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Pope Wolsey

Ricardolindo

Well-known member
Location
Portugal
Cardinal Wolsey almost was elected Pope in 1523. Suppose he was. How would he deal with the Reformation and with Henry VIII's annulment request?
 
Yes, the footnote in the part of Wikipedia article I refer to does say that other sources had him as receiving zero votes.

The California state university page is generally a good tertiary source for papal conclaves, I've found. It's pretty extensive and errors that you see elsewhere, such as this one or the idea that Henry the Chaste of Portugal voted in the two 1555 conclaves, tend not to be repeated by csun.
 
The most recent detailed biography of Wolsey, by John Matusiak (History Press, 2014; 2nd edition 2019) , pp. 264-8 of the 2nd edition, reckons that Wolsey himself preferred to be a big fish in a small pond (ie England as chief minister) to being stuck in faraway Rome with people he hardly knew and a notoriously dodgy, epidemic-prone climate, trying to navigate between the mutually hostile and ego-driven King Francis I of France and Emperor Charles V. Nor had he taken any effort to keep the goodwill of the recently deceased Pope Leo X (Giovanni de' Medici) or the most influential of his cardinals , most of whom were aligned politically to and/or were pensioners of France or the Emperor, by keeping up a correspondence with them and helping the Papal interests in England. He was not well known or had a fund of goodwill in Rome - and neither Charles nor Francis was committed to helping an Englishman to be elected, preferring one of their own controllable clients.

Charles , as Henry's current ally after the Anglo-French rapprochement of 1520 at the Field of Cloth of Gold (always precarious) collapsed, made supportive noises to Henry VIII when the latter asked for his help in getting Wolsey elected but was always likely to double-cross him and just did not want to offend Henry by an open refusal. Francis did not trust Wolsey either as W had helped to undermine the 1520 Anglo-French treaty of alliance by moving England back towards the Empire as a better ally, albeit on Henry's orders - though probably W was never going to help France if it risked annoying Henry and H at best wanted a joint alliance with both Francis and Charles if this would work, not one solely with Francis that led to war with Charles (Francis' goal).

Matusiak reckons that it was Henry rather than Wolsey that was the main promoter of the idea of W being elected Pope, mainly for reasons of prestige for him to get the first English Pope since Adrian IV (in office 1154-9) as he was not yet involved with Anne Boleyn or had any other candidate lined up as a possible replacement for Catherine of Aragon yet; she had just failed to give him a live son again but he was not yet thinking of annulling the marriage so he did not need Papal help in that. Henry forced the pace in the plan to elect Wolsey, and pressurised Charles to help, and W went along with it but showed no signs of being keen - or to have much interest in the intricacies of politics at the Papal Curia. (His predecessor as Archbishop of York, Christopher Bainbridge, had been a Cardinal and had lived in Rome as such, but had died suspiciously suddenly amidst claims of poison so there was a recent precedent of Rome being dangerous for an out-of-his-depth English cardinal.) Also when Henry planned the mission to get Wolsey elected his own envoy sent to help bribe or charm the cardinals, Richard Pace, was not an expert on the Curia , was at a disadvantage as he had further to travel on poor roads than Imperial or French envoys so he arrived in Rome later, and had not enough money with him to overcome his disadvantages of no established 'lobby' waiting in Rome to help him. He did not hurry to Rome or get any serious help there from the Imperial 'lobby'. The election was underway and favoured candidates' supporters were lining up well before he arrived, and his only real hope would have been for a 'deadlock' between French and Imperial candidates to lead to Wolsey being picked as a compromise 'dark horse' - the role in real life went to a candidate who would be more use to practical Italian cardinals as close to Charles V. It is probable that the 'Wolsey wants to be Pope' story in England reflected hostile propaganda by his critics based on his known inflated self-importance rather than any real evidence, and that Henry was unrealistically over-confident of his success and pushed him into it.

Wolsey succeeding would have needed both a stronger and longer-term English presence in Roman politics and a current need at the moment of election for Charles or (less likely) Francis to need to do Henry a favour, plus W gambling on leaving his strong position in England to operate in a far different and more dangerous political field which he did not know much about - only possible if he had had some experience of Italy already, eg as a junior royal representative there in the years of his rise as a diplomat, around 1509-14? (Pre-1509 he was just a junior if impressively hard-working member of Henry VII's Chapel Royal secretariat, based in London with occasional forays abroad as an envoy; he had worked in English-held Calais for a time as chaplain/ secretary to its governor Sir Richard Nanfan.) But if he had had this experience and continuing Roman contacts, Henry had helped him and given him cash to keep a lobby running in Rome in the 1510s, and Charles V had backed him in 1522-3, as Pope he might have been able to take a more firm stand against Charles over the issue of the annulment of Henry's marriage than the nervous and vaccilating Clement VII did in real life in 1527. One course of action possible for him as Pope was to flee Italy before Charles' army attacked Rome and take refuge in the Papal enclave of Avignon, then arrange an annulment from there . So would Charles hav set up an anti-Pope in Rome in revenge?
 
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