The King's Cardinal: The Rise and Fall of Thomas Wolsey (Pimlico) (72 page)

One of the great difficulties in arriving at any verdict is the almost complete lack of evidence about the activities of the Council for this period. The view that all was bad derives entirely from memoranda and letters of the early 1530s, including a letter from a fellow councillor of Veysey, Sir Edward Croft, in which he stated that Wales was ‘far out of order’: he wanted a man to be sent down ‘to use the sword of justice … otherwise the Welsh will wax so wild it will not be easy to bring them into order again’.
²⁵⁵
He was critical of the clerical element on the Council because, he alleged, as churchmen they had no power to inflict the death penalty – a remark which seems to have been a complete red herring. Both under Veysey and most spectacularly so under Veysey’s successor and fellow bishop, Rowland Lee, the Council did impose the death penalty.
²⁵⁶
He also commented on the lord president’s absence – and this has contributed to the view that Veysey was indolent. At about the same time Henry informed Veysey that he had received many complaints that not only was cattle-stealing on the increase in the Marches, but it was going unpunished. Much of the blame for this must rest with the Council which was to rectify the matter immediately.
²⁵⁷

There is other evidence from this period that all was not well with Wales, and it would be foolish to argue that the criticisms were without foundation. All the same,
there may have been a tendency to take them too seriously. Royal complaints were often on the sharp side, and the fact that Veysey was a bishop who had been closely associated with Princess Mary may not have helped him much in the early 1530s, even though he had been careful to comply with the king’s wishes over the divorce. He may also have lacked the enormous energy and drive of his successor, Rowland Lee – though it is partly the chance survival of Lee’s letters to Cromwell that enables us to make a judgement on Lee’s dynamism. At the time of his replacement by Lee in 1534 he was already in his early seventies, which alone may explain quite a lot. But, given his earlier record, it seems most unlikely that he was incompetent or that in Wolsey’s time at least he was presiding over a rapidly deteriorating situation, a view supported by the bits of evidence that have survived. Sometime in 1525 or 1526, the prior of Llanthony was requested to make an indenture for the administration of justice in his lordship that was entirely in line with the instructions given to the Council to make new indentures with all the marcher lords.
²⁵⁸
On 1 September 1526 Veysey reported that he had received the king’s commission and Wolsey’s instructions, and had sent monitions to the shires for their execution.
²⁵⁹
He also excused his hasty writing on the grounds that he was so busy. In March 1528 he could write ‘that these parts under the Princess’s authority are in great quietness’.
²⁶⁰
Four months later he informed Wolsey that the matter between Lord Ferrers and ‘young Mr Rhys’ was pacified
²⁶¹
– but this proved to be premature.

It was suggested earlier that there had been no great political intent behind the decision in 1525 not to appoint Rhys ap Griffith to his grandfather’s office of justiciar of South Wales. Be that as it may, the intrusion of a stranger into his family’s sphere of influence was resented by the young Rhys ap Griffith, leading to those matters which in July 1528 Veysey hoped had been pacified. However, in the following March ap Griffith was complaining to Wolsey that Lord Ferrers’s deputies continued to vex his poor tenants, and in order to prevent this, he asked to become a deputy himself and also chamberlain of South Wales, the post his father had held, offering to pay Lord Ferrers whatever sum Wolsey thought appropriate.
²⁶²
Nothing seems to have come of this request, and by the middle of June he was a prisoner in Carmarthen castle for having, allegedly, attempted to kill Lord Ferrers. It was further alleged that a hundred and forty of his supporters, spurred on by his wife, the former Lady Katherine Howard, had marched on the town in an effort to rescue their leader.
²⁶³
The difficulty with the so-called ‘Welsh insurrection’ of Rhys ap Griffith is to decide whether it was indeed an insurrection, and, if so, how Welsh was it. Of course, if one hundred and forty men did march on Carmarthen the matter was of some seriousness, but there is reason to doubt this. For one thing, in Lord Ferrers’ bill to Star Chamber, out of the hundred and forty he could only produce twenty-seven names.
²⁶⁴
Moreover, when the alleged hundred and forty got
to Carmarthen they do not seem to have done anything – which, given that they were supposed to have been summoned from all the counties of Carmarthen, Cardigan, and Pembroke, would indicate a curious loss of nerve. And if it was obvious that an insurrection had been planned with the murder of Lord Ferrers as one of its aims, it is strange that the reaction of the Council in the Marches was to put both Ferrers and ap Griffith under bonds to appear before Star Chamber, meanwhile releasing ap Griffith. For what happened in Star Chamber we are dependent on the account of the soldier and chronicler Ellis Griffith, an anglicized Welshman who spent much of his life in the service of Sir Robert Wingfield. No lover of the House of Dinefwr, he appears to have concurred with the views of many who lived within twenty miles of Sir Rhys ap Thomas that ‘there was not in possession of the poor yeoman any land which, if he fancied it, he did not obtain’.
²⁶⁵
Nevertheless, when reporting on the trial he wrote that he had heard there ‘the ugliest accusations and charges that two gentlemen could bring against each other’
²⁶⁶
– which in the circumstances was surely a vote for ap Griffith. And according to him, Wolsey took a similar view, censuring both men but being more severe on Lord Ferrers, whom he accused of bad temper and a lack of sense in quarrelling with someone young enough to be his son. But at the same time, he took the precaution of not allowing Rhys ap Griffith to return to Wales.
²⁶⁷

This account of the early stages of the so-called ‘Welsh insurrection’ does not support the view that it was Wolsey who saved ap Griffith from execution in 1529 – this for a number of rather speculative reasons, including the wish, at a critical juncture in his own career, to keep in with the 3rd duke of Norfolk whose brother-in-law ap Griffith was.
²⁶⁸
It suggests, rather, that the main reason why ap Griffith was not executed then was that there had been no insurrection. Ellis Griffith makes no mention of ‘Welsh’ backing for ap Griffith, and even if, unlikely as it is, as many as a hundred and forty did rise in his support, this does not add up to anything like Owen Glendower’s revolt of some hundred years earlier. In fact, far from being a national uprising, the ‘insurrection’ of 1529 was just another skirmish between rival families of the kind that Wolsey spent much of his time trying to contain. In 1529 Wolsey may have thought that in the case of Ferrers and ap Griffith he had done just that. As it turned out, he was wrong. Further incidents occurred, not unlike those leading up to Kildare’s rebellion in Ireland in 1534: in both cases the head of an important family was prevented from returning to his area of influence, and the response was disturbances designed to bring pressure on the Crown to allow his return. The difference was that the support for ap Griffith was never strong enough to threaten English control. Instead, a disgruntled ap Griffith was tempted into opening up negotiations with James
V
of Scotland – which constituted an act of treason and was thus of a quite different order from anything he had been involved in in 1529. And the result was a quite different treatment – his execution on 4 December 1531.

There were other rivalries in Wales, including one between two successful
courtiers with interests in the area, Sir Ralph Egerton, a member of Mary’s Council, and William Brereton,
²⁶⁹
but only that between Ferrers and ap Griffith appears to have caused any concern – and, it has been suggested here, not very much at that. Indeed, that Wales did not cause much concern to Wolsey, has been, in this account, the underlying theme. This explains why he did not set in motion the kind of changes that between 1536 and 1543 were to result in the abolition of the marcher lordships and the incorporation of Wales into the English political, legal and administrative systems: since there was nothing dramatically wrong with Wales, there was no need for any dramatic changes. By 1536, when the first ‘act of union’ was passed, the situation had altered somewhat.
²⁷⁰
There were, for instance, serious doubts about whether the vital legislation by which Henry effected his ‘break with Rome’ was legally enforceable in Wales, while as its revenues as marcher lord dwindled, especially with the ending of the practice of ‘redeeming the Great Session’, the financial advantages of extending the parliamentary subsidy to Wales grew ever more obvious. What is not so clear is that a belief that the ‘good government’ of Wales would be best served by union played any vital part in the Crown’s thinking. At any rate, the man who knew most about Wales, Veysey’s successor as president of the Council in the Marches, Rowland Lee, was strongly opposed to union on the grounds that the Welsh gentry were not up to running an English system of local government; indeed, it was they who, in his view, were largely responsible for Wales’s many ills.
²⁷¹
That he took this view is a warning not to see the union as self-evidently the only way forward. That his assessment turned out to be far too gloomy confirms the view put forward here that there was not much wrong with Wales that a little bit of attention could not cope with – and that at least Wolsey had provided.

¹
The most interesting work on the North in recent years has been done by M.E. James; see
Family Lineage
;
BP
, 27, 30;
NH
1. In taking issue with him I have been much influenced by Bush,
NH
, 6. And I am most grateful to M.L. Bush and R.W. Hoyle for commenting on an earlier draft.

²
For Anglo-Scottish relations at this time Eaves and Rae are indispensable.

³
Rae, pp.157 ff.

⁴
See pp.82-4.

⁵
LP
, iv, 4924, 4986, 5070.

⁶
Reid, pp.1-40; Storey,
EHR
, (1957), lxxii.

⁷
Bean.

⁸
James,
NH
, p.44

⁹
Clifford Letters
, pp.23-4; Hoyle, pp.92-3; James,
NH 1
, p.46, n.24.

¹⁰
LP
, i, 2443.

¹¹
Clifford Letters
, pp.89-90 for Wolsey’s letter. See also
LP
, iv, 2003-4, 2052, 2110.

¹²
Clifford Letters
, pp.21-2;
HMC
, app.iv, p.447.

¹³
James,
NH
,
i
, pp.67-8.

¹⁴
Clifford Letters
, p.105.

¹⁵
LP
, iv, 4419.

¹⁶
Otherwise Richmond’s Council.

¹⁷
LP
, iv, 3971, 4790, 4855.

¹⁸
St. P
, iv, p.516 (
LP
, iv, 4828).

¹⁹
LP
, iv, 5906 (6).

²⁰
Clifford Letters
, pp.23-4.

²¹
Bush,
NH
, 6, pp.40 ff; James,
BP
, 27, pp.26 ff.

²²
LP
, xii, 919.

²³
LP
, iii, 3240.

²⁴
LP
, iii, 3482.

²⁵
LP
, i, 2443; iii, 2536, 2598, 2621, 3241, 3306, 3310, 3412; iv, 278 and no doubt many others.

²⁶
Called this by Magnus in a letter to Dacre, 3 Dec.1523 (
LP
, iii, 3599).

²⁷
See Bernard, ‘Fourth and fifth earls of Shrewsbury’, pp.164 ff. The letter concerning Shrewsbury’s suitability for a command in the North is
LP
, iii, 1462.