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Welcome to week fifteen of Wolf Crawl
This week, we are reading “Supremacy 1534”. Oaths and vows and a play written and performed by Sir Thomas More.
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: Puppet masters
Footnote: Where is our treasure?
Tangent: The living and the dead
And now no more for lack of time
Quote of the week: A buried empire
Next week
Last week’s posts:
1. This week’s story
1534. It’s a busy year for Parliament. It’s a busy year for Thomas Cromwell. A new law will give backing to the king’s marriage and require all England to swear an oath in its favour. But Anne doesn’t like the small print where it explains what happens if she dies.
Stephen Gardiner is back from France. But the king and Anne want him away from court, minding his flock. “Meanwhile we like Cromwell,” says the king. “Cromwell treats us well.” Cromwell is preparing a bill of attainder, charging with treason Elizabeth Barton and his co-conspirators. Anne makes him add Thomas More to the list alongside John Fisher. He visits Barton in the Tower.
The king sends Cromwell to Hatfield to review the arrangements of Elizabeth’s household. He takes Gregory, who says all the wrong things. And Cromwell speaks mildly to Mary, encouraging her to accept the world that is now. He explains to Gregory why their future still may depend on Mary Tudor.
Parliament will not let the king kill Thomas More. Norfolk, Audley, Cranmer and Cromwell get down on their knees and beg Henry to remove More’s name. It buys them some time to sit More down with the Act of Succession. He says he will be damned if he takes the oath, but he won’t say why. Cromwell loses his temper. Which feels like a victory for Sir Thomas More.
The next day, Cromwell is made Master Secretary. He returns to the city in Gardiner’s old barge with the Cromwell flag flying. Rafe picks this moment to tell him he has married Helen Barre. It is a terrible match for a boy born a gentleman. But Rafe can afford it. He will be Cromwell’s double at court and rise with him.
Thomas More’s family take the oath. Thomas More is sent to the Tower. Midsummer, the queen miscarries and “dragons stalk the streets, puffing out smoke and clattering their mechanical wings.”
2. This week’s characters
Click on each link for more details and plot summaries for each character:
Thomas Cromwell • Henry VIII • Thomas Wolsey • Christophe • Thomas Wriothesley • Stephen Gardiner • Anne Boleyn • Richard Cromwell • John Fisher • Elizabeth Barton • Thomas Howard • Thomas Audley • Thomas More • Will Roper • Gregory • Lady Bryan • Lady Shelton • Thomas Boleyn • Princess Elizabeth • Mary Tudor • Rafe Sadler • Mary Shelton • Helen Barre • Thurston • Alice More • Margaret Roper • Will Roper • Anne Cromwell
3. This week’s theme: Puppet Masters
‘I don’t think I ever saw a puppet show,’ Fisher says sadly. ‘At least, not one of the kind of which you speak.’
Wolf Hall is a book of plays and pageants. It begins with a “cast of characters,” an epigraph from Vitruvius on the staging of tragedies, comedies and satires, and the names of the players in John Skelton’s 1520 play Magnificence: Folly, Adversity, Mischief, Despair.
In “Entirely Beloved Cromwell” we endure two farces at the expense of Cardinal Wolsey. Cromwell sets out to find the Theatre of Memory, “In which you yourself are the play.” And in 1533, all perform their parts in the ceremonial stagecraft of Queen Anne’s coronation.
Cromwell has learned how to perform, how to arrange his face, and become the perfect courtier. But now he is setting the stage, writing the script, making the weather and pulling the strings. Some, like Lord Chancellor Audley are happy to act in Cromwell’s play:
‘Oh, he does,’ [Norfolk] says. ‘Whatever you reason, Tom, he reasons. Squawk, squawk.’
Others, like Thomas More, refuse to stand and speak their lines:
‘If I could trust you only to put food in my mouth – but you will put words into it.’
In Cromwell’s opinion, Thomas More is staging his own play, with he, Thomas More, as the tragic hero. “He has lived in public,” a virtuoso performance of wisdom, humility and learning. The consummate humanist scholar. Practically perfectly in every way, it’s enough to set your teeth on edge – if you’re Thomas Cromwell:
‘Do you know what I hate? I hate to be part of this play, which is entirely devised by him. I hate the time it will take that could be better spent, I hate it that minds could be better employed, I hate to see our lives going by, because depend upon it, we will all be feeling our age before this pageant is played out. And what I hate most of all is that Master More sits in the audience and sniggers when I trip over my lines, for he has written all the parts. And written them these many years.’
Wolf Hall is not just the story of the meteoric rise of Thomas Cromwell, it’s also about his failures as a man and as a politician. Rafe Sadler is mentally writing one version of Cromwell’s play. Gregory tells his father that, “Rafe says you will be the second man in the kingdom soon.” “How could I think to keep a secret from you?” says Rafe. “You see everything, sir.”
“Ah. Only up to a point.”
With the king, Cromwell feels his power. “We are breezing in to push our luck.” The chapter opens with Cromwell leading the king’s mind towards the dissolution of the monasteries. Letting Henry think it was his idea: “it was Henry who first suggested picking up a chisel and gouging the sapphire eyes out of saints.”
But like Eliza Barton, when Cromwell thinks he’s winning, he is losing, losing, losing all the time… with Thomas More.
Because More makes Cromwell lose his temper and notionally behead his own son Gregory in a “debating point.” More forces Cromwell to play his part: “This relentless bonhomie of yours. I knew it would wear out in the end.” He has got “exactly what he wants”, and leaves to write the scene: “Depend upon it, in the eyes of Europe we will be the fools and the oppressors, and he will be the poor victim with the better turn of phrase.”
Thomas More tells them, “I would not treat the Lord my God to such a puppet show, let alone the faithful of England.” But from the grave, More continues to pull the strings. In 1960, Robert Bolt will dramatize More’s life in the play A Man for All Seasons. More will be the saint. Cromwell will be the villain.
No wonder he, Cromwell, is “the inconsolable Master Cromwell: the unknowable, the inconstruable, the probably indefeasible Master Cromwell.”
4. Footnote: Where is our treasure?
His guess is, the clergy own a third of England. One day soon, Henry will ask him how the Crown can own it instead. It's like dealing with a child; one day you bring in a box, and the child asks, what is in there? Then it goes to sleep and forgets, but next day, it asks again. It doesn't rest until the box is open and the treats given out.
Henry hates heretics and Martin Luther. He will not listen to the reformers on the continent. So Cromwell thinks he might pay attention to a long dead Italian scholar called Marsiglio of Padua. His 1324 book The Defender of Peace attacks the legitimacy of the Pope’s authority and the powers of church. And he goes even further, arguing that democracy is the highest form of government. Power lies with the people. No wonder Henry looks perturbed.
He reassures him on the point: Marsiglio gives no legitimacy to rebels. Citizens may indeed band together to overthrow a despot, but he, Henry, is not a despot; he is a monarch who rules within the law.
Talk of rebellion reminds Cromwell of the Cornish rebellion of 1497. “We know what to do with rebels here. They are dug into shallow graves.” Cromwell taunts his father Walter, chanting the rebel song, “When Adam delved and Eve span, Who was then the gentleman?” The words of the priest John Bull during the Peasants’ Revolt of 1381. At an open-air sermon he said:
When Adam delved and Eve span, Who was then the gentleman? From the beginning all men by nature were created alike, and our bondage or servitude came in by the unjust oppression of naughty men. For if God would have had any bondmen from the beginning, He would have appointed who should be bond, and who free. And therefore I exhort you to consider that now the time is come, appointed to us by God, in which ye may (if ye will) cast off the yoke of bondage, and recover liberty.
Walter Cromwell didn’t care for rebels. Not because he loved the lords and ladies, but because, “Walter thinks he’s entitled… the Cromwells were a rich family once.” As such, Walter is full of resentment. Everyone is out to take what is yours. Lawyers, rebels, cheats. When Thomas shows him a horseshoe from the river, Walter says: “if horseshoes were lucky, boy, I would be the King of Cockaigne.”
The land of Cockaigne is a mythic kingdom of plenty, a medieval fantasy where there is no hunger or suffering. Here in the real world, the poor feel their poverty every waking minute. As Cromwell thinks of Elizabeth Barton’s fate: “In England there is no mercy for the poor. You pay for everything, even a broken neck.”
Cockaigne, in contrast, is a utopia. But if Thomas More’s Utopia offered the king a picture of a good society, Walter’s son Thomas is happy to paint Henry a rich future. Chapuys wrote that Cromwell “promised to make [Henry] the richest King that England had ever seen.” He, Cromwell, has no intention of following More’s advice to, “Speak to the good heart. Not the strong will.”
He thinks, we don’t want our king to be the poor man of Europe. Spain and Portugal have treasure flowing in every year from the Americas. Where is our treasure?
In Cromwell’s own life time, Spain and Portugal had transformed the world. Portuguese ships had voyaged round the coast of Africa and opened up the first oceanic trade route to Asia. The Spanish had stumbled upon a continent no one knew existed and conquered two fabulously wealthy empires, the Aztecs and the Incas.
What does England have? A lot of wool and too many sheep. A pauper king and a lot of monks living the life of Cockaigne, or Utopia.
This is how the book Utopia begins: friends, talking in a garden.
This is Cromwell, 1534, a little rebel with the ear of the king.
5. Tangent: The living and the dead
Poor Malekin, she is a spirit girl; she eats at night, lives on crumbs and apple peel. Sometimes, if you come down early and are quiet on the stairs, you find her sitting in the ashes.
This chapter is rich in imagery from British folklore. Princess Elizabeth is compared to Malekin, Pole is frightened of the Hob in the Corner and the Boneless Man, and Cromwell doubts his capacity to swear the boggarts and wildmen of England’s “buried empire”.
In my fantastical reading of these books, The Haunting of Wolf Hall, I explore the idea that Cromwell pursues a war in the name of “living England” against the “uncounted dead” that steal the light and “suck the substance” from the future. It’s a war Cromwell will lose, but he’ll tell one hell of a story in losing it. Since the deaths of Liz, Grace, Anne and Wolsey, the ghosts of Wolf Hall have multiplied. Now, in 1534, Thomas More makes himself an ambassador for the “Christian dead.” It is like a declaration of war:
More looks up. For a fraction of a second, he meets his gaze, then turns away, coy. His low, amused murmur: he could kill him for that alone.
In the service of the king, Cromwell will begin a season of killing that continues right up to his own execution in 1540. The gates between the lands of the living and the dead, already rattling, are now open. The dead are walking again in England.
Here is a glossary of the supernatural “countrymen” that Cromwell invokes in this chapter:
Malekin
One of the oldest accounts of faeries in England, Malekin appeared to the household of Sir Osbern de Bradwell of Dagworth Castle, Suffolk, in the 1190s during the reign of Richard I. There appears to be some disagreement about whether Malekin was male or female, but it spoke with the voice of a one-year-old baby and said it had been abducted by faeries. According to the twelfth-century chronicler, Ralph of Coggeshall:
He called himself Malekin, and he said that his mother and brother dwelt in a neighbouring house, and that they often chided him because he left them and went to speak with people. The things which he did and said were both wonderful and very funny and he often told people’s secrets. At first the family of the knight were extremely terrified, but by degrees they became used to his words and silly actions, and conversed familiarly with him.
The spirit was heard and felt but rarely seen. It spoke English and conversed on the Scriptures in Latin with Sir Osbern.
Hob in the Corner
A hob is a type of household spirit, a diminutive form of the name Robin or Robert. What better way to make your resident spirit less scary than to give it a familiar household name? Clearly, this didn’t work for Reginald Pole.
Hobs are, on the whole, a helpful sort, but with a reputation for mischief. They have left their mark in the names of many places around England: Hob holes, hob woods, hob crags and hob hills.
The Boneless Man
‘The magister believes he would dislike the English climate. The fogs. And also, the whole island is covered with witches.’
I don’t know about witches, but the British Isles are covered in fog, mist, sea fret, clag, brume, and murk. Many of these mists are malevolent and are known to swallow up unfortunate travellers on the road. In the Shetland Isles, the Boneless Man is also called Frittening. Old Boneless goes by the name of the Grey Man in Ireland, hiding perilous obstacles from ships at sea and walkers along the cliffs.
Boggarts
Unlike hobs, Boggarts are always bad news. They are found all across the North of England in many different forms, but always, they are terrifying people and causing mayhem and mischief. One cannot imagine them being sympathetic to Henry’s Great Matter and the Act of Succession, nor taking a godly oath before Cromwell’s commissioners.
Wild Men
Woodwose, the wild man of the woods, is covered in hair and lives in the forests far from human settlements. They emerge from the shadows in the art in Cromwell’s time: in engravings, tapestries and manuscripts. According to the romantic poem Sir Gawain and the Green Knight, they populate the Wirral Peninsula in Northwest England. Ralph of Coggeshall, the same chronicler who recorded the sightings of Malekin, told of a wildman captured by fishermen and chained up at Orford Castle, Suffolk.
6. And now no more for lack of time
Some points I have not had time to mention.
I have not mentioned Thomas More’s hay fever and Audley opening a window. “A torrent of birdsong crests on the edge of the sill and spills into the room, the liquid, fluent notes of the storm-thrush.” These little details that undercut the gravity of the moment and remind us that it is Spring in England, as four men called Thomas argue over an oath.
Four Thomases! Cranmer, Audley, Cromwell and More. Replace More with Uncle Norfolk, and in a previous scene, four Thomases go down on their knees before the king. You couldn’t make it up.
I have not mentioned all the foreshadowing. Mary Tudor tells Cromwell: “I shall survive Anne Shelton, believe me. And her niece… Let them do their worst. I am young. I will wait them out.” She is, of course, right. Anne Boleyn has a couple of years left to live. Her aunt Anne Shelton will predecease Mary by two years, dying in the reign of Mary herself.
Oh, and Norfolk: “On the day I go down, who will look after me?” Thomas Howard will be arrested for treason in the last year of Henry VIII’s reign and narrowly avoid execution when the king himself dies in January 1547.
And, of course, Cromwell himself. Thurston, the cook, says, “I think I’d rather keep my hand in. In case things take a down-turn. Not that I say they will. Remember the cardinal, though.” It’s a wise decision and one that he, Cromwell, would instinctively support. In this world where man is wolf to man, you must always be ready for the worst.
Or, as Master Secretary puts it:
‘It’s all very well planning what you will do in six months, what you will do in a year, but it’s no good at all if you don’t have a plan for tomorrow.’
7. Quote of the week: A buried empire
It is one of my favourite passages in the entire trilogy. England does not just belong to the living. In the chapter, “The Dead Complain of Their Burial,” Cromwell tells Henry that “The dead grip the living.” Our world was made by those who went before, and they live on through our laws and in our collective memory. Only when Cromwell sets out to measure and remake England, does he realise what he is up against. Wolsey’s stories were correct. Beneath every history is another history. And beneath England lies a buried empire:
And beneath Cornwall, beyond and beneath this whole realm of England, beneath the sodden marches of Wales and the rough territory of the Scots border, there is another landscape; there is a buried empire, where he fears his commissioners cannot reach. Who will swear the hobs and boggarts who live in the hedges and in hollow trees, and the wild men who hide in the woods? Who will swear the saints in their niches, and the spirits that cluster at holy wells rustling like fallen leaves, and the miscarried infants dug into unconsecrated ground: all those unseen dead who hover in winter around forges and village hearths, trying to warm their bare bones? For they too are his countrymen: the generations of the uncounted dead, breathing through the living, stealing their light from them, the bloodless ghosts of lord and knave, nun and whore, the ghosts of priests and friars who feed on living England and suck the substance from the future.
8. Next week
Thank you for reading and joining me on this slow read of the Cromwell trilogy. Next week, we read the first part of “The Map of Christendom, 1534–1535” to page 620 and the section ending: “Yes, I swear to you. You should have seen his face, when you said you would take your sword in your hand.”
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
‘Oh, for Christ's sake!’ he says. ‘A lie is no less a lie because it is a thousand years old. Your undivided church has liked nothing better than persecuting its own members, burning them and hacking them apart when they stood by their own conscience, slashing their bellies open and feeding their guts to dogs. You call history to your aid, but what is history to you? It is a mirror that flatters Thomas More. But I have another mirror, I hold it up and it shows a vain and dangerous man, and when I turn it about it shows a killer, for you will drag down with you God knows how many, who will only have the suffering, and not your martyr's gratification.' This, for me, is Cromwell at his most satisfying! But, as Moore proves, the best argument in the world can have no effect on fanatics. He will not turn from the mirror that flatters...
The quote of the week is my favorite in the whole trilogy, too. One paragraph that reaches out to encompass all the weird and wild spirits of England that Cromwell and Co. are trying to sweep into a superstitious past while they move into the future. I'm not entirely sure they were successful in doing so.