Friday, November 29, 2024

It is the 29th of November 2024. Welcome to the Christian History Almanac brought to you by 1517 at 1517.org. I'm your guest host, Sam Leanza Ortiz.

Thank you again for tuning in this week; it's been fun digging into these stories. Dan will be back tomorrow for a weekend edition of the Christmas History Almanac.  

Today's show takes us to the cusp of the English Reformation to remember a man who did not quite participate in it, but whose actions put England in a position to break away from Rome. Cardinal Thomas Wolsey, who died on this day in 1530, served as Henry VIII's right-hand man for the first twenty years of his reign and is impossible to ignore in the history of the church in England.

At his best, he is remembered as a formidable servant to the interests of England and, at his worst, a schemer for personal gain at the cost of his church offices. Like so many men around Henry VIII, he would quickly fall from close friend to treasonous enemy.

Born sometime in the 1470s in the commercial town of Ipswich in Suffolk, Thomas Wolsey entered an England at war with itself, as the Wars of the Roses was still very much ongoing. Yorkists and Lancastrians would go on killing one another until 1487, when Henry Tudor won over the throne.

As the Tudors were establishing their dominance, Wolsey was preparing for his—attending Magdalen College, Oxford, to study theology. He was ordained in 1498 and became a dean of divinity and the rector of St. Mary's in Somerset.

Local ministry was not a focal point of Wolsey’s career, however. While holding on to his position at St. Mary’s, he took a series of chaplaincies for various nobles, including the deputy lieutenant at Calais, who would introduce Wolsey to Henry VII.  

Wolsey quickly gained the king's favor and was promoted to become the dean of Lincoln. He was also sent on select diplomatic missions that his time with the nobility evidently prepared him for.

He also served as the king's personal chaplain, which put him in a good position to remain in Henry VIII's service after Henry VII passed in 1509. Henry VIII relied heavily on Wolsey, who crafted many of the king’s policies in the early years of his reign.

The 1510s were tumultuous for many reasons, the Reformation being the most significant, of course, as we know here at 1517, and Wolsey was one of those men at the center.

Aside from his already favored position, Wolsey’s ability to guide the young king on the international stage earned him more honors. Enamored, Henry recommended to Pope Leo X that Wolsey be promoted to bishop, then archbishop, and cardinal – all within the span of a year.

By 1515, Wolsey became lord chancellor of England, which carried tremendous secular power and ecclesiastical sway. Indeed, he held so much power that he came to be known as the "alter rex" or "other king." His wealth was immense, second only to the monarch's, and he enjoyed the privileges of the types of priest the Reformers would write against: he kept a mistress, had illegitimate children, and multiple benefices, all while remaining uncommitted to the souls under his care.

For the Church in England, his interventions were minimal compared to his diplomatic actions. He did propose monastic reforms for the abbeys Henry VIII would go on to tear down. He also reviewed Henry's Defense of the Seven Sacraments, written in response to Martin Luther, placing Wolsey against the coming Protestant Reformation. But other than that, he leaves few theological works to speak of, and parish ministry was too small a stage for him. For Wolsey, European power politics were the stage for his skills.

After years of internal turmoil, he envisioned an England that could play on the international stage. Wolsey began this initiative with an attempt to reignite England’s war with France with a brief expedition in 1513, which, while successful, did not give England any lasting influence.

Undeterred, Wolsey moved from war to peace with his proposal of the Treaty of London, which was a non-aggression pact signed by the leading powers of Europe in 1518. Wolsey's angle was to frame England as the peace broker who could bring together the rival camps of France and the Holy Roman Empire.  This fulfilled Pope Leo X’s desire to bring these powers together against the looming Ottoman threat.

Well, everyone signed it and was back to war within the year. Still, Wolsey's treaty, combined with the famous incident of the Field of the Cloth of Gold, which displayed England's wealth and prestige in France, made England an attractive ally in the conflict.

Wolsey attempted to work both sides, but in the end, England allied with Spain – the more natural partnership at the time, as Henry was then married to the Spanish princess Katherine of Aragon.

Henry severely jeopardized this alliance when he pursued an annulment from Katherine starting in 1527. Wolsey, bound by allegiance to Henry, was hard-pressed to procure an annulment from Pope Clement VII, while Emperor Charles V appealed to the pope to refuse. Wolsey ultimately failed and was charged with treason, though he died before any sentence could be carried out.  

He was succeeded by Thomas More, who received the sentence that natural death precluded Wolsey from suffering. Henry never received the annulment he would quite literally have killed to obtain. However, the pope did send him a notice of excommunication in 1533.

A few months later, Parliament approved the Act of Supremacy, making Henry the Supreme Head of the Church of England, formally kicked off the English Reformation. 

As for Wolsey, his legacy is a complicated one. Shakespeare, writing under the Protestant Queen Elizabeth, lost no love for Wolsey, casting him as a corrupt antagonist in his play, Henry VIII. He set Catholic England up for political success, but it all went haywire shortly after his death. By the end of the 1530s, Spain and France formed an alliance and froze out Protestant England. The monastic houses he sought to reform were dissolved, and the theological views of the Reformers took hold. And England would indeed become, over the next several centuries, the center of Protestant power.

At 1517, we are naturally fans of the Protestant Reformations. Wolsey might have been "on the wrong side" from the Protestant point of view, and he served as proof that this era was full of people using their ministry positions for other ends. Still, we can say that despite all of this, Christ's church will not be overcome in spite of any power or principality, and that is a lesson we can draw from the life of Cardinal Thomas Wolsey, who died on this day in 1530.

 

The last word for today comes from the daily lectionary, from Nehemiah 9:

“But they, our ancestors, became arrogant and stiff-necked, and they did not obey your commands. ¹⁷ They refused to listen and failed to remember the miracles you performed among them. They became stiff-necked and in their rebellion appointed a leader in order to return to their slavery. But you are a forgiving God, gracious and compassionate, slow to anger and abounding in love. Therefore you did not desert them, ¹⁸ even when they cast for themselves an image of a calf and said, ‘This is your god, who brought you up out of Egypt,’ or when they committed awful blasphemies.

¹⁹ “Because of your great compassion you did not abandon them in the wilderness. By day the pillar of cloud did not fail to guide them on their path, nor the pillar of fire by night to shine on the way they were to take.

 

This has been the Christian History Almanac for the 29^th of November 2024 brought to you by 1517 at 1517.org.

This show has been produced by Christopher Gillespie.

This show has been written and read by Sam Leanza Ortiz, who is fully embracing the holiday season by taking the old front-wheel drive sleigh to Home Depot to select that most important of Christmas symbols.

You can catch us here every day- and remember that the rumors of grace, forgiveness, and the redemption of all things are true…. Everything is going to be ok.