The King's Cardinal: The Rise and Fall of Thomas Wolsey (Pimlico) (57 page)

It would be tedious to list the sixty or more similar references to the Council’s active involvement in policy matters,
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but it should be stressed that they are to be discovered just as frequently at the end of Wolsey’s period as at the beginning. Indeed, the emergence of ‘the king’s great matter’, that is, his search for a divorce, if anything increased the need for Henry to consult with not only his councillors but also a wider sample of the political nation, and ultimately with parliament itself, though this only after Wolsey’s fall. In October 1528 the French ambassador was reporting that ‘in truth he [Wolsey] has been for ten days wonderfully burdened. The king came to him from Hampton Court to Richmond every morning and did not leave the Council till the evening.’
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The imminent arrival of Cardinal Campeggio was the occasion for this perhaps slightly unusual run of Council meetings attended by the king – though, as will be suggested shortly, attend Council meetings he certainly did. Moreover, one thing that all the ambassadorial coverage suggests is that Council meetings at which policy matters were discussed were the norm. So the sixty references are almost certainly the tip of an iceberg. The conclusion must, therefore, be that Wolsey did not preside over a one-man band, nor indeed did he even preside. Henry did that. Moreover, there is very little trace in any of the many letters that Wolsey wrote of that ‘thoughtlessness and self-aggrandizement’ that he has so often been accused of.
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As we have seen, he could be critical when people were failing to carry out instructions, but he could also show considerable patience, even when fellow councillors were advocating different and, in his view, damaging policies. Thus, when Richard Pace was bombarding him with excessive praise of the duke of Bourbon’s abilities and willingness to do Henry’s bidding, Wolsey bent over backwards not to offend the prickly royal secretary.
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In his inevitably difficult relationship with Warham, whose position he had in a number of ways usurped, Wolsey worked very hard to keep the older man happy. When in January 1523 Warham was ill, he seems to have been genuinely touched by Wolsey’s offer to allow him to convalesce at Hampton Court.
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In April 1525, at a most difficult time for both Wolsey and the government as opposition to the Amicable Grant increased, he was very supportive, pointing out to his ‘dearest friend’ that someone in Wolsey’s position would always take the brunt of any criticism of royal government, ‘but whatever be spoken, the fruits which a tree brings forth will prove its goodness.’
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Wolsey was good at the art of man-management, as More himself admitted when he acknowledged the way in which by praising him in a letter addressed to himself but which Wolsey knew would be read to Henry, the cardinal had managed both to ‘give me your thanks and get me his [the king’s]. I were, my good lord, very blind if I perceived not, very unkind if I ever forgot, of what gracious favour it proceedeth.’ And even under the enormous
stress of the final months before his downfall, Wolsey could show a sensitivity to the pressures that the English envoys at Rome were also under.
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It may have already become apparent – though it is a matter that will be considered in more detail in chapter 13 – that, far from being riven by faction, Henry’s councillors worked well together, often in difficult circumstances, to ensure the effectiveness of the king’s government. The composition of the Council was very much the same mix as it had always been: noblemen, such as the two Norfolks and Suffolk; leading churchmen, such Clerk and Tunstall, household officials such as Sir Henry Wyatt; and men such as Thomas More, or his predecessor as chancellor of the duchy of Lancaster, Richard Wingfield, often with a legal background and a tradition of service to the Crown.
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Undoubtedly there was a pecking order, and one that reflected the fact that the Council was expected to turn its attention to every conceivable matter, whether it was dilapidated dovecotes in Sussex or complaints to be presented to the emperor for his refusal to play his full part in the Great Enterprise. As regards policy, it was upon a small group of councillors that the king relied: again the two Norfolks, father and son, and Suffolk, Ruthal and Tunstall, Fitzwilliam, Lovell, More and Wingfield, and perhaps also Richard Pace, Henry Marney, Thomas Boleyn and Henry Wyatt. It is not a precise list. Important people were often away on the king’s business, leading armies, or on diplomatic missions. If we bear in mind that Marney and Ruthal died in 1523, the 2nd duke of Norfolk and Lovell in 1524 and Wingfield in 1525, it becomes clear that the inner ring, sometimes referred to as a privy or secret council, was indeed small.
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This is not altogether surprising: the number of close advisers that anyone has tends to be limited. Henry
VII
relied at any one time on about seven,
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Elizabeth perhaps on even fewer.
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It is a feature of every study of the royal Council from the late fourteenth century to at least the end of the sixteenth that it was the principal officeholders – lord chancellor, lord treasurer and lord privy seal – together with one or two household officials or special friends of the monarch, who made up the inner ring.
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In the metaphysical search for a privy council whose formation in the 1530s supposedly signified a new and ‘modern’ way of conducting the king’s business, the more vital fact that important matters had always been dealt with by a small group has been obscured.
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So also has the fact that a formal body with its own staff, assigned membership, and recognized procedures for implementing its decisions and recording of them, had been in existence for at least a hundred years before Wolsey, and, more relevantly, before the supposed architect of the new form of Council, Thomas Cromwell.
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In fact, as we saw in chapter 4, all that happened in the 1530s was that the legal work of the Council was formally hived off to the court of Star
Chamber, so as to prevent its agenda from becoming clogged up.
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A similar process had taken place in the twelfth and and early thirteenth centuries to bring about the court of King’s Bench, and in the late thirteenth and fourteenth centuries to establish the court of Chancery.

However, the essential point being made here is that the king’s Council, as the most important consultative and administrative body in the realm, did not go into abeyance in Wolsey’s time. Then, as now, it can be difficult to express opinions contrary to one’s boss – something that Tunstall had in mind when in December 1525 he wrote to Henry from Toledo begging him not to think that he was dissatisfied with the ‘determination’ of the king and Council. However, as Henry had admitted him, ‘being of your own making, to be of your most honourable Council’, he thought it right to give his opinion, and had been encouraged to do so by declarations often made by Henry in Council ‘that, whatsoever our opinions be, we may have liberty to show them without displeasure’.
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And in a letter to Wolsey he asked him to mitigate the king’s displeasure, expressed in royal letters of 30 October, at certain words in a letter he had written to Brian Tuke, which he believed Henry had misunderstood.
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If the ambassadors with the emperor could not write freely to the king and Council, it might hinder affairs.

Tunstall’s two letters contain many insights into the workings of the upper reaches of Henry’s government. They confirm that to offer advice on important policy matters was considered, at least by one of its members, to be an integral part of the Council’s role. They also help to confirm an underlying theme of this study, that in a real sense Henry did rule. For one thing, it is strongly implied that he frequently sat in Council. Usually it is held that he appeared only on a few very important occasions or set pieces: for instance, when on 14 May 1517 those who had been arrested for their part in the Evil May Day riots were pardoned.
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In contrast, his father is often said to have sat regularly, thereby confirming once more that a hardworking father had been succeeded by a lazy son.
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One of the problems in arriving at any conclusions on this subject is that information about Council meetings for both reigns is extremely scanty; for Henry
VII
’s reign only 135, or about a six a year, are known of, when, during the legal term at least, the Council may have sat every day. Of these 135, the king is known not to have sat in less than half.
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For Wolsey’s period, 580 meetings of the Council in Star Chamber have been identified, but with Henry
VIII
appearing in only a handful.
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The conclusion should not, though, be that the usual view is correct. What in essence has survived are selections made by late sixteenth- and early seventeenth-century officials of the court of Star Chamber, together with often undated documents relating to
particular cases.
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One result of this is that the evidence is very much weighted towards judicial matters, and even on the known figures it seems that neither king was an active participant in the everyday judicial work of the Council. At the beginning of his reign at least, Henry
VII
may have sat a little more frequently than his son did, but it looks as if he soon realized that this was a waste of his time; at any rate from 1497 it was thought necessary to appoint a president of the Council. Moreover, it had not been customary for previous kings regularly to preside over the judicial and administrative work of their Councils, much of it of a fairly routine nature. Like Henry
VII
, they only did so in exceptional circumstances.
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What they wanted was advice and support, but it is precisely in this area that the sources are so deficient, as indeed they have continued to be. Policy matters tend not to get into minutes of any kind, or, if they do, only in the most laconic form: a heated discussion lasting an hour may result in only one line, if that. If one combines the nature of the sources with the usual bias against Wolsey, one can quite see why he has been thought, erroneously, not to have allowed the Council a political role. What has contributed to the error is precisely the notion that Henry
VIII
was weak and lazy, at least when young, and therefore happy to allow Wolsey to take the reins of government into his capable hands.

Tunstall’s letter is not the only piece of evidence that Henry sat in Council. Already mentioned are the half-dozen set pieces and du Bellay’s references to the the ten days he was present in October 1528. It is known that ten years earlier Henry was presiding over Council meetings at Abingdon and Woodstock.
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And in January 1523 the Imperial ambassadors reported that after dinner the king was some time in Council.
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An interesting variation on this was noted in June 1525, when Margaret of Austria’s envoys reported a meeting with the Council during which Henry, in an adjoining room, occasionally put in an appearance.
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This could be taken as evidence of the lazy Henry who did not bother to attend the whole meeting; but the head of any organization may wish to reserve his interventions to particular moments in a discussion; and as far as international relations are concerned, the whole point of having foreign secretaries, or their equivalents, is to keep the head of state in reserve. Still, it is a reminder that evidence does need interpretation, and the evidence of Henry’s direct involvement in government is not only sparse, but difficult to interpret. Hence the wildly differing assessments of the part he played – at least by historians. Contemporaries never seem to have doubted that he was a powerful personality, whose presence could never be forgotten – a perception not to be dismissed lightly.

Part of the reason for the difficulty in assessing the evidence is the one already touched upon: that it is the consequences of decisions – in the early sixteenth century letters patent, writs and so on, along with the more familiar correspondence – rather than the making of them which produce evidence that survives. And since it was the king’s task to make decisions rather than implement them, he does not figure in surviving evidence in the way that much less important figures do; and if
importance depended upon extant handwriting, it would be people such as Ruthal and Pace, and even humbler figures such as the clerks of the Council, who would come out on top – which would be plainly absurd. It is not that Henry did not like writing letters, or even that he was incapable of writing them; he was a highly educated man, perfectly literate, and not just in his own language. As now, important people had secretaries, and might barely glance at the bulk of the letters that went out under their name. Most of Wolsey’s letters were written by others, and in 1517 Richard Fox could marvel that he had found the leisure to write to him in his own hand, clearly taking it it as a special compliment.
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The major problem for a biographer of Wolsey is that much of the business between king and cardinal was conducted in private, without any record of what was said surviving, and this makes it very difficult to assess the dynamics of the relationship. And at this point it is important to stress that they did meet frequently, because it has been argued that one of the problems Wolsey faced in retaining the confidence of and, in some accounts, domination over the king is that he was with him so little.
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What is true is that once he became lord chancellor he was forced to be in London much of the year, presiding over Chancery and Star Chamber. London was also the most convenient place to conduct the day to day running of foreign policy. It was there that the foreign ambassadors resided, and it was well placed to be a centre of communications with the continent. And if he was not at his London residence, York Place, he was usually at Hampton Court, even after he had exchanged it with Henry for the palace of Richmond, probably in 1525, or, if not there, at either Tittenhanger or the More, two manor houses belonging to the the abbey of St Albans. Henry also spent a good deal of time in and around London, but mainly at his palace at Greenwich, or, if he wished to be right in the City, at Bridewell. He was also often at Windsor, the usual venue for the court’s Christmas festivities, and those connected with St George and the knights of the garter in April and May. In July and August Henry went on progress, visiting his leading subjects’ country houses, and also staying at the many royal manor houses, such as Ampthill and Woodstock. Mentioned already has been his visit to the duke of Buckingham at Penshurst in 1519. In 1526 he was in Sussex and Hampshire and in the following year spent most of August at his new palace of Beaulieu in Essex, while Wolsey was in France. In fact, even in a more normal year, it was not Wolsey’s practice to go on progress with Henry, so that during the summer months their usual means of communication was by letter.