The King's Cardinal: The Rise and Fall of Thomas Wolsey (Pimlico) (90 page)

Wolsey calculated his procuration fee at one twenty-fifth of an institution’s annual income, which was considerably more than anyone else charged. To make one direct comparison, in March 1525 Wolsey’s commissary, John Allen, visited Tewkesbury Abbey, whose income was put at £761 7
s
2
d
, and he charged a procuration fee of £30 9
s
1
d
.
³⁵⁹
For the
sede vacante
visitation of Archbishop Warham in 1522, Tewkesbury had paid only £3 6
s
8
d
³⁶⁰
– which seems, incidentally, at least in the diocese of Worcester, to have been the fixed rate for all larger monasteries, irrespective of their precise income. It should be said that the institutions – which included colleges and hospitals as well as monasteries – were allowed to pay their legatine procurations in manageable instalments. Prior William More of Worcester paid his personal contribution to the £40 owed for Allen’s visitation in April 1525 in five instalments of £3;
³⁶¹
Winchester College, whose annual income was put at £628 13
s
6
d
, was charged £8 for Allen’s visitation in March 1527, but was still paying it off after Wolsey’s fall.
³⁶²
But though payment by instalments would have eased the burden, procuration fees were heavy, so it is not surprising that they were made the subject of one of the articles brought against Wolsey in 1529.
³⁶³
Moreover, there were additional sums of money involved. Prior More’s journal records that for his visitation Allen was given £5, William Clayton 26
s
8
d
and their servants 20
s
, plus additional expenses of 6
s
8
d
;
³⁶⁴
and Winchester College gave Allen 30
s
.
³⁶⁵
But such
gifts of this kind were nothing new. In 1494 the bishop of Winchester’s visitation had cost Winchester College £6 13
s
4
d
over and above the procuration fee of 13
s
4
d
, of which 3
s
4
d
had been distributed amongst the bishop’s officials.
³⁶⁶

None of this is meant to be an apology for legatine extortion. But before pronouncing judgment, one needs to consider the historical context. Undoubtedly Wolsey made money out of the legatine visitations, but how much is impossible to say. The legatine visitations made in the London area during the spring and early summer of 1525 brought in £189 8
s
5
d
; and those of about the same time in the dioceses of Salisbury, Worcester, Coventry and Lichfield, and Lincoln £439 12
s
2
d
.
³⁶⁷
Apart from one or two isolated examples, such as Winchester College, these are all the visitations that are known to have taken place, and my guess would be that if many others had occurred, some record of them would have survived. If so, during a period of ten years, Wolsey received about £630. It does not seem to have been an exorbitant charge on the religious orders of England. And when it comes down to it, the only thing that was unusual about Wolsey’s visitations was their legatine nature. Even then we must remember that only about thirty years earlier Archbishop Morton, although not a legate
a latere
and not yet even a cardinal, had been granted a bull in 1487 authorizing him to visit exempt monasteries if the regular authority, such as the order to which the house belonged, failed to act within six months.
³⁶⁸

But how was the undeniably high rate of one twenty-fifth of any given institution’s income arrived at? There is no reference to any procuration fees in Wolsey’s various legatine commissions. On the other hand, it is most unlikely that he just plucked the figure out of thin air. This is not because he was especially saintly, but because it was just not how such matters were decided. The workings of the Church were dominated by precedent and legal requirements. Whatever advantage his position as resident legate
a latere
may have offered him, Wolsey almost always played by the book, whether he was obtaining wider or more specific legatine powers from the papacy, or working out his elaborate compositions with the bishops. The problem is, and no doubt was, that none of the precedents in this matter quite fitted or, if they did, they derived from a very long time ago: procurations for visiting papal nuncios and legates had ceased in the early fifteenth century but to find a legatine visitation of a monastic institution one has to go back to the second half of the thirteenth century.
³⁶⁹
By 1300 the going rate for important papal nuncios and legates, which seems in practice to have meant those who were cardinals, was 4
d
in the mark, or one fortieth, except for institutions with incomes of £200 or more, who were charged a flat rate of £8. Thus, for an income of precisely £200, the rate was one twenty-fifth. Could this be the source of Wolsey’s figure? Perhaps – and, at any rate, it is as near to finding one that I have been able to get.
³⁷⁰
But that there was some source I have little doubt, for to have produced an arbitrary figure would have been out of keeping with the way that Wolsey normally worked, and would anyway have probably been challenged.

But to put the financial aspects of Wolsey’s legatine visitations into some kind of context still leaves us with the even more difficult task of assessing their contribution to reform. It was, after all, in order to reform the religious orders that Wolsey had first asked for legatine powers, so it is of some importance to decide whether he made effective use of them. Vergil, in his castigation of Wolsey’s 1519 visitation of Westminster Abbey, was for the most part unfair, but insofar as he recognized that it was its propaganda effect rather than any particular good it might do for Westminster Abbey, he had grasped the essential point. There is no reason to suppose that the abbey was in any special need of a visitation; what evidence there is suggests that all was reasonably well.
³⁷¹
But it was conveniently placed and, moreover, it happened to be one of the most prestigious monastic houses in England. It was also, despite being a Benedictine house, exempt from episcopal jurisdiction. In all these respects it could hardly have been better suited for Wolsey’s purpose, which was to serve warning on the monastic orders that he had every intention to ‘castigate and punish’ each and every house that was in need of such treatment, whether exempt or not.
³⁷²
Unfortunately, it is not possible to calculate whether the visitation had the intended effect, for no comments have survived. What has is the sermon with which John Longland opened the proceedings, a sermon that he thought sufficiently important to have published, and which gave so much pleasure to Archbishop Warham.
³⁷³

Longland’s text from Genesis 18:18, where God informs Abraham that he intends to visit Sodom and Gomorrah to ‘see whether they have done altogether according to the outcry against them which has come down to me’, was appropriate to the wider ends in view, if a little unfair to Westminster Abbey. After expounding on the monastic vows of poverty, charity and obedience, Longland exhorted the monks of Westminster to live by their vows them in order that there could be no outcry against them. He also made a more general call for church reform:

Today the Churchy, whose former devotion has cooled, is injured. And is she not injured by herself? Certainly by herself. Our true predecessors, both monks and secular clergy, led a holy and hard life, we a much easier and softer one, we who have stained her pristine beauty and devotion with worldly desires
.
³⁷⁴

It was up to the monastic orders and the church authorities to bring the Church back to her ‘pristine beauty’. He did not actually say, as Bishop Fox had written only a few days earlier,
³⁷⁵
that this would best be achieved under Wolsey’s leadership as legate, but, given the occasion, the implication was surely there.

Given this rousing start, what followed may seem a little disappointing. As we have already seen, the number of legatine visitations was not all that great. Moreover, as with Westminster, in most cases there is no reason to suppose that there was anything especially wrong with the places visited. The visitations were, therefore, in part at least, an assertion of Wolsey’s legatine authority, in the same way as his compositions with the bishops were – which is not to say that they were merely a formality.

The only details we have are a set of injunctions dated 17 April 1525 in connection with a visitation of Worcester Priory, later revised because they were ‘frequently occasion of strife and controversy from ambiguous and obscure language’, and not, apparently, ratified by Wolsey until November 1526.
³⁷⁶
Contrary to the generalization that has just been made, all was not entirely well at Worcester. Prior William More had been in dispute with his sub-prior, Neckham, and his cellarer, Fordham, and in the revised injunctions Wolsey’s usual legatine visitor, John Allen, sided with the prior, confirming their dismissal from office, as well as that of two ‘scholastics’.
³⁷⁷
That he did so could be taken as evidence that the prior’s ‘gifts’ had taken effect.
³⁷⁸
Moreover, it has to be said that the character of the prior which emerges from his journal is not that of a zealous reformer. Neither is it, however, that of a villain.
³⁷⁹
William More liked his country pursuits and entertainments, and was at ease with the local gentry, but he also cared a great deal for the well-being of his priory. When in the 1530s – a time when the opportunities for settling scores were easily come by – the two dismissed monks, along with another who had been imprisoned by More for stealing, caused him considerable trouble, both the local gentry and most of the monks of Worcester supported their prior. Indeed, twenty-eight of them wrote to Cromwell saying that they had no wish to have Fordham back as cellarer, because not only was he ‘a troublesome person’, but he had also contracted ‘the pox’.
³⁸⁰
As so often, there is not enough available detail for the rights and wrongs of what was going on at Worcester to be fully established, but the burden of the surviving evidence points to the conclusion that Allen had been right to back the prior in 1525. Moreover, even if Wolsey’s legatine injunctions in their final form were more lenient than they had been initially, they do show that considerable attention had been paid to the specific problems of the priory.

If Allen’s visitation of Worcester Priory was typical of legatine visitations as a whole – and there is no reason to suppose that it was not – then it would be possible to argue that, though perhaps not strictly necessary, they did make some contribution to reform – perhaps even a rather specific one. It has already been
stressed that, despite the troubles at Worcester, there is no reason to suppose that houses visited were specially in need of reform. What may be significant is their geographical location. If the London houses are excluded, there remain forty-nine that Allen visited. Of these, four were in the diocese of Lincoln, seven in the diocese of Coventry and Lichfield, nine in the diocese of Salisbury, and twenty-nine in the diocese of Worcester. It emerges from this that it was the dioceses which had foreign and absentee bishops that saw the greatest number of visitations, which is to say Salisbury and Worcester, and this suggests another reason for them – to compensate for their lack of close episcopal supervision. In other words, it was a sensible, if rather limited, use of Wolsey’s authority, and certainly neither as selfish nor as arbitrary as has sometimes been alleged.

There remain one or two legatine visitations which were the result of particular circumstances. Longland’s request to Wolsey for help with the Cistercian, and therefore exempt, house of Thame, and the consequent visitation in 1526 of the abbot of Waverley acting as Wolsey’s legatine commissary, has already been mentioned.
³⁸¹
In the same year, there was a legatine visitation of the college of Stoke-by-Clare in Bishop Nix’s diocese of Norwich. Like everything in which Wolsey and Nix were brought into contact with, this episode provides a complicated and messy story, the rights and wrongs of which are impossible to unravel. It seems unlikely, though, that it brought Wolsey, as has been alleged, into conflict with Catherine of Aragon, patroness of the College; for his chief agent in the matter was Robert Shorton, not only her almoner but, as future events were to prove, her very devoted servant. Equally unlikely is the allegation that Wolsey intended to suppress the college, since he had no papal authority to suppress an institution of this wealth and size.
³⁸²
True, he did not keep strictly to the conditions laid down in the only relevant papal bull that has survived,
³⁸³
but even so Stoke-by-Clare would have represented a striking departure from the normal run of houses he suppressed.
³⁸⁴
What appears to have been involved was a genuine effort by both Wolsey and Catherine to do something about the state of the college, whose statutes even Nix admitted in a letter to Wolsey, were in need of reform. Admittedly their efforts came to nothing; at least no new statutes resulted, although Shorton’s appointment as dean, which unfortunately cannot be precisely dated, may have been due to their efforts.