It was bad for Cardinal Wolsey that he had left Cranmer to render this
help. It was worse for him that he had tried to dissuade the King from
marrying Anne Boleyn. Such a servant as he, to such a master as Henry,
would probably have fallen in any case; but, between the hatred of the
party of the Queen that was, and the hatred of the party of the Queen
that was to be, he fell suddenly and heavily. Going down one day to the
Court of Chancery, where he now presided, he was waited upon by the
Dukes of Norfolk and Suffolk, who told him that they brought an order
to him to resign that office, and to withdraw quietly to a house he had
at Esher, in Surrey. The Cardinal refusing, they rode off to the King;
and next day came back with a letter from him, on reading which, the
Cardinal submitted. An inventory was made out of all the riches in his
palace at York Place (now Whitehall), and he went sorrowfully up the
river, in his barge, to Putney. An abject man he was, in spite of his
pride; for being overtaken, riding out of that place towards Esher, by
one of the King’s chamberlains who brought him a kind message and a
ring, he alighted from his mule, took off his cap, and kneeled down in
the dirt. His poor Fool, whom in his prosperous days he had always kept
in his palace to entertain him, cut a far better figure than he; for,
when the Cardinal said to the chamberlain that he had nothing to send
to his lord the King as a present, but that jester who was a most
excellent one, it took six strong yeomen to remove the faithful fool
from his master.
Public-domain text, read in full here on John Shaqi.
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