Pole meanwhile remained in Italy, assured of his personal safety but grieved to the heart that his mother and brother were still in England, where the King could take vengeance on them for his own alleged treason. In August, 1538, his brother, Sir Geoffrey Pole, was arrested and placed in the Tower, where he was examined on the charge of having had treacherous correspondence with his brother Reginald, and having interfered with the King’s endeavours to arrest him[524]. His replies to the questions put to him implicated many others, and before the close of the year the heads of the powerful families of Montague, Courtenay, Delawarr, and Nevill had been arrested and sent to the Tower[525]. There is reason to believe that the confessions of Sir Geoffrey Pole were extorted from him by threats of torture, to serve as an excuse for the arrest of these noblemen, and a letter of Castillon to Montmorency asserts that their destruction had been decided on long before, on account of their connexion with the Yorkist dynasty[526]. Cromwell’s activity in procuring matter for the various indictments is sufficiently attested by an enormous number of notes of evidence and memoranda for prosecution in the hand of his chief clerk. The apparent difficulty which he had in trumping up any plausible charges against his victims, would seem to show that no adequate proof of any really disloyal intent could be found. Indeed, in order to have any sort of excuse for the arrests of the Marquis and Marchioness of Exeter, Cromwell had to exhume a long forgotten episode, and accuse the latter of having ridden in disguise three years before to confer with the Holy Maid; while it was remembered that the Marquis had been put in the Tower in 1531 on the charge of assembling the commons of Cornwall for an insurrection, with intent to depose the King. An unfortunate remark of Courtenay’s that ‘Knavys rule about the Kyng,’ and that he hoped ‘to gyue them a buffet oone day,’ was brought up against him as a treasonable sentence; it certainly could not have been pleasing to Cromwell, who was doubtless the arch-‘knave’ referred to[527]. But it is very unlikely that any of the unfortunate noblemen had been guilty of crimes which could fairly be interpreted as treason. The French ambassador had hit upon the real secret of their offences when he remarked that they all were adherents of the White Rose[528]. In fact the whole plot against Pole may in one sense be regarded as preparatory to a final attack on the Yorkist nobles, whose position had never been secure since the accession of the House of Tudor. Blow after blow had been struck against them by Henry VIII. and his father, but still some vestige of them seemed always to remain, to threaten the King’s position and endanger his succession. There can be no doubt that Cromwell, whose action in the case was certainly influenced more than usual by personal animosity, found little difficulty in persuading the King that the existence of Courtenay was a serious menace to the security of the reigning dynasty, on account of the claim that he had to the throne as grandson of Edward IV. At any rate, Henry seemed resolved on a wholesale destruction of all nobles who could possibly be regarded as rivals of the Crown, and the relationship of most of his victims to the family of the persecuted Cardinal afforded him a pretext of which he did not fail to take advantage. Exeter, Montague, and Nevill were beheaded in December, on Tower Hill, while Sir Geoffrey Pole, who had been tried and condemned with them, was spared, mainly, as Cromwell frankly told Castillon at the end of December, because the King expected to get something more out of him[529]. He was ultimately pardoned, but passed the rest of his life in musing, ‘going about,’ says a contemporary writer, ‘like one terror-stricken all his days[530].’
The Marchioness of Exeter and the Countess of Salisbury were meantime held prisoners in the Tower. On May 12, 1539, ‘the moste tractable parlament’ that Henry ever had passed a sweeping bill of attainder, to legalize the wanton massacres of the preceding year and to destroy the victims who still remained[531]. The Marchioness of Exeter was subsequently pardoned, but the Countess dragged on a miserable existence in prison for more than two years after her attainder. The only evidence of her treason was a cloth which had been found in her house, embroidered on one side with the arms of England and on the other with the five wounds of Christ, the emblem carried by the rebels in the Pilgrimage of Grace. Still execution was delayed, and it was not until the spring of 1541, almost a year after the death of Cromwell, that an insurrection in Yorkshire under Sir John Nevill sealed her fate, and she was barbarously beheaded by a clumsy executioner on May 28[532].
Meantime the Cardinal at Rome, powerless as he was to prevent the ruin of his family, was contriving in some way to humble the arrogant King and the ruthless minister who had caused him so much woe. The Pope saw that what Henry dreaded most of all was a coalition of Francis and Charles, and as there was a good prospect of this event at the close of 1538, he sent Pole to each of these two sovereigns to urge them to agree to stop all trade with England and lay the foundation for a continental league against her. Pole gladly accepted the task, and careless of his own safety, though he knew that his path would be full of Henry’s hired assassins, he set out for Spain and reached the Emperor’s Court at Toledo in safety in February, 1539. When the King heard of his arrival there, he wrote to Charles in very much the same way that he had addressed Francis two years before, accusing Pole as a traitor, and demanding his extradition as such, or at least insisting that Charles should not grant him an audience[533]. But unfortunately Henry was now no longer in a position to dictate, and the Emperor, realizing this, saw no reason to accede to his request, and answered, as Cromwell later wrote to Wriothesley, that if Pole ‘were his owne traytour, commyng from that holy father’ he could not refuse him audience[534]. But in spite of all this, the Cardinal’s mission was a failure. Charles for the present was content with the slight rebuke that he had given Henry for his bullying ways; cautious as ever, he did not propose to put himself in a position from which he could not retreat until he was sure of his ground, and intimated to the legate that the Pope had made a great mistake in publishing censures which he could not enforce. Pole could not obtain his consent to the Papal proposals and left Toledo much discouraged[535]. He was also exceedingly suspicious of some design of Sir Thomas Wyatt’s to cause his assassination, and mentioned it in a later letter to Cardinal Contarini[536]. That his fears were not entirely groundless is shown by a cipher letter from Wyatt to Cromwell containing many passages pregnant with hidden meaning which can only be explained if such a design is premised[537]. Pole soon betook himself to his friend Sadolet at Carpentras, whence he sent a messenger to Francis on the same errand as that on which he himself had gone to Charles. The French King’s reply was as unsatisfactory as the Emperor’s had been, and in 1540 the Cardinal returned to Rome with his mission unaccomplished, and deriving only small consolation from the thought that he had been successful in baffling the attempts of Henry’s and Cromwell’s assassins.
The story of Pole’s life between 1535 and 1540 is the thread which binds together the foreign and domestic, secular and religious history of Cromwell’s administration. The Cardinal’s attempts to make the King renounce his title of Supreme Head and the other insignia of the despotism to which Cromwell had raised him at home were an absolute failure, and were punished with the shockingly unjust and cruel destruction of his family. Still his efforts to thwart the main aim of the foreign policy of the time, namely the separation of the interests of France and Spain, though not directly successful, were instrumental in bringing about the fall of his arch-enemy Cromwell. For the endeavours of the Cardinal were one of a number of things which combined to persuade the minister that the catastrophe which seemed imminent throughout the year 1539 could not be averted without external aid, and thus to induce him to take a step on his own responsibility which soon led him into disastrous conflict with the King.
CHAPTER XII
THE FOREIGN POLICY
During the ten years of Cromwell’s ministry, the relations of England with the great continental powers presented a problem fully as difficult as that afforded by the course of events at home. Cromwell’s efforts to cope with the dangers which threatened England from without were far less successful than his internal administration: in the latter he never failed to render invaluable service to the Crown, while in the former he made the mistake which finally lost him the royal favour and brought him to the block. As the results of the minister’s external policy thus led directly to his fall, we may now return to the chronological order of events, which was abandoned while the various phases of his home government were under consideration.
Cromwell had entered the King’s service in 1530 with training and talents which rendered him far more competent to undertake the domestic administration of the country than to guide its foreign affairs. His acquaintance with different trades, his legal ability, and his experience in the suppression of the smaller monasteries for Wolsey’s purposes were of inestimable value to him throughout his ministry in dealing with problems at home. But in the management of affairs abroad he was still very inexperienced. He had borne no part in the great schemes of external policy which had occupied the Cardinal, and though his speech in the Parliament of 1523 showed a very just appreciation of the situation of England abroad, he had had no opportunity to put his ideas into practice. Thus at the outset we find him cautiously remaining in the background and awaiting the development of the King’s foreign policy. In this he was wise, for at Wolsey’s fall Henry had resolved to take the external administration of England into his own hands. We have seen that the Cardinal’s failure had taught him the danger of concluding any definite alliance with either France or Spain, while the two great continental rivals remained at war. He had learned that England’s best security lay in maintaining a position of neutrality between Charles and Francis, and in balancing one against the other, while all disputes between them were encouraged under cover of offers of mediation. It was along these lines that Henry had determined to guide the foreign affairs of England, as soon as order could be brought out of the chaos caused by the divorce. How correct his decision was is proved by the utter collapse of the Imperial alliance of 1543, the only really permanent departure from the policy of neutrality which Henry ever made after the death of Wolsey. A complete change of the political horizon led him into it, only to be left in the lurch by the Emperor at the peace of Crêpy[538] in the same way that he had been abandoned before by Francis at the treaty of Cambray. But during the life of Cromwell the King made no such blunder as this. Though he sometimes wavered, he never definitely renounced the policy of neutrality, although his minister, who sometimes doubted its efficacy, made several efforts to induce him to abandon it. There can be no doubt that, from the very first, Cromwell over-estimated the danger of a foreign invasion and failed to appreciate the real strength of England’s isolated position: he was deceived by constant menaces which never really bore fruit. A more intimate acquaintance with the practical and calculating nature of Charles V. would certainly have convinced the King’s minister that however much the Emperor threatened, he would never actually embark on the somewhat remote project of a crusade against England, until a great many affairs in his own scattered dominions on the Continent had first been settled to his satisfaction. But Cromwell’s inexperience in the management of foreign affairs blinded him to this important fact: and his over-eagerness to seek means for England’s defence proved his ultimate ruin. After successfully co-operating with Henry for seven years on the basis of maintaining strict neutrality between France and Spain, and of encouraging all disputes between them, he abandoned the wise policy of his master in favour of an alliance in Germany which, in one form or another, had been under consideration on several occasions before, but which had been abandoned every time as unnecessary. This new alliance turned out disastrously. At the moment of its completion, the situation on the Continent which had called it into existence suddenly changed; it was thrown over, together with the minister who had originated it. Such is the outline of the history of England’s foreign affairs from 1530 till Cromwell’s fall. We can now take up the very complicated story in detail.