George Cavendish

George Cavendish (1497–c. 1562) was an English courtier and writer, probably born in Suffolk, and the elder son of Thomas Cavendish, a senior financial official in the Exchequer. Around 1522, he entered the service of Cardinal Thomas Wolsey as gentleman-usher, a role that placed him at the center of royal and ecclesiastical life during a turbulent period in Henry VIII’s reign.

Cavendish stayed with Wolsey through the cardinal’s fall from power and death in 1530, showing the personal loyalty that later shaped his writing. Afterward, he retired to his estate at Glemsford in Suffolk rather than continue at court, and he turned his experiences into the work for which he is remembered.

His best-known book, usually called The Life and Death of Cardinal Wolsey, is valued as one of the most important contemporary accounts of Wolsey’s life and of the Tudor court in the 1520s. Written by someone who watched events from close range, it has remained important not just as biography, but as a lively window into power, service, and survival in early sixteenth-century England.