The King's Cardinal: The Rise and Fall of Thomas Wolsey (Pimlico) (126 page)

The usual policy at times of scarcity was to prevent the entrepreneur from acting in a way that would aggravate the situation. This he could do in a number of ways, but essentially by selling at the highest price, which would not necessarily be to the local community. In November 1528 the inhabitants of Yaxley and Holme in
Huntingdonshire were greatly angered that local peas and beans were being bought up by merchants in Lynn and then sold to Scotland, with the result, so they claimed, that in their local markets the price rose and ‘some died for very hunger’.
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In acting in this entrepreneurial way, the Lynn merchants may have been guilty of the crime of ‘forestalling’, that is, of deliberately preventing produce coming to the local market and thereby affecting its price. They would have been more obviously guilty if their intention had been to play the local market by sitting on the produce only to sell when the price had risen sufficiently for them to make a fat profit. If, instead of buying it up beforehand, they had waited for the produce to get to the local market and had then bought it only to resell at a later date, they would have been guilty of the related crime of ‘regrating’. What they were accused of was ‘engrossing’, that is, of buying up produce while it was still growing in the fields.
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Of course, if the Crown had systematically enforced the legislation against these activities, it would have put a stop to a sophisticated agricultural economy whereby produce was being transported long distances, often to supply rather specialized markets, and, for instance, the fifty thousand or so inhabitants of London would have starved. One has, therefore, to assume that this legislation, along, perhaps, with some of the Acts which caused puzzlement earlier on, such as the banning of certain games, were quite consciously thought of as providing reserve powers for use in special circumstances. In late 1527 such circumstances had arisen.

It follows from all this that there was nothing very new about what Wolsey was trying to do in the winter and early spring of 1527-8. The statutes against forestalling and related matters date from at least the thirteenth century, while as early as 1204 it had been laid down that grain could not be exported without licence. In 1437 a slightly different approach was tried: no licence was required as long as certain conditions were met, most importantly that grain did not exceed the specified rates. It was these conditions that were in force in the 1520s, and with the price of grain well above the specified rates 6
s
. 8
d
. per quarter for wheat, that meant, quite sensibly, that none could leave the country. But the main point that is being stressed here is that the idea of regulation was very well accepted long before 1527.
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What was striking about Wolsey’s efforts were their scale and thoroughness. Never before had there been a nation-wide investigation into grain stocks, and without that knowledge it would have been impossible to judge how serious the problem was and where the government should direct its efforts. As it was, the commissioners for Staffordshire were able to report a genuine shortage, with no grain being hoarded or otherwise forestalled, and they therefore asked for the restraint on the movement of grain from county to county to be lifted in their case, so that they could obtain necessary supplies. On the other hand, some of the Northamptonshire commissioners reported that all was well,
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while in Norfolk there was found to be a sufficient surplus for some of it to be released for other counties.
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Given the reported distress of the inhabitants of Norwich at the scarcity of corn, the fact that the county of Norfolk was in surplus comes as a surprise. It may also serve as a warning against taking too alarmist a view. Shortages were indeed discovered. In ten villages along the Essex side of the river Stour, not all that far from Norfolk, the calculation in the returns was that there was a shortage of some 572 quarters of grain for bread making and some 451 quarters for ale; and this, according to a recent calculation, meant that on average these villages could raise only 53 per cent of their requirements.
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But there is really no evidence to suggest that the shortages had any devastating consequences, which may merely mean that, as was suggested earlier, people did find sufficient alternatives to grain. It may also be that the measures that Wolsey took were successful. By being able to move any surpluses to areas especially in need, the worst consequences of the bad harvest may have been averted; though the corollary to this would also have to be that in a normal year English arable farmers were producing very large surpluses. What complicates any assessment is the conjunction of the bad harvest with that temporary severance of trade with the Low Countries already discussed and the resulting threat of widespread unemployment in the cloth industry. Undoubtedly, this made things much more difficult for Wolsey. The interesting point is that, as regards the quite considerable unrest reported in the early part of 1528, it seems to have been the the trade embargo rather than the bad harvest that played the major part – another reason for not believing that there was anything remotely approaching a famine.

The surviving evidence is so patchy that no detailed study of the unrest of 1528 is possible. As in 1525, unemployment was at the heart of it and most of the trouble seems to have been in East Anglia and Kent. In other respects too it was a re-run of those previous disturbances with very much the same principals – namely, the dukes of Norfolk and Suffolk in East Anglia and Warham, Boleyn and the Guildford brothers in Kent – doing and writing in very much the same vein. So yet again Warham found himself having to deal with angry crowds converging on Knole, complaining of their poverty, and, most worryingly, again asking awkward questions about when the loan of 1522 would be repaid
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– and this when only the previous year, Wolsey, on his way through Kent
en route
for Amiens, had been relieved to find that the matter had been forgotten.
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In East Anglia the two dukes were once again having to keep a very high profile in an effort to keep a restless populace under control. A rising was planned at Bury St Edmunds in late February, but it was nipped in the bud. Earlier there had been unrest in Stowmarket and Norwich, and in April at Colchester.
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In Kent the worst trouble came in May, and then was chiefly confined to that area in the Weald around Cranbrook that was
always a thorn in the establishment’s flesh. The plan there was to capture various leading local gentry, including Sir Edward Guildford, but ultimately Wolsey as well. The rebels had even worked out how to dispose of the cardinal once he was taken: to kill him with their own hands would have brought down the wrath of the pope, so he was to be put to sea in a boat ‘in the which shall be bored four great holes’, temporarily filled with large pins. Once out into the Channel, these were to be knocked out and Wolsey was to have met a watery death, but one that could have been passed off as an accident.
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In fact, the trouble at Cranbrook seems never to have amounted to much; the Guildfords’ considered view was that no more than twenty were involved, and these only ‘light persons’.
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And as with the rising in Bury, the authorities had got wind of it before anything happened, and had no difficulty in dealing with it. The same appears to be true of other parts of the country. In March Lord Sandys was informed by the king that ‘certain light persons have assembled themselves in an unlawful number about Westbury’, and unrest was also reported in Devizes, Taunton and Bridgewater.
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But the impression is never of a situation out of control, partly because, as soon as the extent of the disastrous harvest was realized, trouble of some kind was prepared for. The proclamation of November 1527 which announced the setting up of the corn commissions had also, it will be remembered, called for the strict enforcement of a whole range of statutes, most of which, however indirectly, had to do with the maintenance of law and order. Consequently, the commissioners were ordered to carry out ‘privy searches’ of their areas to round up all ‘vagabonds and idle beggars’, and to follow this up with a twice weekly sweep of all the ale-houses.
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The assumption, not borne out by what happened, was that in times of difficulty it was just such people who would cause most trouble. Still, the fact that the law enforcement machinery had been put on red alert and, perhaps most importantly, that leading noblemen and gentry such as the two dukes and Thomas Boleyn, who might otherwise have expected to spend more time at court, had been sent back to their localities in order to supervise the government response to the difficulties, must offer one explanation for the situation never having got out of hand. Another is provided by the fact that however serious the shortages, it was not starving thousands or ‘idle beggars’ who caused the unrest, but a few hundred temporarily unemployed clothworkers.

In 1527 the role of the clothworkers is even clearer than in the 1525 disturbances. For one thing, in all the areas where trouble was reported a considerable amount of clothmaking took place, and most of the reports made the connection between the unrest and unemployment. Moreover, in 1528 there was no question, as there had been in 1525, of the employers inventing a problem merely to avoid having to accede to an unpopular request for money. If cloth could not be sold to the Low Countries, then the industry would be in real difficulty. As has already been shown, Wolsey was quick to realize this, and by negotiating immediately for a truce with Margaret of Savoy he showed a determination to do
something about it. Meanwhile, both he and the men on the spot did their best to persuade clothiers that the situation was only temporary and that there was no need to dismiss their workers. Thus Norfolk, after a meeting with forty of the most substantial clothiers in his area at which he had informed them, quite wrongly, that there was no truth in the rumour that English merchants in Spain and the Low Countries had been detained, strongly advised Wolsey to pressure the London merchants into continuing to buy East Anglian cloth.
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It is doubtful whether Wolsey would have needed this advice, but certainly he did intervene, writing to the City authorities to secure their help.
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He is also known to have instructed Lord Sandys not to allow clothiers to lay off people in Hampshire and Wiltshire.
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Hall reports a rather unsatisfactory meeting that Wolsey had with the London merchants,
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and as late as 4 May Norfolk was still writing to him of the Norfolk clothiers’ inability to sell their cloth.
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That Wolsey’s negotiations were not very successful is not altogether surprising, for until London merchants could be assured of a market for their cloth there was no good reason why they should venture their capital. The key to the problem was the truce with the Low Countries, and until this was signed and the uncertainty about markets abroad was removed, which, it will be remembered, was not achieved until the end of June 1528,
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the situation was bound to remain tense. How far English merchants and clothiers were deliberately stirring up trouble in order to force Wolsey to reverse the pro-French policy that they saw as so destructive to their trading interests is another matter. In February the French ambassador reported that this was precisely what was happening, but then, in order to explain away the widespread francophobia, he was prone to think in conspiratorial terms.
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In April a Colchester clothmaker, under cross-examination, stated that a London merchant had told him that there would be no buying of cloth ‘except we could cause the commons to arise and complain to the king’s grace and show him how the people be not half set awork’, and he had heard something similar from another source.
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But it is very easy to imagine such talk going the rounds without there being very much substance to it, and the surviving evidence is anyway a little thin. More to the point, there is no need for a conspiracy theory in order to explain the unrest. England’s main outlet for cloth had been stopped, merchants were reluctant to buy, employers were laying people off, or were about to, and in such circumstances clothworkers had good reasons to be restless.

In emphasizing unemployment, or the threat of it, rather than scarcity or indeed famine, as the chief cause of the unrest in 1528, one is to some extent playing down the seriousness of the situation that Wolsey had to grapple with, and to that extent removing some of the credit due to him for coping with it so successfully. But something that undoubtedly contributed to the heightened tension, especially
perhaps in London, was the deepening political crisis brought about by Henry’s desire for a divorce, which was never popular. And all these difficulties were connected, if in rather complicated ways, as the government’s efforts to secure imports of grain from both France and the Low Countries demonstrate. As it happened, though French grain was promised, it never materialized, while that from the Low Countries did.
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This only fuelled the general dissatisfaction with a French alliance, and this in turn made the conduct of foreign policy more difficult, because the alliance was vital for any success in the divorce negotiations.

A difficult economic situation, the divorce and an unpopular foreign policy were what Wolsey was faced with from the autumn of 1527 onwards, and the impression one gets is of someone coping remarkably well, and with him the whole apparatus of government. Nobody could have worked harder at this time than the dukes of Norfolk and Suffolk, whether organizing the corn commissioners, talking to clothworkers, interrogating potential rebels or just giving advice. And it was not only leading royal councillors and noblemen who were involved, but every JP, every mayor and alderman, and every local constable. What is most impressive is the sense of a government that knew what it was about: detailed information on a national scale was sought and obtained, instructions were issued, difficulties were foreseen and steps taken to anticipate them. But the question remains of just how effective all this activity was. Some scepticism is probably justified, especially if the suggestion here is correct that supplies were probably never so short that market forces could not have coped. Still, as has also been pointed out, there is more to government than cold logic and in times of difficulty any government’s action may have some beneficial effect, if only on morale. And the scepticism may be unfounded. In judging Wolsey’s achievement, it is the totality of what he was doing that needs to be remembered, including that these years saw renewed efforts to grapple with enclosure, a problem that was thought to bear very directly upon the question of scarcity of corn. And the fact is that Wolsey showed himself just as concerned to grapple with the problem of unemployment as with that of scarcity, so he cannot be accused of making a wrong diagnosis; and anyway the one problem must have compounded the other. The trouble in Cranbrook in late May does seem to have been primarily the result of unemployment but, in the depositions of those arrested, shortage of corn was also mentioned.
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Very soon after helping to put down the trouble there Sir Edward Guildford was writing to Wolsey about local complaints of scarcity and high prices, urging that even greater efforts should be made to tackle the wicked ‘regraters’ who were responsible.
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So he, at least, had sufficient belief in the beneficial effects of government intervention to want more of it.