The King's Cardinal: The Rise and Fall of Thomas Wolsey (Pimlico) (140 page)

¹⁵²
See Dickens,
English Reformation
, pp.79-81 for a sympathetic pen portrait, but for a more streetwise Bilney see Walker,
JEH
, 40.

¹⁵³
J.F. Davis,
HJ
, 24 is the best starting point.

¹⁵⁴
In chronological order of their sentence there were Thomas Hitton, Thomas Bilney, Richard Bayfield, John Tewkesbury and James Bainham.

¹⁵⁵
Though the reader may think it abrasive enough; see Thomas More,
Correspondence
, pp.441-2; also Marius, pp.429-30.

¹⁵⁶
Cavendish, p.179.

¹⁵⁷
For a recent account of early Tudor Lollards, see Hope; but also see M. Aston,
Lollards and Reformers
, pp.119 ff; Davis,
Heresy and Reformation
, passim; Dickens,
English Reformation
, pp.33-7. I must confess to finding it very difficult to take early sixteenth-century Lollards as seriously as no doubt they should be, but even Hope wrote that ‘there remains something insubstantial about Lollardy on the eve of the Reformation’ (Hope, p.24).

¹⁵⁸
For Lollards and the New Testament in general see M. Aston,
History
, lxii; for the Lollard deputation from Steeple Bumstead to Robert Barnes while in custody to buy Tyndale’s
New Testament
see
CWM
, 8, pp.1384 ff; for Robert Necton’s sale of Protestant literature to Lollards see
LP
, iv, 4030, printed in A.W. Pollard, pp.155-9. See also J.F. Davis,
Heresy and Reformation
, pp.59-60.

¹⁵⁹
For a useful survey of all heresy trials at this time see see S. Thompson, ‘English and Welsh bishops’, pp.121 ff; see also Dickens,
English Reformation
, pp.26-33.

¹⁶⁰
See especially Haigh,
PP
, 93;
HJ
, 25; and Scarisbrick,
Reformation
. For a spirited counter-attack to this recent work see Dickens,
Archiv fr Reformationsgeschicte
, lxxviii, where he mentions that for the period 1525-8 3,000 names included in J. Fines’s Biographical Register of Early English Protestants; see ibid, p.191.

¹⁶¹
Hall, p.788.

¹⁶²
Scarisbrick, ‘Reformation’, pp.61 ff. for a brilliant corrective to the more usual whitewash.

BY THE SPRING OF 1527 HENRY VIII WAS MUCH TROUBLED BY A
‘
SCRUPLE
’ concerning his marriage to Catherine of Aragon. He had become aware that not only was the marriage technically invalid, but what was far worse, that it was contrary to divine law. This being so, the very salvation of his soul was in jeopardy unless the Church acted swiftly to free him from a marriage that should never have been. Wolsey’s task as the king’s leading servant and, by virtue of his legatine powers, head of the Church in England was to see that it did so but, as everyone knows, he failed, and in failing destroyed himself. But more than personal loss was at stake. The pope’s refusal to grant a divorce led almost directly to the ‘break with Rome’ and to the creation of a Protestant England.
¹
It is, thus, one of the most significant failures in English history, which brings with it the, in some ways unfortunate, consequence for a biographer of Wolsey that the story has been much told, and in the greatest detail. Usually the storytellers have been emotionally involved, taking sides with the personalities and with their religious beliefs, and as a result the evidence has not been impartially treated. Perhaps more importantly, in a climate in which the religious divisions are no longer so dominant as they once were, the evidence itself is very difficult to interpret.

To begin with there is its bulk. For six years the divorce was Henry’s government’s priority and a matter of some interest in all the courts of Europe, not least at Rome. Every kind of official, lawyer and academic was dragged into it, and this generated an enormous quantity of paper, much of it highly technical and requiring specialist interpretation.
²
It is a daunting prospect and there can be no attempt here to give a full account of Henry’s ‘great matter’. Instead, what follows is a highly selective commentary from which it is hoped that Wolsey’s private attitude to his master’s predicament will emerge, though in a matter in which the king’s personal wishes and royal policy were so powerfully intertwined it was very difficult for any of his servants, as pre-eminently Thomas More found, to have views of their own, or if they did, they might wish to keep them to themselves. And perhaps this must be the first point to make: that considering Wolsey’s position as the king’s chief servant, he could hardly have afforded the luxury of a personal view, even if it had occurred to him to have one. But before we become too lost in interpretation, a brief chronological framework is called for.

Wolsey’s first documented involvement with the divorce was the holding of a legatine court, which met secretly at Westminster on 17 May 1527, to pronounce on
the validity of Henry’s marriage.
³
When, on the 31st, the trial was adjourned without sentence being passed,
⁴
there followed an uneasy period during which Henry and Wolsey appear to have adopted differing tactics. At any rate, Wolsey spent much of the summer in France trying to grapple with the additional complication of the pope’s captivity, begun when on 5 June an Imperial army sacked Rome and ended only with Clement’s escape to Orvieto on 8 December. Meanwhile Henry, acting in the first instance without Wolsey’s knowledge, had instructed his secretary William Knight somehow to gain access to the pope and persuade him to grant a dispensation enabling the king to remarry, despite the fact that, at least in the eyes of the Church, he was legally married to somebody else.
⁵

But Henry’s request to be free to marry someone to whom he was related in the first degree of affinity could only confirm the rumour that his ‘scruple’ had little to do with God and more to do with Anne Boleyn, who as a consequence of Henry’s affair with her sister, Mary, was related to the king in just that degree. It was a curious, not to say foolish, first step, as Wolsey was quick to realize as soon as he got wind of it. This was not until early September, while he was still in France and when Knight had already started for Rome and, despite his best efforts, he was unable to persuade Henry to rescind Knight’s instructions, only to modify them.
⁶
A perfectly useless dispensation was in fact obtained,
⁷
but only at the expense of destroying Henry’s moral credibility, for by drawing attention to Anne it made it difficult for the pope to take seriously any more acceptable reasons that might be advanced later for dispensing with the first marriage.

The one good thing that emerged from Knight’s mission was that it brought Henry and Wolsey together again. The king accepted that, however impatient he might be, the divorce of a queen, with all its many implications, including those concerning the succession, could not be rushed. Every kind of legal propriety needed to be observed,
⁸
or rather to appear to be observed, for what also soon became apparent was that the pope, in whose jurisdiction matrimonial matters ultimately lay, was not as convinced of the rightness of Henry’s case as he himself was. Moreover, Clement was faced with very difficult political choices, for while he was anxious not to offend Henry unnecessarily, circumstances made it even more important for him not to offend Catherine’s nephew, the emperor Charles v. What was required on the English side were patient and persistent negotiations with the pope to overcome the many legal and political obstacles which stood in the way of a decision in Henry’s favour. These began in earnest with the dispatch of Edward Fox and Stephen Gardiner to Italy in February 1528, and to begin with they were very successful. It is true that what Wolsey wanted above all else, a decretal
commission, of which more later, eluded him, and that he had to put up with a ‘secret’ one, which was not the same thing at all, though a gain of sorts. He was also granted a general commission under the terms of which he and Cardinal Campeggio were empowered to conduct a second legatine trial. In addition, Wolsey obtained what was called a ‘pollicitation’, in which the pope promised to do nothing to hinder the execution of the commission. Taken together, these concessions did offer Wolsey and Henry a chance of success. On 25 July Campeggio left Italy for London, and early in August Anne Boleyn wrote to Wolsey that ‘the great pains and troubles that you have taken for me, both night and day, is never likely to be recompensed on my part, but only in loving you, next unto the King’s grace, above all creatures living’.
⁹
That no irony was intended is suggested by the fact that she persuaded the king to write a postscript which he signed as Wolsey’s ‘loving sovereign and friend’. Shortly afterwards Henry wrote to Anne: ‘touching our other affairs’, by which he meant the divorce, ‘I assure you there can be no more done, or more diligence used, nor all manner of dangers better foreseen and provided for’.
¹⁰
Wolsey may not have been quite as optimistic as his master, but the patient negotiations begun in the early part of the year had borne some fruit, and he must have hoped that he would soon be deserving of even more of Anne’s love if that is what he wanted? But as it turned out the summer of 1528 was to be the nearest that Wolsey got to success in this matter.

Campeggio’s journey to London was agonizingly slow; for Campeggio on account of the severe gout from which he suffered, and continued to do so for most of his stay in England; for Henry, Anne, and Wolsey just because it was so slow. When on 8 October he did eventually arrive, instead of proceeding immediately with the trial, as Henry and Wolsey expected, he did what Clement had instructed, which was to waste yet more time, first by trying to reconcile Henry to Catherine, and then, when a four-hour interview with Henry had convinced him that not even an angel from heaven could succeed in that task, by trying to persuade Catherine to take a vow of chastity, a step which, according to some interpretations, would have released Henry from his marriage vows. It is doubtful whether Henry or Wolsey ever believed that such a move on Catherine’s part could provide a satisfactory solution, but she soon resolved their doubts by refusing to comply, despite Wolsey going down on bended knee in one of the many attempts to persuade her. Not long afterwards she brilliantly counter-attacked by producing from out of the blue, or rather from Spain, a copy of a dispensation for her marriage to Henry of which the English had been hitherto unaware. The so-called ‘Spanish brief’ had been sent in 1504 as a special favour to Catherine’s mother, Isabella of Castile, who was dying and wished to have some of the uncertainties surrounding her daughter’s second marriage resolved.
¹¹
It differed slightly from the one provided for the English court, and some of these differences added extra legal complications; but the real complication was its very existence. Since the commission drawn up for Wolsey and Campeggio to try the case made no mention of it, any sentence passed by them
could have no bearing on its validity, and thus it could be claimed that the marriage remained good even if it was found that the ‘English brief’ was defective. By suddenly producing this document in early November, Catherine achieved not only a
coup de théâtre
but a real setback to Henry’s and Wolsey’s plans. Either they would have to prove that the ‘Spanish brief’ was a forgery, and its opportune appearance at least raised a presumption that it might be, or failing that, they would have to get their commission altered so that the brief came within its terms of reference. Wolsey tried both approaches, but all negotiations with the Curia were slow, for it took about a month for letters from London to get there and back. In this case the problem was greatly complicated by Clement’s illness, which began in January 1529 and continued until the summer. Early on, when Clement seemed about to die, Wolsey made his third and last attempt to become pope, in the belief that if he succeeded he would be in a position to solve Henry’s problem. In the event Clement recovered, but his recurring ill health meant that he could not always be visited by the English envoys. This was a nuisance, but it also meant that he could not be visited by Imperial ambassadors either, which, as the diplomatic situation turned increasingly against the English, had its advantages.

The reasons for England’s changing fortunes will be analysed more fully later. All that needs to be mentioned now is that by early 1529 there were many reasons why Clement should want to commit himself more fully to the Imperial side. And there were good reasons, in law as well as in what might be best called natural justice, for taking the case out of Wolsey’s and Campeggio’s hands and advoking it to Rome. This the Imperialists had been begging Clement to do ever since the matter first arose in 1527, but by early 1529 it was really only a question of time before he would give in to them. Realizing this, in early May Wolsey decided to go ahead with the trial, even though there were many loose ends and the prospects for success were not all that good. He was still uncertain whether Clement had agreed to alter his and Campeggio’s commission so as to allow for the existence of the ‘Spanish brief’. In fact, Clement had, and by the time the trial began, or very shortly afterwards, Wolsey would have known this. But other problems remained unresolved. In particular there were Fisher’s many powerful interventions on Catherine’s behalf, especially his famous address to the legatine court on 28 June. Moreover, as he had always feared, the issue of whether or not Catherine’s first marriage, to Henry’s brother, Arthur, had been consummated increasingly dominated the court’s proceedings, and it was not a winning issue for Henry. On 23 July the legatine court was adjourned and it was on 9 October that Wolsey was dismissed from office.