taken into the service of the crown, and soon after the beginning of the present reign we find him exercising the office of royal almoner, which drew him near to the king's person.1 During the late war, as the active organizer of the forces in the campaign of 1513, Wolsey had rendered such services as secured his elevation in that year to the see of Tournay.2 Honors then fell thick and fast upon him. In 1514 he was his rapid made bishop of Lincoln, and before the end of that year promotion he in the was translated to the archbishopric of York. In 1515 Henry church;

seals as

the office of

obtained from Rome his elevation to the office of cardinal,3 and in December of that year, upon the retirement of Warham, he received the seals as chancellor. In that office, although receives the unacquainted with the details of legal procedure, it was ad- chancellor mitted even by his enemies that his decrees were character- in 1515; ized by the greatest equity and good judgment. So popular was his administration, by reason of his capacity for expedition and justice, that his court became overcrowded with business, and four subordinate courts had to be established for its relief, origin of of which that presided over by the master of the rolls 5 still master of survives. It was, however, in the wider field of continental the rolls; politics that the new minister, now supreme in the council, was to find a domain worthy of his ambition. Taking up the thread of diplomacy where the end of the late war had left it, Wolsey's first design was to turn Henry's resentment of Ferdinand's desertion of him to a good account by making it the means of freeing England from Spanish domination, as the results of the war had freed her from the menace of French ascendency. By the death of Louis XII. in 1515 the destinies of France had passed into the stronger hands of Francis I., while by the death of Ferdinand in the next year his grandson, Charles of Austria, had been able to add all Spain to his

1 It is from Polydore Virgil (663), who had been imprisoned by Wolsey, that we learn of the orgies which took place at his house when he happened to be visited by his royal master. 2 Fadera, xiii. 584. 8 Raynald, xx. 192. 4 Fadera, xiii. 530.

5 See Lingard, Hist. Eng., vol. iii. p. 370, 5th ed. "The earliest mention of him as master of the rolls is in 11 Hen. VII. c. 18. . . . In the course of time,

Wolsey's diplomacy

ing factor

in European poli

tics;

appointed legate a

latere;

already vast yet widely scattered dominions. Out of the rivalry between these nearly evenly balanced powers arose Wolsey's opportunity to lift England to a position of the first makes Eng- importance by making her alliance with either the controlling land a lead factor in European politics. By the year 1518 the success of this policy seemed to be assured, and as a crowning reward Henry procured from the pope in July of that year the cardinal's appointment as legate a latere, a station in which his jurisdiction extended over all bishops, suspended all special privileges and exemptions, while his court took the place of that of Rome as the final court for ecclesiastical appeals. In a word, the legatine commission conferred upon the cardinal, so far as England was concerned, nearly all of the prerogatives of the supreme pontiff himself.1 As the chief of both the home and foreign administration, as president of the council, as chancellor, and as legate, Wolsey now concentrated in his hands the power to direct and control the entire secular and the control ecclesiastical business of the kingdom. In this abnormal concentration of power in a single hand can be traced not merely a desire upon the part of the crown to exalt a subject, whose fortunes could be blasted by a frown, but rather the consummation of the new system of personal government which rested upon the notion that the supreme powers of the state were all vested in the council as the mere agent of the royal will. Under the system as thus organized and directed by Wolsey the country enjoyed eight years of peace without a parliament.2

concen

trates in his hands

of both secular and ecclesiastical business;

French and
Spanish

war of

1521;

Not until the beginning of the great French and Spanish war of 1521 was England again forced from her position of neutrality into open participation in a struggle in which Henry hoped, through a fresh alliance with pope and emperor, to accomplish at last the re-conquest of his French inheritance. Although years had passed by since the estates had been assembled, the first attempt to raise money for the war was made in the form of a fresh application of the old system of forced loans forced loans or benevolences. In March, 1522, commissioners of 1522; were sent into the shires to make assessments, and in the maritime counties to array all men between the ages of sixteen 2 There was no parliament from 1515 to 1523.

1 See Fadera, xiii. 734, xiv. 18.

and sixty upon the pretext of an apprehended invasion.1 As a temporary expedient, a loan of £20,000 was exacted of the merchants of London, while the wealthiest citizens were cited to appear before the cardinal as royal commissioner, where they were required to give the true values of their estates, which were received "upon their honesties."2 When all of these oppressive expedients had failed to produce a sum sufficient to supply the great quota of troops which Henry had promised for the war, a parliament was finally summoned to meet in April, 1523, out of whose subsidies all of the unwill- parliament ing lenders hoped for indemnity. The unprecedented demand of 1523. of £800,000, which the king was compelled to make, Wolsey undertook to present in person, backed by all the prestige and power of the conciliar system. At the head of the representative branch of the parliament, the ancient foe of that system, now stood an historic figure, who embodied all that remained of the free spirit of the past.

More as

Near the close of the preceding reign, a young lawyer by the name of Thomas More, the son of an eminent barrister, Sir Thomas had attracted public attention by daring to oppose in the parliament of 1504 an unreasonable demand for money in a speech which resulted in the reduction of a proposed subsidy

1 Stowe, 316; Fœdera, xiii. 770. 2 Holinshed, iii. 680; Hall, 101, 102, 105; Herbert, 121, 122. Each person was required to contribute a ratable portion according to his admission, upon the royal promise of repayment out of the next subsidy. The promises or "privy seals," as they were called, were in form as follows: "We Henry VIII. by the grace of God, king of Eng land and of France, Defender of Faith, and Lord of Ireland, promise by these presents truly to content and repay unto our trusty and well-beloved subject the sum of which he has lovingly advanced unto us by way of loan, for defence of our realm, and maintenance of our wars against France and Scotland."- Instructions to the Commissioners in contemporary MS. in the possession of Mr. Hallam. See Const. Hist., vol. i. p. 19. When in 1526 another attempt was made to collect a forced loan through royal commissioners who demanded a sixth from the laity and a fourth from the clergy, such forcible resistance was made in several

shires that the king was compelled to
give up the attempt, and to declare that
he would take nothing from the peo-
ple but by way of an amiable grant or
benevolence (Holinshed, iii. 709; Hall,
696, 700), which was nothing less than
a forced loan without a definite promise
of repayment. Such promises when
made by Henry VIII. were of little
value. In 1529 (21 Hen. VIII. c. 24) and
in 1544 (25 Hen. VIII. c. 12) he called
upon parliament to release him from
all such promises by statute.
In 1528
he demanded an "amiable grannte "
or benevolence, and in 1545 still an-
other. The practice of collecting be-
nevolences and the cognate exaction
known as forced loans was then con-
tinued during the reigns of Elizabeth,
James, and Charles I., until it was put
an end to by the Petition of Right,
which provided "that no man hereaf-
ter be compelled to make or yield any
gift, loan, benevolence, tax, or such-like
charge, without common consent by act
of parliament."

leader;

of the New Learning;

mat;

pia," its

scope and

of three fifteenths to £30,000.1 As the king refused to forgive this audacious act, the offender found it expedient for a time to seek safety in seclusion. From that seclusion he emerged, as a light after the beginning of the present reign, as one of the bright lights of the New Learning, whose daring spirit of inquiry he undertook to extend beyond the domain of mere educational and religious reform into that of social and political speculation. Drawn by his wit and wisdom into the service of the court, he was sent more than once upon diplomatic missions as a diplo to the Low Countries. While thus employed by a despotism which he despised, More embodied in a work, published in 1516,2 his protest against the whole scheme of social and political oppression which Wolsey had just begun to organize into a vast and comprehensive system. The conceit upon the "Uto which the "Utopia" is founded is that, upon one of his diplomatic missions, More had met by chance a sailor, who had character; been a companion of Amerigo Vespucci in his voyages to the New World, from whom he learned of the kingdom of "Nowhere." In this vague intellectual vision of a higher and better social and political life, in this "ultra-Platonic fancy, bred of the Platonism of the Renaissance," 4 we find beneath the idealism of the dreamer, not only a statement of all the grave social, religious, and political questions involved in the life about him, but also a series of philosophical speculations as to their solution, far in advance of the age in which the writer lived. In nothing is this prescience more manifest than in his premature announcement of the principle of religious toleration, embodied in the statement that in Utopia every man could hold whatsoever religious opinion he would, and propagate the same by argument, but without offence to the aspirations religion of others. It was, however, to the cause of the laborprovement ing poor - bowed down like beasts of burden under a system ing classes; of social tyranny whose evils had been intensified by a scheme

religious

of the labor

1 The leading contemporary authority is the life by his son-in-law, William Roper, to which is added an appendix of letters. Chiswick, 1817. The very best recent contribution is the Life by W. H. Hutton, a rising scholar of St. John's College, Oxford.

2 Utopia, originally printed in Latin, 1516. Translated into English by Robinson, and edited by Edward Arber,

1869. All references will be to the Arber ed.

3 "Thence the Portuguese Hythlodaye wanders to the island of 'Nowhere,' which to More's mind was 'beyond the line equinoctial' between Brazil and India.". Arber, Int. p. iv. 4 Pollock, Hist. of the Science of Politics, p. 22.

5 Arber ed., p. 145.

of erroneous legislation which extended from the earlier Statutes of Laborers to the statute (6 Hen. VIII. c. 3) by which parliament had last attempted to fix the rate of wages1- that the sensitive mind of More addressed itself with the greatest zeal and sympathy. This whole system of oppression he denounces as nothing but a conspiracy of the rich against the poor, a conspiracy through which the rich are ever striving to pare away something further from the daily wages of the poor by private fraud and even by public law, so that the wrong already existing is made yet greater by means of the law of the state. In the realm of "Nowhere" no such conditions