Wolsey’s career and political life are well-documented, but Wolsey the man is difficult to read through the sources despite the abundance of surviving letters. We do know that he was a deeply passionate advocate for education, a lover of humanist literature, art, music and architecture, but these traits are often used as examples of his opulent lifestyle. Wolsey spent a fortune building his colleges, but his other projects, Hampton Court and York Place, later called Whitehall, were architectural masterpieces.
Mantel discovered something in Wolsey beyond the stereotype and the criticisms. Perhaps Wolsey is in greater need of rehabilitation, as Mantel knows there is vastly more to his circumstances and his stellar ascent to the golden centre of the Tudor court. Mantel’s Wolsey reclines in his chair and picks apart the threads to reveal the history of England and the Tudors for his clever new assistant, Cromwell, an insider’s account of how it all began.
It only lasted three generations, but the Tudors are undoubtedly the best-known of all English royal dynasties. They ruled from 1485–1603 as the Middle Ages gave way to Early Modern Britain at the beginning of the 1500s. It was a time when everything started to shift, particularly the relationship between the people and their monarch, and the people and their God. The Tudors could not boast a strong claim to the throne – the line can be traced back to humble Welsh origins sometime during the 13th century – but their rise to prominence began two centuries later with Owen Tudor, a Welsh landowner, who fought in the armies of Henry V.
‘These are old stories’, he says, ‘but some people, let us remember, do believe them’.
Wolsey tells the story of Henry V’s Queen, Catherine of Valois, mother of Henry VI, who embarked on a relationship with Owen Tudor, Keeper of the Wardrobe. Doubt has always been cast over whether Owen and Catherine ever married, and even if they had wed, it would likely not have been recognized, as the Act of 1428 forbade any royal marriage without the consent of Parliament. Owen Tudor’s relationship with the widowed queen took place during the vicious civil wars between the two dynasties and rival branches of the royal house of Plantagenet – York and Lancaster. In an age when heirs and spares could cause tensions within a royal family, there was no animosity between Owen and Catherine’s two sons, Edmund and Jasper, and their royal half-brother. Both Jasper and Edmund served as loyal advisors to Henry VI, devoted to his Lancastrian cause, and in turn they were highly trusted and respected members of the King’s inner circle.
Owen and his son Jasper also led troops at one of the most decisive battles of the Wars of the Roses, the Battle of Mortimer’s Cross in February 1461. It was a Yorkist victory and, unfortunately for Owen Tudor, he was captured by the troops of the Yorkist Edward IV, and beheaded without ceremony.
As Cromwell notes to Wolsey in Wolf Hall:
‘By your account, my lord, our king’s Plantagenet grandfather beheaded his Tudor great-grandfather.’ ‘A thing to know. But not to mention.’
It was the first and last time a Tudor would be executed. From that point, Tudors would be the ones wielding the axe.
Of the remaining Tudor heirs, Edmund married the 13-year-old Margaret Beaufort, a great-granddaughter of John of Gaunt, son of King Edward III, which provided a tenuous claim to the English throne. Margaret’s marital track record – four husbands – would almost rival her grandson’s, the future Henry VIII. She would only have one child, Henry Tudor, born on 28 January 1457, at Pembroke Castle in Wales, three months after the death of his father. With the deaths of Henry VI and his only son, Edward, the child Henry found himself the sole surviving male Lancastrian heir, a dangerous position in a country currently ruled by a Yorkist king. Henry was taken by his uncle Jasper to the duchy of Brittany in France, where it seemed he would live the rest of his years in exile, although his mother Margaret never lost faith that her son would one day sit on the throne. Edward IV died unexpectedly on 9 April 1483, and left two very young sons. His heir, 14-year-old Prince Edward, was too young to take the throne without a regent, and sparring factions within the divided royal family swiftly chose sides: one supporting the king’s widow, Elizabeth Woodville; the other the dead king’s brother, Richard, Duke of Gloucester. Richard made a pre-emptive strike by declaring himself Lord Protector of the young Prince Edward and his 12-year-old brother, Richard, and removed them to the ‘safety’ of the Tower of London, where they were lodged in preparation for Edward’s coronation. However, no plans were forthcoming and the children disappeared from their apartments in the Tower, never to be seen again. Their uncle, Richard, Duke of Gloucester, crowned himself Richard III in July 1483. Richard could never escape the suspicion that he murdered his nephews, and he was surrounded by enemies who turned to the only alternative, Henry Tudor.
In early 1485, Henry had the financial and military backing for an assault on England and King Richard; his fleet sailed along the heavily defended south coast of England, around Land’s End, arriving
