![]() For example, in his complete control of the Court of Star Chamber: He built a picture of a greedy, dominating man who set himself up as an alternative king. He captured all the aristocratic vitriol in the simple description of ‘the Butcher’s Cur’. But Skelton at very least gave articulation to a popular view of the good Cardinal. John Skelton was a pen for hire – at one stage he tried to hire himself out to Wolsey, and wrote some lines in his favour. Skelton at one time had been tutor to Henry VIII, and his comments on Wolsey are to be treated with great care. ![]() The vicious satirist and propagandist, John Skelton also had Wolsey firmly in his sights. ‘Vainglorious was he very far beyond all measure, and that was great pity for it did harm and made him abuse many great gifts that God had given him’. His more measured judgement was to describe him as: He was also part of the faction that brought the Cardinal down, and celebrated his fall with the words ‘the great wether which is of late fallen’. Called a fool by Wolsey, More responded sarcastically ‘But God be thanked the king our master hath but one fool on his council’. More sat on a King’s Council dominated by the Cardinal. I never saw this realm in better order, quietness and obedience than it was the time of his authority and rule ne justice better ministered with indifferency.īut more most, Wolsey was a symbol of the abuse of power, of an outrageous greed for wealth, of the abuse of church privileges. Great wealth, Joy, triumph & glory … until Fortune (of whose favour no man is longer assured than she is disposed) began to work some things wrong with his prosperous estate through which she would devise a means to abate his high port.Īnd along the way, he had plenty good to say about Wolsey’s character, talents and achievements ![]() Cavendish presented the cardinal’s life as an exemplification of the wheel of fortune. Cavendish wrote an enormously popular biography of Wolsey. We are also very lucky to have had the views of one of the Cardinal’s gentlemen ushers, a poet and biographer called George Cavendish. Who was less beloved in the North than my lord Cardinal before he was among them? Who was better loved after he had been there a while? Here’s a chap called Richard Moryson, a Yorkshireman who was a dedicated servant of the Cardinal: Wolsey’s servants also tended to see the great man’s strengths, and feel an affection and loyalty to him. There was never thing done in England more for the commonweal that to redress these enormous decays of towns and making enclosures. The Bishop of Lincoln for example, praised the fact that Wolsey took action against the enclosure of land, the enclosures that Thomas More complained about when he wrote that the sheep ate men. There were, some, just a few, who looked at Wolsey with less jaundiced eyes. Wolsey and the HistoriansĪt his death in 1530, Wolsey was the man that everyone loved to hate, particularly his noble adversaries, who universally despised Wolsey for his lowly birth and success in direct contravention of the Great Chain of being. If you want to hear more, click here to become a member. This article gives a brief survey of his reputation through the ages, and is taken from the members only podcasts on Thomas Wolsey. Wolsey has had a hard time of it at the hands of the historians.
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