Cardinal Thomas Wolsey and His Fall From Favour
He was unable to give King Henry VIII what he wanted and was under arrest when he died
On 29th November 1530, Cardinal Thomas Wolsey died at Leicester Abbey during a journey south that would almost certainly have ended with his execution at the Tower of London.
Thomas Wolsey is generally supposed to have been the son of an Ipswich butcher and cattle dealer, but there is always the possibility that this was a story put about by his enemies in an attempt to demean him as an upstart who had no right to the high office that he achieved.
When King Henry VIII succeeded his father in 1509, Thomas Wolsey was already in royal service, having been chaplain to King Henry VII. He had been noted for his willingness to do just about any task that was asked of him and to get results through his dogged insistence on seeing things through.
He was therefore in just the right place to be advanced under Henry VIII, because the young king (aged only 17 at the time of his accession) was far less interested in the minutiae of government than his father had been. Someone like Thomas Wolsey was just what Henry needed to relieve him of the more boring aspects of being in charge of the country.