Thor's Day: On the Church's repositories of learning

Portrait of Thomas Cromwell,
by Hans Holbein the Younger

From Wolf Hall, by Hilary Mantel

By Morris Dean

After enjoying PBS's Masterpiece Wolf Hall, which was based on the first two novels of Hilary Mantel's trilogy¹ about Thomas Cromwell's rise to power in the court of Henry VIII, I started reading the first novel, Wolf Hall, in which I came upon an interesting statement by the fictional Cromwell bearing on the value of the Church's "repositories of learning."
    The year is 1530. Cromwell has served Cardinal Thomas Wolsey² for about a dozen years and remains loyal to him even though Wolsey, formerly the king's chief adviser, has fallen from the king's favor after failing to negotiate an annulment of Henry's marriage to Catherine of Aragon. In two years, Cromwell will be named the king's chief minister³.

Mark Rylance as Thomas Cromwell & Damian Lewis as Henry VIII

     Cromwell is conversing with the king, who is asking after Wolsey:

When the king asks him what he hears from the cardinal, [Cromwell] says that [the cardinal] misses the light of His Majesty's countenance; that preparations for his enthronement at York [where the king has banished him] are in hand."
    "Then why doesn't he get to York? It seems to me he delays and delays." Henry glares at him. "I will say this for you. You stick by your man."
    "I have never had anything from the cardinal other than kindness. Why would I not?"
    "And you have no other master," the king says...."My lord cardinal told me you were an orphan. He told me you were brought up in a monastery."
    "Ah. That was one of his little stories."
    "He told me little stories!" Several expressions chase each other across the king's face: annoyance, amusement, a wish to call back times past. "I suppose he did. He told me that you had a loathing of those in the religious life. That was why he found you diligent in his work."
    "That was not the reason." He looks up. "May I speak?"
    "Oh, for God's sake," Henry cries. "I wish someone would."
    He is startled. Then he understands. Henry wants a conversation, on any topic. One that's nothing to do with love, or hunting, or war.Now that Wolsey's gone, there's not much scope for it; unless you want to talk to a priest of some stripe. And if you send for a priest, what does it come back to? To love; to Anne [Boleyn]; to what you want and can't have.
    "If you ask me about the monks [Cromwell says], I speak from experience, not prejudice, and though I have no doubt that some foundations are well governed, my experience has been of waste and corruption. May I suggest to Your Majesty that, if you wish to see a parade of the seven deadly sins, you do not organize a masque at court but call without notice at a monastery? I have seen monks who live like great lords, on the offerings of poor people who would rather buy a blessing than buy bread, and that is not Christian conduct. Nor do I take the monasteries to be the repositories of learning some believe they are. Was [William] Grocyn a monk, or [John] Colet, or [Thomas] Linacre, or any of our great scholars? They were university men. The monks take in children and use them as servants, they don't even teach them dog Latin. I don't grudge them some bodily comforts. It cannot always be Lent. What I cannot stomach is the hypocrisy, fraud, idleness – their worn-out relics, their threadbare worship, and their lack of invention. When did anything good last come from a monastery? They do not invent, they only repeat, and what they repeat is corrupt. For hundreds of years the monks have held the pen, and what they have written is what we take to be our history, but I do not believe it really is. I believe they have suppressed the history they don't like, and written one that is favorable to Rome."[pp. 179-180]

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1. Dame Hilary Mary Mantel...is an English writer whose work includes personal memoirs, short stories, and historical fiction. She has twice been awarded the Booker Prize, the first for the 2009 novel Wolf Hall, a fictional account of Thomas Cromwell's rise to power in the court of Henry VIII, and the second for the 2012 novel Bring Up the Bodies, the second installment of the Cromwell trilogy. Mantel was the first woman to receive the award twice...The third installment to the trilogy, The Mirror and the Light, will be published in 2015. –Wikipedia
2. Thomas Wolsey (1473-1530) was an English political figure and a cardinal of the Roman Catholic Church. When Henry VIII became King of England in 1509, Wolsey became the King's almoner [official distributor of alms]. Wolsey's affairs prospered, and by 1514 he had become the controlling figure in virtually all matters of state and extremely powerful within the Church. The highest political position he attained was Lord Chancellor, the King's chief adviser. In that position, he enjoyed great freedom and was often depicted as an alter rex (other king). He fell out of favour after failing to negotiate an annulment of Henry's marriage to Catherine of Aragon and was stripped of his government titles. He retreated to York to fulfill his ecclesiastical duties as Archbishop of York, a position he nominally held but had neglected during his years in government. He was recalled to London to answer to charges of treason – a common charge used by Henry against ministers who fell out of favour – but died en route of natural causes.
       Within the Church, he became Archbishop of York, the second most important cleric in England, and then was made a cardinal in 1515, giving him precedence, even over the Archbishop of Canterbury. –Wikipedia
3. Thomas Cromwell (c.?1485-1540) was an English lawyer and statesman who served as chief minister to King Henry VIII of England from 1532 to 1540. Cromwell was one of the strongest and most powerful advocates of the English Reformation. He helped to engineer an annulment of the king's marriage to Queen Catherine of Aragon, to allow Henry to marry his mistress Anne Boleyn. After failing in 1534 to obtain the Pope's approval of the request for annulment, Parliament endorsed the King's claim to be head of the breakaway Church of England, thus giving Henry the authority to annul his own marriage. Cromwell subsequently plotted an evangelical, reformist course for the embryonic Church of England from the unique posts of vicegerent in spirituals and vicar-general.
       During his rise to power, Cromwell made many enemies, including his former ally Anne Boleyn; he played a prominent role in her downfall. He later fell from power after arranging the King's marriage to a German princess, Anne of Cleves. Cromwell hoped that the marriage would breathe fresh life into the Reformation in England, but it turned into a disaster for Cromwell and ended in an annulment six months later. Cromwell was arraigned under a bill of attainder and executed for treason and heresy on Tower Hill on 28 July 1540. The King later expressed regret at the loss of his chief minister. –Wikipedia

Copyright © 2015 by Morris Dean