The King's Cardinal: The Rise and Fall of Thomas Wolsey (Pimlico)

by Gwyn, Peter

  CONTENTS

  Cover

  About the Author

  Dedication

  Title Page

  Preface

  Introduction

  1. From Butcher’s Cur to Lordly Prelate

  2. Church and State in Early Sixteenth-century England

  3. The Making of the Treaty of London

  4. ‘Where Conscience Hath Most Force’: Wolsey and the Law

  5. Peace or War: The Calais Conference of 1521

  6. Patronage and Politics at the Court

  7. The North, Ireland and Wales

  8. The Cardinal Legate and the English Church

  9. The Great Enterprise

  10. Wolsey and the Common Weal

  11. Reform and Reformation

  12.The King’s Great Matter

  13. Wolsey’s Downfall

  14. The Final Year

  Notes to the Notes

  Bibliography

  Copyright

  PIMLICO

  529

  THE KING’S CARDINAL

  Peter Gwyn taught history at Winchester College, where he was also the archivist from 1965 to 1976. He resigned in protest when the College decided to sell one of its most valuable and historic possessions – the Malory MS. He was elected Bowra Fellow at Wadham College, Oxford for 1981–2. His published writings include ‘Wolsey’s Foreign Policy: The Conferences at Calais and Bruges Reconsidered’, Historical Journal, 23 (1980); ‘The Tunding Row: George Ridding and the belief in Boy-government’ in Winchester College: Six Centenary Essays, ed. R. Custance (OUP 1982). He worked on this biography of Thomas Wolsey for 11 years.

  To Nikolai Tolstoy

  whose efforts to explain the tragic

  events in Austria in the early Summer

  of 1945 I so much admire

  THE KING’S

  CARDINAL

  The Rise and Fall of Thomas Wolsey

  PETER GWYN

  PREFACE

  I am very conscious that this book could not have been written without the support and encouragement of a large number of friends. In the first place I could not have survived financially for the twelve years that it has taken me to write it without the generosity of Romy and Richard Briant and my sister and brother-in-law Alison and David Kingsley. Much of it was written and researched in the Upper Reading Room of the Bodleian, and to the spirit of that beautiful room and those who worked in it during my time I owe a special debt: in particular I would like to thank Ian Archer, Mark Curthoys, Trevor Dean, Jeremy Gregory, Trevor Griffith, David Katz, Sarah Kochan, Simon Payling and Blair Worden; as also the staff of the Bodleian – especially Helen Rogers – whose willingness to help more than compensated for the vagaries of the library’s administration. To other friends, and relatives, in Oxford and elsewhere who were kind enough to put up with Wolsey for so long, a further debt is owed: in particular Catherine Bennett, Roland Dannreuther, Kathleen Davies, Eileen Gwyn, Catherine La Farge, Christl and Michael Lethbridge, Frances and Roger Little, Iain and Nigel McGilchrist, Paul Nabavi, Audrey Nevin, John Nightingale, Emma Rees Mogg, Robert Sackville-West, Lotte and Nicky Spice, Mark Stephenson, Kate and Bryan Ward-Perkins and Lucas Wilson.

  As for libraries and archival repositories other than the Bodleian, I would like to thank the staff of the Guildhall Library, the Kent Record Office, the Lincoln Record Office, the Northumberland Record Office, the Westminster Abbey Muniments, the West Sussex County Record Office, the Wiltshire Record Office for kindly answering enquiries or allowing me to consult their records. I have found working in the Reading Room of the British Library positively harmful to research; not so its Manuscript Room, or the Public Record Office, whose staff have shown great patience in deciphering documents that have defeated me.

  Susan Brigden, M.L. Bush, C. Dyer and Richard Hoyle very kindly read and commented on particular chapters, while M. Bowker, Christopher Brooke, Pierre Chaplais, C.R. Cheney, J.A. Guy, Peter Partner and J.A.F. Thomson have all been kind enough to answer enquiries, while Simon Thurley took a lot of trouble over possible illustrations. My inadequate linguistic skills have been buttressed by a number of people including Trevor Dean and Bryan Ward-Perkins already mentioned, Mrs A. Rainton, and above all Richard Roberts.

  Throughout the enterprise Alistair Ricketts has acted as my unofficial editor and adviser on all literary matters. More recently my ‘official’ editor – though she would not approve of the inverted commas – Sue Phillpott has removed a large number of words to the great advantage of the reader and with the minimum of pain to myself.

  It will quickly become apparent that on many aspects of the Tudor period Sir Geoffrey Elton and I do not agree. This has not prevented him from taking an interest in my work and on a number of occasions offering excellent advice. Steve Gunn, Steve Thompson and Greg Walker, all of whom began their research while this book was in progress and with some justification could have taken a protectionist stance, have gone out of their way to share their knowledge and ideas to my great benefit. The contribution of three other Tudor historians has been immeasurable. It was Jack Scarisbrick’s treatment of Wolsey’s foreign policy in his Henry VIII that provided its starting point, and though I have come to take a different view to his on many matters of detail, his approach to the writing of history remains a source of inspiration. Cliff Davies commented on my first piece of writing on Wolsey, has read much of this book in its various stages, and has throughout these twelve years been a most supportive critic. George Bernard may not have read every word of every draft, but everything in this book has been discussed with him – and occasionally fought over – so that in many ways it is as much his book as mine. Furthermore his practical help in all the minutiae of scholarly activity has helped to overcome the disadvantages of attempting to write this kind book while situated on the outer fringes of academe.

  Finally I must acknowledge two longer-term debts. Paddy McGrath was my tutor at Bristol, and he and his extended family have remained close friends ever since. Those who have had the advantage of having been taught by him will readily understand how much I owe to that combination of scepticism and commitment that are to me his hallmark. My father was a teacher of history, and it was his bedtime stories that, for better or for worse, made the past for me such an exciting world to inhabit. Sadly he died before he could know that the teaching and writing of history would occupy so much of my time. He might have been surprised that I could write so many words. I hope he would have been pleased.

  INTRODUCTION

  THIS BOOK IS AN ATTEMPT TO UNDERSTAND AND EXPLAIN THE POLITICAL career of Thomas Wolsey. There will be very little about his private life, not because it is thought to be of little interest, but because there is virtually no evidence for it. He had a mistress, or concubine, as clerical mistresses were called. Her name was ‘Mistress Lark’. She bore him two children, a girl, Dorothy, who was sent to Shaftesbury Abbey, a much favoured convent for the daughters of the wealthy, and a boy, Thomas Winter, whom Wolsey publicly acknowledged as his ‘nephew’.1 Having said that, one has said almost everything that is known about an aspect of his life that one would really like to know much more about, for it is not necessary to be too Freudian to acknowledge that emotional and sexual matters contribute to an understanding of a person’s character. There is hardly more information about what nowadays might be called Wolsey’s ‘leisure activities’! There is one reference to hunting, and that very late in his life.2 He was to be a great builder, as parts of Hampton Court and Christ Church College, Oxford, still bear witness to. He possessed quantities of tapestries, jewels and plate, and
may have had a particular liking for ‘Damascene carpets’, by which was presumably meant oriental carpets.3 He kept a chapel choir, which in 1518 Henry considered to be so much better than his own that he insisted that some of Wolsey’s choirboys should be transferred to the royal choir4 – and Henry did have rather a habit of insisting that anything he fancied should be his! Still, almost none of these things sheds much light on Wolsey’s personality because it is almost impossible to decide what represents a genuine personal taste, and what the style and preferences of any wealthy man of his time. As for what he read, or even the books that were on his shelves, here information of almost any kind is lacking: only four surviving books have been closely associated with him, two of which are merely liturgical, and there is no surviving catalogue of his libraries.5 Given that one is anxious to penetrate the workings of Wolsey’s mind, this is a grievous handicap.

  Another is the suspicion, not to say hostility, with which Wolsey has been viewed. His first biographer and household servant, George Cavendish, declared that he had only decided to write a life of his master because ‘since his death I have heard divers sundry surmises and imagined tales made of his proceedings and doings which I myself have perfectly known to be untrue’ – and he made it clear that the ‘surmises’ had not been complimentary.6 Some hundred and seventy years later, in 1724, an Oxford don and cleric, Richard Fiddes, explained that there were two reasons for his wanting to write a life of Wolsey. The first was by way of paying a debt that his university owed to Wolsey’s generous patronage. The second was out of a desire to do ‘justice to his injured memory’, for ‘it may be questioned whether in all the histories that are extant, a like instance can be found in any nation of so general a prejudice, as that under which his name has suffered’.7 Not a lot has changed since then. It is true that in the late nineteenth century there was briefly something of a sea change. England was at the zenith of her Imperial power and ‘great statesmen’ were fashionable. Macmillan’s commissioned biographies of ‘Twelve English Statesmen’, and Wolsey was one of the twelve. The result was the appearance in 1891 of Cardinal Wolsey, an on the whole favourable biography by a leading historian of the time, Mandell Creighton. Since then, however, things have only got worse. Two doyens of Tudor history, A.F. Pollard and Sir Geoffrey Elton, have not taken a favourable view.8

  Moreover Pollard’s Wolsey is the last major assessment to have been attempted, and that as long ago as 1929. For want of much attention, the field has been left to the American actor, Orson Welles, whose portrayal of Wolsey in A Man for All Seasons – a most successful film biography of Sir Thomas More, which appeared in 1966 but has been much shown since on television9 – has probably done more to fashion current perceptions of Wolsey than anything else – and it is not a flattering portrayal.

  What Orson Welles portrayed was everybody’s idea of a Renaissance cardinal, an overweight and overdressed spider occupying the centre of a web of intrigue, and bearing a much closer resemblance to the emperor Nero than to anyone remotely religious. The question of Wolsey’s size is an intriguing one. The most famous image of him to have survived, the portrait by an unknown artist in the National Portrait Gallery in London, suggests that he was of ample proportions.10 But it was never intended to be an accurate representation, and the only other near contemporary portrait, though admittedly French and dating from 1567, suggests a much thinner man.11 What there is not is any remotely detailed description of his physical appearance, so that not even the colour of his hair is known. The Venetian ambassador, Sebastian Giustinian, thought him ‘very handsome’,12 and another Venetian ambassador found him ‘hale and of good presence’.13 Neither description suggests that he was thin, but there has to be a suspicion that since his death the poor cardinal’s girth has increased, even as his fame has diminished! The poet John Skelton referred to

  … a flap afore his eye,

  Men wene that he is pocky.14

  Skelton’s explanation is unlikely, even though one of the articles brought against him at his fall accused him of having endangered the king’s person by blowing upon him when knowing himself to have ‘the foul and contagious disease of the great pox broken out upon him’.15 There was Mistress Lark, but insofar as there is any evidence at all, it points to his having been faithful to her; and surely if he had been promiscuous, international gossip would have soon got hold of it. As it is, there was nothing, and what seems more likely is that Wolsey had some kind of disfigurement to his eye which gave Skelton the opportunity to make an easy gibe.16

  Whether Wolsey deserves his bad press will be a major theme of the book. What may be helpful at the start is to explain some of the more obvious reasons for it – and in doing so Mr Welles’s portrayal may be of some help. At its simplest, the English are not very fond of cardinals. They associate them with an excess of wealth and power, at least unseemly in a man of the cloth – and perhaps nothing has done more harm to Wolsey’s reputation than his apparent penchant for dressing up in scarlet. The English also associate cardinals with decadent and superstitious religious practices, with incense and all the mumbo-jumbo that popery is allegedly prey to. Above all they are foreign and, thus, not to be trusted. And in Wolsey’s case, all these prejudices have been aggravated by the simple fact of chronology. Living on the eve of the English Reformation, and in some people’s eyes being one of its principal causes, he has had to bear a weight of criticism, which if he had been born earlier he would have escaped. The myth of a ‘waning Middle Ages’ and of a late medieval church suffocating under the burden of its own excesses has inevitably been a dominant theme of England’s Protestant historiography – and one of the earliest and most savage attacks on Wolsey was made by one of England’s first Protestants, William Tyndale, in his Practice of Prelates of 1530.

  Thus Wolsey has not fared well at the hands of one of the strongest strands of English cultural and intellectual life, the Protestant tradition. Neither has the closely allied Whig tradition treated him any better.17 At its heart lies a pride in this country’s achievements, but especially its nurture of parliamentary democracy, the common law – and common sense! What it is opposed to is kings and queens before they became ‘constitutional’, their favourites, meddlesome clerics – and anything in the least bit intellectual! While it has never been suggested that there was much of the intellectual about Wolsey, in other respects he has scored badly. He was both a royal favourite and a meddlesome priest, and as such despised both parliament and the common law. Moreover, he suffers from another handicap. The Whig tradition is nothing if not teleological. Everything that has happened in English history has had as its purpose the creation of this miraculous construct, parliamentary democracy. Some things, and especially people, have contributed more than others. Wolsey has contributed not at all, and in this sense he has been seen as unimportant. Or, to put it another way, he has been thought of as a medieval figure, representative of a way of doing things which, thankfully, we have grown out of. By contrast, his successor as the king’s leading councillor, Thomas Cromwell – who at least in one account believed in parliament and the civil service18 – is a modern figure and, therefore, of great interest.

  I am neither very Protestant nor very Whiggish, and it is probably true, though this may be to underestimate the underlying strength of these two strands of English intellectual and cultural life, that fewer and fewer English men and women are. But, whatever one’s attitudes, it is easy enough to appreciate that the Protestant and Whig traditions have tremendously distorted our view of Wolsey. What we have for the most part is a caricature out of Gerald Scarfe, or at the least an Old Master so covered with grime and coats of varnish that it is no longer possible to appreciate the portrait underneath. The process of cleaning has been begun by others, but in some ways this has only made things worse: bits of a different Wolsey have been revealed, but the result is a confusing mosaic of dark and light that makes no sense at all. It is time to attempt a complete restoration – despite the risks that this ent
ails. In the end too much may be removed, or the retouching may be obtrusive, but there is this safeguard that the historian is usually not in a position to destroy the evidence, even if he distorts it.

  Before embarking upon this task, a general word about the evidence may be helpful. First there are the ‘State Papers’. The great majority of what has survived relate to the conduct of foreign policy, essentially letters to and from English representatives abroad, those to them usually only in draft form. There are also the letters of foreign representatives in England to their respective heads of state, which, because they have been easy of access and are presented in a straightforward chronological order, have been overused, or at any rate, much misinterpreted. Records of the royal Council, especially in its non-judicial capacity, are extremely patchy, and anything approaching a ‘Home Office’ archive is lacking. As for legal records, they survive in great quantity, but they are not especially relevant to a political biography, and both because of their quantity and their technical nature are difficult to use effectively. On the other hand, the problem as regards Wolsey’s involvement with the English Church is the severe shortage of evidence.

  What all this adds up to is distinct bias towards Wolsey’s conduct of foreign policy, a bias which goes a long way to explain one of the most common misconceptions about him, which is that he was only interested in foreign affairs – and especially their more showy manifestations, such as the Field of the Cloth of Gold. He was interested in such things, if only because as the king’s chief councillor he had to be, but, as will become all too apparent, he was interested in much else besides. What is also lacking is any significant private archive, and not just for Wolsey, but for all the leading figures of the time. There are very few private letters, let alone diaries, and thus precisely the kind of material that might shed light on the most intriguing questions of all, those to do with the motivation of the leading figures, are missing. This is obviously a great disadvantage to the historian. It has also been of some disadvantage to Wolsey’s reputation because it has increased the reliance on the contemporary literary sources, and three out of the four major ones present a distinctly unflattering portrait.