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

by Gwyn, Peter

  Late in February 1518, Wolsey received warning of a ‘plot’. He did not take it too seriously. The secret negotiations with the French continued. Henry decided to celebrate Easter at Abingdon with very little ceremony and a much diminished court on account of the sweating sickness. He did, however, want his sister, Mary, Suffolk’s wife, to be present, and it may be that Suffolk saw this as an opportunity to get back into favour. At any rate, he wrote to consult Wolsey on the subject,150 and both Suffolk and his wife certainly did come. But on 29 March Pace wrote to tell Wolsey that Buckingham also intended to be present.151 Immediately warning signals began to flash. On 3 April Pace thanked Wolsey on Henry’s behalf for his advice about ‘great personages’, and also reported the precautions that had already been taken.152 It is perhaps important to stress that in 1518 neither Henry nor Wolsey had any knowledge of Buckingham’s interest in prophecies concerning his own succession to the throne; that was only to come to light in the autumn of 1520, and was to result in his trial and execution for high treason – and there is no evidence that prior to this they had had any desire to destroy him. Indeed, only two years before, Wolsey had been helping to plan the marriage of Buckingham’s son and heir. What is true is that Buckingham had never been very close to Henry and had been given no place of trust or responsibility, nor was he often at court. Thus, when he announced his intention of coming, and with Suffolk already present, the possibility that the papal warning of a plot might be justified had to be taken seriously. But there appears to have been no panic, certainly no arrests or interrogations, not even any hint that they were under suspicion. Instead a few discreet measures were taken to ensure that the number of retainers that the two noblemen brought with them to court, or stationed in the neighbourhood, was severely restricted. In other words, presumably because it did not altogether believe in its existence, the government’s response to the possibility of a plot was very restrained. All the same, there had been just enough in it for Henry to feel the need to suggest that an eye should be kept not only on Buckingham and Suffolk but also on any other noblemen whose loyalty to the regime was in any way suspect. Hence his famous letter.

  Meanwhile, serious negotiations with the French were being revived. On 8 April the bishop of Paris had written to Wolsey urging him to work for peace between the two countries, as he had done in Louis XII’s time.153 On the 14th he wrote again to thank Wolsey for his favourable response, at the same time informing him that an envoy was on the way with further proposals.154 It was to discuss these and the results of the negotiations between the envoy and Wolsey that Henry had made his dash to Greenwich during the first weekend in July, and it was these results that he presented to his councillors at Woodstock. They apparently judged them ‘to be not only for the great tranquility and wealth of the realm alone, but also for the common quietness and wealth of all Christendom’.155 Nevertheless it took three more months, and some very hard bargaining, to complete the negotiations. Most of that bargaining was between Wolsey and the bishop of Paris, who arrived in London at the very beginning of August. Information about it is scanty, partly because it was conducted with unusual secrecy.156 However, enough is known to identify the areas of conflict, and to suggest that by and large it was the French who gave way.

  As we noted earlier, the occasion, or excuse, for the reopening of negotiations in the spring of 1518 was the birth of the dauphin on 28 February, and the possibility of a marriage between him and Henry’s daughter, Mary. It was to be laid down in the Treaty of London that the marriage would not take place until the dauphin was fifteen, so that with the high sixteenth-century mortality rate and the changeability of diplomatic relations the likelihood of it taking place was never very great. Meanwhile the betrothal would serve as an earnest of good intentions, and a symbol of what it was hoped would be a long and loving relationship between England and France.157

  Under the terms of the marriage settlement Mary’s dowry was fixed at 330,000 gold crowns – a figure only reluctantly agreed to by the French, after a good deal of haggling.158 With any marriage settlement haggling was to be expected, but in this case matters were complicated by the most difficult item on the agenda, the return to France of Tournai.159 As was indicated earlier, the problem here was to get the right balance: neither monarch could afford to lose too much face: Henry by appearing to give it up for too little, Francis by having to pay too much. And less defensively Wolsey was anxious to exploit this expensive bargaining-counter for something that could not be measured in financial terms – real diplomatic advantage. What precisely Wolsey had hoped for in 1515 is not known but there had been talk of territorial compensation.160 In the autumn of 1517 the French were offering 900,000 francs, which Wolsey estimated as equivalent to £100,000.161 A year later the French agreed to pay 600,000 crowns, or about £120,000. Of this, 50,000 francs was to be paid on the day that they re-occupied the city, the rest in twice yearly instalments of 25,000 francs. In fact these payments would cease long before the sum of 600,000 crowns was reached, because by a complicated arrangement the sum the French owed for Tournai would be written off against the 330,000 gold crowns to be paid them as Mary’s dowry. The amount that the English would receive was, therefore, 270,000 gold crowns, or £54,000.162

  At first glance this appears to have been a poor price, for it nowhere near covered the cost of the five and a half year occupation of Tournai. A conservative estimate puts this at £250,000, though some of this, perhaps as much as £15,000, had been recovered from the citizens of Tournai by way of an annual levy.163 This puts the English financial loss at £180,000, rather more than the Crown’s annual income. Admittedly, for this figure Mary, in theory, obtained a husband. On the other hand Francis obtained a newly built citadel which had cost the English over £50,000. Of the two, the citadel may have looked the better asset, though as it turned out it was not to be so. Mary never got the dauphin as her husband, but in 1521 Francis lost Tournai to Charles v and, what was even worse, from 1525 Francis found himself having to pay the English for a city that he no longer possessed. However, none of this was calculable in 1518. The problem here is to know how much to make of the English loss. Of course, it would have been better to have recovered much more for Tournai, but there were limits to what the French were willing to pay. As it is, both over the price for Tournai and the figure fixed for the dowry the French did in the end agree to pay rather more than they had initially intended, which suggests that Wolsey got the best bargain available.164

  It is anyway undoubtedly a mistake to concentrate on the book-keeping aspects of the treaty, for the occupation of Tournai had never been a financial venture. What its capture and occupation had given Wolsey was an important diplomatic weapon without which there might well not have been any treaty at all. Moreover, the treaty of London not only committed France to paying England £5,000 per annum for Tournai, but also guaranteed the previous commitment, under the treaties of 1514 and 1515, to pay her an annual sum of £10,000. Fifteen thousand pounds a year was a considerable sum for one sovereign state to pay to another, equivalent to about a tenth of the revenues of the English Crown. But again, it is not just a question of money. That France was prepared to pay so much is evidence for the success of Henry and Wolsey’s aggressive policy. The payment symbolized England’s dominant role in the relationship, one that her actual financial and military strength did not merit.

  The restoration of Tournai was probably the most important single item on the agenda in September 1518, but one that appears to have caused almost as much difficulty was the vexed question of whether or not the duke of Albany should be allowed to return to Scotland.165 The English were determined to prevent this. The French position was more ambiguous. It has already been argued that they had no intention of allowing Scottish affairs to get in the way of successful negotiations with England, and this, even before the Treaty of London, had led to Scottish mistrust of their actions. On the other hand, they did not want completely to sever their traditional links with Scot
land which, if the English alliance did not survive, would once again be of the utmost importance. The compromise they arrived at was probably a secret agreement that Albany would not be allowed to return during James V’s minority. There is no definite proof for this, but at the time various people suggested that this was indeed what had happened, and various draft clauses have survived.166 Even more convincing is the circumstantial evidence. When the time came for Scotland to join the treaty of universal peace, made at the same time as the treaty between England and France, she refused. Moreover, she showed every sign of being highly suspicious of what had been agreed between those two countries. She also proved very reluctant to renew the truce with England, which was to expire in November 1519, and it needed a combined Anglo-French embassy and a French threat to leave her completely in the lurch before she would agree to do so. Meanwhile Albany was to remain in France until November 1521.167 By that time the Anglo-French alliance formed in London in 1518 was on the point of breaking up. It does, therefore, look as if the exclusion of Albany from Scotland was one of the English gains from the bargaining in September 1518, even though there was no reference to it in any of the public treaties. If this is so, it marked the successful conclusion of English efforts to oust him that had started the moment that Albany had set foot in Scotland three years previously.168

  The French response to the English attempts to prevent French piracy and to obtain compensation for English merchants was, inevitably and with justification, to make counter-claims. The legal battles had been joined at various meetings to settle the rival claims in the late autumn and early winter of 1517, but with no success – and there is a suspicion that these meetings were anyway a cover to allow more serious political negotiations to continue informally. And once the right political climate had been established, it did not prove too difficult, as part of the London negotiations, to draw up procedures by which merchants from both countries could have their grievances looked into – not that the procedures seem to have been all that successful, but then establishing the rights and wrongs in such cases is always difficult. Nor did the Treaty of London do anything very much to eliminate piracy in the English Channel, even if the restoration of normal relations between England and France would have made life more difficult for the pirates.169

  Two more personal matters had also been harming Anglo-French relations. First, there was the refusal of the French to return jewels and plate which the English claimed rightly belonged to the ‘French queen’, Henry’s sister, Mary. This issue had been strongly pushed by the English in 1515.170 In 1518 there was much less concern, though it was on Wolsey’s agenda, and before the final negotiations he raised the matter with Mary’s new husband, the duke of Suffolk.171 But none of the various treaties signed in October provided for the return of the dowry, and there is no evidence that the matter was debated. This is curious. If Wolsey had tried and failed one would have expected some mention to have survived; possibly Suffolk’s indiscretions with the French envoys during the previous year disinclined Wolsey to raise the matter.

  The second personal matter concerned Wolsey’s own tenure of the bishopric of Tournai. With the surrender of the town there was no chance of winning the battle against his French rival, Louis Guillard, and very little point as by 1518 Wolsey was archbishop of York and had just been made bishop commendatory of Bath and Wells. But Francis was quite prepared to accommodate Henry’s leading minister and the chief architect of the French alliance. In return for giving up all claims to the bishopric Wolsey gained a pension of about £1,200 a year which, considering that he had never secured anything like the full revenues from the diocese of Tournai was an extremely good bargain.172

  The pension does not, though, explain Wolsey’s pursuit of a French alliance. For one thing he was not dependent on the French for pensions of this kind. In 1517 Chièvres granted him one of between £300 and £400 a year and was soon making offers of Spanish bishoprics.173 Admittedly the pension was not as much as he received in lieu of Tournai, but was a little more than he had been receiving regularly from France since the Anglo-French alliance of 1514. As has been shown, the latter had in no way inhibited Wolsey from being a constant thorn in the French side, nor did the acceptance of one pension mean the rejection of another, unless, that is, a formal declaration of war against the donor’s country was involved, which was not the case at this time.

  Moreover, it must be stressed that Wolsey was not the only person in Europe in receipt of a foreign pension. The French were always free with such payments and, for instance, after 1525 they were going to spend annually about £4,000 on pensions to important Englishmen. Admittedly over half this amount went to Wolsey, but the dukes of Norfolk and Suffolk and the earl of Shrewsbury received about £100 a year each, and even Sir Thomas More received £30.174 The English did not provide pensions on anything like the same scale. This is probably not because they possessed greater moral rectitude, but because they could not so readily afford them. All the same, when it suited them they were willing to pay out. When Cardinal Schinner left England in November 1516 he was granted a pension of £666 13s 4d, in addition to presents worth about £900.175 Chièvres, on the other hand, when offered a pension in the autumn of 1518, turned it down, though graciously declaring that he would not mind a gratuity.176 He gave no reason for his refusal, which is a pity because it might have helped to define contemporary attitudes. If Chièvres thought that it was unbecoming for a leading minister to accept a foreign pension, he was probably exceptional. Presumably there was some expectation that the recipient would at least look favourably on the country that bestowed it. Like the business man’s lunch, the pension created a favourable climate; it might even incur some minor obligations, but not much more than that. After all, the pensions were not usually kept secret, and all Wolsey’s gains would have been known about by Henry, who never made any objection. Moreover, the practice was just too common to have been an effective way to control another country’s foreign policy; it would have meant that the highest bidder would always take the prize, and this does not seem to have happened. Wolsey did well from foreign gifts and pensions, and not just from French ones; that he did rather better than most people merely indicates his greater standing.

  To see England’s or any other country’s foreign policy as consisting of a private auction sale whereby leading royal ministers sought to feather their own nests is too naïve. We have seen how for three years Wolsey struggled to force the French to come to terms. The policy was expensive and difficult, involving the whole English diplomatic service, the royal Council, and above all the king himself. Henry’s involvement cannot be overestimated, as Pace’s correspondence with Wolsey during the spring and early summer of 1518 makes clear. Not only did Henry want to be informed of every detail, but he had to be persuaded of the correctness of every move.177

  Pace’s correspondence also reveals a disagreement between Henry and Wolsey, one that sheds some light on Wolsey’s methods and may help to confirm the interpretation of his intentions offered here. In April 1518 Wolsey was most anxious for Pace to return to the Swiss. Henry to begin with opposed the idea, then agreed, only for Pace to fall ill. And in the end he never went.178 Henry had argued, quite reasonably, that when England was striving to get on good terms with the French, to send Pace on a mission to try to break the French alliance with the Swiss could only be considered provocative, and therefore counter-productive. Wolsey’s reasons for wanting to send him have not survived, but they can be guesssed at. Such a move was entirely consistent with his policy over the previous three years, which had been to apply the greatest possible pressure on the French. It was to that end that he had secured the alliance with Maximilian, Charles, and Leo x, one of the principal aims of which was to subsidize a Swiss army. As we have seen, once that alliance was confirmed, in the early summer of 1517, little was done about the Swiss, and indeed Pace had soon been recalled. The reason seems clear enough. No sooner had Wolsey completed his alliance than he began
serious negotiations with the French, and for the time being did not need the threat of the Swiss army. When, by the end of 1517, the negotiations broke down, Wolsey once again needed to exert pressure. If the anti-French alliance was to break up too soon, then Wolsey’s hold on the French would be greatly weakened. Thus, in order to remind France of the existence of the alliance at a crucial time in his negotiations with them, Wolsey wanted Pace to return to Switzerland. The difference between Henry and Wolsey was not serious because both were fully agreed about the main aim of English policy, as indeed they were always to be. When from time to time disagreements occurred they were only ever over means, and that these did occur is not all that surprising.179 Both were, after all, intelligent and powerful personalities. More interestingly, the disagreements provide evidence for Henry’s close involvement in the conduct of foreign policy – something that has not always been appreciated.

  In October 1518 Wolsey secured the alliance with the French that he had been looking for during the previous three years; or perhaps it would be more correct to say that he recovered the alliance that he had made with Francis’s predecessor in August 1514. Francis had formally renewed that alliance but he had completely ignored its spirit. He had been less than generous to Henry’s sister Mary, the dowager queen of France; he had allowed Albany to go to Scotland and supplant Henry’s other sister, Margaret; he had shown scant interest in the complaints of English merchants. Above all, he had made it perfectly clear that the English were to have no say in the conduct of his foreign policy. By 1518, Francis’s attitude to an English alliance had changed. Wolsey’s diplomacy was not the only reason for this. Francis’s occupation of the duchy of Milan meant that he was now much more interested in the preservation of the status quo than he had been three years earlier. He also knew that Charles’s accession to the Spanish throne constituted a serious threat to his Italian gains, and perhaps to much else. It was time for him to look around for friends, or at least to try and do something about the English, who for three long years had been behind every move to thwart him. If England’s aggressive policy towards him was to continue in the changed circumstances of 1518, then Francis would be faced with a very serious situation, because the anti-French coalition would no longer be merely a paper one. Thus, though circumstances had undoubtedly helped, Wolsey’s aggression had also played a part in forcing Francis to make the vital move towards him in 1518. And that aggression continued during the negotiations in September, as he used the threat of his alliance with Charles and Maximilian, and in particular their reluctance to see Tournai returned to the French, to extract better terms from Francis.180 In the end, Francis was prepared both to pay more for Tournai than he would have liked and to risk jeopardizing the ancient alliance with the Scots. He was also ready to be much more deferential to Henry and Wolsey than he had been in the past.181 This is not to say that the English had everything their own way, or that the French were humbled; given their successes in 1515 and their vastly superior financial and military resources, it would have required more than the ad hoc alliance that Wolsey had cooked up with Maximilian and his motley crew to achieve that. But in the end the French had come to London, and if only in the symbolic sense, this constituted a victory for Henry and Wolsey.