The English army experienced whatever of pleasure there may be in a panic, or rather in a pair of panics, at the grand Battle of Fontenoy, (May 11, 1745), on which field they were so unutterably thrashed by the French and the Irish. In the first part of the action, the Allies were successful, when suddenly the Dutch troops fell into a panic, and fled as fast as it is ever given to Dutchmen to fly. There is nothing so contagious as panic terror, and the rest of the army, exposed as it was to a tremendous fire, soon caught the disease, and was giving way under it, when their commander, the Duke of Cumberland, who was well seconded by his officers, succeeded in rallying them. They renewed the combat, and their enemy became so alarmed in their turn that even the French King, and his son the Dauphin, were in danger of being swept away in the rout. Again there came a turn in the battle, and, mostly because of the daring and dash of the famous Irish Brigade, the Allies were beaten and forced to retreat.

Panic terror was no uncommon thing during the Reign of Terror in France, in the armies of the French Republic. The early efforts of the French Republicans in the field sometimes failed because of panics occurring in their armies; and they were not unknown to any of the armies that took part in the long series of wars that began in 1792 and lasted, with brief intervals of peace, down to the summer of 1815. At Marengo, both armies suffered from panics. As early as ten o'clock in the forenoon, a portion of Victor's corps retired in disorder, crying out, "All is lost!" There were, in fact, three Battles of Marengo, the Austrians winning the first and second, and losing the third, which was losing all, war not exactly resembling whist. When Desaix said, at three o'clock in the afternoon, that the battle was lost, but there was time enough to win another, he spoke the truth, and like a good soldier. The new movements that followed his arrival and advice caused surprise to the Austrians, and surprise soon passed into panic. The panic extended to a portion of the cavalry, no one has ever been able to say why; and it galloped off the field toward the Bormida, shouting, "To the bridges!" The panic then reached to men of all arms, and cavalry, artillery, and infantry were soon crowded together on the banks of the stream which they had crossed in high hopes but a few hours before. The artillery sought to cross by a ford, but failed, and the French made prisoners, and seized guns, horses, baggage, and all the rest of the trophies of victory. Thus a battle which confirmed the Consular govern

for the creation of the French Empire, and which settled the fate of Europe for years, was decided by the panic cries of a few horse soldiers. The Austrian cavalry has long and justly been reputed second to no other in the world, and in 1800 it was a veteran body, and had been steadily engaged in war, with small interruption, for eight years; but neither its experience, nor its valour, nor regard for the character which it had to maintain, could save it from the common lot of armies. It became terrified, and senselessly fled, and its evil example was swiftly communicated to the other troops: for there is nothing so contagious as a panic, every man that runs thinking, that, while he is himself ignorant of the existence of any peculiar danger, all the others must know of it, and are acting upon their knowledge. That Austrian panic made the conqueror master of Italy, and with France and Italy at his command he could aspire to the dominion of Europe. The man who began the panic at Marengo really opened the way to Vienna to the legions of France, and to Berlin, and (but that brought compensation) to Moscow also.

There were panics in most of the great battles of the French Empire, or those battles were followed by panics. At Austerlitz the Austrians suffered from them; and though the Russian soldiers are among the steadiest of men, and keep up discipline under very extraordinary difficulties, they fared no better than their associates on that terrible field. They had more than one panic, and the confusion was prodigious. It was while flying in terror, that the dense, yet disorderly crowds sought to escape over some ponds, the ice of which broke and two thousand of them were ingulfed. One of their generals, writing of that day, said, "I had previously seen some lost battles, but I had no conception of such a defeat." Jena was followed by panics which extended throughout the army and over the monarchy, so that the Prussian army and the Prussian kingdom disappeared in a month, though Napoleon had anticipated a long, difficult, and doubtful contest with so renowned a military organization as that which had been created by the immortal Frederick; and he had remarked, at the beginning of the war, that there would be much use for the spade in the course of it. In the Austrian campaign of 1809, there was the beginning of a panic that might have produced serious consequences. The Archduke John was at the head of an Austrian army which was expected to take part in the Battle of Wagram ; but it was not until after that battle had been gained by the French that that prince arrived near the Marchfeld, in the rear of the victors. A panic broke out among the persons who saw the heads of his columns, camp-followers, vivandières, long lines of soldiers bearing off wounded men, and others. The young soldiers, who were exhausted by their labours and the heat, were conspicuous among the runaways, and there was a general race to "the banks of the

dark-rolling Danube." Nay, it is said that the panic was taken up on the other side of the river, and that quite a number of individuals did not stop till they had reached Vienna. Terror prevailed, and the confusion was fast spreading, when Napoleon, who had been roused from an attempt to obtain some rest under a shelter formed of drums, fit materials for a house for him, arrived on the scene. In reply to his questions, Charles Lebrun, one of his officers, answered, "It is nothing, Sire, merely a few marauders." "What do you call nothing?" exclaimed the Emperor. "Know, sir, that there are no trifling events in war: nothing endangers an army like an imprudent security. Return and see what is the matter, and come back_quickly and render me an account." The Emperor succeeded in restoring order, but not without difficulty, and the Archduke withdrew his forces without molestation. The circumstances of the panic show, that, if he had arrived at his intended place a few hours earlier, the French would have been beaten, and probably the French Empire have fallen at Vienna in 1809, instead of falling at Paris in 1814; and then the House of Austria would have achieved one of those extraordinary triumphs over its most powerful enemies that are so common in its extraordinary history. The incident bears some resemblance to the singular panic that happened the day after the Battle of Solferino, and which was brought on by the appearance of a few Austrian hussars, who came out of their hiding place to surrender, many thousand men running for miles, and showing that the most successful army of modern days could be converted into a mob by-nothing.

Seldom has the world seen such a panic as followed the Battle of Vittoria, in which Wellington dealt the French Empire the deadly blow under which it reeled and fell; for, if that battle had not been fought and won, the Allies | would probably have made peace with Napoleon, following up the armistice into which they had already entered with him; but Vittoria encouraged them to hope for victory, and not in vain. The French King of Spain there lost his crown and his carriage; the Marshal of France commanding lost his bâton, and the honourable fame which he had won nineteen years before at Fleurus; and the French army lost its artillery, all but one piece, and, what was of more consequence, its honour.

It was

the completest rout ever seen in that age of routs and balls. And yet the defeated army was a veteran army, and most of its officers were men whose skill was as little to be doubted as their bravery.

There were panics at Waterloo, not a few; and, what is remarkable, they happened principally on the side of the victors, the French suffering nothing from them till after the battle was lost, when the pressure of circumstances threw their beaten army into much confusion, and it was not possible that it should be other wise. Bylandt's Dutch-Belgian brigade ran

away from the French about two o'clock in the afternoon, and swept others with them in their rush, much to the rage of the British, some of whom hissed, hooted, and cursed, forgetting that quite as discreditable incidents had occurred in the course of the military history of their own country. One portion of the British troops that desired to fire upon those exhibitors of "Dutch courage" actually belonged to the most conspicuous of the regiments that ran away at Falkirk; seventy years before. At a later hour Trip's Dutch-Belgian cavalry-brigade ran away in such haste and disorder that some squadrons of German hussars experienced great difficulty in maintaining their ground against the dense crowd of fugitives. The Cumberland regiment of Hanoverian hussars was deliberately taken out of the field by its colonel when the shot began to fall about it, and neither orders nor entreaties nor arguments nor execrations could induce it to form under fire. Nay, it refused to form across the high-road, out of fire, but "went altogether to the rear, spreading alarm and confusion all the way to Brussels." Nothing but the coming up of the cavalrybrigades of Vivian and Vandeleur, at a late hour, prevented large numbers of Wellington's infantry from leaving the field. The troops of Nassau fell "back en masse against the horses' heads of the Tenth Hussars, who, keeping their files closed, prevented further retreat." The Tenth belonged to Vivian's command. D'Aubremé's Dutch-Belgian infantry-brigade was prevented from running off when the Imperial Guard began the'r charge, only because Vandeleur's cavalry-brigade was in their rear, with even the squadron-intervals closed, so that they had to elect between the French bayonet and the English sabre. There was something resembling a temporary panic among Maitland's British Guards, after the repulse of the first column of the Imperial Guard, but order was very promptly restored. It is impossible to read any extended account of the Battle of Waterloo without seeing that it was a desperate business on the part of the Allies, and that, if the Prussians could have been kept out of the action, their English friends would have had an excellent chance to keep the field—as the killed and wounded. Wellington never had the ghost of a chance without the aid of Bülow, Zieten, and Blücher.

It would be no difficult task to add a hundred instances to those we have inentioned of the occurrence of panics in European armies; but it is not necessary to pursue the subject further. Nothing is better known than that almost every eminent commander has suffered from panic terror having taken control of the minds of his inen. It is characteristic of a panic that its occurrence cannot be accounted for; and therefore it was that the ancients attributed it to the direct interposition of a god, as arising from some cause quite beyond human comprehension. If panics could be clearly explained, some device might be hit upon, per

T

Thomas Wolsey was born in 1471. The era was propitious for the development of his genius. The battles of York and Lancaster; the terrible hatreds of those rival houses; the blow aimed at legitimacy in the murder of the infant princes in the Tower; the usurpation of Richard; the revolt of his disaffected nobles; the battle of Bosworth-field; and finally, the ascension of the throne by Henry the Seventh, had racked England to its centre. The best blood of the nation had been spilled on the battle-field or the scaffold. All the instruments of vindictive and unscrupulous power had been employed by the successful aspirants to crush or exterminate their rivals. Learning, the arts, manufacture, mechanism, commerce had suffered; religion had, in a measure, lost its hold upon the people; the bonds of family and social affection had been shattered; chivalry had almost waned, and the links of a common interest, loyalty, religion, nationality, that bind together a people in the pursuits of life, were snapping asunder beneath the blows of internecine war and the sudden changes of government. It was at such a period that Henry the Seventh ascended the English throne. It was at such a period that Cæsar became master of Rome, Alexander of Greece, Cromwell of England, and Napoleon of France. Henry the Seventh also, like these arbiters of mankind, had his work-though less brilliant in history than theirs, still serviceable and important-to perform. The task of regenerating the English character was before him of putting together the elements of its disjointed nationality. He lacked the genius to achieve a complete success, and it was reserved for Wolsey to advance the neglected interests of religion, of learning, of commerce and of law, and to confer upon England a substantial power and influence, as the arbiter of European difficulties. It is Wolsey, then, as one who promoted the material and intellectual interests of his race, of whom we wish to write. We therefore expend no time in discussing the probabilities of his mean or noble birth. Whether he was the son of a butcher or a gentleman, matters little to those who wish to contemplate the splendour of his character, the grandeur of his designs, the purity of his motives, or the manner of his death. It matters not what were the ancestries of those men whose fame depends merely upon their own stern exertions for place, power, and fame. We delight to honour them because they were great: not from the adventitious circumstance of birth; but from labour, from hard blows given and received in the conflict of life, from heroism on the battle-field, from piety in the church, from devotion to the wants of humanity, whether

suffering in poverty, groping blindly in ignorance, or wandering in the dark shadows of heathenism. The poet, the soldier, the philosopher, the statesman, the saint, is great of himself, from intrinsic merit, not from the circumstances that may have surrounded his birth. It is Thomas Wolsey, then, the great Cardinal, the distinctive English mind of his age, the man who left his mark broad and deep upon English character, not Thomas Wolsey born gentleman or butcher, whose life we wish to follow.

We omit to notice particularly the education of Wolsey, and his early efforts as a student. That they were arduous, the whole tenor of his career demonstrates. From what we know, however, of his earlier and undistinguished life, we may infer that there was little of the ascetic in his disposition. While vicar at Lymington, his impetuous temper led him into a riot, the result of which was the stocks. Is there not at least one point of similarity between the great Cardinal and Friar Tuck?

Wolsey first came under royal notice as chaplain of Henry the Seventh. This position he obtained through Sir Richard Nanfau, whom he had served at Calais. While occupying this office, he more than once recommended himself to his royal master by the prompt discharge of duties intrusted to his care. The King's appreciation of his chaplain was such, that Wolsey obtained the deanery of Lincoln, and other offices of honour and emolument.

On the 22nd of April, 1509, Henry the Seventh died. In many respects he was a remarkable man. He exhibited in glaring contrast the qualities of greatness and meanness. Personally brave, he had none of the chivalric sentiments of the soldier. With strong common-sense, he yet developed an avarice so overpowering as to blunt not only the nice perceptions of honour, but even the ordinary dictates of justice. The sufferings of Richmond's youth had not taught the mature years of Henry the great Christian lessons of mercy or forbearance. The death of Henry was hailed with almost as much joy as that of his predecessor Richard.

as a

His son and successor, Henry the Eighth, was personally popular. His character man and a sovereign has been a prolific theme of discussion among historical writers; but none who merit the regard of earnest inquirers have attempted to conceal or excuse those vices with which in this present essay we have most to do, and to which we shall presently advert. Upon his ascension of the throne he arraigned and punished the abettors of his

father's tyrannical avarice. But there is no mention of his having depleted the bursting coffers of the old king in such acts of restitution as would have shielded the memory of his father from obloquy and disgrace. Their golden treasure opened a vista of never-ending pleasure to the son, which overcame the stern demands of justice and the dictates of filial piety.

Wolsey at this time was thirty-eight years of age, Dean of Lincoln and almoner to the King. He had shared the youthful pleasures of his master, but while participating in his dissipations, had evidenced his own great powers of mind and consummate practical ability. Henry, from amid the gay revellers who thronged his court, selected Wolsey as his favourite adviser, having discovered in his powerful and conservative intellect the very element which he needed to give strength and dignity to the government, which his own turbulent and reckless dispositiou might in the outset of his reign have sadly shattered.

At this time Julius Second was the Roman pontiff. Julius was a priestly soldier, a fiery, irascible, but withal a large-hearted man, and more of a patriot than a saint.

He had recently become involved in a quarrel with Louis the Twelfth of France. Ferdinand of Spain, the father-in-law of Henry, supported the Pope and drew the English King to the Italian interest. A war with France ensued, in which the English gained no substantial benefit. Wolsey accompanied the army, having the superintendence of its commissariat. The advantages he reaped from this campaign were substantial. One was his introduction into the vacant Bishopric of Tournay after the taking of that city. Other victories, however, beside the few barren triumphs in France, crowned the English arms. At home the battle of Flodden field, so vividly described in Scott's immortal verse, was fought and won for Henry.

Shortly after Henry's return to England Wolsey was elevated to the Archiepiscopal See of York. He was now on the full tide of royal favour. He possessed the potent word that ruled the wayward passions of the King. He was no longor the mere man of pleasure, but the earnest statesman, ready for any emergency, and capable of conducting any affair of state, however complicated its relations or difficult its character. His duties were important and onerous, his responsibilities vast, and his demeanour was that of one who, in controlling the destinies of a great people, not only knew the importance of his office, but placed a high estimate on his own services. And for this princely manner, which fitted him so well, which he honoured in the wearing, and which draped gracefully about him as the folds of a Roman toga, he suffered the aspersion of unwarrantable pride; he was accused of the sudden assumption of a mantle which, from social position, he had no right to wear; he was regarded as an upstart from the ranks of life, who had no sooner thrown aside the livery of the menial than he assumed the pomp and dig.

nity of the lord. But let those who accuse Wolsey of undue arrogance, haughtiness, and love of power, when the favour of his sovereign had invested him with wealth and influence, remember that human nature is the same in all men and in all ages; that Wolsey's disposition was imperious, that his aims had no limit, that he loved magnificence of retinue, of habiliment, of household garnishment, because that age invested human greatness with magnificence and display; that he loved power, and put forth the energies of a giant will to obtain and hold it, because, without affectation, he well knew that his intellect could better serve his country than that of any lordly courtier, whose heart was in the revels of the palace, whose soul could take no flight beyond the pleasures of sense. Before his mind's eye was placed a great object, and to reach it became the constant effort of his life. The dreams of the young priest in his cloister were realized by the Archbishop in his palace. He saw in England a capacity of development that no continental kingdom possessed. He found a system of law which was daily strengthening its proportions. He found a commerce which, though sadly disturbed by civil war, might become the wouder of a world. He found a sturdy, hearty yeomanry, with a national character as unbending as the oak; a character which could give England the position of umpire of the world, perhaps make her island kingdoin a mother of nations, another Rome.

And he found too, and regarded with a hostile eye, a nobility proud, wealthy, and powerful, which might be the terror or the bulwark of the throne, which for centuries had disregarded right and law, had time and time again excited the masses against the sovereign power, but to oppress those masses untrammelled by a government stronger than itself. In short, he found the buds of glorious national promise, which he determined to unfold, and the seeds of evil which he resolved to destroy. How well he succeeded English history can proudly witness.

In the latter part of the year 1515, Wolsey was elevated to the Cardinalate by Leo the Tenth, and about the same time the Great Seal of England, with the office of Chancellor of the Realm, was given him. Wolsey now held one of the highest offices in the church; was, by virtue of his Chancellorship, the first officer of the kingdom; and, more than all, possessed the confidence of the King. His remarkable character and his rapid elevation made him the cynosure of all eyes. European sovereigns, wishing to negotiate with England, regarded Wolsey as the proper meditator between themselves and his King. England was then just beginning to exercise that influence in the councils of Europe which she subsequently so largely developed. A character like Wolsey's was well adapted to give that young influence those advantages of growth which is needed in the acquisition of strength. His powers of mind were not only felt at home, but in their clear, strong, and conservative management of