The Cold Light of Day
Tho[ugh] the Prynces of whom we spake of before, were nat so/but they had dyvers wylls, dyvers councels, and no perdurable amyty, as after that dyd well appere. These Prynces were mortall and mutable, and so theyr wylles dyd chaunge and nat abyde.
Bishop Fisher of Rochester1
BISHOP FISHER HAS spoken for many down the centuries in expressing a certain disappointment in the apparent outcome of the Field of Cloth of Gold. The words quoted above come from a sermon he preached not long after the event. As he observed, the immediate circumstances of the Field certainly ‘did not abide’ for very long after, and all its extravagant gestures of friendship and promises of peace seemed rapidly to come to nothing. The fact that Henry and Francis were at war with each other within two years of the event invites an understandable scepticism about their expressed desire for peace in the first place. As a reformist prelate, and for Erasmus the ideal bishop, Fisher saw all before him as a poor counterfeit of the true joys of heaven and his sermon reflected vividly on the emptiness of the display. In his sermon, Fisher summoned again the winds that had filled the air with dust, torn down the French king's tents and ‘shaked sore the houses that were builded for pleasure’.
Like the Du Bellay account of the event, Fisher observed that ‘many great men's’ coffers were emptied and many were brought to ‘a great ebb and poverty’ and that some even died as a result. He reflected, a touch sourly, that all the splendid fabrics displayed were ‘borrowed of other creatures’, from the backs of sheep or other beasts and, in the case of silk, ‘out of the entrails of worms’, having no time at all for the human skills and ingenuity required to fashion them. All the glory could not avail against the mortality and fallibility of the greatest participants. Bishop Fisher also made a connection between magnificence and competitiveness:
Never was seen in England such excess of apparelment before, as has been used ever since. and thereof also must needs arise much heart burning and secret envy amongst many for the apparel … Thus many for these pleasures were the worse, both in their bodies and in their souls.2
His disparaging comment largely stands as the accepted English historiographical view of the event to this day: ‘these Princes were mortal and mutable, and so their wills did change and [did] not abide’.3 Bishop Fisher and those historians who have commented on the Field to date in like vein do have a point. Yet the real consequences were not immediately obvious to Fisher and appearances were somewhat deceptive.
It is easy to assume that Henry VIII's relations with Francis I were always essentially bad and those with Emperor Charles V were good, or at least neutral, until the issue of the king's marriage arose in the mid-1520s. It is also easy to infer from that assumption that it was always Henry's intention to deceive Francis and that he met Charles before the Field and immediately afterwards in order to stitch up a deal with the emperor that would nullify the commitments made to Francis. Yet, as we have seen, despite a family connection, Henry and Charles were more strangers to each other in early 1520 than were Henry and Francis. It was Charles, not Henry, who assiduously sought the May meeting at Dover, although Henry agreed to it readily enough. Charles did so out of a genuine anxiety about the 1518 Anglo-French rapprochement and upon this Wolsey had played to bring his plans for the Universal Peace to fruition.
While Henry had been at the Field, the emperor had been on progress through his Flemish dominions, visiting his native city of Ghent and then Brussels. In May it had been agreed that the two were to meet at Gravelines on Wednesday 4 July. They were due to remain there for three days and then the emperor was to return with Henry to Calais on 7 July. Festivities would take place and Henry would leave Calais on 10 July.4 Henry arrived back in Calais from Guînes on 25 June and began to oversee final preparations for the emperor's visit. It was therefore something of a surprise when, on 27 June, the English agent at the imperial court reported a suggestion that the meeting between the two sovereigns might now take place at Bruges. ‘They had proposed Bruges as more commodious; Gravelines is not sufficient for the company.’5 While there does not seem to have been any suggestion that Charles would not eventually come to Calais, he was then busy receiving a large number of his Flemish and German magnates. As the English agent in the Netherlands, Thomas Spinelly, reported, Charles had just publicly welcomed the Archbishop of Cologne. Asking Henry to come to Bruges was, in effect, asking for a delay to the meeting. Intentionally or otherwise, however, it was also a statement that the emperor considered his current business to be more important than the meeting with Henry at Gravelines, agreed months earlier. It was intolerable to the English.
Wolsey rejected the suggestion out of hand the same day. Through Spinelly, he informed the emperor's leading official, the Imperial Grand Chancellor Mercurino Gattinara, that if Charles persisted in this demand, Henry would not delay his departure for England beyond Monday 2 July. Neither Wolsey nor Henry was content that the king of England should trot meekly up to meet Charles, given the considerable preparations that had been made to welcome him to Calais and the expense of keeping the English entourage assembled there. It also risked creating the impression that Henry met the emperor as a client, just in the manner of the many territorial princes then flocking to the imperial court.
Status brinkmanship was once again the game. Wolsey insisted, as he had done with Francis, that the king having gone on to imperial territory at Gravelines, the emperor must immediately reciprocate and be received on English territory by Henry. The following day, 28 June, Spinelly reported:
The Chancellor suggests that while the Emperor is on the way, the t[wo] might commune with Wolsey. They blame the Bishop for not informing him of the reasons for the King's hasty return to England. They have delayed their provisions hitherto, in order to keep secret the meeting with Wolsey.
The two men to whom Spinelly referred were the Chancellor himself and Guillaume de Croy, the marquis d'Arschot. Gattinara reminded Wolsey how hard he had himself worked ‘for the anticipation of the day appointed by the last treaty and sworn of both parties’.6 The idea of Henry going to Bruges had been hastily dropped. On 30 June, Charles advised Wolsey that he was now preparing to come to Gravelines and Calais as agreed, but that he would be a little delayed, and was sending Gattinara and Arschot with a request for credence for them.7 Spinelly anticipated that they would be with Wolsey by Tuesday 3 July.
It becomes clear that the emperor's delaying tactics were really designed to create an opportunity for his two most senior officials to have a ‘secret’ meeting with Wolsey before he arrived. But what was there to talk about; and why the need for secrecy? The subject of these proposed talks was almost certainly an idea that Wolsey had canvassed a few weeks earlier at the Field, of a new tripartite alliance. According to a report from the imperial ambassador at the papal court, Juan Manuel, sent to Charles V on 13 June, Wolsey had boasted to a papal official with the court at Guînes of his power to ‘conclude an alliance between the King of England, him [the emperor] and the King of France’.8 That the emperor wanted something rather different is clear from Gattinara's note in the margin of Juan Manuel's letter to the effect that the ambassador in Rome was not to worry about Wolsey's boast because ‘we are about to conclude a treaty with the King of England’. Other correspondence from the papal court indicates that this was to be an offensive alliance between Leo X, Henry and Charles against Francis in support of Charles's attempt to wrest Milan from French hands: exactly the sort of alliance that Francis feared.
Talk of a triple alliance was certainly around in the French king's entourage at the Field, and Wolsey's most recent pronouncement on the significance of the event had rung alarmingly in the imperial ears. Shortly after the Field, Wolsey declared he knew that the pope did not trust him and was deceived by others, but that in striving for peace between three sovereigns, he, Wolsey, was acting in the true interests of the papacy and Christendom.9 It becomes clear why Charles was playing for time. He was unsure what to expect from Henry and Wolsey and what, in English hands, an imperial visit to Calais might be made to betoken internationally. Knowing how influential Wolsey was with Henry, he wanted his ministers to dissuade Wolsey from his idea of a triple alliance in favour of an Anglo-Imperial one instead.
No record of the discussions between Wolsey and the imperial representatives survives, but further news from Rome at the time shows that Wolsey had long since been identified as the key to Henry. Juan Manuel reported that the pope so much wanted an anti-French alliance that, notwithstanding Wolsey's insufferable arrogance, if he could bring one about, then the pope would ‘make the Cardinal his legate in England’ (actually to renew his existing, and at that stage temporary, legateship). Ten days later, Leo also conferred the see of Badajoz on Wolsey. Charles had first asked the pope to give Wolsey this plum sinecure in May as he journeyed to England. Wolsey soon afterwards resigned the benefice in favour of an annual pension of 2,000 ducats out of the revenues of the see of Palencia. He received news of these preferments from Spinelly in early June. The confirmation of them was clearly a bargaining chip in Gattinara's hands and an inducement to Wolsey to join the proposed anti-French league.10
Henry and Charles did meet finally on 10 July at Gravelines. The following day, they came to Calais where the emperor was lodged at the Staple and entertained over the next three days. There was no tournament this time, but another temporary banqueting house was made. On a very much smaller scale than that at Guînes, the ‘house of solace’, as Hall describes it, was still innovative in the English context, but it had obvious affinities with the Bastille banqueting house of 1518, referred to above. Unfortunately the weather was again so inclement that the wind tore the roof loose from its moorings and the banqueting house could not be used. Henry's guests were entertained instead at his residence of the Exchequer to which the temporary house was connected.11
The request for an Anglo-Imperial alliance failed. Nothing in the treaty that was eventually signed that July between Henry and Charles contradicted the pre-existing Anglo-French agreement for Mary's marriage to the dauphin. Resident ambassadors were to be exchanged for the first time, eighteen months, it should be noted, after the first resident English and French ambassadors had been exchanged. The two rulers agreed to send special representatives to Calais within two years to work towards increased co-operation between them. Evidently there was to be no urgent conferring about an attack on France. Finally, the two sovereigns were to maintain all existing agreements between them.12
This was surely not the grand alliance against France to which Henry was already supposedly committed by May 1520, as has so often been argued. It looks rather more like the emperor's best face-saving effort finally to get himself into serious political relations with Henry VIII. The suggestion that Henry should abandon all his preparations at Calais to go to Bruges for Charles's convenience was inept and was made to a king who had just confidently outfaced his great rival – a king to whom Charles had hitherto paid little attention, despite a family connection. Imperial envoys in Rome had openly derided Henry before the pope as insignificant until the spring of 1520 when it was clear that he would meet Francis I. Henry had just spent more than two weeks asserting his international status and military potential in front of the French and ambassadors from half a dozen European rulers, and his own nobility. Was he now to do less before Charles, his junior by some six years, who needed his help against Francis more than Henry currently needed his? Henry and Wolsey held all the cards. As we have seen, Charles had suddenly found room in his schedule to visit England in May as he and his ministers realised just how dangerous an Anglo-French alliance really might be and were panicked into action. It seems that in July there was a similar realisation that Henry's support would have to be earned, not merely assumed. It was an important, if belated, decision by the emperor because, having got himself into the game at last, his preponderant power did indeed turn it in his favour – but that was not until some two years later when the international situation faced by Henry and Wolsey had changed radically.
Immediately after the Field, Francis moved south to Abbeville, hunting in the forest of Crécy and elsewhere as he travelled. On or about 1 July, he and Queen Claude were again conveyed upon the river Somme from Abbeville back to Picquigny, a mercy to the heavily pregnant queen no doubt, and from there they came to Amiens. There the king ordered new fortifications at the northern approaches to the city.13 Sir Richard Wingfield, the English ambassador still, travelled with the court and Amiens's municipal records reveal that a number of other English gentlemen and their wives either accompanied the king or travelled into Picardy soon after him, at his invitation. One Didier de la Varenne and eight colleagues were paid 8 livres, 16 sous tournois between them for escorting ‘plusieurs seigneurs et dames d'Engleterre’ from Abbeville to Amiens. One Jean Charpentier and companions were paid 8 livres for fish presented to the English in accordance with the king's command that they be received and feasted well.14 From Amiens, Francis made his way to Chantilly and on to the royal château of Saint-Germain-en-Laye, arriving by 10 July. There, a month later, the long-suffering Queen Claude was delivered of her fifth child, Madeleine.15
Francis was also aware of Wolsey's talk at the Field of a tripartite peace. He played up to the English cardinal fully, even offering to return to the border of his kingdom and seek no place of honour for himself in conference with the other two kings if only Wolsey could bring about such a concord between them. He gave this dramatic undertaking confident that it would never be required of him. As a mutually agreed expression of trust between the two kings, Anne de Montmorency accompanied Henry to Calais to witness all that went on there and then travelled with him back to England. By 19 July, with Montmorency's return to France, Francis knew for certain that the imperial overtures for an immediate alliance had failed and he expressed his gratitude to Henry through Wingfield.16
The optimistic spirit in the French court at this time was encapsulated in a book written by the king's former tutor, François Demoulins's, which dates from November 1520. This is the third volume of his Commentaires de la guerre gallique, now in the Musée Condé at Chantilly.17 In this work, the events at Guînes and Ardres frame and contextualise what is, in effect, a praise of Francis I's imperial status. Like the first two volumes of this work which were completed in 1519, the third begins with a fictitious meeting between Francis and Julius Caesar which supposedly took place on Saturday 27 February 1520. It opens with Francis at the royal château at Cognac which is also referred to as ‘la maison de Daedalus’. The name of the house symbolises the inventiveness necessary for Francis to play Daedalus to Charles V's Minos.18 Outside is the park and forest of Craige, near Angoulême. The two towns represent Francis's kingdom and dynasty. In the story, a storm blows up, which is almost certainly an allegory of conflict with Charles V. The king is sure that ‘whether the wind comes from Germany or Spain’, the two centres of Habsburg power, the forest (of France) is strong enough to withstand it.19 The king's companions, Bonnivet and Montmorency, urge him to stay close to the château for fear that he will be harmed.
Nevertheless, because of the magnanimity he possessed and his determination not to be afraid, he went out and entered the forest all alone leaving at the gate the two named gentlemen.20
In the forest, Caesar greets Francis as a son. He tells Francis that soon he will go to his town of Ardres near Calais where he will meet a king who will make him
joyous and good cheer; you will make him more honour than your power requires of you, but your humility and gracious eloquence will constrain him to love you and this will reduce the arrogance of the islanders. You also will be contented by him at this meeting, for he is a gracious prince.21
At the end of the conversation the king ‘returns to Angoulême and shortly afterwards sets out on the road to Ardres’. Demoulins's says that he cannot convey the splendour of the Field and refers his readers to Guillaume Budé's greater powers of description – perhaps a reference to the Campi [see Bibliography]? He must, however, note three things. The first is the ‘virtuous bravery and firm constancy of our wise and loving Caesar’. The second is ‘the devotion and clear temperance of our precious and pacific union’, which would appear to be the treaty of London alliance, and the third is the means by which this agreement was secured, namely the ‘wise knowledge and divine way of achieving of Our Lady Concord’. The phrases ‘union precieuse’ and ‘Madame Concorde’ appear frequently in Demoulins's writing as allegorical figures of his patrons, the king's sister and his mother respectively. Louise is particularly flattered for her prudence and dedication to peace. A clear connection is being made here between Francis's apparent status as Caesar's son (and therefore the real ‘Holy Roman Emperor’) and the recent political events. Caesar has advised Francis how, by gracious and magnanimous treatment of his potential enemy, he will bring the king of England into his allegiance.22
This is, of course, a retrospective and highly politicised reading of Francis's behaviour at the Field, and rather ignores the irony of the stormy winds knocking down the French tents there. The emphasis on the king's personal bravery in leaving safety to encounter his destiny is perhaps intended to recall Francis's unannounced visit to Henry at Guînes. Demoulins's poem is evidence that in the months afterwards, the Field of Cloth of Gold was presented by scholars in the king's circle as the event at which Francis had personally and effectively co-opted the English into a celebration of his own power. In this view, by his conduct and magnanimity, Francis had compelled the support of Henry in the achievement of his own ambitions.
Soon after his return to the French capital with the court, Wingfield was succeeded as resident ambassador by his fellow Knight of the Body in the Privy Chamber, Sir Richard Jerningham. This change reflected the wish to emphasise the steadily growing importance of the Chamber representatives and, through them, the more personal links between the two sovereigns so recently strengthened at the Field. Jerningham's instructions incorporated a full report of what had gone on at Calais, confirming that Henry had not agreed to any kind of offensive alliance against Francis. The report was intended to reassure Francis while alerting him once more to the value of Henry's alliance. The implied narrative was direct and simple. Henry had kept faith with Francis as he had promised; let Francis now keep faith with him and do nothing to upset the equilibrium so favourable to Henry.23
Upsetting the equilibrium was, however, exactly what Francis I felt bound to do as the implications of Charles V's election as Holy Roman Emperor and of the Universal Peace became clearer. Francis's problem with Charles was less the fear that he would invade France itself than that his encircling power would threaten Francis's hold on the duchy of Milan and prevent him pursuing his claim to the kingdom of Naples as successor to Charles VIII and Louis XII. By 1520, the treaty of Noyon, agreed in 1516 to resolve their many competing claims, was a dead letter. Francis fretted under the knowledge that the longer he waited to return to Italy, the more time he gave Charles V to consolidate his financial and military power there. Francis expected the English king to support his claim to Naples as a ‘good brother and friend’, but preventing Francis doing anything more in Italy had been one of the driving forces in the Universal Peace and the Field of Cloth of Gold for Wolsey and Henry. In the winter of 1520 the king of France evidently decided that even if he could not himself move immediately against Italy, he must at least prevent Charles from doing do. Not the least of his considerations in taking what proved to be a disastrous decision was the fact that at Aachen, on 23 October 1520, Charles was crowned as the elected ruler of the German lands and acclaimed as ‘King of the Romans’. This was the first of a two-part formalisation of his full imperial status. The final stage would be, theoretically, to receive the imperial crown itself and title of ‘Holy Roman Emperor’ from the pope – in Rome.24
In early February 1521 Robert II de La Marck, duc de Bouillon and seigneur de Sedan, a disaffected vassal of the emperor, arrived at the French court. Shortly afterwards and with covert support from Francis, La Marck attacked imperial territory in Luxembourg. At about the same time, Henri d'Albret and André de Foix, seigneur de Lesparre, attacked Navarre in support of Henri's claim to that kingdom. As the French knew he would, the emperor counter-attacked. They hoped to present this as unprovoked aggression against Francis and to call for assistance under the terms of the Universal Peace. By the end of May, Charles V's commander, Henri de Nassau, had thrown La Marck out of Luxembourg, overrun the lordship of Sedan and threatened France itself. Meanwhile Lesparre overreached himself. After initially taking Navarre, he attacked Castile only to be forced into a rapid withdrawal, leaving Navarre in Castilian hands. To cap this disastrous sequence of events, Pope Leo X, who had been allied to the French king since 1515, now publicly repudiated him. Worse still for Francis, he formally invited Charles to enter Italy to receive the imperial crown.25
Wolsey's initial response in March to the outbreak of war and requests for assistance from both sides was that Henry's power was best served by arbitrating the dispute, as required by the Universal Peace, rather than entering into it himself. As he told the king:
In thys controversy betwext thes two princes yt shalbe a me[rvelous great prayse] and honor to your grace so by your hye wisdo[m] and authority to passe betwen and stey them bothe, that ye be nat by ther [contention and variance brought] onto the wer.26
Wolsey arranged for a conference between the parties chaired by himself to meet at Calais. He arrived there on 2 August 1521 armed with ample powers from Henry, the pope, the emperor and the king of France to arbitrate and, if possible, make the Universal Peace a reality. Wolsey apparently worked hard to this end and his personal international standing was, if anything, even higher than it had been at the Field during the previous summer. Yet, as Peter Gwyn has demonstrated, for all Wolsey's ‘shuttle diplomacy’ between the parties, conducted with that mix of pomposity, earnestness and charm that was his trademark, he could not resolve their differences. He and Henry realised soon enough that nothing could be done to maintain a peace advantageous to Christendom and so to England. Whatever their hopes in March, by August 1521 they knew that Henry must be drawn into the conflict. At all costs, he must do so on his own terms and be kept on the winning side.27
Shortly after his arrival, therefore, Wolsey began covert talks with the imperial representatives to conclude an anti-French alliance. An agreement was reached quite quickly. It provided that the emperor would marry Princess Mary, she receiving a substantially higher settlement than the French had offered. Charles would provide an ‘indemnity’ to cover Henry's loss of the French pension. Henry would not even have to declare war on Francis until March 1523, almost two years later, unless the present war had not ended by November. Henry would, however, immediately assist Charles to return to Spain whither he was desperate to go to reassert his authority after the revolt of the comuneros in 1520.28 The treaty gave all the advantages to Henry. The contracted delay would allow England to play for more time and even, conceivably, turn once more towards France if changed circumstances made it in Henry's interests to do so. More important still, it allowed time for the careful preparation of a really serious double invasion of France such as had not been attempted in the war of 1513. Wolsey could reprise his role as quartermaster-general to the English army and, with his eye for detail, plan so devastating a co-ordinated attack that it must sweep all before it, striking the crown of France into Henry's hands.
The consequence of Francis's ill-calculated moves against the emperor, therefore, was that Charles obtained in the summer of 1521 all that he had sought without success only one year earlier. By the end of the year Charles's armies had deprived Francis of the city of Tournai, so recently repurchased from Henry, and the entire duchy of Milan.29 These were bitter blows and Francis partly blamed the two men by whom he now felt deeply betrayed, Wolsey and Henry. He was right so to do, for almost the last thing Wolsey did before he left Calais at the end of November was to agree to an amplified alliance with Charles in which Pope Leo was now also included.
Henry VIII, meanwhile, had put pen to paper in defence of that same pope against Luther. His 1521 book Assertio septem sacramentorum was greeted warmly by Leo X, who expressed his thanks by bestowing upon Henry the personal title of Fidei Defensor. The bull promulgating it was published in Rome in October and in England the following February.30 By then, Leo was dead but plans were soon in hand for Charles to make his second visit to his uncle's kingdom as he journeyed from the Netherlands to Spain. Travelling with a retinue of 2,000, Charles arrived at Dover on 26 May 1522, and was accompanied by Henry from there to Greenwich. On 6 June Charles made a formal entry into London for Mass at St Paul's Cathedral, and was greeted by the whole civic establishment. En route, king and emperor were presented with pageants that highlighted the commonality of their descent from John of Gaunt, their potential as allies against the enemies of Christendom and Henry's new title of Defender of the Faith. The following week was taken up with hunting, banquets and anti-French pageants. Among the most pointed was one given at a banquet at Windsor in which figures representing Friendship, Prudence and Might together tamed a wild horse, bridled it and made it obey their commands – an obvious allusion, Hall assures us, to the king of France. On 15 June the two allies publicly committed themselves to a joint invasion of France. They aimed, they said, to subdue the disturber of Christian peace as the necessary precondition for an expedition against the Turks. The king then escorted his guest, hunting all the way, from Windsor via Winchester to Southampton, where Charles embarked for Santander on 6 July.31
At Lyon, on 29 May 1522, Clarenceux King of Arms had declared war on Francis I. Henry VIII defied Francis on the grounds that he had broken the treaties of London and of Ardres, principally by his covert and overt attacks on the emperor in Luxembourg and on Navarre and by stopping the annual payments due to Henry. The war that followed lasted for three years. English armies under the duke of Suffolk invaded France in 1522 and 1523 but the projected descent on Paris by an Anglo-Imperial army never materialised due to confused aims and logistics.32 Francis once more crossed the Alps in the autumn of 1524, determined to take back Milan. Instead, his army was crushed at the Battle of Pavia on 24 February 1525, the emperor's twenty-fifth birthday. The defeat saw the greatest slaughter of the French nobility since Agincourt. Francis himself was unhorsed in a failed cavalry charge and surrendered to the imperial commander on the battlefield. He was eventually taken to Spain as Charles V's prisoner.33
The French defeat delighted Henry, who eagerly pressed Charles for the ‘Great Enterprise’ of another joint, full-scale, invasion of France which now lay virtually defenceless before them. Charles, however, was no longer interested in such a plan. He knew his decisive victory at Pavia to be God-given and that with it came a divinely ordained opportunity to settle the neuralgic Habsburg–Valois disputes. Urged on by his Chancellor, Charles determined not to divide France with Henry, but to unite Christendom through his own magnanimity to its defeated king. Restored to an admittedly smaller kingdom, shorn of those lands to which the emperor laid claim, a chastened and grateful Francis would, Charles imagined, join with him and his brother England against the Ottomans. Together, under Charles's leadership, the three great Renaissance princes would force their common enemy back beyond Hungary and the Balkans, liberate the Holy Land, and Charles would become – in fact as well as name – truly the Holy Roman Emperor.
This was a vision of a very different sort of ‘universal peace’ from that Wolsey had tried to make. It may have been compelling for Charles and his advisors but was deeply troubling to the rest of Europe. In the aftermath of Pavia, Charles now looked far too powerful for comfort. As Francis soon realised, this suddenly made him the rallying-point for all those whose interests were threatened by the emperor's preponderant power, including the king of England. Henry was absolutely furious at a second betrayal by an unreliable Habsburg ally. While he stormed and stamped, Wolsey, who had accepted far more quickly than his master that the bid for glory in war in 1522–5 had failed, knew that Henry's best interests now lay in recovering the role of arbiter and at minimal cost. After all, Henry had acted strictly according to the rules of the 1518 Universal Peace. He had, in the end, gone to war against a pronounced aggressor, who had been defeated in battle and taught a lesson. Motivated by no personal ambition, Wolsey could claim, Henry now sought the best for all in another international peace under his aegis.
The reality was rather more prosaic. Finding himself isolated again, Henry did as he had done in 1514 and made a complete about-turn, agreeing to peace with France under the treaty of The More signed on 30 August 1525.34 As under the treaties of London of 1514 and 1518, the king of France had to pay for peace. Henry demanded two million gold écus in annual instalments of 100,000 écus, partly funded through a share of the profitable French salt trade.35 An Anglo-French truce was proclaimed at Lyon on 25 September. Francis finally gained his freedom by the treaty of Madrid, agreed with Charles in January 1526. Among other things, it required him to restore the duchy of Burgundy to Charles, to give up all his Italian and Flemish claims and to marry Charles's sister, Eleanor of Portugal. His two eldest sons were also to be held as hostages in Spain for their father's fulfilment of the treaty. It was a heavy price to pay for his freedom – too heavy, in fact. No sooner had Francis returned to France in March 1526 than he repudiated the treaty of Madrid. Despite the risk to the young hostages, Francis rejected the agreement as one signed under duress and sought allies against Charles. Wolsey, who had encouraged Francis to do exactly this, hurriedly swung Henry behind him. He helped to build a new anti-Habsburg alliance between France, the papacy, Venice, Milan and Florence in the League of Cognac agreed in May 1526. Henry did not join the League himself but became its ‘protector’.
Wolsey encouraged French overtures for a fuller alliance based on the marriage of Francis, or more likely one of his sons, to Princess Mary. Before he would discuss any marriage, however, he demanded that the French confirm, once and for all, Henry's huge pension agreed under the treaty of The More. This, in effect, meant buying out Henry's ancestral claim to the French throne. Only by offering a permanent or ‘eternal’ peace, as it would soon be called, could Henry demand such a high price. Hence Wolsey's insistence to the astonished ambassadors that the marriage negotiations which they had come to complete must await a totally renegotiated peace agreement and his extraordinary statement that neither the 1518 treaty of London nor the treaty of The More was ever intended to be anything other than a short- to medium-term expedient!36 The king of France had once more to acknowledge the English king's rights in France and the value of his alliance.
The treaty that ensued created no mechanism for a ‘universal peace’ such as the agreement of 1518. Neither did the pope play any role, notional or otherwise, in it. Had Wolsey tired of elaborate peace plans? Subsequent evidence suggests not. However, this time he seems to have looked to build solid foundations for the agreement rather than elaborately carved rhetorical keystones. Although Wolsey employed the language of 1518 in the spring of 1527, he was not making a second attempt to impose peace on Europe. In April, the treaty of Westminster was agreed between Henry and Francis. Henry would lend Francis assistance in having his two sons, still prisoners in Spain, released by the emperor. The key to the settlement was that Henry's French pension was increased and the two kings forswore war between them permanently. Mary's marriage would be to Francis's second son, Henri, duc d'Orléans. Henceforward, each habitually referred to the other as not only his ‘good friend and brother’ but his ‘perpetual ally’.
As in 1518, large embassies were exchanged to ratify the Eternal Peace. Henry built a temporary banqueting house and a disguising theatre at Greenwich as showcases for the technical and artistic talent marshalled at his court. The pageants presented to the French during the several banquets at Greenwich in May 1527 combined some rhetorical elements reminiscent of those employed in 1518 and 1520. They were intended as reminders to them of Henry's recent magnanimity towards Francis and warnings to honour him in keeping the peace. All were carefully contrived to show Francis as the supplicant for the 1527 peace, Henry as its bestower and Wolsey as its mediator. Princess Mary took part in one of the pageants, which featured a ‘riche mounte’, an allusion to the Tudor dynasty familiar at the English court since 1513. The absence from the mountain on this occasion of any symbolic plants, other than those of England, contrasted with the profusion of dynastic emblems displayed on the one that had appeared in 1518, underscoring the limited nature of the new agreement.37 As celebrations for the renewed alliance got under way at Westminster, news reached England of the Sack of Rome by rebellious imperial troops and Clement VII's escape, first to the Castel Sant'Angelo on the Tiber, and then to the hilltop retreat of Orvieto.
At the end of May 1527, Arthur Plantagenet Viscount Lisle, Thomas Boleyn (now Viscount Rochford), Anthony Browne and John Clerk were commissioned to go to France at the head of a large English delegation and there to receive Francis I's ratification of the April treaty. The king of France received them in the Salle de Saint-Louis in the Louvre on 8 June. At Mass the next day, Francis swore to uphold the treaty. Brilliantly illuminated, the documents of his ratification of the treaty of Eternal Peace depicted, among other things, the two royal coats of arms, heraldic flowers and Francis's salamander emblems. The document of Francis's final ratification of the treaty incorporated a new three-quarter-length portrait of him based on one done by Jean Clouet on the king's return from Spain in 1526.38 The following Thursday the ambassadors were entertained at a banquet before which Francis met them and spoke ‘very gentylly and discusyd with us of huntyng and buldyng and of dyver odyr thinges’. The pageant of the ‘Ruin of Rome’ was presented on this occasion. It was not described in Lord Lisle's account of the embassy, but its subject is easily imagined from its title.39
On 11 July 1527 Wolsey crossed the Narrow Sea and once more arrived in France as English plenipotentiary and legate a latere. He hoped to turn the Sack of Rome to Henry's advantage by amplifying the treaty of Westminster into a full Anglo-French alliance. He wanted to secure the pope's release from effective captivity by the imperial troops who had ruined the Eternal City. He also wanted the pope's agreement to an international peace and to an annulment for Henry VIII. Francis I personally oversaw plans for Wolsey's reception. At Boulogne, Montreuil-sur-Mer, Abbeville and finally Amiens, Wolsey was presented with a succession of street pageants and orations in which he was praised as Cardinalis pacificus, cardinal peacemaker, and saviour of the Church. As he had been seven years earlier, Wolsey was acutely conscious of the responsibility of his vice-regal status. His gentleman usher, George Cavendish, reports that Wolsey told his household officers that when they were in France, he expected them to give him ‘all such service and reverence as to his highness's presence is meet and due’. On 4 August, as Wolsey approached Amiens he was informed that Francis was coming to meet him. An old roadside chapel stood close by and there he ‘newly apparelled him into more richer apparel’.40 Still mounted on his mule, Wolsey then greeted the king as an equal, just as he had done at Ardres in 1520. As Cavendish describes the encounter, it was almost as fraught with tension about relative status as that between Henry and Francis had been in 1520. When they came within 200 yards of each other, both men stopped and Wolsey would not move again until Francis had first moved towards him. At Amiens, Wolsey told Henry, he found his lodgings ‘richely and pomposely apparelled with the Frenche Kinges oun stuff’ of plate and furnishings brought to Amiens from his châteaux at Blois and Amboise.41 Wolsey received a number of very expensive ecclesiastical gifts from Francis. One account of items made for the legate runs to a total of over 3,220 livres.42 On 18 August, Wolsey and Francis signed and swore to a new Franco-English alliance under the treaty of Amiens. Afterwards, Wolsey went to Compiègne where he negotiated the details of joint Anglo-French action against the emperor with the French council.43
It was this connection between peace and profit which Wolsey later emphasised to Henry VIII's council, to the mayor and aldermen of London and to the king's judges when he addressed them in the Star Chamber at Westminster after his return from France. He said that Henry would, by this peace and alliance, ‘have more treasure out of France yerely then all his revenewes and customes amount to’ and thereby become the ‘richest prince of the world’. It is significant that in his attempt to impress his audience, Wolsey made no mention of international peace as such or of the honour to Henry from managing the affairs of Christendom. Instead, Wolsey told his audience that he had turned a military war into a monetary one and that Henry was its acknowledged victor. The implied promise was that the kind of annoying parliamentary subsidies that had been demanded in 1522 were, perhaps, things of the past.44
A second large French embassy to England came in the autumn to receive Henry's ratification of the treaty of Amiens. It was led by Anne de Montmorency, now the Grand Maître of France, and was escorted into London on 20 October by Henry Courtenay, now Marquess of Exeter, Viscount Rochford, William Blount, Lord Mountjoy, and Cuthbert Tunstall, Bishop of London. As in 1518, the French were accommodated at the bishop's palace and in surrounding merchants' houses. Henry received the French at Greenwich on 22 October and swore to uphold the new alliance at Mass celebrated by Wolsey on All Saints' Day.45 At Francis I's insistence, the two kings finally exchanged membership of each other's chivalric orders. On 10 November at Greenwich, Henry was presented with the collar and mantle of the Order of St Michael. After a tournament that afternoon, the French were entertained in the same banqueting and disguising houses built to entertain the April embassy. These had been entirely renovated and the pageants presented after the banquet recalled those which had greeted Wolsey in France. They played up his supposed role in delivering the pope and the two French princes from captivity.46 However flattering the vision of the omnicompetent churchman was intended to be, Wolsey was actually trying to project an altogether different image of himself to his French guests. A few days before the Greenwich festivities, he had given a banquet at Hampton Court, which, as he explained to his household, was designed to give the French
such triumphant cheer as they may not only wonder at it here, but also make a glorious report in their country to the King's honour and of this realm.47
Wolsey displayed his own wealth to an unprecedented degree on this occasion. Cavendish assures us that Hampton Court was laden with gold and silver plate, ‘very sumptuous and of the newest fashions’ and his guests ate as they would have done at a royal banquet.48
A final reciprocal embassy to deliver to Francis the insignia and robes of the Order of the Garter was dispatched in November. Once more the king took personal charge of its reception. On 2 November he wrote to Montmorency advising him that from Boulogne to Paris the English ambassadors would be received as befitted the perpetual friendship between himself and Henry. He would personally receive them, ‘le plus privement et honorablement qu'il me sera possible’.49 The king's secretary Robertet also congratulated Montmorency on his mission and assured him that the English would be well received. In January 1528, nearly a decade after he first sought to be so, Francis became the first French king to be admitted formally to the highest rank of English chivalry. In St George's Chapel, Windsor, he was installed by proxy as a knight of the Order of the Garter.50
The rhetoric and presentation of the second great Anglo-French rapprochement of Henry's reign was splendidly optimistic, and publicly the English king and his chief minister rejoiced that the alliance in defence of the papacy was proof that Henry was once again at the centre of European affairs and had recovered that pre-eminence and influence which he had enjoyed seven years earlier at the Field of Cloth of Gold. As always, the reality was less marvellous than they pretended. Even as Wolsey arranged this extravagant Franco-English reconciliation, Henry had decided upon a course of action which would hazard the very prominence that Wolsey had laboured so hard to regain. For, in the midst of so much else that year, Henry finally determined to obtain an annulment of his marriage to Katherine, the aunt of Charles V. His repudiation of his wife alienated the most powerful dynasty in Europe and precipitated Henry's break with Rome. His friendship with Charles, tenuous at the best of times, completely collapsed. Whether he liked it or not, Francis was now Henry's only major ally in the face of an emperor who had the pope entirely at his command.51 Almost a decade after its great inauguration at the Field of Cloth of Gold as the key to the Universal Peace of Christendom, Henry VIII discovered that his alliance with Francis I was more important to his international status as king of England than it had ever been before.