Henry VIII was twenty-five, seven years a king, and he was trying to hold a league of princes together with his signature. He could answer for England's part. Getting the others to keep theirs was a different business.
On 29 October 1516, commissioners in London concluded a league linking Henry with Emperor Maximilian I and Charles of Spain. Its purpose was to contain French power, under the banner of defending the Church. Three days later, at Greenwich, Henry signed the surviving oath to observe its terms. This was the league of 1516, not the better-known Treaty of London two years later. The agreement belonged to October. The king's written promise followed in November.
France had given him reason to want powerful friends. Francis I, three years younger than Henry and less than nine months on the throne, had won at Marignano in September 1515 and strengthened the French position in northern Italy. From England, Italy might seem a distant place to spend a king's money, but the pope lived among these competing powers. A French king who could dominate his neighbours there could also bring pressure to bear on Rome. For Henry and his Lord Chancellor, Cardinal Thomas Wolsey, the danger was plain: English influence in Rome would count for very little against a French army in Lombardy.
They had already tried paying for an answer. Earlier in 1516, English money had supported an expedition against French-held Milan. Maximilian advanced, then withdrew, and the enterprise collapsed. The October league was therefore being built after an expensive failure, with the same emperor still among its essential partners. Henry was not beginning with a clean sheet. He was trying to make the next undertaking work where the last had not.
Wolsey's work survives in less imposing forms than a royal oath. There are instructions to the king's commissioners in Flanders corrected by him, letters carrying intelligence from Brussels, and reports of conferences with Charles's advisers. Some intelligence travelled in cipher. The grand design had to pass through all this ordinary labour: a report received, instructions amended, another negotiation pursued. A king could lend an agreement his name. Someone still had to make its articles acceptable to the men expected to perform them.
Henry gave his own promise at Greenwich, where Katherine of Aragon had given birth to their daughter Mary that February, the first of the queen's children to survive. The prince whose undertakings he now needed, Charles, was Katherine's nephew. The oath is a single sheet of vellum, written in Latin in brown ink in a secretary hand, with Henry's signature at its foot. He swore it on the Holy Gospels. It bound him to keep the treaty faithfully and to make his subjects observe the provisions that concerned them. The emperor and Charles were to give corresponding undertakings. The obligation was meant to run both ways.
So were the costs. The league called for horsemen and foot soldiers, ships from England and Spain, and an annual pension to draw the Swiss into the arrangement. These were promises of practical support, not an army already assembled. Men had to be retained, ships supplied and money found. Wolsey could negotiate the commitments. Their fulfilment remained scattered across several courts.
The pope was to be invited to lead.
That invitation mattered. Defending the Church was a serious claim for a king still loyal to Rome, but it did not put the pope at the head of the league merely because Henry wanted him there. Leo X had interests and territories of his own to protect. While English diplomacy sought his commitment, the treaty allowed for him to enter later. The alliance proclaimed a common cause before it had secured the man intended to preside over it.
Nor had Henry's partners stopped looking elsewhere. Charles had already reached an agreement with Francis at Noyon on 13 August, more than two months before the London league. Friendship with England and accommodation with France were being pursued by the same prince. The October agreement was an attempt to pull him into a different alignment while that earlier settlement still stood. His name in Henry's league did not erase his agreement with Henry's rival.
The Swiss, too, had been negotiating with France well before the London treaty. On 29 November they concluded their peace at Fribourg. They had fought the French in Italy; now they were settling with them. The soldiers whom English diplomacy hoped to retain against Francis belonged to communities making a peace of their own. An annual pension offered from one direction had to compete with the settlement available from another.
Then, in early December, Maximilian came to terms with France at Brussels, accepting 60,000 florins from Francis to join the settlement Charles had already made. The emperor on whom Henry's scheme depended had followed his grandson into the French peace. The military combination envisaged in London was coming apart through agreements concluded elsewhere, each of them carrying its own assurances of peace and friendship.
Yet on 9 December the emperor ratified Henry's league as well, eased towards it by a private arrangement that cancelled his debts to England and promised him more. At Greenwich, Henry had sworn on the Gospels to keep his part of a promise that only worked if the others kept theirs. Before the year was out, Maximilian had put his name to Henry's league and to Francis's peace, and had been offered money for both.
