Part 2 (2/2)

_The Mind of Wolsey_

If the outer man was thus caparisoned, what of Wolsey's mind? Its furniture, too, beggared all description. Amiable as Wolsey could be, he could also on occasions be as brusque as his royal master. A contemporary writer says: ”I had rather be commanded to Rome than deliver letters to him and wait an answer. When he walks in the Park, he will suffer no suitor to come nigh unto him, but commands him away as far as a man will shoot an arrow.”

Yet to others he could be of sweet and gentle disposition and ready to listen and to help with advice.

”Lofty and sour to them that loved him not, But to those men that sought him sweet as summer.”

To those who regard characters as either black or white, Wolsey's was indeed a contradiction. Charges of a personal character have been brought against the great prelate, which need not here be referred to, unless it be to say that if they were true, by so much the less he was a priest, by so much more he was a man.

_His Ambition_

There is no doubt that the Cardinal made several attempts to become Pope--but this enterprise was doomed to failure, although in it he was supported warmly by the King. To gain this end much bribery was needed, ”especially to the younger men who are generally the most needy,” as the Cardinal said. Wolsey was a sufficiently accomplished social diplomatist to conciliate the young, for their term of office begins to-morrow, and gold is the key of consciences. He was hated and feared, flattered, cajoled and brow-beaten where possible. But as a source of income he was ever held in high regard by the Pope.

His own annual income from bribes--royal and otherwise--was indeed stupendous, though these were received with the knowledge of the King.

So great was the power Wolsey attained to that Fox said of him: ”We have to deal with the Cardinal, who is not Cardinal but King.” He wrote of himself, ”_Ego et rex meus_,” and had the initials, ”T. W.” and the Cardinal's hat stamped on the King's coins. These were among the charges brought against him in his fall.

To his ambitions there was no limit. For the spoils of office he had ”an unbounded stomach.” As an instance of his pretensions it is recorded that during the festivities of the Emperor's visit to England in 1520, ”Wolsey alone sat down to dinner with the royal party, while peers, like the Dukes of Suffolk and Buckingham, performed menial offices for the Cardinal, as well as for Emperor, King and Queen.”

When he met Charles at Bruges in 1521 ”he treated the Emperor of Spain as an equal. He did not dismount from his mule, but merely doffed his cap, and embraced as a brother the temporal head of Christendom.”

”He never granted audience either to English peers or foreign amba.s.sadors”

(says Guistinian) ”until the third or fourth time of asking.” Small wonder that he incurred the hatred of the n.o.bility and the jealousy of the King.

During his emba.s.sy to France in 1527, it is said that ”his attendants served cap in hand, and when bringing the dishes knelt before him in the act of presenting them. Those who waited on the Most Christian King, kept their caps on their heads, dispensing with such exaggerated ceremonies.”

Had Wolsey's insolence been tempered by his sense of humour, his fall might have been on a softer place, as his Fool is believed to have remarked.

_His Policy_

In his policy of the reform of the Church, Wolsey dealt as a giant with his gigantic task. To quote a pa.s.sage from Taunton: ”Ignorance, he knew, was the root of most of the mischief of the day; so by education he endeavoured to give men the means to know better. Falsehood can only be expelled by Truth.... Had the other prelates of the age realized the true cause of the religious disputes, and how much they themselves were responsible for the present Ignorance, the sacred name of religion would not have had so b.l.o.o.d.y a record in this country.”

Wolsey's idea was, in fact, to bring the clergy in touch with the thought and conditions of the time. It is wonderful to reflect that this one brain should have controlled the secular and ecclesiastical destinies of Christendom.

To reform the Church would seem to have been an almost superhuman undertaking, but to a man of Wolsey's greatness obstacles are only incentives to energy. He was ”eager to cleanse the Church from the acc.u.mulated evil effects of centuries of human pa.s.sions.” A great man is stronger than a system, while he lives; but the system often outlives the man. Wolsey lived in a time whose very atmosphere was charged with intrigue. Had he not yielded to a Government by slaughter, he would not have existed.

The Cardinal realised that ignorance was one of the chief causes of the difficulties in the Church. So with great zeal he devoted himself to the founding of two colleges, one in Ipswich, the other in Oxford. His scheme was never entirely carried out, for on Wolsey's fall his works were not completed. The College at Ipswich fell into abeyance, but his college at Oxford was spared and refounded. Originally called Cardinal College, it was renamed Christ Church, so that not even in name was it allowed to be a memorial of Wolsey's greatness.

_His Genius_

For a long time Wolsey was regarded merely as the type of the ambitious and arrogant ecclesiastic whom the Reformation had made an impossibility in the future. It was not till the ma.s.s of doc.u.ments relating to the reign of Henry VIII. was published that it was possible to estimate the greatness of the Cardinal's schemes. He took a wider view of the problems of his time than any statesman had done before. He had a genius for diplomacy. He was an artist and enthusiast in politics. They were not a pursuit to him, but a pa.s.sion. Not perhaps unjustly has he been called the greatest statesman England ever produced.

England, at the beginning of Henry VIII.'s reign, was weakened after the struggles of the Civil Wars, and wished to find peace at home at the cost of obscurity abroad. But it was this England which Wolsey's policy raised ”from a third-rate state of little account into the highest circle of European politics.” Wolsey did not show his genius to the best advantage in local politics, but in diplomacy. He could only be inspired by the gigantic things of statecraft. When he was set by Henry to deal with the sordid matter of the divorce, he felt restricted and cramped. He was better as a patriot than as a royal servant. It was this feeling of being sullied and unnerved in the uncongenial skirmis.h.i.+ngs of the divorce that jarred on his sensitive nature and made his ambitious hand lose its cunning. A first-rate man cannot do second-rate things well.

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