The King's Cardinal: The Rise and Fall of Thomas Wolsey (Pimlico) (77 page)

It looks, therefore, as if the opposition was confined to the diocese of Lincoln;
and this is in many ways surprising, for even if there was nothing illegal about the constitutions, they were something of a novelty – no new legatine constitutions had appeared since 1268 – and novelty is usually unwelcome, as is reform. Dr Sheffield, who led the opposition in the archdeaconry of Bedford, had long been in dispute with his bishop for holding a benefice without licence while under age. Another opponent had been cited to appear before the bishop for non-residence.
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Such people would have had cause to fear any attempt, from whatever source, at a more strict enforcement of canon law, and their fear would have been even greater if they had had reason to believe that the attempt would be effective.

Stout-hearted resistance to arbitrary intervention, or self-interested and obscurantist opposition to genuine reform – such a question is at the heart of the interpretative problem rather more than the facts, and in the end it is one’s own value judgements that will provide the answer. Still, it would help to know what the legatine constitutions consisted of, but, since no copy has survived, one can only guess. Probably they were a comprehensive restatement of the existing canons, similar to those that, as archbishop of York, Wolsey had issued for the northern province only the previous year.
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It is known that some had to do with clerical dress, and others with the conduct of all those in clerical orders, but especially the bishops.
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What there is no specific evidence for are articles affecting the financial interests of the clergy – the fees they could charge for conducting burial services and the like – and the conditions relating to the holding of benefices, including non-residence and pluralism. However, in any comprehensive restatement such matters would have been included and no doubt would have been of greater concern to the majority of the clergy than more overtly religious matters, such as doctrine and liturgical practice, that are more readily associated with reform. Or, to put it more simply, few clergy would have welcomed reform if it involved financial loss, and this perhaps rather obvious point is worth making in order to counter the tendency to ascribe only the best motives to opposition to Wolsey’s legatine authority and only the worst to Wolsey for wishing to exercise it.

It had been Wolsey’s intention to call a second meeting of bishops for 9 September 1519, but in the event he decided to postpone it. This was not because he had lost interest in reform, but because the presence of the plague in London made such a meeting dangerous; and anyway it may have seemed more sensible to wait until after a meeting with the heads of religious houses, called for 12 November,
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for the relationship between the bishops and the religious orders would have to figure on any agenda for reform. Again, the problem is the very meagre evidence for the meeting. It did take place, and the intention was to include delegates from at least the three major religious orders – the Augustinians, Benedictines and Cistercians – and probably from all.
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This mix of orders was unusual, and, given their autonomy, would hardly have come about but for Wolsey’s legatine authority. It also touches
on an issue that provided the most obvious justification for the meeting – the question of supervision. A large number of religious orders were exempt from any kind of episcopal supervision. Amongst the ‘exempt’ were all the orders of Friars, the most prominent of which were the Dominicans and Franciscans, and, amongst the earlier monastic orders, the Cistercians, which with their sixty-two houses comprised the third largest such order in England.
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In theory the two largest, the Augustinians and Benedictines, were subject to episcopal supervision, but in the course of time many of their wealthier houses such as the Benedictine abbeys of Glastonbury and St Albans had secured exemption; and it was probably the aim of any self-respecting house of any size to aspire to the ranks of the ‘exempt’ – and not necessarily for the wrong reasons. Self-respect may be a better guarantee of the health of an institution than any amount of outside control; and, moreover, because a house was exempt did not mean that it was free of all supervision. Most orders had their own machinery for conducting visitations, and it is by no means certain that these were less effective than episcopal ones. For instance, the Cistercians appear to have been in good order at this time, in part because of the regular visitations by the distinguished head of their order, Marmaduke Huby.
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Moreover, it must be borne in mind that when bishops complained about exempt houses, their own financial interests were at stake, for visitations resulted in the payment of procurations to the visitor. And in any conflict between bishop and monastic head, personal and not always very creditable considerations must sometimes have been involved. The insistence on his house’s right to exemption by the rather pushy and aggressive abbot of St Werburg’s, Chester, John Birchenshawe, must have annoyed his bishop, whatever the rights and wrongs of the abbot’s claims. And it is not surprising that a major dispute, in which Wolsey became involved, arose between them.
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Nevertheless, the health of a monastic institution, especially a large one, undoubtedly affected more than just the well-being of its own members. If monks were regularly visiting the nearby taverns or consorting with local women, then the religious life of the diocese was being undermined; as it could be in ways that are less easily appreciated today. A central purpose of the religious orders was the continual offering up of prayers for the dead, and many local families would have contributed large sums of money in an effort to ensure the salvation of their ancestors’ souls. Thus, if for whatever reason services were not being properly conducted, not only the present but past generations were threatened with eternal damnation. Less dangerous, for the soul at least, was the deep involvement of monks and nuns in the economic life of the community as farmers, landlords, employers, bankers, teachers and almsgivers, and any financial scandals or unfair practices could not be entirely separated from the institution’s religious purposes and standing.
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Finally, religious
houses were responsible for the appointment of many parish priests; in the diocese of Lincoln as many as 40 per cent of all benefices were in their gift, as compared with under 3 per cent in the gift of the bishop.
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All this is not merely supposition. The bishop of Winchester, Richard Fox, was for a time sufficiently worried about the well-being of the important Benedictine abbey of Hyde to visit it every fifteen days.
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More generally, complaints were made that he was too harsh in his treatment of the religious, especially of those nuns who showed a reluctance to abide by their rule and remain within the walls of their nunneries. When Wolsey passed these complaints on, Fox was unrepentant. Indeed, he declared that if he had Wolsey’s ‘power and authority’, he would endeavour ‘to mure and enclose their monasteries acccording to the ordinance of the law’
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– and as a translator of the rule of St Benedict he could speak with some authority.
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And it was Fox who, as deputy to Silvestro Gigli, the absentee bishop of Worcester, drew Wolsey’s attention in 1515 to the ‘inordinate, heady, and unreligious dealing of the canons of Saint Augustine besides Bristol’, as they attempted to elect a new abbot. ‘This is a perilous matter’, he wrote, ‘for the evil example that may come thereof, and therefore according to your good beginning I beseech you hold your good hand to it.’
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Other bishops known to have taken a particular interest in the religious orders were Blythe of Coventry and Lichfield,
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Fisher,
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Nix of Norwich,
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Sherburne of Chichester,
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but above all Longland. In 1519 he was asked to preach before the monks of Westminster on the occasion of Wolsey’s and Campeggio’s joint legatine visitation.
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On becoming bishop of Lincoln in 1521, he concentrated his attention on the 111 monastic institutions within his vast diocese, visiting in person any that showed signs of disarray.
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One of the houses that he was not able to do much about, though by his own account much needed to be done, was Thame; and the point about Thame was that as a Cistercian house it was exempt from his jurisdiction. In an effort to get round this, in 1526 he sought Wolsey’s help as legate. Wolsey in his turn instructed his Cistercian commissary, perhaps best thought of in this context as his deputy, the abbot of Waverley, to conduct a visitation of the wayward house.
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As it happened, Longland was to be disappointed with the abbot’s performance, finding his injunctions lacking in specific criticisms and constructive proposals for reform.
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He did not despair, though, and in the following year, again with Wolsey’s
help, he secured the appointment of a new abbot who he was confident would put all to rights.
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The ‘reform’ of Thame is a good illustration of the problems that the ‘exempt’ monastic houses posed for the bishops, and the ways in which Wolsey’s legatine powers could be called on, at least in theory, to overcome them. In practice they had not, in the case of Thame, worked all that well, and for an interesting and, given Wolsey’s reputation for high-handedness, rather surprising reason. He had chosen to exercise his legatine powers indirectly, by appointing as his legatine commissary a leading abbot of the order who already possessed visitorial powers granted to him by the head of the order, the abbot of Cîteaux. This policy had the disadvantage that it could result, as in the case of Thame, in ineffectual action being taken. On the other hand, it had the great advantage that the Cistercians were not greatly antagonized by Wolsey’s intervention and might therefore be more willing to accept a measure of reform. And, in fact, a feature of Wolsey’s take-over of the English Church was the care that he took not to cause unnecessary offence. Did he go too far in this direction, for what may have been needed, after all, was a more vigorous intervention, and one that took less account of the susceptibilities of the various interest groups within the Church?

Such questions can never be far away in any discussion of Wolsey’s legatine rule – and at some point an answer will have to be attempted. For the moment, what is being stressed is just how careful he was not to tread on any toes. Thame is one example; his consultations with leading churchmen in March and November 1519 are another. And from the November meeting emerged new statutes for the Augustinian and Benedictine orders, a feature of which was, again, Wolsey’s desire to go through what might be called constitutional channels. As regards the Benedictines, this meant calling upon their two distinguished presidents, John Islip abbot of Westminster and Richard Kidderminster abbot of Winchcombe,
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to summon a general chapter for 26 February 1520, where the legatine statutes were presented and accepted. How Wolsey arrived at these is not known. It was usual for the Benedictines to appoint a committee of ‘definitors’ to perform such a task, and it may be that at the meeting of monastery heads in November 1519 such a committee was set up. At any rate, it seems unlikely that new statutes could have been drawn up without close consultation with members of the order, the more so because Islip, as a royal councillor very active in Star Chamber, was well known to Wolsey.
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Still, what efforts Wolsey made at conciliation were not entirely successful, for in an oft-quoted letter to him, members – though how many is not known – pointed out that:

beyond all doubt, if everything should tend, in the reform of the said order, to over-great austerity and rigour, we should not have monks enough to staff all our many very great monasteries … For in these stormy times (as the world now decays towards its end) those who desire a life of austerity and of regular observance are few, and indeed most rare
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It has to be said that a hundred years earlier very similar objections had been made to Henry
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’s attempts to reform the Benedictines, and there has to be a suspicion that this was an instinctive reaction to any outside interference, rather than a reasoned commentary on the nature of the intended reform.
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Still, it serves to reinforce the point that not everybody in England welcomed change, and thus the need for Wolsey to move with caution.

No copy of Wolsey’s legatine statutes for the Benedictines has survived, though in June 1520 the prior of Worcester, William More, is known to have paid twenty pence for one.
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As with the legatine constitutions, it is unlikely that they contained anything very novel. And what is certain is that those for the Augustinian order, of which a copy has survived, did not.
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These were initially published under Wolsey’s own authority as legate – an action which at first glance might appear to gainsay the thrust of the present argument. But it so happened that a general chapter of the Benedictines was anyway due to be summoned in 1520, and therefore Wolsey’s asking for one caused the minimum of inconvenience. An Augustinian chapter was not due until the following year, and thus a problem arose. Should Wolsey insist on a special meeting being summoned, with all the administrative complications this involved? Should he wait until 1521 to publish the new statutes, thereby allowing them to be formally accepted by the chapter, but also running the risk of seeing the impetus for reform brought about by his newly acquired legatine powers diminish? Or should he, having first consulted with at least some members of the order, go ahead and publish the statutes immediately but in doing so stress that not only was he anxious to hear what the general chapter of 1521 had to say about them, but was willing to make alterations in the light of its discussions? It was the last course of action that Wolsey adopted.
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However one estimates his sincerity in asking for the order’s views, again what emerges, despite appearances, is the degree of tact that Wolsey was prepared to show.