The summer Progress of 1527 was a climacteric–both in Anne’s life and in the history of England. When the year began, her relationship with the King of England was the most closely guarded of secrets. When it ended and the rhythms of political life resumed in the autumn, all was out in the open. She had become Henry VIII’s acknowledged consort-in-waiting and was queening it over a Court where she already exerted more power than the unfortunate Catherine had ever done. Meanwhile, as Anne rose, Wolsey, the great minister, declined. He spent the summer away from England, on Embassy to France. And, during his absence, his grip on policy, in particular the policy of the Divorce, weakened alarmingly. Was this Anne’s work? Had she engineered his convenient exile? Or did she only exploit it?
Cavendish, who accompanied his master, Wolsey, to France and gave a remarkable picture of his mounting discomfiture there, was in no doubt: Anne, determined to be revenged on Wolsey for having prevented her marriage to Henry Percy, was responsible for everything. In the early summer, according to Cavendish, she joined in a conspiracy with Wolsey’s enemies on the Council. She set a trap for him by persuading him–with fair and flattering words–to go on the mission to France. She then worked on Henry during Wolsey’s absence to undermine his reputation and destroy his favour. And she succeeded beyond her wildest dreams.
Cavendish’s account has been dismissed by the fashionable band of ‘revisionist’ historians, who are blessed with the happy confidence that they understand the past better than those who were alive at the time. But, in outline, it seems to me to be correct. It errs, in fact, at only one point. Written with the benefit of hindsight, it is too neat and pat, and it exaggerates the extent to which the outcome was planned from the beginning. There was, I would guess, no great conspiracy against Wolsey in the early summer: too few knew of Anne’s relationship with Henry to supply the necessary breadth of support, nor had Anne either the occasion or the motive to act. Rather, Anne took advantage of events as they unrolled. She had the necessary political skill (‘a very good wit’, as Cavendish put it). She also had the strength of character to impose herself as the leader or ‘chief mistress’ (in Cavendish’s phrase again) of Wolsey’s opponents, who increased in number and confidence as his power waned. And, above all, she had the luck–which equally deserted Wolsey.1
The scheme to send Wolsey on a mission to France originated during the lengthy French Embassy to London in the spring of 1527. It was intended as the culmination of the policy of ‘peace with honour’, by which Wolsey had kept Henry at the centre of European affairs ever since the Treaty of London of 1518. Each successive negotiation was more ambitious in scope; the ‘Universal’ Peace of 1518 was trumped by the ‘Eternal’ Peace of 1527. And each was designed to show Henry and Wolsey in a yet more glorious light. The 1527 Embassy was the ne plus ultra for Wolsey. As Henry’s ‘lieutenant’ or viceroy, he was accorded full royal honours during his journey to France (and enforced them to the last jot and tittle). He was also hailed in pageants by the French, who were not to be outdone in sycophancy, as the Holy Ghost who had brought peace to earth and goodwill to men (at least if they were not the subjects and soldiers of the hated Emperor Charles V).
It was a heady brew, and explains why Cavendish thought that Wolsey had been tricked into undertaking the Embassy by having his vanity tickled. But, behind the public pomp and circumstance, Wolsey’s mission also had another, more secret purpose. His fertile brain had quickly spotted that the Sack of Rome, and the Pope’s subsequent imprisonment at the hands of Charles V’s troops, were as much an opportunity for Henry’s schemes as a threat to them. Someone would have to serve as acting head of the Church if the Pope’s captivity were prolonged. And who was better qualified than Wolsey? Once seated on St Peter’s throne, if only temporarily, he could exercise the plenitude of Papal power and grant Henry his Divorce. The world–and Catherine–would be presented with a fait accompli.
Wolsey discussed this scheme fairly widely–though in the strictest confidence and in the highest political circles. He talked it over with Henry before he left London on 3 July on the first leg of his mission to France; indeed the two may have worked it out together. Then, the night after his departure from London, he raised the matter with William Warham, the Archbishop of Canterbury, when he reviewed the state of play on the Divorce with him at Dartford. Warham, no mean political player himself in his younger days, had immediately detected Wolsey’s ulterior motive, remarking smoothly that ‘the same shall much confer to [Henry’s] Secret Matter’. Wolsey seems even to have mentioned it to some of the galaxy of international diplomats, who were gathering in northern France in anticipation of the summit conference with Francis I.2
But, despite all the talk, Wolsey did nothing. He did not even sketch out a programme of action till 29 July, and it was only two weeks later still, on 11 August, that he was finally goaded into action.3
The result was the worst of all possible worlds. Wolsey had said more than enough to alert Henry’s enemies to his intentions (a version of the plan for a Papal vicegerency was known, for instance, in the Imperial Court, then at Valladolid, by 14 July, to the horror of the English ambassador there). But he had done much too little to persuade Henry that he was working seriously to implement the scheme. And if the Great Matter was not top of his minister’s agenda, Henry wanted to know why.4
Anne, with her own axe to grind, was now able to offer Henry an all-too-convincing explanation for the minister’s inactivity. Wolsey was doing nothing because he had never wanted her to marry Henry anyway. He was incompetent. He was not to be trusted. And, in any case, she and her friends had a much better plan. But it must be kept from Wolsey, since he would do everything he could to frustrate it.
Would Henry, despite Wolsey’s decade and a half of service, fall for this rival scheme? And who would win the King’s ear, his minister or his mistress?
In the circumstances of the summer of 1527, there was no contest. Wolsey was two hundred and fifty miles away in France. Anne was ever-present at Henry’s elbow (if not yet in his bed). Wolsey had only a couple of friends at Court: Sir William Fitzwilliam, who had succeeded Anne’s father as Treasurer of the Household on Boleyn’s elevation to the peerage, and Dr William Knight, who had replaced the occasionally demented Richard Pace as royal Secretary. And Knight was to prove treacherous. In contrast, Anne’s friends and relations surrounded the King during this most unusual of royal Progresses.
Normally, the Progress or royal summer holiday was a roving hunting party, which moved, at intervals of two or three days, from country house to country house. Accommodation was strictly limited, and the royal entourage was cut to a handful of intimates and a skeleton staff of domestics. This year, however, it was different. Instead of going on his travels, Henry spent a full month in a single house: Beaulieu or New Hall, two and a half miles to the north-east of Chelmsford in Essex. The house had originally belonged to Anne’s father, who had inherited it through his mother, Lady Margaret Butler, the daughter and eventual heiress of the seventh Earl of Ormond. Thomas Boleyn had sold the house to Henry in 1516, but he retained a substantial landed stake in Essex and took the title of his viscountcy from Rochford (also a former Butler possession) fifteen miles to the south-east.5
The royal party arrived at the ex-Boleyn mansion, which Henry had extended into a full-scale palace, on 23 July. There the King was joined by the Dukes of Norfolk and Suffolk, the Marquess of Exeter, the Earls of Oxford, Essex and Rutland, and Viscounts Fitzwalter and Rochford. This was a conclave of Henry’s most trusted friends and relations: Norfolk was the King’s uncle by marriage; Suffolk was his brother-in-law and sporting partner; Exeter was his first cousin and closest male relation; while Essex, Rutland and Fitzwalter were rather more distant royal connexions through the Yorkist and Woodville lines. It was also–since Rochford was Anne’s father and Norfolk her uncle–a gathering of Anne’s relations as well.
On 31 July, Fitzwilliam alerted Wolsey. ‘The King is keeping a very great and expensive house’, he wrote. He listed the King’s house-guests and noted the even more select band of Norfolk, Suffolk, Exeter and Rochford who usually supped apart with the King in his Privy Chamber. Fitzwilliam complained of the havoc wrought on his plans to use the Progress to continue Wolsey’s schemes for economical reform in the royal Household. But, with characteristic discretion, he left it to Wolsey to draw his own conclusions about the political threat posed by the gathering.6
For the house party at Beaulieu turned into an extended think-tank on the Great Matter. Indeed, that is probably why it was assembled in the first place. Like a modern company ‘away-day’ at a country-house hotel, it was designed to combine business with pleasure and to offer a relaxed atmosphere of country sports and pastimes which encouraged the participants to say the unsayable and think the unthinkable. To judge by the results, it succeeded. It also took its decisions, not only in Wolsey’s absence, but deliberately behind his back. For the first time in his career, Wolsey found himself excluded from the centre of power–and by a woman. And for the first time in hers, Anne, the hunter/huntress of Wyatt’s poem, used the hunt as a political device in the battle to control Henry. It was not a lesson she forgot.
On 6 August the whole party rode off to the Earl of Oxford’s fine ancestral Norman fortress at Castle Hedingham to enjoy the sport there. By the time it returned, the die was cast, and on 7 August Secretary Knight wrote to Wolsey to inform him that ‘the King’s pleasure is that your Grace do send hither immediately Mr Doctor Stephens; for his Highness desires to communicate and confer divers things with him which cannot so readily follow the pen as they should’.7
‘Mr Doctor Stephens’ was Stephen Gardiner, later Bishop of Winchester, Lord Chancellor and a hate-figure for English Protestants. Gardiner, born in about 1497, was the youngest son of a prosperous cloth-worker of Bury St Edmunds, Suffolk. His father, who died when he was a boy, left him a substantial legacy to pay for his education, and Gardiner seized the opportunity. By 1522 he had obtained a double doctorate from Cambridge in civil law and canon law. Three years later, still aged only twenty-eight, he was elected Master of Trinity Hall. Moreover, most unusually for a sixteenth-century academic, he had a fluent knowledge of French. This he acquired during a sort of gap-year between school and university spent in Paris in the company of one of his guardians, Thomas or Richard Eden. A frequent visitor to Eden’s house in the rue St Jean was the great scholar Erasmus. And Gardiner became used to preparing the scholar’s favourite salad of lettuce ‘dressed with [melted?] butter and vinegar’. He did it, as he did most things, exceptionally well.8
Cambridge left a permanent mark on Gardiner. But, even before his election as Master of Trinity Hall, he had taken a decisive step into the wider world when, in 1524, he was talent-spotted for Wolsey’s Household. Wolsey made him his Secretary and, from the beginning, had used him as his own principal agent in the Secret Matter. On 8 June 1527, Gardiner, ‘in the Legate’s name’, had collected the crucial documentation on the Divorce in the form of ‘a box containing eleven pieces of evidence about the matrimony of Spain’ from the archives of the Treasury. Thereafter he had been Wolsey’s only ‘help and instrument’ in drafting and working up Wolsey’s schemes to obtain the Divorce.9
Thus, to send Gardiner to Henry, as the King was now demanding, was tantamount to Wolsey’s handing over the management of the Divorce to Henry. And that, as Wolsey knew, was his own passport to oblivion. So, writing on 11 August, Wolsey refused Henry’s request for Gardiner; he also leapt into action.
But first came the excuses for his delay: he had not wished to weaken his bargaining hand against the French by mentioning the Secret Matter; he had been waiting for news from Rome; he had other ‘importable [insupportable] business, both day and night’. But now, he concluded, circumstances had changed, since the Secret Matter was secret no longer. ‘I have received out of Flanders’, he informed Henry, ‘letters from…your Grace’s agent there, containing that it is come to the [Archduchess] Margaret’s knowledge, by secret ways and means…that your Grace intendith to be separate and divorced from the Queen.’
No doubt. But nothing could conceal the fact that the real trigger to Wolsey’s action was not the news from Flanders but Henry’s demand for Gardiner. Nevertheless, Wolsey’s flurry of activity was impressive. And he made sure that Henry knew it. He had approached the Pope, he wrote to the King, for his consent to the scheme for Wolsey to take over the administration of the Church during the Pope’s captivity. He was sending him three separate envoys, each with excellent contacts in the Roman Court, that ‘if the one expedition fail, the other may take effect’. He would throw money at the problem. He would do anything, in short, he assured Henry, ‘which may confer and be beneficial to your Grace’s purpose’.10
Henry’s reaction was, apparently, sweetness and light. On 17 August the trusty Treasurer Fitzwilliam (whom Knight punningly called Wolsey’s ‘treasure’) informed Wolsey that ‘the King is much pleased with Wolsey’s letters and likes all that he has done’. But, he continued, he was sure that Wolsey had already been told of all this by Secretary Knight, ‘whom [he] esteems a right honest man and a friend to Wolsey’.11
Knight’s letter (written, in fact, two days later on the 19th) confirmed Fitzwilliam’s sunny tone. ‘The King’, Knight told Wolsey, ‘command[ed] me to give unto you his most hearty thanks.’ Henry had made his councillors at Court, Norfolk, Suffolk, Rochford and Fitzwilliam, ‘privy’ only to Wolsey’s other letter dealing with general business. But this reply to Wolsey’s letter ‘concerning the secrets’ had been handled by the King alone. And Henry was delighted: since Wolsey’s approaches to Rome were all that he wished for, the sending of Gardiner was superfluous. Knight’s letter went on to reinforce the picture of his own loyalty to Cardinal Wolsey. He praised Fitzwilliam as another of Wolsey’s ‘faithful and loving servants’. And he told Wolsey of the ugly rumours spreading at Court about the activities of Wolsey’s agents in raising funds for his great educational foundations at Oxford and Ipswich by dissolving a swathe of smaller monasteries. ‘I have heard the King and noblemen speak things incredible’, Knight confided.12
The story about the ‘things incredible’ was true, and shows how far and how quickly the general atmosphere on the Progress had turned against Wolsey. Otherwise, Knight’s letter was a tissue of lies. It was designed to lull Wolsey into a false sense of security; it was also intended to disguise Knight’s own forthcoming role as Judas.
Wolsey was not altogether deceived and sent John Clerk, the Bishop of Bath and Wells, to explain more fully to Henry his actions concerning the Divorce. But nothing prepared Wolsey for what was to come.13
The house party at Beaulieu broke up as planned on 27 August. Most of Henry’s guests left Court while the King, with a small entourage, made for Greenwich. Secretary Knight, however, took a different direction. He travelled to London to make arrangements for a lengthy journey: he was to be ambassador to Rome.
Knight’s mission was the final decision of the Beaulieu think-tank: Knight would be Henry’s envoy to the Pope, not Wolsey’s. He would take his instructions directly from the King, not the minister. And he would do what Henry and Anne wanted–not what Wolsey, in his wisdom, thought they ought to want. For Henry and Anne were weary of Wolsey’s delays and tergiversations. Instead, they had decided to try a frontal approach that was stunning in its directness. Knight would ask Clement VII for a dispensation that would free Henry from all impediments to his immediate remarriage: it would allow him to marry, even though he was still married to Catherine; it would also permit him to marry Anne, even though her sister Mary had been his mistress. And all this would be done without Wolsey’s knowledge.
Some of the Beaulieu deliberations leaked and reached Mendoza, the Spanish ambassador in London, by mid-August. ‘It is generally believed’, he reported home on 16 August, ‘that if the King can obtain a divorce he will end by marrying a daughter of Master Bolo [Boleyn]…who is now called Milord de Rochafort [Rochford].’ But the secret of Knight’s mission was well kept–even from Wolsey.14
The letter which Wolsey received from Knight thus came as a bombshell. King Henry, Knight wrote from London on 29 August, had decided to send him to Rome ‘for the procuring and setting forth…of [the King’s] secret matter’. He was about to depart and would see Wolsey shortly in France to receive the minister’s own further orders ‘concerning such other things as [Wolsey] should think necessary to be sped [in Rome]’. This last went a little way to protecting Wolsey’s dignity. But, finally, it was a mere sop.15
Wolsey now stared into the abyss. If Knight’s mission went ahead, Wolsey would be rendered redundant; if it succeeded, Anne would be made Queen. And what would happen to him then?
Knight’s letter was delivered to Wolsey at Compiègne on 5 September. Cavendish, who was in attendance on the Cardinal at the time, now becomes an eye-witness of Wolsey’s efforts to salvage his career.
Wolsey ‘rose early in the morning about 4 of the clock’ to compose his reply to Henry. He then remained glued to his desk for twelve hours. ‘All which season’, Cavendish noted with amazement, ‘my Lord never rose once to piss, nor yet to eat any meat but continually wrote his letters with his own hand, having all this time his night-cap and kerchief on his head.’ Towards four in the afternoon he finished writing. But even then he took no refreshment until he had ordered the messenger, ‘Christopher [the] Gunner, the King’s servant, to prepare him without delay to ride in post in to England with his letters’.16
Wolsey’s feat has often been cited by historians as an example of his typical industry and energy. But the context (which those historians have not recognised) was hardly typical: Cardinal Wolsey was writing for his political life.
Wolsey’s messenger was also carefully chosen for his speed and intrepidity. Christopher Morris (to give him his proper name) had been sent as diplomatic courier to Spain in early 1527. Communications had been disrupted by severe floods. But Morris somehow fought through, to the admiration of the ambassador, Dr Edward Lee. ‘He wondered’, Lee wrote, ‘how he escaped the waters, which have done much hurt here.’ Perhaps in reward for his efforts, Morris was appointed Chief Gunner in the Tower of London.17
But not even Morris could make the round to England and back in less than five or six days. Wolsey therefore had to wait on tenterhooks, as Cavendish observed, ‘expecting the return of Christopher [the] Gunner’. Instead, on the 10th, a much less welcome face appeared: Secretary Knight himself, en route for Rome as he had promised.
Wolsey was astonished. After all, he had written a letter, a long, brilliant letter to Henry. It was full of knowledge of the world, of Rome and, above all, of the King’s own character. How could it have failed to scotch the wild-cat scheme for Knight’s mission? It was scarcely possible. Instead, he ordered Knight to delay, confident, as Knight reported confidentially to Henry, that ‘by the coming of Christopher Morris I should have been by your Grace countermanded’.
To pacify Wolsey, and ‘for the avoiding of suspicion’, Knight did as he was told. Morris duly arrived the next day. But, as Knight knew all along, Morris bore letters ordering Knight to proceed on his mission and Wolsey to assist him. Wolsey was beaten. He first despatched Knight and then made immediate preparations to return to England. Europe, even the Great Matter, could wait; it was his own position at home which now mattered most.18
But his humiliations were not yet over. The original intention, as Fitzwilliam had informed Wolsey back in July, was that Henry would remain ‘near Greenwich till Wolsey comes home’. Henry would then have gone to meet Wolsey part way on his journey across Kent and there would have been a loving, public reunion between the King and his trusty minister followed by long conversations in private. This is what had happened on Wolsey’s return from his previous mission to France in 1521. But Anne’s advent and the events of the Progress of 1527 made sure that there was no repetition.
Instead, Henry deliberately moved west, to Richmond. He came to Greenwich for the reception of the French ambassadors, who had arrived for the ratification of the treaties, on 22 September. But he stayed only for a single night before returning to Richmond.
And it was at Richmond that Wolsey arrived on the 30th. There he had a reception like no other. He immediately sent to Henry to know when he should ‘repair to the King’s Privy Chamber’ for his usual private audience. But Anne was with Henry when the messenger arrived. She was now an acknowledged figure at Court and, according to the Spanish ambassador, presumed to reply to Wolsey’s messenger on the King’s behalf. ‘Where else is the Cardinal to come?’ she snapped. ‘Tell him that he may come here, where the King is.’ Henry confirmed Anne’s commands and Wolsey came into the presence of Henry–and of Anne.19
At a stroke, she had established herself as consort in all but name.
But where did that leave Wolsey? Rumours were already circulating of a conspiracy against him by Norfolk and Rochford, Anne’s uncle and father. Meanwhile, Wolsey was fighting back. The Beaulieu think-tank had thought the unthinkable. The Cardinal therefore decided to respond with his own gathering of the great and the good at Hampton Court. And, since those invited were lawyers and canonists, they could be relied on to take a more cautious approach.
Who would win? The radicals or the conservatives? Anne or Wolsey?
But perhaps Henry, despite his apparent decisiveness in the summer, was not yet ready to choose.