House Of Treason: The Rise And Fall Of A Tudor Dynasty (10 page)

More was totally unmoved by the advice. He told Norfolk:

These simple words offended the prickly duke and he stalked off, angry that his worldly-wise counsel had been so casually ignored. But More felt confident and relaxed: after all, did he not have Henry’s personal pledge over the divorce: that he would ‘never, with that matter, molest his [More’s] conscience’?

Among the many casualties of Wolsey’s downfall was Thomas Cromwell, his ambitious legal adviser. After talking with his stricken master at Esher, he rode hastily to London, to seek a seat in the new House of Commons, due to be sworn in two days later. In times of trouble, any politician calls in favours owed to him and he sent his servant Ralph Sadler to talk to Sir John Gage, Vice-Chamberlain of the Household, and an ally of Norfolk’s. After much discussion, the duke graciously let it be known that he had spoken with the king ‘and that his highness was very well contented that [Cromwell] should become a burgess [in Parliament and] should order [himself] according to such instructions as the Duke of Norfolk shall give you from the king’. Cromwell thus became Member of Parliament for Taunton.
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So Cromwell rescued his career from the ruin of Wolsey’s downfall and lived to fight another day - and all at Norfolk’s instigation. In the decade that followed, the duke would many times rue that cold night when he unwittingly rescued from the gutter of Tudor political life the man who was to become another powerful enemy.

Norfolk was, meanwhile, busy preparing the
coup de grâce
against his fallen enemy; a Bill of Attainder, with forty-six clauses, was down for debate as the first item of business at the opening session of Parliament. For him, settling old scores was always a joy. The Bill, nicknamed the Book of Articles because of its huge bulk, employed virulent language against Wolsey, including the outlandish allegation that he had attempted to infect the king with syphilis.
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It was passed by the Lords on 1 December and immediately sent down to the Commons for their approval. Here, Norfolk had overreached himself. The Attainder was attacked over its intemperate wording - Cromwell himself argued against it ‘discreetly . . . with such witty persuasions and deep reasons’
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- and it was quickly dropped, probably by royal command, before Parliament was prorogued on 17 December. Though the duke failed finally to destroy the Cardinal, at least he had thoroughly blackened his name.

So the problem of Wolsey’s fate remained undecided. Henry clearly still harboured some sympathy for the broken old man and sent four of his physicians to nurse him through an acute attack of dropsy.
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Norfolk thoroughly mistrusted his sovereign’s compassion for his fallen minister and was painfully aware that, amid the shifting, uncertain loyalties of Henry’s court, if the Cardinal ever managed to claw his way back to power he, Norfolk, would be the first to end up in the Tower. He therefore devised a plan to neutralise the threat still posed by Wolsey. Simply put, it was ‘out of sight, out of mind’, and after Wolsey’s earlier banishments of Norfolk it had the sweet taste of apposite revenge. The prelate should now return to his benefice, ideally as far away as possible from London and the court, and live out his days quietly as a pious churchman. Wolsey had collected a number of clerical hats - Archbishop of York, and Bishop of Winchester, for example - and Norfolk believed that York, 175 miles (282 km.) north of the capital, would fit the bill admirably.

Wolsey grasped that proximity to the king might still bring reinstatement and salvation. When Cromwell informed him of the plan, he replied cheerfully: ‘Well then Thomas, we will go to Winchester’ - signalling his intention to take up residence at his rich bishopric in Hampshire, not far from London. He failed to realise he was speaking to a man who temporarily owed much to Norfolk and, anyway, was only interested in advancing his own fortunes. Cromwell hastened to the duke to pass on Wolsey’s decision.

Norfolk often presented a mask of affability to the outside world. He was short and wiry, with a hooked, aquiline nose, inherited from his father, dominating his fleshy features. Beneath his cordial exterior and those hooded eyes lurked a violent temper, a cold brutality and a callous, single-minded determination. Now his friendly façade was swiftly stripped away and he answered Cromwell candidly:

Wolsey duly left for the north on 5 April 1530, and entered, for the first time, the Church province he had ruled as an absentee metropolitan since August 1514. He arrived at his decayed palace at Southwell, Nottinghamshire, on the 28th, whingeing about being ‘wrapped in misery and need on every side’ before moving on to Cawood Castle, twelve miles (19 km.) from York,
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at the end of September. There he regained his refined taste for the trappings and splendours of ecclesiastical life and despatched a letter to Henry, seeking the rich ‘mitre and pall
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which he had formerly used . . . in celebrating the divine office’. When he read the note, the king was astonished at Wolsey’s ‘brazen insolence’ adding: ‘Is there still arrogance in this fellow, who is so obviously ruined?’
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Cromwell tempered the king’s reaction when he told his former master that Henry was ‘very sorry that you are in such necessity . . . The Duke of Norfolk promises you his best aid, but he wills you for the present to be content and not much to molest the king (concerning payment of your debts) for, as he supposes, the time is not right for it.’ These were saccharic words and Cromwell knew it full well.
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Wolsey wrote to Norfolk on 30 October, in a disingenuous attempt to reassure his brooding enemy that he did not wish to be restored as Lord Chancellor and would be happy to spend the rest of his life in York. He sent Thomas Arundell, a gentleman of his privy chamber, to deliver the letter to the duke, then staying at Hampton Court. After reading it, Norfolk walked in the park, mulling over its empty promises, and then brusquely told the messenger that ‘no man should make him believe that’. Arundell reported: ‘The more I spoke to the contrary, the more out of frame I found him.’

The duke and his niece were yet more determined to tear down the Cardinal once and for all and Norfolk posted agents to watch the movements of the household at Cawood and to intercept the communications, in cipher, of his Venetian physician, Dr Augustine de Augustinis. One of the reasons for his angry rejection of Wolsey’s blandishments was his knowledge of three secret messages sent by the Cardinal ‘whereby it appears that [he] desires as much authority as ever [he] did’.
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Furthermore, he disclosed to Chapuys that Wolsey had attempted, by different agents, to undermine Norfolk’s position at court and they had told him all about it.
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Wolsey was arrested for treason as he sat down to dinner at Cawood on Friday 4 November. Augustine was also detained, tied backwards to a horse like all such felons, and led to London. After spending an uncomfortable night in the Tower of London to concentrate his mind, Augustine was quietly removed to Norfolk’s town house in Broken Wharf, on the south side of Upper Thames Street,
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and there gently interrogated, while being ‘treated like a prince’. The Italian sang like a canary and his disclosures delighted his inquisitors. Wolsey, he chirruped, had asked Pope Clement to excommunicate the king and shut all the parish churches in the realm, unless Anne Boleyn was exiled from court and Catherine reinstated as queen. Moreover, he said, the Cardinal prayed that such an interdict would spawn a widespread popular uprising, when he could snatch back the levers of power in England.
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After hearing that Augustine had fallen into Norfolk’s hands, Chapuys, the Spanish envoy, was worried that his own dealings in the murky business could be compromised by the doctor’s disclosures. As he reported the latest developments, he tried to reassure himself:

Augustine provided the final proof of Wolsey’s treason, or so Norfolk claimed. The Cardinal, being brought back to London by easy stages because of his poor health, died on 29 November 1530 at the Augustinian abbey of St Mary’s, in Leicester, probably from dysentery, although there were some who believed ‘he killed himself with purgatives’.
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He was aged about sixty.

Norfolk delightedly claimed Wolsey’s fleshy scalp as his own trophy. Anne’s brother, George, specially commissioned a hastily written masque, charmingly entitled
On the Cardinal ’s Going into Hell
that was performed at Greenwich Palace, to the gratification and merriment of the Howard and Boleyn clan.

Twelve days after Wolsey’s death, his physician signed a recognisance pledging payment of £100 to the king to ‘keep secret from any man all such matter as is mentioned in a book written with his own hand, concerning the late Cardinal of York and presented by him to my lord of Norfolk, President of the Council . . .’.
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Although the threat posed by Wolsey had been extinguished, the secrets of his downfall had to be protected.

In June 1530, a huge and much redrafted document, signed with the seals of two archbishops, four bishops, twenty-five abbots, two dukes and forty other peers, appealed to the Pope to produce a speedy decision on the king’s marriage to Queen Catherine. It was all to no avail: Rome had no real understanding of the serious ramifications of the issue, nor the need for its urgent resolution.

Catherine was in despair. ‘God knows what I suffer from these people; enough to kill ten men, much more a shattered woman who has done no harm,’ she wrote miserably to her nephew, Charles V, in mid-October 1531.

Norfolk, also weary of the whole business, lugubriously confided to Chapuys that he would be prepared to sacrifice the greater part of his wealth, if God was ‘pleased to take to himself’ both Catherine and Anne ‘for the king would never enjoy peace of mind till he had made another marriage, for the relief of his conscience and the tranquillity of the realm, which could only be secured’ by a lawful male heir to the throne.
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Wishing both ladies dead through some kind of divine thunderbolt was hardly a practical or plausible solution. A papal nuncio visiting England, anxious to discover why the Pope was so unpopular, was amazed and intimidated by Norfolk and Suffolk’s curt declaration that they cared nothing for popes ‘in England - not even if St Peter came to life again. The king was [now] emperor and pope in his own dominions.’
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Henry now moved to sever, irrevocably, his links with Rome and to take the first steps towards independence of the Church in England, through a series of legal measures steered through Parliament by Cromwell.
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An able champion of the annulment arrived in the shape of Thomas Cranmer, who, although only an archdeacon, was nominated as Archbishop of Canterbury in succession to William Warham who had died in August 1532. His loyalties to the cause of the ‘Great Matter’ were unimpeachable: he had been private chaplain to Anne Boleyn’s father, now elevated to the Earldom of Wiltshire and Ormonde.

Henry’s love for Anne remained wholly undiminished and he was determined to demonstrate it. On 1 September 1532, she enjoyed her first public mark of favour when she was raised to the peerage in her own right as Marchioness of Pembroke, with a generous annuity of £1,000 a year. He then took her on to a glittering meeting with Francis I of France in Boulogne and Calais, accompanied by a 2,000-strong English entourage, when she proudly wore a dazzling display of jewellery confiscated from Catherine of Aragon.

It was then, or shortly afterwards, that she allowed Henry into her bed for the first time.

About the middle of January 1533, Anne found that she was pregnant and a proud and expectant Henry swiftly, secretly and bigamously married her on the 25th in a chamber above the Holbein Gate in his new Palace of Westminster. Norfolk was not present at the ceremony.

Cranmer was a fervent supporter of the royal divorce being decided under English jurisdiction and now, naively, if not appeasively, Clement VII in Rome approved Henry’s choice of him as Primate of England. The Pope issued the necessary nine bulls on 21-22 February, allowing Cranmer’s consecration as Archbishop of Canterbury to take place on 30 March at St Stephen’s Chapel, Westminster. So that there could be no doubt as to the reality of religious authority in England, Henry informed Cranmer that the primacy and its authority existed ‘only by the sufferances of us and our progenitors’ and ‘you are, under us, by God’s calling and ours, the most principal minister of our spiritual jurisdiction within this our realm’.
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The archbishop could waste little time, as Anne’s condition was becoming every day more obvious and royal scandal was looming. An ecclesiastical court was established at Dunstable, Bedfordshire, close to where Queen Catherine had been exiled, to dissolve her marriage with Henry. It came as no surprise when she refused to appear before the tribunal, presided over by Cranmer. At ten o’clock on the morning of 23 May 1533, the Primate declared the matrimony ‘to be against the laws of God’ and ‘therefore divorced the king’s highness from the noble lady Catherine’.
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Henry was free to marry again under the law, although in truth, of course, he had already jumped the gun.