The King's Cardinal: The Rise and Fall of Thomas Wolsey (Pimlico) (156 page)

Of the three who might be considered to have possessed rather more political importance, Carew, Bryan and Compton, least is known about Carew. He seem to have received no office or grant of royal favour to compensate him for loss of privy chamber membership, but as master of the horse from 1522 he remained a significant figure at court, and when in 1527 Francis
I
was made a knight of the garter it was Carew who conveyed it to him. And he was to remain significant enough at Court to have his head cut off in 1539! Bryan also seems to have received nothing. Perhaps it was felt that with an annual income of some £400 he was in no need of further remuneration. But he is an interesting figure if, as befits his sobriquet of ‘the Vicar of Hell’, a rather shadowy one.
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Related to Anne Boleyn, his return to the privy chamber in the summer of 1528 may be connected with her increasing influence. It was he who was sent to Paris in the summer of 1528 to escort Campeggio across the Channel and to Rome on an important mission in connection with the divorce in November, with instructions to submit regular
reports for the king’s eyes only;
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and some of these reports were critical of the way the divorce had been handled. Here, at last, is something with a whiff of faction about it, but it is only a whiff, and it could be a false trail. One would need something a bit more definite before it was possible to argue convincingly that Wolsey saw Bryan, along with the others removed from the privy chamber in 1526, as a serious rival, and thus interpret the Eltham ordinances in a factional sense. Moreover, if, as was suggested earlier,
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Henry made his own appointments, then presumably he would have controlled dismissals as well, especially as regards so intimate a matter as a personal servant and companion. So, even if he had wanted to, it is most unlikely that Wolsey was ever in a position to conduct a purge of the royal household.

What is also clear is that, whatever his intentions, Wolsey never succeeded in keeping Bryan, or anyone else, away from the king for any length of time, and it is worth making the point that even after 1526 Compton and Carew continued to be provided with lodgings in the royal household, as indeed did Dorset, Kingston and Weston, presumably, therefore, still well placed to influence the king, if that was what they were bent on. Wolsey was far too intelligent not to have quickly realized the impossibility of doing away with people whom the king liked. Both his instinct and his practice were to conciliate, and there is no reason to suppose that members of the privy chamber were the exception. Neither is there any evidence that he and Bryan did not get on well. He accompanied the cardinal on both his great embassies abroad, to Bruges and Calais in 1521 and to Amiens and Compiègne in 1527, which suggests that Wolsey trusted him and appreciated his diplomatic skills. If, on the other hand, it is argued that on these occasions the choice of Bryan was not Wolsey’s, then this hardly suggests that Wolsey would have been able to remove him from the privy chamber against the king’s wishes. A letter that Bryan wrote to Wolsey in connection with his escorting Campeggio to England in 1528 is very much a friendly exchange between people who knew and respected each other
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– a view which is not necessarily contradicted by what can be taken to be veiled criticisms of Wolsey in his reports from Rome in the spring of 1529.
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Spurred on by both Henry and Wolsey to obtain from the pope something that they realized would not be forthcoming, he and his colleagues were in a difficult position. They had therefore little option but to criticize their instructions or to admit their own incompetence. In the strained atmosphere of those months criticisms were bound to surface, but they should not be taken as evidence of an endemic rivalry between Wolsey and the likes of Bryan.

The overwhelming impression is that the dismissals of 1526 made a good deal of sense, both for those removed and for the more cost-effective running of the royal household, which, after all, was the stated purpose of the exercise. A conspiracy theorist would wish to ignore the stated purpose, but that would seem a little cavalier. Reform of the royal household was to be a leitmotiv of sixteenth- and seventeenth-century politics. The institution itself was an administrator’s
nightmare, in some ways consciously designed to be wasteful and corrupt, because it was one of the purposes of kingship to be bountiful. But given that Tudor and Stuart kings were always short of money, if not desperately in need of it, it was inevitable that attempts would periodically be made by those in charge of government to limit the drain on money that the royal household always was. In 1525 money was a problem for Henry, so there is nothing at all sinister in the fact that Wolsey turned his attention to household reform.

A brief look at Sir William Compton’s position in 1526 will help us to a proper understanding of the role of the privy chamber in this period and of its relationship with Wolsey. Having presided over the first ten years of its existence, as groom of the stool, Compton was the privy chamber member
par excellence
.
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In the late summer of 1525, he had wished to become chancellor of the duchy of Lancaster, one of the major offices of state, and if he had obtained it, he would certainly have had to give up his privy chamber post. As it was, he obtained a post not quite so important but nevertheless perfectly respectable and well paid, that of undertreasurer of the Exchequer
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. Whatever his disappointment, it has to be assumed that Compton was by 1525 anxious to escape from the burdensome duties of groom of the stool, and saw this office as promotion. And the notion of promotion is the key to understanding. The royal household and, if you were fortunate, the privy chamber was where you started your career, not where you hoped to end it. For this reason entry into the privy chamber was largely for the young, and the exceptions, such as Wolsey’s four ‘creatures’, do not disprove the rule. These older men, it was argued earlier, gave to the newly formed institution that status and distinction that, probably following the French model, Henry perceived a body so intimately associated with the king to require. In fact the appointment of four hard-working senior royal servants was not a great success. Kingston and Weston remained until 1526 when both went on to more important things, but Wingfield and Jerningham had dropped out much earlier, being far too busily employed in foreign embassies to perform satisfactorily duties that involved close and permanent attendance upon the king.

Service in the royal household provided an excellent training in all kinds of skills, lots of good perks and, above all, a golden opportunity to form a personal relationship with the king, which would obviously further one’s career; a modern equivalent would be the post of personal private secretary to a cabinet minister. But personal private secretaries do not exercise great power, and neither did members of the the privy chamber, as is suggested by the fact that they were rarely mentioned by foreign ambassadors, one of whose main jobs was, after all, to detect who was and was not important. Compton, it is true, occasionally rated a mention. In 1511 the French ambassador even reported that he enjoyed more ‘credit’ with the king than anyone else, and should therefore be granted a pension, advice that was later to be acted upon.
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All the same, Giustinian in his four years at the English court never once mentioned Compton, and when he came to report the ‘purge’ of 1519 he failed to provide the names of those who had been removed, almost certainly because he
did not know them. The people whom he felt to be important, apart from Wolsey, were Norfolk, Suffolk, Fox, and occasionally Pace and More. Now, it would ill behove one as sceptical of the value of ambassadorial reports as the present writer to set too much store by this, but it does seem unlikely that Giustinian would have completely failed over a four-year period to detect a whole group of people, if indeed they did possess great influence. Later ambassadors did not spot them either. And, when, from 1527 onwards, they began to speculate about an anti-Wolsey faction, it was one composed not of privy chamber members, but of two dukes and one viscount. Even if, as will shortly be argued, they were wrong about this, they were surely right to think that any threat to Wolsey’s position would come from such people, because only they had the authority to force the king’s hand?

By and large it was the 3rd Duke of Norfolk who was singled out by the ambassadors as Wolsey’s chief opponent, and so it is a little surprising to find that during the 1520s he was given an enormous amount of responsibility. Sent to Ireland in 1520, he was recalled in 1522 because of the imminent outbreak of war with France, and by the July of that year he was in charge of an expedition to Brittany. War with France meant war with Scotland, and in February 1523 Surrey, as he was then, was made lord lieutenant of the king’s army against Scotland, his brief to defend the Northern border from invasion by the duke of Albany. By the end of 1524 the threat of invasion was no more, and Surrey, who had by then succeeded his father as 3rd duke of Norfolk, was allowed to return south. But he was not given much rest. In 1525 he was heavily involved in efforts to secure the Amicable Grant in East Anglia and in putting down the accompanying unrest. If, as a result of Pavia, there had been an English invasion of France, it was he who would have led it, but in fact the year brought peace with France, and though there was occasional talk of English armies, Norfolk’s military skills were not required again in Wolsey’s time. Since 1522 he had been lord treasurer of England, and by the end of the decade he was on virtually every commission of the peace, a distinction he shared with Wolsey alone. It must be assumed from this that Henry and Wolsey, who as lord chancellor was responsible for the appointment of JPs, considered that the duke’s name alone added such distinction and authority to a commission that it was worth putting him on it, whether he had any connections with the county or not. As has already been shown, in areas such as East Anglia where he did have strong connections much more than his name was required. In 1525 and from late 1527 through much of 1528 his presence there was considered vital for carrying out government policy and for maintaining law and order.

Norfolk’s contribution at these critical times offers the best illustration of the importance to royal government of a loyal nobility. It also provides important evidence of his good relationship with Wolsey. Not only did he make no effort to exploit what might have been considered a heaven-sent opportunity to bring Wolsey down, but the tone of his correspondence with the cardinal at this time reveals two conscientious servants of the king, with different roles to play, but both co-operating to do their very best for their master in difficult circumstances. And what there is certainly no sign of, even in 1527 and 1528, is that Norfolk was at the head of a faction that was striving night and day to bring the cardinal down. Admittedly, tone is a notoriously difficult matter to reach a judgement about and it would be very odd if Norfolk had chosen in his correspondence to let Wolsey know
that he was plotting against him! Moreover, one of the charges against Wolsey is that he deliberately kept Norfolk in exile in order to deny him political influence, and for a conspiracy theorist the fact that Norfolk was ordered, even if by the king, to remain in East Anglia in 1528 could be seen as part of Wolsey’s machinations. Similar charges levelled against him in connection with Richard Pace and Sir William Compton were refuted, and so will this one be. But it has this much to be said for it: Norfolk, being a nobleman who was prepared to work hard at being a royal servant, was potentially a much more serious threat to Wolsey’s position than anyone so far mentioned.

It was the decision to send Norfolk to Ireland in 1520 which, for Polydore Vergil at least, provided the decisive evidence that Wolsey was determined to keep him as far away as possible from the king;
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and in support of this view is the idea, as much a commonplace of Tudor and Stuart politics as it is of today’s, that if one wants to ruin a man’s reputation one sends him to sink in the quagmire of Irish politics. What this view ignores is that Ireland has presented successive English governments with real problems which, however reluctantly, have had to be faced up to. This was so in 1520, and in the particular circumstances of that year Norfolk was so obviously the candidate for the post of lord lieutenant of Ireland that no other explanation for the appointment is required. It can also be shown that at that time Henry was taking a direct interest in Irish affairs, and that, given his keen interest in all military matters, he was almost certainly responsible for Norfolk’s appointment.
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And what is true of Norfolk’s appointment to Ireland is even more the case, because of his experience of Scottish warfare, of his appointment to command the army against Scotland in 1523 and 1524. The fact is that of the two obvious candidates for any important military command at this time – whether they liked it or not – Norfolk was one. The other was the duke of Suffolk, according to some a fellow conspirator against Wolsey.

Even if Norfolk’s appointments to these important commands cannot be evidence of a plot on Wolsey’s part to do him down, this does not, of course, prove that no such plot existed. Moreover, it is not only Polydore Vergil and the foreign ambassadors who saw the two men as enemies. In October 1526 the young Henry Percy wrote a letter to his brother-in-law, the earl of Cumberland, in which he reported a conversation between his father the 5th earl of Northumberland and Wolsey, to the effect that Wolsey should put no trust in Cumberland because he was ‘all with my lord of Norfolk’.
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On the face of it, here is convincing evidence that, in leading Northern circles at least, Norfolk and Wolsey were thought to be rivals, and one can see why this might be so. It was during his defence of the Northern border in 1523-4 that Norfolk had been so critical of the stay-at-home courtiers, and no doubt he sometimes made rude remarks about Wolsey too, and what anxious military commander has not criticized civilian leaders who have failed to provide him with the necessary men and money and have obstinately refused to appreciate all the difficulties of waging war? Some of Norfolk’s remarks would have gone the rounds and might easily have been misinterpreted – and in this particular instance
were probably being deliberately misinterpreted. Northumberland was never really trusted by Henry or Wolsey, and when this conversation with Wolsey took place, he was on bad terms with both his son and his son-in-law. And its purpose was not to provide Wolsey with an objective assessment of factional groupings in the North, but to create trouble for his son-in-law. This makes him an unreliable source for the true relationship between Norfolk and Wolsey – something that his son, who had been brought up in Wolsey’s household and was thus well placed to make a judgement, seems to have realized. At any rate, the burden of his letter to Cumberland was to warn him not of the awful consequences of a too close attachment to Norfolk but only of Northumberland’s efforts to do him down.