‘These’, Henry wrote to Anne, ‘shall be to advertise you of the great elengenesse that I find here since your departing’. ‘Elengenesse’ means loneliness, dreariness or misery. Henry had encountered the word, almost certainly, in the continuation of the Romaunt of the Rose by a follower of Chaucer:
She had a…scrippe (bag) of faint distresse
That full was of elengenesse.
Anne, familiar probably with the poem in its original French as well as in the English translation, would have got the reference immediately. For the ‘she’, whose attributes include elengenesse, is the personification Abstinence, who cruelly parts lovers from the object of their desires–just as she and Henry were parted.
As usual, therefore, Henry, the most literary of Kings, had chosen his words carefully: elengenesse is a word for lovers, to describe the pangs that only lovers–separated by distance, or necessity, or a false parade of virtue–know.1
And the knowledge, it seems, had taken Henry unawares, as he was surprised by the strength of his own feelings. A day or two since Anne had gone seemed longer, he wrote, than ‘a whole fortnight’ while they were together. His pains were worst in the evening. He wished ‘you were in my arms or I in yours’. He fantasised about embracing her. Above all, he longed to kiss her ‘pretty duckies [breasts]’.
Only two things, he told Anne, lifted his depression. One was the ‘book’ he was composing to argue the case for his Divorce. The ‘book’ was based on the materials produced by his team of theologians. As we have seen, according to Pole, this group had first been assembled by Anne herself; latterly it was almost certainly headed by the bright young theologian, Dr Edward Foxe. That day Henry had ‘spent above four hours’ in writing and he was delighted to find that the result ‘maketh substantially for my matter’.
His other consolation was more material: ‘now that I was coming towards you’, Henry wrote, ‘methinketh my pains half relieved’.2
For Henry had decided that, if Anne could not come to London, then he would come to her. Or at least he would come almost half way and meet her in the vicinity of Beddington. This was the country seat of his friend and Anne’s cousin, Sir Nicholas Carew. Beddington is near Croydon in Surrey: it is some ten miles from London and about sixteen miles from Anne’s parents’ house at Hever. There Carew had turned his old family home into ‘a fair house (or palace rather)…which by advantage of the water is a paradise of pleasure’. Even in November, it was a fitting retreat for the would-be lovers.3
According to the Spanish ambassador, of course, Henry’s departure from London had scarcely been voluntary: instead, he had been driven out by demonstrations in support of Catherine. Perhaps. But it seems more likely that the attraction of Anne was at least as powerful as the repulsion of popular feeling. Moreover, Henry intended to do more than canoodle with Anne: he needed to consult her on the sudden worsening of their position on the Great Matter.4
Only five weeks previously Legate Campeggio had arrived in England, bringing, Henry had convinced himself, and had almost convinced Anne, the solution to all their problems. But Henry’s hopes had been quickly dashed–to his embarrassment and Anne’s irritation. Campeggio, instead of pressing forward with the trial, was trying every device to put it off: from the non-starter (from Henry’s point of view) of reconciliation, to the equally unacceptable notion (from Catherine’s perspective) of persuading the Queen to withdraw to a nunnery. Still worse, Catherine had struck back by revealing the Spanish Brief, which, if it were genuine, nullified all Henry’s gains in Rome and rendered the decretal commission worthless.
Finally, and underlying everything else, were the larger realities of the French collapse in Italy and the triumph there of Catherine’s nephew, the Emperor Charles V.
Henry, in short, desperately needed to regain control of events. Already, in such circumstances, he had formed the habit of turning to Anne for inspiration. Now he did so again, and, as usual, she obliged. When he returned to London on 14 November, after four intense days of business and pleasure at Beddington, a further initiative had been decided on. Henry would send a new Embassy to Rome; he would try new approaches; above all, he would employ new men.
The chief of the new Embassy was Sir Francis Bryan, Henry’s favourite and, since their mothers were half-sisters, Anne’s ‘cousin’. The sixteenth century took ties of kindred and marriage much more seriously than we tend to. But, even by those standards, the relationship was not an especially close one. Nevertheless, Bryan had identified himself wholly with Anne. On 25 June he had been finally reappointed to the Privy Chamber to replace her brother-in-law, William Carey, who had died of the sweat two nights previously. Now he was being sent to Rome as her eyes and ears as well as Henry’s.
And he could be relied on to report frankly what he saw and heard. For one of the principal features of Bryan’s strange, contradictory character was an addiction to plain speech. He called a spade a spade, and often, as one would expect from ‘the Vicar of Hell’, a bloody shovel as well. As with other famously plain-speakers, a mixture of motives was involved. Bryan had a genuine commitment to the truth; he also enjoyed making mischief. The mission to Rome would offer him plenty of scope for both.5
Assisting Bryan was the expert Latinist and native Italian speaker, Peter Vannes, who served as Latin Secretary to both Wolsey and Henry. Vannes was intended to hold a watching brief for Wolsey, with whom he maintained a separate Latin correspondence. But equally he was a pliable careerist, bending to every prevailing wind. And the likely direction of the wind was indicated by the fact that it was also planned to include in the Embassy Dr William Knight, Wolsey’s bête noire, after he had co-ordinated approaches to Rome with Henry’s ally, Francis I of France.
Clearly, if the rather skewed composition of the Embassy was anything to go by, Henry and Anne were deciding to find their own way to Rome–without Wolsey and perhaps against him.
Bryan and Vannes left at the end of November. After a terrible Channel crossing, during which one of them (they would not specify which) suffered from ‘dreadful nausea and vomiting of blood’, they arrived in Calais on 6 December. Travel by land then proved almost as problematic as by sea, as the ‘shortness of the days and the bad state of the roads’ kept them to a snail’s pace.
It was not a good beginning, as their defensive letters home showed.6
Meanwhile, Henry had lost patience with his enforced separation from Anne. To bring her back to Court would defy public opinion; it also risked alienating Campeggio. But Henry was beyond caring. As for Anne, she was always less sensitive than Henry to outward appearances. She also seems to have calculated that, with the sudden darkening of the political skies, she could do more good at Henry’s side than languishing in the country.
So back to Court she came. Wolsey, as usual, was left to sort out the logistics, which he did with his accustomed efficiency. ‘As touching a lodging for you, we have gotten one by my lord Cardinal’s means’, Henry informed Anne in a brisk, business-like letter in English, ‘the like whereof could not have been found hereabout for all causes.’ Work in preparing the new establishment, he continued, was proceeding rapidly, and her father had been instructed ‘to make his provisions with speed’. Soon her accommodation would be ready and they would be together.
As for ‘our other affairs’, Henry assured Anne, ‘there can be no more done; nor more diligence used, nor all manner of dangers better both foreseen and provided for’. All, he vowed, would turn out well, as ‘shall be hereafter to both our comfort’.
The endless iteration suggests a doubt in the mind of the writer; there was certainly one in the reader’s.7
The ‘hereabout’ in Henry’s letter was, almost certainly, Bridewell, Henry’s London palace, which he was using as his base to conduct negotiations with the barely mobile Campeggio. There have been several guesses as to the exact building allocated to Anne. They include Durham House in the Strand, Suffolk Place in Borough High Street or even an apartment in Bridewell itself. None seems very plausible. More likely was a site on the South Bank, where Anne’s father had his London house. Thence it was only a short boat-ride to Bridewell and Henry’s arms.
Wherever it was, Anne was installed by early December. ‘The King’, the French ambassador reported, ‘has lodged her in a very fine lodging, which he has prepared for her close by his own.’
Any pretence about Anne’s position was now abandoned: she was close to Henry physically, and she was close also, ceremony soon made clear, to the throne itself. ‘Greater court is…paid to her every day’, the French ambassador continued, ‘than has been to the Queen for a long time.’ The ambassador, the shrewd and worldly prelate Jean du Bellay, assumed that Anne’s sudden public prominence was a deliberate tactic: ‘I see’, he informed Montmorency, Francis I’s favourite and minister, ‘they mean to accustom the people by degrees to endure her, so that when the great blow comes it may not be thought strange’.8
Du Bellay had a vested interest in the dethroning of the Spanish Queen Catherine. But even he doubted the efficacy of Anne’s move to London. ‘The people’, he reported, ‘remain quite hardened’ in their hostility to both the Divorce and Anne as its intended beneficiary. ‘And I think’, he continued, ‘they would do more if they had more power.’ But the government was alert to the risk of public disorder, and took elaborate precautions.
Anne scarcely left Henry’s side again, with the result that Henry’s letters to her, which cast such a powerful if one-sided light on their love affair, cease.
But, of course, Anne’s public visibility continued to fluctuate with the exigencies of the Great Matter. The Christmas holidays of 1528–9 were such a moment. The King joined the Queen at Greenwich on 18 December, and Anne moved to Greenwich as well, but had a separate establishment. Perhaps, as du Bellay guessed, the reason was that Catherine’s lofty disapproval unsettled Anne. But it seems unlikely that someone who was ordinarily so brazen was intimidated thus easily. A much more likely explanation for Anne keeping a low profile was the presence at Greenwich for much of the festivities of Cardinal Wolsey and Cardinal Campeggio. Henry poured his charm on Campeggio; knighted his son, who had been born in wedlock before he became a priest; and dangled, Du Bellay heard, the vastly rich bishopric of Durham under his nose. Anne would have been out of place while these games were being played.9
She would come into her own soon enough.
Within a few days of the ending of the festivities, extraordinary news arrived at the English Court. Secretary Knight, after the usual dreadful winter Channel crossing, had reached Paris at the beginning of January. There he met Vincento Casale at the French Court, en route to Henry with letters from his brother Gregorio in Rome. The letters painted the blackest picture of the Pope’s mood: ‘he was never more afraid of the Imperialists than now’; he was surrounded by pro-Imperial advisers; ‘he daily shows signs of repentance for having granted the [decretal commission], saying that he is undone if the decretal comes to the knowledge of the Emperor’. In short, Knight concluded, Clement was utterly ‘untoward…in the King’s Great Affair’.
Knight, who had been through a similar renversement before, wrung his hands at the ill-luck which seemed to dog Henry’s efforts: surely, he wrote, there is ‘some cacade [?cassation or annulment] that inturbeth [confuses] all godly devices’. But, bravely, he acted and advised according to his best judgement. It would, he informed Henry and Wolsey, be folly to continue with his mission to Rome, since its only effect would be to alert the now pro-Imperial Clement to Henry’s most secret plans. He would therefore continue on his way with deliberate slowness (to put the French off the scent) and await the countermand which he was sure would come.10
Both his reasoning and his recommended course of action were excellent. But, as before, Knight got no thanks for them. And the reason was the same as before: he had, once again, got across Wolsey. What he said might be true. But it was not the truth that Wolsey wanted to hear–nor, still more importantly, that Wolsey wanted Henry to hear.
The Papal Chamberlain, Francisco Campana, who had been sent as an envoy from Clement himself, arrived in London on 11 January 1529, preceded by Casale who had reached the city a day or two earlier. Wolsey now worked furiously to undo Knight’s advice. His argument was a model of revisionism–that is, of proving conclusively that black is white and that the best scientific evidence demonstrates the moon to be made of green cheese. So what, Wolsey blustered, if the Pope was frightened of the Emperor? Were not the instructions of the English ambassadors designed to obviate that very fear by offering him an Anglo-French garrison or ‘presidy’ in Rome? This would enable him to defy Charles V and his Spanish army of occupation. Let the presidy be pressed on the Pope and all would be well.
Moreover Campana, Wolsey informed Knight, had sung an entirely different tune about the Pope’s attitude. Far from being Imperial, Campana had assured Henry, Clement was his fast friend. So the Pope would not only do all he could for Henry according to ‘law, justice and equity’, he would go further and act on his behalf ex plenitudine potestatis. The latter, as we have seen, means ‘from the fullness of his power’. In one sense it is a mere technical phrase, which was included in all formal Papal acts. But it might mean more. For, in theory, the plenitude of Papal power was absolute. Understood in this sense, therefore, Campana’s words were an unequivocal assurance that the Pope would settle the Great Matter in Henry’s interest.11
Dispute was later to rage about Campana’s words and their exact meaning. But there is no doubt that Wolsey persuaded Henry at the time that the second, ‘strong’ interpretation was the right one. And there is no doubt that this saved the day for Wolsey. Knight was seen off once more and was loftily upbraided by Wolsey for his panic and cowardice.
But equally, as previously in 1527, there is no doubt that Knight’s reading of events was right and that Wolsey’s was wrong. For, despite all the Papal Chamberlain’s smooth, equivocal assurances to Henry, his real mission spelled the end of Henry’s hopes of the Pope. Acting in strictest secrecy and on Pope Clement’s direct command, Campana ordered Campeggio to continue his policy of delaying the Legantine Trial; he also instructed him to destroy the decretal commission. Campeggio obeyed and the rest of his legacy in England was to be a mere postscript to this action.
Wolsey’s performance was magnificently audacious. But, like all high-wire acts, it left him dangerously exposed. Du Bellay, the French ambassador, realised this immediately. ‘Monsieur the Legate’, he reported on 25 January, ‘is in grave difficulty, for the affair has gone so far that, if it do not take effect, the King his master will blame him for it, and terminally.’ But, Du Bellay was convinced, Wolsey would make a fight of it. Henry, he predicted, ‘would have to deal with a tough nut’, and one that even the King would find it hard to crack.
Anne, too, was quick to realise Wolsey’s vulnerability, and, in the same despatch Du Bellay described her dramatic move against him at Court. The long-running quarrel between Russell and Cheyney had flared up again. ‘Cheyney’, Du Bellay reported, ‘had given offence to the Legate within the last few days, and, for that reason, had been expelled the Court.’ But, instead of trying to pour oil on troubled waters, as she had done before, Anne had gone on the offensive against Wolsey too. ‘The young lady’, Du Bellay continued, ‘has put [Cheyney] in again, whether [Wolsey] would or no, and not without sending him a message couched in disrespectful words’.12
Historians, if they have noticed this incident at all, have rather played it down. In fact, it was a watershed. Hitherto, whatever Anne may have thought about Wolsey in private, her public dealings with him had been correct, even warm. Now she had broken with him with deliberate, public ostentation. It can only have been because she had decided that his initiatives in Rome were doomed to failure.
In taking this line, Anne was opposing her judgement to Henry’s. For the King, formally at least, was giving his full backing to his minister. Who would be proved right: the mistress or the minister? And where would that leave Henry?
Wolsey, of course, also understood the risks of his game. And, he quickly decided, a reluctant envoy like Knight was worse than useless. So Knight was countermanded and, in his place, it was decided to send the young Turk, Stephen Gardiner. The decision was extraordinarily sudden, so much so that Gardiner had not time even to say farewell to his closest friend in Wolsey’s household, Thomas Arundel. Instead, he sent him a touching letter. ‘Though I depart from you in body’, Gardiner wrote, ‘I depart not in mind and soul, which…shall be ever where you be during my life, wheresoever this body shall fortune to wander.’13
It was a rare flash of sentiment in a man who would show none in his public life.
This aggression was one reason for Wolsey’s choice of Gardiner; the other was–Wolsey thought–Gardiner’s proven loyalty to himself. But Gardiner showed himself free of sentiment in this area too. Wolsey, he decided, had launched his career, but only Anne could take it to the summit. So, shortly after his arrival in Italy, he wrote to Anne, protesting his ‘willing and faithful mind’ to do her ‘pleasure’. Anne replied promptly, thanking him for his offer and accepting it enthusiastically: ‘not doubting, but as much as possible for man’s wit to imagine, you will do’. But then she added a note of caution. ‘I do trust in God’, she wrote, ‘that the end of this journey shall be more pleasant to me than your first. For that was but a rejoicing hope, which causing the like of it, doth put me to more pain.’ ‘Therefore I do trust’, she concluded, ‘that this hard beginning shall make a better ending’.14
It was done tactfully. But equally there is no doubt that, from Anne’s point of view, Gardiner was on probation. His last mission to the Pope had failed; this one had better succeed.
Gardiner joined Bryan and Vannes at Rome in early February. They found a Papal Court in turmoil. Clement was dangerously ill and there were even rumours that he was dead. The rumours turned out to be exaggerated. But his convalescence was long and slow. It was also a perfect excuse to put off even seeing the English envoys, much less addressing their business.
But, as they were fobbed off from day to day, they came at the truth by other means: as Knight had reported two months earlier, the political climate in Rome had turned decisively against the English. There was now, they became sure, no chance that Henry would get what he wanted.
The position was clear to them by mid-February. Gardiner wrote to Henry in guarded terms; Bryan in much blunter ones. For some reason, these particular letters were delayed and did not reach Wolsey till 19 March. Early the following morning Wolsey sent Brian Tuke, the Master of the Posts, to Greenwich to deliver the letters in person and report on Henry’s reactions.
As it happened, the moment was ill-chosen. Henry had sprained his foot the day before and it was 11 o’clock before it was dressed and he had breakfasted. Tuke was ushered in as soon as he had finished and presented the letters. Their contents were not calculated to improve the King’s mood. Gardiner’s letter to Henry, Tuke reported, was written ‘with as much or more desperation, than that was to your Grace’. Still worse was Bryan’s letter, which was ‘totally of desperation’. The King shared only the odd paragraph with Tuke, but these gave the flavour of the whole. Bryan ‘could not believe that the Pope would do anything for his Grace’, adding the characteristic Bryan-ism that: ‘It might well be in his Pater Noster (Our Father), but it was nothing in his Creed’. Worst of all for Wolsey, Tuke spotted that there was another letter enclosed with the one to Henry. It was ‘directed I wot [know] not to whom, but I suppose to Mistress Anne’.15
The minister’s monopoly of information was broken and the ambassadors had opened up separate channels of communication–not only to the King but to the King’s mistress.
Henry gathered up his miserable morning’s mail and kept it for consideration. It was now Palm Sunday Eve and the beginning of Holy Week. The King and Cardinal spent Easter separately, Henry at Greenwich and Wolsey at Richmond. And they did not meet till the following Saturday, 3 April, when Wolsey visited the Court with his colleague Campeggio.
During their audience, Henry and Campeggio had a conversation about the most recent sensation: the circulation of a Lutheran pamphlet at Court during Holy Week itself. Henry teased Campeggio by repeating the pamphlet’s arguments for the confiscation of Church property and Campeggio did his best to reply. Finally the King called a halt to their argument and assured him that he ‘always would remain a good Christian’.16
It is impossible to be sure of what was going on. But it looks like a struggle for the King’s mind. Anne, for it must be she, had despaired of a solution at Rome and was pressing for more extreme measures, including probably those outlined in the Lutheran pamphlet. Wolsey, on the other hand, was doggedly sticking to his existing policy. Let Henry’s ambassadors only push hard once more and Clement would–must–concede what he wanted.
Wolsey, for the moment, won.
His victory was embodied in the separate letters which Henry and Wolsey sent to the English ambassadors in Rome on 6 April. Both had the same message: the ambassadors were not to despair but to act! But the tone of the letters was different. Wolsey’s had the icy calm of barely suppressed hysteria. Nothing, he insisted, must stand in their way and they must press the Great Matter on the Pope etiam in ipso articulo mortis–‘even in his very death throes’. Henry’s, however, breathed the confidence of superior and particular knowledge. No credence, the King stated flatly, was to be given to ‘common report’. Such were mere vulgar rumours, like the stories about Campeggio’s Imperialism. Here Henry went out on a limb. ‘We find and certainly know Campeggio to be of a far other sort in his love and inclination towards us than was spoken, not having such affection towards the Emperor, as in him was suspected.’ Then he became confidential, tipping his ambassadors the wink. ‘And to be plain with you,’ he continued, ‘if ever he had been of other mind, we have said somewhat to him as might soon change that intention.’ Had Henry applied the stick of a threatened schism from Rome? Or the carrot of the promise of the bishopric of Durham? Or both? In any case, his confidence in his kingly cunning was supreme. He was riding high, and, as it turned out, for a fall.17
The letters were given to the courier Alexander, who made excellent time, arriving in Rome only a fortnight later on 21 April.
As it happened, Bryan had settled down to write another personal report to Henry that day. ‘Sir’, he had begun, ‘your Grace hath sent me hither to the intent I should instruct you, from time to time, of all your affairs here, as I could know, see or hear.’ For those who knew Bryan, as Henry did, it was an ominous beginning.
And it got worse.
They had seen the Pope several times, Bryan told Henry, and they had reported the entirely negative results in their joint letters to Wolsey, ‘whereby ye [Henry] may perceive that plainly [the Pope] will do nothing for your Grace’. ‘There is no man living’, Bryan added, ‘more sorrier to write this news to you, than I am. But if I should not write this, I should not do my duty. I would to God my former letters might have been lies, but I feared ever this end.’
As Bryan was concluding the despatch, the courier arrived with the letters from England. Bryan broke off to read them and added a postscript:
The courier Alexander arrived here bringing certain letters from your Grace and my lord Cardinal, wherein your Grace and my said Lord marvelled that we should write so extremely that the Pope would do nothing for your Grace…seeing as then we had not spoken with him. Sir, we wrote as we saw and know by substantial and credible men. And now your Grace may perceive by [the Pope’s] answer the sequel of the same.
It was as near as even Bryan dared to get to saying ‘I told you so’ to Henry.
But there was someone else, Bryan knew, who would have no such inhibitions. ‘Sir’, he had written in the body of the letter, ‘I write a letter to my cousin Anne. But I dare not write to her the truth of this because I do not know whether your Grace will be contented that she should know so shortly or no.’ Instead, Bryan threw the responsibility of breaking the news on Henry himself: ‘I have’, he added innocently, ‘said to her in my letter that I am sure your Grace will make her privy to all the news’.18
How willingly Henry undertook the task and how Anne responded we can only guess.
Bryan despatched the courier Thaddeus with his letters that same afternoon. Thaddeus also made good time and presented Bryan’s letters at Court on 6 May. Still Wolsey tried to put his own gloss on things, telling Campeggio that the English ‘ambassadors did not despair of obtaining something from the Pope’. This was, of course, a flat lie. On the other hand, Henry, fresh perhaps from a bruising conversation with Anne, recognised that the game was up. On Sunday 9 May he informed Campeggio that he was sending Thaddeus to Italy with letters recalling Bryan and Gardiner from Rome. The courier left on the 13th, bearing letters from Wolsey which announced a complete change of policy.19
In view of ‘this ingratitude in the Pope’s holiness’, Wolsey informed the English ambassadors, Henry had decided to abandon the attempt to get cast-iron guarantees from Rome. Instead, ‘taking as much as may be had and attained here to the benefit of his cause’, he would proceed ‘in the decision of the same here, by virtue of the Commission already granted unto me and my lord Legate Campeggio’. Gardiner and Bryan were to return in post to England, since Gardiner’s expertise, in particular, was wanted in the forthcoming trial.
This option, to go it alone in England, had been open to Henry as long ago as December 1527, when Knight had obtained the first Commission. In the subsequent eighteen months, Henry, advised solely by Wolsey, had laboured mightily at Rome. He had squandered money and diplomatic credit. And he had nothing to show for it. Indeed, his position was actually worse. Had he decided to go ahead in early 1528 on the basis of Knight’s Commission, he would have had a favourable military and diplomatic wind behind him. By 1529, however, Catherine’s nephew, Charles V was master of Italy. The Pope was about to proclaim himself Imperial, and, Henry’s ambassadors informed him from Spain, was on the point of revoking the case to Rome.
All this, the King could bitterly reflect, was the reward for listening to his minister rather than his mistress.
But Henry and Wolsey had not yet plumbed the depths. On 5 May, Bryan wrote to Henry to inform him of their final audience with the Pope. The meeting had been an acrimonious one and high words had been uttered on both sides. One of the issues had been Campeggio’s supposed promises to Henry. The English had thrown his assurances at the Pope. The Pope had countered with Campeggio’s own letters, in which ‘he hath written…that he, neither Francisco Campana, never promised nothing to your Grace particularly but in general words’.
Bryan, of course, was fully aware of the effect of his revelations. ‘If my writing’, he told Henry, ‘sound anything against the Cardinal…[or] other, who feels himself grieved, let him kick; for I do it not of no malice, but according to my duty, to inform your Grace.’20
But, whatever Bryan’s motives, the effect was the same. Henry had been revealed as gullible–to his own servant Bryan, and, still worse, to Anne, whose fears about Campeggio’s being Imperial he had so loftily dismissed the previous autumn.
Events were now running hard against Wolsey. On 14 May the Wolsey loyalist Sir John Russell had been countermanded as ambassador to France at the last moment. His horses had already been embarked at Sandwich and he himself was on the point of boarding when the new orders arrived. In Russell’s place, Henry sent Charles Brandon, Duke of Suffolk. Brandon was even closer to him than Bryan and the consequences were to be even more electric.21
The day before, Du Bellay, freshly back from France, whence he had ridden with most unclerical speed and bravado, had had an audience with Wolsey in which he invited him to the forthcoming peace conference at Cambrai between Francis I’s mother, Louise of Savoy, and Charles V’s aunt, the Archduchess Margaret. Wolsey, recognising immediately the risk to England of a merely bi-lateral agreement between France and Spain, was desperate to attend. But Henry, whom Du Bellay saw twenty-four hours later on the 14th, refused to give him permission to go. Du Bellay, as he explained to Montmorency, could not write Henry’s reasons ‘at present, having no cipher’. But, almost certainly, Henry felt that he needed Wolsey at home to handle the Divorce. Indeed, his minister’s willingness to rush off abroad at such a moment must have seemed like desertion, even betrayal. Such, at any rate, was Du Bellay’s retrospective reading of events. ‘What has most served to put him in discredit with the King’, he wrote later to Montmorency, ‘was that, at my coming, he declared too openly his wish to go to Cambrai.’22
It is true that Wolsey’s attitude to the peace conference did not help. But Wolsey’s ruin was from a different quarter. On the night of 17 May the courier Alexander reached Windsor with Bryan’s letters from Rome. The following morning Wolsey, who had been peremptorily summoned to Court by Henry, commanded Campana and Campeggio’s Secretary to Windsor. They arrived at sunset and found Wolsey at table. He had been with Henry all day and was exhausted. So they were put off till 9 the following morning. They turned up at the appointed hour and greeted Wolsey as he emerged from his chamber. Wolsey, normally so voluble, said nothing but took the visitors to the King, introduced them and then left it to Henry to interrogate them.
‘Do you not remember’, the King asked Campana, ‘that the first time you spoke to me you told me that his Holiness would do for me all he could etiam de plenitudine potestatis?’ Campana said he recalled the occasion perfectly but denied ‘the form of words specified’. Wolsey tried to refresh his memory. But Campana stuck to his guns. Then the letters from Rome were thrust under his nose and they ‘wished to read the very words which the ambassadors had read in [Campeggio’s] letter’.
Henry blustered furiously. But, as the envoys took leave, he besought their help. ‘Be good friends to me’, he begged, ‘and have pity on me.’23
It was to this that Wolsey’s advice had brought him.
Also on the night of the 17th, Suffolk, who, Du Bellay heard, had been substituted for Russell as a result of Anne’s direct intervention, had his final audience with Henry VIII before leaving for France. His ‘secret charge’ was to pump Francis I on Wolsey’s reliability on the Divorce. In his reply Francis damned Wolsey with faint praise and subtle innuendo. Wolsey wanted the Divorce, ‘for he loveth not the Queen’. But Henry should ‘not put too much trust in no man, whereby he may be deceived’. Instead, he should ‘look substantially upon his matters himself ’. And, above all, he should remember that Wolsey ‘had a marvellous intelligence with the Pope, and in Rome, and also with the Cardinal Campeggio’. Which, Francis added mischievously, made it all the stranger that neither Clement nor Campeggio were doing what Henry wanted.24
From this moment, probably, Wolsey was finished. Or he would be, if Anne had her way.