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

by Gwyn, Peter

  But what of Buckingham’s relationship with Wolsey? If the evidence presented at Buckingham’s trial is to be accepted, then it must also be accepted that Buckingham did resent Wolsey’s power and influence with the king. There is, however, no evidence that Wolsey returned this resentment, and, as will be shown shortly, there is no good reason why he should have done. Furthermore, as regards their dealings with one another there is no evidence of great ill-will – if anything, rather the opposite. For instance, when Buckingham was anxious not to take part in the royal joust it was to Wolsey he wrote in his ultimately successful efforts to get his way, at the same time making it clear that he was extremely grateful to Wolsey for all he had done to further his cause on previous occasions. Of course, too much should not be made of this; Wolsey’s help was worth a few compliments. But at least, on the evidence of this letter alone, relations were not so bad that there was no communication between the two men.49 Indeed, on one matter it is known that they worked quite closely together. On his visit to court in May 1516 Buckingham had had a long conversation with Sir Richard Sacheverell, during the course of which Sacheverell had floated an idea, put to him by Wolsey only the night before – with the intention no doubt that it would be passed on50 – that it was high time that Buckingham brought his son to court. In itself the idea is of some interest because it rather confirms the impression that Buckingham was reluctant to become too closely involved with the Crown. His son was by this time fifteen, and it would have been very usual for the son of a leading nobleman to serve some apprenticeship in the royal household. And that he raised the matter is further evidence of Wolsey’s inclination to give good advice to Buckingham: if the son’s appearance was delayed too long, Henry would begin to wonder why.

  Buckingham’s explanation was that he considered the court too risky a place for the health of an only son, especially because of the great danger of contracting the plague there. Only when his son was married and had an heir would it be all right for him to appear. The rather lame explanation elicited the inevitable inquiry – which may have been Buckingham’s intention – about what marriage plans had been made for the boy. When the duke said none, Wolsey had suggested a daughter of the countess of Salisbury. It is quite an interesting choice. The countess was a daughter of the duke of Clarence and thus a niece of Edward IV. Such a marriage could only strengthen the Stafford claim to the throne, which, if there was any worry about it, makes Wolsey’s suggestion extremely foolish. In fact, it does not look as if there was, for two years later the marriage took place.51 What did matter was that Buckingham’s son married someone of whom Henry approved, and although in the late 1530s the countess of Salisbury’s family was to fall foul of him, in 1516 it was very much in favour. No less so was the earl of Shrewsbury, lord high steward and a most conscientious servant of the Crown.52 It was for this reason that when Buckingham foresaw difficulties concerning Wolsey’s first proposal, Wolsey had suggested a Talbot match as an alternative. In making these proposals, Wolsey was doing nothing unusual. The Crown had always taken an interest in the marriages of its leading subjects, and Wolsey, as Henry’s chief minister, was performing a very traditional role – and, it should be said, doing it with his customary tact. There was no suggestion of dictating to Buckingham; here, simply, was an offer to make the Crown’s good offices available if they were required, with admittedly the implication that they would only be made available if the marriage met with royal approval. And that Wolsey did not offend Buckingham is suggested by the fact that he was very shortly to take up Wolsey’s first proposal and bring it to a successful conclusion.

  There was, however, an area that provided possibilities for conflict between Buckingham and Wolsey, and indeed between Buckingham and the Crown, and this was the law. No one was more obsessed with his legal rights than the duke, and whether upholding his claims to property, chasing up unpaid debts or suing his own officials for failure to carry out their duties, he was constantly asserting them. Between 1498 and 1521 he brought 128 separate actions before the courts of King’s Bench and Common Pleas, while 43 additional cases were brought on his behalf by his senior officials.53 With these cases Wolsey was not involved; neither does the frequency with which Buckingham went to law suggest that he felt that the common law courts were biased against him. But when Buckingham’s legal affairs came before the king’s Council sitting in Star Chamber, then Wolsey was involved – and the cases did not always go Buckingham’s way. For instance, it seems likely that Star Chamber upheld John Russell’s claim that his former master had wrongfully seized his estates; at any rate the Crown never accepted that Russell had gone in for large-scale embezzlement – the alleged justification for the duke’s action – for otherwise it would hardly have appointed him to the Council in the Marches of Wales.54 On another occasion Wolsey intervened directly to ensure that one of Buckingham’s Welsh marcher tenants was ‘indifferently handled and truly according to his desire, setting apart all rancour, malice or partiality, and without delays unreasonable’.55 This meant that he should not be tried before Buckingham’s own officials, and demonstrates Wolsey’s well-known concern for ‘indifferent justice’ – a concern which might not endear him to noblemen determined, and perhaps even accustomed, to get their own way in legal matters.

  Here is also a reminder that legal matters and government policy could interrelate, especially where certain sensitive areas such as the Welsh Marches were concerned. The government was bound to be interested in Buckingham’s activities as a marcher lord, even if Buckingham might interpret that interest as unnecessary interference. In 1518 the king’s Council arbitrated in a dispute between Buckingham and his tenants in the lordship of Brecon and Hay. The tenants had refused to ‘redeem the great session’, that is to say they had objected to the common practice by which all defaulters before a lordship’s court were automatically pardoned at the end of the session on the payment of a fixed sum levied on the marcher tenants as a whole, not just on those found guilty. ‘Redeeming the great session’ had become a device by which marcher lords taxed their tenants. It did not further the maintenance of law and order, and was thus viewed with increasing suspicion by the Crown. In a complicated settlement the king’s Council, headed by Wolsey but including, it should be stressed, Buckingham’s fellow peers and relations by marriage, the duke of Norfolk, the earl of Surrey and Lord Bergavenny – the latter especially close to Buckingham – decided that while in this instance redemption should be paid, in future tenants should have the right to refuse. Past debts to Buckingham, other than arrears of rent, were to be cancelled. Efforts were made to prevent arbitrary action by the duke’s officials; for instance, any tenant arrested merely on the suspicion of felony was to be allowed bail.56

  On the other hand, the penalties for breaking the settlement were severe, and of much greater financial consequence to a tenant than to the duke, so that its effect was in some ways to strengthen the duke’s position. The settlement has been called ‘a powerful exercise of royal sovereignty in the Marches’,57 which is fair enough so long as it is also seen as a careful balancing act to ensure that both Buckingham’s legal and financial rights and the good government of the lordship were effectively provided for. Though the Crown had delegated much of the administration of law and order to the marcher lords in return for certain military obligations, it had not thereby surrendered its overall responsibility for these lordships. This the 1518 settlement made clear, as did Henry’s letter to Buckingham in that same year accusing him of failing to impose on his tenants bonds for good behaviour. The result of this failure was that ‘many and diverse murders, rapes, robberies, riots, and other misdemeanours have been of late and daily committed, and left clearly unpunished’.58 The duke was given just under three months to put the matter right. What he thought of Henry’s letter, or indeed of the Council’s settlement, is not known. Almost certainly he did not like them, and no doubt they added to his discontent and frustration. However, what they are not evidence of is any pa
rtial or sustained policy by the Crown or Wolsey to do him down.

  And why should Wolsey want to do Buckingham down? The usual explanation, deriving almost entirely from Vergil’s account, is that he saw the duke as a dangerous political rival. But given the poor relationship between Henry and Buckingham, this explanation will not do. There was never any possibility that Buckingham would usurp Wolsey’s position. There is no evidence that Henry’s visit to Penshurst in the summer of 1519 led to closer relations between the two men; and though, for instance, the duke may have disliked the junketings on the Field of Cloth of Gold, there is no evidence that Henry did, nor that he was losing confidence in Wolsey’s general conduct of foreign policy. Some very few noblemen, perhaps only the dukes of Norfolk and Suffolk, had the necessary standing and influence at court to pose a real threat to Wolsey’s position. Buckingham did not. Of course, if he were somehow to have succeeded to the throne, then Wolsey’s position, even life, would have been in jeopardy. In this most obvious sense Wolsey had a vested interest in preventing this, but as long as Henry VIII was alive, or had a legitimate heir, Wolsey’s duty as a royal servant and loyal subject dictated this as well. Once information reached him of Buckingham’s dreams of becoming king, he had to take decisive action, whatever his personal feelings. This would have included bringing the information to the king’s attention. When precisely he did this is not known, but once informed Henry took an active interest in all aspects of the case, personally supervising the interrogation of the witnesses,59 and probably himself masterminding the duke’s arrest; certainly Sir William Compton, groom of the stool, and other household servants were involved in it.60 Henry’s involvement is not very surprising; the matter did after all concern him intimately, but it needs mentioning just to make the point that if the downfall of Buckingham had been a ‘frame-up’, both Henry and Wolsey would have been responsible. The argument here, however, is quite otherwise. Until information reached them that Buckingham was listening to prophecies about his succession to the throne, both Henry’s and Wolsey’s attitude towards him had been perfectly correct if, especially in Henry’s case, no more than that. Once it had done so, however, it is difficult to see how they could have reacted other than they did, even if Buckingham’s relations with the Crown had been much better – but then if they had been the duke would probably not have spent his time indulging in such speculations.

  If this explanation of Buckingham’s downfall is correct, a number of consequences follow, the most important being that the whole notion of an inherent antagonism between ‘butcher’s cur’ and pure-bred nobleman is seriously undermined. Far from planning the duke’s destruction, it would appear that Wolsey did his best to save him from himself. Moreover, there is plenty of evidence of Wolsey getting on with the nobility. His first benefice had been a gift of the Grey family, presumably as a reward for teaching the three sons of the 1st marquess of Dorset at Magdalen School. When, twenty years later, their mother was anxious to settle with the eldest, the 2nd marquess, her highly complicated affairs – not only had she been an heiress and in her own right a baroness, but on being widowed she had married none other than Buckingham’s brother, the earl of Wiltshire, all the while producing a great many children – it was to Wolsey that she and the 2nd marquess looked to in order to draw up ‘Articles of Agreement’.61

  Two years later it was the Howards who were seeking Wolsey’s help in settling their family affairs. The resulting ‘Order … to limit John earl of Oxenford in the ordering of the expenses of household and other his affairs in his younger years, as also for his demeanour towards the countess his wife’ was an attempt to provide a solution to a family tragedy brought about by the disturbing behaviour of the 14th earl of Oxford.62 Not only was he incapable of managing the De Vere estates, but he drank too much, ate too much, kept wild and riotous company, wore ‘excessive and superfluous apparel’ and, worst of all, treated his wife, who was a daughter of the 2nd duke of Norfolk, with none of the ‘gentleness and kindness’ expected of a husband and a nobleman. It is not known whether Wolsey’s ‘Order’ did solve all the problems – and two years later the earl was dead – but it sheds light on many aspects of early Tudor life, such as attitudes to marriage and, more relevantly, to the nobility. It is permeated with a real concern for the preservation of a nobleman’s patrimony and a belief in aristocratic values as a vital ingredient in the better maintenance of the common weal, and yet its author was supposedly antipathetic to such values. If he was, on this occasion he managed to conceal it with remarkable skill! Moreover, in drawing up the ‘Order’ he would have had to work very closely with the principal parties involved, and in the process he appears to have won the genuine gratitude of the countess of Oxford, who at one stage acknowledged that he was ‘the setting forward of me; for I have nothing, nor was never like to have had, if it had not been for your gracious goodness.’63

  Wolsey’s ‘Articles of Agreement’ for the Grey family and ‘Order’ for the De Veres and Howards are of particular interest, because here were private matters – insofar as anything to do with aristocratic families can be thought of as private – being dealt with by Wolsey, insofar as his position permitted, in a private capacity. That his help was sought in this way may therefore be taken as evidence of a real trust in his ability to produce solutions. Moreover, it confirms something that Cavendish pointed out, but that has been overlooked, that Wolsey’s career was successful not only because he secured the confidence of the king, but also because ‘his sentences and witty persuasions in the Council chamber was always so pithy’ that people, ‘as occasion moved them, assigned him for his filed tongue and ornate eloquence to be their expositor unto the king’s majesty in all their proceedings’.64 Admittedly, Cavendish does not single out noblemen as a class who sought his help, but they more than anyone had dealings with the king, and, though the surviving evidence is meagre, what there is suggests that Wolsey’s good offices were constantly made use of by them.

  The distinction between the private and the public is not one, however, that should be overstressed. The evidence hardly permits any real assessment of Wolsey’s private feelings towards individual noblemen, or theirs towards him – and in any age it is difficult for public men to have private feelings. Insofar as the politics of the time very much centred on the relationship between the Crown and nobility, anyone at the hub of royal government such as Wolsey, as lord chancellor and leading royal councillor, was bound to be intimately involved in the affairs of the nobility.

  Wolsey was also a cardinal and papal legate. In December 1515 there took place at Bologna a famous meeting between Francis I and Pope Leo X. Although Francis came as the conqueror of Northern Italy, his demeanour throughout was modest, not to say subservient. Indeed, he seems to have spent much of his time grovelling at the pope’s feet which, as the Imperial ambassador rather archly remarked, were almost kissed away by his attentions and those of the French nobility who accompanied him.65 Leo, it is true, was a Medici, and thus a member of the great banking family which for most of the fifteenth century had controlled the government of Florence. Nevertheless, in comparison with a king of France or a member of the French aristocracy, the crème de la crème of European society, a Medici was nothing. The Vicar of Christ, on the other hand, was everything, and the fact that the French had spent the last five or six years in bitter conflict with the papacy in no way affected this. Wolsey was not pope, but the English nobility would not have found it in the least demeaning to pay him, as a cardinal and prince of the Church as well as the king’s leading councillor, the greatest respect. Moreover, it needs to be stressed that they were used to clerical lord chancellors, some of whom, such as John Morton only fifteen or so years earlier, had also been cardinals. Although in England leading churchmen had very rarely been drawn from the nobility, or even leading gentry, this had in no way prevented them from playing a leading role, not only in royal government but in society as a whole. Most English historians, perhaps because not familiar
with either cardinals or aristocrats, have found it curiously difficult to accept this – at least when they have turned their attention to Wolsey. Instead, they have latched on to Cavendish’s loving descriptions of the great pomp and ceremony with which Wolsey surrounded his daily life, in which the nobility played a great part, and have seen it as evidence not only of moral failure but of political insensitivity in thereby so obviously antagonizing the ruling classes. Nobody would have been more surprised at this use of his work than Cavendish himself. The lesson to be drawn from Wolsey’s life was indeed that in any final judgment all is vanity, but it was precisely because Wolsey’s life had been so great and glorious that it drew the lesson so well. And when Cavendish wrote, ‘thus in great honour, triumph, and glory he [Wolsey] reigned a long season, ruling all things within this realm appertaining to the King by his wisdom’, he meant every word of it.66

  Cavendish also informs us that the English nobility were quite happy for their children to serve an apprenticeship in Wolsey’s household, for Wolsey had in his household ‘of lords nine or ten, who had each of them allowed two servants; and the earl of Derby had allowed five men’. Sadly, the remaining evidence provides only a few names. The most famous noble member of his household was the 6th earl of Northumberland, Henry Percy, for it was while he was serving there that he allegedly fell in love with Anne Boleyn, and may even have entered into a precontract of marriage with her. The earl of Derby, mentioned by Cavendish, also appears in a list of young noblemen who in 1527 accompanied Wolsey on his mission to Amiens to negotiate with Francis.67 Others were Lords Monteagle and Vaux; Sir John Dudley, the future duke of Northumberland; ‘master Ratclyfe’ (probably the future 2nd earl of Sussex); ‘master Willowby’ (perhaps the future 1st Lord Willoughby of Parham); ‘master Parker’ (probably the son and heir of Lord Morley); and ‘master Stourton’ (the future 7th Lord Stourton) and Edward Seymour, the future Lord Protector. Other noblemen who may have been brought up in Wolsey’s houshold were the Irish peer, James Lord Butler,68 and Christopher Lord Conyers.69