A most unmitigated villain, on a par with that other villain, Henry VIII., whose master, through being his pimp, he was for a time, till, in perfect accordance with his character, he became his abject whining slave. I am well aware that it is not usual to apply such a term as villain to a King or his chief adviser—courtly historians have flowery terms for the crimes of Kings by the 'grace of God,' and holy 'Fathers-in-God,' who misuse the powers foolish nations have entrusted them with to the vilest purposes—but the spirit of justice, which directs thinking and logical minds, rejects the flimsy arguments of sycophantic apologists; it will not have Nero whitewashed.
Thomas Wolsey was born at Ipswich in March, 1471. He was the son of a butcher, who also possessed some land, and was sufficiently well off to send his son to the University of Oxford. In those days the chief and easiest avenue to distinction, office, and wealth was through the Church, and Thomas appears to have been an apt scholar, for at fourteen years of age he was Bachelor of Arts, and thence was called the Boy Bachelor. He soon after became Master of Arts, and had charge of the school adjoining Magdalen College, where he educated the three sons of Thomas Grey, Marquis of Dorset, who presented him in 1500 to the rectory of Lymington. This was indeed a rapid rise for the son of a butcher. But he had not long resided on his benefice when Sir Amias Paulet, a justice of the peace, set him in the stocks for being drunk and making a disturbance at a fair in the neighbourhood. Wolsey was mean enough to take a cruel revenge for this punishment, which, no doubt, he richly deserved, and which must at the time have been approved by the community, for it was no trifling thing in those days to set a rector in the stocks. When Wolsey was Lord Chancellor he sent for Sir Amias, and after a severe jobation confined him for six years in that part of the Temple which long passed for Henry VIII. and Wolsey's palace, and afterwards was Nando's, a famous coffee-house. Wolsey compelled Paulet to almost entirely rebuild the house. When Wolsey's patron, the Marquis of Dorset, died, the former looked out for new means to push his fortunes, for his avarice was boundless. He accordingly got himself admitted into the family of Henry Dean, Archbishop of Canterbury; but that prelate dying in 1502, he found means of ingratiating himself with Sir John Nanfan, treasurer of Calais, who being weakened by age and other infirmities, committed the direction of his post to Wolsey, who by his recommendation was made one of the King's chaplains, and in 1506 was instituted to the rectory of Redgrave, in the diocese of Norwich. But it was on the accession of Henry VIII. that he had the opportunity of developing his ambitious and covetous schemes by the vilest means. He recommended himself to the King's favour by adapting himself to his capricious temper and vicious inclinations, acting as his pimp, and participating in all his debaucheries. And so well did he play his cards with the King that shortly after the attainder of Sir Richard Empson—executed with his coadjutor Dudley in 1510, nominally for extortion, but really because that extortion was not practised on the King's behalf, but on their own—shortly after this attainder the King conferred on Wolsey a grant of several lands and tenements in the parish of St. Bride's, Fleet Street, which by the knight's forfeiture devolved to the Crown. In the grant Wolsey is styled counsellor and almoner to the King. In the same year he was presented by his royal master to the rectory of Torrington, in the diocese of Exeter. Early in the following year he was made a Canon of Windsor and Registrar of the Order of the Garter. In 1512 he was advanced by Archbishop Bambridge to the prebend of Bugthorp, in the church of York, of which afterwards he also was made a Dean. In 1513 he attended the King in his expedition to France, who committed to him the direction of the supplies and provisions to be made for the army—a profitable concession, which Wolsey knew how to turn to his own good account. On the taking of Tournay Henry VIII. made Wolsey Bishop of that city, and not long after Bishop of Lincoln. In 1814, on the death of Cardinal Bambridge, he was translated to the Archbishopric of York. The utter recklessness with which the King bestowed on one man so many high offices, the duties of which from their very multiplicity must be totally neglected by this one man, this recklessness in the bestowal of ecclesiastical dignities and emoluments on an upstart whose moral character was of the vilest in every respect, and openly known to be such, was only equalled by the greed and vanity of the recipient. But Fortune had greater favours yet in store for him. In September, 1515, he was, by the interest of the two Kings of England and France, made Cardinal of St. Cecilia, and in December of the same year Lord Chancellor of England, which dignity had been resigned by the Archbishop of Canterbury, who resented the arrogance of, and the powers conferred on, Wolsey. The Archbishop's resignation led to the retirement of all the other great officers of the Crown, and thus Wolsey became absolute master of the situation, and whilst he was really carrying out his own schemes, he had the address to persuade the King, jealous of his own power, that he was only blindly executing his royal master's behests and wishes. The position of England between the Emperor and the King of France rendered Henry VIII. to some extent the arbitrator of Europe. Wolsey cleverly exploited the situation; he first secured the goodwill of Francis I. of France by restoring to him, in 1516, Tournay, receiving in return an annuity of 12,000 livres. But the Pope was the most anxious to secure the Minister's friendship, and therefore, after the recall of Cardinal Campeggio, made Wolsey his Legate a Latere, or Extraordinary Envoy, which virtually raised him to the rank of Pope of England. Though Wolsey's income was already tremendous from the various bishoprics and other high offices he held, and the presents and pensions he received from foreign princes, the Pope granted him an annuity of 7,500 ducats on the bishoprics of Toledo and Placentia. With Wolsey's increase of power rose his arrogance, his covetousness, and his love of ostentation; the beggar was put on horseback. His revenues almost exceeded those of the Crown; the splendour displayed in his mode of living was greater than that of many Kings. When, after the election of Charles V. as Emperor of Germany, the latter quarrelled with Francis I., each endeavoured to draw the Cardinal to his side. In 1520 he arranged an interview between the three Sovereigns, but at last sided with the Emperor, who granted him an annuity of 7,000 ducats, and held out to him the prospect of the Papal crown. After having, in 1521, attempted at Calais a reconciliation between Henry VIII. and Francis I., he entered into a secret treaty with the Emperor, according to which the English King was to declare war against France. The death of Leo X. and the subsequent election of Hadrian VI. to the Papal dignity almost led to a breach between him and the Emperor; but the latter's promise that after old Hadrian's death he would certainly procure him the Papal crown satisfied Wolsey, especially as the Emperor added 2,500 ducats to the former annuity, and gave him besides another of 9,000 dollars in gold for his loss of the French pension. In 1522 Henry VIII. commenced the war against his former ally by entering and devastating France. Wolsey having to find money for this war, he had recourse to financial oppression, which roused the indignation of the English people. But at the new Papal election in 1523 Wolsey saw himself again passed over, which induced him to lead the King to take the part of Francis I., who was then a prisoner. Henry VIII. had to retire from the war, to enter in 1525 into an alliance with the French Regency, for which service Wolsey received a present of 100,000 crowns, and in 1528 to declare war against the Emperor. Thus the proud and blustering Henry VIII. became the mere tool of an ambitious and disappointed priest, who used him and the resources of England to avenge the slight the Emperor had put upon him at the last Papal election. After the peace of Cambray in 1529, Wolsey was on the summit of his power, but also terribly near to his fall. At first he had, from hatred of her nephew, Charles V., not opposed the King's desire to obtain a divorce from Catherine of Aragon; but when he found that the King wanted to marry Anne Boleyn, he disapproved of the divorce, as he feared that Anne's relatives might endanger his position at Court. In obedience to the King's orders, he indeed for some time urged on the suit, but grew less zealous when he found that the Pope himself, out of consideration for the Emperor, was against the divorce. Henry VIII. looked upon the delay as due to the intrigues of Wolsey, in which opinion he was strengthened by Anne Boleyn, who had a special reason to hate him, for it was through him that her marriage with young Lord Percy, a member of Wolsey's establishment, one of the many scions of the nobility who were placed under the guidance of the Cardinal, had been broken off. When Anne, who had been dismissed the Court, after her recall found it necessary to augment her rising influence over the King to dissemble, and therefore treated Wolsey with the greatest outward respect, she secretly took every opportunity to foster the dislike Henry had taken to him, and it was her underhand influence which hastened his downfall, and not reasons of statecraft, as 'philosophical' historians would have us believe. Long before the catastrophe Wolsey, who had not failed to notice that the brutal tyrant's favourable sentiments towards his minion were on the wane, had tried to conciliate the King by presenting Hampton Court to him in 1526; but the gift had not been one of love, but of fear and despair, and the chief cause of the surrender, according to tradition, was the following:
The King's fool was paying a visit to the Cardinal's fool—for both the King and the Cardinal were such fools themselves as to find pleasure in the gabbling of professional fools—and the couple went down into the wine vaults. For fun one of them stuck a dagger into the top of a cask, and, to his surprise, touched something that gave a metallic sound. The fools thereupon set to work, got the head of the cask out, and found it to be full of gold pieces. Other casks, by the sound, indicated that they held wine. The King's fool stored up the fact in his memory, and one day when the King was boasting about his wine, the fool said, 'You have not such wine as my Lord Cardinal, for he has casks in his cellar worth a thousand broad pieces each;' and then he told what he had discovered. Whether this be true or not, it is certain that Wolsey was awake to the fact that he was losing his power over the King, and so he threw him the magnificent sop of his palace, which, however, did not save him; the King was determined to be rid of him. In October, 1529, the Great Seal was demanded of him, his palace at Whitehall and all his goods were seized for the King's use, and he was ordered to retire to his palace at Esher. The King, indeed, promised Wolsey his protection, and that he should continue to hold the bishoprics of York and Winchester.
As Wolsey was travelling towards Esher, he was overtaken by a messenger from the King, who brought him that comfortable assurance, whereupon the Cardinal dismounted from his mule, knelt down, and blessed the ground on which he had received so gracious a message; and to show his gratitude to his King, he made him a present of—what do you think?—his fool. Had Wolsey in his disgrace shown any manliness or dignity of character, we might think that this present to the King was 'kinder sarcastic,' intimating that a fool was about the only individual fit to be Henry's companion, and whom he could appreciate. But from Wolsey's conduct during the closing years of his life, we cannot give him credit for so much wit and moral courage as the attempt to give the King such a hint would have implied, and we must therefore assume that the gift was a bonâ fide one; and as in those days it was considered the proper thing for great people to associate with fools, and take delight in their forced and artificial jokes, too poor for a halfpenny comic paper of the present day, there was nothing extraordinary in the gift, and no doubt the King thought it highly complimentary to himself. But however favourably the King might at certain moments feel disposed towards Wolsey, and though, from his influence in the country as head of the Church, it was necessary to go to work cautiously, his ruin was determined on. Parliament, which, after an interval of seven years, was allowed to reassemble in 1529, impeached him by a charge of forty-four articles, relating chiefly to the exercise of his legatine power contrary to law, and the scandalous irregularities of his life. The impeachment passed the House of Lords; but when it came to the House of Commons it was effectually defeated by the energy and address of Thomas Cromwell, who had been his servant, so that no treason could be fixed upon him. He remained in his retirement at Esher until about Easter, 1530, when he was ordered to repair to his diocese of York, where, in November of the same year, he was arrested by the Earl of Northumberland for high treason, and committed to the custody of the Lieutenant of the Tower, who had orders to bring him to London. This so affected his mind that he fell sick at Sheffield, in the Earl of Shrewsbury's house, whence, by short stages, he went as far as Leicester, where he is said to have taken poison, which no one knowing his really pusillanimous character will believe; however, he died on November 29, 1530, and was buried in the Abbey of Leicester. The words attributed to him as his last utterances, that if he had served God as he had served his King, he would not be thus forsaken, were false in substance and contemptible in form. He never served the King but when it served his own purposes, and a mean-spirited coward only would have attributed his fall to such a cause. He fell most ignominiously, without even an attempt of resistance against the King's arbitrary decrees, without a struggle to reassert his former ascendancy over his royal master. But probably the ascendancy was irrecoverable; he had himself resigned it when he surrendered his palace of Hampton Court to Henry in an access of cowardly panic; and no ascendancy which is not moral or intellectual ever has any vitality in it, and that of Wolsey over the King had never been any other than that of the practised debauchee over the unpractised one. Wolsey was Henry's senior by twenty years. When the pupil had become as depraved as his teacher, he required his assistance no longer, and in moments of reflection, which come to the most frivolous, he must have felt how debased such teaching had been, and the greater its iniquity the greater the pupil's abhorrence of the instructor, whose constant presence must act as a perpetual reproach; when the orange is sucked dry, the shapeless husk becomes an offensive object to look at.
Cardinal Wolsey is credited with a love of learning and schemes to promote it, as his foundation of a college at Oxford, now Christ Church, which, however, he only partly accomplished, and his school at Ipswich. But these were not so much establishments to advance learning as to support and glorify the Church, of which he was the chief pillar and personal representative, and which therefore it was his pride and interest to strengthen and exalt, even at some personal sacrifice.
Such was the man who built the palace of Hampton Court, to the description and history of which we must now proceed.
We stated above that immediately on having entered into possession of the estate, Wolsey pulled down the ancient manor-house; early in 1515 he began the new buildings. All researches have failed to bring to light the architect employed by the Cardinal. The name of James Bettes occurs as master of the works, as also that of Nicholas Townley as chief comptroller, and that of Laurence Stubbes, paymaster of the works, and that of Henry Williams, surveyor; but probably the design of Hampton Court must be attributed to Wolsey himself, who had the examples of other mediæval prelatic builders to guide him. In fact, we are inclined to think that the entrance to the first court was somewhat of an imitation of the centre of Esher Place, on the river Mole, a building erected by William of Waynfleet, Bishop of Winchester, in 1447. Of this building nothing now remains but the two octagonal towers of the centre, just as the gateway of Wolsey's college at Ipswich only remains, which also bears a striking resemblance to that of Esher Place.
One of the distinguishing features of Wolsey's palace at Hampton Court was that it did not present to the beholder a moat,[#] a drawbridge, or loopholes, or frowning battlements or watch-towers, without which up to that time no nobleman had thought of erecting a mansion. Wolsey, being a Churchman, naturally selected the monastic style, and the first and second courts, all that remains of Wolsey's original building, display it in all its picturesque features. At present the palace consists of three courts, the two just referred to, and the third, built by William III., comprising the buildings surrounding the Fountain Court. On the north side of the palace there are a number of minor courts and passages, around which are grouped domestic offices, stables, and other dependencies of a large mansion.
[#] In Law's 'History of Hampton Court Palace' we are told that a moat surrounded the whole of the palace, but Hollar's view of it (temp. Henry VIII.) shows no indication of one.
And here by way of interscript, though the reader may have seen that we hold Cardinal Wolsey's character as a Churchman in but slight estimation, we must give him credit for proofs of æsthetic culture, which was unusual in his age, when even the most affluent nobles of the land lived in a state of rude habits and surroundings. At the conclusion of the reign of Henry VII. the annual expenses of the powerful family of Percy scarcely exceeded the sum of £1,100. The furniture of even princely households was coarse and comfortless; homely plenty and stately reserve in their entertainments was the rule. The love of pomp and refined pleasure must have been acquired by Wolsey through his visits and residences abroad, and though he indulged in both from personal inclination and political purpose, yet, whatever his motive, his practice led to the amelioration of national taste and manners favourable to the growth of art and the development and advance of home industries. His palace became an example of an interior arrangement suited to liberal, polished, and dignified entertainment. It afforded hints for the improvement of domestic architecture. Till then the attainment of security had been the chief object of the builder; the times having become less turbulent, the external and internal embellishment and comfort of the mansion, no longer a mere castle, became the ruling principle, and Wolsey led the way in these improvements in the palace he built at Hampton.