Traditional accounts of Wolsey's foreign policy have invariably attempted to structure a mass of detailed facts concerning Henry VIII's wars and diplomacy around a single organizational theme in order to attribute to Wolsey a coherent policy and motivation. In the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries, the emphasis was on Wolsey as impresario of a European 'balance of power'. But this mantra neither existed nor had conceptual meaning in the sixteenth century, and the rediscovery of Wolsey's foreign correspondence in the Public Record Office in the 1870s and 1880s ensured its demise as an explanation of Wolsey's goals once approaches based on archival research rather than guesswork became the norm in Tudor historical scholarship.

A. F. Pollard, writing in 1929, was the first historian to propose a clear explanatory thesis after reading transcripts of Wolsey's diplomatic correspondence. For him, the motive that underpinned Wolsey's foreign policy was concern for the papacy. Wolsey had 'the closest understanding' with the popes, said Pollard, and 'every change in his attitude towards other European powers coincided with a change in the policy of the papal curia.'¹ As long as Wolsey pulled the levers of English diplomacy, 'Henry VIII remained the favourite son of the Roman church.' Hence if Rome sought peace, so did Wolsey; if Rome made war on France or the emperor, so too did England. Professor Scarisbrick later ridiculed this suggestion. Mimicking 'Mary had a Little Lamb', he put words into Pollard's mouth: 'Anywhere that Leo X or Clement VII went, England, thanks to the cardinal of York, was sure to go.' ² And why? Only the papacy, argued Pollard, could satisfy Wolsey's yearning for ecclesiastical promotion: his desire for a cardinal's hat, for nomination as legatus a latere, and even, ultimately, his ambition to become pope. According to Pollard, even Wolsey's papal obedience rested on his tenacity as a self-interested schemer. It was an interpretation that derived, ultimately, from the satires of Skelton and Palsgrave, and from the view, inscribed since the Revolution of 1688-9 in the Whig interpretation of history, that Renaissance cardinals were a bad thing since they 'opposed the Protestant Reformation' and 'impeded the development of the English constitution'. ³

Since Pollard's thesis is revived periodically as deserving of consideration, it should be put to rest. First, it is predicated on the erroneous assumption that English foreign policy between 1514 and 1529 was always Wolsey's and never Henry's. Again, if Rome was the key to Wolsey's strategy, why did he do so little to ingratiate himself with the Curia or to build up English votes there? Wolsey exploited and even manipulated Rome, but his policy was not 'papal'. He neither visited Italy nor showed particular deference to the pope, even if he strove constantly to put the papacy under a moral obligation in exchange for English support. In 1518 he shamelessly stole Leo X's clothes, hijacking the negotiations for a universal peace and making London, and Henry VIII, the hub (at least briefly) of European diplomacy. Nor is it true that Wolsey personally aspired to become pope, as Pollard had asserted. Charles V first appears to have planted the idea in Wolsey's head. Thereafter, it was Henry VIII, rather than Wolsey, who seriously pursued it, on the grounds that there would be nothing in the world than the king could not engineer if his cardinal-servant were also to become pope. Wolsey was, therefore, obliged to attend to the plan, but he himself pursued it reluctantly. ⁴ His candidacy was mooted in 1522, when Adrian VI was elected, and in 1523, when Giulio de Medici succeeded as Clement VII. But, if Wolsey's own words are to be believed, he was not in earnest. His agent wrote: 'Your grace at my departing showed me precisely that ye would never meddle therewith.' ⁵ And Wolsey's lobbying on his own behalf was little more than perfunctory. It was designed to show the king that he had strained every nerve to comply, but then withdrawn gracefully in order to support de Medici when his cause seemed lost. In any case, de Medici had for some time acted as England's national spokesmen at the Curia. In 1523 he seemed to be the ideal candidate from an official viewpoint; far better than Wolsey himself.

Perhaps the most influential interpretation of Wolsey's foreign policy has been that of Professor Scarisbrick. In Henry VIII, Scarisbrick argued that Wolsey's foreign policy 'was a peace policy and for about fifteen years he struggled to make it work.' ⁶ Professor Scarisbrick developed his case with considerable flair and ingenuity -- necessarily, since Wolsey had risen to power as Henry VIII's master of military and naval procurement for his French campaigns of 1512 and 1513; and in particular, because, between 1514 and 1529, when Wolsey was supposedly ascendant, England was not merely several times on the brink of war, but was actually at war twice: with France and Scotland in 1522 and 1523, and with the Netherlands in 1528.

Professor Scarisbrick's explanation of such inconsistencies is simple. Wolsey's 'peace policy' collapsed! It failed because it was 'unrealistic' and 'self-contradictory', and because Henry VIII so coveted honour and glory on a European stage and was so obsessed by a desire to win European territorial conquests and assert the traditional English claim to the throne of France against his minister's better advice that he intervened at critical moments to catastrophic effect. This is not to say that Scarisbrick presumed that England, under Wolsey, had two foreign policies rather than one. He did not. But he did assert that there were 'moments when the royal urge for war was at least tempered by the minister's quest for peace and there seem to have been moments when the king's belligerence finally broke the cardinal's designs.' ⁷

Scarisbrick's interpretation of Wolsey's diplomacy paved the way for later 'revisionist' assertions that England's successes between 1514 and 1529 were largely due to Wolsey, while her failures were largely due to Henry VIII. ⁸ This argument should, however, be critically reassessed. As Dr G. W. Bernard has noted, it does not properly accord with the evidence. ⁹ In particular, it is unlikely that a quest for peace drove Wolsey's diplomacy in 1523 when, unlike a more sceptical Henry VIII, he not merely endorsed plans for the invasion and partition of France when the duke of Bourbon's revolt made such schemes seem feasible, but he did so with genuine enthusiasm. In the autumn of 1523, when the duke of Suffolk's army was within 50 miles of Paris, 'it was Wolsey who advocated aggressive, offensive policies, not the king.' ¹⁰ As he assured the king, 'there shall be never such, or like, opportunity given hereafter for the attaining of France.' ¹¹ Throughout, Wolsey had been the architect of these offensive moves: there was 'no sign of any flinching'. ¹² Again, Wolsey's triumphant description of the earl of Surrey's vanquishing of the Scots in 1523 is surely inconsistent with his supposed Christian humanist pacificism. Finally, Wolsey pursued his demands for non-parliamentary taxation (the so-called 'Amicable Grant') so vigorously in 1525 that he virtually committed political suicide. As Dr Bernard has argued, this could only have been because he agreed with Henry VIII that the partition of France was finally within England's grasp following Charles V's victory at Pavia. ¹³

An interpretation more consistent with the facts is that Wolsey's foreign policy was pragmatic and opportunist: designed to win power and glory for Henry VIII whether in war or peace. What mattered in Renaissance diplomacy were reputation -- the ruler's honour -- and the security of the realm. ¹⁴ Henry VIII sought to rival Francis I and Charles V, but lacked the vast fiscal and territorial resources of those two leading European monarchs. He also had to find reliable allies, something that Wolsey knew to be exceptionally difficult, if not impossible. Faced with Henry's objectives, however, it was Wolsey's task to attain them by whatever means. The king's invasion of France in 1513 had achieved the occupation of Thérouanne and Tournai. These were minor provincial towns of negligible strategic value -- Thomas Cromwell called them 'ungracious dogholes' in the Parliament of 1523 -- but they delighted the king, who failed to capture anything better until he secured Boulogne in 1544. Furthermore, the campaign of 1544 cost in excess of £2 million and was underwritten by sales of the ex-monastic lands and by currency debasements. From the beginning, Wolsey was almost certainly aware that participation in the Habsburg-Valois wars would prove fruitless in military terms, but warfare was fundamental to the cult of the roi chevalier and thus of Henry VIII's monarchy.

If, however, Wolsey's task was to win honour and glory for Henry VIII, then peace, if it were glorious enough, had a considerable edge, since it was cheaper! Wolsey therefore made his debut in 1514 by negotiating not merely a peace with France, but one under which Henry VIII's sister, Mary, married King Louis XII. ¹⁵ According to this treaty, the peace was to last until at least a year after the death of either ruler, Henry VIII kept the conquered city of Tournai -- the bishopric of Tournai was immediately granted to Wolsey -- and the king and his leading courtiers obtained French pensions. 'I was the author of the peace', boasted Wolsey. But the brag was true; unfortunately, Louis XII died within a year. The peace crumbled when his successor, Francis I, who coveted the Emperor Maximilian I's control of Naples and Milan, crossed the Alps and won a great victory against the Swiss and Milanese at the battle of Marignano (September 1515). Wolsey spent the next three years trying to recoup the situation, plotting with the Swiss and Maximilian against French domination in northern Italy. Henry VIII subsidized both the Swiss and imperial armies, but was repeatedly let down by his allies. It seemed as if English foreign policy had run into the sand.

At this time Wolsey's energy was his greatest asset. When the European powers came together despite all Wolsey's efforts to split them, he refused to admit defeat and so emerged victorious. Pope Leo X had unveiled a plan for a general European truce and a crusade against the Turks, and Wolsey hijacked these proposals, which he had transformed, by October 1518, into a treaty of 'universal' peace that seemed to unite all Christendom under Henry VIII's sponsorship. The pope, emperor, Spain, France, England, Scotland, Venice, Florence, and the Swiss forged, with others, a mutual non-aggression pact that provided for collective aid in case of hostilities. Wolsey also took his opportunity to end the stand-off with France. Princess Mary, Henry VIII's daughter, was betrothed to the Dauphin, and Tournai returned to France for 600,000 crowns. (In lieu of the episcopal revenues which he had not even succeeded in collecting, Wolsey himself received a pension of 12,000 livres!) It was a dazzling coup de thèatre; Bishop Fox described the peace with France as 'the best deed that ever was done for England; and, next to the King, the praise of it is due to Wolsey'. ¹⁶

Yet the 'universal peace' that the treaty of London represented was built on shifting sands. When Maximilian I died (January 1519), Henry VIII unsuccessfully declared his hand as an imperial candidate, but Charles, king of Spain and lord of the Netherlands, was elected and succeeded to Maximilian's title and possessions in Germany and central Europe. The following year, Henry VIII's 'reconciliation' with France was celebrated near Calais on French territory at the Field of Cloth of Gold. Originally planned for the previous spring as part of the terms of the treaty of 1518, the Field of Cloth of Gold was a glittering chivalric extravaganza designed to outshine Henry V's victory at Agincourt. It involved the construction of a vast and entirely new (wooden) palace and tiltyards near Guisnes, which contemporaries hailed as the eighth wonder of the world. Henry and Francis, accompanied by armies of courtiers, engaged and competed in martial sports: Henry VIII unfortunately lost to Francis at wrestling!

Wolsey, meanwhile, was wheeling and dealing. He was still courting the French, but was also conducting secret negotiations with Charles V. A conflict over Milan between Francis and Charles was inevitable, and Henry VIII, despite England's weakness and relative poverty, could still command attention by one of two means. Either Wolsey could negotiate another peace settlement to replace the treaty of London, or else Henry VIII could exploit any renewed fighting between France and the empire in order to launch an invasion of France. Dr Steven Gunn hits the nail the head when he writes, 'Characteristically, Wolsey [was] prepared to do both.' ¹⁷ At Calais and Bruges in 1521 he met, in turn, the French and the emperor and posed as honest broker; he still needed the rapprochement with France but was determined to extract the most advantageous terms from Charles for an offensive alliance or 'Great Enterprise' against France should his arbitration fail. Basically, Henry and Wolsey still preferred the French alliance at this point. They remained sceptical of the 'Great Enterprise', which it was initially agreed would have to be launched before March 1523. Indeed, when Charles V visited England in June 1522 en route between the Netherlands and Spain, it was agreed by the treaty of Windsor that the invasion date would be postponed until 1524.

Nevertheless, England drifted into war with France and a small expedition was led into Picardy in 1522 by the earl of Surrey. Wolsey's foreign policy had become wholly opportunistic. By 1521 the French were actively supporting the claim of their candidate, the duke of Albany, to the Scottish throne. This turned Henry VIII's attention to Scotland, since Albany had boasted that he could overthrow Henry if Francis gave him 10,000 men. The earl of Surrey was despatched to Scotland, and in the Parliament of 1523, Thomas Cromwell urged the ancient adage, 'Who that intendeth France to win, with Scotland let him begin'. His speech, possibly planted by Wolsey, mirrored debates in the King's Council which contemplated dropping the 'Great Enterprise' in favour of uniting the crowns of England and Scotland by conquest (June 1523). ¹⁸

What killed these schemes was the revolt of Charles, duke of Bourbon, constable of France, against Francis I in the summer of 1523. Henry's and Wolsey's policy oscillated in 1522-3 between their wish to attack France and their negotiations for peace or a papal truce. Yet, immediately they were convinced that Bourbon was planning to rise in revolt -- and to do so just at the moment when Francis I was travelling south to cross the Alps -- they abandoned their Scottish strategy and began shipping an army of 11,000 troops under the duke of Suffolk into France. The army was expected at Calais in late August 1523, and the policy- switch was clinched in September by a new league between Henry VIII, Charles V and Bourbon.

But Bourbon failed to gain aristocratic support for his plot. His revolt misfired. Moreover, when Francis I learned of the constable's treasonable intentions, he remained in France. Bourbon fled, and later died in Italy. Meanwhile, Suffolk's invasion of northern France gained glimpses of brilliant success. His original plan had been to capture Boulogne, but he was persuaded to march on Paris instead. His campaign got off to a bad start thanks to smallpox outbreaks, inadequate transport, and the failure of Margaret of Austria (Charles V's regent in the Low Countries) to raise sufficient troops, but within three weeks Suffolk had crossed the Somme and by late October he was within reach of the capital. Many Parisians were terrified, but Francis remained cool. He threw his total resources into the defence of Paris, which proved to be unnecessary since Suffolk did not march the final leg. It was too late in the campaigning season; also mutinies and drinking bouts steadily incapacitated his forces. An orderly retreat became necessary, whereupon Henry's Burgundian allies withdrew and bitterly cold weather killed men and horses alike.

After Suffolk's return, plans to resume the war were consistently tempered by parallel overtures for peace. Henry's and Wolsey's commitment to the 'Great Enterprise' steadily waned as confidence in Charles V evaporated and as cash reserves ran low. By the beginning of 1525, Wolsey was secretly ready to make terms with France; then news suddenly came of Charles's triumph at the battle of Pavia (24 February). Francis I had been routed and taken prisoner to Madrid. Henry and Wolsey immediately sought to revive the 'Great Enterprise' in order to invade and partition France. As it appeared, England had never been better placed. 'Now is the time,' Henry VIII urged visiting Burgundian diplomats, 'for the emperor and myself to devise the means of getting full satisfaction from France. Not an hour is to be lost'¹⁹

But Charles V was unimpressed; he had no need to share his victory, and his attention was focused on Italy. Wolsey had made a fatal miscalculation. Not only had his diplomacy since 1518 offered too much credence to the French. Before Pavia, he had been telling Henry VIII that, if the Habsburgs won, Henry would get the thanks on account of the money he had contributed to assist them, while in the unlikely event of a French success, he would reap the benefits of Wolsey's secret diplomacy with Francis. The problem was that Charles's victory was too complete. He did not feel indebted to Henry VIII, nor was he inclined to assist him in any large-scale annexations in France. As he wrote in his diary, 'the king of England does not help me as a true friend should; he does not even help me to the extent of his obligations'. ²⁰

There followed the débâcle of the Amicable Grant. Wolsey's vigorous attempts to levy a non-parliamentary tax to finance an invasion of France by England alone precipitated a tax revolt in East Anglia and elsewhere, and Henry VIII stepped in to distance himself from his minister's fiscal policy. This was the context of Wolsey's diplomatic volte-face. By the treaty of The More (30 August 1525), he renounced the Anglo-Burgundian-imperial entente in favour of a new alliance with France. He staked his career on this renversement despite the pro-Burgundian sympathies of the English nobility, the economic importance of England's exports to the Netherlands, and the marriage of Henry VIII to Catherine of Aragon, Charles V's aunt. He had no choice. The alternative was isolation and humiliation, precisely the opposite of the criteria demanded by the king.

In February 1526, Charles released Francis I from captivity on the most stringent terms. Francis was to abandon his claims to Italy and Burgundy, and was to surrender the Dauphin and his second son as hostages pending fulfilment of the treaty. But Francis broke the treaty of Madrid and assembled a league of Italian states to oppose the imperial domination of Italy. The league was cemented by the treaty of Cognac (May 1526), a move that Wolsey's diplomacy had encouraged. In advocating this league, Wolsey had two principal motives. He saw it as an inexpensive investment; he was also attempting to revive his role of honest broker.

Yet, even if Henry and Wolsey obtained substantial French pensions from the renversement of 1525-6 -- a not unattractive prospect once the Amicable Grant had failed -- the new strategy was a mistake. A second treaty of 'universal peace' initiated by England was Wolsey's overarching aim for the next three years. ²¹ But the post-1526 rivalry between Charles, with his strong sense of dignity, and Francis, with his habit of tearing up treaties, was fatal to this goal. To escape from a cul-de-sac, the only hope for Wolsey was to move ever deeper into his alliance with the French. First, France and England agreed not to reach a separate peace with the emperor (August 1526). Next, an 'eternal peace' was declared between England and France (April 1527). In July 1527 Wolsey headed a lavish embassy to France which met Francis I at Amiens, where a fresh set of peace treaties was signed. These exchanges had a profound effect on English foreign policy, since they ushered in a decade of Anglo-French entente. At Amiens the peace between England and France was solemnly ratified, the Princess Mary was pledged in marriage to the duke of Orléans, and it was agreed that war would be declared on Charles if he declined final overtures for peace.

The bubble burst when Habsburg troops mutinied and sacked Rome (May 1527), which destroyed all Henry VIII's hopes of a speedy divorce from Catherine of Aragon. With the pope virtually an imperial hostage, there could be no immediate prospect of a decision in Henry's favour. Next, Henry VIII found himself at war with Charles V in January 1528. True, this 'war' was more phoney than real. It was 'declared' by reluctant English ambassadors acting in concert with the French, when Charles flatly refused the latest peace terms. ²² But it had a catastrophic economic effect. England's wool and cloth exports were temporarily interrupted despite the truce that Wolsey successfully negotiated with the Netherlands. In 1528 rioting clothworkers dangerously threatened the stability of Henry VIII's régime, while the failure of the harvest of 1527 saw wheat prices in 1527-8 at their highest level for 60 years. The final straw was the defeat of France at the battle of Landriano (20 June 1529). The pope came to terms with Charles V, while France and Spain made a (virtually) separate peace at Cambrai (3 August 1529). This left Charles V in control of Italy, and Henry VIII ingloriously isolated. Wolsey's star was waning fast, even if Thomas More snatched some useful crumbs from the table at Cambrai. But the crux by this time was the king's demand that his marriage to Catherine of Aragon be annulled, and in the diplomatic situation that Wolsey had created, that demand was unlikely to be met by the pope. In fact, Wolsey, who had risen to power largely through his handling of foreign and military affairs in the period 1512-14, 'fell largely through his failure to solve the king's problems by diplomatic means.' ²³ Despite the Anglo-French entente, Henry remained married to Catherine and the treaty of Cambrai left England ingloriously isolated. For Henry VIII, it was too much. Wolsey had to go!

END NOTES

1. Pollard, Wolsey, pp. 121-2.
2. Scarisbrick, Henry VIII, pp. 46-7.
3. Pollard, Wolsey, pp. 340-73.
4. Scarisbrick, Henry VIII, pp. 47, 107.
5. LP, III. ii. no. 1960.
6. Scarisbrick, Henry VIII, p. 49.
7. Scarisbrick, Henry VIII, p. 50.
8. E.g. Gwyn, The King's Cardinal, pp. 74-102, 146-58, 354-410, 530-48.
9. Bernard, War, Taxation and Rebellion, p. 44.
10. Bernard, War, Taxation and Rebellion, p. 44.
11. State Papers during the Reign of Henry VIII (11 vols.; London, 1830-52), I, p. 143.
12. Bernard, War, Taxation and Rebellion, p. 44.
13. Bernard, War, Taxation and Rebellion, pp. 44-5.
14. Bernard, War, Taxation and Rebellion, p. 45.
15. This account of Wolsey's foreign policy is based on Scarisbrick, Henry VIII, pp. 49-162; R. B. Wernham, Before the Armada: the Growth of English Foreign Policy, 1485-1588 (London, 1966), pp. 77-110; S. J. Gunn, 'Wolsey's Foreign Policy and the Domestic Crisis of 1527-8', in Gunn and Lindley (eds.), Cardinal Wolsey: Church, State and Art, pp. 149-77; P. J. Gwyn, 'Wolsey's Foreign Policy: the Conferences at Calais and Bruges Reconsidered', Historical Journal, 23 (1980), pp. 755-72; Bernard, War, Taxation and Rebellion, pp. 3-45.
16. LP, II, ii, no. 4540.
17. Gunn, 'Wolsey's Foreign Policy and the Domestic Crisis of 1527-8', p. 150.
18. LP, III. ii. nos. 2476, 2728.
19. Scarisbrick, Henry VIII, p. 136.
20. Bernard, War, Taxation and Rebellion, pp. 30-1.
21. What follows relies on Gunn, 'Wolsey's Foreign Policy and the Domestic Crisis of 1527-8', pp. 151-3.
22. Gunn, 'Wolsey's Foreign Policy and the Domestic Crisis of 1527-8', p. 152.
23. Gunn, 'Wolsey's Foreign Policy and the Domestic Crisis of 1527-8', p. 153.