by Gwyn, Peter
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.
However, the main thrust of the attack was in the law courts themselves. During the last two law terms of Henry VII’s reign ten cases of praemunire were brought before King’s Bench, eight of which were by the new attorney-general, John Ernley. The bishop of Norwich’s registrar and summoner were amongst those cited, but the cases were not confined to the diocese of Norwich. None of the cases was successful, but given that in the previous sixteen years only six praemunire cases were brought, it does look as if Ernley was deliberately testing the law in order to establish the extent of the Crown’s jurisdiction with regard to the Church, and perhaps to extend it. The record specifically states that Ernley had brought his prosecutions ‘for the king himself’, and even if this was merely a legal formula, Henry VII’s known close attention to all matters of government suggests that he would have been fully aware of what his attorney-general was up to.68 Moreover, a list of eighty-four people ‘ill-used’ by Henry VII cited seventeen churchmen, of whom two, th
e abbots of Gloucester and Cirencester, ‘were hardly dealt withal for praemunire’. Also named were none other than Bishop Fitzjames and Dr Horsey, the latter, it was stated, being imprisoned ‘contrary to conscience’. Unfortunately no details are given.69 There is other evidence of Henry VII’s direct intervention in church affairs, though much of it is difficult to interpret – it would be interesting to know, for instance, why the bishop of Salisbury had to pay ‘1000 marks for a very light cause’70 – but it looks as if Henry was unhappy with the concessions made to the Church by his Yorkist predecessors, and was anxious to win back lost ground.
Henry VII does not come across as someone especially interested in political theory, but he was probably well aware of the theoretical justification for his moves against the Church – and, if he was not, one of his closest ministers during the later part of his reign certainly was. Edmund Dudley wrote The Tree of Commonwealth in 1510 while awaiting execution for alleged treason, though he had been guilty merely of being a too willing executant of his master’s wishes. In the circumstances, he must have considered his words carefully. He was aware that some of Henry VII’s actions against individual churchmen had been unfair, for it was he who drew up that list already referred to of those ‘ill-used’ by the king. However, his book makes it clear that he fully supported Henry’s policy: it was the prince’s role not to assist the Church, but rather to assist ‘his maker and redeemer of whom he hath all his power and authority’; moreover, not only was his ability to correct the wicked much greater than the Church’s could ever be, but ‘the root of the love of God … within this realm must chiefly grow by our sovereign lord the king’.71 This last statement almost suggests that he envisaged a spiritual function for the prince, such as Henry VIII was to claim from time to time in the 1530s. Certainly he envisaged an ecclesiastical one – that is to say, he thought it the prince’s duty to control the external activities of the Church, its organization and jurisdiction. Such a view was no novelty. Deriving from Roman law, it had become an integral part of civil law, and as such was very much alive throughout the Middle Ages, despite the challenge of Gregorian views that asserted the primacy of the Church and papacy in all temporal matters. Amost a commonplace of the English legal profession, the notion seems to have been fully grasped by Henry VII, and certainly by his son.72 There is some doubt whether the alterations to the latter’s coronation oath made with his own hand date from the beginning of his reign or from the 1530s, but they indicate very clearly Henry’s view that the royal obligation to maintain the liberties of the Church should be in no way ‘prejudicial to his jurisdiction and dignity royal’.73 And that this view was not merely the by-product of the ‘break with Rome’ of the 1530s is made abundantly clear by the position he took up in 1515 in the Standish Affair – an affair that would not, however, have occurred unless the Church had not already begun to resist the threat to its liberties posed by the Crown.
Shortly after the 1504 parliament, the much-harassed bishop of Norwich, Richard Nix, wrote a letter to the archbishop of Canterbury stating that ‘lay men be much bolder against the Church than ever they were. If your Lordship help not, having the great seal in your hand, I and other of your subjects can no thing do.’ He added that if the archbishop would support him, he would bring charges of heresy against all those who threatened the church courts with praemunire74 – precisely what some people alleged Fitzjames had done in the Hunne affair. In fact, as was mentioned earlier, it is very hard to find any evidence that the Church did proceed in this way,75 but that Nix could think of doing so is an indication of the strong feelings aroused in church circles by the new wave of anticlericalism fomented by the Crown lawyers. It also suggests that the Church was not going to take it lying down. The convocation of 1504 – that is, the Church’s assembly or parliament – made it clear to Henry VII that during his reign the liberties of the English Church had been undermined, and it hoped that he would do something to put this right76 – presumably a hint that even at this late stage he would renew its charter of liberties. In 1510, during the first parliament of the new reign, a bill had been introduced to confirm the Church’s liberties, but without success.77 At the same time convocation determined to resist the activity of certain ‘wicked men’ who were threatening to trample the Church under foot.78 In his opening sermon the dean of St Paul’s, John Colet, strongly criticized the faults of the clergy, but also very much emphasized ‘the dignity of priesthood … the which is greater than either the king’s or emperor’s: it is equal with the dignity of angels’.79 This meant, amongst other things, that the clergy should not be brought before the secular courts.
Colet’s sermon to the 1510 convocation is famous, though more for its call for reform than for extolling the clerical orders. A speech to the 1514 convocation by John Taylor, who, as prolocuter, presided over the debates in the lower house, has been too often ignored.80 Like Colet, he attacked the deficiencies of the Church, that only encouraged the laity to trample on its liberties. Churchmen did nothing but quarrel amongst themselves. Monks were arrogant and idle. Secular priests – that is, those not in religious orders – led ‘foul and dissolute’ lives, and committed crimes which led to them being ‘sold publically in fetters by the secular power, like condemned criminals’. Taylor’s message was that the Church must reform or there would be no Church left, but throughout his speech he stressed that the ‘following of righteousness’ and the Church’s liberties went hand in hand, and, calling the leaders of the Church to arms, he reminded them that ‘neither the threat of harm nor exile, privation, mockeries, calumnies, hatred, not even the parade of death before their eyes’, had prevented their predecessors from fighting for these two things. Taylor’s speech is all the more remarkable in that, unlike Colet, he was not an obvious ‘reformer’, rather a successful career churchman, who under Wolsey was to become master of the rolls, and often employed on diplomatic missions. The fact that such a man could make so forceful a speech is the clearest indication possible of the strength of the clergy’s feelings on the eve of their battle with the Crown. The issues in this battle may appear trivial: whether the minor clerical orders should receive ‘benefit of clergy’, or whether cases of ‘breach of faith’ should be tried in the secular or ecclesiastical courts. But each one of them raised the question that had dominated so much of medieval polemic: who on this earth should have the final word, pope or emperor, Church or state? In 1515 both sides drew back from the brink. Fifteen years later it was to be a different story.
As has already been indicated, the battle in 1515 was not over Richard Hunne, though the feelings aroused by his mysterious death undoubtedly contributed to the heightening of tension. The specific issue was an Act of 1512 which had prohibited all clerics not in holy orders from claiming ‘benefit’ for certain serious offences, such as any murder committed in a holy place, in any occupied house, or on the king’s highway.81 The Act was for a trial period, to be reconsidered in the next parliament. The Church had, therefore, very good warning that the bill would again be before parliament in 1515, and it is almost certain that they had determined to fight it long before there was any question of defending Dr Horsey – and since he was in holy orders the Act did not affect his position one way or the other. The Church would have been encouraged to fight by certain resolutions taken at the Fifth Lateran Council, which was dominated by concerns similar to those being expressed in England by the likes of Colet and Taylor – the need for reform, but also to resist lay interference.82 In two bulls of 1514 the whole panoply of the Church’s defence against such interference was specifically restated.83 The call from Rome was clear, and the English clergy were in the mood to answer it.
Early in 1515, probably to coincide with the opening of parliament on 5 February, the distinguished abbot of Winchcombe, Richard Kidderminster, delivered a sermon at St Paul’s Cross in which he attacked the Act of 1512.84 In it he argued that since minor orders were just as ‘holy’ as major ones, those belonging to them could not b
e sentenced in the secular courts. More controversially, he went on to argue that nobody in holy orders could even be tried there and that the existing practice, quite irrespective of the fate of the disputed Act, was wrong. Immediate exception was taken to the sermon, and pressure from parliament led to Henry calling a conference at Blackfriars to debate the issues it raised. The spokesman for the ‘secular’ side was Henry Standish, the warden of the Grey Friars in London and provincial of the Franciscan order. The fact that he was a Franciscan is not without significance. The convocation of 1512 had forwarded to Rome a whole series of complaints against the orders of friars85 – part of a wider running battle between ‘secular’ clergy and friars that had, for instance, occupied much time at the Lateran Council.86 And amongst the mendicant orders none was so critical of the wealth and pretensions of the ‘secular’ clergy as the Franciscans. Thus in the battle between Crown and Church it is no surprise to find Standish on the side of the Crown.