The King's Cardinal: The Rise and Fall of Thomas Wolsey (Pimlico) (62 page)

This reality had dictated the way in which the North was governed for the last two hundred years. It had led to the creation of the office of warden of the Marches to rule over those areas adjoining the boundary, an arrangement duplicated on the Scottish side – and by the early sixteenth century there were on both sides three in number, West, Middle and East. In the Marches the wardens possessed wide-ranging powers chiefly designed to enable them to raise an army whenever one was needed but also to perform any judicial and administrative functions relating to border warfare. Much older than the Marches was the great ecclesiastical Palatinate of Durham, but its
raison d’être
was much the same as that of the many other
franchises and honours still in existence in the early sixteenth century. By delegation of special powers to men likely to be resident in the area the Crown hoped to create an effective defence against the Scots – all of which enables the simple point to be made that the Crown had been interfering in the affairs of the North long before the Tudors came to power.
⁶

The purpose of this interference had not been to weaken the power of the Northern nobility, which was after all partly of its own creation, in practice providing a more effective defence against the Scots than any administrative unit that the Crown might construct. It was, in the Tudor period, too administratively complicated, and perhaps above all too expensive, to keep anything approaching a professional army in being. The Crown had still to rely very heavily on the nobleman’s retinue, and, thus, also to live with the possibility that it might be used against itself – but the obsession with this possibility has been the historians’ rather than the Crown’s. Kings had to behave peculiarly badly for noblemen to revolt – and almost all kings who did face major rebellions had either succeeded to the throne as minors, like Richard
II
and Henry
VI
, or had wrested the throne from somebody else, as both Henry
IV
and Henry
VII
had done. It is therefore misleading to see the Northern nobility as in some abstract way a constant threat to the Crown. Indeed, by and large it was quite the opposite, and it was for this reason that the Crown appointed the great noblemen to such important offices as the wardenship of a March. Here was the ideal solution, because the nobles brought to the office their own authority and influence in the area. Unfortunately, it was not always possible.

It is sometimes implied that there was an unlimited supply of important Northern noblemen available for royal service. In fact, at any one time there were at the most only three or four: a Neville or a Percy, and perhaps, though not as powerful, a Clifford or Dacre. If any of these, for whatever reason, were unavailable, there were obvious difficulties – and the reason need not have been suspicion of their loyalty: sheer incompetence, or the minority of one of them, would have just the same consequence. Another difficulty was that the nobility’s estates did not fit neatly into the administrative divisions. Percy lands were everywhere.
⁷
Although most often associated with the county of their title and their great residence at Alnwick Castle, the Percys owned even more land in Yorkshire, the county of their origin; and also with their ownership of the great honour of Cockermouth, a great deal in Cumberland. North of Cockermouth was the barony of Gilsland owned by the Dacre family, and it was this, with their chief residence at Naworth Castle, that made the Dacres possible candidates for the wardenship of the West March; but they also owned the barony of Morpeth, away towards the west coast of Northumberland. The chief centre of the Clifford family was Skipton in the West Riding, but they also possessed important estates in Westmorland and some in Cumberland.
⁸
A detailed political map of the North showing the distribution of the leading family estates would comprise concentrations of holdings with a wide and uneven spread. Furthermore, though this mosaic of holdings would be repeated throughout England, the suspicion is that in the North they were more tightly
packed and the possibility for friction greater than elsewhere. Certainly there was friction and rivalry in the North, exacerbated by the royal administrative divisions, in particular the wide powers granted to the wardens. This office gave the occupant power over other people’s tenants, possibly over the tenants of his chief rival, and this both rival lord and tenant could and did resent. The evidence, at least for the first twenty years of Henry
VIII
’s reign, is that these rivalries were not welcomed by the Crown – indeed, nothing made the good administration of the North more difficult.

In the 1520s the most open rivalry was to be found in the West March between the Dacre and Clifford families.
⁹
It had begun at least as early as 1513 when Thomas Lord Dacre felt compelled to request royal intervention in order to ensure that the Clifford tenants carried out his instructions as warden.
¹⁰
It then grumbled on for the rest of Dacre’s life, but only really surfaced after his death in 1525. In that year Henry Lord Clifford was created earl of Cumberland, and succeeded Dacre as warden of the West March just before the latter’s death. Dacre had held the post for almost forty years, so his replacement by Clifford was bound to cause problems as the new warden strove to establish himself in what had become a Dacre stronghold. He immediately had difficulty in gaining possession of various subsidiary royal offices, such as the captaincy of Carlisle and stewardship of Penrith that customarily went with the office of warden. In an effort to secure himself in these offices, he abruptly terminated all leases attached to them, previously granted by Dacre, and put in tenants of his own. Dacre resistance was so great that in order to put an end to the ‘inquietation’, Wolsey wrote to Clifford ordering him to restore immediately the former leaseholders until such time as he and the king’s Council could discuss the matter with him. Though addressed to ‘my entirely beloved friend’, Wolsey’s letter was a rebuke,
¹¹
and it is not certain how great a friend to Clifford Wolsey was. The matter is of some importance. Clifford was to remain warden for only two years, to be replaced at the end of 1527 by his rival, William, the new Lord Dacre, and it could be argued that he only lasted so short a time because he had received insufficient support from the Crown, and in particular from Wolsey. Back in the autumn of 1517 Clifford had spent a fortnight in the Fleet prison, put there by Wolsey. His offence is unknown – probably it had to do with his bad relations with his father and his riotous life-style – but if there was almost certainly good reason for his imprisonment, it cannot have helped his future relations with Wolsey.
¹²
On the other hand, what evidence there is suggests that his relations with Henry, with whom he had been brought up, were good and all his life he was to be a loyal servant of the Crown.
¹³
Could it be, therefore, that Wolsey was never reconciled to him being chosen as warden by Henry, and thus failed to give him the backing he should have done? In favour of such a view is the fact that though Thomas Lord Dacre had lost office in 1525 the family had not been disgraced, and Wolsey’s relations with Thomas’s brother, Sir Christopher, and with his son and heir, William, were good. There is also the evidence of the extremely interesting letter that Lord Percy wrote
to Clifford in October 1526, in which Percy reported a conversation he had overheard during which his father had warned Wolsey ‘that there was no trust in you [Clifford], and desired his Grace to put no confidence in you, for you were all with my Lord of Norfolk’.
¹⁴
Thus, it could be that Clifford’s removal from office was connected with the more important struggle for power at court between Norfolk and Wolsey.

In chapter 13 it will be argued that no such struggle occurred, whatever gossip there may have been to the contrary in Northern circles – and it is almost certainly such gossip that Percy’s father was drawing upon in his conversation with Wolsey. But whether the argument is correct, the notion of such a struggle, in which Clifford, as a supporter of Norfolk, was to suffer, is not necessary to explain Clifford’s removal from office in 1527, nor, indeed, is it likely that personal feeling came into it. This removal occurred at the end of a year which had seen great disturbances in the North as a result of the activities of Sir William Lisle. The failure of the royal administration in the North to cope with Lisle led to major alterations both in organization and personnel. These will be discussed later, but one of the victims of the reshuffle was Clifford. The Crown appears to have taken the view that he had not been an effective warden, one reason being that he was not influential enough in the West March to dominate it in the way that the Dacre family had done – and, of course, one of the reasons why Clifford had failed to dominate there was that he was being constantly undermined by the Dacres. The one worry about this explanation is that almost all evidence for Clifford’s removal from office is lacking. It must therefore remain a suggestion, but one that is strengthened by subsequent events.

Clifford was not disgraced. He remained as captain of Carlisle – this perhaps an attempt partly to soften the blow and partly to balance the rival forces in the West March and thus to lessen the conflict. But if it was a deliberate balancing act, it was one that did not work. Within months, his successor, William Lord Dacre, was being ordered not to interfere in tenancies granted by Clifford, in the same way as Clifford in 1526 had been ordered not to interfere in tenancies granted by the then Lord Dacre.
¹⁵
More importantly, both the new Warden General of the East and Middle Marches, the former Lord Percy, now Earl of Northumberland, and the Council of the North,
¹⁶
were finding it impossible to put an end to the quarrelling between the two families.
¹⁷
By October 1528 Thomas Magnus, one of Wolsey’s closest advisers on Northern matters and a member of Richmond’s Council, was advising that the captaincy of Carlisle should be returned to the new warden, but he clearly felt that rather more than this was required to provide a solution:

There is no little trouble nor business between the earl of Cumberland [Clifford] and the said Lord Dacre, not only to the inquieting of their servants, friends, and lovers in Cumberland and Westmorland, but also the countries there, by the occasion of the same, be the more further from good rule. Wherefore, your said Grace should do a good and blessed deed to set some good order between them
.
¹⁸

The evidence is that Wolsey was no more successful than Northumberland or Richmond’s Council had been in resolving the conflict, though perhaps it would be fairer to say that if he was successful, conflict soon broke out again after his fall, even though in August 1529 Magnus’s advice was taken and the captaincy of Carlisle was granted to Dacre.
¹⁹
In 1534 Dacre was accused of high treason for collusion with the Scots. Though acquitted, he was fined £10,000 and removed from the wardenship.
²⁰
There is little doubt that the Clifford influence was behind these charges and it was Clifford who succeeded him. But Clifford’s second term as warden of the West March was hardly more successful than his first. It is true that he retained the post until his death in 1542, but in 1537 the Crown decided that his rule was so inadequate that they appointed a deputy, Sir Thomas Wharton, giving him such extensive powers that in effect it was he who performed the warden’s duties.
²¹
As a postscript it is worth quoting the duke of Norfolk’s comment in 1537, a time when Clifford’s tenure was under review – ‘no man can serve his highness better than Lord Dacre there’
²²
– though he recognized that he was debarred from office by virtue of the charge of treason made against him in 1534. By 1549 this was deemed to be no longer a bar. Dacre once again became warden of the West March and remained so until his death in 1562.

It looks very much from all this as if the natural leaders in the West March were members of the Dacre family, and it was to these natural leaders, other things being equal, that the Crown looked to exercise its authority there. The problem was that though this was the case, the Dacres were not without rivals – and not just the Cliffords. Or to put it another way, it was not that the Dacre family was too strong but that it was too weak – too weak always to impose its will, even with royal support.

What has been described so far is merely the tip of an iceberg. In August 1523 the earl of Surrey found ‘the greatest dissensions’ amongst the gentlemen of Yorkshire, who would have fought each other, given half a chance, if they had met, and he singled out six factions who were particularly at loggerheads. Though he had taken immediate steps to end the conflicts, he still required, so he informed Wolsey, the sending out of royal letters to ensure that they would stop quarrelling and be ready to serve him at a day’s notice.
²³
In October of the same year he wrote that he was forced to lead in person the Lancashire contingent for ‘there is some little displeasure amongst them, and no man among them by whom they will be ruled.’
²⁴
These letters underline the point that not only were local rivalries inimical to ‘good government’ in the North, but they seriously hampered its defence. Families were unwilling to put aside their mutual dislike, even in the face of the common enemy from over the border. The result was that time and again the senior military man in the area, whether it was Surrey in 1523 or Dacre or Shrewsbury on earlier occasions,
had great difficulty in persuading the leading Northern families to turn up on time and with the right number of men; hence the great number of requests for royal intervention in order to get them to do so.
²⁵
The conclusion to be drawn is that in no sense was the Crown looking to ‘divide and rule’, if only because the divisions were already all too apparent. The rifts between noble and gentry families – and those of the latter were usually the consequence of the former – benefited the Crown not one iota. Recognizing this, the Crown expended a considerable amount of time and effort to minimize their harmful effects. It was precisely in an attempt to solve these problems that great noblemen were used to govern the North, for only they had the necessary power and prestige to impose order on ‘a cumbrous country’.
²⁶