Wolsey, Thomas
Aiton's Encyclopedia (1910)
wul'zi, Thomas (1471-1530), an English cardinal and statesman. He was the son of an Ipswich butcher. He was educated at Oxford University, and on graduation was elected to a scholarship which gave him an opportunity for further study. While master of a grammar school, he taught the three sons of the Marquis of Dorsett, through whom he obtained an appointment to the pastorate of Limington. Later, he became chaplain to the Archbishop of Canterbury, who recommended him to Henry VII . Henry VIII recognized Wolsey's ability and advanced him rapidly from one church dignity to another. In 1515 he was made cardinal by Pope Leo X, and Henry made him his lord chancellor. In the delicate matter of obtaining a divorce from Catherine in order that he might marry Anne Boleyn, Henry felt that he did not have the full support of Wolsey. Anne considered the cardinal her personal enemy. Resentment and suspicion soon brought about Wolsey's downfall. In 1530 he was arrested in Yorkshire on a charge of high treason and died at Leicester Abbey on his way to the Tower of London . His last words are said to have been these: "Had I but served my God as diligently as I have served my king, He would not have given me over in my gray hairs." Shakespeare has used this thought artistically in his play of King Henry VIII. Wolsey cries out to his secretary: Cromwell, I charge thee, fling away ambition; By that sin fell the angels; how can man, then, The image of his Maker, hope to win by it? . . . . O, Cromwell, Cromwell! Had I but served my God with half the zeal I served my king, He would not in mine age Have left me naked to mine enemies.
What Has Changed in the Last Century
The outline Aiton's gave in 1910 still holds: the Ipswich butcher's son who rose to be cardinal and lord chancellor in 1515 and died at Leicester Abbey in 1530. Two details have shifted. Modern reference works usually give his birth as about 1473 rather than 1471, since the date rests on a later inference rather than a record; and where older accounts, following Shakespeare, made Anne Boleyn's enmity the mainspring of his fall, historians since Peter Gwyn's The King's Cardinal (1990) have stressed Wolsey's own failure to deliver the annulment Henry demanded, and treated the famous deathbed speech as reported by his servant George Cavendish rather than as verbatim. There has also been a physical find: four gilt-bronze angels made for Wolsey's unfinished tomb, two of them spotted on gateposts at Harrowden Hall, were bought for the Victoria and Albert Museum in 2015 — while the black sarcophagus he intended for himself was reused in 1806 for Nelson's coffin in St Paul's.
Written for this edition, 2026.