The King's Cardinal: The Rise and Fall of Thomas Wolsey (Pimlico) (85 page)

It has already been stressed that like his predecessors, Henry took a personal interest in episcopal appointments, but his interest extended wider than that. The need to appoint a new dean of Lincoln in 1528 resulted from the death of John Constable in the July of that year, a death which freed not only the deanery, but a number of other church dignities and livings. And at about the same time, there were other comings and goings which offer some insight into the realities of church patronage.

Let us start with the appointment of Edward Staples, a royal chaplain, to the mastership of the hospital of St Bartholomew’s, West Smithfield. The election of a new master had been compromitted to, or given into the hands of, the bishop of London, Cuthbert Tunstall.
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However, it emerges that Staples was not Tunstall’s choice, for when on 10 July 1528 he reported to Wolsey that Staples had been appointed, he referred to it having been done in accordance with Wolsey’s letter and, more importantly, with the king’s pleasure.
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In the previous month, Thomas Heneage, who had just transferred from Wolsey’s to the king’s household, reported to Wolsey that Henry had discussed with him the question of the mastership and was anxious that either Dr Nicholas Wilson ‘or some other good man’ should secure the post.
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The ‘good man’, as it turned out, was Staples, but on becoming master he relinquished some of his ecclesiastical positions, including a prebend attached to Tamworth College, and livings at Covington and Thaxted. What happened at Thaxted has already been explained: at Henry’s request, Dr Wilson was prevented to it. Henry’s suggestion for the Tamworth prebend and Covington was another
of his chaplains, Dr Robert Dingle.
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When Winter failed to become dean of Lincoln, he was compensated with the mastership of St Leonard’s, York. He then resigned his prebend in Ripon, whereupon Wolsey immediately offered the right to fill the vacancy to the king, who accepted with alacrity.
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Meanwhile, Wolsey gave the vicarage of Wirksworth, formerly held by the dean of Lincoln and which, it will be remembered, Wolsey claimed to be his to give ‘by prevention’, to Nicholas Wilson, because he remembered ‘how gladly your highness’ would have him promoted.
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But more was yet to come for Wilson. In August, Henry was asking Wolsey to appoint someone of his choice to the living of Hurworth in the diocese of Durham, which was in Wolsey’s gift, not because he was bishop but because he was the guardian of the patron, Sir George Tailboys. Henry considered that the £25 a year the living was worth not sufficiently valuable for Wilson, so he suggested Richard Croke, the duke of Richmond’s tutor.
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What could be found suitable for Wilson? The answer was the archdeaconry of Oxford, relinquished by Heneage when he had become dean of Lincoln.
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There happens to be rather more information about the comings and goings of church patronage in July and August 1528 than for other periods during Wolsey’s ascendancy, but there is no reason to suppose that what happened then was not typical. It is true that the deanery of Lincoln did not fall vacant every month of the year, but similar vacancies occurred at fairly frequent intervals, and there were always plenty of royal chaplains in need of promotion. In attempting to draw some conclusions from this survey of Wolsey’s church patronage, royal chaplains do provide a valuable clue. It has been shown that what may be called Wolsey’s ordinary patronage was indeed ordinary except in one respect, its scale. Other bishops promoted their relatives, their diocesan administrators and members of their households. They also appointed candidates of the Crown and of anyone else who could influence their decisions.
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Wolsey just had more dignities and livings to give, and, moreover, did have this advantage over his episcopal colleagues, that he did not have to suffer from his own interference!

The main conclusion of this survey of Wolsey’s patronage is the important part played by the king. There was nothing new in this royal interest in appointments: most of Henry’s predecessors had shared it, but none more so apparently than Henry
VII
who, when in 1495 he moved Oliver King from Exeter to Bath and Wells, had secured a promise that all the important episcopal appointments in that see – and there were over fifty prebends – should be made by himself.
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It may be that this was an ad hoc arrangement facilitated by the fact that King, as royal secretary, was close to his royal master, and if similar promises were extracted from other bishops no evidence of them has so far come to light. On the other hand, if there were, it
would come as no surprise. It was Henry
VII
who began on any regular basis the practice, continued by his son, of appointing foreigners to English bishoprics. This was a means not only of securing the aid of people with some influence at the Roman Curia, but also of placing the bishopric under royal control, whether that control was exercised by a Richard Fox under Henry
VII
or a Wolsey under Henry
VIII
. It is also the case that Henry
VII
had pushed his leading minister’s role in church affairs in the same way as his son was to do. John Morton was made archbishop of Canterbury in 1486; in the following year he secured a bull,
Quanta in Dei Ecclesia
, giving him powers to reform the exempt monasteries; and in 1493 he was made a cardinal. Of course, it was the papacy who formally bestowed both the bull and the cardinal’s hat but, as with Wolsey’s successes with the papacy, what was needed was royal support, and this Morton received.
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When to all this is added the critical attitude taken by both kings towards the Church’s defence of its ‘liberties’,
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the broad continuity of policy adopted by father and son towards the English Church becomes apparent. And the direction was towards greater royal control – of which church patronage was one part. One of Wolsey’s principal tasks was to ensure that the royal wishes in church matters were carried out, and as such he, amongst other things, performed the role of church patronage secretary.

It has seemed right to emphasize the Crown’s involvement in the Church, partly because it has been too much overlooked, and partly because it provides one answer to the question why there was so little opposition to Wolsey’s legatine powers. What has misled in the past has been the concentration on Wolsey to the exclusion of his chief source of power, Henry
VIII
. In fact, it was his close association with the king, rather than his legatine powers, that enabled him so easily to dominate the English Church, something that emerges clearly from a brief look at the fate of previous legates
a latere
, the most famous of whom was Henry Beaufort. Despite being a grandson of Edward
III
and probably the wealthiest man in England, both in 1417 and 1428 his appointment as legate was strongly resisted, on the first occasion by Henry
V
and Archbishop Chichele and on the second by Protector Gloucester and the royal Council.
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When a hundred years later Leo x proposed sending Cardinal Bainbridge, archbishop of York but resident at Rome, to England as papal legate there had again been opposition, with this time Wolsey and Fox pointing out to the pope that it was not the practice of English kings to allow legates
a latere
to enter their territory.
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The point about these episodes is that the initiative in sending the legate had not come from the king or royal government. But in 1518 it was different. Henry had wanted Wolsey to become papal legate, so that he could carry out not the pope’s wishes, but his own.

What did Henry hope to obtain from his own papal legate? Certainly, not just a greater control over church patronage, because, as has been shown, though Wolsey’s legatine powers probably did strengthen the king’s hands in this matter, it was not by very much, if only because earlier kings had anyway exercised a considerable control. Still, there does seem to be a difference between Henry
VII
having to extract a promise from one of his bishops to place all his episcopal patronage in his hands, and Henry
VIII
’s assumption in 1528 that the archdeaconry of Oxford, theoretically in the gift of the bishop of Lincoln, was in the royal gift; and maybe Wolsey’s legatine powers explain the difference. At any rate, when on 7 July 1528 Dr Bell wrote to Wolsey that ‘his said highness commanded me to signify to your grace his pleasure and desire to your said grace by virtue of your legatine prerogative and prevention to confer to his chaplain, Mr Wilson, the vicarage of Thaxted’,
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there is just a hint that Henry believed that Wolsey was authorized to appoint anybody to anywhere.

However, the chief advantages of Wolsey’s legatine powers to Henry were of a more general kind. In an earlier chapter it was argued that the early sixteenth century witnessed in England a jurisdictional conflict between Church and state, in which the first two Tudor monarchs had played an active part. Their intentions had not been to destroy the ‘liberties’ of the Church, nor, indeed, had they been looking for any ‘break with Rome’. Instead they had been anxious to prune back ‘liberties’, but to recover ground which, during the fifteenth century, they felt the Crown had lost, and to ensure that where there was a clash of interests the Crown’s interests would prevail. When in 1515 the Church had attempted to interpret its right to ‘benefit of clergy’ in the widest possible sense, perhaps in an effort to reverse the royal policy, a major battle had taken place. There had been no outright winner; neither side was ready for, or even wanted, a fight to the death, but it was the Church that had lost the argument. However, the fact that his archbishop of Canterbury had talked of Becket and of martyrdom can only have encouraged Henry to look for ways to secure a more compliant Church, and the way that he found was Wolsey and his legatine powers. The great advantage to the king of this arrangement was that since Wolsey’s supremacy over the English Church derived in theory from the Church itself – that is, from the pope – it was difficult for the Church to challenge it. Indeed, they could only have done so by appealing to the king which, given his support for Wolsey’s legatine powers, was not a course of action open to them. Thus, as long as Henry felt that he could trust Wolsey, the legatine powers were an ideal solution to the problem of securing a subservient Church; and it is notable that during the 1520s there was no more conflict between Church and state. That the stated purpose of legatine commissions was to facilitate the reform and correction of the Church raises the question of whether Henry had any real interest in such matters.
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Given his sustained involvement in many aspects of the Church’s life, which led him, amongst other things, to write a work of theology, the famous
Assertio Septem Sacramentorum
, the possibility that he did should not be completely discounted, even if positive evidence is hard to come by. In March 1525 it had been his intention to accompany Wolsey on his visitation of the London Greyfriars, but, as we have seen, in the end this did not take place – and this non-event is about all there is. However, when writing to Wolsey in January 1519, Richard Fox argued that there would be less difficulty in carrying through church reform because ‘our most Christian king who had, I think, exhorted,
encouraged, and advised you to undertake the task, will lend his authority and help your godly desires’.
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Of course, in associating the king with Wolsey and reform, an element of flattery was intended, but Fox does seem to have been making a genuine point as well. Moreover, the fact that virtually no evidence of Henry’s interest in reform has survived is partly explained by his having no ‘constitutional’ part to play in its implementation; Henry and Wolsey could well have talked about it, but there would have been no resulting records. Perhaps this argument should not be pushed too far, but it does seem permissible to remark that if there was going to be church reform, Henry would have preferred it to be carried out under the aegis of his favourite minister rather than of his somewhat tiresome archbishop of Canterbury – all of which brings one back to the central question of Wolsey’s intentions towards the Church.

By stressing Henry’s involvement in church matters, and his responsibility for securing Wolsey’s legatine powers, it is possible to reject much of the more extreme criticism of Wolsey’s churchmanship. Far from being the ego-trip that it is frequently portrayed as, in which the attraction of the clothes and the crosses were the dominant feature, it should be seen as yet another aspect of his work as leading royal servant. One feature of that work was clerical taxation. Kings had always seen the Church as a possible source of revenue, and the first two Tudors were no exception. The whole question of clerical taxation is a complicated one best left to the experts; and even they find it hard to come up with very precise figures.
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What does emerge is that Wolsey made some innovations – though, as in so many other areas, he had been partially anticipated by Archbishop Morton. It was Morton who, for the so-called
magnum subsidium
of 1489, had started to overhaul the method of assessment and collection which had remained essentially unaltered since the
taxatio ecclesiastica
of 1291.
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In 1522 Wolsey continued Morton’s work when he instructed the commissioners for the ‘general proscription’ – an enquiry into England’s military potential – to discover ‘the values of all spiritual dignities and benefices … in tithes, portions, annuities, and oblations’.
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Their findings provided the basis for the clerical subsidy voted by convocation in the following year.