To get these updates in your inbox, subscribe to Footnotes and Tangents and turn on notifications for the Cromwell Trilogy.
Welcome to week twelve of Wolf Crawl
This week, we are reading the first part of “Anna Regina, 1533” up to page 462, the section ending “But when they turn back, Frith is waiting, placid, for his journey to resume.”
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 posts 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: Wardrobe adjustments
Footnote: A pretty allegory
Footnote: Death, hidden in plain sight
Tangent: The art of persuasion
Footnote: The book of the heart
Footnote: Victors of Agincourt
Footnote: Moving the furniture
Quote of the Week: A simpler form of himself
Next week
1. This week’s story
At the start of 1533, Thomas Cromwell takes into Austin Friars Helen Barre, the wife or widow of a violent man who has left her with two children and no home. To his growing household, Cromwell also adds the Calais boy known as Christophe.
Before they left Calais, Cromwell inspected the library of Lord Berners. The governor of Calais is also chancellor of the exchequer. When he dies the following year, Cromwell is given the title. After years of doing everyone else’s, it is his first real job.
In January, Anne and Henry take their vows in secret at a chapel at Whitehall. Afterwards, Mary lets Cromwell know that she has let out Anne’s bodice. Her sister is pregnant. Cromwell passes this secret on to Thomas Cranmer, Archbishop Elect. Cranmer doesn’t reciprocate with his own secret, alluded to in the margin of a letter sent from Nuremberg.
Soon, the whole world knows Anne’s secret. She beams with pleasure while mentally rounding up her enemies. Chapuys puts it plainly to Cromwell: Do you know how much you are staking on the body of one woman?
Anne makes plans. She wants to marry Mary Boleyn to Cromwell’s nephew, Richard. But the king overrules the match: he wants Mary for himself while her sister is carrying his heir. He calls Gregory “a very fine young man”, and Gregory almost dies of joy.
At the Tower, Cromwell visits John Frith, a survivor from Wolsey’s fish cellar. He was locked up while Cromwell was in Calais and stands to burn for books he can’t unwrite and beliefs he can’t unbelieve. Cromwell cannot save inflexible men.
The king sends Cromwell to see Katherine in secret. She will not recognise the court of annulment, the new queen, or the archbishop. She denies correspondence with the king’s enemies. “I have brought England little good,” she says, “but I would be loath to bring her any harm.”
Finally, Cromwell visits Thomas More at Chelsea. He must be convinced to attend the coronation, for his own sake. In his favour, he has written to the Holy Maid, Elizabeth Barton, advising her to cease troubling the king with her prophecies. While More’s daughter is out of the room fetching the letter, Cromwell does what he can to make More save Frith from the fire.
John Frith. Dowager Princess Katherine. Thomas More. For a persuasive man, Cromwell could do better. But at least his new robes have arrived. It is time for Cromwell to go into crimson.
2. This week’s characters
Click on each link for more details and plot summaries for each character:
Thomas Cromwell • Helen Barre • Rafe Sadler • Thomas Wyatt • Henry Norris • Henry VIII • Anne Boleyn • Lord Berners • Christophe • Stephen Gardiner • Rowland Lee • William Brereton • Mary Boleyn • Eustache Chapuys • Nicholas Carew • Thomas Cranmer • Richard Cromwell • Gregory • Thomas Audley • John Frith • Jean de Dinteville • Jane Seymour • Mary Shelton • Lady Rochford • Thurston • Reginald Pole • Katherine of Aragon • Thomas More • Meg Roper
3. This week’s theme: Wardrobe adjustments
We could have spent all this week in dry and dusty Parliamentary committees as Thomas Cromwell writes the law that severs England from Rome and declares, “This realm of England is an Empire.” But that’s not Hilary Mantel’s style. What we need is a metaphor for the remaking of a king, a country and a councillor.
“Do you wonder I tremble before him?” complains the French ambassador. “My river. My city. My salvation, cut out and embroidered just for me. My personally tailored English god.”
What we need are wardrobe adjustments.
Indeed, everything that happens this week is subordinate to the slight adjustment of Anne’s bodice to make space for an heir to the Tudor line. Unlike Eustace Chapuys, Cromwell draws no distinction between this and the welfare of the country and the prosperity of his own household. It’s all cut from the same cloth.
Cromwell is ambition personified. When he has to explain to Christophe that he is not a nobleman, the Calais boy says, “In that case, I do not know what a milord in your country looks like.” He wears “loose jackets of Lemster wool so fine they flow like water, in purples and indigos so near black that it looks as if the night has bled into them.” And now on his fingers: a cardinal’s turquoise and a king’s ruby.
“His Majesty’s ring,” says Nicholas Carew, “fits you without adjustment.” Cromwell said, “so it does.”
But lawyerly black won’t do for Anne’s coronation day. “Thomas must go into crimson,” says the hidden Queen of England. “Dear God,” he laughs when the crimson comes in. It is not just Wolsey’s colour. It is the colour of power and magnificence. At the start of Henry’s reign, “An Act Against Wearing of Costly Apparel” forbade all under the rank of Knight from donning “velvet of crimson or blue.” On his body, Cromwell is rewriting the strict Sumptuary Laws of Tudor England.
This chapter begins with a new character: Helen Barre. She “unwinds the thread of her tale”, one of poverty and hardship at the expense of violent men and hypocrite women. He mentally re-dresses her as a lady in velvet, “six shillings the yard.” Later, his nephew Richard chastises Gregory: “You never think of the cost”; you need “armour of show quality” to carry your colours in the joust.
It is expensive to look the part. But uncle and nephew drive a hard bargain. “Cromwells will knock down all-comers,” says Richard.
In contrast, Thomas More claims poverty and can’t afford a new coat for the coronation. It’s so ridiculous, even sworn enemies like Cromwell and Gardiner can share the joke. More always looks unkempt. If he won’t see Anne crowned, it’s not because he can’t afford the costume. It’s because he will not suffer the company of devils.
So this is England, 1533. Henry, in his empire, and the emperor needs new clothes.
Helen Barre’s appearance in Wolf Hall is a great moment to mention
and her newsletter The thread of her tale, which you should now recognise as a quote from the first page of this week’s chapter. Lucie Bea Dutton has spent a decade working on quilting and stitching together Cromwell’s story in various forms. She has written a research paper entitled “Helen Barre’s Needle” on the theme of stitching in the trilogy. To avoid spoilers, you may want to wait until the end of the year before watching her presentation. But for now, she shares her thoughts on sailmaker’s needles and what they tell us about Helen Barre:4. Footnote: A pretty allegory
He looks at the place on the wall where the cardinal’s arms blaze out: the scarlet hat, at his request, recently retouched. ‘You can paint them out now,’ he says. 'And what shall we paint else, sir?' 'Leave a blank.' 'We could have a pretty allegory?' 'I'm sure.' He turns and walk away. 'Leave a space.'
Thomas Cromwell needs new clothes. But he also needs a coat of arms. His biographer, Diarmaid MacCulloch, explains its significance:
Coats of arms matter tremendously in the 16th-century. Heraldry – we've still got it, but frankly it's a bit of an antiquarian, pleasant pursuit these days. Not so in the 16th century. Heraldry was the language of power and what you put on your shield, your coat of arms, really mattered. It had messages. It was important to read those messages right, rather as we have to read road signs right, because something rather unpleasant happens to us if we misunderstand them.
So here is Cromwell’s road sign to the peers of the realm:
Diarmaid MacCulloch decodes the symbolism: Three lions rampant, from the heraldry of his brother-in-law, Morgan Williams (Richard’s father). And Thomas Wolsey’s gold band with Tudor rose between two Cornish choughs:
Choughs (heraldry’s prefered species of crow) are the symbol of Thomas Becket of Canterbury, and therefore of all English Thomases, be they Wolsey or Cromwell.
The irony of these choughs or becketts has already been foreshadowed down in Canterbury, where the Cromwells sneered at old Becket’s bones. But anyone in 1533 would have understood Cromwell’s message: “I am Cardinal Wolsey’s man.”
It’s a two-fingered salute to everyone who helped bring him down. This is extraordinary, not just because Wolsey died in disgrace, but because his greatest enemy was the woman who is about to be queen. If Cromwell hopes for grace and favours from the Howards and Boleyns, this is not going to please Queen Anne.
But he doesn’t seem to care. In fact, he’s rather enjoying himself.
5. Footnote: Death, hidden in plain sight
This chapter sees the first appearance of French ambassador Jean de Dinteville. He is shivering from the cold and dislikes every moment spent on this wet island full of heretics. Hans Holbein should be helping out Cromwell at the Tower, but instead he’s painting the ambassador. De Dinteville’s motto is memento mori, ‘remember that you die.’ The painting includes a distorted skull, only visible from an angle or through a glass tube. It is also a complex still life, rich in possible symbolism and hidden meaning.
6. Tangent: The art of persuasion
When have I, when have I ever forced anyone to do anything, he starts to say: but Richard cuts in, ‘No, you don’t, I agree, it’s just that you are practised at persuading, and sometimes it’s quite difficult, sir, to distinguish being persuaded by you from being knocked down in the street and stamped on.’
Richard Cromwell draws attention to an uncomfortable truth about his uncle: he is a bully. An enforcer. He writes his own rules and makes his own weapons. He learned his techniques of persuasion on the street.
Sometimes, these skills prove effective. We witnessed his annihilation of the Earl of Northumberland. “I will rip your life apart,” he told Harry Percy. “Me and my banker friends.”
It’s not exactly subtle. And it won’t get you very far with men and women with inflexible minds, bent on their own destruction. This week, Cromwell fails to persuade three people: John Frith, Katherine of Aragon, and Thomas More.
He now has the ash of many martyrs on his conscience. Good men he couldn’t save. John Frith was one of the scholars shut away in the cellars of Cardinal College. Wolsey forgot about them, but Cromwell didn’t. The problem is Frith has already made up his mind to burn:
‘I have written books and I cannot unwrite them. I cannot unbelieve what I believe. I cannot unlive my life.’
Cromwell offers Katherine the hope of “great estate” and threatens her with the charge of treason. It’s hard to know how successful his words are, but she is unlikely to be persuaded by a man who “packs up his sins in his saddlebags and carries them from country to country.”
Thomas More considers him the devil, and the feeling is mutual. And for a moment at Chelsea, they are equals in the dark arts:
I am beginning to think that the whole order of the Franciscans is working against the king. If I take them and if I cannot persuade them, and you know I am very persuasive, into confirming my suspicion, I may have to hang them up by their wrists, and start a sort of contest between them, as to which one will emerge first into better sense. Of course, my own inclination would be to take them home, feed them and ply them with strong drink, but then, Sir Thomas, I have always looked up to you, and you have been my master in these proceedings.
This is a chilling moment. For the first time, Cromwell considers the possibility of torture. And it is based on the historical archive. In the summer of 1533, Cromwell arrested Observant Franciscans of the Greenwich community. He wrote: “It is undoubted that they have intended and would confess some great matter, if they might be examined as they ought to be, that is to say, by pains.”
Mantel’s Cromwell seems conscious of his own brutal limitations. He tells More, “you are an eloquent man, you are the great persuader of our age, not me.”
This conversation sets up the principal dialogue of the second half of Wolf Hall. Two Thomases, two devils and two worldviews. Between them, a homicidal king and the axeman waiting at Tower Hill.
7. Footnote: The book of the heart
Richard’s voice is flat. Is he talking himself into it? It’s hard to tell. With many people, most people perhaps, the book of their heart lies open to him, but there are times when it’s easier to read outsiders than your own family.
Cromwell borrows money from a Genovese merchant to send to Rome to confirm Thomas Cranmer as Archbishop of Canterbury. In return, Cromwell gives the Genovese an engraving of a young man holding a heart-shaped book.
There are paintings of heart-shaped books from the Rennaisance, as well as some beautiful heart-shaped songbooks. In medieval Christian theology, the ‘book of the heart’ represented one’s innermost self, a record of thoughts and feelings known only to God and to be read at the Last Judgement.
Previously, Cromwell learned to arrange his face. Now, he claims to read hearts – read people like an open book. It occurs to me that he, Cromwell, keeps his own book of the heart tightly shut. He arranges his face and doesn’t tell stories about his past. As such, maybe Wolf Hall is his heart-shaped book. Helen Barre asks:
‘What happened to our picture? The one with the man holding his heart shaped like a book? Or do I mean his book shaped like a heart?’’
The slip of the tongue is delectable. Is Wolf Hall a heart-shaped book or a book-shaped heart?
8. Footnote: Victors of Agincourt
'Have you heard of the field called Towton? The king tells me more than twenty thousand Englishmen died.' The man gapes at him. 'Who were they fighting?' 'Each other.'
Cromwell stops to watch a stonemason and bricklayer fight in the street. He tells them about Towton, the largest and most bloody battle ever fought in England. They’ve never heard of it. At the start of the year, we discussed the forty-year Tudor peace and the Wars of the Roses that preceded it. That peace is now precariously maintained by one woman’s body:
The child in Anne’s womb is the guaranteee of no more civil wars. He is the beginning, the start of something, the promise of another country.
Two sentences full of foreshadowing. The child will sit on the throne. The child will start something and promise another country. But not until their brother and sister have ruled England and brought the country perilously close to civil war. And the child is not a he, but a she. Elizabeth.
He brings Anne some majolica bowls. The word maschio is painted on the outside, and inside are pictures of plump blond-haired babies, each with a coy little phallus.
Anne is certain she is carrying a son and heir. Beside her, Jane Seymour says, “I’d like a baby.” Her baby will be a son and a future King Edward VI.
9. Footnote: Moving the furniture
Hans Holbein “is building a living model of Mount Parnassus”, a tableux for the coronation procession. Fortunately, we have the sketch of his designs. It was commissioned by merchants from the Hanseatic League, a commercial network of towns across Northern Europe. According to an observer, its fountain ran with wine and the muses sung the praises of Queen Anne.
But much, much more on the coronation next week.
10. Quote of the Week: A simpler form of himself
Cromwell will spend the next seven years at Henry’s side. We get a good long look at the man who has made us. And who will kill us. Hilary Mantel and Cromwell keep finding different angles from which to see this strange creature called Henry up close. “Am I not a man like other men?” he asks. Clearly not.
'Sometimes it is a solace to me,' Henry says, 'not to have to talk and talk. You were born to understand me, perhaps.' That is one view of their situations. He was six years or so in this world before Henry came into it, years of which he made good use. Henry takes off his embroidered cap, throws it down, runs his hands through his hair. Like Wyatt's golden mane, his hair is thinning, and it exposes the shape of his massive skull. For a moment he seems like a carved statue, like a simpler form of himself, or one of his own ancestors: one of the race of giants that roamed Britain, and left no trace of themselves except in the dreams of their petty descendants.
11. Next week
Thank you for reading and joining me on this slow read of the Cromwell trilogy. Next week, we read the second half of “Anna Regina, 1533”.
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.
Until next week, I am your guide,
Master Simon Haisell
What a great week of reading again (both from Mantel and Simon). I could spend a lifetime thinking about how Mantel describes every character’s hands and what that tells us about them. Interestingly, this week, Cromwell notices that his hands have started to change. And we begin to see some of the less-heroic elements of his character (I had thought he was a bit too good to be true up until now, but we do only see him from his own point of view!)
We’ve thought a lot about ghosts over the last few weeks and I think we also see a lot of ‘future ghosts’. I am enjoying Mary (the king’s daughter), almost always off-stage, but hovering, nonetheless. This week we see her as a ‘vision’ being crowned queen. Likewise, Anne’s baby, who we know but the characters don’t, waits, preparing to change everything. As well as Wolf Hall lurking and waiting.
My other favourite part this week was seeing a glimpse of Anne’s relief as she – very briefly – takes her ‘hands off the wheel’. Up until now, she’s been rigid, taught and “still as a statue… only her fingers move”. But after the wedding she is momentarily described as full of movement, “she whirls around…tears bounce out of her eyes and seem to fly away from her”. We are never in Anne’s head, but I felt this section gave an insight into her relief and exuberance after years of careful planning and restraint. It doesn’t last long. Soon, “the queen sits very erect” again, and may only be approached if you’re quoting bible verses. She's back in control of herself with her mind on executing (excuse pun) the next part of her strategy - delivering the heir. Without saying much at all, Mantel captures Anne’s inner life vividly.
And it’s always good to see Katherine of course! Long live the (real) queen! :D
Simon, You write, "Cromwell is ambition personified."
And in this section, I think we really start to see how his closeness to Henry is beginning to affect his judgment. There's obsequiousness in Cromwell's view of Henry's ability to take on different moods. "...[Henry] could have been a traveling player, and leader of his troupe." He compares Henry to one of the ancient, mythic giants. Henry may be an adulterer, but he doesn't boast about it like some other kings would.
If absolute power corrupts absolutely, then being too close to absolute power also corrupts.