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      Chapter IV: Cardinal Wolsey

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      During the autumn of 1513 the French were hard-pressed from all sides. Wolsey, through the Emperor, hired a Swiss army, which invaded Burgundy by way of Besançon, the fortress capital of Franche-Comté, a part of the Burgundian inheritance that had passed into Habsburg hands. Dijon was captured. The French had no troops of their own which could resist the Swiss, and doubled their taille to hire fresh mercenaries from abroad. Henry had every intention of renewing his campaign in France in 1514, but his successes had not been to the liking of Ferdinand of Spain. Ferdinand now set about making a separate peace with France, into which he also tried to draw the Emperor Maximilian.

      Faced with the defection of his allies, Henry was quick to launch a counter-stroke. First he looked to the defences of the realm, and took measures to strengthen his navy. Then he sought and obtained a favourable peace treaty with France, thereby securing exactly double the amount of annual tribute that had been paid to his father. The crowning event of the peace was the marriage between Henry’s young sister, Mary, and Louis XII himself. She was seventeen, he was fifty-two. The story runs that she extracted from her brother the promise that if she married this time for diplomacy she would be free next time to marry for love. Promise or no promise, that is what she did. She was Queen of France for three months; then, as Queen Dowager, and to Henry’s displeasure, she cut short her widowhood by marrying Charles Brandon, Duke of Suffolk. But in this case the royal wrath subsided and Henry VIII joined in the wedding festivities. The marriage ultimately bore tragic fruit: a grandchild was the Lady Jane Grey, who was for ten days to be Queen of England.

      Among those who had crossed with the bridal retinue to France was a young girl named Mary Boleyn. She was one of three nieces of the Duke of Norfolk, all of whom successively engaged the dangerous and deadly love of Henry VIII. Mary and her sister Anne had been educated in France at an expensive academy attached to the French Court. On her return to England Mary married William Carey, a Gentleman of the Bedchamber, and before long became the King’s mistress. Her father was upon this favour created Lord Rochford, while her sister, Anne, continued her studies in France.

      Wolsey was richly rewarded for the foreign successes. He received the Bishopric of Lincoln during the course of the negotiations; then, after the peace terms were settled, the Archbishopric of York; and, a year later, after long negotiation by the King on his behalf, in September 1515, a cardinal’s hat. This shower of ecclesiastical honours did not however give Wolsey sufficient civil authority, and in December 1515 Henry created him Lord Chancellor in place of Warham, whom he forced to resign the Great Seal.

      For fourteen years Wolsey in the King’s name was the effective ruler of the realm. He owed his position not only to his great capacity for business, but to his considerable personal charm. He had “an angel’s wit”, one of his contemporaries wrote, for beguiling and flattering those whom he wished to persuade. In the King’s company he was brilliant, convivial, and “a gay seeker out of new pastimes”. All this commended him to his young master. Other would-be counsellors of Henry’s saw a different side of the Cardinal’s character. They resented being scornfully overborne by him in debate; they detested his arrogance, and envied his ever-growing wealth and extensive patronage. At the height of his influence Wolsey enjoyed an income equivalent to about £500,000 a year in early twentieth-century money. He kept a thousand servants, and his palaces surpassed the King’s in splendour. He loaded profitable favours upon his relations, including his illegitimate son, who held eleven Church appointments, and their incomes, while still a boy. These counts against him gradually added up in the course of years. But for the time being—and it was for a long time, as Chief Ministers go—he successfully held in his grasp an accumulation of power that has probably never been equalled in England. The King’s popularity rose with the achievements of his reign. There were many of course who grumbled at the war taxes imposed during the previous two years; but while pouring money into pageantry and magnificence Wolsey managed to tap new sources of revenue. Henry’s subjects were taxed much as they had been under his father, which was more lightly than any other subjects in Europe. Indeed, the North of England, which had to support billeting and Border warfare, was excused taxation altogether.

      Successes abroad enabled Wolsey to develop Henry VII’s principles of centralised government. During the twelve years that he was Lord Chancellor Parliament met only once, for two sessions spreading over three months in all. The Court of Star Chamber grew more active. It evolved new and simple methods copied from Roman law, by which the Common Law rules of evidence were dispensed with, and persons who could give evidence were simply brought in for interrogation, one by one, often without even the formality of an oath. Justice was swift, fines were heavy, and no one in England was so powerful that he could afford to flout the Star Chamber. When a common soldier of the Calais garrison once sent his wife to complain of his treatment by the Lord Deputy of Calais she received a full hearing. The new generation grown up after the Wars of the Roses was accustomed to royal law and order, and determined that it should prevail.

      Thus it was that this system of arbitrary government, however despotic in theory, however contrary to the principles believed to lie behind Magna Carta, in fact rested tacitly on the real will of the people. Henry VIII, like his father, found an institution ready to his hand in the unpaid Justice of the Peace, the local squire or landlord, and taught him to govern. Rules and regulations of remarkable complexity were given to the Justice to administer; and later in the century Justices’ manuals were produced, which ran through innumerable editions and covered almost every contingency which could arise in country life.

      The Tudors were indeed the architects of an English system of local government which lasted almost unchanged until Victorian times. Unpaid local men, fearless and impartial,

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