was rooted not in dissatisfaction with ecclesiastical performance but rather in worldly envy. The Church owned a lot of land. The laity – particularly the higher laity – coveted the huge incomes of the bigger abbeys, the grander bishoprics. In Scotland, abbots lived like lairds. In England, they behaved like country gentry, hunting and generally enjoying themselves.
Among the ranks of the grand and the powerful, occasional moves were made to introduce cautious but meaningful change within the Church. Pope Leo X convened in 1513 a five-year council (the Fifth Council of the Lateran, instituted by the warrior Pope Julius II) which came up with some modest but realistic proposals for reform. In the year the council concluded, a group of senior clergy and laymen gathered in Rome with the aim of drawing up a blueprint for regenerating the Church from within. Among them were two outstanding figures, Gian Pietro Caraffa and Gasparo Contarini. The former was, many years later, to become a fierce reforming pope (and a very unpopular one); the latter was to become by far the most impressive Catholic evangelical of his time. But their deliberations in 1517 came too late to prevent the conflagration that was already sparking.
If we return to Scotland, we can see in the career of the pluralist Andrew Forman much of what was wrong as well as some of what was right. Forman was educated at St Andrews University and worked for the Earl of Angus before entering the royal service. He represented James IV in Rome and then helped to negotiate the marriage of Margaret Tudor to James. He was appointed Bishop of Moray in 1501. James sent him south to congratulate Henry VIII on his accession in 1509. In the following year, Forman was working on the continent, trying to whip up support for James’s plan for a new grand crusade led by the king himself. Forman, following James’s instructions, presided over the Scottish side in the diplomatic negotiations that led to the renewal of the Auld Alliance, which led in turn to the debacle of Flodden in 1513.
Later, the eminent Scottish scholar and teacher of James VI, George Buchanan, was to blacken Forman’s name, suggesting that he was a duplicitous self-serving rogue whose advice had led directly to the king’s ill-fated revival of the alliance with France. It is true that Forman, an early advocate of peace with England, had changed his position to become a firm supporter of the French alliance. But James IV was a forceful king, and Forman was probably only doing his master’s bidding as best he could. James’s bastard son Alexander, the archbishop of St Andrews, was one of those killed at Flodden, a battle which Forman managed to avoid. Alexander’s death prompted a grotesque and unseemly fight for the archbishopric involving candidates such as Forman, Elphinstone, James Beaton and John Hepburn.
Pope Leo X, showing almost unbelievable insensitivity to the demoralised and newly defeated nation, ignored these credible Scottish candidates and tried to impose his own young nephew, Cardinal Innocenzo Cibo, on St Andrews (thus also indicating that the Scottish Catholic Church at this time was hardly a national church). Eventually, Forman prevailed. He already possessed the bishopric of Moray, the archbishopric of Bourges in France, and the abbacies of Pittenweem, Dryburgh and Arbroath. He was also abbot of Cottingham in England. He had to shed these offices when he took up his post at St Andrews, though he was able to retain yet another abbacy, that of Dunfermline. He died in 1521, having begun, in a modest way, to show some signs of being a reformer, though he also wrote a tract against Luther.
The nearest English equivalent to Forman was Thomas Wolsey, the son of an Ipswich butcher, who took his MA at Oxford when he was only 15. He entered the service of Henry VII as a young man, and carried out a series of diplomatic missions for him. One of these was a notable failure. In 1508, Henry VII sent Wolsey to Scotland to negotiate with James IV on the release of the Earl of Arran, James’s cousin, whom Henry was holding in detention at his court. Arran had been returning to Scotland through England after a diplomatic mission to France, where he had been negotiating a revival of the Auld Alliance. Although James IV had signed a perpetual peace with Henry, the Scottish king was always keen to reopen the old French alliance. When Wolsey arrived in Edinburgh, James – typically – was inspecting a gunpowder factory; when Wolsey eventually established contact with James, he found him inconsistent and elusive. After several meetings, Wolsey returned south, having accomplished nothing.
After Henry VII’s death in 1509, Wolsey’s rise was accelerated. In 1511, he became a member of Henry VIII’s council, and soon its dominant figure. Wolsey was a superb administrator, and Henry VIII trusted him absolutely. Wolsey actually encouraged the king to go hunting, saying he could look after state affairs; and the king required little persuasion. Soon, in Henry’s regular absence, Wolsey was in effect governing England. At the same time, his ecclesiastical rise progressed smoothly: he became abbot of St Albans, dean of Lincoln, Bishop of Lincoln and Archbishop of York. He drew the considerable revenues from these offices. He had an illegitimate son and daughter. The son was made dean of Wells Cathedral when he was still a schoolboy. Wolsey became a cardinal and the papal legate in England.
In 1513, it was Wolsey who drew up the masterplan for Henry’s invasion of northern France. At the same time, he was carefully accumulating enormous wealth, which he flaunted. In 1517, the papal nuncio in London reported that he and other foreign diplomats regarded Wolsey not so much as a cardinal but as ‘a second king’. Wolsey also wanted to become pope and was an official candidate in two papal elections.
Despite his role in preparing for war in 1513, Wolsey was generally a man of peace; like his first master, Henry VII, he had an innate dislike of warfare. In 1518, he presided over the negotiations which led to the Treaty of London, which appeared to unite all Christendom. But not for long. Wolsey was unable to keep in check Henry VIII’s constant bellicose tendencies, and by 1522 England was once again at war with France.
Towards the end of his busy life, Forman had begun to flirt with reform. Wolsey never did so. Just before he died, at Leicester Abbey, he admitted ruefully that he had served his king much more diligently than his God. The Scot Andrew Forman and the Englishman Thomas Wolsey were both typical of a special breed of man who flourished in the immediate pre-Reformation period: they combined consummate diplomatic skills with superb administrative ability. Such men were usually pluralists, but their various ecclesiastical positions did not mean that they devoted much of their energy to Church affairs. Their first loyalty appears to be have been to themselves, not their Church; and their second loyalty was to their secular careers, and thus their secular masters. The Church generally came a poor third. Wolsey’s fall came when he at last discovered that he could not serve both his pope and his king.
They were clever, flexible and urbane, but they were hardly good Christians despite their proliferation of Church responsibilities. Able and diplomatically adept as they were, they exemplified much of what was wrong in the pre-Reformation Church. A few years later, the greatest of all the early English Reformation figures, the numinous William Tyndale, was to write:
To preach God’s word is too much for half a man. And to minister a temporal kingdom is too much for half a man also. Either requireth an whole man. One therefore cannot well do both. He that avengeth himself on every trifle is not meet to preach the patience of Christ, how that man ought to forgive and to suffer all things. He that is overwhelmed with all manner riches and doth but seek more daily, is not meet to preach poverty. He that will obey no man is not meet to preach how we ought to obey all men.
The condition of the one, official, united European Church was thus exceedingly problematic. Its most able servants did not regard the service of their Church as a priority. There were constant stirrings of dissatisfaction, but these never merged into a cohesive movement; the expressions of disquiet, while sometimes strong, were sporadic and often recondite and cerebral. If someone could be found to combine this cerebral unease with an authentic populism, then the Church – and the world – might well be rocked. Savonarola nearly did so, but his exploits were confined to Florence.
There was no sense that the prevalent anticlericalism was about to explode into a great revolt by the lay people. There was much corruption and cynicism and abuse of privilege. People complained about it bitterly, yet they also tolerated it. What was about to happen was unlike, for example, the
