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

by Gwyn, Peter

  Wolsey treated Bilney leniently on the occasion of his first offence partly no doubt because it has never proved easy to decide whether his views were heretical or not, but chiefly because it was proper for him to behave thus towards a much respected and much loved Cambridge scholar.152 When Bilney not only persisted in his errors, but compounded them by proceeding to stump the pulpits of East Anglia and London denouncing the worship of saints and images, Wolsey reacted with much greater severity. Bilney was brought to a formal trial, abjured, albeit reluctantly, and was for a time placed in custody. When, after his release, he not only could not keep silent but proceeded to distribute Tyndale’s New Testament, at least to a Norwich anchoress, then there was little that could be done to save him. In August 1531 he was tried before the bishop of Norwich’s chancellor, found guilty, and, since he had already abjured, was sentenced to death by burning. What needs to be understood is that whether or not he made a full confession of his errors before he was burnt – a question that has been endlessly debated both at the time and since153 – had no bearing on his ultimate fate, for the legal position was quite clear: anyone convicted of holding heretical views who acknowledged his errors and showed himself truly penitent was to be set free and readmitted to full membership of the Church. But there was no second chance. If he or she relapsed into heresy, once having abjured, then the penalty was death by burning, whether or not on this second occasion contrition was shown, and this was the case with Bilney. During More’s chancellorship five Lutherans were burnt.154 During Wolsey’s none were, but, since some Lollards suffered that fate, it cannot be that he was in principle against burning. In fact there is a very simple explanation for Wolsey’s apparent leniency: of the ten or so against whom proceedings were initiated, all were facing trial for the first time and all either abjured or fled before sentence was given.

  This failure to understand the legal position has been another reason why Wolsey’s attitude towards heresy, and indeed More’s, have been misunderstood. And if the comparison between the two men is extended, yet another one emerges. Put at its simplest, by the time of More’s chancellorship it had become so much more obvious that the erring scholar had a strong propensity to turn into the persistent heretic. When, following the round-up of Oxford Lutherans in 1528, Wolsey had considered the case of John Frith, he was faced with someone who, apart from being by all accounts a most attractive personality, may well have done nothing more heinous than to read Tyndale’s New Testament and dip into other heretical works. By December 1532, when More sat down to write A Letter against him, Frith had himself become the author of heretical works, but even so More’s tone was far less abrasive than the one he adopted towards other English heretics.155 By 1532 the battle was much further advanced, people were more committed to their views, and in England the stakes could not have been higher. However, none of this indicates any fundamental difference between More and Wolsey. It was the circumstances that had changed, and from the Catholic point of view much for the worse, if only because the king’s position had become so ambiguous. And even in 1530 Henry may not have been all that receptive to Wolsey’s death-bed message to him, if he ever received it, or indeed if it was ever uttered, for we only have Cavendish’s word for it. Still, as reported by his first biographer, the message was clear: Henry should ‘have a vigilant eye to depress this new perverse sect of Lutheranism, that it do not increase within his dominions through his negligence’.156 The argument of this chapter has been that he had very much followed his own advice. What remains to be decided is how effective his defence of Catholicism had been. In arriving at an answer there are, as always, enormous difficulties, to do partly with evidence or lack of it, partly with the criteria used – of special importance for a subject which remains an emotive one. Still, how you answer the question must depend to a great extent on how many heretics, whether Lutheran or Lollard, you think there were in the 1520s. The number of known Lutherans is very small indeed, even if one takes a generous view of what constitutes an attachment to Lutheranism at this early stage, when distinctions were still blurred. There were the frequenters of the White Horse Inn at Cambridge, and the Oxford Lutherans discovered in 1528, most of them from Cardinal College and many of them recent imports from Cambridge. In close contact with these was a London group, and it was from here, perhaps under Dr Robert Forman’s leadership, that the heretical book trade was organized. It is difficult to push the total to above fifty individuals. Connected with these, though in ways that are both uncertain and disputed, were the Lollards. My own view is that very few of them converted or graduated to Protestantism; and even those who are confident that they did, have found it difficult to name names.157 What is known is that some Lollards were interested in Tyndale’s New Testament and that Robert Necton, for instance, was providing books for both Lollards and Lutherans.158 And there were certainly more Lollards than Lutherans, though just how many is another much disputed question.

  In his visitations of 1527 and 1528 Tunstall and his officials detected about 140, and it was in his London diocese that by the late 1520s most Lollard activity seems to have been concentrated, especially in the Colchester area. Fifteen years earlier about fifty had been discovered in Kent and another seventy or so in Coventry. In 1521-2 some three hundred and fifty were detected in the area around Great Missenden in Buckinghamshire, and the occasional Lollard turns up elsewhere.159 It is interesting that in these clamp-downs the same names keep cropping up. This suggests to me an isolated and ageing group, though others have seen it merely as indication of the inadequacies of the detection process and the skill with which Lollards minimized the damage caused by it. The same may have been true of the early Lutherans – and when arrested most of them did name names but, as with the Lollards, usually the same ones. Thus the final figure would vary according to how easily one thinks the church authorities were conned. And, however arrived at, it is difficult to get the figure into thousands. The Lollards were composed of comparatively small communities of mostly humble folk. The Lutherans were chiefly to be found in academic circles, with some spill-over into London’s mercantile community, and totalling probably under the hundred. Any organization was chiefly confined to the distribution of heretical literature, and there was nothing approaching a coherent command structure presiding over a dedicated body of people bent on reformation.

  In suggesting that there were few heretics I am very much following in the footsteps of recent historians.160 There has been a reaction away from a Protestant view of the English Reformation, which has been an enormously healthy corrective. Still, revisionism can go too far and numbers are not everything. In an earlier chapter it was argued that, while the extent of anti-clericalism in the early sixteenth century has been greatly exaggerated, there was nevertheless a lot of it around, and amongst such important people as courtiers and Crown lawyers. This was not because the clergy were especially wicked but because the Church as an institution was wealthy, powerful and pervasive, and was bound to have its critics at all levels of society. However, what turned something endemic into an epidemic had little to do with the state of the Church, which, under Wolsey’s leadership at least, may never have been so healthy, but with other factors, such as the popularity of a particular monarch or the degree of social unrest. It was these that created the right conditions for the bacilli of anticlericalism to multiply, but what was also needed was a catalyst. In 1515 there had been a major battle in the long-running war between Church and state over disputed areas of jurisdiction, during the course of which Henry VIII had made it very clear that he expected to preside over a Church that was subservient to his will. To ensure this, he had put at its head a man whom he trusted above all others, and for a dozen or so years there was no more conflict. Then came the divorce and the Church’s refusal to grant Henry what he believed was rightly his. Of course, it was not initially the English Church that had refused to do his bidding, but far too many important members of it had shown themselves either lukewarm or downrigh
t contrary. So it was borne in on him that ‘the clergy of our realm be but half our subjects, yea, and scarce our subjects’.161 For Henry this was intolerable, and thus the king who in the 1520s had quite justifiably earned for himself the title of Defender of the Faith became the Church’s greatest enemy. The jurisdictional battle was renewed, the man who had done so much to secure the peace, the king’s own cardinal legate, was jettisoned, and anticlericalism was given its head, this time with the potential to ally with the new heresy from Germany.

  In fact, despite the endemic anticlericalism, the nation seems to have been in no hurry to follow its prince’s lead. Instead, it took a good deal of bullying and bribery to bring about the so-called Henrician Reformation, and not before substantial resistance had been offered. For some, such as the thousands of ‘pilgrims’ in 1536, this meant out-and-out rebellion, for others martyrdom, and for yet others merely the writing of letters or the hiding of their parish church’s furnishings and plate.162 What would Wolsey have done? The usual answer has been that he was not of the stuff of martyrs, and his death-bed admission that he had all his life served his king more diligently than his God tends to confirm this. However, if, as has been argued here, he had devoted so much of his time and energy to the reform and defence of the English Church, then at least a moment’s hesitation is in order. Moreover, it does not follow that because he worked so hard to secure the divorce that he should be thought of as some kind of proto-protestant. There was nothing heretical about making the request, just as long as in the end the pope’s decision was accepted – and that decision did not come until after Wolsey’s death. Wolsey had frequently warned Clement of the consequences of refusing to give Henry what he wanted, schism and the English conversion to Lutheranism, but there is not the slightest indication that he welcomed such a prospect, either for the country or for himself. On his death-bed his major concern had been to warn Henry of the horrors of heresy, while his personal beliefs seem to have been of a very traditional kind.

  Nevertheless, after due pause, the conclusion must be that probably Wolsey would have followed his monarch into schism but he would have hated doing so. This is not because he would have missed dressing up in red, or any of the perks that went with being a cardinal. After all Henry was going to be quite happy to put a layman, Thomas Cromwell, in charge of the Church; and if Wolsey had retained the king’s confidence, he might have had to acquire a new title, but his position would have remained effectively the same. In trying to understand not only Wolsey’s reaction to ‘the break with Rome’, but that of all those who were close to the court, including such as Thomas More, we must bear in mind the strength of the bonds that attached them, both emotionally and intellectually, to the figure of the king. It is not just that it was Henry, or his predecessors, who had granted them office, lands, honours, and so on. In all aspects of their life they were programmed to serve him; and one of the most powerful forces behind this programming was the Church, which was constantly expounding the virtues of loyalty and obedience. So it is not all that surprising that, when Church and king found themselves in a fight to the death, the majority of the political nation, however reluctantly, sided with the king. The suggestion, therefore, that Wolsey would have done so too in no way contradicts the argument that he was devoted to the best interests of the English Church and had fought hard to ward off the threat from Martin Luther. There was always an element of ambiguity in his dual role as both the king’s and the Church’s leading servant – an ambiguity that has applied to countless other churchmen both before and since. Wolsey himself was lucky to have died just before he would have had to choose where his allegiance lay, but his own downfall was intimately involved with the battle between king and pope that was to force that decision upon the English nation – a battle that was to destroy all the work that he had done for the English Church during the 1520s. Thus, if not a martyr, Wolsey has a claim to be considered the first important victim of the Henrician Reformation.

  1 See pp.343 ff. above.

  2 Rymer, xiv, p.239; Wilkins, iii, p.713. Both place it in 1528, but suggest uncertainty about the date. I prefer 1529 because of what I take to be a reference to it in a letter from Gardiner to Henry of 4 May 1529; see LP, iv, 5318.

  3 See p.53 above.

  4 Rymer, xiv, pp.273-4.

  5 Ibid, pp.291-4 for the bull, which is, however, chiefly concerned with providing legal limits for Wolsey’s actions.

  6 Almost the only serious treatment of them is in Gasquet, Henry VIII and the English Monasteries, pp.29 ff.

  7 Rymer, xiv, p.273; LP, iv, 4900.

  8LP, iv, 5226, 5638-9.

  9LP, iv, 5639.

  10 Rymer, xiv, p.293. To the original clause was added: ‘unless it seems to you after mature and diligent consideration necessary to do otherwise’.

  11LP, iv, 5638 for their worries.

  12LP, iv, 5235.

  13 Rymer, iv, p.294.

  14 It may be that I have not understood all of them, despite generous help from Dr P. Chaplais.

  15 Southern, p.186.

  16 Goring, Sussex Archaeological Collections, CXVI.

  17 Hughes, p.33 for the size of English dioceses.

  18 Lupton, p.299 from Colet’s convocation sermon.

  19 Richard Fox, pp.153-4; Surtz, Works and Days, pp.54 ff; S. Thompson, ‘Bishop in his diocese’, pp.69-70.

  20 Bowker, Henrician Reformation.

  21 But Longland’s predecessor, Atwater, made a good attempt, helped by the fact that, unlike Longland, he was free of court commitments; see Bowker, Secular Clergy, pp.85-154.

  22 For Fisher at Rochester see S. Thompson, ‘Bishop in diocese’; for Sherburne see S.J. Lander, ‘Diocese of Chichester’.

  23 Transcripts and some facsimiles of the 1539 plans are to be found in Cole; see also LP, xiv (2), 428, 430. There are considerable variations; hence the difficulty in arriving at a final total.

  24 Rymer, xiv, pp.272-3.

  25 Ibid, p.345; for the badgering see LP, iv, 5607, 5639.

  26 My own rough calculation based on Knowles and Hadcock.

  27Visitations of Norwich, pp.113-22.

  28 Ibid, pp.112-13.

  29Durham, but much of it in Knowles, Religious Orders, iii, pp.129-37.

  30 Knowles, Religious Orders, ii, p.259.

  31VCH, Norfolk, ii, 405, Visitation of Norwich, p.123-4.

  32 Oakley, pp.307-8.

  33 Jedin, i, pp.129-30.

  34 Ibid, i, pp.424-6.

  35 See p.275 ff. above.

  36 Knowles, Religious Orders, iii, pp.212-21. Curiously Knowles made no mention of Whitford’s The Pype or Tonne of the Lyfe of Perfection.

  37 Knowles, Religious Orders, pp.182-91, 206-11.

  38 Ibid, pp.28-38.

  39 This my own interpretation of these episodes, which unfortunately space has not allowed me to develop; but for a different view see Elton, JEH, 7.

  40 Paul, BIHR, xxxiii, pp.115-19.

  41 The locus classicus for all this is Renaudet; and for opposition to d’Amboise see ibid, pp.326 ff. For a useful introduction to the Windesheim canons see Oakley, pp.102 ff.

  42 Elliott, pp.33 ff. and Oakley, pp.247-51.

  43ECW, 6, pp.86-90.

  44 My assessment is based on Bowker, Henrician Reformation, pp.13-28.

  45 Thomas More, Selected Letters, p.137, but the whole letter needs to be read. For the identification of the monk see Knowles, Religious Orders, p.469.

  46 Roper, p.76.

  47 For such a view see Marius, p.465, in my opinion an almost perverse interpretation of More’s life.

  48 Knowles, Religious Orders, p.157. For Wolsey’s involvement in Fisher’s suppressions see LP, iii, 1690.

  49 Surtz, Works and Days, pp.180-93.

  50 See p.323 above.

  51 Quoted in Mumford, p.108.

  52 See pp.340-6 above.

  53 In arriving at this figure I have assumed that all the new cathedrals would have been staffed by secular canons and that a
ll 25 houses mentioned in the 1539 proposals would have been used.

  54 Thomas Starkey, p.140; Herrtage, pp.1iii ff.

  55 Thomas Starkey, p.140.

  56 S. Thompson, ‘English and Welsh bishops’, pp.121-44.

  57 M.J. Kelly, TRHS, 5 ser, xv, p.100.

  58 Ibid, pp.208 ff. for the relationship between heresy and reform in southern convocation in the early 1530s. It is also possible that convocation would have been prepared to hand over the smaller monasteries to the Crown but for an intervention by Fisher; see Ortory, pp.342-4; Surtz, Works and Days, p.87.

  59 Guy, More, pp.104-5, A.F. Pollard, p.208, and for the contrast between the tolerant Wolsey and fanatical More see Marius, pp.336-8; Ridley, The Statesman and the Fanatic, pp.163-5. A little depends on how you assign responsibility. No heretics were burnt in a Wolsey diocese because none were found but heretics were burnt during his chancellorship, including at least four in 1521-2 in the Lincoln diocese; see Dickens, p.27; S. Thompson, ‘English and Welsh bishops’, p.125. The confusion has been caused by the fact that none of those burnt in the 1520s were Lutheran.