Within this world of power, intrigue and patronage, Fox was also a supreme mentor, shaping the lives of two men in particular – Cardinal Thomas Wolsey and Stephen Gardiner. Wolsey would, of course, go on to mentor Thomas Cromwell, imparting the skills Fox himself had once wielded; their own success is part of Fox’s legacy.
WOLSEY
The cardinal, at fifty-five, is still as handsome as he was in his prime.
(Wolf Hall)
A tall, impressive man, Wolsey was the gateway to Henry, and Henry relied completely on Wolsey: no two such significant figures could have been closer. He stood above the royal councillors, many of whom resented his power and influence; even foreign rulers were highly deferential in their letters to him, as if they were writing to a fellow monarch. Cardinal Thomas Wolsey was one of the wealthiest and most powerful men of the Tudor age; his magnificent estate, Hampton Court, was even coveted by the King of England. Wolsey is an integral character in the Tudor narrative, and thus has played no small part in the many Tudor novels, movies and television dramas. In Wolf Hall it is Wolsey who conjures ghosts from behind his desk – Henry VII, Richard III, Prince Arthur – reminding us that Wolsey lived through the last tumultuous years of the Wars of the Roses and the reign of the first Tudor monarch.
But we have only two contemporary narratives of Wolsey, each from a different perspective. The first is by the 16th-century London chronicler Edward Hall, who described Wolsey as a self-serving, duplicitous advisor who manipulated and controlled the young king, advancing his own personal and political agendas, his arrogance and corruption contributing to his own demise. The other account was by Wolsey’s loyal and long-term servant George Cavendish, a not entirely impartial observer who apologized for Wolsey extravagances but stressed that he was a most loyal servant of the king. These accounts of Wolsey’s life are really a response to a very narrow period of history that took place during the twilight of Wolsey’s life and career, and which led to his own downfall. In either case, these depictions affirm our view of Wolsey, accentuated in his famous portraits: the rapacious, rotund cardinal, scarlet robes stretched across his portly belly, with pink, fleshy hands adorned with gold and jewels.
Mantel rejects the tired readings of Wolsey, and avoids drawing on his enemies to strike him with their grievances: Anne Boleyn or Thomas More, for example. Rather she relies on Cromwell’s more sympathetic and charitable account of Wolsey by breathing life into the meetings between the powerful Lord Chancellor and his servant. In a non-linear narrative she delves first into Cromwell’s years in Wolsey’s service, then offers us glimpses of Wolsey’s powerful nature through Cromwell’s recollections. These insightful exchanges flesh out every element of Wolsey’s character: most memorable is that he speaks in ‘honeyed tones, famous from here to Vienna’.
In Wolf Hall, several courtiers refer disparagingly to Wolsey as a butcher’s son or butcher’s dog, common slurs used frequently of the Cardinal, who was not of the aristocracy. Nor was he of the nobility, but the evidence suggests that his father was a reputable grazier, therefore landowner, from Ipswich in Suffolk, who reared sheep for wool for the lucrative textile industry, a far cry from a butcher. The young Wolsey was a prodigy as he was accepted into Magdalen College, Oxford, in his early teens, graduating at 15 with a Bachelor of Arts degree in 1486, earning him the nickname ‘boy bachelor’. In March of 1498, Wolsey was ordained a priest, but he soon turned to administration, entering the service of Richard Fox, loyal supporter and advisor to Henry VII, part of the Henry’s inner circle, along with his mother Margaret Beaufort. Serving as secretary to Fox, Wolsey was trained in the art of foreign policy, and cultivated important connections with the younger courtiers of Henry VII’s reign. According to historian Polydore Vergil, Wolsey made friends through ‘singing, laughing, dancing and clowning about with the young courtiers’, a rather prudish observation.
Wolsey’s career is impressive: in 1514 he became archbishop of York, and then a year later was elected Cardinal. He was Lord High Chancellor of England between 1515 and 1529, a position in which Wolsey wielded almost as much power as the king, which inevitably angered almost everyone.
With the accession of the young King Henry VIII in 1509, Wolsey quickly eclipsed his mentor Richard Fox, as he moved closer to the centre of power. He became a father figure to the young king, over 20 years his junior, and took over most of the administrative tasks, for young Henry preferred more trivial pursuits. Indeed, among many historians there is the sense that Henry shirked his responsibilities or allowed himself to be governed. But as Tudor historian Geoffrey Elton once reasoned: ‘a man who marries six wives is not a man who perfectly controls his own fate’.
What Wolsey did do beautifully was to cultivate the king’s dual nature – young man, young monarch. Mantel illuminates Wolsey’s most important role in Tudor history: his influence on foreign diplomacy. Wolsey’s vision was to position England as a facilitator of peace in Europe, with France on one side and the Holy Roman Empire on the other. In the first years of Henry’s reign, different factions with vested interests jostled to influence the young king, urging Henry to go to war with Scotland. It was Wolsey who made a countermove by reasoning that warring with the French
