Page:Dictionary of National Biography volume 62.djvu/348

 and venison to grace the occasion, no one dreaming of what was about to happen.

On Friday, the 4th, as he was finishing his dinner at Cawood, the Earl of Northumberland and Walter Walsh, a gentleman of the privy chamber, suddenly arrived with a company of gentlemen, and demanded the keys of the castle, which the porter refused to give up, but they swore him to keep it for them as the king's commissioners. When their entry was perceived, Wolsey, still unconscious of what had taken place outside, embraced the earl and offered him hospitality, regretting that he had had no notice of his coming. He then took him to his bedchamber, where the earl, trembling, laid his hand upon his arm, and said in a faint voice, ‘My lord, I arrest you of high treason.’ At the same time Walsh, who, wearing a hood for disguise, had hitherto escaped notice, arrested at the portal Wolsey's Italian physician, Dr. Augustine, driving him in with the words: ‘Go in, traitor, or I shall make thee.’ Augustine was indeed a traitor, not to the king but to Wolsey, and the action was prearranged. The earl had refused to show Wolsey a warrant for his arrest, and Walsh said their instructions were secret; but Wolsey surrendered to Walsh as being a gentleman of the privy chamber. Then the earl and Walsh, with the abbot of St. Mary's beside York, took an inventory, which still exists, of Wolsey's goods at Cawood.

There is distinct evidence that Dr. Augustine had been bribed by Norfolk to betray an important secret about Wolsey; and we know both the fact which he had to reveal and the lies with which he augmented it. The fact was that Wolsey at the time of his fall had in his despair sought through the French ambassador to get Francis to write to Henry in his favour. But to this Augustine shamefully added that the cardinal had urged the pope to excommunicate the king if he did not put away Anne Boleyn, hoping by this to cause an insurrection by which he would recover power. To conceal from Wolsey the fact that he had informed against him, Augustine was carried away prisoner tied under a horse's belly. But when he reached London he lived like a prince in Norfolk's house, while his master was carried southwards in custody. Crowds of people at Cawood, when Wolsey's arrest was known, ran after him with curses on his enemies; but he was taken, first to Pomfret, then to Doncaster, then to Sheffield Park, where he was treated kindly as a guest by the Earl of Shrewsbury. Here he was allowed to remain a fortnight, and he begged the earl, who always tried to keep up his spirits, to write to the king that he might be brought face to face with his accusers—a degree of justice that he did not expect. One day the earl told Cavendish that he had got an answer from the king, showing that Henry had still a good opinion of him, and he begged Cavendish to communicate it discreetly, for the messenger was Sir William Kingston, constable of the Tower. The news brought on a severe attack of dysentery, and no kindly sophistries would comfort him. ‘I know,’ he said, ‘what is provided for me; notwithstanding I thank you for your good will and pains.’ His journey had to be deferred one day longer in consequence of his extreme weakness. Kingston then brought him to another place of Shrewsbury's, Hardwick Hall, near Newstead—not the Derbyshire Hardwick, which came to the family later—next day to Nottingham, and the following day to Leicester Abbey. His illness had increased upon the journey, so that at times he was near falling off his mule; and he said to the abbot, ‘I am come to leave my bones among you.’ He had been admitted a brother of that monastery some years before.

He at once took to his chamber. It was a Saturday night (26 Nov.) On the Monday morning (the 28th) he seemed drawing fast to his end. Yet even now a message came from the king about a sum of 1,500l. lately received by him, of which an entry had been found in a book at Cawood. It was money that he had borrowed to pay his servants and to bury him; but if the king would have it, he hoped he would pay his debts, and he gave the names of his creditors, promising to show where it was next day. He was very ill that night, but in the early morning of the 29th desired some food, and was given a ‘cullis’ made of chicken, though it was a fasting day—St. Andrew's eve, as he himself observed after taking it. He was then confessed, and spoke of his ailments as coming to a crisis. Sir William Kingston told him he made himself worse by one vain fear—meaning, of course, lest he should be brought to the block; but he was not to be consoled. ‘Master Kingston,’ he said, ‘I see the matter against me how it is framed; but if I had served God as diligently as I have done the king, He would not have given me over in my grey hairs.’ That morning he passed away at eight o'clock, an hour at which, according to Cavendish, he had expected to die the day before.

The mayor and aldermen of Leicester were sent for, and the body, after lying in state