The result of some twelve years of abortive alliances and ill-kept treaties was that Henry had obtained no single one of the advantages which he had coveted, and that he had lavished untold wealth and many English lives upon phantom schemes which crumbled between his fingers. His subjects had already begun to murmur; the early parliaments of his reign had been passive and complaisant; but by 1523 the Commons had been goaded into resistance. They granted only half the subsidies asked from them, pleading that three summers more of such taxation as the cardinal demanded for his master would leave the realm drained of its last penny, and reduced to fall back on primitive forms of barter, "clothes for victuals and bread for cheese," out of mere want of coin. Fortunately for the king his subjects laid all the blame upon his mouthpiece the cardinal, instead of placing it where it was due. On Wolsey's back also was saddled the most iniquitous of Henry's acts of tyranny against individuals--the judicial murder of the duke of Buckingham, the highest head among the English nobility. For some hasty words, amplified by the doubtful evidence of treacherous retainers, together with a foolish charge of dabbling with astrologers, the heir of the royal line of Thomas of Woodstock had been tried and executed with scandalous haste. His only real crime was that, commenting on the lack of male heirs to the crown--for after many years of wedlock with Catherine of Aragon Henry's sole issue was one sickly daughter--he had been foolish enough to remark that if anything should happen to the king he himself was close in succession to the crown. The cardinal bore the blame, because he and Buckingham had notoriously disliked each other; but the deed had really been of the king's own contriving. He was roused to implacable wrath by anyone who dared to speak on the forbidden topic of the succession question.
In the later years of Wolsey's ascendancy, nevertheless, that same question was the subject of many anxious thoughts. From Henry's own mind it was never long absent; he yearned for a male heir, and he was growing tired of his wife Catherine, who was some years older than himself, had few personal attractions, and was growing somewhat of an invalid. Somewhere about the end of 1526 those who were in the king's intimate confidence began to be aware that he was meditating a divorce--a thing not lightly to be taken in hand, for the queen was the aunt of the emperor Charles V., who would be vastly offended at such a proposal. But Henry's doubts had been marvellously stimulated by the fact that he had become enamoured of another lady--the beautiful, ambitious and cunning Anne Boleyn, a niece of the duke of Norfolk, who had no intention of becoming merely the king's mistress, but aspired to be his consort.