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

by Gwyn, Peter

  And can Wolsey’s failure to obtain the hand of a widow in marriage for one of his household servants really be a convincing explanation for the events of May 1519? It was shown earlier that the main recipients of royal favour were precisely members of the royal household, such as William Coffin, a fact of life which Wolsey may not have liked, but certainly had to lump. In the Vernon case Wolsey had probably acted for his servant in a fairly routine way, without initially being aware of Coffin’s interest. Moreover, Wolsey was by no means the only person being asked to put in a good word with the king, and so had to take his chances with the rest. On this occasion, his servant lost, but not even the king won all the time; and Wolsey himself does not appear to have done too badly, for he secured ‘the wardship of young Mr Vernon and Mr Clifton’.50 If the failure to secure the young man’s mother for his servant had led to the severe bout of paranoia concerning members of the privy chamber that has been alleged, one cannot help feeling that Wolsey would have had to have been certified long before his master dispensed with his services, for quite other reasons, in 1529.

  One way and another the ‘purge’ of 1519 appears to have been something of a storm in a tea-cup, and not one that Giustinian, for all his excitement about the ‘very great change’, ever mentioned again. Probably on reflection he realized that it had not been so significant, but may be his initial excitement had been fuelled by the French ambassador and his compatriots at court, for what seems to have happened is this: although a French alliance was never popular in England, since the previous summer it had become the cornerstone of English foreign policy. Relations between the two countries were thus in a particularly sensitive state in which possible slights and misunderstandings were likely. People were saying that the changes at court reflected anti-French feeling. To counter this, the French ambassador was putting it about that it was Wolsey who was behind the changes, and it needs to be stressed that it was only ever the French, as reported by Giustinian, who associated Wolsey with this ‘purge’; and the fact that two such hostile commentators as Hall and Vergil did not, helps to confirm the account given here.

  What convinced Giustinian that the ‘French view’ was right was the provenance of those brought in to replace the expelled. They were Sir Richard Wingfield, Sir Richard Jerningham, Sir Richard Weston and Sir William Kingston. Interestingly, they were given the new and rather grand title of ‘knights for the body in the king’s privy chamber’. What has more usually caught the attention has been Giustinian’s comment that they were ‘creatures of Cardinal Wolsey’.51 Edward Hall took a different view, describing them merely as ‘sad and ancient knights’, 52 and in doing so he seems to have been more accurate. All four had been in royal service for a considerable time. About ten years older than Wolsey, Weston had entered the royal household by 1505 at the latest as groom of the chamber. Wingfield had been an esquire of the body as early as 1500, when Wolsey was still at Oxford, and was made marshal of Calais in 1511. Kingston had been a yeoman of the chamber as early as 1497 and a gentleman usher in 1504. Less is known about the early career of Jerningham, but by 1511 he was sufficiently important to be sent on a mission to Venice. All these men had begun their careers in the royal service before Wolsey could have acted as their patron. Their rise was not as spectacular as his, or, indeed, as Brandon’s or Compton’s. Instead, they were typical royal servants of the second rank: competent, hard-working and loyal, they had climbed slowly but steadily up the ladder of promotion, and their appointments in 1519 were but the next rung. They may have got on well with Wolsey; there is no obvious evidence either way. As loyal servants of the Crown they would undoubtedly have tried their best to co-operate with him and to carry out his instructions, but this hardly makes them his ‘creatures’.

  Why, then, were they appointed to these new posts in the privy chamber? What all four men did possess was a certain age and experience, and so perhaps it was a certain gravitas that was their attraction. The privy chamber was, in a formal sense at any rate, a very new department, and what seems to have been felt was that in order to get it established it needed greater status. This was best provided by putting at its head more senior men, at the same time giving them a grander title. It may also be true, and was certainly said at the time, that the likes of Carew and Bryan had been behaving in too frolicsome a fashion and needed a touch of the reins, perhaps even a little experience of the less glamorous side of royal service.53 In this context a letter that the earl of Surrey wrote to Wolsey in October 1523 is of some interest. At Newcastle in command of a royal army raised to defend the North from invasion by the duke of Albany, he was finding it such a worrying business that, as he had written earlier, he was quite decayed in body as well as worn out in purse.54 Such feelings no doubt encouraged him to speak his mind. Please, he wrote, could ‘some noblemen of the king’s house and the south parts’ be sent to help him.

  God knoweth, if the poorest gentleman in the king’s house were here, and I at London and were advertised of this news, I would not fail to kneel upon my knees before the king’s grace to have licence to come hither in post to be at the day of battle. And if young noblemen and gentlemen be not desirous and willing to be at such journeys and take the pain and give the adventure, and the king’s highness well contented with those that will so do, and not regarding others that will be but dancers, dicers and carders, his grace shall not be well served when he would be; for men without experience shall do small service, and experience of war will not be had without it be sought for and the adventure given.55

  Given that Surrey had spent so much of his life fighting for the king, the emotional force of this passage is very understandable. It also made a good deal of sense. But in the present context it is what it has to tell of the likes of Bryan and Carew and others in the privy chamber that is of most interest. The impression is not of politically powerful figures, but rather of young men being trained, though in Surrey’s view not very well, to be effective royal servants. One aspect of this training should have been active campaigning, but in May 1519 there was none to be had, and so the young men had perhaps got a little out of control. Now in 1523, the time for dancing and dicing was over. On 23 October Surrey was reporting the arrival of the marquess of Dorset and ‘all the gentlemen of the king’s house, ’ and among them none other than Sir Francis Bryan and Sir Nicholas Carew.56

  Someone who was not sent up North that October was Sir William Compton, but this was no doubt only because he had been there earlier in the year. It was Vergil who first suggested that Compton had been deliberately sent to the war because Wolsey disliked the fact that ‘Henry found him most agreeable’, and because Compton ‘disliked Wolsey’s ruthless nature’.57 Recently this suggestion has been revived and elaborated upon, in order to promote a conspiracy-theory view of the conduct of foreign policy, this an off-shoot of the factional view of Henrician politics that has become almost an orthodoxy. According to this, the decision to go to war against France in 1522 – which also meant war with Scotland, and hence the presence of the royal army on the northern border in 1523 – was taken primarily in the interests of Wolsey’s factional fighting against members of the privy chamber.58 Despite the ‘purge’ of 1519, they had become too big for their boots. The only way Wolsey could devise to get rid of them was to have a war, because then there could be no excuse for them to hang around the court. The real reasons for the war have already been discussed, and included among them was no desire to separate Henry from his courtiers. It is also most unlikely that war would have achieved what Wolsey is supposed to have wanted. Rather, it would probably have provided just the occasion for such men to shine, and thereby to gain yet more influence over a king who was always attracted by the martial arts.

  There is, in fact, no direct evidence why Compton went to war in the spring of 1523, but Surrey’s letters written that autumn again provide important clues: people such as Compton should ‘be at such journeys’ because it was expected of them. The nobility were for fighting, and if
Compton was not strictly a nobleman, he was the next best thing, a gentleman close to the king with an ever-expanding landed estate. That Compton, who, incidentally, had gone with Henry on the French campaign of 1513 and had been knighted after the capture of Tournai, had joined Surrey on the Scottish border thus hardly needs an explanation. Indeed, what surprised – and annoyed – Surrey was that more people like Compton had not accompanied him: and it needs to be stressed that it was Surrey who was clamouring for members of the household to be sent up to him, not Wolsey who was anxious to see them go. In fact, their staying at court probably had nothing to do, as Surrey thought, with their love of courtly pleasures, nor with any machinations of Wolsey’s, but with the more mundane fact that Henry was expecting at any moment to launch an army across the Channel for which they would be needed, especially if he himself was to go. And this highlights a serious weakness in the factional view of Henrician politics. It completely ignores the practicalities – that armies have to be raised and that men have to be sent on embassies not because somebody wants to be rid of them but because they are the best, or perhaps even the only, people available. In the real world the exigencies of the moment usually dictate what happens, and in so doing make life very difficult for the conspirator – even one as wicked and as wily as Wolsey! And even if the above interpretation of Compton’s journey north were wrong, and it was all a plot by Wolsey, it would have been one that Henry approved of, for why else would he write to Surrey to thank him for having ‘lovingly entertained’ Compton while he had been in the North? Furthermore, Surrey replied that he had done no more than his duty, for he was ‘bound to make much of all such that I know your grace should favour’, especially since ‘at my coming from your highness, your grace showed me your pleasure was I should so do, and to make the more of him for your sake’.59 In this exchange there is not even a whiff of any machinations by Wolsey.

  If it is true, as has been argued here, that neither in 1519 nor in 1523 did Wolsey set out to remove men of standing from the king’s presence, it becomes less likely that he attempted to do so in 1525-6, though not, of course, impossible. It has been suggested that he did precisely this, 60 and it could well be that, as these people became better established, Wolsey would have resorted to more Machiavellian tactics in order to retain his own influence with the king. Moreover, by mid-1525 things were not going particularly well. The Amicable Grant had failed, the Great Enterprise had had to be called off, and the result was a return to the always unpopular alliance with the erstwhile enemy, France. All this could have weakened Wolsey’s position with the king and made him more sensitive to competition. There is no evidence that at this date it did, but what has given rise to speculation that Wolsey did attempt to exclude his rivals from court are his efforts to reform the royal household, culminating with the Eltham ordinances of January 1526. One consequence of these was that not only was the privy chamber thinned down from about twenty-two to fifteen, but that some of its leading lights, including Compton, Bryan and Carew, were excluded. Thus, it can be argued that what Wolsey had failed to do in 1519 and 1523 he at last achieved in January 1526.61

  In fact, the argument is no more convincing than those put forward for the earlier episodes. For one thing, in 1526 as in 1519, none of the people removed was in any way disgraced. Indeed, most of them received, or had recently received, rather lucrative offices. The marquess of Dorset, who had always been a close friend of the king without exercising any very obvious influence, did not immediately receive a compensatory office, but later in the year he became lord master of Princess Mary’s Council in the Marches of Wales, an appointment which hardly suggests that he had earlier been ‘purged’. Moreover, he continued to receive marks of royal favour, including, in 1528, a share in the constableship of Warwick Castle with his former privy chamber colleague, Sir Francis Bryan. He was also frequently at court and was placed fifth in the list of the twenty leading royal councillors as set out in the very instrument of his purging, the Eltham ordinances the only people above him being Wolsey, Norfolk, Tunstall and Suffolk. His position could hardly have been more pre-eminent.

  Sir Richard Weston has been mentioned already as one of ‘the creatures of Cardinal Wolsey’ brought into the privy chamber in 1519, along with another person purged in 1526, Sir William Kingston. That Wolsey would then wish to remove them in 1526 might, therefore, seem a little odd. Of course, six years is a long time in politics, and perhaps Wolsey had grown to distrust them. But there is probably nothing odd about it at all, for just as their original appointment to the privy chamber probably had nothing to do with Wolsey’s factional interests, so neither had their removal. In the autumn of 1525 Weston had been appointed treasurer of Calais. This was quite an important post, with a salary of £100 and apparently requiring residence in Calais.62 At any rate, Weston went, and this provides the most obvious explanation for why he ceased to be a member of the privy chamber. Kingston, though, did not leave court, for he retained his office of captain of the guard, which meant, as the Eltham ordinances made clear, that he had important duties to perform in the royal household. Moreover, in 1524 he had been made constable of the Tower of London, another office with real responsibilities, one of which would be to escort the arrested Wolsey down from the North in 1530. In 1525 he had been given the duchy of Lancaster stewardships, previously retained by the chancellor of the duchy but not given to More when he was appointed to that office.63 It looks as if Kingston had been given quite enough, both to do and by way of reward, and he was probably quite happy to be relieved of his privy chamber duties. And if Wolsey was planning to cut down expenditure on the household, discontinuing Kingston’s membership of the privy chamber would have made sense.

  Of the three who might be considered to have possessed rather more political importance, Carew, Bryan and Compton, least is known about Carew. He seem to have received no office or grant of royal favour to compensate him for loss of privy chamber membership, but as master of the horse from 1522 he remained a significant figure at court, and when in 1527 Francis I was made a knight of the garter it was Carew who conveyed it to him. And he was to remain significant enough at Court to have his head cut off in 1539! Bryan also seems to have received nothing. Perhaps it was felt that with an annual income of some £400 he was in no need of further remuneration. But he is an interesting figure if, as befits his sobriquet of ‘the Vicar of Hell’, a rather shadowy one.64 Related to Anne Boleyn, his return to the privy chamber in the summer of 1528 may be connected with her increasing influence. It was he who was sent to Paris in the summer of 1528 to escort Campeggio across the Channel and to Rome on an important mission in connection with the divorce in November, with instructions to submit regular reports for the king’s eyes only;65 and some of these reports were critical of the way the divorce had been handled. Here, at last, is something with a whiff of faction about it, but it is only a whiff, and it could be a false trail. One would need something a bit more definite before it was possible to argue convincingly that Wolsey saw Bryan, along with the others removed from the privy chamber in 1526, as a serious rival, and thus interpret the Eltham ordinances in a factional sense. Moreover, if, as was suggested earlier, 66 Henry made his own appointments, then presumably he would have controlled dismissals as well, especially as regards so intimate a matter as a personal servant and companion. So, even if he had wanted to, it is most unlikely that Wolsey was ever in a position to conduct a purge of the royal household.

  What is also clear is that, whatever his intentions, Wolsey never succeeded in keeping Bryan, or anyone else, away from the king for any length of time, and it is worth making the point that even after 1526 Compton and Carew continued to be provided with lodgings in the royal household, as indeed did Dorset, Kingston and Weston, presumably, therefore, still well placed to influence the king, if that was what they were bent on. Wolsey was far too intelligent not to have quickly realized the impossibility of doing away with people whom the king liked. Both his instinct and his pra
ctice were to conciliate, and there is no reason to suppose that members of the privy chamber were the exception. Neither is there any evidence that he and Bryan did not get on well. He accompanied the cardinal on both his great embassies abroad, to Bruges and Calais in 1521 and to Amiens and Compiègne in 1527, which suggests that Wolsey trusted him and appreciated his diplomatic skills. If, on the other hand, it is argued that on these occasions the choice of Bryan was not Wolsey’s, then this hardly suggests that Wolsey would have been able to remove him from the privy chamber against the king’s wishes. A letter that Bryan wrote to Wolsey in connection with his escorting Campeggio to England in 1528 is very much a friendly exchange between people who knew and respected each other67 – a view which is not necessarily contradicted by what can be taken to be veiled criticisms of Wolsey in his reports from Rome in the spring of 1529.68 Spurred on by both Henry and Wolsey to obtain from the pope something that they realized would not be forthcoming, he and his colleagues were in a difficult position. They had therefore little option but to criticize their instructions or to admit their own incompetence. In the strained atmosphere of those months criticisms were bound to surface, but they should not be taken as evidence of an endemic rivalry between Wolsey and the likes of Bryan.