© P.E. Blanche 1998

ARCHBISHOP WILLIAM WARHAM [1503 - 1532]

As one of the last Catholic Archbishops of Canterbury, William Warham was also one of the last supporters of "the cult" of St. Thomas. He was Archbishop for twenty-nine years and one of the things that he may have been most well-known for, was his ending of a dispute with the Abbey of Glastonbury regarding the remains of St. Dunstan The Abbots of Glastonbury had continually made claims that the bones of St. Dunstan had been moved to Glastonbury Abbey when Canterbury had been attacked by The Danes early in the eleventh century. The Tomb in the Cathedral was opened in 1508 for "scrutiny" and a body found in full pontificals together with a plate that seemed to bear out the fact that the remains were those of St. Dunstan, so long associated with Canterbury.

The Warham Tomb as it was before 1796 © P.E.Blanche 1998

In 1507 a grant was made for Archbishop Warham to have constructed a chantry adjacent to The Martyrdom where the Archbishop expected his Tomb to be built. The chantry and its altar were finished later in the same year and was entered from a door in the North wall of the Martyrdom Transept. A drawing in 1726 showed the door being at the East end of where the effigy of Archbishop Warham was placed. With a little bit of graphics manipulation, the original placement of this chantry door and the tomb can be seen in the altered photograph on the left.

The chantry occupied the space between the Martyrdom Transept, the original wall of Lanfranc's building, and the South wall of The Chapter House. In 1796 the chantry was blocked off and the effigy moved to a central position, it seems, in the name of symmetry. The space that was once the chantry is now occupied by a broom closet and where the altar once stood is a wash basin.

There is a picture in the Queen's collection of William Warham drawn by Holbein in which he appears tired, worried and an old man. He became Archbishop after following what would seem to have been a conventional route by that time, having received legal training in the Court of Arches, worked at Embassies abroad and finally becoming Master of the Rolls and Lord Chancellor. However, he lived in a highly charged political time and firstly, was humiliated on more than one occasion by Wolsey, who after having become a Cardinal, continually undermined the authority of Canterbury for his own end. Although the then Cardinal Wolsey predeceased Warham, he then had the problems of Henry VIII and his growing dissatisfaction with the Papacy and Rome and, of course, Warham was the principal representative of Rome in England. He is thought to have been in his eighties when he died in 1532, three years before Henry declared himself Supreme Head of the Church in England.

The Warham Tomb - detail © P.E.Blanche 1998

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