But Anne could not destroy Wolsey just yet–if, indeed, Henry would let her destroy him at all.
First, the Legatine Trial at Blackfriars had to be gone through. Then, after the abrupt adjournment on 23 July, the proceedings had to be brought to a seemly conclusion. This was easier said than done, and it took two months to find a formula that satisfied both Catherine’s quest for certainty and Henry’s determination to preserve his kingly dignity.
While this dragged on, Wolsey enjoyed the twilight of power. He received and wrote letters. He kept the machinery of government ticking over. And he proffered advice, which was received more or less graciously. But the real foundation of his authority–Henry’s favour–had gone.
The minister had last seen his King on 14–16 August 1529 at Tyttenhanger, when Henry’s terms for agreeing to the winding up of the Legatine Court dominated the conversation. Thereafter, though he pressed his hospitality on the King and was often only a few miles distant, he was forbidden the Court. The fact soon became notorious, and fed, as it was intended to, rumours of his impending fall. The Cardinal, the new Imperial ambassador reported on 21 September, ‘was under sentence of exile from the Court, and ordered to reside three miles away from it, and not to appear unless summoned’. Probably there was nothing so formal as a ‘sentence of exile’. But the consequences were the same and when on about 10 September Wolsey had begged a personal audience as he had something to say that was better in speech than on paper, he was sharply told not to trouble the King with false mysteries and to write the matter briefly and under clear heads.
This stylistic requirement, apparently innocent in itself, was possibly the cruellest blow of all. Once, Wolsey’s orotund and prolix style, for which he was notorious, had charmed the King; now, he was told, it merely bored him.1
Meanwhile at Court, that magic citadel into which Wolsey would never again freely enter, a new government was forming. Its work-horse was to be Stephen Gardiner, Wolsey’s former Secretary, who had expiated his past by the fervour with which he worshipped Anne’s rising sun. As soon as the Blackfriars Trial was over, he was appointed royal Secretary in place of the more or less permanently absentee Knight. And on 28 July, as he proudly wrote to his friend Peter Vannes, he went off to Court at Greenwich to take up his appointment.2
Wolsey’s initial expectation, clearly, was that the new Secretary would, like his predecessors, act primarily as intermediary between himself and the King as equipollent powers. Henry had other ideas: this time his Secretary would be his alone. So on 28 July, when he assigned Gardiner his lodgings at Court and his fees, he gave him special orders not to absent himself. He then drove home his command with a tag taken from the parable of the wise and foolish virgins. Be vigilant, he warned him, for ‘you know neither the day or the hour’.3
Gardiner, of course, had no intention of proving a foolish virgin and he resisted all of Wolsey’s blandishments to lure him into visiting him. He ‘would gladly come to Wolsey’, he informed him in one letter, ‘but dares not’. ‘I should have come myself ’, he wrote in another, ‘but the King’s Highness specially commanded me to tarry.’4
Slowly and unwillingly, the truth dawned on Wolsey: he was being boycotted by the King’s new ministers on the King’s own orders.
Gardiner, as Du Bellay recognised, had the talent to turn, in time, into another Wolsey. But in 1529 he was barely out of his apprenticeship. The real locus of power is shown, instead, in the first item of business Gardiner transacted for Henry. This was to act as intermediary in the negotiations about the future of the wealthy and powerful prince-bishopric of Durham.
Durham had been vacant since Wolsey had formally exchanged it on 8 February 1529 for the even more valuable see of Winchester. The vacancy presented a double opportunity for the Crown. While the see remained empty, its ‘temporalities’ (as its landed income was known) reverted to the King. The sums involved were vast: Durham’s gross receipts totalled £3,200, while about £2,400 was actually paid net into the bishop’s coffers. When, on the other hand, in the fullness of time the bishopric was filled, it would be a plum piece of patronage, to be bestowed carefully and in expectation of some commensurate gain for the government. In the circumstances of 1529, this meant only one thing: Durham would be used to further the Great Matter.5
The King first, as we have already seen, dangled it as bait in front of Campeggio. But Campeggio, despite his Bolognese bourgeois values, managed to resist. Henry then swung, as he increasingly would, from one extreme to another. Campeggio burned his English boats when he adjourned the Legantine Trial on 23 July. A few days later, Henry gave the temporalities to Thomas Boleyn, now Lord Rochford.
The gesture was perfectly calculated, both practically and symbolically. At a stroke, it gave Anne Boleyn’s father, who, as Lord Rochford, was still only a junior member of the peerage, the magnate income and status that was necessary for him both as the King’s future father-in-law and (if both Anne and her father had their way) as his new first minister as well. It also supplied him with a suitably grand London residence in the form of Durham House. This had been Catherine’s home during the first years of her widowhood after Arthur’s death; more recently, it had served as Wolsey’s temporary London house during the rebuilding of York Place. Henceforward, it would be the headquarters of Boleyn power in the capital.6
But the symbolic effect was at least as important. Back at Easter, Henry had teased Campeggio about confiscating the goods of the Church. Now he showed that he was in earnest. And the first victim, appropriately enough, was Wolsey.
The details were set out in Gardiner’s letter to his former master of (probably) Sunday, 1 August. Wolsey had already been informed of the King’s decision about Durham. Once (as with the choice of an Abbess for Wilton) he would have fought tooth and nail. But the fight had gone out of Wolsey and he fell over himself to be cooperative. He had always, he told Henry, regarded the last half-year’s rental income for Durham as due to the King, not to himself. So far, he continued, he had received nothing. But, he informed Thomas Boleyn separately, he would now write to his former officials in Durham ordering them to hand over direct the rents payable on Lady Day (22 March) 1529.7
This eagerness to please gave Thomas Boleyn pause. He thanked Wolsey for his offer but declined it through Gardiner. ‘He does not wish it to be known’, Gardiner explained, ‘that he had laboured for that half year’s rent.’ Instead, ‘he would be content to receive it from Wolsey, without making business with his officers for the receipt’. At first sight, this looks like a piece of scrupulosity on Thomas Boleyn’s part. He already had an ugly reputation for greed and was, it appears, unwilling to add to it. But Gardiner glossed the proposal very differently and made clear that it was in fact an ultimatum. Thomas Boleyn was not prepared to wait for the rents to trickle in and be shipped from the north. Instead, he wanted cash. Now. Or at least tomorrow–when, Gardiner advised Wolsey, ‘he had better make some arrangement’ for payment. Thomas Boleyn had also calculated the amount to the last hundred pounds. ‘Rochford’, Gardiner reported, ‘reckons it at MCC [£1200].’ This, as we have seen, is exactly half of the expected net receipts of the bishopric. Anne’s father can have arrived at the figure only by checking the records.
Alongside Lord Rochford, the other key members of the new Council were the two Dukes, Norfolk and Suffolk. They, perhaps, belonged more to the dignified than the efficient part of the administration. But their rank gave them an automatic weight. Norfolk also drew strength from his role as Anne’s uncle and his assiduity at business. Suffolk, in contrast, though idle, was even closer to Henry. But his relations with Anne were awkward. And his wife, Mary, the King’s sister, frankly hated her. Caught between his friendship with Henry and his increasing enmity with Anne, Suffolk acts as a litmus test of power during these months.8
The new political world that emerged in the summer of 1529 also had a new observer. This was Eustace Chapuys, who replaced Inigo de Mendoza as the Imperial ambassador to Henry VIII.
The contrast could scarcely have been greater. Mendoza was a Spanish bishop, fervent in his Catholicism and equally fierce in his national pride. Chapuys, in contrast, was that altogether cooler figure, a Savoyard lawyer. Savoy was one of the debatable lands of Europe: linguistically, it was suspended between French and Italian; while politically it was disputed between the kingdom of France to the west and the Italian territories of Charles V to the east. Polyglot and polyvalent in his identities, Chapuys was the perfect servant for the multi-national, multi-lingual empire of Charles V, who himself (it was said) spoke French to his councillors and his wife, Spanish to his God, and German to his dogs. Faced with this choice, Chapuys sensibly opted to write his despatches to the Emperor in French. He also preferred to speak in French ‘being the language most in use’ to Henry ‘which the King understands and speaks best’.9
In terms of his personal history, therefore, Chapuys seems the very embodiment of the Renaissance revolution in diplomacy which has been described by historians such as Garrett Mattingly. He was also equipped with conciliatory instructions and was warned by Catherine herself that too open zeal on her behalf could only make her predicament worse.
Nevertheless, once settled in England, Chapuys threw Catherine’s advice to the winds. Soon, his heart was ruling his head, and he became the Queen’s partisan as whole-heartedly and intemperately as Mendoza had been. And he was correspondingly savage about Anne Boleyn. No word was too coarse for her; no motive too low; no action too immoral. She was la putaine (the whore); a vengeful harpy, who harried her opponents from the Court; a murderess, in thought if not in deed, who would not stop at poison to rid herself of her rival Catherine; and, above all, a heretic, who was at once the bitterest and the most dangerous enemy of the Faith in England.
But if Chapuys hated Anne, he was also fascinated by her. He reported her every word and action and collected every tit-bit and scrap of gossip about her. Mostly it was scurrilous. But occasionally, despite his better judgement, he found himself impressed by her courage and strength of will. And he had the honesty to report this too. The result is paradoxical: the despatches of one of her greatest opponents provide the most vivid picture of Anne’s character and her role in events. The picture, too, is surprisingly nuanced. There is light and shade. There is even humour. And, above all, there is colour.
So Chapuys’s portrait is plausible. It is even seductive. But is it to be believed?
Understandably, Chapuys’s open, violent prejudice against Anne has led some historians to dismiss his evidence almost in its entirety. This, however, is a mistake. There is in principle no reason why a person’s enemies should be less likely to tell the truth about him than his friends. The former exhibit one set of prejudices; the latter another. And both kinds of testimony should be handled accordingly. There is also a more particular point. For Chapuys, despite his evident bias, was careful about his sources. He usually gives the names of his informants and, on inspection, they turn out to be an impressive bunch. They include leading councillors and courtiers, as well as intimate hangers-on about the great, such as doctors and priests. All were in a position to see and hear the incidents they reported, and frequently they corroborate each other. Where this happens, Chapuys is to be believed. Elsewhere, in view of his demonstrable reliability, I have given him the benefit of the doubt. And, on the occasions where I have not, I try to indicate my reasons.
Chapuys arrived in England in late August. It was the dog-days of summer, when normal politics slept during the Progress. But the times were not normal; instead, there was the sea-change as Wolsey’s ministry tottered to its fall. Chapuys grasped the position immediately. In his first despatch, written on 1 September, he reported on the visible signs of Wolsey’s decline: not only was Wolsey forbidden the Court; foreign ambassadors were now forbidden to visit him. Chapuys had also glimpsed the sort of regime that was replacing him. But, before going into details, he wanted to check his facts: ‘the people who have thus sworn the Cardinal’s ruin’, he informed the Emperor, ‘I shall name in my next despatch, when I have obtained more credible information on the point’.10
It took Chapuys a day or two to complete his investigations and, on the 4th, he wrote up the results. ‘The Dukes of Suffolk and Norfolk and Lord Rochford, the father of the Lady Anne Boleyn, are the King’s most favoured courtiers and the nearest to his person’, he reported. They also ‘transact all state business’. But Chapuys then distinguishes between this ‘transaction of business’ and real power. This, Chapuys had discovered, lay elsewhere:
If the Lady Anne chooses [he informed Charles] the Cardinal will be dismissed, and his affair settled; for she happens to be the person in all this kingdom who hates him most and has spoken and acted the most openly against him.
Chapuys had not yet met Anne. But already he had arrived at a judgement. ‘The King’s affection for La Boleyn’, he continued, ‘increases daily. It is so great now that it can hardly be greater; such is the intimacy and familiarity in which they live at present.’11
Ten days later he secured his first audience with the King at Grafton in Northamptonshire. He found a Court where Queen Catherine enjoyed only the shadow of a consort’s place while the substance belonged to Anne. Even diplomatic business waited on Anne’s whim. Chapuys had outlined his instructions to Henry before ‘dinner’ (about 11 a. m.) and was expecting a reply when the King had finished eating. But he found himself denied an answer as Henry had a more pressing appointment, the nature of which he scarcely bothered to disguise. ‘The King’, Chapuys reported, ‘was in a great hurry to repair to the meeting place of the morning, where the Lady [Anne] was ready to open the chase’.12
This is the Anne of Wyatt’s poem, at once the hart and the hound, the hunted and the huntress:
Noli me tangere, for Caesar’s I am
And hard for to hold, though I seem tame.
And Anne had her own quarry, too: Wolsey.13
The hunting season, and with it the Progress, normally ended at Crouchmas, that is, the Day of the Elevation of the Holy Cross. This falls on 14 September. Coincidentally (or perhaps not), Chapuys’s first audience with Henry had been on this day. And its significance was quickly brought home to him by the King’s eagerness to conclude their conversation. ‘He was’, as Chapuys explained in a separate despatch to the Archduchess Margaret, ‘in a hurry to go to dinner, in order to repair afterwards to the hunting field and take leave of the chase, as he is in the habit of doing at this time of year.’ The fact, as Chapuys discovered later, that Anne herself was mistress of the hunt only lent a further edge to Henry’s impatience.14
But despite the cavalier treatment of the new Imperial ambassador, neither the Progress nor the hunt were to end at Crouchmas. Instead, both were prolonged for almost a fortnight after their usual time. And it was not till 29 September that Henry reached Windsor, which was to be his autumn residence that year.15
There were probably straightforward reasons for the extension of the holiday season. It was Henry and Anne’s first uninterrupted summer together and naturally they revelled in the experience. Anne also had her own reasons for not wanting the summer to stop. She was an expert sportswoman and could show off to advantage her intrepidity in the chase, in contrast with Catherine’s much staider enjoyment. Finally, the sport in Northamptonshire must have been unusually good that season.
But there were also deeper motives at work. The King’s extended absence from the vicinity of the capital made it easier to prolong Wolsey’s political purdah. And when that purdah ended, and Wolsey was allowed to visit the Court, the restricted accommodation offered by a house such as Grafton would also make it easier to manage the meeting. For Wolsey might be down but, as Anne and her friends were well aware, he was not yet out. And a meeting between Henry and his not-yet-quite-fallen minister could not be postponed much longer.
By the beginning of September, the negotiations about the winding-up of the Legatine Trial had reached a reasonably satisfactory conclusion, and on the 11th, Cardinals Wolsey and Campeggio formally renounced their powers. The latter was now eager to be off from a country where he had outstayed his welcome. He was granted an audience at Grafton on 19 September; he was also given permission to bring Wolsey with him.
Cavendish, who accompanied his master, gives a set-piece description of the scene. Bets were laid that Henry would not speak to Wolsey. And the odds must have shortened considerably when it became clear that no Chamber had been allocated to him in the little palace. Instead, and highlighting the King’s ambiguous role, Henry Norris, the Groom of the Stool and the royal alter ego, offered Cardinal Wolsey his own room in which to change from his riding clothes.
The two legates, Cardinals Wolsey and Campeggio, were then summoned to the Presence Chamber, where the Council stood in a row in order of rank. Wolsey doffed his cap to each, and each similarly uncovered himself to Wolsey. The rest of the Chamber was crowded with courtiers. They were there for one thing: to see how Henry would greet his former favourite. Would it be with smiles? Or frowns?
They did not have to wait long. Henry entered and stood under the Cloth of Estate. Wolsey eased down his great bulk and knelt to him. Henry first gave him his hand and then ‘took my Lord up by both arms’. All bets were off. The Cardinal seemed safe.
The King and his minister then stood in earnest conversation, which Cavendish was able to overhear in part. ‘I heard the King say, “How can that be? Is not this your own hand?” and plucked out from his bosom a letter.’ Wolsey’s answer apparently satisfied the King and they went off to dine separately: Wolsey with his fellow councillors and Henry with Anne. Neither had an easy time.
For Anne was ‘much offended with the King’ that he seemed to be letting Wolsey off so lightly. Cavendish was not of course there. But he got a report of the conversation from ‘them that waited upon the King at dinner’. Anne launched furious accusations, which Henry batted away. Wolsey had brought the King into debt with his own subjects by the forced loan, she said; he had dishonoured and slandered him; if any nobleman had done half so much, he would have lost his head. ‘I perceive’, Henry observed coolly, ‘ye are not the Cardinal’s friend.’
After dinner, Henry saw Wolsey again: first in the Presence Chamber and then in the Privy Chamber, where they were closeted alone till nightfall. And Wolsey was told to return early the following morning.
The situation now seemed black for Wolsey’s enemies. The minister had had only a few hours with the King but already he appeared to have recovered his former influence. What would be their fate if he was restored to power? Doubtless, the betting was running on that too.
It was time to invoke Anne.
The two Cardinals spent the night in a nearby house at Easton Neston. Early the following morning, according to the King’s command, Wolsey returned to the Court. But there were to be no more private conversations. Instead Henry was booted and spurred. He ordered Wolsey to meet with the Council, took his farewell and rode off to the chase. Anne had done her work well.
Cavendish is clear about what had happened. ‘The King’s sudden departing in the morning’, he asserts, ‘was by the special labour of Mrs Anne, who rode with him to lead him about because he should not return until the Cardinals were gone.’ Just to make sure, she had arranged a picnic dinner at the site of a new park which they were to inspect. The park, Cavendish concludes, ‘is called at this day Hartwell Park’.16
Anne had got her kill.
It is a brilliant narrative: the detail is circumstantial and the psychology plausible. But, alas, the story is flawed. The only question is by how much.
For another of Wolsey’s Chamber servants, Thomas Alvard, also accompanied him to Grafton and described his reception in a letter written only three days after the event. As far as the Sunday is concerned, Alvard’s account agrees closely with Cavendish’s. But for the Monday he tells a very different tale. According to Alvard, Wolsey did see Henry again in the morning. The two had another long private conversation in the Privy Chamber; then they sat together with the Council. In the afternoon, Wolsey escorted Campeggio to the King and they took their leave ‘in as good fashion and manner…as ever I saw before’.17
Only then did the King go hunting. And there is no mention of whether it was with Anne.
Does this mean we must discard the whole of Cavendish’s story? Anne’s best academic biographer thinks so. My guess rather is that Cavendish, who rarely makes fundamental mistakes about events to which he was an eye-witness, simply telescoped things. At thirty years’ distance, he remembered only the King’s hasty departure for the field. Alvard’s account fixes this to the early afternoon; Cavendish placed it instead for dramatic effect first thing in the morning. But, whenever it happened, the effect on Wolsey was the same: a conversation begun was unfinished; a deal half-brokered remained unclinched.18
Just the same thing, after all, had happened to Chapuys a few days previously, when Henry’s post-prandial departure for the hunt, also instigated by Anne, had broken off his business with the King. The ambassador was sanguine: he would soon have another audience at which he could pick up the threads.
Wolsey, on the other hand, would have no second chance.
After Grafton, Henry VIII and Cardinal Wolsey went their separate ways: Henry moved by slow stages to Windsor; while Wolsey rode first to his nearby house at The More and thence to London for the start of the legal term on 9 October. On that day, with magnificent courage or supreme blindness or some mixture of the two, he processed as usual to Westminster Hall. There he sat in judgement as Chancellor. But he could not preside over Star Chamber because ‘all the lords and other the King’s council were gone to Windsor to the King’. A shift in the centre of political gravity had occurred–from Wolsey’s entourage to the Court and from Wolsey himself to Anne.
That same day in King’s Bench the Attorney General, Christopher Hales, launched the legal proceedings that would complete Wolsey’s fall.
On 17 October, when the Great Seal was finally prised from Wolsey’s grasp, Du Bellay reflected on the former minister’s fate. He was ‘the greatest example of fortune that one could see’. But ‘the worst of his evil is that Mlle de Boleyn has made her friend promise that he will never give him a hearing, for she thinks he could not help having pity on him’.
This, of course, is an ambassador’s gossip. But Wolsey himself took the same view of his plight in a letter written a few days later. The letter is damaged. But the drift is clear enough. ‘If the displeasure of my Lady Anne be somewhat assuaged’, Wolsey wrote, ‘as I pray God the same may be, then it should be devised that by some convenient mean she be further laboured.’ ‘For this’, he continued, ‘is the only help and remedy. All possible means must be used for attaining of her favour.’19
And all means were used. Her favourite, her brother George, was bribed with the offer of great pensions from Wolsey’s ecclesiastical preferments. And eventually Wolsey screwed up courage to write directly to Anne. To no avail. ‘She gave kind words’, Wolsey was informed, ‘but will not promise to speak to the King for you’.20
He was naked to his enemies. And she, it seemed clear, was the worst of them.
Meanwhile, the ascent of the Boleyns continued and on 8 December 1529, in one of the first royal ceremonies to be held in Wolsey’s confiscated palace of York Place, Anne’s father Thomas Boleyn, Lord Rochford, was created Earl of Wiltshire in the English peerage and Earl of Ormond in the Irish. The following day there was a celebratory banquet. The greatest ladies of England were present, including the King’s sister Mary, the Queen Dowager of France and Duchess of Suffolk, and the two Duchesses of Norfolk, the Dowager and the wife of the present Duke. But Anne took precedence of them all. She was ‘made’, Chapuys noted with outrage, ‘to sit by the King’s side, occupying the very place allotted to a crowned Queen’. ‘After dinner’, he continued, ‘there was dancing and carousing, so that it seemed as if nothing were wanting but the priest to give away the nuptial ring and pronounce the blessing.’21
Thomas Boleyn now had both wealth and status. It remained only to give him appropriate great office. This was done, once more, at the expense of a churchman. Cuthbert Tunstall, the distinguished humanist and friend of More and Erasmus, was Bishop of London and Lord Privy Seal. In the New Year, he was promoted to the still-vacant bishopric of Durham. But at a price. He was required to resign the Privy Seal, the third ranking office in the kingdom, so that it could be conferred on Boleyn. He also had to confirm the transfer of Durham House to Boleyn and agree to make it permanent. Finally, he had to wait till 25 March, when the half-year rents were due, for a grant of the temporalities of his see. By this transparent device, Boleyn had managed to get his hands on another £1,200.22
It is a story of pillage that anticipates the vast secularization of the 1530s. In this, as in so much else, the Boleyns were pioneers.
Thomas Boleyn had attained the summit of ambition for a subject. Neither Anne nor her family could go any further till that ‘nuptial ring’, which Chapuys had seemed to see proffered to her at the December banquet, were hers indeed.
But, for that, new measures and new men were needed. Anne set about to provide them.