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

by Gwyn, Peter

  There was, however, one area of the fight against heresy in which Wolsey played a special role. The threat from Lutheranism came primarily from abroad, with the corollary that much of the government’s effort in combating it had to be directed there, and increasingly so as English Lutherans, such as Tyndale, went into exile. It was vitally important to neutralize their activities, either by securing their arrest and extradition, or if this proved too difficult, by at least disrupting their publishing activities. But the point about all such efforts, whether made through normal diplomatic channels or clandestinely, was that because any intervention in a foreign country’s affairs is a sensitive matter, it required authorization and direction from above; and it was this that Wolsey provided. We will ignore the details, which are anyway difficult to unravel, in part because much of the activity was clandestine. We know that particular use was made of the English ambassador in the Low Countries, Sir John Hackett, who had the difficult job of persuading Margaret of Austria’s government to arrest obscure Englishmen on flimsy evidence.122 The most successful coup was achieved in the autumn of 1525 by Hermann Rinck, a leading citizen of Cologne, whose contacts with the English court reached back into Henry VII’s reign. Acting on a tip-off from the famous Catholic polemicist, John Cochlaeus, he successfully persuaded the Cologne authorities to disrupt the publication of Tyndale’s New Testament, so that the editor and his collaborator, William Roye, were forced to start more or less from scratch at Worms.123 Three years later, he brought off another coup, this time at Frankfurt, already a great centre of the book trade, where he bought up a whole run of Roye’s A Brief Dialogue between a Christian Father and his Stubborn Son, a mix of anticlericalism and sacramentarian views, and James Barlowe’s The Burial of the Mass, a racy attack in verse on Wolsey and the English Church. In doing so, however, he may have accidentally forestalled an even more dramatic coup by one Friar West who, acting as Wolsey’s ‘heresy-hunter’ abroad, appears to have been cooking up a scheme to secure the capture of the authors themselves.124 In any event, these three, Hackett, Rinck and West, were extremely active in carrying out Wolsey’s instructions to suppress English Lutheranism at its source.

  Wolsey has earned few marks for all this effort. In particular, it has been suggested that he gave insufficient support to Sir John Hackett in his attempt to secure the extradition of Richard Harman, an agent for heretical literature active in the Low Countries, his wife, and a former priest, Richard Akreston, all of whom had been arrested by the Antwerp authorities in July 1528.125 If the suggestion is true, it would go some way to undermine the view of Wolsey as a committed champion of Catholicism that is being put forward here, so the episode calls for a little attention. Undoubtedly, the English ambassador would have liked more support than he got. In almost every letter he complained of lack of instructions and a failure to send him the documents which the Antwerp authorities were insisting upon before they would even consider handing over the prisoners. Whether they ever had any intention of doing so is another matter. Requests for extradition are rarely treated with great enthusiasm, and in this case there was the complication that by having had himself made a burgess of Antwerp, Harman was in a strong legal position to resist the English government’s efforts.126 Neither was the evidence for his alleged heretical activities all that strong. So if Wolsey was not as eager to help as Hackett would have liked, it was probably because he realized that there was not a great deal that could be done. Neither is it likely that Wolsey attached as much importance to Harman’s fate as Hackett did, if only because in the summer and autumn of 1528 there were a number of pressing matters claiming his attention such as his master’s divorce! Wolsey also had to bear in mind the importance of maintaining good relations with Margaret of Austria at a time when, partly because of the divorce, he was anxious to secure her support. Such wider considerations did not bear so heavily upon the hard-pressed English ambassador in whose eyes the fate of Harman must have loomed very large, especially when for a short time the hunted turned hunter and he found himself under arrest at Harman’s instigation!127

  However, in attempting to explain Wolsey’s and Hackett’s different perspectives, the intention is not to excuse Wolsey’s lack of concern, because no excuses are required. Wolsey did write letters to Hackett about Harman, including two very shortly after he first heard of his arrest.128 He also wrote more than one letter to Margaret of Austria, adopting, interestingly, precisely the strategy that Hackett had suggested, of stressing Harman’s treasonable activities rather than his involvement in heresy.129 And when Friar West was sent over to intensify the campaign against English heretics abroad, he brought further instructions as regards Harman.130 All in all, the impression that the surviving evidence creates, despite Hackett’s many laments, is that Wolsey acted as effectively as the situation allowed, and not only in Harman’s case. True, the Antwerp authorities never agreed to his extradition, while Friar West failed in his schemes to secure the arrest of other English Lutherans. True, also, that books continued to be published abroad and to cross back into England. On the other hand, Harman’s activities were greatly checked; he spent just over six months in prison, and all his books and documents were confiscated.131 There had been Hermann Rinck’s successes in delaying the publication of key heretical works, and in the winter of 1526-7 even Hackett managed to persuade the Antwerp authorities to move swiftly against the printers of a pirated edition of Tyndale’s New Testament, with the result that many copies were burnt.132 And for this success Wolsey deserves some of the credit, for it was he who had prompted Hackett to act.133

  Insofar as all the evidence so far presented points to Wolsey’s very serious commitment to the fight against heresy both at home and abroad, it becomes all the more necessary to try and understand how it is that a contrary impression has been given by so many writers. Much has to do with general perceptions about Wolsey, for neither the picture of a fun-loving, overweight cardinal nor even that of a Machiavellian power-broker suggest that a defence of the Catholic Church would mean very much to him. And, as has already been pointed out, the obsession with Thomas More has not helped: indeed, a whole book has been written in order to bring out the contrast between the fanatical saint and the tolerant statesman. But there are other factors that may shed light, if sometimes indirectly, on Wolsey’s attitude.

  That the government feared heretical literature will come as no surprise. Books do have a worrying potential for filling people’s heads with the wrong ideas, which once there prove difficult to remove. But why the fear in the 1520s of an English Bible – or more specifically Tyndale’s New Testament – especially if the earlier argument, that there was very little demand for one, is correct? The notion that there was some kind of conspiracy by the wicked church authorities to deprive the people of the truth need not be accepted. Their real problem was that the majority of their flock were unequipped to grapple with a cerebral religion, even if they desired one. Of course, the essence of the Bible is that it is a story and one need not be theologically trained, let alone literate, to follow it. But every story contains interpretative cruxes, especially if it has been translated from one language to another; and therein lay the danger in an unauthorized version. People quite innocent of theological niceties would be confronted with a Bible in which there was no mention of ‘priests’, no mention of ‘the Church’, no mention of ‘charity’, indeed, no mention of many other words that had come to be closely associated with the Catholic Faith. How could they understand that, far from reading the word of God, or of the Catholic Church, they were reading only the word of Tyndale and Luther?134 The same problem arose with any heretical work written in English. It was dangerous because it was popular – which is not to say that there was any great demand for it, but that it was written for a non-academic audience in no position to evaluate the ideas that were being put forward.

  This distinction between a popular and an academic audience was an old one. The latter, as much in the past as nowadays, is used
to controversy; indeed it thrives on it. During the Middle Ages such controversy had often led to accusations of heresy, but usually without any very dire consequences. It was only when an academic or his supporters looked for an audience outside the confines of the university precinct that a harsher line was taken, and even then it was often the political circumstances of the time rather than the precise nature of the views expressed that were the decisive factor as regards the severity of the response. The career of that earlier Oxford academic, John Wyclif, exemplifies the point, as indeed does that of the Erfurt graduate, Martin Luther. So also do the careers of many English Lutherans of the 1520s and 1530s. As up-and-coming academics, it would have seemed perfectly in order for them to be treated with a certain leniency – at least on the first occasion that they had got into trouble. They were merely naughty schoolboys who would outgrow their youthful indiscretions and go on to make important contributions to the common weal.

  Robert Barnes’s own account of his examination before Wolsey and his legatine commissioners has very much this flavour about it, though it is written from the schoolboy’s point of view. It was during it that Wolsey allegedly made his well known defence of his ‘pillars and Pollaxes and other ceremonies’ on the grounds that such outward symbols were necessary in order ‘to maintain the commonwealth’ – to which Barnes made the excellent rejoinder that as the commonwealth had got on perfectly well before Wolsey had displayed them, it could no doubt do so again.135 At this point Wolsey could well have become angry. Instead, he congratulated Barnes on a good answer. Moreover, at the end of the interview he offered him the opportunity of making an informal submission to him as legate, thereby avoiding the stress, and more serious consequences, of a formal trial.136

  Our information on this point comes from the great chronicler of the English Protestant martyrs, John Foxe, and it is perhaps not surprising that he has Barnes rejecting the easy way out. Apparently Thomas Bilney, around whom so many English Reformation cruxes seem to cluster, did not.137 More’s comment on what he saw as a kindness by Wolsey which in the light of Bilney’s subsequent activities had been misplaced was that it arose from the cardinal’s ‘tender favour’ to the university of Cambridge;138 and it is one that very much supports the present argument. Wolsey may have offered the same opportunity to another leading light of the English Reformation, Hugh Latimer, like Barnes and Bilney a Cambridge academic, and it was probably accepted.139 There has also survived an account of an interview that Latimer had with Wolsey in the spring of 1528 which shows many similarities to his interview with Barnes. The cardinal is alleged to have been much taken with Latimer. Not only did he admire Latimer’s skill in outshining his own chaplains in scholastic theology, but he even approved of his exposition of a bishop’s duties. Since it was just such an exposition that had got Latimer into trouble with his bishop, Nicholas West, Wolsey’s conclusion that ‘if the bishop of Ely cannot abide such doctrine as you have here repeated, you shall have my licence, and shall preach into his beard, let him say what he will’ was, if it was ever made, a remarkable victory indeed for the future Protestant bishop.140

  That both this account and the one concerning Barnes present Wolsey in an unexpectedly sympathetic light is interesting even if, despite having been written not long after the events they describe, they need to be treated with caution. For instance, that Wolsey is portrayed in a favourable light does not prevent both Barnes and Latimer winning the arguments. Surely, if they could convince even the great cardinal, then they must have been right? This seems to be the message, and to get it across the facts may well have been massaged, which would not have been too difficult given that when the accounts were written Wolsey, being dead, could not challenge their veracity. He had also ceased to be the enemy. When Barlowe wrote The Burial of the Mass and Tyndale The Practice of Prelates Wolsey was very much alive, and both these works contained savage attacks on him.141 So the suggestion here would be that the benign Wolsey of these two accounts is to some extent the invention of the propaganda requirements of the early Protestants, but this does not entirely dispose of him. When in 1527 Bilney was in trouble – again like Latimer, he had on the first occasion escaped a formal charge of heresy – he asked to be ‘brought before the tribunal seat of my Lord Cardinal, before whom I had rather stand than before any of his deputies’.142 And there are other bits of evidence to suggest that people in trouble for heresy did believe that they stood more chance with Wolsey than before a formal tribunal. May it not therefore be the case that this notion of a Wolsey who, for whatever reason, never took heresy very seriously is the truth?

  The answer is no, and here we must hark back to that disinction made earlier between the academic world, where differences of opinion were generally tolerated, and the world outside, where they were not. Whatever happened between Wolsey and people such as Barnes, Bilney and Latimer, it would never have been his intention to persecute them. But then neither in the first instance would it have been anybody’s intention, not even Thomas More’s. It was, after all, a requirement, and one that in England appears to have been generally met,143 that everything possible should be done to win back erring sheep to the true faith, and it was only those who wilfully and maliciously resisted who were to be treated with severity. In the case of ‘simple folk’, the working assumption was that it was ignorance that had led them astray. In the case of academics it was assumed to have been intellectual curiosity and youthful high spirits; hence the significance of Wolsey’s alleged remark to Latimer on first seeing him: ‘You are of good years, nor no babe, but one that should wisely and soberly use yourself in all your doings.’144 In other words, ‘You should have known better!’

  The people whom Wolsey was out to get were the pedlars of heretical literature, the colporteurs. In the Oxford round-up of early 1528 it was only Thomas Garrard, responsible for bringing such literature to Oxford, who was formally charged and made to abjure, while scholars such as John Frith were not. Similarly at Cambridge, although the evidence for what occurred there is even less certain than for Oxford,145 it was not someone like Latimer, but Sygar Nicholson, the bookseller, who was proceeded against.146 Then there was Geoffrey Lome, another distributor of books, and Richard Bayfield, a monk of Bury, who acted as a link in the passage of books between London and Cambridge.147 Of the twenty-four articles alleged in May 1528 against Henry Monmouth, Tyndale’s first patron, thirteen had to do with the production and distribution of heretical literature.148 In April 1529 it was the turn of John Tewksbury to stand trial for his part in the sale of heretical works, but especially Tyndale’s Parable of the Wicked Mammon.149 True, Garrard’s rector, Dr Forman, who may have been at the centre of this book trade, did escape a formal trial; and no doubt it helped him that he had been president of Queens’ College, Cambridge, though the more important reason was probably that in the end not enough evidence could be found against him. But the fact that he was very closely investigated by Tunstall and may even have been personally interrogated by Wolsey tends to strengthen the present argument that it was the colporteurs who were seen as the arch-enemies.150

  That this was so is not surprising, though it has been very much underplayed. A modern parallel can be found in the concentration on drug-traffickers rather than the drug-users. The latter are seen as victims, while it is the former who are villains, partly because they make a lot of money from their activities, as to a lesser extent did the traffickers in heretical literature. And without the drugs, or books, there would be no problem, though this is not quite so true of books, since people could be contaminated by word of mouth. Nevertheless, books and, given the Lutheran emphasis upon its privileged position, especially the Bible, did play a part in the success of the Reformation. In calling upon his archdeacons to search out and destroy heretical works, Tunstall declared them to be the source of a ‘pestiferous and most pernicious poison’,151 and it was as a poison that More saw them. Not only did he seek in his writings to provide an antidote, but on becoming lord chan
cellor he did his utmost to prevent the poison being spread by the likes of George Constantine, who incidently was on Friar West’s list of wanted heretics, and Richard Bayfield – but then Wolsey had done the same. In fact, their attitudes were entirely similar. Heresy was an evil to be eradicated, but there were degrees of evil: the foolish young scholar temporarily seduced by intellectual curiosity or emotional instability, such as More’s own son-in-law, William Roper, appears to have been, was a very different proposition from someone who persisted in his foolishness despite all the efforts of the Church to persuade him otherwise, not to mention those who sought by their writings or preaching, or by the distribution of other people’s writings, to infect the nation with their disease.