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

by Gwyn, Peter

  The argument put forward here is that though Wolsey’s dismissal did not come out of a cloudless sky, the effect of the many difficulties crowding in on every side should not be exaggerated. Wolsey had shown himself to be a past master at getting himself and his king out of tight corners: witness the volte-face that he had achieved in 1525 by exchanging the dead-end of the Imperial alliance for a profitable one with France. In the spring of 1528 he was quick to minimize the economic effects of the declaration of war with the emperor by securing a truce with Margaret and the Low Countries. He had also seen to it that the government had intervened on what may have been a hitherto unprecedented scale to minimize the effects of the bad harvests of 1527 and 1528. These bad harvests are a reminder that luck plays a large part in politics, and Wolsey was unlucky not to have survived into the early 1530s when the harvests improved. Moreover, it was suggested in the previous chapter that if the cards had fallen a little bit more kindly, he might even have obtained the divorce, and in that case the unpopularity of the years 1527 to 1529 would have seemed neither here nor there. After all, perhaps Wolsey’s greatest triumph, the Treaty of London of 1518, had been preceded by two years of failure. In the end, Dame Fortune did not serve Wolsey well, but an awareness of this should not lead us to believe that Wolsey was from early 1527 on a downward slide from which it was impossible to get off. Things were going badly. Speculation was rife. This led some people to believe that the dukes of Norfolk and Suffolk had allied with the Boleyns to bring him down. In reality they had done no such thing. Instead, Wolsey’s fate depended entirely on the continuance of Henry’s confidence, and in particular in his confidence that Wolsey would be successful in his efforts to obtain for him a divorce. Indeed, once Henry had decided to get rid of Catherine and marry Anne, everything in English politics was subordinated to that end.

  Interestingly, even the timing of rumours concerning an aristocratic faction supports the notion of the primacy of the divorce in this matter of Wolsey’s downfall. Mendoza’s first references to an anti-Wolsey faction led by Norfolk in May 1527 came in the same letter in which he first mentioned the divorce, describing it as ‘the finishing stroke’ of all Wolsey’s ‘iniquities’.139 He next mentioned the faction in October, by which time, in his account, the Boleyns had been enlisted.140 Then something rather curious happened. The faction disappeared, or at least for over a year none of the ambassadors mentioned its existence. Admittedly in July 1528 the French ambassador du Bellay reported the cardinal as, by his own account, having to use a ‘terrible alchemy’ to defeat the machinations of unspecified people, 141 but it was not until the following January that Norfolk and the Boleyns occupied the centre stage again, 142 and not until the following month that they were joined in the ambassadors’ reports, and for the first time, by Suffolk.143

  Not everything that Mendoza and du Bellay wrote has survived, so it would be wrong to make too much of this apparent hiatus, but it does look as if the existence of an aristocratic faction coincided in the ambassadors’ minds with the ups and downs of the divorce. At first, it must have seemed that such an unexpected and unusual event needed rather more than a king’s infatuation to explain it. High politics must assuredly come into it somewhere; and if so, and the divorce presaged important changes, then the obvious person to be affected would be Wolsey. When he did not go, and, at any rate during much of 1528, it looked increasingly as if Henry might get his divorce, then there was no need to invent any faction. However, in the autumn of that year the situation changed yet again. Campeggio’s arrival did not precipitate a sentence in Henry’s favour, and by January 1529 it must have been fairly obvious to even a casual observer of the political scene that Wolsey’s efforts to secure a divorce were in disarray. It would also have been obvious that this spelt trouble for him – and hence the aristocratic faction made a reappearance. In fact, though, it was no more a reality in January 1529 than it had been in May 1527. What did spell danger for Wolsey was Henry’s growing impatience. As early as autumn 1527 he had been impatient enough to attempt his own short cut. His failure had enabled Wolsey to get things moving in what he hoped would be a better direction. But having suggested that there was a better way, Wolsey only compounded the more general difficulty just referred to, that as Henry’s ‘tame’ churchman he would be expected to be able to obtain from the Church whatever his master wanted.144 Now he had really put his head on the line, for if the better way proved unsuccessful, then Henry would have every justification for getting rid of him – and in January 1529 Mendoza heard that Henry was beginning to blame Wolsey for his failure to fulfil his promises.145

  Whether January 1529 was the moment when Henry seriously began to contemplate the possibility of removing Wolsey will be considered shortly. Meanwhile it is the obvious that needs to be emphasized. It was Henry who was in love, it was Henry who wanted a divorce, and however weak a character he is assumed to be, he really did not require a faction to tell him that, or even that Wolsey’s divorce plans were not succeeding. It is this simple fact that should have always alerted historians to the fallacy of believing in an aristocratic faction. In terms of Wolsey’s downfall, it is an almost entirely superfluous notion. Perhaps it could be allotted a minor role if Henry were thought so weak and incompetent that he could not have organized the mechanics of Wolsey’s removal, but in view of the large number of people, not to mention heads, that he did remove during the course of his reign, such a belief would be curious. And in fact the Henry I have portrayed in this study was much more able to make decisions than at least two supposed leaders of the faction, Norfolk and Suffolk.

  But what about the Boleyns, father and daughter? Their part in this story, especially Anne’s, has to be rather privileged; and that a scheming Anne plotted Wolsey’s downfall is a commonplace, best exemplified by Cavendish’s account of Wolsey’s last meeting with Henry.146 For almost two months after the adjournment of the legatine court on 23 July 1529 Wolsey had been firmly but politely refused a meeting with the king. Then Henry relented, and Wolsey was allowed to accompany Campeggio on his farewell visit to Grafton, where the king then was. Not unnaturally it had been assumed by those at court that Wolsey’s enforced absence from the royal presence was a prelude to his dismissal, so that his arrival at Grafton came as a surprise. Apparently the betting was that Henry would not actually speak to Wolsey, and the fact that no accommodation was provided for him must have shortened the odds. Everything pointed to a very frosty reception, but in fact Henry greeted him as warmly as ever. And even more worryingly for those who wished the cardinal ill – and in Cavendish’s account this seems to have included everybody – he proceeded after dinner to have a lengthy private meeting with him. Suddenly it looked as if the old wizard was once again casting his spell, but the next day it was the young and beautiful witch whose spell proved the more binding. She suggested a picnic. Henry could not resist. He cancelled the planned further meeting with Wolsey, and was never to see his cardinal again. As told by Cavendish, it is a very good story, but, at least as regards Anne’s part in it, a story is just what it is. For one thing, as will be shown shortly, it is almost certain that for once the court gossip was right and Henry had made his decision to dismiss Wolsey sometime before this last meeting, which from Henry’s viewpoint made it a charade from start to finish. This being the case, there was no need for Anne to have laid on a picnic. And probably the picnic never happened. At any rate, a contemporary account of the Grafton meeting by a member of Wolsey’s household has it that while Henry in Cavendish’s account was supposedly enjoying it, he was in fact closeted with Wolsey and his Council. In the afternoon, indeed, he went hunting, but only after he had taken his leave of Wolsey in what appears to have been a perfectly normal way.147

  It should be remembered that for Cavendish Anne was an undoubted she-devil, so that even if he did not invent her role at Grafton he would have been happy to make use of any rumour or apocryphal story of her guileful ways there. He is also the source for Anne’s ‘pr
ivy indignation’ against Wolsey for having broken up her early affair, perhaps even a precontract of marriage, with Henry Percy, and the decision to get her own back if ever the opportunity arose.148 Some kind of affair with Henry Percy does seem to have occurred, 149 but it has to be admitted that Cavendish’s version gains much of its effect from an awareness of subsequent events, so much so that the suspicion must be that at least some fiction was again involved. Still, Cavendish is not the only source for Anne’s dislike of the cardinal. In October 1527 Mendoza reported that it derived from Wolsey at some time having been instrumental in depriving her father of promotion to high office.150 Earlier it was shown that though in 1519 Boleyn may have had some cause for feeling momentarily aggrieved for his failure to obtain a promised household appointment, it is most unlikely that this would have provoked his daughter’s desire for revenge, for the good reason that Wolsey’s role in the episode vis-à-vis Boleyn was entirely benign, and likely in the end to have been seen as such by him.151 Of course, resentments are not necessarily very rational so that this attempt to try and play down the episode may be misplaced. And what cannot be denied is that in the summer of 1528 Wolsey did prevent the election of the Boleyn candidate for the office of abbess of Wilton. Moreover, earlier in the same year she had given her support to Sir Thomas Cheyney, a member of the privy chamber, whose overreaction to Wolsey’s grant of of a wardship to Sir John Russell had not endeared him to the cardinal or, for that matter, to the king.152

  If one adds all the evidence for Anne disliking Wolsey to the belief, held by du Bellay and Mendoza, that he feared that Anne as queen would mean the end of his influence with Henry, 153 there does seem to be some reason for thinking that she did play an important, perhaps even decisive part in Wolsey’s downfall, but in the end not enough. There is first the same difficulty that was encountered with the two dukes’ opposition to Wolsey, which was that, like them, she was bound to be seen as Wolsey’s enemy whatever her real attitude. It is a difficulty to which there is no solution, except perhaps by giving more credence not to what people were saying about their relationship, but to the relationship itself.

  On 3 March 1528 Thomas Heneage, recently transferred from Wolsey’s household to the king’s, wrote that Anne had complained that Wolsey had sent her no ‘token’ by his recent messenger.154 Wolsey took the hint, and by 16 March Heneage was conveying to Wolsey Anne’s thanks ‘for his kind and favourable writing unto her’, while at the same time reporting her sorrow that Sir Thomas Cheyney should have earned Wolsey’s displeasure.155 In this little exchange there is almost a hint of flirtation in Anne’s behaviour; and at the very least a relationship of some sort is implied, even one that might be expected between royal ‘mistress’ and elder statesman. And clearly Wolsey was in the habit of writing to her, because in July she herself replied to a letter of his, thanking him not only for a present but also for his help, ‘of which I have hitherto had so great plenty that all the days of my life I am most bound of all creatures, next the king’s grace, to love and serve your grace’.156 Perhaps this merely illustrates the hypocrisy of court life, but it is quite an interesting letter for her to have written while the Wilton affair, in which Wolsey did undoubtedly oppose her wishes, was still in progress – and need she have written quite as warmly as she did?

  There were other expressions of her fond regard, and why not?157 As we have seen, in the summer of 1528 Wolsey’s plans for the divorce did appear to be coming to fruition; a decretal commission of sorts had been obtained and Campeggio was on his way to England to start what Anne hoped would be successful legal proceedings. No wonder she wrote loving letters to Wolsey. But that is not to say, of course, that she was a close friend, for what would a young lady enjoying a love affair with her king, from which, if she played her cards right, she had so much to gain, have in common with the elder statesman, conscious as he was of all the dangerous implications of the course she and Henry had embarked upon? Moreover, if she was as sympathetic to Lutheranism as some have maintained, 158 then the mere fact that Wolsey was a cardinal was an added complication. In fact, it seems more likely that it was political advantage rather than genuine conversion that might have inclined her to encourage reform, and the Lutheran Anne is probably more of an invention of a subsequent Protestant tradition, in which her role as Elizabeth I’s mother was important. What is not in doubt, though, is that Anne was a very determined lady; there would have been no ‘great matter’ if she had not been, and there is no reason to suppose that her determination would have stopped at trying to remove Wolsey if she had felt he stood in her way. But since until very late in this story he must have seemed the one man in England capable of realizing her wishes, far from organizing an anti-Wolsey faction she had every incentive to try to get on with him; hence the ‘loving’ letters. Equally there was every incentive for Wolsey to get on with her. Theirs was surely a perfectly good working relationship, with the one proviso that Wolsey had to obtain the divorce? There is no more need to invent a conspiracy led by Anne than one by Norfolk, or anyone else.

  And if there was no plot to destroy Wolsey, then Anne’s father could hardly have been part of one! Moreover, even if logic did not insist upon this conclusion, the evidence would. Earlier it was shown that the notion that Wolsey had done his utmost to thwart Sir Thomas Boleyn’s career cannot be sustained, whatever occasional misunderstandings may have occurred.159 And Boleyn’s was a highly successful career, which in 1525 had resulted in his elevation to the peerage as Viscount Rochford. True that this was probably a consolation for Henry’s and Wolsey’s failure, so far, to persuade the Butler family to surrender to Sir Thomas the earldom of Ormond, then in their hands, but to which Boleyn had a claim. But that Henry bothered to further the Boleyn claim, ironically by trying to arrange a marriage between James Butler and none other than Anne, and was willing to to ennoble Sir Thomas indicates his high standing with the king, a high standing that preceded any interest in his daughters. One way or another, it is hardly possible that in 1527, when Henry decided that he was going to marry the younger Boleyn daughter, Sir Thomas can have had much reason for wanting to get rid of Wolsey. Moreover, he would no doubt have shared Anne’s and Henry’s belief that Wolsey was the most likely person to bring about their marriage.

  What the foreign ambassadors make clear is that in the period just before and after Wolsey’s dismissal, Boleyn, even more than either Norfolk or Suffolk, was constantly in attendance upon the king, and here they are reporting the evidence of their own eyes rather than gossip and rumour. Whether this means that his influence at this time was significantly greater than those two is another matter. Du Bellay thought it was: on 4 October he reported that it was Boleyn ‘who leads the dance expressly against the dukes and Wolsey’, 160 and on the 12th he launched into a tirade against him, calling him ‘vainglorious’, only anxious to show that ‘none of the others have influence except insofar as his daughter is prepared to allow it’.161 The report of the new Imperial ambassador, Chapuys, of his first meeting with Henry and the English court at Grafton in September also gives the impression that Boleyn’s influence was dominant, even if by the end of October he was clear that the dukes, especially Norfolk, were the real powers at court.162 But Boleyn’s constant attendance upon the king at this time should hardly come as a surprise. As the father of the woman Henry loved and intended to marry, it was inevitable that he should be more intimately involved than either Norfolk or Suffolk in the search for a divorce, which, while it was on one level a most important matter of state, on another was a private concern in which he was a principal party. This does not necessarily mean that Henry took him in to his confidence about his intentions towards his leading minister, but what must be true is that once the decision was made he was bound to make more use than ever not only of Boleyn, but of Norfolk and Suffolk. There may have been some element of calculation on Henry’s part here. Wolsey’s dismissal, especially in the circumstances of the divorce, was a potentially dangerous moment for h
im, so he would have been anxious for the great men of the kingdom to show their support by keeping a high profile. More simply, they happened to be the men available to Henry, great not only in status but in experience of the conduct of affairs. And there was also an element of optical illusion. With Wolsey no longer there to mask them, they appeared more prominent; but they had always been there.