Tudors (History of England Vol 2) (5 page)

Enclosure itself had been a fact of farming ever since the fourteenth century, when the ‘pestilence’ or ‘black death’ took a large toll upon the population. With the lowered demand for corn, the land had to be put to different uses. Fields lying idle were cheap, also, and a steady process of purchase began that continued well into the eighteenth century. There were barters and exchanges between farmers, with the wealthiest or the most resourceful getting the best of the bargain. Many of the once open fields were enclosed with hedges of hawthorn. It was estimated that the value of enclosed land was one and a half times that of the rest. The process could not be prevented or halted. It came to a crisis, as we shall see, a generation later.

The state of the realm was still very largely the state of an agricultural society. It was comprised of freeholders and leaseholders, customary tenants and labourers, all owing allegiance to their lord. Their houses were grouped closely together, with the fields stretching around them. It was a society immensely susceptible to the vagaries of the weather, where one bad harvest could spell disaster.

In what had always been a world of tradition and of custom, the previous ties of the manor system were now giving way to the new laws of the market. Custom was being replaced by law and contract. Communal effort was slowly supplanted by competition. ‘Now the world is so altered for the poor tenant,’ one contemporary wrote, ‘that he stands in bodily fear of his greedy neighbour – so that, two or three years before his lease ends, he must bow to his lord for a new lease.’ The larger farmers wished to sell their produce to the rising populations of the towns and the cities; the smaller farmers were reduced to subsistence agriculture, by which
they ate what they grew. Land was no longer the common ground of society, the management of which entailed social responsibilities. It had become a simple investment. So the customary rent for a tenant was replaced by what was known as the ‘rack rent’ or market rent. The process was very slow and very long, not really coming to an end until the eighteenth century. Yet the communal farming of the past, with its own co-operative rituals and customs, was not destined to endure. In this respect the movement of agriculture may be compared with the movement of religion.

There is indeed an affinity. The common fields along the coastal plains of Westmorland and Northumberland, for example, harboured an attachment to the old religion. The corn-growing villages of East Anglia and eastern Kent, engaged in the commercial production of food, were committed to the reform of faith. It seems clear enough that religious radicalism prospered in the eastern counties, and was held back in the north and in the west. Yet there are so many exceptions and special cases that even these generalizations are susceptible to doubt. The eastern part of Sussex espoused the new faith, for example, while the western part supported the old. It can only be said with some degree of certainty that the time of the ‘new men’ was approaching.

In 1517 or 1518 some Cambridge scholars began to meet at the White Horse tavern in that city where, like undergraduates before and since, they debated the intellectual issues of the time. The pressing matters of this time, however, were all concerned with religion; it was at the heart of sixteenth-century debate. Some of these scholars, with all the ardour of youth, were attracted to new and potentially subversive doctrines. Reform was in the air. Some of them wished to return to the simple piety of the movements known as the Poor Catholics or the Humiliati; they wished to eschew the pomp and ceremony of the medieval Church, and to cultivate what was called
devotio moderna
, ‘modern devotion’. Others wished to return to the word of the Scriptures, and in particular of the New Testament.

The published work of Desiderius Erasmus had already brought a purer spirit into theological enquiry. While Lady Margaret Professor of Divinity at Queens’ College, Cambridge, he completed a Greek and Latin translation of the New Testament which seemed destined to supersede the old ‘Vulgate’ that had been in use for a thousand years. Erasmus, by an act of historical scholarship, brought back something of the air of early Christian revelation.

He believed that the rituals and the formal theology of the Church were less important than the spiritual reception of the message
of the Scriptures; an inward faith, both in God’s grace and in the redemptive power of His Son, was of more efficacy than conformity to external worship. ‘If you approach the Scriptures in all humility,’ he wrote, ‘you will perceive that you have been breathed upon by the Holy Will.’ By means of satire he also attacked the excessive devotion to relics, the too frequent resort to pilgrimages, and the degeneration of the monastic orders. He rarely mentions the sacraments that were part of the divine machinery of the orthodox faith.

He never advanced into heretical doctrine, but he was as much a dissolvent of conventional piety as Luther or Wycliffe. Without Erasmus, neither Luther nor Tyndale could have translated the Greek testament. He also entertained the hope that the Scriptures would be freely available to everyone, an aspiration that, at a later date, would be deemed almost heretical. One of the scholars who attended the meetings in the White Horse tavern, Thomas Bilney, declared that on reading Erasmus ‘at last I heard of Jesus’. Bilney was later to be burned at the stake.

Erasmus has conventionally been described as a ‘humanist’, although the word itself did not appear in this sense until the beginning of the nineteenth century. In general terms humanism, or the ‘new learning’ at the beginning of the sixteenth century, concerned itself with a renovation of education and scholarship by the pursuit of newly found or newly translated classical models. It brought with it a profound scepticism of medieval authority, and of the scholastic theology that supported it. The new learning opened the windows of the Church in search of light and fresh air. The somewhat commonplace anti-clericalism of the Lollards had become outmoded in an age of constructive criticism and renovation, and it seemed likely that the universal Church would be able to renew itself.

In the autumn of 1517 Martin Luther spoke out, lending a more fiery and dogmatic charge to the general calls for reform. He was close to Erasmus in many respects, but he quickly moved beyond him in his assertion of justification by faith alone. Faith comes as a gift from God to the individual without the interference of rituals and priests. The Church cannot, and should not, come between Christ and the aspiring soul. A person saved by the
sacrifice of Christ will be granted eternal life. Grace will lift the soul to heaven. For those not saved by faith, the only destination is the everlasting fire.

In a series of pamphlets Luther attacked the beliefs and hierarchies of the orthodox faith. The pope in Rome was the Antichrist. There were only two sacraments, those of baptism and holy communion, rather than the seven adumbrated by the Church. Every good Christian man was already a priest. Grace and faith were enough for salvation. The words of Scripture should stand alone. ‘I will talk no more with this animal,’ Cardinal Cajetan wrote after conferring with him in 1518, ‘for he has deep eyes, and wonderful speculations in his head.’

Luther had been read and discussed in Cambridge ever since the monk had nailed his ninety-five theses to the door of the castle church in Wittenberg. The White Horse tavern was nicknamed ‘Germany’ as the Lutheran creed was discussed within its walls, and the participants were known as ‘Germans’. They were, however, an eclectic group; among them were Thomas Cranmer and William Tyndale, Nicholas Ridley and Matthew Parker. Two of them became archbishops, seven became bishops, and eight became martyrs burned at the stake. This was an exhilarating, and also a dangerous, time.

The reading of Luther deepened the instinctive beliefs of some who debated in the White Horse. The doctrine of justification by faith alone has no parallel in Wycliffe, but many of the other anti-clerical doctrines had been expressed for the previous two centuries. Never before, however, had they been shaped with such cogency and coherence. The pulpit of the little Cambridge church of St Edward, King and Martyr, became the platform from which preachers such as Thomas Bilney, Robert Barnes and Hugh Latimer proclaimed the new truths. Faith only did justify, and works did not profit. If you can only once believe that Jesus Christ shed His precious blood, and died on the cross for your sins, the same belief will be sufficient for your salvation. There was no need for priests, or bishops, or even cardinals.

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.