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

by Gwyn, Peter

  There seem to be two possible explanations, not mutually exclusive, for the interval of almost three weeks which elapsed between Wolsey’s last meeting with the king and the first formal charges being brought against him. The simpler one is that since the new law term did not open until 9 October, that day was the first opportunity after the leave-taking for charges to be brought. The second is that it would be preferable if Campeggio were out of the country before the moves against his fellow legate became public, and the calculation probably was that three weeks would allow sufficient time. As it was, bad weather delayed Campeggio in Canterbury until 26 October, so that, rather to Henry’s embarrassment, news of Wolsey’s disgrace reached the Italian cardinal before he set sail.195 Poor Campeggio also suffered the indignity of having his luggage searched, perhaps in a last despairing effort to lay hands on that elusive decretal commission which he had taken the precaution of destroying sometime before, or perhaps merely to get hold of any other documents that might further the king’s case.196 When Campeggio justifiably protested to Henry, he got a flea in his ear.197 Henry had obtained all that he could immediately hope for from his papal legates: the real battle was with the pope himself. In this, Campeggio’s goodwill might have been of some help, but his concern to hang on to the see of Salisbury would probably ensure that anyway. For the moment a little rough handling might help him to convey to the pope just how annoyed Henry was; something that Wolsey’s disgrace would help to make crystal-clear.

  That Wolsey’s downfall was intended as a signal to the pope is suggested by the means Henry chose to achieve it. He could, after all, merely have removed him from office without bringing any charges. Both Fox and Warham before him had retired to their dioceses, and if Wolsey’s retirement would not have been quite as voluntary as theirs, it is difficult to see how he could have resisted the suggestion. On the other hand, Henry could have mounted a full-scale attack on Wolsey’s ‘personal rule’, and he certainly went to the lengths of preparing, or rather inventing, evidence for just such an attack. Articles against Wolsey were prepared, and in his opening address to the Reformation Parliament, his successor as lord chancellor, Sir Thomas More, made his celebrated reference to ‘the great wether, which is of late fallen’, and who had ‘so craftily, so scabbedly, yea and so untruly juggled with the king’.198 In the end the articles were never formally presented, but instead were used as a weapon in the elaborate negotiations with Wolsey after his dismissal from office, and probably this was all they were ever intended for.199 As it is, Henry’s decision to prosecute Wolsey for praemunire, the basis of the charge being his prevention, by virtue of his legatine authority, of clerics to two totally unimportant benefices, seems at first sight extraordinary. The punishment seems so disproportionate to the crime. And it was also hypocritical of Henry to make the charge, because it was he who had asked Wolsey to make use of his legatine powers in this way. Added to which, the basis for the charge was almost certainly a fabrication; for, though Wolsey had occasionally made preventions, such evidence as there is suggests that in the two instances cited he had not.200 All this points to there being something very deliberate about Henry’s choice of praemunire to bring Wolsey down. As well as leading royal servant, Wolsey had been in a very public sense the pope’s chief representative in England, and it was the pope whom Henry was now anxious to get at. Furthermore, if a charge of praemunire had become merely a technicality in the English law courts, it was also part of an English tradition of opposition to papal pretension, and in the fourteenth century, when the praemunire statutes originated, opposition in particular to the papal power to prevent. So Henry’s use of this charge against Wolsey was not only deliberate; it was also very appropriate.

  In the first place, it would remind Clement of the independent traditions of the English Church which not even a papal legate as powerful as Wolsey could withstand, and which Clement, by refusing to do his duty by Henry in the matter of the divorce, was ignoring at his peril. Secondly, it would remind the English Church, which earlier in the reign had appeared to require some reminder, that, if it owed a double allegiance, to pope and king, the first claim on its loyalty should be to the latter. And if any member of the Church showed any inclination to ignore this, it was always possible to use the Church’s acceptance of Wolsey’s legatine powers to bring a charge of praemunire against that member, as indeed was going to happen.201 Meanwhile, Henry had summoned a parliament in which he could manipulate any latent anticlericalism in order to put yet further pressure on the Church to stick closely by him as his quarrel with the pope escalated. All this means that Wolsey’s downfall marked the opening of, if not exactly a new strategy, because Wolsey’s had contained a good deal of the stick as well as carrot, certainly one in which the stick came more and more to dominate. It was a strategy which was to lead to the ‘break with Rome’, and the declaration in 1533 by an English Church, ‘sufficient and meet of itself, 202 that his marriage to Catherine had always been invalid.203 In 1529 Henry did not intend this outcome, but only because he hoped that the sacrifice of his papal legate would help to make more extreme measures unnecessary.

  In the months prior to Wolsey’s downfall Henry emerges very much as the Machiavellian prince, in full control of himself and of those close to him, and so skilled in the arts of manipulation and deception that his decision to dispense with his services appears to have taken Wolsey by surprise. It was an extraordinary achievement, especially since from at least January 1529 Wolsey had been well aware that his position was under threat. How did Henry manage it?

  For some people the explanation may be found in Wolsey’s supposed arrogance: in the end he just ignored all the signs because he believed himself to be indispensable. There could be something in this, though it would be a little unfair to concentrate on the arrogance. Henry and Wolsey had survived through good times and bad for over fifteen years, and the notion that the reward for his devoted service, particularly in this matter of the divorce, would be humiliation and disgrace, must have been very hard for Wolsey to contemplate. Thus, if reason pointed in one direction, his heart probably pointed in another, especially as Henry skilfully fed the heart with just enough to keep the hope alive that before long he would be restored to his master’s full confidence. The masterstroke does seem to have been Grafton, for just when Wolsey’s services could be entirely dispensed with, Henry appeared to welcome him back into the fold. When Wolsey left Grafton, his keeper of the wardrobe was able to reassure Cromwell that, despite the many rumours to the contrary, all was well;204 and probably Wolsey did believe that the worst was over. At any rate, right up until the last moment the king was still consulting him, while on 6 October, only two days before his indictment for praemunire, he took a leading role in an interview with the new Imperial ambassador, Chapuys, despite both Norfolk and Suffolk being present.205 When on 9 October the blow came, it must have taken Wolsey by surprise, but it should not surprise us. It was the same with all Henry’s leading ministers and courtiers when the time for their destruction came, because in every case it was Henry who made the decision, and he kept it very close to his chest. So there could be no leaks, only endless speculation and rumour which, though alarming, did allow the victim to hope that all would be well, right up until the moment that Henry struck.

  Some may find this interpretation of Wolsey’s downfall too simple. By concentrating on one issue, the divorce, and on one agent of Wolsey’s destruction, Henry himself, it may be felt that too much has been ignored. After all, the courts of sixteenth-century kings were notoriously treacherous places, where everyone was looking for any opportunity to do his or her rival down, or so at least the courtier poets of the time would have us believe.

  Say to the Court it glows,

  and shines like rotten wood,

  … Tell potentates, they live

  Acting by others’ action,

  Not loved unless they give,

  Not strong but by a faction:

  … Tell men of high condi
tion,

  That manage the estate,

  Their purpose is ambition,

  Their practice only hate:

  And if they once reply,

  Then give them all the lie.206

  So instructed Sir Walter Raleigh; while earlier Sir Thomas Wyatt, who as a member of the king’s household throughout the 1520s would have had ample opportunity to observe Wolsey at first hand, explained thus his reasons for leaving the court: ‘I cannot speak and look like a saint, / Use wiles for wit and make a deceit a pleasure/ And call craft counsel, for profit still to paint207 – and much else besides. Literature is not life, but there is enough evidence around to suggest that the poets had a point: ministers and courtiers were executed or disgraced in some numbers, and even queens lost their heads. And surely a man like Wolsey, a royal favourite for over a decade, a man who had risen from ‘butcher’s cur’ to become lord chancellor and cardinal legate and in the process amassed a fortune, such a man must have excited envy, and made dangerous enemies? And would not those enemies come from the English nobility, whose natural role as leading royal councillors he had so blatantly, by some accounts, usurped? Faction and intrigue must have existed if only because they are the very stuff of high politics, and any analysis of Wolsey’s downfall that ignores them must be seriously flawed.

  Perhaps; but whatever generalizations are made about the workings of high politics, the historian has to pay attention to the particular circumstances and to the surviving evidence. It has been argued in this chapter that the evidence for Wolsey being destroyed by an aristocratic faction is slight, and that what there is of it is unconvincing. The truth is that not enough can be known about what the leading members of that supposed faction thought about Wolsey to conclude that they wanted to plot his overthrow. To state that they did is, therefore, at best a guess, at worst an invention. Of course, much of history has to be guesswork, and, however great the wealth of evidence, must in the end involve the historian in a judgement. Here the judgement has been that Wolsey got on perfectly well with individual nobles such as Norfolk and Suffolk, but also with the nobility as a group. This was not because Wolsey was a particularly ‘nice guy’, but because he was a good politician, who could see no advantage in antagonizing people upon whom the good government of the kingdom depended, and who, if he got on the wrong side of them, could have made things very difficult for him. In this matter of Wolsey’s downfall, the danger has always been to accept too readily the views of foreign ambassadors with their inevitably very partial vision, and it is hoped that here this danger has been avoided. A new danger has derived from recent interpretations of Henry’s character and the workings of his court. Despite the efforts of his most outstanding modern biographer, the prevalent view is that Henry was a king who was easily manipulated; indeed, so weak was he that he needed to be manipulated for anything to happen. This view has been attacked here. It was Henry who had made Wolsey, and it was Henry who destroyed him, just as he was to make and destroy Thomas Cromwell. He made all the important decisions and appointments. In every sense he ruled.

  If this is so, then the interpretation of Wolsey’s downfall offered here is not as naïve as it might at first appear. Serious fighting usually only breaks out when there is weakness at the centre, which in the case of a monarchy means when the king is a minor or has some obvious character defect – the reigns of Henry III, Edward II, Richard II, and Henry VI are all instances of this. Henry VIII, though at seventeen technically a minor when he ascended the throne, never behaved as one. From the start he caught people’s imagination as the very model of what a king should be. Moreover, he succeeded to the throne of a kingdom which, though driven rather too hard by his father who had been faced with the unenviable task of establishing a new dynasty, was essentially in good order.

  It could be said of Henry and Wolsey that, as these things go, they had a fairly easy ride. It is true that there were Yorkist rivals about, but despite the occasional alarm, the ‘White Rose’, Richard de la Pole, never posed a serious threat, and anyway he had the good manners to die at the Battle of Pavia in 1525. Scotland was a nuisance, but the scale of the English victory at Flodden and the resulting minority of James v ensured that it was never much more than that for all the efforts of the duke of Albany. And if Scotland was a nuisance, Ireland was only a minor irritation. The European powers presented greater problems, but they were mainly of Henry’s own choosing, a consequence of his determination to play a major role in Europe. They offered no major threat to his throne. There was indigenous heresy in the shape of Lollardy, but on a scale small enough for Wolsey not to have to bother with it personally. Lutheranism, though potentially much more serious, in the 1520s was certainly containable. There were bad harvests, plague and the Sweat, and short periods of economic distress, not helped by the heavy taxation required to support Henry’s European ambitions. A case can be made for the situation getting worse as the 1520s progressed, but even so most problems were temporary and manageable, and the strains on the political nation were never very great.

  In the 1530s things would be very different. Henry’s marriages and the ensuing dynastic confusion, together with the ‘break with Rome’ and the religious conflict that followed, did impose enormous strain. Some say that it was during this decade that a ‘Tudor Revolution’ occurred, and whatever doubts have been cast, probably correctly, on this notion, it does at least draw attention to the extraordinary nature of the decade. The times were out of joint. Henry was faced with a major rebellion, which for a time presented him with a much larger force than he could raise himself. In addition, the threat of foreign intervention became for the first time in his reign a reality. Everything was more difficult, and as a result even a strong king would have to become more Machiavellian, might even have to play off rival factions in order to get his way. It is possible to argue that Wolsey was the first victim of this new political climate: indeed, insofar as this climate was created by Henry’s desire to marry Anne, the argument contains an obvious truth. But while any interpretation of Wolsey’s downfall must always be speculative, the one that seems to fit best all the known facts and probabilities is that it was the ruthless act of a strong king determined to get his way.

  One thing that this interpretation would seem to challenge is a central theme of this study: that Henry’s and Wolsey’s relationship had been a genuine marriage of minds and personalities. As late as June 1528 Henry wanted Wolsey to know that with the Sweat threatening he was anxious for him to stay as close as possible, so that ‘every hour one of you might hear of the other, and that his physicians might be as well for his grace as for him if any chance should fortune’.208 And in the following May du Bellay’s view was that Wolsey loved his master more than himself.209 But if there was so much love and concern, why did the marriage break down? A final assessment of their relationship must await the last chapter, but as regards Wolsey’s downfall this much may be said. Henry’s ‘great matter’ was not any old issue which, after fifteen years of wear and tear and plenty of opportunity for either party to become bored or irritated by the other, just happened to be the final straw. It was ‘great’ just because it combined a number of powerful ingredients. These included Henry’s latent anticlericalism, and the belief that what was right for him was right for his country. But above all it included love, and one way of explaining Wolsey’s downfall is that in the end Henry loved Anne more than he loved Wolsey.

  1 Rawdon Brown, ii, p.270 (LP, iii, 235).

  2 See p.153 above.

  3LP, iii, 1717.

  4LP, iii, 1717.

  5 It is Pace who mentioned that it was More who had informed him of Wolsey’s displeasure, which rather suggests that More was deputed to; see LP, iii, 1717.

  6 Scarisbrick, Thought, 52, p.253.

  7 Elton, Tudor Revolution, pp.32, 56-9; Higham.

  8 Chambers, English Representation, pp.390-3.

  9 See p.156 above.

  10 Wegg, pp.225 ff for the above and for much of what
follows.

  11St. P, vi, p.288 (LP, iv, 374).

  12LP, iv, 605.

  13St. P, vi, p.334 (LP, iv, 605).

  14St. P, vi, p.341 (LP, iv, 605).

  15St. P, vi, p.314 (LP, iv, 442).

  16CWE, 2, pp.141-2.

  17Sp. Cal., ii, p.660.

  18Ven. Cal., iii, 897.

  19Ven. Cal., iii, 899.

  20 See pp.385-6 above.

  21Ven. Cal., iii, 888.

  22Ven. Cal., iii, 947.

  23LP, iv, 1178.

  24 See Erasmus’s reference to Pace’s ‘love-affairs’ in LP, iv, 1547; see also LP, iv, 2252 for Pace’s own references to love. For his insomnia see LP, iv, 1546, 1678.

  25Ven. Cal., iii, 1175, 1187.

  26Ven. Cal., iii, 888.

  27Ven. Cal., iii, 975.

  28 Chambers, Cardinal Bainbridge, pp.22 ff. For Pace’s francophobia see his comment to Wolsey in Feb. 1523: ‘We shall soon leave the French king without a friend; the Gallic eagle will not have a single feather to fly with.’ (LP, iii, 2847).

  29 Headley, Emperor and his Chancellor, pp.86 ff. is interesting on this.

  30LP, iv, 2420, 2434.

  31Ven, Cal., iv, 144