Every feeling of resentment against a proud and haughty ecclesiastic, and such feeling was very strong throughout all classes, gathered around his devoted head. "Not that Wolsey," says Dr. Brewer, "was the slave of a vulgar vanity. A soul as capacious as the sea, and minute as the sands upon its shores when minuteness was required, he could do nothing meanly. The last great builder this nation ever had, the few remains which have survived him show the vastness of his mind and the universality of his genius. He could build a kitchen, or plan a college, or raise a tower, as no man since then has been able to build them."

Hampton Court, which he afterwards gave to the King, the original designs for Christ Church, Oxford, and the gateway of his projected school at Ipswich— which alone remains of all he proposed to do for his native place-bespeak him as the consummate architect. The expenses of his household were more than £30,000 of modern money, and yet out of his vast revenue he was able to find money for his great designs. Perhaps the proudest day of his life was the one when he proceeded to Westminster Abbey to have his cardinal's hat placed upon his head by Archbishop Warham, after which he was conducted by two dukes to the western door of the Abbey and from there to Charing Cross, followed by a procession of nobles, bishops and gentlemen. The proceedings of the day ended with a magnificent banquet, graced by the presence of the King and Queen and attended by all that was great in Church and State.

What wonder that this spoilt child of fortune, this son of an obscure home, should have swollen with pride and have been overwhelmed with vanity! Let all this suffice for his outward pomp and inward love of power. In the end he suffered bitterly for it all, and when his fall came he fell never to rise again. He looked for some to have pity upon him, and most men rejoiced. We shall see that the King whom he had served so well did feel a secret respect for his greatness; but in his day of humiliation not a single word of comfort or sympathy

came from the Pope for whose prerogatives he fell, and in whose defence he had fought an unequal battle and lost it.

The Divorce.

In an evil day good Queen Catherine-and let this phrase stand as expressive of her character and conduct throughout the cruel persecutions to which she was subjected-was induced to admit to the list of her gentlewomen at Court Anne Boleyn, then a girl in her sixteenth year. She had already spent some time in France. Cavendish states that "Mistress Anne Boleyn, being very young, was sent into the realm of France and there made one of the French Queen's women." She writes to the Queen a letter of the most extraordinary spelling: "I beg of you to excuse me if my letter is inaccurately written, for I assure you that it is entirely my own." The sentiments and phraseology betray the hand of a master, but the "ottograpie," as she spells it, is all her own.

This was the girl whose fascinating eyes and black hair sent the whole Court, including grave ecclesiastics as well as the young nobility, into transports of admiration. Henry VIII was then thirty-one. It is said that an idle gallantry betrayed him into an uncontrollable passion; if this be so, the passion was no temporary one. The King's marked attention to the young maid of honour warned the young men of the Court to be careful in their own conduct. No one at first thought seriously of the matter. Henry VIII was never a faithful husband, and the latest intrigue was expected to end like many others. We shall have occasion to refer again to the matter when we come to speak of Cranmer, but at present we are concerned only with Wolsey's part in the great affair.

The King began to speak, especially to Wolsey, about his conscience and his doubts as to the legitimacy in God's sight of his marriage with Queen Catherine. Could not the marriage which had brought him no male heir be disannulled? Was not the absence of such an heir an evidence of divine disapproval? Out of other children born to him the Princess Mary alone remained.

Had the dispensation been right, and ought it not to be reviewed? The term "Divorce " is a misnomer, for all the prolonged proceedings, so humiliating to King, Queen and Pope, and so disastrous to Wolsey, were only an attempt to set aside a marriage which, it was contended, ought never to have taken place. When Prince Arthur died, April 1502, a boy of sixteen, the young widow, who was nineteen, had been the wife of a sickly husband for five months. Henry VII, lately a widower, offered, April 1503, to marry her himself, sooner than part with her dowry, but her mother declared it to be "a thing not to be endured." In June 1503 she was betrothed to Henry, then a boy of twelve. Two years later his father caused him to refuse to fulfil the contract, though a Dispensation had been obtained from the Pope; but in 1509, when he succeeded to the throne, Henry married Catherine of his own free choice. Thus did the grasping father and the yielding Pope, who wished to offend neither Ferdinand of Spain nor Henry VIII playing with the sacredness of marriage, weave the meshes of the net within which the papal authority in England was finally entrapped.1

Henry VIII's scruples and his idea of having his marriage disannulled were first expressed in 1514, five years after his marriage.2 Wolsey first became aware of the real state of the King's mind in 1525, when, in

1 The Bull of Julius II in 1503 granting Dispensation had been all too carefully drawn up. Ferdinand wrote to his ambassador at Rome to say "it is well known in England that the Princess is still a Virgin, but as the English are much disposed to cavil, it has seemed to be more prudent to provide for the case as though the marriage had been consummated, and the dispensation of the Pope must be in perfect keeping with the said clause of the treaty." So, to leave no loophole, the words " forsitan consummatum" were introduced.

At the time of her trial Queen Catherine declared that she entered into her marriage with Henry as virgo immaculata. What troubles might have been avoided if the one alone able to speak had been believed! Her married life for five months with a sickly and dying boy makes her solemn declaration the more probable.

2 Sanuto's Diary mentions a report that Henry meant to annul his own marriage, and would obtain what he wanted from the Pope (Venetian State Papers).

the words of his dying speech at Leicester Abbey, he spoke of what he did then and on other occasions: "I assure you I have often kneeled before him (the King) in his privy chamber the space of an hour or two to persuade him from his will and appetite, but I could never bring to pass to dissuade him therefrom." When husband or wife begin to talk about divorce there is always some one else involved, and Wolsey, who could not contemplate the King's marriage with a subject, thought of a French princess.

1

As we are concerned only with Wolsey and must speak of other things in his career, we leave this matter. History must acquit him of responsibility for either raising the question or urging it on. He was foolish enough to think he could have served the King if he had become Pope himself. The Pope was powerless to undo what his predecessors had done so carefully, under prudential motives and without much regard to the sacredness of marriage, and so the cause drifted to its close. The greatly wronged Queen was put away. Anne Boleyn, eleven years after coming to Court, took her place in 1533, but went to the block in three years, at the age of twenty-nine, judged guilty of adultery, though protesting her innocence from the Tower.2 Wolsey, whose powers of fine statesmanship were ruined by all the miserable proceedings of the case, fell in 1529, and entered upon the last year of his life, in which all the best qualities of his nature were shown in the school of adversity.

1 See also an important letter from Wolsey to Henry VIII, when the King suspected him of being unfavourable from the very first (State Papers, i. 194). Also at the time of the trial the Cardinal addressed Henry in court: "Sir, I most humbly beseech Your Majesty to declare me before all this audience whether I have been the chief inventor or first mover in this matter unto Your Majesty, for I am greatly subjected of all men therein."

"My Lord Cardinal," quoth the King, "I can well excuse ye therein. Marry! ye have been rather against me in attempting on setting forth thereof " (Cavendish's Life of Wolsey).

2 See Queen Anne's last letter to King Henry (Burnet's Collection of Records, book iii., 4). The records of the trial no longer exist, and are said to have been destroyed by the order of Queen Elizabeth.

Educational Reformer.

1

Before we sketch this last year we must look at Wolsey in his most honourable character, viz. that of educational reformer. Wolsey's astute and far-seeing mind made him by nature a reformer, though in certain directions he was powerless. How could he reprove the evils of pluralities when he was himself the greatest pluralist in England? How could he raise his voice against the levity of Henry VIII's Court when the King could taunt him with having a "bed-fellow" of his own? Or how protest against the exactions of the Papal Collector's office in London when his eyes were turned to Rome in the hope of one day ruling at the Vatican, and meantime, as Cardinal, he was pledged to maintain all fees? When he tried his hand at reforming the abuses amongst the Friars Minor, Clement VII wrote in 1524 to say "the Order seemed to suspect he was about to visit and reform them, but, while sure of Wolsey's wisdom, he begs him not to attempt any such thing, because the Order is very great and much esteemed throughout the world; and though good may be done in England, it would occasion disturbances elsewhere."

The Friars thus secured two years' delay.

While Wolsey never visited his diocese of York until the last year of his life, he issued in 1518 Provincial Constitutions containing a number of wholesome injunctions and enforcing residence on all the clergy, under the penalty of the loss of income, until they had papal dispensations or were absent with the Bishop's leave.2 However zealous their Archbishop was, he laid himself open to the reply, "Physician, heal thyself! "

In the matter of educational reform Wolsey was free, and herein we see him at the best.

Archbishop Warham was Chancellor of Oxford from 1506 till his death in 1532, and the saintly and ascetic Bishop Fisher of Rochester held the same office at Cambridge. It is humiliating to read the language of flattery

1 On the "Celibacy of the Clergy" see Appendix A, p. 193. 2 Wilkins's Concilia, iii., p. 662.