by G. J. Meyer
Anne very nearly disappeared into Ireland. Her father had long been in a dispute with a noble Anglo-Irish family called the Butlers, with both sides claiming the Earldom of Ormond (which had belonged to Thomas’s maternal grandfather). King Henry and Wolsey, grasping at a possible solution to this tedious but troublesome squabble, offered Anne to Sir James Butler as a way of uniting the two families and making it possible for them to share the inheritance. The Butlers refused, evidently because they expected a dowry bigger than Anne would provide. And so she remained at court—an exceptionally dazzling lady-in-waiting to Queen Catherine, a model for anyone wanting to keep abreast of the latest fashions—passing through a flirtation with the poet Sir Thomas Wyatt and the indignity of being kept from marrying Henry Percy by the interference of Cardinal Wolsey.
Thomas Boleyn, the value of his diplomatic talents augmented by the king’s wish to make him a grateful rather than a resentful father, was ennobled as Viscount Rochford in 1525 and raised to the English and Irish earldoms of Wiltshire and Ormond in 1529. His son George had virtually grown up at court, taking part in the Christmas revels at age ten, becoming a page at twelve and the recipient of offices and even a manor while still barely grown; when Thomas became an earl, George, in his twenties by this time, already an esquire of the body and a junior diplomat, assumed the Rochford title. When the king entered into full pursuit of Anne, the Boleyns became for all practical purposes more the king’s family than Queen Catherine and Princess Mary. All the Boleyns were heaped with honors. That their success may have gone to their heads is suggested by their attempt, thwarted by Wolsey, to secure the appointment of a disreputable sister-in-law of Mary Boleyn’s as abbess of the convent of Wilton.
In the months just after Wolsey’s fall, a triumvirate made up of Thomas Boleyn and the dukes of Norfolk and Suffolk stepped forward to fill the resulting power vacuum. Together the three became the king’s most influential advisers, but only briefly; none of them had the political skill or the force of character to hold such a lofty position for long. It mattered little to Boleyn, who by this point had bet everything on his daughter. He and his son could hardly have been less eager than Henry himself for Anne to become queen and produce a royal heir. That would make them the grandfather and only uncle of the next king—positions from which they might aspire to almost anything.
6
A Revolution in the Making
In the weeks following his fall from power, Wolsey took up residence in a community of Carthusian monks not far from the royal palace at Richmond. Ever hopeful that the king would restore him to favor, he seemed determined to stay as close to the court as possible. He had reason for optimism: Henry would occasionally send him gifts, rings usually, and encouraging little messages. Seeking support among the king’s peers, royal personages with whom he had dealt regularly while in high office, Wolsey wrote to Francis I and to Francis’s mother, to the emperor Charles, and even, at some risk, to the pope. At the same time he involved himself in an apparently serious way in the religious life of his new companions, who “persuaded him from the vainglory of the world and gave him divers hair shirts to wear.” He appears to have made a real effort to become a better priest, but the old hunger for power and pomp continued to gnaw.
His chances of rehabilitation were reduced by the number and influence of his enemies at court. Almost everyone with access to the king’s ear—Anne Boleyn and her father and brother; Anne’s uncle the Duke of Norfolk; Charles Brandon, Duke of Suffolk—detested Wolsey, had no use for the connection with Rome that he personified, and likely would have suffered grievously if he returned to power. Anyone friendly to the cardinal, on the other hand, would have hesitated to say anything in his favor in such an environment. The king is unlikely to have heard anything good about Wolsey, or to have been encouraged to do anything but distrust him and keep him at a distance. That Henry did distrust the cardinal is apparent in the government’s interception of Wolsey’s correspondence and the questioning of his physician by agents looking for evidence of disloyalty. The discovery that he was writing to foreign royalty did him no good.
It is hardly surprising, therefore, that in the spring of 1530 Wolsey was ordered to pack up and move north to remote districts where his chances of crossing paths with the king would be virtually nil. He went for the first time in his life to York, there taking up with unexpected earnestness the ecclesiastical duties that he had so long ignored, visiting country churches every Sunday and holy day, dispensing alms to the poor, seeing to the repair of decrepit properties, and making it his special interest to counsel troubled families. But in his letters he described himself as profoundly miserable. That he continued to be regarded as one of the most important men in the kingdom—possibly the most important after the king himself—was evident in June, when an official letter demanding nullification of the royal marriage was prepared for delivery to Rome. This document, addressed to the pope and intended to show that everyone of importance in England supported the king, was sent to Wolsey before anyone else had signed it, so that his name would appear on it first. It is in the Vatican library in Rome today, dripping with ribbons and seals, Wolsey’s name atop all the others. Notable by their absence are the signatures of John Fisher, of other bishops who would soon be complicating the king’s life, and of Wolsey’s successor as chancellor, Sir Thomas More.
Wolsey made elaborate plans for the ceremony in which he was to be formally installed as archbishop on November 7. On that same day, he ordered, the Northern Convocation (the assembly representing that part of the English clergy under the authority of York rather than Canterbury) would also convene. It was to be a great occasion, an echo of the cardinal’s days of glory. But on November 1 a rider set out from the king’s palace at Greenwich, bound for York with a warrant for Wolsey’s arrest. It charged him with high treason—with engaging, presumably because of his wide-ranging correspondence, in “presumptuous sinister practices.” Wolsey, upon being served with the warrant, understood that this was the end. He stopped eating for a time, saying that he preferred a natural death to what awaited him in London. His health was bad (he was afflicted with edema, or dropsy), and though he set out under guard as ordered, traveling on muleback, he made only slow progress. Near Shrewsbury he came down with dysentery and was unable to continue for two weeks. When he reached his next stopping place, the abbey at Leicester, the end was at hand. “Father Abbot,” he said upon arrival, “I have come to lay my bones among you.” He was put to bed, and a day or two later he opened his eyes to see a familiar face, that of the lieutenant of the Tower of London, who had been sent north to escort him to prison.
“Master Kingston,” said the cardinal to this gentleman, “I pray you have me commended to his majesty, and beseech him on my behalf to call to mind all things that have passed between us, especially respecting good Queen Catherine and himself, and then shall his grace’s conscience know whether I have offended him or not. He is a prince of most royal courage. Rather than miss any part of his will, he will endanger one half of his kingdom, and I do assure you, I have often kneeled before him, sometimes for three hours together, to persuade him from his appetite, and could not prevail. And Master Kingston, had I but served God as diligently as I have served the king, he would not have given me over in my gray hairs. But this is my just reward for my pains and study, not regarding my service to God but only my duty to my prince.”
He died a day later, sixty years of age. He was buried in a nearby church, coincidentally next to the tomb of King Richard III, thereby creating a curiosity that the local people would come to call “the tyrants’ sepulcher.” In Wolsey’s case at least, the name is unfair. He was a gravely flawed man, vain and proud and in love with power and its trappings, but his legacy was far from black. Over many years he had tried repeatedly to bring peace to a Europe endlessly troubled by futile wars, and more than once he had risked his own position in doing so. He had done much to improve the delivery of justice, and he had tried without mu
ch success to curtail the enclosures of farmland that were depriving rural families of their livelihood. He had served one of the most willful and self-centered monarchs ever to draw breath, and if the difference in Henry’s conduct before the fall of Wolsey and after is any fair measure, Wolsey deserves to be judged, for all his weaknesses and failures, a force for good.
Whatever Henry had planned (a show trial leading to a public execution, probably), the cardinal’s passing deprived him of it. If Wolsey had lived to speak in court as he had spoken on his deathbed, he might have given the king cause to regret calling him back from York. Be that as it may, a new year was approaching and the king was laying plans for bigger things than the destruction of his old lieutenant. His time of uncertainty, the period of some three years when he acted by fits and starts and sometimes reversed himself and often seemed paralyzed, was drawing to a close. It had begun with Henry wanting the annulment of his marriage and the freedom to take Anne as his wife. It would end when he showed himself to be openly and unambiguously set on separating his kingdom from the ancient communion of Europe and on making himself a kind of national pope, the supreme spiritual authority over England and its people. Historians disagree as to exactly when Henry stopped wanting just the first thing and started wanting both, which is another way of saying that no one can say for sure. It seems reasonable to conclude, however, that by the time of Wolsey’s death, he was seriously considering, if not yet quite committed to, a break with Rome. This would explain the severely hard line that he now began to take, setting out not only to destroy a sickly and ruined old man who almost certainly wished him no harm and could not have done him harm if he did wish it, but to destroy whatever independence the English church actually possessed. A hypothesis in three parts—that by the end of 1530 Henry had decided to separate England from Rome; that he thought it necessary first to break the English hierarchy to his will; and that until the clergy had been subdued, he wanted to keep the divorce proceedings in Rome from moving to a conclusion—makes his actions at this time more intelligible than does any other explanation.
It explains, among other things, the otherwise curious fact that by late 1530 (probably even before the Boleyn delegation’s visit to Bologna was known to have ended in failure) Henry’s strategy had shifted from trying to get Pope Clement to issue a favorable ruling to trying to keep the pope from doing anything at all. Delay, long a source of frustration, now became an objective. His success in achieving it is reflected in Pope Clement’s response to the appeal for action sent to him with Wolsey’s signature preceding all the others. This petition, composed before Henry changed tactics, complained that the postponements, equivocations, and evasions of the papal court were depriving England’s king of the justice to which he was entitled. It said that Rome’s failures could expose England, in the event of the king’s death, to the dangers of a disputed succession (his daughter by Catherine of Aragon now being, by the king’s reckoning, a bastard). It accused the pope of being biased in Catherine’s favor, and it repeated the by-now-familiar threat that the Crown’s only recourse might be to proceed independently. By the time this missive reached the pope, Clement was able to reply that he was entirely ready to bring the case to trial, that he had not yet done so because Henry had not appointed anyone to represent him in court, and that the Boleyn party, in departing Bologna, had asked not for action but for more time. All these things were true, and they shed interesting light on the question of who was actually responsible, by this point, for the failure to proceed.
The case remained unsettled as 1531 began and the king put into motion the plan that had taken shape the previous autumn—the threat to charge the whole of the English clergy with violations of the praemunire statutes. The Canterbury convocation was in session at Westminster, and news of the king’s threat threw the churchmen first into confusion, then into frightened and angry debate. They had before them the uninspiring example of the late cardinal, who had submitted without complaint when faced with the same charge and in doing so had left them all vulnerable. And they were being urged to submit by their own leader, William Warham, a respected figure after almost thirty years in the see of Canterbury. To his threat of prosecution, Henry added a demand that convocation, as the embodiment of a church that had caused him so much undeserved trouble, should reimburse him for the expenses of the divorce case (all of which had been incurred, as he saw it, because of the pope’s refusal to do what was right). It was to do so by repeating a subsidy of £100,000 that Wolsey, in desperate need of money because of Henry’s war on France, had wrung out of it in the early 1520s.
After days of debate, convocation offered Henry, in effect, a deal. It would pay him the £100,000 that he demanded (another £18,000 was being extracted from the much smaller York Convocation) in five annual installments, there being no tolerable way of coming up with such an immense amount of cash at once. In return Henry was asked to do two things. First, he was to issue a general pardon so that the praemunire charge would not hang over the heads of the churchmen forever, and provide a written explanation of just what praemunire was, so that in future they would know what actions to avoid. Second, he was to reaffirm the traditional liberties of the church as previously upheld by the Magna Carta and other precedents reaching even further back in time: the clergy’s right to operate their courts under their own system of laws, for example, and to provide sanctuary to fugitives.
In the message that conveyed their offer and request to the king, convocation’s leaders referred to Henry as the “protector and highest head” of the church in England—generous words, one would have thought, in light of the church’s theoretical freedom from secular control. Henry soon let it be known that this was not enough. He wanted to be called “sole protector and supreme head of the English church and clergy.” Here was a revolution in the making, and the terms this time were far more portentous than any mere quibble over pluralities or the cost of funerals. Henry was demanding what no king of England, no monarch of any European kingdom, had ever dared to claim. And there was more: he wanted an acknowledgment that he had “cure” of the souls of his subjects—that responsibility for delivering those souls to God rested not with the bishops, not with the pope, but with him. This was an entirely new theory of kingship, one that turned upside down what every Englishman had been taught about the relationship of church and state.
Four days after Henry made these demands, convocation accepted them in a way that left everything shrouded in ambiguity. In its final form, the clergy’s message to the king described him as supreme head “as far as the law of Christ allows.” It would have been just as clear if it had declared that the king is supreme head except if he isn’t; its meaning depended entirely upon what “the law of Christ” was, and that of course could be a matter of opinion. It is unclear whose words these were. If they came from John Fisher or someone like him, they must have been intended to neuter the king’s flamboyant claim without being unnecessarily combative. If they were Thomas Cromwell’s words, or the words of some other member of Henry’s inner circle of advisers, they were a subtle way of trying to seduce the clergy into abandoning a thousand years of tradition. Possibly they were the work of someone like old Archbishop Warham, someone not definitely on one side or the other, in which case they were simply an attempt to avoid or at least postpone a showdown. On the whole, the result appears to have been something approaching a victory for the clergy in all respects except financial. The king got his £100,000, but his new title of supreme head had been so hedged as to mean anything or nothing. Other changes left him with less than the cure of souls—convocation’s final draft, accepted by a silent king, restored that responsibility to the clergy—and some of the things that he had demanded were omitted altogether.
In the end Henry granted the requested pardon. In doing so, he explicitly approved the continuing operation of the ecclesiastical courts, thereby confirming the lawfulness of the very activities for which the churchmen had been threatened with prosec
ution. Significantly for the future—the omission must have seemed ominous—he ignored convocation’s request for a reaffirmation of its traditional rights and liberties.
The churchmen, if confused and frightened, had not been entirely cowed. They had shown themselves to be unwilling to yield to whatever the king demanded. Cuthbert Tunstal, a bishop known for his learning and virtuous personal life and so high in the king’s regard that he had recently been promoted from London to the wealthy northern diocese of Durham, sent Henry a letter in which he pointedly objected to the royal claim of supreme headship. He argued—with the evidence of history overwhelmingly on his side—that the kings of England had always been masters in the temporal realm, never in the spiritual. Departure from this tradition, Tunstal warned, would destroy the unity of the Christian world. The king responded cordially but in startling terms. Of course I am not the head of the church, he said; Christ is the head of the church. I as king merely have jurisdiction over the church in England in Christ’s name. Specifically, Henry said, his supremacy gave him final authority over the election of bishops, the property of the church, and the “courts Christian.” He blithely assured Tunstal that there was nothing revolutionary in any of this, that he was simply stating what was obviously true: that “we and all other princes be at this day chief and heads of the spiritual men.” Tunstal must have been taken aback. Though almost from time immemorial England’s kings had enjoyed the right to nominate bishops, in principle such appointments were the pope’s business, and no one chosen by the king could actually be consecrated until the necessary approvals were received from Rome. And though over the centuries innumerable disputes had erupted between Crown and church over property and jurisdiction and other matters, not even the most ambitious kings had ever claimed to be able to overrule the pope on every question. Henry, in his letter to Tunstal, was expanding his role in nearly the most radical way imaginable.