Christendom, and at the same time to
crush or prevent innovation of doctrine; that faith in the sacramental
system could still be maintained, though the priesthood by whom those
mysteries were dispensed should minister in gilded chains. This was the
English historical theory handed down from William Rufus, the second Henry,
and the Edwards; yet it was and is a mere phantasm, a thing of words and
paper fictions, as Wolsey saw it to be. Wolsey knew well that an
ecclesiastical revolt implied, as a certainty, innovation of doctrine; that
plain men could not and would not continue to reverence the office of the
priesthood, when the priests were treated as the paid officials of an
earthly authority higher than their own. He was not to be blamed if he took
the people at their word; if he believed that, in their doctrinal
conservatism, they knew and meant what they were saying: and the reaction
which took place under Queen Mary, when the Anglican system had been tried
and failed, and the alternative was seen to be absolute between a union
with Rome or a forfeiture of catholic orthodoxy, prove after all that he
was wiser than in the immediate event he seemed to be; that if his policy
had succeeded, and if, strengthened by success, he had introduced into the
church those reforms which he had promised and desired,[130] he would have
satisfied the substantial wishes of the majority of the nation.

Like other men of genius, Wolsey also combined practical sagacity with an
unmeasured power of hoping. As difficulties gathered round him, he
encountered them with the increasing magnificence of his schemes; and after
thirty years' experience of public life, he was as sanguine as a boy. Armed
with this little lever of the divorce, he saw himself, in imagination, the
rebuilder of the catholic faith and the deliverer of Europe. The king being
remarried, and the succession settled, he would purge the Church of
England, and convert the monasteries into intellectual garrisons of pious
and learned men, occupying the land from end to end. The feuds with France
should cease for ever, and, united in a holy cause, the two countries
should restore the papacy, put down the German heresies, depose the
emperor, and establish in his place some faithful servant of the church.
Then Europe once more at peace, the hordes of the Crescent, which were
threatening to settle the quarrels of Christians in the West as they had
settled them in the East--by the extinc