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About the year 1527 there was an attempt made by Wolsey to pass laws in the teeth of the simple rule of supply and demand. The war with Spain caused great losses to the manufacturers of cloth, who were obliged to dismiss their servants and to stop the production. Wolsey thereupon sent for the principal merchants of the City and ordered them to go on buying from the manufacturers as usual; in other words, to ruin themselves and their own servants in order to prevent the dismissal of the factory hands. Should they disobey, the great Cardinal threatened to remove the cloth market from Blackwell Hall to Westminster. “However,” Maitland remarks quietly, “it was neither in the power of the King, nor in that of his Minister, to execute the aforesaid injunction: wherefore commerce continued on the same footing as before, till the conclusion of a Peace.”

In 1529, after the meeting of Convocation already mentioned, a Proclamation was passed in London prohibiting all commercial intercourse with Rome.