Study in Scarlet

NAKED TO MINE ENEMIES (543 pp.)--Charles W. Ferguson--Little, Brown ($6).

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.

This noble exit from history's stage was written by Shakespeare for Thomas Cardinal Wolsey, one of the great Englishmen of his time. This biography, the first appropriate to the scope and splendor of Wolsey's career, makes excellent reading on three counts: it evokes the vast historic tide that submerged the Middle Ages in the frothy waters of the Renaissance; it tells a whodunit about who would rule England's roost; and it is a success story of a butcher's son who rose to highest honors in his country and his church only to fall in the end. Though Biographer Ferguson (a Reader's Digest editor) takes a cool view of theological matters, the book always conveys the rising sense of crisis in which Canterbury split from Rome. It was Wolsey's difficult role to represent both the universal church and an island king. As Ferguson puts it: "Rome could pay his wages, and England could enjoy his talents."

The Tycoon. His talents were great. In a time when a Briton's fate was largely fixed by his birth and when regulations governed life down to the smallest detail (e.g., the fine for "toying with a maid." fourpence; for breaking a glass, twelve-pence), young Wolsey's best chance to advance in the world lay in the church. He went as a scholar to Oxford, excelled his fellows by becoming a bachelor of arts at 15 (he was known as the Boy Bachelor). He was ordained a priest before he was 30. A tireless writer and an administrator with ruthless business acumen, Wolsey went after church posts like a modern tycoon buying up companies. He became Royal Almoner to young King Henry VIII on his accession in 1509, within three years was privy councilor and below the King the strongest figure in the government of England.

With gusto, he accumulated bishoprics (and illegitimate children). His taste for high life and ceremony was not merely personal; pomp and circumstance were a matter of public relations, an art in which Wolsey was a master. A high point of his career came when he stage-managed the futile but beautiful pageant known to history as the Field of Cloth of Gold: in a pleasant French valley, England's King Harry and France's young King Francis I met to pledge a treaty of friendship. It was, says Author Ferguson, "the last great canvas of the Middle Ages ... it marked the end of the age of chivalry and somehow prophetically dramatized the end of the age of churchmen."

The Split. Wolsey created an apparatus of state about his King--the framework of a modern national administration. Henry himself grew under the cardinal's tutelage--one of the King's first diplomatic coups was a pious book presented to the Vatican, which won him the title still borne by British monarchs: "Defender of the Faith." Said the King's jester, wiser than his cardinal: "Prithee, Good Harry, let thee and I defend one another and leave the Faith alone to defend itself."

It was the fatal split between the "Defender of the Faith" and the faith itself that undid Wolsey. He lost his power because he was unable to procure a papal annulment for Henry's marriage to Catherine of Aragon. Wolsey went into retirement first at Winchester, then at York, until the King charged him with treason. Wolsey died before he went on trial, and Shakespeare renders his last wish for himself: "Give him a little earth for charity." King Henry destroyed the abbey where Wolsey's bones rested.

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