Puissance and Poverty: Henry VIII and the Conquest of France

When, in November 1511, Henry VIII plunged headlong into war against France on behalf of the Holy League, his realm remained a small and comparatively insignificant island on the damp and misty fringe of Europe. Apart from Wales and the Channel Islands, the only meagre traces of English ‘empery’ were, in fact, a boggy foothold in Ireland, along with a narrow strip of territory, centring on Calais and the castle of Guisnes, which stretched some 20 miles along the French coast. And though, for its size, England may well have been one of the wealthier kingdoms in Europe, Henry’s little realm of around 2.5 million souls, bordered by an independent Scotland and as such only ‘half an island’, could still scarcely compete with 16 million Frenchmen. Nor, in the long term, could it ever realistically hope to manipulate some 8 million Spaniards for its own purposes, let alone the 20 million Dutch, Flemish and Germans who owed taxes to the Holy Roman Emperor.