A clear understanding of Henry VIII's relationship with his ministers is fundamental to any analysis of Tudor politics and policy-making. The topic has been debated intensively, if inconclusively, over the last thirty years, but a consensus is emerging. Henry VIII, it is generally agreed, was less consistently the author of his own policy than Edward IV or Henry VII, but it is wrong to cast him either as an 'absentee landlord', who delegated the affairs of state to others, or as a 'mental defective', who needed his ministers to manage him. Henry VIII, like Elizabeth I, was uninterested in routine administration, but always wielded a decisive influence over key issues of policy: those related to war and foreign policy, to his marriages and the succession (and notably the tactics of his first divorce campaign), and to religion, especially the royal supremacy and the theology of the nascent church of England. To a greater extent than Elizabeth's, Henry's mind could be swayed by favoured councillors and intimates, but it is a mistake to see him as merely a tool of faction. John Foxe's near-contemporary account, itself the origin of the factional interpretation of the politics of the reign of Henry VIII, contains an element of truth, but is tainted by exaggeration and blatant Protestant bias:

While good counsel was about him, and could be heard, the king did much good. So again, when sinister and wicked counsel, under subtle and crafty pretences, had gotten once the foot in, thrusting truth and verity out of the prince's ears, how much religion and all good things went prosperously forward before, so much, on the contrary side, all revolted backward again.

The significance of this statement has been mistaken. When it was written, Foxe was under pressure to acclaim the role of Henry VIII as a 'godly' (i.e. reformed) prince, and thus to explain away the inconsistencies of Henrician religious policy and, in particular, the reversion to Catholic theology following the Act of Six Articles and Cromwell's fall. He accomplished this by arguing that Henry merely followed his councillors' advice, but this interpretation underestimates the impact of the king's interventions.

The young Henry VIII, admittedly, was less attentive to business than the mature king. In his youth, Henry found writing 'both tedious and painful'. He chose to do as little of it as possible! Two turning-points in this respect were in the 1520s: first, the king's entry into the literary offensive against Martin Luther in 1521, and second his decision to orchestrate his first divorce campaign personally in the summer of 1527. Henry's interest in literary argument and theology was firmly awakened during the experiment of 1521, when, at Wolsey's suggestion, he wrote a treatise in reply to Luther's The Babylonian Captivity of the Church that won him the title 'Defender of the Faith' from the pope. The book, originally in Latin, was entitled The Assertion of the Seven Sacraments. It was probably a team effort. In composing it, Henry was assisted by a panel of Oxford and Cambridge theologians nominated by Wolsey, and Wolsey and Thomas More were involved as well. But there is no doubt that Henry had overall control, that he wrote chunks of the book himself, and that the published version reflected his personal opinions at the time.

Again, in the summer of 1527, Henry seized the initiative from an absent Wolsey in soliciting support for, and orchestrating, the strategy that underpinned his first divorce campaign. This was the fulcrum of Henry VIII's reign, since the king's choice of arguments involved a peremptory, if intelligible, interpretation of passages from the Hebrew text of the Old Testament that undermined Wolsey's position as papal legate and led inexorably towards the break with Rome. The episode was a disaster for Wolsey. Until then, the minister had enjoyed considerable discretion in both domestic and foreign policy. Yet even then, there had been limits. If the young Henry VIII revelled in jousting, hunting and conversation -- and boasted about it in a song he wrote himself! -- he always knew that he was king. In 1515, for example, after a heated debate at Blackfriars concerning the king's right to regulate papal decrees and clerical privileges and immunities by royal prerogative, Wolsey was forced to submit to Henry VIII on his knees. This was a foretaste of later events. Henry VIII could appear generous, gregarious, affable, witty, even benign, but he had a morbid tendency to brood and always insisted on his right to have the last word. He was the final arbiter of policy, even at moments when he seemed to be inattentive. And his enmity was aroused by 'obstinate' disagreement or by anything he perceived to be a slight to his regality.

A. F. Pollard claimed that Wolsey enjoyed a 'prime-ministerial' ascendancy for fourteen years, but this analogy is borrowed from Victorian politics and historiography. In Tudor terms it is anachronistic and misleading. The prime minister has a settled constitutional position. He is properly accountable to Parliament, but, unlike Tudor ministers and councillors, he can no longer be dismissed by the head of state. By contrast, Wolsey held no fixed constitutional position. He served only at the king's will and pleasure. Part of his power, it is true, derived from his status as legatus. His authority as a cardinal-legate and archbishop was exalted. Furthermore, Wolsey was far from loved by the lay nobility in Council and Parliament. The grandeur that emanated from his position as legatus was vital if a butcher's son were to command authority in an aristocratic age. In a sense, his magnificent buildings and his ecclesiastical pomp -- his crosses, his pillars, his pole-axes, his train, his carriages, and his cardinal's hat -- were essential stage props. It was not for nothing that Wolsey almost wept at the charge of praemunire in 1529, since it stripped him of his legatine status, 'wherein consisted all my high honour'. But the insufficiency of Wolsey's position as legatus is demonstrated by the ease with which he was overthrown. This is the crux. Wolsey was the king's chief councillor, but he was also the king's subject. He seemed licensed to rule as alter rex, but served only at the king's pleasure.

The 'prime ministerial' analogy also implies that Wolsey was a public official. It suggests that he was the 'public servant of the state', with a duty to set the 'public' interest -- for example the pursuit of a general European peace or the welfare of the ordinary people -- above the 'private' or sectional interests of the king or the nobility. This line of argument was cast in fictional terms in Book I of More's Utopia and tentatively began to enter the consciousness of English political theorists in the reign of Edward VI, but is alien to the reign of Henry VIII, when it was clearly understood that a 'minister' was a personal servant. In colloquial speech, the term defined someone who waited upon, or acted under, the authority of a superior; its usage to mean a 'high officer of the state' is not found until 1625, and even then is ambiguous. (Even Fletcher and Shakespeare's Henry VIII referred to Wolsey as 'prime man of the state' and not prime minister.) This is not a quibble. Wolsey (and later Cromwell) was the king's preeminent councillor; but he held this position as a royal servant. What mattered was the king's confidence and trust. Nothing could save a man who lost or abused that trust. Tudor monarchy was still a personal monarchy; the crucible of politics was not Parliament but the Court. Wolsey served Henry VIII at a time when no coherent theoretical distinction between the 'state' and royal government had been established. The doctrine of 'ministerial accountability' lay more than a century ahead, and Parliament was still an exclusively royal institution which the king summoned and dissolved at will.

Recent 'revisionist' scholarship has seized on this point and made considerable play of it. After centuries of vilification, Wolsey's reputation is in the process of rehabilitation. Traditional scholarship argued that Wolsey arrogated power to himself in the Council, ruling the roost in Star Chamber and depriving the king of attendant councillors at Court. His ecclesiastical polity was a despotism, and his fiscalism became predatory, showing Tudor government at its most ambitious and least effective. His foreign policy was a costly failure, while he treated domestic government as a series of cavalry charges. In particular, he repeatedly began things that he was unable to finish, thereby clogging up the administrative machine. He worked in fits and starts, stimulated by the scent of political or fiscal advantage, rather than by sustained concern that policies should be seen through. He thought irrelevant the opinions of everyone except Henry VIII, or brushed them aside because he presumed them hostile, wrong, or ignorant. These are extreme views, but they shaped the standard interpretation for almost fifty years.

If, however, Wolsey was the king's loyal 'servant' who was merely following instructions, the picture would look completely different. In that case, the tergiversations of Wolsey's foreign policy, in particular, could be readily explained. Wolsey himself could be presented as a master of diplomacy who consistently endeavoured to establish a European concert for the purposes of peace, but was constrained, through Henry VIII's will and sheer belligerence, to advocate war intermittently. In domestic policy-making, Wolsey's schemes for conciliar, judicial, and socio-economic reform were always too ambitious to have come to perfect fruition, but 'revisionism' can excuse most of his failures on the grounds of subversion by the king's impetuousness and excessive demands for money. Again, the failure of Wolsey's ecclesiastical reforms can be blamed on Henry's demands for clerical taxation and on a succession of interventions that reflected the king's desire to control the English church and its patronage from the beginning of his reign. The last point is compelling. There is evidence to suggest that Henry VIII decided early in his reign that he intended to control and manage the English church; that for fourteen years he ran the church and clergy through Wolsey, and that the clergy connived, because it was better to be ruled by a papal legate than more directly by the king -- and Wolsey certainly protected the clergy from the full force of Henry VIII's greed between 1515 and 1529. The 'revisionist' argument is thus superficially attractive: Wolsey consistently maintained the posture of the king's loyal executive, which -- as we have seen -- was not just simply a matter of tact or presentation, it was strictly true.

Yet further refinement is required. Henry VIII was the final arbiter of Crown policy, but until the mid-1520s Wolsey enjoyed a considerable degree of latitude. Furthermore, only in the broadest sense was Henry VIII taking independent decisions whilst Wolsey's career was at its zenith. This is because Wolsey was able to dominate the King's Council until 1525 or thereabouts, and in particular was able to concentrate it physically around him in the Star Chamber at Westminster during the legal terms, whilst the king resided at Greenwich, Richmond, or Windsor. The old palace of Westminster had been abandoned as a royal residence in 1512 after a disastrous fire, and it was not until Wolsey's own York Place (the site of the modern Whitehall) became Henry's property upon the cardinal's conviction for praemunire in 1529 that the king acquired a suitable replacement.  Again, Wolsey exerted strict controls over the king's counsellors and secretaries at Court and consolidated his power still further by the manner in which Henry was 'fed' information. Anyone who has served on committees knows that the person who manages the secretariat exerts a disproportionate influence on the proceedings. And so it was with Wolsey. He dealt with important matters personally, while lesser matters were delegated to trusted secretaries or to specially-nominated agents whom he manipulated. When a crisis blew up, Wolsey worked for twelve hours at a stretch never rising 'once to piss, ne yet to eat any meat but continually wrote his letters with his own hands'. At other times, secretaries were employed, but these were appointed, promoted, sent on diplomatic missions abroad, seconded to routine judicial business, or simply dismissed, according to Wolsey's inclination.

Until the summer of 1527, it was almost invariably Wolsey who calculated the available options and ranked them for royal consideration; who established the parameters of each successive debate; who edited correspondence from Europe, Scotland and Ireland by summarizing it in his own letters to Henry; who controlled the flow of conciliar information; who selected secretaries, middle-rank officials, sheriffs, and justices of the peace; and who promulgated decisions that he had largely shaped, if not strictly taken. In foreign affairs, Henry's responsibility for the broad outline of his policy is undisputed, but more than mere details were left to Wolsey. To foreign ambassadors, Henry seemed largely consistent: he was bent on conquests in northern France, an objective which in principle Wolsey shared, but about which, in practice, he expressed reservations. Only rarely did Henry and Wolsey disagree. King and minister worked smoothly together. Yet to credit their successes largely to Wolsey's inspired leadership and to blame their failures largely on the damage caused by Henry's interventions is too schematic. Again, to excuse Wolsey's undoubted ambition, monopolistic tendencies, and frequent bullying tactics on the grounds that they were not only useful to Henry's service, but were indulged deliberately as a matter of royal policy, is unwarranted.

The way to resolve the clash between traditional and 'revisionist' interpretations is to recognize that the young Henry VIII, until 1527, imagined Wolsey not only as his servant, but also as his friend and partner. Wolsey was a workaholic. But, like Henry VIII, he, too, knew how to relax. He and Henry spent time together, especially early on in their relationship. Moreover, as a former fellow of Magdalen, one of Oxford's most conspicuously humanist colleges, Wolsey's intellectual interests were wide. Henry VIII always regarded himself as a humanist! Like Thomas More, whom Wolsey brought to Court in April 1518 as a secretary, and with whom the king discussed astronomy, theology and the classics, Wolsey had a penetrating intelligence and a keen sense of humour. Even the Protestant William Tyndale said that he had an angel's wit. The sticking point with the nobility was Wolsey's close relationship with the king, and in particular his uniquely privileged access. (Cromwell enjoyed a very different status in the 1530s: he was invariably the king's servant and 'man of business', and never his friend or partner.)

So Wolsey was attacked for a host of alleged abuses of power: taking the great seal abroad; taking the king's name in vain; misleading the king by falsely reporting the views of others; banging his fist on the Council table in fits of impatience; and failing to consult other members of the Council. But these charges were symptoms of the cause, not the cause itself. Wolsey did generally consult other leading nobles and councillors about significant policy shifts; he did not act improperly by the standards of the day. But he monopolized power and dominated the Council no less as a result, because the fact is that he consulted his fellow-councillors only after he had already agreed with the king in conversation the direction that Crown policy should take. It was less Wolsey's actual decisions which were the cause of resentment, but the fact that, for over a decade, Henry VIII tolerated him as his partner. His political rivals envied these privileges, and were jealous that he and Henry walked arm-in-arm together and were intimate confidantes to the exclusion of others.

Wolsey's 'ministerial' tactics were at odds with the preference of the Yorkists and Henry VII for conciliar government. Moreover, Wolsey broke the mould of conciliar government unilaterally: this was his offence. It was why he rarely got credit later for genuine attempts to consult the Council: he was seen to be 'ministerial', even when his efforts to involve the Council were sincere. It was why he was said to have arrogated power to himself, depriving the king of attendant councillors at Court. It was why he was charged with saying and writing, 'The King and I would ye should do thus: the King and I do give unto you our hearty thanks'.

For over a decade Henry and Wolsey governed as a partnership. The king required a minister to accomplish his 'will and pleasure', and Wolsey triumphantly succeeded. It follows from this interpretation that Wolsey was far more the loyal servant of the Crown than the traditional historiography has suggested. That does not imply that Henry VIII knew or approved of everything Wolsey did, nor did it oblige Henry to stand by his minister when things went wrong. By the middle of 1525 Wolsey was beginning to overreach himself in foreign policy, finance, and relations with the localities. Two years later came the beginning of the end: the burgeoning of the king's 'great matter'. And when Wolsey failed to resolve this in his legatine court at Blackfriars in the summer of 1529, he was disgraced. The partnership between king and minister was dissolved, and Henry sought new counsels.