The King's Cardinal: The Rise and Fall of Thomas Wolsey (Pimlico) (171 page)

The obvious substitute for the pope, with or without parliamentary backing, was the English Church, but the fact that it was obvious did not make it easy to put into effect. For one thing, there remained that obstacle that Wolsey, despite all his ingenuity and effort, had found insurmountable: namely, that Henry’s case was weak in law, especially if, as appeared to be the case, he could not prove that Catherine’s marriage to his brother had been consummated. It is true that some churchmen (amongst the more senior perhaps Warham,
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and amongst a younger generation Gardiner and Edward Fox, used extensively by first Wolsey and then Henry in the divorce negotiations)
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appear to have genuinely believed in Henry’s case. And by the summer of 1530 Oxford and Cambridge, as well as a number of European universities, had pronounced in Henry’s favour, and this obviously strengthened his position.
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Against this, in order to obtain these verdicts a considerable amount of pressure had had to be exerted, nowhere more than at the English universities.
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Given that at any trial Henry would have to deal with men of the calibre of Fisher and Clerk who would not be nearly so easily dictated to, this did not bode well. Moreover, it was one thing to give an opinion, or even to write to the pope on Henry’s behalf, as some of his leading subjects had done, though even getting people to sign this letter had proved very difficult.
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But to give a judgment against the express command of the pope would be quite another matter. In order to persuade people to do this Henry would have to find some totally convincing theoretical justification, and then, no doubt he would also have to do a lot of arm twisting as well.

The theoretical justification was already to hand, and Henry needed no prompting to make full use of it. After all, it was back in 1515 that he had informed his assembled bishops that ‘by the ordinance and sufferance of God we are king of England, and the kings of England in time past have never had any superior but God only’, which, amongst other things, meant that no one other than God could force him to stand trial at Rome. Moreover, both in 1515 and again in 1519 the Crown’s legal advisers had argued that papal decrees had no standing in England unless they had the consent of the Crown and were compatible with ‘the customs of England’.
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But to stress the lack of novelty, is not to play down the particular circumstances of 1530. Whatever may be said about the seriousness of those earlier conflicts between Church and state, Henry had not then been challenging the express command of a pope on a specific issue, and moreover one that could not have been more important to him, both emotionally and politically. This was precisely the situation in 1530, and so the theoretical arguments in defence of the royal position would have to be all the more presented and, of course, tailored to Henry’s particular need, which were to prevent his matrimonial cause being tried at Rome.

The continuing refusal of both Charles and Clement to accede to his wishes compelled Henry in the summer of 1530 to enter upon not exactly a new policy, but rather a new phase, in which these theoretical arguments would have to play an increasingly important part.
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The threat that if Henry did not get his way he would have to proceed without the pope’s consent had been there from the very beginning, and, as we have seen, Wolsey had been just as happy to use it as anyone else.
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At the same time it must be stressed that what is not being said here is that it was in the summer of 1530 that Henry decided to ‘break with Rome’. The threat continued to be, as it had been before, part of a bargaining process in which Henry’s main purpose was still to persuade Clement to do his bidding. But given Clement’s continuing refusal to oblige, Henry was now faced with the prospect either of giving up or of turning the threat into a reality. Not to proceed was for him unthinkable, and the result was that he took a number of decisions which, it will be argued here, led directly to Wolsey’s arrest.

According to Chapuys, the new phase began at the meeting of notables held on 15 and 16 June to draw up that letter to the pope in which they called upon Clement to accede to their master’s wish. The letter itself made no mention of what was going to be the continual cry during the months ahead, that Henry’s case could only be tried in England. What signalled the new phase was the kite which was flown when it was asked at the meeting whether, now that Henry had secured the favourable verdict of ‘many competent judges’, Henry might not remarry immediately ‘without waiting any further approval of his conduct’.
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In fact, the kite had to be hauled down immediately because so few spoke out in its favour, but the lesson that Henry learned from this was not that he should give up but that he would have to try a good deal harder.

In describing Henry’s efforts over the next few months it will be helpful to
separate them into two strands. First, there were the continuing negotiations with the pope, but with the emphasis now on the ‘customs of England’, which the English envoys were instructed to inform Clement forbade any Englishman to appear in a foreign court against his will, but especially a king of England who had never acknowledged any superior but God! Given that at the same time they were instructed to threaten Clement with that anathema to all popes, a General Council, it is not altogether surprising that their initial reaction was to balk, explaining to Henry that they did not feel that either proposition would cut much ice with Clement just at that moment.
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In this, of course they were quite right, but their explanation impressed Henry not at all. He much regretted, he informed them on 7 October, that they had refrained from alleging the ‘customs of England’, which he then proceeded to restate and justify at length, explaining that there was just as much evidence for them as for papal authority, and that, therefore, by some rather curious logic, to question one was to question the other. All of this he now ordered them to put to the pope as vigorously as possible.
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Meanwhile, early in September the papal nuncio, Antonio Borgho, had arrived in England just in time for the publication of a royal proclamation forbidding Henry’s subjects from trying to obtain anything from Rome ‘containing matter prejudicial to the high authority, jurisdiction, and prerogative royal of this his said realm’.
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It may be that, as some ambassadors suggested, this prohibition was not directly related to the campaign for the divorce, but to the appeal to Rome by three English bishops against the anticlerical legislation of the first session of the Reformation parliament. And given that it did not prohibit the pope from summoning people to Rome, the issue that was most germane to the divorce, this is probably correct.
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However, the bishops in question were Fisher, Clerk and West, all three Catherine’s staunch defenders, which only serves to underline that at this time anticlericalism and the search for a divorce were inseparable, as Borgho was quickly to find out. When, quite understandably, he protested against the proclamation, Suffolk and Boleyn informed him that they ‘cared neither for pope or popes in this kingdom, not even if St Peter should come to life again’, and that Henry ‘was absolute both as emperor and pope in his own kingdom’. Just in case the nuncio had failed to take the point, Suffolk apparently ended the interview by graciously admitting that despite all this, Henry was quite willing to be the pope’s most devoted and obedient servant if only he would grant the divorce.
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The poor papal nuncio was going to endure a good deal of this kind of treatment in the following months, as Henry and his councillors tried every possible means to persuade him that any trial of Henry’s matrimonial cause could only take place in England.
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Meanwhile, every effort was made to widen the king’s support. A second appeal to the universities of Europe was made, this time to secure their agreement to the proposition that it had always been the practice of the early Church to allow all
causes to be tried in their country of origin, and that therefore the present practice of citing people to Rome was a gross usurpation of power.
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At the same time the hard-pressed English envoys, already faced with the prospect of informing Clement of Henry’s unacceptable views, were instructed to comb the Vatican Library for anything that touched upon this new obsession with the king’s ‘authority imperial’, which, what with the sheer quantity of the material and the inevitable suspicions of the librarians, was, as they pointed out, a somewhat Herculean task and insofar as they did it, it produced quite the wrong answers.
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Still, the point is that by the autumn of 1530 Henry was generating an enormous head of steam in his effort to prove, not only to the pope but to his own subjects, that his request to pronounce on the divorce in England was perfectly legitimate. But, of course, all this would avail him nothing if when it came to the point he could find nobody in England willing to grant it to him. If only to convince Clement that he really meant business, Henry had to ensure, and in a very public fashion, that the English Church, the most obvious alternative to the papacy as a sanctioning body, would do his bidding. His efforts to achieve this constitute the second strand of the new phase in the divorce campaign, and the one that was to affect Wolsey most.

On 11 July 1530 the attorney-general personally filed informations against fourteen leading churchmen accusing them of praemunire. The reason given was that by virtue of the financial compositions they had made with Wolsey – with which, it may be remembered, they had bought back from him their jurisdictional rights
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– they had all connived in his illegal legatine authority.
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Informations were subsequently filed against two others, one of whom was a notary public and lawyer, Anthony Husye, who practised in the court of arches. Why Husye was singled out is not entirely clear, but it looks as if his role was that of notional layman acting as a warning to all Henry’s subjects that it was not only those in clerical orders who were liable to prosecution for praemunire.
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Indeed, the point that was being made in the summer of 1530 was that anyone who had had anything to do with the Church during the period of Wolsey’s papal legateship might suddenly find himself facing the possibility of imprisonment and the loss of all his goods and, given that Wolsey had admitted his guilt, with little prospect of mounting a successful defence.

Praemunire had always been in theory a potent weapon in the hands of the Crown, but like all such weapons its destructive power could be counterproductive, so it was not frequently used. In normal circumstances it benefited the Crown not at all to be at war with its subjects over the jurisdictional powers of an institution which by and large conferred upon it many more gains than losses. Henry’s use of this weapon against fifteen members of that institution, amongst whom were eight bishops and three abbots, indicates both the intractability of the problem and his determination to overcome it. It has been pointed out that not all the fifteen
accused can be shown to have been passionate defenders of Catherine,
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and indeed four had signed the recent letter to Clement imploring him to respond to Henry’s rightful request.
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But to conclude from this that the divorce was not the main reason for the praemunire charges is surely to miss the very large wood for a small group of trees? For one thing it ignores the fact that people sign things under pressure which they do not truly assent to, and there is evidence, at least in Sherburne’s case, that this is what happened.
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More importantly, such a conclusion suggests a misunderstanding of what Henry was after. It was not a case of getting his own back on particular people, but of frightening a powerful body of opinion into agreeing to what he wanted. What better way of doing this than to point a finger at three of the most senior abbots in the land, one of whom, John Islip of Westminster, was a very busy royal councillor? And there was no harm in throwing in the aged and not very influential Sherburne as a warning to all his episcopal colleagues to keep in line during the difficult months ahead, when the rival claims of king and pope to their alliegance were bound to cause them increasing worries.
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What Henry was looking for was maximum impact, and his sacrificial lambs were well chosen. And with Fisher, Standish, West and Clerk included, who were all close to Catherine, there could not have been the slightest doubt in anybody’s mind what his purpose was.

Then there was the question of influencing lay opinion. A leitmotiv of Henrician propaganda during the early 1530s was the highlighting of the enemy within: that is to say, the clergy whom Henry, as he himself, on one celebrated occasion in May 1532, was to point out to a parliamentary delegation, had thought to be ‘our subjects wholly, but now we have well perceived that they be but half our subjects, yea, scarce our subjects’.
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It was an effective tactic, because by appealing to a gut xenophobia – had not the accused sought the intervention of a foreign jurisdiction? – it distracted people from thinking too hard about what Henry was really up to: namely, ditching his wife and in the process destroying a whole set of beliefs and practices which most of his subjects were happy with. And from the propaganda point of view it did not really matter who was accused, though it would help if they were reasonably distinguished.