9
Long before Christopher Bainbridge’s sinister death on 14 July 1514, Henry VIII had been all too keenly aware of England’s paltry representation in the College of Cardinals. Bainbridge himself had been appointed Ambassador Extraordinary to the Papal Court in 1509 and Cardinal of St Praxedis in March 1511, but thereafter cut a lone path in the corridors of the Roman curia. Moreover, not since John Morton’s death in 1500 had a cardinal been resident in England, and this injustice could not be tolerated indefinitely. Henry was, of course, a devoted son of the Church, who had readily committed himself to the pope’s cause in both peace and war, and without a richly bedecked prince of the Holy See to decorate his court, it could never be complete.
Thomas Wolsey, on the other hand, was no less alert to the greater opportunities that might accrue in the longer term, if the kingdom were to acquire such a senior churchman. Knowing full well that the word ‘cardinal’ is derived from the Latin term for a hinge, he could see all too clearly what doors might open ultimately for Henry, not to mention the chosen man himself. And as early as 1511 – when false rumours reached England that Pope Julius was at death’s door – Wolsey was said to have talked earnestly to his master at Mass and ‘shewed unto his Grace how much honour and also furtherance of all his affairs in time to come should ensue to him if that by his commendation some Cardinal might attain to be Pope’.
But while it is far from certain that the king’s master strategist had himself in mind for the papacy at this or indeed any other time, the possibility of a cardinal’s hat was still undoubtedly a tempting enough prize in its own right. As a cardinal, Wolsey would, for example, automatically become a member of the governing body of the Church, with a direct influence upon the election of any future pontiff. He would also occupy a fitting platform from which to speak with kings and play their arbiter, while acting as a conspicuous representative of the Church in England, with power both to control its affairs and reform its abuses. Significantly, almost all the monks and friars resident within the realm – with the meagre exception of some half dozen or so religious houses – would at once be brought under his control, including those of Archbishop Warham’s Canterbury.
On 7 February 1514, therefore – only one day after the pope had agreed to his consecration as Bishop of Lincoln – Wolsey dispatched the papal revenue collector, Polydore Vergil, on a secret mission to Rome. Ostensibly the purpose of this trip was to allow Vergil to revisit his old home and kiss the feet of the new pontiff Leo X, since he was now 44 years old and had been permanently resident in England for the previous twelve years. The Italian’s real mission, however, was of altogether more significance, for he was instructed to engage in subtle intrigue on Wolsey’s behalf to secure for him the highest prize that the Holy Father could bestow upon any member of his clergy.
The aim, moreover, was not merely to achieve election to the cardinalate, but also to attain the additional office of legate a latere in one fell swoop. Such papal legates were usually men of the broadest experience and highest reputation who were dispatched to distant foreign countries with full papal powers at times when the most delicate political negotiations were in progress. They were sent, therefore, on special occasions for specific reasons and returned to Rome at the earliest possible opportunity, since the whole essence of their mission was that they had come direct from the pope himself.
Pope Leo had, it should be remembered, already considered the possibility of assigning such a role to Christopher Bainbridge before his death. And not without good reason, since Bainbridge was a man of considerable reputation who had earlier shown his mettle by leading a successful military expedition against Ferrara, which he besieged at Julius II’s specific request. But during the spring and early summer of 1514 Wolsey had expressed staunch opposition to the proposal on a number of grounds. In the first place, he argued, Bainbridge had been the English ambassador to the pope for so long that he could not be received as legate a latere ‘without suspicion’. Besides which, the circumstances in England were not sufficiently exceptional to justify such an appointment.
Yet, in spite of these earlier reservations, Wolsey now had no hesitation in seeking the very same post for himself; ultimately, as it transpired, for life. If successful, he would immediately gain precedence over Archbishop Warham, primate of all England, who himself enjoyed only the rank of legatus natus – a largely nominal title giving him purely disciplinary responsibilities within the confines of his own province. As a legate a latere, however, Wolsey would also be empowered to issue dispensations of all kinds, to absolve wrongdoers from excommunications and other sentences, to make appointments to benefices, to grant degrees, to make bastards legitimate and even, under certain circumstances, to sell off ecclesiastical lands. More significantly still, he would be able to grow richer than ever, since the exercise of these powers was guaranteed to produce a steady flow of fees.
But this was not all, for the true audacity of Wolsey’s suggestion lay in the fact that unlike previous legates, he was a resident subject of the king, an Englishman living in England and working there permanently. If, therefore, his appointment were granted, it would in effect involve handing papal power not only to Wolsey himself, but also to the king whom he served.
The full nature of Vergil’s journey is only revealed in the letter he wrote to Wolsey in May, after his arrival in Rome. Firstly, he had been instructed to call upon Cardinal Adriano Castellesi, a man whom Wolsey had recommended for the papacy in 1511 at the time when Julius II’s death seemed imminent. But although Julius had actually lived two more years before being succeeded by Leo X, Vergil was nevertheless to refresh Castellesi’s mind of events not long past, and, if Castellesi showed himself duly grateful, the subject of Wolsey’s own election to the College of Cardinals was to be broached. In the meantime, not a word was to be said, and the affair managed in such a way as to make the pope’s eventual offer seem wholly spontaneous, ‘as,’ remarked Vergil to Wolsey, ‘your reverend lordship told me it was to be done’. Indeed, if Vergil can be trusted, it would seem that Henry himself did not know of the proposal at this time.
Wolsey had not, however, simply trusted to the efforts of Vergil on his behalf. It was better, after all, to exercise pressure by means of a pincer movement and to this end he had also routed his request through none other than Silvestro Gigli, the Bishop of Worcester. Indeed, Gigli was, it seems, already pressing the pope to make Wolsey legate a latere for life. Such a move required what can only be considered the most remarkable nerve, but it would prove yet another example of Wolsey’s extraordinary political nous and uncanny knack for timing.
England was, after all, in the words of one former pope, ‘our storehouse of delights, a very inexhaustible well’. ‘And where much abounds,’ continued this particular Holy Father, ‘much can be extorted from many.’ Nevertheless, the English Church was restive and could well be drawn closer to Rome by a masterful papal representative in permanent residence. There was, too, the possibility of political tit-for-tat. Leo might, for instance, be given – as he himself suggested – some credit in the text of the marriage contract between Mary and Louis XII for suggesting the match in the first place. If Wolsey could manage this, along with a few other amendments in the draft Anglo-French treaty, which Leo kindly listed, it would, wrote Gigli in August, bind his holiness to grant the legation, if not for life, at least for successive periods of years.
Crucially, too, another major bar to Wolsey’s advance had been conveniently excised by Bainbridge’s unexpected demise. At least for the time being, there was now no Archbishop of York, no rival claimant for the post of legate a latere, and no English-born ambassador at the papal court. Nor, eventually, was there any doubting the King of England’s personal enthusiasm for the promotion, though it was Wolsey himself who drafted an appropriate letter for royal signature on 12 August. Wolsey’s merits, the letter to Rome pointed out, ‘are such that the king can do nothing of the least importance without him and esteems him among the dearest friends’. Therefore, the message concluded, ‘our most secret councillor’ should be made a cardinal ‘with all the honours held by the late Cardinal of York’.
Until this point, then, Wolsey’s plans were proceeding with typical smoothness and precision. As early as April it was being reported by Polydore Vergil that Pope Leo was keen to offer his support to one who held such influence with the king. Leo was also promising, it seems, to give the appearance of a spontaneous election, just as Wolsey had hoped, and by August money was already being forwarded to purchase the necessary votes. Nevertheless, Leo remained determined not to be hurried, and concerns about Wolsey’s forwardness and ambition doubtless underlay much of his caution.
There was still the murder of Bainbridge to consider, too. The papal master of ceremonies at the time, de Grassis, wrote that:
Men say an English cardinal ought not to be created lightly, because the English behave themselves so insolently in their dignity, as was shown in the case of Cardinal Bainbridge, just dead. […] Moreover, as Wolsey is the intimate friend of the king, he will not be content with the cardinalate alone, but, as is the custom for those barbarians, will wish to have the office of legate over all England.
Ultimately, then, the frustrated applicant would have to wait upon the Holy Father for nigh on a year before he was finally granted his cardinal’s hat, and even then he was temporarily denied the additional title of legate a latere.
Meanwhile there were other pressing matters at hand. Not least, there was the swift unravelling of the Anglo-French peace treaty to consider. Everything, of course, had been premised on the marriage of Louis XII to the Princess Mary, which had certainly begun auspiciously enough, since the French king was from all accounts overcome with sensual delight in his new bride. Such was Louis’s determination to charm her, indeed, that upon their first meeting at Abbeville he had somewhat ludicrously chosen to attempt to hide his all-too-apparent years by donning the garb of a young man. Nor did he hide his gratitude towards the one who had done most to ease his passage into marital bliss. Wolsey was therefore sent a mule, ‘the best in the world’, for his troubles and told that the French ambassador in Rome had been instructed ‘to no further meddle against you’ regarding the bishopric of Tournai.
Certainly, in material terms at least, Louis was as generous a husband as any might be. He spoke of taking his English wife to Venice, a place she had always wanted to see, and showered her at the same time with magnificent jewels. Before she left England, for example, he had sent her a matchless diamond ‘as large and as broad as a full-sized finger’, known as the Mirror of Naples. With its pendant pearl, the size of a pigeon’s egg, the jewel was estimated at 60,000 crowns in value. And there were others nearly as splendid, including table diamonds, another ‘marvellous great pointed diamond’ worth 10,000 marks and a ruby 2.5in long.
But Louis’s initial enthusiasm for his spouse was soon dampened by suspicion of her servants and intolerance towards her ways. Reports from across the Channel told how he loved to observe the French custom of dining at eight in the morning and going to bed at six in the evening, while it better suited his young queen to dine at noon, and remain awake till midnight. It was not long, too, before Louis dismissed Mary’s English ladies on the grounds that they came between husband and wife. Ultimately, she was even deprived of her favourite English sheepdog. Much worse still, on New Year’s Day 1515 Louis died. Only eighty-five days after his marriage the lifeless body of the French king was lying in state in the great hall of Tournelles, and with him lay the grand alliance with England that Wolsey had forged so boldly.
It was the Duke of Norfolk who first accompanied Mary to France for her wedding and the princess had resented his presence from the first. Norfolk had opposed the marriage throughout, not least because of the triumph it represented for Wolsey, and it was to the duke that Mary ascribed the ease with which her husband had dismissed her favourite attendants. By contrast, she never once doubted that Wolsey was her real friend at court, the one man besides her brother who realised how painful a duty it was for her to go through with her marriage to the old roué Louis. ‘Would God my Lord of York had come with me in the room of my Lord Norfolk,’ she wrote to Henry, ‘for then I am sure I should have been left much more at my heart’s ease now.’
There would certainly be reason enough for the princess to be heavy-hearted as events unfolded over the coming weeks. In the first place, there were the unwelcome attentions of Louis’s successor for her to parry as best she could. Upon becoming king at the tender age of 20 the bold, dashing and incorrigibly over-sexed Francis, Duc d’Angoulême, had immediately married Louis’s elder daughter, Claude, though this marriage to his cousin did not prevent the new king from at once propositioning her dead father’s former wife into the bargain. And even after Mary had apparently escaped his lecherous clutches by fleeing to Cluny, she was not left in peace, for now she was harassed with other offers of marriage involving a motley assortment of French peers and even, at one point, the Emperor Maximilian. But if the former queen’s own lot was fraught enough, she would soon initiate a desperate tangle of events that would require all of Wolsey’s considerable skill to unravel and smooth.
Not surprisingly, the arrival of a new king upon the French throne had made the dispatch of an English embassy across the Channel a matter of the utmost urgency. In the first place, protocol required that Francis be congratulated, however hypocritically, upon his succession. But more importantly still, it was necessary to forestall by all possible means any plans for the remarriage of Henry’s sister that the French might be currently hatching. In the first frantic days after Louis’s death, Wolsey had already written to Mary, informing her that ‘to the effusion of my blood and the spending of my goods’, he would never forsake or leave her and warning her that ‘if any motion of marriage or other offer of fortune’ be made to her, she should ‘in no wise give hearing to the same’.
There was also the issue of the now defunct treaty with France for Wolsey to consider. Would Mary, for instance, be allowed to keep her dower lands and their revenues? And equally importantly, there was the particularly delicate question of the ‘jewels, precious stones, plate, apparel, and other things that her Grace brought with her, as also of the charge of traduction [transportation], which the French king received for the value of 200,000 crowns’. With typical sharpness, in fact, Mary had lost little time in pledging her jewels and plate to her brother, though this, in itself, was no cast-iron guarantee of their safe return.
The need for an English mission to France was, then, clear enough and it was through Wolsey’s agency that Charles Brandon, Duke of Suffolk, was duly dispatched across the Channel in the company of that seasoned diplomat Nicholas West. By any reckoning, however, the selection of Brandon as England’s envoy was nothing less than extraordinary, for his personal ambition was known to one and all, and Mary’s deep feelings for him were already the subject of barely suppressed court gossip.
Predictably, amid her tear-stained letters to her brother and desperate entreaties to Wolsey, came reminders from Mary of the promise that had been made to her by Henry upon her departure for France. And as the French spies about her proved increasingly obtrusive and the malicious dangling of foreign marriages grew more persistent, so the nearness of her long-sought loved one presented her with an unrivalled opportunity to make good that promise, even though the duke himself seemed to be in no position to comply; prior to his departure towards the end of January 1515, he had been made to promise on oath in front of both the king and Wolsey at Eltham that he would make no attempt to marry his pining sweetheart.
Events would soon outpace Brandon, however, for, prior to his arrival, Mary had already told Francis that she and her brother’s favourite boon companion had made a pledge to marry one another that they were determined to keep. Moreover, largely to spite Henry, who continued to regard his sister as a valuable marriage counter in the game of international diplomacy, Francis now discarded his own schemes and encouraged the match wholeheartedly. Indeed, during a private audience with Brandon, the French king teased him with coming to carry off the Queen Dowager, and when the Englishman denied it, he was told that Mary herself had said as much. As Brandon confided to Wolsey afterwards, Francis had made him blush by relating details of his relationship with Mary, ‘which I knew no man alive could tell but she’.
As it transpired, the duke’s resistance was not long in crumbling. Though he hedged by telling Mary that he must get Henry’s written approval before proceeding with the match, none of this had the slightest effect on his ardent admirer and he was no less befuddled by his lady’s arguments than blinded by the bitterness of her tears. ‘Sire, I never saw a woman so weep’, he wrote to Henry. But it was when she risked all by telling him that he must wed her immediately or ‘look never to this day to have the proffer again’ that he finally broke. ‘And so,’ he confessed, ‘she and I was married.’ Furthermore, knowing that any clandestine wedding ceremony could be easily set aside, the couple had proceeded to put matters beyond recall, for as Brandon now confided to Wolsey in secret: ‘To be plain with you, I have married her heartily and lain with her, insomuch [as] I fear me that she [may] be with child.’
The scale of the ensuing outrage cannot be overemphasised. Henry, for his part, was said to have taken the news ‘grievously and displeasantly’ and his reaction was hardly surprising, for while Mary’s irresponsible behaviour might be put down to womanly hysteria, Brandon’s lack of self-control and apparent betrayal of long friendship was much harder still to forgive. Henry would not have believed that his old friend would break his promise in this way ‘had he been torn with horses’, he told Wolsey. Furthermore, the couple had not only betrayed and embarrassed him, but also cost him a good deal of money into the bargain, since Francis had been given the legal right to confiscate Mary’s dowry, not to mention the gifts she had been given by Louis, including the much coveted Mirror of Naples. To cap it all, Brandon still owed Henry the £3,000 he had borrowed to pay for his mission to the French court.
Nevertheless, the king’s displeasure was mild by comparison to the reaction of his council, who, with the sole exception of Wolsey, called for Brandon’s imprisonment or execution. For a gentleman’s son to marry the king’s sister was outrageous, even if he had recently been made a duke. And the French, meanwhile, were equally angry that their former queen had disgraced herself thus. It was said that Brandon did not dare to walk the streets of Paris for fear of the mob. All in all, then, it was hardly surprising that when the floundering bridegroom turned to Wolsey for help, he would be told in no uncertain terms that he had put himself ‘in the greatest danger that ever man was in’.
Wolsey, too, had good reason to be furious with the newlywed couple. Not least, he was rightly annoyed that the brilliant political alliance he had forged with France had been sacrificed so impetuously and selfishly. But he also knew that he himself might well be compromised in the ensuing scandal. The Howards and their allies on the council were producing evidence that Brandon was in league with Francis and if they gained the upper hand they would not hesitate to implicate his confidant. Furthermore, Wolsey had been put in the unenviable position of having to break the news to Henry and face the royal wrath in person. Under the circumstances, Wolsey could not resist his own rebuke to the couple who now so earnestly threw themselves on his aid. ‘Cursed be the blind affection and counsel that have brought ye to [this]’, he scolded. ‘Such sudden and ill-advised dealing shall have sudden repentance.’
Curiously, too, Wolsey made a direct reference in the same letter to Brandon’s humble origins, reminding him of his dependence upon the king for his rank and emphasising that ‘ye hath failed to him which hath brought you up of low degree to be of this great honour’. The sign of the importance of this point in Wolsey’s thinking may be seen from the fact that the words ‘low degree’ were inserted in the place of ‘nothing’; the only editing in the entire letter.
Yet, in spite of his stern admonitions, Wolsey’s response to the couple’s entreaties was to assure them eventually of his support and he promised that he would use all his power to bring the matter to ‘a successful conclusion’. Brandon was, after all, Wolsey’s single possible challenger for the king’s affection and, as such, it made perfect sense to have him beholden. He was also, for the time being at least, still a valuable bulwark against the Howards and their cronies. Wolsey insisted, therefore, that he was the duke’s ‘firm friend’ and seems even to have relished the chance to outwit and wound the jealous and disapproving members of the court and council who were now baying for blood on every side. Should the king be persuaded by these hostile elements not to allow the couple to return as man and wife, he told Brandon, ‘all men here, except his grace and myself, would be right glad’.
All the same, Wolsey’s position as a go-between in a royal family quarrel was an awkward one, which called for juggling of the most skilful kind. He would have to communicate with the disgraced couple without leaving any shadow of doubt that his loyalty lay unequivocally with the king. He would also have to gauge the king’s priorities with his usual skill and this he seems to have done to perfection. In the event, he continued to draft letters of petition for Brandon and Mary to sign and also sent the pair money to ‘make friends’. Nor did he fail to take as well as receive, for, in the meantime, Brandon was finally able to secure the bishopric of Tournai for his would-be saviour.
Ultimately, though negotiations dragged on and tempers grew warm, Wolsey correctly realised that Henry’s main concerns were financial rather than moral. Therefore, in a letter to Brandon, he revealed that the king had spoken to him in private after a meeting of the council and bade him ‘use all effort to obtain from Francis Mary’s gold plate and jewels’ without which neither the duke nor his bride could ‘obtain license to return’. At the same time, Wolsey also assured Brandon that ‘the hope that the king hath to obtain the said plate and jewels is the thing that most stayeth his grace constantly to assent that ye should marry his sister’.
After due wrangling, moreover, the issue of Mary’s jewels and jointure was indeed settled amicably, and this seems to have swung the king once and for all to the side of reconciliation, though neither his gains nor the warmth of his response were in any sense glowing. Mary’s gift of the Mirror of Naples to her brother was, for example, received in silence, while most of the other jewellery and gold and silver plate remained on the other side of the Channel as property of the future queens of France. In fact, when the dust had finally settled, she brought home only twenty-two diamonds, sixteen pearls, one ruby and a large emerald, though she did, all importantly, retain her jointure, together with the payment of 200,000 gold crowns.
With this news Henry seems to have mellowed sufficiently to agree to the couple’s return, for in early May, after waiting several days at Calais for permission, Brandon and Mary finally embarked for England. It was only at Calais, perhaps, that Brandon and Mary came face to face with the full extent of their unpopularity. Forced to barricade their lodging against a screaming mob, their fears did not begin to subside until they reached Dover, where they were greeted by a smiling Wolsey and conveyed to Henry, who met them with open arms at Barking on 13 May.
This initial response from the king was, of course, typically curious, for after undisguised fury he now seemed more than keen to advertise his unbounded delight at the return of his sister and her husband, and was soon insisting that a second grander marriage ceremony should be arranged at Greenwich. Ultimately, the happy event occurred in Grey Friars Church, and Henry accepted the compliment graciously when the couple named their first child after him, after which he even equipped them with extensive lands and estates in East Anglia as a token of his renewed esteem.
But, as so often, Henry’s joy and bounty were deceptive, for, in the meantime, apparently at Wolsey’s suggestion, the couple themselves were forced to pay a crippling fine of £24,000 in annual instalments. And though the sum was never paid in full, the king continued to look for these payments, complaining loudly when they were overdue, and then conspicuously squandering the money once it had been received. Each year some was poured into the eager hands of Queen Catherine’s waiting maids, while more was distributed to his minions to play with at cards. It was money, he told them, paid in token of his domination of France.
Brandon, meanwhile, was temporarily eclipsed – not only financially, but politically as well. Once described as ‘scarcely inferior to the king himself’, he now spent much of his time away from London. ‘He has ceased to reside at the court,’ it was soon noted, ‘secluding himself on account of the accusations prevalent in great courts, where favour does not always remain stable.’ And, in the process, Brandon’s absence from the centre was to remove one more political check on Wolsey’s influence with the king – at least for the time being, since the duke would harbour a gnawing grievance over all of fourteen years until, at last, the chance for revenge presented itself.
Presently, however, Wolsey was once more preoccupied with his ongoing quest for a cardinal’s hat. In July 1515, he grew tired of waiting for what he considered an overdue honour and wrote to Pope Leo to press his case. From his own perspective, or so he declared, the cardinalate was merely one more means of binding the king ever closer to the pope, and since the King of England had consistently proved himself to be a friend of the papacy, it was only fitting that his request should not be refused. Nor, as Wolsey was quick to point out, should the dangers entailed by refusal be overlooked. If, after all, the King of England were to forsake the pope, Leo would be ‘in greater danger on this day two year than ever was Pope Julius’.
Yet in spite of further letters in the same menacing tone, it was ultimately none other than Francis I who unwittingly persuaded the pope, against his better judgement, to act at last. Just as the Brandon affair was reaching its climax another Anglo-French peace treaty was once again being carved out of thin air by an English delegation consisting of Wolsey, the Duke of Norfolk and the Bishop of Winchester. Signed eventually on 5 April, the Treaty of Paris provided for mutual defence against invasion and was supposed to last the lifetime of both kings. It also called for the release of prisoners, forbade either country to harbour dissidents and permitted free passage for Venetian and Florentine merchants to both England and France. But though it gushed with the usual platitudes concerning peace and wellbeing, the agreement predictably guaranteed nothing.
Surely enough, after the customary short-lived hypocritical lull, news reached England in July that the King of France had turned himself towards the unfinished task of conquest in Italy. Equipped with a massive army, he had set out to regain Milan and left Pope Leo with no choice but to bind the English king to him by any means possible – a state of affairs which Wolsey himself did not hesitate to play upon in a letter to Silvestro Gigli:
If by your politic handling the pope can be induced shortly to make me a cardinal, ye shall singularly content and please the king; for I cannot emphasise how desirous the king is to have me advanced to the said honour, to the intent that not only men might perceive how much the pope favoureth the king and such as he entirely loveth, but also that thereby I shall be the more able to do his Grace service.
In the event, however, Wolsey’s potent mix of threats, promises and subterfuge proved largely redundant, for shortly before Francis’s crushing victory over the Venetian army and the hitherto undefeated Swiss mercenaries at the Battle of Marignano, Leo proved only too willing to withdraw his last objections. And even though the rank of legate would be denied the new cardinal for the time being, the full scale of the pope’s capitulation was undeniable. Indeed, on 10 September, as a mark of special favour and contrary to all normal protocol, Wolsey’s name was submitted for election to the cardinalate entirely on its own.
Ten days later, the Venetian ambassador to England, Sebastiano Giustiniani, was reporting that ‘a king’s courier has arrived here from Rome, having been dispatched with the news that the Right Reverend of York has been created Cardinal at the suit of this most serene king who with might and main is intent upon aggrandising him’. He was quick to add, too, that he himself was keen to keep the new cardinal ‘on the most friendly terms, both by reason of his extreme influence with the king, and also because he is of a very active and assiduous mind in matters of business’.
Nor was the Venetian the only one to appreciate the significance of Wolsey’s elevation, for letters of praise and congratulation, as well as gifts and commendations, now poured in from all directions. Erasmus, for example, interrupted his translation of the New Testament to call Wolsey his ‘sheet anchor’, while Bishop Tunstall sent a present of a clock, along with a herald to advise upon how to set it. The Abbot of Winchcombe, in his turn, was even more unashamedly effusive. ‘The mother that bore you,’ he wrote, ‘has reason to rejoice but not less so than your alma mater, Oxford, that gave you to God.’ And the cardinal’s old university would, indeed, celebrate its distinguished son’s achievements most warmly by ordering ‘that whosoever preaches at Oxford or London henceforth shall mention Wolsey’s name in the bidding prayer’.
Bishop Fox, on the other hand, was more inclined to offer good sense and warned his former protégé not to imitate his predecessor in avarice, pride and anger. But there were also broader ramifications, of course, to which others seem to have been fully alive. It was Silvestro Gigli, in fact, who had selected the title of ‘St Cecilia Beyond the Tiber’ for Wolsey’s cardinalate, and he had not found the choice an easy one to make. But now he wrote to tell Wolsey that the title was actually most apt, ‘as many popes had proceeded from it’.
Meanwhile, as news of his great event continued to resound, the cardinal himself was planning his forthcoming installation with his usual eye for fine detail. He was, it seems, especially anxious that he should have a cardinal’s habit and hat by the time that Parliament opened on 3 November and, with this in mind, he had already written to Gigli in Rome to make the necessary arrangements. ‘Send to me,’ he requested, ‘two or three hoods of such pattern and colour as cardinals be wont to wear there and also one paper of caps larger and shallower than those were which your lordship lately sent to me; with two kirtles (tunics) and other like garments.’ And though cardinals like himself, who had not yet achieved the rank of legate a latere, most often wore violet, he would also ask for bolts of silk, damask and taffeta in scarlet, which was properly the papal colour.
Ultimately, the delayed arrival of Wolsey’s hat from Rome would become a source of considerable frustration for him. Along with the ring which all cardinals wore, his hat was the most visible symbol of his newfound eminence and he fretted about its absence excessively. Writing to Gigli, for instance, he mentioned how ‘the King’s Grace marvelleth that the pope delayeth so long the sending of the red hat to me, seeing how tenderly, instantly, and often his grace hath written to his holiness’. In response, Gigli confessed that he could not imagine what had caused the delay, but promised that he would do his best to expedite matters. Yet six more weeks would pass before the hat was finally sent on its way along with a ring ‘of more than usual value’ and a plenary indulgence for all those present at the installation ceremony. And it was not until early November that the treasured object, with its heavy red tassels, arrived at Dover.
Predictably, no effort was spared in making the most of the occasion, in spite of the fact that Cardinal Gambara, the papal protonotary accompanying the hat ‘seemed to all men to be a person of slight estimation’ who had little sense of style or proper decorum. Indeed, according to some reports, Gambara arrived in Dover carrying the hat in nothing more than a servant’s bag and was intending to push on to London like an ordinary courtier before Wolsey intercepted him and, in the words of William Tyndale, ‘clothed the ruffian in rich array and sent him back to Dover again’ to be offered a symbolic welcome by the gentlemen of Kent.
This, however, was only the beginning of the pageantry, for Wolsey had made sure that on its way to London the hat would be conveyed ‘with such triumph as though the greatest prince of Christendom had come into the realm’. At Blackheath, for example, an imposing deputation of temporal and spiritual peers, including the Bishop of Lincoln and the Earl of Essex, paid due reverence, while in the City of London the lord mayor, sheriffs and aldermen, along with the members of the livery companies and guilds, were all on hand to make their obeisance as the precious hat made its final journey to the high altar of Westminster Abbey to await its wearer. There, Tyndale informs us, tapers were set about it ‘so that the greatest duke in the land must curtsie thereto; yea, and to his [Wolsey’s] empty seat, he being away’.
It was at Westminster, on Sunday, 18 November, that England’s new cardinal was finally consecrated in a ceremony that was characteristically grand. There had been no difficulty in ensuring the attendance of the kingdom’s great and mighty, since meetings of Parliament and Convocation were already in process, and it was Warham himself who, after presiding at an unusually elaborate high Mass, placed the hat at last upon his rival’s head. Throughout the whole spectacle, moreover, Warham had been assisted by the two Irish archbishops of Armagh and Dublin, eight mitred abbots and eight senior bishops, including John Fisher of Rochester, who acted as crosier during the mass. It was, thought George Cavendish, more like ‘the coronation of a mighty prince or king’ than any other ceremony.
Only the sermon of John Colet, Dean of St Paul’s, struck a less adulatory note. Avoiding his favourite themes of peace and war, he described how the order of cardinals reflected the order of the seraphim in the heavens and must, like the seraphim, be consumed continually by love of the Trinity. To emphasise the point, Colet then went on to point out that a cardinal’s scarlet robe was intended to be nothing less than a symbol of his burning love, a love that must extend to righteous protection of both rich and poor alike. Furthermore, Colet continued, a cardinal must remember that, like his heavenly Master, he came not to be ministered unto, but to minister, since ‘whosover shall exalt himself shall be abased, and he that shall humble himself shall be exalted’.
But if Colet’s words were intended to instruct Wolsey, they only served, in effect, to emphasise the irony of what followed, for though it was Warham who set the hat upon the cardinal’s head, there was no doubting where seniority now lay. Indeed, as the procession made its way solemnly down the nave of the cathedral, Cardinal Wolsey was preceded by two crosses, while Warham had no cross carried before him at all. And in an age which made the symbolic affirmation of status an obsession, there could be no doubting the significance of this fact. Indeed, in no ceremony from this time forth, public or private, would any cross ever be carried before another clergyman when Wolsey was present.
Naturally enough, the same unmistakable message was reinforced both by the passage back to York Place and the junketing that followed. Eighteen temporal peers, headed by the dukes of Norfolk and Suffolk, formed the cardinal’s personal escort and for the subsequent celebrations all the chief clergy of the English Church were on hand in Wolsey’s newly built banqueting hall, along with the king himself, Catherine his queen and his sister Mary. Sumptuous tapestries and pictures covered every chamber and corridor, we are told, and ‘a great feast was kept as to such a high and honourable creation belongeth’. It was, from all accounts, a uniquely splendid spectacle for one who was rapidly becoming a uniquely splendid spectacle of a man.