The campaigns of 1512-13, Surrey's and Suffolk's inroads of 1522 and 1523, and Henry's invasion of 1544, represent the sum of his military operations outside Great Britain and Ireland.

He acquired Tournay in 1513 and Boulogne in 1544, but the one was restored in five years for an indemnity, and the other was to be given back in eight for a similar consideration.

These facts are in curious contrast with the high-sounding schemes of recovering the crown of France, which others were always suggesting to Henry, and which he, for merely conventional reasons, was in the habit of enunciating before going to war; and in view of the tenacity which Henry exhibited in other respects, and the readiness with which he relinquished his regal pretensions to France, it is difficult to believe that they were any real expression of settled policy.

They were, indeed, impossible of achievement, and Henry saw the fact clearly enough.[147] Modern phenomena such as huge armies sweeping over Europe, and capitals from Berlin to Moscow, Paris to Madrid, falling before them, were quite beyond military science of the sixteenth century.

Armies fought, as a rule, only in the five summer months; it was difficult enough to victual them for even that time; and lack of commissariat or transport crippled all the invasions of Scotland.