George Cavendish, the biographer of Wolsey, was born about 1500, and became Wolsey’s gentleman-usher at least as early as 1527. In attendance upon his great master till the end (November 28, 1530), he afterwards retired to his house at Glemsford, in Suffolk, where he lived quietly with his wife, a niece of Sir Thomas More, till the close of his own life in 1561 or 1562. The best edition of his “Life of Cardinal Wolsey” is Singer’s (1815), reprinted with a good introduction in Morley’s “Universal Library” (1886).

Life of Wolsey

  The reason of this multiplication of copies by the laborious process of transcription, seems to have been this: the work was composed in the days of Queen Mary by a zealous catholic, but not committed to the press during her short reign. It contained a very favourable representation of the conduct of a man who was held in but little esteem in the days of her successor, and whom it was then almost treason to praise. The conduct of several persons was reflected on who were flourishing themselves, or in their immediate posterity, in the court of Queen Elizabeth: and it contained also the freest censures of the Reformation, and very strong remarks upon the conduct and character of Anne Boleyn, the Cardinal’s great enemy. It is probable that no printer could be found who had so little fear of the Star-Chamber before his eyes as to venture the publication of a work so obnoxious; while such was the gratification which all persons of taste and reading would find in it, from its fidelity, its curious minuteness, its lively details, and above all, from that unaffected air of sweet natural eloquence in which it is composed, that many among them must have been desirous of possessing it.

  Though Cavendish was a friendly witness, he yet evidently recorded with fidelity and accuracy what he actually saw and heard. His memoirs of Wolsey, for that is the real character of the work, are of great value, therefore, to the historian, as containing authentic information on many important points connected with that reign. The work, moreover, is written in a sort of gossiping, conversational style, that makes it pleasant reading. Another circumstance gives special value to this work. His account of Henry and Wolsey was the one followed by Shakespeare, in the play of Henry VIII., many of the passages in Shakespeare being Cavendish’s prose turned into verse.

  For a long time there was some uncertainty about the authorship, whether it was the work of George Cavendish or of his better known brother William. The question was settled in 1814, by Rev. Joseph Hunter of Bath, in a pamphlet, “Who wrote Cavendish’s Life of Wolsey?” which is reprinted in vol. ii, of Singer’s edition. Hunter proved satisfactorily by internal evidence that George, not William, Cavendish was Wolsey’s usher, and consequently author of the book…. It is the production of a refined, pious, and gentle nature, which looks back over many years of quiet melancholy upon a period when he too had borne a part in great affairs. The view of Wolsey taken by Cavendish is substantially the same as that of Shakespeare, and it is by no means improbable that Shakespeare had read Cavendish in manuscript. Cavendish writes with the fullest admiration for Wolsey and sympathy with his aims; but reflection has taught him the pathetic side of all worldly aims…. The refinement, the simplicity, the genuine goodness of the writer is present at every page. The fulness of portraiture, the clearness of personal details, the graceful description, the reserve shown in drawing from memories of a time long past and outlived, give the book a distinction of its own, and place it high among English biographies.

  George Cavendish, in the writing of this book, which is one of the most interesting pieces of biography in English literature, was looking back upon what he had known thirty years before, with the reflection of ripe years to soften all; and he made of it one harmonious picture of the vanity of that ambition through which, perhaps, he had himself partly learnt the blessedness of being little. Old memories of love and duty temper the religious spirit in which Wolsey’s faithful servant, grey with years that had slipped by since his master’s death, shaped what he had known into a picture of life so single and so true that the direct suggestion to Shakespeare of his play of “King Henry VIII.” may have come from the reading of George Cavendish’s “Life of Wolsey.”