The King's Cardinal: The Rise and Fall of Thomas Wolsey (Pimlico) (133 page)

‘
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 continued 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.

All this is speculation. What is not is that there are some similarities between what both Wolsey and Starkey were proposing to do with the monasteries. This does not make Wolsey into a fully-fledged humanist reformer; there are just too many qualifications for that, including the almost total lack of evidence for the kind of personal involvement with classical literature, the early Fathers, or the new biblical scholarship that are the humanist’s hallmark. Moreover, the radical nature of Wolsey’s 1528-9 proposals has so far been deliberately exaggerated in order to raise questions that have been too frequently ignored. The 17 per cent reduction in monastic revenues that they could have resulted in was very much an optimum figure: it need not have been anywhere near as much. Even if he had been aiming so high, the assets of the religious orders would have remained considerable. All that Wolsey’s proposals would have resulted in, even at their most ambitious, was a slimmer and sounder version of the existing set-up – and this does seem a little different from the ‘certain monasteries and abbeys’ that Starkey wished to retain merely as a ‘great comfort to many feeble and weary souls which have been oppressed with worldly vanity’.
⁵⁵
That there were differences is not nearly so
surprising as the fact that there were similarities. Wolsey was, after all, a considerably older man, whose formative years were free of the Erasmian influences that coloured Starkey’s views. More importantly, however much he may later have been attracted by such influences, Wolsey remained first and foremost a man of affairs who had to take reponsibility for the effects of any changes he might make, unlike Starkey, who at most only ever became a propagandist and backroom adviser. Responsibility encourages caution. The suggestion here would be that when he became legate in 1518 Wolsey had no blueprint for reform, whether of the religious orders or other areas of the Church. Rather, he was anxious to ensure that everything was functioning as well as possible; and, as we have seen, in a number of ways he worked to that end: new constitutions were drawn up, care was taken over appointments to religious houses, some unsatisfactory heads were removed and, above all, no religious house could hide behind its right to exemption from episcopal jurisdiction. It was a measured and by and large conservative approach, deliberately designed to minimize opposition. On the other hand, Wolsey was sufficiently influenced by humanist ideas to see the provision of education, in which the new studies were assigned a prominent part, rather than any dramatic revival of the religious orders, as the way forward. Or to put it more simply, it was on the fellows of Cardinal College rather than on the friars of Greenwich that Wolsey pinned his hopes. But in the late 1520s the pace quickened, as he contemplated redrawing the diocesan map of England, funding the changes from monastic wealth. The question is, why?

It would be wrong to ignore the possibility that no more is required to explain the 1528-9 proposals than that Wolsey’s interventions in church affairs had built up a momentum of their own. Not only might Wolsey have needed time to assess what reforms were needed, but he also had to ensure that the legatine machinery was securely in place, and it should be remembered that, though Wolsey first acquired his legatine powers in 1518, it was not until 1524 that they were granted to him for life and that his compositions with the bishops were finally secured. Admittedly, there was then a three-year pause before the momentum picked up again, but it is not all that long a time, especially since the Church was by no means Wolsey’s only concern. Nevertheless, there is a further, and probably more compelling, explanation: the threat of Lutheranism, which, though present since 1521, was not a dominant concern until the arrival in England of William Tyndale’s
New Testament
in early 1526. In the fight against this new heresy the bishops would be expected to play a leading part, just as they had for many years in the fight against Lollardy.
⁵⁶
More often than not the early sixteenth-century bishop took personal control of any heresy trial within his diocese. He was also responsible for the detection and suppression of heretical literature. The larger the diocese, the more difficult it was for a bishop effectively to perform this role of defender of the Faith, something which was explicitly acknowledged by southern convocation in 1532 when it explained the necessity for bishops to appoint preachers to act as their pastoral representatives: ‘in these dangerous times’, it was vital that people heard the true
word of God and the size of his diocese made it impossible for a bishop alone to bring it to them.
⁵⁷
Moreover, the greater the threat of heresy, the more anxious was the Church to forestall criticism, and perhaps royal intervention, by carrying out reform itself. Arguably, the many small monasteries were an easy target for such criticism and thus the pressure on Wolsey to do something about them.
⁵⁸
The reform proposals of 1528-9 are thus best understood in the context of a number of measures designed to counter the threat of Lutheranism. But for such an argument to carry conviction it is necessary to believe that Wolsey took the Lutheran threat seriously, and this most historians have been reluctant to do.

There are many reasons for this. Some have been reluctant to believe that Wolsey could take seriously anything that was not directly related to his own self-interest and personal aggrandizement. On the other hand, some have taken the view that, unlike so many of contemporaries, Wolsey was far too sane and sensible to want to burn people, and, indeed, under his benign rule nobody was or so (wrongly) they have alleged.
⁵⁹
Since Wolsey’s supposed toleration of heresy is one of the few aspects of his character that called forth praise, it may seem perverse for a sympathetic biographer to cast doubt on it, but doubt there has to be, especially since the benign view is most frequently advanced to make a stick with which to beat Sir Thomas More, who, unlike Wolsey, was supposedly a fanatic.
⁶⁰
The fanatical More is a curious construct, designed to make it easier for the Protestant or secular mind to come to terms with the opposition by someone with as high a reputation as More to something they see as self-evidently better than what it sought to replace. It is a travesty of the truth, and should not be allowed to obscure the fact that Wolsey took the threat of Lutheranism extremely seriously.

It was on 12 May 1521 that Wolsey publicly opened the campaign against Luther when he presided over a burning of Lutheran books in St Paul’s courtyard. But although it appears to have been carried out with due solemnity, even this episode has been taken as evidence for his lack of enthusiasm for defending Catholicism: it was too late, and anyway his main reason for holding it had everything to do with his foreign policy and very little with his hatred of heresy.
⁶¹
Neither proposition will be accepted here.

The first point to make is that it was not until Luther’s works were officially pronounced heretical that there was any reason, let alone obligation, for Wolsey to act at all; indeed until this was done it would have been hard for him to make any
kind of assessment of the dangers inherent in Luther’s writings. Academics with new ideas – Jacques Lefèvre in France and Johann Reuchlin in Germany – would be contemporary examples, as perhaps also Colet, had always faced the threat of being labelled heretics by their conservative colleagues, but this in no way implied that the Church’s foundations were being threatened. No one in England could have immediately appreciated that Luther, who until at least 1517 was an unknown academic at one of the newer and less distinguished German universities, was a different proposition. Precisely when Wolsey first heard of Luther is not known. By early 1519 his works were on sale in England, and a letter from Erasmus to Wolsey written in the May of that year seems to assume that Wolsey was well acquainted with him. Erasmus’s intention was to distance himself a little from the new theologian, but this did not prevent him from offering some praise. Moreover, he presented Luther as but one of a number of controversial German academics, such as Reuchlin and Ulrich von Hutten, and as of posing no more of a threat than they did.
⁶²
By the following year this could no longer be anybody’s attitude. In May 1520, Silvestro Gigli reported to Wolsey from Rome that after long debate Luther had been declared a heretic; and on 15 June the famous bull,
Exsurge Domine
, was published.
⁶³
Forty-one of Luther’s ninety-five theses were condemned, and the faithful were called upon to destroy his works. It is the fact that it took Wolsey almost a year from this date to organize the English Church’s response that underlies the suggestion that it lacked conviction.