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

by Gwyn, Peter

  The main conclusion of this survey of Wolsey’s patronage is the important part played by the king. There was nothing new in this royal interest in appointments: most of Henry’s predecessors had shared it, but none more so apparently than Henry VII who, when in 1495 he moved Oliver King from Exeter to Bath and Wells, had secured a promise that all the important episcopal appointments in that see – and there were over fifty prebends – should be made by himself.249 It may be that this was an ad hoc arrangement facilitated by the fact that King, as royal secretary, was close to his royal master, and if similar promises were extracted from other bishops no evidence of them has so far come to light. On the other hand, if there were, it would come as no surprise. It was Henry VII who began on any regular basis the practice, continued by his son, of appointing foreigners to English bishoprics. This was a means not only of securing the aid of people with some influence at the Roman Curia, but also of placing the bishopric under royal control, whether that control was exercised by a Richard Fox under Henry VII or a Wolsey under Henry VIII. It is also the case that Henry VII had pushed his leading minister’s role in church affairs in the same way as his son was to do. John Morton was made archbishop of Canterbury in 1486; in the following year he secured a bull, Quanta in Dei Ecclesia, giving him powers to reform the exempt monasteries; and in 1493 he was made a cardinal. Of course, it was the papacy who formally bestowed both the bull and the cardinal’s hat but, as with Wolsey’s successes with the papacy, what was needed was royal support, and this Morton received.250 When to all this is added the critical attitude taken by both kings towards the Church’s defence of its ‘liberties’,251 the broad continuity of policy adopted by father and son towards the English Church becomes apparent. And the direction was towards greater royal control – of which church patronage was one part. One of Wolsey’s principal tasks was to ensure that the royal wishes in church matters were carried out, and as such he, amongst other things, performed the role of church patronage secretary.

  It has seemed right to emphasize the Crown’s involvement in the Church, partly because it has been too much overlooked, and partly because it provides one answer to the question why there was so little opposition to Wolsey’s legatine powers. What has misled in the past has been the concentration on Wolsey to the exclusion of his chief source of power, Henry VIII. In fact, it was his close association with the king, rather than his legatine powers, that enabled him so easily to dominate the English Church, something that emerges clearly from a brief look at the fate of previous legates a latere, the most famous of whom was Henry Beaufort. Despite being a grandson of Edward III and probably the wealthiest man in England, both in 1417 and 1428 his appointment as legate was strongly resisted, on the first occasion by Henry V and Archbishop Chichele and on the second by Protector Gloucester and the royal Council.252 When a hundred years later Leo x proposed sending Cardinal Bainbridge, archbishop of York but resident at Rome, to England as papal legate there had again been opposition, with this time Wolsey and Fox pointing out to the pope that it was not the practice of English kings to allow legates a latere to enter their territory.253 The point about these episodes is that the initiative in sending the legate had not come from the king or royal government. But in 1518 it was different. Henry had wanted Wolsey to become papal legate, so that he could carry out not the pope’s wishes, but his own.

  What did Henry hope to obtain from his own papal legate? Certainly, not just a greater control over church patronage, because, as has been shown, though Wolsey’s legatine powers probably did strengthen the king’s hands in this matter, it was not by very much, if only because earlier kings had anyway exercised a considerable control. Still, there does seem to be a difference between Henry VII having to extract a promise from one of his bishops to place all his episcopal patronage in his hands, and Henry VIII’s assumption in 1528 that the archdeaconry of Oxford, theoretically in the gift of the bishop of Lincoln, was in the royal gift; and maybe Wolsey’s legatine powers explain the difference. At any rate, when on 7 July 1528 Dr Bell wrote to Wolsey that ‘his said highness commanded me to signify to your grace his pleasure and desire to your said grace by virtue of your legatine prerogative and prevention to confer to his chaplain, Mr Wilson, the vicarage of Thaxted’,254 there is just a hint that Henry believed that Wolsey was authorized to appoint anybody to anywhere.

  However, the chief advantages of Wolsey’s legatine powers to Henry were of a more general kind. In an earlier chapter it was argued that the early sixteenth century witnessed in England a jurisdictional conflict between Church and state, in which the first two Tudor monarchs had played an active part. Their intentions had not been to destroy the ‘liberties’ of the Church, nor, indeed, had they been looking for any ‘break with Rome’. Instead they had been anxious to prune back ‘liberties’, but to recover ground which, during the fifteenth century, they felt the Crown had lost, and to ensure that where there was a clash of interests the Crown’s interests would prevail. When in 1515 the Church had attempted to interpret its right to ‘benefit of clergy’ in the widest possible sense, perhaps in an effort to reverse the royal policy, a major battle had taken place. There had been no outright winner; neither side was ready for, or even wanted, a fight to the death, but it was the Church that had lost the argument. However, the fact that his archbishop of Canterbury had talked of Becket and of martyrdom can only have encouraged Henry to look for ways to secure a more compliant Church, and the way that he found was Wolsey and his legatine powers. The great advantage to the king of this arrangement was that since Wolsey’s supremacy over the English Church derived in theory from the Church itself – that is, from the pope – it was difficult for the Church to challenge it. Indeed, they could only have done so by appealing to the king which, given his support for Wolsey’s legatine powers, was not a course of action open to them. Thus, as long as Henry felt that he could trust Wolsey, the legatine powers were an ideal solution to the problem of securing a subservient Church; and it is notable that during the 1520s there was no more conflict between Church and state. That the stated purpose of legatine commissions was to facilitate the reform and correction of the Church raises the question of whether Henry had any real interest in such matters.255 Given his sustained involvement in many aspects of the Church’s life, which led him, amongst other things, to write a work of theology, the famous Assertio Septem Sacramentorum, the possibility that he did should not be completely discounted, even if positive evidence is hard to come by. In March 1525 it had been his intention to accompany Wolsey on his visitation of the London Greyfriars, but, as we have seen, in the end this did not take place – and this non-event is about all there is. However, when writing to Wolsey in January 1519, Richard Fox argued that there would be less difficulty in carrying through church reform because ‘our most Christian king who had, I think, exhorted, encouraged, and advised you to undertake the task, will lend his authority and help your godly desires’.256 Of course, in associating the king with Wolsey and reform, an element of flattery was intended, but Fox does seem to have been making a genuine point as well. Moreover, the fact that virtually no evidence of Henry’s interest in reform has survived is partly explained by his having no ‘constitutional’ part to play in its implementation; Henry and Wolsey could well have talked about it, but there would have been no resulting records. Perhaps this argument should not be pushed too far, but it does seem permissible to remark that if there was going to be church reform, Henry would have preferred it to be carried out under the aegis of his favourite minister rather than of his somewhat tiresome archbishop of Canterbury – all of which brings one back to the central question of Wolsey’s intentions towards the Church.

  By stressing Henry’s involvement in church matters, and his responsibility for securing Wolsey’s legatine powers, it is possible to reject much of the more extreme criticism of Wolsey’s churchmanship. Far from being the ego-trip that it is frequently portrayed as, in which the attraction of the clothes and the crosses w
ere the dominant feature, it should be seen as yet another aspect of his work as leading royal servant. One feature of that work was clerical taxation. Kings had always seen the Church as a possible source of revenue, and the first two Tudors were no exception. The whole question of clerical taxation is a complicated one best left to the experts; and even they find it hard to come up with very precise figures.257 What does emerge is that Wolsey made some innovations – though, as in so many other areas, he had been partially anticipated by Archbishop Morton. It was Morton who, for the so-called magnum subsidium of 1489, had started to overhaul the method of assessment and collection which had remained essentially unaltered since the taxatio ecclesiastica of 1291.258 In 1522 Wolsey continued Morton’s work when he instructed the commissioners for the ‘general proscription’ – an enquiry into England’s military potential – to discover ‘the values of all spiritual dignities and benefices … in tithes, portions, annuities, and oblations’.259 Their findings provided the basis for the clerical subsidy voted by convocation in the following year.

  There were other features of this subsidy which, if not entirely new, were at least unusual. It was a graduated tax which included at the lower end a large number of people who, under previous clerical tenths, would have been exempt from payment; and neither were curates any longer exempt. Dispensing these exemptions contributed to the most novel feature of the 1523 subsidy, its size. The clergy were being asked to provide, according to Wolsey, £120,000, in five annual portions of £24,000; his estimate for the clerical loan of the previous year had been £60,000.260 On top of all this, there was the Amicable Grant of 1525, for which the clergy were supposed to contribute a sum equivalent to one-third of their income. Comparisons with previous payments by the clergy are hard to make, given in particular the uncertainty about how much of the required amount was actually collected – and there were indeed difficulties in collecting the 1523 subsidy.261 What is certain is that the resident papal legate was asking the clergy to contribute annually in taxation to the king about half as much again as they had been accustomed to pay.262 As in the case of patronage, it is difficult to assess just how far Wolsey’s new powers contributed to this achievement, and, as was indicated earlier, it is not even certain that in 1523 Wolsey had been able to make use of a legatine convocation to persuade the clergy to pay. However, insofar as the legatine powers did increase the king’s minister’s authority over the Church, they may have made it marginally easier for large financial demands to be made.

  If Wolsey as legate was to act effectively on the king’s behalf, it was obviously necessary for him to assert his legatine authority. The ways in which he did this have already been described, but given the emphasis in this account on the royal involvement, a further point emerges. In the traditional picture of Wolsey’s churchmanship, his insistence on his legatine rights had a largely financial motivation. And those rights did indeed bring financial gain. As was mentioned earlier, one result of his composition with the bishops was that he secured a third of their annual revenues from spiritualities. A third of the £3,450 arrived at in the 1535 Valor Ecclesiasticus produces a figure of £1,150, and from this must be deducted the spiritualities of the sees that Wolsey himself held – for most of the relevant period York and Durham – and also those of Canterbury, which appear to have been left untouched by Wolsey’s composition with the archbishop. This gives us an annual income from this source of about £800. From the joint-prerogative court he was receiving just over £300 a year, and there would also have been revenue from the proving of wills reserved for his sole legatine jurisdiction. There are no figures for this, nor indeed for the revenues derived from his legatine court of audience, but he was receiving about £200 a year from the granting of dispensations and other licences. Legatine visitations of monastic and collegiate institutions in the dioceses of Coventry and Lichfield, Lincoln, Salisbury and Worcester in 1524-5 resulted in about £440, and similar visitations in and around London about £200.263 Another source of revenue derived from his right to conduct sede vacante visitations, but only in the case of Winchester in 1528, on the death of Fox and before his own accession, does he seem to have asserted the right, and even then he may have arrived at some financial compromise with Warham who, as archbishop of Canterbury, had a better established right to conduct such a visitation.264

  It will be obvious from the many uncertainties surrounding these figures that only a most impressionistic indication of the amount Wolsey derived from his legatine powers can be given. In February 1524 he himself estimated that ‘all the profits that may rise of my legation, … will not be worth one thousand ducats (£300) by the year, whatsoever report may be made to his Holiness to the contrary by such as might suppose and think great revenues might grow’.265 One thing, at least, that this survey of his legatine revenues shows is that Wolsey was here being very economical with the truth, because something approaching £1,500 would be nearer the mark.266 Does such a figure confirm the view that ‘great revenues’ would ensue? The answer has to be yes, since few people in Tudor England had an income of more than this amount – but with one important qualification. Such a figure was a great deal of money for almost everyone but Wolsey himself. After 1526 he was receiving about £7,500 a year from his French pension alone, while Thomas Winter’s income, which was effectively his own, was alleged to be £2,700. Then there were the revenues from his sees of York and Durham, amounting to nearly £5,000, about £2,000 from St Albans, and the lord chancellorship brought him at least £2,000 – and these are just the more obvious sources of revenue. In 1519 the Venetian ambassador had estimated Wolsey’s income at about £9,500, while in 1531 a successor reported that it had been about £35,000 – but this figure left out of the reckoning his French pension.267 In such a context, a legatine income of about £1,500, at the most 8 per cent of his total income, cannot explain Wolsey’s motivation for wanting to become legate. Moreover, by concentrating on the financial aspects, one can too easily ignore the fact that his legatine authority could most easily and effectively be expressed in terms of jurisdiction, and it was from jurisdiction that revenue derived.268 Wolsey could only effectively assert his legatine powers by insisting on his jurisdictional rights, because it was only they which gave reality to his theoretical claim. If he was successful, money would inevitably accrue. It may be going too far to see the money as merely a symbol, but to argue thus is nearer the truth than to see it as an end in itself – especially when a new claim to authority is being asserted, which is precisely what Wolsey was doing.

  It is not, therefore, the love of money or of glory that provides the key to Wolsey’s churchmanship, but rather the desire to further his master’s interests: this at least has been the argument so far. Now the task is to try to discover what such a desire entailed and, if possible, to arrive at some assessment of his personal attitude towards religion. It is, for instance, most unlikely that Wolsey ever had a religious vocation. As mentioned earlier,269 for a person of his social standing, with any aptitude for learning, university followed by the Church provided the obvious and well-tried route not only to financial success but to a more interesting life. There are similar if more varied routes today, but then as now, a passionate devotion to the steps along the way – to learning while at university or to the mechanics of the law while one is being articled – is not required, and indeed is probably unusual. Similarly for Wolsey, university and Church were likely to have been the means to an end – which is not to say that he would have had any emotional or intellectual difficulties in accepting the means. And the point has been made before that what is interesting about Wolsey is his decision not to read for the canon or civil law, courses which the brightest and most ambitious students of his day would have more naturally chosen.270 Perhaps he was a slow developer, or perhaps, as will be suggested shortly, he did have a genuine interest in academic study? The great sadness for his biographer is the dearth of evidence. What, however, need not be accepted is the view that sees all career chur
chmen as time-servers, men with no sincerity in their religious beliefs. For whatever their youthful attitudes, it would have been hard for people in their position not to develop an attachment and loyalty to the institution that had done so much for them. Of course, its size and diversity may not have helped in this respect. On the other hand, the Church did have a great tradition which, combined with the ceremonial and sacramental dimension, must have made its influence very hard to resist – and this would have been as true for Wolsey as anyone else. Another attempt will be made later to discover more about Wolsey’s personal attitude to religion. The point being made here is simply this: even if Wolsey saw his major role as that of royal servant, it does not exclude the possibility that he had, if no vocation, at least a genuine interest in the affairs of the Church. And whether he did or not, he could never escape from the fact that he was a churchman, and this in itself may be of some importance.

  What that importance is was suggested in the chapter on the Hunne and Standish affairs, where it was argued that Wolsey, while essentially working in the king’s interest, was also anxious to minimize the conflict between Church and state; and that this involved keeping open the channels of communication with the clerical party and looking at all times for compromise. Since such a posture made political sense, it does not necessarily tell us very much about his religious beliefs, but it may serve to reiterate the point that neither Church nor state was anxious for a fight to the death. So the ambiguities in his position, which Wolsey had expressed to Henry on bended knee in 1515 – that though he owed everything to his king, he had also, along with all the bishops, taken an oath of loyalty to the pope – need not and, once the dust of 1515 had settled, did not, create for him a major problem. Wolsey as royal servant was not expected to lead an all-out attack on the Church and in fact the most likely effect of Wolsey’s increasing domination of the Church would be in the opposite direction. With his own man in charge, Henry could relax.