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Raphael and Bramante, and commissioned Michelangelo to paint the ceiling of the Sistine Chapel with a force and beauty that seemed divinely planted indeed. He also fathered three daughters, contracted syphilis, woresilver armour as he led papal armies in his vendetta against the Borgias, and launched the indulgence that drew Luther’s wrath. He was succeeded in 1513 by Leo X, the son of Lorenzo de’ Medici and the owner of a menagerie: Persian horses, a panther and two leopards accompanied his processions, together with an elephant, Hanno, whose portrait he had painted by Raphael. These men were indisputably great Renaissance princes, open to every manner of temporal vice and excess; but they were also Christ’s vicars on earth, vulnerable to the spiritual assaults that Luther – and then Tyndale – were to heap upon them.
    At home, Cardinal Wolsey was the grandest priest ever seen in England. He paid a visit of typical grandeur to Cambridge in 1520, a man of ordinary birth who combined the vast secular power of lord chancellor with the spiritual authority of a legatus a latere , the special envoy, of the Holy See. The university addressed him as Majestas, a fitting title, for he was plundering both State and Church to build a new foundation of exquisite grandeur on the Oxford water meadows, which he named Cardinal’s College for himself, 1 and a palace at Hampton Court that outdid the king. Wolsey had attitudes to match his papal masters. ‘How think you?’ he said when criticised for flaunting his wealth. ‘Were it better for me, being in the honour and dignity that I am, to make coins of my pillars and poleaxes and to give money to five or six beggars than to maintain the commonwealth as I do?’
    This was anathema to a Bible-man like Tyndale, who believed that priests should share the poverty of the apostles. Tyndale dubbed him ‘Wolfsee … this wily wolf, I say, and raging sea, and shipwreck of all England’. Wolsey was prey to ‘all manner of voluptuousness, expert and exercised in the course of the world’, Tyndale wrote in a racy character sketch, ‘utterly appointed to semble and dissemble, to have one thing in the heart and another in the mouth … there was no man so obsequious and serviceable, and in all games and sports the first and next at hand …’

    Thomas Wolsey, cardinal, lord chancellor and papal legate, was the grandest priest England had ever seen. His palaces, jewels, feasts and retinue spoke of a Church in which the worldly was overwhelming the spiritual. Tyndale mocked him as ‘Wolfsee … this wily wolf, I say, and raging sea, and shipwreck of all England’. But he was a humane man, who preferred compromise with heretics to burning them at the stake.
    (Popperfoto)

    Beneath the brilliant display of the Church – the altar cloths of silk, velvet and sarcanet, the robes and vestments of damask and linen, the chalices and cups of jewelled silver – lurked a rottenness. Solemn warning had been given by delegates at the Church Council at Basle eighty years before. Henceforth, they had resolved, ‘all simony shall cease … All priests shall put away their concubines [or] shall be deprived of his office, though he be the Bishop of Rome … The abuse of ban and anathema by the popes shall cease … The popes shall neither demand nor receive any fees for ecclesiastical offices. From now on, a pope should think not of this world’s treasures but only of those of the world to come.’ For their pains, the delegates were denounced as ‘apostates, blaspheming rebels, men guilty of sacrilege, gaolbirds’, and ignored.
    Nepotism continued to flourish. Leo X was an abbot at the age of seven, a canon at eight and a cardinal at thirteen. Simony, the sale of office, accelerated and new bureaucracies were invented to extend the business. Leo X traded in 2150 Church appointments with a value of three million ducats. Forgery was rampant in the sale of relics, where demand far outstripped supply as