The King's Cardinal: The Rise and Fall of Thomas Wolsey (Pimlico) (50 page)

Here is also a reminder that legal matters and government policy could
interrelate, especially where certain sensitive areas such as the Welsh Marches were concerned. The government was bound to be interested in Buckingham’s activities as a marcher lord, even if Buckingham might interpret that interest as unnecessary interference. In 1518 the king’s Council arbitrated in a dispute between Buckingham and his tenants in the lordship of Brecon and Hay. The tenants had refused to ‘redeem the great session’, that is to say they had objected to the common practice by which all defaulters before a lordship’s court were automatically pardoned at the end of the session on the payment of a fixed sum levied on the marcher tenants as a whole, not just on those found guilty. ‘Redeeming the great session’ had become a device by which marcher lords taxed their tenants. It did not further the maintenance of law and order, and was thus viewed with increasing suspicion by the Crown. In a complicated settlement the king’s Council, headed by Wolsey but including, it should be stressed, Buckingham’s fellow peers and relations by marriage, the duke of Norfolk, the earl of Surrey and Lord Bergavenny – the latter especially close to Buckingham – decided that while in this instance redemption should be paid, in future tenants should have the right to refuse. Past debts to Buckingham, other than arrears of rent, were to be cancelled. Efforts were made to prevent arbitrary action by the duke’s officials; for instance, any tenant arrested merely on the suspicion of felony was to be allowed bail.
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On the other hand, the penalties for breaking the settlement were severe, and of much greater financial consequence to a tenant than to the duke, so that its effect was in some ways to strengthen the duke’s position. The settlement has been called ‘a powerful exercise of royal sovereignty in the Marches’,
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which is fair enough so long as it is also seen as a careful balancing act to ensure that both Buckingham’s legal and financial rights and the good government of the lordship were effectively provided for. Though the Crown had delegated much of the administration of law and order to the marcher lords in return for certain military obligations, it had not thereby surrendered its overall responsibility for these lordships. This the 1518 settlement made clear, as did Henry’s letter to Buckingham in that same year accusing him of failing to impose on his tenants bonds for good behaviour. The result of this failure was that ‘many and diverse murders, rapes, robberies, riots, and other misdemeanours have been of late and daily committed, and left clearly unpunished’.
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The duke was given just under three months to put the matter right. What he thought of Henry’s letter, or indeed of the Council’s settlement, is not known. Almost certainly he did not like them, and no doubt they added to his discontent and frustration. However, what they are not evidence of is any partial or sustained policy by the Crown or Wolsey to do him down.

And why should Wolsey want to do Buckingham down? The usual explanation, deriving almost entirely from Vergil’s account, is that he saw the duke as a dangerous political rival. But given the poor relationship between Henry and Buckingham, this explanation will not do. There was never any possibility that Buckingham would usurp Wolsey’s position. There is no evidence that Henry’s visit to Penshurst in the summer of 1519 led to closer relations between the two men; and
though, for instance, the duke may have disliked the junketings on the Field of Cloth of Gold, there is no evidence that Henry did, nor that he was losing confidence in Wolsey’s general conduct of foreign policy. Some very few noblemen, perhaps only the dukes of Norfolk and Suffolk, had the necessary standing and influence at court to pose a real threat to Wolsey’s position. Buckingham did not. Of course, if he were somehow to have succeeded to the throne, then Wolsey’s position, even life, would have been in jeopardy. In this most obvious sense Wolsey had a vested interest in preventing this, but as long as Henry
VIII
was alive, or had a legitimate heir, Wolsey’s duty as a royal servant and loyal subject dictated this as well. Once information reached him of Buckingham’s dreams of becoming king, he had to take decisive action, whatever his personal feelings. This would have included bringing the information to the king’s attention. When precisely he did this is not known, but once informed Henry took an active interest in all aspects of the case, personally supervising the interrogation of the witnesses,
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and probably himself masterminding the duke’s arrest; certainly Sir William Compton, groom of the stool, and other household servants were involved in it.
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Henry’s involvement is not very surprising; the matter did after all concern him intimately, but it needs mentioning just to make the point that if the downfall of Buckingham had been a ‘frame-up’, both Henry and Wolsey would have been responsible. The argument here, however, is quite otherwise. Until information reached them that Buckingham was listening to prophecies about his succession to the throne, both Henry’s and Wolsey’s attitude towards him had been perfectly correct if, especially in Henry’s case, no more than that. Once it had done so, however, it is difficult to see how they could have reacted other than they did, even if Buckingham’s relations with the Crown had been much better – but then if they had been the duke would probably not have spent his time indulging in such speculations.

If this explanation of Buckingham’s downfall is correct, a number of consequences follow, the most important being that the whole notion of an inherent antagonism between ‘butcher’s cur’ and pure-bred nobleman is seriously undermined. Far from planning the duke’s destruction, it would appear that Wolsey did his best to save him from himself. Moreover, there is plenty of evidence of Wolsey getting on with the nobility. His first benefice had been a gift of the Grey family, presumably as a reward for teaching the three sons of the 1st marquess of Dorset at Magdalen School. When, twenty years later, their mother was anxious to settle with the eldest, the 2nd marquess, her highly complicated affairs – not only had she been an heiress and in her own right a baroness, but on being widowed she had married none other than Buckingham’s brother, the earl of Wiltshire, all the while producing a great many children – it was to Wolsey that she and the 2nd marquess looked to in order to draw up ‘Articles of Agreement’.
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Two years later it was the Howards who were seeking Wolsey’s help in settling their family affairs. The resulting ‘Order … to limit John earl of Oxenford in the ordering of the expenses of household and other his affairs in his younger years, as also for his demeanour towards the countess his wife’ was an attempt to provide a
solution to a family tragedy brought about by the disturbing behaviour of the 14th earl of Oxford.
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Not only was he incapable of managing the De Vere estates, but he drank too much, ate too much, kept wild and riotous company, wore ‘excessive and superfluous apparel’ and, worst of all, treated his wife, who was a daughter of the 2nd duke of Norfolk, with none of the ‘gentleness and kindness’ expected of a husband and a nobleman. It is not known whether Wolsey’s ‘Order’ did solve all the problems – and two years later the earl was dead – but it sheds light on many aspects of early Tudor life, such as attitudes to marriage and, more relevantly, to the nobility. It is permeated with a real concern for the preservation of a nobleman’s patrimony and a belief in aristocratic values as a vital ingredient in the better maintenance of the common weal, and yet its author was supposedly antipathetic to such values. If he was, on this occasion he managed to conceal it with remarkable skill! Moreover, in drawing up the ‘Order’ he would have had to work very closely with the principal parties involved, and in the process he appears to have won the genuine gratitude of the countess of Oxford, who at one stage acknowledged that he was ‘the setting forward of me; for I have nothing, nor was never like to have had, if it had not been for your gracious goodness.’
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Wolsey’s ‘Articles of Agreement’ for the Grey family and ‘Order’ for the De Veres and Howards are of particular interest, because here were private matters – insofar as anything to do with aristocratic families can be thought of as private – being dealt with by Wolsey, insofar as his position permitted, in a private capacity. That his help was sought in this way may therefore be taken as evidence of a real trust in his ability to produce solutions. Moreover, it confirms something that Cavendish pointed out, but that has been overlooked, that Wolsey’s career was successful not only because he secured the confidence of the king, but also because ‘his sentences and witty persuasions in the Council chamber was always so pithy’ that people, ‘as occasion moved them, assigned him for his filed tongue and ornate eloquence to be their expositor unto the king’s majesty in all their proceedings’.
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Admittedly, Cavendish does not single out noblemen as a class who sought his help, but they more than anyone had dealings with the king, and, though the surviving evidence is meagre, what there is suggests that Wolsey’s good offices were constantly made use of by them.

The distinction between the private and the public is not one, however, that should be overstressed. The evidence hardly permits any real assessment of Wolsey’s private feelings towards individual noblemen, or theirs towards him – and in any age it is difficult for public men to have private feelings. Insofar as the politics of the time very much centred on the relationship between the Crown and nobility, anyone at the hub of royal government such as Wolsey, as lord chancellor and leading royal councillor, was bound to be intimately involved in the affairs of the nobility.

Wolsey was also a cardinal and papal legate. In December 1515 there took place at Bologna a famous meeting between Francis
I
and Pope Leo
X
. Although Francis came as the conqueror of Northern Italy, his demeanour throughout was modest,
not to say subservient. Indeed, he seems to have spent much of his time grovelling at the pope’s feet which, as the Imperial ambassador rather archly remarked, were almost kissed away by his attentions and those of the French nobility who accompanied him.
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Leo, it is true, was a Medici, and thus a member of the great banking family which for most of the fifteenth century had controlled the government of Florence. Nevertheless, in comparison with a king of France or a member of the French aristocracy, the
crème de la crème
of European society, a Medici was nothing. The Vicar of Christ, on the other hand, was everything, and the fact that the French had spent the last five or six years in bitter conflict with the papacy in no way affected this. Wolsey was not pope, but the English nobility would not have found it in the least demeaning to pay him, as a cardinal and prince of the Church as well as the king’s leading councillor, the greatest respect. Moreover, it needs to be stressed that they were used to clerical lord chancellors, some of whom, such as John Morton only fifteen or so years earlier, had also been cardinals. Although in England leading churchmen had very rarely been drawn from the nobility, or even leading gentry, this had in no way prevented them from playing a leading role, not only in royal government but in society as a whole. Most English historians, perhaps because not familiar with either cardinals or aristocrats, have found it curiously difficult to accept this – at least when they have turned their attention to Wolsey. Instead, they have latched on to Cavendish’s loving descriptions of the great pomp and ceremony with which Wolsey surrounded his daily life, in which the nobility played a great part, and have seen it as evidence not only of moral failure but of political insensitivity in thereby so obviously antagonizing the ruling classes. Nobody would have been more surprised at this use of his work than Cavendish himself. The lesson to be drawn from Wolsey’s life was indeed that in any final judgment all is vanity, but it was precisely because Wolsey’s life had been so great and glorious that it drew the lesson so well. And when Cavendish wrote, ‘thus in great honour, triumph, and glory he [Wolsey] reigned a long season, ruling all things within this realm appertaining to the King by his wisdom’, he meant every word of it.
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Cavendish also informs us that the English nobility were quite happy for their children to serve an apprenticeship in Wolsey’s household, for Wolsey had in his household ‘of lords nine or ten, who had each of them allowed two servants; and the earl of Derby had allowed five men’. Sadly, the remaining evidence provides only a few names. The most famous noble member of his household was the 6th earl of Northumberland, Henry Percy, for it was while he was serving there that he allegedly fell in love with Anne Boleyn, and may even have entered into a precontract of marriage with her. The earl of Derby, mentioned by Cavendish, also appears in a list of young noblemen who in 1527 accompanied Wolsey on his mission to Amiens to negotiate with Francis.
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Others were Lords Monteagle and Vaux; Sir John Dudley, the future duke of Northumberland; ‘master Ratclyfe’ (probably the future 2nd earl of Sussex); ‘master Willowby’ (perhaps the future 1st Lord Willoughby of Parham); ‘master Parker’ (probably the son and heir of Lord
Morley); and ‘master Stourton’ (the future 7th Lord Stourton) and Edward Seymour, the future Lord Protector. Other noblemen who may have been brought up in Wolsey’s houshold were the Irish peer, James Lord Butler,
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and Christopher Lord Conyers.
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On the death of his father in 1521, the earl of Derby had been made a royal ward, and though it is not entirely clear why he ended up in Wolsey’s household, it is hardly likely that he had much say in the matter.
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As regards the others, there is no reason to doubt that their parents, at least, had been free to choose Wolsey’s household as a training ground for their children; and clearly it made an enormous amount of sense. It was very common for children of aristocratic and leading gentry families to send their children away to other households, including those of leading churchmen: the future 4th duke of Norfolk was to be a page with successive bishops of Winchester, Stephen Gardiner and John White – a fact to which his grandson the earl of Arundel referred when instructing his own younger son William in all things to ‘reverence, honour and obey my lord bishop of Norwich as you would any of your parents … and in all things esteem yourself my lord’s page; a breeding which youths of my house far superior to you were accustomed to’.
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Arundel’s instructions may serve to make the point that there had always been a familiar, if respectful, relationship between the nobility and leading churchmen, the latter being, just as much as the nobility, pillars of their local communities, living in palaces and enjoying the income from vast estates. The more important the bishop, the more likely it was that the nobility should seek to enter their sons in his household; and what better training, other than service in the king’s household, for a young Tudor nobleman than service in Wolsey’s?