6
In the weeks following his fall from power, Wolsey took up residence in a community of Carthusian monks not far from the royal palace at Richmond. Ever hopeful that the king would restore him to favor, he seemed determined to stay as close to the court as possible. He had reason for optimism: Henry would occasionally send him gifts, rings usually, and encouraging little messages. Seeking support among the king’s peers, royal personages with whom he had dealt regularly while in high office, Wolsey wrote to Francis I and to Francis’s mother, to the emperor Charles, and even, at some risk, to the pope. At the same time he involved himself in an apparently serious way in the religious life of his new companions, who “persuaded him from the vainglory of the world and gave him divers hair shirts to wear.” He appears to have made a real effort to become a better priest, but the old hunger for power and pomp continued to gnaw.
His chances of rehabilitation were reduced by the number and influence of his enemies at court. Almost everyone with access to the king’s ear—Anne Boleyn and her father and brother; Anne’s uncle the Duke of Norfolk; Charles Brandon, Duke of Suffolk—detested Wolsey, had no use for the connection with Rome that he personified, and likely would have suffered grievously if he returned to power. Anyone friendly to the cardinal, on the other hand, would have hesitated to say anything in his favor in such an environment. The king is unlikely to have heard anything good about Wolsey, or to have been encouraged to do anything but distrust him and keep him at a distance. That Henry did distrust the cardinal is apparent in the government’s interception of Wolsey’s correspondence and the questioning of his physician by agents looking for evidence of disloyalty. The discovery that he was writing to foreign royalty did him no good.
It is hardly surprising, therefore, that in the spring of 1530 Wolsey was ordered to pack up and move north to remote districts where his chances of crossing paths with the king would be virtually nil. He went for the first time in his life to York, there taking up with unexpected earnestness the ecclesiastical duties that he had so long ignored, visiting country churches every Sunday and holy day, dispensing alms to the poor, seeing to the repair of decrepit properties, and making it his special interest to counsel troubled families. But in his letters he described himself as profoundly miserable. That he continued to be regarded as one of the most important men in the kingdom—possibly the most important after the king himself—was evident in June, when an official letter demanding nullification of the royal marriage was prepared for delivery to Rome. This document, addressed to the pope and intended to show that everyone of importance in England supported the king, was sent to Wolsey before anyone else had signed it, so that his name would appear on it first. It is in the Vatican library in Rome today, dripping with ribbons and seals, Wolsey’s name atop all the others. Notable by their absence are the signatures of John Fisher, of other bishops who would soon be complicating the king’s life, and of Wolsey’s successor as chancellor, Sir Thomas More.
Wolsey made elaborate plans for the ceremony in which he was to be formally installed as archbishop on November 7. On that same day, he ordered, the Northern Convocation (the assembly representing that part of the English clergy under the authority of York rather than Canterbury) would also convene. It was to be a great occasion, an echo of the cardinal’s days of glory. But on November 1 a rider set out from the king’s palace at Greenwich, bound for York with a warrant for Wolsey’s arrest. It charged him with high treason—with engaging, presumably because of his wide-ranging correspondence, in “presumptuous sinister practices.” Wolsey, upon being served with the warrant, understood that this was the end. He stopped eating for a time, saying that he preferred a natural death to what awaited him in London. His health was bad (he was afflicted with edema, or dropsy), and though he set out under guard as ordered, traveling on muleback, he made only slow progress. Near Shrewsbury he came down with dysentery and was unable to continue for two weeks. When he reached his next stopping place, the abbey at Leicester, the end was at hand. “Father Abbot,” he said upon arrival, “I have come to lay my bones among you.” He was put to bed, and a day or two later he opened his eyes to see a familiar face, that of the lieutenant of the Tower of London, who had been sent north to escort him to prison.
“Master Kingston,” said the cardinal to this gentleman, “I pray you have me commended to his majesty, and beseech him on my behalf to call to mind all things that have passed between us, especially respecting good Queen Catherine and himself, and then shall his grace’s conscience know whether I have offended him or not. He is a prince of most royal courage. Rather than miss any part of his will, he will endanger one half of his kingdom, and I do assure you, I have often kneeled before him, sometimes for three hours together, to persuade him from his appetite, and could not prevail. And Master Kingston, had I but served God as diligently as I have served the king, he would not have given me over in my gray hairs. But this is my just reward for my pains and study, not regarding my service to God but only my duty to my prince.”
He died a day later, sixty years of age. He was buried in a nearby church, coincidentally next to the tomb of King Richard III, thereby creating a curiosity that the local people would come to call “the tyrants’ sepulcher.” In Wolsey’s case at least, the name is unfair. He was a gravely flawed man, vain and proud and in love with power and its trappings, but his legacy was far from black. Over many years he had tried repeatedly to bring peace to a Europe endlessly troubled by futile wars, and more than once he had risked his own position in doing so. He had done much to improve the delivery of justice, and he had tried without much success to curtail the enclosures of farmland that were depriving rural families of their livelihood. He had served one of the most willful and self-centered monarchs ever to draw breath, and if the difference in Henry’s conduct before the fall of Wolsey and after is any fair measure, Wolsey deserves to be judged, for all his weaknesses and failures, a force for good.
Whatever Henry had planned (a show trial leading to a public execution, probably), the cardinal’s passing deprived him of it. If Wolsey had lived to speak in court as he had spoken on his deathbed, he might have given the king cause to regret calling him back from York. Be that as it may, a new year was approaching and the king was laying plans for bigger things than the destruction of his old lieutenant. His time of uncertainty, the period of some three years when he acted by fits and starts and sometimes reversed himself and often seemed paralyzed, was drawing to a close. It had begun with Henry wanting the annulment of his marriage and the freedom to take Anne as his wife. It would end when he showed himself to be openly and unambiguously set on separating his kingdom from the ancient communion of Europe and on making himself a kind of national pope, the supreme spiritual authority over England and its people. Historians disagree as to exactly when Henry stopped wanting just the first thing and started wanting both, which is another way of saying that no one can say for sure. It seems reasonable to conclude, however, that by the time of Wolsey’s death, he was seriously considering, if not yet quite committed to, a break with Rome. This would explain the severely hard line that he now began to take, setting out not only to destroy a sickly and ruined old man who almost certainly wished him no harm and could not have done him harm if he did wish it, but to destroy whatever independence the English church actually possessed. A hypothesis in three parts—that by the end of 1530 Henry had decided to separate England from Rome; that he thought it necessary first to break the English hierarchy to his will; and that until the clergy had been subdued, he wanted to keep the divorce proceedings in Rome from moving to a conclusion—makes his actions at this time more intelligible than does any other explanation.
It explains, among other things, the otherwise curious fact that by late 1530 (probably even before the Boleyn delegation’s visit to Bologna was known to have ended in failure) Henry’s strategy had shifted from trying to get Pope Clement to issue a favorable ruling to trying to keep the pope from doing anything at all. Delay, long a source of frustration, now became an objective. His success in achieving it is reflected in Pope Clement’s response to the appeal for action sent to him with Wolsey’s signature preceding all the others. This petition, composed before Henry changed tactics, complained that the postponements, equivocations, and evasions of the papal court were depriving England’s king of the justice to which he was entitled. It said that Rome’s failures could expose England, in the event of the king’s death, to the dangers of a disputed succession (his daughter by Catherine of Aragon now being, by the king’s reckoning, a bastard). It accused the pope of being biased in Catherine’s favor, and it repeated the by-now-familiar threat that the Crown’s only recourse might be to proceed independently. By the time this missive reached the pope, Clement was able to reply that he was entirely ready to bring the case to trial, that he had not yet done so because Henry had not appointed anyone to represent him in court, and that the Boleyn party, in departing Bologna, had asked not for action but for more time. All these things were true, and they shed interesting light on the question of who was actually responsible, by this point, for the failure to proceed.
The case remained unsettled as 1531 began and the king put into motion the plan that had taken shape the previous autumn—the threat to charge the whole of the English clergy with violations of the praemunire statutes. The Canterbury convocation was in session at Westminster, and news of the king’s threat threw the churchmen first into confusion, then into frightened and angry debate. They had before them the uninspiring example of the late cardinal, who had submitted without complaint when faced with the same charge and in doing so had left them all vulnerable. And they were being urged to submit by their own leader, William Warham, a respected figure after almost thirty years in the see of Canterbury. To his threat of prosecution, Henry added a demand that convocation, as the embodiment of a church that had caused him so much undeserved trouble, should reimburse him for the expenses of the divorce case (all of which had been incurred, as he saw it, because of the pope’s refusal to do what was right). It was to do so by repeating a subsidy of £100,000 that Wolsey, in desperate need of money because of Henry’s war on France, had wrung out of it in the early 1520s.
After days of debate, convocation offered Henry, in effect, a deal. It would pay him the £100,000 that he demanded (another £18,000 was being extracted from the much smaller York Convocation) in five annual installments, there being no tolerable way of coming up with such an immense amount of cash at once. In return Henry was asked to do two things. First, he was to issue a general pardon so that the praemunire charge would not hang over the heads of the churchmen forever, and provide a written explanation of just what praemunire was, so that in future they would know what actions to avoid. Second, he was to reaffirm the traditional liberties of the church as previously upheld by the Magna Carta and other precedents reaching even further back in time: the clergy’s right to operate their courts under their own system of laws, for example, and to provide sanctuary to fugitives.
In the message that conveyed their offer and request to the king, convocation’s leaders referred to Henry as the “protector and highest head” of the church in England—generous words, one would have thought, in light of the church’s theoretical freedom from secular control. Henry soon let it be known that this was not enough. He wanted to be called “sole protector and supreme head of the English church and clergy.” Here was a revolution in the making, and the terms this time were far more portentous than any mere quibble over pluralities or the cost of funerals. Henry was demanding what no king of England, no monarch of any European kingdom, had ever dared to claim. And there was more: he wanted an acknowledgment that he had “cure” of the souls of his subjects—that responsibility for delivering those souls to God rested not with the bishops, not with the pope, but with him. This was an entirely new theory of kingship, one that turned upside down what every Englishman had been taught about the relationship of church and state.
Four days after Henry made these demands, convocation accepted them in a way that left everything shrouded in ambiguity. In its final form, the clergy’s message to the king described him as supreme head “as far as the law of Christ allows.” It would have been just as clear if it had declared that the king is supreme head except if he isn’t; its meaning depended entirely upon what “the law of Christ” was, and that of course could be a matter of opinion. It is unclear whose words these were. If they came from John Fisher or someone like him, they must have been intended to neuter the king’s flamboyant claim without being unnecessarily combative. If they were Thomas Cromwell’s words, or the words of some other member of Henry’s inner circle of advisers, they were a subtle way of trying to seduce the clergy into abandoning a thousand years of tradition. Possibly they were the work of someone like old Archbishop Warham, someone not definitely on one side or the other, in which case they were simply an attempt to avoid or at least postpone a showdown. On the whole, the result appears to have been something approaching a victory for the clergy in all respects except financial. The king got his £100,000, but his new title of supreme head had been so hedged as to mean anything or nothing. Other changes left him with less than the cure of souls—convocation’s final draft, accepted by a silent king, restored that responsibility to the clergy—and some of the things that he had demanded were omitted altogether.
In the end Henry granted the requested pardon. In doing so, he explicitly approved the continuing operation of the ecclesiastical courts, thereby confirming the lawfulness of the very activities for which the churchmen had been threatened with prosecution. Significantly for the future—the omission must have seemed ominous—he ignored convocation’s request for a reaffirmation of its traditional rights and liberties.
The churchmen, if confused and frightened, had not been entirely cowed. They had shown themselves to be unwilling to yield to whatever the king demanded. Cuthbert Tunstal, a bishop known for his learning and virtuous personal life and so high in the king’s regard that he had recently been promoted from London to the wealthy northern diocese of Durham, sent Henry a letter in which he pointedly objected to the royal claim of supreme headship. He argued—with the evidence of history overwhelmingly on his side—that the kings of England had always been masters in the temporal realm, never in the spiritual. Departure from this tradition, Tunstal warned, would destroy the unity of the Christian world. The king responded cordially but in startling terms. Of course I am not the head of the church, he said; Christ is the head of the church. I as king merely have jurisdiction over the church in England in Christ’s name. Specifically, Henry said, his supremacy gave him final authority over the election of bishops, the property of the church, and the “courts Christian.” He blithely assured Tunstal that there was nothing revolutionary in any of this, that he was simply stating what was obviously true: that “we and all other princes be at this day chief and heads of the spiritual men.” Tunstal must have been taken aback. Though almost from time immemorial England’s kings had enjoyed the right to nominate bishops, in principle such appointments were the pope’s business, and no one chosen by the king could actually be consecrated until the necessary approvals were received from Rome. And though over the centuries innumerable disputes had erupted between Crown and church over property and jurisdiction and other matters, not even the most ambitious kings had ever claimed to be able to overrule the pope on every question. Henry, in his letter to Tunstal, was expanding his role in nearly the most radical way imaginable.
The churchmen understood that, though they had survived a skirmish, further and probably more dangerous struggles lay ahead. A letter signed by seventeen members of the Southern Convocation’s lower house provides a rare glimpse (it survives only because Charles V’s ambassador to England procured a copy and sent it to Spain) into how unsettled the situation of ordinary members of the clergy had become by this time. The letter takes much the same line as Tunstal’s, affirming the independence of the church, the authority of the pope, the traditional arrangements between the temporal and spiritual powers, and the importance of preserving unity. The seventeen signatories say that, in conceding to Henry the title of supreme head, they had intended no repudiation of tradition. They conclude, oddly and rather pathetically, by disavowing in advance anything that they might later say or do to repudiate what they are here affirming. Any such later words or actions, their letter says, will be the work of the devil or the result of their own weakness. Such sentiments could have been put into writing only by men of passionate conviction who were almost desperately afraid both of what lay ahead and of how they themselves were likely to respond to retribution. That their fears were justified soon became clear: several were arrested not long after their letter arrived at court, and all who survived imprisonment (some did not) ultimately accepted all the king’s claims.
Though Henry had accepted the insertion of the words “so far as the law of Christ allows,” from the start he either ignored them or interpreted them in his own favor, displaying more and more boldness in his approach to religious issues. He fancied himself a majestically knowledgeable theologian, loved to engage in discussions of doctrine and dogma, and invariably concluded such discussions by proclaiming the truth to everyone involved. Soon after his exchanges with the Canterbury Convocation, he attended and actively involved himself in the heresy trial (such proceedings, historically rare in England, would occur with increasing frequency in the superheated environment of the early 1530s) of a preacher who had got into trouble by echoing the beliefs of the German reformers, most of which Henry abhorred. Examining a list of the accused man’s alleged heresies, Henry saw at its top the statement that the pope was not the head of the whole church. “This proposition cannot be counted as heretical,” Henry declared, “for it is both true and certain.” Paying no attention to the rest of the list—it would inevitably, being Lutheran, have contained many items that the king regarded as intolerable—he ordered the lucky man set free. Thus did he exercise his new authority and shed a confusingly distorted light on the kinds of opinions he was and was not prepared to approve. For the first time in history the king was defining heresy and deciding who should be punished for it.
With similar aplomb he refused to allow a French abbot of the order of Cistercians to enter England for the purpose of visiting and inspecting the houses of the English Cistercian monks. The abbot’s mission could hardly have been more routine: it was to determine whether his order’s strict rule was being sufficiently observed and whether corrective measures might be in order. Such visitations had been a familiar and essential element of monastic life since the time of Saint Benedict early in the sixth century. The fact that the English houses were to be inspected by a French abbot reflected the international character of the order and indeed of the church, and it was mirrored by the use of English monks to inspect houses in France and elsewhere. But now Henry declared that no foreigner could have jurisdiction in his kingdom. If anyone was going to pass judgment on English religious houses, it would be Englishmen acting on his authority. It was yet another way for him to broadcast the fact that the old rules no longer applied, and that the new rules would be of the king’s making and entirely in his favor.
The success of every such gesture demonstrated to Henry and to his subjects lay and clerical that he could do very nearly whatever he wished. The absence of serious resistance must have added to his growing self-assurance and to his willingness to go further. Rome offered no objections because Pope Clement—irresolute by nature and faced with the near-disintegration of the German church, plus the Turkish threat in eastern Europe and the Mediterranean, plus the ongoing conflict between Charles and Francis—still hoped to avoid provoking him. Henry had quieted the English clergy—which was receiving no leadership, not so much as a word of guidance, either from Rome or from Warham—by alternating between intimidation and confusion while casting an artful veil of ambiguity over his own intentions. As for the people at large, little had happened thus far to cause them serious concern. Squabbles between the Crown and the pope were a centuries-old story, and thus far they had always left the traditional order intact. This latest unpleasantness—which in any case had had no impact on everyday worship or on what was taught by the parish priests—could be expected to end in the usual way.
Suddenly the tide was running strongly in Henry’s favor. In a stroke of sheer good luck for the king, a remarkably high number of bishoprics were now becoming vacant, thirteen between 1529 and 1536, along with the position of abbot at several of the most important monasteries. Any pope would have hesitated to deny any English king his choice of candidates to fill these positions, and Clement was still looking for every opportunity to make Henry think of him as a friend. And so Henry encountered no difficulty in filling the sees of England with men who had proved their loyalty to him. Stephen Gardiner, his secretary, became bishop of Winchester. Edward Lee, his almoner, replaced Wolsey as Archbishop of York. The dependable John Stokesley became bishop of London, and so forth. These and the king’s other nominees applied to Rome for the traditional bulls signifying approval. When the bulls arrived in England, Henry accepted them without comment. Here again the interested parties must have been confused. Henry was already claiming, as he had done in his response to Tunstal, that as a matter of principle he had the authority to appoint England’s bishops. But he was continuing to follow the old forms. He was either unsure of how to proceed—which would have been justified, considering the consequences that a conclusive break with Rome might bring down on his head—or simply biding his time.
Things were also turning in Henry’s favor on the continent. If he was in fact determined by this time to break with Rome, he was also, necessarily, considering the possibility that such a step would lead to war. As a schismatic king, he could expect to be excommunicated, and as an excommunicated king he would be fair game for invasion by whatever forces the pope and the emperor Charles and possibly Francis I might send against him. He had good reason to be grateful, therefore, for the friendliness that Francis was continuing to extend. He could rejoice that Charles was adrift in a sea of troubles, so threatened by the Turks and overextended in Italy that he was forced to make peace with the newly Lutheran princes of northern Germany—heretics, as the Catholic Charles saw them, badly in need of being disciplined.
Henry became forty that year—still a strong, hearty man but past his physical prime. He was troubled now with the thigh ulcers that would plague him intermittently, at times causing excruciating pain, for the rest of his days. He was also suffering from severe headaches. Though his treasury continued to be painfully low in funds—the Crown was able to meet its obligations only because of the money extorted from the church and the “pension” that Francis was once again paying to keep the English out of France—Henry still regarded all the money in the kingdom as his to do with as he chose. His extravagance was remarkable: he wore a jacket that cost as much as a farm; bought a thousand pearls in a single day; lost thousands of pounds betting on cards, dice, tennis, dominoes, and bowls; and was building and expanding more palaces—Whitehall, Richmond, St. James’s, and many others—than any king could possibly have needed or even used.
At the center of his life was Anne Boleyn, living though supposedly not sleeping with him. (This can strain credulity, considering that they had by this time been waiting for the divorce for four years and were at a level of intimacy that had Henry rhapsodizing about kissing Anne on her “pretty dukkys”—her breasts.) She was a high-spirited, temperamental woman, beginning to feel the strain of the king’s long struggle to become free to marry, so uninhibited in her arguments with Henry as to reduce him to baffled exasperation. He complained that Catherine had never spoken to him as brazenly as Anne did, but he remained in her thrall. Through the first half of 1531 Henry and Anne and Catherine all lived under the same roof, Catherine stubbornly following along as the court moved from place to place. Anne found this intolerable, not surprisingly, and treated Catherine and her retainers with excoriating contempt. Anne was given lavish living quarters adjacent to the king’s and allowed to spend freely. She could not have dominated the court more completely if she were already married to Henry and the mother of a royal son, but she was popular neither with the public (rumors circulated that gangs of commoners were plotting to murder her) nor with those members of the court who were not part of her family-centered, ardently antichurch faction. The comptroller of the king’s household, Sir Henry Guildford, earned a small share of immortality when Anne became angry with him and said that when she became queen she would have him dismissed. Guildford replied that he would save her the trouble and quit on the spot. He refused to relent even when Henry asked him to pay no attention to “women’s talk.”
Early one morning in July Henry rode off from Windsor Castle, leaving Catherine behind and not saying goodbye. They would never meet again. When she wrote, he became apoplectically angry, shouting that she should be ordered not to send any more letters. But if this was a nerve-rackingly tense time for the king, for his subjects it was becoming dangerous. Anyone whose beliefs did not conform exactly to the king’s was likely to find himself in trouble. To continue believing things that all Englishmen had been expected to believe since Christianity first came to their island was suddenly to put oneself in jeopardy, because the king no longer believed all those things and was determined that everyone should follow his lead. On the other hand, to repudiate too many of the traditional beliefs was to risk another kind of trouble, because the king still believed strongly, and would continue to believe strongly, that most of those things remained true and whoever denied them should be subject to the penalties prescribed for heresy. Anyone with serious religious beliefs of any kind would have needed nerves of iron not to feel unsettled.
No one’s situation was more difficult than that of the man who had replaced Wolsey as lord chancellor, Sir Thomas More. He had not wanted to become chancellor, understanding from the start that his thinking about the divorce was irreconcilable with that of the king. But Henry had assured him that their differences on that one subject would not matter and prevailed on him to accept. But it did matter, as did More’s conviction that without the old church Christian civilization would dissolve. He had never been a fervent papalist; early in his public career, when Henry was writing enthusiastically in support of the pope and against Luther, More had cautioned him to be more restrained in his language. In addition to being head of the church, More had observed, the pope was the ruler of a state and therefore a potential adversary. But More was a committed Roman Catholic all the same—Henry did not yet know how committed.
Because he was completely lacking in Wolsey’s craving for power and also out of step with the king’s thinking, More as chancellor never achieved a fraction of the influence that his predecessor had long wielded. By late 1531 he was not even part of the king’s inner circle and barely had a voice in the making of policy. He focused instead on the judicial responsibilities of his office—the chancellor was a judge among other things, and More’s background equipped him superbly for the bench—and on doing what he could to turn back the flood of heretical ideas that had been coming across the Channel since the advent of Martin Luther. Those ideas, as More saw it, were putting millions of souls in danger of damnation.
His role as a suppressor of heresy put More further at odds with the king because their views on what constituted heresy were diverging radically. And Henry compounded his chancellor’s difficulties—we can only wonder if he was acting with malicious intent—by requiring him to present arguments to Parliament that More himself did not accept. More did as instructed, but he did it in a coolly impersonal way, refusing to answer when asked for his own opinion.
It was an impossible situation, an explosion waiting to happen.
Background
WINDOWS OF OPPORTUNITY
THAT THE ENGLAND OF THE LATE MIDDLE AGES WAS A society of rigid class distinctions is hardly a secret. The nature of those distinctions, however, is considerably less obvious. Though a baron was not the equal of an earl, and a yeoman was not quite the same as a farmer, differences of this kind were subtle and of limited importance. Basically there was just one great line of separation, but it was a chasm so deep and wide, dividing the population into such grossly unequal parts, that the people on the two sides might almost have been living on different planets.
At the pinnacle, below the royal family but above everyone else, were the fifty-odd holders of hereditary titles. Dukes were highest of all (the name derives from the Latin for “leader” and was long reserved for the sons of kings), followed in descending order by marquesses (so called because they were supposedly responsible for governing marks or marches or borderlands), earls (an Anglo-Saxon word, the equivalent of count), viscounts, and finally mere barons. The proudest of these dignitaries were those with Norman forebears who had come to England with William the Conqueror (the Percy earls of Northumberland, for example, and the de Vere earls of Oxford) and those whose family trees had been injected with royal blood via marriage (the route that carried the Howards from obscurity to the Dukedom of Norfolk in just a few decades).
Below the titled nobility, but not always far below in wealth or even status, were the landowning families that made up the local elites (“lords of the manor” in spite of not actually being barons) in every part of the kingdom. They called themselves the gentry—people of “gentle” birth—because they thought of themselves as having, and in fact often did have, antecedents quite as good as the titled families; many were descended from the daughters and younger sons of nobles. This is a crucial fact about English society not only in the Tudor era but for centuries after: the closest thing to a middle class identified with—regarded itself as related to and descended from—those above it on the pyramid of rank. This was true even of those families that had climbed to wealth through the window of opportunity that opened briefly when the Black Death wiped out half the population, and of families that got rich in business and (like the Boleyns) used their winnings to buy country estates. Such families wanted no reminders of their origins and would have recoiled at any suggestion that they might ever have had any connection with the masses of landless workers. The word “gentleman,” accordingly, carried a potency that it has long since lost, at least in America. It bore no necessary relation to wealth or position or even to having good manners (though all those things were prized). Rather its use was a claim to being special by birth, special in ways that only ancestry made possible.
This was the great divide: the line separating not just the rich from the poor or the powerful from the weak but the few who were inherently superior from the many who, having no family at all by the standards of the time, did not matter. To achieve a position of prominence in public life, it was not necessary to be noble—nobles were far too few for that much exclusivity to be possible. But it was absolutely necessary to be “gentle.” Without that qualification, all the best doors remained shut.
With one conspicuous and important exception: the church. For centuries, and well into the reign of Henry VIII, it had been the one ladder by which young men of virtually any background could rise even to positions of the greatest power.
The pattern was set early, if not in the most appealing of ways. Ranulf Flambard began life in Normandy as the son of a simple parish priest (marriages of clergymen still being arguably lawful) but rose to become the strong (and brutishly ruthless) chief agent of King William II as well as bishop of Durham. Roger, bishop of Salisbury, had origins so obscure that no one knows where he was born, or when or to whom; but in the twelfth century he became Henry I’s chancellor and most trusted adviser. Thomas Becket grew up as the sports-loving son of a London tradesman and took holy orders only after his father’s financial ruin made it necessary for him to find employment, and he, too, became both chancellor and archbishop.
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.