The King's Cardinal: The Rise and Fall of Thomas Wolsey (Pimlico)
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The fact that Francis’s and Charles’s resources were more stretched than Henry’s helped to lessen the disparity between them. Moreover, the secret of the successful financing of war was not so much how much credit one might eventually obtain but how quickly and efficiently one could get large sums of money to a particular spot at a particular time; and arguably the English were rather better, at any rate than Charles, at doing this. It was, after all, an Imperial army that in 1527 sacked Rome for lack of pay, not an English one. And when for the only time during the Great Enterprise English and Imperial armies co-operated on any scale, for the ‘march on Paris’ in October and November 1523, it was the Imperial army, not the English, that failed to receive its wages.26 Not so many months later the emperor was recording in a private memo that ‘however much I save and scrape, it is often difficult for me to find the necessary means’.27 None of this is meant to suggest that if either Francis or the emperor, or the two of them together, chose to concentrate their resources against England, she would not have been outgunned, and it will be argued later that as regards the vital matter of Henry’s divorce, Charles was to prove to have a few too many guns for Wolsey’s good. But in assessing the viability of Wolsey’s foreign policy it is important to bear in mind that England’s main rivals had as many financial difficulties as she did, and that in most circumstances they were not prepared to concentrate their resources against her. Both these factors enabled Henry and Wolsey to play a much greater role in European affairs than their comparatively slender resources might, at first glance, appear to have allowed.
What Henry and Wolsey could not have done, however, was to play such a role without a fairly massive contribution from the English taxpayer. Moreover, recently it has been argued very persuasively that in 1525 vital decisions were forced upon them by a lack of money, as taxpayers finally revolted against having to finance their too ambitious plans.28 In what follows such an argument will be resisted, but however convincing the refutation may be, the revolt did take place and has to be taken as evidence of some unusual strain on the body politic, a strain undoubtedly imposed by war. Thus, if England could indeed finance her foreign policy with comparative ease, as was earlier claimed, emphasis needs to be placed upon the qualification. And the general proscription of 1522 has to be evidence of some concern about England’s ability to pay for enterprises abroad. So also do the efforts made, at about this time, to modernize a system of parliamentary taxation that had seen little alteration in some hundred and fifty years.
The usual practice in the late Middle Ages was for a parliamentary grant to be made in the form of ‘tenths’ and ‘fifteenths’ – representing the rate at which the tax had been levied, that is, at one-tenth of the wealth of those individuals residing within a borough and at one-fifteenth for the remainder.29 But ever since 1334 all attempts to reassess an individual’s wealth each time the tax was levied had been abandoned. Instead, each local community was allocated a fixed sum, based upon what had been customarily raised from the area, and was then left to its own devices as to how to raise the amount. It was a system that had advantages for both Crown and taxpayer. From the Crown’s point of view, it was simple to administer and the revenue was certain. For the taxpayer, its initial advantage lay in the fact that his personal wealth was not submitted to frequent scrutiny by central government. But as the years went by, the system acquired the additional advantage that the fixed sums, anyway significantly reduced in 1433 and 1446 and subject to a great number of exemptions, increasingly underestimated real wealth.30 Of course, it was possible for the Crown to compensate for this shortfall by asking for more and more fifteenths and tenths, but to do so was politically difficult. For one thing, the Crown had to provide a convincing reason for any request for money – virtually the only acceptable one being the need to provide for the defence of the kingdom – and this was not always possible. For another, in such a sensitive matter as taxation, people were very quick to react to novelty of any kind. One case had been the famous poll tax of 1381, and the result had been the Peasants’ Revolt. Another had been Henry VII’s ‘subsidies’ of 1489 and 1497. Both had resulted in rebellions – the first in Yorkshire and the second, while starting in Cornwall, had only been ended on the battlefield of Blackheath. One way and another, then, the existing system of parliamentary taxation was not to the Crown’s advantage: the yield from any one grant was less and less, but any attempt at change met with great resistance.
It is evidence of the self-confidence of Henry VIII’s government that it was prepared to make a new attempt, despite the disastrous results that had attended Henry VII’s efforts. The way chosen was to return to something not unlike an individual assessment of wealth, but without insisting upon a precise figure. Instead, certain bands of taxation were laid down, so that all that had to be established was what band any particular person was in. Thus both over-complexity and too much interference in an individual’s financial affairs were avoided. Moreover, the source of any person’s wealth was divided into three categories – land, moveable goods and wages – and an individual was liable only for that category which yielded the largest amount. Again this must have eased the task of assessment, while the fact that not all an individual’s wealth was liable to tax may have helped to reconcile tax-payers to the new set-up. It was also a graduated tax, those in the higher bands paying at a higher rate. Whether the fact that the yield was not fixed had any advantages for the Crown is unclear. Probably not, for any kind of budgeting is made more difficult by uncertainty; and attempts at a similar form of taxation in Henry VII’s reign had raised very much less than had been expected. Be that as it may, the Tudor ‘subsidy’, when first introduced, was a more flexible tax than the old one, and one that corresponded much more accurately to the real wealth of the country, so that even at a lower rate, more money would accrue to the Crown. Thus the subsidy of 1515 at 6d. in the pound, or a fortieth, had brought in about £44,900, as compared with the £29,800 that a fifteenth and tenth traditionally yielded. The fact that the Commons accepted the new tax has to be considered a major victory for the Crown. But what part did Wolsey play in its introduction?
No precise answer to this question can be given. Clearly, Henry VII’s subsidies prefigure the more successful innovations of 1512 and 1515, and as regards the former especially, it would be surprising if Wolsey had played a major role, if only because his influence was not yet fully established. Moreover, the only remotely financial office he ever held was that of king’s almoner, whose function was peripheral to the main business of administering the Crown’s finances. True, the lack of specialization amongst early Tudor officials may disguise the amount of financial expertise that Wolsey had acquired, and his deep involvement in the organization of the war effort in 1512 and 1513 meant that he could hardly have avoided acquiring some. Still, there were many leading officials, such as Sir Thomas Lovell and Sir John Heron, whose involvement in the Crown’s finances, going back well into the previous reign, was much more extensive than Wolsey’s, and it is on such people that the search for the authors of the new tax should concentrate – though any search will quickly come up against a lack of evidence. So far all that has been discovered is an original draft of the subsidy Act drawn up for the 1513 parliament by a future baron of the Exchequer, John Hales.31 The suspicion must be that it is to his skill in drafting rather than to his financial expertise that this discovery bears witness, but in any event there is no evidence to associate him closely with Wolsey.
There seems, therefore, to be no compelling reason to think of Wolsey as the originator of the Tudor subsidy; but insofar as what was important was not so much the idea – which even in Henry VII’s reign was not original – but the political will to persist with it, then his connection looms rather larger. It is probably significant, for instance, that in 1523, when Wolsey’s central role in government is unquestionable, the request for a subsidy was not, as it had been earlier, coupled with one for a fifteenth and tenth. The earlier co
upling suggests a lack of confidence – which was to be justified – that a subsidy alone would bring in the required amount. In 1523 no such safety net was thought necessary, in part because the general proscription had provided the government with a much more accurate assessment of the country’s wealth and hence of what a subsidy would bring in. Moreover, the 1523 subsidy Act appears to have been so well drawn up that it became the blueprint for successive Acts. It also included some important new features. For the first time local collectors were to receive payment, which may have made their difficult task more palatable. The assessment of the nobility was transferred from the hands of local commissioners to those of a high-powered committee, presided over by Wolsey himself as lord chancellor. The purpose of this measure was not to do down the nobility; indeed, it has been suggested that it may even have appealed to their amour propre by freeing them from having to submit their financial affairs to the scrutiny of local gentry. On the other hand, it would be much more difficult to deceive such a committee, and the measure bears all the hallmark of Wolsey’s concern, as shown in the search for ‘indifferent justice’, to ensure that the nobility lived up to the obligations that their high rank imposed.
Before we consider how much the country was asked to contribute towards the Great Enterprise, some attempt must be made to sum up Wolsey’s attitude to the Crown’s finances. As was mentioned earlier, the impression is often conveyed of a rather profligate Wolsey, who while failing to build upon Henry VII’s careful housekeeping, lacked the bureaucratic flair and ‘modern’ methods of his successor, Thomas Cromwell. In fact, character judgement need play no part in explaining the different financial approaches of these three men. Given the collapse of royal revenue in the early years of his reign, Henry VII’s close involvement in financial administration is readily understandable. Cromwell, for his part, had to cope with the problem of processing the enormous influx of money that resulted from Henry VIII’s assault on the Church. Thus both men were faced with problems that needed immediate attention, and there is no reason to suppose that in similar circumstances Wolsey would not have risen to the challenge. As it was, his circumstances were different, and the way that he responded reflects this much more than any alleged character defect.
Henry VII’s greatest contribution to the successful management of the royal finances was not his willingness to devote his own time to auditing the accounts, though no doubt this helped, but his decision early in his reign to return to the highly successful Yorkist system of chamber finance, thereby bypassing the ministrations of an increasingly moribund Exchequer.32 Despite the very significant increases in royal revenue that resulted, in which admittedly luck played a part, an attempt has been made to portray chamber finance as somehow old-fashioned, allegedly because it was short on that apparently modern characteristic, bureaucratic procedure.33 Quite why this should be considered modern is not entirely clear, for to label as modern the labyrinthine workings of Byzantium – a fair description of the medieval Exchequer – does not altogether convince. Still, as long as its normative connotations are ignored, the distinction may serve. Compared with what it replaced, the chamber system was not very bureaucratic. This was its strength and its weakness. It undoubtedly gave to the financial administration of the Crown a greater flexibility both in the collection and, perhaps even more importantly, in the disbursement of royal revenues; its leasing policies could more easily be adjusted to current economic practice, and a much more financially orientated supervision and auditing of the accounts could be introduced. What was not so good for the common weal was the uncertainty and, perhaps, arbitrariness that the abandonment of the Exchequer practices introduced. Securing the Crown’s revenues was a difficult business. It was not just that people might fail to pay what was owing, or even that they might challenge what the Crown alleged they owed, but inevitably there were some royal officials who were bent on cheating the Crown and whom it would wish to bring to book. All these matters were traditionally dealt with in the court of Exchequer, which, most importantly, was a ‘court of record’ whose decisions had full legal standing and whose procedures for ensuring attendance and such matters were formally established.
It was because the chamber and the court of general surveyors, which in practice had taken on many of the functions of the Exchequer court, lacked full legal standing that they came under threat at the beginning of Henry VIII’s reign, as part of a general reaction to the first Tudor’s allegedly arbitrary methods. For a short time the Exchequer recovered much of its control over the collection and processing of the royal revenues, but with predictable results: the old problems returned and revenues declined. What then occurred was a gradual restoration of the chamber system of finance, so that by 1523 it was more or less performing as it had under Henry VII. In particular, the general surveyors could act once again as a court of law, summoning people to appear before them on their own initiative and able to enforce their decisions by, amongst other measures, the hated recognizance, by which the defendant concerned promised to perform what he was ordered to on pain of a fine, though now with an upper limit of £100. Moreover, this return to the chamber system had been brought about by successive Acts of parliament, which gave it just the kind of legal standing that previously had been lacking.34
One might be forgiven for thinking that the compromise that had emerged by 1523 offered the best of all possible worlds: the greater flexibility and efficiency of the chamber system had been restored, but the resulting potential for arbitrary government had been greatly reduced. And insofar as the government might deserve some credit for such a development, one might also be forgiven for supposing that Wolsey would enjoy a share of it. In fact most historians have not been very complimentary, the usual judgment being that while the chamber was no longer the ruthless debt-collecting agency that it had been under Henry VII, it had not been replaced by the modern financial departments that Cromwell was supposedly to introduce. Leaving aside some of the rather dubious normative judgements previously touched upon, the main cause for doubts about the compromise is that revenues do appear to have declined while at the same time expenditure was rising – never a very happy state of affairs. However, the case would be more compelling if it was based upon more evidence. As it is, except for the very specific loan account book for 1522-3, very little information about the Crown revenues at this time has survived. For instance, for the period 1509-36 there are none of the chamber receipt books that have survived for Henry VII’s reign. Instead, one has to make do with the occasional financial survey, and, of these, none falls within the period 1516-29. It is thus impossible to be too dogmatic about the success or failure of Wolsey’s supervision of royal finances. The drop in overall revenue indicated by the surviving surveys does point, though, to a decline in income from Crown lands, amounting to as much as £15,000 a year.35
One reason may be that disruption to the system of chamber finance already described, and which the government had by 1523 restored. But there was a more important reason, and one that it was more difficult to do anything about – royal generosity. In the survey designed to show the loss of annual revenue following Henry VIII’s accession, it was stated that Crown lands worth £7,500 a year had been given away, £3,000 a year was having to be found to pay for additional annuities and fees, and £1,000 a year in payments due from Crown lands was being remitted. In other words, some £11,000 a year had been lost to the Crown by Henry VIII’s exercise of royal patronage. What is not clear is whether such generosity was necessarily a bad thing. However one characterizes Henry VII’s methods, there seems little doubt that, at least towards the end of his reign, he had been pressing a little too hard on his subjects for the house of Tudor’s ultimate good. With his son there had come a relaxation. Kings were, after all, expected to give, and Henry VIII performed this function with an affability and skill which did his standing amongst the political nation no harm at all. In the process people such as Sir William Compton, a leading figure in his household, may ha
ve made a fortune, but they also gave very loyal service.
However, while suggesting that it is wrong to judge the administration of early Tudor finance from a Gladstonian or Thatcherite standpoint, I am not trying to make excuses for laxity or incompetence, for the evidence, admittedly rather scanty, would not support such a charge. A modified return to Henry VII’s system of chamber finance was the best policy decision that could have been made, and that there was a genuine concern to make the system work is shown by the number of Acts that were introduced to bring about that return – including two in 1515 and one in 1523 that Wolsey must have been involved with – and by the surviving surveys, designed, it would seem, to show that the change in direction was desirable.36 Moreover, there was some realization that in strict accounting terms Henry’s generosity was a growing liability. In 1515 an Act of resumption was passed whereby a certain number of royal grants – though not of land – were revoked, and this may have saved the Crown somewhere between £5,000 and £10,000 a year.37 And both in 1519 and again in the so-called Eltham ordinances of January 1526, Wolsey tried to do something about the mounting expenditure in the royal household.
Wolsey’s attempts at household reform have frequently attracted attention, but sometimes for the wrong reasons. English historians’ obsession with trying to chart and weigh the significance of the constant changes in the composition of the king’s Council has inevitably led them to that provision in the Eltham ordinances for a group of twenty of the most prominent councillors to be in constant attendance upon the king. More recently, interest has centred upon the possible factional concerns that may have lain behind the attempts at reform. Both these matters are discussed elsewhere.38 What will be suggested here is that there is no very good reason why what Wolsey was attempting to do should not be taken at its face value as a genuine effort to put the royal household in ‘honourable, substantial and profitable order without any further delay’.39 After all, the matter had been a major concern of Edward IV’s government in the 1470s,40 was to occupy the attention of Cromwell in the 1530s,41 and then for the next hundred years was to be always somewhere near the top of the agenda for every leading minister of the Crown.42 The chief reason for this is that the running of the royal household was increasingly expensive. In Edward IV’s reign the annual running costs were about £13,000.43 By the beginning of Henry VIII’s reign they had risen to about £19,000, creeping ever upwards through the 1520s and 30s so that by 1545-6 they stood at £45,000;44 and by the middle of James I’s reign the total was about £77,500.45 Some of the reasons for this increase had very little to do with the household itself, or the competence of those who ran it. Sixteenth-century inflation is an obvious one; also much depended upon the size of the royal family: wives, ex-wives and children, in practice all with their separate households but all with a claim on what might be called the household account, were an additional, unavoidable and unpredictable burden.