Cardinal Wolsey's Angels come to Ipswich
Thomas Wolsey was born in Ipswich, Suffolk, around 1475. His father, who is thought to have been a butcher, provided a good education and he went on to Magdalen College, Oxford. Wolsey was ordained in around 1498. He became chaplain to the archbishop of Canterbury and later chaplain to Henry VII, who employed him on diplomatic missions.
Wolsey was a cardinal and statesman, Henry VIII's lord chancellor and one of the last churchmen to play a dominant role in English political life.
Wolsey made a name for himself as an efficient administrator, both for the Crown and the church. When Henry VIII became king in 1509, Wolsey's rapid rise began. In 1514, he was created archbishop of York and a year later the pope made him a cardinal. Soon afterwards the king appointed him lord chancellor. Wolsey used his great wealth to indulge his passion for building - at his London home, York Place in Whitehall, and at Hampton Court, 20 miles south west of London. He also founded Cardinal College at Oxford (later King's College, and now Christ Church), but his haughtiness and grand style of living made him increasingly unpopular.
In 1524, he commissioned the Florentine sculptor Benedetto da Rovezzano to create four bronze angels for his magnificent Renaissance tomb, but as we know, fate intervened and Wolsey fell from favour. When Wolsey died in 1530, his possessions were appropriated by Henry for his own use, angels and unfinished tomb included.
Henry didn't live to see the tomb finished, though he outlived Wolsey by 17 years. Construction was halted despite Benedetto establishing a team of craftsmen in Westminster, and the plans of Henry's three children to complete the memorial posthumously went unrealised.
After Henry's death, details of whether the angels remained with the tomb become scant. Elizabeth I moved much of the tomb to Windsor in 1565, where it stayed for over 80 years, with some parts sold off during the civil war to help finance the Royalist cause. After the civil war, the only element of the tomb known to have survived was a black stone chest, finally put to use as the centrepiece of Horatio Nelson's tomb at St Paul's Cathedral.
As for Wolsey's angels, their location, if they had survived at all, was unknown. In 1994, an unillustrated entry in a Sotheby's catalogue listed two bronze sculptures 'in Italian Renaissance style'.
A Parisian art dealer bought the statues, and soon afterwards the Italian scholar Francesco Caglioti attributed the angels to Benedetto. In 2008, the second pair was discovered at Harrowden Hall, a country house in Northamptonshire owned by the Wellingborough Golf Club. The Sotheby's angels, it emerged, had been stolen from Harrowden in 1988.
So, when Christchurch Mansion in Ipswich were loaned the four Angels by the V&A, I just had to see them.
Christchurch Mansion, Ipswich
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