The King s Cardinal: Rise and Fall of Cardinal Wolsey
£16.99
Revisionist but blinkered - Gwyn has undertaken the monumental task of revising out opinions of one of the most controversial and often misunderstood characters in English history. On the whole his re-anaylsis is a sucessful, scholarly and persuasive affair, featuring some excellent insight into Wolsey s relationship with the nobility and Henry himself, challenging the faction driven interpretaion currently fashionable with the likes of David Starkey. Having said that one does get the feeling that Gwyn is often so anxious to see Wolsey in the most positive of lights that his interpretation seems somewhat blinkered and onesided, the most obvious example of which is the chapter on the Amicable Grant. However, overall the work represents a valuable and often courageous reinterpretation of an age old charaterisation for which Gwyn deserves full praise.
Magisterial indeed - I think Wolsey was definitely a person whose motives, motivation, etc, may well have been misunderstood or misinterpreted by many, both his contemporaries and writers of more recent times. This biography attempts to get behind the scandal, and the ambassador s letters of the times, and really analyse legal, formal documentation, in the context not only of Henry s divorce and marriage to Anne Boleyn, and not only the break with the Catholic Pope, but also in the context of the powerplay within France, and the Empire, and Europe as a whole, and, possibly more importantly, attempts to analyse such things within the framework of the time and the people who lived in that time, not with the viewpoint that we as moderns tend to allow to slant our interpretations of past events.The interpretations are sometimes controversial and defy what could be considered the accepted view, but they clarify elements of Wolsey s character that I believe have been glossed over by past historians, and open him up to our view as a complex statesman, dedicated church figure, and man of his times.