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. All who owned it were clearly descended from the Teutonic people who, a thousand years before Wolsey's era, swarmed over to England from the mouths of the Weser and Elbe, and went to form the North-folk and South-folk. It was amongst those latter folk that there grew up the port of Ipswich. In the reign of Elizabeth it is spoken of as ' a place of considerable trade, very populous, adorned with fourteen churches and with large handsome houses,' * and, from all that can be learned,, that description was equally applicable in Wolsey's time. In fact, 1 Robert Ferguson, The Teutonic Name-System, 71. • Oough's Camden'a Britannia, ii 75. 1888 THE EARLY LIFE OF THOMAS WOLSEY 459 Suffolk was one of the wealthy eastern counties, having been, with Norfolk, from a very early date, ' the great and well-known centre of textile industry in England.' * Hence, without doubt, arose the trade and wealth of Ipswich. There during the reign of Edward IV, if not earlier, lived Eobert Wolsey and Joan his wife, the parents of the future cardinal. Ac- cording to tradition they resided ' in St. Nicholas street, on the left hand going down, at the left corner of a little avenue leading to the churchyard' of the church of St. Nicholas.4 The spot thus indi- cated is still easily identifiable, though it is now occupied by a wholly modern brick house. The commonly received opinion is that Eobert Wolsey was by trade a butcher. But the opinion rests Downloaded from on no proved foundation. The assertion was made and was never denied, that is all. It first appears in Skelton's ' Speak, Parrot!' published about 1521, and was repeated by him in his ' Why come ye not to Court ? ' It is found in a ballad to which Mr. Furnivall gives the date of 1522 or 1528,8 again in Roy's ' Bead me and be http://ehr.oxfordjournals.org/ not wroth,' and, as a matter of course, in Hall and Vergil. On the other hand Sebastian Giustinian, for four yearB Venetian ambassador to England, in his report made to the senate in 1519 simply says Wolsey was ' of low origin,' a statement repeated in other words by a successor of Giustinian's.6 Towards the end of 1515 a petition was presented to Henry VJJJ. by Wolsey's nephew in which Wolsey's father is spoken of as at Georgetown University on July 24, 2015 ' Bobert Wulcy, late of Sternfield by Farnham.'7 Sternfield is an agricultural village in Suffolk about twenty-four miles from Ipswich. The words of the petition prove Bobert Wolsey to have lived there, probably in the earlier portion of his life, a probability further strengthened by another statement in this same petition, namely that a daughter of his married a man from Sibton, which lies six miles from Sternfield. If Eobert Wolsey was a native of Sternfield, his occupation was almost certainly agricultural. The next point in the case is a very interesting one. Grove, who issued the first volume of his ' Life and TimeB of Cardinal Wolsey' in 1742, made two journeys to Ipswich in quest of information respecting Wolsey's- father, and he sums up all he was able to learn in these words: ' In fine, upon a new and strict inquiry, several gentlemen in Suffolk are of opinion that Wolsey's father was in truth a reputable grazier in the town of Ipswich, and not a butcher poor and as many have asserted.'8 This is all the more valuable since Grove was totally ignorant of the petition above quoted. If we keep in mind that Bogers, Hist, of Prices, i. 669 and iv. 18,19. dough's Camden's Brit, additions, ii. 76. Gough wrote in 1789. Ballads from MS8. i. 188. See also a sketch of Wolsey's life in Pocock, ii 89. Blown, Venetian Calendars, ii. p. 660, iv. p. 800. Brewer, Calendars of State Papers of Henry VIII. ii. 1868. Singer's Cavendish, L 4, note 2; Grove, i. 9. 460 THE EARLY LIFE OF THOMAS WOLSEY July wool was England's chief export, and that Suffolk was one of the two great textile manufacturing counties of England itself, we shall find strong cause to doubt the popular version of Robert Wolsey'B vocation. If he was a grazier, it is not difficult to imagine how he came to be termed a butcher. Both trades dealt with sheep and cattle, and it was easy for the heat and passion of the day to turn grazier into butcher, either by mistake or with the intention of making a point against the all-powerful favourite. The well-known words of Cavendish are that Wolsey was ' an honest poor man's son.' Of course 'poor' is an entirely relative word. DoubtlesB, Robert Wolsey was poor when his circumstances are compared with the height of splendour to which his son rose, Downloaded from but in poverty he certainly was not. He was connected with moneyed people, as is indicated by a privy seal of 21 Feb. 1510, by which Edmund Daundy of Ipswich was authorised to found a chantry in St. Lawrence's there to pray for the souls of, among others, his wife, Wolsey, and ' of Robert Wolsye and ^Toan his wife, father and http://ehr.oxfordjournals.org/ mother of the said Thomas Wolsy.' • This is proof that the Wolseys were related to the Daundys in some way or other. Daundy was a prominent rich and munificent freeman of Ipswich, who had been a member for the town.10 He had several daughters, who all mar- ried well," while his son William took to wife a daughter of Thomas Alford, another opulent and landed citizen of Ipswich." To be con- nected with wealthy folk is in itself some presumption of affluence; and so we find it in this case. Gough, after describing the tradi- at Georgetown University on July 24, 2015 tional residence of Robert Wolsey, previously quoted, adds : ' Other houses his property run up to Creighton the printer's '—run up, that is, from the house inhabited by Robert, which the ' other' demon- strates to have belonged to himself. The whole of this property is referred to in Robert's will as his ' lands and tenements in the parish of St. Nicholas in Ipswich aforesaid.' Nor was that all, for the same document specifies also ' free and bond lands in the parish of St. [Mary] Stoke,' lying opposite Ipswich on the other side of the Orwell.13 All this conclusively proves that Robert, so far from being in poverty, actually belonged to the better clasB of merchants. Robert and Joan had, to our knowledge, three BonsM and a daughter. Of the sons Thomas would appear to have been the eldest. The date to which hitherto, on the authority of Fiddes, his • Brewer, i. 897. " Beauties of England and Wales, xiv. 267. " Stiff. Traveller for 1764, p. 87, quoted in Oeni. Mag. for 1807, p. 1203, note. The issue of one of them was wife to Lord Keeper Nicholas Bacon—his first, I should say. 11 John Wodderspoon, Memorials of Ipswich, 286, 348-60. 11 Singer's Cavendish, i. 244, 245, copied from Fiddes. Robert directs his body to be buried at Newmarket, on injunction the execution of which would cost a sum not likely to be incurred by one of slender fortune. 14 Brown, ii. p. 660. Cp. also Brewer, iv. p. 2767 and Nos. 6182, 6348. 1888 THE EARLY LIFE OF THOMAS WOLSEY 461 birth has been assigned is March 1471. This date supports or con- firms Cavendish's story of Wolsey washing fifty-nine poor men's- feet on Maundy Thursday, 1580, an occasion on which it was cus- tomary for the ablutionist to wash one person for every year of his age. Yet explicit as these statements seem, contemporary evidence is against them.