1515 SUFFOLK AND MARY. 195 pass the mountains and recover Milan for the fleur de lys. CHAP. The death of the old king, the snapping of the marriage alli- VIII. ance, the accession to power of the new sovereign, so fresh, enterprising, and incalculable, caused keen mortification and active jealousy in the English court; and the mortification was deepened by the fact that at the same time the country was deprived of a valuable weapon in the contests of diplomacy. The young widow of Louis XII., still a girl in the first blush of her beauty, contracted while in Paris a secret marriage with Charles Brandon, Duke of Suffolk, who had been sent to carry hollow congratulations to the new sovereign of France upon his accession. That the sister of the English king should give her hand to a subject, surreptitiously, without royal sanction and in a foreign capital, was a proceeding calculated to cause deep resentment at the court and great disappointment in the country. The wiseacres of the City were annoyed that so beautiful a princess should be wasted upon a mere love-match when she might have purchased a substantial political alliance; and the council was full of men who clamoured for Suffolk's ruin. It could not be denied that his fault was grave, and that its consequences might be serious. Wolsey, who represented himself as Suffolk's only friend at the council board, stated that the crime might be condoned by a yearly contribution to the king of £4,000 from the queen's dower, as well as the surrender of all the plate and jewels which Louis had given to his bride, but even so the result was uncertain. The bridegroom was "in the greatest danger that ever man was," and many weeks elapsed before the cloud passed over. However, in the end the affair was condoned, and Wolsey's intercession prevailed. Mary was compelled to cede her plate and jewels, to give up the full amount of her dowry, and to repay the expenses of her marriage with Louis by yearly instalments of £1,000. On May 13, 1515, she was publicly married at Greenwich in the presence of the king and queen and the nobility of the court. Her second husband had already been twice wedded, and his first wife was still alive; but whether these facts ever came to Mary's knowledge is doubtful. Her fancy had been caught by Suffolk's brilliant presence and bluff, frank airs before she had been sacrificed upon the altar of politics; and in giving her hand to the elderly Louis she had extracted a promise from VIII. CHAP. Henry that she might choose for herself when Louis should die. When that moment came Mary found herself alone and unfriended, exposed to solicitations from every side, and she threw herself into Suffolk's arms. Her appeal for mercy was touching and romantic, but romance had no place in Henry's court. At least the king and Wolsey between them took care that romance should pay toll to the exchequer. A far more serious cause of anxiety followed. On April 5 a treaty was signed between England and France, and then, having secured himself from his northern enemy, Francis sped off for Italy at the head of 110,000 men. That he might be the less embarrassed on the Channel coast, he had sent the Duke of Albany into Scotland well-provisioned with money; and a pretender to the English crown was also at hand, in the shape of Richard de la Pole, who might prove serviceable should occasion arise. Nor were these the sole precautions. Francis had signed a treaty with Charles, the new governor of the Netherlands, had won the friendship of Venice and of Genoa, and was in negotiation with the pope. The expedition was conducted with the greatest secrecy, and the English court derived its information of French designs from oblique and unauthoritative rumours. Wolsey spoke of the French king's conduct with great heat and bitterness. "He never writes hither; he does not impart any of his secrets; he treats all our subjects as enemies, and allows his own people to capture the ships and vessels of England without enforcing any compensation soever. He has sent the Duke of Albany, who styles himself governor, into Scotland, and will not desist until he has compassed the death of the queen and the infant king in order to make himself master of that realm." The war party in the council who had opposed the French alliance pressed their point with exultation. "I tell you, domini oratores," said Wolsey to the Venetian envoys, "that we have ships here in readiness, and in eight days could place 60,000 men on the soil of France." Henry affected to think that Francis was too much afraid of England to venture across the mountains. "My belief," he boasted to Giustinian, "is, that if I choose he will not pass the Alps, and if I choose he will." But all this indignation and bluster were thrown away. Francis crossed into Italy and beat the famous Swiss infantry at Marignano, September 1515 MARIGNANO. VIII. 197 13, 14. Sforza renounced his rights on Milan and accepted a CHAP. French pension, and the pope, who wished at all costs to secure the Medici in Florence, made his peace with the conqueror. It seemed probable that all Italy might become a province of France. From the first Henry had conceived the utmost jealousy of his younger rival. On May 1, as Pasqualigo was breakfasting by command in one of the bowers in the garden of Greenwich, the king came in dressed in green, shoes and all, and addressing him in French said, "Talk with me awhile. The King of France, is he as tall as I am?" I told him there was but little difference. He continued, "Is he as stout ?" I said he was not; and then he inquired, "What sort of legs has he?" I replied, "Spare". Whereupon he opened the front of his doublet, and placing his hand on his thigh, said, "Look here; and I have also a good calf to my leg". And to this rivalry the events of the summer and autumn gave a keen and bitter tinge. Beside the great victory of Marignano, the vaunted successes of Tournay and Thérouanne looked mean and shabby. Francis had acted on a larger scale, and achieved a more brilliant result, and in the meantime his conduct wore an air unfriendly to England. Wolsey was specially concerned with the fact that the collection of the revenues of his see of Tournay was impeded by the Archbishop of Reims, an intimation that the severance of that city from France was not so complete as he had reason to expect; and to these personal considerations other causes were added, calculated to inflame the irritation against the French. Slipping out of St. Malo on May 18, and successfully avoiding the English cruisers, Albany had landed on the western coast of Scotland to give heart to the partisans of the French connexion. He was received with enthusiasm. Queen Margaret, already unpopular as an Englishwoman, had added to her difficulties by an unwise marriage with an unpopular Scot, Archibald Douglas, Earl of Angus; and a Scottish parliament meeting at Edinburgh in July, and vehemently desiring the overthrow of the English party, named Albany protector of the kingdom until the infant king should have reached the age of eighteen. Albany struck at the adherents 1 Letters and Papers, Hen. VIII., ii., 411. VIII. CHAP. of England, laid siege to Stirling Castle, and forced the queen to surrender her two sons to his charge. Henry offered his sister a refuge in England, and Lord Dacre, warden of the western marches, who from his stronghold at Naworth had busily sown dissension in Scotland through the summer, concerted her escape. On September 30 she was south of the Cheviots at Harbottle, and in this Northumbrian stronghold a week later gave birth to a "fair young lady," afterwards famous as Margaret Douglas, Countess of Lennox, ancestress of James I. of England. 1 Albany had been almost as successful in Scotland as Francis. had been in the Milanese, and at the news of the expulsion of Margaret the war spirit mounted high in the English council. "Believe me," said Wolsey, after recounting the story of the queen's humiliation with great passion, "his majesty and the kingdom will not brook such an outrage." In October the Venetian ambassadors reported that ships in the Thames were being armed and supplied with military stores. At the launching of the king's great five-masted warship, the Henry Grace de Dieu, no pains were spared to impress the Venetians with England's naval prowess. The king himself, "dressed gallyfashion, with a vest of gold brocade reaching to the middle of the thigh," showed his ship to the Venetians, and to the Venetians alone, as a compliment to their able seamanship. It was given out that parliament, summoned for November 14, was to discuss an expedition to Scotland. But however bitterly the double triumph of France was felt, open war would have been the most fruitless and costly of expedients. The expenditure of the last three years had been enormous, and Wolsey, who had been a college bursar, was as much interested in public economy as he was prone to private magnificence. A formal expedition into Scotland to recover the control of the royal princes would certainly fail of its object, and if a means of annoying Albany was to be found, it was far more efficacious to loose the moss troopers of the border, to launch the Humes against the regent, and to stir all the private factions of that distracted country. Besides this, only £45,637 13s. 8d. had been collected out of the £110,000 voted by the parliament of 1514. Such defi 1 Cal. State Papers, Venice, ii., 651. 1516 SECRET SUBSIDIES. 199 ciencies were common and pointed to imperfect assessment CHAP. and inadequate machinery for collection. Accordingly, when the houses met in November they granted a fifteenth and tenth payable on November 1, 1516, to make good the shortcoming, but nothing more. To encourage the navy, licences contrary to the navigation act were repealed, and a grant was made of the customs on wool and wool fells to the merchants of the staple upon condition that they should pay to the king a yearly sum of £10,022 4s. 8d. to defray the military and civil expenses of Calais and the marches. But these measures, though framed for national defence, were not part of a scheme for aggressive war. Having decided for sufficient reasons against open war, the king and Wolsey would have done wisely to keep the peace. Francis was still a nominal ally, and nothing in his recent proceedings could strictly be construed as a breach of his engagements to England. The help which he had given to Albany had been granted in conformity with treaties between France and Scotland, and was openly avowed. But he had been too successful, too negligent of Henry, and if his luck continued, -he had won over eight Swiss cantons to his side by December 7, he might overset the political balance of Europe. Accordingly Wolsey hit upon a policy which was as crooked as it was ineffective. While maintaining a show of open friendship with Francis, he determined to send secret subsidies to the emperor to assist him to oppose the French arms in Lombardy. Richard Pace, a man of letters as well as a diplomatist, was despatched to Zurich to hire Swiss troops with English gold, and to prevent the remaining five cantons from falling under French influence. The best that can be said for such a policy is, that it probably quieted the more clamorous members of the war party and gave a comparatively innocuous vent to the resentment aroused by the achievements of Francis. But in spite of Wolsey's solemn and repeated lies, the fact that English money was being sent into the continent became known to the Venetian ambassadors as early as December, 1515, and once known to Venice, it became the open talk of Europe. The disclosure of the secret, however, would not have mattered to Wolsey if England's mercenaries could have swept the French out of Milan. But the expedition, which had been subsidised by drafts upon the English treasury, failed in an VIII. |