by Gwyn, Peter
What Wolsey was proposing to do was fraught with difficulty, both politically and legally. A modern parallel would be the public inquiries set up in response to government schemes for building major roads or airports, at which every conceivable kind of objection is raised, almost all of them partial. And in the end, whatever the modifications or concessions made as a result, for the scheme to be implemented some of the objections have to be ignored or overridden. Faced with this kind of situation, Wolsey would have had no illusions about the difficulties. Hence his concern to exclude the clause in the bull which insisted on the agreement of all those with a rightful interest – a clause which in effect would have prevented any changes taking place. Although it is not known what constitutions he intended for the new cathedrals, by allowing for the possibility that they might retain a monastic character he was in a position not only to threaten but also to bribe. It was one thing for a monastery to be suppressed, but quite another for it to be turned into a cathedral presided over by the former abbot as bishop with the monks as canons.
It may be felt that this interpretation of Wolsey’s negotiations with the Curia and of the resulting bulls has been much too favourable to him. One could just as easily cite these same things as evidence of the megalomaniacal Wolsey determined to trample upon other people’s rights. Powerful figures attract such conflicting opinions that probably no amount of evidence can resolve them because value judgements are so much involved. For some people any degree of arbitrariness is unacceptable, but in doing so they preclude almost any achievement. Most are prepared to put up with some, and reserve most concern for the ends in view, which in this case brings us back to the question that Clement himself raised, whether or not there was any need for the major reorganization of diocesan boundaries that Wolsey was proposing.
The answer can only be guess-work. None of the surviving evidence throws any light on the matter. Indeed, there appears to be no pre-history to Wolsey’s plans: no previous discussions in convocation or any other clerical assembly, and no reference by anyone to the need for such an increase. This is both frustrating and surprising. Many English bishoprics were large, those of York and Lincoln especially so.17 The larger the diocese, the more difficult it was for the bishop to make a personal impact and to be, as Colet wanted, ‘living unto us’.18 One who seems to have shared Colet’s views was John Fisher. In a dedicatory letter to his fellow bishop, Richard Fox, he wrote that he did not envy his colleagues their wealthier sees – and Fox was the occupant of the wealthiest. Fisher was quite happy with his poor see of Rochester because it permitted him to exercise a close personal supervision; and since he stayed at Rochester for so long he probably meant what he wrote.19 What he never seems to have done was to draw any general conclusions from this and advocate the kind of diocesan reform that Wolsey envisaged. That Longland, bishop of Lincoln, did not do so is less of a surprise, for any reform would have resulted in just that diminution in the wealth and privileges of his diocese that bishops saw it as their duty to resist. Nevertheless, it was almost certainly the very size of his huge diocese of Lincoln, with its 1,736 parishes and 111 religious houses, extending from the Thames to the Humber, that forced him to limit his personal role in diocesan life. At any rate, he seems to have confined his personal interventions to the religious houses in his diocese and to the cathedral itself. Yet Longland took his episcopal office seriously, and he must have had some inkling that he could have been a much better bishop if his diocese had been smaller, as indeed in the 1540s it was to become.20
Before condemning the episcopal bench of the 1520s for their self-interest and lack of imagination, it is necessary to point out that what may be involved is not their failings but rather the inadequacy of the surviving evidence. Just as almost nothing of what went on at Wolsey’s legatine meetings has been preserved, so it is with any episcopal correspondence that might touch upon diocesan life. Thus silence on this particular issue cannot be made too much of: the sampling is just too small. Moreover, for Wolsey to have got his scheme for diocesan reform to the stage of conducting lengthy negotiations with pope and Curia, some discussion must surely have gone on with leading churchmen at home, even if the initiative came from him. Moreover there is a prima facie case for stating that almost any scheme for diocesan reform was a good one. If a bishop was to be the active shepherd of his flock, as Colet and Fisher wished him to be, he would have to involve himself in regular visitations of his parishes and monastic houses. With a diocese the size of Lincoln or York, this was virtually impossible.21 With a diocese like Rochester, or even one a little larger, such as Chichester where Robert Sherburne was a very active resident bishop, it was a much more practical proposition.22
It is only possible to make an informed guess at how radical a change in the size of the dioceses Wolsey had in mind. When plans for the creation of new ones were revived in the late 1530s, two men who had been very close to Wolsey, namely Stephen Gardiner and Richard Sampson, took a leading part in drawing them up. Given that in April 1529 Gardiner had discussed Wolsey’s plans with the pope, it seems inconceivable that ten years later when he and Sampson were asked to provide new plans they did not draw heavily on the old ones. Gardiner’s list of 1539 indicates that as many as sixteen new dioceses were considered; another, in Henry’s own hand, named thirteen. What seems to have been envisaged was that diocesan boundaries should coincide as far as possible with those of the counties. Thus, in Henry’s list the county, or in some cases two, are given first. Then come the religious house or houses that were to be used to form the new diocese; the abbey church – and if more than one was involved a choice would have to be made – would become the new cathedral, its lands would provide the necessary endowments. For example, Westminster Abbey and its lands would be used to create a diocese of Middlesex, while to create a diocese of Bedfordshire and Buckinghamshire, two monasteries, Dunstable and Newnham, and one nunnery, Elstow, were to be used. In the event Henry’s ardour for diocesan reform quickly peaked, and only six new dioceses were formed, one of which, Westminster, was quickly abandoned. However, there is no doubting the radical nature of the plans as put forward in 1539, and there is only slightly less doubt that these were the same plans that Wolsey had drawn up ten years earlier.23
It could be that, like Henry’s, Wolsey’s ardour might have cooled when faced with the task of implementing such a major undertaking, but if so, there would at least have been some justification. As far as Henry was concerned, the monasteries were to go anyway, so that the very real argument that such a major undertaking would cause too much disruption, and therefore opposition, could hardly have been used. With Wolsey, though, the very selectivity of the exercise would make resistance easier, as each monastery put up a case for its own salvation and another house’s destruction. The prospect of such resistance would have encouraged Wolsey to be cautious. On the other hand, he was not faced with the temptation that faced Henry, and to which he succumbed, of using the revenues of religious houses not for the creation of new dioceses but for much more secular purposes. And it is perhaps worth making the point that none of Wolsey’s reforms ever envisaged the wholesale transference of ecclesiastical funds to secular, or indeed private, purposes – and this can be extended to Catholic reform in general. Still, the main point remains that the evidence of the schemes put forward in 1539 strongly suggests that what Wolsey had in mind was a dramatic increase in the number of dioceses and a consequent decrease in their size, thereby providing the English bishops with a much better opportunity of making a personal impact on their dioceses.
The second major reform that Wolsey was planning to undertake in the last eighteen months before he lost office was some change in the size and number of monastic houses. As with the plans for the dioceses, information about what precisely he had in mind is very meagre, essentially just the relevant bulls and one or two references in letters between himself and the English envoys at Rome. The original bull of 12 November 1528 enabled Wolsey to unite any monastic in
stitution with less than twelve inmates with one that had more.24 Nine months later, and after considerable badgering, Wolsey persuaded the pope to grant him a second bull, empowering him to unite houses with less than twelve people with similar houses, in order to create a house of more than twelve.25 Obviously, Wolsey intended to take some action, but the bulls themselves do not greatly help to answer the more interesting question of what precisely he had in mind. He could have been merely seeking reserve powers enabling him to take action when the need arose, perhaps just to tidy up the odds and ends after the new dioceses had been created. Alternatively, he may have intended a major reorganization. Marginally, it is the latter that seems the more likely, for the efforts taken to obtain the necessary powers, and especially the insistence on the second bull giving that greater flexibility, would otherwise look disproportionate.
The reason why the number twelve was fixed upon was almost certainly because it had traditionally been taken as the ideal, being the number of Christ’s disciples. The Cistercian order, in particular, insisted that no house should consist of less than twelve together with the head, extending the analogy to include Christ, and by and large they kept to it. Sometimes the ideal was more honoured in the breach than in the observance, especially by the Augustinian order, amongst whose houses were many very small ones, often with as few as two or three canons. About 55 per cent of its houses would have been liable to reorganization under the provision of Wolsey’s bulls,26 and it may be that it was precisely in order to do something about the small Augustinian houses that the bull was obtained. Be that as it may, there does, as in the case of the diocesan bulls, seem to be a prima facie case for believing that Wolsey’s intentions were honourable. There was to be no financial gain for himself, and conversely no loss to the orders affected, not even by diversion of their revenues to other quasi-religious ends. Moreover, and most compelling, the bulls did seem to address themselves to a genuine problem.
Not all small religious houses were composed of unsatisfactory inmates, while many large ones had their fair share. When in July 1514 Bishop Nix visited the Augustinian priory of Walsingham, he found its affairs in grave disorder largely because of the prior, who not only had a mistress but was also very much under the influence of two disreputable servants.27 Clearly, neither its size – in 1514 there were twenty-nine canons and two novices – nor its prestige as the home of one of the most famous shrines in England had done anything to improve the religious life of the community. On the other hand, in the same year Hempton, with only a prior and three canons and with an annual revenue of £32 as compared with Walsingham’s minimum of £400, was found to be in reasonably good order, the only complaint being that on days when the canons were not occupied in manual work they received nothing to eat until after High Mass, which could be thought to have been rather to its credit.28 Size, therefore, was not everything, but there was something in the point made in the preamble to Wolsey’s two bulls, that if numbers and income fell below a certain level then even the very minimal observance of the daily round of services and intercession was more difficult to perform. If more was expected, then the problems multiplied. The smaller the community the more difficult it was for any kind of scholarly or intellectual life to flourish, because not only were the chances of there being someone with the requisite ability, to act as teacher for instance, much less than in a large establishment, but it was more difficult to provide what we nowadays refer to as ‘resources’, primarily in the early sixteenth century manuscripts and, increasingly, the comparatively new educational resource, the printed book. Moreover, it needs to be stressed that members of the regular orders were not supposed to be hermits leading solitary lives of prayer and ascetic practices. Rather, their task was to play an active role in a corporate life governed by a rule, and the very notion of a corporate life suggests more than two or three people.
An anonymous late sixteenth-century writer lovingly recreated the daily life of the Benedictine monks of Durham Cathedral Priory on the eve of the Reformation. Not only were they surrounded by a kaleidoscope of colour from the gold and marble and precious jewels, by images and shrines, by pyxes and candles, by solemn services and holy anthems, but they were ‘always most virtuously occupied, never idle, but either writing of good and godly works or studying the Holy Scriptures to the setting forth of the honour and glory of God, and for the edifying of the people’.29 Undoubtedly the picture is all the more idealized for the writer by the destruction and disappearance by his time of the corporate life it describes, but the ideal is worth bearing in mind when we try to understand likely attitudes to the great number of small religious houses that coexisted with the larger ones like Durham. Admittedly, not all religious orders placed the same emphasis on liturgical display as the Benedictines, but it was the Carthusians, interestingly, with their quite different emphasis on private devotion and study who more than any other order adhered to the ideal of twelve.30 The ideal number for a successful corporate life, whether of ritual or private devotion, is, of course, debatable. But it is difficult not to believe that Durham represented considerably more ‘prayer power’ – and at the heart of all forms of the religious life was, after all, prayer – than, say, the little priory of Weybourne in Norfolk with, in 1514, just two canons.31 And even if a large house like Walsingham could go spectacularly wrong, it also stood a much better chance of living up to the ideal of its rule, and acting as a beacon of spiritual light.
There was, therefore, a lot to be said for a comprehensive reorganization of the monastic institutions. Moreover, this is not just a twentieth-century view. The need for a complete overhaul was discussed in almost all the important reform proposals of the fifteenth and sixteenth centuries. Pierre d’Ailly had raised the matter in his Tractatus de Reformatione ecclesiae presented to the Council of Constance in 1416.32 It is also to be found in the Libellus ad Leonum x presented by Tommaso Giustiniani and Vincenzo Quirini to the Fifth Lateran Council in 1513,33 and then again in probably the most famous of all proposals for Catholic reform, the Consilium de emendanda ecclesia of 1537.34 All these proposals touched upon much more than just the problem to which Wolsey’s bulls addressed themselves, that of the size of religious houses; and now may be the right moment to widen the discussion in an effort to answer the question of what Wolsey’s attitude to the monastic orders as a whole might have been, and this in turn will lead on to a serious attempt to assess Wolsey as a religious reformer.
A central concern of all these proposals for monastic reform had to do with the relationship between the religious orders and the secular clergy, and in particular with the way this was affected by the exemption from episcopal jurisdiction possessed by so many religious orders. Most Catholic reformers considered such exemption to be harmful, so that in using his legatine powers to override it, Wolsey was going with the current of reform, if in an idiosyncratic way: the bishops were still barred from intervening directly, but they were now in a position to call upon Wolsey to do so and, as was shown earlier, at least one bishop, Longland, is known to have done so, and more than once. Another concern was with the multiplicity of the religious orders themselves, and there was a general consensus that a good deal of weeding out might profitably be done. There is no direct evidence that Wolsey had any plans in this direction, but if he was seriously thinking of redrawing the monastic map of England, it would have simplified his task of regrouping the smaller houses if the orders to which they belonged could be ignored; and in this way one reform would have suggested another.
What also worried reformers is that not nearly enough effort was being taken to ensure that those who entered the religious orders were suited for what should be a demanding life. Inevitably the quality of that life declined and, especially worrying, the orders’ rule had to be accommodated to the low standard of entry. The severest critics had come from within the orders, and one result had been the emergence of the ‘observant’ orders dedicated to the recovery of the spirit and form of the original rule. These h
ad attracted the patronage of wealthy laymen, including many of the rulers of Europe. It is possible to be cynical about this; just as with cars, the wealthy like to be seen with the latest model, and no doubt a desire for kudos was involved. Alternatively, and perhaps only a little less cynically, it may be that they were in search of an insurance policy against damnation, and if they could buy the best, why not! More relevant here is the possibility that the rulers at least saw the Observants and such associated orders as the famous ‘Congregation of Windesheim’ as the driving force for more wide-ranging reform. Certainly periods of religious revival were often associated with the religious orders. In the tenth and eleventh centuries it had been Cluny and the Benedictines who had led the way, and in the thirteenth it had been the Friars. Could the same thing happen in the sixteenth century? There were people, both then and since, who have thought no; the religious orders had served their turn and had become obsolete. But the enormous success of the Jesuits in second half of the sixteenth century is proof positive that it could.
