CHAPTER FIVE
PAUL’S CROSS AND THE CRISIS OF THE 1530S
Richard Rex
Long before the reign of Henry VIII, the role of Paul’s Cross in shaping English opinion, in London and beyond, had been well established. It was from Paul’s Cross, on 22 June 1483, that Dr Ralph Shaw presented Richard III’s case against the right of his nephews to succeed to the throne.1 A gen- eration earlier, in 1440, a nervy government had put up a friar to preach there when popular agitation threatened to make a saint of a man burned for heresy.2 In 1382 a friar had followed up the synodical condemnation of John Wycliffe with a sermon reporting the reconciliation of a Wycliffite sympathiser, Sir Cornelius Cloyne, won back to the orthodox doctrine of the eucharist after a miraculous vision of the consecrated host as bleeding flesh.3 So it is hardly surprising that this pulpit was used to inaugurate Henry VIII’s campaign against Luther in May 1521, when John Fisher, Bishop of Rochester, preached a lengthy sermon to accompany the prom- ulgation of the papal condemnation of Martin Luther. The burning of Luther’s books in sight of the booksellers whose shops lined the square was a pointed message, as was the public announcement that Henry had himself written a book refuting Luther’s heresies. The ceremony was attended by the cream of church and state, and Cardinal Wolsey held up a copy of the king’s book for the crowds to cheer.4 However, while events such as this underline the role of Paul’s Cross as a platform for the regime, it is important to remember that prior to 1534 the Cross was by no means under direct royal control. It was from Paul’s Cross that the Abbot of
1 Charles Ross, Richard III (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1981), 88. 2 R. Rex, ‘Which is Wyche? Lollardy and Sanctity in Lancastrian London,’ in Martyrs and Martyrdom in England, c. 1400–1700, ed. Thomas S. Freeman and Thomas F. Mayer (Woodbridge: Boydell & Brewer, 2007), 88–106, at 95. 3 Knighton’s Chronicle, 1337–1396, ed. G.H. Martin (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1995), 260–63. 4 Richard Rex, ‘The English campaign against Luther in the 1520s,’ in Transactions of the Royal Historical Society, ser. 5.39 (1989), 85–106. For Fisher’s sermon, see the critical edition in English Works of John Fisher, Bishop of Rochester (1469–1535): sermons and other writings, 1520–1535, ed. Cecilia A. Hatt (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2002), 48–144; and in chap- ter one above.
Winchcombe, Richard Kidderminster, provoked the church-state crisis of 1515 by arguing that the 1512 statute restricting benefit of clergy was con- trary to divine and canon law.5 The 1530s were to see some sharp changes of direction in religious poli- tics, as Henry turned successively against his wife, the pope, his second wife, the monasteries, and ‘graven images’. These changes were all reflected at Paul’s Cross, and the political tensions of a decade of crisis and contro- versy led the Crown to seek increasing control over that pulpit. That said, we should not forget that most of the preaching there in the 1520s and 1530s, as at any time, was probably routine and unremarkable. Theologians from Oxford and Cambridge were obliged to preach there as a condition of graduation.6 In the 1530s over 100 graduates from Cambridge needed to take their turn.7 Not one of these graduation sermons is definitely recorded, nor are any of them known to survive. Indeed, few Paul’s Cross sermons of any kind survive from the 1530s, and while we know of several dozen others, the story that can be pieced together is necessarily patchy. Nevertheless, a thorough re-examination of the evidence for Paul’s Cross preaching in this decade enables us to offer a fuller picture than has previously been sketched. This is partly because new evidence has come to light, including the discovery of a previously unidentified Paul’s Cross sermon in manuscript, and partly because many of the papers and sources on which Millar MacLure based his handlist of sermons for these years have been misdated, miscalendared, and misin- terpreted in ways that have obscured the full import of the evidence.8 It is now possible both to correct MacLure’s list and to clarify numerous details in a way that gives a fuller understanding of the struggles in and over that pulpit between the Bishop of London (John Stokesley), the king’s Vicar
5 Relationes quorundam casuum selectorum ex libris Roberti Keilwey (London: T. Wight, 1602), STC 14901, fol. 181r. The best modern account of this crisis is J.D.M. Derrett, ‘The Affairs of Richard Hunne and Friar Standish,’ in Thomas More, The Apology, ed. J.B. Trapp, in The Complete Works of St Thomas More, vol. 9 (New Haven & London: Yale University Press, 1979), 215–46, esp. 225–27. 6 See D.R. Leader, The University to 1546, in A History of the University of Cambridge, vol. 1 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1988), 174; and S.L. Greenslade, ‘The Faculty of Theology,’ 295–334 of The Collegiate University, ed. J.K. McConica in The History of the University of Oxford, vol. 3 (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1986), at 311–12. 7 See Grace Book Γ, ed. W.G. Searle (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1908), pas- sim. Cambridge theologians required to preach at the Cross included Nicholas Shaxton in 1530 (247), George Day in 1533 (272), Matthew Parker in 1535 (296), and John Scory in 1539 (337–38). 8 M. MacLure, The Paul’s Cross Sermons, 1534–1642 (Toronto: University of Toronto Press, 1958), 184–88, gives a list of the sermons delivered there in the 1530s.