10th of January, 1519, empowering him to settle with Henry's commissioners the time, place, and all the other circumstances of the intended interview. The public mind in both France and England was occupied by the details of this royal ceremony to the exclusion of almost every other topic, and both nations saw with wonder the vast and expensive preparations for the pageant. The offence which this unparalleled height of favour enjoyed by the favourite gave to the nobility, caused much secret murmuring, and told against him fearfully when the tide at length turned. The effects of such enormous prosperity were now every day ripening and growing into a strange flagrance in the public eye. Wolsey was a despot of the most decided stamp, and Henry appeared judicially blind. Such was the pride of the cardinal that on solemn feast days he was not contented without saying mass after the manner of the Pope himself. He had bishops and abbots to serve him, and had even noblemen to hand him water and the towel. It was owing to this last piece of arrogance that he is said to have contracted that deadly enmity to the Duke of Buckingham, which never rested till he brought that great nobleman to the block. One day the duke was holding the basin for the king to wash, when the cardinal came and unceremoniously dipped in his hand. The duke, incensed at this indignity, flushed scarlet with anger, and let the water fall into Wolsey's shoes. The cardinal, stung by this insult, said apart to Buckingham that "he would sit on his skirts" for that. Buckingham, to mark his contempt of Wolsey, appeared next day at court in a jerkin, and when the king demanded the reason of that bizarre costume, Buckingham replied merrily that the cardinal had threatened to sit on his skirts, and therefore he had taken this precaution, for if he had no skirts they could not be sat upon.
It was only by such incidental means and by such spirited men as Buckingham that any complaint of my lord cardinal's doings could be brought to the king's notice. Every one was in terror of the overgrown minister. Such was his towering pride at this period that even Warham, the Archbishop of Canterbury, having addressed him in a letter as "Your loving brother," Wolsey resented it as an indignity, and complained of the primate's presumption in thus challenging an equality with him. On this being reported to the venerable Warham, he only calmly replied, "Don't you yet know that this man is drunk with too much prosperity?"
No one, except the honest Warham, dared to complain to the king of his favourite's proceedings. Wolsey had set up a court of his own, which was an actual inquisition, into which he compelled both laity and clergy, and in this he set himself up as the public censor of morals and opinions. Not only every man's conduct, but every man's conscience was at his mercy. He appointed as judge in this court one John Allen, a man of scandalous life, whom he had himself, as chancellor, condemned for perjury. With such an apt but unworthy tool as this, Wolsey drew a large income by fines upon the dissolute conduct of both laymen, and of monks, and the clergy, who gave him ample scope for it. But though this might have been tolerated in a man of strict life, the people were especially disgusted to see one who indulged himself freely, both in pomp and pleasure, so severe on the licentiousness of others. Nor did Wolsey confine himself to his own court: by his commissions he claimed to possess jurisdiction over all the bishops' courts, especially as it regarded wills; and his decisions on such matters were regarded as most arbitrary and intolerable.
None but Warham dared to bring the complaints and discontents of the public on this score to the ears of Henry, who merely bade Warham tell Wolsey that if anything were amiss to see it amended. But at length a person of the name of Loudon ventured to prosecute Allen, Wolsey's judge, in a court of law, and convicted him of injustice and corruption; and the people were so delighted with this that their clamour reached the king, who was greatly incensed, and gave the cardinal a rebuke, which made him a little more cautious. At the approaching royal meeting, however, we shall see the cardinal occupying the place of sole arbiter of all proceedings; the depository, as it were, of the jurisdiction and glory of the two monarchs of England and France.
But whilst Wolsey was deeply occupied in his plans and preparations for the royal meeting, an event occurred which for a time arrested the attention of all Europe. This was the death of the Emperor Maximilian, and the vacancy in the imperial office. Francis I. and Charles of Spain were the two candidates for its occupation, and the rivalry of these two monarchs seems to have again awakened in Henry the same wish, though the plain statements of Bishop Tunstall had for a time suppressed it. He dispatched a man of great learning, Dr. Richard Pace, to Germany, to see whether there were in reality any chance for him. The reports of Pace soon extinguished any hope of such event, and Henry, with a strange duplicity, then sent off his "sincere longings for success" to both of the rival candidates, Francis and Charles!
Francis declared to Henry's ambassador, Sir Thomas Boleyn, that he would spend three millions of gold, but he would win the imperial crown; but though the German electors were notoriously corrupt, and ready to hold out plausible pretences to secure as much of any one's money as they could, from the first there could be no question as to who would prove the successful candidate. The first and indispensable requisite for election was, that the candidate must be a native of Germany, and subject of the empire, neither of which Francis was, and both of which Charles was. Charles was not only grandson of Maximilian, and his successor to the throne of Austria, and therefore of a German royal house, but he was sovereign of the Netherlands, which were included in the universal German empire.
Even where Francis placed his great strength—the power of bribing the corrupt German electors, the petty princes of Germany, for the people had no voice in the matter—Charles was infinitely beyond him in the power of bribery. He was now monarch of Spain, of the Netherlands, of Naples and Sicily, of the Indies, and of the gold regions of the newly-discovered America. Nor was Francis at all a match for Charles in the other power which usually determines so much in these contests—that of intrigue. Francis was open, generous, and ardent; Charles, cool, cautious, and, though young, surrounded by ministers educated in the school of the crafty Ferdinand-and the able Ximenes to every artifice of
