House Of Treason: The Rise And Fall Of A Tudor Dynasty by Robert Hutchinson Page B

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    Wolsey was arrested for treason as he sat down to dinner at Cawood on Friday 4 November. Augustine was also detained, tied backwards to a horse like all such felons, and led to London. After spending an uncomfortable night in the Tower of London to concentrate his mind, Augustine was quietly removed to Norfolk’s town house in Broken Wharf, on the south side of Upper Thames Street, 42 and there gently interrogated, while being ‘treated like a prince’. The Italian sang like a canary and his disclosures delighted his inquisitors. Wolsey, he chirruped, had asked Pope Clement to excommunicate the king and shut all the parish churches in the realm, unless Anne Boleyn was exiled from court and Catherine reinstated as queen. Moreover, he said, the Cardinal prayed that such an interdict would spawn a widespread popular uprising, when he could snatch back the levers of power in England. 43
    After hearing that Augustine had fallen into Norfolk’s hands, Chapuys, the Spanish envoy, was worried that his own dealings in the murky business could be compromised by the doctor’s disclosures. As he reported the latest developments, he tried to reassure himself:
    I think the physician must have declared he had no intelligence with me. Otherwise the duke, who is a bad dissembler, would have said something about it. . . . Were the physician to say all that has passed between us, he could not do anything but impugn me. 44
    Augustine provided the final proof of Wolsey’s treason, or so Norfolk claimed. The Cardinal, being brought back to London by easy stages because of his poor health, died on 29 November 1530 at the Augustinian abbey of St Mary’s, in Leicester, probably from dysentery, although there were some who believed ‘he killed himself with purgatives’. 45 He was aged about sixty.
    Norfolk delightedly claimed Wolsey’s fleshy scalp as his own trophy. Anne’s brother, George, specially commissioned a hastily written masque, charmingly entitled On the Cardinal ’s Going into Hell that was performed at Greenwich Palace, to the gratification and merriment of the Howard and Boleyn clan.
    Twelve days after Wolsey’s death, his physician signed a recognisance pledging payment of £100 to the king to ‘keep secret from any man all such matter as is mentioned in a book written with his own hand, concerning the late Cardinal of York and presented by him to my lord of Norfolk, President of the Council . . .’. 46
    Although the threat posed by Wolsey had been extinguished, the secrets of his downfall had to be protected.
    In June 1530, a huge and much redrafted document, signed with the seals of two archbishops, four bishops, twenty-five abbots, two dukes and forty other peers, appealed to the Pope to produce a speedy decision on the king’s marriage to Queen Catherine. It was all to no avail: Rome had no real understanding of the serious ramifications of the issue, nor the need for its urgent resolution.
    Catherine was in despair. ‘God knows what I suffer from these people; enough to kill ten men, much more a shattered woman who has done no harm,’ she wrote miserably to her nephew, Charles V, in mid-October 1531.
    For the love of God, procure a final sentence from his Holiness as soon as possible.
    The utmost diligence is required.
    May God forgive him [the Pope] for the many delays which he has granted and which alone are the cause of my extremity! I am the king’s lawful wife and while I live, I will say no other.
    The Pope’s tardiness makes many on my side waver and those who would say the truth, dare not. 47
    Norfolk, also weary of the whole business, lugubriously confided to Chapuys that he would be prepared to sacrifice the greater part of his wealth, if God was ‘pleased to take to himself’ both Catherine and Anne ‘for the king would never enjoy peace of mind till he had made another marriage, for the relief of his conscience and the tranquillity of the realm, which could only be secured’ by a lawful male