by Gwyn, Peter
60 Marius, pp.386-406; Ridley, The Statesman and the Fanatic, pp.238-62.
61 Meyer.
62ECW, 6, pp.368-72.
63LP, iii, 847.
64 Meyer, p.179, n.4; Hempsall, p.296.
65 Sturge, pp.360-1. It was never calendared.
66LP, iii, 969.
67CWM, 5, p.718
68LP, iii, 1197.
69LP, iii, 1210, 1233-4.
70 Meyer, p.181 for a different view.
71LP, iii, 1218.
72LP, iii, 1233.
73 Oxford University, Reg. H, fo.60. For Cambridge see Mullinger, p.571. There has been considerable confusion about the university burnings. Following Chester, Library Chronicle, pp.69-71 my own belief is that none occurred, but if there was one in Cambridge it was certainly in 1521.
74 Pastor, viii, pp.17-36.
75 See p.147 ff. above
76Ven. Cal., iii, p.124 for Spinelli’s estimate, but more generally ibid, pp.121-5; LP, iii, 1275.
77 Fisher, English Works, pp.313, 347-8 for the quotations; see also Surtz, Works and Days, pp.302 ff.
78 Wilkins, iii, pp.690-2.; GRO MS 9531/10/fo.139; KCA DR c/R7/fo.107v.
79 Fisher, English Works, p.327.
80 For a good example of damning with faint praise see Elton, Reform and Reformation, pp.75-6, while a standard work on the English Reformation gives it a sentence; see Dickens, English Reformation, p.95.
81LP, iii, 1220, 1233.
82 Scarisbrick, Henry VIII, pp.110-16; 245 ff., 403 ff. is good on this.
83LP, iii, 1233; CWM, 5, pp.720-1.
84 Roper, p.67.
85 Quoted in Doernberg, p.19; see also Tjernagel, pp.9-10 and E. Gordon Duff, important for the book’s bibliographical history. For the presentation and and the pope’s reply see LP, iii, 1574, 1654, 1656.
86 Scarisbrick, Henry VIII, pp.115-17.
87LP, iii, 1574.
88CWM, 5, p.719.
89 Tjernagel, pp.17-22.
90LP, iv, 40, where misdated to 1524.
91 Very fully treated in CWM, 5, pp.715 ff.
92 Mitchell, pp.109-14 CWM, 5, p.792.
93 Surtz, Works and Days is essential for Fisher’s writings.
94LP, iii, 1659 (2), 1772.
95LP, iii, 1450; E. Gordon Duff, pp.3-4.
96LP, iii, 1510, 1574.
97 Henry Ellis, 3 ser, i, pp.283-4 (LP, iii, 1760).
98LP, iii, 2714, 3025; iv, 2652, 2677, 2933.
99St. P, i, p.175 (LP, iv, 2445); see also LP, iv, 2371, 2420.
100LP, iv, 2446, quoted in Doernberg, p.56; see also CWM, 8, pp.1135-6.
101 For More’s writing on this theme see Thomas More, Correspondence, p.323 in his Letter to Bugenhagen, and CWM, 8, pp.56 ff., 483 ff. in his Confutation of Tyndale’s Answer. See also Cavendish, p.179-81 for Wolsey’s views.
102CWM, 8, pp.1068, 1159-10 for a good starting point to a complicated story.
103 Henry Ellis, 1 ser, i, pp.179-84 (LP, iv, 995), a most important letter, redated to 1526 in Chester, HLQ, 14, pp.214-5.
104 Hall, p.708 says that only two Hanse merchants abjured, but see Chester, HLQ, 14, pp.211-21 for five. For the raid see Kronenburg; for Fisher’s sermon see Surtz, Works and Days, pp.330-2.
105 Chester, HLQ, 14 p.221. CWM 8, p.1160, for the suggestion that they first reached England in March.
106CWM, 8, pp.1161-2.
107 See Elton, Studies, i, 148; Marius, p.316.
108 Kronenberg, p.26.
109LP, iv, 1962 (1-5); for his personal presence see LP, iv, 1962 (5); Barnes, HLQ, 14, p.217.
110 GRO MS 9531/10/fos.130v-6, printed in Foxe, iv, app; Walker, JEH, 40 appeared too late to be assimilated here, but it needs to be consulted.
111 Sometimes Garret or Garrett.
112LP, iv, 4004, 4017, 4073, 4125, 4150, 4418, printed in Foxe, v, app.vi.
113 GRO MS 9531/10/fos.136v-8 for Garrard’s and Lome’s trials; Foxe, iv, pp.689-90, curiously not to be found now in Tunstall’s register.
114LP, iii, 1275; Chester, HLQ, 14, p.211.
115 Longland, fo.35 ff., not referred to in Bowker, Henrician Reformation, but see ibid, pp.57-64 for his concern about heresy.
116 Barlowe, p.120.
117LP, iv, 3960, transcribed in Arber, p.54.
118LP, iv, 2607; S. Thompson, ‘English and Welsh bishops’, p.127.
119 Reed, pp.165-6.
120LP, iv, p.2549.
121 Thomas More, Correspondence, pp.387-8; (LP, iv, 4028).
122 For biographical information and full transcripts of his letters see Hackett.
123CWM, 8, p.1068; Arber, pp.18 ff. For Rinck see LP, iv, 4810 his letter to Wolsey of 4 Oct. 1528.
124 The evidence in letters of West to Hackett and Rinck to Wolsey in Hackett, pp.173-5; Arber, pp.32-6 (LP, iv, 4693, 4810).
125 Ridley, The Statesman and the Fanatic, 168.
126 Hackett, p.169 (LP, iv, 4650), but for Harman episode as a whole see ibid, pp.155 ff.
127LP, iv, 5461.
128 The letters are not extant, but are referred to by Hackett in Hackett, p.167 (LP, iv, 4650).
129LP, iv, 4714, 5078, 5402.
130 Hackett, p.180 (LP, iv, 4714).
131 He was arrested in July 1528 and was out of prison the following April; see Hackett, pp.156, 251 (LP, iv, 4511, 5462). For the search see ibid, pp.173 ff. (LP, iv, 4693-4).
132 Hackett, pp.63-72 (LP, iv, 2797).
133 Hackett, pp.41-2 (LP, iv, 2649).
134 In writing thus I am to a great extent paraphrasing More; see especially Thomas More, Correspondence, p.441; CWM, 6, pp.284 ff., 508 ff; CWM, 8, pp.143 ff. For similar worries of Tunstall’s chaplain, Robert Ridley, in a letter to Henry Gold see LP, iv, 3960.
135CWM, 8, p.1379.
136 Foxe, v, p.417.
137 Admitted under interrogation at his trial in 1527; see GRO MS 9531/10/fos.130v.; Foxe, iv, app.vi.
138CWM, 6, p.268.
139 The evidence is difficult to interpret but see Chester, Hugh Latimer, pp.22 ff.
140 This from the only source for the interview, Ralph Morice’s near contemporary account; see BL Harleian 422, fos.84-7, printed in Foxe, vii, app.iv.
141 Tyndale’s work appeared in 1530, and thus after Wolsey’s fall. But since he expected Wolsey’s triumphant return, I hope the point being made holds.
142 In a letter to Tunstall; see Foxe, iv, p.638.
143 Thomson, Later Lollards, pp.227-36.
144 Foxe, vii, app.iv.
145 But see Chester, Hugh Latimer, p.36.
146 No record of his trial has survived but see Foxe, iv, p.586; v, p.27; CWM, 9, pp.119-20.
147 GRO MS 9531/10/fos136v-7.
148LP, iv, 4260.
149 Foxe, iv, pp.688-91; see also J.F. Davis, ‘Heresy and Reformation’, pp.269-71.
150 Foxe, v, app.vi (LP, 4073, 4175).
151 From his instructions to his archdeacons in Oct. 1526, quoted in Foxe, iv, p.667, but see GRO MS 9531/10/fo.45, where the date is 24th rather than 28th, but everybody produces a slightly different date!
152 See Dickens, English Reformation, pp.79-81 for a sympathetic pen portrait, but for a more streetwise Bilney see Walker, JEH, 40.
153 J.F. Davis, HJ, 24 is the best starting point.
154 In chronological order of their sentence there were Thomas Hitton, Thomas Bilney, Richard Bayfield, John Tewkesbury and James Bainham.
155 Though the reader may think it abrasive enough; see Thomas More, Correspondence, pp.441-2; also Marius, pp.429-30.
156 Cavendish, p.179.
157 For a recent account of early Tudor Lollards, see Hope; but also see M. Aston, Lollards and Reformers, pp.119 ff; Davis, Heresy and Reformation, passim; Dickens, English Reformation, pp.33-7. I must confess to finding it very difficult to take early sixteenth-century Lollards as seriously as no doubt they should be, but even Hope wrote that ‘there remains something insubstantial about Lollardy on the eve of the Reformation’ (Hope, p.24).
158
For Lollards and the New Testament in general see M. Aston, History, lxii; for the Lollard deputation from Steeple Bumstead to Robert Barnes while in custody to buy Tyndale’s New Testament see CWM, 8, pp.1384 ff; for Robert Necton’s sale of Protestant literature to Lollards see LP, iv, 4030, printed in A.W. Pollard, pp.155-9. See also J.F. Davis, Heresy and Reformation, pp.59-60.
159 For a useful survey of all heresy trials at this time see see S. Thompson, ‘English and Welsh bishops’, pp.121 ff; see also Dickens, English Reformation, pp.26-33.
160 See especially Haigh, PP, 93; HJ, 25; and Scarisbrick, Reformation. For a spirited counter-attack to this recent work see Dickens, Archiv fr Reformationsgeschicte, lxxviii, where he mentions that for the period 1525-8 3,000 names included in J. Fines’s Biographical Register of Early English Protestants; see ibid, p.191.
161 Hall, p.788.
162 Scarisbrick, ‘Reformation’, pp.61 ff. for a brilliant corrective to the more usual whitewash.
CHAPTER TWELVE
THE KING’S GREAT MATTER
BY THE SPRING OF 1527 HENRY VIII WAS MUCH TROUBLED BY A ‘SCRUPLE’ concerning his marriage to Catherine of Aragon. He had become aware that not only was the marriage technically invalid, but what was far worse, that it was contrary to divine law. This being so, the very salvation of his soul was in jeopardy unless the Church acted swiftly to free him from a marriage that should never have been. Wolsey’s task as the king’s leading servant and, by virtue of his legatine powers, head of the Church in England was to see that it did so but, as everyone knows, he failed, and in failing destroyed himself. But more than personal loss was at stake. The pope’s refusal to grant a divorce led almost directly to the ‘break with Rome’ and to the creation of a Protestant England.1 It is, thus, one of the most significant failures in English history, which brings with it the, in some ways unfortunate, consequence for a biographer of Wolsey that the story has been much told, and in the greatest detail. Usually the storytellers have been emotionally involved, taking sides with the personalities and with their religious beliefs, and as a result the evidence has not been impartially treated. Perhaps more importantly, in a climate in which the religious divisions are no longer so dominant as they once were, the evidence itself is very difficult to interpret.
To begin with there is its bulk. For six years the divorce was Henry’s government’s priority and a matter of some interest in all the courts of Europe, not least at Rome. Every kind of official, lawyer and academic was dragged into it, and this generated an enormous quantity of paper, much of it highly technical and requiring specialist interpretation.2 It is a daunting prospect and there can be no attempt here to give a full account of Henry’s ‘great matter’. Instead, what follows is a highly selective commentary from which it is hoped that Wolsey’s private attitude to his master’s predicament will emerge, though in a matter in which the king’s personal wishes and royal policy were so powerfully intertwined it was very difficult for any of his servants, as pre-eminently Thomas More found, to have views of their own, or if they did, they might wish to keep them to themselves. And perhaps this must be the first point to make: that considering Wolsey’s position as the king’s chief servant, he could hardly have afforded the luxury of a personal view, even if it had occurred to him to have one. But before we become too lost in interpretation, a brief chronological framework is called for.
Wolsey’s first documented involvement with the divorce was the holding of a legatine court, which met secretly at Westminster on 17 May 1527, to pronounce on the validity of Henry’s marriage.3 When, on the 31st, the trial was adjourned without sentence being passed,4 there followed an uneasy period during which Henry and Wolsey appear to have adopted differing tactics. At any rate, Wolsey spent much of the summer in France trying to grapple with the additional complication of the pope’s captivity, begun when on 5 June an Imperial army sacked Rome and ended only with Clement’s escape to Orvieto on 8 December. Meanwhile Henry, acting in the first instance without Wolsey’s knowledge, had instructed his secretary William Knight somehow to gain access to the pope and persuade him to grant a dispensation enabling the king to remarry, despite the fact that, at least in the eyes of the Church, he was legally married to somebody else.5
But Henry’s request to be free to marry someone to whom he was related in the first degree of affinity could only confirm the rumour that his ‘scruple’ had little to do with God and more to do with Anne Boleyn, who as a consequence of Henry’s affair with her sister, Mary, was related to the king in just that degree. It was a curious, not to say foolish, first step, as Wolsey was quick to realize as soon as he got wind of it. This was not until early September, while he was still in France and when Knight had already started for Rome and, despite his best efforts, he was unable to persuade Henry to rescind Knight’s instructions, only to modify them.6 A perfectly useless dispensation was in fact obtained,7 but only at the expense of destroying Henry’s moral credibility, for by drawing attention to Anne it made it difficult for the pope to take seriously any more acceptable reasons that might be advanced later for dispensing with the first marriage.
The one good thing that emerged from Knight’s mission was that it brought Henry and Wolsey together again. The king accepted that, however impatient he might be, the divorce of a queen, with all its many implications, including those concerning the succession, could not be rushed. Every kind of legal propriety needed to be observed,8 or rather to appear to be observed, for what also soon became apparent was that the pope, in whose jurisdiction matrimonial matters ultimately lay, was not as convinced of the rightness of Henry’s case as he himself was. Moreover, Clement was faced with very difficult political choices, for while he was anxious not to offend Henry unnecessarily, circumstances made it even more important for him not to offend Catherine’s nephew, the emperor Charles v. What was required on the English side were patient and persistent negotiations with the pope to overcome the many legal and political obstacles which stood in the way of a decision in Henry’s favour. These began in earnest with the dispatch of Edward Fox and Stephen Gardiner to Italy in February 1528, and to begin with they were very successful. It is true that what Wolsey wanted above all else, a decretal commission, of which more later, eluded him, and that he had to put up with a ‘secret’ one, which was not the same thing at all, though a gain of sorts. He was also granted a general commission under the terms of which he and Cardinal Campeggio were empowered to conduct a second legatine trial. In addition, Wolsey obtained what was called a ‘pollicitation’, in which the pope promised to do nothing to hinder the execution of the commission. Taken together, these concessions did offer Wolsey and Henry a chance of success. On 25 July Campeggio left Italy for London, and early in August Anne Boleyn wrote to Wolsey that ‘the great pains and troubles that you have taken for me, both night and day, is never likely to be recompensed on my part, but only in loving you, next unto the King’s grace, above all creatures living’.9 That no irony was intended is suggested by the fact that she persuaded the king to write a postscript which he signed as Wolsey’s ‘loving sovereign and friend’. Shortly afterwards Henry wrote to Anne: ‘touching our other affairs’, by which he meant the divorce, ‘I assure you there can be no more done, or more diligence used, nor all manner of dangers better foreseen and provided for’.10 Wolsey may not have been quite as optimistic as his master, but the patient negotiations begun in the early part of the year had borne some fruit, and he must have hoped that he would soon be deserving of even more of Anne’s love if that is what he wanted? But as it turned out the summer of 1528 was to be the nearest that Wolsey got to success in this matter.
Campeggio’s journey to London was agonizingly slow; for Campeggio on account of the severe gout from which he suffered, and continued to do so for most of his stay in England; for Henry, Anne, and Wolsey just because it was so slow. When on 8 October he did eventually arrive, instead of proceeding immediately with the trial, as Henry and Wolsey expected, he did what Clement had
instructed, which was to waste yet more time, first by trying to reconcile Henry to Catherine, and then, when a four-hour interview with Henry had convinced him that not even an angel from heaven could succeed in that task, by trying to persuade Catherine to take a vow of chastity, a step which, according to some interpretations, would have released Henry from his marriage vows. It is doubtful whether Henry or Wolsey ever believed that such a move on Catherine’s part could provide a satisfactory solution, but she soon resolved their doubts by refusing to comply, despite Wolsey going down on bended knee in one of the many attempts to persuade her. Not long afterwards she brilliantly counter-attacked by producing from out of the blue, or rather from Spain, a copy of a dispensation for her marriage to Henry of which the English had been hitherto unaware. The so-called ‘Spanish brief’ had been sent in 1504 as a special favour to Catherine’s mother, Isabella of Castile, who was dying and wished to have some of the uncertainties surrounding her daughter’s second marriage resolved.11 It differed slightly from the one provided for the English court, and some of these differences added extra legal complications; but the real complication was its very existence. Since the commission drawn up for Wolsey and Campeggio to try the case made no mention of it, any sentence passed by them could have no bearing on its validity, and thus it could be claimed that the marriage remained good even if it was found that the ‘English brief’ was defective. By suddenly producing this document in early November, Catherine achieved not only a coup de théâtre but a real setback to Henry’s and Wolsey’s plans. Either they would have to prove that the ‘Spanish brief’ was a forgery, and its opportune appearance at least raised a presumption that it might be, or failing that, they would have to get their commission altered so that the brief came within its terms of reference. Wolsey tried both approaches, but all negotiations with the Curia were slow, for it took about a month for letters from London to get there and back. In this case the problem was greatly complicated by Clement’s illness, which began in January 1529 and continued until the summer. Early on, when Clement seemed about to die, Wolsey made his third and last attempt to become pope, in the belief that if he succeeded he would be in a position to solve Henry’s problem. In the event Clement recovered, but his recurring ill health meant that he could not always be visited by the English envoys. This was a nuisance, but it also meant that he could not be visited by Imperial ambassadors either, which, as the diplomatic situation turned increasingly against the English, had its advantages.
