The King's Cardinal: The Rise and Fall of Thomas Wolsey (Pimlico) (169 page)

At this stage it may be helpful to try to approach the matter from Wolsey’s point of view. How had he come through the enormous strain of the events of October 1529 when, accused of praemunire, he had been dismissed as lord chancellor, and then banished, first to the bishop of Winchester’s palace at Esher, and then in the following March to Richmond? Not surprisingly, his mood appears to have oscillated. In a letter that he wrote to Henry shortly after the original charges of praemunire were made against him he referred to himself as ‘your poor, heavy, and wretched Priest’.
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According to Chapuys, he managed to remain in control of himself until the day after the great seal was removed from him, that is to say 18
October, at which point ‘all his bravadoes turned suddenly into bitter complaints, tears, and sighs which are unceasing night and day’.
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Chapuys also reported that Henry had sent Wolsey a ring ‘by way of consolation’.
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According to Cavendish, on receiving it from the groom of the stool, Sir Henry Norris, Wolsey, ‘incontinent, kneeled down in the dirt upon both his knees, holding up his hands for joy’, where he was joined by Norris…

And talking with Master Norris upon his knees in the mire, he would have pulled off his cap of velvet, but he could not undo the knot under his chin. Wherefore with violence he rent the laces and pulled it from his head and so kneeled bareheaded. And that done, he covered again his head and arose, and would have mounted his mule, but he could not mount again with such agility as he lighted before, where his footmen had as much ado to set him in his saddle as they could have
.
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Here are obvious signs of emotional stress, and if one is tempted to think that Cavendish had embroidered the scene a little, it has to be said that the same signs are very much present in Wolsey’s own letters of the next two or three months, especially those that he wrote to the man he was most relying upon to conduct his negotiations, Thomas Cromwell. He was for Wolsey his ‘only aider in this mine intolerable anxiety and heaviness’,
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and any delay in communications with him sent Wolsey into utter despair, in December writing that ‘the furthering and putting over of your coming hither hath so increased my sorrow, and put me in such anxiety of mind that this night my breath and wind by sighing was so short that I was by the space of three hours as one that should have died’.
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How far these symptoms resulted only from stress is hard to say, for by late January he was very ill. Agostini, a doctor himself, wrote a hurried note to Cromwell for Dr Butts, the king’s own doctor, and one other, to be sent immediately, and ordered a good supply of leeches.
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Cromwell seems to have passed the request on to Henry, and, at least according to Cavendish, the royal response was both prompt and friendly. Not only was Butts sent, but four other doctors as well. In addition, and perhaps a far better medicine than any doctor could have provided, Henry sent another ring ‘for a token of our good will and favour’, and with it the message that he was in no way offended by Wolsey, who should therefore ‘be of good cheer, and pluck up his heart and take no despair’. And as if this was not enough, Henry also persuaded Anne to send a token, and with it ‘very gentle and comfortable words’.
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All this royal concern on behalf of one who only a few months before had been dismissed from office and charged with praemunire seems rather curious, all the more so since a few months later he would be arrested for treason. Still, the concern seems to have been effective, for when Joachim visited him late in March he found a Wolsey who was not only physically well but ‘so completely resigned and so armed with patience’ that there was no need for the French ambassador to console him
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– but by then Henry had at last made up
his mind about what to do with Wolsey.

When in October 1529 Wolsey confessed to being guilty of praemunire, legally he lost everything but his life. He had no income, no property and no position. His continued existence depended entirely upon what Henry chose to give back to him, and Henry had shown himself to be in no hurry to come to a decision. A general pardon was not granted until 10 February 1530,
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and though Wolsey was at the same time informed about the major decisions concerning his future, in the following weeks negotiations continued, and indeed in a sense they never ceased until the day he was arrested. These decisions can be briefly summarized as follows.
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Wolsey was to be allowed to enjoy all his rights and revenues as archbishop of York, with the exception of a few wealthy collations which were to be placed at the king’s disposal. But York Place, the London residence of the archbishops of York and very much Wolsey’s centre of his operations, was to be forfeited to the Crown, shortly to emerge as Whitehall.
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As regards St Albans and Winchester the situation was more complicated. He was to retain the titles of abbot and bishop, but his rights and duties were to be exercised by others. At the same time his income from the two, which in the case of Winchester had amounted to nearly £4,000 a year, was to go to the Crown, in return for which he was to be allowed a pension of 1,000 marks, to be drawn out of Winchester’s revenues.
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He also forfeited to the Crown his French and Spanish pensions. However, he did receive an estimated £6,374 3
s
. 7
d
., of which £3,000 was in ready money, and the rest in goods and chattels, urgently required since being stripped of everything that he had previously owned, right down to the sheets and pillow cases.
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Despite this, ready money appears to have remained an acute problem for Wolsey, so that during the next few months he asked for and obtained further sums.
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The result of this agreement was that Wolsey was going to enjoy something approaching the £4,000 a year which he had at an early stage in the negotiations accepted as the least he could survive on.
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It might be thought that such a sum was a rather high ‘pension’ for an apparently disgraced minister, but there are signs, not least the requests for further sums, that Wolsey was not altogether happy with it. And what was certainly making him very unhappy were Henry’s designs on his colleges at Oxford and Ipswich. It quite quickly became apparent that there was no chance of Wolsey saving the latter, though a final decision was not made until September 1530.
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The fate of Cardinal College, which at Wolsey’s downfall had been much more of a going concern and was in every way the more important
institution, hung much more finely in the balance, and during the summer of 1530 Wolsey devoted much of his energies to trying to save it. Cromwell was his chief agent in this, but almost anybody who was anybody was approached, including Norfolk and Gardiner, but also More who was reported in October to be ‘Very good in this matter’, though rather pessimistic.
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The details of the negotiations can be passed over, but in the end More’s pessimism was justified. Wolsey was undoubtedly heart-broken by his failure to preserve an institution on which he had expended so much energy, time and money. Amongst other things, the failure threatened his good relations with Cromwell, whom he began to suspect of not having done enough to save it.
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What effect the outcome had on his relationship with Henry no document discloses, but it surely could have left Wolsey by October 1530 extremely bitter: perhaps even bitter enough, when his other disappointments concerning Henry’s arrangements for his future are borne in mind, to have contemplated treason?

In asking this question the intention is not to revive the just discarded theory of the conspiratorial Wolsey, but to draw attention to that aspect of his attitude during his last year that has been generally overlooked. It could, after all, be argued that Wolsey had absolutely no reason for being bitter or disappointed. Indeed, should he not have been immensely grateful that as a disgraced minister he was allowed to remain archbishop of York, enjoying what was by the standards of the day an almost princely income? The loss of the colleges was obviously a great blow, but Henry’s decision to refound Cardinal College meant that something might be saved from the wreckage. And anyway, just to be alive and comparatively free to do what he liked was surely, in all the circumstances, something to be going on with? In fact, Wolsey never seems to have viewed the matter in this light. It is true that at the time of his fall he did write that fairly cringing letter to Henry already referred to
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and that he admitted his guilt as to the praemunire charges, though there was much that was tactical about this.
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He was quite prepared to write begging letters and to solicit help from all and sundry, and he exhibited to his close associates a degree of self-pity. All that said, however, his general stance was not of a man conscious of having escaped a terrible fate or even of one experiencing guilt and thus deserving of what had befallen him – and this surely is a little strange?

So far very little has been said about the charges brought against Wolsey, either officially by members of both houses of parliament, or unofficially by Lord Darcy and John Palsgrave; and in fact not a lot will be said, for in a sense much of this book has been a reply to them. The point to bear in mind about both Darcy and Palsgrave is that, rightly or wrongly, but probably wrongly, they felt that they had been badly treated by Wolsey. Darcy was aggrieved with his former ‘bedfellow’ at court for, in
his view, so woefully under-using him in the government of the North and of starving him of the fruits of royal patronage;
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indeed, one of the charges that he levelled against Wolsey in 1529 was that he had deprived him of royal offices.
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In 1524 his eldest son was summoned before the Council for unknown offences.
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In 1525 he was not appointed to the new Council of the North, while in 1526 he was worried that Wolsey was displeased with him, though in fact another of his sons assured him that this was not the case.
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The main reason why Darcy was not made more use of was almost certainly because his power base was not sufficiently strong to make him an effective leader in the North, nor did he possess the requisite legal experience to make him an automatic choice as a member of the Council there.
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He may also have been a rather curmudgeonly old stick with a natural disposition to be ‘agin the government’; at any rate Wolsey’s passing was to bring him no closer to the centre of power, and in 1537 he was to be executed for his part in the Pilgrimage of Grace. Be that as it may, during the 1520s Darcy was a man who felt that he had been cold-shouldered by a former friend and colleague. It is not therefore surprising that in 1529 he came forward with a list of greivances amounting almost to a formal indictment against Wolsey.

Unlike Darcy, Palsgrave did not volunteer his voluminous charges, but their existence was either known about or strongly suspected, and for the following reason. When Henry’s illegitimate son was created duke of Richmond and set up as nominal head of the Council of the North, Palsgrave had been appointed his tutor. However, he was soon complaining that he was not being allowed to educate the child as he wished, because of interference from members of the duke’s own council, who were much more interested in the knightly arts than in book learning.
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He had looked to Wolsey for support, but far from being forthcoming he found himself very quickly out of the job, which pleased him not at all. The obvious target for his displeasure was Wolsey, and in what was almost certainly intended to be an essentially private and therapeutic exercise, he let off steam by working upon a very literary attack upon the king’s leading minister, in which ironic praise was the main weapon. Thus, quite unlike Darcy’s, it was not drawn up in anything approaching a legal form. On the other hand, steam there does seem to have been, not all of which he had managed to retain in his study. The result was that on 11 April 1528 he was formally bound ‘to demean and behave himself discreetly, soberly and wisely in his words towards the king’s highness and his most honourable Council, and not to use or to speak any seditious words against them’.
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It was thus well known that Palsgrave was a man with a grievance, so that when the time came to look for material to use in drawing up charges against Wolsey his study was an obvious place to search.
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Why the Crown was anxious to lodge further charges, given that Wolsey had quickly admitted to the offence of praemunire, will be discussed shortly. What is most relevant here is Wolsey’s attitude to them, and it emerges very clearly in a letter that he wrote to Cromwell: ‘As touching the articles laid unto me, whereof a great part be untrue, and those which be true are of such sort that by the doing of them no malice nor untruth can be justly arrected unto me, neither to the prince’s person, nor to this realm.’
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This was an extraordinarily bold defence to have made, all the more so because it was intended not only for Cromwell’s ears, but for the king’s as well.
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In trying to make sense of Wolsey’s conduct during his last year this lack of contrition must somehow be fitted into the increasingly complicated picture. For most of the time he appears to have been unwilling even to put on a show of contrition which, given his situation, might be thought at the very least to have been tactless; but then tact was not a feature of his conduct during the last months of his life, as his friends were only too well aware. Early in June Thomas Heneage, on being asked yet again to approach the king on his former master’s behalf, advised that if only Wolsey would content himself ‘with that you have’, there was no doubt that Henry would be ‘good and gracious’ to him.
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Three or four weeks later Peter Vannes, who like Heneage had been close to Wolsey for many years before entering royal service, was advising him to keep a low profile.
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So also, and on more than one occasion, did Thomas Cromwell. His long letter of 18 August was devoted to this theme, and included a philosophical passage which he would have done well to have paid more attention to himself. Having urged great restraint as to Wolsey’s building programme in the diocese of York, and specifically at Southwell where he was then residing, he supposed Wolsey was ‘right happy that you be now at liberty to serve God and to learn to experiment how you shall banish and exile the vain desires of this unstable world’, which people with Wolsey’s gifts were especally afflicted by. In the end, though, these brought only ‘sorrow, anxiety and adversity’, so he assumed that Wolsey would not wish to return to the political fray, though he ‘were to win a hundred times as much as ever you were possessed of.
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