2009
Sometimes you buy a book, powerfully drawn to it, but then it just sits on the shelf. Maybe you flick through it, the ghost of your original purpose at your elbow, but it’s not so much rereading as re-dusting. Then one day you pick it up, take notice of the contents; your inner life realigns. This is how I came to George Cavendish’s book Thomas Wolsey, Late Cardinal, His Life and Death. It is one of the earliest of English biographies, but it reads as much like a novel as like a life story, though it was written before the novel was invented. That’s not to say it’s made up; Cavendish, who was a gentleman usher in the great cardinal’s entourage, was a firsthand witness and as accurate as he could be. What makes it startlingly modern is that events are conveyed through anecdote and dialogue, with turning points and dramatic highlights clicked into place; its language is direct and inventive; and the story it has to tell is fascinating, poignant and full of unexpected twists and turns. While attending on a political genius, the devoted attendant was nourishing a small writing genius within himself.
I bought my copy about ten years ago, secondhand, a Folio Society edition with a faded gray cover. I hoped I might write a book about the Tudors, but this purchase was the first step toward a project I knew was distant. I had spent many years living in the eighteenth century. I had written about the French Revolution and about England and Ireland in the same era. I didn’t know if I had the nerve or stamina to time-travel backward. I knew whose career I would like to follow—Henry VIII’s minister Thomas Cromwell. I couldn’t resist a man who was at the heart of the most dramatic events of Henry’s reign, but appeared in fiction and drama—if he appeared at all—as a pantomime villain. What attracted me to Cromwell was that he came from nowhere. He was the son of a Putney brewer and blacksmith, a family not very poor but very obscure; how, in a stratified, hierarchal society, did he rise to be Earl of Essex?
I needed to know Wolsey to understand Cromwell. But what was Wolsey? A great scarlet beast, I thought, a pre-Reformation priest who belonged to the old world, not the fierce, striving, dislocated society I wanted to write about. I thought of him as a means to an end; I imagined I would dispose of him quickly to get to the meat of the plot. Then the day came when I opened Cavendish’s Life; the author leaned out of the text and touched my arm, keen to impart the story of the man whose astonishing career he saw at firsthand: “Truth it is, Cardinal Wolsey, sometimes Archbishop of York, was an honest poor man’s son…”
Wolsey’s father was a butcher—a fact which the cardinal’s detractors never let him live down—but he was able to send his clever son to Oxford, where he was known as the boy bachelor because he took his BA at fifteen. This prodigy—and Cavendish’s pride shines out of the page—rose quickly in the service of Henry VII, who sent him (a trial run for a promising young cleric) on a diplomatic mission to the court of the emperor, in Flanders. Three days afterward, Wolsey appeared at morning mass. What, not gone yet? the king asked. Wolsey replied, “Sir, if it may stand with Your Highness’s pleasure, I have already been with the emperor, and dispatched your affairs…” Richmond Palace to London, barge to Gravesend, horseback to Dover, boat to Calais, horseback again, one night with the emperor, Calais by the time the gates opened at dawn, the Channel again, and back at Richmond in time to get a good night’s sleep before handing over the emperor’s letters: two and a half days, door to door. The old king was left in “a great confuse and wonder.” He didn’t realize that tides and post horses and border guards all bowed down to the whims of the future cardinal. This “good speedy exploit” was nothing to what Wolsey would accomplish when the young Henry VIII came to the throne.
On “a plain path to walk in toward promotion,” Wolsey decided to “disburden” his young, pleasure-loving king of affairs of state. “He had a special gift,” Cavendish says, “of natural eloquence … to persuade and allure all men to his purpose,” and his head was “full of subtle wit and policy.” He became Archbishop of York, Bishop of Winchester, papal legate, Lord Chancellor. The papacy eluded him, but in England he was alter rex—the other king—and Europe knew it: French diplomats blanched when he raised his voice. He was, as Cavendish admitted, “haughty”; but he seems also—and this is what strikes the reader—a man of great warmth and personal kindness. He was a superb organizer of everything from wars to banquets, and he didn’t do it wholly by charm; Cavendish was at his elbow one morning when Wolsey rose at four and “continually wrote his letters with his own hands,” till four in the afternoon, “all which season my lord never rose once to piss, nor yet to eat any meat.” After this feat of concentration, the cardinal heard mass, ate dinner and supper together to save time, and went to bed early, ready for another lucrative and thoroughly gratifying day. Patron of artists, architects and poets, Wolsey lived “in fortune’s blissfulness.” Henry VIII’s early years were, Cavendish says, “a golden world,” and the cardinal was its golden center, with his household of 500 attending him around the clock, “down-lying and up-rising”: Cavendish knew them all, from the “master cook who went daily in damask, satin or velvet,” to the “twelve singing children and sixteen singing men” to Master Cromwell, the ebullient, dry-witted and slightly mysterious lawyer with whom the cardinal spent long hours in secret talks. You imagine Cavendish, sweating slightly, ear glued to the keyhole.
Then suddenly, in the autumn of 1529, the golden world was finished. Wolsey stood by and watched the dukes of Norfolk and Suffolk ransack his London palace of York Place, and strangers swarm in to itemize his clothes, his silver, his linen. The king took everything. The cardinal was left with what he stood up in. Henry had no patience with failure, and Wolsey had failed to get him an annulment from his first marriage so that he could marry Anne Boleyn, whom Cavendish calls the “gorgeous young lady.” Anne, “having both a very good wit and also an inward desire to be revenged on the cardinal,” joined forces with the noblemen who had hated Wolsey for years because he “kept them low.” On the dreadful day when York Place was taken apart, Cavendish traveled upriver with his master as he fled to his palace at Esher. Esher was a gentleman servant’s nightmare: unaired, understaffed, ill-equipped. There, on All Hallows’ Day, Cavendish saw “Master Cromwell leaning in the great window,” a prayer book in his hand. “He prayed not more earnestly than the tears distilled from his eyes.” Now Cavendish understood how bad things were. He had never before seen Cromwell pray (or cry)—and he never saw him do either again. A moment, and the lawyer pulled himself together; he was going to London, he said grimly, “to make or mar.”
The cardinal’s people began fighting a rearguard action, encouraged by the king’s double-dealing. Emotionally dependent on Wolsey, torn between minister and wife-to-be, Henry blew hot and cold, sending loving messages but standing by while bills were brought into Parliament accusing the cardinal of a long list of serious crimes. Was Cavendish superb in a crisis? We know, at least, that his writing was. Holding his readers in suspense, he diverts us with an anecdote: “Now I will tell you a certain tale…” He talks to us directly, earnestly, as if looking into our eyes: “You must understand this…” He leaves us poised and anxious at Esher, while flipping away to the action elsewhere: “Now let us return again to Master Cromwell, to see how he has sped since his last departure from my lord…” Wolsey’s enemies wanted him to go north, to his episcopal see in York. Every day he managed to stay near the court was a triumph; at any moment the king might change his mind, recall him. The Duke of Norfolk, boiling with panic, threatened Cromwell: “show him that if he go not away shortly, I will, rather than he should tarry still, tear him with my teeth.” Cromwell conveyed the message to the cardinal: “Marry, Thomas, quoth he, then it is time to be going…”
George Cavendish was with Wolsey in his uneasy exile and at his sudden arrest. The young earl of Northumberland arrived at the cardinal’s lodging a day’s ride from York: “trembling … with a very faint and soft voice, laying his hand upon his arm,” he said, “My lord … I arrest you of high treason.” Cavendish followed the cardinal into his private room, barring the door to the invaders. Wolsey told him, “Look at my face—I am not afraid of any man alive.” The journey south began, the cardinal under guard, toward the Tower. “I know what is provided for me,” he said; he did not think he would evade his enemies again. Then he fell ill. Cavendish served the cardinal his last meal this side of heaven, a dish of baked pears. He was with him at Leicester Abbey, at his agonizing death. Natural causes or poison? If poison, self-administered? Cavendish saw him laid to rest in a coffin of plain boards. He had washed his body for burial; beneath his “very fine linen Holland cloth,” this most vain, flamboyant and worldly of men was wearing a hair shirt. Ahead of Cavendish was a sticky interview with the king, who wanted to know what the cardinal had said in his last moments. He kept Cavendish on his knees for an hour while he questioned him. Whatever the cardinal’s parting shot, Cavendish keeps it even from the reader. “I have utterly denied that I ever heard any such words.”
Cromwell scrambled out of the wreckage of Wolsey’s fortune. His enemies said the cardinal had given him a magic jewel which gave him power over Henry, but more likely Wolsey had given him a list of hints for dealing with a petulant, volatile and increasingly costly monarch. Henry soon regretted the hounding to death of his cardinal; he wanted him back, just as years later, after executing Cromwell, he wanted him back too. The “gorgeous young lady” had her head severed, wives came and went, some violently, Henry died swollen and monstrous and perhaps a little mad. Meanwhile George lived quietly in the country. He broke his silence only in 1554, when Henry’s Catholic daughter Mary was on the throne. Shakespeare plundered Cavendish’s manuscript for his play Henry VIII, and not just for that; when Cavendish refers to an ambitious man as “hungry and lean,” you can hear Will’s brain whirring.
Cavendish’s more famous brother, William, married Bess of Hardwick. For many years, oddly, it was supposed that William had written Thomas Wolsey. But it is all George’s work: his beady eye for detail, his intimacy, his eye for emotional truth and his rolling, robust phrases. He functioned as a textbook for me: Learn to Talk Tudor. I reread him till the rhythm of his prose was natural to me. He made me love his cardinal as he did, so that when I came to write him, he wouldn’t stop talking; I wanted Wolsey in every scene, and no more than Cavendish did I want to stand by, useless and wretched, at his miserable deathbed. The cardinal had planned a marble sarcophagus for himself, but now, I understand, it is at St. Paul’s, with the bones of Lord Nelson rattling inside it. Wolsey might have been amused. He was always seasick on his rapid Channel crossings. When Cromwell the blacksmith’s son was granted a coat of arms, he adopted the cardinal’s emblem, the Cornish chough; for ten years after Wolsey’s death, the little black birds tweeted defiantly in the teeth of the Duke of Norfolk and all Wolsey’s other begrudgers. But it was his servant Cavendish who gave him his lasting monument: “And thus ended the life of my late lord and master, the rich and triumphant legate and cardinal of England, on whose soul Jesu have mercy! Amen.”