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It was not until 10 May 1509 that Henry VII was finally consigned to dwell ‘more richly dead than he did alive’ in his splendid tomb of black marble at Westminster. And throughout the grief and gravity of his final agonies, as well as the lavish obsequies which accompanied his passing, Thomas Wolsey was never far removed. While the king lay dying at Richmond Palace, for instance, it was his almoner who had assisted prominently at the Easter services, and during the next harrowing weeks, Wolsey would also play his solemn part in both the shriving of his master’s soul and anointing of his body.
Nor was he absent from the final ceremony of interment itself. Snugly flanked by bishops, abbots and representatives of the King’s Bench, he duly took his place amid the grand cortège which formed on the evening of 8 May to convey the royal corpse on its final journey. Further ahead, behind the royal standard and a wax effigy of the dead king dressed in his most magnificent robes of state, rode an imposing throng of foreign potentates, courtiers and dignitaries of all kinds, while hooded monks, canons of the cathedral chapter and the choir of the King’s Chapel intoned their most mournful Latin dirges.
Past the green parks and great houses of the nobility on the south bank of the Thames, along rows of ornate, well-windowed merchant houses, and through the meaner streets of Southwark where pock-marked whores and reeling drunks usually abounded, the solemn procession wound its way by the light of 600 torches. And when, over the next two nights, the former king’s body lay in state at St Paul’s, illuminated by ‘a goodlie curious Light of Nine Branches’, Wolsey was nearby at Westminster to offer up his prayers beside the freshly prepared grave.
Yet as the time approached for the king’s wasted remains to be placed beside the bones of his wife, the chaplain’s feelings were likely to have been mixed. It was true that he had once more lost a patron, but then again his dead master had always been his own man, and his councillors, just as surely, were men of his mind and making. Moreover, those in his trust, like William Warham, Archbishop of Canterbury; Thomas Ruthall, secretary to the king; and, of course, Richard Fox, were all weighty and substantial figures, anchored permanently in their sovereign’s estimation and, as such, not to be outstripped or undermined by any rising force while the crown was still his.
There was also the 66-year-old Thomas Howard, first soldier of England and Lord Treasurer to consider, as well as a host of lesser lights who had hemmed Wolsey in and blocked his way. Sir Edward Poynings, controller of the royal household, had forged a worthy reputation as a soldier and administrator, while George Talbot, Earl of Shrewsbury, had fought bravely beside his sovereign at Stoke Field, and carried with him an illustrious family reputation. Likewise, Sir Henry Marney had stood firm against the rebel host at Blackheath in 1497 and fully confirmed his unflinching loyalty in subsequent years. If, therefore, Henry VII required loyal and capable senior servants, they had been his in abundance.
As such, the demise of the old king spelled opportunity rather than crisis for Thomas Wolsey, particularly when the age and nature of the new monarch were considered. Nine weeks and four days short of his eighteenth birthday, Henry VIII was cut in a clean-contrasting mould to his newly deceased father. Glittering, massive, puffed up and impressionable, his excessive heartiness and exhibitionism were merely the tip of a much more ominous emotional iceberg. Having been reared in comparative isolation under the leaden piety of his careworn grandmother, Lady Margaret Beaufort, he still bore the marks, and, to compound matters, he had suffered a series of losses between the ages of 8 and 12 which cut him deeply. On 11 February 1503, for instance, his mother, Elizabeth of York, had swiftly followed her newborn daughter to the grave, and in June of the same year Henry’s favourite sister, Margaret, suffered what appeared to be an equally final fate when she was carried off to Edinburgh to wed the gifted, but philandering King James IV of Scotland.
Furthermore, the death of Arthur, his elder brother, in 1502 had already ushered in a time of upheaval and uncertainty for the boy who now became the sole guarantee of the Tudors’ grasp upon the crown. Though the emotional bond between the two brothers had been tenuous to say the least, the impact of the younger prince’s elevation upon his subsequent development cannot be doubted. Thereafter, he would live at Westminster under the remorseless gaze of his father and suffer the full rigours of a sheltered upbringing which would ill equip him for the practical tasks of leadership ahead. Nor would the early attempts to break him for government succeed in other respects. On the contrary, they would serve only to reinforce the boy’s natural wilfulness and impulsiveness, and, in doing so, store up untold problems for the future. Curbed, cowed and cloistered during the crucial years of his adolescence, Henry VIII would be not so much crowned in 1509 as unleashed.
Nevertheless, though politically raw and prone to violent gusts of enthusiasm, he would be hailed by his subjects as the herald of a golden age of glory, light and learning. And if surface appearances were to be trusted, England’s high hopes were by no means unfounded, for everything about the new monarch seemed to declare his careless grace and prowess. Indeed, he could play the roles of Christian scholar, courtly lover or dashing soldier-athlete with equal ease. Tireless in the field, invincible with lance, spear, poleaxe or bow, ‘angelic’ of face, broad-chested, bejewelled and beringed, there seemed no admirable quality or advantage in which he was lacking.
Equally importantly, he had inherited a stable realm, freed from the shadow of rebellion which had stalked his father, and he was also comfortably equipped with a financial legacy amounting, in all probability, to around £300,000 – the equivalent of some two or three years revenue. ‘He is very rich,’ wrote one of his innumerable enthusiasts, ‘and very liberal, so humane and kind that the poorest person can easily approach him and so made for war, that there is no military exercise in which he does not equal, not to say surpass his soldiers.’ The papal tax collector and historian Polydore Vergil was yet another who gushed praise for the new king’s ‘handsome bearing’, ‘skill at arms’ and ‘scholarship of no mean order’. There were even references by the Italian to Henry’s ‘humanity, benevolence and self-control’. The adulation heaped upon the new king from all quarters was, then, utterly unalloyed, though in the process, his pride and sense of power, as well as his contempt for the foreigner, were all magnified accordingly. And if, when the time came, the old heads of the previous reign might choose to deny him his wishes, he could be counted upon to look elsewhere for counsel.
Yet if any of this might be taken to imply, as it often is, that Thomas Wolsey was already safely set upon a well-paved high road to power under a new, more flamboyant and pliable king, events would soon prove otherwise. For though the young monarch was said to have received him with friendly and familiar conversation upon his regal debut at court, the progress of Henry VII’s favourite chaplain and almoner seems to have been squarely baulked thereafter by none other than the new king’s grandmother.
It was Lady Margaret Beaufort, Countess of Richmond, who had engineered her son’s ascent to the crown before the climactic Battle of Bosworth, and in later overseeing the education and upbringing of her grandson she had firmly established her authority over him. Not surprisingly, then, she was eminently well placed to seize the initiative in those first harried days when that same grandson became king himself. Wise, devout, watchful and controlling, the countess’s deep-seated suspicion of fast-rising men at court is likely to have been especially pronounced at this time. And though there was by now little of the parvenu about Thomas Wolsey, for he had long ago grown easy among the great and noble, his questionable beginnings were unlikely to have been ignored entirely by the ‘venerable Margaret’. Even more importantly, Wolsey’s sponsor had been the old Marquess of Dorset, and for one of the countess’s calculating cast of mind and Lancastrian blood, the marquess and his protégés were all automatically tarred with the same Yorkist brush.
In consequence, Wolsey was left to wait edgily in the political wings as the old guard, who were all of the Lady Margaret’s age and persuasion, continued to dominate the corridors of power. Indeed, Warham, Fox, Ruthall and Thomas Howard picked up the reins of power just where they had laid them upon the old king’s death, leaving Wolsey and others close to him stranded in political limbo. While his friend Darcy, for instance, was superseded as vice-chamberlain, Wolsey himself was not only overlooked as royal chaplain, but also barred from re-appointment as almoner. Indeed, the latter post now became the sole responsibility of Dr John Edenham and, to add insult to injury, Wolsey was bypassed once more in July, following Edenham’s untimely demise.
Meanwhile, the absence of Wolsey’s name from any lists drawn up for the coronation is no less striking, and it was not until November, almost two months after the death of Edenham’s successor, Thomas Hobbes, that Wolsey was finally appointed as Henry VIII’s royal almoner. To all appearances, then, his career hung precariously in the balance as the new order took shape during the late spring and summer of 1509.
Even during the ten weeks or so of Lady Margaret Beaufort’s dominance, however, a subterranean tide had continued to run in Wolsey’s favour. The accession of a handsome and dashing young king in place of his cautious and niggardly father would, for instance, put paid to the two most prominent and unpopular ministers of the previous reign. On 25 April, only three days after the death of Henry VII, a proclamation was issued to the effect that anyone who had previously sustained injury or suffered loss of goods at the hands of his royal commissioners should make due supplication to the new king. Thus were the flood gates opened and all too predictably the popular clamour was now directed in full against Richard Empson and Edmund Dudley.
There followed baying petitions, biting ballads and a hearty collective cry for blood, which England’s new sovereign was keen to exploit for popularity’s sake. Accordingly, the pair were arrested in July and charged with high treason on the wholly spurious grounds that they had plotted to place the new king under restraint in order to prevent their removal from power. ‘Whoever yet saw any man condemned for justice?’ complained Empson at the time.
Crucially, though, the death of these two newly rich scapegoats had the effect of sparing Wolsey’s own patrons. Richard Fox survived his sovereign’s whim and continued as Bishop of Winchester and Lord Privy Seal on Henry VIII’s council, while another of Wolsey’s sponsors, Sir Thomas Lovell, also managed to emerge unscathed after some anxious weeks, regardless of his former close connection with Empson and Dudley at the Exchequer.
Moreover, even though the remaining personnel were unchanged, the evolving balance of power on the new king’s council would suit Wolsey’s longer-term needs admirably. Though the Great Seal remained with the Archbishop of Canterbury, William Warham seems, in fact, to have taken little or no part in moulding the new king’s outlook. Unambitious and almost certainly weary of twenty years of official life, his hang-dog expression in his most famous portrait implies a long lifetime of mild regrets. Ultimately, he was content to devote himself to his clerical duties while dispensing generous patronage to impecunious authors. And in consequence, the chief place in the direction of affairs belonged to Richard Fox.
Named by Henry VII as one of his executors in return for his considerable services, Fox had also, it seems, been specially commended by the former king to his heir. Even so, the new monarch was wary of Fox, confiding to the Spanish ambassador Caroz that though he trusted him, he knew he did so ‘at his risk’. ‘Here in England,’ added Caroz, ‘they think he is a fox and such is his name.’ Yet wily or not, such was Fox’s undeniable talent that by 1510 Badoer, the Venetian ambassador, was referring to him as ‘alter rex’. And this, of course, could not have been better news for Wolsey, since the bishop had, as we have already seen, marked him out as a rising star of the clerical interest at court.
Fox’s primacy was no doubt reinforced, too, by his support for the new king’s most passionate early cause – his marriage to his brother Arthur’s former wife, Catherine of Aragon. Less than a week into his reign, in fact, Henry VIII boldly announced his intention to marry the Spanish princess, who was five years his senior and had lived in harassed isolation since her husband’s death. Negotiations had already been in hand to match Henry with Eleanor of Savoy, thereby hitching England to the Habsburgs in a grand dynastic scheme. But the young king was nothing if not headstrong and would not be deterred from putting his own distinctive stamp on his kingdom’s foreign policy. Nor, for that matter, would he be swayed by serious divisions on his council concerning the wisdom of the marriage.
William Warham, for instance, had expressed grave doubts about Pope Julius II’s bull, which had originally sanctioned the union back in December 1503. Most seriously of all, it had ignored Catherine’s claim that her previous marriage had never been consummated. But it had also been conspicuously slow in arriving and, to make matters worse, its validity had eventually been challenged by none other than young Henry himself, on the eve of his fourteenth birthday. It was no secret either that Henry VII, for all his eagerness to secure the Spanish alliance and dowry, could not ultimately bring even his well-worn conscience to sanction the marriage. It did not take an archbishop, after all, to know that in biblical terms any match between a woman and her dead husband’s brother was highly questionable, for, according to the Book of Leviticus, it was an ‘unclean thing’, which would leave the sinning couple childless.
The new king’s decision was therefore as risky as it was momentous and it succeeded in no small part because Richard Fox supported it on practical grounds of statecraft. From the bishop’s perspective, moreover, the apparent non-consummation of Catherine’s previous marriage served as a clear-cut incentive for the new match. Certainly, there was no conclusive evidence that Catherine and the sickly Arthur had ever lived together as man and wife in the fullest sense. And was not the new king, in any case, someone whose own conscience should be respected and trusted? This, after all, was a prince who, in spite of all his interests and distractions, still found time to hear three Masses per day. And had his theological training not made him a dutiful son of the Church, wholly alert to its laws – someone who had fully imbibed the piety of his dead father?
There were other arguments, too, that could now be raised in favour of the marriage. Henry VII in his death agony was said, for instance, to have beseeched his son to marry Catherine. Likewise, Ferdinand of Spain was eagerly offering to pay up his daughter’s dowry, while offering at the same time to betroth his grandson, Charles of Ghent, to young Henry’s sister, the Lady Mary. Indeed, such was Ferdinand’s keenness that 200,000 crowns were dispatched, not by sea – for fear of delay – but through Italian bankers in bonds and bills of exchange. So Fox, and by implication Wolsey, were surely bound to prevail.
Within two months of his father’s funeral, therefore, Henry VIII duly married and brushed aside, at a stroke, eight long years of vacillation. He had gone with his bride to the church of the Observant Franciscans at Greenwich on Barnaby Bright Day, 11 June, and pledged his troth in a ceremony that was remarkable only for its privacy. In fact, no official celebrations at all were arranged and even the traditional ceremony of putting the bride and groom to bed seems to have been waived on this occasion, since the king who could do no wrong was still officially in mourning for his father.
Nevertheless, before the day was done the whole teeming populace of London knew of the marriage. They knew, too, that the bride had been clad in white in token of her virginity. And if Londoners were sorry to have been denied a wedding spectacle, the coronation ceremony which followed two weeks later would more than compensate for any temporary disappointment. In fact, it would set the tone resoundingly for the lavish pageantry which came to characterise the entire reign. Henry had, after all, demanded that his wedding be spoken of in superlatives, and, even though time for preparation was short, the robes and trappings for the procession to Westminster were described by one and all as ‘more rich’ and ‘more curious’ than had ever been seen.
On the eve of the midsummer ceremony the royal couple rode through a capital festooned with decorations. At that point in the city known as Old Change, which London’s goldsmiths had made their own, young maidens clad in white waved branches of white May, while at Cornhill the lavish display of rich tapestries and cloth of gold was nothing short of breathtaking. As free wine flowed from conduits, Henry rode beneath a canopy borne by the barons of the Cinque Ports, with his heralds going before him and the bearers of his hat and cloak just behind, their mounts trapped with silver cloth under a web of green and gold. Then, we are told, came ‘nine children of honour’ in blue velvet and fleurs-de-lys on horses decked with the emblems of England and France, Gascony and Guienne, Normandy, Anjou, Cornwall, Wales and Ireland – all the king’s dominions, actual or claimed.
Like his gentlemen and household officers, the king himself wore scarlet robes, though his were of the richest velvet and furred with ermine. Sewn into his jacket of raised gold were diamonds, emeralds, pearls and other precious stones, while across his chest he wore a baldric of outsize rubies. The queen, in her turn, was drawn by white palfreys in a litter of cloth of gold, clad once more in white satin, her gleaming hair hanging down her back, ‘of a very great length, beautiful and goodly to behold’.
Then, on the day of the ancient ceremony itself, Henry and Catherine walked the short distance to Westminster Abbey along a carpet of striped cloth strewn with flowers, which was later ripped to pieces by the common people in quest of souvenirs. Led to his throne by no fewer than thirty-six bishops, the king was anointed with holy oil before being consecrated by Archbishop Warham with the crown of St Edward the Confessor in a ritual which unfolded over many hours. In a much shorter ceremony, meanwhile, the queen was crowned with a heavy gold diadem set with rubies, pearls and sapphires.
Thereafter it was time for a banquet at Westminster Hall, ‘greater than any that Caesar had known’, followed by jousts and tournaments over many days. Such was the scale of celebration that in the tiltyard of the palace at Westminster a miniature castle had been erected around which mock battles of various descriptions were fought, the most notable of which involved a combat between the ‘Knights of Diana’, wearing gold helmets with huge feather plumes, and the ‘Knights of Pallas’. At its climax fallow dear were released and killed by greyhounds, after which their carcasses were trussed on poles and presented to the ladies.
But though Wolsey appears to have missed out on this and all else associated with the coronation, he need not have felt too deprived, for soon enough, on 30 July, the pious, creaking roadblock who had so far frustrated him finally made way. Ironically, it may well have been the wedding festivities themselves that put paid to the king’s grandmother once and for all. Sixty-eight years old, enfeebled by her spiritual exertions and itching, in any case, for eternity, Lady Margaret Beaufort did not linger long after her collapse, though even on her death bed at the abbot’s house of Cheyney Gates at Westminster, where she had been lodged for the duration of the nuptials, she continued to load her grandson with advice. He should take as his mentor, she said, her confessor, Bishop John Fisher, ‘the most holy and learned prelate in Christendom’, for in her opinion, only he could now help to guide the newly fledged monarch through the trying transition to high authority.
Both the implication and irony of the old lady’s words are, of course, clear to see with hindsight. But even the force of a personality like Lady Margaret’s could not extend beyond the grave, and her passing duly broke Henry VIII’s last remaining link to his childhood. The two dominant figures of his past, his father and his grandmother, were thus swept from his life within months of one another and now he was his own master, for even if he faced the disapproval of his councillors, he was still their king. And the king’s word was law.
Henceforth, England’s new ruler could at last seek to give his court a style that would be the envy of foreign princes. It would be a home to artists from Italy and the Low Countries, to fine home-grown musicians such as Robert Fairfax, and, above all, it would be a haven for the finest scholars in Europe: a place where humanist lights like Erasmus and More, Linacre, Colet, and Mountjoy could shine brightest. But, much more visibly still, Henry’s court was to become a refuge from worldly cares and haven for glorious, youthful excess. Unlike the Holy Roman Emperor, for instance, who was said to be ‘frugal and an enemy to pomp’, England’s king would neither skimp nor scrape in cutting a figure amid his European counterparts. And there was more, it seems, to Henry’s high living than mere public relations and international prestige.
Brought up in a household that saved candle ends and ate porridge, and freed now from the tyranny of the schoolroom, regular bedtimes and a meagre allowance, England’s new ruler was determined to kick over the traces like a schoolboy on holiday. May Day festivities might henceforth last for four whole days, while two days a week, the Spanish ambassador observed, were devoted to single combat on foot in imitation of Lancelot and Amadis, the heroes of romance. Henry hunted and hawked with equal gusto and when, in May and June, such sport was out of season, he merely redoubled his efforts with the lance or sword. Sheathed extravagantly in the latest German or Italian plate armour, fluted and braced and inlaid with gold, Henry would take to the lists, plumes flying, on his magnificent stallion, gifted to him by the Duke of Mantua. Many young men excelled in such sports, it was said, but among them all ‘the most assiduous and the most interested was the king’.
In the evenings, meanwhile, there were elaborate ‘masks’ at which Henry would indulge his other consuming passion – his love of dressing up. Disappearing with some of his boon companions in the middle of an extravagant banquet, the King of England would presently reappear in glittering disguise in the midst of a party of ‘Turks’ or ‘Moors’ or ‘Germans’, intruding upon the company and demanding to dance with the supposedly astonished ladies thereabouts. Once, it seems, when the court was at Greenwich, a party of masked outlaws all in Kendal green made their entrance, followed, however incongruously, by a band of musicians. The queen and her ladies, the chronicler assures us, were surprised and terrified by the invasion, but courteously danced with the outlaws and were duly amazed and delighted when the king and his nobles eventually unmasked. No matter how often such games occurred, Catherine, it seems, never disappointed her boyishly exuberant spouse by identifying the gigantic Muscovite or wild man or Saracen in her midst, or by failing to be suitably nonplussed or delighted as occasion dictated.
The more the king carolled and cavorted, the more he attracted young nobles of similar mind, as eager to indulge him as to match his lust for play. Though older nobles also began to attend court more regularly, it was especially the younger scions of mighty houses who were prominent from this point onwards, along with newer men, too; young squires from newly risen families or those freshly resurrected by a wealthy marriage. Such characters found themselves just as welcome as their social betters, so long as their wits were sharp and their purses full. Courtenays and Staffords, Howards, Percys, Nevilles and Talbots all rubbed shoulders, therefore, with Comptons, Bryans and Boleyns and men of other names hitherto unknown to court chroniclers. And as they gathered, these young bucks were more prepared than ever to encourage and indulge their sovereign’s excess.
In fact, there soon grew up around the king an inner circle of drinking, gaming and sporting companions who acted as raucous elder brothers to their sovereign: an elite fellowship of noble funsters to whom he looked for guidance and by whose standards he gauged his own adulthood and virility. This band of high-spirited heroes – or gaggle of irresponsible braggarts, according to perspective – included William Compton, Charles Brandon, Edward and Henry Guildford, Thomas Knyvet and Edward Howard. Ranging in age in 1509 from 21 to 30, they seemed to exercise an unseemly familiarity with the king and were almost daily involved in incidents which always irritated and sometimes shocked and scandalised.
If, moreover, the Welsh chronicler Elis Gruffydd is to be believed, the king’s own little games were soon exceeding the bounds of acceptable behaviour. His cutting of a nobleman’s purse, for instance, may well have represented excellent sport for his merry cronies, but it would ultimately end unhappily. ‘As a result,’ says the Welshman, ‘the stealing of purses became so common that […] if anyone had the chance to do it so skilfully that the owner did not notice or catch him in the act he could only treat it as a laughing matter.’ In the event, the foolish craze would have to be checked ultimately on pain of death.
Not altogether surprisingly, then, the king’s exuberance did not sit so comfortably with the sentiments and priorities of his councillors, who were said to be firmly set in their dusty ways and sober, seemingly, to a fault: as arthritic in outlook as they were of limb. Yet George Cavendish’s suggestion that these men set out to bridle the young king and thereby directly drove him under the more indulgent wing of Thomas Wolsey may not be so certain as is often assumed. According to Cavendish, the council had neither wasted time nor spared any frankness in reminding the king of his regal duties, on the grounds that they feared ‘lest such abundance of riches […] the king was now possessed of should move his young years into a riotous forgetting of himself’. So, said Cavendish, ‘they gate him to be present with them to acquaint him with the politique government of the realm, with which at first he could not endure to be much troubled’.
On the other hand, Sir William Paulet, who would become one of the century’s great political survivors, referred many years later to another formal debate which supposedly took place at court around this time, led by two great officers of the royal household: John de Vere, Earl of Oxford, a veteran general, councillor and long-time friend of the late king, and Edward Stafford, Duke of Buckingham. The subject once again was the handling of the young monarch and whether he should be tutored in the intricacies of policy and administration or encouraged to devote himself to the creation of a magnificent, cultured court and leave the details of government to his council. According to this account, however, the greybeards in the king’s service opted for the latter alternative.
Certainly, such a decision would have had much to recommend it. The realm was fortunate, after all, in having as its monarch a glittering figure who loved display and could parade before the whole of Europe the might and splendour of a renascent England. There would be little benefit, therefore, in immuring him within the council chamber or counting house. The dynasty, moreover, required colour and publicity, and, as such, it made sound sense for the king and his household to flaunt their magnificence.
Likewise, even the more conservative councillors will have been keen to avoid the confusion likely to arise from any sudden lurches of policy, particularly in the conduct of foreign affairs caused by the new king’s contributions. When Henry did apply himself to affairs of state, he had already displayed a notably headstrong and impulsive streak. His peremptory decision to marry, for instance, had sent an early warning signal, not only of his intention to take charge of his own destiny but also, more worryingly, of his determination to take sides in the European power struggle and to resume the ancient feud with France. Only a few weeks later he had flown into a rage upon learning that the council had written in his name to Louis XII of France assuring him of England’s friendship. Clearly, such barely concealed enmity with the French represented a drastic reversal of Henry VII’s policy of avoiding dangerous entanglements, and raised at the same time the spectre of the ‘auld alliance’ between France and Scotland.
For at least some members of the council, then, the problem was not so much Henry’s absence from the council chamber as the fact that his ill-considered interventions in affairs were inclined all too often to act to the detriment of measured and sensible policy-making. As such, Cavendish’s suggestion that Wolsey wooed Henry by liberating him from his responsibilities is likely to be at least partially wide of the mark.
Nevertheless, the almoner was still surprisingly well placed for a blind side assault on power, for there was now, undoubtedly, a vacuum at the heart of government into which a man like him could well have been sucked, albeit as much by chance as by design. Technically, the almoner’s role was a comparatively inconspicuous one, entailing the distribution of largesse on the king’s behalf and dealing with the multitude of supplicants who sought it. In effect, though, royal almoners were factotums, used by monarchs in any way they saw fit, acting alternately as messengers, diplomats and intermediaries. Besides which, this particular almoner was now at liberty to operate on an altogether more imaginative and lavish scale than his predecessors, for there was a dazzling splash of colour about the new regime that was lacking in the old.
The monarchy had, as it were, come out of hiding, affording the king’s almoner a new visibility of his own in the new, more generous setting then prevailing. And there were underlings aplenty to handle the more mundane aspects of the almoner’s main business. What mattered most about this comparatively humble household post, in fact, was that it secured daily access to the king. From there on it was up to the office holder to use it how he might in his ascent of the gilded staircase to power. In this respect, he might also use his role to enrich himself with benefices and sinecures, for the almonership had already proven a reliable stepping stone to greater things, as it would throughout the sixteenth century.
Thanks to the present king’s character this flexible position afforded ampler opportunities than ever before. Though Henry firmly believed that he was naturally endowed with all the gifts required for all the more serious aspects of government, there was a surfeit of niggling chores by which he was unwilling to be distracted, and now the ever-willing Wolsey was always close by to lend a helping and guiding hand. Indeed, since the young man who had come to occupy England’s throne was unversed in the day-to-day business of the court, Wolsey could actually assume the role of mentor. Knowing the lie of the royal household already and bolstered by appointments within the Church that gave him a status of sorts, his increasing command of government procedures and protocol enabled him to shepherd the king through the tasks for which he was largely unprepared. Apart from wearisome talks with the dreary grey men who populated his father’s parsimonious court, young Henry had, after all, gained little contact with the game of politics. Nor, as we have seen, was this a situation he was overly anxious to remedy.
Government business was, in fact, usually handled by a group of between eight to a dozen councillors, meeting mainly in the Star Chamber at Westminster. Not only was the king rarely present, he was frequently miles away on progress or residing at Greenwich or Richmond. Thus there existed an executive of which Henry VIII was the head de jure but seldom de facto, and this, in turn, meant that someone was needed to mediate between king and council, gauging the king’s inclinations, reporting the outcomes of debates and securing the seal of the royal signet on state documents.
Individuals, such as the Earl of Surrey or Archbishop of Canterbury, could not, of course, be expected to scurry about the countryside on routine matters of this kind, though the potential power which might be wielded by such a ‘messenger’ was certain to be considerable. More significantly still, a headless executive could not be counted upon to frame policy effectively, and debates in such circumstances might well degenerate into fruitless stalemates between factions and individuals. Though Warham doubtless chaired meetings effectively, the council could not make policy confidently, even with a broad consensus, when it might later be altered by the king. The only answer, therefore, was for a suitable intermediary to become, in effect, the royal mouthpiece. And that, indeed, is precisely what happened.