The King's Cardinal: The Rise and Fall of Thomas Wolsey (Pimlico) (137 page)

That both this account and the one concerning Barnes present Wolsey in an
unexpectedly sympathetic light is interesting even if, despite having been written not long after the events they describe, they need to be treated with caution. For instance, that Wolsey is portrayed in a favourable light does not prevent both Barnes and Latimer winning the arguments. Surely, if they could convince even the great cardinal, then they must have been right? This seems to be the message, and to get it across the facts may well have been massaged, which would not have been too difficult given that when the accounts were written Wolsey, being dead, could not challenge their veracity. He had also ceased to be the enemy. When Barlowe wrote
The Burial of the Mass
and Tyndale
The Practice of Prelates
Wolsey was very much alive, and both these works contained savage attacks on him.
¹⁴¹
So the suggestion here would be that the benign Wolsey of these two accounts is to some extent the invention of the propaganda requirements of the early Protestants, but this does not entirely dispose of him. When in 1527 Bilney was in trouble – again like Latimer, he had on the first occasion escaped a formal charge of heresy – he asked to be ‘brought before the tribunal seat of my Lord Cardinal, before whom I had rather stand than before any of his deputies’.
¹⁴²
And there are other bits of evidence to suggest that people in trouble for heresy did believe that they stood more chance with Wolsey than before a formal tribunal. May it not therefore be the case that this notion of a Wolsey who, for whatever reason, never took heresy very seriously is the truth?

The answer is no, and here we must hark back to that disinction made earlier between the academic world, where differences of opinion were generally tolerated, and the world outside, where they were not. Whatever happened between Wolsey and people such as Barnes, Bilney and Latimer, it would never have been his intention to persecute them. But then neither in the first instance would it have been anybody’s intention, not even Thomas More’s. It was, after all, a requirement, and one that in England appears to have been generally met,
¹⁴³
that everything possible should be done to win back erring sheep to the true faith, and it was only those who wilfully and maliciously resisted who were to be treated with severity. In the case of ‘simple folk’, the working assumption was that it was ignorance that had led them astray. In the case of academics it was assumed to have been intellectual curiosity and youthful high spirits; hence the significance of Wolsey’s alleged remark to Latimer on first seeing him: ‘You are of good years, nor no babe, but one that should wisely and soberly use yourself in all your doings.’
¹⁴⁴
In other words, ‘You should have known better!’

The people whom Wolsey was out to get were the pedlars of heretical literature, the colporteurs. In the Oxford round-up of early 1528 it was only Thomas Garrard, responsible for bringing such literature to Oxford, who was formally charged and made to abjure, while scholars such as John Frith were not. Similarly at Cambridge, although the evidence for what occurred there is even less certain than for Oxford,
¹⁴⁵
it was not someone like Latimer, but Sygar Nicholson, the bookseller, who was
proceeded against.
¹⁴⁶
Then there was Geoffrey Lome, another distributor of books, and Richard Bayfield, a monk of Bury, who acted as a link in the passage of books between London and Cambridge.
¹⁴⁷
Of the twenty-four articles alleged in May 1528 against Henry Monmouth, Tyndale’s first patron, thirteen had to do with the production and distribution of heretical literature.
¹⁴⁸
In April 1529 it was the turn of John Tewksbury to stand trial for his part in the sale of heretical works, but especially Tyndale’s
Parable of the Wicked Mammon
.
¹⁴⁹
True, Garrard’s rector, Dr Forman, who may have been at the centre of this book trade, did escape a formal trial; and no doubt it helped him that he had been president of Queens’ College, Cambridge, though the more important reason was probably that in the end not enough evidence could be found against him. But the fact that he was very closely investigated by Tunstall and may even have been personally interrogated by Wolsey tends to strengthen the present argument that it was the colporteurs who were seen as the arch-enemies.
¹⁵⁰

That this was so is not surprising, though it has been very much underplayed. A modern parallel can be found in the concentration on drug-traffickers rather than the drug-users. The latter are seen as victims, while it is the former who are villains, partly because they make a lot of money from their activities, as to a lesser extent did the traffickers in heretical literature. And without the drugs, or books, there would be no problem, though this is not quite so true of books, since people could be contaminated by word of mouth. Nevertheless, books and, given the Lutheran emphasis upon its privileged position, especially the Bible, did play a part in the success of the Reformation. In calling upon his archdeacons to search out and destroy heretical works, Tunstall declared them to be the source of a ‘pestiferous and most pernicious poison’,
¹⁵¹
and it was as a poison that More saw them. Not only did he seek in his writings to provide an antidote, but on becoming lord chancellor he did his utmost to prevent the poison being spread by the likes of George Constantine, who incidently was on Friar West’s list of wanted heretics, and Richard Bayfield – but then Wolsey had done the same. In fact, their attitudes were entirely similar. Heresy was an evil to be eradicated, but there were degrees of evil: the foolish young scholar temporarily seduced by intellectual curiosity or emotional instability, such as More’s own son-in-law, William Roper, appears to have been, was a very different proposition from someone who persisted in his foolishness despite all the efforts of the Church to persuade him otherwise, not to mention those who sought by their writings or preaching, or by the distribution of other people’s writings, to infect the nation with their disease.

Wolsey treated Bilney leniently on the occasion of his first offence partly no doubt because it has never proved easy to decide whether his views were heretical or not, but chiefly because it was proper for him to behave thus towards a much respected and much loved Cambridge scholar.
¹⁵²
When Bilney not only persisted in
his errors, but compounded them by proceeding to stump the pulpits of East Anglia and London denouncing the worship of saints and images, Wolsey reacted with much greater severity. Bilney was brought to a formal trial, abjured, albeit reluctantly, and was for a time placed in custody. When, after his release, he not only could not keep silent but proceeded to distribute Tyndale’s
New Testament
, at least to a Norwich anchoress, then there was little that could be done to save him. In August 1531 he was tried before the bishop of Norwich’s chancellor, found guilty, and, since he had already abjured, was sentenced to death by burning. What needs to be understood is that whether or not he made a full confession of his errors before he was burnt – a question that has been endlessly debated both at the time and since
¹⁵³
– had no bearing on his ultimate fate, for the legal position was quite clear: anyone convicted of holding heretical views who acknowledged his errors and showed himself truly penitent was to be set free and readmitted to full membership of the Church. But there was no second chance. If he or she relapsed into heresy, once having abjured, then the penalty was death by burning, whether or not on this second occasion contrition was shown, and this was the case with Bilney. During More’s chancellorship five Lutherans were burnt.
¹⁵⁴
During Wolsey’s none were, but, since some Lollards suffered that fate, it cannot be that he was in principle against burning. In fact there is a very simple explanation for Wolsey’s apparent leniency: of the ten or so against whom proceedings were initiated, all were facing trial for the first time and all either abjured or fled before sentence was given.

This failure to understand the legal position has been another reason why Wolsey’s attitude towards heresy, and indeed More’s, have been misunderstood. And if the comparison between the two men is extended, yet another one emerges. Put at its simplest, by the time of More’s chancellorship it had become so much more obvious that the erring scholar had a strong propensity to turn into the persistent heretic. When, following the round-up of Oxford Lutherans in 1528, Wolsey had considered the case of John Frith, he was faced with someone who, apart from being by all accounts a most attractive personality, may well have done nothing more heinous than to read Tyndale’s
New Testament
and dip into other heretical works. By December 1532, when More sat down to write A
Letter
against him, Frith had himself become the author of heretical works, but even so More’s tone was far less abrasive than the one he adopted towards other English heretics.
¹⁵⁵
By 1532 the battle was much further advanced, people were more committed to their views, and in England the stakes could not have been higher. However, none of this indicates any fundamental difference between More and Wolsey. It was the circumstances that had changed, and from the Catholic point of view much for the worse, if only because the king’s position had become so ambiguous. And even in 1530 Henry may not have been all that receptive to Wolsey’s death-bed message to
him, if he ever received it, or indeed if it was ever uttered, for we only have Cavendish’s word for it. Still, as reported by his first biographer, the message was clear: Henry should ‘have a vigilant eye to depress this new perverse sect of Lutheranism, that it do not increase within his dominions through his negligence’.
¹⁵⁶
The argument of this chapter has been that he had very much followed his own advice. What remains to be decided is how effective his defence of Catholicism had been. In arriving at an answer there are, as always, enormous difficulties, to do partly with evidence or lack of it, partly with the criteria used – of special importance for a subject which remains an emotive one. Still, how you answer the question must depend to a great extent on how many heretics, whether Lutheran or Lollard, you think there were in the 1520s. The number of known Lutherans is very small indeed, even if one takes a generous view of what constitutes an attachment to Lutheranism at this early stage, when distinctions were still blurred. There were the frequenters of the White Horse Inn at Cambridge, and the Oxford Lutherans discovered in 1528, most of them from Cardinal College and many of them recent imports from Cambridge. In close contact with these was a London group, and it was from here, perhaps under Dr Robert Forman’s leadership, that the heretical book trade was organized. It is difficult to push the total to above fifty individuals. Connected with these, though in ways that are both uncertain and disputed, were the Lollards. My own view is that very few of them converted or graduated to Protestantism; and even those who are confident that they did, have found it difficult to name names.
¹⁵⁷
What is known is that some Lollards were interested in Tyndale’s
New Testament
and that Robert Necton, for instance, was providing books for both Lollards and Lutherans.
¹⁵⁸
And there were certainly more Lollards than Lutherans, though just how many is another much disputed question.

In his visitations of 1527 and 1528 Tunstall and his officials detected about 140, and it was in his London diocese that by the late 1520s most Lollard activity seems to have been concentrated, especially in the Colchester area. Fifteen years earlier about fifty had been discovered in Kent and another seventy or so in Coventry. In 1521-2 some three hundred and fifty were detected in the area around Great Missenden in Buckinghamshire, and the occasional Lollard turns up elsewhere.
¹⁵⁹
It is interesting that in these clamp-downs the same names keep cropping up. This suggests to me an isolated and ageing group, though others have seen it merely as indication of the inadequacies of the detection process and the skill with which Lollards minimized the damage caused by it. The same may have been true of the early Lutherans – and when arrested most of them did name names but, as with the
Lollards, usually the same ones. Thus the final figure would vary according to how easily one thinks the church authorities were conned. And, however arrived at, it is difficult to get the figure into thousands. The Lollards were composed of comparatively small communities of mostly humble folk. The Lutherans were chiefly to be found in academic circles, with some spill-over into London’s mercantile community, and totalling probably under the hundred. Any organization was chiefly confined to the distribution of heretical literature, and there was nothing approaching a coherent command structure presiding over a dedicated body of people bent on reformation.

In suggesting that there were few heretics I am very much following in the footsteps of recent historians.
¹⁶⁰
There has been a reaction away from a Protestant view of the English Reformation, which has been an enormously healthy corrective. Still, revisionism can go too far and numbers are not everything. In an earlier chapter it was argued that, while the extent of anti-clericalism in the early sixteenth century has been greatly exaggerated, there was nevertheless a lot of it around, and amongst such important people as courtiers and Crown lawyers. This was not because the clergy were especially wicked but because the Church as an institution was wealthy, powerful and pervasive, and was bound to have its critics at all levels of society. However, what turned something endemic into an epidemic had little to do with the state of the Church, which, under Wolsey’s leadership at least, may never have been so healthy, but with other factors, such as the popularity of a particular monarch or the degree of social unrest. It was these that created the right conditions for the bacilli of anticlericalism to multiply, but what was also needed was a catalyst. In 1515 there had been a major battle in the long-running war between Church and state over disputed areas of jurisdiction, during the course of which Henry
VIII
had made it very clear that he expected to preside over a Church that was subservient to his will. To ensure this, he had put at its head a man whom he trusted above all others, and for a dozen or so years there was no more conflict. Then came the divorce and the Church’s refusal to grant Henry what he believed was rightly his. Of course, it was not initially the English Church that had refused to do his bidding, but far too many important members of it had shown themselves either lukewarm or downright contrary. So it was borne in on him that ‘the clergy of our realm be but half our subjects, yea, and scarce our subjects’.
¹⁶¹
For Henry this was intolerable, and thus the king who in the 1520s had quite justifiably earned for himself the title of Defender of the Faith became the Church’s greatest enemy. The jurisdictional battle was renewed, the man who had done so much to secure the peace, the king’s own cardinal legate, was jettisoned, and anticlericalism was given its head, this time with the potential to ally with the new heresy from Germany.