Thomas wolsey biography

Thomas Wolsey was born in Ipswich, c1475. His beginnings were not auspicious. After he rose to power, jealous courtiers claimed his father had been a butcher; Wolsey’s own servant and eventual biographer, George Cavendish, said merely that Wolsey was “an honest poor man’s son.” Whatever the truth of his father’s work, they were a poor and unknown family and it was Wolsey’s brilliance and hard work which led him from Ipswich to become ruler of England in all but title.

He was educated at Oxford and took his degree at 15, a formidable achievement.

He then became a fellow of Magdalen College and was ordained a priest in 1498.

Thomas cromwell

Given Wolsey’s vast accumulation of wealth in later years, some of which was acquired by suppressing almost 30 monasteries, many historians and biographers have questioned his religious vocation. His contemporaries were equally skeptical.

But in his early caree