Henry V by Malcolm Vale

Author:Malcolm Vale
Language: eng
Format: epub
ISBN: 9780300208832
Publisher: Yale University Press
Published: 2016-11-30T16:00:00+00:00

Chapter 5

THE KING AND THE CHURCH II

PREROGATIVE, POWER AND THE PAPACY

We have already seen the extent to which relations between England and the papacy under Henry V were to a considerable degree determined and shaped by the operation of legislation concerning provisions to English benefices, and the prevention of appeals to Rome.1 It can be argued that Pope Martin V, although he may not have had a very clearly formulated programme or policy, sought every opportunity to campaign for the abolition of this legislation, by persuasion, inducement or coercion. He was wont to refer to this campaign as the defence of ‘ecclesiastical liberty’.2 But there were substantial obstacles strewn across the road. Above all, there was Henry V. To what extent, in his opposition to the pope, was Henry assuming the role of ‘governor’, if not ‘head’, of the Church in England? In Henry Chichele, archbishop of Canterbury (appointed in 1414) he had an able and effective coadjutor in Anglo-papal relations. But Henry was usually careful to respect the rights and privileges of the see of Canterbury and of Chichele’s metropolitan status.3 Those rights and privileges, after all, enshrined the liberties of the English Church and its freedom from unwanted external (or indeed internal) interference. So, when Martin V conferred a cardinal’s hat on Henry Beaufort, bishop of Winchester, in 1417, Henry forbade Beaufort to accept it.4 The papal bull creating him cardinal-legate was impounded by the king, Beaufort was threatened with loss of his bishopric, and he in effect went into exile from England for well over a year.5 The king was concerned, as was Chichele, that Beaufort’s legatine authority, conferred by the red hat, would reduce that of the archbishop over the English Church. It might also, by extension, threaten the authority of secular government, especially in ecclesiastical matters. As McFarlane points out, Henry V ‘wanted an English envoy at the papal court, not a papal envoy at the English court’.6 If, as was indeed the case, Beaufort persuaded the pope to allow him to retain, for life, the bishopric of Winchester (their current sees were normally resigned by cardinals on their elevation), there would certainly be a papal agent within the king’s own council and Parliament. Such sentiments were well, if partisanly, expressed at a later date (1440) by Henry’s brother, Humphrey of Gloucester, to Henry VI, when he told the young king that Beaufort

[t]ook upon himself the state of cardinal, which was gainsaid and denied him by the king, of most blessed memory, my lord your father [Henry V] … who said that he would rather renounce his crown than see him [Beaufort] wear a cardinal’s hat … for he knew full well that the pride and ambition that was in him, when he was only a bishop, would have lifted him up all the more into quite intolerable pride … if he was a cardinal …7

Gloucester reiterated Henry V’s views on Beaufort’s legatine status, observing that the king considered the cardinalate to be contrary to the ‘freedom of the chief church [i.

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