Six Wives (65 page)

    In his report home, Chapuys endorsed at least the broad outlines of the idea. 'It seems', he advised, 'as if your Majesty ought to have matters brought to a crisis at once.' A first step, he advised, would be for Rome to order Anne's removal from the Court.
¹⁵

    Charles agreed and instructed his ambassador in Rome to approach the Pope for the necessary Brief to Henry. Even in his remote exile, it seemed, Wolsey could reach far.

    The fact, no doubt, was balm to his fractured ego. But it was also profoundly dangerous. It was not yet a crime, of course, to argue that Catherine's marriage was valid. It was equally permissible to advise her on the best means to protect her position. But Wolsey had gone far beyond this. He was advising foreign powers on the best tactics to use against his sovereign. He was trying to foment unrest in England. He was seeking to force his services on the King, with the threat and perhaps even the reality of violence. And, above all, he was aiming to coerce Henry into leaving Anne.

    There was only one name for these acts: it was treason.

    Wolsey of course was no fool. He was not a Buckingham, to blunder into treason. It is possible, on the other hand, that his burning sense of injustice destabilised him and blinded him to the reality of his actions. But it is much more likely that he acted with his eyes open. The key is his attack on Anne, which lay at the heart of all his schemes. For he had decided that she was
the
enemy. She was 'the night crow', who haunted Henry like an evil spirit, he told Cavendish. She 'called continually upon the King in his ear, with such a vehemency' that she was irresistible. And she called on him to destroy Wolsey.
¹⁶

    Wolsey had issued the challenge. Anne was not the woman to refuse to take it up.

    It was a war to the death between them.

    Nor had Wolsey limited himself to scheming with Chapuys. Complex as ever in his diplomacy, he also kept his channels open with the French. Indeed, before his departure for the north, he had been visited by the resident French ambassador, Giovanni Gioachino di Passano, sieur de Vaux, who was one of the many Italians in the service of Francis I. There were good reasons for De Vaux's visit. Wolsey had been the beneficiary of a generous pension from the French and had neglected to provide receipts for the last three payments. But to suspicious minds – and Wolsey seemed to be going out of his way to arouse suspicion – the question of the receipts could look like a cover for something more sinister.
¹⁷

    It was of course common knowledge that Wolsey was pulling every string at Court to return to favour. As early as May, indeed, Cromwell passed on Henry's blunt warning that Wolsey should stop playing politics by trying to make bad blood between the King and the Duke of Norfolk. But these were domestic matters. Wolsey's foreign schemes, on the other hand, seem to have gone undetected till the late summer.
¹⁸

    The most likely spy-catcher is Anne's cousin, Sir Francis Bryan. He had played Wolsey's nemesis once already with his outspoken reports from Italy. Now he may have repeated the role by picking up rumours of the Cardinal's activities in France – hence the closure of the ports on his return to England at the beginning of September.
¹⁹

    Even then, Henry would not move precipitately against his former minister. Instead, a more careful watch was kept on his activities. The result confirmed his enemies' worst fears. 'Though I list to be blinded,' Norfolk told Wolsey's old servant, Sir Thomas Arundel, who was trying to press his master's suits at Court, 'I should blind no man here.' Arundel had claimed that Wolsey was quietly resigned to his fate. Nonsense, said the Duke, he was continuing to intrigue and call in favours. And to prove it he was even able to give the names of three men whom Wolsey had recently reminded of the benefits he had conferred on them and their families. 'All these messages are taken in the worst sense,' Arundel reported despairingly.
²⁰

    That was in mid-October. At the end of the month more damning evidence came to light. Letters were intercepted from Agostini addressed to De Vaux who was taking a sea-side holiday at Dover. When they were opened they were discovered to contain lines in cipher.
²¹

    Now surely Wolsey was finished.

* * *

* * *

On 1 November, about noon, Walter Walsh, Groom of the Privy Chamber, left Court with a commission for himself and the Earl of Northumberland to arrest the Cardinal. At that moment, according to Cavendish, Wolsey was sitting down to dinner at Cawood Castle, seven miles outside York. He kept his accustomed state. His massive silver archiepiscopal cross was propped up in the corner against the wall hangings. Dining with him, but separated, according to etiquette, by the length of the table, were some of his senior servants, including Agostini. As Agostini rose at the end of the meal his 'boisterous' (that is, stifftextured) gown of black velvet caught on the cross. It fell along the hangings. In its path, unfortunately, knelt one of Wolsey's chaplains. The cross struck him on the head and drew blood.

    The company looked on, appalled. '
Malum omen
[an evil omen],' murmured Wolsey.
²³

    Four days later, Walsh and the Earl of Northumberland entered Cawood. Northumberland, of course, was none other than Henry Percy, Wolsey's former ward and Anne's former suitor, who had inherited his father's title.

    Northumberland, 'trembling' and speaking 'with a very faint and soft voice', said 'I arrest you of High Treason.' Wolsey, in return, humiliated him for one last time by denying his authority and surrendering instead to Walsh, as one of the King's Privy Chamber. 'For the worst person there', he said, 'is a sufficient warrant to arrest the greatest peer of this realm.' He should have known, because it was he who had sent Compton, the head of the Privy Chamber, to arrest Buckingham.
²⁴

    Meanwhile, as the Cardinal and the Earl were having their altercation, Walsh, hooded and disguised like any modern secret policeman, had arrested Agostini. 'Go in, thou traitor', Cavendish heard him exclaim, 'or I shall make thee.' Hastily, Cavendish opened the door, and Walsh thrust Agostini violently into the room. His rough usage continued, as the next day he was sent off to London with an escort and his legs tied under his horse. This, on a journey of two hundred and fifty miles, cannot have been pleasant.
²⁵

    They were in no such hurry with Wolsey. Instead, he was taken, by easy stages, to Sheffield Park, the Earl of Shrewsbury's house, where he remained under honourable house arrest for almost a fortnight.

* * *

This curious hiatus makes it clear that there were two stages to Wolsey's fall. The first, his arrest on 4 November, was a pre-emptive strike. Three days later, on the 7th, he had planned to enter York in state, to be installed as Archbishop and to meet his clergy of the Northern Province in Convocation. This was the ideal moment, it was feared, for Wolsey to rise up like another Becket against his King. He could have ordered Henry to submit himself to Rome and to separate himself from Anne. And he could have excommunicated him in the event of his refusal. In view of his known dealings abroad, the risk was too great. The installation had to be aborted.
²⁶

    This was achieved by his arrest at Cawood. Meanwhile, Agostini's interrogation would reveal the extent of Wolsey's schemes. He seems to have arrived in London between the 10th and the 13th. Two hundred and fifty miles tied to the back of a horse had been duress enough and he confessed freely and without further torture. There was no need even to send him to the Tower.
²⁷

    His confession has disappeared. But, to judge from reports of it, it seems to have been oddly skewed. Chapuys deduced that 'he had denied having any understanding or acquaintance with me'. On the other hand (Henry informed Bryan in France) Agostini
had
made much of a letter which Wolsey had instructed him to write to De Vaux. In it Wolsey is supposed to have suggested that the French should first provoke England into war with the Emperor and then turn on their ally. The scheme is fantastic and improbable. But, fantastic or not, Agostini said he was so appalled by it that he failed to deliver the letter. Conveniently, however, he remembered the incriminating paragraph word for word.
²⁸

    Now why on earth should Agostini deny a set of contacts which had certainly happened, and 'confess' instead to a scheme which was an implausible fiction?

    Actually, the mystery is easily solved. What we know is not what Agostini said but what the Council wanted it to be thought that he had said. He
had
, I strongly suspect, confessed to his contacts with Chapuys. It would have been mad to do otherwise. But equally, the last thing the English wanted was a diplomatic incident with Charles V, in which an accusation against his ambassador might be the last straw in provoking the Emperor into war with England. Hence the concocted charge of trying to communicate with De Vaux. This established Wolsey's attempt to provoke foreign intervention, which was essential to a convincing charge of treason. But, as relations with France were good and as the attempt was supposed to have been abortive, it avoided any risk of diplomatic unpleasantness.

    There is a sort of poetic justice here. In his time, Wolsey had fabricated more than his share of lies, white and black. It was only fair perhaps that he should be condemned by an untruth that was impudent even by his standards.

* * *

But, once again, Wolsey was to cheat his fate. Toward the end of his stay at Sheffield Park he was finishing his dinner with a dish of baked 'wardens' or pears. Suddenly, Cavendish noticed that he looked very ill. He changed colour and had a violent fit of colic. A prescription from his apothecary (carefully tested for poison) enabled him to 'break wind upward'. But the relief was only temporary. Diarrhoea set in and became more acute. By the time Sir William Kingston, the Lieutenant of the Tower, arrived on 22 November 1530 with a detachment of the Guard to conduct him to the Tower, Wolsey was already very weak. He managed to struggle as far as Leicester, where he died on the 29th.
²⁹

    His last words did not mention Anne by name. But, since they warned Henry in apocalyptic terms against his Divorce and the threat of Lutheranism, she was their real target. Prudently, those who witnessed what he said conspired to suppress it – 'for in any wise', Kingston advised Cavendish, 'the [Council] would not hear of it'.
³⁰

    'Such at length', the Milanese ambassador reported, 'was the end of the man who boasted that he ruled the whole world.'
³¹

    Anne, however, was never his willing subject and she was instrumental in destroying him at last. One great threat to her marriage had gone. But there still remained Queen Catherine. She would be next.

* * *

It is not clear which side broke the curious, three-year-long truce between Anne and Catherine. But there can be no doubt as to the winner.

B
ack in June 1530, Anne had set herself to cut one of the few, lingering threads of domesticity which still bound Henry to Catherine. Thanks to her mother's careful training, Catherine was (as we have seen) an excellent needlewoman. And, despite all that had happened, she and her ladies continued to make Henry's shirts. Henry – fond, like most men, of having his cake and eating it – saw nothing wrong with the arrangement. Anne did, and she intervened decisively to stop it.

    As usual, Henry had sent some linen to the Queen with a request to have it made into shirts. Anne's response was to throw a very public scene and blame the messenger. According to Chapuys, she 'sent for the person who had taken the cloth – one of the Principal Gentlemen of the Privy Chamber – and . . . abused [him] in the King's very presence'.
¹

    But Henry, of course, still needed his shirts. At first, it seems as though Anne intended to step into Catherine's shoes and wield the needle herself. That at least would be a plausible interpretation of the large delivery to Anne in September of linen cloth for which Henry paid 'the wife of the Dove' the sum of £10. But, predictably perhaps, sewing proved not to be Anne's forte. Maybe Henry was dissatisfied with the quality of her work. Maybe Anne simply gave up. At all events a professional solution was found and, by November, Mrs William Armerer, the wife of one of the King's footmen, and a practised seamstress, had stepped into the breach. Hitherto, she had made shirts for Henry's dependants, including the King's boy attendants, Mark Smeaton, his favourite musician, and his Fool. Now she started to make them (out of far finer fabric and at much greater cost) for the King himself.
²

    But Catherine also rebelled at the curious apartheid of her existence. She became convinced (on no very good grounds) that solely Anne stood between her and reunion with Henry. Only let Anne be forced from his side for a few months, even for a few weeks, and her husband would be hers again.

    So, rather as Wolsey had done, she went on the offensive against Anne. And Anne, once more, took up the challenge – with relish and increasing confidence of victory.

    The occasion for Catherine's broadside was Christmas Eve, 1530. Christmas, notoriously, is a time for family quarrels and the season began miserably enough with Catherine riding her moral high horse. Not only, she told Henry, was his conduct doing her a grave personal wrong, he was also setting a scandalous example by keeping Anne Boleyn in his company.