12
While the walls of Hampton Court were continuing to rise so grandly in the late summer of 1515, the crumbling edifice of England’s peace with France was already bound for demolition. Not only had the French victory over the pope’s Swiss mercenaries at Marignano in early September given Francis I the opening success of his reign, it had also presented him with the greatest military triumph in living memory. In a battle lasting two days and part of a night, those same Frenchmen who had quailed and run at the sight of English forces outside Thérouanne less than two years earlier now defeated the best fighters in the whole of Europe. They had done so, moreover, in the kind of gory combat that made Henry’s first campaign across the Channel seem little more than a summer outing. ‘For two thousand years,’ Francis wrote to his mother, ‘there has not been so grand or so hard a battle.’ And to gall his English counterpart further, the French king had been in the thick of the fighting throughout.
Such was the stunning scale of events in Italy that on 11 October, almost a whole month after the battle, Wolsey was still pretending not to believe the news. Henry, meanwhile, was even more dazed by what had taken place. Both Francis and his mother had written directly to inform him of the victory, but he had dismissed the letters as forgeries and ultimately it was only the arrival of the French envoy, Bapaume, which confirmed the English king’s worst fears. Predictably, the letters and reports which Bapaume brought with him did not bring Henry ‘any great pleasure’, for it seemed, said the Frenchman, ‘as if tears would have burst from his eyes, so red were they from the pain he suffered in hearing and understanding the good news and prosperity of my master’.
Wolsey’s eventual reaction was, however, altogether more controlled and calculating. When officially informed of Francis’s triumph, he was said to have told Bapaume that he greeted the glad tidings ‘as much as if they had been the king’s his master, by reason of the alliance and friendship between them’. And having ‘laid his hand on his breast’, he gave his firm assurances that his own sovereign had not been entertaining any thought of endangering ‘the peace and amity’ existing between the two kingdoms. Needless to say, such hollow professions of friendship fooled no-one.
Nor could they conceal the seriousness of England’s predicament, for the warning signs had been clear for all to see throughout the preceding weeks and months. As the French war machine cranked into gear under its new leader, Wolsey had sounded the usual threats. He told an assembly of Venetian diplomats:
Be assured that should the King of France show signs of valuing the friendship of our King, he will never violate the confederation and his faith […] Should the said King choose, on the other hand, to maltreat English subjects, and appear not to hold his Majesty in account, his [Henry’s] power is such, that he will know how to avenge himself; for I tell you, Sir Ambassadors, that we have ships here in readiness, and in eight days could place sixty thousand men on the soil of France; so we are able to thwart any of his projects at our pleasure.
On this occasion, however, both Wolsey and his master were more concerned with striking poses than inflicting blows. Indeed, their sole hope now rested on the fond belief that the greed of Emperor Maximilian might somehow be turned to advantage. Chiefly through the English agent on the spot, the ever reliable and cautious Richard Pace, money was therefore steadily released to Maximilian for the purchase of mercenaries. But so avaricious and duplicitous were the emperor and his ministers that even Pace was stretched to breaking point. In dealing with ‘such people’, he finally declared, ‘Christ himself should with difficulty obtain anything without money’. And though, against all odds, the funds were eventually gathered to mount a challenge against the French, the imperial troops remained unpaid and ultimately turned and ran.
To compound matters, the French had also played a cunning hand in Scotland, which not only distracted attention from their manoeuvres in Italy, but also genuinely threatened England with war against her northern neighbour. Henry’s sister Margaret, had, in fact, already tested her brother’s affection to the limit by giving herself to the 19-year-old Earl of Angus after the death of her husband, James IV, at Flodden Field. More importantly, however, in throwing herself at an unworthy youth she had completely lost whatever slim affection the native Scots may have felt for her in the first place.
Not surprisingly, then, the French lost no time in loosing that renowned hothead and Anglophobe the Duke of Albany upon his sworn enemies, and before long he had rallied the disaffected Scottish chieftains, secured the infant King James V and ousted Margaret from any vestige of influence. In the aftermath of this calamity, Margaret had fled south into her brother’s protection. But this was far from the end of the matter, for she was heavily pregnant and the hard riding over wild countryside caused her to give birth prematurely. Though the child survived, the queen herself became so sick that she was unable to travel on to London, taking shelter instead at the border castle of Thomas Lord Dacre. And there, for the moment, she rested in pathetic and fevered state, surrounded by the fine gowns and presents her brother had sent on to her in the vain hope that her return to England might not be construed as the total embarrassment it undoubtedly was.
From some perspectives, of course, the French victory at Marignano was merely the final sorry chapter in a long and sorry tale, but this is not to minimise England’s impotence in its aftermath. Certainly, it would not be easy to revive any kind of anti-French alliance. King Ferdinand, for instance, remained as unreliable as ever and after his death in January 1516 – from ‘hunting and hawking to the last in fair weather or foul, and following more the counsel of his friends than his physicians’ – the prospects of Spanish assistance remained as remote as ever. Indeed, the 15-year-old grandson who succeeded him as King Charles I before later becoming the Holy Roman Emperor Charles V was for the first few years of his reign wholly under the influence of his pro-French council in the Netherlands, where he remained. The English envoys who were now sent to Brussels to ply him with baits of money and friendship were consequently wasting their time, and it would not be long before Charles was speaking more and more frequently of marriage between himself and the 4-year-old French Princess Renée.
Nor were England’s alternatives any more favourable. Charles’s other grandfather, Maximilian, was, in theory at least, somewhat more ready to oppose France, but the world had already come to know beyond all shadow of doubt that ‘the said Emperor doth so oftentimes change his mind as the weathercock doth change his turn’. And his susceptibility to bribery remained undeniable. ‘He is always dunning for money’, the pope said of him, while Machiavelli observed that if all the leaves on all the trees of Italy had been converted into ducats for his use, they would not have been sufficient to his needs. Venice, on the other hand, was still at loggerheads with him and hastened to support Francis’s armies as soon as they advanced into Italy. Likewise, Pope Leo X, wholly lacking his predecessor’s stomach for a fight, rushed to make peace with the conqueror.
For the Duke of Albany and his French sponsors, therefore, there were English threats and curses, but little else besides. ‘Believe me,’ said Wolsey, after passionately recounting the story of Queen Margaret’s humiliation to the council, ‘his majesty and the kingdom will not brook such an outrage.’ And by October, Venetian ambassadors were, indeed, talking of England’s mounting preparation for war. Ships in the Thames were being steadily armed and stocked with military supplies, while Henry, it seems, was being encouraged to play the role of would-be warrior to his heart’s content. At the launch of his great five-masted warship, the Henry Grace à Dieu, for instance, he brandished his golden admiral’s whistle in boyish high spirits and ‘dressed galley-fashion, with a vest of gold brocade reaching to the middle of his thigh’.
Unlike the king, however, Wolsey was far more concerned on this occasion with conserving money rather than launching heady schemes for conquest abroad. By any standards, the expenditure of the last three years had been truly enormous, and, to make matters worse, less than half the sum voted by parliament in 1514 had ever been collected. Accordingly, when MPs gathered once again in November 1516 they granted two subsidies to make good the shortfall, but nothing else. And the sums involved were, in any case, intended more for national defence than for further indulgence of the king’s ego across the Channel.
Under such circumstances, then, Wolsey certainly had good reason to keep the peace. Francis was, after all, still a nominal ally and nothing in his recent actions actually constituted a breach of his country’s existing treaty with England. Even the help he had given to Albany had been granted in strict conformity with current treaties between France and Scotland, which were known to exist by all concerned. But the King of France had been altogether too successful and by December 1516 he was genuinely threatening the balance of power in Europe after winning eight Swiss cantons over to his side. More importantly still, he had been too dismissive of Henry and in consequence Wolsey was now left with little choice but to opt for a policy which would prove to be every bit as ineffective as it was crooked.
The plan itself was simple enough. While Henry maintained a show of open friendship with Francis, the hapless Richard Pace was to be dispatched to Zurich to hire Swiss troops with English gold, in the hope that the Holy Roman Emperor might thereby be able to prevent the remaining Swiss cantons from falling under French control. Once again, a vast treasure was placed at Pace’s disposal, though Wolsey issued the strictest instructions that no money was to be shown until the emperor and his advisers had proven their word. ‘Ascending little by little, and not in anywise passing or exceeding the said sum of four thousand nobles by year,’ Wolsey informed Pace, ‘ye by your wisdom and discretion shall satisfy and content them with as little sum as ye conveniently may.’
But haggling with Maximilian, especially on his own territory, was like ploughing the desert or sowing the sea, and in this case the whole empty exercise would prove not only vain but life-threatening, too. As always, Pace, it seems, ‘did the king’s business admirably without expending money’. And it was even more to his credit that, in doing so, he also ‘disturbed all the attempts of the French, who lavished large amounts of their own’. But in return for his efforts, Pace was made to suffer the full brunt of Maximilian’s ‘hospitality’ – so much so that he barely lived to tell the whole frustrating tale. Verbal abuse, capricious threats of banishment and frequent house arrest all came Pace’s way, in fact, before he eventually became the target of an unsuccessful attempt at murder by poisoning.
In the meantime, while Pace was eating insults and dodging death on the continent, Wolsey was meeting with mounting frustration of his own and, in the process, finding himself less and less able to contain his anger. His fits of temper were already familiar enough to those close to him. But now they began to flare with increasing frequency and unprecedented violence. More worryingly still, they were sometimes directed at individuals of real substance who would not be treated to such outbursts lightly.
On one occasion, for instance, Wolsey became so ‘wrath and excited, that he did not seem in his right mind’. The trigger was an interview with Matthias Schinner, Cardinal of Sion, who had been travelling throughout Italy, Switzerland, Germany and the Netherlands instigating resistance to the French with English money. What had actually passed at the meeting is unknown, but in its wake Wolsey was so incensed that he suddenly demanded the presence of the imperial ambassador once more, regardless of the fact that ‘it was already night and the hour inconvenient’. Nor can there be any doubt about the kind of reception that awaited the hapless diplomat, for Wolsey was said to have been ‘in such a state of perturbation’ afterwards that he would not grant an audience with the Venetian ambassador for a number of days.
Only a few weeks later, moreover, another high-profile victim was to feel, quite literally, the full force of Wolsey’s frustration. On this occasion it was the papal nuncio Francesco Chieregato who would be told in ‘fierce and rude language’ to reveal what he had written to the King of France. And this time Wolsey also ‘laid hands on him’, threatening that ‘unless he told by fair means’, he would be ‘put to the rack’. Needless to say, such gross mistreatment of a papal official scandalised many a foreign capital. Yet it reflected, too, the overwhelming pressure and frustration that Wolsey was experiencing on an almost daily basis.
Now, as a finishing touch, Maximilian’s military expedition against the French, which had been subsidised so lavishly by England’s treasury, failed in the strangest and most abject manner possible. At the head of 30,000 Swiss and German freebooters, the emperor had swept down over the Brenner Pass and by late March was within striking distance of the ill-provisioned French garrison in Milan. But just as the prize beckoned for the imperial forces, their leader slipped away by night and withdrew to Verona. Whether he had been bribed by Francis or whether, as he claimed, his nerve had suddenly left him at the prospect of fierce resistance is hard to say. Wolsey, however, was in little doubt of Maximilian’s double-dealing. ‘The Emperor,’ he recorded drily, ‘doth play on both hands, using the nature of a participle, which taketh partem a nomine et partem a verbo [part from a noun and part from a verb].’ But guilt and grammar aside, the fact remained that England was now as vulnerable as ever with no real prospect of improvement in sight.
Even the ongoing struggle between London and Paris for the goodwill of the new King of Spain brought no better news. Indeed, on 13 August 1516, Charles agreed to the Treaty of Noyon by which he consented to marry Princess Louise, the 1-year-old daughter of the French king, in return for which Francis abandoned his claim upon Naples. In October, meanwhile, Maximilian formally renounced French gold and committed himself to a league with England before brazenly joining the French and Spanish two months later in return for 200,000 ducats. In all, the English had paid the emperor some 1.5 million crowns of their own for nothing more than his masterful cynicism. ‘You, my grandson,’ he told Charles, ‘are going to trick the French and I the English’, and in this particular respect, at least, he had proven true to his word.
But if Wolsey had played a weak hand badly on this occasion, he had already proven in 1514 that he could rapidly turn defeat to advantage, and now he would do so more stunningly than ever. His rescuer this time was, arguably, the most unlikely of all, for while Western Europe was tearing itself in pieces over a small Italian duchy, the Turkish sultan Selim I had been advancing his Ottoman Empire with gigantic strides. In 1516 alone, he conquered Northern Mesopotamia from the Persians, beat the Mamelukes at Aleppo, and annexed Syria. The following year he would win Egypt in a single battle and obtain from the last caliphs of the Abbasid line the surrender of supreme religious authority over Islam. In other words, he had become the greatest political figure in the world, and now his conquering energies were turning westward towards Hungary and Rhodes.
In March 1517, therefore, Leo X issued a papal bull imposing a five-year truce upon the whole of Christendom, and called for a combined expedition against the Turk, involving all Catholic monarchs. Almost at once, Maximilian, Francis and Charles pledged their allegiance, and, by April, England, too, had lent her nominal support. Accordingly, the door was also neatly opened for Wolsey to conduct negotiations of his own with France, which steadily ripened throughout the summer. By October, indeed, representatives from Francis duly appeared in England, and in order to counter Charles’s suspicions, two English envoys were at the same time sent to Spain with a view to playing down the significance of the French visit. Not surprisingly, all negotiations were handled in such secrecy that Thomas More was inclined to believe ‘that the king himself scarcely knows in what state matters are’.
But with characteristic panache and ingenuity, Wolsey was already looking beyond amity with France and conceiving of something altogether grander than his Holy Father’s scheme – nothing less, in fact, than a ‘universal peace’ within Europe, with none other than himself as the sole architect in the name of his sovereign lord, Henry. As an essential preliminary, Francis would have to be appeased over the loss of Tournai, which still rankled with all Frenchmen. But the King of France was willing to buy and Henry willing to sell in return for an annual pension of £15,000, while Wolsey, in his turn, was more than willing to surrender his claim to the bishopric for a round sum of £12,000. The matter of Scotland was also taken in hand with the French agreeing that the Duke of Albany, who had returned home on a visit in June 1517, should be kept there. To cement the peace once and for all, Henry’s 2-year-old daughter, Mary, was to be betrothed to the dauphin. And as a means of dispelling the mutual suspicion which might undermine peace in the longer term it was also agreed, at Wolsey’s very specific urging, that Francis and Henry should from this point onwards meet one another regularly.
It was around this fragile accord with France, then, that the whole grandiose plan for a Europe-wide peace was to be constructed. As early as January 1518 Wolsey had drafted the main outline of his scheme, and with the help of the Archbishop of Paris, who had travelled to London in secret, he soon made sufficient progress to write to Pope Leo, Maximilian and Charles for their help in securing a permanent truce. With sufficient moral pressure, it seemed, the unimaginable could indeed become a reality: Habsurg-Valois rivalry might, against all odds, be terminated once and for all, leaving Italy free at last from invaders, and allowing Rome to regain her former authority.
Naturally enough, the sealing of this ‘universal peace’ was of such significance that it would have to be marked with fitting celebrations, and the pomp and junketing that accompanied the initial Anglo-French component of the treaty was quite without parallel. In late September the largest French embassy ever to enter England arrived in London. Some 600 horsemen in all, along with another seventy mules, made their way through crowded streets amid brilliant banners, beating drums and fanfares. The English, not wishing to be outdone, sent the Earl of Surrey accompanied by the same number of riders to lead the procession alongside Bonnivet, High Admiral of France. A smaller delegation, meanwhile, sailed down to Greenwich to be welcomed by Henry and Wolsey in person.
But it was not until Sunday, 2 October that events were to reach their fitting climax, for on that day England and France formally committed themselves to maintain their part of the cardinal’s multilateral peace. They did so, appropriately enough, at the high altar of St Paul’s Cathedral, following a Mass which Wolsey himself celebrated with a splendour that was said to have defied exaggeration. Assisted, as always, by abbots and bishops as well as priests, Wolsey not only held centre stage but appeared to own it, and it was no coincidence that the feast which followed was held at his very own York Place.
Giustiniani leaves no doubt either about the splendour in store for all those lucky enough to have been present. The whole banqueting hall was, it seems, so sumptuously decorated that the Italian fancied himself ‘in the tower of Chosroes, where that monarch caused divine honour to be paid to him’. All involved were served with ‘countless dishes of confections and other delicacies’, and ‘after gratifying their palates’, we are told, the guests also ‘gratified their eyes and hands’. Feasting was followed by music, masques and dancing, and ‘large bowls, filled with ducats and dice, were placed on the tables for such as liked to gamble’ before dancing recommenced until midnight. It was, said Giustiniani, an event ‘the like of which, I fancy, was never given by Cleopatra or Caligula’.
Two days later, proxy marriage celebrations between the infant Princess Mary and the dauphin occurred at Greenwich, and on the following day Wolsey, Henry and Bonnivet concluded all outstanding business in private, while Campeggio, the papal legate, was left to wait outside in the corridor. Most important of all, it was now finally settled that Henry and Francis should meet each other near Calais at the earliest convenient opportunity.
Before many weeks had passed the remaining powers – Spain, the Holy Roman Empire and the papacy, along with Venice and a number of other Italian states – had all signed Wolsey’s treaty and in due course Portugal and Denmark, plus another eleven principalities, would also follow suit. Under the treaty’s terms any state that became the victim of aggression was to appeal to the other signatories, who would issue a collective request for any invading power to withdraw its troops. If, after a month, the aggressor remained resolute, all were to declare war in a conflict that was to increase in intensity by stages. No state, moreover, could forbid the passage through its territory of any army coming to the aid of a country in danger and there were also strict clauses forbidding the hire of Swiss mercenaries.
The scheme’s boldness was undeniable, and arguably only someone of Wolsey’s limitless imagination and energy – not to mention audacity – could ever have fashioned it. Only in Rome was the cardinal’s plan greeted with outright cynicism. There, predictably, it was regarded with jealousy and seen as nothing less than a crude hijacking of the pope’s own proposal. It was noted, too, how papal hopes for a crusade had been conveniently downgraded in Wolsey’s agreement. But most of all the treaty was seen as a sign of possible things to come. ‘From it,’ commented Cardinal Giulio de Medici, ‘we can tell what the Holy See and the Pope have to expect from the English chancellor.’
Elsewhere, however, the praise flowed freely. Giustiniani, ‘knowing the cardinal to be greedy of glory and covetous of praise,’ told Wolsey that he would win immortal fame by his actions, ‘for whereas the pope had laboured to effect a quinquennial truce, his lordship had made a perpetual peace; and whereas such a union of the Christian powers was usually concluded at Rome, this confederacy had been concluded in England’. Old Bishop Fox, meanwhile, was especially delighted at his former pupil’s achievement. ‘I doubt not,’ he informed Wolsey on 30 October:
that there be some invide et malivoli obtrectatores [envious and malevolent detractors]; but undoubtedly, my lord God continuing it, it shall be the best deed that ever was done for the realm of England; and after the King’s Highness, the laud and praise shall be to you a perpetual memory.
But, as usual, the most effusive praise of all seems to have flowed from the pen of Erasmus, who saw Wolsey’s efforts as the final fulfilment of Christian enlightenment. Seven years earlier, when Julius II had formed the Holy League with Spain and Venice to defend the unity of the Church by expelling France from northern Italy, the Dutch scholar had deplored the coming bloodshed. ‘I was dreaming of an age that really was golden and isles that were truly blessed,’ he wrote from London, ‘and then I woke up […] when that Julian trumpet sounded all the world to arms.’ Now, however, Erasmus’s dreams seemed at last to have become a reality. ‘I see a truly golden age coming,’ he told Wolsey in 1518, ‘if that mind of yours should persist with some number of our rulers. He, under whose auspices they are made, will reward your most holy efforts; and eloquence, alike in Latin and in Greek, will celebrate with eternal monuments your heart, for to help the human race.’
All had been achieved, moreover, in the face of the most formidable obstacles. There was deeply entrenched distrust and bigotry to contend with on both sides of the Channel; French children were still reared on stories about the Hundred Years War, when English ‘no-goods with tails’ had ravaged their lands, while many’ Englishmen remained convinced that French peasants were so backward that they walked barefoot and drank only water. Nor was English hostility confined to their Gallic counterparts, it seems, for at the height of negotiations one of Wolsey’s countrymen wrote to declare in no uncertain terms how ‘it is a true saying that the Germans are tipplers, the French unchaste, the Spaniards thieves, the Scots perfidious, the Danes bloodthirsty’.
At the same time, Wolsey’s reluctance to delegate encumbered him with a mountain of petty chores. On the one hand, as he struggled with the intricacies of the balance of power in Europe, there were the preparations for Queen Margaret’s return to Scotland to attend to, as well as the careful arrangement of her affairs once she was there. The issue of passports and letters of safe conduct to all attending dignitaries was also overseen by Wolsey in person, along with the responsibilities he had recently acquired from Pope Leo as an apostolic collector of funds for the building of St Peter’s in Rome. Harassed as well by the ongoing clashes between town and gown at Oxford, he still found time, nevertheless, to attend to the ponds and palings about the park at Hampton Court and, last but not least, to intervene in a case of horse theft involving the Marquess of Dorset.
However, if Wolsey’s latest venture was nothing short of mind-boggling in terms of its ambition and the effort it entailed, its real benefits were to prove minimal and the optical illusion of English influence that it created woefully short-lived. Martin Luther had already sown the seeds of religious turmoil in Europe the year before, and predictably the projected crusade upon which Wolsey’s scheme was supposedly premised never materialised. Syria and Egypt would remain under Turkish control for another three and a half centuries, and while the sovereigns of Europe were collecting tithes from their clergy for a holy war waged in the name of brotherly concord, the Emperor Maximilian was achieving his final flourish by dying with typical inconvenience on 19 January 1519. Thereby, he would plunge Europe into a succession struggle for his crown, which shattered at a single stroke the whole balance of power that had been established at such pains only four months earlier.
The resulting election for a new Holy Roman Emperor marked the beginning of what would become an interminable struggle for hegemony in Europe between France and the Empire. Charles of Spain, bolstered by his blood relationship with the dead emperor, pressed ahead with his claim confidently, while Francis I was supported in his candidature by the pope and, like Charles, lavished exorbitant sums of money on sweeteners and outright bribes. Even Henry VIII proved as willing as ever to lash out money that England could ill afford, in order to press his own tepid claims, though Wolsey secretly shared the opinion of Richard Pace, who was duly rushed into action yet again on his sovereign’s behalf. ‘Here,’ said Pace of the imperial crown, ‘is the most dearest merchandise that ever was sold; and after mine opinion, it shall be the worst that ever was bought, to him that shall obtain it.’
The outcome, however, was always a foregone conclusion, since Germans would never tolerate an English ruler, let alone a French one, and on 28 June 1519 Charles of Spain was duly elected King of the Romans. As it transpired, the whole tawdry contest had paralysed the German government and would, in the longer term not only destroy any last hopes of concerted action against the Ottoman Empire, but directly presage the downfall of Rhodes and the Turkish annihilation of Hungarian forces at the Battle of Mohács. Ultimately it would also bring the newly invigorated forces of the Holy Roman Empire sweeping into Italy as conquerors in their own right.
With his ‘universal peace’ therefore reduced almost at once to the status of a dead man walking, Wolsey once again fell back upon pomp, spectacle and sleight-of-hand to maintain at least the myth of English mastery. Nor, of course, did he have much option, since the abandonment of lost causes that were dear to his master’s heart was unlikely, even now, to be a healthy option. In effect, the only alternative was to direct all energy towards the meeting between Henry and Francis, which had been agreed earlier in London, and to ensure that it should take the form of the most dazzling spectacle possible. If, Wolsey reasoned, a truly unparalleled chivalric extravaganza could now be staged, it would appeal to Henry’s most deeply held romantic sentiments while placing him, ostensibly at least, at the very centre of European affairs. Moreover, by advertising the King of England’s friendship with France in the most vivid way possible, there was also the tantalising prospect that the new Holy Roman Emperor might himself be forced into offering an alternative alliance on even better terms.
Throughout the closing months of 1519, therefore, Wolsey began the colossal task of arranging a meeting between the Kings of England and France at the place just outside Calais that would become known to posterity as the Field of Cloth of Gold. It was intended that the event should be staged the following summer, and this meant that there was no time to lose. As events unfolded, therefore, Wolsey was in almost continual communication with Francis himself, as well as his mother, Louise of Savoy. And he lost no opportunity to charm as well as cajole, for when a new French prince was born, he at once dispatched a christening gift of £100 for the nurse, the four rockers of the royal crib, and the gentlewomen of the queen’s chamber. The French, in their turn, also played the friendship game with some aplomb, for Francis duly named his son Henry, while the Grand Master of France told Wolsey directly that ‘it had not been seen or heard of one man being a cardinal to be in so great esteem, trust and reputation of both the Kings of England and France as your grace is’.
Predictably, however, there were also niggling causes of delay and frustration for Wolsey to overcome in his tireless efforts ‘to bind the two majesties together in a knot of perdurable amity’. The young Englishmen who had been sent on embassy to the court of Francis, for example, were soon said to be ill from ‘the haunting of harlots’, while the French Queen Claude proved ‘very sickly’ during her latest confinement. Much more fundamentally, there was also the question of where exactly the projected meeting would take place, which was made especially thorny by the time-honoured principle that an inferior prince was always obliged to visit the superior rather than vice versa. Not surprisingly, therefore, Wolsey wanted the event to take place at Guisnes within the English Pale of Calais, while the French suggested Ardres, some 10 miles away on their own territory.
Yet by December a compromise had been reached and in January the French king gave Wolsey full authority to proceed to the detailed planning of what would now become not only a political conference, but also a grand tournament, a festival of arts and, not least of all, a perfect opportunity for a series of state banquets that would surpass any staged hitherto. Everything about the event, in fact, was specifically designed to conjure up a long-vanished chivalric past that still captivated and titillated the rulers and elites of the day. It was said, for instance, that every knight of the Christian world would be invited to run at the tilt and show his prowess with sword and lance – something that was especially likely to tickle the interest of Francis and, above all, Henry.
Wolsey, too, was eager for his share of the limelight. Indeed, it was suggested by Polydore Vergil that he ‘longed like a peacock to display his many-adorned tail, that is, to exhibit his special appearance, in the land of France’. Twelve chaplains, fifty gentlemen and 237 servants were to travel with him, in comparison to the 140 men apiece allocated to the two dukes that would be making the journey and the mere 70 allowed for Archbishop Warham. But more than this, the cardinal would be at the centre of events: wining, dining, easing, dealing, confiding, advising, posing and charming as occasion required.
Certainly, Wolsey was in his element as the preparations forged ahead in the early spring of 1520 with all the intensity and thoroughness of the military campaign that he had organised seven years earlier. In a characteristic fit of enthusiasm Francis had once told Henry that he was determined to meet him, even if he came with no more than a page and a lackey, but as the proposal hardened into reality, both monarchs soon sought to outstrip the other in terms of the grandness of their plans. This, after all, was as much a contest as a reconciliation – an unprecedented opportunity to flaunt, assert and confirm the superiority of one realm and its prince over another.
Ultimately some 5,172 Englishmen and women would now be transported across the Channel before the end of May with all their requirements for a full month. The king’s immense entourage eventually numbered 3,997 persons on its own, including the Archbishop of Canterbury and five bishops, two dukes, one marquess, ten earls and twenty barons, not to mention 200 members of his household guard. And whatever Wolsey’s achievements as a diplomat, no one can fairly deny him his rightful place as the greatest picnic-planner in history on the basis of what he now organised. In all, provisions costing £8,831 and a further £1,568 for wine and beer were duly assembled at Calais, and every last culinary detail was personally overseen by him, from the ordering of 700 conger eels, 2,014 sheep, 26 dozen heron and a bushel of mustard, right down to the purchase of cream for the king’s cakes at a price of £1 0s 10d.
At the same time a countless number of other details, great and small, all came under Wolsey’s personal supervision. The most meticulous attention was given to the task of safely transporting 2,865 horses across the Channel, including the particularly hefty Neapolitan breed which English knights preferred for jousting. The steel mill at Greenwich was to be dismantled and set up at Guisnes castle, which the English had decided to use as their base. And Wolsey also arranged for the erection of a suitably splendid palace of brick and timber to serve as the king’s temporary lodging during his stay.
In the event, the additional plan for a banqueting house was abandoned in favour of a vast highly ornate tent. However, the palace itself, which was distinguished by the amount of glass in it, would still include three chambers for the king on the first floor, the largest of which was more spacious than the White Hall at Westminster. Measuring 124ft in length, 42ft in width and 27ft in height, it was adjoined by an 80ft dining room and withdrawing room covering some 1,620 square feet. Each chamber, meanwhile, was to be hung with cloth of gold, embroidered with pearls and fine jewels, emblazoned with Tudor roses and portcullises and lit by a thousand candles. And, in the courtyard outside, streams of malmsey and claret, free for all, would flow from a fountain bearing statues of Cupid and Bacchus.
Even Leonardo da Vinci himself, according to one Italian, could not have surpassed the design of the palace, while another, not without some justification, compared it to the fairytale palaces of Ariosto’s Orlando Furioso. The state apartments would be equipped with Turkish carpets, chairs of estate and gold and silver plate brought across from Greenwich and Richmond by the Lord Chamberlain’s men. For the chapel, meanwhile, bejewelled vestments, canopies and chalices were to be transported specially from Westminster Abbey. Such, indeed, was the scale of effort involved that England virtually emptied its shores of carpenters, builders, masons, glaziers and artists as preparations reached a climax in late April and May.
While the king was cosseted in unprecedented luxury, the needs of those close to him were not forgotten either. Queen Catherine would be lodged in her own separate apartments within the palace, while the Duchess of Suffolk, as Dowager Queen of France, was assigned quarters next to her. Henry’s chief courtiers were also allocated rooms in Guisnes Castle itself, while the rest were to stay in the encampment of nearly 400 tents that Richard Gibson, master of the king’s hales, tents and pavilions, intended to erect in the neighbouring fields.
Wolsey, naturally, was accorded his own suite next to the king’s, and it was no coincidence that his coat of arms was made to feature particularly prominently amid the vast array of heraldic displays which could eventually be seen everywhere at the site. Appropriately enough, the arms themselves recalled his East Anglian origins through the sable shield and cross engrailed of the fourteenth-century Ufford earls of Suffolk and the azure leopards’ faces of their successors to the titles, the de la Poles. His cardinalate, on the other hand, was depicted by means of Leo X’s purple lion, and there was room too for the choughs that the College of Arms believed to have been the arms born by Thomas Becket, whom Wolsey had adopted as his patron. As supporters, there were dragons holding aloft pillars, the symbol of his legatine authority.
If showmanship and attention to detail were any measure of a servant’s worth, Wolsey would truly surpass all contenders by his efforts across the Channel in the summer of 1520. And it was only fitting, perhaps, that when the waiting was over and the mighty English horde had finally made its way across the Channel on the final day of May, Wolsey should be the first to sally forth towards the French camp to arrange the time and place for the two sovereigns to meet in person. Accompanied by more attendants than the dukes of Suffolk and Buckingham and the Archbishop of Canterbury combined, his retinue caused the greatest possible stir.
Fifty mounted gentlemen in crimson velvet preceded him, with fifty ushers bearing gold maces ‘as large as a man’s head’. His standing gold cross with its jewelled crucifix was also borne before him, and the richly trapped mule upon which he inevitably rode was surrounded by dozens of lackeys wearing his insignia. Behind him, there then rode a clutch of bishops and other churchmen, including the Grand Prior of the Knights of St John of Jerusalem, along with 100 mounted archers of the king’s guard – their bows bent and at the ready – who brought up the rear.
Moreover, when Henry and Francis finally met in person forty-eight hours later on Corpus Christi day, Wolsey stage-managed every detail of the event with comparable skill. At the sound of a cannon shot from Guisnes Castle, both men left their respective camps late in the afternoon and made for two artificial hillocks built at opposite entrances to the ‘Golden Valley’ at which their rendezvous was to occur. In preparation, a little pavilion had been erected at the exact centre of the valley, where the first conversation between the two rulers was due to take place. But before they entered, arm-in-arm and accompanied only by Wolsey and the French admiral Bonnivet, each king abandoned his retinue and rode alone towards the other in full view of the thousands of spectators crowding the surrounding ridges. Nor did the ensuing climax disappoint. Indeed, the lavish display of feigned affection, which stunned all onlookers, caused one Italian eyewitness to swear that Henry and Francis proceeded to throw their arms around each other more than thirty times.
There followed three weeks of feasting, jousting, carolling and carousing during which the myth of friendship and concord was played out with tireless energy by all concerned. Francis gave banquets for Henry’s knights, Henry for Francis’s knights. Queen Catherine and Queen Claude also lavished splendid banquets upon one another, while their two husbands dined together in a hall lined with pink brocade. Likewise, Francis entertained Catherine and Henry Claude, just as Wolsey himself entertained Francis’s mother, Louise of Savoy. According to one account, an inexhaustible supply of dishes was served at each of these banquets, though another commentator noted drily that the guests of honour did nothing but converse on one occasion, having eaten before they came.
In the meantime, the craftsmen of the weapons forge worked furiously as the knights of both countries broke hundreds of lances and fought valiantly at the barriers. Francis himself ‘shivered spears like reeds,’ it was said, ‘and never missed a stroke’, while Henry lived up to his reputation as an expert jouster, tiring six horses in rapid succession one day, ‘laughing the whole time, being in truth very merry, and remaining in the lists for upwards of two hours’. Rather less conveniently, Francis experienced an unexpected defeat at the hands of an English knight named Weston Brown, suffering a slight wound and momentary humiliation in the process, though any loss of face was soon made good when the French king threw his English counterpart to the ground in an impromptu wrestling contest, albeit one with potentially explosive consequences. Even so, both men eventually emerged with their egos intact, since each was said to have surpassed himself in various forms of mock combat, dealing blows ‘with such force that the fire sprang out of their armour’.
Yet for all its splendour and hearty back-slappery, and all the undying promises of Anglo-French friendship that it generated, the Field of Cloth of Gold amounted to little more than an unrivalled exercise in empty posturing. Shortly before the sails of Henry’s ships billowed in the breeze that carried them over to Calais, Wolsey had already organised a visit to England by the new ruler of the Holy Roman Empire, only six days earlier. And though this meeting at Canterbury was consistent, in theory at least, with the principles of ‘universal peace’, the implication was clear enough – particularly as Charles had been trying to abort plans for the Field of Cloth of Gold since April and would in no way consent to a personal meeting with Francis.
Meanwhile, Wolsey’s firm professions of commitment to Anglo-French reconciliation had served as a most convenient means of increasing the emperor’s inclination to ply him with patronage. As planning for the meeting with Francis went forward Charles had been in frequent correspondence with the cardinal, and in February wrote to thank him personally for his efforts in maintaining peace and for arranging a meeting with Henry. In order to secure Wolsey’s continuing good offices, moreover, Charles also offered him the bishopric of Pace and its substantial incomes, as well as a pension of 7,000 ducats. More importantly still, before his departure from Dover Charles had promised Wolsey his support whenever the next papal vacancy occurred, and won, in return, the guarantee of a further meeting with Henry as soon as events at the Field of Cloth of Gold had been concluded.
Even before Wolsey and Henry had set off for Calais on the last day of May, then, the long-term prospects for peace with France were already ebbing. In truth, it was always going to require more than a few weeks of mealy-mouthed cavorting across the Channel for Henry to shed his deep-seated antipathy to France and craving for her crown. Nor is this something that Wolsey can ever seriously have doubted. He was certainly no lover of war and remained keen to play the peacemaker whenever opportunity allowed, especially if such an opportunity might be used to further the illusion of his master’s central importance to European affairs. But now he was driven more and more uneasily by the king’s ambition, and now, more ominously still, he was increasingly a hostage to it, feeding it by whatever methods he could, in order to prevent it from consuming him.
Pomp and panache, after all, could only be used to camouflage painful realities for so long. Indeed, from most perspectives the entire spectacle at the Field of Cloth of Gold merely reflected the cardinal’s unbending determination to satisfy his sovereign’s weakness for an extravagant show at which he could be the star performer. And surely enough, as soon as the English camp at Guisnes had been dismantled, both Henry and Wolsey were hastening to Gravelines to consult with Charles once more. Within a day of this initial rendezvous, moreover, all three were making their way back to Calais, where Sir Edward Belknap, General Surveyor of the Crown Lands, had constructed a huge wooden hall, lit by ‘a thousand torches and other lights of wax’ and topped by a vast canvas roof depicting the heavens. It was here that the serious business of negotiation was to begin, and here, too, that the hollow overtures to France of recent weeks were finally given the lie.
For while the French king had done his best to gain admittance to this subsequent meeting, even hinting that he required no elaborate accommodation and would come instead as a member of Henry’s entourage, the resulting snub was anything but subtle. Two French noblewomen, the Lady Vendôme and her daughter-in-law, gained access to Calais on business and a few French nobles attended the masquerade ball subsequently given for the emperor by his English counterpart. But this was as close as any French subject got to the conference itself, since the game at hand, as all could plainly see, was a double one. Uppermost in the ensuing discussions was the question of marriage between Henry’s daughter Mary and her cousin the emperor, notwithstanding the child’s existing betrothal to the dauphin. And while it would take another year for firm agreement to ensue, the die was already well and truly cast. The ‘defensive’ alliance made only a month or so earlier at Canterbury during Charles’s recent visit was duly confirmed, and arrangements set in place for a further meeting the following year. Nor was the French king long in looking to his own interests. For he too was swiftly hatching war, this time in Navarre: a war which, by 1522, Henry would have joined as Charles’s ally. In a world of clockwork diplomacy, where subterfuge, suspicion and tawdry self-interest were the norm, how could things have ever been otherwise?