Wolsey's fall in 1529 stemmed directly from the inability of the cardinal-minister to persuade Pope Clement VII to annul Henry VIII's first marriage to Catherine of Aragon in order that he might marry Anne Boleyn. By 1519 Henry was complaining that Catherine had failed to produce a male heir, and by 1524 his marriage had to all intents and purposes broken down. By the spring of 1527, Henry had set his mind on divorcing Catherine in order to marry Anne Boleyn. He began openly to voice his 'scruples' about the validity of his marriage. These partly concerned the circumstances surrounding Catherine's previous marriage to his deceased brother, Prince Arthur; and partly related to his lack of a legitimate male heir, which heightened his conviction that his marriage was unlawful in the eyes of God.

Much of the trouble arose because Henry, in preparing his Assertion of the Seven Sacraments against Martin Luther in 1521, had studied canonical and scriptural sources which he discussed with Thomas More and a team of theologians. This meant that, when he later debated his 'great matter' with Wolsey and others, he was able to 'load' his case with quotations from the primary sources, however mistaken his interpretation may have been. These interventions by Henry marked the fulcrum of his reign. No longer did Wolsey have discretion to formulate policy in consultation with the king. He had to endorse, and pursue diplomatically to their conclusion, the specific arguments selected by the king. For Henry believed that there could be no reasonable denial of the justice of his cause. His arguments were the correct ones! He insisted that his marriage to Catherine of Aragon infringed divine and natural law, which no pope could dispense. Despite all Wolsey's efforts to identify alternative, more technical, and less confrontational arguments, Henry VIII insisted that policy be formulated in line with his own thesis.¹

In May 1527, Wolsey summoned Henry to appear before a legatine court at York Place to answer matters affecting the 'tranquillity of consciences' and the salvation of the royal soul. Quickly adjourned, these stage-managed proceedings enabled Wolsey to start a debate and to argue that there was a 'sufficient' case for the king to answer. However, as soon as Wolsey had departed for Amiens in July on the embassy to ratify the Anglo-French alliance, Henry alone took command of his divorce campaign. Although he and Wolsey initially worked together to identify the canonists and theologians who would offer the best support for the king's position, once Wolsey had left for France the king personally directed his divorce policy and never again relinquished control of it. In particular, he conscripted to his side Richard Wakefield, the reader in Hebrew at Oxford, whose reputation for learning ran far and wide, and who was summoned to give his opinion on the interpretations of key passages from the Old Testament books of Leviticus and Deuteronomy and to debate the matter with Bishop John Fisher, who opposed the divorce.

In October 1527, Henry broached the matter of his marriage to Thomas More at Hampton Court. He laid the Bible before him and read out conflicting texts from Leviticus and Deuteronomy.

If a man shall take his brother's wife, it is an impurity. He hath uncovered his brother's nakedness; they shall be childless. (Leviticus, 20:21)

When brethren dwell together, and one of them dieth without children, the wife of the deceased shall not marry to another; but his brother shall take her, and raise up seed for his brother. (Deuteronomy, 25:5)

These were just two of several passages which, despite apparent mutual contradiction, proved, as Henry always maintained, that his marriage was against divine law, which no pope can dispense. Henry had married Catherine by virtue of Julius II's dispensation of the impediment of affinity² which her former marriage to Henry's deceased brother, Arthur, had created between them. But this dispensation, according to Henry, was invalid. His marriage was against the Levitical law, which the king held to be divine. Henry was living in sin, because the affinity between himself and Catherine 'could in no wise by the Church be dispensable'.

Henry could resolve the apparent conflict between Leviticus and Deuteronomy because he held that, unlike the law of Leviticus, the 'law' of Deuteronomy was not divine but merely a practice of Jewish society -- a social habit or custom -- and thus not binding on Christians. Again, Henry had to explain that he really was 'childless' in accordance with the text of Leviticus. This is where Wakefield came in, since he supported the king's thesis that 'childless' meant 'male childless' and not 'female childless' on the basis of the Hebrew texts. He also held that Leviticus condemned not so much illicit sexual intercourse as irregular marriage; that the law of Leviticus was binding on Christians; and that Leviticus applied as much to the wives of dead relatives as to the wives of the living. This was exactly what Henry required! In addition, Henry VIII increasingly maintained that marriage to a brother's wife was an unnatural act. It was akin to incest or sodomy or other sexual crimes. All of this considerably livened up the king's proceedings! When Henry finally presented in person his libellus (i.e. the summary of his side of the case) to Wolsey's legatine court at Blackfriars in the spring of 1529, it fascinated all who heard it. When, a little later, it was printed in defence of the king's cause, Henry was quickly complaining that his private affairs were the gossip of every alehouse!

The crux is the king's contention that his marriage to Catherine infringed divine and natural law. If the pope had dispensed a marriage against the Levitical law, he had erred and should correct the matter at once. If he declined, then he was no better than any human legislator who had exceeded his authority. Wolsey's fall and the break with Rome substantially derived from these propositions. In particular, Henry's arguments exposed the latent tension between Wolsey's dual role as lord chancellor and legatus a latere. His position could quickly become untenable.

If Wolsey had been more secure at home, he might have survived. But he was not. Already he faced a barrage of difficulties. These had begun with the failure of the Amicable Grant, followed by the French alliance of 1525. A majority of Henry's courtiers were pro-imperial-Burgundian: powerful nobles such as Thomas Howard, 3rd duke of Norfolk, resented Wolsey's renversement des alliances which they criticized continually in the king's presence. ³ Henry VIII himself had been shaken by the East Anglian revolt over the Amicable Grant. He distanced himself from Wolsey in the aftermath, professing ignorance of the latter's fiscal demands and insisting that it had never been his intention to ask anything dishonourable or against his laws. Wolsey excused himself and accepted the blame. ⁴ The issue here is not whether Henry may indeed have been ignorant of the demand -- this is possible, but highly unlikely -- but rather that Wolsey was publicly humiliated.

It was in this context that the special relationship between king and minister began to dissolve and the King's Council returned to the fore. The name of the game was politics. Wolsey had to retain, as well as initially gain, power. For a decade he had been Henry VIII's friend and partner, but to survive he had to hold his place and keep ahead of the field. After the débâcle of the Amicable Grant, this became increasingly difficult. The French alliance was a diplomatic volte-face and highly controversial. Moreover, as Henry VIII increasingly took an interest in foreign and domestic policy-making, he became aware of the lack of councillors attendant on his person at Court. By the end of 1525, he was demanding that Wolsey furnish him with 'an honourable presence of councillors about his Grace'. Since Wolsey's ascendancy had, thus far, largely rested upon his ability to concentrate the King's Council around himself in Star Chamber and to restrict and manage the flow of personnel and information to the king, this was a potentially threatening request. As a result, Wolsey resolved that the Council should indeed be reorganized, but in such a way as to limit the access to the king enjoyed by his political rivals. ⁵

The Eltham Ordinances for the regulation of the Court were promulgated in January 1526. They instructed twenty 'honourable, virtuous, sad, wise, expert, and discreet' councillors to give 'their attendance upon [the king's] most royal person', and to perform the Council's full range of political, administrative and judicial duties. The councillors named included Wolsey, the dukes of Norfolk and Suffolk, the marquises of Dorset and Exeter, the earls of Shrewsbury and Worcester, Bishop Tunstall, Lord Sandes, Sir William Fitzwilliam, Sir Henry Guildford, Sir Henry Wyatt and Sir Thomas More. They were the leading office-holders of Court and state. Had the proposed new Council come into effect and governed as a corporate board, it would have resembled the Privy Council that emerged in the wake of Cromwell's fall in 1540 and been more mobile and powerful than Wolsey, who was obliged by his duties as lord chancellor to keep the legal terms in his courts of Chancery and Star Chamber at Westminster.

But to publish a reforming ordinance is not necessarily to alter anything! And sure enough, Wolsey's text immediately provided that 'by reason of their attendance at the [legal] terms for administration of justice', the lords of the Council 'shall many seasons fortune to be absent from the king's Court, and specially in the term times.' ⁶ Accordingly, Wolsey reduced the twenty attendant councillors to a committee of ten and then to a sub-committee of four, it being finally provided that two councillors from among those resident at Court should always be present to advise the king and dispatch matters of justice unless Henry otherwise gave them leave. 'Which direction well observed', concluded Wolsey in a final audacious flourish, 'the king's highness shall always be well furnished of an honourable presence of councillors'. ⁷

What Wolsey did in 1526 was to appease the king and offer his fellow-councillors on paper the corporate political role he had denied them since 1514, but in reality to thwart exactly that! The conciliar chapters of the Eltham Ordinances were designed to boost Wolsey's waning ministerial power. For eighteen months, moreover, the ploy worked. Until Wolsey departed for Amiens and the king's divorce reacted with the French alliance to erode his power fatally, the councillors daily attendant at Court were still only the king's secretaries. Likewise, the gentlemen of the privy chamber whom Wolsey nominated in the Ordinances -- the king's personal body servants who had the greatest opportunities to chat informally with him -- were chosen precisely because they were not councillors. ⁸ Even then, Wolsey's nominees were warned not to approach the king unless expressly summoned, and the minister's working papers reveal his nagging concern that privy chamber staff should not follow the king into 'secret places' to play politics.

Yet Wolsey could not maintain his ascendancy. The combined forces of the divorce crisis and of opposition to the French alliance were too great. The dukes of Norfolk and Suffolk and Viscount Rochford, Anne Boleyn's father, were prominent among the large group of lords resident at Court and dining with Henry in the privy chamber while Wolsey was at Amiens. ⁹ Already the king had started to show Wolsey's letters to Norfolk and Rochford, and by the following Easter Norfolk and Rochford were being consulted on policy-making without reference to Wolsey. ¹⁰ By March 1529 Henry was showing all his European correspondence to the duke of Suffolk as well as to Norfolk and Rochford. ¹¹ For Wolsey it signalled the end. When Henry openly started to criticize his minister, and the nobles returned to Court to attend the king daily, Wolsey had to work by different rules to those he had previously sustained.

The final nail in Wolsey's coffin was the failure of the second legatine court which sat from May to July 1529 to settle the matter of Henry VIII's suit for annulment of his marriage. Wolsey sat with his fellow-legate Cardinal Campeggio at Blackfriars on the strength of a hard-won commission from Clement VII which empowered them to decide the case, but the court was adjourned before sentence was given. Even at the moment that Wolsey opened its business, a letter was on its way from the Curia instructing Campeggio to exploit every tactic of delay until Clement revoked the case to Rome. Already Campeggio had announced that the legatine court would adjourn at the end of the month for the summer vacation. And on 31 July, the adjournment was declared, whereupon the duke of Suffolk 'gave a great clap on the table and said, "by the Mass, now I see that the old said saw is true, that there was never legate nor cardinal that did good in England"'.¹²

Henry VIII wavered over Wolsey's dismissal, postponing his decision until the beginning of the Michaelmas law term after the summer vacation, when the courts of Chancery and Star Chamber reopened and the lord chancellor's presence would be required. The delay reflected Henry's residual affection for Wolsey. Unlike Cromwell, whom he quickly came to distrust as (allegedly!) an extreme Protestant, Henry VIII was prepared to protect Wolsey from the full extent of his enemies' wrath until a year after his fall, when he was persuaded (probably correctly) that Wolsey was plotting a return to power by way of treasonable interventions in foreign policy in concert with the French.

Wolsey in 1529 was the wrong man in the wrong place at the wrong time. He was wrong because his role as legatus a latere made it impossible for him to pursue to its logical conclusion the king's thesis in the matter of his divorce or to coerce the pope or the English clergy to decide the suit in Henry's favour. Again, Wolsey's diplomacy had left Henry VIII isolated and humiliated in 1529, and, furthermore, had boxed him into a corner over the divorce since the pope was a virtual prisoner of Charles V and the French were almost worthless as allies in Italian politics.

On 9 October 1529, Wolsey 'came into Westminster Hall with all his train' as lord chancellor:

But none of the king's servants would go before, as they were wont to do. And so he sat in the Chancery, but not in the Star Chamber, for all the lords and others of the King's Council were gone to Windsor to the king. ¹³

On the same day, a writ of praemunire was filed against him in the court of King's Bench. A week later, he resigned as lord chancellor and pleaded guilty to the charge of praemunire, confessing that he had illegally promoted papal authority in England as legatus a latere in derogation of the king's prerogative and the laws and customs of the realm. The sentence was life imprisonment and the loss of all his offices and property which were forfeit to the Crown. Henry VIII spared Wolsey the penalty of imprisonment, and restored his archbishopric of York to him. He allowed him to travel north to perform pastoral work. But even at the end, Wolsey was an instinctive politician who could not keep his head below the parapet. He was betrayed by his physician and arrested on suspicion of treason. He succumbed to dysentery on the journey south to London and died at Leicester Abbey (29 November 1530). His most compelling epitaph is surely the one he wrote himself: 'If I had served God as diligently as I have done the King, he would not have given me over in my grey hairs.'

END NOTES

1. The following works are essential: Virginia Murphy and Edward Surtz (eds.), The Divorce Tracts of Henry VIII (Angers, 1988); Murphy, 'The Literature and Propaganda of Henry VIII's First Divorce', in D. MacCulloch (ed.), The Reign of Henry VIII: Politics, Policy and Piety (London, 1995), pp. 135-58; Richard Rex, The Theology of John Fisher (Cambridge, 1991), pp. 162-83; Guy (ed.), The Tudor Monarchy, pp. 213-33. Scarisbrick's chapters on the first divorce in Henry VIII, pp. 163-240 have been superseded by the fresh discoveries of Dr Murphy.
2. Affinity is the relationship that exists between a person and the relatives of their spouse. It is created by sexual intercourse and thus by a marriage which has been consummated.
3. LP, IV, ii, nos. 3105 (pp. 1410-11), 3663.
4. Bernard, War, Taxation and Rebellion, pp. 60-5.
5. Starkey (ed.), The English Court from the Wars of the Roses to the Civil War, pp. 105-7; Guy, The Cardinal's Court, pp. 45-6.
6. Bodleian Library MS. Laud Misc. 597, fo. 31.
7. Bodleian Library MS. Laud Misc. 597, fo. 31.
8. Bodleian Library MS. Laud Misc. 597, fos. 24-9.
9. LP, IV, ii, no. 3318; S. J. Gunn, Charles Brandon, Duke of Suffolk 1484-1545 (Oxford 1988), p. 102.
10. LP, IV, ii, nos. 3360, 3992-3; State Papers during the Reign of Henry VIII, I, p. 261.
11. State Papers during the Reign of Henry VIII, I, p. 332; Gunn, Charles Brandon, pp. 106-14.
12. Scarisbrick, Henry VIII, pp. 226-7.
13. Edward Hall, The Triumphant Reigne of Kyng Henry the VIII (ed.) C. Whibley (London, 1904), II, p. 156.