Several versions of the articles justifying Wolsey's fall were circulating in the first session of the Reformation Parliament (November 1529). The notes of Edward Hall, MP for Wenlock, provide a concise summary:

First that he without the king's assent had procured to be a legate, by reason whereof he took away the right of all bishops and spiritual persons.

Item, in all writings which he wrote to Rome or any other foreign Prince, he wrote Ego et Rex meus, 'I and my King', as who would say that the king was his servant.

Item, that he hath slandered the church of England in the court of Rome, for his suggestion to be legate was to reform the church of England, which as he wrote was 'fallen into an reprobate state'.

Item, he without the king's assent, carried the king's great seal with him into Flanders when he was sent [as] ambassador to the Emperor.

Item, he without the king's assent, sent a commission to Sir Gregory Casale, to conclude a league between the king and the duke of Ferrara, without the king's knowledge.

Item, that he having the French pox presumed to come and breath on the king.

Item, that he caused the cardinal's hat to be put on the king's coin.

Item, that he would not suffer the king's clerk of the market to sit at St Albans.

Item, that he had sent innumerable substance to Rome, for the obtaining of his dignities, to the great impoverishment of the realm.¹

Hall's account is truncated, but gives a taste of the bizarre mix of the general and the particular, and of the extraordinary malice, misrepresentation, and axe-grinding, that greeted Wolsey's destruction. Wolsey was variously accused of pride, presumption, illegal acts, defamation, extortion, treachery, and attempting to harm the king by the transmission of contagious diseases! Even Thomas More was uncharitable. In a speech to Parliament, he compared Wolsey to 'the great wether' who 'craftily, scabbedly, and untruly juggled' with the king.² Elsewhere, he said that Wolsey was '[vain]glorious ... far above all measure, and that was great pitie; for it did harme and made him abuse many great gifts that God had given him.'³

These allegations, if taken out of context, can appear superficially plausible, but are entirely deceptive. By November 1529, Wolsey was the man whom everyone loved to hate! It became obligatory to attack him; convenient to forget how successful his special relationship with Henry VIII had been until the summer of 1527.

Wolsey's style was certainly presidential. By temperament he was a workaholic: a man driven by ambition and his own sheer ebullience. His passion was politics. Humility was not his strong suit. He pushed everything to the limit. But Wolsey was bound to be unpopular to some degree. Effective administrators are! It is especially misleading to claim that he arrogated decision-making to himself and did not consult the Council. The problem (from the Council's point of view) was that his partnership with the young king enabled him to agree the broad outlines of policy first with Henry in private, and only then consult others. But it is likely that even Wolsey's fiscal policy had, eventually, been endorsed by the whole Council. It was only when things went wrong that his conciliar colleagues ran for cover.

In domestic government Wolsey worked on a broad front; his sweep was spacious. Justice, enclosures and taxation were the main focus of his activities. In the judicial sphere, he made a permanent impression on the system, since his philosophy that the people should have justice as a right was enlightened and infectious. It is true that he bit off more than he could chew. A century later, Lord Chancellor Ellesmere was scathing, saying that Wolsey had stirred up suits, and 'so brought water to the mill'. But legal reformers are always unpopular with the legal profession itself! And Wolsey had no time for nit-picking or protracted litigation. On the contrary, he favoured speedy arbitration, and could insist that lawyers advocate the causes of the poor gratis. On one occasion, during a tedious dispute between the mayor and the priory of Norwich over land boundaries, a case that was a monument to small-mindedness even by Tudor standards, he finally lost patience and ended the case in a flash by paying himself for the costs of dredging a disputed ditch!

The significance of Wolsey's enclosure policy is less certain. The policy was well-intentioned, since illegal enclosures were perceived to be the main cause of rural depopulation and unemployment. On the other hand, Wolsey's attitude was informed by the precepts of classical literature rather than by economic theory. Furthermore, he quickly conceded an amnesty to enclosing landlords when his fiscal policy was on the line. How many enclosing landlords fulfilled the terms of their recognisances, and how many turned a blind eye, is also unknown. Wolsey's policy was, however, revived (with disastrous results!) in the reign of Edward VI by Protector Somerset, who believed it to have been popular with the poor.

As to taxation, this was the field where Wolsey made a permanent contribution to English government. Taxation is not popular, and Wolsey's taxation was realistic and highly effective. It was realistic because it was based on accurate assessments of taxpayers' wealth, and not stereotyped valuations. It was effective because it was also progressive: closely related to the ability to pay. In these respects, Wolsey's taxation was ahead of its time. Of course, he went too far. He pushed his taxation to the limit and beyond. The Amicable Grant provoked a revolt in East Anglia. In addition, taxpayer fatigue and the law of diminishing returns afflicted the subsidy of 1523, which had to be levied in instalments on the basis of fresh (and lower) valuations.

Still, no one previously had succeeded in devising, and operating, such a system. Henry VII had tried, but failed. Others had different priorities. Thus, in the 1560s, Elizabeth and Cecil abandoned the rigour of Wolsey's techniques in favour of a more relaxed outlook designed to limit debate over taxation and win the support of taxpayers for the new Protestant régime. The subsidy, as a result, was diluted and its receipts sufficed only to maintain normal government in peacetime. A crisis erupted when the Armada sailed up the Channel in 1588. Elizabethan and early-Stuart government could not cope with the costs of warfare: the problems of James I and Charles I largely resulted from their inability to levy effective taxation. Nevertheless, an emasculated version of Wolsey's taxation system survived until 1642, and was revived in a slightly different form at the Restoration.

Whether or not Wolsey was a spiritual man is elusive. Cavendish said 'he heard most commonly every day two Masses in his privy closet'. He rose at dawn to say his daily offices; his chaplain noticed that he never missed so much as one collect, 'wherein I doubt not but he deceived the opinion of divers persons'.⁴ But overall, his achievements in the church cannot be rated much above the level of good intentions. Typically, he had ambitious plans for reform. A number of reforms were even implemented, but these were minor or largely formal, and were not targeted at those areas of pastoral neglect that would be criticized by the Reformation Parliament.

If Wolsey made a lasting contribution in the church, he did so in an unplanned, unexpected way. Before 1518, the English church was to all intents and purposes administered as two separate provinces of Canterbury and York. Wolsey used his position as legatus a latere to centralize the church as it had never been centralized before. He also subjected the clergy to the most rigorous taxation in living memory.

It is most likely to have been Henry VIII's intention all along that Wolsey, once he had secured his position as a cardinal-legate, should control the English church in the king's interest. In many ways, Henry VIII envied the practical control that Francis I had secured over church patronage by the Concordat of Bologna (1516). In exchange for revoking the Pragmatic Sanction of Bourges, Francis I gained significant rights over higher church patronage, and was able to reward the nobility with grants of ecclesiastical estates, benefices, allowances, and other gifts. Whether or not this analogy is correct, Henry saw it as Wolsey's task to follow the trail blazed by Henry VII and to exploit church patronage in the king's interest. Wolsey was the king's servant: his agenda was prescribed, and this meant that he was expected to augment, rather than restrict, Tudor power over the church.

Wolsey's foreign policy was a remarkable roller-coaster. His objective was to secure 'honour and glory' for Henry VIII by whatever means, and his policy increasingly became pragmatic and opportunist. French territorial conquests were Henry VIII's main ambition. Tournai and Thérouanne were captured in 1513. But lack of money and manpower (compared to France or Spain) were the chief obstacles to military expansion in Europe. Given England's limited resources, Wolsey had no alternative than to present Henry VIII as an ally whose support could tip the scales, or as an esteemed arbitrator whose interventions could command respect.

Wolsey established his credentials as a diplomat and organizational genius in 1512-14. His pièce de resistance was the treaty of 'universal peace' of 1518. Thereafter, he sought to cultivate the role of honest broker between Francis I and Charles V, while shuttling between the two in order to obtain the maximum advantage for Henry VIII. As a general rule, Wolsey preferred peace to war on the grounds of cost and practicability in the 1520s, except when genuine opportunities for the invasion and partition of France seemed to present themselves, as in 1523, when Bourbon rebelled against Francis I and the duke of Suffolk marched to within 50 miles of Paris, and in 1525, following the imperial victory at Pavia.

After the débâcle of the Amicable Grant and the re-establishment of the Anglo-French entente, Wolsey's overarching aim was a second treaty of 'universal peace' initiated by England, but he was driven deeper and deeper into the French alliance with disastrous results. By 1528, England was at war with Charles V. And by the summer of 1529, Wolsey's diplomacy had collapsed. In the last resort, it had all the substance of a cardboard castle. With the peace of Cambrai, Henry VIII had become ingloriously and humiliatingly isolated. Moreover, Charles V controlled Italy and the papacy, so that speedy progress on Henry VIII's divorce suit was unlikely.

But this is too negative for a conclusion. The king's 'great matter' was hardly a strategy of Wolsey's choice. Again, Renaissance diplomacy was ultimately about 'reputation', and Wolsey's skill in repeatedly putting Henry VIII at the centre of the European stage ensured that England's prestige rose considerably. In 1485, England was a little island on the edge of Europe; the international status of Henry VII was comparable to that of the kings of Scotland or Denmark, not that of Charles VIII or the emperor. By 1509, England's prestige was greater, but it was Wolsey who achieved the breakthrough whereby England exerted an influence far greater than she deserved on geographical or material grounds. None of this is likely to have impressed the ordinary people, who thought that Wolsey's diplomacy was for the gratification of his vanity. But in this matter, as in everything else, Wolsey was Henry VIII's servant. The king's expectations of Wolsey's foreign policy were unrealistic, even absurd. His task was to do the impossible. That he did so for over a decade, is a tribute to his transformative genius, and to the sheer energy and exuberance that he brought to the art of politics.

END NOTES

1. Hall, Triumphant Reigne of Kyng Henry the VIII (ed.) Whibley, II, pp. 170-1.
2. Guy, The Public Career of Sir Thomas More (Brighton and New Haven, 1980), pp. 113-5.
3. Pollard, Wolsey, p. 373.
4. Two Early Tudor Lives, p. 24.

FURTHER READING

The most significant editions of printed primary sources for Henry VIII's reign are: Letters and Papers, Foreign and Domestic, of the Reign of Henry VIII (ed.) J. S. Brewer, J. Gairdner, and R. H. Brodie (21 vols. and Addenda; London, 1862-1932); State Papers during the Reign of Henry VIII (11 vols.; Record Commission, London, 1830-52). Four general works which put Wolsey's career into perspective are: John Guy, Tudor England (Oxford 1988); G. R. Elton, Reform and Reformation (London, 1977); A. G. R. Smith, The Emergence of a Nation State: the Commonwealth of England (London, 1984); Penry Williams, The Tudor Regime (Oxford, 1979). A recent compendium of articles on Tudor politics and political culture is John Guy (ed.), The Tudor Monarchy (London, 1997). The best accounts of the politics of the reign of Henry VIII are: J. J. Scarisbrick, Henry VIII (London, 1968); D. MacCulloch (ed.), The Reign of Henry VIII: Politics, Policy and Piety (London, 1995); D. R. Starkey, The Reign of Henry VIII: Personalities and Politics (London, 1985). The leading biographies of Wolsey are very different in character. The conventional historiography is summarized in A. F. Pollard, Wolsey (London, 1929). An 'ultra-revisionist' interpretation is Peter Gwyn, The King's Cardinal: the Rise and Fall of Thomas Wolsey (London, 1990). By far and away the most interesting and coherent assessments of Wolsey are in the essays collected in S. J. Gunn and P. Lindley (eds.), Cardinal Wolsey: Church, State and Art (Cambridge, 1991). The most accessible edition of Cavendish's near-contemporary 'Life of Wolsey' is R. S. Sylvester and D. P. Harding (eds.), Two Early Tudor Lives: The Life and Death of Cardinal Wolsey by George Cavendish; The Life of Sir Thomas More by William Roper (New Haven, Conn., 1962). Useful introductions to the organization of the Tudor Court are: D. R. Starkey (ed.), The English Court from the Wars of the Roses to the Civil War (London, 1987); D. M. Loades, The Tudor Court (London, 1986). Specialist aspects of Wolsey are covered by: G. W. Bernard, War, Taxation and Rebellion in Early Tudor England: Wolsey and the Amicable Grant of 1525 (Brighton, 1985); W. E. Wilkie, The Cardinal Protectors of England: Rome and the Tudors before the Reformation (Cambridge, 1974); John Guy, The Cardinal's Court: The Impact of Thomas Wolsey in Star Chamber (Hassocks, 1977); John Guy, 'Thomas More as Successor to Wolsey', Thought: Fordham University Quarterly, 52 (1977), 275-92; Roger Schofield, 'Taxation and the Political Limits of the Tudor State', in C. Cross, D. Loades, and J. J. Scarisbrick (eds.), Law and Government under the Tudors (Cambridge, 1988), pp. 227-55; J. J. Scarisbrick, 'Cardinal Wolsey and the common weal' in E. W. Ives, R. J. Knecht, and Scarisbrick (eds.), Wealth and Power in Tudor England (London, 1978), pp. 45-67; Franz Metzger, 'Das Englische Kanzleigericht unter Kardinal Wolsey, 1515-1529', unpublished Erlangen Ph.D dissertation (1976); John Guy, 'Wolsey and the Parliament of 1523' in Cross, Loades, and Scarisbrick (eds.), Law and Government under the Tudors, pp. 1-18; David Starkey, 'Court, Council and Nobility in Tudor England', in R. G. Asch and A. M. Birke (eds.), Princes, Patronage and the Nobility (Oxford, 1991), pp. 175-203; Peter Gwyn, 'Wolsey's Foreign Policy: the Conferences at Calais and Bruges Reconsidered', Historical Journal, 23 (1980), pp. 755-72; D. S. Chambers, 'Cardinal Wolsey and the Papal Tiara', Bulletin of the Institute of Historical Research, 38 (1965), pp. 20-30; J. J. Goring, 'The General Proscription of 1522', English Historical Review, 86 (1971), pp. 681-705. Monographs and specialist studies of the period which provide essential contexts include: S. J. Gunn, Charles Brandon, Duke of Suffolk, 1484-1545 (Oxford, 1988); Greg Walker, John Skelton and the Politics of the 1520s (Cambridge, 1988); Helen Miller, Henry VIII and the English Nobility (Oxford, 1986); Barbara J. Harris, Edward Stafford, Third Duke of Buckingham, 1478-1521 (Stanford, 1986); C. Coleman and D. R. Starkey (eds.), Revolution Reassessed: Revisions in the History of Tudor Government and Administration (Oxford, 1986); Peter Heath, The English Parish Clergy on the Eve of the Reformation (London, 1969); Susan Brigden, London and the Reformation (Oxford, 1989); F. C. Dietz, English Public Finance 1485-1641 (2 vols., 2nd edn.; London, 1964); D. MacCulloch, Suffolk and the Tudors: Politics and Religion in an English County, 1500-1600 (Oxford, 1986); D. Knowles, The Religious Orders in England, Vol. III: The Tudor Age (Cambridge, 1959); R. B. Wernham, Before the Armada: the Growth of English Foreign Policy, 1485-1588 (London, 1966).