Thomas Wolsey
Thomas Wolsey, the son of an Ipswich butcher, rose through Oxford and royal service to become the greatest subject in England. Within a few years of Henry VIII’s accession he was Archbishop of York (1514), cardinal (1515), Lord Chancellor (1515), and papal legate a latere (1518), with authority over the whole English church.
Wolsey was a statesman before he was a churchman, but he was the first great enemy of the Reformation in England. On May 12, 1521, he presided in state at St. Paul’s while Luther’s books were burned and Bishop John Fisher preached against them.1 He set his agents to hunt the evangelicals of Cambridge and Oxford, forced Robert Barnes to carry a faggot in public penance in 1526, and directed the effort to stop William Tyndale’s English New Testament from entering the kingdom.
His fall came from another quarter. Unable to win Henry’s divorce from Catherine of Aragon at Rome, he lost the king’s favor in 1529, was stripped of office, and in November 1530 was arrested for treason. On the journey to London he fell ill at Leicester Abbey. There, dying, he spoke his famous lament, and with his last breath returned to the Reformation:
If I had served God as diligently as I have served the king, he would not have given me over in my gray hairs! … Master Kingston, … attend to my last request: tell the king that I conjure him in God’s name to destroy this new pernicious sect of Lutherans.2 Thomas Wolseyat Leicester Abbey, November 1530
Wolsey died on November 29, 1530.
