upon the proud cardinal as her enemy. He
fell, as Shakespeare says, like Lucifer, never
to rise again. The king stripped the gourd
leaf by leaf. Henry, with one hand, seized
York-place, renaming it Whitehall, and with
the other clutched at Hampton Court. Wolsey's
retinue of one hundred persons was
disbanded. Even his cloth of gold and silver
hangings were taken by the master who had
given them. His gold plate was confiscated.
He was accused by his enemies of claiming
equal rank with the king and of monopolising
royal power, and that was nearly all that could
be alleged. Wolsey might have been

    A man of most unbounded stomach.

He certainly, to judge by his portraits (always
we believe in profile), was uncommonly stout,
but he was also a man of grand views, of princely
generosity, and of far-seeing and honourable
ambition. It speaks well for him that his servants
loved him, and that he fell at last only
from resisting a wicked and unjust divorce.
Above all, we honour him for having founded
Christ Church and Ipswich College. Wolsey's
Tudor gateway of Ipswich College of
moulded red bricks, still standing on the east
side of St. Peter's churchyard, is now the
entrance of a private house. It looks rather
helpless, and leans over towards the street.
Ipswich College had first been an Austin
Canon's Priory, founded in 1177, and rebuilt in
the reign of Richard Coeur-de-Lion. Wolsey
suppressed the old priory, and founded a college
for a dean, twelve secular canons, eight clerks,
and eight choristers, to the honour of the Virgin
Mary, and also a grammar school, which he
designed as a nursery for his great college at
Oxford. In his lavish way he then endowed
the college with all the lands of ten suppressed
monasteries. Henry the Eighth gave
the college lands to one Thomas Alverde, and
James the First bestowed them on Richard
Percival and Edmund Duffield. It is a singular
fact, that "up to within the last ten years,"
says Mr. Walter White, writing in 1865, "there
was a Wolsey, a butcher, living in this town
a fact which leads me to imagine an unbroken
succession of butchers of the same name from
the days of the original Wolsey."

Skelton, the rugged satirist, who had to fly
from Wolsey's wrath and take sanctuary at
Westminster, has left some savage verses on the
proud "butcher's cur," who snubbed the nobles
at the Privy Council, and struck them dumb by
one dash of his hand upon the table. Sir Thomas
More has also (according to Dr. Wordsworth)
sketched Wolsey in his "full-blown dignity."
He describes him sitting alone at dinner under
the dais in his hall, and asking his courtiers
how they liked an oration he had just
delivered. "Then I ween," says More, "no
man eat another morsel of meat. Every man
was fallen into so deep a study for the finding
of some exquisite praise, for he that should
have brought out but a vulgar and a common
commendation would have thought himself
shamed for ever. Then said we our sentences
by row as we sat, from the lowest unto the
highest, in good order, as it had been a great
matter of the common weal in a right solemn
counsayle. A world it was to see how a man
before me marked every man's word, and the
more proper it was the worse he liked it for the
cumbrance that he had to study out a better to
pass it. He even sweat with his labour, so that
he was fain, now and then, to wipe his face.
This man when he had to speak said nothing,
and yet surpassed all the preceding flatterers
who had exhausted trope and metaphor upon
the subject. For as he were ravashed unto
heavenward with the wonder of the wisdom and
eloquence that my Lord's Grace had uttered in
that oracyon, he fette a long sigh with an oh!
from the bottom of his heart, and held up both
his hands, and lift up his head, and cast up
his eyes unto the welkin, and wept." What an
Hogarthian picture of a coarse flatterer. No
king could have lived more sumptuously than
Wolsey; even his head cook wore damask and
satin, and had a chain of gold round his neck. In
his chapel he kept twelve singing boys, and in
his private ecclesiastical processions it was not
unusual to count forty-one wearers of sumptuous
copes, besides cross-bearers and pillar-
bearers. Forty cup-bearers, carvers, and servers
waited at his table, and nine or ten lords were
daily in attendance on him. He had forty-six
yeomen of the chamber, and kept sixteen doctors
and chaplains to say daily mass. His four
running footmen were superbly apparelled, and
he had also constantly in attendance a herald,
a physician, four minstrels, a tent-keeper, an
armourer, and other servants, and to every
officer, gentleman, or young lord in his court
he allowed two or three domestics.

Cavendish, Wolsey's faithful and loyal gentleman
usher, has left an elaborate account of the
Cardinal's appearance and state as he rode
daily to Westminster Hall or through Thames-
street to take boat and meet the King at
Greenwich. He would emerge from his privy
chamber at York House (afterwards Whitehall)
attired in the flowing splendour of scarlet
or crimson taffety, or damask, "a round pillion
on his head, with a noble of black velvet
on its inner side." Round his neck would
be a tippet of costly sables, and he held in his
hand an orange filled with a sponge dipped in
aromatic vinegar to smell at in the crowd, or
when he was pestered with importunate suitors.
Before him was always borne first the great
seal of England, and, secondly, the scarlet
Cardinal's hat, both carried by noblemen or
gentlemen, bareheaded. From his presence
chamber he set forth with two huge silver
crosses upraised before him, followed by two
men, carrying tall pillars of silver, and a
pursuivant-at-arms, carrying a large silver gilt
mace. The gentlemen ushers cried out, "On
my lords and masters, on before; make way
for my Lord's Grace!" And at the hall door
he mounted a mule trapped in crimson velvet
with gilt stirrups. His cross-bearers were
mounted upon horses trapped in red, and near
him always marched four footmen carrying gilt