Free Bloody Mary by Carolly Erickson Page A

of York and the bishopric of Bath and Wells—and in addition he enjoyed the income from the bishopric of Worcester whose bishop, an Italian, was out of the country. Beyond his own numerous offices Wolsey gained most of the profits from the church livings bestowed on his bastard son Thomas Wynter. While he was still a schoolboy Wynter became dean of Wells; later he was made provost of Beverly, archdeacon of both York and Richmond, and chancellor of Salisbury, holding in all a group of livings earning some twenty-seven hundred pounds a year. 2
    Cardinal Wolsey was fast becoming a symbol of the worldly power and wealth concentrated in the English church. In the king’s name he claimed authority over every other noble or cleric in the land, and did not hesitate to bully and rough up foreign dignitaries if they threatened England’s interests. He caused a scandal in 1516 by seizing the papal nuncio Chieregato, taking him into a private chamber and “laying hands on him,” demanding to know whether Chieregato was conspiring with the French and Venetians. In “fierce and rude language,” Wolsey made it clear that unless the nuncio confessed freely, he would be put to the rack, and in fact he was not allowed to leave the kingdom until his house had been ransacked and all his papers and ciphers seized and read. 3 On another occasion Wolsey summoned Giustinian and threatened him in the strongest possible language against sending dispatches abroad without his personal consent, “under pain of the indignation of the king.” As he spoke Wolsey became more and more beside himself, until in his frustration he began to gnaw at the cane he was holding in his hand and scrape it roughly against his teeth. 4
    If Wolsey did no more than threaten, other clerics were not above criminal intrigues. In 1514 Cardinal Bainbridge, archbishop of York, was poisoned at Rome by a self-proclaimed agent of the bishop of Worcester. Conclusive proof of the bishop’s guilt was lacking, but it was thought the matter was hushed up because Wolsey succeeded to Bainbridge’s see and later Worcester helped Wolsey to become cardinal. 5
    Clearly the English church was marred by abuses, vice and worldliness,but the idea of a fundamental change of religious sentiment was as foreign to the English as it was welcome to Luther’s eager supporters in Germany. If the Lutherans were ridiculing the veneration of relics, the English were still taking to the roads in spring and summer on pilgrimages to the shrines of St. Cuthbert at Durham, the two Hughs at Lincoln, the Saxon St. Etheldreda at Ely, St. Joseph of Arimathea at the holy shrine of Glastonbury and, most beloved of all, the jewel-encrusted tomb of St. Thomas Becket at Canterbury. If Lutheran doctrine condemned the sale of indulgences—papal pardons which claimed to shorten the sinner’s time in purgatory—the English were still moved to buy them for themselves and their dead relatives. Thomas More conjured a piteous image of the torment of souls in purgatory, condemned by God’s inexorable judgment to writhe in fire hotter than any earthly flame, “sleepless, restless, burning and broiling in the dark fire one long night of many days,” and torn by “cruel, doomed sprites, odious, envious and hateful.” To ease this unthinkable anguish English men and women were glad to pay for indulgences that promised them a year, or five hundred years, or, as in one formula from Salisbury, 32,755 years of pardon. The love of saints, the fear of punishment for sin, the place of the church feasts in the timeless cycle of the agricultural year—these and not theological disputes were for the majority of the English the unchallenged substance of belief in the 1520s.
    The general indifference of his subjects to the new doctrines from Germany put no damper on King Henry’s enthusiasm for his new project. He rushed ahead with his treatise during May and June of 1521, calling it the
Assertion of the Seven Sacraments
and