LECTURE XLI.-THE HEAD OF THE CHURCH. Cardinal Wolsey. His rise and greatness. Henry and Katherine. Fall of Wolsey. The Pope's supremacy renounced. The king declared head of the Church. Deaths of More and Fisher. 1513. Battle of 1. WHILE Henry was in France, winning a few easy victories. which did no good whatever to the country, the Scotch as usual took the opportunity of quarrelling with England, and the great battle of Flodden Field was fought, in which the English wiped away the disgrace of Bannockburn by entirely defeating the Scotch, and of which we can read an animated account in Marmion.' In this battle the Scotch king and many of the highest nobles of the land were killed. Flodden Field. 2. Some time after this England and France made peace, and the two kings met. There was a fine young King of France now, as well as of England, and their interview was of a very different kind from that of Edward IV. and the French king through the gratings on the bridge. This royal meeting was so grand and splendid that it was called the "Field of the Cloth of Gold." There were fine tournaments, and shows of all sorts, plenty of compliments and embraces, and the two young kings called each other brothers. But no great good came of it at all, for in another year or two the two sworn brothers went to war again. 1519. Wolsey. 3. We must now hear a little about the man who arranged this, and who guided and advised the king in all matters, great and small. This was the man before referred to as the very type of a clever, proud, and worldly churchman, Cardinal Wolsey. We have often observed already how a man even of the very lowest class, if he had talents and capabilities, might rise to the highest rank in the Church, so as to be equal and even superior to kings and emperors. Wolsey was one who rose thus. The man who wrote his life, of which we shall read a few extracts, was a gentleman in his service; for in those days great lords and bishops had many gentlemen in their households who were proud to be called their servants. Cavendish tells us that his master was "an honest poor man's sonne of Ipswich;" he is apparently too delicate to say that, in fact, he was the son of a butcher. 4. The child proving to be richly gifted, he received an excellent education, and went very young to Oxford, where he did so well that he took his degree at fifteen years His rise. old, and was called all through the university the Boy Bachelor. After that by his talents and industry he got on in the world very fast, and by and bye came to be chaplain to Henry VII., and was much noticed by some of the counsellors. But the way he first gained the king's favour was rather curious. Henry had to send a message to the Emperor Maximilian, who was at that time in Flanders; and his counsellors recommended as messenger this chaplain Wolsey, whom it does not seem the king had ever noticed before. The king conversed with him, "perceived his wit to be very fine," and gave him his instructions. We can now get from London to Brussels in ten hours by the help of trains and steamboats; but in those days it was quite a long and difficult journey. Most of it had to be done on horseback, with relays of post-horses; and there was generally a good deal of waiting here, and waiting there, waiting for horses, waiting for the boat, and so on. But Wolsey made such haste and such excellent arrangements that he waited nowhere. He travelled night and day, caught the Calais boat at the right moment, saw the emperor, arranged the business, and came back again. All this he did so quickly that, supposing he left the king at Richmond on Monday at twelve o'clock, he came back again by Thursday night, and saw the king on Friday morning just as he came out of his bed-room. 5. The king, never guessing how busy he had been, "checked" or rebuked him "for that he was not on his journey ;" and when he found that he had already been and come back again, "he rejoiced inwardly not a little, and gave him princely thanks." This was the beginning of Wolsey's high favour in the king's esteem. He had shown such zeal and industry," such excellent wit," and had managed the whole affair so well, that he was straightway made Dean of Lincoln, and from that time continually rose higher and higher. When Henry VIII. became king he at once made Wolsey one of his chief counsellors. Henry loved his own will and his own way, but at the same time, being still young, he loved pleasure better than business. Wolsey soon perceived that the best manner in which he could hope to rise as high as he intended would be by helping the king to indulge those tastes. All he aimed at was " to advance the king's only will and pleasure, having no respect unto the cause. 6. Nothing could have answered better, as far as those two were concerned. Wolsey was quite willing to work; no trouble was too great for him; he did all the king wanted, took all the labour on himself, and so let the king have leisure to amuse himself, and yet get everything done as he wished. Thus Wolsey got enormous power into his own hands; he was at the head of all the affairs of the country; he had charge of the royal treasury, and, being Lord Chancellor, he was the highest judge in the kingdom. He was also supreme in the Church, and had all the bishops, abbots, and clergy under his control. With all this he still only worked as the king's servant, and to carry out his will. He received in return enormous rewards, pensions, bishoprics, and all sorts of wealth. He was not only Lord Chancellor, but Archbishop of York, and a cardinal. He hoped to be Pope by and bye; nothing seemed too great for him to aim at. He becomes chancellor, archbishop, and car dinal. His lord liness. 7. He now lived in wonderful style. In his household, attending on him, and holding various offices, were a good number of lords and gentlemen to begin with; under them innumerable servants of all degrees, clerks of the kitchen, yeomen of the scullery, yeomen of his chariot and his stirrup, cupbearers, carvers, and grooms. His head cook "went daily in velvet or in satin, with a chain of gold." He had doctors, and chaplains, and choristers innumerable, filling two or three large pages of Cavendish's book. When he went out in the morning his cardinal's hat was borne before him "by a lord or some gentleman of worship right solemnly;" also two great crosses. "Then cried the gentlemen ushers, going before him bareheaded, and said, 'On before, my lords and masters, on before, and make way for my Lord Cardinal.' Thus went he down through the hall, with a sergeant-of-arms before him bearing a great mace of silver, and two gentlemen carrying two great pillars of silver; and when he came to the hall door, then his mule stood all trapped in crimson velvet, with a saddle of the same, and gilt stirrups. Then was there attending upon him when he was mounted his two cross-bearers, and his pillar-bearers, in like case, upon great horses trapped all in fine scarlet. Then marched he forward with a train of noblemen and gentlemen, having his footmen, four in number, about him, bearing each of them a gilt pole-axe in their hands, and thus passed he forth until he came to Westminster Hall door." With all this finery and display, it is satisfactory to know that "there he spared neither high nor low, but judged every estate according to his merits and deserts." Nor did he forget his old home, nor his old university; nor the good education which had helped him to rise so high. With a true generosity, he wished to give other men the same opportunities, and he founded a good school at Ipswich, and a splendid college at Oxford, which was at first called Cardinal College; but the name was afterwards changed to Christ Church, and that grand building with its magnificent staircase speaks to us still of Wolsey's lordly spirit. 8. His houses were splendid palaces, fit for a king's abode. One of them was Hampton Court, the other was at Whitehall. They were filled with magnificent furniture, costly hangings, beds of silk (Cavendish says there were 280 beds at Hampton Court), rich arras and tapestry work, gold and silver plate in profusion. We cannot help wondering whether, now that people had begun to read the New Testament, they ever contrasted all this with Peter the fisherman, or Paul the tent-maker, or the Master of them all, carrying His cross. 9. But it was too grand to last. In the Roman Catholic Church, in the midst of their most splendid ceremonies, which are more gorgeous than any one can conceive who has not seen them, sometimes on special occasions they have a very significant custom; it is as if a thought of mortality, a cold wind of warning, blows through their souls. When a Pope is being crowned, at that proudest hour of his life, or at some other grand solemnity, when the beautiful cathedral is hung with rich silk, golden lamps glittering everywhere, the air filled with music and incense, the bishops and archbishops in sumptuous apparel, you may see hanging in the midst of the church an iron cresset with a quantity of flax twisted round it. At one point in the service this is set alight, while the choristers sing "Sic transit gloria mundi." "It blazes up, oh, so brightly, for a moment, and then it is gone. Had Wolsey ever seen this ceremony? or ever thought of it? "Sic transit gloria mundi." The time was drawing near when his glory would pass away, and the glory of his Church too. 10. It was during Henry VIII.'s reign that the Reformation in Germany began under Martin Luther. Though we cannot * So passes away the glory of the world. and the give our attention to that, we must suppose that Luther's writings, his bold words and deeds, had a Henry VIII. great effect on men's minds in England. The king Reformation. took much interest in these matters, and though he liked Colet, he was still decidedly in favour of the Pope, and against Luther. He even wrote a book on the subject, which pleased the Pope so much that he gave him the title of Defensor Fidei, Defender of the Faith; which our kings and queens have borne ever since, though, as most of them have been Protestants, the Pope would probably consider that they have no great right to it. Queen Katherine. 11. But after a time Henry began to alter his views about the Pope, and it was then that meaner and lower motives came into play, and helped to bring the Reformation into England. Henry had been married, while still a boy, to Katherine of Aragon, the young widow of his brother Arthur. It is not likely that he ever loved her much, she being forced upon him in his childhood, and being some years older than himself. But she was a good woman; gentle, patient, pure, and queenly; no one could ever breathe a word against her. Henry and she had many children, but only one, a daughter, lived; the rest all died at once. Henry, who very much wished for a son, began to think, or said he thought, that his losing all his children was a mark of God's anger against the marriage, she being his brother's widow. Wolsey at first favoured this idea from motives of policy. He wished the king to be at peace with France instead of with Spain, and he thought if Henry separated from his Spanish wife he might marry a French one, which would help on his projects. He little foresaw how matters would turn out. The Pope's dilemma. 12. It was no very easy thing to get rid of Queen Katherine. Henry had now been king more than twenty years, and she had been his acknowledged and blameless wife all that time. Everybody knew that the former Pope had given a dispensation to permit the marriage. Henry could not be divorced unless the present Pope allowed it. The Pope did not know what to do. He did not want to offend Henry, who had written a book in his favour, and was so rich and great a king. But neither did he want to offend Katherine's relations, especially her nephew, Charles V., who besides being King of Spain, was Emperor of Germany, and the most powerful sovereign in the world, and who had also taken his part against Luther. Whether he ever thought at all of what would |