Episode 009: A Tale of Two Thomases Part I (Wolsey & More)

The first in a two-part story of four Thomases who were very important to Henry VIII’s reign. This week: Wolsey and More.

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Episode Transcript: A Tale of Two Thomases Part I (Wolsey & More)

Hello, and welcome to the Renaissance English History Podcast. I’m your host Heather Teysko. We’re still in the midst of Henry VIII’s reign, and I would be remiss if I didn’t devote an episode or two to a few of the advisors who molded and shaped Henry’s policies and beliefs. In this episode, we will talk about two of the four Thomases who are very important advisors to Henry VIII – Thomas Wolsey and Thomas More. Next week, I will talk about another two – Thomas Cromwell and Thomas Cranmer.

Thomas Wolsey

The first Thomas that we’ll talk about is Thomas Wolsey, a statesman, cardinal in the church, and eventually the Lord Chancellor for Henry VIII. Wolsey rose to power from a humble family, though the meagerness of his beginnings may have been overestimated, both from those who thought he had no place in a royal court, and from Wolsey himself, doing a bit of PR to exaggerate just how high he rose.

He was born around 1473 in Ipswich, and he studied theology at Magdalen College in Oxford. In 1507, he entered the service of Henry VII who, if you remember from an earlier podcast, was very suspicious of his nobility after a century of civil wars, and favor those who came from humble backgrounds. This was to Wolsey’s advantage, and he was appointed the Royal chaplain. Not only was Wolsey politically astute, but he backed it up with intelligence and amazing work ethic and ambition.

In 1509, Henry VII appointed him almoner. In this role, he would be responsible for much of the charitable giving of the court, but it had greater implications. He now had a seat on the Privy Council and was able to become known both by the nobles and by the king himself.

When Henry VIII succeeded his father, Woolsey recognized that Henry was not interested in government, still being young and interested only in the benefits of being king, namely sports, hunting, and women. So Wolsey made a role for himself with his thoroughness and his attention to detail, and Henry quickly grew to rely on his advice.

Wolsey’s Contributions

Wolsey navigated the political seas like an expert, both rising in secular power, and in 1515, he was made a cardinal. His hand was on nearly every war, alliance, and treaty that England entered into until his downfall in the late 1520’s. He was behind the Treaty of London in 1518, an agreement that most of the European states made in response to the rise of the Ottoman Empire in the Balkans.

The treaty stated that no participating member would attack one another and they would come to each other’s aid if they were attacked. The treaty didn’t last very long. But it did make England a foreign policy powerhouse and brought the island nation out of the isolation of the previous centuries.

Wolsey also organized much of the Field of Cloth of Gold in 1520, which was a peaceful meeting between the monarchs of England and France. While Wolsey worked tirelessly for Henry, he was unable to do the one task that Henry really demanded of him, which was to secure an annulment of his marriage to Catherine of Aragon. It would be the opportunity that many of his enemies needed to encourage bad relations between Wolsey and the king.

Anne Boleyn and her family were able to convince Henry that Wolsey was slowing down the proceedings. And in 1529, he was stripped of his government offices and property, he was headed back to Yorkshire where he was still the bishop. He was quickly accused of treason and ordered back to London, where he became ill on the road back and died on the journey.

Thomas More

The next Lord Chancellor was also a Thomas. Thomas More, St. Thomas More in the Catholic Church. More was born in London in 1478, the son of a lawyer. He studied Latin and logic at Oxford, becoming a friend of Erasmus. After his studies, he returned to London and studied law with his father, and became a barrister in 1501.

Early on, he was devoted to his faith, and he actually angered his father when he seriously considered leaving law to become a monk. He abandoned those plans because he wanted to marry in 1505, but he continued many of the practices of the church including self-punishment, he wore a hairshirt every day.

A hairshirt is an undershirt that’s made of coarse cloth or animal hair. And it would cause a lot of discomfort, even often becoming infested with lice. And it would just be a general nuisance, and More also engaged in self-flagellation occasionally.

From 1510, he served as one of the two undersheriffs of the City of London, which carried great responsibility, and he got a reputation as an honest public servant who made things happen, and he impressed the king with his arguments in a noted Star Chamber case. More became Master of Requests in 1514, and in 1517, he entered the king’s services as a counselor and personal servant and became a Privy Counsellor in 1518.

More’s major roles

As a secretary and personal advisor to King Henry VIII, he became increasingly influential in the government. He welcomed foreign diplomats, he drafted official documents, and he was a liaison between the king and his Lord Chancellor, who was still Wolsey. More also assisted Henry in writing his response to Martin Luther – The Defence of the Seven Sacraments, which would eventually earn Henry the title Defender of the Faith from the Pope.

More is often remembered first for his Renaissance humanist writing. Utopia is still read in classrooms today, written around 1516, a contrast of the politically contentious social life of European states with the order and reasonable arrangements in Utopia, and imaginary island country. The name is actually a Greek pun, which translates to both “no place” and “good place”.

More during the Reformation

More was eventually torn. He loved his king, and he served him loyally, but he hated the Reformation. And as Henry’s policies began to embrace reform, he grew closer to marrying Anne Boleyn, who was a rumored Protestant. More really struggled. He became Lord Chancellor after Wolsey’s downfall.

And at first, he went along with Henry’s policies. He found theologians at Oxford and Cambridge who said that Henry’s marriage to Catherine had been unlawful. But when Henry began to fight with the Pope, More had to put his foot down.

In between, he spent much of his time as Lord Chancellor fighting the Reformation. He saw Luther’s calls to destroy the Catholic Church as a call to warfare. So he responded appropriately, he burned Protestants and those who distributed the English translation of the Bible.

In 1530, he refused to sign a letter by the leading English churchman and aristocrats asking the Pope to annul Henry’s marriage to Catherine. In 1531, he attempted to resign after being forced to take an oath declaring the king, the Supreme Head of the English Church as far as the law of Christ allows. He refused to take the oath in the form in which it would renounce all claims of jurisdiction over the church except the sovereigns.

In 1532, he asked the king to relieve him of his office, claiming that he was ill and suffering from sharp chest pains. This time, Henry granted his request. A year later in 1533, he refused to attend the coronation of Anne Boleyn. Technically, this was not an act of treason as he had written to Henry acknowledging and queenship and expressing his desire for the king’s happiness and the new queen’s health, but everybody saw it as a snub, and Henry had to take action against him.

Shortly thereafter, More was charged with accepting bribes, but the patently false charges had to be dismissed for lack of any evidence. On April 13, 1534, More was asked to appear before a commission and swear his allegiance to the parliamentary Act of Succession.

He accepted Parliament’s right to declare Anne Boleyn the legitimate Queen of England, but he refused to take the oath because of an anti-papal preface to the act asserting Parliament’s authority to legislate in matters of religion, which More would not accept. And he also would not swear to uphold Henry’s divorce from Catherine.

John Fisher, the Bishop of Rochester also refused the oath along with More. Four days later, More was imprisoned in the Tower where he prepared a devotional Dialogue of Comfort Against Tribulation. While More was in the tower, he had many visits from Thomas Cromwell who urged More to take the oath, but More persistently refused to do so. It seems that Henry really didn’t want to execute More, but that he was left with no choice once More was disobeying him so clearly.

On July 1, 1535, More was tried before a panel of judges that included Anne Boleyn’s father, brother, and uncle. He was charged with high treason for denying the validity of the Act of Succession. More believed that he could not be convicted as long as he did not explicitly deny that the king was the Head of the Church, and he, therefore, refused to answer all questions regarding his opinions on the subject.

Thomas Cromwell, at the time the most powerful of the king’s advisors brought forth the Solicitor General Richard Rich to testify that More had, in his presence denied that the king was the legitimate Head of the Church. This testimony was almost certainly perjured.

More’s Conviction

Witnesses denied having heard the details of the reported conversation, but on the strength of it, the jury voted for More’s conviction. More was tried and found guilty under the following section of the Treasons Act 1534:

“If any person or persons, after the first day of February next coming, do maliciously wish, will or desire, by words or writing, or by craft imagine, invent, practise, or attempt any bodily harm to be done or committed to the king’s most royal person, the queen’s, or their heirs apparent, or to deprive them or any of them of their dignity, title, or name of their royal estates … That then every such person and persons so offending … shall have and suffer such pains of death and other penalties, as is limited and accustomed in cases of high treason.^”

After the jury’s verdict was delivered, and before his sentencing, More spoke freely of his belief that “no temporal man may be the head of spirituality”. He was sentenced to be hanged, drawn, and quartered the usual punishment for traitors but the king commuted this up to the execution by decapitation.

More’s Execution

The execution took place on July 6, 1535. While on the scaffold, he declared that he died “the king’s good servant, but God’s first.” Another comment he is believed to have made to the executioner is that his beard was completely innocent of any crime and did not deserve the axe. He then moved his beard so that it would not be harmed.

More asked that his foster daughter Margaret Giggs should be given his headless corpse to bury. He was buried in the Tower of London in the Chapel of St. Peter in an unmarked grave. His head was put on a pike over London Bridge for a month according to the normal custom for traitors. His daughter Margaret Roper rescued it, possibly by bribery before it could be thrown in the Thames.

So I know that my posting has been intermittent at best the past few months. And that should be clearing up here in a few weeks, once a really intensive course that I’ve been on finishes up. So stay tuned for more episodes more regularly, and a new website with a lot of English Renaissance information that I’m building, and hopefully we’ll have it up by late spring.

I’m actually going to England in two weeks. And I’m trying to set up some interviews with people at Hatfield House, where the young Elizabeth I lived before she was queen, and Hampton Court. So fingers crossed that that works out next week. I will post an episode on the next two Thomases – Cromwell and Cranmer. Thank you for listening this week. And as always, you can post show ideas, comments, and any other random thoughts on the blog, which is Englandcast.blogspot.com, and thank you so much for listening!