The Rule of the Tudors 1485 - 1603

 He determined to emulate Henry V's victories of a century before; his goal was glory before commercial advantage. At his accession Henry was seventeen -  not even of age. He was, for a while,
governed by his father's councillors, his father's policies. The doves in the Council opposed his plans;
the humanists, who had hoped for a pacific king and universal peace, lamented. No matter. The French King Louis XII's support for a schismatic General Council of the Church against the Pope provided
the cause for war, and by the end of 1511 Henry, horrified by Louis' rebellion against papal authority,
had persuaded his Council that the truce with a perfidious France must be broken, and an invasion
prepared. This was his first venture as papal champion, and one which would look strange thereafter.
Henry wanted freedom from an obstructive Council, he wanted fredom from the infinite boredom of
administration, and he wanted conquest in France. His liberator, and the mastermind of a policy designed to be glorious in peace and war was Thomas Wolsey, royal almoner from 1509, Bishop of
Lincoln, and successively Archbishop of York, Cardinal, Lord Chancellor, and papal legate. In 1513
Wolsey planned Henry's invasion of northern France. The small episcopal city of Thérouanne, and
Tournai, a French enclave within the Burgundian-Habsburg Netherlands, were besieged and occupied
between July and September. According to Thomas Cromwell, speaking in Parliament a decade later,
these were 'ungracious dog-holes'. But any English visitor to the Netherlands was more likely to report
that English towns were dog-holes by comparison. For Henry, the importance of capturing these towns
lay in their status as part of his dominion as 'King of France'. His standing among European princes
was enhanced by this conquest, and by his simultaneous victory in Scotland. In September, the Earl
of Surrey inflicted desperate defeat upon the Scots with whom Louis XII of France had concluded a
league. The King of Scotland, three bishops, eleven earls, fifteen lords and 10,000 men lay dead in
the mud of Flodden Field. When the old guard among his councillors complained that the new king
was too wedded to pleasure and urged that he attend Council meetings more often, Wolsey councelled
the contrary. Here, for him, was the way to exceptional favour and power. Wolsey determined, according to his gentleman-usher George Cavendish, to show himself keenest 'to advance the King's
only will and pleasure without any respect to the case'. From 1514 or so Wolsey came to hold a seemingly unassailable supremacy in the counsels of the King; he was 'the beginning, middle and
end'. He might be challenged, but for fifteen years he was not overthrown. As long as he could find
the means to advance the King's will and pleasure - whatever it may be; Wolsey minded little - the
rest of the Council was almost redundant; its corporate political role usurped. The Council was still
consulted, but only after Wolsey and the King, in a kind of partnership, had determined policy.
Wolsey would first 'move' Henry towards some idea; the King 'dreamed' of it more and more'; and
only then would the Council be informed. Wolsey's influence seemed supreme, and his household,
in its magnificence, looked a rival to the royal court. So completely did he see himself as alter rex,
it was alleged, that he would say: 'The King and I would ye should do thus: the King and I do give
you our hearty thanks.' His pride and splendour were legendary: crosses, pillars and poleaxes, hated
symbols of his authority, were carried before him; earls and lords served him. He held authority only
so long as he held royal favour, and he knew how precarious that was. It was the King's will that
was implemented, not Wolsey's. Otherwise Wolsey, whose own aspiration was for peace in Europe,
would not have had to prosecute war. Wolsey's Anglo-French peace of 1514 was evanescent, for it
died with the French King Louis XII in 1515.
The happy prospect of perpetual peace would have seemed more likely of achievement had Henry
been content to leave England withdrawn from the Continent. But he was not. Henry's determination,
supported by Wolsey, to play a part in Continental power politics and win international renown,
led ineluctably to entanglement in the European war which always threatened, especially once
Francis I had come to the French throne in 1515. Francis was a king, according to Henry, more dangerous to Christendom than the Great Turk (with whom, indeed, Francis, 'the most Christian king', was intermittenly allied). Henry's relations with Francis, whose appetite for glory and whose tastes
he shared (although without the means to emulate them), reained ambivalent through three decades.
Wolsey constantly sought ways to win for England a leading part in European affairs without recourse
to war. In 1516 he schemed with the Swiss and the Holy Roman Emperor Maximilian against French
domination in North Italy, thinking, like More Utopia's, that if fighting were necessary to secure
peace, it were better that others did the fighting. In 1518 he seemed to achieve his ambition to be seen
as arbiter of Europe when, in the Treaty of London, he united all Christendom. It was a precarious
peace, and one that England played the leading part in securing. When in 1519 the Habsburg Charles
V added the Holy Roman Empire to his estates in the Netherlands and Spain, the configuration of
power in Europe shifted: the houses of Habsburg and Valois were more nearly balanced, and their
dynastic rivalry grew accordingly. Henry earnestly proclaimed friendship to both these rivals, as
the Treaty of London bound him to do, but would become their enemy if either of them broke the
peace. England's alliance with either power would give it dominance over the other: her neutrality
might guarantee peace. Henry gained unwonted power in Europe, and a new freedom to allege the
ancient claims to France without the likelihood of imminent retaliation. But France could, and did
in 1513 and 1521-4, reinstate her 'auld alliance' with Scotland and thereby threaten England on her
northern border. The ambivalence of English relations with France was never so apparent as at the
Field of the Cloth of Gold in 1520 where the two kings, attended by their courts in all their splendour,
met to proclaim their friendship, while all the while the magnificence covered their enmity and the
betrayal of the peace which Henry was already negoiating with the Emperor. By May 1522 England
was at war with France again, and being urged by her imperial ally to invade. Henry's freedom to
intervene on the Continent was constrained by the perpetual prospect of war on his borders at home.
The great lords of Ireland - not only his 'Irish enemies', the Gaelic chiefs like O'Neill and O'Donnell,
but also the Anglo-Irish feudatories, such as the Earl of Desmond - intrigued perpetually with England's foreign enemies and, as sovereign princes, from time to time made alliances with the kings
of France and Scotland and with the Emperor.
Though Wolsey wanted peace, he countenanced war - despite opposition in the Council - rather than
lose England's new-found prominence in European affairs, and, compellingly, because Henry still
hankered after it. In August 1523 a new invasion of France was mounted, English troops were soon
within fifty miles of Paris, and Henry believed, mistakenly, that the French crown was within his
grasp. In February 1525 that inheritance seemed even closer when Francis I was defeated and captured by Imperial forces at Pavia. At that battle too Richard de la Pole, the White Rose of York, who was
the French candidate for the English throne, was killed. Henry urged Charles V to seize the moment
and partition France between them, but - to Henry's disappointment and humiliation - Charles held
back, and at the end of August 1525 England was at peace with France once more. The Cardinal
then helped to create a league against the Emperor, which England sponsored but would not join:
another attempt to engineer peace by force. That peace was traumatically broken when in May 1527
Imperial troops sacked Rome, desecrated the Eternal City and took Christ's Vicar into captivity.
Wolsey ordered processions and fastings for the Pope's release, but the lack of popular response was
telling. The common people 'little mourned for it', wrote Edward Hall, the chronicler. England was
a Catholic country, but not a papalist one, and now the resentment which grew, in London particularly,
against the Cardinal Legate was transferred from servant to master.
Wolsey ruled outside the court, against the court, from his own great household which became its
rival. Around the King his friends and favourites exerted a crucial political influence. To the inner
sanctum, his Privy Chamber, Henry had introduced not the nonentities who had served his father,
but a new generation of young gentlemen. Highborn and high-spirited, they were dashing enough
to amuse him, confident enough to be 'homely and familiar' and to play 'light touches with him'.
They 'forgot themselves' and the awe-inspiring distinctions of rank which should have set them
apart from their monarch. In emulation of Francis I's court, these young gentlemen were elevated
in 1518 to Gentleman of the Privy Chamber, a new rank, with new pretensions. Between Wolsey,
with his uniquely privileged position as pre-eminent councillor, and the King's arrogant young
favourites, a state of hostility - sometimes latent often open - prevailed. Their battles were always
for royal favour, patronage and influence. In 1519 Wolsey succeeded in exiling them to darkest
Calais, for a while; in 1526 he purged the Privy Chamber, for a time. Soon they returned, to greater
favour than before. As men 'near about the King', they were respected, even feared. They were
empowered to represent the King beyond the court. As special messengers embodying the royal
will, they were sent to summon or arrest the King's greatest subjects; as diplomats they went on
missions to 'decipher' the secrets of 'outward princes' at other courts; they were given high military
command against the King's enemies, foreign or domestic; they were entrusted with positions of influence throughout the country as leading members of the Tudor affinity. As royal representatives
and royal retainers, they were part of the new world of Renaissance courts and an older one of bastard-feudal affinities. These men were the nearest friends that a king could have. Educated, well versed
in scripture and the writings of classical antiquity, bound by the chivalric ideal of fidelity, Henry's
courtiers thought about the virtue of friendship. One of the first classical works to be translated into
English and printed was Cicero's Of Friendship (1481).