The King's Cardinal: The Rise and Fall of Thomas Wolsey (Pimlico) (157 page)

But what is one to make of the confession of one William Stapleton who in the late 1520s was called in by a servant of Norfolk to free his master from a spirit allegedly conjured up by Wolsey’s enchantment? And what of the Scotsman who, while in France in 1527, got to hear of rude remarks against the duke that Wolsey had apparently made to the French at Amiens, and then reported them to Norfolk? As regards Stapleton, it is necessary to bear in mind he was a professional ‘conjuror’ who had previously been up before Sir Thomas More for trying to find treasure by magical means, and it looks rather as if Norfolk had been deliberately leading him on in order to discover more about his activities.
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As regards the Scotsman, there was no doubt some truth in the anecdote, but only insofar as he was reporting that favourite gambit of Wolsey with foreigners in which he portrayed himself as the only Englishman who favoured their cause.
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A feature of both episodes is that Norfolk did not attempt to conceal them from Wolsey. This may have been mere prudence: he would no doubt have borne in mind the salutary example of his father-in-law, the duke of Buckingham, whose secret consultations with the Carthusian prophesier of Henton Priory had led to his destruction in 1521. Still, if he was seriously planning Wolsey’s destruction, why get involved with the likes of Stapleton, only then to rat on him? And if he had to tell somone, why not go straight to the king, who after all was the man he had to persuade that Wolsey was up to no good if he was going to bring the cardinal down? In fact, on both occasions Norfolk behaved very correctly, and in a way that does not suggest that he believed Wolsey to be his evil genius. Twenty years later, however, he was to maintain, if not quite that, at least that Wolsey had spent all his political life plotting against him.

On the face of it this statement would appear decisively to refute the claim being made here that Wolsey and Norfolk got on perfectly well. Here is Norfolk himself saying quite the opposite, and why should we not believe him? One reason might be that twenty years is a considerable time. Wolsey was long dead and much discredited, so that it did not really matter what Norfolk said about him. Moreover, the accusation was made in a letter to the Council written from the Tower where he had just been placed, along with his eldest son, on a charge of treason.
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Its purpose was to show that he who had done so much for his sovereign had been misunderstood and wronged by almost everyone at court, especially those who had
in the end proved unfaithful to their master: his two nieces, Anne Boleyn and Catherine Howard; Buckingham; and the two great ministers of the Crown, Cromwell and Wolsey. The price of his loyalty had been their opposition to him, so how was it that this man who had suffered so much on behalf of his king could now be considered a traitor? This at any rate was Norfolk’s argument, and, of course, the truth about the opposition to him was not his greatest concern. Moreover, what he had to say about Wolsey’s plotting against him does not fit in very well with the usual interpretations of his part in the downfall of Wolsey. For one thing, he had learnt of it from Wolsey himself, and only after he had been removed from office, so it cannot have provided the motivation for his alleged machinations against Wolsey. For another, what according to Norfolk Wolsey had confessed to was that he had been put up to his plotting by an aristocratic faction, which had included none other than the duke of Suffolk, who is usually supposed to have been working with Norfolk against Wolsey! It is all very confusing, and in the end cannot be very convincing evidence of what was really going on between the two men during the 1520s.

It is begins to look as if there were two Norfolks. On the one hand there was the Norfolk ‘small and spare in person, and his hair black’,
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a Machiavellian figure who not only destroyed Henry’s Wolsey and Cromwell but who may have attempted to murder his second wife while she was pregnant! Such a Norfolk deserves the judgement of a great Tudor historian that he was ‘one of the most unpleasant characters in an age which abounded in them’.
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What is interesting about this version is that it is based largely on the evidence of foreign ambassadors and the like, who, as we have seen, often had some axe to grind. The other Norfolk, emerging largely from his own correspondence, was the conscientious duke co-operating fully with Wolsey to ensure the good government of the realm. And in other respects his correspondence is relevant to our present concerns. In October 1523 he wrote to the cardinal a rather sad letter from Newcastle, asking to be discharged from his responsibilities in the North: by the end of the month the campaigning season would be over so that for the time being Albany would be no threat; the affairs of the North were generally in good order, but he himself was not, because after four years of almost continual fighting, in Ireland, France and the Far North, he was desperately in need of some respite.
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The letter that he wrote a month later to Henry was even more emotional, for he made the dramatic announcement that another winter in the North would kill him.
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He followed this up with another letter to Wolsey, in which he explained that ‘the little flesh that I had is clean gone, and yet I am not sick, but in a manner I eat very little, and these five week days I never slept one whole hour without waking, my mind is so troubled for fear that anything should frame amiss’.
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On the face of it this all adds up to dramatic evidence not only that Wolsey was deliberately keeping poor Norfolk away from court, but that he was trying to kill him off!

Undoubtedly Norfolk was in a bad way, and, as we have suggested, may have
permitted himself the occasional rude remark about a cardinal sitting comfortably in front of his own fire. But momentary anger need not indicate long-term enmity, and as their replies to Norfolk’s passionate requests for a discharge indicate, both Henry and Wolsey believed that he was performing a vital service, for as the former wrote: ‘Considering that for your wisdom, prowess and experience no man is more meet to match him [Albany]’, Norfolk must ‘possess himself with patience’ until such time as the situation on the Border had become clearer.
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But if his continuing presence in the far North was deemed essential for the success of royal policy there, this did not mean that his actions were beyond criticism. Indeed, Wolsey was often critical: Norfolk had been warned; he should have foreseen that; unnecessary expense could have been avoided if only; and, above all, if only he had carried out his instructions.
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But no more than Norfolk’s momentary anger, should these criticisms to ‘his loving friend’ be taken as Wolsey’s final judgement on Norfolk, for just as often he praised the duke, some of the praise in marginal notes intended for Henry’s eyes only
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– not the best way of doing down his arch-rival! What elicited the particular response were the particular circumstances, and it is precisely these that a conspiratorial view of Henrician politics ignores. Every scrap of evidence is dragged in to support the view that leading figures were always at one another’s throats and, in this instance, the fact that it was the overriding necessity of defeating Albany that explains Wolsey’s critical comments is ignored. Moreover, the leitmotiv of Wolsey’s criticisms was that Norfolk was failing to carry out instructions which he himself had helped to draw up.
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And when Henry and Wolsey at last agreed to let him return south, it was not out of any great concern for his health, but because they wished to consult with him in person about the king’s affairs. Wolsey never saw Norfolk as merely an executant of royal policy, but as one involved in its making at the highest level. As lord treasurer from 1522, he was one of the principal ministers of the Crown, and despite his frequent absences on active service, he emerges as one of the most regular attenders of Council meetings. No wonder that in 1525 the Imperial ambassador wrote to Margaret of Austria: ‘You know how powerful the cardinal and Norfolk are in this kingdom and how much confidence their master places in them.’
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Does it not become ever more difficult to sustain the belief that the two men were bitter enemies?

What it is also difficult to sustain is a belief in the Machiavellian Norfolk, for if there is one thing which his many letters from the North make abundantly clear, it is that he found responsibility a great worry, which makes him an unlikely candidate for the role of leader of a faction. Of course, one has to be extremely careful. Writing in the 1530s, his wife provided the text for the Machiavellian Norfolk when she alleged that he could ‘speak fair, as well to his enemy as to his friend, and that I perceive by them that be dead and them that be alive’.
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But given the unhappy state of the marriage at this time the text does not have to be believed; and it may be
relevant that in their quarrels not only their children, but her own brother, who refused even to have her in his house, took the duke’s side.
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And it is very difficult to believe that when on 23 October 1523 Norfolk ‘scribbled’ a note to Wolsey ‘at 11 at night’ desperately seeking further instructions,
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he was only pretending to be worried in order to disguise his ambitious plans to usurp Wolsey’s place. Norfolk was always worrying about something, usually about whether he was carrying out his instructions properly, so that on occasions he drove Wolsey to distraction. Yet this is the man who is supposed to have successfully plotted to bring down first Wolsey and then Cromwell, so that he could be, under Henry, the first man in the land. It really will not do. Norfolk was loyal, conscientious, hardworking, reasonably intelligent, though, as du Bellay commented on more than one occasion,
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not nearly as intelligent as Wolsey. If this makes him seem too good to be true, there are criticisms that can be made. Thomas Magnus, a close observer of Norfolk’s rule of the North during 1523 and 1524, believed that, while the duke always took great pains to serve the king, he was ‘some deal suspicious, … and soon will be moved to be hasty’,
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and the observation seems a shrewd one. Norfolk was a little suspicious, towards the end of his life even a little paranoid, as his letter from the Tower in 1546 indicates, though perhaps one should be allowed a little paranoia when in the Tower! Still, his efforts always to do the right thing may well have been only part of a strategy to deflect all possible criticism from himself. He may also have felt that his great services to Henry had not always been appreciated, even that Wolsey had not always appreciated him. Norfolk was no saint, but there is nothing in his character to suggest that he had either the ability or the desire to be a ruthless manipulator of the political scene. Why then did people as shrewd as the Imperial and French ambassadors think that he was just that? Part of the explanation is that as one of the two or three most important men in the kingdom, Norfolk was bound to be thought of as Wolsey’s rival. It has also to do with the particular circumstances of the years 1527 to 1529. More will have to be said about both these things, but before this is done it is necessary to consider whether, any more than his fellow duke, Suffolk emerges as someone who had it in him to bring Wolsey down.

There are three aspects to Suffolk’s career and character that are relevant. The most obvious is that he seems to have always got on well with Wolsey; indeed, in their younger days they were probably close friends.
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The hiccup to Suffolk’s career in early 1515 brought about by his initially unauthorized marriage to the king’s sister Mary may have placed some strain on the friendship, but the strain was inherent in the situation; Henry to begin with was furious, as well he might be, and Wolsey had no choice but to represent that fury to Suffolk. However, it appears that Wolsey did his best to restore Suffolk to royal favour, and, that achieved, continued to give help and advice, especially on his very complicated financial affairs. One
consequence of his becoming duke in 1514 and being set up as a great East Anglian magnate, was that Suffolk was less frequently at court, so that he did not see as much of Wolsey as previously. However, one of his close advisers in East Anglia, Humphrey Wingfield, was also close to Wolsey, which must have helped to continue the good relations between duke and cardinal.
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Certainly, as late as 1527 and at least during the first half of 1528, the two were corresponding in a friendly way, with Suffolk asking Wolsey the usual mixture of favours, and Wolsey doing his best to provide them.
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In fact, the increasing importance to England at this time of the French alliance involved Wolsey and Suffolk, known for his francophile sentiments, working closely together on plans for possible military action against the emperor.
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Their co-operation was also called for over the difficulties in East Anglia, for, like Norfolk, Suffolk was doing everything possible to ensure that the government measures to alleviate distress and to maintain law and order were put into effect there.
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And, as with Norfolk, there is no hint in all this of any attempt by Suffolk to take advantage of the government’s difficulties to embarrass a Wolsey who on the face of it remained his friend.

The second point to make is that Suffolk emerges as an even less likely candidate for the leadership, or even membership of a faction, than Norfolk. Indeed, the chief impression is of a man who, despite almost as dramatic a rise as Wolsey’s – from, ‘stable boy into a nobleman’, as Erasmus, with a good deal of exaggeration, had put it
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– was as near as anybody in his position could have been to being apolitical. His elevation to a dukedom had been entirely due to his friendship with the young Henry, with whom he shared an interest in military matters. He showed himself to be a competent enough soldier, who was, as has already been noted, along with Norfolk, the natural choice to command a royal army in the 1520s, and indeed during most of the reign. But what really seems to have brought him and Henry together was their mutual passion for the joust, at which they both excelled. And sport is perhaps the key to Suffolk’s character: today he would have been very much the ‘good chap’, almost a ‘hooray Henry’, excelling at most games, enjoying his field sports, not especially bright but loyal and courageous. Suffolk, wrote the Venetain ambassador in 1531 was