CARDINAL WOLSEY. By JOHN RICHARD GREEN.

[Thomas Wolsey, born of low origin 1471, died 1530. After a university education and taking priest’s orders he was rapidly made private chaplain to Henry VII, and, on the accession of Henry VIII, he became the favorite of the new king, and soon afterward lord chancellor and cardinal. Wolsey’s diplomatic and ministerial genius became one of the great powers in Europe while he managed English affairs, a period of about eleven years, and at home his magnificence rivaled that of the king himself. His fall from power grew out of his opposition to the king’s marriage with Anne Boleyn.]

Thomas Wolsey was the son of a wealthy townsman of Ipswich, whose ability had raised him into notice at the close of the preceding reign, and who had been taken by Bishop Fox into the service of the crown. His extraordinary powers hardly, perhaps, required the songs, dances, and carouses with his indulgence in which he was taunted by his enemies, to aid him in winning the favor of the young sovereign. From the post of favorite he soon rose to that of minister. Henry’s resentment at Ferdinand’s perfidy enabled Wolsey to carry out a policy which reversed that of his predecessors. The war had freed England from the fear of French pressure. Wolsey was as resolute to free her from the dictation of Ferdinand, and saw in a French alliance the best security for English independence. In 1514 a treaty was concluded with Louis. The same friendship was continued to his successor, Francis I, whose march across the Alps for the reconquest of Lombardy was facilitated by Henry and Wolsey, in the hope that while the war lasted England would be free from all fear of attack, and that Francis himself might be brought to inevitable ruin. These hopes were defeated by his great victory at Marignano. But Francis, in the moment of triumph, saw himself confronted by a new rival. Master of Castile and Aragon, of Naples and the Netherlands, the new Spanish king, Charles V, rose into a check on the French monarchy such as the policy of Henry or Wolsey had never been able to construct before.

The alliance of England was eagerly sought by both sides, and the administration of Wolsey, amid all its ceaseless diplomacy, for seven years kept England out of war. The peace, as we have seen, restored the hopes of the New Learning; it enabled Colet to reform education, Erasmus to undertake the regeneration of the Church, More to set on foot a new science of politics. But peace, as Wolsey used it, was fatal to English freedom. In the political hints which lie scattered over the “Utopia,” More notes with bitter irony the advance of the new despotism. It was only in “Nowhere” that a sovereign was “removable on suspicion of a design to enslave his people.” In England the work of slavery was being quietly wrought, hints the great lawyer, through the law. “There will never be wanting some pretense for deciding in the king’s favor; as that equity is on his side, or the strict letter of the law, or some forced interpretation of it; or if none of these, that the royal prerogative ought, with conscientious judges, to outweigh all other considerations.”

We are startled at the precision with which More maps out the expedients by which the law courts were to lend themselves to the advance of tyranny till their crowning judgment in the case of ship-money. But behind these judicial expedients lay great principles of absolutism, which, partly from the example of foreign monarchies, partly from the sense of social and political insecurity, and yet more from the isolated position of the crown, were gradually winning their way in public opinion. “These notions,” he goes boldly on, “are fostered by the maxim that the king can do no wrong, however much he may wish to do it; that not only the property but the persons of his subjects are his own; and that a man has a right to no more than the king’s goodness thinks fit not to take from him.” In the hands of Wolsey these maxims were transformed into principles of state. The checks which had been imposed on the action of the sovereign by the presence of great prelates and nobles at his council were practically removed. All authority was concentrated in the hands of a single minister. Henry had munificently rewarded Wolsey’s services to the crown. He had been promoted to the See of Lincoln and thence to the Archbishopric of York. Henry procured his elevation to the rank of cardinal, and raised him to the post of chancellor. The revenues of two sees whose tenants were foreigners fell into his hands; he held the bishopric of Winchester and the abbacy of St. Albans; he was in receipt of pensions from France and Spain, while his official emoluments were enormous. His pomp was almost royal.

A train of prelates and nobles followed him wherever he moved; his household was composed of five hundred persons of noble birth, and its chief posts were held by knights and barons of the realm. He spent his vast wealth with princely ostentation. Two of his houses—Hampton Court and York House, the later Whitehall—were splendid enough to serve at his fall as royal palaces. His school at Ipswich was eclipsed by the glories of his foundation at Oxford, whose name of Cardinal College has been lost in its later title of Christ-church. Nor was this magnificence a mere show of power. The whole direction of home and foreign affairs rested with Wolsey alone; as chancellor he stood at the head of public justice; his elevation to the office of legate rendered him supreme in the Church. Enormous as was the mass of work which he undertook, it was thoroughly done; his administration of the royal treasury was economical; the number of his dispatches is hardly less remarkable than the care bestowed upon each; even More, an avowed enemy, confesses that as chancellor he surpassed all men’s expectations. The court of chancery, indeed, became so crowded through the character of expedition and justice which it gained under his rule that subordinate courts had to be created for its relief. It was this concentration of all secular and ecclesiastical power in a single hand which accustomed England to the personal government which began with Henry VIII; and it was, above all, Wolsey’s long tenure of the whole Papal authority within the realm, and the consequent suspension of appeals to Rome, that led men to acquiesce at a later time in Henry’s claim of religious supremacy; for, proud as was Wolsey’s bearing and high as were his natural powers, he stood before England as the mere creature of the king. Greatness, wealth, authority he held, and owned he held, simply at the royal will. In raising his low-born favorite to the head of Church and state, Henry was gathering all religious as well as all civil authority into his personal grasp. The nation which trembled before Wolsey learned to tremble before the king who could destroy Wolsey by a breath.