The King's Cardinal: The Rise and Fall of Thomas Wolsey (Pimlico) (143 page)

The importance of William Knight’s mission to the Pope in the autumn and winter of 1527 is that not only was he chosen as emissary to the pope against Wolsey’s advice, but the king did not inform Wolsey of the true purpose of his mission, which was to obtain for Henry a dispensation to remarry irrespective of his existing marital status.
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In the event, Wolsey got to know about the purpose, was intensely critical of it, but failed to prevent the mission going ahead. It is evidence of a lack of confidence between king and leading councillor more serious than any that had occurred before, for previous differences had been stated, not hidden, and had never concerned such a central matter. Henry’s doubts probably set in in June 1527, when Wolsey had pointed out the difficulties for Henry’s case if consummation of Catherine’s first marriage could not be proved,
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and were certainly over by the following May, when Wolsey’s tactics were beginning to bear fruit. But that these doubts existed does not prove that Wolsey was an opponent of the divorce. Most people have felt, mistakenly, that because Henry had been anxious to keep the information from him, Wolsey was slow to appreciate that what he really wanted was a marriage to Anne.
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In support of this view has been that contention that while Wolsey was in France during the summer of 1527 he had been working on his own plan to marry Henry off to a French princess. Since it has been argued here that he never had such a plan, it cannot be used as evidence that he was in the dark about Anne. And is it probable that he would have been? Since at least April of that year he had been heavily involved in Henry’s great matter, presiding over the first legatine trial and discussing it at length with Warham, Fisher and Richard Sampson, not to mention the king himself. He must have thought a great deal about why, after all these years, Henry should suddenly be so anxious to discard Catherine. Whatever respect he may have had for Henry’s biblical interests and the ensuing ‘scruple’, he would surely also have taken the trouble to check up on who
his current favourite was, and so could hardly have failed to find out about Anne.

All this is, of course, to assume that Henry would not have told Wolsey about Anne, and, given Wolsey’s major role in obtaining the king what he wanted, it is surely a curious assumption to make. And there is one piece of evidence which suggests quite strongly that Henry had indeed informed him, and at an early stage. While Wolsey was in France, he received a letter from Sampson, already deeply involved in the divorce, which informed him that:

The great matter is in very good train; good countenance, much better than was in mine opinion; less suspicion or little; the merry visage is returned not less than was wont. The other party, as your grace knoweth, lacketh no wit, and so showeth highly in this matter. If that I perceive otherwise or more, I shall not fail to advertise your grace with diligence. The 23rd day the king’s highness departed from Hunsdon to Beaulieu. And though his grace was ready to depart by a good space, and yet he tarried for the queen. And so they rode forth together
.
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There are a number of ways of interpreting this passage, but the suggestion here is that the ‘merry visage’ refers to Catherine, the ‘other party’ to Anne. What is being described is a deliberate deception of Catherine to which Wolsey was privy, and for which, indeed, he was probably responsible. Catherine had not in the first instance been told of Henry’s ‘scruple’, or even about the first legatine trial, the intention being to present her with a
fait accompli
that she could not have reversed. However, it was soon realized that the case was too complicated to be rushed through in this way. On 31 May the trial had been called off, and on 22 June, Catherine was informed by the king himself of his ‘scruple’:
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no doubt this became necessary because rumours were already circulating and had, for instance, been picked up by the Imperial ambassador as early as 18 May.
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Of course, the calling off of the trial was not intended to end the matter. It was simply that difficulties had been encountered, and time was needed to resolve them. Meanwhile, Henry had a deeply unhappy and potentially dangerous wife on his hands, and the question was how best to manage her. Not surprisingly, it was decided to play the whole thing down and to induce in her a false sense of security: the ‘scruple’ needed to be cleared up (the bishop of Tarbes’s raising of the subject would have been useful here) but Catherine need not worry because it would all quickly be sorted out and Henry would end up more securely married to his dear wife than ever. With Catherine’s fears allayed, negotiations could proceed at Rome without any interference from her. This, at any rate, was the plan.

Wolsey knew about Anne from the start. So it was not any sudden discovery that so upset him when he divined the true purpose of Knight’s mission, nor, of course, could it have been Henry’s intention, in sending him to Rome, to keep knowledge of Anne from Wolsey. So why did Henry send Knight, and, in particular, why did he send him while trying to keep from Wolsey any knowledge of the instructions he had given him? Something that has so far perhaps been underplayed is the extreme foolishness of those instructions. There was first the point that Wolsey had felt able to put directly to the king, which was that Knight
was poorly qualified to conduct such negotiations with the pope.
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There was also the obstacle that Wolsey had spent so much of the summer trying to get round: namely, that Clement was a prisoner of the Imperial army in Rome, so that even access to him was extremely difficult. But the real foolishness was the one already mentioned: by seeking to secure a dispensation to remarry before securing an annulment of his first marriage, Henry had effectively blown any cover of respectability that his case might have had. The rumours circulating in Rome, one of which was that Anne was already expecting Henry’s child,
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must be true, for why else would Henry want such a dispensation? What was at stake was not a ‘scruple’ but lust, and lust was not something that the Vicar of Christ should encourage, especially when the legal arguments for doing so were not very strong.

That Henry’s credibility with the pope had been destroyed at the outset was quite clear to Wolsey. In a letter dated 5 December 1527 to Gregory Casale, the permanent English representative at the Curia, he tried his best to rebuild it. Casale was told:

how the king, partly by his assiduous study and learning, and partly by conference with theologians, has found his conscience somewhat burdened with his present marriage, and out of regard to the quiet of his soul, and next to the security of his succession and the great mischiefs likely to arise, he considers it would be offensive to God and man if he were to persist in it, and with great remorse of conscience has now for a long time felt that he is living under the offence of the Almighty, whom in all his efforts and actions he always sets before him
.
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Casale was to make all this known to the pope, and in every way to try and further the king’s ‘great matter’ with him. What Wolsey did not tell him was that the notion of a conscience-stricken Henry had already been exploded by Knight, but at least it could be made clear to Clement, lest by chance he had got a different impression, that Anne was not a harlot. Rather, ‘the approved, excellent, virtuous qualities of the said gentlewoman, the purity of her life, her constant virginity, her maidenly and womanly pudicity, her soberness, chasteness, meekness, humility, wisdom, and laudable qualities and manners, apparent aptness to the procreation of children, with her other infinite good qualities’ justified Wolsey believed – or said he did – the request that Henry was making.
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One may squirm at the hypocrisy, but at the same time admire the way in which Wolsey set about trying to restore the right tone to the proceedings after it had been so foolishly sullied by Henry’s half-cocked effort to obtain a speedy resolution to what could only ever have been half of his problem.

Wolsey was upset by Knight’s secret mission not because he suddenly perceived the threat to his position that Anne posed, but because it seriously impaired the chances of the king’s eventual success. But in stating that Wolsey was determined the intention is not to deny those doubts about the wisdom of the king’s wishes that have already been raised. Two pieces of evidence support the notion of an unhappy Wolsey. Cavendish states that when Wolsey first heard of Henry’s intentions he
went down on bended knee in an effort to persuade him to change his mind.
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Wolsey in such a posture is not always evidence of sincerely held belief. Moreover, given that Cavendish likened the destructive power of ‘this pernicious and inordinate carnal love’ of Henry for Anne to the plague,
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he could hardly have portrayed his hero supporting it. But if there is room for scepticism, it seems likely that, if Wolsey did have doubts, he would have expressed them before the matter became public and before unalterable positions had been taken up and to that extent Cavendish’s account rings true. More convincing is Campeggio’s assessment, made not years afterwards as Cavendish’s was, but as events were still unfolding. On 9 January he wrote:

As far as I can make out the cardinal is actually not in favour of the affair, but your lordship can be sure that he would not dare to admit this openly, nor can he help to prevent it; on the contrary he has to hide his feelings and pretend to be eagerly pursuing what the king desires. I talk freely with the cardinal, since I know his opinion is as I have described it. In the end he shrugs his shoulders, and says there is nothing he can say except that the only course open is somehow to satisfy the king whatever the consequences, since in time some remedy will be found
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Campeggio may have been clutching at straws; it would, after all, have been comforting for him to believe that secretly his fellow legate was on his side, despite his occasional bullying. For his part, Wolsey was quite astute enough to present a sympathetic face or hint that he believed something that he did not, if he thought that he could thereby get what he wanted. Nevertheless, there is something about Campeggio’s assessment that is convincing. Wolsey was not the author of the king’s ‘great matter’, and probably he always had reservations about its wisdom and may just possibly have had worries about how it would affect his own position. But if at the outset he had dared, as Cavendish maintained, to persuade the king to change his mind, he had thereafter kept his doubts to himself and done everything possible to bring about what Henry wanted. Campeggio understood that Wolsey had no choice. If his position depended upon his personal relationship with Henry, it needed to be reinforced by frequent proof that he was still the best man to put into effect the royal wishes. The more Henry wanted something, the more necessary it was for Wolsey to provide it, for if he did not, there were plenty of others who would. But it was not just a matter of self-interest; one does not serve a person or institution, and Henry was both, for over fifteen years without developing strong attachments, and no doubt the magic of kingship would also have cast its spell. Carrying out the king’s wishes was what in every sense Wolsey was programmed to do, and if one studies the letters and instructions that were drawn up by him in the pursuit of the divorce, very rarely less than five thousand words, and occasionally twice that length, and if one considers the ingenuity with which he grappled with the legal problems involved and the complexity of the diplomatic initiatives that he undertook, there can be no reason to doubt that, whatever his reservations, he did everything in his power to free Henry from his unwelcome marriage. All that remains to be considered is how skilfully he went about it, and we shall approach
this on two fronts. The first to be considered will be the legal issues, which, though ultimately less important than the second – his negotiations with the pope and other European rulers – are every bit as complicated.

The most important point to make, and one which touches on both aspects, is that getting rid of a queen, especially the mother of the (albeit female) heir to the throne, was a serious undertaking with all kinds of political consequences. To take one minor point: under the terms of the Treaty of Amiens, Mary was to marry the duke of Orleans, Francis’s younger son; but what would become of this marriage if Mary, instead of being heir to the throne, became merely an illegitimate daughter? The more serious point concerned the English succession itself and the rival claims to the throne that a second marriage could create. To try and prevent such rivalry it was vitally important to achieve the divorce in the most legally binding way possible. There was also the question of decorum. One could not just dump a queen: not only because she might be, as Catherine was, popular and therefore a potential focus of opposition, but because as queen she shared in the divinity of kingship – a dangerous thing to tamper with. Moreover, there were standards of behaviour which Henry, not only as king but as a chivalrous knight and Renaissance gentleman, would be expected and would want, if at all possible, to conform to. Rigging an ecclesiastical trial and rushing into marriage with the sister of a former mistress could hardly be said to be doing that. Technically, it is true, a court sitting under Wolsey as cardinal legate would have had a legal status of sorts, and would have given Henry’s actions a veneer of respectability. However, it would not have created a good impression that one of the parties had no knowledge of the trial, and the more arbitrary and precipitate the efforts to get rid of Catherine were, the thinner that veneer became.