The King's Cardinal: The Rise and Fall of Thomas Wolsey (Pimlico) (103 page)

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, it had not been replaced by the modern financial departments that Cromwell was supposedly to introduce.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 have 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.

But the real problems of administering the royal household with any degree of efficiency were inherent in its function as the National Theatre of the country’s political life. As such, it had to provide lavish and virtually open hospitality, magnificent ceremonial and varied and colourful entertainment, to mention but the most obvious. And all this went on not in one location but on tour! In every way it was an administrator’s nightmare. Exact numbers are difficult to estimate, but if the retinues of the royal servants are included – for these were men of rank themselves and so were attended by their own servants, as indeed were courtiers and distinguished visitors to court – then one should probably be thinking in terms of about two thousand individuals.
⁴⁶
Not all of these were officially supposed to have their accommodation and food provided but, given the belief that the king had always to be available to his subjects, it was virtually impossible to prevent exploitation by ‘rascals and vagabonds now spread, remaining and being in all the court’.
⁴⁷
And whatever the success of such efforts, the numbers were always going to be large, and the tendency would be for them to increase as the court became more and more the focus of the political nation’s ambitions.
⁴⁸

What Wolsey was trying to do in 1519 and 1525-6 was to bring Edward
IV
’s household ordinances up to date.
⁴⁹
Abuses that had crept in, especially in what might be called the expense account area to do with the entitlement of members of the royal household to free board and lodging, were to be eliminated. New lists of legitimate claimants and of precisely what they were entitled to were drawn up.
⁵⁰
Something that was certainly on the increase was the ‘delight’ that ‘sundry noblemen, gentlemen and others’ took in dining ‘in corners and secret places, not repairing to the king’s chamber nor hall, … by reason whereof … such viand as is allowed to be spent in the king’s house appeareth not to be employed and dispensed to the king’s honour’.
⁵¹
In other words, dining in the royal hall was becoming unfashionable, thereby removing the original reason for the lavish provision of food and drink. What had not been removed was the possibility for pecuniary gain by such practices as selling off the unwanted food. Provision was also made for a much closer supervision of the household officials, and there was a new determination that they should actually carry out the duties assigned to them, rather than delegating them to deputies.
⁵²
The excessive use of deputies may have been new, or at any rate a growing practice and, if so, just the kind of abuse to prompt Wolsey to embark upon household reform.

Wolsey’s determined effort to slim down the establishment included that reduction in the numbers in the privy chamber from twenty-two to fifteen that has given rise to the suspicion that the whole exercise was principally a political one.
⁵³
But the seven who lost their jobs in that department in 1526 were but a tiny fraction of the hundreds from elsewhere who suffered the same fate and who, incidentally, as would be the case today, had to be compensated in some way.
⁵⁴
In pointing this out the intention is not to deny the Eltham ordinances any political significance, but to put the emphasis in the right place. What is being suggested is that while the household did present a real administrative problem that would have to be tackled, the precise timing of any attempt was likely to have a political dimension to do not with any factional struggle but rather with the strains that war imposed upon the political fabric. As the preamble of the Ordinances put it:

the king’s highness soon after his first assumption of his crown and dignity royal was enforced and brought unto the wars, wherein his grace
…
hath much travailed and been occupied in such wise as many of the officers and ministers of his household being employed and appointed to the making of provisions and other things concerning the wars, the accustomed good order of his said household hath been greatly hindered and in manner subverted
.
⁵⁵

This was undoubtedly true. Members of the household were very much caught up in the mechanics of war, and at the very least this would have distracted them from their household duties. But the more general point, for obvious reasons, was not made: namely, that when a king is asking his subjects to make a great financial contribution to war, then it becomes politically expedient for him to put his own house in order. Indeed, the very notion that the king should ‘live of his own’ and not trouble his subjects for money save in exceptional circumstances arose very
largely out of the final phase of the Hundred Years War and the financial incompetence of Henry
VI
’s government. This led Edward
IV
to embark upon financial and administrative reforms, amongst which figured prominently reform of the household, which may have been particularly stimulated by the 1475 invasion of France.
⁵⁶
Turning to the early seventeenth century, one again sees a connection between household reform and the Crown’s financial difficulties, and its consequent desire to obtain more money in both direct and indirect taxation.
⁵⁷
It seems reasonable to suppose that there was some such connection in the 1520s. The Crown had made unusually large demands on the taxpayers’ pockets. The difficulties encountered over the Amicable Grant in the spring of 1525 sounded a warning that they should not be pushed any harder. In these circumstances household reform made a lot of sense, both as a way of conciliating the taxpayers by making a show of prudent management of money, and more directly as a way of saving money so that further recourse to them would not be necessary.

How successful the Eltham ordinances were is difficult to assess. Politically they may have been, though there is precious little evidence one way or another. At any rate, there seems to have been no widespread demand for the repayment of the 1522-3 loans, as Wolsey was relieved to note in the summer of 1527 as he journeyed through Kent, one of the most troubled areas in 1525,
en route
to Amiens.
⁵⁸
Although only a dozen or so years later Cromwell felt the need to look at the matter again, which might suggest that the impact of the ordinances had not been very great, it must be borne in mind that the household running costs continued to grow throughout the 1530s, perhaps precisely because the cardinal’s hand had been removed.
⁵⁹
The truth is that it was the kind of problem to which there would never be any final solution. All that a leading minister could do was to worry away at it in the hope of keeping the costs within reasonable limits. This is what Cromwell tried to do. So also did Wolsey, and that he did so provides further evidence that the view of Wolsey as a man totally unconcerned with the mundane world of administration and finance is one that does not stand up to close examination.