Part 6 (1/2)

[Footnote 172: _Sp. Cal._, ii., 201. A Venetian reports that the English were so enraged that they would have killed Carroz had it not been for Henry (_Ven. Cal._, ii., 248), and Carroz was actually placed in confinement.]

[Footnote 173: _L. and P._, i., 5718; _Ven. Cal._, ii., 464.]

Henry had struck back with a vengeance. His blow s.h.i.+vered to fragments the airy castles which Maximilian and Ferdinand were busy constructing.

Their plans for reviving the empire of Charlemagne, creating a new kingdom in Italy, inducing Louis to cede Milan and Genoa and a.s.sist in the conquest of Venice, disappeared like empty dreams. The younger Ferdinand found no provision in Italy; he was compelled to retain his Austrian inheritance, and thus to impair the power of the future Charles V.; while the children's grandparents were left sadly reflecting on means of defence against the Kings of England and France. The blot on the triumph was Henry's desertion of Sforza,[174]

who, having gratefully acknowledged that to Henry he owed his restoration of Milan,[175] was now left to the uncovenanted mercies of Louis. But neither the credit nor discredit is due mainly to (p. 077) Henry. He had learnt much, but his powers were not yet developed enough to make him a match for the craft and guile of his rivals. The consciousness of the fact made him rely more and more upon Wolsey, who could easily beat both Maximilian and Ferdinand at their own game. He was not more deceitful than they, but in grasp of detail, in boldness and a.s.siduity, he was vastly superior. While Ferdinand hawked, and Maximilian hunted the chamois, Wolsey worked often for twelve hours together at the cares of the State. Possibly, too, his clerical profession and the cardinalate which he was soon to hold gave him an advantage which they did not possess; for, whenever he wanted to obtain credence for a more than usually monstrous perversion of truth, he swore ”as became a cardinal and on the honour of the cardinalate”.[176]

His services were richly rewarded; besides livings, prebends, deaneries and the Chancellors.h.i.+p of Cambridge University, he received the Bishoprics of Lincoln and of Tournay, the Archbishopric of York, and finally, in 1515, Cardinalate. This dignity he had already, in May of the previous year, sent Polydore Vergil to claim from the Pope; Vergil's mission was unknown to Henry, to whom the grant of the Cardinal's hat was to be represented as Leo's own idea.[177]

[Footnote 174: _L. and P._, i., 5319.]

[Footnote 175: _Ibid._, i., 4499, 4921.]

[Footnote 176: _Cf._ _Ven. Cal._, ii., 695; _L. and P._, ii., 1380. Giustinian complains that Wolsey ”never said what he meant but the reverse of what he intended to do” (_Ibid._, ii., 3081). This perhaps is no great crime in a diplomatist.]

[Footnote 177: _L. and P._, i., 5110, 5121. Henry's request that Leo should make Wolsey a Cardinal was not made till 12th Aug., 1514 (_L. and P._, i., 5318), at least six months after Wolsey had instructed Pace to negotiate for that honour.]

CHAPTER IV. (p. 078)

THE THREE RIVALS.

The edifice which Wolsey had so laboriously built up was, however, based on no surer foundation than the feeble life of a sickly monarch already tottering to his grave. In the midst of his preparations for the conquest of Milan and his negotiations for an attack upon Spain, Louis XII. died on 1st January, 1515; and the stone which Wolsey had barely rolled up the hill came down with a rush. The bourgeois Louis was succeeded by the brilliant, ambitious and warlike Francis I., a monarch who concealed under the mask of chivalry and the culture of arts and letters a libertinism beside which the peccadilloes of Henry or Charles seem virtue itself; whose person was tall and whose features were described as handsome; but of whom an observer wrote with unwonted candour that he ”looked like the Devil”.[178] The first result of the change was an episode of genuine romance. The old King's widow, ”la reine blanche,” was one of the most fascinating women of the Tudor epoch. ”I think,” said a Fleming, ”never man saw a more beautiful creature, nor one having so much grace and sweetness.”[179]

”He had never seen so beautiful a lady,” repeated Maximilian's amba.s.sador, ”her deportment is exquisite, both in conversation (p. 079) and in dancing, and she is very lovely.”[180] ”She is very beautiful,”

echoed the staid old Venetian, Pasqualigo, ”and has not her match in England; she is tall, fair, of a light complexion with a colour, and most affable and graceful”; he was warranted, he said, in describing her as ”a nymph from heaven”.[181] A more critical observer of feminine beauty thought her eyes and eyebrows too light,[182] but, as an Italian, he may have been bia.s.sed in favour of brunettes, and even he wound up by calling Mary ”a Paradise”. She was eighteen at the time; her marriage with a dotard like Louis had shocked public opinion;[183] and if, as was hinted, the gaieties in which his youthful bride involved him, hastened the French King's end, there was some poetic justice in the retribution. She had, as she reminded Henry herself, only consented to marry the ”very aged and sickly” monarch on condition that, if she survived him, she should be allowed to choose her second husband herself. And she went on to declare, that ”remembering the great virtue” in him, she had, as Henry himself was aware, ”always been of good mind to my Lord of Suffolk”.[184]

[Footnote 178: _Ven. Cal._, ii., 582.]

[Footnote 179: _L. and P._, i., 4953.]

[Footnote 180: _L. and P._, i., 5203.]

[Footnote 181: _Ven. Cal._, ii., 499, 500.]

[Footnote 182: _Ibid._, ii., 511.]

[Footnote 183: _L. and P._, i., 5470.]

[Footnote 184: _Ibid._, ii., 227.]

She was probably fascinated less by Suffolk's virtue than by his bold and handsome bearing. A bluff Englishman after the King's own heart, he shared, as none else did, in Henry's love of the joust and tourney, in his skill with the lance and the sword; he was the Hector of combat, on foot and on horse, to Henry's Achilles. His father, plain William Brandon, was Henry of Richmond's standard-bearer on Bosworth field; and as such he had been singled out and killed in personal (p. 080) encounter by Richard III. His death gave his son a claim on the grat.i.tude of Henry VII. and Henry VIII.; and similarity of tastes secured him rapid promotion at the young King's Court. Created Viscount Lisle, he served in 1513 as marshal of Henry's army throughout his campaign in France. With the King there were said to be ”two obstinate men who governed everything”;[185] one was Wolsey, the other was Brandon.

In July he was offering his hand to Margaret of Savoy, who was informed that Brandon was ”a second king,” and that it would be well to write him ”a kind letter, for it is he who does and undoes”.[186]

At Lille, in October, he continued his a.s.sault on Margaret as a relief from the siege of Tournay; Henry favoured his suit, and when Margaret called Brandon a _larron_ for stealing a ring from her finger, the King was called in to help Brandon out with his French. Possibly it was to smooth the course of his wooing that Brandon, early in 1514, received an extraordinary advancement in rank. There was as yet only one duke in England, but now Brandon was made Duke of Suffolk, at the same time that the dukedom of Norfolk was restored to Surrey for his victory at Flodden. Even a dukedom could barely make the son of a simple esquire a match for an emperor's daughter, and the suit did not prosper. Political reasons may have interfered. Suffolk, too, is accused by the Venetian amba.s.sador of having already had three wives.[187] This seems to be an exaggeration, but the intricacy (p. 081) of the Duke's marital relations.h.i.+ps, and the facility with which he renounced them might well have served as a precedent to his master in later years.

[Footnote 185: _L. and P._, i., 4386.]

[Footnote 186: _Ibid._, i., 4405.]