WOLSEY

Glenn Richardson

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2020
• ISBN:
  9781000096385
• Edition: 1
• Topic: History
• Subtopic: British History
• Index: History

Through a thematic and broadly chronological approach, Wolsey offers a fascinating insight into the life and legacy of a man who was responsible for building Henry VIII's reputation as England's most impressive king.

The book reviews Thomas Wolsey's record as the realm's leading Churchman, Lord Chancellor and political patron and thereby demonstrates how and why Wolsey became central to Henry's government for 20 years. By analysing Wolsey's role in key events such as the Field of Cloth of Gold, the study highlights how significant Wolsey was in directing and conducting England's foreign relations as the king's most trusted advisor. Based on up-to-date research, Richardson not only newly appraises the circumstances of Wolsey's fall but also challenges accusations of treason made against him. This study provides a new appreciation of Wolsey's importance as a cultural and artistic patron, as well as a royal administrator and politician; roles which helped to bring both Henry VIII and England to the forefront of foreign relations in the early-sixteenth century.

Presenting Wolsey in his contemporary and historiographical contexts more fully than any currently available study, Wolsey is perfect for students of Tudor England.

1
From Ipswich to Hampton Court

Wolsey’s rise to power

In whom the king conceived such a loving fancy, especially for that he was most earnest and readiest among all the council to advance the king’s only will and pleasure without any respect to the case.¹

Nobody knows exactly when Thomas Wolsey was born. The man whose eventual fall from power and subsequent death would reverberate across Europe appeared with little trace. He was, in the words of his first biographer, an ‘honest poor man’s son, born in Ipswich’ who rose from obscurity, as Cavendish tells us, through his willingness to ‘advance the king’s only will and pleasure’.

Much ink has been spilled on trying to narrow the range of possible dates of his mother’s presumed happy event to some time between late 1470 and early 1474. The Venetian ambassador Sebastian Giustinian estimated him to be about 46 in 1519, so born around 1473. On the other hand, Cavendish, who knew him well towards the end of his life, tells us that at Peterborough at Easter 1530, as Archbishop of York, Wolsey washed the feet of 59 poor men; one for every year of his age. If this is accurate, then the likely date of his birth is the early part of 1471, possibly March, a date first suggested by Richard Fiddes in the eighteenth century and followed by Creighton and Sybil Jack. Based on traceable Maundy practice, however, Pollard argued that 59 men meant one for every year in which the benefactor had lived, incomplete as well as complete, making 1472–3 more likely. In that case, by April 1530, Wolsey had been alive during 59 years, although he would only have been aged 57 years and 11 months. Cavendish’s modern editors and Gwyn both favour 1472–3. Perhaps an exact date doesn’t matter very much. It certainly doesn’t seem to have mattered to Wolsey who, almost uniquely among his contemporaries, did not wish to dwell on the precise details of his origins. His enemies harped on them constantly, calling him the ‘butcher’s cur’ and a man of no social standing whatsoever.²

Childhood, education and early career

The basis of this insult was that Thomas’s father, Robert Wolsey, or Wulcy, as it was also spelt, carried out a butchery business in Ipswich, kept and grazed livestock and did a spot of beer selling and inn-keeping on the side. Of humble stock he may have been, but Robert was not literally poor in either the Tudor or the modern senses of the word. Even Polydore Vergil, Wolsey’s sternest critic, later said of him that, ‘he had a father who was an upright man, but a butcher, which he [Wolsey] did not like to remember, as something unworthy of his station’.³ Robert owned his own premises with dwellings, as well as tenements and a tavern in the parish of St Mary at the Elms. He was evidently a man on the make, and sometimes fell foul of local regulations governing brewing, ale-house-keeping and public health. He made an advantageous marriage to Joan Daundy who came from an East Anglian yeomanry family. Her brother, Edmund, was an Ipswich merchant of standing, a town burgess and a sometime MP. Robert and Joan had four children, of whom Thomas was the eldest. The ‘Mr Wulcy’ later listed as an attendant in the royal household is likely to have been one of those brothers. Robert Wolsey died in 1496, a comparatively wealthy man who left ten marks (£6 10s) for masses for the repose of his soul, to be said, he instructed in his will, by his son if Thomas was in holy orders within 12 months of his death. Wolsey was not in fact ordained until March 1498 at the age of 27 (if a birth date of 1471 is accurate). His mother remarried and died in 1509. On 21 February 1510, Edmund Daundy obtained a licence to found a chantry chapel in the town with masses to be said for the souls of the family, including Robert and Joan Wolsey.

Thomas was born in the family home, but while he was still very young his parents moved to a somewhat more central location in the busy port town, just down from the Cornhill, near St Peter’s church. From an early age he was, according to Cavendish, ‘very apt to learning’. A boy from his background is likely to have attended a local guild or ‘petty’ school where he would have been taught his alphabet, reading, writing and arithmetic, all skills which would be used in helping his father’s business and in which he doubtless first showed his native intelligence. It is likely that his maternal uncle, Edmund Daundy, took the lead in developing that promise in the education of his nephew, having greater resources and social standing than Robert his brother-in-law. Probably under his auspices, Wolsey went to the local grammar school established in 1476 near the neighbouring Dominican church. He would have learnt Latin and perhaps some Greek, but he was not there long before, as Cavendish tells us, ‘his parents or his good friends and masters conveyed him to the University of Oxford’. Thomas did indeed go to Oxford, to Magdalen College School there, possibly on one of four scholarships for bright boys in the gift of James Goldwell, the Bishop of Norwich.⁴ After a fairly short interval there, and presumably continuing to show that promise of which Cavendish later wrote, Wolsey enrolled as an undergraduate at the College of St Mary Magdalen, not long before founded by William Waynflete, Bishop of Winchester. There, in short order, ‘the butcher’s cur’ became ‘the boy bachelor’. In or about 1486, at the age of 15 by his own account, he graduated BA ‘which was a rare thing and seldom seen’. Gwyn believed that Wolsey was more likely to have enrolled at 15 and finished about four years later. The university’s records are silent on the subject, but, then as now, the Bachelor’s degree was only the first rung on the academic ladder. Wolsey gained his MA in 1497 and thereafter proceeded in Theology. He would have been taught the techniques of the scholastic tradition, including logical thought and disputation, complex oratory and participation in discussions on divinity and moral theology. Magdalen had been founded for the teaching of the last two subjects particularly. He may have encountered in lectures some of the great English figures in what was becoming the fashionable curriculum of biblical humanism, focusing on Greek and the new exegesis of classical and biblical texts. For example, William Grocyn and John Colet gave lectures in the university while Wolsey was there. He would later become a generous patron of such learning at Oxford. Wolsey continued his studies in theology with some continued distinction, but had not fully completed them by the time he left Oxford in 1501–2. He evidently had an aptitude for languages and while at university became proficient not just in Latin but also French, which he seems to have spoken fluently. As ambassadors would later attest, he also spoke some Italian and perhaps a little Spanish. Wolsey’s choice of theology as his principal study probably reflected his personal interests and talents, although he never wrote publicly with any authority on the subject. His own education was formally completed in 1510 when the university admitted him, despite incomplete studies, to the degrees of Bachelor and Doctor of Theology.⁵

Like many talented boys of his background and generation, the university and the Church provided the next steps forward. Wolsey was made a Fellow of Magdalen in 1497 and the following year was ordained priest in the parish church of St Peter at Marlborough. In 1498 he also became the junior bursar of his college and at some time in 1499–1500 became its senior one. He also became briefly the master of Magdalen College School, the beginning, we may suppose, of his life-long commitment to educational provision.

As bursar, Wolsey was in charge of the on-going building works at Magdalen. There is a college tradition that he was accused of mis-allocating monies for the completion of its great tower and that he was consequently forced to resign. Perhaps he took short cuts with the work, or overspent in getting it finished? Perhaps the accounts were not as fully auditable as they ought to have been? His resignation of his fellowship has often been cited as retrospective evidence of this financial indiscretion. There is, however, no documentation to support the story, and Wolsey’s departure is more likely to have been due to the college’s statutory requirement that any Fellow who obtained a benefice above the value of £8 per year had to give up his place. This was exactly Wolsey’s situation. In October 1500, he obtained just such a living (worth £21 annually) in Limington, Somerset, within the diocese of Bath and Wells.⁶

While he was Master of Magdalen School, he had overseen the education of the three sons of Thomas Grey, first Marquis of Dorset. Grey was the eldest son of Elizabeth Woodville, Edward IV’s queen, by her first marriage. It was he who presented Wolsey to the living at Limington, but the appointee may not have spent much time there or even resided at all. The idea that Wolsey ever did so rests principally on yet another of those anecdotes that punctuate Cavendish’s life of the cardinal. This was that while in Grey’s service, an anti-social (probably drunk) Wolsey was put in the stocks at a fair in Limington by the local sheriff, Sir Amias Paulet. Wolsey is alleged to have had his revenge some twenty years later by confining Paulet to the Middle Temple (whose Treasurer the latter then was) at the royal council’s pleasure. Paulet may have had lodgings there and been prevented from leaving the London area without permission of the council – a genteel form of Tudor open detention. He is supposed to have made amends by embellishing the Temple’s gatehouse with Wolsey’s coat of arms and other symbols. The truth of the story is impossible to establish, but it is used by Cavendish in his narrative to emphasise the impermanence of power, not least Wolsey’s, in the circle of Fortune.⁷ In fact, barely had the Somerset benefice been settled on Wolsey than Grey died, and the ambitious churchman bade farewell to the first of his major patrons.

Towards the end of 1501, Wolsey became a chaplain to William Deane, the Archbishop of Canterbury and Chancellor of England, whom he may have first met when in Grey’s service. Wolsey obtained the vicarage of Lydd in Kent, with a papal dispensation to be absent from his existing benefice and to hold another. It was with Deane that Wolsey got his first experience of the demands of civic administration, of diplomacy and dynastic politics – and his evident taste for its pomp and circumstance. The archbishop was involved in negotiating the treaty for the marriage of Katherine of Aragon to Arthur, Prince of Wales. He then conducted their wedding ceremony at St Paul’s in November 1501. Deane was also involved in negotiations with James IV which culminated in a peace treaty sealed by the king of Scots’ betrothal to Henry VII’s eldest daughter, Margaret. A chaplain like Wolsey would have acted as secretary, messenger and perhaps confidant to Deane in these discussions, and also would have played a conspicuous ceremonial role in the archbishop’s suite. Doubtless he did his best to learn as much as he could and to impress all observers. Deane died in February 1503, and after a seemly pause as chief mourner (and possibly executor), Wolsey became a chaplain in the household of Sir Richard Nanfan, the Lieutenant of Calais, then acting as the Deputy (or governor) of the territory in the prolonged absence of Giles, Lord Daubeney.

According to Cavendish, on the strength of Wolsey’s ‘wit, gravity and just behaviour’, Nanfan, who was an important figure in the conciliar circle of Henry VII, entrusted him with the ‘whole charge’ of his own office at Calais. This assertion cannot literally be true and was largely an intimation in Cavendish’s narrative of Wolsey’s extraordinary capacities and the future they would bring him. During this time, however, Nanfan was certainly very busy in discussions with the Burgundian Netherlands, Saxony and Riga, negotiating over trade and the security of the Tudor regime, seeking to apprehend members of the Yorkist affinity, chiefly Richard de la Pole. He may well have relied on Wolsey to a considerable extent in the day-to-day administration of the Calais garrison, giving his chaplain valuable experience in military organisation and logistics that was to stand him in good stead. He evidently esteemed Wolsey and may have been responsible for his appointment as vicar of Redgrave in Suffolk in 1506. He certainly recommended his chaplain to the king. At Nanfan’s death in January 1507, Wolsey, who was co-executor of the old knight’s will, was appointed to the royal household as a chaplain. There he worked closely with Sir Thomas Lovell, the President of the royal council, and with the man who was his greatest patron and mentor to date, Richard Fox, the Bishop of Winchester since 1501.

Fox was an early supporter of Henry VII. Keeper of the king’s privy seal (and thus effectively in charge of the business of the royal council) from 1487 and a close counsellor to the king, Fox was also an important diplomat who would negotiate the betrothal of Princess Mary to Charles of Castile and the treaty for the marriage of Katherine of Aragon to Henry, Prince of Wales in 1508.⁸ Fox was that rare thing in Henry VII’s regime, a true royal confidant. He sought assiduously to guard his influence with the king and to deny the same to others. The founder of Corpus Christi College Oxford, he was, as Bishop of Winchester, the official ‘Visitor’ (the ultimate authority) at Magdalen, and this is probably where he first met Thomas Wolsey. A relatively recent convert to the humanist ‘new learning’ himself, Fox may also have been influential on the new royal chaplain’s interest in this developing intellectual fashion.

Whatever his own theological interests, Wolsey seems principally to have assisted Fox in the conduct of Henry VII’s diplomacy. He was entrusted with a message from the king to James IV of Scotland in April 1508. He was also sent as an envoy to the Holy Roman Emperor Maximilian, probably on some aspect of Henry VII’s continuing hopes for a marriage between himself and Maximilian’s daughter, Margaret of Savoy, the emperor’s representative in the Netherlands, and regent there for her nephew, the future emperor Charles V. Seeing his chaplain still apparently hanging around some days later, a rather annoyed king demanded to know why Wolsey had not yet set out as instructed. He was astonished to learn that his envoy had already been, delivered the message, furthered the negotiations with the emperor on his own initiative and returned, in three and a half days – or so Wolsey told Cavendish years afterwards. How, when and over what period of time Wolsey actually conducted this mission cannot precisely be dated. He probably exaggerated the speed for effect, but his capacity for hard work and his stamina suggests that if anyone could have pulled off this astonishing feat of early-modern shuttle diplomacy, it was Wolsey. Again, for Cavendish, this story was an intimation of the greatness to come. On 2 February 1509, at the king’s behest, came Wolsey’s first significant ecclesiastical appointment. He was made Dean of Lincoln Cathedral and prebend of Welton Brinkhall in the same place, but exchanged it barely two months later for that of Stow Magna and resigned his first benefice at Limington. By then Henry VII had died, and Wolsey farewelled the last of that string of patrons whose short-lived favour he had enjoyed.⁹

Henry VIII became king of England on 21 April 1509. His advent was greete...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Half Title
• Series Page
• Title Page
• Copyright Page
• Dedication Page
• Contents
• List of illustrations
• Acknowledgements
• Chronology
• List of abbreviations
• Introduction: Wolsey and the historians
• 1 From Ipswich to Hampton Court: Wolsey’s rise to power
• 2 Cloth of Gold: Wolsey’s ‘Universal’ Peace
• 3 Chief executive: Wolsey in council and court
• 4 Cardinal legate: Wolsey and the English Church
• 5 Cardinal benefactor: Wolsey’s cultural and educational patronage
• 6 ‘Cardinalis pacificus’: Wolsey’s ‘Eternal Peace’
• 7 The Cardinal’s greatest matter: Wolsey and the annulment
• 8 The turn of Fortune’s wheel: Wolsey’s fall
• Conclusion: the Cardinal’s legacy
• Suggestions for further reading
• Index