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Welcome to week thirteen of Wolf Crawl
This week, we are reading the second part of “Anna Regina, 1533”. A coronation, a promotion, a secret marriage and a slow burning.
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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In this week’s post:
This week’s story
This week’s characters
This week’s theme: Great expectations
Tangent: The other England
Footnote: St Edward’s crown
Footnote: The white falcon
Footnote: Married priests
Tangent: Books within books
Quote of the Week: Bargains stuck between women and God
Next week
1. This week’s story
June 1533. Anne Boleyn is crowned Queen of England. Four days of processions, ceremonies and feasting. And Thomas Cromwell is running everything, including the weather. He pays a visit to his neighbour Chapuys, a satirical procession for the ambassador who says he has failed his master and failed Katherine.
The coronation at Westminster Abbey allows Cromwell to survey the present and the future. He sees Anne’s enemies humbled and his enemies humiliated, and he sees himself as the guardian of a prince of England for twenty years to come.
He takes the king’s ring to Anne as a token of Henry’s love. But Anne is ungrateful because, when will England love her? “When this creature is out of me,” she says. “Never,” says Lady Rochford, helpfully. In the wings, Mary Boleyn is tired and miserable. The king visits her nightly, and all Cromwell can say is, “This will end. He will free you.”
In the gallery, the king and the French ambassadors are talking about Giulio Camillo’s theatre of memory. It sounds a little like witchcraft to the king of England. And besides, he doesn’t need a memory machine. He has Thomas Cromwell, who will replace Stephen Gardiner as his Master Secretary.
Meanwhile, the Archbishop of Canterbury summons his “chief friend,” Thomas Cromwell, to reveal his marginal secret. In England, priests cannot marry. But Cranmer is hiding a pregnant German wife. “I hope for a daughter,” says Cranmer. “Jesus,” says his chief friend. Cromwell installs Helen Barre as Margarete's companion. Rafe seems sad to see Helen go.
John Frith burns. The pope prepares to excommunicate the English king, meaning Henry will burn in hell for heresy. The prophetess Elizabeth Barton is brought in for questioning, and rumours go around that Cromwell is keeping a woman in secret. In August, Anne begins her confinement to deliver England its future king.
2. This week’s characters
Click on each link for more details and plot summaries for each character:
Thomas Cromwell • Anne Boleyn • Henry VIII • Thomas Howard • Lord Lisle • Honor • Thomas Audley • Eustache Chapuys • Stephen Gardiner • John Stokesley • Thomas Cranmer • Charles Brandon • Mary Howard • Lady Rochford • Mary Boleyn • Jane Seymour • Jean de Dinteville • Georges de Selve • Thomas Wriothesley • Christophe • John Frith • Helen Barre • Rafe Sadler • Elizabeth Barton • Katherine of Aragon • Hans Holbein
3. This week’s theme: Great expectations
There is a world of the possible. A world where Anne can be queen is a world where Cromwell can be Cromwell. He sees it; then he doesn’t. The moment is fleeting.
Consider this week a brief space in time: June to August 1533. A fleeting moment between Anne’s coronation and the birth of Elizabeth Tudor. We have reached the world of the possible, where Anne is queen and Cromwell can be Cromwell. It is a place full of promise and expectations of a future that is glorious, bright, and mercifully long.
Anne expects a son. When he is born, the people of England will love her as Henry loves her. “I was always desired. But now I am valued.” And yet stocks can fall as well as rise. There is a lot riding on the sex of the “creature” inside her. Cromwell pragmatically leaves a gap after “prince” in the proclamations so it can be amended to “princess” later. Everyone looks at him as if he is a traitor.
Not he. Cromwell hopes for a prince. Wolsey created Henry, and he, Cromwell, will build his own prince: “to the glorification of God and the commonwealth of England.” He knows they will never turn Henry their way, in matters of religion. And when he sees Mary Boleyn, “dazed with misery and fatigue”, he knows some evils cannot be undone. But give him twenty years, and he will make a Tudor who is mild and just, loves the Gospel and fears nothing but God.
‘I hope for a daughter,’ says Thomas Cranmer. He never expected to be Archbishop of Canterbury. But a world where Anne is queen is a world where Cranmer cannot be Cranmer. He married for love but must hide his wife and trust in no one. One of his first tasks in the new job is to try and talk John Frith away from the true religion. It is not what he expected.
“Welcome to this world below,” thinks Cromwell.
Expectations are dangerous. The world below is cruel. When John Frith chose his path to death, he hoped for it to be mercifully short. At the coronation, Cromwell runs everything, “including the weather.” In her confinement, Anne closes the shutters “so she can make her own weather.” But who arranged the weather the day Frith burned? “The wind blowing the flames away from them repeatedly.”
“Death is a japester; call him, and he will not come. He is a joker and he lurks in the dark, a black cloth over his face.”
In the summer of 1533, we call on our future. But the future is not ours to call.
4. Tangent: The other England
Throughout the Cromwell trilogy, Hilary Mantel refers to a mythic England that lies half-buried in the earth, or towers above us in the skies. “Beneath every history, another history.” Each day, Cromwell wakes up and does business or battle with flesh-and-bone men of the 1530s. But behind them stand the countless armies of the dead. Centuries of saints and sinners, ancient laws and unwritten rules – all pressing down on the present, pushing Cromwell back into the Putney mud, blocking the way between him – us – and the future. Cromwell – who doesn’t believe in ghosts – is the personification of the modern world, re-making itself into being by exorcising the demons of the past.
And looking down on them, the other Londoners, those monsters who live in the air, the city’s uncounted population of stone men and women and beasts, and things that are neither human nor beasts, fanged rabbits and flying hares, four-legged birds and pinioned snakes, imps with bulging eyes and ducks’ bills, men who are wreathed in leaves or have the heads of goats or rams; creatures with knotted coils and leather wings, with hair ears and cloven feet, horned and roaring, feathered and scaled, some laughing, some singing, some pulling back their lips to show their teeth; lions and friars, donkeys and geese, devils with children crammed into their maws, all chewed up except for their helpess paddling feet; limestone or leaden, metalled or marbled, shrieking and sniggering above the populace, hooting and gurning and dry-heaving from buttresses, walls and roofs.
5. Footnote: St Edward’s crown
Anne, shaky, is back on her feet. Cranmer, in a dense cloud of incense, is pressing into her hand the sceptre, the rod of ivory, and resting the crown of St Edward briefly on her head, before changing for a lighter and more bearable crown.
King Edward the Confessor reigned between 1042 and 1066 and was the only English king to be canonised as a saint. By all accounts, he wasn’t especially saintly: he had a temper and enjoyed hunting (much like our present king, Henry). His title of Confessor distinguished him from martyred saints. He, Edward, died after a succession of strokes in 1066, the year of the Battle of Hastings and three English kings: Edward, Harold and William the Conqueror.
The Normans claimed their legitimacy through Edward the Confessor. From Henry III onwards, his crown was revered as a holy relic, kept at Westminster Abbey, and used during for corronations, symbolising the succession of divine right from one monarch to the next. It was unprecedented for a queen consort to be crowned in this way and demonstrated Henry’s desire to see Anne’s coronation as divinely ordained.
Thomas Cromwell’s great-great grand nephew will be Oliver Cromwell, Lord Protector of the Commonwealth after the execution of Charles I. That future Cromwell will call this crown a symbol of the “detestable rule of kings.” It will be melted down and remade anew in 1660 with the restoration of Charles II. Elizabeth II will make the crown her royal monogram and she and her son, Charles III, will wear this crown for their own coronations in Westminster Abbey.
But all of that is still to come. It is 1533 and Anne is queen.
6. Footnote: The white falcon
At every turn on the route there are pageants and living statues, recitation of her virtue and gifts of gold from city coffers, her white falcon emblem crowned and entwined with roses, and blossom mashed and minced under the treading feet of the stout sixteen, so scent rises like smoke.
Anne’s white falcon comes from the Butlers, the noble ancestors of the Boleyns. Anne’s badge has the falcon alighting from Tudor roses. The historian Eric Ives explained its significance: “With the advent of Anne, already pregnant, life would once more burst forth from the apparent barrenness of the Tudor stock.”
At this time she also adopted the motto, “The Most Happy”, which was perhaps a more diplomatic slogan than the one she briefly used in 1530: “Let them grumble; that is how it is going to be.”
But happiness in England is like the weather. And in the end, not even Wolsey could stop the rain.
Read about the return of Anne’s falcon badge to the Great Hall at Hampton Court.
And click through below to see
’s latest portrait inspired by our slow read! I love all the creative projects that come out of these slow reads, so let me know if you have a creation you would like to share. Thanks, Susannah!
7. Footnote: Married priests
‘Do you know what the king will do to you when he finds you out? The master executioner of Paris has devised a machine, with a conterweighted beam – shall I draw it for you? – which when a heretic is burned dips him into the fire and lifts him out again, so that the people can see the stages of his agony. Now Henry will be wanting one. Or he will get some device to tease your head off your shoulders, over a period of forty days.’
Thomas Cranmer has married in Germany. For centuries, Catholic priests took vows of celibacy and were forbidden to marry. This did not stop them from fathering children. Thomas Wolsey had at least two illegitimate children. The current pope’s successor, Paul III, has four and will make two of his grandsons into cardinals.
Martin Luther and other reformers attacked this hypocrisy and argued that celibacy had not been compulsory in the Early Church. In 1523, Luther helped rescue twelve nuns convinced of the teachings of the German Reformation. They escaped their convent, hidden in the back of an empty delivery wagon. Two years later, Martin Luther married Katharina von Bora, one of these ex-nuns.
Henry Tudor despised Luther and believed fervently in clerical celibacy. As Cranmer wrote in the margin of a letter from Nuremberg: “Something has occurred… Some would say I have been rash. I shall need your advice. Keep this secret.” Cranmer’s secret marriage is a nice counterpoint to Henry’s very public marriage to Anne.
And it’s now Cromwell’s job to keep both men happy and stop Henry from killing his Archbishop.
8. Tangent: Books within books
Suppose within every book there is another book, and within every letter on every page another volume constantly unfolding; but these volumes take no space on the desk. Suppose knowledge could be reduced to a quintessence, held within a picture, a sign, held within a place which is no place. Suppose the human skull were to become capacious, spaces opening inside it, humming chambers like hives.
In case you missed it, I introduced Giulio Camillo in week eleven when Cromwell made his first inquiries in Calais to acquire the Theatre of Memory. As the French ambassador says, it is a theatre “in which you yourself are the play.” From the stage, you can see all human knowledge.
The idea gets under Cromwell’s skin. In this chapter he is reaching out towards his own future. He can build a future king of England as his father made blades and as Wolsey made Henry. But there is another future, where knowledge is “held within a place which no place.” The information age of the computer and the Internet.
“He sees it; then he doesn’t. The moment is fleeting. But insight cannot be taken back. You cannot return to the moment you were in before.”
9. Quote of the Week: Bargains struck between women and God
I want to give pride of place this week to this sublime description of a woman entering her confinement before giving birth. I don’t really know what to say about it other than it is a piece of ethereal brilliance. Henry, Cromwell and Cranmer may be celebrated Anna Regina, but nothing on Earth can compare to the journey that Anne must now take:
When a woman withdraws to give birth the sun may be shining but the shutters of her room are closed so she can make her own weather. She is kept in the dark so she can dream. Her dreams drift her far away, from terra firma to a marshy tract of land, to a landing stage, to a river where a mist closes over the further bank, and earth and sky are inseparate; there she must embark towards life and death, a muffled figure in the stern directing the oars. In this vessel prayers are said that men never hear. Bargains are struck between a woman and her God. The river is tidal, and between one feather-stroke and the next, her tide may turn.
10. Next week
Thank you for reading and joining me on this slow read of the Cromwell trilogy. Next week, we read two chapters: “Devil’s Spit, Autumn and winter 1533.” and “A Painter’s Eye, 1534.”
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Until next week, I am your guide,
Master Simon Haisell
Mantel's writing just takes my breath away! The whiplash I get from the juxtaposition of comedy and tragedy in the section where Frith is burned: Henry's hypochondria about the sweat is written just wickedly, "The king, who embodies all his people, has all the symptoms every day," as he dithers over a letter to Anne, while Frith and the tailor's apprentice suffer and "Frith is being shoveled up, his youth, his grace, his learning and his beauty: a compaction of mud, grease and charred bone."
Simon,
Thanks for highlighting the passage about Anne's confinement. When i saw the end of the chapter coming, I didn't linger on it as it deserved.
It's good and natural that Cromwell has ambitions and dreams. In his fantasy of molding a future Henry into the perfect king, he's like Ovid's Pygmalion wanting to make the perfect woman.
We're rooting for Cromwell, how can we not when he seems to be able to solve every problem? But Mantel gives him human frailties of vanity and pride.
Still, he's always practical. During the coronation, he thinks about making copies of coronation rites set down in a book so old that no one dares touch it.
And I'm glad you highlighted the statuary staring down at the crowds. That passage reminded me very much of Dickens.
Wittiest line by the French Ambassador: "[Anne] must have been six hours on her feet today. One must congratulate Your Majesty on obtaining a queen who is as strong as a peasant woman. I mean no disrespect of course."
Thanks as always for the great post.