The King's Cardinal: The Rise and Fall of Thomas Wolsey (Pimlico) (121 page)

those whom we call yeomen next unto the nobility, the knights and squires, have the greatest charge and doings in the commonwealth, or rather are more travailed to serve in it than all the rest… these tend their own business, come not to meddle in public matters and judgments, but when they are called, and glad when they are delivered of it, are obedient to the gentlemen and rulers, and in war can abide travail and labour as men used to it, wish it soon at an end that they might come home and live of their own… These were they which in the old world got that honour to England
.
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Such men were worth taking a good deal of trouble about, and it is this that may provide the chief explanation, as well as the chief justification, for Wolsey’s determination to grapple with enclosure.

In comparison with the government’s response to enclosure, its other interventions into economic and social matters have a distinct air of
déjà vu
. Statutes were passed and proclamations issued laying down maximum wages, compelling all those out of work to take up whatever jobs were offered; confirming the usual rates for Thames watermen; insisting that Venetian merchants brought in a certain proportion of bowstaffs with any other merchandise imported; providing victuals for London; regulating the kind of games people could play; prohibiting the use of crossbows and handguns; issuing new coins and so on.
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Not surprisingly, many Acts and proclamations had to do with England’s most important exports, wool and cloth, and with the maintenance of standards and the defence of English merchants from foreign competition.
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One such Act was concerned to ensure that the clothmakers of Great Yarmouth and Lynn observed the regulations, because the making of worsteds ‘hath much increased and been multiplied in the city of Norwich and divers towns and places in the county of Norfolk’.
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Another Act allowed the cordwainers of London to resume the selling of shoes on a Sunday.
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Both Acts are a reminder that much legislation was promoted, as it is now, by sectional interests, whether a particular craft or town. Many other Acts dealt with purely private concerns. But economic regulation did not depend wholly on statutes and proclamations; letters patent from the king granting licences and so forth were commonly used, though not as commonly as at the end of the century when the practice of granting monopolies in this way became a political issue. Still, contrary to existing regulations, towns, as well as favoured courtiers, were receiving export licences on quite a large scale. In 1517 Sir William Compton was granted a licence to export eight hundred ‘weys’ of beans and peas,
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and in 1526 Sir Thomas More was licensed to export one thousand cloths.
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In 1523 the city of York, with Wolsey’s
active support, received a licence to export wool and fells from various parts of Yorkshire, thereby escaping the staplers’ monopoly.
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But such licences were no innovation, and indeed there was nothing new about the mix of statute, proclamation and letters patent, or about the matters that they dealt with.

An area of people’s lives that the government legislated for had to do with the clothes that people of different status could wear and the food they could eat.
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In these more egalitarian times when informality in dress and the free interchange of fashion between social groups is now quite accepted, this concern may come as some surprise and, as will emerge, I have some difficulty in understanding it!
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One striking feature was the obsession with detail. Not only were the types of material prescribed but also the precise fashion, so that, for instance, in 1515 it was stated that only knights and their superiors could wear ‘guarded or pinched shirts’. In 1517 the exact number of dishes of food permitted at any meal to each category of person from a cardinal downwards was set out. The result was that, in theory at any rate, the Tudor nanny controlled every aspect of what a person wore or ate, and not only in public. But in fact ever since the late thirteenth century sumptuary legislation had been passed throughout Western Europe. The first English Act was in 1337 and from then on they were passed with some regularity. Perhaps the most comprehensive came in 1463, but this did not prevent two more appearing in 1483 and 1510, before those of 1515, which were by no means the last. Moreover, between 1516 and 1593 there were no fewer than nineteen proclamations. And to what end? The Acts of 1510 and 1515 claimed ‘great and costly array and apparel … hath been the occasion of great impoverishing of divers of the king’s subjects, and provoked many of them to rob and do extortion and other unlawful deeds to maintain thereby their costly array’
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– which brings us back, as did enclosure, to that obsession of Tudor government with law and order. Another way in which this expenditure on luxuries impoverished not so much the individual but the country as a whole, was in its adverse effect on the balance of payments: so many luxury goods, those ‘Apes and japes and marmusettes tailed, / Nifles and trifles that little availed’ of
The Libelle of Englyshe Polycye
,
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came from abroad and English exports were not sufficient to pay for them, or so it was alleged. But it is another contemporary obsession that is usually seen as the motor behinds these Acts and proclamations. There were many names for it, ‘degree’, ‘order’, ‘place’, ‘rank’. Considered an essential ingredient both of heaven and earth, of the natural world and civil society, it came in many shapes and guises, but what was certain was that without it there was only hell and chaos.
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My suspicion is that we have become so familiar with the popular wisdom on this subject that we may have some difficulty in imaginatively comprehending it,
but it is easy, though, to see how dress comes into this, for nothing more easily distinguishes different ‘orders’ of men, whether religious, chivalric, or whatever. Wolsey’s alleged defence of the outward signs of office, his ‘pillars and pollaxes’, that they were necessary ‘to maintain the commonwealth’,
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is of some relevance here, but more so are the words of someone who worked under him, Sir Thomas Elyot:

Apparel may be well a part of majesty. For as there hath been ever a discrepance in vesture of youth and age, men and women, and as our Lord God ordained the apparel of priests distinct from seculars, as it appeareth in Holy Scripture, also the Gentiles had of ancient times sundry apparel to sundry estates, as to the senate and dignitaries called magistrates. And what enormity should it now be thought, and a thing to laugh at, to see a judge or sergeant at law in a short coat, garded and pounced after the galyard fashion, or an apprentice of the law or pleader come to the bar with a Milan bonnet or French hat on his head, set full of plumes, powdered with spangles. So is the apparel comely to every estate and degree and that which exceedeth or lacketh, procureth reproach, in noblemen specially. For apparel simple or scanty reproveth him of avarice. If it be always exceeding precious, and oftentimes changed, as well into charge as strange and new fashions, it causeth him to be noted dissolute of manners
.
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But laughter or reproach is one thing, elaborate legislation is another, and in trying to understand the reasons for it we are again faced with the problem which dominated the discussion of enclosure: the wild overreaction on the part of government to a problem which at this distance in time hardly seems to have existed.

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.
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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’.
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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’.
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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’,
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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!
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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.
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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’,
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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.
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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.
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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)
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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’.
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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.
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