This article appears in: October In November , roughly three years before the Siege of Boulogne, King Henry VIII of England suffered one of the most severe shocks of his life when he was shown a report alleging that his plumpish year-old queen, Catherine Howard, had been intimate with other men before their marriage.
Even more upsetting, it seemed that she was still being unfaithful to the king under his very nose. He called for a sword and bellowed out his intention to kill her, but was he restrained by his worried courtiers. Visibly diminished by the experience, Henry withdrew from London to nurse his bruised ego in near seclusion, while his government prosecuted Catherine for treasonous behavior.
Always a heavy drinker, King Henry VIII drank even more than usual during his self-imposed exile, and in the process he aggravated the pain from a chronic ulcer on one of his legs. The dismal winter weather did nothing to help the situation. Henry sat alone, listening to his harp player or talking with Will Somers, his fool, while his unfaithful former wife was duly beheaded before a small group of witnesses on the grounds of the Tower of London.
He began to mull over a favorite action of many monarchs beset with troubles: provoking a foreign war to distract their subjects from the prevailing embarrassment or crisis at home. It was a comforting thought for Henry, given his decades-long appetite for foreign adventure and military glory.
And reasons for starting a war were easy enough to come by, particularly with France to pick on, something he had done twice before. Sufficiently stirred, Henry assembled his Privy Council in London. His sense of timing was perfect. Facing them with more majesty than he truly felt, Henry insisted that the country must seize the opportunity to wage war with her long-standing enemy, France, while the French were distracted by Spain over the issue of who would control northern Italy.
