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

by Gwyn, Peter

  In the early sixteenth century the marcher lords were no longer the political problem they had been for much of the Middle Ages. Moreover, especially after the attainder of the 3rd duke of Buckingham in 1521, the Crown was by far and away the greatest marcher lord. The only lordships of any size that it did not possess were Gower, which was in the hands of that most active of royal servants, Charles Somerset, created earl of Worcester in 1514, and Powys, the two halves of which were owned respectively by Lord Dudley and Lord Powis, neither of whom posed any threat to the Tudor monarchy. The new problem was that the marcher lords had become an anachronism. In the twelfth and thirteenth centuries they had had a raison d’être. Then the Crown had been willing to surrender many of its rights to those it hoped would prove loyal supporters, willing and able to provide a plentiful supply of men and weapons and with a vested interest in ensuring that its conquest of Wales was permanent.229 By Henry VIII’s accession the last serious rebellion – Glendower’s – had occurred some hundred years previously, and then only in exceptional circumstances.230 With no one to keep in submission, marcher lords had declined into being merely holders of hereditary sinecures which provided them, usually in their absence, with money and patronage. In this respect the greatest beneficiary was the Crown which, as the greatest marcher lord, had a vested interest in their continuing existence; but it was a very moot point whether this vested interest was also shared by royal government.

  The most difficult problem that the marcher lordships created was that the multiplicity of jurisdictions made it easy for criminals to move from one to another, thus avoiding capture or, if captured, pleading that they were not subject to the jurisdiction of the particular lord in whose lordship their arrest had occurred. Attempts had been made to overcome these difficulties, but while the separate jurisdictions remained they were unlikely to be very successful. Another problem arose from the predominantly financial concerns of the marcher lords, which in the mid-fourteenth century had led to the practice of ‘redeeming the Great Session’.231 The Great Session, or session in eyre, was the highest court of a lordship, competent to deal with all manner of cases, both civil and criminal, with the one exception of treason, which was reserved for the Crown. The advantage to a marcher lord was that in return for dissolving the session and issuing a general pardon he received an agreed sum of money, or ‘fine’, for which there was also an agreed machinery for assessment and collection. If he went ahead and held the session, he would probably in theory have obtained more from the ensuing judicial fees, but collecting them would have been much more problematic. There were also advantages for those paying the redemption ‘fine’ – which in a lordship meant all its inhabitants – the main one being that they were freed from the obligation of attending the Great Session and from paying any fine for non-attendance. In addition, in order to secure the redemption fine the marcher lord was prepared to make concessions. He might, for instance, agree not to interfere with any existing liberties and franchises within his lordship. During the fifteenth century these mutual advantages seem to have resulted in a willing acceptance of the practice by both sides. By the early sixteenth century the tenants were no longer so happy with it and were exerting considerable pressure to bring the practice to an end.

  Why this should have been so is not entirely clear. The Great Session was only ever an occasional court, and the bulk of judicial business was performed in lesser courts, so that it is difficult to see how the practice seriously affected the administration of justice, as it was alleged it did. The practice of issuing pardons to people charged with criminal offences was extremely common at every level of Tudor judicial activity, but elsewhere the custom of people who were not charged with a crime being required to pay pardons for those who were did not occur. This custom was extremely difficult to enforce, and it looks as if it was not a greater concern for law and order that motivated the early sixteenth-century marcher tenants, but rather the dislike of a tax which they no longer considered brought them sufficient benefits. But whatever the motivation behind their new attitude, the tenants succeeded in making the question of the redemption of the Great Session a central issue of the government of Wales during the first decades of the sixteenth century. Moreover, increasingly, the Crown took their view of the matter. What may have helped its change of mind was that when, after the attainder of Buckingham, Henry VIII himself became marcher lord of Brecon, his own attempt to redeem the Great Session there met with the tenants’ refusal to pay the redemption money. This may help to confirm that what was at issue here was not really any great concern for good government – although much talked about by both sides – but financial considerations. If the tenants refused to pay the redemption money, obviously the advantages of the practice to the marcher lords ceased, and as the Crown was marcher lord not only of Brecon but of many other lordships, the fact that the financial advantages of ‘redeeming the Great Session’ had been put in doubt made it at least easier for the Crown to accept the tenants’ argument.

  Another practice peculiar to Wales for which there were demands for abolition was the levying of commorths.232 In theory these were voluntary gifts of money to anyone in financial distress, but in practice almost anything – a marriage of a daughter, the upkeep of a house, or even the paying of a judicial fine – could provide the excuse for levying one and their voluntary nature was disregarded. They had become a form of irregular taxation, one imposed not by the lord but by anyone powerful enough for his request for a commorth not to be denied. Amongst such were undoubtedly the lord’s officials, whose abuse of their position did constitute a further problem. Of course, such abuse by officials was not confined to the Marches of Wales, but the almost unlimited power that a marcher lord enjoyed over his tenants, the fact that he was almost always an absentee (the most notable absentee being the king), and therefore in no position to supervise his officials very closely, the possibility that he might himself benefit from the abuse of his officials, the great number of lordships and thus the great number of officials – all this makes it likely that marcher officials constituted more of a threat to good government than those elsewhere.

  However, as regards good government, the problems peculiar to Wales were probably less important than those endemic to all pastoral and mountainous areas, which we have come across already in discussing the problems of the North and Ireland. When in 1533 Thomas Holt, a member of the Council in the Welsh Marches, was listing ‘the greatest things that be amiss at this time in Wales’, the ‘great stealing of cattle’ by the poorer Welsh gentry figured prominently.233 He also specifically mentioned the complicity in this activity of ‘under-officers and gentlemen that be younger brethren and bastards’, who because of the prevalence of partible inheritance were in possession of uneconomic holdings but whose aspirations were too grand to permit them seriously to look for regular employment. For such people the stealing of cattle had become a way of life, especially since they often had sufficient influence and family connections to prevent any effective action being taken against them – and even if it was, local juries were often unwilling to return a verdict of guilty. And if one adds to the cattle stealing of the poorer Welsh gentry the inevitable disputes and rivalries between all manner of gentry families of the kind to be found throughout Henry’s kingdom, there can be little doubt that there was plenty to occupy Henry and Wolsey in Wales.

  However, the ‘wildness’ of Wales can be exaggerated. Much of it, including most of Glamorgan, was very similar in economic and social structure to many English regions.234 Increasingly the English system of inheritance and land tenure, resulting in the bulk of a family’s land remaining with the eldest son, was adopted;235 and this was but one aspect of an ‘anglicization’ of Wales that had been going on for two hundred years. This was in marked contrast to the situation in Ireland, where, as we have seen, Irish laws and customs showed no sign of dying out, even within the English Pale. Moreover, although as a consequence of Glendower’s revolt various penal statutes
against the Welsh had been passed, including a ban on their holding of office, these had been more honoured in the breach than in the observance.236

  In 1496 Sir Rhys ap Thomas was appointed justiciar of South Wales, the most important office in that area. Admittedly, he had the advantage of special links with the Tudor monarchy, forged when he had provided crucial support for Henry VII in 1485. But over fifty years before, his grandfather, Griffith ap Nicholas, had had no such advantage, and, though officially only deputy-justiciar, he had in effect been the most powerful political figure in west Wales.237 Arguably an even more successful Welsh family than the house of Dinefwr, to which ap Nicholas and ap Thomas belonged, though admittedly one that had chosen to adopt an English surname, were the Herberts, who, in the person of William Herbert 1st earl of Pembroke, had not only dominated much of Wales throughout the 1460s but had also played an important role at the court of Edward IV.238 These two families were, however, only exceptional in the degree of success they had achieved. Most of the offices, both in the principality and in the marcher lordships, were held by Welshmen. Not surprisingly, therefore, there is little evidence for any strong Welsh resentment against an alien oppressor. The pattern of political control and patronage was in many respects similar to that which pertained in England: the Crown and leading families dominated. Whether these leading families were of English or Welsh origin was not an issue. Admittedly, Englishmen could be heard to make rude remarks about the Welsh, but they were most commonly made by Englishmen living in the border counties, who suffered from the activities of the Welsh cattle thieves – but it was the fact that they were cattle thieves, not that they were Welsh, that mattered.

  The suggestion that is being made here is that unlike Ireland and the North, Wales in the early sixteenth century did not present the Crown with a political problem. The difficulty for the Crown in the North had been that it was still an active border which had to be defended against an organized enemy. In Ireland the problem was one of trying to maintain some kind of political control; the problem of lawlessness was a symptom of the much larger problem of endemic Irish resistance to English rule. Neither of these conditions pertained to Wales. The Welsh Marches were in no real sense an active border, and had not been so for almost two hundred years.

  Not surprisingly, then, Wolsey attempted no fundamental alterations to the way in which Wales was governed. Instead, his efforts were directed to making the existing machinery work more effectively. The key to this was close supervision of the marcher lordships, not only to ensure that each was well governed, but to secure the greatest possible co-operation in criminal matters with each other and with the adjoining shires. To achieve this various means were used. Indentures were drawn up between the Crown and marcher lords by which the latter promised to carry out the Crown’s instructions, any default resulting in payment of money to the Crown. Within the lordships every man between the ages of eighteen and seventy was made to enter into a bond as a guarantee of his good conduct, and to ensure his appearance at the lord’s court when required.239 The attempt to impose severe financial penalties on all those who misbehaved was central to the Crown’s efforts in the marcher lordships. It was neither a new policy nor, indeed, was it confined to Wales.

  Under its indentures with the marcher lords, the Crown insisted that the pursuit of criminals into another lordship was not to be prevented by the officers of that lordship, nor was the criminal to be given any hope of escaping punishment by pleading that he was not a resident of the lordship or county where his arrest had taken place. Efforts were also made to prevent a criminal ‘abjuring’, a process whereby someone who had committed a crime could, by promptly confessing, avoid being tried and sentenced. Instead, he was to be banished from the realm – though, since in the case of a tenant the realm was taken to refer merely to the area under the jurisdiction of his marcher lord, his exile was not especially onerous.240 These provisions went some way, in theory, towards solving the problem of the many rival jurisdictions. In practice much depended on the efficiency and good intentions of the marcher officials, something that the Crown in its many interventions in Welsh affairs showed itself to be well aware of. As it was, one of the greatest impediments to good government in Wales came from the actions of those whose chief responsibility was to try to bring it about. Before any attempt is made to evaluate the Crown’s success or failure in Wales, it is important to stress that considerable attention was paid to Wales during this period – for there is a tendency to dismiss what was done there as merely ‘business as usual’. Certainly nothing very new was attempted, and what constituted the major thrust of the policy, the system of indentures and bonds, was only the stock response to the problems that areas such as Wales presented to royal government. Moreover, it has been suggested here that as regards the few positive reforms attempted, the Crown’s financial self-interest may have played a part. Whether this means that any assessment of Wolsey’s involvement with Wales must be critical is another matter.

  In 1518 letters were sent by the Crown to the marcher lords accusing them of failing to bind their men to good behaviour, ‘by means thereof many and diverse murders, rapes, robberies, riots, and other misdemeanours have been of late and daily committed’. They were given just under three months to remedy this omission.241 In the same year Wolsey and other royal councillors gave judgment in Star Chamber that the tenants of the duke of Buckingham’s lordship of Brecon and Hay had the right to some say in whether or not the Great Session should be redeemed.242 And the issue came up again in Star Chamber in 1524, when the tenants of the lordship of Gower and Kelvey challenged the right of the marcher lord, the earl of Worcester, even to hold a Great Session, let alone redeem it.243 This time the decision went against the tenants. Wolsey, who as lord chancellor was involved in it, may have been influenced by being embroiled, yet again, with the tenants of Brecon and Hay, the important difference being that on this second occasion the lord was now the Crown. This time round the Crown put considerable pressure on the tenants to redeem – which they formally agreed to do, while insisting that this should not be seen as a precedent.244 But in practice they showed an extreme reluctance to pay the redemption fee. By 1528 this counter-pressure was largely successful, for in a royal ordinance of that year the Crown agreed never to redeem the Great Session without the consent of the majority of the tenants of Brecon and Hay.245

  The biographer of Wolsey does well to concentrate on the Star Chamber cases for they provide one of the few bits of evidence that Wolsey was fully aware of the problems of Wales. There is also the elaborate set of instructions prepared in 1525 for Princess Mary’s Council and household, set up in that year to administer the affairs of Wales.246 Given its intimate connection with the administration of justice, and the setting up in the same year of the duke of Richmond’s Council to perform a similar role in the North, the assumption that Wolsey was deeply involved in the decision to send the princess to Wales is probably justified. It has often been suggested that a major reason for doing so was the realization that lawlessness was on the increase in Wales. The evidence for this comes solely from the preamble to the instructions.247 It must always have been tempting to justify any such royal initiative by a dire assessment of the existing state of affairs and the obvious benefits of what was being proposed. It was apparently ‘the long absence of any Prince’ which explained why ‘the good order, quiet, and tranquillity of the country’ had been subverted, and so Henry, ‘by mature deliberation and substantial advice of his Council’, had decided to remedy the omission. It seems hardly likely that he, or indeed Wolsey, genuinely believed that Princess Mary’s presence in Wales would solve the problems of law and order; although it might marginally help by providing the already well-established Council in the Marches with some additional status. In particular, her household could become a centre of hospitality, thereby reminding the Welsh gentry of both the power and the generosity of the Crown. In fact the whole point of the exercise seems to have been to show th
e Tudor flag, and probably the only reason for not having acted earlier was the hope that a ‘Prince of Wales’ might yet appear and Mary’s youth – she was nine in 1525.

  The notion that things were going from bad to worse in Wales receives little support, therefore, from the sending of Mary there in 1525. Moreover, a Council in the Marches had been in almost continuous existence since 1471, and despite its title its jurisdiction had always covered not only the marcher lordships but also the counties of the principality, the palatinate of Chester, and the English counties adjoining the Welsh border – Shropshire, Herefordshire, Worcestershire, and Gloucestershire. Its powers had certainly been extensive, with authority to try civil as well as all criminal cases, and they do not seem to have been added to in any way in 1525. Nevertheless, the new instructions remain impressive in their detail and their scope. One thing which catches the eye is the apparently genuine concern for poor suitors whose cases were to be dealt with before any others and who were to receive free legal advice.248 The instructions also contained much about the need to supervise the marcher officials and to prevent abuse by the councillors. Commorths were not to be levied, nor were Great Sessions to be redeemed249 – this last provision striking a slightly false note, given what the Crown was attempting to do in its lordship of Brecon.

  What the ‘Instructions’ of 1525 also show is a real awareness of the problems of Wales and a determination to tackle them, albeit in ways that had been tried before. Whether a different approach should have been used will be considered later, but of some relevance here is the suggestion already made that Mary’s Council was not a response to a dramatically worsening situation. What may have helped to bring Wales to Henry’s and Wolsey’s notice was the death in 1525 of Sir Rhys ap Thomas. For almost thirty years he had held the most important post of justiciar of South Wales, while his son, Sir Griffith ap Rhys, had been chamberlain of South Wales from 1509 until his death in 1521 and had also been active on the Council in the Marches.250 There appears to have been no sustained criticism of their ‘rule’, as there had been in the North about Dacre’s – a tribute, perhaps, to their skill, but also a consequence of the more normal conditions that prevailed in South Wales. The decision not to appoint Sir Rhys’s grandson, Rhys ap Griffith, as his successor in the office of justiciar of South Wales has been seen as a deliberate move against an ‘over-mighty’ family,251 but given that he was only in his late teens or early twenties, the less Machiavellian reason that he was considered too young is probably correct. Since he may have been brought up in Wolsey’s household and was married in 1524 to Katherine Howard, sister of the 3rd duke of Norfolk, he evidently did not lack friends in high places.