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Wolsey
1953. Illustrated Edition. 393 pages. Dust jacket (in two pieces) over red cloth. Clean pages throughout with noticeable tanning and foxing to endpapers. Tightly bound with faint thumb-marking throughout. Previous owner's inscription to front pastedown and endpaper. Pencil inscription to rear pastedown. Boards have light shelf-wear with corner bumping. Mild crushing to spine ends. Unclipped jacket has heavy edgewear with some areas of loss, heavy tears, chips, and creasing. Split at front joint. Mild tanning to spine. Mild rubbing and marking all over. Sticker to rear.
- GenresNonfiction
393 pages, Paperback
First published January 1, 1929
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About the author
A.F. Pollard
45 books4 followersAlbert Frederick Pollard was born in Ryde on the Isle of Wight. He was educated at Felsted School and Jesus College, Oxford where he achieved a first class honours in Modern History in 1891. He became Assistant Editor of and a contributor to the Dictionary of National Biography in 1893. He was Professor of Constitutional History at University College London from 1903 to 1931. He was a member of the Royal Commission on Historical Manuscripts, and founder of the Historical Association, 1906. He was Editor of History, 1916-1922, and of the Bulletin of the Institute of Historical Research, 1923-1939. He published 500 articles in the Dictionary of National Biography, and many other books and papers concerning history. Later in his career, he was a major force in establishing history as an academic subject in Britain. One of his most influential textbooks became The Evolution of Parliament published in 1920.
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June 8, 2025
In this prejudicial examination of the public career of Thomas Wolsey, first published in 1928, but here with a corrective introduction by G.R. Elton written for the 1960 edition, A.F. Pollard, stylishly- the writing is fluent and elegant and copiously littered with bons mots - and somewhat insidiously in his partiality in marshaling evidence, makes the case against his subject every bit as coruscating and excoriating as the charges made by the Parliament of 1529. For Pollard, the Cardinal-Legate of York, as well as being the author of his own disgrace and one of the 'bad men of history', was also a total failure both as Henry VIII's chief minister and the supreme authority under the pope over the Church in England. However, one must wonder why, if Wolsey was a failure, how he retained authority so long under such an active king and why his influence was felt so wide, not just in his own country, but also all across western Europe? Perhaps there was more to him than just the avaricious, grasping, and corrupt, cynical churchman of popular belief.
Pollard's charges against Wolsey are primarily focused upon what he regards as his disastrous foreign policy, castigating him for placing his personal ambitions before the needs of his king and the kingdom, and pursuing unrealistic and unachievable aims that only resulted in financial improvidence, causing excessive taxation and extra-lawful exactions, and in national humiliation before the great courts of Europe, Imperial, French, and papal. Pollard charges that the intent of this policy was that Wolsey should gain the papal tiara, but this unsupported allegation is roundly dismissed by Elton and his successors. There is no doubt that either Wolsey sought election as Pope or that he came close to success in the conclaves of 1521 and 1523, but such an outcome would have been incidental to Wolsey's policy and not its result. His policy at home may have seen him become a papal vicar and delegate de facto, exercising the potentialities of power of the papacy within England, but that was a matter of domestic administration and personal authority and was not directed at securing the papacy and was distinct from the policy he pursued in Europe, which was driven by the exigencies of the time and the ambitions of his king.
There is no suggestion that Wolsey was in search of a 'balance of power' in Europe, a prospect only possible once the age of the state-nation emerged in the later sixteenth and early seventeenth centuries, and Pollard knocks down this aunt Sally with otiose ease, but in trying to find another, non-benign reason for his policy, and coming to the simplistic cause of the Cardinal's papal ambition, Pollard totally underestimates the importance of dynasties and the need for dynastic alliances in determining the decisions of Henry's government. When Wolsey first rose to predominance in 1512, England was allied with Ferdinand of Aragon, Henry VIII's father-in-law, by both necessity and long-standing association. As the young and inexperienced heir of a usurper king of little hereditary claim, Henry VIII had need of alliance with Spain, just as his father had, as a source of confirmation of legitimacy and as helpmate against the perceived growing power of France, still regarded as the dynastic enemy, and to whose kingship Henry VIII posited an hereditary claim, just as had his Plantagenet predecessors.
It was not so much that Henry, or England, required tutorship in the intrigues of international diplomacy, but that as an emerging power, only recently emerged from the dislocations of civil war, with smaller population and less wealth than France or Germany, and not yet aware or seized of its full economic and commercial potential, England was yet lacking the strength required to pursue an independent policy. England could only act in concert with allies, the first, and most natural of these being the Spanish kingdoms, and it was no accident that upon his accession Henry VIII had moved swiftly to marry his brother's widow, not just to secure her dowry, which his father had unjustly maintained through keeping Catherine in his custody, but also to cement his association with her father. What caused a change of policy was the extraordinary chain of dynastic events that resulted in one ruler, Charles V, acceding to the German lands of the Habsburgs, the kingdoms of Spain, and the Burgundian Netherlands, which forced England into a tentative alliance with France, as the only bulwark against the Emperor from 1519. That this led Wolsey into alliances against Charles V to protect the papacy was not due to personal ambition, but because he was a threat to the independence of the popes, an independence that was in England's interests. What could not have been predicted was the outcome of the battle of Pavia in 1525, which temporarily gave Charles mastery of Europe, eclipsed France and its imprisoned king, and made Clement VII into the emperor's chaplain. This imperial hubris was indeed short-lived, but it encompassed the period of Wolsey's fall, of which it was the direct cause. Pollard regards Wolsey's policy as a failure, but it was determined by circumstance and was not necessarily wrong in principle even if unaffordable in practice, and after the watershed of the 1527 Sack of Rome and the restoration of a better European balance with the revival of France, it was in effect the policy pursued by Henry for the rest of his reign, first allying with France, and then turning towards the Empire, punctuated by Cromwell's failed, ideological attempt to join with the Lutherian German states. But, of course, after 1532, there was no longer any need to maintain papal independence, as Wolsey had sought to do against the competing aggressions of the France and the Empire in the Italian cockpit.
Pollard is highly critical of Wolsey as Legate à Latere, an office he regards as existing only for the personal and pecuniary ambition of the Cardinal. Again, Pollard fails to judge Wolsey by the standards of his day and refuses to see the positive purposes to which the Legacy was put, separate from Wolsey's avariciousness. The reason for the legantine commission was to empower Wolsey to reform the Church in England to the benefit of both pope and king, a task that became more urgent after 1517 and Luther's Wittenburg theses. Wolsey did accrue enormous power from his novel status as both Legate and Chancellor, but he used it to bolster both papal and royal authority, with he as its arbiter, with no superior but pope and king. That he did not use this vast power all to the good, that he used it for furtherance of his greed and ambition, and that he often rod roughshod over his episcopal colleagues and the customs of the Church he was supposedly protecting is all true: he was in his splendour a Renaissance cardinal at home in the age of Borgia and Medici popes. However, through his administrative skills, his reform of the minor monasteries, and his exercise of papal authority and provision of curial candidates he sought to build a more centralised and ordered Church within a state where sacerdotum and regulum were equal partners in the better governance of England, with he as the linchpin. This did indeed involve his aggrandisement and more opportunity for the exercise of his greed - Wolsey was never a theologian or pastoral bishop, but few of his peers were - but it was also visionary, the vision of the perfect Christian society, where Church and king had differing roles, but worked in partnership for the provision of Christ's rule in England. That this idea of a Church both Roman and papal and royal and Erastian never took root may have been because it was impossible in the age of the emerging administrative state and the fissures brought about by Lutherianism, but what really rendered it an impossibility was the decision of Henry VIII to rid himself of one wife in order to wed another.
Wolsey's fall is regarded by Pollard as no more than comeuppance for his earlier arrogance and hubris, but history should not be a moral text; history should be the objective analysis of the reason why things in the past occurred. Wolsey did not fall because of his personal flaws or the totting up of errors in his long dominance. Wolsey fell because in the particular circumstances of 1527 to 1529, he could not give the king the divorce he wanted and expected while also upholding papal authority in England. If Clement VII would or could not annul the marriage with Catherine of Aragon, then there was nothing Wolsey, whose unique position was dependent upon his Legacy as ultimate provider of papal government within the realm as much as his role as chief minister, could do. The moment Clement remitted the King's Great Matter to Rome, and removed it from Wolsey's jurisdiction, Wolsey's power evaporated, not only because of the outcome that this foreshadowed, with the papacy a prison guarded by the Emperor, but because by doing so the pope destroyed Wolsey's authority - what use to Henry VIII was a Cardinal-Legate who could not even set aside a marriage unlawful in Scripture and wrongly permitted by papal dispensation - and Wolsey was doomed. With the Cardinal no use, and the Pope forced into opposition, Henry needed to find another way to put away Catherine and marry Anne Boleyn, which he did in tandem with Parliament by renouncing all papal authority and establishing a royal supremacy with himself as Head of the Church in England. This could not be achieved with the papalist Wolsey, who had to be banished from power and exiled to his never visited northern archdiocese, and did indeed mark the failure of all for which Wolsey had endeavoured, but the failure was not his, it was the failure of the papacy to maintain its independence, an independence that had been at the heart of Wolsey's policy for fifteen years for this very reason, and which required the pope to be free from control by one of the competing great powers, which was now the case after Pavia in the form of the triumphant empire and the masterful Charles V. Charles did not permit the pope to permit the divorce from his aunt, so Clement could not grant it, and so he took the matter away from the Cardinal of York, inadvertently stripping him of all the power he had accrued and the worth his king had seen in him and his legantine office, and in so doing, exposing how Wolsey was never the independent quasi-pope and sub-king Pollard seems to make him: his authority was never his own, it came from that of the pope and of the king, and when first the former removed his from Wolsey, causing the latter to revoke his in consequence, Wolsey was left with nothing, and his enemies and rivals, given free rein by Henry, whatever his personal affection for his minister, were able to pounce.
Pollard's greatest fault is in his teleology and his Whiggish conception of history as progressive, which leads him into the great error of reading Wolsey by what came after him and regarding Wolsey's government as the inadvertent forerunner of the Henrician Reformation to come. For Pollard, Wolsey is ultimately a failure because the very thing he most wished to prevent, the destruction of English papal administration and the sundering of the English Church from Rome, came to pass a few short years after Wolsey's fall. However, this is palpable nonsense. At the time of Wolsey's loss of power, and despite a strong trait of anticlericalism, particularly in London, England was still fully part of Catholic Christendom and as much opposed to Luther's doctrines, as it had been when Henry VIII was appointed Fedei Defensor by Leo X in 1521, while the government that succeeded his, with Thomas More, who was to die a martyr in 1535, as Lord Chancellor, was no more evangelical than its predecessor, and can be regarded between 1529 and 1532 as a continuation of its predecessors, except stripped of the Cardinal and his grandiose, dominating personality, but more committed to reform, although still within the Catholic Church.
However, the same issue that had brought Wolsey to his downfall, the demand of Henry to lawfully set aside Catherine of Aragon in favour of Anne Boleyn, was to break this government, as it too was unable to give the king what he wanted for the very reason that Wolsey had failed, in that, in the political and religious circumstances of the time, it was impossible for the pope to do as Henry demanded. For political reasons he could not pursue a policy opposed by Charles V, who had non-familial reasons of his own for not wanting an annulment of his aunt's marriage; and, for religious reasons, in the face of Luther's onslaught against papal authority, he could not be seen to undermine his authority by reversing Julius II's dispensation of 1503, particularly as he needed Charles V if he was to defeat heresy in Germany. There was therefore as much an impasse in 1529-32, as in 1527-29, which was only broken with the death of William Warham and his succession as archbishop of Canterbury by the evangelical Thomas Cranmer, who did straight away what Henry wanted by annulling the marriage of the king to Catherine and then wedding him to Anne without reference to Rome. By so doing, king and archbishop, acting in defiance of the pope, had made fact the rejection of papal authority, which was then made law through the remainder of the Reformation Parliament, with the evangelical reformers, Cranmer and Thomas Cromwell, acting in concert with the Commons to drive through a complete jurisdictional Reformation that permanently separated the Church of England from the Roman Catholic Church and placed royal authority and the common law in superiority over the Church and its ministers. This was the outcome Wolsey wanted to avoid, but it does not follow that he can be blamed for it coming about. The Henrician Reformation took place because, for reasons of both conscience and lust, Henry wanted lawfully in sight of God to marry Anne, ensuring the legitimacy and succession of any progeny, because Clement VII could not bring this about and the English Church would not act in the matter without papal authority, and because new men emerged, fervent in evangelical reform and antipapalism, who seized the opportunity to impose Lutherianism in England under a king who until 1540, so long as Catholic practice was retained, was happy to support a radicalism that he regarded as enhancing his princely authority in his realm and giving him control of the sacerdotum.
Further, Pollard states that it was Wolsey's aggrandisement and centralisation of papal powers in his own hands which in effect provided a base upon which the Reformers would build, as though the radical reforms after 1529 consisted principally in the substitution of royal rule over the Church for papal-legantine rule, as if Henry VIII simply stepped into the Cardinal's richly made shoes. However, this totally ignores how different the reforms, particularly after 1533, were from what had come before. Under Wolsey, the authority he exercised was both spiritual and derived from above, from God and from the Petrine commission given by Christ to the popes, while authority in the Reformation was predominantly lay, and while the king as its chief author also derived his authority from God, his power was exercised principally by the laity, administered often by lay officials, such as Cromwell as Vice-gerent in spirituals, and given legitimacy by Parliament in which the laity in Commons and Lords overwhelmed all clerical opposition: indeed, even the archbishop of Canterbury no longer derived his office from papal and clerical appointment, but by kingly appointment, the secular finally having complete dominance over the religious. The authority, administration, and intent after 1529 are so clearly different from how Wolsey governed and for what purpose as to deny any suggestion that Wolsey held any inadvertent responsibility for the Reformation; if he had, then there would not have been that curious period of continuity between 1529 and 1532, during which prominent traditional Catholics such as More and John Fisher were still eminent. The revolutionary moment was after 1533 and not in 1529: it was the beginning of a new politico-religious dispensation, and it had nothing to do with Thomas Wolsey and his government, 1512 to 1529.
However, for all its flaws, this is still an engaging and stimulating book, written in sophisticated and sometimes beguiling prose, but it is still a very one-dimensional account if an extremely complex man. A.F. Pollard admits that too little research at the time of writing had been made into Wolsey as administrator, research that later has helped to redeem him in part, revealing not just how hard he worked, but how efficient and indeed fair and compassionate, particularly regarding alleged heretics, he could be, while Elton points out that Pollard never consulted the original manuscript sources that would reveal the efficacy of Wolsey's administration, even if the policies he pursued in Church and in foreign affairs were ultimately unsuccessful, although not for reasons of his making. Thomas Wolsey was a hugely flawed man, but he was charming, more intelligent than allowed here, and a good administrator of an increasingly complex state at a time of unprecedented change and intellectual fervour, and he deserves better than he receives in this study, which, however, remains after nearly a century an important landmark in Tudor historiography.
Pollard's charges against Wolsey are primarily focused upon what he regards as his disastrous foreign policy, castigating him for placing his personal ambitions before the needs of his king and the kingdom, and pursuing unrealistic and unachievable aims that only resulted in financial improvidence, causing excessive taxation and extra-lawful exactions, and in national humiliation before the great courts of Europe, Imperial, French, and papal. Pollard charges that the intent of this policy was that Wolsey should gain the papal tiara, but this unsupported allegation is roundly dismissed by Elton and his successors. There is no doubt that either Wolsey sought election as Pope or that he came close to success in the conclaves of 1521 and 1523, but such an outcome would have been incidental to Wolsey's policy and not its result. His policy at home may have seen him become a papal vicar and delegate de facto, exercising the potentialities of power of the papacy within England, but that was a matter of domestic administration and personal authority and was not directed at securing the papacy and was distinct from the policy he pursued in Europe, which was driven by the exigencies of the time and the ambitions of his king.
There is no suggestion that Wolsey was in search of a 'balance of power' in Europe, a prospect only possible once the age of the state-nation emerged in the later sixteenth and early seventeenth centuries, and Pollard knocks down this aunt Sally with otiose ease, but in trying to find another, non-benign reason for his policy, and coming to the simplistic cause of the Cardinal's papal ambition, Pollard totally underestimates the importance of dynasties and the need for dynastic alliances in determining the decisions of Henry's government. When Wolsey first rose to predominance in 1512, England was allied with Ferdinand of Aragon, Henry VIII's father-in-law, by both necessity and long-standing association. As the young and inexperienced heir of a usurper king of little hereditary claim, Henry VIII had need of alliance with Spain, just as his father had, as a source of confirmation of legitimacy and as helpmate against the perceived growing power of France, still regarded as the dynastic enemy, and to whose kingship Henry VIII posited an hereditary claim, just as had his Plantagenet predecessors.
It was not so much that Henry, or England, required tutorship in the intrigues of international diplomacy, but that as an emerging power, only recently emerged from the dislocations of civil war, with smaller population and less wealth than France or Germany, and not yet aware or seized of its full economic and commercial potential, England was yet lacking the strength required to pursue an independent policy. England could only act in concert with allies, the first, and most natural of these being the Spanish kingdoms, and it was no accident that upon his accession Henry VIII had moved swiftly to marry his brother's widow, not just to secure her dowry, which his father had unjustly maintained through keeping Catherine in his custody, but also to cement his association with her father. What caused a change of policy was the extraordinary chain of dynastic events that resulted in one ruler, Charles V, acceding to the German lands of the Habsburgs, the kingdoms of Spain, and the Burgundian Netherlands, which forced England into a tentative alliance with France, as the only bulwark against the Emperor from 1519. That this led Wolsey into alliances against Charles V to protect the papacy was not due to personal ambition, but because he was a threat to the independence of the popes, an independence that was in England's interests. What could not have been predicted was the outcome of the battle of Pavia in 1525, which temporarily gave Charles mastery of Europe, eclipsed France and its imprisoned king, and made Clement VII into the emperor's chaplain. This imperial hubris was indeed short-lived, but it encompassed the period of Wolsey's fall, of which it was the direct cause. Pollard regards Wolsey's policy as a failure, but it was determined by circumstance and was not necessarily wrong in principle even if unaffordable in practice, and after the watershed of the 1527 Sack of Rome and the restoration of a better European balance with the revival of France, it was in effect the policy pursued by Henry for the rest of his reign, first allying with France, and then turning towards the Empire, punctuated by Cromwell's failed, ideological attempt to join with the Lutherian German states. But, of course, after 1532, there was no longer any need to maintain papal independence, as Wolsey had sought to do against the competing aggressions of the France and the Empire in the Italian cockpit.
Pollard is highly critical of Wolsey as Legate à Latere, an office he regards as existing only for the personal and pecuniary ambition of the Cardinal. Again, Pollard fails to judge Wolsey by the standards of his day and refuses to see the positive purposes to which the Legacy was put, separate from Wolsey's avariciousness. The reason for the legantine commission was to empower Wolsey to reform the Church in England to the benefit of both pope and king, a task that became more urgent after 1517 and Luther's Wittenburg theses. Wolsey did accrue enormous power from his novel status as both Legate and Chancellor, but he used it to bolster both papal and royal authority, with he as its arbiter, with no superior but pope and king. That he did not use this vast power all to the good, that he used it for furtherance of his greed and ambition, and that he often rod roughshod over his episcopal colleagues and the customs of the Church he was supposedly protecting is all true: he was in his splendour a Renaissance cardinal at home in the age of Borgia and Medici popes. However, through his administrative skills, his reform of the minor monasteries, and his exercise of papal authority and provision of curial candidates he sought to build a more centralised and ordered Church within a state where sacerdotum and regulum were equal partners in the better governance of England, with he as the linchpin. This did indeed involve his aggrandisement and more opportunity for the exercise of his greed - Wolsey was never a theologian or pastoral bishop, but few of his peers were - but it was also visionary, the vision of the perfect Christian society, where Church and king had differing roles, but worked in partnership for the provision of Christ's rule in England. That this idea of a Church both Roman and papal and royal and Erastian never took root may have been because it was impossible in the age of the emerging administrative state and the fissures brought about by Lutherianism, but what really rendered it an impossibility was the decision of Henry VIII to rid himself of one wife in order to wed another.
Wolsey's fall is regarded by Pollard as no more than comeuppance for his earlier arrogance and hubris, but history should not be a moral text; history should be the objective analysis of the reason why things in the past occurred. Wolsey did not fall because of his personal flaws or the totting up of errors in his long dominance. Wolsey fell because in the particular circumstances of 1527 to 1529, he could not give the king the divorce he wanted and expected while also upholding papal authority in England. If Clement VII would or could not annul the marriage with Catherine of Aragon, then there was nothing Wolsey, whose unique position was dependent upon his Legacy as ultimate provider of papal government within the realm as much as his role as chief minister, could do. The moment Clement remitted the King's Great Matter to Rome, and removed it from Wolsey's jurisdiction, Wolsey's power evaporated, not only because of the outcome that this foreshadowed, with the papacy a prison guarded by the Emperor, but because by doing so the pope destroyed Wolsey's authority - what use to Henry VIII was a Cardinal-Legate who could not even set aside a marriage unlawful in Scripture and wrongly permitted by papal dispensation - and Wolsey was doomed. With the Cardinal no use, and the Pope forced into opposition, Henry needed to find another way to put away Catherine and marry Anne Boleyn, which he did in tandem with Parliament by renouncing all papal authority and establishing a royal supremacy with himself as Head of the Church in England. This could not be achieved with the papalist Wolsey, who had to be banished from power and exiled to his never visited northern archdiocese, and did indeed mark the failure of all for which Wolsey had endeavoured, but the failure was not his, it was the failure of the papacy to maintain its independence, an independence that had been at the heart of Wolsey's policy for fifteen years for this very reason, and which required the pope to be free from control by one of the competing great powers, which was now the case after Pavia in the form of the triumphant empire and the masterful Charles V. Charles did not permit the pope to permit the divorce from his aunt, so Clement could not grant it, and so he took the matter away from the Cardinal of York, inadvertently stripping him of all the power he had accrued and the worth his king had seen in him and his legantine office, and in so doing, exposing how Wolsey was never the independent quasi-pope and sub-king Pollard seems to make him: his authority was never his own, it came from that of the pope and of the king, and when first the former removed his from Wolsey, causing the latter to revoke his in consequence, Wolsey was left with nothing, and his enemies and rivals, given free rein by Henry, whatever his personal affection for his minister, were able to pounce.
Pollard's greatest fault is in his teleology and his Whiggish conception of history as progressive, which leads him into the great error of reading Wolsey by what came after him and regarding Wolsey's government as the inadvertent forerunner of the Henrician Reformation to come. For Pollard, Wolsey is ultimately a failure because the very thing he most wished to prevent, the destruction of English papal administration and the sundering of the English Church from Rome, came to pass a few short years after Wolsey's fall. However, this is palpable nonsense. At the time of Wolsey's loss of power, and despite a strong trait of anticlericalism, particularly in London, England was still fully part of Catholic Christendom and as much opposed to Luther's doctrines, as it had been when Henry VIII was appointed Fedei Defensor by Leo X in 1521, while the government that succeeded his, with Thomas More, who was to die a martyr in 1535, as Lord Chancellor, was no more evangelical than its predecessor, and can be regarded between 1529 and 1532 as a continuation of its predecessors, except stripped of the Cardinal and his grandiose, dominating personality, but more committed to reform, although still within the Catholic Church.
However, the same issue that had brought Wolsey to his downfall, the demand of Henry to lawfully set aside Catherine of Aragon in favour of Anne Boleyn, was to break this government, as it too was unable to give the king what he wanted for the very reason that Wolsey had failed, in that, in the political and religious circumstances of the time, it was impossible for the pope to do as Henry demanded. For political reasons he could not pursue a policy opposed by Charles V, who had non-familial reasons of his own for not wanting an annulment of his aunt's marriage; and, for religious reasons, in the face of Luther's onslaught against papal authority, he could not be seen to undermine his authority by reversing Julius II's dispensation of 1503, particularly as he needed Charles V if he was to defeat heresy in Germany. There was therefore as much an impasse in 1529-32, as in 1527-29, which was only broken with the death of William Warham and his succession as archbishop of Canterbury by the evangelical Thomas Cranmer, who did straight away what Henry wanted by annulling the marriage of the king to Catherine and then wedding him to Anne without reference to Rome. By so doing, king and archbishop, acting in defiance of the pope, had made fact the rejection of papal authority, which was then made law through the remainder of the Reformation Parliament, with the evangelical reformers, Cranmer and Thomas Cromwell, acting in concert with the Commons to drive through a complete jurisdictional Reformation that permanently separated the Church of England from the Roman Catholic Church and placed royal authority and the common law in superiority over the Church and its ministers. This was the outcome Wolsey wanted to avoid, but it does not follow that he can be blamed for it coming about. The Henrician Reformation took place because, for reasons of both conscience and lust, Henry wanted lawfully in sight of God to marry Anne, ensuring the legitimacy and succession of any progeny, because Clement VII could not bring this about and the English Church would not act in the matter without papal authority, and because new men emerged, fervent in evangelical reform and antipapalism, who seized the opportunity to impose Lutherianism in England under a king who until 1540, so long as Catholic practice was retained, was happy to support a radicalism that he regarded as enhancing his princely authority in his realm and giving him control of the sacerdotum.
Further, Pollard states that it was Wolsey's aggrandisement and centralisation of papal powers in his own hands which in effect provided a base upon which the Reformers would build, as though the radical reforms after 1529 consisted principally in the substitution of royal rule over the Church for papal-legantine rule, as if Henry VIII simply stepped into the Cardinal's richly made shoes. However, this totally ignores how different the reforms, particularly after 1533, were from what had come before. Under Wolsey, the authority he exercised was both spiritual and derived from above, from God and from the Petrine commission given by Christ to the popes, while authority in the Reformation was predominantly lay, and while the king as its chief author also derived his authority from God, his power was exercised principally by the laity, administered often by lay officials, such as Cromwell as Vice-gerent in spirituals, and given legitimacy by Parliament in which the laity in Commons and Lords overwhelmed all clerical opposition: indeed, even the archbishop of Canterbury no longer derived his office from papal and clerical appointment, but by kingly appointment, the secular finally having complete dominance over the religious. The authority, administration, and intent after 1529 are so clearly different from how Wolsey governed and for what purpose as to deny any suggestion that Wolsey held any inadvertent responsibility for the Reformation; if he had, then there would not have been that curious period of continuity between 1529 and 1532, during which prominent traditional Catholics such as More and John Fisher were still eminent. The revolutionary moment was after 1533 and not in 1529: it was the beginning of a new politico-religious dispensation, and it had nothing to do with Thomas Wolsey and his government, 1512 to 1529.
However, for all its flaws, this is still an engaging and stimulating book, written in sophisticated and sometimes beguiling prose, but it is still a very one-dimensional account if an extremely complex man. A.F. Pollard admits that too little research at the time of writing had been made into Wolsey as administrator, research that later has helped to redeem him in part, revealing not just how hard he worked, but how efficient and indeed fair and compassionate, particularly regarding alleged heretics, he could be, while Elton points out that Pollard never consulted the original manuscript sources that would reveal the efficacy of Wolsey's administration, even if the policies he pursued in Church and in foreign affairs were ultimately unsuccessful, although not for reasons of his making. Thomas Wolsey was a hugely flawed man, but he was charming, more intelligent than allowed here, and a good administrator of an increasingly complex state at a time of unprecedented change and intellectual fervour, and he deserves better than he receives in this study, which, however, remains after nearly a century an important landmark in Tudor historiography.
November 1, 2025
A nice bit of Tudor reading yay
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