In matters of succession Henry could be savage. He had already demonstrated that the wrath of the king meant death. In the event of the king’s own demise Edward Stafford, third duke of Buckingham, was considered the favourite to succeed him; he was after all descended from Thomas Woodstock, one of the sons of Edward III. He was, therefore, an object of suspicion. In the spring of 1521 the king himself had interrogated the duke’s servants in order to find evidence of treason. It was alleged as the principal charge that the duke had consulted with a monkish necromancer who had told him that Henry would have no male issue and that ‘he should have all’. Buckingham had bought inordinate amounts of cloth of gold and cloth of silver. It was even stated by one of his servants that he had planned to come into the royal presence ‘having upon him secretly a knife’. He was of course found guilty by seventeen of his peers and beheaded on Tower Green. It was widely believed at the time that Wolsey – who was known to Londoners as ‘the butcher’ – had engineered Buckingham’s fall but Henry’s overwhelming need to preserve his dynasty was the root cause of all.
He may have now rested all his hopes on his bastard son, Henry, but there was no precedent for an illegitimate heir to the throne except for the improbably distant Harold Harefoot in 1037. There was always Princess Mary, already given her own court, but there had been only one queen regnant in English history; and Matilda had in fact been known as ‘lady of England’. So a proper male heir would have to be found. Already, then, Henry was contemplating the possibility of a new bride.
Mary could, in the interim, be put to other uses. At the age of two she had been promised to the son of Francis I but then, only four years later, she was formally betrothed to Charles V. What could be more fitting than to be the wife of the Holy Roman Emperor and sovereign of Spain? These were games of war, however, rather than of betrothal.
In the summer of 1521 Henry entered into a treaty with Charles against Francis I, and promised to send a great army of 30,000 foot and 10,000 horse into the French dominion. Yet the stomach for war breeds an appetite for money. That is why Wolsey was soon demanding, and obtaining, new revenues from the Church. In March 1522 he set in motion a great national inquiry to assess the wealth of each individual and the military capacity of every male; it was characteristic of his direct and inclusive style of government. The taxes raised were nominated as ‘loans’, but in fact they were never repaid. Two months later the earl of Surrey, with a large force of men, invaded northern France to no obvious effect. Charles sailed to England and was formally affianced to Princess Mary. On the journey upriver from Gravesend to Greenwich, the emperor’s barges were perfumed with ‘sweet herbs’ to conceal the offensive odours of the Thames.
In the spring of the following year parliament was convened to treat of what Wolsey called ‘the grand invasion of France’ or, rather, to provide the funds for it. ‘There has been,’ a contemporary reported, ‘the greatest and sorest hold in the Lower House for payment of two shillings of the pound that ever was seen, I think, in any parliament. This matter has been debated and beaten fifteen or sixteen days together …’ The tax on the value of land was a precedent never ‘seen before this time’. The Speaker of the House, Thomas More, was able by his powers of calm persuasion to pass the measure.
This was the meeting of parliament in which Thomas Cromwell first came to notice. He was already a merchant and a scrivener, a dyer of cloth and a moneylender, his various employments testifying to his skill and facility in the affairs of the world. He would soon also enter Gray’s Inn as a lawyer. In his speech to his colleagues he volunteered ‘to utter my poor mind’. He urged the king to stay in England and not to risk himself by campaigning in France; he also argued for caution and vigilance in maintaining the supply lines or ‘victualling’. In conclusion he recommended that Scotland should be the principal target of the king’s army. He used an old maxim, ‘who that intendeth France to win, with Scotland let him begin’.
Cromwell was not enthusiastic about the parliamentary debates. He wrote to a friend that ‘for sixteen whole weeks wherein we communed of war, peace, strife, contention, debate, murmur, grudge, riches, poverty, penury, truth, falsehood, justice, equity, deceit, oppression, magnanimity, activity, force … as well as we might, and left where we began’. He did admit, however, that the Commons had granted the king ‘a right large subsidy, the like whereof was never granted in this realm’.
So, in the summer of 1523, the great enterprise was undertaken. Under the command of Suffolk, Henry’s jousting partner, 10,000 men sailed to Calais. In girth as well as in splendour, he was a good substitute for the king. He had intended to lay siege to Boulogne and thus gain another port for England. But the king and the cardinal urged him to march upon Paris and, with the help of Charles V and other allies, destroy the heart of France. Yet war is fickle. The allies were captured, or surrounded, or fled from battle. Rain, mud and disease reduced the English forces outside Paris, and eventually they were forced to retreat.
In the vortex of this war strange mischances and collisions were destined to occur. The city states of Renaissance Italy, the true cause of the confrontation between Francis and Charles, were put at great peril; Scotland, as part of its old alliance with France, was threatening invasion with the assistance of French troops; and, with the princes of Europe fighting one another, the Turks came much closer to their goal of conquering the eastern parts of that continent. No one could see a path through the wood because, in truth, there was no path. It was a wearisome story of battles and sieges, of invasions and retreats, which left all the participants in approximately the same position as before.
Yet there was to be one more tremor of martial fervour. At the beginning of 1525 the Spanish imperial army won an overwhelming victory at the battle of Pavia, taking the French king prisoner and destroying much of his nobility. In his excitement Henry projected another grand coalition with Spain for the purpose, as he put it, ‘of getting full satisfaction from France’. Charles V was disinclined to share the proceeds of victory; he was now the master of Europe, and felt less need for the support of Henry. Yet the English king continued to dream and to conspire.
He and Wolsey intended to raise money for the further campaign by a forced loan that he called an ‘amicable grant’. There was nothing amicable about it. By virtue of the royal prerogative a tax of a sixth on wealth was demanded from the laity, and a fourth from the clergy. The people of England, however, were tired of a war that was driven only by the desire of the king for honour and glory. War put at risk commerce between the nations of Europe and, by artificially raising prices on basic commodities such as meat and drink, it disturbed the patterns of national trade and industry. Since the soldiers of England were largely taken from the land, their deployment severely affected agricultural prosperity. War may have been in the interest of the king, but it was not waged to the benefit of the country. What was the point, in any case, of invading and conquering France? A ballad-writer wrote against Wolsey:
By thee out of service many are constrained
And course of merchandise thou hast restrained
Wherefor men sigh and sob.
War was bad for business. Much foreign trade was directed through Antwerp, where the major English export was that of manufactured woollen cloth. The Flemish used to say that ‘if Englishmen’s fathers were hanged at the gates of Antwerp, their children would creep between their legs to come into the town’. The trade in manufactured cloth doubled in the course of Henry’s reign, thus lending power and authority to the guild of the cloth exporters known as the Merchant Adventurers. From this period, therefore, we can date the rise of the English merchant. Anything that endangered or disrupted trade was deplored.