york00orns

WOLSEY.
manner All Souls and Magdalen. Fisher likewise
was the means of procuring the dissolution of certain
monasteries on the ground of the corruption of their
inmates, and their possessions were devoted by Margaret,
Countess of Richmond (as has been alreadymentioned),
to the endowment of the colleges and
professorships which she founded in the universities
of Oxford and Cambridge. It does not appear that
any particular feeling was evoked by these proceedings.
But Wolsey was dealing in a more wholesale
manner. The number suppressed at one blow
was rather startling, and an uneasy feeling was
awakened in the minds of many who had a sort of
prophetic instinct that it would be followed, at no
distant day, by other blows at the great monastic
institutions of the country. A remarkable indication
of this feeling is exhibited in a letter addressed to
Wolsey by Edmund Whalley, the Abbot of St. Mary's,
York, in which he remonstrates strongly against the
suppression of a small monastery in Suffolk which
belonged to that abbey. It betrays great alarm, and
if the little monastery might only be spared he offers
the sum of 300 marks sterling towards his Grace's
"speciall, honourable, and laudable purpose concerning
the erection and foundation of the said college
and schoole." 1
It was not long before the forebodings of far-sighted
men like the Abbot of St. Mary's were realized. The
suppression of these small monastic establishments
'
"Letters relating to Suppression of Monasteries" (Pub.
Camden Soc), p. 3.