The King's Cardinal: The Rise and Fall of Thomas Wolsey (Pimlico) (170 page)

Given that Cromwell was just as much a political animal as Wolsey, it is difficult to take this passage too seriously; though such people do seem to have moments when release from the burdens of office is the only thing they crave, however much they regret it if it comes.
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Here, however, the main purpose of the homily was
probably to convert Wolsey to a view that Cromwell was all too well aware he did not hold. Some aspects of Wolsey’s allegedly ostentatious conduct, such as his much criticized building programme, were undoubtedly exaggerated by enemies at court, but it was nonetheless a very substantial cavalcade that moved north with him to Southwell. At Peterborough on Maundy Thursday he washed the feet of fifty-nine poor men. When he got to Southwell

he kept a noble house and plenty both of meat and drink for all comers, both for rich and poor, and much alms given at his gate … He made many agreements and concords between gentleman and gentleman, and between some gentlemen and their wives that had been long asunder and in great trouble, and divers other agreements between other persons; making great assemblies for the same purpose and feasting of them, not sparing for any costs where he might make peace and amity, which purchased him much love and friendship in the country
.
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And if he was extremely prominent on what might be called the secular front, he was equally so as regards his episcopal duties. On one occasion, Cavendish reports, he personally confirmed about two hundred children, while Richard Morison shortly after Wolsey’s death gave this account of his activities:

There were few holydays but he would ride five or six miles from his house, now to this parish church, now to that, and there cause one or other of his doctors to make a sermon unto the people. He sat amongst them and said mass before at the parish. He saw why churches were made. He began to restore them to their right and proper use … He brought his dinner with him, and had divers of the parish to it. He inquired whether there was any debate or grudge between any of them; if there were, after dinner he sent for the parties to the church and made them at one
.
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Wolsey the great pastoral bishop is not a Wolsey that most people know of, though an attempt was made in an earlier chapter to show that the picture is not so improbable. Here, however, the emphasis is on his great visibility during his last months. He may have been a recently disgraced minister; may have confessed to being guilty of praemunire, with all the dire consequences that this was supposed to bring; but in his conduct in his diocese of York there was not the slightest hint of any of these things. Instead he was every inch the great cardinal bishop, merely taking a little time off from the more hectic affairs of state to minister to his flock.

Wolsey’s high profile in the North is, on the face of it, the most obvious reason for believing in the ‘sensible view’, for surely it must have forced the Crown to be suspicious of what he was up to, even to wonder whether he was not deliberately courting popularity in this always sensitive region only so as to be able to bring pressure upon Henry to restore him to power. Perhaps it did, but there are serious difficulties in accepting that this was the chief reason for Wolsey’s arrest. To begin with, would any government, however anxious, have felt seriously threatened by a previously absentee bishop with no particular ties with the Northern gentry, whose support he would surely have needed to bring any pressure to bear. And if there had been any question mark about the loyalty of the Northern gentry, why deliberately
banish the fallen minister to that region? This question keeps obtruding, and for the very good reason that it is so difficult to answer. After all, no archbishop of York could have kept a low profile, if only because the office made its holder a leading, if not the leading, representative of the Crown in the area. As such, it was his duty to keep open house and to try to settle disputes in precisely the way that Wolsey actually did. All this Henry would have been well aware of. Moreover, the figure that Wolsey cut there was largly dictated by the amount of cash that the Crown had been willing to provide; and that he was given £150 to furnish his household with ninety horses and their trappings and £300 for his own clothing hardly suggests that he was expected to be invisible!

Why send Wolsey north, thus becomes a key question. Perhaps it was simply because Henry had no option but to do so, and in offering such an answer we come up against the strangest aspect of the whole story. As the time for Henry’s decision on his future approached – and it appears that Wolsey had been promised that it would be made shortly after parliament was prorogued in December 1529
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– he was naturally anxious that as many important people as possible should put in a good word for him with the king.
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Pre-eminent among these were the dukes of Norfolk and Suffolk, and it was they whom Cromwell was especially urged to approach, but not just because of their leading positions at court. They were also, Wolsey explained to Cromwell, men who ‘knoweth honour, and what is convenient to be done with the king’s honour in this behalf, and can call to remembrance what hath been promised unto me upon the trust and confidence whereof I have done and made my submission, putting me wholly in the king’s most gracious hands, who by the rigour of his laws could not have had so much as his Grace now hath’.
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As it turned out their honour could not prevent Wolsey losing, at least for all practical purposes, both Winchester and St Albans, and when this became evident he made very clear his hurt and surprise because, as he explained in another letter to Cromwell, he had ‘never thought, and so I was assured at the making of my submission, to depart from any of my promotions’.
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Neither, apparently, had he expected to lose all his ecclesiastical apparel, and again for the good reason that at the time of his submission Norfolk and Suffolk had promised that he would not.
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Just how much of a shock it was that their word, indirectly the king’s, had not been entirely kept is not clear; certainly, his great anxiety about the final settlement does not suggest that he had really hoped to hang on to everything. What he was quite prepared to do was to use the original promises as bargaining counters in the negotiations, by, for instance, insisting that he secured the pension out of Winchester’s revenues.
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But the very fact that the story of Wolsey’s last months can be seen as a whole series of negotiations has to be considered as very odd, for what other disgraced minister of Henry’s was allowed such a say in what was to become of him?

That he was allowed it explains a lot about what has so far been puzzling about
Wolsey’s state of mind at this time. The high profile, the lack of contrition, the surprising degree of confidence that all would be well, make sense just because he had been promised that all would indeed be well. He would, of course, have had in certain respects to toe the line: this would have meant accepting the loss of secular office, at least for the time being, and making no attempt to resist his indictment for praemunire; for, given Henry’s own deep involvement in the legatine powers and the shakiness of the charges, any resistance could have proved embarrassing for the king, and certainly would not have given the clear message to the Church that Henry intended.
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It would, of course, be wrong to exaggerate the strength of Wolsey’s position. Henry could have crushed him just whenever he wished, by, for instance, bringing an act of attainder against him. As it was, he contented himself with a mere petition from both houses of parliament containing a list of the many heinous offences the fallen minister was guilty of.
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This could very easily have been converted into a formal attainder, but Henry’s hope was that this would not be necessary. Wolsey should have got the message and behaved accordingly, which is to say that he should have accepted gratefully any terms that Henry chose to offer him. The purpose of the forty-four charges brought against him was to exert pressure on him while negotiations about his future were still going on. They were part of a bargaining process, and never intended to be taken too seriously, something which helps to explain some of the more far-fetched articles, that, for instance, Wolsey had infected Henry with the pox by ‘rouning’ in his ear and blowing upon him ‘with his perilous and infective breath’.
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Unfortunately for Henry, Wolsey realized this only too well, called the king’s bluff by dismissing the charges out of hand, and continued to bargain for the best terms possible. But the only reason why he felt in a strong enough position to do this was because of the earlier promises made to him that he would be treated well, and more importantly because of what lay behind these earlier promises: Henry’s realization that his former minister might still be of use to him.

In the last chapter it was argued that Wolsey’s dismissal from office was neither the work of a faction nor the king’s impulsive reaction to the failure of the second legatine court. Instead, it was seen as a calculated act of policy on Henry’s part to further the divorce negotiations. The argument here is that after he had been dismissed Wolsey continued to figure in those calculations, with the result that he was in quite a strong position for as long Henry continued to see a use for him. If this argument is correct then important consequences follow, for by focusing attention on Henry rather than on Wolsey the second possibility mentioned at the start of this chapter looms ever larger: that Wolsey’s arrest and the accusation of conspiracy was a set-up quite unrelated to what he was actually doing. Or to put it another way, if Henry had been prepared to dismiss him from office on a trumped-up charge of praemunire in October 1529, there seems no good reason why he should not have had him arrested on a trumped-up charge of treason in November 1530 if, that is, a good enough reason for doing so can be discovered. In looking for that reason the
timing must be important. There would have been little point in sending Wolsey off to York if it was known that he was shortly to be arrested. This means that it is most unlikely that any decision to arrest him had been made before April 1530. Moreover, on 16 June Wolsey had dutifully signed a letter to be sent to the pope by English notables requesting him promptly to do what they saw as the only right and proper thing: to grant Henry a divorce.
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In fact, Wolsey’s signature heads the list, and it would not have made much sense to ask him to sign if by that date the decision to arrest him had already been taken. So we are looking for a change of plan that occurred after 16 June, and probably much nearer the time when Walter Walsh was sent north to arrest him on 1 November. Furthermore, one would expect the change to have had something to do with the divorce; there would have been little point in arresting Wolsey in connection with anything less than this all-engrossing issue. Thus, what had been happening in the divorce negotiations since Wolsey’s dismissal from office becomes a matter of some importance.

From Henry’s point of view things had not gone well. One year after the advocation in July 1529 the position remained exactly the same: the case was still to be heard in Rome, and nothing that Henry had thrown at the pope, not even the dismissal and disgrace of his papal legate, had persuaded Clement to change tack. Someone else who had not budged was Catherine’s nephew, Charles
V
, and this despite both the Treaty of Cambrai, which had meant that, in a formal sense at least, he and Henry were allies again, and an embassy, headed not altogether tactfully by Anne’s father, sent specially to persuade him that it was in Catherine’s best interests to give way gracefully. Lastly and as regards Wolsey’s arrest, most relevantly there was little indication that Henry’s own subjects had changed their minds and become in any way reconciled to the loss of their queen. True, parliament had been called, and a certain amount of anticlerical feeling had been stirred up which could be made use of in any future bargaining with the English Church. However, at least according to Chapuys, this feeling was in no way associated with any sympathy for the divorce.
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Of course, Chapuys is no impartial source here but, as we saw earlier, almost all the evidence points to the great majority of the English nation being behind Catherine.
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This was obviously bad news for Henry, but especially given Clement’s continuing obstinacy.

Until recently at any rate, it has been rather assumed that the key to obtaining the divorce was the realization, probably by either Cromwell or Cranmer, that the pope’s consent was not required.
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Everything so far in this study has pointed to the inadequacies of this assumption, and it will continue to do so. Earlier it was
emphasized that papal consent was sought not out of some kind of conventional piety or concern for justice, but for reasons of state: that is, in order to bolster up an unpopular, and, as regards the succession, politically unwise decision, which without the papal blessing might not have been made to stick. And just how politically necessary the pope’s consent was considered to be is suggested not only by the enormous lengths that Henry went to in order to obtain it, but by the fact that whenever Clement himself had hinted that the best thing would be for Henry to go it alone, his advice was never acted upon.
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On the other hand, if the pope would not grant a divorce, then an alternative way of freeing himself would, however reluctantly, have to be found. What this did not mean was that Henry could just fling Catherine aside, for the political problem of making acceptable the essentially unacceptable remained – indeed, was made much worse by the lack of papal authorization. A substitute had to be found for the pope. There was obviously parliament, but an essentially secular body was not best suited to pass judgment on a matter that had traditionally been the preserve of the ecclesiastical courts. Better, perhaps, to confine its role to authorizing some other body to give judgment; but even as regards this supporting role there remained the little matter of whether or not it would be amenable to Henry’s wishes. And this, as has been indicated, was not at all certain.