Page:Dictionary of National Biography volume 62.djvu/332

 Here he gave some offence to a neighbouring gentleman, Sir Amias Paulet (d. 1538) [q. v.], who, according to Cavendish, set him in the stocks—an indignity for which Wolsey called him, in after years, to severe account. Even then he had good friends besides Dorset, who died in September 1501; for on 3 Nov. of that year he obtained a dispensation from the pope to hold two incompatible benefices along with Limington, and the archbishop of Canterbury, Henry Deane [q. v.], about the same time appointed him one of his domestic chaplains. The archbishop, however, died in February 1503, and Wolsey next became chaplain to Sir Richard Nanfan [q. v.], deputy of Calais, who apparently entrusted to him the entire charge of his money affairs, and commended him to the service of Henry VII.

Wolsey accordingly about 1507, when Nanfan died, became the king's chaplain, and grew intimate with the most powerful men at court, especially with Richard Foxe [q. v.], bishop of Winchester, and Sir Thomas Lovell [q. v.], who remained his lifelong friends. On 8 June 1506 he had been instituted to the parish church of Redgrave in Suffolk, on the presentation of the abbot of Bury St. Edmund's. In the spring of 1508 he was sent to Scotland by the king to prevent a rupture which James seemed almost anxious to provoke. On 31 July the pope gave him a bull permitting him to hold the vicarage of Lydd and two other benefices along with Limington. He must have been presented to Lydd by the abbot of Tintern, and he is said to have raised at his own expense the height of the church tower there. To this year also probably belongs the marvellous story told from memory by Cavendish, as reported to him by Wolsey himself, of his having been despatched by the king as a special envoy to Maximilian the emperor, then in Flanders, not far from Calais, and, getting an immediate answer, of his having performed the double journey and double crossing of the Channel with such extraordinary celerity that he arrived again at Richmond on the evening of the third day after his despatch, and next morning incurred at first an undue reproof from the king, who thought he had not yet started. The affair seems to have taken place at the beginning of August, but he could not have visited the emperor then. The matter, we know, related to the king's intended marriage to Margaret of Savoy, about which Wolsey was certainly in the Low Countries again later in the year.

Henry VII, however, died in April following; but before his death, on 2 Feb. 1509, he had made Wolsey dean of Lincoln. Six days later he obtained also the prebend of Welton Brinkhall in that cathedral, which on 3 May he exchanged for that of Stow Longa. He was installed as dean by proxy on 25 March. Henry VIII at once made him almoner, and on 8 Nov. 1509 granted him all the goods of felones de se and all deodands in England, in augmentation of the royal alms. On 9 Oct. he had a grant of the parsonage of St. Bride's in Fleet Street, of which Sir Richard Empson [q. v.] had taken a long lease from the abbot of Westminster; but the patent seems to have been invalid, and was renewed in a more effectual form on 30 Jan. 1510. On 21 Feb. following one Edmund Daundy of Ipswich obtained a license to found a chantry there, with masses for the souls of Wolsey's father and mother. On 24 April Wolsey, being then M.A., supplicated for the degrees of B.D. and D.D. at Oxford (, Register of the University, i. 67, 296). On 5 July he obtained the prebend of Pratum Minus in Hereford Cathedral, and on 27 Nov. he was presented to the parish church of Torrington in Devonshire, which he held till he became a bishop. On 17 Feb. 1511 he was made a canon of Windsor, and was a few months after elected by the knights of the Garter as their registrar. In the latter part of the same year his signature appears for the first time in documents signed by privy councillors, and it is to be remarked that he always spells his own surname ‘Wulcy.’

We then trace his hand for the first time in public affairs under the new reign; for the plan of operations against France in 1512 was clearly due to him. England, besides attacking the northern coast of that country, sent that unfortunate expedition to Spain under Thomas Grey, second marquis of Dorset [q. v.], which was so ill supported by Ferdinand, and came home in defiance of orders. The mutineers seem to have been encouraged by a knowledge of Wolsey's unpopularity at home; for the special confidence shown in ‘Mr. Almoner’ was very distasteful to the old nobility. A letter of 7 Aug. 1512 from Lord Darcy at Berwick shows that some important intelligence from spies at Berwick was communicated to Wolsey alone of all the council; and in September, when Thomas Howard, first earl of Surrey (afterwards Duke of Norfolk) [q. v.], had retired from court under a cloud, Wolsey ventured to suggest to Bishop Foxe that he might as well be kept out of it henceforth altogether. The king relied on Wolsey to devise new expeditions to wipe out a national disgrace, and he not only drew up estimates of the nature, amount, and expenses of the armaments required, but was busy for months pro-