Chapter II “A vysage of trwthe”: George Cavendish’s Characterizations of Wolsey

Chapter II

“A vysage of trwthe”: George Cavendish’s Characterizations of Wolsey

The works of George Cavendish represent a unique opportunity for scholars to compare poetry and prose characterizations of Cardinal Wolsey authored by someone who had close personal ties to and professional experience with the Cardinal. Cavendish served as gentleman-usher to the Cardinal from some point before 1522 (Mike Pincombe gives the date as “around 1520”) until the death of Wolsey in November 1530.¹⁶⁸ As gentleman-usher, Cavendish was required to keep close company with his master; as Richard S. Sylvester notes in his Introduction to the Early English Text Society’s edition of The Life and Death of Cardinal Wolsey, Cavendish performed many roles:

He was primarily a messenger, as he shows himself to have been on the French embassy, one who prepared the way for the arrival of the cardinal himself. The servants of the household looked to him for instructions and, in 1527, it was to him that the preparations for the great banquet at Hampton Court were entrusted.¹⁶⁹

Despite Sylvester’s assertion, it is perhaps misleading to think of Cavendish as a messenger; we can better describe Cavendish as a lead gentleman-servant, entrusted to act on Wolsey’s behalf on personal matters (even when the Cardinal was on state business). The Oxford English Dictionary defines the role as “An officer at court, in a dignitary’s household, etc., whose duty it is on occasion to walk or go before a person of high rank; also, a chamberlain.” The ‘gentleman’ prefix indicates Cavendish’s own social rank: he was born into a moderately wealthy Suffolk family of civil servants and courtiers and his younger brother William’s son would be named earl of Devonshire in 1618 (with a descendant being elevated to a dukedom following the Glorious Revolution). In acting as gentleman-usher to the Cardinal, Cavendish had ample access to Wolsey; the two apparently enjoyed a close and friendly relationship until Wolsey’s death in 1530. After the Cardinal’s death, Cavendish withdrew from public service, turning down an offer of an appointment from Henry VIII and instead choosing to retire to his family’s holdings in Surrey.¹⁷⁰

Despite his intention to retire from public life, Cavendish was sufficiently motivated to write his defensive Life and Death of Cardinal Wolsey (written between 1554 and 1558) in part due to the increasing amount of anti-Wolsey literature published in the second half of the sixteenth century. Indeed, he felt moved enough to write the Life that he broke off from writing a collection of de casibus poems set in the voices of a variety of Henrician, Edwardian, and Marian political figures, later collectively called the Metrical Visions (c. 1552-1558). These two texts provide a counterpoint to the mid-sixteenth century chronicles, of which those by Polydore Vergil and Edward Hall were the most prominent. Vergil and Hall were largely critical of Wolsey and his policies. Hall’s The Vnion of the Two Noble and Illustre Famelies of Lancastre & York, first published by Richard Grafton in 1548, in particular was very likely to have spurred Cavendish to defend Wolsey. Vergil’s comments on Wolsey did not appear until the third edition of his Anglica Historia in 1555 and may have reinforced Cavendish’s resolve to continue writing his Life. Indeed, Cavendish explicitly states that his Life was to contradict the “historygraffers of Cronycles of prynces” who “with there blaphemous trompe” had “spred abrode innvmerable lyes”.¹⁷¹ Cavendish, a moderate Catholic writing during the comparatively brief Roman resurgence in the reign of Mary, felt compelled to combat what he saw as the propagandist efforts of the Protestants to manipulate the life of Wolsey so as to represent “a vysage of trwthe, as thowghe it weare a perfet veritie”.¹⁷² In many ways, the revelation of truth is the guiding principle of both the Life and the Metrical Visions. In the Metrical Visions Cavendish was writing poetic attempts at creating a didactic framework for revealing the ephemeral nature of wealth and power and the fickleness of Fortune; the Life, by contrast, was conceived of as a text which might provide a more literal truth regarding Wolsey’s life. The Life is not merely a defense of Wolsey, but is also a defense of documentary representations history against poetic or mimetic versions. In addition, Cavendish’s texts provide an ideal opportunity to see how a mid-century author reacted to the dominant contemporary characterizations of Wolsey (as provided by authors like Hall), and how he himself adopted and adapted those characterizations in his own works to better represent the history he had experienced first-hand. These texts act as valuable mid-century touchpoints which allow us to analyze representations both of Wolsey as an individual and as a subject of discourse; in addition, we can also see how Cavendish discussed history itself—in two very different genres—in reaction to Vergil’s and Hall’s ‘untruths’.

To better understand Cavendish’s characterizations of Wolsey and their significance, we will first consider the Metrical Visions, beginning with the Wolsey poem Le Historye / Cardinalis Eboracensis and then setting that text against the other poems in the collection. This section will also look at Cavendish’s poetic heritage with a particular focus on the debt he owed to John Skelton. The discussion will center on how Cavendish used Tudor de casibus commonplaces to provide both a moral lesson for readers and a more personal ruminative lament for the Cardinal and the political figures who once so dominated the former gentleman-usher’s life. Following the Metrical Visions, we will discuss the Life and the images it contains in chronological order. This structure will help to demonstrate Cavendish’s technique of chronological ‘telescoping’, whereby Cavendish compressed the length of time between key moments in Wolsey’s career as well as alleging that Wolsey completed particular diplomatic feats more quickly (perhaps) than he actually did. It will also allow us to consider the textual effect of Cavendish’s interrupting his work on the Metrical Visions in order to write the Life.