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

by Gwyn, Peter

  Royal favour did not last long. In the autumn of 1519 he was summoned back to England, though, again, exactly why is not altogether clear. Nearly twenty years later Robert Cowley, a client of Kildare’s only significant rival, Piers Butler of Ormond, gave as the reason a list of ‘enormities’ committed by Kildare, which he presented in person before the king’s Council.170 Amongst these was his ‘disinheriting the king of his hereditaments’, a failure to make any account of the Crown’s Irish revenues, and his wrongful retaining of Irishmen. But whatever the reason, when the earl of Surrey arrived to take up his post of lord lieutenant of Ireland in May 1520, he found much of the country in rebellion. What is more, he was convinced that Kildare, who was still retained in England, was largely responsible for this state of affairs. His reports led to Kildare’s examination by Wolsey. He was for a time placed in custody, and when not in custody was bound not only to remain in London and to appear in Star Chamber at a certain date, but also not to have any communication with Ireland without Wolsey’s express permission. Despite all this, by August 1524 he was once again lord deputy, only for the whole process to start up again two years later. In the late autumn of 1526 he was summoned back to London again to be examined by Wolsey, and put into custody. And after Wolsey’s fall, the process was to be repeated. In 1532 he became lord deputy for the third time, but by the end of 1533 he was back in the Tower of London, and on this occasion there was to be no return, for on 12 December 1534 he was to die while still in the Tower. Yet even without death intervening another come-back had virtually been ruled out. In the previous June his son and heir, ‘Silken Thomas’, had led the Geraldines in a full-scale revolt. It was not successful, and with its failure the Kildare ascendancy came to an end.171

  However, long before these last dramatic events, the Crown was surely becoming increasingly impatient with the Kildare domination. A man is not constantly recalled, accused of all manner of offences and put in the Tower of London, if his performance is perfectly satisfactory. Moreover, the arguments presented at the time to support Kildare’s various reappointments merely confirm the fact that the Crown was deeply suspicious of him. It was Surrey who argued for the first of Kildare’s reappointments, in 1521, within only a year of having taken over the lordship from him. This was not because he was greatly in favour of Kildare; as just mentioned he considered him largely responsible for the difficulties he was facing.172 But his difficulties in restoring royal control had convinced him that unless Henry was prepared to invest much more money and many more men in Ireland than previously, there was little alternative to Geraldine rule. Seven years later he took precisely the same view:

  So to look upon the poor land of Ireland that it take not more hurt this year than it hath done in any year since the first conquest, which was never so likely to ensue as now considering the great weakness as well of good captains of the Englishry, as lack of men of war, and also great dissention between the greatest bloods of the land, and the Irish never so strong as now. The premises considered on my truth I see no remedy, the king not sending the Earl of Kildare thither, but only to continue his brother in authority for this summer.173

  To antagonize the Geraldines, and with no effective power to put in their place, would have been a recipe for disaster – or, in other words, if one could not beat the Geraldines, one should join them.

  With all this, Wolsey agreed. At about the same time that he received Norfolk’s letter, he presented a paper to the king in which he argued that the situation in Ireland was so bad that it was quite the wrong moment to antagonize the Geraldines unnecessarily. Kildare should be retained in office as lord deputy, but should remain in England while Lord James Butler, the earl of Ormond’s heir, should be given the task of defending the Pale. With Kildare still deputy, the Geraldines would not wish to come out in open revolt, and at the same time Kildare himself could be held accountable for their good behaviour, which was really to say that he would serve as a hostage but with honourable status.174 However, it is clear that in 1528 Wolsey saw the retaining of Kildare, even as an absentee deputy, as merely a temporary measure ‘until a more mature consultation were taken and had therein’.175 And thus, as with Norfolk, his support for a continuation of the Kildare ascendancy is not evidence that he liked it. In fact, it is usual to suggest quite the opposite, that he was profoundly antagonistic towards the 9th earl of Kildare, rather in the same way that he is alleged to have been antagonistic towards the 3rd duke of Buckingham, the 5th earl of Northumberland – and, indeed, towards all noblemen.

  There are two main sources for Wolsey’s dislike of Kildare. One is Polydore Vergil, who produces a most complicated scenario in which Wolsey’s hatred for Kildare is a sub-plot in his great rivalry with the earl of Surrey: in order to get him to Ireland, he must first disgrace Kildare.176 It is not very convincing, if only because it was almost certainly Henry rather than Wolsey who chose Surrey as lord lieutenant in 1520.177 The other, and perhaps more important, source is Richard Stanyhurst’s account of Ireland in the reign of Henry VII, first published by Holinshed in 1577. It includes a vivid description of Kildare’s interrogation by Wolsey before the Council after his third summons to England in 1526 – a description which leaves the reader in no doubt that it was Kildare who got the better of the argument. As regards the main charge against him, that while ostensibly going to arrest his ‘cousin Desmond’ he had deliberately ensured that Desmond escaped, Kildare pointed out that the only evidence for this had been provided by people who have ‘gaped long for my wreck, and now at length for want of better stuff are fain to fill their mouths with smoke.’ He then gave Wolsey a lesson in the conduct of Irish affairs.

  Little know you my lord, how necessary it is not only for the governors but also for every nobleman in Ireland, so to hamper their neighbours at discretion, wherein if they waited for process of law they might hap to lose their own lives and lands without the law. You, in England, hear of a case and feel not the smart that vexeth us.

  Finally, he denied Wolsey’s charge that he saw himself as ‘King of Kildare’, declaring that he would give anything to exchange for one month his ‘kingdom’ for Wolsey’s.

  I sleep in a cabin, when you lie soft in your bed of down. I serve under the cope of heaven, when you are served under a canopy. I drink water out of a skull, when you drink wine out of golden cups. My courser is trained to the field, when your gennet is taught to amble. When you are begraced and belorded, and crouched and kneeled unto, then 1 find small grace with our Irish borderers, except I cut them off by the knees.178

  It is wonderful stuff, but it is almost certainly fiction. Not only has no contemporary account of the interrogation survived, but there is no evidence that any verbatim account was ever made at any Council meeting. Moreover, the little documentary evidence that has survived does not suggest that Wolsey had any particular animus against Kildare. Of course, he would conduct the investigations into Kildare’s rule in Ireland and be responsible for his treatment while in England, but then he was paid to do that. It is also true that in 1521 Wolsey thought that Kildare’s great rival, Piers Butler earl of Ormond, ‘for his wisdom and puissance’, would be the most suitable successor to Surrey.179 By 1528 he was rather more doubtful about Piers, ‘his age, unwellness, and other passions considered’, but he wrote highly of his son, Lord James Butler, who had spent much of the 1520s in England, may even have been in Wolsey’s household, and was generally well liked.180 This last point is of some importance, for if Wolsey showed any preference for the Butlers over the Geraldines it was a preference shared by almost every Englishman who thought at all seriously about Ireland – except the Grey family. In 1520 Kildare had taken as his second wife Elizabeth Grey, sister of Thomas marquess of Dorset. Whether the marriage was arranged by the king is not known, but given that Kildare was in England in response to a royal summons, it cannot have happened without royal knowledge and consent, and it was probably seen as a way of binding Kildare to the English court.181 But Wolsey was
closely involved with the Grey family, who had been his first patrons, and in May 1523 the new countess of Kildare considered it worth her while to write to Wolsey on her husband’s behalf.182 Thus, this second marriage gave Kildare a personal link with Wolsey, making it a little less likely that there should be any strong animus between them.

  If there was someone at court who seems to have disliked Kildare, it was the king. It was he who in 1521 had refused to send him back to Ireland when Surrey, his man on the spot, had suggested such a move. Henry took the view that for this to happen so soon after Kildare’s imprisonment could only reflect dishonourably on himself, and would discourage all those who, unfavourably inclined towards Kildare, had loyally supported Surrey. Moreover, it might give Kildare an opportunity to take revenge for his treatment in England by joining up with the Irish rebels.183 And it was Henry, against the advice of Wolsey and Norfolk, who in 1528 refused to allow him to remain as lord deputy. Indeed, he considered that Kildare ‘goeth fraudulently about to colour that the King should think that his grace could not be served there, but only by him’, and replaced him with Piers Butler.184 In fact the suspicion with which the 9th earl was viewed throughout the 1520s, but especially by the king, only makes his treatment the more puzzling, for though between 1518 and 1529 he was twice dismissed from office, he was also twice reappointed.

  Wolsey’s assessment in 1528, strongly endorsed by Norfolk, that to do without Kildare would endanger the security of the English Pale is the simple solution to the puzzle. Kildare was too strongly entrenched there to be dismissed, unless the Crown was prepared to intervene in the affairs of Ireland with much more vigour and perseverance than hitherto. Did the Crown in Wolsey’s period ever even contemplate such intervention? The nearest it got to it was early in 1520 when Surrey was sent to Ireland as lord lieutenant, but the episode is deceptive. Once he had re-established good order, his main task was to make an on-the-spot assessment of the situation and report back.185 With him went Sir John Stile, with a special responsibility for assessing the financial situation in the Pale, which after almost twenty years of unbroken Geraldine administration was an unknown quantity. Surrey arrived in Ireland in May 1520 to find a state of chaos, with both O’Neill in the north-east and the earl of Desmond in the south-west up in arms, so it was not until June of the following year that he felt able to give his considered view on the long-term future of the lordship. By then he had no doubt that ‘this land shall never be brought to good order and due subjection, but only by conquest.’ One way of achieving this was to do it gradually, taking one county one year, another the next. Such a policy would require a force of at least 2,500 men. The other was to attempt a speedier conquest, in which case at least 6,000 men would be required. But even with that number the conquest would take a long time, for Ireland was five times as large as Wales, which had taken Edward I ten years. Moreover, for conquest to be successful, it would require not only the building of fortified towns and castles, but also the importation of English colonists, for unless Irish customs were rooted out no reconquest could ever be permanent.186

  This was Surrey’s assessment in 1521, and it may have been deliberately pessimistic in order to try to introduce a note of reality into the discussion of Irish affairs at court.187 No direct reaction to his assessment has survived, but given the Crown’s horrified reaction to an earlier modest request for reinforcements, which, it was estimated, would raise the cost of his army to between £16,000 and £17,000 a year,188 it is not difficult to guess how a proposal to at least double the army’s size would have been received, especially as it was quickly followed by Stile’s gloomy views on the Crown’s financial prospects in Ireland.189 Within months of Surrey’s assessment being submitted, his recall was under discussion, not least by Surrey himself, who as soon as he was aware of just how little help would be forthcoming, was most anxious to extract himself from a situation which offered him no chance to shine. In the end he did not get away until March 1522, and not before he had had to make a hurried trip to London and back in order to take part in discussions about his successor.190 And in these one of the chief considerations, as Wolsey pointed out in a long letter from Calais in October 1521, was the desirability of spending as little money on his successor as possible.191 In effect, this meant that he would have to be an Irishman.

  When in the spring of 1521 Henry had rejected Surrey’s request for reinforcements, the period of European peace inaugurated by the Treaty of London in 1518 had come to an end. In March hostilities between Francis I and Charles V had begun, and Henry made it very clear to Surrey what in this situation his priorities were: first, and very much foremost, Europe; second, Scotland because it seemed likely that the government there would seek to take advantage of England’s European involvement; lastly and a long way behind these two, Ireland. But it is almost certain that the particular circumstances of that year made very little difference.192 Europe had always been Henry’s and Wolsey’s main concern. All that had happened was that peace in Europe had given them a breathing space to look at other less important matters, amongst them Ireland.193

  However, even the maintenance of peace cost money. In the month following Surrey’s arrival in Dublin, Henry crossed to France to meet with Francis at the Field of Cloth of Gold at a cost of about £15,000, considerably more than he was to spend on Surrey’s expedition. On his return to England in the middle of July he was quickly writing to a lord lieutenant increasingly involved in fighting rebel Irishmen, to press upon him the need for caution and restraint: ‘now at the beginning politique practices may do more good than exploit of war, till such a time as the strength of the Irish enemies shall be enfeebled and diminished, as well as getting their captains from them as by putting division amongst them, so that they join not together’.194 In October he was even more certain of the need for ‘sober ways, politique drifts, and amicable persuasions’, rather than ‘rigorous dealing, commination [denunciations], or any other enforcement by strength or violence’, for to spend large sums of money merely ‘to bring the Irishry in appearance only of obeisance … it were a thing of little policy, less advantage, and no effect’.195 What Surrey had to do was to persuade the Irish of the great benefit that would accrue to them from the rule of law, nor need it be English law if the Irish felt that to be too extreme and vigorous; any reasonable laws would do as long as they were kept, and as long as the Crown’s lands wrongfully retained by the Irish were returned.196 It does not say very much for Henry’s concern for his lordship of Ireland that the only thing that seemed to interest him in October 1520, when he had comparatively few distractions on the continent, was the recovery of his lands. Once these returned, all he was willing to do then was to spend the absolute minimum merely to maintain some kind of presence in Ireland. What this means is that Surrey’s period as lord lieutenant from 1520 to 1522, far from being crucial evidence that the Crown had any serious intentions towards Ireland, on the contrary turns out to be good evidence that it had not.

  It also shows that at the heart of the Crown’s unwillingness to take Ireland very seriously was its great reluctance to spend money on it. It is true that throughout the later Middle Ages there had been a vague hope that Ireland could once again become a source of revenue, just as it had been in the late thirteenth century; and that this hope was still alive at the time of Surrey’s expedition is suggested by the expectation that it might be paid for partly out of Irish revenues.197 The hope proved illusory, and though Irish ‘reformers’ might continue to hold out the promise of financial gain if Ireland was taken in hand,198 Sir John Stile’s gloomy assessment of the financial situation there probably weighed more heavily. What is clear, however, is that, unless large amounts of money were spent, little could be achieved – and certainly not the reconquest of Ireland. To take one example, most people commenting on Irish problems saw the Irish lords’ right to coyne and livery – that is their right to billet troops and horses on their tenants free of charge – as an abuse that ought to be tac
kled. But, as was pointed out to the Crown at the time of Surrey’s expedition, if the practice was abolished large additional sums would have to be found for any defence of the Pale.199 It was not, therefore, the right time to do anything about it. In 1528 Surrey himself made virtually the same point when he advised Wolsey against agreeing to the archbishop of Cashel’s request that no coyne and livery be levied in his diocese, for Ormond’s military strength depended upon it.200 Thus, until the Crown was willing to provide adequate funding from England for military expenditure in Ireland, nothing could be done to remedy a major abuse.

  Probably the cheapest solution to the problem of finding a successor to Surrey would have been the return of Kildare, but this, as we have seen, Henry was not prepared to countenance. For a brief moment, he toyed with the possibility of an English successor, in particular William Devereux Lord Ferrers, who with his military and Welsh experience had some qualifications,201 but when Wolsey explained that any Englishman would prove more expensive to maintain than an Irishman, he quickly plumped for the only possible Irish alternative to Kildare, Piers Butler earl of Ormond.202 Not only did he have considerable resources in Ireland, but his recent loyal service to Surrey also recommended him.203 The choice was not a success. Without additional Crown backing – and of course it was the belief that this would not be required which had inspired the choice – his resources proved inadequate. This was largely because his power base was in Kilkenny and Tipperary, which was excellent for containing the earl of Desmond, lying to the west of him, but not for governing the English Pale.204 And in the English Pale it soon emerged that the Geraldines and their supporters were not prepared to accept this rule. A policy of sustained pressure designed to secure Kildare’s return was adopted. Early in 1523 the Crown gave way and Kildare returned, but the quarrelling between the Butlers and the Geraldines continued. In December 1523 Robert Talbot, on his way to keeping Christmas with Ormond, was murdered by some Geraldines. Feeling it must intervene, the Crown sent out a high-powered commission which in July 1524 not only brought about an elaborate settlement of all outstanding disputes between the two families, but laid down elaborate procedures to be followed in the event of further quarrelling.205 In many ways the settlement seems to have favoured Ormond, and certainly Kildare agreed to forgo a number of financial claims on him. However, on its return to England, the commission left behind a new lord deputy – none other than Kildare.