vigorous measures in hand for the pruning away of the abuses of the church. It is significant that his great college at Oxford--"Cardinal's College" as he designed to call it, "Christ Church" as it is named to-day--was endowed with the revenues of some score of small monasteries which he had suppressed on the ground that they were useless or ill-conducted. His master turned the lesson to account a few years later; but Henry's wholesale destruction of religious houses was carried out not in the interests of learning, but mainly in those of the royal exchequer. (C. W. C. O.) VII. THE REFORMATION AND THE AGE OF ELIZABETH (1528-1603) Fall of Wolsey. Wolsey did not fall through any opposition to reform; nor was he opposed to the idea of a divorce. Indeed, both in France and Spain he was credited with the authorship of the project. But he differed from Henry on the question of Catherine's successor. Wolsey desired a French marriage to consummate the breach upon which he was now bent with the emperor; and war, in fact, was precipitated with Spain in 1528. This is said to have been done without Henry's consent; he certainly wished to avoid war with Charles V., and peace was made after six months of passive hostility. Nor did Henry want a French princess; his affections were fixed for the time on Anne Boleyn, and she was the hope of the anti-clerical party. The crisis was brought to a head by the failure of Wolsey's plan to obtain a divorce. Originally it had been suggested that the ecclesiastical courts in England were competent without recourse to Rome. Wolsey deprecated this procedure, and application was made to Clement VII. Wolsey relied upon his French and Italian allies to exert the necessary powers of persuasion; and in 1528 a French army crossed the Alps, marched through Italy and threatened to drive Charles V. out of Naples. Clement was in a position to listen to Henry's prayer; and Campeggio was commissioned with Wolsey to hear the suit and grant the divorce. Question of the divorce.