Cardinal Wolsey in Tudor and Stuart literature: Relationships between Renaissance views of the meaning of history and the character of literary texts

This study examines the treatment in Renaissance English literature of Thomas Cardinal Wolsey, arguably the greatest cardinal-statesman of sixteenth-century Europe and the central figure under Henry VIII in the watershed events which determined the Tudor succession and the separation of the English church from Rome. It emphasizes both close reading of literary works in their full historical and intellectual contexts, and the definition of relationships among texts. It explores concepts held by Tudor and Stuart figures of their own age as an epoch in history, the influence on such views of changing political, religious, and cultural circumstances, and relationships between ideas about history and the character of literary texts. Wolsey's career and his tragic fall and death became important subjects for poets, humanists, religious controversialists of all persuasions, biographers, moralists, and playwrights. Inaccurate and unjust evaluations of the Cardinal originated through ignorance, prejudice, and the satiric and polemical declarations of his enemies. They were long sustained through diverse circumstances, including the Protestant reinterpretation of Christian history as the struggle of the true church against the papal Antichrist, the uncritically agglomerative and repetitive techniques of the chronicle tradition, the political necessity of presenting Henry VIII and Anne Boleyn in artificially favorable lights, often at Wolsey's expense, and the antipathy toward the Cardinal of disgruntled English Catholics, who wrongly held him accountable for instigating Henry's divorce of Catherine and consequently for destroying Roman Catholicism in England. The study also traces the gradual rehabilitation of Wolsey's reputation in the late sixteenth and early seventeenth centuries. A truer estimation of the Cardinal was made possible by the waning of the Tudor dynasty, which permitted a more objective analysis of Henry's deficiencies as a man and a king; by the firmer establishment of English Protestantism, which obviated the need to denigrate Wolsey in the cause of religious partisanship; by the realization that reformed religion was also marked by imperfections; by scholarly improvements to the methodologies of historiography; and by the deepening appreciation of at least some historical poets and dramatists of the complexities and ambiguities of the Henrician age, and of Wolsey's enormous and unique accomplishments.