by Gwyn, Peter
Having been defeated in the archbishop’s court, Hunne took about six months to decide on his next step. According to Thomas More, Hunne had been set on a famous victory over the Church from the start,10 but if so, this six-month delay seems unaccountable. It seems more probable that something happened during the second half of 1512 to persuade him to resume battle. One can only guess at what that might have been. It was not, apparently, because he was excommunicated for non-payment, as he was later to deny this before King’s Bench.11 It may have been the opening of proceedings against him for heresy, or at least a hint that this was about to happen, that prompted him to act. Perhaps this was what Thomas Dryffeld’s chaplain had in mind when, on 27 December 1512, he refused to begin evensong unless the ‘accursed’ Hunne left the church. Such a scenario would mean that Hunne’s main motive in bringing two cases before King’s Bench in the Hilary term 1513 was to defend himself.12 First he sued the chaplain for defamation of character.13 Then he issued a writ of praemunire against the rector and everyone connected with the mortuary case, including the summoner Charles Joseph (later to become his gaoler and perhaps even his murderer), on the grounds that the Church had no jurisdiction in this matter. With these two cases in progress, the church authorities may have been reluctant to accuse a leading citizen of heresy. It would look as if they were deliberately trying to influence the outcome, and if the judgments went against them, this would not help to convict Hunne of heresy. The contrary view, prevalent at the time in some London circles, alleged that the heresy prosecution was a defensive measure by the church authorities.14 The problem with this is that it does not explain the delay of nearly two years between the start of Hunne’s proceedings in King’s Bench, early in 1513, and his first interrogation for heresy the next year. If the authorities really thought that they could quash the praemunire charges by convicting Hunne of heresy, the sooner they acted the better. Nor is the suggestion that the Church was motivated by desire for revenge on Hunne convincing. Many people brought charges of praemunire against the clergy,15 but despite allegations to the contrary by such arch-critics as Simon Fish, there is little evidence that they were accused of heresy as a result.16 What seems to have happened is that, possessing evidence that Hunne was a heretic, the church authorities waited until December 1514 to proceed against him because by then it looked as if King’s Bench was about to decide against him.17
Was Hunne a heretic? Probably he was, which is not the same as saying that he was a paid-up member of a Lollard cell. But according to the evidence of his heresy trials, he did possess Lollard literature, he was prepared to defend a convicted Lollard, Joan Baker, and he did deny any obligation of the laity to pay tithes. He did also make highly critical remarks about the church establishment, including a statement that the bishops and priests were just like the scribes and pharisees who had crucified Christ.18 It looks suspicious, at any rate, and if More’s evidence that Hunne haunted the midnight lectures patronized by Lollards is not an invention, the case against him hardens.19
What perhaps more than anything else has led people to be suspicious of the Church’s motives in the Hunne affair is that the heresy trial took place only after his death and that the final sentence was that his already dead body should be burnt – an act of revenge seemingly the more vindictive for being so gratuitous. But it was never the intention of the church authorities to burn heretics. Instead what they sought was the return of erring sheep to the fold – or, to put it more technically, the abjuration of those accused. The problem in Hunne’s case was simply that since he was already dead, he was in no position to abjure, and therefore under canon law had to be burnt – and it was only the fact of his unexpected death that had resulted in the posthumous trial. It is usually alleged that such a trial was to the Church’s advantage, on the grounds that its case against Hunne was so weak that had he been alive, he would have been able to demolish it.20 Indeed, such an argument has been necessary, for it is the only explanation that anyone has been able to give as to why Dr William Horsey, the bishop’s vicar-general, might have had Hunne murdered, which is what the coroner’s court found that he had done. In fact, Hunne’s death was almost certainly a grave blow to the church authorities. Two days before, in the course of a preliminary examination before the bishop of London, he had made a partial confession. While denying that he had spoken the precise words alleged against him, he did admit to having ‘spoken words somewhat sounding to the same’. More to the point, he asked God’s mercy for what he had done and submitted himself to the bishop’s ‘charitable and favourable correction’.21 After this, the church authorities must have been extremely confident of Hunne’s successful conviction and subsequent abjuration, and there was thus no need to murder him. As it was, after his death, they had to do the best they could without their star witness.
The trial itself appears to have been conducted with the utmost formality. It was presided over by three bishops and one suffragan bishop. It was conducted in public. It lasted for at least a week, and though no detailed account of what took place has survived, it is known that considerable evidence was presented to show that Hunne had both possessed and made use of Lollard literature.22 And it seems most unlikely that the Church needed the posthumous trial in order to save Dr Horsey. Whether or not Hunne was a heretic could not have affected Horsey’s fate one way or another, for the Church had no licence to murder heretics. What the Church may have been guilty of was political ineptitude, for undoubtedly the trial added fuel to an already overheated situation. Amongst other things, Hunne’s conviction meant that his children would be disinherited, and this in turn was likely to provoke moves in their defence – as indeed, it did.23 Tactically the church authorities would have been well advised to keep a low profile. That they chose not to suggests that they were genuinely convinced that Hunne was a heretic and, that being the case, they considered it impossible for tactical considerations to be taken into account.
It must also be remembered that heresy was a serious and persistent problem for bishops of London and, like his predecessors, Bishop Fitzjames was determined to grapple with it.24 All the evidence suggests that he was an extremely conscientious churchman.25 Certainly his determination to stamp out heresy was such that, probably in 1513, at the time when the Hunne affair was brewing, he contemplated heresy proceedings against the dean of St Paul’s, John Colet, and may have suspended him briefly from preaching. Usually this is taken to be yet another black mark against the bishop but this is unfair.26 The ‘conservative’ Fitzjames did not accept Colet’s criticism of the Church: too wealthy, too worldly, too much emphasis upon rites and ceremonies, too great a veneration of images, too great a concentration on the ‘good works’ themselves, rather than the spirit with which they were performed. The Bishop of London’s objection was that these criticisms coincided with those voiced by the Lollards. No wonder they went to hear the dean’s sermons! Colet, of course, was no Lollard. Whether his views were heretical or not is another matter. It is not known why Fitzjames did not in the end proceed against Colet. Perhaps he felt that the dean had too many friends in high places, including, possibly, the archbishop of Canterbury, or perhaps, like modern historians, he could not quite decide whether his views were heretical.27 There was no such difficulty with the Lollards. For well over a century the Church had been ‘persecuting’ them and the guidelines were well drawn. During 1510 and 1511 twenty-two people had abjured this heresy in the diocese of London, among them Joan Baker whose views Hunne had defended.28 If a wealthy citizen such as Hunne was even thought to sympathize with Lollard views, it made a great deal of sense to investigate and, if sufficient evidence was forthcoming, to proceed against him. It made no sense at all to have him murdered in the bishop’s prison.
Was Richard Hunne murdered and if so, by whom? On the morning of 4 December 1514, only two days after his interrogation by the bishop, his body was discovered hanging from a beam in his cell in the bishop’s prison. A coroner’s jury decided that he had been mu
rdered, and named William Horsey, along with the gaoler and summoner, Charles Joseph, and his assistant, John Spalding. The Church maintained that Hunne had committed suicide, and the Crown appears to have agreed; certainly Horsey’s plea of ‘not guilty’ was accepted by King’s Bench, and there is no evidence that any proceedings were taken against the other two.29 Most historians have inclined towards the coroner’s view. This is surprising. To begin with, our only record of the inquest derives entirely from an anticlerical booklet published in the late 1530s.30 What is more, the evidence itself is totally unbelievable. Is it likely, as is stated in the booklet, that Horsey, if he was planning to murder Hunne, would have asked his forgiveness beforehand? Would he have chosen the two obvious suspects, Hunne’s gaolers, to carry out the crime? Would he have accompanied them? Would he, when they got to the cell, have shouted ‘Lay hands on the thief’? Why shout anything? Why ‘thief’? And there are plenty of other oddities. There is the suggestion that physical pressure was used on Hunne by the church authorities, which if true would be almost the only occasion that there is evidence for this.31 Moreover, it would surely have been considered counterproductive in the case of an important London citizen in a position to make public what had happened to him. One way and another, the more the evidence is looked at, the less likely does it seem that Richard Hunne was murdered either by Horsey or at his instigation – even, that is, if one accepts that Horsey was the sort of person likely to contemplate committing murder.
But to maintain that Horsey was not responsible in no way discounts the possibility that Hunne was murdered by somebody else, and in Charles Joseph, the summoner cum gaoler, there is at least a plausible candidate. On admittedly rather limited and partial evidence, he does appear to have been an unsavoury character who, along with his other professions, may also have been a professional pimp. Not only did Joseph have access to Hunne’s cell, but he also had a number of motives. Unlike Horsey, he had been cited by Hunne in the praemunire case, but as Hunne was apparently on the point of losing his case, this alone does not appear to be a sufficient reason to commit murder. What may have supplied a motive was Joseph’s dismissal from the post of summoner by Horsey only a few weeks before Hunne’s death. If this had taken place, it would have put Horsey in a position to make an offer that Joseph would have found difficult to refuse: his reinstatement as summoner in return for murdering Hunne – the only difficulty being that such a surmise brings one straight back to why Horsey would have wished Hunne dead, and for that no explanation has ever been discovered.32
A theory that avoids this problem is that Joseph murdered Hunne at his own instigation in an effort to win back Horsey’s favour – and it is just conceivable that Horsey may have given the false impression that he would like to see Hunne dead.33 But if Joseph was the murderer, why did the church authorities not press the case against him themselves? Such a move would have had its obvious dangers, but, to take the most cynical view, Joseph’s reputation would surely have made it a possible ploy, and one that would have been tactically sounder than faking a suicide, for at least it offered to the citizens of London a sacrificial lamb, or rather wolf. As it was, the authorities stuck by Joseph throughout, despite his damaging confession that he had committed the murder at Horsey’s instigation and indeed in Horsey’s presence.34Moreover, it would appear that the Crown accepted Joseph’s plea of ‘not guilty’ at the same time that it accepted Horsey’s.35 There is a lot that needs to be explained about Joseph’s involvement in the Hunne affair, but the evidence does not appear to be sufficient to convict him of murder, whether at his own or someone else’s instigation. However, if he really had been dismissed by Horsey, at the very least this means that he was a biased witness, and it has always to be remembered that the only evidence produced at the coroner’s inquest that implicated Horsey was Joseph’s confession. Hunne might, of course, have died as a result of an accident, or from natural causes, and in either case the church authorities might have felt that some cover-up was required. But this explanation was never put forward by anyone with any inside knowledge.36 This leaves suicide, the explanation favoured at the time by the authorities, and later by Thomas More.37 This would discount the evidence at the inquest, but as we have seen, much of that was unbelievable. Moreover, it is certainly quite feasible that Hunne took his own life. For over three years he had been waging war against the Church, and by December 1514 he was losing on every front. About to be defeated in King’s Bench and to be convicted of heresy, with all the public humiliation that entailed, he may well have felt suicidal.
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 s
trong 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 152950. 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.