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The Master of the Free Grammar School, Old Malton
In July 2024 a set of papers from a Malton solicitor's estate, John Estill, appeared for auction on eBay. The seller Iain Colquohun was kind enough to alert me to the sale, which allowed me to copy the photos of the documents he had put on the auction site. One of these was a four-page pamphlet by G F A Newey, an extract form the 1932 April Maltonian, giving details of the founder of Malton Grammar School, Robert Holgate, Archbishop of York. A very mixed portrait of the School's founder, a man who appears to have looked after his own interests well in the turbulent times under Henry VIII and Thomas Cromwell as they plundered the monasteries.
Extract from the Maltonian, April 1932
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Robert Holgate, alias Halgate,
Archbishop of York, 1545 – 1554.
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The Founder
of the
Malton Grammar School
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By G. F. ARTHUR NEWEY
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Our Founder
The Sixteenth Century was a period of violent religious upheaval commencing with the Reformation, which has been termed a vague expression put forward to justify an act of plunder. The monastic houses may have lost their former zeal, but they were far from bad; but complete destruction was not reform It is probably that the dissolution of the monasteries was the result of greed for gold of an extravagant king, guided by one the most sinister figures in English history, Thomas Cromwell. Amongst their creatures was Robert Holgate.
The Founder of the Grammar School was born at Hemsworth, near Wakefield, probably in the year 1481, and was the son of a farmer or tradesman. He became a Canon of the Order of St. Gilbert of Sempringham, and would consequently take the vows of poverty, chastity and obedience. It is possible that he was educated at St. Edmund’s Hall, Cambridge, which had been founded by the Order: at any rate, he was a preacher of that University in 1524.
Holgate became Prior of the Gilbertine House of S. Catherine’s, outside Lincoln, and, upon a dispute arising about a vicarage, he went to London where he was appointed a Royal Chaplain, and Chaplain to Cromwell, who in 1535 became Vicar General of the Supreme Head of the English Church. In or before 1534, Holgate became Master (i.e. Head) of the Order of St. Gilbert and about the same time Prior of Watton, which was another Gilbertine House in the East Riding. On the 29th March, 1537, he was consecrated Bishop of Llandaff and the same year took his degree of Doctor of Divinity and helped in the preparation of a book called "The Institution of a Christian Man."
The dissolution of the monasteries led to the Pilgrimage of Grace, and the Gilbertines in Yorkshire were charged with helping the commons. Holgate fled at once to the Lord Cromwell and left the brethren and sisters of Watton "without forty shillings to succour them." An examinate before the King’s Commissioners at Hull said "he was good to no man ….. and he gives many unkind words to his tenants in his court, more like a judge than a religious man." Incidentally, the Prior of Malton was arrested and examined in the Tower because under compulsion he sent to the rebels a servant and a cart of two men, but without a harness to drive it. One result of the Pilgrimage was the formation of the Council of the North, which corresponded to the Star Chamber, and of which Holgate became a member, and in July, 1538, succeeded Bishop Tunstall, or Durham, as President.
Old Malton Priory, with most of the other Gilbertine houses, should have fallen under the Act passed in 1536 for the dissolution of the smaller monasteries, but the exemption of the Order was probably on account of the revenues which Holgate drew from it. However, when it was finally decided to suppress the larger monasteries, the Gilbertines made no resistance to the surrender of their houses, which could only have been a matter of arrangement between Holgate and his patron, Cromwell. On the 11th December, 1539, Holgate was at Malton and joined with the Prior, John Crawshawe, and nine canons in the surrender of the last of the Gibertine houses.
From thence onwards Holgate became "more set on enriching himself than on anything else." He wrote to Cromwell: "My suit is to your good Lordship to be a mean to the King’s Majesty for the signing of the bill for the assurance of Watton for the term of my life, and this I am ever bold to molest you with my suits, and can never deserve no part of your goodness as knoweth the Blessed Trinity who ever have you in His governance my most singular good lord." On the 16th July, 1540, he received a life grant of the Priory of Watton, the Manor of Watton and seven others, all the priory possessions, and the Master of Sempringham’s "bedhous," at Smithfield, in London. Watton Priory was the richest house of the Order and had a ne income of £360. On the 26th June, 1540, Henry the Eighth, for the sum of £276, granted to Holgate the house and site of the then late Priory of Malton and the whole belfry and churchyard, the demesne lands, Sutton Grange at Norton, the Fishery in Derwent, and lands at Ryton.
In 1545, Holgate became Archbishop of York, when he was one of the first to take the oath prescribed by Parliament in the previous year that, having the veil of darkness of the usurped power of the Bishop of Rome clearly taken away from his eyes, he testified that neither the See nor the Bishop of Rome had any jurisdiction within the realm. He commenced his role by alienating to the King 67 manors belonging to the See of York, but received in exchange 33 impropriations and advowsons which had formed part of the property of thie Northern dissolved monasteries. A letter written to him in October, 1547, is typical of the wholesale spoliation of the Church which was taking place. It is written from Hampton Court and requires that the silver found by reliques and all that riseth of a shrine of silver and gilt and some gold in the Cathedral Church at York should be weighed by the officers of the Mint at York in Holgate’s presence and delivered to the officers to the King’s use.
A small rising in August, 1549, led by the parish clerk of Seamer, was made the pretext for Holgate’s removal from the presidency of the Council of the north. Freed from the civil responsibilities which this entailed he began t be more active in encouraging the spread of the doctrines of the Continental Reformers; for instance, in 1552, he directed the Dean and Chapter of York to place the works of Calvin in the Library and forbade the use of the organ in services.
The French Admiral visited Edward VI in 1552 and Holgate, accompanied by a retinue of 70 horsemen, went South to attend the King; this cost the Archbishop then the enormous sum of £1000 – nearly four times the price he paid for the Malton property. The King died whilst he was in the South and the Catholic Queen Mary ascended the throne, whereupon Holgate no doubt realized his downfall was imminent. Soom afterwards he was arrested and thrown into the Tower on a charge pf treason, whilst his rich stores of money and plate were seized, and on the 16th March, 1554, he was deprived of his See. However, on the 18th January, 1555, Holgate was released from the Tower on payment of a fine of £1000 and lived in retirement until his death on the 15th November following at the Master of Sempringham’s house in Cow Lane, Smithfield.
By his will he devised amongst the property his lands at Old Malton for the founding of a hospital for a Master and twenty brethren and sisters of Hemsworth. The executors built the Hospital which remains in existence to-day, and the income from a considerable amount of the land in the Old Malton district is still devoted towards its maintenance.
And so the Grammar School, in common with its sister Schools at York and Hemsworth and the Hospital at the latter place, owes its origin to an unscrupulous renegade monk who perhaps tried to salve his conscience for robbing the Church he professed to serve. It is singular that Malton should have received a foundation, and one can only surmise that the Founder was influenced by the fact that he had robbed the Priory of which he had been the Master and possibly also by a desire to replace an earlier school which had been attached to the Priory.
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