The King's Cardinal: The Rise and Fall of Thomas Wolsey (Pimlico) (9 page)

Even the rags to riches element in Wolsey’s story, or as this chapter title has it, the rise from ‘butcher’s cur to lordly prelate’, has been much exaggerated. In this respect John Skelton who, especially in
Why come ye not to Courte
, could not put the theme down, has done his work only too well. Wolsey’s

…
gresy genalogy
,

He came of the sank royall

That was cast out of a bochers stall!
¹¹⁴

is the one thing that almost everybody knows about him. In part, this is because Skelton was mining an already well-worked vein of English satirical writing, of which John Lydgate’s
Fall of Princes
is but the best of many.
¹¹⁵
It thrived then presumably for the same reason that it remains alive and well today, that anyone who betters himself is open both to the envy of those whom he has left behind and the contempt and jealousy of those whose social position he now shares, and threatens. The upstart courtier or despised royal favourite is a stock figure because he represents but the most extreme example of the parvenu who, almost by definition, has more wealth, more ambition, and above all more pride than is good for him.

What thyng to God is mor abhomynable

Than pride upreised out of poverte
?
¹¹⁶

asked Lydgate in the fifteenth century, and for John Skelton in the sixteenth, Wolsey with his

Presumcyon and vayne glory
,

Envy, wrath and lechery
,

Covetys and glotiny
;

Slouthfull to do good
,

Now frantick, now starke wode
!
¹¹⁷

was living proof that to ‘set up a wretche on hye’ was asking for the worst possible trouble.
¹¹⁸
But it must always be remembered that the satirical view is a very partial one. In the 1980s we laugh with
Spitting Image
at Ronald Reagan and Margaret Thatcher, the former having risen from the Hollywood ‘B’ movie to the White House, the latter from the corner shop to 10 Downing Street. No doubt there is much that is comic and unlikeable about both people. But they happen to be the two most successful politicians in the Western world with a proven capacity to capture the imagination, or at least the vote, of millions of people. Moreover, it is almost certainly the case that if the one had been a
WASP
and the other a member of the English aristocracy, they would still not have escaped the eagle eye of the satirist, though the topos would be different. In other words,
Spitting Image
is no more right about these two figures than Skelton was about Wolsey, and in many respects both are demonstrably wrong.

That someone from Wolsey’s urban and retailing background had got to university in the early sixteenth century should come as no surprise, for, along with the sons of yeomen and lesser gentry, it was for such people, rather than those from the ruling classes, that the universities largely catered.
¹¹⁹
Once there, the great
likelihood was that such a person would go into the Church, and, as a graduate, have a successful ecclesiastical career. If he did well, he was very likely to end up in royal service, which had always been staffed with a high proportion of clerics.
¹²⁰
Admittedly some changes in the career structure of the educated were taking place. It is probable that the fifteenth century saw an increasing number of laymen in royal service,
¹²¹
and the universities themselves were a comparatively new phenomenon, the full exploitation of which it had taken some time to develop. About two hundred years earlier William of Wykeham, like Wolsey a lord chancellor and founder of an Oxford college, and like him from a comparatively humble background (in his case that of the tenant farmer), had not gone to university, but in his day it was not the most normal route to the top. By Wolsey’s time the successful cleric did as a rule go to university, and to that extent he is a typical figure.
¹²²
However, the really fast route lay through a study of law, increasingly both civil and canon law, then into the household of the archbishop of Canterbury in some legal capacity, and then into royal service.
¹²³
Typical of those who took that route were two clerical lawyers, Archbishop Warham, whose career lay through Winchester, New College and the Canterbury Court of Arches, and Tunstall, who transferred early from Oxford to King’s Hall, Cambridge, and then to Padua, whence he returned to become Warham’s chancellor before transferring to royal service as master of the rolls in 1516. Wolsey’s career with its more university and schoolmasterly flavour, and his study not of law but of theology, is just that little bit different, and when he entered the service of the archbishop of Canterbury it was as a chaplain rather than a legal administrator. This slight difference serves to draw attention to that element of personality as opposed to qualifications that played a vital part in Wolsey’s rise. However, as against the Skeltonic view, what needs to be emphasized is that for someone entering royal service Wolsey’s early career was not all that unusual, nor were his social origins. The English episcopacy had always been largely recruited from below the top ranks of society. Of the nineteen men appointed to bishoprics by the Yorkist kings only four had come from the nobility,
¹²⁴
and, of the twenty-four prior to Wolsey appointed to the plum see of Winchester from the time of the Norman Conquest only six appear to have come from noble families.
¹²⁵
As for Wolsey’s contemporaries, while Tunstall, though illegitimate, came from a Northern gentry family, Warham was of yeoman stock, as was Richard Fox. John Fisher’s father was a mercer of Beverley; the father of Nicholas West, bishop of Ely, was a baker from Putney; and of all Wolsey’s episcopal colleagues only Audley of Salisbury came out of the top drawer.

Moreover, it needs to be stressed, especially given the English dislike of ‘meddlesome priests’, that high-flying clerics had always played a leading role in
English politics. Starting with William the Conqueror’s first archbishop of Canterbury, Lanfranc, the list of powerful ecclesiastical personalities is very long, through Becket and Langton in the twelfth and thirteenth centuries, Winchelsey and Stratford in the fourteenth, Arundel, Beaufort and Chichele in the fifteenth, and in the present context most relevantly, and just getting on into the sixteenth century, Cardinal John Morton. Morton, indeed, prefigures Wolsey in all manner of ways, some of which will be looked at in more detail later, but most obviously in his general management of all the king’s affairs, both secular and ecclesiastical.
¹²⁶
And if, nevertheless, one feels that there was something about the scale of Wolsey’s dominance that separates him from these predecessors, the explanation is almost certainly not to be found in his greater ambition and greed, but in the increasing power and centralized control of the Crown. Without anticipating too much, it needs to be borne in mind that for much of the Middle Ages Church and state were in some degree of conflict, resulting most famously in the murder of Thomas Becket in his own cathedral on 29 December 1170. But if the king was in conflict with the Church, he was unlikely to give to a churchman the necessary trust and confidence to make him his chief minister; and for much of the Middle Ages even royal control of episcopal appointments was not completely secure. Moreover, for an ecclesiastical statesman to dominate the political scene he needed, paradoxically, the support of a strong king because unlike a nobleman’s, the wealth and military might of a bishop derived most usually from office alone. Of course, along with their expertise in law and administration, it was precisely this lack of family affinity or influence that made such an ecclesiastical statesman attractive to kings, and that Henry
VII
looked to Morton and sought with success to make him a cardinal with unusually extensive powers over the English Church, should come as no surprise. But in the present context the essential point is that, whatever Morton’s role in Henry’s campaign for the throne of England, it was the king who chose to give him a dominating position in government, just as it was his son who chose to give Wolsey a similar position. And if a cleric was chosen to be the king’s leading councillor, and as a consequence become a prince of the Church, it was inevitable that he would live in some style.

From Skelton onwards, Wolsey’s ostentatious life-style has attracted unfavourable comment. Interestingly, lay figures, such as the Cecils, who made immense private fortunes as leading councillors to Elizabeth and James
I
, have to a great extent escaped criticism;
¹²⁷
and perhaps the expectation is that as a churchman, Wolsey should have behaved better. In a later chapter it will be argued that the expectation is unwarranted, or at the very least that it involves a judgement about how the Church should present itself, a judgement that has by no means always come down on the side of apostolic poverty – and justifiably so. Wolsey did pour money into
building, purchased tapestries and carpets, and commissioned all kinds of beautiful objects, from illuminated manuscripts through to jewellery and silver.
¹²⁸
His chief London residence from 1514, York Place, was the traditional home of archbishops of York, but it seems to have been largely rebuilt by Wolsey. Very little detail about this has survived, but the new work was considered impressive enough by Henry
VIII
for him to appropriate it on Wolsey’s fall in 1529, and in the process it acquired the new name of Whitehall.
¹²⁹
Wolsey’s chief out-of-town residence was the building most associated with him, Hampton Court.
¹³⁰
This in 1515 he leased from the Knights Hospitallers, though it had been used by Henry
VII
. Again, the details of Wolsey’s quite clearly extensive rebuilding are not known, but when Bishop Sherburne visited it in 1525 he found it a ‘most splendid and magnificent house’,
¹³¹
a view shared by a French envoy in 1527.
¹³²
However, in 1525 Wolsey had surrendered Hampton Court to the king, or rather he seems to have exchanged it for Richmond. For some, this has been seen as confirmation that, as Skelton would have it, Henry was becoming fed up with being constantly outshone by his minister, most visibly in the matter of palaces, but given that an exchange was involved – and apparently, unlike his father, Henry had never taken to Richmond – this seems very unlikely. Wolsey certainly continued to use Hampton Court a lot, but was anyway by 1525 making increasing use of two manor houses belonging to St Albans, whose abbot he had become in 1522, the More and Tittenhanger, and the more likely conclusion is that the exchange was agreeable to both men.
¹³³

What is not in doubt is that wherever Wolsey was in residence, or when, for instance, in 1527 he travelled to France, he lived in great style – and to his first biographer’s obvious admiration. In his conclusion, Cavendish referred to him as ‘my late lord and master, the rich and triumphant legate and Cardinal of England’,
¹³⁴
while earlier he went to great lengths to describe the magnificence of Wolsey’s household, which according to him numbered some five hundred people.
¹³⁵
It may be that present-day Western man is not quite as impressed by magnificence as his sixteenth-century counterpart, though much fascination – and repulsion – with glamour, and royalty, still abounds. But it is important to appreciate that in Wolsey’s time magnificence of all kinds was expected from princes, whether of Church or state, and that for Wolsey to have dressed down would have won him very few marks indeed.
¹³⁶
All his colleagues, including his episcopal ones, lived in some style.
¹³⁷
Warham’s household consisted of well over two hundred people,
¹³⁸
and he is alleged to have spent £33,000 on the building of a new ‘palace’ – as
significantly bishops’ major residences were called – at Otford.
¹³⁹
And he had a reputation for a certain personal abstemiousness and frugality!
¹⁴⁰
Although the figure has to be an exaggeration, he did virtually rebuild Otford, and on such a magnificent scale that its courtyard was larger than Hampton Court’s – and this despite the fact that his two predecessors, Bourchier and Morton, had spent a lot of money on rebuilding Knole, only a stone’s throw away.
¹⁴¹
If only to suggest that there was nothing very personal in Henry’s acquisition of Hampton Court, it is worth pointing out that in the 1530s he was to acquire, by exchange, both Knole and Otford from the then archbishop of Canterbury, Thomas Cranmer, whom nobody has ever accused of wanting to upstage Henry!
¹⁴²

What is difficult about Wolsey’s outward show is not that it occurred, because any cardinal and lord chancellor would have had to exhibit a good deal, but deciding how far it reflected a genuine personal preference. Given how little can ever be known about Wolsey’s inner feelings, there is probably no way of arriving at a confident answer, but in resisting what has been the received and, admittedly not unnatural view, that he positively revelled in it, it would be wrong to go too far in the other direction. On such a matter Cavendish, who must have been present at many of Wolsey’s entertainments, may provide a valuable insight, as regards both Wolsey’s attitude in this matter and, even more importantly, his relationship with Henry. ‘It pleased the king’s majesty’, he writes,