The King's Cardinal: The Rise and Fall of Thomas Wolsey (Pimlico) (161 page)

If one adds all the evidence for Anne disliking Wolsey to the belief, held by du Bellay and Mendoza, that he feared that Anne as queen would mean the end of his
influence with Henry,
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there does seem to be some reason for thinking that she did play an important, perhaps even decisive part in Wolsey’s downfall, but in the end not enough. There is first the same difficulty that was encountered with the two dukes’ opposition to Wolsey, which was that, like them, she was bound to be seen as Wolsey’s enemy whatever her real attitude. It is a difficulty to which there is no solution, except perhaps by giving more credence not to what people were saying about their relationship, but to the relationship itself.

On 3 March 1528 Thomas Heneage, recently transferred from Wolsey’s household to the king’s, wrote that Anne had complained that Wolsey had sent her no ‘token’ by his recent messenger.
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Wolsey took the hint, and by 16 March Heneage was conveying to Wolsey Anne’s thanks ‘for his kind and favourable writing unto her’, while at the same time reporting her sorrow that Sir Thomas Cheyney should have earned Wolsey’s displeasure.
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In this little exchange there is almost a hint of flirtation in Anne’s behaviour; and at the very least a relationship of some sort is implied, even one that might be expected between royal ‘mistress’ and elder statesman. And clearly Wolsey was in the habit of writing to her, because in July she herself replied to a letter of his, thanking him not only for a present but also for his help, ‘of which I have hitherto had so great plenty that all the days of my life I am most bound of all creatures, next the king’s grace, to love and serve your grace’.
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Perhaps this merely illustrates the hypocrisy of court life, but it is quite an interesting letter for her to have written while the Wilton affair, in which Wolsey did undoubtedly oppose her wishes, was still in progress – and need she have written quite as warmly as she did?

There were other expressions of her fond regard, and why not?
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As we have seen, in the summer of 1528 Wolsey’s plans for the divorce did appear to be coming to fruition; a decretal commission of sorts had been obtained and Campeggio was on his way to England to start what Anne hoped would be successful legal proceedings. No wonder she wrote loving letters to Wolsey. But that is not to say, of course, that she was a close friend, for what would a young lady enjoying a love affair with her king, from which, if she played her cards right, she had so much to gain, have in common with the elder statesman, conscious as he was of all the dangerous implications of the course she and Henry had embarked upon? Moreover, if she was as sympathetic to Lutheranism as some have maintained,
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then the mere fact that Wolsey was a cardinal was an added complication. In fact, it seems more likely that it was political advantage rather than genuine conversion that might have inclined her to encourage reform, and the Lutheran Anne is probably more of an invention of a subsequent Protestant tradition, in which her role as Elizabeth
I
’s mother was important. What is not in doubt, though, is that Anne was a very determined lady; there would have been no ‘great matter’ if she had not been, and there is no reason to suppose that her determination would have stopped at trying to remove Wolsey if
she had felt he stood in her way. But since until very late in this story he must have seemed the one man in England capable of realizing her wishes, far from organizing an anti-Wolsey faction she had every incentive to try to get on with him; hence the ‘loving’ letters. Equally there was every incentive for Wolsey to get on with her. Theirs was surely a perfectly good working relationship, with the one proviso that Wolsey had to obtain the divorce? There is no more need to invent a conspiracy led by Anne than one by Norfolk, or anyone else.

And if there was no plot to destroy Wolsey, then Anne’s father could hardly have been part of one! Moreover, even if logic did not insist upon this conclusion, the evidence would. Earlier it was shown that the notion that Wolsey had done his utmost to thwart Sir Thomas Boleyn’s career cannot be sustained, whatever occasional misunderstandings may have occurred.
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And Boleyn’s was a highly successful career, which in 1525 had resulted in his elevation to the peerage as Viscount Rochford. True that this was probably a consolation for Henry’s and Wolsey’s failure, so far, to persuade the Butler family to surrender to Sir Thomas the earldom of Ormond, then in their hands, but to which Boleyn had a claim. But that Henry bothered to further the Boleyn claim, ironically by trying to arrange a marriage between James Butler and none other than Anne, and was willing to to ennoble Sir Thomas indicates his high standing with the king, a high standing that preceded any interest in his daughters. One way or another, it is hardly possible that in 1527, when Henry decided that he was going to marry the younger Boleyn daughter, Sir Thomas can have had much reason for wanting to get rid of Wolsey. Moreover, he would no doubt have shared Anne’s and Henry’s belief that Wolsey was the most likely person to bring about their marriage.

What the foreign ambassadors make clear is that in the period just before and after Wolsey’s dismissal, Boleyn, even more than either Norfolk or Suffolk, was constantly in attendance upon the king, and here they are reporting the evidence of their own eyes rather than gossip and rumour. Whether this means that his influence at this time was significantly greater than those two is another matter. Du Bellay thought it was: on 4 October he reported that it was Boleyn ‘who leads the dance expressly against the dukes and Wolsey’,
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and on the 12th he launched into a tirade against him, calling him ‘vainglorious’, only anxious to show that ‘none of the others have influence except insofar as his daughter is prepared to allow it’.
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The report of the new Imperial ambassador, Chapuys, of his first meeting with Henry and the English court at Grafton in September also gives the impression that Boleyn’s influence was dominant, even if by the end of October he was clear that the dukes, especially Norfolk, were the real powers at court.
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But Boleyn’s constant attendance upon the king at this time should hardly come as a surprise. As the father of the woman Henry loved and intended to marry, it was inevitable that he should be more intimately involved than either Norfolk or Suffolk in the search for a divorce, which, while it was on one level a most important matter of state, on another was a private concern in which he was a principal party. This does not
necessarily mean that Henry took him in to his confidence about his intentions towards his leading minister, but what must be true is that once the decision was made he was bound to make more use than ever not only of Boleyn, but of Norfolk and Suffolk. There may have been some element of calculation on Henry’s part here. Wolsey’s dismissal, especially in the circumstances of the divorce, was a potentially dangerous moment for him, so he would have been anxious for the great men of the kingdom to show their support by keeping a high profile. More simply, they happened to be the men available to Henry, great not only in status but in experience of the conduct of affairs. And there was also an element of optical illusion. With Wolsey no longer there to mask them, they appeared more prominent; but they had always been there.

It is easy to see why the belief in an aristocratic faction was, and is, so pervasive, but it is hoped that by this stage it will be just as easy to see why it is wrong. At any rate, the argument here has been that Wolsey fell because at a certain moment Henry came to the conclusion that he was not going to get him what he most wanted in the world, a pronouncement by the Church that his marriage to Catherine had never had any validity, thereby leaving him free to marry Anne. The only question remaining is exactly when he made that decision: not an easy task for by its very nature it was not something which he would have wanted to make very public, and certainly not to commit to paper.

It was in January and February 1529 that Mendoza reported having been told that Henry was beginning to blame Wolsey for his failure to fulfil his promises concerning the divorce. Could this be the moment that Wolsey’s fate was decided? It is possible, but there is quite a bit of evidence to suggest that Henry’s confidence in Wolsey had not yet been completely eroded. It was only at the very end of the previous November that an important embassy, carrying with it new divorce proposals, had set off for Rome, and when in mid-January it eventually arrived, it found Clement supposedly on his deathbed. This had resulted in Stephen Gardiner being rushed out to promote Wolsey’s candidature for the prospective vacancy, for if he could have become pope, Henry’s problems would have been over. Meanwhile Campeggio was still in England, his ostensible task to preside with Wolsey over a trial to consider the validity of Henry’s marriage. And however poor the king’s prospects in the trial, it would have been foolish to move against Wolsey without seeing the outcome. When in March the English envoys at Rome sent back extremely gloomy reports about the chances of obtaining anything from the now no longer dying pope,
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Henry joined with Wolsey in berating them for being far too pessimistic,
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which he would have been unlikely to do if he had not still believed in Wolsey’s ability to bring about a divorce. By the end of May he was no longer confident, despite the legatine court having at last got under way.

That Henry had lost confidence in Wolsey is proved by a letter that the duke of Suffolk wrote to him from Orléans on 4 June. He and Fitzwilliam had been sent there in a rather desperate attempt to prevent a long-threatened and increasingly likely accord between Francis and the emperor. Their mission had been planned
with Wolsey’s knowledge and approval, but what he did not know was that Suffolk had been given a ‘secret charge’, which was to pump Francis for any views and information about the reliability of Campeggio in the matter of the divorce.
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Having discovered that Francis had always mistrusted him, Suffolk then asked if he ‘knew any other that in like case doth dissemble’. When Francis failed to take the hint, Suffolk was forced to be more direct: ‘Sir, ’ he asked, ‘what say you by the cardinal of England in this matter?’ Francis’s initial reply was, not unnaturally, cautious: when he had met Wolsey at Amiens in the summer of 1527 he told Suffolk, ‘I assure you, as far as I could perceive in him, he would the divorce should go forth and take effect, for he loved not the queen’.
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Not too damaging an answer as far as Wolsey was concerned, but then Francis became rather more mischievous.

Why he did is not entirely clear. It was not at all what his ambassador in London, du Bellay, would have wanted: his advice almost to the very end was that the French should stick by Wolsey as the one man in England who could ensure the continuance of an Anglo-French alliance.
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Probably Francis’s assessment was that, with or without Wolsey, Henry was going to require French support, and that the removal of such a skilled negotiator as Wolsey could only strengthen the French position. He may also have felt that if Wolsey was anyway on the way out, he could only gain credit with Henry by advancing the process. At any rate his next remarks could have done Wolsey no good at all:

Mine advice shall be to my good brother that he shall have good regard and not put so much trust in no man, whereby he may be deceived as nigh as he can. And the best remedy for the defence thereof is to look substantially upon his matters himself, as I hear say he doth, which I am not a little glad of
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So far not very good, but Francis then proceeded to touch upon a very sensitive nerve: he understood that Wolsey

had a marvellous intelligence with the Pope, and in Rome, and also with Cardinal Campeggio. Whereof, seeing that he hath such intelligence with them, which have not minded to advance your matter, he thinketh it shall the more need for your grace to have the better regard to your said affair
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As was shown in the previous chapter, Francis’s remarks were very unfair: in fact, Wolsey was battling against enormous odds to persuade Clement to do something that was bound to offend an emperor who happened to be in a much better position to affect the fortunes of the papacy for good or ill than Henry and Wolsey were. No wonder there were delays; but, as they continued, the implication behind Francis’s remarks that the reason for them could only be that Wolsey was deceiving Henry, or at least not doing his best to bring about the divorce, must have crossed the English king’s mind. And, after all, what was the point of Henry having his own cardinal legate if he could not obtain from the pope what he wanted?

Suspicion and resentment were lodged in Henry’s mind by the end of May, for
otherwise why the ‘secret charge’ to Suffolk? It was hardly usual to ask another monarch whether one’s leading servant was deceiving one. Moreover, further reports from Rome, addressed to the king rather than to Wolsey, would have helped to fuel these feelings, may even have triggered it off, for they probably reached England just before Suffolk set off for France.
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In the first, written on 21 April, Sir Francis Bryan (incidently, a distant relation of Anne’s)
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who had recently returned to the privy chamber and had by his own account been sent to Rome with a special brief to keep Henry personally informed of what was going on, made it quite clear that in his opinion Clement ‘will do nothing for your grace’, adding ominously for Wolsey that ‘whosoever hath made your grace believe that he would do for you in this cause hath not, as I think, done your grace the best service’.
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Bryan devoted his letter of 5 May to an attack on Campeggio who, he understood, was reporting back to the pope that he had merely indulged in diplomatic pleasantries with Henry, but had never promised anything specific as regards the divorce, nor had he any intention of doing so. Then Bryan repeated his earlier warning that ‘all that is told you there [England] that the pope will do for your grace in this cause, I assure you they tell you the gloss and not the text’.
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