Wingfield's credulous indiscretion. An acrimonious correspondence ensued between Wolsey and Wingfield. Pace, too, ridiculed Wingfield's credulity, a circumstance which Wingfield discovered by opening Pace's correspondence during the latter's illness. He also feigned Pace's signature and seal to a receipt for money sent to Pace, by which device he obtained sole control of its distribution. He was perhaps reckoning for condonation of this audacious act on a splendid offer which the emperor commissioned him to lay before Henry. This was the creation of Henry as Duke of Milan and the resignation of the empire in his favour. Maximilian's real intention was to obtain supplies from Henry and to plunder the duchy of Milan in his name. Pace's insight prevented Henry falling into the trap. Henry in reply refused to provide any more money, and expressed his displeasure with Wingfield for having advanced sixty thousand florins to the emperor on his own responsibility. In the summer of 1516 Henry himself wrote to Wingfield an extraordinary letter of censure upon his credulous confidence in the emperor and his ‘envy and malice’ towards Pace, whom he had accused of betraying the secret of Maximilian's offer. A treaty was, however, drawn up between Henry and the emperor, dated 29 Oct. 1516, providing, inter alia, for the advance of forty thousand crowns by Henry, in return for the offer of the imperial crown, to be formally made by Wingfield and the cardinal of Sion. Wingfield received the emperor's oath on 8 Dec. 1516 with much self-gratulation on his success. Yet the ink was scarcely dry when Wingfield heard rumours that Maximilian had secretly subscribed to the obnoxious treaty of Noyon.
Wolsey, however, continued to employ Wingfield, and despatched him, together with Tunstall and the Earl of Worcester, to Brussels to negotiate with Charles (afterwards Charles V) a policy favourable to English interests. The mission succeeded in obtaining from Charles on 11 May 1517 a ratification of Henry's treaty with the emperor of the previous October. Wingfield left Brussels on 16 March to return to the imperial court, then in the Netherlands. On 5 June, having received instructions from Henry to follow Maximilian back to Germany, Wingfield wrote to the king a point-blank refusal. He was unpaid, his servants refused to remain with him, and he was under vows to make pilgrimages in England. On 18 Aug. he was at Wenham Hall, Suffolk. Exasperation and gout had made him reckless. ‘Infamy,’ he wrote to Wolsey, ‘would hang over’ the king and cardinal if a merchant who had advanced money on his guarantee as ambassador were not satisfied. The arrears of Wingfield's salary, amounting to 224l. for seven weeks, were paid in the following December.
During the next two and a half years Wingfield appears to have remained in retirement in England. The first sign of the king's returning favour is a grant, in which he is recited to be ‘a king's councillor,’ of an annuity of a hundred marks out of the tonnage and poundage in the port of London, on 14 Aug. 1519. In November 1520 he vacated his post of joint-deputy of Calais (Chron. of Calais, p. xxxviii), and apparently in December 1521 was appointed ambassador at Charles V's court. He was now not only a king's councillor but ‘of the privy council’ and vice-chamberlain. He arrived at Brussels on 8 Feb. 1521–2. He apparently accompanied Charles to England in July. But on 14 Aug. he again crossed the Channel as an ambassador, on this occasion to the court of Margaret of Savoy at Brussels. His instructions were to induce Margaret to lend active assistance to the projected operations of Charles and Henry against France. He returned to England in May 1523, but in August was appointed to a command in the Duke of Suffolk's army for the invasion of France. He seems to have taken no part in the campaign, remaining apparently in Calais, of the castle of which he was appointed lieutenant by the influence of Wolsey.
After the battle of Pavia (23 Feb. 1525) preparations were made by Henry for an invasion of France. Wingfield was nominated (11 April) upon the council of war under the Duke of Norfolk, and was at the same time despatched, together with Sir William Fitzwilliam, to the court of Brussels to concert measures with the regent of the Netherlands. A series of evasive negotiations followed, and when Henry's projects of a joint invasion of France had given place to an alliance with that power (30 Aug.), it fell to Wingfield to extenuate the change of policy by dilating on the necessity of international peace for the extirpation of Lutheranism, the spread of which gave him great concern. In May 1526 he returned to Calais, of which place he was appointed deputy on 1 Oct. 1526. He appears to have remodelled the municipality by introducing into it, as the representatives of the crown, the military officers who supervised its defences; this oligarchical change was made on instructions from home, and subsequently led to much dissatisfaction, into which
