The King's Cardinal: The Rise and Fall of Thomas Wolsey (Pimlico)
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32LP, 3233, 3235-6; Sp. Cal, iii (ii), 224, 442; see also Wegg, pp.273 ff.
33 Henry Ellis, 3 ser., ii, p.151 (LP, iv, 4927).
34 Wegg, pp.285-8.
35LP, iv, 3234.
36 See pp.72-3, 205, 551-2 above.
37Royal Household, p.155.
38 Ibid, p.156.
39 Ibid, p.155.
40 For all this see D.R. Starkey, ‘King’s Privy Chamber’, pp.89-111.
41 Central to all Starkey’s writing on the privy chamber, but see especially History Today, 32.
42 Rawdon Brown, ii, 270 (LP, iii, 235).
43 Rawdon Brown, ii, p.271 (LP, iii, 235).
44 Ibid.
45LP, ii, 246.
46 D.R. Starkey, Henry VIII, pp.73-4; LP, ii, 3807 for Wolsey’s displeasure.
47LP, iii, 247, 261, 259, 265.
48 Morgan, p.94.
49LP, iii, pp.1551; Hall, p.599.
50LP, ii, 3807.
51 Rawdon Brown, ii, p.271 (LP, iii, 235).
52 Hall, p.598.
53 Walker’s reappraisal of this episode appeared too late to be seriously considered here, but he argues for a genuine desire for a reformation of the court’s lifestyle, pushed not by Wolsey but other royal councillors such as Norfolk; see Walker, HJ, 32, pp.12-16.
54LP, iii, 3384.
55 Henry Ellis, 1 ser, i, pp.225-6 (LP, iii, 3405).
56LP, iii, 3458; also LP, iii, 3421, 3424.
57 Vergil, p.309.
58 D.R. Starkey, History Today, 32, p.19; see also his ‘King’s privy chamber’, pp.161 ff.
59LP, iv, 149, quoted in Bernard, EHR, xcvi, p.775, but since Surrey was not in Newcastle in March 1524 the LP dating must be wrong.
60 D.R. Starkey, ‘King’s privy chamber’, pp.161 ff; Henry VIII, pp.86-9.
61 For non-factional aspects of the Eltham ordinances see pp.365-9 above.
62 Morgan, pp.94, 295.
63 See pp.194 ff. above.
64 For both Bryan and Carew see D.R. Starkey, Henry viii, pp.69-70; for his income see LP, iv, 2972.
65St. P, vii, p.166 (LP, iv, 5481).
66 See.pp.190-201.
67LP, iv, 4656.
68 See p.589 below.
69 Bernard, EHR, xcvi for Compton’s career.
70 For the detail see pp.194 ff. above.
71LP, i, 734, 3502; iii, 1321.
72 Vergil, p.265.
73 See Quinn, pp.234-5.
74Clifford Letters, p.106.
75LP, iv, 5096.
76LP, iv, app.125-6, 128.
77 Burnet, vi, p.276 (LP, xxi, 554).
78Ven. Cal., iv, 694.
79 Elton, Studies, i, p.189.
80LP, iii, 3384.
81LP, iii, 3508.
82St. P, iv, p.55 (LP, iii, 3515).
83St. P, iv, p.48 (LP, iii, 3394) Henry to Norfolk, 5 Oct. 1523.
84 BL Caligula B ii, fos.31-2 (LP, iii, 3477), marginal notes for Henry’s benefit to a letter written by Surrey to Wolsey in Oct. 1523.
85St. P, iv, pp.53-6 (LP, iii, 3515).
86St. P, iv, p.100 (LP, iv, 571).
87Sp. Cal, F.S., p.432.
88LP, xii (2), 1049.
89 For the marriage see B. Harris, Journal of Social History, 15; see also Letters of Royal and Illustrious Ladies, ii, p.367; iii, p.96.
90LP, iii, 3458.
91LP, iv, 5210, 5679 – though other opponents of Wolsey, under Norfolk’s leadership, were included in this judgement.
92LP, iii, 3625.
93 Gunn, Charles Brandon, pp.27, 32-3.
94 Ibid, pp.50, 59.
95LP, iv, 2807, 3884, 3997, 4324; LP, iv, app.11.
96LP, iv, 3105; LP, iv, app.173.
97Inter alia LP, iv, 3760, 3883.
98CWE, 2, p.278.
99Ven. Cal., iv, p.294.
100 Gunn, Charles Brandon, pp.15, 33, 36, 98.
101LP, i, 3376.
102 Gunn, Charles Brandon, pp.41-2.
103Sp. Cal., iii (ii), pp.190-3.
104LP, iv, p.1410.
105Inter alia Scarisbrick, Henry VIII, pp.158-162.
106LP, iv, 3318.
107LP, iv, 3318.
108LP, iv, 2368, 2377, 2407.
109King’s Works, p.172, n.1.
110LP, iv, 3360.
111LP, iv, 3360.
112 Bellay, Ambassades, pp.359-65 (LP, iv, 4649).
113Sp. Cal., iii (ii), pp.190-1.
114 Hall, p.721.
115Mercers’ Company, pp.749-50.
116 Hall, p.723.
117 Ibid, pp.742-4.
118 Ibid, p.744.
119 The reports of both Imperial and French ambassadors are an obvious source; see inter alia Bellay, Ambassades, p.365 (LP, iv, 4649); Correspondence, 324 (LP, iv, 5679); Sp. Cal., iii (ii), pp.178-85.
120LP, iv, pp.1410-11.
121LP, iv, pp.1410-13.
122LP, iv, 5862 for du Belley’s assessment to this effect.
123 See Tunstall’s comments to this effect in Dec. 1525 in LP, iv, 1800.
124 See p.455 above.
125Ven. Cal., iv, p.295.
126 At least he was alleged to have had doubts about the validity of the original dispensation; see Scarisbrick, Henry VIII, p.13.
127Inter alia Mendoza mentions hostility to the king in May 1527; see Sp. Cal., iii (ii), p.190; also Hall, p.754. For hostility to government as a whole, see Sp. Cal., iii (2), p.444, 845-6, 862.
128LP, iv, app.39.
129 See p.298.
130St. P, i, p.261 (LP, iv, 3360).
131 See Knowles, Religious Orders, iii, pp.161-3, 470; Goring, Sussex Archaeological Collections, cxvi.
132LP, iv, 4507, 4509.
133LP, iv, 4513.
134 See pp.321 ff. above for the Wilton affair.
135LP, iv, 5985; Knowles, Religious Orders, iii, p.470.
136LP, iv, 5458.
137LP, iv, 4044.
138 Gunn, Charles Brandon, pp.102-3.
139Sp. Cal., iii (ii), p.193.
140Sp. Cal., iii (ii), pp.432-3.
141 Bellay, Ambassades, p.360 (LP, iv, 4649 where placed wrongly in August). Du Bellay himself commented that if Wolsey were to stumble, there were plenty on the watch to pick him up which is surely not quite the same as saying that there was a faction plotting his overthrow. It is also true that in Sept.1528 Mendoza suggested that Wolsey was increasingly fearful of Anne’s growing influence; see Sp. Cal., iii (ii), p.790.
142LP, iv, 5210.
143LP, iv, 5255. Sp. Cal., iii (ii), pp.885-6.
144 Bellay, Correspondence, p.19 (LP, iv, 5582) for du Bellay’s assessment to this effect of 22 May 1529.
145Sp. Cal., iii (ii), p.877 (LP, iv, 5177).
146 Cavendish, pp.92-6.
147 BL Vitellius B xii, fos, 168-9 (LP, iv, 5953), Thomas Alvard to Thomas Cromwell, 23 Sept.1529.
148 Cavendish, pp.29-34.
149 Suggested by Henry’s wish in 1527 for a dispensation allowing him to marry a woman who had already contracted to marry someone else provided there had been no consummation, and by the need in 1532 to obtain a statement from Henry Percy that no formal precontract had been entered into.
150Sp. Cal., iii (ii), p.432.
151 See pp.192-3 above.
152LP, iv, 4081, 4584, 5210; see also Ives, Anne Boleyn, pp.126-7. I should perhaps mention that my account of Wolsey’s downfall was written before Ives’s biography appeared, and differs from it in a number of respects.
153Inter alia LP, iv, 4649; Sp. Cal., iii (ii), p.790.
154LP, iv, 4005.
155LP, iv, 4081.
156LP, iv, 4480.
157LP, iv, 4360; see p.503 above.
158 Dowling, JEH, 35; Ives, Anne Boleyn, pp.302-31, though both place the emphasis on a biblical humanism rather than on a commitment to Lutheran doctrine.
159 See pp.192-3 above.
160 Bellay, Correspondence, p.94 (LP, iv, 5983).
161 Bellay, Correspondence, pp.104-5 (LP, iv, 6003).
162Sp. Cal., iv (i), pp.220-39, 292, 303.
163LP, iv, 5213, 5302, 5348.
164LP, iv, 5427 for Henry’s letter; LP, iv, 5428 for Wolsey’s.
165St. P, vii, p.182 (LP, iv, 5635).
166St. P, vii, p.183 (LP, iv, 5635).
167LP, iv, 5862, 5582, 6011.
168St. P, vii, p.183 (LP, iv, 5635).
169 Suffolk set off on 17 May. On 21 May Wolsey reported receiving letters from Rome of 4 May (LP, iv, 5576). Admittedly seventeen days was fast; the norm from Venice was twenty-four, the fastest nine; see Braudel, i, p.362.
170 Usually referred to as a cousin, but only a half-cousin: one of Bryan’s grandmothers was also Anne’s, but their mothers were only half-sisters; see Ives, Anne Boleyn for genealogical table.
171St. P, vii, pp.166-7 (LP, iv, 5481).
172St. P, vii, p.170 (LP, iv, 5519).
173St. P, vii, p.167 (LP, iv, 5519).
174 As Wolsey’s secretary, though ever since the previous February he had been working almost full time on the divorce, and was to become royal secretary in July.
175LP, iv, 5518.
176LP, iv, app.173; also Gunn, Charles Brandon, pp.101-2.
177 Bellay, Correspondence, pp.64-9 (LP, iv, 5862) for this episode.
178St. P, i, p.343 (LP, iv, 5894) but for Tuke’s defence to Wolsey of the brevity of Gardiner’s letters see LP, iv, 5885.
179LP, iv, 5918.
180LP, iv, 5844.
181LP, iv, 5865; Sp. Cal., iv (i), p.189.
182 Or at least reaching Wolsey’s household; see Thomas Alvard’s reference to them in LP, iv, 5953.
183LP, iv, 5801.
184LP, iv, 5867.
185LP, iv, 5882.
186 Incidently the policy that, after the failure Thomas Boleyn’s mission to the emperor in early 1530, was to be pursued, but for Wolsey’s advice see LP, iv, 5801, 5875, 5881, 5890, 5891, 5893.
187St. P, i, pp.341-2 (LP, iv, 5890).
188LP, iv, 5797, 5864-5, 5878 (2), 5966; 5995 (Ehses, Römische Dokumente, pp.132-5).
189LP, iv, 5928, 5936.
190 Ehses, Römische Dokumente, p.134 (LP, iv, 5995).
191LP, iv, 5820.
192 For both see LP, iv, 6035.
193LP, iv, 6025.
194LP, iv, 6017, 6035, A.F. Pollard, pp.242-5 for full documentation.
195LP, iv, 6050.
196LP, iv, 6003, 6016.
197LP, iv, 6016.
198 Hall, p.724.
199 See p.617 below.
200 See pp.303-4 above for both points.
201 See p.623 below.
202 From the famous preamble to the Act in restraint of appeals of 1533.
203 Archbishop Cranmer’s judgment at Dunstable, 23 May 1533.
204LP, iv, 5953.
205Sp. Cal., iv (i), pp.276-7.
206 From The Lie; but Raleigh’s authorship is not certain.
207 From the Epistolatory Satires.
208St. P, i, pp.303-4 (LP, iv, 4438).
209 Bellay, Correspondence, p.20 (LP, iv, 5610).
CHAPTER FOURTEEN
THE FINAL YEAR
THE GREAT FRUSTRATION FOR ANYONE TRYING TO FATHOM WHAT WOLSEY was up to during the last year of his life is that it is a story without an end. Or rather there is an end: Wolsey’s death on 29 November 1530, but it is precisely his death that prevents one from knowing why, almost four weeks earlier, Henry had had him arrested on a charge of treason. Was he really intending to put a cardinal and archbishop to death? True, there were precedents of a kind. Over three hundred and fifty years earlier an archbishop of Canterbury had been murdered in his own cathedral, and though the then king, Henry II, may not have been directly responsible, he had felt sufficiently implicated to do penance. In 1405 Henry IV had had an archbishop of York, Richard Scrope, executed for treason, a more precise parallel, obviously, but with one important difference: whatever the justification for his actions, Scrope’s treason was undoubted. There can be no such certainty about Wolsey. And whatever the precedents, the death of a prince of the Church at the hands of laymen, however princely, was so unusual and threatened such dangerous political consequences that it immediately raises the question of whether Henry VIII could ever have seriously considered taking such a step. Sadly, Wolsey’s death before Henry was forced to declare his hand means that no definitive answer can ever be given, for the vital piece in the jigsaw is missing. This is all the more frustrating because in many ways no period of Wolsey’s life is better documented. There are innumerable letters, both to and from him. There is also Cavendish.
Cavendish’s account of Wolsey’s last months can claim to be one of the great passages of English prose. It is not that it is fine writing; indeed, some may find almost all early Tudor English a little clumsy. But in some rather magical way Cavendish has got the mix right: plenty of lively detail is combined with moral reflections to generate a powerful emotional charge. It helped that for him it was the story not only of the fall of a great man who happened to have been his master, but also of a nation brought low by the lust of a king for his mistress. At this level there is little point in trying to compete with Cavendish, and no such attempt will be made here. This does not mean that his account of these months needs to be accepted, and in what follows in some important respects it will not be. But, given the many criticisms made earlier about him as a historical source, it is only fair to state that for the last months of Wolsey’s life he has to be considered much more reliable than for any other period. This is not surprising. Wolsey was no longer the statesman grappling with the affairs of the nation, the intricacies of which his servant would not have been privy to, even if he had wished to be. The spotlight now focused on the man and his household, and with both of these Cavendish was intimately concerned. He was probably with Wolsey throughout this period. He was certainly one of the few to accompany him on his fateful journey south following his arrest at Cawood, near York, on 4 November, and he was present at his death. Cavendish is, therefore, an important eyewitness of much that took place, and in the rather special circumstances of his close attendance upon a man both physically and mentally under great stress, he is likely to have been more than usually privy to that man’s thoughts. Not that eyewitnesses are always reliable; and, certainly, by the time that he came to write his biography Cavendish had a very committed view of his former master’s part in England’s destiny. But his usefulness as a source for what actually took place cannot be denied, and to unravel what did take place will be the main purpose of this chapter.
There are three main possibilities, though each of them spawns a number of mutants. Firstly, and most excitingly, Wolsey may have been involved in some kind of conspiracy, perhaps to overthrow Henry himself and replace him with Princess Mary, but at any rate to bring about his own restoration to full power. At the other extreme it is possible that there was no real conspiracy, merely one invented by Henry and/or the ‘Boleyn faction’, with the duke of Norfolk to the fore. There could have been a number of reasons for such a set-up. If Henry was its principal author, then his campaign against the Church in order to force it to embrace his view of his marital status would provide the motivation; if the faction was behind it, then the motivation could have been a determination to prevent a comeback by Wolsey. In the middle lies what might be called the ‘sensible view’. There was no conspiracy, but Wolsey was giving Henry and his advisers genuine grounds for believing that a recently dismissed lord chancellor, apparently winning for himself ever more golden opinions in that always slightly worrying part of the kingdom north of the Trent, constituted a threat that in the rather special circumstances of 1530 was too great to ignore. Such a view has an obvious attraction for one as suspicious of conspiracy theories as the present writer. But people are not always sensible, and there is plenty of evidence that would point to either extreme.