imperial ambassador eustace chapuys and henry viii's great matter, 1529-1536 a the

157 Pages·2015·0.89 MB·English

DIPLOMAT OF DIVORCE AND SERVANT OF EMPIRE:
IMPERIAL AMBASSADOR EUSTACE CHAPUYS AND HENRY VIII’S GREAT MATTER,
1529-1536

A THESIS SUBMITTED FOR THE KENDRICK K. KELLEY PROGRAM IN HISTORICAL
STUDIES (HIS 488-489)

DEPARTMENT OF HISTORY
DAVIDSON COLLEGE

THOMAS S. JAMES III

DAVIDSON, NORTH CAROLINA
SPRING 2015
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Table of Contents
INTRODUCTION
The Diplomacy of Eustace Chapuys...........................................................................….................1
CHAPTER 1
The Diplomacy of an Arrival: Faction and the Fall of Wolsey …….…………...………………25
CHAPTER 2
The Diplomacy of a Queen: Defending Katherine of Aragon………….....……………….…….46
CHAPTER 3
The Diplomacy of an Anglo-French Alliance: Crossing the Channel….......................................65
CHAPTER 4
The Diplomacy of a Schism: Religion, Reformation, and Papal Relations……………………...94
CONCLUSION
The Diplomacy of the Aftermath.................................................................................................135
BIBLIOGRAPHY
Primary Sources………………………………………………………………………………...146
Secondary Sources..………………………………………………………………………….....148
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Acknowledgements
In many ways I feel as if I began this project as an eleven year-old. My fifth grade math
teacher offhandedly recommended a young adult novel about Tudor England, and I was
instantly, completely, and permanently fascinated. The English Reformation and the execution of
Anne Boleyn were two plot twists I had decidedly not seen coming. While my interest in
sixteenth-century Europe has grown and developed more academic foundations, I have retained
the same youthful enthusiasm and curiosity that drew me to the period in fifth grade. As I take
the time to thank the various individuals who helped shape this project, I find I must start with
Mrs. Campbell. She might not have taught me to love long division but did introduce me to the
captivating world of Eustace Chapuys, and for that I am extremely grateful.
I am similarly appreciative of the warm support and consistent reassurance I have
received from my friends and family throughout this process. This is especially true of my fellow
Kelley scholars, all of whom brought humor, compassion, and a healthy love of frozen yogurt to
our meetings. Their feedback has been invaluable, and I would not have survived many long
nights in the library without their commiseration. I have learned far more about eugenics, parks
(both state and national), opium, the lyceum movement, Orientalist scholars, and the Sokoto
Caliphate than I could have anticipated, and I would not have it any other way.
I’ve been fortunate enough to encounter many wonderful professors during my time at
Davidson, with my mentors in the History and Theatre Departments providing precious gems of
wisdom and inspiration throughout my entire undergraduate career. I would especially like to
thank my academic advisor, Dr. Vivien Dietz, who taught my first history of college and first
recommended that I consider the Kelley program while leading the remarkable Davidson in
Cambridge program two years ago.
Of course, it is impossible to imagine this project without the guidance of my first and
second readers. With his enthusiasm and positivity, Dr. Robin Barnes frequently improved my
morale when I was discouraged and motivated me to think both critically and carefully about a
time period so frequently reduced to melodrama. Ultimately, he has made my writing crisper, my
analysis stronger, and my understanding of sixteenth-century Europe far richer. Were it not for
his vast knowledge, I would be helplessly lost in a sea of interconnecting dynastic wars I could
neither name nor understand.
Dr. Jane Mangan has been our fearless leader throughout these last two semesters, and it
is impossible to articulate my immense gratitude. Her encouragement has been consistently
inspiring, especially when she so frequently had more faith in me than I had confidence in
myself. By being incredibly generous with her time and extremely thoughtful in her feedback,
she prevented this process from ever feeling impossible. She has evidenced such remarkable
dedication to our class, resulting in an educational opportunity unlike anything I have previously
experienced or am likely to experience again.
Finally, the family of Kendrick K. Kelley has given the History Department a superb gift.
I am deeply humbled to have been a part of such a wonderful program that has inspired such
innovative undergraduate research.
James 1

Introduction:
The Diplomacy of Eustace Chapuys
17 July, 1534
Upon arrival, wrote the diplomat, they were greeted with as much enthusiasm “as if the
Messiah had actually come down.”1 After several days of travel from London, Imperial
Ambassador Eustace Chapuys and his party made their way toward the fortified palace at
Kimbolton in Cambridgeshire. Inside waited England’s incarcerated queen, Katherine of Aragon.
She was the aunt of Chapuys’ master, Emperor Charles V, the daughter of the late Isabella and
Ferdinand of Spain, and the unlucky first wife of King Henry VIII of England. Though she had
been married to her husband for over twenty-five years, disagreement over their divorce and his
remarriage to Anne Boleyn had left Katherine a virtual prisoner, long since exiled from court.
Chapuys had been trying to visit the queen since Pentecost. He reported in his official
dispatches to Charles V that he had received almost daily pleas from Katherine, urging him to
obtain permission from the king to visit her in person.2 Such a visit, maintained the queen, would
be the “greatest service [he] could render her.”3 Yet the ambassador’s petitions to the Privy
Council were consistently met with unconvincing excuses. His request had been dismissed on the

1 Letter from Eustace Chapuys to Charles V on 27 July, 1534. G.A. Bergenroth, Pascual de Gayangos, and
M.A.S. Hume, ed., Calendar of State Papers, Dispatches, and State Papers, Relating to the Negotiations between
England and Spain (hereafter, Cal. Span.) (London, 1862-1954), Vol. 5, Pt. 1, 75. This nineteen-volume collection
covers the period from 1485 until 1558 and includes works from the archives at Simancas, the General Archives of
the Crown of Aragon at Barcelona, the Archives de France in Paris, the Bibliothque Impriale in Paris, the Archives
Genrales du Departement du Nord in Lille, the Geheime Haus-Hof-und Staats-Archiv in Vienna, the Public Record
Office in London, and the British Museum. The volumes were originally published by Her Majesty's Stationery
Office and later digitized by British History Online through double-rekeying, a transcription process that involves
two typists inputting text from page scans independently of one another. The two transcriptions are then compared
and any differences are manually resolved. This process is believed to ensure an estimated accuracy rate of greater
than 99.995 percent, which is significantly higher than can currently be achieved through other computerized
techniques now available. Spelling has been anglicized throughout this thesis in order to match the published
documents.
2 Letter Eustace Chapuys to Charles V on 7 June, 1534. See Cal. Span., Vol. 5, Pt. 1, 61.
3 Letter from Eustace Chapuys to Charles V on 7 July, 1534. See Cal. Span., Vol. 5, Pt. 1, 70.
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grounds that women were simply “not to be believed implicitly.”4 On another occasion, a
planned meeting to discuss his journey with Chancellor Thomas Cromwell was cancelled with an
apology that the statesman had been summoned to meet with the king at court. “This, of course,
was only an invention of his,” remarked the ambassador, who learned that Cromwell was instead
seen travelling to his country house half a league from the city.5
If Chapuys could not garner permission to see Katherine, then he would visit her without
it. Indeed, he would make a show of it. On the seventeenth morning of July 1534, Chapuys
assembled a troop of nearly sixty men comprised of members of his household and several
Spanish merchants to travel to Katherine’s residence. This was to be a spectacle that could not be
ignored. It happened “very opportunely” that the ambassador found the occasion to lead his party
through the length of London, maximizing the number of people who would see him embark on
his journey.
Two days later and only five miles from Kimbolton, the group arrived at an inn, only to
find an officer waiting for them with news from the king that Chapuys was forbidden from
speaking to the queen or entering her residence. The ambassador dissembled. “It was not my
intention to displease the King in that or any other matter,” he claimed, but seeing as they had
already come so far, Chapuys insisted that he would need to see their orders in writing before he
would back down. Early the following morning, a higher-ranking servant arrived on the scene to
assure the diplomat that he should, in fact, refrain from even passing through the neighboring
village, let alone make his way to the queen’s castle. Furthermore, the messengers insisted that
Henry would “take it in bad part” if Chapuys publicized the king’s refusal lest it provoke “much
scandal.”

4 Letter from Eustace Chapuys to Charles V on 23 June, 1534. See Cal. Span., Vol. 5, Pt. 1, 68.
5 Letter from Eustace Chapuys to Charles V on 27 July, 1534. See Cal. Span., Vol. 5, Pt. 1, 75
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A scandal, however, was exactly what Chapuys had in mind. He agreed to the king’s
demands but sent a smaller contingent of his suite forward on what was supposedly a quick
pilgrimage to the nearby shrine at Walsingham. On the way, the men passed by Katherine’s
palace, to the great consolation of the queen and her ladies. Nearby villagers apparently flocked
to the scene with “astonishment and joy,” while the delighted women of Katherine’s household
called down to the travelers from the battlements and windows of the palace. Despite the
impressive show, Chapuys decided to stay behind. This simultaneously allowed him to maintain
that he had obeyed Henry’s commands while preventing anyone from claiming that his principal
object had been anything but visiting Katherine, he later wrote.
Making his way back to London, Chapuys explained in his dispatch that he planned to
take a longer route than was necessary so that even more people might notice his journey and
understand where he had been. He also noted that he was followed during his journey by the
same officer who had initially instructed him not to enter the queen’s residence. The royal agent
approached Chapuys before he could reenter London and asked if the diplomat had any message
for the king. The Imperial diplomat asked him to pass along his gratitude that the episode had
made plain to the world the “the roughness with which [Katherine] is treated,” which “could no
longer be disguised, and would consequently become more notorious and public.” The
ambassador added, “I myself felt grateful to the King for the opportunity thus offered to me of
showing to the world that it was not my fault if my duty as an ambassador was not fulfilled.”6

6 Chapuys’ prevented journey to Kimbolton is recorded in his dispatch to Charles dated 27 July, 1534. See
Cal. Span., Vol. 5, Pt. 1, 75. It is worth noting that the ambassador himself does not include the oft-quoted story that
he brought a jester sporting a padlock on his hood who performed a humorous bit that mocked Katherine’s jailors.
The story is precisely the type of colorful and corrosively funny tidbit that Chapuys would have relished, but it, in
fact, originates from the notoriously inaccurate Spanish Chronicle, which was written at least ten years later by an
unknown author and mistakenly presumed to be an authentic contemporary account when translated by Martin
Hume in 1889. Still, it is frequently associated with Chapuys and this episode. For examples, see Garret Mattingly,
Catherine of Aragon (Boston: Little, Brown and Company, 1941), 392; Antonia Fraser, The Wives of Henry VIII
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Chapuys’ journey to Kimbolton might serve as a metaphor for much of his embassy in
England. Ostensibly, the attempted visit was a failure. After weeks of frustration and several
days of travel, the ambassador did not succeed in seeing Katherine. A similar pattern of sustained
effort met by ultimate disappointment characterized most of Chapuys’ experiences during the
divorce years. Still, Chapuys’ ride to Kimbolton was a moment of diplomatic theatre in which
the explicit goal of visiting Katherine became less important than the implicit goal of displaying
her mistreatment for all to see. Leading an unmistakably loud and large procession through all of
London was not the behavior of a man who wanted to sneak quietly to a secluded fortress for a
secret meeting but rather that of an image-conscious politician who understood that even the
most certain failure might present an opportunity for a qualified gain. The episode unequivocally
indicates the diplomat’s devotion to Katherine’s cause, but unlocking its implications requires a
closer look at both the ambassador himself and the significance of Henry VIII’s divorce for the
Habsburg Empire that Chapuys represented.
***
Eustace Chapuys was born at the foot of the Alps in Annecy, a small town in Savoy now
located in modern-day southern France, to Louis and Guigone Chapuys as early as 1486 but no
later than 1492.7 Through the steady acquisition of land, his father, a second-generation notary,

(New York: Alfred A. Knopf, 1992), 222; Giles Tremlett, Catherine of Aragon: The Spanish Queen of Henry VIII
(New York: Walker & Company, 2010), 348.
7 Chapuys’ exact year of birth is unknown. The Roman numerals on his tomb indicate the year 1499, but
the date is too late for Chapuys to have then entered the University of Turin in November 1507, a date that can be
confirmed in the Chapuys family papers now located at the Archives de la Ville in Annecy. On the other hand,
Ursula Schwarzkopf’s consideration of a variety of sources points to either 1491 or 1492. Garret Mattingly suggests
the year 1489 under the assumption that the stonecutter included one ‘X’ too many on his tomb. See Garret
Mattingly, “A Humanist Ambassador,” The Journal of Modern History, Vol. 4, No. 2 (Jun., 1932), 175; Ursula
Schwarzkopf, “Généalogie de la Famille d'Eustache Chappuis à Annecy,” Bibliotheque d'humanisme et renaissance.
Tome 28, (1966): 521.
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secured the family’s financial and social position in the local elite.8 Regarding the specifics of
Eustace’s childhood, we know little. Following the deaths of both his father and elder brother, he
found himself both his family’s heir and the subject of a minor guardianship dispute between his
mother and uncle.9 Regardless, the teenaged Savoyard was approaching maturity and left for the
University of Turin two years later, in November 1507. Here too the details of his biography are
scarce. In 1512 he left the university to travel, spending an indefinite period in Rome, Pavia, and
Valence. Ultimately, he earned his doctorate in both civil and canon law by 1515, though
whether in Rome or back in Turin is disputed.10 Following the completion of what was an
inarguably impressive education, Chapuys worked as the secretary to the prince-bishop of
Geneva, Jean de Savoie. In the position he served as his master’s representative to the city
council and to foreign powers, experiencing a mixture of religion, politics, and diplomacy that
undoubtedly helped prepare him for his career in England.11
His involvement with the Hapsburg Empire of Charles V began not long after. By 1524,
Chapuys had graduated to working as the personal representative, messenger, and liaison for the
Duke of Bourbon, then commander of the Imperial army. It was on Bourbon’s behalf that
Chapuys first travelled to the Imperial court at Granada in August 1526. Chapuys carried with
him the good news of the Duke of Milan’s recent surrender to Bourbon that summer and hoped
to ensure that his master’s interests were protected during subsequent negotiations. The diplomat,

8 Garret Mattingly’s assessment of the family as being largely “hard-headed, tight-fisted mountain stock, a
clannish, unadventurous breed, sticking stubbornly to small gains, pushing their way by inches up the narrow social
ladder of their little native town” is now largely outdated. Schwarzkopf’s German-language discussion is easily the
most thorough discussion of the Chapuys family, though it is worth noting that this is the extent of her focus; she
does not explore Chapuys’ career as a diplomat. Richard Lundell’s dissertation and the first chapter of Lauren
Mackay’s popular history represent the clearest insights on Chapuys’ family available in English, though both lean
heavily on Schwarzkopf. Mattingly, Catherine of Aragon, 296. Richard Lundell, “The Mask of Dissimulation:
Eustace Chapuys and Early Modern Diplomatic Technique, 1536-1545” (PhD diss., University of Illinois, 2001), 21;
Lauren Mackay, Inside the Tudor Court (Gloucestershire: Amberley Publishing, 2014), 14-16.
9 Lundell, “Mask of Dissimulation,” 21.
10 Mackay, 17.
11 Lundell, “Mask of Dissimulation,” 28.
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a title Chapuys had undoubtedly earned by this point, spent the following winter traveling with
the Imperial court and its army before a surprising blow the next spring. News of the sack of
Rome would have reached the ambassador by late May 1527, at which point Chapuys learned
that he was suddenly without a master; the Duke of Bourbon had died leading the attack.
Nevertheless, he was not unemployed for long. Charles V appointed Chapuys maître des
requites, essentially a councilman whose primary task was overseeing petitions, shortly
thereafter.12
Chapuys’ path had crossed with that of the Holy Roman Empire in an auspicious
historical moment. Thus, it is worth briefly pausing the narrative of our central figure’s life in
order to better understand the empire he was to join. From this point forward, Chapuys’ career
would be shaped in part by the renewed significance of empire both as an ideal and as a practical
reality in the early sixteenth century. The Christmas day coronation of Charlemagne by Pope Leo
III had announced the rebirth of the Western Roman Empire in the year 800.13 In the time since
its alleged revival, however, the import of the Holy Roman Empire had lessened, and by the
dawning of the sixteenth century, it constituted an increasingly localized German concern.
Though arguably obsolete in terms of its practical attainability, the concept of a universal
empire ruling over a unified Christendom did remain a time-honored ideal. In empire existed the
possibility for a union between Saint Augustine’s civitas Dei, the City of God, the church; and
the civitas terrena, the Earthly City, the temporal world of secular society. Having been
symbolically restored by a pope, the Empire existed, at least in theory, as a Christianized
dominion with its emperor as the defender of the civitas Dei. Its history and very existence

12 Mackay, 19-20.
13 Charlemagne was the first titular emperor in the West since Romulus Augustulus was deposed in 475
A.D, from which point Western Europe entered the Dark Ages and the Eastern Empire continued unrivaled.
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evoked Western Europe’s common descent from the Roman Empire and suggested Rome as a
natural site of universal leadership.14
By the fifteenth and early sixteenth centuries, the ideal of empire – or at least the
possibility for unity that it represented – was reemphasized through humanist studies of ancient
political history and theory. For Christian idealist Desiderius Erasmus, a unified Europe was
necessary for the betterment of Christianity even when a cohesive empire under one monarch
appeared impossible. Though the Renaissance humanist and later friend of Eustace Chapuys
doubted the likelihood and even the capacity of one man to rule over Christendom, he saw in
Christ “the true and only monarch of the world,” noting that “if our princes would agree together
to obey His commands, we should truly have one prince, and everything would flourish under
Him.”15 Through his desire for ‘one prince,’ the value of a universal monarchy became both a
metaphor and perhaps even the means for achieving the universal rule of Christ and the religious
unity that Erasmus so wanted.16 Written less than three years before Charles V was elected
emperor, these words showcased how northern humanist circles conceived of empire on the eve
of its becoming a tentative reality.
In 1519, the universalist potential of empire came closer to actualization in the person of
Charles V. The nineteen year-old inherited the Netherlands and Austria from his father’s family
and both Spain and Sicily from his mother’s. His subsequent election by the princes of Germany

14 Yates offers a detailed discussion of the textual origins, symbolism, and poetic imagery behind what he
calls the “phantom” of empire during the Middle Ages. Frances A. Yates, Astraea: The Imperial Theme in the
Sixteenth Century (Boston: Routledge & Kegan Paul, 1975), 2-12.
15 Erasmus to Dukes Frederick and George of Saxony on 5 June, 1517. See The Correspondence of
Erasmus: Vol. 4 Letters 446 to 593; 1516 to 1517, R.A.B. Mynors, and D. F. S. Thomason, trans. (Toronto:
University of Toronto Press, 1977), 381-382. This letter was used as the preface Erasmus’ own Suetonius, edited
himself alongside Historiae Augustae Scriptores and printed by Froben in June 1518. Duke Frederick the Wise,
Elector of Saxony, was a patron of Luther but Duke George, his cousin, enforced the Edict of Worms (1521) and
remained a staunch supporter of Roman Catholicism and the Habsburg dynasty. See James K McConica’s
annotation in Erasmus, 373.
16 One senses from this letter why Yates equates Erasmus with the “vestigial survival of the imperial idea.”
Yates, 19-20. See also, Charles G. Nauert Jr., Humanism and the Culture of Renaissance Europe (Cambridge:
Cambridge University Press, 1995), 146-155, 164-165.