The King's Cardinal: The Rise and Fall of Thomas Wolsey (Pimlico) (93 page)

The suggestion being put forward here is that, despite the severe limitations of the evidence, it is possible to assign Wolsey a position within that broad movement for church ‘reform’ whose existence was argued for earlier. It was, to use the current jargon, a little left of centre, nearer to Colet than to Fitzjames – at least as regards educational and intellectual matters. As for his personal preferences, there is no evidence that he was in love with classical literature, nor do his letters display any great knowledge of the Bible – but then diplomatic correspondence hardly lends itself to biblical quotation. Erasmus did send him a copy of the 1519 edition of his
New Testament
, bearing a Latin epigram written by More in which much was made of Wolsey’s ‘preoccupation’ with ‘the Law of Christ’ which More equated with Erasmus’s work.
⁴²⁸
Still, this is not proof that Wolsey ever read the proffered gift, and in fact no acknowledgement of its receipt has survived. Moreover, as an undergraduate and fellow of Magdalen in the last two decades of the fifteenth century, neither classical literature nor the Bible would have figured prominently, though perhaps more at his college than elsewhere in the university.
⁴²⁹
What Wolsey would have been trained in were scholastic skills, and a letter that Thomas Winter wrote in December 1528 suggests that he retained his interest in scholasticism. Winter, then resident in Paris, was giving his father an account of his studies. What pleased him most, he wrote, were scholastic questions, because of their ‘intellectual subtilty’;
⁴³⁰
other authors merely skimmed the surface, but the schoolmen really got to the bottom of things.
⁴³¹
Such remarks were hardly calculated to win the heart of a committed humanist, but there was method in them, and method that may have had very little to do with Winter’s own likes and dislikes. What had happened was that the Venetian ambassador in Paris, none other than that earlier Wolsey-watcher, Sebastian Giustinian, had remarked to Winter that any real learning was dependent on the schoolmen, adding that this was something of which ‘your patron was not ignorant’
⁴³²
– ‘patron’ being an ambassadorial euphemism for natural father. Winter did what was expected of him and passed on the compliment, at the same time stressing his own interest in the subject. One could take the view that, like Giustinian’s remark, Winter’s letter was no more than an exercise in insincerity but, even as such, it would have made no sense if there had been no substance to the Venetian ambassador’s view of Wolsey’s intellectual interests. It looks, therefore, as if Wolsey never completely deserted his training as a schoolman, and that, although he came to accept the relevance of humanism to the Church’s current needs, unlike those around him, such as More and Tunstall, he was never personally reanimated by it.

Such a view is supported by the scraps of evidence that do throw some light on Wolsey’s inner religious life. In 1517 he went on a pilgrimage to the shrine of our Lady of Walsingham. So did Erasmus, but, unlike him, Wolsey was not prompted to
write a satire about what he found there. Instead, he seems to have made the pilgrimage for the time-honoured reason that he had vowed to do so if he recovered from a serious attack of the ‘sweating sickness’.
⁴³³
And if humanists were not supposed to take pilgrimages very seriously, neither were they supposed to believe very much in relics. Yet Wolsey, so Cavendish tells us, wore a piece of the ‘true cross’ on a chain around his neck, and a hair-shirt
⁴³⁴
– though whether this was only in the exceptional circumstances following his political disgrace is not certain; probably it was, but then exceptional circumstances offer a good testing ground for a person’s beliefs. At any rate, penitential aids are more easily associated with the monastery than the humanist’s stamping ground of court and university, although the fact that More also wore one is a useful reminder that humanists, like every other category of person, came in all shapes and sizes! It is Cavendish again who tells us that Wolsey ‘heard commonly every day two masses in his privy closet. And there then said his daily service with his chaplain and, as I heard his chaplain say (being a man of credence and of excellent learning), that the cardinal, what business or weighty matters so ever he had in the day, he never went to his bed with any part of his divine service unsaid, yea not so much as one collect, wherein I doubt not but he deceived the opinion of divers persons.’
⁴³⁵
His view that behind the public persona in all its pomp and glitter lay hidden a truly devout Christian carries some conviction, in part because of the way it emerges in his account: he provides a source – Wolsey’s chaplain – while the fact that he does not feel the need to elaborate on the subject gives his judgement additional credibility. And what none of Cavendish’s comments provides is evidence of any interest on Wolsey’s part in ‘humane studies’. Admittedly, as one whose job it was to further the smooth running of Wolsey’s household, he was not in the best position to comment upon his master’s intellectual concerns, but his silence on the subject at least corroborates the view being offered here that Wolsey’s humanism was a matter of policy rather than private conviction. At the same time, his extensive patronage of humanism makes it impossible not to think that he genuinely believed in the policy.
⁴³⁶

But is one not entitled to expect rather more ‘policy’ from him? Erasmus had a vision of a time when the Bible, having been translated into the vulgar tongue, would be sung by the farmer walking behind his plough and hummed by the weaver in time with the movement of his shuttle, and when travellers would tell stories from it to lighten their journeys.
⁴³⁷
More cautiously Thomas More could write in 1531 that he

never yet heard any reason laid why it were not convenient to have the Bible translated into the English tongue, but all those reasons seemed they never so gay and glorious at the first sight, yet when they were well examined they might in effect as well be laid
against the holy writers that wrote the scripture in the Hebrew tongue
.
⁴³⁸

If only Wolsey had agreed with him and, instead of leaving it to heretics such as William Tyndale to meet the demand, had authorized a vernacular Bible, then the Reformation in England might never have occurred – or so it can be argued. And it is precisely his failure to come up with this kind of major innovation, so the argument continues, that makes it difficult to justify his legatine rule of the English Church. At the very least it was a glorious opportunity missed – and most historians have been more severe than that!

In rejecting such a view, the first point to make is that it is based largely on an assumption that the battle for the hearts and minds of the English people was lost by the Catholic Church on account of its own failings. If, on the other hand, there would have been no Reformation in England but for the betrayal of the Catholic cause by the English Crown, then the argument that an English Bible was a necessary ‘reform’ does not look so strong. The second point to make is that it was not just Wolsey who failed to see the need for an English Bible. There is no evidence before the 1530s for anyone of orthodox beliefs advocating an English Bible – and this should have given pause for thought. For instance, it is a striking fact that nowhere in Colet’s writings or sermons is there any call for an English Bible and yet it is Colet who is supposed to have brought the new biblical scholarship to England. The same is true of Fisher’s writings and sermons, and yet not only did he believe that scripture was the spiritual food of the soul but he had so encouraged Erasmus’s biblical studies that the great Dutch humanist had considered dedicating to him his famous 1516 edition of the New Testament.
⁴³⁹
Moreover, even More’s advocacy of an English Bible in 1531 was so circumspect as to be almost off-putting. It is not only that he insisted that any such Bible must be authorized, but that even then it should only be allowed to people whom a bishop considered ‘honest, sad and virtuous’.
⁴⁴⁰
Of course, in 1531 with the Church under threat both from the king and Lutheranism, one can understand his circumspection. But the fact is that in the 1520s he, along with Fisher, had been silent on the subject, and it is difficult not to escape the conclusion that but for the advent of William Tyndale’s translation of the New Testament in early 1526 he would have remained so. It is therefore not just a case of having to explain why Wolsey showed no interest in an English Bible, which could easily be ascribed to his moral failings and lack of interest in anything genuinely religious. Instead, the question that has to be tackled is why it was on nobody’s agenda, not even those whose good intentions are usually considered beyond reproach.

The most usual explanation is that since such Bibles were already associated with the Lollard heresy, even the best English Catholics were prejudiced against them
⁴⁴¹
– and undoubtedly the association was commonly made. One of the reasons why the church authorities had taken Richard Hunne to be a Lollard was that he possessed ‘the Apocalypse in English, epistles and gospels in English, Wyclif’s damnable works, and other books containing infinite errors’, while at his
posthumous trial article 13 stated that ‘he defendeth the translation of the Bible and the holy Scripture into the English tongue, which is prohibited by the laws of our mother, holy Church’.
⁴⁴²
How far they were actually prohibited is another matter. It has been estimated that by 1500 at least 29 editions of vernacular Bibles had appeared on the continent, with little or no opposition from the church authorities
⁴⁴³
– not that this prevented the Reformation! The English Church did take a different line. Such Bibles in themselves were never banned, but as a direct result of Wyclif and Lollardy, anyone wishing to read an English Bible had to obtain the approval of a bishop, and the possession of an unauthorized English bible, as in the case of Hunne, was taken as evidence of heterodoxy.
⁴⁴⁴
Does it have to be concluded that fear of Wyclif’s Bible drove the English bishops into a blinkered resistance to something that their flocks were everywhere hungering after?

The simple fact is that it is virtually impossible to find any demand for an English Bible before the ‘break with Rome’, except amongst the Lollards. Admittedly the church authorities’ alarm at the appearance of Tyndale’s
New Testament
in 1526 is evidence that they anticipated some demand for it. And people did buy it. Indeed, there was in the 1520s an illicit trade in heretical works, amongst which was Tyndale’s
New Testament
, but the notion that these sold like hot cakes should be treated with a good deal of scepticism. For instance, following the arrest of Thomas Garrard in 1528 for his efforts to subvert the undergraduates of Oxford with such literature, about six Tyndale’s
New Testaments
were discovered, which, in view of the thoroughness of the searches that were carried out, does not seem all that many.
⁴⁴⁵
And what of the evidence of Robert Necton’s confession of the same year, which reveals that over a period of eighteen months he managed to sell thirty-five copies of that same work, mostly to people with known Lollard connections?
⁴⁴⁶
My own feeling is that it was a highly selective trade, the booksellers using almost exclusively their connections with Lollard groups and the few at the universities who were interested in the new heresy from abroad.

The answers one gives to the questions that these controversial matters raise depend very much upon one’s assumptions, in particular about the state of the English Church on the eve of the Reformation and the inclination, or otherwise, of the English nation to embrace Protestantism. It is hardly surprising that most English historians, brought up in a Protestant and Whig tradition, have argued, to use the current jargon, for a ‘fast’ Reformation, one fuelled by a genuine popular desire for the new faith. Yet even the most passionate believers in such a view have had great difficulty in finding many avid readers of an English Bible, even though by the late 1530s the provision of such a Bible in every parish church had become a government requirement.
⁴⁴⁷
And the lack of demand cannot be unconnected with the fact that, as More rightly pointed out, only a very few people could read.
⁴⁴⁸
One
suspects, anyway, that Bible-reading has only ever appealed to the committed, who tend to be few. And if there was so little demand, it can hardly be held against Wolsey, along with such champions of reform as Colet, Fisher and More, that he made no effort to meet it.

Part of the difficulty in assessing the demand for an English Bible on the eve of the Reformation derives from the great differences between Catholics and Protestants about the importance to be attached to the Bible itself. As the authentic word of God, for Luther and his followers the Bible provided the only touchstone for all matters of doctrine and practice. For a Catholic such as More this position was untenable. The Church was a living organism sustained by Christ’s promise to the disciples that he would remain with them until the end of time. As such, it could speak with even more authority than the Bible, for it was able to produce, so to speak, the most up-to-date edition. It naturally followed that the possession of a Bible, particularly in one’s own language, was of more importance to a Protestant than to a Catholic. Indeed, for the former it became something of a membership card, not necessarily read but evidence of belonging, and it is this that has caused the confusion. After all, it is doubtful that every Chinese who acquired Mao Tsetung’s Little Red Book was necessarily a fervent supporter of Mao, and thus the distribution of Little Red Books might not be very reliable evidence of the demand. Similarly, the fact that Thomas Cromwell ordered that an English Bible be kept in every parish church is not reliable evidence that lots of people wanted to read it. But since in England the Protestants were to win, it has been assumed that they had a better case, and one that most people believed in. The suggestion here has been that most people in the 1520s held no such belief.