Was Thomas Arundel a ruthless persecutor or a defender of the English Church? Chris Given-Wilson’s new book revisits one of the most powerful—and controversial—figures of late medieval England, revealing a far more complex man behind the reputation.
By Chris Given-Wilson
In December 2005, a BBC poll sought nominations for the ten most infamous British villains of the previous millennium, one from each century. Several of the names that emerged as ‘winners’ are unsurprising: for the twentieth century, Oswald Mosley; for the nineteenth, Jack the Ripper; for the thirteenth, King John. Also included were two archbishops of Canterbury: for the twelfth century, St Thomas Becket, who ‘divided England in a way that even many churchmen who shared some of his views thought unnecessary and self-indulgent’; and for the fifteenth century (ahead of, for example, Richard III), Thomas Arundel, the subject of my book, who ‘used his authority to persecute the Lollards, a group promoting lay priesthood and translations of the Bible’.
Thomas Cranmer, the first Protestant archbishop of Canterbury (1533-55), would not have demurred. In 1540, as the epochal religious reforms of the 1530s reached their climax, Cranmer oversaw the demolition and removal of the free-standing chantry chapel which Arundel had endowed to enclose his tomb-chest in the nave of Canterbury cathedral 130 years earlier. Nothing was left but ‘a bare gravestone levelled with the floor’. England’s early Protestants such as Cranmer, John Foxe and John Bale loathed Arundel. They believed that he had introduced to England the practice of burning heretics. In fact, heretics had been burned in England before, in the twelfth and thirteenth centuries, and it had long been regarded by both clerics and the laity as the ‘correct’ way to punish those who refused to recant. Unlike many European countries, however, England had experienced very little heresy before the late fourteenth century.
From the 1380s, with the rise of Lollardy, ‘the English heresy’, this changed, and by the time Arundel became archbishop of Canterbury, in 1396, Lollardy was becoming a real threat to the English Church. Moreover, although two heretics were indeed burned during Arundel’s archiepiscopacy, in 1401 and 1410, this was not on his initiative but that of the king and commons, who introduced the bill De Heretico Comburendo (‘For the Burning of a Heretic’) to the parliament of 1401.
This is not to deny that Arundel did all he could to suppress Lollardy. This was, after all, the mission with which he believed God had charged him – the preservation of the unity of the faith in England. Yet he never wanted to burn heretics. His approach to Lollardy was that of the physician, not the surgeon. A heretic burned was a soul lost; a heretic who recanted was a soul saved. That was what the Church was for – to save souls. Many records of heretics’ trials survive from Arundel’s time, indicating that they were always given ample opportunity to redeem themselves, and those who did so went free. Many continued to preach and disseminate their heterodoxy for years without serious punishment. It is easy to say with hindsight that Arundel took heresy too seriously, that it was never a real threat to either Church or State, but there is no mistaking the conviction of many contemporaries that it was – which is why the kings of the time, Richard II (1377-99), Henry IV (1399-1413) and Henry V (1413-22), were also determined to silence them.
As well as being head of the English Church, Arundel also bestrode the English political stage for three decades, with all the inevitable controversies that entailed. By late 1396, he had served as chancellor of the realm, in effect the head of the royal administration, for more than seven of the previous ten years, during which he had rescued the crown’s finances from near-bankruptcy and helped to heal the divisions between king and nobility which had disfigured the late 1380s. Yet Richard II never forgave Arundel for siding with his opponents in 1386-88, and in September 1397 – the year in which, as one chronicler put it, ‘King Richard began to tyrannise his people’, the king drove him into exile, exclaiming that ‘with this archbishop, he would never have peace’.
The King’s intention was that Arundel’s exile should be for life, but after two years spent mainly in Florence, which he described as ‘an earthly paradise’, he joined forces with Henry, duke of Lancaster, who had also been exiled for life, and returned to England, where, after a brief and almost bloodless campaign during the summer of 1399, they captured and deposed Richard. Duke Henry now became King Henry IV – the progenitor of a Lancastrian dynasty which would rule England for sixty years – and Arundel was restored to Canterbury.
Yet despite the extraordinary bouleversement of 1399, Arundel tends to be remembered primarily as a churchman rather than a politician – in large part due to William Shakespeare. Three of Shakespeare’s most frequently performed history plays – Richard II, Henry IV Part 1 and Henry IV Part 2 – tell the story of the years 1397-1413, yet not once does Arundel appear in any of them. There were good dramatical reasons for this. In Richard II, Henry is shown as a man of action and purpose, bulldozing his way to the crown on his own initiative, thereby providing a starker contrast to the beleaguered, self-doubting, prematurely aged monarch he later becomes. No archiepiscopal midwife or kingmaker is needed; he makes his own history. Brilliant drama this is (much the most important thing), but brilliant history it is not. In reality, Richard’s deposition in 1399 was as much Arundel’s doing as it was Henry’s, and it was his most significant contribution to English public life, for if Richard’s downfall was a personal tragedy, his triumph would have been a nation’s tragedy.
Arundel preaching to the Londoners on the evils of Richard II’s Rule – British Library MS Harley 1319, fol.12r
For the next fourteen years, England was, up to a point, a diarchy. Already prominent in the political life of the kingdom, Arundel now became dominant, ‘greater and more powerful than anyone else in the kingdom of England apart from the king’. Three times Henry IV reappointed him as chancellor, and even when not holding high secular office he was widely acknowledged to be the king’s most trusted councillor. Yet, despite the indubitably close political and personal bond between Arundel and Henry, this could never be an equal partnership. When the stakes were at their highest, after the arrest of Archbishop Scrope in 1405, the king could afford to ignore Arundel’s pleas for mercy, but Arundel could never afford to ignore Henry’s unrelenting pleas for money, and there were probably a good number of clerics who saw their archbishop’s willingness to do the king’s bidding as the alliance of the shepherd and the wolf.
During the early years of the reign, with frequent rebellions against the ‘usurper’ and the crown’s finances in chaos, Arundel found himself continually having to fend off demands for the clergy to contribute more, or even for clerical disendowment. After 1406, however, with Henry more secure on the throne and Arundel now chancellor, he successfully harnessed ecclesiastical and political power in the service of both solvency and orthodoxy – the most notable example of the latter being the promulgation in 1407-9 of his Constitutions, which for decades remained the yardstick by which those suspected of heresy were investigated.
So, what of the man? Arundel’s instincts were authoritarian and conservative. Despite being first appointed a bishop (of Ely) at the age of twenty, almost certainly through the influence of his immensely wealthy father, Earl Richard of Arundel, he himself did not practice nepotism and was never accused of corruption, sexual immorality or excessive indulgence. Although personally pious, no one thought him saintly. Although politically astute, he was no scholar or theorist. Too much religious enthusiasm, too much ‘cleverness’, aroused his suspicion – hence his determination in 1410-11 to curb theological speculation at Oxford University, that ‘teeming nest of heretics’, as one chronicler called it.
Yet he was quite willing to approve a variety of devotional practices as long as ecclesiastical jurisdiction was not compromised. After the eccentric visionary and mystic Margery Kempe visited him at Lambeth Palace in the summer of 1413, she later described how, ‘until stars appeared in the firmament’, he had ‘benignly and meekly’ listened to her criticism of his servants and approved her unorthodox (though not heterodox) devotional proclivities, and when, eventually, their conversation ended, she left him ‘well comforted and strengthened in her soul’.
Also indicative of his renewed confidence after 1406 was his authorization of Nicholas Love’s Mirror of the Blessed Life of Jesus Christ, the start of what has been characterized as ‘Thomas Arundel’s Reformation’ – the orthodox self-reform of the English Church in response not just to Lollardy but to widespread criticism of its wealth and corruption. And although his primary focus remained resolutely on the practical leadership and defence of the English Church as a whole, he never lost sight of his diocese, to which he returned whenever he could in order to fulfil his pastoral role and, as far as he could, to enforce the kind of reforms – against non-residence, or pluralism – which he constantly urged his clergy to implement.
In his will, drawn up a week before his death from a quinsy (distended abscess) in his throat on 19 February 1414, Arundel described himself as a ‘miserable sinner … [whose] fetid and putrid cadaver is too utterly vile to merit burial, especially in the holy church of Canterbury’. The fact that he had already endowed a chantry chapel and tomb-chest for himself in the cathedral nave suggests that such testamentary self-abasement should not be taken too literally.
On the other hand, it also suggests that behind the authoritarian and combative archiepiscopal persona lurked a more self-questioning mortal. Here, after all, was a man who, to many, epitomized the worldly, secularized prelacy routinely excoriated not just by Lollards but by so many of the faithful: the son of England’s richest aristocrat, promoted to the episcopacy at an uncanonical age, an academic lightweight addicted to political office, a man who had deposed a legitimate king and who had shown himself willing at times to place the needs of the State above those of the Church – this was not a negligible charge-sheet, and he must surely have wondered, as he lay dying, what would God make of it? Had he been in a position to read the verdicts of contemporary chroniclers, he may have felt some reassurance: to them, he was ‘the unshakeable pillar of the Christian faith’, ‘the tallest tower and undefeated champion of the English Church’, ‘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’. These did not amount to a verdict of failure, nor indeed of villainy.
Was Thomas Arundel a ruthless persecutor or a defender of the English Church? Chris Given-Wilson’s new book revisits one of the most powerful—and controversial—figures of late medieval England, revealing a far more complex man behind the reputation.
By Chris Given-Wilson
In December 2005, a BBC poll sought nominations for the ten most infamous British villains of the previous millennium, one from each century. Several of the names that emerged as ‘winners’ are unsurprising: for the twentieth century, Oswald Mosley; for the nineteenth, Jack the Ripper; for the thirteenth, King John. Also included were two archbishops of Canterbury: for the twelfth century, St Thomas Becket, who ‘divided England in a way that even many churchmen who shared some of his views thought unnecessary and self-indulgent’; and for the fifteenth century (ahead of, for example, Richard III), Thomas Arundel, the subject of my book, who ‘used his authority to persecute the Lollards, a group promoting lay priesthood and translations of the Bible’.
Thomas Cranmer, the first Protestant archbishop of Canterbury (1533-55), would not have demurred. In 1540, as the epochal religious reforms of the 1530s reached their climax, Cranmer oversaw the demolition and removal of the free-standing chantry chapel which Arundel had endowed to enclose his tomb-chest in the nave of Canterbury cathedral 130 years earlier. Nothing was left but ‘a bare gravestone levelled with the floor’. England’s early Protestants such as Cranmer, John Foxe and John Bale loathed Arundel. They believed that he had introduced to England the practice of burning heretics. In fact, heretics had been burned in England before, in the twelfth and thirteenth centuries, and it had long been regarded by both clerics and the laity as the ‘correct’ way to punish those who refused to recant. Unlike many European countries, however, England had experienced very little heresy before the late fourteenth century.
From the 1380s, with the rise of Lollardy, ‘the English heresy’, this changed, and by the time Arundel became archbishop of Canterbury, in 1396, Lollardy was becoming a real threat to the English Church. Moreover, although two heretics were indeed burned during Arundel’s archiepiscopacy, in 1401 and 1410, this was not on his initiative but that of the king and commons, who introduced the bill De Heretico Comburendo (‘For the Burning of a Heretic’) to the parliament of 1401.
This is not to deny that Arundel did all he could to suppress Lollardy. This was, after all, the mission with which he believed God had charged him – the preservation of the unity of the faith in England. Yet he never wanted to burn heretics. His approach to Lollardy was that of the physician, not the surgeon. A heretic burned was a soul lost; a heretic who recanted was a soul saved. That was what the Church was for – to save souls. Many records of heretics’ trials survive from Arundel’s time, indicating that they were always given ample opportunity to redeem themselves, and those who did so went free. Many continued to preach and disseminate their heterodoxy for years without serious punishment. It is easy to say with hindsight that Arundel took heresy too seriously, that it was never a real threat to either Church or State, but there is no mistaking the conviction of many contemporaries that it was – which is why the kings of the time, Richard II (1377-99), Henry IV (1399-1413) and Henry V (1413-22), were also determined to silence them.
As well as being head of the English Church, Arundel also bestrode the English political stage for three decades, with all the inevitable controversies that entailed. By late 1396, he had served as chancellor of the realm, in effect the head of the royal administration, for more than seven of the previous ten years, during which he had rescued the crown’s finances from near-bankruptcy and helped to heal the divisions between king and nobility which had disfigured the late 1380s. Yet Richard II never forgave Arundel for siding with his opponents in 1386-88, and in September 1397 – the year in which, as one chronicler put it, ‘King Richard began to tyrannise his people’, the king drove him into exile, exclaiming that ‘with this archbishop, he would never have peace’.
The King’s intention was that Arundel’s exile should be for life, but after two years spent mainly in Florence, which he described as ‘an earthly paradise’, he joined forces with Henry, duke of Lancaster, who had also been exiled for life, and returned to England, where, after a brief and almost bloodless campaign during the summer of 1399, they captured and deposed Richard. Duke Henry now became King Henry IV – the progenitor of a Lancastrian dynasty which would rule England for sixty years – and Arundel was restored to Canterbury.
Yet despite the extraordinary bouleversement of 1399, Arundel tends to be remembered primarily as a churchman rather than a politician – in large part due to William Shakespeare. Three of Shakespeare’s most frequently performed history plays – Richard II, Henry IV Part 1 and Henry IV Part 2 – tell the story of the years 1397-1413, yet not once does Arundel appear in any of them. There were good dramatical reasons for this. In Richard II, Henry is shown as a man of action and purpose, bulldozing his way to the crown on his own initiative, thereby providing a starker contrast to the beleaguered, self-doubting, prematurely aged monarch he later becomes. No archiepiscopal midwife or kingmaker is needed; he makes his own history. Brilliant drama this is (much the most important thing), but brilliant history it is not. In reality, Richard’s deposition in 1399 was as much Arundel’s doing as it was Henry’s, and it was his most significant contribution to English public life, for if Richard’s downfall was a personal tragedy, his triumph would have been a nation’s tragedy.
For the next fourteen years, England was, up to a point, a diarchy. Already prominent in the political life of the kingdom, Arundel now became dominant, ‘greater and more powerful than anyone else in the kingdom of England apart from the king’. Three times Henry IV reappointed him as chancellor, and even when not holding high secular office he was widely acknowledged to be the king’s most trusted councillor. Yet, despite the indubitably close political and personal bond between Arundel and Henry, this could never be an equal partnership. When the stakes were at their highest, after the arrest of Archbishop Scrope in 1405, the king could afford to ignore Arundel’s pleas for mercy, but Arundel could never afford to ignore Henry’s unrelenting pleas for money, and there were probably a good number of clerics who saw their archbishop’s willingness to do the king’s bidding as the alliance of the shepherd and the wolf.
During the early years of the reign, with frequent rebellions against the ‘usurper’ and the crown’s finances in chaos, Arundel found himself continually having to fend off demands for the clergy to contribute more, or even for clerical disendowment. After 1406, however, with Henry more secure on the throne and Arundel now chancellor, he successfully harnessed ecclesiastical and political power in the service of both solvency and orthodoxy – the most notable example of the latter being the promulgation in 1407-9 of his Constitutions, which for decades remained the yardstick by which those suspected of heresy were investigated.
So, what of the man? Arundel’s instincts were authoritarian and conservative. Despite being first appointed a bishop (of Ely) at the age of twenty, almost certainly through the influence of his immensely wealthy father, Earl Richard of Arundel, he himself did not practice nepotism and was never accused of corruption, sexual immorality or excessive indulgence. Although personally pious, no one thought him saintly. Although politically astute, he was no scholar or theorist. Too much religious enthusiasm, too much ‘cleverness’, aroused his suspicion – hence his determination in 1410-11 to curb theological speculation at Oxford University, that ‘teeming nest of heretics’, as one chronicler called it.
Yet he was quite willing to approve a variety of devotional practices as long as ecclesiastical jurisdiction was not compromised. After the eccentric visionary and mystic Margery Kempe visited him at Lambeth Palace in the summer of 1413, she later described how, ‘until stars appeared in the firmament’, he had ‘benignly and meekly’ listened to her criticism of his servants and approved her unorthodox (though not heterodox) devotional proclivities, and when, eventually, their conversation ended, she left him ‘well comforted and strengthened in her soul’.
Also indicative of his renewed confidence after 1406 was his authorization of Nicholas Love’s Mirror of the Blessed Life of Jesus Christ, the start of what has been characterized as ‘Thomas Arundel’s Reformation’ – the orthodox self-reform of the English Church in response not just to Lollardy but to widespread criticism of its wealth and corruption. And although his primary focus remained resolutely on the practical leadership and defence of the English Church as a whole, he never lost sight of his diocese, to which he returned whenever he could in order to fulfil his pastoral role and, as far as he could, to enforce the kind of reforms – against non-residence, or pluralism – which he constantly urged his clergy to implement.
In his will, drawn up a week before his death from a quinsy (distended abscess) in his throat on 19 February 1414, Arundel described himself as a ‘miserable sinner … [whose] fetid and putrid cadaver is too utterly vile to merit burial, especially in the holy church of Canterbury’. The fact that he had already endowed a chantry chapel and tomb-chest for himself in the cathedral nave suggests that such testamentary self-abasement should not be taken too literally.
On the other hand, it also suggests that behind the authoritarian and combative archiepiscopal persona lurked a more self-questioning mortal. Here, after all, was a man who, to many, epitomized the worldly, secularized prelacy routinely excoriated not just by Lollards but by so many of the faithful: the son of England’s richest aristocrat, promoted to the episcopacy at an uncanonical age, an academic lightweight addicted to political office, a man who had deposed a legitimate king and who had shown himself willing at times to place the needs of the State above those of the Church – this was not a negligible charge-sheet, and he must surely have wondered, as he lay dying, what would God make of it? Had he been in a position to read the verdicts of contemporary chroniclers, he may have felt some reassurance: to them, he was ‘the unshakeable pillar of the Christian faith’, ‘the tallest tower and undefeated champion of the English Church’, ‘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’. These did not amount to a verdict of failure, nor indeed of villainy.
Chris Given-Wilson is Emeritus Professor of Medieval History at the University of St Andrews. His new book is Archbishop, Chancellor, Kingmaker: A Life of Thomas Arundel, published by Yale University Press.
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