Ye’ve angels faces, but Heaven knows your hearts!”
And this wilful King befriended learning and letters in his own wilful way. Nay, he came to have ambitions of his own in that direction, when he grew too heavy for practice with the long-bow, or for feats of riding—in which matters he had gained eminence even amongst those trained to sports and exercises of the field.
Cardinal Wolsey and Sir Thomas More.
It was with the King’s capricious furtherance that Cardinal Wolsey became so august a friend of learning. The annalists delight in telling us how the great Cardinal went down to St. Paul’s School to attend upon an exhibition of the boys there, who set afoot a tragedy founded upon the story of Dido. And at the boys’ school was then established as head-master that famous William Lilly[70] who had learned Greek in his voyaging into Eastern seas, and was among the first to teach it in England: he was the author too of that Lilly’s Latin Grammar which was in use for centuries, and of which later editions are hanging about now in old New England garrets, from whose mouldy pages our grandfathers learned to decline their pennæ—pennarum. Wolsey wrote a preface for one of the earlier issues of this Lilly’s Grammar; and the King gave it a capital advertisement by proclaiming it illegal to use any other. The Cardinal, moreover, in later years established a famous school at his native place of Ipswich (a rival in its day to that of Eton), and he issued an address to all the schoolmasters of England in favor of accomplishing the boys submitted to their charge in the most elegant literatures.
The great Hall of Christ’s Church College, Oxford, still further serves to keep in mind the memory and the munificence of Cardinal Wolsey: it must be remembered, however, in estimating his munificence that he had only to confiscate the revenues of a small monastery to make himself full-pocketed for the endowment of a college. ’Tis certain that he loved learning, and that he did much for its development in the season of his greatest power and influence; certain, too, that his ambitions were too large for the wary King, his master, and brought him to that dismal fall from his high estate, which is pathetically set forth in Shakespeare’s Henry VIII.:
“——Farewell to all my greatness!
This is the state of man: to-day he puts forth
The tender leaves of hope, to-morrow blossoms
And bears his blushing honors thick upon him;