The King's Cardinal: The Rise and Fall of Thomas Wolsey (Pimlico) (35 page)

What is the evidence for Wolsey wishing people to bring their complaints before him? There were two principal ways in which he could have encouraged them. He could have set out to publicize the work of his courts, and especially that of Star Chamber; or, by deliberately going out of his way to favour the plaintiff, who was undoubtedly at most disadvantage in the common law courts, he could have encouraged the legal profession to advise its clients to make use of his courts. It has been suggested that he did both these things. To take the question of publicity first: not long after he became lord chancellor, on 2 May 1516, Wolsey made an important speech before a great assembly of the Council at which the king himself was present.
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There he spoke of the ‘enormities’ which were prevalent in the kingdom, ‘to the derogation of indifferent justice, as well as the causes of the continuance of the same enormities. For the redress and reformation whereof the same most reverend father advertised his highness in the name of the whole councillors of certain provisions by their diligent study excogitate.’ As if to emphasize that he meant business, Wolsey chose the same day for the appearance of the 5th earl of Northumberland before the Council for an offence which probably had to do with the ‘ravishment’ of a royal ward. And whatever the offence, it involved the public humiliation of a leading nobleman, one which ended with the earl being committed to the Fleet prison. Then in May 1517 there was a second great assembly, convened so that the king could pardon four hundred or so Londoners who had taken part in ‘the Evil May Day riots’, but Wolsey took the opportunity to refer again to ‘the enormities and things misbehaved and misordered within this Realm’.
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Two years later, on 27 October 1519, he delivered a ‘notable oration’ concerning the ‘due administration of justice’, following it up the next day by hearing the submission of Sir William Bulmer for wearing the duke of Buckingham’s livery in the king’s presence, and at the same time passing sentence upon two Surrey Justices of the Peace accused of ‘great maintenance, embracery, and bearing’ – all different ways of corrupting a jury.
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There seems little doubt that all these occasions were stage-managed for maximum effect. What effect was intended is not so clear, but they were almost certainly not attempts to popularize the conciliar courts.

‘Enormities’ is a rather general term, used not of defects in the common law but rather of abuses of it, especially by the powerful, such as the earl of Northumberland, and those such as the Surrey JPs whose task it was to administer the law. In other words, the propaganda was towards better law enforcement rather than the provision of better remedies for private problems. In practice, of course, the two things could not be separated. If a genuine riot accompanied a dispute over property, or if the claim quite often made in a bill of complaint that the plaintiff could not obtain justice in the local courts because of the undue influence of his
opponents was true, then indeed ‘enormities’ were being committed. Even if they were not, it could be that litigants might be more willing to pretend that these things were occurring in order to get their private suits before Star Chamber, if it was known that a chancellor was anxious to put an end to them. Whether or not this happened under Wolsey, and whether he publicized the conciliar court in other ways – through, for instance, the justices of assize – is not known. Given that the conciliar courts were already popular, to have wasted time on such efforts would appear to have been uncharacteristically foolish, but, if he did, he had by 1527 clearly repented, because we know that in that year he was sending at least some categories of cases back to them. What is more likely is that his prestige and known abilities provided an additional attraction to litigants and their legal advisers; if they were looking for genuine remedies he may well have seemed an ideal man to provide them, as a brief glance at one or two particular cases will demonstrate.

The first two decades of the sixteenth century saw a number of disputes over property and claims to wardship in the counties of Lancashire and Cheshire between the earl of Derby and Sir Thomas Butler of Warrington. Butler on more than one occasion claimed that he could obtain no justice either at the local assizes or at the duchy of Lancaster’s courts, because the earl ‘was and is of such strength and power in the said county’.
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He therefore wished his complaints to be considered before the Council in Star Chamber. There was probably something in Butler’s claim, though given the importance of his own family he probably exaggerated the Derby influence in order to justify his appeal to Star Chamber. The advantage of doing this was not necessarily just to receive a fair trial, but a trial which would be better able to take into account that along with the strictly legal issues involved there was also a conflict between two leading families. To resolve such a conflict compromises would have to be made, to secure which both the procedures and the prestige provided by the Council in Star Chamber would be useful. One would like to add to these advantages Wolsey’s chairmanship of the proceedings, but if this ever did come into Butler’s calculations it cannot have been the chief attraction, because he first brought his troubles to the Council long before Wolsey became lord chancellor.
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What has survived, though, is a letter from Derby to Wolsey, probably written in January 1521, in which he refers to another dispute that came before Star Chamber, this time with tenants from his lordship of Holland.
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Here the tenants seem to have won, despite the fact that it was admitted by the Crown ‘that the said earl by the rigour of the common law might put the said tenants from the said leases and liberties without any offence doing to the said law’.
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Would Derby have given way to his tenants without the intervention of Wolsey and the Council in Star Chamber, and, by extension, would there have been any hope of a settlement with Butler without such intervention? It may not be beside the point that Derby was heavily in debt to the Crown, and by an agreement renewed in 1517 had been forced to set aside the revenues of certain of his manors for the repayment of his debt.
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Consequently, Derby may well have been anxious to
please the Crown in the hope that some of the debt might be cancelled. And in his letter to Wolsey he did express the hope that ‘by your good mediation and my reasonable petition and consideration seen afore your grace I doubt not that I shall have some favour at the King’s hand and yours’.
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Disputes between leading families were not infrequently brought before Star Chamber. In Wolsey’s time the peace of Leicestershire was disturbed by rivalry between Thomas marquess of Dorset on the one hand and Lord Hastings and his relative by marriage, Sir Richard Sacheverell, on the other. In 1516 all three appeared in Star Chamber to be examined about their illegal retaining and this was followed by charges being brought against them in King’s Bench. Despite this, in 1525 Sacheverell turned up at the Leicestershire assizes ‘with such a company that he ruleth the whole court’, and that this was not merely a partial view is suggested by the fact that the two judges presiding over the assize, Sir Robert Brudenell and Sir Anthony Fitzherbert, felt compelled to order him and his followers to leave. Sacheverell’s behaviour on this occasion led Dorset to file an ‘information’ against him, thereby suggesting that Sacheverell was guilty of a wrong done to the Crown rather than to himself, for such a procedure was more usually used by the Crown. However, one suspects that Sacheverell’s effort during the preceding years to ‘use himself in manner of comparison with the lord marquess’ may have had a good deal to do with Dorset’s action. In 1527 it was the turn of Lord Hastings, for in that year his dispute with Dorset over the exercising of certain offices in the county was brought before Star Chamber and then submitted to arbitration.
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Kent was another county whose whose leading families’ rivalries came to the attention of Wolsey and the Council. Most prominent was that between the Nevilles, led by Lord Bergavenny, and the Guildfords, and in 1516 Bergavenny was accused, not for the first time, of illegal retaining, and suffered the same fate as Dorset, Hastings and Sacheverell.
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There is no evidence to suggest any great rivalry between two other predominantly Kentish families, the Boleyns and the Wyatts, but given their close relationship with the king, it is perhaps not surprising to find that in February 1528 Thomas Boleyn, recently created Viscount Rochford, and Sir Henry Wyatt treasurer of the chamber, promised Wolsey in Star Chamber that they would abide by the decision of the two chief justices and chief baron of the Exchequer in a dispute over property.
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At about the same time a much more serious dispute over property mainly in Lincolnshire, but also in Norfolk and Suffolk, was brewing. It concerned the inheritance of Lord Willoughby, who died in 1526, and the leading protagonists were Lord Willoughby’s brother and male heir, Sir Christopher Willoughby, on the one hand, and Lord Willoughby’s second wife and their daughter Katherine on the other. What made the conflict especially difficult to resolve was the support that the two women received from the duke of Suffolk. In 1527 he had secured the wardship of the daugter, with the obvious intention of getting his hands on the Willoughby inheritance, thereby establishing himself as a dominant figure in Lincolnshire. The
matter was complicated in law because Lord Willoughby had contrived in 1512 to settle half his estate on Sir Christopher, but then, following his second marriage, he had bequeathed the whole of it, including the lands already promised to his brother, to Katherine. What, however, complicated it even more were the personalities and positions of those involved. At one point Sir Christopher decided to take the law into his own hands by making a forcible entry, despite a previous order from Wolsey and the Council not to, into one of the disputed manors – Eresby in Lincolnshire. As a consequence, Suffolk and Lady Willoughby brought a bill of complaint against him before Star Chamber.
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Wolsey was only involved with the beginnings of this dispute, which seems to have led to genuine disturbances of the peace and was to continue through most of the 1530s.
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Sir Thomas More, after succeeding Wolsey as lord chancellor, was to make an attempt to settle the matter, but with no real success.
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This may serve as a reminder that the lord chancellor and his fellow councillors were often unsuccessful in putting an end to major disputes between leading families. At the same time, it is easy to see why they offered the best hope for a solution: they had great authority, they could command the best legal expertise available, and in Wolsey they had a man who, if his conduct of foreign policy is anything to go by, was a past master at just the kind of negotiations that any successful solution would entail. The great sadness is that the documents do not really allow for any proper evaluation of Wolsey’s personal contribution to any particular case, with perhaps the exception of that which involved the prior of Norwich and the City Fathers.

This was the kind of dispute that was all too common in the later Middle Ages, arising as it did out of competing claims to jurisdiction over a particular area between secular and religious bodies, but the problems of Norwich do appear to have been especially intractable.
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They had defeated the effort of Wolsey’s predecessor, Warham, to solve them, and in fact conflict between the church and the city had been intermittent since at least the 1420s. What was in dispute was the prior’s jurisdiction both over an area of the city called Tombland, including the fairs that were held there, and over land outside the city owned by the priory but to which the citizens of Norwich had rights of commons. Wolsey’s settlement involved the Priory surrendering all claims over Tombland, while in return the citizens gave up their rights of commons. In achieving this various other compromises were arrived at. The priory was to be exempt from all tolls within the city, and the citizens were to be given priory land just outside, which, in order to make it viable, had to be drained. Indicative of his personal interest is the fact that this was apparently carried out at Wolsey’s expense. The episode involved him in at least one trip to Norwich;
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in the drawing up of a ‘book’ in which the conflicting claims
were set out; in an an ultimatum in 1522 to settle the matter within the week or else to submit to a decision imposed by outside commissioners, in drawing up a composition, or agreement, late in 1523, and in a threat of
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proceedings in 1524. In August of that year a final agreement was reached, and in 1525 it was incorporated into a new city charter.
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Wolsey was instrumental in at least two other similar, though relatively minor, disputes: one between the Charterhouse and the city of Hull concerning an area of the town called the Trippett and a rather more complicated franchise case concerning Bishop’s Lynn.
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In both cases solutions appear to have been found, and although the second did not, it seems, involve the conciliar courts, it illustrates Wolsey’s skill at bringing constructive pressure to bear. Here the key seems to have been provided by the use of the
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proceedings to challenge the franchisal rights of everyone in Bishop’s Lynn, and then to discontinue the proceedings when the parties agreed to settle their differences – a ploy he had also used at one point in his negotiations with the the prior and city of Norwich.