The problems of Henry VIII.'s reign can indeed only be solved by realising the misrule of the preceding century, the failure of parliamentary government, and the strength of the popular demand for a firm and masterful hand. It is a modern myth that Englishmen have always been consumed with enthusiasm for parliamentary government and with a thirst for a parliamentary vote. The interpretation of history, like that of the Scriptures, varies from age to age; and present political theories colour our views of the past. The political development of the nineteenth century created a parliamentary legend; and civil and religious liberty became the inseparable stage properties of the Englishman. Whenever he appeared on the boards, he was made to declaim about the rights of the subject and the privileges of Parliament. It was assumed that the desire for a voice in the management of his own affairs had at all times and all seasons been the mainspring of his actions; and so the story of Henry's rule was made into a political mystery. In reality, love of freedom has not always been, nor will it always remain, the predominant note in the English mind. At times the English people have pursued it through battle and murder with grim determination, but other times have seen other ideals. On occasion the demand has been for strong government irrespective of its methods, and good government has been preferred to self-government. Wars of expansion and wars of defence have often cooled the love of liberty and impaired the faith in parliaments; and generally English ideals have been strictly subordinated to a passion for material prosperity.
Never was this more apparent than under the Tudors. The parliamentary experiment of the Lancastrians was premature and had failed. Parliamentary institutions were discredited and people were indifferent to parliamentary rights and privileges: "A plague on both your Houses," was the popular feeling, "give us peace, above all peace at home to pursue new avenues of wealth, new phases of commercial development, peace to study new problems of literature, religion, and art"; and both Houses passed out of the range of popular imagination, and almost out of the sphere of independent political action. Parliament played during the sixteenth century a modester part than it had played since its creation. Towards the close of the period Shakespeare wrote his play of King John, and in that play there is not the faintest allusion to Magna Carta.[69] Such an omission would be inconceivable now or at any time since the death of Elizabeth; for the Great Charter is enshrined in popular imagination as the palladium of the British constitution. It was the fetish to which Parliament appealed against the Stuarts. But no such appeal would have touched a Tudor audience. It needed and desired no weapon against a sovereign who embodied national desires, and ruled in accord with the national will. References to the charter are as rare in parliamentary debates as they are in the pages of Shakespeare. The best hated instruments of Stuart tyranny were popular institutions under the Tudors; and the Star Chamber itself found its main difficulty in the number of suitors which flocked to a court where the king was judge, the law's delays minimised, counsel's fees moderate, and justice rarely denied merely because it might happen to be illegal. England in the sixteenth century put its trust in its princes far more than it did in its parliaments; it invested them with attributes almost Divine. By Tudor majesty the poet was inspired with thoughts of the divinity that doth hedge a king. "Love for the King," wrote a Venetian of Henry VIII. in the early years of his reign, "is universal with all who see him, for his Highness does not seem a person of this world, but one descended from heaven."[70] Le nouveau Messie est le Roi.
Such were the tendencies which Henry VII. and Henry VIII. crystallised into practical weapons of absolute government. Few kings have attained a greater measure of permanent success than the first of the Tudors; it was he who laid the unseen foundations upon which Henry VIII. erected the imposing edifice of his personal authority. An orphan from birth and an exile from childhood, he stood near enough to the throne to invite Yorkist proscription, but too far off to unite in his favour Lancastrian support. He owed his elevation to the mistakes of his enemies and to the cool, calculating craft which enabled him to use those mistakes without making mistakes of his own. He ran the great risk of his life in his invasion of England, but henceforth he left nothing to chance. He was never betrayed by passion or enthusiasm into rash adventures, and he loved the substance, rather than the pomp and circumstance of power. Untrammelled by scruples, unimpeded by principles, he pursued with constant fidelity the task of his life, to secure the throne for himself and his children, to pacify his country, and to repair the waste of the civil wars. Folly easily glides into war, but to establish a permanent peace required all Henry's patience, clear sight and far sight, caution and tenacity. A full exchequer, not empty glory, was his first requisite, and he found in his foreign wars a mine of money. Treason at home was turned to like profit, and the forfeited estates of rebellious lords accumulated in the hands of the royal family and filled the national coffers. Attainder, the characteristic instrument of Tudor policy, was employed to complete the ruin of the old English peerage which the Wars of the Roses began: and by 1509 there was only one duke and one marquis left in the whole of England.[71] Attainder not only removed the particular traitor, but disqualified his family for place and power; and the process of eliminating feudalism from the region of government, started by Edward I., was finished by Henry VII. Feudal society has been described as a pyramid; the upper slopes were now washed away leaving an impassable precipice, with the Tudor monarch alone in his glory at its summit. Royalty had become a caste apart. Marriages between royal children and English peers had hitherto been no uncommon thing; since Henry VII.'s accession there have been but four, two of them in our own day. Only one took place in the sixteenth century, and the Duke of Suffolk was by some thought worthy of death for his presumption in marrying the sister of Henry VIII. The peerage was weakened not only by diminishing numbers, but by the systematic depression of those who remained. Henry VII., like Ferdinand of Aragon,[72] preferred to govern by means of lawyers and churchmen; they could be rewarded by judgeships and bishoprics, and required no grants from the royal estates. Their occupancy of office kept out territorial magnates who abused it for private ends. Of the sixteen regents nominated by Henry VIII. in his will, not one could boast a peerage of twelve years' standing;[73] and all the great Tudor ministers, Wolsey and Cromwell, Cecil and Walsingham, were men of comparatively humble birth. With similar objects Henry VII. passed laws limiting the number of retainers and forbidding the practice of maintenance. The courts of Star Chamber and Requests were developed to keep in order his powerful subjects and give poor men protection against them. Their civil law procedure, influenced by Roman imperial maxims, served to enhance the royal power and dignity, and helped to build up the Tudor autocracy.
To the office of king thus developed and magnified, the young Prince who stood upon the steps of the throne brought personal qualities of the highest order, and advantages to which his father was completely a stranger. His title was secure, his treasury overflowed, and he enjoyed the undivided affections of his people. There was no alternative claimant. The White Rose, indeed, had languished in the Tower since his surrender by Philip, and the Duke of Buckingham had some years before been mentioned as a possible successor to the throne;[74] but their claims only served to remind men that nothing but Henry's life stood between them and anarchy, for his young brother Edmund, Duke of Somerset, had preceded Arthur to an early grave. Upon the single thread of Henry's life hung the peace of the realm; no other could have secured the throne without a second civil war. It was small wonder if England regarded Henry with a somewhat extravagant loyalty. Never had king ascended the throne more richly endowed with mental and physical gifts. He was ten weeks short of his eighteenth year. From both his parents he inherited grace of mind and of person. His father in later years was broken in health and soured in spirit, but in the early days of his reign he had charmed the citizens of York with his winning smile. His mother is described by the Venetian ambassador as a woman of great beauty and ability. She transmitted to Henry many of the popular characteristics of her father, Edward IV., though little of the military genius of that consummate commander who fought thirteen pitched battles and lost not one. Unless eye-witnesses sadly belied themselves, Henry VIII. must have been the desire of all eyes. "His Majesty," wrote one a year or two later,[75] "is the handsomest potentate I ever set eyes on; above the usual height, with an extremely fine calf to his leg; his complexion fair and bright, with auburn hair combed straight and short in the French fashion, and a round face so very beautiful that it would become a pretty woman, his throat being rather long and thick.... He speaks French, English, Latin, and a little Italian; plays well on the lute and harpsichord, sings from the book at sight, draws the bow with greater strength than any man in England, and jousts marvellously." Another foreign resident in 1519[76] described him as "extremely handsome. Nature could not have done more for him. He is much handsomer than any other sovereign in Christendom; a great deal handsomer than the King of France; very fair and his whole frame admirably proportioned. On hearing that Francis I. wore a beard, he allowed his own to grow, and as it is reddish, he has now got a beard that looks like gold. He is very accomplished, a good musician, composes well, is a capital horseman, a fine jouster, speaks French, Latin, and Spanish.... He is very fond of hunting, and never takes his diversion without tiring eight or ten horses which he causes to be stationed beforehand along the line of country he means to take, and when one is tired he mounts another, and before he gets home they are all exhausted. He is extremely fond of tennis, at which game it is the prettiest thing in the world to see him play, his fair skin glowing through a shirt of the finest texture."
The change from the cold suspicious Henry VII. to such a king as this was inevitably greeted with a burst of rapturous enthusiasm. "I have no fear," wrote Mountjoy to Erasmus,[77] "but when you heard that our Prince, now Henry the Eighth, whom we may well call our Octavius, had succeeded to his father's throne, all your melancholy left you at once. For what may you not promise yourself from a Prince, with whose extraordinary and almost Divine character you are well acquainted.... But when you know what a hero he now shows himself, how wisely he behaves, what a lover he is of justice and goodness, what affection he bears to the learned, I will venture to swear that you will need no wings to make you fly to behold this new and auspicious star. If you could see how all the world here is rejoicing in the possession of so great a Prince, how his life is all their desire, you could not contain your tears for joy. The heavens laugh, the earth exults, all things are full of milk, of honey, of nectar! Avarice is expelled the country. Liberality scatters wealth with a bounteous hand. Our King does not desire gold or gems or precious metals, but virtue, glory, immortality." The picture is overdrawn for modern taste, but making due allowance for Mountjoy's turgid efforts to emulate his master's eloquence, enough remains to indicate the impression made by Henry on a peer of liberal education. His unrivalled skill in national sports and martial exercises appealed at least as powerfully to the mass of his people. In archery, in wrestling, in joust and in tourney, as well as in the tennis court or on the hunting field, Henry was a match for the best in his kingdom. None could draw a bow, tame a steed, or shiver a lance more deftly than he, and his single-handed tournaments on horse and foot with his brother-in-law, the Duke of Suffolk, are likened by one who watched them to the combats of Achilles and Hector. These are no mere trifles below the dignity of history; they help to explain the extraordinary hold Henry obtained over popular imagination. Suppose there ascended the throne to-day a young prince, the hero of the athletic world, the finest oar, the best bat, the crack marksman of his day, it is easy to imagine the enthusiastic support he would receive from thousands of his people who care much for sport, and nothing at all for politics. Suppose also that that prince were endowed with the iron will, the instinctive insight into the hearts of his people, the profound aptitude for government that Henry VIII. displayed, he would be a rash man who would guarantee even now the integrity of parliamentary power or the continuance of cabinet rule. In those days, with thirty years of civil war and fifteen more of conspiracy fresh in men's minds, with no alternative to anarchy save Henry VIII., with a peerage fallen from its high estate, and a Parliament almost lost to respect, royal autocracy was not a thing to dread or distrust. "If a lion knew his strength," said Sir Thomas More of his master to Cromwell, "it were hard for any man to rule him." Henry VIII. had the strength of a lion; it remains to be seen how soon he learnt it, and what use he made of that strength when he discovered the secret.
CHAPTER III.
THE APPRENTICESHIP OF HENRY VIII.
Quietly and peacefully, without a threat from abroad or a murmur at home, the crown, which his father had won amid the storm and stress of the field of battle, devolved upon Henry VIII. With an eager profusion of zeal Ferdinand of Aragon placed at Henry's disposal his army, his fleet, his personal services.[78] There was no call for this sacrifice. For generations there had been no such tranquil demise of the crown. Not a ripple disturbed the surface of affairs as the old King lay sick in April, 1509, in Richmond Palace at Sheen. By his bedside stood his only surviving son; and to him the dying monarch addressed his last words of advice. He desired him to complete his marriage with Catherine, he exhorted him to defend the Church, and to make war on the infidel; he commended to him his faithful councillors, and is believed to have urged upon him the execution of De la Pole, Earl of Suffolk, the White Rose of England. On the 22nd he was dead. A fortnight later the funeral procession wended its way from Sheen to St. Paul's, where the illustrious John Fisher, cardinal and martyr, preached the éloge. Thence it passed down the Strand, between hedges and willows clad in the fresh green of spring, to
That acre sown indeed
With the richest, royallest seed
That the earth did e'er drink in.
There, in the vault beneath the chapel in Westminster Abbey, which bears his name and testifies to his magnificence in building, Henry VII. was laid to rest beside his Queen; dwelling, says Bacon, "more richly dead in the monument of his tomb than he did alive in Richmond or any of his palaces". For years before and after, Torrigiano, the rival of Buonarotti, wrought at its "matchless altar," not a stone of which survived the Puritan fury of the civil war.
On the day of his father's death, or the next, the new King removed from Richmond Palace to the Tower, whence, on 23rd April, was dated the first official act of his reign. He confirmed in ampler form the general pardon granted a few days before by Henry VII.; but the ampler form was no bar to the exemption of fourscore offenders from the act of grace.[79] Foremost among them were the three brothers De la Pole, Sir Richard Empson and Edmund Dudley. The exclusion of Empson and Dudley from the pardon was more popular than the pardon itself. If anything could have enhanced Henry's favour with his subjects, it was the condign punishment of the tools of his father's extortion. Their death was none the less welcome for being unjust. They were not merely refused pardon and brought to the block; a more costly concession was made when their bonds for the payment of loans were cancelled.[80] Their victims, so runs the official record, had been "without any ground or matter of truth, by the undue means of certain of the council of our said late father, thereunto driven contrary to law, reason and good conscience, to the manifest charge and peril of the soul of our said late father".
If filial piety demanded the delivery of his father's soul from peril, it counselled no less the fulfilment of his dying requests, and the arrangements for Catherine's marriage were hurried on with an almost indecent haste. The instant he heard rumours of Henry VII.'s death, Ferdinand sent warning to his envoy in England that Louis of France and others would seek by all possible means to break off the match.[81] To further it, he would withdraw his objections to the union of Charles and Mary; and a few days later he wrote again to remove any scruples Henry might entertain about marrying his deceased brother's wife; while to Catherine herself he declared with brutal frankness that she would get no other husband than Henry.[82] All his paternal anxiety might have been spared. Long before Ferdinand's persuasions could reach Henry's ears, he had made up his mind to consummate the marriage. He would not, he wrote to Margaret of Savoy,[83] disobey his father's commands, reinforced as they were by the dispensation of the Pope and by the friendship between the two families contracted by his sister Mary's betrothal to Catherine's nephew Charles. There were other reasons besides those he alleged. A council trained by Henry VII. was loth to lose the gold of Catherine's dower; it was of the utmost importance to strengthen at once the royal line; and a full-blooded youth of Henry's temperament was not likely to repel a comely wife ready to his hand, when the dictates of his father's policy no longer stood between them. So on 11th June, barely a month after Henry VII.'s obsequies, the marriage, big with destinies, of Henry VIII. and Catherine of Aragon was privately solemnised by Archbishop Warham "in the Queen's closet" at Greenwich.[84] On the same day the commission of claims was appointed for the King's and Queen's coronation. A week then sufficed for its business, and on Sunday, 24th June, the Abbey was the scene of a second State function within three months. Its splendour and display were emblematic of the coming reign. Warham placed the crown on the King's head; the people cried, "Yea, yea!" in a loud voice when asked if they would have Henry as King; Sir Robert Dymock performed the office of champion; and a banquet, jousts and tourneys concluded the ceremonies.
Though he had wedded a wife and been crowned a king, Henry was as yet little more than a boy. A powerful mind ripens slowly in a vigorous frame, and Henry's childish precocity had given way before a youthful devotion to physical sports. He was no prodigy of early development. His intellect, will and character were of a gradual, healthier growth; they were not matured for many years after he came to the throne. He was still in his eighteenth year; and like most young Englishmen of means and muscle, his interests centred rather in the field than in the study. Youth sat on the prow and pleasure at the helm. "Continual feasting" was the phrase in which Catherine described their early married life. In the winter evenings there were masks and comedies, romps and revels, in which Henry himself, Bessie Blount and other young ladies of his Court played parts.[85] In the spring and summer there were archery and tennis. Music, we are told, was practised day and night. Two months after his accession Henry wrote to Ferdinand that he diverted himself with jousts, birding, hunting, and other innocent and honest pastimes, in visiting various parts of his kingdom, but that he did not therefore neglect affairs of State.[86] Possibly he was as assiduous in his duties as modern university athletes in their studies; the neglect was merely comparative. But Ferdinand's ambassador remarked on Henry's aversion to business, and his councillors complained that he cared only for the pleasures of his age. Two days a week, said the Spaniard, were devoted to single combats on foot, initiated in imitation of the heroes of romance, Amadis and Lancelot;[87] and if Henry's other innocent and honest pastimes were equally exacting, his view of the requirements of State may well have been modest. From the earliest days of his reign the general outline of policy was framed in accord with his sentiments, and he was probably consulted on most questions of importance. But it was not always so; in August, 1509, Louis XII. acknowledged a letter purporting to come from the English King with a request for friendship and peace. "Who wrote this letter?" burst out Henry. "I ask peace of the King of France, who dare not look me in the face, still less make war on me!"[88] His pride at the age of eighteen was not less than his ignorance of what passed in his name. He had yet to learn the secret that painful and laborious mastery of detail is essential to him who aspires not merely to reign but to rule; and matters of detail in administration and diplomacy were still left in his ministers' hands.
With the exception of Empson and Dudley, Henry made little or no change in the council his father bequeathed him. Official precedence appertained to his Chancellor, Warham, Archbishop of Canterbury. Like most of Henry VII.'s prelates, he received his preferment in the Church as a reward for services to the State. Much of the diplomatic work of the previous reign had passed through his hands; he helped to arrange the marriage of Arthur and Catherine, and was employed in the vain attempt to obtain Margaret of Savoy as a bride for Henry VII. As Archbishop he crowned and married Henry VIII., and as Chancellor he delivered orations at the opening of the young King's first three Parliaments.[89] They are said to have given general satisfaction, but apart from them, Warham, for some unknown reason, took little part in political business. So far as Henry can be said at this time to have had a Prime Minister, that title belongs to Fox, his Lord Privy Seal and Bishop of Winchester. Fox had been even more active than Warham in politics, and more closely linked with the personal fortunes of the two Tudor kings. He had shared the exile of Henry of Richmond; the treaty of Étaples, the Intercursus Magnus, the marriage of Henry's elder daughter to James IV., and the betrothal of his younger to Charles, were largely the work of his hands. Malicious gossip described him as willing to consent to his own father's death to serve the turn of his king, and a better founded belief ascribed to his wit the invention of "Morton's fork".[90] He was Chancellor of Cambridge in 1500, as Warham was of Oxford, but won more enduring fame by founding the college of Corpus Christi in the university over which the Archbishop presided. He had baptised Henry VIII. and advocated his marriage to Catherine; and to him the King extended the largest share in his confidence. Badoer, the Venetian ambassador, called him "alter rex,"[91] and Carroz, the Spaniard, said Henry trusted him most; but Henry was not blind to the failings of his most intimate councillors, and he warned Carroz that the Bishop of Winchester was, as his name implied, a fox indeed.[92] A third prelate, Ruthal of Durham, divided with Fox the chief business of State; and these clerical advisers were supposed to be eager to guide Henry's footsteps in the paths of peace, and counteract the more adventurous tendencies of their lay colleagues.
At the head of the latter stood Thomas Howard, Earl of Surrey, soon to be rewarded for his victory at Flodden by his restoration to the dukedom of Norfolk. He and his son, the third duke, were Lord High Treasurers throughout Henry's reign; but jealousy of their past, Tudor distrust of their rank, or personal limitations, impaired the authority that would otherwise have attached to their official position; and Henry never trusted them as he did ministers whom he himself had raised from the dust. Surrey had served under Edward IV. and Richard III.; he had fought against Henry at Bosworth, been attainted and sent to the Tower. Reflecting that it was better to be a Tudor official at Court than a baronial magnate in prison, he submitted to the King and was set up as a beacon to draw his peers from their feudal ways. The rest of the council were men of little distinction. Shrewsbury, the Lord High Steward, was a pale reflex of Surrey, and illustrious in nought but descent. Charles Somerset, Lord Herbert, who was Chamberlain and afterwards Earl of Worcester, was a Beaufort bastard,[93] and may have derived some little influence from his harmless kinship with Henry VIII. Lovell, the Treasurer, Poynings the Controller of the Household, and Harry Marney, Chancellor of the Duchy of Lancaster, were tried and trusty officials. Bishop Fisher was great as a Churchman, a scholar, a patron of learning, but not as a man of affairs; while Buckingham, the only duke in England, and his brother, the Earl of Wiltshire, were rigidly excluded by dynastic jealousy from all share in political authority.
The most persistent of Henry's advisers was none of his council. He was Ferdinand the Catholic, King of Aragon; and to his inspiration has been ascribed[94] the course of foreign policy during the first five years of his son-in-law's reign. He worked through his daughter; the only thing she valued in life, wrote Catherine a month after her marriage, was her father's confidence. When Membrilla was recalled because he failed to satisfy Catherine's somewhat exacting temper, she was herself formally commissioned to act in his place as Ferdinand's ambassador at Henry's Court; Henry was begged to give her implicit credence and communicate with Spain through her mediation! "These kingdoms of your highness," she wrote to her father, "are in great tranquillity."[95] Well might Ferdinand congratulate himself on the result of her marriage, and the addition of fresh, to his already extensive, domains. He needed them all to ensure the success of his far-reaching schemes. His eldest grandson, Charles, was heir not only to Castile and Aragon, Naples and the Indies, which were to come to him from his mother, Ferdinand's imbecile daughter, Juaña, but to Burgundy and Austria, the lands of his father, Philip, and of Philip's father, the Emperor Maximilian. This did not satisfy Ferdinand's grasping ambition; he sought to carve out for his second grandson, named after himself, a kingdom in Northern Italy.[96] On the Duchy of Milan, the republics of Venice, Genoa and Florence, his greedy eyes were fixed. Once conquered, they would bar the path of France to Naples; compensated by these possessions, the younger Ferdinand might resign his share in the Austrian inheritance to Charles; while Charles himself was to marry the only daughter of the King of Hungary, add that to his other dominions, and revive the empire of Charlemagne. Partly with these objects in view, partly to draw off the scent from his own track, Ferdinand had, in 1508, raised the hue and cry after Venice. Pope and Emperor, France and Spain, joined in the chase, but of all the parties to the league of Cambrai, Louis XII. was in a position to profit the most. His victory over Venice at Agnadello (14th May, 1509), secured him Milan and Venetian territory as far as the Mincio; it also dimmed the prospects of Ferdinand's Italian scheme and threatened his hold on Naples; but the Spanish King was restrained from open opposition to France by the fact that Louis was still mediating between him and Maximilian on their claims to the administration of Castile, the realm of their daughter and daughter-in-law, Juaña.
Such was the situation with which Henry VIII. and his council were required to deal. The young King entered the arena of Europe, a child of generous impulse in a throng of hoary intriguers—Ferdinand, Maximilian, Louis XII., Julius II.—each of whom was nearly three times his age. He was shocked to see them leagued to spoil a petty republic, a republic, too, which had been for ages the bulwark of Christendom against the Turk and from time immemorial the ally of England. Venice had played no small part in the revival of letters which appealed so strongly to Henry's intellectual sympathies. Scholars and physicians from Venice, or from equally threatened Italian republics, frequented his Court and Cabinet. Venetian merchants developed the commerce of London; Venetian galleys called twice a year at Southampton on their way to and from Flanders, and their trade was a source of profit to both nations. Inevitably Henry's sympathies went out to the sore-pressed republic. They were none the less strong because the chief of the spoilers was France, for Henry and his people were imbued with an inborn antipathy to everything French.[97] Before he came to the throne he was reported to be France's enemy; and speculations were rife as to the chances of his invading it and imitating the exploits of his ancestor Henry V. It needed no persuasion from Ferdinand to induce him to intervene in favour of Venice. Within a few weeks of his accession he refused to publish the papal bull which cast the halo of crusaders over the bandits of Cambrai. The day after his coronation he deplored to Badoer Louis' victory at Agnadello, and a week later he wrote to the sovereigns of Europe urging the injustice of their Venetian crusade. In September he sent Bainbridge, Cardinal-Archbishop of York, to reside at the Papal Court, and watch over the interests of Venice as well as of England. "Italy," wrote Badoer, "was entirely rescued from the barbarians by the movements of the English King; and, but for that, Ferdinand would have done nothing."[98] Henry vainly endeavoured to persuade Maximilian, the Venetian's lifelong foe, to accept arbitration; but he succeeded in inducing the Doge to make his peace with the Pope, and Julius to remove his ecclesiastical censures. To Ferdinand he declared that Venice must be preserved as a wall against the Turk, and he hinted that Ferdinand's own dominions in Italy would, if Venice were destroyed, "be unable to resist the ambitious designs of certain Christian princes".[99] The danger was as patent to Julius and Ferdinand as it was to Henry; and as soon as Ferdinand had induced Louis to give a favourable verdict in his suit with the Emperor, the Catholic King was ready to join Henry and the Pope in a league of defence.
But, in spite of Venetian, Spanish and papal instigations to "recover his noble inheritance in France," in spite of his own indignation at the treatment of Venice, and the orders issued in the first year of his reign to his subjects to furnish themselves with weapons of war, for which the long peace had left them unprepared,[100] Henry, or the peace party in his council, was unwilling to resort to the arbitrament of arms. He renewed his father's treaties not only with other powers, but, much to the disgust of Ferdinand, Venice and the Pope, with Louis himself. His first martial exploit, apart from 1,500 archers whom he was bound by treaty to send to aid the Netherlands against the Duke of Guelders,[101] was an expedition for the destruction of the enemies of the faith.[102] Such an expedition, he once said, he owed to God for his peaceful accession; at another time he declared[103] that he cherished, like an heirloom, the ardour against the infidel which he inherited from his father. He repressed that ardour, it must be added, with as much success as Henry VII.; and apart from this one youthful indiscretion, he did not suffer his ancestral zeal to escape into action. His generous illusions soon vanished before the sordid realities of European statecraft; and the defence of Christendom became with him, as with others, a hollow pretence, a diplomatic fiction, the infinite varieties of which age could not wither nor custom stale. Did a monarch wish for peace? Peace at once was imperative to enable Christian princes to combine against the Turk. Did he desire war? War became a disagreeable necessity to restrain the ambition of Christian princes who, "worse than the infidel," disturbed the peace of Christendom and opened a door for the enemies of the Church. Nor did the success of Henry's first crusade encourage him to persist in similar efforts. It sailed from Plymouth in May, 1511, to join in Ferdinand's attack on the Moors, but it had scarcely landed when bickerings broke out between the Christian allies, and Ferdinand informed the English commanders that he had made peace with the Infidel, to gird his loins for war with the Most Christian King.
In the midst of their preparation against infidels, so runs the preamble to the treaty in which Henry and Ferdinand signified their adhesion to the Holy League, they heard that Louis was besieging the Pope in Bologna.[104] The thought of violent hands being laid on the Vicar of Christ stirred Henry to a depth of indignation which no injuries practised against a temporal power could rouse. His ingenuous deference to the Papacy was in singular contrast to the contempt with which it was treated by more experienced sovereigns, and they traded on the weight which Henry always attached to the words of the Pope. He had read Maximilian grave lectures on his conduct in countenancing the schismatic conciliabulum assembled by Louis at Pisa.[105] He wrote to Bainbridge at the Papal Court that he was ready to sacrifice goods, life and kingdom for the Pope and the Church;[106] and to the Emperor that at the beginning of his reign he thought of nothing else than an expedition against the Infidel. But now he was called by the Pope and the danger of the Church in another direction; and he proceeded to denounce the impiety and schism of the French and their atrocious deeds in Italy. He joined Ferdinand in requiring Louis to desist from his impious work. Louis turned a deaf ear to their demands; and in November, 1511, they bound themselves to defend the Church against all aggression and make war upon the aggressor.
This reversal of the pacific policy which had marked the first two and a half years of Henry's reign was not exclusively due to the King's zeal for the Church. The clerical party of peace in his council was now divided by the appearance of an ecclesiastic who was far more remarkable than any of his colleagues, and to whose turbulence and energy the boldness of English policy must, henceforth, for many years be mainly ascribed. Thomas Wolsey had been appointed Henry's almoner at the beginning of his reign, but he exercised no apparent influence in public affairs. It was not till 1511 that he joined the council, though during the interval he must have been gradually building up his ascendancy over the King's mind. To Wolsey, restlessly ambitious for himself, for Henry, and England, was attributed the responsibility for the sudden adoption of a spirited foreign policy; and it was in the preparations for the war of 1512 that his marvellous industry and grasp of detail first found full scope.
The main attack of the English and Spanish monarchs was to be on Guienne,[107] and in May, 1512, Henry went down to Southampton to speed the departing fleet.[108] It sailed from Cowes under Dorset's command on 3rd June, and a week later the army disembarked on the coast of Guipuscoa.[109] There it remained throughout the torrid summer, awaiting the Spanish King's forces to co-operate in the invasion of France. But Ferdinand was otherwise occupied. Navarre was not mentioned in the treaty with Henry, but Navarre was what Ferdinand had in his mind. It was then an independent kingdom, surrounded on three sides by Spanish territory, and an easy prey which would serve to unite all Spain beyond the Pyrenees under Ferdinand's rule. Under pretence of restoring Guienne to the English crown, Dorset's army had been enticed to Passages, and there it was used as a screen against the French, behind which Ferdinand calmly proceeded to conquer Navarre. It was, he said, impossible to march into France with Navarre unsubdued in his rear. Navarre was at peace, but it might join the French, and he invited Dorset to help in securing the prey. Dorset refused to exceed his commission, but the presence of his army at Passages was admitted by the Spaniards to be "quite providential,"[110] as it prevented the French from assisting Navarre. English indignation was loud and deep; men and officers vowed that, but for Henry's displeasure, they would have called to account the perfidious King. Condemned to inactivity, the troops almost mutinied; they found it impossible to live on their wages of sixpence a day (equivalent now to at least six shillings), drank Spanish wine as if it were English beer, and died of dysentery like flies in the autumn. Discipline relaxed; drill was neglected. Still Ferdinand tarried, and in October, seeing no hope of an attempt on Guienne that year, the army took matters into its own hands and embarked for England.[111]
Henry's first military enterprise had ended in disgrace and disaster. The repute of English soldiers, dimmed by long peace, was now further tarnished. Henry's own envoys complained of the army's insubordination, its impatience of the toils, and inexperience of the feats, of war; and its ignominious return exposed him to the taunts of both friends and foes. He had been on the point of ordering it home, when it came of its own accord; but the blow to his authority was not, on that account, less severe. His irritation was not likely to be soothed when he realised the extent to which he had been duped by his father-in-law. Ferdinand was loud in complaints and excuses.[112] September and October were, he said, the proper months for a campaign in Guienne, and he was marching to join the English army at the moment of its desertion. In reality, it had served his purpose to perfection. Its presence had diverted French levies from Italy, and enabled him, unmolested, to conquer Navarre. With that he was content. Why should he wish to see Henry in Guienne? He was too shrewd to involve his own forces in that hopeless adventure, and the departure of the English furnished him with an excuse for entering into secret negotiations with Louis. His methods were eloquent of sixteenth-century diplomacy. He was, he ordered Carroz to tell Henry many months later,[113] when concealment was no longer possible or necessary, sending a holy friar to his daughter in England; the friar's health did not permit of his going by sea; so he went through France, and was taken prisoner. Hearing of his fame for piety, the French Queen desired his ghostly advice, and took the opportunity of the interview to persuade the friar to return to Spain with proposals of peace. Ferdinand was suddenly convinced that death was at hand; his confessor exhorted him to forgive and make peace with his enemies. This work of piety he could not in conscience neglect. So he agreed to a twelvemonth's truce, which secured Navarre. In spite of his conscience he would never have consented, had he not felt that the truce was really in Henry's interests. But what weighed with him most was, he said, the reformation of the Church. That should be Henry's first and noblest work; he could render no greater service to God. No reformation was possible without peace, and so long as the Church was unreformed, wars among princes would never cease.
Such reasoning, he thought, would appeal to the pious and unsophisticated Henry. To other sovereigns he used arguments more suited to their experience of his diplomacy. He told Maximilian[114] that his main desire was to serve the Emperor's interests, to put a curb on the Italians, and to frustrate their design of driving himself, Louis and Maximilian across the Alps. But the most monumental falsehood he reserved for the Pope; his ambassador at the Papal Court was to assure Julius that he had failed in his efforts to concert with Henry a joint invasion of France, that Henry was not in earnest over the war and that he had actually made a truce[115] with France. This had enabled Louis to pour fresh troops into Italy, and compelled him, Ferdinand, to consult his own interests and make peace! Two days later he was complaining to Louis that Henry refused to join in the truce.[116] To punish Henry for his refusal he was willing to aid Louis against him, but he would prefer to settle the differences between the French and the English kings by a still more treacherous expedient. Julius was to be induced to give a written promise that, if the points at issue were submitted to his arbitration, he would pronounce no verdict till it had been secretly sanctioned by Ferdinand and Louis. This promise obtained, Louis was publicly to appeal to the Pope; Henry's devotion to the Church would prevent his refusing the Supreme Pontiff's mediation; if he did, ecclesiastical censures could be invoked against him.[117] Such was the plot Ferdinand was hatching for the benefit of his daughter's husband. The Catholic King had ever deceit in his heart and the name of God on his lips. He was accused by a rival of having cheated him twice; the charge was repeated to Ferdinand. "He lies," he broke out, "I cheated him three times." He was faithful to one principle only, self-aggrandisement by fair means or foul. His favourite scheme was a kingdom in Northern Italy; but in the way of its realisation his own overreaching ambition placed an insuperable bar. Italy had been excluded from his truce with France to leave him free to pursue that design;[118] but in July, 1512, the Italians already suspected his motives, and a papal legate declared that they no more wished to see Milan Spanish than French.[119] In the following November, Spanish troops in the pay and alliance of Venice drove the French out of Brescia. By the terms of the Holy League, it should have been restored to its owner, the Venetian Republic. Ferdinand kept it himself; it was to form the nucleus of his North Italian dominion. Venice at once took alarm and made a compact with France which kept the Spaniards at bay until after Ferdinand's death.[120] The friendship between Venice and France severed that between France and the Emperor; and, in 1513, the war went on with a rearrangement of partners, Henry and Maximilian on one side,[121] against France and Venice on the other, with Ferdinand secretly trying to trick them all.
For many months Henry knew not, or refused to credit, his father-in-law's perfidy. To outward appearance, the Spanish King was as eager as ever for the war in Guienne. He was urging Henry to levy 6,000 Germans to serve for that purpose in conjunction with Spanish forces; and, in April, Carroz, in ignorance of his master's real intentions, signed on his behalf a treaty for the joint invasion of France.[122] This forced the Catholic King to reveal his hand. He refused his ratification;[123] now he declared the conquest of Guienne to be a task of such magnitude that preparations must be complete before April, a date already past; and he recommended Henry to come into the truce with Louis, the existence of which he had now to confess. Henry had not yet fathomed the depths; he even appealed to Ferdinand's feelings and pathetically besought him, as a good father, not to forsake him entirely.[124] But in vain; his father-in-law deserted him at his sorest hour of need. To make peace was out of the question. England's honour had suffered a stain that must at all costs be removed. No king with an atom of spirit would let the dawn of his reign be clouded by such an admission of failure. Wolsey was there to stiffen his temper in case of need; with him it was almost a matter of life and death to retrieve the disaster. His credit was pledged in the war. In their moments of anger under the Spanish sun, the English commanders had loudly imputed to Wolsey the origin of the war and the cause of all the mischief.[125] Surrey, for whose banishment from Court the new favourite had expressed to Fox a wish, and other "great men" at home, repeated the charge.[126] Had Wolsey failed to bring honour with peace, his name would not have been numbered among the greatest of England's statesmen.
Henry's temper required no spur. Tudors never flinched in the face of danger, and nothing could have made Henry so resolved to go on as Ferdinand's desertion and advice to desist. He was prepared to avenge his army in person. There were to be no expeditions to distant shores; there was to be war in the Channel, where Englishmen were at home on the sea; and Calais was to be the base of an invasion of France over soil worn by the tramp of English troops. In March, 1513, Henry, to whom the navy was a weapon, a plaything, a passion, watched his fleet sail down the Thames; its further progress was told him in letters from its gallant admiral, Sir Edmund Howard, who had been strictly charged to inform the King of the minutest details in the behaviour of every one of the ships.[127] Never had such a display of naval force left the English shores; twenty-four ships ranging downwards from the 1,600 tons of the Henry Imperial, bore nearly 5,000 marines and 3,000 mariners.[128] The French dared not venture out, while Howard swept the Channel, and sought them in their ports. Brest was blockaded. A squadron of Mediterranean galleys coming to its relief anchored in the shallow water off Conquêt. Howard determined to cut them out; he grappled and boarded their admiral's galley. The grappling was cut away, his boat swept out in the tide, and Howard, left unsupported, was thrust overboard by the Frenchmen's pikes.[129] His death was regarded as a national disaster, but he had retrieved England's reputation for foolhardy valour.
Meanwhile, Henry's army was gathering at Calais.[130] On 30th June, at 7 p.m., the King himself landed. Before his departure, the unfortunate Edmund de la Pole, Earl of Suffolk, was brought to the block for an alleged correspondence with his brother in Louis' service, but really because rumours were rife of Louis' intention to proclaim the White Rose as King of England.[131] On 21st July, Henry left Calais to join his army, which had already advanced into French territory. Heavy rains impeded its march and added to its discomfort. Henry, we are told, did not put off his clothes, but rode round the camp at three in the morning, cheering his men with the remark, "Well, comrades, now that we have suffered in the beginning, fortune promises us better things, God willing".[132] Near Ardres some German mercenaries, of whom there were 8,000 with Henry's forces, pillaged the church; Henry promptly had three of them hanged. On 1st August the army sat down before Thérouanne; on the 10th, the Emperor arrived to serve as a private at a hundred crowns a day under the English banners. Three days later a large French force arrived at Guinegate to raise the siege; a panic seized it, and the bloodless rout that followed was named the Battle of Spurs. Louis d'Orléans, Duc de Longueville, the famous Chevalier Bayard, and others of the noblest blood in France, were among the captives.[133] Ten days after this defeat Thérouanne surrendered; and on the 24th Henry made his triumphal entry into the first town captured by English arms since the days of Jeanne Darc. On the 26th he removed to Guinegate, where he remained a week, "according," says a curious document, "to the laws of arms, for in case any man would bid battle for the besieging and getting of any city or town, then the winner (has) to give battle, and to abide the same certain days".[134] No challenge was forthcoming, and on 15th September Henry besieged Tournay, then said to be the richest city north of Paris. During the progress of the siege the Lady Margaret of Savoy, the Regent of the Netherlands, joined her father, the Emperor, and Henry, at Lille. They discussed plans for renewing the war next year and for the marriage of Charles and Mary. To please the Lady Margaret and to exhibit his skill Henry played the gitteron, the lute and the cornet, and danced and jousted before her.[135] He "excelled every one as much in agility in breaking spears as in nobleness of stature". Within a week Tournay fell; on 13th October Henry commenced his return, and on the 21st he re-embarked at Calais.
Thérouanne, the Battle of Spurs, and Tournay were not the only, or the most striking, successes in this year of war. In July, Catherine, whom Henry had left as Regent in England, wrote that she was "horribly busy with making standards, banners, and badges"[136] for the army in the North; for war with France had brought, as usual, the Scots upon the English backs. James IV., though Henry's brother-in-law, preferred to be the cat's paw of the King of France; and in August the Scots forces poured over the Border under the command of James himself. England was prepared; and on 9th September, "at Flodden hills," sang Skelton, "our bows and bills slew all the flower of their honour". James IV. was left a mutilated corpse upon the field of battle.[137] "He has paid," wrote Henry, "a heavier penalty for his perfidy than we would have wished." There was some justice in the charge. James was bound by treaty not to go to war with England; he had not even waited for the Pope's answer to his request for absolution from his oath; and his challenge to Henry, when he was in France and could not meet it, was not a knightly deed. Henry wrote to Leo for permission to bury the excommunicated Scottish King with royal honours in St. Paul's.[138] The permission was granted, but the interment did not take place. In Italy, Louis fared no better; at Novara, on 6th June, the Swiss infantry broke in pieces the grand army of France, drove the fragments across the Alps, and restored the Duchy of Milan to the native house of Sforza.
The results of the campaign of 1513 were a striking vindication of the refusal of Henry VIII. and Wolsey to rest under the stigma of their Spanish expedition of 1512. English prestige was not only restored, but raised higher than it had stood since the death of Henry V., whose "name," said Pasqualigo, a Venetian in London, "Henry VIII. would now renew". He styled him "our great King".[139] Peter Martyr, a resident at Ferdinand's Court, declared that the Spanish King was "afraid of the over-growing power of England".[140] Another Venetian in London reported that "were Henry ambitious of dominion like others, he would soon give law to the world". But, he added, "he is good and has a good council. His quarrel was a just one, he marched to free the Church, to obtain his own, and to liberate Italy from the French."[141] The pomp and parade of Henry's wars have, indeed, somewhat obscured the fundamentally pacific character of his reign. The correspondence of the time bears constant witness to the peaceful tendencies of Henry and his council. "I content myself," he once said to Giustinian, "with my own, I only wish to command my own subjects; but, on the other hand, I do not choose that any one shall have it in his power to command me."[142] On another occasion he said: "We want all potentates to content themselves with their own territories; we are content with this island of ours"; and Giustinian, after four years' residence at Henry's Court, gave it as his deliberate opinion to his Government, that Henry did not covet his neighbours' goods, was satisfied with his own dominions, and "extremely desirous of peace".[143] Ferdinand said, in 1513, that his pensions from France and a free hand in Scotland were all that Henry really desired;[144] and Carroz, his ambassador, reported that Henry's councillors did not like to be at war with any one.[145] Peace, they told Badoer, suited England better than war.[146]
But Henry's actions proclaimed louder than the words of himself or of others that he believed peace to be the first of English interests. He waged no wars on the continent except against France; and though he reigned thirty-eight years, his hostilities with France were compressed into as many months. The campaigns of 1512-13, Surrey's and Suffolk's inroads of 1522 and 1523, and Henry's invasion of 1544, represent the sum of his military operations outside Great Britain and Ireland. He acquired Tournay in 1513 and Boulogne in 1544, but the one was restored in five years for an indemnity, and the other was to be given back in eight for a similar consideration. These facts are in curious contrast with the high-sounding schemes of recovering the crown of France, which others were always suggesting to Henry, and which he, for merely conventional reasons, was in the habit of enunciating before going to war; and in view of the tenacity which Henry exhibited in other respects, and the readiness with which he relinquished his regal pretensions to France, it is difficult to believe that they were any real expression of settled policy. They were, indeed, impossible of achievement, and Henry saw the fact clearly enough.[147] Modern phenomena such as huge armies sweeping over Europe, and capitals from Berlin to Moscow, Paris to Madrid, falling before them, were quite beyond military science of the sixteenth century. Armies fought, as a rule, only in the five summer months; it was difficult enough to victual them for even that time; and lack of commissariat or transport crippled all the invasions of Scotland. Hertford sacked Edinburgh, but he went by sea. No other capital except Rome saw an invading army. Neither Henry nor Maximilian, Ferdinand nor Charles, ever penetrated more than a few miles into France, and French armies got no further into Spain, the Netherlands, or Germany. Machiavelli points out that the chief safeguard of France against the Spaniards was that the latter could not victual their army sufficiently to pass the Pyrenees.[148] If in Italy it was different, it was because Italy herself invited the invaders, and was mainly under foreign dominion. Henry knew that with the means at his disposal he could never conquer France; his claims to the crown were transparent conventions, and he was always ready for peace in return for the status quo and a money indemnity, with a town or so for security.
The fact that he had only achieved a small part of the conquest he professed to set out to accomplish was, therefore, no bar to negotiations for peace. There were many reasons for ending the war; the rapid diminution of his father's treasures; the accession to the papal throne of the pacific Leo in place of the warlike Julius; the absolution of Louis as a reward for renouncing the council of Pisa; the interruption of the trade with Venice; the attention required by Scotland now that her king was Henry's infant nephew; and lastly, his betrayal first by Ferdinand and now by the Emperor. In October, 1513, at Lille, a treaty had been drawn up binding Henry, Maximilian and Ferdinand to a combined invasion of France before the following June.[149] On 6th December, Ferdinand wrote to Henry to say he had signed the treaty. He pointed out the sacrifices he was making in so doing; he was induced to make them by considering that the war was to be waged in the interests of the Holy Church, of Maximilian, Henry, and Catherine, and by his wish and hope to live and die in friendship with the Emperor and the King of England. He thought, however, that to make sure of the assistance of God, the allies ought to bind themselves, if He gave them the victory, to undertake a general war on the infidel.[150] Ferdinand seems to have imagined that he could dupe the Almighty as easily as he hoped to cheat his allies, by a pledge which he never meant to fulfil. A fortnight after this despatch he ordered Carroz not to ratify the treaty he himself had already signed.[151] The reason was not far to seek. He was deluding himself with the hope, which Louis shrewdly encouraged, that the French King would, after his recent reverses, fall in with the Spaniard's Italian plans.[152] Louis might even, he thought, of his own accord cede Milan and Genoa, which would annihilate the French King's influence in Italy, and greatly facilitate the attack on Venice.
That design had occupied him throughout the summer, before Louis had become so amenable; then he was urging Maximilian that the Pope must be kept on their side and persuaded "not to forgive the great sins committed by the King of France"; for if he removed his ecclesiastical censures, Ferdinand and Maximilian "would be deprived of a plausible excuse for confiscating the territories they intended to conquer".[153] Providence was, as usual, to be bribed into assisting in the robbery of Venice by a promise to make war on the Turk. But now that Louis was prepared to give his daughter Renée in marriage to young Ferdinand and to endow the couple with Milan and Genoa and his claims on Naples, his sins might be forgiven. The two monarchs would not be justified in making war upon France in face of these offers. Venice remained a difficulty, for Louis was not likely to help to despoil his faithful ally; but Ferdinand had a suggestion. They could all make peace publicly guaranteeing the Republic's possessions, but Maximilian and he could make a "mental reservation" enabling them to partition Venice, when France could no longer prevent it.[154]
So on 13th March, 1514, Ferdinand renewed his truce with France, and Maximilian joined it soon after.[155] The old excuses about the reformation of the Church, his death-bed desire to make peace with his enemies, could scarcely be used again; so Ferdinand instructed his agent to say, if Henry asked for an explanation, that there was a secret conspiracy in Italy.[156] If he had said no more, it would have been literally true, for the conspiracy was his own; but he went on to relate that the conspiracy was being hatched by the Italians to drive him and the Emperor out of the peninsula. The two were alike in their treachery; both secretly entered the truce with France and broke their promise to Henry. Another engagement of longer standing was ruptured. Since 1508, Henry's sister Mary had been betrothed to Maximilian's grandson Charles. The marriage was to take place when Charles was fourteen; the pledge had been renewed at Lille, and the nuptials fixed not later than 15th May, 1514.[157] Charles wrote to Mary signing himself votre mari, while Mary was styled Princess of Castile, carried about a bad portrait of Charles,[158] and diplomatically sighed for his presence ten times a day. But winter wore on and turned to spring; no sign was forthcoming of Maximilian's intention to keep his grandson's engagement, and Charles was reported as having said that he wanted a wife and not a mother.[159] All Henry's inquiries were met by excuses; the Ides of May came and went, but they brought no wedding between Mary and Charles.
Henry was learning by bitter experience. Not only was he left to face single-handed the might of Louis; but Ferdinand and Maximilian had secretly bound themselves to make war on him, if he carried out the treaty to which they had all three publicly agreed. The man whom he said he loved as a natural father, and the titular sovereign of Christendom, had combined to cheat the boy-king who had come to the throne with youthful enthusiasms and natural, generous instincts. "Nor do I see," said Henry to Giustinian, "any faith in the world save in me, and therefore God Almighty, who knows this, prospers my affairs."[160] This absorbing belief in himself and his righteousness led to strange aberrations in later years, but in 1514 it had some justification. "Je vous assure," wrote Margaret of Savoy to her father, the Emperor, "qu'en lui n'a nulle faintise." "At any rate," said Pasqualigo, "King Henry has done himself great honour, and kept faith single-handed."[161] A more striking testimony was forthcoming a year or two later. When Charles succeeded Ferdinand, the Bishop of Badajos drew up for Cardinal Ximenes a report on the state of the Prince's affairs. In it he says: "The King of England has been truer to his engagements towards the House of Austria than any other prince. The marriage of the Prince with the Princess Mary, it must be confessed, did not take place, but it may be questioned whether it was the fault of the King of England or of the Prince and his advisers. However that may be, with the exception of the marriage, the King of England has generally fulfilled his obligations towards the Prince, and has behaved as a trusty friend. An alliance with the English can be trusted most of all."[162]
But the meekest and saintliest monarch could scarce pass unscathed through the baptism of fraud practised on Henry; and Henry was at no time saintly or meek. Ferdinand, he complained, induced him to enter upon the war, and urged the Pope to use his influence with him for that purpose; he had been at great expense, had assisted Maximilian, taken Tournay, and reduced France to extremities; and now, when his enemy was at his feet, Ferdinand talked of truce: he would never trust any one again.[163] "Had the King of Spain," wrote a Venetian attaché, "kept his promise to the King of England, the latter would never have made peace with France; and the promises of the Emperor were equally false, for he had received many thousands of pounds from King Henry, on condition that he was to be in person at Calais in the month of May, with a considerable force in the King's pay; but the Emperor pocketed the money and never came. His failure was the cause of all that took place, for, as King Henry was deceived in every direction, he thought fit to take this other course."[164] He discovered that he, too, could play at the game of making peace behind the backs of his nominal friends; and when once he had made up his mind, he played the game with vastly more effect than Maximilian or Ferdinand. It was he who had been really formidable to Louis, and Louis was therefore prepared to pay him a higher price than to either of the others. In February Henry had got wind of his allies' practices with France. In the same month a nuncio started from Rome to mediate peace between Henry and Louis;[165] but, before his arrival, informal advances had probably been made through the Duc de Longueville, a prisoner in England since the Battle of Spurs.[166] In January Louis' wife, Anne of Brittany, had died. Louis was fifty-two years old, worn out and decrepit; but at least half a dozen brides were proposed for his hand. In March it was rumoured in Rome that he would choose Henry's sister Mary, the rejected of Charles.[167] But Henry waited till May had passed, and Maximilian had proclaimed to the world his breach of promise. Negotiations for the alliance and marriage with Louis then proceeded apace. Treaties for both were signed in August. Tournay remained in Henry's hands, Louis increased the pensions paid by France to England since the Treaty of Étaples, and both kings bound themselves to render mutual aid against their common foes.[168]