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Welcome to week 19 of Wolf Crawl
This week, we are reading the first part of the chapter, “Crows, London and Kimbolton, Autumn 1535.” Cromwell takes stock of the world at Austin Friars as Anne is all elbows and the king looks too long at Jane Seymour.
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 posts:
1. This week’s story
Autumn, 1535. Thomas Cromwell runs into Stephen Gardiner outside the king’s chamber. Gardiner has written a book defending the king’s authority and supremacy as head of the church.
The court arrives at Winchester, and Anne’s bishops are concretated at the cathedral. Cromwell reflects on his souring relationship with Anne and his attempts to accommodate the men surrounding the king and queen.
Plague diverts the court to the Seymour house of Elvetham, where Cromwell arranges for Jane to be seen by the king. That night, Henry can’t sleep and summons Cromwell. The king asks him how he might free himself from his marriage.
This summer, Cromwell sent his inspectors out to the monasteries. They are tasked with assessing the church's wealth and any good cause for the king to reclaim what is rightfully his. As he talks this over with his son Gregory, he reminds himself to visit Wolsey’s daughter Dorothea at Shaftesbury.
Back at Austin Friars, Cromwell visits the kitchens to get the London gossip from Thurston, the cook. The word on the street is that Anne is cuckolding the king. With whom? Thomas Wyatt, Henry Percy, and every gentleman of the privy chamber.
Cromwell’s household council discuss a turf war between George Boleyn and Nicholas Carew and Gardiner’s fresh appointment as ambassador to France. The empire is once again a threat to England, and Katherine of Aragon is dying.
Richard Riche says, “If she should die within the year, I wonder what world would be then?”
2. This week’s characters
Click on each link for more details and plot summaries for each character:
Thomas Cromwell • Stephen Gardiner • Hugh Latimer • Henry VIII • Anne Boleyn • Rafe Sadler • Francis Weston • Jane Seymour • Gregory • Dorothea - Tom Seymour • Edward Seymour • Richard Cromwell • Thurston • Thomas Wriothesley • Richard Riche • Nicholas Carew • George Boleyn • William Fitzwilliam
3. Notes
Due to family visits this month, this will be a shorter bulletin from me. But here are some observations on this week’s reading.
‘Stephen Gardiner! Coming in as he’s going out.’
You may remember that this is (almost) how the second chapter of Wolf Hall begins:
So: Stephen Gardiner. Going out, as he’s coming in.
In that scene, Gardiner is coming from a meeting with Cardinal Wolsey. Now, their master is the king, and the roles are reversed: Cromwell is there first, and Gardiner is late to the party.
‘When Stephen comes into a room, the furnishings shrink from him.’
In Wolf Hall, Gardiner is described as the “noon-day devil” in oily furs that gather “like black angel’s wings.” He blows in “like a thunderstorm”, and there is nothing subtle about the Bishop of Winchester. He does not have Cromwell’s sense of diplomacy, his charm and wit, the “voice that can caress or contradict.”
Stephen is no diplomat. But he’s off to France as ambassador, and Cromwell is happy about it. Delighted to have Gardiner out of the country. And satisfied that Gardiner is just what they need in France: “a stout ambassador… a man full of spleen and spite.” It leaves Cromwell and his people in charge of the more delicate relationship with the Holy Roman Empire, with its Catholic emperor and Protestant princes.
‘Why did you let her take the head off London Bridge?’
This is the grisly custom of displaying traitors’ heads on spikes at the southern gateway of London Bridge. It began in 1305 with William Wallace, the Scottish knight who fought the First War of Scottish Independence. Severed heads were dipped in tar to preserve them against the weather. “In England it’s been raining, more or less, for a decade.”
One of Cromwell’s descendants will be the last man to suffer this indignity. In 1660, on the restoration of the monarchy, Oliver Cromwell’s body was dug up, and his head was put on a spike. It remained outside the Tower of London for the next thirty years.
‘They had hardly left the Savernake forest…’
This is an ancient forest in Wiltshire that is at least one thousand years old. Today, it is the only ancient forest in Britain still in private hands, owned by the same family who became forest wardens of Savernake after the Norman Conquest. The forest features the longest tree-lined avenue in Britain and hundreds of ancient trees, including the King of Limbs that inspired the Radiohead album of the same name.
The Emperor Charles’s ‘crooked countenance’
Intermarrying within the Habsburg dynasty had resulted in a hereditary condition called mandibular prognathism, a protruding jaw also known as the “Habsburg jaw”. In 1517, an Italian diplomat wrote that Charles possessed “a long, cadaverous face and a lopsided mouth (which drops open when he is not on his guard).”
These features were even more pronounced in future generations as interbreeding continued. The last Spanish Habsburg monarch, Charles II, could not properly chew his food, causing him stomach problems.
Read more on the genetics of the Habsburg jaw.
Anne’s trick
He has seen Anne work her trick on lord and commoner, on the king himself. You watchh as the man’s mouth gapes a little and he becomes her creature. Almost always it works; it has never worked on him. He is not indifferent to women, God knows, just indifferent to Anne Boleyn.
It is notable that Cromwell calls this a “quick, cheap, effective and repeatable trick.” Unlike many of his countrymen—and Eustace Chapuys—Cromwell does not consider Anne a witch. This is not sorcery or black magic. It is a conjuring trick. He means no disrespect by this. After all, he is the hustler with the three-card trick. Where others see dark arts, Cromwell sees a woman with a talent for the political game. And he enjoys watching her play:
She will have to think it through. And it is always a pleasure to see Anne thinking.
More’s death
He doesn’t regret what happened; his only regret is that More wouldn’t see sense.
Diarmaid MacCulloch wonders about this in his biography of Thomas Cromwell. In late June 1535, Cromwell jotted down, “When Master Fisher shall go to execution, and also the other.” It was as though he couldn’t bring himself to name Thomas More. As we saw at the end of Wolf Hall, he kept More in food and books right up until the end. Here he jokes:
‘You know me, Stephen. The fluid of benevolence flows through my veins and sometimes overspills.’
He laughs it off with Gardiner because you wouldn’t want him to think you were actually soft at heart. But Mantel draws out this complex weave of respect, bewilderment and disgust. Towards the end of Wolf Hall, Cromwell feels he has failed, and More has won. He’s got the martyrdom he wanted. Here, in Bring Up The Bodies, he has usefully forgotten his role in the man’s death:
He doesn’t exactly miss the man. It’s just that sometimes, he forgets he’s dead. It’s as if they’re deep in conversation, and suddenly the conversation stops, he says something and no answer comes back. As if they’d been walking along and More had dropped into a hole in the road, a pit as deep as a man, slopping with rainwater.
Crumb
I think this is the first use of Cromwell’s nickname, Crumb. Please correct me if I am wrong. It raises an interesting debate about the pronunciation of his surname. His correspondents generally wrote “Crumwell”, but he appeared as “Cromwell” on official documents. Diarmaid MacCulloch notes that it is harder to pronounce the “w” after a short “u” sound than after a long “o” sound. Therefore, he believes that in spoken English, his name was probably something like “Crummle”. This helps explain one of the anti-Cromwell slogans of 1536: “We would Crum him and Crum him that he was never so Crumwed.”
A little later in the chapter, the king turns to Cromwell and says: “But you are very frightening, Crumb. You would make a man forget his manners before God.”
Rewind
He had felt the years roll away: he was the cardinal, listening to the same conversation: only the queen’s name then was Katherine.
This is a brilliant moment. Cromwell is now “all the cardinal was, and more,” according to the Imperial ambassador Chapuys. And from tonight, Henry gives him the same impossible task Wolsey was given: get me out of this marriage.
Wolsey, where are you now? You have heard all this before. Advise me now.
Cromwell delivered where Wolsey failed, but now he must undo all his hard work. No wonder he hopes the king will forget this conversation by sunrise, so he can stick to the plan of providing Henry with a mistress rather than a wife.
Nicholas Carew
We met Carew briefly in Wolf Hall, when the king’s boyhood friend reluctantly bowed to the new queen:
He watches Sir Nicholas Carew in particular; nothing is wanting in his reverence to his new queen, but he cannot help a downturn of his mouth. Arrange your face, Nicholas Carew, your ancient family face. He hears Anne saying, these are my enemies: he adds Carew to the list.
Later, a shrewd Cromwell redistributes Katherine’s confiscated lands to Carew because “gifts blind the eyes of the wise.” Carew looks dazed. “Call it an early Christmas present.”
Carew will play an important role in the story ahead of us. He entered Henry’s household at age six and grew up with the king. As Cromwell recalls in this chapter, Wolsey thought Carew had too much influence over the king and repeatedly tried to sweep him out, but the king’s pals “would seep back like dirty water.”
As an important protagonist in Bring Up The Bodies, Carew gets a vivid introduction:
For picture Carew, one of Henry’s old friends, one of his privy chamber gentlemen, and devoted to the queen that was. See him, an antique man with his long grave face, his cultivated air of having stepped straight from a book of knight-errantry. No surprise if Sir Nicholas, with his rigid sense of the fitness of things, has found it impossible to bend to George Boleyn’s parvenu pretensions. Sir Nicholas is a papist to his steel-capped toes, and is offended to his marrow by George’s support of reformed teaching. So an issue of principle lies between them; but what trivial event has sparked the quarrel into life? Did George and his evil company make a racket outside the chamber of Sir Nicholas, while he was at some solemn business like admiring himself in the looking glass?
4. And now no more for lack of time…
Other details I picked up on this week: Gregory grappling with the art of diplomacy as his father sees questions “chase each other across the boy’s face.” In contrast, Richard, his nephew, has inherited the Cromwell brains and the Cromwell voice. “He is afraid of nothing that walks the earth, and nothing that walks below it.”
Cromwell on his men of talent:
Troubled men both, he thinks, Wriothesley and Riche, and alike in some ways, sidling around the peripheries of their own souls, tapping at the walls: oh, what is that hollow sound?
Everything right now depends on whether Anne can provide Henry with a son and England with an heir. Richard Cromwell remarks that Parliament can make Henry head of the church, but it can’t put a baby in the queen’s belly. So, all eyes are on Anne, “nails flashing like tiny knives.” All elbows and points and spikes.
He darts a look at his nephew: enough now, say nothing more about the queen, her belly or any other part.
It is Call-Me who sums up the situation best:
‘All our labours, our sophistry, all our learning both acquired or pretended; the strategems of state, the lawyers’ decrees, the churchmen’s curses, and the grave resolutions of judges, sacred and secular: all and each can be defeated by a woman’s body, can they not? God should have made their bellies transparent, and saved us the hope and fear. But perhaps what grows in there has to grow in the dark.’
5. Next week
Thank you for reading and joining me on this slow read of the Cromwell trilogy. Next week, we will read the second half of “Crows, London and Kimbolton, Autumn 1535” up to page 119 of the Fourth Estate paperback edition.
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 ran across this blog post today (published yesterday), https://livinglondonhistory.com/thomas-cromwell-and-the-curious-history-of-austin-friars/ Have you all read it? The writer, a London tour guide, lives up to the premise of the link's URL: He does provide a brief history plus maps of what the Austin Friars area looked like in Cromwell's time (and earlier and later) plus recent photos. Fascinating!
If you know how everything plays out by the end of Bring up the Bodies, it's fascinating and a little eerie to see how all the cards were put down across the telling of Wolf Hall, and how Crumb picks them up later and plays them all so well that it's difficult to see what, exactly, he did to make it all happen. A three-card-trick, indeed.