by Gwyn, Peter
Such a view of Henry’s mood in the spring and summer of 1522 has something to be said for it. It was hardly possible for there to be a war with France without playing the old tunes; and perhaps it was impossible for a king of England not to be somewhat stirred by them. In the September of that year Sir Thomas More reported to Wolsey a conversation with Henry during the course of which the king had declared ‘that he trusted in God to be there [in France]’, and to be ‘governor himself’, and that the French should ‘make way for him as King Richard did for his father’.2 It might seem quite a bellicose remark, but perhaps in the circumstance of an existing war with France not exceptionally so. It had been prompted by a report from Surrey, then in command of an expeditionary force in France, that the French Council were thinking of ‘retiring’ Francis and appointing a governor; and to contemplate acceptance of the throne as the gift of a committee is not evidence of excessive machismo; even his ‘unheroic’ father had had to win the English crown on Bosworth Field. More’s hope, that if Henry’s becoming governor of France should ‘be good for his grace and for this realm that then it may prove so, and else in the stead thereof I pray God send his grace one honourable and profitable peace’,3 may be evidence of the kind of restraints that a Christian humanist laboured under as a royal councillor. But, as his literary battles with the French poet, Germain de Brie, indicate, More could be as anti-French as any other Englishman, and both his and Henry’s comments on this occasion reflect the degree of ambiguity that always lay behind the Great Enterprise.
That there was ambiguity should come as no surprise. Enough has already been explained about Wolsey’s approach to foreign policy to suggest that there was nothing very chivalric about it – not, at least, if that meant a lot of charging about on white horses. Henry may have been rather more fond of equestrian pursuits, but as his approach to the campaign of 1523 will show, he was in military matters extremely cautious. Moreover, the argument to date has been that in matters of substance there was no conflict between master and servant, which in the present context would suggest that Wolsey was not about to spend his time restraining a monarch concerned only to win honour on the battlefields of France. Of course, Henry’s honour was always a major concern, but, as we have already seen, this was a fairly flexible notion, able to incorporate a number of contradictory activities, such as seeking peace or waging war. Furthermore, it will greatly help to understand the ambiguities of English foreign policy in the three years that elapsed between the signing of the Treaties of Windsor and Bishop’s Waltham with the emperor in July 1522 and the signing of the Treaty of the More with the French in August 1525 if the reasons for the Imperial alliance are firmly borne in mind. Powerless to prevent conflict between Habsburg and Valois, Henry and Wolsey had been forced either to opt out of European affairs or to make a choice between the contending royal houses. As the first course of action was virtually unthinkable, because so detrimental to Henry’s honour, a choice had to be made. In the end it was the Imperial alliance that appeared to have more to offer, on the assumption that Charles was likely to be more compliant than Francis. As events were to prove, the assumption was wrong, for despite the care that Wolsey had taken to draw up an agreement that would be binding upon him, the emperor was to find it remarkably easy to escape. But the central purpose of the Imperial alliance had never been the conquest of France; indeed, not until the emperor’s resounding victory over the French at Pavia in early 1525 was the conquest of France discussed – and then, it will be argued, not very seriously. Instead, the intention was to use any military success that might result from the war to establish a European order dominated by Henry and his leading councillor. It was, in other words, very much the same policy as before, except that this time circumstances had dictated that England’s partner should be not, as in 1514 and 1518, a king of France but rather a Holy Roman Emperor and king of Aragon and Castile, Charles v. All the same, it remains the case that from Wolsey’s return from Calais in November 1521 until at least the spring of 1524, English foreign policy did have a consistency of purpose unlike what had gone before, and indeed what was to follow; the reason for this was the Great Enterprise. War with France was what all England’s efforts were directed towards and to that end in March 1522 commissioners had been sent to every county in order to establish the extent of her ability to conduct it.
The so-called ‘general proscription’ of 1522 is perhaps the most important piece of evidence for the seriousness of the government’s commitment to the Great Enterprise.4 In fact the first reports from the commissioners were considered incomplete and inaccurate, and in July new instructions had to be sent out, which incidently make it clearer that financial rather than more directly military matters were the government’s chief concern. Nevertheless, as a result of the exercise, for the first time for centuries the Crown had a reasonably accurate notion of the number of able-bodied men available to fight, and the potential size of any retinue that any given leading figure could raise; and it needs to be remembered that such retinues, rather than any professional force, still comprised a major part of any royal army. The survey had also discovered to what extent people’s obligations under the statute of Winchester of 1285 to provide armour and weapons were being fulfilled, and in the following year an effort was made to remedy the many deficiencies that had come to light. All in all, it was an impressive achievement, and in its close targeting on the practical problems of waging war perhaps unparalleled. By the spring of 1523 the information obtained concerning people’s wealth had made it possible to raise two loans from the laity amounting to over £200,000, and one from the Church of over £55,000. Moreover, a parliament had been summoned to meet in April 1523 so that yet more money might be raised, for if one thing was certain it was that the Great Enterprise would cost a lot of money, for there has never been a more expensive activity than war.
No medieval or early modern king could finance war from his own resources.5 Henry VII, and indeed his Yorkist predecessors, had undoubtedly strengthened the royal finances, especially as regards the management of the royal estates, which, along with the customs revenue, by Henry VIII’s accession had come to provide about 80 per cent of the Crown’s annual income. Precisely how great this income was has been disputed, but it was somewhere in the region of £110,000. By 1522 there had probably been a decline; certainly, revenue from both customs and land had decreased, and there is no reason to suppose that the shortfall had been made up from other sources.6 All the same, there is no evidence that in peacetime the Crown was experiencing any major financial difficulty, though both in 1519 and in 1525-6 some concern was shown to restrict royal expenditure, especially in the household departments. What is certain, however, is that £110,000 was not enough in wartime. Even the supposedly financially prudent Henry VII managed to spend some £108,000, though admittedly over four years, ostensibly in defence of Breton independence. His son’s early interventions in France were even more expensive. Between the spring of 1511 and the autumn of 1514 Henry VIII spent a staggering £892,000 on wages, provisions and ordinance, though even this does not compare with the £560,000 that he spent on warfare in the space of of twelve months in the 1540s.7 Nor was it only English kings who spent colossal sums in this way. Within two years of his succession Francis I found himself in debt to the tune of something approaching four million livres (about £400,000), the result very largely of his first, and it should be stressed very successful, invasion of Italy.8 Almost the same amount was to be provided by the kingdom of Naples alone to finance Imperial forces in Northern Italy in the late 1520s, and even this was not enough to prevent large-scale mutiny amongst the Imperial forces for lack of pay, leading amongst other things to the sack of Rome.9
It was undoubtedly to Henry’s disadvantage that both Francis and Charles were in receipt of much larger sums. It has been estimated that in 1523 Francis’s revenue was in the region of 7,800,000 livres (£780,000) a year.10 Because of the autonomy of the various parts of his empire, Charles�
�s revenue is much harder to calculate, but merely as king of Aragon and Castile, he received somewhere in the region of 1,000,000 ducats, or £225,000 a year.11 Moreover, in differing ways, both rulers were in a better position than Henry to draw upon a greater proportion of their subjects’ wealth by way of taxation. There was, for instance, nothing in England to compare with such important indirect taxes as the gabelle in France or the alcabala in Spain; and the beauty of such taxes was that they did not require the subject’s consent. Another difference was that both Francis and Charles borrowed money on a much greater scale than Henry – especially Charles, who was fortunate to be able to make use of the increasingly large amounts of revenue from South American bullion to serve as security for large loans from the great finance houses of Europe such as the Fuggers of Augsburg. He also borrowed from his own subjects on an increasingly large scale by the sale of annuities. Francis also borrowed from his subjects, but more usually from very particularly wealthy men such as his own finance minister, Semblançay. He also very much extended the practice of creating offices for the express purpose of selling.
Something all three monarchs agreed upon was that the Church was a suitable case for financial exploitation, Charles obtaining from just one Spanish clerical source, the cruzada, 150,000 ducats, or over £30,000 a year.12 Curiously, however, in the secular field the English Crown was not nearly so innovative or various in its approaches to the obtaining of money. Admittedly, in the 1540s Henry, like Charles, was to borrow large sums from the Fuggers,13 but in Wolsey’s time there was very little borrowing either from foreign bankers or, except in special circumstances such as applied in 1522 and 1525, from private individuals. Indeed, the strong impression is that private individuals were much more likely to be in debt to the Crown rather than the other way round. Some money does seem to have passed hands on the appointment to offices, and the practice was to grow as the century progressed, while under James I the sale of titles was to be introduced in a systematic way. But the sale of neither title nor office made any real contribution to Henry VIII’s revenues. What did was taxation, of which more shortly. First, though, some comment is needed upon the great disparity between the financial resources of the English monarchy and those of its European counterparts, a comment that may come quite naturally at a moment when England was about to embark upon a Great Enterprise.
If one first asks why the disparity, the obvious answers have to do with size and resources. It is easy to forget just how big a political unit France was in the sixteenth century. Although in area just a little behind her nearest rival, Spain,14 in other respects she was way ahead. Population figures are largely a matter of guesswork, but it looks as if France contained about fifteen million, Castile and Aragon together about seven and half million. As for revenue, Francis I could expect perhaps three times the amount that Charles V received from his Spanish kingdoms.15 Compared with both these, England and Wales together could muster only two and half million people, with royal revenues amounting to about one-fifth the French.16 But lack of size and numbers was no reason for not attempting to sell offices or adopting other such financial stratagems, and it has to be said that the impression is that in the first two decades of his reign Henry does not seem to have been under any great financial strain, and hence there was little incentive to seek for new sources of revenue.
Why this was so is not as clear as it used to be when the belief was that Henry VII had left his son great financial surpluses, and it may still be the case that quite large sums of money, some of it in the form of jewels and plate, had been channelled into such private repositories as the rather shadowy king’s coffers.17 But whatever the reality, for at least the first decade of his reign, Henry was considered by foreigners to be a wealthy king, the Venetian ambassador, Giustinian, calling him not only ‘the best dressed sovereign in the world’ but also ‘very rich indeed’.18 Moreover, in 1513 not only had he been able to finance one of the largest expeditionary forces ever to have set sail from England, but he had also had to finance an army to meet the Scots. And for Henry even peace could be quite expensive, the famous meeting with Francis at the Field of Cloth of Gold costing about £15,000, or roughly one-seventh of the Crown’s annual revenue.19 But the money for all this expenditure was apparently found with comparative ease; and the conclusion would seem to be, therefore, that there was no great pressure to seek new sources of revenue because it was thought that there was money enough to conduct even the kind of ambitious foreign policy that both Henry and Wolsey believed in. And it is the connection between finance and foreign policy that has to be looked at now.
It was apparently Wolsey’s practice to answer criticism of his forward foreign policy by recounting one of Aesop’s fables. A few wise men were attempting to escape the consequences of a ‘great rain the which should make them all fools’ by retreating into a cave, hoping that when the rain had passed they would re-emerge to hold sway over those foolish enough to stay out in the rain. The stratagem did not work for ‘the fools would none of that, but would have the rule themselves’ for all the wise men’s craft.20 In other words, Wolsey was arguing that whatever the wisdom of isolationist and pacifist policies, there are just too many ‘foolish’ or, alternatively, ruthless, people who will take advantage of passivity. The sensible policy can only be for a government to get its hands dirty or, to continue the metaphor of the fable, get wet, and hope to beat the ‘fools’ at their own game. It is the classic defence of realpolitik which may offer a different perspective on the rationale of Wolsey’s foreign policy from that provided by ‘honour’ and the chivalric trappings of a Field of Cloth of Gold. It may, nevertheless, not convince everyone, for the difficulty is that it is not very obvious that during the 1520s the ‘fools’ were anxious to invade or in other ways to threaten the interests of Henry’s kingdom. Moreover, as one contemporary who may not have been altogether happy with Wolsey’s foreign policy, or indeed with the moral implications of the fable whereby to rule the ‘fools’ one had to become a ‘fool’ oneself, wryly commented, it was a fable that in Wolsey’s time had helped ‘the king and the realm to spend many a fair penny’.21
The implication behind More’s comment that the pennies had been badly spent by Wolsey, together with something of his ‘puritanism’ – if one may use such a term in relation to a Catholic saint – has remained lurking behind much of the criticism of Wolsey’s foreign policy. It has been thought too grandiose, too extravagant, too much a reflection of his own self-glorification.22 From a certain viewpoint such criticism must be true, but it is the point of view that is controlling the judgement. For some people, all expenditure on foreign policy is so much vanity and wickedness. For others, any amount spent in the pursuit of a country’s self-interest is money well spent. And what of money spent on more nebulous, and perhaps nowadays unfashionable, concepts, such as honour and glory? By their very nature such things are not very amenable to accounting criteria. For both Henry and Wolsey the king’s honour and the best interests of the common weal were hardly divisible, and both needed to be promoted with all the resources at the kingdom’s disposal. It is perfectly legitimate to be critical of the foreign policy that resulted from this, as long as one tries to understand the attitudes that lay behind it and to appreciate how all-pervasive they were. It has already been mentioned that the English spent about £15,000 on the Field of Cloth of Gold. What should also be mentioned is that the French spent about £20,000.23 As much in peace as in war conspicuous display was expected of a sixteenth-century monarch, and it would have been a very brave and probably foolish king who did not try and fulfil such expectations. And it needs to be stressed that the argument of this book has been that Wolsey was just as much concerned for his master’s honour as his master was. It was not the case that he was having to spend all his time restraining a more chauvinistic and chivalric Henry.24 Indeed, as will be shown in this chapter, Henry could on occasions be considerably more cautious than Wolsey. Thus, if there is criticism to be made of the
extravagance, not to say fecklessness, of English foreign policy during the 1520s, Wolsey must take his fair share, and insofar as he was more concerned with the administrative and financial consequences of the policy, perhaps the lion’s share.
What has already been made clear is that England’s resources were nowhere near equal to those of her two main rivals. What is equally true, however, is that her commitments were nowhere near as great, if only because she was not involved in the battle for Italy. In preparation for his first and, as it turned out, most successful Italian campaign, culminating in his famous victory at Marignano, Francis I had spent in the region of 1.8 million livres (£180,000), and the diplomacy which followed cost him almost as much. In the aftermath of the Treaties of Noyon and Fribourg in 1516 he had had to find well over £200,000 for the Swiss, at least £45,000 for the Emperor Maximilian, and £20,000 for the dispossessed duke of Milan; and despite English opposition to much of what he was doing, he continued to pay Henry a pension of £10,000 a year.25 As for Charles, he was having to provide armies to put down rebellions in Spain, to defend all his Mediterranean possessions from naval attack by the Turks and Barbary pirates, to fight campaigns in Italy, to maintain his own position in Germany as Holy Roman Emperor and to help his brother, the Archduke Ferdinand, defend Habsburg lands in Austria and Hungary from Turkish attack.