The conversion of the cardinal ? Pride and penitence in some Tudor histories of Thomas Wolsey

Copyright: © 2016. The Authors. Licensee: AOSIS. This work is licensed under the Creative Commons Attribution License. Professor Graham Duncan is by origin a Scottish Presbyterian, so there may appear to be something incongruous about writing in his honour a study of an English cardinal whose reputation over the centuries has been more that of sinner than saint. However, Professor Duncan has also been a thoughtful reader of Roman Catholic texts, especially the groundbreaking documents of the Second Vatican Council (1962–1965), and not unlike many of his 16th-century forebears he has been outspoken when reform has been needed in his church communities, so I hope that he will take delight rather than offense at these pages dealing with the depiction of Thomas Wolsey in a range of chronicles and plays from the Tudor period.

Professor Graham Duncan is by origin a Scottish Presbyterian, so there may appear to be something incongruous about writing in his honour a study of an English cardinal whose reputation over the centuries has been more that of sinner than saint. However, Professor Duncan has also been a thoughtful reader of Roman Catholic texts, especially the groundbreaking documents of the Second Vatican Council (1962)(1963)(1964)(1965), and not unlike many of his 16th-century forebears he has been outspoken when reform has been needed in his church communities, so I hope that he will take delight rather than offense at these pages dealing with the depiction of Thomas Wolsey in a range of chronicles and plays from the Tudor period.
Cardinal Wolsey (c. 1473Wolsey (c. -1530, who served among other roles as archbishop of York (1514York ( -1530 and lord chancellor of England (1515-1529), was King Henry VIII's closest and most trusted advisor during the first half of his reign. Wolsey's influence during the period of his chancellorship was so great that some of his supporters did not hesitate to apply to him language traditionally reserved for monarchs: '[I]n great honour, triumph, and glory he reigned a long season, ruling all thing within this realm appertaining unto the King by his wisdom' (Cavendish 1962:26). Yet the close of Wolsey's life was marked by disgrace. Dismissed as chancellor in 1529, he languished for a year in exile from the royal court before being permitted to go to his archdiocese, where in a short span of time he was arrested on charges of high treason, ordered to return to London for trial, and died en route. Since the time of Wolsey's death, historians have speculated about the causes of his fall: was it his failure to obtain for the king the annulment of his marriage with Katherine of Aragon, was it his apparent disdain for the king's intended bride Anne Boleyn, had he betrayed Henry's trust, or all of the above? Questions have also been asked about the manner of his death: some sources report that he committed suicide, while others invite pity for a loyal servant who was deserted by his king and died of shock and a broken heart.
On a broader stage, Wolsey has often served as a foil in the historiography of the Henrician Reformation, and indeed in that of English Catholicism. In the 16th century, evangelical 1 writers almost universally held Wolsey up as the image of what was wrong with Roman Catholicism: here was a (supposedly) bloated prelate who never set foot in his archdiocese until the year of his death, who was more obedient to Rome than to his king, and whose personal pride and arrogance knew no bounds. Those of Catholic sympathies were split, some seeing Wolsey as an able administrator who instituted necessary reforms and managed England's affairs while the king 1.In using the term 'evangelical' for those who would later be called Protestant, I follow MacCulloch's (2004:xviii) suggestion that scholars embrace the terminology of the second quarter of the 16th century as a way of avoiding anachronism.
The life of Cardinal Thomas Wolsey, lord chancellor of England from 1515 to 1529, has inspired no small number of literary, historical, and dramatic retellings. A comprehensive study of these texts remains to be written, but this article seeks to make a start by examining how Tudor writers portrayed the cardinal's response to his deposition and subsequent disgrace. For some authors, Wolsey's fall only made him more proud, and he began to act erratically and disloyally, confirming the wisdom of the king's decision to relieve him of office. For others, deposition moved Wolsey to become philosophical and penitent, and some such writers depict a cardinal who at the end of his life underwent nothing short of a conversion. This article traces both of these historiographical trajectories from their origins in writings of the late 1540s and 1550s through a range of late Tudor chronicle accounts. Elements of both narratives about the cardinal appear, prominently if not always congruously, in one of the best-known theatrical works about the events of the reign of Henry VIII, the play King Henry VIII (All Is True) by William Shakespeare and John Fletcher. Understanding the interrelationships between the Tudor texts presented here is essential to grasping later portrayals of Wolsey and his contemporaries. The first extensive accounts of Wolsey's life were not published until the late 1540s, nearly two decades after his downfall and death, perhaps out of concern that Henry VIII might react adversely to texts that excessively lionised − or demonised − a figure about whom he appeared to retain mixed feelings. In 1548 the first edition of Edward Hall's Union of the Two Noble and Illustre Families of Lancaster and York, known commonly as Hall's Chronicle, appeared; a revised edition was published in 1550. 4 Hall was a member of the 'Reformation Parliament', which among other acts charged Wolsey with praemunire (illegitimately maintaining the supremacy of papal jurisdiction) and adopted the Act of Supremacy that declared the king to be the supreme head on earth of the Church of England. 5 His chronicle, as we will see, is both anti-Roman and anti-Wolsey. Edwards (2014) has 2.Among the few pre-20th-century historians who were sympathetic to Wolsey, Gairdner (1899) stands out. The final quarter of the 20th century was notable for revisionist work on the English Reformation(s), but not all revisionists believed it appropriate to soften longstanding criticisms of the cardinal. For Haigh (1987:56-74), for instance, 'no charge against Wolsey was too gross to be possible,' but 'Wolsey was not the church,' and indeed the pre-reformation church was not nearly as corrupt as evangelical polemicists claimed. For Duffy (2005), Wolsey merits no more than passing mention in either edition of his influential The stripping of the altars.
3.I am currently preparing a study of the treatment of Wolsey in a wide selection of historical, literary, and dramatic works from the mid-sixteenth to the early 21st centuries.
4.The second edition is STC 12723. On the printing history of Hall's Chronicle, see Pollard (1932).
5.For background on the charges presented against Wolsey and, after his fall, against other senior clergymen as well, see Guy (1982). On the various statutes of praemunire more broadly, the classic study, Waugh (1922)  Therefore, the nuanced if occasionally unstable portraits of Wolsey, Henry, and other characters in the play are, in the final analysis, the playwrights' own creation.
These six sources − Hall, Cavendish, Foxe, Holinshed, Stow, and Shakespeare/Fletcher − are by no means the only historical or dramatic texts from the Tudor period that depict Wolsey's fall, but they are and have been among the most influential ones, and they represent the full spectrum of contemporary opinion about the cardinal and the possibility of his conversion. 9 Therefore, they form the basis for the historiographical analysis that follows. Edward Hall (1497-1547 was one of the first writers to produce an extended history of the reign of Henry VIII, a reign that he witnessed at close quarters as a London official 6.As Wiley (1946)  himself in his diocese, but even after Henry grants him permission to do so, the cardinal 'continued this yere euer grudgying at his fall as you shall here after' (fol. clxxxxi v ). Once in York, Wolsey is nothing short of seditious:

Crafting the case for and against Wolsey: Edward Hall and George Cavendish
[he] wrote to the Court of Rome and to divers other prynces letters in reproche of the kyng…. The Cardinal also woulde speake fayre to the people to wynne their heartes, and declared euer, that he was uniustlye and untruely ordered… and to gentlemen he gaue great gyftes to allure them unto him.
(fol. clxxxxiiii r ) The king orders the cardinal's arrest, yet Wolsey resists almost to the end, claiming that as a papal legate he is not subject to royal authority and that he had already been forgiven his praemunire, a crime into which he only 'by negligence fell' (fol. clxxxxiii r-v ). Even though the cardinal does eventually submit to arrest, Hall goes so far as to imply that Wolsey wilfully frustrates the king's justice by hastening his own death before he can return to London for trial (fol. clxxxxiiii v ).
Unsurprisingly, Hall's overall verdict on Wolsey is a negative one. More than one of the chroniclers whose texts we will be reviewing borrow from Hall's assessment in framing their accounts of the cardinal:  (Sylvester & Harding 1962; see also Sylvester 1960) The Life is a personal as well as political portrait of its subject, and Cavendish uses rhetorical techniques and hermeneutical lenses that differ greatly from Hall's. Even though it is probable that Cavendish consulted Hall in writing his text, it should go without saying both that Cavendish's vantage point was not the same as Hall's, and that his role as one of Wolsey's most intimate servants afforded him a measure of access to and sympathy for the cardinal that would have been impossible for an evangelical-leaning London MP (Anderson 1984:36-37).
As many scholars have noted, Cavendish's principal interpretive schema for Wolsey's rise and fall is that of Fortune's wheel (Edwards 2014;Sylvester 1960:45). Fortune 'followeth some whom she listeth to promote, and even so to some her favor is contrary, though they should travail never so much with urgent diligence and painful study' (Cavendish 1962:11). It is by Fortune that Wolsey first rises in the service of King Henry VII, for whom he famously completes in 3 days a mission to the emperor that would take another man many more, 11 and by Fortune likewise that Wolsey became prominent enough by the time of Henry VIII's accession that the young king was able to see him as 'a meet instrument for the accomplishment of his devised will and pleasure' (p. 12).
But Fortune also brings about Wolsey's downfall, for at the time of the cardinal's greatest influence Fortune (of whose favor man is no longer assured than she is disposed) began to wax something wroth with his prosperous estate − thought she would devise a mean to abate his high port; wherefore she procured Venus, the insatiate goddess, to be her instrument to work her purpose. Wolsey's fall from power occupies a disproportionate section of Cavendish's narrative; it comprises more than half of the printed text of the Life, is in equal parts moralising and moving, and, as several commentators have noticed, takes not a few cues from the narrative of Christ's passion (Anderson 1984;Steiner 1952-53). 13  The disgraced cardinal shows other signs of repentance as well: he sheds tears that he cannot compensate his household staff; he never speaks against Henry or Anne; and he rejoices at any sign that he might be restored to royal favour, as in the memorable scene where he kneels in the dirt before Sir Henry Norris, a member of the king's privy chamber, who has come to bring Wolsey a ring symbolising the king's on-going affection (pp. 110, 105). 14 Cavendish's exiled Wolsey adopts religious practices not previously part of his piety: on his journey north to York, he stays for some weeks at the Charterhouse at Richmond, where every day he attends prayers and where the monks 'by their counsel persuaded [him] from the vainglory of this world, and gave him divers shirts of hair, the which he often wore afterward' (p. 133).
Some commentators have taken the position that Wolsey's political subtlety was such that even Cavendish was occasionally deceived by the cardinal's true motives, and certainly Wolsey's self-abasement in his gentleman-usher's narrative is in part calculated to have the best chance of restoring the cardinal to favour (see, e.g., Wiley 1946). He explains to Cavendish that it was most best way for me (all things considered) to do as I have done than to stand in trial with the King, for he would have 12.There is an eerie parallel between Anne, whom Wolsey rebuked but who finds herself in a position to procure Wolsey's fall, and Wolsey, who as chancellor punishes Sir Amias Paulet, who put the future cardinal in the stocks when he was a schoolmaster (pp. 5−6).
13.For extensive discussion of the parallels between the first and second halves of Cavendish's text, see Sylvester (1960:47−53 been loth to have been noted a wrong-doer. And in my submission the King (I doubt not) had a great remorse of conscience, wherein he would rather pity than malign me. (Cavendish 1962:141) Wolsey's performance of his duties as archbishop of York is also, in Cavendish, devised in such a way as to reassure the king that the cardinal had learned his lesson. Plans for his installation in York Minster are 'not in so sumptuous a wise as his predecessors did before him', and en route to York Wolsey spends 2 days confirming children − the sort of quotidian pastoral duty that at the height of his power would have been beneath him (p. 148). The differences between Hall's and Cavendish's Wolseys are stark, and no doubt Cavendish had passages of Hall in mind as he narrated his master's downfall. Thus, for instance, Cavendish fashioned the scene of Wolsey's arrest in glaring contrast to Hall: while Wolsey does ask the Earl of Northumberland to see a copy of the commission to arrest him, he neither asserts clerical immunity nor attempts to excuse his actions, and once it is clear that a member of the king's privy chamber has come with the earl, he relents: '[Y]ou are a sufficient commission yourself…. Therefore I am ready to be ordered and disposed at your will' (p. 160).
The period from Wolsey's arrest to his death occupies two sentences in Hall, but nearly thirty pages in Cavendish. Far from suicide, it is clear that Wolsey's final illness comes from his shock at learning that the king has sent William Kingston, constable of the Tower, to conduct him back to the capital. Wolsey's conversations with Kingston reveal him to have glimpsed the nature of the king he has served: '[R]ather than he will either miss or want any part of his will or appetite, he will put the loss of one half of his realm in danger.' Wolsey's famous deathbed words, 'if I had served God as diligently as I have done the king, he would not have given me over in my grey hairs', likewise testify to his recognition of the true state of affairs between him and Henry (Cavendish 1962:183;see Sylvester 1960:58-62;Sylvester and & Harding 1962:xii). Yet Wolsey is pensive and penitent more than bitter, and in Cavendish's telling his death is good and Christian. Not unlike Christ before the crucifixion, Wolsey predicts the hour when he will die. He confesses, receives the last rites, and passes away with dignity − all marks of the medieval ars moriendi. And when servants strip the cardinal's body for burial, they are surprised to find a shirt of hair under his fine linen (Cavendish 1962:186-187).
It must be emphasised that for all his sympathy toward the fallen Wolsey, Cavendish was not blind to his master's faults.
Although there is not space here to multiply examples, many episodes in the Life present the cardinal as ambitious, concerned for pomp and ostentation, jealous of rivals, arrogant, and greedy − traits not unfamiliar from Hall. For Cavendish, Wolsey tempted fate with his worldly success, and so, even if he did not deserve his end, he risked his fall by trusting too much in the stability of good fortune and in the favour of an earthly king − a king who appears in Cavendish's pages as lustful, indecisive, self-absorbed, and at the end 'hated' by the cardinal (Cavendish 1962:193; see also Wiley 1946:126). Thus, in contrast to Hall, Cavendish presents a Wolsey who underwent a conversion, if not in the year between his dismissal as chancellor and the time of his arrest, then at least in the short span between his arrest and his death.

Receiving Hall and Cavendish: Foxe, Stow, and Holinshed
By the time of Queen Elizabeth's accession in 1558, two competing narratives about Wolsey were in circulation. Hall's was by far the more popular and closer to the Elizabethan establishment's own account of the queen's father's reign, but Cavendish's, first in manuscript and then in excerpts printed from 1580 onward, made substantial inroads and contributed to the development of portraits of the cardinal that were both more nuanced and more sympathetic.
That said, the 1570 edition of John Foxe's Actes and Monuments is innocent of influence from Cavendish. There is not space here for a thorough discussion of Foxe's teleological, providential, and nationalistic account of the restoration of the gospel to England, but it is worth examining how Foxe frames his narrative of Wolsey, which in large part he lifts from the pages of Hall, although he omits any reference to Anne Boleyn. 15 Foxe interrupts his narrative of the persecution of 'simple men within the dioces of Lincolne' with what he entitles A briefe discourse concerning the Storye and lyfe of Thomas Wolsey, late Cardinall of Yorke, by way of digression, wherin is to be seene and noted the expresse image of the proud vainglorious church of Rome, how farre it differeth from the true church of Christ Iesus. (Foxe 1570(Foxe :1120b Indeed, Foxe continues, he wishes to tell Wolsey's story so that the 'pompe and pride' of the Roman church 'more notoriouslye may appeare to all men' (p. 1120b). The life of Wolsey, then, is a warning of the dangers of Roman Catholicism, dangers that in this part of Foxe's telling are more political and economic than theological. Certainly Foxe presents Wolsey as a pretender at church reform and as one who 'thought him selfe equall with the kyng', but his complaints primarily concern the quantities of money that Wolsey sent from England to Rome. , that his nature was not able to beare it', but here, 'Also the matter that came from hym was so blacke, that the steining therof, could not be gotten out of hys blanckets by any meanes'. His corpse, moreover, was blacke as pitch, and also was so heauy, y t vi. could scares beare it. Furthermore, it did so stincke aboue the ground, y t they were co[n]streyned to hasten the burial therof.
To add a final insult, 'At the which burial, such a tempest, with such a stincke there arose, that all the torches went out, and so he was throwen into the tombe'. Foxe reports that he learned all these details from 'one, yet beyung a lyue, in whose armes the sayd Cardinall dyed' (p. 1133a). His source cannot be identified with certainty, but it is clear that Foxe used the symbolic discourse of Christian hagiography − especially a corpse that, most unlike the preserved body of a saint, decays more quickly than usual − to demonstrate that Wolsey was not in God's good graces and that his church is in fact the church of the devil.
In contrast to Foxe, John Stow brought together material from Hall's and Cavendish's accounts and created what we might call the first composite portrait of Wolsey, one that hesitates neither to condemn him for his failings nor to treat him sympathetically in disgrace. Stow's Chronicles of England (1580) explicitly cites both Hall and Cavendish, and in both the Chronicles and the more extensive Annales of England (1592) Stow treats the cardinal with what one scholar has called 'objectivity … and comparative freedom from the bias against Wolsey so common in the sixteenth century' (Wiley 1946:128 Hall had observed that '[t]he authoritie of this Cardinal set the clergie in such a pride that they dysdayned al men, wherefore when he was fallen thei followed', a claim that foreshadows the submission of the clergy and their payment of a £100,000 fine two paragraphs later. In Stow, the clergy do submit and tender this substantial sum, but there is little about the foregoing narrative that appears to warrant the payment of such a penalty (Hall 1550: fol. clxxxxiiii v ;Stow 1592:942-943). The effect is to imply that the crown's actions against the clergy − and perhaps likewise against Wolsey − were not so much morally justified as politically expedient. It is not surprising, therefore, that Stow was investigated at least once for Roman Catholic sympathies. Although the charges against him were never substantiated, his familiarity with and willingness to use Cavendish's Life, alongside his refusal to repeat the most baseless accusations against Wolsey, suggests that he was somewhat sceptical of propagandistic evangelical versions of the cardinal's doings (Beer 2004).
It was through the works of Stow that the editors of the second edition of Raphael Holinshed's Chronicles had access to Cavendish's narrative; indeed, no part of Cavendish's Life not quoted in Stow makes an appearance in Holinshed. 16 Wolsey's initial appearances in Holinshed are suffused with critical language, much of it personally as well as professionally censorious. Cavendish had told the story of how Wolsey was so dissatisfied with the appearance of the messenger sent from Rome to bring him his cardinal's hat that he apparelled him in finer clothes, and the gentleman-usher had marvelled, mostly approvingly, at how the reception of the hat 'was done in so solemn a wise as I have not seen the like unless it had been at the coronation of a mighty prince or king' (Cavendish 1962:17). However, in Holinshed, the story serves a sinister purpose, with Wolsey's creation as a cardinal furnishing an opportunity for comment on the public's hatred of him: And now that he was thus a perfect cardinall, he looked aboue all estates, which purchased him great hatred and disdaine on all sides. For his ambition ws no lesse discernable to the eies of the people, than the sunne in the firmament in a cleere and cloudlesse summer daie … for that his base lineage was both noted and knowne, in so much that his insatiable aspiring to supereminent degrees of dignitie kindled manifest contempt and detestation among such as pretended a countenance of good will and honourable dutie unto him, though in verie deed the same parties… would have tituled him a proud popeling; as led with the like spirit of swelling ambicion, wherewith the rable of popes had beene bladder like puffed and blowne up. (Holinshed 1587:837) This final metaphor no doubt referred derogatorily to Wolsey's waistline as well as to his pride. Certainly Holinshed's 16.For the sake of convenience, I will be referring to the text of the second edition of the Chronicles as Holinshed's, though it was produced after his death in 1580 by Abraham Fleming and other contributors (Clegg 2015 (Cavendish 1962:30). Of course, any narrative that questioned the legitimacy of Anne's marriage, and in consequence the legitimacy of Queen Elizabeth's birth, was anathema in late-16th-century England, and thus it is no surprise that Holinshed made the adjustments that he did.

Dramatising the fall of Wolsey: Shakespeare's and Fletcher's Henry VIII (All Is True)
The second edition of Holinshed served as the primary source for one of the most influential theatrical renderings of the cardinal's story (Shakespeare & Fletcher 2000:162). In William Shakespeare's and John Fletcher's Henry VIII (All Is True), both Wolsey's political glory and the tragedy of his fall and conversion reach new dramatic heights. 18 A thorough discussion of the play is impossible here, but suffice it to note that critics differ with regard to its portrayal of Wolsey: some find that his character is 'ambivalently drawn', while others find him 'sharply depicted … as villain and regenerate' (Champion 1979:12;Shakespeare & Fletcher 2000:171). What is generally agreed is that Shakespeare and Fletcher create a sharp contrast between the proud Wolsey of the first half of the play and the disgraced Wolsey of the second scene of Act III, a contrast that one commentator has observed is so marked that it lacks 'a scene of transformation from one face to the other … which would lend a genuinely dynamic quality to the characterization' (Champion 1979:12).
In the first two acts, Wolsey is preeminent and insuperable, procuring the downfall of the Duke of Buckingham by paying the duke's servants to testify against him, deceiving the king with regard to his having enacted the Amicable Grant, and when Henry repeals the levy, commanding his secretary to 18.The authorship of the play remains a topic of discussion: see Shakespeare and Fletcher (2000:180−199) and Law (1957) among many other studies. For a full bibliography see Micheli (1988

Conclusion
It is worth remarking that Henry VIII, which contains some of the sharpest depictions of Wolsey of the sources we have encountered, also portrays the cardinal's repentance and conversion as the most thoroughgoing. This unexpected contrast may be because of the ways in which the editors of Holinshed, who compiled Shakespeare's and Fletcher's chief source, brought together two disparate historiographical trajectories. As we have seen, Holinshed's chronicle combines, sometimes disjointedly, Hall's unflattering insinuations alongside Cavendish's loyal apologia for the fallen Wolsey. Elements of both trajectories were embellished as they moved from source to source, and by the time they reached the playwrights, they were ripe to be imaginatively interpreted in a way that produced the sharp contrast between the regnant cardinal of Acts I and II and the repentant cardinal of the second half of Act III.
Understanding the interrelationships between the texts we have been discussing is essential not only for the historiography of the Henrician Reformation, an historiography in which Wolsey has played an important, if variable, supporting role since the 1530s. Grasping how Wolsey's story was told in the 16th century is also essential for interpreting later portrayals of Wolsey, Henry, and other actors, because the chronicles of Hall, Foxe, Holinshed, and their contemporaries continued to serve as source materials for historians in the 17th century and beyond. Although this study cannot claim to be comprehensive, I hope that it has been able to show how an historiographically sensitive approach can reveal how Wolsey developed as a subject of historical writing and drama in the decades after his death. But if this article at least has demonstrated the value of careful, critical, yet sympathetic reading of texts from periods and mentalities other than our own, then at least it may be a 20.An alternative view is that of Kiefer (1979), who argues that Shakespeare and Fletcher suggested that Wolsey's fall was an instance of bad luck rather than moral reckoning.
fitting tribute to an extraordinary teacher, scholar, minister, ecumenist, and friend, Graham Duncan.