The King's Cardinal: The Rise and Fall of Thomas Wolsey (Pimlico) (168 page)

When Joachim had visited Wolsey in March the main topic of conversation was apparently the cardinal’s French pension, which was in arrears. As, however, under the terms of Henry’s agreement with Wolsey made the previous month, this pension would now go to the Crown, it has been quite plausibly suggested that during this visit Wolsey was negotiating on Henry’s behalf, not his own. The suggestion is supported by the fact that the visit was allowed to take place at all; a meeting between an accredited French ambassador and a fallen minister could hardly have taken place without the king’s knowledge.
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And if Henry had been willing to make use of Wolsey in March in order to get as much money out of the French as possible, might he not also have been trying to do so in October and November when negotiations with the French were at a critical stage and when he had few cards to play? This time, however, the tactics were to be a little different. Instead of Wolsey’s close relationship with the French being a plus, it was to be presented as something treasonable, the aim being to thereby embarrass the French and make them more compliant. It is all very speculative, but at least it may serve to alert us not to take Henry’s account of Wolsey’s treasonable contacts with the French entirely at its face value.

The main difficulty, however, in accepting Henry’s version is that it made no sense at all for the French to become involved in a war with the English, which was,
according to him, what Wolsey was proposing. If Anglo-French relations were not all sweetness and light at this time, the two countries had many more shared interests than opposing ones. Moreover, the French had good relations with the Boleyns, the father having been a resident ambassador in France, and Anne herself having been in part educated at the French court. So if they had lost a friendly, though always formidable, royal servant, they had gained a royal mistress, an exchange that cannot have been too much to their disadvantage. Furthermore, since they were in such a strong position
vis-à-vis
the English, there was no incentive for them to destroy this by going to war. And although the possibility that Wolsey suggested a conspiracy cannot be ruled out, one has to continue to work on the assumption that Wolsey’s intelligence had not completely deserted him, unless, that is, his fall had unhinged him in some way. If it had not, he would have appreciated, just as much as we do, if not more, that the French were not about to embark on some hare-brained scheme to put him back in power. What he might reasonably have expected was that they put in a good word for him, and in suggesting this he might well have promised that if he were restored to favour, he would be even more francophile than he was alleged to have been hitherto. Such promises could have been misinterpreted, deliberately or otherwise, by both the French and Henry, and hence the talk of conspiracy. But that the French were involved in anything like a conspiracy, or that Wolsey suggested one, is the least likely of the many possible hypotheses.

It will be remembered that in the official version of Wolsey’s conspiracy the French had a very positive role to play; and, indeed a letter intended for Joachim, though in fact only stored in Agostini’s head, had been the main, if not the only, exhibit in the case against Wolsey. If a conspiracy with the French was unlikely, then the case for a conspiracy of any kind is seriously undermined. Arguably, however, the person most likely to have been interested in conspiring with Wolsey was the emperor, in order to make life as difficult as possible for the man who was behaving so dishonourably towards his aunt. But it has already been suggested that his attachment to his aunt was largely a calculated one, which he did not allow to stand in the way of other more pressing interests. In 1530 Charles did have such interests, in Germany and elsewhere, and though quite prepared to cause a little trouble for England in order to prevent her causing mischief, in particular with France, it is difficult to see how a full-scale conspiracy could have been of much help to him. Moreover, not only does nothing Chapuys reported give any indication that the emperor was interested in such a conspiracy, but if the mention of bringing in ‘the secular arm’ is interpreted as it has been here, there is not even any suggestion that Wolsey ever proposed one. Admittedly, Wolsey’s and Agostini’s arrests must have alarmed Chapuys momentarily because he had been in frequent communication with both. However, when on 27 November he wrote to Charles that even should Agostini ‘repeat every word that has passed between him and me, he could say nothing for which I should be liable to be impugned or calumniated’,
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there is no reason to suppose that he was not telling the truth; neither did Henry ever try to contradict Chapuys on this point. The significance of his clean bill of health is worth underlining. It is only from Chapuys’s detailed reports that we have
any inside information of Wolsey’s dealings with foreign powers at this time. The French evidence is far less complete; there is Joachim’s account of his stay with Wolsey, but it lends no support to any conspiratorial theory.
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If, therefore, a search of Chapuys’s reports draws a blank, then again the case for a conspiracy by Wolsey is considerably undermined.

But it was the pope, not the French, who was given the leading role in the official account of the plotting, for according to Henry’s first letter to Bryan on the subject, ‘the particularities [of the plot] most specially concern sinister practices made and set forth to the court of Rome’.
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There were obvious tactical advantages for Henry in stressing the papal connection, for Clement was hardly a favourite with him. However, these advantages would operate whether there had been any ‘sinister practices’ or not, so that Clement’s star billing does not help much to unravel the truth. Moreover, as with both Francis and Charles, it is difficult to see what advantages such plotting would have had for Clement. It was argued in a previous chapter that during the winter of 1528-9 he had come to the conclusion that there was more to be gained from co-operating with Charles than not. Such co-operation of necessity entailed some resistance to Henry’s anyway rather importunate demands for a divorce; that said, Clement had no wish to become merely the emperor’s puppet, and, as the whole history of the divorce shows, he bent over backwards to be as amenable to Henry as possible. What Clement would have loved most of all was for the problem to go away, and conspiring with Wolsey, who had done precious little for him, was not going to bring that about. So there was no strong reason for him to be receptive to feelers from Wolsey concerning any serious conspiracy. And there is virtually no evidence of it. The Venetian ambassador in Rome stated on 6 December that some people there were reporting the discovery of letters from Wolsey to the pope in which, according to some accounts, he had asked to be reappointed legate, while according to others he had been making proposals about the divorce.
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Rumours of this kind do not really add up to much, while the assertion sometimes made that Henry had asked his envoys at Rome to search for any incriminating evidence against Wolsey does not stand up to close scrutiny.
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It depends upon a passage from a letter of one of the English envoys, William Benet, to Henry on 27 October 1530 in which he declared that ‘as concerning those things that your Highness in your last letter commanded to Dr Carne and to me to search for, we shall not by God’s grace omit no labours nor diligence for the searching thereof. And such things as we shall find with all diligence we shall advertise your Highness thereof.’
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Henry’s command has not survived, but nowhere in this nor in Benet’s subsequent letter is there any reference to Wolsey. On the other hand, the English envoys were constantly being asked to chase up various matters to do with the divorce, and it seems likely that it was some such matter that this particular command had to do with.
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Positive evidence for any plotting by Wolsey with the pope is, then, negligible; foreign ambassadors in London might say otherwise, but as they were merely reporting gossip or information fed to them by the Crown, what they had to say is hardly more convincing than the Rome rumours. Moreover, that there was no plotting nor even much communication of any kind between Wolsey and the pope is strongly suggested by some negative evidence. When in the late summer of 1530 the papal nuncio, Antonio de Pulleo baron de Burgho, was sent to London, ostensibly to discuss proposals for a defence of Christendom against the infidel Turk but inevitably with divorce matters on his agenda, he was instructed to be guided in his conduct towards Wolsey by Joachim.
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Since he found that the French ambassador and Wolsey were not on good terms, this was not very helpful, but more to the point, it hardly suggests that Clement had any plans for secret negotiations with Wolsey. Neither does the fact that Wolsey was apparently desperately anxious to discover from Chapuys whether the nuncio had brought any instructions about him.
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And in a long letter that the nuncio wrote on 16 September he made no mention of Wolsey whatsoever.
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In some ways all this is curious. It might be thought that Clement would have shown more concern about the fate of a papal legate, an attack on whom – which was, it has been argued, what Henry intended it to be – was an attack on himself, and more generally on the liberties of the Church. In fact, Wolsey’s fate seems to have been a very low priority for the pope, his difficult relations with Henry being of much more importance. No doubt he was approached in some way by Wolsey, but quite how is not known. Almost certainly, any approach would have had to do with Wolsey’s restoration not so much to royal favour but to a full enjoyment of his rights as bishop of Winchester and abbot of St Albans. Perhaps, also, his help was sought in connection with Wolsey’s strenuous efforts to save his colleges, though it is more likely that Wolsey would have realized that in the circumstances papal help would have been counterproductive. Again, in the complete absence of any real evidence all this has to be speculation. Nevertheless, the strong probability is that, as with both Francis and Charles, there was nothing between cardinal and pope that deserves to be called a conspiracy.

It is beginning to look as if the first possibility mentioned at the start of this chapter does not stand up to close scrutiny, and what may deliver the
coup de grâce
is an aspect of Wolsey’s arrest not so far mentioned. It will be remembered that it took place at Cawood on 4 November and that Wolsey died three and a half weeks later, by which time he and the accompanying entourage had got as far as Leicester, about half way between Cawood and London. The journey up had taken Walter Walsh, the groom of the privy chamber sent to arrest him, four days,
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so that Wolsey’s progress south was by any standards slow. Admittedly, he was increasingly ill, but even the concern shown for his health tells against the view of Wolsey as a dangerous threat to Henry’s security. Cavendish reports, though one cannot be too certain about his accuracy, that on this last journey Wolsey was accompanied by people ‘weeping and lamenting … crying “God save your grace, God save your
grace, my good Lord Cardinal.”
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This is really not the kind of reception that the king would have liked to see given to a traitor, and the slow, almost stately, progress of the cavalcade bringing Wolsey to the Tower, which included eighteen days at Sheffield Park, a home of the earl of Shrewsbury, seems almost calculated to make it easy for anyone involved in a conspiracy to co-ordinate their plans. In fact, nobody stirred, probably for the very good reason that there was nobody to stir. In fact, there is not one piece of evidence that connects anyone in England, outside Wolsey’s household, with a plot of any kind.

There was no conspiracy. Moreover, the Crown’s handling of Wolsey’s arrest hardly suggests that it really believed in one, which may in turn cast the first doubt on what was referred to at the beginning of this chapter as the ‘sensible view’: that there was in truth no conspiracy, but that the Crown had reasonable grounds for believing that Wolsey was up to no good. Given this scenario, its actions do make some kind of sense. The slow journey south is explained by the fact that Henry and his councillors were quite happy to take their time in deciding whether or not there was a conspiracy, and to pronounce on Wolsey’s future accordingly. It has to be said that this was not how Henry presented the matter to Bryan, but then there was no particular reason why, when instructing one of his ambassadors, Henry should have concerned himself with the truth, which is unfortunately not always helpful in the successful conduct of affairs. More interestingly, and this is where the first doubts creep in, the slowness of journey south makes even more sense if Henry’s intention was to continue to use Wolsey as a weapon in his attack on the Church, even if this meant inventing a conspiracy, this, of course, being precisely what the second possibility suggested earlier entailed. Still, the ‘sensible view’ is nevertheless attractive, partly just because it avoids a conspiratorial view of life. Much has to be muddle and misunderstanding. Henry had created a most difficult situation for himself in which anxiety, if not paranoia, could well have come to dominate his judgement, fuelled, as it is known to have been, by reports of Wolsey’s increasing popularity in the North and his never ending complaints about shortage of money and the fate of his colleges.
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At the same time, no one would have understood better than the king that his former lord chancellor knew his way around the courts of Europe better than any man living. Wolsey was potentially dangerous, and it was surely only sensible to bring him down from the North, though if this were the case why let him go there in the first place?