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

by Gwyn, Peter

  What of Henry and Wolsey? Had they any intention of keeping their word? The answer already given is that the enormous efforts made by them during 1522 and 1523 to prepare for war indicate that some notable exploit against France was contemplated; but, that said, the qualifications press in on all sides. To begin with, war with France brought with it the renewal of Albany’s interference in Scotland. England’s northern border had to be put on a war footing and her most experienced military commander, the earl of Surrey, was to spend much of 1523 and 1524 at the head of a large army fending off the constantly threatened Scottish invasion. Moreover, some people, including apparently Thomas Cromwell, considered that it was against Scotland that the full weight of English resources should be concentrated, while Surrey’s unknown correspondent suggested that £10,000 or £12,000 of the 1523 subsidy should be set aside ‘on the building up again of the piles and castles on our English borders’.104 But if Scottish affairs were an unavoidable distraction, what is more difficult to interpret is the fact that from the outset both Henry and Wolsey entertained the strongest suspicions, constantly fuelled by the reports of the English ambassadors at the Imperial court, of Charles’s intentions. Time and again these warned of the emperor’s lack of money, of his failure to make any warlike preparations, of his preoccupation with Italian affairs, and of his intention to make use of English support merely to further his own interests.105

  There was thus nothing starry-eyed about England’s attitude towards the Great Enterprise. Moreover, as has already been suggested, despite its grandiose title, it did not really represent any dramatic change in Wolsey’s underlying approach to foreign policy. The conquest of France was never very high on the agenda, and indeed when dining with the Imperial ambassadors on Christmas day 1522, Wolsey ventured the opinion that there was little likelihood that the allies would ever conquer France, for the French king would be able to fortify his cities while at the same time refusing to give battle.106 He was almost certainly being deliberately pessimistic in order to test the Imperial commitment, but that such a remark could even be made is an indication that England’s approach to the Great Enterprise was far from straightforward. What does seem to have been looked for was some notable exploit by which France would be forced to make terms even more favourable to England than those she had made in 1518, this in turn leading to a new European settlement that Wolsey could claim had been brought about under England’s aegis. Thus, in September 1522 the English ambassadors to the emperor were informed that while the present French offers of peace might seem favourable, they would be much more favourable once the war against them had been successfully prosecuted.107

  But though the title Great Enterprise may in one sense mislead, it may nonetheless help to capture the mood of the mid-1520s which was anything but pessimistic or defensive; hence the large amounts of money sought from the English taxpayers, hence the immediate despatch in the summer of 1522 of an expeditionary force under the earl of Surrey, and hence, in part at any rate, the willingness to commit a force of some eleven thousand men under the duke of Suffolk to what became, briefly, a march on Paris. Whatever view of Henry’s and Wolsey’s mood is taken affects the interpretation of the policy that they adopted. If, for instance, one believes, according to the most persuasive and only detailed account of these events in recent years,108 that their main concern was with damage-limitation, which in effect meant trying to ensure that England ended up on the winning side, then what happened was something of a disaster. It was the Imperialists who, in February 1525, were to win the decisive battle of Pavia and who in the process captured the French king, but by August it was the French who were to be England’s closest ally – not only because Charles had conspicuously failed to do anything that Henry and Wolsey asked him to do, but also because the English taxpayers had refused to shell out any more money, thereby forcing king and minister to bring the Great Enterprise to an end. In the account that follows, the fruits of Pavia will be considered to have been much more satisfactory. Indeed, as a consequence of the new French alliance, England was arguably in an even better position to dominate European affairs than in either 1514 or 1518, until, that is, Henry’s matrimonial concerns completely undermined it.

  There is obviously some contradiction between an optimistic Wolsey and a Wolsey highly suspicious of Imperialist intentions, but the contradiction lies in the situation and not in the interpretation. One way of describing English policy is to say that until the collapse of Suffolk’s expedition in December 1523, optimism was dominant. The main evidence for this is the speed and energy with which Wolsey attempted to take advantage of what in a letter to Henry of 10 August 1523 he called the ‘so many concurrances’.109 These included the detachment of Venice from the French side, partly thanks to the efforts of England’s ambassador to the Republic, Richard Pace,110 the decision by the new pope Adrian VI finally to commit himself to the Anglo-Imperial side,111 but above all the severing of the allegiance to the French Crown of the constable of France, Charles duke of Bourbon.

  The precise reasons for this dramatic event are obscure, but it had something to do with the death of the duke’s wife in April 1521, the complicated problems of her inheritance that ensued, and the decision of both Francis I and his mother, Louise of Savoy, to lay claims to that inheritance. Bourbon’s unhappiness about this was known to the Imperialists as early as August 1522, and by the following May serious negotiations were under way, which in the following month Henry and Wolsey were to join in, when first William Knight and then John Russell were sent on embassies to Bourbon.112 Thus, by the late summer of 1523 a leading French nobleman at the head of three duchies, seven counties, two vicomtés and seven lordships, not to say several fortresses, was poised to rebel, and with the real prospect that a number of his fellow noblemen would join him. The opportunity to inflict severe damage upon Francis was just too good to miss, even though the Great Enterprise was not scheduled until the following year; and, indeed, Wolsey had been seeking to put it off until 1525.113

  Still, however good the prospects, the speed with which England acted is worth stressing. On 1 June 1523 the Imperial ambassador, de Praet, could write that English preparations were so tardy that he strongly advised his master not to bother with their help for this year.114 But by the end of August the duke of Suffolk and his expeditionary force were in France – and despite the fact that not only had no formal agreement yet been signed between England and Bourbon,115 but a large English army under Surrey was already engaged in counter-measures against the Scots.116 That Henry and Wolsey were prepared to be committed on two fronts is a measure of that optimism already referred to. But what can also be concluded is that their priority was some notable exploit in France. An English invasion of France in the summer of 1523 could easily have been avoided. In the event not only was there an invasion, but also a march on Paris.117

  The march on Paris in the autumn and early winter of 1523 was the occasion for probably the best-known disagreement between king and cardinal. The original plan, accepted reluctantly by the Imperialists on 2 July, had been to besiege Boulogne.118 Situated on the English Channel and close to Calais, it was accessible to the English from land and sea. Moreover, it would make rather more sense of England’s toe-hold in France, the area around Calais called the English Pale, if Boulogne could be added to it. Thus, whenever there was an English invasion of France at this time, an attack on Boulogne usually featured in it, and indeed in 1544 Henry was to capture the town.119 However, sometime between 12 and 20 September Wolsey changed his mind. Instead, he accepted the wisdom of what was really an Imperial plan, though one that had apparently been contemplated the previous year, to march deep into French territory, along a line close to the borders of Flanders, crossing the Somme a little to the east of Amiens. That accomplished, the English army would contrive to link up both with Bourbon’s forces in the Champagne and with a contingent of German cavalry, or landsknechts, whose cost Henry and Charles had agreed to share.120

 
; There were obvious worries about this new strategy. Pushed by the regent Margaret and the commander of her forces that were to co-operate with the English, Floris Egmont count of Buren, there was a very real possibility, recognized by Wolsey as well as by Henry, that its main purpose was to defend the Burgundian border from French attack at England’s expense.121 And to this general worry Henry added a number of what might be called technical or military ones. It was too late in the year to mount such a campaign, what with the ‘wet weather and rotten ways’. Capturing the small towns in their path would be much harder than the Imperialists were suggesting, especially given the difficulty of manoeuvring heavy artillery in bad weather. The logistical problems, which even for a stationary army around Boulogne were difficult enough, especially given the all too justified doubts about Margaret’s ability and willingness to provide the vital supplies she had promised, would be ten times worse for an army marching deep into French territory. If, as Bourbon was insisting, the allied forces were to pose as an army of liberation and that as a consequence no ‘profit of spoil’ was allowed, the soldiers would have ‘evil will to march far forward, and their captains shall have much ado to keep them from crying Home! Home!’ Most importantly, there was a very real danger that with the English lines of communication overextended, with the effectiveness of Bourbon’s support difficult to calculate, and the likelihood that his treason would force Francis to give up his invasion of Northern Italy, to concentrate on defeating the rebellious duke and his allies, Suffolk’s army could find itself deep in enemy country, isolated and alone, an easy prey to a French attack.122

  Reading Henry’s sane and all too prescient analysis, one is immediately struck by how little it seems to relate to the gung-ho figure sometimes portrayed, who if, in some accounts at least, he had not been restrained by such as Wolsey, would have been constantly charging into battle. In this case it was Wolsey who was being more gung-ho than Henry, and to explain this curious reversal of roles on the grounds that Wolsey felt that if his master insisted on having a war, then the sooner the better, does not entirely convince.123 It seems more likely that this apparent disagreement is rather evidence of an essential unity of purpose between king and minister. Henry had thought it necessary to acquaint Wolsey with ‘these considerations … to the entent that the same by your high prudence advised and considered, such final determination may be taken by his grace and yours’. That this was to accept the new plan is not evidence that, despite his better judgment Henry had given way to a dominant minister; it is more likely that in the light of the assessment of the commanders in the field, Suffolk and Buren, and, perhaps even more, of Russell’s report of his meeting with Bourbon he decided that it was, on balance, worth the greater risks involved.124 The point is that if there had been real tension between king and minister, the tone of Henry’s letter would have been very different,125 and indeed the issue might well have blown them apart, especially when many of Henry’s points turned out to be all too true. However, there is no hint that Henry ever held the ultimate failure of the expedition against Wolsey, and no doubt for the good reason that he had in the end, like Wolsey, accepted the very compelling reasons for embarking upon it.

  Just how great a failure the expedition was is a matter of judgment, and probably the tendency has been to exaggerate it.126 It is true that by the second week in November, with the onset of weather more wintery than any in living memory, mutiny in the English army was rife: ‘it was no worse being hanged in England than dying of cold in France’, was apparently the feeling. If anything, things were worse with the Imperial contingent under Buren, who for at least six weeks had received no money. By 13 November the pressure to order an immediate withdrawal could no longer be resisted, though Suffolk’s intention was still to overwinter in France. Indeed, only a few days before, he had received instructions to that effect, together with the news that substantial reinforcements and money were on the way. But it was not to be. The continuing bad weather and the almost immediate disbandment of Buren’s forces forced Suffolk on the 22nd to instruct his troops to make their own way back to Calais as best they could, and most of them seem not to have bothered to stop there. If not exactly a rout, it was not far off, and for a brief moment, at least, Suffolk appears to have wondered what sort of reception he would receive on his return. Interestingly, it was not at all bad, and no feeling of disgrace prevented him before leaving Calais from exercising his privilege as a commander in the field of rewarding some of his men with knighthoods. Moreover, in the following year, and again in 1528, he was appointed to command new expeditionary forces to France, though in the event they were never sent. Thus his military reputation, in Henry’s eyes at least, does not appear to have suffered – and in a sense why should it have? In the space of six weeks, eight towns had fallen to him, and he had found himself only seventy miles from Paris and in a position seriously to contemplate its capture. On the very day that the withdrawal was ordered, the defences of that city had been put on full alert, every bell silent so that when one did ring the citizens would know that the attack had begun. For a moment it had looked as if Suffolk had secured ‘unrestricted entry into the bowels of France’, and even that the English Crown’s ancient right to the throne of France might be enforced.127 It was not quite like 1419-20 when Henry v had entered Paris as heir to the king of France, but the similarity made it all seem for a time quite exciting. And even when, early in the following year, both Henry and Wolsey knew the worst, they nevertheless felt able to make the point that this near-success with such a small force showed the golden opportunities that awaited, if only their allies would come up to the mark.128

  Thus, in Henry and Wolsey’s eyes the failure of Suffolk’s expedition was a qualified one, and the qualifications are of great importance. They felt, and with some justification, that England had been badly let down by every one of her allies. Margaret had failed to provide money for her own troops and the promised carts and horses for Suffolk’s. Buren had failed to prevent his troops from looting and pillaging, thus creating great difficulties for the English command, which at Bourbon’s request had pledged itself not to permit such activity. Neither had the sudden disbanding of his troops, when all that had been agreed was withdrawal, helped very much. Meanwhile, the absence of any contribution at all from Bourbon had been even more disastrous. Not only had the rest of France singularly failed to come to his support, even in those areas where his family influence could have been expected to be decisive, but his promised invasion of the Champagne from over the border in the Franche-Comté came to nothing, while the landsknechts supposedly hired to help him never got very far.129 And what had Charles been doing all the while? Well, according to Henry and Wolsey, not a damned thing, or at least nothing that helped them. Indeed, it looked very much as if he had been using English money and men merely to further his own ends. In March 1524 he recovered Fuentarrabia, and in the following month the French were yet again driven out of Northern Italy, but none of this could be said to have been to England’s advantage. Moreover, as Henry and Wolsey were unlikely to forget, one consequence of the alliance with the emperor had been the giving up of the very considerable French ‘pension’. Back in Bruges in August 1521, Charles had promised to compensate the English for this loss by the payment of what was called the ‘indemnity’, to the tune of 133,305 gold crowns (nearly £30,000) a year.130 The only trouble was that not a penny of it had come England’s way – and indeed never was to come. Thus, by early 1524 Henry and Wolsey had a whole series of complaints to put to England’s allies, and they were not backward in putting them, either then or during the months that followed. Indeed, for the next year and a half they were to dominate the relationship between king and emperor, and they go a long way to explain why by the summer of 1525 that relationship had broken down.131

  It would be wrong, of course, to take these complaints entirely at their face value; to some extent they were merely part of the bargaining process, and indeed it could be argued that far
from showing that Henry’s and Wolsey’s belief in the Great Enterprise was disintegrating, they suggest a continuing commitment. There is, after all, nothing like putting people in the wrong to make them anxious to do what you want. The argument here, however, will be that the complaints were to a great extent only a smoke screen to disguise Wolsey’s increasing lack of faith in the Great Enterprise as a whole and his desire to extricate his master, if only a favourable opportunity arose – but one must emphasize the last point. Wolsey did not suddenly decide in January 1524 that in August 1525 he would make an alliance with the French; that was not his way, nor in the real world can it be anybody’s. What happened is that at about that time he came to the decision that the strategy that had emerged in Bruges in the summer of 1521 of using an Imperial alliance to forge a new European settlement was unlikely to be successful, and he began actively to look for a new way forward.

  That Wolsey’s approach had changed significantly can be shown by his reaction to the opportunities for another invasion of France in the late summer and autumn of 1524. On the face of it, the prospects looked good. The French defeat and expulsion from Northern Italy in April had been followed up by an invasion of French territory by an army led by Bourbon. True, it did not move north towards Lyons as Wolsey had hoped, but by the middle of August it was besieging Marseilles, reached on the 26th. On the way there, rather as with Suffolk’s army the previous year, one French town after another had surrendered to it.132 Admittedly, after his success in March in capturing Fuenterrabia, Charles had not done much to help Bourbon, but at least until late May he had put on some pretence of being keener on concerted action than he had shown himself to be earlier.133 As regards Scotland, however, things had dramatically improved with the departure of Albany to France in June, which led almost immediately to negotiations for peace and thus removed the threat, very much a reality the previous year, of a war on two fronts.134