520
REIGN OF HENRY THE EIGHTH.
[ch. 19.
skilful astrologer; and the English, as Paget said, were morsels less easy to swallow.
The Scots desired war, and war they should have. Halydon Rigg had been taken by the Scottish clergy as an earnest of instant triumph and an evidence of Divine favour. 'All is ours,' was the cry among them. 'The English are but heretics. If we be a thousand, and they ten thousand, they dare not fight. France shall enter on one part, and we on the other; and so shall England be conquered within a year.'[1] In reply to these loud menaces the Duke of Norfolk moved forward from York, where his troops had collected; and Henry at the same time issued a manifesto of the causes by which he was compelled to take a course that 'he so much abhorred.'
October'Being now enforced to the war,' he said, 'which we have always hitherto so much fled, by one who, above all others, for our manifold benefits towards him, hath most just cause to love us, honour us, and rejoice in our quietness, we have thought good to notify unto the world his doings and behaviour in the provocation of this war, and likewise the means and ways by us used to eschew and avoid it; and by utterance and divulging of that matter to disburden some part of our inward displeasure and grief. The King of Scots, our nephew and neighbour, whom we in his youth and tender age preserved and maintained from the great danger of others, and by our authority conduced him safely to the real possession of his estate, he now compelleth and- ↑ Knox's History of the Reformation in Scotland.
