without them I see no
manner of good thing that shall fall after it." But her tactlessness even
in this letter shows clearly when she boasts that the King in France is
not so busy with war as she is in England against the Scots. "My heart is
very good of it, and I am horribly busy making standards, banners, and
badges."[22] After congratulating Henry effusively upon the capture of
Therouenne and his meeting with the Emperor, Katharine herself set forth
with reinforcements towards Scotland, but before she had travelled a
hundred miles (to Woburn) she met the couriers galloping south to bring
her the great news of Surrey's victory at Flodden Field. Turning aside to
thank Our Lady of Walsingham for the destruction of the Scottish power,
Katharine on the way sent the jubilant news to Henry. James IV. in his
defeat had been left dead upon the field, clad in his check surcoat, and
a fragment of this coat soaked with blood the Queen sent to her husband in
France, with a heartless gibe at his dead brother-in-law. We are told that
in another of her letters first giving the news of Flodden, and referring
to Henry's capture of the Duke of Longueville at Therouenne, she
vaingloriously compared her victory with his.[23] "It was no great thing
for one armed man to take another, but she was sending three captured by a
woman; if he (Henry) sent her a captive Duke she would send him a prisoner
king." For a wife and _locum tenens_ to write thus in such circumstances
to a supremely vain man like Henry, whose martial ambition was still
unassuaged, was to invite his jealousy and dislike. His people saw, as he
with all his boastfulness cannot fail to have done, that Flodden was the
real English victory, not Therouenne, and that Katharine and Surrey, not
Henry, were the heroes. Such knowledge was gall and wormwood to the King;
and especially when the smoke of battle had blown away, and he saw how he
had been "sold" by his wife's relations, who kept the fruit of victory
whilst he was put off with the shell.

From that time Katharine's influence over her husband weakened, though
with occasional intermission, and he looked for guidance to a subtler mind
than hers. With Henry to France had gone Thomas Wolsey, one of the clergy
of the royal chapel, recently appointed almoner by the patronage of Fox,
Bishop of Winchester, Henry's leading councillor in foreign affairs. The
English nobles, strong as they still were territorially, could not be
trusted