King’s desire to obtain a divorce from Catherine of Aragon; but when he found that the King wanted to marry Anne Boleyn, he disapproved of the divorce, as he feared that Anne’s relatives might endanger his position at Court. In obedience to the King’s orders, he indeed for some time urged on the suit, but grew less zealous when he found that the Pope himself, out of consideration for the Emperor, was against the divorce. Henry VIII. looked upon the delay as due to the intrigues of Wolsey, in which opinion he was strengthened by Anne Boleyn, who had a special reason to hate him, for it was through him that her marriage with young Lord Percy, a member of Wolsey’s establishment, one of the many scions of the nobility who were placed under the guidance of the Cardinal, had been broken off. When Anne, who had been dismissed the Court, after her recall found it necessary to augment her rising influence over the King to dissemble, and therefore treated Wolsey with the greatest outward respect, she secretly took every opportunity to foster the dislike Henry had taken to him, and it was her underhand influence which hastened his downfall, and not reasons of statecraft, as ’philosophical’ historians would have us believe. Long before the catastrophe Wolsey, who had not failed to notice that the brutal tyrant’s favourable sentiments towards his minion were on the wane, had tried to conciliate the King by presenting Hampton Court to him in 1526; but the gift had not been one of love, but of fear and despair, and the chief cause of the surrender, according to tradition, was the following: The King’s fool was paying a visit to the Cardinal’s fool—for both the King and the Cardinal were such fools themselves as to find pleasure in the gabbling of professional fools—and the couple went down into the wine vaults. For fun one of them stuck a dagger into the top of a cask, and, to his surprise, touched something that gave a metallic sound. The fools thereupon set to work, got the head of the cask out, and found it to be full of gold pieces. Other casks, by the sound, indicated that they held wine. The King’s fool stored up the fact in his memory, and one day when the King was boasting about his wine, the fool said, ’You have not such wine as my Lord Cardinal, for he has casks in his cellar worth a thousand broad pieces each;’ and then he told what he had discovered. Whether this be true or not, it is certain that Wolsey was awake to the fact that he was losing his power over the King, and so he threw him the magnificent sop of his palace, which, however, did not save him; the King was determined to be rid of him. In October, 1529, the Great Seal was demanded of him, his palace at Whitehall and all his goods were seized for the King’s use, and he was ordered to retire to his palace at Esher. The King, indeed, promised Wolsey his protection, and that he should continue to hold the bishoprics of York and Winchester.