The King's Cardinal: The Rise and Fall of Thomas Wolsey (Pimlico) (2 page)

Moreover Pollard’s
Wolsey
is the last major assessment to have been attempted, and that as long ago as 1929. For want of much attention, the field has been left to the American actor, Orson Welles, whose portrayal of Wolsey in
A Man for All Seasons
– a most successful film biography of Sir Thomas More, which appeared in 1966 but has been much shown since on television
⁹
– has probably done more to fashion current perceptions of Wolsey than anything else – and it is not a flattering portrayal.

What Orson Welles portrayed was everybody’s idea of a Renaissance cardinal, an overweight and overdressed spider occupying the centre of a web of intrigue, and bearing a much closer resemblance to the emperor Nero than to anyone remotely religious. The question of Wolsey’s size is an intriguing one. The most famous image of him to have survived, the portrait by an unknown artist in the National Portrait Gallery in London, suggests that he was of ample proportions.
¹⁰
But it was never intended to be an accurate representation, and the only other near contemporary portrait, though admittedly French and dating from 1567, suggests a much thinner man.
¹¹
What there is not is any remotely detailed description of his physical appearance, so that not even the colour of his hair is known. The Venetian
ambassador, Sebastian Giustinian, thought him ‘very handsome’,
¹²
and another Venetian ambassador found him ‘hale and of good presence’.
¹³
Neither description suggests that he was thin, but there has to be a suspicion that since his death the poor cardinal’s girth has increased, even as his fame has diminished! The poet John Skelton referred to

…
a flap afore his eye
,

Men wene that he is pocky
.
¹⁴

Skelton’s explanation is unlikely, even though one of the articles brought against him at his fall accused him of having endangered the king’s person by blowing upon him when knowing himself to have ‘the foul and contagious disease of the great pox broken out upon him’.
¹⁵
There was Mistress Lark, but insofar as there is any evidence at all, it points to his having been faithful to her; and surely if he had been promiscuous, international gossip would have soon got hold of it. As it is, there was nothing, and what seems more likely is that Wolsey had some kind of disfigurement to his eye which gave Skelton the opportunity to make an easy gibe.
¹⁶

Whether Wolsey deserves his bad press will be a major theme of the book. What may be helpful at the start is to explain some of the more obvious reasons for it – and in doing so Mr Welles’s portrayal may be of some help. At its simplest, the English are not very fond of cardinals. They associate them with an excess of wealth and power, at least unseemly in a man of the cloth – and perhaps nothing has done more harm to Wolsey’s reputation than his apparent penchant for dressing up in scarlet. The English also associate cardinals with decadent and superstitious religious practices, with incense and all the mumbo-jumbo that popery is allegedly prey to. Above all they are foreign and, thus, not to be trusted. And in Wolsey’s case, all these prejudices have been aggravated by the simple fact of chronology. Living on the eve of the English Reformation, and in some people’s eyes being one of its principal causes, he has had to bear a weight of criticism, which if he had been born earlier he would have escaped. The myth of a ‘waning Middle Ages’ and of a late medieval church suffocating under the burden of its own excesses has inevitably been a dominant theme of England’s Protestant historiography – and one of the earliest and most savage attacks on Wolsey was made by one of England’s first Protestants, William Tyndale, in his
Practice of Prelates
of 1530.

Thus Wolsey has not fared well at the hands of one of the strongest strands of English cultural and intellectual life, the Protestant tradition. Neither has the closely allied Whig tradition treated him any better.
¹⁷
At its heart lies a pride in this country’s achievements, but especially its nurture of parliamentary democracy, the common law – and common sense! What it is opposed to is kings and queens before they became ‘constitutional’, their favourites, meddlesome clerics – and anything in
the least bit intellectual! While it has never been suggested that there was much of the intellectual about Wolsey, in other respects he has scored badly. He was both a royal favourite and a meddlesome priest, and as such despised both parliament and the common law. Moreover, he suffers from another handicap. The Whig tradition is nothing if not teleological. Everything that has happened in English history has had as its purpose the creation of this miraculous construct, parliamentary democracy. Some things, and especially people, have contributed more than others. Wolsey has contributed not at all, and in this sense he has been seen as unimportant. Or, to put it another way, he has been thought of as a medieval figure, representative of a way of doing things which, thankfully, we have grown out of. By contrast, his successor as the king’s leading councillor, Thomas Cromwell – who at least in one account believed in parliament and the civil service
¹⁸
– is a modern figure and, therefore, of great interest.

I am neither very Protestant nor very Whiggish, and it is probably true, though this may be to underestimate the underlying strength of these two strands of English intellectual and cultural life, that fewer and fewer English men and women are. But, whatever one’s attitudes, it is easy enough to appreciate that the Protestant and Whig traditions have tremendously distorted our view of Wolsey. What we have for the most part is a caricature out of Gerald Scarfe, or at the least an Old Master so covered with grime and coats of varnish that it is no longer possible to appreciate the portrait underneath. The process of cleaning has been begun by others, but in some ways this has only made things worse: bits of a different Wolsey have been revealed, but the result is a confusing mosaic of dark and light that makes no sense at all. It is time to attempt a complete restoration – despite the risks that this entails. In the end too much may be removed, or the retouching may be obtrusive, but there is this safeguard that the historian is usually not in a position to destroy the evidence, even if he distorts it.

Before embarking upon this task, a general word about the evidence may be helpful. First there are the ‘State Papers’. The great majority of what has survived relate to the conduct of foreign policy, essentially letters to and from English representatives abroad, those to them usually only in draft form. There are also the letters of foreign representatives in England to their respective heads of state, which, because they have been easy of access and are presented in a straightforward chronological order, have been overused, or at any rate, much misinterpreted. Records of the royal Council, especially in its non-judicial capacity, are extremely patchy, and anything approaching a ‘Home Office’ archive is lacking. As for legal records, they survive in great quantity, but they are not especially relevant to a political biography, and both because of their quantity and their technical nature are difficult to use effectively. On the other hand, the problem as regards Wolsey’s involvement with the English Church is the severe shortage of evidence.

What all this adds up to is distinct bias towards Wolsey’s conduct of foreign policy, a bias which goes a long way to explain one of the most common misconceptions about him, which is that he was only interested in foreign affairs –
and especially their more showy manifestations, such as the Field of the Cloth of Gold. He was interested in such things, if only because as the king’s chief councillor he had to be, but, as will become all too apparent, he was interested in much else besides. What is also lacking is any significant private archive, and not just for Wolsey, but for all the leading figures of the time. There are very few private letters, let alone diaries, and thus precisely the kind of material that might shed light on the most intriguing questions of all, those to do with the motivation of the leading figures, are missing. This is obviously a great disadvantage to the historian. It has also been of some disadvantage to Wolsey’s reputation because it has increased the reliance on the contemporary literary sources, and three out of the four major ones present a distinctly unflattering portrait.

Wolsey’s first biographer, and household servant, George Cavendish, undoubtedly meant to present his master in a favourable light, or at least, as was indicated earlier, to put the record straight. However, his
Life and Death of Cardinal Wolsey
was not written until some thirty years after Wolsey’s death, in the late 1550s, and the passage of time did not make for accurate recollection. Moreover, it is important to bear in mind that it is not until after Wolsey’s political disgrace in 1529 that his work becomes anything like a primary source – and for this reason a fuller discussion of the work will be postponed until the final chapter. The simple point to make here is that he did not join Wolsey’s household until probably 1522. His job as gentleman usher only required him to act as a cross between a social secretary and travel agent much involved in planning the frequent movement from place to place of Wolsey’s large household. As such, until the special circumstances of Wolsey’s last year, he was not close to Wolsey, and certainly not informed about matters of state. This comes out very clearly in his book. Only two-fifths of the way through it the matter of Henry’s divorce takes centre stage, and about half of it is devoted to Wolsey’s last year when he was no longer a councillor. Thus, as a source for Wolsey’s political life it has severe limitations.
¹⁹

The two contemporary historians, Polydore Vergil and Edward Hall, were much less close to Wolsey than Cavendish. Arguably, however, they were both intellectually and politically more literate, though neither was anywhere near the centre of English political life. Something else they shared was a strong dislike of Wolsey. An Italian by birth and upbringing, Vergil came to England in 1502 to be deputy collector of Peter’s Pence – an infrequent and not very onerous papal tax – to a fellow countryman, Adriano Castellessi,
²⁰
who happened to be well in with Henry
VII
; in 1504 Henry had made him bishop of Bath and Wells, perhaps encouraged to do so by his elevation to the office of cardinal the previous year. Vergil quickly established himself in the cultural and intellectual life of London and in 1506 Henry
VII
asked him to write a history of England. Not surprisingly, the resulting
Anglica Historia
is an especially important source for that king’s reign and when it first appeared in 1535 ended with Henry
VII
’s death. However, in a subsequent edition published in 1555, the year of Vergil’s death, he continued the history down to
1537, so that it included the whole of Wolsey’s career – and Wolsey’s first appearance in the book sets the tone for what follows. Commenting on the marriage of Louis
XII
to Henry
VIII
’s sister, Mary, in 1514, Vergil wrote:

English affairs thus daily prospered, and in this prosperity Thomas Wolsey gloried exceedingly, as though he alone were responsible for the great good fortune, in that his authority was now supreme with the king. But he was also more hated, not only on account of his arrogance and his low reputation for integrity, but also on account of his recent origins
.
²¹

Why Vergil came to hate Wolsey is a complicated story. It has to do in part with rivalries at Rome between Vergil’s original patron, Castellessi, and Silvestro Gigli, another Italian favoured by Henry
VII
, who appointed him bishop of Worcester; and for a time, at any rate, Gigli was very much in favour with the new king and with Wolsey, and much more so than Castellessi was. It also had to do with rivalries at court between intellectuals, or ‘humanists’ favoured by the old king, such as Vergil, and those favoured by the new king, such as yet another Italian, Andrea Ammonio. Appointed Latin secretary to Henry
VIII
, Ammonio, in cahoots with Gigli, had designs on Vergil’s post as deputy collector. Vergil thought, perhaps correctly, that Wolsey favoured Ammonio’s designs. It is worth mentioning, however, that in 1514, only a year before the crisis in their relationship occurred, Wolsey had been quite prepared to use Vergil, on a trip to Rome, to push his own claims for a cardinal’s hat, something which was very much a priority of his and the king’s at this time. In February 1515 Vergil returned, but without having achieved anything, not that this was in the first instance held against him. However, very soon Ammonio brought to Wolsey’s attention the fact that Vergil had begun to write letters back to Castellessi in which he was extremely rude about Wolsey. The result was that for a few months Vergil found himself in the Tower, and the following year lost his post as deputy collector. It is not clear from all this that Vergil deserves much sympathy, for in fuelling the opposition to Wolsey in Rome he had been acting in direct contradiction to the king’s wishes. Moreover, the episode cannot have been so unpleasant for him, for he was to stay in England until 1553. Still, it certainly did not predispose him towards Wolsey – and the way he got his own back was to launch a sustained attack on him in his history.
²²