As soon as Wolsey had obtained the lease, he pulled down the old manor-house, in which hitherto a prior and a few knights had been accommodated, and began erecting in a style of grandeur, heretofore unsurpassed in this country, a mansion of unparalleled magnificence. But who was this Wolsey? A most unmitigated villain, on a par with that other villain, Henry VIII., whose master, through being his pimp, he was for a time, till, in perfect accordance with his character, he became his abject whining slave. I am well aware that it is not usual to apply such a term as villain to a King or his chief adviser—courtly historians have flowery terms for the crimes of Kings by the ’grace of God,’ and holy ’Fathers-in-God,’ who misuse the powers foolish nations have entrusted them with to the vilest purposes—but the spirit of justice, which directs thinking and logical minds, rejects the flimsy arguments of sycophantic apologists; it will not have Nero whitewashed. Thomas Wolsey was born at Ipswich in March, 1471. He was the son of a butcher, who also possessed some land, and was sufficiently well off to send his son to the University of Oxford. In those days the chief and easiest avenue to distinction, office, and wealth was through the Church, and Thomas appears to have been an apt scholar, for at fourteen years of age he was Bachelor of Arts, and thence was called the Boy Bachelor. He soon after became Master of Arts, and had charge of the school adjoining Magdalen College, where he educated the three sons of Thomas Grey, Marquis of Dorset, who presented him in 1500 to the rectory of Lymington. This was indeed a rapid rise for the son of a butcher. But he had not long resided on his benefice when Sir Amias Paulet, a justice of the peace, set him in the stocks for being drunk and making a disturbance at a fair in the neighbourhood. Wolsey was mean enough to take a cruel revenge for this punishment, which, no doubt, he richly deserved, and which must at the time have been approved by the community, for it was no trifling thing in those days to set a rector in the stocks. When Wolsey was Lord Chancellor he sent for Sir Amias, and after a severe jobation confined him for six years in that part of the Temple which long passed for Henry VIII. and Wolsey’s palace, and afterwards was Nando’s, a famous coffee-house. Wolsey compelled Paulet to almost entirely rebuild the house. When Wolsey’s patron, the Marquis of Dorset, died, the former looked out for new means to push his fortunes, for his avarice was boundless. He accordingly got himself admitted into the family of Henry Dean, Archbishop of Canterbury; but that prelate dying in 1502, he found means of ingratiating himself with Sir John Nanfan, treasurer of Calais, who being weakened by age and other infirmities, committed the direction of his post to Wolsey, who by his recommendation was made one of the King’s chaplains, and in 1506 was