William Warham

• 1. Introduction

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  William Warham died on the 22nd of August 1532, just months after drafting one of the most defiant documents of his long career. He had served as Archbishop of Canterbury for nearly thirty years. He had crowned a king, brokered a royal marriage, and quietly endured decades of royal pressure. Yet in his final months, this cautious old man compared Henry VIII to Henry II and reached for Magna Carta to defend the church's liberties. How did a man famous for his favourite Latin phrase, "ira principis mors est" - "the king's anger is death" - find the nerve to speak up when it mattered most? And why did it come so late?

• 2. A Lawyer's Rise

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  Robert Warham of Malshanger, Hampshire, was a tenant farmer, a fact that makes his son's trajectory all the more striking. William attended Winchester College and then New College, Oxford, before practising and teaching law in both London and Oxford. The law was his ladder. His brother, Sir Hugh Warham, took a different route, acquiring an estate at Croydon that eventually passed through his daughter Agnes to her husband, Sir Anthony St Leger. The two brothers carved out different kinds of status, but it was William who would reach the highest offices in the land.

  By 1494, Warham had become Master of the Rolls, and Henry VII recognised in him a useful and clever diplomatist. The king put him to work on some of the era's most delicate negotiations. Warham helped arrange the marriage between Henry's son Arthur, Prince of Wales, and Catherine of Aragon. In 1497, he travelled to Scotland alongside Richard Foxe, then Bishop of Durham. He was also partly responsible for several commercial and other treaties with Maximilian I, Holy Roman Emperor, who was simultaneously Count of Flanders and Regent Duke of Burgundy, negotiating on behalf of Philip IV of Burgundy. Each assignment built the reputation that would carry him to Canterbury.

• 3. At the Summit

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  In 1502, Warham was consecrated Bishop of London and took on the role of Keeper of the Great Seal. Both posts proved brief. By 1504, he held the two greatest offices available to a churchman in England: Lord Chancellor and Archbishop of Canterbury. In 1506, he added the Chancellorship of Oxford University, a position he would keep until his death.

  The crowning of Henry VIII in 1509, which Warham himself presided over, was also the occasion for the wedding of the new king to Catherine of Aragon. Warham officiated at both. On the 28th of September 1511, he made a formal visit to the hospital at Maison Dieu in Faversham. Then came the quarrels. A serious dispute with Foxe, now Bishop of Winchester, and others in 1512 seemed to mark a turning point. After that, Warham gradually withdrew from the centre of affairs. His resignation from the Lord Chancellorship came in 1515, and he was succeeded by Thomas Wolsey, a man Warham had himself consecrated as Bishop of Lincoln the year before. His dislike of Henry's foreign policy may have driven the decision.

• 4. The King's Anger Is Death

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  Warham was present at the Field of the Cloth of Gold in 1520, that spectacular meeting of Henry VIII and Francis I of France. Seven years later, he served as an assessor alongside Wolsey during the secret inquiry into whether Henry's marriage to Catherine was valid. Throughout the long divorce proceedings, observers described him as an old and weary man.

  Named as one of the counsellors assigned to assist Catherine herself, Warham gave her very little support. He feared provoking the king. His favourite phrase, "ira principis mors est," was not merely a rhetorical habit - it expressed the calculation that shaped his decisions. He went so far as to sign the letter to Pope Clement VII urging the pope to grant Henry's wish. At one point, it was proposed that Warham himself should try the divorce case, but the suggestion never came to anything.

  In 1531, presiding over the Convocation of Canterbury, Warham watched as the clergy of his province voted £100,000 to the king to avoid the legal penalties of praemunire. They also accepted Henry as supreme head of the church, though with the careful qualification "so far as the Law of Christ allows."

• 5. A Protest Too Late

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  In February 1532, something shifted. Warham formally protested against all acts concerning the church that had been passed by the parliament sitting since 1529. The gesture did not slow what followed. The complete submission of the clergy to royal authority went ahead later that same year.

  Against that submission, Warham drew up a protest in which he explicitly compared the conduct of Henry VIII to that of Henry II, the king whose conflict with Thomas Becket had ended in Becket's murder at Canterbury Cathedral. He invoked Magna Carta in defence of the church's liberties. He attempted to negotiate a compromise during the Submission of the Clergy, and failed. He was, as contemporaries might have noted, standing in the very cathedral where Becket had died. His effort came to nothing, but he made it. He died that August, on a visit to his nephew, who shared his name. He was buried in the Martyrdom transept of Canterbury Cathedral, the north transept named for Becket himself. The man who succeeded him as archbishop was Thomas Cranmer, who had been central to engineering the break with Rome that Warham had spent his last months resisting. Warham Guild was later named in his memory.