The Cardinal’s Descent into Hell

The Cardinal’s Descent into Hell is a court interlude in which Wolsey’s downfall becomes a public entertainment. Staged at Hampton Court after his death, it makes political reversal into a theatrical spectacle: a scarlet figure is dragged, mocked, and tormented while the court laughs. Thomas Cromwell watches the performance and its aftermath, where the actors’ discarded disguises reveal another contest over who may play the fool, speak freely, or claim authority. The scene links courtly amusement to the vulnerability of reputation and the persistence of Wolsey in Cromwell’s memory.

Setting and political occasion

The interlude is performed in the great hall at Hampton Court, where the audience includes Henry VIII, Anne Boleyn, and Thomas Howard, Duke of Norfolk. Its title turns Wolsey’s death into the premise of a staged descent to Hell. Cromwell’s recollection connects the performance to the previous year, when carpenters at Gray’s Inn had built frames for painted scenes of torture and hung the screens at the back of the hall with flames. The entertainment is therefore presented not as a spontaneous joke but as a prepared court production, made with the king’s household watching over its construction.

The spectacle follows Wolsey’s fall from power and death, but the performance does not simply represent a dead man’s fate. In the court’s hands, his former rank becomes material for ridicule: the cardinal’s scarlet robes are enlarged into a stage image, and the audience is invited to watch authority reduced to a body being dragged by actors dressed as devils. The interlude makes the change in political fortunes visible and communal, turning humiliation into an occasion in which courtiers can display their allegiance and take pleasure in the defeated minister’s apparent degradation.

The staged descent

The central figure, a vast scarlet shape lying on the floor, is hauled along by four masked devils, one for each limb. They prod him with tridents, making him writhe and plead, while painted tortures and flames furnish the imagined Hell. The actor playing Wolsey cries out that the devils are taking him to their master, Beelzebub. He then asks what wine the devil serves and rejects English wine, mocking the kind Norfolk provides. The joke interrupts the scene’s performance of suffering with a pointed insult aimed at the duke, and the court responds with laughter and noisy approval.

The actors then stage an apparent hanging. The devils catch the cardinal’s head in a noose and haul him upright as he struggles. The court cries for him to be let down alive; the performers release him, only to continue the mock torture by thrusting their forks into the figure and drawing out lengths of scarlet wool. Blasphemies, comic bodily noises, and fireworks complete the sequence. The staged violence shifts between horror and farce, inviting spectators to laugh at an image of punishment while presenting the fallen cardinal as its helpless object.

Norfolk circles the hall, delighted, and says the piece is good enough to print so he can take it home and have it performed again at Christmas. Anne laughs, points, and applauds. Henry sits beside her, sometimes laughing, but Cromwell reads fear in the king’s eyes. That contrast unsettles the performance’s surface confidence: the court can celebrate Wolsey’s apparent defeat, yet the king’s reaction suggests that the spectacle does not leave power entirely secure or free of apprehension.

Actors and spectators

Cromwell follows the performers behind the screens, away from the hall and the public show. There, the devils remove their masks and struggle out of their rough costumes. George Boleyn and Henry Norris, who played the hand-devils, are among them; Francis Weston and William Brereton played the foot-devils. They laugh, curse, ask for clean linen, and return to the hall still wearing their cloven hooves. Their unceremonious change from demons to courtiers exposes the labor and artifice behind the spectacle: the figures who had seemed to embody Hell are young men in costume, resuming their ordinary places in the court once the performance is over.

The scarlet figure also proves to be an assumed role. Its performer is Sexton, the fool known as Master Patch, who had once protested fiercely when separated from Wolsey. After the other actors leave, Patch gets up without Cromwell’s help and strips off the padded costume. He explains that he acts the part for which he is paid, then turns the same question back on Cromwell. His exchange makes acting a form of political comparison: both men have performed roles, but Patch insists that his own low status gives him license to say what others cannot.

Patch calls Cromwell a retired mercenary and taunts his low birth, claiming that he knows the ditch from which Cromwell came. He invokes a future meeting ten years later and declares, “The fool has said in his heart, there is no Pope.” Cromwell answers that fools may speak, but not where his writ runs. Patch retorts that Cromwell’s authority does not extend even to the place where he was christened. Their quarrel folds social origin and institutional power into the performance’s afterlife: once the formal show is over, the fool uses the space behind the screens to challenge the minister who can control speech by law.

Cromwell’s memory and the scene’s meaning

Cromwell does not take Patch’s offered hand as he rises. Instead, he watches the fool discard the scarlet padding and holds his own writing hand in a hidden fist. The gesture accompanies the scene’s deeper reversal: the splendid cardinal represented in the hall becomes a worn costume, while the actor beneath it is revealed as scrawny and exposed. Cromwell’s attention remains on the difference between the public image and the person concealed within it, and on how quickly a court can convert a powerful man into an object of ridicule.

The interlude is also set against Cromwell’s private persistence of Wolsey. He has received the cardinal’s turquoise ring, and the cardinal’s scarlet clothing is to be cut up and remade into other garments. In Cromwell’s imagination, the red survives in ordinary things—a cushion, a banner, a sleeve—and the dead cardinal remains present in its color. The staged scarlet figure thus contrasts with the private memory that the performance cannot command: where the court uses red to caricature and abase Wolsey, Cromwell continues to associate it with the life and authority of his former master.

The scene’s political humor is sharpened by its theatrical form. The audience first sees a cardinal apparently dragged into Hell; behind the screens, it sees courtiers undoing their masks and costumes; then it encounters Patch, who uses the role of the fool to speak against Cromwell’s power. Each reveal unsettles the one before it. What looks like a settled verdict on Wolsey’s fall becomes a performance whose actors, spectators, and hidden conversations disclose how fragile the boundary is between authority and ridicule, public image and private allegiance, command and speech.