Eustace Chapuys was born in the year 1489, a date that places his life squarely within the turbulent transition from the late Middle Ages to the Renaissance. He was not a man of the sword, but of the quill, emerging from the Duchy of Savoy as the second son of a notary named Louis Chapuys and a woman named Guigonne Dupuys, who may have held noble blood. His early years were spent in Annecy, but his true education began in 1507 when he entered the University of Turin, where he remained for at least five years. By 1512, he had chosen law as his vocation, continuing his studies at the University of Valence before arriving in Rome in early 1515. There, at the Sapienza University of Rome, he attained the degree of doctor of civil and canon laws and received the Pope's blessing, setting the stage for a career that would be defined by legal precision and humanist scholarship. Chapuys was a humanist who moved in circles of intellectual giants, counting Claude Blancherose, Claude Dieudonné, Heinrich Cornelius Agrippa, Thomas More, and John Fisher among his friends. He corresponded with Erasmus, sharing a deep mutual respect and admiration, even though the two men never met in person. This intellectual foundation would later become his most potent weapon in the high-stakes game of European diplomacy.
The Legal Shield of Catherine
Chapuys arrived in England in late August 1529 to take over the post of resident ambassador from Don Íñigo de Mendoza, a position that had been rather unstably occupied since the forced withdrawal of Louis of Praet in 1525. He was to remain in the post from 1529 until 1545, except for brief absences from 1539 to 1540, and in 1542. His legal background made him an ideal candidate to defend the king's wife Catherine of Aragon, who was also an aunt of Emperor Charles V, against the legal proceedings known at the time as the King's Great Matter. Catherine had specifically requested Chapuys as a replacement for Mendoza because of his legal expertise and his proficiency in Latin. He lived in Austin Friars, a neighbor to Thomas Cromwell, whom he came to consider a friend, and Chapuys cultivated religiously conservative noblemen in the king's court as his informants. His attempts to defeat English machinations against Catherine eventually failed, and Henry married Anne Boleyn. Catherine died in January 1536, and it has been traditionally thought that Chapuys despised Anne and could never bring himself to say her name, referring to her only as the whore or concubine. Eric Ives, however, suggests that the ambassador's use of the term was not from his disdain for Anne but because he failed to appreciate that she could ever become Henry's wife. Chapuys was a faithful servant to Charles V, an astute observer of men, and although he spoke and wrote fluently in French, he was a staunch opponent of France and the French, whom he loathed because of their designs on his homeland, Savoy. On one occasion, he threatened to disinherit his niece if she married a Frenchman.