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

by Gwyn, Peter

  Two main explanations for sixteenth-century sumptuary legislation are usually offered. Both involve defensive responses to alarming new developments. First, there was more social mobility. Second, there was more fashion. And the two things were supposedly connected: a greater and more widely spread prosperity led to greater social mobility and more money for the socially mobile to spend on fashion.127 The result was confusion. Clothes no longer distinguished a lord from a peasant, and this encouraged the latter to think that he was a lord, which would never do. The worry is that social mobility and fashion had been facts of life for a long time, and so, as we have just seen, had the measures taken against them. Since previous Acts had clearly not been effective, was it not time for governments to recognize their impotence in this matter? Moreover, having lived with them for so long, surely governments would have ceased to feel threatened? The point of these questions is to raise doubts about whether social mobility or changing fashion do provide a convincing explanation for Wolsey’s interest in the subject, for interested he certainly was. Not only do the Acts and proclamations of 1515 and 1517 suggest this, but in December 1515 he had sent Henry ‘as well of Act of apparel as well also articles of the same containing in effect the whole substance of the same Act that it may like your grace to change, restore and correct such parts as shall be thought to your great wisdom not meet to pass’.128 The fact that both king and minister showed such interest in the detail of the Act is some kind of testimony to the curious obsession of the age with sumptuary legislation – without, unfortunately, explaining it!

  If the reader detects a note of desperation creeping in, he or she would be right, and the problem is not helped by there being virtually no evidence for any prosecutions occurring as a result of these Acts, despite the Act of 1463 having introduced a scale of fines. However, the one piece of evidence to the contrary, though admittedly only literary, does concern Wolsey who, according to Hall, took it upon himself to confiscate ‘an old jacket of crimson velvet and divers brooches’. Hall commented that ‘this extreme doing caused him to be greatly hated’ and led to ‘many cruel officers for malice’ following his example, of whom he instanced the mayor of Rochester who had a young man placed in the stocks ‘for wearing a riven shirt’.129 We may detect here Hall’s usual jaundiced view of the cardinal’s doings, but perhaps, as a London lawyer, he was just the kind of upwardly mobile person that the legislation aimed to keep in his place! On the other hand, when writing of the so-called ‘purge’ of 1519, he was happy to point out that one reason for the ‘purged’ courtiers’ unpopularity was that they were ‘all French in eating, drinking and apparel, yea, and in the French vices and brags’,130 proving that clothes did have some moral connations for him. Someone else who commented unfavourably on French fashion was Thomas More, who in one of his epigrams portrayed a man who was only happy strutting about in French clothes, even down to his underpants, and beating his servants!131 More could be almost as francophobic as Hall, but behind the satire was a more serious concern for the vanity of all conspicuous display. Thus in Utopia cloth of gold and ropes of pearls were only worn by prisoners, as the Anemolian ambassadors found to their cost.132 In trying to understand the attractions of sumptuary legislation it is, as with enclosure, the mix of ingredients that is important. After all, xenophobia and protectionism go well together, as do morality and law and order. Add to these a belief that ‘from man down to the meanest worm’ there is no ‘creature which is not in some respect superior to one creature and inferior to another’,133 and we may begin to make a little sense of sumptuary legislation. It would be easier to understand, though, if it had been accompanied by a little more action on the government’s part and if it had not coexisted with quite so much social mobility, such a delight in ostentation and new fashions and such a willingness in practice to let in from abroad all manner of luxury goods.

  The lack of prosecutions was not, however, confined to sumptuary legislation, for very few prosecutions are known to have resulted from any Tudor social and economic legislation. To trot out the usual explanation that the government lacked the necessary enforcement machinery is not altogether convincing, partly because there was in the JPs, town officers and local constables considerable machinery, and even the often denigrated system of informers is not unknown today, and is used precisely when government is most concerned to produce results. At any rate, lack of machinery cannot be the whole answer, because if it was, it would have been as apparent to sixteenth-century man as it seems to be to twentieth-century historians; all of which leaves us with the puzzle of why so much legislation that nobody, apparently, paid much heed to.134

  It has been suggested that Wolsey did exhibit some impatience with this lack of effectiveness, enough at any rate ‘to stretch the proclaiming power to its outermost limits and possibly even beyond, if necessary, without seeking parliamentary authority’ in order to remedy it.135 This he, allegedly, did most blatantly in his efforts to prevent people from playing unlawful games and using handguns and crossbows. The efforts to prevent the games seem almost as mysterious as those to dictate what clothes people should wear. On the face of it there is little to object to in the occasional game of bowls or quoits, which along with cards and dice (perhaps more obviously worrying)136 were on the proscribed list. Admittedly, almost any game can involve an element of gambling and drinking, possibly resulting in violence and the occasional rumpus or riot. But even so, what is difficult to understand is how the authorities ever thought that such games could be effectively banned, though perhaps this is no more mysterious than the endlessly unsuccessful efforts of present-day schoolteachers to prevent their pupils from smoking and drinking. Anyway, clearly Wolsey felt that the existing legislation relating to games and illegal weapons was not working well, and in a series of proclamations issued ever more dire threats against those who were breaking it; so that, according to Hall, ‘the people murmured against the cardinal, saying he grudged at every man’s pleasure saving his own’.137 By December 1528 so impatient had Wolsey become that he authorized people ‘to take and burn the said tables, dice, cards, bowls, closhes, tennis balls and all other things pertaining to the said unlawful games’, while anyone who saw a handgun or crossbow being used was ordered to seize it and break it up. Furthermore, right of entry was granted to anyone who suspected that such weapons were being kept in another’s house. There is just a little evidence that Wolsey really did mean business, for at any rate in London and New Romney, Kent, searches were carried out, and some people were prosecuted.138

  Earlier we saw a similar escalation in the government’s response to enclosure, culminating with the proclamation of February 1529 empowering sheriffs and enclosure commissioners to destroy the enclosures of anyone failing to comply with the law. What is not true, however, is that Thomas More, on succeeding Wolsey as lord chancellor, pronounced such action to be illegal. Admittedly, the landlord involved in the Thingden case did make such claim, but More’s judgment was that it was only the subsequent actions of the inhabitants, not those of the sheriff, that were against the law.139 Thus, in arriving at his judgment, More was making no adverse comment on Wolsey’s constitutional propriety, for the good reason that none was called for. And recent attempts to draw a distinction between his unconstitutional and Thomas Cromwell’s constitutional behaviour should surely be resisted.140 The use of parliament in the 1530s had everything to do with matters of high policy, nothing to do with more general concerns for the common weal – and if one truly wants to see unconstitutional behaviour, then it is to the 1530s that one should turn. Or to put it another way, nobody in the sixteenth century would have called a parliament to pass legislation about unlawful games, enclosure or the like, so that the fact that Wolsey did not either should not be a matter for comment. What should be, though, is the evidence that these proclamations provide of his persistence in trying to grapple with the problems of the common weal. It may also be true that, as Hall suggests, his efforts may not always have been po
pular, but then neither would have been the frequent calling of parliament!

  Wolsey’s efforts to combat the plague and other epidemics may not have been popular either, despite his obvious good intentions. What is interesting is that these did involve a new departure.141 What may have prompted Wolsey here was the sweating sickness. All epidemics are alarming, but while the bubonic plague, and even typhus and smallpox, all of which were present in England at this time, had more devastating effects on the mortality rates, the Sweat did have a number of features that made it especially feared. The first attack probably occurred in 1485, and the second in 1508-9, but when it broke out in 1517 and then again in 1525-6 and 1528 it was still a new phenomenon. That it was apparently confined to England, hence its title, ‘English Sweat’, cannot have helped morale, especially for those who saw illness as a judgment from God. It was no respecter of persons, so that its victims included noblemen and courtiers such as Lords Clinton and Grey in 1517 and Sir William Compton in 1528. There remains a mystery about precisely what kind of disease it was. Probably it was not bubonic, but viral, and so in some ways more infectious than the plague, though not, as it happened, so lethal. Its main symptom, profuse sweating, led within twenty-four hours either to death or to a fairly rapid recovery so that, as Hall put it, one could be ‘merry at dinner and dead at supper’.142 Henry considered himself something of an expert on its treatment and, when in June 1528 first Anne Boleyn and then Wolsey were struck down, he bombarded them both with advice. His prescription was ‘small suppers’ and little wine, ‘once in the week to use the the pills of Rasis; and if it come in any wise to sweat moderately the full time, without suffering it to run in; which by your grace’s physicians, with a possetale, having certain herbs clarified in it, shall facilly, if need be, be provoked and continued’. Of course, it would have been better if they had avoided catching it in the first place, and Henry was quite clear that the key to that was ‘to keep … out of all air where any of that infection is’.143 When anybody anywhere near him went down with it, Henry was the first to take his own advice by removing himself as quickly as possible. Brian Tuke, on the other hand, seems to have thought that the illness was largely psychosomatic, noting that it only needed a rumour of its presence in London for everyone to believe they had it. This did not stop him from thinking that it was better to avoid contact with the infection if possible and to prevent people congregating in large numbers when the disease was known to be present.144

  Isolation was also at the heart of Wolsey’s preventative measures, as it had been on the continent; indeed, it is quite possible that it was continental measures that provided him with his model for the royal proclamation of January 1518, for in many respects it was similar to plague orders issued in Paris and other French towns not long before. In fact the continent was way ahead of England in its management of epidemics, Italian towns having made elaborate provisions to cope with them in response to the Black Death of the mid-fourteenth century.145 Why nothing similar had been introduced in England is a mystery, but one thing that may have prompted Wolsey to make the first public provision for combating major epidemics was his close contact with England’s leading medical man, Thomas Linacre, an academic of great distinction and for a time Wolsey’s own doctor. Not only did Linacre dedicate one of his translations of Galen, De pulsuum usu, to Wolsey, but he also obtained his help in founding a college of physicians in 1518.146

  The proclamation of January 1518 ordered that all infected houses in London should be marked by bundles of straw attached to ten-foot poles overhanging the streets, these to be left out for forty days. For thirty-eight days after an attack any member of an infected household was to carry a white stick when they went out, while infected clothes were not to be worn for three months.147 These were stringent measures, imposing some inconvenience and financial burden. When in April Thomas More discovered the Sweat in Oxford he decided to enforce Wolsey’s decree there, and received the Council’s approval for doing so. However, after much debate, it advised against the banning of the Austin Friars’ fair shortly to be held there. Since it would be attended by merchants from London, to hold it would, admittedly, result in the spread of more infection, but the Council feared ‘grudges and murmurs’ of Londoners, who ‘would think that men went about utterly to destroy them’.148 However, it was Wolsey who was allowed the last word, which was only right because, unlike the king and those of the Council in attendance on him, he had remained in London and therefore more in touch with the mood of the City. Undoubtedly, some Londoners were hostile to the measures taken to combat the Sweat and the City authorities had been forced to seek out those who had uttered seditious words against the proclamation and, interestingly, against the king for having so conspicuously fled the City.149 Whether Wolsey’s remaining behind was entirely to his credit is not entirely clear, for London was the obvious centre of operations for his chief preoccupation at this time, the complicated negotiations with the French that led to the Treaty of London. But this did not prevent him from taking a close interest in the problems of the City and not just those caused by the Sweat. Food appears to have been scarce, prices were high, and above all the riots of the previous year were a reminder that London’s problems could never be ignored.150

  It could be that more people have heard of Evil May Day than have heard of Wolsey. At any rate, it is one of those events in English history, like, perhaps, the Field of Cloth of Gold, that have somehow caught the imagination without it being very clear why. It may have something to do with ingrained fears of the ‘many-headed monster’, for riots and revolts do seem to be remembered, even when, like those associated with the earl of Essex or Lord George Gordon, they did not in the end amount to much. At any rate on the eve of May Day 1517 substantial numbers of Londoners, mainly apprentices and journeymen, went on the rampage, their anger directed against the many foreign residents in the City who were involved not only in trade but also, and more importantly, in manufacture. The estimate is that there were some three thousand aliens in London at this time. Some were wealthy merchants and/or bankers such as More’s Italian friend Antonio Bonvisi, or the German merchants of the Hanseatic League with their important trading privileges, and in the Steelyard, not far from London Bridge, there was a very visible symbol of those privileges. In 1493, when a trade war with the Netherlands was breaking out, the Steelyard had been attacked by an angry mob. In 1517, though, it was not the wealthier foreign merchants who were the principal problem, even though certain commercial interests within the City were pushing, as they always did, for some curbing of their powers, but the less wealthy artisans and skilled craftsmen, especially those in tanning and brewing. The great bulk of these came from the Low Countries, in the past mostly Dutch speaking but more recent arrivals tended to speak French. The result was just that mix required to bring about racial antagonism, in which often quite realistic fears about losing out economically to the new arrivals, who in early sixteenth-century London were often highly skilled and thus very competitive, combine with much more irrational fears of the unknown. Anti-semitism is one manifestation of this. Nowadays, it is more usually associated with colour, but language can be just as divisive. Moreover, then, as now, immigrants tended to congregate in the same areas, thereby maintaining a much higher profile than if they had been scattered randomly through the City. And by living together the process of assimilation was slowed down.151

  Evil May Day has all the appearance of a race riot. It did not come out of a cloudless sky. There had been similar riots throughout the Middle Ages, not only in London but in places such as Southampton where there were also large foreign communities. Foreigners had often been a target of rioters and rebels – for instance, in the Peasants’ Revolt in 1381 and Jack Cade’s rebellion in 1450. As for the Crown, it took up then, as many governments take up now, a very ambiguous position. It was perfectly aware that foreigners were unpopular and that foreign competition might be harmful. Yet it also knew that the English economy and standa
rd of living could not be maintained without a large input of money, goods and skills from abroad. Moreover, foreigners were an invaluable source of cash, either as bankers or because they could be sold privileges, such as rights of denizenship, enabling them to live and work in England, or be made to pay special duties on the goods they traded in. The result was that foreigners were allowed into the country in quite large numbers both to trade and to seek employment, but their activities were closely regulated. In Wolsey’s time, even in the aftermath of Evil May Day, the Crown seems to have performed the same kind of balancing act as it had previously. Through much of the 1520s the City was pushing hard to restrain foreign merchants at least enough to ensure that money accrued to the City from their activities. In 1523 an Act was passed compelling foreign tradesmen to employ at least one English apprentice and not more than two foreign journeymen, though this may have been a relaxation of previous Acts prohibiting the employment of foreigners.152 When in 1526 Londoners were forbidden to trade with certain foreign merchants who, in the opinion of the City authorities, had been evading trading regulations, these merchants complained to the king. Wolsey was brought in to mediate, and with some success in that both sides dropped their complaints. On the other hand, when in the same year French merchants complained of the City’s treatment, he seems to have supported the French. This cannot have helped his popularity at a time when he was anyway thought of as far too pro-French and it does seem that xenophobia was running high throughout the decade. But Wolsey’s action on this occasion probably had very little to do with any great desire to please the French. Instead, his principal concern was almost certainly to resist attempts by the City to interfere in the regulation of foreign trade, which the Crown considered to be its own preserve.153