This article is taken from the December-January 2025 issue of The Critic. To get the full magazine why not subscribe? Right now we’re offering five issues for just £10.

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William Warham, last pre-Reformation archbishop of Canterbury, died just in time to avoid martyrdom at the hands of Henry VIII. In his final days, the elderly scholar-priest composed a magnificent speech in defence of the law and of the liberty of the English Church, then under threat through the King’s machinations in trying to obtain the annulment that would enable him to marry Anne Boleyn.

Had Warham lived to make his speech, he would certainly have met the same fate — and obtained the same renown — as his friends Thomas More and John Fisher, who would later be executed for the same cause.

Warham’s illustrious career in Church and government spanned 44 years; he remains the second longest-serving archbishop of Canterbury. As a lawyer, diplomat and statesman as well as archbishop, Warham was at the centre of all the great set-piece events of the early Tudor era. He crowned Henry VIII and Catherine of Aragon in 1509, played a leading role in Henry’s meeting with King Francis I of France at the Field of Cloth of Gold in 1520, and (albeit unwillingly) presided over the opening phase of the Henrician Reformation.

As a scholar and a patron of the arts who counted Erasmus and Hans Holbein amongst his friends, Warham was a key supporter of the new humanist learning that remade the intellectual and religious landscape of England in the 1510s and 20s.

Unfairly eclipsed for centuries by the better-known political operators of his day — his great rivals, the three Thomases: Wolsey, Cranmer and Cromwell — and by the martyrs More and Fisher, Warham deserves to be much better known.

Born around 1450 to a Hampshire family of no great distinction, Warham was educated at Winchester College and New College, Oxford, where he obtained a doctorate of law in 1486. In 1506 he would be made chancellor of Oxford, a post he held until his death.

The law remained Warham’s great love throughout his life. His prodigious learning and skill as a lawyer and diplomat ensured his rapid rise at the court of Henry VII. From a position in the Court of Arches (the ecclesiastical court of the Province of Canterbury), Warham was made Master of the Rolls in 1494.

Henry VII sent him on numerous embassies to rulers across the Continent, including the sensitive job of negotiating the marriage of Prince Henry (later Henry VIII) to Catherine of Aragon, widow of Prince Henry’s elder brother Arthur Tudor, who had died after six months of probably unconsummated marriage to the young Spanish princess.

Warham came late to a career in the Church, not entering Holy Orders until 1493, when he would have been in his mid-40s. Various ecclesiastical preferments soon followed. Unlike the churches of the Continent, the medieval English Church largely recruited and promoted on merit; in no other realm could the nephew of a carpenter and the son of a butcher become the two most senior ecclesiastics in the land. Warham was made bishop of London in 1502 and — at royal insistence — archbishop of Canterbury in 1504.

Humanism had been an intellectual force in England since at least the 1460s; records show Englishmen undertaking extended study in Italian universities and bringing the new learning home with them. The resulting intellectual ferment, aided by the printing presses of William Caxton and his successors, made London, Oxford and (especially) Cambridge centres of early Reformation thought.

He was a friend of Erasmus and a key supporter of the humanist learning that remade the religious landscape of England

As a humanist scholar with a wide correspondence, Warham gave generously to promote the new learning. Erasmus called Warham his “sacred anchor” for the consistent and open-handed support Warham gave him not only during his occasional stints in England, but across several decades of fruitful intellectual friendship.

Warham’s support extended to other humanists, including John Colet, dean of St Paul’s Cathedral, whom Warham invited to address the clergy on the subject of clerical reform.

Christian humanism and the reassessment of Greek and Hebrew sources that accompanied it tended towards reform, and Warham, through his patronage of men like Erasmus and Colet, as well as in his own actions as archbishop, seems to have encouraged it.

Small-r reform was no threat to the English Church, which had reformed itself numerous times throughout the Middle Ages and was widely held in the 1520s as an example of national piety. Small-r reform, rather than big-R Reformation, is likely what would have happened in England had Queen Catherine borne a living son.

But by 1527, Henry VIII seemed dead set on ridding himself of his ageing Spanish wife, who had produced only one surviving child, Princess Mary (later Mary I). The King appointed Warham and his friendly rival Thomas Wolsey — archbishop of York and Warham’s successor as Lord Chancellor — to investigate the case for annulment.

The two ecclesiastics put the case to the Pope. After a period of intense negotiations, Pope Clement VII dispatched a legate, Cardinal Lorenzo Campeggio, to try the case alongside Wolsey at a special ecclesiastical court to be held at London Blackfriars in July 1529.

Warham was appointed as one of Queen Catherine’s counsel for the Blackfriars trial, but did little to assist her; Catherine complained to the Spanish ambassador that when she demanded to know why Warham did not do more to plead her cause, he replied ira principis mors est (“the anger of the king is death”).

For his part, Warham seems to have been against the marriage from the beginning, having only solemnised it at the young King’s insistence. He was hardly a suitable person to be appointed as counsel for the Queen, as everyone involved would have known.

The Blackfriars trial was a debacle. Catherine appealed for and won a change of jurisdiction to the papal court at Rome, which would be far less sympathetic to Henry’s designs. Wolsey’s resulting fall from grace was sudden and spectacular. He died in 1530 whilst travelling to London to be imprisoned and almost certainly executed on trumped-up treason charges.

Wolsey’s downfall marks the opening of the most ambiguous phase of Warham’s career, which has led the few scholars who have written about it to vastly different interpretations of the man and his motives.

In 1530 and 1531, Warham seems to have simply gone along with the King’s schemes. He signed a petition asking the Pope to grant Henry’s annulment. He tried to convince John Fisher, bishop of Rochester, to give up his support of the queen. When the divinity faculties of the European universities were consulted on the case, Warham convinced the Oxford divines to take the King’s side.

Most seriously of all, Warham presided over the so-called “submission of the clergy” of 1532, which named the King as supreme head of the Church in England, though he insisted on adding the qualifier “so far as the law of Christ allows”. Was Warham colluding with the King against the dignity of the Church, or was the archbishop, now over 80 years old, simply past it?

Henry was not above using the English clergy as hostages in his game of chicken with the papacy as he sought to regain control of the legal proceedings around the annulment. Wolsey’s dismissal as Chancellor and the summoning of the “Reformation Parliament” to force through legislation fundamentally altering the relation between Church and State were probably designed to force the pope to capitulate. So was his 1531 decision to charge the entire clergy of England with praemunire — a conveniently elastic offence, which relied on the King’s own assessment of whether his royal prerogative was infringed by the exercise of ecclesiastical jurisdiction.

Warham had known Henry since the King was a boy and had seen numerous caprices come and go. He may well have believed in 1530 that the King’s actions were mere sabre — rattling against the papacy in an attempt to indulge his passing fancy for the favours of Anne Boleyn, and that it was necessary to humour the King until his mood shifted.

By some point in 1531, however, Warham seems to have realised that Henry had genuinely convinced himself of the righteousness of his cause of royal supremacy, and that the King’s attacks on the independence of the English Church weren’t simply incidental to satisfying his sexual appetite.

It may also be that the archbishop, drawing near his end, realised that whilst “the anger of the king is death”, the anger of the King of kings might be somewhat worse. Warham seems to have taken courage from another archbishop of Canterbury who faced down a King Henry to preserve the rights of the English Church — St Thomas Becket.

The archbishop began to fight back. In early 1532 he formally protested against all the anti-Church legislation passed since 1529 by the Reformation Parliament. Henry doubled down, wielding Parliament like a blunt instrument to force the clergy to acknowledge the King as supreme head of the Church and give up their right to determine ecclesiastical law.

Probably in revenge for the archbishop’s exercise of conscience, Henry also had Warham personally charged with praemunire — a charge so laughably factitious that it could mean only one thing: Henry had decided to rid himself of his turbulent archbishop.

Warham drafted a speech of defence, evidently anticipating his imminent imprisonment and trial. After a closely and beautifully reasoned set of legal arguments demonstrating the spuriousness of the charge against him and elucidating the perpetual liberties of the English Church enshrined in the Constitutions of Clarendon and Magna Carta, Warham took up the theme of Henry II’s quarrel with Thomas Becket over similar points of law in the 1160s:

In case you should be so noted by other folks’ instigation … as to draw your swords in this case and hew me to small pieces … yet I think it were better for me to suffer the same than against my conscience to confess this Article [the charge that Warham’s exercise of his ecclesiastical office injured the King] to be a praemunire, for which Saint Thomas died.

Henry stood in peril of his soul, concluded Warham; God might choose to visit him with the gruesome demise that had awaited other English kings who persecuted the Church.

Though seemingly prepared by this time to suffer death for his convictions, Archbishop Warham was denied the martyr’s palm. He died of natural causes in August 1532, aged around 82, and was placed in a tomb of his own devising in Canterbury Cathedral, as near as he could manage to the place where his beloved Thomas Becket had been martyred.

His friend Thomas More wrote that Warham left no money and no debts on his death. Having lived an abstemious life and given lavishly over many years to scholarly and charitable causes, he had nothing to bequeath but his books, which were divided amongst several Oxford colleges.

Though fully deserving of the type of magisterial doorstop-length biography chronicling the lives of Wolsey, Cranmer, Cromwell, More and Henry VIII, no book has ever been written about Warham. His ambiguous legacy — as not quite martyr, reformer or saint, and yet somehow all three — is due a reassessment. Nearly 500 years after his death, it is finally time for the archbishop to step out of the shadow of the Thomases and their King.