WOLSEY, THOMAS.
His Rise and Dignities (§ 1).
His Policies and Statesmanship (§ 2).
His Fall (§ 3).
His Faults and their Extenuation (§ 4).
Thomas Wolsey, cardinal, papal legate, and chan-
cellor of England, was born, according to tradition, at Ipswich, Mar., 1471 (more probably Mar., 1475, or late in 1474), and died at Leicester Abbey (34 m. n. of Leicester) Nov. 29, 1530. That he was a “butcher’s boy”? was probably the slander of an enemy, for his father seems to have been a grazier and woolmerchant, and certainly possessed land and other property at Ipswich, while he also had relatives who were well-to-do. The future cardinal studied at Magdalen College, Oxford, and received his first degree at the age of fifteen, win-
1. His Rise and Dignuities.
Wolsey
THE NEW SCHAFF-HERZOG
i eee ee
ning the name of the “‘ boy bachelor.”” He became
fellow of Magdalen, then master of a grammar-school attached to the college, and was its bursar, 1498- 1500. He was ordained priest Mar. 10, 1498, and in 1500 Thomas Grey, marquis of Dorset (whose sons attended the Magdalen grammar-school), gave him the living of Limington in Somerset. About 1501 he became chaplain to Henry Deane, archbishop of Canterbury, and after Deane’s death (Feb., 1503) he was chaplain to Sir Richard Nanfan, deputy lieutenant of Calais. Nanfan was an old man and turned over to Wolsey the more arduous duties of his post; he commended him to the king (Henry VII.), and about 1507 Wolsey entered the royal service as chaplain. In 1509 he became dean and prebendary of Lincoln and royal almoner (the latter by appointment of Henry VIII., who succeeded to the throne in April), and the next year he was appointed prebendary of Hereford; in 1511 canon of Windsor and registrar of the Knights of the Garter; in 1512, dean of Hereford; in 1518, prebendary and dean of York and precentor of London; in 1514 bishop of Lincoln and archbishop of York; and in 1515 cardinal (the red hat was placed on his head with magnificent ceremonial in Westminster Abbey Nov. 18, John Colet preaching the sermon; his title was S. Cecilia trans Tiberim), and (Dec. 14) lord chancellor. In 1518 he became legatus a latere and bishop of Bath and Wells (in commendam); in 1521 abbot of St. Albans; in 1523 bishop of Durham (resigning Bath and Wells); and in 1529 bishop of Winchester (in commendam; soon after this appointment he resigned Durham). In addition to these dignities in England, he was made bishop of Tournai after the English captured the town in 1518, and in 1520, at the instigation of Charles V., was made bishop of Badajoz (he never actually obtained possession of Tournai, and surrendered his claims toit in 1518 for a pension of 12,000 livres; Badajoz was worth 5,000 ducats; an annual pension of 2,000 ducats was added from the bishopric of Palencia). His princely revenues from all these appointments were augmented by various livings in England, and as early as 1501 he obtained a dispensation to hold two incompatible benefices with Limington. In 1506 he was instituted to the parish church of Redgrave, Suffolk, and a papal bull permitted him to hold the vicarage of Lydd, Kent, and two other benefices with Limington. In 1509 or 1510 he was granted the parsonage of St. Bride’s, Fleet. Street, London, and from Nov., 1510, until he became bishop he held the parish church of Torrington, Devonshire. He resigned Limington before July 2, 1509.
Wolsey’s first diplomatic employment was a mission to Scotland in 1508, and later in the same year he was sent to the Emperor Maximilian in Flanders, acquitting himself with such dispatch that he was back in England on the evening of the third day after his departure. His signature as privy councilor first appears in the latter part of 1511, after which his hand soon became the guiding one in English public affairs, and till 1530 his history was the history of England. It is a dreary recital of diplomatic intrigue and sixteenth century statecraft, belonging to secular, not religious, history, His
paramount aim was to exalt his country abroad—and herein he succeeded; he found England a third-rate power; he made her the arbiter of 2. His Europe. Secondarily, he contemplated Policies at home a judicious scheme of social, and States- economic, and ecclesiastical reform, manship. which he failed to carry out; changes were made later by others, who used methods they had learned from Wolsey, though they worked with a spitit and a motive far different from his. Of all his misfortunes, none was greater than this, for it led men of his time, and long after, to judge him by merely apparent results of his policies; and the evil was aggravated because these results were more or less closely bound up with matters of religion and ethics. Since the publication of the state papers of Henry VIII. and other authoritative documents in the.Jatter half of the nineteenth century, the enlightened judgment of an age more free from religious prejudice and personal animosities has increasingly recognized that Wolsey was a statesman rather than an ecclesiastic; that he comprehended the problems and conditions of his time as probably no other did; that his.aims were wise and good; that he made skilful use of indifferent opportunities and instruments; that he was unsparing in labor, tenacious of purpose, fertile in expedient, ever undismayed and ready to begin anew when a particular plan failed; above all, that he fired the English imagination, roused the national spirit, and, more than any other, created the English greatness of the later time. Bishop Creighton, his latest Anglican biographer, pronounces him the greatest political genius and most devoted patriot that England has ever produced. The Roman Catholic Ethelred Taunton acclaims him as the greatest statesman of all Europe, the master mind of his age, and thinks that, had he been made pope, he might have averted the schism of the sixteenth century.*
What he might have attempted at Rome is indicated by his plan of ecclesiastical reform for England. He aimed to bring the English Church into accord with national needs by restricting its excessive privileges; by limiting the jurisdiction of its vexatious courts; by reducing the number of its unnecessary Officials; by reorganizing on a more efficient basis its antiquated episcopal system; and by applying some of its superabundant revenues to the social welfare, particularly by diversion of some of its wealth from the maintenance of idle and ignorant monks to the education of a body of learned clergy. This comprehensive and judicious plan
* He was three times a candidate, or quasi-candidate, for the papacy—in 1521-22, when Adrian VI. succeeded Leo X.; in 1523, when Clement VII. succeeded Adrian VI.; and in 1529, when Clement VII. fell ill and it was believed he would die. On the two former occasions Wolsey seems neither to have expected nor desired to be elected; it was Henry who was eager that his cardinal and minister should be chosen, and Wolsey’s own attitude can not justly be characterized as more than one of willingness to gratify the king by accepting the honor in case the choice should fall upon him. Certainly he did not shape his previous policy with any such end in view. In 1529 the case was different; election then would have meant triumphant escape from the difficulties crowding hard upon him at home. But Clement recovered, and Wolsey was not to be saved in this way.
failed, partly because Wolsey made his domestic policy secondary to foreign affairs, more because he thought to carry reforms through by power rather than by persuasion, and strove unwisely to gather and wield all power in his own hands. It may well be doubted whether mistakes would not have frustrated his good intentions, had he occupied the chair of St. Peter. He was a churchman and theologian of the old school, deeply versed in Thomas Aquinas. His studies did not lead in the direction of the new learning, and he had not its spirit, though his practical sense and experience made him friendly to some of its representatives and ideals. He was ready to spend himself to confer benefits on those beneath him, but he would have all reforms made in due order, propriety, and dignity, and would have repressed democratic aspirations. On his deathbed he admonished Henry to “ have a vigilant eye to suppress the hellish Lutherans ’’—having in mind, as the full text of his message shows, the social and political disorders bound up with the Reformation on the continent.
Wolsey was never popular with the old nobility, whom he thrust aside, while he fell into disfavor with men of lesser rank when they had to pay the cost of his (and the king’s) policies. He was secure
only so long as he had the royal sup-
3. His Fall. port; and this he lost when he failed to obtain the divorce for Henry from
Catharine of Aragon. The divorce became a pressing matter in 1527, but Wolsey did not approve of the new marriage, however willing he may have been to be rid of Catharine, who was an obstacle to his plans. On other occasions, when his judgment differed from the king’s—as when Henry chose to be a candidate for the imperial crown in 1519, and desired war with France in 1521—25—he had temporized and striven, successfully, to minimize the harm from following the less judicious course. The matter of the divorce, however, was too hard for him, and as it dragged along his enemies obtained the king’s ear, finding a potent ally in the ambitious and frivolous Anne Boleyn. Wolsey gave up the great seal on Noy. 19, 1529, and three days later he acknowledged a Premunire (q.v.) and turned his property over to the king. He was ordered to repair to a house belonging to his bishopric of Winchester at Esher (in Surrey, 15 m. s.w. of London), where he lived for three months, in great distress of mind, ill, and suffering pecuniary straits. In Feb., 1530, he resigned (unwillingly) Winchester and St. Albans, but was granted a general pardon and had the possessions of his archbishopric restored to him. It does not appear that Henry was ever, even to the last, of his own volition unfriendly to Wolsey, and probably the real situation was that the king (one of the ablest of English sovereigns, and an apt scholar) felt that he had learned the moves and stratagems of statecraft, and could now play the game as well as the minister. He was content to be rid of the cardinal in public affairs, and purposed to relegate him to the ecclesiastical sphere—incidentally appropriating his wealth, especially as by this course he hoped to keep Wolsey in reserve, should need of him yet arise. Wolsey’s foes bent their energies to prevent a meeting between him and the king, and when