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

by Gwyn, Peter

  From Henry’s point of view things had not gone well. One year after the advocation in July 1529 the position remained exactly the same: the case was still to be heard in Rome, and nothing that Henry had thrown at the pope, not even the dismissal and disgrace of his papal legate, had persuaded Clement to change tack. Someone else who had not budged was Catherine’s nephew, Charles V, and this despite both the Treaty of Cambrai, which had meant that, in a formal sense at least, he and Henry were allies again, and an embassy, headed not altogether tactfully by Anne’s father, sent specially to persuade him that it was in Catherine’s best interests to give way gracefully. Lastly and as regards Wolsey’s arrest, most relevantly there was little indication that Henry’s own subjects had changed their minds and become in any way reconciled to the loss of their queen. True, parliament had been called, and a certain amount of anticlerical feeling had been stirred up which could be made use of in any future bargaining with the English Church. However, at least according to Chapuys, this feeling was in no way associated with any sympathy for the divorce.90 Of course, Chapuys is no impartial source here but, as we saw earlier, almost all the evidence points to the great majority of the English nation being behind Catherine.91 This was obviously bad news for Henry, but especially given Clement’s continuing obstinacy.

  Until recently at any rate, it has been rather assumed that the key to obtaining the divorce was the realization, probably by either Cromwell or Cranmer, that the pope’s consent was not required.92 Everything so far in this study has pointed to the inadequacies of this assumption, and it will continue to do so. Earlier it was emphasized that papal consent was sought not out of some kind of conventional piety or concern for justice, but for reasons of state: that is, in order to bolster up an unpopular, and, as regards the succession, politically unwise decision, which without the papal blessing might not have been made to stick. And just how politically necessary the pope’s consent was considered to be is suggested not only by the enormous lengths that Henry went to in order to obtain it, but by the fact that whenever Clement himself had hinted that the best thing would be for Henry to go it alone, his advice was never acted upon.93 On the other hand, if the pope would not grant a divorce, then an alternative way of freeing himself would, however reluctantly, have to be found. What this did not mean was that Henry could just fling Catherine aside, for the political problem of making acceptable the essentially unacceptable remained – indeed, was made much worse by the lack of papal authorization. A substitute had to be found for the pope. There was obviously parliament, but an essentially secular body was not best suited to pass judgment on a matter that had traditionally been the preserve of the ecclesiastical courts. Better, perhaps, to confine its role to authorizing some other body to give judgment; but even as regards this supporting role there remained the little matter of whether or not it would be amenable to Henry’s wishes. And this, as has been indicated, was not at all certain.

  The obvious substitute for the pope, with or without parliamentary backing, was the English Church, but the fact that it was obvious did not make it easy to put into effect. For one thing, there remained that obstacle that Wolsey, despite all his ingenuity and effort, had found insurmountable: namely, that Henry’s case was weak in law, especially if, as appeared to be the case, he could not prove that Catherine’s marriage to his brother had been consummated. It is true that some churchmen (amongst the more senior perhaps Warham,94 and amongst a younger generation Gardiner and Edward Fox, used extensively by first Wolsey and then Henry in the divorce negotiations)95 appear to have genuinely believed in Henry’s case. And by the summer of 1530 Oxford and Cambridge, as well as a number of European universities, had pronounced in Henry’s favour, and this obviously strengthened his position.96 Against this, in order to obtain these verdicts a considerable amount of pressure had had to be exerted, nowhere more than at the English universities.97 Given that at any trial Henry would have to deal with men of the calibre of Fisher and Clerk who would not be nearly so easily dictated to, this did not bode well. Moreover, it was one thing to give an opinion, or even to write to the pope on Henry’s behalf, as some of his leading subjects had done, though even getting people to sign this letter had proved very difficult.98 But to give a judgment against the express command of the pope would be quite another matter. In order to persuade people to do this Henry would have to find some totally convincing theoretical justification, and then, no doubt he would also have to do a lot of arm twisting as well.

  The theoretical justification was already to hand, and Henry needed no prompting to make full use of it. After all, it was back in 1515 that he had informed his assembled bishops that ‘by the ordinance and sufferance of God we are king of England, and the kings of England in time past have never had any superior but God only’, which, amongst other things, meant that no one other than God could force him to stand trial at Rome. Moreover, both in 1515 and again in 1519 the Crown’s legal advisers had argued that papal decrees had no standing in England unless they had the consent of the Crown and were compatible with ‘the customs of England’.99 But to stress the lack of novelty, is not to play down the particular circumstances of 1530. Whatever may be said about the seriousness of those earlier conflicts between Church and state, Henry had not then been challenging the express command of a pope on a specific issue, and moreover one that could not have been more important to him, both emotionally and politically. This was precisely the situation in 1530, and so the theoretical arguments in defence of the royal position would have to be all the more presented and, of course, tailored to Henry’s particular need, which were to prevent his matrimonial cause being tried at Rome.

  The continuing refusal of both Charles and Clement to accede to his wishes compelled Henry in the summer of 1530 to enter upon not exactly a new policy, but rather a new phase, in which these theoretical arguments would have to play an increasingly important part.100 The threat that if Henry did not get his way he would have to proceed without the pope’s consent had been there from the very beginning, and, as we have seen, Wolsey had been just as happy to use it as anyone else.101 At the same time it must be stressed that what is not being said here is that it was in the summer of 1530 that Henry decided to ‘break with Rome’. The threat continued to be, as it had been before, part of a bargaining process in which Henry’s main purpose was still to persuade Clement to do his bidding. But given Clement’s continuing refusal to oblige, Henry was now faced with the prospect either of giving up or of turning the threat into a reality. Not to proceed was for him unthinkable, and the result was that he took a number of decisions which, it will be argued here, led directly to Wolsey’s arrest.

  According to Chapuys, the new phase began at the meeting of notables held on 15 and 16 June to draw up that letter to the pope in which they called upon Clement to accede to their master’s wish. The letter itself made no mention of what was going to be the continual cry during the months ahead, that Henry’s case could only be tried in England. What signalled the new phase was the kite which was flown when it was asked at the meeting whether, now that Henry had secured the favourable verdict of ‘many competent judges’, Henry might not remarry immediately ‘without waiting any further approval of his conduct’.102 In fact, the kite had to be hauled down immediately because so few spoke out in its favour, but the lesson that Henry learned from this was not that he should give up but that he would have to try a good deal harder.

  In describing Henry’s efforts over the next few months it will be helpful to separate them into two strands. First, there were the continuing negotiations with the pope, but with the emphasis now on the ‘customs of England’, which the English envoys were instructed to inform Clement forbade any Englishman to appear in a foreign court against his will, but especially a king of England who had never acknowledged any superior but God! Given that at the same time they were instructed to threaten Clement with that anathema to all popes, a General Council, it is not altogether surprising that their initial
reaction was to balk, explaining to Henry that they did not feel that either proposition would cut much ice with Clement just at that moment.103 In this, of course they were quite right, but their explanation impressed Henry not at all. He much regretted, he informed them on 7 October, that they had refrained from alleging the ‘customs of England’, which he then proceeded to restate and justify at length, explaining that there was just as much evidence for them as for papal authority, and that, therefore, by some rather curious logic, to question one was to question the other. All of this he now ordered them to put to the pope as vigorously as possible.104

  Meanwhile, early in September the papal nuncio, Antonio Borgho, had arrived in England just in time for the publication of a royal proclamation forbidding Henry’s subjects from trying to obtain anything from Rome ‘containing matter prejudicial to the high authority, jurisdiction, and prerogative royal of this his said realm’.105 It may be that, as some ambassadors suggested, this prohibition was not directly related to the campaign for the divorce, but to the appeal to Rome by three English bishops against the anticlerical legislation of the first session of the Reformation parliament. And given that it did not prohibit the pope from summoning people to Rome, the issue that was most germane to the divorce, this is probably correct.106 However, the bishops in question were Fisher, Clerk and West, all three Catherine’s staunch defenders, which only serves to underline that at this time anticlericalism and the search for a divorce were inseparable, as Borgho was quickly to find out. When, quite understandably, he protested against the proclamation, Suffolk and Boleyn informed him that they ‘cared neither for pope or popes in this kingdom, not even if St Peter should come to life again’, and that Henry ‘was absolute both as emperor and pope in his own kingdom’. Just in case the nuncio had failed to take the point, Suffolk apparently ended the interview by graciously admitting that despite all this, Henry was quite willing to be the pope’s most devoted and obedient servant if only he would grant the divorce.107

  The poor papal nuncio was going to endure a good deal of this kind of treatment in the following months, as Henry and his councillors tried every possible means to persuade him that any trial of Henry’s matrimonial cause could only take place in England.108 Meanwhile, every effort was made to widen the king’s support. A second appeal to the universities of Europe was made, this time to secure their agreement to the proposition that it had always been the practice of the early Church to allow all causes to be tried in their country of origin, and that therefore the present practice of citing people to Rome was a gross usurpation of power.109 At the same time the hard-pressed English envoys, already faced with the prospect of informing Clement of Henry’s unacceptable views, were instructed to comb the Vatican Library for anything that touched upon this new obsession with the king’s ‘authority imperial’, which, what with the sheer quantity of the material and the inevitable suspicions of the librarians, was, as they pointed out, a somewhat Herculean task and insofar as they did it, it produced quite the wrong answers.110 Still, the point is that by the autumn of 1530 Henry was generating an enormous head of steam in his effort to prove, not only to the pope but to his own subjects, that his request to pronounce on the divorce in England was perfectly legitimate. But, of course, all this would avail him nothing if when it came to the point he could find nobody in England willing to grant it to him. If only to convince Clement that he really meant business, Henry had to ensure, and in a very public fashion, that the English Church, the most obvious alternative to the papacy as a sanctioning body, would do his bidding. His efforts to achieve this constitute the second strand of the new phase in the divorce campaign, and the one that was to affect Wolsey most.

  On 11 July 1530 the attorney-general personally filed informations against fourteen leading churchmen accusing them of praemunire. The reason given was that by virtue of the financial compositions they had made with Wolsey – with which, it may be remembered, they had bought back from him their jurisdictional rights111 – they had all connived in his illegal legatine authority.112 Informations were subsequently filed against two others, one of whom was a notary public and lawyer, Anthony Husye, who practised in the court of arches. Why Husye was singled out is not entirely clear, but it looks as if his role was that of notional layman acting as a warning to all Henry’s subjects that it was not only those in clerical orders who were liable to prosecution for praemunire.113 Indeed, the point that was being made in the summer of 1530 was that anyone who had had anything to do with the Church during the period of Wolsey’s papal legateship might suddenly find himself facing the possibility of imprisonment and the loss of all his goods and, given that Wolsey had admitted his guilt, with little prospect of mounting a successful defence.

  Praemunire had always been in theory a potent weapon in the hands of the Crown, but like all such weapons its destructive power could be counterproductive, so it was not frequently used. In normal circumstances it benefited the Crown not at all to be at war with its subjects over the jurisdictional powers of an institution which by and large conferred upon it many more gains than losses. Henry’s use of this weapon against fifteen members of that institution, amongst whom were eight bishops and three abbots, indicates both the intractability of the problem and his determination to overcome it. It has been pointed out that not all the fifteen accused can be shown to have been passionate defenders of Catherine,114 and indeed four had signed the recent letter to Clement imploring him to respond to Henry’s rightful request.115 But to conclude from this that the divorce was not the main reason for the praemunire charges is surely to miss the very large wood for a small group of trees? For one thing it ignores the fact that people sign things under pressure which they do not truly assent to, and there is evidence, at least in Sherburne’s case, that this is what happened.116 More importantly, such a conclusion suggests a misunderstanding of what Henry was after. It was not a case of getting his own back on particular people, but of frightening a powerful body of opinion into agreeing to what he wanted. What better way of doing this than to point a finger at three of the most senior abbots in the land, one of whom, John Islip of Westminster, was a very busy royal councillor? And there was no harm in throwing in the aged and not very influential Sherburne as a warning to all his episcopal colleagues to keep in line during the difficult months ahead, when the rival claims of king and pope to their alliegance were bound to cause them increasing worries.117 What Henry was looking for was maximum impact, and his sacrificial lambs were well chosen. And with Fisher, Standish, West and Clerk included, who were all close to Catherine, there could not have been the slightest doubt in anybody’s mind what his purpose was.

  Then there was the question of influencing lay opinion. A leitmotiv of Henrician propaganda during the early 1530s was the highlighting of the enemy within: that is to say, the clergy whom Henry, as he himself, on one celebrated occasion in May 1532, was to point out to a parliamentary delegation, had thought to be ‘our subjects wholly, but now we have well perceived that they be but half our subjects, yea, scarce our subjects’.118 It was an effective tactic, because by appealing to a gut xenophobia – had not the accused sought the intervention of a foreign jurisdiction? – it distracted people from thinking too hard about what Henry was really up to: namely, ditching his wife and in the process destroying a whole set of beliefs and practices which most of his subjects were happy with. And from the propaganda point of view it did not really matter who was accused, though it would help if they were reasonably distinguished.

  When on 11 July the first move against the accused was made, Henry was already aware that the vital component of his new tactics, the ‘customs of England’ and his ‘authority imperial’, had not gone down well with his leading subjects. At the meeting of 12 June about the letter to the pope, they had made their opposition clear.119 What must have been all the more worrying for Henry is that dislike of the new tactics was coming not from partisans of Catherine such as Fisher and Clerk, who had not been invited to
the meeting, but from the solid ranks of the Tudor establishment. If Henry was to succeed in any battle with the papacy, it was vital for him to win them over, and it was this that encouraged him to make an assault on the Church – or that at least is the suggestion being made here. Very little is known about Henry’s meeting with his leading councillors at Hampton Court in August: only that it lasted five days, that Warham was amongst those summoned, and that at least for some of the time the French envoy, Joachim, was present.120 Chapuys, our source for the meeting, believed that its chief purpose was to decide the next move in the divorce campaign, and even if negotiations with the French were also on the agenda, as the presence of Joachim suggests and as some of those present later alleged, this was hardly unrelated to the divorce. Moreover, on 17 August, the day after the meeting, a courier was dispatched to Rome possibly carrying with him instructions for the English envoys outlining the new tactics.121 And whatever may have taken place there, the following weeks were to see a quickening of activity and, it has to be confessed an increase in the mystery, a reflection, in part, of Henry’s success in preventing Council ‘leaks’,122 as throughout August and September negotiations with the papal nuncio, Burgho continued. Needless to say, this gentleman was quite good at spinning things out, apparently going along with some of the suggestions put to him but without committing his master to anything, which must have been very frustrating.123 Meanwhile, on 31 August a ban had been imposed preventing anyone leaving the Kent ports except for authorized business in Calais. There was much speculation about the reasons for this. Some even thought that it was a preventive measure against any attempt by Wolsey to flee the country, an idea which Chapuys rather pooh-poohed, believing that the current tricky stage of negotiations with the French was a sufficient explanation.124