Reel Heraldry: Anne of the Thousand Days, Part 5

Today we come to the character in the movie whose arms appear more often than any other: Cardinal Wolsey.

Played in the movie by Anthony Quayle, Thomas Wolsey (1473-1530) was Lord Chancellor of England, as well as the King's almoner, a papal legate, and Archbishop of York. His appointment as a cardinal in 1515 by Pope Leo X gave him precedence over all other English clergy. Well, at least until Henry VIII broke from the Catholic church and established himself as the supreme head of the church in England.

Wolsey's arms are of the very busy style popular in Tudor times, consisting of two different types of charges on a cross, and two other different types of charges on a chief.

Be that as it may, we see Wolsey's coat of arms in a number of settings:

In Wolsey's rooms, carved and painted over the door (on the right) and embroidered under a gilded canopy (to the left):

Here are better views of the embroidered arms under the canopy in that room:

Painted onto the headboard of his bed:

And here they appear again behind Wolsey (on the right) during the hearing of the case for divorce between Henry VIII and Katherine of Aragon:

(We will be looking at this last photo again in a later post discussing the two other coats of arms which appear behind the two cardinals.)

And finally, we have a banner of the arms of the Archbishopric of York (Gules two keys in saltire wards to chief and outward argent in chief a crown or)* impaling Wolsey's personal arms (I have mirrored the images to show the shield in its proper orientation instead of the reverse side of the banner):

It was a bit of a thrill to see all of these different depictions of Cardinal Wolsey's arms. It was even more gratifying to see that these arms are correctly recreated in the movie! The arms are instantly recognizable as Wolsey's wherever they appear. (Something that does not always happen, as we will discuss in a later post on this same movie.)

* We have seen these arms before in this blog, from my 2022 trip to York.