Colet (1466-1519), who strikes us as entirely English, downright, straightforward, and impatient of scholastic subtleties and pagan license, had come home from Italy in 1498 with a contempt for its ungodly refinements. He lectured without stipend in Oxford on the Epistles of St Paul, after a new method which attracted many, but was a stone of offence to some of the elders. Colet preached a return to primitive discipline; he preferred the Fathers before their commentators; and he despised much of the current usage as tending to overlay the Gospel with human inventions. In 1504 Henry VII named him Dean of St Paul’s. Here he endowed the public school of which he made William Lilly headmaster; its governors were to be married citizens, not monks or clerics. It furnished a pattern to other foundations, including the grammar-schools of Edward VI and Elizabeth, but was much decried by teachers of the ancient stamp. In Archbishop Warham Colet, as afterwards Erasmus, found an unfailing friend and benefactor. By him the Dean was enabled to address the Convocation of Canterbury, in 1512. Colet inveighed against the worldliness of bishops, the accumulation of benefices, the evils of non-residence. He attacked no dogma. But he was at once accused before the Primate as disparaging celibacy and as being himself a heretic. Warham dismissed the charges. If we consider who Colet’s friends were the accusations against him seem scarcely probable. He had been for a number of years More’s spiritual director. He strongly approved of Erasmus when he brought out his Greek New Testament. But he praised quite as strongly Melton’s jExhortation to Young Men entering- on Orders, printed by Wynkin de Worde, in which it is laid down that a priest should say his Hours and his Mass every day, as well as meditate on the writings of the Fathers and read the Scriptures. It was not dogma, but the superfluous contendings of “neoteric divines” which provoked the indignation of those moderate reformers with whom Colet thought and acted. As a patristic student he is termed by Erasmus “the assertor and champion of the old theology,”—a phrase which defines his position, but which does not exhibit him as favouring the Reformation. Foxe, Bishop of Winchester, founded Corpus Christi, Oxford, in 1516, with special reference to the study of Greek. Three years later, sermons and speeches were made against this innovation, but More and Pace engaged the King easily on their own side, and the “Trojans” were laughed out of court. At Cambridge, Fisher, the Chancellor, recalled his protege Richard Croke from Leipzig in 1519 to carry on the work of Erasmus, who had taught Greek in the University between 1511 and 1513. In the great humanist’s flattering judgment, Cambridge had become equal to the best academy abroad since it had discarded the old exercises in Aristotle and put away Scotus. On the appearance of his New Testament, Warham assured Erasmus in an all but official letter that it had been gladly received by all the bishops to whom he had shown it. Fisher and More in 1519 helped in the correction of the second edition. Leo X accepted its dedication. The alarm which was raised in some parts, as if Greek studies were a prelude to Lutheranism, found no echo in England. Few signs of an approaching catastrophe in Church and State can be noted until the fall of Wolsey. The Lollards were extinct. Benevolence still continued to flow in ecclesiastical channels. As in Germany, schools, colleges, and gilds were multiplied. The people, who had during the last fifty or sixty years rebuilt so many parish churches, now adorned, endowed, and managed them. Printing-presses were set up under clerical patronage. Religious literature was in constant demand. Missals, manuals, breviaries, for the use of the clergy; special treatises like Pars Oculi, dealing with their duties; and primers, prayer-books, Dives et Pauper, for the laity, were printed in great abundance. Sermons were much in request. Paul’s Cross attracted famous preachers and vast audiences. But there was another side to the picture.
That religious men in England had somewhat degenerated from their ancient strictness and fervour of spirit, is one reason alleged by Cresacre More why Sir Thomas did not join the Carthusians or Franciscans. Unlike Erasmus, who suffered from the intemperate zeal which thrust vows upon him in his youth, More was a devoted adherent of monasticism. His biographer’s judgment, however, is far too mild; on the other hand, the sweeping inferences which have been drawn from the indictment laid before Cardinal Morton in 1489 against the Abbot of St Albans, cannot be accepted without proof.
Disorder and dilapidation enough were shown to justify Wolsey in taking out the Legatine commission in 1518, which later on was turned against the clergy, whom it did not amend, as bringing them into a praemunire. Wolsey could have reformed others, himself not at all,—or not until his dignities were stripped off and death stared him in the face. A magnificent pluralist ill-famed for his unclerical living, and a Cardinal who did not shrink from proposing to buy the papal tiara, he had always been the friend of learning since he completed Magdalen Tower at Oxford in his bursar’s days. With a revival of monastic discipline he intended to combine large schemes of study founded on the classics. Bishops as severe as Foxe of Winchester welcomed his clerical reform, which could not imply designs on the Catholic Faith. The nation did not repulse an English Legate. Various Benedictine houses put into Wolsey’s hands the election of their superiors. The Dominicans would not resist. But with the Observantines there was great difficulty. For his own Province of York Wolsey drew up a Constitution (1515 or 1518) which has been termed a model of ecclesiastical government; how far it was carried out we have scanty means of determining. His measures with regard to education are better known. In 1515 the University of Oxford surrendered to him all its powers. He proceeded to found seven lectureships, one of which was held by Ludovico Vives. He planned the “College of Secular Priests” for five hundred students, which was then styled Cardinal College and is now Christ Church. It was to be fed from a richly-endowed school at Ipswich, where only a gateway remains to tell of that splendid undertaking. Twenty-two small convents, with less than six inmates apiece, were suppressed and their revenues applied to defray these enterprises. It was remarked afterwards that Wolsey’s Legatine autocracy had paved the way for Henry’s assumption of the Supreme Headship; and that a precedent had been given in dissolving the small monasteries for the pillage and spoliation that speedily followed by Act of Parliament. On the other side, if reformation was necessary, Wolsey’s dealing can scarcely be judged inhumane; his hand would have been lighter than Thomas Cromwell’s; and while he protected the ancient creed he was lenient with such dissenters as fell under his jurisdiction.
In truth, it was not the Revival of Learning that shook Europe to its base, but the assault on a complicated and decaying system in which politics, finance and privileges, were blended with religion. Of the twelve Popes who sat in St Peter’s Chair between 1420 and 1520 not one was a man of transcendent faculty or deep insight. Martin V broke his solemn engagement to reform the Curia. Eugenius IV trifled with the Council of Basel and squandered a great opportunity. Cesarini warned him in vain that the German clergy were dissolute, the lay people scandalised; that the Holy See had fallen from its high estate. He pleaded for a serious amendment, if, “the entire shame were not to be cast on the Roman Curia, as the cause and author of all these evils.” When the anarchy of Basel drove him from it he did what in him lay at Florence (1439) to promote the short-lived union with the Greeks. And he perished in Hungary at the battle of Varna, still fighting on behalf of a united and reformed Christendom. Nicholas V, though intent chiefly on restoring literature, sent Cusanus with ample powers, as we have seen, into the North. But his own desire was that Rome should be a missionary of culture, when what the world needed was an economic and moral restoration. Pius II, whose character stands forth so individually in the long succession, had been a dissolute young man, but as a Pontiff he was grave and enthusiastic; his zeal for the Crusade denoted some far-off touch of greatness. He, too, spoke of reform. The learned Venetian, Domenichi, drew up a project which was to cure the ills of simony, to correct the vices of churchmen, and “other uncleanness and indecency.” Cusanus, on being consulted, took a wider range in his fourteen Articles; primitive discipline should be restored, and three visitors, clothed in dictatorial power, were to deal with the whole Church, beginning from the Pope and Curia. At least, he observed significantly, their state need not be worse than in the time of Martin V. Of all this nothing-whatever came.
Pius