What we cannot know is whether Wolsey. was truly at fault, or whether Rochford set him up while Gardiner looked the other way. He had been appointed Henry’s secretary on 28 July, and made it clear that he would not favour his former employer. Anne’s father was an expert on foreign affairs and might easily have seen an opportunity to represent coolness towards France as imperilling progress towards the divorce. If Henry was to get free from Katherine, he needed Francis, and that should take priority above everything. Wolsey hit back, challenging Gardiner on the change in direction and making his resentment plain.
69
His erstwhile protégé protested his good faith and told the minister that he was suspected of an ulterior motive - wanting to stir Henry against the French. He also read back to the cardinal his own recipe for success with Henry: ‘If your grace had been here and seen how the king’s highness took it [you] would rather have studied how by some benign interpretation to have made the best of that which is past remedy than to have persisted in the blaming of not observation of covenants on the French part.
70
Wolsey excused himself to Gardiner by return, but the damage had been done.
71
Du Bellay was able to report on 1 September that he and his brother had fully satisfied most English doubts, that Norfolk, Suffolk and Rochford were in high favour, and that Wolsey was now clearly on the way out.
72
Only one thing could have saved Wolsey, and that was access to Henry in person, but while he was trying to work through the unreliable Gardiner, Norfolk, Suffolk and Rochford as the courtiers in favour and on the spot simply took over the execution of policy, while Anne conducted an open campaign of character assassination.
73
All Wolsey’s anxiety to go to Cambrai in June and July was now represented as an attempt to delay the Boleyn marriage. He was also accused of having been for years in the pocket of Francis I’s mother and mentor, Louise of Savoy; even Suffolk’s ignominious retreat when only fifty miles from capturing Paris in 1523 was now attributed to Wolsey withholding the necessary cash at her behest.
74
Sometime in the second week of September Wolsey took the plunge and asked directly for an interview with Henry in order to impart information too sensitive for a letter, normally an infallible way to touch the suspicious Henry. However, on 12 September he was told that on this occasion he was to indicate in writing the subjects he wished to raise.
75
Henry was not going to trust blindly again - or was it Anne and her allies determined not to be caught out?
What happened when king and minister met is the subject of a famous passage in Cavendish, but with some contemporary support from the newly arrived Chapuys.
76
According to this, Wolsey was refused access to court until Campeggio insisted that he should accompany him when he came to take his leave of the king, but even then the two legates were told to come without pomp and ceremony. The date chosen was Sunday, 19 September, and the place, the king’s hunting lodge at Grafton, near what is now Milton Keynes, a house so small that half the court had to sleep at Richard Empson’s old house at Easton Neston three miles away.
77
Concerned that the cardinal’s magic might still work on the king, Suffolk arranged for Campeggio alone to be given lodgings at Grafton. However, the emollient Norris, groom of the stool, lent Wolsey his room to change in, and the cardinal’s supporters flocked to welcome him and warn of the latest situation. Then the two legates were called to the presence chamber, packed with every courtier who could find a place, with polite greetings all the way, sincere and insincere. Henry entered, and the old magic did begin to work. Raising the kneeling Wolsey, the king took him to one of the great window embrasures, made him put his hat on and engaged in a long and earnest conversation. The climax came when Henry produced against Wolsey one of his own letters, saying ‘how can that be? Is this not your own hand?’ only to be given a full and, as far as observers could tell, entirely satisfactory explanation.
Dinner followed, with Anne and her supporters more than worried. Norfolk dined with Wolsey and tried to make him angry. Anne entertained Henry to dinner in her chamber, and tried to make
him
angry:
‘Sir’, quoth she, ‘Is it not a marvellous thing to consider what debt and danger the cardinal hath brought you in, with all your subjects?’ ‘How so, sweetheart?’ quoth the king. ‘Forsooth, Sir’, quoth she, ‘There is not a man within all your realm worth £5 but he hath indebted you unto him by his means’ (meaning by a loan that the king had but late of his subjects). ‘Well, well’, quoth the king, ‘As for that there is in him no blame, for I know that matter better than you or any other’.
Even this did not discourage Anne, or so observers retailed:
‘Nay, Sir’, quoth she, ‘Besides all that what things hath he wrought within this realm to your great slander and dishonour. There is never a nobleman within this realm that if he had done but half so much as he hath done but he were well worthy to lose his head. If my lord of Norfolk, my lord of Suffolk, my lord my father, or any other noble person within your realms had done much less than he but they should have lost their heads [bef]ore this’. ‘Why then I perceive’, quoth the king, ‘Ye are not the cardinal’s friend’. ‘Forsooth, Sir’, then quoth she, ‘I have no cause nor any other man that loveth your grace. No more have your grace if ye consider well his doings’.
Despite this barrage, Henry went back to the presence chamber and had another long, private conversation with Wolsey, followed by an even more secret tête-à-tête with him in the privy chamber until bedtime, when the king told him to return early next day to continue their discussion. So Wolsey set out for Easton, and there he was joined by Gardiner, either to find out what he could for Anne, or else to mend his relationship with his old master. However, when Wolsey arrived back at Grafton the next morning, he found the plan changed. Anne was going riding with Henry to a new park three miles away, and had quickly arranged a picnic to ensure that the cardinals would be gone before the king returned.
It is a good story. It is psychologically right; it illustrates to perfection the importance of access to the monarch - and the ability to deny access; it ought to be true. Unfortunately, it does not square with other evidence about the meeting. Gardiner’s letter of 12 September agreeing to a meeting docs not suggest that Wolsey reached the king by hanging on to Campeggio’s coat-tails - it looks more as if the Italian accompanied Wolsey. As well as Cavendish, Thomas Alward was at Grafton with Wolsey.
78
He had certainly heard the rumour that his master’s days of power were numbered, but said that he had seen nothing out of the ordinary in the regular exchange of letters and messages between the cardinal and the court that vacation, and he seems to suggest that Wolsey attended court as much as would be expected. In particular, Alward noticed nothing unusual in his master’s reception at Grafton, either by the king or by the courtiers, and nothing strange in lodgings being provided at Easton for, he says, both cardinals. His letter confirms Wolsey’s lengthy sessions with Henry on the Sunday, but gives no support to the story of a change of plan for Monday. According to him, Wolsey sat in council with Henry all morning, and the king did not go hunting until after dinner; even then Wolsey did not leave until after dark. As for Suffolk, Rochford, Brian Tuke and Gardiner, Alward had heard stories but had noted ‘as much observance and humility to my lord’s grace as I ever saw them do’, although he did add, ‘What they bear in their hearts I know not.’ Clearly not the most sensitive of men, and one also wanting to believe that things were as usual, but unlike Cavendish, Alward was writing five days, not almost thirty years, after the event. Regretfully we must discard the brilliantly opportunistic ride and picnic, and assume that if Henry did go out riding with Anne that day, it was after he had completed business with the two legates.
On this reading, Grafton was not the victory tradition has given to Anne. Nevertheless, as a counter-attack by Wolsey, success was short-lived. The day before, du Bellay had noted that the cardinal was counting on the support at court of certain people ‘made by him’ who had already turned their coats - undoubtedly Gardiner, and possibly Heneage and Tuke.
79
They would defer to his face and observe the proprieties, but they were unwilling to support the minister otherwise. Meanwhile, at court Anne was ever closer to Henry. Now the king even needed her to start the hunt, almost like the goddess Diana!
80
Wolsey retained office and chaired council meetings in the normal way as late as 6 October, but on the first day of the law term, 9 October, he found himself deserted in his own court and charged in King’s Bench with praemunire.
81
A week or so later he was dismissed as chancellor, and on 22 October he pleaded guilty to the charge, surrendered all his property to Henry and threw himself on the king’s mercy.
82
As du Bellay (who was still in touch with Wolsey) explained to Montmorency, the constable of France, he had been offered his chance with either king or parliament and had no doubt which threatened less. And that was despite Anne trying to block all hope of access to Henry by making the king promise never to receive his old friend; there would be no more Graftons.
83
How wise she was is clear from the evidence that Henry continued for many months to feel that Wolsey had value, and even to communicate with him in secret. Meanwhile the lovers went to inspect his Westminster house, York Place, to gloat over its treasures and decide that there they would build the palace of their dreams.
84
The anti-Wolsey faction rejoiced, and began to argue about the spoils. Chapuys, quite rightly, congratulated Norfolk as the man who would be the king’s new chief counsellor.
85
Yet the fall of Wolsey was first and foremost Anne’s success. Without her they would not have made it. Wolsey himself explained his decision not to fight the
praemunire
on the grounds that it was impossible to challenge ‘a continual serpentine enemy about the king’.
86
Anne had made the difference; Anne now had the triumph. Du Bellay reported: ‘The duke of Norfolk is made chief of the council and in his absence the duke of Suffolk, and above everyone Mademoiselle Anne.‘
87
He made it clear, indeed, that Anne and her father were determined to be recognized as enjoying and deserving the king’s highest favour. Even before Wolsey’s fall, Thomas Boleyn was seeking to impress his value on the French by deliberately frustrating the agreement du Bellay was trying to negotiate: ‘at least he is the one who is keeping the dance going, expressly against the dukes and the cardinal of York whom I had so convinced that I thought I had gained my objective.’
88
What was needed was a letter from Louise of Savoy acknowledging Boleyn’s new standing. With still no such letter of greeting to hand, du Bellay wrote again a week later. Anne Boleyn and her father were continuing their obstruction in order to demonstrate that they were as zealous in the king’s affairs as Wolsey had been, and because they saw that Henry himself was already inclined against the ambassador’s proposal. They were well aware, he noted, ‘that one of the principal devices which the cardinal of York had to maintain his influence (given the nature of his master) was to heap praise on his opinions.’
89
Du Bellay was now even more pointed about the relative importance of Anne and Thomas. During the discussions,
[Boleyn] allowed everything to be said, and then came and suggested the complete opposite, defending his position without budging, as though he wanted to show me that he was not pleased that anyone should have failed to pay court to the lady [Anne], and also to make me accept that what he had said before is true, that is, that all the rest have no influence except what it pleases the lady to allow them, and that is gospel truth. And because of this he wanted with words and deeds to beat down their opinions before my eyes.
90
The ambassador’s firm advice to Paris was to flatter Boleyn pretensions and in particular to lionize the family’s
petit prince
, George, who was just going on his first diplomatic mission. The arrival at the French court of such a young man as ambassador would probably provide a few laughs, but the new realities of power had to be recognized.
91
9
STALEMATE, 1529 — 1532
W
HAT puzzled European contemporaries most was that Henry VIII went about divorce the hard way. Wanting Anne as a wife instead of a mistress was eccentric enough, but his determination to bludgeon the pope into guaranteeing in advance, not only the outcome, but also his own distinctive interpretation of canon law, was unprecedented. Pressure on the pope - that was expected; but ‘the urgency used’ by Henry was a principal cause of his humiliation at Blackfriars.
1
Even then the king would not resign himself to having to wait for Rome to adjudicate, and swallow the ruling if he did not like it. The struggle began again. True, Henry had good reason to distrust Clement VII, but there was more than suspicion behind his enormous effort to force the pope to admit that in allowing him to marry Katherine, his predecessor Julius II had exceeded his powers.