The King's Cardinal: The Rise and Fall of Thomas Wolsey (Pimlico) (166 page)

¹⁸³
LP
, iv, 5801.

¹⁸⁴
LP
, iv, 5867.

¹⁸⁵
LP
, iv, 5882.

¹⁸⁶
Incidently the policy that, after the failure Thomas Boleyn’s mission to the emperor in early 1530, was to be pursued, but for Wolsey’s advice see
LP
, iv, 5801, 5875, 5881, 5890, 5891, 5893.

¹⁸⁷
St. P
, i, pp.341-2 (
LP
, iv, 5890).

¹⁸⁸
LP
, iv, 5797, 5864-5, 5878 (2), 5966; 5995 (Ehses,
Römische Dokumente
, pp.132-5).

¹⁸⁹
LP
, iv, 5928, 5936.

¹⁹⁰
Ehses,
Römische Dokumente
, p.134 (
LP
, iv, 5995).

¹⁹¹
LP
, iv, 5820.

¹⁹²
For both see
LP
, iv, 6035.

¹⁹³
LP
, iv, 6025.

¹⁹⁴
LP
, iv, 6017, 6035, A.F. Pollard, pp.242-5 for full documentation.

¹⁹⁵
LP
, iv, 6050.

¹⁹⁶
LP
, iv, 6003, 6016.

¹⁹⁷
LP
, iv, 6016.

¹⁹⁸
Hall, p.724.

¹⁹⁹
See p.617 below.

²⁰⁰
See pp.303-4 above for both points.

²⁰¹
See p.623 below.

²⁰²
From the famous preamble to the Act in restraint of appeals of 1533.

²⁰³
Archbishop Cranmer’s judgment at Dunstable, 23 May 1533.

²⁰⁴
LP
, iv, 5953.

²⁰⁵
Sp. Cal
., iv (i), pp.276-7.

²⁰⁶
From
The Lie
; but Raleigh’s authorship is not certain.

²⁰⁷
From the
Epistolatory Satires
.

²⁰⁸
St. P
, i, pp.303-4 (
LP
, iv, 4438).

²⁰⁹
Bellay,
Correspondence
, p.20 (
LP
, iv, 5610).

THE GREAT FRUSTRATION FOR ANYONE TRYING TO FATHOM WHAT WOLSEY
was up to during the last year of his life is that it is a story without an end. Or rather there is an end: Wolsey’s death on 29 November 1530, but it is precisely his death that prevents one from knowing why, almost four weeks earlier, Henry had had him arrested on a charge of treason. Was he really intending to put a cardinal and archbishop to death? True, there were precedents of a kind. Over three hundred and fifty years earlier an archbishop of Canterbury had been murdered in his own cathedral, and though the then king, Henry
II
, may not have been directly responsible, he had felt sufficiently implicated to do penance. In 1405 Henry
IV
had had an archbishop of York, Richard Scrope, executed for treason, a more precise parallel, obviously, but with one important difference: whatever the justification for his actions, Scrope’s treason was undoubted. There can be no such certainty about Wolsey. And whatever the precedents, the death of a prince of the Church at the hands of laymen, however princely, was so unusual and threatened such dangerous political consequences that it immediately raises the question of whether Henry
VIII
could ever have seriously considered taking such a step. Sadly, Wolsey’s death before Henry was forced to declare his hand means that no definitive answer can ever be given, for the vital piece in the jigsaw is missing. This is all the more frustrating because in many ways no period of Wolsey’s life is better documented. There are innumerable letters, both to and from him. There is also Cavendish.

Cavendish’s account of Wolsey’s last months can claim to be one of the great passages of English prose. It is not that it is fine writing; indeed, some may find almost all early Tudor English a little clumsy. But in some rather magical way Cavendish has got the mix right: plenty of lively detail is combined with moral reflections to generate a powerful emotional charge. It helped that for him it was the story not only of the fall of a great man who happened to have been his master, but also of a nation brought low by the lust of a king for his mistress. At this level there is little point in trying to compete with Cavendish, and no such attempt will be made here. This does not mean that his account of these months needs to be accepted, and in what follows in some important respects it will not be. But, given the many criticisms made earlier about him as a historical source, it is only fair to state that for the last months of Wolsey’s life he has to be considered much more reliable than for any other period. This is not surprising. Wolsey was no longer the statesman grappling with the affairs of the nation, the intricacies of which his servant would not have been privy to, even if he had wished to be. The spotlight now focused on the man and his household, and with both of these Cavendish was intimately concerned. He was probably with Wolsey throughout this period. He was certainly one of the few to accompany him on his fateful journey south following his arrest at Cawood, near York, on 4 November, and he was present at his death. Cavendish is, therefore, an important eyewitness of much that took place, and in
the rather special circumstances of his close attendance upon a man both physically and mentally under great stress, he is likely to have been more than usually privy to that man’s thoughts. Not that eyewitnesses are always reliable; and, certainly, by the time that he came to write his biography Cavendish had a very committed view of his former master’s part in England’s destiny. But his usefulness as a source for what actually took place cannot be denied, and to unravel what did take place will be the main purpose of this chapter.

There are three main possibilities, though each of them spawns a number of mutants. Firstly, and most excitingly, Wolsey may have been involved in some kind of conspiracy, perhaps to overthrow Henry himself and replace him with Princess Mary, but at any rate to bring about his own restoration to full power. At the other extreme it is possible that there was no real conspiracy, merely one invented by Henry and/or the ‘Boleyn faction’, with the duke of Norfolk to the fore. There could have been a number of reasons for such a set-up. If Henry was its principal author, then his campaign against the Church in order to force it to embrace his view of his marital status would provide the motivation; if the faction was behind it, then the motivation could have been a determination to prevent a comeback by Wolsey. In the middle lies what might be called the ‘sensible view’. There was no conspiracy, but Wolsey was giving Henry and his advisers genuine grounds for believing that a recently dismissed lord chancellor, apparently winning for himself ever more golden opinions in that always slightly worrying part of the kingdom north of the Trent, constituted a threat that in the rather special circumstances of 1530 was too great to ignore. Such a view has an obvious attraction for one as suspicious of conspiracy theories as the present writer. But people are not always sensible, and there is plenty of evidence that would point to either extreme.

If quantity of evidence alone was the criterion, probably the first view would prevail. It also has going for it, or against, it the fact that it was the official line as, for instance, expounded in correspondence between Henry and his ambassador at the French court, Sir Francis Bryan.
¹
According to the king, Wolsey’s plot was as follows. First, the French were to encourage England to engage in a war with both emperor and pope. War against the former would result in the collapse of English foreign trade, against the latter in Henry’s excommunication and an interdict whereby almost any kind of hostile action against the English Crown would receive the Church’s blessing. The French would thereby be discharged of the need to repay their debts to England, and they would also be provided with a justification for invading the pale of Calais, while the Scots would be enabled to march into Northern England. Both these things, according to Henry, Wolsey had countenanced; but that was only the beginning of it. To counter these invasions the English people would be asked to provide both men and money in great amounts. Henry would then be faced with large-scale unrest, not to say insurrection, on the part of his own subjects. In desperation he would turn against the advisers who had got him into such a mess, and would recall the fallen minister. And as if all this were not enough, something even more miraculous would happen. At an instant Henry’s enemies would cease causing him trouble, and peace and prosperity would reign
again. However, just in case the plot did not quite work out, Wolsey would at the same time have been establishing a fall-back position whereby foreign powers, but especially the papacy and France, would put subtler pressure upon Henry to secure his restoration. What precisely was meant by this is not clear, but at least Wolsey’s full enjoyment of his rights as bishop of Winchester and abbot of St Albans, which he had been forced to surrender when he had accepted that he was guilty of praemunire.

This, then, was what Henry alleged Wolsey was plotting, and the main evidence was apparently provided by members of Wolsey’s own household, especially his Venetian doctor, Agostino Agostini.
²
How much of the evidence can be believed will be considered shortly, but there is no doubt that Agostini was extremely active on Wolsey’s behalf at this time, and was in personal contact with the French ambassador, Joachim, and the Imperial ambassador, Chapuys. Moreover, if Agostini’s evidence is to be believed, then the case for a conspiratorial Wolsey must prevail. It is certainly supported by Joachim’s and Chapuys’s dispatches as well as those of the Venetian and Milanese ambassadors. What is interesting, though, is that reports of Wolsey’s plotting were circulating, and in government circles, a long time before he was arrested. Thus, in July Norfolk informed Chapuys that all Wolsey’s machinations were known to the government, having apparently been revealed by the three men in whom Wolsey had most confidence, though Chapuys mentioned no names.
³
And even if one were inclined to take Norfolk’s statement with a pinch of salt, it is harder to dismiss Chapuys’s account in the previous month of Wolsey’s advice, as conveyed to him by Agostini, that now was the moment to take the strongest possible action on Catherine’s behalf.
⁴
On the face of it, Chapuys’s evidence alone would provide incontrovertible proof of a plot, but it is not alone. When in November Henry informed Sir Francis Bryan of Wolsey’s arrest he sent also, as proof of the cardinal’s mendacity, a copy of an extract from a letter that Agostini would have written on his master’s behalf to the French ambassador in England if he had not had the great sense to perceive that it was ‘maliciously contrived’, and had therefore, without telling Wolsey, not sent it.
⁵
Agostini’s confession, which included his total recall of the letter, was and remains at the heart of the case against Wolsey. If its validity could be undermined, then the rest of the evidence might not be quite as incontrovertible as at first it appears.

Agostini was arrested at the same time and place as Wolsey, but unlike his master he was hurried back to London for questioning, where he quickly turned king’s evidence – if indeed he had not always been a mole, acting on the Crown’s behalf while posing as a loyal servant of the cardinal. The reason for supposing that Agostini was not quite what he seemed to be is the treatment that he received once he got to London. On 13 November Chapuys reported that the doctor had been sent to the Tower on a charge of treason,
⁶
but on the 27th the picture he presented was
very different: ‘The said physician, ever since the second day of his coming here, has been, and still is, treated as a prince in the house of the duke of Norfolk, which clearly shows that he has been singing to the right tune.’
⁷
Writing just a few days later the Milanese ambassador gave a similar account; only he reported that Agostini ‘immediately, from the very first, … found great favour’.
⁸
It was ‘undeniable’, he added, that a few days before his arrest letters of Agostini’s, probably to the French ambassador, had been intercepted, and that these had contained some lines in cipher.