Henry VIII (40 page)

37

“Above Everyone, Mademoiselle Anne”

At the end of July 1 529, Henry went with Anne Boleyn to Greenwich, then took her on progress, visiting Waltham Abbey, Barnet, Tittenhanger, Windsor, Reading, Woodstock, Langley, Buckingham, and Grafton, where Anne “kept state more like a queen than a simple maid.”
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Here, in September, the two legates came, so that Campeggio could take his official leave of the King before returning to Rome.

There is no doubt that Wolsey was in disgrace, and that Anne, Norfolk, and the rest of their faction were resolved to be rid of him for good. There are conflicting accounts of what happened at Grafton. Cavendish, writing many years later, claims that when the cardinals arrived, Campeggio was led away to a comfortable lodging, but that no provision had been made for Wolsey, and he was forced to sit on his mule in the courtyard until Henry Norris came and offered the use of his own room, so that the Cardinal could change out of his riding clothes before seeing the King. Another of Wolsey's servants, Thomas Alward, whose account was written five days after the event, does not mention this but states that, because Grafton was a very small house, both cardinals were lodged at nearby Easton Neston.
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Both are agreed that when Wolsey, full of trepidation, came into the crowded presence chamber and knelt before his master, Henry's old affection for him surfaced and, smiling, he raised him and led him to a window embrasure, where they talked for some time, much to the amazement of the onlookers.

Anne was furious. After Wolsey had gone off to eat, having arranged to meet with the King the following morning, she sat at dinner with Henry and upbraided him for entertaining a man who had done him and his realm so much ill. Alward claims that Henry and Wolsey did sit in Council the following morning, and that the King went hunting after dinner, but Cavendish says Anne insisted that Henry leave early with her to see a new hunting park nearby, and that Wolsey and Campeggio arrived just as the King was ready to leave, when he told them he had no time to talk and bade them farewell. Anne, who had ordered a picnic, saw to it that he was away all day. When he returned, Wolsey had gone, bound for the More.
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Whatever happened, Henry never saw Wolsey again. Influenced by the Boleyn faction, who were even accusing their enemy of witchcraft, he agreed that the Cardinal be indicted under the Statute of Praemunire, which prohibited papal interference in English affairs without royal consent, for receiving bulls from Rome, which Wolsey could not deny. On 17 October, he was stripped of his post as Lord Chancellor, and the Dukes of Norfolk and Suffolk triumphantly went to collect the Great Seal from him at Esher. Yet the King was merciful: when, in November, Parliament arraigned Wolsey on forty-four charges, Henry refused to proceed against him, but allowed him to retain several of his ecclesiastical properties and retire to his diocese of York.

The effects of Wolsey's fall were manifold. It unleashed a wave of anticlerical feeling, which was fed by Norfolk and Suffolk. It gave the King a useful scapegoat for things that had gone wrong in the past: he could say that Wolsey deceived him, and that many things had been done without his knowledge.
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The Privy Council and the nobility grew more powerful now that they had no rival.

In October, the King had returned to Greenwich, having seized four of Wolsey's most desirable houses—York Place, the More, Tittenhanger, and Esher—along with their priceless contents, and taken full possession of Hampton Court. Building works still in progress were allowed to continue, and Wolsey's coats of arms were torn down and replaced with the King's.

On 2 November, Henry and Anne, accompanied by her mother, went by barge to view York Place.
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This was, strictly speaking, still the property of the archdiocese of York, but early in 1530 the King's lawyers would manage to overcome this technicality.
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Wolsey had drawn up an inventory before leaving the house, and the King and Anne inspected the piles of gold plate that had been left on trestles in the presence chamber and the sumptuous hangings that had been laid out in the long gallery.
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Anne particularly liked York Place because it had no apartments for the Queen, and would be a house she could share exclusively with Henry. When Anne visited, she would lodge in a chamber beneath Wolsey's old library, and there was accommodation for her family also.
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At Hampton Court Henry was building a new private lodging for himself, the Bayne Tower, which was connected to the privy chamber by a new gallery.
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While work was in progress, he himself lodged in Wolsey's stacked royal apartments. The Bayne Tower, which still survives,
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is a three-storey donjon, the last of its type to be built in England. On the ground floor were the Privy Chamber office and a strong room; the first floor housed the King's private bedchamber, bathroom (hence the name Bayne) with hot and cold taps, and study, and the top floor his library, housed in two rooms, and jewel house.
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Henry used the Bayne Tower until 1533, when he abandoned it for more modern apartments.

His next tasks were to improve the drainage system
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and add a second great kitchen with three huge open fireplaces and two stone hatches,
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as well as several subsidiary kitchens and offices. Later, he extended the cellars. The service complex would then occupy more than fifty rooms.
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Over the next year or so, the King, encouraged by Anne Boleyn, undertook other works at Hampton Court. He replaced Wolsey's wooden bridge with a stone one, guarded by statues of the King's Beasts, and set up the royal arms on the gatehouse and the inner gateway.
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He built a new council chamber and constructed an imposing watergate down by the river, with an adjacent covered and crenellated water gallery with oriel windows. Later, he would transform the chapel, build innovative royal apartments, and erect a vast great hall.
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Altogether, in the period 1529–1546, he spent £62,000 (£18,600,000) on converting Hampton Court into a magnificent show palace.
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Esher Palace had been built of red brick by William Wayneflete, Bishop of Winchester in the fifteenth century, and remained officially episcopal property until Henry VIII purchased it in 1537.
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Wolsey had added a fine projecting gallery similar to that at Bridewell, which Henry had ripped out and moved to York Place while Wolsey was still residing at Esher, “only to torment him.”
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The More, another fifteenth-century house, which stood to the southeast of Rickmansworth, had been so lavishly rebuilt by Wolsey that Jean du Bellay claimed it was finer than Hampton Court.
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Henry initially did little to it, and by 1531 its once beautiful gardens were “utterly destroyed”
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and the house was deteriorating. Only in 1535 did the King make improvements, partitioning the great hall with a floor and creating new chambers above and below. Later, he entertained there several times.

Henry also took over Wolsey's unfinished tomb at Windsor, having decided that it would make an ideal sepulchre for himself. But the work proceeded in fits and starts, and the tomb, with its golden effigy on a black marble sarcophagus embellished at each corner with nine-foot-high bronze pillars adorned with angels bearing candlesticks, would still not be completed at the time of Henry's death.

Cardinal College, however, did not survive Wolsey's fall. Many of the lands that supported it were “begged away to hungry courtiers,”
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and when the Master and Fellows begged the King to save the rest, he gave a vague promise to found his own “honourable college, but not of such magnificence as my Lord Cardinal intended to have.”
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It would be seventeen years before he kept his word.

For the next two years, Henry ruled England alone, determined that in future he would manage his own affairs.
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For the first time in years, he bore the sole responsibility for his kingdom, and he found it a heavy one. Initially, he told the Queen that Wolsey had left affairs in such a chaotic state that he would have to work day and night to set everything in order.
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Yet it soon became clear just how many of the burdens of state the Cardinal had shouldered, and the King soon lost patience with his councillors, shouting that Wolsey had been “a better man than any of them for managing matters” and stamping out of the council chamber in disgust at their incompetence.
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However, ruling autonomously gave Henry a new confidence and authority, and his political and personal priorities led him to forge increasingly aggressive policies. Driven by the unshakeable conviction that he was right to demand the annulment of his marriage—“not because so many say it, but because he, being learned, knoweth the matter to be right”
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—he relied more and more on his own judgement and political instincts. He also paid greater attention to paperwork: Erasmus noted in 1529 that the King personally corrected and amended his letters, often drafting up to four versions before he was satisfied.
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Wolsey's fall resulted in the promotion of several courtiers. Norfolk and Suffolk were made joint Presidents of the Council. Norfolk had envisaged that his career would flourish once the Cardinal was out of the way, but was to find himself outmanoevred by cleverer men. Moreover, his policies were invariably directed by his own insecurities, for it was his constant fear that the King might restore Wolsey to his former place.

Henry appointed as his secretary a canon and civil lawyer from Cambridge, Dr. Stephen Gardiner, an able but rather arrogant and difficult man
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of about thirty-two, who had been one of Wolsey's secretaries. Gardiner was in many ways a conservative, but his overriding belief in absolute monarchical authority, and his hostility towards the Queen for defying it, made him an ideal royal servant. He was of swarthy complexion, and had a hooked nose, deep-set eyes, a permanent frown, huge hands, and a “vengeable wit.”
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He was ambitious, sure of himself, irascible, astute, and worldly. Henry came to rely on him, sending him on important diplomatic missions and telling everyone that, when Gardiner was away, he felt as if he had lost his right hand; yet he was also aware that the Secretary could be two-faced.
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Gardiner was successful in his career because he understood “his master's nature” and knew how to manipulate him.
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The final, and most important, new appointment was that of Sir Thomas More as Lord Chancellor of England, on 26 October 1529; Sir William Fitzwilliam was made Chancellor of the Duchy of Lancaster in his place. Suffolk had been the King's first choice for the post of Lord Chancellor, but a jealous Norfolk opposed it on the grounds that Suffolk was powerful enough. But More did not want to be Chancellor: he was reluctant to become embroiled in the Great Matter because he knew that his views did not coincide with the King's. Henry overruled his doubts, assuring him that that he need play no part in the nullity proceedings; More might “look first unto God and, after God, to him.” Eustache Chapuys, the new imperial ambassador who had come to replace Mendoza, declared, “There never was nor will be a chancellor as honest and so thoroughly accomplished as he.”
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More cared nothing for the pomp and show of his office, and hated wearing his gold chain of office. When his friend Norfolk, visiting him at Chelsea, found him in a plain gown, singing with the local church choir, he tutted, “God body, God body, my Lord Chancellor! A parish clerk! A parish clerk! You dishonour the King and his office!”
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More was unmoved. There were more important matters to occupy his mind, such as the Lutheran heresy that was spreading in England, which More particularly deplored. During his time as Chancellor, he would deal severely with reformers and those who spread sedition, and he regarded the burning of six heretics as “lawful, necessary and well done.”
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William Tyndale, the exiled reformist translater of the Bible, against whom More had written a vicious diatribe, called him “the most cruel enemy of truth.”
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Such was the new order, yet “above everyone,” noted du Bellay, was “Mademoiselle Anne,” whose word was law to the King.

It seemed that the nullity suit might drag on indefinitely, yet a solution appeared to be at hand. On 29 August 1529, Stephen Gardiner and Edward Foxe, the King's Almoner, brought an obscure cleric, Thomas Cranmer, whom they had known at Cambridge, to see Henry at Greenwich. They had met him while staying at a house near Waltham Abbey, on their way back from Rome, and been impressed with his views on the Great Matter. Cranmer declared that it was a theological issue that could not be dealt with under canon law, and suggested that the King canvas the universities of Europe, where were to be found the greatest experts on theology.

Henry was very impressed with the short, slight, and scholarly cleric. “That man hath the sow by the right ear!” he declared, and ordered Lord Rochford to take Cranmer into his household and appoint him his chaplain; Cranmer, in turn, was to write a treatise on his views, and in January 1530, armed with this, the King sent his envoys to every university, asking for their views.

Thomas Cranmer was to become one of Henry's staunchest supporters and a great partisan of the Boleyns. A keen advocate of reform, who was already secretly flirting with Lutheranism, he had won a fellowship at Jesus College, but been expelled for getting married. After his first wife, a barmaid called “Black Joan,” died in childbirth, he was reelected to his fellowship, took holy orders, then went to Germany, where he became involved in reformist circles and married the niece of the Lutheran theologian Andreas Osiander; she bore Cranmer three children. During Henry's lifetime, he had to keep their union secret, because in England the clergy were supposed to be celibate, and he was obliged to smuggle his wife into the country in a packing case.