The King's Cardinal: The Rise and Fall of Thomas Wolsey (Pimlico) (110 page)

Whatever view is correct, some chronology is called for, taking as a starting point the cancellation of Henry’s meeting with the French envoys on 9 March, the day that confirmation of Pavia reached England. Things then began to happen fairly quickly, except for the departure of the French envoys, which did not take place until the 21st.
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Still, this curious delay did not prevent Wolsey informing Margaret’s envoys on the 10th that Henry himself was to lead an invasion of France. On the 21st commissioners were appointed to secure the Amicable Grant, and on the 26th Tunstall and Richard Wingfield received their commission to go to Spain.
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In fact they did not leave Southampton until 18 April, having been held up by bad weather,
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by which time the decision that Henry would immediately lead an army over to France had been rescinded – the first hint, perhaps, that all was not quite as it seemed.
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Nevertheless, some kind of imminent English invasion was still, apparently, to take place. On 11 April Wolsey wrote to Norfolk, chosen to lead it, giving him details of his command, and on the 14th Norfolk wrote a modest thankyou for the honour, while promising to do his best. He was also able to report good progress in the county of Norfolk with the initial negotiations for the Amicable Grant.
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Meanwhile on the 12th Fitzwilliam and Robert Wingfield had been sent to Margaret with instructions to present the same aggressive line that Tunstall and Richard Wingfield were taking to the emperor and as Wolsey was employing with her envoys in England.
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But, over a week before Norfolk’s letter of the 14th, Warham had already reported resistance to the Amicable Grant in Kent,
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and by the 26th this had spread sufficiently for the government to modify their original demands – though, as will be shown, in a curiously uneven way. Not until 14 May were attempts to obtain money called off, by which time a minor uprising in the area of Suffolk around Lavenham, Sudbury and Hadleigh had had to be put down. Almost immediately after came the first clear indications that the Great Enterprise had been abandoned.

In the ten days following the cancellation of the grant Wolsey wrote a number of letters to English representatives abroad containing secret instructions. Unfortunately these have not survived but their gist can perhaps best be illustrated by the fact that immediately after receiving his, Clerk had an interview with the pope during the course of which his Holiness was informed that it had always been
Henry’s wish that the Imperial victory at Pavia should be ‘moderately used’ and that anyway his principal reason for taking part in the war had only ever been to save Northern Italy from French domination.
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The degree of double-talk is almost breathtaking but the message was surely clear enough. And if one needs more certainty, Wolsey’s letter to Henry of 27 May provides it. Its chief purpose was to explain why Margaret’s envoys, who had just taken leave of the king in readiness for their return home, had suddenly decided to stay on. Wolsey ventured to add that he did not doubt

but of your profound and great wisdom your grace will and can facilely conject what this manner of proceeding doth imply; and partly your grace shall take some conjecture thereof by such letters as Master Sampson now writeth which were delivered unto me by the said ambassadors. Your grace shall receive the same herewith, and right soon shall understand thereby that such war as the said emperor intendeth to provoke your highness unto shall little or nothing be to your commodity, profit or benefit. And whereas your highness hath lately been advertised that the said emperor would be moderate in his requests and demands of the French king to the intent that your bargain might be the better, I can perceive little or no appearance that he is minded so to do
.
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The notion that at this time Charles was intent on provoking Henry into any kind of war is ripe indeed, but clearly by this date England’s grandiose plans of only two months earlier were no more. Indeed it is more likely that negotiations with the French had been renewed. At any rate, sometime during the first week in June Joachim left Lyons
en route
for London, where he arrived on the 23rd. Just over a month later the chancellor of Alençon was also back and by the end of August a treaty between the two former enemies was signed, perhaps appropriately at the More, one of Wolsey’s country houses.

Presented thus, the chronology very much supports the interpretation that is to be rejected here. Everything appears to hinge on the failure of the Amicable Grant and the government’s recognition of this on, or near to, 14 May. Before this date English diplomacy shows every appearance of working towards an invasion of France. Only after it was cancelled was there a rapid change-about. And if this were not enough to clinch the argument, there is the undoubted fact that Wolsey himself was to inform the English ambassadors with the emperor that ‘the king’s coffers are not furnished for a continuance of war, and his subjects cannot help him’.
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Why then reject it? The immediate answer is that if the earlier interpretation of English foreign policy prior to Pavia was correct, then anything that has as its groundwork a euphoric reaction to the Imperial victory makes no sense. Henry’s and Wolsey’s suspicions of the way in which the Imperialists had sought to use England for their own purposes were just too great to be blown away, even by a victory on such a scale. However, what the scale did mean was that, for the moment, plans for any immediate desertion of the emperor had to be abandoned. There was little point in joining a sinking ship, and moreover, if France really was sinking, then there could
certainly be no question of leaving the salvage to the emperor. This last point needs to be stressed. The argument that follows is not that the revival of the Great Enterprise in March 1525, and the consequent request for an Amicable Grant, was a complete fiction. The circumstances were such that an invasion of France might have had to have been mounted. Charles might have been so fired up by Pavia that he might, after all, wish to invade France. Some provision had to be made for Bourbon, one of the victors of Pavia, who at the very least would be expecting to recover his lands in France and who might feel entitled to more. Moreover, there was even the possibility that as a result of the crushing defeat and the capture of its king, the French state might disintegrate, leaving a power vacuum that would have been too dangerous for Charles to ignore. In other words, even though Charles had never been keen on a conquest of France, the logic of the new situation might have compelled him to embark on one. And if France was to be dismembered, there was no way in which Henry’s honour would have allowed him not to play a leading part and for this to happen money would be needed immediately. However, there was never any real euphoria; long before the Amicable Grant was called off, it was clear that there was going to be no immediate invasion, and by the time it was, Wolsey, if not actively in negotiations with the French, would have been fairly confident that an approach by Louise was about to be made. It will also be argued that it is not as certain as is sometimes suggested that the resistance to the Amicable Grant was such that it had to be cancelled.

There are a number of reasons for believing that, whatever diplomatic noises they were making in the aftermath of Pavia, Henry and Wolsey had no real desire to invade France. In the first place, the degree of military preparation seems not to have been commensurate with the enormous amount of talk about it, which lends some weight to Francis’s observation the following year that he ‘knew right well that it was but ceremoniously done’.
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It is also strange that it was not until 16 May – that is, not until after the Amicable Grant had been called off – that there was any effort to contact Bourbon; and yet, as all the paper plans make clear, his contribution to any invasion of France was supposedly crucial. Moreover, even before Tunstall and Wingfield ever set sail for Spain, the plans that they were originally to have presented to Charles had already been scaled down, and an invitation to meet Henry in Paris had been withdrawn, or at least delayed, because Henry was no longer going to be leading the initial invasion force. When, as early as 7 April, Wolsey informed them of this decision, he gave as the chief reason that it was clear that the emperor would not agree to a personal invasion, or to any great feat of war, at least until after he had seen how his negotiations with the French were progressing.

Wolsey’s concern about these negotiations may help to direct attention away from the fantasy world of chivalric exploits on the fields of France to his real worries. More importantly, his assessment that the emperor was not, for the moment, interested in war is evidence that, almost before anybody had been asked to contribute to the Amicable Grant, the likelihood of any English invasion of France had enormously diminished, for there is no evidence anywhere of any desire by the English to go it alone. Wolsey gave as his source for this assessment a letter of
Clerk’s from Rome, but it was something that his own negotiations with Margaret’s envoys throughout April and May would only have confirmed.

The role that Wolsey chose to play in these was that of a man consumed with a desire to satisfy his master’s dream of an invasion of France and consequently filled with righteous indignation at the series of obstacles being put forward by the pusillanimous representatives of the emperor and his aunt. But that it was a performance is suggested not only by the views he had expressed on 7 April, but by the way he made certain throughout that his demands were pitched in such a manner as to render their acceptance highly unlikely. For instance, on 8 March, before news of Pavia had been confirmed, when they were still anxious to obtain some military aid from the English, the Imperial envoys had made it plain that they were opposed to an invasion of Normandy, and by the 30th Margaret had categorically rejected the idea, as she was to again a week or two later.
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In fact, it was not until the end of April that Wolsey gave way
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– a curiously late concession if the English effort was designed to get an invasion of France off the ground as quickly as possible. On the other hand, if it was Wolsey’s intention to steer clear of any invasion while continuing to appear to want one, it was eminently sensible. At an earlier interview he had contrived to turn the tables on the envoys by playing a game of ‘let’s pretend for the sake of argument that we will give up a Normandy invasion’. He was rewarded with five reasons why an invasion of Picardy was also unacceptable!
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Thus, when later on he formally conceded the point, he already knew that this would not further the invasion plans – and hence the willingness to concede.

Anybody interested in witnessing Wolsey at work should study the envoys’ account of their negotiations with him. They present a picture of Wolsey very much on top of his form, forcing the ever more embarrassed envoys in one meeting after another to justify the rejection of a whole number of requests from their erstwhile and, they still hoped, future ally. Finally, in some desperation, on 2 May Margaret and her councillors signed an agreement on Anglo-Burgundian military co-operation, but in practice all it amounted to was the promise of 100 hoys, plus, as its
pièce de résistance
, the promise of a hundred transport ships – this in lieu of the thousand that had been asked for! It was an offer that would have finally convinced Wolsey, if nothing else had, that there was nothing to be hoped for from the Imperialists by way of real military aid – but then in my view he had long ago lost all faith in that.
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When Wolsey received news of this non-agreement, there was no display of histrionics, as there had been earlier. Instead, he merely ventured the comment that he ‘should have wished for a better answer, but since Madame is not willing to give it we shall have patience and wait’.
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He may also have permitted himself a quiet smile. Margaret and her envoys had not come out well from these negotiations. On every possible issue they had been put into a position which made them appear to have let their ally down, thereby providing Wolsey with the perfect
justification for double-crossing them. So by 7 May, when making this comment, he could afford to be a little gracious. He could also call to a halt the Amicable Grant without any real loss of face and without giving any obvious signal to anyone about his real intentions. England, as he told Margaret’s envoys on the 7th, was still keen on invading France but, alas, her allies had not seen fit to support her.
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This being so, there was no point in continuing the attempt to raise further sums of money, and a week later the Amicable Grant was brought to an end.

It will be seen that in this account the question of whether or not Wolsey had been forced to come to this decision because of widespread opposition to the grant is almost irrelevant. Instead, the question becomes why it was not called off sooner – why, even, it had been called for in the first place. It could hardly have come as a complete surprise that an unexpected request for yet more money would result in some resistance, particularly since the second instalment of the 1523 subsidy was still being collected.
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Would Wolsey have dared to risk such resistance, perhaps even widespread rebellion, if he had not been genuinely determined on reviving the Great Enterprise? In answering this question it must again be pointed out that when the grant was called for in March there was no certainty that there would not be military action. That said, it surely cannot have escaped Wolsey’s notice that here was a golden opportunity to raise money in order more generally to finance a foreign policy which, given his own and his master’s ambitions, was never likely to be inexpensive. Both theory and practice dictated that when the king was risking his life in a rightful cause, it was his subjects’ duty to support him financially, even if the request lacked parliamentary authorization. In 1475 and 1481-2 Edward
IV
, and in 1491 Henry
VII
had secured such support in the form of ‘benevolences’, but if any of Henry
VIII
’s subjects had cared to dwell on these precedents, they might have been a little perturbed. True, both kings did get across to France but in 1475 it had taken Edward just over a month, and in 1495 Henry considerably less, to come to some satisfactory financial settlement with the supposed enemy. And in 1482 Edward had not, as promised, led an invasion of Scotland – not, it should be said, the first time he had reneged on a commitment to his subjects to fight. No wonder questions have been raised about exactly what these kings’ intentions were in asking for money, and neither should Henry’s and Wolsey’s escape scrutiny.
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