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Updated: May 5, 2025
Wolsey's aim of breaking down constitutional traditions was shown, as in the case of the Commons, by his setting aside the old assembly of the provincial convocations, and as Legate summoning the clergy to meet in a national synod. But the clergy held as stubbornly to constitutional usage as the laity, and the Cardinal was forced to lay his demand before them in their separate convocations.
But I was again impressed with the stately grandeur of Wolsey's great Hall, with its great window at each end, and one side window, descending almost to the floor, and a row of windows on each side, high towards the roof, and throwing down their many-colored light on the stone pavement, and on the Gobelin tapestry, which must have been gorgeously rich when the walls were first clothed with it.
Wolsey's mind was European rather than English; it dwelt little on home affairs but turned almost exclusively to the general politics of the European powers and of England as one of them. Whatever might be Henry's disappointment in the issue of his French campaigns the young king might dwell with justifiable pride on the general result of his foreign policy.
Admitting Wolsey's faults, it nevertheless presents him in an attractive light. The simple yet eloquent style gives it a high place as a biography. Printer and translator, b. in the Weald of Kent, was apprenticed to a London mercer.
King Henry was at Hampton Court, engaged in practising archery in the park when George Cavendish arrived with the news of Wolsey's death, and the bluff King paid his old and too loyal servant the tribute of saying that he would rather have given £20,000 than he had died. The King did not, however, let any sentiment about the builder of Hampton Court trouble him long or interfere with his plans.
Clement VII., while not unwilling to grant the dispensation requested, did not think it consistent with his own honour or that of the king, to grant the commission according to the terms drawn up for him in England. A new embassy, consisting of Edward Foxe, and Dr. Stephen Gardiner, Wolsey's secretary, was dispatched, and arrived at Orvieto in March 1528.
And now Cromwell emerges as the man who was to give that policy tremendous effect, and by inference at least as its probable creator and organiser from the close of 1530. It is not till 1535 however that he becomes openly and indisputably first minister; Wolsey's successor in Henry's confidence and to Henry's gratitude.
Wolsey's two great ambitions wealth and power were both gratified, and for a while all went well; but time brought the King's displeasure, and it was he who took possession at Hampton Court after the complete disgrace which led to the death of the Cardinal.
He would at least have pruned ecclesiastical abuses; and would have forced upon the clergy as an ecclesiastic those reforms which they were always on the verge of introducing when they found themselves anticipated by the drastic action of the temporal Power. Reform was the inevitable corollary of Education, and the development of Education was of all schemes the nearest to Wolsey's heart.
To make use of comparison, it was Cardinal Wolsey's assumption of full legatine power by permission of the Pope which first suggested to Henry VIII that he could dispense with His Holiness altogether. He saw that the Cardinal wielded both spiritual and temporal jurisdiction.
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