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

by Gwyn, Peter

  The overwhelming impression is that the dismissals of 1526 made a good deal of sense, both for those removed and for the more cost-effective running of the royal household, which, after all, was the stated purpose of the exercise. A conspiracy theorist would wish to ignore the stated purpose, but that would seem a little cavalier. Reform of the royal household was to be a leitmotiv of sixteenth- and seventeenth-century politics. The institution itself was an administrator’s nightmare, in some ways consciously designed to be wasteful and corrupt, because it was one of the purposes of kingship to be bountiful. But given that Tudor and Stuart kings were always short of money, if not desperately in need of it, it was inevitable that attempts would periodically be made by those in charge of government to limit the drain on money that the royal household always was. In 1525 money was a problem for Henry, so there is nothing at all sinister in the fact that Wolsey turned his attention to household reform.

  A brief look at Sir William Compton’s position in 1526 will help us to a proper understanding of the role of the privy chamber in this period and of its relationship with Wolsey. Having presided over the first ten years of its existence, as groom of the stool, Compton was the privy chamber member par excellence.69 In the late summer of 1525, he had wished to become chancellor of the duchy of Lancaster, one of the major offices of state, and if he had obtained it, he would certainly have had to give up his privy chamber post. As it was, he obtained a post not quite so important but nevertheless perfectly respectable and well paid, that of undertreasurer of the Exchequer70. Whatever his disappointment, it has to be assumed that Compton was by 1525 anxious to escape from the burdensome duties of groom of the stool, and saw this office as promotion. And the notion of promotion is the key to understanding. The royal household and, if you were fortunate, the privy chamber was where you started your career, not where you hoped to end it. For this reason entry into the privy chamber was largely for the young, and the exceptions, such as Wolsey’s four ‘creatures’, do not disprove the rule. These older men, it was argued earlier, gave to the newly formed institution that status and distinction that, probably following the French model, Henry perceived a body so intimately associated with the king to require. In fact the appointment of four hard-working senior royal servants was not a great success. Kingston and Weston remained until 1526 when both went on to more important things, but Wingfield and Jerningham had dropped out much earlier, being far too busily employed in foreign embassies to perform satisfactorily duties that involved close and permanent attendance upon the king.

  Service in the royal household provided an excellent training in all kinds of skills, lots of good perks and, above all, a golden opportunity to form a personal relationship with the king, which would obviously further one’s career; a modern equivalent would be the post of personal private secretary to a cabinet minister. But personal private secretaries do not exercise great power, and neither did members of the the privy chamber, as is suggested by the fact that they were rarely mentioned by foreign ambassadors, one of whose main jobs was, after all, to detect who was and was not important. Compton, it is true, occasionally rated a mention. In 1511 the French ambassador even reported that he enjoyed more ‘credit’ with the king than anyone else, and should therefore be granted a pension, advice that was later to be acted upon.71 All the same, Giustinian in his four years at the English court never once mentioned Compton, and when he came to report the ‘purge’ of 1519 he failed to provide the names of those who had been removed, almost certainly because he did not know them. The people whom he felt to be important, apart from Wolsey, were Norfolk, Suffolk, Fox, and occasionally Pace and More. Now, it would ill behove one as sceptical of the value of ambassadorial reports as the present writer to set too much store by this, but it does seem unlikely that Giustinian would have completely failed over a four-year period to detect a whole group of people, if indeed they did possess great influence. Later ambassadors did not spot them either. And, when, from 1527 onwards, they began to speculate about an anti-Wolsey faction, it was one composed not of privy chamber members, but of two dukes and one viscount. Even if, as will shortly be argued, they were wrong about this, they were surely right to think that any threat to Wolsey’s position would come from such people, because only they had the authority to force the king’s hand?

  By and large it was the 3rd Duke of Norfolk who was singled out by the ambassadors as Wolsey’s chief opponent, and so it is a little surprising to find that during the 1520s he was given an enormous amount of responsibility. Sent to Ireland in 1520, he was recalled in 1522 because of the imminent outbreak of war with France, and by the July of that year he was in charge of an expedition to Brittany. War with France meant war with Scotland, and in February 1523 Surrey, as he was then, was made lord lieutenant of the king’s army against Scotland, his brief to defend the Northern border from invasion by the duke of Albany. By the end of 1524 the threat of invasion was no more, and Surrey, who had by then succeeded his father as 3rd duke of Norfolk, was allowed to return south. But he was not given much rest. In 1525 he was heavily involved in efforts to secure the Amicable Grant in East Anglia and in putting down the accompanying unrest. If, as a result of Pavia, there had been an English invasion of France, it was he who would have led it, but in fact the year brought peace with France, and though there was occasional talk of English armies, Norfolk’s military skills were not required again in Wolsey’s time. Since 1522 he had been lord treasurer of England, and by the end of the decade he was on virtually every commission of the peace, a distinction he shared with Wolsey alone. It must be assumed from this that Henry and Wolsey, who as lord chancellor was responsible for the appointment of JPs, considered that the duke’s name alone added such distinction and authority to a commission that it was worth putting him on it, whether he had any connections with the county or not. As has already been shown, in areas such as East Anglia where he did have strong connections much more than his name was required. In 1525 and from late 1527 through much of 1528 his presence there was considered vital for carrying out government policy and for maintaining law and order.

  Norfolk’s contribution at these critical times offers the best illustration of the importance to royal government of a loyal nobility. It also provides important evidence of his good relationship with Wolsey. Not only did he make no effort to exploit what might have been considered a heaven-sent opportunity to bring Wolsey down, but the tone of his correspondence with the cardinal at this time reveals two conscientious servants of the king, with different roles to play, but both co-operating to do their very best for their master in difficult circumstances. And what there is certainly no sign of, even in 1527 and 1528, is that Norfolk was at the head of a faction that was striving night and day to bring the cardinal down. Admittedly, tone is a notoriously difficult matter to reach a judgement about and it would be very odd if Norfolk had chosen in his correspondence to let Wolsey know that he was plotting against him! Moreover, one of the charges against Wolsey is that he deliberately kept Norfolk in exile in order to deny him political influence, and for a conspiracy theorist the fact that Norfolk was ordered, even if by the king, to remain in East Anglia in 1528 could be seen as part of Wolsey’s machinations. Similar charges levelled against him in connection with Richard Pace and Sir William Compton were refuted, and so will this one be. But it has this much to be said for it: Norfolk, being a nobleman who was prepared to work hard at being a royal servant, was potentially a much more serious threat to Wolsey’s position than anyone so far mentioned.

  It was the decision to send Norfolk to Ireland in 1520 which, for Polydore Vergil at least, provided the decisive evidence that Wolsey was determined to keep him as far away as possible from the king;72 and in support of this view is the idea, as much a commonplace of Tudor and Stuart politics as it is of today’s, that if one wants to ruin a man’s reputation one sends him to sink in the quagmire of Irish politics. What this view ignores is that Ireland has presented successive English governments
with real problems which, however reluctantly, have had to be faced up to. This was so in 1520, and in the particular circumstances of that year Norfolk was so obviously the candidate for the post of lord lieutenant of Ireland that no other explanation for the appointment is required. It can also be shown that at that time Henry was taking a direct interest in Irish affairs, and that, given his keen interest in all military matters, he was almost certainly responsible for Norfolk’s appointment.73 And what is true of Norfolk’s appointment to Ireland is even more the case, because of his experience of Scottish warfare, of his appointment to command the army against Scotland in 1523 and 1524. The fact is that of the two obvious candidates for any important military command at this time – whether they liked it or not – Norfolk was one. The other was the duke of Suffolk, according to some a fellow conspirator against Wolsey.

  Even if Norfolk’s appointments to these important commands cannot be evidence of a plot on Wolsey’s part to do him down, this does not, of course, prove that no such plot existed. Moreover, it is not only Polydore Vergil and the foreign ambassadors who saw the two men as enemies. In October 1526 the young Henry Percy wrote a letter to his brother-in-law, the earl of Cumberland, in which he reported a conversation between his father the 5th earl of Northumberland and Wolsey, to the effect that Wolsey should put no trust in Cumberland because he was ‘all with my lord of Norfolk’.74 On the face of it, here is convincing evidence that, in leading Northern circles at least, Norfolk and Wolsey were thought to be rivals, and one can see why this might be so. It was during his defence of the Northern border in 1523-4 that Norfolk had been so critical of the stay-at-home courtiers, and no doubt he sometimes made rude remarks about Wolsey too, and what anxious military commander has not criticized civilian leaders who have failed to provide him with the necessary men and money and have obstinately refused to appreciate all the difficulties of waging war? Some of Norfolk’s remarks would have gone the rounds and might easily have been misinterpreted – and in this particular instance were probably being deliberately misinterpreted. Northumberland was never really trusted by Henry or Wolsey, and when this conversation with Wolsey took place, he was on bad terms with both his son and his son-in-law. And its purpose was not to provide Wolsey with an objective assessment of factional groupings in the North, but to create trouble for his son-in-law. This makes him an unreliable source for the true relationship between Norfolk and Wolsey – something that his son, who had been brought up in Wolsey’s household and was thus well placed to make a judgement, seems to have realized. At any rate, the burden of his letter to Cumberland was to warn him not of the awful consequences of a too close attachment to Norfolk but only of Northumberland’s efforts to do him down.

  But what is one to make of the confession of one William Stapleton who in the late 1520s was called in by a servant of Norfolk to free his master from a spirit allegedly conjured up by Wolsey’s enchantment? And what of the Scotsman who, while in France in 1527, got to hear of rude remarks against the duke that Wolsey had apparently made to the French at Amiens, and then reported them to Norfolk? As regards Stapleton, it is necessary to bear in mind he was a professional ‘conjuror’ who had previously been up before Sir Thomas More for trying to find treasure by magical means, and it looks rather as if Norfolk had been deliberately leading him on in order to discover more about his activities.75 As regards the Scotsman, there was no doubt some truth in the anecdote, but only insofar as he was reporting that favourite gambit of Wolsey with foreigners in which he portrayed himself as the only Englishman who favoured their cause.76 A feature of both episodes is that Norfolk did not attempt to conceal them from Wolsey. This may have been mere prudence: he would no doubt have borne in mind the salutary example of his father-in-law, the duke of Buckingham, whose secret consultations with the Carthusian prophesier of Henton Priory had led to his destruction in 1521. Still, if he was seriously planning Wolsey’s destruction, why get involved with the likes of Stapleton, only then to rat on him? And if he had to tell somone, why not go straight to the king, who after all was the man he had to persuade that Wolsey was up to no good if he was going to bring the cardinal down? In fact, on both occasions Norfolk behaved very correctly, and in a way that does not suggest that he believed Wolsey to be his evil genius. Twenty years later, however, he was to maintain, if not quite that, at least that Wolsey had spent all his political life plotting against him.

  On the face of it this statement would appear decisively to refute the claim being made here that Wolsey and Norfolk got on perfectly well. Here is Norfolk himself saying quite the opposite, and why should we not believe him? One reason might be that twenty years is a considerable time. Wolsey was long dead and much discredited, so that it did not really matter what Norfolk said about him. Moreover, the accusation was made in a letter to the Council written from the Tower where he had just been placed, along with his eldest son, on a charge of treason.77 Its purpose was to show that he who had done so much for his sovereign had been misunderstood and wronged by almost everyone at court, especially those who had in the end proved unfaithful to their master: his two nieces, Anne Boleyn and Catherine Howard; Buckingham; and the two great ministers of the Crown, Cromwell and Wolsey. The price of his loyalty had been their opposition to him, so how was it that this man who had suffered so much on behalf of his king could now be considered a traitor? This at any rate was Norfolk’s argument, and, of course, the truth about the opposition to him was not his greatest concern. Moreover, what he had to say about Wolsey’s plotting against him does not fit in very well with the usual interpretations of his part in the downfall of Wolsey. For one thing, he had learnt of it from Wolsey himself, and only after he had been removed from office, so it cannot have provided the motivation for his alleged machinations against Wolsey. For another, what according to Norfolk Wolsey had confessed to was that he had been put up to his plotting by an aristocratic faction, which had included none other than the duke of Suffolk, who is usually supposed to have been working with Norfolk against Wolsey! It is all very confusing, and in the end cannot be very convincing evidence of what was really going on between the two men during the 1520s.

  It is begins to look as if there were two Norfolks. On the one hand there was the Norfolk ‘small and spare in person, and his hair black’, 78 a Machiavellian figure who not only destroyed Henry’s Wolsey and Cromwell but who may have attempted to murder his second wife while she was pregnant! Such a Norfolk deserves the judgement of a great Tudor historian that he was ‘one of the most unpleasant characters in an age which abounded in them’.79 What is interesting about this version is that it is based largely on the evidence of foreign ambassadors and the like, who, as we have seen, often had some axe to grind. The other Norfolk, emerging largely from his own correspondence, was the conscientious duke co-operating fully with Wolsey to ensure the good government of the realm. And in other respects his correspondence is relevant to our present concerns. In October 1523 he wrote to the cardinal a rather sad letter from Newcastle, asking to be discharged from his responsibilities in the North: by the end of the month the campaigning season would be over so that for the time being Albany would be no threat; the affairs of the North were generally in good order, but he himself was not, because after four years of almost continual fighting, in Ireland, France and the Far North, he was desperately in need of some respite.80 The letter that he wrote a month later to Henry was even more emotional, for he made the dramatic announcement that another winter in the North would kill him.81 He followed this up with another letter to Wolsey, in which he explained that ‘the little flesh that I had is clean gone, and yet I am not sick, but in a manner I eat very little, and these five week days I never slept one whole hour without waking, my mind is so troubled for fear that anything should frame amiss’.82 On the face of it this all adds up to dramatic evidence not only that Wolsey was deliberately keeping poor Norfolk away from court, but that he was trying to kill him off!

  Undoubtedly Norfolk was in a ba
d way, and, as we have suggested, may have permitted himself the occasional rude remark about a cardinal sitting comfortably in front of his own fire. But momentary anger need not indicate long-term enmity, and as their replies to Norfolk’s passionate requests for a discharge indicate, both Henry and Wolsey believed that he was performing a vital service, for as the former wrote: ‘Considering that for your wisdom, prowess and experience no man is more meet to match him [Albany]’, Norfolk must ‘possess himself with patience’ until such time as the situation on the Border had become clearer.83 But if his continuing presence in the far North was deemed essential for the success of royal policy there, this did not mean that his actions were beyond criticism. Indeed, Wolsey was often critical: Norfolk had been warned; he should have foreseen that; unnecessary expense could have been avoided if only; and, above all, if only he had carried out his instructions.84 But no more than Norfolk’s momentary anger, should these criticisms to ‘his loving friend’ be taken as Wolsey’s final judgement on Norfolk, for just as often he praised the duke, some of the praise in marginal notes intended for Henry’s eyes only85 – not the best way of doing down his arch-rival! What elicited the particular response were the particular circumstances, and it is precisely these that a conspiratorial view of Henrician politics ignores. Every scrap of evidence is dragged in to support the view that leading figures were always at one another’s throats and, in this instance, the fact that it was the overriding necessity of defeating Albany that explains Wolsey’s critical comments is ignored. Moreover, the leitmotiv of Wolsey’s criticisms was that Norfolk was failing to carry out instructions which he himself had helped to draw up.86 And when Henry and Wolsey at last agreed to let him return south, it was not out of any great concern for his health, but because they wished to consult with him in person about the king’s affairs. Wolsey never saw Norfolk as merely an executant of royal policy, but as one involved in its making at the highest level. As lord treasurer from 1522, he was one of the principal ministers of the Crown, and despite his frequent absences on active service, he emerges as one of the most regular attenders of Council meetings. No wonder that in 1525 the Imperial ambassador wrote to Margaret of Austria: ‘You know how powerful the cardinal and Norfolk are in this kingdom and how much confidence their master places in them.’87 Does it not become ever more difficult to sustain the belief that the two men were bitter enemies?