Thomas Wolsey (c. 1473-1530) was for fifteen years the most powerful man in England after the king. The son of an Ipswich tradesman, he became cardinal, Archbishop of York, Lord Chancellor and papal legate, amassed immense wealth and built Hampton Court Palace. His fall, linked to the failure of Henry VIII's annulment, was as swift as his rise.
The butcher's son
Wolsey was born around 1473 in Ipswich, Suffolk; his enemies liked to say his father was a butcher, though he was in fact a prosperous cattle dealer and innkeeper. Brilliant at his studies, he graduated very young from Magdalen College, Oxford, and took holy orders. He entered Henry VII's service as chaplain and diplomat, and with Henry VIII's accession in 1509 his career took off: the young king, more interested in hunting and festivities than in day-to-day government, found in him a tireless minister.
The "king cardinal"
Within a few years Wolsey accumulated extraordinary offices: Archbishop of York in 1514, cardinal and Lord Chancellor in 1515, papal legate a latere from 1518, which gave him authority over the English Church greater than that of the Archbishop of Canterbury. He effectively ran the kingdom: he directed foreign policy, justice and finance. He was the architect of the Treaty of London of 1518, an ambitious attempt at universal peace among the European powers, and organised the meeting between Henry VIII and Francis I in 1520 at the Field of the Cloth of Gold, near Calais, one of the most splendid events of the Renaissance. He even dreamed of becoming pope.
He loved luxury and pomp: he lived with a household of hundreds and built for himself the great residence of Hampton Court, on the Thames west of London, and York Place in Westminster, the future Whitehall Palace. In Oxford he founded Cardinal College, later refounded by the king as Christ Church (see Oxford), and a college in his native Ipswich. His power and arrogance earned him many enemies among the nobility, who saw him as an upstart.
The fall
When Henry VIII decided to seek the annulment of his marriage to Catherine of Aragon, it fell to Wolsey to persuade the Pope. But Clement VII, effectively a political prisoner of Emperor Charles V, the queen's nephew, played for time, and the trial held in London in 1529 ended without a verdict. The king, urged on by Anne Boleyn and the cardinal's enemies, stripped him of the Chancellorship and his property. To regain the king's favour, Wolsey had already handed over Hampton Court. Banished to York, in November 1530 he was arrested on a charge of treason for secret contacts with the French court and the Pope. On the journey to London, where the Tower and the scaffold probably awaited him, he fell ill and died at Leicester Abbey on 29 November 1530. He is credited with the words: "Had I but served God as diligently as I have done the King, He would not have given me over in my grey hairs".
Legacy
Wolsey was a great statesman, ambitious and corrupt, but also a patron and a reformer of justice, who opened the courts of Chancery and the Star Chamber even to the poorest subjects. His secretary Thomas Cromwell took up his political legacy. Wolsey is one of the protagonists of Hilary Mantel's Wolf Hall and of Shakespeare's Henry VIII. See also Henry VIII and the royal palaces.