Battle of the Spurs

• 1. Introduction

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  On the 16th of August 1513, a French cavalry force arrived on a hillside near the village of Bomy, five miles from the besieged town of Thérouanne in Artois, and within hours its commander Jacques de La Palice had been captured, his men had thrown their lances and standards into the dust, and some had cut the heavy armour from their own horses to flee faster. The day would be remembered not by the name of a great general or a decisive strategic manoeuvre, but by the objects of shame the French left behind: spurs. They were riding so hard away from the field that the battle was named for the one thing they used well that afternoon. What had brought Henry VIII of England and the Holy Roman Emperor Maximilian I to the same Flemish hillside? Why did the most senior commander of France's relief force hesitate on the edge of a slope until it was too late? And what happened to a royal duke, a celebrated knight, and an entire campaign's worth of planning when the English archers stepped out from behind a hedgerow?

• 2. The Road to Thérouanne

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  Henry VIII joined the Holy League on the 13th of October 1511, alongside Venice and Spain, pledging to defend the Papacy against France by military force. His first attempt to put that promise into action came in June 1512, when he landed 10,000 men at Hondarribia in the Basque Country under Thomas Grey, 2nd Marquess of Dorset, conveyed by the admiral Edward Howard. The expedition stalled at Bayonne through the rest of that year, undersupplied and in poor morale, supporting Ferdinand II of Aragon's operations in Navarre without striking a blow against France.

  By May 1513 a fresh army was assembling at Calais under George Talbot, Earl of Shrewsbury, appointed Lieutenant-General on the 12th of that month. Henry had announced to the Cinque Ports on the 17th of May that he would cross the Channel himself. In his absence, Catherine of Aragon would govern England and Wales as Rector and Governor. He sailed from Dover and arrived at Calais on the 30th of June with the main body of 11,000 men. Shrewsbury led the vanguard of 8,000 and Charles Somerset, Lord Herbert, commanded the rearward of 6,000. Eight hundred German mercenaries marched in front of the king. Cardinal Thomas Wolsey, serving as Almoner, had assembled a force that included cavalry, artillery, infantry, and longbowmen using arrows with hardened steel heads designed to penetrate armour.

  The siege of Thérouanne opened with difficulty. Shrewsbury dug mines and set up a battery but made little progress in July. The French garrison, commanded by Antoine de Créquy, sieur de Pont-Remy, kept up a steady fire the English described by the nickname "the whistle." Two English cannon, "John the Evangelist" and the "Red Gun," had been abandoned on the road, and French skirmishing prevented their recovery. An Imperial agent of Margaret of Savoy noted that two men effectively ran everything: Charles Brandon, Viscount Lisle, whom he called the "Grand Esquire," and Wolsey.

• 3. Kings at Aire-sur-la-Lys

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  Maximilian arrived at Aire-sur-la-Lys in August with a force the sources estimate at anywhere from a small escort to between 1,000 and 4,000 horsemen. Henry donned light armour and dressed his entourage in cloth-of-gold before riding to meet him on the 11th of August. Maximilian's followers were still in mourning dress of black for his wife Bianca Maria Sforza. Henry then hosted Maximilian from the 13th of August at a tent with a gallery of cloth-of-gold; the chronicles noted that the weather on the day of meeting was the "foulest ever."

  Catherine of Aragon wrote to Wolsey that the personal meeting was an honour for Henry and would raise Maximilian's standing; the emperor would be "taken for a nother man that he was befor thought." At the same time, Henry exchanged angry words with a Scottish herald at Thérouanne on the 11th of August, aware that Louis XII was hoping Scotland would join the war against England.

  A French relief had already pierced the besiegers' lines in July, when a force of 800 Albanians under Captain Fonterailles pushed through and delivered gunpowder and bacon to the garrison, leaving 80 soldiers as reinforcements. Reports to Venice mentioned 300 English casualties or more. Fonterailles claimed the town could hold out until the 8th of September, the feast day of the Nativity of the Virgin. The Venetians, however, noted that their French sources might have been shading the truth to win their support.

• 4. The French Plan

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  A second relief attempt was set for the 16th of August. The French assembled at Blangy to the south, a force of heavy cavalry divided into two companies: the larger under Jacques de La Palice and Louis, Duke of Longueville, the smaller under Charles IV, Duke of Alençon. Their infantry remained at Blangy. Alongside the gendarmes rode a force of light cavalry called stradiots, equipped with short stirrups, beaver hats, light lances, and Turkish swords, and thought to be Albanian units. Each stradiot carried a side of bacon at his saddlebow and a sack of gunpowder behind him.

  The idea was to use the two heavy-cavalry attacks as diversions: Alençon's force would strike at Lord Shrewsbury's positions blockading the town, while La Palice's larger group pressed the section commanded by Lord Herbert to the south. With the English engaged on both fronts, the stradiots would slip through to reach Thérouanne. The French hoped to move before dawn and catch the besiegers unprepared.

  English military engineers had already spent the previous nights building five bridges across the river Lys so their army could cross freely. Henry had moved his camp to Guinegate on the 14th of August after driving out a company of French horse armed with spears who had been stationed at the Tower of Guinegate. The English border prickers, light cavalry from the Scottish borders, were out before dawn and detected the movement of the larger French column.

• 5. The Rout at Bomy

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  La Palice's cavalry encountered English scouts at the village of Bomy and, realising the enemy was alert, halted on the edge of a hillside. Henry drew a field force from the siege lines: a vanguard of 1,100 cavalry followed by 10,000-12,000 infantry. According to Sir Charles Oman's account drawn from Edward Hall's mid-16th century chronicle, the English heavy cavalry formed up opposite La Palice's front while mounted archers dismounted and opened fire from a flanking hedgerow.

  La Palice waited. The most likely explanation, according to Oman, was that he was giving the stradiots the longest possible window to reach the town. But cannon fire from the English lines drove the stradiots off before they could get through, and they crashed in confusion into the flank of La Palice's own cavalry. With Imperial cavalry now threatening his other flank and English infantry approaching in overwhelming numbers, La Palice ordered a retreat too late. The Clarenceux Herald urged the Earl of Essex to charge at that precise moment. The English men-at-arms struck the French as they were beginning to move, throwing them into disorder. Panic took hold; gendarmes threw away their lances and standards and cut the armour from their horses. La Palice tried to rally his force but failed. The pursuit continued for miles until the French reached their own infantry at Blangy.

  A parallel account, drawing on Reinhold Pauli and others, credits Maximilian more centrally. In this version the emperor, who had already won two battles in the same area including the First Guinegate, personally commanded 2,000 vanguard cavalry and had developed the battle plan before arriving at the English headquarters. Henry had wanted to lead the cavalry charge himself but was advised against it by his allies. The 53-year-old emperor charged with the cavalry as soon as contact was made.

• 6. Prisoners and Propaganda

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  After a three-mile pursuit, the captives taken included Jacques de La Palice himself, Pierre Terrail, seigneur de Bayard, and Louis d'Orléans, Duke of Longueville. The Imperial Master of the Posts, Baptiste de Tassis, sent news of the battle to Margaret of Savoy the same evening from Aire-sur-la-Lys, reporting that the Emperor with 2,000 men had held 8,000 French horse at bay until four in the afternoon. Henry's own account, sent to Margaret the following day, mentioned 44 men captured and 22 wounded in Shrewsbury's initial position before the rout. Three English soldiers of note were killed; French casualties were reported at 3,000. Nine French standards were taken, along with 21 noble prisoners dressed in cloth-of-gold.

  The battle's name spread quickly. In the summer of 1518 the English ambassador in Spain, Lord Berners, joked that the French had learned to ride fast at the "jurney of Spurres." Henry and Maximilian published a joint account of their victories with a long German title translating roughly as an account of their meeting in Picardy and the attack before Thérouanne, which included a woodcut of their meeting and one of Maximilian in battle. An Italian poem on the fall of Thérouanne was printed in Rome in September 1513. Maximilian also commissioned images from Leonhard Beck and from Albrecht Dürer, who included a scene of the two mounted rulers joining hands in his Triumphal Arch.

  Henry commissioned commemorative paintings showing him at the centre of the action, though Hall's chronicle quietly noted that he had taken advice to stay with the foot soldiers. Henry VIII insisted that French ambassadors visiting his court should turn and look at one such picture. According to Patrick Fraser Tytler and others, Maximilian's flattering behaviour toward Henry had a practical motive: Henry had financed the entire campaign, and Maximilian wanted English muscle to dismantle the walls of Tournai, which threatened his grandson Charles's Burgundian territories. Maximilian promised Wolsey help in obtaining the bishopric of Tournai, and Wolsey ultimately received both the bishoprics of Lincoln and Tournai, later exchanging the latter for a pension of 12,000 livres. Henry and Catherine, for their part, sent Maximilian the sum of 100,000 golden florins in genuine gratitude.

• 7. The Fall of Tournai

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  Thérouanne fell on the 22nd of August. The garrison, no longer threatened by relief, was drawn into negotiation with Shrewsbury by their lack of supplies. Shrewsbury welcomed Henry into the town and presented him with the keys. Eight or nine hundred soldiers were set to demolishing the walls and three large bastions, pushing them into the defensive ditches. The town was prepared to be burned after demolition, according to the Milanese ambassador Paolo Da Laude. On the 5th of September Pope Leo X heard of the English victories from the Florentine ambassador and sent congratulations to Cardinal Wolsey.

  Allied attention shifted to Tournai after discussions on the 4th of September. Henry would have preferred Boulogne, but Maximilian prevailed. On the 10th of September Henry entered Lille, where Margaret of Savoy held court. The Milanese ambassador reported that Henry played the lute, harp, lyre, flute, and horn that evening and danced with "Madame the Bastard" until nearly dawn "like a stag." The siege of Tournai began the same day.

  Before Tournai fell, news arrived from England. The Scots army had been defeated at Flodden on the 9th of September. Catherine of Aragon sent John Glyn to Henry with the blood-stained coat and gauntlets of James IV of Scotland, suggesting that Henry use the coat as his battle-banner. She had thought to send the body itself, she wrote, but "Englishmen's hearts would not suffer it." An exchange was proposed: Catherine, noting that Henry had sent her a captive duke, promised she would soon send him a king. The Duke of Longueville, captured at Thérouanne by John Clerke of North Weston, had been lodged in the Tower of London.

  Tournai fell on the 23rd of September. Henry attended mass in Tournai Cathedral on the 2nd of October and knighted many of his captains; Edward Hall specifically mentioned the knighting of John Peachy, captain of the King's horse, as a banneret. The town presented Margaret of Austria with tapestries woven with scenes from the Book of the City of Ladies by Christine de Pizan. Charles Brandon captured one of the gatehouses and took two statues as trophies. Tournai remained in English hands with William Blount, 4th Baron Mountjoy as Governor. Work on its fortifications and a new citadel ran from August 1515 to January 1518 at a cost of around £40,000, but was later judged an essentially medieval conception, lacking the input of a professional military engineer. Henry had already decided to return the town to France; the transfer was made by treaty on the 4th of October 1518, and the surveyor Thomas Pawne sent unused building stones by boat via Antwerp to Calais, some carved with English insignia, along with the machinery of two watermills.