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

by Gwyn, Peter

  But what of Wolsey? Did he see the religious orders as an instrument of reform? Well, not if his treatment of the Observant Franciscans is anything to go by, and, with the possible exception of the Carthusians, it was this order, much favoured by both Edward IV and Henry VII, that would have been the most obvious choice to perform such a role. A reformer worth his salt should surely have made use of them, but on the contrary we have seen how Wolsey had become embroiled in conflict with them over his right to conduct a legatine visitation of their Greenwich house, and in the end went to considerable lengths to put them in their place.35 Moreover, his readiness to use monastic endowments for his educational foundations, and his proposal to use them to create new dioceses suggests that, far from assigning the religious orders a special role, he was disenchanted with them. One could cite this as yet another example of his lack of genuine Christian concern were it not for the fact that fellow countrymen, whose credentials were beyond reproach, seem to have shared his disenchantment.

  When the great historian of the religious orders in England, David Knowles, came to answer the question of whether or not those of the Tudor age had deserved their fate, he came as near as makes no difference to saying that they did. It is not that he concluded that all was bad, but rather that there was just not enough that was good to resist the onslaught when, in the 1530s, it came. As a member of a religious order himself, he must have found this a painful conclusion, but it may also be that his very membership led him to be over-critical because his expectations were too high. It is also true that in the 1950s when he was writing the last volume of The Religious Orders a much gloomier view of all aspects of the late medieval Church was taken than is the case today. By and large, it is no longer felt that that Church was failing to meet spiritual and pastoral needs, or, to put it another way, that it was out of date – and behind Knowles’s disappointment lurks the notion that the religious orders had become just that. If the work was to be done again from today’s different perspective, a more optimistic view might emerge. That said, however, Knowles’s conclusions still remain persuasive.

  Even for Knowles there were bright spots. These included the Franciscan Observants and the Carthusians, and also the Bridgettines, represented in England, however, by only one house, albeit the most distinguished abbey of Syon, home not only of Richard Whitford, one of the few published defenders of the religious against the attacks of Luther and Tyndale, but also of the martyr Richard Reynolds.36 And if martyrdom is a test of the vitality of religious belief, it is a test which points precisely to these three orders.37 Of those monks who took part in the Pilgrimage of Grace, the most open resistance to the religious changes of the 1530s, the Cistercians were the most prominent. Admittedly they were much more strongly represented in the North than elsewhere, and statistically one would expect to find quite a high percentage of them in any sample of Northern monks. Nevertheless, there are some grounds for thinking that the Cistercians were in reasonably good health and in Marmaduke Huby, abbot of Fountains from 1494 to 1526, they could claim one of the most distinguished monastic figures of the early sixteenth century.38 What may also tell in their favour is that in the early 1530s Cromwell was prepared to go to some lengths to bring down a successor of Huby at Fountains, William Thirsk, and the abbot of nearby Rievaulx, Edward Kirkby, both of whom took some part in the Pilgrimage.39 Finally, it is worth mentioning that even the possibly complacent and compliant Benedictines included at least three ‘martyrs’ and, if this seems too few, they were at least some of the most eminent representatives of their order. One was Richard Whiting who presided over Glastonbury, the second wealthiest abbey in England, and under his rule a model of what a Benedictine abbey should have been.40

  But when all is said and done, nowhere in England was there the kind of spiritual intensity and rigorous discipline to be found at this time on the continent, in particular in those houses that came into contact with the Augustinian canons of Windesheim in the Low Countries. It was a group of these canons led by Jan Mombaer, author of a famous spiritual treatise, the Rosetum, that in 1496 had been summoned to France by Jean Standonck, principal of the College of Montaigu, to spearhead that movement for reform behind which, as legate a latere from 1501 to 1510, Cardinal d’Amboise was to put his own authority and that of the French Crown. The similarities between d’Amboise and Wolsey are many, not least that behind the acquisition of both men’s legatine authority lay the desire of their respective monarchs to dominate the Church. However, in his reliance on the Windesheimers and other monastic reform movements in France d’Amboise clearly differs, as he does in another important respect. Whatever the virtues of d’Amboise’s support for monastic reform, it was met by so much opposition both from the religious orders and the parlement of Paris that for his last six years he was virtually a lame-duck legate. In contrast, Wolsey, as we saw earlier, experienced little opposition from anyone, least of all from the religious orders, amongst whom only the Franciscan Observants showed any real unease. Should this be taken as evidence of a lukewarm Wolsey who, unlike his French counterpart, was unwilling to grapple with the real problems of reform, or is it merely that he was a more skilful operator than d’Amboise? In fact, neither a moralistic nor an expediential judgment is appropriate, for the answer probably lies in the very different circumstances. While the French religious orders may have been more vigorous and more powerful and so better able to resist any interference, they also showed many more signs of grave disorder. Consequently, there was not only a greater need to intervene but also a much greater likelihood that any intervention would result in conflict, especially in view of the powerful opposition of the French parlement, an institution for which there was no equivalent in England.41

  While d’Amboise was battling with the problems of reform in France, another and more famous cardinal was doing the same in Spain. Like his French counterpart but unlike Wolsey, Cardinal Ximenes saw the religious orders as the key to reform. At a comparatively late stage in his life he had become a Franciscan Observant and was always noted for his extreme asceticism. There can be little doubt that Ximenes’s religion was very different from either d’Amboise’s or Wolsey’s, despite the latter’s hairshirt, but differences in the Spanish background too are also very important. In Ximenes’s time the religious life of the Spanish peninsula was dominated by the continuing presence of a large Muslim population, given both a real and symbolic focus by the Moorish kingdom of Granada until its reconquest by Ferdinand and Isabella in 1492. The enormous crusading energy unleashed by the reconquista continued to fuel the engine of Spanish imperialism throughout the sixteenth century. It also, and more relevantly, explains much about the religious sensibilities of Spain. Ximenes himself was both a product and an architect of this crusading spirit. A zealot himself, he could count upon considerable grass-roots support for the kind of fervent reform associated with the Observant movements. What is also true is that, given the imperatives of reconquest, there was a close identification between the Spanish Crown and Church, which made opposition to reform more difficult than, for instance, in France.42

  To state that the particular conditions in the Spanish peninsula and in France have to be taken into account may seem to be stating the obvious, but it is curious how often the obvious is overlooked. People like their religious reformers to look the part, and in this respect Ximenes scores heavily over both his French and English counterparts. But in France and England there was no Moorish kingdom and hence no crusade, and in neither of these countries is it conceivable that a Franciscan Observant zealot could ever have become the monarch’s chief adviser. What is also true is that in comparison with France and Spain even the best of English monasticism appears a little low key, which may provide one reason why Wolsey did not make significant use of it to further reform.

  Another reason may have a lot to do with chronology. Even by the time of d’Amboise’s death in 1510, serious doubts were being entertained in some quarters of France, not just about the likeliho
od of the success of monastic reform but its value. One reason for this was the growing influence of Erasmus and the humanist movement associated with him; and with the increasing number of humanist publications in the decade after d’Amboise’s death the doubts could only have grown. Indicative of this is the fact that in the preface to the 1518 edition of his Enchiridion, dedicated to the Benedictine abbot of Hügshofen, Paul Volz, Erasmus felt obliged to defend himself against the accusation that his book was intended to turn men’s minds against the monastic life – not that the defence could have carried much conviction, since only a few paragraphs later he launched into one of his most sustained attacks on the religious orders. It was in that year, 1518, that Wolsey first acquired his legatine powers and began seriously to turn his attention to the problems of the English Church. If he read Erasmus’s preface, he would not have been encouraged to place monastic reform of the kind that d’Amboise and Ximenes had envisaged at the top of his agenda. But if, as seems more likely, he did not read it, there were plenty of people in England who almost certainly did, people who were not only friends of Erasmus but who were also known to, and in some cases worked closely with, Wolsey. Given that so little that offers any insight into Wolsey’s mind has survived, these people’s thoughts on such matters may be the nearest that we can get to his.

  Someone who was close to Wolsey and at least corresponded with Erasmus, was John Longland, and of all the English humanists it is he who has the best claim to be called a friend of the religious orders.43 It will be remembered that in 1519 he delivered to the monks of Westminster Wolsey’s and Campeggio’s visitation sermon, a passionate exhortation for them to live up to the high ideals of their rule. On becoming bishop of Lincoln in 1521 he spent a good deal of time trying to improve the quality of life of the religious in his diocese, amongst other things probably providing the nuns of his diocese with a compendium of the rule of St Benedict drawn up by the famous abbot of Wincombe, Richard Kidderminster. That said, however, it remains difficult to become very excited by Longland’s efforts. The impression is very much of a conscientious bishop in an over-large diocese deciding to concentrate on an area in which he felt he could make the best use of his time. Of monastic reform as a means by which to inspire a religious revival in his diocese, let alone his country, there is no hint.44

  Much closer to Erasmus was Thomas More, though in his earlier days at least he was much more attracted to the religious life than his friend was. At any rate, far from having to battle to free himself of it as Erasmus had, for a time More may have even have contemplated entering the Carthusian order. Yet when some years later a Carthusian presumed to attack Erasmus’s New Testament, he received the full force of More’s scorn, not only for his lack of learning but also for his very calling as a monk, ‘as if to reside for ever in the same spot and, like a clam or sponge, to cling eternally to the same rock were the ultimate of sanctity’.45 And when, in the late 1520s and early 1530s, More felt compelled to take up his pen in defence of the Catholic Church, he had very little to say in defence of the religious life, even though wherever in Europe the Protestant reformers had gained control that life had been destroyed. Admittedly, when he came to be imprisoned in the Tower he informed his daughter, Meg, that if his captors had thought to displease him by locking him up, they had made a great mistake because, but for the love of his family, he ‘would not have failed long ere this to have closed myself in as strait a room and straiter, too’.46 To see this, however, as compelling evidence of a deep yearning for the monastic life is probably to ignore More’s love of irony and his concern to comfort Meg.47 Indeed, his A Dialogue of Comfort written while in the Tower is essentially a defence of the active life.

  But what of More’s fellow martyr and saint, John Fisher? Like Longland, he seems to have taken a genuine interest in the religious houses in his diocese, especially in his cathedral priory, but neither in his great polemical writings nor in his two famous sermons against Luther did he choose to make any significant defence of the monastic ideal. Moreover, like Wolsey he was quite prepared to have religious houses suppressed, although on nothing like the same scale, in order to help finance new university colleges.48 Perhaps even more to the point, the purpose of these colleges was not to fit men for the life of the cloister, but, as Fisher himself reminded the university of Cambridge in 1528, to enable them to go out into the world and preach the Gospel of Christ.49

  More modest in his intellectual and spirtual attainments than More and Fisher, though to that extent a more representative figure, was Richard Fox. However, his thirty years at the centre of politics had not prevented him from taking an interest in religious matters. As bishop of Winchester he had been no enemy to the religious orders, except insofar as he endeavoured to impose a stricter observance of their rules which, as we saw earlier, earned him a mild rebuke from Wolsey, who wondered whether more allowances should not be made for human fraility.50 As we have also seen, Fox was the founder of Corpus Christi, Oxford, whose outstanding feature was its promotion of humanist learning. Apparently his original intention had been to establish a college for the monks of his cathedral priory, similar to other monastic colleges such as Durham and Gloucester, until he had the following conversation with Hugh Oldham, bishop of Exeter:

  ‘What! My lord, shall we build houses and provide livelihoods for a company of buzzing monks, whose end and fall we ourselves may live to see? No, no. It is more meet to provide for the increase of learning and for such as who, by their learning, shall do good in the Church and commonwealth’.51

  Oldham’s prescience about the fate of the monasteries is suspicious, and the story may well be an invention of the editor of the 1577 edition of Holinshed’s Chronicles, in which it first appeared. On the other hand, there is evidence that Fox did originally make plans for a monastic college, while Oldham was a close enough friend of his to contribute a large sum towards it, so the story cannot be dismissed out of hand. And whether true or false, it is undeniable that in the early sixteenth century the foundation of Oxbridge colleges was more fashionable than the foundation of new monasteries.

  What has emerged so far is that not only was there nothing much about the English religious orders to suggest that they could be used as a jumping-off point for widespread reform, but that this was appreciated by those in a position to influence policy making. Wolsey could hardly have been unaffected by this disenchantment amongst at least some sections of informed opinion. What one really wants to know is how far this disenchantment fuelled his specific proposals for major reform in 1528-9, which brings us back to the question raised in chapter 8 of whether it makes any sense to call Wolsey a humanist reformer. The very cautious answer then was that while there was no evidence for any strong commitment to humanism at a personal level, at the level of policy there was enough to suggest that he was anxious to make use of humanist ideas to further reform.52 Could it be that his schemes for 1528-9 provide more evidence of this?

  One way of tackling the question is to try to calculate the consequences to monastic life of all the proposals that Wolsey was considering in 1528-9. Such an exercise involves a good many variables but to begin with we will assume the worst. By this reckoning, the creation of the new dioceses would have resulted in a loss of monastic revenue of about £19,500 a year.53 To provide endowments for Cardinal College and Ipswich, Wolsey had by the time of his fall suppressed twenty-nine houses whose total annual revenue amounted to about £2,220, a sum equivalent to the revenues of one of the larger abbeys, such as St Albans. In addition, in November 1528 Wolsey obtained a bull enabling him to suppress monasteries to the total value of 8,000 ducats (about £1,750) to provide further endowments for the royal colleges of Eton and Cambridge. All this adds up to a potential loss for the religious orders in the region of £23,500, or 17 per cent of their total annual revenue of £136,361, as assessed in the Valor Ecclesiasticus of 1535. About a hundred monastic institutions would have ceased to exist, though in some cases their buildings would have cont
inued to be put to religious purposes. A much larger but unknowable number would have been affected by Wolsey’s plans to reorganize all houses containing less than twelve people. At the very least, therefore, such changes would have been noticed, particularly since some of the most famous religious houses in England would have ceased to function.

  Is this unambiguous evidence, at last, for the kind of radical and humanist reform that the English Church was supposedly in need of? Perhaps not, but, even if we make a much more modest calculation of the possible effects of his 1528-9 proposals, it is indisputable that Wolsey did not see religious houses as inviolable, but rather as institutions whose usefulness needed to be periodically reassessed and whose wealth could be diverted if the need arose. In thinking thus he differed little from Thomas Starkey, the young humanist product of his own former college, Magdalen, who having spent time in one of the magic circles of European intellectual life, the household in Padua of Henry’s cousin and future cardinal, Reginald Pole, had returned to England in the early 1530s to offer his services to the cause of reform. Starkey never advocated the complete destruction of the monasteries, but instead assigned to them a modest role as places where, on reaching the age of thirty, the select few could spend their remaining years in study and prayer. He envisaged the great bulk of monastic wealth being reallocated by the Crown to current educational and social needs – a reallocation which, he argued, the original founders and subsequent benefactors would be sympathetic to, as long as it was to the benefit of the common weal.54 Admittedly Starkey envisaged using some of the money for such essentially secular purposes as poor relief. Wolsey did not, but, given that he was willing to make that most difficult first step of reinterpreting past benefactors’ wishes, in the very different circumstances of the 1530s he might well have come to agree with Starkey that such purposes were godly enough to justify widespread suppression.