Master of Phantoms (Part 3/5)
Wolf Crawl Week 27: Monday 1 July – Sunday 7 July
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Welcome to week 27 of Wolf Crawl
This week, we are reading the third of five parts of ‘Master of Phantoms, London, April–May 1536’. This section runs from page 361 to 406 of the Fourth Estate paperback edition. It starts with the line, ‘He has asked the king to keep to his privy chamber, admit as few people as possible.’ It ends: ‘They have brought knives to the table, carved themselves, and picked their own bones clean.’
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:
This week’s story
Now we are in dangerous days. We, Cromwell, must keep the king apart and keep him to his course. ‘Henry seems inclined to obey.’ A letter comes from Cromwell’s other self, the Archbishop of Canterbury, Thomas Cranmer. Cran plays his part: ‘She cannot be guilty. But yet she must be guilty. We, her brethren, repudiate her.’
Down in Surrey, the Seymours are preparing Jane to be queen. She doesn’t know how to open doors, but Cromwell thinks it doesn’t matter. Soon she will have others to open all her doors. Her sister Bess eases her out of French headgear, and into the gable hood, she will make her own. At the door, Sir Nicholas Carew reminds the Putney clerk of his obligations to the old families of England.
Bring in Bryan, one-eyed Vicar of Hell, stinking of cheap Gascon wine. He enjoys Sir Francis, who has one foot in the enemy camp. Prepare to be helpful, he says. Ready George Boleyn’s inlaws for what is coming. And tell Carew to get off my back.
In his dark chambers, the king gazes into his glass of truth. Cranmer and Cromwell are there to interpret what he sees. Fitzroy, Henry’s bastard, comes to comfort the king. And afterwards, to press his advantage with Cromwell. The king has no legitimate heirs now, and only one son.
Now to the Tower to put questions to guilty men. Harry Norris, oldest and wisest of the four, can see where this is headed and from whence it came. Gentle Norris says, ‘you cannot make my thoughts a crime.’ But Cromwell wonders out loud: why are you not married, Harry? Are you saving yourself for the queen?
William Brereton: ‘Turbulent, arrogant, hard-as-nails.’ We need not waste time with Brereton. He doesn’t care for justice in his own domain, so why should he expect justice in ours?
George Boleyn: guilty of ‘pride and elation.’ Guilty of crossing Cromwell and not bending with the times. Master Secretary thumbs his soul and finds him complacent. There will always be time for forgiveness. He wants his chaplains, but Crumb is his confessor now.
And Francis Weston. Contrite, ready with remorse. Ready with family money to buy his life. A young man who has not lived, who sees his future dissolve before him and he, Cromwell, has to walk out. He excuses himself. Not for a weak bladder, or to bring in the devices. But because he needs air for his stone heart and racing mind, for the nightmare he has dreamed into being and is now all too real, in the room.
This week’s characters
Click on each link for more details and plot summaries for each character:
Thomas Cromwell • Henry VIII • Thomas Cranmer • Edward Seymour • Tom Seymour • Jane Seymour • John Seymour • Lady Margery • Bess Seymour • Nicholas Carew • Francis Bryan • Henry Fitzroy • William Fitzwilliam • Henry Norris • William Brereton • George Boleyn • Francis Weston • Thomas Wriothesley • Richard Riche
This week’s theme: Revenge
He sees Norris's eyes move, as the scene rises before him: the firelight, the heat, the baying spectators. Himself and Boleyn grasping the victim's hands, Brereton and Weston laying hold of him by his feet. The four of them tossing the scarlet figure, tumbling him and kicking him. Four men, who for a joke turned the cardinal into a beast; who took away his wit, his kindness and his grace, and made him a howling animal, grovelling on the boards and scrabbling with his paws.
This week, Cromwell interrogates the four gentlemen in the Tower. He makes explicit what has been implicit for some time now: this is revenge for the cardinal.
The Cromwell trilogy is a story of revenge. This is why Wolf Hall begins in 1529 with the fall of Thomas Wolsey. Two episodic prologues in 1500 and 1527 take the Putney boy to Austin Friars and York Place. And then we’re there, behind his eyes, as ‘they are taking apart the cardinal’s house.’ Wolsey’s loyal secretary stands by him, while rats like Stephen Gardiner swim away. He, Cromwell, survives as the cardinal’s house collapses, taking careful note of ‘where everyone was sitting, at the moment the roof fell in.’
Cromwell has a prodigious memory, ‘a very large ledger. A huge filing system, in which are recorded (under their name, and also under their offence) the details of people who have cut across’ him.
In that ledger is a long list of those who brought Wolsey down. Norfolk and Suffolk, ‘two vengeful grandees.’ Norfolk’s niece, Anna Regina, Queen of England. Sir Thomas More, deceased. And the four gloating devils: Brereton, Weston, Norris and George Boleyn. Oh, and a crooked question mark next to Henricus Rex.
As he, Cromwell, rises, he takes the cardinal with him. The choughs on his shield, the turquoise ring on his finger. Now, he reads Norris and the rest, ‘a fat extract from the book of grief, kept since the cardinal came down.’
Last week, Anne understood. ‘Cremuel, you have never forgiven me for Wolsey.’ Wolf Hall began with scenes of humiliation at York Place and on the river. York Place: the palace Anne took from Wolsey. He thinks, ‘now Anne Boleyn knows what it is like to be turned out of your house and put upon the river, your whole life receding with every stroke of the oars.’
Mark Smeaton babbled many names in his confession. When he hears Mark say Brereton, he makes sure someone writes it down. But the other names do not interest him, for they do not appear in his own ledger or in his book of grief.
But one name is hard to keep out. Smeaton says it. Carew demands it. Wriothesley queries it. Norris and Brereton are incredulous.
'What about Wyatt, Cromwell? Where is he in this?'
Cromwell promised Henry Wyatt he would protect his son and be a father to him. If revenge against the four devils was easy, saving Sir Thomas Wyatt will be anything but. And it is to that story that we will turn next week.
Footnotes
1. Thomas Cranmer repudiates Anne
You can feel Cranmer shrinking as he writes, hoping the ink will run and the words blur. Anne the queen has favoured him, Anne has listened to him, and promoted the cause of the gospel; Anne has made use of him too, but Cranmer can never see that.
You can read Cranmer’s letter to Henry online. This is a powerful moment in the story. The betrayal of Anne’s archbishop has been set up earlier in the book. Anne regards herself as indispensable to the ‘great and marvellous… work of the gospel’ that has created ‘a new England.’ When she is arrested, she calls for ‘my bishops’ and Thomas Cranmer: ‘He will swear I am a good woman.’ But Cromwell has already worked on Cranmer, convincing his better self that ‘the king does not need Anne’ to ‘maintain the church.’
2. Ballads against Jane
‘There are rumours on the streets, and crowds who want to see her, and ballads made, deriding her.’
Hilary Mantel has Cromwell inform the king of these ballads. We have the letter that Henry wrote to Jane, warning her about these songs and praying her ‘to pay no manner of regard to it.’ He writes that those responsible will be ‘straitly punished’, which are the same words Mantel puts in Henry’s mouth when addressing Cromwell.
This letter also refers to ‘a token of my true affection for thee’ and so Mantel imagines that it is Cromwell himself who goes down to Surrey to present this note and gift to Jane Seymour.
3. The Carew Manor at Beddington Park
The walks are coming into their early summer glory. Birds twitter from an aviary. The grass is shorn as close as velvet pile. Nymphs watch him with stone eyes.
Jane Seymour is being kept disceretly away from court at Carew’s house in Surrey. The Carew Manor still stands in Beddington. Cromwell notes ‘its great hall especially splendid and much copied.’ Nicholas Carew’s father built the hall with its impressive hammerbeam roof, similar to the one at Wolsey’s Hampton Court:
Cromwell mentions that Carew ‘brought Italians in to replan the gardens.’ Carew’s son, Francis, will later plant some of the first orange trees in England in this garden. I can’t find the exact quote, but at one point in the novels, Mantel’s Cromwell muses about growing oranges in his own gardens.
The house later became the Royal Female Orphanage and is now a school for children with additional learning needs.
Further reading:
4. Jane Seymour’s Gable Hood
She stands back to assess her daughter, now imprisoned in an old-fashioned gable hood, the kind that hasn’t been seen since Anne came up.
What a fabulous scene this is: Bess Seymour looking ‘as if she is attacking her sister’, removing the French hood and building the elaborate fortified headdress of the gable hood. Their mother Margery looking on, ‘grimly triumphant, like a woman who has squeezed success from life, though it’s taken her nearly sixty years to do it.’
We know that Henry’s courtiers thought Jane to be plain and not a beauty. But she loved clothes (remember the kingfisher sleeves) and had a lavish wardrobe. Her portrait by Hans Holbein really draws attention to the beauty and quality of her garments.
Later when she is queen, the Earl of Bedford will write:
…the richer she was in apparel, the fairer and goodly lady she was and appeared; and the other was the contrary, for the richer she was apparelled, the worse she looked.
The other was Anne Boleyn. And everything is being done to make Jane the mirror opposite of the outgoing queen. Mantel shows her family fussing over her to achieve this effect. But Mantel’s Jane Seymour is no meek shrew, no puppet of ambitious men. Throughout Wolf Hall and Bring Up the Bodies, Mantel lets us know there is a quietly ambitious mind behind that demure and innocent face. I stuck an exclamation mark in the margin when Cromwell asks her what she wouldn’t do to ruin Anne:
Jane considers: but only for a moment. 'No one need contrive at her ruin. No one is guilty of it. She ruined herself. You cannot do what Anne Boleyn did, and live to be old.'
Cromwell alone has never understimated Jane Seymour. In his way, he has admired all three of Henry’s wives, if for different reasons. Like his own arranged face, Jane has perfected the art of showing the world what it wants to see, while keeping the book of her heart private. He thinks she has studied the ‘painted silver-faced virgins’ of the Florence masters, ‘their eyes turned inwards, to images of pain and glory.’
French hood, gable hood, it is not enough. If Jane could veil her face completely, she would do it, and hide her calculations from the world.
Further reading:
5. Girdle books
He produces from among his papers a tiny, jewelled book: the kind a woman keeps at her girdle, looped on a gold chain. ‘It was my wife’s,’ he says. Then he checks himself and looks away in shame. ‘I mean to say, it was Katherine’s.’
Henry is always forgetting who he was married to and whether they were really queens. ‘Three presents, three wives, and only one jeweller’s bill.’ Henry’s father was infamously tight-fisted, and it appears his son has inherited some of Henry VII’s thrifty habits.
At the British Library there is a girdle book long-thought to have been worn by Anne Boleyn:
Could this be the book Mantel has in mind? Well, possibly. However, recent research has revealed a manuscript mix up between this and a lost girdle book that was inherited by the Wyatt family. Curator Eleanor Jackson speculates that the smiling portrait of Henry VIII pictured here may have been added in the ninteenth-century to help validate the Anne Boleyn story.
Further reading:
6. Lord Morley
‘My Lord, I shall say, I come myself to spare you a shock – your daughter Jane will soon be a widow, because her husband is to be decapitated for incest.’
A quick note on Henry Parker, 10th Baron Morley, father of the meddlesome Jane Rochford, Anne’s sister-in-law. Francis Bryan has ‘a dread of Lord Morley’ because he is something of a towering Tudor intellect. He had translated Plutarch, Seneca and Cicero into English. He is the only Englishman to have been drawn by the German artist Albrecht Dürer:
But he has another unusual distinction: he served on every jury of lords for cases of high treason during the reign of Henry VIII. So we will meet him again when his son-in-law, George Boleyn, is brought to trial.
7. Henry the theologian
'Repetition of false teachings does not make them true. You agree, Cranmer?' Just kill me now, the archbishop's face says.
A reoccurring theme is Henry’s retreat into matters of religion whenever he is between wives and needled with doubt. It is worth remembering that he was his father’s second son, raised for the church and not the throne. He has already written against Martin Luther, with some help from Sir Thomas More. Now he has an archbishop with Lutheran inclinations who would quite like to melt into the night and away from his king’s awkward questions.
8. Guilty men, a refresher course
He needs guilty men. So he has found men who are guilty. Though perhaps not guilty as charged.
We first met Harry Norris in Week 2, ‘the man who hands the diaper cloth’, Groom of the Stool, riding to Wolsey with a ring and ‘words of comfort’ from the king. Wolsey fell on his knees before Norris to thank God. Cromwell ‘can never wipe that scene from his mind’s eye.’ That blot alone seems enough to get Gentle Norris killed.
William Brereton appeared first in Week 7, ‘old enough to know better’ as he removes his devil’s mask. Cromwell notes on a number of occasions that Brereton has a habit of being in two places at once, and one of those places is always near the queen.
No sooner had George Boleyn appeared as a devil in Week 7, we heard the London gossip about his incest with Anne Boleyn in Week 9. That was 1531, five years ago. He is ‘the blazing noonday planet’ who took Cromwell aside to remind him of his place. ‘I shall profit from this,’ said Cromwell. ‘I assure you sir, and from now on conduct myself more humble-wise.’
And Francis Weston (right handpaw). It wasn’t so long ago that Weston was at Wolf Hall, defaming Cromwell’s dead children, while upstairs, Gregory and Rafe were setting a trap for him with a magic net.
9. William Brereton, King of Cheshire
In my own country, my family upholds the law, and the law is what we care to uphold.
In sixteenth-century England, Cheshire was a county palatine, a region of the kingdom where local magnates operated with very little oversight. It did not send MPs to London, but held its own parliament and had its own legal system. Brereton had amassed titles and positions in the region and become the most powerful man in Cheshire and North Wales.
Brereton asks Cromwell why he is here and not Wyatt. It is a good question. The evidence against Brereton is weaker than the rest. He is socially inferior to the other three gentlemen and somewhat peripheral to Anne’s circle. The historian Eric Ives suggests that Cromwell saw Brereton as an obstacle to his own local agent Bishop Rowland Lee and his reform of government in Wales.
But as Cromwell explains in this chapter, he believed Brereton guilty of murdering a local gentleman, John ap Eyton. ‘But your schemes end here,’ Cromwell says. The prisoner replies:
‘You are judge and jury and hangman, is that it?' 'It is better justice than Eyton had.' And Brereton says, 'I concede that.'
Further reading:
Quote of the week: A wild garden
The last two prisoners are young men. They hoped to become old men. Cromwell tells George Boleyn, ‘I think you have become too assured of forgiveness, believing you have years ahead of you to sin.’ God must be patient while George sins. Francis Weston says, ‘I have not lived,’ and he thinks of the good works he would do, so ‘God would see I was sorry.’
Not long later, Cromwell excuses himself. The boy Weston talking about being ‘forty-five or fifty’ is a little too much for this fifty-year-old servant of the king. ‘As if, past mid-life, there is a second childhood, a new phase of innocence.’ But of course, no second childhood exists for Cromwell. At fifty, he plays chess with men’s lives and holds the butcher’s knife to a boy’s throat. No wonder Master Secretary needs some air.
Let us say you are in a chamber, window sealed, you are conscious of the proximity of other bodies, of the declining light. In the room you put cases, you play games, you move your personnel around each other: notional bodies, hard as ivory, black as ebony, pushed on their paths across the squares. Then you say, I can't endure this any more, I must breathe: you burst out of the room and into a wild garden where the guilty are hanging from trees, no longer ivory, no longer ebony, but flesh; and their wild lamenting tongues proclaim their guilt as they die. In this matter, cause has been preceded by effect. What you dreamed has enacted itself. You reach for a blade but the blood is already shed. The lambs have butchered and eaten themselves. They have brought knives to the table, carved themselves, and picked their own bones clean.
Next week
Thank you for reading and joining me on this slow read of the Cromwell trilogy. Next week, we read the fourth of five parts of ‘Master of Phantoms, London, April–May 1536’. The fourth part runs from page 406 to page 441 of the Fourth Estate paperback edition, ending with the line: ‘If ever a man came close to beheading himself, Thomas More was that man.’
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Until next week, I am your guide,
Master Simon Haisell
What do people think Cromwell means about the Proverbs quotation. He says, "'Do you know this woman who is mentioned here?' Her clothing is silk and purple, says the author. I could tell you much about her, from the verses this page cannot contain.'"
What does he mean by this? That there are some things you only know from experience? It feels very enigmatic. And Edward Seymour says, 'You should have been a bishop, Cromwell.'
'Edward,' he says, 'I should have been Pope.'
Dark, O so Dark. I felt the darkness as I read up to here, but your torch has shown into every cobwebbed corner. I did like that Mantel gave Anne the line and awareness that it was about Woolsey. I know that Mantel's Cromwell (now my Cromwell) can love his wife, children, sister and family, Woolsey, Jesus and his Gospel, and he honors his promises (Wyatt) and doesn't make one that he can't keep. I think this is what is so illuminating to me--very good men can do brutal things with full justification in their heart and mind. I can see it so much clearer in More (the torturer), perhaps because for More it is about his ego/certainty. With Cromwell, it almost seems he is compelled to act, but it doesn't just seem like ego. He knows if he goes down, his whole household and so many others go down with him. He acts with dedication but with uncertainty. I was grateful he needed air after Weston.