Cuthbert Tunstall
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Cuthbert Tunstall (or Tonstall) (1474–November 18, 1559) was an English church leader, twice Bishop of Durham.
He was born at Hackforth, Yorkshire, in 1474, an illegitimate son of Thomas Tunstall of Thurland Castle, Lancashire. His legitimate half-brother, Brian Tunstall, was killed at the Battle of Flodden in 1513. Cuthbert studied at Oxford, at Cambridge and at Padua (where he graduated LL.D.), and became an accomplished mathematician, accomplished in theology and law, proficient in Greek and Hebrew, and a distinguished scholar, winning favourable comment from Erasmus. He soon won the friendship of William Warham, Archbishop of Canterbury, who on August 25, 1511, made him his chancellor, and shortly after rector of Harrow-on-the-Hill. He became successively a canon of Lincoln (1514) and archdeacon of Chester (1515). He was soon employed on diplomatic business by King Henry VIII and Thomas Cardinal Wolsey, being sent to Brussels in 1515 in conjunction with Sir Thomas More, and there he lodged with Erasmus, becoming the intimate friend of both of them. Further embassies fell to his lot (he was sent to Cologne in 1519), and also preferments. In 1516 he had been made Master of the Rolls. In 1521 he became Dean of Salisbury, and in 1522 Bishop of London, by papal provision. On May 25, 1523, he became Lord Keeper of the Privy Seal; but neither the work this entailed nor fresh embassies prevented him from making a visitation of his diocese. A visit to Worms (1520-21) had given him a clear view of the import of the Lutheran movement and the significance of heretical literature. He negotiated with Charles V, Holy Roman Emperor, after the Battle of Pavia in 1525, and he helped to arrange the Peace of Cambrai in 1529. On February 22, 1529/30, again by papal provision, he succeeded Wolsey as Bishop of Durham, a step which involved the assumption of quasi-regal power and authority within the territory of the diocese. To this, in 1537 Tunstall was to add the onerous position of President of the new Council of the North, but although he was often engaged in negotiations with the Scots, he found time to take part in other public business and to attend parliament, where in 1539 he participated in the discussion on the Bill of Six Articles.
In the divorce question Tunstall acted as one of Queen Catherine's counsel, but he endeavoured to dissuade her from appealing to Rome. During the troubled years that followed, Tunstall was far from imitating the constancy of Bishop John Fisher and Sir Thomas More, adopting a policy of passive obedience and acquiescence in many matters with which he could have had no sympathy. For all that, he did hold to Catholic doctrine and practices. Like many leading clergymen of his age, Tunstall was as much a professionally trained civil servant as a man of God. This conditioned his reaction when this combination of roles arrived at a point of crisis. While Tunstall adhered firmly to the traditional teaching of the Catholic Church, after some hesitation he accepted Henry as its head and publicly defended this position, thus moving into schism with Rome.
He disliked the religious policy pursued by the advisers of King Edward VI and voted against the first Act of Uniformity in 1549. However, he continued to discharge his public duties without molestation and seems to have hoped that Warwick might be induced to reverse the anti-Catholic policy of Edward Seymour, 1st Duke of Somerset, a hope that failed. After Somerset's fall in May 1551, he was summoned to London and confined to his house there. During this captivity he composed a treatise on the Eucharist which was published at Paris in 1554. At the end of 1551 he was removed to the Tower, and a bill for his deprivation was introduced into the House of Commons. When this failed, he was tried by a commission (October 4-5, 1552) and deprived of his bishopric.
On the accession of Mary in 1553 he was set at liberty. When his bishopric, which had been dissolved by Act of Parliament in March, 1553, was re-established by a further Act in April, 1554 and Tunstall, now an octogenarian, again assumed his office as Bishop of Durham, but maintained his earlier irenical approach, indulging in no systematic persecution of the Protestants. Through Mary's reign he ruled his diocese in peace.
When Elizabeth I came to the throne Tunstall refused to take the Oath of Supremacy, and would not participate in the consecration of the Protestant Matthew Parker as Archbishop of Canterbury. He was arrested, deprived of his see in September 1559 and was held as Parker's prisoner at Lambeth Palace, where within a few weeks he died, one of eleven Catholic bishops to die in custody in Elizabeth's reign. "Tunstall's long career of eighty-five years, for thirty-seven of which he was a bishop, is one of the most consistent and honourable in the sixteenth century. The extent of the religious revolution under Edward VI caused him to reverse his views on the royal supremacy and he refused to change them again under Elizabeth." (Arthur Pollard).
Among Tunstall's writings are De arte supputandi libri quattuor (1522); Confutatio cavillationum quibus SS. Eucharistiae Sacramentum ab impiis Caphernaitis impeti solet (Paris, 1552); De veritate corporis et sanguinis domini nostri Jesu Christi in eucharistia (Paris, 1554); Compendium in decem libros ethicorum Aristotelis (Paris, 1554); Certaine godly and devout prayers made in Latin by C. Tunstall and translated into Englishe by Thomas Paynelle, Clerke (London, 1558).
Tunstall's correspondence as president of the Council of the North is in the British Library.
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References
- This article incorporates text from the Encyclopædia Britannica Eleventh Edition{{#if:{{{article|}}}| article {{#if:{{{url|}}}|[{{{url|}}}}} "{{{article}}}"{{#if:{{{url|}}}|]}}{{#if:{{{author|}}}| by {{{author}}}}}}}, a publication now in the public domain.
This article incorporates text from the public domain Catholic Encyclopedia.