The Tudors (22 page)

There is no mystery about the rise of men like these to heights that
were utterly inaccessible to laymen of similar background. For centuries after the Conquest, education remained almost exclusively the domain of the church: even the universities were founded by clerics and operated by clerics mainly for the purpose of training more clerics. The aristocracy, by contrast, continued to live by a code that exalted martial values above all others; in their world, education beyond the rudiments long seemed to have little point or purpose. It was in the church alone, therefore, that kings could find the levels of literacy and intellectual sophistication needed for diplomacy, the creation and functioning of a system of justice, financial management, and general administration. And priests offered the further attraction of not having to be paid, no small consideration as money was always in short supply; they could be rewarded with appointments to ecclesiastical livings, any number of which might be held by a single churchman. The most valuable of the king’s servants could be made bishops, which had the great advantage of putting the church itself, with all its wealth and influence, in the hands of men whose loyalty to the Crown rarely had to be doubted.

The church, for its part, kept the ladder of mobility in good working order by offering nearly unlimited opportunities, first in education and then in educational and ecclesiastical management, to the most able and ambitious of its recruits. Noble and gentle credentials were useful, inevitably, but rarely to the exclusion of talent. Communities of monks and nuns even elected their own leaders, commonly making their choices on the basis of merit. The almost egalitarian character of many of the church’s institutions must have been rooted at least in part in the belief, integral to Catholic doctrine, that no human being is more or less a child of God than any other and the mighty have no better chance of salvation than the destitute. In part, no doubt, openness to the advancement of the lowborn was also a function of institutional self-interest: both the church itself and the Crown obviously benefited when talent was given the fullest possible scope. Aristocratic resentment at the rise of clerical leaders with roots in the peasantry, to the extent that it existed, was tempered by the clerical commitment to celibacy. An archbishop might dispense more money than a duke, but neither his title nor his wealth could be made hereditary, even if he had children.

As the amorphous phenomenon known to us as the Renaissance burst upon Italy and spread north, the scholarly apparatus of the church
became the conduit through which it was introduced to England. And it found fertile ground there, thanks mainly to the ecclesiastical meritocracy. The most respected English bishop of Henry VIII’s reign, John Fisher, became a member of the King’s Council, founded two colleges at Cambridge, and by the time of the king’s separation from Catherine of Aragon was known throughout Europe as an advocate of reform from within, a champion of the new humanist learning, and a man of impeccable probity. All this after starting life as the son of a Yorkshire cloth merchant. England’s first great scholar of classical Greek, Thomas Linacre, was one of a number of eminent scholar-churchmen of whose family background virtually nothing is known. As for William Warham, the man who headed both church and government just before Thomas Wolsey’s emergence, we know his father’s name but nothing of his occupation. We know only that the family included a carpenter and a maker of candles.

With all this as background, there could be nothing truly astonishing about the emergence of the butcher’s son Wolsey as chancellor of England, archbishop of York, member of the College of Cardinals, candidate for the papacy, and master of international politics. He was in fact a familiar kind of figure, having received his first degree at such a precocious age—fifteen—that he became known as “the boy bachelor,” proceeded from there to an M.A., to ordination at twenty-five, to doctoral studies in theology (an unusual choice even then for a young cleric hoping for a career in government, suggesting that the young Wolsey had no such aspirations), and finally to the obscure jobs that led him into royal service. It is impossible to doubt that every step of his rise had been the result of ability and hard work.

If Wolsey was a great manager and administrator, he was certainly not the first churchman of whom that could be said. If for more than a decade he exercised so much power as to be called
alter rex
, the other king, again he was not unprecedented. If he became a great patron of education and the arts, if he showed serious commitment to the improvement of the justice system, and if he even tried to address abuses of the church’s prerogatives (an area in which he was gravely handicapped by the burden of his own bad example), in all these things he was typical of the English church’s hierarchy at the time. That hierarchy included many men of talent and learning. If few were as saintly (or as
pugnacious) as John Fisher, virtually all set a better example than Wolsey.

It was his flaws, his failures, that really set Wolsey apart. His way of life was magnificent on a scale never before seen in England. It centered on a court of some five hundred persons (his kitchens alone employed seventy-three men and boys), and it shifted back and forth between palaces at Hampton Court and York Place that surpassed any of the royal family’s homes. His every public move became a procession, a display of opulence, with gentlemen and nobles carrying before him the gold and silver emblems of his great offices and waiting on him at table. Some of this was appropriate to the king’s chief minister in an age when royalty was expected to offer constant proofs of its wealth and power, and a man in Wolsey’s position
needed
an army of assistants to deal with an unending stream of visitors and all the business of church and state. But inevitably it drew mutterings from almost every direction. And some of Wolsey’s indulgences were simply indefensible. If it was not scandalous of him to hire an Italian sculptor to build his tomb—and to insist that that tomb surpass the one in which the remains of Henry VII and Elizabeth of York had been laid to rest in Westminster Abbey—it was not far short of being so.

Nor can anything be said in defense of Wolsey’s private life. He had a mistress and children, and on his son and namesake, ordained a priest before he was grown, the cardinal lavished a cornucopia of church livings. When he vacated the rich see of Durham in order to become bishop of Winchester and abbot of St. Albans (grabbing the latter plum in defiance of canon law, which barred nonmonks from becoming abbots), he did so partly in the hope of inserting his son as Durham’s new bishop. But even he was unable to get away with that.

Perhaps his ultimate failure grew out of his chief strength, his brilliance as an executive. In the king’s name Wolsey ruled virtually alone, refusing to share power, reducing the council to a shadow of what it had been before his rise. This further inflamed the resentment of those members of the higher nobility who already hated the cardinal for his arrogance, for his constant rubbing of their noses in the outward signs of his greatness, for the intolerable presumption of this escapee from the wrong side of the class divide. Wolsey alienated everyone. Those loyal
to the old church—Catherine of Aragon most visibly—regarded his way of life as a disgrace. Those drawn to the ideas of Luther and other radical reformers—the Boleyns and their faction at court, for example—pointed to him as proof that the whole Roman connection was corrupt beyond hope of repair. Wolsey had left himself with no powerful friends except Henry VIII, surely the least dependable and most dangerous friend in all of England.

By 1530 England had changed to such an extent that it no longer needed Wolseys. Education was no longer almost exclusively the province of the church. Laymen such as John More were becoming eminent jurists, and in the next generation lawyers such as More’s son Thomas were among Europe’s leading humanist scholars. A few years at university were now a rite of passage for sons of the nobility and the gentry, and some were even using those years to get educations. Only once after Wolsey would a power in the government become a power in the church as well, or vice versa, and that sole exception would be Wolsey’s onetime protégé, Stephen Gardiner. With the old ladder of mobility destroyed, England’s class divisions would become more rigid, more impermeable, than ever.

A Thunderbolt Falls

A
crisis appeared to be near as 1532 began, but it was impossible to know for sure. Everything depended on the king, on what he intended to do, but the signals he was sending were so self-contradictory as to be indecipherable. That the king himself knew what he wanted is unclear.

In the year just ended he had given numerous indications that he no longer hoped for a favorable judgment from Rome, that his sights were on something much bigger than a mere annulment. But now he sent a delegation of nobles to Windsor Castle to call on Queen Catherine, to offer yet another solution to the old deadlock. The idea this time was that the divorce question should be referred to a panel of eight men, four lay lords and four bishops or abbots, with the understanding that whatever judgment they rendered would be final. It is not known whether her visitors informed Catherine that something very similar to their proposal had already been floated in Rome, that Pope Clement had responded positively, but that in doing so he had added that no such arrangement could be acceptable without the queen’s assent, as it was she who had appealed to Rome. What they were offering, Catherine’s visitors told her, would be of great comfort to the king’s troubled conscience. “God grant him a good conscience,” she replied. “But this shall be your answer: I am his wife, lawfully married to him by holy church,
and so I will abide until the court of Rome, which was privy to the beginning, shall have made thereof an end.”

She was ordered to leave Windsor for a smaller, more remote residence where there could be no possibility of her intercepting Henry and Anne as they made their royal rounds. “Go where I may,” she said, “I shall still be his lawful wife.” In the months that followed she would be moved again and again and would not be allowed to see her daughter. She wrote often to the princess, always advising her to honor her father and be properly submissive.

And so the king’s great matter hung in the air unresolved, a vexation to everyone it touched, a force powerful enough to push even the queen to the outermost periphery of public life while drawing others toward the center against their will. Among those others were Henry’s cousins the young Pole brothers, grandsons of that Duke of Clarence who had been the brother (and was killed on the orders) of Henry’s maternal grandfather, Edward IV. Being of royal blood was a very mixed blessing in the England of the sixteenth century; the tenuousness of the Tudors’ claim to the throne inclined them to see kinsmen as potential threats, which is why Henry VII had had Clarence’s harmless son put to death. The Poles (a family entirely distinct, by the way, from the king’s other and more obstreperous cousins the
de la
Poles) were already acquainted with the cutting edge of Henry VIII’s distrust and anger. In 1521 their mighty relative the Duke of Buckingham, a man all too haughtily proud of his Yorkist blood and conspicuously unwilling to curry favor with the upstart Tudors, had arranged the marriage of his son and heir to Ursula Pole. Henry reacted to this union of two families that had plausible claims to the throne with unexpected savagery. Buckingham was convicted of treason and executed; Ursula’s mother, Margaret, Countess of Salisbury, lost her place as lady governess to little Princess Mary; and the countess’s two eldest sons were imprisoned in the Tower. Later the family won its way back into favor, Henry Pole achieving a prominent place at court as Lord Montague, but they lived with the knowledge that careless displays of ambition could prove fatal.

With this history—his grandfather put to death by one of the last Plantagenet kings, his uncle killed by the first Tudor and his sister’s father-in-law by the second—it is hardly surprising that the youngest of the Pole brothers, Reginald, grew to adulthood with no wish to be involved
in the court or its politics. In spite or perhaps because of this, Henry VIII took a fatherly interest in him, providing five hundred crowns a year for his education. In five years at the University of Padua, the bookish and unambitious youth won favorable notice for his devotion to his studies, his pleasing manners, and his excellent moral character. After two years back in England, during which he took up residence in a monastery and continued his preparations for a career in the church, he was permitted by the king to return to the continent for further study at the University of Paris. In departing he turned his back on the certainty that, had he remained at home, the king would have showered him with offices and other signs of favor.

Pole’s quiet life in France was first interrupted when Henry set out to get support for the annulment of his marriage from the continental universities. Considerable intellectual gifts, excellent contacts in the academic world, and a growing reputation made Pole a potentially valuable agent in the king’s campaign, and he received instructions to become involved. When he claimed to be too young and lacking in experience to be of any use—much later he would write that his real reason for begging off was discomfort with the king’s position—he was ordered home. There the Duke of Norfolk, England’s most powerful magnate as well as Anne Boleyn’s uncle, confided to him that Henry had marked him out for a high place in the church but expected a clear statement of where he stood on the divorce. (The Archbishopric of York, Wolsey’s old sinecure, was still vacant when this conversation took place and is almost certainly what the king had in mind. It would have been a surprising and even inappropriate appointment in light of Pole’s youth and the fact that he was not yet even an ordained priest, but the pope doubtless would have given his assent even if Pole had not been so favorably regarded in Rome. Clement would soon be accepting from Henry an at least equally surprising nominee for the even more exalted see of Canterbury.)