Part 6 (1/2)
In the result, an alliance was concluded with France under which the infants were betrothed, Tournai was restored to France. France was to pay 60,000 crowns and promise not to interfere in Scottish affairs to the detriment of England, and Wolsey was enabled to pose as the pacificator of Europe; the other Powers with more or less reluctance all finding themselves constrained to give their adherence to the new treaty of Universal Peace.
Thus when the year 1519 opened, Wolsey's policy was triumphant. France was bound to England; the young King of Spain wanted her friends.h.i.+p; Maximilian was still looking to her for money; and the Pope was obliged to applaud her for having usurped his official function as peacemaker. But in the days when war and peace and the movements of armies turned habitually on the personal predilections, quarrels, and amours of monarchs, the political atmosphere was liable to violent disturbances without warning. In January, 1519, Maximilian died suddenly; and his death in fact involved a complete rearrangement of ideas as to the positions of the Powers.
[Sidenote 1: 1519 Charles V.]
[Sidenote 2: The Imperial election]
Ten years before, when Henry came to the throne, he was the only young man among the European sovereigns. The Emperor and the King of France were both more than middle-aged: so was the King of Aragon who was virtually King of Spain and the Sicilies. Before six years were out there was a youthful King of France; not much later, all Spain was under the dominion of a boy. These three Kings were now twenty-eight, twenty-four, and nineteen respectively, while the succession to the Empire lay with the Electoral Princes. Charles was an obvious candidate, since the Habsburgs had actually retained the office among themselves for three generations; yet the Electors were in no way bound to maintain the tradition. In ability and in character, one of their number was fit for the purple--Frederick of Saxony; but Saxony was only one among a number of German States, and Frederick himself had no mind to undertake the office. Thereupon ensued the somewhat curious spectacle of the French King entering the lists, he being the one possible rival of Charles. Of all the Continental Princes, these two alone were powerful enough to sustain the burden of the Empire: yet either of them, achieving it, would have his power dangerously expanded, and would become a serious menace to the Pope.
So Charles and Francis both intrigued and bribed the Electors; the Pope tried to avoid helping either; Wolsey promised support to both; and the Electors themselves watched for opportunities of raising the price of their suffrages. And presently Henry himself conceived the idea of getting himself put forward as a third candidate, through whom a way of escape might be found for those who regarded Francis and Charles as Scylla and Charybdis. The combination however of the Crown of England with the Imperial diadem was no improvement in their eyes. Leo did not wish to find himself in Wolsey's grip. The scheme must almost inevitably have been fraught with disaster both to England and the Empire. Wolsey of necessity made himself the instrument of his master's desires; but while he selected as his agent Pace, the most astute of his subordinates, Pace's own correspondence is a good deal concerned with hints that an over-zealous pursuit of the policy would be a bartering of the substance for the shadow of power, and with explanations of the impracticability of an effective electoral campaign. Pace, in fact, went very little beyond sounding the Electors and declaring the results to be extremely unpromising; a state of things to which we may infer that neither he nor Wolsey had any objection. In the end, the influence of England was employed in favour of Charles, who was chosen Emperor in the middle of summer. The three sovereigns, Charles V., Francis I., and Henry VIII., dominated Europe for nearly thirty years to come--an unusually long period for three princes to reign side by side.
It was now Wolsey's difficult business to keep both Francis and Charles as suitors for the favour of England; and, having placated the latter in the contest for the Empire, to turn his attention to the former.
[1520 Wolsey's triumph]
Francis was at this time ready to meet Wolsey more than half way. He was particularly desirous of holding a formal interview and a personal interchange of courtesies with the King of England; and to this end he actually appointed Henry's minister his own plenipotentiary, a position without precedent or parallel for an English subject. Wolsey prepared to make the meeting an occasion for such a display of magnificence as has rarely been witnessed. At the same time he emphasised the independent position of England by arranging for a separate preliminary interview between Henry and the Emperor, and making it clear that herein it was not the Emperor who was doing the King a favour, but the contrary. If Charles wished to meet Henry, he must come to England for the purpose. Meantime both monarchs sought to obtain the great minister's goodwill by promises of support when the Papacy should become vacant--promises which Wolsey would not permit to influence his plans; whether because he rated them at their true value, or because he had no great anxiety to barter the position he had already secured for one which, however magnificent, however dominant in theory, might convey actual power of a much less substantial kind.
[Sidenote: Rival policies]
The French alliance, it must be observed, was never popular in England.
Tradition was against it; the n.o.bles of the old families were against it; the Queen was also naturally against it and very anxious for close and friendly relations with Spain. A degree of antagonism was thus generated between Katharine and the Cardinal, who held resolutely to his policy of maintaining the balance and never so committing himself to one party as to preclude a _rapprochement_ with the other.
There was much intriguing on the part of Francis to bring on the meeting of the Kings before Charles could visit England. The state of the French Queen's health on one side and of the English Queen's wardrobe on the other figured largely as conclusive reasons for haste or delay. Wolsey however gained the day. The meeting was fixed to take place early in June between Guisnes and Ardres. In the last week of May (1520), Charles came to England, remaining three days; a week later, Henry sailed for Calais.
[Sidenote: Field of the Cloth of Gold]
It might almost be said that the entire courts of England and France, n.o.bles and knights and ladies, met on the famous ”field of the Cloth of Gold”. Jousts and feastings were the order of the day. Wolsey understood how to impress the popular imagination; and he had a magnificent scorn or a cynical contempt for the enmities and jealousies aroused, of which he himself, as responsible for all the arrangements, became the centre. It may be doubted, however, whether any great goodwill between the two nations was born of all the display of amity; nor were there any very marked diplomatic results. If it was Wolsey's particular object to evolve a triple league, he was disappointed. The two Kings met and parted, Henry proceeding to a fresh conference with his nephew of Spain, from which Francis, in his turn, was excluded. Neither Charles nor Francis knew in the end which of them stood in the more favourable position with England; but the little Princess Mary, betrothed to the Dauphin, was half-pledged to Charles himself; while Charles was still formally betrothed to the French Princess Charlotte, and was inclining to subst.i.tute for both the well-dowered Infanta Isabella [Footnote: Otherwise called Elizabeth. The names are interchangeable.] of Portugal. Among all the surprising matrimonial complications of this half-century, one particular feature appears to be tolerably constant--that when Charles was not actually married, he was rarely without at least one fiancee actual, and another prospective.
At any rate, the total result in 1520 was that Henry was in separate alliance with Francis on one side and with Charles on the other; alliances which neither could afford to break, but on which neither could rely.
[Sidenote: Wolsey's aims]
The main interest of Wolsey's career, from the national point of view, attaches to his conduct of foreign policy: and in the confusion of alliances and counter-alliances it is not always easy to recognise the objects of that policy or its fundamental consistency. The aim always in view was to prevent any Power or combination of Powers from dominating Europe; to subst.i.tute diplomacy for the actual arbitrament of arms; to secure for England recognition as the true arbiter without involving her in war. The three first-cla.s.s Powers of the earlier years were reduced to two by the combination under one head, Charles V., of Spain and the Empire, with France as the sole Continental rival.
But behind Wolsey's own policy was the traditional one of hostility to France, popular in the country, supported by the n.o.bility, and offering attractions to an ambitious and martial-minded monarch who was not yet thirty years of age: whose Queen moreover was by birth and sympathy a strong partisan of Spain. Hence the Cardinal was liable to be forced out of his mediatorial position into one of hostility to France.
[Sidenote: Charles and Francis]
On the other hand, Francis and Charles each desired to strengthen his own position at the expense of the other. Each therefore desired an alliance with England close enough to secure her aid in an aggressive programme. But while Charles required active a.s.sistance and subsidies, seeking to throw on England the real burden of accomplis.h.i.+ng his designs, Francis was comparatively satisfied with English neutrality. Again, while an aggressive alliance with Charles offered some uncertain prospects of the acquisition of French territory, circ.u.mstances were once more tending to enable Francis to utilise the ancient Scottish alliance as a means of holding England in check.
[Sidenote: Scotland 1513-20]
Since the decisive battle of Flodden, Scotland had not to any marked degree influenced Wolsey's European diplomacy. The blow dealt to her had been too serious: and the n.o.bles, always turbulent, had never been more so than during the years which followed the great defeat. Queen Margaret, sister of the English King, a woman of only five and twenty when James was killed, made haste to marry the young Earl of Angus within a year of the event. The Douglases had frequently headed the Anglicising factions of the Scottish n.o.bility, whereas the country at large constantly favoured the traditional alliance with France and hostility to the Southron. At present, the Douglases of whom Angus was the chief headed one faction: the Hamiltons, whose chief was Arran, headed the other. The marriage put an end to the arrangement under which Margaret had been Regent; there was intriguing and fighting to obtain possession of the person of the infant King; the Duke of Albany, [Footnote: Albany's father had been brother of James III.; their sister was Arran's mother.] of the royal house, who had been bred in France, was sent for, in the hope that as Regent he would compose discords.
In the summer of 1515 he arrived. In the meantime, Dacre, in charge of the English border, had been fomenting quarrels [Footnote: _Lang_, _Hist. of Scotland_, i., 395. L. & P., ii., 779, 795.] and suborning outlaws to raid and devastate in the border counties, and plotting unsuccessfully to have James carried off into England to the tender care of his uncle. Albany, for his part, demanded the custody of the child, which was refused by Margaret; who however was forced to surrender with a show of friendliness. But she herself very shortly took refuge in England.
In 1517 Albany withdrew to France with a view to resuscitating the French alliance; the rivals Arran and Angus were again the two most powerful of the n.o.bles; Margaret returned to Scotland, but quarrelled with her husband.
In 1520 Albany was still in France which he probably found more cheerful than his own country. Angus got the better of Arran, who fled to France.
There however Francis was still aiming at close alliance with England; and under such a combination of favourable conditions the truce between England and Scotland, entered upon in 1514 and now about to terminate, was extended for a couple of years. But Margaret herself being now hostile to Angus, there was every prospect that, should Albany return to Scotland, Wolsey would have to reckon seriously with the anti-English party there as a factor in his diplomatic relations with France.
[Sidenote: 1520-21 Affairs abroad]
The closing months of 1520 arid the opening months of 1521 witnessed events of importance at the time-and one at least which had very far-reaching consequences. The Emperor's wide do-minions were disturbed by a local outbreak in Germany, a revolt in Spain, and an attempt on the part of the claimant to the throne of Navarre to recover that territory. The Diet of the Empire met at Worms, and Martin Luther was cited before it; with the result that the Empire was practically divided into two camps, Charles ranging himself on the papal side. As Henry VIII. was so far a loyal son of the Church, wielding an anti-Lutheran pen in theological controversy, while the French King's reverence for the papacy was under suspicion, the present tendency of this event was favourable to the union of Charles and Henry with the Pope against Francis. On the other hand there was very little question that the troubles in the Emperor's dominions were fostered by Francis, who was preparing for an Italian expedition. Had Charles and Wolsey trusted each other, their alliance would certainly have been drawn closer; but Wolsey was not the man to take up Charles's cause without securing an adequate return, while Charles wished to involve England on the strength of promises which he expected subsequently to find no necessity for carrying out. Charles found his justification in the unexpected success of his arms in Navarre, in Spain, and in Germany. Good fortune relieved him from the more pressing need of English aid, and thus the prospect of a close and active alliance faded.