This was in the spring (1529).  Nothing was done that summer, and in the autumn, the court, instead of reaching a decision, dissolved.  Campeggio, the Italian legate, returned to Italy, and Henry, to his disappointment and rage, received an order from Rome to carry the question to the Pope for settlement.

346.  Fall of Wolsey (1529).

Both the King and Anne Boleyn believed that Wolsey had played false with them.  They now resolved upon his destruction.  The Cardinal had a presentiment of his impending doom.  The French ambassador, who saw him at this juncture, said that his face had shrunk to half its size.  But his fortunes were destined to shrink even more than his face.

By a law of Richard II no representative of the Pope had any rightful authority in England[1] (S265).  Though the King had given his consent to Wolsey’s holding the office of legate, yet now that a contrary result to what he expected had been reached, he proceeded to prosecute him to the full extent of the law.

[1] Act of Praemunire.  See S243 and Summary of Constitutional History in the Appendix, p. xiii, S14, and p. xxxii.

It was an easy matter for him to crush the Cardinal.  Erasmus said of him, “He was feared by all, he was loved by few—­I may say by nobody.”  His arrogance and extravagant ostentation had excited the jealous hate of the nobility; his constant demands for money in behalf of the King set Parliament against him; and his exactions from the common people had, as the chronicle of the time tells us, made them weep, beg, and “speak cursedly.”

Wolsey bowed to the storm, and to save himself gave up everything; his riches, pomp, power, all vanished as suddenly as they had come.  It was Henry’s hand that stripped him, but it was Anne Boleyn who moved that hand.  Well might the humbled favorite say of her: 

“There was the weight that pulled me down.
... all my glories
In that one woman I have lost forever."[1]

[1] Shakespeare’s “Henry VIII,” Act III, scene ii.

Thus deprived of well-nigh everything but life, the Cardinal was permitted to go into retirement in the north; less than a twelve-month later he was arrested on a charge of high treason.  Through the irony of fate, the warrant was served by a former lover of Anne Boleyn’s, whom Wolsey, it is said, had separated from her in order that she might consummate her unhappy marriage with royalty.  On the way to London Wolsey fell mortally ill, and turned aside at Leicester to die in the abbey there, with the words: 

                        “...O, Father Abbot,
        An old man, broken with the storms of state,
        Is come to lay his weary bones among ye: 
        Give him a little earth for charity!"[2]

[2] Shakespeare’s “Henry VIII,” Act IV, scene ii.

347.  Appeal to the Universities.