Abstract:
The life of Cardinal Thomas Wolsey, lord chancellor of England from 1515 to 1529, has inspired
no small number of literary, historical, and dramatic retellings. A comprehensive study of
these texts remains to be written, but this article seeks to make a start by examining how Tudor
writers portrayed the cardinal’s response to his deposition and subsequent disgrace. For some
authors, Wolsey’s fall only made him more proud, and he began to act erratically and disloyally,
confirming the wisdom of the king’s decision to relieve him of office. For others, deposition
moved Wolsey to become philosophical and penitent, and some such writers depict a cardinal
who at the end of his life underwent nothing short of a conversion. This article traces both of
these historiographical trajectories from their origins in writings of the late 1540s and 1550s
through a range of late Tudor chronicle accounts. Elements of both narratives about the
cardinal appear, prominently if not always congruously, in one of the best-known theatrical
works about the events of the reign of Henry VIII, the play King Henry VIII (All Is True) by
William Shakespeare and John Fletcher. Understanding the interrelationships between
the Tudor texts presented here is essential to grasping later portrayals of Wolsey and his
contemporaries.
