Wolsey's Rule of the King's Whole Council

Abstract

AFTER I5I5 Wolsey, as chancellor, ruled the whole council which sat in the star chamber at Westminster Palace. There he did his permanent work in building up the unity of the state,' and he did this by making Henry VIII personify the high prerogative he himself exercised. The royal prerogative grew during Wolsey's regency, he brought it to blossom, and after his fall the king picked the fruit. The English kingship had developed might during the preceding fifty years, and it was exuding an aura of divinity. The king, in I5I5, was ready to assume the plowers with which medieval legal theory had endowed him, and his office had not yet begun to metamorphose into the modern constitutional fiction. Fourteen years were still to elapse, however, before Henry VIII was to assert his strong personal rule, and during this interval the cardinlal wielded the king's most terrible power and became his chiefest and only councillor. The policy that Wolsey pursued governed the work the whole council did, and he had as his goal three objectives: he sought, first of all, security for the king and his official family, then the protection of the subjects from wrongdoers, and finally an extension of the king's control over privileged institutions -the church, the city of London, and the feudality. Almost every action the whole council took led to one or another of these ends, and minutes of its meetings make clear how ultraroyalist was the quality of Wolsey's program. Personal motives, however, as well as reasons of state, might determine that a particular matter should be brought before the council, and a councilor, a royal official, or a man with a friend literally at court usually started those actions which came to be entered in the Book of the Acts of the Council. In this book the clerk of the council, on Oictober ii, 1509, described the institution whose proceedings he recorded as all the whole council. The whole council had its own book, clerk, and names, its own places and times of meeting; and these characteristics marked it off from its parts-the council attendant upon the king's person, the court of requests, and other councils.2