RELIGIOUS ENCYCLOPEDIA
Wolsey
Henry permitted him, for his health, to move to Richmond (nearer the court), they ordered him threateningly to go to his archbishopric. He proceeded northward by slow stages, apparently hoping things would yet turn in his favor, and reached Cawood (10 m.s8. of York) in the early fall. He avoided ostentation, busied himself with ecclesiastical duties, and won the hearts of many who had previously been prejudiced against him, although he was continually subjected to much petty persecution. He arranged to be instituted, quietly, on Nov. 7, but three days before that date he was arrested, charged with high treason. He seems to have hoped for some amelioration of his affairs through the intervention of Francis I., and attempted to open negotiations with the French envoy; really his offense was not great, but this indiscretion was enough to equip his enemies with a trumped-up charge against him, though his keepers were lenient and traveled slowly toward London because of his weakness. He was very despondent and asserted constantly that he was being led to execution. Death, however, saved him from this possible fate. Midway between York and London, at Leicester Abbey, his strength failed completely, and here, tended by the kindly ministrations of his brother monks (he had joined the abbey some years before), he breathed his last. He was buried in the abbey.
Wolsey was ambitious; proud, perhaps arrogant; lavish, even extravagant, in both public and private expenditure.* He applied church revenues shamelessly to personal ends as well as to the devious
scheming of diplomacy, and he fol-
4. His lowed all the tortuous ways of his pro- Faults and fession, prevaricating, bribing, and their Ex- choosing the means to his ends with the tenuation. recklessness and cynicism of a very practical politician. He accepted
bribes. His private life is said to have been impure. He was subservient to the king, even cringing when he feared to lose his master’s favor. He appears weak and pitiable in adversity. On the other hand, he was no mere self-seeker. He was not ruthless, vindictive, or blood-thirsty.t He must have been lovable, for in his fall his servants stood by him
* He accompanied Henry to France in 1513 (not yet even a bishop) with a retinue double those of Bishops Fox and Ruthall. His household in London numbered 800 persons (cf. Cavendish, chap. v., Of the Orders and Offices'of his House and Chapel; cf. also chap. vii., Of the Manner of his Going to Westminster Hall; chap. viii., Of the Cardinal’s Magnificence in his House, an account of an entertainment for the king and court, utilized—in many lines verbatim—in Shakespeare’s Henry VIII.,1.,iv.; chap. xiii., Of the French King’s Redemption out of Captivity and of the Cardinal's Ambassage into France; chap. xiv., Of the French Ambassador’s Entertainment and Dispatch). The Field of the Cloth of Gold, the most magnificent of medieval pageants (1520), was entirely under Wolsey’s direction, and in all the glittering throng none was more splendid than Wolsey; none also was busier with weighty matters of state amid all the show. He took a ninety-nine years’ lease of Hampton Court from the Knights of St. John in 1515, adorned and extended the palace in succeeding years to suit his taste, and made it his favorite retreat, though in 1525 he presented it to the king as ‘‘ too magnificent for a subject.’
{It is worth noting that no one brought before his legatine court on a charge of heresy was burned; and in political matters and toward personal enemies he showed a like selfrestraint and toleration.
Wolsey Women
THE NEW SCHAFF-HERZOG
nobly, and he made friends of all with whom he came personally in contact; when he was led from Cawood the crowd ran after him crying: “‘ God save your Grace! The foul evil take them that have taken you from us!”’ His subserviency to his royal master was grounded in a conviction that Henry’s sovereignty was the only guaranty against civil strife; furthermore, that the royal power was the only power in England strong enough to work necessary reforms. Herein public opinion strenuously endorsed Wolsey’s. Likewise, his magnificent life accorded with the spirit of his time; the subventions he received from France and Spain were questioned by no one; his apparent misuse of church offices and revenues was sanctioned by time-honored custom. And he has better extenuation than the specious and commonplace plea that “ his faults were those of his time.” The ostentatious display in which he lived and with which he clothed all his enterprises was a part of his great aspirations and plans, and was, moreover, an effective means toward the ends he was striving for. It impressed foreign potentates, and pleased and animated men at home; probably nothing contributed more to Wolsey’s greatest and permanent achievement—the awakening and invigorating of the English spirit—than the magnificent life of the English cardinal. ‘ Bribes ”’ may be too harsh a word to apply to his pensions, annuities, and subsidies; they were given and accepted openly, and they never caused him to waver in his duty to England. A churchman of the highest rank, he served the State and used the Church’s money for the public good, because in the early sixteenth century churchmen alone had the education, experience in affairs, and general training requisite for public duties, and the Church possessed by far the larger share of the national wealth—a greater share, moreover, than it needed for the work it was doing. A conspicuous example is his diversion of abundant wealth to grand educational foundations. As early as 1518 he sought and obtained exceptional powers in the visitation of monasteries. Making use of these powers, augmented by later bulls, he suppressed a number of religious houses and applied their revenues to the foundation of Christ Church College at Oxford (1525) and a school at Ipswich (1528), the latter intended to be the first of a series of institutions scattered over England to meet local needs. Thus he would have corrected a fault in the English educational system, which, after his fall, remained unrelieved until the century just ended. No incident of his fall occasioned him deeper grief than the news that his two colleges were to be suppressed. The Oxford institution was ultimately saved (partly in response to Wolsey’s earnest entreaties), but its name was changed from Cardinal College to King’s (it is now Christ Church) and its plan was much curtailed. Another trait, less patent but more noteworthy, linking Wolsey with the opening twentieth century, is his steadfast belief that the greatness and prosperity of his land and of all lands are truly promoted by peace, not by war. He worked constantly, devotedly, untiringly for peace, winning the title of cardinalis pacificus, and he stands forth, in the long line of English statesmen,
as the great peace minister—than whom no other
is more fit to be taken as patron by those who would
now substitute arbitration and reason for pillage and
bloodshed in the settlement of international disputes.
BIBLIOGRAPHY: Among the sources may be mentioned in the Rolls Series: Letters and Papers of . . . Richard III. and Henry VII., 2 vols., 1861-63; Calendars of Letters and Papers, Henry VIII., vols. i-vi., 1862 sqq.; Calendar of Letters between England and Spain, vols. ii.—v., 1868 sqaq.; Venice, State Papers and Manuscripts, vols. ii.-v., 1864 sqq.; and J. 8. Brewer, Reign of Henry VIII., ed. Gairdner, 2 vols., 1884. ‘Besides these, reference should be made to all original publications dealing with the reign of Henry VIII., as well as to the works on the history, secular and ecclesiastical, dealing with that period. The so-called life by George (not William) Cavendish contains the reminiscences of a faithful servant, written late in life (in the reign of Mary). Cavendish remained with Wolsey to the end, was present at his deathbed, and personally carried the news of his death to Henry VIII. The book is gossipy, deficient in dates and other data for reconstructing Wolsey’s life, and has value chiefly for the picture it gives (very favorable) of Wolsey the man by one who knew him long and intimately. A copy of the first edition (The Negotiations of Thomas Wolsey, the Great Cardinall of England, Containing his Life and Death, etc., London, 1641), bound in red levant morocco, gilt edges, brought $50 at the Hoe sale (1910). The work has frequently been reproduced and in cheap form, as in Morley’s Universal Library, London, 1885, recent ed., ib., 1908. The best life of Wolsey is Mandell Creighton’s Cardinal Wolsey in Twelve English Statesmen Series, London, 1888 (written with abundant knowledge of English and continental history and shrewd discrimination, treats of Wolsey as a statesman, but is rather hard reading). Of importance is E. L. Taunton’s Thomas Wolsey, Legate and Reformer, London, 1901 (a eulogy of Wolsey as churchman, thus supplementing Creighton; it is rather loosely written, and is not to be implicitly trusted in dates, citations, and, perhaps, conclusions, though it has interest and value as the work of a liberal Roman Catholic; cf. his article in American Catholic Quarterly Review, xxv (1900), 289-329); F. A. Gasquet, Henry VIII. and the English Monasteries, chap. ii., London, 1888, rev. ed., 1899 (unfavorable to Wolsey). The drama, Henry VIII., attributed to Shakespeare (really written by him and Fletcher and containing more of Fletcher than Shakespeare), is not history, but has value in that it doubtless presents Wolsey as men of his time and immediately succeeding generations saw him; the eulogy (IV., ii. 48-68) is inadequate, but just as far as it goes.
Other works which may be consulted to advantage are: T. Storer, Life and Death of Thomas Wolsey, London, 1599, reprint, Oxford, 1826; R. Fiddes, Life of Cardinal Wolsey, ib. 1724; J. Grove, Hist. of the Life and Times of Cardinal Wolsey, 4 vols., ib. 1742-44; C. Wordsworth, Ecclesiastical Biography, 4 vols., ib. 1853; W. Busch, Drei Jahre englischer Vermitilungspolitik, 1618-21, Bonn, 1884; idem, Cardinal Wolsey und die englische kaiserliche Allianz, 1622-26, ib. 1884; idem, in Historisches Taschenbuch, vols. vili.—ix.; Cambridge Modern History, ii. 42- 45, 416-435, New York, 1904; DNB, Ixii. 325-343.
WOLTERS, volt’ers, ALBRECHT JULIUS KON- STANTIN: German theologian; b. at Emmerichon-the-Rhine (60 m. w. of Miinster) Aug. 22, 1822; d. at Bonn Mar. 29, 1877. He began his education in the gymnasium of his native town, and the relics of early Christian art of various kinds accessible there gave him a taste for archeological studies. He attended the University of Bonn, where he came under the influence of Friedrich Bleek and Karl Immanuel Nitzsch (qq.v.); then went to Berlin and pursued theological and philosophical studies under Marheineke, Vatke, Hengstenberg, and others, developing his talent for languages; he closed his studies by returning to Bonn. His first work was done as private tutor at Naples, during three years of which activity he acquired a mastery of the Italian; re-