The election of Charles V. as emperor in 1519 brought the rivalry between him and Francis I. to a head, and Wolsey was mainly responsible for the attitude adopted by the English government. Both monarchs were eager for England's alliance, and their suit enabled Wolsey to appear for the moment as the arbiter of Europe. England's commercial relations with Charles V.'s subjects in the Netherlands put war with the emperor almost out of the question; and cool observers thought that England's obvious policy was to stand by while the two rivals enfeebled each other, and then make her own profit out of their weakness. But, although a gorgeous show of friendship with France was kept up at the Field of Cloth of Gold in 1520, it had been determined before the conference of Calais in 1521, at which Wolsey pretended to adjudicate on the merits of the dispute, to side actively with Charles V. Wolsey had vested interests in such a policy. Parliament had in 1513-1515 showed signs of strong anti-clerical feeling; Wolsey had in the latter year urged its speedy dissolution, and had not called another; and he probably hoped to distract attention from the church by a spirited foreign policy, as Henry V. had done a century before. He had, moreover, received assurances from the emperor that he would further Wolsey's candidature for the papacy; and although he protested to Henry VIII. that he would rather continue in his service than be ten popes, that did not prevent him from secretly instructing his agents at Rome to press his claims to the utmost. Charles, however, paid Wolsey the sincere compliment of thinking that he would not be sufficiently subservient on the papal throne; while he wrote letters in Wolsey's favour, he took care that they should not reach their destination in time; and Wolsey failed to secure election both in 1521 and 1524. This ambition distinguishes his foreign policy from that of Henry VII., to which it has been likened. Henry VII. cared only for England; Wolsey's object was to play a great part on the European stage. The aim of the one was national, that of the other was oecumenical.
In any case the decision taken in 1521 was a blunder. Wolsey's assistance helped Charles V. to that position of predominance which was strikingly illustrated by the defeat and capture of Francis I. at Pavia in 1525; and the balance of power upon which England's influence rested was destroyed. Her efforts to restore it in 1526-1528 were ineffectual; her prestige had depended upon her reputation for wealth derived from the fact that she had acted in recent years as the paymaster of Europe. But Henry VII.'s accumulations had disappeared; parliament resisted in 1523 the imposition of new taxation; and the attempts to raise forced loans and benevolences in 1526-1528 created a storm of opposition. Still more unpopular was the brief war with Charles V. in which Wolsey involved England in 1528. The sack of Rome in 1527 and the defeat of the French before Naples in 1528 confirmed Charles V.'s supremacy. Peace was made in. 1529 between the two rivals without England being consulted, and her influence at Wolsey's fall was less than it had been at his accession to power.
This failure reacted upon Wolsey's position at home. His domestic was sounder than his foreign policy: by his development of the star chamber, by his firm administration of justice and maintenance of order, and by his repression of feudal. jurisdiction, he rendered great services to the monarchy. But the inevitable opposition of the nobility to this policy was not mitigated by the fact that it was carried out by a churchman; the result was to embitter the antagonism of the secular party to the church and to concentrate it upon Wolsey's head. The control of the papacy by Charles V., moreover, made it impossible for Wolsey to succeed in his efforts to obtain from Clement VII. the divorce which Henry VIII. was seeking from Charles V.'s aunt, Catherine of Aragon. An inscription on a contemporary portrait of Wolsey at Arras calls him the author of the divorce, and Roman Catholic historians from Sanders downwards have generally adopted the view that Wolsey advocated this measure merely as a means to break England's alliance with Spain and confirm its alliance with France. This view is unhistorical, and it ignores the various personal and national motives which lay behind that movement. There is no evidence that Wolsey first suggested the divorce, though when he found that Henry was bent upon it, he pressed for two points: (i.) that an application should be made to Rome, instead of deciding the matter in England, and (ii.) that Henry, when divorced, should marry a French princess.
The appeal to Rome was a natural course to be advocated by Wolsey, whose despotism over the English church depended upon an authority derived from Rome; but it was probably a mistake. It ran counter to the ideas suggested in 1527 on the captivity of Clement VII., that England and France should set up independent patriarchates; and its success depended upon the problematical destruction of Charles V.'s power in Italy. At first this seemed not improbable; French armies marched south on Naples, and the pope sent Campeggio with full powers to pronounce the divorce in England. But he had hardly started when the French were defeated in 1528; their ruin was completed in 1529, and Clement VII. was obliged to come to terms with Charles V., which included Campeggio's recall in August 1529.
Continued on page three.
This article is from the 1911 edition of an encyclopedia, which is out of copyright here in the U.S. See the encyclopedia main page for disclaimer and copyright information.
