The Early Life of Thomas Wolsey
458 July The Early Life of Thomas Wolsey Downloaded from UST below Ipswich, the Gipping, from which the town takes part J of its name, or Orwell as it is sometimes called, after having rolled through more than half its course in insignificant obscurity, rapidly broadens and deepens, and thence sweeps magnificently on till, narrowing a little and mingling its waters with those of the http://ehr.oxfordjournals.org/ Stour, it disappears in the North Sea. Strangely similar to this was the career of the greatest son of Ipswich, Thomas Wolsey. Of the first forty years of his life we know comparatively little, though they form almost two-thirds of his earthly existence. Then, to appear- ance quite suddenly, the stream of his life and fortune swiftly gains in breadth and depth, and flows on expanding its glassy surface to the golden sun of favour, sounding ' all the depths and shoals of honour,' till, with contracted course, at last it vanishes in at Georgetown University on July 24, 2015 the great sea of time. Owing precisely to its obscurity, the early period has a strong attraction for the Btudent of history. Wolsey's father, and Wolsey himself so long as he used his own surname, wrote it Wulcy. Originally it seems to have been a diminutive form of WvJf, and to have been spelt Wulfsi, si being the diminutive particle.1 The lupine derivation was still remembered in Wolsey's day, for Skelton speaks of the ' wolfs head' gaping above the crown, and puns in Latin upon the name marts lupus; while Tyndale girds at' this wily wolf and raging sea.' In early English times the name seems to have been a comparatively common one.
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