nity for their own loose doings, by winking at those of others; in many cases safe from any visitation at all, unless from the Pope, which was equivalent to none, the monks had made good use of their opportunities, and were living in a condition which there is no occasion for us to describe.

in their judgment upon him? The first of cal life of the Catholic church had steeped itself. these questions is difficult to answer; the sec-The causes of the Reformation, which gave it ond is, we believe, answered easily, in the in fact its terrible vantage ground, he read too peculiar character of the thirty years which clearly in the idleness, the sensuality, the succeeded his fall, and in the course of which worse than profligacy, by which the monastic his reputation settled into its present form.-orders in England had disgraced themselves The administration of Wolsey immediately so fatally; and his whole heart was bent to preceded the convulsions of the Reformation; wash them clean, if cleansing were possible; and as no one knew better than he the nature if it were impossible, to sweep them utterly of what was impending, or the causes which away. Safe from visitation, except from ecwere hurrying it forward, he pursued a policy clesiastics who were glad to purchase indemwith respect to it which offended equally each of the rival factions. This policy, from causes over which he had no control, failed, and came to nothing; the Reformation was left to be carried through by a violent collision; and the Protestant and Catholic fanatics, between whom, for a time, the energy of the country became divided, united to revenge themselves. This worse than Augean stable, Wolsey set on the memory of the common enemy of both. himself to purify. He wrote to the Popes, one His creed was not like that of Sir Thomas after another, concealing nothing. Among More-an actively interested, theoretic ap- the articles of impeachment, we find him acprehension of the Catholic mysteries; it was cused of having disgraced the English Church rather the quiet assent of a sober English by the complaints which he had entered mind, to that interpretation of the relation be-against it. He had not feared to dwell upon tween God and man, which the general under- its very darkest crime, veiling it under the standing of mankind had for centuries agreed significant expression of the animus “ improto receive; and knowing well at what a cost bus;" and it was for this that he obtained this interpretation had been arrived at, he re- from the Court of Rome his absolute authorigarded the disturbers of it in the light in ty as Legate, which, superseding every other which, whether right or wrong, such men are power, placed the monasteries throughout always regarded by persons of strong practi- England in the joint hands of the king and cal intelligence, as wanton and mischievous himself. How far he would have carried out innovators. The progress of Lutheranism in the work of reformation, we cannot now tell. Germany connected itself justly in his mind He suppressed many of the smaller houses; with the civil wars in Europe, the insurrec- and he was proposing to suppress many more tion of the peasants, and the alarining advan-at the time of his fall. From him Cromwell ces of Solyman; and developing, as it threat-learned the possibility of what he so grindly ened to do, into theoretic doctrines of anarchy, afterwards executed; and he is known at political as well as spiritual, his plain duty, as least to have expressed a desire to see the an English statesman intrusted with the care entire system of inonastic establishments abolof the Commonwealth, appeared to be to ex-ished utterly, and their revenues confiscated tinguish, by all means and at all hazards, that for the founding of hospitals, and schools, and fire, wherever he found it burning. Thus his colleges, from end to end of England. name figures largely in the martyrology, as a We are tempted, both as a proof of the persecutor of the Protestants; yet it would nature and extent of this intended reformahave been well for them if they had never tion, and as an evidence of the light in which fallen into hands more disposed to deal with Wolsey, three years only before his death, was them hardly. His object was to suppress here-regarded by one of the greatest and best men sy as folly, not to punish it as a crime; and then living, to insert a letter which was writin the lists of those poor men who, in the later ten to him on the subject by Fox (not the years of Henry's reign, fulfilled their course Martyrologist, nor any relation to him, but) at the stake or on the scaffold, we find many Bishop of Winchester, and Henry the Sevnames of persons who had previously been enth's old minister, to whom the infatuation of brought before Wolsey, and by him had been general hostility has represented Wolsey as persuaded into quietness and dismissed. He having behaved with ingratitude and insocontrived, however, and naturally enough, to lence. The original is in Latin, and will be earn their hatred; they remembered only found in Strype, "Memor. Eccles., vol. i. Apwhat he had done against them, not what he pendix, No. 10.

had saved them from.

On the other hand, if he saw in Protestant- Great is the comfort and marvellons the pleaism a danger of anarchy, he saw a still great- sure, most excellent father, which I have received er danger in the infamy in which the practi- from your late letters to me, understanding as I

do from them, that your lordship proposes to king and the nobility. Most of all will it be institute a reform of the whole body of the pleasing, will it be the best of all sacrifices which clergy; that you have gone so far as even to fix we can offer, to the Most High God; and gladly a day, and that at no distant date, at which it will I expend upon it what remains to me of life, shall be commenced. Such a day, indeed, I have as I will more largely declare in your lordship's desired to see more than Simeon desired to see presence on the day which your letter names, if the expected Messiah; and since your letter it be granted to me to see it alive, and in health. came to me, I have pictured to myself a reformation of the entire hierarchy, more ample and more searching than, I will not say, I could have expected, for, in this age of mankind, I could not even have hoped to witness it undertaken, all but completely executed.

These were the terms in which the grandest old man in England could write to Wolsey, whom he had known and watched from childhood, at the time when the faults which we most attribute to him (if they existed at all); I know what is to be done. In my own dio- were at the fulness of their growth; and surely cese I have myself attempted what your lordship they may well make us pause and hesitate proposes to accomplish for the entire realm. what to think. That day which, like Simeon, For these three years past, it has been the one business which has occupied all my thoughts, the aged bishop longed for, less happy than and all my labors, and I have discovered what Simeon, he never saw. The opportunity was antecedently to experience I could not have lost - perhaps it never existed; and the task believed that almost everything belonging to lay beyond the strength of Wolsey. Foxe liv the original institution of the clergy, and espe-ed but two years longer to mourn over his discially of the monastic orders, has become either appointment, and in his fear of what was hangso depraved by licentiousness, or so affected from ing over England, he is said to have passed age or from the degeneracy of the times, that, them in almost unbroken prayer. worn out as I am with years, I had lost hope, however anxious I might be, of ever seeing, even within my own jurisdiction, anything like a real improvement.

Now, however, from these welcome words of your lordship, not only do I hope to see it, but I have a most sure expectation that I shall see it, and that shortly, not limited to a single diocese, but universal, public, and complete. For I have experienced again and again, in many instances, that whatever your lordship undertakes, is carried out prudently, constantly, and firmly, to its perfect issue, without difficulty and without delay; so incomparable an ability there is in you in all matters divine and human, and so great favor and authority have you with our gracious sovereign and our most holy lord the pope. You have executed whatever you have hitherto attempted in such a manner as to gain for yourself the highest credit, and the applause of the whole world; so it has been with the conduct of your legacy; so it has been with the treaty of peace between the princes of Christendom, which has been brought about at last by your single endeaAnd by this your determination to take upon yourself the reform and settlement of the ecclesiastic orders, you will obtain solid and immortal glory before God and all posterity; a glory as far exceeding that of all others who within our memory have been legates a latere pontificis, as peace exceeds war, or as the clergy are more venerable than the people.

The

But if Wolsey had not fallen, if the one fatal difficulty of the divorce had not crossed his path and overthrown him, and if he had retained the favor of Henry, it really seems as if he might have steered England over the breakers in his own way and done what he intended. He, if any man, could have done it, with his undaunted courage, his vast prudence, his enormous practical ability; and a very large English party, even the king himself, would have been ready to make many sacrifices short of what seemed essential to the interest of the kingdom, to escape a separation from Rome. And then who can say what would have followed? Protestantism, as a doctrine, would have been extinguished in England. weight of the country would have been thrown, at the impending council, on the Conservative side, and would have ensured its triumph; while, instead of a Council of Trent, which enacted into laws the worst extravagances of Catholicism, we should have had a council moderately and judiciously reforming, to which the Lutherans would have been forced to submit; and the course of all European history would have been different. So in this world the greatest things are linked together with the smallest; and the destinies of mankind, perhaps for all time, may have hung on the resolution of one stout hearted Spanish woman, who refused, though a Pope and half I suppose, are undertaking this work, will lend the world implored her, to surrender her rights you his authority and power; and, unless I am as the wife of an English king. mistaken, the prelates, especially the bishops, will not be backward to co-operate with you. land declined into insignificance, the most For myself, at least, I can promise; and I think that this reform of the clergy and the religious bodies, will appease, at last, the long growing discontent of the people, will restore themselves to

ΤΟΥ.

That your grace will succeed, I cannot doubt, seeing that our most Christian king, by whose advice, and under whose auspices, you, as

credit, and will recover for them the favor of the

As it was, the Conservative party in Eng

capable members of it attaching themselves to one or other of the extremes; and, as we saw before how Wolsey had earned the hatred of the Protestants, so the Papal party never forgave him for those imputations so doubly fatal

as urged against them by the leader of their ful statesman was not a virtue which would own order. They attributed the actual sup- recommend itself to an age which was agitated pression of the monasteries, and the fatal by the collision of two parties equally unskill with which it was conducted by Crom- reasoning; like only recognizes like, and for well, to Wolsey's designs, and to lessons learnt in Wolsey's closet; and they surrendered his name with spiteful pleasure, to the vindictiveness of their adversaries.

the years which intervened between the first mention of the divorce of Catherine and the secure establishment of Elizabeth on the throne, the mind of England was undergoTo the latter, as the greatest of all those ing oscillations, in which, though both sides prelate-statesmen, who so long had "held displayed abundant chivalry, enthusiasm, selfpower in England, he became the type of the devotion, and other heroical virtues, the quiet haughty, arrogant, over-bearing Churchman, words of reason had little chance of being in whom" to use the words of Foxe the heard. In this period, the historical character Martyrologist about him," was to be seen and of Wolsey shaped itself into the form in which noted the express image of the proud, vain- it has ever since remained, and there is little glorious Church of Rome;" whose splendor chance that it will now be altered. Himself furnished ready matter for declamatory ora- we will hope that our opinions do not much tions, and could be held up in broad and ap-affect, and if we have constructed out of our posite contrast with the fishermen of the Lake imaginations a figure which serves to impress of Galilee. It is easy to see how all this was on schoolboys an elementary lesson of caused; among ordinary human beings it could morality, he may spare his name to clothe not have been otherwise; and thoughtful per- an innocent and useful phantom. sons will not allow more weight than is due to the declamation, any more than they will judge hardly the poor preachers who indulged in it. The Smithfield bonfires were indifferent teachers of charity, and the victims and their judges, who to us are alike objects of compassion rather than of anger, could hardly be expected to extend it to one another.

Of what he really was we have indirectly seen something; to describe him truly would be to write some twenty years of European history, which wear the impress of his mind. We English, however, need not look so far to find traits which ought to commend his memory to us-in these democratic days, least of all-when the people, and the people's interAt all events, the Protestants cursed Wol- est, appear to be so much cared for. The sey as the largest specimen of their worst ene-administration of Wolsey was a prosperous my, and the Catholics made him over to time for the people, who at that time felt no them with all readiness as an expiatory victim. Some middle party, it might have been expected, would have been found of wiser judgment; and such undoubtedly there was in his own time, although even among his contemporaries, also, he had made many enemies. The noble lords found difficulty in reconciling themselves to seeing a butcher's son towering above their heads; and Wolsey, as far as we know, did very little towards making it easy for them. A man who went through so much work as he did, had no leisure for delicate his personal intercourse with the courtiers persuasiveness, and he was naturally violent and irritable. Clear-sighted in discussion, and swift in execution, he had little patience with high-born imbecility; and as he was not afraid to speak blunt truths in blunt language to kings and emperors, he is likely enough not to have been over courteous in his language at the council table.

alarm about" over-legislation ;"-a fair day's wages for a fair day's work was the law of the land; wages and prices were alike fixed by Act of Parliament, and the lowest sum paid weekly to the unskilled laborer would buy more beef and bread and beer than twenty shillings of our money. And Stowe, in a happy moment, has left us another significant testimony to him. We turn our eyes in a very wrong direction if, to ascertain the merits of a chief minister of a great country, we look to

with whom he came in contact, to the number of his retinue, or the furniture of his palace. This is but to trifle with history; and his character is written, not in these, but in the justice or the injustice of his rule.

says

"He punished perjury with infamy, Stowe, "so that in his time it was less used than And yet even among the Privy Council, of long time before. He punished, also, lords, where he was generally detested, there was a knights, and men of all degrees for riots, for small minority who thought nobly of him, and bearing out of wrongs, or for maintenance prac tised in the counties, whereby the poor lived spoke nobly; and their judgment, which was no doubt the true and just one, would, in or- of imprisonment. It was a strange matter to see quietly, and no man durst use boistering for fear dinary times, have made its way in the aftera man not trained up in the laws, to sit in the generation. The offensive manner would seat of judgment to pronounce the law, being have been forgotten; the substantial thing aided, at the first, by such as, according to would have received its due tribute of ad- ancient custom, did sit as associates with him; miration. But the prudent vigor of a power-but he would not stick to determine sundry causes,

neither rightly decided nor judged according to servants. Incapable members of noble familaw [the law, we suppose, being a little tedious in lies were hanging upon the court as the idle arriving at its right decision, and peremptory appendages of it; and the Cardinal made judgment if a little arbitrary being on the whole ordinances concerning it, which be at this in many cases preferable]; and again, such as were clear cases [in law], he would sometimes day called the Statutes of Eltham, the which, prohibit the same to pass, call them into judg able."-Hall, 707. some said, were more profitable than honorment, frame an order in controversies, and punish such as came with untrue surmises, as also the judges themselves which had received such sur"It was considered," he goes on, "that the mises, and not well considered of the controver- great numbers of the yeomen of the guard was sies of the parties. Also, he ordained by the very chargeable, and that there were many offiking's commission divers under courts, to hear cers far stricken in age, which had servants at the complaints by bill of poor men, that they might the sooner come by justice; so that wise men have reported never to have seen this realm in better obedience and quiet than it was in the time of his authority and rule; nor justice better administered with indifferency."

the court. And so the king was served with their servants, and not with his own servants, which was thought not convenient; whereupon the officers' servants were put out of the court and old officers dismissed [with pensions], and put out of wages.

"Alas! what sorrow, what lamentation was made when all these persons should depart the court! Some said the poor servants were undone, and must steal. Some said that they were found of the reversion of the officers' services, so that for them was nothing more set out upon the dressers, and it was great charity to find them; others said that now they would poll and pill in their counties, and oppress the poor people. Thus every man had his saying."

Very dishonorable, doubtless, all this, in the opinion of persons to whom right and wrong are alike consecrated by antiquity, and abuses overgrown till they are no longer tolerable are the expanded virtues of the

Sensible persons who will really weigh this passage (and it would be easy, if we had time, to illustrate it in ample detail from the statutes passed under his administration), will see cause to reconsider their judgment, if they have allowed it to flow with the common stream; for larger praise could not be given to any governor of any nation. What is it but an acknowledgment that the work which he was set to do, in all its essential features, he did most excellently; and by the side of this, all outward faults, all insolence of manner, and, if it must be so, even vulgarities, sink into insignificance. If the same intellect which he expended upon the welfare of the good old times. England of his own age had been laid out in It may be that Wolsey was unwisely splenproducing anything which would have visibly did in his outward habits. It may be that, endured to posterity; if it had gone into books having been born in a poor man's family, which we could ourselves read, or into pic- he valued the magnificences and pomps of tures which we could see, or into any other of life more highly than they are valued by the secondary materials upon which the mind those to whom such things are familiar from of a great man is able to impress itself, our their cradles. If it were so, the crime is a judgments would not stray so wildly; and the venial one. But to us his chief fault appears visible greatness of the work produced would rather to have been too great a recklessness have taught us long ago to forget the petty of the opinion of others: he did not care blemishes on the surface of the workman's to avoid the odium which so much display character. But so it is with human things. would inevitably entail upon him; an odium The greatest men of all, those men whose which he ought to have foreseen, and taken energies are spent, not in constructing immor- measures to escape. And yet his splendor tal mausoleums for their own glory, but in was but one more exhibition of the same guiding and governing nations wisely and nature in him, which was every way great. righteously, sink their real being in the life of Prodigally gifted with the most varied powmankind; the shell and the surface only re-ers, with exquisite tastes of all kinds, taste main to us, and we deal with them as we see. for music, taste for painting, taste for archiWhatever Wolsey tried, as Foxe says, he tecture, taste for everything which was beaudid most admirably, whether it was the dis- tiful or magnificent, the vast rewards which tributing justice among the people, or the were heaped upon him from every court in reining the ambition of the princes of Europe, Europe-rewards not for underhand service, or the ordering the economy of a court. but for honest work honestly done-enabled Even Hall, in spite of himself, has left a him to gratify such tastes in the most gortribute to his conduct; which, nothwithstand-geous manner; and he did gratify them, and ing the injustice of the language in which that is all. If he had been born a nobleit is conveyed, is still transparently favor- man, it would have been called honorable able. The Civil Service then, as now, it and glorious. In the son of the poor man, appears, was encumbered with unprofitable who had conquered his position, not by divine

right of primogeniture, but by his own genius idle thunders which had become but a vain and the grace of God, it was vulgarity and sound-this was no position for which the first paltry ostentation. minister of the strongest power in Europe would gladly have exchanged his place, or which he would very readily have accepted, if it had been offered him. Of course he would have accepted it, because he at one time canvassed for it; but he canvassed for it without his own goodwill, and at the entreaty, and at last at the command, of Henry.

But inasmuch as any attempt at an active picture of what Wolsey was, is beyond our scope, and for the present we desire only to re-open the question whether he has, or has not, been fairly dealt with; this purpose will best be answered by narrowing our compass and confining ourselves to an examination of those special actions which have been made These are not assertions which do not admit matter of heaviest complaint against him. And of being proved. The first occasion on which of these, perhaps, three will be as many as we he was named in the conclave was on the vashall be able to deal with his aspirations after cancy caused by the death of Leo the Tenth the papacy, his conduct about Queen Cather-in 1522, the vacancy ultimately filled by ine's divorce, and the (supposed) abject nature Adrian the Sixth. That he was proposed at of his behavior in his disgrace. this time without his own knowledge and by a

The first and the last are represented as the spontaneous act of some of the Italian cardinals, counterparts of each other; the same essential is evident from the history of the election, vulgarity of mind displaying itself alternately which is related in the simplest manner in a in the arrogancy of an enormous self-con- letter to Wolsey himself from the English fidence, and in a prostrate imbecility when ambassador, where the general attitude of the flung back upon its own resources. The different parties, the causes which led to the second is what tells most heavily against him in proposal of Wolsey, and the probable feelings the opinion of serious persons, and on so great with which he himself would be likely to rea matter we shall of course be able to touch gard the chances of his own election, are debut slightly. We shall be able to see, however, tailed with all the openness of confidential the principles on which he acted; and if our correspondence. Obviously, it was a thing view of his history be a correct one, they will which, in the opinion of the ambassador, he be found remarkably characteristic of him. had never thought of, and which it was not First, then, for the matter of the popedom likely that he would desire. Others, not him-the standard topic of declaration against self, desired it for him, for no other reason him among the early Protestant writers; and than because he was the fittest person; and there is a curious paralogism in their invectives his election was not carried, on grounds in which is not unamusing. On the one hand, the highest degree honorable to him. The the anti-Christian character of the Roman letter is printed by Ellis, 3d Series, vol. i., bishop is reflected upon the aspirant to the p. 307-8. The writer is Dr. Clerke, after

see.

To be anti-Christ was bad, but to have wards Bishop of Worcester. He begins with desired to become anti-Christ was infinitely the common story of the factions in the monstrous. On the other hand, the outward conclave; and he tells them with a naiveté position of the popedom, the spiritual sove- which, considering the occasion of them, thereignty of Europe, with an independent prin- oretically ought to be startling. That is to cipality attached to it, placed its possessor on say, in the election of the supreme head of a level with crowned heads; and for the butch- Christ's Church, the degree of religious feeler's cur to aspire to such a dignity was an ing amounted to nothing, and Dr. Clerke enormous audacity. Sweeping our minds sees not the least occasion to be surprised clear of this and similar folly, and looking at at it. He tells us of the Imperial faction, the thing really as it was, it is hard to say why, the French faction, the Medici faction; how if Wolsey felt any ambition to become pope, it they divided this way and divided that way, was an ambition which he was not at perfect neither of them being strong enough to carry liberty to entertain. Being already a member their own man, and combining, therefore, of the College of Cardinals, from ainong whom in alternate pairs to defeat the third. Of the popes were chosen, why, if he so wished, any honest faction, either actually existing might he not innocently desire a position or even as a thing to be desired, we hear which he was so admirably qualified to occupy? nothing. The fact happens to be, however, that he de"In these distractions," he continues, "your sired nothing of the kind; the pontifical throne not at that time being in such a condition that grace as indifferent and very meet for the room the seat upon it was in any way a thing to be had in every scrutiny certain voices; that is to was proposed, and, as I am credibly informed, coveted; the name of a power and not the say, in the first, nine; in the second twelve; in thing, an authority without a sword, a spiritual empire in full mutiny, and the rulers of it left with no weapon to enforce order, except the

the third, nineteen; and if by the varying of any of the said cardinals, three or four had made any access to the said nineteen, the residue were de