The Autobiography of Henry VIII_ With Notes by His Fool, Will Somers - Margaret George [74]
But More, the Speaker of the House, offered the one thing Wolsey could not refute: silence. He claimed that it was an ancient privilege of Co as my Lord Cardinal lately laid to our charge the lightness of our tongues.”
It was a stunning device. Wolsey had no recourse but to leave the Parliament chamber in defeat. In the next session one of his own household members, also in the House of Commons, spoke in a low voice about the ill logic of spending money to fight on the Continent when it could better be spent subduing the Scots at our backs, “and thereby make our King Lord of Scotland as well.”
In the end I was allowed a tax of one shilling on the pound.
“Who was the fellow who proposed incorporating Scotland into our Crown?” I asked Wolsey, after the fact, when his pride had stopped smarting.
“Thomas Cromwell,” he replied. “A youngling from my household. He speaks when he should keep silent.” Thus Wolsey apologized for him.
“I would think you would never hereafter commend silence as a virtue!” The wounds were still open and salt was at hand. “His suggestion had ... merit.” More was a different matter. Did he seek to prove his integrity by this contrariness?
“Cromwell is a man who thinks only in terms of the attainable, not the permissible or the conventional. King of Scotland ... I’ll wager he sees the crown on your head even now.”
“As I could be persuaded to, myself.” I felt the corners of my mouth go up in the facsimile of a smile. It was a trick I had learned lately to mask impatience or boredom.
In the end we had to go to war, and Parliament had to finance it. Unfortunately for us, Parliament would finance it only so far, and that was not far enough. The war turned out to be a three years’ affair, and Parliament would sanction only a year’s participation. The result was that we paid our money, suffered tosses—but were excluded from the final victory and its glories. For Francis fell in the Battle of Pavia, and was taken prisoner by Charles, in the end. The French army was destroyed. Fighting alongside his patron and master, Richard de la Pole, Edmund’s younger brother, the self-styled “White Rose of York” and Francis-styled “King of England,” was killed on the battlefield.
“Now we are free of all pretenders!” I cried, when the news was brought me. I rejoiced. But it was a secondhand victory.
In the opening volley of the war, we made great impact. I had recalled Brandon from his estates in Suffolk, where he languished, and put him in charge of the invading army. He and his men came within forty miles of taking Paris itself. But then the money, and the season, ran out. Snow fell and enveloped them, followed by ice. They could not winter over; it would be impossible to sustain an army of twenty-five thousand in the field in winter conditions. (To think that war must obey the trumpet-sound of the seasons!) I beseeched Parliament for the funds to enable them to take up in spring where they had left off. Parliament refused.
So the opportunity to conquer France was thrown away on the smug vote of a few self-satisfied Yorkshire sheep-herders and Kentish beer-brewers!
All English citizens had been ordered to return before the outbreak of the war. That included the few still in Francis’s court, such as the Seymour lads and Anne, Mary Boleyn’s sister. It was not meet that e imprisoned or held for ransom. Even the Bordeaux wine procurers hurried home, bringing their provisioning ships along with them.
WILL:
And thus Anne Boleyn—“Black Nan,” as she was known already—came to England. The Witch returned home....
HENRY VIII:
Going to Parliament had been demeaning in itself (but necessary, as I did not want to exhaust the Royal Treasury completely), but being refused by them was doubly so. Having to call my citizens home, admitting that I was unable to protect them abroad, was tantamount