Background
Cardinal Wolsey was born Thomas Wolsey at Ipswich about 1473. He was the son of a Suffolf grazier.
Cardinal Wolsey was born Thomas Wolsey at Ipswich about 1473. He was the son of a Suffolf grazier.
He was sent to Magdalen College, Oxford, and received his B. A. degree after rigorous examinations in Latin at 15, being known as the "Boy Bachelor. " He then became a fellow of Magdalen and was bursar there when the college's famous tower was built.
After the season as a parish priest, he served as chaplain to Archbishop Deane of Canterbury and assistant to the deputy collector of the port of Calais. From this post he was recommended to the court of Henry VII, where he accomplished one diplomatic mission to the Continent so swiftly that, by his own account, he was back before the king knew he had left. When Henry VIII came to the throne at 18, Wolsey undertook the tedious work of government and encouraged both the pleasures and the ambitions of the young king. In 1512 their first venture abroad, an attempted invasion of France, ended in failure and mutiny. The next year, however, Wolsey organized brilliantly an invasion for Henry to lead in person. It was a huge success, and from this event Wolsey's honors date.
In 1514 he was named at Henry's behest bishop of Tournai, bishop of Lincoln, and then archbishop of York. In September 1515, Pope Leo X, needing English support against Francis I of France, made Wolsey a cardinal, and Henry made him lord chancellor. Henceforth, Wolsey ran the realm with scant and perfunctory reference to Parliament. Abroad he played off Francis I against Charles V of Spain, keeping England for the most part in a position of arbiter, until, in 1529 at Cambrai, Francis and Charles made peace, ignoring Wolsey and leaving England isolated. The collapse of his balance-of-power policy coincided with his failure to get an immediate annulment of the marriage of Henry and Catherine of Aragon. In the summer of 1529, under an equivocal commission from Pope Clement VII, Wolsey and another cardinal held a long trial in London, but the court was adjourned without decision and the whole matter was referred to Rome. Shortly thereafter Wolsey was tried under an early statute that forbade holding a foreign court in England. He was found guilty and deprived of the Great Seal of the lord chancellor and of most of his property. Although kept under palace arrest at Esher and later at Richmond, he came in contact with a strict order of monks, the Carthusians, who " persuaded him from the vainglory of this world. " When in the spring of 1530 he was sent to assume at last his duties as archbishop of York, he had apparently undergone a change in values and performed many priestly offices along the way. The cardinal could not, however, escape the intrigues of which he had been so long a part. His popularity in the north led his enemies to fear his return to power--a fear not lessened by the king's practise of citing his competence to the court. His enemies prevailed, and on Halloween in 1530 he was arrested near York. He fell ill shortly after but came by slow stages toward London until his journey ended at Leicester.
Quotations: "If I had served God as diligently as I have done the king, He would not have given me over in my grey hairs. " Wolsey's last words tell much of the story of his life.
The genius of Wolsey lay in the variety of his abilities beyond statecraft.
His zeal for education built two colleges, one of which survives as Christ Church, Oxford.
Sitting as a judge, he was swift and fair.
Quotes from others about the person
Keith Randall: “By the early 1520’s an established fact of political life in England was that you did not incur the cardinal’s displeasure if you held any aspirations for the future. ”
