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

by Gwyn, Peter

  But the real problems of administering the royal household with any degree of efficiency were inherent in its function as the National Theatre of the country’s political life. As such, it had to provide lavish and virtually open hospitality, magnificent ceremonial and varied and colourful entertainment, to mention but the most obvious. And all this went on not in one location but on tour! In every way it was an administrator’s nightmare. Exact numbers are difficult to estimate, but if the retinues of the royal servants are included – for these were men of rank themselves and so were attended by their own servants, as indeed were courtiers and distinguished visitors to court – then one should probably be thinking in terms of about two thousand individuals.46 Not all of these were officially supposed to have their accommodation and food provided but, given the belief that the king had always to be available to his subjects, it was virtually impossible to prevent exploitation by ‘rascals and vagabonds now spread, remaining and being in all the court’.47 And whatever the success of such efforts, the numbers were always going to be large, and the tendency would be for them to increase as the court became more and more the focus of the political nation’s ambitions.48

  What Wolsey was trying to do in 1519 and 1525-6 was to bring Edward IV’s household ordinances up to date.49 Abuses that had crept in, especially in what might be called the expense account area to do with the entitlement of members of the royal household to free board and lodging, were to be eliminated. New lists of legitimate claimants and of precisely what they were entitled to were drawn up.50Something that was certainly on the increase was the ‘delight’ that ‘sundry noblemen, gentlemen and others’ took in dining ‘in corners and secret places, not repairing to the king’s chamber nor hall, … by reason whereof … such viand as is allowed to be spent in the king’s house appeareth not to be employed and dispensed to the king’s honour’.51 In other words, dining in the royal hall was becoming unfashionable, thereby removing the original reason for the lavish provision of food and drink. What had not been removed was the possibility for pecuniary gain by such practices as selling off the unwanted food. Provision was also made for a much closer supervision of the household officials, and there was a new determination that they should actually carry out the duties assigned to them, rather than delegating them to deputies.52 The excessive use of deputies may have been new, or at any rate a growing practice and, if so, just the kind of abuse to prompt Wolsey to embark upon household reform.

  Wolsey’s determined effort to slim down the establishment included that reduction in the numbers in the privy chamber from twenty-two to fifteen that has given rise to the suspicion that the whole exercise was principally a political one.53 But the seven who lost their jobs in that department in 1526 were but a tiny fraction of the hundreds from elsewhere who suffered the same fate and who, incidentally, as would be the case today, had to be compensated in some way.54 In pointing this out the intention is not to deny the Eltham ordinances any political significance, but to put the emphasis in the right place. What is being suggested is that while the household did present a real administrative problem that would have to be tackled, the precise timing of any attempt was likely to have a political dimension to do not with any factional struggle but rather with the strains that war imposed upon the political fabric. As the preamble of the Ordinances put it:

  the king’s highness soon after his first assumption of his crown and dignity royal was enforced and brought unto the wars, wherein his grace … hath much travailed and been occupied in such wise as many of the officers and ministers of his household being employed and appointed to the making of provisions and other things concerning the wars, the accustomed good order of his said household hath been greatly hindered and in manner subverted.55

  This was undoubtedly true. Members of the household were very much caught up in the mechanics of war, and at the very least this would have distracted them from their household duties. But the more general point, for obvious reasons, was not made: namely, that when a king is asking his subjects to make a great financial contribution to war, then it becomes politically expedient for him to put his own house in order. Indeed, the very notion that the king should ‘live of his own’ and not trouble his subjects for money save in exceptional circumstances arose very largely out of the final phase of the Hundred Years War and the financial incompetence of Henry VI’s government. This led Edward IV to embark upon financial and administrative reforms, amongst which figured prominently reform of the household, which may have been particularly stimulated by the 1475 invasion of France.56 Turning to the early seventeenth century, one again sees a connection between household reform and the Crown’s financial difficulties, and its consequent desire to obtain more money in both direct and indirect taxation.57 It seems reasonable to suppose that there was some such connection in the 1520s. The Crown had made unusually large demands on the taxpayers’ pockets. The difficulties encountered over the Amicable Grant in the spring of 1525 sounded a warning that they should not be pushed any harder. In these circumstances household reform made a lot of sense, both as a way of conciliating the taxpayers by making a show of prudent management of money, and more directly as a way of saving money so that further recourse to them would not be necessary.

  How successful the Eltham ordinances were is difficult to assess. Politically they may have been, though there is precious little evidence one way or another. At any rate, there seems to have been no widespread demand for the repayment of the 1522-3 loans, as Wolsey was relieved to note in the summer of 1527 as he journeyed through Kent, one of the most troubled areas in 1525, en route to Amiens.58 Although only a dozen or so years later Cromwell felt the need to look at the matter again, which might suggest that the impact of the ordinances had not been very great, it must be borne in mind that the household running costs continued to grow throughout the 1530s, perhaps precisely because the cardinal’s hand had been removed.59 The truth is that it was the kind of problem to which there would never be any final solution. All that a leading minister could do was to worry away at it in the hope of keeping the costs within reasonable limits. This is what Cromwell tried to do. So also did Wolsey, and that he did so provides further evidence that the view of Wolsey as a man totally unconcerned with the mundane world of administration and finance is one that does not stand up to close examination.

  It ought perhaps to be stressed here that there is not the slightest doubt that Wolsey was personally involved in drawing up the Eltham ordinances, as he had been in 1519 when he headed the committee set up to look into the underlying problem.60 In August 1525 he wrote to Sir Henry Guildford for the relevant papers, while one of the drafts of the ordinances has amendments in his own hand, as have other working papers.61 What has also been shown is that he was directly responsible for that major administrative and financial exercise of 1522, the general proscription. And although his personal involvement in the two other aspects of financial policy and administration I have already discussed, the return to the highly successful chamber system of finance and the introduction of the Tudor subsidy, is less certain, the timing of both these moves would seem to connect them with his increasing influence in royal government. Moreover, when in March 1515 Wolsey is to be found personally checking through the accounts of the recently deceased general surveyor of Crown lands, Sir Robert Southwell,62 or when in 1525 in connection with the Amicable Grant he queried with the duke of Norfolk the varying amounts being promised by the wealthiest men in the county of Norfolk and the city of Norwich,63 the impression is very much of a man in control of the detail of financial administration.

  What now needs to be stressed is that for Henry to cut the kind of figure that he wished to cut upon the European scene, much more than prudent financial administration was required. Earlier it was made clear that there was no way in which Henry’s ordinary revenues could bear the enormous cost of war. What was required was a quite different source of revenue, the pockets of the king’s subjects, whether lay or clerical. The
main skill of any leading minister would have to be to persuade Henry’s subjects to part with their money in quite large amounts. This was the task that Wolsey was faced with in 1522 and 1523, as he had been in a lesser capacity in connection with the earlier French wars. It was for this reason that he had instituted the general proscription, and it was for this reason that in April 1523 a meeting of parliament was summoned and with it the convocations of the two provinces of the English Church.

  Like so many other aspects of his career, Wolsey’s attitude towards and management of parliament has not been looked upon very kindly by historians. It is hardly surprising that Pollard’s Wolsey, with his obsession with the papacy and his unbridled egotism, had no time for anything that smacked of government by consent.64 For Pollard’s successor as the doyen of Tudor studies, Sir Geoffrey Elton, the problem has always been complicated by his wish to award to Thomas Cromwell the prize for having first realized England’s sacred mission to act as the standard-bearer of parliamentary democracy. It has suited him to draw the contrast between Wolsey, ’the uncomplicated activist, a magnificent if often extravagant manipulator of what was available’,65 and a Cromwell who was sufficiently creative to realize the full potential of this hitherto sadly under-used institution – for Elton yet another illustration of the divide between the old and the new world that the careers of these two leading ministers are supposed to epitomize. The argument here will be that both these views, and any others that take their lead from them, both over- and under-estimate the importance of parliament in the early sixteenth century, while at the same time being unfair to Wolsey.66

  The first point to make is that by any criteria the parliament of 1523 was an extremely successful one, at least from the Crown’s point of view. From it the king received what both Thomas Cromwell and an anonymous correspondent of the duke of Norfolk considered to be an unprecedentedly large amount of money.67 To some extent, they exaggerated. In the previous decade some £287,000 had been raised in taxation, its collection spread over a period of five years. The 1523 subsidy was to raise about £152,000 over four years. Thus, the annual rate of taxation was slightly less than it had been earlier. However, the taxation of the 1510s had not been voted all at one time, and what made the situation in 1523 unprecedented was that the subsidy was granted immediately after the enormous loans of 1522-3, amounting to no less than £204,000. If one counts this as tax – and it was never in fact to be repaid – the annual rate of taxation shot up to £89,000 compared with the already high 1510s figure of £57,000.68 All in all, there is no doubt that Henry’s subjects – with what degree of enthusiasm will be discussed shortly – had been extremely generous. For the Crown, money was the chief motive in calling a parliament; and this was no peculiarity of Henry’s – or indeed of Wolsey’s. But parliament also passed statutes whose pre-eminent legal standing, it should be stressed, had been established well before the reign of Henry VIII. This being so, it was in the interests of both king and subjects from time to time to have their wishes and actions sanctioned by parliamentary consent, and in 1523 both parties took advantage of the opportunity to do so. Fifteen public Acts were passed, this very much in line with previous numbers, along with an unusually large number of private ones.69

  The claim has been made that none of the public Acts was of much importance,70 and there is some truth in this: bits and pieces to do with the cloth trade and apprenticeship, a consolidating Act to do with the organization of chamber finance and an Act to prevent the tracing of hares in the snow, apparently brought in because so many hares were being caught by this method that there were not enough left for the king and noblemen to hunt!71 However, the mix is not that different from those passed by other parliaments, and it would be wrong to read anything very sinister into it. Important social legislation depends upon there being important social problems. Undoubtedly the one problem that contemporaries identified had to do with enclosure, but the statutory aspects of this had been dealt with by two Acts in the previous parliament,72 the provisions of the second having been made permanent, unlike so many statutes which had effect only until the following parliament. Thus the absence of legislation in 1523 on this important matter is neither evidence for Wolsey’s lack of concern, which in the following chapter will be shown to have been considerable, nor, more relevantly, a lack of respect for parliament. What he did secure was a quite important modification in the existing law by which offenders were pardoned for past transgressions of the enclosure Act, so long as they had made these good by a specific date. This, however, was achieved not by a new statute but by provisos in the General Pardon which, as was customary, brought the parliament to an end. That Wolsey made use of it in this way is not, of course, evidence of any great love of parliament, but at least he did not dislike it so much that he was unable to take advantage of the possibilities it presented.73

  The view that Wolsey and parliament did not agree with each other rests on three foundations, not one of which on close inspection proves sound. The first is provided by a brief passage in a letter Wolsey wrote to Henry in December 1515, which can be paraphrased as follows: ‘I send as requested the Act of apparel and accompanying papers; please examine them and send back your amendments as quickly as possible so that we can get on and dissolve parliament.’74 Apart from the fact that it must be dangerous to read anything much into such a passing reference to parliament, the circumstances in which the letter was written lend little weight to the usual interpretation given to it.75 This was that the parliament’s main business, the provision of further sums of money consequent upon the failure of the grants of the first session to raise what was required, had been achieved.76 Henry’s sister Margaret, the dowager queen of Scotland, was expected any minute and her visit required the court’s full attention, as did the approaching feast of Christmas. Indeed, the proximity of Christmas is probably sufficient to explain any urgency Wolsey felt as regards the dissolution of parliament. No Tudor parliamentary session continued through the Christmas period for the obvious reason that, then as now, it was a time when people wished to be with their families, not kicking their heels in London. Thus, it is very likely that in December 1523 everyone concerned would have been as anxious as Wolsey for a prompt dissolution.

  But what, more generally, was the attitude of Wolsey’s contemporaries to parliament? It is an almost impossible question to answer, for virtually no direct comments on the institution have come down to us. One that has was made by none other than Thomas Cromwell and in connection with the 1523 parliament. Writing to a friend in August 1523, he referred to the fact that

  by long time I amongst others have endured a parliament which continued by the space of xvii whole weeks where we communed of war, peace, strife, contention, debate, murmur, grudge, riches, poverty, penury, truth, falsehood, justice, equity, deceit, oppression, magnanimity, activity, force, attemprance, treason, murder, felony, conciliation, and also how a commonwealth might be edified and also continued within our realm. Howbeit in conclusion we have done as our predecessors have been wont to do; that is to say as well as we might and left where we began.77

  We have been warned, quite rightly, not to take this passage too seriously,78 but given the dearth of evidence one cannot help but try to make something of it – and that something hardly suggests that Cromwell thought parliament all that important. It is the sort of thing that today might be said about the United Nations: issues, both large and small, are there discussed, but in the end nothing much results because real power does not lie in that assembly. Much the same was true of early Tudor parliaments. Although the early Tudor parliament did have some important functions and, as Cromwell’s comments make clear, could provide a useful talking shop, it had nothing to do with the making of policy or its execution, something that the statistics concerning the frequency and duration of its meetings help to confirm.

  From 1485 to 1523 there were eleven parliaments, meeting, therefore, on average only once every three and a half years. Moreover, when
parliament did meet, it did not meet for long. No session lasted more than nine weeks, and two for less than five; the average was about seven. During the mid-Tudor period parliament sat more often, with twenty-one sessions in the thirty years between 1529 and 1559; but the reason for this is not that Tudor monarchs or their advisers had grown to love parliament, or indeed that the institution had become sufficiently powerful to warrant or insist upon more frequent meetings. Rather it was the particular circumstances of this unsettled period. The dramatic religious changes requiring statutory confirmation, the need to cajole the political nation into accepting them, the fact that there were two short reigns and that a new reign customarily began with a parliament, and that for ten of these years England was at war – all these things rendered it inevitable that parliament would meet more often. With the long and comparatively more settled reign of Elizabeth, the figures return more or less to the early Tudor norm, with parliament meeting on average every three and a half years, though admittedly the sessions tended to be a little longer.79