The King's Cardinal: The Rise and Fall of Thomas Wolsey (Pimlico) (86 page)

There were other features of this subsidy which, if not entirely new, were at least unusual. It was a graduated tax which included at the lower end a large number of people who, under previous clerical tenths, would have been exempt from payment; and neither were curates any longer exempt. Dispensing these exemptions contributed to the most novel feature of the 1523 subsidy, its size. The clergy were being asked to provide, according to Wolsey, £120,000, in five annual portions of £24,000; his estimate for the clerical loan of the previous year had been £60,000.
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On top of all this, there was the Amicable Grant of 1525, for which the clergy were supposed to contribute a sum equivalent to one-third of their income. Comparisons with previous payments by the clergy are hard to make, given in particular the uncertainty about how much of the required amount was actually collected – and
there were indeed difficulties in collecting the 1523 subsidy.
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What is certain is that the resident papal legate was asking the clergy to contribute annually in taxation to the king about half as much again as they had been accustomed to pay.
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As in the case of patronage, it is difficult to assess just how far Wolsey’s new powers contributed to this achievement, and, as was indicated earlier, it is not even certain that in 1523 Wolsey had been able to make use of a legatine convocation to persuade the clergy to pay. However, insofar as the legatine powers did increase the king’s minister’s authority over the Church, they may have made it marginally easier for large financial demands to be made.

If Wolsey as legate was to act effectively on the king’s behalf, it was obviously necessary for him to assert his legatine authority. The ways in which he did this have already been described, but given the emphasis in this account on the royal involvement, a further point emerges. In the traditional picture of Wolsey’s churchmanship, his insistence on his legatine rights had a largely financial motivation. And those rights did indeed bring financial gain. As was mentioned earlier, one result of his composition with the bishops was that he secured a third of their annual revenues from spiritualities. A third of the £3,450 arrived at in the 1535 Valor Ecclesiasticus produces a figure of £1,150, and from this must be deducted the spiritualities of the sees that Wolsey himself held – for most of the relevant period York and Durham – and also those of Canterbury, which appear to have been left untouched by Wolsey’s composition with the archbishop. This gives us an annual income from this source of about £800. From the joint-prerogative court he was receiving just over £300 a year, and there would also have been revenue from the proving of wills reserved for his sole legatine jurisdiction. There are no figures for this, nor indeed for the revenues derived from his legatine court of audience, but he was receiving about £200 a year from the granting of dispensations and other licences. Legatine visitations of monastic and collegiate institutions in the dioceses of Coventry and Lichfield, Lincoln, Salisbury and Worcester in 1524-5 resulted in about £440, and similar visitations in and around London about £200.
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Another source of revenue derived from his right to conduct
sede vacante
visitations, but only in the case of Winchester in 1528, on the death of Fox and before his own accession, does he seem to have asserted the right, and even then he may have arrived at some financial compromise with Warham who, as archbishop of Canterbury, had a better established right to conduct such a visitation.
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It will be obvious from the many uncertainties surrounding these figures that only a most impressionistic indication of the amount Wolsey derived from his legatine powers can be given. In February 1524 he himself estimated that ‘all the profits that may rise of my legation, … will not be worth one thousand ducats (£300) by the year, whatsoever report may be made to his Holiness to the contrary by such as might suppose and think great revenues might grow’.
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One thing, at
least, that this survey of his legatine revenues shows is that Wolsey was here being very economical with the truth, because something approaching £1,500 would be nearer the mark.
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Does such a figure confirm the view that ‘great revenues’ would ensue? The answer has to be yes, since few people in Tudor England had an income of more than this amount – but with one important qualification. Such a figure was a great deal of money for almost everyone but Wolsey himself. After 1526 he was receiving about £7,500 a year from his French pension alone, while Thomas Winter’s income, which was effectively his own, was alleged to be £2,700. Then there were the revenues from his sees of York and Durham, amounting to nearly £5,000, about £2,000 from St Albans, and the lord chancellorship brought him at least £2,000 – and these are just the more obvious sources of revenue. In 1519 the Venetian ambassador had estimated Wolsey’s income at about £9,500, while in 1531 a successor reported that it had been about £35,000 – but this figure left out of the reckoning his French pension.
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In such a context, a legatine income of about £1,500, at the most 8 per cent of his total income, cannot explain Wolsey’s motivation for wanting to become legate. Moreover, by concentrating on the financial aspects, one can too easily ignore the fact that his legatine authority could most easily and effectively be expressed in terms of jurisdiction, and it was from jurisdiction that revenue derived.
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Wolsey could only effectively assert his legatine powers by insisting on his jurisdictional rights, because it was only they which gave reality to his theoretical claim. If he was successful, money would inevitably accrue. It may be going too far to see the money as merely a symbol, but to argue thus is nearer the truth than to see it as an end in itself – especially when a new claim to authority is being asserted, which is precisely what Wolsey was doing.

It is not, therefore, the love of money or of glory that provides the key to Wolsey’s churchmanship, but rather the desire to further his master’s interests: this at least has been the argument so far. Now the task is to try to discover what such a desire entailed and, if possible, to arrive at some assessment of his personal attitude towards religion. It is, for instance, most unlikely that Wolsey ever had a religious vocation. As mentioned earlier,
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for a person of his social standing, with any aptitude for learning, university followed by the Church provided the obvious and well-tried route not only to financial success but to a more interesting life. There are similar if more varied routes today, but then as now, a passionate devotion to the steps along the way – to learning while at university or to the mechanics of the law while one is being articled – is not required, and indeed is probably unusual. Similarly for Wolsey, university and Church were likely to have been the means to an end – which is not to say that he would have had any emotional or intellectual difficulties in accepting the means. And the point has been made before that what is interesting about Wolsey is his decision not to read for the canon or civil law, courses which the brightest and most ambitious students of his day would have more
naturally chosen.
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Perhaps he was a slow developer, or perhaps, as will be suggested shortly, he did have a genuine interest in academic study? The great sadness for his biographer is the dearth of evidence. What, however, need not be accepted is the view that sees all career churchmen as time-servers, men with no sincerity in their religious beliefs. For whatever their youthful attitudes, it would have been hard for people in their position not to develop an attachment and loyalty to the institution that had done so much for them. Of course, its size and diversity may not have helped in this respect. On the other hand, the Church did have a great tradition which, combined with the ceremonial and sacramental dimension, must have made its influence very hard to resist – and this would have been as true for Wolsey as anyone else. Another attempt will be made later to discover more about Wolsey’s personal attitude to religion. The point being made here is simply this: even if Wolsey saw his major role as that of royal servant, it does not exclude the possibility that he had, if no vocation, at least a genuine interest in the affairs of the Church. And whether he did or not, he could never escape from the fact that he was a churchman, and this in itself may be of some importance.

What that importance is was suggested in the chapter on the Hunne and Standish affairs, where it was argued that Wolsey, while essentially working in the king’s interest, was also anxious to minimize the conflict between Church and state; and that this involved keeping open the channels of communication with the clerical party and looking at all times for compromise. Since such a posture made political sense, it does not necessarily tell us very much about his religious beliefs, but it may serve to reiterate the point that neither Church nor state was anxious for a fight to the death. So the ambiguities in his position, which Wolsey had expressed to Henry on bended knee in 1515 – that though he owed everything to his king, he had also, along with all the bishops, taken an oath of loyalty to the pope – need not and, once the dust of 1515 had settled, did not, create for him a major problem. Wolsey as royal servant was not expected to lead an all-out attack on the Church and in fact the most likely effect of Wolsey’s increasing domination of the Church would be in the opposite direction. With his own man in charge, Henry could relax.

From the bishops’ point of view, too, there were some advantages in Wolsey’s legatine ascendancy. Of course, they were shrewd enough to appreciate that Wolsey was first and foremost the king’s man as, indeed, in many respects they were. What they wanted was protection from the Crown lawyers, from fellow clergy such as Veysey and Franciscans such as Standish, who took the Crown’s side in any jurisdictional conflict; and this they hoped someone with Wolsey’s influence with the king could achieve. Here Fox’s letter to Wolsey in January 1519 is again helpful, for after he had stressed the importance of the king’s support in carrying out reform, he went on:

As far as I can see this reformation of the clergy and religions will so abate the calumnies of the laity, so advance the honour of the clergy, and so reconcile our sovereign lord the king and his nobility to them and be the most acceptable of all sacrifices to God, that I intend to devote to its furtherance the few remaining years of my life
.
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One thing that emerges from this passage – as from the position he took up in the Standish affair
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– is that, despite having been a career churchman and royal servant
par excellence
, he had still retained, or perhaps had developed, a strong attachment to the Church. But what matters here is that he clearly perceived that what Wolsey was about to do had some relevance to the current conflict between Church and state and, by implication at any rate, that he saw Wolsey as being on the Church’s side. It is not known whether other bishops took a similar view, but it is conceivable that they did. And if so, this would provide a further explanation of why they did not oppose Wolsey’s legatine authority with the vigour that might have been expected. Perhaps even Nix took the point in the end; he of all the bishops had suffered most from royal interference, with his officials being systematically accused of praemunire by Henry
VII
’s attorney-generals. In attempting to combat this interference he had looked to Warham for support, but it does not look as if his support was very effective. This did not prevent Nix from backing Warham in early 1519, when they had both tried to resist Wolsey’s legatine authority. However, what may have in the end helped both men to accept it was the realization that it might offer some protection to what they saw as a beleaguered Church.

But whatever the reasons for supporting legatine reform, there was one thing that Richard Fox at least was in no doubt about, and that was that serious reform was intended. Indeed, in a moving passage that surely exceeds the requirements of decorum, Fox described his reaction to Wolsey’s summoning of a legatine council on the subject:

This day I have truly longed for, even as Simeon in the Gospel desired to see the Messiah, the expected of men. And in reading your grace’s letter I see before me a more entire and whole reformation of the ecclesiastical hierarchy of the English people than I could have expected, or ever hoped to see completed, or even so much attempted in this age
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Fox’s words may have been a little excessive, but they do convey a genuine excitement about Wolsey’s intentions, which, it has to be said, most historians have not shared. The bare bones of what Wolsey achieved have already been outlined: the new legatine constitutions for the secular clergy and new statutes for the Benedictine and Augustinian orders, along with some kind of legatine supervision over the remaining ones. The time has now come to try to assess the quality of these reforms. New legislation and new machinery are all very well, but did anything change for the better as a result of their introduction?

It will come as no surprise if it is admitted from the start that there are great difficulties in answering this question. These have not only to do with limitations of the evidence, but perhaps even more so with the criteria to use for judging success. To take one point about evidence: the question was raised earlier whether the legatine constitutions were widely published. The answer given was that probably they were, although only about half a dozen references to them have survived. Must one therefore conclude that they made no impact? In the end that is a judgment that everyone must make for themselves, but what must be borne in mind is that
immediately after his fall, Wolsey’s legatine constitutions could only have been an embarrassment to the Church, and for this reason one would not expect to find any reference made to them in the discussions about reform in the early 1530s.
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After the ‘break with Rome’ they would have become an irrelevance. It would also be surprising to find references to them, once they had been locally published, in the diocesan archives. What a bishop and his officials required records for were particular judicial and administrative actions, and the connection between these and any set of constitutions would, in most cases, be too remote to deserve a mention. Since the lack of documentary references cannot, therefore, be taken as a measure of their success or failure the problem – and it is probably insoluble – is to find another yardstick. The verdict of the considerable amount of recent work on the activities of the early Tudor bishops and their administrations has been favourable, and certainly not one that lends support to the common notion of a Church suffering from a terminal illness.
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There were regular visitations of both parishes and monastic institutions, effective church courts, some efforts to supervise the suitability of candidates for ordination, and considerable worries about heresy – though mostly of a Lollard rather than a Lutheran variety. And a feature of the 1520s that has been particularly commented upon is the considerable degree of involvement in the health of their diocese shown by a majority of the bishops. Fisher at Rochester, Fox at Winchester, Longland at Lincoln, Nix at Norwich, Sherborne at Chichester, Veysey at Exeter, Warham at Canterbury and West at Ely, all in their differing ways were much concerned with what went on in their dioceses, and even someone like Blythe of Coventry and Lichfield, not an obvious choice as a distinguished bishop, is known to have preached three visitation sermons and in 1511-12 was actively involved in one of the largest heresy trials to have taken place in England.
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How far the publication of Wolsey’s legatine constitutions helped them in the successful administration of their dioceses, it is impossible to say. Most of them had been involved in drawing them up, and if the evidence of Fisher’s contribution to the legatine council of 1519 can be accepted, they had approached their task with a proper seriousness. At the very least the new constitutions were a statement of intent, and in this respect may have helped to create a climate in which reform and correction could more easily be carried out.