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 his 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). However, England was drawn into invading France in 1522 and 1523, forcing heavy and much‐resented taxation, for which Wolsey was blamed.

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. 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.

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, but died on his way to London to answer, at Leicester, on 29 November 1530.