The King's Cardinal: The Rise and Fall of Thomas Wolsey (Pimlico) (160 page)

Both these houses were suppressed to provide endowments for Wolsey’s college at Ipswich, and both the suppressions led to complicated negotiations in which Cromwell, on Wolsey’s behalf, played a leading role. Whether the dukes got the worst of it is not clear, but it seems unlikely. The interests of the new college would not have been best served by alienating the leading men in the locality, and Norfolk, at any rate, seems to have done quite well out of it since he obtained possession of the lands of Felixstowe at an annual rent of £20, when it was worth double.
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It is true that in April 1529 the dean of the college, William Capon, reported that on a recent visit Norfolk had at first been ‘very rough’ because he had heard that Felixstowe’s lead and stone had been used on the college’s buildings. However, when it was pointed out that this was not the case, he had ended up by being ‘very kind’.
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A year earlier he had also been kind, for in March 1528 he had written to Wolsey to say that he had seen the plans for the new college and had thought of ways in which Wolsey might save on building costs.
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Admittedly, this seems to have been before he knew that Felixstowe was to be suppressed, but it is clear that he had no objections in principle to the new foundation, indeed rather the opposite. As for Suffolk, although in January 1529 he and his wife agreed to renounce all their rights in Snape without, it would seem, getting anything in return, not even the honour bestowed upon Norfolk of being made a co-founder of Ipswich College, there is no evidence that he felt hard done by.
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And in becoming a co-founder, Norfolk had joined a select band including not only Wolsey but also the king and the archbishop of Canterbury. That he was granted this distinction is evidence of Wolsey’s customary tact and good sense in such matters. For the success
of his college, the support of such an important local figure as Norfolk, and indeed of Suffolk, would be an enormous advantage. So he had every incentive to ensure that neither of the two dukes felt any grievance, and such evidence as there is suggests that he was successful.

But if it seems unlikely that Norfolk and Suffolk were amongst those making rude remarks about Wolsey in August 1527, it remains true that criticisms were being made in the king’s presence and that he had chosen to take notice of them by telling Wolsey off in no uncertain terms. And that they had to do with ecclesiastical matters is of some significance. It is almost certainly wrong to exaggerate the strength of anticlericalism, for much of the time it probably amounted to no more than the occasional anticlerical joke amongst the young bucks at court. But it would not take all that much for such jokes to turn into something more serious, and some anticlericalism was anyway a bit more serious than that. As we saw earlier, relations between Church and state were not especially happy in the early Tudor period, and in 1515 it had taken a good deal of effort on Wolsey’s part to prevent a serious rift. It had been precisely so as to obtain a firmer control over the English Church that Henry had been happy for Wolsey to seek extensive legatine powers, thereby allowing the man he most trusted to have more control over the English Church than probably anyone had ever enjoyed. It has been one of the central arguments of this study that Wolsey’s legatine rule brought the Church considerable gains, amongst them protection from the unwelcome interference of the Crown lawyers. But there was a price to be paid, not only by the Church but by Wolsey personally, for what Henry would expect in return was that in matters close to his heart the Church would do what he wanted. Of course, English kings had always expected this, but insofar as Henry’s close relationship with Wolsey had increased his expectations, the resulting disappointment, not to say anger, if the Church refused, would be that much greater. In 1527 the moment came for Henry to collect. He wanted a divorce and only the Church could give it to him. He realized that there would be difficulties, and he was prepared to give it a little time to overcome them. In the end, however, he would go to any lengths to secure the payment, even if this meant schism, and with it the destruction of his cardinal legate.

The argument put forward here is that though Wolsey’s dismissal did not come out of a cloudless sky, the effect of the many difficulties crowding in on every side should not be exaggerated. Wolsey had shown himself to be a past master at getting himself and his king out of tight corners: witness the volte-face that he had achieved in 1525 by exchanging the dead-end of the Imperial alliance for a profitable one with France. In the spring of 1528 he was quick to minimize the economic effects of the declaration of war with the emperor by securing a truce with Margaret and the Low Countries. He had also seen to it that the government had intervened on what may have been a hitherto unprecedented scale to minimize the effects of the bad harvests of 1527 and 1528. These bad harvests are a reminder that luck plays a large part in politics, and Wolsey was unlucky not to have survived into the early 1530s when the harvests improved. Moreover, it was suggested in the previous chapter that if the cards had fallen a little bit more kindly, he might even have obtained the divorce, and in that case the unpopularity of the years 1527 to 1529 would have seemed neither here nor there. After all, perhaps Wolsey’s greatest triumph, the Treaty of
London of 1518, had been preceded by two years of failure. In the end, Dame Fortune did not serve Wolsey well, but an awareness of this should not lead us to believe that Wolsey was from early 1527 on a downward slide from which it was impossible to get off. Things were going badly. Speculation was rife. This led some people to believe that the dukes of Norfolk and Suffolk had allied with the Boleyns to bring him down. In reality they had done no such thing. Instead, Wolsey’s fate depended entirely on the continuance of Henry’s confidence, and in particular in his confidence that Wolsey would be successful in his efforts to obtain for him a divorce. Indeed, once Henry had decided to get rid of Catherine and marry Anne, everything in English politics was subordinated to that end.

Interestingly, even the timing of rumours concerning an aristocratic faction supports the notion of the primacy of the divorce in this matter of Wolsey’s downfall. Mendoza’s first references to an anti-Wolsey faction led by Norfolk in May 1527 came in the same letter in which he first mentioned the divorce, describing it as ‘the finishing stroke’ of all Wolsey’s ‘iniquities’.
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He next mentioned the faction in October, by which time, in his account, the Boleyns had been enlisted.
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Then something rather curious happened. The faction disappeared, or at least for over a year none of the ambassadors mentioned its existence. Admittedly in July 1528 the French ambassador du Bellay reported the cardinal as, by his own account, having to use a ‘terrible alchemy’ to defeat the machinations of unspecified people,
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but it was not until the following January that Norfolk and the Boleyns occupied the centre stage again,
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and not until the following month that they were joined in the ambassadors’ reports, and for the first time, by Suffolk.
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Not everything that Mendoza and du Bellay wrote has survived, so it would be wrong to make too much of this apparent hiatus, but it does look as if the existence of an aristocratic faction coincided in the ambassadors’ minds with the ups and downs of the divorce. At first, it must have seemed that such an unexpected and unusual event needed rather more than a king’s infatuation to explain it. High politics must assuredly come into it somewhere; and if so, and the divorce presaged important changes, then the obvious person to be affected would be Wolsey. When he did not go, and, at any rate during much of 1528, it looked increasingly as if Henry might get his divorce, then there was no need to invent any faction. However, in the autumn of that year the situation changed yet again. Campeggio’s arrival did not precipitate a sentence in Henry’s favour, and by January 1529 it must have been fairly obvious to even a casual observer of the political scene that Wolsey’s efforts to secure a divorce were in disarray. It would also have been obvious that this spelt trouble for him – and hence the aristocratic faction made a reappearance. In fact, though, it was no more a reality in January 1529 than it had
been in May 1527. What did spell danger for Wolsey was Henry’s growing impatience. As early as autumn 1527 he had been impatient enough to attempt his own short cut. His failure had enabled Wolsey to get things moving in what he hoped would be a better direction. But having suggested that there was a better way, Wolsey only compounded the more general difficulty just referred to, that as Henry’s ‘tame’ churchman he would be expected to be able to obtain from the Church whatever his master wanted.
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Now he had really put his head on the line, for if the better way proved unsuccessful, then Henry would have every justification for getting rid of him – and in January 1529 Mendoza heard that Henry was beginning to blame Wolsey for his failure to fulfil his promises.
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Whether January 1529 was the moment when Henry seriously began to contemplate the possibility of removing Wolsey will be considered shortly. Meanwhile it is the obvious that needs to be emphasized. It was Henry who was in love, it was Henry who wanted a divorce, and however weak a character he is assumed to be, he really did not require a faction to tell him that, or even that Wolsey’s divorce plans were not succeeding. It is this simple fact that should have always alerted historians to the fallacy of believing in an aristocratic faction. In terms of Wolsey’s downfall, it is an almost entirely superfluous notion. Perhaps it could be allotted a minor role if Henry were thought so weak and incompetent that he could not have organized the mechanics of Wolsey’s removal, but in view of the large number of people, not to mention heads, that he did remove during the course of his reign, such a belief would be curious. And in fact the Henry I have portrayed in this study was much more able to make decisions than at least two supposed leaders of the faction, Norfolk and Suffolk.

But what about the Boleyns, father and daughter? Their part in this story, especially Anne’s, has to be rather privileged; and that a scheming Anne plotted Wolsey’s downfall is a commonplace, best exemplified by Cavendish’s account of Wolsey’s last meeting with Henry.
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For almost two months after the adjournment of the legatine court on 23 July 1529 Wolsey had been firmly but politely refused a meeting with the king. Then Henry relented, and Wolsey was allowed to accompany Campeggio on his farewell visit to Grafton, where the king then was. Not unnaturally it had been assumed by those at court that Wolsey’s enforced absence from the royal presence was a prelude to his dismissal, so that his arrival at Grafton came as a surprise. Apparently the betting was that Henry would not actually speak to Wolsey, and the fact that no accommodation was provided for him must have shortened the odds. Everything pointed to a very frosty reception, but in fact Henry greeted him as warmly as ever. And even more worryingly for those who wished the cardinal ill – and in Cavendish’s account this seems to have included everybody – he proceeded after dinner to have a lengthy private meeting with him. Suddenly it looked as if the old wizard was once again casting his spell, but the next day it was the young and beautiful witch whose spell proved the more binding. She suggested a picnic. Henry could not resist. He cancelled the planned further meeting with Wolsey, and was never to see his cardinal again. As told by
Cavendish, it is a very good story, but, at least as regards Anne’s part in it, a story is just what it is. For one thing, as will be shown shortly, it is almost certain that for once the court gossip was right and Henry had made his decision to dismiss Wolsey sometime before this last meeting, which from Henry’s viewpoint made it a charade from start to finish. This being the case, there was no need for Anne to have laid on a picnic. And probably the picnic never happened. At any rate, a contemporary account of the Grafton meeting by a member of Wolsey’s household has it that while Henry in Cavendish’s account was supposedly enjoying it, he was in fact closeted with Wolsey and his Council. In the afternoon, indeed, he went hunting, but only after he had taken his leave of Wolsey in what appears to have been a perfectly normal way.
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It should be remembered that for Cavendish Anne was an undoubted she-devil, so that even if he did not invent her role at Grafton he would have been happy to make use of any rumour or apocryphal story of her guileful ways there. He is also the source for Anne’s ‘privy indignation’ against Wolsey for having broken up her early affair, perhaps even a precontract of marriage, with Henry Percy, and the decision to get her own back if ever the opportunity arose.
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Some kind of affair with Henry Percy does seem to have occurred,
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but it has to be admitted that Cavendish’s version gains much of its effect from an awareness of subsequent events, so much so that the suspicion must be that at least some fiction was again involved. Still, Cavendish is not the only source for Anne’s dislike of the cardinal. In October 1527 Mendoza reported that it derived from Wolsey at some time having been instrumental in depriving her father of promotion to high office.
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Earlier it was shown that though in 1519 Boleyn may have had some cause for feeling momentarily aggrieved for his failure to obtain a promised household appointment, it is most unlikely that this would have provoked his daughter’s desire for revenge, for the good reason that Wolsey’s role in the episode
vis-à-vis
Boleyn was entirely benign, and likely in the end to have been seen as such by him.
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Of course, resentments are not necessarily very rational so that this attempt to try and play down the episode may be misplaced. And what cannot be denied is that in the summer of 1528 Wolsey did prevent the election of the Boleyn candidate for the office of abbess of Wilton. Moreover, earlier in the same year she had given her support to Sir Thomas Cheyney, a member of the privy chamber, whose overreaction to Wolsey’s grant of of a wardship to Sir John Russell had not endeared him to the cardinal or, for that matter, to the king.
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