Archbishop Wareham

...In reading of him what seems to be the most characteristic and at the same time the finest mark in him is his concentration on the things that mattered and his indifference to things local, ephemeral and personal...

...There was no change in any doctrine or in any part of the ritual...

...But he was the last man who lived and died in the See of Canterbury as his predecessors had lived and died, in an unchanging stream for nearly a thousand years...

...The man was old, he died well after his eigthieth year...

...Erasmus was both moved to humility in his presence (and that is saying a great deal considering how self-satisfied that great scholar was—especially in his fame) and moved also to sincere and enthusiastic praise...

...But they did not know it...

...One of these is the last Catholic Archbishop of Canterbury, in direct continuity with Saint Augustine: Archbishop Wareham...

...It seemed at the time no more than a passing political thing...

...There is a wonderful contrast between the two men, and all in Wareham's favor...

...Until Wareham died, Henry VIII dared not arrange for his marriage with his wife to be annulled in England...

...yet when this towering new figure of Wolsey's overshadowed that ancient dignity by becoming legate a latere and assuming nearly all the papal powers in England, had his cross borne before him in the Archbishop's presence, and superseded as it were the Archbishop's ancient jurisdiction, Wareham took it as simply as he had the transference of the chancellorship...

...He was much more just than most of his contemporaries in understanding the peril to society which lay in the new movement of uncriticized reform, and of violent undisciplined reaction against the corruptions of the time...

...ARCHBISHOP WAREHAM By HILAIRE BELLOC ' I *¦ HERE are men in history of whom one gets glimpses and •*¦ not full views, and of whom one wishes that one could get not only full views but a close intimacy because one feels instinctively that they were worth much more than their contemporaries who made more noise and got more limelight...

...He was a man who profoundly affected his contemporaries...

...It would be for the benefit of history if our own time were as much moved by his character as those contemporaries were...

...And yet he did not die until three good years after the attempt to get the annulment in the regular way through papal action had manifestly failed...

...His hesitation speaks more for Wareham's character than anything else which could be quoted...

...Wareham seems to have had something fine and silvery about him which no one who met him missed...

...in nine things out of ten the crown had had the main power for generations...

...and speaking of Wolsey, it is most estimable in Wareham that he was entirely devoid of any pride or worldliness or even vanity in the face of that overwhelming figure...

...He was not the last Catholic Archbishop of Canterbury, for Cardinal Pole had that melancholy honor more than twenty years after Wareham died...

...He had had his doubts upon the right of Prince Henry's marriage with Catherine of Aragon, the nominal widow of Henry's brother, and he had expressed them at a time when it was not convenient to express them...

...If ever there was a man who cared nothing for ambition it was Wareham...

...Why, then, did such a man consent to what seems to us the turning-point: the admission of Henry's supremacy over the Church ? I think I can answer that question...

...He had despaired of having it annulled in Rome...

...He noticed how the Primate of All England entertained his guests, his lavish table, his own abstemiousness, his interest in all the conversation around, the affection which all bore for him, the dignity and perhaps the holiness of his presence...

...There was an instinct of peril in the aid but also a habit of security...

...It was because he did not think of it as we do...

...that is, not only chief minister but almost only minister of the crown...

...He was legate of the Pope for life, by virtue of his office, legatus natus, ex officio legate as being Archbishop of Canterbury...

...This in fine should be carefully noted...

...It is a terrible lesson in the necessity of refusing all compromise in essential things...

...We, who know what was to come, and who know what meaning was to be attached to the word "supremacy," think of that fatal vote given by the clergy of England as the determining moment...

...If ever there was a man ruined by ambition, that is, by the preference of self-glory to one's duty, it was Wolsey: and that was why Wolsey failed...

...So we now know it to be...

...Until he died Henry and Anne Boleyn could not move...

...And Wareham, who was a saintly man, hesitatingly, reluctantly, but with no passion of fear, consented...

...The only authority which could half satisfy him and give the divorce an appearance of legality was the Archbishop of Canterbury, the Primate of All England...

...He knew that the moment Wareham died his way to his piece of wickedness was free, but the remarkable thing is that allpowerful as he was, he dared not take that way until Wareham was dead...

...To do that piece of dirty work Henry had already picked his man (all unknown to his victim), the subservient scholar, Cranmer...

...He was not the last Archbishop in direct continuity with Saint Augustine to be in communion with Rome and to carry on the unbroken Catholic doctrine—to say the Mass common to all western Christendom, to receive the pallium from the Pope—for such things still belonged to Cranmer, his successor, who broke with them...

...When the post was taken away from him to be given to the young King's new favorite, a bold, strong domineering man, Wareham seems to have accepted the change as a matter of course, and even with relief...

...The relation with Rome continued...

...Wareham was chancellor...

...He warned Wolsey against them...

...No one dreamed that unity was broken and that through the breach thus made, the ruin of Christian life would come pouring in at last...