The King's Cardinal: The Rise and Fall of Thomas Wolsey (Pimlico) (65 page)

Since the main public function of the Council was to provide justice, the presence of a large number of lawyers is not very surprising. That half of the lawyers were churchmen and therefore not trained in the common law is only significant if some major clash between common and civil law is assumed. It has, however, been shown that there was no such clash.
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Neither was it Wolsey’s intention that Richmond’s Council should replace the existing common law machinery, that provided by the commissions of oyer and terminer, the assizes, and quarter sessions.
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In the running of this machinery its members would play an important part, but the Council itself would have the same kind of supervisory role as the king’s Council in Star Chamber, the only difference being that as it was on the spot it could perform the role all the more effectively. It also had administrative functions, but the temptation may be to read too much into this. For instance, much is often made of the fact that Richmond himself was made warden-general; the suggestion being that the warden’s functions were assumed by Richmond’s Council. In fact it was the
deputy-wardens – initially the earls of Cumberland and Westmorland – who did most of the work, and were able to deal directly with Wolsey.
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With a Clifford or a Neville appointed to high positions in the North, it is not possible to argue that the setting up of Richmond’s Council marks a major step in the Crown’s usurpation of the noblemen’s position there. Rather, it was the best available solution to a number of different problems, not least the financial one. To set up as resident overlord of the North someone from elsewhere would have cost the Crown a lot of money.
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Of course, even a Northern nobleman cost something, wardens of Marches received fees, were given other offices with fees attached, and so on. But the Northern nobleman did at least have his own residences and household to provide a basis. Anyone else would have to start
de novo
, and, moreover, would have to outshine his Northern compeers in display and hospitality. By giving to Richmond the estates that belonged to Henry’s grandmother, Margaret Beaufort countess of Richmond, many of which were in the North as they derived from attainted Neville land, the Crown provided him with an income of over £4,000, and it was out of this income that his Council’s activity was funded.
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There were precedents for what might be called the royal solution, Edward IV’s gift of lands to his brother Richard, which provided the basis for Richard’s rule in the North, being the most obvious.
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The alternative, tried on the Welsh Marches,
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of using a bishop, whose position could financed out of his episcopal revenues, was not available here, because the obvious candidate as archbishop of York and from 1523 bishop of Durham was Wolsey, and he was rather occupied elsewhere!

The argument presented here that the choice of Richmond and his Council was almost one of
force majeure
rather than one eagerly sought by Henry and Wolsey cannot be proved, for no statement of their reasons for making the choice has survived. However, that it may be the right argument is suggested by subsequent events, and in particular by the rapid ending of the Council’s jurisdiction in the Marches and the appointment in December 1527 of Henry Percy 6th earl of Northumberland as warden of the East and Middle Marches. It is only fair to state that these events have been used to support a quite different argument, one which sees them as a defeat for the alleged new policy of direct intervention in Northern affairs inaugurated in 1525, and a defeat that was brought about by pressure from the Percy family to be restored to their rightful place at the head of Northern society.
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What is common to both views is the fact that the experiment of giving a Council of the North some jurisdiction over the Marches had not been a success. In a letter to Wolsey, written in August 1526, Magnus had pointed out some of the dangers and
inconveniences that resulted from Tynedale men – these some of the most unruly men in the North – having to come into Yorkshire to act as pledges for the good behaviour of those left behind.
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Just over a year later, most of Richmond’s Council were crying out for a great nobleman to be resident in Northumberland.
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The reason for their distress was the activity of Sir William Lisle and his eldest son, Humphrey, who in July 1527 had broken out of Newcastle prison, releasing at the same time a number of fellow prisoners.
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Ever since, and in league with many of the most troublesome Northern clans such as the Armstrongs, Carletons and Dodds, these two had been terrorizing the Marches while using Scotland as a bolthole.
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Neither Richmond’s Council nor the deputy-wardens, especially Sir William Eure in the Middle March who had borne the brunt of Lisle’s rampaging, were able to bring Lisle to justice, and by the beginning of November the situation appeared to be out of control.
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The Lisles had close connections with the Percys. Sir William’s father had fought at Flodden in the Percy retinue, while in 1522 Sir William himself had fought under Sir William Percy, the 5th earl’s brother. On 25 March 1525 the earl had appointed him constable of Alnwick.
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But the Lisles, as lords of Felton, were quite an important family in their own right, having rather more status and wealth than a typical border clan such as the Armstrongs. Moreover, in 1523 Sir William, as captain of Wark (a royal appointment), had been the hero of the hour when he had successfully defended the castle against the invading Scots. This had led Henry to ask the earl of Surrey to pass on to Lisle his monarch’s congratulations.
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However, though a cut above the border ‘clans’, the Lisles had close contacts with them, especially in Redesdale where the Lisles held property. Like the clans, they were of the utmost help to the Crown in times of war, but found peacetime irksome, and were always willing to take the law into their own hands, as, for instance, Sir William’s contretemps with Roger Heron, with whose family he was often at loggerheads, demonstrates. When Sir William subsequently appeared before Richmond’s Council with his son Humphrey, he was alleged to have said that he had already ‘ruffled’ with Wolsey, and now had every intention of plucking him by the nose.
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Furthermore, the son had apparently put an apparitor, acting on behalf of one of Wolsey’s legatine commissarys, in the stocks.
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Following their examination, father and son were indicted at Newcastle assizes for riot and forcible entry and were placed in Newcastle prison from which, as we have seen, they subsequently escaped.
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Even before he embarked on his embassy to Amiens and Compiègne in July 1527, Wolsey had become directly involved in the Lisles’ activities, but on his
return in late September he was faced with an increasingly serious crisis. The Lisles were by now plundering the Marches and the adjoining country more or less at will, and they were able to do so mainly because they were able to use Scotland as a comparatively safe base from which to mount their raids.
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Wolsey’s response was first to put pressure on the Scots to move against the Lisles.
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Secondly, in December 1527 he appointed the 6th earl of Northumberland warden of the East and Middle Marches with a special brief to put an end to the Lisles’ activities.
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On Sunday 25 January 1528 the earl was returning from church to his castle at Alnwick when he was met by fifteen penitents in white shirts and with halters around their necks. On his approach, they knelt and ‘submitted themselves without any manner of condition unto the king’s gracious mercy’.
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The leader of the group was Sir William Lisle. The appointment of the 6th earl had brought almost immediate success, but does this mean that to him should go the credit? And if so, should the episode be seen as evidence that the North was ungovernable without the active co-operation of the Percy family, a fact of life that, in making the earl’s appointment, Henry and Wolsey had had reluctantly to come to terms with?
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The Lisles certainly claimed the 6th earl as their ‘good lord’, and thus someone from whom they could expect mercy, and in return he did go to some lengths to save not Sir William’s life, as is sometimes stated, but his two sons.
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And the reason he gave to Wolsey for doing so was because ‘William Lisle is kyned and allied of the borders amongst them that I must need put my life in trust with many times’, if he was to serve successfully as Henry’s warden.
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The earl’s point is a fair one. Families such as the Lisles were just as much a fact of Northern life as the Percys. They would not disappear or quickly change their ways, however strong and frequent were the exhortations from the South for them to do so, and besides, in times of conflict with Scotland, their warlike propensities were of great advantage to the English Crown. All this may not have been fully appreciated by the Crown, or even by Wolsey, though it might be more accurate to say that it wished to play it both ways just because there were two different problems: defending the border against the Scots, and maintaining law and order when there was no immediate Scottish threat. The Crown was happy enough to congratulate a Lisle for his defence of Wark, but equally happy to put him in prison
for ruffling with the sheriff of Northumberland. This ambiguity was all very well when one was sitting in London, but it undoubtedly made life difficult for those in the North who had to deal with the likes of the Lisles.

It is not clear whether the Lisles presented a particular difficulty to the 6th earl because of his family’s close connection with them. It was his father whom Sir William Lisle had known well and who had made him constable of Alnwick and, given that father and son got on so badly, the suggestion that Sir William would have assumed that he would receive special treatment from the son is probably wrong. Indeed, that he could even have hoped for it is more likely to be an indication of his desperate plight, something that the emphasis often placed on the ‘feudal’ relationship between the Percys and the Lisles rather obscures.

The fact is that in January 1528 the Lisles had little option but to submit. Admittedly, it is hard to assess how effective the English appeal to the earl of Angus – at this time still in control of Scottish affairs – to do something about the Lisles was. The 6th earl was to deny that he had received any help from that quarter,
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and both Henry and Wolsey had complained that not enough was being done.
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This Angus had denied and, given the prospect of Albany’s return and his own overthrow that the improving relations between England and France opened up, it seems likely that he would have been anxious to do everything he could to keep in with Henry and Wolsey.
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His problem was that his control over the Scottish Marches, where the Lisles were harbouring, was not all that secure. Still, he was probably able to do enough to persuade the Lisles that Scotland could not for long remain a safe haven.
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More important in exerting pressure on the Lisles was Wolsey’s decision to order the new warden of the East and Middle Marches to go into the trouble spots such as Redesdale and Tynedale, where the Lisles were getting a lot of support, and to extract pledges whereby certain individuals from each family were made responsible for the good behaviour of the rest.
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Such a ploy was by no means new, but Northumberland was able to get across that in this instance the government meant business – helped no doubt by the proclamations, issued on Wolsey’s orders, calling upon the rebels to submit to the king’s mercy and threatening excommunication and terrible punishment on their families if they did not do so.
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By the end of January Lisle was thus a desperate man, unsure of his base in Scotland but all too sure that the new warden was determined to bring him to justice. The offer of a pardon, which it must be stressed came not from the warden but from the Crown, may well have seemed to him the only possible way of saving anything from an impossible situation. Whether Lisle was helped to this conclusion by the fact that the person he would have to submit to was a Percy is impossible to tell, but if he hoped for some special treatment, he was soon to be disappointed, at least insofar as his own person was concerned. By the beginning of April, various parts of his anatomy were decorating conspicuous public places in Newcastle.
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Nevertheless, it remains true that where the deputy wardens and Richmond’s Council had failed, the 6th earl had succeeded, and it may be that the prestige of a Percy was an important factor in the Crown’s ability to tighten the noose around the rebels’ necks. This is not, however, the same thing as saying that the rebels’ activities forced the Crown to return to a Percy rule of the North, nor does it give any support to the suggestion that the Percys encouraged the rampages of the Lisles in 1527 in order to force the Crown to turn to them.
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The difficulty with this latter point is that, as an explanation, it is not required. The Lisles’ quarrel with the Herons, with which the whole episode had begun, has every appearance of being genuine, and was certainly all too typical, while their rampage following their break-out from prison appears to have been one long act of revenge against the sheriff of Northumberland who had tried to intervene in the original quarrel.
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Furthermore, it seems too altruistic of Sir William to have risked his own life and those of his family merely to further the interests of the Percys! And, of course, if the argument presented here can be accepted, there was no need for the Crown to be forced into accepting Percy rule. Its objection had been to a particular Percy, the 5th earl of Northumberland. There was, at least initially, no objection to his son. Indeed, it looks very much as if, brought up in Wolsey’s household, he had been groomed for high office in the North. What had almost certainly prevented an earlier appointment were those major disagreements with his father already referred to. Once the father died, in May 1527, the way was left clear for the son’s appointment, which took place only six months later. The activities of the Lisles may well explain the precise timing, but there is no reason to suppose that it would not have come about at some stage, and sooner rather than later.