Thomas Wolsey

Thomas Wolsey governed England for fifteen years as Henry VIII's chief minister and fell because he could not get the king a divorce. He was a butcher's son from Ipswich, took a degree at Oxford at about fifteen, and rose through the church and the royal household by administrative competence at a moment when the young king wanted to hunt rather than to govern. By 1515 he was Archbishop of York, Lord Chancellor and a cardinal, and papal legate two years later, which gave him authority over the English church that no archbishop of Canterbury could challenge. He ran foreign policy on the principle of holding the balance between France and the Empire, staged the Field of the Cloth of Gold in 1520 as the most expensive diplomatic display of the century, and reformed the court of Chancery into something poor litigants could actually use against powerful ones, which made him popular where it made him enemies. He also accumulated wealth on a scale that was noticed: Hampton Court was his, and he gave it to the king in an unsuccessful attempt to placate him. The annulment of the marriage to Catherine of Aragon defeated him because the pope was in the power of Catherine's nephew, and the legatine court he convened at Blackfriars in 1529 was revoked to Rome without deciding anything. He was stripped of everything but the see of York, arrested for treason the following year, and died at Leicester on the journey south. His servant Thomas Cromwell survived the fall and finished the business by other means. He founded Cardinal College at Oxford, refounded after his fall as Christ Church. Shakespeare and Fletcher gave him the farewell speech in Henry VIII. His remark that had he served God as diligently as the king, God would not have given him over in his grey hairs, is reported by his gentleman usher George Cavendish.

MyHistorian
A causal knowledge graph of history