3

HEAD AND MEMBERS

The Body of Christ

IN NOVEMBER 1515, a messenger disembarked at Dover with a precious object in a bag. The bearer was the Protonotary Apostolic of the papal court, and the encased object was the red, tasselled and broad-brimmed hat of a Roman cardinal. It was sent by Pope Leo X to adorn the head of Thomas Wolsey, archbishop of York, and trusted favourite of the young King of England, Henry VIII. Within days, the envoy was met by assorted lay and ecclesiastical dignitaries at Blackheath, and escorted across old London Bridge into the city. At the door of Westminster Abbey, the hat was received by Abbot Islip and eight other abbots in full regalia, and laid reverently on the high altar. Three days later, Wolsey was installed as cardinal in the abbey, amidst such splendour that an eyewitness declared he had never seen the like ‘unless it had been at the coronation of a mighty prince or king’.1

A hat for a head, a head for a body. Society’s resemblance to a human body was the commonest of medieval metaphors. The idea had strong mystical and sacral underpinnings, for St Paul taught that the Church was the body of Christ. The analogy appealed to people wishing to live in a state that was hierarchical but not tyrannical – the head governs but does not vex the other body parts.

If the Church was a body, then clearly, as Bishop Alcock declared in 1497, ‘in every realm of Christianity, the head thereof is Christ’.² For practical purposes, it needed a head attached to its members in more concrete and visible ways. The bishops of Rome – known as popes, from the Latin papa, father – exercised this role for the Church in the west. They based their claim on Christ’s commission to St Peter to ‘feed my sheep’ (John 21:17), and on his pledge that Peter was the rock on which ‘I will build my Church’ (Matt. 16:18–19). For centuries before 1500, popes were accustomed to refer to themselves as ‘vicars of St Peter’, and also as ‘vicars of Christ’.

Yet the precise scope and character of their authority had long been a matter of contention. It was placed in the spotlight by the scandal of the Great Schism. From 1378, rival lines of popes, one based in Rome, the other in Avignon in southern France, hurled anathemas at each other and competed for the allegiance of European powers. The eventual remedy was a little used but venerable instrument of discipline and reform, a General Council of the Church. A council meeting at Constance in southern Germany between 1414 and 1418 achieved what an earlier council at Pisa failed to enforce: the deposition of all rival claimants and the election of a universally recognized new pope. Furthermore, Constance set itself the task of reforming the Church ‘in head and members’, and in the process asserted that the authority of a General Council came directly from Christ, and all, even popes, were bound to obey it.3

The conciliar movement of the early fifteenth century was an emergency response to crisis circumstances. Despite the hopes of its proponents, it failed to transform itself into a new model of church government. Subsequent popes refused to recognize conciliar claims, and spent much of the century clawing back their authority. But the slogan of reform in ‘head and members’ remained in the memory of those who cared about the health of the Church, and kept alive the question of whether the papacy was the key agent of reform, or its first and necessary object.

In the meantime, the real winners from this crisis of authority were those other heads of the body politic, the secular rulers of European states. Their interests did not always coincide with those of a supra-national Church, and they had reason to begrudge the idea that its local manifestation constituted a separate ‘body’ within the realm, with its own rights and privileges. To earlier generations of tidy-minded national and constitutional historians, it was self-evident that the Reformation grew out of this problem of too many bodies inhabiting the same skin, and of rival heads seeking to direct them. The decisive showdown between ‘Church’ and ‘State’ was only a matter of time.

That idea now seems naïve, underestimating the extent to which contemporaries could cope with complexity and compromise. But more recent assessments of the Reformation in England, emphasizing a general cultural and doctrinal satisfaction with the late medieval Church, have paid too little attention to tensions and rivalries surrounding its legal and constitutional position.⁴ These did not make a reformation inevitable. Yet they are an important part of the explanation for why a largely dutiful and devout Catholic nation proved in the end unable to meet an unexpected doctrinal challenge with a powerfully united front. They also tell a story of opportunities missed, of preventative action not taken. Disagreements about who should have primary responsibility for reform of Church and society, and about the forms it should take, acted to inhibit a thoroughgoing reformation that stayed within the bounds of Catholic orthodoxy. Wolsey’s red hat – supplied by the Pope, but ordered by the King – could have been the instrument and symbol of just such a reformation. Its failure was conspicuous, and left a legacy of disappointment and frustration.

In July 1511, the papacy produced a powerful statement of intent regarding the process of reform. Julius II published a bull summoning a universal council of the Church to assemble the following year in Rome, at the palace of the Lateran. In England, the King commissioned an impressive team to represent the nation there. John Fisher, bishop of Rochester, Thomas Docwra, prior of the Knights Hospitaller, and Richard Kidderminster, abbot of Winchcombe, were to attend, along with the diplomat Sir Robert Wingfield, and the Italian Silvestro Gigli, absentee bishop of Worcester, who helped keep an eye on English interests at the Roman curia (court). Fisher, characteristically, invited Erasmus to accompany him to the council, though, for reasons not entirely clear, it seems most of the English delegation did not make it to Rome, and it may have been Gigli alone who travelled to the council.5

The prospect of a reforming council struck a chord with those longing for a clergy-led renewal of the Church in England: in the same week that Fisher and his colleagues were commissioned to go to Rome, Colet delivered his rousing reformist manifesto to the Convocation of Canterbury.⁶

Yet the Fifth Lateran Council proved a false dawn. There were some moderate achievements – a doctrinal decree on the immortality of the soul, greater restrictions on the exemption of regulars from episcopal oversight, and a renewed assertion of the dignity of clerical office. But the council did not effect any fundamental reforms. Its very existence was in fact fundamentally political and reactive. Julius II was locked in conflict with Louis XII of France, over territory and influence in northern Italy. In 1511, to put pressure on the Pope, Louis summoned a group of rebellious cardinals to attend a council at Pisa; the principal purpose of the Lateran Council was to anathematize its Pisan rival.

Julius saw off the French-sponsored, half-hearted revival of conciliarism, but in the process he did little to enhance the dignity of the papal office. That dignity was already severely compromised by the shameless nepotism, opulent lifestyle and relaxed morality of what we have come to know as the ‘Renaissance papacy’ – an institution of whose excesses Julius’s predecessor, the Borgia pope Alexander VI, was the most scandalous but scarcely the sole exemplar. A few years earlier, sensitive observers looked on open-mouthed as Julius, clad in full plate armour, led armies to victory over the bothersome rulers of Perugia and Bologna.⁷ The episode underlines how the papacy was locked into the politics of the Italian peninsula, especially after the French invasion of 1494, and the extent to which its priorities had become those of a local territorial prince, rather than a universal Christian pastor.

There were sound reasons for popes to be masters of their own independent territorial state. A papacy under the thumb of either of the two great powers with a hand in the Italian pie – the French or the Spanish – was everyone else’s worst nightmare. But a loss of moral authority was the price for playing the part of Italian princeling.

Shortly after Julius II’s death, a text called the Julius Exclusus e Coelis (‘Julius Excluded from Heaven’) circulated in manuscript; it was printed in 1518. In this merciless satire, Julius tries to bluster his way past St Peter at the heavenly gates, threatening to return with an army when entry is refused. It is usually attributed to Erasmus (who always denied writing it), though just possibly its author may have been the English humanist Richard Pace.

On Good Friday 1513, as Henry VIII prepared to lead an army into France, John Colet preached a sermon at court. He extolled the virtues of peace, and urged Catholics ‘to imitate Christ their king, rather than characters like Alexander and Julius’.8 He referred here to the ancient warrior rulers of Macedonia and Rome, but a coincidence with the regnal names of two preceding popes was scarcely accidental. Catholic reformers were sceptical, and sometimes cynical, about the wise judgement of the head.

Popes and People

What ordinary English people thought about popes and the papacy is an elusive but not impenetrable question. We should not expect to find what could not have existed: a late medieval equivalent to the modern Catholic personality cult of the papacy, sustained by the possibilities of air travel, photography and instant mass communications. The Pope was, in every sense, a distant figure. But distance need not imply dislike or indifference.

Everyone knew the Pope was head of the Church. The prayers of intercession, or bidding of the bedes, taking place during mass every Sunday, began with the priest calling on people in English to pray for ‘our holy father the Pope of Rome with all his true cardinals’. Awareness of the Pope’s position of primacy was reinforced by commentaries on the Ten Commandments, which ranked him first in the requirement to honour your (spiritual) father and mother, and by passing references to ‘our holy father, the Pope’ in a broad range of printed works. A papal presence in the cultural landscape of English people was further enshrined by images in churches of popes who happened also to be saints – in particular, the figure of St Gregory, one of the four Latin doctors adorning large numbers of rood screens. Images of the Mass of Pope Gregory, during which the pontiff experienced a vision of Christ at the altar, proliferated in devotional books.⁹

More than any other artefact, printed indulgences – of which vast quantities were proclaimed, produced and purchased in England – promoted popular consciousness of papal authority, and its significance for the life of the Church.¹⁰ Emblazoned with the papal arms, indulgences were neatly packaged distillations of the spiritual authority of the Holy Father, and of his ability to offer remission from the penalties of sin. They depended for efficacy, not on vague invocations of papal authority, but on specific grants from named occupants of the chair of St Peter. Popes took their share of the proceeds, but as most indulgences were issued in response to requests from the English individuals and institutions to whose advantage they accrued, they can scarcely be considered merely a money-making scam on the part of the Holy See.

In light of later events, it is remarkable how few rumblings of anti-papal satire or complaint are to be heard in England around the turn of the sixteenth century. Conceivably, the absence of overt hostility is a marker of the relatively low importance of the Pope. For other than enticing them to purchase indulgences, what practical impact on the lives of English laypeople did the authority of the papacy have? Perhaps a few hundred men and women – including merchants with good business reasons for being in Italy – journeyed to Rome each year and took advantage of the indulgences on offer for visiting Roman churches. Some lodged gratefully at the hospice for English pilgrims. No fewer than 489 visitors stayed in the hospice between November 1504 and May 1507, and an impressive 750 English pilgrims were welcomed there, receiving alms, if not accommodation, during the papal jubilee year of 1500.11

Rome was not always where the heart was. Luther, still an ardent friar, travelled there on the business of his order in 1510–11, and was famously turned off by the louche character of the papal court. A few years earlier, Colet and More’s friend Cuthbert Tunstall attended a papal audience in the city. He was appalled by the haughty demeanour of Julius II, who caused a chamberlain to lift the hem of his robe so that ‘a nobleman of great age’ might prostrate himself before the pontiff and kiss his shoe. But this was a recollection from 1539, when there was only one politic way to speak about popes in England.¹²

The vast majority of English people never came physically close to the person of the Pope. We cannot know, when they were invited to pray for their Holy Father, how many did so with fervent sincerity, how many carelessly or perfunctorily. Yet Rome was far from an absolute irrelevance. The curia, in the words of the Norfolk gentleman Sir John Paston, was ‘the well of grace’, and a ‘salve sufficient for such a sore’.

The sore in question was Paston’s betrothal to Anne Hault, now to be broken off, an action that, for satisfaction of the lady’s conscience, required a dispensation from the Pope’s tribunal. Rome was Christendom’s supreme licensing agency, the ultimate source of legal resolution for a host of practical, personal and professional problems.¹³ The Pope was universally recognized to possess power to dispense from the prescriptions of the canon law, and the archives of the two main curial offices, the chancery and penitentiary, record the concerns and successes of a steady stream of supplicants: the number of English and Welsh petitioners to the apostolic penitentiary was certainly much greater than the 4,085 recorded in an incomplete set of registers between 1411 and 1503.

Many requests were of a technical and ecclesiastical variety: clergymen sought dispensations to hold benefices in plurality, be ordained to the priesthood despite the canonical bar on illegitimate birth or physical deformity, or receive promotions before the required canonical age. Complex tithe disputes were sometimes referred to Rome for resolution, though in these and other cases authority to rule on the matter was often referred back to judges-delegate in England, and after 1518 were increasingly remitted to Wolsey as papal legate.

Laypeople petitioned the papacy for an equally wide range of permissions and dispensations. These included requests to be released from vows – perhaps rashly made in time of sickness – to go on pilgrimage to the Holy Land, or to live a life of perpetual chastity, a pledge sometimes made by bereaved wives in the emotionally intense first days of widowhood.

Most commonly, it was the business of marriage that impelled laypeople to seek guidance and grace from Rome. Medieval canon law closely regulated pools of potential marriage partners, setting out the just causes why a man and woman might not be joined in holy wedlock. The principal barriers were those of consanguinity (relationship in blood), affinity (a form of kinship created by marriage or sexual relations, preventing union with an ‘in-law’ or step-relation), and spiritual kinship (the relationship created between godparents and godchildren, and their respective families). The prohibitions were extensive. Consanguinity and affinity applied to the fourth degree; that is, a man and woman might not legally marry if they had a great-great-grandparent in common, or if one of them had previously married, or slept with, a sibling or a first, second or third cousin of the other.14

Applied rigidly, the rules severely constricted choice in marriage, for the small worlds of English villages, and for the socially small world of the gentry and aristocracy. But other than in cases of close consanguinity, the Church was generally prepared to dispense from its own rules. Prohibitions so extensive, and frankly difficult to demonstrate or even know about, must often have been quietly ignored. But considerable numbers of laypeople did seek and secure dispensations, in some cases retrospectively, to validate a marriage contracted in ignorance of consanguinal or affinal relationship.

In such ways, the formal legal structures of the Church interacted with the intimate transactions of daily life. The Pope’s ability, even at a remove or two, to wave a restorative hand over the messy realities of lived experience subtly reinforced popular awareness of the overarching character of papal authority. In 1490, for example, John Speke and Isabel Beaumond were granted a dispensation to marry, despite the unfortunate circumstance that John had earlier committed fornication with an illegitimate daughter of Isabel’s maternal grandfather.¹⁵ Of rather greater interest, at the time and subsequently, was the dispensation granted by Julius II in 1502 to allow Henry, Prince of Wales, to marry Catherine of Aragon, widow of his elder brother, Arthur.

Crown and Tiara

One layman in particular – the King – had a pronounced interest in the power of the Pope, and in how it might strengthen, sanctify or subvert the sinews of his own authority. Popes and kings had many mutual and compatible interests, and where their interests clashed, there were strong motives and mechanisms for working things out. Periodic quarrels between the King and the Pope, like rain on a Scottish holiday, were things simply to be expected, and they would always pass. Or so it seemed.

The Tudors came to the English throne in 1485 with a strong papal wind at their back. Richard III was unpopular in Rome – a result of his bloody usurpation, and of his outrageous attempt to bastardize the sons of Edward IV with wild assertions about the invalidity of their parents’ marriage. Richard also failed to seek a dispensation for his own marriage to Anne Neville, a consanguinal cousin, as well as an affinal sister-in-law. Pointedly, after his victory at Bosworth, Henry VII requested and received a dispensation for his marriage to Edward IV’s daughter, Elizabeth of York, to whom he was related in the fourth degree of consanguinity. Crucially, and unusually, Pope Innocent VIII followed this with a bull confirming the legitimacy of any children from the marriage, and of the Act of Parliament that declared Henry’s title.

Henry VII valued papal support. In 1487 he successfully requested the Pope to excommunicate Irish bishops who supported the pretender Lambert Simnel. He also reported with satisfaction that after his victory over the rebels at the battle of Stoke, a criminal named John Swit, seeking sanctuary at Westminster, tried spreading a false report of Henry’s supposed defeat: ‘And what then for the censures of the Church or the powers of the Pontiff? Don’t you see that the interdicts have no force, since you have before your eyes the very men who hurl them at you put to flight?’ But Swit was instantly struck down dead for his lying and blasphemous words, his body becoming blacker than soot and emitting an unbearable stench.16

There was a strong scent of co-operation around Anglo-papal relations in Henry VII’s first years. Henry had the 1486 papal bull of dispensation printed as a broadsheet in English translation, with further editions in 1494, 1495 and 1497.¹⁷ Successive popes indulged the English usurper-king, bestowing on him the traditional honours of presentation with a papal cap and sword of maintenance, and an ornamental Golden Rose, as well as graciously dispensing him to eat cheese and eggs during the Lenten fast. The papacy also responded benignly, if cautiously, to Henry’s desire to see the last of the direct Lancastrian line, Henry VI, canonized as a saint – excessive sanctity being the only plausible excuse for the disastrous levels of incompetence Henry demonstrated in the exercise of his kingship.

Of more immediate concern were the concessions Henry wrung out of Pope Innocent in 1489 regarding privileges of sanctuary, the long-standing claims of particular churches to provide protection from prosecution to those seeking refuge within their precincts. Henry did not object to sanctuary in principle, but would not tolerate immunity for rebels. He had already hauled out of sanctuary the Yorkist fugitives Humphrey and Thomas Stafford, the judges ruling, controversially but decisively, that rights of sanctuary did not apply to traitors. The Pope agreed that malefactors who left sanctuary could not claim it a second time, and that guards could be posted around sanctuaries to prevent nefarious comings and goings.18

For his part, Henry was prepared to invest effort in cultivating good relations with Rome, no fewer than ten English ambassadors arriving to receive an audience with Innocent VIII in 1489. In 1492, Henry established the office of cardinal-protector, a permanent representative of English interests at the curia, and an innovation soon emulated by other European monarchs. The first of the English cardinal-protectors, a reform-minded Sienese prelate, Francesco Piccolomini, was in 1503 elected to the papacy as Pius III, though his death within a month makes it impossible to judge the extent to which his elevation would have paid policy dividends. Henry also bestowed the bishopric of Worcester on the papal officials Giovanni Gigli (1497–8) and his cousin Silvestro (1499–1521). The bishoprics of Hereford (1502) and Bath and Wells (1504) were given to another reliably pro-English papal bureaucrat, Adriano Castellesi. In 1496, in a further nod to the diplomatic importance of Rome, the English hospice there became ‘The King’s Hospice’, Henry assuming the right to appoint its warden from the autonomous confraternity that previously performed the task.¹⁹

Henry VII’s policies could scarcely be described as slavishly enthralled to the Pope. He was dilatory and evasive, for example, in support for the persistent preoccupation of successive popes, a crusade against the Ottoman Turks. Yet, as a pious Christian king, Henry liked to be seen on the side of Christ’s vicar; never more so than when the latter was at odds with the English monarchy’s old rival, the King of France. In 1496, Henry signed up to membership of the Holy League, an alliance of the Emperor, the King of Aragon, the Venetian Republic, Milan and – supplying the holiness – Pope Alexander VI: a coalition designed to constrain French ambitions in Italy.²⁰ That Henry himself had no such territorial ambitions undoubtedly made diplomatic relations between England and the papacy less fraught than those between popes and other west European monarchs often were.

There were few signs of any of this changing when, in 1509, following Henry VII’s death, the reins of power passed to his seventeen-year-old son. The younger Henry, epitome of a cultivated Renaissance prince, lauded by the humanists Erasmus and More, was if anything still more outwardly pro-papal than his father. English diplomatic ties with Rome were strengthened with the appointment of Christopher Bainbridge, archbishop of York, as permanent ambassador in September 1509. When Bainbridge was elevated to the Sacred College in March 1511, he became the first English cardinal resident in Rome in more than a hundred years. His principal brief was to foment intrigues against the French.

Papalism and Francophobia were the coffee and cream of early Henrician foreign policy. Henry VIII’s adherence to a reconstituted Holy League was celebrated with bonfires and processions in Rome in 1511, and a supportive letter from Henry was read at the second session of the Fifth Lateran Council in May 1512. By then, in emulation of the monarchical heroes of the Hundred Years War, Henry had formally declared war on France. He cited as casus belli the ‘great sin of the King of France’ in seeking to ‘lacerate the seamless garment of Christ’. Specially commissioned ballads called upon true Englishmen to help their King ‘against the Frenchmen in the field to fight / In the quarrel of the Church and in the right’.21

Julius II was eager to embolden the ardent young English sovereign. In the summer of 1511 he sent him a hundred Parmesan cheeses. A probably more motivational gift was the promise, in a secret brief dated 20 March 1512, to strip the Kingdom of France from Louis XII.²² The Pope was reportedly willing to come to Paris to place the crown on Henry’s head. Alas, there was a condition: Henry had actually to defeat Louis before the ruling could take effect. The campaign Henry led in northern France in the summer of 1513 was long on pageantry and bombast, short on practical results.

Still, Henry had continuing hopes of honours beyond the conventional golden rose and papal cap and sword. It was a sore point that his rival of France was Rex Christianissimus (the most Christian King), while Ferdinand and Isabella and their successors of Castile and Aragon had been dubbed Reyes Católicos (Catholic monarchs) by Alexander VI in 1496, a reward for their role in ruthlessly Christianizing their once multi-faith kingdoms.

Silvestro Gigli worked hard to secure a comparable title for his English master. ‘Protector’ was considered, but rejected as properly pertaining to the Emperor; likewise ‘Defender’, a style Julius II had already bestowed on the Swiss. Other ideas were to dub Henry ‘Orthodox King’, or the ‘King Apostolic’, on the intriguing grounds that a petitionary prayer for all apostolicae fidei cultoribus (guardians of the apostolic faith) occurred in the canon of the mass. But the Pope did not like these suggestions. By January 1516, Gigli had secured a bull for recognition of Henry as Sanctae Romanae Ecclesiae Defensor (defender of the Holy Roman Church). But nothing happened on this score, Wolsey suspecting the Pope of having been intimidated into inaction by the French.²³ In the event, Henry was obliged to wait until 1521 to receive his coveted title of Fidei Defensor (Defender of the Faith), in recognition of literary efforts against the upstart friar, Martin Luther.

Ironically, the sole gain from Henry’s holy little war against the French, the captured Flemish fortress-town of Tournai, precipitated a minor but revealing spat with the papacy. When the French bishop-elect, Louis Guillard, refused to recognize Henry’s claim to sovereignty over the territory, Leo X appointed Wolsey administrator of the see, and the rising star of Henry’s government strongly pressed his claims to be recognized as bishop. But after the new French King, Francis I, triumphed over Swiss and papal forces at the battle of Marignano in September 1515, Leo was obliged to come to terms with him. Under the December Concordat of Bologna, Leo conceded considerable royal authority over the French Church, and in a secret ruling of August 1516 granted the diocese of Tournai back to Guillard, allowing him to seek military assistance from the French King to re-establish his authority.

When all this emerged, Henry was furious. In a letter to Gigli he fulminated against the Pope for seeking to ‘take from us the superiority, regal pre-eminence, jurisdiction and authority that we have in the region and dominion of Tournai’. Henry was dismayed by the ingratitude towards someone who had done so much for the Church, and he hinted darkly about dangers to the Pope if he were to carry on granting bulls ‘against the sovereignty of princes’. A more measured, but still angry, letter of protest was despatched to Leo himself.

Much has been made of this affair, though in fact it did not articulate any radical new doctrine of sovereignty, or prefigure claims Henry was to make in 1533–4.24 The King’s grievance was that Leo was acting beyond the scope of his powers in granting ‘temporalities’ (estates and income) of a bishopric in Henry’s territory to someone who was in effect a disobedient subject. The row slowly blew over. Leo protested feebly he had not realized Guillard would refuse to swear allegiance to Henry, and more or less admitted he had been pressured into reversing policy by Francis I. Tournai was returned to the French by the 1518 Treaty of London, and Wolsey accepted a pension of £1,200 a year as compensation for the loss of a diocese he had never properly controlled.²⁵

Nonetheless, the episode is revealing about the limits of co-operation between crown and papacy. Both parties derived ideological capital from an amicable and reciprocal relationship of honour and respect. Henry was the pious and dutiful son; Julius, Leo and their successors the benevolent fathers in God. Only a couple of years after the return of Tournai, Henry was lauding the papacy in extravagant terms in his Defence of the Seven Sacraments against Luther. Thomas More helped sort out a draft of the text, and, as he later recalled, advised Henry to tone down his high papalism in case it embarrass him in any future political or diplomatic quarrels. But the King apparently retorted that ‘we are so much bounden unto the See of Rome that we cannot do too much honour unto it.’ Intriguingly, he added this was because ‘we have received from that See our crown imperial’.

The remark is typically opaque. Perhaps Henry was acknowledging a debt of gratitude owed for papal support of his father’s accession. But his emphasis on an imperial crown sounds like he was claiming a relationship of equality and autonomy. The Arthurian legends verified (or rather, invented) as history by medieval chroniclers like Geoffrey of Monmouth, and popularized by Thomas Malory’s Morte D’Arthur, reported a defining episode. Lucius, Emperor of Rome, demanded tribute from the British King. Arthur acknowledged that the status of empire had devolved on his realm through kings of Britain, such as Constantine, who were also rulers of the Empire. But for that very reason, there was now no requirement for tribute or fealty to Rome. Henry’s elder brother, Prince Arthur, never lived to be king, but Arthurianism was in the Tudor lifeblood. It was probably in 1516, on the occasion of a royal visit to Winchester, that the Round Table there, believed to be Arthur’s own, was repainted, its figure of Arthur given an imperial crown and the features of the young Henry VIII.26

Despite all the talk of piety and fatherhood, the King of England and the Pope of Rome made use of each other for political ends. The papacy hoped western pressure would weaken the French hold in northern Italy, while Henry sought a blanket of sanctification to cast over his atavistic ambitions to sit as a crowned king in Paris. Henry’s petulance in 1516–17, no less than his graciousness in 1521, suggests the contingent and quasi-contractual character of his attachment to the Holy See. To put it more simply, it reveals how Henry VIII was capable of reacting when he didn’t get his own way.

Tax and Benefice

In most practical matters the King did get his own way. His ability to tax the English Church was a case in point. Churchmen were, by papal insistence, exempt from royal taxes imposed on the laity. But English rulers had long since learned the habit of levying parallel demands through Parliament, and through Convocations of the clergy, whenever they needed to raise revenue for defence or other pressing causes. In fact, royal taxation of the clergy increasingly abandoned the convention of making demands in wartime only, and turned into a regular part of crown income, averaging £7,600 per annum in the fifteenth century, and £9,000 a year (a slight real-terms decrease due to inflation) between 1485 and 1534. Voices of complaint were sometimes raised, but Convocation invariably granted the request and appointed local collectors, generally heads of monastic houses, to implement it.²⁷

On top of formal demands for taxation and forced loans, the crown could exact considerable sums (perhaps £3,500 a year) in its guise as feudal overlord of ecclesiastical estates: fees for restitution of temporalities, and – still more profitably – income from the temporalities themselves during vacancy of an episcopal see or major religious house. In addition, there were fees for confirmation of privileges, and for retention of plural benefices, as well as fines to secure indemnity from a range of offences, real or cooked up.

The Church was emphatically not exempt from Henry VII’s notorious ‘fiscalism’ – his determination, through agents like Edmund Dudley, to scour the crannies and crevices of the law to maximize his income. Between 1504 and 1508, Dudley managed to squeeze over £38,000 from English churchmen, in cash and bonds. For some, it was all too much. Robert Freeman, prior of the Gilbertine house of Shouldham in Norfolk, complained over dinner in 1505 about how the King ‘polleth us’. Ominously, he added that, rather than put up with such exactions, he would welcome the return of ‘yon gentleman beyond the sea’ – the Yorkist claimant, Edmund de la Pole. Other clergy, including the King’s almoner, Christopher Urswick, owned copies of a work by an Italian monk, printed in London in 1505, which denounced encroachment on the goods of the Church.

Such grumbling availed little, and there was scant support for it in Rome, which depended on the co-operation of the English crown to levy its own taxation in England. Religious houses with papal privileges paid a small regular charge for them, and payments known as annates were due from clergymen on first appointment to their benefices. In addition, laypeople were liable to contribute to the annual levy sent to Rome, known colloquially as Peter’s Pence. All of these charges between them amounted to an average of £4,816 a year in the early sixteenth century, barely two-fifths of what the crown was taking annually from the Church in England.28

More significant even than taxation, the papacy had sold the pass over appointment of clergy to English benefices. Papal rights to override the wishes of the patron had long been challenged by the crown, and popes de facto conceded restrictions that were spelled out in the 1351 Statute of Provisors. The most important benefices – the bishoprics – remained in theory a matter of papal provision. Newly appointed bishops were required to take an oath of obedience to the Pope, and, in principle, to attend personally in Rome. In practice, these obligations were regularly fudged to the King’s advantage. Weakened by the Great Schism, and anxious for political support against conciliarists and rival Italian powers, successive popes simply provided to English bishoprics whomever the King nominated. The pattern was so taken for granted that the crown regularly bestowed the temporalities of the see on its nominees before formal ratification by the papacy. The requirement to visit Rome became a formality, performed by proxies.

In important and obvious public respects the English and Welsh bishops were servants of two masters. They were bound to the Pope by oath, and, according to many reputable theologians, were directly dependent on the papacy for spiritual authority: the Pope delegated power and jurisdiction to bishops, just as St Peter had to the other apostles. But bishops were also feudal subjects of the King, doing homage for the temporalities of their sees. It was standard practice for episcopal oaths of obedience to the King to renounce clauses in the papal bull of provision to the bishopric that could be regarded as prejudicial to the rights of the crown.29

The power to nominate bishops, and exercise patronage at a variety of levels in the Church, mattered to Henry VII and Henry VIII for a variety of reasons, good and not so good. As major landowners, bishops were figures of real social and political power, and as ‘lords spiritual’ they sat in the Upper House of Parliament along with a comparable number of mitred abbots. The crown could do little to change or influence inheritance patterns among the aristocracy. But it could at least try to ensure their ecclesiastical equivalents were politically reliable and more than minimally competent, a combination particularly desirable for the troubled border regions of the north. The Wars of the Roses were an object lesson in the dangers of ‘bastard feudal’ power exercised by ‘overmighty subjects’. Bishops did not found dynasties, and their followings were often dependably linked to the crown’s own webs of patronage and favour.

Those nominated to bishoprics had usually already proved loyal and effective in royal service. Their appointment ensured that the coffers of the Church, rather than the crown, were an immediate source of incentive and reward for high-flying administrators. It was no accident that high offices of state had long tended to be bestowed on churchmen. Lord Keepership of the Privy Seal was held between 1485 and 1523 by Peter Courtenay, bishop of Exeter, Richard Fox, bishop of Winchester, and Thomas Ruthall, bishop of Durham; the Lord Chancellorship over the same period resided in the hands of Thomas Rotherham, archbishop of York, John Alcock, bishop of Worcester, three successive archbishops of Canterbury (John Morton, Henry Deane and William Warham), and Thomas Wolsey, archbishop of York.³⁰

It was, in a sense, blatant exploitation. But the Church benefited too from having capable administrators. It is questionable whether a papacy granted free rein in the matter, and subject to the pleading of a plethora of suitors, would have managed to select candidates of comparable talent and dedication.

In the main, the early Tudor bishops deserve the positive reputation they have accrued with modern historians. They were virtually without exception graduates, mostly in law rather than theology. Hardly any of them showed blatant disregard for their priestly obligation to celibacy. James Stanley, the anomalously aristocratic bishop of Ely, and Thomas Wolsey are the exceptions here. Also out of character were the couple of sees held by the almost permanently absentee Italians, and the tenure of York by the curial Cardinal Bainbridge, who was literally never there.

Other bishops were non-resident for considerable periods, but most made an effort to return when they could. As archbishop of Canterbury (1504–32), William Warham resided only a third of the year there; yet others like Richard Nykke of Norwich (1501–35), Hugh Oldham of Exeter (1505–19) and Nicholas West of Ely (1515–33) all managed to spend around three-quarters of their time in their dioceses. Even absentees generally felt a strong sense of obligation to ensure the diocese was competently managed, working through assistant or suffragan bishops for spiritual tasks like ordinations and confirmations, and through commissaries and diocesan chancellors for administrative ones.31

The pastoral aspects of episcopal office, and the plethora of legal, administrative, political and diplomatic responsibilities it also involved, nonetheless sometimes chafed. William Smith, bishop of Lincoln, petitioned Henry VII in vain to be allowed to give up his duties as a member of Prince Arthur’s Council governing the Marches of Wales, in order to see to the needs of his diocese: its neglected state ‘runneth in my mind both day and night’. Richard Fox, bishop successively of Exeter, Bath and Wells, Durham and Winchester, tirelessly served Henry VII and Henry VIII as Lord Privy Seal for nearly thirty years. His sometime chaplain, the humanist monk Richard Whitford, remarked to Thomas More that the bishop was one that ‘to serve the King’s turn, will not stick to agree to his own father’s death’.

But by 1516, Fox had had enough. He resigned his offices, writing to Wolsey that to continue ‘to serve worldly’ would mean ‘the damnation of my soul’. He now intended to devote himself to the running of his diocese ‘whereby I may do some satisfaction for twenty-eight years negligence’. John Fisher, though never a major office-holder of state, still felt the pressures acutely. In a speech to a synod of bishops summoned by Wolsey in 1519, Fisher complained of an unrelenting burden of secular business on the clergy:

For sundry times when I have settled and fully bent myself to the care of my flock committed unto me, to visit my diocese, to govern my church and to answer the enemies of Christ, straightways hath come a messenger for one cause or other sent from higher authority by whom I have been called to other business …³²

Cardinal Legate

Fisher’s speech, and Fox’s resignation letter, contained barely hidden barbs. Their target was the unparalleled accumulation of spiritual and secular authority resting in the hands of Thomas Wolsey. One of the most written-about figures of early Tudor history, Wolsey remains in many respects an enigma. Some see him as a serious reformer, others as the epitome of moral and ecclesiastical corruption. There is disagreement too over whether he was widely hated, or whether most of the secular and ecclesiastical establishment managed to work with him effectively and amiably, only turning pack-like against him after his fall from royal favour in 1529. Most of all, historians ask whether his ascendancy over the Church was a warning cloud of a coming storm, or a period of constructive stability, knocked off the rails by unforeseeable events.³³

There had been powerful cardinal-ministers before: Henry Beaufort in Henry VI’s reign, Thomas Bourchier in Edward IV’s, John Morton under Henry VII. Nor did Wolsey’s lowly social origins make him exceptional – the Church always provided for the talented and ambitious a meritocratic entry scheme to the corridors of power. What made Wolsey unusual, and unusually powerful, was his delegated papal authority, his legateship.

It was as resident legate that Wolsey could override the exemptions of privileged religious orders, convoke an impromptu reform synod of bishops of Canterbury province (1519), or summon a Convocation of the clergy of York in 1518 to codify canon law and issue decrees against clerical absenteeism and (somewhat hypocritically) the keeping of mistresses. It was as legate that Wolsey received petitions and issued dispensations in cases reserved to the judgement of the Holy See. And as legate that he could cut across the demarcated structures of the English Church, imposing his authority without respect of difference on the provinces of York (of which he happened also to be archbishop), and of Canterbury, the ‘primatial’ see, of whose possession only the stubborn longevity of Archbishop William Warham (c. 1450–1532) managed to deprive him.

By 1522, Wolsey had set up his own legatine court, staffed it with aggressively efficient church lawyers, and claimed precedence in testamentary cases. Warham was not alone among the bishops in feeling resentful, and tensions were only partially resolved when in 1524 Wolsey agreed to a series of compositions with the bishops, which in effect allowed them to purchase back the ordinary episcopal authority his legateship had taken away from them.

The bishops, like the secular nobles, were capable of courteous co-operation with the cardinal-minister in the course of carrying out their duties. In truth, they had little choice, for Wolsey was first and last the King’s man, and his actions, even when they seemed arrogant or self-aggrandizing, nearly always had behind them the warm, scented breeze of royal favour. It was as a result of Henry’s petitioning that Leo X created Wolsey a cardinal in 1515, and in 1518 appointed him legate. The stated reasons were, of course, laudable ones: in January 1520, Henry complained to Leo that the time-limit imposed on Wolsey’s legateship was making it difficult for him to ‘to proceed with greater vigour in the reformation of the clergy’.34 In 1524, a second cultured Medici pope, Leo’s cousin Clement VII, was reluctantly persuaded to extend Wolsey’s legatine powers indefinitely.

Henry VIII was neither perverse nor unique in this scarcely concealed sleight of hand. Prior to his dramatic falling-out with the warrior-pope, Louis XII of France persuaded Julius II to provide, and then extend, sweeping legatine powers for Georges, Cardinal d’Amboise. Around the same time, Emperor Maximilian I negotiated hard to try to secure a permanent legateship a latere for his minister, Cardinal Matthias Lang.³⁵

In all these cases, popes were colluding in an erosion of their ability to control the day-to-day running of national churches. There was nothing in this pointing inexorably towards heresy, schism or separation. On the contrary, here was a pattern for local centralization and streamlining of church institutions, under remote papal auspices and immediate royal stewardship, to bring about the meaningful structural changes reformers had long prayed for, but which were always prevented by the power of vested and sectional interests. The perfect medicinal partnership of a pious Catholic ruler and an energetic reforming prelate, blessed from a distance by the therapeutic authority of the Pope, could shake off the lethargy afflicting the body of Christ, and provide inoculation against more radical, doctrinal solutions to that body’s ills. Something of the sort did happen in Spain, a country whose lack of enthusiasm for Lutheran reforms was in part a legacy of the immense spiritual and political authority wielded by the gaunt Franciscan reformer, Cardinal Cisneros, and the trust reposed in him by the ‘Catholic monarchs’ Isabella and Ferdinand.36

In England, this potential for systematic local reform in head and members never came to fruition. Wolsey’s reform initiatives were fitful and erratic, more often concerned with scoring points against rivals and subordinates, and with justifying retention of his legateship, than with change and renewal for its own sake. His incursions into the authority of fellow prelates encouraged an unhealthy preoccupation on their part with the defence of sectional rights and privileges. And in a culture that looked for clergymen, even bishops, to be exemplars of holiness, Wolsey’s worldliness underlined a failure of inspirational leadership for which the Church would pay a heavy price.

Henry, meanwhile, was a pious enough Catholic ruler, but his priorities were elsewhere, principally in the resolve, inherited from his father, to secure dynastic and political authority at home, and in a determination, departing from his father’s concerns, to cut an imposing figure on the European stage. Henry was eager for churchmen to assist him in realizing these objectives; when they asserted and pursued priorities of their own, his patience with them waned.

Common Law and Canon Law

In 1515, the year of Wolsey’s elevation to the Sacred College, rival understandings of what was meant by ‘reform’ came into open conflict. Churchmen threw out accusations of heresy at laymen and at each other; lawyers fulminated against abuses committed in the name of ecclesiastical jurisdiction. In the end, the King forced his new cardinal to seek mercy on his knees for the infractions of the Church, and sententiously declared that ‘Kings of England in time past have never had any superior but God alone’.³⁷

The origins of the 1515 crisis lie in the existence of parallel systems of justice and jurisdiction. For centuries, royal courts had applied and adjudicated the body of legal authority known as ‘common law’, the mass of acknowledged precedent and established procedure that provided a necessary complement to the relatively few matters explicitly defined by parliamentary statute. The common law was administered in the central courts of King’s Bench, Common Pleas, and the Exchequer, meeting at Westminster Hall, and it radiated to the localities through assize courts presided over in the shires by itinerant royal justices, and through regular quarter sessions and petty sessions convened by amateur justices of the peace. The professional common lawyers were trained at the London Inns of Court, alternative centres of learning to the clerically dominated universities.38

The church courts, by contrast, were components of a Europe-wide pyramid of justice, capped by the papal curia in Rome. Within England, cases could come before the archbishop of Canterbury’s Prerogative Court (and briefly, Wolsey’s Legatine Court), consistory courts convened by bishops in their dioceses, or commissary courts to which they delegated authority, and at the lowest level the courts presided over by archdeacons in their archdeaconries. In addition, there were courts hearing cases from ‘peculiar’ jurisdictions, such as parishes administered by the dean and chapter of certain cathedrals. The canon law underpinning these courts was an amalgam of long-established compilations of decisions or canons of popes and church councils, and of rulings by English provincial synods and Convocations.³⁹

In theory, lines of demarcation between the two laws were clear. Canon law concerned itself with matters of faith and morals: detection of heresy, regulation of marriage, punishment of moral offences like adultery and fornication. It also covered the internal running of the Church, and business relating to the conduct of its personnel. Other matters of criminal or civil litigation fell within the purview of the common law. In practice there were significant grey and shady areas across which litigants and lawyers could wander more or less at will.

Wills and testaments were one such area. Testamentary matters (excluding the transfer of land) were part of spiritual preparation for death, and thus administered by the Church. But where disputed bequests revolved around matters of property, or where debts owed to or by the deceased were at issue, both secular and ecclesiastical courts could claim an interest. A similar conflation of categories pertained in a sphere that seemed clearly ecclesiastical – the rights of appointment to benefices. But because advowsons were regarded as a property right, cases relating to them were heard principally in common law courts. There was a drift towards the common law too in cases of slander and defamatory words. Defamation was a spiritual crime, punishable in the church courts. But where the motivation of the plaintiff was to seek damages, or where the accusation was one of theft (a felony) rather than fornication or adultery (a sin), there was a standing invitation to take cases to secular courts. Conversely, cases involving unpaid petty debts, an apparently civil matter, were increasingly in the later fifteenth century heard in front of the courts Christian. The rationale was that the breach of faith was a spiritual offence – perjury – and payment of the debt a necessary restitution of charity.

The situation was not a free-for-all. Judges in both secular and ecclesiastical courts sometimes directed cases to the other jurisdiction, and pragmatic co-existence was often the order of the day. In a ‘reading’ (lecture on a legal topic) given at Gray’s Inn in 1514, the common lawyer John Hales suggested the temporal and spiritual jurisdictions were like two swords, each of which should assist the other. For litigants, ambiguity about spheres of competence could represent good news, allowing them to take cases where they thought justice would be cheapest, fastest, and most likely to work in their favour.

The idea – once widespread among historians – that church courts were deeply unpopular, intrinsically intrusive, oppressive and extortionate institutions, has little to recommend it. Few, then as now, enjoyed going to court, or having to pay fees to officials and lawyers. But in their ‘instance’ business – that is, cases brought at the suit of an interested party – the ecclesiastical courts were often relatively cheap and efficient. ‘Office’ or disciplinary cases, brought by the courts on their own authority, were scarcely likely to be welcomed by the targets. But other laypeople may well have been happy to see fornicators, slanderers or notorious tithe-dodgers brought to book, and made to do public penance – clad in a sheet and bearing a lighted candle – for sins against God and their neighbours.40

If rivalry between practitioners of canon and common law was not ruthlessly unremitting, it was nonetheless fairly endemic, and growing rather than lessening in intensity. Common lawyers, however personally pious, were professionally and ideologically conditioned to resent the Church’s legal privileges, and to assert the intrinsic superiority of common and statute law.⁴¹ Two factors operated in their favour. Firstly, common lawyers could usually assume the crown was predisposed to support their side of the argument. Secondly, in disputing the Church’s claims, they had an overarching legal and statutory principle to which they could appeal.

This was the offence of praemunire, codified in statutes of 1353, 1365 and 1393. When an action of praemunire was brought, the indictment ominously charged the accused with ‘scheming to disinherit the King and his crown’. Praemunire – the term derives from the wording of the royal writ despatched to the sheriff, praemunire facias – that you forewarn (X to appear in court) – was a potent legal instrument, designed to prevent appeals from an English court to one outside the King’s jurisdiction. The original purpose was to prevent unwarranted papal interference with the exercise of royal administration and justice. It was not intended to prevent appeals from English courts to Rome, deny the legitimate claims of canon law, or impede the operations of church courts in England.

Yet loose drafting in the 1393 statute, referring to people suing ‘in the court of Rome or other places’, allowed praemunire to be increasingly used to inhibit cases in English ecclesiastical courts, if lawyers could argue they belonged rightfully in royal ones. This particularly related to landed property, advowsons and debts, areas where the activities of ecclesiastical courts had expanded during the unsettled middle decades of the fifteenth century. Moreover, in 1462, Edward IV, newly and uneasily seated on the throne, issued a ‘Charter of Liberties’ to the Church, offering concessions on tithes, and guarantees to the clergy of immunity from praemunire actions and citation before secular courts. The charter, although confirmed in 1483 by Richard III, never delivered half as much as it promised. But it was a potent symbol of the flowering of ecclesiastical liberties, a plant Henry VII and his son were eager to see pruned.42

Common lawyers sat high in Henry VII’s counsels, among them Sir James Hobart, the King’s attorney general, and a member of the debt-enforcement agency known euphemistically as ‘the Council Learned in the Law’. As a landowner and prominent justice of the peace in Norfolk and Suffolk, Hobart egged individuals on to praemunire actions in pursuit of their personal interests. The process was facilitated by a 1495 act allowing JPs at quarter sessions to hear information relating to offences under any statute. As attorney general, Hobart transferred numbers of these cases to King’s Bench, and co-ordinated presentments (falling just short of formal praemunire charges) against the bishop of Norwich, Richard Nykke. In the face of all this, the church courts’ business, at least in some regions, began to retract. Official encouragement of praemunire actions continued under Hobart’s successor, John Ernley, another member of the Council Learned. As a London chronicler observed, under Henry VII, ‘bishops and many other of the spiritualty’ were ‘vexed full uncharitably and full grievously’.⁴³

Another of the lawyer-enforcers on the Council Learned was Edmund Dudley. He believed it was a royal prerogative to step in and reform matters whenever ‘any manner of grudge’ arose between the King’s ‘subjects of the spiritualty and his subjects of the temporalty, for privileges or liberties’.⁴⁴

The guise of neutral arbiter was disingenuous, for the King was usually disposed to allow erosion of the ‘liberties’ of the Church, which, almost by definition, interfered with his own untrammelled exercise of authority. Through the 1490s and beyond, judicial rulings by chief justices Sir William Hussey and Sir John Fineux chipped away at rights of sanctuary. The issue came forcefully to public notice in 1516, when John Pauncefote, a Gloucestershire JP, was murdered on his way to the sessions, and one of the killers, Sir John Savage, took refuge at the Priory of St John of Jerusalem at Clerkenwell. Savage was forcibly removed from the sanctuary, but at the ensuing trial he alleged the priory’s title to it through papal grant and long customary usage. Justice Fineux argued, however, that all privileges and immunities originated from the King, and laid down that no church could offer more than the customary forty days of sanctuary without a specific confirmation of the supposed privilege by a judge. Royal permission, not ancient custom or papal grant, was to be the basis for the sanctuary offered by the great ecclesiastical ‘liberties’.

Coming before the royal council in November 1519, the Savage case provided another occasion for Henry VIII to expatiate on the abuses of ecclesiastical authority, and his own obligation to direct and reform it. He could not imagine the old kings and holy fathers who established the sanctuary of Westminster Abbey ever intended it ‘to serve for voluntary murder and larceny done outside the sanctuary in hope of returning … and so I will have that reformed which is encroached by abuse, and have the matter reduced to the true intent of the making thereof’.45 It was the kind of statement Henry would make again in the future, about matters much more fundamental than the sanctuary rights of Westminster.

Benefit of Clergy

Another privilege widely believed to have been ‘encroached by abuse’ was the right of clerics to avoid punishment by secular courts: so-called benefit of clergy. This was a principle hallowed by the blood of England’s premier martyr-saint. In the later twelfth century, in defiance of King Henry II, Thomas Becket gave his life for the conviction that churchmen must not submit to judgement by the laity. By the later fifteenth century, as with other areas of dispute, the problem was not so much with the core principle as with its application in particular cases.

The privilege extended not just to priests, but also to clerks in so-called ‘minor orders’, some of whom had no intention of proceeding to ordination as a priest. Still more anomalous was the conventional mechanism for ‘pleading one’s clergy’ upon conviction, and thus removing oneself from a secular to an ecclesiastical court for punishment. This was to demonstrate the ability to read. It might once have made sense to regard the skill as a unique and defining characteristic of a ‘clerk’. But long before the turn of the sixteenth century it had come to look like a loophole through which literate laymen might leap to evade the consequences of their misdeeds. Church courts could not impose the death penalty, as clergymen were canonically banned from the shedding of blood. Offenders might have to endure lengthy periods of imprisonment, but they could expect to regain their freedom, along with, potentially, the ability to reoffend.

Such concerns prompted a tightening up. A 1489 Act of Parliament restricted full benefit of clergy to men actually in orders; others could claim it only once, and were to be branded on the thumb to prevent any second attempts. A subsequent act in 1497 removed the privilege entirely from deserters from royal armies, and those convicted of ‘petty treason’ (i.e. murdering a master or employer); high treason against the crown had always been considered outside its scope. Benefit of clergy was considered again by the Parliament of 1512, when a clutch of further heinous offences was added to the list for which it could not be claimed by anyone other than bona fide clergymen: murder or other felonies committed on the open highway, in a church or other sacred place, or in a private dwelling.

This act proved astonishingly controversial. In its original drafting, it planned to restrict pleading of clergy for these offences to clerks in the three ‘major orders’ of sub-deacon, deacon and priest, and deny it to those in the four preliminary minor orders, reception of which did not involve laying on of hands by a bishop, or authority to perform any significant sacramental functions. Men in minor orders were always allowed to marry.

Perhaps, parliamentarians feared, career criminals were taking minor orders as an insurance policy against the penalties of the 1489 statute. But in canon law – and in the perception of rights-conscious churchmen – major or minor, clerks were clerks. The explicit redefinition was dropped from the final version of the bill, though a cloud of ambiguity hovered over exemption for ‘such as be within holy orders’. Were minor orders ‘holy’ or not? Opposition, particularly from abbots and bishops in the Lords, likely explains why the act was to be in force only until the next Parliament, when its provisions were to be renewed or reviewed.46

What, from one perspective, looked like the stamping out of abuses felt from another like a trampling on the rights and traditions of the Church. In a sermon preached at Paul’s Cross in 1497, at a time when Parliament was enacting a relatively minor curtailment of benefit of clergy, Bishop Alcock of Ely defiantly appropriated the words of the psalmist: ‘touch not my priests’. People would say the English bishops (in Parliament) had given their consent for alterations to the law on benefit of clergy. But in Alcock’s view, they could not give such consent, ‘and such that did so be accursed’.

This was fighting talk, arising from a conviction that the Church of Christ was a single family, looking to the See of Rome as its mother, with liberties given by Christ not to this or that particular national Church, but to all as one. To believe Alcock – a generally level-headed educational reformer and royal administrator – martyrdom and persecution lurked just around the corner: ‘it is to presume, brethren, that [if] Saint Thomas of Canterbury were now living, they which directly now do against the liberties of the Church would put him to death again’.⁴⁷

Complaints that the liberties of the Church were under threat, and demands they be restored, were raised in the Convocation of 1504. About the same time, Bishop Nykke of Norwich penned an irate letter to Warham, his frustration with Hobart’s encouragement of praemunire suits having finally boiled over. The attorney general, said Nykke, was nothing less than ‘the enemy of God and his Church’. The bishop declared his intention to ‘curse [excommunicate] all such promoters and maintainers of the praemunire in such cases as heretics and not-believers in Christ’s Church’.48

Warham seems to have talked him out of this precipitate course of action. But bitterness over the treatment of the Church was palpable, and not confined to die-hard conservatives like Nykke. Christopher Urswick was a leading clerical servant of Henry VII, and a friend and patron of humanists, who once presented Erasmus with the welcome gift of a dependable horse. But as dean of St George’s Chapel, Windsor, he opposed Henry VII’s removal of the remains of Henry VI to Westminster Abbey, regarding it as an intolerable infringement on the liberties of his church. Urswick was a professed admirer of Becket’s stance, and the owner of various texts protesting against past royal mistreatments of the Church, and implicitly criticizing present ones.⁴⁹

There were high hopes among churchmen in 1509 that with the accession of Henry VIII the injustices suffered by the Church would abate. At the opening of the new Parliament in January 1510, Archbishop Warham’s sermon urged the new King to dispense justice fairly and respect good laws made by his ancestors. Warham’s mandate summoning delegates to the concurrent Convocation was less mealy mouthed. It spoke of a pressing need to defend the rights of the Church from machinations of ‘malicious and wicked men’. Shortly afterwards, a bill ‘for the liberties of the English Church’ was introduced into the Lords; perhaps an attempt to secure confirmation for Edward IV’s Charter of 1462. The bill seems to have been so heavily amended in the Commons that it was dropped by its sponsors. Determined to recover lost ground, judges in the ecclesiastical courts of Canterbury began in 1511 to order the repayment of debts by convicted parties in breach of faith cases, a practice effectively halted by the sustained pressure of praemunire actions during the previous reign.⁵⁰ The resurfacing of benefit of clergy as an issue in Parliament the following year showed there had been no real turning of the tide.

In facing these challenges, the Church did not divide between ‘progressives’ urging reform, and ‘conservatives’ defending traditional privilege. Rather, the causes of reform and church liberties were seen as intrinsically linked. Colet’s excoriating sermon to Convocation in February 1512 was made at a time of ‘contradiction of the laypeople’. Yet it was no part of Colet’s solution that the Church should surrender any part of its jurisdictional power. His concern, rather, was for that power to be wielded more effectively and with greater moral authority.

A sermon made at the opening of the 1514 Convocation by Dr John Taylor, royal chaplain and clerk of the House of Lords, drew the same conclusion. Like Colet and other clerical reformers, Taylor denounced the idleness of monks, and the dissolute lives of secular clergy. But he drew a strong connection between reform of the Church and defence of its liberties; reform was essential so that priests might no longer be ‘sold publically in fetters by the secular power, like condemned criminals’. Taylor warned his audience that ‘little by little the laity were encroaching, serpent-like, upon ecclesiastical dominion’, and he urged them to emulate predecessors who had stood by their rights, even with ‘the parade of death before their eyes’.51

In February 1515, as Parliament met at Westminster, and Convocation reconvened at St Paul’s, another churchman with strong reforming credentials determined to speak out. Richard Kidderminster, Benedictine abbot of Winchcombe, and latterly a nominated delegate to the Fifth Lateran Council, took to the pulpit at Paul’s Cross to preach on the text Bishop Alcock interpreted in the same place nearly two decades earlier: Psalm 105, ‘Touch not mine Anointed’.

Kidderminster’s sermon was an uncompromising assertion of the principles behind benefit of clergy, and an attack on the act of 1512, due to come up for renewal before the new Parliament. This law was contrary to the Word of God, and those who passed it rendered themselves liable to excommunication. Addressing the ambiguity in the wording of the statute, Kidderminster declared it to be a fundamental principle that all clerics were in ‘holy orders’, and that any attempt to deny benefit of clergy to minor orders was inherently sinful. Steeling Kidderminster’s resolve was the fact Rome had recently spoken.

In May 1514, during the ninth session of the Fifth Lateran Council, Leo X issued the bull Supernae dispositionis arbitrio. It was an ambitious reforming decree, proposing an overhaul of the lifestyle and duties of cardinals, tighter regulation of church appointments, and a crackdown on a range of abuses from blasphemy to the holding of incompatible benefices. It also emphatically reaffirmed the Church’s established position that ‘human and divine law give laymen no control over ecclesiastical persons’.⁵²

Rome’s position, which Kidderminster endorsed, was that clergymen should not even be tried, let alone sentenced, in secular courts. But the intensity of the furore provoked by his comments, which precipitated a white-hot political crisis, is explicable only in the light of preceding events in London, and the unfortunate fate of a merchant named Richard Hunne.

Richard Hunne, Heretic

The circumstances surrounding the arrest, imprisonment and death of Hunne are as convoluted as they were controversial.⁵³ In February 1511, Hunne’s wife gave birth to a baby boy, and most likely died after the delivery, for the child was sent to the care of a wet-nurse in the parish of St Mary Matfelon, Whitechapel. Five weeks later the boy himself died, a second personal tragedy for Hunne, but a common enough occurrence in the unforgiving conditions of the early sixteenth century. The rector of the parish, Thomas Dryfield, then demanded the cloth the child had been christened in as a mortuary, the customary payment due to the incumbent on the death of a parishioner, technically as recompense for forgotten tithes. Mortuaries – usually the best or second-best animal, or in towns, the best item of clothing – were in principle generally accepted, though they could be an unpopular tax, particularly if they were claimed cumulatively, or with threats to withhold rites of burial.

Hunne, however, took an unusual stand: a principled refusal to pay. His argument seems to have been that, not possessing property of its own, the child was not liable for the tax. He may also have made something of the fact that Dryfield was not incumbent of the parish where Hunne himself resided. Dryfield’s demand for the chrisom-cloth was not unlawful, but it was unquestionably tactless. Priests did not usually insist on their rights in this matter, particularly in light of the well-established custom of burying deceased infants in their baptismal cloths as a symbol of innocence and purity.54

Perhaps the matter might have been quietly forgotten. But Hunne got into a dispute with another clergyman, the rector of St Michael Cornhill, over damage caused by a fire in the tenement of a friend for whom Hunne stood surety. To the clannish community of London city clergy, in light of ongoing fiscal pressures on them, and the assault on clerical immunities brewing in Parliament, Hunne looked like a dangerous troublemaker – one of those laymen who, as Christopher Urswick bemoaned in a letter to Thomas Goldstone, prior of Canterbury, sought to undermine the Church’s discipline to mask their own misconduct, and whose ‘detestable greed’ was depriving the Church of bequests and donations.⁵⁵

Dryfield started proceedings against Hunne in April 1512 in the Archbishop’s Court of Audience. In May, Warham’s chancellor, the urbane and learned Cuthbert Tunstall, found on Dryfield’s behalf, but Hunne stuck to his principles and refused to hand over the christening cloth. On 27 December 1512, Hunne went to attend vespers at St Mary Matfelon. Dryfield’s chaplain, Henry Marshall, refused to commence service while Hunne was in the church, saying ‘thou art accursed and thou standest accursed, and therefore go thou out of the church’.

Marshall was claiming that, as an excommunicate, Hunne was barred from the sacraments and from society and fellowship of the faithful. Hunne had not yet, however, been formally excommunicated for non-compliance with the court’s order, and his response was to bring a suit for defamation of character against Marshall. Pointedly, he did so not in an ecclesiastical court, but in the secular tribunal of King’s Bench, on the grounds his business had been damaged by Marshall’s words, and merchants with whom he usually dealt would not now trade with him. Hunne launched a second legal action in King’s Bench against Dryfield, Marshall, and several officials of the church court, alleging that the initial action against him was an offence under the statute of praemunire.

This was a considerable escalation, guaranteed to raise the hackles of his opponents. It seems a disproportionate response to what was at stake in the mortuary case, unless Hunne was seeking to make legal and political points. Like the slander action, the praemunire suit was repeatedly adjourned, and never came to a conclusion, so it is now impossible to know what Hunne’s stated grounds for it were. Perhaps he argued that, as matters involving property, mortuaries should not come within purview of the courts Christian. Or perhaps that the entire system of ecclesiastical justice represented a foreign jurisdiction impugning the rights of the King of England. If so, that was a radical, and perhaps desperate, claim. Thomas More, at that time Undersheriff of London, and someone who later claimed he knew the matter ‘from top to toe’, thought Hunne was a man possessed by ‘the spirit of pride’, ‘set on the glory of a victory, which he hoped to have in his praemunire’. Among friends, Hunne boasted of his boldness and said he trusted to be remembered long after his death, and that in the annals of law his action should be called ‘Hunne’s case’.56

More had another explanation of events: Hunne was ‘detected of heresy before the praemunire sued or thought upon’. His suit was a diversionary tactic, to slow or halt heresy investigations against him.⁵⁷ That Hunne was already marked out as a suspected heretic is by no means implausible, and would cast a different light on Marshall’s heated reaction to his presence in church. In any case, on 14 October 1514 Hunne was arrested on charges of heresy by order of Richard Fitzjames, bishop of London. He was housed in the Lollards’ Tower, the episcopal prison on the south side of the entrance to St Paul’s Cathedral. On 2 December, Hunne was brought before Fitzjames, and charged with various offences, including speaking up for a heresy suspect, attacking tithes, denouncing priests and bishops as ‘scribes and pharisees that did crucify Christ’, and possessing forbidden English translations of the gospels, epistles and Book of the Apocalypse.

Two days later, Hunne was found hanging from his belt, attached to an iron staple in his cell. Judging him to have committed suicide, the Church proceeded with the case against him – death brought no exemption from charges of heresy. A sermon was preached against him at Paul’s Cross on 10 December 1514, and at a trial beginning the following day, and attended by Wolsey and Bishop Smith of Lincoln, as well as Fitzjames, Hunne was pronounced guilty. On 16 December, he was formally condemned as a heretic, and on 20 December, the matter having been properly ‘signified’ to the secular authorities, his body was exhumed and burned.

Meanwhile, as always with suspicious deaths, a coroner’s inquest was instigated, and a jury of citizens was despatched to view Hunne’s body in the Lollards’ Tower. The state of the corpse, and other details concerning the girdle and the stool on which Hunne supposedly stood, convinced the jurors he had been murdered. Those responsible were named: Fitzjames’s chancellor, William Horsey, and two low-ranking functionaries, John Spalding, bell-ringer of St Paul’s, and Charles Joseph, the bishop’s former summoner. Joseph made a clumsy attempt to flee, and supplied a confession implicating the others. They were duly indicted in King’s Bench and imprisoned – though everyone was acutely aware that should Horsey be convicted, he would be able to plead his clergy and escape execution.

The waters of this lake of suspicion and accusation are too murky for us ever to know what lies at its bottom. Premeditated murder on Chancellor Horsey’s orders seems unlikely, not least due to the absence of plausible motive – the wheels of ecclesiastical justice were already in full motion, and steaming towards a conviction. Joseph – who had been dismissed as summoner by Horsey in October 1514 – seems an unreliable witness, though as a named co-defendant in Hunne’s praemunire suit he may have entertained an animus against the merchant. It is possible Hunne was killed, accidentally or angrily, by Joseph and Spalding during a roughing-up in his cell, and that they attempted to make the death look like a suicide. But it is also conceivable that Thomas More and the church authorities were right in insisting Hunne took his own life, and no conspiracy was involved.

What is not in doubt is that Hunne’s death caused a sensation, or that it was widely believed he had been slain at the behest of the clergy. Polydore Vergil, a papal official resident in London, wrote to Bishop Castellesi of Bath and Wells in March 1515 to report that ‘a heretic has been put to death by the Bishop of London and created great outcry’.58 The King ordered the royal council to undertake a thorough inquiry, and in the spring of 1515 bills were introduced in Parliament to restore to Hunne’s children the property forfeited to the crown as a result of his heresy conviction, and to pursue a murder charge whatever the crown’s inquiry decided on. In London there was a widespread suspicion, later to become an article of faith among Protestant writers, that Hunne was made a heretic because he had dared to sue the praemunire.⁵⁹

The clergy did little to allay it, revealing a defensive mind-set sharpened by years of friction with common lawyers. In the midst of the furore, Bishop Nykke learned that people in Ipswich were claiming ‘no bishop within his diocese shall reserve the absolution of any certain crime to himself’. Nykke’s response was to write to the bailiffs, warning them that this ‘savours of heresy’. Meanwhile, Bishop Fitzjames wrote in frustration to Wolsey of his certainty that ‘if my chancellor be tried by any twelve men in London, they be so maliciously set in favorem hereticae pravitatis, that is, are so set upon the favour of heresy, that they will cast and condemn my clerk, though he were as innocent as Abel.’ This was a serious slur upon the good name of the citizenry, and somehow the letter’s contents were leaked. On 17 April 1515 the Court of Aldermen sent a deputation to have words with the bishop ‘for certain perilous and heinous words as be surmised by him to be spoken of the whole body of the City touching heresy’.60

This was the poisoned atmosphere through which Richard Kidderminster passed to ascend the pulpit at Paul’s Cross, there to assert, in all circumstances, the immunity of clerics from secular judgement, and to accuse members of the last Parliament of having committed an offence against God in passing the 1512 statute. Members of the new Parliament took exception, and petitioned the King to call a conference to review the issue. A meeting was convened at Blackfriars in February 1515, at which Kidderminster defended his position against a combative and effective spokesman for the ‘temporalty’. This was Dr Henry Standish, a robust Lancashire man and popular court preacher, Warden of the London Grey Friars, and Provincial of the (Conventual) Franciscans in England. The debate touched on old fault-lines within the Church: bishops were impatient of the independence of the friars, as friars were resentful of the power, and perceived pomp and pride, of the bishops. Liberties of the Church was one hot-button issue at the Fifth Lateran Council; the autonomy of the friars was another.⁶¹

Standish argued that the 1512 statute was lawful and that the established custom of bringing criminous clerks before a secular judge contradicted neither divine law nor the liberties of the Church. Papal decrees that clergymen should not even appear before secular tribunals had never been formally received in England. In effect, he argued that canon law required the confirmation of royal authority.

The laymen moderating the disputation were impressed, and asked the bishops to order Kidderminster to disavow his sermon. But instead the ecclesiastical leadership was galvanized into endorsing Kidderminster’s uncompromising stance: divine (i.e. canon) law was superior to all other forms, and formal ‘reception’ of it by a secular ruler was not required. How could the Church reform itself, or fulfil its mission to reform society, if its internal life-blood, the canon law, was drained from it? It followed that the current practice of allowing clerics to be summoned in front of lay courts, albeit to be later punished elsewhere, was at odds with the will of God. Leading churchmen thus pushed for a major extension of the principle of benefit of clergy at the very moment when significant numbers of laymen – shocked by the Hunne affair – were more than ever convinced it should be curtailed.

Battle lines were drawn. John Taylor, clerk of Parliament and prolocutor (or chairman) of the Lower House of Convocation, recorded how ‘in this Parliament and Convocation there arose the most dangerous discords between the clergy and the secular power over the liberties of the Church’.⁶² Standish departed unbowed from the Blackfriars conference, and continued to make his case in sermons. The consequence was a further upping of the stakes. He was summoned before Convocation to answer articles against him, the beginning of a process for heresy.

Did Standish believe minor orders were not ‘holy’? That benefit of clergy was not a matter of divine law, and that secular authorities might legitimately punish clerics if bishops proved negligent? Standish stuck to his position that the established custom of ‘conventing’ criminal clerics before the secular courts meant ecclesiastical ordinances to the contrary could not be binding in England. He did not believe exemption of clerics to be a positive requirement of divine law, prompting both sides to engage in some fancy footwork around what was meant by the biblical obligation to ‘honour thy father’. Wisely, Standish decided to ignore the other biblical injunction about not putting your trust in princes, and appealed to Henry VIII.

The arguments were rehearsed again at a second Blackfriars conference in November 1515. Standish was not wholly isolated among the clergy. The dean of the King’s chapel, Dr John Veysey, was emerging as a rising star of the ‘royalist’ party. He reassured Henry that summoning clerks before temporal judges for criminal causes was not against the law of God. At the conference, Veysey developed the point by analogy with priestly celibacy. Priests had once been married, but by papal decree ‘received’ in England and elsewhere had long since put away their wives. Yet there were Churches in the east where the decree had not been received, and priests were married still.63 This was a slick debating point. Yet its insinuations about the uneven and historically contingent scope of papal jurisdiction, and about the federated character of wider European Christendom, perhaps lodged themselves in Henry VIII’s mind.

More immediately pertinent was the response of the royal judges, as predictable as it was potent. By proceeding against Standish on the basis of a papal decree that as yet lacked royal assent, the clergy were guilty of praemunire. Convocation’s formal response to the charge exuded an air of aggrieved hurt: was it fair that Members of Parliament, without fear of punishment, might criticize churchmen and church laws, while Convocation might not discuss laymen and laws of the land without risking the penalties of praemunire? There was no retraction of the claim. Standish was summoned before them because he had ‘taught, affirmed and published divers matters which were thought not to stand with the laws of God and the determination of Holy Church’. Prelates had a responsibility to ‘inquire of such matters and causes as appertain to the laws of God, for the redressing and reformation of all things contrary to the same’. If they failed in this, heresies would increase daily. The statement concluded by professing complete loyalty to the King, while urging him to allow Convocation to act as it had done in the days of his noble progenitors. A promise to maintain the King’s laws to the best of their powers was hedged with a crucial qualification: ‘as far as their order and profession shall suffer them’.⁶⁴

It was the moment for the King to make his entrance. Leading churchmen, judges and other concerned parties were summoned before him at Baynard’s Castle, a royal palace adjoining the Thames. Proceedings opened with a set-piece tableau: Wolsey knelt on the ground, and protested that none of the clergy ever intended to do anything prejudicial to the King’s prerogative. For his own part, he added that ‘he owed his whole advancement solely to our lord the King’, and that he would ‘assent to nothing that would tend to annul or derogate from his royal authority for all the world’.

This was not the abject surrender it is sometimes painted. Wolsey reiterated that conventing of clerks before secular judges ‘seems contrary to the laws of God and the liberties of the Holy Church’, and requested the whole matter be referred to Rome. Henry’s reply that he thought that question had been answered fully by Dr Standish provoked a flurry of exchanges. Richard Fox, epitome both of a reforming bishop and of a steadfast royal servant, huffed that ‘Dr Standish will not abide by his opinion at his peril’. Standish himself histrionically proclaimed, ‘What should one poor friar do alone against the bishops and clergy of England?’ Archbishop Warham reminded everyone how previous attempts to restrict benefit of clergy were resisted by ‘divers holy fathers of the Church’, some even suffering death. This was a pointed avowal – uncomfortable for kings to hear – of the literally iconic status of his predecessor Thomas Becket as a blessed martyr for the liberties of Ecclesia Anglicana.65

In all likelihood, Henry came knowing exactly what he planned to say. His words made a strong impression, as they were intended to do:

By the ordinance and sufferance of God, we are King of England, and the Kings of England in time past have never had any superior but God alone. Wherefore know you well that we will maintain the right of our Crown and of our temporal jurisdiction, as well in this point as in all others, in as ample a wise as any of our progenitors have done before us. And as to your decrees, we are well informed that you yourselves of the Spiritualty do expressly contrary to the words of many of them, as has been well shown to you by some of our spiritual Counsel; nevertheless, you interpret your decrees at your pleasure. Wherefore, consent to your desire more than our progenitors have done in time past we will not.⁶⁶

A final plea from Warham that Convocation might, at its own costs and charges, seek a final ruling from Rome was met with resounding royal silence.

The significance of Henry’s speech, and of the 1514–15 crisis more broadly, has been much debated over the years. Was this episode the opening salvo of the English Reformation, or simply a particularly noisy moment in the ongoing sound and fury attending royal–papal relations, signifying not much more than nothing?⁶⁷

In the wake of the 1515 conferences, most of the immediate causes of conflict were quietly defused, with shows of compromise on all sides. Horsey was quietly pardoned, and Fitzjames was able to block parliamentary moves to restore Hunne’s property to his children. The praemunire suit against Convocation was dropped, as were the heresy proceedings against Standish. The 1512 act was not renewed, but in February 1516, at Wolsey’s behest, Leo X reluctantly issued a bull ordering that no one was to be ordained in England for the next five years unless he took all five orders up to subdeacon simultaneously. This was an ingenious solution, but, as so often with Leo’s reform initiatives, does not appear to have been implemented on the ground. A later expedient was more radical. In 1528 Wolsey secured permission from Clement VII to allow a clerk to be formally degraded from his orders by any bishop assisted by two abbots or dignitaries, a reforming exercise of the legateship that events were soon to overtake.68

Other than Hunne and his family, no one was very materially harmed by the events of 1514–15. Kidderminster resumed his distinguished rule of Winchcombe Abbey, and was in later years praised by the King as a man of learning and experience. Wolsey continued to soar in the King’s favour. The ‘royalists’ reaped their rewards. Veysey was raised to the episcopate as bishop of Exeter in 1519, and in 1525 was created president of the Council in the Marches of Wales. Standish too received a bishopric, that of St Asaph in North Wales. There was an ironic sequel. Carelessly, if conventionally, Standish was consecrated by Warham before he had done the requisite homage for his temporalities and sworn to renounce any features of the papal bull of provision ‘in derogation of our sovereign lord’s crown and dignity’. Threatened with praemunire, Standish knelt before the royal council and begged the lords to intercede with Wolsey to secure pardon on his behalf. Wolsey undoubtedly took pleasure in this small humiliation. He probably helped ensure that after 1518 Standish never progressed further up the episcopal ladder than St Asaph, the poorest and least alluring of English and Welsh dioceses. Standish’s own spleen was subsequently expended in attacks on Erasmus’s New Testament, which did little to earn him the continued admiration or gratitude of the King.⁶⁹

The following years saw continued tensions over the issue of sanctuary, but there was to be no comparable bust-up over the liberties of the Church during the period of Wolsey’s legateship. Benefit of clergy and praemunire receded from the forefront of public debate. By uniting in his own person unreserved royal trust and delegated papal authority, Wolsey was able for most of the 1520s to prevent ‘Church–State’ conflicts from getting out of hand. Yet the unforgotten events of 1514–15 – for crown, commons and clergy alike – would cast a very long shadow.

Whose Reform?

While the crisis was drawing to a close, Thomas More put the finishing touches to his satirical masterpiece, Utopia:

No official is more honoured among the Utopians than the priest, to such an extent that even if one of them commits a crime, he is not brought to court, but left to God and his own conscience. They think it wrong to lay human hands on a man, however guilty, who has been specially consecrated to God, as a holy offering, so to speak. This custom is the easier to observe because their priests are so few and so carefully selected. Besides, it rarely happens that a man chosen for his goodness and raised to high dignities solely because of his moral character will fall into corruption and vice.70

It is far from clear who, or what, was being satirized here. A diplomat in royal service, a common lawyer closely linked to the London merchant community, but also a supporter of the clergy’s legitimate rights and an unyielding enemy of heresy, More exemplifies the contradictory impulses felt by many thoughtful and spiritual persons in early Tudor England. They longed for reformation of Church and people. But there was little clarity about who could lead that reform to fruition. The optimistic vision of a top-down overhaul of the institution by its hierarchical leaders – the head renewing the members – received little practical leadership or example from the Fifth Lateran Council, or from the distracted, politique popes in Rome. It had meanwhile become abundantly clear that the freedom of action clerical leaders felt was necessary to bring about reformation on their own terms was not to be allowed them in England. A reform agenda for the Church defined by the King’s prerogative produced only Thomas Wolsey. The cardinal was a capable administrator, and, viewed in some lights, an almost plausible impression of an Erasmian idealist. But he was hardly a churchman, in More’s acerbic formulation, ‘chosen for his goodness and raised to high dignities solely because of his moral character’.

Henry VIII drew lessons from the crisis of 1515, and from the spat over Tournai that came sharply on its heels. Popes and bishops had their own agendas. He concluded that – as with Wolsey, who, to Henry’s disappointment, never became pope – it was safest to own them absolutely, or if not, to deal with them robustly. At his coronation in 1509, Henry had sworn to ‘keep and maintain the right and the liberties of Holy Church of old time granted by the righteous Christian kings of England’. But at some stage, and with his own pen, he altered the wording to make clear he meant to uphold only those rights of ‘the holy Church of England not prejudicial to his jurisdiction and dignity royal’. We do not know when the changes were made; the term ‘Church of England’ need not imply a date after the break with Rome.⁷¹ The basic sentiment was one Henry subscribed to from early in his reign. And even the original form of the coronation oath made clear that the Church’s liberties were ‘granted’ by English kings; they were not God-given and inalienable.

Under both Henry VII and Henry VIII, praemunire served as a kind of thermostat control, ensuring the ‘liberties’ of the Church never rose above a temperature that the crown found comfortable. Thomas More, discussing with the King in 1521 the passage on the papacy in Henry’s Defence of the Seven Sacraments, gently reminded him of ‘the Statute of Praemunire, whereby a good part of the Pope’s pastoral cure here was pared away’. More suggested papal authority might be ‘more slenderly touched’ in the book.72 Henry did not see the objection – at that stage he perceived no inherent incompatibility between extravagant deference to the Holy See (about to reward him with a coveted title of honour) and his own ‘imperial’ kingship.

At various times in the first twenty-odd years of his reign, Henry VIII felt frustrated with churchmen and disappointed with popes. But the frustrations just about always resolved themselves to the King’s satisfaction. The bishops were convincingly slapped down in 1515, while the Pope provided satisfaction (of a sort) over Tournai, as well as adequate recompense with grants of Wolsey’s legateship and Henry’s Defendership of the Faith. If, before the end of the 1520s, Henry never found his sticking-place, it was because his ecclesiastical problems never really caused him to get stuck.

The leaders of the Church in England had their own sticking-place. They would loyally serve the crown, as Convocation put it in 1515, ‘as far as their order and profession shall suffer them’. In 1515 and for many years afterwards, most clergymen had little idea just how far such sufferance might have to extend.

One thing, however, was certain: it ended on this side of the line that separated orthodox faith from false and heretical belief. It was the clergy’s responsibility to define and defend doctrinal orthodoxy. But as the disputes culminating in 1515 made abundantly clear, some churchmen believed that criticisms of the clergy, and attacks on their jurisdiction, were themselves potentially doctrinal matters. Anticlericalism might slip easily into heresy. The Hunne case brought to the surface acute anxieties over where, and how, the line between them was to be drawn.

In defending their status, rights and privileges, clergymen sincerely believed they were defending the faith of Christ. And by seeking out and destroying heresy and heretics, they justified the perpetuation of those rights and privileges. If other routes of reformation were blocked, this at least was a path down which the English bishops might boldly lead. As disputes over church courts crystallized at the end of the sixteenth century’s first decade, the bishops prepared to demonstrate the indispensability of their jurisdiction. They launched a campaign to eradicate heresy.