The King's Cardinal: The Rise and Fall of Thomas Wolsey (Pimlico) (111 page)

To be over-cynical is not my intention: armies needed to be fed and paid reasonably promptly, and if war was even to be contemplated, financial provision had to be made in advance. But what is being suggested is that the calling of the Amicable Grant cannot, in itself, be proof of a strong commitment to the Great Enterprise. The decision to postpone the king’s personal involvement in the invasion had been taken a fortnight before instructions alleging his continued commitment to such an invasion were sent to the commissioners for the grant.
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And, whatever Wolsey’s real intentions, there were diplomatic advantages to be
gained from the Amicable Grant. After all, England was proposing to carve up the kingdom of France, something that the Hundred Years War and any amount of money had failed to bring about. It would, therefore, have been odd indeed to have made such a proposal without making any special financial provision.
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As it was, in all his negotiations with the Imperialists Wolsey was able to stress the efforts taken by the English to prosecute the Great Enterprise, efforts notably absent on her allies’ part.
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But when, by 7 May at the latest, the allies had made it so clear that there would be no support for military action, then any diplomatic advantage to be gained from continuing with the Amicable Grant ceased. This made it easy for the Crown to back down as the resistance stiffened. Whether it was forced to back down is another matter.

Much will probably always remain problematical about the Amicable Grant. It is not even known precisely how much Henry’s subjects were asked to pay: the clergy certainly one-third of their income, or of the value of their moveable goods, if this came to more than £10, and a quarter if it was less; the laity less certainly a sixth, though Hall at one point describes a complicated sliding scale.
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Our knowledge of how people reacted to the request is confined very largely to those living in London, Kent and East Anglia, with only one or two snippets from elsewhere. In London and in Kent there was considerable opposition, and from the latter no promise of any money; it is also worth mentioning that it was only ever a promise that was sought or ever obtained.
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On the other hand, in Norfolk and Suffolk people were generally willing to contribute, even before any concessions about amounts to be contributed were made.
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Even where, as in Ely, there was much ‘dolour and lamentation’, in the end most people had been won over.
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It is hard at this distance in time and on such little evidence to judge how seriously to take the considerable dismay, in some areas at least, caused by the grant. It must also be true that at the time considerable political judgement would have been required in assessing the risks involved in pushing on with it. We have no real insights into Wolsey’s view, no letters between him and Henry or indeed any one else, which shed much light on real feelings or intentions. What is known is that probably after a consultation with leading commissioners such as the dukes of Norfolk and Suffolk sometime before 25 April,
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a decision was taken to make concessions, but these were curiously uneven. While some, such as Londoners, were to be allowed to contribute what they thought they could afford, thereby making the grant into a ‘benevolence’, others such as the inhabitants of Norfolk had the request reduced from one-sixth to one-twelfth. Yet others, such as the inhabitants of Kent had no reductions made until 5 May, some ten days after the concessions granted to others.
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The inconsistency of the government’s reaction is
bizarre enough to deserve a little more attention shortly. But whatever the reasons, it could not have helped the commissioners one little bit as news of the uneven treatment travelled and was used as ammunition against the new request. Nevertheless, a considerable amount was promised; and even in Kent, the search for money was not abandoned. Warham may not have thought much of Wolsey’s advice to try asking for it at small meetings rather than at the large ones so far attempted, but his response of 12 May to this suggestion was not so desperate as to have forced Wolsey to call off the Amicable Grant altogether.
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What may have done is a rising centring on the Suffolk towns of Lavenham, Sudbury and Hadleigh, close to the Essex border.

In the present context the most interesting thing about this rising is that it probably had little to do directly with the Amicable Grant. Of 525 people indicted for riot and unlawful assembly as a consequence of the rising, 390 were not, according to the 1524 assessment, worth more than one pound, and so were probably not being asked to pay anything in 1525.
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What seems to have happened is that workers, but especially those in the cloth industry – and it was a considerable cloth-making area – feared for their livelihoods as a consequence of their employers trying to recoup the amount by cutting down on their labour force. Whether their fears were justified or not hardly matters. In Hall’s version the clothiers had started to lay people off, and the Norwich authorities’ warning to Norfolk that this would happen may confirm this.
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On the other hand, the warning could have been merely a bargaining counter, played in order to encourage the Crown to call off the grant; and there was hardly time for lay-offs to have have taken place. Moreover, the fact that no money had changed hands by the time the decision to end the grant was taken might suggest that there was a lot of rumour but no actual unemployment – but then rumour is often a potent cause for rioting. Anyway, the suggestion that is being made here is that it would be wrong to call the rising in Suffolk in 1525 a taxpayers’ revolt, because by and large it was not they who were directly involved. But does that matter? A rising is a rising and must be viewed by authority as extremely dangerous – and dangerous enough in this instance for the government to have decided to call off the offending demand for more money. Less than thirty years previously the men of Cornwall had marched on London in response to a demand for money, so that it is perfectly conceivable that in May 1525 it was felt that there was no option but to give way. But there is no direct evidence that either Wolsey or Henry felt this. Moreover, the fact that it was not, by and large, the taxpayers who were rebelling must make a difference to how one views the matter – and in two respects.

The first is that it was not from the cloth workers of Suffolk, or anywhere else,
that the government was hoping to obtain the bulk of the money, but from much wealthier people. In 1475 it was precisely these wealthier people that Edward
IV
had approached to obtain his benevolence, and in the process had raised, at the lowest estimate, £21,656, while probably from the same class Henry
VII
had raised in excess of £48,000 in 1491.
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In 1525 these people may have grumbled – and in London and Kent may have grumbled a lot – but, as we have seen, there is enough evidence to suggest that in the end they would have paid up if pressed to do so. The second, and perhaps more relevant, point is that risings become revolts, and thus even more serious, when some section of the political nation is involved. Insofar as they were taxpayers, the Cornishmen of 1497 fall into that category. They even found a nobleman, Lord Audley, to lead them and, even if they were not part of a White Rose conspiracy, Perkin Warbeck was at the time alive and reasonably well, hoping to persuade James
IV
to invade England.
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But there seems to have been nothing remotely political about the happenings of May 1525 in Suffolk, and insofar as the insurgents there were below the tax level they cannot even be said to have been part of the political nation, however widely defined. Neither is there any evidence that they were being made use of by leading clothiers or gentry to frighten the government into giving way. And that the rising in Suffolk was not as serious as all that is confirmed by the speed with which it was put down. It began at Lavenham on 4 May; by the 8th Norfolk and Suffolk appear to have felt that they had the matter well in hand, and by the 11th it was all over, apparently without a blow being struck.
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What the two dukes were certainly concerned about was what might happen elsewhere. On 8 May they suggested a watch might be kept on those potentially dissident noblemen, the Lords Bergavenny and Stafford – and here was the only hint in the whole episode that the political nation might not entirely rally to the Crown.
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More seriously, on the very day that they were reporting the first humble submissions from the rebels of Lavenham, they received alarming reports that not only other parts of Suffolk, but also Essex and Cambridgeshire, including both the town and university of Cambridge, were on the verge of rebellion, and that as many as twenty thousand might be involved.
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On the following day there was no mention of twenty thousand, but ‘continually more and more knowledge’ was coming in of a ‘confederacy with evil disposed persons’, extending to many other counties in addition to those already mentioned.
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Despite reporting also that the submission of the original rioters was proceeding according to plan, the two dukes were obviously increasingly worried, and would have been even more so if they had been able to read Longland’s letter to Wolsey of the same date, which reported that rumours had just reached his diocese of a rising in Norfolk and Suffolk, adding that ‘such rumours in these parts, where so late was lightness of the commonalty used, doth not well’.
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Was it these rumours that finally convinced the government that it must give up
its attempt to raise money? If the suggestion here is that it was not, this is not because the fears that such rumours would have caused are underestimated. But if governments are really determined on something they are usually prepared to take risks, and Henry
VIII
’s government was no exception. After all, the much greater opposition, in which elements of the political nation were certainly involved, did not prevent the king from divorcing Catherine and ‘breaking’ with Rome. If, as has been argued here, the Amicable Grant had long ceased to have any real justification, the question that needs to be asked is why it was persisted with for so long. One answer could be that Henry and Wolsey were just greedy. Once the exercise had begun, why not continue and see what could be obtained? Of course, some awkward explanations would be called for when a peace treaty with France was announced, but perhaps they felt strong enough to ride out any resulting political storm, or did until they realized the extent of the opposition. It is never easy to turn down large sums of money and, as has been noted, the kind of foreign policy that Henry’s and Wolsey’s ambitions demanded was not cheap. Still, as an explanation it does not altogether convince, if only because the possible gains do not seem to have been commensurate with the risks involved. In that same year, 1525, they were anyway to obtain somewhere in the region of £80,000 by way of lay and clerical taxation, so that it would have been excessively greedy, and thus politically very unwise, to go ahead in the knowledge that no military activity was to take place.

Here it is appropriate to recall the curiously inconsistent way that the government handled the concessions it embarked on from 25 April onwards; for there is not the slightest doubt that they did considerable damage to the prospects of success, so much so that in their letter to Wolsey of 12 May the dukes called for a meeting of the Council to iron out the discrepancies.
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For some this ineptness strengthens the case for a Wolsey at odds with his master and so determined to prevent any revival of the Great Enterprise that he was willing to sabotage the Amicable Grant by more or less engineering a taxpayers’ revolt; or it shows, at the very least, that because his heart was not in it, he made mistakes.
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But any view based on the notion of a major divergence between master and servant is suspect, and in this instance the evidence points in the opposite direction. Indeed, it is worth stressing that there can be no question but that Henry was fully informed about the Amicable Grant and about the uprising in Suffolk.
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Another possible explanation for Wolsey’s inept performance is to see it as the desperate effort of someone so keen to obtain money that he was reluctantly forced into making concessions as he encountered first one, then another point of resistance. In such a scenario it might be expected that far from keeping Warham in the dark for so long, Wolsey would have informed him before anyone else of any concession, because it was in Kent that the strongest resistance by taxpayers was encountered. Or was it that the ineptness – and whatever the explanation, ineptness it certainly was – resulted from Wolsey’s knowledge all along that the
pressure could and indeed would be released? In this scenario his chief concern was not the day-to-day management of the grant but choosing the moment when giving it up would cause least damage to his diplomatic negotiations.

It has already been pointed out that at least a week before 14 May and the calling off of the Amicable Grant, one of the reasons for continuing with it had disappeared. The Imperialists had made it so clear that they had no intention of engaging in any military activity that Wolsey could call a halt to any English military preparations while still maintaining that an invasion of France was what his master wanted. He now needed to establish that the prospects for negotiations with the French were encouraging, and it is tempting to think that this was what the delay in calling off the grant was about. Of course, it would have had to emerge sooner or later that some such negotiations had begun – but all the more reason for advancing them as far as possible while still pretending to be France’s greatest enemy, for there was no doubt that the negotiations were contrary to both the spirit and the letter of Henry’s treaty obligations to the emperor. It is not possible to ascertain precisely when these negotiations began, and it probably never will be. What has survived is an undated letter that Joachim wrote to Thomas Lark, his host for much of his earlier visit to England and, as brother of Wolsey’s former mistress, close to Wolsey. Its purpose was to persuade Wolsey that with the emperor now in such a strong position, this was the moment ‘rather to strengthen than relax the arrangements with France that by so doing he may turn an afflicted neighbour into a most obliged friend’. In the rest of the letter Joachim was anxious to get across the message that France had rallied to Louise and remained powerful.
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No doubt his intention was primarily to try to strengthen a weak hand in any resulting negotiations, but in doing so he provided Wolsey with just the information he was looking for, because a France on the verge of collapse was not a viable ally. And clearly the letter did please Wolsey. By 8 June Joachim had left Lyons and Louise, and he was in London by the 23rd. It is very frustrating that these two June dates are the only certainties. Letters between Lyons and London took about a fortnight and this pushes back the possible date for a reply from Wolsey to about 24 May, though even that presents one with the problem that in a letter to Henry on the 27th there is no mention of French negotiations.
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On the other hand, there might well have been an earlier exchange of letters, for Joachim’s surviving letter was so informal as to make it very unlikely it was the first. Moreover, given that their two countries were still formally at war, the reference in that letter to ‘arrangements’ is tantalizingly suggestive of some secret understanding that Pavia had not destroyed. Still, none of this proves that there were any new negotiations between England and France before the Amicable Grant was called off on about 14 May. All that is certain is that by the 18th there was a definite change of direction in English foreign policy, signalled by those secret instructions from Wolsey to English diplomats already referred to. They suggest that by then Wolsey had some knowledge of Joachim’s original letter, or at the very least was very confident that an approach
from France would shortly be made. What has also been shown is that as early as 7 April he was sufficiently suspicious of the emperor’s intentions to scale down his proposals for an invasion of France. Lastly, there is evidence that by 21 April he was making plans that his supposed ally would not have approved of.