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 London John Joachim, who now bore the title of Seigneur de Vaulx, this time as a regular accredited ambassador. He came from Louise, for Francis had just been conveyed to Spain, and another French envoy, Brinon, arrived shortly after him. With these two Wolsey concluded no fewer than five, or rather six, treaties, at the More (Moor Park in Hertfordshire, which belonged to him as abbot of St. Albans), by which France secured the amity of England for a sum of two million crowns to be paid by instalments, with various other conditions extremely advantageous to England, bonds being afterwards procured from the leading persons and cities of France for the strict fulfilment of the terms. Nor did Wolsey forget his own interests in these transactions; for though he forbore a claim for arrears of a pension once given him by Francis, he obtained thirty thousand crowns for those of his indemnity for the bishopric of Tournay (notwithstanding that the city had been meanwhile won from France by the emperor), and a present of one hundred thousand crowns besides from Louise, payment of which sums was spread over seven years.

In January 1526 Wolsey came to Eltham, where the king was staying, and made, along with the council, certain ordinances for the king's household which were called ‘the statutes of Eltham,’ mainly intended to rid the court of superannuated servants and too numerous dependents. On 11 Feb. he went with great pomp to St. Paul's, when Robert Barnes [q. v.] bore a fagot for heresy. In March Francis I was set at liberty, as agreed in the treaty of Madrid signed two months before, leaving two of his sons hostages in Spain for fulfilment of the terms. Charles now hoped to take his imperial crown at Rome, but the pope and the northern powers of Italy took alarm, and concluded with Francis on 22 May the league of Cognac, which was to enable him to recover his children on easier terms than those wrung from him when he was a prisoner without counsel. This league England was strongly solicited to join, offers being held out to Henry of a duchy in Naples consisting of lands worth thirty thousand ducats a year, and to Wolsey of other lands worth ten thousand ducats a year. But it was not the interest of England to make an open enemy of the emperor. In September imperial troops, along with Cardinal Colonna, treacherously surprised Rome during a truce and wrung terms from the pope by intimidation. Charles himself disavowed the outrage, but in May following Rome was attacked by Bourbon. The commander was killed in the assault, but his unpaid troops sacked the city with a barbarity quite unheard of, and kept the pope for some months prisoner in the castle of St. Angelo.

Meanwhile in England an allegorical play had been performed at Christmas at Gray's Inn suggesting that misgovernment was the cause of insurrection. Wolsey, though he declared, no doubt with perfect truth, that it was the king who was displeased rather than himself, had the author, John Roo, serjeant-at-law, deprived of his coif and committed to the Fleet for a time along with one of the players. The king, and even his council, now seemed to be quite converted to the policy of cultivating the new French alliance rather than an imperial one, and hints were thrown out to Francis that, instead of marrying the emperor's sister Eleanor, he might have Henry's daughter Mary, once offered to his son. So in March 1527 a great embassy arrived in England with Grammont, bishop of Tarbes, at its head, which held very lengthy conferences with Wolsey with a view to a closer league. Of these negotiations a minute French account has been preserved, which gives an extraordinary impression of Wolsey's wonderful statecraft. He demanded a new perpetual peace, with an annual tribute of salt and a pension of fifty thousand crowns to Henry. He affected astonishment at the difficulties made at his high terms, and told the ambassadors (what, perhaps, was not far from the truth) that if he advised the king to abate them he was in danger of being murdered. In the course of a long discussion he gradually shifted the basis of negotiation. If Francis declined to marry Mary himself, he suggested that she might be married to the Duke of Orleans, then a hostage in Spain, the two kings meanwhile agreeing on terms for his and his brother's liberation, on refusal of which they should make joint war on the emperor. Then, after further conference, he told the ambassadors that Henry advised Francis to marry Eleanor for the sake of peace, if the emperor would not restore his sons otherwise. The French were quite confounded at the withdrawal of the very bait that had lured them on. ‘We have to do,’ wrote one of them to Francis, ‘with the most rascally beggar in the world, and the most devoted to his master's interests.’ Wolsey had won the day. Treaties very advantageous to England were signed and sealed at Westminster on 30 April.

In the course of these negotiations Wolsey