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

by Gwyn, Peter

  Given the paucity of evidence, the reasons for sending Mary to Wales in 1525 must in the end remain speculative. The continuing failure of Henry and Catherine of Aragon to produce a prince of Wales, the decision to set up a Council of the North headed by the duke of Richmond, a desire to facilitate access to royal justice but also to relieve pressure on the central courts and particularly Star Chamber, and the continuing recognition that a Council was required to supervise the governing of an administratively very confused area in which law and order was not everywhere well maintained – all these things played their part. The most prominent lay figure on the new Council was a former member, Walter Devereux Lord Ferrers. He was by way of being a professional soldier, serving in France both in 1513 and 1523. What he lacked was political skills, or so Wolsey argued in opposing Henry’s desire to appoint him Surrey’s successor in Ireland in 1521.252 He must have seemed a more suitable choice for the less politically sensitive Wales, for what he lacked in nous was made up for by his unquestioned loyalty, his experience in Welsh affairs, and the fact that his estates lay on the Welsh borders. Unfortunately it was to turn out otherwise.

  Almost all the lay members of Mary’s Council had, like Ferrers, considerable experience of Welsh affairs, in some cases going back almost thirty years.253 Four members out of fifteen were clerics, a proportion which hardly supports the general thesis – though not one accepted in this study – that Wolsey strove for a clerical dominance of government. Admittedly the Council’s president, John Veysey, was bishop of Exeter, but then his predecessors had also been bishops. Moreover, Veysey almost certainly owed his successful career not, as has been alleged, to Wolsey but to his close association with the court as dean both of the Chapel Royal and St George’s, Windsor. This is not to suggest that he and Wolsey did not get on, or that Wolsey did not approve of his appointment to the presidency, for which his proven administrative and legal ability, together with his intimate association with the court, made him the obvious choice. Nevertheless his presidency is often deemed to have been something of a fiasco,254 and one for which Wolsey, even if not as close to Veysey as is sometimes alleged, must share some of the responsibility – always assuming that the verdict is correct.

  One of the great difficulties in arriving at any verdict is the almost complete lack of evidence about the activities of the Council for this period. The view that all was bad derives entirely from memoranda and letters of the early 1530s, including a letter from a fellow councillor of Veysey, Sir Edward Croft, in which he stated that Wales was ‘far out of order’: he wanted a man to be sent down ‘to use the sword of justice … otherwise the Welsh will wax so wild it will not be easy to bring them into order again’.255 He was critical of the clerical element on the Council because, he alleged, as churchmen they had no power to inflict the death penalty – a remark which seems to have been a complete red herring. Both under Veysey and most spectacularly so under Veysey’s successor and fellow bishop, Rowland Lee, the Council did impose the death penalty.256 He also commented on the lord president’s absence – and this has contributed to the view that Veysey was indolent. At about the same time Henry informed Veysey that he had received many complaints that not only was cattle-stealing on the increase in the Marches, but it was going unpunished. Much of the blame for this must rest with the Council which was to rectify the matter immediately.257

  There is other evidence from this period that all was not well with Wales, and it would be foolish to argue that the criticisms were without foundation. All the same, there may have been a tendency to take them too seriously. Royal complaints were often on the sharp side, and the fact that Veysey was a bishop who had been closely associated with Princess Mary may not have helped him much in the early 1530s, even though he had been careful to comply with the king’s wishes over the divorce. He may also have lacked the enormous energy and drive of his successor, Rowland Lee – though it is partly the chance survival of Lee’s letters to Cromwell that enables us to make a judgement on Lee’s dynamism. At the time of his replacement by Lee in 1534 he was already in his early seventies, which alone may explain quite a lot. But, given his earlier record, it seems most unlikely that he was incompetent or that in Wolsey’s time at least he was presiding over a rapidly deteriorating situation, a view supported by the bits of evidence that have survived. Sometime in 1525 or 1526, the prior of Llanthony was requested to make an indenture for the administration of justice in his lordship that was entirely in line with the instructions given to the Council to make new indentures with all the marcher lords.258 On 1 September 1526 Veysey reported that he had received the king’s commission and Wolsey’s instructions, and had sent monitions to the shires for their execution.259 He also excused his hasty writing on the grounds that he was so busy. In March 1528 he could write ‘that these parts under the Princess’s authority are in great quietness’.260 Four months later he informed Wolsey that the matter between Lord Ferrers and ‘young Mr Rhys’ was pacified261 – but this proved to be premature.

  It was suggested earlier that there had been no great political intent behind the decision in 1525 not to appoint Rhys ap Griffith to his grandfather’s office of justiciar of South Wales. Be that as it may, the intrusion of a stranger into his family’s sphere of influence was resented by the young Rhys ap Griffith, leading to those matters which in July 1528 Veysey hoped had been pacified. However, in the following March ap Griffith was complaining to Wolsey that Lord Ferrers’s deputies continued to vex his poor tenants, and in order to prevent this, he asked to become a deputy himself and also chamberlain of South Wales, the post his father had held, offering to pay Lord Ferrers whatever sum Wolsey thought appropriate.262 Nothing seems to have come of this request, and by the middle of June he was a prisoner in Carmarthen castle for having, allegedly, attempted to kill Lord Ferrers. It was further alleged that a hundred and forty of his supporters, spurred on by his wife, the former Lady Katherine Howard, had marched on the town in an effort to rescue their leader.263 The difficulty with the so-called ‘Welsh insurrection’ of Rhys ap Griffith is to decide whether it was indeed an insurrection, and, if so, how Welsh was it. Of course, if one hundred and forty men did march on Carmarthen the matter was of some seriousness, but there is reason to doubt this. For one thing, in Lord Ferrers’ bill to Star Chamber, out of the hundred and forty he could only produce twenty-seven names.264 Moreover, when the alleged hundred and forty got to Carmarthen they do not seem to have done anything – which, given that they were supposed to have been summoned from all the counties of Carmarthen, Cardigan, and Pembroke, would indicate a curious loss of nerve. And if it was obvious that an insurrection had been planned with the murder of Lord Ferrers as one of its aims, it is strange that the reaction of the Council in the Marches was to put both Ferrers and ap Griffith under bonds to appear before Star Chamber, meanwhile releasing ap Griffith. For what happened in Star Chamber we are dependent on the account of the soldier and chronicler Ellis Griffith, an anglicized Welshman who spent much of his life in the service of Sir Robert Wingfield. No lover of the House of Dinefwr, he appears to have concurred with the views of many who lived within twenty miles of Sir Rhys ap Thomas that ‘there was not in possession of the poor yeoman any land which, if he fancied it, he did not obtain’.265 Nevertheless, when reporting on the trial he wrote that he had heard there ‘the ugliest accusations and charges that two gentlemen could bring against each other’266 – which in the circumstances was surely a vote for ap Griffith. And according to him, Wolsey took a similar view, censuring both men but being more severe on Lord Ferrers, whom he accused of bad temper and a lack of sense in quarrelling with someone young enough to be his son. But at the same time, he took the precaution of not allowing Rhys ap Griffith to return to Wales.267

  This account of the early stages of the so-called ‘Welsh insurrection’ does not support the view that it was Wolsey who saved ap Griffith from execution in 1529 – this for a number of rather speculative reasons, including the wish, at a crit
ical juncture in his own career, to keep in with the 3rd duke of Norfolk whose brother-in-law ap Griffith was.268 It suggests, rather, that the main reason why ap Griffith was not executed then was that there had been no insurrection. Ellis Griffith makes no mention of ‘Welsh’ backing for ap Griffith, and even if, unlikely as it is, as many as a hundred and forty did rise in his support, this does not add up to anything like Owen Glendower’s revolt of some hundred years earlier. In fact, far from being a national uprising, the ‘insurrection’ of 1529 was just another skirmish between rival families of the kind that Wolsey spent much of his time trying to contain. In 1529 Wolsey may have thought that in the case of Ferrers and ap Griffith he had done just that. As it turned out, he was wrong. Further incidents occurred, not unlike those leading up to Kildare’s rebellion in Ireland in 1534: in both cases the head of an important family was prevented from returning to his area of influence, and the response was disturbances designed to bring pressure on the Crown to allow his return. The difference was that the support for ap Griffith was never strong enough to threaten English control. Instead, a disgruntled ap Griffith was tempted into opening up negotiations with James V of Scotland – which constituted an act of treason and was thus of a quite different order from anything he had been involved in in 1529. And the result was a quite different treatment – his execution on 4 December 1531.

  There were other rivalries in Wales, including one between two successful courtiers with interests in the area, Sir Ralph Egerton, a member of Mary’s Council, and William Brereton,269 but only that between Ferrers and ap Griffith appears to have caused any concern – and, it has been suggested here, not very much at that. Indeed, that Wales did not cause much concern to Wolsey, has been, in this account, the underlying theme. This explains why he did not set in motion the kind of changes that between 1536 and 1543 were to result in the abolition of the marcher lordships and the incorporation of Wales into the English political, legal and administrative systems: since there was nothing dramatically wrong with Wales, there was no need for any dramatic changes. By 1536, when the first ‘act of union’ was passed, the situation had altered somewhat.270 There were, for instance, serious doubts about whether the vital legislation by which Henry effected his ‘break with Rome’ was legally enforceable in Wales, while as its revenues as marcher lord dwindled, especially with the ending of the practice of ‘redeeming the Great Session’, the financial advantages of extending the parliamentary subsidy to Wales grew ever more obvious. What is not so clear is that a belief that the ‘good government’ of Wales would be best served by union played any vital part in the Crown’s thinking. At any rate, the man who knew most about Wales, Veysey’s successor as president of the Council in the Marches, Rowland Lee, was strongly opposed to union on the grounds that the Welsh gentry were not up to running an English system of local government; indeed, it was they who, in his view, were largely responsible for Wales’s many ills.271 That he took this view is a warning not to see the union as self-evidently the only way forward. That his assessment turned out to be far too gloomy confirms the view put forward here that there was not much wrong with Wales that a little bit of attention could not cope with – and that at least Wolsey had provided.

  1 The most interesting work on the North in recent years has been done by M.E. James; see Family Lineage; BP, 27, 30; NH 1. In taking issue with him I have been much influenced by Bush, NH, 6. And I am most grateful to M.L. Bush and R.W. Hoyle for commenting on an earlier draft.

  2 For Anglo-Scottish relations at this time Eaves and Rae are indispensable.

  3 Rae, pp.157 ff.

  4 See pp.82-4.

  5LP, iv, 4924, 4986, 5070.

  6 Reid, pp.1-40; Storey, EHR, (1957), lxxii.

  7 Bean.

  8 James, NH, p.44

  9Clifford Letters, pp.23-4; Hoyle, pp.92-3; James, NH 1, p.46, n.24.

  10LP, i, 2443.

  11Clifford Letters, pp.89-90 for Wolsey’s letter. See also LP, iv, 2003-4, 2052, 2110.

  12Clifford Letters, pp.21-2; HMC, app.iv, p.447.

  13 James, NH, i, pp.67-8.

  14Clifford Letters, p.105.

  15LP, iv, 4419.

  16 Otherwise Richmond’s Council.

  17LP, iv, 3971, 4790, 4855.

  18St. P, iv, p.516 (LP, iv, 4828).

  19LP, iv, 5906 (6).

  20Clifford Letters, pp.23-4.

  21 Bush, NH, 6, pp.40 ff; James, BP, 27, pp.26 ff.

  22LP, xii, 919.

  23LP, iii, 3240.

  24LP, iii, 3482.

  25LP, i, 2443; iii, 2536, 2598, 2621, 3241, 3306, 3310, 3412; iv, 278 and no doubt many others.

  26 Called this by Magnus in a letter to Dacre, 3 Dec.1523 (LP, iii, 3599).

  27 See Bernard, ‘Fourth and fifth earls of Shrewsbury’, pp.164 ff. The letter concerning Shrewsbury’s suitability for a command in the North is LP, iii, 1462.

  28LP, iii, 2536 for Dacre’s own account of the event.

  29LP, iii, 3291.

  30LP, iii, 2271, 3304, 3306, 3286; iv, 133, 218, 220, 279, 682, 701, 726, 822, 893, 1223, 1239, 1429, 1460, 1517. For the charges and Darcy’s replies see Hodgson, v, pp.31-40.

  31LP, iii, 3544; iv, 218, 220. For the bishop of Carlisle’s comment that the Dacres were not loved in the East and Middle Marches see LP, iii, 2271.

  32LP, iii, 3544. This was one of the chief points that he made in his defence: he had endeavoured to keep the East and Middle Marches in as good order as the West, ‘albeit his power was not so good of the one as the other’; see Hodgson, v, p.33.

  33LP, iv, 220.

  34LP, iii, 2537.

  35Inter alia, Wolsey’s marginal note to Surrey’s recommendation that Dacre succeed him: ‘True it is that there is no man so meet as the Lord Dacre is, as well for his great wisdom and experience, as for his power ready at hand to withstand excursion to be made by the Scots from time to time.’ (LP, iii, 3515). For Wolsey remitting all to Dacre’s wisdom see LP, iii, 1950; for Fox’s favourable assessment see Richard Fox, pp.137-8; for Surrey being unable to spare Dacre see LP, iv, 726.

  36LP, iv, 1665, 1725.

  37 Hodgson, v, pp.31-40. The chief burden of the case against Dacre was that he had been unable to maintain law and order because he was too closely involved with those who were causing the disorder. BL Lansdowne, 1, fo.105 states that on 1 Feb.1525 Dacre confessed to the ‘bearing of thieves … Whereupon he is committed to the keeping of the warden of the Fleet and his recognizance, taken and knowledged the 31 January last part as well for himself and his sureties, is decreed by the said most reverend father [Wolsey] to be utterly void, prostrate, and cancelled.’ See also BL Vespasian C xiv (pt. 2), fo.267; LP, iv, 302. For a different account see Guy, Cardinals’ Court, pp.122-3.

  38LP, iv, 2401, 2402; Reid, p.104.

  39LP, i, 2443.

  40LP, iii, 2402.

  41LP, iii, 3603.

  42LP, iii, 3286 though it should be said that Dacre was not mentioned by name. For a fuller treatment of the Dacre/Percy conflict see James, BP, 30, pp.28 ff. James makes the point that those who signed were closely connected with the Crown, but since all the leading gentry were likely to have had connections both with the Crown as well as Northern noblemen it hardly carries the weight he wishes it to. The conflict between local clientage and Crown service was never as great as he suggests and there is little evidence that it was growing.

  43LP, iv, 331.

  44 Bean, p.140, who puts his income in 1523 at c. £3,900. The nobility’s average income was £1,000; see Miller, ‘Early Tudor peerage’, p.127.

  45 I owe this information to R.W. Hoyle.

  46 For biographical information see inter alia Fonblanque, pp.310-360, a splendid though not entirely reliable source.

  47 James, BP, 30, pp.18-9; Select Cases, pp.41-4. For the dispute with Savage see PRO STAC/2/24/79.

  48 Bean, p.143; James, BP, 30, pp.21-2.

  49 James, BP, 30, p.27, n.101.

  50 Ibid, 27, n. 102; LP, i, 2053.


  51 Fonblanque, i, p.552, but James gives the figure as 762; see BP, 30, p.27, n.102.

  52Inter alia, Bernard, Early Tudor Nobility, pp.38-58; C.S.L. Davies, Past and Present, 41, pp.54-76. Fonblanque, i, p.458 gives a figure of nearly 35, 000 for the rebel army.