The King's Cardinal: The Rise and Fall of Thomas Wolsey (Pimlico) (76 page)

ONE OF THE BYPRODUCTS OF WOLSEY
’
S SKILFUL DIPLOMACY IN 1518 HAD
been his appointment by Leo x to the office of legate
a latere
. Admittedly, the appointment was to last only for as long as his fellow legate
a latere
, Cardinal Campeggio, remained in England, and the only specific power it gave Wolsey was to help Campeggio in furthering the papal plans for a crusade.
¹
However, the mere fact of being legate
a latere
did in theory give Wolsey the kind of supremacy over the English Church that he and Henry had been looking for. Under canon law a legate
a latere
had very extensive powers, including the right to make visitations, to appoint to all benefices in ecclesiastical patronage, to summon church councils, and to make new constitutions for the clergy and those in religious orders. In theory, also, all other ecclesiastical jurisdiction had to give way. Consequently, Warham, as archbishop of Canterbury only
legatus natus
, would have to concede precedence to Wolsey, though otherwise the primacy lay with Canterbury rather than York.
²
And as it turned out, the papacy’s continuing desire for English support made it comparatively easy for Wolsey not only continually to renew his legatine commission, until in January 1524 he was made legate
a latere
for life, but also greatly to enlarge the specific powers granted to him.
³

Many people have argued that the acquisition of these powers was for Wolsey an end in itself. Cavendish describes a disagreement between Wolsey and Warham before the former’s appointment as legate.
⁴
It had to do with ecclesiastical etiquette – roughly speaking, whose cross should be carried before whose in whose province – and the point of the story has usually been taken to be that Wolsey found the primacy of Canterbury irksome to his over-developed
amour propre
.
⁵
Moreover, Canterbury was a wealthier see than York, and one source of this wealth derived
from its archbishop’s many jurisdictional rights throughout the southern province, including his right to prove the wills of the wealthy and to conduct
sede vacante
visitations.
⁶
York had similar rights, but the province was much smaller, the number of dioceses it contained far fewer, and its inhabitants by and large less wealthy. But as legate
a latere
, Wolsey was able to lay claim to all Canterbury’s jurisdictional rights and revenues, and indeed to all such rights and revenues belonging to any churchman. The suggestion has been, therefore, that along with his obsession with self, it was his insatiable greed that motivated his ecclesiastical policies as legate, and that, if he occasionally talked of reform, this was mere window-dressing for what was in reality a systematic exploitation of the English Church for his own ends. An assessment along these lines raises many issues. For one thing, it makes it difficult to pass a favourable judgment on some of his other activities: someone who could so cynically milk an institution of which he was head is hardly likely to have performed his other duties responsibly.

Moreover, in discussing Wolsey’s administration of the Church, much more than a judgement on his character is involved. The English Reformation, begun dramatically by Henry
VIII
’s ‘break with Rome’ in the early 1530s, is one of the major events of English history, with consequences that are still working themselves out today. In this event, Wolsey is usually assigned an important role, although in line with the usual assessment of his performance, it is not one that brings him any credit. The cardinal, it is argued, personified all that was wrong with the late medieval Church: its concern with pomp and ceremony, its excessive wealth, its over-involvement with secular affairs – and in support of this argument is the way that Wolsey was portrayed by such Protestant polemicists as William Tyndale. If, therefore, there was in the early sixteenth century a steady stream of people disenchanted with the existing state of the Church, it only needed a Wolsey to turn that stream into a flood whose direction led straight to Martin Luther. But as well as being a representative figure, Wolsey was by virtue of his legatine powers, a unique one – and this, it has been suggested, had certain consequences. Instead of the papacy being remote and ineffectual, it suddenly became in the figure of the pope’s chief representative in England, a very active presence that many people would rather have done without. For, as the duke of Suffolk remarked, ‘it was never merry in England whilst we had Cardinals among us’.
⁷
In reminding people of the pope’s existence, Wolsey succeeded in disturbing the
modus vivendi
between Church and state which had emerged during the later Middle ages, and in doing so had revived an age-old conflict. The people who felt the new papal pressure most were not the laity, but rather the clergy, who suddenly found their own well-established rights under threat. This, so the argument continues, hardly put them in the right frame of mind to rush to the support of the papacy when it found itself in direct conflict with Henry
VIII
over the divorce. And even if they had wanted to, Wolsey’s legatine domination over them in the 1520s had not been the ideal preparation for doing
serious battle with the Crown in the 1530s, for by then they had lost the will to stand up for themselves. The indictment could hardly be more damning, but it does not have to be accepted, nor should it be.
⁸

Perhaps the first thing to try to establish is what use Wolsey made of his legatine powers, leaving the more difficult questions of intent and motivation until later. His first appointment as legate, on 17 May 1518, gave him authority to promote, along with Campeggio, the papal crusade.
⁹
By the end of August his powers had been widened to enable him, again along with Campeggio, to conduct visitations of the English religious houses, whether ‘exempt’ or not – that is, irrespective of whether they were normally free of episcopal jurisdiction.
¹⁰
In December, he summoned the bishops to a council at Westminster Abbey for the following March, in order to consider how best to go about reform of the Church. Sadly, little is known about what happened at it. Probably all the bishops were asked to attend: only two summonses have survived, those for the bishops of Hereford and London,
¹¹
but their standard form suggests that they were sent out to more than just two. Moreover, there is evidence to believe that Fox of Winchester,
¹²
Oldham of Exeter,
¹³
and Penny of Carlisle received summonses, the latter asking to be excused attendance on the grounds of ill health.
¹⁴
Even less helpful is the fact that only two accounts of what was discussed at the meeting have survived, both in their differing ways unsatisfactory. The Venetian ambassador reported that what Wolsey was really after was ‘certain pecuniary contributions’.
¹⁵
These could have been intended for the crusade, but it is unlikely that they were the main item on the agenda. There was no mention of the crusade in the summonses, and no evidence of any moves by Wolsey to obtain a contribution for one has survived. Moreover, Fox, in what appears to be his letter of acceptance, concerned himself only with the prospects for reform that Wolsey’s acquisition of legatine powers had opened up.
¹⁶

The second report derives from an account of a speech that John Fisher, bishop of Rochester, is alleged to have made at what his anonymous early biographer called a ‘synod of bishops’, summoned shortly after Wolsey had acquired his ‘powers legatine’
¹⁷
– and this does look to be the March meeting. Far from having to do with a crusade, the speech was a powerful attack on the state of the Church, an attack Fisher said he felt all the freer to make because he was addressing only his fellow churchmen. He concentrated on two issues: the vanity of costly apparel and ‘this vanity in temporal things’, which involved the clergy too much in affairs of state. He himself was constantly being interrupted by messengers from ‘higher authority’,
so that ‘by tossing and going this way and that way, time hath passed, and in the meanwhile nothing done but attending after triumphs, receiving of ambassadors, haunting of prince’s courts, and such like, whereby great expenses rise that might be better spent many other ways’.
¹⁸

Fisher’s biographer took a jaundiced view of Wolsey’s intentions, maintaining that he called the synod ‘rather to notify to the world his great authority, and to be seen sitting in his pontifical seat, than for any great good that he meant to do’. He added that Fisher was quick to realize this, and implied that the main target of his attack was Wolsey himself.
¹⁹
This seems unlikely. Whatever reservations the future saint may have had about Wolsey as a man of God, he must have realized, as his episcopal colleague Fox had, that Wolsey’s legatine powers, his closeness to the king, and his proven administrative and political ability offered a unique opportunity for reform.
²⁰
To jeopardize this by launching a personal attack would have made no sense. Moreover, although the faults that he highlighted have commonly been associated with Wolsey, they were also part and parcel of almost every cry for reform during the late Middle Ages and were a common theme of sermons.
²¹
More specifically, in the convocation of 1487 Archbishop Morton had criticized some London clergy for being too ostentatious in their dress.
²²
In the convocation of 1510 the main burden of Colet’s famous speech had been to warn against what he called ‘creeping secularity’, something that he considered to be an even greater danger than heresy itself.
²³
And in that same convocation, of the three new canons passed, one was a condemnation of improper dress.
²⁴
What all this means is that Fisher’s speech, far from being a personal attack on the new legate, concerned itself with issues that were very much at the centre of reform long before Wolsey ever came to prominence. It therefore needs no disapproval of Wolsey to explain why Fisher should have raised them. In fact, if the speech was ever delivered – and there has to be a question mark over this – it provides evidence that at the March meeting there was a genuine discussion of the present state of the Church. And if so, then it rather looks as if Wolsey’s oft-declared concern for reform was not the mere window-dressing that it has commonly been taken to be.

At any rate, the meeting did result in something positive being done, for out of it emerged new legatine ‘constitutions’ for the Church – or at least for the southern province of Canterbury, because no evidence that they were ever published in Wolsey’s own northern province has survived. However, one would expect legatine constitutions to apply to both, and the fact that the bishop of Carlisle – Carlisle
being one of the three Northern dioceses – was summoned to the March meeting supports this assumption. The dioceses in which they are known to have been published are Hereford and Lincoln in 1519, and Ely in the following year. The silence concerning the others should not be taken as proof that they were not published there, for there is nothing about these three that would explain why they might have been singled out. In Hereford, as well as the constitutions being read out in English so that they would be better understood – they would have been published in Latin – printed copies were provided.
²⁵
In Lincoln the lack of copies led to demands that unless they were produced they would not be agreed to and there was other opposition.
²⁶

Its extent should not be exaggerated. At four of the eight Lincoln meetings at which the constitutions were presented no objections were raised, and only in the archdeaconries of Bedford and Huntingdon were the protesters in a majority. And in Hereford and Ely there seems to have been no protest.
²⁷
Still, that there was some in Lincoln is of interest. It arose in part from a suspicion of the legatine powers. A certain Dr Harrington argued that it was not in anyone’s power, not even a papal legate’s, to legislate for the English Church without the prior consent of the clergy.
²⁸
He was probably incorrect. In granting Wolsey legatine powers Leo x had envisaged that Wolsey would consult with the bishops and heads of religious houses before taking any action,
²⁹
and in calling the March meeting Wolsey had complied with both the letter and the spirit of the pope’s commission. On the other hand, there is no indication in them that any formal consent was required. No such consent had been obtained in the thirteenth century for the most famous of the English legatine constitutions, those of Cardinals Otto and Ottobuono.
³⁰
Moreover, the very notion of consent is contrary to the nature of legatine authority: depending so directly on the papal
plenitudo potestatis
, it could hardly require any further legitimization. In the fifteenth century the English canon lawyer, William Lyndwood, in his famous commentary on the constitutions of the English Church, the
Provinciale
, had pointed out very clearly that no English bishop or council had power to repeal or override legatine constitutions, precisely because they derived from a superior authority, that of the pope.
³¹
Thus, Wolsey’s decision to issue his constitutions without the formal consent of convocation was almost certainly in order. And when convocations – there was both a northern and southern convocation – were summoned in 1523 to coincide, as was the normal practice, with the calling of parliament, there is no indication that Wolsey saw any need, or that there was any call by others, to have the constitutions ratified.