Thomas Wolsey, cardinal archbishop of York, was undoubtedly one of the most important religious and political figures of the reign of Henry VIII. The son of an Ipswich tavern keeper and butcher, he rose—to the scandal and fury of his betters—to the pinnacle of English politics, thanks to the confidence of his master the king. Archbishop, lord chancellor, papal legate—by the mid-1520s, he was second only to King Henry in power. But the withdrawal of royal confidence, the result of his failure in the pursuit of a papal annulment, resulted in a fall no less spectacular than his rise. The general outline of Wolsey's career is familiar to many, and the author of this fascinating and thought-provoking study does not intend to rehearse the details.

Hornbeck is less interested in the particulars of the cardinal's life and career than in the way he has been depicted in the centuries since his death in October 1530. In part, the book is about the uses to which Wolsey has been put: “Overwhelmingly he has been invoked by those wishing to advance their arguments about the events that led up to the break between the Roman Catholic Church and what was to become the Church of England” (3). If this were all Hornbeck accomplished, he would have done a service. But in fact, the book does more than this. Drawing upon the work of scholars of history and memory such as Jan Assmann, he reflects upon the ways Wolsey's story has been told, not simply by historians, but in historical fiction, civic pageantry, and on the stage. In so doing, he sheds light on broader questions.

The introduction establishes three “prototypical representations” of Wolsey, all of which make their appearance quite early following his death and which reappear down to the present. While these prototypes sometimes evolve in ways more suited to their contemporary context, they remain ubiquitous. The first is of Wolsey as the epitome of Catholic corruption, an image beloved by Protestants from John Foxe in the sixteenth century to A. G. Dickens in the twentieth. A second, in which Wolsey is depicted as the author of the English schism, has been more popular with Catholics. For these interpreters—Polydore Vergil, for instance, in his Angliae Historia (1555)—Wolsey's pride, ambition, and arrogance led him to put his own interests above the church. In this account, the break with Rome owed much to Wolsey's personal pique over being denied the Papacy for himself. The third prototype was pioneered by George Cavendish, the cardinal's gentleman usher, who depicts his master as a flawed man, but ultimately as the victim of his enemies and a capricious king.

Having established these prototypes, Hornbeck proceeds to trace their evolution chronologically. Perhaps the first depiction of the cardinal came in December 1530, only weeks after his death, when Anne Boleyn's father, the earl of Wiltshire, sponsored a performance at court depicting Wolsey's soul being unceremoniously hauled to the devil. Interestingly, this scene plays an important part in one of the more recent retellings of these events in Hilary Mantel's Wolf Hall, both the novel and its film version (examined in chapter 5). For most of the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries, Wolsey's life story was used to forward religious narratives. In the sixteenth century, he was either the poster boy of Catholic corruption or the father of schism, a disloyal son of the church. In the seventeenth century, authors used his life in the fight between Puritans and Arminians—he was a proxy for Archbishop Laud, another over mighty and corrupt clergyman. In 1641, for example, William Sheares produced the first printed edition of Cavendish's book (which had previously circulated in manuscript), altered in such a way as to project an obvious anti-Laud message. In the late eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries, his life became useful for those arguing over Catholic emancipation.

The nineteenth century saw the beginnings of professional history, as primary source material started appearing in carefully edited scholarly editions. The most important of these was J. S. Brewer's Letters and Papers, Foreign and Domestic, of the Reign of Henry VIII, the first volume of which was published in 1862. Academic historians used these sources to scrutinize Wolsey's life, though as Hornbeck shows, they still continued to adhere mostly to the well-established prototypes. Modern historians, such as Dickens, put the cardinal into the Wolsey-as-corrupt-churchman basket, while others, for example Eamon Duffy, preferred a story closer to the Cavendish line.

Hornbeck's analysis of recent historiography is useful, but it is when he turns to Wolsey's representations beyond the realm of the footnote that he makes some fascinating observations. The character of Wolsey began making appearances on stage in the previously mentioned 1530 court entertainment, and he has reappeared from time to time: in Shakespeare and John Fletcher's Henry VIII and John Banks's Vertue Betray'd; or, Anna Bullen (1682). In the nineteenth century, Wolsey became the subject of historical fiction—for example, Richard Cobbold's Freston Tower (1850). He played a role in civic pageantry as well, being celebrated in his hometown of Ipswich four centuries after his death and in Oxford, where he shared credit for the foundation of Christ Church. Hornbeck discusses all of these and has interesting things to say about the intersection of history and fiction. Bringing his story to the present day, he also examines the character of Wolsey on film in A Man for All Seasons (1966 and 1988), The Tudors (2007–2010), and Wolf Hall (2015). These latter representations are particularly powerful—the image of Wolsey embodied by Orson Welles at his most gigantic remains indelible in many minds, despite the fact that there is no hard evidence that the real Wolsey was actually obese.

This book provokes an uncomfortable question for this academic historian: we are conditioned to dismiss the “popular” (to say nothing of the work of novelists like Hilary Mantel), but the author's sensitive treatment of all of these genres makes it clear that life by footnote may be less satisfying (or possibly even less illuminating) than we think it is. We should be grateful to J. Patrick Hornbeck for putting the doubt in our minds.