Emotion in the Tudor Court

Literature, History, and Early Modern Feeling

By Bradley J. Irish

Northwestern University Press

Copyright © 2018 Northwestern University Press
All rights reserved.
ISBN: 978-0-8101-3639-7

Contents

Acknowledgments,
List of Abbreviations,
Introduction,
Chapter 1 The Disgusting Cardinal Thomas Wolsey,
Chapter 2 The Envious Earl of Surrey,
Chapter 3 The Rejected Earl of Leicester, the Rejected Sir Philip Sidney,
Chapter 4 The Dreading, Dreadful Earl of Essex,
Notes,
Index,

CHAPTER 1

The Disgusting Cardinal Thomas Wolsey

In 1544 the Flemish painter Cornelis Metsys produced an engraving of King Henry VIII, a man with three more years to live. (See the front cover of this book.) In the image, a modern commentator observes, the king's appearance is "ravaged by a combination of overindulgence, disease, and ever-increasing suspicion of those around him"; this Henry resembles an old toad, perched with "shoulders hunched, his face bloated, his mouth pinched, and his wary eyes reduced to mere slits." The king of Metsys's portrait — and the king immortalized in history — bears little physical resemblance to the youthful Henry, whose beauty was sung in the courts of foreign princes:

And first of all, his Majesty is twenty-nine years old, and extremely handsome; nature could not have done more for him; he is much handsomer than any other sovereign in Christendom, a great deal handsomer than the King of France; very fair, and his whole frame admirably proportioned.

Henry remained the stud of Christendom for the first half of his reign — a role more widely acknowledged of late, thanks not only to the work of historians like David Starkey, but also to Jonathan Rhys Meyers's portrayal of the king in Showtime's popular television series The Tudors (2007–2010).

But Henry's reign would have a second half, and age would not prove kind to him within it. At about the time of his infamous break with Rome, the king first complained of the "sore legge" that would increasingly plague his life; when this ulcerated wound clogged in 1538, Henry was found "without speaking, black in the face, and in great danger," and when the same occurred three years later, he was again "really thought to be in danger." Though the king's mobility was severely limited, his appetite did not follow suit, and he soon swelled to infamous proportions. His condition in the final years is perhaps best indicated by an entry in the postmortem inventory of the royal household: "Twoo Cheyres called trauewes" had been commissioned for the ailing Henry, "for the kinges Majestie to sitt in to be carried to and fro in his galleries and Chambres." The mighty King Henry VIII — who once, "placing his hand on his thigh," had boasted to an Italian diplomat of what "a good calf" he had — spent his last days being "moved by engines and art rather than by nature," the same leg unable to hoist his decaying body. Time, we know, ravages all, but Henry went less gracefully than most, and did so far more publicly.

But even back in Henry's younger days, when the lusty king kept his vigor with a steady diet of hunting, harping, and hawking, his court was still home to — and indeed dominated by — an "unwieldy hulk of corrupted flesh bearing perilously [a] supple, powerful brain, a demoniac incandescence of ambition and pride driving and lighting from within the bloating, rotting body." This is how Garrett Mattingly assessed the life and career of Cardinal Thomas Wolsey, the lord chancellor and papal legate whose meteoric rise starting in 1509 was capped by an equally spectacular fall in 1529. During the years of his ascendancy, Wolsey extended his reach into virtually every facet of English monarchal politics — a political mastery that was not unnoticed by contemporaries, for whom he eventually assumed the qualities of alter rex ("other king"). Having little of his father's taste for bureaucratic tasks, the young King Henry left much of his realm's daily operation to Wolsey, whose control of the Great Seal ensured that his own court at Hampton was in many ways an unmatched administrative and political center.

Nearly a century after his death, it is Wolsey who plays the villain role in Shakespeare's King Henry VIII, a domineering royal minister whose arrogance and treachery pervade the first half of the play. ("The devil speed him!" exclaims his chief adversary, Edward, Duke of Buckingham, "No man's pie is freed / From his ambitious finger.") But Shakespeare's depiction of a churlish, self-interested cardinal emerges from a pool of anti-Wolsey sentiment that had festered in England for nearly a century — and that has, despite some recent revisionist efforts, largely shaped the subsequent historical tradition. I begin my study of emotion in the Tudor court by considering one aspect of how this reputation was generated: the portrayal of Wolsey in Henrician literary culture. Ripe with images of gluttony and disease, contemporary satires of Wolsey — such as John Skelton's Why Come Ye Nat to Courte?, William Roy and Jerome Barlowe's Rede Me and Be Nott Wrothe, and a variety of anti-Wolsey ballads — are underwritten by the affective energy of disgust, a visceral response through which the cardinal is cast as a physical and spiritual contaminant, dangerously infecting both King Henry and his realm.

In this chapter, I suggest that the dynamics of disgust, as articulated by modern researchers in the humanities and sciences, can help us situate Wolsey's place in the Henrician imagination. As the governor of ingestion and rejection, disgust is a key force in the emotional arsenal that was fielded against Wolsey; as we will see, contemporary attacks insistently invoke the rhetoric of disgust in their attempts to discredit the cardinal and his political influence. Furthermore, this sentiment of disgust ultimately guides the terms of Wolsey's ruin: despite his profound role in shaping the first half of Henry's reign — in which he is so fully incorporated into the body politic that he is often indistinguishable from the king — the cardinal is finally imagined as a sickness of the res publica, a disease that is only cured by purging him from the symbolic body of the court.

"From the Donge Carte": The Rise of Cardinal Thomas Wolsey

"Cardynall wolsey," so writes George Cavendish, the cardinal's former gentleman usher and contemporary biographer, "was an honest poore mans Sonne borne in Ipsewiche with in the Countie of Suffolk." Though few imagined that a butcher's son would grow to become the most formidable subject in England, Wolsey apparently showed a remarkable early promise: in 1486 he took his B.A. from Oxford at just fifteen years old, earning him the famous moniker "boy bachelor." As he continued his studies, he advanced to fellow and eventually dean of his alma mater, Magdalen College; he then turned his attention to an ecclesiastical career, taking his first benefice in 1500 at Limington and gradually acquiring more over the next decade. After securing a position as royal chaplain to Henry VII (and aligning himself with Richard Fox, Bishop of Winchester), Wolsey made his ventures into the political realm, embarking on notable ambassadorial journeys to the Low Countries and Scotland in 1508.

At the death of Henry VII, Wolsey was named almoner to the new king; by 1511, he was a fixture in Henry VIII's council, starting the rise to power that would...