The King's Cardinal: The Rise and Fall of Thomas Wolsey (Pimlico) (15 page)

However, the main thrust of the attack was in the law courts themselves. During the last two law terms of Henry
VII
’s reign ten cases of praemunire were brought before King’s Bench, eight of which were by the new attorney-general, John Ernley. The bishop of Norwich’s registrar and summoner were amongst those cited, but the cases were not confined to the diocese of Norwich. None of the cases was successful, but given that in the previous sixteen years only six praemunire cases were brought, it does look as if Ernley was deliberately testing the law in order to establish the extent of the Crown’s jurisdiction with regard to the Church, and perhaps to extend it. The record specifically states that Ernley had brought his prosecutions ‘for the king himself’, and even if this was merely a legal formula, Henry
VII
’s known close attention to all matters of government suggests that he would have been fully aware of what his attorney-general was up to.
⁶⁸
Moreover, a list of eighty-four people ‘ill-used’ by Henry
VII
cited seventeen churchmen, of whom two, the abbots of Gloucester and Cirencester, ‘were hardly dealt withal for praemunire’. Also named were none other than Bishop Fitzjames and Dr Horsey, the latter, it was stated, being imprisoned ‘contrary to conscience’. Unfortunately no details are given.
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There is other evidence of Henry
VII
’s direct intervention in church affairs, though much of it is difficult to interpret – it would be interesting to know, for instance, why the bishop of Salisbury had to pay ‘1000 marks for a very light cause’
⁷⁰
– but it looks as if Henry was unhappy with the concessions made to the Church by his Yorkist predecessors, and was anxious to win back lost ground.

Henry
VII
does not come across as someone especially interested in political theory, but he was probably well aware of the theoretical justification for his moves against the Church – and, if he was not, one of his closest ministers during the later part of his reign certainly was. Edmund Dudley wrote
The Tree of Commonwealth
in 1510 while awaiting execution for alleged treason, though he had been guilty merely of being a too willing executant of his master’s wishes. In the circumstances, he must have considered his words carefully. He was aware that some of Henry
VII
’s actions against individual churchmen had been unfair, for it was he who drew up that list already referred to of those ‘ill-used’ by the king. However, his book makes it clear that he fully supported Henry’s policy: it was the prince’s role not to assist the Church, but rather to assist ‘his maker and redeemer of whom he hath all his power and authority’; moreover, not only was his ability to correct the wicked much greater than the Church’s could ever be, but ‘the root of the love of God … within this realm must chiefly grow by our sovereign lord the king’.
⁷¹
This last statement almost suggests that he envisaged a spiritual function for the prince, such as Henry
VIII
was to claim from time to time in the 1530s. Certainly he envisaged an ecclesiastical one – that is to say, he thought it the prince’s duty to control the
external activities of the Church, its organization and jurisdiction. Such a view was no novelty. Deriving from Roman law, it had become an integral part of civil law, and as such was very much alive throughout the Middle Ages, despite the challenge of Gregorian views that asserted the primacy of the Church and papacy in all temporal matters. Amost a commonplace of the English legal profession, the notion seems to have been fully grasped by Henry
VII
, and certainly by his son.
⁷²
There is some doubt whether the alterations to the latter’s coronation oath made with his own hand date from the beginning of his reign or from the 1530s, but they indicate very clearly Henry’s view that the royal obligation to maintain the liberties of the Church should be in no way ‘prejudicial to his jurisdiction and dignity royal’.
⁷³
And that this view was not merely the by-product of the ‘break with Rome’ of the 1530s is made abundantly clear by the position he took up in 1515 in the Standish Affair – an affair that would not, however, have occurred unless the Church had not already begun to resist the threat to its liberties posed by the Crown.

Shortly after the 1504 parliament, the much-harassed bishop of Norwich, Richard Nix, wrote a letter to the archbishop of Canterbury stating that ‘lay men be much bolder against the Church than ever they were. If your Lordship help not, having the great seal in your hand, I and other of your subjects can no thing do.’ He added that if the archbishop would support him, he would bring charges of heresy against all those who threatened the church courts with praemunire
⁷⁴
– precisely what some people alleged Fitzjames had done in the Hunne affair. In fact, as was mentioned earlier, it is very hard to find any evidence that the Church did proceed in this way,
⁷⁵
but that Nix could think of doing so is an indication of the strong feelings aroused in church circles by the new wave of anticlericalism fomented by the Crown lawyers. It also suggests that the Church was not going to take it lying down. The convocation of 1504 – that is, the Church’s assembly or parliament – made it clear to Henry
VII
that during his reign the liberties of the English Church had been undermined, and it hoped that he would do something to put this right
⁷⁶
– presumably a hint that even at this late stage he would renew its charter of liberties. In 1510, during the first parliament of the new reign, a bill had been introduced to confirm the Church’s liberties, but without success.
⁷⁷
At the same time convocation determined to resist the activity of certain ‘wicked men’ who were threatening to trample the Church under foot.
⁷⁸
In his opening sermon the dean of St Paul’s, John Colet, strongly criticized the faults of the clergy, but also very much emphasized ‘the dignity of priesthood … the which is greater than either the king’s or emperor’s: it is equal with the dignity of angels’.
⁷⁹
This meant, amongst other things, that the clergy should not be brought before the secular courts.

Colet’s sermon to the 1510 convocation is famous, though more for its call for
reform than for extolling the clerical orders. A speech to the 1514 convocation by John Taylor, who, as prolocuter, presided over the debates in the lower house, has been too often ignored.
⁸⁰
Like Colet, he attacked the deficiencies of the Church, that only encouraged the laity to trample on its liberties. Churchmen did nothing but quarrel amongst themselves. Monks were arrogant and idle. Secular priests – that is, those not in religious orders – led ‘foul and dissolute’ lives, and committed crimes which led to them being ‘sold publically in fetters by the secular power, like condemned criminals’. Taylor’s message was that the Church must reform or there would be no Church left, but throughout his speech he stressed that the ‘following of righteousness’ and the Church’s liberties went hand in hand, and, calling the leaders of the Church to arms, he reminded them that ‘neither the threat of harm nor exile, privation, mockeries, calumnies, hatred, not even the parade of death before their eyes’, had prevented their predecessors from fighting for these two things. Taylor’s speech is all the more remarkable in that, unlike Colet, he was not an obvious ‘reformer’, rather a successful career churchman, who under Wolsey was to become master of the rolls, and often employed on diplomatic missions. The fact that such a man could make so forceful a speech is the clearest indication possible of the strength of the clergy’s feelings on the eve of their battle with the Crown. The issues in this battle may appear trivial: whether the minor clerical orders should receive ‘benefit of clergy’, or whether cases of ‘breach of faith’ should be tried in the secular or ecclesiastical courts. But each one of them raised the question that had dominated so much of medieval polemic: who on this earth should have the final word, pope or emperor, Church or state? In 1515 both sides drew back from the brink. Fifteen years later it was to be a different story.

As has already been indicated, the battle in 1515 was not over Richard Hunne, though the feelings aroused by his mysterious death undoubtedly contributed to the heightening of tension. The specific issue was an Act of 1512 which had prohibited all clerics not in holy orders from claiming ‘benefit’ for certain serious offences, such as any murder committed in a holy place, in any occupied house, or on the king’s highway.
⁸¹
The Act was for a trial period, to be reconsidered in the next parliament. The Church had, therefore, very good warning that the bill would again be before parliament in 1515, and it is almost certain that they had determined to fight it long before there was any question of defending Dr Horsey – and since he was in holy orders the Act did not affect his position one way or the other. The Church would have been encouraged to fight by certain resolutions taken at the Fifth Lateran Council, which was dominated by concerns similar to those being expressed in England by the likes of Colet and Taylor – the need for reform, but also to resist lay interference.
⁸²
In two bulls of 1514 the whole panoply of the Church’s defence against such interference was specifically restated.
⁸³
The call from Rome was clear, and the English clergy were in the mood to answer it.

Early in 1515, probably to coincide with the opening of parliament on 5 February, the distinguished abbot of Winchcombe, Richard Kidderminster, delivered a sermon at St Paul’s Cross in which he attacked the Act of 1512.
⁸⁴
In it he argued that since minor orders were just as ‘holy’ as major ones, those belonging to them could not be sentenced in the secular courts. More controversially, he went on to argue that nobody in holy orders could even be tried there and that the existing practice, quite irrespective of the fate of the disputed Act, was wrong. Immediate exception was taken to the sermon, and pressure from parliament led to Henry calling a conference at Blackfriars to debate the issues it raised. The spokesman for the ‘secular’ side was Henry Standish, the warden of the Grey Friars in London and provincial of the Franciscan order. The fact that he was a Franciscan is not without significance. The convocation of 1512 had forwarded to Rome a whole series of complaints against the orders of friars
⁸⁵
– part of a wider running battle between ‘secular’ clergy and friars that had, for instance, occupied much time at the Lateran Council.
⁸⁶
And amongst the mendicant orders none was so critical of the wealth and pretensions of the ‘secular’ clergy as the Franciscans. Thus in the battle between Crown and Church it is no surprise to find Standish on the side of the Crown.

The main thrust of his argument, both at the first Blackfriars conference and subsequently, was that the Act of 1512 was for the ‘public good’. It was therefore very much the concern of the Crown, who had a duty to ensure that the ‘public good’ was upheld, irrespective of whether the matter in question was ecclesiastical or secular; indeed, as regards the ‘public good’ there was no such distinction. And in arguing thus, Standish was drawing on that tradition of the civil law already referred to, that gave to the Crown control of the ‘ecclesiastical’ or external affairs of the Church as distinct from ‘spiritual’ or inward matters. He also argued that many papal decrees had not been observed in England, and that anyway their observance depended both on their formal acceptance by the Crown and on local custom. Since in England it had been the practice for all clergy, whether in major orders or not, to be ‘convented’ before the secular courts and only to be handed over to the ecclesiastical ones for sentencing, papal decrees to the contrary should have no effect. Standish also argued for a distinction between major and minor orders. If his earlier reasoning concerning the sovereignty of the ‘public good’ was correct, to do so was surely unnecessary – but as the Act of 1512 affected only those in minor orders, to emphasize the distinction was no doubt tempting.

The Church’s argument was that clerical exemption from secular jurisdiction derived from ‘divine law’, and to prove it they cited two texts: ‘Touch not the Lord’s anointed’ and ‘Honour thy Father’. The point of the first text is clear: as the Lord’s anointed, the clergy could not be arrested or tried. As regards the second, it was
well understood that by ‘Father’ was implied the layman’s spiritual as well as natural father, and since it would be against all reason to suppose that a child could have jurisdiction over its father, so it was for a layman to have jurisdiction over a priest. Moreover, as ‘divine law’ was superior to all other kinds of law, its formal acceptance by a ruler was obviously not required, neither could local practice override it. But it was also argued that the ‘positive law’ of the Church did not require formal ‘acceptance’ by a ruler. Thus papal decrees forbidding secular interference in church affairs were to be obeyed, whether formally ‘received’ or not. In making their case the church spokesmen had gone well beyond the particular issues raised by the Act of 1512, for the whole thrust of their argument was to show that ‘divine law’ prohibited the subjection of the clergy to any form of secular jurisdiction, and that therefore existing English practice was quite wrong. If it persisted, ecclesiastical censures would follow. It was aggressive stuff, but then the Church was in aggressive mood.
⁸⁷