by G. J. Meyer
And if the Peace of Cambrai was a disaster for English foreign policy, one that turned France from an ally of England into an ally of the Hapsburg empire and closed the breach between empire and pope while leaving England isolated, that too was easily blamed on Wolsey. And more fairly this time, because it was Wolsey who had overreached and Wolsey’s ambitious strategy that had failed.
What was worst for the cardinal, he was nearly without friends. That Queen Catherine held him responsible for the king’s rejection no longer mattered, but Anne Boleyn and her family had, with even less reason, persuaded themselves that Wolsey was not only failing to pursue the divorce with all possible vigor but secretly undercutting Henry’s efforts. The nobility had always despised and resented Wolsey for being not only a lowborn upstart but an insufferably haughty one, while the people at large, conveniently for the king, believed him to be at fault for the financial burdens imposed by Henry’s wars. In 1525, when Wolsey attempted to levy what he laughably called an “Amicable Grant” to pay for a new continental campaign that the king was determined to launch (it was not a grant at all, of course, but a proposed confiscation of between a sixth and a third of the incomes and movable goods of almost every subject clerical or lay), protests came so close to turning into rebellion that Henry called off both the campaign and the levy. In doing so he pretended that the whole thing had been Wolsey’s idea and that he himself had known nothing about it, cheerfully allowing the cardinal to take the blame. Later Wolsey drew both the king’s wrath and that of Anne and her family by blocking the appointment, as abbess of the ancient convent at Wilton, of a Boleyn in-law named Eleanor Carey, a woman notorious for sexual promiscuity. The post went instead to the choice of the sisters of Wilton, an old woman known to be “wise and discreet.” By doing the right thing, however, Wolsey had given the Boleyns fresh reason to regard him as their enemy, and by allowing the issue to become a royal domestic dispute he had deeply annoyed the king.
As for the world on the other side of the Channel, if the cardinal’s many years in command of English diplomacy had won him any real friends there, those friends were, in the aftermath of Cambrai, unable or unwilling to do anything for him. On the contrary, all across Europe there were influential people who, if they were not exactly his enemies, could see little reason to lament his fall.
He had become eminently dispensable, a wonderfully convenient scapegoat. But for Henry, somehow, it was not enough merely to dismiss the man who had served him so faithfully and in most ways so effectively for two decades. The king wanted Wolsey’s humiliation—his public humiliation and total ruin. On October 9, 1529, the day the cardinal was opening a session of the Westminster court over which he presided as chancellor, he was suddenly charged with several dozen crimes. Most strikingly, he was accused of violating the laws dealing with what was called praemunire, the interference by foreign courts—which in practice meant the papal court—in English affairs. These laws had been passed in the second half of the fourteenth century, mainly during the period when King Richard II was embroiled in a conflict with the pope, and after Richard was deposed they were almost never invoked though they were also never repealed. By making them his weapon as he now did, Henry underscored what would have been obvious in any case: that in throwing the book at Wolsey he was attacking not only the pope’s legate but the papacy itself. He was taking a step the meaning of which could have been apparent only to those few English people who had any real knowledge of what Martin Luther and other reformers were doing in Germany. He was moving toward the separation of the English from the universal church. The fact that he was also destroying the most hated man in the kingdom, a man whose existence had become an inconvenience and whose ruin would deflect criticism away from the throne, was in the great scheme of things almost incidental.
The praemunire charges against Wolsey were true in a strictly literal sense but also absurd. Obviously the cardinal, by accepting his appointment as legate and then using his legatine powers, had made himself of-finally the pope’s man in England; that was the very definition of the job. But all of it had been done with the king’s knowledge and consent and often at the king’s insistence—Henry had nagged at Pope Leo X to make Wolsey his legate, and at Leo’s successors to renew the appointment and finally to make it permanent. For the king to now criminalize the very career that he himself had made possible was little less than an outrage. The cardinal would have had no difficulty in mounting a strong defense, had he chosen to do so. But he knew better than any man that he could have no hope of saving himself by opposing the king. He understood his sovereign’s mind, and that resistance could only inflame the royal wrath. And so he surrendered immediately, without hesitation or argument, confessing himself guilty as charged. As the king demanded more and more of him, he continued to give ground. He handed over the Great Seal, and with it the office of chancellor, on October 17. He gave up the Bishopric of Winchester, and the handsome income that went with it, at about the same time. He also gave up his position as abbot of St. Albans, the wealthiest monastery in England. At the king’s orders he withdrew to a rural manor house distant from any center of power.
For years Wolsey had been diverting part of his immense income to the creation of a college at Oxford (Cardinal College, it was to be called) and a grammar school in the town of Ipswich, where he had been born to a butcher’s wife some fifty-five years before. In 1528 he had asked Pope Clement to permit him to shut down (to “suppress”) twenty-nine small and presumably failing monasteries and use their revenues (mainly rental income from farmland) in the endowment of these projects. Assured that the monasteries in question were places “wherein much vice and wickedness were harbored,” and eager as always to show as much friendliness to Henry and his chancellor as possible, Clement assented, cautioning only that the displaced monks must not be cast adrift but placed in other monasteries. In a seemingly trivial step that would have vast consequences, Wolsey gave responsibility for closing the monasteries and diverting their income to a resourceful new member of his retinue, a self-made lawyer named Thomas Cromwell. Soon after Wolsey’s fall, the seized properties along with the other assets of his schools, which were to have been his legacy, were confiscated by the Crown. Cromwell moved with them as manager, thereby benefiting rather than suffering as a result of the cardinal’s disgrace.
And so entered the service of Henry VIII the most remarkable figure of the entire Tudor era. Thomas Cromwell was sui generis—his own creation, like nobody else, about as self-made as it is possible for a human being to be. Born around 1485, the son of a blacksmith who was brought before the local authorities in his home village of Putney so many dozens of times that he must have been a troublemaker and probably was a drunk, young Thomas had grown up without connections, money, or much in the way of education. For reasons unknown he left England while still an adolescent, joined the army of the king of France and went with it to Italy where he may have been in a battle, and got himself hired by a banker in Florence. Later he worked in the cloth trade in Flanders. By the time he returned to England, aged about thirty, he spoke several languages, was an experienced businessman, and apparently had made enough money to set himself up in London and marry a widow of some means. He traded in cloth, became an agent for other merchants, and dabbled in moneylending and the providing of legal counsel. He must have made a powerful impression, because by 1523 he was a member of the House of Commons and a year later a fellow of Gray’s Inn, part of the inner sanctum of the legal establishment. What most set him apart was his brainpower and his willingness to try anything. Once, on a business trip to Rome (where he inveigled an unscheduled appointment with the pope and supposedly used a gift of candies to win from him a favor sought by his client), he filled tedious weeks in the saddle by memorizing the New Testament in Latin.
He did not need long to get the attention of the king. His opportunity came when Henry, in attempting to take over the revenues of the suppressed monasteries, ran up against a legal complication
. The pope had allowed Wolsey to seize those revenues only on condition that they be used for the endowment of his schools. By any reasonable interpretation of the law, the king had no right to them at all. Cromwell, characteristically, simply swept the problem aside, declaring that he had “discovered” that Wolsey’s agreement with the pope was in violation of the praemunire statutes. Thus it was the cardinal who had no right to the money, which therefore—somehow—became the property of the Crown. As legal theory it may have been nonsense, but it satisfied the king and no one dared to raise questions. Building on his strong start, Cromwell began acting as liaison between the disgraced but still formidable Wolsey and the king, showing himself to be adroit enough to avoid offending either party. Soon he secured a seat in the Parliament summoned to meet for the first time in November 1529—the one that would become forever famous as the Reformation Parliament. In short order he was handling all the Crown’s land transactions and overseeing its many construction projects. His access to Henry attracted clients eager to pay for his advice and support. There were complaints about his methods—people said he extorted backroom payoffs whenever he could—but if he was guilty it did him no harm.
As Cromwell rose, Wolsey continued his decline, surrendering one by one all the things he had accumulated during his decade and a half of power. Several years before, in a timely response to mounting criticism, Wolsey had voluntarily handed over to the king the magnificent palace that he had built for himself at Hampton Court. This palace was so much grander than any of Henry’s own residences that it had become an embarrassment, a too-vivid example of the grandeur in which the cardinal lived. Now, in giving up nearly everything else, he hesitated only when ordered to sign over London’s opulent York Place, soon to be renamed Whitehall and to provide adjoining apartments for Henry and Anne Boleyn. He explained that York Place was not his property but the church’s, belonging to the Archdiocese of York, so that he had no right to give it to anyone. Told otherwise by the king’s legal scholars, he yielded with wry good cheer. “Inasmuch as ye, the fathers of the laws, say that I may lawfully do it,” he said, “therefore I charge your conscience and discharge mine. Howbeit, I pray you, show his majesty from me, that I most humbly desire his highness to call to his most gracious remembrance that there is both heaven and hell.”
Those were bold words to be addressed to Henry VIII, especially by a man who remained desperately hopeful, throughout his final tribulations, of being restored to royal favor. Henry encouraged Wolsey’s hopes, periodically sending him little tokens of goodwill. Perhaps he was merely playing with his victim, as a cat will toy with a mouse. Perhaps, in spite of everything that Anne and her father and her uncle the Duke of Norfolk were doing to poison his mind against Wolsey, Henry was not yet certain that he could spare the cardinal. When he learned that Wolsey had fallen ill, he dispatched three court physicians to attend him. “God forbid that he should die!” Henry said. “I would not lose him for twenty thousand pounds.”
But Henry had learned many things from Wolsey over the years, and now he was learning from Wolsey’s destruction. He was even learning how to get along without Wolsey while making full use of his example. By achieving domination over the administrative machinery of church and state alike, the cardinal had demonstrated how the secular and ecclesiastical dimensions of English life might be pulled together into a single entity entirely subordinate to the Crown. By closing monasteries as a way of filling his coffers, he had demonstrated—Cromwell would soon show that he had understood this lesson best—how to tap a reservoir of seemingly limitless wealth. By not defending himself against ridiculous charges, Wolsey had shown the king how potent a weapon the praemunire statutes could be. By yielding without argument to the king’s every demand, he had given Henry what must have been a deeply gratifying demonstration of how infinitely more powerful he was than even the mightiest of his subjects.
Henry was by this time developing a lofty conception indeed of the extent of his authority. On October 26, in conversing with an ambassador newly sent by Charles V, he concluded a monologue about the need for church reform, and the responsibility of rulers to effect reform, by stating that the clergy had no power over laymen except the power, through the sacrament of penance, to forgive sins. It can be difficult to grasp just how astonishing an assertion this was in the Catholic Europe of the 1520s. The word of the church had long been accepted as final in many areas of life, and in an age when religious faith was so nearly universal as to be taken for granted, those areas were widely regarded as more important than the ones under secular jurisdiction. The result was a division of power between church and state, a balance that by Henry’s time had been in shifting and sometimes precarious equilibrium for hundreds of years. It had been sustained less by raw political (or military or economic) power than by an enduring consensus on how and for what purposes society should be organized. The papacy if not the church itself would have been extinguished many times over, between the end of the Roman Empire and the start of Henry’s reign, except that an overwhelming majority of Europe’s people were content to let it continue. Part of the consensus was an understanding, more often assumed than asserted or discussed, that the church must be free to govern itself, and that it was the church’s responsibility to bring God and God’s word to the people. Henry’s comment to the ambassador provides a glimpse into a mind that was ceasing to believe such things, that wanted to move the boundary between church and state drastically in the state’s (meaning in his own) favor. Over the centuries many European rulers, in England and elsewhere, had wanted something similar. Virtually all had failed, often paying a high price for their failure. None of those who succeeded had done so to such an extent as to overturn the ancient consensus.
But the world was changing. The foundations of the old equilibrium had grown brittle, and were more eroded than most people imagined. In the north of Germany the revolt of a single Augustinian friar, Martin Luther, had been enough to bring the whole traditional structure crashing down. Timbers were creaking in France and elsewhere. Everywhere people expressed discontent with the wealth and power of the church and its departures from its own standards, though the breadth and intensity of that discontent and the extent to which it was justified are impossible to measure. Throughout Europe, and for varied reasons, the general tendency of the sixteenth century was toward strong central governments dominated by monarchs who inevitably regarded the church skeptically, as a dangerous rival needing to be subdued. In country after country the church was on the defensive, and it would have been so even if the conduct of the clergy had been above reproach. It was under attack both by increasingly powerful princes and by religious reformers of many different kinds with widely differing aims.
Inevitably two of the great issues of the day, the condition of the church and the nature of kingship, became entangled. From an early age Henry had displayed an exceptionally keen appreciation of the powers and prerogatives of kings—exceptional even for the time, and even for a ruling monarch—while simultaneously making a great show of his Catholic orthodoxy and loyalty to the pope. As early as 1515 during a dispute with the clergy, he had angrily declared that “kings of England had never had superiors but God alone.” Wolsey had defused that crisis by leading his fellow bishops in submission to the king, and by dissolving a Parliament that was raising unwelcome questions about the mysterious death of an accused heretic while in the custody of the bishop of London. But the idea of limitless royal authority to which Henry had briefly given voice continued to simmer not only in his own brain but in those of the most alienated and ambitious reformers. It also had the enthusiastic approval of some of the most powerful nobles in England, men who hated and feared Wolsey and after his fall directed their hatred at the ecclesiastical system that had produced him. In London and at Cambridge University and port cities like Bristol, those lawyers and merchants and scholars who were embracing the Lutheran ideas coming out of Germany supported this idea as well.
By 1529 tho
se ideas were bursting into print, a still-novel phenomenon made possible by Johann Gutenberg’s invention of movable type almost a century before. The year before, two remarkable works had been widely circulated and much talked about in London. The well-named Obedience of a Christian Man by William Tyndale, one of the first translators of the Bible into English, claimed for the king as much authority and as much right to the unqualified loyalty of every subject as any tyrant could have wished for. “God hath made in every realm [the king] judge over all, and over him there is no judge,” Tyndale wrote. “He that judgeth the king judgeth God; and he that layeth hands on the king layeth hands on God; and he that resisteth the king resisteth God, and damneth God’s law and ordinance.” To justify these words, which would have raised the eyebrows of anyone familiar with English law and tradition, Tyndale invoked the example of the priest-kings of the Old Testament, chosen by God to rule Israel. Henry read Tyndale’s book, possibly with the encouragement of Anne Boleyn, and of course was charmed. “This,” he is supposed to have said, “is a book for me and for all kings to read.” Tyndale’s time as a royal favorite would be brief: within a year he infuriated Henry by condemning his efforts to rid himself of Catherine, dismissing the divorce case as the work of the papist archfiend Wolsey, and rejecting items of church doctrine that the king was determined to uphold.
Out of Antwerp there came at the same time A Supplication for the Beggars by an English lawyer named Simon Fish. It was a depiction of the abuses of the church so impossibly exaggerated as to be self-defeating where credibility was concerned. England was crowded with paupers, said Fish, because its wealth was being drained away into the church. England was flooded with women turned into whores by a lascivious clergy. The orders of friars that supported themselves by begging were draining £40,000 pounds or more out of the economy annually. (This utterly impossible number rivaled the regular revenues of the Crown.) Fish’s diatribe was of course welcomed by those willing to use any stick to beat the church, but what particularly pleased Henry was his insistence that all these terrible abuses must be corrected by the king, the church itself being too sunk in corruption. Henry is said to have summoned Fish, extended assistance to him and his wife, and shielded him from prosecution.