7
And therefore considering the manner of this dealing, it putteth me in remembrance of a fable, how the axe that lacked a handle came on a time to a wood and making his moan to the great trees how that for lack of a handle to work withal he was fain to sit idle, he therefore desired of them to grant him a young small tree whereof he shaped himself a handle, and being made at last a perfect axe in all parts, he fell to work and so laboured in the wood that in the process of time he left neither great tree nor small standing.
Words attributed to John Fisher at the meeting of Convocation in November 1529.
Not long before the Duke of Suffolk’s brawny fist had smitten the table at Blackfriars in a despairing act of brute frustration at the legatine court’s outcome, Elizabeth Barton delivered an oracle that not only mentioned him by name but incorporated part of the very expression he had bellowed at the time while delivering his final verdict on the cardinal whom he had always despised. Preserved in the Act of Attainder that was to condemn her, Barton’s pronouncement was allegedly gleaned from the writings of Dom Edward Bocking and another Benedictine monk, Dom John Dering, and told of how ‘it should never be merry in England’ until a root with three branches was plucked up and destroyed. The first branch, unsurprisingly enough, was Wolsey, but the other two were none other than the Dukes of Norfolk and Suffolk who, along with Anne Boleyn’s father, the Earl of Wiltshire, now took up the reins of government, wholly devoid of fresh approaches, let alone novel solutions, to their royal master’s marital dilemma. In the background lay the new Lord Chancellor, Sir Thomas More, a man of altogether more prodigious talents, but one who had taken office only on the condition that, as the king himself put it, he should not be placed in either ‘ruffle or trouble’ of his conscience regarding the divorce. And the result was an administration that for the next two years drifted aimlessly between random acts of intimidation against the clergy, largely engineered by the king himself, and equally forlorn attempts at moral and political pressure upon the papacy. As all hopes of progress faltered, moreover, so the king’s anger increasingly consumed him. ‘Wolsey was a better man than any of you,’ he was soon reminding his new right-hand men, as their policies proved no more watertight than the leaky roof of the shabby dwelling at York where the cardinal himself now resided, ‘wrapped’, as he put it, ‘in misery and need on every side, not knowing where to be succoured or relieved’.
Now largely thrown back upon his own resources, therefore, the king’s main concern initially extended little further than the mere semblance of action, and since he could not be seen to be idle, Parliament was promptly summoned to give vent, as he hoped, to what the London lawyer, anticlerical MP and chronicler Edward Hall described as ‘the griefs wherewith the spirituality had before time grievously oppressed them’. But if England’s aggrieved ruler was wishing to unleash a slavering parliamentary hound in pursuit of the clergy and thereby intimidate the Bishop of Rome into submission, then all that he had to hand, for the present at least, was a largely toothless puppy, since the much-vaunted raging anticlericalism of what would become known as the ‘Reformation Parliament’ was far from evident in its first session. And the reason was apparent. For unlike the later sessions that ran on ultimately until 1536, the 310 MPs arriving in November 1529 had been largely elected without exceptional interference from the Crown, with the consequence that, in spite of strong language and a measure of intemperate bluster, only three of the twenty-six acts passed in the subsequent six weeks actually involved criticism of ecclesiastical abuses, and even then as no more than a comparatively low priority, so that when the Mercers’ Company of London complained of probate and mortuary fees exacted by the clergy, it did so only as the fifth of a five-point programme otherwise concerned with trade. The other item of legislation, meanwhile, addressed the problem of clerical non-residence and pluralism, but even here, for many MPs, the target is likely to have been not to so much the clergy in general as Thomas Wolsey in particular. For Parliament had been called, after all, with the express intention of killing two birds with one stone – the largest of which was the fallen cardinal, who was now to be stripped of his former glory by Act of Attainder, on grounds of forty-four charges, which were deemed, nevertheless, to be ‘but a few in comparison of all his enormities, excuses and trespasses against Your Grace’s laws’.
Only an hour or so before Parliament opened on 3 November Henry read a pleading letter that Wolsey had written with his ‘rude and trembling hand’, and then stood by impassively as his subjects tore into the cardinal’s flesh with all the pent-up fury of almost two decades’ dissatisfaction. Even the elegance of Sir Thomas More’s opening oration did little to lessen its cutting impact. Presenting a travesty of the parable of the Good Shepherd, the normally accommodating Lord Chancellor now displayed his own set of finely filed teeth. The king, he said, like a good shepherd had seen the need for reform and just as any great flock contained creatures that were ‘rotten or faulty’, so he had rightly seen fit to cast out the ‘great wether which is of late fallen, as you all know’. Wolsey, the new chancellor continued, had ‘so craftily, so scabbedly, yea, and so untruly juggled with the King’ that men must surely think he was either unable to see his wrongdoing or had counted on his master’s ignorance. But, More concluded, ‘he was deceived, for his Grace’s sight was so quick and penetrable that he saw him, yea and saw through him’. Not only saw through him, moreover, but now looked on blankly into the deep blue horizon – much as he had done at Blackfriars when his wife confronted him – as his former favourite was systematically accused of making wrongful appointments to benefices, pillaging monastic foundations, depriving them of free elections and impeding bishops in their attempts to stamp out heresy.
Nor was there any flicker of defence when the king’s sometime confidant was accused of embezzling the goods of his predecessors in the archbishopric of York as well as the sees of Lincoln, Durham and Winchester. He had, it was said, concluded treaties with both the pope and the King of France, as well as the Duke of Ferrara, without Henry’s authority, and in his correspondence with foreigners he had used the expression the ‘King and I’, demonstrating that ‘he used himself more like a fellow to Your Highness than like a subject’ – something that was also confirmed by the appearance of a cardinal’s hat on the coinage of the realm. He had even, it seems, endangered the king’s health. For, knowing that he had ‘the foul and contagious disease of the great pox broken out upon him in divers places of his body’, he nevertheless ‘came daily to Your Grace, rowning in your ear and blowing upon your most noble Grace with his perilous and infective breath’. And while the charges mounted, the king continued to lift not a finger to save the man who, with supreme irony, was now becoming, from some appearances, the very first martyr of the royal divorce. Accused of withholding ambassadorial letters to his sovereign, of granting himself licences to export grain for personal profit, of stifling debate on the king’s council, and of interfering with the decisions of Common Law judges, he received no glimmer of sympathy. Equally, when spiteful reference was made to his former mistress, Joan Lark – ‘which woman the said lord cardinal kept, and had with her two children’ – there was no attempt to mitigate the onslaught. On the contrary, the articles were presented to the king on 1 December 1529 and thereafter sent, without amendment, directly to the Commons.
Wolsey had therefore, it seems, exploited and extorted on all fronts, and now he would be left to face the music almost wholly alone, though not entirely. For at least his rising servant, Thomas Cromwell, was prepared to offer sustained defence on his master’s behalf as the newly elected MP for Taunton. Indeed, to every charge levelled, said George Cavendish, Cromwell ‘was ever ready furnished with a sufficient answer, so that at length, for his honest behaviour in his master’s cause, he grew into such estimation in every man’s opinion’ and ‘was of all men greatly commended’. Even this, however, was little more than cupboard love. For, as Cavendish recognised, such a show of loyalty, when applied with the correct balance of professed loyalty and carefully crafted moderation, could at least be guaranteed to raise a principled profile among his peers without risking a rather less self-sacrificing head. Besides which, there was the far more pressing worry still that were the cardinal to fall, the prospects for his retainers were far from certain. So when Cavendish eventually found Cromwell weeping copious tears at Esher with a prayer book in his hands – ‘which’, said Cavendish, ‘had been a strange sight in him afore’ – the truth was soon forthcoming. ‘Why Mr Cromwell,’ said the gentleman usher, ‘what meaneth this dole. Is my lord in any danger?’ But Cromwell’s main concern remained Cromwell, and the future ramifications of his employer’s fall for him personally, especially within those more elite circles he had already set his eye upon. ‘I am like to lose all that I have ever laboured for,’ he confessed, since, he feared, he was already ‘disdained for his master’s sake’ among the high and mighty, and an ‘evil name, once gotten’, was not to be ‘lightly put away’.
Yet while Wolsey’s former minion feared for his future prospects, John Fisher, by contrast, seemed further intent upon flagrantly wrecking his own. He had been summoned to both Parliament and Convocation in August 1529, and was now intent from the outset, it seems, to take up where he had left off at Blackfriars, notwithstanding the comparative moderation of the anticlerical legislation put forward by the House of Commons. For while limited in scope, Fisher appreciated all too acutely that the bills dealing with pluralism, non-residence, and probate and mortuary fees nevertheless represented an encroachment upon what had hitherto been exclusively ecclesiastical territory, and, true to character, he duly delivered a speech to the Upper House, which, according to the account of his anonymous early biographer, took no prisoners, as he now ‘stepped up among the other lords and said in effect the followeth’:
My lords, I pray you for God’s sake, consider what bills are here daily preferred from the Commons. What the same may sound in some of your ears I cannot tell, but in my ears they sound all to this effect, that our holy mother the Church being left unto us by the great liberality and diligence of our forefathers in most perfect and peaceable freedom, shall now by us be brought into servile thraldom like a bondmaid, or rather by little and little to be clean banished and driven out of our confines and dwelling places. For else to what end should all this importunate and injurious language from the Commons tend? What strange words be here uttered, not to be heard of any Christian ears and unworthy to be spoken in the hearing of Christian princes? For they say that bishops and their officials, abbots, priests and others of the clergy are covetous, ravenous, insatiable, idle, cruel, and so forth. What? Are all of this sort, or is there any of these abuses that the clergy seek not to extirpate and destroy? Be there not laws already provided by them against such and many more disasters? Are not books full of them to be read of such as list to read them if they were executed? But, my lords, beware of yourselves and your country, nay, beware the liberty of our mother the Church. Luther, one of the most cruel enemies to the faith that ever was, is at hand, and the common people study for novelties and with good will hear what can be said in favour of heresy. What success is there to be hoped for in these attempts other than such as our neighbours have already tasted, whose harms may be a good warning to us? Remember with yourselves what these sects and divisions have wrought among the Bohemians and Germans, who, besides an innumerable number of mischiefs fallen among them, have almost lost their ancient and catholic faith. And what by the snares of John Huss and after him of Martin Luther (whom they reverence like a prophet) they have almost excluded themselves from – the unity of Christ’s Holy Church. These men now among us seem to reprove the life and doings of the clergy, but after such a sort as they endeavour to bring them into contempt and hatred of the laity. And so finding fault with other men’s manners, whom they have no authority to correct, omit and forget their own, which is far worse and much more out of order than the other … Wherefore I will tell you, my lords, plainly what I think. Except ye resist manfully by your authorities this violent heap of mischief offered by the Commons, ye shall shortly see all obedience withdrawn from the clergy and after from yourselves. Whereupon will ensue the utter ruin and danger of the Christian faith, and in place of it (that which is likely to follow) the most wicked and tyrannical government of the Turks. For ye shall find that all these mischiefs among them riseth only through lack of faith.
Once again, Fisher had excelled himself, both in bravery and insensitivity, as well as foresight and folly. Rigorously uncovering the logic of events, much of what he predicted would indeed come to pass. But the reproof of the Duke of Norfolk that followed, ‘half merrily and half angrily’, nevertheless, went to the root not only of the bishop’s greatness but also his human weakness: ‘I wis [know], my lord, it is many times seen that the greatest clerks be not always the greatest men.’ And almost in confirmation of his adversary’s point, Fisher could not, of course, resist the final word. For to Norfolk’s rebuke, we are told, ‘he answered merrily again and said that he could not remember any fools in his time that had proved great clerks’.
Nor was it only Norfolk that Fisher had stirred. On the contrary, as the chronicler Edward Hall makes abundantly clear, the MPs that had been the butt of the bishop’s comments were, if anything, far more outraged still. And Hall, of course, as an eyewitness to events, was not only in the finest of positions to tell, but spared no detail in describing the response of his peers to the bishop’s words. For, as he relates:
When these words were reported to the Commons of the nether house, that the bishop should say that their doings were for lack of faith, they took the matter grievously, for they imagined that the bishop esteemed them as heretics, and so by his slanderous words would have persuaded the temporal lords to have restrained their consent from the said two bills which they before had passed as you have heard before.
Wherefore the Commons after long debate determined to send the speaker of the Parliament to the king’s highness with grievous complaint against the Bishop of Rochester, and so on a day when the king was at leisure, Thomas Audley the speaker for the Commons and thirty of the chief of the Common House came to the king’s presence in his palace at Westminster, which before was called York Place, and there very eloquently declared what a dishonour to the king and the realm it was to say that they which were elected for the wisest men of all the shires, cities and boroughs within the realm of England should be declared in so noble and open presence to lack faith, which was equivalent to say that they were infidels and no Christians, as ill as Turks or Saracens, so that what pain or study soever they took for the commonwealth, or what acts or laws soever they made or established, should be taken as laws made by paynims and heathen people, and not worthy to be kept by Christian men: wherefore he most humbly sought the king’s highness to call the said bishop before him and to cause him to speak more discreetly of such a number as was in the Common House.
Under the circumstances, the call for greater discretion was hardly misplaced, and nor was it surprising, as Hall makes clear, that the king ‘was not well contented with the saying of the bishop’. Rather more curious, however, was the fact that on this occasion Henry ‘gently answered the speaker’, informing him that Fisher would indeed be sent for, and that ultimately the bishop’s explanation of his action, corroborated by six other bishops in attendance, was eventually accepted so readily, since Fisher’s sole defence consisted of the claim that he had ‘meant the doings of the Bohemians was for lack of faith, and not the doings of them that were in the Common House’. As such, the king’s subsequent leniency was far from welcome to the complainants. Indeed, the bishop’s ‘blind excuse’, we are told, ‘pleased the Commons nothing at all’. For if Fisher was already an identikit saint and martyr – a hair-shirted, hard-praying ascetic and man of unwavering principle – he was continuing to exhibit a seemingly indestructible ego, which, while fit perhaps to match the undoubted grandeur of his principles, was equally capable of magnifying issues and stirring storms. Plainly, the line between prescience and overreaction is a fine one, and perhaps it was for this reason that his fellow bishops declined to follow his course from this point onwards – not so much out of cowardice in the face of a coming tidal wave that might sweep them away, but rather from a prudent inclination to ride out what they saw, at this stage, as more of a troublesome squall than typhoon.
Yet if the Bishop of Rochester consequently stood largely alone among the episcopacy, other stirrings elsewhere, and especially at Canterbury, were merely serving to echo his own misgivings about the royal divorce. For at Conceptiontide in the midwinter of 1529–30, as the king created his intended father-in-law Earl of Wiltshire and Ormonde in an elaborate investiture ceremony held at York Place – followed by a grand celebration at Whitehall over which Anne herself presided at the king’s side amid the winter blazes – Elizabeth Barton was labouring in pangs and ecstasies, ‘three or four days without meat or drink’, at the distant convent of St Sepulchre. And it was now, according to John Wolff’s later account, that she received a second prompting, this time delivered by an angel, ‘to go again unto the king’:
And say that, since her last being with his Grace, he hath more highly studied to bring his purpose to pass; and that she saw in spirit the King, the Queen [Anne Boleyn] and the Earl of Wiltshire, standing in a garden together; and that they did devise how to bring this matter to pass. And by no means it would not be.
Thereafter, according to the information gleaned by Wolff from his cellmate, Fr Hugh Rich, the Guardian of the Friars Observant of Richmond:
A little devil stood beside the Queen and put it into her mind to say this: ‘You shall send my father unto the Emperor, and let him show your mind and conscience, and give him these many thousand ducats to have his good will; and that it shall be brought to pass.’
Whereupon, the angel delivered the following command to Barton: ‘Go and fear not to show the King this tale and privy token, and bid him take his old wife again, or else … etc.’
As a man imprisoned in the Tower and intent upon escaping a death sentence of his own, Wolff’s decision to avoid more specific detail about the nature of the Maid’s oracle and to opt instead for an altogether blander ‘etc.’ is hardly surprising, particularly when the whole episode, as he timorously confessed at the time, was ‘so naughty a matter that my hand shaketh to write it, and something better unwritten than unwritten’. But it was none other than John Fisher who, in a later attempt to justify his own association with Barton, saw fit to reveal how she had related the content of her recent prophecy to the king upon their first meeting, which occurred, as the bishop was keen to make clear, after she had already shared it with the king himself and then ‘came unto my house, unsent for on my part’. Nor was Fisher eventually in any position to beat about the bush with what he had been told, for, as he related in a letter to his royal master, dated 27 February 1534, she had informed him that ‘if your Grace went forth with the purpose ye intended, ye should not be King of England seven months after’.
By the time that this oracle had first been delivered, moreover, Henry’s intended purpose could not have been more apparent. For although his relations with Queen Catherine would be maintained at formal occasions for around a year and a half after Blackfriars, and although they continued to meet ‘every few days’ for appearances’ sake, the upper hand was already entirely Anne Boleyn’s. And nor was she failing to employ it, since she was now in her late twenties and increasingly impatient at her own predicament:
Did I not tell you [she railed at her royal suitor in early November 1529] that when you disputed with the queen she was sure to have the upper hand … I have been waiting long and might in the meantime have contracted some advantageous marriage … But alas! Farewell to my time and youth spent to no purpose at all!
Yet even such outbursts failed to cool the king’s ardour, it seems, for as Chapuys observed, his love was invariably ‘greater than before’ after such spats, and resulted in nothing more than a continual string of expensive peace offerings that included ornate French saddles and harnesses, fine linen for night clothes, as well as gold embellishment for Anne’s desk. In December 1529, £180 was spent on purple velvet for Anne’s gowns, and large sums of £100 or more also followed as New Year’s gifts, along with expensive furs, diamonds and pearls in abundance, while Catherine of Aragon confined herself to mending her husband’s shirts at Greenwich, regally contemptuous of her upstart rival and stoically resigned to her chosen path of fruitless resistance. For her rival was now not only snugly installed within her own apartments at the same palace but kept, we are told, ‘an estate more like a Queen than a simple maid’.
No one, it is true, even at court, pretended to like the turn that events were taking. The Duchess of Norfolk, for example, had to be packed off home at Anne’s request ‘because she spoke too freely and declared herself more than was liked for the Queen’. And even her husband, the duke, who as Anne’s uncle probably knew too much already of his niece’s temper to be truly glad at her advancement, was heard to have complained that ‘it was the devil and nobody else who was the inventor of this accursed dispute’. In Parliament, the Speaker had to rebuke those who suggested that ‘the King pursued this divorce out of love for some lady and not out of any scruple of conscience’. And while common folk continued to cheer the queen and the princess, the women of Oxford would soon be hurling stones at the university’s vice-chancellor when he sought to set its seal upon the document declaring the king’s first marriage incestuous. By that time Catherine had already been ordered to vacate her apartments and move to Wolsey’s former house at the More before beginning a further dreary and humiliating exodus, encompassing a series of distant royal manors at Ampthill, Buckden and finally Kimbolton. Forbidden ultimately either to write to the king or to see her daughter, her household was also progressively whittled away until it became a paltry embarrassment to all concerned, consisting of little more than a confessor, a physician, an apothecary, and three women, including the ever-loyal Lady Willoughby: a retinue even more inadequate than in Catherine’s days of hardship at Durham House twenty-five years earlier.
That the king’s Gordian knot was all but cut even before the end of 1529 seemed manifestly clear to most outside observers and especially Eustace Chapuys, the 40-year-old Imperial ambassador, who was in that year newly arrived at the English court. By now, indeed, as the queen’s little court became increasingly ‘scantily visited by courtiers’, it appeared little more than a home for lost causes. Yet the precise means for effecting the divorce remained as elusive as ever, and all the more so when Henry’s own attempts at independent diplomatic initiatives continued to backfire so manifestly. His appeal to Europe’s universities, recommended by Thomas Cranmer, would prove indecisive, while plans for the Earl of Wiltshire’s projected visit to the pope – the genesis of which had already been witnessed by Elizabeth Barton by means of angelic assistance, as the king, his mistress and the earl paced up and down in their furs under the wintry trees of York Place – were, in effect, merely indicative of the depth of the prevailing impasse. Indeed, the visit would provide the Holy Father with a priceless opportunity for gleeful disrespect, as he served the dumbstruck earl with a writ citing his master to appear before him at Rome, before issuing a series of bulls threatening excommunication if Henry should proceed with his intended marriage.
In the meantime, moreover, while Anne Boleyn’s father floundered abroad, so his would-be son-in-law found himself further encumbered at home by other inconveniences, the most pressing of which by now was the re-emergence of the Maid of Kent from her cloister in Canterbury with a heavenly message so pressing that she was prepared to venture once more into the royal presence to deliver it. Not altogether surprisingly, perhaps, official sources preserve a discreet silence over this particular encounter, as they do over the first. But whatever transpired in 1528, the meeting in either December 1529 or January 1530 was altogether more significant, not least because the Maid’s prestige had continued to increase considerably. From no less a source than John Fisher himself, indeed, we learn that she travelled once more with her prioress, Dame Philippa Jonys, and an escort of convent servants from St Sepulchre’s, and we know, too, that this expedition was again made with the permission, if not the active encouragement, of the Archbishop of Canterbury. But it is John Fisher’s earliest biographer who informs us that the Maid and her entourage finally caught up with the king at Hanworth – a royal manor in Middlesex, within easy distance of London and very near Richmond Palace – where she delivered an oracle declaring that:
The King had an ill intent and purpose in him, especially in that he minded to separate himself and the good Queen Catherine asunder, and minded for his voluptuousness and carnal appetite to marry another; which by no means he could do without the great displeasure of Almighty God, for it was directly against his holy laws … saying that by her revelation she perceived that, if the King desisted not from his purpose in this great case of divorce but would needs prosecute the same and marry again, then after such marriage he should not long be king of his realm, and in the reputation of God, he should not be king thereof one day, nor one hour after, and that he should die a shameful and miserable death.
Largely in keeping with John Wolff’s account of the same episode, Fisher’s earliest biographer was probably present at Rochester when the Maid spoke of it during her unscheduled visit to the bishop shortly afterwards. And we can confirm, too, that the king was spending lavishly upon the renewal of Hanworth at this very time in preparation for granting it to Anne for life in the following year. So it was with the builders at work around them that the king’s kneeling visitor:
Opened all her mind as freely as she was able to utter it, desiring him therefore in God’s name, as well for the safety of his own soul as for the preservation of this noble realm, to take good heed what he did and to proceed no further in this business.
When the interview took place, furthermore, it was not a private one, since Henry’s reactions, as John Fisher’s correspondence shows, were reported in Rochester by other witnesses as well, which may explain in part the otherwise surprising royal restraint. For the king, we are told:
All the while gave her quiet hearing, seeming to all men that were there present not only content with her words but also dismayed to hear them at the mouth of so simple a woman. And so dismissed her peaceably enough at that time to her house of Canterbury, where she remained not long quiet after.
Certainly, Henry’s no more than temporary dismay accords well enough with the frequent oscillations between self-willed bravado and traditional piety that were so much a part of his make-up. But if a government informer, whose handwriting identifies him as the Observant Friar Fr John Lawrence of Greenwich, is to be believed, the meeting did not conclude without at least one further twist. For Lawrence suggests that, before dismissing her, the king introduced her to the circle of his adopted family, where he and Anne Boleyn and the Countess of Wiltshire attempted to enlist her support by means of various enticements. In Lawrence’s own words: ‘The said Nun did show to me being with her at Canterbury, that the King did offer to make her Abbess of … [left blank by Lawrence], which she did refuse to; for which the King was with her greatly displeased.’ And the Boleyn ladies too, it seems, offered inducements of their own: ‘The Queen [Anne Boleyn] would have had her to remain at the court. And my lady her mother [the Countess of Wiltshire] did desire her to wait upon her daughter.’ If true, and there is no inherent reason to believe otherwise, Elizabeth Barton was now clearly established as a figure of considerable political importance even at the royal court – an individual whose good offices were crucial enough, indeed, to merit subornment at the highest possible level. And this was not all. For she was now gaining an international reputation to boot, as Charles V was swiftly apprised – some time before the Earl of Wiltshire visited him in Bologna – how a young Benedictine nun had ‘reproved the King for his sins’, snubbed his mistress and refused a handsome bribe.
When she knocked at the door of John Fisher’s episcopal palace in Rochester, however, on her homeward journey to Canterbury, fresh from her royal encounter, she showed nothing more than an intense desire to share her prophecy with the most renowned ecclesiastic in the kingdom, in the hope that he at last might have some bearing upon the king. As Fisher himself put it, ‘I conceived not by these – I take it upon my soul – that any malice or evil was intended or meant unto your Highness by any mortal man, but only that they were the threats of God, as she then did affirm.’ And that Fisher did indeed believe he was encountering a divinely inspired seeress is beyond all doubt. Lawrence, in fact, suggests that the stern old bishop ‘wept for joy’ when he heard of the Maid’s revelations, ‘saying that he did give to them the more credence because that she had been with the King divers times and reproved him for his sins’. The Draft of Charges eventually levelled against Barton also suggested how ‘of likelihood, the obstinacy of mind of [the bishop of] Rochester hath been confirmed by the said Nun’s revelations’. And nor, of course, should this have been surprising, since what the Maid told Fisher in early 1530 was exactly what the bishop himself had been saying since 1527. Indeed, when later interrogated in the Tower for concealing Barton’s words about the king, it was this very reason he gave for believing her: namely, that she merely confirmed his most gloomy forebodings.
For good measure, however, Fisher also gave six other reasons at that time for having taken her seriously, and for having invited her on two subsequent occasions to visit him, all of which throw vivid light upon the Maid’s standing with the public and with the clergy in general at the turn of the year 1529–30:
Whereof the first is grounded upon the bruit [reputation] and fame of her;
the second, upon her entering into religion after her trances and disfiguration;
the third, upon rehearsal that her ghostly father [Dom Edward Bocking], being learned and religious, should testify that she was a maid of great holiness;
the fourth, upon the report that divers other virtuous priests, men of good learning and reputation, should so testify to her;
the fifth, upon the praise of my late Lord of Canterbury [Archbishop Warham] which showed … that she had many great visions;
the sixth, upon the saying of the Prophet Amos: Non faciet Dominus Deus verbum, nisi revelaverit secretum suum ad servos suos prophetas – The Lord does nothing without first revealing his secrets to his servants.
To Fisher, then, with his taste for the miraculous and the occult, not to mention the wondrous secrets of numerology and the Cabbala, which had influenced his study of the Septuagint in particular, it seemed entirely plausible that God had at last spoken against the disorders of the English Samaria – against the English Ahab and the English Jezebel. And since God had spoken, the Maid – being mystically united to the will of God, as all declared – had no choice but to prophesy and her hearers no choice but to listen. Since the voice of prophecy was now raised, moreover, wholesale change – conceivably for the better – was plainly at hand.
Yet in the wake of Barton’s departure, the point of crisis actually seemed to be looming ever closer. For the king’s first response was to remind the papal nuncio of the law of praemunire, which declared that those who brought or received papal bulls into England relating to ‘our Lord the King, against him, his crown, and royalty of his realm’ should be ‘put out of the King’s protection, and their lands, tenements, goods and chattels forfeited’ to the Crown. Furthermore, in the summer of 1530, writs of praemunire facias were indeed issued against fifteen clergy, which included not only John Fisher but all of Catherine’s supporters among the episcopacy, with the exception of Cuthbert Tunstall, on the specific charge that they had aided Wolsey in his offences by handing over part of their income to him. And even before a decision had been reached in this case the charge was extended in December to the entire English clergy. ‘No one,’ Chapuys said of the Statute of Praemunire, ‘can fathom the mysteries of this law. Its interpretation depends wholly on the King, who limits or amplifies it according to his will, and applies it to anyone he pleases.’ Nor were the penalties any less arbitrary, for in eventually surrendering, the provinces of Canterbury and York were required to pay fines of £100,000 and £18,840 respectively in return for a royal pardon, and were further forced to recognise Henry as their ‘singular protector, only and supreme lord … even Supreme Head’ – an acknowledgement that clearly set a potentially handy precedent for the Crown if it chose at some future juncture to press its control of ecclesiastical affairs.
But the success of the king’s attack had not been achieved without arduous effort and intense pressure, and nor in any case was his victory complete, since the Bishop of Rochester, who had for so long remained austerely apolitical in his earlier career, once again emerged as the lynchpin of resistance to anticlerical bullying on behalf of the parliamentary Commons and the regime they were now unquestioningly buttressing. As Fisher’s anonymous early biographer records it:
When this matter was come to scanning in the Convocation House, great hold [contention] and stir was made about it. For among them there wanted not some that stood ready to set forth the king’s purpose; and for fear of them, many others durst not speak their minds freely. But when this holy father [Fisher] saw what was towards and how ready some of their own company were to help forward the king’s purpose, he opened up before the bishops such and so many inconveniences by granting of this demand, that in conclusion all was rejected and the king’s intent clean overthrown for that time.
There followed the predictable royal threats to all concerned, ‘putting them in mind what danger and peril they stood in at this present time against his Majesty’, since the law decreed that ‘their bodies and goods were wholly at his highness’ will and pleasure’. But while his colleagues faltered, Fisher as always remained unyielding, earnestly requesting Convocation ‘to take good heed what mischiefs and inconveniences would ensue to the whole Church of Christ by this unreasonable and unseemly grant to a temporal prince’. And neither was he moved when the king’s counsellors assured Convocation of their master’s good intentions and ‘fell into disputation among the bishops of a temporal prince’s authority’. On the contrary, ‘my lord of Rochester answered them so fully that they had not list to deal that way any further’. ‘For they were indeed,’ as the anonymous early biographer puts it, ‘but simple smatterers in divinity to speak before such a divine as he was.’
Yet there was, of course, a further price to pay for a victory that remained no more than moral, since the king’s representatives departed, we are told, ‘in great anger’, ‘showing themselves openly in their own likeness and saying that, whosoever would refuse to condescend to the king’s demand therein, was not worthy to be accounted a true and loving subject’. And as pressure mounted, so Fisher’s fellow bishops, knowing the king to be ‘cruelly bent against the clergy’, once again slowly melted before the ‘threatening persuasion’ exerted against them, though not before ‘sundry days’ argument in great striving and contention’, and not before one parting master-stroke and final indignant flourish from the man at the centre of the storm, which his anonymous biographer describes thus:
My Lord of Rochester, perceiving this sudden and hasty grant [i.e. payment for a royal pardon] only made for fear and not upon any other just ground, stood up again all angry and rebuked them for their pusillanimity in being so lightly changed and easily persuaded. And being very loath that any such grant should pass from the clergy thus absolutely and yet by no means able to stay it for the fear that was among them, he then advised the Convocation that seeing the king by his own mouth and also by the sundry speeches of his orators had faithfully promised and solemnly sworn in the high word of a king that his meaning was to require no further than quantum per legem dei licet [as far as the law of God allows], and that by virtue thereof his purpose was not to intermeddle with any spiritual laws, spiritual jurisdiction or government more than all his predecessors had always done before, ‘If so be that you are fully determined to grant him this demand (which I rather wish you to deny than grant), yet for a more true and plain exposition of your meaning towards the king and all his posterity, let these conditional words be expressed in your grant quantum per legem dei licet, which is no other wise (as the king and his learned counsel say) than yourselves mean.’
With much ingenuity, therefore, and even greater effrontery, Fisher had found his loophole and exploited it with all the artistry of the politician he never usually was. Technically at least, he had partially negated the king’s claims to be ‘only and supreme lord of the Church and the English clergy’ and ‘also their supreme head’ by appending the theoretical restriction ‘as far as the law of God allows’ – a term first used, ironically enough, not only by the king himself but by his own representatives in attempting to demonstrate his honourable intentions. And in doing so Fisher had stirred the bishops anew in defending this principle against the ‘open and continual clamour’ of those same representatives ‘to have the grant passed absolutely’. Indeed, the early biographer tells us how the clergy had ‘gotten new courage by this good man’s words’, and that nothing thereafter ‘could prevail among them’.
Nor, given the power of Fisher’s oratory, was its effect altogether surprising. For as the debate reached its climax, so the bishop’s words appear to have attained a new level of intensity:
We cannot grant this [supremacy] unto the king but [unless] we must renounce our unity to the see of Rome; and, if there were further matter in it than a renouncing of Clement VII, Pope thereof, then the matter were not so great: but in this we do forsake the first four General Councils, which none ever forsook; we renounce all canonical and ecclesiastical laws of the Church of Christ; we renounce all other Christian princes; we renounce the unity of the Christian world; and so leap out of Peter’s ship, to be drowned in the waves of all heresies, sects, schisms and divisions.
And as if this were not enough, Fisher once more made reference to Herod while adding a further allusion to Nero and yet another crushing application of logic to expose the flaws and contradictions in his opponents’ reasoning, since by accepting the royal supremacy:
We renounce the judgement of all other Christian princes, whether they be Protestants or Catholics, Jews or Gentiles, for, by this argument, Herod must have been head of the church of the Jews; Nero must have been head of the church of Christ; the Emperor [Charles] must be head of the Protestant countries in Germany; and the church of Christ must have had never a head till about three hundred years after Christ [when the Emperor Constantine became a Christian].
In a nutshell, the whole structure of organised religion in Western Europe hinged upon papal authority, and the failure to accept as much could only result in catastrophe, as Fisher made clear in his concluding comments:
Then is the granting of the supremacy of the Church to the King a renouncing of this unity, a tearing of the seamless coat of Christ in sunder, a dividing of the mystical body of Christ’s spouse, limb from limb, and tail to tail, like Samson’s foxes, to set the field of Christ’s Holy Church all on fire; and this is it which we are about.
Wherefore let it be said unto you in time, and not too late: Look you to that!
Nor was this the only sting in the tail. For when Archbishop Warham subsequently put Fisher’s suggested amendment to the king’s title to Convocation on 11 February, he did so on the assumption that silence signified assent: Qui tacet consentire. And the deadly hush that followed was not only ringing, but enough, it seems, to drive Henry to further fury when news of the decision reached him from those of his representatives who had been present:
Mother of God! You have played a pretty prank. I thought to have made fools of them; and now you have so ordered the business that they are more likely to make a fool of me, as they have done of you already.
Even so, Chapuys was to report to the Emperor on 21 February 1531 that Fisher was actually very ill with disappointment at the overall outcome regarding the supremacy. He had ‘opposed it as much as he can’, wrote the ambassador, ‘but being threatened that he and his adherents should be thrown into the river, he was forced to consent to the king’s will’. As might be expected for a man of the bishop’s disposition, the consolation of the phrase quam per legem dei licet had been of small comfort amid the broader retreat, and the strain of resistance is indeed likely to have taken a temporary toll. More than twenty days, after all, had been spent in discussing the royal demand, and although the possibility exists that his anonymous biographer may have ascribed too dominant a role to Fisher himself, his account, which is the most detailed available, would certainly explain the delay of some twelve or thirteen sittings between the grant of money in return for a royal pardon and Convocation’s final acceptance of the king’s new title. But it was not merely bitter disappointment that had harmed the bishop’s health. For his principled stand had also made him enemies who would now, it seems, stop at nothing to be rid of him, and on 20 February 1531, his cook, a man named Rouse, who was said by some to have been acting on the instructions of either Anne Boleyn or her father, had poisoned a cauldron of broth with a mysterious white powder, which was served to the bishop and his household.
According to Chapuys’s account, which mistakenly suggests that Fisher had not tasted the broth and was only incapacitated from disappointment at Convocation’s acceptance of the royal supremacy, the incident had unfolded as follows:
There was in the bishop’s house about ten days ago some pottage, of which all who tasted it, that is, nearly all the servants, were brought to the point of death, though only two of them died, and some poor people to whom they had given it. The good bishop, happily, did not taste it. The cook was immediately seized at the instance of the bishop’s brother, and, it is said, confessed that he had thrown in a powder which, he had been given to understand, would only stupefy the servants without doing them any harm. I do not yet know whom he has accused of giving him this powder nor the issue of the affair. The king has done well to show dissatisfaction at this; nevertheless, he cannot wholly avoid some suspicion, if not against himself, whom I think too good to do such a thing, at least against the lady [Anne Boleyn] and her father.
The said Bishop of Rochester is very ill, and has been so ever since the acknowledgement made by the clergy of which I wrote. But, notwithstanding his disposition, he has arranged to leave tomorrow by the king’s leave. I know not why, being ill, he is anxious to go on a journey, especially as he will get better attendance of physicians here than elsewhere, unless it be that he will no longer be a witness of things done against the Church, or that he fears there is some more powder in reserve for him. If the king desired to treat of the affair of the queen, the absence of the said Bishop and of the Bishop of Durham [Cuthbert Tunstall] would be unfortunate.
In fact, Fisher had only been saved by eating so sparingly of the broth, which was his wont, and was left with excruciating abdominal pains for some time thereafter. But two men died at table and seventeen others – including some beggars who were unlucky enough to be treated to the leftovers – fell seriously ill, with the result that even Fisher seems to have deemed it unavoidable to beat a rapid exit thereafter, notwithstanding his condition and the potential consequences of his absence for the queen. Such was the publicity of the case, moreover, that in its aftermath Henry VIII went in person to the House of Lords and in a speech lasting one and a half hours declaimed upon the barbarity of poisoning.
In truth, the fuss raised by the king seems likely to have had much less to do with Fisher’s plight or justice per se than with his own morbid terror of poison, which is well documented. But a law was nevertheless enacted making murder by poison high treason and punishable by boiling in oil. And the outcome for the bishop’s hapless cook was a particularly ghastly one, for, as the following entry in the Chronicle of the Grey Friars of London records, he duly became the new law’s first victim:
This year was a cook boiled in a cauldron at Smithfield, for he would have poisoned the Bishop of Rochester with divers of his servants, and he was locked in a chain and pulled up and down with a gibbet at divers times till he was dead.
But even now Fisher remained in danger. For it was not long after his return to Lambeth that another, arguably even more dramatic incident, was recorded by his early biographer:
Suddenly a gun was shot through the top of his house not far from his study where he accustomably used to sit. Which made such a terrible noise over his head and bruised the tiles and rafters of his house so sore, that both he and divers others of his servants were suddenly amazed thereat. Wherefore speedy search was made whence this shot should come and what it meant. Which at last was found to come from the other side of the Thames out of the Earl of Wiltshire’s house who was father to the Lady Anne. Then he perceived that great malice was meant towards him and calling speedily unto him certain of his servants, said, ‘Let us truss up our gear and be gone from hence, for here is no place for us to tarry any longer.’
Having narrowly escaped the deadly effects of poison from within, then, the Bishop of Rochester and his household were once again on the move after a near-fatal cannon shot from without, though whether Anne Boleyn and her relatives, as both the anonymous early biographer and Chapuys believed, were indeed responsible remains a matter for conjecture. The real significance in any event is that the extremity of Fisher’s perceived threat to the king’s designs was now undeniable. No other critic of the divorce among the kingdom’s elites would, in fact, be more outspoken and no opponent of the looming breach with Rome would be treated to such levels of intimidation. For where Sir Thomas More opposed by silence, and only after prolonged attempts to preserve his position, the Bishop of Rochester’s resistance was vigorous, forthright and prolonged. And if Eustace Chapuys was of a sanguine temperament and ofttimes inclined to see things as he would like them to be, he was nevertheless on sure ground when he wrote on 9 October 1531 of Anne Boleyn’s fears of Fisher and the bishop’s ongoing determination to oppose her marriage, irrespective of the personal risk involved:
The lady fears no one here more than the Bishop of Rochester, for it is he who has always defended the queen’s cause, and she has therefore sent to persuade the bishop to forbear coming to this Parliament that he may not catch any sickness as he did last year, but it is no use, for he is resolved to come and to speak more boldly than he has ever done should he die a hundred thousand times.
A veiled threat? Certainly, Fisher could not have been blamed for believing as much after the harrowing events of the previous months. But battle had been joined and the war itself was broadening, as the king’s attitude towards the papacy hardened in the wake of the conflicting verdicts of Europe’s universities and the Earl of Wiltshire’s failed embassy to the pope. Not altogether surprisingly, of course, the ‘intellectual’ inclinations of the Continent’s leading universities had ultimately borne a striking resemblance to the political priorities of their rulers. In England, France and Northern Italy, where anti-Habsburg feeling was strong, the universities duly found in favour of Henry. After Poitiers had supported Catherine, for instance, Francis intervened on behalf of his current ally and Paris was bullied into compliance. Orléans, Bourges and Toulouse followed suit. On the other hand, Alcalá and Salamanca did as they were bidden by Emperor Charles and found in favour of the pope, as did those German universities under the emperor’s thumb. In Italy, not surprisingly, only Ferrara, Padua and Bologna were for the divorce, although Vicenza would also have supported Henry had its bishop not arrived, with a beefy gang of minders in attendance, to tear up the theses that nine learned doctors were ready to maintain. Most of the decisions were, in fact, paid for. But upon his return to England on 30 September 1530, the Earl of Wiltshire had reflected a new prevailing mood within government circles by confirming to Antonio de Pulleo that the king now considered himself ‘absolute emperor and pope in his kingdom’.
In reality, of course, the English ruler’s defiant posturing, spiteful threats and token gestures of confidence in the aftermath of Blackfriars were more indicative of growing frustration and deepening impasse than of any budding desire to break with Rome, since his attempts at irresistible force were continuing to founder upon the immovable position of a pope, hemmed in on all sides by circumstances beyond his control. Indeed, in the twelve months following the ending of the legatine court at Blackfriars, the king’s policy was remarkable only in terms of its confusion. In June 1530, for instance, when his case was finally revoked by the pope to Rome, Henry summoned his leading subjects to court to give speedy judgement on his behalf, since informed opinion in England and Europe as a whole, or so he claimed, was in no doubt of the rectitude of his case. But at this very time, he was also urging his representative in Rome, William Bennet, to procrastinate at all costs in the vain hope that by some unforeseeable change of circumstance a breakthrough might yet be achieved. Clearly, if an overall plan existed at all, it was almost entirely camouflaged in a meandering stream of empty bluster and idle threats.
Yet in spite of his agonising twists and turns, like a sleepwalker in a maze, Henry did indeed appear during this time to stumble on at least the right direction, if not a precise route, to his desired ends. For although a severance with the underlying doctrinal principles of Roman Catholicism remained unthinkable for the defender of the faith, a juridical breach had its attractions both for his ego and, ultimately, of course, his purse. And throughout 1530 this realisation appeared to grow upon him. On Christmas Eve 1529, for instance, Henry had given notice to Catherine of Aragon that ‘he prized and valued the Church of Canterbury as much as the people across the sea did the Roman’, while in April 1530 he went on tell the French ambassador that he intended to settle the matter of his divorce within his own kingdom and without recourse to the pope ‘whom he regards as ignorant and no good father’. By September 1530, indeed, he was prepared to declare with more stridency than ever that he had ‘a pinnacle of dignity’ and ‘no superior on earth’. And nor were such pronouncements framed purely for foreign consumption, since his references to himself as Supreme Head of the Church in his letters to Bishop Tunstall further suggested a growing preparedness to contemplate the ultimate step. All of which might still be interpreted, of course, as little more than yet another fit of bellicose foot stamping, were it not for the fact that the first drafts of the treason laws, which were later used to crush opposition to the royal supremacy, are known to have been drawn up without advertisement as early as 1530.
In consequence, John Fisher would have to maintain the fight, as the king continued to prowl and probe for weaknesses in the Church’s armour by increasingly desperate means. Just as Catherine of Aragon had denied the authority of the legatine court in 1529, so now it was the king’s turn to deny the authority of the papal tribunal in Rome: to stall, to block, to challenge, to threaten appeal to even higher authority – if a General Council of the Church could indeed be considered such. And as Fisher’s fellow bishops looked on in silent dismay, so the king pleaded an alternative justification for his claims: the fictitious immunity of England, whether derived from the Trojan kings who had supposedly colonised England after Troy’s fall, or from the Emperor Constantine, whose mother’s roots were English, or indeed from King Arthur, that imperial paladin of the Dark Ages. The more outlandish the claim, the more tortuous the reasoning, the more inclined the king became to seize upon it, as a great trawling of obscure chronicles began, comparable to that conducted in the theological libraries of Europe’s universities earlier in the year. But now, instead of bulls and briefs and dispensations, new searchers turned up ancient traditions and prophetical material of origin so antique and nebulous as hopefully to pre-date St Peter and the papacy itself, or if not that, then at least to pre-date the coming of St Augustine and the introduction of a pretended papal jurisdiction into England.
Certainly, the researches of Edward Fox, Thomas Cranmer and John Stokesley were by now playing a major role in feeding Henry a diet of evidence that would help him fuel the rationalisations and self-justifications that he was always inclined to embrace so ardently. Working together, the three divines had indeed compiled for Henry’s benefit by September 1530 a massive collection of legal and historical evidence, entitled Collectanea satis copiosa, supporting the judicial independence of the Crown from Rome. The pre-eminence of the king was confirmed, on the one hand, from Old Testament examples connected with Solomon and David, and on the other by medieval Catholic authorities, such as Ivo of Chartres. Likewise, the Council of Nicea of AD 325 and subsequent councils had, it was now argued, affirmed the principle that no legal case should be taken outside the ecclesiastical province of its origin. And for good measure, the Collectanea included a letter, written supposedly by Pope Eleutherius around AD 187, in which he addressed the mythical King Lucius I of Britain as ‘vicar of God’. Last but not least, William Bennet and Sir Edward Carne were now accorded the impossible task in Rome of reading all the Vatican Registers to abstract entries that would support Henry’s claim to ‘authority imperial’.
And in the meantime, Henry turned, too, to British sources. The Constitutions of Clarendon of Henry II’s reign, for instance, had enshrined England’s jurisdictional privileges, while another favourite source for Henry’s legal burrowers proved to be the largely mythical chronicle of Geoffrey of Monmouth, which favoured a version of English history based on the claim that Christianity had been brought across the Channel in biblical times by Joseph of Aramathea, and therefore wholly independently of the Roman Church. The king’s archivists also tried to trace the descent of the kings of England back to the Roman Emperor Constantine via King Arthur, in spite of the fact that such myths had already been exposed by Polydore Vergil. Given, they argued too, that it was the so-called Donation of Constantine, which had first granted papal authority, and that this document had been proven a forgery, it followed in any case that England’s rulers had always been independent of the papacy. And so, by such twisted logic and dubious scholarship of various kinds, Henry thus sought to press home his case that the Christian world had started as, and still should be, a federation of autonomous, local churches, each ruled over by a prince appointed by God and rejecting the fraudulent universal authority of the Bishop of Rome.
Predictably, of course, King Arthur continued to feature prominently in the new surge of propaganda in other ways as well. For as a previous vanquisher of Roman ambitions, it was only natural, perhaps, that prophecies derived from Arthurian legend should have been invoked so freely and circulated and expounded from one coast to another. The vaticinations of Merlin, as derived from Geoffrey of Monmouth’s History of the Kings of Britain, were, indeed, an especial favourite, and one in particular that told how:
A tree shall rise up above the Tower of London that, thrusting forth three branches only, shall overshadow all the face of the whole island with the spreading breadth of the leaves thereof. Against it shall come the Northwind as an adversary, and an evil blast shall tear away the third branch, but the two that remain shall occupy his place until the one shall bring to nought the other by the multitude of his leaves …
London shall mourn the slaughter of twenty thousand, and the River Thames shall be turned into blood. They that wear the cowl shall be provoked into marriage, and their outcry shall be heard in the mountains of the Alps.
All these catastrophes, moreover, were to be heralded by a portent: the sign that the grimy, gloomy Tower of London would turn white – all of which had indeed begun to happen, in the wake of the cleaning operations enacted by the new king after he had taken up residence there upon his succession.
Here, then, it seemed, was something for everyone: an oracle for King Henry, if he understood himself to be the Northwind; a warning the clergy, whose vows of celibacy the reformers in Europe were already set upon abolishing; a fearsome prediction for Londoners, threatened by strife and massacre from an unspecified quarter; not to mention a prophecy for the king’s detractors to ponder, including, of course, the Maid of Kent, whose own Parable of the Three Branches had already foretold the fall of Wolsey. According to the testimony of William Harlock, moreover, who was examined by the authorities in September 1530 for encouraging malicious rumours, some almanacs in ready circulation were emphasising three other alternative themes to those preferred by the government: namely, that there would be ‘a great battle of priests’; that England would be invaded by foreign armies; and that King Henry’s reign would be cut short. Clearly, during a period of such invasive uncertainty and tension, even the most agitated ramblings could attract the keen notice of the authorities. And in the process many simple people were said to have been ‘greatly agitated’ by another prediction, which had begun to circulate from around 1530 onwards, to the effect that the kingdom was to be destroyed by a woman. Equally alarmingly, a series of occult marvels and heavenly portents seemed to confirm the imminence of grave danger. A monstrous dead fish, said to be some 90ft in length, was beached on the northern coast and not long afterwards a freak tide flowed into the Thames for nine straight hours, causing the river to rise higher than ever before, to the very steps of the royal chapel at Greenwich. Even more ominously, there was talk of a ball of fire falling from the sky near the same place, and for some weeks a comet with a long tail ‘in the form of a luminous silver beard’ was visible before daybreak.
Most significantly of all, however, Thomas Wolsey’s death at Leicester Abbey on 29 November 1530 had only served to heighten the profile of Elizabeth Barton. That summer, apparently broken in health and tormented with leeches, which he described as ‘very hungry ones’, he had taken to signing his correspondence with Stephen Gardiner as ‘Thomas the miserable, Cardinal of York’. Yet in spite of his straitened circumstances, Wolsey had lost none of his appetite for status and power. Certainly, he continued to entertain and even to build lavishly – so much so that on 18 August Cromwell issued a word of warning. ‘Sir,’ he wrote, ‘some there be that doth allege that Your Grace doth keep too great a house and family and that ye are continually building.’ Therefore, suggested Cromwell, it was time to curtail any familiar excess and ‘put to silence some persons that much speaketh of the same’. More importantly still, in May Cromwell had also advised his former master to be much more circumspect in what he said and wrote, since the king was aware of his wish to undermine the Duke of Norfolk in particular. This, Cromwell warned, was a risky enterprise. And it was not, to his great misfortune, the only gamble that Wolsey now undertook. On the contrary, too long accustomed to greatness, he could not resist the temptation to meddle and now attempted to enlist the favour of Catherine of Aragon, who, like him, had suffered so grievously at the hands of the Norfolk–Boleyn faction. In early June the Imperial ambassador received a letter from Wolsey’s physician, Agostini, which seemed to imply that his patient was willing to supply information beneficial to the former queen. And before the end of the month, Wolsey had dispatched another letter, this time asking how the queen’s divorce case was progressing and urging the ambassador that strong action – presumably by the emperor and the pope – should be taken on her behalf. By August, indeed, the cardinal was sending messages to Chapuys on an almost daily basis. ‘He dislikes delay above all,’ wrote the ambassador to his emperor, ‘for he thinks that, this business settled, he has a good chance of returning to power.’
Not long since, Henry had, it seems, lost his temper in the council room and in a spiteful outburst berated his advisers, telling them once more that ‘the Cardinal was a better man than any of them for managing matters’. ‘Repeating this twice,’ observed Chapuys, ‘he flung himself out of the room,’ since when ‘the Duke [of Norfolk], the Lady Anne and her father have not ceased to plot against the Cardinal, especially the Lady.’ But the king, in spite of his outburst, subsequently needed little persuasion, since a report had reached him on 23 October that a papal brief had already been issued forbidding him to marry while his divorce was still under litigation. More provocatively still, he had heard further rumours that Pope Clement intended to excommunicate him and banish Anne Boleyn from court. All this, coupled to Wolsey’s summons of a northern convocation without royal permission, convinced him that his one-time favourite’s long-overdue formal enthronement as Archbishop of York on 7 November might well become the occasion for the official publication of a bull of excommunication. Always more than capable of mistaking the smoke from smouldering ashes for forest fire, Henry therefore panicked and came to the conclusion that Wolsey must be guilty of ‘presumptuous sinister practices made to the court of Rome’.
On All Souls’ Eve, meanwhile, the cardinal is said to have received a premonition of his impending misfortune. Sitting at dinner with various members of his household – the great silver cross of York positioned at one end of the table – Wolsey received his warning just as the meal reached its end. Rising to take his leave, none other than Dr Agostini, wearing a ‘boisterous black gown of velvet’, seems to have swept against the cross, causing it to fall upon the head of Edmund Bonner, the cardinal’s personal chaplain. ‘Hath it drawn any blood?’ asked Wolsey of George Cavendish after a moment’s stunned silence. ‘Yea, forsooth, my lord,’ responded the gentleman usher, whereupon the cardinal looked long and sombrely at his servant. Malum omen – ill luck – came his final comment at last, as he made for his bedchamber, heavy, Cavendish tells us, with foreboding. And the following Friday, 4 November, again at the end of dinner, when Wolsey was ‘at his fruites’ in his private room, the young Earl of Northumberland, accompanied by a gaggle of eager gentry, duly entered the great hall at Cawood after taking the keys from the porter and sealing the gates with sentries. ‘My Lord,’ declared the cardinal’s visitor, ‘I arrest you of high treason’, and laying his hand upon the victim’s arm, rendered him dumbstruck.
On his subsequent journey south, Wolsey was taken ‘with a thing about his stomach as cold as a whetstone’, which turned before long into full-blown dysentery. In spite of medicinal powders administered to him by a physician at Shrewsbury – which he would only accept, for fear of poison, after Cavendish and the physician himself had tasted them – he showed no sign of improvement. Ominously, too, he was delivered at Sheffield Park into the custody of Sir William Kingston, Constable of the Tower, who arrived with twenty-four royal guards. At which point, we are told, his ‘bloody flux’ worsened markedly, ‘in so much from the time that his disease took him unto the next day’, Cavendish tells us, ‘he had fifty stools, so that he was next day very weak’. ‘The matter that he voided,’ it seems, ‘was wondrous black, the which physicians call choler adustum’, and such was his weakness and fever that he could not resume his journey for twenty-four hours. Indeed, on the way from Hardwick Hall, we are told, ‘he waxed so sick that he was divers times likely to have fallen from his mule’. Yet he continued his journey from Hardwick to Nottingham and from there to Leicester Abbey, which he reached on the evening of Saturday, 26 November. Propped up on both sides by yeomen and greeted with torches at the abbey gate by Abbot Pexall, it was plain to everyone, and especially him, that his condition was fatal. ‘Father Abbot,’ he told Pexall, ‘I am come hither to leave my bones among you.’
And in this respect, at least, Wolsey would finally prove true to his word. For just before dawn, the mayor of Leicester and his aldermen were duly invited to view the mitred body, dressed in all its archiepiscopal robes within a coffin of boards. And thus identified, the Cardinal of York was then carried to the Lady Chapel where his body lay open and barefaced, ‘that all men might see him there dead without feigning’. Throughout the night, too, the corpse lay on display amid wax tapers and mournful dirges before it was brought to its final resting place in the abbey’s main aisle – not far, we are told, from the body of Richard III in what, according to the Imperial ambassador, was commonly called ‘the tyrants’ sepulchre’. His death, the Maid of Kent was soon revealing, had been premature, and for that reason he would not be judged by God until the further period of what should have been his natural life had elapsed. Or this at least was the suggestion in Dom Edward Bocking’s ‘great book’, which was quoted in Nicolas Heath’s Sermon some four years later:
That my Lord Cardinal came to his death before God would have him by the space of fifteen years; and therefore Almighty God hath given no sentence upon him, but will defer it till those years he expired, which it was the will of God that he should have lived in the world.
Even now, however, the Maid’s connection with Wolsey was not quite over. For, according to the testimony of John Wolff, she would subsequently witness ‘the disputations of the devils for his soul … and was three times lifted up and could not see him, neither in heaven, hell nor purgatory’. In the process, she would witness – among other things of which she could not speak – many souls ‘fly through purgatory’, and she would tell, too, of her revelations concerning ‘the going of the Earl of Wiltshire into Spain, with the receiving of the King’s letter, and the answer of the Emperor’, which proved a flat refusal to countenance in any way either the divorce or the summoning of a General Council to overrule the pope. But, for all her wondrous visions, the most significant of all for her Church, her kingdom and indeed her own personal fate had eluded her: namely, the identity of Wolsey’s ultimate successor as her sovereign’s right-hand man – the very individual, in fact, who would henceforth plot his master’s course anew and thereby lead him to the longed-for promised land of his frustrated desires.