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.  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