As readers are well aware, this year Christ Church is celebrating its 500th anniversary. It marked its 400th anniversary in 1925. But similar celebrations were not held in 1825, 1725, or 1625—because, until the twentieth century, Christ Church commemorated the anniversary of King Henry VIII’s foundation of 1546 rather than Cardinal Thomas Wolsey’s foundation of 1525. And King Henry wanted it that way. Shortly after Wolsey’s fall from grace, it was rumored that the king intended that parts of the college “be demolished . . . for no other purpose than that of removing the Cardinal’s escutcheon, which will be no easy work, as there is hardly a stone from the top of the building to the very foundations where his blazoned armorial is not sculptured.”

Since his death in 1530, Wolsey’s memory has been controversial. Some have remembered him as the epitome of all that was wrong with the traditional religion of the later Middle Ages and its intertwinement with affairs of state. Others regarded him as personally arrogant, vengeful, and greedy—a “bad apple” in the Roman church whose flaws precipitated the English Reformation. And still others, not least Shakespeare, represented Wolsey as a sinner who, after being cast down by a capricious monarch, repented as his life drew to a close. These three prototypes for Wolsey have appeared across a wide range of literary and artistic genres—including chronicles, histories, plays, films and television programmes, civic pageants, monuments, and even items on sale in the Christ Church gift shop.

In my book Remembering Wolsey: A History of Commemorations and Representations (Fordham University Press, 2019), I traced how Wolsey has served as an “ideological football” in debates about English religion, politics, and culture. The book did not purport to retell Wolsey’s life; there are enough good biographies of him for that. Rather, I was interested in Wolsey’s afterlife—the ways in which everyone from his near-contemporaries to people in our own day have retold his story.

Wolsey was keenly interested in his own legacy. He commissioned an elaborate marble tomb for himself (parts of which ended up being repurposed for Admiral Nelson). He was intimately involved in the establishment of two Cardinal Colleges—one that is now Christ Church and the other, in his hometown of Ipswich, that was suppressed before becoming fully operational. And during the last year of his life, while he was in exile in York, Wolsey shared with his servant George Cavendish reminiscences that were likely meant to inspire Cavendish’s sympathetic portrayal in his Life of Wolsey.

But, as the American composer Lin-Manuel Miranda has recently reminded us, “you have no control who lives, who dies, who tells your story.” And the life of Wolsey, like that of most major historical figures, has been repeatedly repurposed for new ends. Evangelical writers of the sixteenth century and anti-Laudians of the seventeenth regarded him as “the classic example of prelatical hybris,” as one commentator put it. During the period of Catholic Emancipation, writers looked to Wolsey as a gifted administrator and compared him even to Ignatius of Loyola, the founder of the Jesuits. Curators at Hampton Court Palace celebrated his architectural skill; city councillors in Ipswich praised his munificence toward the town and his commitment to educating its youth; and nineteenth-century writers of historical fiction represented him as a local, middle-class boy made good through hard work. Somewhat more frivolously, his name and image have been used to market a range of commercial products, even furniture and underwear.

The twentieth and twenty-first centuries have been no exception. They have seen the scheming, corrupt Wolsey of the play and films A Man for All Seasons; the urbane, political Wolsey of the bawdy series The Tudors; and the paternal, fearless Wolsey of Hilary Mantel’s novel Wolf Hall and its adaptations. Scholars and biographers have offered their perspectives. In 2011, Ipswich unveiled a statue commemorating the cardinal as a churchman, Crown official, and educator but pointedly not taking a position on his role in the Reformation. And, of course, this year has seen Christ Church’s latest commemorations of Wolsey—whose name and cardinal’s hat, despite Henry VIII’s efforts, still adorns walls, furniture, silverware, notepaper, and so much more at the House that he founded. Wolsey’s memory, and the controversy about it, lives on.