A Church Needing Reform
Wolsey knew the corruptions of the English Church: absentee bishops, worldly clergy, idle monks and priests with illegitimate children. He himself embodied them. The government that so wished the Church reformed was now a cause of its decay, since the king chose the bishops. Some English bishops, such as Morton, Warham and Fisher, were able and distinguished men. Others were so taken up with comfort and rank that they thought nothing of reforming their subordinates. In sexual matters English priests may have been purer than the German, but among England's 8,000 parishes concubinage, adultery, drunkenness and crime were found. These evils had led Archbishop Morton to say in 1486, "The scandal of the clergy endangers the very existence of the Church." In 1519 Richard Fox told Wolsey that the debauchery and crime of the priests in the diocese of Winchester had made him despair of reforming the Church in his lifetime. Parish priests, thinking promotion depended on the sums they gathered, pressed hard for tithes, and some went so far as to take a tenth every year of chickens, eggs, milk, cheese, fruit and the peasants' earnings. Anyone who did not leave part of his property to the Church before death was not buried with religious rites, which had grievous consequences. In short, to extort all they could from the people, the clergy taxed them with the care and diligence of the governments of our day. One conservative Catholic estimated the Church's property in 1500 at a fifth of the land of England. In England as in Germany the people envied Church wealth and waited for the day when they could take back the estates and revenues their pious ancestors had given the Church.
In 1512 Colet, speaking to the Convocation of the English clergy, described the worldliness of the clergy in unmistakable language. He urged them for their name and station to make reform of the Church their aim, for reform had never been so needed. The Church, the bride of Christ, had become foul and loathsome. As Isaiah said, "the faithful city has become a harlot," and as Jeremiah said, she had lain with many lovers and borne many wicked children. Nothing had so stained the Church's face as the worldliness and lust of the clergy. He wondered at the clergy's eagerness and greed for rank and elevation, and at the fierce rivalry for income and higher office. The Church's rulers, who had made the Church a plaything of their appetites, thought of nothing but pleasure and private gain; most priests gave themselves to feasting, hunting and amusement and clung to the pleasures of this world. Greed, he added, had entered the hearts of priests like himself so that they thought of nothing but their own profit. Foolish heretics troubled them in those days, but their heresy did the Church and the people less harm than the impurity and wickedness of the clergy. Reform must begin with the clergy themselves.
Elsewhere Colet cried out in anger against unworthy priests, who, he said, filled the world in his day and were not afraid to go from the arms of harlots to the Church's sanctuary, the altar of Christ and the presence of the Creator.
Even some prominent clergy and heads of houses were not free of charges. In 1489 Archbishop Morton accused William, abbot of St. Albans, of simony, profiteering and embezzlement, said that he consorted openly within the abbey with harlots or mistresses, and that through his shameful relations with nuns he had ruined the repute of holy places and of the Church itself and turned the neighboring priory into a public brothel (I soften the wording). Yet the bishops' reports on English monasteries of the time give a cleaner picture. Of forty-two monasteries visited by bishops between 1517 and 1530, fifteen had no serious fault, and the main complaint against most of the rest was lack of discipline, not lack of chastity. Some houses, with honest and real faith, devoted themselves in medieval fashion to worship, scholarship, nursing the sick, charity and teaching the young. Others took advantage of the people's simplicity and fleeced them by selling bogus relics as healing aids. Bishops denounced those who offered the public "rotten boots, filthy shoulders ... decayed belts ... hairs and rags" as relics of holy men and women. By the account of a Catholic historian of our day, in the first quarter of the sixteenth century improper conduct, sloth and neglect of Church property were general in six hundred English monasteries.
In 1520 there were about a hundred and thirty nunneries in England. Only four had more than thirty nuns. By one bishop's account, eight nunneries whose inmates had a name for impurity came under pressure from the bishops because they stood near Cambridge University. Of thirty-three nunneries in the diocese of Lincoln that were inspected, sixteen were found pure and orderly, four lacking in faith and discipline, and two with disreputable women; in another a nun had been made pregnant by a priest. Given the morals of the age such lapses seemed natural, and the monasteries' services in teaching and relief made up for them.
Heresy and the Cambridge Reformers
The clergy were not loved by the people. In 1529 Eustace Chapuys, Charles V's Catholic ambassador in England, wrote to Charles, "Most of the people bear a hatred for the clergy." The heavy taxes the Church laid on the people, the waste of its leaders, and the wealth and idleness of the priests had angered even many devout and conservative Christians. When the chancellor of the Bishop of London was prosecuted for the death of a man who opposed the Church (1514), the bishop asked Wolsey to prevent his trial in a civil court, telling him, "The London juries are so biased in favor of the Church's opponents that if the case goes to them they will convict my secretary, though innocent as Abel." Heretical ideas were again spreading in England. In 1506, of forty-five people summoned by the Bishop of Lincoln for opposing the Roman Catholic faith, forty-three recanted and two were burned. In 1510 the Bishop of London tried forty and burned two for nonconformity. In 1521 the same bishop tried forty-five more and burned five. In fifteen years history records three hundred and forty-two such trials in England, by the book's count. Among views counted heresy were: denying the transubstantiation of the sacramental bread; denying the priest's miraculous power to consecrate it and to forgive sins; denying the worth of pilgrimages and intercession for the dead; believing that man is not saved by good works alone; that prayer should be addressed to God only; that man is saved by faith regardless of works; that the faithful Christian is subject to no law but Christ's; that Scripture, not the Church, should be the sole basis of belief; and that all should marry and monks and nuns break their vows of celibacy. Some of these ideas were left from the Lollard movement and some drew on Luther. From 1521 young opponents of the Roman Church echoed news of the German religious revolution at Oxford. Between 1521 and 1525 Cambridge produced young men who later became leaders of English heresy: William Tyndale, Miles Coverdale, Hugh Latimer, Thomas Bilney, Edward Fox, Nicholas Ridley and Thomas Cranmer. Some, fearing for their lives, fled to the Continent, where they printed tracts against the Roman Church and sent them secretly to England.
The King Against Luther
Apparently to suppress this movement, and perhaps to show off his own learning, Henry VIII in 1521 published his famous tract Defense of the Seven Sacraments against Martin Luther. Many people ascribed it to Wolsey, and it is not unlikely that Wolsey, to support his own policy toward Rome, advised the king to compose it and suggested some of its main themes. But Erasmus held that the king himself wrote it and prepared its matter personally, and our contemporaries agree with him. The tract is the work of an amateur and inexperienced writer; in place of argument it leans on Scripture and Church tradition and turns to abuse of its opponents. Henry VIII, who soon raised the flag of revolt against the pope, wrote in it that those who call the pope's powers improper and unjust are like venomous snakes, and that wicked hands strive to cut Christian members of the Church from its head. No penalty is too heavy for one who defies the supreme priest and noble judge, he wrote, for the Church is subject not to Christ alone but must obey his single vicar, the pope of Rome. Henry envied the French king, styled "Most Christian," and Ferdinand and Isabella, known as the "Catholic Sovereigns." So when Henry's envoy presented a copy to Leo X, he asked that Henry and his successors be honored with the title "Defender of the Faith." The pope granted the request, and the founder of the English reformation struck the title he had received from the pope on his coins (the text is garbled here, and I reconstructed it).
In 1525 Luther answered Henry in his own style, calling him a "stupid ass," an "angry wall ... lying king, wicked king, hated by his Creator," and wrote that, since the hated and rotting king had deliberately insulted his heavenly Lord, he felt free to bury the English king in his own filth (I soften his coarse words). Henry, who had never had such insults reach his ears, complained to the Elector of Saxony, who was too modest to tell the English king not to challenge a lion. Though Luther later apologized to the English king, Henry never put the hatred out of his heart. Even when he openly broke with the pope, he did not stop condemning the German Protestants.
Tyndale's New Testament
As his influence spread in England, Luther gave Henry a crushing answer. In the same year Luther abused Henry (1525) we find a "Society of Christian Brethren" in London, whose members traveled all over England spreading Lutheran tracts, heretical leaflets and the English text of the Bible or parts of it. In 1408 Archbishop Arundel, alarmed at the spread of Wycliffe's translation, had forbidden printing and distributing the Bible in the local English dialects, arguing that unofficial translations might misread some of its difficult passages and so distort people's religious ideas. Many English clergy disliked the people's reading the Bible, saying its correct interpretation needs special learning and that some of its passages had served as pretexts for riot. The Church did not formally oppose reading English texts translated before Wycliffe, but this tacit permission was meaningless, since none of them had been printed and the people could not get them.
So Tyndale's translation of the New Testament into English, published in 1525 and 1526, is historically important. Since his days at Cambridge Tyndale had thought of translating the Bible. But unlike Wycliffe, who rendered the Latin Vulgate into English, he meant to translate from the original Hebrew and Greek. When a bigoted Catholic told him, "It is better to be without God's law, the Bible, than without the pope's law," Tyndale answered, "If God spare my life, I will cause a boy that driveth the plough to know more of the Scripture than thou dost." A member of the London city council housed Tyndale for six months, and the young man spent all that time translating the Bible. In 1524 he went to Wittenberg and continued his work under Luther's guidance. At Cologne he tried to print a New Testament translated from the Greek text edited by Erasmus, but an English agent stirred the city's authorities against him. Tyndale fled from Catholic Cologne to Protestant Worms, and there printed the English New Testament, with a sharp, combative preface containing the views of Erasmus and Luther, in 6,000 copies. All were smuggled into England and strengthened the wish for religious reform there.
Cuthbert Tunstall, Bishop of London, claiming that Tyndale's translation had gross errors and its preface heretical ideas, resolved to keep it from the people by buying up and burning all the copies, but for every book he burned more arrived from Europe, and More quipped that Tunstall was paying for Tyndale's press. More himself attacked Tyndale's translation in a long dialogue (1528). Tyndale replied to More's criticisms, and More answered Tyndale in a confutation of 578 pages. To end the quarrel the king forbade the reading of the Bible in English until an official translation should appear (1530). About the time of the king's decree the government also banned the printing, publishing, importing and possession of any heretical book. Wolsey asked Philip, Landgrave of Hesse, to arrest Tyndale, but Philip protected him.
Tyndale went to Marburg (1530) and went on with the Pentateuch. Gradually most of the Old Testament too was translated into English by Tyndale or under his supervision. But his imprudence delivered him to the emperor's agents. For sixteen months he was held at Vilvoorde near Brussels, and in 1536, over the intercession of Thomas Cromwell, Henry VIII's minister, he was burned alive. His last words, as reported, were: "Lord, open the king of England's eyes." Tyndale lived long enough to finish his mission and tell the moving, inspiring story of the life of Jesus in plain, clear and forceful language for the plowmen of England. When the Authorized (King James) Version was published in 1611, ninety percent of its finest and most valued classic passages belonged to Tyndale.
Wolsey's Mild Hand and His Plan for the Monasteries
Wolsey, as one might expect from the head of state and Church, was lenient and tolerant toward the rising English reform movement. He employed detectives to find followers of heretical views, examine suspect publications and arrest opponents of Catholicism. But since he thought silencing opponents wiser than rebuking them, we know of no one burned at his command. In 1528 three Oxford students were arrested for heresy; the Bishop of London kept one in prison until he died there; another recanted and was freed; and the third, who had been handed to Wolsey, escaped through the deliberate laxity of Wolsey's officers. When the Bishop of Ely demanded punishment for Hugh Latimer, England's most eloquent sixteenth-century reformer, for condemning the wickedness of the clergy, Wolsey allowed Latimer to preach in all the churches of England.
Cardinal Wolsey himself had drawn up a wise plan for reforming the Church. In Bishop Gilbert Burnet's words, "He had no liking for the clergy, especially the monks, who instead of serving Church or state ruined the Church's good name with their shameful lives and had become a burden to the state, and he meant to strip many of them of their privileges and gather the monks into another organization." Closing disreputable monasteries was not unprecedented, and even before Wolsey's time some had been suppressed by the monastic orders themselves. From 1519 Wolsey issued orders to reform the rules of the Augustinian houses, which, had they been carried out, would have made them models for other houses. He commissioned his secretary, Thomas Cromwell, to inspect the monasteries himself or through agents and report. These observations later trained Cromwell for carrying out Henry's orders for a stricter and more serious inspection of English monasteries. Rumors spread of the harshness of these agents, their bribe-taking and their splitting the proceeds with Cromwell and Cardinal Wolsey. In 1524 Wolsey, with the permission of Clement VII, suppressed monasteries with no more than seven monks and gave their income to founding colleges. He was pleased to have opened two colleges with the income of suppressed houses, one in his birthplace Ipswich and one at Oxford, and wished by gradual suppression of monasteries to open more. But political troubles kept him from carrying out his high and useful plans. His steps toward monastic reform gave Henry, who later seized the monasteries and their property for himself, a respectable pretext.
Failure Abroad
Wolsey's foreign policy had now brought grievous results. The reason was perhaps that he tried by winning the emperor's support to reach the papacy (1521 and 1523), and marched with Charles V into France (1522). The war ended in defeat for England, with heavy loss of money and men. To renew the fighting Wolsey summoned Parliament for the first time in seven years (1523) and enraged its members by asking for a war grant of 800,000 pounds, a fifth of every layman's property. After strong protest Parliament agreed to take a seventh of the people's property to go on with the war. The clergy also protested but agreed to yield half of their yearly church income. When news came that Charles's troops had beaten the French at Pavia (1525) and captured Francis I, Wolsey and Henry resolved to profit by France's defeat. For a new attack on France Wolsey needed extra funds. He asked all Englishmen with incomes above 50 pounds to give the state a sixth of their property to carry the war through and keep Charles from taking all France. The demand met such resistance that Wolsey had to put forward a peace plan. To keep the balance of power he made a pact of mutual military aid with France. But in 1527 the emperor's troops took Rome and imprisoned the pope. Now that Charles seemed the unchallenged and invincible ruler of Europe, Wolsey's policy of balance of power on the Continent was barren. In 1528 England went to war with Charles beside France.
Charles was the nephew of Catherine of Aragon, and Henry meant to put Catherine away. But Clement, who, if free, would have annulled Henry's marriage to Catherine for political reasons, was now in Charles's captivity.