The English statesman and prelate Thomas Wolsey was virtual ruler of England as chief minister to Henry VIII.
He fell from favor because of his inability to secure the King's divorce.
Background
Thomas Wolsey was born at Ipswich, Suffolk, England about 1475; the son of Robert Wolsey (or Wuley, as his name was always spelt) by his wife Joan.
His father is generally described as a butcher, but he sold other things than meat; and although a man of some property and a churchwarden of St Nicholas, Ipswich, his character seems to have borne a striking resemblance to that of Thomas Cromwell's father.
He was continually being fined for allowing his pigs to stray in the street, selling bad meat, letting his house to doubtful characters for illegal purposes, and generally infringing the by-laws respecting weights and measures
He died in September 1496, and his will, which has been preserved, was proved a few days later.
Education
Thomas was educated at Magdalen College, Oxford; but the details of his university career are doubtful owing to the defectiveness of the university and college registers.
He is said to have graduated B. A. at the age of fifteen {i. e. about 1490).
Career
His earliest definite appearance in the records is as junior bursar of Magdalen College in 1498-1499, and senior bursar in 1499- 1500, an office he was compelled to resign for applying funds to the completion of the great tower without sufficient authority.
His connexion with Magdalen had perhaps terminated with his resignation of the bursarship, though he supplicated for the degrees of B. D. and D. D. in 1510; and the college appears to have derived no advantage from Wolsey's subsequent greatness.
At Limington he came into conflict with -law and order as represented by the sheriff, Sir Amias Paulet, who is said by Cavendish to have placed Wolsey in the stocks; Wolsey retaliated long afterwards by confining Paulet to his chambers in the Temple for five or six years.
Dorset died in 1501, but Wolsey found other patrons in his pursuit of wealth and fame.
Before the end of that year he obtained from the pope a dispensation to hold two livings in conjunction with Limington, and Archbishop Deane of Canterbury also appointed him his domestic chaplain.
Deane, however, died in 1503, and Wolsey became chaplain to Sir Richard Nanfan, deputy of Calais, who apparently recommended him to King Henry VII. Nanfan died in 1507, but the king made Wolsey his chaplain and employed him in diplomatic work. In 1508 he was sent to James IV of Scotland, and in the same year he pleased Henry by the extraordinary expedition with which he crossed and recrossed the Channel on an errand connected with the king's proposal of marriage to Margaret of Savoy.
His ecclesiastical preferments, of which he received several in 1506-1509, culminated in his appointment by Henry to the deanery of Lincoln on February 2, 1509.
Henry VIII made Wolsey his almoner immediately on his accession, and the receipt of some half-dozen further ecclesiastical preferments in the first two years of the reign marks his growth in royal favour.
His influence then made itself felt on English policy.
The young king took little pains with the government, and the control-of affairs was shared between the clerical and peace party led by Richard Fox and Archbishop Warham, and the secular and war party led by Surrey.
He brought about the peace with France and marriage between Mary Tudor and Louis XII in 1514, and reaped his reward in the bishoprics of Lincoln and Tournai, the archbishopric of York, which was conferred on him by papal bull in September, and the cardinalate which he had sent Polydore Vergil to beg from Pope Leo X in May 1514, but did not receive until the following year. Nevertheless, when Francis I in 1515 succeeded Louis XII and won the battle of Marignano, Wolsey took the lead in assisting the emperor Maximilian to oppose him; and this revival of warlike designs was resented by Fox and Warham, who retired from the government, leaving Wolsey supreme. Maximilian proved a broken reed, and in 1518 Wolsey brought about a general pacification, securing at the same time his appointment as legate а latere in England.
The election of Charles V as emperor in 1519 brought the rivalry between him and Francis I to a head, and Wolsey was mainly responsible for the attitude adopted by the English government.
Both monarchs were eager for England's alliance, and their suit enabled Wolsey to appear for the moment as the arbiter of Europe.
England's commercial relations with Charles V's subjects in the Netherlands put war with the emperor almost out of the question; and cool observers thought that England's obvious policy was to stand by while the two rivals enfeebled each other, and then make her own profit out of their weakness.
But, although a gorgeous show of friendship with France was kept up at the Field of Cloth of Gold in 1520, it had been determined before the conference of Calais in 1521, at which Wolsey pretended to adjudicate on the merits of the dispute, to side actively with Charles V. Wolsey had vested interests in such a policy.
Parliament had in 1513-1515 showed signs of strong anti-clerical feeling; Wolsey had in the latter year urged its speedy dissolution, and had not called another; and he probably hoped to distract attention from the church by a spirited foreign policy, as Henry V had done a century before.
He had, moreover, received assurances from the emperor that he would further Wolsey's candidature for the papacy; and although he protested to Henry VIII that he would rather continue in his service than be ten popes, that did not prevent him from secretly instructing his agents at Rome to press his claims to the utmost.
Charles, however, paid Wolsey the sincere compliment of thinking that he would not be sufficiently subservient on the papal throne; while he wrote letters in Wolsey's favour, he took care that they should not reach their destination in time; and Wolsey failed to secure election both in 1521 and 1524.
This ambition distinguishes his foreign policy from that of Henry VII, to which it has been likened.
The aim of the one was national, that of the other was ecumenical.
In any case the decision taken in 1521 was a blunder.
Wolsey's assistance helped Charles V to that position of predominance which was strikingly illustrated by the defeat and capture of Francis I at Pavia in 1525; and the balance of power upon which England's influence rested was destroyed.
Her efforts to restore it in 1526-1528 were ineffectual; her prestige had depended upon her reputation for wealth derived from the fact that she had acted in recent years as the paymaster of Europe.
But Henry VII's accumulations had disappeared; parliament resisted in 1523 the imposition of new taxation; and the attempts to raise forced loans and benevolences in 1526-1528 created a storm of opposition.
Still more unpopular was the brief war with Charles V in which Wolsey involved England in 1528.
The sack of Rome in 1527 and the defeat of the French before Naples in 1528 confirmed Charles V. 's supremacy.
Peace was made in 1529 between the two rivals without England being consulted, and her influence at Wolsey's fall was less than it had been at his accession to power. This failure reacted upon Wolsey's position at home.
His domestic was sounder than his foreign policy: by his development of the Star Chamber, by his firm administration of justice and maintenance of order, and by his repression of feudal jurisdiction, he rendered great services to the monarchy.
The control of the papacy by Charles V, moreover, made it impossible for Wolsey to succeed in his efforts to obtain from Pope Clement VII the divorce which Henry VIII was seeking from Charles V's aunt, Catherine of Aragon.
An inscription on a contemporary portrait of Wolsey at Arras calls him the author of the divorce, and Roman Catholic historians from Sanders downwards have generally adopted the view that Wolsey advocated this measure merely as a means to break England's alliance with Spain and confirm its alliance with France. This view is unhistorical, and it ignores the various personal and national motives which lay behind that movement. There is no evidence that Wolsey first suggested the divorce, though when he found that Henry was bent upon it, he pressed for two points: (1) that an application should be made to Rome, instead of deciding the matter in England, and (2) that Henry, when divorced, should marry a French princess.
The appeal to Rome was a natural course to be advocated by Wolsey, whose despotism over the English church depended upon an authority derived from Rome; but it was probably a mistake.
It ran counter to the ideas suggested in 1527 on the captivity of Clement VII, that England and France should set up independent patriarchates; and its success depended upon the problematical destruction of Charles V. 's power in Italy.
At first this seemed not improbable; French armies marched south on Naples, and the pope sent Campeggio with full powers to pronounce the divorce in England.
But he had hardly started when the French were defeated in 1528; their ruin was completed in 1529, and Clement VII was obliged to come to terms with Charles V, which included Campeggio's recall in August 1529.
Wolsey clearly foresaw his own fall, the consequent attack on the church and the triumph of the secular party.
Parliament, which he had kept at arm's length, was hostile; he was hated by the nobility, and his general unpopularity is reflected in Skelton's satires and in Hall's Chronicle.
Even churchmen had been alienated by his suppression of monasteries and by his monopoly of ecclesiastical power; and his only support was the king, who had now developed a determination to rule himself.
A bill of attainder, passed by the Lords, was rejected at Cromwell's instigation and probably with Henry's goodwill by the Commons.
The last few months of his life were spent in the exemplary discharge of his archi- episcopal duties; but a not altogether unfounded suspicion that he had invoked the assistance of Francis I, if not of Charles V and the pope, to prevent his fall involved him in a charge of treason.
His qualities and his defects are alike exhibited on a generous scale; and if his greed and arrogance were colossal, so were his administrative capacity and his appetite for work.
As a diplomatist he has had few rivals and perhaps no superiors.
But his pride was equal to his abilities.
His egotism equalled Henry VIII's; his jealousy and ill-treatment of Richard Pace, dean of St Paul's, referred to by Shakespeare but vehemently denied by Dr Brewer, has been proved by the publication of the Spanish state papers; and Polydore Vergil, the historian, and Sir R. Sheffield, speaker of the House of Commons, were both sent to the Tower for complaining of his conduct.
For his son, before he was eighteen years old, he procured a deanery, four archdeaconries, five prebends and a chancellorship, and he sought to thrust him into the bishopric of Durham.
For himself he obtained, in addition to his archbishopric and lord chancellorship, the abbey of St Albans, reputed to be the richest in England, and the bishopric first of Bath and Wells, then of Durham, and finally that of Winchester.
He also used his power to extort enormous pensions from Charles V and Francis I and lavish gifts from English suitors.
His New Year's presents were reckoned by Giustiniani at 15, 000 ducats, and the emperor paid or owed him 18, 000 livres a year.
His palaces outshone those of his king, and few monarchs could afford such a display of plate as commonly graced the cardinal's table.
Wolsey must be judged by his deeds and not by doubtful intentions.
During the first half of his government he materially strengthened the Tudor monarchy by the vigorous administration of justice at home and by the brilliance of his foreign policy abroad.
But the prestige he secured by 1521 was delusive; its decline was as rapid as its growth, and the expense of the policy involved taxation which seriously weakened the loyalty of the people.
The concentration of civil and ecclesiastical power by Wolsey in the hands of a churchman provided a precedent for its concentration by Henry VIII in the hands of the crown; and the personal example of lavish ostentation and loose morals which the cardinal-archbishop exhibited cannot have been without influence on the king, who grew to maturity under Wolscy's guidance.
Achievements
In 1518 Wolsey negotiated an alliance between England and France, to be cemented by the marriage of Henry VIII's daughter Mary to the French Dauphin.
Religion
As well as his State duties, Wolsey simultaneously attempted to exert his influence over the Church in England. As cardinal and, from 1524, lifetime papal legate, Wolsey was continually vying for control over others in the Church. His principal rival was William Warham, the Archbishop of Canterbury, who made it more difficult for Wolsey to follow through with his plans for reform. Despite making promises to reform the bishoprics of England and Ireland, and, in 1519, encouraging monasteries to embark on a programme of reform, he did nothing to bring about these changes.
Politics
Wolsey carefully tried to destroy or neutralise the influence of other courtiers. He helped cause the fall of Edward Stafford, 3rd Duke of Buckingham, in 1521; and in 1527 he prosecuted Henry's close friend William Compton and Henry's ex-mistress Anne Stafford, Countess of Huntingdon, through the ecclesiastical courts for adultery. In the case of Charles Brandon, Duke of Suffolk, Wolsey attempted to win his favour instead, by his actions after the Duke secretly married Henry's sister Mary Tudor, Queen of France, much to the King's displeasure. Wolsey advised the King not to execute the newlyweds, but to embrace them; whether this was through care for the couple or for his own safety is unknown – the bride, as the Dowager Queen of France, was royalty and that made her dangerous if she chose to go against Wolsey for she was close to her brother, the King.
Wolsey's rise to a position of great secular power paralleled his increased responsibilities in the Church. He became a Canon of Windsor in 1511. In 1514 he was made Bishop of Lincoln, and then Archbishop of York in the same year. Pope Leo X made him a cardinal in 1515, with the titular church S. Cæciliæ trans Tiberim.
In tribute to the success of his campaign in France and subsequent peace negotiations, Wolsey's ecclesiastical career advanced further: in 1523 he became Prince-Bishop of Durham.
Views
Quotations:
Just before his death he reputedly spoke these words: "I see the matter against me how it is framed. But if I had served God as diligently as I have done the King, he would not have given me over in my grey hairs. "
Personality
Quotes from others about the person
"He is, " wrote the Venetian ambassador Giustiniani, "very handsome, learned, extremely eloquent, of vast ability and indefatigable. He alone transacts the business which occupies all the magistrates and councils of Venice, both civil and criminal; and all state affairs are managed by him, let their nature he what it may. He is grave, and has the reputation of being extremely just; he favors the people exceedingly, and especially the poor, hearing their suits and seeking to despatch them instantly. "
Connections
His morals were of the laxest description, and he had as many illegitimate children as Henry VIII himself.
Wolsey lived in a "non-canonical" marriage for around a decade with a woman called Joan Larke (born circa 1490) of Yarmouth, Norfolk. The edict that priests, regardless of their functions or the character of their work, should remain celibate had not been wholeheartedly accepted in England.
Wolsey subsequently had two children, both born before he was made bishop. These were a son, Thomas Wynter (born circa 1510)and a daughter, Dorothy (born circa 1512), both of whom lived to adulthood.
