George Cavendish Character Analysis

“Is it something to do with the English?” Cavendish asks earnestly. He’s still thinking of the uproar back there when they embarked; and even now, people are running along the banks, making obscene signs and whistling. “Tell us, Master Cromwell, you’ve been abroad. Are they particularly an ungrateful nation? […]”

“I don’t think it’s the English. I think it’s just people. They always hope there may be something better.”

“But what do they get by the change?” Cavendish persists. “One dog sated with meat is replaced by a hungrier dog who bites nearer the bone. […]”

He closes his eyes. The river shifts beneath them, dim figures in an allegory of Fortune. Decayed Magnificence sits in the center. Cavendish, leaning at his right like a Virtuous Councillor, mutters words of superfluous and belated advice […]; he, like a Tempter, is seated on the left […].

“All along, we were misled, […] because when the king said, Mistress Anne is not to marry into Northumberland, I think, I think, the king had cast his eye on her, all that long time ago.”

[…]

“I wonder,” he says, “how it can be that, though all these people think they know the king’s pleasure, the king finds himself at every turn impeded.” At every turn, thwarted: maddened and baffled. The Lady Anne, whom he has chosen to amuse him, while the old wife is cast off and the new wife brought in, refuses to accommodate him at all. How can she refuse? Nobody knows.

[…] “How has my lord cardinal…” Missed a trick, he wants to say. But that is not a respectful way to speak of a cardinal.

“Is it something to do with the English?” Cavendish asks earnestly. He’s still thinking of the uproar back there when they embarked; and even now, people are running along the banks, making obscene signs and whistling. “Tell us, Master Cromwell, you’ve been abroad. Are they particularly an ungrateful nation? […]”

“I don’t think it’s the English. I think it’s just people. They always hope there may be something better.”

“But what do they get by the change?” Cavendish persists. “One dog sated with meat is replaced by a hungrier dog who bites nearer the bone. […]”

He closes his eyes. The river shifts beneath them, dim figures in an allegory of Fortune. Decayed Magnificence sits in the center. Cavendish, leaning at his right like a Virtuous Councillor, mutters words of superfluous and belated advice […]; he, like a Tempter, is seated on the left […].

“All along, we were misled, […] because when the king said, Mistress Anne is not to marry into Northumberland, I think, I think, the king had cast his eye on her, all that long time ago.”

[…]

“I wonder,” he says, “how it can be that, though all these people think they know the king’s pleasure, the king finds himself at every turn impeded.” At every turn, thwarted: maddened and baffled. The Lady Anne, whom he has chosen to amuse him, while the old wife is cast off and the new wife brought in, refuses to accommodate him at all. How can she refuse? Nobody knows.

[…] “How has my lord cardinal…” Missed a trick, he wants to say. But that is not a respectful way to speak of a cardinal.