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Updated: June 10, 2025
In October, on the very day that the Cardinal took his place with a haughty countenance and all his former pomp in the Court of Chancery, an indictment was preferred against him by the king's attorney for receiving bulls from Rome in violation of the Statute of Præmunire. A few days later he was deprived of the seals. Wolsey was prostrated by the blow.
The grandeur of Cardinal Wolsey, and the meanness of Henry VIII., in the sufferance and the performance of that extortion are as sensible in the local air as if they were qualities of some event in our own day, and the details of the tyrant's life in the palace remain matters of as clear knowledge as those of some such tragedy as the recent taking off of the Servian king and queen.
The capture of Rome occurring almost at the same moment, Wolsey caught the opportunity to break the Spanish alliance; and the prospect of a divorce was grasped at by him as a lever by which to throw the weight of English power and influence into the papal scale, to commit Henry definitely to the catholic cause.
Between the fall of Wolsey and the defeat of the Armada was decided the great question whether England should be Catholic or Protestant, bond or free. The dazzling Queen of Scots, like the virtuous Chancellor and the holy Bishop, were on the wrong side. Henry and Elizabeth, with all their faults, were on the right one. That is the pith and marrow of Froude's book.
Here is John C. Calhoun, ranked by all as one of the triumvirate Webster, Calhoun and Clay. Here is Gen. Robert E. Lee, of whom Lord Wolsey said that for one State to have given birth to two such men as Washington and Lee was to have lent it immortal renown.
At the east end of St. George's Chapel is a freestone edifice, built by Henry the Seventh, as a burial-place for himself and his successors; but afterwards altering his purpose, he began the more noble structure at Westminster; and this remained neglected until Cardinal Wolsey obtained a grant of it from Henry the Eighth, and, with a profusion of expense, began here a sumptuous monument for himself, whence this building obtained the name of Wolsey's Tomb House.
Barnes, returning from the continent, had used violent language in a pulpit at Cambridge; and Latimer, then a neophyte in heresy, had grown suspect, and had alarmed the heads of houses. Complaints against both of them were forwarded to Wolsey, and they were summoned to London to answer for themselves.
The inflation of the power of France was satisfactory to no one else; but incidentally the effect was not disadvantageous to Wolsey, since it forced Pope Leo into an attitude of compliance with English demands in order to secure English support, with the result that Wolsey was raised to the Cardinalate, having recently been made Archbishop of York.
The daring boast which his enemies laid afterwards to Cromwell's charge, whether uttered or not, is but the expression of his system, "In brief time he would bring things to such a pass that the King with all his power should not be able to hinder him." His plans rested, like the plan which proved fatal to Wolsey, on a fresh marriage of his master.
What Henry lacked in experience and craft was supplied by his Chancellor Wolsey, whose private and personal ambition to reach the Papal Chair was dexterously mingled with the royal game.
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