by Gwyn, Peter
How far Ormond resented his own early loss of office and Kildare’s appointment in his stead is uncertain. He had earlier asked for the return of his rival to Ireland because he was finding it impossible to maintain order in Kildare, and in November 1523 he had even agreed to pay the earl an annuity of £100 to enable him the better to achieve that task.206 All this was an admission of defeat, and it may be that Ormond was quite relieved to return to his own lands, while still retaining a place on the Irish Council as treasurer. In any event, despite the settlement, the quarrelling between the two families continued. Charges and counter-charges were put before the king, both sides making use of their contacts at court. The result, in the late summer of 1526, was a summons to both Kildare and Ormond to come to England. There followed a most unsatisfactory year in Ireland during which there were two vice-deputies in charge, first Kildare’s brother, Sir Thomas Fitzgerald, and then the pro-Butler Lord Delvin. Then in 1528 Delvin was kidnapped by the O’Connors, almost certainly with Geraldine backing. Such a direct challenge to royal authority in Ireland demanded a response – but what? On 4 August Henry made his decision.207 Despite Wolsey’s and Norfolk’s advice to the contrary,208 he rejected a Geraldine solution and Piers Butler – since earlier in the year earl of Ossory rather than Ormond – became lord deputy for the second time.
When in June 1528 Norfolk had written to Wolsey on the subject of Ireland, he made the point that in his opinion ‘the malice between the earls of Kildare and Ossory’ was ‘the only cause of the ruin of that poor land’.209 In this, of course, he exaggerated, but there is little doubt that here was the key to the failure of the Crown’s preferred policy between 1522 and 1528. The hope had been that Piers Butler would prove strong enough to keep the Pale in reasonably good order and at least to defend it from outside attack, but not so strong as to be the worry that Kildare had become by 1520. And that even Piers Butler was viewed with some suspicion is evidenced by Wolsey’s suggestion to Henry in November 1521 that his son, Lord James Butler, should be retained in England so as to provide some kind of check on his father’s activities.210 In the event Piers Butler had not proved strong enough to keep even reasonably good order, and Kildare had to be resorted to again. But with Kildare came the old worries, well expressed by an anonymous writer in the 1520s when he made the point that although Kildare as lord deputy was undoubtedly strong enough to reform the Pale he had chosen not to do so, perhaps because he did not wish the king’s laws to press too heavily on his own kinsmen.211 Or in other words, the price for having Kildare as lord deputy was to allow him to have his own way. After Piers Butler’s failure and given their heavy commitment in Europe, it was a price that Henry and Wolsey were just about prepared to pay, but only if they could get Kildare and Butler to co-operate. Despite great efforts, they failed. The faults were probably not all with Kildare, but it would appear that the Crown took Butler’s criticism of Kildare’s rule seriously, and an increasingly important reason for doing so was the activity of Kildare’s relation, James Fitzgerald, earl of Desmond. Desmond was dangerous. He had a large army, he was virtually independent of royal control, and, as was mentioned earlier, he was quite prepared to negotiate with the Crown’s enemies, whether Francis I or Charles V.212 In the second half of the 1520s the most important task of the lord deputy was at the very least to contain Desmond, but preferably to bring him under royal control. In 1526 the Crown took the view that Kildare had failed in this task – indeed it had evidence that he had deliberately failed, which, if correct, was tantamount to treason.213 But treason or not, Kildare’s failure to do anything about Desmond must have confirmed the view, probably held by Henry and Wolsey from at least 1515, that he was not to be trusted.
But what real alternative was there to Kildare? Wolsey in 1528 could only come up with the stop-gap solution of leaving Kildare in nominal charge while giving the actual task of reasserting royal authority to the Butlers. It had this much to be said for it – that it made some concessions to the reality of Kildare’s continuing power and influence in the lordship. Henry’s solution to go all out for the Butlers, despite their earlier failure, was thought to be unrealistic by both Wolsey and Norfolk, and so it proved. Sandwiched between the two branches of the Geraldine family, Ossory and his son found their task too much, with the result that the Crown was forced to consider intervening more directly in Irish affairs – exactly what, during the previous six years, it had desperately tried to avoid. The death of Hugo Inge, archbishop of Dublin and chancellor of Ireland, in August 1528 gave an opportunity for this process to begin. Inge’s successor as both archbishop and chancellor was John Allen who had hitherto been involved at the highest level in the administration of Wolsey’s legatine powers. His appointment is thus a strong indication that Wolsey at this late date intended to take Ireland more seriously. Shortly after Allen had been consecrated archbishop in Dublin in June 1529, Henry Fitzroy duke of Richmond was made lord lieutenant of Ireland, while the administration of the lordship was placed in the hands of a secret council which included Allen.214 In the following month the master of ordinance, Sir William Skeffington, was chosen as special commissioner, essentially to act as the military arm of the secret council. Skeffington did not arrive in Ireland until 24 August, less than a month before Wolsey was dismissed as lord chancellor, but there seems no reason to suppose that his instructions had not been drawn up by Wolsey.215 If so, Wolsey was probably also responsible for an agreement made between Skeffington and Ossory (even though it was not actually signed until November 1529), whereby Kilkenny, Tipperary and Ormond were to be made into ‘English’ counties, committed indeed to Ossory’s charge, but as a justice of the peace administering English laws. At the same time his power to retain men was limited: he could only do so when the security of the three counties was threatened, not for his own private purposes.216
What was to happen elsewhere is not known, but in itself this agreement suggests a determination to control the power of a noble family in its own area of influence – a radical departure. The same agreement bound Ossory to settle all future quarrels with the earl of Desmond by arbitration, but by November 1529 there was a new earl, Thomas the Bald, and he was anxious to co-operate with the English. It could, therefore, be that the curbs placed on Ossory’s power are significant only as part of a wider settlement with the new earl of Desmond. At any rate, his succession dramatically altered the political scene in Ireland, removing as it did the pressure that a possible conjunction between the two branches of the Geraldine family had posed since at least 1526. By the end of June 1530 the secret council was no more. Shortly afterwards Kildare was allowed to return to Ireland, to be appointed in July 1532 lord deputy for the third and last time.
The experiment of a ‘secret council’ in 1529 is of some interest to a biographer of Wolsey. The fact that John Allen, who had worked so closely with him in England, was a member, and Wolsey’s own suggestion in his memorandum to Henry in the previous year that the time had come for ‘a substantial debatement and consultation’ on the problems of Ireland,217 both point to Wolsey’s close involvement in the experiment despite it having been begun so shortly before his loss of office. But while this suggests that he had come to think that the only way forward was for much greater control of Irish affairs from England, there is no hint that he saw the corollary of this as being either reconquest or recolonization. What seems, rather, to have happened is that for differing reasons the two families through which the Crown had tried to govern what was left to it in Ireland had proved unsatisfactory, the Geraldines because they were too strong, and the Butlers because they were not strong enough. As a result, the Crown had had to look for an alternative, and that alternative was ‘the secret council’. In other words, the experiment was a response to the pressure of events – something that was characteristic of the conduct of Irish affairs throughout the period of Wolsey’s ascendancy. The only possible evidence of a major initiative, Surrey’s period as lord lieutenant from 1520 to 1522, turns
out in this account to be no evidence of such at all. It has been argued by one historian that after Surrey’s return to England in 1522 a deliberate policy of limiting the period of tenure of any lord deputy was implemented, in order to prevent either Kildare or Ormond becoming too powerful.218 It is not an interpretation which I find acceptable; instead, I argued that in 1522 both Henry and Wolsey made a genuine decision in favour of Ormond, a decision which Geraldine power in the English Pale was strong enough to reverse.
Any assessment of Wolsey’s personal contribution to Irish affairs is seriously hampered by lack of evidence. Only two documents give any direct insight: his letter to Henry of October 1521 in which he pressed strongly for an Irish successor to the earl of Surrey on the grounds of cost-effectiveness,219 and his memorandum in 1528 following the kidnapping of the vice-deputy, Lord Delvin.220 Neither document suggests that if Wolsey had been given a free hand in Ireland he would have wished to pursue a more interventionist policy. If he had, one might have expected him to take a greater interest than he appears to have done in the affairs of the Irish Church. It is true that a memorandum drawn up just before Surrey’s departure to Ireland early in 1520 made the point that Wolsey should send a legatine commissary to Ireland in order to get the Irish Church behind Surrey’s efforts.221 But Surrey made no reference to such a person, so it can only be assumed that if he was ever sent, he was not very active. At a later stage, perhaps in 1524, Wolsey does appear to have appointed someone to look after his legatine interests in Ireland. Who this person was is not known, but whoever it was, he was very gloomy about his ability to do anything effective. One reason he gave was that he was getting no co-operation from the Irish chancellor and archbishop of Dublin, Hugh Inge.222 The other, and more significant reason, was that there was considerable doubt whether Wolsey’s legatine powers had any authority in Ireland.223 In 1528 Wolsey sought to remedy this uncertainty by securing a bull which specifically included Ireland within his legatine jurisdiction. At about the same time he sought another bull to enable him to redraw the ecclesiastical map of Ireland by severely reducing the number of dioceses, thereby greatly increasing the revenues of those remaining and making it much easier to attract Englishmen to them.224 And if by appointing Englishmen to top positions he could have secured effective control of the Irish Church, he might have been able to use the Church to spearhead the anglicization of Ireland. Or, if this was too ambitious, the new diocese could at least have provided the means of financing competent English administrators.
These moves to assert greater English control over the Irish Church provide further evidence that by the late 1520s Wolsey was being forced to take Ireland more seriously, but perhaps more significant is the time that it took him to make them. Why did he wait until 1528? One possible reason was that, though it was easy enough to point out the need for action, it was most unlikely that any action would be effective. Control of the Irish Church was not possible without a greater degree of political control. It was no good appointing Englishmen to Irish dioceses if they could be prevented from exercising their authority by unfriendly Irish chiefs. The same would apply for Wolsey’s legatine powers, whether or not they were boosted by additional papal bulls. They could and would be ignored just as long as political control was lacking. In other words, though in theory the Irish Church may have seemed a way into Ireland for the English, in practice it was not. Wolsey may well have realized this and thus have been in no hurry to attempt something that would almost certainly end in failure. Another reason, probably the most important, was that neither the Irish Church nor Ireland itself was high on his list of priorities.
When, earlier, Ireland was compared with the North of England, it was argued that though there were obvious similarities between the problems facing the Crown in both areas and in its responses to them, there were two important differences. The first was that the Crown’s control of Ireland was significantly weaker than its control of the North. Consequently, though in both areas the Crown preferred to delegate much of its power to leading families, such a policy was much riskier in Ireland because the great Irish families, in particular the Fitzgeralds, were less amenable to royal control. This being so, one might have expected the Crown to intervene in Irish affairs much more than it did in the North. That it did not was due to the second major difference – the lack in Ireland of any strongly organized opposition to the Crown such as was provided in the North not indeed by any English noble family but by the Crown of Scotland. Especially because of its close relationship with France, Scotland was a threat that could never be ignored, and so the Crown had to spend a lot of time and energy on the defence of its northern border.
In Ireland none of the great families were sufficiently powerful by themselves to pose the same kind of threat; neither in this period were they capable of successfully combining. This meant that a very small English presence in the English Pale, coupled with the geographical fact of the Irish Channel was sufficient to protect the English Crown from the worst effects of its lack of political control. It could, therefore, choose to ignore the problems of Ireland, despite the fact that they were in many ways greater than those in the far North. The honour and reputation of the English monarch did not depend upon what happened in Ireland, an unimportant backwater, but on playing a leading role in European affairs; Ireland was seen merely as a drain on valuable English resources. The result was that Irish affairs were only to be taken even moderately seriously when there was little else going on, or when even the small English presence there was threatened. To lose Ireland altogether would have been a blow to Henry’s honour and, perhaps, even a threat to his security. To reconquer it would have required a great deal of time, effort, and above all money. For better or for worse, neither Henry nor Wolsey considered that Ireland was worth all this. One consequence of this is that the lordship does not provide a glorious chapter in the cardinal’s life – but then it has not done so for many English politicians and at least, unlike his immediate successors, he avoided a Kildare Rebellion!225
With scenery every bit as mountainous and wooded as both Ireland and the North, to many observers Wales still appeared to be inhabited by wild men, speaking their own language, and preserving their own customs – all of which spelt trouble. ‘Thieves I found them and thieves I shall leave them,’ lamented that scourge of the Welsh and lord president of the Council, Rowland Lee,226 which is perhaps why he decided to leave so few: within six of his nine years’ presidency he is alleged to have hanged over five thousand of them.227 No doubt his office inclined him to take a gloomy view, but it cannot be denied that there was a problem of law and order. What is less certain is how serious it was.
Wales’s problems can most conveniently be divided into two kinds. First, there were those that were endemic to all pastoral and mountainous regions in which tribal loyalties persisted, and second those that were a legacy of the English conquest and the resulting administrative chaos. By the early sixteenth century Wales had not yet been incorporated into the English administrative system, nor had it any centralized system of its own. To the west was the so-called principality of Wales, established in 1284 by the Statute of Rhuddlan, and consisting of the counties of Anglesey, Caernarvon and Merioneth presided over by the justice of North Wales, the counties of Cardigan and Carmarthen by the justice of South Wales, and the county of Flint by the justice of Chester. In these counties English law and legal proceedings were in use, though less in civil than in criminal matters. However, it can be argued that similarities with the English counties were fewer than the nomenclature suggests, the main reason being that in the Welsh counties there were no justices of the peace. One important consequence was that these counties were governed by a much smaller circle of leading gentry, the sheriffs, constables of castles and other royal officials, than their English equivalents. What remained of Wales – rather more than half – was made up of a mosaic of marcher lordships of varying sizes, each, to the despair of the historian, with its own distinctive customs
and practices, and varying considerably in size. What they shared was a high degree of independence, for in them the royal writ did not run and ‘life and death, lands and goods’ were ‘subject to the pleasure of peculiar lords’.228
