Who is this favoured mortal? He is Thomas Wolsey, the son of a wealthy wool-merchant of Ipswich. By his great ability and his zeal in the king’s service, he has raised himself from a comparatively humble position to be the envy of the greatest nobles in the land. “He is the person,” writes the Venetian ambassador, “who rules both the king and the kingdom. He is very handsome, learned, extremely eloquent, of vast ability, and indefatigable. He alone transacts all the business that occupies all the magistrates, offices, and councils of Venice. He has the reputation of being extremely just. He favours the people exceedingly, and especially the poor, hearing their suits and making the lawyers plead gratis for them.” But if he has friends among the poor, his pomp and pride have made him hosts of enemies among the proud and rich. The old nobles hate him, and would fain bring his haughty head to the dust. Nevertheless, even his enemies are forced to admit that he is the ablest statesman of his time, and the chief prop of the kingdom.
Truly, he treads all the ways of glory, and sounds all the depths and shoals of honour; but the knell of his greatness is soon to toll. The sun will no longer usher forth his honours, or gild again the noble troops that wait upon his smiles. Even now a woman’s bright eyes are weaning Henry from him, and soon he will be fain to say—
“The king has gone beyond me; all my glories
In that one woman I have lost for ever.”
Listen to the story of his fall.
Never king came to his throne more blessed by nature, fortune, and circumstance than the eighth Henry. Nature had fashioned him as the handsomest and ablest monarch in Christendom. “He was tall and well proportioned . . . his complexion very fair and bright, with auburn hair combed straight and short in the French fashion, and a round face that would become a pretty woman.” But there was no effeminacy about him. He was devoted to tennis and extremely fond of jousting and hunting—“never taking his diversion without tiring eight or ten horses.” Nor was there a more accomplished king living. He spoke good French, Latin, and Spanish; he was a musician and an author, and even as a boy his ability and address most favourably impressed the great scholar Erasmus. With all these gifts and graces, Henry began his reign with the highest promise; but as the years went by he steadily changed for the worse. His unbridled self-will grew upon him until he became a cold-hearted despot, who made his whim the law of the land, and ruthlessly sent to the scaffold all on whom his displeasure fell. From the first he was absolute master of the realm, and could say, L’état, c’est moi! Nevertheless, he was always careful to make his acts legal by getting Parliament to endorse them. He greatly valued his popularity with the people, and his ministers had to bear the blame of all his unpopular acts.
During the later years of Henry the Seventh’s reign, Arthur, the heir to the throne, had been married to Catherine, the daughter of Ferdinand and Isabella of Spain. Arthur died young, and the miserly old king, unwilling to part with Catherine’s rich dowry, proposed to marry her to her brother-in-law, Henry, who was six years her junior. Such an alliance was against the law of the Church, but a dispensation was readily obtained, and shortly after his accession Henry married her. For many years they lived happily together. “The king adores her, and her Highness him,” wrote her confessor, and never had any man a more faithful helpmeet. She was a fair-haired, gentle, pious woman, of a lively and gracious disposition, but not beautiful. As she grew older her health failed, and she became prematurely old and lost much of her attraction. All her children died except one—the Princess Mary. After eighteen years of married life Henry fell violently in love with Anne Boleyn, one of the queen’s maids of honour.
“Madame Anne,” wrote an eye-witness, “is not one of the handsomest women in the world. She is of middling stature and swarthy complexion, and has nothing but the king’s great love, and her eyes, which are black and beautiful.” She was, however, bright and lively, and had “wonderful long hair.” Soon Henry pretended to have scruples about the lawfulness of his marriage with his brother’s widow, and he persuaded himself that the death of his children was a visitation of God for his sin. Further, he argued that a son was necessary in the interests of his kingdom, for hitherto the rule of women had always provoked civil war. The real fact of the matter was that the selfish, self-willed king wanted to cast off Catherine in favour of a new, young wife. Before long Henry asked Pope Clement to declare that his marriage was null and void from the beginning.
Wolsey, as the Pope’s legate in England, was the natural channel of communication between the king and the Pope. Wolsey could not believe that Henry desired a dissolution of his marriage tie in order to contract an alliance with a giddy, insignificant lady of the court. Rather, he assumed, Henry was contemplating a union with some lady of the royal house of France, and this fell in with his pet scheme for securing the friendship of that powerful state. Believing this, he used his influence with the Pope. But the wearer of the triple crown was then in a parlous state. He was in the power of Charles the Fifth, nephew of Queen Catherine, and that monarch was determined that his aunt should not be divorced. At the same time, Clement was an ally of Henry’s, and was naturally anxious to assist him. In his dilemma the Pope sought to gain time, and therefore appointed Wolsey and the Italian Cardinal Campeggio to inquire into the case. In June 1529 the two cardinals opened their court in the great hall of the Black Friars’ Monastery in London. Catherine refused to plead, but knelt at the feet of her husband and made a touching appeal to him to spare her the indignity and injustice of divorce.
“Heaven witness,