Monarchy: From the Middle Ages to Modernity. David Starkey

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СКАЧАТЬ but the marriage also cemented England’s alliance with Spain against France. In 1510 peace with France was renewed, but when the ambassador came to thank Henry, he angrily retorted to an unwisely phrased French sentence, ‘I ask peace of the King of France, who dare not look me in the face let alone make war on me!’ Henry was rearming England, and in 1511 he got both the council’s agreement and a moral justification for war. The French king had committed the most mortal sin as far as Henry was concerned: he threatened to depose Pope Julius II and he had insulted the English ambassadors. On 28 June 1513, the English army crossed the Channel to France with Henry’s banners intertwined with those of the Pope. For the first time in almost a century, Parliament had proved willing to vote serious war taxation. The result was the largest and best-organized English army since Agincourt. This was a holy war, and Henry was the Pope’s greatest ally against schismatic France. The French king was stripped of the title ‘Most Christian King’, and it was given to Henry.

      Henry, like his great hero Henry V, led the English army in person. He even came under fire occasionally. He defeated the French in the Battle of the Spurs – so called because the French knights ran away so quickly; captured important prisoners; and took two French cities after set-piece sieges. Henry hadn’t conquered all France, of course, but he had restored the reputation of English arms. He had made England once more one of the big three European powers alongside France and the Habsburg Empire. Above all he had covered himself in glory.

      At the same time, however, Henry – or rather Catherine, since it was always the woman who was blamed – had failed to produce an heir. She gave birth to a short-lived son in 1511, but then followed miscarriage after miscarriage. Henry was surprisingly understanding, but how long could he wait for a son?

      II

      King Henry VIII had triumphed in France, and had covered himself in glory, but he hadn’t done it alone. The architect of his victories was Thomas Wolsey, a butcher’s son from Ipswich. Wolsey had risen from nothing through his intelligence, drive and ambition. Though nominally only a royal chaplain, it was he who had organized the whole French campaign. Wolsey had an affinity with the king; they were both pleasure-seekers and men of broad vision. He flattered the young monarch, provided him with royal pleasures and relieved the king of the irksome, inglorious, pleasure-denying day-to-day business of ruling a country.

      His rewards were commensurate with his usefulness: in quick succession he became bishop, archbishop and cardinal. Abroad his power and international standing added to the dignity of the English monarchy. At home, by virtue of his role as papal legate and a Prince of the Church, he was de facto Pope in England: so long as Wolsey held his personal supremacy there was no possibility of a foreigner interfering in the internal affairs of the kingdom or of the spiritual power of the Church challenging the temporal power of the Crown. He was also a territorial magnate and dominated the ecclesiastical establishment. And as Lord Chancellor, he held executive and judicial power.

      Thus, by 1515, Wolsey was supreme in Church and state. But as much as his power, contemporaries were impressed by his overweeningly flamboyant character, by his taste, his magnificence and his sense of display. His supreme monument is his great palace at Hampton Court, where he kept a court every bit as lavish as Henry’s own and demonstrated with his every move that the levers of power were in the hands of the cardinal legate. But we should not let this outward display deceive us about the reality of Wolsey’s power. He had risen only because he was able to deliver what Henry yearned for – glory and war – and he would survive only if he were able to continue to deliver what Henry wanted, whatever it might be.

      But it was becoming harder to see how Henry’s lust for power could continue to be satisfied. For the gains of the war proved fleeting, and by 1516 Henry was no longer the teenage star of Europe. There was a new, young, warlike King of France, Francis I, and a new, even younger Habsburg emperor, Charles V, Queen Catherine’s nephew, who ruled in his own right Spain, Germany, the Netherlands, and most of Italy.

      Since both commanded much larger resources than Henry; glory in war was no longer a possibility. But peace, he was told, could be as noble and religious; it was also realistic. Henry was still only twenty-seven and the same ambitions to reclaim the throne of France burnt within him. How had he become the peace broker of Europe? Just as Wolsey fixed the king’s wandering attention to mundane business with a rich gift or a relishing dish, so he made peace attractive. It was not merely peace with honour: it was peace with glory. England’s military and material weakness had been transmuted into nobler metal. She was now, it seemed, the leader of Europe and Henry truly the Most Christian of Kings.

      The change was also underpinned by material considerations. For the moment, England seemed to hold the balance of power between Francis and Charles, and was courted by both sides. But could it last when the great rulers of Europe eyed each other with hostility? Wolsey, dextrous and inventive as usual, turned the situation to England’s advantage by organizing a magnificent peace conference, the Field of Cloth of Gold, which took place on a dusty, windswept plain in the north-east of France on 6 June 1520. It centred on a personal meeting between Henry VIII and Francis I. And, in another first for Wolsey, it was one of the earliest modern summit conferences. But the jamboree was much more than that. Wolsey had pulled off the seemingly impossible: English and French aristocrats met in peace and friendship. Centuries-old conflict had been replaced by martial sports. Wolsey sought to overawe Henry, the aristocracy and the people with something so grand that it made up for what many believed to be a shameful peace. It had all the ritual of war, but none of the blood. It was an Olympic Games with international jousting and wrestling competitions; there were displays of lavish cloth-of-gold tents, fantastic pavilions and almost competitive feasting. The English were generally reckoned to have won.

      But it proved to be a mirage. England’s role as arbiter of Europe depended on the continuing balance of power between Francis and Charles. Sooner or later Francis and Charles would fight, and one of them would win. What would Henry and Wolsey do then? Still with Arthur and Henry V on his mind, Henry renewed his determination to defeat France. For all the posturing on the Field of Cloth of Gold and the rhetoric about the glories of peace, Henry was edging closer to Charles and the Holy Roman Empire. Together, they plotted to violate the sacred peace and vanquish Francis. Henry and Charles wanted to fight immediately, but Wolsey knew that England wasn’t ready. With all his skills as a diplomatist, he continued to play both sides off against each other.

      Henry had cast aside his humanist pretensions, and was animated by what the cardinal (with typical flourish) called the ‘Great Enterprise’ against France. By 1523, they seemed ready. But in reality the aims of Charles and Henry were very different. A tentative English invasion of France failed before it got farther south than Agincourt. But where was Charles? The allies were far from accord. In the autumn of 1523, a revolt by the leading French nobleman, the duc de Bourbon, provided the perfect opportunity for an invasion. But Henry’s army invaded and fought on its own; what was supposed to be a multi-pronged invasion by England and the empire ended in farce. The Duke of Suffolk led the English army deep into France and it was poised to besiege Paris. But with winter coming on and no allies in the field, he was forced to abandon the campaign. The essential food supplies promised by Charles never arrived. England’s best chance to defeat France came to nothing.

      On 9 March 1525 Henry was woken by the arrival of a messenger come from Charles’s army in Italy. He reported that the French had been crushed at Pavia, the capital of Lombardy; leading French nobles had been killed and Francis himself was a prisoner. Henry was elated. The Great Enterprise must surely enter its final phase, when England would reclaim her inheritance. He sent ambassadors to Spain to arrange the final destruction of France. Charles and Henry should launch an immediate invasion and take Paris, where Henry would be crowned king.

      But the victory, which had promised so fair, was to be the final blow to Henry’s great ambitions. For Charles had no intention of setting up Henry as the most powerful monarch in Europe. Instead he called Henry’s СКАЧАТЬ