Joan Larke

Joan Larke was an English woman best known for her relationship with Thomas Wolsey before or during his early clerical career. She was the mother of Wolsey’s acknowledged children, including Thomas Wynter, for whom the cardinal secured education and church benefices.

Surviving evidence about Joan’s origins and later life is limited, and much of what is repeated about her depends on hostile or retrospective accounts of Wolsey’s failure to observe clerical celibacy. Joan Larke was born in Great Yarmouth.

Alison Weir’s The Cardinal follows his public ascent and private relationships, including Joan Larke and their children, as political service turns into isolation and ruin. Joan Larke is treated fictionally in Alison Weir’s The Cardinal’s Daughter.