The King's Cardinal: The Rise and Fall of Thomas Wolsey (Pimlico) (67 page)

In an anonymous reform programme of 1515 Desmond appears at the top of a list of ‘30 great captains of the English noble folk that followeth the same Irish order and keepeth the same rule, and every of them maketh war and peace for himself without any licence of the king, or any other temporal person, save to him that is strongest, and of such that may subdue them by the sword’.
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The ‘Irish order’ was more graphically described by the Imperial envoy when he remarked of Desmond’s men that they were much given to theft and murder and showed no skill in anything except in daring death like animals.
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Amongst Desmond’s following were some of the sixty ‘chief captains’ of ‘the king’s Irish enemies’ mentioned elsewhere in the reform programme, and even some of these called themselves kings.
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The most important were the heads of the O’Neill family of Tyrone and the O’Donnell of Tyrconnell, families which dominated the northern province of Ulster. Not perhaps in the same league, but situated in the heart of Leinster – a province which had seen more continuous English occupation than any other – were such ‘Irish enemies’ as the MacMurroughs and the O’Byrnes. But as the anonymous writer was at pains to point out, as well as ‘the chief captains’ there were ‘diverse petty captains, and every of them maketh war and peace for himself without licence of the chief captains’.
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Ireland in the early sixteenth century was, thus, a patchwork of
usually competing but nonetheless interlocking entities, whose precise mix and strength was entirely dependent upon the personalities of those who governed the individual pieces. Moreover, the racial origins of these leaders, whether Gaelic or Anglo-Irish, and their nominal relationship to the English Crown, had little bearing on the question of effective English control. The English Pale was but one piece of an ever revolving kaleidoscope of power groupings, and by no means the biggest and brightest.

Moreover, even within the English Pale all does not seem to have been well. To begin with, the Irish way of life, including such things as dress, language, hairstyle, and even their liking for the moustache, was as dominant inside the Pale as outside – which, considering that most of ‘the common people’ there were of Gaelic origin, is not all that surprising. The presence of this large fifth column was thought to threaten the security of the Pale, constantly under attack from the Irish without, but for some commentators at least the problem went deeper. It was not only that the ‘Irish’ within were potential allies of the enemy but that they were temperamentally ungovernable. So although some commentators put their faith in education, especially of the Irish chiefs, the easier solution of importing ready-made Englishmen was increasingly favoured.
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Another point that commentators frequently made was that though the Irish exchequer received very little, the lords of the Pale did very well for themselves from all manner of exactions from their tenants. The most controversial of these was ‘coyne and livery’, which was a lord’s right to billet his men and horses upon his tenants free of charge, and it was a right which was much used – and abused.
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Another was a tribute called ‘black rent’, exacted by one lord or family from another family or area. For instance, the county of Meath paid £300 a year to the O’Connors,
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and when in early 1528 the vice-deputy, Delvin, in the absence of the lord deputy, Kildare, the Crown’s chief representative in Ireland, attempted to put an end to this payment he was promptly kidnapped by them.
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As this episode shows, these exactions as well as being burdensome in themselves were also evidence of royal weakness. Coyne and livery was, or could become, merely a way of subsidizing the lord’s private army, ‘black rent’ merely a protection racket imposed upon the Palesmen by the Irish chiefs.
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But then, however one approaches the lordship of Ireland in the early sixteenth century, the predominant impression is of English weakness and a resulting lack of good government, so much so that the writer of the 1515 reform programme could lament that ‘there is no land in the world of so long continual war within himself nor of so great shedding of Christian blood, nor of so great rubbing, spoiling, praying, and burning, nor of so great wrongful extortion continually as Ireland’.
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Perhaps what has been presented is rather an English view. After all, the Crown
did have a nasty habit of winning any military encounter, and moreover, what looked like bad government from London or even Dublin might not seem so from Connacht or Leinster – no doubt cattle raids could be fun! Furthermore, most of the evidence comes from harassed royal servants, from noblemen and their retainers anxious to exaggerate the evil doings of their rivals, or from the ‘reforming’ gentry and merchants of the Pale and major Irish ports. All these people had a vested interest in painting as black a picture as possible; and there is some evidence that all was not entirely black, for, as in England, the fifteenth century saw considerable building activity in Ireland, which suggests increasing economic prosperity. From the English viewpoint, however, the problems of governing Ireland must have appeared great, and in many ways significantly greater than those of governing the North, where, after all, royal control had been reasonably effective for hundreds of years.

But in one crucial respect Ireland posed less of a problem than the North. Whereas the Northern border was dominated by a Scottish Crown sufficiently organized and powerful to mount a serious invasion of England, the sheer political chaos of Ireland meant that it posed no such threat. It is true that an earl of Desmond or an O’Neill could put into the field a sizeable army, but even more than most sixteenth-century armies they were liable to fragmentation. Thus when O’Neill was anxious to take on the new lord lieutenant of Ireland in 1520 he was effectively prevented from doing so by his great rivals, the O’Donnells. And if the earl of Desmond wished to attack the English Pale, he had first to march through the territory of his great rivals, the Butlers. The smaller Irish families, mainly of Gaelic origin, such as the O’Connors of Offaly or the MacMurroughs of Carlow, might well prove a nuisance to an English lord deputy in Ireland, but they hardly posed a threat to the English Crown.

All the same, there was the potential for danger. In the conflict between York and Lancaster, for example, Ireland had played a part, and that mainly on the Yorkist side. Thus, in Henry
VII
’s reign both Lambert Simnel and Perkin Warbeck, though especially Simnel, had received support from Ireland, which was a convenient base for a rival claimant, or foreign power, from which to launch an attack on the English throne. Its value as such was something that the fifteenth-century English author of the
The Libelle of Englyshe Polycye
had been well aware. On no account, he argued, must England lose Ireland, because it acted as a buttress against foreign intervention and gave England vital control of the Irish Channel.
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This belief may not have been restated in Wolsey’s time, but there is little doubt that the possible use of Ireland by foreign powers or rival claimants – and often the two went together – did help to concentrate the minds of the first two Tudor kings on the problems of the lordship. It was because of his justified suspicions that his lord deputy, the 8th earl of Kildare, was giving support to Perkin Warbeck that Henry
VII
made his one serious effort to solve them, when in 1494 he had sent over Sir Edward Poynings with a force of about seven hundred men.
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In the 1520s the earl of Desmond’s alliances with first France and then the emperor caused some concern. The difficulty is to decide just how much, and whether that concern was
the main reason for the Crown’s involvement with Ireland. Or alternatively, was it thought that there was a ‘final solution’ for Ireland, not to prevail in Wolsey’s time, or even in Henry
VIII
’s, but one that was already clearly articulated and in which the twin props were reconquest and colonization? To arrive at some answers to these questions, Henry’s and Wolsey’s relationship with Gerald the younger, 9th earl of Kildare, must be looked at.

The Fitzgeralds of Kildare, the senior branch of the Geraldine family, made up, with their allies and clients, the most important political grouping in Ireland. This is not necessarily because it was the wealthiest or because it could put the most men into the field, but because its undoubted power and wealth were concentrated either in or just outside the English Pale, especially in the counties of Kildare and Meath. From land in these counties the family received just under £900 a year,
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but it had many other sources of revenue and profit. These included not only booty from the ‘hostings’ – that is raids on competing families – and a large number of ‘tributes’ extracted from Irish chieftains, but also the English Crown’s Irish revenues if, as was more often than not the case, the head of their family was lord deputy. What this all added up to is difficult to estimate. Sir William Darcy suggested in 1515 that the earl of Kildare spent £10,000 a year,
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which seems too high an estimate – and much more than any English noble family was spending at this time – but then another contemporary thought that by using his position as lord deputy to levy coyne and livery on all inhabitants of the Pale, not just on his own tenants, the 9th earl obtained the equivalent of £36,000 a year.
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Whatever the real figure, there is no disputing that the Kildare wealth and power had been increased by the fact that, but for a brief interregnum in the 1490s, the 8th earl had been lord deputy from 1478 until his death in 1513. The chief consequence of this was that the family increasingly controlled royal patronage in the Pale.
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There had been some attempt to check this process: when the earl was restored to office in 1496 the appointment of the two most important posts in the Irish administration, those of lord chancellor and chief justice, had been taken out of his hands and reserved for the Crown; and in 1522 six more offices were placed in this category.
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But even when a Kildare was not lord deputy it was a very brave man who would dare to criticize or oppose him. When in 1515 Sir William Darcy did so, he was dismissed from the Irish Council. In that year the 9th earl had been summoned to the English court, and it may have looked as if one could get away with criticism because his days in office were numbered. In fact he returned with even greater powers, so Darcy’s gamble, if that is what it was, did not pay off.
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But for most people the prospect of a Geraldine comeback – even if, as in the 1520s, the 9th earl was often out of office and, indeed, often in custody in England – must always have weighed heavily enough to prevent opposition to the family’s wishes.

One way in which the earls of Kildare had strengthened their position was by
marrying into such powerful Gaelic families as the O’Neills of Tyronne. Perhaps of even greater concern to the English Crown was their kinship, if by the sixteenth century at some remove, with the Fitzgeralds earls of Desmond, whose power and independence of royal control has already been mentioned. It is not, therefore, surprising that the 8th earl of Kildare was called ‘the Great Earl’, and earned for himself the title of ‘all-but-king of Ireland’. Something else that he might have been is that rather elusive being – at least in this work – ‘the over mighty subject’, though his receipt of a great deal of royal favour would suggest that, even in his case, much caution needs to be exercised before such a label be pinned on him. Still, it was not all royal favour, for despite being lord deputy of Ireland for most of Henry
VII
’s reign and for the first four years of Henry
VIII
’s, he had been, in 1494, attainted for treason. So eventually was the 9th earl, but it would seem that almost from the moment that he succeeded his father as lord deputy in 1513 he was viewed with some suspicion. Unfortunately, little is known of the circumstances surrounding his summons to the English court in 1515, but it would appear from Sir William Darcy’s paper presented to the royal Council on 24 June of that year that one reason was that he had been making war without ‘the assent of the Lords and King’s Council’
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– though who was meant by the ‘Lords’ and whether the Irish or English Council was intended is not made clear. But though Darcy’s paper was an indictment of Kildare rule, by 1516 the 9th earl had returned to Ireland, not only still lord deputy, but having acquired many marks of royal favour, including permission to call a parliament and a licence to endow a perpetual college at Maynooth. In March of that year he was granted a new patent as lord deputy, which gave him authority to appoint his own nominees to the (since 1496) reserved posts of lord chancellor and chief justice.
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Royal favour did not last long. In the autumn of 1519 he was summoned back to England, though, again, exactly why is not altogether clear. Nearly twenty years later Robert Cowley, a client of Kildare’s only significant rival, Piers Butler of Ormond, gave as the reason a list of ‘enormities’ committed by Kildare, which he presented in person before the king’s Council.
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Amongst these was his ‘disinheriting the king of his hereditaments’, a failure to make any account of the Crown’s Irish revenues, and his wrongful retaining of Irishmen. But whatever the reason, when the earl of Surrey arrived to take up his post of lord lieutenant of Ireland in May 1520, he found much of the country in rebellion. What is more, he was convinced that Kildare, who was still retained in England, was largely responsible for this state of affairs. His reports led to Kildare’s examination by Wolsey. He was for a time placed in custody, and when not in custody was bound not only to remain in London and to appear in Star Chamber at a certain date, but also not to have any communication with Ireland without Wolsey’s express permission. Despite all this, by August 1524 he was once again lord deputy, only for the whole process to start up again two years later. In the late autumn of 1526 he was summoned back to London again to be examined by Wolsey, and put into custody. And after Wolsey’s fall, the process was to be repeated. In 1532 he became lord deputy for the third time, but by
the end of 1533 he was back in the Tower of London, and on this occasion there was to be no return, for on 12 December 1534 he was to die while still in the Tower. Yet even without death intervening another come-back had virtually been ruled out. In the previous June his son and heir, ‘Silken Thomas’, had led the Geraldines in a full-scale revolt. It was not successful, and with its failure the Kildare ascendancy came to an end.
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