Wolsey

The Life of King Henry VIII's Cardinal

John Matusiak

• Publisher: The History Press
• Year: 2014
• Print ISBN: 9780750965354, 9780752498843
• eBook ISBN: 9780750957762
• Topic: History
• Subtopic: Historical Biographies
• Index: History

Cardinal Wolsey is a controversial figure: a butcher's son, a man of letters and the Church, a divisive political expert, a man of principle – yet, to some, an arrogant upstart. As Lord Chancellor to the incorrigible Henry VIII he achieved much both at home and abroad, but his failure to achieve the mighty monarch's divorce from Catherine of Aragon saw him brought to his knees. John Matusiak explores the pragmatic cardinal's life and career to uncover a man of contradictions and extremes whose meteoric rise was marked by an equally inexorable descent into desperation, as he attempted in vain to satisfy the tempestuous master whose ambition ultimately broke him. Far from being another familiar portrait of an overweight and overweening spider or cautionary tale of pride preceding a fall, this is the gripping story of how consummate talent, noble intentions and an eagle eye for the main chance can contrive with the vagaries of power politics to raise an individual to unheard of heights before finally consuming him.

1

‘This Ipswich Fellow’

In a report of 1519 which echoed the universal prejudice of the day, the Venetian ambassador Sebastiano Giustiniani noted tersely that Thomas Wolsey was of ‘low origin’. Yet in terms of the rarefied courtly world that he frequented, the Italian’s remark could hardly have been more apt, for the cardinal who by then had come to vie with princes is said to have grown up above a butcher’s shop in the provincial port and market town of Ipswich, ‘at the left corner of a little avenue leading down to the churchyard’ of St Nicholas. According to the Court Rolls relating to the borough, the premises had cost a total of £8 6s 8d to purchase, which, by the humble standards of the day, was no mean sum for any moderately successful tradesman to acquire. But if it smacked of thrift and earnest endeavour, the amount involved was hardly suggestive of grace or privilege. And the common well that the property shared with the neighbouring family of a certain Edward Winter provides ample proof of its limitations.

By contrast, the date of Wolsey’s birth is altogether more uncertain. In the same report, Giustiniani observed that the cardinal was ‘about’ 46 years of age, placing his birth towards the end of 1472 or in the early part of 1473. But the Abbot of Winchcombe’s claim in August 1514 that Wolsey was then under 40 indicates a slightly later alternative. And calculations based upon the date of his ordination in March 1498 offer little further assistance, for if the minimum age of admission into the priesthood was 24, the only certainty is that Wolsey cannot have been born later than 1474.

Nevertheless, some inspired guesses have stood the test of time and two in particular are worthy of special consideration. Writing in 1724, it was Sir Richard Fiddes who first suggested that Wolsey’s Christian name might well be linked to the feast of St Thomas Aquinas on 7 March and this particular notion has always had its fair share of advocates. The year, on the other hand, has often been reckoned at 1471 from the evidence of George Cavendish, a trusted member of the cardinal’s household who would later become his most notable biographer. Neither proposal, therefore, is without a respectable pedigree. But it is not until the two dates are used in combination that their full interest emerges, for if England’s most remarkable statesman really did make his entrance in March 1471 or thereabouts, he could hardly have done so in more inauspicious circumstances.

Only two months earlier a marvellous blazing star, marked by ‘a white flame of fire fervently burning’, was said to have lit up the sky for twelve nights on end, while throughout March itself ‘great storms and tempests from the sea’ raged continually. For some while, too, an outbreak of bubonic plague had been delivering what Sir John Paston considered ‘the most universal death’ he had ever witnessed in England. Most ominously of all, however, this was a time when the peace of the realm was hanging by the slenderest of threads. Little more than a year before, the Earl of Warwick, the ‘Kingmaker’, had changed sides to depose his sovereign, and though Edward IV soon returned in triumph it would require two grim battles, at Barnet and Tewkesbury, not to mention the violent death of Henry VI in the Tower, to restore temporary peace.

Yet, for all its tribulations, this was also a time of rich opportunity for any thrusting individual suitably endowed with an eagle eye for advancement. And Robert Wolsey – who, like his son, would always spell his name ‘Wulcy’ – was, it seems, just such a person. Throughout the fifteenth century, in fact, successive generations of Suffolk Wolseys had fashioned modest livings as butchers, while at Dunwich, Yoxford and Blythburgh the more enterprising of them had also made their way as innkeepers. But despite his sturdily plebeian roots, Thomas Wolsey’s father was not, it seems, inclined to mediocrity and for this reason he moved as a young man to Ipswich from his native village of Combs, near Stowmarket, bent on making good. Furthermore, by the time that Thomas – the first of his four children – was born, he was already combining the roles of butcher, innkeeper and grazier, and, in the process, confidently outstripping his forebears.

Crucially, he had achieved a lucrative marriage to a member of a well-connected East Anglian family that had come over the years to dominate several local villages, and though Joan Daundy was not quite of gentle stock, her dowry was nevertheless a more than handy acquisition. Indeed, a potent combination of her father’s means and her husband’s methods would soon be yielding such solid dividends that by 1475 the Wolseys had moved from the parish of St Mary Elms, where their famous son was born, to the more central location where he was to spend his childhood. By around 1480, moreover, an Ipswich monk named Fetherstone was referring to a local squire called ‘Wolci’ who, besides fattening cattle on his meadow near the town, was also selling wool to the English market in Calais. Indeed, well before his death in the autumn of 1496, ‘Squire’ Wolsey had, it seems, actually acquired sufficient means to retire in comparative comfort.

The rest from his life’s labours was surely welcome, too, for the head of the Wolsey household had striven long and hard to better himself, and suffered his fair share of indignities along the way. As a newcomer to Ipswich, possibly unfamiliar with the tangle of civic ordinances impeding his enterprise and doubtless keen to make his mark in any event, it had not been long before he was making regular appearances before the local magistracy. Arraigned at first for keeping a ‘hospicium’ or inn, where he is said to have sold victuals for excessive gain, he also found himself in court shortly afterwards when he and a Stowmarket butcher by the name of John Wood were accused of selling bad pies.

Although the fines involved were comparatively light, by the time that Thomas was 9 his father was said to be ‘the greatest offender before the leet’. Not only had he gone on to brew ale and sell it in illegal measures, he had also supplied horse feed for excessive profit, permitted his pigs to wander at large within the borough precincts and failed to maintain the guttering in front of his house. Later, he would be indicted yet again: first, for defiling the highway with filth from his stables instead of placing it within the public pits provided for the purpose, and then, as a final flourish, for ‘fostering harlots and adulterers within his house against the king’s peace’.

Despite these scrapes and setbacks, however, Robert Wolsey continued to grow in wealth and came ultimately to be something of a fixture in the community. No doubt, too, the son beheld in his father’s progress signs of what was required by the times, for a bold head and stout heart could, it seems, open many a door. Though he would never manage to become a free burgess of the borough of Ipswich and thereby gain the right to vote, Wolsey senior still served his turn for three years as churchwarden of St Nicholas and acquired further property at St Mary Stoke, along with farmland at Sternfield-by-Farnham, a village some 24 miles away.

Likewise, at his death he was not only able to bequeath funds for a painting of an archangel above the altar of his parish church but also to leave other money to guarantee that masses should be sung for both him and his friends over the space of one whole year. And if his house just down from the Cornhill, past Rosemary Lane and Dog’s Head Street, provided a somewhat modest address for any aspiring bourgeois, at least it stood at the heart of things. Nearby rose the massive church of St Peter and behind that the humbler but still august edifice of Ipswich Grammar School, founded in 1476 by a local mercantile elite which was thriving at that time as never before.

Certainly, the town of Thomas Wolsey’s birth was one where any industrious individual had scope to prosper. Situated 70 miles north-east of London and benefiting from good access to the sea along the Gipping and Orwell rivers, it was a sheltered port, through which thousands of tightly stuffed woolsacks passed continually to the great duchy of Burgundy and the English-held port of Calais. For all of two centuries, in fact, Ipswich merchants had been taking wool, hides, corn and cheese either to Brittany in return for salt, or to the Low Countries from which they returned with finished cloth.

Just as Ipswich had long served as a window on the Continent, so it had also become over many years a magnet for foreign traders and craftsmen – a goodly number of whom would surely have lodged at Robert Wolsey’s premises. In this truly cosmopolitan community, wine merchants from Bordeaux rubbed shoulders with arms traders from Hamburg and dealers in horses’ hides from Cologne. Spanish vessels, too, were regular visitors and the town also boasted its own thriving community of Flemings who had drifted there throughout the fifteenth century, marrying local brides and occupying themselves with industries such as brewing, carving and hat-making.

Predictably, the material benefits accruing from such a bustle of commercial activity had been considerable, particularly since 1404, when Ipswich became one of the few towns in the kingdom permitted to export wool to the Continent. Thereafter, Ipswich merchants had also begun to send their ships on the lucrative ‘long Iceland’ voyage, selling their cargoes of stockfish to London merchants at St Gregory’s Fair in Sudbury, or to the Suffolk gentry. Others made good profits from the canvas trade, and such were the resulting surplus funds available to the host of newly rich burgesses that every one of Ipswich’s churches would be rebuilt during these plentiful years. Indeed, the Perpendicular churches and half-timbered town houses with their ornately carved corner posts, which form such a prominent part of Suffolk’s architectural heritage, still bear ample testimony to a sustained commercial boom that would cause average incomes in the area to rise fourfold during the century.

Meanwhile, as Ipswich continued to hum with commercial activity the town charter, granted by King John on 25 May 1200, further reinforced its robustly independent outlook. Protected from the interference of powerful magnate families, such as the Mowbrays, de la Poles, de Veres and Howards, Ipswich’s 5,000 inhabitants were almost always smugly dismissive of the high politics associated with the Wars of the Roses. Tending mainly to support the Yorkist cause – albeit in a lukewarm manner – through the influence of Sir John Howard, or ‘Jockey of Norfolk’ as he was known, the town gained from Edward IV and Richard III the privileges it prized and quietly ignored the greater tides of national affairs.

Thus, when Edward IV returned from his foreign exile the annals of the town recorded only that a certain Ingell Bolton was fined ‘for nuisance done to the highway at Cole Dunghill, by laying muck therein’. On other occasions, too, while the country at large was being rocked by faction and assassination, we hear in Ipswich mainly of stiff fines for the likes of John Maughteld, a local shoemaker, found guilty of eavesdropping under the paneless windows of the overhanging upper stories of a wealthy merchant’s house. And when news came finally that the murdered corpse of Henry VI had been brought to St Paul’s and ‘bled on the pavement there’, the same report was swift to return to more pressing local concerns, warning earnestly that ‘the town millers are, at their peril, to take no excessive toll’.

It was here, then, in the midst of the pealing bells of Ipswich’s fifteen churches and a whole wide world away from Westminster and its distracted turnings that Thomas Wolsey was reared. Here, as an eldest son, he was schooled, no doubt, in all the finer points of his father’s trades, learning to barter shrewdly at local market stalls, tending to the foreign merchants at the family inn and rinsing the bloodied floor of the shop in St Nicholas Street when required. Here, too, as he grew through boyhood, he will doubtless have learned of human nature at his father’s side and been shaped and moulded in other ways by the rhythms and spectacles of the everyday world around him.

Bordered by the old Buttermarket and the shambles, the hub of town life for the common people of Ipswich and for young Wolsey, too, was the Cornhill. It was the site of regular wheat and cattle markets and the favourite resort of public preachers and travelling showmen. It was also the place where fairs occurred in summer and the hustings were held from time to time. Less happily, it was home to the stocks, the pillory and the bull ring, and occasionally it heaved with crowds who came to witness a bear-baiting or public execution. By and large, offenders were dispatched unceremoniously enough by the hangman’s noose in Ipswich, but for those criminals who refused to plead, there was also the prospect of death by crushing under heavy stones – the so-called punishment of ‘delapidaretur’ or ‘peine forte et dure’.

No local butcher’s son could have failed to know the sights and sounds of the Cornhill anything other than intimately and, like any young boy, Wolsey is certain to have drunk deeply of what he saw and heard there. No less surely, he must also have gained first-hand experience of some of the town’s other idiosyncracies. According to one local ordinance, for instance, it was deemed an offence to sell the flesh of any bull that had not been baited by dogs for at least an hour prior to slaughter. This savage and noisy practice was said to add flavour to the meat, and it provided its share of daily spectacle as well, for if the tormented animal were not dead within the allocated time, it would be finished off in full public view by a butcher.

But if the world of Wolsey’s boyhood was filled with more than its fair share of cruelty, there were also pockets of prayer and contemplation all around him, which were clearly not without their influence either. The Carmelites or ‘White Friars’ lived out their lives of learning and austerity not far from his house, in a priory whose precincts stretched from St Stephen’s Lane and the Buttermarket towards the town jail. Closer still to Wolsey’s home were the mendicant Franciscans, who resided near the western wall of the town, immediately west of the parish church of St Nicholas. Then there were the ‘Black’ or Dominican Friars, who were established in the town by Henry III back in the thirteenth century, as well as the Austin canons whose priors seem to have led the way in organising the town’s many open-air processions.

Ipswich also boasted its very own religious shrine, located in Lady Lane, only a stone’s throw away from where Wolsey lived. Early historical records abound, in fact, with references to the ‘miraculous powers’ and ‘many marvels’ associated with the Shrine of Our Lady of Grace at Ipswich, and make it clear that the Lady Lane chapel was ‘much resorted to by pilgrims’ and ‘second only to Walsingham’ in popularity. Long after Wolsey had left his home town, Sir Thomas More would visit Ipswich and sing the shrine’s praises, observing how he had seen the daughter of Sir Roger Wentworth, a local landowner, freed from demonic possession: ‘her mouth drawn aside, and her eyes laid out upon her cheeks […] a terrible sight to behold’.

This is not to say that Wolsey’s Ipswich was without its lighter side. Indeed, there was an abundance of festivities and local customs to lighten the everyday struggle for survival. On so-called ‘Hockmondays’, for instance, the women of St Nicholas ward would stretch a chain across a chosen street and hold all passing men to ransom. The guild feasts for which Ipswich was well known are certain to have been another highlight of Thomas Wolsey’s childhood. They were a time for remembrance of dead brethren and an occasion, too, for contrition and reflection. But above all, they were a time for public display and junketing on the grandest scale.

On the day of Corpus Christi 1479, for instance, it is hard to believe that Wolsey’s father was not among those walking slowly behind their guild symbols through the town’s crowded streets: the mariners, merchants and brewers following the sign of the ship; the cloth makers, dyers, drapers, mercers and other men of similar trades making their way behind the effigy of the Virgin Mary; and the butchers and tallow chandlers being led, appropriately enough, by a bull. In the feasting that followed, moreover, young Thomas would almost certainly have enjoyed his share of the lamb, veal, goose, pork, chicken, bread, spices and honey supplied, so we are told, to the families of all guild members on that day.

Most spectacular of all, however, were those rarer occasions when a mighty lord would come to visit Ipswich amid brilliant colours, beating drums and blaring fanfares. By and large, the local landed elite kept their distance from the town, preferring to maintain an Olympian detachment on their extensive estates. Nevertheless, occasional displays of might and splendour remained a crucial element of their mystique and on days such as these the butcher’s son may well have caught a fleeting glimpse of the youthful Thomas Howard, his future nemesis. The two were, after all, almost exact contemporaries and Ipswich itself was surrounded by Howard properties, the most notable of which at this time was the manor of Stoke-by-Nayland a dozen miles to the south-west.

But it was Wolsey’s potential as a budding scholar that would eventually lead him, around the age of 11, to abandon the sights and novelties of his Ipswich home once and for all. Precisely when he embarked upon his education and who was responsible for his earliest tuition are both uncertain, although a number of guild chaplains are known to have doubled as grammar masters, and there were certainly independent schoolmasters within the borough to teach the ‘petties’ or little ones the alphabet. In any event, it was at the town’s grammar school that he received his first formal instruction for a fee of eightpence a quarter under the supervision of a headmaster who had, it seems, only been appointed on condition that he arrange the construction of latrines for his pupils’ use. In a house standing beside the gate of the Friars Preachers, then, Wolsey learnt his Latin primers, memorised his psalter and possibly developed his first love of music as a chorister, since the will of the school’s main benefactor, Richard Felaw, had stipulated that the pupils should sing a Mass of Our Lady at six o’clock each morning in the neighbouring Dominican church.

Wolsey’s stay, however, would not be a long one, and though the precise circumstances of his removal are unclear, it seems that he must have shone sufficiently at his studies to come to the attention of James Goldwell, who had been Bishop of Norwich since 1472. Goldwell, a former principal secretary to Edward IV, is known to have taken a keen interest in the grammar school at Ipswich and he is known, too, to have held in his gift four places at Magdalen College School each year. In all likelihood, young Wolsey’s name would have been put forward by John Squyer, Master of the grammar school, and the funds of the Daundy family may also have been enlisted to help with the costs involved. Ever keen to identify and reward scholars of potential, Goldwell was thus persuaded to select the butcher’s son as a likely candidate for study at Oxford.

There can be little doubt either that Wolsey’s father would have fully appreciated the considerable possibilities that admission to the university and eventual entry into the priesthood might open up for his firstborn. The Church, after all, offered a career not only to lowly parsons and curates in every one of England’s parishes, but also to canons in cathedral chapters, to chantry priests singing lucrative private masses for the souls of dead benefactors, and even to the chaplains of the nobility. That a clerical career might eventually make his son one of the most influential figures in Christendom would, however, surely have exceeded even Robert Wolsey’s wildest expectations.

The College of St Mary Magdalen, which had been established twenty-six years earlier, was still being built when its fresh-faced resident from Ipswich arrived there to spend the next eighteen years or so. A small turreted fragment of the college’s school, which was founded in 1479, remains to this day, but apart from a single large room the original building consisted of little more than the chambers of the headmaster and usher, along with a kitchen. It was in this Grammar Hall that Wolsey, along with a handful of timid boys, would have received his first instruction. And though the frequent references in the college accounts to the repair of broken windows suggest that the boys remained a spirited bunch, they were subjected to a rigorous academic diet, which was imposing enough to intimidate even the most avid of young scholars.

The s...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Title Page
• Dedication
• Contents
• 1. ‘This Ipswich Fellow’
• 2. The Wide Ocean of Opportunity
• 3. ‘At Anchor in the Port of Promotion’
• 4. The Threshold of All Things Great
• 5. Service and High Favour
• 6. Mars Ascendant
• 7. To Tournay’s Towered Walls
• 8. Author of Peace
• 9. Thomas Cardinalis
• 10. Pillar of Church and State
• 11. ‘Glorious Peacock’
• 12. ‘Arbiter of Christendom’
• 13. ‘Butcher’s Cur’
• 14. Neither Glory nor Gain
• 15. ‘Violence and Puissance’
• 16. The Cardinal’s ‘Great Matter’
• 17. Bereft, Beleaguered and Bedevilled
• 18. ‘Tyrants’ Sepulchre’
• Epilogue
• Sources and Bibliographical Information
• Author’s Note
• Acknowledgements
• Plates
• Copyright