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

by Gwyn, Peter

  Pace, it should be stressed, made it quite clear that this new task was one he welcomed.11 Like so many of his colleagues in the upper echelons of royal service, he was a committed Imperialist and entirely approved of the notion of bringing Francis I to his knees. Arriving at Bourbon’s camp, he was soon writing glowing reports of the duke’s personal qualities, and making optimistic assessments of his chances of success. Pace’s judgement in this matter was of vital concern to Wolsey because upon it would depend whether or not Henry himself invaded France. Wolsey made all this very clear to Pace, itself evidence of Wolsey’s continuing confidence in him.12 It is also true that he was well aware that Pace’s enthusiasm for the Imperialist cause coloured his judgement. Commenting in a letter of 31 August on Pace’s desire that Henry should invade, Wolsey allowed himself a little irony: ‘For the helping whereof, you desire me to lay my cardinal’s hat, crosses, maces, and myself in pledge.’13 He also warned Pace: ‘In this matter necessary it is that you look substantially to yourself that by fair words, promises, or demonstrations you be not seduced, nor, giving over-much credence to them, provoked to allect the king’s highness or his army over the sea.’14 Pace, for his part, accused Wolsey of taking a remark of his too seriously, though, as it had been to the effect that if Henry failed to gain the French crown, the responsibility would be Wolsey’s, his seriousness is understandable.15

  In September 1508 Erasmus had described Pace thus:

  a young man so well versed in knowledge of Greek and Latin letters that his intellect would enable him unaided to bring fame to the whole of England; and who is of such high character, and so modest withal, that he wholly deserves the favour of yourself, and those who resemble you.16

  The praise could hardly have been more generous, and undoubtedly Pace did win favour amongst a lot of people, including both Henry and Wolsey at home, and the Venetian signory abroad, as well as the devotion of people such as Thomas Lupset and Reginald Pole. But as a colleague, his over-anxiousness and hyperactivity, which by March 1525 had begun seriously to undermine his sanity, caused problems. In August 1524 the Imperial ambassador at Rome commented that Pace wrote ‘“in a thousand colours”’. In one letter he says that the Imperial army is prosperous beyond all expectation … and in another he pretends that all is ruined, and the army is lost. Such letters do much harm.’17 In November Pace had told a Venetian friend that when he returned to England he would be urging Henry to invade France in person, and had then added ‘whole sackfuls of bravadoes’.18 In December the Imperial diplomat, Nicholas Schomberg, archbishop of Capua, told the Venetian Gasparo Contarini that ‘he did not approve of Pace because he was too vehement’.19 These comments, it should be stressed, were from people to whose cause Pace was wholly committed. What some may find surprising, particularly given Wolsey’s own detached attitude towards the Imperialists, is the patience that he showed throughout the summer and autumn of 1524 in dealing with Pace’s outpourings. If there was criticism, there was also much praise, and always Wolsey emphasized how great was his and Henry’s trust in him. There was also some acute probing behind Pace’s over-involvement with Bourbon in order to arrive at a realistic assessment of the duke’s chances of success.20

  By the end of September Bourbon’s army was in retreat from Marseilles. By October Francis had entered Milan. The Great Enterprise was in ruins, and with it Pace’s dreams. He was ordered back to Venice with the important task of trying to prevent the republic from reverting to its former ally. At the same time, though, he was increasingly having to deny rumours that his own master was involved in serious negotiations with the French. Not surprisingly he found this painful, especially as he suspected, rightly, that the rumours were true.21 If the French defeat at Pavia on 25 February 1525 caused him some happiness, it was short-lived, because by 5 March he was seriously ill.22 In a letter to Wolsey of the 12th of that month he described his illness as a fever, 23 but it soon transpired that the problem was mental. One symptom was insomnia, and he may also have been suffering delusions.24 Shortly after Pace’s return to England in November paranoia had set in. He was melancholy, and thought that the king had taken all his possessions and that he had been left penniless.25 Some of his paranoia may have focused upon Wolsey. In October 1524 Pace had apparently blamed the failure of Bourbon’s mission on Wolsey and suspected that, lured by generous bribes and his own ‘base nature’, he had come to some secret understanding with the French.26 In the following April the signory advised their newly appointed ambassador to England not to praise Pace too highly in Wolsey’s presence, for they understood that he was not in great favour with the cardinal27 which suggests that Pace’s criticisms of Wolsey were common knowledge in Venice.

  Pace’s criticisms are not surprising, but they should not be misinterpreted. They centred not upon any deep grievance about his blighted career, for given the office of royal secretary and his many church preferments, including the deaneries of St Paul’s, Salisbury and Exeter, blighted it could hardly be said to have been. Rather, they stemmed from his completely different attitude towards the conduct of foreign policy. As has been frequently mentioned, the view that England’s interests were best served by a close alliance with the emperor was a commonplace amongst the English ruling classes, but for Pace it had been reinforced by his early Italian experiences, especially his service with Cardinal Bainbridge whose four and a half years at the papal court had been devoted to doing the French down at every conceivable opportunity.28 There was also a moral dimension, an attachment to some kind of Imperialist pax christiana in which the emperor served as protector, perhaps even as reformer, of the Church, if the papacy would not take up this task.29

  For Wolsey, on the other hand, foreign policy was not a matter of sentiment or of morality, except insofar as pursuing the best interests of one’s monarch was in itself a good. Wolsey’s only commitment was to the pursuit of those interests, and if this meant, as in 1525, sacrificing the Imperial alliance, so be it. But with that sacrifice went all Pace’s efforts of the last three years. Given his temperament, the feeling of having been let down by Wolsey, perhaps even deceived by him, might easily lead to madness and paranoia, which would only have reinforced and exaggerated his feelings of betrayal. It is possible to argue that in this sense Wolsey was responsible for Pace’s insanity, though given the complexity of the human personality and the continuing uncertainties about the origins of mental illness, it might be a little unfair to do so. What it is not possible to do is to argue that Wolsey deliberately set out to destroy Pace because he had perceived him to be a dangerous rival. There is nothing sinister in the use that Wolsey, and Henry also, made of Pace’s services from 1521 to 1525. Indeed, that they drove him so hard during these years is evidence of their continuing trust and confidence.

  There is a coda to this story. On his return to England in November 1525 Pace’s condition worsened. On the 24th the Venetian ambassador reported that he was no longer allowed visitors, and a month later he wrote of those delusions already referred to. Sometime in 1526 he was replaced as king’s secretary by William Knight, and Wolsey took steps, for which he was commended by the king, to ensure that Pace’s three deaneries were properly administered by appointing coadjutors:30 a normal procedure when holders of church offices were unable for reasons of ill-health or old age to carry out their duties. Shortly afterwards Pace went to reside at the famous Brigettine monastery of Syon.31 In October 1527, having switched allegiance in the king’s ‘great matter’ from Henry’s side to Catherine’s, he tried to arrange a clandestine meeting with the Imperial ambassador, Mendoza, which the latter claimed he had avoided precisely because he believed Pace to be mad. Be that as it may, the government got to hear of Pace’s plan, and he was arrested. And probably the madness had returned, for Pace was surprisingly free with his criticisms not only of Wolsey but of Henry.32 At any rate, after a short spell in the Tower, he was placed in the custody of the abbot of Beaulieu, who was a relation, perhaps even a brother. This did not pre
vent the abbot coming to the conclusion that Pace was incurable, ‘for in his rage and distemperance, renting and tearing his clothes, no man can rule him’.33 By November 1528 poor Pace was very mad indeed, and, moreover, the abbot’s prognosis seems on the whole to have been correct. During Pace’s eight remaining years there were temporary respites, but he was never able to resume a normal life.34

  In all the circumstances, Wolsey’s treatment of Pace was both considerate and patient. His wild accusations against Wolsey have been taken too much at their face value. They must have been highly embarrassing to Wolsey personally, as well as detrimental to the search for the divorce. Yet he made great allowances, going to some lengths to obtain the best treatment for him. And interestingly, Pace could also praise Wolsey, writing, probably in 1527 at the time of his arrest, that ‘whatsoever is spoken here of my lord cardinal’s evil mind against me it is untrue, for he hath nothing done against me but that is to my high contentation, and rather advancement than hindrance’.35 Where mental illness is concerned, there can be no compelling reason for believing one statement rather than another; but if the record of Wolsey’s behaviour towards Pace throughout the 1520s is considered in detail, what may surprise is not any harm that Wolsey may have done, but that he put up with so much.

  The reason for focusing so long on Pace is that it tells us so much about Wolsey’s treatment of his colleagues. What has emerged is not some power-crazed paranoid – indeed it was Pace who was paranoid – but one who, though expecting a lot, treated them with respect and decency. Moreover, and this was commented upon earlier in connection with his conduct of foreign policy, 36 he was quite prepared to listen to different viewpoints. Wolsey did not control royal patronage, did not surround himself with yes-men, nor was he hated by everybody: that has been the argument so far. What is true, however, is that as royal secretary Pace resided, when in England, in the royal household and was therefore in the kind of intimate contact with the king that Wolsey, with his many duties at Westminster, could not be. As such he was well placed to undermine Wolsey’s position. In an even stronger position, because in even closer contact, were members of a newly created department of the household, the privy chamber. It is upon these people that our attention must now focus.

  As the name suggests, the function of members of this department was to wait upon the king in the privy chamber, a private apartment to which he could withdraw in order to escape the hurly-burly of the great chamber and the only slightly less public presence chamber. At one level, their duties were what one would nowadays expect of a servant: seeing to it that when the king got up in the morning the fires were lit and the room ‘pure, clean, wholesome, and meet without any displeasant air’.37 By 1526 such duties were being performed by the grooms of the privy chamber. The ushers controlled the entrances, allowing only those with royal permission to enter, though the great chamber was open to almost anyone. The gentlemen of the privy chamber were particularly responsible for dressing the king, and two of them attended him throughout the night. During the day they were to ‘have a vigilant and reverent respect and eye to his grace so that by his look and countenance they may know what lacketh, or is his pleasure to be had or done’.38 But though their duties were mundane enough, the object of their attentions was not, which meant that they had to be men of discretion and of a certain social standing, accomplished in the ways of the court. Being so close to the king they would overhear all sorts of conversations, some very personal, others to do with important matters of state. They were used as royal messengers, and not only within the environs of the court, for as the 1526 Eltham ordinances put it, they were to be ‘well languaged, expert in outward parts, and meet and able to be sent on familiar messages, or otherwise, to outward princes, when the case shall require’.39 And they were not only the king’s servants and messengers but also the companions of his leisure, whether snowball fights, playing cards and dice, hunting, jousting or performing masques and disguisings. Of course, they were not the only people who took part in these entertainments. At the start of his reign the royal companions had not been organized into a privy chamber, but they performed essentially the same role of servant cum courtier that the sons of the nobility and leading gentry had performed ever since courts first existed. All that was new was the formality.

  As it happened, the original group of royal companions was quickly dispersed: two of its most prominent members, Sir Thomas Knyvet and Sir Edward Howard, were killed in naval engagements, and perhaps more significantly for what follows, others, such as Charles Brandon, created duke of Suffolk in 1514, received promotions and rewards which made it more difficult for them to perform their earlier role. Consequently, new companions had to be sought. In September 1518 took place a grand French embassy which included amongst its entourage six leading ‘gentilzhommes de la Chambre’. To complement these, six Englishmen were given similar titles: Sir Edward Neville, Arthur Pole, Nichlas Carew, Francis Bryan, Henry Norris, and William Carey, just those younger companions who had been emerging during the previous two or three years, and of whom all but Neville had fought in Henry’s ‘band’ at the great joust on 7 July 1517.40 To these six should be added Sir William Compton who from 1510 occupied the office of groom of the stool and, as such, was head of the privy chamber, with special responsibilities not only, as the name suggests, for Henry’s lavatorial requirements but for his day-to-day expenditure, which by the 1520s was running at about £10,000 a year, and for the safe-keeping of his jewels and plate. Like Richard Pace, all these men have been seen as rivals to Wolsey, and we must now look and see if this was so.41

  On 18 May 1519 the Venetian ambassador, Giustinian, wrote:

  Within the last few days his majesty has made a very great change in the court here, dismissing four of his chief lords-in-waiting who enjoyed extreme authority in this kingdom, and were the very soul of the king; he has likewise changed some other officials, replacing them by men of greater age and repute, a measure which is deemed of as vital importance as any that has taken place for many years.42

  In an effort to discover the reason for this ‘great change’ Giustinian had consulted the Venetian organist, Dionysius Memo, whose playing since his arrival in England in September 1516 had so impressed both Henry and Wolsey that he had been given a permanent post at court. Memo came up with various explanations, one of which was that those who had been removed were considered to be too French, through having taken part in an embassy to France during which they had spent some time with Francis I ‘throwing eggs, stones, and other foolish trifles’ at the unsuspecting Parisians. Another view, and one which had the seal of approval from none other than the duke of Norfolk, was that these young men by their obsession with gambling had been leading Henry astray, and that he, ‘resolving to lead a new life, … of his own accord removed these companions of his excesses’.43 Giustinian also consulted the French ambassador and those French hostages who under the terms of the Treaty of London were resident at the court as security for the French payments for the return of Tournai. While admitting that the changes might have had something to do with English suspicions of the French, they came up with quite a different explanation: it was Wolsey who had got rid of them, believing that they had become ‘so intimate with the king that in the course of time they might have ousted him from government’.44 Meanwhile, across the Channel the French court was abuzz with gossip about the changes, and Francis was able with some accuracy to inform the English ambassador at his court, Thomas Boleyn, of the names of those dismissed: Carew, Bryan, Neville, the two Guildfords, Sir John Peachey, Francis Pointz and one other whose name he did not know.45 Of these, Carew, Bryan and Neville had been named as gentlemen of the privy chamber in 1518, while Edward and Henry Guildford and Peachey had a long record of service in the royal household. Here they were, being unceremoniously bundled out of the court, and, at least according to the French ambassador, all because Wolsey had become jealous. On the face of it, it does look as if something quite important had t
aken place, but as so often closer scrutiny raises doubts.

  In order to explain the precise dating of this purge, our attention has recently been directed to Wolsey’s failure in the autumn of 1517 to secure for one of his household servants the hand in marriage of the recently widowed Margaret Vernon. Instead, the prize was won by a member of the privy chamber, William Coffin who, with the help of his colleague, Nicholas Carew, had obtained royal letters in his favour. The gossip at court, and the source was none other than Compton, was that Wolsey was not best pleased.46 In May 1519 he took his revenge – or so it can be argued. One difficulty with this interpretation is that if it was revenge that Wolsey was after, he was peculiarly unsuccessful, for one of the curious things about the ‘expulsions’ is that those expelled did rather well. Carew, the rising star of the royal jousts, was made captain of Rysbank, a castle at the entrance to Calais harbour. Sir Edward Guildford was made marshal of Calais. Sir John Peachey, whom Carew had replaced at Rysbank, was appointed deputy-lieutenant of Calais, replacing Sir Richard Wingfield, one of Wolsey’s so-called ‘creatures’ who replaced the expelled in the privy chamber.47 And in exchanging one Calais office for another in getting Rysbank, Carew was given an increase in his annual salary of some £100, while Peachey’s new office was one of some distinction, more usually held by a nobleman.48 For the others expelled there are no details of promotions, though Sir Henry Guildford retained his important office of master of the horse, which hardly suggests that he was in any serious disgrace. What is true of all those expelled is that the event did not seriously interrupt their already successful careers; in fact, they can hardly be said to have been away from court. Only four months later, Carew and Bryan were taking part in a great masque at the newly acquired palace of Beaulieu in Essex, while the chance survival of the houshold accounts shows that for October and November they were both in receipt of breakfasts and liveries as members of the royal household, as were Sir Henry Guildford, and someone spelt either as Poynes or Poyntes, 49 and my suggestion is that they never lost these privileges. Sir Edward Neville does appear to have left the household at this time, but did not lose royal favour until his alleged treason and consequent execution in 1538, but that event surely cannot be blamed on Wolsey!