The King's Cardinal: The Rise and Fall of Thomas Wolsey (Pimlico) (125 page)

It was mentioned earlier that economic considerations were not the only reason for the Crown’s interest in the coinage. The need to have ready cash to pay for military and naval requirements was probably of greater concern to it than, for instance, any overwhelming desire to boost English exports. Indeed, an undervalued currency would have been good for exports, for it would have meant that English goods were comparatively cheap. Thus to praise Wolsey for his reform of the coinage is still not to credit him with any great interest in economic activity. Moreover, what has already emerged from the study of his foreign policy is that furthering economic prosperity was not his chief priority. But it would be wrong to conclude that economic considerations played no part. Indeed, in June 1525 that doughty champion of the Imperialist cause, Sir Robert Wingfield, not liking the pro-French direction that England’s foreign policy was taking, suspected that it arose out of a desire to please the merchants who ‘have more mind to their case and singular profit than the weal of Christendom’.
¹⁹⁵
His suspicions were ill-founded, but what is significant here is that he could have held them at all.

Like most people, English merchants in the early sixteenth century were quite happy to make their own decisions, until, that is, they found themselves in dispute with a foreign merchant, or needed protection for their ships. Thus in September 1522 it was recorded in the minute book of the Mercers’ Company that Wolsey was to be consulted over the capture by the French of a ship called
The Windsor
and some compensation obtained; and in the following month the Company was seeking protection for their Zeeland fleet.
¹⁹⁶
Requests such as these must have frequently ended up on Wolsey’s table. Like any royal councillor, Wolsey would have seen it as his duty to further the interests of English merchants. This was partly because they brought in a significant proportion of the annual £30-40,000 in customs revenue. It was partly because the export trade, especially cloth, which made up three-quarters of it, provided much needed employment. And it was partly because the export trade stimulated the ship-building industry, which in turn provided ships for the royal navy. But over and above all these tangible reasons for royal concern, the king’s honour demanded that the interests of English merchants, as his subjects, were vigorously pursued. And if money, defence and honour are put
together, one has what might be called a policy, one that might even pass as mercantilism. All it really means is that there were certain general considerations that governed the Crown’s attitude towards trade. It was slightly defensive. It was suspicious of foreign competition. It paid more attention to national security than to economic growth.

Almost certainly Wolsey shared these attitudes and saw no reason for any radical departures. It is true that during the 1520s customs revenue fell, from an annual average of £42,643 during the previous decade to £35,305, and for the years 1530-8 it was to fall even further, to just over £32,000.
¹⁹⁷
It is also true that, with the disruption to trade caused by the outbreak of war with France and subsequent naval activity in the English Channel, 1522 was a particularly bad year, revenue dropping to just below the £30,000 mark for the first time since 1492. There was also going to be a temporary crisis in the first half of 1528, as a result of the albeit reluctant declaration of war against the emperor. Since wool had been the chief export when custom duties were first introduced, the duties on wool were traditionally greater than on anything else, so that as the export of wool declined, the customs revenues increasingly underestimated the volume of English trading. Thus, if instead of customs revenue, one takes as an indicator the number of cloths leaving London, a more buoyant picture emerges. In 1515 some 59,000 cloths were being exported, rising to 67,000 in 1519. There was then a drop to 50,000 in 1521, but after that there were successive rises, until in 1527 the number had reached 81,000. The 1528 declaration of war resulted in a dramatic drop, but the next year the number was still over 70,000, as, apart from 1528, it had been since 1524. One can, of course, play around with the figures endlessly, but even if the cloth trade was not quite so booming as it had been in the last years of Henry VII’s reign (and this is by no means certain) by and large it continued to flourish, and with it the rest of England’s foreign trade, this despite the efforts of a leading minister who allegedly had no interest in such things!
¹⁹⁸

In most circumstances Wolsey did his best to further the interests of English merchants, but there were occasions when these conflicted with other concerns. Then the other concerns were quite often given priority, though any such generalization oversimplifies an often very complicated picture. To begin with the merchant community itself was very heterogeneous, with, for instance, those in the outports such as Bristol and Exeter having quite different interests from those in London, and increasingly it was the last, especially members of the Merchant Adventurers’ Company with its virtual monopoly of the cloth trade, that dominated government thinking. And if we turn to a particular episode, the picture becomes no less complicated. The well known disagreement between Henry and Wolsey in 1521 over whether the English merchants should sail to Bordeaux for the autumn shipment of wine is an example of a conflict of interest, and one in which the king may be said to have taken the merchants’ part against his chief minister. At any rate, at a time of increasing international tension he was very reluctant to let them run the risk of sequestration by the French. Wolsey, however, took the view that to
prevent them sailing would alert the French to his deception during the lengthy Calais and Bruges negotiations. His priority was for everything to appear as normal, and to this end he was prepared to jeopardize the merchants’ ships, though he never considered the risk of sequestration to be very great.
¹⁹⁹

On this occasion it was an anti-French alliance with the emperor that was being negotiated behind Francis
I
’s back. A pro-French alliance would be more damaging to England’s foreign trade because of its strong bias towards the Low Countries, particularly Antwerp, and insofar as Wolsey was pursuing such a policy from 1525 onwards it could be seen as a much more significant example of his lack of interest in mere trade. But on closer inspection it is not nearly so obvious that this is so. It so happens that when, in January 1528, war was formally declared between Henry and the emperor, England was also facing serious economic and and social problems at home, largely the consequence of the disastrous harvest in 1527 followed by two more with low yields. This combination of difficulties provides an excellent opportunity for studying Wolsey, the promoter of the common weal, in action, and of arriving at some final assessment of his performance.

It will be shown later that in 1528 Wolsey had no real wish for a war with the emperor, and that the formal declaration of war made in Spain on 22 January was not of his choosing.
²⁰⁰
Nevertheless, he must have been aware that if Charles refused to make any concessions to Anglo-French pressure, war was a possibility. During the summer of 1527 he took steps to encourage English merchants to make use of Calais as their main mart, rather than Antwerp, and while at Amiens he sought to obtain important concessions for English merchants trading with France, which suggests that he was trying to minimize the harmful economic consequences of a war with Charles some time before it took place.
²⁰¹
Not surprisingly, most English merchants resisted, pointing out that ‘as a town of war’ Calais was unsuitable as a centre of trade, nor could the harbour cope with the ‘great hulks and carracks that come to a mart’.
²⁰²
Interestingly, Wolsey appears to have listened to them. At any rate, when the war came, instead of putting even more pressure on the merchants to use Calais, he moved quickly to keep the trading routes to the Low Countries open. As early as 25 February 1528 Margaret was aware of Wolsey’s wishes in this respect, and expressed herself willing to comply.
²⁰³
An exchange of envoys took place in March and negotiations continued until 15 June when a truce between England, France and the Low Countries was signed, the main purpose of which was to allow trade to continue as normal.

That it took so long for a truce to be signed was not Wolsey’s fault. The French proved awkward; but, then, not having a vital cloth trade with the Low Countries and being desperately anxious to maintain pressure on the emperor in order to recover the French princes held by him as surety for their observance of the Treaty of Madrid, there was little in it for them.
²⁰⁴
Undoubtedly the fact that in ail three countries merchants had been taken into custody and their goods seized
complicated matters.
²⁰⁵
There was also some suspicion on the English side that Margaret was dragging her feet: Imperialist and French forces were fighting in Italy so there was every reason for her not to make life easier for the French, or indeed the English.
²⁰⁶
Still, there were disadvantages for her own subjects in any prolonged disruption to trade, and the English suspicions may have been exaggerated. What is certainly not the case is that Wolsey was dragging his feet.
²⁰⁷
He must have approached Margaret almost immediately news of the defiance in Spain reached England: when precisely that was is not known, but there could have been no knowledge of it before the middle of February, and by the 24th Margaret was writing of Wolsey’s expressed concern that trade should continue as normal.
²⁰⁸
A little later he was to show himself sufficiently determined to secure the truce to stand up to Henry’s criticisms. It was not that the king was opposed to a truce on principle – he too had been quick to recognize the importance of obtaining one
²⁰⁹
– but he thought the final terms were far too generous to the Imperialists, especially disliking the lack of any provision for the restitution of English goods seized in Spain. Wolsey, on the other hand, believed that he had obtained the best deal possible and that delay was not in England’s interests. Rather grudgingly, Henry came round, but as a result of his opposition the proclamation of the truce was delayed until 27 June.
²¹⁰

In the spring of 1528 the interests of English merchants trading abroad were not Wolsey’s chief priority; securing his master’s divorce occupied that position, and would do so until his dismissal from office in October 1529. This meant that there was no question of giving up the French alliance, seen by him, and indeed by Henry, as vital for the securing of the divorce. But the alliance seems to have been disliked by almost everybody else in England, especially by merchants with interests in the Low Countries. Wolsey did his best to minimize its harmful economic consequences. Even in normal circumstances he would have wanted to to do this, but in early 1528 the situation was decidedly abnormal, and not just because of the requirements of the divorce, which put added pressure on him to intervene. From September 1526 to June 1527 it rained virtually without ceasing.
²¹¹
The result was a disastrous harvest; in the whole of the century only the harvests of 1556 and 1596 were worse.
²¹²
The index figure for wheat rose from 110 in 1526 to 227 in 1527: in money terms, from £6.53s. per quarter to £13.37s. The situation appears to have been much worse in eastern England than in the west, and wheat suffered more than other grain. Other arable crops such as peas and beans were not so badly affected, the index figure rising from 148 to 195. Livestock prices hardly seem to have been affected at all.
²¹³

These qualifications need to be borne in mind when trying to assess the
seriousness of the crisis. It seems unlikely that famine stalked the land. Bread and ale provided the staple diet and both involved grain; but bread did not have to be made from wheat, it could even be made, in part at any rate, from beans and peas, while ale was normally made from barley, which, if there were some local shortages, was overall in plentiful supply.
²¹⁴
Still, in the winter and spring of 1527-8 the situation must have seemed desperate, as it became apparent that there was not enough wheat to go round. The Venetian ambassador was reporting rising prices and great scarcity in London, and was even having to defend his own servants from attack when they bought his bread.
²¹⁵
Hall also recorded alarming shortages,
²¹⁶
and in Norwich, ‘there was so great scarceness of corn that about Christmas the commons of the city were ready to rise upon the rich men’.
²¹⁷
Wolsey was not long in taking action. As early as 26 September the JPs in Kent were ordered to take themselves ‘into sundry places and parts of the said county and not only to view, search and try what grains and corns be in the houses, barns, garners or ricks’ but also to force all those with surplus grain to sell it on the open market. Anyone who refused was to be imprisoned.
²¹⁸
Whether similar orders went out to other counties is uncertain, but by 12 November a national response to the crisis had been planned. Similar tasks were now to be performed in every county of England by specially appointed commissioners, and any statute that might have some bearing on the matter was to be vigorously enforced.
²¹⁹

The fact that Wolsey was prepared to contemplate having every single barn in England searched is rather impressive. Even more so is the fact that probably every barn in England was searched, and all within a surprisingly short time. The names of any who refused to release their surplus were to be presented to king and Council in Star Chamber before 21 January, and the surviving returns of the commissioners indicate that by that date not only was this achieved but that a census of all the available grain in the country had been drawn up. How accurate the census was is another matter: the surviving returns appear to be complete, even if some of the maths is occasionally awry. A calculation was made of the amount of grain needed to provide sufficient bread and ale until the next harvest as well as enough seed in times of scarcity there was always considerable pressure not to make such provision. Then, the actual amount of grain discovered was recorded, and from these two sets of figures the amount of surplus or shortfall was calculated. Armed with this information, the government could then take appropriate action.
²²⁰