ASV, Penitenzieria Ap., Reg. Matrim. et Div.

Archivio Segreto Vaticano, Penitenzieria Apostolica, Registra Matrimonialium et Diversorum

LPL

Lambeth Palace Library, London

TNA

The National Archives

An important way in which papal power was demonstrated in pre-Reformation England was by the conceding of special favours, notably dispensations.Footnote ² This was all to change following Henry viii's decision to break with Rome in the early 1530s. This was motivated by Henry's need for a divorce from Catherine of Aragon, which he suspected the pope would refuse him, but the decision was justified by the grand principle of royal supremacy over the English Church. One practical consequence of this policy was to make appeals to Rome illegal, including that by Catherine to save her marriage. Another was to abolish papal jurisdiction in the important matter of dispensations, tackled by an act of parliament in 1533–4. Its preamble declared that the pope had ‘usurped’ the power to grant dispensations to the English crown and its subjects, and that this properly belonged to the king and parliament.Footnote ³ The act went on to delegate this power to the archbishop of Canterbury, who might thereby grant any ‘licences, dispensations, compositions, faculties, grants, rescripts, delegacies, instruments and other writings’ formerly issued on papal authority and ‘not being contrary or repugnant to the holy scriptures and laws of God’.Footnote ⁴ Henceforth the crown and its subjects might no longer seek such grants from Rome or from those authorised by the pope to issue them; any obtained in this way after 12 March 1534 would be invalid.Footnote ⁵ The archbishop of Canterbury's new ‘Faculty Office’, established by provision of this act in 1534, consequently replaced the papal Curia and its representatives as the main source of these graces in Henry viii's realm (meaning here England and Wales).Footnote ⁶

Dispensations therefore continued to be available to Henry's subjects even if from a different source. Doubtless dispensations had become too important a part of ecclesiastical jurisdiction to abolish altogether. Petitioners had sought them from the Curia in increasing numbers since at least the eleventh century, because dispensations released them from observing canon law in certain instances, notably its prohibition on marriage within seven and later four degrees of kinship.Footnote ⁷ Dispensations were important not only to laity, especially to validate such marriages between close kindred, but also to clergy, for example enabling them to hold several benefices, usually condemned in canon law as pluralism, or to receive ordination despite such canonical impediments as illegitimate birth. By the late Middle Ages requests for dispensations formed a major part of relations between the English and Rome; letters issued by the papal chancery to English recipients and copied in its registers largely responded to such requests.Footnote ⁸ Another papal office mainly specialised in granting dispensations and other papal graces, namely the penitentiary;Footnote ⁹ and its registers of petitions also testify to substantial demand for these favours from England and Wales: 4,085 petitions from there were recorded in its fifty registers extant down to 1503.Footnote ¹⁰ These registers only covered the years 1410–11, 1438–43 and 1447 onwards, recording petitions approved by the penitentiary and probably also where the petitioners expressly requested their registration; hence the actual number of petitions from late medieval England and Wales to the penitentiary was undoubtedly far higher. Despite such limitations, the registers constitute an important ‘new’ source for understanding Anglo-papal relations on the eve of the Reformation (new as they have only been available to researchers since 1983). They are particularly relevant since the penitentiary was in many respects the forerunner of the Faculty Office, and they will be used here together with English ecclesiastical sources, notably bishops’ registers, to show that the transition from this office to its post-Reformation successor was less dramatic and less novel than might at first appear. Indeed this fits with the prevailing impression that the jurisdictional upheavals unleashed by the English Reformation were far less radical than the institutional and doctrinal ones.Footnote ¹¹

What prepared the way for this transition was a remarkable development in the 1520s. Even before 1534 the penitentiary and other curial offices, including the chancery, did not possess a monopoly on dispensationsFootnote ¹² (which the Faculty Office eventually asserted in Henry viii's realm). Popes had often issued ‘faculties’ to papal agents, especially legates and nuncios, and even bishops, including the archbishops of Canterbury, delegating authority to grant certain papal graces. Cardinal Wolsey in particular was to acquire a wide range of such faculties as a legate a latere, and he exploited them to such an extent in the 1520s that he would seriously rival Rome as a source of dispensations for Henry viii's subjects.Footnote ¹³ The evidence for his exercise of these faculties is certainly extensive. Several of his original letters of dispensation survive; copies of many others can be found entered in episcopal registers. Most remarkably, a list of 110 graces that Wolsey granted between July 1525 and July 1526 testifies to the sheer scale of his legatine activity.Footnote ¹⁴ This evidence deserves study in its own right; here Wolsey's activity will be assessed in terms of its consequences for later developments. Chambers has indeed described his activity in granting dispensations as ‘Wolsey's Faculty Office’ and suggested that it ‘had some influence in the organisation of the new Faculty Office’.Footnote ¹⁵

One immediate consequence is that Wolsey effectively replaced the penitentiary as the main source of dispensations for English and Welsh petitioners. Before Wolsey it is clear that they had largely turned to the penitentiary for papal graces. For example, during the papacy of Alexander vi (1492–1503) the office approved around sixty petitions a year from England and Wales, according to its registers. Under Wolsey this situation changed dramatically: such petitions declined to a mere four enregistered at the penitentiary in 1525–6, while by contrast Wolsey issued 110 graces in this period.Footnote ¹⁶ This development is also illustrated by Wolsey's register as archbishop of York (1514–30), which further suggests that he consciously eclipsed the Curia in this activity. His register includes copies of penitentiary letters solicited by petitioners in his archdiocese dating from 1513 onwards, but these stop dead early in 1521 and copies of Wolsey's letters of dispensation then appear from 1522 until 1528, the year before his downfall. It is indeed no coincidence that Wolsey, first appointed legate a latere in May 1518, apparently received faculties to grant certain dispensations when Pope Leo x renewed his legation on 6 January 1521; he remained a legate and so retained these faculties until his downfall in autumn 1529.Footnote ¹⁷

Why did most English and Welsh petitioners turn from the papal penitentiary to Wolsey for dispensations in the 1520s? One reason is that Wolsey granted much the same graces as the penitentiary; it was clearly more convenient to approach him than send off requests to distant Rome. About half of the entries in his list of 1525–6, fifty-three out of 110, deal with marriage dispensations. The penitentiary had also issued these in large numbers since at least the mid-fifteenth century, and by Leo x's papacy (1513–21) they likewise formed about half of its business, since the office then began to copy petitions which it approved into two annual registers (as opposed to one), one of them devoted purely to marriage.Footnote ¹⁸ The kinds of marital dispensations granted by the penitentiary and Wolsey were also similar. Both mostly conceded dispensations for marriages in the third and/or fourth degrees of consanguinity or affinity (forty out of fifty-three in Wolsey's list).Footnote ¹⁹ Like the penitentiary Wolsey also often granted dispensations from cognatio spiritualis (ten entries in his list), the impediment against marrying a daughter or son of one's godparent or one's sponsor at confirmation.Footnote ²⁰ Similarly he issued dispensations for ordination below the canonical age (twenty-five for priests) or outside the usual days for conferring orders (fourteen and ten entries respectively in his list);Footnote ²¹ these had long formed part of the penitentiary's stock-in-trade. Wolsey did not confine his dispensations to those issued by the penitentiary; he also granted graces which the penitentiary rarely issued, notably licences of non-residence and capacities for regular clergy to hold benefices or leave religion, and he issued others which lay outside the penitentiary's competence (but pertained to the chancery's), especially dispensations for pluralism and uniting benefices. Conversely he granted few known dispensations from illegitimacy (permitting men of illegitimate birth to receive ordination and benefices), whereas these were often solicited from the penitentiary; probably his faculty to grant such favours was restricted.Footnote ²² This limitation aside, he exercised his faculties very widely. From Wolsey's list it is abundantly clear that his dispensations were solicited by clergy and laity from all twenty-one English and Welsh dioceses (particularly his own of York and nearby Coventry and Lichfield) except Canterbury and Rochester.Footnote ²³

A further reason why most English and Welsh petitioned Wolsey rather than the penitentiary for dispensations in the years after 1527 was the Sack of Rome (an unexpected repercussion of Pope Clement vii's support for the international alliance against Emperor Charles v). The invasion of Rome by imperial troops in May 1527 paralysed papal government for months, if not years, afterwards.Footnote ²⁴ Above all, the penitentiary did not function properly. No registers of the office survive for the fifth, sixth and seventh years of Clement vii's pontificate (1527–30). Perhaps they were lost in the chaos of the period, but more likely they were never compiled. Contemporary flyleaf notes in a penitentiary register from Clement's third year (1525–6) claim that the office's business was not registered in the next four pontifical years.Footnote ²⁵ Other evidence clearly shows that the penitentiary did not resume normal activity until the early 1530s. The earliest known letter of dispensation which it issued to English petitioners following the Sack of Rome is dated 7 November 1530.Footnote ²⁶ The office's earliest surviving register after the Sack recorded petitions from 28 September 1531 onwards. Antonio Pucci had become cardinal penitentiary, the head of the office, on 27 September, and possibly registration only revived under him.Footnote ²⁷ In any case it is evident that the Sack of Rome had been very disruptive of the office's activity in the late 1520s.

Furthermore it is likely that many seeking dispensations were put off from even approaching the penitentiary in this chaotic period, since news of the Sack spread rapidly across Europe.Footnote ²⁸ In its immediate aftermath Clement vii had found himself a virtual prisoner in Rome's Castel Sant'Angelo, besieged by imperial troops. The cardinal penitentiary Lorenzo Pucci had joined the pope there until they escaped Rome with other members of the Curia for nearby Orvieto in December 1527.Footnote ²⁹ Despite the circumstances, some requests for dispensations appear to have reached them during their Roman captivity, when ‘owing to the insistence and incessant entreaties of ecclesiastics and laymen, many graces, privileges, dispensations, etc., were agreed to and granted more under compulsion than of our own free will’. But the papal bull that ruefully admitted this soon after Clement's arrival in Orvieto went on to revoke most of the grants allegedly made under duress.Footnote ³⁰ Even if this did not discourage petitioners, the perils of reaching the Curia, behind imperial battle-lines, doubtless would have done. Henry viii's agent William Knight had ‘survived a nearly lethal attack’ outside Rome on his way to ask Clement vii for the king's divorce from Catherine of Aragon in late 1527. He obtained a letter of dispensation at Orvieto for Henry's planned marriage to Anne Boleyn, which Lorenzo Pucci apparently had a hand in drafting.Footnote ³¹ But it is uncertain whether many other English petitioners were ready and able to go to such lengths, particularly when their king had joined the alliance against Charles v and was seeking a divorce from Charles's aunt.Footnote ³² It was clearly safer and easier for them to ask Wolsey for dispensations; Pope Clement had conceded as much when he apparently appointed Wolsey his vicar with full powers of dispensation during his Roman captivity.Footnote ³³

It might also be argued that petitioners found it cheaper to obtain dispensations from Wolsey, but the evidence is hard to interpret on this point. The Dispensations Act of 1533–4 refers to the grievous and excessive costs that Henry's subjects bore in petitioning the Curia for dispensations, and Chambers has suggested that this claim drew ‘some of its power from a regret for the recent disappearance of Wolsey's Faculty Office’.Footnote ³⁴ A crude comparison of the Curia's and Wolsey's charges appears to undermine this point, however, as Chambers himself recognised. The charges for Wolsey's dispensations in his list of 1525–6 were actually higher than the fees for similar graces in a contemporary penitentiary tax-list, which indeed suggests that the act's rhetoric did not reflect reality.Footnote ³⁵ For example, the curial tax-list (June 1525 × 1534) set a basic fee of seven gros tournois for a dispensation to marry in the fourth degree of consanguinity or affinity. This was the fee to pay a penitentiary scribe to write the letter of dispensation. The same tax-list shows that extra fees were due to other penitentiary officials involved in the document's expedition;Footnote ³⁶ the charges for sealing the letter (5½ gros tournois) and the proctor who solicited it thus raised its cost to 18 gros. This composite fee was equivalent to about 8s. 2d. in English currency.Footnote ³⁷ The same grace in Wolsey's list usually cost 23s. 4d., almost three times as much. Similarly a dispensation to marry in the third and fourth degrees of consanguinity or affinity incurred a composite fee of 30 gros at the penitentiary, or about 13s. 6d., whereas Wolsey usually charged twice as much (26s. 8d.) for this in 1525–6.Footnote ³⁸

In theory, therefore, the Curia was cheaper, but in practice it probably was not. Indeed such comparisons are misleading, for the penitentiary's tax-list does not represent the full cost of petitioning this office. E. Göller, who edited it, sought to defend the office from Protestant accusations of papal venality, but even he admitted that the composite fees in some cases might be supplemented by up to three further taxes.Footnote ³⁹ For example, certain of the penitentiary's letters attracted a surcharge known as a ‘composition’, which was payable by the mid-fifteenth century to a new papal finance office, the ‘datary’. Significant instances were dispensations for marriage in the third degree and dispensations for couples who had married knowing that they were related in the fourth degree.Footnote ⁴⁰ W. P. Müller has also noted that the penitentiary's fees had been rising steadily since at least the mid-fifteenth century and probably earlier, for they had drawn frequent complaints from the conciliar movement. Papal attempts to control them were apparently ineffective; in 1513 Leo x had denounced the escalation of these fees since Sixtus iv's papacy (1471–84) but left their reform to the penitentiary. The Curia had no incentive to regulate them, however. It had lost many of its traditional sources of income since the late fourteenth century, and popes had sought to raise new revenues by such expedients as the sale of curial offices, including those of penitentiary scribes. Offices increasingly went to the highest bidder, hence their buyers tried to make a return on their investment by charging as much as they could for their services. This led to price inflation at the penitentiary, which the papacy tolerated. Hence it was unclear to petitioners what the final bill at the Curia might be despite the existence of printed penitentiary tax-lists by the late fifteenth century, because it rarely bore much relation to such tariffs.Footnote ⁴¹ For example, when Abbot Whethamstede of St Alban's visited Rome in 1423, he secured a licence to eat meat during Lent. The nominal fee for this was ten gros but he actually paid about 462 gros or £7 14s. His case was perhaps exceptional, and more evidence is needed of petitioners’ expenditure at the later medieval curia, notably proctors’ accounts.Footnote ⁴² Nevertheless the act of 1533–4 was probably not exaggerating when it declared that Henry viii's subjects had been greatly impoverished ‘by the losses and exchanges and in conductyng of currours [couriers] and wagyng solicitours’ when petitioning Rome. The act even asserted that ‘many tymes greatter sommes have byn demaunded for the spedy expedicion’ of graces at the Curia than its tax-lists required, leaving the king's subjects uncertain as to their true cost and so ‘constrayned to pay more than they were wont to doo’.Footnote ⁴³ If, as it appears, it had been overall cheaper to petition Wolsey than Rome, the complaints of the act against the costs of curial dispensations were at least plausible. Admittedly Wolsey's charges were by no means low and he evidently sought to share in the profits of papal jurisdiction (his list of 1525–6 was primarily a financial record), but the disappearance of his Faculty Office after his fall from royal favour in 1529 exposed English and Welsh petitioners to much higher costs, as it forced them to turn back to the Curia for dispensations.

Another consequence was that it took longer to obtain dispensations, for the Curia was slower to issue them, as the act also alleged: ‘some times the spedying of suche dispensations … at Rome have byn soo longe differed, that the partyes laboryng for the same have suffered great incommodities and losse for lacke of quycke spede’.Footnote ⁴⁴ Wolsey's office was surely quicker, for it was easier of access to English and Welsh petitioners and dealt exclusively with them, while the Curia faced far more petitioners from across Europe and developed a large administration and complex procedures to handle them. Indeed an example from shortly after Wolsey's fall shows the inconvenience which could arise from petitioning the distant Curia, especially in a case where speed was essential. John Breck and Joan Wydon of Chesham in Lincoln diocese had petitioned the penitentiary for a dispensation to marry because John's mother was Joan's godparent, which created the canonical impediment of cognatio spiritualis to their marriage. A letter of the cardinal penitentiary dated 12 June 1531 authorised their request, but in order for their dispensation to take effect the letter had to be executed by the couple's ordinary, i.e. the bishop of Lincoln, or his vicar-in-spirituals, to whom it was addressed. This was standard procedure and meant that the Curia commissioned such local church authorities to verify the petitioners’ claims.Footnote ⁴⁵ If they found these to be true, they might grant what was requested; but if not, they might refuse, which in this case would mean that the marriage was invalid and in certain circumstances its issue might be considered illegitimate.Footnote ⁴⁶ This is precisely what John and Joan sought to avoid, for what had clearly prompted their petition was that she had fallen pregnant with his child. The couple's proctor emphasised the urgency of the situation when he asked the bishop of Lincoln to execute their letter of dispensation in January 1532. Unless their marriage were dispensed and solemnised beforehand, he explained, their child would be born illegitimate (endangering its inheritance rights) and they would incur infamy. In order to speed matters along, the proctor brought a witness from the couple's village to testify to their cognatio spiritualis and to the imminent birth.Footnote ⁴⁷ The bishop accepted this evidence and so executed the couple's dispensation on 22 January 1532, crucially recognising their ‘future’ offspring as legitimate. He also licensed the immediate solemnisation of their marriage in Chesham parish church before 27 January with one reading of the banns at the wedding (instead of the usual three on preceding consecutive Sundays); whether it all happened in time to fulfil the anxious couple's wishes is not known.

This may be an extreme case, but it illustrates the problems of long-distance petitioning: seven months passed between the issuing and execution of the couple's letter of dispensation. Doubtless it took some time to reach them from Rome. But the need to engage a proctor, find a reliable witness and send both to their bishop, then at his London residence, in order to gain its execution must have complicated matters further, as well as adding to the case's expenses. Indeed it was not unusual by this time, at least in Lincoln diocese, for petitioners to hire one proctor at the Curia to request the letter of grace there, and another to secure its execution by the local ordinary (fifteenth-century English and Welsh petitioners had normally asked their ordinary in person to execute such letters).Footnote ⁴⁸ Petitioning Wolsey for papal graces had been a more straightforward procedure, partly since it did not apparently involve execution.

Despite the complexities and costs involved, Henry's subjects had little choice but to petition Rome after Wolsey's fall in autumn 1529, when his legatine authority effectively lapsed. By then the Curia had revived normal business after the Sack of Rome. Certainly several English and Welsh supplicants submitted petitions to and received letters from the penitentiary in the following years. The register of John Longland, bishop of Lincoln (1521–47), comprises only graces issued by Wolsey up to 1528, but those granted by the papal penitentiary and chancery reappear there in the early 1530s.Footnote ⁴⁹ Likewise the penitentiary registers, resuming from 1531, comprise petitions from England and Wales at least down to 1534. The three registers for the ninth year of Clement vii's papacy (1531–2) include at least twelve and possibly as many as eighteen, and the two for his tenth year (1532–3) similarly include sixteen.Footnote ⁵⁰ However, these were far fewer petitions than the penitentiary had approved from England and Wales in the late fifteenth century, or indeed Wolsey in the 1520s, if his list of 1525–6 is anything to go by. This might reflect the fact that English and Welsh petitioners could turn not just to Rome but to those holding similar faculties to Wolsey's. But the evidence is hardly compelling; graces of such local papal agents seem less numerous in the early 1530s than those formerly issued by Wolsey, and hardly enough to make up for his Faculty Office's absence.Footnote ⁵¹ A more convincing cause was the increasingly tense Anglo-papal relationship arising from Henry viii's campaign against the Church (in 1530 the pope was also reconciled to Henry's enemy Charles v after the Sack, further hardening his opposition to Henry's divorce from Charles's aunt). These facts doubtless persuaded Henry's subjects that their petitions would not receive a warm reception at Rome. This is hard to prove, but it is telling that petitions from Charles's Spanish territories dominate the penitentiary registers by the early 1530s. In practice, the Curia actually seems to have been quite receptive to petitions from Henry's realm, perhaps in the hope of retaining its adherence to Rome despite Henry's ecclesiastical reforms.Footnote ⁵² Simply fewer English and Welsh solicited dispensations, and this reflects the pattern in other parts of Europe where petitions to the penitentiary declined as the Reformation advanced, notably in Germany and Scandinavia during the 1520s.Footnote ⁵³ This does not mean that Henry viii’s subjects saw the Dispensations Act coming or its ban on petitioning Rome as inevitable. One petition in the penitentiary registers especially throws doubt on this. It was approved at Rome on 13 July 1533, some four months before parliament passed the act, and the petitioner was John Johnson, ‘illustrissimi domini Henrici regis Anglie capellanus’.Footnote ⁵⁴ It is surely remarkable that someone as close to the king as his chaplain should petition Rome if a ban on doing so were already anticipated, especially when the grace that Johnson sought was also available from his local bishop (namely a licence of non-residence to study at a university).

What should have been clear to the king's subjects by 1533, above all to his chaplain, was that Henry had already mounted a bold challenge to papal authority, and the Dispensations Act arose in this context. Indeed the act had an immediate effect on petitioning to Rome once it came into force. The penitentiary registers for Clement vii's eleventh year (1533–4) record only two petitions from Henry's realm, both approved shortly after the act's 12 March deadline which rendered the resulting dispensations invalid.Footnote ⁵⁵ Another act of 1536 indeed alleged that after this date papal graces had still been ‘temerously and ignorantly accepted, receyved, used and erroniously put in execucion and exercised’.Footnote ⁵⁶ The scale of continued English and Welsh petitioning to the penitentiary needs fuller investigation, but it was doubtless small. Certainly Henry viii's subjects had started to turn to the archbishop of Canterbury's Faculty Office in significant numbers by April 1534. Indeed the office's first surviving register shows that this new source of graces faced high demand at once.Footnote ⁵⁷ It indicates that the office issued more than 300 marriage dispensations alone in its first year of operation (1534–5), six times as many as those recorded in Wolsey's list of 1525–6.Footnote ⁵⁸ Admittedly parliament had given it a virtual monopoly on dispensations which Wolsey had never enjoyed, but doubtless it was also popular with petitioners for the same reasons as Wolsey's earlier ‘Faculty Office’ had been: it granted much the same dispensations as the Curia, notably for marriage impediments, and was more convenient than Rome. Furthermore the Dispensations Act promised a transparent and fixed scale of taxes for dispensations in contrast to the allegedly arbitrary and excessive costs of the Curia.Footnote ⁵⁹ All Reformation statutes also provided for punishment of those who disobeyed them; the Dispensations Act, and that of 1536, threatened penalties on those who continued to petition the Curia in defiance of the new system. In any case bishops complying with royal reforms would have been reluctant to execute the papal dispensations which such petitioners obtained. Hence there was probably little point in resisting change, though the act of 1536 indicates that some of Henry's subjects did so.Footnote ⁶⁰

Clearly the Faculty Office represented change, if not necessarily actual reform. However, in important respects it was characterised by continuity with the old system, displaying notable similarities to the penitentiary. This continuity doubtless made the transition more palatable to Henry's subjects even if they had little choice but to accept it. First, the Dispensations Act empowered the archbishop of Canterbury to concede every kind of grace formerly obtained from Rome. In the first six years of the Faculty Office's existence the kind that it issued most often were dispensations for marriage within the prohibited degrees;Footnote ⁶¹ this was also the main category of business at the penitentiary. Archbishop Cranmer even signed a dispensation for Henry himself to marry his third wife Jane Seymour, since they were said to be related twice in the third degree of affinity; this was issued at Lambeth on 19 May 1536 (in some haste as Henry's second wife Anne Boleyn was executed that day).Footnote ⁶² Second, there was no immediate rejection or revision of the medieval canon law; consequently dispensations were still needed from it just as they had been before. Not until 1540 would this change with the parliamentary act that abolished most of the prohibited degrees, retaining only those mentioned in Leviticus xviii and xx, and declared that marriages not otherwise contrary to God's law were lawful. This made dispensations from the other ‘outer’ degrees unnecessary and thus reduced the Faculty Office's powers; ultimately the act even ended dispensations from those degrees that were retained.Footnote ⁶³ Nevertheless until then, the relevant provisions of canon law remained in force and those who did not observe its rules without the appropriate dispensation might be judged violators of them and punished accordingly.

An example is the case of Sylvester Darius, who was deprived of two benefices in the diocese of Worcester on 3 November 1536 because he was non-resident and held them in plurality ‘absque aliquo iusto titulo aut dispensatione alia quacumque competenti’.Footnote ⁶⁴ A reform agenda probably motivated the case against him, since he had been a papal agent in England and his judge was Hugh Latimer, the reformist who had succeeded another absentee Italian curialist as bishop of Worcester; Latimer was probably also enforcing an act of 1536 which tightened up the rules on non-residence.Footnote ⁶⁵ Hence the case was not entirely typical, but whatever Latimer's political point, lengthy proceedings gave it an air of legality and Darius's defence largely failed in his absence (he had returned to Italy), for his proctor could not produce the required dispensation. And indeed the Faculty Office continued to issue large numbers of dispensations for plurality, often allowing non-residence, into the 1540s, graces which had formerly been secured mostly from the papal chancery. The Faculty Office also conceded other graces previously received from the penitentiary (which show that the old rules still operated because of the absence of particular reforms), notably licences to eat meat and dairy produce in Lent and other fasting periods and dispensations for men of illegitimate birth or with physical deformities to receive ordination and benefices.Footnote ⁶⁶ Less extensive evidence can also be found for the Faculty Office granting dispensations for under-age ordination and licences for ordination outside the legal times and by any catholic bishop, grants previously solicited from the penitentiary.Footnote ⁶⁷ Finally regular clergy in Henry viii's realm had petitioned the penitentiary by the 1520s for licences standi extra, also known as capacities, to leave the religious life, and (for male religious only) to hold a benefice as secular priests.Footnote ⁶⁸ The Faculty Office subsequently granted large numbers of such grants during Henry viii's dissolutions of religious houses until, of course, the total suppression of the regular life made them unnecessary.Footnote ⁶⁹

The Faculty Office also displayed other remarkable similarities to the penitentiary in terms of both its organisation and the format and language of its letters. First of all, the heads of both offices exercised delegated authority, though derived from different sources: the pope in the case of the cardinal penitentiary; king and parliament in that of the archbishop of Canterbury. The penitentiary, therefore, issued letters in the cardinal penitentiary's name which included the clause ‘auctoritate domini pape cuius penitentiarie curam gerimus’. Faculty Office letters were likewise issued in the archbishop's name and contained a similar phrase ‘ad infrascripta auctoritate parliamenti Anglie legitime fulcitus’ (the latter compares even more closely to the phrase in letters of those holding papal faculties to grant dispensations, notably Wolsey: ‘ad infrascripta auctoritate apostolica fulciti’). Secondly both heads of these offices had deputies who approved most requests for dispensations on their behalf, even if the resulting letters of grace were still in their name: a regent in the cardinal's case; a commissary, deputy, guardian or master of the faculties in the archbishop's case.Footnote ⁷⁰ Thirdly both offices followed the same procedure of issuing letters in response to petitions which they approved, employed scribes (or in the Faculty Office's case, a clerk) to draw these letters up, and registered the approved petitions.Footnote ⁷¹ Clearly the papal penitentiary served as an obvious administrative model for the Faculty Office that claimed many of its powers; this imitation of curial practices is especially remarkable in the age of the supposed ‘Tudor Revolution in Government’. Doubtless it helps to explain these similarities and the use of the penitentiary as a model that Thomas Cranmer, the first archbishop to head the Faculty Office, had formerly served the Curia as ‘Penitentiary-General of England’; evidently this affiliation to the penitentiary made him well aware of the latter's organisation.Footnote ⁷²

From the petitioners’ perspective, however, the most striking parallels occurred in the letters that they impetrated. Letters of the Faculty Office bore remarkable similarities to those issued by the penitentiary (and doubtless other curial offices).Footnote ⁷³ In terms of external features these were standard to most documents issued by public authorities in later medieval Europe: both kinds of letter were written on parchment (although Faculty Office letters were not ‘in an Italianate humanist script’);Footnote ⁷⁴ each bore a seal of the office issuing it;Footnote ⁷⁵ and each was signed on a plica to the right of the seal cord by the specific scribe who wrote it. The internal features of these letters were far more peculiar, hence the comparisons here are more striking. Firstly, the text was usually structured in the same way. Both papal and Faculty Office letters of dispensation began with a greeting clause (naming the cardinal penitentiary in penitentiary letters and the archbishop of Canterbury in Faculty Office letters). What followed normally comprised an arenga or statement of general principle (and Faculty Office arengae seem to be modelled on papal ones), a narratio describing the circumstances of the petitioner(s) and their request, and a dispositio, in which the official named in the greeting clause usually authorised this request. The dispositio normally ended with a non obstante clause disregarding any canonical norms contrary to its decision, and a final dating clause followed.Footnote ⁷⁶ Secondly, Faculty Office letters borrowed much of the formulaic language of papal dispensations that dealt with the same issues. For example the marriage dispensations in appendices 1 and 2 are worded in a way similar to those issued by the papal penitentiary, notably the clause recognising the children of the marriage dispensed as legitimate (crucial to their inheritance rights).Footnote ⁷⁷ The most striking adoption of papal language occurs in appendix 1, namely the phrases ‘ex certa scientia’, ‘mero motu’ and ‘deque nostre potestatis … plenitudine’. The first phrase signified that the grant concerned was made based on ‘certain knowledge’ and so might not be revoked subsequently; it usually occurred in papal letters confirming earlier grants. The second phrase implied that the grant was made on the grantor's own initiative, not in response to a petition; papal letters also contain a variant on this phrase, motu proprio, with the same meaning. The final phrase referred to the plenitude of power which the papacy claimed to exercise over the Church by divine will; it was used to justify papal dispensations. After the Dispensations Act, extraordinarily, it was adopted to cloak with supreme authority not only dispensations granted by the archbishop of Canterbury but also by the king himself, since the crown reserved the right to issue them under the royal supremacy though rarely exercised it. Henry viii thus granted a dispensation on 27 April 1537 ‘ex certa scientia et mero motu’ and ‘de plenitudine potestatis nostre supremitatis’.Footnote ⁷⁸ Although such pretensions to papal power were radical (Francis i of France allegedly remarked that Henry would try to celebrate mass next),Footnote ⁷⁹ they were surely meant to reassure Henry's subjects that these new dispensations carried the same authority as those previously sought from Rome. Certainly they were designed to look and sound similar.

Such parallels did not cease, however, once letters had been secured from the Faculty Office. The letters were sometimes copied into episcopal registers just as penitentiary letters had formerly been.Footnote ⁸⁰ In the latter case this was because the letters had normally been addressed to the bishop of the petitioner(s) who solicited them and he was instructed to execute the letters. Faculty Office letters did not apparently require execution, and thus were normally addressed to their beneficiaries or petitioners.Footnote ⁸¹ Nevertheless, some were evidently presented to bishops, notably in instances regarding ordination and admission to benefices, which bishops normally controlled. Furthermore, just as penitentiary letters had not conferred the grace requested until they had been executed, certain Faculty Office letters did not do so unless the royal chancery ratified them. The Dispensations Act ruled that Faculty Office letters costing over £4 could not take effect until they ‘be fyrst confirmed by your Highness … under the greate Seale, and inrolled in your Chauncerie in a Roll by a Clerke to be appoynted for the same’.Footnote ⁸² Clearly this kept the archbishop's office subject to the crown (as did the act's provision that petitioners might appeal to the king if the office refused dispensations, and should it still defy his writ to issue them, it might even be deprived of the power to grant them). Likewise the penitentiary had to seek higher papal approval for certain grants, since it lacked the delegated authority to issue them automatically.Footnote ⁸³ An even closer analogy can be drawn between royal letters patent confirming Faculty Office grants and episcopal letters executing papal graces.Footnote ⁸⁴ Although the latter put into effect decisions of a higher rather than lower authority, they also took the form of letters patent and recited the papal letters of grace that they ratified; appendix 2 similarly consists of a royal letter patent quoting the Faculty Office letter that it approved. Furthermore the royal chancery effectively took over the episcopal role of executing papal graces after an act of 1536 permitted Henry's subjects to seek royal confirmation of them (except marriage dispensations) under the great seal before Michaelmas 1537 (thereafter they became invalid). Therefore several royal letters patent survive from just before this deadline which recited and approved graces granted on the ‘pretended and usurped authority of the Roman bishop’.Footnote ⁸⁵

Underlying such rhetoric here and in the Dispensations Act was a radical rewriting of the history of the pre-Reformation Church. In reality the papacy had granted dispensations in response to demand from petitioners, and the papal administration, notably the penitentiary, had largely developed in order to meet this demand. Admittedly petitioners would not have sought these favours from the Curia if canon law had not required them and the papacy had not reserved to itself the power to grant them. But now the growth of papal power from the ‘Gregorian’ reform onwards was portrayed as an insidious encroachment on customary royal rights over the English Church. This vision of the past had its roots in earlier (if less divisive) clashes between the English crown and the papacy, and even in medieval anti-papal polemic, notably Marsilius of Padua's Defensor pacis (which, incidentally, Thomas Cromwell had translated into English for Henry viii).Footnote ⁸⁶ It was reinforced by the erastian principle that lay rulers ought to assume control over the Church and its reform, anticipated in England perhaps as early as the fourteenth-century statutes of Provisors and Praemunire and certainly by John Wyclif (d. 1384). In this sense the creation of the Faculty Office was an expression of royal supremacy, since it supplanted papal offices, notably the penitentiary, and derived its authority from the crown and parliament not the pope. But this change did not mark a total break with the past. In another sense the Faculty Office provided continuity with the pre-Reformation Church, as it issued much the same graces as the Curia, imitated its administrative structures, borrowed the forms and language of its documents, and followed analagous procedures. The fact that dispensations were still deemed necessary also showed that the canon law that they relaxed continued to be respected.Footnote ⁸⁷ This possibly reassured Henry's subjects that his Reformation was less radical than it really was or that it was not going to move in more radical directions, at least in juridical terms. Canterbury (or strictly speaking Lambeth) was the ‘new Rome’ as far as dispensations were concerned. Wolsey's Faculty Office during the 1520s had arguably prepared the way for this development, as it accustomed Henry's subjects to drawing upon a local ‘well of grace’, especially at a time when the Sack of Rome and perhaps also the king's ‘Great Matter’, discouraged them from petitioning the distant Curia. Such continuity with the past was remarkable at a time when continental Protestants were launching radical attacks on canon law and dispensations; it was not till the 1570s that English Puritans would criticise the ‘popish’ character of the Faculty Office and its grants, calling for their abolition.Footnote ⁸⁸ Its powers were reduced under Elizabeth i, but by then, in 1569, Pope Pius v had similarly curtailed the competence of the penitentiary as a result of Catholic calls for its reform at the Council of Trent. What is striking is that no attempt had been made to reform dispensations in England during the 1530s; only their ultimate source of authority had been changed. Henry viii had assumed the papal plenitude of power that justified dispensations and substituted the Faculty Office for the Curia as their provider, but this left dispensations otherwise unaffected. Even the Faculty Office was less novel than it appeared, since in the previous decade Wolsey had issued many dispensations that the Curia would otherwise have granted. Given that the English and Welsh had hitherto regarded the Curia as principally a ‘well of grace’, a source of dispensations, all of this arguably made the break with Rome less dramatic and disruptive for Henry's subjects than it might otherwise have been.