Cardinal Wolsey's words
Cardinal
Wolsey's words
In Brief
When a onelegged beggar holds out his cap to Father Conmee,
"Father Conmee blessed him in the sun for his purse held, he
knew, one silver crown." The priest's lack of financial
charity is perhaps excusable, but the lack of emotional
charity he displays seconds later is not: "He thought, but not
for long, of soldiers and sailors, whose legs had been shot
off by cannonballs, ending their days in some pauper ward, and
of cardinal Wolsey's words: If I had served my God as I
have served my king He would not have abandoned me in my old
days." The cardinal served King Henry VIII faithfully
and effectively until his failure to enact Henry's plan of
divorcing his wife invited the king's wrath. The pathos of
this tragic fall, represented in Shakespeare's King Henry
VIII, is in no way commensurate with Conmee's
self-congratulatory application.
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Thomas Wolsey, successively Archbishop of York, papal legate,
and Cardinal, became also King Henry's Lord Chancellor and
chief advisor, amassing great wealth in consequence. He fell
out of royal favor when he could or would not secure an
annulment of the king's marriage to Catherine of Aragon. Henry
charged him with treason and sent men to York to bring him
back to the Tower in London, but Wolsey died of natural causes
on the way. Shakespeare stages a scene in which he takes leave
of Thomas Cromwell, his servant, disciple, and successor:
Cromwell, I did not think to shed a tear
In all my miseries; but thou hast forc'd me
(Out of thy honest truth) to play the woman....
Say Wolsey, that once trod the ways of glory,
And sounded all the depths and shoals of honor,
Found thee a way, out of his wrack, to rise in,
A sure and safe one, though thy master miss'd it.
Mark but my fall, and that that ruin'd me:
Cromwell I charge thee, fling away ambition!...
There take an inventory of all I have,
To the last penny, 'tis the King's. My robe,
And my integrity to heaven is all
I dare now call mine own. O Cromwell, Cromwell,
Had I but ser'v my God with half the zeal
I serv'd my king, He would not in mine age
Have left me naked to mine enemies.
(3.2.428-30, 435-40, 451-57)
Joyce may have deliberately allowed Conmee to mute the eloquence of Shakespeare's verse, or he may simply have relied on some derivative text. Slote, Mamigonian, and Turner note that "Other than using the word abandoned instead of forsaken, the version Conmee quotes is identical to one version in circulation in the nineteenth century (e.g., Charlotte M. Yonge, Young Folks' History of England, p. 212)." But in this case precise identification of a source matters much less than the way the priest applies the tragic words to the crippled sailor. That poor fellow would be much better off, he thinks, if he had pursued a career in the church rather than the navy. Conmee's smug complacency is of a piece with his dismissal of empathetic imagination: "He thought, but not for long, of soldiers and sailors, whose legs had been shot off by cannonballs, ending their days in some pauper ward."
The Disgrace of Cardinal Wolsey, 1869 oil on canvas painting by John Pettie held in the Sheffield Museums. Source: artuk.org.