A HISTORY OF LONDON
Bishop Stokesley died on 8 September. According to Richard Hilles, 'being much harassed by Cromwell, he died miserably ... almost worn out with grief.'[1] But nothing shows more clearly the change which had taken place during the last year than Wriothesley's manner of recording this event. Stokesley, to whom in 1538 the king had been 'better than he deserved' in granting him a pardon, was now 'the greatest divine that ever was counted in this realm,' and it was partly through his 'great learning and knowledge' that 'the great heresies that were likely to have grown in this realm was at this Parliament ended.' He had a magnificent funeral at St. Paul's; after the requiem mass a sermon was preached by his suffragan, Bishop Hodgkin, in praise of his steadfast orthodoxy and his learning.[2]
His successor, Edmund Bonner, was an able lawyer and an experienced diplomatist, but wanted tact and good manners, theological learning, and holiness of character.[3] His religious convictions were at this time, it would appear, by no means settled. He had been zealous in repudiating the pope's supremacy, had been on friendly terms with Grafton when he was printing his Bible in Paris, and, according to Foxe, had blamed Stokesley for troubling poor men who had the Scripture in English, and promised to have at least six of those Bibles set up in St. Paul's.[4] His answer, given in June 1540, to a set of questions on the sacraments was made 'salvo judicio melius (sic) sententiae cui me prompte et humiliter subjicio'[5] and he seems to have taken little or no share in the controversies of that year. He returned from France in March,[6] and on 4 April was consecrated in a chapel in the bishop's palace by Gardiner, assisted by Sampson and the Bishop of Hereford;[7] thus from the beginning he appears to have been definitely connected with their party, and he may have owed to its victory a grant he obtained in July of 'the old rent of Paul's,' appointed only for the repairs of that church. Thus the cathedral was robbed that the bishop might pay his first-fruits to the Crown; it is also stated that the king had 'divers ways derived great revenues and profits 'out of the see since the death of the last bishop.[8]
The impression left by a study of contemporary records is that in force of personality Bonner was by no means equal to Stokesley, and that the real inheritor of the latter's position as the leader and protector of the followers of the ' old learning ' in London was Stephen Gardiner, whose diocese of Winchester included Southwark and half of London Bridge, He had been much employed on diplomatic business abroad since his consecration in November 1531; but after his return from Germany in 1539 he remained for the most part in England for the rest of the reign,[9] living chiefly at his palace in Southwark, and exercising much influence in the religious affairs of the City.
Wriothesley's first notice of his activity is a pleasant one. On the dissolution of the London religious houses four of their churches became parochial, while the quire of that of St. Bartholomew's Priory was given to
- ↑ Orig. Letters (Parker Soc.), i, 231.
- ↑ Wriothesley, Chron. (Camd. Soc.), i, 105-7.
- ↑ Dict. Nat. Biog.; Gasquet and Bishop, Edw. VI and the Bk. of Common Prayer, 86; L. and P. Hen. VIII, xvi, 640. The allegations of the latter may be untrue, but Wyatt was too clever to invent anything absurdly inconsistent with his enemy's known character.
- ↑ Foxe, op. cit. v, 78, 149-62, 410-13.
- ↑ L. and P. Hen. VIII, xv, 826.
- ↑ Corresp. politique de MM. de Castillon et de Marillac, 162, 169, 172.
- ↑ Lond. Epis. Reg Bonner, fol. 131.
- ↑ L. and P. Hen. VIII, xv, 942 (21).
- ↑ Ibid, passim.
