Product Description

Proud, greedy, corrupt and driven by overwhelming personal ambition. Such is the traditional image of Thomas Wolsey, Lord Chancellor, Archbishop of York, Bishop of Winchester, Abbot of St. Albans, Bishop if Tournai and Papal Legate. It is an image which Peter Gwyn examines, challenges and decisively overturns in this remarkable book. From exceedingly humble beginnings Wolsey rose to a pinnacle of power unsurpassed by any other British commoner. Peter Gwyn explores every aspect of the Cardinal's career - not least his relationship with Henry VIII - and sets it firmly in a vividly recreated Tudor world. The Wolsey who emerges is a man of prodigious energy and ability, a tireless dispenser of justice, an enlightened reformer wholly dedicated to his king and country - a man who has been consistently misrepresented and maligned for four-and-a-half centuries.

Product Details

• Amazon Sales Rank: #99220 in Books
• Published on: 1992-01-09
• Original language: English
• Binding: Paperback
• 688 pages

Review
'Magisterial' Antonia Fraser, Sunday Telegraph 'Learned and controversial, it has all the elements of a detective story...His verdict is convincing...a fascinating book.' Lord Blake, Country Life 'A work of magisterial ambition and achievement...He has taken a great subject and transformed it.' Blair Worden, London Review of Books

Lord Blake, Country Life
‘Learned and controversial, it has all the elements of a detective story…His verdict is convincing…a fascinating book.’

Blair Worden, London Review of Books
‘A work of magisterial ambition and achievement…He has taken a great subject and transformed it.’

Customer Reviews

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.

a heavy tome
There is no doubt that Peter Gwyn knows his stuff: the research is exhaustive. It is his manner of presenting it which I find wanting: he seems to have more detail than he is capable of organising into a coherent whole. The book is organised thematically rather than chronologically, with successive chapters on Wolsey's foreign policy, work as Lord Chancellor, church reforms etc. It assumes a fair amount of prior knowledge in the reader: this is a book for the specialist in Tudor history rather than the interested general reader. Buy this book only if you are one of the former!