Contributions
The son of an Ipswich merchant, Thomas Wolsey rose by sheer talent to the summit of power: Lord Chancellor (1515), cardinal (1515), legate a latere, he governed England almost as a viceroy on Henry VIII's behalf. A reformer of justice, he developed the Star Chamber and the Court of Chancery and sought to be a judge accessible to the poor. An ambitious diplomat, he orchestrated the Treaty of London (1518), dreamed of "universal peace", and staged the lavish Field of the Cloth of Gold (1520). But it is as builder and patron that he marks the English Renaissance: he raised Hampton Court, the kingdom's largest private palace, adorned with Italian terracottas by Giovanni da Maiano, and founded Cardinal College at Oxford — the future Christ Church — and a school at Ipswich, funding these works by dissolving small monasteries, a precedent heavy with consequence.
Significance
Wolsey embodies the Renaissance minister-servant, a brilliant administrator raised to power by merit alone and the builder of an Italianate palatial style that introduced England to a continental taste for ornament. Hampton Court and Christ Church remain his monuments. The shadow matches the ascent: pride, a relentless accumulation of benefices, ostentatious wealth that came to eclipse the king's own and to stir jealousy. His inability to obtain from Rome the annulment of Henry VIII's marriage to Catherine of Aragon caused his fall in 1529; arrested for high treason, he died on the road to London, at Leicester Abbey, in 1530. His fall was no mere court drama: by depriving the king of his ablest servant, it opened the way to Thomas Cromwell and to the break with Rome. Thus this prince of the Catholic Church hastened, by his very failure, the birth of the Church of England.
Influence
He furnished at once the model and the warning of the all-powerful minister, whose heir would be Thomas Cromwell. Hampton Court, which he ceded to Henry VIII, and Christ Church, Oxford, carry on his name. His dissolution of small monasteries to fund his colleges offered a precedent for the general dissolution that followed. Formed at Magdalen College, Oxford, he climbed the ecclesiastical ladder through study and ambition, while the models of the court and of the Roman curia, and the splendour of the Italian princes of the Church, inspired his way of life and his patronage.
Anecdote
Fallen, ill, escorted towards London to answer a charge of treason, Wolsey died at Leicester Abbey in the autumn of 1530. His faithful gentleman-usher George Cavendish, who gathered his last days, reports the words of a man who measured, too late, the vanity of serving princes: had he but served God as diligently as he had served the king, God would not have abandoned him in his grey hairs. A lucid farewell, become the epitaph of punished pride.