IT IS A truism to observe that moments of revolution, reformation, and transformation prompt reflection and experimentation in art. Nevertheless, surveying the literary outputs of the Cavendishes shows us how these reflections and experiments speak in a diachronic kind of way—both about and across time—from what researchers normally see. To follow on from Lisa Hopkins's point that a general lack of conventional poetic technique typifies the Cavendish family canon, focusing on three centuries of a single family's outputs rather than a collection of accomplished or thematically connected texts allows us to see a very different kind of evolving literary culture that could either move with or push against contemporary trends. The most famous literary Cavendish—Margaret, whose works are examined in Chapters 10 and 11 in this volume—used poetry to consider scientific questions: in this volume, Lisa Walters argues that Margaret “escapes” from the seventeenth-century push towards what Robert Hooke called a “plainness” of scientific language. Margaret instead uses poetry and language to explore the philosophic and scientific, and we can see how she worked consciously against developing trends in natural philosophy to test how best to work through these most difficult questions about the nature of the world. In a similar manner, we can see George Cavendish, ancestor of Margaret's husband, weighing the relative capabilities of poetry and prose to illuminate the past, testing his own sense of verisimilitude and poetic style against changing contemporary ideas about how to write about the past.

As George sat in comfortable retirement in rural Suffolk in the 1550s, it must have seemed to him—as to many of his contemporaries—that there were important lessons to be taken from a turbulent past and applied to an uncertain present. Having served as gentleman usher to Thomas Cardinal Wolsey (ca. 1470–1530) for at least the final eight years of Wolsey's life, George was an eyewitness to and participant in elements of some of the most important political and religious events of the early Henrician period.