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

by Gwyn, Peter

  It is very hard to know what to make of a man who, suspected of Yorkist leanings in Henry VII’s reign and found guilty of misprision of treason in Henry VIII’s, was yet extremely active in all military matters on behalf of the Crown, and whose advice was most sought after by Henry VIII. Bergavenny was wealthy, and could raise a large retinue. Moreover, the fact that his chief power and influence lay in Kent meant that his retinue was conveniently placed for an expedition to France; but it was also, from another point of view, dangerously close to London. Perhaps the nearest we can get is to suggest that he was too powerful and too useful to the Crown for his support not to be strongly desired, and yet, given some of his activities and connections, he could never be completely trusted – a point confirmed by the fact that he, and indeed his younger brother, Sir Edward, gave less than wholehearted support to the ‘break with Rome’. In other words, Bergavenny was a rather difficult customer, but the Crown’s handling of him, far from indicating any desire to destroy an overmighty subject, is evidence of skilful management of a potentially very important member of the political nation. This is also true of those other noblemen whose relationship with Henry VIII was not always of the best during the period of Wolsey’s ascendancy. All were treated with the respect due to their rank and position, all were made use of to varying degrees in the conduct of government and in court ceremonial – unless, that is, they were actively disloyal or showed an unwillingness to abide by the rule of law. When that happened, the Crown intervened. Only in the case of the duke of Buckingham did it feel compelled to take extreme measures.

  Curiously, the only nobleman for whom it is possible to make a case that he personally mistrusted Wolsey is that most trustworthy and in most respects uncontroversial figure, George Talbot earl of Shrewsbury; the mere fact that Shrewsbury was that kind of man may suggest that the case is not all that convincing.121 As lord high steward he was heavily involved in court ceremonial. He was a frequent attender at Council meetings, and, though not a lot of evidence has survived for this, he was no doubt active on the Crown’s behalf in those areas of the Midlands where he possessed considerable land and influence; it is no surprise to find him on the commissions of the peace for the counties of Derbyshire, Leicestershire, Nottinghamshire, Shropshire, Staffordshire, Worcestershire and the three Yorkshire Ridings. He was also an important military figure. He led a large contingent to France in 1513, and in 1522 was appointed lieutenant general in the North. He may not have been the first choice for the post: the obvious candidate, given his previous experience in the North, was the future 3rd duke of Norfolk, but at that time he was needed for the war with France. Shrewsbury was also a rather reluctant candidate, Wolsey reporting to Henry that he had had some difficulty in persuading him to accept.122 But then campaigning in the North was never very popular, and Shrewsbury was not a man to seek the limelight. Nevertheless, we know that someone, probably Wolsey, judged him ‘to be as active a captain as can be chosen within your realm, meet, convenable, and necessary to be appointed for the leading of the army against Scotland’,123 and so off to the North he dutifully went.

  However, back in May 1516 he had not been quite so dutiful in turning up at court, where Henry was most anxious for his presence.124 There is nothing sinister about Henry wanting him there. As lord steward, Shrewsbury was an important figure in the royal household, who might, for instance, be expected to grace the Whitsuntide celebrations. But he was reluctant to come, and moreover was strongly advised not to by his servant Thomas Allen, whose letters are a principal source for this episode and who was at this time very active in London on his master’s behalf, and in contact with Wolsey.125 Shrewsbury maintained that serious illness prevented him from coming, for even if he himself was on the mend, the chaos caused by the illness of other members of his household made a journey to London administratively very difficult.126 The suggestion has been made that the talk of illness should be interpreted as a mild protest or coded message by which a trusty servant was informing the king that he did not like the way that his recently appointed lord chancellor was running his affairs – something rather similar to the present one-day strike.127 Henry certainly did not act upon the message, nor is there any evidence that he understood it in the way that has been suggested – but that does not mean that Shrewsbury did not intend it. There were a number of reasons why Shrewsbury might have wanted to stay away. It was a little embarrassing for him that the earl of Northumberland, the father of the man he was hoping to have as his son-in-law, had recently been made to acknowledge his guilt before the king and Council in Star Chamber.128 And Wolsey’s suggestion, however well intentioned, that rather than a Percy, he should take a Stafford as a brother-in-law would not have been very welcome either; and he quickly turned it down.129 The drive taking place against illegal retaining had led to a number of noblemen being temporarily in trouble before the Council, and Allen reported that a servant of Shrewsbury’s had been rather carelessly wearing his master’s livery.130 England’s foreign policy was going badly and because its purpose was being very much kept under wraps, it lent itself to rumour and misunderstanding. Moreover, it was only recently that two very senior councillors, Warham and Fox, had resigned from high office, with Wolsey replacing the former as lord chancellor, and this had also led to rumour and unease. More pertinently, Shrewsbury was himself involved in a case before Star Chamber. The details are obscure.131 It seems to have involved the duchy of Lancaster, whose chancellor, Sir Henry Marney, was not his favourite fellow councillor, so he must have been delighted when he heard that Wolsey had put him in his place, by informing the chancellor that he ‘had done more displeasure unto the king’s grace, by reason of his cruelty against the great estates of this realm, than any man alive’.132 And indeed, a feature of the whole episode is that both Allen, and another correspondent of Shrewsbury’s, and one of those in trouble over retaining, Sir Richard Sacheverell, made it clear on more than one occasion that the earl was very much in Wolsey’s good books.133 Indeed there is not a hint in any of the correspondence that Shrewsbury saw Wolsey as some bogey figure.

  In the spring of 1516 rumour and speculation were rife, but if the argument of the first chapter is accepted, that Wolsey had not knifed his former patron, Richard Fox, in the back, and that Warham’s retirement was not enforced, rumour and speculation was probably all that it was – and if Shrewsbury had come to court he would have been in better position to appreciate this. Moreover, the earl does not seem the sort of person who would have wanted to make coded signals to anybody, let alone to his king. So, if in the spring of 1516 he was deliberately keeping away, it is likely that it had more to do with the state of his private affairs, such as his marriage negotiations with the Percys, than with any dislike of the new cardinal, who certainly showed no dislike of him. Indeed, one of Wolsey’s tasks as the king’s leading councillor was to keep the likes of Shrewsbury happy.

  It will by now be clear that any evidence which would afford an assessment of a particular nobleman’s happiness is extremely scanty, and in all cases difficult to interpret. What must be true is that access to royal patronage and favour would have been a vital ingredient in how a nobleman viewed his king. If he felt that he was being denied his just rewards, or that other people were getting more than they deserved, he was unlikely to take a favourable view; he might even in certain circumstances be tempted to oppose him. Moreover, if he thought that this situation arose out of the stranglehold that the king’s leading councillor had obtained over the exercise of royal patronage, his opposition and resentment would naturally focus on him – and the same would go for any others who might have expected to enjoy some of the fruits, however small and however indirectly, of royal favour. In fact, Wolsey never commanded such a monopoly of patronage, or anything approaching it. This, at least, was his own assessment of the matter, if Cavendish is to be believed. The circumstances in which he made it were, admittedly, unusual. In disgrace at Esher in 1529, Wolsey summoned his household officers and ser
vants. His chief purpose for doing this was to dismiss them until such time as it became clearer what was to become of him, but he was also anxious to justify his past behaviour towards them in the light of criticism recently put to him by one who was at this time probably the most important member of his household, Thomas Cromwell. According to Cromwell, while Wolsey had been in royal favour he had only rewarded those members of his household who were clerics: just those people, Cromwell had added with some bitterness, who had deserted him at his downfall. Hurt by this accusation, Wolsey had launched into a defence; in ‘floods of tears’, he explained to the assembled household:

  There was never thing that repenteth me more that ever I did than doth the remembrance of my oblivious negligence and ungentleness, that I have not promoted or preferred you to condign rooms and preferments according to your demerits. Howbeit it is not unknown unto you all that I was not so well furnished of temporal advancements as I was of spiritual preferments. And if I should have promoted you to any of the king’s offices and rooms, then I should have incurred the indignation of the king’s servants, who would not much let to report in every place behind my back that there could no office or room of the king’s gift escape the cardinal and his servants.134

  In arguing thus, Wolsey may have conveniently overlooked the amount of secular patronage that the holder of two episcopal sees, an abbacy and the office of lord chancellor held directly in his own hands; and for local families in particular, such as the Boweses, Eures and Tempests in the diocese of Durham, such patronage would be important.135 Still, as he implied, in comparison with the Crown he had little to offer, so it is what he had to say about royal patronage that is of most interest. His claim was that he had never interfered in what might be called the small change of royal patronage, and the surviving evidence very much supports this. The people who day in, day out, were in receipt of it were either members of the royal household, or else in some other way connected with royal service. Members of Wolsey’s household did not normally benefit; that is the fact. Of course, it could have been that only royal servants whom Wolsey considered to be favourably disposed towards him were rewarded and that in this circumscribed way he was manipulating royal patronage. The problem of arriving at the truth is common to all discussions of the exercise of royal patronage: that the circumstances surrounding any particular grant are rarely known. It needs to be stressed, though, that such evidence as has survived suggests quite strongly that Wolsey had little say in who got what.

  The gamut of what the king had to offer was extremely various, ranging from important offices of state to minor posts in the royal kitchens, and from grants of large estates to stewardships of decaying castles. Add to these a whole range of licences and exemptions from existing statutes, all of which offered some pecuniary advantage to the receiver.136 The most prestigious and financially rewarding office to become vacant during Wolsey’s time was that of lord treasurer – after the lord chancellor, the most important office of state. When Wolsey first began to acquire political influence it was held by Thomas Howard 2nd duke of Norfolk, and had been since 1501. In December 1522, aged nearly eighty, he resigned, to be succeeded by his son and heir, the earl of Surrey. In a letter written two days before his appointment was confirmed, Surrey informed Wolsey that he had spoken to the king on the subject, that Henry had been very gracious, but had told him to get in touch with Wolsey, so he was now writing to make an appointment with him for 9.00 or 10.00 a.m. the following day.137 It would be possible to interpret all this as vital evidence that Henry had left the appointment completely in Wolsey’s hands, but further thought suggests otherwise. The impending resignation of so important a person from so important a post must have been known to the king for some time before it took place, and, given Norfolk’s age, would anyway have been foreseen. The likelihood, therefore, is that the decision to appoint the son was taken long before he saw the king. No doubt it had involved discussion between Henry and Wolsey, but there is no good reason for believing that the king’s would not have been the decisive voice. After all, it was he who had appointed Wolsey and, perhaps even more relevantly, had raised his close friend Charles Brandon from esquire to duke in the space of five years, so he was quite capable of making choices. In such a scenario Surrey’s interview with Henry becomes something of a formality or courtesy call, and that with Wolsey only a matter of sorting out the details. Even if this reconstruction is faulty, the bits of evidence do not point in any convincing way to Wolsey as the man who made the appointment; and for Surrey to have given Wolsey less than twenty-four hours’ notice of what, in this scenario, would have been a crucial interview, would have been a curious way to go about securing such an important post. And what the episode certainly cannot be taken as is evidence of a desire by Wolsey to do the house of Howard down, although those who are predisposed to think along these lines would want to draw attention to the following coda.

  Surrey succeeded his father as lord treasurer in 1522. In 1524, on his father’s death, he did not succeed him as earl marshal. How is one to interpret this? Was it a deliberate blow to Howard amour propre, or was it instead, or as well, a political balancing act? In other words, if Surrey was to have the treasurership, perhaps it was only fair that Suffolk became earl marshal, with the possible advantage to Wolsey that the division of spoils would help to maintain a rivalry between his two most powerful opponents? Clearly, some notion of fairness, if not balance, was involved. Surrey had been given a succession of important military and administrative posts in Ireland, in the North and against the French. Suffolk, on the other hand, ever since his marriage without initial royal consent to Henry’s youngest sister Mary in early 1515, had been given very little responsibility, until, that is, the summer of 1523 when he was given command of the important expeditionary force to France; and it should be mentioned that it was in that summer that he secured the reversion of the office of earl marshal which, on the old duke’s death in the following year, was to give him the office itself. Surrey in 1523 was heavily involved in the North, so that the attention paid to Suffolk should not be seen as any demotion of himself. Still, it does look as if there was in that year a deliberate decision to make more use of Suffolk, and his receipt of the high and particularly honorific office of earl marshal was part of this. However, it is surely of much greater relevance that it was an office that was almost tailor-made for Suffolk. Most of its duties had to do with the ceremonial and chivalrous side of court life, with which Suffolk had been intimately involved all his life, and he had already held the related though less important office, of master of the horse.138 In other words, Suffolk’s appointment was sensible, if, and only for that reason, rather obvious. And in the context of the present argument probably the most important aspect of the appointment is that it was in an area so closely connected with the whole panoply of kingship, as well as with Henry’s particular interests, that it is hardly conceivable that he would not have made the decision himself.

  Given all this, it seems unlikely that Surrey would have greatly resented his failure to obtain the earl marshalship, and indeed there is no evidence that he did. On the other hand, in October 1527 the Spanish ambassador reported that one of the reasons why the king’s new favourite, Anne Boleyn, was antagonistic towards Wolsey was because he had some years previously deprived her father of an important office.139 Here is a specific accusation that Wolsey did manipulate the higher reaches of royal patronage, and to the detriment of one of the triumvirate of Norfolk, Suffolk and Thomas Boleyn that allegedly brought him down in 1529. What the Spanish ambassador seems to have been referring to is an episode which had taken place eight years before, and for which some evidence, mainly in the form of letters from Boleyn to Wolsey, has survived.

  In May 1519 on an embassy to the court of Francis I, Boleyn was informed in a letter from Wolsey that the office of treasurer of the household, to become vacant as a result of Sir Thomas Lovell’s wish to resign, was going to Sir Edward Poynings rather than to himself
.140 Poynings’ elevation would make available the lesser office of comptroller of the household, but Boleyn was not going to be given that either. This double blow must have been very distressing for someone who, ever since his involvement in putting down the Cornish rebellion of 1497, had played an active part in Tudor government, especially, since 1512, in the conduct of diplomacy, and who might justifiably have felt that this service deserved some reward. It was even more distressing because when, four years previously, he had asked Henry whether on Lovell’s resignation as treasurer, expected at any moment, he might succeed him, he had been promised that while that office was likely to go to Poynings, the comptrollership would definitely be his. What is more, Henry had repeated his promise in January 1519 just before Boleyn’s departure for France. In wondering why the promise had not been fulfilled, Boleyn wrote that he supposed it was because Wolsey had perceived some fault in him141 – and in so wondering he may appear to prove the case for the Machiavellian Wolsey. A closer reading of the letter, however, dispels such an impression.

  There are two points to be addressed here. The first concerns the degree of Wolsey’s involvement in the proposed appointments. The second, and perhaps more relevant to the question of subsequent Boleyn resentment, is to try to decide whether what was happening was a deliberate attempt to do Sir Thomas down. The suggestion will be that Wolsey did have a hand in the appointments, but that this in itself does not prove that there was dirty work afoot. Indeed, the argument will be that part of Wolsey’s intention was to benefit Boleyn. It is important to bear in mind that the basic proposal, that on Lovell’s retirement as treasurer, Poynings would succeed him, was at least four years old. Both Lovell and Poynings were outstanding Tudor servants, and that one should succeed the other was very right and proper; and it may be said in passing that there is nothing to associate Poynings and Wolsey in any factional sense. It is also noticeable, though given his long association with the royal household not at all surprising, that Boleyn carried out his own negotiations with Henry. On neither of the occasions when the matter was discussed was Wolsey present, nor is there any suggestion that the proposals were Wolsey’s. What makes it likely that he did have something to do with them as they emerged in May 1519 is the reason that Boleyn was given for Henry’s promise to him not being fulfilled: that it was Henry’s intention in the fairly near future to create Poynings a baron. When that happened, Boleyn would succeed him, and meanwhile it was thought not very sensible to put Boleyn in as comptroller for such a short period. Instead – and this had been Wolsey’s reason for writing to Boleyn – it was thought important that whoever was appointed to that office should be someone approved of by Boleyn, so that when he did succeed Poynings, treasurer and comptroller would get on well together. What Wolsey was doing, in other words, was trying to devise the best possible solution to the problems raised by Sir Thomas Lovell’s retirement, to ensure both that the administrative requirements of government were well served, and that the rewards of patronage were best distributed amongst the many claimants.