It might almost be said that the entire courts of England and France, nobles and knights and ladies, met on the famous "field of the Cloth of Gold". Jousts and feastings were the order of the day. Wolsey understood how to impress the popular imagination; and he had a magnificent scorn or a cynical contempt for the enmities and jealousies aroused, of which he himself, as responsible for all the arrangements, became the centre. It may be doubted, however, whether any great goodwill between the two nations was born of all the display of amity; nor were there any very marked diplomatic results. If it was Wolsey's particular object to evolve a triple league, he was disappointed. The two Kings met and parted, Henry proceeding to a fresh conference with his nephew of Spain, from which Francis, in his turn, was excluded. Neither Charles nor Francis knew in the end which of them stood in the more favourable position with England; but the little Princess Mary, betrothed to the Dauphin, was half-pledged to Charles himself; while Charles was still formally betrothed to the French Princess Charlotte, and was inclining to substitute for both the well-dowered Infanta Isabella [Footnote: Otherwise called Elizabeth. The names are interchangeable.] of Portugal. Among all the surprising matrimonial complications of this half-century, one particular feature appears to be tolerably constant--that when Charles was not actually married, he was rarely without at least one fiancée actual, and another prospective. At any rate, the total result in 1520 was that Henry was in separate alliance with Francis on one side and with Charles on the other; alliances which neither could afford to break, but on which neither could rely. [Sidenote: Wolsey's aims] The main interest of Wolsey's career, from the national point of view, attaches to his conduct of foreign policy: and in the confusion of alliances and counter-alliances it is not always easy to recognise the objects of that policy or its fundamental consistency. The aim always in view was to prevent any Power or combination of Powers from dominating Europe; to substitute diplomacy for the actual arbitrament of arms; to secure for England recognition as the true arbiter without involving her in war. The three first-class Powers of the earlier years were reduced to two by the combination under one head, Charles V., of Spain and the Empire, with France as the sole Continental rival. But behind Wolsey's own policy was the traditional one of hostility to France, popular in the country, supported by the nobility, and offering attractions to an ambitious and martial-minded monarch who was not yet thirty years of age: whose Queen moreover was by birth and sympathy a strong partisan of Spain. Hence the Cardinal was liable to be forced out of his mediatorial position into one of hostility to France. [Sidenote: Charles and Francis]