The King's Cardinal: The Rise and Fall of Thomas Wolsey (Pimlico) (136 page)

One of Lord Darcy’s accusations against Wolsey in 1529 was that ‘he and other bishops have counselled together, often secretly’.
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He did not say whether they did so in order to promote the fight against heresy, but there is no doubt that the defence of the Church against the onslaught of Luther and his English followers frequently resulted in precisely that. Such co-operation will come here as no surprise, for the notion of a legatine ‘despotism’ has already been rejected. What should also be rejected is the notion of a beleaguered Thomas More battling almost alone to stem the heretical tide, for, as we have seen, it was the full apparatus of Church and state that was quickly mobilized to that end. Moreover, it is unlikely that More’s horror of heresy was significantly stronger than anyone else’s, for it was a horror that was widely shared – at least until the divorce and ‘break with Rome’ greatly muddied the waters. What was special about More, as Tunstall implied when licensing him to read Lutheran works in order to write against them, was that he could ‘play the Demosthenes in our native tongue just as well as in Latin’ and was therefore well qualified to put forth ‘some writings in English which will reveal to the simple and uneducated the crafty malice of the heretics’.
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In other words, it was not More’s fervour but his literary skills that Tunstall wished to mobilize though whether Tunstall was the prime mover is another matter. When More had first been asked to take up his pen in the Catholic cause, in 1523, the initiative had almost certainly been Henry’s. It may have been his in 1528 also, or perhaps, More himself asked to do so. But it is most likely that the request came from Wolsey, perhaps after
consultation with his fellow bishops, including Tunstall. What is most unlikely is the scenario of the two old chums, More and Tunstall, getting together to do something off their own bat, because they felt no one else was making an effort. Apart from anything else, it would have been incredibly foolish to have embarked upon a private crusade; and there is no reason why they should even have contemplated doing so, for both would have been well aware of how much was already being done to combat Lutheranism, not least by the king and his cardinal legate.

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.
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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.
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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.
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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.
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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.
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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!
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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.
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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.
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And when Friar West was sent over to intensify the campaign against English heretics abroad, he brought further instructions as regards Harman.
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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.
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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.
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And for this success Wolsey deserves some of the credit, for it was he who had prompted Hackett to act.
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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?
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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.
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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.
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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.
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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;
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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.
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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.
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