Wolsey and Cromwell: Continuity or Contrast?

It would be hard to think of two more sharply contrasted portraits than Wolsey's and Cromwell's. Wolsey appears all in scarlet; Cromwell, all in black. And the temptation is to paint the contrast between their ministries equally; strongly. In such a scenario Wolsey was : the last medieval churchman to rule England; Cromwell the first reforming bureaucrat-minister (after all, does not Holbein paint him with books and papers before him and letter in his hand?). In fact Wolsey played the card of governmental reform more frequently and explicitly than : Cromwell; while Cromwell (Wolsey's former legal factotum), far from repudiating his former master, went out of his way to express both continuity and gratitude through the evocative language of heraldry. He took the chief of Wolsey's arms – or a rose gules between two Cornish choughs sable – and made it the fesse of his own. It was a plain statement of discipleship.

On the other hand, there were contrasts. But they were contrasts not in administrative methods but political style. And they showed most clearly in the two men's different attitudes to the centre and touchstone of Tudor politics: the court.