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Cardinal Wolsey and the English Church: Peter Marshall asks how diligently Wolsey served his Church.

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Thomas Wolsey (c. 1471-1530) was without question the towering figure in English government during the first half of Henry VIII's reign. As Lord Chancellor (from 1515) he dominated the legal system and presided over the House of Lords. He overhauled royal taxation and headed a (moderately successful) campaign against enclosure in the countryside. He managed (indeed, often bypassed) the royal council, through his close personal and working relationship with the monarch. Always politically astute, he restrained the influence of the king's young companions at the court, and kept a watchful eye on the pretensions of the nobility in the country at large. His mastery of foreign affairs--the king's great interest until the problem of his marriage arose--was second to none. But alongside all these activities and accomplishments in the secular sphere, Wolsey was also a man of the Church. This, more than anything else, was what contemporaries noted about him. For Wolsey managed to build up in a short space of years an accumulation of ecclesiastical power that was quite unprecedented in English history.

Archbishop, Cardinal and Legate

A tradesman's son from Ipswich (critics always insisted that his father had been a butcher), Wolsey entered the Church not out of any sense of deep religious vocation but because it offered the only real route for the social advancement of talented youth in the intensely hierarchical society of late fifteenth-century England. He began his career in Oxford and subsequently became a chaplain to the Treasurer of Calais, Sir Richard Nanfan, who recommended him to the service of Henry VII. But it was in the next reign that Wolsey's ecclesiastical career took off. In 1509 he was merely Dean of Lincoln. But by 1513 he was bishop of Tournai (a town Henry had conquered in France), and he went on to acquire the bishoprics of Lincoln (1514), Bath and Wells (1518), Durham (1524), and Winchester (1529). Each of the last three he held alongside the archbishopric of York, to which he was promoted in 1514.

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Only the stubborn refusal of the aging archbishop of Canterbury, William Warham, to do the decent thing and die, prevented Wolsey from acquiring what had always been the top job in the English church. But in the end this was more an inconvenience than a real disappointment. For Henry was able to persuade the pope to supply his favourite servant with powers that short-circuited the archbishop of Canterbury's position of primacy. In 1515, Wolsey received from Rome the red hat of a cardinal, but this was a largely honorific title. The real triumph was his appointment in 1518 as a legate--a personal representative of the pope. This was usually a temporary assignment, but Wolsey was able to secure permanent confirmation as a legate a latere (literally, from the side of the pope). This gave him the powers of the pope himself in England, and put the archbishop of Canterbury firmly in the shade.

Wolsey never attempted to play down his concentration of spiritual power--indeed, he flaunted it, as he did his immense wealth (bolstered by his possession, as absentee abbot, of England's richest abbey, St Albans). As his gentleman usher and first biographer George Cavendish records, it was his habit to process daily to Westminster Hall, and on Sundays to the court, mounted on a mule and clad in scarlet satin robes, accompanied by an imposing retinue of gentlemen...

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