Anne’s first target was Wolsey. Once, she had vowed undying devotion to him. But it was always conditional and, after Wolsey had betrayed her cause (as she saw it) in the Blackfriars Trial, she had become his most dangerous enemy. She was also the best placed to give effect to her feelings. But not even she could move as quickly as she wished. For Henry himself stood in her way.
Henry had decided to get rid of Wolsey as his minister, and the old ascendancy of the Cardinal over his mind was gone forever. But he would not throw him to the wolves–yet. The King’s ‘love and friendship’, which had been the real foundation of Wolsey’s power, were still too strong for that. Nor had he forgotten Wolsey’s vast talents, or the extent of his past services. There might even have been a sneaking sense that he might need them again.
It was this last which really alarmed Wolsey’s enemies. But there was nothing they could do. Instead, they had to stand by while Henry (in the nice phrase of the Milanese ambassador) allowed his former minister to ‘fall on a featherbed’.1
No sooner, indeed, was his surrender to the majesty of the law complete on 30 October 1529 than Wolsey began (with Henry’s covert encouragement) to hope for a restoration to favour and soon to more besides. Barely twenty-four hours later, on the night of 1–2 November, Henry sent Sir John Russell, Wolsey’s old client, to him with a token and message. The latter was so encouraging that, in his letter of thanks to the King, Wolsey ventured to hope that ‘as soon as it shall seem to your pitiful heart…it may be openly known…that your Highness hath forgiven me mine offence and trespass, and delivered me from the danger of your laws’. Less than three weeks later, on 18 November, Wolsey had his desire when he was formally readmitted to the King’s protection which had been forfeited by his condemnation at law.2
But there was still the hurdle of Parliament to overcome. An important group in the Lords was determined to bring Wolsey to account and on 1 December a version of Lord Darcy’s articles against him was passed by the House. The articles ended with a plea to Henry to inflict exemplary justice on the fallen minister and to make of him a ‘terrible example’ to all other like offenders. But, though the passage of the articles gave Wolsey another bad fright, Henry had no intention of unleashing Parliament against him. Instead, on 17 December, Parliament was prorogued till 26 April 1530. Wolsey could breathe again.3
Indeed, now that he was doubly secure, both against the ordinary processes of law and the extraordinary procedures of Parliament, he did more. Soon he was confident enough to begin to negotiate with the King and his new councillors to rescue as much from the wreck as possible. It was not so much plea bargaining as fine bargaining.
And it says rather a lot about Henry that Wolsey dared to undertake it all. For the Henry he appealed to was generous and merciful. He tempered justice with pity and moderated the rigour of his laws out of regard for Wolsey’s long service, his grey hairs and (as Wolsey himself constantly predicted) the short span of life left to him.
This, in short, was a Henry that Anne had yet to toughen up.
In the negotiations, Wolsey of course used the language of profound abasement. But that was a front. Behind the verbal smokescreen, there is no mistaking his sense of self-worth or his increasing outrage at the injustice (as he saw it) of his treatment. He had done nothing which deserved punishment, he insisted. Or at least nothing maliciously. He could not be expected to live on less than £4,000 a year (an enormous sum that was more than the income of a duke). This was not out of an appetite for filthy lucre–he calls it ‘the muck of the world’–but only to look after his servants and kinsfolk and to live ‘according to his poor degree’. The revenues of the archbishopric of York were ‘sore decayed’ and could not possibly produce this minimum sum. Let him therefore be given a pension of 1,000 marks (£666 13s 4d) out of the revenues of Winchester or the Abbey of St Albans (neither of which he had expected to surrender). Oh, and he needed ready cash. And Household stuff and provisions. Above all, the message was, he needed these things as a sign that Henry had not finally forgotten and rejected him.4
All the talents which had made Wolsey so formidable in the days of his power were now focused on the single task of his rehabilitation. And, as his horizons shrank, so his energies seemed to concentrate and become febrile in their intensity. He wrote letter after letter. He wheedled and pleaded. He appealed to his past services. He invoked pity by vivid descriptions of his present ill-health (which, since the symptoms included loss of appetite and insomnia, was probably the result of a nervous breakdown). And, crucially, he called in every favour.
Henry Norris, the Groom of the Stool, lived up to his usual epithet of ‘gentle’ and did his best to help. Russell, as always, was stalwartly loyal. Gardiner was outwardly helpful too. But, in the view of the shrewd, rising young man, Ralph Sadler, Gardiner could not be trusted. ‘I think he will do little or nothing to [Wolsey’s] avail’, Sadler wrote after a frustrating visit to Court, ‘more than he may not choose for very shame, considering the advancements and promotion he hath had at [Wolsey’s] hands.’5
But most effective of all was the addressee of Sadler’s letter: Thomas Cromwell.
Cromwell was a man of humble origins: as humble as Wolsey’s. Wolsey was the son of an Ipswich butcher; Cromwell of a Putney blacksmith. But, unlike Wolsey, he was schooled in the university of life. Some stories make him a mercenary who, in his youth, fought his way even to Italy. Certainly he was well travelled, and, with a natural aptitude for languages, he seems to have picked up German, French and Italian on the way. He returned to England and became somebody in the City. There seems to have been a bit of trade and a bit of law, and he became reasonably adept at Latin too. Then, we do not know how, he was talent-spotted by Wolsey and became his key legal agent in a specialist and controversial area.6
Wolsey’s two colleges at Oxford and his native Ipswich were his pride and joy. But their endowments were raised, not out of his own wealth, but by dissolving a host of lesser monasteries. Cromwell headed the team which handled the legal side of this first dissolution. And it made him a figure of universal hatred. Indeed, as early as 1527, Wolsey was warned on no account to use Cromwell as his messenger to Court, because Cromwell was so unpopular.7
As long as Wolsey remained in power, this opprobrium was water off a duck’s back (and no back was broader or more impermeable than Cromwell’s). But, when Wolsey fell, Cromwell stood utterly unprotected: ‘You are’, his friend Stephen Vaughan, the radical Antwerp merchant, wrote, ‘more hated for your master’s sake [in other words, for Wolsey’s], than for anything which I think you have wrongfully done against any man.’8
This was a charitable view. But Cromwell’s activities, as he himself well knew, left few disposed to charity, and his prospects were grim. The fact produced a rare display of open, unguarded emotion. It took place in Wolsey’s Presence Chamber on the morning of 1 November (a few hours, that is, before Russell brought his comforting message from the King). There, Cavendish remembered Cromwell praying with tears in his eyes. Why was he so distressed, Cavendish asked. ‘It is my unhappy adventure [fortune],’ Cromwell replied, ‘which am like to lose all that I have travailed for all the days of my life for doing of my Master’s true and faithful service.’ Cavendish tried to comfort him. Surely he had done nothing to be ashamed of, he said. But Cromwell was more realistic: what mattered was not what he had done but how it was perceived. ‘An ill name once gotten will not lightly be put away,’ he insisted.
Moping, however, did not come naturally to him. Action did. ‘This afternoon’, Cromwell announced at the end of the conversation, ‘I do intend…to ride…to the Court, where I will either make or mar or I come home again.’9
He made it. Subsequently, he was to remake England, while, in the process, undoing hundreds of others, including, in the fullness of time, Anne herself.
Cromwell’s immediate task was a difficult one. He had to square the circle of protecting the interests of his old master, Wolsey, on the one hand, and providing for his own future in the new world of a Boleyn ministry and Anne’s likely marriage to the King, on the other. Unlike the too obviously self-interested Gardiner, he pulled the feat off brilliantly.
The trick, Cromwell realised, was to combine the appearance of loyalty with the reality of pragmatism. So no man was more conspicuously loyal to Wolsey; no man sued harder for him or was readier with comfort and good advice. All this won him golden opinions, since the theory of Tudor politics valued loyalty above all things, however treacherous the practice might be. But equally it was Cromwell who seems to have suggested that Wolsey give lavish bribes to those now in favour about the King: £100 a year to Norris (which was doubled by Wolsey); the reversion of an office with an augmented fee of £40 a year to Fitzwilliam; another £40 p.a. to Sir Henry Guildford; £20 p.a. to Russell, which once again Wolsey proposed increasing to £40 or even £50.10
The lion’s share, however, of Wolsey’s spoils went to Anne’s brother, George, who extracted an annuity of £200 from Winchester and 200 marks (£133 6s 8d) from St Albans. Between them, these grants transformed George Boleyn’s financial position. Before, he had been dependent on royal handouts; now he could plausibly maintain the dignity of his viscountcy. Even six years later, the two annuities amounted to seventy-five per cent of his total income.
The drafts of George Boleyn’s grants survive. They are corrected by Cromwell, just as it was Cromwell who handled the delicate negotiations for the other handouts. Wolsey, of course, was the reservoir of gold. But it was Cromwell who opened the tap which gushed riches.
The result was a paradox. Wolsey had his wish and a phoenix rose from the ashes of his fortunes. But the phoenix was Cromwell, not Wolsey.11
Only Anne seems to have resisted Cromwell’s blandishments and failed to join in the chorus of praise. For he was guaranteeing Wolsey’s survival and even perhaps his ability to revive.
And that was not what she wanted at all.
But, for the moment, there was nothing she could do about it. On 11 February 1530, Wolsey agreed to the biggest bribe of all, when the title of York Place, which Henry and Anne had seized the previous autumn, was formally transferred to the King. The next day Wolsey was formally pardoned and restored to the archbishopric of York and on the 17th the deal was further ratified by the exchange of indentures between the King and the Cardinal. Winchester and St Albans were of course forfeit. But Wolsey got his pension of 1,000 marks; he also got £6,374 in cash, goods and livestock to enable him to resume living in something like the style to which he had become accustomed.12
It might have been much worse. And, save for Cromwell’s efforts, it probably would have been.
On 5 April, Wolsey set out from Richmond towards his archbishopric of York, which he had held for sixteen years but had not yet seen. This was not the only novelty. He who had been a by-word for luxury and soft living now wore a hair-shirt (at least occasionally). He devoted himself to his religious duties. He even washed the feet of the poor (all fifty-nine of them, one for each year of his life) on Maundy Thursday. There were other changes, too. He had always been lavish and generous in his hospitality. But now its purpose altered. Instead of entertaining kings and plenipotentiaries, he feasted his neighbours. And instead of riding roughshod over public opinion, he courted it–as only a professional courtier knew how. His tongue turned to honey and he became a peace-maker and reconciler.
But some things did not change. He started building again, as he tried to make his diocesan palaces (unlived in for decades) habitable. Above all, as he always had done, he longed for power. For twenty years it had been his element. He had lived it and breathed it. Like a drug it had energised him and like a drug he found he could not do without it.13
It was a fatal attraction.
Probably Wolsey’s restoration had always been a forlorn hope. In theory, Henry could have done it at a stroke. In practice, even supposing he wanted it, he would have found it difficult to achieve. Anne and her family were against it; his Council was against it and an overwhelming majority in his Parliament was against it too. Indeed people who disagreed on everything else could at least agree on hating Wolsey. But it was the means that Wolsey chose to try to recover his position that finally undid him. For he changed tack on the Great Matter yet again.
The signal may well have come from Catherine herself. As early as December 1529, she had ‘shown some pity for the Cardinal’s fall’. This immediately led Chapuys to speculate on a grand renversement d’alliances. Wolsey would ally with Catherine. The former would regain power and the latter her husband. And the Boleyns would be dished, to the mutual advantage of Queen and Cardinal. At the time, Wolsey was too prostrate to have anything to do with the idea. But by the following summer he seems to have made the scheme his own.14
He began cautiously. As soon as he had arrived in his diocese at the end of April 1530, he put out feelers to Chapuys, vindicating his conduct and offering his services, such as they were, to Charles V. Chapuys’s response had been non-committal but polite and designed to string Wolsey along. He did not have long to wait for the Cardinal to bite. In early June, Dr Agostino Agostini, Wolsey’s Italian physician, who had carried the earlier messages, wrote to Chapuys again. The letters were obscure, deliberately so. But they seemed to hint that the Pope and Charles should co-ordinate their forces to intervene decisively in the Great Matter, the former with spiritual censures, the latter with an army. This would provoke a crisis which Henry had neither the power nor the will to resist. Anne would fall and Wolsey would be restored.
In his report home, Chapuys endorsed at least the broad outlines of the idea. ‘It seems’, he advised, ‘as if your Majesty ought to have matters brought to a crisis at once.’ A first step, he advised, would be for Rome to order Anne’s removal from the Court.15
Charles agreed and instructed his ambassador in Rome to approach the Pope for the necessary Brief to Henry. Even in his remote exile, it seemed, Wolsey could reach far.
The fact, no doubt, was balm to his fractured ego. But it was also profoundly dangerous. It was not yet a crime, of course, to argue that Catherine’s marriage was valid. It was equally permissible to advise her on the best means to protect her position. But Wolsey had gone far beyond this. He was advising foreign powers on the best tactics to use against his sovereign. He was trying to foment unrest in England. He was seeking to force his services on the King, with the threat and perhaps even the reality of violence. And, above all, he was aiming to coerce Henry into leaving Anne.
There was only one name for these acts: it was treason.
Wolsey of course was no fool. He was not a Buckingham, to blunder into treason. It is possible, on the other hand, that his burning sense of injustice destabilised him and blinded him to the reality of his actions. But it is much more likely that he acted with his eyes open. The key is his attack on Anne, which lay at the heart of all his schemes. For he had decided that she was the enemy. She was ‘the night crow’, who haunted Henry like an evil spirit, he told Cavendish. She ‘called continually upon the King in his ear, with such a vehemency’ that she was irresistible. And she called on him to destroy Wolsey.16
Wolsey had issued the challenge. Anne was not the woman to refuse to take it up.
It was a war to the death between them.
Nor had Wolsey limited himself to scheming with Chapuys. Complex as ever in his diplomacy, he also kept his channels open with the French. Indeed, before his departure for the north, he had been visited by the resident French ambassador, Giovanni Gioachino di Passano, sieur de Vaux, who was one of the many Italians in the service of Francis I. There were good reasons for De Vaux’s visit. Wolsey had been the beneficiary of a generous pension from the French and had neglected to provide receipts for the last three payments. But to suspicious minds–and Wolsey seemed to be going out of his way to arouse suspicion–the question of the receipts could look like a cover for something more sinister.17
It was of course common knowledge that Wolsey was pulling every string at Court to return to favour. As early as May, indeed, Cromwell passed on Henry’s blunt warning that Wolsey should stop playing politics by trying to make bad blood between the King and the Duke of Norfolk. But these were domestic matters. Wolsey’s foreign schemes, on the other hand, seem to have gone undetected till the late summer.18
The most likely spy-catcher is Anne’s cousin, Sir Francis Bryan. He had played Wolsey’s nemesis once already with his outspoken reports from Italy. Now he may have repeated the role by picking up rumours of the Cardinal’s activities in France–hence the closure of the ports on his return to England at the beginning of September.19
Even then, Henry would not move precipitately against his former minister. Instead, a more careful watch was kept on his activities. The result confirmed his enemies’ worst fears. ‘Though I list to be blinded,’ Norfolk told Wolsey’s old servant, Sir Thomas Arundel, who was trying to press his master’s suits at Court, ‘I should blind no man here.’ Arundel had claimed that Wolsey was quietly resigned to his fate. Nonsense, said the Duke, he was continuing to intrigue and call in favours. And to prove it he was even able to give the names of three men whom Wolsey had recently reminded of the benefits he had conferred on them and their families. ‘All these messages are taken in the worst sense,’ Arundel reported despairingly.20
That was in mid-October. At the end of the month more damning evidence came to light. Letters were intercepted from Agostini addressed to De Vaux who was taking a seaside holiday at Dover. When they were opened they were discovered to contain lines in cipher.21
Now surely Wolsey was finished.
But still Henry hesitated and the ‘night crow’ had to use all her ‘vehemency’. Anne, Chapuys heard, ‘has wept and wailed, regretting her lost time and honour, and threatening the King that she would go away and leave him’. Henry, terrified at this ultimatum (which, curiously, was the mirror image of Wolsey’s own scheme to engineer Anne’s judicial separation from the King), had pleaded with tears in his eyes. But Anne would not be pacified. ‘Nothing would satisfy the Lady short of the Cardinal’s arrest,’ Chapuys reported.22
On 1 November, about noon, Walter Walsh, Groom of the Privy Chamber, left Court with a commission for himself and the Earl of Northumberland to arrest the Cardinal. At that moment, according to Cavendish, Wolsey was sitting down to dinner at Cawood Castle, seven miles outside York. He kept his accustomed state. His massive silver archiepiscopal cross was propped up in the corner against the wall hangings. Dining with him, but separated, according to etiquette, by the length of the table, were some of his senior servants, including Agostini. As Agostini rose at the end of the meal his ‘boisterous’ (that is, stiff-textured) gown of black velvet caught on the cross. It fell along the hangings. In its path, unfortunately, knelt one of Wolsey’s chaplains. The cross struck him on the head and drew blood.
The company looked on, appalled. ‘Malum omen [an evil omen],’ murmured Wolsey.23
Four days later, Walsh and the Earl of Northumberland entered Cawood. Northumberland, of course, was none other than Henry Percy, Wolsey’s former ward and Anne’s former suitor, who had inherited his father’s title.
Northumberland, ‘trembling’ and speaking ‘with a very faint and soft voice’, said ‘I arrest you of High Treason.’ Wolsey, in return, humiliated him for one last time by denying his authority and surrendering instead to Walsh, as one of the King’s Privy Chamber. ‘For the worst person there’, he said, ‘is a sufficient warrant to arrest the greatest peer of this realm.’ He should have known, because it was he who had sent Compton, the head of the Privy Chamber, to arrest Buckingham.24
Meanwhile, as the Cardinal and the Earl were having their altercation, Walsh, hooded and disguised like any modern secret policeman, had arrested Agostini. ‘Go in, thou traitor’, Cavendish heard him exclaim, ‘or I shall make thee.’ Hastily, Cavendish opened the door, and Walsh thrust Agostini violently into the room. His rough usage continued, as the next day he was sent off to London with an escort and his legs tied under his horse. This, on a journey of two hundred and fifty miles, cannot have been pleasant.25
They were in no such hurry with Wolsey. Instead, he was taken, by easy stages, to Sheffield Park, the Earl of Shrewsbury’s house, where he remained under honourable house arrest for almost a fortnight.
This curious hiatus makes it clear that there were two stages to Wolsey’s fall. The first, his arrest on 4 November, was a pre-emptive strike. Three days later, on the 7th, he had planned to enter York in state, to be installed as Archbishop and to meet his clergy of the Northern Province in Convocation. This was the ideal moment, it was feared, for Wolsey to rise up like another Becket against his King. He could have ordered Henry to submit himself to Rome and to separate himself from Anne. And he could have excommunicated him in the event of his refusal. In view of his known dealings abroad, the risk was too great. The installation had to be aborted.26
This was achieved by his arrest at Cawood. Meanwhile, Agostini’s interrogation would reveal the extent of Wolsey’s schemes. He seems to have arrived in London between the 10th and the 13th. Two hundred and fifty miles tied to the back of a horse had been duress enough and he confessed freely and without further torture. There was no need even to send him to the Tower.27
His confession has disappeared. But, to judge from reports of it, it seems to have been oddly skewed. Chapuys deduced that ‘he had denied having any understanding or acquaintance with me’. On the other hand (Henry informed Bryan in France) Agostini had made much of a letter which Wolsey had instructed him to write to De Vaux. In it Wolsey is supposed to have suggested that the French should first provoke England into war with the Emperor and then turn on their ally. The scheme is fantastic and improbable. But, fantastic or not, Agostini said he was so appalled by it that he failed to deliver the letter. Conveniently, however, he remembered the incriminating paragraph word for word.28
Now why on earth should Agostini deny a set of contacts which had certainly happened, and ‘confess’ instead to a scheme which was an implausible fiction?
Actually, the mystery is easily solved. What we know is not what Agostini said but what the Council wanted it to be thought that he had said. He had, I strongly suspect, confessed to his contacts with Chapuys. It would have been mad to do otherwise. But equally, the last thing the English wanted was a diplomatic incident with Charles V, in which an accusation against his ambassador might be the last straw in provoking the Emperor into war with England. Hence the concocted charge of trying to communicate with De Vaux. This established Wolsey’s attempt to provoke foreign intervention, which was essential to a convincing charge of treason. But, as relations with France were good and as the attempt was supposed to have been abortive, it avoided any risk of diplomatic unpleasantness.
There is a sort of poetic justice here. In his time, Wolsey had fabricated more than his share of lies, white and black. It was only fair perhaps that he should be condemned by an untruth that was impudent even by his standards.
But, once again, Wolsey was to cheat his fate. Toward the end of his stay at Sheffield Park he was finishing his dinner with a dish of baked ‘wardens’ or pears. Suddenly, Cavendish noticed that he looked very ill. He changed colour and had a violent fit of colic. A prescription from his apothecary (carefully tested for poison) enabled him to ‘break wind upward’. But the relief was only temporary. Diarrhoea set in and became more acute. By the time Sir William Kingston, the Lieutenant of the Tower, arrived on 22 November 1530 with a detachment of the Guard to conduct him to the Tower, Wolsey was already very weak. He managed to struggle as far as Leicester, where he died on the 29th.29
His last words did not mention Anne by name. But, since they warned Henry in apocalyptic terms against his Divorce and the threat of Lutheranism, she was their real target. Prudently, those who witnessed what he said conspired to suppress it–‘for in any wise’, Kingston advised Cavendish, ‘the [Council] would not hear of it’.30
‘Such at length’, the Milanese ambassador reported, ‘was the end of the man who boasted that he ruled the whole world.’31
Anne, however, was never his willing subject and she was instrumental in destroying him at last. One great threat to her marriage had gone. But there still remained Queen Catherine. She would be next.
It is not clear which side broke the curious, three-year-long truce between Anne and Catherine. But there can be no doubt as to the winner.