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Welcome to week 21 of Wolf Crawl
This week, we are reading a long chapter, ‘Angels, Stepney and Greenwich, Christmas 1535 – New Year 1536.’ Revels at Stepney and at court as Katherine dies at Kimbolton.
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
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Last week’s post:
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This week’s story
It’s Christmas, 1535, and a festive mood descends on the Cromwell household and the Tudor court. But he, Cromwell, has never been busier: buried under an avalanche of paperwork. ‘Sometimes he would give a king’s ransom to see the sun.’
At court, he sits on the low table for functionaries like himself, and the king’s friends who are not of noble birth: Nicholas Carew, William Fitzwilliam, and William Paulet. He ‘is an easy man to get along with,’ so he eases into a more amicable relationship with Nicholas Carew, Katherine’s old partisan.
The queen’s dog Purkoy falls from a window. Why? No one knows. Cromwell offers words of comfort, but Anne’s knives are out for Katherine, Mary and Jane Seymour. She turns her wrath on Cromwell: ‘Those who are made can be unmade.’
Cromwell’s house at Stepney. The Christmas star goes up and he takes in a jester called Anthony. Anthony does impressions: his King Henry is rather good. Cromwell’s friends visit and ask what he will do for William Tyndale, in prison and likely to be killed. He can do nothing and the conversation leaves a sour taste in his mouth.
Chapuys comes to Stepney. Katherine is dying and the imperial ambassador wants permission to see her at Kimbolton. Cromwell and Chapuys go together to Greenwich to ask the king. The courtiers are dressing for a masque when Charles Brandon Duke of Suffolk barges in, accusing Anne of adultery.
He, Cromwell, is needled by Brandon’s comments: ‘Get back to your abacus, Cromwell.’ In Stepney, he puts his man Vaughan on the road to keep an eye of Katherine’s people. In the new year, the old queen dies. Henry and Anne rejoice in yellow and the king parades Princess Elizabeth about court.
Anne makes a peace offering to Lady Mary, one she knows Henry’s bastard will refuse. She does. Cromwell commiserates with Chapuys, hopeful that Katherine’s death removes an obstacle preventing amicable relations with the Empire. And Christophe says the word on the street is that he, Cromwell, and the king murdered Katherine, once Queen of England, and no more.
This week’s characters
Click on each link for more details and plot summaries for each character:
Thomas Cromwell • Nicholas Carew • William Fitzwilliam • William Paulet • Anne Boleyn • Lady Rochford • Anthony • Gregory • Thomas Wriothesley • Richard • Rafe • Richard Riche • Robert Packington • Humphrey Monmouth • Eustache Chapuys • Henry Norris • Henry VIII • Francis Weston • William Brereton • Charles Brandon • Stephen Vaughan • Christophe • María de Salinas • Katherine of Aragon • Princess Elizabeth • Jane Seymour
I charge thee, fling away ambition: by that sin fell the angels.
Cardinal Thomas Wolsey in William Shakespeare’s Henry VIII
This week’s theme: Angel nets
Again the kingdom of heaven is like unto a net cast in to the sea, that gathereth of all kinds of fishes: the which when it is full, men draw to land, and sit and gather the good into their vessels, and cast the bad away. So shall it be at the end of the world. The angels shall come and sever the bad from the good, and shall cast them in to a furnace of fire, there shall be wailing and gnashing of teeth.
Matthew 13:47-51, William Tyndale’s translation
What happens to the dead? This question shadows the story through all three Cromwell books. In Germany, religious reformers have done away with Purgatory, but in England, no one is quite sure where we stand. ‘The king will not allow preaching on Purgatory, it is so contentious.’ The subject is spiritual, political and deeply personal for every person in prayer: Gregory takes it hard. Can his mother hear him?
Imagine the silence now, in that place which is no-place, that anteroom to God where each hour is ten thousand years long. Once you imagined the souls held in a great net, a web spun by God, held safe till their release into his radiance. But if the net is cut and the web broken, do they spill into freezing space, each year falling further into silence, until there is no trace of them at all?
Magic nets are two a penny in Bring up the Bodies. At Greenwich, Cromwell thinks: ‘if he had a net, he would drop it over’ the Duke of Suffolk. Charles Brandon is a big bearded bull in a china shop, shooting off his mouth in the presence of the king and the Imperial ambassador, Eustace Chapuys – in his delightfully cheerful Christmas hat.
Chapuys is not cheerful. Princess Elizabeth’s red locks do not prove her paternity: ‘Considering I could go out on the street and catch half a dozen redheads without a net.’ We know from the Calais alchemists that England is riddled with witches and from the Continent, this island of redhead devils is ripe and ready for excommunication.
At Wolf Hall, Gregory had Francis Weston’s phantom in his magic net, for speaking ill of his dead sisters. But Weston cut loose and is now at Greenwich, dressed as a dragon, pursued by gentle Norris in the guise of a Moor. That’s the problem with imaginary nets: they’re only imaginary.
Still, nets don’t need to be real to work. You can ensnare, entangle your victims in a web of rumour and accusation. Londoners with their ‘busy, buzzing minds.’ The last chapter and this one both end with street-level speculation about the secret lives of Thomas Cromwell. He has murdered an innkeeper’s husband. He has poisoned Katherine of Aragon.
When Katherine’s lady-in-waiting Maria de Salinas comes to Stepney he switches her to English: ‘in any dealing with Katherine’s friends, he wants witnesses.’ Queen Anne has long suspected some conspiracy between Cromwell and Chapuys, neighbours of Austin Friars. Her thoughts are threading a net fine enough to catch Master Secretary, before he catches her.
‘You must study your advantage, Master Secretary. Those who are made can be unmade.’ He says, 'I entirely agree.'
The Boleyns think they made Cromwell but he tells himself that he made Anne queen. The issue is contentious, like Purgatory. But don’t ask Archbishop Cranmer for the ‘current thinking’, because he is Anne’s creature and is not neutral in this matter.
Do we still believe in angels? They are in Tyndale’s bible, so they must be so. But who will be Tyndale’s angel, now he’s in prison and facing fire? Cromwell and Anne are his most powerful brethren but will do nothing for him. ‘The queen needs help herself,’ says Cromwell. And Cromwell only helps himself, says Robert Packington.
'So must our brother burn? That is what you are telling me? A merry Christmas to you, Master Secretary.' He turns away. 'They say money follows you these days like a spaniel his master.'
Like Purkoy the spaniel, slipping from the sill into canine oblivion. Dogs have no souls, so God needs no net. ‘Pourquoi? Good question.’
He, Cromwell, once made an angel.
The year that Grace was an angel, she had wings made of peacock feathers. He himself had contrived it. The other little girls were dowdy goose creatures, and their wings fell off if they caught them on the corners of the stable. But Grace stood glittering, her hair entwined with silver threads; her shoulders were trussed with a spreading, shivering glory, and the rustling air was perfumed as she breathed. Lizzie said, Thomas, there's no end to you, is there?
Lizzie is gone. Grace is gone (Where? We do not know) but her wings are at Stepney. ‘Mirrored, the peacock eyes speak to him. Do not forget us. As the year turns, we are here: a whisper, a touch, a feather’s breath from you.’
So here we are. New year, 1536. Here are England’s angels: Thomas Cromwell and Anne Boleyn. ‘Since my coronation there is a new England. It cannot subsist without me.’ Together they have delivered the kingdom from darkness. Replaced false religion with the truth. From the street, the two angels rise together and as one.
But here, in this closed room, is something other, twisting into shape.
‘If need be, I can separate you from history.’
Angels are bright still, though the brightest fell.
William Shakespeare, Macbeth
Footnotes
1. The dog called Why
'I am so sorry,' he says, his eyes down. He knows better than to say, you can get another dog.
Hilary Mantel’s Cromwell has a soft spot for little dogs. A long line of Bellas dutifully follow him through his life from Putney to Stepney. So for a moment he feels Anne’s pain, ‘wants to soothe her; she seems as torn, as injured, as if the attack had been on her person.’
The Tudors loved their dogs. So much so that the accompanying mess caused for royal censure. In 1526, Henry VIII banned all but ladies’ lapdogs from court. And while we don’t know for sure whether Purkoy was a toy spaniel, this breed was new and all the rage. Mary Tudor became the first English monarch to be painted with her spaniels, long before Charles II gave his name to the King Charles Spaniel.
Purkoy was a gift from the ambitious Lady Lisle in Calais, who hoped her daughters would be promoted to the court. The Lisles’ correspondence from Calais is one of the richest historical records from this period. We know the Lisles continued to shower Anne with gifts, sending song birds and live quails. You may remember Thurston complaining about the meat on Lord Lisle’s quails in Wolf Hall. After Purkoy’s death, they considered sending Anne a monkey, but the queen detested these animals, one of which appears in a portrait of Katherine of Aragon.
Further reading:
2. Cromwell’s jester
'Are you a papist, Anthony?' 'I may be. I like miracles. I have been a pilgrim in my time. But the fist of Cromwell is more proximate than the hand of God.'
We know of Anthony thanks to Thomas Avery’s fastidious account books.
reminds us that Cromwell believes: ‘the page of an accounts book is there for your use, like a love poem. It’s not there for you to nod and then dismiss it; it’s there to open your heart to possibility.’That is how Mantel uses Cromwell’s accounts: like a love poem. On 29 December 1538, Cromwell paid 34 shillings and 6d for ‘bells for Anthony’s coat.’ Right now, in 1535, Anthony’s coat has no bells. I will leave it to you slow and careful readers to notice when our jester acquires his musical suit.
3. Standing stones and walking trees
‘I’ll get you in the end. When I learn to imitate a gatepost. A standing stone. A statue. There are statues who move their eyes. In the north country.’
Anthony’s reference to standing stones is a nice nod back to their mention in Falcons: ‘Our forefathers the giants left their earthworks, their barrows and standing stones.’
Anthony’s difficulty in impersonating Cromwell ties in with Master Secretary’s portrait that gives nothing away: the book of his heart is a private book. His face is arranged as blank as a wall. What creative fool would even think of writing a book about the king’s creature without character?
'I'll give you a good character, if you want a new master.'
From standing stones to walking trees.
'In the Indies,' Gregory says, 'trees can ambulate. They lift themselves up by their roots and if the wind blows they can move to a more sheltered spot.'
It’s a tall tree story told by Call-Me-Risley. We know Gregory prefers a good story over a true one, so no harm done. But the really fun bit is that there are actually walking palm trees in the neotropics.
Not quite as fast as the Ents, these trees grow new roots over several years to move to better sunlight and more solid ground. I saw many of these in their slow ambulation when I stayed at the Los Cedros biological reserve in Ecuador in 2007.
Further reading:
4. Saint Uncumber
'St Uncumber was a virgin and grew a beard,' Gregory volunteers. 'The beard was to repulse her suitors and so guard her chastity. Women pray to her if they wish to be rid of their husbands.'
Saint Uncumber never existed but her legend did. She is a folk saint whose story appeared in Western Europe in the fourteenth-century to explain the androgenous icons of Christ crucified in the Orthodox East. According to this folk history, Uncumber was a Portuguese noblewoman who avoided marriage to a Moorish king by growing a beard. Her furious father had her crucified: so perhaps not the best recommendation for Call-Me’s costume.
Hilary Mantel and Gregory judiciously avoided the pun embedded in the saint’s name. Women who pray to St Uncumber desire to be ‘disencumbered’ of their husbands.
5. The Frozen Thames
As Chapuys and Cromwell take the barge to Greenwich, Master Secretary is unusually chatty:
'I am glad we are not iced up. Sometimes we cannot use the river for weeks. Have you seen it when it's frozen over?' No reply.
This is a little bit of foreshadowing. Cromwell is perhaps remembering the bitter winter of 1515, when the Thames partially froze over. But next year, 1536, will be worse and the annual royal boat procession down river will proceed on horse by the banks.
In the sixteenth-century the Thames was wider and shallower than it is today, making freezing more likely. In winter, ice blocked the many arches and piers beneath the old London Bridge. The new bridge built in 1831 had only five arches and the Thames has not frozen over since.
During the Little Ice Age, from the mid-fourteenth to the nineteenth century, colder winters led to the river freezing over more frequently. From 1608, a ‘frost fair’ was held on the river, with games, races and spectacles on the ice. The last frost fair was held in 1814.
Further reading:
6. Masques and mummery
'I ride at first light,' Chapuys tells him; rapidly, they walk away, through the morris men and the bobbing hobby horses, through a merman and his shoal, skirting round a castle that rumbles towards them, painted masonry on oiled wheels.
Costumes play a central role to the story in this chapter. From the start, nothing is as it seems: “A huge toad blocks his path. ‘Is that Matthew?’”
Chapuys’ Christmas hat follows us through the pages, incongruously cheerful on the sombre head of the imperial ambassador. It’s too small for Cromwell’s big head and too precious a charge to be borrowed for a papal snowman. It is ‘a startling hat. More like the sort that George Boleyn sports,’ and it is everywhere inappropriate and out-of-place. A symbol of the grim news in festive times.
More inappropriate attire: Anne’s joyful yellow dress, William Brereton’s leopard skin with nothing on beneath. ‘Is that proper?’ asks a very proper Master Secretary. Call-Me dressed as a virgin in a veil. ‘Go and change,’ says Cromwell. ‘I don’t like it.’
The titular angel is also a costume: the peacock wings that Cromwell made for his daughter Grace. They are now worn by Rafe’s stepdaughter. He, Cromwell, approves of this costume, although its appearance disturbs the past and makes it speak. ‘Do not forget us.’
While mummery and pageantry were part of medieval life, the court masque was formalised during the reign of Henry VIII, importing styles and devices from Italy. In 1512, the chronicler Edward Hall described the first masque, ‘a thyng not seen afore in England’ when, on Twelfth Night, the king and eleven gentlemen appeared at court in disguise, ‘after the manner of Italie’. One participant in these early revels was Henry Guilford, the former Master Comptroller, in who’s memory Carew offers his gloomy toast at the beginning of this chapter.
Further reading:
7. The first snowmen
In the Author’s Note to Hilary Mantel’s novel on the French Revolution she writes:
I am not trying to persuade my reader to view events in a particular way, or to draw any particular lessons from them. I have tried to write a novel that gives the reader scope to change opinions, change sympathies: a book that one can think and live inside. The reader may ask how to tell fact from fiction. A rough guide: anything that seems particularly unlikely is probably true.
‘A book that one can think and live inside’ is the finest description of Mantel’s writing in particular, and the object of writing fiction in general. Our slow read allows us to do just that: and for a week we are in Stepney and Greenwich at Christmas, dodging human toads and castles on wheels.
Mantel’s words came back to me as we stumbled across the snowmen this week:
When he arrives back in Stepney torchlight spills out of the house, and the singing children, in a state of high excitement, are carolling in the garden; dogs are barking, black shapes bobbing against the snow, and a dozen mounds, ghostly white, tower over the frozen hedges. One, taller than the rest, wears a mitre; it has a stub of blue-tinged carrot for its nose, and a smaller stub for its cock. Gregory pitches towards him, a swirl of excitement: ‘Look, sir, we have made the Pope out of snow.’
Fact or fiction? I was delighted to read Mantel’s notes on this section in her interview with
:In the winter of 1535 a man otherwise unknown to history wrote to Thomas Cromwell to explain how he had made a snowman. It was made to look like the pope. It was ‘for the better setting forth of the king’s supremacy.’ But his local priest and his associates broke his door down, barged in and accused him of heresy. Can Cromwell help?
‘Anything that seems particularly unlikely is probably true,’ and the delight is to weave the detail into the tapestry of fact and fiction. Like last week’s mention of Andrew Boorde’s lost book of beards, the frozen pope is rescued from time: ‘I am happy,’ said Mantel, ‘that the original snowman isn’t lost for ever, that it has been, as it were, rebuilt, only to melt again.’
Further reading:
8. ‘Wearing yellow to a funeral’
He says to Lady Rochford, do we call it a new colour, or an old colour come back? Will you be wearing it, my lady? She says, I don't think it suits any complexion, myself. And Anne should stick to black.
Look at me, I’ve run out of time and space this week. So just a quick note to say there is plenty of discussion about what Henry and Anne wore at court after Katherine’s death. Chapuys informed his master that ‘the King was clad all over in yellow, from top to toe, except the white feather he had in his bonnet.’ But no mention of Anne. Which is odd, given his antipathy to our current queen. The first accounts of her wearing yellow appear after her death, first in Edward Hall’s Chronicle.
Over the years, some have asserted that the court wore yellow because it was the colour of mourning in Katherine’s native Spain. This would be a nice twist if it was true but there is no evidence yellow was ever worn in mourning there.
Further reading:
If a man is not rising upwards to be an angel, depend upon it, he is sinking downwards to be a devil.
— Samuel Taylor Coleridge
Quote of the week: ‘Get back to your abacus, Cromwell’
‘What is all this agitation?’ asks Stephen Vaughan. Chapuys wonders the same: ‘Why are you chattering? It is not like you.’
It’s true. A nervous energy runs through Cromwell this week. Everyone is in a festive mood, but Cromwell senses the shifting sands. The world can turn and leave you, Cromwell, to freeze in the cold. ‘Study your advantage, Master Secretary. Those who are made can be unmade.’
Here’s the risk: The longer Katherine stays alive, the more likely it is that England will be driven into an alliance with France. There is a future where the king re-marries a good Catholic French princess and the Empire shuts its ports to English ships. England will be poorer, hungrier and further from true religion. And perhaps that new England will have no place for Thomas Cromwell.
He takes a breath. Lisle, mayor, insults, Lisle. Calais, Dublin, secret funds. He wants Chapuys to get to Kimbolton in time. But doesn't want Katherine to rally. You should not desire, he knows, the death of any human creature. Death is your prince, you are not his patron; when you think he is engaged elsewhere, he will batter down your door, walk in and wipe his boots on you.
Day by day, month by month, Cromwell grows more entangled in matters of international diplomacy and the fates of dynasties and nations. He may be on the low table at court, but he’s playing a high stakes game that the likes of Charles Brandon believe is theirs and theirs alone.
But the Cromwell trilogy tells the story of the birth of the modern world. Noblemen like Brandon will still ‘make a racket’ and represent the king abroad. But from now on, the world will be run by ‘new men’, trained administrators and lowborn lawyers like Crumb and Rafe and Call-Me and Richard Riche. The king looks mighty in his armour…
But chivalry’s day is over. One day soon moss will grow in the tilt yard. The days of the moneylender have arrived, and the days of the swaggering privateer; banker sits down with banker, and kings are their waiting boys.
Next week
Thank you for reading and joining me on this slow read of the Cromwell trilogy. Over the next three weeks we will be reading ‘The Black Book, London, January – April 1536.’ Next week’s reading ends on page 223 of the Fourth Estate paperback edition with the line: ‘But her hands and feet are cold and her heart is like a stone.’
Before I go, 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 your own discussion threads in the chat area. You can also donate to my tip jar on Stripe. Thank you so much for all your support.
Until next week, I am your guide,
Master Simon Haisell
I feel like round about here is when Cromwell first starts a. forgetting things and b. being excluded from the King's innermost thoughts. Also, he outright refuses Anne for the first time: "That is not my aim and those are not my methods." And, he can do nothing for Tyndale. Also, he is overwhelmed and wants a rest. Many turning points: his power is just beginning to wane.
Fantastic chapter and marvellous notes from Simon. It has struck me lately that these books have a touch of the unreliable narrator about them. We see the world through TC’s eyes and - more importantly - we see his own actions through his eyes. And, of course, he thinks he’s one of the guys. But now and then there’s a line that sharply cuts through to an alternate reality. Where generous, patient, dog-loving, child-adopting Cromwell achieves peace in Ireland mainly “by hanging people”. I see you there, the real Thomas Cromwell. Quite the spine tingling moment.