Thomas Wolsey was a lucky man. Accused of treason, he narrowly avoided Henry VIII’s ‘justice’ on the scaffold and instead died of natural causes at Leicester Abbey on 29 November 1530. Earlier that month, Henry VIII’s once all-powerful minister had been arrested on charges of high treason at his archepiscopal palace of Cawood, near York. …
As the deepening chill of late autumn crept icily across the Yorkshire countryside, a cavalcade of men on horseback, headed by the twenty-eight-year-old, Henry Percy, Earl of Northumberland, swept into the gates of Cawood Castle. Inside, Cardinal Thomas Wolsey, one-time chief minister to Henry VIII, was at dinner, entirely unaware of the storm that was …