It says much for Wolsey that he chose as his personal attendant a man of the sweet, sensitive, retiring type of George Cavendish, though it was not till after his fall from power that he learned the value of such a friend. No less significant of the times is the profound impression which Wolsey's fate excited on the mind of Cavendish, who in the retirement of his own county of Suffolk lived with increasing sadness through the changes which befell England and destroyed many of the memories which were dearest to his heart. No one then cared to hear about Wolsey, nor was it safe to recall the thought of the great Cardinal of England to the minds of men who were busied in undoing his work. Not till the days of Mary did Cavendish gather together his notes and sketch the fortunes of one whose figure loomed forth from a distant past, mellowed by the mists of time, and hallowed by the pious resignation which was the only comfort that reflection could give to the helpless recluse. The calm of a poetic sadness is expressed in the pages of Cavendish's _Memoir_. Wolsey has become to him a type of the vanity of human endeavour, and points the moral of the superiority of a quiet life with God over the manifold activities of an aspiring ambition. But Cavendish did not live to see the time when such a sermon, preached on such a text, was likely to appeal to many hearers. His work remained in manuscript, of which copies circulated amongst a few. One such copy, it is clear, must have reached the hands of Shakespeare, who, with his usual quickness of perception, condensed as much as his public could understand into his portrait of Wolsey in the play of _Henry VIII._ When the _Memoir_ was first printed in 1641 it was garbled for party purposes. The figure of Wolsey was long left to the portraiture of prejudice, and he was regarded only as the type of the arrogant ecclesiastic whom it was the great work of the Reformation to have rendered impossible in the future. Wolsey, the most patriotic of Englishmen, was branded as the minion of the Pope, and the upholder of a foreign despotism. When Fiddes, in 1724, attempted, on the strength of documents, to restore Wolsey to his due position amongst England's worthies, he was accused of Popery. Not till the mass of documents relating to the reign of Henry VIII. was published did it become possible for Dr. Brewer to show the significance of the schemes of the great cardinal, and to estimate his merits and his faults. CHAPTER XI THE WORK OF WOLSEY