The King's Cardinal: The Rise and Fall of Thomas Wolsey (Pimlico) (71 page)

However, the ‘wildness’ of Wales can be exaggerated. Much of it, including most of Glamorgan, was very similar in economic and social structure to many English regions.
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Increasingly the English system of inheritance and land tenure,
resulting in the bulk of a family’s land remaining with the eldest son, was adopted;
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and this was but one aspect of an ‘anglicization’ of Wales that had been going on for two hundred years. This was in marked contrast to the situation in Ireland, where, as we have seen, Irish laws and customs showed no sign of dying out, even within the English Pale. Moreover, although as a consequence of Glendower’s revolt various penal statutes against the Welsh had been passed, including a ban on their holding of office, these had been more honoured in the breach than in the observance.
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In 1496 Sir Rhys ap Thomas was appointed justiciar of South Wales, the most important office in that area. Admittedly, he had the advantage of special links with the Tudor monarchy, forged when he had provided crucial support for Henry
VII
in 1485. But over fifty years before, his grandfather, Griffith ap Nicholas, had had no such advantage, and, though officially only deputy-justiciar, he had in effect been the most powerful political figure in west Wales.
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Arguably an even more successful Welsh family than the house of Dinefwr, to which ap Nicholas and ap Thomas belonged, though admittedly one that had chosen to adopt an English surname, were the Herberts, who, in the person of William Herbert 1st earl of Pembroke, had not only dominated much of Wales throughout the 1460s but had also played an important role at the court of Edward
IV
.
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These two families were, however, only exceptional in the degree of success they had achieved. Most of the offices, both in the principality and in the marcher lordships, were held by Welshmen. Not surprisingly, therefore, there is little evidence for any strong Welsh resentment against an alien oppressor. The pattern of political control and patronage was in many respects similar to that which pertained in England: the Crown and leading families dominated. Whether these leading families were of English or Welsh origin was not an issue. Admittedly, Englishmen could be heard to make rude remarks about the Welsh, but they were most commonly made by Englishmen living in the border counties, who suffered from the activities of the Welsh cattle thieves – but it was the fact that they were cattle thieves, not that they were Welsh, that mattered.

The suggestion that is being made here is that unlike Ireland and the North, Wales in the early sixteenth century did not present the Crown with a political problem. The difficulty for the Crown in the North had been that it was still an active border which had to be defended against an organized enemy. In Ireland the problem was one of trying to maintain some kind of political control; the problem of lawlessness was a symptom of the much larger problem of endemic Irish resistance to English rule. Neither of these conditions pertained to Wales. The Welsh Marches were in no real sense an active border, and had not been so for almost two hundred years.

Not surprisingly, then, Wolsey attempted no fundamental alterations to the way in which Wales was governed. Instead, his efforts were directed to making the existing machinery work more effectively. The key to this was close supervision of
the marcher lordships, not only to ensure that each was well governed, but to secure the greatest possible co-operation in criminal matters with each other and with the adjoining shires. To achieve this various means were used. Indentures were drawn up between the Crown and marcher lords by which the latter promised to carry out the Crown’s instructions, any default resulting in payment of money to the Crown. Within the lordships every man between the ages of eighteen and seventy was made to enter into a bond as a guarantee of his good conduct, and to ensure his appearance at the lord’s court when required.
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The attempt to impose severe financial penalties on all those who misbehaved was central to the Crown’s efforts in the marcher lordships. It was neither a new policy nor, indeed, was it confined to Wales.

Under its indentures with the marcher lords, the Crown insisted that the pursuit of criminals into another lordship was not to be prevented by the officers of that lordship, nor was the criminal to be given any hope of escaping punishment by pleading that he was not a resident of the lordship or county where his arrest had taken place. Efforts were also made to prevent a criminal ‘abjuring’, a process whereby someone who had committed a crime could, by promptly confessing, avoid being tried and sentenced. Instead, he was to be banished from the realm – though, since in the case of a tenant the realm was taken to refer merely to the area under the jurisdiction of his marcher lord, his exile was not especially onerous.
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These provisions went some way, in theory, towards solving the problem of the many rival jurisdictions. In practice much depended on the efficiency and good intentions of the marcher officials, something that the Crown in its many interventions in Welsh affairs showed itself to be well aware of. As it was, one of the greatest impediments to good government in Wales came from the actions of those whose chief responsibility was to try to bring it about. Before any attempt is made to evaluate the Crown’s success or failure in Wales, it is important to stress that considerable attention was paid to Wales during this period – for there is a tendency to dismiss what was done there as merely ‘business as usual’. Certainly nothing very new was attempted, and what constituted the major thrust of the policy, the system of indentures and bonds, was only the stock response to the problems that areas such as Wales presented to royal government. Moreover, it has been suggested here that as regards the few positive reforms attempted, the Crown’s financial self-interest may have played a part. Whether this means that any assessment of Wolsey’s involvement with Wales must be critical is another matter.

In 1518 letters were sent by the Crown to the marcher lords accusing them of failing to bind their men to good behaviour, ‘by means thereof many and diverse murders, rapes, robberies, riots, and other misdemeanours have been of late and daily committed’. They were given just under three months to remedy this omission.
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In the same year Wolsey and other royal councillors gave judgment in Star Chamber that the tenants of the duke of Buckingham’s lordship of Brecon and Hay had the right to some say in whether or not the Great Session should be
redeemed.
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And the issue came up again in Star Chamber in 1524, when the tenants of the lordship of Gower and Kelvey challenged the right of the marcher lord, the earl of Worcester, even to hold a Great Session, let alone redeem it.
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This time the decision went against the tenants. Wolsey, who as lord chancellor was involved in it, may have been influenced by being embroiled, yet again, with the tenants of Brecon and Hay, the important difference being that on this second occasion the lord was now the Crown. This time round the Crown put considerable pressure on the tenants to redeem – which they formally agreed to do, while insisting that this should not be seen as a precedent.
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But in practice they showed an extreme reluctance to pay the redemption fee. By 1528 this counter-pressure was largely successful, for in a royal ordinance of that year the Crown agreed never to redeem the Great Session without the consent of the majority of the tenants of Brecon and Hay.
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The biographer of Wolsey does well to concentrate on the Star Chamber cases for they provide one of the few bits of evidence that Wolsey was fully aware of the problems of Wales. There is also the elaborate set of instructions prepared in 1525 for Princess Mary’s Council and household, set up in that year to administer the affairs of Wales.
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Given its intimate connection with the administration of justice, and the setting up in the same year of the duke of Richmond’s Council to perform a similar role in the North, the assumption that Wolsey was deeply involved in the decision to send the princess to Wales is probably justified. It has often been suggested that a major reason for doing so was the realization that lawlessness was on the increase in Wales. The evidence for this comes solely from the preamble to the instructions.
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It must always have been tempting to justify any such royal initiative by a dire assessment of the existing state of affairs and the obvious benefits of what was being proposed. It was apparently ‘the long absence of any Prince’ which explained why ‘the good order, quiet, and tranquillity of the country’ had been subverted, and so Henry, ‘by mature deliberation and substantial advice of his Council’, had decided to remedy the omission. It seems hardly likely that he, or indeed Wolsey, genuinely believed that Princess Mary’s presence in Wales would solve the problems of law and order; although it might marginally help by providing the already well-established Council in the Marches with some additional status. In particular, her household could become a centre of hospitality, thereby reminding the Welsh gentry of both the power and the generosity of the Crown. In fact the whole point of the exercise seems to have been to show the Tudor flag, and probably the only reason for not having acted earlier was the hope that a ‘Prince of Wales’ might yet appear and Mary’s youth – she was nine in 1525.

The notion that things were going from bad to worse in Wales receives little support, therefore, from the sending of Mary there in 1525. Moreover, a Council in
the Marches had been in almost continuous existence since 1471, and despite its title its jurisdiction had always covered not only the marcher lordships but also the counties of the principality, the palatinate of Chester, and the English counties adjoining the Welsh border – Shropshire, Herefordshire, Worcestershire, and Gloucestershire. Its powers had certainly been extensive, with authority to try civil as well as all criminal cases, and they do not seem to have been added to in any way in 1525. Nevertheless, the new instructions remain impressive in their detail and their scope. One thing which catches the eye is the apparently genuine concern for poor suitors whose cases were to be dealt with before any others and who were to receive free legal advice.
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The instructions also contained much about the need to supervise the marcher officials and to prevent abuse by the councillors. Commorths were not to be levied, nor were Great Sessions to be redeemed
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– this last provision striking a slightly false note, given what the Crown was attempting to do in its lordship of Brecon.

What the ‘Instructions’ of 1525 also show is a real awareness of the problems of Wales and a determination to tackle them, albeit in ways that had been tried before. Whether a different approach should have been used will be considered later, but of some relevance here is the suggestion already made that Mary’s Council was not a response to a dramatically worsening situation. What may have helped to bring Wales to Henry’s and Wolsey’s notice was the death in 1525 of Sir Rhys ap Thomas. For almost thirty years he had held the most important post of justiciar of South Wales, while his son, Sir Griffith ap Rhys, had been chamberlain of South Wales from 1509 until his death in 1521 and had also been active on the Council in the Marches.
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There appears to have been no sustained criticism of their ‘rule’, as there had been in the North about Dacre’s – a tribute, perhaps, to their skill, but also a consequence of the more normal conditions that prevailed in South Wales. The decision not to appoint Sir Rhys’s grandson, Rhys ap Griffith, as his successor in the office of justiciar of South Wales has been seen as a deliberate move against an ‘over-mighty’ family,
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but given that he was only in his late teens or early twenties, the less Machiavellian reason that he was considered too young is probably correct. Since he may have been brought up in Wolsey’s household and was married in 1524 to Katherine Howard, sister of the 3rd duke of Norfolk, he evidently did not lack friends in high places.

Given the paucity of evidence, the reasons for sending Mary to Wales in 1525 must in the end remain speculative. The continuing failure of Henry and Catherine of Aragon to produce a prince of Wales, the decision to set up a Council of the North headed by the duke of Richmond, a desire to facilitate access to royal justice but also to relieve pressure on the central courts and particularly Star Chamber, and the continuing recognition that a Council was required to supervise the governing of an administratively very confused area in which law and order was not everywhere well maintained – all these things played their part. The most prominent lay figure on the new Council was a former member, Walter Devereux
Lord Ferrers. He was by way of being a professional soldier, serving in France both in 1513 and 1523. What he lacked was political skills, or so Wolsey argued in opposing Henry’s desire to appoint him Surrey’s successor in Ireland in 1521.
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He must have seemed a more suitable choice for the less politically sensitive Wales, for what he lacked in nous was made up for by his unquestioned loyalty, his experience in Welsh affairs, and the fact that his estates lay on the Welsh borders. Unfortunately it was to turn out otherwise.

Almost all the lay members of Mary’s Council had, like Ferrers, considerable experience of Welsh affairs, in some cases going back almost thirty years.
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Four members out of fifteen were clerics, a proportion which hardly supports the general thesis – though not one accepted in this study – that Wolsey strove for a clerical dominance of government. Admittedly the Council’s president, John Veysey, was bishop of Exeter, but then his predecessors had also been bishops. Moreover, Veysey almost certainly owed his successful career not, as has been alleged, to Wolsey but to his close association with the court as dean both of the Chapel Royal and St George’s, Windsor. This is not to suggest that he and Wolsey did not get on, or that Wolsey did not approve of his appointment to the presidency, for which his proven administrative and legal ability, together with his intimate association with the court, made him the obvious choice. Nevertheless his presidency is often deemed to have been something of a fiasco,
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and one for which Wolsey, even if not as close to Veysey as is sometimes alleged, must share some of the responsibility – always assuming that the verdict is correct.