The King's Cardinal: The Rise and Fall of Thomas Wolsey (Pimlico) (146 page)

If considerable time has been spent on this rather than on any other aspect of the second legatine trial, it is because it does seem to have been a losing line for Henry, and one which, if lost, would fundamentally undermine his case that any dispensation granted for his marriage had been invalid from the start. It would then be very difficult, as we saw earlier, for him to resist the argument that any faults in the original dispensation could be easily remedied, and after twenty years of marriage even that was probably not required. Once the question of consummation had become central, Wolsey would be in difficulty; and there are indeed signs that, despite the pressure to conclude lest the case be advoked to Rome, proceedings were becoming bogged down. At one point it had been Wolsey’s and Campeggio’s intention to have all the relevant material on which to base their judgment presented to them on 14 July. But the documents were not presented until the 19th, and there are some indications that, even then, all was not as it should be, for though sentence was to have been given on the 21st, there was yet another postponement, which led only to Campeggio’s ‘unexpected’ adjournment on the 23rd.
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It is difficult to believe that these delays can be ascribed entirely to Campeggio’s machinations, for if all had been going well there would have been enormous pressure from the king’s side to come to judgment as soon as possible. But what appears to have happened is that Henry’s lawyers were having trouble in presenting a winning line – and if that was so, then the adjournment may not have been quite the disaster that is usually assumed.

There has always been something surprising about the passivity with which Wolsey accepted the allegedly unilateral declaration of an adjournment by his
fellow judge, especially when it is usually further alleged that it was this declaration that destroyed him. And the idea that the adjournment was either unexpected or disastrous is not supported by the letter which Wolsey wrote to the English envoys at Rome on 27 July. Admittedly there are problems about it, one being the date, for written apparently after the adjournment, it anticipates it! Moreover, it is a signed letter which must raise a doubt about whether it was ever sent, since outgoing letters have usually only survived in draft form. Neither is there any reference to it having been received by the envoys, nor do any of its instructions appear to have been carried out
.
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On the other hand, the fact that all but the first two sentences were written in an apparently unique cipher suggests that, whether sent or not, Wolsey considered its contents of some importance.
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He began by thanking the envoys for their efforts in trying to prevent the advocation until:

such time as you supposed, celerity being used, sentence might have been given
…
Howbeit, to show unto you in great and secret counsel, and to be in any wise reserved to yourselves without disclosing thereof to the pope or any other person, such discrepant contrareity of opinions hath here ensued in the said cause, that no manner of hope in the same opinions can be in any brief time groundly trutinate, weighed, and every part to the point pondered, but that it must require more long demur and tract of time for the profound digesting of the same. So, as no certain time being known how long it shall be before the said opinion shall now be well resolved, remembering furthermore that now within one week the days judicial shall expire wherein it is by law used and appointed to proceed in such causes, and so the course of the process must needs of force cease for two months or thereabouts, it is here taken for a thing not feasible so long to protract and put over the signature of the said advocation
.
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Wolsey then instructed the envoys to act on the assumption that the advocation would go ahead, whether or not it had been signed by the time they received this letter. The adjournment, which Wolsey does not even associate with Campeggio, let alone blame him for, was thus merely an addendum to Wolsey’s main point: that it had proved impossible to come to any speedy conclusion to the trial. There seems to have been no good reason for Wolsey to make this point unless it was the truth; he seems merely to have wanted to put the envoys in the picture, while naturally being anxious that the difficulties should not too quickly become common knowledge at Rome. And, of course, the picture that Wolsey presented here fits well with the delays and difficulties that have been shown to have existed.

If Wolsey was speaking the truth and there really was ‘no manner of hope’ that the trial would be quickly concluded, and by that must be understood concluded in Henry’s favour, then it is most unlikely that Campeggio’s adjournment would have been unexpected, or indeed unwelcome. This view receives some confirmation from a letter which the French ambassador wrote on 22 July, just a day before the adjournment was announced. His assessment was that, while on the 19th, when all the documents had been finally presented to the legates, the king’s supporters had been hopeful of success, already by the 22nd the situation had changed and they
were now worried that Campeggio would not do as they wished.
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The ambassador’s explanation for this turn of events was that Campeggio was so anxious to profit from Imperial favour now that Charles v was the virtual master of Italy, that he would do nothing to disappoint him. There could be something in this, although his loyalty to the pope was probably more significant. Both explanations, however, obscure an aspect that is of great relevance. To secure an adjournment Campeggio would have needed to secure the agreement of his fellow judge. Furthermore, his fellow judge was probably aware of the dates of curial holidays and, as his letter of 27 July proves, did know that these dates were not binding in the case of special commissions such as he and Campeggio were acting under.
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To assume otherwise is to assume that Wolsey had been grossly negligent in his preparation, and this is so unlike him as to be inconceivable, and Englishmen had been dealing with the Roman courts from time out of mind. No, the only credible scenario is that Campeggio adjourned the court with Wolsey’s agreement and Henry’s prior knowledge. The question then arises of how that agreement was obtained.

The answer has more or less been given already. On the evidence presented it would have been quite easy for Campeggio to show that sentence could not be given in Henry’s favour, or at the very least that there were so many difficulties that a speedy decision was not possible. But time was not on Wolsey’s side, for by the end of July the advocation, which Clement had agreed to on the 13th,
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was expected any minute.
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In these circumstances it was vital for Wolsey not to allow knowledge of the true state of the legal position to become public, let alone to allow a sentence in favour of the marriage, legally the most correct outcome of the trial, to be passed. Far better to create the impression that all would have been well if only Campeggio had not intervened. And why would Campeggio have been prepared to shoulder the blame? Because it averted the more difficult alternative of having to pass a sentence that would have infuriated his hosts, and at the same time it enabled him to carry out the only specific instruction that he had from Rome, which was to prevent any sentence being passed. The adjournment was a compromise that gave just enough to all sides for it to be acceptable.

But what, then, becomes of the duke of Suffolk’s one moment of fame? It may be remembered that when Campeggio had announced the adjournment, so great apparently was his fury that the duke had shouted out what, according to most accounts, all Henry’s loyal subjects were thinking at this time: that ‘it was never merry in England whilst we had cardinals amongst us’.
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There is no reason to doubt that Suffolk made the remark, but if it should be thought a little too theatrical and apposite to ring completely true, there is an explanation. According to Cavendish, Suffolk’s declaration was made at the king’s command and, although there are
problems about Cavendish as a source, in this instance he probably got it right: there is nothing else in Suffolk’s career to suggest that he was capable of taking a political initiative, and the alternative interpretation, that he merely lost his temper, is undermined by the argument put forward here that the adjournment could not have come as a surprise to Henry and his leading councillors, of whom Suffolk was one.
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Thus, Suffolk’s outburst was probably entirely premeditated: an official protest made for propaganda effect, and one entirely compatible with the kind of compromise that it has been suggested was arrived at, with the king’s full knowledge, between Campeggio and Wolsey. Moreover, though the failure of the legatine court was a setback – and following the optimism of the previous September, one severe enough to convince Henry that the time had come to disgrace his cardinal legate – Wolsey did not see it as the end of the road. He was to spend the next two months conducting a skilful damage limitation exercise, the aim of which was to persuade the pope to take the matter into his own hands and give a personal judgment in Henry’s favour.
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It was the continuation of the existing policy in another guise, and, as before, it meant that somehow the pope would have to be fixed, but in a way that could not be proved, for appearances were almost more important than reality. The best solution had been the decretal commission, and with its failure the prospects for any kind of success greatly diminished. But because, as Wolsey put it, the king’s cause suffered no negative,
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the search for a solution had to go on. And if there was a solution, it had probably far less to do with the complexities of the canon law than with the equally complex issues of foreign policy.

The task that Henry set Wolsey in the spring of 1527 was the hardest he had ever asked his cardinal legate to perform. Insofar as the pope held the key, it meant that it was Italian politics that Wolsey would have to try and dominate, and one does not have to be too influenced by Burckhardt to appreciate that the Italian peninsula was something of a quicksand in which even the best laid plans could quickly disappear without trace. Moreover, for England, as has been pointed out before, for what were essentially logistic reasons, it was probably the most difficult area of Europe on which to exert pressure. But the alternative was to rely on allies, and after fifteen years of involvement in foreign affairs Wolsey did not need to read Machiavelli to appreciate that allies were unreliable and at best a crude instrument with which to achieve one’s ends. Admittedly, he did not have to look for lasting success in Italy. All that was needed was to apply a half-nelson for just long enough to persuade Clement that it was worth his while to agree to Henry’s request. It would be entirely a question of timing, and, given that in the late 1520s Clement was much in need of help, it might just be possible to pull it off.

One thing in Wolsey’s favour was that, as a result of the Imperial victory over the French at Pavia in February 1525, the rulers of Italy were extremely suspicious of Charles’s intentions. King of Naples and effective ruler of both Genoa and Milan,
and for the moment without the French to act as a restraining influence, Charles did seem to be in a strong position to establish some kind of sovereignty over the whole peninsula, although the assumption that he wanted to was probably a mistake. Threatened from within by the spread of Lutheranism and from without by the army of Suleiman the Magnificent, his hold over the Holy Roman Empire, never strong, was increasingly precarious. All he wanted in Italy was a settlement which safeguarded his position sufficiently to allow him to turn his attention to overcoming these threats. But if Charles saw his policy towards Italy as essentially defensive, her rulers, given the opportunities that Pavia had created, may be excused for not sharing his view. For them the immediate task was to resist further Imperial advancement, and to that end they were very much in the market for allies, even one who could give as little help as England. This underlying point needs to be borne in mind as the complex story of Wolsey’s negotiations with the papacy is unravelled. It was this that gave him his chance to exert some influence on Italian affairs and thus to obtain the divorce; for, of course, one of the most important of the Italian states was presided over by Clement
VII
, the only person able to grant it.

When, however, the news of Pavia had first reached Wolsey, the divorce had not yet been thought of. Instead he had to contend with the more general problem of deciding how this Imperial victory, and the unusual circumstances that resulted from the capture of the French king, affected England’s chances of continuing in the dominant role in European affairs that both he and his master considered rightfully hers. At first sight Pavia might have appeared to confirm the wisdom of the Imperial alliance and the Great Enterprise against France decided upon at Bruges way back in 1521. In fact, as we saw earlier, Wolsey had begun to have serious doubts about the alliance sometime before Pavia, and these were soon confirmed when it became clear that Charles had no intention of seizing the opportunity to launch an all-out attack on France. The result was the volte-face described in a previous chapter and the signing, on 30 August, of the Treaty of the More.
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The most obvious purpose of this was to secure Francis’s release from captivity in Spain on reasonable terms. In return for English help, his mother, Louise of Savoy, was prepared, albeit reluctantly, to pay quite a high price: in money terms about £20,000, and she was also at last to come to some satisfactory financial settlement of what was owing to Henry’s sister, Mary, as dowager queen of France, and to settle yet another long-standing grievance by forbidding Albany to return to Scotland. In making this treaty, Wolsey had no intention of allowing England to become involved in a full-scale war with the emperor, but to achieve a position somewhat similar to the one he had secured in 1518 by the Treaty of London: a European peace presided over by Henry and himself, and underpinned and dominated by the Anglo-French alliance of which England was to be the senior partner.
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The difficulty, even before the king’s ‘great matter’ complicated everything, was that this time neither Francis nor Charles was especially anxious for peace. Once Francis had been released in March 1526, he was determined to re-establish himself as a leading figure
in Europe, while at the same time attempting to recover the two sons whom he had had to surrender to Charles as a guarantee of his good behaviour. Both these ambitions meant intervening in Italian affairs. Charles’s position, although arguably more defensive, did have a curious tendency to end in war-like behaviour. Moreover, though he may not have been anxious for further gains in Italy, he was faced with some difficult decisions there which were always likely to provoke opposition. First, there was what to do about Milan whose puppet duke, Francesco Sforza, and his adviser, Girolamo Morone, had proved to be less compliant to his wishes than he had hoped. He was also most anxious to be crowned emperor by the pope, which would necessitate a personal visit to Italy, and this could only arouse the gravest suspicions about his long-term intentions. The Venetians and Clement – if his chief advisers at the time, Gian Giberti bishop of Verona and Francesco Guicciardini, could persuade him to make any decision – were likely to resist even Charles’s modest plans for Italy. All in all, the prospects for peace in 1525 and 1526 were not good, but especially not for one arranged by Wolsey, since one undoubted consequence of Pavia was that Charles was in no mood to be dictated to. Somehow or other, Wolsey would have to prove to the emperor that England was a force to be reckoned with, and this was not going to be easy.