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

by Gwyn, Peter

  The Lisles had close connections with the Percys. Sir William’s father had fought at Flodden in the Percy retinue, while in 1522 Sir William himself had fought under Sir William Percy, the 5th earl’s brother. On 25 March 1525 the earl had appointed him constable of Alnwick.107 But the Lisles, as lords of Felton, were quite an important family in their own right, having rather more status and wealth than a typical border clan such as the Armstrongs. Moreover, in 1523 Sir William, as captain of Wark (a royal appointment), had been the hero of the hour when he had successfully defended the castle against the invading Scots. This had led Henry to ask the earl of Surrey to pass on to Lisle his monarch’s congratulations.108 However, though a cut above the border ‘clans’, the Lisles had close contacts with them, especially in Redesdale where the Lisles held property. Like the clans, they were of the utmost help to the Crown in times of war, but found peacetime irksome, and were always willing to take the law into their own hands, as, for instance, Sir William’s contretemps with Roger Heron, with whose family he was often at loggerheads, demonstrates. When Sir William subsequently appeared before Richmond’s Council with his son Humphrey, he was alleged to have said that he had already ‘ruffled’ with Wolsey, and now had every intention of plucking him by the nose.109 Furthermore, the son had apparently put an apparitor, acting on behalf of one of Wolsey’s legatine commissarys, in the stocks.110 Following their examination, father and son were indicted at Newcastle assizes for riot and forcible entry and were placed in Newcastle prison from which, as we have seen, they subsequently escaped.111

  Even before he embarked on his embassy to Amiens and Compiègne in July 1527, Wolsey had become directly involved in the Lisles’ activities, but on his return in late September he was faced with an increasingly serious crisis. The Lisles were by now plundering the Marches and the adjoining country more or less at will, and they were able to do so mainly because they were able to use Scotland as a comparatively safe base from which to mount their raids.112 Wolsey’s response was first to put pressure on the Scots to move against the Lisles.113 Secondly, in December 1527 he appointed the 6th earl of Northumberland warden of the East and Middle Marches with a special brief to put an end to the Lisles’ activities.114

  On Sunday 25 January 1528 the earl was returning from church to his castle at Alnwick when he was met by fifteen penitents in white shirts and with halters around their necks. On his approach, they knelt and ‘submitted themselves without any manner of condition unto the king’s gracious mercy’.115 The leader of the group was Sir William Lisle. The appointment of the 6th earl had brought almost immediate success, but does this mean that to him should go the credit? And if so, should the episode be seen as evidence that the North was ungovernable without the active co-operation of the Percy family, a fact of life that, in making the earl’s appointment, Henry and Wolsey had had reluctantly to come to terms with?116 The Lisles certainly claimed the 6th earl as their ‘good lord’, and thus someone from whom they could expect mercy, and in return he did go to some lengths to save not Sir William’s life, as is sometimes stated, but his two sons.117 And the reason he gave to Wolsey for doing so was because ‘William Lisle is kyned and allied of the borders amongst them that I must need put my life in trust with many times’, if he was to serve successfully as Henry’s warden.118

  The earl’s point is a fair one. Families such as the Lisles were just as much a fact of Northern life as the Percys. They would not disappear or quickly change their ways, however strong and frequent were the exhortations from the South for them to do so, and besides, in times of conflict with Scotland, their warlike propensities were of great advantage to the English Crown. All this may not have been fully appreciated by the Crown, or even by Wolsey, though it might be more accurate to say that it wished to play it both ways just because there were two different problems: defending the border against the Scots, and maintaining law and order when there was no immediate Scottish threat. The Crown was happy enough to congratulate a Lisle for his defence of Wark, but equally happy to put him in prison for ruffling with the sheriff of Northumberland. This ambiguity was all very well when one was sitting in London, but it undoubtedly made life difficult for those in the North who had to deal with the likes of the Lisles.

  It is not clear whether the Lisles presented a particular difficulty to the 6th earl because of his family’s close connection with them. It was his father whom Sir William Lisle had known well and who had made him constable of Alnwick and, given that father and son got on so badly, the suggestion that Sir William would have assumed that he would receive special treatment from the son is probably wrong. Indeed, that he could even have hoped for it is more likely to be an indication of his desperate plight, something that the emphasis often placed on the ‘feudal’ relationship between the Percys and the Lisles rather obscures.

  The fact is that in January 1528 the Lisles had little option but to submit. Admittedly, it is hard to assess how effective the English appeal to the earl of Angus – at this time still in control of Scottish affairs – to do something about the Lisles was. The 6th earl was to deny that he had received any help from that quarter,119 and both Henry and Wolsey had complained that not enough was being done.120 This Angus had denied and, given the prospect of Albany’s return and his own overthrow that the improving relations between England and France opened up, it seems likely that he would have been anxious to do everything he could to keep in with Henry and Wolsey.121 His problem was that his control over the Scottish Marches, where the Lisles were harbouring, was not all that secure. Still, he was probably able to do enough to persuade the Lisles that Scotland could not for long remain a safe haven.122 More important in exerting pressure on the Lisles was Wolsey’s decision to order the new warden of the East and Middle Marches to go into the trouble spots such as Redesdale and Tynedale, where the Lisles were getting a lot of support, and to extract pledges whereby certain individuals from each family were made responsible for the good behaviour of the rest.123 Such a ploy was by no means new, but Northumberland was able to get across that in this instance the government meant business – helped no doubt by the proclamations, issued on Wolsey’s orders, calling upon the rebels to submit to the king’s mercy and threatening excommunication and terrible punishment on their families if they did not do so.124 By the end of January Lisle was thus a desperate man, unsure of his base in Scotland but all too sure that the new warden was determined to bring him to justice. The offer of a pardon, which it must be stressed came not from the warden but from the Crown, may well have seemed to him the only possible way of saving anything from an impossible situation. Whether Lisle was helped to this conclusion by the fact that the person he would have to submit to was a Percy is impossible to tell, but if he hoped for some special treatment, he was soon to be disappointed, at least insofar as his own person was concerned. By the beginning of April, various parts of his anatomy were decorating conspicuous public places in Newcastle.125

  Nevertheless, it remains true that where the deputy wardens and Richmond’s Council had failed, the 6th earl had succeeded, and it may be that the prestige of a Percy was an important factor in the Crown’s ability to tighten the noose around the rebels’ necks. This is not, however, the same thing as saying that the rebels’ activities forced the Crown to return to a Percy rule of the North, nor does it give any support to the suggestion that the Percys encouraged the rampages of the Lisles in 1527 in order to force the Crown to turn to them.126 The difficulty with this latter point is that, as an explanation, it is not required. The Lisles’ quarrel with the Herons, with which the whole episode had begun, has every appearance of being genuine, and was certainly all too typical, while their rampage following their break-out from prison appears to have been one long act of revenge against the sheriff of Northumberland who had tried to intervene in the original quarrel.127 Furthermore, it seems too altruistic of Sir William to have risked his own life and those of his family merely to further the interests of the Percys! And, of course
, if the argument presented here can be accepted, there was no need for the Crown to be forced into accepting Percy rule. Its objection had been to a particular Percy, the 5th earl of Northumberland. There was, at least initially, no objection to his son. Indeed, it looks very much as if, brought up in Wolsey’s household, he had been groomed for high office in the North. What had almost certainly prevented an earlier appointment were those major disagreements with his father already referred to. Once the father died, in May 1527, the way was left clear for the son’s appointment, which took place only six months later. The activities of the Lisles may well explain the precise timing, but there is no reason to suppose that it would not have come about at some stage, and sooner rather than later.

  Henry and Wolsey had always understood that only by co-operating with the leading noblemen in the North could its good government and safety be insured. The problem had been to find a suitable nobleman. In January 1528 with the success in bringing the Lisles to book, it must have seemed as if the search was over. But as it turned out, the 6th earl was to be something of a disappointment – not because he was ‘overmighty’, but because he was unstable, subject to depression and what looks like hypochondria – or, as he called it, ‘my old disease’.128 It is perhaps a little harsh to suggest that his affair with Anne Boleyn, while still in Wolsey’s household, provides the first indication of this instability, but it certainly did not help his relationship with his father, who had been planning for some time to marry him to Mary Talbot, a daughter of the earl of Shrewsbury. When, late in 1523 or early 1524, the marriage took place it turned into something of a disaster, perhaps partly the result of a dependence upon male favourites strong enough to suggest some quite strong homosexual element in his make-up. At any rate, his affection for them led him to give away such large amounts of money and land that in 1537 one of the royal commissioners who surveyed his estates on his death could write: ‘Never have I seen a finer inheritance more blemished by the follies of the owner and untruth of his servants.’129

  It is against this background that Wolsey’s efforts in 1528 to supervise the management of the 6th earl’s household must be seen. Often taken as yet more evidence of Henry VIII’s and Wolsey’s implacable pursuit of the Percys, it is in fact evidence of their desire to save them from themselves. The case is paralleled by a similar desire to save the De Vere and Grey families from the efforts of a particular head of each family to dissipate its inheritance.130 The real question to ask is not whether the 6th earl was badly treated but why, given his instability, he was chosen to rule over the East and Middle Marches. It could be argued that it was his weakness and malleability that attracted the Crown, but that would be to ignore the circumstances surrounding his appointment. What was looked for was someone tough enough to deal with the Lisles, and Wolsey must have hoped that the 6th earl would prove to be such – and however much he was aided and abetted by others such as Angus, and indeed Wolsey, the earl did rise to the occasion. But it may be that Wolsey underestimated the difficulty of keeping him up to the mark; and indeed, almost immediately he was forced to give him a severe telling-off for going behind his back in his efforts to save the lives of Lisle’s two sons.131 Is there evidence here of the autocratic Wolsey, suspicious of any potential rivals and all too anxious to browbeat his own protégé? It seems unlikely, and neither of the two people the earl consulted, Tunstall and Tuke, was in any serious sense a rival of Wolsey. The straightforward explanation for Wolsey’s reaction is that the earl had done the wrong thing: if it was his considered view that Lisle’s sons should be pardoned, his correct course of action was to have raised the matter with Wolsey. And what is sometimes overlooked is that Wolsey did take the earl’s advice and the sons were spared.132 Still, by late 1528 Wolsey was having to reassure Henry that the earl would, given time, prove ‘conformable to his Highness’s pleasure in giving better attendance, leaving off his prodigality, sullennness, mistrust, disdain and making of parties’.133 It could hardly have been a more damning indictment, and it brings one back to the central problem that, whatever the theoretical solution, the real difficulty in governing the North was to find the right person. That Henry and his two leading councillors, Wolsey and Cromwell, persevered for so long with one who appears to have been so unsuitable only confirms the central argument of this chapter, that they were prepared to put up with a great deal from a Percy.

  In stressing Henry’s and Wolsey’s desire to make use of the nobility in the running of Northern affairs, the danger has been perhaps to play down the role that both men saw the Crown playing. The emphasis was on co-operation, not surrender. When in 1524 criticisms of Dacre’s rule were mounting, Wolsey wrote to Norfolk that he considered that some of the complainants ‘exceed the limits of humble and conformable subjects, when they absolutely affirm in their supplication that they cannot nor ever will be contented to be ordered by Lord Dacre, not to favour or love him in their hearts, but rather to depart the country. For such saying implieth in it great presumption, and is not to be pretermitted under silence, for as much as it becometh not them to refuse any officer which the king shall constitute, though he were of much inferior degree than the Lord Dacre is’.134 Thirteen years later Henry was expressing a similar idea when he wrote to that same duke that ‘we will not be bound of a necessity to be served there with Lords, but we will be served with such men, what degree so ever they be of, as we shall appoint to the same’.135 Neither man was saying that they disliked or were suspicious of the nobility – and it should be added that noblemen continued to be used as much in the 1530s and 1540s as in the 1520s. The point they were making was that a servant of the Crown in carrying out the king’s commands should be obeyed as if he was king, and therefore the servant’s own status was of no consequence. In practice they were perfectly well aware that it was, but as the choppings and changings of the 1520s indicate, whomever they chose to govern the North, they had absolutely no intention of leaving him to his own devices.

  Wolsey was immersed in all the details of Northern government: the conduct of war, the raising of money, the settling of quarrels, the maintenance of law and order – all was grist to his mill. And in obtaining the necessary information and implementing his decisions he did not – nor indeed could he – rely only on noblemen; people such as Thomas Magnus and his colleagues on Richmond’s Council were also indispensable. Moreover, all royal servants, including the likes of Dacre and Surrey, were expected to do Wolsey’s bidding. Indeed, one’s overriding impression is of the immense pressure that Wolsey exerted to ensure that his instructions were carried out – the kind of pressure that, for instance, had led to Lisle’s surrender. The pressure may not have been there all the time; and it appears that the Scottish threat, for instance, concentrated his mind on the problems of the North in the early 1520s. But any leading minister must have his priorities, and obviously the North was not always going to be Wolsey’s.

  How successful was Wolsey in tackling the problems of the North? At the start of this chapter a warning was given against thinking that anybody could have solved them: they were too intractable, and the solution to one problem was probably going to be detrimental to the solving of another. It must also be admitted that the detailed work needed to come up with an answer has yet to be done; and because of the inadequacies of the sources it will never be possible to do it very satisfactorily. But as always the real difficulty is elsewhere. There is at all times considerable ‘disorder’, and how one measures its containment depends upon so many assumptions. The easy way out would be to say that good order was present when those responsible for it declared that it was. But the men on the spot had a penchant for announcing that all had never been better, only to have to admit in their next despatch that all had never been worse – not that we should be critical. Like us, they found any assessment difficult; and until the next incident happened no doubt all did look well, and in one sense was. The obsession with trends – are things getting better or worse? – obscures the fact that event
s are often random and unpredictable, and certainly the men of Redesdale and Tynedale were not thinking of the historian’s tidy graph when they planned their next crime! And if one draws comparisons between the state of the North in Wolsey’s time and at others it is the similarities that are striking. By the 1580s, for instance, a permanent Council of the North had been at work for forty years, but this had prevented neither the rebellion of the Northern earls in 1569, nor the ambushing of the sheriff of Northumberland and the murder of his brother in 1586. Furthermore when the ambushers were brought to trial the jury was very much on their side and found the murderer not guilty. And in 1596 two members of the Council of the North could write to Lord Burghley: ‘We find that the gentlemen, to the great overthrow of justice, do too much favour their blood.’136 Such difficulties would have been well understood by Wolsey and those who served under him in the North.