His Policy
In his policy of the reform of the Church, Wolsey dealt as a giant with his gigantic task. To quote a passage from Taunton: “Ignorance, he knew, was the root of most of the mischief of the day; so by education he endeavoured to give men the means to know better. Falsehood can only be expelled by Truth.... Had the other prelates of the age realized the true cause of the religious disputes, and how much they themselves were responsible for the present Ignorance, the sacred name of religion would not have had so bloody a record in this country.”
Wolsey’s idea was, in fact, to bring the clergy in touch with the thought and conditions of the time. It is wonderful to reflect that this one brain should have controlled the secular and ecclesiastical destinies of Christendom.
To reform the Church would seem to have been an almost superhuman undertaking, but to a man of Wolsey’s greatness obstacles are only incentives to energy. He was “eager to cleanse the Church from the accumulated evil effects of centuries of human passions.” A great man is stronger than a system, while he lives; but the system often outlives the man. Wolsey lived in a time whose very atmosphere was charged with intrigue. Had he not yielded to a Government by slaughter, he would not have existed.
The Cardinal realised that ignorance was one of the chief causes of the difficulties in the Church. So with great zeal he devoted himself to the founding of two colleges, one in Ipswich, the other in Oxford. His scheme was never entirely carried out, for on Wolsey’s fall his works were not completed. The College at Ipswich fell into abeyance, but his college at Oxford was spared and refounded. Originally called Cardinal College, it was renamed Christ Church, so that not even in name was it allowed to be a memorial of Wolsey’s greatness.
His Genius
For a long time Wolsey was regarded merely as the type of the ambitious and arrogant ecclesiastic whom the Reformation had made an impossibility in the future. It was not till the mass of documents relating to the reign of Henry VIII. was published that it was possible to estimate the greatness of the Cardinal’s schemes. He took a wider view of the problems of his time than any statesman had done before. He had a genius for diplomacy. He was an artist and enthusiast in politics. They were not a pursuit to him, but a passion. Not perhaps unjustly has he been called the greatest statesman England ever produced.
England, at the beginning of Henry VIII.’s reign, was weakened after the struggles of the Civil Wars, and wished to find peace at home at the cost of obscurity abroad. But it was this England which Wolsey’s policy raised “from a third-rate state of little account into the highest circle of European politics.” Wolsey did not show his genius to the best advantage in local politics, but in diplomacy. He could only be inspired by the gigantic things of statecraft. When he was set by Henry to deal with the sordid matter of the divorce, he felt restricted and cramped. He was better as a patriot than as a royal servant. It was this feeling of being sullied and unnerved in the uncongenial skirmishings of the divorce that jarred on his sensitive nature and made his ambitious hand lose its cunning. A first-rate man cannot do second-rate things well.
Henry and Wolsey were two giants littered in one day. Wolsey had realised his possibilities of power before Henry. But when Henry once learned how easy it was for him to get his own way, Wolsey learned how dependent he necessarily was on the King’s good will. And then, “the nation which had trembled before Wolsey, learned to tremble before the King who could destroy Wolsey with a breath.”
Had Wolsey been able to fulfil his own ideals, had he been the head of a Republic and not the servant of a King, his public record would no doubt have been on a higher ethical plane. That he himself realised this is shown by his pathetic words to Sir William Kingston, which have been but slightly paraphrased by Shakespeare: “Well, well, Master Kingston, I see how the matter against me is framed, but if I had served my God as diligently as I have done the King, He would not have given me over in my grey hairs.” In this frankness we recognise once again a flicker of greatness—one might almost say a touch of divine humour.