On the high road to success and in the height of his power, Wolsey extorts an admiration which is still somewhat reluctant. His figure cannot be called attractive. Over the business of the divorce it is difficult not to feel him positively repellent. But in his fall he rose to moral heights of which his previous career gives no warning. What shall it profit a man if he gain the whole world and lose his own soul? Here, it would seem, was one who—not voluntarily surrendering but forcibly bereft of the world, when he had gained it—found thereby his soul’s salvation. Through tears and tribulation, pain of the worn-out body, anguish of the spirit, he won it. In the day of his triumph, his countrymen hated him while they could not but admire; hated him with a rare bitterness which made even Thomas More ungenerous; save some few of his own household, none felt a touch of sympathy, unless perhaps the king, who condescended to send him one or two kindly messages to salve his own royal conscience while he was stripping his most loyal servant of everything he possessed. Yet in the months of his retirement, while, in his diocese of York, he devoted himself to the care of his spiritual flock, the fallen Cardinal won on all hands a passionate affection bestowed only upon men and women who can forget themselves in their thought for others. At bottom there must have been in the man an essential sweetness and loveableness repressed—dried up in the fires of ambition, parched in the sunshine of prosperity, welling forth in the shadow of adversity. Gone was the power that swayed the politics of a continent; gone the gorgeous pomp, the insolent state, that stirred the impotent malice of the lesser men he had overshadowed. But with their loss, the hidden best that was in the fallen minister found free play.
Wolsey’s chroniclers have been against him. Those who wished to magnify the king pointed to the Cardinal as the evil genius who had prompted every ill-judged deed. The nobility hated him as an insolent and upstart foe to their order. Katharine’s party hated him, because he was credited not only with anti-Spanish policy but with being the prime mover of the divorce. The Boleyn party hated him, because they knew that he loathed the Boleyn marriage. He had no sympathy from the Protestants, since he stood for the old ecclesiastical order; none from the later Catholics, since his attitude to the Papacy was misunderstood; none from the populace, because he embodied the most unpopular characteristics of ecclesiasticism. Even Cavendish, who admired him, is careful in his record to point the moral that pride goeth before a fall, lest his praise of the Cardinal’s demeanour in his last year of life should be regarded as unduly laudatory. From Skelton to Fox the martyrologist, every man had some motive for throwing a stone at him.
But if Shakespeare—or another—has summed up for us the libels of his enemies, the same hand has shaped the far truer eulogium pronounced by the “honest chronicler” Griffith in the same play. By his own talents he had made himself great: in his high station, if in some respects he abused his power, yet in the main he worked for the glory of England. It is inconceivable that when he fell, when the world slipped from the grasp of one who had been the very type of worldliness, he should have kissed the rod with perfect resignation, and found no taste of bitterness in the cup allotted to him. Yet there was at least a solid proportion of truth in the pious words of Griffith:
His overthrow heaped happiness upon him;
For then, and not till then, he felt himself,
And found the blessedness of being little;
And, to add greater honours to his age
Than man could give him, he died fearing God.
No amount of historical inquiry will ever suffice to displace in the public mind a portrait bearing Shakespeare’s signature. The Wolsey of the play is not easy to reconcile with the Wolsey Griffith described after his disappearance from the stage: but these words are still a part of the Shakespearean portrait.