The Tudor Cardinal

When one spends a lifetime studying sixteenth-century Russia, it can be easy to forget that politics in the rest of Renaissance Europe was every bit as cutthroat and duplicitous as in the court of Ivan the Terrible and his predecessors. That truth is clearly illustrated in The Cardinal (Ballantine Books, May 27, 2025), the latest historical novel from Alison Weir, the author of many books, not all of them fictional, about Tudor England.

The Cardinal traces the career of Thomas Wolsey, a tradesman’s son who rose through the ranks of the clergy, eventually attracting the attention of King Henry VII. Henry VII’s trust in Wolsey—coupled with Wolsey’s own early recognition that the new king, the eighteen-year-old Henry VIII, valued the prestige of authority over the day-to-day work involved in running a kingdom—led to Tom (as he is called throughout this novel, since there were many men at Henry’s court named Thomas) becoming the most powerful man in England after the king himself.

Power, then as now, went hand in hand with money, and in an age of unabashed conspicuous consumption, that has led to serious discussion of whether Wolsey not only could but did outspend the king. The most notorious example is Hampton Court Palace, which Wolsey built for his own use and turned over to Henry VIII only out of fear that its opulence would alienate his benefactor.

Unsurprisingly, many court servitors did not appreciate the lowborn Wolsey’s influence over the king, and this novel traces their schemes and Tom’s attempts to combat them. His occasional pettiness and petulance during the ongoing struggle help to humanize him, but it is his long love affair with Joan Larke—which resulted in two living children, one stillborn, and possibly other offspring attributed to her eventual husband—that goes farthest to make the cardinal sympathetic.

When I accepted this book for review, I had no idea that Pope Francis would pass on to his heavenly reward and a new pope be selected, but I mention the connection because it was Wolsey’s deepest dream to be elected pope (then a decision that was even more the result of political maneuvering than it is now, hard as that may be to believe), and his machinations toward that end make for some of the best parts of the story.

Alas, when forced to choose between love and power, Tom picks what most of us would consider the wrong side. But that’s the trouble with writing about people who actually lived: you can’t respect the historical record and ignore the real choices your characters made; you can only try to explain them. Alison Weir does as good a job as anyone could of explaining Cardinal Wolsey, what drove him, and the forces that ultimately led to his downfall.

Painting of Thomas, Cardinal Wolsey, public domain via Wikimedia Commons.