The King's Cardinal: The Rise and Fall of Thomas Wolsey (Pimlico) (108 page)

As regards Wolsey’s commitment to peace, the essence of the rebuttal has been that no one who wished to dominate the European scene in the way that Wolsey did, could have afforded the luxury of truly pacifist sentiments.
¹⁵²
Neither have any serious divisions between him and his master in the conduct of foreign policy been discerned so far, nor is there much evidence for thinking there were any in 1524 or 1525. It is true that on 25 March 1524 Wolsey wrote to the English envoys in Rome that he would not refrain ‘to study, devise and set forth, as much as may stand with my duty to my Sovereign Lord and master, all such things [that] in my conceit may be thought upon or imagined for to conduce everything to the best purpose’, and by emphasizing the scruple about his duty to the king it is possible to see what follows
in the letter as an attempt to distance himself from Henry’s views, especially in view of the ensuing references to the papal peace initiatives.
¹⁵³
For a number of reasons, however, such a reading must be rejected. To begin with, Wolsey gave his own ‘conceit’ because he had been asked to by the pope, so it cannot in itself provide evidence that he was embarking on an independent, not to say clandestine, policy. The main emphasis throughout the letter, even in that part which allegedly contained his real thoughts, was not on any new peace initiative but on the continuing need to maintain military pressure on the French. The problem, however, as Wolsey made clear to the envoys, was that it was becoming increasingly unlikely that such pressure could be maintained. The Imperialists had already let him down badly and the new pope was not nearly as opposed to the French as had been expected. It was all this, not any love of peace, that was forcing Wolsey to look for a new policy – something that emerges more clearly from the way he left it to the envoys to decide whether circumstances in Northern Italy made this the right moment to launch it.
¹⁵⁴

Wolsey’s willingness to give the envoys such a free rein hardly suggests that he was asking them to do something that he knew their king disapproved of, for surely the longer the delay in implementing it, the more likely that Henry would get wind of it? But in this instance there is no need to speculate. Henry did know about the pope’s desire for peace because back in February the pope had written to him about it; and, what is more, at the same time as Wolsey had presented his own ‘conceits’, Henry had made his favourable response.
¹⁵⁵
And at this stage it may be helpful to reiterate the general point that for Wolsey to have conducted a clandestine policy he would have needed to set up a private courier service, of which there is no evidence. As it was, almost all the diplomatic correspondence was either seen by the king or made known to him in digest form. He was extremely well briefed for his audiences with foreign ambassadors. When important decisions had to be made he usually contrived a meeting with Wolsey, and letters were daily passing between them.
¹⁵⁶
None of this means that Wolsey’s advice did not carry great weight. After all, advice was what he was paid to give and all the evidence is that for fifteen years or more Henry for the most part took it. But this in itself provides another reason for disbelieving that Wolsey was having to conduct a clandestine policy; the more Henry is thought to have trusted his judgement, the less need would there have been for any secrets.

It is almost certainly true that on occasions Wolsey may have been quicker to grasp the appropriate means by which to achieve his master’s ends. It is difficult to believe, given the recent fate of Suffolk’s expedition, that anyone in England in the first few months of 1524 could have been very enthusiastic for war or the Imperial alliance, and in March Henry’s favourable response to the papal feelers for peace underlines this. Admittedly, there is some evidence for a rather bellicose Henry, but there were good reasons why he should want to appear so. First there was the need to keep up diplomatic appearances. England was, after all, still formally
committed to the Great Enterprise, and nothing was to be served by letting her ally think otherwise, especially not if she was thinking of deserting! Thus, Wolsey’s statements about how bellicose the king and Council were and Henry’s suitably warlike noises when he met the Imperial ambassador should not be taken as the truth.
¹⁵⁷
In addition, as has already been pointed out, Wolsey was very ready, in order to clinch a deal quickly and on the most favourable terms, to put pressure on any foreign power he was negotiating with by stressing that he was the only person in England on their side. Most commonly it was a ploy he used with the French, but when sometime in May or early June he instructed Clerk to inform Clement that he, Wolsey, had had to labour hard to persuade king and Council to listen to the papal pleas for peace, ‘they now being fixed upon matters of war’, it looks very much as if he was using it with the pope too, if only because Henry would almost certainly have known the contents of Wolsey’s letter.
¹⁵⁸

The difficulty in early 1524 was not in realizing that the Great Enterprise was going badly but in finding some attractive alternative. Merely to have given it up would have been an unthinkable admission of failure and would have anyway left England totally isolated. On the other hand, the alternative of a French alliance and the consequent imposition of a European settlement in which ‘all the glory and the incense’ would fall to Henry and Wolsey seemed a long way off.
¹⁵⁹
What seems to have happened is that Wolsey took advantage of, and indeed subtly encouraged, the new pope’s desire for peace in order to get into direct negotiations with the French without having himself to make the first approach. The vital evidence for this is provided by a letter from the English envoys in Rome of 21 March in which they reported that, as instructed, they had suggested to Clement that he should persuade the French to send someone to England with a view to furthering the peace process that he had already embarked upon, and for the success of which, it was to be stressed, Clement was to get all the honour – though in reality this was something that Wolsey would have had no intention of allowing.
¹⁶⁰
For the moment, however, the important thing was for the process to start, and it seems that Clement took the bait. When his envoy, the archbishop of Capua, arrived at the French court on 27 March he brought with him the very suggestion that Wolsey had put to Clement. Louise had responded favourably, and the result was that appearance in London already mentioned of a Genoese friar ostensibly on a business trip but really to begin negotiations with Wolsey for a peace with France.
¹⁶¹
It is difficult not to admire the skill with which Wolsey had achieved this vital first step, and in particular the way in which he had minimized the risks. After all, he could not have known what the French response would be, and there was the very real possibility that any hint that England was willing to make a separate peace with them might have been exploited, by, for instance, their informing the emperor. But by making it a papal suggestion, Wolsey had more or less pre-empted such a manoeuvre because he could, and indeed would, always maintain that Joachim’s arrival had had nothing to do with him.
¹⁶²
As it was, all sorts of stratagems had to be used to allay the inevitable
suspicions of, in particular, the Imperial ambassador in England, Louis de Praet, suspicions that inevitably increased the longer Joachim stayed.

The cheekiest of the stratagems used by Wolsey to try and throw his allies off the scent was the pretence that Joachim was a French spy,
¹⁶³
but none of them should encourage the notion that Wolsey was working behind Henry’s back. For one thing, there is direct documentary evidence that the king was well aware of Joachim’s presence in England and very interested in the negotiations that were taking place.
¹⁶⁴
What, of course, he could not do, in any public way at any rate, was take part in them. Whatever the actual state of play, the French in 1524 were still ostensibly the enemy whose territory Henry had committed himself to invade. It was just about all right for there to be suspicions that his leading minister was involved in clandestine meetings with Genoese friars who might or might not be in the service of the French queen-mother – and, after all, not all the Imperialists’ negotiations were above suspicion – but it would not do at all for such suspicions to be attached to the person of the king. Indeed, it would have been very unseemly if, involved in the Great Enterprise against France, Henry had not appeared more bellicose than his minister. Still, none of this helps to answer the question how seriously these negotiations were taken.

At the very least, one has to assume some seriousness. After all, they had been difficult to set up and, given that any hint of them would undermine the alliance and place England in a very exposed position,
¹⁶⁵
it would have been foolish to embark on them just on the off chance that something good might come of it. Moreover, the mere fact that Joachim’s visit was so prolonged and that he was eventually joined by the chancellor of Alençon, Jean Brinon, must indicate that Wolsey was looking for something substantial.
¹⁶⁶
The question remains, what? If it was neither a papal blessing nor the sixteenth-century equivalent of the Nobel peace prize, could it have been that most recently favoured answer, some kind of insurance policy against the possibility of French success, which in the early months of 1524 and again the following winter, as Francis followed Bourbon’s retreating army back into Northern Italy, might have seemed a real possibility? For such an answer to carry conviction it would have to be shown that, as during early 1525 the prospects of French success in Northern Italy dwindled, so Wolsey took his negotiations with the French less and less seriously. And it would certainly make a nonsense of the view that an audience planned for the French envoys with Henry
VIII
on 9 March was intended to be the occasion for reaching some kind of Anglo-French agreement.
¹⁶⁷

In fact, it will never be known for certain what was intended, for on that very day confirmation of the overwhelming nature of the Imperial victory at Pavia arrived in London, and the audience was cancelled even as the envoys were on their
way.
¹⁶⁸
All the same, the view put forward here is that the negotiations with the French were serious enough, and had become increasingly so. One reason for thinking this is the kind of terms that were being discussed. Back in the summer of 1524 the English demands, by Wolsey’s own account at any rate, had been ludicrously high – nothing less, indeed, than ‘the whole realm of France’.
¹⁶⁹
Since, this piece of information was only for Imperial consumption, it may well have been disinformation, but be that as it may, by the time Joachim had been joined by the chancellor of Alençon in late January 1525 the demands were of a much more realistic kind: the counties of Boulogne and Guisnes and the town of Ardres, which is to say an area of land adjoining Calais and the English Pale, together with an annual pension of 100,000 crowns. It is true that the French appear to have been determined not to surrender any territory and thought that the financial demands were on the high side, but on the other hand the possible gains for them were great: if they could break the Anglo-Imperial alliance, Milan might be theirs once again, and perhaps even Naples – in which case a bit of land around Calais might not seem too high a price. As for the money, it was only a little more than they were paying before war broke out, and as it turned out, was to be precisely the amount agreed to a few months later at the Treaty of the More. From the English point of view, it appears to be not nearly so good a deal, for by giving up the Great Enterprise they were in theory giving up the opportunity of conquering France. On the other hand, they would at least be sure of getting some money, which they had singularly failed to do from the emperor. They also stood to recover that dominant position in European affairs which, as it became increasingly obvious how little influence they had over their present allies, was rapidly slipping away – but more of this later. For the present the point to be made is not that the terms on the table were especially liked by either party, but that they were not so unacceptable as to suggest that neither side took them seriously. There are other reasons, too, for believing that the contrary was true.
¹⁷⁰

One of the things that anyone who thinks otherwise has to account for is the enormous damage that the presence of Joachim in England for so lengthy a period did to Anglo-Imperial relations. From the moment in June 1524 when Wolsey, in order to assuage Imperial worries, reported that he had sent the French emissary packing after only half an hour, to well after Pavia when, at least by some accounts, the English were very keen to revive the Great Enterprise, the negotiations with Joachim were a stumbling block which all Wolsey’s diplomatic inventions did little to remove.
¹⁷¹
Thus, when the English ambassador at the Imperial court first presented the English congratulations for Pavia, he had to report that Charles’s response had not been altogether gracious. One reason for this was Joachim’s long stay in England which, according to the emperor, could only mean that Henry had chosen to desert him – and by implication deserved no share in the spoils of victory.
¹⁷²
No doubt it suited Charles at this moment to play down his ally’s contribution, but in truth it had not been very great, nor was this by any means the first time that he had
expressed his disappointment.
¹⁷³
Why, if Wolsey was still
au fond
committed to the Great Enterprise, did he let the negotiations with Joachim drag on so that they became a real bone of contention with England’s partner? Even a merely wary Wolsey might have been a little more careful not to provide the emperor with such an obvious excuse for not co-operating. It was very curious behaviour, as was his failure to ensure that Charles’s special envoy, Beaurain, was not granted, while he was in London, an audience with the king – something that Henry had expressed himself perfectly amenable to.
¹⁷⁴
As it was, the failure to do so provided Charles with another reason for his lack of graciousness in March.