Master of Phantoms (Part 4/5)
Wolf Crawl Week 28: Monday 8 July – Sunday 14 July
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Welcome to week 28 of Wolf Crawl
This week, we are reading the fourth of five parts of ‘Master of Phantoms, London, April–May 1536’. This section runs from pages 406 to 441 of the Fourth Estate paperback edition. It starts with the line, ‘May is blossoming even in the city streets.’ It ends: ‘If ever a man came close to beheading himself, Thomas More was that man.’
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
Cromwell brings May flowers for the women in the Tower and meets Anne in her coronation rooms. Her father, her bishops, her king; all England has abandoned her. She unnerves him, but a gesture to her heart tells him she is not innocent. ‘She can only mimic innocence.’
All ask him, where is Wyatt in this? So he, Cromwell, puts Wyatt in the Tower. ‘It is the only place you are safe.’ He assures Wyatt that his friends will not suffer. But Wyatt notes Cromwell has ‘strange and sudden friends’ this month.
When the indictments are drawn up, the King embellishes them with his lurid imagination. Cromwell checks the documents to ensure there is no way out while his new friends tell him this is the road back from heresy to Rome.
Wyatt in the Tower, playing dice with himself. ‘Who’s winning?’ he says. He wants evidence against Anne’s character but no admission of guilt. And after it is accomplished, he promises that everything will be destroyed.
Harry Percy at Stoke Newington. The Earl of Northumberland is dying, and he and the king will take everything owing after the earl is gone. For now, he wants Harry to swear he is married to Anne and take back his oath of four years back. Harry Percy will not do it. So he will instead sit in judgment at the trial.
Chapuys in high spirits and his Christmas hat. He thinks Mark was tortured, but then, all of London thinks so too. He looks forward to more meals with Master Secretary in a world where Anne is not queen and England is at ease.
The king calls for Jane, and Jane is back in London: still hidden and often moved around. “The order goes to the Tower, ‘Bring up the bodies.’” Brereton, Weston, Norris and Smeaton are tried first. Bets are placed, but there is no doubt as to the verdict. The only uncertainties are the means and the date of their deaths.
On the day of trial, Gregory comes to see him. His whole household is there. He gives them all the Cromwell line: This was not his doing. It was the king’s. This was ‘beyond grudge’, he says. ‘And I could not save them if I tried.’
This week’s characters
Click on each link for more details and plot summaries for each character:
Thomas Cromwell • Christophe • Anne Boleyn • Lady Kingston • Lady Shelton • Kingston • Charles Brandon • Thomas Wyatt • Chapuys • Richard Cromwell • Thomas Wriothesley • Henry VIII • William Brereton • Francis Weston • Henry Norris • George Boleyn • Mark Smeaton • Rafe Sadler • Harry Percy • Jane Seymour • Bess Seymour • Richard Riche • Norfolk • Gregory • Thomas Avery • Anthony • Thurston
This week’s theme: The angel of death
Look, he says: once you have exhausted the process of negotiation and compromise, once you have fixed on the destruction of an enemy, that destruction must be swift and it must be perfect. Before you even glance in his direction, you should have his name on a warrant, the ports blocked, his wife and friends bought, his heir under your protection, his money in your strong room and his dog running to your whistle. Before he wakes in the morning, you should have the axe in your hand.
It is always a wonder when someone tells you that Hilary Mantel made Thomas Cromwell too sympathetic; she turned the story’s villain into its hero and upended the narrative. Mantel’s Cromwell is much more interesting than that.
Look at anyone hard enough and long enough and you’ll begin to see the stitch beneath the cloth, the sketch beneath the paint. We are Cromwell and we tell ourselves our story; we are loyal and faithful, limitless in capacity and tireless in our pursuit of the betterment of this world. If we are an avenging angel, let there be no doubt: our enemies deserve what’s coming.
It is a good story; some days we even believe in it.
Last week, we saw how the inevitable end of this book is the climax of a revenge plot that began at the start of Wolf Hall. This week, we seek to save what is left of what we love. Thomas Wyatt must live because he represents all that is graceful in this world, and all that is good in Thomas Cromwell: the protector, the father, the friend. ‘No friend of mine will suffer.’
Beyond Wyatt, Cromwell must save himself. He tells Wyatt that he only answers ‘for bodies’ and not a man’s spirit or soul. Afterall, we are here because it was either Anne or Cromwell to die, and he decided he wanted to live. But saving his spirit and his sense of himself will not be easy.
In Rome, he heard of an angel, ‘heavy and smooth as marble’ in a ‘sunken store room … where cardinals never tread.’ We sense that he too has descended underground into a place where it is difficult to tell devils and angels apart. He cannot turn back; he does not know how. But when everything is over and ‘this thing is accomplished’, he is unsure of what he will have become.
He tells Wyatt to admit nothing. This is not the time for confessions. He asks Call-Me, ‘Do you think a bishop could read my mind?’
'No sir.' He nods. 'Just as well.'
Footnotes
1. The ladies-in-waiting in the Tower
‘I do not want these women. I should like women of my own choosing, not yours.’
We know from William Kingston’s letters to Cromwell that Anne was not happy with the women who accompanied her to the Tower. She asked for women ‘of mine own privy chamber, which I favour most.’
Instead, she had to endure Lady Kingston, Mary Scrope, who was indeed Cromwell’s spy. The other gentlewomen included the aptly named Margaret Coffin (or Cosyn, née Dymoke), Anne’s aunt Lady Elizabeth Boleyn, and Elizabeth Stoner, the ‘Mother of the Maids.’
Hilary Mantel puts Lady Anne Shelton in the room, although there is some doubt about whether she was there. It suits Mantel’s narrative because we have already met Lady Shelton at Hatfield in Week 15; she called her brother Thomas Boleyn ‘the most selfish man I know’ who would have sold Anne ‘at a Barbary slave market if he had thought he would get a good price.’
Historians and biographers mention Lady Mary Orchard, Anne’s old nurse. She is supposed to have ‘shrieked out dreadfully’ when the sentence was read out at Anne’s trial. However, historian Sylvia Barbara Soberton has questioned her very existence. William Kingston mentions the other women, but not Orchard. Windsor Herald, Charles Wriothesley, wrote that Ladies Kingston and Boleyn accompanied Anne to trial, but not Mrs Orchard.
Lady Orchard may have been a phantom creation of the Victorian historian S. Hubert Burke, known for fabricating sources. But here she is, in this book of ghosts, silent and watching over Anne’s last days. Cromwell says, ‘I thought you would like to have Mistress Orchard.’
Further reading:
2. Performing Queen Esther
She is not innocent; she can only mimic innocence.
This is the third allusion to Queen Esther. On Passion Sunday, Anne’s almoner, John Skip, cast Anne as Queen Esther and Cromwell as Haman, the wicked councillor who is hanged from his own gallows. Jane Rochford compares Anne’s gesture to Queen Esther ‘in the king’s tapestry.’ Here, Cromwell recognises the movement of the hands clasped to the breast. ‘In one gesture,’ he thinks, ‘she has damaged’ all her interests.
In the Hebrew Bible and Old Testament, Esther is a member of the Jewish community in the Persian empire during the Babylonian exile. She rises to become queen and uses her position of influence to protect her community.
Anne’s gesture interrupts a dangerous moment for Thomas Cromwell. Anne says:
'You do not believe these stories against me? I know in your heart you do not. Cremuel?' It is a long moment. He feels himself on the edge of something unwelcome: superfluous knowledge, useless information. He turns, hesitates, and reaches out, tentative ...
I think Cromwell doesn’t believe these accusations against Anne. The ‘something unwelcome’ is the ache of his conscience as he recognises this fact. But Anne’s biblical gesture does not convince him of her guilt; what condemns her is the performance of innocence. The perfect performer makes her mask her own, so you cannot see the join, or how it was made. But she is a bad actor, and it allows him to forget that she is anything else.
His hand drops to his side. He turns away. He knows her for a woman without remorse. He believes she would commit any sin or crime.
Cromwell’s self-deception is manifold. He, too, is an actor who has mastered his mannerisms, but you wouldn’t say he has mimicked innocence. Those who watch him (say, for example, Thomas Wriothesley?) may conclude that this is a man who ‘would commit any sin or crime.’ And Cromwell has already admired the way Jane Seymour imitates the ‘painted silver-faced virgins’: he prides himself on being fooled by neither queen.
3. Kingston’s evidence
‘She said to me, Master Kingston, shall I have justice? I said to her, madam, the poorest subject of the king has justice. But she just laughs.’
Hilary Mantel has taken most of what Kingston tells Cromwell from the five letters that the real Constable of the Tower sent the real Master Secretary in May 1536. You can read them here. It is through Kingston’s letters that we get a glimpse of Anne’s state of mind in the Tower. Kingston comes across as a dutiful servant of the crown who is perhaps a little exasperated by his current high-profile guest. When Anne says it will not rain until she is released, he jokes:
I pray you it be shortly by cawse of the fayre wether. You know what I mayne.
In Bring Up the Bodies, Cromwell looks out of the window, ‘and he sees only a summer shower. In a moment the sun will scorch the moisture from the stones.’
Further reading:
4. Thomas Wyatt: Cromwell’s Muse?
‘It is not the king, but metre that constrains me. And I would be plainer, he says, if I could: but I must keep to the rhyme.’
I am beginning to notice that when Thomas Cromwell and Call-Me Risley converse, neither understands the other. This is one of Crumb’s blindspots that we must return to another day. But Call-Me can never grasp the Cromwellian love of Thomas Wyatt. Cromwell says:
‘Wyatt once said I was the cleverest man in England.' 'He didn't flatter,' Call-Me says. 'I learn much daily, from mere proximity.' 'No, it is him. Wyatt. He leaves us all behind.'
None of Thomas Wyatt’s poetry was published during his lifetime. Wriothesley suggests that ‘someone should take his verses to the printer… That would fix them.’
After Cromwell’s execution, Wyatt penned a sonnet to his murdered friend:
“The pillar perish’d is whereto I leant; The strongest stay of mine unquiet mind: The like of it, no man again can find, From east to west still seeking though he went. To mine unhap; for hap away hath rent Of all my join the very bark and rind; And I, alas! by chance am thus assign’d Dearly to mourn, till death do it relent. But since that thus it is by destiny, What can I more but have a woeful heart; My pen in plaint, my voice in woeful cry, My mind in woe, my body full of smart, And I myself, myself always to hate; Till dreadful death do ease my doleful state.”
This poem compels us to wonder at the close friendship between the diplomat-poet and the king’s secretary. Who was this pillar that propped up Thomas Wyatt and kept him from destroying himself? More than anything, I think Mantel’s novels are an exercise in bringing Thomas Wyatt’s version of Thomas Cromwell back to life.
Call-Me says, ‘I would have stayed away from Caesar’s wife.’ This is a reference to Wyatt’s poem Whoso List to Hunt, regarded as Wyatt’s most explicit admission of his love for Anne Boleyn. Cromwell’s reply is instructive:
'That is the wise course.' He smiles. 'But it is not for him. It is for people like you and me.'
Wriothesley would like to be Cromwell (if only his nerves were stronger). That is the grand sum of his ambition. Cromwell would like to be Wyatt. Which is to say, he would like to be free. No material wealth or political power can substitute the grace of Wyatt’s soul:
When Wyatt writes, his lines fledge feathers, and unfolding this plumage they dive below their meaning and skim above it.
Cromwell admires Wyatt’s art of deception. The poet conceals himself; the councillor arranges his face. He, Cromwell, loves books and poetry and words. But unlike Thomas More, he does not make the mistake of writing his heart in a book. For don’t we always look to poets to put into words what we can not say, or dare not? Wyatt must live because his words and his life express the private poetry of Cromwell’s innermost world. Without Wyatt, where would we be?
Further reading:
5. The scales of justice
'I have a book on accountancy that is often mistaken for a Bible.'
This comment to Harry Percy has recently taken on new significance. You may remember that Hans Holbein asked to see Cromwell’s bible but dismissed it as ‘too plain, too thumbed’ for a portrait painting. Instead, Cromwell ‘found the finest volume he owned’: Luca Pacioli’s book on accountacy.
Thanks to a remarkable discovery in 2023, we now know that Mantel had it backwards: She had mistaken his Book of Hours for Pacioli’s tome on accounts.
Of course, Harry Percy quips that Cromwell mistakes accountancy for religion. Cromwell can take criticism from the Earl of Northumberland. Harder to bear is Gregory’s questioning at Austin Friars:
Gregory nods. He seems to understand, but perhaps seeming is as far as it goes. When Gregory says, 'Are they guilty?' he means, 'Did they do it?' But when he says, 'Are they guilty?' he means, 'Did the court find them so?' The lawyer's world is entire unto itself, the human pared away.
Cromwell has removed the human and moral content of justice and is concerned only with the function of the law. He once said ‘all the poems’ are in accountancy for ‘anything that is precise is beautiful.’ But these indictments are ‘ugly in content and ugly in form.’ Either from a legal perspective, or a moral one, this trial is an unjust act of murder. And he, Cromwell, looks like a murderer.
He asks Thomas Wyatt in the Tower:
‘Are you comfortable?’ 'In body or spirit?' 'I only answer for bodies.' 'Nothing makes you falter,' Wyatt says. He says it with a reluctant admiration that is close to dread. But he, Cromwell, thinks, I did falter but no one knows it, reports have not gone abroad. Wyatt did not see me walk away from Weston's interrogation. Wyatt did not see me when Anne laid her hand on my arm and asked me what I believed in my heart.
No wonder, then, when all the Cromwell household is assembled at Austin Friars, he must dispel any illusion that he, or they, have blood on their hands.
'The king is wreaking his pleasure, and so many fine gentlemen will be spoiled,' He speaks for the household to hear. 'When your acquaintances tell you, as they will, that it is I who have condemned these men, tell them that it is the king, and a court of law, and no one has been hurt bodily in pursuit of the truth, whatever the word is in the city.
Truth. The word hangs heavy as an angel in the air. It moves in the mirror for a moment, and then is gone.
Further reading:
6. The indictments
‘…with this trial, with these defendants, there is no way but one, no exit, no direction except the scaffold.’
I must thank
for sending me some images of the King’s Bench trial documents, including Mark Smeaton’s confession. They are kept in a safe at the National Archives and can only be viewed under supervision. Bea described to me the physical recoil on reading Norris’s name; she calls these documents ‘the most haunted set of papers’ she has ever seen.The order goes to the Tower, ‘Bring up the bodies.’
If reading the book’s title this week doesn’t give you the chill, I don’t know what will. Attainted for treason, the prisoners are legally dead. Although they live and breathe still, they are no longer people and cannot be saved.
Bodies are a central theme in the Cromwell trilogy. They seem to face both ways on the threshold between life and death. These characters are not their historical documents; they are the living creatures that hold the page. But their breathing bodies remind them and us that this is all that keeps the eternal from the door.
Quote of the week: Angels are messengers
A statute is written to entrap meaning, a poem to escape it. A quill, sharpened, can stir and rustle like the pinions of angels. Angels are messengers. They are creatures with a mind and a will. We do not know for a fact that their plumage is like the plumage of falcons, crows, peacocks. They hardly visit men nowadays. Though in Rome he knew a man, a turnspit in the papal kitchens, who had come face to face with an angel in a passage dripping with chill, in a sunken store room of the Vatican where cardinals never tread; and people bought him drinks to make him talk about it. He said the angel’s substance was heavy and smooth as marble, its expression distant and pitiless; its wings were carved from glass.
Notice that Cromwell contrasts the plumage of angels to the wings of falcons, crows and peacocks. These correspond to the first three chapters of Bring Up the Bodies; peacocks are a reference to Grace’s angel wings, which are brought out in Chapter III, Angels. After they are inadvertently used to torture Mark Smeaton, Cromwell notes that he will have to destroy them.
The Roman turnspit describes an angel ‘heavy and smooth as marble.’ This tells us we are not looking for weightless ghosts; the angel is not ethereal. In fact, that ‘distant and pitiless’ expression may remind us of Cromwell himself in Holbein’s portrait: looking like a murderer. He is the angel you do not want at your back.
Next week
Thank you for reading and joining me on this slow read of the Cromwell trilogy. Next week, we will finish Bring Up the Bodies. We will read the fifth and final part of ‘Master of Phantoms, London, April–May 1536’. This starts: ‘The queen wears scarlet and black…’ on page 441 of the Fourth Estate paperback edition. We will also read ‘Spoils, London, Summer 1536’.
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
This week’s post took my breath away, Simon! So very well done. This whole chapter has felt like a boulder rolling downhill and gathering everything it crushes into itself, getting bigger and faster with each tumble and bump. The anticipation and dread of reaching the bottom grows ever more present. Crumb can feel it, and so can we.
Reading all these behind the scenes moments to such a momentous event (even if they didn't happen exactly like it's told) has made me wonder what would've happened if Anne went quietly to a convent? Or if she agreed to divorce Henry when she saw how things were going? Or, bigger still, what would've happened if she'd had a son? I find myself wanting to reach through time and nudge things in a different direction.