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proved to Wolsey that his case was not yet hopeless, alarmed his opponents. They had gone too far to desist with safety; they must either complete his ruin, or submit to be afterwards the victims of his resentment. Hence they laboured to keep alive the royal displeasure against him.

Still the king's partiality for his former favourite seemed to be proof against all the representations of the council and the arts of his mistress. He continued to send to the cardinal from time to time consoling messages and tokens of affection, though it was generally by stealth, and sometimes during the night. When the court pronounced judgment against him, he took him under the royal protection; and when articles of impeachment, enumerating forty-four real or imaginary offences, and signed by fourteen peers and the law officers of the crown, had been introduced into the house of lords, and passed from it to the house of commons, he procured them to be thrown out by the agency of Cromwell, who from the service of the cardinal had risen to that of the king. i The articles exhibited by the lords against Wolseysuch as his writing to Rome, "Ego et Rex meus"-his putting the cardinal's hat on his York groat-his sending large sums to Rome and similar charges of ecclesiastical assumption, were evidently held insufficient to sustain any accusation of offence "to the prince's person or to the state," as Wolsey himself alleged. It was not Henry's purpose then to crush Wolsey. We may be sure that Cromwell would not have dared to defend him if the king had willed his condemnation. The future was too doubtful to allow the king utterly to destroy a cardinal of the Roman see whilst there was anything to hope in the matter of the divorce from the decision of the pope.d

The anguish of Wolsey's mind, however, rapidly consumed the vigour of his constitution. About Christmas he fell into a fever, which obstinately defied the powers of medicine. When Henry heard of his danger, he exclaimed, "God forbid that he should die. I would not lose him for twenty thousand pounds." He immediately ordered three physicians to hasten to Esher; repeatedly assured the cardinal of his unabated attachment, and, no longer concealing his anxiety from Anne Boleyn, compelled her to send to the sick man a tablet of gold for a token of reconciliation. It was ultimately agreed that Wolsey should retain the administration, temporal as well as spiritual, of the archiepiscopal see of York, but make over to the crown, for the term of his natural life, all the profits, all advowsons, and all nominations to offices, spiritual or secular, in his gift, as bishop of Winchester and abbot of St. Albans, and that in return he should receive a general pardon, an annuity of one thousand marks from the bishopric of Winchester, and a release from all moneys due to the king for his maintenance since the day of his conviction.

When he had assented to every demand, his vicinity to the court alarmed the jealousy of his enemies, and a peremptory order to reside within his archbishopric drove him, notwithstanding his entreaties and remonstrances, to a distance of two hundred miles. Henry, to soften the rigour of his exile, had recommended him in the warmest terms to the attention of the northern nobility, and Wolsey by his conduct and generosity quickly won their esteem. His thoughts seemed entirely devoted to the spiritual and temporal concerns of his station. He made it his favourite employment to reconcile families at variance-a tedious and expensive office, as he frequently satisfied the injured

years since he was wont to say to the Venetian ambassador, "I shall do so and so.' He now writes to Stephen Gardiner, praying him to extend his benevolence towards him, and begging for pecuniary help from the sovereign who has stripped him of everything. These are his abject words: "Remember, good Mr. Secretary, my poor degree, and what service I have done, and how now, approaching to death, I must begin the world again."d

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or discontented party out of his own purse. Every gentleman in the county was welcome to his table, which was plentifully, though not extravagantly, supplied; and, in repairing the houses and buildings belonging to his see, he gave employment to three hundred workmen. The more he was known the more he was beloved; the men to whom in prosperity he had been an object of hatred, applauded his conduct under adversity.

WOLSEY'S ARREST AND DEATH (1530 A.D.)

The cardinal had invited the nobility of the county to assist at his installation on the 7th of November; on the 4th he was unexpectedly arrested at Cawood on a charge of high trea

son. What was the particular crime alleged against him we know not; but the king asserted that his very servants had accused him of practising against the government both within and without the realm; and it is probable that the suspicion of Henry was awakened by the correspondence of the cardinal with the pope and the king of France. If we may believe Cavendish, he wrote to them to reconcile him with Henry. It is most improbable that the cardinal could have committed any act of treason since his pardon in February; and a man must be credulous indeed to believe it on the mere testimony of the despatches sent by his enemies to ambassadors abroad. Such despatches with general charges were always sent on similar occasions to justify the government in the eyes of foreign princes. Wolsey betrayed no symptoms of guilt; the king had

not, he maintained, a more loyal subject than himself; there lived not on earth the man who could look him in the face and charge him with untruth; nor did he seek any other favour than to be confronted with his accusers.

His health (he suffered much from the dropsy) would not allow him to travel with expedition. He said to the abbot of Leicester, as he entered the gate of the monastery, "Father abbot, I am come to lay my bones among you." He was immediately carried to his bed; and the second day, seeing Kingston, the lieutenant of the Tower, in his chamber, he addressed him in these well-known words: "Master Kingston, I pray you have me commended to his majesty; and beseech him on my behalf to call to mind all things that have passed between us, especially respecting good Queen Catherine and himself; and then shall his grace's conscience know whether I have offended him or not. He is a prince of most royal courage; rather than miss any part of his will, he will endanger one-half of his kingdom; and I do assure you, I

[1530 A.D.] have often kneeled before him, sometimes for three hours together, to persuade him from his appetite, and could not prevail. And, Master Kingston, had I but served God as diligently as I have served the king, he would not have given me over in my gray hairs. But this is my just reward for my pains and study, not regarding my service to God, but only my duty to my prince." Having received the last consolations of religion, he expired the next morning, 1530, in the sixtieth year of his age.i

Cavendish, after the funeral, repaired to London, and was sent for by the king to come to Hampton Court. Henry was shooting at the rounds in the park. The gentleman-usher leaned against a tree, when Henry came suddenly behind him and slapped him on the shoulder, telling him to wait till he had made an end of his game. Cavendish then discoursed with him for more than an hour. One rankling grief was upon the sovereign's mind, with reference to the friend and adviser of twenty years. A sum of fifteen hundred pounds had been entered in Wolsey's accounts, which entry the earl of Northumberland had seen. Kingston had pressed the dying man to account for the money, who said that he had borrowed it to distribute amongst his servants, and for his own burial, and had placed it in the hands of an honest man. The chief business of this magnanimous king with Cavendish was to obtain the knowledge where this treasure was hidden, and Cavendish told him. "Well, then," quoth the king, "let me alone, and keep this gear secret between yourself and me, and let no man be privy thereof; for if I hear any more of it, then I know by whom it is come to knowledge.' He had broken the great heart of his too faithful servant; but he thought only of the contents of the money-bags, to be appropriated to jewels for my lady Anne and to wagers with Domingo.d

VARYING ESTIMATES OF WOLSEY

Henry Hallam

If we justly regard with detestation the memory of those ministers who have aimed at subverting the liberties of their country, we shall scarcely approve the partiality of some modern historians towards Cardinal Wolsey; a partiality, too, that contradicts the general opinion of his contemporaries. Haughty beyond comparison, negligent of the duties and decorums of his station, profuse as well as rapacious, obnoxious alike to his own order and to the laity, his fall had long been secretly desired by the nation and contrived by his adversaries. His generosity and magnificence seem rather to have dazzled succeeding ages than his own.

But, in fact, his best apology is the disposition of his master. The latter years of Henry's reign were far more tyrannical than those during which he listened to the counsels of Wolsey; and though this was principally owing to the peculiar circumstances of the latter period, it is but equitable to allow some praise to a minister for the mischief which he may be presumed to have averted. Had a nobler spirit animated the parliament which met at the era of Wolsey's fall, it might have prompted his impeachment for gross violations of liberty. But these were not the offences that had forfeited his prince's favour, or that they dared bring to justice. They were not absent, perhaps, from the recollection of some of those who took a part in prosecuting the fallen minister. We can discover no better apology for Sir Thomas More's participation in impeaching Wolsey on articles so frivolous that they have

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served to redeem his fame with later times, than his knowledge of weightier offences against the common weal which could not be alleged, and especially the commissions of 1525.

Edward A. Freeman

For fourteen years, from 1515 to 1529, ecclesiastical statesmanship was in truth at its highest pitch in the person of Thomas Wolsey, archbishop, cardinal, and chancellor. During the administration of this famous man, we are instinctively reminded of the joint rule of an earlier Henry and an earlier Thomas; but the fate of the two great chancellors was widely different. No English minister before Wolsey, and few after him, ever attained to so great an European position. He dreamed of the popedom, while his master dreamed of the empire. In his home administration Wolsey carried out the policy which had become usual since Edward IV, and summoned parliament as seldom as possible. On the other hand, his administration of justice won the highest general confidence, and his hand was far from heavy on the maintainers of the new religious doctrines.

On the whole his position is rather European than English. He is more like the great cardinals who ruled in other lands than anything to which we are used in England. The purely English work of Henry's reign was done by the hands of men of another kind. The era of the lay statesmen now begins in the mightiest and most terrible of their number, Thomas Cromwell. From this time the highest offices are still occasionally held by churchmen, even as late as the middle of the seventeenth century. But the holding of office by churchmen now becomes exceptional; lay administration is the rule.

J. A. Froude

If there were no longer saints among the clergy, there could still rise among them a remarkable man, and in Cardinal Wolsey the king found an adviser who, holding a middle place between an English statesman and a Catholic of the old order, was essentially a transition minister. Wolsey could not bind himself to the true condition of the church. He was too wise to be deceived by outward prosperity; he knew well that there lay before it, in Europe and at home, the alternative of ruin or amendment; and therefore he familiarised Henry with the sense that a reformation was inevitable, and dreaming that it could be effected from within, by the church itself inspired with a wiser spirit, himself fell the first victim of a convulsion which he had assisted to create, and which he attempted too late to stay. A man who loved England well, but who loved Rome better, Wolsey has received but scanty justice from Catholic writers since he sacrificed himself for a Catholic cause.

Like other men of genius, Wolsey also combined practical sagacity with an unmeasured power of hoping. As difficulties gathered round him, he encountered them with the increasing magnificence of his schemes, and after thirty years' experience of public life he was as sanguine as a boy. Armed with this little lever of the divorce, he saw himself, in imagination, the rebuilder of the Catholic faith and the deliverer of Europe. The king being remarried and the succession settled, he would purge the church of England, and convert the monasteries into intellectual garrisons of pious and learned men, occupying the land from end to end. The feuds with France should cease forever, and, united in a holy cause, the two countries should restore the papacy, put down the German heresies, depose the emperor, and establish in his place some faithful servant of the church. Then Europe once more at peace, the

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hordes of the Crescent, which were threatening to settle the quarrels of Christians in the west as they had settled them in the east-by the extinction of Christianity itself-were to be hurled back into their proper barbarism.

These magnificent visions fell from him in conversations with the bishop of Bayonne,m and may be gathered from hints and fragments of his correspondence. Extravagant as they seem, the prospect of realising them was, humanly speaking, neither chimerical nor even improbable. He had but made the common mistake of men of the world who are the representatives of an old order of things at the time when that order is doomed and dying. If we look at the matter, however, from a more earthly point of view, the causes which immediately defeated Wolsey's policy were not such as human foresight could have anticipated. We ourselves, surveying the various parties in Europe with the light of our knowledge of the actual sequel, are perhaps able to understand their real relations; but if in 1527 a political astrologer had foretold that within two years of that time the pope and emperor who had imprisoned him would be cordial allies, that the positions of England and Spain toward the papacy would be diametrically reversed, and that the two countries were on the point of taking their posts, which they would ever afterwards maintain, as the champions respectively of the opposite principles to those which at that time they seemed to represent, the prophecy would have been held scarcely less insane than a prophecy six or even three years before the event, that in the year 1854 England would be united with an emperor Napoleon for the preservation of European order.

Leopold Von Ranke

Henry VIII's resolve to summon parliament was of almost greater importance to progress than the change of ministry. During the fourteen years of his administration Wolsey had summoned parliament but once, and that when he needed an extraordinary grant of funds for the war in alliance with the emperor against France. The parliament and the nation had always complained against Wolsey's oppressive and extravagant management of finances. His fall and the summoning of a parliament seemed a renewal of parliamentary principles in general.

Wolsey cannot be counted among statesmen of the first rank, either mentally or morally; yet his position and ability, his ambition and his political scheme, what he accomplished and what he suffered, his triumph and his tragedy, have gained him an immortal name in English history. His effort to bind the royal power to the papacy by strongest bonds, rent them asunder forever. The moment he was dead the clergy was made subject to the crown, a subjection which could only mean a final breach. Indeed, the whole clerical body was involved in Wolsey's guilt.p