The early modern literary representation of Cardinal Thomas Wolsey (1470/71–1530) is ripe for scholarly analysis. This material has not received the attention it deserves: Wolsey is among the most important Tudor administrators, and during his lifetime and beyond he became subject to substantial satire and invective. Scholars have long been aware of major literary treatments of Wolsey, including the poems of John Skelton, passages concerning Wolsey in John Foxe’s Acts and Monuments and Holinshed’s Chronicles, and Shakespeare’s and Fletcher’s Henry VIII. By offering a reading of the representation of Wolsey in these texts, Gavin Schwartz-Leeper’s From Princes to Pages offers an important step toward remedying the gap in knowledge of this important subject. Schwartz-Leeper includes analysis of the characterization of Wolsey in the work of the cardinal’s former gentleman-usher, George Cavendish, and he is correct to observe that these writings, which include a Life and Death of Cardinal Wolsey and Metrical Visions in the de casibus literary tradition, have received less attention than other, more prominent sixteenth and early seventeenth-century writings on Wolsey.

Schwartz-Leeper is at his greatest strength when he identifies generalised satirical tropes and figures used by Skelton to describe Wolsey, and then traces the ways in which these devices came to signify first Wolsey specifically, and then the Roman Catholic church itself, in later English Protestant writing. Prominent among these tropes are descriptions of Wolsey as a dog and butcher’s cur, as well as metonymic association of the cardinal with his galero, or cardinal’s hat. This study also offers an intriguing and persuasive revisionist reading of the treatment of Wolsey in Shakespeare’s and Fletcher’s Henry VIII. Schwartz-Leeper argues that the cardinal’s characterisation is more positive than some scholars have assumed, when they have taken other characters’ complaints against Wolsey at face value or wrongly viewed the playwrights’ Wolsey through the lens of anti-Wolsey stereotypes that still exist in culture. This study is valuable for explaining the origin of these stereotypes for readers unfamiliar with this material. The introduction and conclusion frame the account in terms of early modern historiographical debate on the nature of historical ‘truth’. This is all very useful, as are this book’s claims that Cavendish wrote positively of Wolsey in order to counter negative images then in circulation, that Foxe took those images as signs of the Roman church’s broader institutional corruption, and that the editors of Holinshed took differing approaches to the cardinal’s posthumous reputation.

There exists much ground which this study does not cover. William Tyndale’s Practyse of Prelates (1530), one of the most important Henrician anti-Wolsey treatises, represents an important omission. The author might have incorporated findings from Tyndale’s work amid his discussion of Skelton’s anti-Wolsey verse invective Why Come Ye Nat to Courte?, which memorably describes the cardinal as ‘maris lupus’ (‘wolf of the sea’); Practyse also calls Wolsey Wolfsee. The work’s five chapters focus upon five authors and scarcely venture beyond their respective topics. This would not necessarily be a problem were it not for the work’s claim to demonstrate the ways in which Wolsey characterisations ‘reflect’ (p. 19) and ‘evolved across the sixteenth century in response to’ (p. 241) Tudor social, political, and religious change. Even a work devoted to Wolsey’s ‘literary lives’ would benefit from a wide cultural canvas to supply richer contextual details for its literary readings. It would be very interesting indeed to learn the ways in which the regime of Henry VIII viewed Wolsey during the 1540s, or the ways in which reaction to Wolsey shaped the Edwardian Reformation or helped determine the course of Elizabethan controversies including the Jewel-Harding polemics, debate over Presbyterian forms of church government, or the ongoing Catholic threat. One also cannot help but wish that the author had gone beyond his salutary discussion of the manuscript circulation of Cavendish’s works to consider other responses to Wolsey that circulated exclusively in manuscript in this era. There exists an issue of emphasis. The author argues that Wolsey offers a ‘unique’ opportunity among Tudor public figures, not to study character satire per se, but rather to examine the way in which such a figure’s public image evolved posthumously (p. 14). This may be the case, but this book doesn’t demonstrate the point clearly enough, and the reader is left to wonder the extent to which Wolsey’s posthumous reputation came to characterise the Henrician period itself, or whether it remained an isolated, if exceedingly high-profile, example.

This book, therefore, assembles important primary sources on this subject and will appeal to any reader encountering this material for the first time. It offers a useful point of departure for scholars to develop these arguments further.