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

by Gwyn, Peter

  It is easy to see why the belief in an aristocratic faction was, and is, so pervasive, but it is hoped that by this stage it will be just as easy to see why it is wrong. At any rate, the argument here has been that Wolsey fell because at a certain moment Henry came to the conclusion that he was not going to get him what he most wanted in the world, a pronouncement by the Church that his marriage to Catherine had never had any validity, thereby leaving him free to marry Anne. The only question remaining is exactly when he made that decision: not an easy task for by its very nature it was not something which he would have wanted to make very public, and certainly not to commit to paper.

  It was in January and February 1529 that Mendoza reported having been told that Henry was beginning to blame Wolsey for his failure to fulfil his promises concerning the divorce. Could this be the moment that Wolsey’s fate was decided? It is possible, but there is quite a bit of evidence to suggest that Henry’s confidence in Wolsey had not yet been completely eroded. It was only at the very end of the previous November that an important embassy, carrying with it new divorce proposals, had set off for Rome, and when in mid-January it eventually arrived, it found Clement supposedly on his deathbed. This had resulted in Stephen Gardiner being rushed out to promote Wolsey’s candidature for the prospective vacancy, for if he could have become pope, Henry’s problems would have been over. Meanwhile Campeggio was still in England, his ostensible task to preside with Wolsey over a trial to consider the validity of Henry’s marriage. And however poor the king’s prospects in the trial, it would have been foolish to move against Wolsey without seeing the outcome. When in March the English envoys at Rome sent back extremely gloomy reports about the chances of obtaining anything from the now no longer dying pope, 163 Henry joined with Wolsey in berating them for being far too pessimistic, 164 which he would have been unlikely to do if he had not still believed in Wolsey’s ability to bring about a divorce. By the end of May he was no longer confident, despite the legatine court having at last got under way.

  That Henry had lost confidence in Wolsey is proved by a letter that the duke of Suffolk wrote to him from Orléans on 4 June. He and Fitzwilliam had been sent there in a rather desperate attempt to prevent a long-threatened and increasingly likely accord between Francis and the emperor. Their mission had been planned with Wolsey’s knowledge and approval, but what he did not know was that Suffolk had been given a ‘secret charge’, which was to pump Francis for any views and information about the reliability of Campeggio in the matter of the divorce.165 Having discovered that Francis had always mistrusted him, Suffolk then asked if he ‘knew any other that in like case doth dissemble’. When Francis failed to take the hint, Suffolk was forced to be more direct: ‘Sir, ’ he asked, ‘what say you by the cardinal of England in this matter?’ Francis’s initial reply was, not unnaturally, cautious: when he had met Wolsey at Amiens in the summer of 1527 he told Suffolk, ‘I assure you, as far as I could perceive in him, he would the divorce should go forth and take effect, for he loved not the queen’.166 Not too damaging an answer as far as Wolsey was concerned, but then Francis became rather more mischievous.

  Why he did is not entirely clear. It was not at all what his ambassador in London, du Bellay, would have wanted: his advice almost to the very end was that the French should stick by Wolsey as the one man in England who could ensure the continuance of an Anglo-French alliance.167 Probably Francis’s assessment was that, with or without Wolsey, Henry was going to require French support, and that the removal of such a skilled negotiator as Wolsey could only strengthen the French position. He may also have felt that if Wolsey was anyway on the way out, he could only gain credit with Henry by advancing the process. At any rate his next remarks could have done Wolsey no good at all:

  Mine advice shall be to my good brother that he shall have good regard and not put so much trust in no man, whereby he may be deceived as nigh as he can. And the best remedy for the defence thereof is to look substantially upon his matters himself, as I hear say he doth, which I am not a little glad of.

  So far not very good, but Francis then proceeded to touch upon a very sensitive nerve: he understood that Wolsey

  had a marvellous intelligence with the Pope, and in Rome, and also with Cardinal Campeggio. Whereof, seeing that he hath such intelligence with them, which have not minded to advance your matter, he thinketh it shall the more need for your grace to have the better regard to your said affair.168

  As was shown in the previous chapter, Francis’s remarks were very unfair: in fact, Wolsey was battling against enormous odds to persuade Clement to do something that was bound to offend an emperor who happened to be in a much better position to affect the fortunes of the papacy for good or ill than Henry and Wolsey were. No wonder there were delays; but, as they continued, the implication behind Francis’s remarks that the reason for them could only be that Wolsey was deceiving Henry, or at least not doing his best to bring about the divorce, must have crossed the English king’s mind. And, after all, what was the point of Henry having his own cardinal legate if he could not obtain from the pope what he wanted?

  Suspicion and resentment were lodged in Henry’s mind by the end of May, for otherwise why the ‘secret charge’ to Suffolk? It was hardly usual to ask another monarch whether one’s leading servant was deceiving one. Moreover, further reports from Rome, addressed to the king rather than to Wolsey, would have helped to fuel these feelings, may even have triggered it off, for they probably reached England just before Suffolk set off for France.169 In the first, written on 21 April, Sir Francis Bryan (incidently, a distant relation of Anne’s)170 who had recently returned to the privy chamber and had by his own account been sent to Rome with a special brief to keep Henry personally informed of what was going on, made it quite clear that in his opinion Clement ‘will do nothing for your grace’, adding ominously for Wolsey that ‘whosoever hath made your grace believe that he would do for you in this cause hath not, as I think, done your grace the best service’.171 Bryan devoted his letter of 5 May to an attack on Campeggio who, he understood, was reporting back to the pope that he had merely indulged in diplomatic pleasantries with Henry, but had never promised anything specific as regards the divorce, nor had he any intention of doing so. Then Bryan repeated his earlier warning that ‘all that is told you there [England] that the pope will do for your grace in this cause, I assure you they tell you the gloss and not the text’.172

  It is worth stressing that Bryan was not taking a ‘privy chamber’ or factional view of the matter, but, as he put it in this same letter, was merely reporting what seemed to be the truth as seen from Rome.173 That this was so is confirmed by someone who was neither a relative of Anne’s nor a member of the privy chamber, and indeed was probably still technically in Wolsey’s household: Stephen Gardiner.174 Writing on 4 May, he first warned Henry that it looked very much as if Clement would revoke his commission to Wolsey and Campeggio to try the divorce and then remarked how sorry he was to see that Henry’s case had not been handled according to his merits by the pope, ‘or some other’.175 It is not clear whether by this Gardiner meant Wolsey. Much of his letter was an attack on Campeggio, so probably he was intended, just as it is possible that Bryan in his comments to Henry had only Campeggio in mind. But in a sense it hardly matters. Campeggio’s presence in England had become an essential part of Wolsey’s plans to achieve Henry’s ends. How certain he himself was of the Italian’s soundness is difficult to judge; any confidence he had in him must have taken a severe knock during those first few weeks after his arrival in England, when he had blatantly failed to do what Wolsey and Henry had expected him to. But by now they simply had to make the best of him; and for all Campeggio’s reluctance he very nearly was pressurized into doing what Henry and Wolsey wanted. But in this matter a near miss was no good, and as the months went by and nothing happened, Henry must have grown increasingly impatient with the Church in general and the two cardinal legates in particular, impatient enough to instruct the du
ke of Suffolk to make discreet inquiries of Francis about them.

  Again, it must be stressed that this does not show that the duke was plotting Wolsey’s downfall, however much it might appear to be so. Because of his francophile sentiments he had been much involved with Wolsey in drawing up plans for a possible Anglo-French campaign against the emperor, 176 and since the main purpose of his mission was to persuade Francis not to come to terms with the emperor by promising to make a much greater English contribution to the present war, the duke was an obvious choice as envoy. If he was being sent on such a mission, then he was also an obvious choice, as a personal friend of both monarchs, to perform the ‘secret charge’. And that the initiative came from Henry is confirmed by an episode that occurred on Suffolk’s return. Apparently du Bellay had fed Wolsey a rather garbled version of Suffolk’s interview, in which the duke had done his best to put him out of favour with Francis.177 Wolsey was naturally annoyed and complained to Henry, who then solemnly asked Suffolk in Wolsey’s presence whether there was any truth in the allegation. Suffolk duly denied that there was. Strictly speaking his denial was correct, for to have asked those questions does not have to be interpreted as trying to create bad blood between Wolsey and Francis. But by indicating to Francis that Wolsey was no longer trusted by his king, he was doing something at least as harmful. Still, it is Henry’s part in the episode that is most interesting, for there can be no doubt at all that he was acting, and acting very well. Even if one believed, unlikely as it is, that he was putty in Suffolk’s hand, he knew perfectly well that Suffolk had asked questions that could only have damaged Wolsey’s credit with Francis. Yet here he was playing the innocent, asking Suffolk questions to which he already knew all the answers. And if Henry was capable of stage-managing this little charade, it really does not look as if he needed many lessons in the art of political infighting, from Suffolk, or indeed from anyone else.

  The suggestion being put forward here is that at some time during April and May 1529 Henry began to take seriously the possibility that it might be in his best interests to disgrace his cardinal legate. He would, of course, want to wait for the outcome of the legatine trial which had at length got under way on 31 May, and if all went well the time bomb would be defused. However, as was shown in the previous chapter, there was little optimism about its outcome. And once the embarrassing question of the consummation of Catherine’s first marriage, upon which so many of the legal issues turned, came more and more to dominate the proceedings, and after Fisher’s powerful intervention on Catherine’s behalf, Henry would have had to face the fact that the initiative begun very early in the previous year was increasingly likely to fail. The news from Rome was increasingly that Clement would recall the case to the Curia, which almost certainly meant that he would decide in Catherine’s favour. At the same time all the diplomatic signals were unfavourable. Since Charles had managed to bring both Clement and Francis to heel, any chance of Henry getting his way seemed for the time being out of the question. The Henry of this book was no fool: he would have been perfectly aware how badly things were going. Once the court had adjourned on 23 July, it had to be made clear to the pope that he was not going to take no for an answer. One way of doing this would be publicly to humiliate the pope’s English legate, Cardinal Wolsey, and he began in a small way by sending Suffolk down to inform the court that ‘I see that the old saw is true that never a cardinal or legate did good in England’. But then for two months he stayed his hand. Campeggio was allowed to depart in peace, and publicly Wolsey’s position remained unchanged. Since in this account Henry had been contemplating the possibility of dispensing with Wolsey’s services since at least May, this curious hiatus needs some explanation.

  In fact, the ending of the legatine court did more or less immediately affect Wolsey’s position. For almost two months Henry skilfully kept him at arm’s length, politely turning down all his efforts to arrange a meeting. And, when in the middle of September Henry relented, it was only to allow Wolsey to accompany Campeggio on that leave taking at Grafton already described. Meanwhile, Gardiner, appointed royal secretary on 28 July, was conducting much of the day-to-day business of the Crown previously carried out by Wolsey. Amongst other things this involved him in writing a good many letters to Wolsey, and this correspondence with his former master – he had been Wolsey’s secretary – offers some indication of the change in their respective relationships with the king. Gardiner’s letters were often brief, sometimes off-hand, and by the end of August openly critical. Thus on 31st he wrote: ‘Your grace’s qualifications, to say truly to your grace, doth no more serve the king’s purpose than as the treaty is now couched’, 178 and four days later he warned Wolsey not to blame others for his mistakes.179 But the real problem for Wolsey was precisely his banishment from the king’s presence; nor, indeed, was Gardiner, at Henry’s express command, allowed to visit him.180 Even foreign ambassadors had now to obtain permission before doing so.181 Wolsey did not require the rumours which were reaching him of his imminent disgrace to realize that his position was extremely precarious.182 His letters if not abject, were by now entirely lacking in their usual confidence. Late in July he referred to his perfectly sensible comments to Brian Tuke on the Treaty of Cambrai as his ‘poor fantasies’ which he hoped would be taken ‘in agreeable part’.183 Three weeks later he wrote to Gardiner that he would not approach Catherine until he ‘be advertised how the king’s highness and you of his Council do like the same’.184 And when he used one of his chaplains as a messenger, he advised him to consult with Gardiner before seeing Henry185 – a clear indication of Wolsey’s recognition that his former secretary was in greater favour with the king than he was.

  During August and September Wolsey was fighting for survival. He had never been under any illusion about how badly Henry wanted a divorce, or the effect on his own position if he failed to obtain it. What he was not aware of was that his battle for survival was already lost. How could he be, when his advice and help were still in such demand? In fact, it is the very nature of the advice that he was now being asked for which lends support to the view that Henry had already made his decision to get rid of him sometime earlier. True, what Wolsey was being consulted about concerned the major issue of the day: namely, how did the Treaties of Barcelona and Cambrai affect Henry’s chances of obtaining the divorce? Should he still rely chiefly upon the French alliance, or did the new peace with the emperor open the way to some deal over the future of his aunt? Wolsey appears to have recommended the former, but only as long as the price was not too high.186 However, that Wolsey was not being retained in office in order to obtain such advice is suggested by the way in which it was received. On 30 August Gardiner wrote to thank him for his ‘excessive pains and labour … Nevertheless, for speedy speaking with the King, and to speak at leisure, I reckon great difficulty, and, as for this night, I am out of hope by reason the king’s highness is out on hunting … but I shall do therein the best I can’.187 Gardiner’s response to advice on the major issue of the day from England’s greatest expert on foreign affairs appears a little cavalier, not to say downright dismissive; and it is evident that Henry no longer wanted Wolsey’s opinions on such matters. What he still needed Wolsey for was something much more tangible. The advocation of his case to Rome had been both a bitter blow to his reputation and a great impediment to his chances of victory. Having got him into this mess, Wolsey must now get him out of it, or at least minimize the damage. This meant, in the first place, ensuring both that Henry was not served with any formal summons and that the standard financial penalties for non-observance of such summonses, should he be served with any, were not demanded. That achieved, it might then be possible to persuade the pope to take the case into his own hands and give a personal judgment in Henry’s favour. In this way the more formal proceedings in the papal courts, the outcome of which it would be impossible to control, could be bypassed, but at the same time any accusation of bias inevitably to be attached to any sentence given i
n England could be avoided. This at least was how Wolsey saw the way forward, 188 but it was not advice that Henry really wanted now. His more pressing concern in August and September was to overcome the legal and technical consequences of the advocation, and it would not have helped him one bit to have moved precipitously against either of the two papal legates then present in England. Indeed, in persuading both the pope and Catherine to dispense with the formal summons, their help was essential.

  As was mentioned in the previous chapter, Henry’s immediate ends were achieved. During the second week of September Wolsey was able to report that Catherine’s legal advisers were willing to waive the formal summons on Henry, 189 and shortly afterwards a papal brief arrived by which all financial penalties were removed, and the hearing of the case in Rome was suspended until Christmas.190Henry’s honour had been saved and valuable time gained. Meanwhile, Campeggio had agreed to sign a document by which he promised to keep his mouth shut concerning any privileged information he may have gained as judge in the case, and to work wholeheartedly to advance the king’s interests.191 This done, the way was left open for Henry to bid not only him but also Wolsey a gracious farewell, which he neatly accomplished at Grafton on 20 September. On 9 October a first indictment of praemunire was brought against Wolsey in King’s Bench, and on the 20th a second, 192 while on the 17th he had surrendered the great seal, thus ceasing to be lord chancellor.193 On the 22nd he admitted his fault, and on the 30th he formally submitted himself to the mercy of the king.194 His downfall was complete.