The King's Cardinal: The Rise and Fall of Thomas Wolsey (Pimlico) (69 page)

It also shows that at the heart of the Crown’s unwillingness to take Ireland very
seriously was its great reluctance to spend money on it. It is true that throughout the later Middle Ages there had been a vague hope that Ireland could once again become a source of revenue, just as it had been in the late thirteenth century; and that this hope was still alive at the time of Surrey’s expedition is suggested by the expectation that it might be paid for partly out of Irish revenues.
¹⁹⁷
The hope proved illusory, and though Irish ‘reformers’ might continue to hold out the promise of financial gain if Ireland was taken in hand,
¹⁹⁸
Sir John Stile’s gloomy assessment of the financial situation there probably weighed more heavily. What is clear, however, is that, unless large amounts of money were spent, little could be achieved – and certainly not the reconquest of Ireland. To take one example, most people commenting on Irish problems saw the Irish lords’ right to coyne and livery – that is their right to billet troops and horses on their tenants free of charge – as an abuse that ought to be tackled. But, as was pointed out to the Crown at the time of Surrey’s expedition, if the practice was abolished large additional sums would have to be found for any defence of the Pale.
¹⁹⁹
It was not, therefore, the right time to do anything about it. In 1528 Surrey himself made virtually the same point when he advised Wolsey against agreeing to the archbishop of Cashel’s request that no coyne and livery be levied in his diocese, for Ormond’s military strength depended upon it.
²⁰⁰
Thus, until the Crown was willing to provide adequate funding from England for military expenditure in Ireland, nothing could be done to remedy a major abuse.

Probably the cheapest solution to the problem of finding a successor to Surrey would have been the return of Kildare, but this, as we have seen, Henry was not prepared to countenance. For a brief moment, he toyed with the possibility of an English successor, in particular William Devereux Lord Ferrers, who with his military and Welsh experience had some qualifications,
²⁰¹
but when Wolsey explained that any Englishman would prove more expensive to maintain than an Irishman, he quickly plumped for the only possible Irish alternative to Kildare, Piers Butler earl of Ormond.
²⁰²
Not only did he have considerable resources in Ireland, but his recent loyal service to Surrey also recommended him.
²⁰³
The choice was not a success. Without additional Crown backing – and of course it was the belief that this would not be required which had inspired the choice – his resources proved inadequate. This was largely because his power base was in Kilkenny and Tipperary, which was excellent for containing the earl of Desmond, lying to the west of him, but not for governing the English Pale.
²⁰⁴
And in the English Pale it soon emerged that the Geraldines and their supporters were not prepared to accept this rule. A policy of sustained pressure designed to secure Kildare’s return was adopted. Early in 1523 the Crown gave way and Kildare returned, but the quarrelling between the Butlers and the Geraldines continued. In December 1523 Robert Talbot, on his way
to keeping Christmas with Ormond, was murdered by some Geraldines. Feeling it must intervene, the Crown sent out a high-powered commission which in July 1524 not only brought about an elaborate settlement of all outstanding disputes between the two families, but laid down elaborate procedures to be followed in the event of further quarrelling.
²⁰⁵
In many ways the settlement seems to have favoured Ormond, and certainly Kildare agreed to forgo a number of financial claims on him. However, on its return to England, the commission left behind a new lord deputy – none other than Kildare.

How far Ormond resented his own early loss of office and Kildare’s appointment in his stead is uncertain. He had earlier asked for the return of his rival to Ireland because he was finding it impossible to maintain order in Kildare, and in November 1523 he had even agreed to pay the earl an annuity of £100 to enable him the better to achieve that task.
²⁰⁶
All this was an admission of defeat, and it may be that Ormond was quite relieved to return to his own lands, while still retaining a place on the Irish Council as treasurer. In any event, despite the settlement, the quarrelling between the two families continued. Charges and counter-charges were put before the king, both sides making use of their contacts at court. The result, in the late summer of 1526, was a summons to both Kildare and Ormond to come to England. There followed a most unsatisfactory year in Ireland during which there were two vice-deputies in charge, first Kildare’s brother, Sir Thomas Fitzgerald, and then the pro-Butler Lord Delvin. Then in 1528 Delvin was kidnapped by the O’Connors, almost certainly with Geraldine backing. Such a direct challenge to royal authority in Ireland demanded a response – but what? On 4 August Henry made his decision.
²⁰⁷
Despite Wolsey’s and Norfolk’s advice to the contrary,
²⁰⁸
he rejected a Geraldine solution and Piers Butler – since earlier in the year earl of Ossory rather than Ormond – became lord deputy for the second time.

When in June 1528 Norfolk had written to Wolsey on the subject of Ireland, he made the point that in his opinion ‘the malice between the earls of Kildare and Ossory’ was ‘the only cause of the ruin of that poor land’.
²⁰⁹
In this, of course, he exaggerated, but there is little doubt that here was the key to the failure of the Crown’s preferred policy between 1522 and 1528. The hope had been that Piers Butler would prove strong enough to keep the Pale in reasonably good order and at least to defend it from outside attack, but not so strong as to be the worry that Kildare had become by 1520. And that even Piers Butler was viewed with some suspicion is evidenced by Wolsey’s suggestion to Henry in November 1521 that his son, Lord James Butler, should be retained in England so as to provide some kind of check on his father’s activities.
²¹⁰
In the event Piers Butler had not proved strong enough to keep even reasonably good order, and Kildare had to be resorted to again. But with Kildare came the old worries, well expressed by an anonymous writer in the 1520s when he made the point that although Kildare as lord deputy was undoubtedly strong enough to reform the Pale he had chosen not to do so, perhaps
because he did not wish the king’s laws to press too heavily on his own kinsmen.
²¹¹
Or in other words, the price for having Kildare as lord deputy was to allow him to have his own way. After Piers Butler’s failure and given their heavy commitment in Europe, it was a price that Henry and Wolsey were just about prepared to pay, but only if they could get Kildare and Butler to co-operate. Despite great efforts, they failed. The faults were probably not all with Kildare, but it would appear that the Crown took Butler’s criticism of Kildare’s rule seriously, and an increasingly important reason for doing so was the activity of Kildare’s relation, James Fitzgerald, earl of Desmond. Desmond was dangerous. He had a large army, he was virtually independent of royal control, and, as was mentioned earlier, he was quite prepared to negotiate with the Crown’s enemies, whether Francis
I
or Charles
V
.
²¹²
In the second half of the 1520s the most important task of the lord deputy was at the very least to contain Desmond, but preferably to bring him under royal control. In 1526 the Crown took the view that Kildare had failed in this task – indeed it had evidence that he had deliberately failed, which, if correct, was tantamount to treason.
²¹³
But treason or not, Kildare’s failure to do anything about Desmond must have confirmed the view, probably held by Henry and Wolsey from at least 1515, that he was not to be trusted.

But what real alternative was there to Kildare? Wolsey in 1528 could only come up with the stop-gap solution of leaving Kildare in nominal charge while giving the actual task of reasserting royal authority to the Butlers. It had this much to be said for it – that it made some concessions to the reality of Kildare’s continuing power and influence in the lordship. Henry’s solution to go all out for the Butlers, despite their earlier failure, was thought to be unrealistic by both Wolsey and Norfolk, and so it proved. Sandwiched between the two branches of the Geraldine family, Ossory and his son found their task too much, with the result that the Crown was forced to consider intervening more directly in Irish affairs – exactly what, during the previous six years, it had desperately tried to avoid. The death of Hugo Inge, archbishop of Dublin and chancellor of Ireland, in August 1528 gave an opportunity for this process to begin. Inge’s successor as both archbishop and chancellor was John Allen who had hitherto been involved at the highest level in the administration of Wolsey’s legatine powers. His appointment is thus a strong indication that Wolsey at this late date intended to take Ireland more seriously. Shortly after Allen had been consecrated archbishop in Dublin in June 1529, Henry Fitzroy duke of Richmond was made lord lieutenant of Ireland, while the administration of the lordship was placed in the hands of a secret council which included Allen.
²¹⁴
In the following month the master of ordinance, Sir William Skeffington, was chosen as special commissioner, essentially to act as the military arm of the secret council. Skeffington did not arrive in Ireland until 24 August, less than a month before Wolsey was dismissed as lord chancellor, but there seems no reason to suppose that his instructions had not been drawn up by Wolsey.
²¹⁵
If so,
Wolsey was probably also responsible for an agreement made between Skeffington and Ossory (even though it was not actually signed until November 1529), whereby Kilkenny, Tipperary and Ormond were to be made into ‘English’ counties, committed indeed to Ossory’s charge, but as a justice of the peace administering English laws. At the same time his power to retain men was limited: he could only do so when the security of the three counties was threatened, not for his own private purposes.
²¹⁶

What was to happen elsewhere is not known, but in itself this agreement suggests a determination to control the power of a noble family in its own area of influence – a radical departure. The same agreement bound Ossory to settle all future quarrels with the earl of Desmond by arbitration, but by November 1529 there was a new earl, Thomas the Bald, and he was anxious to co-operate with the English. It could, therefore, be that the curbs placed on Ossory’s power are significant only as part of a wider settlement with the new earl of Desmond. At any rate, his succession dramatically altered the political scene in Ireland, removing as it did the pressure that a possible conjunction between the two branches of the Geraldine family had posed since at least 1526. By the end of June 1530 the secret council was no more. Shortly afterwards Kildare was allowed to return to Ireland, to be appointed in July 1532 lord deputy for the third and last time.

The experiment of a ‘secret council’ in 1529 is of some interest to a biographer of Wolsey. The fact that John Allen, who had worked so closely with him in England, was a member, and Wolsey’s own suggestion in his memorandum to Henry in the previous year that the time had come for ‘a substantial debatement and consultation’ on the problems of Ireland,
²¹⁷
both point to Wolsey’s close involvement in the experiment despite it having been begun so shortly before his loss of office. But while this suggests that he had come to think that the only way forward was for much greater control of Irish affairs from England, there is no hint that he saw the corollary of this as being either reconquest or recolonization. What seems, rather, to have happened is that for differing reasons the two families through which the Crown had tried to govern what was left to it in Ireland had proved unsatisfactory, the Geraldines because they were too strong, and the Butlers because they were not strong enough. As a result, the Crown had had to look for an alternative, and that alternative was ‘the secret council’. In other words, the experiment was a response to the pressure of events – something that was characteristic of the conduct of Irish affairs throughout the period of Wolsey’s ascendancy. The only possible evidence of a major initiative, Surrey’s period as lord lieutenant from 1520 to 1522, turns out in this account to be no evidence of such at all. It has been argued by one historian that after Surrey’s return to England in 1522 a deliberate policy of limiting the period of tenure of any lord deputy was implemented, in order to prevent either Kildare or Ormond becoming too powerful.
²¹⁸
It is not an interpretation which I find acceptable; instead, I argued that in 1522 both Henry and Wolsey made a genuine decision in favour of Ormond, a decision which Geraldine power in the English Pale
was strong enough to reverse.

Any assessment of Wolsey’s personal contribution to Irish affairs is seriously hampered by lack of evidence. Only two documents give any direct insight: his letter to Henry of October 1521 in which he pressed strongly for an Irish successor to the earl of Surrey on the grounds of cost-effectiveness,
²¹⁹
and his memorandum in 1528 following the kidnapping of the vice-deputy, Lord Delvin.
²²⁰
Neither document suggests that if Wolsey had been given a free hand in Ireland he would have wished to pursue a more interventionist policy. If he had, one might have expected him to take a greater interest than he appears to have done in the affairs of the Irish Church. It is true that a memorandum drawn up just before Surrey’s departure to Ireland early in 1520 made the point that Wolsey should send a legatine commissary to Ireland in order to get the Irish Church behind Surrey’s efforts.
²²¹
But Surrey made no reference to such a person, so it can only be assumed that if he was ever sent, he was not very active. At a later stage, perhaps in 1524, Wolsey does appear to have appointed someone to look after his legatine interests in Ireland. Who this person was is not known, but whoever it was, he was very gloomy about his ability to do anything effective. One reason he gave was that he was getting no co-operation from the Irish chancellor and archbishop of Dublin, Hugh Inge.
²²²
The other, and more significant reason, was that there was considerable doubt whether Wolsey’s legatine powers had any authority in Ireland.
²²³
In 1528 Wolsey sought to remedy this uncertainty by securing a bull which specifically included Ireland within his legatine jurisdiction. At about the same time he sought another bull to enable him to redraw the ecclesiastical map of Ireland by severely reducing the number of dioceses, thereby greatly increasing the revenues of those remaining and making it much easier to attract Englishmen to them.
²²⁴
And if by appointing Englishmen to top positions he could have secured effective control of the Irish Church, he might have been able to use the Church to spearhead the anglicization of Ireland. Or, if this was too ambitious, the new diocese could at least have provided the means of financing competent English administrators.