by Derek Wilson
To which court?
To the King’s court?
Or to Hampton court?
Nay, to the King’s court!
The King’s court
Should have the pre-eminence!
And York Place
With ‘my lord’s grace’,
To whose magnificence
Is all the confluence,
Suits and supplications,
Embassies of all nations . . .
Wolsey’s position might appear to observers as unshakeable but it relied, as the corpulent cardinal knew, on three interlinked skills: efficient administration, careful management of the king and vigilant watchfulness of potential rivals. Wolsey was no less assiduous than Empson and Dudley had been in keeping a tight reign on overmighty subjects and he used the same methods as his hated predecessors. He hauled great men into court before him for supposed offences against the laws of livery and maintenance and other ancient statutes and imposed heavy fines on them. However, even Wolsey could not be in two places at once. While he was keeping court in one of his great palaces the king might be at Whitehall or Greenwich or on progress where other people could have access to him. The cardinal was particularly nervous about the gentlemen of the Privy Chamber, including the Guildfords, who were always close to Henry and who might, he feared, use their influence to undermine his policies or become a conduit for those hereditary magnates he had shouldered aside. Events in 1516 and 1517 indicated the currents that were running beneath the surface of court politics. In May 1516, Wolsey harangued the council about the presumption of certain well-placed men and assured them that no one was beyond the reach of the law. He followed this up by having the Earl of Northumberland thrown into the Fleet prison and subjecting others of the king’s entourage to interrogation. The attempted showdown failed when the Earls of Shrewsbury and Surrey led a protest against such high-handedness and won Henry’s grudging sympathy. The gentlemen of the Privy Chamber followed up this little victory the following year when Wolsey was laid up for several months with the sweating sickness. The king fell into the habit of dictating sensitive correspondence to some of his trusted gentlemen. As soon as Wolsey was back in circulation he had the ‘offenders’ banished from court. A year later the feud was still bubbling, for once again the cardinal had some of the king’s household companions dismissed for allegedly unruly behaviour. The position for which John Dudley was being groomed was not just one of military and court service; it carried political potential and it could not avoid involvement in intrigue.
An active and athletic teenager could not fail to be impressed by the splendour of the royal court. John watched the popular heroes of the tiltyard, the headstrong but skilful Duke of Suffolk, the flamboyant Sir Nicholas Carew and, of course, the king, whose polychrome embroidered surcoats, gilded helms and gleaming Nuremberg armour outdazzled his opponents, and he longed for the day when he would enter the arena to draw admiring gasps from the ladies and be feted by his peers. But, like all the other young gentlemen jostling for notice, John also longed to disport himself on a wider military or diplomatic stage and his chance was not long in coming.
In 1519, Sir Edward Guildford was appointed Knight Marshal of Calais, which meant that he was charged with keeping law and order among the king’s subjects in the town and its pale. It was a responsible position at any time but had a special importance at that moment. Calais was about to become the stage for the most sumptuous diplomatic display that Europe had ever seen, and vigilant security and policing were vital if everything was to run smoothly. Wolsey had discovered that indulging Henry’s passion for military adventure was ruinously expensive. Money had been poured into the early campaigns of the reign and there was nothing to show for it. Somehow the king had to be deflected into relying on diplomacy rather than warfare, but without appearing to be weak. The answer was a series of meetings between Henry and his royal rivals, Francis of France and the Emperor Charles V, at which Henry would play the pivotal role of broker of universal peace and Christian brotherhood. But there was to be much more to these royal get-togethers than discussions round the table. Wolsey designed them to be high theatre in which the king of England would outdo his fellow monarchs in the splendour of his personal presence and the magnificence of his retinue.
The high point of all these demonstrations of national hubris took place in June 1520 at the Field of Cloth of Gold, a temporary township built near Calais to receive English and French delegations. The diplomatic festival went on for three weeks.
It was an Olympic Games: the jousts tournaments, archery and wrestling. It was a musical and dramatic festival: the solemn chart of royal choirs, the evenings’ minstrelsy, the masques. It was an architectural competition: the English raised a large temporary palace, the French a myriad tents and pavilions. It was a wine and food festival: the banquets with every luxury in food and drink, and free wine for all. It was an international ‘concours d'elegance’ in dress and costume, in jewellery, and in caparisons for the choicest mounts.8
Everyone wanted to be there. From one end of England to the other gentlemen desperately urged their friends at court to pull strings to engineer an invitation to be a part of the Tudor retinue and pawned lands to acquire the necessary finery to join the cavalcade.
Sir Arthur Plantaganet was there, as were the Guildfords. It is more than likely that a place was found for John Dudley in his guardian’s entourage. If so, the memory would have remained vividly with him to the end of his days. As a military leader in after years John often displayed a love of dramatic gesture and a regard for the niceties of honourable combat that were already becoming old fashioned. It seems likely that early exposure to the overwhelming productions of the cardinal-impresario made a lasting impression.
Sir Edward’s protégé had certainly come to Wolsey’s attention, for a year after the Field of Cloth of Gold the cardinal chose John Dudley to be one of his attendants when he travelled in state to Calais in a further attempt to make peace between the Habsburg and Valois rivals. Weeks of talking had no positive result, except to tie England firmly to the imperial cause. The big issues of statesmanship would have been of little interest to John. What mattered to him was the excitement of being at the centre of international affairs – and he was still only seventeen.
There was someone else within whose ambit the impressionable young man came at this time who must also have had a marked influence. That was John Bourchier, Baron Berners. This ebullient courtier–soldier was another of the king’s bosom companions and frequently borrowed money from his majesty in order to maintain the state which his position necessitated. Unlike many of the macho action men of the royal household, Berners was no mean scholar. He had an excellent command of French, Spanish and Latin, he collected the works of contemporary artists and his greatest solace was his library. Henry valued Lord Berners as a cultured man of letters and employed him on various foreign embassies but he also recognized his friend as a valiant knight who shared his love of military glory and the paraphernalia of chivalric etiquette and knightly display. Berners had his place in most of the early campaigns of the reign but his impact on later ages was of a different order. He was the most accomplished author/translator of his day, and it is to him that we are indebted for the English version of Froissart’s Chronicles, written by the Frenchman over a century earlier, which provided many sixteenth-century schoolboys with their basic knowledge of history and became the pattern for the even more influential works of Hall and Holinshed. Berners revelled in stories of the past or, rather, in the romanticized, chivalric image of the past. He translated the French Charlemagne adventure, Huon of Bordeaux, and, in so doing, introduced into English literature the figure of Oberon, later developed by Shakespeare. He made his contribution to native legend with The History of the Most Noble and Valyaunt Knight, Artheur of Lytell Brytaine. It was this multi-talented royal servant whom Henry made his Deputy Governor of Calais in 1520 and who thus became the superior of Sir Edward Guildford and John D
udley.
This was a crucial time and Berners carried a major responsibility in Calais. Henry and Charles entered into an offensive alliance against Francis I in 1521 (so much for the elaborate celebration of Anglo-French amity of the previous year) and the port was England’s gateway to the realm of the enemy. Berners’ duties were manifold. He set about strengthening the defences of the town. He sent skirmishing parties into the surrounding countryside to impress the inhabitants with the force of English arms. And his remuneration included the significantly large annual sum of £104 as ‘spyall money’. In the spring of 1522 the French began harassing the garrison and Berners sent out several sorties to see them off. It was in these minor engagements that John Dudley had his first taste of real action. He quitted himself well enough to gain the attention of Lord Berners and, in August 1523, he received his first salaried military appointment. The Deputy Governor raised the nineteen-year-old soldier to the position of Lieutenant of the Calais Spears. This gave him command – under the direction of a more experienced officer – of a formidable body of pikemen.
The appointment was part of the arrangements that were being made for a major campaign. After months of diplomatic wrangling a joint Anglo-Imperial strike into the heart of France had been agreed. The troops from Calais joined the Duke of Suffolk’s contingent in the Low Countries and from there the army moved south during the autumn. For a while all went well. On 14 November, Sir Edward Guildford distinguished himself by leading a successful assault on the supposedly impregnable Ardennes fortress of Bohan. John Dudley had already proved his mettle for, a week earlier, he had been knighted on the field of battle by the army commander, Charles Brandon, Duke of Suffolk, that same hero of the joust whom John had so long idolized. The duke did not distribute honours rashly and there can be no doubt that the young commander fully deserved the recognition he now received. John’s shrewd judgement was still masked by the dash and bravado of youth but his natural battlefield talents were already evident.
Henry wanted his best fighting men in France but he also liked to have his household graced by lusty, virile courtiers who were proficient in the tiltyard and projected the image England’s monarch wished to project. Thus, while what Wolsey called the ‘dribbling war’ went inconclusively on, hampered, as was becoming commonplace, by the competing ambitions of the allies, the young knight was summoned home to be made an esquire of the body to the king. At the end of 1524 we find him among those who competed in the Christmas tourney.
It was probably on his return from the continent that Sir John was married to Jane Guildford. The newlyweds set up home on one of the Dudley estates and John divided his time between there and the royal court. His mother’s death soon afterwards transformed this son of a condemned traitor into a man of property advancing steadily in royal favour. Thus, by the time his royal master set in train that sequence of events which were to bring about the greatest changes in the nation’s history, John Dudley was well established at the centre of national life. As long as his own ambition kept him there he could not avoid being involved in political and religious conflicts such as England had never seen.
5
Crises and Calculations
Three major elements rendered the decade of the 1530s explosive. First came the unstable European political situation, shaped by the bellicose Habsburg–Valois rivalry and the English king’s determination to remain on equal terms with the neighbouring monarchs. To this was added religious revolution which began in an insignificant Saxon town and spread rapidly across all national boundaries. Finally, Henry flung into the pot his own insecurity about the survival of the Tudor dynasty.
The volatility of Europe was the product of the competing anxieties and ambitions of Charles V and Francis I. We cannot speak in any meaningful way of ‘French policy’ or ‘Imperial policy'; wars, massacres and treaties were embarked upon by the will of two superpower leaders who hated each other with total conviction. Charles, a cold, duty-bound automaton, had by various means, inherited and acquired a miscellany of territories which built into the most formidable personal fiefdom Europe had seen in over seven hundred years and, theoretically at least, he had the fabulous wealth of his New World possessions to sustain it. Francis, a death-or-glory extrovert, was ruler of a state only recently united under his crown, and encircled by Habsburg territory which stretched from the Netherlands, via Franche Comté and Milan, to the whole of southern Italy and Spain. To the east, it also incorporated the kingdoms of Austria, Hungary and Bohemia. Each ruler regarded himself as the arbiter of Europe’s destiny, the true heir of Charlemagne, and what finally made them irreconcilable was their competition, in 1519, for the crown of the Holy Roman Empire, vacant following the death of Maximilian I. Despite their solemn avowals to be the defenders of Catholic Christendom, Charles and Francis subordinated religious and moral considerations to the pursuance of their personal aims. The French king was not averse to making alliances with Lutheran heretics and even the infidel Turk, while the Emperor shocked Europe profoundly by sending his troops to sack the Eternal City and hold the pope a virtual prisoner. Henry VIII and Wolsey were outclassed by the energetic malevolence of these combatants and lacked the resources for effective competition. Thus, most of their policies were doomed to frustration.
When, in 1517, Martin Luther, a lecturer at the recently-founded university of Wittenberg, on the banks of the middle Elbe, proposed a debate on the controversial hawking of indulgences he unwittingly set a match to several powder trails. He was very far from being alone in condemning the ‘pay now, live later’ propaganda of papal agents who preyed upon the fears and hopes of the gullible and superstitious by offering remissions from purgatory in return for cash, and it was not just this narrow issue which an ever-widening circle of supporters took up. There were hundreds of thousands of ordinary people throughout Europe who felt angry yet powerless to stand up to a domineering priesthood whose motto was ‘Do as I say not as I do’. There were scholars who studied the Bible in its original languages and believed that the authority and dogmas imposed by the Vatican and its lieutenants had no warranty in the word of God. There were peasants who lived in squalor and were no longer easily overawed by the glittering splendour of shrines and altars or the richly adorned senior clergy who lived among them in unashamed state. There were German nobles and princes whose national pride was offended by the taxes and obeisance claimed by a distant Italian pontiff on the far side of the Alps. There were scores of petty rulers within the confines of the Holy Roman Empire who resented the ‘conspiracy’ of pope and emperor to keep them in subjection. And there were the multitudes who found it difficult to rationalize the resentment they felt with the existing order but who were ready to listen to fiery preachers who proclaimed God’s wrath against a corrupt church and invited the faithful to purge themselves of error and throw off the yoke of priestly subjection.
So rapidly had the contagion of Lutheranism spread in less than four years that Charles V denounced the Wittenberg monk at an imperial diet in 1521. The reformer’s books were burned throughout Europe and he would have met the same fate had he not been protected by his own prince, the Elector Frederick, who was determined to advertise his own autonomy. Henry VIII was eager to demonstrate his immaculate orthodoxy and he published a book, the Assertio Septem Sacramentorum, in refutation of Luther’s heresies. For this a grateful pope rewarded him with the title ‘Defender of the Faith’, which put him on a par with his ‘Catholic’ majesty, Charles V and his ‘Most Christian’ majesty, Francis I. But when his own interests came into conflict with his loyalty to Rome Henry proved himself just as ready as his brother monarchs to set aside his obedience to the holy father.
The issue that set the English king at variance with Rome was the same fundamental concern which had motivated his father, the security of the dynasty. He kept up Henry VII’s policy of seeking out Yorkist cells and eradicating possible claimants to the throne. In sporadic purges between 1513 and 1538 a dozen or more descendants o
f Edward III (some very distant from the throne) and their suspected supporters were executed or vanished while in the Tower in circumstances every bit as suspicious as the death of the ‘little princes’. The problem was that Henry was the last of the male Tudor line. He had no brothers, so securing the throne his father had grasped some forty years before depended entirely on the birth of a male heir. The tragedy was that the Spanish bride Henry had eagerly married in 1509 had suffered a series of miscarriages and infant deaths, leaving her husband with only a single child, a daughter, Mary. By 1525 Henry was in his thirties and Catherine, five and half years his senior, was approaching the end of her child-bearing days. The king desperately wanted a son and he was not accustomed to being denied anything he wanted. Those close to him were aware of his increasing perplexity.
And no one was closer to him than Anne Boleyn, younger daughter of one of Henry’s close companions. Not especially beautiful, Anne returned, in 1522, from years of training at the refined French court, a vivacious, witty, strong-willed fifteen-year-old and took her place as one of the queen’s maids-of-honour. She made no especial impact on the life of the royal household for several years. The king, who was now often looking outside his marriage for sexual gratification, was taken up with Anne’s sister, Mary, who became his established mistress. But as Anne grew into womanhood she turned many heads about the court, and eventually aroused the king’s interest. As they grew more intimate, Anne became fully aware of Henry’s concern about the succession and, in his longing to get the younger Boleyn girl into bed, he told her that relations between him and his wife were becoming increasingly strained. For her part, Anne was determined not to go the way of her sister. She genuinely abhorred adultery and it is likely that her resolve was stiffened by members of her family who saw a possible road to advancement opening up before them. If Henry truly loved her and if he was a king in more than name then he would dispose of the only obstacle to their happy union. The king was in full agreement. He had by now convinced himself, through careful study of the Bible’s teaching on marriage, that he had been wrong to take to himself his dead brother’s widow. For this act a papal dispensation had been necessary and Henry reasoned that what one pope had done another could undo. As his own mind became more firmly made up he assumed that everyone else would fall into line, including Clement VII in distant Rome. There was nothing uniquely arrogant about this; Henry’s fellow monarchs no less blithely assumed that popes could be bullied, bribed or cajoled into obliging them in such delicate matters.