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

by Gwyn, Peter

  In stating this, one is making an important point about Wolsey’s role in government. There is no evidence at all that it was he who made the really important decision that both Poynings and Boleyn should be rewarded. Wolsey’s job was to implement Henry’s decisions in the best way possible, whether they had to with the making of war and peace, obtaining a ‘divorce’, or, as in this case, with the exercise of royal patronage. Although it follows from this that there was no deliberate attempt to do Boleyn down, this is not to say that Boleyn did not have some grounds for feeling aggrieved. He had, after all, failed to obtain a post that he had been promised only a month before and, as he himself pointed out to Wolsey, it was a poor reward for his services as ambassador; and if he had realized that his absence from the court might be used as an argument for his non-appointment, he would not have agreed to go to France.142 But if Boleyn was not unreasonably a little put out, how far did he blame Wolsey for what had happened? Since the main evidence for what he was thinking comes from letters he wrote to Wolsey, only a very cautious answer can be given, but he does appear to have appreciated that the real decision-maker had been Henry. At any rate, he was not averse to applying a little gentle pressure on Wolsey to persuade the king to honour his original promise. And when he wrote that he supposed Wolsey had perceived some fault in him, he seems to have been looking for a denial in the hope that this would force Wolsey to prove it by strongly furthering his cause. It is a common enough gambit and it is not one that works with anyone you genuinely believe to be hostile. And if this is to read too much or too little into Boleyn’s response, what is not in doubt is that in the September he was writing to Wolsey that he surrendered any claim that he might have had to the comptrollership resulting from Henry’s previous promise, and this because he perceived ‘the favourable mind that your grace beareth to me, intending my advancement to the treasurership, wherein I think myself more bounden to your grace than ever I can deserve.’143 Boleyn may not have been entirely sincere here – who can tell? – but probably by October 1521, on Poynings’s death, and certainly by April of the following year, he had become treasurer.144 It may also be the case that for a short time after his return from France, he did hold the office that he had originally been promised.145

  With the death of the chancellor of the duchy of Lancaster, Sir Richard Wingfield, while on an embassy to Spain in the summer of 1525, an opportunity occurred for a reshuffle amongst certain quite important office-holders. The appointment of a new chancellor would in itself, of course, probably create a vacancy, but it was not the only office that Wingfield had held. Making the numerous new appointments was bound to be a complicated business, at the end of which not everyone might feel well done by. For those of a conspiratorial mind it is worth stressing at the outset that there has never been any suggestion that Wolsey had Wingfield murdered, so that the opportunity to fill these vacancies, even assuming that Wolsey would have considered them his to fill, was not of his own creation, nor is there any evidence that he welcomed it.146 What follows, therefore, does not require a conspiracy theory to explain it.

  The office of chancellor of the duchy was a major one, the holder exercising judicial and administrative responsibilities over a large area. He was paid a salary of £66 13s. 4d., a large enough sum, but probably, like so many Tudor salaries, merely the tip of the iceberg. It was bound to be much sought after, but it required a man of some proven judicial and administrative ability. From this distance in time it is obvious that the man to replace Wingfield was Sir Thomas More, and he was in fact to be appointed, though not without at least one other person being seriously considered. On 18 September Wolsey wrote to Henry that:

  it might like your highness to understand that yesterday I received a letter from Sir Richard Weston wherein he desireth me to be a mediator unto your grace for him, that he may have the office of steward of your duchy of Lancaster which Sir Richard Wingfield had, offering for the same to leave the office of master of your wards, or his annuity of one hundred pounds by year, of the which his desire and offer I thought convenient to advertise your grace, not doubting that by good means Sir William Compton shall be satisfied with the said stewardship or office of master of your wards, being offices more meet for him than the chancellorship of your said duchy.147

  Sir William Compton was, as groom of the stool, head of the privy chamber, a newly formed department of the royal household, membership of which brought one into daily and intimate contact with the king. As such, Compton was bound to have been favoured by Henry. Someone who had occupied a very similar position, but at a time when the privy chamber as a formal subdepartment of the royal household did not exist, was Charles Brandon, and his meteoric rise has already been mentioned. Although never ennobled, Compton was most generously rewarded, so that at his death in 1528 he was one of the wealthiest men in the kingdom, with an annual landed income somewhere in the region of £2,000 and moveables worth nearly £4,500. And, as with Brandon, it should be stressed that it was his master, not Wolsey, who was showering these rewards upon him. Obviously in 1525 he was being considered for the office of chancellor of the duchy, but equally obviously he was not Wolsey’s choice, a fact which has been taken as evidence of Wolsey’s hatred of him – for which, it should be stressed, there is precious little support elsewhere. And surely Wolsey’s letter to Henry is evidence of no such thing? Compton’s career had been wholly in the royal household, and though, as groom of the stool, he did perform some administrative and financial tasks, Wolsey was only expressing an obvious truth when he said that he was not the person best qualified for the office under consideration. On the other hand, it is understandable that after fifteen years of close personal service to the king Compton would have been looking for further promotion and that the king would be anxious to provide it. There was thus a problem. Compton did deserve something quite important. The lesser offices of steward of the duchy or master of the wards might do, but not the chancellorship; this at least was Wolsey’s view, and a perfectly sensible one. In fact, the solution arrived at was to give Compton More’s former office of under-treasurer of the Exchequer. Compton, as keeper of the privy purse, an office which went with being groom of the stool, did have some experience of finance. Moreover, the under-treasurer received the large annual salary of £173. It does not seem, therefore, that in the end Compton had very much to complain about, nor is there any evidence that he did.

  Neither is there any evidence that More complained, though, as with Compton, it has been suggested that he had some grounds.148 Wingfield had combined the chancellorship with a lesser duchy office – though one worth £100 a year – that of steward of the south parts. But More was not given this: instead it went to Sir William Kingston, a man, who it has been alleged was close to Wolsey.149 Here, surely, is evidence of a deliberate slight by Wolsey of a man of whom he was jealous and, because of the king’s great liking for him, a little afraid? It was a slight, moreover, which may have had financial consequences for More. His salary as under-treasurer had been £173, but that of chancellor of the duchy was only £66 13s 4d, with additional annual sums of just under £100; thus without the stewardship his promotion appears not to have brought additional remuneration, though we must be cautious about this. If the remuneration of other offices is anything to go by, the £160 odd for the chancellorship is probably only a very minimum figure. Furthermore, only three months before becoming chancellor, More had been given the admittedly lesser stewardship of Hertfordshire and Middlesex.150 At about the same time he also acquired a French pension of about £35,151 while in June 1526 he received a licence to export cloth.152

  In any event, remuneration does not seem to have been More’s problem at this time, nor, as with all the other men so far looked at, is there convincing evidence that he was disliked or feared by Wolsey. If anything, the opposite was true. In 1523 Wolsey had gone out of his way to obtain from Henry a further £100 for More as a reward for his good services as Speaker of the House of Commons.153 And in th
at same year More was frequently acting as the king’s unofficial secretary, and, as a consequence, was at times in almost daily correspondence with Wolsey.154 The surviving letters indicate a very good working relationship between the two men. This goes beyond and behind the mutual flattery which is certainly present and is always hard to interpret. At one point More referred to a letter of Wolsey’s as ‘one of the best made letters for words, matter, sentence, and couching that ever I read in my life’,155 which may seem a little excessive, were it not that Wolsey’s letters are to this day very impressive. But the point is that Wolsey need not have reminded Henry about the additional £100 owing to More, nor need he have continually praised him in his letters to Henry.156 In August 1524 the University of Oxford thanked Wolsey for prevailing on More to accept the office of high steward of the university.157 It seems a little improbable that More would have needed much prevailing upon, but it is just as improbable that, given Wolsey’s very close involvement with Oxford, the university would have offered More the post without the cardinal’s full consent. Nothing that occurred between August 1524 and September 1525, when More became chancellor of the duchy, offers any reason for believing that Wolsey would have wished to alter his favourable view of More, while a letter that he wrote to More shortly after the appointment seems warm enough to suggest that all was well between them.158 And just suppose, finally, that despite the weight of evidence to the contrary, Wolsey was suspicious of More; would the supposed slight have been a very intelligent way of giving vent to such suspicion? In such a scenario it would simply have annoyed someone very close to the king without doing that person any serious harm. Machiavelli would surely have done it better!

  Wolsey’s role in the appointment of a new chancellor of the duchy of Lancaster in 1525 was the same as his role in the appointment of the household officers between 1519 and 1521. What he had tried to do was to redistribute royal patronage in the most effective way. And that this was always his purpose is confirmed by his actions in the summer of 1528. To examine them in detail might seem to be unnecessarily repetitious if the issue of royal patronage were not so relevant to possible reasons for Wolsey’s downfall. If Wolsey did monopolize it, then the motivation for an aristocratic faction is obvious. If, as is argued here, he did not, it becomes very difficult to explain why men who were doing very well during his tenure of high office should have been desperate to see him go. Moreover, it is often alleged that by 1528 the opposition to Wolsey was gaining ground – which the events surrounding the appointments about to be discussed would appear at first glance to corroborate. And there happens to be a rather unusual amount of evidence relating to these appointments.

  On 30 June 1528 Wolsey wrote to Henry, then at Tittenhanger, a St Albans manor where he had taken refuge from the sweating sickness:

  This present hour it has come to my knowledge that it hath pleased Almighty God to call unto his mercy, Sir William Compton. And forasmuch as the said Sir William had divers great rooms and offices, as well of your grace’s gift as of divers other men, both spiritual and temporal, it shall be well done, if it may stand with your high pleasure, to stay the gift and disposition of the same offices for a while, and that your letters may be sent forth to such other persons as he had offices of to do the semblable till your pleasure may be further notified unto them in that behalf. In thus doing, your grace shall provide for such your servants as your pleasure shall be to advance and do good unto, and in respecting of the gift no hurt, but good, can ensue.159

  Here, in Wolsey’s own words, is a statement of precisely that attitude to royal patronage that I have argued here is the one he took. It was the king’s servants, not his, who were to be rewarded, and the clear implication is that it was the king who would make the choices. Wolsey’s only concern was that they should be implemented as smoothly as possible. The question then arises whether Wolsey’s words can be taken at their face value, or whether they merely mask self-interest. What this letter could demonstrate is his realization that after Compton’s death Henry would immediately be bombarded with all kinds of requests, and that those physically nearest to the king, such as his own alleged enemies in the privy chamber, were more likely to have their requests accepted. Hence his call for a moratorium so that he could the more effectively bring his own influence to bear. In support of such a view is the fact that five days later he wrote another letter specifically asking that Compton’s most important post, that of under-treasurer, should not be filled until he and Henry had had a chance to talk about it. He added that he had a plan by which the office would be given to an ‘able person, to your pleasure’, and which would also ‘provide for divers other your good servants’.160 Again one must note Wolsey’s concern that royal patronage should be shared out, resulting in these rather complicated reshuffles. But, again, was his concern merely to share it amongst his friends? That his proposal for a moratorium was not very sinister is suggested by the fact that at almost precisely the same time as he made it, Thomas Heneage, recently transferred from Wolsey’s household to the king’s, was writing to inform him that Henry did not intend to grant any of Compton’s offices ‘unto such time as he hath knowledge from your grace how many offices he had of his gift, and what they be’.161 In other words, Henry, quite independently of Wolsey, had come to the conclusion that a pause would be a good idea. In practice, however, the pressure of suitors made it difficult to put the idea into effect.

  On the very morning that the news of Compton’s death reached the court, Heneage informed Wolsey that ‘divers there is that maketh suit to the king for his offices’,162 and by the following day he was able to report that already a front-runner for the post of under-treasurer had emerged in the person of Sir John Gage.163 That same day Wolsey received the first request, from Lord Sandys, for support in obtaining some of Compton’s offices.164 The speed of all this is remarkable, and the pressure to grant quickly must have been great. Moreover, it proved quite impossible to prevent the patrons of the non-royal offices which Compton had held from filling the vacancies immediately. Henry himself was anxious that the office of steward of Furness Abbey should be bestowed upon Sir Thomas More and Sir William Fitzwilliam jointly.165 Meanwhile, sometime before he knew of this, Wolsey had written to the abbot requiring him to write what was the equivalent of a blank cheque: a grant of the stewardship duly signed and sealed, leaving Wolsey and/or the king to make the appointment.166 In fact, even Wolsey’s letter was too late, because the abbot replied that, alas, he had already filled the post, the lucky recipient being the earl of Derby.167 But why had Wolsey written to the abbot? Was he using the very moratorium that he had suggested in order to go behind Henry’s back to secure his own nominees? Or was he merely trying to get hold of as many non-royal offices as possible so as to be in a better position to make an intelligent distribution of all the Compton offices? If Derby was to get Furness it would not make much sense for him to get a royal stewardship as well. In support of the former view might be the fact that Henry was a little put out to discover that Wolsey had already granted Compton’s stewardship of Sarum.168 Wolsey’s explanation for his action has not survived. The office was theoretically in the gift of the bishop of Salisbury, but owing to the then bishop, Campeggio’s, absence, Wolsey was the effective grantor. Maybe he felt that offices in his own gift should be excluded from the moratorium, a perhaps understandable but not very creditable view of the matter? On the other hand, it may be that Henry had simply been misinformed of Wolsey’s actions.

  There is some reason for giving Wolsey the benefit of the doubt, for in another case, unconnected with Compton’s death but in which Henry’s will was thwarted, there is no doubt at all about Wolsey’s innocence. The king had wanted to give various offices in the gift of the duke of Richmond to Sir Edward Seymour and Sir Giles Strange ways, but before he could do so they had been filled by Richmond’s Council, who, as the nine-year-old duke was made to explain to his natural father, had been given by Wolsey, allegedly speaking for the king, c
arte blanche to make all appointments theoretically in his gift.169 And that this was not merely a cover-up for another snatch and grab by Wolsey is suggested by the fact that Thomas Magnus, a member of the duke’s Council, had to explain to Wolsey precisely what had happened – which would not have been necessary if Wolsey himself had been pulling the strings.170