A book was prepared in which the failures of the cardinal’s administration were outlined; this account of pride and waste and folly was signed by thirty-four of the royal council. The French ambassador was sure of their real intentions. ‘These lords’, he wrote, ‘intend after Wolsey is dead or ruined, to impeach the state of the Church, and take all their goods.’
Henry was not sure how to proceed after the failure of his attempt to procure a favourable court verdict, and so he gathered together a team of scholars and clerics in pursuit of his ‘great matter’. Among these was Thomas Cranmer. The young reader of divinity at Cambridge suggested that the king could avoid long and fruitless negotiations at Rome by appealing directly to the scholars and universities of Europe; if they declared in his favour, the pope would be obliged to act. As soon as he was informed of Cranmer’s plan the king declared that the cleric ‘had the sow by the right ear’. In time Cranmer became the man to guide the English Reformation.
The king’s envoys visited the universities of Europe in order to gain the opinions of eminent canonists on the prohibitions of Leviticus against marrying a brother’s widow. Some of them could be persuaded by the liberal use of bribes to declare in his favour, but others proved recalcitrant. It was not a wholly successful enterprise. Paris and Bologna, together with six other universities, supported his position. But the divines of Padua, Ferrara and Venice were against him. Poitiers and Salamanca also favoured Katherine. When it was rumoured that even the doctors and proctors of Oxford were opposed, the king wrote a harsh letter to them from Windsor that ended with the words ‘non est bonum irritare crabrones’, ‘It is not good to stir a hornets’ nest’. The king also arranged for a sympathetic letter, signed by all the peers and prelates of England, to be dispatched to the pontiff. He had not yet decided to defy the pope and was still willing to persuade him.
By the early autumn of 1529 it was clear to all observers that the time of Wolsey had come to an end. He was no longer one of the king’s confidential councillors, and Henry had been alerted to secret correspondence between Wolsey and the pope. Wolsey’s usher reported that, on one of the last occasions the cardinal was at court, the king took out a letter and was overheard asking him ‘how can that be: is not this in your own hand?’ The nature of the letter is not known, yet it must have contained something to the cardinal’s disadvantage.
On 9 October the first formal charges were laid against Wolsey. He was accused of praemunire, or of placing the interests of the pope before those of the king. Since he had become papal legate at Henry’s urgent instigation, this was not the principal issue. The king was attacking the pretensions of the pope as well as the supposed malfeasance of the cardinal. When the writ was issued against Wolsey, it was decreed that all of his lands and goods were also forfeited to the Crown. His days of glory had come to an end. The cardinal then wrote to Henry pleading for ‘grace, mercy, remission and pardon’. The French ambassador visited him and found him scarcely able to speak. His countenance ‘has lost half of its life’.
Two weeks after Wolsey’s dismissal the king was pleased to invite Thomas More to become the new chancellor. Since More was known to be an avid hunter of heretics, it was evident proof that Henry did not wish to disavow the orthodox Church. In fact More started his pursuit within a month of taking his position; he arrested a citizen of London, Thomas Phillips, on suspicion of heresy. Phillips was interrogated many times and yet refused to admit any guilt; More consigned him to prison, where he remained for three years. It was the beginning of the new chancellor’s campaign of terror against the ‘known men’.
Yet ambiguous words were still coming from the king himself. Even as he was working to obtain papal consent for his separation from Katherine, he was reflecting upon the alternatives. In a heated argument with the queen he had declared that if the pope did not judge the marriage to be null and void, he ‘would denounce the pope as a heretic and marry whom he pleased’. He told the imperial ambassador that Luther had been right to attack the pomp and circumstance of the Church. Yet he saw no certain way forward, and had no grand strategy for religious reformation. He was in any case perplexed and anxious after the uncertain ending of the legatine court. It was reported that he was suffering from insomnia, and was ill in bed ‘in consequence of the grief and anger he had lately gone through’. He spent four hours closeted with the French ambassador, talking over the options and perils that faced him.
Nevertheless Henry now took over the direction and administration of the country. He would never again allow any one minister to determine policy in the manner of Wolsey. Eleven days after the cardinal’s dismissal the king applied the Great Seal, the sign and symbol of royal power, to certain documents in an inner chamber at Windsor; it was a ceremonial occasion, and was duly recorded as such. He gathered a new inner group around him, among them the dukes of Norfolk and of Suffolk. Even the lord chancellor was a layman, thus breaking an ancient precedent.
One other member of the administration was recruited. Thomas Cromwell had been previously in the service of Wolsey, particularly in the work of dissolving smaller monasteries and nunneries. On his master’s fall he was seen weeping, with a book of prayers to the Virgin in his hand; yet he inveigled himself into the king’s good grace and was nominated for a place in parliament. Soon enough his talent and self-assurance helped him to rise, in a career that has been compared to that of a grand vizier in an eastern despotism, and he became successively royal councillor, master of the king’s jewels, chancellor of the exchequer for life, master of the rolls and secretary of state. Yet he never repudiated his old patron and when granted his own coat-of-arms he adopted Wolsey’s device of the Cornish chough.
It had been intimated to the cardinal that he should retire to a small episcopal palace in Esher and, as he rode there on his mule, a messenger came from the king bearing with him a ring and a letter. Henry had written to tell him that he need not despair and that he could at any time be raised higher than before. The cardinal alighted from his mule and knelt down on the earth in prayer. The motives of the king are not immediately apparent. It was said at the time that there was a mystery or secrecy about royalty that no observer should attempt to penetrate. Yet it may be that Henry wished to test the success of his new council before irrevocably destroying the cardinal.
A parliament was summoned at the beginning of November as a way of informing the nation of the king’s will. The members of the Commons, in large part lawyers and country gentlemen, were quite at ease with the royal prerogative; their role was to register the king’s decrees and to shield him from blame for unpopular measures. When Thomas Cromwell was first nominated as a member of parliament he was told to consult with the duke of Norfolk ‘to know the king’s pleasure how you shall order yourself in the parliament house’. The Speaker was a royal official whose salary was paid by the king and, as Edward Hall states in his Chronicle, ‘the most part of the Commons were the king’s servants’.
The parliament of 1529 was no different from its predecessors. The king sat upon his throne while the lord chancellor, Thomas More, standing at his right hand, delivered an oration on the causes for its summons. He adverted to Wolsey as ‘the great wether [a castrated ram] which is of late fallen’. The members of the Commons soon showed their loyalty with an Act ‘to release the king from repayment of the loans he borrowed’. When one member opposed the measure the king wondered aloud whether he was ‘on my side’. The parliament passed bills on the rearing of calves and the price of woollen hats beyond the sea, but its attention was largely trained on the economic exactions of the Church. It was riding in the wake of the anti-clerical anger released at the fall of Wolsey. A general petition was drawn up in which the vices and corruptions of the clergy were denounced in strident terms as the fruit of the seven deadly sins; the ‘ordinaries’ or secular clergy were vicious and ravenous and insatiable and idle and cruel.