The King's Cardinal: The Rise and Fall of Thomas Wolsey (Pimlico)

by Gwyn, Peter

  The great difficulty – one that will also be encountered when the subject of political factions is discussed – is that the evidence almost never gives any hint as to the motivation behind a particular action. This being the case, almost everything depends on one’s preconceptions about the way either Wolsey or the political system operated.

  As regards Wolsey and Star Chamber, one illuminating test case concerns Sir Robert Sheffield, whose father had been a successful lawyer in Lincolnshire.148 The father had managed to obtain as Sir Robert’s wife a sister of the 2nd earl of Derby, but this marriage into the nobility had not discouraged him from following his father into the law, and from 1495 to 1508 he was recorder of London, usually representing the City in parliament. He was also a royal councillor, and at the beginning of Henry VIII’s second parliament in February 1512 he was elected Speaker of the House of Commons, evidence of some royal favour. The following parliament of 1515 was dominated by church matters. As a City MP Sheffield may have been particularly concerned about the mysterious death of his fellow citizen Richard Hunne in the bishop of London’s prison, but he was also involved in the much more serious conflict between Church and state arising from the public debate between the abbot of Winchcombe and Friar Standish over benefit of clergy. On this second issue Sheffield appears to have taken an anticlerical stance, and that, according to his own as well as some others’ interpretation, was the reason for his subsequent downfall.149 In any event, after 1515 things began to go so wrong for him that on his death in August 1518, after spending a good part of the previous two and a half years in prison, he owed to the court as the result of a fine the very large sum of 8000 marks (£5,333 6s. 4d.).150

  How had this happened? Sheffield’s explanation, which he had apparently given to the king in person,151 was that he had been maliciously accused by Wolsey of complicity in a murder merely because of his anticlerical stance in the 1515 parliament. If the explanation were to be accepted, one would have to find Wolsey guilty of a deliberate perversion of justice which, even if justified politically on the grounds that he intended Sheffield’s fate to be seen as a warning against laymen attacking the Church, would reflect no credit on him at all. However, there are many reasons for not accepting Sheffield’s explanation. First, there is the fact that in the end he admitted that he had consistently lied to the Council and withdrew his allegations against Wolsey.152 Of course, he may have done this in a last desperate effort to rescue something from a most difficult situation; and it should be said in Sheffield’s favour that the chief evidence for his complicity in the murder was provided by the two people who were accused of doing it and who would have had a good motive for placing the blame on someone whom they had reason to believe was not in Wolsey’s favour. Thus, though Sheffield’s confession should be taken into account, it is not by itself a convincing reason for exonerating Wolsey. The main reason, which relates to a point that has already been made in a different context, is that Wolsey never acted alone in Star Chamber. For instance, when in July 1517 Sheffield was committed to the Tower for ‘the complaint he made to the King of my lord cardinal’,153 there were nineteen other councillors present, including the duke of Norfolk and three judges.154 It is therefore most unlikely that a trumped-up charge could have been brought against Sheffield. For even if one takes the view that his colleagues were all so frightened of Wolsey that they would do whatever he told them, this would not explain why his treatment of Sheffield was not made the basis of one of the many charges brought against him at his downfall. Moreover, it has to be remembered that Sheffield was a sufficiently important man to make his allegations against Wolsey to the king in person. Furthermore, in the conflict between Church and state in 1515 he had taken the king’s side. The fact, therefore, that Henry made no effort to intervene on his behalf suggests quite strongly that Henry himself had no doubt about the justification for the action taken by Wolsey against him. Indeed, it looks as if it was immediately after his interview with Henry that Sheffield was brought before the Council for contempt.155 Finally, much of the motivation for either a personal or a political attack on Sheffield by Wolsey disappears, if the view put forward in chapter 2, that Wolsey was not the leader of the clerical party, is accepted.

  Of course, once Sheffield made his allegations against him, Wolsey would have had to take them seriously. It could not have been in the public interest, let alone his own, for an accusation that the lord chancellor of England had perverted the course of justice to have gone unanswered. Once Sheffield began to talk, Wolsey was forced to intervene, but not, as is so often implied, out of a personal desire for revenge. And it is worth pointing out that any attack on Wolsey – whether made by Sheffield or by Thomas Lucas, a solicitor-general under Henry VII, who in 1518 was committed to the Tower for scandalous words against Wolsey,156 or even by John Roo, a serjeant-at-law committed to the Fleet in 1527 for a masque he had produced at Gray’s Inn which Wolsey thought contained a veiled attack on him157 – was immediately a matter of public concern just because Wolsey was not a private person but the leading royal servant.

  If there is, then, good reason for not accepting Sheffield’s explanations for his trials and tribulations, another is required, and it might go something like this: the original charge in 1516 of some involvement by Sheffield in a murder – of the kind, for instance, that Sir William Brereton or Sir John Savage was accused of – was genuine, and he was thus rightly fined or at least bound by recognizances.158 He seems to have been worried that additional charges might be made, for he took the precaution of suing out a pardon in Chancery that covered all possible offences that he might have committed.159 He also went on to the attack by challenging Wolsey’s motives. But the attack boomeranged when the king refused to accept the allegations, and in July 1517 he found himself hauled before the Council and then put in the Tower for having made them. At about the same time further evidence came to light concerning his complicity in the murder. Thus, when in February 1518 he had to face three separate interrogations by Wolsey he found himself in an impossible situation, conceded all the charges, both for the complicity in the murder and for the many personal attacks on Wolsey, and threw himself on the mercy of the king and Council. He was again committed to the Tower, but sometime before his death in August he was fined and then released. The view that he died while still in the Tower,160 which has previously lent colour to the portrayal of a Wolsey driven by personal animosity, is not sustained by the evidence of his will.161 That Sheffield was buried in the Austin Friars – which is the only reason so far produced for suggesting that he did die in the Tower, on the grounds that it was commonly used for the burial of those who had died there162 – turns out to have been his own choice, because his wife was buried there.

  In the end, of course, everyone must make their own judgement, and as we have seen, given the difficulties that the evidence presents, people’s preconceptions will play a large part in that judgment. But the argument presented here is that Sheffield was no innocent victim of Wolsey’s spite, but rather that he was treated with commendable fairness, and that even the fine, though large, was justified.163

  If this view of Wolsey’s treatment of Sheffield is accepted, it becomes very difficult to accept the more general charge that Wolsey deliberately used his position as lord chancellor to further his own personal and political interests. It is not the only case that could be used to support the charge: two others that might, one concerning Henry Standish, and the other Thomas lord Dacre, are examined elsewhere.164 But the Sheffield case is the best, partly because a possible motive is discernible and partly because the allegation of Wolsey’s bias was actually made at the time. Although there was no mention of it in any of the accusations made against Wolsey at his fall, there were amongst the articles drawn up at that time three references to personal bias in legal matters, one of which was very personal indeed. Article 38 accused him of committing to the Fleet prison Sir John Stanley until he released a farm which he held of the abbot of Chester,
to one Legh of Adlington. And the reason why Wolsey wanted Legh to have the farm, at least according to the article, was that Legh had married one Lark’s daughter, ‘which woman the said Lord Cardinal kept, and had with her two children’. Poor Stanley was allegedly so upset by Wolsey’s treatment of him that ‘upon displeasure in his heart, [he] made himself a monk in Westminster, and there died’.165 No record of the case has been traced, so it is not possible to make any convincing judgment on the validity of the charge. It does, however, seem a little unlikely that Wolsey would have stooped to a deliberate perversion of justice merely to help his mistress’s husband, when he was in a position to do so much for him in quite legitimate ways. And to become a monk at Westminster was, to say the least, an idiosyncratic response to the loss of a case in Star Chamber.166 Nothing is known of the other two cases singled out, the one concerning a disputed lease of parsonage with which Wolsey’s newly founded Cardinal College was involved, the other the use of an injunction in favour of Sir George Throckmorton. Three comparatively trivial cases seem a meagre catch for people looking to discredit a fallen minister, and that so little was found is perhaps the best evidence that Wolsey was in no sense a corrupt lord chancellor.167

  Nevertheless, one apparently worrying aspect of the cases that had to do with law enforcement is that most of the culprits do seem to have escaped comparatively lightly. If Sir William Brereton and Sir John Savage were really guilty of aiding and abetting murderers, was a fine, even if quite a large one, a sufficient punishment? It becomes even more worrying when twenty years after he had been punished in Star Chamber, Brereton was discovered still troubling the peace of Cheshire.168 Sir John Savage’s heavy fine in 1520 did not prevent him and his family from feuding with other local gentry, and on more than one occasion they were back before Wolsey in Star Chamber.169 The three Surrey JPs in trouble in 1519 were not as a consequence removed from the commission of the peace, and although Sir John Hussey was never found guilty of any of the various offences alleged against him, it is nonetheless a little surprising that he continued to play such an active part in government, both in Lincolnshire and at the Council table.170 And if all these people were inadequately punished, is it not also true that far too few were made even to answer for their abuse of justice? It has been calculated that 28 cases of some kind of maladministration by an official were brought before Star Chamber in Wolsey’s period, to which can be added 44 others which bore directly on the problem of law and order – a grand total of 66 cases out of the 473 brought before Wolsey, for which there is enough evidence to make any classification possible.171 Even with the admittedly important qualification that it was never Wolsey’s intention that Star Chamber should play a major role in criminal jurisdiction, and that when cases were brought there it was his usual practice to transfer them to King’s Bench, the number might still appear too few. What had become of all those ‘enormities and things misbehaved and murdered within this realm’?

  It is easy enough to raise the question, but almost impossible to answer it – though not for lack of evidence. Enough of the records of Wolsey’s judicial activities has survived to lead one to suspect that the discovery of more would not alter the general picture. As for the common law courts, all too many records survive, though perhaps because of this they have not been studied in quite the same detail. In any event, one is still left with the insoluable problem of trying to decide what proportion of serious crime was detected; or, to relate this problem to the present context, does the fact that comparatively few cases came to Wolsey’s attention merely reflect that very few serious crimes involving the maladministration of justice were committed? One will never know. Even Wolsey’s frequent references to ‘enormities’ are not very helpful. It was the practice of royal government in the late medieval and early modern period to use emotive terms in describing society’s ills. Any new law or administrative move was justified as providing a remedy to almost unspeakable evils, but just because the evils are so unspeakable it is difficult to take the government’s view as a realistic assessment, especially when the same few evils are so frequently referred to. If things were as bad as royal governments maintained, life would have been intolerable for most people most of the time, and the evidence does not suggest that this was so. Why, then, did royal governments and indeed parliament, use such extreme language? The question has not been much studied.172 It may in part be a question of style: the English language in the fifteenth and early sixteenth centuries was more colourful and more emotional. It may be that there was a greater need to justify government action of any kind. But perhaps, most obviously, there were advantages in exaggerating the extent of a problem. If, for instance, instead of talking about ‘enormities’, Wolsey had merely said that it had come to his notice that one or two local officials were a little lax in their enforcement of the law, it would hardly have encouraged anyone to take the problem of law enforcement seriously. Moreover, he did not always speak in such extreme terms, as a well-known letter of his written to Henry in the autumn of 1517 attests: ‘And for your realm, our Lord be thanked, it was never in such tranquility. For all this summer I have had neither of riot, felony, nor forcible entry, but that your laws be in every place indifferently ministered without leaning of any manner.’173 There is no reason to suppose that Wolsey was deliberately lying, and indeed, since Henry could so easily have checked his assessment, it would have been extremely foolish of him to do so. Rather, what it shows is that both the view taken and the language used depended to a great extent upon one’s audience.

  My suggestion would be that many historians have failed to take this into account, and have taken the rhetoric of early Tudor pronouncements on law and order at its face value.174 What may give some support to this are the very facts that are produced to show that law enforcement was an exceptionally difficult problem. It now seems reasonably well established that only between 10 and 30 per cent of all those brought to trial were convicted and, what is more, that the number of defendants who escaped trial by not putting in an appearance was sometimes as high as 80 per cent, and only rarely fell under 50 per cent.175 The elaborate process by which defendants should have been forced to appear, leading eventually to distraint of goods or outlawing if they failed to respond, had, by the end of the fifteenth century, become very ineffective.176 However, the vast majority of those defendants who did put in an appearance escaped trial by the payment of money, either as a fine, if they admitted their guilt, or for a pardon. As a result, very few people actually had their cases submitted to a jury and even fewer were found guilty. If, for instance, one combines the figures for the Michaelmas terms of 1488 and 1490, it emerges that of the 112 defendants who appeared only six were actually tried, only three were found guilty, and only one failed in the end to receive a pardon – and as a consequence was executed.177

  These are remarkable figures, but the conclusion need not be that the system was in total chaos. Indeed, for the figures to have been in one sense so bad – and there is no reason to suppose that those of 1488 and 1499 were untypical – suggests that at the very least the early Tudors had a different perception of what was acceptable, or, perhaps even more importantly, realistic. This is not to say that early Tudor society was more violent than others, or that crime was less easily detectable. Both have been suggested, and some play is frequently made of the fact that there was no police force.178 Yet the presence of a police force today does not prevent a great many cases going undetected, nor indeed has it put an end to violence. Moreover, there is no good reason to believe that our society is any better than early Tudor society at preventing the rich and the powerful from abusing the legal system. What is different is that the nobility and landed gentry have been forced, over a very long period of time, to share their power with other sections of the community, and there has also occurred a greater specialization of functions, of which the emergence of a police force is but one example. The near monopoly of power exercised by the nobility and landed gentry has thus been b
roken. Whether that monopoly resulted in an early Tudor version of the Hobbesian nightmare portrayed by some historians is another matter, but all that its breakdown means is that nowadays it is more likely to be the wealthy business man, the large industrial company or a powerful trade union that abuses the system rather than the nobleman or the country squire. Things have changed, but not all that much and not necessarily for the better.

  The intention of this detour has been to provide some criteria by which to judge Wolsey’s achievements in this field. If early Tudor society is thought of as violent and disorderly, then what he did will not appear to add up to very much. But if the more optimistic view offered here is taken, then his achievement will appear much more considerable. Only a comparatively few people appeared before him in Star Chamber on what may loosely be called criminal charges, because only comparatively few people deserved to; and those who were guilty ‘got away’ with only a fine or a pardon not because Wolsey lost his nerve or was weak, but because he held the accepted view that these were appropriate punishments. As regards the powerful, an appropriate punishment meant ensuring that they were made fully aware that they were not above the law, but this did not usually mean that they were deprived of their natural role as leaders in their localities, partly because that was difficult to do. An occasion on which it might have been attempted was when the action involved was treasonable, though even in such cases the Crown was well aware that to cut somebody’s head off solved very little because the victim’s family and friends remained to seek their revenge. Thus attainders were often reversed, and kings were usually anxious – but some more anxious than others179 – to restore to favour families that had been in opposition to them. In other words, the realities of the power structure in late medieval and early modern England imposed a certain degree of leniency and compromise upon the Crown’s and Wolsey’s treatment of the powerful, but only in the way that a different power structure demands different compromises today.