Yet to others he could be of sweet and gentle disposition and ready to listen and to help with advice.
“Lofty and sour to them that loved him not,
But to those men that sought him sweet as summer.”
To those who regard characters as either black or white, Wolsey’s was indeed a contradiction. Charges of a personal character have been brought against the great prelate, which need not here be referred to, unless it be to say that if they were true, by so much the less he was a priest, by so much more he was a man.
His Ambition
There is no doubt that the Cardinal made several attempts to become Pope—but this enterprise was doomed to failure, although in it he was supported warmly by the King. To gain this end much bribery was needed, “especially to the younger men who are generally the most needy,” as the Cardinal said. Wolsey was a sufficiently accomplished social diplomatist to conciliate the young, for their term of office begins to-morrow, and gold is the key of consciences. He was hated and feared, flattered, cajoled and brow-beaten where possible. But as a source of income he was ever held in high regard by the Pope.
His own annual income from bribes—royal and otherwise—was indeed stupendous, though these were received with the knowledge of the King.
So great was the power Wolsey attained to that Fox said of him: “We have to deal with the Cardinal, who is not Cardinal but King.” He wrote of himself, “Ego et rex meus,” and had the initials, “T. W.” and the Cardinal’s hat stamped on the King’s coins. These were among the charges brought against him in his fall.
To his ambitions there was no limit. For the spoils of office he had “an unbounded stomach.” As an instance of his pretensions it is recorded that during the festivities of the Emperor’s visit to England in 1520, “Wolsey alone sat down to dinner with the royal party, while peers, like the Dukes of Suffolk and Buckingham, performed menial offices for the Cardinal, as well as for Emperor, King and Queen.”
When he met Charles at Bruges in 1521 “he treated the Emperor of Spain as an equal. He did not dismount from his mule, but merely doffed his cap, and embraced as a brother the temporal head of Christendom.”
“He never granted audience either to English peers or foreign ambassadors” (says Guistinian) “until the third or fourth time of asking.” Small wonder that he incurred the hatred of the nobility and the jealousy of the King. During his embassy to France in 1527, it is said that “his attendants served cap in hand, and when bringing the dishes knelt before him in the act of presenting them. Those who waited on the Most Christian King, kept their caps on their heads, dispensing with such exaggerated ceremonies.” Had Wolsey’s insolence been tempered by his sense of humour, his fall might have been on a softer place, as his Fool is believed to have remarked.