The King's Cardinal: The Rise and Fall of Thomas Wolsey (Pimlico) (122 page)

Earlier we saw a similar escalation in the government’s response to enclosure, culminating with the proclamation of February 1529 empowering sheriffs and enclosure commissioners to destroy the enclosures of anyone failing to comply with the law. What is not true, however, is that Thomas More, on succeeding Wolsey as lord chancellor, pronounced such action to be illegal. Admittedly, the landlord involved in the Thingden case did make such claim, but More’s judgment was that it was only the subsequent actions of the inhabitants, not those of the sheriff, that were against the law.
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Thus, in arriving at his judgment, More was making no adverse comment on Wolsey’s constitutional propriety, for the good reason that none was called for. And recent attempts to draw a distinction between his
unconstitutional and Thomas Cromwell’s constitutional behaviour should surely be resisted.
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The use of parliament in the 1530s had everything to do with matters of high policy, nothing to do with more general concerns for the common weal – and if one truly wants to see unconstitutional behaviour, then it is to the 1530s that one should turn. Or to put it another way, nobody in the sixteenth century would have called a parliament to pass legislation about unlawful games, enclosure or the like, so that the fact that Wolsey did not either should not be a matter for comment. What should be, though, is the evidence that these proclamations provide of his persistence in trying to grapple with the problems of the common weal. It may also be true that, as Hall suggests, his efforts may not always have been popular, but then neither would have been the frequent calling of parliament!

Wolsey’s efforts to combat the plague and other epidemics may not have been popular either, despite his obvious good intentions. What is interesting is that these did involve a new departure.
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What may have prompted Wolsey here was the sweating sickness. All epidemics are alarming, but while the bubonic plague, and even typhus and smallpox, all of which were present in England at this time, had more devastating effects on the mortality rates, the Sweat did have a number of features that made it especially feared. The first attack probably occurred in 1485, and the second in 1508-9, but when it broke out in 1517 and then again in 1525-6 and 1528 it was still a new phenomenon. That it was apparently confined to England, hence its title, ‘English Sweat’, cannot have helped morale, especially for those who saw illness as a judgment from God. It was no respecter of persons, so that its victims included noblemen and courtiers such as Lords Clinton and Grey in 1517 and Sir William Compton in 1528. There remains a mystery about precisely what kind of disease it was. Probably it was not bubonic, but viral, and so in some ways more infectious than the plague, though not, as it happened, so lethal. Its main symptom, profuse sweating, led within twenty-four hours either to death or to a fairly rapid recovery so that, as Hall put it, one could be ‘merry at dinner and dead at supper’.
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Henry considered himself something of an expert on its treatment and, when in June 1528 first Anne Boleyn and then Wolsey were struck down, he bombarded them both with advice. His prescription was ‘small suppers’ and little wine, ‘once in the week to use the the pills of Rasis; and if it come in any wise to sweat moderately the full time, without suffering it to run in; which by your grace’s physicians, with a possetale, having certain herbs clarified in it, shall facilly, if need be, be provoked and continued’. Of course, it would have been better if they had avoided catching it in the first place, and Henry was quite clear that the key to that was ‘to keep … out of all air where any of that infection is’.
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When anybody anywhere near him went down with it, Henry was the first to take his own advice by removing himself as quickly as possible. Brian Tuke, on the other hand, seems to
have thought that the illness was largely psychosomatic, noting that it only needed a rumour of its presence in London for everyone to believe they had it. This did not stop him from thinking that it was better to avoid contact with the infection if possible and to prevent people congregating in large numbers when the disease was known to be present.
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Isolation was also at the heart of Wolsey’s preventative measures, as it had been on the continent; indeed, it is quite possible that it was continental measures that provided him with his model for the royal proclamation of January 1518, for in many respects it was similar to plague orders issued in Paris and other French towns not long before. In fact the continent was way ahead of England in its management of epidemics, Italian towns having made elaborate provisions to cope with them in response to the Black Death of the mid-fourteenth century.
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Why nothing similar had been introduced in England is a mystery, but one thing that may have prompted Wolsey to make the first public provision for combating major epidemics was his close contact with England’s leading medical man, Thomas Linacre, an academic of great distinction and for a time Wolsey’s own doctor. Not only did Linacre dedicate one of his translations of Galen,
De pulsuum usu
, to Wolsey, but he also obtained his help in founding a college of physicians in 1518.
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The proclamation of January 1518 ordered that all infected houses in London should be marked by bundles of straw attached to ten-foot poles overhanging the streets, these to be left out for forty days. For thirty-eight days after an attack any member of an infected household was to carry a white stick when they went out, while infected clothes were not to be worn for three months.
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These were stringent measures, imposing some inconvenience and financial burden. When in April Thomas More discovered the Sweat in Oxford he decided to enforce Wolsey’s decree there, and received the Council’s approval for doing so. However, after much debate, it advised against the banning of the Austin Friars’ fair shortly to be held there. Since it would be attended by merchants from London, to hold it would, admittedly, result in the spread of more infection, but the Council feared ‘grudges and murmurs’ of Londoners, who ‘would think that men went about utterly to destroy them’.
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However, it was Wolsey who was allowed the last word, which was only right because, unlike the king and those of the Council in attendance on him, he had remained in London and therefore more in touch with the mood of the City. Undoubtedly, some Londoners were hostile to the measures taken to combat the Sweat and the City authorities had been forced to seek out those who had uttered seditious words against the proclamation and, interestingly, against the king for having so conspicuously fled the City.
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Whether Wolsey’s remaining behind was entirely to his credit is not entirely clear, for London was the obvious centre of operations for his chief preoccupation at this time, the complicated negotiations with the French that led to the Treaty of London. But this did not prevent him from taking a close interest in the problems of the City and not just those caused by the
Sweat. Food appears to have been scarce, prices were high, and above all the riots of the previous year were a reminder that London’s problems could never be ignored.
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It could be that more people have heard of Evil May Day than have heard of Wolsey. At any rate, it is one of those events in English history, like, perhaps, the Field of Cloth of Gold, that have somehow caught the imagination without it being very clear why. It may have something to do with ingrained fears of the ‘many-headed monster’, for riots and revolts do seem to be remembered, even when, like those associated with the earl of Essex or Lord George Gordon, they did not in the end amount to much. At any rate on the eve of May Day 1517 substantial numbers of Londoners, mainly apprentices and journeymen, went on the rampage, their anger directed against the many foreign residents in the City who were involved not only in trade but also, and more importantly, in manufacture. The estimate is that there were some three thousand aliens in London at this time. Some were wealthy merchants and/or bankers such as More’s Italian friend Antonio Bonvisi, or the German merchants of the Hanseatic League with their important trading privileges, and in the Steelyard, not far from London Bridge, there was a very visible symbol of those privileges. In 1493, when a trade war with the Netherlands was breaking out, the Steelyard had been attacked by an angry mob. In 1517, though, it was not the wealthier foreign merchants who were the principal problem, even though certain commercial interests within the City were pushing, as they always did, for some curbing of their powers, but the less wealthy artisans and skilled craftsmen, especially those in tanning and brewing. The great bulk of these came from the Low Countries, in the past mostly Dutch speaking but more recent arrivals tended to speak French. The result was just that mix required to bring about racial antagonism, in which often quite realistic fears about losing out economically to the new arrivals, who in early sixteenth-century London were often highly skilled and thus very competitive, combine with much more irrational fears of the unknown. Anti-semitism is one manifestation of this. Nowadays, it is more usually associated with colour, but language can be just as divisive. Moreover, then, as now, immigrants tended to congregate in the same areas, thereby maintaining a much higher profile than if they had been scattered randomly through the City. And by living together the process of assimilation was slowed down.
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Evil May Day has all the appearance of a race riot. It did not come out of a cloudless sky. There had been similar riots throughout the Middle Ages, not only in London but in places such as Southampton where there were also large foreign communities. Foreigners had often been a target of rioters and rebels – for instance, in the Peasants’ Revolt in 1381 and Jack Cade’s rebellion in 1450. As for the Crown, it took up then, as many governments take up now, a very ambiguous position. It was perfectly aware that foreigners were unpopular and that foreign competition might be harmful. Yet it also knew that the English economy and standard of living could not be maintained without a large input of money, goods and skills from abroad. Moreover, foreigners were an invaluable source of cash, either as bankers or
because they could be sold privileges, such as rights of denizenship, enabling them to live and work in England, or be made to pay special duties on the goods they traded in. The result was that foreigners were allowed into the country in quite large numbers both to trade and to seek employment, but their activities were closely regulated. In Wolsey’s time, even in the aftermath of Evil May Day, the Crown seems to have performed the same kind of balancing act as it had previously. Through much of the 1520s the City was pushing hard to restrain foreign merchants at least enough to ensure that money accrued to the City from their activities. In 1523 an Act was passed compelling foreign tradesmen to employ at least one English apprentice and not more than two foreign journeymen, though this may have been a relaxation of previous Acts prohibiting the employment of foreigners.
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When in 1526 Londoners were forbidden to trade with certain foreign merchants who, in the opinion of the City authorities, had been evading trading regulations, these merchants complained to the king. Wolsey was brought in to mediate, and with some success in that both sides dropped their complaints. On the other hand, when in the same year French merchants complained of the City’s treatment, he seems to have supported the French. This cannot have helped his popularity at a time when he was anyway thought of as far too pro-French and it does seem that xenophobia was running high throughout the decade. But Wolsey’s action on this occasion probably had very little to do with any great desire to please the French. Instead, his principal concern was almost certainly to resist attempts by the City to interfere in the regulation of foreign trade, which the Crown considered to be its own preserve.
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But what there was not in 1517 was any major dispute between the City, or any particular interest group within it, and foreign merchants that might directly explain the explosion of racial antagonism; nor does there appear to be any other obvious reason, such as a sudden dislocation of trade or a catastrophic harvest. It is true that England’s efforts to bring the French to heel without actually declaring war against them were failing, and, as was suggested earlier, this may have led to some unease at court.
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But it is not immediately clear why this unease should have transferred itself to City circles, for England’s trading position was not affected. On the other hand, some accounts of the rioting do suggest that the mob’s anger was especially directed against the French, which could have reflected the anti-French stance that the government was taking abroad. Still, foreign policy hardly provides a full explanation for Evil May Day, and more to the point may have been a series of minor incidents going back at least to the previous spring, when anti-alien placards had been posted on the doors of some London churches.
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There was almost certainly some deliberate stirring by particular people or interest groups, though only scraps of information have survived. In February or early March the Mercers’ Company had sought the help of the earl of Surrey ‘to subdue all strangers that be breakers of the privileges of the said City’.
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At the instigation of a certain John Lincoln, the preacher at the Easter Monday sermon at St Mary’s Spital in London, had played upon anti-alien feeling, declaring that it was the duty of all Englishmen
‘to hurt and grieve aliens for the common weal’.
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Then on the day that the riot began certain citizens including a skinner, William Daniel, had been bound on pain of death not to hurt any Frenchmen or strangers, while their servants were not to be allowed ‘to go forth May day now next coming’.
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