Wolsey's domestic policy is often subordinated to consideration of his foreign policy, but this lopsidedness reflects an imbalance in the sources. Although intact at the time of his fall, Wolsey's files of domestic correspondence were subsequently broken up and partly lost or destroyed, whereas the bulk of his foreign papers survived. This makes it appear as if his priorities lay in foreign policy, but this is incorrect. Domestic and foreign policy were equally important. In any case, the two were intimately connected, not least because Henry VIII's desire for French conquests had massive fiscal and political repercussions which rebounded on Wolsey at home.

Wolsey has been upbraided for his unsystematic and high-handed approach to domestic policy, but such criticisms are derived from his hostile contemporaries and are parti pris. Wolsey was not perfect. He rarely lost an opportunity to discredit his opponents. He tended to begin things that he was unable to finish. Yet politics is about ambition and the exercise of power. To vie with one's opponents, or to launch initiatives that subsequently collapse, is not uncommon among politicians; a more realistic index of assessment is required. The questions are these. Was Wolsey's domestic policy enlightened and well-intentioned? Was it a product of vision and originality from a mind in tune with the values of pre-Reformation humanism? Or was it cynically rooted in a desire for political survival? In particular, did Wolsey's ecclesiastical policy reflect a commitment to raising clerical and pastoral standards? Was his fiscalism the product of his greed? Or did it reflect Henry VIII's demands for money and desire to control church patronage, using Wolsey as his agent?

Wolsey's first initiative was his law-enforcement policy, unveiled in Henry VIII's presence in Star Chamber on 2 May 1516 and reiterated in May 1517 and October 1519.¹ A two-tiered strategy, it emphasized, first, that wrongdoing must be punished wherever it was to be found, irrespective of the personal influence or social status of those committing offences; and, second, that justice should be 'equally' and 'indifferently' (i.e. impartially) offered to all who sought it. In effect, Wolsey launched an attack on sleaze, obliging the king's councillors, the nobility, and those local magistrates who served as sheriffs or justices of the peace in their counties, to apply to others the standards that they sought for themselves and their friends.

Again, Wolsey sought to introduce an element of philosophy into the judicial system. In an age when the slogan was that 'Justice was a lawyer's fee', he advocated the principle that the people should have justice as a right. As lord chancellor, he insisted that law enforcement in his courts of Chancery and Star Chamber should be governed by the golden rule of equity: 'Do as you would be done by!' -- as Christ himself had commanded in the Sermon on the Mount. This amounted to a frontal assault upon the mafia-type methods associated with fifteenth-century 'bastard feudalism'. Moreover, Wolsey vigorously used the Court of Star Chamber to investigate the illegal acts, abuses and offences perpetrated by his fellow-councillors. He threatened Sir Andrew Windsor, the keeper of the king's wardrobe, with 'the new law of the Star Chamber'. He sent Sir Robert Sheffield, who as Speaker of the House of Commons had thwarted Wolsey in 1512, to the Tower as an accessory to felony, fined him £5,333 for 'opprobrious words', and obliged him to confess in public on his knees that he had arrived at this astronomical fine only through Wolsey's 'charitable' mediation! He sent the earl of Northumberland to the Fleet prison. He threw the earl of Surrey and other nobles out of the Council chamber, and prosecuted Sir William Bulmer for illegal retaining. He hammered three Surrey JPs for corruption in a show trial. He even had the nerve to prosecute Henry Standish, the bishop of St Asaph, for praemunire in Star Chamber. (It had been Standish, of course, whose arguments at the Blackfriars assembly of 1515 had resulted in Wolsey being forced to submit to Henry VIII on his knees.)

There was also the duke of Buckingham's case. Edward Stafford, 3rd duke of Buckingham, was among those nobles who found it difficult to adapt themselves to their Tudor roles as courtiers and servants of the Crown. Like Charles, duke of Bourbon, constable of France, he was among those who felt a contradiction between his ducal standing and a royal policy calculated to ensure the subordination of the nobility. In short, Buckingham stood for chivalry and noble privileges. He regarded Wolsey as an upstart. They had clashed in various ways, and Wolsey's attack on Sir William Bulmer was, indirectly, an attack on Buckingham, whose livery Bulmer had worn. Thereafter, Buckingham was heard grumbling about the king's councillors. And when he allegedly threatened that he would kill Henry VIII as his father had been willing to kill Richard III, Henry and Wolsey struck. Henry wrote to Wolsey, 'I would you should make good watch on the duke of Suffolk, on the duke of Buckingham, on my lord of Northumberland, on my lord of Derby, on my lord of Wiltshire, and on others which you think suspect'. Whatever was afoot, it culminated in Buckingham's trial and execution (May 1521).

By this time, Wolsey was at the top of the greasy pole. He basked in the glow of Henry VIII's confidence. He seemed untouchable. This was the context in which he seized his opportunities to repay old scores. Wolsey's policy of impartial justice was at one level enlightened and well-intentioned. But at another, it looks as if he offered justice to the poor partly in order to strike back at those among the rich who were his opponents. ² Wolsey was genuinely a man of vision; but he always believed in killing two birds with one stone! The irony is that, in Standish's case, he provided Henry VIII with a precedent for his own destruction on the charge of praemunire. In this respect, Wolsey would be hoisted with his own petard!

Wolsey's next policy was his campaign against illegal enclosures. Socio-economic theory was at a rudimentary stage in the reign of Henry VIII: commentators took their arguments from classical authors such as Plato, Aristotle and Cicero rather than from modern economics. They argued that landlords who converted arable land to sheep pasture in order to maximise profits, who extinguished community rights over common land, or who amalgamated smaller strips of land into larger economic units in order to achieve economies of scale, were immoral and irresponsible, since they sought private gain above the public good. Whether enclosures, in reality, caused rural depopulation and unemployment is hotly contested, and the heyday of enclosures was, in any case, the eighteenth and not the sixteenth century. Yet perception is more important than reality. Enclosures were perceived to be evil; a popular jingle held that 'sheep ate men'. Legislation restricting such activities by landowners was enacted in 1489 and 1514-15.

In 1517-18, Wolsey launched a national census to discover how effective this legislation had been: how many farmhouses had been destroyed, and how much land had been enclosed by whom, when, and where. Massive in scale -- the editor of the returns to the inquiry called it the 'Domesday of Enclosures' -- those commissioned to conduct the survey reported to Wolsey's Chancery, where it was decided to proceed in the Court of Exchequer against 264 landlords or corporations. ³ Of these 264 prosecutions, 222 were decided or ended, and 188 ended with clear verdicts: more than ten times the usual rate for Tudor litigation, which suggests that Wolsey threw his personal weight behind the cases. Seventy-four defendants pleaded guilty and entered into recognisances to rebuild demolished farmhouses or to restore their lands to arable husbandry by a stated date.

How serious was Wolsey about the prosecutions? Professor Scarisbrick has argued that he was, citing in evidence the high percentage of cases that reached a clear verdict. On the other hand, it has never been shown how many convicted defendants satisfied the terms of their recognisances and how many carried on regardless. Again, if the high proportion of decided cases suggests that Wolsey was in earnest, his seriousness did not override his fiscalism. In the Parliament of 1523, he temporarily suspended his enclosure policy as part of the deal whereby he raised taxation worth £151,215. Wolsey granted enclosing landlords an amnesty, a sign that taxation had become more important to him than his desire to redress abuses of the commonwealth. Of course, Henry VIII's demands for money put Wolsey on the spot. But when his amnesty is linked to our suspicion that Wolsey offered justice to the poor partly to strike back at those among the rich who were his opponents, a more politically-attuned view of his philanthropy may be appropriate.

Wolsey also attacked food racketeers from Star Chamber. In 1518 he fixed poultry prices in London and investigated the scarcity of beef, mutton, and veal. He hauled 74 provincial graziers before the King's Council along with dozens of butchers for a variety of offences, but this crackdown does not seem to have been followed up. He issued proclamations prohibiting profiteering in grain and enforcing traditional statutes regulating vagabonds and labourers. Yet, when in 1520 six grain speculators from Buckinghamshire were reported to him for racketeering, Wolsey referred the complaint back to the locality, being too busy to deal with it. Another swoop on traders led to only one documented conviction, while only two cases were pursued by Wolsey on the strength of his proclamations. ⁴

As to Wolsey's ecclesiastical policy, it is entirely mistaken to claim that he was insensitive to the humanists' demands for clerical reform in the spirit of Erasmus. On the contrary, his open-mindedness and love of intellectual debate drove him to take seriously the arguments of men like John Colet and even (initially) the evangelical Robert Barnes. Contemporaries did not doubt Wolsey's reforming intentions. Clerical standards were not as low in pre-Reformation England as in Germany, but the humanists had singled out areas for improvement. There was general excitement about Wolsey's plans. Richard Fox's reaction to the news that Wolsey proposed to summon a legatine council in 1519 was to exclaim: 'This day I have truly longed for, even as Simeon in the Gospel desired to see the Messiah.' ⁵

The problem is that Wolsey ended up by using his power as legatus a latere less for the purposes of reform than in order to create a centralized authority in the church that paved the way for the break with Rome and the royal supremacy in the 1530s. It must be said in Wolsey's defence that he stood between the church and its subjection by the Crown before 1529, but he surely lacked foresight in this respect, relying (especially in the 1520s) far too much on his ability to persuade the young Henry VIII to follow his advice, even at the moment when the king was liberating himself from Wolsey's spell.

It is no longer believed that Wolsey's fees and exactions, especially those demanded from bishops or charged for the probate of wills, sprang from pure greed: the amounts involved were, by Wolsey's standards, small. Most of these payments were designed to secure legal recognition by those making the payments of Wolsey's jurisdiction as legate. Although canon law granted extensive powers to a legate a latere, these powers were resented by the higher clergy since they overrode their own jurisdictions. Thus Wolsey had the right to make visitations of all the clergy. He controlled appointments to all benefices in ecclesiastical patronage. He had the right to summon church councils, where he sat above the archbishop of Canterbury. Lastly, he had the right to make new 'constitutions' (i.e. regulations) for the secular (i.e. mainly parochial) clergy and those in religious orders. ⁶

Whatever Wolsey's original plans, his 'reforms' in practice did not amount to much. There were new legatine constitutions for the secular clergy, and a revised set of statutes for the Benedictine and Augustinian orders, along with provisions for supervision of the remaining religious orders. Some more exacting measures for monastic reform were considered, but did not, apparently, lead to anything. Again, Wolsey intervened in 20 monastic elections, took part in eight or nine attempts to remove a monastic head (though on only four occasions were these efforts successful), and authorized 72 legatine visitations. Lastly, he promoted a scheme to create thirteen new English episcopal sees on monastic foundations in order to bring the dioceses into line with current population patterns. He also advocated a plan to reduce the number of Irish archdioceses from four to two and dioceses from thirty to nine or ten, and to appoint only English candidates to them.

Peter Gwyn, author of an ultra-revisionist biography of Wolsey, has argued that 'by and large, Wolsey's rule [of the church] was beneficial'. This is not incorrect. But Gwyn himself concedes that it amounts to little. To remark that his rule was beneficial is hardly to acclaim Wolsey as a 'reformer' or to justify the legatine powers that he acquired in order to achieve reform. ⁷ In reality, Wolsey's constitutions for the secular clergy were selected from existing canon law and were a new codification rather than a new beginning, while his statutes for the religious orders were modelled on the Benedictine Constitutions of 1336. Again, his plans for diocesan reorganization in England and Ireland were imperfect and incomplete. To describe as 'reforms' either attempts to enforce supposedly existing standards or ambitious but (typically) unfinished plans to re-structure the diocesan hierarchy, does not seem entirely satisfactory. And while Skelton's view of Wolsey as a vicious and perjured extortioner is grotesque, it is hard, on the other side, to rate his ecclesiastical policy at anything much beyond the level of good intentions.

In addition, Wolsey dissolved some thirty houses of monks, canons, or nuns between 1524 and his fall, using the proceeds to build colleges at Oxford and Ipswich. Inspired by the foundations of William of Waynflete and Bishop Fox at Oxford, and of Margaret Beaufort and John Fisher at Cambridge, he had planned institutions since 1515 'where scholars shall be brought up in virtue, and qualified for the priestly dignity'. A renowned patron of learning and the arts whom Erasmus acclaimed, Wolsey founded lectureships at Oxford in theology, civil law, medicine, philosophy, mathematics, Greek, and rhetoric, nominating scholars of the highest calibre. Cardinal's College, which he conceived as having five hundred students, and Ipswich School, which he saw as a feeder-institution for his Oxford college, were planned on the most lavish scale. They were, indeed, Wolsey's pride and joy. But he did not always proceed canonically, and loud protests followed the activities of his agents, whom Thomas Cromwell directed. Of course, there were two sides to the story. Wolsey probably spoke the truth when he assured Henry VIII, 'I have not ... willed mine officers, to do anything concerning the said suppressions, but under such form and manner as is, and hath largely been, to the full satisfaction ... of any person which hath ... interest in the same'. ⁸ Yet to build by compulsorily acquiring other founders' assets was controversial, and Wolsey never escaped the accusation that his object was less the advancement of learning than his wish to build monuments to himself. Likewise, his refusal to convey his colleges' assets formally to them, meant that they were seized by the Crown with the rest of his property in 1529. Cardinal's College was refounded on a much smaller scale by Henry VIII as King's College (later Christ Church), but Ipswich School was dismantled.

By 1525, Wolsey had run into serious political difficulties caused by Henry VIII's desire to exploit the vacuum created by Charles V's defeat of the French at Pavia. The trigger was the king's demands for money. Thus far, all had gone well. Indeed it is arguable that Wolsey's most enduring achievements were in the sphere of taxation. Henry VII's experiments in raising new taxes to supplement the old, stereotyped fifteenths and tenths had been imperfect. Wolsey therefore seized the opportunity as the administrator of Henry VIII's early wars to devise the directly assessed subsidy. This was perfected over the course of a decade with the assistance of John Hales, reader in Gray's Inn in 1514, and baron of the Exchequer from 1522 until his death in 1539, who drafted the necessary legislation. ⁹

The trick was to abandon static rates of tax and stereotyped assessments of taxpayers' wealth in favour of a flexible approach designed to maximize receipts. Wolsey laid down the foundations as early as 1513. Taxpayers were to be assessed individually on oath by local officials under the supervision of centrally appointed commissioners, who had power to examine and revise assessments. The commissioners then calculated the tax due from each individual, and in cases where taxpayers were liable to be assessed in more than one category -- for example, in respect of the net value of annual incomes, or the capital value of their moveable possessions -- they were charged in one category only, but that was to be the one which yielded the greatest amount of tax. When Parliament granted a subsidy, every adult in the country (except married women whose legal personalities were incorporated in those of their husbands) had to be assessed. But only those whose incomes were above prescribed limits had to pay tax. These limits varied from subsidy to subsidy, but a far from trivial proportion of the population were exempted. By the 1520s, moreover, new graduated rates of tax were introduced which increased considerably the proportion of the subsidy which fell upon the shoulders of the rich. Unlike the French taille and gabelle or the Thatcherite poll tax, Wolsey's system of taxation was progressive as well as efficient.

There were teething troubles, but Wolsey learned by experience. He raised £325,000 in parliamentary subsidies between 1513 and his fall, while separate clerical taxation yielded £240,000. ¹⁰ This contrasts with receipts from fifteenths and tenths in the same period amounting to £118,000 and 'loans' which totalled a quarter of a million. For the first time since 1334 the English Crown was levying taxation which accurately reflected the true wealth of taxpayers. But Wolsey became hubristic. In the Parliament of 1523 he demanded taxation of £800,000 on top of the 'loans' he had collected in 1522-3. He announced rates of 4s. in the £ on goods and lands, but in the end was obliged to settle for less than half this amount to be paid in annual instalments. ¹¹ He also was forced to levy this subsidy on the basis of lower valuations. Yet the tax provoked dismay. When the second instalment fell due in February 1525, late payments by the vast majority of taxpayers signalled burgeoning resistance to his demands. ¹²

The crunch came the following spring when Henry VIII wished to invade France after Pavia: the war chest was empty. So Wolsey instructed his commissioners to demand a further, non-parliamentary, tax which Wolsey (in a doomed public relations exercise) called not a 'subsidy', but an 'amicable grant'! Taxpayers were not, however, amused; the result was a tax rebellion. By the end of April, Wolsey was modifying his demands and was attempting to settle for a benevolence (i.e. a free gift of money by selected taxpayers to the Crown). He was told that, if compulsory, benevolences had been outlawed by Richard III's legislation of 1484, and at length he had to accept voluntary contributions. Discontent rose to dangerous levels throughout England. In Essex, Kent, Norfolk, Warwickshire, and Huntingdonshire, the Amicable Grant provoked reactions ranging from reluctance to outright refusal, and full-scale revolt erupted in Suffolk that spread to the borders of Essex and Cambridgeshire. The dukes of Norfolk and Suffolk mustered the East Anglian gentry; they successfully negotiated the surrender of the rebels. But 10,000 men had converged on Lavenham -- the most serious rising since 1497. ¹³

It had become impossible to levy further taxation in the 1520s, and Henry and Wolsey dropped the Amicable Grant in a stage-managed display of 'clemency'. No further taxation was attempted by Wolsey, and in 1529 the Crown's short-term needs were satisfied when the first session of the Reformation Parliament cancelled the king's debts (i.e. the 'loans' of 1522-3) ¹⁴ and Francis I agreed by the treaty of Cambrai to pay the arrears of Edward IV's pension and to redeem some of Charles V's debts to Henry VIII.

To sum up. It is not only possible, but easy, to argue that Wolsey's domestic policy was well-intentioned and enlightened. For all his faults, Wolsey did exhibit a keen sense of social 'justice' when he sought to do justice to the poor and to punish enclosing landlords. His concern was for the welfare of the community, which Wolsey interpreted in a genuinely philosophic sense. He also ensured that his relatively draconian taxation was progressive and did not unduly oppress wage-earners or those whose incomes fell into the lower half of the spectrum. Again, the classical and humanistic authors whose writings extolled virtue and moral idealism, and which condemned economic exploitation and self-interest, were exactly those which Wolsey had studied at Oxford. Pre-Reformation humanism extolled ideal forms and the nature of things, not economic individualism.

Yet we should not be taken in. Wolsey's idealism was genuine, but cannot be allowed to disguise the delight with which he hammered his opponents, nor does it excuse his hubris and his tendency to bite off more than he could chew. By 1529 his court of Star Chamber had almost collapsed under the weight of unnecessary litigation that his law-enforcement policy had encouraged. He was forced to remit the vast majority of suits either back to local commissioners to be settled by arbitration, or else to abandon them to the common law. ¹⁵ His policy against enclosures had more or less been suspended, and resistance to his financial demands was so widespread that no further taxation was attempted between the failure of the Amicable Grant and Wolsey's fall.

Lastly, in the church, it is false to assert that Wolsey's fees and compositions were extortionate, or that he eschewed the pre-Reformation vision of reform. He did make plans for a reforming legatine council, when his intentions were seen as genuine. No one claimed, at least until 1527, that this was simply rhetoric designed to allay criticism and protect the status quo. On the other hand, Wolsey achieved little. His 'reforms' were mainly targeted at the lax discipline of the monks and friars, and not at those areas of pastoral and parochial neglect that would later be criticized by the Reformation Parliament. It can be said that he was 'interested more in the highly visible deterioration of the religious [orders] than in parochial and pastoral matters'. ¹⁶ Again, 'Wolsey was under no illusion about the exercise of [his] authority being dependent on his serving the king's pleasure, and the king's pleasure was that Wolsey control the English church in the king's interest'. ¹⁷ This last point is important. Traditional accounts have tended to become distorted by their concentration on Wolsey to the exclusion of Henry VIII. ¹⁸ Only when the dynamic (and by the 1520s fluctuating) relationship between the young king and Wolsey is properly understood does it become possible to evaluate the significance of Wolsey's achievements in church and state.

NOTES

1. Guy, The Cardinal's Court, pp. 23-78, 119-31; John Guy, 'Thomas More as Successor to Wolsey', Thought: Fordham University Quarterly, 52 (1977), pp. 275-92.
2. The Cardinal's Court, pp. 72-8.
3. J. J. Scarisbrick, 'Cardinal Wolsey and the Common Weal', in E. W. Ives, R. J. Knecht, and J. J. Scarisbrick (eds.), Wealth and Power in Tudor England (London, 1978), pp. 45-67.
4. P[ublic] R[ecord] O[ffice], STAC 2/15/188-90; Tudor Royal Proclamations (ed.) P. L. Hughes and J. F. Larkin, Vol. I (New Haven, 1964), nos. 118, 121, 125, 127; Henry E. Huntington Library, San Marino, California, Ellesmere MS. 2655, fo. 16; STAC 2/26/103; 2/32/bundle of unlisted fragments (Roger Barbor's case); Guy, The Cardinal's Court, pp. 70-1.
5. Gwyn, The King's Cardinal, p. 315.
6. Gwyn, The King's Cardinal, p. 265.
7. The King's Cardinal, pp. 337-8.
8. The History of the University of Oxford, Vol. III: The Collegiate University, (ed.) J. K. McConica (Oxford, 1986), pp. 26-32, 337-41; E. L. Taunton, Thomas Wolsey, Legate and Reformer (London, 1902), p. 111.
9. Roger Schofield, 'Taxation and the Political Limits of the Tudor State', in C. Cross, D. M. Loades, and J. J. Scarisbrick (eds.), Law and Government under the Tudors, (Cambridge, 1988), pp. 231-3.
10. Schofield, 'Taxation and the Political Limits of the Tudor State', p. 232; Roger Schofield, 'Parliamentary Lay Taxation, 1485-1547', unpublished Cambridge Ph.D. dissertation (1963), table 40 (facing p. 416); M. J. Kelly, 'Canterbury Jurisdiction and Influence during the Episcopate of William Warham, 1503-1532', unpublished Cambridge Ph.D. dissertation (1963), pp. 301, 316-17.
11. John Guy, 'Wolsey and the Parliament of 1523', in Cross, Loades, and Scarisbrick (eds.), Law and Government under the Tudors, pp. 1-18.
12. Guy, 'Wolsey and the Parliament of 1523', in Cross, Loades, and Scarisbrick (eds.), Law and Government under the Tudors, p. 18.
13. G. W. Bernard, War, Taxation and Rebellion in Early Tudor England (Brighton, 1986), pp. 136-48; D. MacCulloch, Suffolk and the Tudors: Politics and Religion in an English County, 1500-1600 (Oxford, 1986), pp. 290-3.
14. The 'loans' were deemed retrospectively to have been taxation. S. E. Lehmberg, The Reformation Parliament (Cambridge, 1970), pp. 89-91.
15. Guy, The Cardinal's Court, pp. 46-50.
16. S. B. House, 'Sir Thomas More and Holy Orders: More's Views of the English Clergy, both Secular and Regular', unpublished University of St. Andrews Ph.D. dissertation (1987), p. 105.
17. W. E. Wilkie, The Cardinal Protectors of England: Rome and the Tudors before the Reformation (Cambridge, 1974), p. 158.
18. Gwyn, The King's Cardinal, p. 309.