CAVENDISH, GEORGE

born 1500 died 1561/62 English courtier and writer who won a minor but lasting reputation through a single work, his Life of Cardinal Wolsey, a landmark in the development of English biography, an important document to the student of Tudor history, and a rare source of information on the character of the author himself. Cavendish applied to his subject methods of concrete observation in matters of behaviour, gesture, and speech, so that in his shapely and unaffected narrative the figure of the cardinal emerges with an air of life. Besides thus anticipating later biographical principles, Cavendish, though still close to medieval tragedy in conceiving Wolsey's rise and fall as governed by Fortune's wheel, moved away from the older idea that biographies should deal only with saints or royal personages. About 1526 Cavendish entered Wolsey's service as a gentleman usher and remained loyal to him from the height of his power to his rapid fall under the disfavour of Henry VIII. This position of trust afforded Cavendish a valuable eyewitness impression of the cardinal, especially in his final days of crumbling magnificence. After Wolsey's death in 1530 Cavendish left public employment and retired to Suffolk, where in 1557 he completed his Life, undertaken in his later years partly with the intention of supplying a truthful report of the cardinal's career. Although the fact that Cavendish was a Roman Catholic and his mention of dangerous political issues obstructed the printing of the complete Life during the reign of Elizabeth I, its factual and literary value caused it to circulate freely in manuscript, and it thus provided a source for chronicles such as those of John Stow and Raphael Holinshed, for poems, and for plays such as William Shakespeare's Henry VIII. The first printed version, published in 1641, The Negotiations of Thomas Woolsey, was so mangled by party propagandists as to render it a polemical tract; and the reissue of this bad text throughout the rest of the 17th and 18th centuries fostered the idea that it was a controversial work. Not until 1810 did Christopher Wordsworth attempt to restore the original by issuing in his Ecclesiastical Biography a text based upon original manuscripts. In 1815 S.W. Singer published a more completely restored text. At this time also the authorship, long attributed to George Cavendish's brother William, was correctly assigned to George by internal evidence.