CARDINAL WOLSEY'S fall from power in the autumn of 1529 is
one of those spectacular events that really are as great as they seem to
be. Never, in all English history, has there been a subject so plenti-
fully endowed with authority and so powerful in the use of it, so wealthy,
so magnificent; and never has any man stirred up in his career such a general,
variously assorted, tide of bitter, determined hatred. The cardinal is not
indeed an actor in the great affair of the change of religion: barely a year
after his fall death removed him from the scene. But the guns were already
loaded and trained that were to deliver the first broadside against the papal
supremacy; it was only a bare seven weeks after Wolsey died that they were
fired. Such had been his career that the cardinal may be said to have
created, in almost all its parts, the king's opportunity, ¹ the critical situation
of the two years that followed his own death, the crisis from which the
religion of the English emerged a royal and no longer a papal thing, national
and no longer Catholic. Wolsey's fall was truly "the prelude to a revolu-
tion", ² and it was all but necessarily so.

What had Wolsey been in the long years of his power? The simplest
thing is to say, tritely, that he had been everything. As Lord Chancellor he
was the principal minister of state for the government of the country. From
his seat in the court of Chancery, with the needed strong hand, he controlled
the endless conflict of legal systems which was now a permanent menace to
good government, and from this point of view he was "the chancellor par
excellence". ³ His work here is his greatest title to fame. He was no less
diligent and masterful in that "courte at Westminster commonly called the
Starre chamber"; so diligent, indeed, that he has a claim to be considered
the first creator of its fame. With Wolsey in control, this court became the
centre to which flowed in all complaints of oppression by the mighty, of
neglect and delay of justice, of insubordination to the royal will in
administration. The cardinal was prompt, he was just, and extremely
vigorous; and he never hesitated to call into his court for settlement cases
he thought would be better settled there than in other courts. And so he came
to stir up the most fatal animosity of all, the hatred of the lawyers and judges
of the courts of Common Law. ⁴

Of Parliament Wolsey made almost no use at all; it met only once in the
fourteen years of his power. The same dictatorial temperament drove him
also to dispense, as far as this was possible, with the council itself.

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