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

by Gwyn, Peter

  However that may be, the ban was an unusual step to have taken, and indicative of the increasing strain that failure to secure a divorce was imposing upon Henry and his councillors. So much activity had resulted in so little progress, as letters that Henry received from his envoys in Rome on 30 September would have made all too clear to him.125 Indeed, given that the wretched envoys had not even dared to carry out his most recent instructions, Henry might well feel that there had been no progress at all. Certainly, he felt in no position to meet parliament, which was due to reassemble on 1 October, but which he had prorogued until the 22nd.126 Before it met he called yet another meeting to consider the divorce. Chapuys refers only to clergy and lawyers being present,127 which suggests a more specialized gathering than at some of the previous meetings. And the question before them was in a sense a technical one: ‘whether in virtue of the privileges possessed by this kingdom, parliament could and would enact that notwithstanding the pope’s prohibition, this cause of the divorce be decided by the archbishop of Canterbury’.128 Henry’s problem was that, whatever view was taken of English privileges, it was most unlikely that they permitted an English bishop to decide upon a matter which the pope had specifically forbidden anyone other than himself to consider. And that was precisely the view that the meeting took. No wonder that

  the king was very angry, and adopted the expedient of proroguing parliament till the month of February in the hope, as may be supposed, that in the meanwhile he may hit upon some means of bringing over to his opinion the said lawyers as well as some members of his parliament, with whose power he is continually threatening the pope, and see whether by compulsion or persuasion he can ultimately gain his end.129

  And on the day that Henry learned the unwelcome verdict of his clergy and lawyers he was telling the papal nuncio that he was being very strongly urged to summon

  parliament for the punishment of the clergy who were indeed so hated throughout his kingdom, both by the nobles and the people, that but for his protection they would be utterly destroyed, and yet in spite of this urgent request he had determined to prorogue parliament till the month of February next, to see whether the pope would in the meantime adopt a different course of action towards him.130

  This assessment of Henry’s tactics is Chapuys’s, as is the report of the meeting itself, for which he is the only source. The view here is that it is in essence correct, which, given the scepticism with which so many ambassadorial reports in this book have been greeted, calls for further comment. Chapuys’s assessment convinces for two reasons. It ties in with the known facts concerning both the English negotiations at Rome and events at home, and particularly with the fact that parliament was indeed prorogued, though until January and not February as Chapuys first thought. It also makes a lot of sense. Henry was trying to threaten the pope with talk of parliament and the independent jurisdictional powers of the English Church, when neither body were quite as willing to do his bidding as he was pretending. To ensure that they were, the cardinal archbishop of York might be of some use to him.

  When the October meeting took place, the sixteen praemunire charges were public knowledge, and it would have been understood how easy it would be for Henry to use the same weapon against anyone. It is thus all the more surprising, and rather to its credit, that the meeting chose not to come up with the answer that Henry was looking for. One explanation for why the threat did not work must surely be that many members of the Tudor establishment were rather more principled than has usually been allowed. It has been no part of the Protestant tradition to publicize opposition to the coming of the true religion, and although such events as More’s and Fisher’s executions have had to be incorporated into the story, that really large numbers of people were very unhappy with what was going on has been suppressed. But another explanation may be that Wolsey’s pardon and subsequent generous treatment did not give the threat of praemunire quite the force that it would otherwise have had. It may even not have helped the legal case, because what the sixteen were accused of was participating with Wolsey in something that he had been forgiven for. All this is speculative,131 but whatever the legal niceties, what was important for Henry was to create a climate of opinion which would make it more difficult for the sixteen, and for the Church as a whole, to resist his wishes; and it would not have helped to have the man most guilty of the crime of praemunire swanning around the diocese of York, while his so-called accomplices stood trial. Very much more to Henry’s purpose would have been the spectacle of that man standing trial for treason, for there could hardly have been a more effective way of demonstrating that the Church was a thoroughly untrustworthy institution whose members were deserving of little sympathy from Henry’s subjects.

  The argument that Wolsey was arrested on an essentially trumped-up charge of conspiracy (the second possibility referred to earlier) makes an enormous amount of sense in the context of Henry’s continuing campaign, and not only as regards motivation. It has already been pointed out that if the surviving evidence is taken at its face value, one has to explain why a government which was well aware of Wolsey’s ‘conspiratorial’ activities by mid-July waited until the beginning of November to arrest him. If, on the other hand, there was no conspiracy, then there is far less difficulty in explaining the timing of the arrest. By the end of October it would have been clear to Henry that he would have to bring additional pressure to bear if he was going to persuade both Church and parliament to his point of view. Moreover, on 31 October nine of the sixteen accused of praemunire had failed to appear in King’s Bench, amongst them three of Henry’s most distinguished opponents, Clerk, Fisher and West. This act of defiance required some immediate counter-measure by the government:132 accordingly the following day Walter Walsh was sent north to expedite Wolsey’s arrest – this, at any rate, is the suggestion. Before looking at the many possible objections to it, two more points in its favour must be briefly touched upon.

  When the nine failed to appear in court on 31 October they were summoned to appear on 20 January, by which time, according to Henry’s latest decision on the matter, both parliament and southern convocation would have been in session for a week. What this meant was that when these bodies first met, the sword of Damocles would still be hanging over many of their members, inducing, it was to be hoped, the right frame of mind on all those issues relating to the divorce about which, to date, they had shown themselves to be so unco-operative. What it also meant was that once Wolsey was arrested there was no need for any urgency in proceeding against him. Indeed, the longer the delay the greater the tension that would build up amongst those under threat. Henry may also have been anxious to keep a number of options open, one of which may even have been Wolsey’s restoration to the Council in return for doing Henry’s bidding in the matter of the divorce. It would have been quite a desperate expedient, and there is no evidence to indicate that Henry was planning to make use of Wolsey in this way, unless, that is, there is some hint of it in a report by both Chapuys and the Milanese ambassador that shortly before Wolsey’s arrest was ordered Henry exclaimed ‘I miss the cardinal of York every day.’133 Be that as it may, what Henry was looking for was a tame but nonetheless important churchman to give credibility to a divorce secured without papal consent, a job description that the cardinal archbishop of York might be said to fit! And as we have seen, not only was Wolsey’s journey southwards in all the circumstances surprisingly leisurely, but also he was treated remarkably well, being assured by his custodians more than once that the king meant him no harm. Now, of course, it is well recognized that a contented prisoner is one who will give his custodians no trouble, and clearly these assurances do not prove that in return for granting him a divorce Henry intended to let Wolsey off the charge of treason. All that can be said is that given Henry’s manipulation of people such as Cranmer and Gardiner in the 1540s,134 it is not inconceivable that in the autumn of 1530 Henry contemplated making use of Wolsey in this way.

  Finally, the scenario that
is being proposed does help to make more sense of the extraordinary nature of the conspiracy that Wolsey was allegedly at the head of – the very extraordinariness, it was argued earlier, that helps to make such a conspiracy so unlikely. But as a government invention it makes considerable sense. The reason for the emperor’s and pope’s alleged complicity in it hardly needs any comment: in the matter of the divorce they were the enemy, and anything that embarrassed them or told against them was grist to the mill. But why implicate the French, on whose support Henry was very much relying? More specifically, why was it that the only bit of concrete evidence that the Crown ever produced for Wolsey’s conspiratorial activity was that letter which he had supposedly asked Agostini to write to the French ambassador detailing the plot, and why, whatever its validity, show it to the French king? It was an odd way of maintaining good relations between the two countries, though not so odd when it is borne in mind that, as was mentioned earlier, they were at this time engaged in difficult negotiations over their complicated financial arrangements. There was a whole series of diplomatic missions, with much huffing and puffing on both sides, and it may well be that the embargo of 31 July on people leaving the country had something to do with these missions.135 During much of October Joachim was to be found holidaying at Dover, not a very usual way for a foreign envoy to pass the time.136 Meanwhile, all the foreign ambassadors were reporting that the negotiations between England and France were going badly.137 Thus Chapuys, writing on 31 October, referred to the French having made ‘so many and such exorbitant conditions’ that Henry had become exceedingly angry, but now they were ‘trying to make matters straight again, and have the conditions demanded by the French modified’.138 In this context it did make some sense politely to draw the attention of the French to the embarrassing fact of Wolsey’s treasonable negotiations with them. It also made sense for the French to distance themselves from Wolsey as much as they could; hence Francis’s remarks about his ‘pompous and ambitious’ heart and humble origins.139

  The view being put forward here, that Wolsey’s arrest was but another ploy in Henry’s desperate quest for a divorce, rests upon no direct evidence, and neither has it found favour with historians, who have all more or less accepted that, as the Crown maintained, Wolsey had been involved in a conspiracy. Furthermore, if this alone is not considered to deal the view a fatal blow, there are some weaknesses in the argument that must be tackled now. First, the question of timing. Much importance has been attached in this account to the connection between Wolsey’s arrest and the praemunire charges against the sixteen. Indeed, it has even been suggested that it was the failure of nine of them to appear in court that led directly to it. A difficulty in accepting this view arises from Cromwell’s letter to Wolsey of 21 October – incidentally the last communication that has survived between the two men – in which he wrote that ‘the parliament is prorogued until the sixth day of January. The prelates shall not appear in the praemunire. There is another way devised in place thereof as your grace shall further know.’140 Cromwell’s ‘other way’ has usually been taken to refer to a decision to bring pressure upon the Church through parliament rather than through the law courts, a decision which was to result in the famous Act for the Pardon of the Clergy of March 1531.141 If this is so, it can then be argued that the Crown would have had very little interest in whether those accused of praemunire showed up or not, and indeed it is possible that those who defaulted dared to do so only because they were aware of the government’s change of plan.142 In such a scenario Wolsey’s arrest would not have had much significance: it was Henry’s manipulation of parliament that was going to provide the pressure, not Wolsey’s final humiliation. And even if it is countered, as it will be, that the one does not preclude the other and that in any scenario parliament was going to play an important part, what would be extremely difficult to argue is that the final decision to arrest Wolsey was a consequence of the nine’s decision not to appear.

  There are no easy rejoinders to these criticisms, but given that the large gaps in the evidence make any interpretation very provisional, they are not such that the view put forward here has to be rejected. In the first place, what Cromwell meant by this piece of information, or what authority should be attached to it, is not as clear as it has sometimes been taken to be. Whatever his precise position in royal government at this time, he was not involved in the making of major policy decisions, nor is there any reason to suppose that he had access to any privileged information.143 One reason for being so confident about both these things is that the closer Cromwell became to Henry the less likely it is that he would have either dared or wished to pass on confidential information to his former master, particularly if he had any reason to believe that the former master was about to be arrested for high treason. Secondly, it is most unlikely that any very dramatic decision had been made as regards the praemunire prosecutions. The notion that the government had decided to drop them in favour of a charge against the whole of the English clergy cannot be sustained, for the simple reason that this did not happen.144 Instead, at least the nine who had defaulted would be appearing in court on 20 January, shortly after parliament had reassembled. As suggested earlier, there could hardly have been a better way of encouraging MPs to think carefully before opposing the royal wishes; but the point is that the government had always seen a connection between the prosecutions and parliamentary pressure on the Church, since what it was looking for was some kind of parliamentary authorization for the Church to grant a divorce. The original cases had been timed to coincide with the sitting of parliament, and Cromwell’s cryptic remark probably only referred to the fact that the recent prorogation had made a nonsense of that timing, which now needed to be adjusted. But an alternative explanation does present itself. What Henry had done in October by proroguing parliament was to buy himself a little time – time in which, perhaps, to tighten the screws by moving against Wolsey, or even to make use of him to pronounce his first marriage null and void? If this is so, then it may be that Cromwell was trying to convey some kind of coded message to his former master, something he might have attempted just because he was not in the inner ring of royal advisers. A possible scenario might be that he knew of the prorogation, for that after all was public knowledge. He would have deduced that this might affect the praemunire prosecutions. He may have heard rumours that some of the accused bishops had decided not to turn up; he could hardly have known for certain that they would not because that decision was the bishops’, not, as in some accounts is assumed, the Crown’s. He may also have picked up rumours of a decision affecting Wolsey. Putting all these things together, he might then have written as he did, not daring to be more explicit about what he had gleaned concerning Wolsey’s fate. It is a scenario that may appear bizarre, but it seems to make at least as much sense as any other, particularly of Cromwell’s remark that Wolsey would ‘further know’ about the praemunire prosecutions. This is unlikely to have been a reference to some new parliamentary tactics which the Crown had decided upon vis-à-vis the Church. Even if it is assumed that the government had just made some important decision about the prosecutions, and that, contrary to the view advanced earlier, Cromwell was privy to the decision, there is no earthly reason why Wolsey would have received any information about something that was inevitably of a confidential nature until, that is, it was put into effect some three months hence. That ‘as your grace shall further know’ suggests something more immediate than this, and, moreover, something that might affect Wolsey more closely.

  Another criticism of the view of events being advanced is that it ignores some important evidence concerning Wolsey’s arrest that in most accounts has been given some prominence. When in mid-July 1530 Norfolk had informed Chapuys of Wolsey’s plotting, he had made a point of saying that, come what may, the cardinal ‘would never again either see or speak with the king’, adding that the information about the conspiracy had only been revealed to him by those closest to Wolsey, because they knew that it
could harm no one but himself, the duke.145 Three months later, and only about a fortnight before Wolsey’s arrest, a former member of Wolsey’s household, Thomas Arundel, reported to Wolsey a conversation with Norfolk, who had told him that he did not believe that Wolsey no longer aspired to any position of authority, ‘for he said that he had both your grace’s hand to the contrary, and knew three messages, sent by three divers persons, of your grace to the king, whereby it might well appear that you desired as much authority as ever you did’.146 And that this was not entirely an invention of Norfolk’s paranoia is indicated by the fact that at one point Henry himself had informed Cromwell that he understood that Wolsey had been trying to stir up trouble between himself and the duke.147