Lucy Wooding: Made to Eat Wax

Lucy Wooding

In a 2005 poll to find the most infamous British villains of the last millennium, Thomas Arundel unexpectedly won the 15th-century nomination, emerging in the public eye as more dastardly than Richard III and as wicked as Jack the Ripper and Oswald Mosley. This startling condemnation reflects Arundel’s place in popular Protestant mythology as the man who persecuted the Lollards and – so the story goes – banned the Bible in English. Chris Given-Wilson’s assessment of Arundel’s life suggests that there are a number of things wrong with the historical caricature.

Archbishop of Canterbury and five times Lord Chancellor, Arundel was Henry IV’s closest friend and ally, and one of the most eloquent orators of his time. He was a bishop for four decades and chancellor – intermittently – for nearly three. As the youngest son of the third earl of Arundel, the richest lord in England, he was wealthy, influential and related to most of the ruling class. It would be easy to cast him as the kind of entitled, worldly cleric who gave the pre-Reformation Church a bad name, and such has been his reputation, but he also carried a heavy load of responsibility with sincerity and skill. He was liked and trusted by many – including some of his political opponents – in an age when betrayal was commonplace.

Arundel came to prominence during the troubled reign of Richard II, who had inherited the throne at the age of ten and who in adulthood displayed almost every trait considered deplorable in a king. Richard was vengeful, unpredictable and spendthrift, gave his favourites too much sway and was vicious in pursuit of his critics. The suggestion, in a Commons bill of 1396, that the court was needlessly extravagant led to the complainant being condemned to death for treason, until Arundel stepped in and secured the man’s pardon. This affair may have been staged to show the king’s power and his mercy, but it’s clear that Arundel was managing a volatile monarch. When Richard asked to be anointed king a second time, with holy oil said to have been given to St Thomas Becket by the Virgin Mary, Arundel refused: once was enough. And when, in 1387, Richard asked why the Lords Appellant – his chief critics and opponents – had not answered his summons to Westminster, Arundel was blunt: ‘They do not consider you trustworthy.’

His travails as chancellor were only just beginning, however. The country, already scarred by the Black Death and shaken by the Peasants’ Revolt of 1381, was now sliding deeper into crisis. As Richard grew in confidence, his vengeance became increasingly ugly. Arundel was compelled to hand over his own brother, Richard Fitzalan, fourth earl of Arundel, one of the Appellants who had protested against Richard’s abuses of power. Arundel made the king swear on the sacrament that he would do his brother no harm. But Fitzalan was found guilty of treason and beheaded on Tower Hill. His was at least a comparatively dignified death: a fellow Appellant, the Duke of Gloucester, Edward III’s son and the king’s uncle, was murdered on Richard’s orders, smothered with a feather bed in a Calais hostel. In 1397, Arundel himself was accused of treason as he stood beside the king in Parliament. He was tried in absentia and banished.

Arundel’s career demonstrates the extent to which political stability in the late 14th century required the collaboration of all those who wielded any kind of authority. He did his best to maintain unity. Even after he had been disgraced, in his last interview with the king, Arundel reportedly expounded on the extravagance and corruption of the royal court. His time in exile, chiefly spent in Florence, must have brought some respite from the blood-stained crises he had been living through; he described it as an ‘earthly paradise’.

Richard II was deposed in 1399. It was an extraordinary development at a time when kings ruled by divine sanction. But Richard had failed to see that arbitrary rule was unsustainable. The accession of his cousin, Henry Bolingbroke, as Henry IV, was not just a move from Plantagenet dynasty to Lancastrian. It embodied the political principle that kingship could not survive when it was partisan and vindictive. Bolingbroke’s bid for the throne grew out of the injustice he had suffered from Richard II, who tried to deny his inheritance. His claim to the Duchy of Lancaster expanded to encompass Richard’s overthrow and his own accession to the throne, to which, as Edward III’s grandson, he had a claim.

Arundel met Bolingbroke in Paris in February 1399. In May, Richard sailed to Ireland on a military campaign and Bolingbroke saw his chance. As Given-Wilson writes,

for the next six months – from their return to England, through the almost bloodless campaign culminating in Richard’s capture, the negotiations leading to his forced abdication, the stage management of Henry’s usurpation, the brittle splendour of his coronation and the tricky balance of conciliation and retribution which characterised his first parliament – Arundel was constantly at Henry’s side.

In siding with Bolingbroke, Arundel had broken his vow of allegiance to the king – no small matter for a member of the priesthood. His loyalty to Henry IV seems to have been less about personal gain than about a broader commitment to good governance. Having made his choice, he stood by it. The new king had to face down the Welsh rebellion under Owain Glyn Dŵr and uprisings from those still loyal to Richard II; later, as he grew frail, he found himself bitterly at odds with his impatient son and heir, the future Henry V. Arundel stuck by him throughout. Henry IV died in 1413, in the Jerusalem Chamber at Westminster, the nearest he got to the Holy City he longed to see again. Arundel was dismissed as chancellor within hours. He crowned Henry V as king, but didn’t have his confidence. In his will, the old king left the decisions regarding his burial and chantry in Canterbury to ‘the discretion of my cousin the archbishop’, whom in this, as in so much else, he trusted.

In the anonymous chronicle the Gesta Henrici Quinti, Arundel is described as ‘a man of exalted ancestry and profound wisdom, a noble defender of the Church, whom neither good fortune made proud nor adversity cast down, who more than any man anywhere since ancient times fought Christ’s battles against the seditious’. Yet ever since the Reformation he has been vilified as the man whose campaign against the Lollards postponed the evangelical awakening of the English people for more than a century.

To later chroniclers, in particular the Elizabethan martyrologist John Foxe, the Lollards were heroic proto-Protestants who had advocated for an English Bible long before the arrival of the first printed versions in the 1520s and 1530s. Lollards deplored the wealth of the Church, its love of opulent decorations and neglect of the poor. They challenged clerical authority and brought into question the central eucharistic doctrine of transubstantiation. Arundel not only oversaw the prosecution of several Lollards for heresy but drew up a set of regulations, known as Arundel’s Constitutions, which sought to suppress their teachings. For this, Protestants have hated him down the ages. In 1540, his successor as archbishop, Thomas Cranmer, razed Arundel’s chantry chapel to the ground, leaving only, as one 17th-century antiquarian put it, ‘a bare gravestone levelled with the floor, with the brass all shamefully torn away’.

Protestants in later centuries came to feel strongly about vernacular scripture, and considered access to the English Bible a form of spiritual liberation. Arundel, however, lived at a time when very few people could read at all; experience had taught him that many of those who did used their learning to cause trouble. Lollards not only challenged religious orthodoxy, they posed a political threat. Indeed, the last major episode of Arundel’s career was the rebellion of the Lollard knight John Oldcastle. Even so, the Protestant caricature is wrong. Arundel did not ban the English Bible outright. The Constitutions of 1407-8 prohibited unlicensed translation and required ecclesiastical approval to own an English Bible, which many of the faithful sought and were granted. Arundel wanted to be sure that only reliable translations circulated – a concern shared by later Protestant regimes: the Douay-Rheims Bible, for instance, produced by English Catholics in exile in the late 16th century, was banned in Elizabethan and Jacobean England.

There are around 250 surviving manuscript copies of the English Bible from this period, invariably referred to as ‘Wycliffite Bibles’, after John Wycliffe, and hailed as testimony to a religious movement that withstood persecution and opposed corrupt and superstitious beliefs and practices. Leaving aside the obvious prejudice against medieval Catholicism, most of these Bibles were not Wycliffite at all. A small minority had prefaces indicating Lollard provenance, but most were for orthodox use, owned by monastic houses, pious laymen, clerics and, in one case, Henry VI. They show that Arundel’s rules did not prevent many 15th-century believers from gaining permission for their English Bibles. Richard Rolle’s English translation of the Psalms was widely circulated and there were debates at Oxford on the subject of Bible translation. In his funeral sermon for Queen Anne, who was Bohemian by birth, Arundel himself went so far as to praise her for having an English – rather than the usual Latin – version of the Gospels. She had made sure, of course, to check with Arundel that the translation was ‘good and true’.

The Lollard priest William Sawtre, whose trial was overseen by Arundel, was celebrated by 16th-century Protestants as a martyr. The truth is more complicated. He believed he was ‘sent from God’ and threatened England with foreign conquest. Heretics were rarely content with proposing reform of religious life; they usually had a political agenda too. Already tainted by the Peasants’ Revolt of 1381, which had demonstrated the link between religious and political radicalism, those who argued for Church reform were generally viewed as potential troublemakers in the political sphere. The legislation ‘Against the Lollards’, which passed on the last day of Parliament in December 1406, was aimed in part at those who claimed Richard II was still alive and living in Scotland. The new monarchy was too precarious for Arundel not to feel worried about attacks on religion.

Given-Wilson, perhaps unconsciously, condones a certain amount of Protestant myth-making. He uncritically casts Sawtre as ‘England’s Protestant protomartyr’, which is highly questionable. Lollards were not Protestants and many historians have argued that they were not even part of a coherent movement. It is possible to trace the existence of Lollard communities, but these pose a problem. Like other heretical groups, they often become visible in the historical record only if their suppression was documented, and the interrogations to which they were subjected reflect the anxieties of the Church authorities rather than the convictions of those supplying the answers. Many people caught up in anti-Lollard repression may have been nothing more than unusually zealous or idiosyncratic believers to whom official heresy proceedings imparted a false impression of doctrinal clarity or group identity. Sawtre’s trial before Convocation (the Church parliament) lasted several days, but his account of his own beliefs was neither clear nor consistent. His distinguishing feature may have been his defiance of authority.

More problematic is the implication that some of the best things about late medieval religion were an early indication of future reforms. Nicholas Love, Carthusian prior of Mount Grace in Yorkshire, wrote a book called The Mirror of the Blessed Life of Jesus Christ, which became a devotional bestseller in the early 15th century. It was a work of profound and humane piety, aimed at ordinary people, for whom it provided a programme of daily devotion. Given-Wilson describes it as catering to orthodox believers who nevertheless ‘yearned for less ritualised forms of worship, less distance between them and God … in order to achieve a more personal, affective dialogue with Jesus’. In an otherwise balanced book, this is an astonishing endorsement of the notion that Protestantism brought a more ‘personal’ relationship with God and that late medieval religion was distant and pompous. It could be argued that Protestantism actually created far greater distance between ordinary people and God – at least initially – by making that relationship so dependent on literacy. Any detailed appreciation of pre-Reformation religion shows the many and varied routes – literary, ritualised, liturgical, communal, musical, visual and material – by which the ordinary believer, regardless of education, could come close to Christ. Love’s work is a prime example, and to imply that it was proto-Protestant is a misreading of a text that reveals the strength and creativity of late medieval devotion.

It was the secular arm of the law that executed Sawtre, who was one of only two Lollards to be condemned to death under Henry IV. Arundel wanted to save heretics, not burn them, as is testified by the many hours he devoted to conversations with those accused, trying to explain to them where they had erred. He was also open to the idea of religious reform. Love wrote under Arundel’s patronage, complying with the guidelines laid down in the Constitutions. But Christendom had been in a state of conflict for decades, thanks to the Great Schism between warring popes in Rome and Avignon, and there were good reasons for an archbishop to tread carefully. Wycliffe had a Bohemian equivalent in Jan Hus, and more contemporary copies of Wycliffe’s works survived in Bohemia than in England. The conflict between the Hussites and their Catholic opponents led to fifteen years of war. Arundel’s wariness regarding religious initiatives is not hard to understand.

As archbishop, Arundel was responsible for everything from negotiations with fractious popes to adjudicating whether a priest really did keep a concubine or whether a church needed Mass books. Here again the preservation of social order depended on the co-operation of all involved. Arundel had no mechanisms for resolving parish disputes other than to draw on the consensus of the fidedigni, ‘trustworthy men’ who would come together to decide the truth of any allegations. As Given-Wilson points out, this was the case at every level of Church government, which is why papal bulls often began with the words si ita est – ‘if it is as alleged’. A new piece of evidence could send everybody back to the beginning. Arundel himself was kept especially busy. We find him supervising the royal hospitals, helping merchants to recover their debts and on one occasion dealing with a blocked road in the middle of London. Henry constantly sought his help with tasks as varied as appointing a sheriff, taking action against a misbehaving nun and dealing with a woman who was pestering him for protection against her creditors – ‘you too will tire of her company and annoying persistence,’ the king observed.

Arundel knew how to get on with people. He even managed to remain on good terms with the monastic community at Canterbury, which traditionally had uneasy relations with the bishopric. The 13th-century archbishop Edmund of Abingdon had in one of his less saintly moments excommunicated nineteen monks. The monks were notoriously protective of their autonomy, and proud of being England’s first monastic foundation. But they liked Arundel. He worked well with Prior Thomas Chillenden, who served at Canterbury for twenty years. Arundel tried to promote him to a bishopric in 1404, but Chillenden preferred to stay where he was. And Arundel did his best for the cathedral, helping to bring about the great reconstruction of its nave, reroofing the chapter house, rebuilding much of the monastery dormitory and cloister and adding two new chapels and a silver reredos, which cost a fabulous amount of money. He also commissioned the chapel dedicated to the Blessed Virgin Mary, where his tomb was later placed. He specified that it was to be available as an oratory for lay folk when needed.

The 14th century had plenty of examples of bad clerical behaviour. There were squabbles over Church posts and over the ‘visitations’ that sought to weed out error and corruption. During a row in 1384 between the Bishop of Exeter and Archbishop Courtenay, who was conducting a visitation of Exeter diocese, some of the archbishops’ officials were assaulted and one was made to eat the wax from his official seal. Thomas Gascoigne, chaplain to the king and chancellor of Oxford University, recalled Henry IV asking why bishops seemed less saintly than they used to be and were not ‘translated’ (moved from their graves as a prelude to their canonisation as saints), as once had been common. A clerk retorted that while bishops used to be chosen by God to make miracles, they were now chosen by kings to please more worldly agendas, and the ‘translation’ they favoured was instead from one see to another in search of larger revenues. Gascoigne related that the king found this amusing, but the same could not be said for Bishop Bowet, who was standing next to him (and who had paid handsomely for his elevation to archbishop).

The complicated politics of the north of England led the archbishop of York, Richard Scrope, to join the rebellion against the king in 1405. After the rebels were tricked into disbanding, Arundel rode ‘all day and night’ from London to York to plead for his life, but in vain. It was said that Scrope was executed, at his own request, with five blows of the axe, to represent the five wounds of Christ. Yet many bishops were peaceable, educated and conscientious; two-thirds of the bishops appointed by Edward III had university degrees. Bishops caught up in politics often behaved with integrity in a bewildering world. The Benedictine Thomas Merks, bishop of Carlisle under Richard II, was loyal to his king and so was deprived of his office on the accession of Henry IV. He was made bishop of Salmas, which since it was far from England (in what is today Iran) neutralised him as a clerical authority. He was condemned to death for his involvement in the Epiphany Rising against Henry IV in 1400, but Arundel did not want to see a bishop executed and pleaded with the king for his pardon. Merks was released and returned to academic life in Oxford. In a similar episode, Roger Walden, temporarily archbishop of Canterbury during Arundel’s exile, was demoted and imprisoned in 1399 as the Ricardian regime crumbled. But Arundel rescued him from disgrace and saw he was appointed bishop of London. When Walden died, he asked for burial either in St Paul’s or in the chapel he had built at St Bartholomew’s, Smithfield, but left the choice to Arundel, ‘who raised me up from lying under the feet of men and the dust to the heights of the church of London’.

Late medieval religion was a vigorous popular creed, which found expression in the building and adorning of hundreds of churches, the celebrations of feasts such as Corpus Christi, miracle plays, pilgrimages and lives of saints. Monastic discipline was observed the length and breadth of England. The increased use of religious texts for the most part enhanced orthodox belief and practice rather than undermining it. Spurred on by Arundel, the 15th-century Church entered a great age of religious reform, which produced the writings of poets such as John Lydgate and Thomas Hoccleve, the circulation of devotional manuscripts, the founding of chantries and confraternities, the building of schools and colleges and the advancement of university learning. All this would have been impossible without popular backing, but the laity were enthusiastic about their faith, and showed it. It was this that Arundel sought to defend from Lollardy.

Arundel seems to have been by nature a peacemaker. He was the person brought in to arbitrate when England fell out with the Hanseatic League over compensation claims for piracy. He mediated between the Observant Franciscans and the Conventual Franciscans over degrees of asceticism. In the febrile months leading up to the Merciless Parliament of 1388, in which the Appellants purged most of Richard’s inner circle, Arundel seems to have been trusted by both sides, and he tried hard to restrain the king’s excesses and to introduce financial and administrative reforms.

Arundel’s skills as a conciliator were on show in his interview with Margery Kempe. Many people who encountered Kempe thought she was mad and some accused her of Lollardy. At Lambeth Palace, she denounced the members of Arundel’s household whom she passed in the hall for swearing ‘great oaths’ and speaking ‘reckless words’; one woman present told her ‘it is a pity that you live’ and threatened to ‘bring a faggot to burn you with’. But Arundel talked to her in the garden ‘until stars appeared in the firmament’, as she later wrote, and granted her request to choose her own confessor and take communion every Sunday. She left him ‘well comforted and strengthened in her soul’.

Arundel is badly in need of the kind of historical rehabilitation that Given-Wilson’s book – at least in part – advances. The man who stands accused of spiritual tyranny over the people because he required the licensing of English Bibles played a central role in first managing and then deposing England’s most complicated royal tyrant. At a time when people were most immediately worried about arbitrary government and the possibility of civil war, Arundel sought to protect them from both.

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