Page:Dictionary of National Biography volume 62.djvu/347

Wolsey ring with his portrait in a ruby, but induced Anne Boleyn likewise to send him a token, and caused Dr. Butts and three other physicians to attend him constantly till he was well again. Against Candlemas 1530 the king sent him more furniture, plate, and hangings. On 7 Feb. he executed the conveyance of York Place, and on the 12th he received a general pardon. On the 14th the other possessions of his archbishopric were restored to him; but on the 17th he executed an indenture with the king resigning the bishopric of Winchester and the abbey of St. Albans in consideration of 6,374l. 3s. 7½d., only 3,000l. of which was given him in ready money, the rest being a valuation of the goods that had been delivered to him. After this resignation, however, the king found that he could not give valid grants of life pensions out of these benefices, and Cromwell got Wolsey to give what Cavendish calls a ‘confirmation’ of those grants—probably antedated grants by himself, of which drafts still remain.

Continuing at Esher, Wolsey had an attack of dropsy, and, requiring a drier air, the king allowed him to remove to Richmond. The lords, however, took alarm at his coming nearer London, and Norfolk sent him word by Cromwell that he should remove to York to attend to his diocese, promising him a pension of a thousand marks out of his bishopric of Winchester and abbacy of St. Albans. Early in Lent he prepared to go, but at first he only moved out of the lodge in Richmond Park to the Charter House there; when Norfolk, taking alarm, used such violent threats that he was compelled to begin his journey in Passion Week. He went by Hendon, the Rye House, and Royston to Peterborough, where he rested from Palm Sunday to Thursday in Easter week (10–21 April). Then, till Monday following, he was gladly received as a guest by Sir William Fitzwilliam of Milton, a few miles off, whence he went by Grantham and Newark to Southwell, and remained there during the summer. He found his palace at Southwell sadly out of repair, and had at first to be lodged at a prebendary's house till Whitsuntide; but he was then able to occupy the palace, and the country gentlemen resorted to him in great numbers. He kept open house in the hospitable style of the day, and did much to pacify discords in the country and in families, winning the hearts of many who had been prejudiced against him before.

Yet the mere costs of coming down to his diocese had consumed an advance of one thousand marks made him by the king out of his Winchester pension, and he had no prospect of receiving any of his rents before August. He appealed in vain for further aid, and his creditors were clamorous. He was compelled to borrow money of friends. Yet having to get workmen from London to repair his buildings, it was supposed at court that he was raising sumptuous edifices. On Corpus Christi eve (15 June), after he and his household had retired to bed, two messengers, Brereton and Wriothesley, came from the king and called him up to sign and seal some important document with which they again departed in the night to George Talbot, fourth earl of Shrewsbury [q. v.] It was the letter of the lords of England to the pope in favour of the king's divorce. Shortly after he was disquieted by a new process against him and inquisitions taken on the lands of his archbishopric; but he was assured both by the chief baron of the exchequer and by Cromwell that it was only a formality. He was more deeply grieved to learn in July that the king had determined to dissolve the two colleges he had been at so much pains to set up. He wrote to Cromwell, ‘with weeping tears,’ that the news had deprived him of sleep and appetite. The Ipswich college was entirely suppressed, and it had been intended to do the same with that at Oxford, but the buildings had already advanced so far that it would have cost more to suppress than to alter it, and so Christ Church has come down to us, an imperfect realisation of the cardinal's great aim.

At ‘the latter end of grease time’—in September—he removed from Southwell to Scrooby, some way further in the direction of York, evading various attentions that would have been paid him on his journey by the Earl of Shrewsbury and the country gentlemen, lest it should be said elsewhere that he was courting people's favour. He remained at Scrooby till after Michaelmas, officiating on Sundays in neighbouring churches and doing many deeds of charity. He then passed on to Cawood, twelve miles from York, holding confirmations by the way at St. Oswald's Abbey and near Ferrybridge, which, from the number of children, fatigued him not a little. At Cawood as at Scrooby he had to repair the castle buildings. He composed a dangerous dispute between Sir Richard Tempest and Brian Hastings. Finally he arranged to be installed at York on Monday, 7 Nov., with less than the pomp of his predecessors. But when the day appointed was known, the country gentlemen and the monasteries sent copious presents of fat beeves, mutton, wild fowl,