Ever since the early 1960s and Robert Bolt’s play and film, A Man for All Seasons, Thomas Cardinal Wolsey (c. 1473-1530) has entered the popular imagination as a menacing villain. Whether portrayed by Orson Welles in 1966 or by John Gielgud in 1988, Bolt’s version of Wolsey was of an elderly and devious man trying to bully Thomas More. In reality, Wolsey was only five years older than More and lived into his late fifties. As for Wolsey’s shrewdness, in his secular, political service to King Henry VIII, Wolsey was right, his policy being to avoid a civil war that would result if the king had no male heir. His headache was facing the impossible, finding a way to navigate between that policy and canon law, all while dealing with important men who could not bear to be told the word No.

When William Shakespeare wrote Henry VIII, around 1611, he was intrigued again by the interaction of various types of character. From Holinshed’s Chronicles, he knew that Wolsey had for a time been one of those important men to whom anyone rarely dared to say No, and yet in the end, King Henry VIII told him No and stripped him of all his power and wealth. Shakespeare imagined himself into that situation, how it might be for a man second in rank only to the king to be suddenly brought to his lowest ebb.

In Act III, Scene 2, of Henry VIII, as Wolsey prepares to go into impoverished exile in Yorkshire, he engages in a soliloquy and then addresses his aide, Thomas Cromwell. Wolsey sighs to himself, “A long farewell to all my greatness!,” then muses, “This is the state of man: today he puts forth/The tender leaves of hopes; tomorrow blossoms/And bears his blushing honors thick upon him;/The third day comes a frost, a killing frost,/And when he thinks, good easy man, full surely/His greatness is a-ripening, nips his root,/And then he falls, as I do. I have ventured,/Like little wanton boys that swim on bladders,/This many summers in a sea of glory,/But far beyond my depth. My high blown pride/At length broke under me and now has left me,/Weary and old with service, to the mercy/Of a rude stream that must forever hide me.”

When Cromwell enters, Wolsey tells him, “And when I am forgotten, as I shall be,/And sleep in dull cold marble, where no mention/Of me more must be heard of, say I taught thee;/Say, Wolsey, that once trod the ways of glory/And sounded all the depths and shoals of honor,/Found thee a way, out of this wrack, to rise in,/A sure and safe one, though thy master missed it.”

He then changes his tone, exhorting his protégé, “Mark but my fall and that that ruined me,/Cromwell, I charge thee, fling away ambition!/By that sin fell the angels; how can man, then,/The image of his maker, hope to win by it?” He gives advice from lessons learned: “Love thyself last; cherish those hearts that hate thee./Corruption wins not more than honesty./Still in thy right hand carry gentle peace/To silence envious tongues. Be just, and fear not.”

Wolsey offers more wise words, and it is clear he wishes he had lived by them. Now it is too late, and he concedes, “My robe/And my integrity to heaven is all/I dare call mine own.” Among his last words is a perfect statement of regret: “Had I but served my God with half the zeal/I served my king, He would not in mine age/Have left me naked to mine enemies.”

Wolsey’s stark realism contrasts with another Shakespearean summary of the trajectory of human life, from infancy to senility. Around 1599, in As You Like It, Shakespeare had Jaques deliver what has become known as “The Seven Ages of Man.” Along with Hamlet’s “To be or not to be” and Antony’s funeral oration, it is a favorite set piece for actors. Interpretations have ranged from Maurice Evans in 1967 on television’s The Red Skelton Hour, reciting it in formal evening attire and in grand tones rivalling Gielgud or Olivier, to Drew Abernathy in 2022 on TikTok, wearing a frayed ball cap and faded tee shirt, using the drawling intonation of his native Texas.

Shakespeare’s “Seven Ages of Man” speech contains many memorable and amusing lines. With his keen eye for everyday detail, Shakespeare sketches for us “the whining school-boy . . . creeping like snail/Unwillingly to school,” and a lover who is so besotted he makes a fool of himself “with a woeful ballad/Made to his mistress’ eyebrow.” Shakespeare then takes us through the other phases of a man’s life, that of a soldier, a judge, and then the decline of old age, until finally there “Is second childishness and mere oblivion;/Sans teeth, sans eyes, sans taste, sans everything.”

Those observations come from a comedy, and for that last line, as an actor wistfully indicates parts of the head, he can rescue the words from total melancholy by then pointing below the belt. For Wolsey’s lines, Elizabethan earthiness has no place, the situation being that of serious history. Although overshadowed by “The Seven Ages of Man,” Wolsey’s words on man’s three ages remain a cautionary tale.

In his disgrace, Wolsey sees a Christian pattern, since in a Christian culture reference to three days always calls to mind the three days of Christ’s Passion. Wolsey’s three ages of man cover three days of springtime, the tender leaves, then the blossoms, then a sudden killing frost. His words allude to those of Job, long seen by Christians as a prefiguring of Christ. In the Geneva Bible that Shakespeare knew, Job laments, “Man that is born of woman, is of short continuance and full of trouble. He shooteth forth as a flower, and is cut down: he vanisheth also as a shadow, and continueth not” (Job 14:1-2).

However, Job can see beyond death: “For there is hope of a tree, if it be cut down, that it will yet sprout, and the branches thereof will not cease” (Job 14:7). For Wolsey, the frost kills, and there is no hope.

By way of post script, it is worth noting that in 1907, Gerard Bridge, a Benedictine monk and priest of Saint Vincent Archabbey in Latrobe, Pennsylvania, published Sixty Selections from Shakespeare. In his Preface, Bridge wrote that he hoped that the book would “benefit the more advanced students of elocution” while also containing “many little gems which will awaken an interest and infuse a love for the Works of the Great Master.” One of those gems was Wolsey’s speech; absent, though, was that of Jaques.