[187] “In the houses of our ancient nobility they dined at long tables. The Lord and his principal guests sate at the upper end of the first table, in the Great Chamber, which was therefore called the Lord’s Board-end. The officers of his household, and inferior guests, at long tables below in the hall. In the middle of each table stood a great salt cellar; and as particular care was taken to place the guests according to their rank, it became a mark of distinction, whether a person sate above or below the salt.”—Notes on the Northumberland Household Book, p. 419.
[188] The enemies of Archbishop Laud, particularly in the time of his troubles, were fond of comparing him with Cardinal Wolsey: and a garbled edition of this life was first printed in the year 1641, for the purpose of prejudicing that great prelate in the minds of the people, by insinuating a parallel between him and the cardinal. It is not generally known that, beside the edition of this life then put forth, a small pamphlet was also printed with the following title, “A true Description or rather Parallel betweene Cardinall Wolsey, Archbishop of York, and William Laud, Archbishop of Canterbury, 1641.” As it is brief, and of extreme rarity, I shall give it a place in the [Appendix].
[189] “But what he did there, I know not.” The more recent MS. and Dr. Wordsworth’s edition have this reading.
[190] The words which follow, I apprehend, are part of some ecclesiastical hymn. It was not unusual to attribute the name of Scripture to all such compositions; and to whatever was read in churches. “Also I said and affirmed” (the words are part of the recantation of a Wickliffite), “that I held no Scripture catholike nor holy, but onely that is contained in the Bible. For the legends and lives of saints I held hem nought; and the miracles written of hem, I held untrue.” Fox’s Acts, p. 591. W.
[191] “I know not whether or no it be worth the mentioning here (however we will put it on the adventure), but Cardinal Wolsey, in his life time was informed by some fortune-tellers, that he should have his end at Kingston. This, his credulity interpreted of Kingston on Thames; which made him alwayes to avoid the riding through that town, though the nearest way from his house to the court. Afterwards, understanding that he was to be committed by the king’s express order to the charge of Sir Anthony [William] Kingston (see Henry Lord Howard in his Book against Prophecies, chap. 28, fol. 130), it struck to his heart; too late perceiving himself deceived by that father of lies in his homonymous prediction.” Fuller’s Church History. Book v. p. 178. W.
[192] where for whereas.
[193] In the old garbled editions the passage stands thus: “But alas! I am a diseased man, having a fluxe (at which time it was apparent that he had poisoned himself); it hath made me very weak,” p. 108, edit. 1641. This is a most barefaced and unwarranted interpolation. The words do not occur in any of the MSS. Yet the charge of his having poisoned himself was repeated by many writers among the reformers without scruple. See Tindall’s Works, p. 404. Supplications to the Queen’s Majesty, fol. 7. A. D. 1555. Fox’s Acts, p. 959.
[194] “This is an affecting picture,” says a late elegant writer. "Shakspeare had undoubtedly seen these words, his portrait of the sick and dying Cardinal so closely resembling this. But in these words is this chronological difficulty. How is it that Hardwick Hall is spoken of as a house of the Earl of Shrewsbury’s in the reign of Henry VIII, when it is well known that the house of this name between Sheffield and Nottingham, in which the Countess of Shrewsbury spent her widowhood, a house described in the Anecdotes of Painting, and seen and admired by every curious traveller in Derbyshire, did not accrue to the possessions of any part of the Shrewsbury family till the marriage of an earl, who was grandson to the cardinal’s host, with Elizabeth Hardwick, the widow of Sir William Cavendish, in the time of Queen Elizabeth?—The truth however is, that though the story is told to every visitor of Hardwick Hall, that “the great child of honour, Cardinal Wolsey,” slept there a few nights before his death; as is also the story, perhaps equally unfounded, that Mary Queen of Scots was confined there; it was another Hardwick which received the weary traveller for a night in this his last melancholy pilgrimage. This was Hardwick-upon-Line in Nottinghamshire, a place about as far to the south of Mansfield as the Hardwick in Derbyshire, so much better known, is to the north-west. It is now gone to much decay, and is consequently omitted in many maps of the county. It is found in Speed. Here the Earl of Shrewsbury had a house in the time of Wolsey. Leland expressly mentions it. “The Erle [of Shrewsbury] hath a parke and manner place or lodge in it called Hardewike-upon-Line, a four miles from Newstede Abbey.” Itin. vol. v. fol. 94, p. 108. Both the Hardwicks became afterwards the property of the Cavendishes. Thoroton tells us that Sir Charles Cavendish, youngest son of Sir William, and father of William Duke of Newcastle, “had begun to build a great house in this lordship, on a hill by the forest side, near Annesly-wood-House, when he was assaulted and wounded by Sir John Stanhope and his men, as he was viewing the work, which was therefore thought fit to be left off, some blood being spilt in the quarrel, then very hot between the two families.—Thoresby’s Edit. of Thoroton, vol. ii. p. 294.”—Who wrote Cavendish’s Life of Wolsey? p. [18].
[195] Mr. Douce has pointed out a remarkable passage in Pittscottie’s History of Scotland (p. 261, edit. 1788,) in which there is a great resemblance to these pathetic words of the cardinal. James V. imagined that Sir James Hamilton addressed him thus in a dream. “Though I was a sinner against God, I failed not to thee. Had I been as good a servant to the Lord my God as I was to thee, I had not died that death.”
[196] In the yeare 1521, the cardinal, by virtue of his legatine authority, issued a mandate to all the bishops in the realme, to take the necessary means for calling in and destroying all books, printed or written, containing any of the errors of Martin Luther: and further directing processes to be instituted against all the possessors and favourers of such books, heresies, &c. The mandate contained also a list of forty-two errors of Luther. See Wilkins’s Concilia, vol. iii. p. 690-693; and Strype’s Ecclesiastical Memorials, vol. i. p. 36-40. W.