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away from us.
Nevertheless, if we compare |
the story found by Burnet in the register,
with "Hall's Chronicle," which in all this mat-
ter is most careful and accurate, and also with
the letters of the Bishop of Bayonne, which
furnish almost a second register of the pro-
ceedings from day to day, no doubt can re-
main that Burnet is right.

The legate Campeggio arrived in England in October, 1528. In the same month the Bishop of Bayonne writes that he and Wolsey had then held their first interview with the queen; and that the queen had spoken violently of Wolsey. Of this interview we have a full account from Hall, who adds that it was at the palace of the Bridewell, and was strictly private; giving also the words which the queen was said to have used, and which the bishop describes only in general terms.

No progress was made in the trial of the cause throughout the winter, through default of instructions from the pope. In January, 1528-9, it was feared that he would recall the commission, and it was openly stated in Lon. don, that the emperor had said, that if Henry dared to proceed," he would hurl him from his throne by the hands of his own subjects." In the spring, the French government laid a pressure on the pope, and the commission was allowed to be opened; but from the first, it appears, there was a private understanding between the legates and the court of Rome, that no sentence was to be delivered. The proceedings, such as they were, commenced at the Hall of the Black Friars, on the 31st of May, 1529. The king and queen were summoned; and then ought to have been the famous scene and the speech at the king's feet. Unhappily, both the register and Hall are agreed that the king appeared by proctor, and the queen only in person. Of what passed, the register only says that she appealed to Rome. Hall is more explicit, but in substance says the same thing.

The queen, being accompanied with four bishops, and others of her council, and a great company of ladies and gentlewomen following her, came personally before the legates, and after her obeisance, sadly, and with great gravity done, she appealed from them as judges not competent for that cause to the court of Rome, and after that done, she departed again.

And this, in sorrow be it confessed, was all that passed, and the beautiful ideal falsehood, for all persons who care to know the hard truths of life, must pass again under the ivory gate through which it entered among us, and take its place with the spirits of those never realized visions, which ought to have been

true and were not. The queen behaved like herself, like a noble lady sadly resentful of the measure which was dealt out to her, but buoyed up with her high Castilian heart to endurance and defiance. She never knelt at the king's feet, that history knows of, and she made no fine speeches to him. The words which Cavendish, and Shakespeare after him, assign to her, are composed out of what she said in private to the legates in the preceding October; and those which they assign to the king were uttered by him in her high praise in the court on a later occasion.

So much for the authority of Cavendish's "Life." If it be our object to prove that fair justice has not been done to Wolsey, we may be thought to have acted unwisely in questioning the evidence of the one English writer who has shown any thing like tenderness for his memory. It is this evident tenderness, however, which lies at the bottom of so many of our mistakes, bespeaking, as it does, so general a credence to his narrative. Throughout his book there is an apparent struggle between kindly feeling and moral disapprobation, and the censures gain double weight from the seeming unwillingness with which they are uttered. But moreover, we cannot help feeling, on a careful perusal of what Cavendish says, that the picture, as drawn by him, is not a picture of one man, but of two men wholly different, the characteristics of whom cannot possibly have coexisted in any single person, and thus it becomes essential to determine what amount of accurate knowledge of the matter he is really likely to have possessed. Wherever he is telling any thing in which he himself was personally concerned; in his account of all his own interviews with Wolsey, and of almost every thing which he describes himself as having witnessed, he draws the likeness of an exceedingly noble person, as little resembling the Wolsey of ordinary history as the Socrates of Plato resembles the Socrates of Aristophanes. Wherever, on the other hand, he is writing from hearsay, we have the old figure of Hall and Polydore Virgil and Foxe, a figure so unlike the other that both cannot be true, and we must make our choice between them. On the one side lies the mass of the authorities; on the other, the experience of a personal friend; and the natural inference is, that as long as Cavendish was kept in check by actual knowledge, he drew his master's features faithfully; and that as soon as he passed beyond his own recollections, he wrote only what other people told him, in the tone in which they told it, yielding to the stream

of popular opinion which set against Wolsey immediately after his death almost without an eddy.

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And again if that vulgar figure in our history books was the real Wolsey, it is a slighter reproach to the man whom it repreYet, notwithstanding infirm places in the sents, than to the age which raised a person evidence, it might remain easily true that of such a character out of nothing, to the Wolsey was in general what he is supposed most powerful position ever occupied by an to have been. General impressions are fre- English statesman. Let it not be thought a quently right, though no satisfactory account slight thing, a thing in the least easy of excan be given of the facts out of which they planation, that a person of humble origin, originate. They may result as a collective actuated only by a mean ambition for power effect of a great number of little things, each and grandeur, coarse in manner, and profiin itself perhaps trifling; perhaps of a kind gate in life, vain, impudent, and overbearing, not admitting of being adequately expressed should have arisen as Wolsey rose, unassisted in words, and yet together perfectly con- by any influence except what lay in himself vincing. Often within our own experience, we and in his own capacities, to be the equal of form judgments on people's characters from kings, and for fifteen years the arbiter of looks, from gestures, from habitual expres- Europe. If this be true, it is a fact by itself sions, from slight characteristic anecdotes in history. No hypothesis of his "abilities and a judgment so formed may be thoroughly will help us through the difficulty; for ability correct; although, if we try to justify it to a large enough to neutralize so much baseness stranger who knows nothing of these things, is not found-let us say so at once and deciwe find it very difficult to do so, and in the sively, is not practically found to coëxist with effort, we detect ourselves exaggerating sepa- it. Wicked, indeed, men of high abilities rate points and laying stress on them which have been and are; but they are great in they will not bear, merely from the desire to their wickedness, and they do not fall before give a sufficient reason for a conclusion which vulgar and little temptations. Even ambiwe know in itself to be right. Thus, any tion, "the last infirmity of noble minds," is thing like a common consent of a man's the infirmity of a very second-rate order of contemporaries in one opinion about him, nobility, and is but a poor account of the although the grounds of that opinion escape career of any remarkable man. Men of real investigation, or break down when examined intellect do not set out into life with a fixed into, remains an evidence for or against him, idea of conquering greatness for themselves. in most cases, wholly overwhelming; and It is greatness rather which finds them, takeven when such unanimity exists, as in Wol-ing often no little pains to seek them out. sey's case, not in his own generation, but in the generation next succeeding him, it is presumptive proof so grave, that if there were O contemporary evidence of another kind, we should admit it at once as conclusive. Such evidence, however, there is, evidence both external and internal; not easy to set aside, making clean against the popular view; and we believe it will be found considerably more easy to explain why the generation which came after him thought of him as they did, than to explain away the contradictions in which we are involved, if we suppose them to have thought correctly.

If many persons hated Wolsey, there were some at least who loved him, who loved him in his greatness and did not forsake him in his fall. The common people loved him. The king loved him. Part, at least, of the council loved him. No fallen minister ever found loyalty more constant in the followers who had gathered round him in his splendor; and human beings are not so constructed as to love deeply what is utterly without claim for being loved.

Every man, as he passes into manhood, has work thrust upon him as he is able to do it; and the able man finds himself, as a matter of course, dragged up, he knows not how, from thing to thing, from step to step, employment after employment forcing itself into the hands best competent to deal with it; till at last he is on the summit of the ladder, and the world moralizes on his ambition. Ambition! The highest step of that ladder in Wolsey's time was but an indifferent place to be ambitious for. There was usually but one step from it to the flooring of the scaffold. The Anne Boleyns may be ambitious, but not the Wolseys.

If, however, he is not the person which he is said to have been, what was he then? and how came the world so singularly to agree in their judgment upon him? The first of these questions is difficult to answer; the second is, we believe, answered easily, in the peculiar character of the thirty years which succeeded his fall, and in the course of which his reputation settled into its present form. The administration of Wolsey immediately

preceded the convulsions of the reformation; | steeped itself.
and as no one knew better than he the na-
ture of what was impending, or the causes
which were hurrying it forward, he pursued
a policy with 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 on the memory
of the common enemy of both.

His creed was not like that of Sir Thomas More-an actively interested, theoretic apprehension of the Catholic mysteries; it was rather the quiet assent of a sober English mind, to that interpretation of the relation between God and man, which the general understanding of mankind had for centuries agreed to receive; and knowing well at what a cost this interpretation had been arrived at, he regarded the disturbers of it in the light in which, whether right or wrong, such men are always regarded by persons of strong practical intelligence, as wanton and mischievous innovators. The progress of Lutheranism in Germany, connected itself justly in his mind with the civil wars in Europe, the insurrection of the peasants, and the alarming advances of Solyman; and developing as it threatened to do, into theoretic doctrines of anarchy, political as well as spiritual, his plain duty, as an English statesman intrusted with the care of the Commonwealth, appeared to be to extinguish, by all means and at all hazards, that fire, wherever he found it burning. Thus his name figures largely in the martyrology, as a persecutor of the Protestants; yet it would have been well for them if they had never fallen into hands more disposed to deal with them hardly. His object was to suppress heresy as a folly, not to punish it as a crime; and in the lists of those poor men who, in the later years of Henry's reign, fulfilled their course at the stake or on the scaffold, we find many names of persons who had previously been brought before Wolsey, and by him had been persuaded into quietness and dismissed. He contrived, however, and naturally enough, to earn their hatred; they remembered only what he had done against them, not what he had saved them from.

On the other hand, if he saw in Protestantism a danger of anarchy, he saw a still greater danger in the infamy in which the practical life of the Catholic church had

The causes of the reforma

tion, which gave it in fact its terrible vantage ground, he read too clearly in the idleness, the sensuality, the worse than profligacy, by which the monastic orders in England had disgraced themselves so fatally; and his whole heart was bent to wash them clean, if cleansing were possible; if it were impossible, sweep them utterly away. Safe from visitation, except from ecclesiastics who were glad to purchase indemnity 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 acondition which there is no occasion for us to describe.

This worse than Augean stable, Wolsey set himself to purify. He wrote to the Popes, one after another, concealing nothing. Among the articles of impeachment, we find him accused of having disgraced the English Church by the complaints which he had entered against it. He had not feared to dwell upon its very darkest crime, veiling it under the significant expression of the "animus improbus;" and it was for this that he obtained from the court of Rome his absolute authority as Legate, which, superseding every other power, placed the monasteries throughout England in the joint hands of the king and himself. How far he would have carried out the work of reformation we cannot now tell. He suppressed many of the smaller houses; and he was proposing to suppress many more at the time of his fall. From him Cromwell learned the possibility of what he so grandly afterwards executed; and he is known at least to have expressed a desire to see the entire system of monastic establishments abolished utterly, and their revenues confiscated for the founding of hospitals, and schools, and colleges, from end to end of England.

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, | them with all readiness as an expiatory victim. as a doctrine, would have been extinguished Some middle party, it might have been exin England. The weight of the country would pected, would have been found of wiser judghave been thrown, at the impending council, ment; and such undoubtedly there was in on the Conservative side, and would have in- his own time, although even among his consured its triumph; while, instead of a Coun- temporaries, also, he had made many enemies. cil of Trent, which enacted into laws the worst The noble lords found difficulty in reconciling extravagances of Catholicism, we should have themselves to seeing a butcher's son towering had a council moderately and judiciously re- above their heads; and Wolsey, as far as we forming, to which the Lutherans would have know did very little towards making it easy been forced to submit; and the course of all for them. A man who went through so much European history would have been different. work as he did, had no leisure for delicate So in this world the greatest things are linked persuasiveness, and he was naturally violent together with the smallest; and the destinies and irritable. Clear-sighted in discussion, of mankind, perhaps for all time, may have and swift in execution, he had little patience hung on the resolution of one stout-hearted with high-born imbecility; and as he was not Spanish woman, who refused, though a Pope afraid to speak blunt truths in blunt language and half the world implored her,. to surrender to kings and emperors, he is likely enough her rights as the wife of an English king. not to have been over courteous in his lanAt it was, the Conservative party in Eng-guage at the council table. land declined into insignificance, the most 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 own order. They attributed the actual suppression of the monasteries, and the fatal skill with which it was conducted by Cromwell, 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. To the latter, as the greatest of all those prelate statesmen, who so long had "held power in England, he became the type of the haughty, arrogant, overbearing Churchman, in whom," to use the words of Foxe the Martyrologist about him, was to be seen and noted the express image of the proud, vain-glorious Church of Rome;" whose splendor furnished ready matter for declamatory orations, and could be held up in broad and opposite contrast with the fishermen of the Lake of Galilee. It is easy to see how all this was caused; among ordinary human beings it could not have been otherwise; and thoughtful persons 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.

At all events, the Protestants cursed Wolsey as the largest specimen of their worst enemy, and the Catholics made him over to

And yet even among the Privy Council, where he was generally detested, there was a small minority who thought nobly of him, and spoke nobly; and their judgment, which was no doubt the true and just one, would, in ordinary times, have made its way in the after-generation. The offensive manner would have been forgotten: the substantial thing would have received its due tribute of admiration. But the prudent vigor of a powerful statesman was not a virtue which would recommend itself to an age which was agitated by the collision of two parties equally unreasoning: like only recognizes like, and for the years which intervened between the first mention of the divorce of Catharine and the secure establishment of Elizabeth on the throne, the mind of England was undergoing oscillations, in which, though both sides displayed abundant chivalry, enthusiasm, selfdevotion, and other heroical virtues, the quiet words of reason had little chance of being heard. In this period, the historical character of Wolsey shaped itself into the form in which it has ever since remained, and there is little chance that it will now be altered. Himself we will hope that our opinions do not much affect, and if we have constructed out of our imaginations a figure which serves to impress on schoolboys an elementary lesson of morality, he may spare his name to clothe an innocent and useful phantom.

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 peo- | ple's interest, appear to be so much cared for. The administration of Wolsey was a prosperous time for the people, who at that time felt no 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 his personal intercourse with the courtiers 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.

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 England of his own age had been laid out in producing any thing which would have visibly endured to posterity; if it had gone into books which we could ourselves read, or into pictures which we could see, or into any other of the secondary materials upon which the mind of a great man is able to impress itself, our judgments would not stray so wildly; and the visible greatness of the work produced would have taught us long ago to forget the petty blemishes on the surface of the workman's character. But so it is with human things. The greatest men of all, those men whose energies are spent, not in constructing immortal mausoleums for their own glory, but in guiding and governing nations wisely and righteously, sink their real being in the life of mankind; the shell and the surface only remain to us, and we deal with them as we see.

"He punished perjury with infamy," says Stowe, "so that in his time it was less used than of long time before. He punished, also, lords, knights, and men of all degrees for riots, for bearing out of wrongs, or for maintenance practised in the countries, whereby the poor lived quietly, and no man durst use boistering for fear of inprisonment, Whatever Wolsey tried, as Fox says, he It was a strange matter to see a man not trained did most admirably, whether it was the disup in the laws, to sit in the seat of judgment to tributing justice among the people, or in reinpronounce the law; being aided, at the first, by ing the ambition of the princes of Europe, or such as, according to ancient customs, did sit as the ordering the economy of a court. Even associates with him; but he would not stick to Hall, in spite of himself, has left a tribute to determine sundry causes, neither rightly decided his conduct; which, notwithstanding the innor judged according to law [the law, we suppose, being a little tedious in arriving at is right de- justice of the language in which it is concision; and peremptory judgment is a little arbi-veyed, is still transparently favorable. The trary, being on the whole in many cases preferable]; and, again, such as were clear cases, [in law,] he would some times prohibit the same to pass, call them into judgment, frame an order in controversies, and punish such as came with untrue surmises, as also the judges themselves which had received such surmises, and not well considered of the controversies of the parties. Also, he ordained by the king's commission divers under courts, to hear 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 indifference."

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

Civil Service then, as now, was encumbered with unprofitable servants. Incapable members of noble families were hanging upon the court as the idle appendages of it; "and the Cardinal made ordinances concerning it, which be at this day called the Statutes of Eltham, the which, some said, were more profitable than honorable."-Hall, 707.

"It was considered," he goes on, "that the great numbers of the yeomen of the guard were very chargeable, and that there were many officers far stricken in age, which had servants at 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 court! Some said the poor servants were unmade when all these persons should depart the done, 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

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