Wolsey, Thomas

Wolsey, Thomas (c.1472–1530). Cardinal. Thomas Wolsey, cardinal-minister to Henry VIII, dominated the political and ecclesiastical life of England from 1515 to 1529. His relatively modest origins (reputedly the son of an Ipswich butcher) were not unusual for a senior cleric; it was the contrast between his origins and life-style which drew notice. He studied at Oxford and became a fellow of Magdalen College around 1497. He soon left scholarship to serve as chaplain to Henry Deane, archbishop of Canterbury, from 1501, became a royal chaplain from 1507, and the king's almoner in 1509. For helping to organize Henry VIII's first campaign in France (1513), he was rewarded with the bishoprics of Lincoln and newly captured Tournai in 1514, and the archbishopric of York shortly afterwards. In 1515 he became both cardinal and lord chancellor of England. In 1518 the pope honoured him with the special status of legate a latere, outranking the legatine status held by every archbishop of Canterbury; in 1524 this title was, uniquely, given for life.

With such an accumulation of posts, and vast energy, Wolsey took responsibility under the king for nearly all areas of government policy. A primary aim was to win military and diplomatic success for Henry. After the costly first campaign in France, Wolsey tried to magnify his master through grandiose peace negotiations (the treaty of London, 1518, and the Field of Cloth of Gold, 1520); he also tried to steer England into a position as arbiter and broker between the much wealthier monarchies of France under Francis I and Austria-Spain-Burgundy under Charles V. However, England was drawn into invading France in 1522 and 1523, forcing heavy and much-resented taxation, for which Wolsey was blamed. Attempts to side with France after 1525 backfired: a cloth embargo on the Habsburg Netherlands in 1527–8 had to be abandoned because of the harm done to England.

In domestic affairs Wolsey used his position as lord chancellor to pursue traditional policies with unusual verve and aggression. He revived Henry VII's campaign against those gentry and nobles who ‘retained’ excessive numbers of supporters to overawe royal justice. In 1517 he instituted commissions to search out those who had broken the law against converting arable farms into sheep-runs. He expanded the scope of the prerogative courts' equity jurisdiction, attracting a flood of civil suits to Star Chamber and offering redress to poor plaintiffs in what later became the Court of Requests.

Wolsey's management of the church was less creative. He enjoyed his pro-papal status as legate, gratuitously thwarting the primate's jurisdiction at times. There is no evidence that he seriously coveted the papacy for himself, though the idea of setting him up as an anti-pope was briefly canvassed to resolve the royal marriage crisis. He had neither the moral reforming zeal of Colet nor the taste for theological polemic of John Fisher. However, he had a good eye for intellectual gifts in others; and his educational foundations, including the great unfinished project of Cardinal College, Oxford (later refounded as Christ Church), allow him to rank with Bishops Richard Foxe in Oxford and John Fisher in Cambridge. Dissolving multiple monasteries to endow a college and a school, however, set a dangerous precedent.

Historians have argued unfruitfully whether Wolsey or Henry VIII was really in charge of England before 1529. Contemporaries regarded the cardinal's power as quasi-regal, and his vastly ostentatious household, larger and more ritualized than the king's, contributed to that impression. Henry did not like to read papers and absented himself from duties for long periods. However, the king could intervene decisively and stubbornly via his secretaries, and occasionally did. His penchant for war created problems Wolsey would not have chosen to set himself, and brought ill-deserved public hatred on the minister. At intervals Wolsey felt the need to protect himself against hostile courtiers close to the king: he restructured the king's privy chamber in 1519 and again in 1526, and gave his own magnificent palace of Hampton Court to Henry in 1525.

Henry's desperate need for the annulment of his first marriage required Wolsey to ask of the papacy the one thing it could not grant. Wolsey attempted to have the issue devolved to a commission composed of himself and the roving Cardinal Campeggio, but the queen's appeal to Rome thwarted this plan. Wolsey, who planned a diplomatic second marriage to a French bride for Henry, had no control over Anne Boleyn, who fed the king anticlerical and anti-Wolsey propaganda in the months leading up to the sudden loss of all his offices in October 1529. Wolsey pleaded guilty to an absurd charge of Praemunire arising out of his legatine status, and temporarily retired to church affairs; but when he dabbled unofficially in diplomacy in the summer of 1530 he was denounced as a traitor, and died on his way to London to answer, at Leicester, on 29 November 1530.

Wolsey's unpopularity with the political nation has been blamed for much of the anticlerical sentiment expressed in the 1529 session of Parliament. It is, however, probably too harsh to place the subsequent misfortunes of either church or state on him. For his accumulation of offices, and many of the unpopular policies he followed, the king was personally responsible. Wolsey's moral failings and pompous style were comparable to those of other cardinal-ministers in Europe at the time. It was only in the light of the religious earnestness of the 1530s and 1540s that his ministry came to appear so incongruous.

Euan Cameron

Bibliography

Gunn, S. J. , Cardinal Wolsey (Cambridge, 1991).