The King's Cardinal: The Rise and Fall of Thomas Wolsey (Pimlico) (94 page)

The distortions of the Protestant tradition have led to bad history, and have created
en passant
the very critical view of Wolsey as a churchman that it has been the purpose of this chapter to revise. What the Catholics of the early sixteenth century thought of as necessary ‘reforms’ have been downgraded, if not ignored completely, thereby creating a false perspective. For instance, by giving the impression that Catholics were opposed to the Bible, historians have ignored the enormous amount of money and effort being expended by leading churchmen on better provision for biblical studies. Both Fisher at Christ’s and St John’s, Cambridge, and Fox at Corpus Christi, Oxford, made detailed provision for it, the latter going out of his way to point out that in interpreting the Bible his reader in theology should not make use of medieval authorities, who were ‘posterior and inferior in learning, but the holy and ancient Greek and Latin doctors’.
⁴⁴⁹
For Cardinal College Wolsey did not specify what authorities should be consulted. Probably he felt that it was no longer necessary to do so, and certainly the emphasis in his statutes on the usefulness of Latin and Greek for a proper understanding of the Bible suggests that he expected a humanist approach. True, he insisted that the professor of theology spend half of his time in scholastic pursuits, but that left the
other half for Old and New Testament studies.
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Moreover, as Fisher and Fox had done at their colleges, Wolsey insisted that a portion of the Bible should be read out each day at dinner, and then expounded upon by a suitably qualified person.
⁴⁵¹

Something else that the Protestant tradition has tended to obscure is the fact that most medieval men and women liked sermons; one thinks not only of the great audiences that a Bernardino of Sienna or a Savonarola could command, but also of the great number of medieval sermons delivered in England by much less charismatic preachers.
⁴⁵²
And after all, it was as early as 1216 that the Dominican order had been established, with preaching as its principal task. Thus, whatever special significance he may have attached to it as the principal means, alongside the Bible, by which the ‘Word of God’ was revealed to man, the sermon was not the invention of Martin Luther, and what is to be noted is the concern being shown in England in the first decades of the sixteenth century to provide a preaching ministry. As Fisher reminded the university of Cambridge in 1528, it had been his intention and that of the university’s great patroness, Lady Margaret Beaufort, that its graduates should ‘spread Christ’s Gospel throughout the confines of the whole of Britain’,
⁴⁵³
and to ensure this he laid down that a quarter of the fellows of St John’s should preach to the people in English at least eight times a year.
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Wolsey’s provision for preaching by the fellows of Cardinal College was, if anything, more extensive. Four public sermons were to be delivered in the college chapel each year, to which the citizens of Oxford were to be summoned by the ‘ringing of the largest bell for a notable space of time’. Furthermore, for the ten years after obtaining their doctorates the college’s five doctors of theology should preach publicly seven times a year. Anyone studying theology who left the college before becoming a doctor and sought to become one at a later date, as Wolsey himself did, was to deliver one public sermon a year.
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It looks therefore as if in any one year Wolsey was intending to fund about forty public sermons,
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surely by any standards an impressive contribution to the spreading of Christ’s gospel?

Fisher, Fox and Wolsey all felt that a better knowledge of the Bible and the preaching of Christ’s gospel were vital to any programme of church reform, and went to great lengths to ensure that both were encouraged. More generally, all three saw the education of the clergy, rather than doctrinal or administrative changes, as being at the heart of the matter which is why their colleges must be assigned a major role in any assessment of the state of the English Church on the eve of the ‘break with Rome’. The purpose of this education was to bring about a moral reformation. This could only be achieved by beginning at the top, for as Colet put it in 1510, ‘if the priests and bishops, that should be as lights, run in the dark way of the world, how dark then shall the secular people be? Wherefore St Paul said chiefly unto priests and bishops: be you not conformable to this world, but be ye reformed.’
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Colet saw no use for new laws: ‘The way whereby the Church may be reformed into better fashion is not for to make new laws, for there be laws many enough and out of number; as Solomon saith: nothing is new under the sun.’
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Instead, what he wanted was an inward spiritual regeneration and it was his sources for this, such as neo-platonism, St Paul’s epistles and a humanist approach to the Bible, which displeased conservative churchmen, just as their concern for the veneration of saints and the efficacy of good works displeased Colet. However, both conservatives and humanists could agree that what was essential to any programme of moral regeneration was a tightening up of the existing church machinery and enforcement of existing laws.

[The evils] that are now in the Church were before in time past, and there is no fault but that the fathers have provided very good remedies for it. There are no trespasses but there be laws against them in the body of the canon law. Therefore it is no need that new laws and constitutions be made, but that those that are made already be kept
.
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Thus spoke Colet but so also spoke almost everybody with any interest in the well-being of the Church.

But if in the 1520s the call was for ‘moral regeneration’ rather than for innovation, was Wolsey really a suitable person to make it? Colet, yes. Fisher, yes. Even a layman like More, yes. But surely not Wolsey? After all, no one could have been more ‘conformable to this world’, the very evil that Colet believed was destroying the Church, an evil for Colet even more dangerous, because more insidious, than heresy itself. In some obvious ways, it has to be admitted, Wolsey was not suitable. Even if one can discount some of the more extreme criticisms of his allegedly excessive love of pomp and ceremony made by such as Skelton and Vergil at the time, and many people since, there is no escaping the fact that, as the leading royal servant for fifteen years, Wolsey was heavily involved in secular affairs including the conduct of war and diplomacy. To achieve such a position he must have been ambitious, and, undoubtedly, his position made him extremely wealthy. There is also the matter of his ‘concubine’, Mistress Lark, and their two children – a daughter, Dorothy, placed in the wealthy nunnery at Shaftesbury, and the son Thomas Winter, on whom he lavished, according to his critics, far too much wealth and church patronage. On the whole Wolsey seems to have managed his sex life very discreetly. True, Skelton makes some rude remarks on the subject, though compared with what he wrote about other aspects of the cardinal’s life he is surprisingly restrained
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– perhaps because it was not a convincing line to take? There is also article 6 of the charges drawn up after his fall from power, which accused him of endangering the king’s person, for while knowing he had ‘the foul and contagious disease of the great pox broken out upon him in divers places of his
body, [Wolsey] came daily to your grace rowning in your ear and blowing upon your most noble grace with his perilous and infective breath’.
⁴⁶¹
Wolsey was to dismiss these charges out of hand, and it will be argued later that he was right to do so. Interestingly, very little was dredged up at that time about Mistress Lark – just the case of Sir John Stanley, allegedly bullied into surrendering a tenancy to the man whom Wolsey had married her off to. Neither was there anything about other mistresses, which, if there had been, would have been just the kind of thing to help blacken Wolsey’s name. Moreover, nothing of Mistrss Lark, or even a hint of any other sexual peccadilloes, is to be found in the reports of foreign ambassadors; and one suspects that even diplomatic caution would not have excluded such subject matter if there had been anything serious to report.
⁴⁶²
Still, however discreetly Wolsey behaved, the fact remains that Mistress Lark should not have been or, at least, not if one is directing a programme of ‘moral regeneration’. Unlike Fisher, Wolsey was not a saint; but then a saint was probably not what the English Church needed at its head.

In arriving at any assessment of Wolsey’s achievement, some allowance must be made for the political realities of the time. The Church constituted a number of extremely powerful and wealthy interest groups, none of which would welcome interference in its affairs from any quarter. It is difficult to say what made life more difficult for a reformer: the ability of any one of these groups to resist intervention, or the existence of the groups themselves and the consequent rivalries between them. As regards the former, it is worth recalling the almost successful efforts of the Observant Franciscans who had powerful enough friends at Rome to obtain the support of the pope himself to prevent a legatine visitation of the Greenwich house. The problem of conflicting interest groups, although implicit in much of the discussion, may not so far have been sufficiently highlighted, but, arguably, it was Warham’s inability to dominate these groups that undermined his efforts at reform. Despite a theoretical primacy, an archbishop of Canterbury’s authority over the English Church was very limited. For all practical purposes York’s northern province was outside his control. Over the religious orders, he had no more jurisdiction than any other bishop, which is to say that he could intervene only in the affairs of the non-exempt monasteries in his own diocese and, for a brief period, in any diocese in which there was an episcopal vacancy. He could, indeed, summon southern convocation, though in practice he only did this when a parliament was called, but his efforts to push through reform there were not very successful, in part at least because he became embroiled in a major row over competing jurisdictions with a group of his suffragans led by the extremely influential Richard Fox. Moreover, what this conflict showed up was that Warham did not have the support of the king, and, indeed, in 1515 he found himself in direct conflict with Henry over the Standish affair.

What Wolsey brought to the task of reform were just those things that Warham lacked: immense political skill and Henry’s full support. It was easy enough for the likes of Colet and Fisher, with their limited responsibilities and scholarly interests,
to deplore the the way in which the Church had become so enmeshed in the affairs of Caesar as to leave precious little time or room for the affairs of God. But while a yearning for the ‘purity’ of the early days of the apostles was understandable, whether the reality of being a small persecuted sect would have fulfilled these yearnings is another matter. And in the early sixteenth century the reality was that religious and secular life were so intertwined, and the need of both Church and Crown for each other so established, that, while there was room to argue about the nature of the relationship, divorce or disestablishment was not a possibility. Thus, it was precisely what in 1519 Bishop Fox called his ‘great skill in business, whether divine or human’ that enabled Wolsey during the 1520s to provide the right conditions for the Church to flourish. There were no more attacks from the Crown lawyers. There were no damaging disputes between different interest groups within the Church. The standards expected from its various members were publicly restated and it was made clear that where necessary the legatine authority was available to ensure that these were enforced. Far from being ‘despotic’, a possible criticism of Wolsey is that he was not willing enough to ignore the legal restraints that, for instance, made the removal of unsatisfactory heads of religious houses so difficult. It may also be that he did not attempt enough, though the force of such a criticism derives from, in this account, the mistaken notion that everything was terribly wrong with the English Church. In fact, during his last eighteen months in power Wolsey did embark upon some major reforms, prompted, so it will be argued, by a growing fear of the Lutheran threat. It was a threat that Wolsey took extremely seriously, but then the argument here has been that Henry’s cardinal legate always had the best interests of the English Church at heart.

¹
See pp.102-3 above. This chapter could not have been written without the help of Stephen Thompson. The references to his important thesis, ‘English and Welsh bishops’, are comparatively few only because it was completed after this chapter was written.

²
Pollard, pp.165-7 remains one of the best accounts of the distinction between legate
a latere
and
legatus natus
.

³
M.J. Kelly, ‘Canterbury jurisdiction’, pp.166 ff. for the best available survey of the various extensions based in part on his search of the Vatican archives, which I have not been able to do. However, I have given his references to them, as they are not available in print, and may be of some use: 10 June 1519 (Reg. Vat, 1200, fos 34-41v; KCA, DR c/R7 (Fisher’s Register), fos.100v-101v;
LP
, iii, 475). Jan. 1520 (Reg.Vat, 1200, fo 344). Jan. 1521 (Reg.Vat, 1177, fo.50; Rymer, xiii, p.734). 1 April 1521 (Reg.Vat, 1202, fos.39 ff; Rymer, xiii, pp.739-42). July 1521 (Reg.Vat, 1202, fo 110). Jan. 1523 (
LP
, iii, 2521, 2771, 2891). Jan. 1524 (
LP
, iv, 14, 115, 126 not discovered by Kelly in Vatican register). 21 Aug. 1524 (Wilkins, iii, 703-4). See also M.J. Kelly, ‘Canterbury jurisdiction’, pp.168-71.