Henry VIII, the Reign
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Part Twenty - Three 
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In Cambrai ​the Ladies Call Order 
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Henry VIII,the Reign
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​Part 23


In Cambrai ​the Ladies Call Order 
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​The Ladies Emerge as Rulers of a United Christendom – Over powerful Papal Legate, Cardinal Wolsey Castrated in Parliament – Weak King – Darcy’s List
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United in their cause, three determined women, Margaret Habsburg for the Hapsburgs and Louise and Marguerite d’Angoulême for the Valois, united against the cardinal to end his tertius gaudens policies. His ambition to become the pope was at an end and Christendom, now wise to his plots intrigues and conspiracies, had no further use for him.

Europe was at peace in spite of Wolsey’s machinations to promote and prolong the war.

On 3 August 1529, Marguerite d’Angoulême, Louise de Valois and Margaret Habsburg signed the Peace of Cambrai.

Wolsey had used the church to advance his power and authority over both king and country. He was a megalomaniac, drunk on omnipotence and grandeur. He was intoxicated by a supreme clerical power that had been despised and venerated in varying degrees almost without interruption for centuries. Resistance to this power had existed since the days of Henry II, and Becket, King John and Pope Innocent, Richard II, Wycliffe, Chaucer and John of Gaunt and thence passed down through the likes of Sir John Oldcastle and the Lollard Knights – indeed since the Britons first met Augustine. It had lain hibernating in substantial pockets of the kingdom, and now it woke up.

Opinions and beliefs varied, but the anti-clericalists were united in the conviction that clerics in England had acquired too much power. These ordained men ought to confine themselves to matters spiritual and leave matters temporal to the secular authorities, not least Parliament.

Wolsey had gone too far; Henry was too slow of thought to have any control over him, being ever two or three steps behind events. Wolsey had exploited his clerical offices as Bishop of Lincoln, Archbishop of York, cardinal and papal legate to the extreme and to the detriment of the common weal. He had ruled England for almost twenty years and for most of the past ten years had fought both Charles and Francis, and set them against each other to further his own papal ambitions to control of all Christendom.

At Cambrai, the ladies in their peace had eliminated him from their conflict.

 In England, now the Lords and Commons would join together, and their king would, rather than bow to the dictatorial Wolsey, toe the line with decisions made by members in Parliament to reform the power exercised by the clergy.

In these early stages, Lord Thomas Darcy was at the forefront of this brave new world with a list of charges against Wolsey. On 9 August 1529, the first Parliament for six years was summoned. Sir Thomas More delivered the opening speech. Henry, he inferred, was a shepherd to his subjects:

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Thomas More

Amongst a great flock of sheep some be rotten and faulty which the good shepherd sends from the good sheep, so the great wether [castrated ram] which is of late fallen as you all know, so craftily, so scabedly [shabbily] yea and so untruly juggled with the king, that all men must needs guess and think that he thought in himself, that he had no wit to perceive his crafty doing, or else that he presumed that the king would not see nor know his fraudulent juggling and attempts.

​The anti-clerics formed a group organised with a set of beliefs that included a wide range of opinions and ideas, but they were united in their will to remove interfering, overbearing churchmen from the governance of their country.
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But how long could this potentially divisive anti-clericalist union last?

Links and Notes Part 23

1529 Parliament List of  All Acts 
1529 Wolsey castrated, the great wether
​1529 Commons - Fishers Angry Response​
​The Fate of Wolsey. Suffolk, Montmorency, Money and Montdidier in 1523 LP 6011
​Wolsey's Deathbed Speech at Leicester Abbey​

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