Many priests spent their time in hawking or hunting, in lounging at taverns, in the dissolute enjoyment of the world.  If, however, there were no longer saints among the clergy, there could still arise among them a remarkable man.  In Cardinal Wolsey the king found an adviser who was essentially a transition minister, holding a middle place between an English statesman and a Catholic of the old order.  Under Wolsey’s influence, Henry made war with Louis of France in the pope’s quarrel, entered the polemic lists with Luther, and persecuted the English Protestants.

Yet Wolsey could not blind himself to the true condition of the church, before which lay the alternative of ruin or amendment.  Therefore he familiarised Henry with sense that a reformation was inevitable.  Dreaming that it could be effected from within, by the church itself inspired with a wiser spirit, he himself fell the first victim of a convulsion which he had assisted to create, and which he attempted too late to stay.

Wolsey talked of reformation, but delayed its coming.  The monasteries grew worse and worse.  Favoured parish clergy held as many as eight benefices.  Bishops accumulated sees, and, unable to attend to all, attended to none.  Wolsey himself, the church reformer (so little did he really know what a reformation means), was at once Archbishop of York, Bishop of Winchester and of Durham, and Abbot of St. Albans.  Under such circumstances, we need not be surprised to find the clergy sunk low in the respect of the English people.

Fish’s famous pamphlet shows the spirit that was seething.  He spoke of what he had seen and knew.  The monks, he tells the king, “be they that have made a hundred thousand idle dissolute women in your realm.”  But Wolsey could interfere with neither bishops nor monks without a special dispensation from the pope.  A new trouble arose from the nation in the desire of Henry to divorce Catherine of Aragon, who had been his deceased brother’s wife, was six years older than himself, and was an obstacle to the establishment of the kingdom.  Her sons were dead, and she was beyond the period when more children could be expected.  Though descent in the female line was not formally denied, no queen regent had ever, in fact, sat upon the throne; nor was the claim distinctly admitted, or the claim of the House of York would have been unquestionable.  It was, therefore, with no little anxiety that the council of Henry VIII. perceived his male children, on whom their hopes were centred, either born dead, or dying one after another within a few days of their birth.

The line of the Princess Mary was precarious, for her health was weak from her childhood.  If she lived, her accession would be a temptation to insurrection; if she did not live, and the king had no other children, a civil war was inevitable.  The next heir in blood was James of Scotland, and gravely as statesmen desired the union of the two countries, in the existing mood of the people, the very stones in London streets, it was said, would rise up against a king of Scotland who entered England as sovereign.