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Welcome to week 24 of Wolf Crawl
This week, we are reading the final part of ‘The Black Book, London, January–April 1536.’ This runs from page 255 to 287 of the Fourth Estate paperback edition, starting with the line: ‘William Fitzwilliam comes to the Rolls House and sits down with him.’
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
William Fitzwilliam comes to see Crumb. He says Anne is harming the king. He implies it would be right to remove her. He accuses Crumb of dancing around the point. But in truth, they are both on their toes, one eye on the door.
Nicholas Carew has no such reticence or discretion. He is bristling with conspiracy. He represents the old families, and he wants to sign Cromwell up to the fight. The bargain is struck and sealed. Help us, and we might just let you live.
And so it begins. Fitz and Carew, the Courtenays and the Poles. They are all talking to each other, and they are all talking to him. And in his mind’s eye, he sets the table. All the guests are assembled and the meat is brought in, still yet unslaughtered. The Boleyns, laid at his hand to be carved.
Rafe is now in the privy chamber, so he hears all the gossip. It is sordid stuff that embarrasses Master Sadler. The gentlemen of the privy chamber speculate which one of them will sire the king’s heir. It is foolish talk, and he, Cromwell, hopes none of it will be needed.
But first, he must guide Henry into an alliance with the empire. He sets up a meeting with Chapuys and makes the ambassador endure an encounter with La Ana, and a dinner with her brother George. It is a carefully arranged humiliation to satisfy Henry that his marriage is recognised, before he may choose to discard it.
But Henry grows wise to the game. In return for an alliance, Chapuys wants Mary back in the line of succession. The king explodes with rage and demands an apology. He turns his anger on Cromwell. ‘I really believe, Cromwell, that you think you are king, and I am the blacksmith’s boy.’ He, Cromwell, protects himself, arms crossed, his father Walter at his side.
The next day, at the king’s council, they must talk their sovereign round to continue negotiations with the Emperor. Afterwards, he listens to the king’s humble words, his apology to his right hand. He needs Cromwell, and Cromwell will now go to work to free Henry from Anne.
So it is game on. The Seymours join the conspirators at Cromwell’s table. Anne, he knows, is plotting something. Something devious and dark. So he must pick up the pace, and break down the door, before it is too late.
This week’s characters
Click on each link for more details and plot summaries for each character:
Thomas Cromwell • William Fitzwilliam • Nicholas Carew • Thomas Howard • Henry Pole • Margaret Pole • Henry Courtenay • Gertrude • Eustache Chapuys • Suffolk • Francis Bryan • Rafe Sadler • Mark Smeaton • Francis Weston • George Boleyn • Henry VIII • Anne Boleyn • Thomas Audley • Edward Seymour • Thomas Boleyn • Thomas Wriothesley
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This week’s theme: All in hazard
It is treason, of course, to speak against the present queen and her heirs; a treason from which the king alone is exempt, for he could not violate his own interest.
There is nothing in the Black Book to prepare you for this. The king wants a new wife, but until he gives the word, it remains treason to do or say anything that undermines the legitimacy of the Boleyn marriage.
So, what’s a ‘good Englishman’ supposed to do?
If you’re a careful councillor, like Crumb or Fitz, you’ll hedge and hint. You’ll dance around the point. Cromwell says,
‘I am not often accused of dancing.’
If you’re a plotting papist, like Sir Nicholas Carew, you’ll clatter in wearing your show-armour, wink conspiratorially, and come right out with it: We want Anne gone.
But until the king gives you the nod, these are dangerous times. The Black Book is silent, so consult The Book Called Henry: ‘He is suspicious of any plan that doesn’t originate with himself, or seem to.’ Wolsey has scribbled in the margin: ‘Make him say what he wants, do not guess, for by guessing you may destroy yourself.’
The debacle at court with Eustache Chapuys tests the point. When Henry senses he is being led, he lashes out:
‘Cromwell, I know just what you have done. You have gone too far in this matter. What have you promised him? Whatever it is, you have no authority. You have put my honour in hazard.’
Henry's turn of phrase echoes Cromwell’s earlier thoughts when he sends Gregory away from London:
If he is to place all in hazard, and he thinks he is, then Gregory should not have to go through the pain and doubt, hour by hour. Let him hear the conclusion of events; he does not need to live through them.
Cromwell is running risks on two fronts: an imperial alliance and making ‘new friends’ with the ‘old families.’ All plans can go south with no warning: ‘Henry could, at any moment, gesture to his guards; he could find himself with cold metal at his ribs, and his day done.’
You don’t want your son to see that. In his marrow, Cromwell knows he will not survive these days. ‘You fear he will turn on you.’ Chapuys says. ‘He will, I suppose. One day.’
So when he faces the king’s full wrath, his son Gregory is far away, learning the art of public speaking. Cromwell crosses his wrists in subjugation, to confuse the pain, as his father Walter taught him. His son is away. ‘but he is glad his father is with him. Someone must be.’
He has been burned once. He will not be burned again. Before putting all again in hazard, he must hear the king say it:
‘I cannot live as I have lived, Cromwell.’
This is good enough for Crumb. He can now ‘set this affair in train’ and ‘seek an annulment’. There is no talk of treason, no need for the headsman. Anne will go to a convent. George? He’ll kick him back to Kent. There are lascivious rumours at court, but they won’t be needed. ‘If he acts against Anne he hopes for a cleaner way.’
Edward Seymour looks twitchy. He’s new to this game. ‘Anne must not know,’ he insists. Well, says Cromwell wryly, ‘I do not think we can keep it from her for ever.’
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Footnotes
1. The word from Europe
The word from Europe is that Mount Etna has eruped, and brought floods throughout Sicily. In Portugal there is drought; and everywhere, envy and contention, fear of the future, fear of hunger or the fact of it, fear of God and doubt over how to placate him, and in what language.
One of the largest volcanoes in Europe and one of the most active in the world, Mount Etna has a curious relationship with British myth and legend. After the Norman conquest of Sicily, storytellers weaved Etna into the tales of King Athur. According to some stories, Arthur’s underworld kingdom lay beneath the volcano.
Centuries later, peasants in the village of Nicolosi said that Anne Boleyn burns for all eternity within the fires of Etna, as punishment for turning Henry VIII away from true religion.
In this chapter, Etna’s explosion foreshadows another natural disaster: the King of England is about to blow his top. And Cromwell is a little village in the lava flow.
Further reading:
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2. Wicked councillors
On Passion Sunday a sermon is preached in the king's chapel by Anne's almoner, John Skip. It appears to be an allegory; the force of it appears to be directed against him, Thomas Cromwell. He smiles broadly when those who attended explain it to him, sentence by sentence: his ill-wishers and well-wishers both. He is not a man to be knocked over by a sermon, or to feel himself persecuted by figures of speech.
John Skip told the story of Haman from the Book of Esther. This ambitious councillor at the Persian court conspires to have all the Jews in the empire killed at the king’s behest. But Queen Esther exposes his wickedness, and Haman is hanged from a high gallow pole that he himself had prepared for Esther’s cousin, Mordecai.
If Cromwell is rattled by this story, he doesn’t show it. His way is to never let his enemies think him afraid. This is his ‘iron belly’, and it has served him well so far.
‘Cromwell has plenty stomach,’ his friends say; his enemies too. They mean he has appetite, gusto, attack: first thing in the morning or last thing at night, a bloody collop of meat would not disgust him, and if you wake him in the small hours he is hungry then too.
In the Book of Esther, Haman begs the queen’s mercy, a tableaux that has inspired many painters, including Rembrandt.
In Skip’s sermon, the English clergy take the place of the Jews threatened with extermination. This is an attack on Cromwell’s suppression of the monasteries. Although this may sound odd from an evangelical aid to Anne Boleyn, it manifests the growing gulf between Anne and Cromwell’s agenda for religious reform. The queen wants to champion the evangelical reform of the institutions Cromwell is working to dissolve outright.
Cromwell may have shrugged off the comparison of himself to Haman, the wicked councillor. But the allegory sticks, and is used against him in the years to come.
Further reading:
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3. Bend the knee
‘He, Cremuel, kneels and takes communion. God turns to paste on his tongue. While this process occurs, it is reverent to close the eyes; but on this singular occasion, God will forgive him for looking about. He sees George Boleyn, pink with pleasure. He sees Chapuys, white with humiliation. He sees Henry dazzle in gold as he descends, ponderous, from the gallery. The king’s tread is deliberate, his step is slow; his face is blazing with solemn triumph.
On 18 April 1536, Chapuys is tricked into bowing before Anne Boleyn. Up until now, he has carefully avoided crossing the concubine’s path. On his arrival at Greenwich, George Boleyn and Cromwell told Chapuys that the king would like him to visit the queen and kiss her hand. Chapuys got out of that meeting only to be forced into her presence at Mass.
The timing of this encounter is fascinating. Within two weeks, Anne Boleyn will be arrested. In a month, she will be dead. And yet here the king is, ‘blazing with solemn triumph’ at the sight of the Imperial ambassador, ‘white with humiliation’, recognising Anne as queen. Chapuys ‘feels a draught from the future’, but who else sees what is coming? Mantel gathers together political manoeuvres and personal pride in a set piece as rich with meaning as it is deep with ambiguity.
Further reading:
4. The sign of the cross
And now, his monarch’s sweating face thrust into his, he remembers something his father told him: if you burn your hand, Tom, raise your hands and cross your wrists before you, and hold them so till you get to the water or the salve: I don’t know how it works, but it confuses the pain, and then if you utter a prayer at the same time, you might get off not too bad.
A year before Hilary Mantel published Bring Up the Bodies, researchers at UCL published research showing that crossing your arms ‘confuses the brain and reduces the intensity of the pain sensation.’ I love to think that Mantel read this news story and decided to bestow Walter Cromwell with some efficacious folk medicine.
The experience of pain is central to Mantel’s work. It was fundamental to her life, living with migraines and endometriosis. She writes about how pain transforms one’s view of oneself and the world. We cannot, for example, understand Henry VIII separate from the bad leg that tormented him at this time.
And when we picture Cromwell crossing his hands, we can’t help but think of Gothic literature and vampire slayers. ‘He raises his palms. He crosses his wrists. Back you go, Henry.’ It reinforces the picture we already have of the king as a mythic monster, unlike any other man.
This section is interesting for another reason. For the first time, Cromwell invokes his father as his protector. ‘But he is glad his father is with him. Someone must be.’ This is the man who is trying to kill him in the first scene of Wolf Hall. Walter does tend to reappear when Cromwell skirts close to death: he heard his father’s steel-tipped boots clipping on the stair when he was bedridden with the Italian fever. But here is helpful Walter, confusing the pain and cheating death.
In Wolf Hall, Mantel stuck to received wisdom about awful Walter. Since then, Diarmaid MacCulloch and others have questioned this picture. It is mostly based on one account of Cromwell’s life, fleeing his father for Europe. Mantel seems to recognise this reappraisal in Bring Up the Bodies. Here is Cromwell at the start of this chapter:
You wonder what else you have always believed, believed without foundation. His father Walter had laid out money for him, or so Gardiner said: compensation, for the stab wound he inflicted, the injured family paid off. What if, he thinks, Walter didn't hate me? What if he was just exasperated with me, and showed it by kicking me around the brewery yard? What if I deserved it?
Cromwell has a prodigious memory. He’s famous for it. But it is also unstable and unreliable. We see things through him, and we trust his vision implicitly and absolutely. Only later do we, and he, start to wonder what went wrong.
Further reading:
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Quote of the week: I shall dream it into being
Later in the year, Chapuys will report to his master, the emperor, that Cromwell told him this day, 18 April 1536, was the moment he ‘set himself to think up and plot out the whole business.’ This is where the bloody thing takes shape:
He says to Edward, I must go home and shut the door and consult with myself. The queen is plotting something, I know not what, something devious, something dark, perhaps so dark that she herself does not know what it is, and as yet is only dreaming of it: but I must be quick, I must dream it for her, I shall dream it into being.
The rest of the novel will play out over a month in Cromwell’s time, and just over a month in ours. We will live and breathe those days of April and May 1536.
That night, enclosed in his thoughts, Cromwell pictures himself ‘entering Anne, not as a lover but as a lawyer, and rolled in his fist his papers, his writs; he imagines himself entering the heart of the queen. In its chambers he hears the click of his own boot heels.’ An echo of Walter’s boots, coming to kill him?
The two memories that come to him now are opposites. Himself, breaking down a door in Bruges. ‘You don’t need skill and you don’t need time if you’ve got a shoulder and a boot.’ And his wife, Liz, spinning loops of thread: ‘I can’t slow down, if I stopped to think how I was doing it I couldn’t do it at all.’
Liz’s skillful hands and Cromwell’s brutal boot. The two contrasting images entwine as he, Cromwell, sits down and sets himself to think of how to destroy a queen.
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Next week
Thank you for reading and joining me on this slow read of the Cromwell trilogy. Next week, we start ‘Master of Phantoms, London, April–May 1536’. We will read this chapter over five weeks. The first part ends on page 323 of the Fourth Estate paperback edition with the line: ‘And then you count the money. And lock it in your strongbox.’
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Until next week, I am your guide,
Master Simon Haisell
That last line, "I can’t slow down, if I stopped to think how I was doing it I couldn’t do it at all" takes on such an ominous meaning when you think about what's to come. Liz's fingers had the surety of a skilled craftsperson such that she couldn't do her work slowly- but hers was an act of creation. Cromwell's act, that he can't think too slowly about, is an act of destruction. And now I'm wondering what Liz would have made of what he's about to do.
I tried to vote in the survey on desktop, and it gave me an error, but I was able to vote via the app on my phone.
There's a moment near the end of the chapter when Call-Me gives Cromwell a "glassy look" regarding Cromwell's shrug about a rumor of a marriage between Mary and a subject. Mantel then writes about Cromwell's understanding of Call-Me's glassy look that
"It will be some years before [Cromwell] understands why."
I found that line to be unusually mysterious.