Thomas Wolsey, Lord Chancellor of England and…
1546 CE
Thomas Wolsey, Lord Chancellor of England and Cardinal Archbishop of York, at the height of his power in 1525, had suppressed the Abbey of St. Frideswide in Oxford and founded Cardinal College on its lands, using funds from the dissolution of Wallingford Priory and other minor priories.
He had planned the establishment on a magnificent scale, but had fallen from grace in 1529, before the college was completed.
The college was itself suppressed in 1531 and refounded in 1532 as King Henry VIII's College by Henry VIII, to whom Wolsey's property had escheated.
The King, having broken from the Church of Rome and acquired great wealth through the dissolution of the monasteries in England, refounds the college as Christ Church in 1546 as part of the reorganization of the Church of England, making it the cathedral of the recently created diocese of Oxford.