equal in our money to £285,000. When he exchanged Durham for Winchester, he asked that the see which he vacated should be transferred to his son, a youth then studying at Paris. Mr. Brewer will not admit a doubt as to Wolsey's integrity. If we remember rightly, he nowhere mentions the proposed transfer of the great see of Durham. He is almost unwilling to believe that Wolsey had a son. That he had a daughter Mr. Brewer does not dispute. But he thinks that such transgressions did not necessarily involve any greater impropriety than the marriage of an English clergyman at the present day.[1] This view of the age of the Reformation leaves a great feature in its history unexplained. No influence then at work contributed more than the private lives of ecclesiastics such as Wolsey to undermine Catholicism, and to incline men towards a Church which renounced the hazards of an enforced celibacy. We would undertake, if necessary, to justify our words by proof which Mr. Brewer will accept, by the writings of the most eminent and the most impartial men of the sixteenth century, by the decrees of twenty synods, by the constitutions of York itself.
Mr. Brewer's abounding charity defends the Cardinal as a persecutor. Wolsey had caused Protestants to be burnt in the day of his power, and in the last hour of his life, when his speech faltered and his eyes grew dim, he uttered an exhortation that Henry would not spare the Lutherans, because they would prove a danger to the State. Yet even that appalling vision of the dying Prelate, who, having clothed himself in sackcloth, and made his peace with God, gathered his last breath to fan the flames of Smithfield, has no terrors for Mr. Brewer. No man, he says, was less disposed to persecute ; and he excuses him by the examples of his age, and by the greater cruelty of More.
- ↑ "Here, as in other Catholic countries at the present day, or at least until recently, the marriage of the parochial clergy had to be tolerated more generally than is supposed. . . . In many instances such offences involved no greater transgression of the moral law than . . . such marriages, for instance, as are now contracted by the English prelates and clergy" (pp. 639, 640).
