The King's Cardinal: The Rise and Fall of Thomas Wolsey (Pimlico) (66 page)

Henry and Wolsey had always understood that only by co-operating with the leading noblemen in the North could its good government and safety be insured. The problem had been to find a suitable nobleman. In January 1528 with the success in bringing the Lisles to book, it must have seemed as if the search was over. But as it turned out, the 6th earl was to be something of a disappointment – not because he was ‘overmighty’, but because he was unstable, subject to depression and what looks like hypochondria – or, as he called it, ‘my old disease’.
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It is perhaps a little harsh to suggest that his affair with Anne Boleyn, while still in Wolsey’s household, provides the first indication of this instability, but it certainly did not help his relationship with his father, who had been planning for some time to marry him to Mary Talbot, a daughter of the earl of Shrewsbury. When, late in 1523 or early 1524, the marriage took place it turned into something of a disaster, perhaps partly the result of a dependence upon male favourites strong enough to suggest some quite strong homosexual element in his make-up. At any rate, his affection for them led him to give away such large amounts of money and land that in 1537 one of the royal commissioners who surveyed his estates on his death could write: ‘Never have I seen
a finer inheritance more blemished by the follies of the owner and untruth of his servants.’
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It is against this background that Wolsey’s efforts in 1528 to supervise the management of the 6th earl’s household must be seen. Often taken as yet more evidence of Henry
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’s and Wolsey’s implacable pursuit of the Percys, it is in fact evidence of their desire to save them from themselves. The case is paralleled by a similar desire to save the De Vere and Grey families from the efforts of a particular head of each family to dissipate its inheritance.
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The real question to ask is not whether the 6th earl was badly treated but why, given his instability, he was chosen to rule over the East and Middle Marches. It could be argued that it was his weakness and malleability that attracted the Crown, but that would be to ignore the circumstances surrounding his appointment. What was looked for was someone tough enough to deal with the Lisles, and Wolsey must have hoped that the 6th earl would prove to be such – and however much he was aided and abetted by others such as Angus, and indeed Wolsey, the earl did rise to the occasion. But it may be that Wolsey underestimated the difficulty of keeping him up to the mark; and indeed, almost immediately he was forced to give him a severe telling-off for going behind his back in his efforts to save the lives of Lisle’s two sons.
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Is there evidence here of the autocratic Wolsey, suspicious of any potential rivals and all too anxious to browbeat his own protégé? It seems unlikely, and neither of the two people the earl consulted, Tunstall and Tuke, was in any serious sense a rival of Wolsey. The straightforward explanation for Wolsey’s reaction is that the earl had done the wrong thing: if it was his considered view that Lisle’s sons should be pardoned, his correct course of action was to have raised the matter with Wolsey. And what is sometimes overlooked is that Wolsey did take the earl’s advice and the sons were spared.
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Still, by late 1528 Wolsey was having to reassure Henry that the earl would, given time, prove ‘conformable to his Highness’s pleasure in giving better attendance, leaving off his prodigality, sullennness, mistrust, disdain and making of parties’.
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It could hardly have been a more damning indictment, and it brings one back to the central problem that, whatever the theoretical solution, the real difficulty in governing the North was to find the right person. That Henry and his two leading councillors, Wolsey and Cromwell, persevered for so long with one who appears to have been so unsuitable only confirms the central argument of this chapter, that they were prepared to put up with a great deal from a Percy.

In stressing Henry’s and Wolsey’s desire to make use of the nobility in the running of Northern affairs, the danger has been perhaps to play down the role that both men saw the Crown playing. The emphasis was on co-operation, not surrender. When in 1524 criticisms of Dacre’s rule were mounting, Wolsey wrote to Norfolk that he considered that some of the complainants ‘exceed the limits of humble and conformable subjects, when they absolutely affirm in their supplication that they cannot nor ever will be contented to be ordered by Lord Dacre, not to
favour or love him in their hearts, but rather to depart the country. For such saying implieth in it great presumption, and is not to be pretermitted under silence, for as much as it becometh not them to refuse any officer which the king shall constitute, though he were of much inferior degree than the Lord Dacre is’.
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Thirteen years later Henry was expressing a similar idea when he wrote to that same duke that ‘we will not be bound of a necessity to be served there with Lords, but we will be served with such men, what degree so ever they be of, as we shall appoint to the same’.
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Neither man was saying that they disliked or were suspicious of the nobility – and it should be added that noblemen continued to be used as much in the 1530s and 1540s as in the 1520s. The point they were making was that a servant of the Crown in carrying out the king’s commands should be obeyed as if he was king, and therefore the servant’s own status was of no consequence. In practice they were perfectly well aware that it was, but as the choppings and changings of the 1520s indicate, whomever they chose to govern the North, they had absolutely no intention of leaving him to his own devices.

Wolsey was immersed in all the details of Northern government: the conduct of war, the raising of money, the settling of quarrels, the maintenance of law and order – all was grist to his mill. And in obtaining the necessary information and implementing his decisions he did not – nor indeed could he – rely only on noblemen; people such as Thomas Magnus and his colleagues on Richmond’s Council were also indispensable. Moreover, all royal servants, including the likes of Dacre and Surrey, were expected to do Wolsey’s bidding. Indeed, one’s overriding impression is of the immense pressure that Wolsey exerted to ensure that his instructions were carried out – the kind of pressure that, for instance, had led to Lisle’s surrender. The pressure may not have been there all the time; and it appears that the Scottish threat, for instance, concentrated his mind on the problems of the North in the early 1520s. But any leading minister must have his priorities, and obviously the North was not always going to be Wolsey’s.

How successful was Wolsey in tackling the problems of the North? At the start of this chapter a warning was given against thinking that anybody could have solved them: they were too intractable, and the solution to one problem was probably going to be detrimental to the solving of another. It must also be admitted that the detailed work needed to come up with an answer has yet to be done; and because of the inadequacies of the sources it will never be possible to do it very satisfactorily. But as always the real difficulty is elsewhere. There is at all times considerable ‘disorder’, and how one measures its containment depends upon so many assumptions. The easy way out would be to say that good order was present when those responsible for it declared that it was. But the men on the spot had a penchant for announcing that all had never been better, only to have to admit in their next despatch that all had never been worse – not that we should be critical. Like us, they found any assessment difficult; and until the next incident happened no doubt all did look well, and in one sense was. The obsession with trends – are things getting better or worse? – obscures the fact that events are often random and unpredictable, and certainly the men of Redesdale and Tynedale were not thinking
of the historian’s tidy graph when they planned their next crime! And if one draws comparisons between the state of the North in Wolsey’s time and at others it is the similarities that are striking. By the 1580s, for instance, a permanent Council of the North had been at work for forty years, but this had prevented neither the rebellion of the Northern earls in 1569, nor the ambushing of the sheriff of Northumberland and the murder of his brother in 1586. Furthermore when the ambushers were brought to trial the jury was very much on their side and found the murderer not guilty. And in 1596 two members of the Council of the North could write to Lord Burghley: ‘We find that the gentlemen, to the great overthrow of justice, do too much favour their blood.’
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Such difficulties would have been well understood by Wolsey and those who served under him in the North.

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 office
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– 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’.
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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’.
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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.
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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
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on his return to Berwick was the possibility of concerted action against one of the most troublesome border clans, the Armstrongs of Liddesdale.
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The lordship of Ireland and the North presented Henry
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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.
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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.
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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
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, while for much of that period the Irish exchequer was receiving on average £6,300 a year.
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By
the early sixteenth century that amount was down to under £1,000, barely enough to pay for the lordship’s royal officials.
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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.
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Anything resembling effective English control was confined to those first four, the so-called ‘obedient shires’ or ‘English Pale’ surrounding the city of Dublin.
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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,
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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 horsemen
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– figures that give some indication of the military problem facing the English Crown in Ireland in the early sixteenth century.