The King's Cardinal: The Rise and Fall of Thomas Wolsey (Pimlico) (14 page)

If this is so, then an important consequence follows. Hunne was one of Foxe’s ‘martyrs’, and it is as a martyr that he has been portrayed ever since. Even today, when the Protestant tradition of historiography is no longer so strong, we are still expected to feel a great deal of sympathy for Hunne and none at all for the church authorities. Whether actually stated or not, the implication is that murder and cover-ups are to be expected from the late medieval Church.
³⁸
But if Hunne was not murdered, and if there was therefore no cover-up, then the affair ceases to provide evidence of a wicked Church. It also, and rather importantly for Wolsey’s reputation, ceases to provide evidence that Wolsey was the sort of person who would have connived at this kind of action.

But it is not only ‘Protestant’ historians who have thought that Hunne was murdered. Whatever the status and reliability of the surviving account of the inquest, a coroner’s jury did return a verdict of murder. It is also clear that other people at the time agreed, or at least felt that Hunne had been treated badly. Polydore Vergil, in a letter of March 1515, referred to people crying out indiscriminately against the clergy because ‘a heretic’ had been put to death by the bishop of London.
³⁹
When he came to write the
Anglia Historia
he was not so certain that the bishop was responsible, but he had no doubt that ‘an uproar’ had resulted.
⁴⁰
The London chroniclers, Richard Arnold and Charles Wriothesley, both indicate
that strong feelings were aroused,
⁴¹
and so does Hall.
⁴²
It is known that a City delegation went to Fitzjames to object to ‘certain perilous and heinous words as been surmised by him to be spoken of the whole body of the city touching heresy’
⁴³
– not evidence, of course, that the City Fathers thought that Hunne had been murdered or that he was not a heretic, but only that they were critical of the bishop’s handling of the affair. It is also known that, at Henry’s request, a full inquiry into the matter, in which he himself participated, was conducted by members of his Council at Baynard’s Castle.
⁴⁴
Concern was also shown in parliament. A bill was introduced to secure the restitution to Hunne’s children of his property forfeited to the Crown as a result of his posthumous conviction for heresy. Another bill endeavoured to bring a charge of murder irrespective of what action the Crown took. Both bills failed to get through the Lords, but they are yet another indication that many people felt Hunne had been treated badly.
⁴⁵
It is therefore clear that if the Hunne affair is not evidence for a ‘wicked’ Church, it does show that there was a willingness to think that the Church was wicked. It is, in other words, evidence of that difficult and complex notion, anticlericalism.

The death of a wealthy London citizen in a bishop’s prison was bound to arouse comment and suspicion. Such a man was likely to have influential friends in City circles who would have been active on his and his children’s behalf – it was presumably the City members of parliament who had introduced the two bills concerning Hunne in the House of Commons. Furthermore, whether Hunne was a heretic or not, it was unusual for a man of his standing to be accused of heresy, and it was also unusual, though not irregular, for anyone to be convicted of heresy after their death.
⁴⁶
These things may have secured sympathy for Hunne from people who would not normally have been critical of the Church. And, of course, there were people in London who did hate the Church – the Lollards. No doubt, given an opportunity to express their anticlerical feeling with some impunity, they also contributed to the ‘uproar’. But it must not be assumed that sympathy for Hunne necessarily implied strong antagonism towards the Church in general for there is just not sufficient evidence for such an equation to be made.

The religious life of London continued after 1515 very much as it had done before.
⁴⁷
There continued to be Lollards, and they continued to be persecuted. There was opposition to tithes, with a major dispute orchestrated by the City Fathers beginning in 1519 and ending ten years later with a compromise in the Church’s favour. But such disputes were endemic in London – there had been a particularly prolonged one in the 1450s – and what is more they were not about tithes
per se
, which would have been heretical, but about how the assessment was arrived at and the actual amount demanded.
⁴⁸
In the 1520s the occasional clergyman did have disputes with his parishioners. There is some evidence that Londoners
were increasingly conducting their litigation before secular rather than ecclesiastical courts, a trend that, as regards cases to do with ‘breach of faith’ and the payment of debts, was nation-wide, as secular courts showed themselves more willing to take cognizance of such cases and provide better remedies for the aggrieved parties.
⁴⁹
As for that matter with which the Hunne affair had begun, his opposition to the payment of a mortuary fee, contrary to what has often been implied – in part by a rather too uncritical use of the Hunne affair – there is surprisingly little evidence in the surviving records of ecclesiastical courts of widespread opposition to its payment, whether in London or elsewhere: for instance, between 1519 and 1529 only six cases were brought before the bishop of Norwich’s consistory court, while in the archdeaconry of Chester there were only eight between 1504 and 1529
⁵⁰
. Such figures lend little support to St German’s contention that ‘mortuaries increased daily’,
⁵¹
which is not to say that on occasions people did not object to their payment, or that some clergy did not abuse their right to exact this, and other, payments. In 1515 there was discussion of mortuaries in parliament, while in 1529 an Act was passed to regulate their payment.
⁵²
What needs to be stressed, however, is that, both in 1515 and 1529, feelings were inflamed – and were being manipulated. It is, therefore, terribly important to get, as it were, behind the headlines and the rhetoric, and if this is done the picture of a Church in its death throes, wracked by abuse, and quite unable to answer to the spiritual needs of its flock seems very far from the truth.

It is only in recent years that the vitality of late medieval religious life has come to be fully appreciated.
⁵³
In the first three decades of the sixteenth century, the laity appear to have been pouring money into the Church: for enlarging and beautifying their parish churches, for setting up chantries, for having obits said for the repose of their souls, contributing to lay fraternities, and much else besides. It is a rich and varied picture, and one from which London should not be excluded. Indeed, such was the Londoners’ liking for religious processions and festivals that they threatened to get out of hand so that in 1523 the bishop and the City’s Common Council were forced to agree that in future all festivals for the dedication of particular churches should be held on one day each year, 3 October.
⁵⁴
This agreement may serve to make the point that the religious life of the city was not all conflict and dissatisfaction with the church authorities. If it had been, one would have expected a more headlong rush towards Lutheranism. In fact there was no rush at all, but rather government pressure in the 1530s to accept even the limited changes which were then being introduced.
⁵⁵
London was a great commercial centre, and as such it was
composed, both socially and ethnically, of a great variety of people – not an easy place for the Church to control or satisfy. It is not, therefore, surprising that heterodox views were to be found there. But the suggestion often made that London’s reaction to the Hunne affair is evidence of a strong tide of anticlericalism which, growing through the 1520s, led inevitably to the ‘break with Rome’ and protestantism, is the result either of wishful or lazy thinking.
⁵⁶

The problem of anticlericalism can be approached in another way. It is inconceivable that an organization such as the Church, so pervasive, so closely involved with almost every aspect of life, with power not only to summon anyone before its courts, to extract money in fees and tithes, to supervise all testamentary matters, but also to grant or withhold eternal salvation, should not attract criticism, just as all governments will attract criticism.
⁵⁷
And one of the features of the Church was that, for better or worse, it was inextricably bound up with royal government, its popularity depending to some extent on the popularity of a particular monarch. Anticlericalism was inevitable, but insofar as it can be measured, it was less strong in the first two decades of Henry
VIII
’s reign than in the past. There was nothing then to compare with the attacks on papal power in the second half of the fourteenth century that had resulted in the famous statutes of provisors and praemunire. And it was not only papal power that had earlier come under attack. In the 1370s and 1380s there had been moves in parliament to remove clerics from high office as well as attempts to ensure that the clergy contributed a much greater share to national taxation. During the Peasants’ Revolt of 1381 the archbishop of Canterbury had been summarily executed, while in 1385 there had been an attempt in parliament to deprive the Church of all its temporal possessions. Out of all this agitation had emerged John Wyclif and the Lollard heresy, with their message that the existing church institutions and those who ran them had nothing to do with the true Church of God. The anticlericalism of the late fourteenth and early fifteenth century involved not only the new heresy which, as it turned out, was fairly rapidly brought under control (though never eliminated), but also a systematic attack on the extent of ecclesiastical jurisdiction. In 1450 violence erupted with the murder of two bishops, while in 1456 rebels in Kent demanded that all pluralist clerics should be put to death and the remainder castrated.
⁵⁸
The ‘uproar’ resulting from the death of Richard Hunne bears no comparison with the strength of anticlericalism in this earlier period.

There is little to suggest that in the period in which anticlericalism was so overt the state of the Church was any worse than at any other time. The difference lay in the prevalence of plague, economic difficulties, major continental wars, heavy taxation, minority governments, and much political instability. All this suggests that in order to understand anticlericalism, economic and political factors need to be considered just as much as, if not more than, the condition of the Church itself. Given that anticlericalism was always present, it was there to be exploited by
anyone in a position to do so – by rebels, by noble factions, and by the Crown itself. In the early sixteenth century, it was the Crown that was doing the exploiting, as it sought to recover control over areas of the Church in which it had lost ground during the previous fifty years.

The second half of the fifteenth century was a period of recovery for the Church.
⁵⁹
No bishops were murdered and there was no anticlerical legislation. Instead, in 1462 Edward
IV
, anxious for church support, granted to it a charter of liberties.
⁶⁰
The main intention of this charter was to alter the existing practice as regards ‘benefit of clergy’ by which clerics were protected from punishment in a secular court as long as they could prove that they were clerics. Previously, they could only claim the benefit after sentence had been passed in the secular court. Now they could claim it immediately. Furthermore, if the claim was challenged, its validity was to be decided in an ecclesiastical court, though a secular judge would be present. The charter also stated that all cases concerning tithes should be determined in the ecclesiastical courts, and prohibited any attempt to have them transferred to a secular one by means of the writ of ‘praemunire facias’. The practice of using this writ to remove many kinds of cases from ecclesiastical courts had been developed by the common lawyers after the statute of praemunire of 1393. It was intensely disliked by the Church, so this concession was greatly welcomed, and as it turned out, it was to be the only real gain resulting from the charter. The clauses relating to benefit were never put into effect, unlike the one prohibiting the use of the writ of praemunire facias, which appears to have been interpreted in the widest sense so as to include not just tithes but matters traditionally within the jurisdiction of the Church.
⁶¹
Partly as a result of this, the thirty years following the grant of Edward
IV
’s charter witnessed a great increase in the activities of the ecclesiastical courts, especially in one of its most important, the consistory court of Canterbury. Not only was there more business before it, but that business included cases relating to breach of faith and other matters which for almost two hundred years had been considered outside the Church’s jurisdiction by the secular courts.
⁶²

Richard
III
confirmed the Church’s charter of liberties.
⁶³
Henry
VII
did not. Instead, his reign witnessed a sustained attack on those liberties, an attack which included two statutes actually curtailing benefit of clergy.
⁶⁴
The first, in 1489, prohibited clerics not in holy orders – that is below the order of sub-deacon – from claiming benefit more than once, and to ensure that they did not, they were to be branded on their thumb after their first claim.
⁶⁵
The second Act, in 1497, deprived those not in holy orders of any benefit in cases involving the murder of their masters.
⁶⁶
Neither Act was very drastic, and together they could hardly have solved
the problem of abuse of benefit, which was considered at the time, probably mistakenly, to be great.
⁶⁷
Even so, they were a public declaration that church liberties were not immune from secular interference.