The Map of Christendom (Part 1)
Wolf Crawl Week 16: Monday 15 April – Sunday 21 April
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Welcome to week sixteen of Wolf Crawl
This week, we are reading the first part of “The Map of Christendom, 1534–1535.” While More languishes in the Tower, Cromwell redraws the maps. And then, falls ill.
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: Love in the Time of Cromwell
Footnote: A new pope
Tangent: Master of the Memory Machine
Footnote: House of the Converts
Tangent: Labyrinths and dungeons
Tangent: Killing words
Footnote: Cardinal Cromwell
Tangent: Perhaps this is Utopia?
Quote of the week: Men in small rooms
Next week
Last week’s posts:
1. This week’s story
Autumn, 1534. The king offers Cromwell the job of Lord Chancellor. It is Thomas Audley’s current title. Squawk squawk. And before him: Thomas More and Thomas Wolsey. But Cromwell eyes up a different job: Master of the Rolls.
It comes with a house in Chancery Lane, close to the Court and Parliament. Christophe goes with him to dust off the cobwebs. His move to the Rolls House makes him take stock of life: its growing magnificence veiling haunted hollows.
Ireland is in rebellion, and Cromwell serves a paranoid king with a gammy leg. He, Cromwell, visits More in the Tower. The prisoner must now swear an oath to the Act of Supremacy, recognising the king as head of the church. It’s just words, but More won’t budge.
Uproar in the Boleyn camp. Mary is pregnant, and Anne thinks it is the king’s. She is sent off to Kent, and Jane Seymour helps her pack.
Hans Holbein talks about the Queen of Sheba. Hans talks about Anselma. He knows who she is: Cromwell’s old flame in Antwerp. He could have her if he wants, Hans says. He, Cromwell, could have any woman in England.
Alice More comes to see him. She wants to plead the king’s mercy for her husband in the Tower. She talks about More’s piety and his hair shirt, but also her tenderness and desire to protect him.
New year, 1535. The king makes him his deputy in church affairs. It’s a new title: Vicegerent in Spirituals. It empowers him to visit, inspect and reform the monasteries. He is working harder than ever. Too hard. He falls ill. The Italian fever, he says. He is visited by the living and the dead. And then by the King of England himself, who calls him, “My dear Cromwell.”
When the king is gone, it is Johane who tells him the truth. “Henry,” she says, “is frightened of you.”
2. This week’s characters
Click on each link for more details and plot summaries for each character:
Thomas Cromwell • Henry VIII • Christophe • Alice • Jo • Rafe • Richard • Chapuys • Thomas Howard • Thomas More • Antonio Bonvisi • Meg Roper • Martin • Thomas Boleyn • Francis Weston • Francis Bryan • Mary Boleyn • Anne Boleyn • Henry Norris • Jane Rochford • Jane Seymour • William Stafford • Katherine • Mary Shelton • Hans Holbein • Anselma • Alice More • Gregory • Harry Percy • Dr Butts • Thomas Avery • Hugh Latimer • Thomas Cranmer • Johane • Mercy
3. This week’s theme: Love in the Time of Cromwell
‘The wives of England, they all keep secret books of whom they are going to have next when they have poisoned their husbands. And you are the top of everyone’s list.’
Re-reading this chapter, I get a greater sense of how lonely Thomas Cromwell seems at this moment in the story. His lands and titles are growing. He has the confidence of the king and everything going his way in Parliament. But a sadness creeps in around the edges.
He thinks about making the Rolls House an office, and Austin Friars a home. “But for whom?” he wonders. Everyone is moving off into the world. Helen has taken her two daughters with Rafe, “so I shall never have any more children at Austin Friars.” He can see his dead daughters coming down the stairs to take him.
His daughter Anne with her thundering feet: Anne, he would say to her, couldn't we have felt mufflers over those hooves of yours? Grace skimming down like dust, drawn into a spiral, a lively swirl ... going nowhere, dispersing, gone. Liz, come down. But Liz keeps her silence; she neither stays nor goes. She is always with him and not with him. He turns away. So this house will become a place of business. As all his houses will become places of business. My home will be where my clerks and files are; otherwise, my home will be with the king, where he is.
Gregory tells his father that Rafe and Richard think he will marry “some old dowager with a great settlement and black teeth.” “They are making sport of you, Gregory,” Cromwell says. “If I knew such a woman, I would marry her myself.”
His jokes disguise a yearning. An emptiness at the heart of Cromwell. The thought is never far from his mind. When he reads Mary Boleyn’s letter, he wonders whether she giggled in writing it, saying, “Thomas Cromwell, I once raised his hopes.” When Jane Seymour says no one has ever written her a sonnet:
Liz, he thinks, take your dead hand off me. Do you grudge me this one little girl, so small, so thin, so plain?
In the Tower, he uses his own yearning for intimacy against Thomas More, reminding him of Alice waiting for him at home:
‘She bears you off to her bedchamber, locks the door and drops the key in her pocket and pulls off your clothes till there you are in your shirt and nothing but your little white legs sticking out – well, admit it, the woman is within her rights.’
It’s a blade pointing both ways: the free man with no wife, the prisoner who denies himself Alice. Alice, who comes to Cromwell on Christmas Eve, in “a thin sharp light, like the edge of an old knife.” She looks old, but Liz, too, would, by now, be old.
There will be no more wives and no more children. “Well,” he thinks, “not unless I take time out of the king’s business and go wooing: not unless, when a woman speaks to me, I actually listen.”
4. Footnote: A new pope
‘If Clement dies, who will be the next rogue in office?’ 'I've put my money on Alessandro Farnese.' 'Really?' Henry sits up. 'One lays bets?' 'But the odds are short. He has thrown about such bribes to the Roman mob all these years, that they will put the cardinals in terror when the time comes.'
So Cromwell and Henry collect their bets. Cardinal Farnese becomes Pope Paul III. Henry must learn to call him the “Bishop of Rome,” because the king is still getting used to his new supremacy over the church of England.
Paul III was a compromise candidate in the papal conclave. The cardinals expected a short papacy: Farnese was 66 and in poor health. In fact, he lived until 1549, overseeing the start of the Catholic Reformation, summoning the Council of Trent in 1545 and recognising new religious orders like the Jesuits.
But Paul III was no saint. As Henry ruefully noted in a previous chapter, Farnese had four children. On becoming pope, he made two of his teenage grandsons into cardinals. Later, he gave his son, Pier Luigi Farnese, the title of Duke of Parma. Parma had previously fought for Emperor Charles V in 1527, participating in the Sack of Rome that had so shocked Christendom and Thomas More.
Thomas More says that the imperial troops, for their enjoyment, are roasting live babies on spits. Oh, he would! says Thomas Cromwell. Listen, soldiers don't do that. They're too busy carrying away everything they can turn into ready money.
Cromwell knows about such things because he was a soldier once. And in 1534, “he is building a treasure room,” for the gold plate the king gives him so that “whatever he deposits can quickly be turned into ready money.”
5. Tangent: Master of the Memory Machine
As Master of the Rolls, Thomas Cromwell is officially Audley’s deputy in the Court of Chancery, one of the highest courts in England. The rolls are the court records, relating to contracts and land titles. Who owns what in England. It’s a powerful piece of information, as Cromwell demonstrates to Gregory:
‘This is the Scots border,’ he says gently. ‘Harry Percy’s country. Look, let me show you. These are parcels of his estates he has given away to his creditors. We cannot let it continue, because we can’t leave our borders to chance.’
He will punish Harry Percy for what he did to Wolsey at Cawood: arresting him for high treason and taking him to his death.
Christophe says, “The Rolls have no paws to go walking,” like the cat Marlinspike. You can put your foot straight through them. He demonstrates. But when Cromwell reminds More of the book he was holding as a boy, “he makes the shape of wings.” For Cromwell, books are not dead things. Words walk into the world, remaking it as they go.
Giulio Camillo is building a theatre of memory. Christophe tells it better than anyone:
'There is a man in Paris who has built a soul. It is a building but it is alive. The whole of it is lined with little shelves. On these shelves you find certain parchments, fragments of writing, they are in the nature of keys, which lead to a box which contains a key which contains another key, but these keys are not made of metal, or these enfolded boxes of wood.'
Cromwell does not need Camillio. At the Rolls House, he is building his own machine. It contains the memories of all England: its oaths and curses. Its dreams and nightmares. What they own and what they owe. Thomas More may have his Utopia, but Master Secretary has the keys to every soul in England. And his machines will go on growing, without limit and without rest. Christophe explains:
‘They are made of spirit. They are what we shall have left, if all the books are burned. They will enable us to remember not only the past, but the future, and to see all the forms and customs that will one day inhabit the earth.’
It is a fantasy of total government, foreshadowing dystopian futures. But it is 1535, and the machine needs its master. Cromwell wants to work. “How will it go forward” without Cromwell? His nephew says, no, you don’t understand: “You have made a thinking machine that marches forward as if it were alive, you don’t need to be tending it every minute of every day.”
6. Footnote: The House of the Converts
‘In the year 1353,’ he says, ‘there was only one person in the house. I am sorry to think she lived here without company. Her last domicile was the city of Exeter, but I wonder where before that? Her name was Claricia.’
In the late thirteenth century, there were around 2,000-3,000 Jews living in England. They were facing a rising wave of persecution, sanctioned by both church and crown. In 1278, some 600 were arrested on charges of coin tampering, and 298 were executed in London alone. In 1290, Edward I expelled all Jews from the kingdom. The refugees could only take some of their possessions, and the rest of their property was confiscated by the crown.
Around 100 avoided expulsion by converting to Christianity and moving to the Domus Conversorum, the House of the Converts, in London. This later became the Rolls House and, later still, the Public Records Office.
Claricia was the daughter of Jacob Copin, one of those executed for coin-clipping in 1278. According to the house records, she arrived at the Domus Conversorum at a young age, around the time of her father’s execution. Twenty-eight years later, she returned to her hometown of Exeter, married and had two children. Later in life, she came back to the house with her children and remained there until her death in 1356. She was the last Jew of the pre-1290 community to inhabit the house.
Jews were not legally allowed to settle in England until the 1650s, during the Protectorate of Oliver Cromwell, the distant descendant of Master Secretary.
7. Tangent: Labyrinths and dungeons
‘You’ve broken up her home, you heartless boy.’ He examines Ariane’s crumbling prey: a leg, a wing. ‘Let’s be gone, before she comes back.’
When Cromwell enters his new house on Chancery Lane, Christophe disturbs a spider in her vast web. He, Cromwell, christens her Ariane, a Latinized version of the Greek name Ariadne. The daughter of King Minos, who gave Theseus a ball of thread to escape the Labyrinth of the Minotaur.
The Labyrinth was built by Daedalus, revered by medieval masons as the first and greatest of their craft. The masons who built the cathedral at Chartres designed a paved labyrinth with the Minotaur at its centre. To walk a church labyrinth is a form of prayer or pilgrimage. But for Cromwell, the centre of the labyrinth holds not salvation but knowledge and power:
He says to Chapuys, 'Were you ever at the cathedral in Chartes? You walk the labyrinth,' he says, 'set into the pavement, and it seems there is no sense in it. But if you follow it faithfully it leads you straight to the centre. Straight to where you should be.'
Daedalus built the labyrinth but became its prisoner. As Master of the Jewel House, Cromwell supervises the renovations at the Tower, a prison that one day will hold him captive. He stands godfather to the gaoler's daughter. Will Martin still hold the keys, when Thomas is there on other business?
There are ways out of dungeons. Henry Wyatt came out alive. Alice More talks of her husband in the past tense as though he is already dead:
‘My husband used to say, lock Cromwell in a deep dungeon in the morning, and when you come back that night he’ll be sitting on a plush cushion eating larks’ tongues, and all the gaolers will owe him money.’ 'Did he talk a lot about locking me in dungeons?'
Daedalus knew a way out. He built wings for himself and his son, Icarus. It was the most audacious plan ever conceived. And it almost worked.
Don’t forget Daedalus. He will be back for Cromwell later.
8. Tangent: Killing words
‘If people don’t like new ideas, let them have old ones.’
Cromwell and other members of the council had been working on a new Treason Act for some time. In 1534, it finally became law. And the wording was pretty terrifying. It is now high treason “to wish, will or desire by [spoken] words or in writing” any challenge to the royal succession or the king’s supremacy over the church. It is also treason to call the king a heretic, tyrant or usurper.
And silence will not save you. It is high treason not to take the oath. Cromwell reassures Thomas More: “You have to say some words. That’s all.”
“Ahh. Just words,” says More. “Words. Words. Just words.”
He turns. He stares at More. It’s as if the light has changed. A window has opened on a strange country, where a cold wind from childhood blows. ‘That book … Was it a dictionary?’
Cromwell recalls when he was seven and caught More reading a great book at Lambeth Palace. By dictionary, Cromwell is probably thinking of a Latin glossary. The English word dictionary derives from the work of the thirteenth-century medieval grammarian John of Garland and his Latin vocabulary, Dictionarius.
In 1538, Thomas Elyot published the first comprehensive Latin dictionary in English. Thomas Cromwell, of course, owned a copy.
9. Footnote: Cardinal Cromwell
I almost feel like Hilary Mantel doesn’t make enough of this moment. In 1535, Henry VIII makes Thomas Cromwell his deputy in church affairs: Vicegerent in Spirituals. A title no one has held before or since. Historian Diarmaid MacCulloch gets to the heart of the matter:
Despite the novelty of the confected name, it did have an exact and recent precedent of which Cromwell was of course aware: the special papal legateship a latere exercised by his old master Cardinal Wolsey. Wolsey had been deputy of the Pope in the Tudor realms; Vice-Gerent Cromwell enjoyed the same powers, overriding the two Archbishops in England.
In his own way, Henry has made Cromwell a cardinal. Cromwell is now all that Wolsey was and more. Except, of course, he is not an ordained priest. This created a bit of a problem. Diarmaid MacCulloch again:
No one was quite sure about the appropriate form of respectful address for such a beast as a Vice-Gerent. He could hardly be called ‘your Grace’, certainly not ‘your Holiness’. During 1535, someone on his visitorial team must have intimated to those worried by the probleem that an equally novel ‘your Goodness’ might be the solution… One hopes that the Vice-Gerent was saved by his sense of humour from encouraging its adoption.
His Goodness, Thomas Cromwell, “puts his commissioners on the road. Valor Ecclesiasticus. I will do it in six months, he says. Such an exercise has never been attempted before, it is true, but he has already done much that no one else has even dreamed of.”
He didn’t quite meet his ambitious deadline, but most of the work was done in nine months. The result is the first complete record of church wealth since the Domesday Book of 1086. MacCulloch calls it a “staggering achievement given the administrative conditions of the time.”
If only the cardinal were here to see it. How he would smile!
10. Tangent: Perhaps this is Utopia?
In March and April 1535, Thomas Cromwell fell ill, and the king visited him in person to eat and conduct business. In a letter dated 17 April to Charles V, Chapuys wrote: “The kindness shown by the King to Cromwell in visiting him and supping at his house has driven away what remained of his illness.” It was an unusual thing for Henry to do and an indication of how much the king had come to depend on Master Secretary.
Cromwell is exhausted. He is delirious. He wonders whether he is in More’s Utopia, and the city of dreams.
He is tired out from the effort of deciphering the world. Tired from the effort of smiling at the foe.
In his fever, the words in the ledgers stand up and walk off the page. “On the stairs he can hear the efficient, deathly clip of his father’s steel-tipped boots.”
“So now get up.”
But he is not in Utopia. He is in England. You cannot mistake the difference. The king knows it when he “looks out, hopeless, at the teeming rain.” When the emperor has an evil humour he can change his climate, but the English must make do with England.
What was England, before Wolsey? A little offshore island, poor and cold.
But Cromwell is burning up. He is in Ormuz, “the driest kingdom in the world.” In 1515, the Portuguese conquered this small island in the Persian Gulf. It had a reputation for luxurious wealth and licentious living. In another lifetime, Cromwell could have gone there. A throw of the dice in Cyprus. “East is high. West is low. Gambling is not a vice, if you can afford to do it.”
11. Quote of the week: Men in small rooms
If Wolf Hall reminds us of a stage play, it is because the plot is driven by dialogue, conversation after conversation, between two, three, four or five men and women, a fistful of Thomases, in small rooms, five hundred years ago. There are a few set pieces. very little action and no battle scenes. And yet, there is tension and drama on every page. Hilary Mantel’s imaginative work was to read between the lines of history and ask: what hidden thoughts and unrecorded moments made their world? Their world, which has become ours:
The fate of peoples is made like this, two men in small rooms. Forget the coronations, the conclaves of cardinals, the pomp and processions. This is how the world changes: a counter pushed across a table, a pen stroke that alters the force of a phrase, a woman's sigh as she passes and leaves on the air a trail of orange flower or rosewater; her hand pulling close the bed curtain, the discreet sigh of flesh against flesh.
12. Next week
Thank you for reading and joining me on this slow read of the Cromwell trilogy. Next week is the last week of Wolf Hall. We will read the rest of “The Map of Christendom, 1534–1535” and the last chapter, “To Wolf Hall, July 1535.”
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
It strikes me how much fear is present in Mantel's evocation of the Tudor court. Henry to some extent fears his enemies outside England, but he is far more afraid of his own people, living and dead. He is afraid of his grandmother, of Queen Katherine, of Anne Boleyn, of Mary his daughter, and even of Thomas Cromwell, to whom he would, at the same time, give anything. Even Anne is afraid, Mary Boleyn says - "of every woman at court - have you looked at her, have you looked at her lately?"
It's odd, because one never thinks of either Henry or Anne as fearful people. Especially not Henry. But it makes perfect sense that they should have been so afraid.
This feels like the turning point in Cromwell's fate. He made his way into court listening to women: his wife's opinions, Mary B's intelligence, Anne's desires both stated and observed. Cromwell was once held in contrast to Norfolk who looked down on listening to women. Now, Cromwell didn't see Mary's pregnancy or departure coming. There will be so much more he doesn't see coming.
He won't find a wife, and he won't save himself "not unless, when a woman speaks to me, I actually listen.”