INTRODUCTORY NOTE
GEORGE CAVENDISH, author of the Life of Cardinal Wolsey, the first true biography written in England, was born in 1500, and died in 1561. He was the eldest son of Thomas Cavendish, Clerk of the Pipe in the Exchequer. In 1524 be was married to a niece of Sir Thomas More. Two years later, in 1526, he took service in the suite of Cardinal Wolsey, “abandoning” as the Cardinal said, “his own country, wife and children, his own house and family, his rest and quietness, only to serve me.” In the four years that intervened between this time and Wolsey's fall and death, Cavendish was his devoted servitor. He was with him in the time of his adversity, and was present at his death.
Cavendish seems deeply to have meditated the dramatic spectacle which his master's life presented, and to have taken to heart its lesson of the “wondrous mutability of vain honours, the brittle assurances of abundance, the uncertainty of dignities, the, flattering of vain friends, and the tickle trust to worldly princes.” After Wolsey's burial, Cavendish retired as speedily as he might to his quiet country home in Suffolk, there to spend the thirty-one years of life remaining to him, in comparative poverty and failure. He must, however, have found solace in continual brooding upon the rich and crowded years of his service with the great Cardinal, for after some years of idleness he bestirred himself to write this simple, sincere, and picturesque record of the things he had seen.
His work remained long in manuscript, for, owing to its reflections upon the character of Henry VIII, it could not safely be published in the lifetime of his daughter. It was first printed in an incomplete and corrupt form in 1641, for the sake of turning its moral against Archbishop Laud, another prelate ambitious in statecraft. Before this time, however, it had been largely circulated in numerous manuscript copies, and it had formed the basis of the account of Wolsey in Holinshed's Chronicles. Either indirectly, through Holinshed, or directly in manuscript, it had coloured the interpretation of Wolsey's character and career that has been made traditional by Shakespeare.
Was fashioned to much honour from his cradle.
He was a scholar, and a ripe, and good one;
Exceeding wise, fair spoken, and persuading:
Lofty, and sour, to them that lov'd him not,
But, to those men that sought him, sweet as summer.
And though he were unsatisfied in getting,
(Which was a sin), yet in bestowing —
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