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

by Gwyn, Peter

  What of other possible allies? Given the continuing French obsession with his kingdom of Naples, Ferdinand of Aragon had good cause to dislike their presence in Italy. Unfortunately his track record made it difficult for the English to place much trust in him; neither, in 1515, did he have much to offer. He was old and ailing, and by the end of January 1516 he would be dead, leaving his grandson, Charles, free to take possession of his Iberian inheritance. This was not Charles’s only inheritance. The Spanish kingdoms of Aragon and Castile came to him via his mother, Joanna – nicknamed the Mad – who was the heir both to her mother, Isabella’s, kingdom of Castile, and her father’s, Ferdinand’s, kingdoms of Aragon and Naples. The title of duke of Burgundy, and with it the Burgundian inheritance – in 1515 approximating to what is now Belgium and Holland, then commonly referred to as the Low Countries – had already come to Charles from his father, Philip the Handsome, who had died in 1506. Philip’s father – Charles’s paternal grandfather – was none other than Maximilian, head of the house of Habsburg, whose territorial centre was Austria. On Maximilian’s death in 1519, Charles was not only to succeed to the Habsburg inheritance, but was also to be elected Holy Roman Emperor in his place. It was a mighty inheritance that would force this shy and introverted man into the very centre of European politics, where amongst other things he was to be, along with Francis I, Henry’s, and thus Wolsey’s, leading rival.12 But in 1515 this was in the future. Charles was then only fifteen, and therefore what mattered, as far as Henry and Wolsey were concerned, was not his views but those of his advisers – and these mattered a great deal. As the whole history of Anglo-French conflict during the previous hundred and fifty years demonstrated, no policy directed against the French was likely to succeed without, at the very least, the benevolent neutrality of the house of Burgundy. In 1515 not even this could be guaranteed. At the beginning of that year Charles was officially declared to have come of age. The regency of his aunt, the pro-English Margaret of Savoy, thereby came to an end, and Charles’s government was now dominated by the so-called ‘regents’, his former tutor, William of Croy, lord of Chièvres, and the chancellor of Burgundy, John Sauvage. While not in any committed way pro-French, they were not prepared to allow the young duke to be dragged into war with France at Henry’s bequest, as had happened in 1513. Instead, they immediately set about restoring good relations with the new French king, Francis I – which is precisely what Wolsey did not want.13

  Lastly, the Pope – and it is extremely difficult to make any simple statement about Leo X’s intentions.14 This is due in part to the complexities of his personality, but even more to the complexities of his situation: ruler of the Catholic Church and of the papal states and, as head of the Medici family, effectively ruler of Florence, it required a considerable juggling act on his part to keep in play the conflicts of interest that resulted. No wonder he, and even more his cousin, the future Clement VII, at this time his close adviser, have been accused of being over-cautious. Probably Leo would have preferred the French not to have been in Northern Italy. But once they were there he was prepared to make the best of it.15 At the famous meeting between him and Francis at Bologna in December 1515, despite the French king’s recent military victories, Leo had not emerged altogether the loser. Just who in reality secured the greater benefits from the Concordat of Bologna, by which the relationship between the papacy and the French Church was from henceforth to be governed, is difficult to evaluate – the usual answer has been the French Crown, whose right of nomination to major benefices in France, was formally conceded. But from Leo’s point of view the mere fact that the concordat replaced the long-hated pragmatic sanction of Borges of 1438, whereby all papal rights in France had been severely curtailed, was an enormous feather in his cap. Territorially, he had had to endure the loss of Parma and Piacenza to Francis, and Modena and Reggio to his supposed ally, the duke of Ferrara all of which was very painful and, incidentally, soured relations between the papacy and France. On the other hand, Leo was given a free hand to remove the duke of Urbino and replace him with his own nephew, Lorenzo de’ Medici, even though the duke’s neutrality during the war had been of great help to Francis. The result of all this was that, while during the next three years Leo X did find continuing French influence in Italy irksome, there was no great incentive for him to ally with England to throw the French out.16

  One way and another, the anti-French alliance that Wolsey concocted in the aftermath of Marignano was a pretty ramshackle affair: a few Swiss cantons and an emperor who bore all too close a resemblance to that famous knight of la Mancha, Don Quixote. The surprising thing is that in March 1516 it came very close to success. Urged on by the English envoys, Richard Pace and Sir Robert Wingfield, the Swiss and Maximilian were converging on a very inadequately defended Milan. By 25 March their two armies were poised for attack only nine miles from the city, at which point Maximilian decided to sit ‘still in pensiveness, and was angry with every man that did move him to set forward’.17 That evening he announced his decision not to besiege Milan and the next day he was off, taking with him the gunpowder, thereby effectively preventing the Swiss from pressing on with the siege alone.18

  Why Maximilian retreated at this juncture need not concern us. All sorts of reasons were given at the time, by those like Pace who were very critical, and by those like Wingfield, whose many years at the Imperial court had made him so great a devotee of Maximilian’s that even as regards this episode he would have nothing said against him. Two brief comments may be helpful. Maximilian’s complaint that the promised English money had not arrived was true as far as it went – and poor Pace suddenly found himself having to serve as a human surety that it would eventually be paid. On the other hand, on the day that Maximilian decided to retreat the money was less than a fortnight away, and if he could have got within nine miles of Milan without it, he could surely have continued for just a little longer.19 The truth seems to have been that he had very little wish to attack the city, and the lack of money was merely an excuse. As has been made clear, it was Venice, not France, that was his main enemy, so to have provoked the wrath of France would not have been at all to his advantage. During the spring and summer of 1516 Maximilian was to occupy himself chiefly with the defence of Brescia and Verona, though without much success. As early as May he had managed to lose Brescia, and though he hung on to Verona for longer, by the end of the year he had decided to cut his losses and sell it back to Venice. By then he had also come to terms with the French.

  But if there was something a little strange about Maximilian’s performance before Milan, it was as nothing compared with Henry’s and Wolsey’s reaction to it. Far from drawing the obvious conclusion that Maximilian should never be trusted again, after just a brief period of disillusionment, they were to offer him an equally prominent part in an even more grandiose scheme to bring the French down.20 This entailed the construction of a new league consisting of Henry, Maximilian, Charles and, if possible, the pope, the principal purpose of which was to raise an annual pension for the Swiss, who in return would spearhead a military effort against the French. In essence it was the same policy as before, but instead of the rather ad hoc arrangements which had come to grief at the siege of Milan something rather more formal and, with luck, more effective was to be put in their place.

  Not altogether surprisingly, it did not turn out that way. The débâcle before Milan had done nothing to improve relations between the emperor and the Swiss,21 and the fact that the English envoys, Pace and Wingfield, were locked in their own private battle, the result largely of the latter’s resentment that Pace should have been preferred to him as royal secretary, did not help either.22 Nor did another rivalry, this in the Swiss camp between Matthew Schinner, cardinal of Sion, an influential figure in Swiss politics, whose violently anti-French sentiments made him anxious to restore good relations with the emperor as quickly as possible, and Galeazzo Visconti, the recently appointed captain-general of the Swiss army, who, since his maj
or concern was to remove the French from Milan, was far less ready to forgive and forget the emperor’s recent behaviour.23 None of this assisted Wolsey’s plans, but a more serious hindrance was the continuing refusal of Charles’s leading ministers, Chièvres and Sauvage, to help.24 Wolsey’s answer to this was, to say the least, high-handed: to engineer their removal from office! This was to be achieved by paying the emperor to make a ‘descent’ on the Low Countries so as to be able to persuade his young grandson, Duke Charles, to appoint councillors more amenable to Wolsey’s direction.25 Meanwhile he proceeded to negotiate with the duke’s ambassadors in England as if the regents had already been dismissed. On 29 October 1516 a treaty was concluded with them and with Schinner, representing Maximilian, that apparently gave Wolsey everything he wanted.26 Its main purpose was to supply that pension for the Swiss that was ostensibly at the centre of Wolsey’s strategy. He also sought to retain control of the timing of any attack on the French by the insertion of a clause whereby any refusal by the French to meet an English claim to redditus et emolumentia – a deliberately catch-all phrase designed to cover anything from the return of Henry’s sister Mary’s dowry as dowager queen of France to any revenue resulting from Henry’s claim to the throne of France (which all English kings since Edward III had claimed) – could be taken as a casus belli.27

  Potentially this treaty was a great coup, deliberately designed to cause the regents maximum embarrassment, but especially because only three months previously, at Noyon, they had signed a treaty with France which should have prevented Duke Charles from making any alliance with the English.28 The question now was whether Wolsey would be able to force the regents to honour what had been signed on their behalf, or, alternatively, whether his plan to get them dismissed would work. Throughout the winter of 1516-17 English diplomacy did its utmost to achieve one or the other solution, but to no avail. The regents felt confident enough to repudiate what their ambassadors had agreed29 – a confidence which was apparently in no way shaken when in January Maximilian eventually made his long-expected ‘descent’.30 Indeed, the English ambassadors reported back that the regents seemed as strongly entrenched as ever.31 What was worse, these same ambassadors were soon confirming the suspicion that before his arrival Maximilian had followed the regents’ example by coming to terms with the French, even though this had meant selling his beloved Verona back to the Venetians.32

  Thus, by the spring of 1517 it had come to this. England had spent the previous twelve months financing Maximilian’s defence of a city which he had then proceeded to sell. She had financed his ‘descent’ to the Low Countries in an effort to bring about an effective league against the French, only to learn that he had gone and joined up with them. Meanwhile, Richard Pace had spent this time endeavouring to keep at least some of the Swiss cantons faithful to the English, only to find that in November 1516 at Fribourg the French had outbid him.33 It is difficult to estimate what all this had cost, but it was probably somewhere in the region of £35,000.34 What, on the face of it at least, seems much clearer is that it had been money down the drain.

  It might be thought that the time was thus long overdue for England to cut her losses, perhaps even for her to do what everybody else was doing and make her own terms with the French – but not a bit of it. Wolsey’s efforts to create some kind of anti-French alliance persisted, and with them inevitably the expenditure of yet more money. What is even more bizarre is that now the money was to be given to none other than the regents, the very people whom he had been spending most of the winter trying to get rid of. A year had passed since Ferdinand’s death, and it was high time that Charles claimed his inheritance in Spain. And once he had done this, so the English thinking went, he would be in a position seriously to turn his attention to some great exploit against the French. There was also the hope that once he had got to Spain the influence of the Burgundian regents might be lessened. At any rate, the decision was made for England to help finance Charles’s voyage to his new kingdoms of Aragon and Castile – and this took place in September.35 Two months earlier an extremely showy embassy had been sent over from the Low Countries for the purpose, no less, of confirming that long-resisted treaty of the previous October.36 Is this evidence that at last Wolsey’s policy was beginning to work? Well, not obviously so. For one thing that rather essential clause, as far as the English were concerned, to do with redditus et emolumentia, was omitted.37 More puzzling was the attitude taken towards the provision of the Swiss with money, which, it will be remembered, had been at the heart of Wolsey’s strategy. In September Pace was reporting from Switzerland that since the new league ‘hath been concluded to the king’s great cost, and your grace’s singular wisdom and intolerable labours, no man has had any mind to this thing that should be concluded with the Swiss’.38 And by the following month he was back in England, with no treaty with the Swiss concluded. Indeed, nobody seemed at all interested in it – which is odd, because without it there was really no hope of any serious moves against the French. The only conclusion to be drawn is that insofar as it had been Wolsey’s intention ever since the autumn of 1515 to organize a major offensive against the French, it had met with no success whatsoever.

  What has been briefly described is, however, not only a policy that appears to have failed, but one that was doomed almost from the start; and, furthermore, many informed people had thought it likely to fail and had not been afraid to say so. This last point needs to be considered in more detail, and this will provide an opportunity to look more generally at the nuts and bolts of foreign policy during Wolsey’s time: how was the information on which it was based obtained, by whom, and other related matters.

  During April and May 1517, a busy but not unrepresentative period, Henry and Wolsey received at least seventy letters from their diplomatic representatives in Europe. The English effort was being concentrated in the Low Countries, what with Maximilian’s ‘descent’, and attempts to get the regents to agree to an alliance against France. The main burden of the negotiations there was borne by two extremely competent diplomats, Charles Somerset earl of Worcester, and Cuthbert Tunstall. They were very different. Worcester, an illegitimate son of Henry Beaufort 3rd duke of Somerset, had been involved in most of the major diplomatic events under Henry VII, who had first made him chamberlain of the royal household and then in 1505 raised him to the peerage as Lord Herbert. Henry VIII had confirmed him in his household post and had continued to make great use of him in the conduct of diplomacy. He had played an important role during the 1513 campaign in France, while in 1514 he had accompanied Henry’s sister, Mary, to her marriage with Louis XII, and had then become involved in the refortification of the recently captured town of Tournai. In the same year he was created earl of Worcester. His mission to the Low Countries in early 1517 had been his next big job, and many others followed. Worcester was, thus, an extremely experienced diplomat. Aristocratic, and, indeed, related through the Beauforts to the Tudors, he was perfectly at home in the courts of Europe. But he was much more than a mere ceremonial figure, as his despatches during the early months of 1517 make clear. And perhaps it should be added that, though he was in no sense a dependant of Wolsey’s, the two men appear to have worked well together.

  Tunstall’s background was quite different, though he too was illegitimate. Educated at Oxford, Cambridge and Padua, and graduate in both canon and civil law, he was quickly picked up by Archbishop Warham, becoming his chancellor and commissary of the prerogative court of Canterbury. Such positions were traditional starting points for a successful career in both Church and state, and so it turned out for Tunstall. Having been in 1516 appointed master of the rolls, in 1522 he became bishop of London, and in the 1523 keeper of the privy seal. In his humanist interests, or rather the combination of these with an active career in the royal service, Tunstall is in many ways a representative figure of the early sixteenth century. Knowing both Greek and Hebrew, he was in touch with leading continental humanists such as Erasmus, and also, of co
urse, with humanist circles in England. In 1517 he was a comparative newcomer to diplomacy, his experience beginning with that embassy to the Low Countries, two years before, made famous by More’s involvement and his writing of at least part of Utopia during it.39 Despite his manifold duties at home, during the next twelve years Tunstall was constantly used for important embassies abroad, no doubt because he was good at diplomacy.40 In the early sixteenth century the diplomatic careerist had not yet arrived – at least not in England – but it would be a mistake therefore to underestimate the diplomatic skills of men like Tunstall and Worcester. Indeed, they were clearly ‘pros’ to their finger tips, and all the more effective for having a wide experience of government.

  The diplomat with the most difficult task during these years was Richard Pace, who had to try to keep the peace between Maximilian and the Swiss at the same time as trying to prevent the Swiss from going over en bloc to the French.41 His career was not dissimilar from Tunstall’s, at least until madness and perhaps Wolsey’s displeasure intervened. Like Tunstall, Pace studied at Padua, but also probably at Bologna and Ferrara. Then in 1509 he became secretary to Cardinal Bainbridge who was just starting his embassy at Rome, and on his master’s death in 1514 he was taken up first by Wolsey and then, almost immediately, by the king. Indeed, while on his embassy to the Swiss in 1516, he was appointed royal secretary, and it was during this time that he wrote – in the public baths at Constance, he alleged – his De Fructu. This suggests a further similarity with Tunstall, his humanist interests, and, if his ecclesiastical career was not to be as distinguished, he did hold many important benefices, which included succeeding Colet as dean of St Paul’s. Pace’s career will have to be looked at again.42 All that needs to be said here is that his linguistic skills and scholarly reputation well equipped him for his many diplomatic missions, especially to Italy where his previous experience in the service of Cardinal Bainbridge in Rome would serve him in good stead.