Henry Chichele - Later Career

Later Career

In his capacity of archbishop, Chichele remained what he had always been chiefly, the lawyer and diplomatist. He was present at the siege of Rouen, and the king committed to him personally the negotiations for the surrender of the city in January 1419 and for the marriage of Katherine. He crowned Katherine at Westminster (20 February 1421), and on 6 December baptized her child Henry VI. He was of course a persecutor of heretics. No one could have attained or kept the position of archbishop at the time without being so. So he presided at the trial of John Claydon, Skinner and citizen of London, who after five years imprisonment at various times had made public abjuration before the late archbishop, Arundel, but now was found in possession of a book in English called The Lanterne of Light, which contained the heinous heresy that the principal cause of the persecution of Christians was the illegal retention by priests of the goods of this world, and that archbishops and bishops were the special seats of Antichrist.

As a relapsed heretic, he was left to the secular arm by Chichele. On 1 July 1416 Chichele directed a half-yearly inquisition by archdeacons to hunt out heretics. On 12 February 1420 proceedings were begun before him against William Taylor, priest, who had been for fourteen years excommunicated for heresy, and was now degraded and burnt for saying that prayers ought not to be addressed to saints, but only to God. A striking contrast was exhibited in October 1424, when a Stamford friar, John Russell, who had preached that any religious potest concuinbere cum muliere and not mortally sin, was sentenced only to retract his doctrine.

Further persecutions of a whole batch of Lollards took place in 1428. The records of convocation in Chichele's time are a curious mixture of persecutions for heresy, which largely consisted in attacks on clerical endowments, with negotiations with the ministers of the crown for the object of cutting down to the lowest level the clerical contributions to the public revenues in respect of their endowments. Chichele was tenacious of the privileges of his see, and this involved him in a constant struggle with Henry Beaufort, bishop of Winchester. In 1418, while Henry V was alive, he successfully protested against Beaufort's being made a cardinal and legate a latere to supersede the legatine jurisdiction of Canterbury. But during the regency, after Henry VI's accession, Beaufort was successful, and in 1426 became cardinal and legate.