Thus at the close of the year 1538, England was trembling at the prospect of a coalition of France and Spain against her. The outlook was certainly alarming, and demanded united action at home. But at this very moment the King and his minister could not agree on the best method of averting the peril which was threatening. Each adopted his own way of meeting it, and the history of the year 1539 is the story of the varying success of the two methods when brought into conflict. We shall see that fortune twice inclined to favour Cromwell, only to desert him, after he had become so hopelessly committed to the policy which he had adopted in face of the opposition of the King, that there was no drawing back, and he paid the penalty for his rashness with his life.
CHAPTER XIII
THE CATHOLIC REACTION AND THE ALLIANCE WITH CLEVES
The first few months of the new year brought no improvement in the state of England’s foreign affairs. Having postponed the Lutheran alliance which Cromwell had so strongly advocated in the end of 1538, for fear of losing his position of neutrality between France and Spain, Henry was driven back on his own policy of seeking safety for England in direct negotiations with Charles and Francis. Matrimonial agitations had failed—malicious tale-bearing had not borne fruit, so the King took the more straightforward course of making direct complaints that he was spoken of with too little respect in foreign parts. He sent grumbling letters to his neighbours, accusing them of permitting evil reports to be circulated about him. He caused the President of the Council of the North to request James of Scotland to suppress and punish the authors of several ‘spyttfull ballades,’ which had been published about the wrongfully usurped authority of the King of England, and also wrote to Wyatt in Spain, commanding him to protest against the malicious and unreasonable lies of the ‘barking prechers ther’ who slandered him behind his back[604]. But these petty remonstrances had no effect in diminishing the growing cordiality of Francis and Charles, or their hatred of England: in fact the two continental sovereigns seemed better friends than ever. On January 12, representatives of both monarchs met at Toledo and concluded an agreement not to make any new alliances, either political or matrimonial, with the King of England, without each other’s consent[605]. The news of this treaty was a deathblow to Henry’s hopes; and the King was reluctantly forced to admit that his minister’s scheme of a German alliance offered better chances of safety for England than any other. So he again gave his consent to a renewal of negotiations for an outside league, though, as we shall soon see, it was on a basis somewhat different from that of the previous ones.
Disappointed by the King’s refusal definitely to accept the alliance for which he had laboured so hard, Cromwell had meantime been amusing himself with a very feeble plan for gaining friends against the Pope, the chimerical nature of which was quite at variance with the direct and practical character of most of his schemes. He had proposed a league of England with the Dukes of Ferrara, Mantua, and Urbino against his Holiness, who had just challenged the title of the latter to the dukedom of Camerino. An interesting set of instructions to Cromwell’s friend Edmund Harvell at Venice tells the story of this negotiation very vividly[606]. But the princes of northern Italy were too weak and the scheme itself was too remote and far-fetched to promise any real advantage, and Cromwell doubtless lost all interest in it as soon as the King again consented to approach the Germans. The fact that three months had been suffered to elapse since the return of the envoys in 1538, without an acceptance of the King’s invitation to send other representatives to discuss theological points, simply proves that Henry’s treatment of the first embassy had not been such as to encourage the Lutherans to persevere[607]. But now that the King had again veered round to Cromwell’s policy, he ‘mervayled not a litel’ at the slowness of the Germans, and sent Christopher Mont over to the Court of the Elector of Saxony on January 25 to discover the feelings of John Frederic and the Landgrave of Hesse, the leaders of the Schmalkaldic League, towards the Emperor, to inquire further into their attitude on the tenets about which they had so fruitlessly disputed with the English bishops in the preceding summer, and finally to learn whether the Duke of Cleves and his son were of the ‘old popisshe fasshyon’ or no[608]. Appended to these very non-committal injunctions are certain others from Cromwell himself of quite a different nature[609]. Completely dodging the theological issue, which he wisely left entirely in the King’s hands, Cromwell took up the question of the German alliance from a new and far more practical side, the matrimonial. He instructed Mont to suggest to the Vice-Chancellor Burckhard the possibility of two marriages; one between the young Duke of Cleves and the Princess Mary, and the other between Anne, the elder of the two unmarried daughters of the old Duke, and the King himself[610]. It appears that Cromwell had already discussed the feasibility of the first of these two matches with the Vice-Chancellor, when the latter had been in England in the previous summer, and John Frederic had subsequently written to the King’s minister that the plan met with his entire approval. The proposal for Henry’s marriage, on the contrary, was now brought forward for the first time. We shall soon see why it was that Mont was sent to the Elector of Saxony, rather than to the Duke of Cleves himself, to feel the way for these two alliances.
In order to understand the precise bearing on the foreign affairs of England of the two marriages which Cromwell proposed, and of the political league which would naturally go with them, we must make a slight digression here and examine the very peculiar position in which the Duke of Cleves found himself at this juncture. Various political considerations, above all an increasing jealousy of the power of the House of Saxony, had led the Emperor Maximilian in 1496 to declare Maria, the only child of the Duke of Juliers and Berg, to be the lawful heiress of these two provinces; a step which was in direct contravention of a grant which Maximilian, at his election as King of the Romans, had made to Frederic the Wise of the reversion of Juliers and Berg in case of failure of male heirs in the ducal line there. This grant was definitely revoked in various documents of the years 1508 and 1509; and Duke John of Cleves, who in the meantime had married the heiress Maria of Juliers and Berg, was permitted to unite these three rich provinces in his own hand, and to establish a strong power on the Lower Rhine which prevented undue preponderance of the House of Wettin, and furnished a useful support for the Hapsburgs in the western part of the Empire[611]. The peace-loving Duke John lived and died in friendship with Maximilian and his grandson, although his desire to see a reform in the Church had prevented his definite acceptance of the Imperial invitation to join a Catholic League against the Schmalkaldner in 1537. Instead he devoted himself to strengthening his power in his own possessions by a series of wise and prudent measures, through which he welded the three component parts of his dominions into one[612]. But during the last year of his life (which ended on February 6, 1539, while Mont was on his way to the Saxon Court) affairs took a turn which was destined to bring his son and heir William into direct conflict with the Empire. In June, 1538, the warlike Duke Charles of Gelderland, whose possessions lay next to the province of Cleves on the north, died leaving no children. His life had been spent in a struggle against the pretensions to his hereditary dominions brought forward by the Emperor as heir of Charles the Bold, and in order to prevent the substantiation of the Imperial claims at his death he had planned to leave his lands to the King of France[613]. This scheme however had encountered strong opposition from the estates of Gelderland, who regarded with little favour a proposal so threatening to their comparatively independent position, and Duke Charles was finally forced, much against his will, to designate young William of Cleves as his successor. The latter, though by nature weak and irresolute, was not in a position to refuse the chance which fortune had thrown in his way: he accepted the proffered inheritance, and the death of his father soon after left him in full possession of the four rich provinces[614].
The result was that he immediately became involved in a serious quarrel with the Emperor, who realizing how dangerous a rival to his own power had been created by the events just recounted, reasserted his claims to Gelderland even more strongly than before. In looking for allies against Charles, Duke William naturally turned to the Elector of Saxony, whose rights to Juliers and Berg, once rudely revoked by Maximilian, had not been forgotten, but who seems to have preserved sufficiently friendly relations with the family in favour of which his claims had been set aside, to marry Sibylla, one of the sisters of the Duke[615]. Common enmity to Charles V. now drew them very close together, and at the Imperial Court it was actually thought that Cleves had been formally admitted to the Schmalkaldic League[616]. This however was a mistake. Though Duke William was certainly not opposed to the Lutheran doctrines, he had not as yet made open confession of the Protestant faith; and for that reason the Elector and the Landgrave had steadily refused to make a political alliance with him[617]. Still he was on very intimate terms with John Frederic, who had promised, when he wedded Sibylla of Cleves, to advance money for the marriage of her sisters, and thus had a certain right to be consulted when husbands were to be chosen for them. Henry was doubtless well aware of all this, and it was consequently at the Saxon Court that Mont was instructed to obtain information about the Duke of Cleves, and if possible to pave the way for the two matrimonial alliances from which Cromwell hoped so much.
Having completed this preliminary survey of the position of the Duke of Cleves, we are enabled to make some interesting observations on the instructions to the English ambassador. It is very significant that the inquiries which Mont was ordered to make concerning the religious tendencies of Duke William were concerned only with his attitude towards the Pope. Of course the King could not consistently ally himself with firm adherents of the Holy See after the events of the past ten years; but it is also of the utmost importance to notice that he apparently preferred a league with powers which he knew had not definitely committed themselves to the New Faith to an alliance with the Schmalkaldner. Else why did he rather seek to unite with Cleves than with Saxony? Both were politically valuable, as enemies of the Emperor; the only difference was that Cleves was not as yet avowedly Protestant, and Saxony was. It is possible that the idea which bore fruit five months later in the Six Articles had already taken shape in Henry’s mind; at least it seems certain that he was determined to keep a perfectly free hand in religious affairs, so as not to be hampered in his political relations with France and Spain. Thus when Cromwell at last succeeded in persuading him reluctantly to return to a German alliance, it was really only half a victory for the minister. There was this great difference between the league with the Lutherans which Cromwell had proposed and which never succeeded, and the Cleves alliance which was now sought. The one would have been necessarily both political and religious (for we have seen that the Lutherans had always refused to join with England until a satisfactory theological agreement could be made), while the other was solely political. It was simply another expression of the old disagreement between Henry and Cromwell. The King, always looking for a chance of reconciliation with Charles and Francis, refused to enter an alliance the religious conditions of which would greatly enhance the difficulty of a return to his favourite scheme. He was only induced to enter a purely political league, which he doubtless felt he could throw over at any moment if he wished to do so; an agreement both political and religious he might have found it more difficult to escape from. Cromwell on the other hand, having definitely given up all ideas of direct negotiations with France and Spain, wished to plunge headlong into the Lutheran alliance, caring little what he was committed to provided he gained solid support. But, as we have seen, the King would not agree to this, and the alliance with Cleves can thus only be regarded as a compromise between the royal and Cromwellian policies, which the King could abandon whenever affairs in France and Spain took a more favourable turn. Later events in the same year furnish further proofs of this most important fact.