The King's Cardinal: The Rise and Fall of Thomas Wolsey (Pimlico) (112 page)

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Authors: Peter Gwyn

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It comes in a reply of John Clerk’s from Rome to a letter of the 21st in which Wolsey had disclosed to him ‘the whole platte [plan] of the king’s highness and your grace’s determinate and resolute mind’.
²⁴¹It is frustrating, of course, that Wolsey’s letter has not survived; even more so that because Clerk felt that the time was not ripe ‘to wade any further with his Holiness in the disclosing of any secret matter concerning the King’s mind contained in your grace’s letter, the Emperor not concurring with his Highness or being otherwise too much studious of his own advantage’, we are never told what the ‘platte’ was. What does emerge, though, is that Wolsey was hoping to use the pope as ‘mediator for the bringing to pass of your grace’s desires’, which, if past precedent was anything to go by, was another way of saying that he was looking for some alliance with the French.
²⁴²

No more than any of the other evidence cited is Clerk’s letter of 14 May proof that long before the failure of the Amicable Grant the Great Enterprise had been dead and buried, but that is the conclusion to which it points. And what is inescapable is that the deep suspicion of Imperial intentions which had so characterized English policy in the weeks before any knowledge of Pavia continued unabated afterwards. This makes it hard to take very seriously the grandiose plans of conquest that for a brief time Wolsey was conjuring up, like rabbits out of a hat. And that these plans never meant much is suggested by the speed and comparative smoothness with which the negotiations with the French proceeded after Joachim’s arrival, culminating in the Treaty of the More of 30 August. The key to this was England’s willingness to give up all territorial claims to France, and to accept instead the resumption of the annual French pension of 100,000 gold crowns (about £20,000) – and £4,000 more than she had gained from the Treaty of London.
²⁴³Such an increase must have gratified Henry’s purse, if not his honour; and, indeed, on the face of it it does seem small recompense for all the time and effort expended on the Great Enterprise, not to mention all the taxpayers’ money. As against this, it was Louise’s opinion that her envoys had conceded too much.
²⁴⁴And what the terms of the Treaty of the More tend to confirm is something that has been central to my interpretation of Wolsey’s conduct of foreign policy: that it was always position rather than possessions that Wolsey was seeking. The position that he had engineered in the summer of 1525 offered his master the possibility of continuing to play a leading role in European affairs, as a brief look at his relations with the emperor and with Margaret during the time leading up to the signing of the treaty with France will show.

There is always a danger of presenting the conduct of foreign policy as if it consisted of a simple choice between allies: for England in the early sixteenth century, between the emperor and the French; or nowadays between America and
Russia. Sometimes, of course, it does boil down to this, and at any rate most of us find it easier to make sense of a policy in which there are obvious friends and enemies. For those responsible for the conduct of foreign policy the scenario can look rather more complicated, leading nowadays to what is sometimes rather dismissively referred to as the ‘Foreign Office view’. If the phrase implies an over-cautious approach, it may not be readily applied to Wolsey. On the other hand, for him Europe was not, as it was for such as Pace and Tunstall, peopled with goodies and baddies, for if it had been, he would not have been able to conduct the kind of secret diplomacy that he was involved in during 1524 and the first half of 1525. Furthermore, there is the curious phenomenon that, as the new French alliance began to look more certain, so his attitude towards the emperor appeared to mellow. This can best be shown by his reaction to Charles’s, on the face of it, rather provocative proposal to reject the hand of the Princess Mary in favour of Isabella of Portugal. As it happened, this suited England quite well. Charles had always been rather old for Mary, who in 1525 was still only nine to his twenty-five. More importantly, it freed her for a possible French match, another bargaining counter in the negotiations with France. Nevertheless, it would have been well within English rights to kick up an enormous fuss at the emperor’s reneging on a solemn promise concerning a matter that touched Henry’s honour so closely – and that Wolsey could kick up a fuss is shown all too clearly by his earlier treatment of de Praet, while apparently in December 1524 he had informed another Imperial envoy that his master was a liar, Margaret a ribald, the Archduke Ferdinand (aged twenty-one) a child, and Bourbon a traitor.
²⁴⁵However, when in June Henry and Wolsey first got wind of Charles’s intention, they took it all remarkably calmly.
²⁴⁶And that they were increasingly concerned to maintain a good relationship with the emperor, despite their secret negotiations with France, emerges from a series of marginal comments to one of Tunstall’s and Sampson’s reports from the Imperial court.

When they wrote them on 11 August, the two English envoys were becoming increasingly worried at the pro-French direction that English foreign policy was taking, and did not hesitate to express their worries – so much for Wolsey’s dictatorial behaviour! Their particular concern was that if England made a separate treaty with France before Charles had ended his negotiations, ‘you in so doing shall lose the emperor for ever’.
²⁴⁷It was a fair enough assessment – and it could well have been that what Wolsey was after was some kind of conflict with the emperor to pay him back for all the frustration and disappointment of the last few years. But according to Wolsey they had simply got it wrong: there was no reason, he explained to Henry, why Charles’s friendship should be lost, ‘seeing your grace is minded to continue your old amities with him’. For one thing, ‘nothing is done by the treaty with France to the emperor’s prejudice’. For another, ‘your amity is as beneficial to the emperor as his to your grace’.
²⁴⁸In other words, Wolsey had every intention that the ‘old amities’ should continue, but only on his terms, not the emperor’s.

It may be felt that, in teasing out an explanation for Wolsey’s policy during the period that the Great Enterprise was supposedly England’s aim, there has been too much supposition and guesswork and not enough attention to the evidence. This may be so, though it is one of the
sine qua nons
of this work that all the evidence needs a great deal of interpretation, not least because there are so many gaps in it. What, however, the surviving reports of Tunstall and Sampson permit is the construction of a viable alternative policy to the one, it has been argued, Wolsey adopted.
²⁴⁹Instead of trying to tell Charles what to do with his great victory, would it not have been much better for England to have adopted a more modest posture? Pavia could, and should, have been good news for her. If she had only been willing to please her victorious ally just a little, she would have been in a good position to gain from the resulting peace settlement – probably, in fact, rather more than she was going to from the Treaty of the More, though Tunstall and Sampson never said this. There is no evidence that Charles wanted to do England down. Indeed, it was, as Wolsey had pointed out, very much in his interests to continue his friendship with her, but only as long as he was not asked to do too much. Thus, for Tunstall and Sampson at least, the straightforward and honourable course was to fulfil England’s treaty obligations to the emperor in the reasonable expectation that he would reciprocate. Moreover, it was their belief that the policy that they now perceived Wolsey to have embarked upon was so dangerous, threatening an alliance between the emperor and Francis against England, that it had made them ‘more bold to write thus plainly in discharging of our duty to your highness’ – to which Wolsey had appended the comment: ‘Being in this fear and perplexity they know not the bottom of your affairs, nor the force of your puissance, thinking that all dependeth upon the emperor’s string’.
²⁵⁰

Put like that, it is difficult not to feel a little sorry for the simple-minded English envoys! And at the same time it may serve as a warning to those of us who have tried to get to the bottom of what Wolsey was after – and it is worth pointing out
en passant
that Wolsey’s comment makes it clear that Henry certainly had. Whether the interpretation that has been presented here is correct only the dead will know for certain, but at least it does allow for the complexity of Wolsey’s approach. His secret diplomacy with the French had been specifically designed to free England from dependence upon the emperor, and for two reasons. Unlike Tunstall and Sampson, and probably others at the English court, Wolsey had come to believe nothing that the emperor said; and it has to be said that Charles’s record of broken promises was justification enough for this view. At the same time – and much more importantly – any policy that resulted in vital decisions affecting Henry’s honour and interests being made by someone other than Henry and himself was unacceptable. Wolsey had always been aware that in any alliance with the emperor Henry might be forced into a subsidary role, and it was to prevent this happening that the Great Enterprise had been invented. Henry had had to appear bullish and provide money and armies because only by drawing Charles into a conquest of France could he force him to treat him as an equal, while at the same time putting
the maximum pressure on Francis so as to persuade him once again to come to Henry’s heel.

This, in general terms, was the policy Henry and Wolsey adopted in the years 1522-5, and, as was the case between 1515 and 1518, it was by no means an unmitigated success. Charles and the unexpected ally, Bourbon, proved to be extremely difficult, if not impossible, to manage. Francis, as usual, was very reluctant to be brought to heel. And by 1525 the situation had become, as far as England was concerned, something of a stalemate, with neither the French nor the Imperialists prepared to do what she wanted them to do. Pavia broke this up. Potentially it had been a moment of great danger, if dependence upon the emperor was what was feared. Wolsey’s immediate response, as in 1522-3, had been to be more bullish than ever, in a desperate effort to prevent Charles from making all the decisions. Meanwhile, he waited to see what had happened to France. If she had not collapsed completely there was a strong possibility that she would be willing to accept England’s predominance as never before. And this was how it turned out. Wolsey with his accustomed flair had been able to execute a diplomatic volte-face which could well have put England in a stronger position than ever before. What with an alliance with a suitably chastened France, the strong possibility of an anti-Imperial alliance, orchestrated by himself, emerging in Northern Italy, and an emperor who, though victorious, was increasingly desperate for money and, as always, dreadfully overcommitted, the scene looked set for Wolsey to execute another diplomatic triumph similar to that of 1518 – in other words, a settlement of the affairs of Europe directed from London. It was never to be. One reason was that Charles, whatever the weaknesses of his position, still had a great number of cards to play, including the person of the French king. Another would result from the fact that, all too soon, Henry would make the momentous decision to seek a divorce. For Wolsey this was a devastating stroke of ill-luck, for nothing could have been better calculated to undermine all his efforts to make his master the dominant sovereign of Europe.