A.D. 1527. Wolsey in forms the he has de Henry from this I will labour. And now let me mention the CH. 2. great and marvellous effects which have been wrought by my instrumentality on the mind of my most excellent master the king, whom I have persuaded to unite himself with his Holiness in heart and soul. I urged innumerable reasons to induce him to part him from the emperor, to whom he clung with much tenacity. The most effective of them all was the constancy with which I assured him of the good-will and affection which were felt for him by his Holiness, and the certainty that his Holiness would furnish proof of his friendship in conceding his said Ma- Dec. 6. jesty's requests, in such form as the church's treasure and the authority of the Vicar of Christ pope that shall permit, or so far as that authority extends tached or may extend. I have undertaken, moreover, the empe for all these things in their utmost latitude, pledging my salvation, my faith, my honour and soul upon them. I have said that his demands shall be granted amply and fully, without scruple, without room or occasion being left for after- And that in retractation; and the King's Majesty, in conse- has underquence, believing on these my solemn assevera- taken that tions that the Pope's Holiness is really and indeed will conwell inclined towards him, accepting what is divorce. spoken by me as spoken by the legate of the Apostolic See, and therefore, as in the name of his Holiness, has determined to run the risk which I have pressed upon him; he will spare no labour or expense, he will disregard the wishes of his subjects, and the private interest of his Realm, ror, return he the pope cede the Сн. 2. A. D. 1527. to attach himself cordially and constantly to the Holy See.'* These were the words of a man who loved England well, but who loved Rome better; and Wolsey has received but scanty justice from catholic writers, since he sacrificed himself for the sincere ser- catholic cause. His scheme was bold and well church of laid, being weak only in that it was confessedly Wolsey a vant of the Rome. titled to suppose that if he succeeded, success would justify him. in contradiction to the instincts and genius of the nation, by which, and by which alone, in the long run, either this or any other country has been He was en- successfully governed. And yet he might well be forgiven if he ventured on an unpopular course in the belief that the event would justify him; and that, in uniting with France to support the pope, he was not only consulting the true interest of England, but was doing what England actually desired, although blindly aiming at her object by other means. The French wars, however traditionally popular, were fertile only in glory. The rivalry of the two countries was a splendid folly, wasting the best blood of both countries for an impracticable chimera; and though there was impatience of ecclesiastical misrule, though there was jealousy of foreign interference, and general irritation with the state of the church, yet the The spread mass of the people hated protestantism even worse of protes than they hated the pope, the clergy, and the tantism, English and the consistory courts. They believed-and Wolsey aversion to was, perhaps, the only leading member of the privy council, except Archbishop Warham, who was not under the same delusion-that it was it. * State Papers, vol. vii. pp. 18, 19. A.D. 1527. possible for a national church to separate itself CH. 2. from the unity of Christendom, and at the same time to crush or prevent innovation of doctrine; that faith in the sacramental system could still be maintained, though the priesthood by whom those mysteries were dispensed should minister in gilded chains. This was the English historical theory handed down from William Rufus, the second Henry, and the Edwards; yet it was and is a mere phantasm, a thing of words and paper fictions, as Wolsey saw it to be. Wolsey knew well that an ecclesiastical revolt implied, as a certainty, innovation of doctrine; that plain men could not and would not continue to reverence the office of the priesthood, when the priests were treated as the paid officials of an earthly authority higher than their own. He was not to be blamed if he took the people at their word; if he believed that, in their doctrinal conservatism, they knew and meant what they were saying: and the reaction which took place under Queen Mary, when the Anglican system had been tried and failed, and the alternative was seen to be absolute between a union with Rome or a forfeiture of catholic orthodoxy, prove after all that he was wiser than in the immediate event he seemed to be; that if his policy had succeeded, and if, strengthened by success, he had introduced into the church those reforms which he had promised and desired, he would have satisfied the substantial wishes of the majority of the nation. * The fullest account of Wol- I will be found in a letter adsey's intentions on church reform dressed to him by Fox, the old CH. 2. A.D. 1527. character Wolsey's Europe. schemes. Like other men of genius, Wolsey also combined practical sagacity with an unmeasured power of hoping. As difficulties gathered round Visionary him, he encountered them with the increasing of Wolsey's magnificence of his schemes; and after thirty genius. 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 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 for ever, 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 hordes of the Crescent, which were threatening to settle the quarrels of Christians in the West as they had settled them in the Eastby the extinction of Christianity itself,—were to be hurled back into their proper barbarism.* These blind Bishop of Winchester, in for the Reformation of Ireland, drawn up in 1515, contains the following curious passage: The prophecy is, that the King of England shall put this land of Ireland into such order that the wars of the land, whereof grow *Letters of the Bishop of Bayonne, LEGRAND, vol. iii. It is not uncommon to find splendid imaginations of this kind haunt-eth the vices of the same, shall ing statesmen of the 16th century; and the recapture of Constantinople always formed a feature in the picture. A Plan cease for ever; and after that God shall give such grace and fortune to the same king that he shall with the army of England A.D. 1527. but fatal magnificent visions fell from him in conversations Ca. 2. with the Bishop of Bayonne, and may be gathered from hints and fragments of his correspondence. Extravagant as they seem, the prospect of realizing them was, humanly speaking, neither chimerical nor even improbable. He had but made the His single common mistake of men of the world who are mistake. the representatives of an old order of things at the time when that order is doomed and dying. He could not read the signs of the times; and confounded the barrenness of death with the barrenness of a winter which might be followed by a new spring and summer; he believed that the old life-tree of catholicism, which in fact was but cumbering the ground, might bloom again in its old beauty. The thing which he called heresy was the fire of Almighty God, which no politic congregation of princes, no state machinery, though it were never so active, could trample out; and as in the early years of Christianity the meanest slave who was thrown to the wild beasts for his presence at the forbidden mysteries of the gospel, saw deeper, in the divine power of his faith, into the future even of this earthly world than the sagest of his imperial persecutors, so a truer political prophet than Wolsey would have been found in the most ignorant of those poor men, for whom his myrmidons were searching in and of Ireland subdue the realm | Holy Cross and the Holy Land, |