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tragedy of his son’s death. At twenty-one he was still under the tutelage of the councilors who had guided his government since the beginning of his reign, but more and more his own style was asserting itself. The expedition to France was clear evidence of this. No English army had invaded the continent within living memory, and it had been the considered policy of Henry’s father to gain his diplomatic ends without the expense and risk of war, Henry’s advisers urged the young king not to endanger England by subjecting himself to the hazards of battle, but their arguments were merely logical. Other persuasions touched Henry nearer his heart.
    At the start of the sixteenth century the business of war was still central to the chivalric imagination. It was the nature of a great king to be a knight first and a statesman afterward; all of Henry’s most famous predecessors had proved that, from Edward I campaigning in Wales to Edward III and his sons in the Hundred Years’ War. The feudal society that produced the warrior aristocracy had disintegrated generations earlier, but the personal values of the knightly class—fearlessness and hardiness in combat, indomitability, generosity, courtesy to enemies and allies alike, fidelity to a strict code of honor—were all the more fiercely prized as the knights’ purely military usefulness waned. And models of individual valor were more plentiful now than at any time since the days of Richard Lionheart and Saladin. Chief among them was Henry’s older contemporary the Chevalier de Bayard, whose exploits in the Italian wars were well known at Henry’s court. On one occasion, it was said, he defended a bridge against an assault of two hundred Spanish soldiers, and another time he magnanimously refused a reward of twenty-five hundred ducats offered by a grateful nobleman whose wife and daughters Bayard had saved from dishonor. Until he had proved himself worthy of a similar reputation, Henry would not attain full stature as a monarch. And so, in the spring of 1513, he laid his plans for war.
    By June the thousands of bowstaves, arrows, and barrels of flour and beer were assembled and loaded. Suits of armor had been ordered from the armaments factories of northern Italy, and hundreds of tents were sewn and folded for shipment. The larger tents had names: White Hart, Greyhound, Feather, Cup of Gold, Mountain, Gold Hynd, World, Flower de Lyce. The artillery pieces too—the minions, lizards and demi-culverins—had been christened Crown, Garter, Rose and Virago. One of the great curtows was called The Sun Arising. The serpentines bore the heraldic titles of Mermaid, Griffon, Olyvant and Antelope; the largest cannons of all, whose twenty-pound iron shot took so long to load they could only be fired thirty times in a day, were dubbed The Twelve Apostles.
    The term was apt, for Henry’s campaign had the official status of a crusade. Julius II’s anger at the French king led him to issue a papal brief taking the kingdom away from Louis and giving it to Henry, to take effect as soon as Henry had made himself master of France by conquest. Late in July Henry’s men filed out of the English-held town of Calais, where they had landed three weeks earlier, and made their way southeastward in alternating rain and suffocating heat toward the town of Thérouanne. The ordnance was carried in the van, setting the pace for the entire force. Then came the king’s household guard, under the banner of the Trinity, the duke of Buckingham with his four hundred soldiers, and three ecclesiastical corps under the bishops of Durham and Winchester and Wolsey, the king’s almoner. Under Henry’s own banner was a picked guard of six hundred men, followed by the priests and singers of his chapel—a small army in themselves, 115 strong—his secretaries, kitchen staff, bedchamber attendants and his lutanist. In the rear marched another large force under the Lord Chamberlain and the earl of