Page:Dictionary of National Biography volume 59.djvu/386

This page has been proofread, but needs to be validated.

peggio at Canterbury on his first coming to England as legate. This mission was to obtain aid for a crusade against the Turks—a project for which the convocation of Canterbury had some years before refused to make any grant. And Campeggio was only allowed to enter the country after legatine authority had been conferred also upon Wolsey, who had long set his heart on it. The result was that for some time afterwards Warham's jurisdiction as archbishop was encroached upon by Wolsey as legate. In May 1520, when Charles V first landed in England, Warham received him and the king at Canterbury, where the hall of his palace was partitioned for the banquet. The archbishop immediately afterwards went over to Henry VIII, meeting Francis I at the Field of the Cloth of Gold, and was also present at the second meeting with the emperor at Gravelines, attended by ten horsemen and ten men on foot. Next year (1521) there was much outcry about Lutheranism in England, with which it was said that Oxford was infected; but Warham, as chancellor of the university, replying to Wolsey's letter on the subject, believed that the evil was limited to a few indiscreet persons. He witnessed, however, along with other bishops at St. Paul's the burning of some Lutheran volumes on 12 May before Wolsey and the pope's nuncio. In January 1522 he writes to thank Wolsey for getting Tunstall promoted to the see of London, rejoicing that the king gave great preferments to learned men.

In May 1522 Warham received notice at Oxford of the emperor's determination to land in England, but was unable from illness to be at Canterbury to meet him. Later in the year he had the duty imposed on him of setting watches on the Kentish coast, and preparing for defence against invasion. On 23 Jan. 1523 he made an agreement with Wolsey about testamentary jurisdiction. It does not appear to have turned out satisfactorily; for in this, as in other things, there was always a good deal of friction between the legatine authority and the ordinary jurisdiction of the southern archbishop. In 1518, indeed, at the very commencement of Wolsey's legateship, the cardinal wrote the archbishop a seemingly censorious rebuke for having dared to call a council of his suffragans about reforms in the church without reference to the legatine authority (Wilkins, iii. 660, cp. pp. 661, 681). But this was probably a mere official proceeding. The archbishop exercised his authority in the first place, and then the legate overruled the archbishop. Another instance of the same thing occurred in this year (1523), when Wolsey, as legate, cited to Westminster a convocation summoned by the archbishop to meet at St. Paul's. A satirical distich was written by Skelton on the occurrence, and doubtless the new jurisdiction was not very popular. But Warham's disputes with Wolsey, though sometimes referred to the king and sometimes to Rome, were never personal, as Polydore Vergil insinuates that they were. On the contrary, his letters repeatedly declare his sense of Wolsey's kindness; and just before this agreement about testamentary jurisdiction, he being too ill to wait upon the cardinal, Wolsey offered him quarters at Hampton Court, and urged him to be careful to live in a high and dry situation.

On 2 Nov. commissions were sent into the different counties to press the country gentlemen to anticipate their payment of the subsidy granted by parliament for the war, and Warham was chief commissioner in Kent. Next year a loan was demanded in addition to the subsidy, and the king asked the archbishop for a thousand marks by royal letter dated 6 Sept. 16 Hen. VIII (1524). Warham with some difficulty furnished this amount on 27 Oct., but meanwhile, although troubled with an ‘old disease in his head,’ was compelled to press similar demands from the king on the clergy and laity in Kent—the money to be gathered in at Michaelmas (in the Calendar of Henry VIII, vol. iv., No. 1662 seems to belong to the year 1524, and also No. 4631 which is placed in 1528). In the spring of 1525, after the news of Francis I's capture at Pavia, people were again pressed for further contributions in the shape of an amicable grant. Warham had to feel the pulse of both clergy and laity in this matter in Kent, and he reported their general inability to contribute. Some, indeed, were impatient with Wolsey, whom they supposed to be the author of this exaction, and called Warham behind his back an old fool for submitting to it. Shortly afterwards Warham congratulated Wolsey on the wisdom of his mediation with the king for a mitigation of the demand, which ultimately led to its withdrawal. He also in July protested against Wolsey's suspicion that he was in any way responsible for the opposition of the inhabitants of Tunbridge to the dissolution of the priory there for the benefit of Wolsey's college at Oxford.

In May 1527 Warham was Wolsey's assessor in the secret inquiry first instituted as to the validity of the king's marriage with Catherine of Arragon. He was simple enough to believe Wolsey's story that the doubt which had been raised proceeded, not from the king but from the bishop of Tarbes, and was pre-