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

by Gwyn, Peter

  The result of this agreement was that Wolsey was going to enjoy something approaching the £4,000 a year which he had at an early stage in the negotiations accepted as the least he could survive on.58 It might be thought that such a sum was a rather high ‘pension’ for an apparently disgraced minister, but there are signs, not least the requests for further sums, that Wolsey was not altogether happy with it. And what was certainly making him very unhappy were Henry’s designs on his colleges at Oxford and Ipswich. It quite quickly became apparent that there was no chance of Wolsey saving the latter, though a final decision was not made until September 1530.59 The fate of Cardinal College, which at Wolsey’s downfall had been much more of a going concern and was in every way the more important institution, hung much more finely in the balance, and during the summer of 1530 Wolsey devoted much of his energies to trying to save it. Cromwell was his chief agent in this, but almost anybody who was anybody was approached, including Norfolk and Gardiner, but also More who was reported in October to be ‘Very good in this matter’, though rather pessimistic.60 The details of the negotiations can be passed over, but in the end More’s pessimism was justified. Wolsey was undoubtedly heart-broken by his failure to preserve an institution on which he had expended so much energy, time and money. Amongst other things, the failure threatened his good relations with Cromwell, whom he began to suspect of not having done enough to save it.61 What effect the outcome had on his relationship with Henry no document discloses, but it surely could have left Wolsey by October 1530 extremely bitter: perhaps even bitter enough, when his other disappointments concerning Henry’s arrangements for his future are borne in mind, to have contemplated treason?

  In asking this question the intention is not to revive the just discarded theory of the conspiratorial Wolsey, but to draw attention to that aspect of his attitude during his last year that has been generally overlooked. It could, after all, be argued that Wolsey had absolutely no reason for being bitter or disappointed. Indeed, should he not have been immensely grateful that as a disgraced minister he was allowed to remain archbishop of York, enjoying what was by the standards of the day an almost princely income? The loss of the colleges was obviously a great blow, but Henry’s decision to refound Cardinal College meant that something might be saved from the wreckage. And anyway, just to be alive and comparatively free to do what he liked was surely, in all the circumstances, something to be going on with? In fact, Wolsey never seems to have viewed the matter in this light. It is true that at the time of his fall he did write that fairly cringing letter to Henry already referred to62 and that he admitted his guilt as to the praemunire charges, though there was much that was tactical about this.63 He was quite prepared to write begging letters and to solicit help from all and sundry, and he exhibited to his close associates a degree of self-pity. All that said, however, his general stance was not of a man conscious of having escaped a terrible fate or even of one experiencing guilt and thus deserving of what had befallen him – and this surely is a little strange?

  So far very little has been said about the charges brought against Wolsey, either officially by members of both houses of parliament, or unofficially by Lord Darcy and John Palsgrave; and in fact not a lot will be said, for in a sense much of this book has been a reply to them. The point to bear in mind about both Darcy and Palsgrave is that, rightly or wrongly, but probably wrongly, they felt that they had been badly treated by Wolsey. Darcy was aggrieved with his former ‘bedfellow’ at court for, in his view, so woefully under-using him in the government of the North and of starving him of the fruits of royal patronage;64 indeed, one of the charges that he levelled against Wolsey in 1529 was that he had deprived him of royal offices.65 In 1524 his eldest son was summoned before the Council for unknown offences.66 In 1525 he was not appointed to the new Council of the North, while in 1526 he was worried that Wolsey was displeased with him, though in fact another of his sons assured him that this was not the case.67 The main reason why Darcy was not made more use of was almost certainly because his power base was not sufficiently strong to make him an effective leader in the North, nor did he possess the requisite legal experience to make him an automatic choice as a member of the Council there.68 He may also have been a rather curmudgeonly old stick with a natural disposition to be ‘agin the government’; at any rate Wolsey’s passing was to bring him no closer to the centre of power, and in 1537 he was to be executed for his part in the Pilgrimage of Grace. Be that as it may, during the 1520s Darcy was a man who felt that he had been cold-shouldered by a former friend and colleague. It is not therefore surprising that in 1529 he came forward with a list of greivances amounting almost to a formal indictment against Wolsey.

  Unlike Darcy, Palsgrave did not volunteer his voluminous charges, but their existence was either known about or strongly suspected, and for the following reason. When Henry’s illegitimate son was created duke of Richmond and set up as nominal head of the Council of the North, Palsgrave had been appointed his tutor. However, he was soon complaining that he was not being allowed to educate the child as he wished, because of interference from members of the duke’s own council, who were much more interested in the knightly arts than in book learning.69 He had looked to Wolsey for support, but far from being forthcoming he found himself very quickly out of the job, which pleased him not at all. The obvious target for his displeasure was Wolsey, and in what was almost certainly intended to be an essentially private and therapeutic exercise, he let off steam by working upon a very literary attack upon the king’s leading minister, in which ironic praise was the main weapon. Thus, quite unlike Darcy’s, it was not drawn up in anything approaching a legal form. On the other hand, steam there does seem to have been, not all of which he had managed to retain in his study. The result was that on 11 April 1528 he was formally bound ‘to demean and behave himself discreetly, soberly and wisely in his words towards the king’s highness and his most honourable Council, and not to use or to speak any seditious words against them’.70 It was thus well known that Palsgrave was a man with a grievance, so that when the time came to look for material to use in drawing up charges against Wolsey his study was an obvious place to search.71Why the Crown was anxious to lodge further charges, given that Wolsey had quickly admitted to the offence of praemunire, will be discussed shortly. What is most relevant here is Wolsey’s attitude to them, and it emerges very clearly in a letter that he wrote to Cromwell: ‘As touching the articles laid unto me, whereof a great part be untrue, and those which be true are of such sort that by the doing of them no malice nor untruth can be justly arrected unto me, neither to the prince’s person, nor to this realm.’72 This was an extraordinarily bold defence to have made, all the more so because it was intended not only for Cromwell’s ears, but for the king’s as well.73

  In trying to make sense of Wolsey’s conduct during his last year this lack of contrition must somehow be fitted into the increasingly complicated picture. For most of the time he appears to have been unwilling even to put on a show of contrition which, given his situation, might be thought at the very least to have been tactless; but then tact was not a feature of his conduct during the last months of his life, as his friends were only too well aware. Early in June Thomas Heneage, on being asked yet again to approach the king on his former master’s behalf, advised that if only Wolsey would content himself ‘with that you have’, there was no doubt that Henry would be ‘good and gracious’ to him.74 Three or four weeks later Peter Vannes, who like Heneage had been close to Wolsey for many years before entering royal service, was advising him to keep a low profile.75 So also, and on more than one occasion, did Thomas Cromwell. His long letter of 18 August was devoted to this theme, and included a philosophical passage which he would have done well to have paid more attention to himself. Having urged great restraint as to Wolsey’s building programme in the diocese of York, and specifically at Southwell where he was then residing, he supposed Wolsey was ‘right happy that you be now at liberty to serve God and to le
arn to experiment how you shall banish and exile the vain desires of this unstable world’, which people with Wolsey’s gifts were especally afflicted by. In the end, though, these brought only ‘sorrow, anxiety and adversity’, so he assumed that Wolsey would not wish to return to the political fray, though he ‘were to win a hundred times as much as ever you were possessed of.76

  Given that Cromwell was just as much a political animal as Wolsey, it is difficult to take this passage too seriously; though such people do seem to have moments when release from the burdens of office is the only thing they crave, however much they regret it if it comes.77 Here, however, the main purpose of the homily was probably to convert Wolsey to a view that Cromwell was all too well aware he did not hold. Some aspects of Wolsey’s allegedly ostentatious conduct, such as his much criticized building programme, were undoubtedly exaggerated by enemies at court, but it was nonetheless a very substantial cavalcade that moved north with him to Southwell. At Peterborough on Maundy Thursday he washed the feet of fifty-nine poor men. When he got to Southwell

  he kept a noble house and plenty both of meat and drink for all comers, both for rich and poor, and much alms given at his gate … He made many agreements and concords between gentleman and gentleman, and between some gentlemen and their wives that had been long asunder and in great trouble, and divers other agreements between other persons; making great assemblies for the same purpose and feasting of them, not sparing for any costs where he might make peace and amity, which purchased him much love and friendship in the country.78

  And if he was extremely prominent on what might be called the secular front, he was equally so as regards his episcopal duties. On one occasion, Cavendish reports, he personally confirmed about two hundred children, while Richard Morison shortly after Wolsey’s death gave this account of his activities:

  There were few holydays but he would ride five or six miles from his house, now to this parish church, now to that, and there cause one or other of his doctors to make a sermon unto the people. He sat amongst them and said mass before at the parish. He saw why churches were made. He began to restore them to their right and proper use … He brought his dinner with him, and had divers of the parish to it. He inquired whether there was any debate or grudge between any of them; if there were, after dinner he sent for the parties to the church and made them at one.79

  Wolsey the great pastoral bishop is not a Wolsey that most people know of, though an attempt was made in an earlier chapter to show that the picture is not so improbable. Here, however, the emphasis is on his great visibility during his last months. He may have been a recently disgraced minister; may have confessed to being guilty of praemunire, with all the dire consequences that this was supposed to bring; but in his conduct in his diocese of York there was not the slightest hint of any of these things. Instead he was every inch the great cardinal bishop, merely taking a little time off from the more hectic affairs of state to minister to his flock.

  Wolsey’s high profile in the North is, on the face of it, the most obvious reason for believing in the ‘sensible view’, for surely it must have forced the Crown to be suspicious of what he was up to, even to wonder whether he was not deliberately courting popularity in this always sensitive region only so as to be able to bring pressure upon Henry to restore him to power. Perhaps it did, but there are serious difficulties in accepting that this was the chief reason for Wolsey’s arrest. To begin with, would any government, however anxious, have felt seriously threatened by a previously absentee bishop with no particular ties with the Northern gentry, whose support he would surely have needed to bring any pressure to bear. And if there had been any question mark about the loyalty of the Northern gentry, why deliberately banish the fallen minister to that region? This question keeps obtruding, and for the very good reason that it is so difficult to answer. After all, no archbishop of York could have kept a low profile, if only because the office made its holder a leading, if not the leading, representative of the Crown in the area. As such, it was his duty to keep open house and to try to settle disputes in precisely the way that Wolsey actually did. All this Henry would have been well aware of. Moreover, the figure that Wolsey cut there was largly dictated by the amount of cash that the Crown had been willing to provide; and that he was given £150 to furnish his household with ninety horses and their trappings and £300 for his own clothing hardly suggests that he was expected to be invisible!

  Why send Wolsey north, thus becomes a key question. Perhaps it was simply because Henry had no option but to do so, and in offering such an answer we come up against the strangest aspect of the whole story. As the time for Henry’s decision on his future approached – and it appears that Wolsey had been promised that it would be made shortly after parliament was prorogued in December 152980 – he was naturally anxious that as many important people as possible should put in a good word for him with the king.81 Pre-eminent among these were the dukes of Norfolk and Suffolk, and it was they whom Cromwell was especially urged to approach, but not just because of their leading positions at court. They were also, Wolsey explained to Cromwell, men who ‘knoweth honour, and what is convenient to be done with the king’s honour in this behalf, and can call to remembrance what hath been promised unto me upon the trust and confidence whereof I have done and made my submission, putting me wholly in the king’s most gracious hands, who by the rigour of his laws could not have had so much as his Grace now hath’.82 As it turned out their honour could not prevent Wolsey losing, at least for all practical purposes, both Winchester and St Albans, and when this became evident he made very clear his hurt and surprise because, as he explained in another letter to Cromwell, he had ‘never thought, and so I was assured at the making of my submission, to depart from any of my promotions’.83 Neither, apparently, had he expected to lose all his ecclesiastical apparel, and again for the good reason that at the time of his submission Norfolk and Suffolk had promised that he would not.84 Just how much of a shock it was that their word, indirectly the king’s, had not been entirely kept is not clear; certainly, his great anxiety about the final settlement does not suggest that he had really hoped to hang on to everything. What he was quite prepared to do was to use the original promises as bargaining counters in the negotiations, by, for instance, insisting that he secured the pension out of Winchester’s revenues.85 But the very fact that the story of Wolsey’s last months can be seen as a whole series of negotiations has to be considered as very odd, for what other disgraced minister of Henry’s was allowed such a say in what was to become of him?

  That he was allowed it explains a lot about what has so far been puzzling about Wolsey’s state of mind at this time. The high profile, the lack of contrition, the surprising degree of confidence that all would be well, make sense just because he had been promised that all would indeed be well. He would, of course, have had in certain respects to toe the line: this would have meant accepting the loss of secular office, at least for the time being, and making no attempt to resist his indictment for praemunire; for, given Henry’s own deep involvement in the legatine powers and the shakiness of the charges, any resistance could have proved embarrassing for the king, and certainly would not have given the clear message to the Church that Henry intended.86 It would, of course, be wrong to exaggerate the strength of Wolsey’s position. Henry could have crushed him just whenever he wished, by, for instance, bringing an act of attainder against him. As it was, he contented himself with a mere petition from both houses of parliament containing a list of the many heinous offences the fallen minister was guilty of.87 This could very easily have been converted into a formal attainder, but Henry’s hope was that this would not be necessary. Wolsey should have got the message and behaved accordingly, which is to say that he should have accepted gratefully any terms that Henry chose to offer him. The purpose of the forty-four charges brought against him was to exert pressure on him while negotiations about his future were still going on. They were part of a bargaining process, and never intended
to be taken too seriously, something which helps to explain some of the more far-fetched articles, that, for instance, Wolsey had infected Henry with the pox by ‘rouning’ in his ear and blowing upon him ‘with his perilous and infective breath’.88 Unfortunately for Henry, Wolsey realized this only too well, called the king’s bluff by dismissing the charges out of hand, and continued to bargain for the best terms possible. But the only reason why he felt in a strong enough position to do this was because of the earlier promises made to him that he would be treated well, and more importantly because of what lay behind these earlier promises: Henry’s realization that his former minister might still be of use to him.

  In the last chapter it was argued that Wolsey’s dismissal from office was neither the work of a faction nor the king’s impulsive reaction to the failure of the second legatine court. Instead, it was seen as a calculated act of policy on Henry’s part to further the divorce negotiations. The argument here is that after he had been dismissed Wolsey continued to figure in those calculations, with the result that he was in quite a strong position for as long Henry continued to see a use for him. If this argument is correct then important consequences follow, for by focusing attention on Henry rather than on Wolsey the second possibility mentioned at the start of this chapter looms ever larger: that Wolsey’s arrest and the accusation of conspiracy was a set-up quite unrelated to what he was actually doing. Or to put it another way, if Henry had been prepared to dismiss him from office on a trumped-up charge of praemunire in October 1529, there seems no good reason why he should not have had him arrested on a trumped-up charge of treason in November 1530 if, that is, a good enough reason for doing so can be discovered. In looking for that reason the timing must be important. There would have been little point in sending Wolsey off to York if it was known that he was shortly to be arrested. This means that it is most unlikely that any decision to arrest him had been made before April 1530. Moreover, on 16 June Wolsey had dutifully signed a letter to be sent to the pope by English notables requesting him promptly to do what they saw as the only right and proper thing: to grant Henry a divorce.89 In fact, Wolsey’s signature heads the list, and it would not have made much sense to ask him to sign if by that date the decision to arrest him had already been taken. So we are looking for a change of plan that occurred after 16 June, and probably much nearer the time when Walter Walsh was sent north to arrest him on 1 November. Furthermore, one would expect the change to have had something to do with the divorce; there would have been little point in arresting Wolsey in connection with anything less than this all-engrossing issue. Thus, what had been happening in the divorce negotiations since Wolsey’s dismissal from office becomes a matter of some importance.