Long before his death, Wolsey had planned to be regally interred at St George’s Chapel, Windsor. But the magnificent tomb, designed by Benedetto da Rovezzano of Florence to rival that of Henry VII, was never completed. And though Henry VIII had subsequently planned to use it for his own uneasy appointment with eternity, he too had eventually spurned the opportunity, preferring instead the somewhat humbler accommodation provided by Jane Seymour’s grave. Only the sarcophagus of black marble, originally intended to be the base for a magnificent recumbent statue of the cardinal in gilt bronze, ultimately survived – minus, of course, the 9ft pillars, the angels bearing candlesticks, the legatine emblems, the archiepiscopal cross and cardinal’s hat intended for its decoration. And only centuries later would a suitable use be found for the grand but empty shell, when it was adapted for service in Nelson’s tomb at St Paul’s.
Nevertheless, a timely if agonising death at Leicester Abbey had at least spared the fallen minister from the final ignominy of a state trial and a verdict which was a foregone conclusion. It had also saved the king from another inconvenient assault upon his conscience, not unlike that inflicted by Buckingham’s execution eight years earlier. When George Cavendish was eventually summoned to Hampton Court to relate the events of his master’s final hours, he had already been warned that he should not mention all of the cardinal’s deathbed comments. And he was treated subsequently to the full measure of the king’s grief. Told by Henry that he would give £20,000 to have Wolsey still alive, the gentleman usher was then interrogated about the possible whereabouts of the missing £1,500 that the much-missed minister was alleged to have salted away.
Not all responses to the hated minister’s death were quite so conspicuously ambivalent, however. Instead, most contemporaries flagrantly ignored his earlier diplomatic wizardry and worthy quests for European peace, and scoffed dismissively at his administration of justice, which ensured that England would never again endure a clerical Lord Chancellor. Meanwhile, as the king’s new palaces at Whitehall and Hampton Court were widely praised for their lavish splendour, their creator was derided for his worldly excesses. Even those whom Wolsey had genuinely tried to court were deeply scornful – none more so, perhaps, than the King of France. Finally rid of his ‘bon ami’, Francis I was quick to tell the English ambassador, Sir Francis Bryan, of his long-held conviction that ‘so pompous and vicious a heart, sprung out of so vile a stock, would once show forth the baseness of his nature’ and eventually rise against the very sovereign who ‘hath raised him from low degree to high dignity’. Thus, continued Francis, ‘by his outrageous misbehaviours he had well merited either a life worse than death, or else of all deaths the most cruel’.
For sheer exuberance at the cardinal’s passing, however, the Boleyns exceeded all. Anne herself was ‘now as brave as a lion’, and at the behest of her father, a company of actors was commissioned to play out a farce celebrating the demise of his family’s bitterest enemy. Performed with great gusto before the king himself and subsequently printed and distributed upon the Duke of Norfolk’s order, its title, Of the Descent of the Cardinal into Hell, spoke as eloquently of its patrons as it did of its target. Stripped of power, vainly intriguing to regain his lost authority, Wolsey had at last given the victors the opportunity they craved for gleeful triumph. Yet even in defeat within his bare wood coffin, there remained, for better or worse, something altogether more substantial about the fallen prelate than the smaller men who sought to fill his place. And only his influence, for all its imperfections, had proffered passing hope of shelter from the far more treacherous course to come.
Plates
The old Grammar Hall of Magdalen College, Oxford, which served as the college’s school from 1480 until 1928. It was here that Wolsey studied and later taught.
The Church of St Mary at Limington became Wolsey’s first parish after his departure from Oxford. Presented to him by Thomas Grey, 1st Marquess of Dorset ‘in reward for his diligence’, this quiet parish in a remote part of the kingdom soon became a launching pad to higher office.
Wolsey’s status and influence at court before the reign of Henry VIII is often underestimated. After his appointment as royal chaplain in 1507, he became a valued servant of Henry VII during the king’s declining years, when Sir Richard Empson and Edmund Dudley were powerful figures that any ambitious newcomer needed to watch warily.
Richard Fox (c. 1448–1528) was a prominent English bishop, who, as Lord Privy Seal, was instrumental in assisting Wolsey’s rise to influence.
Wolsey’s expertise in the area of foreign policy made him especially valuable to Henry VIII, though his early encounters with the king’s father-in-law Ferdinand II of Aragon were to result in frustration and disappointment.
This portrait by Jacques Le Boucq, produced in 1567, offers an unusually favourable image of the cardinal. In spite of his later corpulence and contemporary references to his facial disfigurement by the pox, the Venetian ambassador Sebastiano Giustiniani described Wolsey as ‘very handsome’.
An administrator of exceptional energy and talent, Wolsey drew up proposals for reform and retrenchment at court, which eventually bore fruit in 1526 as the so-called ‘Eltham Ordinances’.
After serious misgivings Pope Leo X finally appointed Wolsey to the cardinalate in 1515.
This painting by Lucas van Leyden is not what it first appears. Far from being an innocent depiction of card players, its actual concern is the conduct of secret diplomatic negotiations at the highest level. Emperor Charles V sits opposite Cardinal Wolsey as an alliance is forged against the King of France. The woman in the centre appears be Margaret of Austria, sister of Charles and regent of the Netherlands.
The Battle of Pavia in February 1525 resulted in Charles V’s capture of Francis I and prompted a headlong rush by Henry VIII to seize the French crown. When Parliament refused to raise the necessary taxation, however, Wolsey was forced to devise the Amicable Grant and in doing so encountered a tidal wave of hostility.
Illustration from George Cavendish’s biography of Wolsey, depicting the cardinal’s downfall. Here Wolsey surrenders the Great Seal of England to his enemies, the Dukes of Norfolk and Suffolk, in October 1529.
Of all Wolsey’s enemies, Thomas Howard, 3rd Duke of Norfolk, was the most persistent and formidable. The uncle of Anne Boleyn, Howard was instrumental in leading the alliance of nobles that orchestrated the cardinal’s downfall in 1529.