The King's Cardinal: The Rise and Fall of Thomas Wolsey (Pimlico) (64 page)

Be that as it may, in the following year he was asked to escort Margaret of Scotland for part of her journey back over the border.
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In 1520 he took an active part at the Field of Cloth of Gold.
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In 1522 he was a member of the council set up to advise the new lieutenant of the North,
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and incidentally a personal friend, the earl of Shrewsbury, and in the following year he took part under Shrewsbury’s successor, the earl of Surrey, in further campaigning against the Scots. In June 1525 he was present at the ceremonies at which Henry’s illegitimate son, Henry Fitzroy, was created duke of Richmond,
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but when in the next month the lapsed Council of the North was resuscitated with Richmond as its nominal head, Northumberland was not put on it.
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In fact, this is not quite so surprising as is sometimes made out. Since the council’s function was primarily legal, it was composed largely of lawyers, not of noblemen for whom such work on any regular basis would have been inappropriate and uncongenial. When, on the other hand, a military council had been needed, as in 1522, Northumberland was made a member. It is, therefore, a little surprising that in 1525 he was not given what was essentially a military post, that of deputy-warden of a March – Richmond having been made warden-general – particularly as his fellow noblemen, the earls of Cumberland and Westmorland, were.

Before we attempt to make sense of this very patchy evidence, Northumberland’s relations with Wolsey himself must be considered. It may be assumed that Wolsey had been much involved in the 5th earl’s appearance before the king and Council in 1516. Nevertheless, relations between the two men were not irredeemably harmed by this episode, for otherwise it would have been very strange for the earl to have entrusted to Wolsey at least the later stages of his eldest son’s upbringing.
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Just as with Buckingham, some pressure may have been put upon him to bring his son to court. Moreover, there were some advantages, even for a disgruntled nobleman, in establishing a connection with the cardinal. However, the fact is that he need not have placed his son in Wolsey’s household, and he chose to do so. Furthermore, during the crisis brought about by his son’s ‘affair’ with Anne Boleyn, both the father and Wolsey combined to force the son to break it off, this probably in 1522.
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In 1523 Wolsey defended Northumberland against the king’s charge that the Percy retinue had worn the cross keys of the See of York during the Scottish campaign.
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Of course, Wolsey’s defence was not disinterested; the charge was aimed almost as much against himself as against the 5th earl. But Wolsey could have made use of the incident to do the earl down, and did not. In 1526 Northumberland was involved in a case before the Council of the North in which it appears – though, as is so often the case, the evidence is ambiguous – that Wolsey put in a kind word for him.
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Then in October of the same year, when the earl was in London, he took the trouble to warn Wolsey not to trust the earl of Cumberland because he was in league with the duke of Norfolk.
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What to make of all this? Certainly it is not evidence of abiding enmity between the two men, or of any vendetta on Wolsey’s part to discredit the earl. What does emerge from some of the evidence is strong antagonism between the earl and his son, antagonism which Wolsey was attempting to put an end to early in 1527.
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As has been shown, he was quite often drawn into the nobility’s family quarrels, a role that required great tact and sensitivity and not one that can easily be associated with his alleged opposition to its concerns.
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It is not known in this case how successful he was and, in any event, the death of the 5th earl in May of 1527 removed the problem. What, however, the antagonism between father and son probably does explain is Wolsey’s otherwise bizarre and heartless request that the son should not attend his father’s funeral.
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It may also explain why the plan to create the son warden of the East and Middle Marches, in the early 1520s, never came to anything:
his father’s dislike would have made his position untenable.
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The more one looks at the evidence usually put forward for a deliberate policy, whether Henry
VIII
’s or Wolsey’s, to destroy the power of the Percys, the less convincing it appears. What emerges is a more complicated picture, at the heart of which must be the personality of the 5th earl, however shadowy that now appears. Undoubtedly, he was never trusted sufficiently, nor considered competent enough, to be given high office. What may be significant is the fact that, though brought up at Henry
VII
’s court, he failed to become an intimate of the young Prince Henry. Of course he was thirteen years older, but then the first boon companions of the future Henry
VIII
were almost all of them considerably older. Those who did manage to become close at an early stage – Brandon, Compton, the Howards and the Guildfords – all became important figures in the new reign, and remained close until either they or Henry died.
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Why the 5th earl did not will probably never be known, but his failure to do so may well explain much that followed. In many ways his career parallels the duke of Buckingham’s, not only in that he was never brought into the inner circle of government, but that his reaction to this exclusion was similar. He retired to his estates and concentrated his energies on administering them effectively – and successfully, for if wealth is a measure of a nobleman’s power, the 5th earl was undoubtedly more powerful by the end of his life than when he succeeded to the title.
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And if, as in the case of the duke, the Crown always viewed him with some suspicion, so, like the duke he was usually treated with the respect due to a great peer of the realm. The great difference between him and Buckingham was, of course, that he steered clear of treasonable speculation. But, just as Buckingham’s execution cannot be taken as evidence of any theoretical or general hatred of the nobility, neither can the 5th earl’s exclusion from high office be taken as evidence for any such hatred of the Northern nobility, or of the Percy family.

If one reason for being so sure about this is that Percy wealth was greater by the end of the 1520s than it had been at the beginning of Henry
VII
’s reign, another is the evident willingness of both Henry
VIII
and Wolsey, insofar as it was practical, to make use of the nobility in their rule of the North. The re-establishment in 1525 of a Council of the North under Richmond – often referred to as Richmond’s Council – in no way contradicts this. The increased government activity in the North, brought about by Albany’s return to Scotland in 1521 and the ensuing threat of an invasion by the Scots, had, almost incidentally, brought to Wolsey’s attention the more general problem of law and order – or rather the lack of it. When the new bishop of Carlisle, John Kite, had arrived in the North in 1522 his special task was to act as councillor and treasurer to Lord Dacre in the fight against Albany. He soon
found, however, that the more serious problem was caused by the English:

There is more theft, more extortion by English thieves, than there is by all the Scots of Scotland. There is no man which is not in a hold strong that hath or may have any cattle or moveable in surety through the bishopric and from the bishopric till we come within eight miles of Carlisle, all Northumberland likewise. Exhamshire, which longeth to your Grace, worst of all, for in Exham self every market day there is fourscore or 100 strong thieves, and the poor men and gentlemen seeth them which did rob them and their goods and neither complain of them by name, nor say one word to them. They take all their cattle and horse, their corn as they carry it to sow or to the mill to grind, and at their houses bid them deliver what they will have, or they shall be fired and burnt. By this ungracious mean not looked to all the country goeth, and shall more, to waste
.
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It may be that Kite overreacted to his first immersion in the realities of the North, but he was no innocent, having served for some time in both Ireland and Spain. Moreover, his gloomy view of the matter was to be echoed on many occasions during 1523 and 1524 by the earl of Surrey. But while Kite concentrated on what were endemic problems of any border country, especially one with difficult terrain, Surrey tended to emphasize the rivalry between the leading families, which was characteristic of the whole of England, but compounded here by being placed in a border context.

In his analysis of the causes of disorder, Surrey made two important points.
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First, that most of the Northumberland gentry had close connections with thieves. Dacre was charged with this in 1524,
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and the charge was true. He was closely connected with such families, or clans, as the Armstrongs and Carletons, who, based in the border valleys of Liddesdale, Redesdale, and Tynedale – valleys difficult of access and providing little settled employment – were in effect professional cattle thieves and robbers.
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This was their way of life and, furthermore, in any conflict with Scotland it was they who provided the best soldiers. Thus, any successful warden would have to rely on their military help while hoping to keep their peacetime activities sufficiently under control so that the more settled parts of the North – and there were many – were not too inconvenienced. A careful balancing act was required, and it looks as if by 1524 Dacre, even on his own admission, was failing to achieve it.
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Thus, though in the mounting criticism of Dacre’s rule, the not impartial role of both the Cliffords and the Percys has been emphasized, much of that criticism was probably deserved. At the same time, Wolsey, though most anxious that Dacre should have a fair hearing,
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and well aware, as indeed was Surrey, that Dacre’s knowledge of Scottish affairs was indispensable,
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also saw, especially when the prospects for a long-term peace with Scotland were good, that some new initiative must be made to establish law and order in the North.

Surrey’s second explanation for the disorder in the North was that people were highly sceptical of the seriousness of the government’s intentions to launch a new initiative, and would remain so until someone was appointed to ‘continue among them to see justice administered’.
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As always, it was easier to provide the explanation than the solution. Wolsey’s immediate answer, early in 1524, was to press Dacre to be more active,
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and by June he was able to write that he and Henry were pleased that Dacre now took such pains for the correction of malefactors, at the same time pointing out that to persist in so doing would be the best way to put an end to the mounting criticism against him.
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In the following month special commissions were set up for Yorkshire and Northumberland to put an end to the ‘enormities’ there.
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Both commissions were headed by Surrey, now duke of Norfolk, and included the king’s attorney-general, Ralph Swillington. Interestingly, the commission for Northumberland included Dacre – further evidence of Wolsey’s reluctance to move against him. But, if any persistent effort to enforce law and order was to be made, by 1524 Dacre could not be considered the right man to implement it, and anyway, he did not want to. Neither did Norfolk: almost from the moment he set foot in the North, early in 1523, he had been pleading for his recall with a persistence that suggests that his pleading was genuine
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– and twenty years later he was remembering with horror the time that he had spent in the North on this occasion.
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And if Norfolk would not serve, it seems unlikely that many other noblemen would have been eager to do so. To spend long periods up there, involved for the most part in judicial matters, was not an exciting prospect for a nobleman whose estates and interests were elsewhere – and if Dacre and Northumberland were considered ineligible, it would have to be someone from further south. But in order to compensate for his lack of local influence any southern candidate would have to be a man of more than ordinary prestige,
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and this further narrowed the choice. Indeed with Norfolk so unwilling and Shrewsbury having been in 1522 a reluctant and not especially successful lord lieutenant in the North,
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it gave Wolsey virtually no choice at all. The duke of Suffolk might just have been considered, but he had no experience of Northern affairs, and anyway there is no reason to suppose that he would have welcomed a posting to the North any more than Norfolk had. Thus when it comes down to it, the choice of the duke of Richmond, far from being part of a long-term plan to increase royal authority in the area at the expense of the nobility’s, appears to have been merely an expedient forced upon Henry and Wolsey
for want of an alternative.

Henry Fitzroy was an illegitimate son of Henry
VIII
by Elizabeth Blount. Until created earl of Nottingham and duke of Richmond and Somerset in July 1525, he had lived in relative obscurity – not all that surprising since he was at the time only six years old. Given his age, his appointment as lieutenant-general north of the Trent and warden-general of the Marches four days after his elevation to the peerage, can only have been to provide a figurehead, albeit one intended to be as prestigious as possible.
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The real work, as in the earlier appointments of this kind involving legitimate royal children, was to be carried out by a Council of the North attached to the duke’s household made up entirely of people with considerable experience of Northern affairs.
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One such was Thomas Magnus, archdeacon of the East Riding, very much in Wolsey’s confidence and used by him for all manner of tasks, but perhaps especially for Scottish diplomacy. Wolsey’s close relationship with Magnus and many of Richmond’s councillors, and the fact that ten out of the seventeen members of the Council were lawyers, of whom only half were trained in the common law, has been seen as evidence of an intention to obtrude a personal, and clerical rule on the North, though mistakenly so.
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Given Wolsey’s involvement in Northern affairs during the previous decade, their closeness to him could hardly have been avoided. And how close is close? If they were merely ‘Wolsey’s yes-men’, one would expect them to have been removed from office at his fall and this was not the case.
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Someone who was appointed to the Council was the same Sir William Bulmer who in 1519 had got all too close to Wolsey when he was forced to appear before the king’s Council in Star Chamber for wearing the duke of Buckingham’s livery in the royal presence. Whether this episode made him a particular friend is surely another matter.