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

by Gwyn, Peter

  The accepted view of Wolsey’s success in the North is that all was bad until in 1525 he re-established a Council of the North under the duke of Richmond’s nominal headship. There may be something in this, though it may owe rather too much to Dacre’s critics. Dacre’s own view was that there had been no increase in crime during his long period of office137 – but then he was hardly likely to think otherwise. What needs to be stressed is that from 1515 when Albany first set foot in Scotland until 1524 when he left for the last time, the threat he posed was the Crown’s, and therefore Dacre’s, chief priority: more general considerations regarding the good government of the North came second. But as the Scottish threat subsided so a concern for law and order gradually crept up Wolsey’s list of priorities. At about the same time the number of cases appearing before Star Chamber was increasing so rapidly that he began to look for ways of lightening the load: the result was Richmond’s Council for, as well as exercising a more general supervisory role, it also acted as a court to which private suits could be brought. Whether the Council really solved the problems that it was designed to solve has been hotly debated. Lord Darcy took the rather jaundiced view that those in the North desired ‘to live under the king without commissioners, for at present if we do well, the commissioners get all the thanks, and if either we or any of the commissioners do badly the whole blame is laid to us’.138 His assessment was more than a little biased, but it is a warning against a too easy acceptance that the Council of the North was indeed the answer to the endemic problems.

  In April 1528 Thomas Magnus reported to Wolsey the successful conclusion of assizes held at York and Newcastle. Twenty-four offenders had been executed, amongst them ‘two great thieves’ from Tynedale and two from Redesdale. The result was that, in his view, the county of Northumberland was now ‘in reasonable good order’.139 This assessment will serve as a final judgment on Wolsey’s involvement with the North, just as long as it is borne in mind that to secure even partial good order was quite an achievement. The credit for this was due not only to Wolsey, for nobody had worked harder to achieve it than Magnus himself. Towards the end of 1528 he was back in Newcastle, having spent ten weeks in difficult negotiations with the Scots, resulting on 14 December in the Treaty of Berwick. However, even before he had returned to Newcastle he received letters from Henry and Wolsey instructing him to return to Berwick for yet more talks. Back he went, despite his sixty-five years and his ‘wanting powers, [feblished] and made weak with many winter journeys’ – and this, he added, was ‘the sorest winter’ he had yet suffered.140 It may not have been of much consolation to him that the one person who was almost certainly working harder was Wolsey himself; more so might have been the realization that the negotiations were of the greatest importance for the good rule of the North. As long as the disturbers of the peace had been able to take refuge on the other side of the border, there could be no real progress towards the taming of the border clans. A permanent peace with Scotland rather than administrative innovations in the North offered the way forward, and Wolsey’s continual efforts to bring this about can only be to his credit. And in support of such a view is the fact that one of the matters that Magnus raised with James V on his return to Berwick was the possibility of concerted action against one of the most troublesome border clans, the Armstrongs of Liddesdale.141

  The lordship of Ireland and the North presented Henry VIII and Wolsey with many similar problems. Both were wooded regions a long way from the centre of government. Both were inhabited by ‘wild men’ who showed much more interest in raiding other people’s cattle and burning other people’s corn than in their own agricultural pursuits. And if the northern clans such as the Armstrongs and the Dodds bear many obvious similarities to such Gaelic tribes as the MacMurroughs and the O’Byrnes, so also do the great Northern families such as the Nevilles and Percys to Anglo-Irish families such as the Butlers and Geraldines. That said, it is on the differences between the regions that we will concentrate here, for it is these which will provide a key to an understanding of the Crown’s handling of Irish affairs during the period of Wolsey’s ascendancy.142

  The first essential difference is that the Crown’s control of the lordship of Ireland was significantly weaker than its control of the North. Indeed, by the early sixteenth century it was virtually non-existent. This had not always been the case. The hundred years following the first Anglo-Norman invasion of Ireland in 1169 had been a period of such great expansion and consolidation that by 1300 much of Ireland was governed in the same way as England.143 There was a chancery, an exchequer and a developed legal administration. There were twelve counties, including Connacht, Cork and Kerry in the west, in which the king’s writ ran just as it did in the English counties. There were also, it is true – as in the North of England and Wales – many ‘liberties’, such as Kilkenny, Ulster and Wexford, where royal administration and justice were delegated to a particular noble family. Some indication of the English success in Ireland is provided by the fact that between 1278 and 1306 more than £40,000 was provided by the lordship for Edward I, while for much of that period the Irish exchequer was receiving on average £6,300 a year.144 By the early sixteenth century that amount was down to under £1,000, barely enough to pay for the lordship’s royal officials.145 And by the same time the number of counties had been decimated: in 1515, according to a contemporary estimate, there were only five half-counties – Louth, Meath, Dublin, Kildare and Wexford – and the inclusion of Wexford appears anyway to have been wishful thinking.146 Anything resembling effective English control was confined to those first four, the so-called ‘obedient shires’ or ‘English Pale’ surrounding the city of Dublin.147 In theory the royal ‘liberties’ remained, but English control, even where the holder of the liberty was entirely loyal to the Crown – as were in this period the Butlers of Ormond and Tipperary – was really only nominal. And when the holder was one such as James Fitzgerald earl of Desmond, who during this period was in effect an independent prince with his own client lords, control was hardly even nominal. In 1529 an Imperial envoy to Desmond was told that the earl could put into the field of his own account a force of 16,000 foot soldiers and 1,500 horsemen,148 while his allies and clients could produce a further 6,620 foot soldiers and 1,130 horsemen. But when the earl of Surrey was sent over in 1520 to restore order in the lordship, he brought with him just 400 of the king’s guard and 24 gunners, and money to raise a further 100 Irish horsemen149 – figures that give some indication of the military problem facing the English Crown in Ireland in the early sixteenth century.

  In an anonymous reform programme of 1515 Desmond appears at the top of a list of ‘30 great captains of the English noble folk that followeth the same Irish order and keepeth the same rule, and every of them maketh war and peace for himself without any licence of the king, or any other temporal person, save to him that is strongest, and of such that may subdue them by the sword’.150 The ‘Irish order’ was more graphically described by the Imperial envoy when he remarked of Desmond’s men that they were much given to theft and murder and showed no skill in anything except in daring death like animals.151 Amongst Desmond’s following were some of the sixty ‘chief captains’ of ‘the king’s Irish enemies’ mentioned elsewhere in the reform programme, and even some of these called themselves kings.152 The most important were the heads of the O’Neill family of Tyrone and the O’Donnell of Tyrconnell, families which dominated the northern province of Ulster. Not perhaps in the same league, but situated in the heart of Leinster – a province which had seen more continuous English occupation than any other – were such ‘Irish enemies’ as the MacMurroughs and the O’Byrnes. But as the anonymous writer was at pains to point out, as well as ‘the chief captains’ there were ‘diverse petty captains, and every of them maketh war and peace for himself without licence of the chief captains’.153 Ireland in the early sixteenth century was, thus, a patchwork of usually competing but nonetheless interlocking entities, whose precise mix and strength wa
s entirely dependent upon the personalities of those who governed the individual pieces. Moreover, the racial origins of these leaders, whether Gaelic or Anglo-Irish, and their nominal relationship to the English Crown, had little bearing on the question of effective English control. The English Pale was but one piece of an ever revolving kaleidoscope of power groupings, and by no means the biggest and brightest.

  Moreover, even within the English Pale all does not seem to have been well. To begin with, the Irish way of life, including such things as dress, language, hairstyle, and even their liking for the moustache, was as dominant inside the Pale as outside – which, considering that most of ‘the common people’ there were of Gaelic origin, is not all that surprising. The presence of this large fifth column was thought to threaten the security of the Pale, constantly under attack from the Irish without, but for some commentators at least the problem went deeper. It was not only that the ‘Irish’ within were potential allies of the enemy but that they were temperamentally ungovernable. So although some commentators put their faith in education, especially of the Irish chiefs, the easier solution of importing ready-made Englishmen was increasingly favoured.154

  Another point that commentators frequently made was that though the Irish exchequer received very little, the lords of the Pale did very well for themselves from all manner of exactions from their tenants. The most controversial of these was ‘coyne and livery’, which was a lord’s right to billet his men and horses upon his tenants free of charge, and it was a right which was much used – and abused.155 Another was a tribute called ‘black rent’, exacted by one lord or family from another family or area. For instance, the county of Meath paid £300 a year to the O’Connors,156 and when in early 1528 the vice-deputy, Delvin, in the absence of the lord deputy, Kildare, the Crown’s chief representative in Ireland, attempted to put an end to this payment he was promptly kidnapped by them.157 As this episode shows, these exactions as well as being burdensome in themselves were also evidence of royal weakness. Coyne and livery was, or could become, merely a way of subsidizing the lord’s private army, ‘black rent’ merely a protection racket imposed upon the Palesmen by the Irish chiefs.158 But then, however one approaches the lordship of Ireland in the early sixteenth century, the predominant impression is of English weakness and a resulting lack of good government, so much so that the writer of the 1515 reform programme could lament that ‘there is no land in the world of so long continual war within himself nor of so great shedding of Christian blood, nor of so great rubbing, spoiling, praying, and burning, nor of so great wrongful extortion continually as Ireland’.159

  Perhaps what has been presented is rather an English view. After all, the Crown did have a nasty habit of winning any military encounter, and moreover, what looked like bad government from London or even Dublin might not seem so from Connacht or Leinster – no doubt cattle raids could be fun! Furthermore, most of the evidence comes from harassed royal servants, from noblemen and their retainers anxious to exaggerate the evil doings of their rivals, or from the ‘reforming’ gentry and merchants of the Pale and major Irish ports. All these people had a vested interest in painting as black a picture as possible; and there is some evidence that all was not entirely black, for, as in England, the fifteenth century saw considerable building activity in Ireland, which suggests increasing economic prosperity. From the English viewpoint, however, the problems of governing Ireland must have appeared great, and in many ways significantly greater than those of governing the North, where, after all, royal control had been reasonably effective for hundreds of years.

  But in one crucial respect Ireland posed less of a problem than the North. Whereas the Northern border was dominated by a Scottish Crown sufficiently organized and powerful to mount a serious invasion of England, the sheer political chaos of Ireland meant that it posed no such threat. It is true that an earl of Desmond or an O’Neill could put into the field a sizeable army, but even more than most sixteenth-century armies they were liable to fragmentation. Thus when O’Neill was anxious to take on the new lord lieutenant of Ireland in 1520 he was effectively prevented from doing so by his great rivals, the O’Donnells. And if the earl of Desmond wished to attack the English Pale, he had first to march through the territory of his great rivals, the Butlers. The smaller Irish families, mainly of Gaelic origin, such as the O’Connors of Offaly or the MacMurroughs of Carlow, might well prove a nuisance to an English lord deputy in Ireland, but they hardly posed a threat to the English Crown.

  All the same, there was the potential for danger. In the conflict between York and Lancaster, for example, Ireland had played a part, and that mainly on the Yorkist side. Thus, in Henry VII’s reign both Lambert Simnel and Perkin Warbeck, though especially Simnel, had received support from Ireland, which was a convenient base for a rival claimant, or foreign power, from which to launch an attack on the English throne. Its value as such was something that the fifteenth-century English author of the The Libelle of Englyshe Polycye had been well aware. On no account, he argued, must England lose Ireland, because it acted as a buttress against foreign intervention and gave England vital control of the Irish Channel.160 This belief may not have been restated in Wolsey’s time, but there is little doubt that the possible use of Ireland by foreign powers or rival claimants – and often the two went together – did help to concentrate the minds of the first two Tudor kings on the problems of the lordship. It was because of his justified suspicions that his lord deputy, the 8th earl of Kildare, was giving support to Perkin Warbeck that Henry VII made his one serious effort to solve them, when in 1494 he had sent over Sir Edward Poynings with a force of about seven hundred men.161 In the 1520s the earl of Desmond’s alliances with first France and then the emperor caused some concern. The difficulty is to decide just how much, and whether that concern was the main reason for the Crown’s involvement with Ireland. Or alternatively, was it thought that there was a ‘final solution’ for Ireland, not to prevail in Wolsey’s time, or even in Henry VIII’s, but one that was already clearly articulated and in which the twin props were reconquest and colonization? To arrive at some answers to these questions, Henry’s and Wolsey’s relationship with Gerald the younger, 9th earl of Kildare, must be looked at.

  The Fitzgeralds of Kildare, the senior branch of the Geraldine family, made up, with their allies and clients, the most important political grouping in Ireland. This is not necessarily because it was the wealthiest or because it could put the most men into the field, but because its undoubted power and wealth were concentrated either in or just outside the English Pale, especially in the counties of Kildare and Meath. From land in these counties the family received just under £900 a year,162 but it had many other sources of revenue and profit. These included not only booty from the ‘hostings’ – that is raids on competing families – and a large number of ‘tributes’ extracted from Irish chieftains, but also the English Crown’s Irish revenues if, as was more often than not the case, the head of their family was lord deputy. What this all added up to is difficult to estimate. Sir William Darcy suggested in 1515 that the earl of Kildare spent £10,000 a year,163 which seems too high an estimate – and much more than any English noble family was spending at this time – but then another contemporary thought that by using his position as lord deputy to levy coyne and livery on all inhabitants of the Pale, not just on his own tenants, the 9th earl obtained the equivalent of £36,000 a year.164 Whatever the real figure, there is no disputing that the Kildare wealth and power had been increased by the fact that, but for a brief interregnum in the 1490s, the 8th earl had been lord deputy from 1478 until his death in 1513. The chief consequence of this was that the family increasingly controlled royal patronage in the Pale.165 There had been some attempt to check this process: when the earl was restored to office in 1496 the appointment of the two most important posts in the Irish administration, those of lord chancellor and chief justice, had been taken out of his hands and reserved for the Crown; and in 1522 six more offices we
re placed in this category.166 But even when a Kildare was not lord deputy it was a very brave man who would dare to criticize or oppose him. When in 1515 Sir William Darcy did so, he was dismissed from the Irish Council. In that year the 9th earl had been summoned to the English court, and it may have looked as if one could get away with criticism because his days in office were numbered. In fact he returned with even greater powers, so Darcy’s gamble, if that is what it was, did not pay off.167 But for most people the prospect of a Geraldine comeback – even if, as in the 1520s, the 9th earl was often out of office and, indeed, often in custody in England – must always have weighed heavily enough to prevent opposition to the family’s wishes.

  One way in which the earls of Kildare had strengthened their position was by marrying into such powerful Gaelic families as the O’Neills of Tyronne. Perhaps of even greater concern to the English Crown was their kinship, if by the sixteenth century at some remove, with the Fitzgeralds earls of Desmond, whose power and independence of royal control has already been mentioned. It is not, therefore, surprising that the 8th earl of Kildare was called ‘the Great Earl’, and earned for himself the title of ‘all-but-king of Ireland’. Something else that he might have been is that rather elusive being – at least in this work – ‘the over mighty subject’, though his receipt of a great deal of royal favour would suggest that, even in his case, much caution needs to be exercised before such a label be pinned on him. Still, it was not all royal favour, for despite being lord deputy of Ireland for most of Henry VII’s reign and for the first four years of Henry VIII’s, he had been, in 1494, attainted for treason. So eventually was the 9th earl, but it would seem that almost from the moment that he succeeded his father as lord deputy in 1513 he was viewed with some suspicion. Unfortunately, little is known of the circumstances surrounding his summons to the English court in 1515, but it would appear from Sir William Darcy’s paper presented to the royal Council on 24 June of that year that one reason was that he had been making war without ‘the assent of the Lords and King’s Council’168 – though who was meant by the ‘Lords’ and whether the Irish or English Council was intended is not made clear. But though Darcy’s paper was an indictment of Kildare rule, by 1516 the 9th earl had returned to Ireland, not only still lord deputy, but having acquired many marks of royal favour, including permission to call a parliament and a licence to endow a perpetual college at Maynooth. In March of that year he was granted a new patent as lord deputy, which gave him authority to appoint his own nominees to the (since 1496) reserved posts of lord chancellor and chief justice.169