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 invasion, by which Charles and Henry would meet in Paris; thereupon France would be handed over to English domination, and Henry would go on with the emperor to his coronation at Rome.

Of course he had no expectation that Charles would listen to a project so chimerical. But Bishop Tunstall and Sir Richard Wingfield [q. v.] were despatched to Spain with these proposals at the end of March, that the emperor by his answer might show whether he was willing to prosecute the war with vigour or restore his captive for a ransom, in which latter case they were not only to remind him that he was bound not to treat apart from England, but also to hint that the king had no lack of offers to forsake the emperor's alliance. For indeed the pope, the Venetians, and the other Italian powers were most seriously alarmed at the emperor's success. The ambassadors, after a tedious voyage, reached the imperial court at Toledo only on 24 May. But they soon obtained an answer frankly confessing that the emperor had no means of maintaining the war; he added, however, a most extraordinary suggestion that his bride, the Princess Mary, should be sent to Spain at once with her dowry of four hundred thousand crowns, and that a further contribution might enable him to carry on the war in earnest. The amazed ambassadors reminded the imperial chancellor that the emperor ought first to repay the 150,000 crowns he had borrowed for his last voyage to Spain and the king's indemnity for his French pensions. But the emperor's real meaning came out three days later, when the chancellor told them that his majesty was much perplexed; and if he could have neither the princess nor her dowry paid beforehand, perhaps the king would allow him to take another wife. In short, Charles had made up his mind to marry Isabella of Portugal, and if the king meant to prosecute the war he would have to do it alone.

The answer suited Wolsey very well. But meanwhile in England the talk was about the king leading an invasion of France in person, and Wolsey, under a commission dated 21 March, called the mayor and aldermen before him and pressed for a general contribution in aid of the project, at the rate of 3s. 4d. a pound on incomes of 50l. and upwards, with lower rates on the smaller incomes, according to the valuations made by the citizens themselves in 1522. Some exclaimed that this was unjust, as many incomes had since been impaired; but remonstrance was stifled by threats that it might cost some their heads, and the matter was pressed both in London and throughout the country. The strain, however, was beyond endurance. Even the prosperous citizens of Norwich could not raise the money requisite, but offered their plate. In Suffolk the clothiers said they must discharge their workmen, whom they had no money to pay, and an insurrection broke out.

For this ‘amicable grant,’ as it was curiously called, Wolsey was not specially responsible. It had been agreed on by the council generally for a war policy that was not to Wolsey's mind, but was imputed to him specially, and the public were slow to believe, what was really the fact, that it was at his intercession that the king agreed to turn the grant into a ‘benevolence’ without further insisting on a fixed rate. A new difficulty, however, was started, that ‘benevolences’ had been made illegal by a statute of Richard III, and Wolsey in vain attempted to persuade the Londoners that an act of parliament passed by a wicked usurper was bad law. In the end the king was obliged to give up the demand altogether and pardon those who had resisted. Even the rebels of Suffolk, when called before the Star-chamber on 30 May, were dismissed with a pardon. Sureties, indeed, were asked for their good conduct, and when they could find none Wolsey said to them, ‘I will be one, because you be my countrymen, and my lord of Norfolk will be another.’

This business was an unpleasant interruption to a work of Wolsey's own, on which he had set his heart. In the preceding year he had procured from Clement VII a bull, dated 3 April 1524, allowing him to convert the monastery of St. Frideswide at Oxford into a college, transferring the canons to other monasteries. That house was accordingly dissolved, and on 11 Sept. following Clement gave him another bull, allowing Wolsey to suppress more monasteries, to the value of three thousand ducats, for the endowment of his college. Several houses were thus suppressed in February 1525, and the work was proceeding. But in June, at the monastery of Begham in Sussex, a riotous multitude with painted faces and disguises put in the canons again—an outrage which of course was punished. At Tunbridge also, though there was no disturbance, the inhabitants did not wish the priory to be converted into a school, and desired to see the six or seven canons restored.

Meanwhile Wolsey was aware that the emperor had been making separate offers of peace to Louise of Savoy, the regent of France; and in June appeared again in