King Henry that France, even when engaged with other enemies,
was too strong to be overrun in the old style. Moreover, his
allies were giving him no aid, though they had eagerly accepted
his great subsidies. With a sudden revulsion of feeling Henry
offered peace to France, which King Louis XII. gladly bought,
agreeing to renew the old pension or tribute that
Treaty of Étaples.
Henry VII. had received by the treaty of Étaples.
Their reconciliation and alliance were sealed by the
marriage of the French king to Henry’s favourite sister Mary,
who was the bridegroom’s junior by more than thirty years.
Their wedlock and the Anglo-French alliance lasted only till the
next year, when Louis died, and Mary secretly espoused an
old admirer, Charles Brandon, afterwards duke of Suffolk, King
Henry’s greatest friend and confidant.
While the French war was still in progress there had been heavy fighting on the Scottish border. James IV., reverting to the traditionary policy of his ancestors, had taken the opportunity of attacking England while her king and his army were overseas. He suffered a disaster War with Scotland. Battle of Flodden. which recalls that of David II. at Neville’s Cross—a fight which had taken place under precisely similar political conditions. After taking a few Northumbrian castles, James was brought to action at Flodden Field by the earl of Surrey (September 9th, 1513). After a desperate fight lasting the greater part of a day, the Scots were outmanœuvred and surrounded. James IV.—who had refused to quit the field—was slain in the forefront of the battle, with the greater part of his nobles; with him fell also some 10,000 or 12,000 of his men. Scotland, with her military power brought low, and an infant king on the throne, was a negligible quantity in international politics for some years. The queen dowager, Margaret Tudor, aided by a party that favoured peace and alliance with England, was strong enough to balance the faction under the duke of Albany which wished for perpetual war and asked for aid from France.
With the peace of 1514 ended the first period of King Henry’s reign. He was now no longer a boy, but a man of twenty-three, with his character fully developed; he had gradually got rid of his father’s old councillors, and had chosen for himself a minister as ambitious and energetic as Thomas Wolsey. himself, the celebrated Thomas Wolsey, whom he had just made archbishop of York, and who obtained the rank of cardinal from the pope in the succeeding year. Wolsey was the last of the great clerical ministers of the middle ages, and by no means the worst. Like so many of his predecessors he had risen from the lower middle classes, through the royal road of the church; he had served Henry VII.’s old councillor Foxe, bishop of Winchester, as secretary, and from his household had passed into that of his master. He had been an admirable servant to both, full of zeal, intelligence and energy, and not too much burdened with scruples. The young king found in him an instrument well fitted to his hand, a man fearless, ingenious, and devoted to the furtherance of the power of the crown, by which alone he had reached his present position of authority. For fourteen years he was his master’s chief minister—the person responsible in the nation’s eyes for all the more unpopular assertions of the royal prerogative, and for all the heavy taxation and despotic acts which Henry’s policy required. It mattered little to Henry that the cardinal was arrogant, tactless and ostentatious; indeed it suited his purpose that Wolsey should be saddled by public opinion with all the blame that ought to have been laid on his own shoulders. It was convenient that the old nobility should detest the upstart, and that the commons should imagine him to be the person responsible for the demands for money required for the royal wars. As long as his minister served his purposes and could execute his behests Henry gave him a free hand, and supported him against all his enemies. It was believed at the time, and is still sometimes maintained by historians, that Wolsey laid down schemes of policy and persuaded his master to adopt them; but the truth would appear to be that Henry was in no wise dominated by the cardinal, but imposed on him his own wishes, merely leaving matters of detail to be settled by his minister. Things indifferent might be trusted to him, but the main lines of English diplomacy and foreign policy show rather the influence of the king’s personal desires of the moment than that of a statesman seeking national ends.
It has often been alleged that Henry, under the guidance of Wolsey, followed a consistent scheme for aggrandizing England, by making her the state which kept the balance of power of Europe in her hands. And it is pointed out that during the years of the cardinal’s ascendancy the alliance of England was sought in turn by the great princes of the continent, and proved the make-weight in the scales. This is but a superficial view of the situation. Henry, if much courted, was much deceived by his contemporaries. They borrowed his money and his armies, but fed him with vain promises and illusory treaties. He and his minister were alternately gulled by France and by the emperor, and the net result of all their activity was bankruptcy and discontent at home and ever-frustrated hopes abroad. It is hard to build up a reputation for statecraft for either Henry or Wolsey on the sum total of English political achievement during their collaboration.
During the first few years of the cardinal’s ascendancy the
elder race of European sovereigns, the kings with whom
Henry VII. had been wont to haggle, disappeared one
after the other. Louis of France died in 1515, Ferdinand
of Aragon in 1516, the emperor Maximilian—the
Henry VIII. and the rivalry of Francis I. and
Charles V.
last survivor of his generation—in 1519. Louis
was succeeded by the active, warlike and shifty
Francis I.; the heritage of both Ferdinand and
Maximilian—his maternal and paternal grandfathers—fell to
Charles of Habsburg, who already possessed the Netherlands
in his father’s right and Castile in that of his mother. The
enmity of the house of Valois and the house of Habsburg,
which had first appeared in the wars of Charles VIII. and
Maximilian, took a far more bitter shape under Francis I. and
Charles V., two young princes who were rivals from their youth.
Their wars were almost perpetual, their peaces never honestly
carried out. Their powers were very equally balanced; if
Charles owned broader lands than Francis, they were more
scattered and in some cases less loyal. The solid and wealthy
realm of France proved able to make head against Spain and
the Netherlands, even when they were backed by the emperor’s
German vassals. Charles was also distracted by many stabs in
the back from the Ottoman Turks, who were just beginning their
attack on Christendom along the line of the Danube. To each
of the combatants it seemed that the English alliance would
turn the scale in his own favour. Henry was much courted,
and wooed with promises of lands to be won from the other side
by his ally of the moment. But neither Charles nor Francis
wished him to be a real gainer, and he himself was a most untrustworthy
friend, for he was quite ready to turn against his ally
if he seemed to be growing too powerful, and threatened to
dominate all Europe; the complete success of either party
would mean that England would sink once more into a second-rate
power. How faithless and insincere was Henry’s policy
may be gauged from the fact that in 1520, after all the pageantry
of the “Field of the Cloth of Gold” and his vows of undying
friendship for Francis, he met Charles a few weeks later at
Gravelines, and concluded with him a treaty which pledged
England to a defensive alliance against the king’s “good
brother” of France. Such things happened not once nor twice
during the years of Wolsey’s ministry. It was hardly to be
wondered at, therefore, if Henry’s allies regularly endeavoured
Failure of Henry’s diplomacy.
to cheat him out of his share of their joint profits.
What use was there in rewarding a friend who might
become an enemy to-morrow? The greatest deception
of all was in 1522, when Charles V., who had
made the extraordinary promise that he would get Wolsey made
pope, and lend Henry an army to conquer northern France,
failed to redeem his word in both respects. He caused his
own old tutor, Adrian of Utrecht, to be crowned with the papal
tiara, and left the English to invade Picardy entirely unassisted.
But this was only one of many such disappointments.
