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CHAPTER 3

The State of the Pre-Reformation Church in England and Scotland

IT is far too neat, even simplistic, to say that the Reformation happened because the Church had become corrupt. For all that, it is as well to survey the condition of the Church in this period – the late fifteenth and early sixteenth centuries – because its condition was not good. The Roman Catholic Church, for most of the fifteenth century, was recovering from the ‘great Schism’ of 1378–1417, the serious split when rival popes in Avignon and Rome contended for authority. The papacy recovered, and consolidated in Rome. Popes towards the end of the fifteenth century were undoubtedly corrupt, but the corruption was widely accepted and indeed endorsed. There was surprisingly little indignation about the many abuses of Church power.

The ‘Renaissance popes’ were in effect monarchs, competing and intriguing with the other city states and kingdoms of Italy, and trying to play their part in the power politics of Europe. Leading cardinals became courtiers. The papacy was not as wealthy as is sometimes thought; its revenue was about half of that of Venice, for example. Unlike most monarchies, the papacy was not hereditary. And tenure was generally brief; in the 100 years between 1455 and 1555, there were fifteen different popes. The lack of continuity and consistency was a major problem.

The degraded papacy reached its nadir with the Borgia Pope Alexander VI (1492–1503), who brazenly paraded his young and frankly sexy mistress around the Vatican and was reputed to have poisoned several of his cardinals. He fathered at least nine illegitimate children by three different women. He also presided over an ever more incompetent Curia – the papacy’s great administrative office – where posts were bought and appointments were rarely made on merit. The jobs proliferated but the efficiency diminished. Alexander granted his son Cesare no fewer than four bishoprics when he reached the age of 18.

Despite the constant nepotism and occasional murderous violence, there was one considerable positive. The achievement of the Renaissance popes lay in their patronage of the arts. They began the reinvention of Rome, which had declined to a relatively undistinguished obscurity, as the epicentre of the Italian Renaissance. Today’s Rome – arguably the most splendidly adorned city in the world – is a glorious monument to their legacy. The popes’ aesthetic taste was as refined as their lives were gross, and they could certainly spot up-and-coming artists of genius. Julius II, although best known as the ‘warrior pope’, famed for leading his troops in his suit of shining silver armour, also laid the foundation stone of the new St Peter’s and persuaded Michelangelo to paint the ceiling of the Sistine Chapel. He was the patron of, among others, Raphael and Leonardo.

The most pressing challenge to the Church was intellectual, and it came from humanist scholars like Desiderius Erasmus in Rotterdam and John Colet in London. But, because they were eminently reasonable men, they did not represent real danger to the established order. They were scholars, not agitators. Erasmus preferred gentle satire to bitter polemics. Colet, the son of a Lord Mayor of London, studied at Oxford and then travelled widely on the continent (including Florence, where he heard a certain Girolamo Savonarola preach). When he became dean of St Paul’s Cathedral back in London, he emerged as a potential reformer. He believed – and said publicly – that heretics were not as dangerous to the Church as the corrupt and even evil lives of so many priests.

This indeed was the Church’s main problem in the early years of the sixteenth century. There was still widespread respect for the Church as an institution, for its liturgy and its doctrine. There was no obvious public desire for the Bible to be translated and made into the stupendously popular book it was shortly to become. But there was widespread disrespect – even contempt – for the clergy, from the papacy downwards. Yet the Church did not appear vulnerable. It was not so weak as to be seriously shaken by the words of men like Colet and Erasmus. Powerful monarchs like James IV in Scotland and Henry VII in England were, in their very different ways, pious and essentially conventional men. They used the Church to further their own ends, but they also had sincere personal respect for it.

There was a kind of conspiracy of mutual convenience. These two kings, like many others, were relaxed about exploiting the Church’s resources as best they could; at the same time, they were concerned about their souls. So, these were not the kind of men to lead a revolution against the Church. Heresy – serious religious dissidence – was not for them. Nor was it for most of their subjects.

The growth of Renaissance humanism had for some time been subtly undermining the papacy, but in a cerebral, unthreatening way. The Italian scholar Lorenzo Valla, who fortunately enjoyed the protection of King Alfonso of Aragon and Sicily, argued that the papacy was too concerned with temporal power and was consequently directly responsible for the widespread corruption that vitiated the Church. Valla also exposed flaws in the Latin New Testament of the Vulgate, used by the Church. But this was the stuff of recondite scholarship, far above the heads of ordinary people. Men such as Valla, while they contributed to a growing intellectual scepticism about the papacy, hardly smashed the foundations – indeed, Valla himself ended up as senior secretary to Pope Nicholas V.

One man who was more in the mould of rabble-rousing revolutionary than the likes of Valla or Erasmus or Colet was Girolamo Savonarola. This prophetic figure, whose genius flared in a brilliant spurt of fiery fury in Florence at the end of the fifteenth century, blazed the trail – literally – for what was to come in the next century. A Dominican friar from Ferrara, in 1491 he started to excite Florence to an almost ecstatic fervour with his violent preaching, first at the church of San Marco, then at the cathedral. He soon held almost total sway over the city through the extraordinary power of his spoken words. Although he was kind and gentle as a confessor, when he preached, a special anger, at once divine and terrifying, overcame him. His sermons, delivered in his distinctive high-pitched tones, were long and electrifying. In some ways, the Reformation should have been his, not Luther’s.

Among those who heard him preach were John Colet passing through Florence, Niccolò Machiavelli and Michelangelo. Savonarola so scared Michelangelo that the artist fled from Florence in panic after hearing one of his sermons. So, Savonarola had something of the demagogue about him. Those who listened to him were variously alarmed, horrified and inspired. Yet he managed to temper the extremism of his eloquence with spiritual nobility.

He was an early Puritan, and this was another way in which he anticipated much that was to come. He presided over somewhat stagey ‘bonfires of the vanities’ in which vulgar books, pornography, immodest clothes, cosmetics, gambling materials, carnival masks and the like were publicly burned. His sermons, while severe and raw, were utterly inclusive in that he denounced sin with an unequivocal and far-reaching power that seemed to spare nobody. He abjured what he contemptuously called the ‘prostitute Church’. Politically, he was a republican. He also claimed to be a heaven-sent prophet. And people believed him.

Needless to say, none of this resonated too well in Rome. Pope Alexander VI, a lover of the vanities if ever there was one, first tried to shut him up by promising to make him a cardinal. Savonarola, to his credit, was uninterested in such preferment. Then Alexander simply ordered Savonarola to desist. The friar responded by condemning Alexander as a servant of Satan – and turning his fearsome attention to the ostentatious corruption of the papal court. So, Alexander excommunicated him.

In some ways, most importantly in his courageous and steadfast defiance of the papacy, Savonarola paved the way for the Reformation, although his impact was very localised. His main problem was political. Unlike his great successor Martin Luther, he had no friends in high places. He infuriated the Medici family, who wanted to regain their hold on Florence; he also alienated the powerful Franciscans. After he was excommunicated, his popular support – which had been enormous – ebbed rapidly away. His greatest modern biographer, Professor Lauro Martines, has noted that his enemies had the troops, the guns, the laws, the prisons and the gallows.

The city authorities, egged on by Pope Alexander, placed him on trial for heresy and schism. Alexander sent two emissaries north to Florence to assist with the trial. One of them, Francisco Remolins, quickly became the lead prosecutor. A friend of the pope’s son Cesare Borgia, Remolins was a Church careerist with a taste for bishoprics (he held four – Palermo, Sorrento, Fermo and Albano).

Needless to say, Savonarola was found guilty. In 1498, with two associates, he was publicly hanged and then burned. Once most of their flesh had burned away, and what was left of the remains still hung from their iron collars, local boys who had watched the execution threw stones at the blackened bones. They were trying to get hold of them; they wanted to drag them round the piazza for sport. Instead, the charred remains, the embers and ashes, were swept up and dumped in a cart, taken to the River Arno and thrown into the water. The authorities, scared of martyrdom, were determined to leave no remains, no relics. Meanwhile, Remolins returned to Rome with various gifts from the grateful Medici – including a nubile young widow.

Savonarola is remembered primarily as a public speaker of enormous power, but he left behind various writings. Ignatius Loyola, founder of the Society of Jesus, was to ban his Jesuits from reading anything by Savonarola, even though he admired some of his works. Of Savonarola’s contemporaries, his most ardent disciple was Giovanni della Mirandola, a philosopher and scholar who was a precocious Renaissance humanist. When he came under Savonarola’s influence, he changed his life and became a humble street evangelist.

Savonarola was very different from men like Valla or Colet because he was above all concerned to communicate directly with ordinary people – something he did superbly. In this, once again, he anticipated Luther. A man of magnetism, scope and apparently divine inspiration, he was by far the most charismatic of the various precursors of the Reformation. Yet his impact on Florence, while enormous, was short-lived; and his impact elsewhere was negligible.

The Christian Church had been essentially united in Europe for many centuries, yet there had been scattered breaks of serious anti-Church agitation. Jan Hus, a distant follower of the Oxford theologian John Wycliffe, was perhaps the most cerebral and influential dissident. Hus came from peasant stock in Bohemia and pursued an academic career as a philosopher at the University of Prague. He insisted, as Wycliffe had, that the fundamental authority for Christian belief was not the papacy but the Bible. Like the Lollards – and indeed the later Savonarola – he abhorred ecclesiastical grandeur and tilted bravely against it.

He was excommunicated in 1411 after he had denounced the sale of indulgences, which people bought in order to ensure their salvation. (Indulgences had originally been granted to those who had done exceptional work for the Church, such as the crusaders – but the medieval Church came to regard indulgences as an easy way of making money.) Hus was burned to death in 1415, and his martyrdom created a movement which was forcefully suppressed.

But the Hussites would not go away. Bohemia was wracked by the first serious, organised fighting between Christians over religion that Europe had known for many centuries. The Hussite ‘wars’ petered out in the 1430s – but they, too, anticipated the Reformation.

In the early sixteenth century in Germany, an eloquent nationalist historian called Jacob Wimpfeling became a scourge of clerical and papal corruption. He inveighed against the disgraceful state of the clergy, their ignorance and immorality. He objected vociferously to the pope’s interference in the appointment of German bishops. Further, he warned that Hussite-style heresy could easily sweep through Germany. Not everybody admired Wimpfeling; Martin Luther described him as an old and distracted scarecrow. But the historian contributed to a growing mood of nascent nationalism, which was often linked with a dislike of the Italian papacy.

It would, however, be wrong to overemphasise the way in which prophetic figures like Wycliffe, Hus and Savonarola, and even Wimpfeling, were harbingers of the tumult to come. One of the key characteristics of the Protestant Reformation was the manner in which so many of the reformers sought, and received, the support of the worldly and the powerful – not least princes and monarchs. By contrast, the followers of Wycliffe, Hus and Savonarola identified with the losers in society – indeed, they often were the losers in society. Crucially, the key supporter of Martin Luther was a powerful, established figure who could protect him: the Elector of Saxony.

Another cautionary point: the Roman Catholic Church’s worldliness, its riches and its frequent immorality did not inspire, or provoke, that much spiritual or holy anger. The power preaching of Savonarola in Florence was an exception.

There was, across Europe as the fifteenth century ended, a widespread spiritual malaise; and, while this was largely the fault of the Church, it is not correct to suggest that the Church had failed in one of its prime duties, which was to bring solace and consolation to people who were often devastated by plague, by war at both national and local level, by life-threatening poverty and by acute economic uncertainty. Not all the parish clergy were ignorant uncouth men unable to understand or even read the Latin of the services they took. Not all the parishes were in decay; some clergy were lively, helpful pastors whose minds were open to new forms of devotion. By no means everybody in the Church abhorred innovation and the new spirit of Renaissance humanism.

And, even in the countries and the areas where Protestantism was to spread like a bushfire, there often remained among the ordinary people a very strong attachment to the old ways – for example, the ritual of praying for the dead. Even when the clergy were weak and inadequate, the people stayed remarkably loyal. One of the paradoxes of the immediate pre-Reformation period was that virulent anticlericalism existed side by side with an accepted need for the religious service, flawed as it was, that both worldly prelates and second-rate priests were providing, as they had over many generations.

And, while the anticlericalism was growing rapidly, there was the concomitant question of who was to deal with its causes. Exactly who was to undertake serious, root-and-branch reform of the clergy? The papacy? Hardly. The cardinals, archbishops and bishops? They were too often appointed for the wrong reasons. Nepotism was widespread, as was pluralism (the holding of more than one ecclesiastical office at once). And the ablest of the bishops and cardinals were often heavily involved in secular affairs as diplomats, as advisers to kings and princes, as political fixers – or indeed as a mixture of all three.

Often, anticlericalism 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 American Revolution, or the French one or the Russian one. It was a revolution all right, but it had not been anticipated. It was not picked over, discussed and predicted before it happened. One of the reasons was that the genius who precipitated it was in many ways an extraordinarily conservative man, a German peasant-scholar who most certainly did not want to break up the Church he loved. And so this huge, diffuse and ramshackle Church had held together, and it had retained much that was good. Not least among its virtues was its ability to educate. It is too often forgotten that Martin Luther, fine theologian and scholar as he was, owed much to the excellent training he received from the old Church.

The rise of humanism and secularism was meanwhile helping to create a mental climate that in turn created diversity. Power was soon to be based on more than the military prowess and ambitions of kings, which had so dominated the medieval period. In the future, wars, far too many of them, would be fought over religion as often as not. Violent and spectacular reform, when it came, would arrive not in one spectacular tempest but in a tumultuous succession of fierce squalls and storms that each bore its distinctive character. For example, the Reformation in England predated Scotland’s Reformation by quite some time. And they were completely different in character, though the English helped the Scots to secure their Reformation.

But first we must turn to Germany.