The King's Cardinal: The Rise and Fall of Thomas Wolsey (Pimlico) (82 page)

The only other leading churchman with whom Wolsey had, from time to time, any serious difficulties was Richard Nix, bishop of Norwich since 1501. Unlike both Wolsey and Warham, his early career had been in ordinary diocesan administration, acting as vicar-general to Richard Fox at both Bath and Wells, and Durham. This did not prevent him from siding against his former patron and with Warham in the conflict over Canterbury’s prerogative jurisdiction, perhaps because of the support he had received from Warham in his conflict with Henry
VII
’s attorney-general, John Ernley.
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And as has already been shown, early in 1519 he had sided with Warham against Wolsey over the latter’s legatine powers, even expressing a readiness to forsake the king over the matter.
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Despite, however, being
‘always stiff in his causes’,
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Nix did at some point give way and make a composition with Wolsey; no doubt Warham’s surrender had left him in such an exposed position that he felt he had very little alternative. However, trouble broke out again in connection with Wolsey’s illegitimate son, Thomas Winter, who from 1526 to 1528 was archdeacon of Suffolk and subsequently until 1530 archdeacon of Norfolk. All seems to have been well while Winter held the former office, but when he moved a difficulty immediately arose because of Wolsey’s wish to replace him at the archdeaconry of Suffolk with one of his chaplains, ‘doctor Leigh’ – perhaps Rowland Lee the future bishop of Coventry and Lichfield.
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Nix had other ideas, and appointed one of his leading diocesan officials, Edmund Steward, which, as the office was in his gift, he had every right to do. Whether Wolsey had intended to ‘prevent’ ‘doctor Leigh’ by virtue of his legatine authority, or whether he had assumed Nix would go along with his choice and make the appointment on his behalf is not known. But at any rate Nix, having in August 1528 claimed Wolsey as his ‘good lord, the which I esteem a great treasure to me’, got his way and Steward remained as archdeacon.
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However, in the following May, Nix informed Wolsey that he had become positively ill on hearing of the cardinal’s ‘heavy mind and displeasure’ towards him.
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What had caused this was Nix’s challenge to Wolsey’s right to testamentary jurisdiction in the archdeaconry of Norfolk. Nix argued that in claiming and enforcing this right Wolsey had broken their composition, the purpose of which had been to exclude Wolsey’s legatine interference in the diocese in return for an agreed share of the bishop’s revenue from spiritualities.
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Wolsey’s defence is nowhere stated, but presumably he would have argued that the issue had nothing to do with his legatine powers and thus nothing to do with their composition, but entirely concerned the rights of the archdeacon of Norfolk on whose behalf he was acting.

Wolsey’s position, if this it was, might be more compelling had the archdeacon not been a teenager who happened to be his illegitimate son. It is also possible that in enforcing the archdeacon’s jurisdictional rights Wolsey may have intended to get his own back on Nix for his swiftness in appointing Steward to the archdeaconry of Suffolk. On the other hand, he may merely have been anxious to protect his son’s legally justified rights, which for better or worse he always viewed as his own. Nix was a crusty and combative man who was inclined to overreact, and it would be quite wrong to assume that his position was the correct one.
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But, whatever the rights and wrongs of this particular episode, there is no doubt that in the late 1520s relationships between the two men were not good. Moreover, in none of the surviving letters between the two men are there those touches of any personal regard to be found in those between Wolsey and Warham. Nix, not being nearly so involved in national affairs, would not have known Wolsey as well as Warham did,
and he was anyway almost certainly a more difficult man to deal with. But if Wolsey’s handling of Warham, and indeed other people, is anything to go by, he would have treated the bishop of Norwich as tactfully as the situation allowed – and Wolsey’s tact is one of the explanations of the surprising fact that, when all is said and done, the amount of opposition to his legatine rule was surprisingly small.

What may also have helped Wolsey in avoiding opposition is the amount of patronage and therefore power that he had at his disposal. The more one can offer people, the more willing they are to do one’s bidding – or, at least, that is one view of the world. Or, to make essentially the same point in a slightly different way: if one fills all the posts with one’s own nominees, one is not likely to meet with much opposition. And the fact that neither Warham nor Nix was a nominee of Wolsey’s and, indeed, each had been made bishop at about the time that Wolsey secured his first benefice back in 1500, may in a negative way help to make this point. It also helps to introduce a note of caution into any consideration of Wolsey’s ecclesiastical patronage. The usual impression given, perhaps especially by A. F. Pollard in his sustained attack on Wolsey’s ‘despotism’ over the English Church,
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is that during the 1520s Wolsey monopolized ecclesiastical patronage. Such an impression needs to be seriously modified. To take episcopal appointments first: from early 1514 to his appointment as legate
a latere
in May 1518, a period during which Wolsey had considerable influence in royal government but was not master of the English Church, there were only three appointments to English sees, apart from his own to Lincoln and York in 1514 – those of William Atwater to Lincoln in 1514, of West to Ely in 1515 and of Booth to Hereford in 1516. From May 1518 until his downfall in October 1529, eleven appointments or translations were made, three of which involved himself: Bath and Wells in 1518, Durham in 1523 and Winchester in 1529, all held
in commendam
with York. Three others – those of Giulio de’ Medici to Worcester in 1521, of Geronimo de Ghinucci to that same see in 1523, and of Campeggio to Salisbury in 1524 – involved the appointment of foreigners, a practice much favoured by Henry
VII
and continued by Henry
VIII
and Wolsey as a way of rewarding foreign churchmen who had proved, or might prove, useful to the English Crown, especially in any negotiations with the Curia. These changes left the core of the episcopal bench very much as it had been before Wolsey’s ‘despotism’: Warham at Canterbury, Sherburne at Chichester, Blythe at Coventry and Lichfield, Nix at Norwich, and Fisher at Rochester remained throughout the 1520s, and Fox at Winchester until 1528.

Of the seven new appointments to English sees from 1514 to 1529 there is direct evidence of Wolsey’s involvement in two cases only, that of Cuthbert Tunstall to London in 1522 and of John Clerk to succeed him at Bath and Wells in 1523; and as regards the former the evidence is somewhat misleading. It comes in a letter from Warham in January 1522 in which he thanks Wolsey for advising the king to promote Tunstall who, ‘in [his] poor opinion’ was ‘a man of so good learning, virtue, and sadness’ and therefore ‘right meet and convenient to entertain ambassadors and other noble strangers at that notable and honourable city’ in the absence of the king and Wolsey.
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The reason why Warham wrote was that until 1515 Tunstall had been
his protégé, serving as one of his leading archiepiscopal officials. After 1515, admittedly, Tunstall became heavily involved in royal service as diplomat and administrator, and inevitably came into close contact with Wolsey.
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Presumably he would not have been so fully employed if he had not won Wolsey’s respect, but then Tunstall won the respect of everyone he met, for not only was he a most successful ecclesiastical lawyer and diplomatist but he was also part of the great humanist network centring on Erasmus. Tunstall was destined for a highly successful career in the Church, whether Wolsey had come along or not, and even if he was subsequently, but most reluctantly, to temporize over religious changes with which he was not in sympathy, he was in no obvious sense a yes-man to Wolsey, or anyone else.
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Much the same can be said of the other new appointments. John Veysey, in September 1519 appointed bishop of Exeter, was like Wolsey a Magdalen man, although he had resigned his fellowship in 1496, a year before Wolsey took his up. His early patron had been John Arundel, bishop of Coventry and Lichfield from 1496 to 1502, and of Exeter from 1502 until his death in 1504. Veysey acted as his vicar-general in both sees, continuing in that post under the new bishop of Exeter, Henry Oldham, until in 1509 he became dean of Exeter. It is just possible that Wolsey had a hand in what was clearly the vital appointment in Veysey’s career, that to the deanery of the Chapel Royal in 1514; but his subsequent appointments, culminating in his bishopric, were probably at the king’s initiative. Veysey had been a major spokesman for Henry both in the debates over the Standish affair in 1515 and over the legal position of sanctuaries in 1519. Given his earlier connections with Exeter, he was an obvious choice for that see. Veysey was older than Wolsey, as were the pre-1518 appointments, West and Booth, neither of whom had any close connections with Wolsey; so also was John Kite, appointed to Carlisle in 1521. Tunstall was almost Wolsey’s exact contemporary. All these men were therefore well-established on the ladder of clerical promotion before Wolsey could have had any decisive say in church appointments. And there is a further point to bear in mind. Wolsey’s rise was so rapid that there was no time for him to have gathered a group of clerical administrators or household officials who could have been immediately considered for episcopal office. It is thus not surprising that he only ever had a limited influence over episcopal appointments. His protégés, people like Stephen Gardiner and Rowland Lee, were to become bishops only after he himself had fallen.

Still, there are two episcopal appointments in which Wolsey may have had a considerable say. One is John Clerk’s who became bishop of Bath and Wells in 1523. Like Tunstall, Clerk attended Bologna university, where in 1510 he became a doctor of canon law. He had then been snapped up by Cardinal Bainbridge as part of the talented team he surrounded himself with during his five-year embassy at Rome, a team which also included Richard Pace, the future royal secretary, and William Burbank who was to become one of Wolsey’s leading legatine officials.
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On
Bainbridge’s death in 1514 Wolsey took over this team, and this undoubtedly accelerated Clerk’s promotion, as it did Pace’s and Burbank’s. Clerk’s experience of Rome no doubt explains why in 1521 he was sent on an important embassy there in 1521, one of the purposes of which was to present to the pope Henry
VIII
’s defence of the Catholic Church against Martin Luther, the
Assertio Septem Sacramentorum
. He returned to England in the autumn of 1522, and it was early in 1523 that he became bishop. By the end of that year he was back in Rome on another important mission, and it was from there that, on 2 December, he wrote to Wolsey to inform him that he was about to be consecrated as bishop, adding: ‘I pray God send me grace to behave myself henceforth accordingly in the high and holy order whereunto most unworthily I have been called only by your grace.’
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Even allowing for the element of flattery, the remark may well have been somewhere near the truth.

There is no direct evidence for the appointment of John Longland to Lincoln in 1521, but there are good reasons for thinking that it owed something to Wolsey.
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They had been exact contemporaries at Magdalen, and their surviving correspondence, most of it admittedly for the period following Longland’s appointment as bishop, suggests a genuine friendship within the limits set by their different positions in the Tudor hierarchy. And that Wolsey respected Longland is indicated by the fact that he chose him to deliver the sermon to the monks of Westminster at his joint-legatine visitation of the abbey in January 1519, which signalled his intention to embark on reform. It should be said, though, that by that date Longland was already a distinguished doctor of theology, and probably did not need Wolsey’s influence to bring him to the king’s attention; from 1518 he was a regular preacher at court and thus well known to the king, well before he became bishop. Be that as it may of all his episcopal colleagues, Longland was probably the closest to Wolsey. But that does not mean that he was Wolsey’s ‘creature’, or even that he owed his appointment entirely to him.

What emerges, therefore, is that a significant number of bishops owed nothing to Wolsey as regards their appointment; one, John Longland, was personally close to him and no doubt owed something to him, but only one, John Clerk, owed a great deal. Moreover, given his academic qualifications and diplomatic skills, even if Clerk had not had the good fortune to be taken up by Wolsey in 1514, he would almost certainly have risen to a high position in the Church. In other words, there was nothing odd about Clerk’s appointment, and the same can be said about all the others. The chief characteristic of those appointed to English bishoprics between 1514 and 1529 was simply the suitability of their qualifications, which differed very little from bishops of earlier periods, except insofar as not one of them was of noble birth, and not one of them was incompetent. In fact, if one takes Wolsey’s episcopal colleagues as a whole, it is fair to say that they were an exceptionally able and conscientious group.
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With Fisher as its star, any group that also included Warham, Tunstall and Fox must be awarded high marks. Longland was a theologian by training and an outstanding preacher. Sherborne of Chichester a first-rate diocesan administrator.
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Even those who at first glance do not appear to be promising
episcopal material improve on closer inspection. In some ways Veysey of Exeter looks like a typical court appointment, but his earlier diocesan experience should not be forgotten, nor that he had been an active preacher in his earlier days.
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Although West of Ely had been at one time heavily involved in diplomacy, this did not prevent him from earning the praise of Fisher, not only for his learning but for being a good bishop.
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Only Booth of Hereford has nothing particular to recommend him – apart from his residency – and perhaps Kite of Carlisle, though he had been very active in royal government before his appointment. It is not a bad line-up. Only Fisher, it is true, gave his life for the Catholic Church, but in their different ways Clerk, Nix, Sherborne, Tunstall, Warham, West and Standish all attempted to resist the ‘break with Rome’.
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And it certainly cannot be argued that the reason why there was so little opposition to Wolsey’s legatine powers was because the bishops were either too sycophantic or too afraid to put up more resistance.