CAVENDISH, GEORGE (I 5oo—I 562 ?), the biographer of Cardinal Wolsey, was the elder son of Thomas Cavendish, clerk of the pipe in the Exchequer. About 1527 he entered the service of Cardinal Wolsey as gentleman-usher, and for the next three years he was in the closest personal attendance on the great man. It is plain that he enjoyed Wolsey's closest confidence to the end, for after the cardinal's death George Cavendish was called before the privy council and closely examined as to Wolsey's latest acts and words. Many years passed before his biography was composed. At length, in 1557, he wrote it out in its final form. It was impossible to publish it in the author's lifetime, but it was widely circulated in ms. The book was first printed in 1641, in a garbled text, and under the title of The Negotiations of Thomas Wolsey. The genuine text, from contemporary mss., was first published in 181o. Until that time it was believed that the book was the composition of George Cavendish's younger brother William, the founder of Chats worth, who also was attached to Wolsey; but Joseph Hunter, in a tract called Who wrote Cavendish's Life of Wolsey? (1814), proved the claim of George. The book is the sole authentic record of a multitude of events highly important in a particularly interesting section of the history of England. Its biographical excellence was first emphasized by Bishop Creighton, who in sisted that Cavendish was the earliest of the great English biographers and an individual writer of particular charm and originality.
See the edition of the Life published by S. W. Singer in 1815, which was reprinted, with a biographical introduction, by Henry Morley in the Universal Library Series (1885). See also Francis Bickley, The Cavendish Family 0910.