, 177, 193–4, 240 Ingolstadt 136 inns 46, 76–7, 81, 98, 100, 263, 273, 279, 284 insurance 63 Interim 259 intelligence 74–5, 102, 105, 107, 114, 157–8, 203–4, 210, 238 Ipswich, Suff 56 Ireland 4–7, 13–15, 22, 26, 34, 128, 141, 237, 252, 284, 334; deputyship or lieutenancy 133, 167–8, 232; Gaelic areas 5, 7, 36, 303, 309, 332; Pale 5, 7, 152, 281; plantations 17, 22, 303; see also Thomas Howard II Irish Sea 24, 60 iron 5, 49, 83, 101, 281, 286–7 Isabella of Castile 14, 172, 249 Isham, Gregory 83 Isle of Wight 17 Islington, Middx 276 Italy 83, 218, 224–5, 230, 276, 287, 298; campaigns in 13–18, 27, 34, 108, 165, 168, 172, 180–1, 204, 231, 258, 260, 262, 270, 297, 317; see also soldiers; trace italienne Ittersum, Jan van 205–6 Ivoix (now Carignan), Luxembourg 180, 195, 305 Jacopszoon, Andries 285 Jacqueline of Bavaria 8 James IV, king of Scots 13–14, 153, 160, 162, 185, 228, 257, 283 James V, king of Scots 17, 159, 283 James, Mervyn 159 Jauche, lords of 180 Jerningham, Sir Richard 200 Jerningham, Robert 200 Jerusalem 320 Jews 268 Jobson, Walter 61 John II, king of France 8 John III, king of Portugal 286 John the Fearless 8, 258 John Frederick, elector of Saxony 195, 263–4 Johnson, George 139 Jonghelinck, Jacob 226 Joris, David 306 Joshua 213 Josiah 251 jousts 251 Judas Maccabaeus 213 J¨ulich 16, 158, 171, 184, 187, 246 Julius Caesar 249, 266 Junius, Hadrianus 221

385 justice 3, 6–7, 10–11, 43–4, 110–11, 233, 237, 244, 247, 279–80, 325, 333–4; see also courts of law justices of the peace 43, 63, 241 Kalderbach family 145 Kalkar, Klein von 147 Kallo, Flanders 99 Kampen, Overijssel 263 Kats, lord of 145 Katzenelnbogen 189 Kelso 216 Kendal, Westmor 318 Kenninghall, Norf 133, 142, 150, 152, 227 Kent 24 Kett’s rebellion 17, 23, 149, 179, 209, 227, 302, 320 Kildare, earls of, see Fitzgerald king’s spears 21 Kingston, Sir William 201 Kirkbyshire, Yorks 139 Kleef, Adolf van, lord of Ravenstein 231 Knaresborough, Yorks 186 Knevel, Paul 56 knighthood 196, 200–2, 205, 248, 251; see also chivalry Knyvet, Anthony 200 Kortrijk, Flanders 100, 156, 211; armaments 67; entries and celebrations 272; finances 77 Lalaing family 129, 131, 134 Lalaing, Antoine de, count of Hoogstraten 118, 130, 151, 179–80, 190, 195–6, 218, 227; as provincial governor 115, 120, 157; reputation 219, 223 Lalaing, Charles, count of 130, 207, 305 Lalaing, Jacques de, lord of Bugnicourt 218 Lalaing, Pontus de, lord of Bugnicourt 143, 275, 305 Lam, John 55 Lambeth, Surr 215 Lampleugh, Sir John 164, 167, 203 Lancashire 128, 208–9, 220, 317 Landen, Brabant 100 Landrecies, Hainaut 16, 216–17, 224 landsknechts 22–3, 56, 171, 229, 254, 275, 277, 306 Langley, Northumb 149 Langonesse, Antoine 297 Langston, Robert 106 Langstrothdale, Yorks 139 Lannoy family 129, 131, 205 Lannoy, Baudouin de, lord of Molembaix 114 Lannoy, Charles, count of 186

386 Lannoy, Franc¸oise de 181 Lannoy, Marie de 137 Lascelles, Roger 164, 167 Latimer, Hugh 266 Latin language 228, 249, 258–60, 262–3, 268 Lawson, George 165 lawyers 7, 128–9, 132, 164, 212, 215; see also pensionaries; recorders lay subsidy 30, 43–4, 54, 175 lead 49 leather 50, 88 Leconfield, Yorks 139, 152, 228 Leerdam, Holland 137, 174, 204 Leeuwaarden, Friesland 67, 259, 262, 304 Leicester 50, 63, 112; earl of, see Dudley Leiden, Holland 76, 108–11, 114–15, 117–19, 285, 295–6; armaments 65–7; economy 41, 48, 50; entries and celebrations 107–8, 250; finances 92–6, 98–9; fortifications; troops 57–9; urban government 49, 96, 98, 103–4 Leiden, Jan of 263 Leke, Robert 139 Leland, John 303 Lemaire de Belges, Jean 296 Lens, Artois 76 Leuven, Brabant 16, 41, 259; economy 41; entries and celebrations 246; finances 92–5; fortifications 100; publications at 258–9; troops 57; university 99; urban government 42–3, 96 Lewes, Suss 201, 208, 270 Ley family 145 Licques, Jacques de Recourt, lord of 144 Li`ege, prince-bishopric of 9–10, 12, 134, 286–7, 314, 317; cathedral chapter 213 Lier, Brabant 81 lieutenancy of the North 56, 99, 110, 133, 141–2, 160–1, 177, 232 Ligne, Antoine de, count of Fauquembergues 146–7 Ligne, Jean de, lord of Barbenc¸on, count of Arenberg 58, 195, 199, 218, 305 Lille, Walloon Flanders 50, 77, 84, 98, 113–14, 119, 129, 211, 256, 262–3, 316; economy 41, 286; finances 94; fortifications 108, 155; troops 57; urban government 42 Limburg 5, 8; States 174 Lincoln 209, 303 Lincoln, earl of, see De la Pole linen 50, 103 Lingen 187 lions 298 Lisle family 202 Lisle, Viscount, see Dudley; Plantagenet

Index litany 266 London 5, 74, 86, 90, 185, 277, 284–5, 302, 320; as capital 50, 60, 78, 117, 128, 162, 257, 310; chronicles 224–5, 264; economy 33, 35, 41, 63, 80, 83, 177, 282, 287, 291, 324; entries and celebrations 251, 269–70; St Paul’s Cathedral, 250; Smithfield, 302; Tower, 23–4; urban government 42 Lons-le-Saunier, Franche-Comt´e 231 lords lieutenants 44, 113, 122, 129, 142, 158, 234 Lorraine 10 lotteries 95 Louis de Male, count of Flanders 8 Louis XI, king of France 4, 10, 134, 256, 258, 263 Louis XII, king of France 13, 172, 251, 258, 286 Louise of Savoy 15 Louth, Lincs 209, 270 Lovel, Henry, Lord Morley 179 L¨ubeck 13, 15 Ludlow, Salop 53, 63, 269 Lusy, Antoine de 75, 171, 223, 284, 289, 300 Lutherans 306 Luxembourg 5, 8–9, 22, 41, 130, 232, 244, 278; campaigns in 14, 16, 18, 158, 198, 274; governor, see Mansfeld; States 32; town 305–6 Luxembourg-Clausen 228 Luxembourg-Fiennes family 134 Luxembourg, Jacques II de, lord of Fiennes and Gavere 60, 190 Luxembourg, Jacques III de, lord of Fiennes, count of Gavere 130, 195 Luxembourg, Jean de, lord of Ville 190 Lynn, Norf 43, 208 Lyon 311 Lys, River 157 Maas, River 59, 63, 65, 156, 210 Maasbommel, Guelders 223 Maastricht, Brabant / Li`ege 41, 43, 72, 83, 303 Machiavelli, Niccol`o 237, 294, 329 Machyn, Henry 225 Macqu´ereau, Robert 223–4, 271, 283, 289, 296, 308, 315 Madison, Edward 102 Madon 213 Madrid, treaty of 281 Magalotti, Galiotto 287 Main, River 297 Mainz 136, 169 Mallett, Michael 3 Manners, Henry, earl of Rutland 151, 252–3

Index manorial courts 43 Mansfeld, Peter-Ernst, count of 180–1, 218, 305; as provincial governor 143, 186; reputation 195, 227–8 maps 5, 227 marching watches 97–9 Marck, Marguerite de la 199 Marck, Robert III de la, count of Arenberg 144, 199 Marcq 18 Marechin family 144 Margaret of Austria 13–15, 170, 210, 268, 271, 313, 317; and the nobility 114, 131, 144, 146–7, 157, 162, 165–6, 188–90, 195–6, 198; reputation 248, 284; and towns 43, 46, 71, 95, 99, 104, 107–9, 115, 121 Margaret of Parma 131 Marguerite de Male 8 Mariembourg, Hainaut 18, 26, 304–5 Marignano, battle of 14 Marigny, Philibert de 26 Mark, county of 204–6 Marne, River 171 Mars 221–2, 227–8, 283 martial law 252–3, 256 Mary I 4, 17–18, 21, 170 and passim; reputation 245, 251, 283–4 Mary of Burgundy 10, 12, 258, 271, 305 Mary of Hungary, regent of the Netherlands 15–18, 25, 33, 34, 163, 242, 254, 276, 292, 297, 303, 313; and the nobility 131–2, 135–6, 147, 155, 157–8, 166, 173–4, 184, 188–90, 195–6, 198, 205, 214, 216; and towns 58, 72–3, 76, 96, 107–9 Mary Rose 17 Mary, Blessed Virgin 268, 306 Mary, queen of Scots 17, 134 masons 285 mass 229–30, 270, 306 Maximilian I, Holy Roman Emperor 10, 12–14 and passim; reputation 247–8, 250, 258, 260, 263, 270, 294, 301, 313, 316 McFarlane, K. B. 6 Mechelen 41, 45, 78, 255, 284; arms industry 65–6, 83–4, 151, 286–7; arsenal 24, 66, 84, 166, 285–6; as capital 10, 26, 46, 107, 157, 209, 223; entries and celebrations 270–1, 283; finances 80; publications at 226; troops 297, 300 Meckeren, Gerard van 157 medals 226, 238, 250 Mediterranean 15, 82, 217

387 Meissen, dean of 115 Melsthede, Hermann van 148 Melun family 134, 143 men-at-arms 21, 143–4, 151, 224, 242, 275, 285, 297 Mendham, Suff 150 Menhem family 144 mercenaries 10, 21–3, 36, 124, 147–9, 183, 210, 232, 276–7, 284, 295, 297, 300, 302, 319, 331 merchants 4, 26, 42, 48, 61–2, 71, 80–3, 85, 96, 102–3, 121, 161, 171, 177, 184, 238, 279, 281–2, 286–7, 311, 332 metals 5, 88, 292; see also copper; iron; lead; tin Metz 18, 166, 189, 216 Michiel, Giovanni 295 Middelburg, Zeeland, 59, 62, 75, 76–7, 79, 80, 81, 115, 317; armaments 65–7; economy 50; entries and celebrations 85, 270–1; fortifications 70–2, 110; ships 62 ‘military revolution’ 3, 20, 27 Militia Act 21, 113 militias 6, 17, 20–1, 27, 36, 129, 243, 294, 317, 325; urban 10, 22, 45–6, 56–8, 65, 103, 123, 157, 162, 183 Millet, John 200 miners 152, 318 Molinet, Jean 268, 283 monasteries, see religious houses monopolies 238, 287 Mons, Hainaut 45, 50, 75, 107, 168, 211, 221, 223, 255, 263, 267, 283, 311; economy 41; entries and celebrations 270–1, 316; finances 82; troops 58 Montmorency, Anne, duke of 171–2 Montmorency, Floris de, baron of Montigny 184 Montmorency, Philippe de, count of Horn 130, 196, 199, 218, 225, 305 Montreuil, Picardy 16, 169, 171, 181, 191, 194, 215, 224, 309 Mor, Antonis 248 More, Sir Thomas 297 Morebath, Devon 282 Morison, Sir Richard 241–2, 244–5, 251, 266, 294, 303, 309, 321 Morlaix 194, 200–1 Morley, Lord, see Lovel Mortagne, Hainaut 147 Morton, Cardinal John, archbishop of Canterbury 112 Mount Surrey, Norf 133, 150, 152, 177, 209, 228 Mouzon, Luxembourg 199 Mowbray family 133

388 M¨uhlberg, battle of 17, 247, 249, 270 M¨unchhausen, Burchard von 148 M¨unchhausen, Hilmar von 147–8 M¨unchhausen, Johann von 148 M¨unster 205–6, 263, 278, 306–7 Musgrave, Cuthbert 164, 167 Musgrave, Leonard 164 musters 16, 20, 53, 77, 97–9, 110, 113, 120, 124, 139, 142, 144, 146, 160, 208, 240–3, 251, 254–5, 279, 290, 306, 319 mutiny 18, 58, 76–7, 123, 198, 217, 224, 252, 254–5, 323 Naj´era, battle of 294 Namur 5, 8, 296 and passim; economy 72, 83, 281, 286, 292; States 31, 173 Nancy, battle of 10, 180 Naples 34, 186, 231 Nassau, Alexis, bastard of 199 Nassau, Engelbrecht, count of 114, 172, 180, 190, 209, 219; as provincial governor 155, 186 Nassau, Hendrik III, count of 16, 59, 107, 114, 130, 172, 187–8, 190, 209–10, 213, 219; and Breda 70, 72, 131, 152; clientele 143–4, 199; and Floris van Egmond-Buren 146, 195–6; as provincial governor 118, 131, 155, 189 national identity 6, 237–9, 294–322 Navagero, Bernardo 296 Navarre 13 navies 13–15, 17, 19, 24–6, 28–9, 36, 57, 61, 63, 66, 80, 232, 234, 241, 253, 288, 329 Neptune 225, 249 Neuburg 136 Neuss 10, 277 Neuville-St-Vaast, Artois 276 Nevele, bastard of 145 Neville family, earls of Westmorland 212 Neville, George, Lord Bergavenny 182 Neville, Richard, earl of Warwick, ‘the Kingmaker’ 7 Newcastle upon Tyne 139–40, 276, 318; economy 41, 47; fortifications 91; ships 60; as supply base 80–1, 83, 161; urban government 101 Newfoundland 61 news 46, 237–8, 257–72, 323 Nicanor 213 Nieuwpoort, Flanders 61, 99, 158 Nigri, Filips 267 Nijmegen, Guelders 41, 156, 180, 183, 196, 223; publications at 259, 262 Nine Worthies 231 Nivelles, Brabant 107

Index nobility, noblemen 3–4, 127–234, 312, 329, 332–3; affinities, clienteles, retinues 20–1, 46, 128–31, 138–50, 154, 178, 196–207, 233–4; bastards 26, 143–5, 199–200; and the church 134–5; estates 127–37, 180 and passim; finances 4, 177–88; households 139–41, 146, 150, 226; judicial role 132, 135, 162–3, 215, 233, 334; political influence 188–214, 233–4; tenants 32, 132, 138–42, 145, 150; see also towns and nobles Noorney, Frederik 204 Norfolk 133, 175; duke of, see Howard Norham, North Durh 281 Norman Conquest 6 Normandy 276, 292 Normanville, Sir John 167 North Sea 5, 10, 60–1, 70 northern earls, rising of 78, 110, 160, 257 northern horse 149, 167, 252, 318 Northumberland 139; earl of, see Percy; duke of, see Dudley Norwich 116–17, 175, 208–9, 264–5, 302, 309–10; armaments 63–4; economy 41, 47–9, 86, 88; entries and celebrations 269; finances 90–2; fortifications 68–9; troops 52–5, 83, 111–12, 141–2, 318; urban government 48, 97, 101 notice boards 264 Nottingham 50, 55 Nottinghamshire 128 Nucius, Nicander 302 Nuremberg 169 oaths 98, 107, 147, 169, 188, 242, 244–5, 248, 253–4, 310–11, 316, 320–1 Oem van Wijngaerden, Floris 96, 111 Oest, Christoffel van 143 Ogle family 202 Ogle, Robert, Lord Ogle 179 Oijen, Guelders 59, 210 Ommelanden 5, 16, 129, 244; see also Groningen Oostkerke, bastard of 145 Orange, William of 128, 130, 137, 163, 166, 171–2, 174, 179, 181, 189, 196, 216, 218, 305; Apologie 187, 219, 229; and Breda 82, 131; clientele 131, 143–4, 146; later career 154, 301, 307; as provincial governor 232, 304; reputation 225 Orchies, Walloon Flanders 316 ordinances of war 253, 264 Ordnance Office 24, 151, 209 Os, Peter van 223

Index Ostend, Flanders 61, 158 Ottomans 15, 168, 248, 251, 259, 267–8, 283 Oudenaarde, Flanders 57, 166, 270–1 Overijssel 5, 15, 129, 145, 158, 169, 330; governor, see Maximiliaan van Egmond-Buren; Jean de Ligne-Barbenc¸on; States 32, 172, 204, 206 Oxford: earl of, see De Vere; university 310 Oye Sluice 284 Padua 181 paintings 225–7, 238, 249, 251, 320; see also portraits Pallant family 145 Pallas 231 pardons 85, 115, 130, 155, 211, 246, 252–3, 255, 273, 275–6, 278, 290, 295, 302 Paris 14, 136, 170, 181, 224, 311 Parkhurst, John 221 parliament 6, 128, 201, 242, 331; and taxation 29–30, 35, 116; and towns 41, 45–6, 97, 102, 105, 116–17, 123, 208 Parma, Alexander Farnese, duke of 287 Parma 34, 260 parrots 181 Pasqualini, Alessandro 71, 73, 151–3 Patten, William 299 Paulet, William, Lord St John 79, 113 Pavia, battle of 14, 249, 255, 258–60, 262, 267, 269–71, 281, 283, 308 pay, soldiers’ 6, 21, 26, 53, 58–9, 107, 120, 170, 203, 279, 300–1; belated or insufficient 77, 144, 147, 163–4, 167, 177, 179, 206, 252, 254, 276, 323 peace 14, 19, 85, 238, 245–6, 248–9, 251, 266–72, 274–5, 281–4 Peasant War, German 99 peasants 4, 11, 129, 148, 163, 233, 246, 262, 273–4, 276, 280, 301, 320; fighting 243, 276, 296 Pecquencourt, Walloon Flanders 217, 298 Peeris, William 220 Pennington, John 139 pensionaries 42, 67, 117 Percy family 128, 132–3, 137, 152, 219 Percy, Henry, ‘Hotspur’ 220 Percy, Sir Henry 201 Percy, Henry, fourth earl of Northumberland 132–3, 186, 191, 193, 207, 212; clientele 138–40, 150, 164, 178, 201; death and commemoration 175–6, 201, 225, 230, 233; and the Marches 159, 178; reputation 221

389 Percy, Henry Algernon, fifth earl of Northumberland 133, 165, 178, 191, 212–13, 228; clientele 138–40, 164, 167, 202; death and commemoration 230; and the Marches 159, 193–4; reputation 220–1, 225 Percy, Henry, sixth earl of Northumberland 133, 150, 207, 333; clientele 138–40, 149, 164, 178, 197–8, 202–3, 234; death and commemoration 230; and the Marches 159–60, 164–5, 178, 191, 194, 202, 216, 232 Percy, Sir Ingram 164, 197–8 Percy, Margaret 194 Percy, Sir Thomas 139, 164, 197–8 Percy, Thomas, seventh earl of Northumberland 133, 150; clientele 139; and the Marches 160, 186; reputation 225 Percy, Sir William 197 P´eronne, Picardy 16, 85, 263 Petit-Bon 145 Philip I of England and II of Spain 4, 18, 35 and passim; reputation 246–52, 257, 262, 270, 302 Philip, landgrave of Hesse 147, 187, 195 Philip the Bold 8, 134 Philip the Fair 12–13 and passim; reputation 248, 268 Philip the Good 8–9, 28, 129 Philippeville, Hainaut 18, 304–5 Picardy 3–4, 8–10, 12, 16, 36, 134, 171, 183, 292 Pickering, Sir John 164 pigs, mocked 321 pikemen 10, 22 pikes 63, 65, 151 pilgrimage 46, 267 Pilgrimage of Grace 11, 15, 52, 70, 78, 133, 139, 141, 159–60, 194, 196, 198, 203, 215, 244, 319–21 pillory 72, 279 Pinkie, battle of 17, 134, 213, 227, 269, 299, 317 pioneers 59, 243, 254–5 pirates 13, 24, 62, 119, 154, 287, 292, 318, 330 plague 3, 80, 85–6 Plantagenet, Arthur, Viscount Lisle 307 Plantin, Christophe 222 plate 166, 179, 227–9, 233, 306 plays 46, 77, 106, 108, 238, 250, 258, 263, 269–72, 275, 281–4, 286, 314 Plumpton, Sir Robert 150, 201 plunder 6, 79, 182–4, 228, 233, 274, 278, 296, 300–1, 331

390 Plymouth, Devon 75, 83, 86, 269 poaching 277–9 Poederoijen, Guelders 92, 120, 315 poems 134, 219–22, 234, 249, 251, 258, 260–1, 263, 267, 270–1, 281, 283–4, 296, 300, 304, 308–9, 313–14, 316–17 Poitiers, battle of 294 Ponchelet, Jean 100 Pontefract, Yorks 160 poor relief 45, 72, 84–6, 97, 123, 238, 281, 331 popes, papacy 242, 251, 253, 265–7; see also under names Poppenruyter, Hans 286 population: distribution of 4–5, 9, 31–2, 41, 280; growth of 45, 84, 128, 238, 333 portraits 225–7, 234, 238, 247–52 Portsmouth, Hants 24, 77, 83, 252 Portugal 5 post-horns 291 Potter, David 3 Pownall, Robert 283 Poynings, Sir Edward 228 Poynings, Thomas, Lord Poynings 179 Pragmatic Sanction 18, 237, 313 prayer 6, 226, 265–7 preaching 46, 229–30, 266–7, 269, 306, 323–4 primers 237 printing 5, 46, 163, 219–20, 222–5, 234, 237–8, 241, 253, 257–68, 294, 296, 320–1, 323–4, 332–3 prints 46, 71, 226–7, 234, 238, 249–50, 263, 275, 283 prisoners of war 47, 75, 78–80, 91, 106, 181–3, 195, 318, 331 private war 11, 147, 232, 330–1 privateering 12, 24–5, 60–2, 79, 88–9, 102, 154, 282, 287, 292, 318, 331 privy coffers 28 Privy Council 11, 60, 69, 78–9, 106, 112–13, 122, 160, 162, 165, 191, 193–4, 245, 252 processions 95, 99, 238, 260, 265–6, 267–71 ; see also marching watches proclamations 74, 105–6, 240–1, 253, 256–8, 262, 264, 277, 279, 283, 288–90, 292, 320 Procter, William 139 progresses, princely 46, 69, 106–9 Protestants, Protestantism 18, 160, 172, 249, 266, 283, 305–8; and national identity 242, 309, 324; see also Germany Provence 16, 168, 263 provincial councils 44, 109–11, 118, 122; see also under names of provinces

Index provincial governors 4, 44, 67, 77, 114, 118, 122, 131, 143, 146, 155–8, 163, 180, 184, 186, 232, 234, 311, 331;see also under individual names provost marshals 254, 274, 278 Prudhoe, Northumb 197 Pruynen, Christoffel 286–7 purveyance 81, 86, 279, 288 Puttaert, Gommaer 81 Pynson, Richard 219 Quesnoy, Le, Hainaut 199, 304 Qui´evrain, Hainaut 114 Rabutin, Franc¸ois de 214, 224 Radcliffe, Henry, earl of Sussex 17, 113 Radcliffe, Robert, Lord Fitzwalter 200 Raesfelt, Goswin van 204, 206 Rammekens, Zeeland 305 ransoms 6, 79–80, 88, 147, 178, 180, 182–3, 280, 282, 302, 311 Ranst, van, family 57 rape 274, 306 Ravenstein, Brabant / Guelders 107 Reading, Berks 269 recorders 42, 112 Redesdale, Northumb 149 Reeden, Frederik van 205–6 Reformation 3, 11, 88, 91, 102, 117, 237–8, 242, 245, 251, 269, 305–8, 325, 333–4 refugees 58, 76, 84–6, 88, 123, 278 Regent 13 reiter 23, 162–3, 183 relics 306, 316 religious houses 44, 72–3, 83, 288, 306, 310; dissolution of 20, 29, 64, 185, 187, 213–14, 230, 290; see also under names of houses renten 31–4, 44, 72, 95–7, 104, 179, 210 Renty, Artois 18, 248 revolts 6–7, 9, 11, 46, 64, 68, 74, 106, 108, 237, 239, 269, 301–2, 310, 319–22; see also individual entries Reygersbergh, Jan 223, 304, 321 Reynsberger, Thomas 287 Rhine, River 136, 168, 227 Rhineland 145, 204 Richard II 6 Richard III 7, 133, 141, 159, 185–6, 190–1, 228; as duke of Gloucester, 12, 46, 112, 193, 201, 207 Richmond, duke of, see Fitzroy Ripon, Yorks 212 roads 291 Roeulx, bastard of 199 Roeulx, count of, see Cro¨y Roeulx, Le, Hainaut 180–1, 183

Index Rogers, John 69 Rolin-Aimeries, Louis de 144, 187, 229, 234 Rome, 231; see also popes Rore, Cipriano da 221 Rossum, Maarten van, lord of Poederoijen 15, 16, 71, 76, 99, 158, 189, 255, 259, 311 Rostinne family 145 Rothenberg 169 Rotterdam, Holland 321 Rouse family 200 Rugley, Northumb 213 Russell, Francis, earl of Bedford 65, 112–13, 307–8 Russell, John, earl of Bedford 112–13, 148, 165, 171, 194 Rutland, earl of, see Manners Rye, Suss 75, 86, 116–17; armaments 63–4, 83; economy 47–9, 88; finances 79, 90–2; fortifications 69, 79, 86; ships 60–1, 64, 75, 79, 113; urban government 48, 97, 102 Sadler, Sir Ralph 160 sailors 215, 241, 244, 253, 276, 295, 298 St Albans, Herts, battle of 51 Saint-Amand, abbey of, Tournaisis 213 Saint-Etienne, battle of 191–2 Saint-Feuillien, abbey of, Hainaut 231 Saint-Hubert, Luxembourg 296 St Leger, Sir Anthony 318 Saint-Michel, Order of 171 Saint-Omer, Artois 50, 106–7, 114, 145, 211, 219, 320; armaments 66; entries and celebrations 99; finances 77, 94, 96 Saint-Pol, Artois 16, 136, 172, 183, 198, 221, 263, 317 Saint-Quentin, Picardy 16; battle and siege of, 18, 80, 135, 137, 181, 183, 190, 219, 222–3, 228, 248–9, 259–60, 269–70, 296–7, 300, 306–8, 316 Salisbury, Wilts 74, 90, 106, 116; armaments 64; economy 47–9; fortifications 68; troops 53–4, 106, 111; urban government 48, 101 Salm-Reifferscheidt, count of 145 Samson and Delilah 271 Samuel 261 Sandall, Robert 167 Sandwich, Kent 105 Sandys, Sir William, 170, 201 Savage, Thomas, archbishop of York 191, 212 Savoie-Romont, Jacques de 190 Savoy 16 Scarborough, Yorks 74, 303 Schaumburg, Wilwolt von 301, 304 Schepper, Cornelis de 25 Schetz family 179, 286

391 Schetz, Gaspar 287 schiltal 30–1 Schmalkalden, League of 17, 136, 147–8, 168, 171, 218, 259–60, 262, 298–9 Schoonbeke, Gilbert van 71–2, 81 Schore, Lodewijk van 109, 157 schutters, schutterijen 46, 56–7, 65, 67, 75, 99, 107, 210, 277, 316 Schwendi, Lazarus von 305 Scipio Africanus 218, 249, 296 Scotland 6–8, 12–15, 17–18, 299 and passim; see also aliens Scrots, William 226 Selby, Percival 53 Senlis, treaty of 12 sermons, see homilies; preaching Seymour, Edward, earl of Hertford, duke of Somerset 192, 194; clientele 197, 200–1; campaigns against Scotland 100, 148, 227; as Lord Protector 17, 55, 78, 110, 116–17, 194, 258, 284, 309; reputation 213; social policy 288, 291 Seymour, Sir Thomas 24, 69, 287 Shaftesbury, Dorset 284 Shaftoe, Alexander 203 Sheffield, Edmund, Lord Sheffield 179 Sheffield, Yorks 110, 287 Sheriff Hutton, Yorks 177 ship-building 60, 83, 88, 241, 285, 287 Shrewsbury, earl of, see Talbot Sicily 34 sieges 10, 16, 18, 56, 65, 152, 166, 181, 198, 212, 226–7, 296, 320 signet, king’s 105, 110, 240 Simnel, Lambert 13, 140 Simons, Menno 306 Sint Maartensdijk, Zeeland 199 Sittard, battle of 297 Skeffington, Sir William 24 Skelton, John 221, 223 Slavonia 297 Sluis, Flanders 79; battle of 294; privateering base 12, 61–2, 154, 184, 228, 316, 321 Smeken, Jan 221 Smith, Iggelbyrd 64 smuggling 279 Sneewint 315 soldiers: Albanian 23, 148, 302; and civilians 36, 59, 76–7, 96, 153, 155, 162–3, 273–80, 300–2, 311, 319; clothing 54–5, 83, 144, 162, 167, 287, 291, 317; English serving foreign rulers 21, 59, 300; German 17, 23, 26, 59, 64, 76–7, 108, 145, 147–9, 217, 226, 229, 254, 262, 274–5, 284, 295, 297, 299–302, 304–6, 320, 332; Greek 302; Irish 167, 277, 318; Italian 17, 21, 23,

392 soldiers: (cont.) 148, 168, 256, 300, 302; Manx 302; Netherlandish serving foreign rulers 23, 64, 155, 243–4, 302; Portuguese 302; social origins of 3, 53–4, 56, 58; Spanish 17, 23, 26, 36, 59, 76–7, 148, 168, 229, 247, 254, 273–6, 299–304, 306, 332; Swiss 10, 14, 23, 64; Tatar 168, 302; see also archers; cavalry; demilances; gunners; halberdiers; handgunners; men-at-arms; mercenaries; militias; pikemen; reiter; stradiots Solent 17 Solre-le-Chˆateau, Hainaut 256 Solway Moss, Cumb, battle of 17 Sombreffe, Friedrich von 206 Somerset family, earls of Worcester 128 Somerset, Protector, see Edward Seymour Somme, River 14, 136, 170 songs 46, 115, 220–2, 234, 249, 258–60, 263–5, 272, 283–4, 315, 317 South Kilvington, Yorks 175 Southampton, Hants 81, 276, 308, 310; armaments 64; fortifications 69 Southwell family 200 Sovereign 276 Spain 3, 13, 34–5, 62, 83, 154, 168, 284, 298 Spanish language 260 Spencer, John 177 spices 5, 49, 292 Spinola, Ambrogio 287 Spurs, battle of the 182, 251, 315 Stafford, Henry, duke of Buckingham 12, 51–2, 185–6, 190, 194 Stafford, Thomas 18, 74, 186 stained glass 225–6, 238 Standard, battle of the 317 standing armies 10, 20–2, 26, 232, 234, 329–30; see also compagnies d’ordonnance Stanhope, Sir Michael 60, 78, 80, 110 Stanley family 128, 228, 317 Stanley, Edward, earl of Derby 218 Stanley, Sir Edward 209, 219 Star Chamber, Court of 241, 279 States 9, 29–32, 36, 41, 62, 94, 117–22, 128, 146, 172, 180, 183, 234, 276, 323, 331–2; see also under individual provinces States-General 9–10, 35, 118, 120–2, 173, 247, 285, 301, 315, 330 statutes 116–17, 240–2, 244, 253, 257–8, 264, 279, 290–1, 303, 309; Statute of Winchester 20, 55, 240–1 Stavele, Filips van, lord of Glajon 24, 181, 305 Stevenson, Richard 139

Index Stewart, John, duke of Albany 161 Stoke (East Stoke, Notts), battle of 12 stradiots 148, 168, 180 Stratford upon Avon, Warw 46 Streithagen, Dietrich von 148 Strynger, Anthony 177 Sucre, Jacques de 204 Suffolk, 133, 158, 175, 321; duke of, see Brandon S¨uleyman, Ottoman sultan 15, 268 Sully, Maximilien de B´ethune, duke of 293 sumptuary legislation 291 Suriano, Michel 297 Surrey, earl of, see Howard Sussex 24, 132–3; earl of, see Radcliffe Swinburn, George 167 swords 63, 98, 106, 165, 227, 244, 246, 277, 279 tableaux-vivants 246, 270–1 Tables of the Holy Ghost 45, 84–5 Taillor, William 287 tailors 53, 55 Talbot family 128 Talbot, Francis, earl of Shrewsbury 60–1, 110, 112 Talbot, George, earl of Shrewsbury 140 tapestries 5, 227, 249, 271, 306 Tautenburg, Georg Schenk von 196, 225 tax state 27, 35, 330 taxation 3–4, 10, 90–7, 108, 115, 119–21, 123–4, 172–6, 233, 241, 243, 246–7, 257–8, 261, 281, 285, 307, 309, 323–4, 329; direct 6, 28–32, 35–6, 87, 90, 282; revolts against 11, 13, 16, 30, 95, 103–4, 107, 124, 175–6, 210, 244, 318; on trade 6, 28–9, 281–2, 292; see also clergy; excises Te Deum 269 Tecklenburg 187 Tendring Hall, Suff 226 tents 66, 165, 179, 226, 233 Tewkesbury, Gloucs, battle of 190 Thames, River 251 Th´erouanne, Artois 14, 16, 72, 87, 134–5, 181, 188, 216, 224, 251, 259–60, 263, 269, 306, 316 Thetford, Norf 230 Thieulaine, Jean 121, 223, 247, 274–5, 292, 304 Thionville, Luxembourg 18 Thirsk, Yorks 150, 175 Thomas of Hull 60 Thomas, Sir Rhys ap 221, 227 Thorpe, Norf 265 Thurstanby, Yorks 139 Thynne, John 182

Index Tiel, Guelders 63, 65, 120, 166, 212, 316 Tielerwaard, Guelders 204 Tienen, Brabant 73, 100, 278, 303 Tilbury, Essex 252 Tilly, Charles 329 Tilney, Sir Philip 141, 165, 197 timber 49, 88, 280 Timperley family 197 Timperley, John 141 tin 5, 49 Titian (Tiziano Vercelli) 247 Toledo 134 tombs 230–1 Topcliffe, Yorks 139 Torgau, League of 18 torture 162, 189, 263, 279 Toul 18 Tourcoing, Walloon Flanders 281 Tournai 31, 79, 184, 255–6, 262–3, 280, 316; bishops of 134, 213; economy 41; English occupation 14, 22, 144, 147, 171, 250–2, 269, 277, 309; entries and celebrations 261, 271–2; Habsburg conquest 14, 58, 65–7, 166, 209, 314–15, 321; States 277, 309; troops 59; urban government 43 Tournehem, Artois 151 towns 41–124; armouries 63–7; charters 42, 78, 108, 113, 117; councils 42–3, 48–9, 101–4; and the countryside 11, 42, 44, 81–2, 88, 99–101, 118–19, 124; economic regulation 81–2, 84–90, 102; finances 44–5, 54, 67, 69, 90–7; magistrates 4, 42–4, 48–9, 62, 100, 117, 199, 209–10, 271–2 and passim; and nobles 4, 46–7, 65, 111–16, 122–4, 131, 183–4, 207–12, 234; ships 59, 63, 88, 102, 123; suburbs 44, 72–3, 99–101; town clerks 42; town halls 45, 55, 64, 67, 72, 80, 250, 261, 316; watches 74–5, 77, 85, 123; see also billeting; fortifications; guilds; militias; pensionaries; recorders Towton, Yorks, battle of 51, 321 trace italienne 59, 67–73, 123 Tracy, James 295, 334 trade 5, 41, 62–3, 87–90, 119, 124, 128, 281–2, 296–7, 332; regulation of 261, 289–93, 324; see also merchants Traheron, Bartholomew 283 transport 41, 80–2, 100, 123, 162, 239, 288–90, 324 transport 30 treason 134, 137, 162, 253–6, 264–5, 323 treasurers of war 26–7, 115, 141 Trent, River 51 Triez, Robert du 222

393 triumphal arches 228, 249, 251, 303 Troyes, treaty of 7 truces 15–16, 189, 243, 249, 253, 262, 270, 274, 281, 311, 317 Tucher, Lazarus 287 Tunis 15, 166, 227, 248–9, 259, 262, 269–70, 297–8 Turck, Lubert 144 Turck, Willem 203–5 Turks see Ottomans Twente, Overijssel 204, 206 Twizzle, River 165 Tyburn, Middx 198 Tye, Pelgrum van 148 Tyndale, William 266 Tynedale, Northumb 149, 197 Tyrrell, Sir Thomas 56 Ulm 169 usury 118 Utrecht 41, 146, 205, 316, 321; bishops of 9, 15, see also David of Burgundy; Joris van Egmond; chapters 213; citadel 72–3, 303–4; city government 43; entries and celebrations 248, 272; governor, see Antoine de Lalaing-Hoogstraten; William of Orange; Sticht of 12, 15, 62, 119, 136, 146, 153, 168, 180, 188–9, 205, 213, 223, 330; under Habsburg rule 22, 32, 72, 82, 129, 131, 196, 205, 289, 295 Vaernewyck, Marcus van 223 vagabonds 59, 84–5, 241, 243, 247, 278–9, 284, 324 Valenciennes, Hainaut 44, 76–7, 100, 107, 114, 119, 207, 229, 256, 313, 316; armaments 66; economy 41, 48–50, 82, 84–5, 89; entries and celebrations 250, 260, 267, 271–2, 308; finances 96; fortifications 70–1, 73, 107–8; troops 59, 315; urban government 49, 96, 103 Vaucelles, truce of 18, 249, 281, 283, 286 Vaudrey, bastard of 145 Vaughan, Cuthbert 227 Vaulx, Jean de 199 Veell family 145 Veere, Zeeland 62, 130; naval base 25–6, 28, 66, 285 Vegetius 294 Vendˆome, Antoine, duke of 16 Venice 3, 13, 168; see also ambassadors Venlo, Guelders 89, 108, 166, 263 Venus 226 Verdun 18 Vergil, Polydore 224–5, 250

394 Vergy family 130 Vergy, Claude de 231 Vertamboz, lord of 231 Vesalius, Andreas 229 Veyr´e, Philibert de 190 Veyr´e, Philippe de 145 victualling, see food supplies Vienna 15, 168, 268–9 Viglius, see Zwichem Vincidor da Bologna, Tommaso 152 Virton, Luxembourg 100 Vlaanderen, Lodewijk van, lord of Praat 130, 190, 195 Vladeracken, Jan van 115 Vollenhove, Overijssel 204, 206 Vorsterman, Willem 260 Vredewold, Friesland 206 Vught, Brabant 210 Waal, River 63 Wakefield, Yorks, battle of 51 Wales 5–6, 128, 221, 302, 317–18, 332; see also Council in the Marches Walhain family 144 Wallenstein, Albrecht von 187 Walloon Flanders 31–2, 43, 129, 134, 243, 312; governor, 131 and see Engelbrecht of Nassau; Adrien de Cro¨y-Roeulx; States, 119 Walloon Guard 22, 114, 274, 298 Wallop, Sir John 182, 201 Warbeck, Perkin 13, 52 wardens of the Marches 99, 133, 138, 140, 149, 158–60, 164–5, 177–8, 186, 191, 207, 232, 253, 279 Warham, William, archbishop of Canterbury 266 Wark, Northumb 161, 178 Warkworth, Northumb 150, 152, 197 Warluzel, lord of 144 Wars of the Roses 7–8, 51, 55, 87, 90, 105, 129, 321 Warwick, earl of, see Dudley; Neville Wassenaar, Jan (II) van 168, 195, 218; death and commemoration 181, 231; reputation 222, 225 Watten, Flanders 224 Weber, Max 277 Weert, Josse de 224 Wentworth, Thomas, Lord Wentworth 253 Wesel 307 Westerholt, Herman van 205–6 Western rebellion (1549) 17, 23, 149, 245, 302, 320 West Friesland, Holland 136 Westmorland, earl of, see Neville Wharton family 202

Index Wharton, Sir Thomas 159, 202–3 Whitby, Yorks 139; White Friars 213 Whitehall Palace, Middx 27 Widdrington family 202 Widdrington, Sir Ralph 201 Wijk family 145 Wijnendale, Flanders 151, 228 Wijngaerde, Jan van den 204 William of J¨ulich-Cleves, duke of Guelders 16, 189, 206, 263, 284, 311 William of York 60 Williams, John, Howard follower 140 Williams, John, vagabond soldier 284 Wilstrop, Sir Oswald 56 Wilton, Herefs 178 Winchelsea, Suss 64 wine 44, 61, 72, 228, 270, 274, 298; as gift 77, 108, 113–15, 208, 211; trade in 5, 29, 82, 89, 292 Wingfield, Sir Richard 200 Withypoll, Edmund 182 woad 292 Woerden, Holland 59 Wolsey, Thomas, Cardinal 11, 14, 20, 32, 117, 132, 159, 161, 167, 179, 191, 194, 202, 253, 265 Woodhouse, Sir Thomas 208 Woodhouse, Sir William 154 wool 5–6, 29, 102, 117, 282 Wouw, Brabant 152 Wrangwish, Thomas 207 Wressle, Yorks 152, 160, 197, 228 W¨urttemberg 313 Wyatt’s rebellion 18, 134, 151, 185, 191, 197, 307 Wylford, Sir James 252 Wymondham Priory, Norf 185 Wyndham family 200 Wyndham, Sir Edmund 142, 200 Wynter, John 60 yeomen of the guard 21 York 46, 74–5, 105–6, 109–10, 113, 160, 175, 207, 318; archbishops of 48, 207, 212; armaments 63–4; duke of, see Henry VIII; economy 47–9, 81, 83, 86–8; entries and celebrations 269; finances 90–1; fortifications 68–9; St Lawrence 54; St Mary’s Abbey 213; St Peter in the Willows 54; ships 60; troops 51–6, 58, 79, 106, 112; urban government 43, 48, 101; see also Ainsty Yorkists 12–13, 105, 253, 265, 291 Yorkshire 128, 132, 318–19; rising (1489) 13, 133, 207 Ypres, Flanders 31, 41, 45, 164

Index Zaltbommel, Guelders 65, 316 Zeeland 5, 8–9, 12, 82; naval affairs 25, 121; States 313 Zierikzee, Zeeland 76, 298

395 Zuider Zee 61–2, 89, 154, 158 Zuylen family 145 Zwichem van Aytta, Viglius 227, 244 Zwieten family 111