by Gwyn, Peter
Nevertheless, the health of a monastic institution, especially a large one, undoubtedly affected more than just the well-being of its own members. If monks were regularly visiting the nearby taverns or consorting with local women, then the religious life of the diocese was being undermined; as it could be in ways that are less easily appreciated today. A central purpose of the religious orders was the continual offering up of prayers for the dead, and many local families would have contributed large sums of money in an effort to ensure the salvation of their ancestors’ souls. Thus, if for whatever reason services were not being properly conducted, not only the present but past generations were threatened with eternal damnation. Less dangerous, for the soul at least, was the deep involvement of monks and nuns in the economic life of the community as farmers, landlords, employers, bankers, teachers and almsgivers, and any financial scandals or unfair practices could not be entirely separated from the institution’s religious purposes and standing.40 Finally, religious houses were responsible for the appointment of many parish priests; in the diocese of Lincoln as many as 40 per cent of all benefices were in their gift, as compared with under 3 per cent in the gift of the bishop.41
All this is not merely supposition. The bishop of Winchester, Richard Fox, was for a time sufficiently worried about the well-being of the important Benedictine abbey of Hyde to visit it every fifteen days.42 More generally, complaints were made that he was too harsh in his treatment of the religious, especially of those nuns who showed a reluctance to abide by their rule and remain within the walls of their nunneries. When Wolsey passed these complaints on, Fox was unrepentant. Indeed, he declared that if he had Wolsey’s ‘power and authority’, he would endeavour ‘to mure and enclose their monasteries acccording to the ordinance of the law’43 – and as a translator of the rule of St Benedict he could speak with some authority.44 And it was Fox who, as deputy to Silvestro Gigli, the absentee bishop of Worcester, drew Wolsey’s attention in 1515 to the ‘inordinate, heady, and unreligious dealing of the canons of Saint Augustine besides Bristol’, as they attempted to elect a new abbot. ‘This is a perilous matter’, he wrote, ‘for the evil example that may come thereof, and therefore according to your good beginning I beseech you hold your good hand to it.’45
Other bishops known to have taken a particular interest in the religious orders were Blythe of Coventry and Lichfield,46 Fisher,47 Nix of Norwich,48 Sherburne of Chichester,49 but above all Longland. In 1519 he was asked to preach before the monks of Westminster on the occasion of Wolsey’s and Campeggio’s joint legatine visitation.50 On becoming bishop of Lincoln in 1521, he concentrated his attention on the 111 monastic institutions within his vast diocese, visiting in person any that showed signs of disarray.51 One of the houses that he was not able to do much about, though by his own account much needed to be done, was Thame; and the point about Thame was that as a Cistercian house it was exempt from his jurisdiction. In an effort to get round this, in 1526 he sought Wolsey’s help as legate. Wolsey in his turn instructed his Cistercian commissary, perhaps best thought of in this context as his deputy, the abbot of Waverley, to conduct a visitation of the wayward house.52 As it happened, Longland was to be disappointed with the abbot’s performance, finding his injunctions lacking in specific criticisms and constructive proposals for reform.53 He did not despair, though, and in the following year, again with Wolsey’s help, he secured the appointment of a new abbot who he was confident would put all to rights.54
The ‘reform’ of Thame is a good illustration of the problems that the ‘exempt’ monastic houses posed for the bishops, and the ways in which Wolsey’s legatine powers could be called on, at least in theory, to overcome them. In practice they had not, in the case of Thame, worked all that well, and for an interesting and, given Wolsey’s reputation for high-handedness, rather surprising reason. He had chosen to exercise his legatine powers indirectly, by appointing as his legatine commissary a leading abbot of the order who already possessed visitorial powers granted to him by the head of the order, the abbot of Cîteaux. This policy had the disadvantage that it could result, as in the case of Thame, in ineffectual action being taken. On the other hand, it had the great advantage that the Cistercians were not greatly antagonized by Wolsey’s intervention and might therefore be more willing to accept a measure of reform. And, in fact, a feature of Wolsey’s take-over of the English Church was the care that he took not to cause unnecessary offence. Did he go too far in this direction, for what may have been needed, after all, was a more vigorous intervention, and one that took less account of the susceptibilities of the various interest groups within the Church?
Such questions can never be far away in any discussion of Wolsey’s legatine rule – and at some point an answer will have to be attempted. For the moment, what is being stressed is just how careful he was not to tread on any toes. Thame is one example; his consultations with leading churchmen in March and November 1519 are another. And from the November meeting emerged new statutes for the Augustinian and Benedictine orders, a feature of which was, again, Wolsey’s desire to go through what might be called constitutional channels. As regards the Benedictines, this meant calling upon their two distinguished presidents, John Islip abbot of Westminster and Richard Kidderminster abbot of Winchcombe,55 to summon a general chapter for 26 February 1520, where the legatine statutes were presented and accepted. How Wolsey arrived at these is not known. It was usual for the Benedictines to appoint a committee of ‘definitors’ to perform such a task, and it may be that at the meeting of monastery heads in November 1519 such a committee was set up. At any rate, it seems unlikely that new statutes could have been drawn up without close consultation with members of the order, the more so because Islip, as a royal councillor very active in Star Chamber, was well known to Wolsey.56 Still, what efforts Wolsey made at conciliation were not entirely successful, for in an oft-quoted letter to him, members – though how many is not known – pointed out that:
beyond all doubt, if everything should tend, in the reform of the said order, to over-great austerity and rigour, we should not have monks enough to staff all our many very great monasteries … For in these stormy times (as the world now decays towards its end) those who desire a life of austerity and of regular observance are few, and indeed most rare.57
It has to be said that a hundred years earlier very similar objections had been made to Henry V’s attempts to reform the Benedictines, and there has to be a suspicion that this was an instinctive reaction to any outside interference, rather than a reasoned commentary on the nature of the intended reform.58 Still, it serves to reinforce the point that not everybody in England welcomed change, and thus the need for Wolsey to move with caution.
No copy of Wolsey’s legatine statutes for the Benedictines has survived, though in June 1520 the prior of Worcester, William More, is known to have paid twenty pence for one.59 As with the legatine constitutions, it is unlikely that they contained anything very novel. And what is certain is that those for the Augustinian order, of which a copy has survived, did not.60 These were initially published under Wolsey’s own authority as legate – an action which at first glance might appear to gainsay the thrust of the present argument. But it so happened that a general chapter of the Benedictines was anyway due to be summoned in 1520, and therefore Wolsey’s asking for one caused the minimum of inconvenience. An Augustinian chapter was not due until the following year, and thus a problem arose. Should Wolsey insist on a special meeting being summoned, with all the administrative complications this involved? Should he wait until 1521 to publish the new statutes, thereby allowing them to be formally accepted by the chapter, but also running the risk of seeing the impetus for reform brought about by his newly acquired legatine powers diminish? Or should he, having first consulted with at least some members of the order, go ahead and publish the statutes immediately but in doing so stress that not only was he anxious to hear what the general chapter of 1521 had to say about them, but was willing to make alterations
in the light of its discussions? It was the last course of action that Wolsey adopted.61 However one estimates his sincerity in asking for the order’s views, again what emerges, despite appearances, is the degree of tact that Wolsey was prepared to show.
Probably he showed equal tact when he turned his attention to the remaining religious orders, but sadly the information is so meagre that it is not even always possible to state with certainty that he did anything. His use of the Cistercian abbot of Waverley as a legatine commissary may exemplify the way in which he made himself the effective head of this order in England. Unlike the Cistercians, the Premonstratensians, with thirty-one houses, had secured independence from their founding abbey – in their case, Prémontré – though only as recently as 1512.62 The abbot of Welbeck became ex officio head of the order, but what that abbot’s relationship with Wolsey was, or whether, indeed, there was any legatine interference in the affairs of the order, is not known. The same is true of the Carthusians and Gilbertines. The presence in England of both these orders was small – perhaps as few as nine Carthusian and ten Gilbertine houses63 – and they may have escaped Wolsey’s attention on this account. On the other hand, his usual thoroughness would suggest otherwise, and, as there is so little information about any aspect of these orders for the 1520s, it seems reasonable to assume that Wolsey did intervene, despite the lack of evidence.
What of the friars, or mendicant orders? Together the various orders of friars owned about 180 houses, and numbered between 1,500 and 3,000 members.64 Most historians have taken a somewhat gloomy view of their performance during the fifteenth and early sixteenth centuries,65 a view that was shared by none other than Thomas More whose fictional friar in the first book of Utopia was made the butt of hangers-on at Cardinal Morton’s household – and of More’s readers ever since.66 Much of the contemporary criticism may have been exaggerated, a consequence of the long-standing battle between the friars and secular clergy which was touched upon in connection with the Hunne affair;67 and if the evidence of wills can be taken as an indication of genuine attitudes, it would seem that many laymen thought highly enough of the friars to believe that their presence at a funeral improved the deceased’s chances of salvation.68 Be that as it may, the friars constituted such a large part of the religious landscape of England that it is hard to believe that Wolsey would have ignored them, though again there are difficulties in establishing what precisely he did.
Best documented is Wolsey’s intervention in the affairs of the Franciscan Observants. Although a very small order with no more than six houses, they were, because of royal patronage and their reputation for holy living, much more important than their numbers suggest.69 In particular, Greenwich, founded in 1481 by Edward IV, but with its foundation confirmed in 1485 by Henry VII, played an important role because of its very close proximity to the royal palace.70 It was at Greenwich in June 1509 that Henry VIII and Catherine of Aragon were married, and that the Princess Mary was baptized in February 1516, with Wolsey as one of her godfathers. So it is not inappropriate that in the crisis brought about by Henry’s desire for a divorce from Catherine the majority of the Observants sided with Catherine and Mary. Indeed, the irony is that an order which the first Tudor monarch had done so much to encourage was the first to be suppressed, and this as early 1534.71 Wolsey, too, had his difficulties with it. In the summer of 1524 both Clement VII and Francisco Quinones, the general of the order, wrote in an effort to persuade him not to carry out his intended visitation of the Greenwich house.72 The new pope went out of his way to stress the importance of the order in the battle against Luther. He asked Wolsey to think more about the good of Christendom than of England alone by treating the Greenwich Observants with the utmost gentleness and tact; with some vehemence, he asked the English envoy at Rome to pass on the message, ‘For God’s sake use mercy with these Friars.’73 In reply, Wolsey assured the pope that he would use such tact that no complaints would arise, but he refused to give way.74 16th January 1525 was set aside for the visitation, which was to be conducted by John Allen, responsible for most of the legatine visitations, and by Henry Standish, the same man who in 1515 had done battle with the English clergy.75
That Standish was chosen is yet further evidence that Wolsey never held his actions in 1515 against him, but it may nonetheless have been a controversial choice.76 The bishop of St Asaph, as he had become by 1525, was probably the most distinguished English Franciscan of his time, but he was not an Observant, and between the Observants and the Conventual Franciscans there was no love lost. His appointment, therefore, as joint visitor, though making some sense, may explain the vigour of Greenwich’s opposition – of which the pleas of the pope and the general were but an early salvo – just as much as any dislike of legatine interference. When that salvo failed to head off the visitation, a number of the Greenwich friars decided to sabotage it by staging a mass walk-out. However, a new day was arranged, and it was made clear that those who did not attend would be expelled from the order. At the same time, one of the most eminent of the Greenwich friars, John Forest, confessor to Catherine of Aragon, and a future Catholic martyr, was called upon to preach against his offending brothers at Paul’s Cross. Some were for a time ‘put in the porter’s ward in the cardinal’s palace’, while a lay-brother, William Renscroft, was sent to the Greyfriars’ house in London until he ‘submitted himself, and was assoiled of the said bishop [Standish] by the authority of the cardinal, and so delivered home again’.77 For some this is yet another episode to be held against Wolsey. It may be that in carrying through the visitation, Wolsey was acting illegally, because it looks as if in the summer of 1524 the Observants had managed to secure a two-year restraint from legatine interference that was only lifted in November 1525 – after the visitation had taken place. If this is so, it would further help to explain the vigour of Greenwich’s resistance, as does the mere fact that they had such powerful friends. But if Wolsey did act illegally, it was one of the very rare occasions that he did; and the powerful are not always in favour of reform.
Very little is known of Wolsey’s legatine involvement with the remaining orders of friars. Apparently he had intended to carry out a visitation of the London Greyfriars himself, accompanied by the king. In what precise capacity Henry would have acted is a little unclear, but his intention to take part is at any rate evidence of his support for Wolsey’s legatine activities. As it happened, the day chosen, 9 March 1525, was the moment when confirmation of the Imperial victory at Pavia reached London, and the visitation was postponed. When later in the year, it did take place it was carried out once again by John Allen.78 There is no evidence of any resistance, but neither is there any further information about what took place, nor evidence of any other legatine connection with the Franciscans. The small order of Austin Friars had run into financial difficulties as a result of a plenary indulgence secured in 1516 to help finance their Oxford house.79 It was thought that the provincial of the order, Edmund Bellond, may have pocketed some of the money, so the prior-general, the Venetian Gabriel della Volta, was brought in, and early in 1520 Bellond was removed from office. In April 1522, his financial affairs were examined by John Dowman and Richard Wolman, both distinguished clerical lawyers and administrators with close connections with Wolsey,80 and it seems likely, although there is no direct evidence, that they were acting in some legatine capacity. In any event, their investigations failed to solve the problems of the order. By the end of 1522 Bellond’s successor, William Wetherall, had in turn been replaced by John Stokes, only for Wetherall to be reinstated in 1526. This time he managed to secure his tenure of office for six years by virtue of Wolsey’s legatine powers – something that was to backfire on him when, following Wolsey’s downfall, he was accused by the prior-general of destroying the liberties of his province. Still, it provides some definite proof of Wolsey’s involvement with the order, though whether Wetherall was worthy of the cardinal’s support cannot be established.