sheep taken, wheresoever it was, they would take again of Englishmen twenty; and that for every man slain they would slay forty'—'an answer,' the English council exclaimed, 'of a tyrant or Turk, and not of a Christian prince.'[1] A fleet suddenly left the Seine at the beginning of August, and made a dash at Guernsey and Jersey. According to the French accounts, they were merely in pursuit of English privateers, which they encountered and half destroyed;[2] according to the English, they intended to surprise the islands, and met a serious defeat there.[3] Following up his first blow, Henry informed the ambassadors that he intended to be his own commissioner. He went down to Mottreul, where troops had been silently collected, and passed in person into the Boulonnaise. Besides Boulogne proper, the English had now five detached works in the adjoining district; one at Bullenberg, on the hill at the back of the town; another at Ambletue, where there was a tidal harbour; a third called Newhaven, at the mouth of the Boulogne river; a fourth, Blackness, a little inland; and the fifth and most important, on the high ground between Boulogne and Ambletue, called the Almain camp. This last was the key to the other four. The governor and the captain of the artillery
- ↑ The Council to Wotton: MS. France, bundle 8, State Paper Office.
- ↑ De Thou, lib. vi.
- ↑ 'The French King, to take the King's Majesty unprovided, suddenly set forth an army to the sea, and with the same attempted to surprise the isles of Guernsey and Jersey, and such of his Majesty's ships as were there, and were beaten from them with small honour and no small loss of his men.'—Council to Wotton: MS. France, bundle 8, State Paper Office.
