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

by Gwyn, Peter

  Such a view is supported by the scraps of evidence that do throw some light on Wolsey’s inner religious life. In 1517 he went on a pilgrimage to the shrine of our Lady of Walsingham. So did Erasmus, but, unlike him, Wolsey was not prompted to write a satire about what he found there. Instead, he seems to have made the pilgrimage for the time-honoured reason that he had vowed to do so if he recovered from a serious attack of the ‘sweating sickness’.433 And if humanists were not supposed to take pilgrimages very seriously, neither were they supposed to believe very much in relics. Yet Wolsey, so Cavendish tells us, wore a piece of the ‘true cross’ on a chain around his neck, and a hair-shirt434 – though whether this was only in the exceptional circumstances following his political disgrace is not certain; probably it was, but then exceptional circumstances offer a good testing ground for a person’s beliefs. At any rate, penitential aids are more easily associated with the monastery than the humanist’s stamping ground of court and university, although the fact that More also wore one is a useful reminder that humanists, like every other category of person, came in all shapes and sizes! It is Cavendish again who tells us that Wolsey ‘heard commonly every day two masses in his privy closet. And there then said his daily service with his chaplain and, as I heard his chaplain say (being a man of credence and of excellent learning), that the cardinal, what business or weighty matters so ever he had in the day, he never went to his bed with any part of his divine service unsaid, yea not so much as one collect, wherein I doubt not but he deceived the opinion of divers persons.’435 His view that behind the public persona in all its pomp and glitter lay hidden a truly devout Christian carries some conviction, in part because of the way it emerges in his account: he provides a source – Wolsey’s chaplain – while the fact that he does not feel the need to elaborate on the subject gives his judgement additional credibility. And what none of Cavendish’s comments provides is evidence of any interest on Wolsey’s part in ‘humane studies’. Admittedly, as one whose job it was to further the smooth running of Wolsey’s household, he was not in the best position to comment upon his master’s intellectual concerns, but his silence on the subject at least corroborates the view being offered here that Wolsey’s humanism was a matter of policy rather than private conviction. At the same time, his extensive patronage of humanism makes it impossible not to think that he genuinely believed in the policy.436

  But is one not entitled to expect rather more ‘policy’ from him? Erasmus had a vision of a time when the Bible, having been translated into the vulgar tongue, would be sung by the farmer walking behind his plough and hummed by the weaver in time with the movement of his shuttle, and when travellers would tell stories from it to lighten their journeys.437 More cautiously Thomas More could write in 1531 that he

  never yet heard any reason laid why it were not convenient to have the Bible translated into the English tongue, but all those reasons seemed they never so gay and glorious at the first sight, yet when they were well examined they might in effect as well be laid against the holy writers that wrote the scripture in the Hebrew tongue.438

  If only Wolsey had agreed with him and, instead of leaving it to heretics such as William Tyndale to meet the demand, had authorized a vernacular Bible, then the Reformation in England might never have occurred – or so it can be argued. And it is precisely his failure to come up with this kind of major innovation, so the argument continues, that makes it difficult to justify his legatine rule of the English Church. At the very least it was a glorious opportunity missed – and most historians have been more severe than that!

  In rejecting such a view, the first point to make is that it is based largely on an assumption that the battle for the hearts and minds of the English people was lost by the Catholic Church on account of its own failings. If, on the other hand, there would have been no Reformation in England but for the betrayal of the Catholic cause by the English Crown, then the argument that an English Bible was a necessary ‘reform’ does not look so strong. The second point to make is that it was not just Wolsey who failed to see the need for an English Bible. There is no evidence before the 1530s for anyone of orthodox beliefs advocating an English Bible – and this should have given pause for thought. For instance, it is a striking fact that nowhere in Colet’s writings or sermons is there any call for an English Bible and yet it is Colet who is supposed to have brought the new biblical scholarship to England. The same is true of Fisher’s writings and sermons, and yet not only did he believe that scripture was the spiritual food of the soul but he had so encouraged Erasmus’s biblical studies that the great Dutch humanist had considered dedicating to him his famous 1516 edition of the New Testament.439 Moreover, even More’s advocacy of an English Bible in 1531 was so circumspect as to be almost off-putting. It is not only that he insisted that any such Bible must be authorized, but that even then it should only be allowed to people whom a bishop considered ‘honest, sad and virtuous’.440 Of course, in 1531 with the Church under threat both from the king and Lutheranism, one can understand his circumspection. But the fact is that in the 1520s he, along with Fisher, had been silent on the subject, and it is difficult not to escape the conclusion that but for the advent of William Tyndale’s translation of the New Testament in early 1526 he would have remained so. It is therefore not just a case of having to explain why Wolsey showed no interest in an English Bible, which could easily be ascribed to his moral failings and lack of interest in anything genuinely religious. Instead, the question that has to be tackled is why it was on nobody’s agenda, not even those whose good intentions are usually considered beyond reproach.

  The most usual explanation is that since such Bibles were already associated with the Lollard heresy, even the best English Catholics were prejudiced against them441 – and undoubtedly the association was commonly made. One of the reasons why the church authorities had taken Richard Hunne to be a Lollard was that he possessed ‘the Apocalypse in English, epistles and gospels in English, Wyclif’s damnable works, and other books containing infinite errors’, while at his posthumous trial article 13 stated that ‘he defendeth the translation of the Bible and the holy Scripture into the English tongue, which is prohibited by the laws of our mother, holy Church’.442 How far they were actually prohibited is another matter. It has been estimated that by 1500 at least 29 editions of vernacular Bibles had appeared on the continent, with little or no opposition from the church authorities443 – not that this prevented the Reformation! The English Church did take a different line. Such Bibles in themselves were never banned, but as a direct result of Wyclif and Lollardy, anyone wishing to read an English Bible had to obtain the approval of a bishop, and the possession of an unauthorized English bible, as in the case of Hunne, was taken as evidence of heterodoxy.444 Does it have to be concluded that fear of Wyclif’s Bible drove the English bishops into a blinkered resistance to something that their flocks were everywhere hungering after?

  The simple fact is that it is virtually impossible to find any demand for an English Bible before the ‘break with Rome’, except amongst the Lollards. Admittedly the church authorities’ alarm at the appearance of Tyndale’s New Testament in 1526 is evidence that they anticipated some demand for it. And people did buy it. Indeed, there was in the 1520s an illicit trade in heretical works, amongst which was Tyndale’s New Testament, but the notion that these sold like hot cakes should be treated with a good deal of scepticism. For instance, following the arrest of Thomas Garrard in 1528 for his efforts to subvert the undergraduates of Oxford with such literature, about six Tyndale’s New Testaments were discovered, which, in view of the thoroughness of the searches that were carried out, does not seem all that many.445 And what of the evidence of Robert Necton’s confession of the same year, which reveals that over a period of eighteen months he managed to sell thirty-five copies of that same work, mostly to people with known Lollard connections?446 My own feeling is that it was a highly selective trade, the booksellers using almost exclusively their connections wi
th Lollard groups and the few at the universities who were interested in the new heresy from abroad.

  The answers one gives to the questions that these controversial matters raise depend very much upon one’s assumptions, in particular about the state of the English Church on the eve of the Reformation and the inclination, or otherwise, of the English nation to embrace Protestantism. It is hardly surprising that most English historians, brought up in a Protestant and Whig tradition, have argued, to use the current jargon, for a ‘fast’ Reformation, one fuelled by a genuine popular desire for the new faith. Yet even the most passionate believers in such a view have had great difficulty in finding many avid readers of an English Bible, even though by the late 1530s the provision of such a Bible in every parish church had become a government requirement.447 And the lack of demand cannot be unconnected with the fact that, as More rightly pointed out, only a very few people could read.448 One suspects, anyway, that Bible-reading has only ever appealed to the committed, who tend to be few. And if there was so little demand, it can hardly be held against Wolsey, along with such champions of reform as Colet, Fisher and More, that he made no effort to meet it.

  Part of the difficulty in assessing the demand for an English Bible on the eve of the Reformation derives from the great differences between Catholics and Protestants about the importance to be attached to the Bible itself. As the authentic word of God, for Luther and his followers the Bible provided the only touchstone for all matters of doctrine and practice. For a Catholic such as More this position was untenable. The Church was a living organism sustained by Christ’s promise to the disciples that he would remain with them until the end of time. As such, it could speak with even more authority than the Bible, for it was able to produce, so to speak, the most up-to-date edition. It naturally followed that the possession of a Bible, particularly in one’s own language, was of more importance to a Protestant than to a Catholic. Indeed, for the former it became something of a membership card, not necessarily read but evidence of belonging, and it is this that has caused the confusion. After all, it is doubtful that every Chinese who acquired Mao Tsetung’s Little Red Book was necessarily a fervent supporter of Mao, and thus the distribution of Little Red Books might not be very reliable evidence of the demand. Similarly, the fact that Thomas Cromwell ordered that an English Bible be kept in every parish church is not reliable evidence that lots of people wanted to read it. But since in England the Protestants were to win, it has been assumed that they had a better case, and one that most people believed in. The suggestion here has been that most people in the 1520s held no such belief.

  The distortions of the Protestant tradition have led to bad history, and have created en passant the very critical view of Wolsey as a churchman that it has been the purpose of this chapter to revise. What the Catholics of the early sixteenth century thought of as necessary ‘reforms’ have been downgraded, if not ignored completely, thereby creating a false perspective. For instance, by giving the impression that Catholics were opposed to the Bible, historians have ignored the enormous amount of money and effort being expended by leading churchmen on better provision for biblical studies. Both Fisher at Christ’s and St John’s, Cambridge, and Fox at Corpus Christi, Oxford, made detailed provision for it, the latter going out of his way to point out that in interpreting the Bible his reader in theology should not make use of medieval authorities, who were ‘posterior and inferior in learning, but the holy and ancient Greek and Latin doctors’.449 For Cardinal College Wolsey did not specify what authorities should be consulted. Probably he felt that it was no longer necessary to do so, and certainly the emphasis in his statutes on the usefulness of Latin and Greek for a proper understanding of the Bible suggests that he expected a humanist approach. True, he insisted that the professor of theology spend half of his time in scholastic pursuits, but that left the other half for Old and New Testament studies.450 Moreover, as Fisher and Fox had done at their colleges, Wolsey insisted that a portion of the Bible should be read out each day at dinner, and then expounded upon by a suitably qualified person.451

  Something else that the Protestant tradition has tended to obscure is the fact that most medieval men and women liked sermons; one thinks not only of the great audiences that a Bernardino of Sienna or a Savonarola could command, but also of the great number of medieval sermons delivered in England by much less charismatic preachers.452 And after all, it was as early as 1216 that the Dominican order had been established, with preaching as its principal task. Thus, whatever special significance he may have attached to it as the principal means, alongside the Bible, by which the ‘Word of God’ was revealed to man, the sermon was not the invention of Martin Luther, and what is to be noted is the concern being shown in England in the first decades of the sixteenth century to provide a preaching ministry. As Fisher reminded the university of Cambridge in 1528, it had been his intention and that of the university’s great patroness, Lady Margaret Beaufort, that its graduates should ‘spread Christ’s Gospel throughout the confines of the whole of Britain’,453 and to ensure this he laid down that a quarter of the fellows of St John’s should preach to the people in English at least eight times a year.454 Wolsey’s provision for preaching by the fellows of Cardinal College was, if anything, more extensive. Four public sermons were to be delivered in the college chapel each year, to which the citizens of Oxford were to be summoned by the ‘ringing of the largest bell for a notable space of time’. Furthermore, for the ten years after obtaining their doctorates the college’s five doctors of theology should preach publicly seven times a year. Anyone studying theology who left the college before becoming a doctor and sought to become one at a later date, as Wolsey himself did, was to deliver one public sermon a year.455 It looks therefore as if in any one year Wolsey was intending to fund about forty public sermons,456 surely by any standards an impressive contribution to the spreading of Christ’s gospel?

  Fisher, Fox and Wolsey all felt that a better knowledge of the Bible and the preaching of Christ’s gospel were vital to any programme of church reform, and went to great lengths to ensure that both were encouraged. More generally, all three saw the education of the clergy, rather than doctrinal or administrative changes, as being at the heart of the matter which is why their colleges must be assigned a major role in any assessment of the state of the English Church on the eve of the ‘break with Rome’. The purpose of this education was to bring about a moral reformation. This could only be achieved by beginning at the top, for as Colet put it in 1510, ‘if the priests and bishops, that should be as lights, run in the dark way of the world, how dark then shall the secular people be? Wherefore St Paul said chiefly unto priests and bishops: be you not conformable to this world, but be ye reformed.’457Colet saw no use for new laws: ‘The way whereby the Church may be reformed into better fashion is not for to make new laws, for there be laws many enough and out of number; as Solomon saith: nothing is new under the sun.’458 Instead, what he wanted was an inward spiritual regeneration and it was his sources for this, such as neo-platonism, St Paul’s epistles and a humanist approach to the Bible, which displeased conservative churchmen, just as their concern for the veneration of saints and the efficacy of good works displeased Colet. However, both conservatives and humanists could agree that what was essential to any programme of moral regeneration was a tightening up of the existing church machinery and enforcement of existing laws.

  [The evils] that are now in the Church were before in time past, and there is no fault but that the fathers have provided very good remedies for it. There are no trespasses but there be laws against them in the body of the canon law. Therefore it is no need that new laws and constitutions be made, but that those that are made already be kept.459

  Thus spoke Colet but so also spoke almost everybody with any interest in the well-being of the Church.

  But if in the 1520s the call was for ‘moral regeneration’ rather than for innovation, was Wolsey really a suitable person to make it? Colet, yes. Fisher
, yes. Even a layman like More, yes. But surely not Wolsey? After all, no one could have been more ‘conformable to this world’, the very evil that Colet believed was destroying the Church, an evil for Colet even more dangerous, because more insidious, than heresy itself. In some obvious ways, it has to be admitted, Wolsey was not suitable. Even if one can discount some of the more extreme criticisms of his allegedly excessive love of pomp and ceremony made by such as Skelton and Vergil at the time, and many people since, there is no escaping the fact that, as the leading royal servant for fifteen years, Wolsey was heavily involved in secular affairs including the conduct of war and diplomacy. To achieve such a position he must have been ambitious, and, undoubtedly, his position made him extremely wealthy. There is also the matter of his ‘concubine’, Mistress Lark, and their two children – a daughter, Dorothy, placed in the wealthy nunnery at Shaftesbury, and the son Thomas Winter, on whom he lavished, according to his critics, far too much wealth and church patronage. On the whole Wolsey seems to have managed his sex life very discreetly. True, Skelton makes some rude remarks on the subject, though compared with what he wrote about other aspects of the cardinal’s life he is surprisingly restrained460 – perhaps because it was not a convincing line to take? There is also article 6 of the charges drawn up after his fall from power, which accused him of endangering the king’s person, for while knowing he had ‘the foul and contagious disease of the great pox broken out upon him in divers places of his body, [Wolsey] came daily to your grace rowning in your ear and blowing upon your most noble grace with his perilous and infective breath’.461 Wolsey was to dismiss these charges out of hand, and it will be argued later that he was right to do so. Interestingly, very little was dredged up at that time about Mistress Lark – just the case of Sir John Stanley, allegedly bullied into surrendering a tenancy to the man whom Wolsey had married her off to. Neither was there anything about other mistresses, which, if there had been, would have been just the kind of thing to help blacken Wolsey’s name. Moreover, nothing of Mistrss Lark, or even a hint of any other sexual peccadilloes, is to be found in the reports of foreign ambassadors; and one suspects that even diplomatic caution would not have excluded such subject matter if there had been anything serious to report.462 Still, however discreetly Wolsey behaved, the fact remains that Mistress Lark should not have been or, at least, not if one is directing a programme of ‘moral regeneration’. Unlike Fisher, Wolsey was not a saint; but then a saint was probably not what the English Church needed at its head.