The King's Cardinal: The Rise and Fall of Thomas Wolsey (Pimlico) (70 page)

These moves to assert greater English control over the Irish Church provide further evidence that by the late 1520s Wolsey was being forced to take Ireland more seriously, but perhaps more significant is the time that it took him to make them. Why did he wait until 1528? One possible reason was that, though it was easy enough to point out the need for action, it was most unlikely that any action would be effective. Control of the Irish Church was not possible without a greater degree of political control. It was no good appointing Englishmen to Irish dioceses if they could be prevented from exercising their authority by unfriendly Irish chiefs. The same would apply for Wolsey’s legatine powers, whether or not they were boosted by additional papal bulls. They could and would be ignored just as long as political control was lacking. In other words, though in theory the Irish Church may have
seemed a way into Ireland for the English, in practice it was not. Wolsey may well have realized this and thus have been in no hurry to attempt something that would almost certainly end in failure. Another reason, probably the most important, was that neither the Irish Church nor Ireland itself was high on his list of priorities.

When, earlier, Ireland was compared with the North of England, it was argued that though there were obvious similarities between the problems facing the Crown in both areas and in its responses to them, there were two important differences. The first was that the Crown’s control of Ireland was significantly weaker than its control of the North. Consequently, though in both areas the Crown preferred to delegate much of its power to leading families, such a policy was much riskier in Ireland because the great Irish families, in particular the Fitzgeralds, were less amenable to royal control. This being so, one might have expected the Crown to intervene in Irish affairs much more than it did in the North. That it did not was due to the second major difference – the lack in Ireland of any strongly organized opposition to the Crown such as was provided in the North not indeed by any English noble family but by the Crown of Scotland. Especially because of its close relationship with France, Scotland was a threat that could never be ignored, and so the Crown had to spend a lot of time and energy on the defence of its northern border.

In Ireland none of the great families were sufficiently powerful by themselves to pose the same kind of threat; neither in this period were they capable of successfully combining. This meant that a very small English presence in the English Pale, coupled with the geographical fact of the Irish Channel was sufficient to protect the English Crown from the worst effects of its lack of political control. It could, therefore, choose to ignore the problems of Ireland, despite the fact that they were in many ways greater than those in the far North. The honour and reputation of the English monarch did not depend upon what happened in Ireland, an unimportant backwater, but on playing a leading role in European affairs; Ireland was seen merely as a drain on valuable English resources. The result was that Irish affairs were only to be taken even moderately seriously when there was little else going on, or when even the small English presence there was threatened. To lose Ireland altogether would have been a blow to Henry’s honour and, perhaps, even a threat to his security. To reconquer it would have required a great deal of time, effort, and above all money. For better or for worse, neither Henry nor Wolsey considered that Ireland was worth all this. One consequence of this is that the lordship does not provide a glorious chapter in the cardinal’s life – but then it has not done so for many English politicians and at least, unlike his immediate successors, he avoided a Kildare Rebellion!
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With scenery every bit as mountainous and wooded as both Ireland and the North, to many observers Wales still appeared to be inhabited by wild men, speaking their own language, and preserving their own customs – all of which spelt trouble. ‘Thieves I found them and thieves I shall leave them,’ lamented that scourge of the Welsh and lord president of the Council, Rowland Lee,
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which is perhaps why he
decided to leave so few: within six of his nine years’ presidency he is alleged to have hanged over five thousand of them.
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No doubt his office inclined him to take a gloomy view, but it cannot be denied that there was a problem of law and order. What is less certain is how serious it was.

Wales’s problems can most conveniently be divided into two kinds. First, there were those that were endemic to all pastoral and mountainous regions in which tribal loyalties persisted, and second those that were a legacy of the English conquest and the resulting administrative chaos. By the early sixteenth century Wales had not yet been incorporated into the English administrative system, nor had it any centralized system of its own. To the west was the so-called principality of Wales, established in 1284 by the Statute of Rhuddlan, and consisting of the counties of Anglesey, Caernarvon and Merioneth presided over by the justice of North Wales, the counties of Cardigan and Carmarthen by the justice of South Wales, and the county of Flint by the justice of Chester. In these counties English law and legal proceedings were in use, though less in civil than in criminal matters. However, it can be argued that similarities with the English counties were fewer than the nomenclature suggests, the main reason being that in the Welsh counties there were no justices of the peace. One important consequence was that these counties were governed by a much smaller circle of leading gentry, the sheriffs, constables of castles and other royal officials, than their English equivalents. What remained of Wales – rather more than half – was made up of a mosaic of marcher lordships of varying sizes, each, to the despair of the historian, with its own distinctive customs and practices, and varying considerably in size. What they shared was a high degree of independence, for in them the royal writ did not run and ‘life and death, lands and goods’ were ‘subject to the pleasure of peculiar lords’.
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In the early sixteenth century the marcher lords were no longer the political problem they had been for much of the Middle Ages. Moreover, especially after the attainder of the 3rd duke of Buckingham in 1521, the Crown was by far and away the greatest marcher lord. The only lordships of any size that it did not possess were Gower, which was in the hands of that most active of royal servants, Charles Somerset, created earl of Worcester in 1514, and Powys, the two halves of which were owned respectively by Lord Dudley and Lord Powis, neither of whom posed any threat to the Tudor monarchy. The new problem was that the marcher lords had become an anachronism. In the twelfth and thirteenth centuries they had had a
raison d’être
. Then the Crown had been willing to surrender many of its rights to those it hoped would prove loyal supporters, willing and able to provide a plentiful supply of men and weapons and with a vested interest in ensuring that its conquest of Wales was permanent.
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By Henry
VIII
’s accession the last serious rebellion – Glendower’s – had occurred some hundred years previously, and then only in exceptional circumstances.
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With no one to keep in submission, marcher lords had declined into being merely holders of hereditary sinecures which provided them, usually in their absence, with money and patronage. In this respect the greatest
beneficiary was the Crown which, as the greatest marcher lord, had a vested interest in their continuing existence; but it was a very moot point whether this vested interest was also shared by royal government.

The most difficult problem that the marcher lordships created was that the multiplicity of jurisdictions made it easy for criminals to move from one to another, thus avoiding capture or, if captured, pleading that they were not subject to the jurisdiction of the particular lord in whose lordship their arrest had occurred. Attempts had been made to overcome these difficulties, but while the separate jurisdictions remained they were unlikely to be very successful. Another problem arose from the predominantly financial concerns of the marcher lords, which in the mid-fourteenth century had led to the practice of ‘redeeming the Great Session’.
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The Great Session, or session in eyre, was the highest court of a lordship, competent to deal with all manner of cases, both civil and criminal, with the one exception of treason, which was reserved for the Crown. The advantage to a marcher lord was that in return for dissolving the session and issuing a general pardon he received an agreed sum of money, or ‘fine’, for which there was also an agreed machinery for assessment and collection. If he went ahead and held the session, he would probably in theory have obtained more from the ensuing judicial fees, but collecting them would have been much more problematic. There were also advantages for those paying the redemption ‘fine’ – which in a lordship meant all its inhabitants – the main one being that they were freed from the obligation of attending the Great Session and from paying any fine for non-attendance. In addition, in order to secure the redemption fine the marcher lord was prepared to make concessions. He might, for instance, agree not to interfere with any existing liberties and franchises within his lordship. During the fifteenth century these mutual advantages seem to have resulted in a willing acceptance of the practice by both sides. By the early sixteenth century the tenants were no longer so happy with it and were exerting considerable pressure to bring the practice to an end.

Why this should have been so is not entirely clear. The Great Session was only ever an occasional court, and the bulk of judicial business was performed in lesser courts, so that it is difficult to see how the practice seriously affected the administration of justice, as it was alleged it did. The practice of issuing pardons to people charged with criminal offences was extremely common at every level of Tudor judicial activity, but elsewhere the custom of people who were not charged with a crime being required to pay pardons for those who were did not occur. This custom was extremely difficult to enforce, and it looks as if it was not a greater concern for law and order that motivated the early sixteenth-century marcher tenants, but rather the dislike of a tax which they no longer considered brought them sufficient benefits. But whatever the motivation behind their new attitude, the tenants succeeded in making the question of the redemption of the Great Session a central issue of the government of Wales during the first decades of the sixteenth century. Moreover, increasingly, the Crown took their view of the matter. What may have helped its change of mind was that when, after the attainder of Buckingham, Henry
VIII
himself became marcher lord of Brecon, his own attempt to redeem the Great Session there met with the tenants’ refusal to pay
the redemption money. This may help to confirm that what was at issue here was not really any great concern for good government – although much talked about by both sides – but financial considerations. If the tenants refused to pay the redemption money, obviously the advantages of the practice to the marcher lords ceased, and as the Crown was marcher lord not only of Brecon but of many other lordships, the fact that the financial advantages of ‘redeeming the Great Session’ had been put in doubt made it at least easier for the Crown to accept the tenants’ argument.

Another practice peculiar to Wales for which there were demands for abolition was the levying of commorths.
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In theory these were voluntary gifts of money to anyone in financial distress, but in practice almost anything – a marriage of a daughter, the upkeep of a house, or even the paying of a judicial fine – could provide the excuse for levying one and their voluntary nature was disregarded. They had become a form of irregular taxation, one imposed not by the lord but by anyone powerful enough for his request for a commorth not to be denied. Amongst such were undoubtedly the lord’s officials, whose abuse of their position did constitute a further problem. Of course, such abuse by officials was not confined to the Marches of Wales, but the almost unlimited power that a marcher lord enjoyed over his tenants, the fact that he was almost always an absentee (the most notable absentee being the king), and therefore in no position to supervise his officials very closely, the possibility that he might himself benefit from the abuse of his officials, the great number of lordships and thus the great number of officials – all this makes it likely that marcher officials constituted more of a threat to good government than those elsewhere.

However, as regards good government, the problems peculiar to Wales were probably less important than those endemic to all pastoral and mountainous areas, which we have come across already in discussing the problems of the North and Ireland. When in 1533 Thomas Holt, a member of the Council in the Welsh Marches, was listing ‘the greatest things that be amiss at this time in Wales’, the ‘great stealing of cattle’ by the poorer Welsh gentry figured prominently.
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He also specifically mentioned the complicity in this activity of ‘under-officers and gentlemen that be younger brethren and bastards’, who because of the prevalence of partible inheritance were in possession of uneconomic holdings but whose aspirations were too grand to permit them seriously to look for regular employment. For such people the stealing of cattle had become a way of life, especially since they often had sufficient influence and family connections to prevent any effective action being taken against them – and even if it was, local juries were often unwilling to return a verdict of guilty. And if one adds to the cattle stealing of the poorer Welsh gentry the inevitable disputes and rivalries between all manner of gentry families of the kind to be found throughout Henry’s kingdom, there can be little doubt that there was plenty to occupy Henry and Wolsey in Wales.