Penitence and Prophecy: George Cavendish on the Last State of Cardinal Wolsey

In composing the work known asThe life and death of Cardinal Wolsey, some twenty-five years after the last event it describes, George Cavendish was not motivated by the ambitions of a secular annalist or historian. He wrote mostly from memory without verifying dates or the sequence of events, and he was not much interested in the sort of things historians ordinarily want to know. It is an odd biography of a great political figure. Up to the period of Wolsey's mid fifties (c.1472–1527) it is little more than a loose succession of anecdotes and vignettes, and becomes more expansive only for the last three years of his life after his political career had first run into insuperable difficulties and then collapsed in disaster (1527–30). The whole second half of the book is taken up with the very last year of his life, one of frustration and dejection. This weighting towards Wolsey's last years might be explained as a bias towards the time when Cavendish was closest to his subject; Wolsey perhaps talked to his servants more when he had nothing else to do. This prompted A. F. Pollard, in his biography of Wolsey, to describe theLifeas ‘the classic example of history as it appears to a gentleman-usher’.