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

by Gwyn, Peter

  The point was that over a period of a year Wolsey had failed even to get close to any sort of settlement between these two monarchs. In order to secure his release, the French king had been forced to sign the treaty of Madrid.121 This had included his agreement to the restoration of Burgundy to its nominal duke, Charles v, and to the reinstatement of the rebel duke of Bourbon. Neither of these was in the long run acceptable to him, and, short of being compelled by armed force, he had no intention of keeping his word on either account. More negotiable was his renunciation of any claims to the duchy of Milan, though this was only because, not being in control of the duchy, he had little choice. Furthermore, the fact that Charles had taken the precaution of insisting on hostages, the dauphin, François, and Henri duke of Orléans, forced him at least to pretend to negotiate. Meanwhile, he was hoping to use his alliance with England and the League of Cognac to bring pressure on Charles to return the princes without having to pay too high a price. By securing a yet larger English commitment at Amiens, he was in a stronger position vis-à-vis Charles, and therefore less likely to make concessions – none of which was good news for a Wolsey trying to occupy the pivotal position. But Wolsey needed Amiens to bring pressure on Charles, who even less than Francis was showing no inclination to make concessions.

  Wolsey’s problem was that, as a consequence of Pavia, it was very difficult to get a firm hold on Charles. True, the emperor’s difficulties in Germany and with the Turk, further complicated by his brother Ferdinand’s newly acquired claims to the kingdoms of Bohemia and Hungary, which needed his support if they were to be made a reality, did impose certain restraints on his freedom of action. For instance, while he was anxious that Francis should comply with as many of the terms of the Treaty of Madrid as possible, he was even more anxious that he should not cause him too much trouble in Italy, which he needed to have firmly under his control before he could safely move on to Germany. As we have seen, in Italy his two priorities were, first, to ensure that Milan should be securely held in the Imperial interest and his determination to be crowned emperor by the pope. The problem here was that Clement had been a founder member of the League of Cognac, and although in September 1526 Charles had been able to compel him to sign a four-month truce, the pope was in no mood to do his bidding.

  The dramatic events of May 1527 drove the wedge between the two men even deeper, though their consequences were more complex than might at first appear.122 The rape and pillage of the Holy City by Bourbon’s unpaid and mutinous army, and the consequent imprisonment of the Holy Father in St Angelo for the second year running, may appear to have reduced Clement to the role of Charles’s puppet. However, when all is lost it is sometimes easier to be brave, and this even the timid Clement determined to be. Thus, in the summer of 1527 Charles was faced with the hostility of a battered but unbowed pope, and the imminent arrival of a French army in Northern Italy, which after Pavia he had probably hoped never to see again. What would he do? One option was immediately to buy Francis off by offering to return his sons on the most generous terms, however much he might lose face by it. Another was to respond more favourably to Wolsey’s overtures. This too would have meant the return of the French princes, but on more advantageous terms for himself than could probably be obtained by direct negotiations with the French, while much talk of European peace, his cousin Henry’s good offices, and such like, would let him off the hook as far as loss of face was concerned. The third option was to hope that the French army could be defeated and Clement and his other opponents in Italy forced to come to terms, thereby eliminating the need to make concessions to either Francis or Wolsey. It was this last option that in the autumn of 1527 Charles felt strong enough to pursue, but he would have quickly to reconsider his position if Lautrec’s army proved successful.

  What has been described is a very fluid situation in which neither Francis nor Charles was willing to give away too much too soon, in the hope that their bargaining positions would improve. On the other hand, they might at any moment have been persuaded to come to the conference table by the ever persuasive Wolsey, especially if things began to go wrong for them. For Wolsey it was the usual juggling act, but by the summer of 1527 his priority was no longer the glorious settlement of Europe’s problems under the aegis of his king, but the much more specific, and, if truth be told, rather sordid, matter of getting that king a divorce. Before we examine how this change of priority affected Wolsey’s plans, it needs to be stressed how seriously it weakened his position in Europe, as he himself was quick to appreciate. Writing from Amiens on 11 August, he explained to Henry that he had ‘forborn to make any overture of your secret matter, fearing that by disclosing thereof the same might cause the said French king to be more slack and stand further aloof’. Only when he had put Henry’s affairs ‘in assured perfection and train’, that is, only after the terms of the Treaty of Amiens had been settled, would it be wise to bring the subject up.123 Undoubtedly, Henry’s matrimonial problems were a godsend to Francis. As a result of his recent humiliations, he and his mother had had to come to the English cap in hand. Overnight the relationship had been, if not reversed, at least put on a more equal footing. Henry was now very much in need of Francis’s help, and Francis was, of course, going to make quite sure that he paid for it.

  For Charles too, Henry’s matrimonial problems brought advantages. What he really thought of Henry’s proposed rejection of his aunt is not at all clear. He and Catherine met only three times, briefly at Canterbury and Gravelines in 1520, and for a little longer in June 1522 when Charles had paid a visit to England in order to finalize plans for the Great Enterprise. On these occasions they appear to have got on perfectly well, but there was a fifteen-year difference in their ages, and, apart from the fact that Catherine was the sister of his mother, Joanna the Mad, whom Charles had hardly known, having been brought up in the household of another aunt, Margaret of Savoy, they had little in common. Charles was a son of Burgundy who became a king of Spain. Catherine, a daughter of Spain, became a queen of England who, when she first met her nephew, had not been anywhere near Spain for fifteen years. And whatever their feelings, Charles had been a most dilatory correspondent. Of course, Henry’s behaviour towards his aunt did touch upon the family honour, and the Habsburgs took their honour extremely seriously. However, when in January 1529 Campeggio had put this precise point to Wolsey, the answer he got was that ‘the Emperor will not in fact be concerned about the affair, and once it is done there will be a thousand ways of being reconciled to him’.124 It looks as if Wolsey was right, for Charles would not object in principle to Henry becoming a signatory to the Treaty of Cambrai in August 1529, nor in February 1535, when Catherine, though divorced, was still alive, would he be against putting out feelers to Henry for an alliance, for the good reason that he felt very much in need of support and was therefore not too fussy where it came from.125 Whatever Charles’s feelings towards his aunt, Henry’s matrimonial difficulties suited him well, just because they seriously weakened England’s position, and put a bridle on any schemes of Wolsey’s to do him down. Or, to put it another way, they provided him, as every other ruler in Europe, with a bargaining counter, to be used however and in whatever way, and whenever he wished – and in 1527 and 1528 he saw no overwhelming reason to let Henry off the hook by meekly accepting the English king’s wish for a divorce.

  The divorce not only weakened Wolsey’s position, but it seriously affected the direction of his strategy. Hitherto, the League of Cognac had been essentially a means to force Charles to the conference table. In the new situation the wishes of the league’s members, and above all Clement’s, had to become his chief concern. This meant involving himself even more in the affairs of Italy, which was not good news. It also meant having to adopt a more aggressive stance towards Charles, the declared enemy of the league, than ideally he would have wished. Firm pressure rather than all-out war was what he had wanted, but the overriding necessity to comply with papal wishes would make it much more dif
ficult to achieve the one without the other. Of course, all this only applied if Charles opposed the divorce, but Wolsey did not have to wait long to find out. At the end of July, despite all the government’s efforts to prevent it, a private messenger from Catherine had put Charles in full possession of the facts, at least as far as they were known to Catherine, including her determination to resist Henry’s wishes.126 He immediately informed Henry of his support for his aunt, and at the same time dispatched the general of the Franciscan order, Francisco Quinoñes, to Rome in order to register his strong protest at what had already occurred and to insist that if there was to be a trial it should not take place in England, where Catherine could hardly expect an impartial hearing.127

  Since Clement was still a prisoner of an Imperial army Charles was in a reasonable position to insist on his request being acted upon, though not in quite such a good position as might at first appear. The destruction of the Holy City and the humiliating treatment of the Holy Father and his cardinals was a matter of some embarrassment to the Holy Roman Emperor, even if he could truthfully claim this had happened without his knowledge or consent.128 In order to avoid even greater odium, he was forced to move with circumspection, or, to put it another way, Clement, although physically helpless, was in a strong moral position to resist unwarranted demands from Charles. And there remained for Charles the further embarrassment that, while his troops remained in what threatened to become a chronic state of mutiny, he was not fully in control of events in Rome, and, therefore, not best placed to negotiate with a pope who was his army’s prisoner rather than his own.

  For Wolsey, on the other hand, the pope’s captivity offered an outside chance of obtaining the divorce without Clement becoming directly involved. Given that Henry’s case was by no means certain in law, and given Clement’s inevitable fears about offending the emperor, such a possibility had its attractions, and he tried two ways of bringing it about. One was to summon a council of cardinals to Avignon, whose ostensible task would be to administer the Church during this emergency, but en passant they might be persuaded to pass sentence in Henry’s favour.129 The other way was to have himself appointed the pope’s vicar-general with full authority to act on his behalf; once in that office he could then himself pass sentence. Having completed the main negotiations with Francis and Louise, Wolsey spent his remaining time in France attempting to accomplish one or other of these ends.130 As he himself realized all too well, his chances were never good.131 What is also clear is that both schemes were only ever a reluctant response to an extraordinary situation, for throughout this time he was working even harder for Clement’s release.132 One might think this a little surprising, and certainly not in line with the usual picture of an egotistical Wolsey always anxious to push himself forward; but, in fact, neither scheme, even if it could be achieved, offered a satisfactory solution to his problem. Any divorce pronounced either by himself alone as vicar-general or by a council of cardinals could only have ever been considered partial and provisional, and certainty was what he was after. Of course, if Clement was going to remain in captivity for long, then alternatives would have to be sought, but it was not to be. On 7 December, with some connivance from his gaolers, Clement escaped to Orvieto, and both schemes became redundant, for it was now possible to negotiate with Clement directly.

  Admittedly the flight to Orvieto only marginally increased Clement’s room for manoeuvre, for his position remained extremely fraught.133 Before escaping he had been forced to accept humiliating terms from the Imperial commanders. These included the surrender not only of some papal towns but also of a number of cardinals, who were to serve as security for the large sums of money that he had promised and that the Imperial commanders needed to pay their troops with, but which, because of the havoc wrought by those troops and by the endemic feuding of the Orsini and Colonna families, was not available. Clement was left with no money, no Rome and no Papal States. And with the havoc came famine and disease. But, despite everything, he remained the Vicar of Christ, and this was a negotiable commodity. During the months ahead he was to exploit it for all it was worth, with everyone, but especially with the emperor. Meanwhile, although he was reasonably secure in Orvieto, it was fear of the Imperial army, whether paid or unpaid, that preoccupied him. This state of mind was by no means entirely to Wolsey’s disadvantage, but, as always, everything would depend on getting the timing and balance right. If Clement was too frightened, he would only do what Charles told him to do; but if he had no fears at all, he might well not do what Wolsey wanted. What Wolsey needed was a Clement who remained both grateful and beholden, at least long enough for him to decide in Henry’s favour over the divorce. The instrument by which Wolsey was to bring this about was the existing League of Cognac, but more especially Lautrec’s army, which at Amiens in August he had agreed to help finance.

  What Lautrec’s army could do was provide Clement with the prospect of real protection against the Imperial army, and it was a prospect which became increasingly real with Lautrec’s new success. By early November he had reached Parma on the southern fringe of the Po valley, and Genoa and most of the duchy of Milan, though not the city itself, were already in the league’s hands. These successes were enough to persuade Alfonso d’Este duke of Ferrara to change sides and on 14 November he formally joined the League. Would Clement follow suit? Having recovered his freedom, he could again receive foreign envoys, and those of the league immediately began to pressure him into rejoining. Even without his inherent caution there were good reasons why Clement should hesitate, but as during the spring of 1528 Lautrec proceeded to mop up the cities of the kingdom of Naples, so that by 26 April virtually only Naples itself was left to the Imperialists, the reasons for rejoining grew more compelling. One early bonus was that during 16 and 17 February the Imperial army, after nearly eight months of occupation, left Rome, enabling Clement to contemplate a return. And as the league’s successes continued, and the likelihood of his rejoining increased, so did the likelihood of his granting what Wolsey wanted as regards the ‘divorce’.

  There has been some debate about how far Clement’s attitude towards Henry’s ‘great matter’ was governed by political and temporal considerations rather than legal and ethical ones. The great historian of the papacy, Ludwig Pastor, took pains to emphasize that it was the latter;134 but even if it is admitted, as it is here, that Henry’s case was poor and that, therefore, there was no overwhelming legal or moral reason why Clement should have supported him, the facts do not appear to endorse Pastor’s view. It was only during the spring and summer of 1528 that Clement was prepared to make significant concessions to Henry: the dispensations enabling him to marry within the prohibited degrees, and thus to marry Anne, the general commission of 13 April enabling the divorce to be decided in England; the regranting of this commission on 9 June, and in that same month the ‘secret’ decretal commission; and finally in July the ‘pollicitation’, by which he promised not to interfere with any decision reached in England. The granting of the decretal commission, of which the content but not its potential application satisfied Wolsey, is particularly relevant. As we saw earlier, by this document Clement was in effect giving judgment in Henry’s favour, provided only that three highly selective and easily ascertainable facts could be established. In doing this he made it impossible for Catherine to mount a defence, which, given that certainly as regards natural justice and probably in law she was in the right, was a monstrous act of injustice, and one that can only be explained by his wish to take advantage of the league’s successes. For Clement it was a comparatively cheap way of signalling to an important constituent of the league that he was on its side, but without having as yet to commit himself. The fact that the decretal commission was only granted in a secret and limited form only confirms that political considerations were uppermost in his mind when taking this step.

  By mid-1528 it was by no means certain that the league’s successes would continue. Lautrec and his army had been encamped around
Naples for some time without the city falling, and, as the summer advanced, so did the heat, and with the heat plague and typhoid. Meanwhile, for the defenders of Naples the only serious problem appears to have been the lack of wine for the thirsty German troops who made up a large part of the Imperial army. It was also becoming clearer that, owing to insensitive handling on their part, the French were in imminent danger of losing the services of the Genoese naval condottiere, Andrea Doria, whose support had given them vital naval supremacy off the west coast of Italy. Moreover, as early as April a second Imperial army, led by the duke of Brunswick, had entered Northern Italy and linked up with those Imperial forces that had remained in possession of the city of Milan. Admittedly, this new threat had been countered by a second French army led by the count of St-Pol, but the situation in the north was by no means promising for the league. One way and another, Clement would have been extremely foolish to commit himself wholeheartedly to it at this point. He would also have been foolish not to make some concessions to Henry. The decretal commission was a large concession but, given the manner in which it had been granted, one that could easily be withdrawn. And how right Clement was to move cautiously. On 4 July Doria left the French service, on 16 August Lautrec died of the plague, and by the end of the month what was left of the French army in the kingdom of Naples surrendered. In the north it took a little longer for things to turn decisively against the league, but by the end of October the French had lost control of Genoa and nearby Savona. Only a toe-hold in Northern Italy remained to them. Venice, for her part, was just able to cling on grimly to what was her own, or, in some cases, to what only she considered to be her own. The League of Cognac was, in effect, no more.