'Alas, What Shall I Do For Love?' (Part 2) / Early Mass
Wolf Crawl Week 11: Monday 11 March – Sunday 17 March
To get these updates in your inbox, subscribe to Footnotes and Tangents and turn on notifications for the Cromwell Trilogy.
Welcome to week eleven of Wolf Crawl
This week, we are reading the second part of “‘Alas, What Shall I Do For Love?’ Spring 1532”, and the short chapter “Early Mass, November 1532”. We go to Calais, where the king marries Anne Boleyn.
You will find everything you need for this read-along on the main Cromwell trilogy page of my website, including:
Weekly updates, like this one
Online resources about Mantel’s writing and Thomas Cromwell
These resources are free for all, thanks to the generosity of paying subscribers who support my writing and this slow book group. Supporters can read my series of posts on The Haunting of Wolf Hall, and start their own discussion threads in the chat area.
This is a long post and may get clipped by your email provider. It is best viewed online here.
In this week’s post:
This week’s story
This week’s characters
This week’s theme: Consummation
Tangent: ‘I do not keep heretics about my person’
Footnote: A fancy wicker basket
Footnote: Marquess of Pembroke
Footnote: ‘Are you going to dance?’
Tangent: Kingfisher Flash
Footnote: Calais
Footnote: The Theatre of Memory
Quote of the Week: The tide is running for him
Next week
Correction
In last week’s post, I got my Henrys in a twist. The mistake has been corrected in the post, but is still floating around in your emails and, alas, in the audio voiceover. It is, of course, Sir Henry Percy, Earl of Northumberland, who claimed to be married to Anne Boleyn and not slouching-gentleman-in-chief Henry Norris. My apologies to both Henrys.
1. This week’s story
Summer, 1532. John Petyt has died. One less heretic, if you ask Sir Thomas More. One more martyr, if you speak to Humphrey Monmouth. The kingdom is fractious: congregations are heckling priests. Bards are writing ballads about Lady Anne: “The words are not repeatable in this company.”
Promotions are in order: Cromwell is now Clerk of the Hanaper and Anne is Marquess of Pembroke. Stephen Gardiner thinks she should settle for Marquess, and Charles Brandon says his wife won’t appear in the train of a harlot. So it’s Cromwell’s job to be peacemaker and king-pleaser as Anne edges throneward.
It is October, and we are going to Calais. It’s going to be the first international meeting of the kings of England and France since the Field of the Cloth of Gold. It must be bigger, better, and cost less. Demand the impossible, Master Cromwell.
At Canterbury, his grace the King has a run-in with the Holy Maid, Elizabeth Barton. The prophetess says he’ll be dethroned, stricken, and scorched within seven months of marrying Anne. Norfolk steps in and almost punches the nun. They sail for Calais, and Cromwell makes his glum king laugh. “It is welcome to his ears.”
Calais: Cromwell slips away to talk with alchemists and find a man called Giulio Camillo. He’s building something for the King of France, but Cromwell wants it for his master and for England. “The magister believes he would dislike the English climate,” they tell him. “And also, the whole island is covered with witches.”
The men leave the women behind at Calais to join the French court at Boulogne. There, Cromwell has a brief interview with King Francis. The Most Christian King can’t get his head around Cromwell or Anne. But he does give him a ruby in a glove. The dutiful servant passes it on to his monarch, who purchases it from his beloved councillor. “Two hours. Two kings.” He thinks. “What do you know, Walter?”
Singing and dancing. The French king spends too much time with Anne, so Cromwell makes Norfolk intervene. Norfolk dances: priceless stuff. Later, a Bible is needed and a door is unbolted. And outside, the other Boleyn girl is keeping her options open in the salty sea air. Cromwell thinks of another night in Cyprus and then another in Antwerp. The memories fold into one another and then again, into the night.
Early Mass, November, 1532. Cromwell is awoken from a bed of phantoms. The king has gone to Mass with his queen-to-be and comes out with a wife-that-is and a feather in his hat. A new era has begun.
2. This week’s characters
Click on each link for more details and plot summaries for each character:
Thomas Cromwell • Antonio Bonvisi • John Petyt • John Parnell • Humphrey Monmouth • Johane • Richard Cromwell • Henry VIII • Anne Boleyn • Thomas Boleyn • Stephen Gardiner • Jane Seymour • Katherine of Aragon • Charles Brandon • William Warham • Rafe Sadler • Mary Boleyn • Elizabeth Barton • Thomas Howard • Duke of Richmond • Lord Berners • Christophe • King Francis • Mary Shelton • Thomas Wyatt • Edward Seymour • Thomas Seymour • William Stafford • Anselma
3. This week’s theme: Consummation
You have to admire her; her measured exactness, her restraint. She uses her body like a soldier, conserving its resources; like one of the masters in the anatomy school at Padua, she divides it up and names every part, this my thigh, this my breast, this my tongue.
Henry Tudor has waited six years for this. November, 1532. Calais. “As he leaves the church, Henry puts on his hat. It is a big hat, a new hat. And in that hat there is a feather.”
Oaths are sworn, and doors unbolted: Henry and Anne consummate their relationship in England's last continental outpost. They will be officially married in Whitehall next year, followed by Anne’s coronation. But this is the consummation of everything they, and Cromwell, have been working towards.
“Cromwell, you are my man,” says Anne Boleyn. Cromwell to Charles Brandon: ‘My lord, be guided by me.” “We all are,” says Brandon. “We must be. You do everything, Cromwell. You are everything now.”
Cromwell has eclipsed his old master, Thomas Wolsey. The cardinal couldn’t get the king a divorce. He disappointed Henry. “Oh, you are not disappointing,” Henry says, “But the moment you are, I will let you know.” A chill foreshadowing wind.
In Cromwell’s life, there will always be a Before Calais and an After Calais. Through this small town, the needle of his life is passed. Here is his story in microcosm: a working model of his world. “The visit,” he thinks, “has compacted the court’s quarrels and intrigues, trapped them in the small space within the town’s wall.”
It is the last time Cromwell will step foot outside England. He organises everything but he still has no name, no title, so the heralds don’t bother to mention he is here. If he wanted, he could cut loose and wander back into the heart of Europe:
Still, that's not the reason, not the reason why he hestitates, not quite pulling away. Her lips brush his. She asks, 'What are you thinking?' 'I was thinking that if I were not the king's most dutiful servant, it would be possible to be on the next boat out.'
Cromwell is no longer free. He has picked his prince, his queen and his country. He will return to England, and his fate will be fastened tightly to the future of Henry Tudor, Anna Regina and Albion. “You cannot return to the moment you were in before.”
This is a consummation of sorts. He’s had other offers. The King of France gave him a ruby. Mary Boleyn parted her furs. But no, he is the dutiful servant. “Can it be true, he wonders, that as a subject should, I really love my king?”
“Alas, what shall I do for love?” sings Henry Tudor. “Anything,” snipes Stephen Gardiner. If Cromwell agrees, he will not say so. Because now is the time of all-consuming love. When we think the king is good and Anne is chaste.
And with these vows, we consummate our love. And upon these truths, we intend now to live, or die.
4. Tangent: ‘I do not keep heretics about my person’
I think one of the fascinating things about the early English Reformation is that it was overseen by a religiously conservative king afraid of heresy and his own damnation. You often hear the joke that England became a Protestant country because Henry VIII wanted to get into Anne Boleyn’s bed. This implies that religion didn’t matter to Henry Tudor and his motivations were power, love and lust. This is simply not true.
As Mantel writes in her Reith Lectures, all her characters “operate within the ethical framework of their day,” devoted to ideas of “authority, tradition, precedent, hierarchy” that may be alien to modern readers.
We find this difficult, and we also find it difficult to understand their religious experience. Their lives were lived in an exquisite tension between the claims of time and the claims of eternity. This life was short and hard. Its aim was salvation. The single aim of salvation permeated their thinking and governed their actions day by day.
Henry feared damnation. And he hated Martin Luther, married priests and those who denied the sacraments. Which is why it is deliciously ironic that he is marrying a heretic and making another his indispensable councillor.
“Your brethren stick together,” Johane tells Cromwell, coldly. Wolsey was not deceived by Cromwell’s heresy, he just chose to ignore it. Henry is no fool and has a sharp mind, but clearly does not think Anne or Cromwell are heretics. To what extent are they deceiving him? And to what extent is he deceiving himself?
Alas, what shall I do for love?
5. Footnote: A fancy wicker basket
In this chapter, Cromwell acquires two splendidly named offices: Master of the Jewels and Clerkship of the Hanaper. Diarmaid MacCulloch explains that this latter post was “the custodianship of what was indeed once just a wicker travel-hamper, holding a great variety of documents produced by the various secretaries and legal activities of Chancery: charters, formal royal writs and much more.”
Well, it beats being Groom of the Stool. Henry Norris, “the man who hands the diaper cloth.”
His appointments are pretty modest compared to Thomas Cranmer, who has been raised from Cambridge don to Archbishop of Canterbury, with no wider experience of the church. As MacCulloch writes, “The difference was that in that case the promotion of Thomas Cranmer had the enthusiastic backing of Anne Boleyn.”
“Cromwell, you are my man,” says Anne. But only, it may appear, up to a point.
6. Footnote: Marquess of Pembroke
Stephen’s conversation is on a track of its own. ‘You’d think it would be enough for any woman, wouldn’t you, to be made a marquess in her own right?’
Anne now has her own title, Marquess of Pembroke, elevating her to the peerage and making her fit for marriage to the king and enthronement as a queen.
She becomes the second of two women in England to acquire their titles not through marriage. The other is Margaret Pole, Countess of Salisbury. Margaret was the only surviving daughter of George, Duke of Clarence, the brother of Edward IV and Richard III. On his succession, Henry VIII gave Margaret the Earldom of Salisbury. By 1538, she would be the fifth richest peer in England.
Anne and Margaret are on opposing sides of the religious divide in the 1530s, but both owe the king for their elevation. Sadly, they share the same fate: beheading at the behest of Henry Tudor.
There would not be another peerage created for a woman until James I made Mary Villiers the Duchess of Buckingham in 1618, almost a century after Henry VIII had removed the head of the last Duke of Buckingham.
‘Buckingham set much store by visions. He had a friar who prophesised for him. Told him he would be king.’ He does not need to add, Buckingham was a traitor and is more than ten years dead.
7. Footnote: ‘Are you going to dance?’
There is plenty of music and dancing in this week’s reading. At Mass following Anne’s instalment as Marquess of Pembroke, they sing Te Deum, ‘Thee, God, we praise’, although you’d be forgiven for thinking the Howard clan are praising themselves:
The Howards and the Boleyns are en fête. Monseigneur caresses his beard, nods and smiles as he recieves murmured congratulations from the French ambassador. Bishop Gardiner reads out Anne’s new title. She is vivid in red velvet and ermine, and her black hair falls, virgin-style, in snaky locks to her waist.
Later, Thomas Wyatt joins Henry, with Mark Smeaton on lute, to sing “Alas, what shall I do for love?” This is a savagely ironic trio: Henry, Wyatt and Smeaton are all in love with Anne Boleyn.
Cromwell and Wyatt sing Scaramella together. If Wyatt shares with the king a love of the new Marquess of Pembroke, he shares with Cromwell an adventurous youth spent in Italy.
And to round off the night, Henry sings As I Walked the Woods So Wild. “His voice strong, true, plangent.” It was supposedly a favourite song of his, although the lyrics are lost to time. We have only the refrain:
Shall I go walk the wood so wild, wandering, wandering, here and there.
8. Tangent: Kingfisher Flash
He speaks to Mistress Seymour. ‘Look,’ she says. She holds up her sleeves. The bright blue with which she has edged them, that kingfishher flash, is cut from the silk in which he wrapped her present of needlework patterns.
Compare the two future queens of England: Anne, “vivid in red velvet and ermine” and Jane “bright blue” sleeves made from silk gifted by Thomas Cromwell. One is self-consciously regal, the other artlessly joyous. “These are Thomas Cromwell’s sleeves,” she tells everyone at Wolf Hall. And nobody knows what she is talking about.
Jane says she wants to go “up-country to the queen” but Cromwell advises her to serve Lady Anne. Jane replies that “it is good to be humble”, and when she says this it is hard to know how innocent she is. Does she not see that Anne will be queen? Unlike everyone else we meet, Jane does not appear to be planning her ascendency. She’s just delighting in her kingfisher flash of bright blue.
9. Footnote: Calais
Calais, this outpost of England, her last hold on France, is a town where he has many friends, many customers, many clients.
In the 1340s, Edward III made a claim for the French throne, starting the Hundred Years’ War between England and France. In 1346, England besieged and captured Calais. “The English have been here for two hundred years,” Cromwell thinks, “but in the streets now you hear more French and Flemish spoken.”
Henry VIII clings on to Calais and the title of “King of France”, but the glory days are over. “Who remembers Agincourt?” says King Francis. Cromwell “almost laughs” because every man in England remembers Agincourt. And four hundred years later, they will still be talking about it.
Henry’s daughter Mary will be on the throne in 1558, when the town is finally reconquered by the French. It will be a devastatingly symbolic defeat for a dynasty with imperial pretensions. Mary, who will marry Philip, King of Spain, will say: “When I am dead and cut open, they will find Philip and Calais inscribed on my heart."
10. Footnote: The Theatre of Memory
‘The thing you have, I want it for my master.’
In Calais, Cromwell attempts to contact Giulio Camillo, an Italian philosopher at the French court between 1530 and 1537. Camillo presented King Francis with his idea for a “theatre of memory”, an architectural structure that would contain “everything which exists in the whole world.”
Camillo imagined a theatre set out as described by Vitruvian in De Architectura, whose words appear in the epigraph of Wolf Hall. However, Camillo reverses the relationship between the audience and the stage so that a single spectator can stand at its centre and survey all human knowledge. Information is archived using images and symbols, creating what Camillo called an artificial mind or a “mind endowed with windows.”
The boy says, ‘What is it, monsieur? What are they selling?’ He almost tells him. What harm could it do? But then in the end he can't think of the right words.
Cromwell is seeking an upgrade for his own memory system. A proto-computer or a form of Renaissance artificial intelligence that could provide him and his king with a memory machine without the faults and flaws of a human, like Thomas Cromwell.
We will return to this memory machine very soon.
11. Quote of the Week: The tide is running for him
A week at sea and at coastal Calais, the language of the ocean permeates the writing in this chapter:
The wind is set fair and the tide is running for him. He can feel the tug of it under his feet.
It’s a good week for Thomas Cromwell. The wind, the sea and the tide are on his side:
The ship’s timbers creak. The king steadies himself with a hand on his shoulder. The wind stiffens the sails. The sun dances over the water.
That image of Cromwell physically supporting his king is already a recurring theme. And on the ship and in Calais, there is a sense of a union forming between the king and councillor, mirroring the union between Henry and Anne.
But the memories of the dead are never far behind:
In the ship’s wake the gulls cry like lost souls.
No one is immune to melancholy when faced with a sea wind. The last two pages of this chapter summon up a swell of phantoms from the deep:
A wind has blown up from the Narrow Sea, snapping at the rigging in the harbour, rattling the windows inland. Tomorrow, he thinks, it may rain. He lights a candle and goes back to his letter. But his letter has no attraction for him. Leaves flurry from the gardens, from the orchards. Images move in the air beyond the glass, gulls blown like ghosts: a flash of his wife Elizabeth’s white cap, as she follows him to the door on her last morning. Except that she didn’t: she was sleeping, wrapped in damp linen, under the yellow turkey quilt.
12. Next week
Thank you for reading and joining me on this slow read of the Cromwell trilogy. Next week, we start “Anna Regina, 1533” up to page 462 and the section ending “But when they turn back, Frith is waiting, placid, for his journey to resume.”
A quick reminder that this book group is entirely funded by its readers. So, if you have enjoyed this post and found it helpful, please consider a paid subscription to access the bonus posts on The Haunting of Wolf Hall and start discussion threads in the chat area. You can also donate to my tip jar on Stripe. Thank you so much for all your support.
Finally, are you enjoying this slow read? Is there anything we can do to improve the experience, deepen discussion or foster a greater sense of community?
Our sister book group, War and Peace, is benefiting from daily chat threads. Today someone said they would like something similar for Wolf Crawl. However, because of the way this reading is structured, I’m not quite sure how this would work.
But if anyone has any bright ideas for creating more space for discussion and community, let me know in the comments, or message me directly by email or in Substack:
Until next week, I am your guide,
Master Simon Haisell
As usual, Simon has covered this section with great grace and sprezzatura (my new favorite word)
A few things I noted: Cromwell anticipates Las Vegas when he wants Henry to issue "gaming tokens" for the gambling game he plays with the French.
How close does Cromwell come to being seduced by Mary B. ? If not for Stafford showing up....
Finally, I was moved by Cromwell thinking about his life five years past, leaving his house in the morning with Liz still alive, carrying Wolsey's files. He asks himself whether in that moment he was happy. He answers that he doesn't know. It's a poignant moment. His career is at a zenith, but most of his family and his freedom have been taken from him. I take it as a moment of regret for all the alternative lives he could have led.
There are three quotes that struck me as wonderfully funny in this week's section. First, a certain French boy in a seedy tavern informs Cromwell that if he wants something good to drink, he "drink somewhere else".
Another, when Madge Shelton asks for a Bible for Anne, is told that Cromwell knows the whole of New Testament by heart, and when she says, "I think she wants it to swear on", Cromwell says, "In that case I'm no use to her".
And the last, when Cromwell mentions to Mary Boleyn that he could get on a ship for somewhere else, she asks where they might go, he "doesn't remember inviting a friend".