The King's Cardinal: The Rise and Fall of Thomas Wolsey (Pimlico) (4 page)

The precise date of Wolsey’s birth is not known, but it was probably in late 1472 or early the following year. His father, Robert, appears to have been a successful innkeeper and butcher in the Ipswich area.
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Thomas was sent to Magdalen College, Oxford, having probably first attended the college’s school;
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at any rate it would have been quite normal for a person of his social and financial standing to have done so.
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Though many details are missing, he clearly had a successful, if not
outstanding, academic career. He would have read first of all for a Bachelor of Arts degree, in his day normally taking four years to complete, followed by three years reading for a Master of Arts. There would then usually have been two years as ‘regent in practice’, essentially a junior teaching post, and only after this would he have started on his theology degree course. To obtain a B.Th. required at the very least a further seven years’ study, but by the time Wolsey left the university in 1501 he had not taken his degree – not altogether surprising when one starts to do the arithmetic. Even if, as Cavendish had it from Wolsey himself,
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he became a B.A. when only fifteen, probably in 1488 – and this would have been unusually young
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– he could not have become a B.Th. until at the earliest 1498, and more reasonably 1500. If such distractions as his year as master of Magdalen School and his two years as bursar are then added, there was hardly time for him to have obtained the degree by 1501
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– as anyone studying for a further degree today would surely confirm! In fact, nothing would be known about his academic attainments if in 1510 he had not obtained a grace to proceed to degrees of B.Th. and D.Th.,
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something that would not have been granted if he had not gone a long way to meet the statutory requirements as to length of study and academic attainment.
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There is documentary evidence for his having been bursar of Magdalen College and master of Magdalen School. There is nothing, however, in the records to support the college tradition that he was dismissed from the former office for financial impropriety in connection with the building of the college’s most beautiful tower.
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He certainly was not dismissed from his fellowship, which one might have thought would have been an inevitable consequence. In 1500-1, just prior to his resignation from the college, he held the mastership of the school and the quite senior post of dean of divinity, which does not suggest that he was in any way in disgrace. And there is nothing surprising about his resignation. Through the patronage of the marquess of Dorset, whose sons he had taught at Magdalen School, in October 1500 he became rector of Limington in Somerset. With the benefice came an income of £21, and thus some measure of financial security; and, more to the point, it was a statutory requirement that on obtaining a benefice worth more than £8 a year, a fellow should resign.
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Limington is the scene for another story not entirely to the credit of the young Wolsey. According to Cavendish, Wolsey managed to offend the local squire, Sir Amyas Paulet, and as a consequence was put in the stocks.
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Unfortunately Cavendish gave no explanation for this but later two were given – one that Wolsey was a drunkard, the other that he was a fornicator!
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Be that as it may, as lord chancellor Wolsey supposedly got his revenge by insisting that Paulet be confined to
the Middle Temple, where he was made to supervise the building of a new gatehouse adorned with decoration in praise of the miscreant he had punished so many years previously. For Cavendish, the story served as a warning to all in authority to have a certain humility, because the wheel of fortune never stops going round – and who knows where it will deposit one next? In other words it was a moral fable, but based on how much truth? For Cavendish morality was always more important than accuracy, but it is doubtful that, even to point the moral, he would have gone to the trouble of a complete fabrication. What seems more likely is that he picked up gossip, itself derived merely from the fact that Paulet was for a time treasurer of the Middle Temple
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– but to become such is not quite the same as being a prisoner there! Moreover, it is unlikely that Wolsey was resident at Limington long enough for any conflict between him and Paulet to have arisen. Clerical careerists were not inclined to linger in their first benefices, and it is much more likely that Wolsey was never resident at Limington. Very soon after resigning his fellowship he became chaplain to the archbishop of Canterbury, Henry Deane; and it must have been soon after because Deane died in 1503, having only been appointed in 1501. Thus, one way and another, the story as Cavendish presented it looks to have been so garbled as to bear little relation to the truth.

The patronage of a marquess and an archbishop of Canterbury made a promising beginning, but by 1503 both were dead. For a time Wolsey had to make do with service in the household of Sir Richard Nanfan, governor of Calais, where he seems to have resided until Nanfan’s death in 1507. Only then did he make the vital transference to the royal household, becoming chaplain to Henry
VII
. As such, his duties were not in any sense confined to the saying of the office, or preaching, or indeed to any more general spiritual duties. There was very little specialization amongst household servants, whether royal or otherwise, clerical or secular. Someone with Wolsey’s university training would have been expected to perform every kind of administrative duty, and in the royal household this would have included serving on missions abroad. Wolsey’s experience at Calais especially equipped him for such work, and in 1508 he was sent both to Scotland and the Low Countries. Surviving correspondence between him and his royal master suggests that even within such a short time his views were being taken seriously,
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and his appointment as dean of Lincoln in February 1509 is further evidence of the good impression that he was making. However, in April Henry
VII
died. As chaplain, Wolsey not surprisingly took part in the funeral service, but he may not have been immediately appointed chaplain to the new king.
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Whether it is right to deduce from this that Margaret Beaufort, Henry
VIII
’s grandmother, had taken against him is another matter.
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There is no evidence that she had; and by November he was not
only once again royal chaplain, but also almoner – but by then Margaret was dead.

It is on such slender evidence – the coincidence of her death on 30 July and Wolsey’s reappointment to the royal household on, as has been assumed wrongly, 8 November, that the stuff, or should one say the fantasy, of faction has been built.
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In fact, all that is known for certain is that by that date he already held both offices; and my guess would be that he was appointed almoner on Thomas Hobbs’s death in September, and that probably he had never ceased to be a royal chaplain. But whatever the truth of this, from November 1509 Wolsey’s career was to proceed in leaps and bounds. In April 1510 he was appointed registrar of the Order of the Garter. There followed a burst of ecclesiastical preferments, culminating in February 1513 in the deanery of York. The successful campaign in France during the summer of that year, in the organization of which he played a leading part, brought him the rather doubtful benefit of the bishopric of Tournai, his claim to which in the face of a French rival he never made effective. However, by March 1514 Wolsey was bishop of Lincoln, and by September he had been translated to York. On 10 September 1515 he became a cardinal, and on 24 December lord chancellor. In May 1518 he obtained his first commission as legate
a latere
, thereby securing at least a legal supremacy over the English Church, and by maintaining pressure on the papacy he was to have it periodically renewed, and enlarged, until in January 1524 he became legate
a latere
for life.
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Meanwhile in July 1518 he had obtained the bishopric of Bath and Wells
in commendam
, which is to say he held it in conjunction with York. In 1523 he exchanged it for Durham, and in 1529 he exchanged Durham for Winchester, while all the time remaining archbishop of York. In addition, in November 1521 he had been granted the abbacy of St Albans, which he thus held
in commendam
with his bishoprics.
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Pluralism, or the holding of a number of ecclesiastical offices at the same time, was a commonplace of the period, and had been for much of the Church’s history. Nevertheless, though common on the continent, in an English context the practice of holding
in commendam
was unprecedented. Thus John Morton, whose political authority under Henry
VII
was similar to Wolsey’s under Henry
VIII
, became archbishop of Canterbury and a cardinal, but never held more than one episcopal office, nor did he combine such an office with an abbacy. It will be argued subsequently that the difference is to be explained not by Wolsey’s greater greed, but by Henry
VIII
’s greater standing in European affairs. That, however, raises the question as to why Henry was so anxious to promote Wolsey in this very generous way.

Broadly, there have been two responses to such a question. One has it that Henry was weak and lazy, a natural victim to every scheming courtier or ambitious cleric. Like most weak people, according to this argument, he was also a poor judge of men, and, though he could put his faith in somebody as statesmanlike as Thomas Cromwell, he was just as likely to be seduced by Tom, Dick or Harry – but even
more by a Catherine, Anne or Jane! Admittedly in such a scenario Wolsey is a slight anomaly. He did, after all, hold a position of considerable power for fifteen years, which suggests a modicum of constancy on Henry’s part. However, the way round this has been to concentrate on Wolsey’s particularly effective – some have even thought magical – powers of seduction on a young and therefore more than usually impressionable Henry. Not until he grew up would he try to take the reins of power into his own hands, only to fall even more swiftly into the clutches of somebody else. Or to put it another way, the more Henry tried to be king, the more obviously his weaknesses were exposed. However, in the context of Wolsey’s rise to prominence the key has been seen to be an essentially passive Henry being manipulated by a very active Wolsey – a view which can easily complement that of an excessively greedy Wolsey.
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The counter-argument, if not exactly the reverse of the first because it has never been suggested that Wolsey was weak, has placed the emphasis on a powerful Henry dominating all that he surveyed, and insofar as there was factional fighting very much the puppeteer rather than the puppet. It is the Henry of the Holbein portraits, bull-like in his bulk and arrogance. It is the Henry who got through six wives and in the process executed two of them; the Henry of the Field of Cloth of Gold, the Henry who no sooner had he been proclaimed Defender of the Faith by one pope than he repudiated the authority of another and took the English Church into schism – and, as it turned out, into the Protestant camp. And if this was what Henry was like, then the explanation for Wolsey’s rise is simply that Henry saw him as a suitable instrument for his own ambitions – and when he ceased to be such, he was dismissed.
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Contrasts of this kind are helpful in finding one’s way about, but they also distort and exaggerate. In the course of this book, it is hoped, some shading will emerge. Henry, after all, was not a bull, and to get through six wives is not necessarily a sign of strength. Nevertheless, of these two ways of looking at Henry it is the latter that will be adopted here.
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There are many reasons for this, but, not I hope too perversely, the best way of explaining the decision is to show how the alternative view has developed. In so doing, it will be possible to examine in some detail the influence that the major literary sources have exerted on subsequent
interpretations. What will also emerge is a more informative chronology of Wolsey’s rise than the mere recital of the principal offices he held in Church and state.

The notion that it was a passive Henry – in the words of Sir Geoffrey Elton, the most influential modern exponent of the view, a ‘bit of a booby and a bit of a baby’
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– manipulated by the wily Wolsey goes back, like so much else that is unfavourable to him, to Polydore Vergil. Indeed, Vergil is virtually the only contemporary source for Wolsey’s political career before 1515. Hall is surprisingly laconic; his first mention of Wolsey is not until his appointment as bishop of Lincoln in February 1514, by which time, in most accounts, Wolsey had already masterminded the 1513 campaign in France.
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He does, however, suggest that Wolsey was behind the diplomatic revolution of the summer of 1514, whereby Henry, having spent a year or two fighting the French, suddenly deserted the Habsburgs and Ferdinand of Aragon, and married his sister to the king of France.
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As Hall hated the French, it provides him with the occasion of awarding the first black mark; but as regards Wolsey’s rise to influence, all he ventures is that, when in the November of that year Wolsey was translated to York, he ‘bare all the rule about the king, and what he said was obeyed in all places’.
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Obviously, Cavendish has something to say about Wolsey’s rise, but, as was made clear earlier, his account of his career prior to 1523 was derivative, if, in part, derived from Wolsey himself. Nevertheless, in some respects Cavendish’s account is of a man willing and able to take advantage of a ‘young and lusty’ king only too happy to place all ‘troublesome business’ in someone else’s hands.
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To that extent he is an exponent, and source, of the passive view of Henry. However, he makes some rather important qualifications – of which more later – and anyway does not attempt anything like such a detailed account as Vergil. As for Skelton, that most influential jibe, already quoted, about the pre-eminence of Hampton Court over the king’s court puts him firmly in the same camp. It is he who, along with William Tyndale,
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ascribed Wolsey’s ascendancy to