The King's Cardinal: The Rise and Fall of Thomas Wolsey (Pimlico) (102 page)

The fact that Francis’s and Charles’s resources were more stretched than Henry’s helped to lessen the disparity between them. Moreover, the secret of the successful financing of war was not so much how much credit one might eventually obtain but how quickly and efficiently one could get large sums of money to a particular spot at a particular time; and arguably the English were rather better, at any rate than Charles, at doing this. It was, after all, an Imperial army that in 1527 sacked Rome for lack of pay, not an English one. And when for the only time during the Great Enterprise English and Imperial armies co-operated on any scale, for the ‘march on Paris’ in October and November 1523, it was the Imperial army, not the English, that failed to receive its wages.
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Not so many months later the emperor was recording in a private memo that ‘however much I save and scrape, it is often difficult for me to find the necessary means’.
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None of this is meant to suggest that if either Francis or the emperor, or the two of them together, chose to concentrate their resources against England, she would not have been outgunned, and it will be argued later that as regards the vital matter of Henry’s divorce, Charles was to prove to have a few too many guns for Wolsey’s good. But in assessing the viability of Wolsey’s foreign policy it is important to bear in mind that England’s main rivals had as many financial difficulties as she did, and that in most circumstances they were not prepared to concentrate their resources against her. Both these factors enabled Henry and Wolsey to play a much greater role in European affairs than their comparatively slender resources might, at first glance, appear to have allowed.

What Henry and Wolsey could not have done, however, was to play such a role without a fairly massive contribution from the English taxpayer. Moreover, recently it has been argued very persuasively that in 1525 vital decisions were forced upon them by a lack of money, as taxpayers finally revolted against having to finance their too ambitious plans.
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In what follows such an argument will be resisted, but however convincing the refutation may be, the revolt did take place and has to be taken as evidence of some unusual strain on the body politic, a strain undoubtedly imposed by war. Thus, if England could indeed finance her foreign policy with comparative ease, as was earlier claimed, emphasis needs to be placed upon the
qualification. And the general proscription of 1522 has to be evidence of some concern about England’s ability to pay for enterprises abroad. So also do the efforts made, at about this time, to modernize a system of parliamentary taxation that had seen little alteration in some hundred and fifty years.

The usual practice in the late Middle Ages was for a parliamentary grant to be made in the form of ‘tenths’ and ‘fifteenths’ – representing the rate at which the tax had been levied, that is, at one-tenth of the wealth of those individuals residing within a borough and at one-fifteenth for the remainder.
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But ever since 1334 all attempts to reassess an individual’s wealth each time the tax was levied had been abandoned. Instead, each local community was allocated a fixed sum, based upon what had been customarily raised from the area, and was then left to its own devices as to how to raise the amount. It was a system that had advantages for both Crown and taxpayer. From the Crown’s point of view, it was simple to administer and the revenue was certain. For the taxpayer, its initial advantage lay in the fact that his personal wealth was not submitted to frequent scrutiny by central government. But as the years went by, the system acquired the additional advantage that the fixed sums, anyway significantly reduced in 1433 and 1446 and subject to a great number of exemptions, increasingly underestimated real wealth.
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Of course, it was possible for the Crown to compensate for this shortfall by asking for more and more fifteenths and tenths, but to do so was politically difficult. For one thing, the Crown had to provide a convincing reason for any request for money – virtually the only acceptable one being the need to provide for the defence of the kingdom – and this was not always possible. For another, in such a sensitive matter as taxation, people were very quick to react to novelty of any kind. One case had been the famous poll tax of 1381, and the result had been the Peasants’ Revolt. Another had been Henry
VII
’s ‘subsidies’ of 1489 and 1497. Both had resulted in rebellions – the first in Yorkshire and the second, while starting in Cornwall, had only been ended on the battlefield of Blackheath. One way and another, then, the existing system of parliamentary taxation was not to the Crown’s advantage: the yield from any one grant was less and less, but any attempt at change met with great resistance.

It is evidence of the self-confidence of Henry
VIII
’s government that it was prepared to make a new attempt, despite the disastrous results that had attended Henry
VII
’s efforts. The way chosen was to return to something not unlike an individual assessment of wealth, but without insisting upon a precise figure. Instead, certain bands of taxation were laid down, so that all that had to be established was what band any particular person was in. Thus both over-complexity and too much interference in an individual’s financial affairs were avoided. Moreover, the source of any person’s wealth was divided into three categories – land, moveable goods and wages – and an individual was liable only for that category which yielded the largest amount. Again this must have eased the task of assessment, while the fact that not all an individual’s wealth was liable to tax may have helped to reconcile tax-payers to the new set-up. It was also a graduated tax, those in the higher bands paying at a higher rate. Whether the fact that the yield was not fixed had any advantages for the Crown is unclear. Probably not, for any kind of budgeting is made more difficult
by uncertainty; and attempts at a similar form of taxation in Henry
VII
’s reign had raised very much less than had been expected. Be that as it may, the Tudor ‘subsidy’, when first introduced, was a more flexible tax than the old one, and one that corresponded much more accurately to the real wealth of the country, so that even at a lower rate, more money would accrue to the Crown. Thus the subsidy of 1515 at 6
d
. in the pound, or a fortieth, had brought in about £44,900, as compared with the £29,800 that a fifteenth and tenth traditionally yielded. The fact that the Commons accepted the new tax has to be considered a major victory for the Crown. But what part did Wolsey play in its introduction?

No precise answer to this question can be given. Clearly, Henry
VII
’s subsidies prefigure the more successful innovations of 1512 and 1515, and as regards the former especially, it would be surprising if Wolsey had played a major role, if only because his influence was not yet fully established. Moreover, the only remotely financial office he ever held was that of king’s almoner, whose function was peripheral to the main business of administering the Crown’s finances. True, the lack of specialization amongst early Tudor officials may disguise the amount of financial expertise that Wolsey had acquired, and his deep involvement in the organization of the war effort in 1512 and 1513 meant that he could hardly have avoided acquiring some. Still, there were many leading officials, such as Sir Thomas Lovell and Sir John Heron, whose involvement in the Crown’s finances, going back well into the previous reign, was much more extensive than Wolsey’s, and it is on such people that the search for the authors of the new tax should concentrate – though any search will quickly come up against a lack of evidence. So far all that has been discovered is an original draft of the subsidy Act drawn up for the 1513 parliament by a future baron of the Exchequer, John Hales.
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The suspicion must be that it is to his skill in drafting rather than to his financial expertise that this discovery bears witness, but in any event there is no evidence to associate him closely with Wolsey.

There seems, therefore, to be no compelling reason to think of Wolsey as the originator of the Tudor subsidy; but insofar as what was important was not so much the idea – which even in Henry
VII
’s reign was not original – but the political will to persist with it, then his connection looms rather larger. It is probably significant, for instance, that in 1523, when Wolsey’s central role in government is unquestionable, the request for a subsidy was not, as it had been earlier, coupled with one for a fifteenth and tenth. The earlier coupling suggests a lack of confidence – which was to be justified – that a subsidy alone would bring in the required amount. In 1523 no such safety net was thought necessary, in part because the general proscription had provided the government with a much more accurate assessment of the country’s wealth and hence of what a subsidy would bring in. Moreover, the 1523 subsidy Act appears to have been so well drawn up that it became the blueprint for successive Acts. It also included some important new features. For the first time local collectors were to receive payment, which may have made their difficult task more palatable. The assessment of the nobility was transferred from the hands of local commissioners to those of a high-powered committee, presided over by Wolsey himself as lord chancellor. The purpose of this measure was not to do down the nobility; indeed, it has been suggested that it may
even have appealed to their
amour propre
by freeing them from having to submit their financial affairs to the scrutiny of local gentry. On the other hand, it would be much more difficult to deceive such a committee, and the measure bears all the hallmark of Wolsey’s concern, as shown in the search for ‘indifferent justice’, to ensure that the nobility lived up to the obligations that their high rank imposed.

Before we consider how much the country was asked to contribute towards the Great Enterprise, some attempt must be made to sum up Wolsey’s attitude to the Crown’s finances. As was mentioned earlier, the impression is often conveyed of a rather profligate Wolsey, who while failing to build upon Henry
VII
’s careful housekeeping, lacked the bureaucratic flair and ‘modern’ methods of his successor, Thomas Cromwell. In fact, character judgement need play no part in explaining the different financial approaches of these three men. Given the collapse of royal revenue in the early years of his reign, Henry
VII
’s close involvement in financial administration is readily understandable. Cromwell, for his part, had to cope with the problem of processing the enormous influx of money that resulted from Henry
VIII
’s assault on the Church. Thus both men were faced with problems that needed immediate attention, and there is no reason to suppose that in similar circumstances Wolsey would not have risen to the challenge. As it was, his circumstances were different, and the way that he responded reflects this much more than any alleged character defect.

Henry
VII
’s greatest contribution to the successful management of the royal finances was not his willingness to devote his own time to auditing the accounts, though no doubt this helped, but his decision early in his reign to return to the highly successful Yorkist system of chamber finance, thereby bypassing the ministrations of an increasingly moribund Exchequer.
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Despite the very significant increases in royal revenue that resulted, in which admittedly luck played a part, an attempt has been made to portray chamber finance as somehow old-fashioned, allegedly because it was short on that apparently modern characteristic, bureaucratic procedure.
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Quite why this should be considered modern is not entirely clear, for to label as modern the labyrinthine workings of Byzantium – a fair description of the medieval Exchequer – does not altogether convince. Still, as long as its normative connotations are ignored, the distinction may serve. Compared with what it replaced, the chamber system was not very bureaucratic. This was its strength and its weakness. It undoubtedly gave to the financial administration of the Crown a greater flexibility both in the collection and, perhaps even more importantly, in the disbursement of royal revenues; its leasing policies could more easily be adjusted to current economic practice, and a much more financially orientated supervision and auditing of the accounts could be introduced. What was not so good for the common weal was the uncertainty and, perhaps, arbitrariness that the abandonment of the Exchequer practices introduced. Securing the Crown’s revenues was a difficult business. It was not just that people might fail to pay what was owing, or even that they might challenge what the Crown alleged they owed, but inevitably there were some royal officials who were bent on cheating the Crown
and whom it would wish to bring to book. All these matters were traditionally dealt with in the court of Exchequer, which, most importantly, was a ‘court of record’ whose decisions had full legal standing and whose procedures for ensuring attendance and such matters were formally established.

It was because the chamber and the court of general surveyors, which in practice had taken on many of the functions of the Exchequer court, lacked full legal standing that they came under threat at the beginning of Henry
VIII
’s reign, as part of a general reaction to the first Tudor’s allegedly arbitrary methods. For a short time the Exchequer recovered much of its control over the collection and processing of the royal revenues, but with predictable results: the old problems returned and revenues declined. What then occurred was a gradual restoration of the chamber system of finance, so that by 1523 it was more or less performing as it had under Henry
VII
. In particular, the general surveyors could act once again as a court of law, summoning people to appear before them on their own initiative and able to enforce their decisions by, amongst other measures, the hated recognizance, by which the defendant concerned promised to perform what he was ordered to on pain of a fine, though now with an upper limit of £100. Moreover, this return to the chamber system had been brought about by successive Acts of parliament, which gave it just the kind of legal standing that previously had been lacking.
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