Henry and Woolsey did not pursue war against the new French king but used all diplomatic means to thwart him, including offering of financial aid to any power who would oppose him. By the time of this "cold war" of 1515 Woolsey was bishop or archbishop of any number of communities, with additional income internationally from various Spanish, French, and Imperial agreements so that he was becoming very wealthy. Some considered him "ipse rex" - the king himself. Having close ties with Venice commercially, the English king and the cardinal soon tried to woo that Italian city away from their French alliance, but were unsuccessful until 1523.
Undoubtedly most of us tend to associate Henry VIII only with obesity, gluttony and beheading of enemies and wives, but actually in his younger years he was apparently a capable, bright, ambitious but well liked man. He was determined to make England the greatest artistic and literary center of Europe. Among the English intellectuals was Thomas More, the lawyer that we also mentioned in the last chapter. Initially one of the great humanists, More soon became a close friend of Erasmus of the Netherlands, who had made many visits to England. In addition to their humanist views they had in common the study of Greek and both wrote copiously in Latin and Greek. More's book
Utopia
The full name was The Best State of a Commonwealth and the New Island of Utopia. "Utopia" was coined from the Greek word for "nowhere". (Ref.
291 )
, written in Latin, developed a most unusual hypothetical community, which has given its name as a new word in most languages. Partly as a result of his reputation from this book and for his success in some diplomatic activities in Flanders, he was soon invited to join the king's government. It was thus that Henry VIII, Cardinal Woolsey and Thomas More all eventually were joined together in the control and manipulation of England.
The extent of the pomp and ceremony of governments and royalty in the 16th century is not easily pictured today. In 1520, when Henry VIII crossed to Calais on another trip to confer near there with Emperor Charles V, he was accompanied by a retinue of 3,990 persons and 2,087 horses, while 1,175 persons and 778 horses accompanied his Queen Catherine
Catherine of Aragon was the daughter of King Ferdinand and Queen Isabella
. All of the accompanying officials had dozens of servants and/or knights, while the Lord Legate
By this time Cardinal Woolsey was also the Papal Legate to England
, the Cardinal of York, Woolsey, had 300 servants. Initially all of these individuals professed the Catholic faith and suppressed Lutheranism, including the burning of the heretics' books and a few of the heretics themselves. Henry, the king, even wrote a book, The Assertion of the Seven Sacraments
Although the authorship of this has been debated in the past, it is now pretty generally acknowledged that the king did write it. (Ref.
291 )
. No subject in Europe could even approach the power, wealth and status of Thomas Woolsey. He lived at Hampton Court with its 280 rooms and a staff of 500 servants, although this was only one of several of his palaces. It was this man who was involved in the unscrupulous diplomatic maneuvers which pushed Charles V and Francois I into a major, western European war-which raged, with only brief intervals, for nearly 40 years at a time when Christendom was threatened internally by Lutheran heresy and externally by the Turks in Hungary. Through the first 25 years of the century, Woolsey kept promising the emperor and the Spanish that he would invade and conquer France, but this never actually materialized in any degree and at the same time Woolsey kept up secret negotiations with France. In this period there were several papal deaths and each time Woolsey tried to conjure, buy or blackmail himself into the papacy, but he always failed. Henry's only living offspring, his daughter Mary, was used in much international bargaining and intrigue - at one time offered to Charles V in marriage and other times to Francois I of France. While supporting the church, Cardinal Woolsey at the same time managed to get papal dispensation to confiscate any number of monasteries and nunneries to use the proceeds for constructions of 2 colleges of his founding
One of these persists today at Oxford as Christ Church
