I feel I must be the only person in the country not to have had the Tudors bludgeoned into me at school, read Hilary Mantel’s books or watched the neverending stream of TV adaptations of their tediously complicated affairs.
In case there are any others, in a nutshell, Henry VIII’s (qv) loyal sidekick Cardinal Wolsey failed to arrange an annulment of his marriage to Catherine of Aragon so that he could marry Anne Boleyn (qv). Wolsey fell from grace and in 1529 was charged with high treason, only to die of natural causes before he could be tried and face the inevitable aftermath with the executioner.
SANDOWN
Meanwhile, Wolsey had used one of his official residences, Esher Palace (qv) (next to where Sandown racecourse was laid out in 1875), to monitor the building of a new, bigger and better palace for Henry nearby, Hampton Court. In 1537 Henry acquired Esher Palace as well, by which time he had executed Anne Boleyn for failing to give him a male heir.
Sandown has had occasional Cardinal races (eg a handicap hurdle of that name in January 1983). There was a Cardinal Wolsey Novice Chase on the Friday of the 2001 Tingle Creek meeting, a solitary handicap on 27 July 2016, and a Wolsey Handicap Chase on 8 March 2022, presumably the removal of his title referring his demotion or decapitation by Henry.
LEICESTER
Cardinal Wolsey, once the most powerful man in the country apart from the king, died in Leicester and is thought to have been buried in the abbey there. He has had sparse attention in the racing world since Leicester used to honour him with a race from 1958 up to 1993.