The King's Cardinal: The Rise and Fall of Thomas Wolsey (Pimlico) (28 page)

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.
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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.
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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.
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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.
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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.
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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.
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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 13
s
4
d
, in addition to presents worth about £900.
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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.
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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.
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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.
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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.
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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.
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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.
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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.

But to what end? To answer this, the reasons which had originally led Wolsey to seek a French alliance back in 1514 must be touched upon. Very simply, he had calculated that, given the lack of any reliable allies, a serious campaign in France might well end in disaster. He had also grasped that despite her great financial and military resources, France was the country most amenable to English pressure, precisely because it did make some sense to threaten an invasion. It was close, the possession of Calais provided a secure harbour for both men and provisions, while the possession of a rightful claim to the throne of France provided a justification. To invade Spain or the Low Countries had none of these advantages: no rightful claim, difficult logistics and the worst possible disruption of trade, which was increasingly concentrated on Antwerp. These considerations were not lost on the rulers of these countries, with the result that first Ferdinand and later Charles could afford to be unreliable allies: England might huff and puff, but it was most unlikely that she would do more. What had completely thrown Wolsey’s calculations was Francis’s initial unwillingness to accept his logic. Instead of deferring to the English, he had virtually ignored them. Wolsey had therefore set out to show Francis the error of his ways by forcing him to acknowledge how dependent on the English he really was. The Treaty of London is evidence that Wolsey had succeeded. But if France could be brought to heel, why not the rest of Europe?

To answer this question, we must consider that aspect of the London negotiations which resulted in a treaty of universal peace on 2 October. That it was initially signed only by England and France may throw some doubts on its universality, but the terms themselves were impressive enough. The signatories were to live in peace with one another, which meant that not only invasion of one another’s territory, but also any unfriendly or harmful action, was prohibited. No aid or asylum was to be given to rebels, and any outside request for their return had to be complied with within twenty days. Another clause prohibited the hiring of foreign troops. As all armies were heavily dependent upon such troops, especially those from the Swiss cantons, this was an eminently sensible attempt at least to limit the scale of warfare. The most important provisions concerned the action to be taken in the event of any breach of the peace. Any aggressor was to be requested to curb his actions forthwith, and to make reparations for any injury or loss he had inflicted. If he refused, everyone else was to declare war on him within one month, and within two was to be at war. It was expected that the pope, Maximilian and Charles would sign the treaty within four months, thereby, along with Henry and Francis, becoming ‘principal contraherents’, with the right to nominate other adherents who would have eight months to make up their minds. In this way it was hoped that almost
every state in Europe would become signatories.
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Nothing Wolsey had done until this moment quite prepares one for this treaty, and it has been a puzzle to everyone who has given it any thought.
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Even Wolsey’s authorship is not absolutely certain. A rough draft in his own hand is suggestive, perhaps more significant is the general assumption by contemporaries that he was responsible.
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But when it comes down to it very little is known about its origins, what precedents were used, what sources of inspiration tapped. One obvious source would be the great Erasmian polemics against war; the most famous of these, ‘
Dulce Bellum lnexpertis
’, first appeared in the much revised edition of his
Adages
of 1515, while
The Complaint of Peace
, dedicated to one of the regents, John le Sauvage, was published in December 1517. Thus, the dates fit well, while Wolsey certainly knew who Erasmus was if only because the great author had frequently badgered him for gifts and favours – not, incidently, with much success. Furthermore, it is probably safe to assume that he would have been aware of Erasmus’s views on war, for he was surrounded by people who were. By 1518 such a close friend of Erasmus as Sir Thomas More had become a royal councillor – and he was, as it happened, with the king at Woodstock during the spring of 1518. There was Andrew Ammonio, the king’s Latin secretary, responsible for much of Wolsey’s correspondence with the papacy. There was Richard Pace who had just become the king’s secretary and had been for a short time Wolsey’s. Cuthbert Tunstall, appointed master of the rolls in May 1516, had during the three years under discussion become one of Wolsey’s most trusted diplomats. All these men were close to Erasmus and close to Wolsey, and no doubt the rights and wrongs of warfare were discussed by them, perhaps in Wolsey’s hearing. Nevertheless, to have a secondhand acquaintance with someone’s views is very different from being deeply imbued, and there is no evidence for Wolsey having first-hand acquaintance with any work of Erasmus.