by Gwyn, Peter
extremely handsome; nature could not have done more for him; he is much handsomer than the king of France; very fair, and his whole frame admirably proportioned … He is extremely fond of tennis, at which game it is the prettiest thing in the world to see him play, his fair skin glowing through the shirt of the finest texture.99
The eulogy is the more convincing in that it faithfully echoed his first impression of the king, which four years at court had done nothing to dim.100
The young Henry’s ability to charm, almost to mesmerize all those he came into contact with, is vitally important in capturing the mood of the early years of his reign, when his relationship with Wolsey was formed. There is no doubt that he was determined to cut a great figure on the European stage, and that he was fortunate enough to be endowed with many of the necessary attributes. This does not mean that he was foolishly over-confident and impetuous, determined to charge into battle at the earliest opportunity; in fact, he was to wait five years, until he got to France, and then with rather more support than his father had in 1492. Neither should the war with France be seen as mere bravado or just a chivalric gesture. There was something of that in it, but then chivalry was an essential part of the panoply of kingship. Any king with ideas of dominating Europe would have to present himself as an embodiment of chivalric virtues;101 and however much Christianity had tried to soften or disguise them, it remained true that in the end there had to be a man in armour on a horse performing daring deeds before such virtues could be displayed. The point would have been perfectly clear to Henry, as it was to his rivals Francis I and Charles V, that great kings had to be warriors as well as judges and patrons. For a French king this meant making good his claim to Milan and Naples, for an English king it meant an invasion of France. When Henry VIII looked around for a model of kingship, it is not surprising that he alighted upon his namesake, Henry V102 – and what had he done on becoming king but lead an army into France, thereby winning everlasting renown on the field of Agincourt? During the course of this book it will become apparent that in practice English foreign policy was never solely directed to winning battles in France; indeed a French alliance was often the desired aim, but the contradiction between the field of Agincourt and the Field of Cloth of Gold, on which the kings of England and France embraced each other as loving brothers, is not as great as may first appear. Or, to put it another way, Henry was to find other means of maintaining his honour than waging war.
For the modern reader, the trappings of chivalry may confuse and trivialize. Such notions as nationalism, or great power rivalry – or whatever the current jargon is – are more readily understood. But while the language changes, the competitive nature of the relationship between states does not, and somewhere not far below the surface has to lurk power, not exclusively of a military kind but with the capability of being translated into that – as, for instance, quite commonly in the early sixteenth century by the hiring of mercenary troops. In February 1513 Ferdinand of Aragon, who after over forty years of political life knew something about these matters, made the significant comment that, while English soldiers might be strong and courageous, their inexperience of continental warfare was such that they could not compete with the best in Europe.103 His explicit conclusion was that in the forthcoming campaign they would need to be supplemented with German troops. Implicit was the belief that Henry was not a major force to be reckoned with, and could be easily manipulated. This Ferdinand had done the previous year, when he had made use of English help to capture Navarre for himself while ignoring the English aim of capturing Guienne; and he was, as he thought, about to do it again, this time by unilaterally signing a truce with England’s declared enemy, France, while pretending to be England’s ally. This time it did not work out as he intended, because England chose to ignore his defection and conducted a successful enough campaign without him. Moreover, when the following year Ferdinand tried to perform the same trick, he found the English had got there before him. And one of the chief reasons they were able to outmanoeuvre him was that in 1513 they had shown they were indeed a military force to be reckoned with, while, if the truth be told, Ferdinand was militarily and financially very stretched, and thus for Louis XII a potential victim rather than an ally.104
It has to be said that English historians have tended to take a rather dim view of the 1513 campaign.105 But in desperately trying to calculate some material advantage, and, not surprisingly, given the enormous expense of waging war, coming up with a large deficit, they have missed the whole point. By showing that he could deliver, not just money – and the general perception was that he was extremely wealthy106 – but also military and naval might, Henry secured for himself a leading role in Europe, at least until the ‘divorce’ seriously weakened his hand. And it was Henry himself, and only he, who took the decision to play that role. Seen in this light, the notion of a ‘peace’ or ‘war’ faction becomes an irrelevance. Instead, there were only royal councillors giving advice to a king who knew the direction that he wished to take, and, moreover, was much more active in getting what he wanted than is frequently allowed. The myth of a lazy king devoting himself entirely to pleasure, while the likes of Wolsey and Thomas Cromwell got on with the hard work, does not stand up to scrutiny.107 Admittedly Henry sometimes gave this impression; and harassed councillors, trying to get him to read or sign something which they thought important and he did not, may occasionally have despaired. But where it is possible to follow the king at work over a period of time, for instance in the spring of 1518 or in August and September 1523, what is striking is his close attention to business, a quickness of mind that enabled him immediately to grasp the essentials, and the strong feeling that he was very much in control of all that was being done on his behalf.108 In confirmation of this there is the judgement of that astute French ambassador, Jean du Bellay, that there was nothing that went on, whether inside or outside the court, that Henry was not aware of.109
There are, of course, many different styles of governing a country, or indeed, of running any large organization. Some have found delegation impossible, and like Philip II of Spain have immersed themselves in paperwork; but while such people get good marks for effort, they are not necessarily good at making decisions. Indeed too much immersion may make decision making all the more difficult, and certainly there was more to being an effective king than shutting oneself up in the Escorial, or its equivalent. Henry’s style should not deceive, and though there were many who were deceived by him, there was almost no one who doubted that he was in charge – and certainly not those, such as Wolsey and Cromwell, who worked most closely with him.110 In this respect it is interesting that both More and Wolsey are alleged to have made almost precisely the same comment: that Henry, in order to get his own way, would have been willing to go to any lengths, whether this meant cutting off a subject’s head or losing half a kingdom.111 They also agreed that it was vital to think before one spoke to him because, as Wolsey said on his deathbed, once an idea was put into his head, ‘you shall never pull it out again’.112 It could be that these judgements reflect merely the views of their contemporary biographers, only too conscious that their subjects had been treated badly; but they receive support from almost everything that Henry is known to have said and done.
None of this is supposed to make Henry into a Superman, and certainly not into the bluff King Harry of popular mythology, though this was a role he could play well. The choices that he made were often not, at least to the present writer, very attractive ones, nor, in spite of the warmth and charm he could exhibit, at least when young, was he at bottom an attractive character. Much more than his first great minister, he wore his egotism close to the surface, and as he aged and life became more difficult – probably at a personal level but certainly in the 1530s and 40s at a political level – the suspicion and animal cunning came to the fore. Flawed he obviously was, and to argue that he was a powerful personality is not to imply that there was not weakness or insecurity as well. It has b
een suggested, for instance, that he had difficulties with sex: the fact of his six wives, his very few mistresses – by the standards at any rate of his great rival Francis I – and only four children who survived for any length of time (and even then the two males, his illegitimate son by Elizabeth Blount, Henry Fitzroy, and Edward VI, were both dead before they were out of their teens) may suggest that something was amiss.113 And despite his cunning he was very capable of great errors of judgement – but then what leading political figure has not been? The key to political success lies in a capacity to recover from one’s mistakes, and in this art Henry was extremely skilled, as indeed was Wolsey. But the one thing Henry was not was someone who could be easily manipulated, whether by an individual or a faction, and even those he fell head over heels in love with, such as Anne Boleyn and, to a lesser extent, Catherine Howard, though they obviously affected what he did, were never able to manage him to any significant extent. All of this leads to only one conclusion: that Wolsey rose to a commanding position in royal government because Henry chose that he should, and all that remains to be stressed in this chapter is that there was nothing very surprising in Henry’s choice.
Even the rags to riches element in Wolsey’s story, or as this chapter title has it, the rise from ‘butcher’s cur to lordly prelate’, has been much exaggerated. In this respect John Skelton who, especially in Why come ye not to Courte, could not put the theme down, has done his work only too well. Wolsey’s
… gresy genalogy,
He came of the sank royall
That was cast out of a bochers stall!114
is the one thing that almost everybody knows about him. In part, this is because Skelton was mining an already well-worked vein of English satirical writing, of which John Lydgate’s Fall of Princes is but the best of many.115 It thrived then presumably for the same reason that it remains alive and well today, that anyone who betters himself is open both to the envy of those whom he has left behind and the contempt and jealousy of those whose social position he now shares, and threatens. The upstart courtier or despised royal favourite is a stock figure because he represents but the most extreme example of the parvenu who, almost by definition, has more wealth, more ambition, and above all more pride than is good for him.
What thyng to God is mor abhomynable
Than pride upreised out of poverte?116
asked Lydgate in the fifteenth century, and for John Skelton in the sixteenth, Wolsey with his
Presumcyon and vayne glory,
Envy, wrath and lechery,
Covetys and glotiny;
Slouthfull to do good,
Now frantick, now starke wode!117
was living proof that to ‘set up a wretche on hye’ was asking for the worst possible trouble.118 But it must always be remembered that the satirical view is a very partial one. In the 1980s we laugh with Spitting Image at Ronald Reagan and Margaret Thatcher, the former having risen from the Hollywood ‘B’ movie to the White House, the latter from the corner shop to 10 Downing Street. No doubt there is much that is comic and unlikeable about both people. But they happen to be the two most successful politicians in the Western world with a proven capacity to capture the imagination, or at least the vote, of millions of people. Moreover, it is almost certainly the case that if the one had been a WASP and the other a member of the English aristocracy, they would still not have escaped the eagle eye of the satirist, though the topos would be different. In other words, Spitting Image is no more right about these two figures than Skelton was about Wolsey, and in many respects both are demonstrably wrong.
That someone from Wolsey’s urban and retailing background had got to university in the early sixteenth century should come as no surprise, for, along with the sons of yeomen and lesser gentry, it was for such people, rather than those from the ruling classes, that the universities largely catered.119 Once there, the great likelihood was that such a person would go into the Church, and, as a graduate, have a successful ecclesiastical career. If he did well, he was very likely to end up in royal service, which had always been staffed with a high proportion of clerics.120 Admittedly some changes in the career structure of the educated were taking place. It is probable that the fifteenth century saw an increasing number of laymen in royal service,121 and the universities themselves were a comparatively new phenomenon, the full exploitation of which it had taken some time to develop. About two hundred years earlier William of Wykeham, like Wolsey a lord chancellor and founder of an Oxford college, and like him from a comparatively humble background (in his case that of the tenant farmer), had not gone to university, but in his day it was not the most normal route to the top. By Wolsey’s time the successful cleric did as a rule go to university, and to that extent he is a typical figure.122 However, the really fast route lay through a study of law, increasingly both civil and canon law, then into the household of the archbishop of Canterbury in some legal capacity, and then into royal service.123 Typical of those who took that route were two clerical lawyers, Archbishop Warham, whose career lay through Winchester, New College and the Canterbury Court of Arches, and Tunstall, who transferred early from Oxford to King’s Hall, Cambridge, and then to Padua, whence he returned to become Warham’s chancellor before transferring to royal service as master of the rolls in 1516. Wolsey’s career with its more university and schoolmasterly flavour, and his study not of law but of theology, is just that little bit different, and when he entered the service of the archbishop of Canterbury it was as a chaplain rather than a legal administrator. This slight difference serves to draw attention to that element of personality as opposed to qualifications that played a vital part in Wolsey’s rise. However, as against the Skeltonic view, what needs to be emphasized is that for someone entering royal service Wolsey’s early career was not all that unusual, nor were his social origins. The English episcopacy had always been largely recruited from below the top ranks of society. Of the nineteen men appointed to bishoprics by the Yorkist kings only four had come from the nobility,124 and, of the twenty-four prior to Wolsey appointed to the plum see of Winchester from the time of the Norman Conquest only six appear to have come from noble families.125 As for Wolsey’s contemporaries, while Tunstall, though illegitimate, came from a Northern gentry family, Warham was of yeoman stock, as was Richard Fox. John Fisher’s father was a mercer of Beverley; the father of Nicholas West, bishop of Ely, was a baker from Putney; and of all Wolsey’s episcopal colleagues only Audley of Salisbury came out of the top drawer.
Moreover, it needs to be stressed, especially given the English dislike of ‘meddlesome priests’, that high-flying clerics had always played a leading role in English politics. Starting with William the Conqueror’s first archbishop of Canterbury, Lanfranc, the list of powerful ecclesiastical personalities is very long, through Becket and Langton in the twelfth and thirteenth centuries, Winchelsey and Stratford in the fourteenth, Arundel, Beaufort and Chichele in the fifteenth, and in the present context most relevantly, and just getting on into the sixteenth century, Cardinal John Morton. Morton, indeed, prefigures Wolsey in all manner of ways, some of which will be looked at in more detail later, but most obviously in his general management of all the king’s affairs, both secular and ecclesiastical.126 And if, nevertheless, one feels that there was something about the scale of Wolsey’s dominance that separates him from these predecessors, the explanation is almost certainly not to be found in his greater ambition and greed, but in the increasing power and centralized control of the Crown. Without anticipating too much, it needs to be borne in mind that for much of the Middle Ages Church and state were in some degree of conflict, resulting most famously in the murder of Thomas Becket in his own cathedral on 29 December 1170. But if the king was in conflict with the Church, he was unlikely to give to a churchman the necessary trust and confidence to make him his chief minister; and for much of the Middle Ages even royal control of episcopal appointments was not completely secure. Moreover, for an ecclesiastical statesman to dominate the politic
al scene he needed, paradoxically, the support of a strong king because unlike a nobleman’s, the wealth and military might of a bishop derived most usually from office alone. Of course, along with their expertise in law and administration, it was precisely this lack of family affinity or influence that made such an ecclesiastical statesman attractive to kings, and that Henry VII looked to Morton and sought with success to make him a cardinal with unusually extensive powers over the English Church, should come as no surprise. But in the present context the essential point is that, whatever Morton’s role in Henry’s campaign for the throne of England, it was the king who chose to give him a dominating position in government, just as it was his son who chose to give Wolsey a similar position. And if a cleric was chosen to be the king’s leading councillor, and as a consequence become a prince of the Church, it was inevitable that he would live in some style.