The King's Cardinal: The Rise and Fall of Thomas Wolsey (Pimlico) (107 page)

Thus, in Henry and Wolsey’s eyes the failure of Suffolk’s expedition was a qualified one, and the qualifications are of great importance. They felt, and with some justification, that England had been badly let down by every one of her allies. Margaret had failed to provide money for her own troops and the promised carts and horses for Suffolk’s. Buren had failed to prevent his troops from looting and pillaging, thus creating great difficulties for the English command, which at Bourbon’s request had pledged itself not to permit such activity. Neither had the sudden disbanding of his troops, when all that had been agreed was withdrawal, helped very much. Meanwhile, the absence of any contribution at all from Bourbon had been even more disastrous. Not only had the rest of France singularly failed to come to his support, even in those areas where his family influence could have been expected to be decisive, but his promised invasion of the Champagne from over the border in the Franche-Comté came to nothing, while the
landsknechts
supposedly hired to help him never got very far.
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And what had Charles been doing all the while? Well, according to Henry and Wolsey, not a damned thing, or at least nothing that helped them. Indeed, it looked very much as if he had been using English money and men merely to further his own ends. In March 1524 he recovered Fuentarrabia, and in the following month the French were yet again driven out of Northern Italy, but none of this could be said to have been to England’s advantage. Moreover, as Henry and Wolsey were unlikely to forget, one consequence of the alliance with the emperor had been the giving up of the very considerable French ‘pension’. Back in Bruges in August 1521, Charles had promised to compensate the English for this loss by the payment of what was called the ‘indemnity’, to the tune of 133,305 gold crowns (nearly £30,000) a year.
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The only trouble was that not a penny of it had come England’s way – and indeed never
was to come. Thus, by early 1524 Henry and Wolsey had a whole series of complaints to put to England’s allies, and they were not backward in putting them, either then or during the months that followed. Indeed, for the next year and a half they were to dominate the relationship between king and emperor, and they go a long way to explain why by the summer of 1525 that relationship had broken down.
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It would be wrong, of course, to take these complaints entirely at their face value; to some extent they were merely part of the bargaining process, and indeed it could be argued that far from showing that Henry’s and Wolsey’s belief in the Great Enterprise was disintegrating, they suggest a continuing commitment. There is, after all, nothing like putting people in the wrong to make them anxious to do what you want. The argument here, however, will be that the complaints were to a great extent only a smoke screen to disguise Wolsey’s increasing lack of faith in the Great Enterprise as a whole and his desire to extricate his master, if only a favourable opportunity arose – but one must emphasize the last point. Wolsey did not suddenly decide in January 1524 that in August 1525 he would make an alliance with the French; that was not his way, nor in the real world can it be anybody’s. What happened is that at about that time he came to the decision that the strategy that had emerged in Bruges in the summer of 1521 of using an Imperial alliance to forge a new European settlement was unlikely to be successful, and he began actively to look for a new way forward.

That Wolsey’s approach had changed significantly can be shown by his reaction to the opportunities for another invasion of France in the late summer and autumn of 1524. On the face of it, the prospects looked good. The French defeat and expulsion from Northern Italy in April had been followed up by an invasion of French territory by an army led by Bourbon. True, it did not move north towards Lyons as Wolsey had hoped, but by the middle of August it was besieging Marseilles, reached on the 26th. On the way there, rather as with Suffolk’s army the previous year, one French town after another had surrendered to it.
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Admittedly, after his success in March in capturing Fuenterrabia, Charles had not done much to help Bourbon, but at least until late May he had put on some pretence of being keener on concerted action than he had shown himself to be earlier.
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As regards Scotland, however, things had dramatically improved with the departure of Albany to France in June, which led almost immediately to negotiations for peace and thus removed the threat, very much a reality the previous year, of a war on two fronts.
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The fact is that by the summer of 1524 the situation was more favourable for an English invasion of France than it had been the previous year, and indeed there was some pretence at making such an invasion. On 25 May an agreement was made with Bourbon to that effect;
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on 2 September Wolsey reported to Norfolk, then still in the North, that on the strength of the good news of Bourbon’s successes in the south of France, a decision to invade had been taken; and on the 10th circular letters had been sent out to the relevant people instructing them to prepare for war.
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But even
in the letter to Norfolk, Wolsey had made an important qualification: England would invade, but only in the event of ‘the matters prosperously succeeding’.
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As almost every letter that Wolsey wrote in 1524 on this subject made abundantly clear,
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the qualification was all-important, and nowhere does this emerge more clearly than in the letters he wrote to Pace.
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Like so many of his fellow English diplomats, Pace was pro-Imperialist. Furthermore, his was a very emotional, not to say unstable, nature. So it is not surprising that no sooner had he arrived at Bourbon’s camp than a hero-worship of the French king’s rebellious subject set in.
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Bourbon had, he reported, ‘so faithful and so steadfast mind without vacillation to help the king to his crown of France that if he be assuredly entertained, the king shall assuredly obtain his crown in France’, and even if he would not, Bourbon’s valiant army would get it for him.
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Wolsey had to put up with a good deal of such hyperbole, even being threatened at one point that if he refused to accept Pace’s advice, he would be held responsible by him for any failure to obtain the crown of France for their master – all of which Wolsey took in surprisingly good part.
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What he would not do was accept the advice, neither, indeed, as he pointed out to Pace, would the king or other members of the Council. Victories in Provence were all very well, but it was well known to be a very weakly defended area, and moreover the only two strongholds there, Arles and Marseilles, remained in French hands. There was little doubt that Francis’s decision not to engage with Bourbon was deliberate; he was merely allowing him to waste the allies’ money there so that in the end Bourbon would have to retreat without the French king having to lift a finger. Writing on 31 August, Wolsey showed himself to be not at all impressed with Bourbon’s achievement so far, nor was he especially amused to hear that in Provence the French were giving their allegiance to Bourbon and not to Henry, thereby undermining Henry’s claim to the French throne, which had been a matter of negotiation between Bourbon and the English from the start.
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On the other hand, Wolsey did make it clear that if Bourbon crossed the Rhone, marched on Lyons and then on into ‘the bowels of France’, achieving there ‘a notable victory with a general revolution’, Henry would be willing to invade. But even then further conditions would have to be met. Under the provisions of the May agreement, once England invaded, Charles had to take on the full burden of paying for Bourbon’s army, and it was vital, so Wolsey informed Pace, for Bourbon to confirm that this condition would be fulfilled by the emperor. He also thought it vital that the promised Imperial reinforcements for Bourbon should materialize before England committed herself. And if all this was not enough to dampen even Pace’s enthusiasm, Wolsey raised the suspicion that even if Bourbon successfully moved
north, the duke’s intention would be to secure not some ‘notable revolution’ but rather his own lands in the Auvergne and Bourbonnais – which would hardly be to England’s advantage.
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What all this adds up to is that Wolsey had no intention of being taken for a ride by the Imperialists, as to some extent he had been the previous year. On the other hand – and this is important for the argument that follows – he could not afford to miss out on any notable Imperial success, for the obvious reason that in any settlement that followed he would have a very weak hand to play. But it looks as if in 1524 he had little faith in any such success, and he was indeed proved right; on 29 September Bourbon was forced to raise his siege and one month later Francis
I
was back again in Milan!
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But Wolsey’s reluctance in 1524 to take any military action to further the Great Enterprise is not the only curious feature of his conduct of policy at this time. Perhaps even more so, and especially to the Imperialists, was the appearance in London in April of a Genoese friar, one Jean-Joachim de Passano. Moreover, as it turned out, during the next eighteen months he was very rarely to be out of London.
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Ostensibly he had come on a business trip to a fellow Genoese settled in London, Antonio Bonvisi, but in fact he was Louise of Savoy’s
maître d’hôtel
, sent by her to England to begin negotiations for peace. Quite how serious these were lies at the heart of the interpretative problem that a study of Wolsey’s foreign policy during these years presents. For some it is crucial evidence of Wolsey bending yet again to the dictates of the papacy, for was not the new pope, Clement
VII
, at this very time working hard for a peace that might prevent Northern Italy from being a permanent battlefield between the French and Imperialists? Thus loyally taking his cue from his spirtual head, Wolsey too sought peace.
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And there was a more personal reason for this decision. Clement’s election to the papacy in November was a second rebuff in two years to Wolsey’s ambitions to obtain the papal tiara for himself. It was also sure proof of the emperor’s unwillingness to honour the promise he had made at Bruges in 1521 to support Wolsey’s candidature in any future papal elections. Thus, so it has been alleged, his determination to get his own back on the emperor by coming to terms with France.
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For yet others it demonstrates Wolsey’s lack of genuine commitment to the Great Enterprise from the start, deriving in part from an attachment to peace that supposedly was always threatening to separate him from his more bellicose master.
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More recently the negotiations have been seen as merely an insurance policy, to be activated only when it looked as if the French might be winning. Moreover, according to this view, in the weeks just before Pavia they were anyway in the process of breaking down. Thus, the dramatic Imperial victory there, far from disrupting Wolsey’s well-laid plans for a diplomatic revolution, was genuinely welcomed by him, the negotiations with the French being only
reluctantly resumed when neither the emperor nor Henry’s subjects proved as co-operative as Wolsey had hoped.
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The fact that all these interpretations will be rejected here is not to say that there is not a good deal to be said in favour of all of them. It is the case that in the spring of 1524 Clement was actively working for peace and that by the end of the year he had entered into secret agreements with the French king, so that a Wolsey dedicated to peace might have been inclined to follow his lead. Moreover, as already stressed, at no time during 1524 did Wolsey show any enthusiasm for war against France. And as regards the ‘insurance policy’, it may well be true that in the weeks leading up to Pavia the Anglo-French negotiations were not on the verge of success. But there are serious objections to be made to all three interpretations – not least, of course, that if one is right, the others must be wrong.

The chief objections to the first two have in effect already been presented. The notion of Wolsey as a lackey of the papacy is unconvincing, in part because even the obvious link with it, his legatine authority, was obtained very much to further Henry’s policies, and in part because on close examination the necessary links between papal and English diplomatic initiatives are missing. Moreover, it was suggested earlier that, when Wolsey first put his name forward at a papal election in December 1521, he was prompted to do so out of concern for Henry’s prestige rather than any personal ambition; and this seems to have been equally true when in the late autumn of 1523 he stood again. True, in the October he had graciously responded to intimations that both Charles and Margaret of Austria were eager for him to become pope by agreeing that if they were willing to write on his behalf, he would put himself forward – and put himself forward he did. However in doing so he again stressed that it was Henry who desired him to obtain the dignity. Furthermore, the word from Rome was that it was Giulio de’ Medici who would be the successful candidate. If this indeed was the case, the English envoys at Rome were not to put Wolsey’s name forward but instead were to make use of letters in support of de’ Medici, who was not only officially the cardinal-protector of England but was considered to be genuinely sympathetic towards her interests. Wolsey’s response, when informed of de’ Medici’s success, makes it difficult to believe that he had suffered any great disappointment at his own lack of success.
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