The King's Cardinal: The Rise and Fall of Thomas Wolsey (Pimlico) (147 page)

Francis’s release was accomplished in March 1526, but it has to be admitted that the part played by Wolsey was not all that great, for it was Charles’s priorities in Italy and Germany and thus his desire to conciliate France that applied the pressure. Still, insofar as Wolsey had promised to obtain the French king’s freedom, it was an auspicious start, but no more than that. France was weak in 1526, and though up to a point this suited Wolsey it would not do if she was so weak that even the combined strength of England and France could pose no threat to the emperor. Further allies would have to be sought, and the obvious place to look was among the Italian states anxious to resist further Imperial encroachments. The result was that in May 1526 the League of Cognac was formed, consisting of France, the papacy, Venice, Florence and the duke of Milan, who was being besieged at the time by Imperial forces in the castle of Milan, and was in effect a duke without a duchy.
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For the Italians it was his restoration that was the major purpose of the league, for this was the most practical way of limiting Imperial power. For Wolsey, however, Milan was but a small brick in a much larger edifice. Although he was much involved in bringing the league into existence, it did not suit his purpose to be too obviously connected with it. Henry was to be given the deliberately shadowy title of ‘protector’, but for the moment that was all. The actual fighting was to be left to the members of the League, especially to the Venetians, for to begin with Francis was almost as reluctant to fight as Wolsey was, and anyway, what with the setbacks of the last year and a half, including the payment of a large ransom to Charles, he was hardly in a position to do so. However, some fighting was essential to Wolsey’s plans. What Wolsey hoped was that Charles would become so embroiled in fighting the league that he would be only too willing to take up Wolsey’s offer to act as honest broker. Once he could get Charles to the conference table, then he was confident that he could engineer a settlement of Europe’s problems acceptable to all, but most of all to England: a subordinate France paying England a large annual
sum for the privilege of being number two; a contained Charles, content to surrender more dangerous ambitions so as to concentrate on what was, after all, the task of a Holy Roman Emperor, the defence of Christendom from the Infidel; and a grateful Italy freed from the threat of the rapacious Imperialists. The plan has all the hallmarks of its author: a mix of bluff and real pressure, of stick and carrot, a combination that had served him well in the past. It was ambitious, but with a little luck and his usual good judgement it might not be impossible to bring it off.

One characteristic feature of the plan was that it required only the minimum use of England’s own military and financial resources. This had the disadvantage that the more the fighting was left to his allies, the more difficult it would be for Wolsey to prevent them from dictating the terms of any peace settlement that might emerge. The advantage was that, when the right moment occurred, England’s non-involvement in the fighting would lend credibility to Wolsey’s claim to the role of honest broker and it was this that was central to his strategy of dominating any general European settlement. Moreover, there was the important further consideration that money to finance any major contribution to a war against the emperor was lacking. Whatever Henry and Wolsey’s real intentions as regards the Amicable Grant, the undoubted resistance to it was a warning that the country was in no mood to accept further heavy financial demands; a mood which could not have been improved now that the enemy was no longer to be the French but the more popular Imperialists. It is possible to make too much of this shortage of money: it was, after all, a weakness shared by every European power, yet it very rarely prevented them from engaging in war. But it was a further complication for Wolsey in what was already a very complicated scenario.

Just how complicated it was, and how difficult it was going to be for Wolsey to achieve success, was already apparent before Henry’s ‘great matter’ doubled his difficulties. The trouble was that during 1526 the new league had not had much success in Italy; indeed, one member, Clement, had had to endure the indignity of being besieged in his castle of St Angelo in Rome by a small force organized, with Imperial help, by his arch-rival Cardinal Pompeo Colonna. And in early 1527 a large force of German and Spanish troops, commanded by the duke of Bourbon, had moved into Northern Italy and was posing a real threat to the continued existence of the league. It was obvious that, if it was to survive, much more would have to be done by England and France, and the result was a series of diplomatic initiatives culminating in Wolsey’s famous mission to Amiens and Compiègne in the summer of 1527. By the Treaty of Amiens, signed on 18 August, England agreed to make a monthly financial contribution to support a French army led by Odet de Foix, sieur de Lautrec, which had, in fact, already left for Italy.
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As Wolsey explained to Henry, it was now necessary for there to be ‘a real and actual prosecution of the war’,
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but it is important to realize that for Wolsey this was something of a setback. The evidence lies in the otherwise curious fact that while negotiating an offensive alliance against the emperor, Wolsey spent much of his time at Amiens trying to persuade Francis to modify the terms that were to be put to Charles, so that there was some prospect of them being acceptable.
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The point was that over a period of a year Wolsey had failed even to get close to any sort of settlement between these two monarchs. In order to secure his release, the French king had been forced to sign the treaty of Madrid.
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This had included his agreement to the restoration of Burgundy to its nominal duke, Charles v, and to the reinstatement of the rebel duke of Bourbon. Neither of these was in the long run acceptable to him, and, short of being compelled by armed force, he had no intention of keeping his word on either account. More negotiable was his renunciation of any claims to the duchy of Milan, though this was only because, not being in control of the duchy, he had little choice. Furthermore, the fact that Charles had taken the precaution of insisting on hostages, the dauphin, François, and Henri duke of Orléans, forced him at least to pretend to negotiate. Meanwhile, he was hoping to use his alliance with England and the League of Cognac to bring pressure on Charles to return the princes without having to pay too high a price. By securing a yet larger English commitment at Amiens, he was in a stronger position
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Charles, and therefore less likely to make concessions – none of which was good news for a Wolsey trying to occupy the pivotal position. But Wolsey needed Amiens to bring pressure on Charles, who even less than Francis was showing no inclination to make concessions.

Wolsey’s problem was that, as a consequence of Pavia, it was very difficult to get a firm hold on Charles. True, the emperor’s difficulties in Germany and with the Turk, further complicated by his brother Ferdinand’s newly acquired claims to the kingdoms of Bohemia and Hungary, which needed his support if they were to be made a reality, did impose certain restraints on his freedom of action. For instance, while he was anxious that Francis should comply with as many of the terms of the Treaty of Madrid as possible, he was even more anxious that he should not cause him too much trouble in Italy, which he needed to have firmly under his control before he could safely move on to Germany. As we have seen, in Italy his two priorities were, first, to ensure that Milan should be securely held in the Imperial interest and his determination to be crowned emperor by the pope. The problem here was that Clement had been a founder member of the League of Cognac, and although in September 1526 Charles had been able to compel him to sign a four-month truce, the pope was in no mood to do his bidding.

The dramatic events of May 1527 drove the wedge between the two men even deeper, though their consequences were more complex than might at first appear.
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The rape and pillage of the Holy City by Bourbon’s unpaid and mutinous army, and the consequent imprisonment of the Holy Father in St Angelo for the second year running, may appear to have reduced Clement to the role of Charles’s puppet. However, when all is lost it is sometimes easier to be brave, and this even the timid Clement determined to be. Thus, in the summer of 1527 Charles was faced with the hostility of a battered but unbowed pope, and the imminent arrival of a French army in Northern Italy, which after Pavia he had probably hoped never to see again. What would he do? One option was immediately to buy Francis off by offering to
return his sons on the most generous terms, however much he might lose face by it. Another was to respond more favourably to Wolsey’s overtures. This too would have meant the return of the French princes, but on more advantageous terms for himself than could probably be obtained by direct negotiations with the French, while much talk of European peace, his cousin Henry’s good offices, and such like, would let him off the hook as far as loss of face was concerned. The third option was to hope that the French army could be defeated and Clement and his other opponents in Italy forced to come to terms, thereby eliminating the need to make concessions to either Francis or Wolsey. It was this last option that in the autumn of 1527 Charles felt strong enough to pursue, but he would have quickly to reconsider his position if Lautrec’s army proved successful.

What has been described is a very fluid situation in which neither Francis nor Charles was willing to give away too much too soon, in the hope that their bargaining positions would improve. On the other hand, they might at any moment have been persuaded to come to the conference table by the ever persuasive Wolsey, especially if things began to go wrong for them. For Wolsey it was the usual juggling act, but by the summer of 1527 his priority was no longer the glorious settlement of Europe’s problems under the aegis of his king, but the much more specific, and, if truth be told, rather sordid, matter of getting that king a divorce. Before we examine how this change of priority affected Wolsey’s plans, it needs to be stressed how seriously it weakened his position in Europe, as he himself was quick to appreciate. Writing from Amiens on 11 August, he explained to Henry that he had ‘forborn to make any overture of your secret matter, fearing that by disclosing thereof the same might cause the said French king to be more slack and stand further aloof’. Only when he had put Henry’s affairs ‘in assured perfection and train’, that is, only after the terms of the Treaty of Amiens had been settled, would it be wise to bring the subject up.
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Undoubtedly, Henry’s matrimonial problems were a godsend to Francis. As a result of his recent humiliations, he and his mother had had to come to the English cap in hand. Overnight the relationship had been, if not reversed, at least put on a more equal footing. Henry was now very much in need of Francis’s help, and Francis was, of course, going to make quite sure that he paid for it.

For Charles too, Henry’s matrimonial problems brought advantages. What he really thought of Henry’s proposed rejection of his aunt is not at all clear. He and Catherine met only three times, briefly at Canterbury and Gravelines in 1520, and for a little longer in June 1522 when Charles had paid a visit to England in order to finalize plans for the Great Enterprise. On these occasions they appear to have got on perfectly well, but there was a fifteen-year difference in their ages, and, apart from the fact that Catherine was the sister of his mother, Joanna the Mad, whom Charles had hardly known, having been brought up in the household of another aunt, Margaret of Savoy, they had little in common. Charles was a son of Burgundy who became a king of Spain. Catherine, a daughter of Spain, became a queen of England who, when she first met her nephew, had not been anywhere near Spain for fifteen years. And whatever their feelings, Charles had been a most dilatory
correspondent. Of course, Henry’s behaviour towards his aunt did touch upon the family honour, and the Habsburgs took their honour extremely seriously. However, when in January 1529 Campeggio had put this precise point to Wolsey, the answer he got was that ‘the Emperor will not in fact be concerned about the affair, and once it is done there will be a thousand ways of being reconciled to him’.
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It looks as if Wolsey was right, for Charles would not object in principle to Henry becoming a signatory to the Treaty of Cambrai in August 1529, nor in February 1535, when Catherine, though divorced, was still alive, would he be against putting out feelers to Henry for an alliance, for the good reason that he felt very much in need of support and was therefore not too fussy where it came from.
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Whatever Charles’s feelings towards his aunt, Henry’s matrimonial difficulties suited him well, just because they seriously weakened England’s position, and put a bridle on any schemes of Wolsey’s to do him down. Or, to put it another way, they provided him, as every other ruler in Europe, with a bargaining counter, to be used however and in whatever way, and whenever he wished – and in 1527 and 1528 he saw no overwhelming reason to let Henry off the hook by meekly accepting the English king’s wish for a divorce.

The divorce not only weakened Wolsey’s position, but it seriously affected the direction of his strategy. Hitherto, the League of Cognac had been essentially a means to force Charles to the conference table. In the new situation the wishes of the league’s members, and above all Clement’s, had to become his chief concern. This meant involving himself even more in the affairs of Italy, which was not good news. It also meant having to adopt a more aggressive stance towards Charles, the declared enemy of the league, than ideally he would have wished. Firm pressure rather than all-out war was what he had wanted, but the overriding necessity to comply with papal wishes would make it much more difficult to achieve the one without the other. Of course, all this only applied if Charles opposed the divorce, but Wolsey did not have to wait long to find out. At the end of July, despite all the government’s efforts to prevent it, a private messenger from Catherine had put Charles in full possession of the facts, at least as far as they were known to Catherine, including her determination to resist Henry’s wishes.
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He immediately informed Henry of his support for his aunt, and at the same time dispatched the general of the Franciscan order, Francisco Quinoñes, to Rome in order to register his strong protest at what had already occurred and to insist that if there was to be a trial it should not take place in England, where Catherine could hardly expect an impartial hearing.
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