GREAT RELIGIOUS MOVEMENT IN ENGLAND
FALL OF WOLSEY
A.D. 1529
JOHN RICHARD GREEN
The "New Learning" which had been slowly spreading from Italy over all Europe, did not markedly affect England until the sixteenth century. There the long Wars of the Roses had not only gone nigh to exterminating the old nobility, but had so distracted men's minds from more peaceful pursuits that little note was taken of the intellectual movement abroad. Under Henry VII and Henry VIII all this changed. These Tudor monarchs were indeed tyrants over England, but they brought her peace—and time for thought. Under the leadership of the celebrated Dutch scholar Erasmus, and the almost equally renowned Englishmen, Sir Thomas More and Dean Colet, the land awakened about 1500 to a new life of study and of culture, whose principles spread rapidly among the upper classes.
When news of Luther's religious revolt reached England, the leaders of the New Learning were at first inclined to favor his ideas. But the two movements, one scholarly and calm, the other impassioned and intense, soon parted company, as Green shows in his justly famous account.
The true ruler of England at the time was the "great cardinal," Wolsey, whose brain long enabled him to play upon King Henry as a toreador does upon a bull, guiding at will the frenzied rushes of the mighty brute. In 1521, the period when the following account begins, Wolsey was fifty years old. He had risen from being the studious son of a grazier and wool merchant to be a dean of the Church under Henry VII, and a bishop, cardinal and lord chancellor, of England under Henry VIII. His ambition to be pope was thwarted by the emperor Charles V, but he was "cardinal legate," having control of the Catholic Church throughout England; and it was said of him that in all European affairs he was "seven times more powerful than the Pope."
In England Luther's protest seemed at first to find no echo. King Henry VIII was, both on political and on religious grounds, firm on the papal side. England and Rome were drawn to a close alliance by the identity of their political position. Each was hard pressed between the same great powers; Rome had to hold its own between the masters of Southern and the masters of Northern Italy, as England had to hold her own between the rulers of France and of the Netherlands. From the outset of his reign to the actual break with Clement VII the policy of Henry is always at one with that of the papacy. Nor were the King's religious tendencies hostile to it. He was a trained theologian and proud of his theological knowledge, but to the end his convictions remained firmly on the side of the doctrines which Luther denied. In 1521, therefore, he entered the lists against Luther with an "Assertion of the Seven Sacraments," for which he was rewarded by Leo with the title of "Defender of the Faith." The insolent abuse of the reformer's answer called More and Fisher into the field.
The influence of the "New Learning" was now strong at the English court. Colet and Grocyn were among its foremost preachers; Linacre was Henry's physician; More was a privy councillor; Pace was one of the secretaries of state; Tunstall was master of the rolls. And as yet the New Learning, though scared by Luther's intemperate language, had steadily backed him in his struggle. Erasmus pleaded for him with the Emperor. Ulrich von Hutten attacked the friars in satires and invectives as violent as his own. But the temper of the Renaissance was even more antagonistic to the temper of Luther than that of Rome itself.