took Beauchamp’s side, confirming by letters patent in 1472 those
liberties and privileges granted to past bishops by Henry III and Edward
III, further delineating the bishop’s prerogatives. The charter – for it was
often viewed as a constitution for the city thereafter – stipulated that the
town of Salisbury belonged to the bishop, that the mayor, though elected
by the people was his mayor, and should the people fail to elect a mayor
in a timely fashion, the bishop had the right of appointment. Further, it
was in the bishop’s power to have his servants carry maces bearing the
royal arms, and the right both to have a jail and to detain prisoners.^2
Matters came to a head again under Henry VIII and his episcopal
appointee, Nicholas Shaxton. After the death of Edmund Audley in 1524
the see of Salisbury had been granted to the papal Legate, cardinal
Campeggio, but upon his deprivation of the temporalities in 1534 (he
had left England in 1529 after he had ended the English trial for
Catherine of Aragon) Henry granted the see to Shaxton, who was
enthroned in 1536. Audley, a member of the nobility who nonetheless
had little trouble with the town, was also a strong traditionalist. Upon
his death he had erected an ornate chantry chapel, complete with
pomegranates, a distinctive part of Catherine of Aragon’s device, in the
tracery. Following Henry’s divorce from Catherine, as pomegranates
were part of Catherine’s coat of arms, the king ordered all pomegranates
removed from all monuments, but those in Audley’s chapel are still there.
While this may speak to the question of the chapter’s relative disposition
about both the divorce and the supremacy, it should be noted that
pomegranates can still be found in King’s College Chapel, Cambridge,
along with the initials of Anne Boleyn on what was once the rood screen.
The chapter had the run of the cathedral following Audley’s death, for
Campeggio never came to his diocese during the six years of his residence
in England, and thus the see stood essentially vacant for 12 years.^3
Campeggio’s disposition seems to have been that of the city’s, for when
Henry’s case was made for his divorce from the cathedral pulpit, the
congregation hissed and pulled the offending priest out of the lectern.^4 In
1536, upon his arrival, Shaxton, an evangelical, made no pretension
about how he would oversee the city and diocese. Whether the town was
not ready for Shaxton and the Reformation, or whether the question of
liberties was what provoked it, Salisbury, now with the added
incitements of religion to bolster its animus, gave its bishop a rough go
LIFE AS A BISHOP IN SALISBURY 205
(^2) Fanny Street, ‘The Relations of the Bishops and Citizens of Salisbury (New Sarum)
between 1225 and 1612’. W.A.&N.H.M.39 (1916), pp. 249–50.
(^3) Despite never having been there, and having taken the wrong side of the controversy,
Campeggio’s likeness is still among the carved miniatures of the bishops in the cathedral
choir, his likeness being distinguished by his cardinal’s hat.
(^4) Garrett Mattingly, Catherine of Aragon(G. Mattingly, 1941), p. 336.