Cardinal Thomas Wolsey was King Henry VIII’s right hand man for years, and when he fell from the king’s favour, the prelate — along with everyone else — blamed Anne Boleyn for his disgrace. This is, however, poppycock. Wolsey was accused of committing treason because he committed treason.
Motivated by his hatred of Henry’s intended bride, in 1530 Wolsey foolishly offered his clandestine support to the king’s first wife, Katherina of Aragon, in order to frustrate Henry’s plan to gain an annulment. Wolsey even began “advising foreign powers on the best tactics to use against his sovereign” in an attempt to “foment unrest in England” and “coerce Henry into leaving Anne”[1]. That, by anyone’s standards, is base treason.
There are some historians who believe that Anne pushed Henry into arresting Wolsey for treason on 4 November 1530 — that she threatened to leave the king if he did not move against his pernicious former Chancellor[2]. However, there is no evidence that it was Anne who initiated Wolsey’s arrest. Moreover, there was no need for Anne to make that demand. Wolsey had clearly dug his own grave with his back-handed rebellion against his monarch. Finding out Wolsey was plotting against him would have spurred Henry into action much more quickly than any coaxing by Anne Boleyn.
It will never be known if Wolsey would have sweet-talked the king into forgiving him, because the Cardinal died a natural death on the trip back to London, on 29 November 29. Henry was still angry enough at his former favourite to punish him beyond the grave. The king changed the name of Wolsey’s former home — York Place — to Whitehall and gave it over to Anne’s use in a severe posthumous insult to the dead Cardinal. [4]
Did Anne feel a sense of satisfaction when she was at Whitehall, thinking of how unhappy Wolsey would be to know his worst enemy was enjoying the home he worked so hard on? Did she feel this would “work as much displeasure” for the Cardinal as she felt after Henry Percy was torn away from her? Who knows? Anne never said. Nonetheless, the lack of information as to Anne’s true feeling has not stopped historians for assuming she orchestrated and levered in Wolsey’s downfall. Then, as now, Anne perpetually serves as a scapegoat for the actions of Henry VIII.
The Cardinal’s arrest was a scandal and the tales doubtlessly grew in the telling. Shortly before Wolsey’s death, imperial ambassador Eustace Chapuys wrote to Emperor Charles V to tell him an item of gossip he had gleaned from Wolsey’s personal physician. According to Chapuys, the doctor had admitted to him that Wolsey had urged the Pope to excommunicate the king unless he sent Anne away and that the Cardinal hoped to “raise the country and obtain the management” by these intrigues. [5] It is completely understandable that the Cardinal would want to rid himself of Anne Boleyn, but it seems doubtful he was planning to help the Holy Roman Empire take over England by force. Chapuys was desperate to coax Charles V into an invasion of England in the hopes of placing Henry’s eldest daughter, Princess Mary, on the throne. It seems far more likely that Chapuys would take any rumour of a plot to overthrow Henry and exaggerate it for fullest effect than that Wosley was plotting an imperial assault on Britian.
A Spanish invasion of England was nonetheless not such a far-fetched possibility that it could be ignored or dismissed by Henry VIII. Two years earlier, in November of 1528, an English agent had written to Wolsey in order to warn him that the Spanish chancellor had bragged that “if we wished we could expel [Henry] from his own Kingdom in three months. What force had the King? his own subjects would expel him”[6]. This was probably bravado on the part of Spain; in spite of Chapuy’s claims and the Spanish chancellor’s boasts, the people of England were not so eager to get rid of their king.
When the words of the Spanish chancellor were reported in London they were received poorly, turning popular opinion against the Emperor and even lessening support for the Princess Mary. A letter from one English nobleman to another stated that Charles V “lost the hearts of one hundred thousand Englishmen” that day.[7] The king’s later later paranoia about the potential rebellion of his first wife and daughter was not as groundless as it would seem.
Henry VIII had not yet made the transformation from monarch to monster in the first part of the 1530s, and Wolsey’s arrest was a rational outcome of the Cardinal’s own behaviour rather than paranoia on the king’s part or malicious efforts by Anne Boleyn. Wolsey’s death is one that should not be laid at Henry’s door.
[1] Starkey, David. 2003. Six Wives : The Queens of Henry VIII. Chatto & Windus.
[2] Starkey, 2003:429-430
[3] Starkey, 2003:432
[4] Lindsey, K. 1995. Divorced, Beheaded, Survived: A Feminist Reinterpretation of the Wives of Henry VIII. Reading, Massachusetts: Addison-Wesley Publishing Company.
[5] Froude, James Anthony. 1891. The Divorce of Catherine of Aragon: The Story as Told by the Imperial Ambassadors Resident at the Court of Henry VIII … Longmans, Green & co.
[6] Froude, 1891:82
[7] Froude, 1891:83