The Map of Christendom (Part 2) / To Wolf Hall
Wolf Crawl Week 17: Monday 22 April – Sunday 28 April
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Welcome to week seventeen of Wolf Crawl
This week, we are reading the second part of “The Map of Christendom, 1534–1535” and the final chapter, appropriately named, “To Wolf Hall, July 1535”. Cromwell shrugs off death and More casts off life. And it all ends in slaughter on the road to Wolf Hall.
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: It all ends in slaughter
Tangent: Two dukes on the run
Footnote: End times in Münster
Footnote: The conquest of Tunis
Tangent: The bald fact
Footnote: Charterhouse traitors
Tangent: King Cromwell
Tangent: The new map of Christendom
Quote of the week: Fear of plain words
Next week
Last week’s posts:
1. This week’s story
The Duke of Norfolk visits Cromwell in his sickbed and goes away disappointed that the blacksmith’s boy is not yet dead. Chapuys puts his head around the corner: “My dear Thomas, you are always the only opponent.”
Death comes, and Death goes. “Knock him down and he will get up.” Cromwell returns to the land of the living to find everyone has cut their hair and Call-Me is still frightened of him.
April 1535. The Charterhouse monks refuse the oath and are tried for treason. They are hung, drawn and quartered. The king’s bastard Henry FitzRoy watches, to “learn the sights and sounds of slaughter.”
Thomas More is unmoved. He is preparing himself for death. But John Fisher will die first: the pope has made him a cardinal, and the king "swears he will send Fisher’s head across the sea to meet his hat.”
They put the oath to More one last time. Silence. They indict him for treason and take away his books. Left alone with Richard Riche, More lets slip that matters spiritual are rightfully determined “out of this realm.” “Hang him for a papist,” says Cromwell.
He visits More before the trial. The prisoner fears the manner of his death. He, Cromwell, says he would let him live, “to repent of your butcheries.”
The trial of Sir Thomas More. “It’s England against Rome, he says. The living against the dead.” The jury is fixed, Riche presents his evidence, and the judgement takes fifteen minutes. Afterwards, More breaks his silence and speaks his mind. He summons the dead. Take him out, says Norfolk. “It is finished.”
July, 1535. More to the scaffold, Cromwell to his garden. The rain abates and a map of England is laid before us. This summer, the court heads west. He, Cromwell, plots the route. There are some spare days in the itinerary and time to drop in on the Seymours. “Who says I never get a holiday?”
Early September. Five days. Wolf Hall.
2. This week’s characters
Click on each link for more details and plot summaries for each character:
Thomas Cromwell • Thomas Howard • Rafe Sadler • Charles Brandon • Eustache Chapuys • Thomas Avery • Henry VIII • Thomas Wriothesley • Richard Cromwell • Richard Riche • Thomas Boleyn • Rowland Lee • Gregory • George Boleyn • Duke of Richmond • Margaret Roper • Thomas More - Martin - Heny Pattinson - William Tyndale - Thomas Audley - Anne Boleyn - Dick Purser - John Parnell - Humphrey Monmouth
3. This week’s theme: It all ends in slaughter
Whichever way you look at it, it all begins in slaughter. Trojan Brutus and his descendants ruled till the coming of the Romans. Before London was called Lud's Town, it was called New Troy. And we were Trojans.
That was Wolsey’s version of the history of England, told to Cromwell in “The Occult History of Britain” at the start of Wolf Hall. We now reach a sort of ending – although, as we shall find out shortly, there are no endings. Only beginnings.
This end is defined by slaughter. “The king is in his killing vein,” and we must plead not for life but for a cleaner, quicker death. Not the “full traitor’s penalty” received by the monks of the London Charterhouse, “the short spin in the wind and the conscious public disembowelling.” The thought unmakes Thomas More, as Anne once said it would: “Let me be killed cleanly. I ask nothing, but I ask that.”
We know Thomas Cromwell cannot abide self-sacrifice. “I would advise anyone to get a few more weeks of life.” Implicitly, he agrees with Anne: “People must say whatever will keep them alive, till better times comes. That is no sin. Would not you?”
He puts it to Sir Thomas More: where does one draw the line between sacrifice and self-slaughter?
“Christ drew it.” He insists he is not a martyr, but he, Cromwell, thinks More does a bargain with his God, “who loves slaughter”: his life to save England. More says that Cromwell’s task is to kill him, but he does not want to see More butchered. Dead men are dangerous, and “executing” the king’s decision means letting More win.
It is finished. Norfolk’s words. Also, Christ’s last words on the cross – which Thomas Howard would know if he ever sat down to read a book.
We are living in end times. In Münster, the prophets are killing each other; their refugees are heading to England to build a new Jerusalem. In the north, the harvests have failed and they are rioting in York. The pope is poised to excommunicate the King of England. It will sanction holy war. It will sanctify rebellion.
Whichever way you look at it, it all ends in slaughter.
4. Tangent: Two dukes on the run
They arrived on a Sunday, two vengeful grandees: the Duke of Norfolk a bright-eyed hawk, the Duke of Suffolk just as keen.
In a reversal of fortune, Wolf Hall ends with Norfolk and Suffolk on the run from Master Secretary Thomas Cromwell. In 1529, they came to York Place to bring Wolsey down. These two great noblemen despised the cardinal because he was lowborn and held himself like a king. They find Cromwell even more objectionable. “Why are you such a person?” Norfolk asks him. “It isn’t as if you could afford to be.”
Cromwell remembers York Place, and how he bought twenty-four hours for Wolsey by sending them back to Winsdor for “a piece of paper.” He told them they had to fetch the Master of the Rolls. Now he is Master of the Rolls and not even death herself can dislodge him. Rafe says he is the second man in England, above even Norfolk. Chapuys says, “you are all the cardinal was, and more.”
He closes his eyes. It is bliss to think of: two dukes on the run from him.
5. Footnote: End times in Münster
Some said the world would end in 1533. Last year had its adherents too. Why not this year? There is always somebody ready to claim that these are end times, and nominate his neighbour as the Antichrist. The news from Münster is that the skies are falling fast. The besiegers are demanding unconditional surrender; the besieged are threatening mass suicide.
Early in 1534, radical reformers took over the German city of Münster. Their enemies called them Anabaptists, the re-baptisers, because they practised adult baptism. They hijacked the more moderate Lutheran reformation and, inside the besieged city, abolished private property and made polygamy compulsory.
Anabaptists were a headache for religious reformers like Cromwell and Cranmer. “You see, Thomas, where heresy leads us,” says Thomas More. “It leads us to Münster, does it not?” The problem is that Cromwell’s respectable London merchants held very similar evangelical beliefs to many of these radical Anabaptists. How to make Henry see the difference?
There is news of refugees pouring out of the Münster area, some of them heading for England.
This was the threat of international terrorism. In May 1535, twenty-five Anabaptists were burned at Smithfield and elsewhere, as the Charterhouse monks were butchered at Tyburn. Cromwell could link both groups in the king’s mind as “sects”, papist religious orders and apocalyptic radicals, who had rejected the moderate mainstream and the mother church.
In 1538, Cromwell will compel every parish to keep a register of marriages, christenings, and burials, a Cromwellian innovation that continues to this day. Conveniently, it provided the authorities with a record of those who had not baptized their children.
6. Footnote: The conquest of Tunis
He casts a glance at the rain. ‘If you were the Emperor, wouldn’t you pick Tunis, rather than London?’
At this time, England’s foreign policy was to avoid war with one or both of the two Catholic powers: France and Spain. The thought that Emperor Charles V might come to Katherine’s aid preoccupied Cromwell in previous chapters. It seemed unlikely, but the threat encouraged Henry’s enemies to conspire and ferment rebellion.
So the English can sleep soundly in the knowledge that the imperial fleet is heading to Tunis on the North African coast. The previous year, Tunis was taken by the Ottoman corsair Barbarossa. At school, I loved this bit of history, mainly because it featured a pirate named Redbeard.
Charles V destroys Barbarossa’s fleet, besieges Tunis and restores the local ruler Muley Hasan. The discovery of French cannonballs points to a pact between France and the Ottomans. And indeed, the following year, 1536, France became the first Christian kingdom to form an alliance with the Ottoman Empire. Highly controversial at the time, it lasted for over two and a half centuries until Napoleon’s campaign in Egypt in 1798.
7. Tangent: The bald fact
While he has been recovering, the king has cropped his hair. He has done this to disguise his increasing baldness, though it doesn't, not at all. His loyal councillors have done the same, and soon it becomes a mark of fellowship between them.
Henry VIII really did get the barber in to cut his hair in 1535, in imitation of his royal cousin, the King of France. The personal rivalry between these two monarchs goes back to the Field of Cloth of Gold in 1520, where Henry challenged Francis to a wrestling match. The French king won. They are of similar age and are now growing old rather reluctantly.
In Henry’s case, he’s losing his hair and putting on weight. You can see the marked change in his appearance in these two portraits from 1531 and 1538. One of the stories weaved into the next two books is how Cromwell manages a king who knows he is no longer young and is not at all happy about it. Remember him practising his archery in the butts and out hunting, leaving his courtiers in the ditch. “He loves any man with flair and courage and physical strength,” but these days, he has to “sit with the spectators.” He is in pain, he is restless, he is mourning his own youthful body. Thomas Cromwell’s master is a difficult and dangerous man to serve.
8. Footnote: Charterhouse traitors
The London Charterhouse was a Carthusian monastery founded in 1371: an “austere house of men who sleep on straw.” Carthusians emphasise solitude and silent contemplation. No wonder Thomas More spent time here. In the 1530s, they become a focal point of opposition to Henry’s reformation.
While still ill in April 1535, Cromwell was interviewing Charterhouse members at the Rolls House. Mantel mentions “disaffected members of the community”, but Cromwell also reached into the Charterhouse’s own prison. The monks had imprisoned Andrew Borde, who Diamaid MacCulloch describes as a “maverick Carthusian polymath.” Cromwell freed Borde and set him on the road as one of his ambassadors on the continent. Over the years, he wrote back to Cromwell from his travels, and, in 1542, published the first travel guide to Europe, called The Fyrst Boke of the Introduction of Knowledge.
9. Tangent: King Cromwell
‘I should hardly be surprised if I woke up in the reign of King Cromwell, for if a tailor can be King of Jerusalem I suppose a lad from the smithy can be King of England.’
Do you remember this quote from Week One?
He can draft a contract, train a falcon, draw a map, stop a street fight, furnish a house and fix a jury. He will quote you a nice point in the old authors, from Plato to Plautus and back again. He knows new poetry, and can say it in Italian. He works all hours, first up and last to bed. He makes money and he spends it. He will take a bet on anything.
I thought it would be interesting to see how this impressive skill set has been borne out by events in Wolf Hall.
Fixed a jury. This week, he fixed Thomas More’s jury: “They are men who know More and have known him these twenty years.” They include Lucy Petyt’s new husband, John Parnell, who saw how More harried John Peyt to his death. Audley is squeamish, but Norfolk is impressed. “You’d have to get up early in the morning to be ahead of him.”
Works all hours. Yes, we know he puts in long hours. “Eighteen-hour days,” according to Richard. Just like the cardinal. And he quotes Luca Pacioli’s maxim: “You don’t go to bed until the books balance.”
Quotes the old authors. We do not hear from Plato or Plautus, but he has a nice point from Cicero on the story of Simonides, the man who “remembered exactly where everyone was sitting, at the moment the roof fell in.” That was back in 1529, when Wolsey came down. Everyone else may have moved on, but he, Cromwell, remembers exactly who did what to whom. He has a “prodigious… memory.” A very large ledger, “in which are recorded the details of people who have cut across me.”
Draw a map. People like Harry Percy, up on the Scots border. Cromwell hasn’t drawn any maps, but it is a project pending. “Is it no wonder Gregory mistook Northumbria for the Indies,” he thinks. “For these maps are deficient in all practical respects; they do not, for example, tell you which way is north.”
Furnish a house. He, Cromwell, has done more than furnish a house. He made Esher comfortable for the cardinal (“Get cats, huge starving ones”), and the Tower fit for the king’s bride (“He scribbles a direction to the overseer: Arrow to be picked out in gold. All goddesses have dark eyes.”)
But sure, he can furnish a house. At Austin Friars, Johane marvels at “all these things we have now,” the clock, the chest, the comb. The Queen of Sheba, back from the dead. He is buying up land and manor houses across England: Bedfordshire, Lincolnshire, Essex. “All this is small stuff. It’s nothing to what he intends to have.”
Make money and spend it. “His outgoings would frighten a lesser man.” But he came up with the cardinal and knows how to dispense largesse, feeding the whole district, including the aldermen in disguise.
Know new Italian poetry. It’s not exactly poetry, and it’s not exactly new, but he can sing “Scaramella is off to war”, his thoughts bubbling “Tuscan, Putney, Castilian oaths.” Thumbing Pacioli’s Summa de Arithmetica, he tells Thomas Avery: “My friends in Italy send me new poems, but I think all the poems are in here… Not that a page of figures is a verse, but anything that is precise is beautiful.”
Draft a contract. Precise like a new law. These days, Cromwell has clerks to draft his contracts. These days, his mind is on bigger things: “Time now to consider the compacts that hold the world together: the compact between ruler and ruled.” These past years, he has written a new settlement: “This realm of England is an Empire, and so has been accepted in the world, governed by one Supreme Head and King…” And to tie the knot, he’s sworn every shepherd and ploughboy into new matrimony with the Mother Church of England.
Stop a street fight. At the Tower, he walks into a fight between a bricklayer and a stonemason. “Two crumbly Englishmen, snappable bones, chalky teeth. Victors of Agincourt. He’s glad Chapuys isn’t there to see.”
Take a bet on anything. He picked up a snake in Italy, for a bet. He bet Cavendish that More would be Lord Chancellor. He tipped Farnese for pope. He counts his winnings. The devil, and King Cromwell, always collect.
Train a falcon. Ah, let that one wait until next week: Bring Up The Bodies, Part One, Chapter One: Falcons.
10. Tangent The new map of Christendom
‘On numbers I suppose you have me beat. But have you looked at a map lately? Christendom is not what it was.’
When Cromwell prepares Norfolk and Audley for More’s trial, he tells them how it will be: “It’s England against Rome, he says. The living against the dead.”
Cromwell and More were born at the end of the fifteenth century. They grew up in the world of an “undivided” church with the pope at its head. How could they have imagined what was to come? In 1517, Martin Luther kicked off the Reformation in Germany, followed by Zwingli in the Swiss cantons. In the 1520s, free imperial cities and German princes defied Emperor Charles V to break away from Rome. In 1531, they formed a defensive alliance called the Schmalkaldic League. Meanwhile, Lutherans are making inroads into Scandinavia, and a French theologian called John Calvin has just fled persecution at home to the comparative safety of Basel and Geneva.
England’s future role in this transformation is uncertain. After all, Henry VIII is still “Defender of the Faith”, a title awarded to him in 1521 by the then pope in recognition of his opposition to Lutheranism. But Cromwell is right to point out that the map of Christendom is not what it was.
As a tangent, Hans Holbein has given us a beautiful depiction of a terrestrial globe, tipped over in his painting The Ambassadors (1533). Christendom is painted gold but with no allusion to the religious upheavals taking place. But it does show two straight red lines quartering the world in the Atlantic and representing two treaties between Spain and Portugal that divided their imperial ambitions in the Indies and the New World.
The globe has been tipped upside down, and the world is never going to be the same again.
The other side of the story: “You threaten like a dockside bully.” Cromwell, Cranmer and Norfolk interrogate Thomas More in A Man For All Seasons (1966)
11. Quote of the week: Fear of plain words
Oh, I can’t choose this week. We are spoilt for choice in a feast of words.
Cromwell on silence:
He says, this silence of More’s, it was never really silence, was it? It was loud with his treason; it was quibbling as far as quibbles would serve him, it was demurs and cavils, suave ambiguities. It was fear of plain words, or the assertion that plain words pervert themselves; More’s dictionary, against our dictionary. You can have a silence full of words. A lute retains, in its bowl, the notes it has played. The viol, in its strings, holds a concord. A shrivelled petal can hold its scent, a prayer can rattle with curses; an empty house, when the owners have gone out, can still be loud with ghosts.
Cromwell on the remaking of England:
But the trouble is, maps are always last year’s. England is always remaking herself, her cliffs eroding, her sandbanks drifting, springs bubbling up in dead ground. They regroup themselves while we sleep, the landscapes through which we move, and even the histories that trail us; the faces of the dead fade into other faces, as a spine of hills into the mist.
Cromwell on writing history:
He knows different now. It’s the living that turn and chase the dead. The long bones and skulls are tumbled from their shrouds, and words like stones thrust into their rattling mouths: we edit their writings, we rewrite their lives. Thomas More had spread the rumour that Little Bilney, chained to the stake, had recanted as the fire was set. It wasn't enough for him to take Bilney's life away; he had to take his death too.
12. Next week
And that is it for Wolf Hall. This entire series of posts, along with my Haunting of Wolf Hall series and additional foodie posts from
can all now be found on one Wolf Hall page.Next week, we start Bring Up The Bodies, with the first chapter, Falcons, pages 1 – 35. The complete reading schedule can be found here.
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Until next week, I am your guide,
Master Simon Haisell
Well, that’s that then. *slaps knees gets up puts Wolf Hall on the shelf-side eyes Bring Up the Bodies*. Pub??
👏👏👏 A very fitting round up to Wolf Hall. I have got so much from this and appreciated the times I have had sitting down listening to your weekly roundup. From this week, I had not realised it was Crowell who set up the registration of births, deaths and marriages in the parishes. There have been lots of interesting facts along the way and I look forward to more as we move into Bringing up the Bodies. I am resisting lifting it from my shelf until next week! Thank you.