Wednesday, May 29, 2019

One of Wolsey's Predecessors: Thomas Rotherham


Yesterday, we celebrated Blessed Margaret Pole, survivor of the Wars of the Roses and martyr during Henry VIII's English Reformation. Today, some biographical information about a Lord Chancellor and Archbishop of York at the end of those Wars and the beginning of the Tudor Dynasty, Thomas Rotherham, from the Dictionary of National Biography. He was Keeper of the Privy Seal and Lord Chancellor for King Edward IV and concelebrated his Funeral Mass, and then he sided with Edward's widow and heirs:

Rotherham's fidelity to Elizabeth led to the forfeiture of the chancellorship. At the death of Edward IV (9 April 1483) the vantage of power seemed in the queen and her kindred. Before the month closed the boy king was in Gloucester's hands, the queen's brother, Lord Rivers, and her son, Lord Grey, were imprisoned, and the queen herself was seeking sanctuary. Lord Hastings assured Rotherham that there was no danger to the young king, and that all would be well. ‘Be it as well as it will,’ was Rotherham's reply, ‘it will never be as well as we have seen it.’ He hastened with his retinue of servants in the middle of the night to the queen, and found her sitting on the rushes among the trunks and household stuff for her use in sanctuary. Rotherham assured her of his loyalty, declared that if anything should happen to the young king he would crown the next brother, the Duke of York, who was still with the queen, and, as the greatest proof of faithfulness he could give, put the great seal into her hands. This surrender was of course indefensible, and after a few hours' reflection he sent for the seal again. But for his action that night he was deprived of office before the end of May, and on 13 June, concurrently with the hurried and brutal execution of Hastings, he was thrown into prison. In some editions of the ‘History of Richard III’ assigned to Sir Thomas More, and in Holinshed's and Stowe's ‘Chronicles,’ Rotherham appears as a consenting party to the next move of the Duke of Gloucester, by which he gained the delivery of the little Duke of York out of his mother's hands in sanctuary through Bourchier the archbishop of Canterbury; but the actual date of that transaction (16 June) given by the Croyland continuator proves that Rotherham was then in prison. After the coronation of Richard at the beginning of July he was released. But he took no share in the splendid reception of the king and queen shortly afterwards at York. According to the York register, although Richard lodged at the archbishop's palace, Rotherham himself was not present, the bishop of Durham being the officiating prelate (, Hist. of the Metropolitan Church of York, pp. 260–1). He did not wholly withdraw from public affairs. He appears as one of the commissioners at Nottingham for managing a marriage ‘between the Prince of Scottes and one of the Kinge's blood’ (1484), and was among the triers of petitions in the parliaments of Richard and Henry VII until 1496. He attended, although ‘not in pontificals,’ the creation of Henry (afterwards Henry VIII) as Duke of York, and at the three days' jousts which followed (1494) (Gairdner, Letters … illustrative of the Reigns of Richard and Henry VII, pp. 64, 393, 403).

Rotherham ranks among the great benefactors of the two English universities. Oxford lay within his diocese of Lincoln, and he was visitor of Lincoln College. At the time of his first visitation (1474) the college was in great distress. Through the carelessness of a scribe the charter it had received from Edward IV about twelve years before had been so drawn that the crown claimed to resume its grants to it. In the course of a sermon before the bishop, the rector, or one of the fellows, described the desolate condition of the college, and appealed to him for help. Rotherham's response was immediate and thorough. For the present needs of the college he made it an annual grant of 5l. for his life. He afterwards built the southern side of the quadrangle. He impropriated the benefices of Long Combe and Twyford to the endowment; obtained from Edward IV a larger charter, which confirmed the college perpetually in its old rights of property, and in 1480 gave the college a new body of statutes. For these great services he was styled the second founder of Lincoln; his portrait, now removed, was placed in the Bodleian among the benefactors of Oxford and another portrait, in cope and mitre, with a crosier in his hand—the gift, according to tradition, of Bishop Saunderson—hangs in the college hall at Lincoln (Clark, The Colleges of Oxford, pp. 171–6). Cambridge, Rotherham's own university, chose him several times her chancellor (1469, 1473, 1475, 1478, 1483), and petitioned Gloucester to release him from captivity in 1483. The completion of the schools, which had been proceeding slowly for several years, was due to his munificence. The eastern front, with its noble gateway, and the library on its first floor, enriched by him with two hundred volumes, were his special work. His arms also are still visible on the tower of St. Mary's, which he helped to repair (Guest, Rotherham, p. 94; Robert Willis, Architectural Hist. of Cambridge, ed. Clark, iii. 13–15). He was elected also master of Pembroke Hall (1480), and held the office for six years, and perhaps longer (Wrenn MS.)

He died on the 29th of May in 1500. He appears in Shakespeare's Richard III, Act 2, Scene 4. His speech ends the scene:

My gracious lady, go;
And thither bear your treasure and your goods.
For my part, I'll resign unto your grace
The seal I keep: and so betide to me
As well I tender you and all of yours!
Come, I'll conduct you to the sanctuary.

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