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

by Gwyn, Peter

  In the present context the most interesting thing about this rising is that it probably had little to do directly with the Amicable Grant. Of 525 people indicted for riot and unlawful assembly as a consequence of the rising, 390 were not, according to the 1524 assessment, worth more than one pound, and so were probably not being asked to pay anything in 1525.227 What seems to have happened is that workers, but especially those in the cloth industry – and it was a considerable cloth-making area – feared for their livelihoods as a consequence of their employers trying to recoup the amount by cutting down on their labour force. Whether their fears were justified or not hardly matters. In Hall’s version the clothiers had started to lay people off, and the Norwich authorities’ warning to Norfolk that this would happen may confirm this.228 On the other hand, the warning could have been merely a bargaining counter, played in order to encourage the Crown to call off the grant; and there was hardly time for lay-offs to have have taken place. Moreover, the fact that no money had changed hands by the time the decision to end the grant was taken might suggest that there was a lot of rumour but no actual unemployment – but then rumour is often a potent cause for rioting. Anyway, the suggestion that is being made here is that it would be wrong to call the rising in Suffolk in 1525 a taxpayers’ revolt, because by and large it was not they who were directly involved. But does that matter? A rising is a rising and must be viewed by authority as extremely dangerous – and dangerous enough in this instance for the government to have decided to call off the offending demand for more money. Less than thirty years previously the men of Cornwall had marched on London in response to a demand for money, so that it is perfectly conceivable that in May 1525 it was felt that there was no option but to give way. But there is no direct evidence that either Wolsey or Henry felt this. Moreover, the fact that it was not, by and large, the taxpayers who were rebelling must make a difference to how one views the matter – and in two respects.

  The first is that it was not from the cloth workers of Suffolk, or anywhere else, that the government was hoping to obtain the bulk of the money, but from much wealthier people. In 1475 it was precisely these wealthier people that Edward IV had approached to obtain his benevolence, and in the process had raised, at the lowest estimate, £21,656, while probably from the same class Henry VII had raised in excess of £48,000 in 1491.229 In 1525 these people may have grumbled – and in London and Kent may have grumbled a lot – but, as we have seen, there is enough evidence to suggest that in the end they would have paid up if pressed to do so. The second, and perhaps more relevant, point is that risings become revolts, and thus even more serious, when some section of the political nation is involved. Insofar as they were taxpayers, the Cornishmen of 1497 fall into that category. They even found a nobleman, Lord Audley, to lead them and, even if they were not part of a White Rose conspiracy, Perkin Warbeck was at the time alive and reasonably well, hoping to persuade James IV to invade England.230 But there seems to have been nothing remotely political about the happenings of May 1525 in Suffolk, and insofar as the insurgents there were below the tax level they cannot even be said to have been part of the political nation, however widely defined. Neither is there any evidence that they were being made use of by leading clothiers or gentry to frighten the government into giving way. And that the rising in Suffolk was not as serious as all that is confirmed by the speed with which it was put down. It began at Lavenham on 4 May; by the 8th Norfolk and Suffolk appear to have felt that they had the matter well in hand, and by the 11th it was all over, apparently without a blow being struck.231

  What the two dukes were certainly concerned about was what might happen elsewhere. On 8 May they suggested a watch might be kept on those potentially dissident noblemen, the Lords Bergavenny and Stafford – and here was the only hint in the whole episode that the political nation might not entirely rally to the Crown.232 More seriously, on the very day that they were reporting the first humble submissions from the rebels of Lavenham, they received alarming reports that not only other parts of Suffolk, but also Essex and Cambridgeshire, including both the town and university of Cambridge, were on the verge of rebellion, and that as many as twenty thousand might be involved.233 On the following day there was no mention of twenty thousand, but ‘continually more and more knowledge’ was coming in of a ‘confederacy with evil disposed persons’, extending to many other counties in addition to those already mentioned.234 Despite reporting also that the submission of the original rioters was proceeding according to plan, the two dukes were obviously increasingly worried, and would have been even more so if they had been able to read Longland’s letter to Wolsey of the same date, which reported that rumours had just reached his diocese of a rising in Norfolk and Suffolk, adding that ‘such rumours in these parts, where so late was lightness of the commonalty used, doth not well’.235

  Was it these rumours that finally convinced the government that it must give up its attempt to raise money? If the suggestion here is that it was not, this is not because the fears that such rumours would have caused are underestimated. But if governments are really determined on something they are usually prepared to take risks, and Henry VIII’s government was no exception. After all, the much greater opposition, in which elements of the political nation were certainly involved, did not prevent the king from divorcing Catherine and ‘breaking’ with Rome. If, as has been argued here, the Amicable Grant had long ceased to have any real justification, the question that needs to be asked is why it was persisted with for so long. One answer could be that Henry and Wolsey were just greedy. Once the exercise had begun, why not continue and see what could be obtained? Of course, some awkward explanations would be called for when a peace treaty with France was announced, but perhaps they felt strong enough to ride out any resulting political storm, or did until they realized the extent of the opposition. It is never easy to turn down large sums of money and, as has been noted, the kind of foreign policy that Henry’s and Wolsey’s ambitions demanded was not cheap. Still, as an explanation it does not altogether convince, if only because the possible gains do not seem to have been commensurate with the risks involved. In that same year, 1525, they were anyway to obtain somewhere in the region of £80,000 by way of lay and clerical taxation, so that it would have been excessively greedy, and thus politically very unwise, to go ahead in the knowledge that no military activity was to take place.

  Here it is appropriate to recall the curiously inconsistent way that the government handled the concessions it embarked on from 25 April onwards; for there is not the slightest doubt that they did considerable damage to the prospects of success, so much so that in their letter to Wolsey of 12 May the dukes called for a meeting of the Council to iron out the discrepancies.236 For some this ineptness strengthens the case for a Wolsey at odds with his master and so determined to prevent any revival of the Great Enterprise that he was willing to sabotage the Amicable Grant by more or less engineering a taxpayers’ revolt; or it shows, at the very least, that because his heart was not in it, he made mistakes.237 But any view based on the notion of a major divergence between master and servant is suspect, and in this instance the evidence points in the opposite direction. Indeed, it is worth stressing that there can be no question but that Henry was fully informed about the Amicable Grant and about the uprising in Suffolk.238

  Another possible explanation for Wolsey’s inept performance is to see it as the desperate effort of someone so keen to obtain money that he was reluctantly forced into making concessions as he encountered first one, then another point of resistance. In such a scenario it might be expected that far from keeping Warham in the dark for so long, Wolsey would have informed him before anyone else of any concession, because it was in Kent that the strongest resistance by taxpayers was encountered. Or was it that the ineptness – and whatever the explanation, ineptness it certainly was – resulted from Wolsey’s knowledge all along that the pressure could and indeed would be released? In this scenario his chief concern was not the day-
to-day management of the grant but choosing the moment when giving it up would cause least damage to his diplomatic negotiations.

  It has already been pointed out that at least a week before 14 May and the calling off of the Amicable Grant, one of the reasons for continuing with it had disappeared. The Imperialists had made it so clear that they had no intention of engaging in any military activity that Wolsey could call a halt to any English military preparations while still maintaining that an invasion of France was what his master wanted. He now needed to establish that the prospects for negotiations with the French were encouraging, and it is tempting to think that this was what the delay in calling off the grant was about. Of course, it would have had to emerge sooner or later that some such negotiations had begun – but all the more reason for advancing them as far as possible while still pretending to be France’s greatest enemy, for there was no doubt that the negotiations were contrary to both the spirit and the letter of Henry’s treaty obligations to the emperor. It is not possible to ascertain precisely when these negotiations began, and it probably never will be. What has survived is an undated letter that Joachim wrote to Thomas Lark, his host for much of his earlier visit to England and, as brother of Wolsey’s former mistress, close to Wolsey. Its purpose was to persuade Wolsey that with the emperor now in such a strong position, this was the moment ‘rather to strengthen than relax the arrangements with France that by so doing he may turn an afflicted neighbour into a most obliged friend’. In the rest of the letter Joachim was anxious to get across the message that France had rallied to Louise and remained powerful.239 No doubt his intention was primarily to try to strengthen a weak hand in any resulting negotiations, but in doing so he provided Wolsey with just the information he was looking for, because a France on the verge of collapse was not a viable ally. And clearly the letter did please Wolsey. By 8 June Joachim had left Lyons and Louise, and he was in London by the 23rd. It is very frustrating that these two June dates are the only certainties. Letters between Lyons and London took about a fortnight and this pushes back the possible date for a reply from Wolsey to about 24 May, though even that presents one with the problem that in a letter to Henry on the 27th there is no mention of French negotiations.240 On the other hand, there might well have been an earlier exchange of letters, for Joachim’s surviving letter was so informal as to make it very unlikely it was the first. Moreover, given that their two countries were still formally at war, the reference in that letter to ‘arrangements’ is tantalizingly suggestive of some secret understanding that Pavia had not destroyed. Still, none of this proves that there were any new negotiations between England and France before the Amicable Grant was called off on about 14 May. All that is certain is that by the 18th there was a definite change of direction in English foreign policy, signalled by those secret instructions from Wolsey to English diplomats already referred to. They suggest that by then Wolsey had some knowledge of Joachim’s original letter, or at the very least was very confident that an approach from France would shortly be made. What has also been shown is that as early as 7 April he was sufficiently suspicious of the emperor’s intentions to scale down his proposals for an invasion of France. Lastly, there is evidence that by 21 April he was making plans that his supposed ally would not have approved of.

  It comes in a reply of John Clerk’s from Rome to a letter of the 21st in which Wolsey had disclosed to him ‘the whole platte [plan] of the king’s highness and your grace’s determinate and resolute mind’.241 It is frustrating, of course, that Wolsey’s letter has not survived; even more so that because Clerk felt that the time was not ripe ‘to wade any further with his Holiness in the disclosing of any secret matter concerning the King’s mind contained in your grace’s letter, the Emperor not concurring with his Highness or being otherwise too much studious of his own advantage’, we are never told what the ‘platte’ was. What does emerge, though, is that Wolsey was hoping to use the pope as ‘mediator for the bringing to pass of your grace’s desires’, which, if past precedent was anything to go by, was another way of saying that he was looking for some alliance with the French.242

  No more than any of the other evidence cited is Clerk’s letter of 14 May proof that long before the failure of the Amicable Grant the Great Enterprise had been dead and buried, but that is the conclusion to which it points. And what is inescapable is that the deep suspicion of Imperial intentions which had so characterized English policy in the weeks before any knowledge of Pavia continued unabated afterwards. This makes it hard to take very seriously the grandiose plans of conquest that for a brief time Wolsey was conjuring up, like rabbits out of a hat. And that these plans never meant much is suggested by the speed and comparative smoothness with which the negotiations with the French proceeded after Joachim’s arrival, culminating in the Treaty of the More of 30 August. The key to this was England’s willingness to give up all territorial claims to France, and to accept instead the resumption of the annual French pension of 100,000 gold crowns (about £20,000) – and £4,000 more than she had gained from the Treaty of London.243 Such an increase must have gratified Henry’s purse, if not his honour; and, indeed, on the face of it it does seem small recompense for all the time and effort expended on the Great Enterprise, not to mention all the taxpayers’ money. As against this, it was Louise’s opinion that her envoys had conceded too much.244 And what the terms of the Treaty of the More tend to confirm is something that has been central to my interpretation of Wolsey’s conduct of foreign policy: that it was always position rather than possessions that Wolsey was seeking. The position that he had engineered in the summer of 1525 offered his master the possibility of continuing to play a leading role in European affairs, as a brief look at his relations with the emperor and with Margaret during the time leading up to the signing of the treaty with France will show.

  There is always a danger of presenting the conduct of foreign policy as if it consisted of a simple choice between allies: for England in the early sixteenth century, between the emperor and the French; or nowadays between America and Russia. Sometimes, of course, it does boil down to this, and at any rate most of us find it easier to make sense of a policy in which there are obvious friends and enemies. For those responsible for the conduct of foreign policy the scenario can look rather more complicated, leading nowadays to what is sometimes rather dismissively referred to as the ‘Foreign Office view’. If the phrase implies an over-cautious approach, it may not be readily applied to Wolsey. On the other hand, for him Europe was not, as it was for such as Pace and Tunstall, peopled with goodies and baddies, for if it had been, he would not have been able to conduct the kind of secret diplomacy that he was involved in during 1524 and the first half of 1525. Furthermore, there is the curious phenomenon that, as the new French alliance began to look more certain, so his attitude towards the emperor appeared to mellow. This can best be shown by his reaction to Charles’s, on the face of it, rather provocative proposal to reject the hand of the Princess Mary in favour of Isabella of Portugal. As it happened, this suited England quite well. Charles had always been rather old for Mary, who in 1525 was still only nine to his twenty-five. More importantly, it freed her for a possible French match, another bargaining counter in the negotiations with France. Nevertheless, it would have been well within English rights to kick up an enormous fuss at the emperor’s reneging on a solemn promise concerning a matter that touched Henry’s honour so closely – and that Wolsey could kick up a fuss is shown all too clearly by his earlier treatment of de Praet, while apparently in December 1524 he had informed another Imperial envoy that his master was a liar, Margaret a ribald, the Archduke Ferdinand (aged twenty-one) a child, and Bourbon a traitor.245 However, when in June Henry and Wolsey first got wind of Charles’s intention, they took it all remarkably calmly.246 And that they were increasingly concerned to maintain a good relationship with the emperor, despite their secret negotiations with France, emerges from a series of marginal comments to one of Tunstall’s and Sampson’s report
s from the Imperial court.

  When they wrote them on 11 August, the two English envoys were becoming increasingly worried at the pro-French direction that English foreign policy was taking, and did not hesitate to express their worries – so much for Wolsey’s dictatorial behaviour! Their particular concern was that if England made a separate treaty with France before Charles had ended his negotiations, ‘you in so doing shall lose the emperor for ever’.247 It was a fair enough assessment – and it could well have been that what Wolsey was after was some kind of conflict with the emperor to pay him back for all the frustration and disappointment of the last few years. But according to Wolsey they had simply got it wrong: there was no reason, he explained to Henry, why Charles’s friendship should be lost, ‘seeing your grace is minded to continue your old amities with him’. For one thing, ‘nothing is done by the treaty with France to the emperor’s prejudice’. For another, ‘your amity is as beneficial to the emperor as his to your grace’.248 In other words, Wolsey had every intention that the ‘old amities’ should continue, but only on his terms, not the emperor’s.