'How be it the primordyall
Of his wretched originall,
And his base progeny,
And his gresy genealogy,
He came of the sank royall (royal blood),
That was cast out of a bochers stall.'
Skelton's Why Come Ye not to Court.
I. i. 138. Ipswich. Ipswich was Wolsey's birthplace.
I. i. 172. count-cardinal. The title is hyphenated because a secular title is joined to an ecclesiastical one. Wolsey was both Archbishop of York and Count of Hexamshire.
I. i. 176. Charles the emperor. Charles V, Emperor of the Holy Roman Empire and King of Spain. His mother, Joanna, was a sister of Katharine of Aragon, wife of Henry VIII. He landed at Dover, May 26, 1520. The real and pretended motives for this visit are taken from Holinshed.
I. i. 183. He privily. He was omitted in the First Folio, but supplied in the Second.
I. i. 197 S. d. Enter Brandon. A Sir Thomas Brandon is mentioned by Holinshed as Master of the King's Horse. Yet, according to Holinshed, the arrest was made by Sir Henry Marny, Captain of the King's Guard. There is no dramatic reason for this change of persons; it merely shows that the dramatists worked up the material for the play rapidly.
I. i. 200. Hereford. The Folio misprints Hertford.
I. i. 204–206. I am sorry, etc. Two coordinate clauses. I am sorry to see that you are taken prisoner and to be an eye-witness to the event.
I. i. 211. Lord Abergavenny. The Folio spells the name Aburgany, a spelling that indicates the pronunciation. The fact of the arrest is taken from
