CHAPTER FOUR
CARDINAL WOLSEY
DURING THE AUTUMN OF 1513 THE FRENCH WERE HARD-PRESSED from all sides. Wolsey, through the Emperor, hired a Swiss army, which invaded Burgundy by way of Besancon, the fortress capital of Franche-Comté, a part of the Burgundian inheritance that had passed into Habsburg hands. Dijon was captured. The French had no troops of their own which could resist the Swiss, and doubled their taille to hire fresh mercenaries from abroad. Henry had every intention of renewing his campaign in France in 1514, but his successes had not been to the liking of Ferdinand of Spain. Ferdinand now set about making a separate peace with France, into which he also tried to draw the Emperor Maximilian.
Faced with the defection of his allies, Henry was quick to launch a counter-stroke. First he looked to the defences of the realm, and took measures to strengthen his navy. Then he sought and obtained a favorable peace treaty with France, thereby securing exactly double the amount of annual tribute that had been paid to his father. The crowning event of the peace was the marriage between Henry’s young sister, Mary, and Louis XII himself. She was seventeen, he was fifty-two. The story runs that she extracted from her brother the promise that if she married this time for diplomacy she would be free next time to marry for love. Promise or no promise, that is what she did. She was Queen of France for three months; then, as Queen Dowager, and to Henry’s displeasure, she cut short her widowhood by marrying Charles Brandon, Duke of Suffolk. But in this case the royal wrath subsided and Henry VIII joined in the wedding festivities. The marriage ultimately bore tragic fruit: a grandchild was the Lady Jane Grey, who was for ten days to be Queen of England.
Among those who had crossed with the bridal retinue to France was a young girl named Mary Boleyn. She was one of three nieces of the Duke of Norfolk, all of whom successively engaged the dangerous and deadly love of Henry VIII. Mary and her sister Anne had been educated in France at an expensive academy attached to the French Court. On her return to England Mary married William Carey, a Gentleman of the Bedchamber, and before long became the King’s mistress. Her father was upon this favour created Lord Rochford, while her sister, Anne, continued her studies in France.
Wolsey was richly rewarded for the foreign successes. He received the Bishopric of Lincoln during the course of the negotiations; then, after the peace terms were settled, the Archbishopric of York; and, a year later, after long negotiation by the King on his behalf, in September 1515, a cardinal’s hat. This shower of ecclesiastical honours did not however give Wolsey sufficient civil authority, and in December 1515 Henry created him Lord Chancellor in place of Warham, whom he forced to resign the Great Seal.
For fourteen years Wolsey in the King’s name was the effective ruler of the realm. He owed his position not only to his great capacity for business, but to his considerable personal charm. He had “an angel’s wit,” one of his contemporaries wrote, for beguiling and flattering those whom he wished to persuade. In the King’s company he was brilliant, convivial, and “a gay seeker out of new pastimes.” All this commended him to his young master. Other would-be counsellors of Henry’s saw a different side of the Cardinal’s character. They resented being scornfully overborne by him in debate; they detested his arrogance, and envied his evergrowing wealth and extensive patronage. At the height of his influence Wolsey enjoyed an income equivalent to about £500,000 a year in early twentieth-century money. He kept one thousand servants, and his palaces surpassed the King’s in splendour. He loaded profitable favours upon his relations, including his illegitimate son, who held eleven Church appointments, and their incomes, while still a boy. These counts against him gradually added up in the course of years. But for the time being—and it was for a long time, as Chief Ministers go—he successfully held in his grasp an accumulation of power that has probably never been equalled in England.
The King’s popularity rose with the achievements of his reign. There were many of course who grumbled at the war taxes imposed during the previous two years; but while pouring money into pageantry and magnificence Wolsey managed to tap new sources of revenue. Henry’s subjects were taxed much as they had been under his father, which was more lightly than any other subjects in Europe. Indeed, the North of England, which had to support billeting and Border warfare, was excused taxation altogether.
Successes abroad enabled Wolsey to develop Henry VII’s principles of centralised government. During the twelve years that he was Lord Chancellor Parliament met only once, for two sessions spreading over three months in all. The Court of Star Chamber grew more active. It developed new and simple methods copied from Roman law, by which the Common Law rules of evidence were dispensed with, and persons who could give evidence were simply brought in for interrogation, one by one, often without even the formality of an oath. Justice was swift, fines were heavy, and no one in England was so powerful that he could afford to flout the Star Chamber. When a common soldier of the Calais garrison once sent his wife to complain of his treatment by the Lord Deputy of Calais she received a full hearing. The new generation grown up after the Wars of the Roses was accustomed to royal law and order, and determined that it should prevail.
Thus it was that this system of arbitrary government, however despotic in theory, however contrary to the principles believed to lie behind Magna Carta, in fact rested tacitly on the real will of the people. Henry VIII, like his father, found an institution ready to his hand in the unpaid Justice of the Peace, the local squire or landlord, and taught him to govern. Rules and regulations of remarkable complexity were given to the Justice to administer; and later in the century Justices’ manuals were produced, which ran through innumerable editions and covered almost every contingency which could arise in country life.
The Tudors were indeed the architects of an English system of local government which lasted almost unchanged until Victorian times. Unpaid local men, fearless and impartial, because they could rely on help from the King, dealt with small matters, sitting in the villages often in twos and threes. Bigger matters such as roads and bridges and sheep-stealing came before quarter sessions in the appropriate town. It was a rough justice that the country gentlemen meted out, and friendship and faction often cut across the interests of both the nation and the Crown. If in the main they carried the directions of the Crown to the people, the Justices could also on occasion, by turning a deaf ear to official advice, express popular resistance to the royal will. What they did in the counties they could also sometimes do in the House of Commons. Even as Tudor rule advanced towards its climax the faithful Members of Parliament were not afraid to speak their minds. Wolsey saw the dangers of the situation and preferred to work out his policy without the unappreciative counsel of Parliament. Henry VIII and Thomas Cromwell learned to handle the Commons with discretion, though even then resistance was not unknown. But in spite of occasional friction, and even riot and rebellion in the countryside, it was on the whole a working partnership. Crown and community alike recognised what the partnership had achieved and what it had to offer.
Within a few years of his accession Henry embarked upon a programme of naval expansion, while Wolsey concerned himself with diplomatic manœuvre. Henry had already constructed the largest warship of the age, the Great Harry, of 1,500 tons, with “seven tiers one above the other, and an incredible array of guns.” The fleet was built up under the personal care of the sovereign, who ordered the admiral to send word to him in minute detail “how every ship did sail,” and was not content until England commanded the Narrow Seas. Wolsey’s arrangements for the foreign service were hardly less remarkable. A system of couriers and correspondents was organised over Western Europe, through whom news was received in England as quickly as during the wars of Marlborough or Wellington. The diplomatic service which Henry VII had organised with such care was used as a nucleus, supplemented by the ablest products of the New Learning at Oxford, including Richard Pace, John Clerk, and Richard Sampson, the last two destined to become bishops later in the reign. The dispatches of this period, at the height of the Renaissance, are as closely knit and coloured as any in history; each event, the size of armies, rebellions in Italian cities, movements within the College of Cardinals, taxes in France, is carefully weighed and recorded. For some years at least Wolsey was a powerful factor and balancing weight in Europe.
The zenith of this brilliant period was reached at the Field of the Cloth of Gold in June 1520, when Henry crossed the Channel to meet his rival, Francis I of France, for the first time. Henry’s main perplexity was, we are told, about his appearance; he could not decide how he would look best, in his beard as usual or clean-shaven. At first he yielded to Catherine’s persuasion and shaved. But directly he had done so he regretted the step and grew the beard again. It reached its full luxuriance in time to create a great impression in France.
At the Field of the Cloth of Gold, near Guîsnes, the jousting and feasting, the colour and glitter, the tents and trappings, dazzled all Europe. It was the last display of medieval chivalry. Many noblemen, it was said, carried on their shoulders their mills, their forests, and their meadows. But Henry and Francis failed to become personal friends. Henry, indeed, was already negotiating with Francis’ enemy, the new Emperor Charles V, who had lately succeeded his grandfather, Maximilian. At Guîsnes he attempted to outdo Francis both by the splendour of his equipment and the cunning of his diplomacy. Relying on his great physical strength, he suddenly challenged Francis to a wrestling match. Francis seized him in a lightning grip and put him on the ground. Henry went white with passion, but was held back. Although the ceremonies continued Henry could not forgive such a personal humiliation. He was, in any case, still seeking friends elsewhere. Within a month he had concluded an alliance with the Emperor, thus forfeiting the French tribute. When the Emperor declared war on Francis English wealth was squandered feverishly on an expedition to Boulogne and subsidies to mercenary contingents serving with the Emperor. Wolsey had to find the money. When Kent and the Eastern Counties rose against a species of capital levy imposed by Wolsey in the second year of war, and absurdly misnamed the “Amicable Grant,” the King pretended he did not know of the taxation. The Government had to beat a retreat, and the campaign was abandoned. Wolsey now got the King’s consent to make secret overtures for peace to Francis.
These overtures were Wolsey’s fatal miscalculation; only six weeks later the Imperial armies won an overwhelming victory over the French at Pavia, in Northern Italy. After the battle the entire peninsula passed into the hands of the Emperor. Italy was destined to remain largely under Habsburg domination until the invasions of Napoleon. But although Francis himself was taken prisoner and crushing terms of peace were imposed on France, England did not share in the spoils of victory. Henry could no longer turn the scales in Europe. The blame was clearly Wolsey’s, and the King decided that perhaps the Cardinal had been given too free a hand. He insisted on visiting the great new college which Wolsey was building at Oxford, Cardinal College, destined to become Christ Church, the largest and most richly endowed in the university. When he arrived he was astonished at the vast sums which were being lavished upon the masonry. “It is strange,” he remarked to the Cardinal, “that you have found so much money to spend upon your college and yet could not find enough to finish my war.”
Up till now he had been inseparable from Wolsey. In 1521 he had sent to the scaffold the Duke of Buckingham, son of Richard III’s Buckingham, and close in line of succession to the throne. His crime had been leading the opposition of the displaced nobility to the King’s chosen Chancellor. But after Pavia Henry began to have second thoughts. Perhaps, he decided, Wolsey would have to be sacrificed to preserve the popularity of the monarch. Then there was Queen Catherine. In 1525 she was aged forty. At the Field of the Cloth of Gold, five years before, King Francis had mocked at her behind the scenes with his courtiers, saying she was already “old and deformed.”
A typical Spanish princess, she had matured and aged rapidly; it was clear that she would bear Henry no male heir. Either the King’s illegitimate son, the Duke of Richmond, now aged six, would have to be appointed by Act of Parliament, or perhaps England might accept Catherine’s child, Mary, now aged nine, as the first Queen of England in her own right since Matilda. It was still doubtful if a woman could succeed to the throne by English law. Would England tolerate being ruled by a woman? Might Mary not turn out very like her Spanish mother, narrow and bigoted, a possible queen perhaps in Spain, or France, or Austria, countries full of soldiers, but not acceptable to the free English, who had obeyed Henry VII and Henry VIII because they wished to obey, and although there was no central army except the Beef-eaters in the Tower? Would Mary be able to rule in the Tudor manner, by favour and not by force?
The long clash of the Wars of the Roses had been a nightmare to the nation which a disputed succession might revive. To the monarch these great questions of State were also questions of conscience, in which his sensual passions and his care for the stability of the realm were all fused together. They perplexed Henry for two more years. The first step, clearly, was to get rid of Catherine. In May 1527 Cardinal Wolsey, acting as Papal Legate and with the collusion of the King, held a secret ecclesiastical court at his house in Westminster. He summoned Henry to appear before him, charged with having married his deceased brother’s wife within the degrees of affinity prohibited by the laws of the Church. Henry’s authority had been a Bull of dispensation obtained by Ferdinand and Henry VII in 1503, which said in effect that since the marriage between Catherine and Arthur had not been consummated Catherine was not legally Henry’s deceased brother’s wife and Henry could marry Catherine. Although Catherine, on the advice of successive Spanish ambassadors, maintained to her dying day that her marriage with Arthur had not been consummated, nobody was convinced. She had lived under the same roof with Prince Arthur for seven months.
After hearing legal argument for three days the court decided that the point should be submitted to a number of the most learned bishops in England. Several bishops replied however that provided Papal dispensation had been secured such a marriage was perfectly lawful. Henry then tried to persuade Catherine herself that he and she had never been legally married, that they had lived in mortal sin for eighteen years. He added that as he intended to abstain from her company in future he hoped she would retire far from Court. Catherine burst into tears and firmly refused to go away.
About a fortnight later Wolsey crossed the Channel to conduct prolonged negotiations for a treaty of alliance with France. While Wolsey was away Henry became openly infatuated with Anne Boleyn. Since she had returned from school in France Anne had grown into a vivacious, witty woman of twenty-four, very slender and frail, with beautiful black eyes and thick black hair so long that she could sit on it, which she wore flowing loose over her shoulders. “Mistress Anne,” wrote the Venetian Ambassador, “is not the handsomest woman in the world. She is of middle height, dark-skinned, long neck, wide mouth, rather flat-chested.” She had a fiery temper, was outspoken and domineering, and although not generally liked soon gained a small following, many of them noted for their leanings towards the new religious doctrines of Luther. We first hear of Anne Boleyn at Court in a dispatch of the Imperial Ambassador dated August 16, 1527, four months after Henry had begun proceedings for the annulment of his marriage. Did he plan the divorce and then find Anne? Or had he arranged to marry Anne from the beginning? We shall never know, for Henry was very secretive in his private matters. “Three may keep counsel,” he observed a year or two later, “if two be away; and if I thought my cap knew my counsel I would cast it into the fire and burn it.” His love letters were secured by Papal agents, and are now in the Vatican library, but, while prettily phrased, they are undated, and disclose little except that Anne Boleyn kept him waiting for nearly a year.
Henry had been carefully guarded by Wolsey and Catherine. He had had mistresses before, but never openly. The appearance at Court of a lady with whom he spent hours at a time created an extraordinary stir. Together Anne and Henry arranged to send a special royal ambassador to Pope Clement VII, independently of the resident ambassador chosen by Wolsey, to seek not only annulment of the King’s marriage, but also a dispensation to marry again at once. Dr William Knight, now over seventy, was brought forth from retirement to undertake this delicate mission. Two entirely different sets of instructions were prepared for Knight. One made no mention of the proposed new marriage and was to be shown to Wolsey as he passed through Compiègne on his way to Rome; the other was the one on which Knight was to act. Wolsey was shown the dummy instructions as arranged, and at once saw that they had been drafted by ignorant laymen. He hurried home to have the instructions altered, and thus learned all. But although he now took over the management of the negotiations every expedient proved fruitless. The Papal Legate, Cardinal Campeggio, who was sent to England to hear the case used all possible pretexts to postpone a decision. Now that Italy had fallen to the Habsburgs the Pope was at the mercy of the Imperial soldiery. In 1527 they shocked Europe by seizing and sacking Rome. The Pope was now practically a prisoner of Charles V, who was determined that Henry should not divorce his aunt.
This broke Wolsey. New counsellors were called in. A follower of the Duke of Norfolk, Dr Stephen Gardiner, was appointed Secretary to the King. Soon after this appointment Dr Cranmer, a young lecturer in divinity at Cambridge and a friend of the Boleyns, made a helpful new suggestion to Gardiner, that the question whether the King had ever been legally married should be withdrawn from the lawyers and submitted to the universities of Europe. The King at once took up the idea. Cranmer was sent for and complimented. Letters and messengers were dispatched to all the universities in Europe. At the same time the King had the writs sent out for a Parliament, the first for six years, to strengthen his hand in the great changes he was planning. Norfolk and Gardiner, not Wolsey, completed the arrangements. Wolsey retired in disgrace to his diocese of York, which he had never visited. On one occasion he came to Grafton to see the King. But when he entered he found that Anne was there, Norfolk insulted him to his face, and he was dismissed without an audience.
On October 9, 1529, Wolsey’s disgrace was carried a step farther by an indictment in the King’s Bench under one of the Statutes of Præmunire, passed in the reign of Richard II. These Acts of Parliament were designed to uphold the jurisdiction of the royal courts against the Church courts, and had been one of Wolsey’s favourite instruments for exacting money for the King for technical offences. They provided that anyone who obtained in the court of Rome or elsewhere any transfers of cases to Rome, processes, sentences of excommunication, Bulls, instruments, or “any other things whatsoever which touch, the King, against him, his crown and regalty, or his realm,” should lose the royal protection and forfeit all his goods to the King. While the proceedings were going forward in King’s Bench, Norfolk and Suffolk came to Wolsey to take away the Great Seal as a mark that he was no longer Lord Chancellor. But Wolsey protested, saying that he had been made Chancellor for life. Next day they came again, bearing letters signed by the King. When they had gone with the seal the great Cardinal broke down, and was found seated, weeping and lamenting his misfortunes.
Anne was determined however to ruin him. She had set her heart on York Place, the London residence of the Archbishops of York, which was, she decided, of a convenient size for her and Henry; large enough for their friends and entertainments, yet too small to permit Queen Catherine to live there also. Anne and her mother took the King to inspect the Cardinal’s goods in York Place, and Henry was incensed by the wealth which he found. The judges and learned counsel were summoned and the King asked how he could legally obtain possession of York Place, which had been regarded as belonging to the Archbishops of York in perpetuity. The judges advised that Wolsey should make a declaration handing over York Place to the King and his successors. A judge of the King’s Bench was accordingly sent to Wolsey. A member of his household, George Cavendish, has left an account of the Cardinal’s last days. According to him Wolsey said, “I know that the King of his own nature is of a royal stomach. How say you, Master Shelley? May I do it with justice and conscience, to give that thing away from me and my successors which is none of mine?” The judge explained how the legal profession viewed the case. Then said the Cardinal, “I will in no wise disobey, but most gladly fulfil and accomplish his princely will and pleasure in all things, and in especial in this matter, inasmuch as ye, the fathers of the law, say that I may lawfully do it. Howbeit I pray you show his Majesty from me, that I most humbly desire his Highness to call to his most gracious remembrance that there is both Heaven and Hell.”
Henry cared nothing for the fulminations of a Cardinal. Threats merely made him take more sweeping measures. The charge under Præmunire was supplemented by a charge of traitorous correspondence with the King of France, conducted without the King’s knowledge. Five days after Wolsey had been found guilty under Præmunire the Earl of Northumberland came to the castle of the Archbishop of York at Cawood, near York, and, trembling, said in a very faint and soft voice, “My lord, I arrest you of high treason.” “Where is your commission?” quoth the Cardinal. “Let me see it.” “Nay, sir, that you may not,” replied the Earl. “Well, then,” said the Cardinal, “I will not obey your arrest.” Even as they were debating this matter there came in Councillor Walshe, and then said the Cardinal, “Well, there is no more to do. I trow, gentleman, ye be one of the King’s privy chamber; your name, I suppose, is Walshe; I am content to yield unto you, but not to my Lord of Northumberland without I see his commission. And also you are a sufficient commissioner yourself in that behalf, inasmuch as ye be one of the King’s privy chamber; for the worst person there is a sufficient warrant to arrest the greatest peer of this realm by the King’s only commandment, without any commission.”
As Wolsey journeyed back to London, where the cell in the Tower used by the Duke of Buckingham before his execution was again being placed in readiness, he fell ill, and when he neared Leicester Abbey for the night he told the monks who came out to greet him, “I am come to leave my bones among you.” About eight in the morning two days later he sank into a last decline, murmuring to those gathered at the bedside, “If I had served God as diligently as I have done the King He would not have given me over in my grey hairs.” Soon afterwards he died; and they found next to his body a shirt of hair, beneath his other shirt, which was of very fine linen holland cloth. This shirt of hair was unknown to all his servants except his chaplain.
Wolsey’s high offices of State were conferred on a new administration: Gardiner secured the Bishopric of Winchester, the richest see in England; Norfolk became President of the Council, and Suffolk the Vice-President. During the few days that elapsed until Wolsey was replaced by Sir Thomas More as Lord Chancellor the King applied the Great Seal himself to documents of State. With the death of the Cardinal political interests hitherto submerged made their bid for power. The ambition of the country gentry to take part in public affairs in London, the longing of an educated, wealthy Renaissance England to cast off the tutelage of priests, the naked greed and thirst for power of rival factions, began to shake and agitate the nation. Henry was now thirty-eight years old.