The King's Cardinal: The Rise and Fall of Thomas Wolsey (Pimlico)
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Does Longland’s advice imply that if Kirton had kept to his original promise, all attempts to remove him would have been dropped – a course of action which would reflect no credit on Wolsey? The suggestion is no: it was merely the timing of his resignation and the various other conditions he was insisting on, such as that his successor should be someone from within the abbey, that were at stake. If it were otherwise, it is odd that Kirton should have been in the end offering so little, unless he had come to the conclusion that he was in such a strong position to resist removal that he need not bother with a bribe. And one thing that does emerge from all these negotiations is that it was much easier for Longland to propose Kirton’s resignation than to achieve it. Ten months later, in June 1527, the bishop was still trying to remove him.331 By then he had come up with a new strategy, the appointment of two coadjutors who would take over the administration of the abbey on the grounds that Kirton, because of his age, was no longer able to carry this out. Such a procedure was not uncommon and had been used, for instance, in 1519 for St Albans in Abbot Ramrige’s case.332 It would have been easier to implement than a formal dismissal, because there was no requirement to prove that any crime had been committed, and because easier, it would have posed a greater threat for Kirton. However, if it did have the effect of making him reconsider his position, he nevertheless took his time for it was only eight months after Longland had devised the strategy – that is, in March 1528 – that he eventually resigned.333
One of the complaints that Longland made about Kirton during these lengthy negotiations was that he was doing everything possible to persuade the prior of Spalding, Thomas White, not to resign; ‘thus secretly he works, not like a wise and kind man, to study to abridge your grace of your honourable pleasure and purpose’.334 What Wolsey’s precise ‘pleasure and purpose’ was is uncertain. No mention of any direct financial advantage accruing to Wolsey from the prior’s resignation has survived. On the other hand, Spalding was a wealthy house with an income of about £880, so there may have been some financial motive involved. There was also a persistent rumour that Wolsey intended to appoint the prior of Tynemouth in White’s place.335 But there were also criticisms of Prior White. Longland, it is true, in a letter to Wolsey called him ‘good and gentle’, but added that he was led by others,336 an observation which mirrors almost precisely those made at the time of Bishop Atwater’s visitation in 1519. Then the bishop had ordered the prior to take the advice not of two laymen, whom White clearly relied on far too much, but of the majority of the brothers.337 Without knowing a great deal more about the state of the priory, it is impossible to say whether this criticism should have provided sufficient grounds for attempting to force his resignation. It certainly did not provide a sufficient case in law, as Longland himself admitted.338 Thus, when the good prior, for all his gentleness, refused to give way to pressure, there was nothing that either Wolsey or Longland could do, and he remained at the head of his house until well into the 1530s.339
What Wolsey’s efforts to secure the resignations of the heads of the monastic houses of Chester, Peterborough and Spalding make abundantly clear is how difficult they were to remove. This means that even if the worst possible view is taken of Wolsey’s intentions, there were severe limits to what he could do – and this despite his legatine authority. But, in fact, none of these three cases suggests that Wolsey’s intentions were wholly bad. There were, it is true, financial considerations involved – and what is thought of these depends very much on what view is taken of Cardinal College, because it was this that was to be the main beneficiary of money accruing from monastic appointments and resignations. But even if these considerations arouse suspicion, it cannot be denied that there were genuine grounds for considering the removal of all three men from high office; and the same can be said about most of the other people in whose removal, or attempted removal, Wolsey played some part. The usual defect was old age and the consequent inability to cope with the demands of an exacting office. In 1526, Wolsey wrote to Richard Romsey, abbot of the large Benedictine abbey of Hyde in Winchester, suggesting that though in the past he had managed his house discreetly and well, he could no longer do so given his age and imbecility. Not surprisingly, the abbot hotly denied this. However, since he had been abbot since 1509, he must have been of a considerable age, and even he had to admit that he was ‘somewhat diseased’. This, he said, would prevent him from travelling to see Wolsey but did not, in his opinion, prevent him from exercising his office. He had therefore no intention of resigning, but trusted that Wolsey would rather conserve and aid him than ‘experiment any sharper means’ to remove him340 – and in March 1529 Romsey was to die in office. Wolsey also attempted to remove the prior of St Andrew’s, Tywardreth, because ‘by reason of your great age and impotency you neither may nor can take such pain and diligence … as you have done in time past’. He should therefore relieve himself ‘of the great burden of office, live restfully and at ease in this your great age, and, as we verily think, do a great deed of good merit to the pleasure of Almighty God and weal of your said house.’341 The letter shows some tact, quite unlike the marquess of Exeter’s peremptory request, made after Wolsey’s fall, for the prior to make way for the marquess’s own candidate. But Prior Collins, whether or not, as was later alleged, he had taken to drink, was quite sober enough to resist both these approaches, and he is last encountered writing off to his friends amongst the diocesan administrators of Exeter to rally support.342
However much one may sympathize with Prior Collins or with the abbot of Hyde, an ageing head who had held office for many years – and both Romsey and Collins had held it for about thirty343 – was probably no good thing for the ‘weal’ of the community, and arguably what was required were greater powers to remove such a person. A tactful letter, hints about the possible loss of a pension, or even the start of more direct moves to depose might do the trick, but if the head was determined to resist, his likelihood of success was great. For Hyde and Tywardreth, this may not have been too disastrous. Things may have been a little lax at Hyde, but there is no evidence that anything was seriously wrong with either. At the Augustinian abbey of Wigmore in Herefordshire, the situation was more serious. Its abbot, John Smart, had in fact been appointed by Wolsey in June 1518, and for once Wolsey’s choice did not turn out well.344 At any rate, by 1537 the then bishop of Hereford, Edward Fox, was forced to issue a set of injunctions critical of the behaviour both of Smart and the canons under him.345 Worse was to follow, for in the following year one of the canons accused Smart of every crime under the sun, of which rape, murder and robbery were the most heinous.346 One of the lesser charges was that he had paid Wolsey £100 in order to obtain his appointment as abbot. It should be said that the canon’s evidence was very partial and, in the view of the new bishop, Rowland Lee, incapable of proof, so there is no compelling reason to accept it now. But if money did pass hands at the election, this did not in any way prevent Wolsey from working to secure his removal,347 and according to Wolsey’s agent in the matter (none other than the same Rowland Philipps who had allegedly led the opposition to Wolsey in the 1523 legatine convocation), Smart’s removal was necessary if the house was not to be destroyed.348
Smart apparently felt confident enough to tell Phillips that he trusted to the extinction of Wolsey’s legatine powers to escape removal, and so it proved.349 But the remark itself was surely some acknowledgement, if unintentional, of Wolsey’s genuine concern for the good of the monastic houses, a concern that emerges most clearly from the last case to be discussed. In 1528, the prior of King’s Langley, Hertfordshire, was Robert Miles. He was also provincial of the Dominican order and thus a man of some importance. Unfortunately he had a weakness, which was women, or rather, one particular woman, Agnes Pastloo. It was a relationship which he had attempted to disguise by marrying her off to one of his servants, but without success, and one of the people who got to know about it was none other than the queen who, since the house was a royal fou
ndation, had every right to show her concern. The ‘honest people’ of Dunstable were also concerned, though why this should have been so is not at all clear. Although in an adjoining county, Dunstable was not especially close geographically,350 and neither this nor the fact that Dunstable had a Dominican priory of its own appears quite to explain the town’s interest. Be that as it may, they had gone to the trouble of drawing up a list of ‘detections’ against Miles.351 Longland, who as diocesan bishop had been drawn into the matter, admonished the prior both in a private interview and by letter, but to no effect. Despite the warnings, the prior and Agnes had obviously remained rather more than ‘just good friends’.
Longland’s problem was that, as a Dominican house, King’s Langley was exempt from his jurisdiction. Private remonstrations were thus the only course of action available to him, other than appealing to Wolsey as legate, which he did. In fact his letter to Wolsey is the only evidence for this episode which has survived.352 It is not known what action, if any, Wolsey took. It is not even known when Miles ceased to be prior, though by 1530 he was no longer there which may suggest that some action against him was taken.353 How, then, is it possible to consider this episode to be important evidence of Wolsey’s genuine interest in the welfare of the religious orders? The answer lies in the tone of Longland’s letter. The bishop obviously felt strongly that something must be done, ‘for it is a pity such a man should be head of Christ’s Church’. Moreover, it was not just Miles’s sexual lapses that worried him, for he reported that there ‘is little religion kept at his house, and it is in utter decay’.354 When Longland wrote this letter on 1 June 1528 he had known Wolsey for about thirty years, and for the previous seven had worked closely with him in all manner of ways. It would therefore seem most unlikely that he would have bothered to express himself in this way unless he was reasonably certain that Wolsey would share his concern for the well-being of King’s Langley and of the Dominican order over whose affairs the incontinent prior presided.
On 10 January 1519 Wolsey, in company with his fellow legate Cardinal Campeggio, conducted a visitation of the great Benedictine monastery of St Peter’s, Westminster that was intended to herald the start of a new era of legatine reform of the religious orders. The episode provided Polydore Vergil with the occasion for one of his most vicious assaults on Wolsey:
He dealt with the business extravagantly and confused and disturbed them in order to frighten the other monks, to show his power, to represent himself as even more terrible. The whole performance tended to one result: that the monks who had been called to judgment should prefer voluntarily to pay cash rather than change their way of life. His view was not mistaken. The monks easily comprehended why the physician who was so forgetful of his own health was so careful of that of others.355
Following Vergil, most other historians have suspected that Wolsey saw his legatine powers only as a means of raising revenue,356 and no aspect of these powers has done more to arouse these suspicions than that which enabled him to visit monastic houses, and as a consequence to charge a procuration fee. One reason for this may be that post-medieval historians are not very familiar with procurations, even though they continued to be paid in England after the Reformation. Reading Pollard, one might even think that Wolsey had invented them which, of course, is in no sense true.357 Although in theory they were supposed to cover the expenses of any ecclesiastical official in the conduct of his business, usually when carrying out a visitation, but also when acting as papal nuncio or legate, they had in the course of time become a standard charge for every kind of church visitation, not just those of monastic institutions.358 So large sums of money were involved: Morton, for instance, as archbishop of Canterbury, obtained from ten sede vacante visitations the sum of £1,416 15s 3d, of which £402 12s 4d came from visitations of monastic houses. Given this background, it was both inevitable and acceptable that Wolsey should, in his legatine capacity, charge a procuration fee. The only possible objection can be to the amount.
Wolsey calculated his procuration fee at one twenty-fifth of an institution’s annual income, which was considerably more than anyone else charged. To make one direct comparison, in March 1525 Wolsey’s commissary, John Allen, visited Tewkesbury Abbey, whose income was put at £761 7s 2d, and he charged a procuration fee of £30 9s 1d.359 For the sede vacante visitation of Archbishop Warham in 1522, Tewkesbury had paid only £3 6s 8d360 – which seems, incidentally, at least in the diocese of Worcester, to have been the fixed rate for all larger monasteries, irrespective of their precise income. It should be said that the institutions – which included colleges and hospitals as well as monasteries – were allowed to pay their legatine procurations in manageable instalments. Prior William More of Worcester paid his personal contribution to the £40 owed for Allen’s visitation in April 1525 in five instalments of £3;361 Winchester College, whose annual income was put at £628 13s 6d, was charged £8 for Allen’s visitation in March 1527, but was still paying it off after Wolsey’s fall.362 But though payment by instalments would have eased the burden, procuration fees were heavy, so it is not surprising that they were made the subject of one of the articles brought against Wolsey in 1529.363 Moreover, there were additional sums of money involved. Prior More’s journal records that for his visitation Allen was given £5, William Clayton 26s 8d and their servants 20s, plus additional expenses of 6s 8d;364 and Winchester College gave Allen 30s.365 But such gifts of this kind were nothing new. In 1494 the bishop of Winchester’s visitation had cost Winchester College £6 13s 4d over and above the procuration fee of 13s 4d, of which 3s 4d had been distributed amongst the bishop’s officials.366
None of this is meant to be an apology for legatine extortion. But before pronouncing judgment, one needs to consider the historical context. Undoubtedly Wolsey made money out of the legatine visitations, but how much is impossible to say. The legatine visitations made in the London area during the spring and early summer of 1525 brought in £189 8s 5d; and those of about the same time in the dioceses of Salisbury, Worcester, Coventry and Lichfield, and Lincoln £439 12s 2d.367 Apart from one or two isolated examples, such as Winchester College, these are all the visitations that are known to have taken place, and my guess would be that if many others had occurred, some record of them would have survived. If so, during a period of ten years, Wolsey received about £630. It does not seem to have been an exorbitant charge on the religious orders of England. And when it comes down to it, the only thing that was unusual about Wolsey’s visitations was their legatine nature. Even then we must remember that only about thirty years earlier Archbishop Morton, although not a legate a latere and not yet even a cardinal, had been granted a bull in 1487 authorizing him to visit exempt monasteries if the regular authority, such as the order to which the house belonged, failed to act within six months.368
But how was the undeniably high rate of one twenty-fifth of any given institution’s income arrived at? There is no reference to any procuration fees in Wolsey’s various legatine commissions. On the other hand, it is most unlikely that he just plucked the figure out of thin air. This is not because he was especially saintly, but because it was just not how such matters were decided. The workings of the Church were dominated by precedent and legal requirements. Whatever advantage his position as resident legate a latere may have offered him, Wolsey almost always played by the book, whether he was obtaining wider or more specific legatine powers from the papacy, or working out his elaborate compositions with the bishops. The problem is, and no doubt was, that none of the precedents in this matter quite fitted or, if they did, they derived from a very long time ago: procurations for visiting papal nuncios and legates had ceased in the early fifteenth century but to find a legatine visitation of a monastic institution one has to go back to the second half of the thirteenth century.369 By 1300 the going rate for important papal nuncios and legates, which seems in practice to have meant those who were cardinals, was 4d in the mark, or one fortieth, except for institutions with incomes of
£200 or more, who were charged a flat rate of £8. Thus, for an income of precisely £200, the rate was one twenty-fifth. Could this be the source of Wolsey’s figure? Perhaps – and, at any rate, it is as near to finding one that I have been able to get.370But that there was some source I have little doubt, for to have produced an arbitrary figure would have been out of keeping with the way that Wolsey normally worked, and would anyway have probably been challenged.
But to put the financial aspects of Wolsey’s legatine visitations into some kind of context still leaves us with the even more difficult task of assessing their contribution to reform. It was, after all, in order to reform the religious orders that Wolsey had first asked for legatine powers, so it is of some importance to decide whether he made effective use of them. Vergil, in his castigation of Wolsey’s 1519 visitation of Westminster Abbey, was for the most part unfair, but insofar as he recognized that it was its propaganda effect rather than any particular good it might do for Westminster Abbey, he had grasped the essential point. There is no reason to suppose that the abbey was in any special need of a visitation; what evidence there is suggests that all was reasonably well.371 But it was conveniently placed and, moreover, it happened to be one of the most prestigious monastic houses in England. It was also, despite being a Benedictine house, exempt from episcopal jurisdiction. In all these respects it could hardly have been better suited for Wolsey’s purpose, which was to serve warning on the monastic orders that he had every intention to ‘castigate and punish’ each and every house that was in need of such treatment, whether exempt or not.372 Unfortunately, it is not possible to calculate whether the visitation had the intended effect, for no comments have survived. What has is the sermon with which John Longland opened the proceedings, a sermon that he thought sufficiently important to have published, and which gave so much pleasure to Archbishop Warham.373