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

by Gwyn, Peter

  208 S.L. Adams, p.63.

  209Inter alia, A.L. Brown, pp.95-109; Chrimes, Administrative History, pp.133, 161-2, 223-5; Catto, ‘King’s servants’, p.81; Ross, p.308; Select Cases, pp.xxix-li.

  210 The metaphysics largely provided by Elton; see especially Tudor Revolution, 316-69; Studies, iii, pp.21-38; but followed by his pupils, Guy and Starkey, though they have sought to modify their master’s chronology; see Guy, ‘Privy Council’, pp.59 ff; D.R. Starkey, History Today, 37, pp.27-31.

  211Inter alia, A.L. Brown, 96-8; Chrimes, Administrative History, pp.216 ff; Harriss, pp.32 ff. Catto, ‘King’s servant’, pp.82-84.

  212 See p.115 above.

  213LP, iv, 1800.

  214LP, iv, 1801.

  215 Guy, Cardinal’s Court, pp.29-35 for this and other appearances.

  216Inter alia, Davies, Peace, Print and Protestantism, p.156; Elton, Reform and Reformation, pp.33-4; Guy, Cardinal’s Court, p.9-21, 29.

  217 Chrimes, Henry VII, pp.102-3 Select Cases of Henry VII, pp.xix, xxxiii-xxxiv, 7 ff.

  218 Guy, Cardinal’s Court, p.27.

  219 Guy, Cardinal’s Court, pp.1 ff.

  220 A.L. Brown, pp.96-7; Chrimes, Administrative History, p.236.

  221LP, iv, 4061, 4124, 4125, 4288, 4293.

  222Sp. Cal., F.S, p.176.

  223Sp. Cal., iii (i), p.194.

  224 Richard Fox, p.97 (LP Add, 185): ‘And much I marvel when you could find the leisure to write it yourself. I know perfectly that it came of your special good heart and affection towards me.’

  225 The notion underlies all Starkey’s work on the privy chamber and faction first presented in ‘King’s privy chamber’; see also Scarisbrick, Thought, 52, pp.251-6.

  226St. P, i, p.289 (LP, iv, 4335).

  227 Cavendish, p.24.

  228 Rawdon Brown, ii p.268 (Ven. Cal., ii, 1215).

  229Ven. Cal., iii, 1201, 1203, 1220, 1235.

  230Sp. Cal., F.S, pp.177 ff.

  231Sp. Cal., F.S, p.181.

  232LP, ii, 4276.

  233LP, iii, 3485, 3568.

  234LP, iv, 1234.

  235 Thomas More, Correspondence, pp.275 f; St. P, i, pp.135 ff; the latter includes Wolsey’s letters direct to Henry.

  236 See especially Thomas More Correspondence, p.275 (LP, iii, 3270).

  237 See especially ibid, p.295 (LP, iii, 3355) for More reporting to Wolsey that he had ‘distinctly read’ to Henry a letter from Wolsey to himself, four letters from Margaret of Scotland, two to Henry and two to Surrey, and two letters devised by Wolsey to be sent to her. In 1521 Pace informed Wolsey that Henry ‘readeth all your letters with great diligence’; see St. P, i, p.79 (LP, iii, 717).

  238 Elton, Tudor Revolution, pp.68-9 for some examples.

  239 More, Correspondence, p.283 (LP, iii, 3291).

  240LP, iii, 3477, 3515; iv, 2392.

  241 More, Correspondence (LP, iii, iv, 2535) Wolsey to More in Sept-Oct 1526.

  242 Ibid, pp.279-82 (LP, iii, 3291).

  243 Ibid, pp.275-8 (LP, iii, 3270).

  244 Ibid, p.285 (LP, iii, 3320).

  245 Ibid, pp.289-95 (LP, iii, 3346).

  246 Gunn, EHR, CI, pp.607-11.

  247 More, Correspondence, pp.288-9 (LP, iii, 3340).

  248 Ibid, pp.295-7 (LP, iii, 3355).

  249 Ibid, p.287 (LP, iii, 3359).

  250St. P, i, p.149 (LP, iii, 3613).

  251 More, Correspondence, p.301 (LP, iii, 3485).

  252 See Bernard, War, Taxation and Rebellion, pp.40-5 for an excellent treatment of Henry’s role in the conduct of foreign policy.

  CHAPTER SEVEN

  THE NORTH, IRELAND AND WALES

  WOLSEY SPENT LESS THAN SIX MONTHS IN THE NORTH OF ENGLAND, AND then only after his fall from favour. However, an enormous amount of his time and energy was spent on its affairs. Partly this was because as archbishop of York from 1514 until his death in 1530, and as bishop of Durham from 1523 until 1529, he had specific responsibilities in the area. But the major reason was that the North posed serious problems for royal government which demanded constant attention from any important servant of the Crown. And perhaps it would be helpful to state at the outset that these problems were insoluble: there were too many of them, and any attempt to solve one would only aggravate another. This point needs stressing if only because historians, like journalists, are apt to believe in solutions, and have sometimes suggested that the Tudors did have a solution to the problems of the North. Put at its simplest, their answer was to remove the ‘feudal barons’ from power and influence in the North and to replace them with ‘modern’, ‘bureaucratic’ Councils, staffed by royal nominees and closely controlled from the centre.1

  In such a scheme, Wolsey puts in a rather muted appearance as the architect in 1525 of a Council of the North – otherwise referred to as the duke of Richmond’s Council – but even this had been foreshadowed by those set up by the Yorkist kings, and was but a pale shadow of what was to come. Wolsey thus earns few marks from such historians, being always considered more medieval than modern, whatever that is supposed to mean. In reality, the problems facing Wolsey in the 1520s were much the same as those facing Elizabethan statesmen in the 1580s and 1590s. The differences were those of detail, and it is the detail that historians have tended to ignore. For the people having to deal with the day-to-day problems of the North, they were of the utmost importance. All that was really open to Tudor statesmen was to ‘make and mend’, and this was something that Wolsey was very good at.

  The underlying problem was that the North had a border with a traditionally unfriendly country only too willing to make trouble, especially when England was involved in continental matters. In 1496 and 1497 James IV had invaded England on Perkin Warbeck’s behalf, and when in 1513 Henry VIII had taken an army to France, James could not resist the opportunity to invade yet again. There followed his defeat and death at Flodden, but for England the Scottish threat remained. The intervention of the duke of Albany in Scottish affairs, with his close connections with France, had foiled English efforts to set up a government in Scotland with which they could co-operate. In the summer of 1517 Albany had returned to France, but by the end of 1521 he was back and during the following three years, a period when England was actively engaged in a war with France, a Scottish invasion was a constant threat. At the end of May 1524, Albany left Scotland for good, and by the end of that year a truce between the two countries was signed. During the next three years this was constantly renewed until in December 1528 a five-year truce was arranged at Berwick, along with a major redress of grievances.2

  Two things had greatly contributed to the improved relations between the two countries following Albany’s departure. First and foremost, there was the new English alliance with France, signalled by the Treaty of the More in August 1525. Only in conjunction with France could Scotland be a real threat to England, and both countries knew this. Secondly, in February 1525, a new faction headed by the earl of Angus had taken over the government in Scotland – a faction which owed much of its success to English support, for the return of Angus and his brother to Scotland had been engineered by Wolsey.3 But the underlying reason for the good relations – something that was stressed in a previous chapter – was English restraint.4 Evidence of what might otherwise appear to be too Sassenach a view can be found in the English reaction to the overthrow of Angus in 1528 by a faction led by the young king, James V. Neither James nor the new faction were by inclination friends of England, and there is no doubt that the overthrow of Angus was a major defeat for Wolsey, who was for some time, and according to some of his advisers on the spot, for too long, reluctant to accept it.5 Yet despite Scotland’s continuing isolation and the insecurity of James’s position, the English reaction was not to wage war but to negotiate the Treaty of Berwick. All this is not to suggest that Wolsey was a saint. There was constant English intervention in Scottish affairs, and Wolsey was, as usual in his conduct of foreign policy, quite prepared to heighten tension and to use force
– in this case border raids – in order to exert pressure to achieve his ends. But in the North the direction of this pressure was always towards peace. The conquest of Scotland was never one of Wolsey’s aims, which is also to say that it was never one of Henry’s. Scottish affairs were peripheral to their European design, to be coped with only insofar as they affected it, and with as little expenditure as possible. But that did not prevent both men having to spend a great deal of time on Scottish affairs, nor did their pacific intentions enable them to escape from the reality that the North was a border which had to be kept in some kind of military preparedness.

  This reality had dictated the way in which the North was governed for the last two hundred years. It had led to the creation of the office of warden of the Marches to rule over those areas adjoining the boundary, an arrangement duplicated on the Scottish side – and by the early sixteenth century there were on both sides three in number, West, Middle and East. In the Marches the wardens possessed wide-ranging powers chiefly designed to enable them to raise an army whenever one was needed but also to perform any judicial and administrative functions relating to border warfare. Much older than the Marches was the great ecclesiastical Palatinate of Durham, but its raison d’être was much the same as that of the many other franchises and honours still in existence in the early sixteenth century. By delegation of special powers to men likely to be resident in the area the Crown hoped to create an effective defence against the Scots – all of which enables the simple point to be made that the Crown had been interfering in the affairs of the North long before the Tudors came to power.6

  The purpose of this interference had not been to weaken the power of the Northern nobility, which was after all partly of its own creation, in practice providing a more effective defence against the Scots than any administrative unit that the Crown might construct. It was, in the Tudor period, too administratively complicated, and perhaps above all too expensive, to keep anything approaching a professional army in being. The Crown had still to rely very heavily on the nobleman’s retinue, and, thus, also to live with the possibility that it might be used against itself – but the obsession with this possibility has been the historians’ rather than the Crown’s. Kings had to behave peculiarly badly for noblemen to revolt – and almost all kings who did face major rebellions had either succeeded to the throne as minors, like Richard II and Henry VI, or had wrested the throne from somebody else, as both Henry IV and Henry VII had done. It is therefore misleading to see the Northern nobility as in some abstract way a constant threat to the Crown. Indeed, by and large it was quite the opposite, and it was for this reason that the Crown appointed the great noblemen to such important offices as the wardenship of a March. Here was the ideal solution, because the nobles brought to the office their own authority and influence in the area. Unfortunately, it was not always possible.

  It is sometimes implied that there was an unlimited supply of important Northern noblemen available for royal service. In fact, at any one time there were at the most only three or four: a Neville or a Percy, and perhaps, though not as powerful, a Clifford or Dacre. If any of these, for whatever reason, were unavailable, there were obvious difficulties – and the reason need not have been suspicion of their loyalty: sheer incompetence, or the minority of one of them, would have just the same consequence. Another difficulty was that the nobility’s estates did not fit neatly into the administrative divisions. Percy lands were everywhere.7 Although most often associated with the county of their title and their great residence at Alnwick Castle, the Percys owned even more land in Yorkshire, the county of their origin; and also with their ownership of the great honour of Cockermouth, a great deal in Cumberland. North of Cockermouth was the barony of Gilsland owned by the Dacre family, and it was this, with their chief residence at Naworth Castle, that made the Dacres possible candidates for the wardenship of the West March; but they also owned the barony of Morpeth, away towards the west coast of Northumberland. The chief centre of the Clifford family was Skipton in the West Riding, but they also possessed important estates in Westmorland and some in Cumberland.8 A detailed political map of the North showing the distribution of the leading family estates would comprise concentrations of holdings with a wide and uneven spread. Furthermore, though this mosaic of holdings would be repeated throughout England, the suspicion is that in the North they were more tightly packed and the possibility for friction greater than elsewhere. Certainly there was friction and rivalry in the North, exacerbated by the royal administrative divisions, in particular the wide powers granted to the wardens. This office gave the occupant power over other people’s tenants, possibly over the tenants of his chief rival, and this both rival lord and tenant could and did resent. The evidence, at least for the first twenty years of Henry VIII’s reign, is that these rivalries were not welcomed by the Crown – indeed, nothing made the good administration of the North more difficult.

  In the 1520s the most open rivalry was to be found in the West March between the Dacre and Clifford families.9 It had begun at least as early as 1513 when Thomas Lord Dacre felt compelled to request royal intervention in order to ensure that the Clifford tenants carried out his instructions as warden.10 It then grumbled on for the rest of Dacre’s life, but only really surfaced after his death in 1525. In that year Henry Lord Clifford was created earl of Cumberland, and succeeded Dacre as warden of the West March just before the latter’s death. Dacre had held the post for almost forty years, so his replacement by Clifford was bound to cause problems as the new warden strove to establish himself in what had become a Dacre stronghold. He immediately had difficulty in gaining possession of various subsidiary royal offices, such as the captaincy of Carlisle and stewardship of Penrith that customarily went with the office of warden. In an effort to secure himself in these offices, he abruptly terminated all leases attached to them, previously granted by Dacre, and put in tenants of his own. Dacre resistance was so great that in order to put an end to the ‘inquietation’, Wolsey wrote to Clifford ordering him to restore immediately the former leaseholders until such time as he and the king’s Council could discuss the matter with him. Though addressed to ‘my entirely beloved friend’, Wolsey’s letter was a rebuke,11 and it is not certain how great a friend to Clifford Wolsey was. The matter is of some importance. Clifford was to remain warden for only two years, to be replaced at the end of 1527 by his rival, William, the new Lord Dacre, and it could be argued that he only lasted so short a time because he had received insufficient support from the Crown, and in particular from Wolsey. Back in the autumn of 1517 Clifford had spent a fortnight in the Fleet prison, put there by Wolsey. His offence is unknown – probably it had to do with his bad relations with his father and his riotous life-style – but if there was almost certainly good reason for his imprisonment, it cannot have helped his future relations with Wolsey.12 On the other hand, what evidence there is suggests that his relations with Henry, with whom he had been brought up, were good and all his life he was to be a loyal servant of the Crown.13 Could it be, therefore, that Wolsey was never reconciled to him being chosen as warden by Henry, and thus failed to give him the backing he should have done? In favour of such a view is the fact that though Thomas Lord Dacre had lost office in 1525 the family had not been disgraced, and Wolsey’s relations with Thomas’s brother, Sir Christopher, and with his son and heir, William, were good. There is also the evidence of the extremely interesting letter that Lord Percy wrote to Clifford in October 1526, in which Percy reported a conversation he had overheard during which his father had warned Wolsey ‘that there was no trust in you [Clifford], and desired his Grace to put no confidence in you, for you were all with my Lord of Norfolk’.14 Thus, it could be that Clifford’s removal from office was connected with the more important struggle for power at court between Norfolk and Wolsey.

  In chapter 13 it will be argued that no such struggle occurred, whatever gossip there may have been to the contrary in Northern circles – and it is almost certainly such g
ossip that Percy’s father was drawing upon in his conversation with Wolsey. But whether the argument is correct, the notion of such a struggle, in which Clifford, as a supporter of Norfolk, was to suffer, is not necessary to explain Clifford’s removal from office in 1527, nor, indeed, is it likely that personal feeling came into it. This removal occurred at the end of a year which had seen great disturbances in the North as a result of the activities of Sir William Lisle. The failure of the royal administration in the North to cope with Lisle led to major alterations both in organization and personnel. These will be discussed later, but one of the victims of the reshuffle was Clifford. The Crown appears to have taken the view that he had not been an effective warden, one reason being that he was not influential enough in the West March to dominate it in the way that the Dacre family had done – and, of course, one of the reasons why Clifford had failed to dominate there was that he was being constantly undermined by the Dacres. The one worry about this explanation is that almost all evidence for Clifford’s removal from office is lacking. It must therefore remain a suggestion, but one that is strengthened by subsequent events.

  Clifford was not disgraced. He remained as captain of Carlisle – this perhaps an attempt partly to soften the blow and partly to balance the rival forces in the West March and thus to lessen the conflict. But if it was a deliberate balancing act, it was one that did not work. Within months, his successor, William Lord Dacre, was being ordered not to interfere in tenancies granted by Clifford, in the same way as Clifford in 1526 had been ordered not to interfere in tenancies granted by the then Lord Dacre.15 More importantly, both the new Warden General of the East and Middle Marches, the former Lord Percy, now Earl of Northumberland, and the Council of the North,16 were finding it impossible to put an end to the quarrelling between the two families.17 By October 1528 Thomas Magnus, one of Wolsey’s closest advisers on Northern matters and a member of Richmond’s Council, was advising that the captaincy of Carlisle should be returned to the new warden, but he clearly felt that rather more than this was required to provide a solution: