Six Wives (45 page)

    Wolsey's argument, for which some historians including J. J. Scarisbrick have expressed enthusiasm, might just have won in Rome – on a good day and with a favourable political wind behind it. But it was excessively, nit-pickingly technical and lacked the awful simplicity of
Leviticus
. Nevertheless, it
did
offer an escape from the impasse into which Catherine's insistence on the non-consummation of her first marriage had driven Henry's case. But Wolsey got no thanks from Henry – or from Anne.
⁹

    Instead, Henry's immediate reaction had been to smell treachery or at best backsliding in his minister. The King jumped to the conclusion (as Wolsey put it) 'that I should either doubt or should [word illegible] your secret matter'. And, to rub salt in the wound, Henry sent Wolman, his new confidant in the Divorce, to tell Wolsey of his displeasure.

    Wolsey received Henry's message on the morning of 1 July. It left him 'not a little troubled [in] . . . mind' and a few hours later he wrote to Henry to defend himself. 'Most humbly prostrate at your feet', he begged Henry to believe in his loyalty, 'whatsoever report shall be made [to the contrary]'. And he solemnly vowed him his unswerving devotion. 'In this matter', he swore, 'and in all other things that may touch your honour and surety [security], I shall be as constant as any living creature; not letting [failing] for any danger, obloquy, displeasure or persecution; ye, and if all did fail and swerve, your Highness shall find me fast and constant.' 'I shall stick', Wolsey ended his letter, 'with your Highness,
usque ad mortem
[unto the death].'
¹⁰

    Only one month into his management of the Divorce, Wolsey was reduced to volunteering to die in the last ditch. It was not a good beginning – especially since there were many who would be delighted to see him taken up on the offer.

* * *

What had gone wrong? As usual in such situations, both sides were to blame. Wolsey had badly misjudged the King's feelings. Not having been involved in the early stages of the Divorce, he had discussed it with Sampson as just another item of policy. One approach (affinity based on
Leviticus
) had failed, so another (public honesty based on the canon law of unconsummated marriages) should be tried. But Henry did not see the arguments in this cool way at all.
Leviticus
could not be dumped, as circumstances dictated. Instead, belief that his first marriage was forbidden by divine law had already become an article of faith with him. And to question it was already an act of treachery – even for his 'friend' and minister.

    But why, for his part, did Henry, who was normally tolerant of differences of opinion with Wolsey, leap so quickly to impugn his motives? We shall never know for certain. But Wolsey's letter drops heavy hints, since he begs Henry, 'of your high virtue and most noble disposition' to protect him 'against all those who will speak or allege to the contrary [of his loyalty]'. Had Anne already started to poison Henry against Wolsey? And were others already jumping on the band-wagon?
¹¹

T
he summer Progress of 1527 was a climacteric – both in Anne's life and in the history of England. When the year began, her relationship with the King of England was the most closely guarded of secrets. When it ended and the rhythms of political life resumed in the autumn, all was out in the open. She had become Henry VIII's acknowledged consort-in-waiting and was queening it over a Court where she already exerted more power than the unfortunate Catherine had ever done. Meanwhile, as Anne rose, Wolsey, the great minister, declined. He spent the summer away from England, on Embassy to France. And, during his absence, his grip on policy, in particular the policy of the Divorce, weakened alarmingly. Was this Anne's work? Had she engineered his convenient exile? Or did she only exploit it?

* * *

    Cavendish's account has been dismissed by the fashionable band of 'revisionist' historians, who are blessed with the happy confidence that they understand the past better than those who were alive at the time. But, in outline, it seems to me to be correct. It errs, in fact, at only one point. Written with the benefit of hindsight, it is too neat and pat, and it exaggerates the extent to which the outcome was planned from the beginning. There was, I would guess, no great conspiracy against Wolsey in the early summer: too few knew of Anne's relationship with Henry to supply the necessary breadth of support, nor had Anne either the occasion or the motive to act. Rather, Anne took advantage of events as they unrolled. She had the necessary political skill ('a very good wit', as Cavendish put it). She also had the strength of character to impose herself as the leader or 'chief mistress' (in Cavendish's phrase again) of Wolsey's opponents, who increased in number and confidence as his power waned. And, above all, she had the luck – which equally deserted Wolsey.
¹

    The scheme to send Wolsey on a mission to France originated during the lengthy French Embassy to London in the spring of 1527. It was intended as the culmination of the policy of 'peace with honour', by which Wolsey had kept Henry at the centre of European affairs ever since the Treaty of London of 1518. Each successive negotiation was more ambitious in scope; the 'Universal' Peace of 1518 was trumped by the 'Eternal' Peace of 1527. And each was designed to show Henry and Wolsey in a yet more glorious light. The 1527 Embassy was the
ne plus
ultra
for Wolsey. As Henry's 'lieutenant' or viceroy, he was accorded full royal honours during his journey to France (and enforced them to the last jot and tittle). He was also hailed in pageants by the French, who were not to be outdone in sycophancy, as the Holy Ghost who had brought peace to earth and goodwill to men (at least if they were not the subjects and soldiers of the hated Emperor Charles V).

    It was a heady brew, and explains why Cavendish thought that Wolsey had been tricked into undertaking the Embassy by having his vanity tickled. But, behind the public pomp and circumstance, Wolsey's mission also had another, more secret purpose. His fertile brain had quickly spotted that the Sack of Rome, and the Pope's subsequent imprisonment at the hands of Charles V's troops, were as much an opportunity for Henry's schemes as a threat to them. Someone would have to serve as acting head of the Church if the Pope's captivity were prolonged. And who was better qualified than Wolsey? Once seated on St Peter's throne, if only temporarily, he could exercise the plenitude of Papal power and grant Henry his Divorce. The world – and Catherine – would be presented with a
fait accompli
.

    Wolsey discussed this scheme fairly widely – though in the strictest confidence and in the highest political circles. He talked it over with Henry before he left London on 3 July on the first leg of his mission to France; indeed the two may have worked it out together. Then, the night after his departure from London, he raised the matter with William Warham, the Archbishop of Canterbury, when he reviewed the state of play on the Divorce with him at Dartford. Warham, no mean political player himself in his younger days, had immediately detected Wolsey's ulterior motive, remarking smoothly that 'the same shall much confer to [Henry's] Secret Matter'. Wolsey seems even to have mentioned it to some of the galaxy of international diplomats, who were gathering in northern France in anticipation of the summit conference with Francis I.
²

    But, despite all the talk, Wolsey
did
nothing. He did not even sketch out a programme of action till 29 July, and it was only two weeks later still, on 11 August, that he was finally goaded into action.
³

    The result was the worst of all possible worlds. Wolsey had said more than enough to alert Henry's enemies to his intentions (a version of the plan for a Papal vicegerency was known, for instance, in the Imperial Court, then at Valladolid, by 14 July, to the horror of the English ambassador there). But he had done much too little to persuade Henry that he was working seriously to implement the scheme. And if the Great Matter was not top of his minister's agenda, Henry wanted to know why.
⁴

    Anne, with her own axe to grind, was now able to offer Henry an alltoo-convincing explanation for the minister's inactivity. Wolsey was doing nothing because he had never wanted her to marry Henry anyway. He was incompetent. He was not to be trusted. And, in any case, she and her friends had a much better plan. But it must be kept from Wolsey, since he would do everything he could to frustrate it.

    Would Henry, despite Wolsey's decade and a half of service, fall for this rival scheme? And who would win the King's ear, his minister or his mistress?

* * *

In the circumstances of the summer of 1527, there was no contest. Wolsey was two hundred and fifty miles away in France. Anne was everpresent at Henry's elbow (if not yet in his bed). Wolsey had only a couple of friends at Court: Sir William Fitzwilliam, who had succeeded Anne's father as Treasurer of the Household on Boleyn's elevation to the peerage, and Dr William Knight, who had replaced the occasionally demented Richard Pace as royal Secretary. And Knight was to prove treacherous. In contrast, Anne's friends and relations surrounded the King during this most unusual of royal Progresses.

    Normally, the Progress or royal summer holiday was a roving hunting party, which moved, at intervals of two or three days, from country house to country house. Accommodation was strictly limited, and the royal entourage was cut to a handful of intimates and a skeleton staff of domestics. This year, however, it was different. Instead of going on his travels, Henry spent a full month in a single house: Beaulieu or New Hall, two and a half miles to the north-east of Chelmsford in Essex. The house had originally belonged to Anne's father, who had inherited it through his mother, Lady Margaret Butler, the daughter and eventual heiress of the seventh Earl of Ormond. Thomas Boleyn had sold the house to Henry in 1516, but he retained a substantial landed stake in Essex and took the title of his viscountcy from Rochford (also a former Butler possession) fifteen miles to the south-east.
⁵

    The royal party arrived at the ex-Boleyn mansion, which Henry had extended into a full-scale palace, on 23 July. There the King was joined by the Dukes of Norfolk and Suffolk, the Marquess of Exeter, the Earls of Oxford, Essex and Rutland, and Viscounts Fitzwalter and Rochford. This was a conclave of Henry's most trusted friends and relations: Norfolk was the King's uncle by marriage; Suffolk was his brother-in-law and sporting partner; Exeter was his first cousin and closest male relation; while Essex, Rutland and Fitzwalter were rather more distant royal connexions through the Yorkist and Woodville lines. It was also – since Rochford was Anne's father and Norfolk her uncle – a gathering of Anne's relations as well.

    On 31 July, Fitzwilliam alerted Wolsey. 'The King is keeping a very great and expensive house', he wrote. He listed the King's house-guests and noted the even more select band of Norfolk, Suffolk, Exeter and Rochford who usually supped apart with the King in his Privy Chamber. Fitzwilliam complained of the havoc wrought on his plans to use the Progress to continue Wolsey's schemes for economical reform in the royal Household. But, with characteristic discretion, he left it to Wolsey to draw his own conclusions about the political threat posed by the gathering.
⁶

    For the house party at Beaulieu turned into an extended think-tank on the Great Matter. Indeed, that is probably why it was assembled in the first place. Like a modern company 'away-day' at a country-house hotel, it was designed to combine business with pleasure and to offer a relaxed atmosphere of country sports and pastimes which encouraged the participants to say the unsayable and think the unthinkable. To judge by the results, it succeeded. It also took its decisions, not only in Wolsey's absence, but deliberately behind his back. For the first time in his career, Wolsey found himself excluded from the centre of power – and by a woman. And for the first time in hers, Anne, the hunter/huntress of Wyatt's poem, used the hunt as a political device in the battle to control Henry. It was not a lesson she forgot.

    On 6 August the whole party rode off to the Earl of Oxford's fine ancestral Norman fortress at Castle Hedingham to enjoy the sport there. By the time it returned, the die was cast, and on 7 August Secretary Knight wrote to Wolsey to inform him that 'the King's pleasure is that your Grace do send hither immediately Mr Doctor Stephens; for his Highness desires to communicate and confer divers things with him which cannot so readily follow the pen as they should'.
⁷

    'Mr Doctor Stephens' was Stephen Gardiner, later Bishop of Winchester, Lord Chancellor and a hate-figure for English Protestants. Gardiner, born in about 1497, was the youngest son of a prosperous cloth-worker of Bury St Edmunds, Suffolk. His father, who died when he was a boy, left him a substantial legacy to pay for his education, and Gardiner seized the opportunity. By 1522 he had obtained a double doctorate from Cambridge in civil law and canon law. Three years later, still aged only twenty-eight, he was elected Master of Trinity Hall. Moreover, most unusually for a sixteenth-century academic, he had a fluent knowledge of French. This he acquired during a sort of gap-year between school and university spent in Paris in the company of one of his guardians, Thomas or Richard Eden. A frequent visitor to Eden's house in the rue St Jean was the great scholar Erasmus. And Gardiner became used to preparing the scholar's favourite salad of lettuce 'dressed with [melted?] butter and vinegar'. He did it, as he did most things, exceptionally well.
⁸