DURANTS' S o C
Vol.VI The REFORMATION
Pgs. 529 - 532
WOLSEY (cont.)
He was, on a grander scale than most of us, a fluid compound of virtues and faults. His morals were imperfect. Twice he slipped into illegitimate parentage; these were peccadilloes readily overlooked in that lusty age; but if we may believe a bishop, the cardinal suffered from the “pox”. He accepted what might or might not be called bribes, large gifts of money from both Francis and Charles; he kept them bidding against each other with the pensions and benefices that they offered him; these were courtesies of the time; and the expensive Cardinal who felt that his policies were serving all Europe, felt that all Europe should serve him. Beyond doubt he loved money and luxury, pomp and power. A large part of his income went to maintain an establishment whose surface extravagance may have been a tool of diplomacy, designed to give foreign ambassadors an exaggerated notion of English resources. Henry paid Wolsey no salary, so the Chancellor had to live and entertain on his ecclesiastical revenues and his pensions from abroad. He was the richest and most powerful subject in the nation; “seven times more powerful than the Pope,” thought Giustiniani; he is,said Erasmus, “the second king.” Only one step remained to be taken -- the papacy. Twice Wolsey tried for it, but in that game the wily Charles, ignoring promises, outplayed him.
The Cardinal believed that ceremony is the cement of power; force can gain power, but only public habituation can cheaply and peaceably sustain it; and people judge a man’s altitude by the ceremony that hedges him in.. So in his public and official appearances Wolsey dressed in the formal splendour that seemed to him advisable. Red hat of a cardinal, red gloves, robes of scarlet or crimson taffeta, shoes of silver or gilt inlaid with pearls and precious stones. Here were Innocent III, Benjamin Disraeli, and Beau Brummel all in one. He allowed his attendants to kneel in waiting upon him at table. Five hundred persons, many of them of high lineage, served him in his office and his home. Hampton Court that he built as his residence was so luxurious that he presented it to the king (1525) to avert the evil eye of royal jealousy.
Sometimes, however, he forgot that Henry was King. An ambassador wrote “If it were necessary to neglect either King or Cardinal it would be better to pass over the King; the Cardinal might resent precedence conceded to the King.” Peers and diplomats seldom obtained audience with the Chancellor until the third request. With each passing year the Cardinal ruled more and more openly as a dictator; he called parliament once during his ascendancy; he paid little attention to constitutional forms; he met opposition with resentment and criticism with rebuke. The historian Polydore Vergil wrote that these methods would bring Wolsey’s fall; Vergil was sent to the Tower, and only repeated intercession by Leo X secured his release. Opposition grew.
Perhaps those whom Wolsey superseded or disciplined secured the ear of history, and transmitted his sins unabsolved. But no one questioned his ability. He was generous to scholars and artists, and began a religious reform by replacing several monasteries with colleges. He was on his way to a stimulating improvement of English education when all his enemies he had made in the haste of his labours and the myopia of his pride, conspired with a royal romance to engineer his fall.
He recognised and largely exemplified the abuses which still survived in the ecclesiastical life of England; absentee bishops, worldly clergymen, idle monks, and priests snared into parentage. The state which had so often called for a reform of the Church, was now part of the evils, for the bishops were appointed by the kings. Some bishops, like Morton and Warham and Fisher, were men of high character. and calibre; many others were too absorbed in the comforts of prelacy to train their clergy in spiritual fitness as well as financial assiduity. The sexual morality of the curates was probably better than in Germany, but among 8,000 parishes in England there were inevitably cases of sacerdotal concubinage, adultery, drunkenness, and crime -- enough to make Archbishop Morton say ( 1486) that “the scandal of their lives imperilled the stability of their order.” The parish priests, suspecting that their promotion depended on their collections were more than ever exacting tithes; some took a tenth , each year, of the peasant’s chickens, eggs, milk, cheese, and fruit, even of all wages paid to his help; and any man who left no legacy to the Church ran high risk of being denied Christian burial, with prospective results too horrible to contemplate. In short, the clergy, to finance their services, taxed almost as sedulously as the modern state. By 1500 the Church owned, on a conservative Catholic estimate, almost a fifth of all property in England. The nobility, here as in Germany, envied this ecclesiastical wealth, and itched to recover lands and revenues alienated to God by their pious or fearful ancestors.
The regular or monastic clergy incurred severe censure. Archbishop Morton in 1489 charged Abbot William of St. Albans with “simony, usury, embezzlement, and living publicly and continuously with harlots and mistresses within the precincts of monastery and without”; he accused the monks of “ a life of lasciviousness . . . nay, of defiling the holy places, even the churches of God, by infamous intercourse with nuns,” making a neighbouring priory “a public brothel.” In 1520 there were some 130 nunneries in England. Only four had over thirty inmates. Eight were suppressed by the bishops, in one case, said the bishop, because of “the dissolute disposition and incontinence of the religious women of the house, by reason of the vicinity of Cambridge University.”
The clergy were not popular. Eustace Chapuys, Catholic ambassador of Charles V to England wrote to his master in 1529 “Nearly all the people hate the priests.” Many men fully orthodox in creed denounced the severity of ecclesiastical taxation, the extravagance of the prelates, the wealth and idleness of the monks.
When the chancellor of the bishop of London was accused of murdering a heretic ( 1514), the bishop begged Wolsey to prevent trial by a civil jury, “for assured I am, if my chancellor be tried by any twelve men in London, they be so maliciously set in favour of heretical pravity that they will cast and condemn my clerk though he were as innocent as Abel.” Heresy was rising again. In 1506 forty-five men were charged with heresy before the bishop of Lincoln; forty-three recanted, two were burned. In 1510 the bishop of London tried forty heretics, burned two; in 1512 he tried forty-five and burned five. Among the heresies were contentions that the consecrated Host remains merely bread; that priests have no more power than other men to consecrate or absolve; that the sacraments are not necessary to salvation; that pilgrimages to holy shrines, and prayer for the dead, are worthless; that prayers should be addressed only to God; that man can be saved by faith alone, regardless of good works; that the faithful Christian is above all laws but that of Christ; that the bible, not the church should be the sole rule of faith; that all men should marry, and that monks and nuns should repudiate their vows of chastity. Some of these heresies were echoes of Lollardry, some were reverberations of Luther’s trumpet blasts. As early as 1521 young rebels in Oxford eagerly imported news of religious revolution in Germany. Several of them, anticipating persecution, migrated to the Continent, printed anti-Catholic tracts, and sent them clandestinely into England.
