And yet he might well be forgiven if he ventured on an unpopular
course in the belief that the event would justify him; and that, in uniting
with France to support the pope, he was not only consulting the true
interest of England, but was doing what England actually desired, although
blindly aiming at her object by other means. The French wars, however
traditionally popular, were fertile only in glory. The rivalry of the two
countries was a splendid folly, wasting the best blood of both countries
for an impracticable chimera; and though there was impatience of
ecclesiastical misrule, though there was jealousy of foreign interference,
and general irritation with the state of the church, yet the mass of the
people hated protestantism even worse than they hated the pope, the clergy,
and the consistory courts. They believed--and Wolsey was, perhaps, the only
leading member of the privy council, except Archbishop Warham, who was not
under the same delusion--that it was possible for a national church to
separate itself from the unity of 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.
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