shooting, singing, dancing, wrestling, casting the bar, playing at the recorders, flute, virginals, and in setting of songs, making of ballads; and did set two goodly masses, every of them five parts, which were sung oftentimes in his chapel, and afterwards in divers other places." his custom being to hear four or five masses a day, and two or three in the days he went hunting.2 The king was also, in spite of his fondness for pleasure, very attentive to business, and showed great aptitude and shrewdness in affairs.

He was very observant of his religious duties,

a

§ 5. Almost from the beginning of his reign Henry's councils were influenced, and many of his important affairs transacted, by Thomas Wolsey, Dean of Lincoln, who had been almoner to his father, and successfully employed in diplomatic service.3 After the expedition to France, and the capture of Tournai, the bishopric of this city was conferred on Wolsey, but he was not consecrated bishop until the see of Lincoln fell vacant by the death of Doctor Smith. To this see he was consecrated March 26, 1514; and in the same year appointed Archbishop of York on the death of Cardinal Bainbridge, who was poisoned at Rome. As Archbishop of York, he was still of inferior rank to the Archbishop of Canterbury, and on one occasion having caused his cross to be "advanced" in presence of the cross of Canterbury, he received “ certain check for his presumption, by reason whereof there engendered some grudge between York and Canterbury." Wolsey, therefore, by the king's influence, obtained, after some delay, the office of cardinal from the pope, which gave him precedence of the archbishop. With this he was solemnly invested at Westminster, November 18, 1515. On December 22 he became Lord Chancellor, Archbishop Warham having resigned the post. He was made legatus a latere to the pope, first for certain terms, afterwards for life. He exchanged the bishopric of Lincoln for that of Durham, and besides the three sees of Tournai, Durham, and York, he held the rich abbey of St. Albans in commendam, and had in farm the sees of Bath, Worcester, and Hereford, whose incumbents were foreigners. The magnificence and profuse dis

1 Hall's Chronicle, p. 515 (quarto ed.)

2 Cavendish's Life of Wolsey, Wordsworth's Eccl. Biog. vol. i.

3 For early life of Cardinal Wolsey, see Notes and Illustrations at the and of the chapter.

4 The cardinal was poisoned by one Rainaldi, an Italian, at the instigation, it was believed, of Sylvester de Giglis, Bishop of Worcester. See letters of Burbank and Pace, Calendar of State Papers, vol. i.

5 Cavendish, Life of Wolsey, Wordsworth's Eccl. Biog. i. 479. • Calendar of State Papers, ii. 1335-1552.

' Cavendish, Wordsworth, Eccl. Biog. i 1481.

play of the Cardinal were in proportion to his great revenues. These are fully described in his life by Cavendish, his gentlemanusher. They may have contributed to recommend him to the king, and to exalt him in the eyes of foreign ambassadors, but they rendered him odious in the country, and through the bitter feeling which they created tended to alienate the laity from the whole clerical order. By the nobles Wolsey was regarded as an upstart 1 who had usurped the great places which they looked upon as their own. By the Parliament and the middle classes he was hated, as the inflictor upon them of illegal taxation.2 To the lower orders, groaning under want and misery, his overweening splendour was argument enough for dislike. His sole friend was

the king, whose favour he did not scruple to seek by an excessive servility of adulation, which was the weakest part of his character. But though the object of aversion to his contemporaries, the verdict of modern inquirers is that Wolsey was a great man, one of the greatest statesmen that England has produced; one of the most enlightened, if not absolutely the most enlightened, churchman of his day. He had, indeed, great faults. But as a statesman he did more than any other man to exalt his country into European importance, and as a churchman he had the singular and almost unique merit of being disinclined to persecution and cruelty.

§ 6. At the accession of Henry to the throne the state of the clergy was very corrupt and disordered. We possess a full censure of this in a sermon preached by John Colet, Dean of St. Paul's, before the Convocation of Canterbury, December 1512.4 In this the dean declares that there never was more need of an ecclesiastical reformation. It might almost be said, "All that is in the Church is either the lust of the flesh, the lust of the eyes, or the pride of life. And first of this last. Clergymen run almost out of breath from one benefice to another, from the less to the greater, from the lower to the higher. They carry their heads so stately that they seem not to be put in the humble bishopric of

1 Polydore Virgil, in his invective, asserts that he was the son of a butcher. Polydore was a contemporary whom Wolsey had angered by sending him to prison for ill conduct. His very bitter attack will be found

in his History of England, p. 646 (ed. 1570).

2 Hallam, Constitutional History, i. 18.

3 For a severe criticism of Wolsey, see Mr. Hallam, Const. Hist. c. i. For an elaborate panegyric, see Mr. Brewer's Introduction to Calendar of State Papers, vol. iv.

4 His text was Romans xii. 2, "Be not conformed to this world, but he ye transformed by the renewing of your mind, that ye may prove what is that good and acceptable and perfect will of God." The sermon is printed in Knight's Life of Colet, also in Phænix, vol. ii., in an English translation from which this abridgment is taken.

Christ, but rather in the high lordship and power of the world. Next of the lust of the flesh. The far greater number of priests mind nothing but what will please their desires. They give themselves to feasts and banqueting, spend their time in vain babbling, are addicted to hunting and hawking, and, in a word, drowned in the delights of the world. The third great evil is covetousness. This abominable pestilence hath so entered into the minds of almost all priests, hath so blinded the eyes of their understanding, that we see nothing but that which seems to bring to us some gain. What other thing seek we now-a-days in the Church, but fat benefices and high promotion? And it were well if we minded the duty of those when we have them, but he that hath many great benefices minds not the duty of one small one. . . . The fourth evil that spotteth the Church is secular occupation, wherein priests and bishops now-a-days do busy themselves, becoming the servants rather of men than of God. Thus the dignity of priesthood is dishonoured, which is greater than that either of kings or emperors, equal with the dignity of angels. The beautiful order and holy dignity in the Church is confused, when the highest in the Church do meddle with earthly things. In this age we are sensible of the contradiction of lay people, but they are not so much contrary to us as we are to ourselves. We are now also troubled with heretics, but their heresies are not so pestilent and pernicious to us and the people, as the naughty lives of the priests." Wherefore the dean would exhort them to reformation. No new laws, he says, are wanted-only that the old ones be observed. There are sufficient laws against all ecclesiastical abuses; against the giving of orders to unfit persons; against undue exercise of patronage; against non-residence (which causes the duties of a benefice to be done by vicars, "foolish and mute, and oftentimes wicked"); against secular employments of clergy; against simony; against undue appointment of bishops; against their absenting themselves from their dioceses; against the evil practices of their courts. But all these good laws have fallen into disuse. It is for the bishops to begin the amendment. If they would have the people to live aright, they must set them the example. They will thus make the people better disposed towards them, and no longer inclined to drag them before secular judges, and to harass and vex them.

§ 7. Such was the substance of this famous sermon, which, delivered by a doctor of high reputation and elected by the archbishop before the assembled clergy of the province, clearly indicates not only the corrupted state of the clerical body at that time, but also the alienation of the laity from them, and the bitter feeling which prevailed between laymen and clerks.

§ & This bitter feeling is illustrated by various events of the period. One great and special cause of it was the unfair advantage which the clergy were held to possess through the privilege which was generally described as Benefit of Clergy." While all the best offices of the State were absorbed by the clergy, by the peculiar character of the law the clergy enjoyed an almost absolute immunity from the punishments and penalties for transgression to which the laymen were subject. Various attempts had been made at different times to get rid of or to abridge this anomaly. Under Henry VI. an improvement had been made which obliged clerks to plead their privilege either at arraignment or conviction, and did not allow the bishop at once to claim them previous to any trial. Under Henry VII. a further advance was made. It was enacted that clerks convicted of felony should be burned in the hand.2

§ 9. Now, at the beginning of the reign of Henry VIII. a bold attempt was made by the House of Commons still further to restrict this obnoxious privilege. The House of Commons passed an Act to the effect that persons committing sacrilege, murderers, and robbers, should be denied the benefit of clergy. The Lords refused to accept this, whereupon it was modified by the Commons. The higher orders of bishops, priests, and deacons were exempted from the Act, and its duration was limited till the next Parliament. With these provisions the Act passed (Jan. 26, 1513).3 It created great excitement among the clergy, who saw in it the first serious attempt to take from them a highly cherished privilege. Accordingly every effort was made to prepare the way for the reversal of the decision of Parliament.

§ 10. While an ill feeling was thus developed between the two orders, the strange and mysterious case of Richard Hunne came to aggravate it. Hunne was a merchant tailor of London, who, having lost a child, refused to pay the accustomed mortuary fee to the parish, and being cited to the spiritual court, sued the priest by the advice of his lawyers, under the statute of Præmunire. Upon this the priest changed his tactics, and accused Hunne of heresy. No proof was needed for this accusation to be acted on. The bishop or his commissary could proceed ex officio. Hunne was committed to the Lollards' Tower, and was 1 For origin and history of this privilege, see Notes and Illustrations at the end of the chapter. The privilege belonged not only to those in holy orders, but also to those in the minor orders, and to their servants. 24 Henry VII., c. 13. See Hallam, Const. Hist. i. 56.

34 Henry VIII. c. 2.

That is the statute of 16 Richard II., which forbade any English subject to exercise a jurisdiction derived from a foreign source.

soon afterwards found dead in his prison. Apparently he had been made away with, and afterwards hanged as though it were his own act. This, at least, was the finding of the coroner's jury, who further found that Dr. Horsey, chancellor of the Bishop of London, was accessory to the murder. As though in contempt of these proceedings, the Bishop of London ordered Hunne's body to be burnt for heresy. Dr. Horsey was put on his trial, but his plea of not guilty was accepted, and he was allowed to escape.1 A very angry feeling against the clergy was developed by this incident among the citizens of London.

§ 11. The clergy, however, do not seem to have rightly interpreted the state of public feeling. They even seem to have judged the opportunity favourable for recovering what they had lost by the late Act of Parliament in the way of clerical immunities. It was supposed that a popular appeal by a sermon at Paul's Cross might be useful in inducing the people to help them. The orator chosen was Richard Kidderminster, Abbot of Winchcomb, who is several times mentioned at this period as a preacher before the king. This divine declared that the late Act, by which murderers, robbers of churches, and housebreakers were deprived of the benefit of clergy, unless they were in the higher orders, was "against the law of God and the liberties of the Church, and that all the lords, who were parties to that Act, had by so doing incurred the censures of the Church." 2 The preacher ventured to produce in his sermon a Decretal, which, in direct opposition to the Act of Parliament, declared that clerks even in criminal cases were absolutely sacred, and exempted from the control of secular judges.

§ 12. This caused great offence to some of the temporal lords, who appealed to the king in the matter. Henry ordered that the point should be argued before him at his palace of Blackfriars. The Act of Parliament was defended by Dr. Henry Standish, Warden of the Observant Franciscans, a very able disputant. The ground he took was that an Act which was for the weal of the whole nation could not be against the liberties of the Church. He met the Decretal produced by quoting another Decretal, which

1 Hall's Chronicle, p. 573, sq. Sir T. More, who had given much attention to this case, is of opinion that Dr. Horsey was not guilty. At the same time he admits that the jurors were "right honest men, and found the verdict as they themselves thought in their own consciences." More's Works, p. 238.

It shows a strange

2 Calendar of State Papers, Henry VIII., ii. 351. want of policy that this sermon should have been preached, as the Act of 1513 was only in force until the meeting of the next Parliament, and thus was about immediately to expire.