In the spring of 1518, at the urgent instigation of the king, Wolsey was appointed as papal legate; he became the representative of Rome at the court of which he was already chief minister. He embodied everything that the reformers abhorred; he was the whore in scarlet. Whenever he made a submission as the pope’s envoy he left the court and then ceremonially reappeared in his fresh role. Yet there was no disguising the fact that the Church and the royal council were now being guided by the same hand. The truth of the matter was not lost upon the king, who would at a later date assert his royal sovereignty over both. Wolsey taught Henry that it was possible to administer and effectively run the Church without the interference of any external power. The king would at a later date, therefore, take over the cardinal’s role and in the process greatly enlarge it.
Wolsey’s status as papal legate gave him additional power to reform the English Church. He began in the spring of 1519 by sending ‘visitors’ to various monasteries in order to record the conditions and habits of the monks, where of course they found various levels of disorder and abuse. The abbot brought his hounds into the church; the monks found solace in the tavern; the prior had been seen with the miller’s wife. This had always been the small change of monastic life, and had largely become accepted as the way of the world. But Wolsey punished the principal offenders and sent out strict regulations or statutes to guide future conduct.
His severity did not of course prevent him from growing rich in his own manner with a collection of ecclesiastical posts. He was in succession bishop of Bath and Wells, bishop of Durham and bishop of Winchester; these were held in tandem with the archbishopric of York, and in 1521 he obtained the richest abbey of the land in St Albans. His tables groaned with gold and silver plate and the walls of his palaces were hung with the richest tapestries. Wolsey was without doubt the richest man in England – richer even than the king, whose income was curtailed by large responsibilities – but he always argued that his own magnificence helped to sustain the power of the Church.
At a slightly later date he suppressed some twenty-nine monastic houses and used their revenues to finance a school in Ipswich and a college, Cardinal’s College, which he intended to build at Oxford. The obscure devotions of a few monks and nuns should not stand in the way of a great educational enterprise. He was interested in good learning as well as good governance; indeed they could not properly be distinguished. So the work of the Church continued even as it was being denounced and threatened by the ‘new men’, otherwise called ‘gospellers’ and ‘known men’.
At the end of 1520 the doctrines of Luther were deemed to be heretical and his books were banned. They ‘smelled of the frying pan’, resting on the fires of Smithfield and of hell itself. In the spring of the following year, Wolsey in a great ceremony burned Luther’s texts on a pyre set up in St Paul’s Churchyard. Yet it was already too late to staunch the flow of the new doctrines. The known men were, according to Thomas More, ‘busily walking’ in every alehouse and tavern, where they expounded their doctrines. More was already a privy councillor and servant of the court. The supposed heretics were present at the Inns of Court where fraternal bonds could be converted to spiritual bonds. They were ‘wont to resort to their readings in a chamber at midnight’. They began to congregate in the Thames Valley and in parts of Essex as well as London. In the parish church of Rickmansworth, in Hertfordshire, certain people flung the statues and the rood screen upon a fire. It was a portent of later iconoclasm in England.
Luther’s books came into the country, from the ports of the Low Countries and from the cities of the Rhineland, as contraband smuggled in sacks of cloth. Yet the tracts did not only reach the disaffected. They also reached the king. On 21 April 1521 Henry was seen to be reading Luther’s De Captivitate Babylonica Ecclesiae (‘On the Babylonian Captivity of the Church’) and in the following month he wrote to Pope Leo X of his determination to suppress the heresies contained in that tract. Wolsey suggested to the king that he might care to be distinguished from other European princes by showing himself to be erudite as well as orthodox. So with the help of royal servants such as More the king composed a reply to Luther entitled Assertio Septem Sacramentorum, ‘In Defence of the Seven Sacraments’.
It was not a brilliant or enthralling work, but it served its purpose. The pope professed to be delighted by it, and conferred on Henry the title of Fidei Defensor, ‘Defender of the Faith’. It was not supposed to be inherited, but the royal family have used it ever since. Luther composed a reply to the reply, in the course of which he denounced Henry as ‘the king of lies’ and a ‘damnable and rotten worm’. As a result Henry was never warmly disposed towards Lutheranism and, in most respects, remained an orthodox Catholic.
The pope died two months after conferring the title upon the king, and there were some who believed that Wolsey himself might ascend to the pontificate. Yet the conclave of cardinals was never likely to elect an Englishman, and in any case Wolsey had pressing business with the Church in England alone. His visitations of the monasteries were only one aspect of his programme for clerical reform. He devised new constitutions for the secular or non-monastic clergy and imposed new statutes on the Benedictine and Augustinian monks. He guided twenty monastic elections to gain favourable results for his candidates, and dismissed four monastic heads.
In the spring of 1523 he dissolved a convocation of senior clergy at Canterbury and summoned them to Westminster, where he imposed a new system of taxation on their wealth. Bishops and archbishops would in the future be obliged to pay him a ‘tribute’ before they could exercise their jurisdictions. He proposed reforms in the ecclesiastical courts, too, and asserted that all matters involving wills and inheritances should be handled by him. The Church had never been so strictly administered since the days of Henry II. The fact that, in pursuit of his aims, Wolsey issued papal bulls, letters or charters sanctioned by the Vatican, served further to inflame the English bishops against him.
Yet he was protected by the shadow of the king. Wolsey was doing Henry’s bidding, so that his ascendancy virtually guaranteed royal supremacy. There was no longer any antagonism between what later became known as ‘Church’ and ‘State’; they were united in the same person. At this stage, however, the question of doctrinal reform did not arise, and Wolsey paid only nominal attention to the spread of heresy in the kingdom. He was concerned with the discipline and efficiency of the Church, and in particular with the exploitation of its wealth.
Wolsey’s role as papal legate involved other duties. It was his responsibility as the pope’s representative to bring peace to the Christian princes of Europe, as a preliminary to a united crusade against the Turks. In matters of diplomacy the cardinal was a master and through 1518 he continued negotiations with Maximilian of the Holy Roman Empire, Francis of France and Charles of Spain. Their representatives came to London in the autumn of that year and swore a treaty of universal peace that became known as the Treaty of London. The cardinal had engineered it, and the cardinal took the credit. There was a passing allusion to the possibility of a crusade and the pope was named only as comes or ‘associate’ in the negotiations. ‘We can see,’ one cardinal wrote, ‘what the Holy See and the pope have to expect from the English chancellor.’