The King's Cardinal: The Rise and Fall of Thomas Wolsey (Pimlico) (8 page)

As with the previous episode, there is something almost miraculous for Cavendish about Wolsey’s behaviour, though on this occasion it was his master’s capacity to concentrate for so long that caused him to marvel.

This view of Wolsey, as a man who combined both enormous ability and unstoppable determination, is not the invention of a doting household servant. Even Vergil admitted that Wolsey was intelligent and daring, and when he portrays
Fox trying to convince the king of Wolsey’s ability it is his ‘sound judgement, vigilance and hard work’ that Vergil has Fox specifically mention.
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This is not to say that he agreed with Fox’s assessment, but even his criticisms of Wolsey testify to the man’s ability. And if one turns from the literary evidence to the documents that went out under Wolsey’s name, what immediately impresses is not only their quantity and length – each one frequently over five thousand words – but the range of business they cover. It might be the formation of an alliance with a foreign power, or a ‘universal peace treaty’; an enclosure commission or a new constitution for the Augustinian canons; the founding of a college at Oxford or the settling of a dispute in Chancery – and often all these things at much the same time! The multiplicity is endless and the workload staggering; but Wolsey was evidently able, both physically and mentally, to take it in his stride.

Of course, what one has described is no more than anyone in a similar position, from the first pharaoh to Margaret Thatcher, has to cope with; and given that for fifteen years Wolsey was closely involved with every aspect of royal government, that he had these qualities should come as no surprise. Why it might is because, as was pointed out in the Introduction, there has been a tendency to hide Giustinian’s man ‘of vast ability’ under the glitz and razzmatazz of Renaissance politics, in the process turning Wolsey into some kind of strutting peacock devoted only to self-glorification and self-indulgence.
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The truth is much more sober, which is not to deny a glamorous side to politics. It is also true that ability and hard work can combine very happily with intense ambition – and even worse! Whether this was so in Wolsey’s case is best dealt with as the story unfolds, but it is right to start with the fact that Wolsey was a man of enormous ability, for it provides the simple answer to the question why he became the king’s leading minister.

There are many more descriptions of the young Henry
VIII
than there are of the early Wolsey. All are extremely complimentary. William Lord Mountjoy, writing to Erasmus in May 1509, referred to his ‘exceptional and almost more than human talents’,
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while in 1511 Andrea Ammonio wrote to the same correspondent about the king ‘who every day shows himself in a more godlike guise’.
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As for Erasmus himself, his praise of Henry and his court – the only court in the world, he wrote to a friend in 1518, that he would consider being a part of
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– is almost too well known to be quoted,
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and like all his praise of potential or actual patrons has to be viewed with some suspicion. On the other hand, it is hard to see why Erasmus should have bothered to conceal his true feelings when writing to Cochlaeus in 1529. His purpose was to explain to the Catholic polemicist why he was convinced that Henry was the true author of the royal attacks on Luther, and one reason he gave was his
first-hand knowledge of Henry’s great ability as a young man, for when he was ‘no more than a child, he was set to study. He had a vivid and active mind, above measure able to execute whatever tasks he undertook. He never attempted anything in which he did not succeed … You would say he was a universal genius.’ And amongst the many pursuits at which Erasmus claimed Henry excelled were riding, music, mathematics, reading and disputations, ‘of which he is very fond’ and in which he conducted himself ‘with remarkable courtesy and unruffled temper’.
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What the humanist did not dwell on were Henry’s more martial accomplishments, those jousts and tourneys with which he was so obsessed, or even hunting, in which, Giustinian reported, he never took part ‘without tiring eight or ten horses, which he causes to be stationed beforehand along the line of the country he may mean to take, and when one is tired, he mounts another, and before he gets home they are all exhausted’.
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What also caught Giustinian’s imagination, as it did many other observers, was Henry’s physical appearance, for he found him

extremely handsome; nature could not have done more for him; he is much handsomer than the king of France; very fair, and his whole frame admirably proportioned … He is extremely fond of tennis, at which game it is the prettiest thing in the world to see him play, his fair skin glowing through the shirt of the finest texture
.
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The eulogy is the more convincing in that it faithfully echoed his first impression of the king, which four years at court had done nothing to dim.
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The young Henry’s ability to charm, almost to mesmerize all those he came into contact with, is vitally important in capturing the mood of the early years of his reign, when his relationship with Wolsey was formed. There is no doubt that he was determined to cut a great figure on the European stage, and that he was fortunate enough to be endowed with many of the necessary attributes. This does not mean that he was foolishly over-confident and impetuous, determined to charge into battle at the earliest opportunity; in fact, he was to wait five years, until he got to France, and then with rather more support than his father had in 1492. Neither should the war with France be seen as mere bravado or just a chivalric gesture. There was something of that in it, but then chivalry was an essential part of the panoply of kingship. Any king with ideas of dominating Europe would have to present himself as an embodiment of chivalric virtues;
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and however much Christianity had tried to soften or disguise them, it remained true that in the end there had to be a man in armour on a horse performing daring deeds before such virtues could be displayed. The point would have been perfectly clear to Henry, as it was to his rivals Francis
I
and Charles
V
, that great kings had to be warriors as well as
judges and patrons. For a French king this meant making good his claim to Milan and Naples, for an English king it meant an invasion of France. When Henry
VIII
looked around for a model of kingship, it is not surprising that he alighted upon his namesake, Henry
V
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– and what had he done on becoming king but lead an army into France, thereby winning everlasting renown on the field of Agincourt? During the course of this book it will become apparent that in practice English foreign policy was never solely directed to winning battles in France; indeed a French alliance was often the desired aim, but the contradiction between the field of Agincourt and the Field of Cloth of Gold, on which the kings of England and France embraced each other as loving brothers, is not as great as may first appear. Or, to put it another way, Henry was to find other means of maintaining his honour than waging war.

For the modern reader, the trappings of chivalry may confuse and trivialize. Such notions as nationalism, or great power rivalry – or whatever the current jargon is – are more readily understood. But while the language changes, the competitive nature of the relationship between states does not, and somewhere not far below the surface has to lurk power, not exclusively of a military kind but with the capability of being translated into that – as, for instance, quite commonly in the early sixteenth century by the hiring of mercenary troops. In February 1513 Ferdinand of Aragon, who after over forty years of political life knew something about these matters, made the significant comment that, while English soldiers might be strong and courageous, their inexperience of continental warfare was such that they could not compete with the best in Europe.
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His explicit conclusion was that in the forthcoming campaign they would need to be supplemented with German troops. Implicit was the belief that Henry was not a major force to be reckoned with, and could be easily manipulated. This Ferdinand had done the previous year, when he had made use of English help to capture Navarre for himself while ignoring the English aim of capturing Guienne; and he was, as he thought, about to do it again, this time by unilaterally signing a truce with England’s declared enemy, France, while pretending to be England’s ally. This time it did not work out as he intended, because England chose to ignore his defection and conducted a successful enough campaign without him. Moreover, when the following year Ferdinand tried to perform the same trick, he found the English had got there before him. And one of the chief reasons they were able to outmanoeuvre him was that in 1513 they had shown they were indeed a military force to be reckoned with, while, if the truth be told, Ferdinand was militarily and financially very stretched, and thus for Louis
XII
a potential victim rather than an ally.
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It has to be said that English historians have tended to take a rather dim view of the 1513 campaign.
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But in desperately trying to calculate some material advantage,
and, not surprisingly, given the enormous expense of waging war, coming up with a large deficit, they have missed the whole point. By showing that he could deliver, not just money – and the general perception was that he was extremely wealthy
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– but also military and naval might, Henry secured for himself a leading role in Europe, at least until the ‘divorce’ seriously weakened his hand. And it was Henry himself, and only he, who took the decision to play that role. Seen in this light, the notion of a ‘peace’ or ‘war’ faction becomes an irrelevance. Instead, there were only royal councillors giving advice to a king who knew the direction that he wished to take, and, moreover, was much more active in getting what he wanted than is frequently allowed. The myth of a lazy king devoting himself entirely to pleasure, while the likes of Wolsey and Thomas Cromwell got on with the hard work, does not stand up to scrutiny.
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Admittedly Henry sometimes gave this impression; and harassed councillors, trying to get him to read or sign something which they thought important and he did not, may occasionally have despaired. But where it is possible to follow the king at work over a period of time, for instance in the spring of 1518 or in August and September 1523, what is striking is his close attention to business, a quickness of mind that enabled him immediately to grasp the essentials, and the strong feeling that he was very much in control of all that was being done on his behalf.
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In confirmation of this there is the judgement of that astute French ambassador, Jean du Bellay, that there was nothing that went on, whether inside or outside the court, that Henry was not aware of.
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There are, of course, many different styles of governing a country, or indeed, of running any large organization. Some have found delegation impossible, and like Philip
II
of Spain have immersed themselves in paperwork; but while such people get good marks for effort, they are not necessarily good at making decisions. Indeed too much immersion may make decision making all the more difficult, and certainly there was more to being an effective king than shutting oneself up in the Escorial, or its equivalent. Henry’s style should not deceive, and though there were many who were deceived by him, there was almost no one who doubted that he was in charge – and certainly not those, such as Wolsey and Cromwell, who worked most closely with him.
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In this respect it is interesting that both More and Wolsey are alleged to have made almost precisely the same comment: that Henry, in order to get his own way, would have been willing to go to any lengths, whether this meant cutting off a
subject’s head or losing half a kingdom.
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They also agreed that it was vital to think before one spoke to him because, as Wolsey said on his deathbed, once an idea was put into his head, ‘you shall never pull it out again’.
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It could be that these judgements reflect merely the views of their contemporary biographers, only too conscious that their subjects had been treated badly; but they receive support from almost everything that Henry is known to have said and done.

None of this is supposed to make Henry into a Superman, and certainly not into the bluff King Harry of popular mythology, though this was a role he could play well. The choices that he made were often not, at least to the present writer, very attractive ones, nor, in spite of the warmth and charm he could exhibit, at least when young, was he at bottom an attractive character. Much more than his first great minister, he wore his egotism close to the surface, and as he aged and life became more difficult – probably at a personal level but certainly in the 1530s and 40s at a political level – the suspicion and animal cunning came to the fore. Flawed he obviously was, and to argue that he was a powerful personality is not to imply that there was not weakness or insecurity as well. It has been suggested, for instance, that he had difficulties with sex: the fact of his six wives, his very few mistresses – by the standards at any rate of his great rival Francis
I
– and only four children who survived for any length of time (and even then the two males, his illegitimate son by Elizabeth Blount, Henry Fitzroy, and Edward
VI
, were both dead before they were out of their teens) may suggest that something was amiss.
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And despite his cunning he was very capable of great errors of judgement – but then what leading political figure has not been? The key to political success lies in a capacity to recover from one’s mistakes, and in this art Henry was extremely skilled, as indeed was Wolsey. But the one thing Henry was not was someone who could be easily manipulated, whether by an individual or a faction, and even those he fell head over heels in love with, such as Anne Boleyn and, to a lesser extent, Catherine Howard, though they obviously affected what he did, were never able to manage him to any significant extent. All of this leads to only one conclusion: that Wolsey rose to a commanding position in royal government because Henry chose that he should, and all that remains to be stressed in this chapter is that there was nothing very surprising in Henry’s choice.