Entirely Beloved Cromwell (Part 1)
Wolf Crawl Week 6: Monday 5 February – Sunday 11 February
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Welcome to week six of Wolf Crawl
This week, we are reading the first part of “Entirely Beloved Cromwell, Spring–December 1530”. Cromwell is summoned, interviewed and invited by three very important people, as his old master goes north and, he, Cromwell, has his eye on his advantage.
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
These resources are free for all, thanks to the generosity of paying subscribers who support my writing and this slow book group. Full members can read my series of posts on The Haunting of Wolf Hall, and start their own discussion threads in the chat area.
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In this week’s post:
This week’s story
This week’s characters
This week’s theme: ‘They want you upstairs’
Character focus: Anne Boleyn
Background: The Italian job
Tangent: Who are you working for?
Spotlight: Ditches and dogholes
Background: Death and taxes
Focus: Made in Chelsea
Quote of the week: Black notes
Next week
1. This week’s story
Anne Boleyn is bored, so she summons Master Cromwell to amuse her. He cannot convince her to end the vendetta against the cardinal, but he never thought she would. He has seen her now and can begin to understand her. Mary Boleyn is there with the gossip, and another half-hidden lady, rolling her eyes at the Boleyn sisters.
In the kitchens at Austin Friars, we learn of Cromwell’s rise from the kitchen to the counting-house at the Frescobaldi in Florence, a long time ago. In 1530, he can’t get hold of the king; Stephen Gardiner bars his path. So, the Putney boy uses the Duke of Norfolk to get his foot in the door. The king gives him a thousand pounds to help Wolsey on his way, but Cromwell is not going with him.
Holy Week. Reports of crowds greeting the cardinal as he processes towards his enthronement as Archbishop of York. And Chapuys, the Imperial ambassador, is at Cromwell’s sleeve, warning him of the “tangle of wreckage that will be left if this divorce is granted.” We learn of Cromwell’s memory system and how his thoughts are running from his dead wife to her living sister, Joanne. The cardinal writes that Cromwell is his “most assured refuge in this my calamity” and “mine own entirely beloved Cromwell.”
The king feels melancholy. The king wants the cardinal’s gold plate. The king wants Anne in his bed. Who will give the king what he wants? “I will say this for you,” he tells Cromwell. “You stick by your man.” The king considers Cromwell. There were landed Cromwells once, but this man insists he is not one of them.
Cromwell gives the king his opinion on monks and monasteries. The king is impressed and tells Cromwell to look at the evidence and see what he can do. It is one of the more remarkable moments of his life so far, he thinks. So why is Henry Norris there?
Gregory is fifteen and is as self-conscious as any fifteen-year-old. ‘People in Cambridge are laughing at my greyhounds.’ Cromwell had bigger problems at fifteen. Gregory has the latest edition of Le Morte d’Arthur. Anne is in the pages, and birds like flying daggers.
Cromwell is making himself useful. To the king, and to Charles Brandon. They talk about a dog’s cataracts. They talk about Brandon’s wife, the king’s sister, who says she will die for the queen. ‘You’re a useful sort of man’, says Suffolk.
Summer is for hunting. Harry Norris is where the king is, and so is Cromwell. When Cromwell looks at Harry Norris, he thinks: how did the law students know about the cardinal on his knees in the mud at Putney? Did you tell them, Harry?
Cromwell’s household is growing. There’s Marlinspike the cat. There’s Thomas Avery the accountant. And there’s Thomas Wriothelsey, “call me Risley”. He works for Gardiner, and he works for Cromwell. He’s Stephen’s spy, the children say.
Cromwell accepts an invitation to dinner at Thomas More’s house in Chelsea. Gardiner is there, scaring the children. There is Thomas More in the painting and Thomas More in the flesh, and the real More is friendly to Cromwell and cruel to his family. Gardiner and Cromwell share the journey home via Westminster. Remarkably, neither of them throws the other into the river.
2. This week’s characters
Click on each link for more details and plot summaries for each character:
Thomas Cromwell • Stephen Gardiner • Duke of Norfolk • Thomas Wriothesley • Thomas More • Gregory Cromwell • Harry Norris • Eustache Chapuys • George Cavendish • Thomas Wolsey • Henry VIII • Richard Williams • Johane Williamson • Anne Boleyn • Mark Smeaton • Mary Boleyn • Mary Shelton • Thomas Boleyn • Thurston • Duchess of Norfolk • Duchess of Suffolk • Alice More • Margaret Roper • Henry Pattinson • Sir John More • Stephen Vaughan • Anselma • Thomas Avery
A shift of the light wiped the curiosity from his face, blanking it, fading his past into the past, washing the future clean. Scaramella is off to war … But I’ve been to war, he thought.
3. This week’s theme: ‘They want you upstairs’
Last week, was about the autumn and winter of 1529. Cromwell’s world was collapsing around him. And like Simonides in the story, he used his prodigious memory to remember “exactly where everyone was sitting, at the moment the roof fell in.” Like the Putney boy of fifteen, he bet everything on a better future. Make or mar.
This week, the little lawyer Cromwell meets three powerful people: Anne Boleyn, Henry VIII, and Thomas More. His days of “edging blackly into a room” are over. In a matter of weeks, he’s gone from “I’m finished” to the man with “the king’s ear”:
‘I want,’ he says, ‘to become perfectly calm. I want to be able to get into the coop without ruffling the chickens’ feathers. I want to be less like Uncle Norfolk, and more like Marlinspike.’
Marlinspike: Wolsey’s kitten is now the Cromwell cat with “observant golden eyes.” Named after a giant and named after a needle: a marlinspike is a tool used in marine ropework for untying knots and making a hitch to adjust the tension on a rope.
As Cromwell enters the chicken coop, he recalls another time in his life when his fortunes changed for the better:
‘Tommaso, they want you upstairs,’ His movements were unhurried as he nodded to a kitchen child, who brought him a basin of water. He washed his hands, dried them on a linen cloth. He took off his apron and hung it on a peg. For all he knows, it is there still.
Cromwell traded the kitchens for the counting house at the Frescobaldi merchant house in Florence. On his way up the stairs, he hears a young boy singing Scaramella is off to war. He leaves the apron, but takes the tune. And forever after, when his fortunes are rising, he hears the Italian earworm’s merry rhythm rising up from his memories below.
4. Character Focus: Anne Boleyn
She’s so small. Her bones are so delicate, her waist so narrow; if two law students make one cardinal, two Annes make one Katherine.
The conventional narrative is that Thomas Cromwell and Anne Boleyn were allies and even friends in the court of Henry VIII. They were co-religionists, both pushing the king towards an evangelical reformation. Cromwell gave her the “one simple thing” she wanted: an annulment of the king’s marriage, clearing the way to make her Queen of England.
In her research for Wolf Hall, Hilary Mantel came to a different conclusion. There is a glaring absence of correspondence between Anne and Cromwell. She appeared to obstruct him, and his rise to power slowed during her preeminence. Furthermore, his allies and supporters were notably not friends of the Boleyns, but old supporters of Cardinal Wolsey, the man Anne set out to destroy. Did Cromwell never forgive Anne Boleyn for bringing down his former master? Mantel concludes: Anne and Cromwell were not friends or allies, but mutually suspicious rivals in the bear pit of the Tudor court.
Mantel depicts Anne as Cromwell sees her. Unlike her detractors, he doesn’t think she is a witch. There’s no black magic here. He sees a fiercely intelligent and politically agile woman who can make or break anyone at court, including himself. Like everyone who gets on in Wolf Hall, she is part wolf:
‘Are her teeth good?’ Mercy said.
‘For God’s sake, woman: when she sinks them into me, I’ll let you know.’
“You do not have six fingers”, Mantel tells Anne Boleyn in her Notes on characters.1 “The extra digit is added long after your death by Jesuit propaganda.” And during and after her lifetime, she becomes a hate figure for everyone scared of powerful women. Mantel’s portrayal of Anne is controversial because she understates Anne’s charm, her wit, her loyalty and her distinctive beauty that beguiled the king. But this is no character assassination, either. Mantel’s Anne is a compelling portrait of a strong woman in a world that burns strong women:
You are elegant, reserved, self-controlled, cerebral, calculating and astute. But you are (especially as the story progresses) inclined to frayed nerves and shaking hands. You are quick-tempered and, like anyone under pressure, you can be highly irrational. You look at people to see what use can be got out of them, and you immediately see the use of Thomas Cromwell.
What do you think about Mantel’s portrayal of Anne in the book so far?
5. Background: The Italian job
‘There are people, in this household and elsewhere, who would give much to know the whole of what you learned in Italy.’
Little by little, we are assembling Cromwell’s past. Of the real Cromwell’s Italian years we know very little. Our main source is a novella written by Matteo Bandello called Francesco Frescobaldi Shows Hospitality to a Stranger. Bandello put Cromwell in the French army at the battle of Garigliano in 1503, fighting a Spanish army in the ongoing Italian Wars that rocked the peninsula between 1494 and 1559. Cromwell was a teenage mercenary fighting on the losing side of someone else’s war.
‘With the French,’ [Norfolk] chuckles. ‘With the French. And how did you scramble out of that disaster?’
‘I went north. Got into …’ He’s going to say money, but the duke wouldn’t understand trading in money. ‘Cloth,’ he says. ‘Silk, mostly.’
Bandello writes that Cromwell worked for the great mercantile Frescobaldi family in Florence. The Frescobaldi had money invested in the cloth trade in the Low Countries, modern Belgium and the Netherlands. So that’s where Cromwell goes next, before returning to England.
Walter: ‘You look like a foreigner.’
Thomas: ‘I am a foreigner.’
Cromwell’s biographer Diarmaid MacCulloch credits Cromwell’s success to being “the best Italian in all England.” He’s cosmopolitan in a provincial backwater. Mantel’s Cromwell speaks (at the very least) Latin, Spanish, Italian, French, Flemish and Welsh. He learned food at Lambeth Palace and perfected it with the Frescobaldi. The Italians taught him the world of commerce and cloth and a memory system to stitch it all together.
Cromwell was Wolsey’s Italian. In the 1520s, Cromwell’s main brief was the cardinal’s legacy project: establishing two new colleges at Oxford and Ipswich, and a mausoleum built by the Italian architect and sculptor Benedetto da Rovezzano:
The cardinal, who thinks upon a Christian’s last end, has had his tomb designed already, by a sculptor from Florence. His corpse will lie beneath the outspread wings of angels, in a sarcophagus of porphyry. The veined stones will be his monument, when his own veins are drained by the embalmer; when his limbs are set like marble, an inscription of his virtues will be picked out in gold.
When Wolsey fell from favour, the king repurposed the project for his own royal person. It lies now in the crypt of St Paul’s Cathedral, London, but it contains neither Henry nor Wolsey. In 1805, it became the final resting place of Vice-Admiral Horatio Nelson, killed at the Battle of Trafalgar.
While Cromwell was helping Wolsey with his Italian artisans, he was building himself a home at Austin Friars. The district was popular with Italian merchants who could worship safely within the friary church, away from the xenophobic Londoners. There, Cromwell bought one of the most lavish houses in the area from Florentine merchants with links to the Frescobaldi.
Battles. Kitchens. Counting houses and cloth. Looking at frescos with the Frescobaldi. No wonder the Duke of Suffolk asks the king, “where does the fellow spring from?” He can’t fit him together, and as Liz Cromwell once said, “Thomas, there’s no end to you.” Cromwell’s Italian years continue to surprise and inform our Cromwell present.
Bonus: The Haunting of Wolf Hall
For paying subscribers, I discuss the holes in Cromwell’s memory system in the next instalment in my series The Haunting of Wolf Hall:
6. Tangent: Who are you working for?
‘Master Wriothesley has his eye on his advantage?’
‘I hope we all have that. Or why did God give us eyes?’
Something really interesting is going on this week, just beneath the surface of the story. Thomas Wolsey has gone north, leaving Cromwell behind to defend him at court and in parliament. Cromwell “believes and does not believe” that Wolsey is coming back. So, is Cromwell staying behind to help Wolsey? Or is Cromwell staying behind to help Cromwell?
Henry glares at him. ‘I will say this for you. You stick by your man.’
Dig down deep into Cromwell’s soul. At one level, he loves the cardinal. At another, he is doing his reputation no harm by demonstrating his loyalty. The king notices it and admires it. Dig deeper still, and I just wonder whether he feels he has abandoned his master so that he can make his future:
He makes for the courtyard. He falters; in a smoky recess where the light has extinguished itself, he leans against the wall. He is crying. He says to himself, let George Cavendish not come by and see me, and write it down and make it into a play.
He swears softly, in many languages: at life, at himself for giving way to its demands.
What are life’s demands? Cromwell appears to have two motivations: loyalty and ambition. Sometimes, they dovetail; sometimes, they only appear to do so. Note this moment well, because it is significant to the story much later in the trilogy.
7. Spotlight: Ditches and dogholes
‘When you speak to Henry,’ More says, ‘I beg you, speak to the good heart. Not the strong will.’
In the historical record, there were two consequential meetings between Henry VIII and Master Cromwell in the year 1530. One took place in late January, in the king’s gardens at Westminster. Another in December, when according to the imperial ambassador Eustache Chapuys, Cromwell “promised to make him the richest King that England had ever seen.”
This is what Mantel’s Cromwell says:
‘When did anything good last come from a monastery? They do not invent, they only repeat, and what they repeat is corrupt. For hundreds of years the monks have held the pen, and what they have written is what we take to be our history, but I do not believe it really is. I believe they have suppressed the history they don’t like, and written one that is favourable to Rome.’
Later, in the historical record, Chapuys notes that Cromwell “spoke so well and eloquently that the King from that moment made him of his Council.”
Here, Mantel’s Cromwell is eloquent and forceful. His ideas are backed up by experience and religious conviction. But my question is More’s question:
Does Cromwell speak to the king’s good heart or the king’s strong will?
8. Background: Death and taxes
‘He killed his father’s best men. Empson. Dudley. Didn’t the cardinal get one of their houses?’
A spider scuttles from under a stool and presents him with a fact. ‘Empson’s house on Fleet Street. Granted the ninth of October, the first year of this reign.’
The spider is part of Cromwell’s elaborate memory system. The eight-legged mnemonic reminds him of Richard Empson.
Henry VIII’s father had conquered England through battle. To keep the kingdom, he needed to raise money and control the unruly nobility. And he did this through an extensive system of penalties and fines that put the country’s greatest families in debt to the king. In the later years of Henry’s reign, the men in charge of this system were two lawyers, Richard Empson and Edmund Dudley.
They became excessively wealthy and exceedingly unpopular. The only man protecting them was the king. When he died in 1509, the new regime made a clear break with the past by charging both with treason. It is a warning to future tax collectors. And men whose only friend in England is the king.
9. Focus: Made in Chelsea
Master Holbein has grouped them under his gaze, and fixed them for ever: as long as no moth consumes, no flame or mould or blight.
Mantel’s paying with us. In 1752, the painting Cromwell describes was indeed consumed by flames. A fire in a Moravian castle destroyed the original painting by Hans Holbein. The art historian Roy Strong called it Holbein’s “greatest and most innovative work”, a painting a century ahead of its time, and “the greatest single visual artefact to epitomize the aims and ideals of the early Renaissance in England.”2
Thankfully, we have various copies made by Rowland Lockey and a study by Hans Holbein in preparation for the painting:
It is a revolutionary painting because, for the first time, it shows a statesman at home in conversation with his family. It is a compassionate representation of family life and of the ideals of the Rennaisance. It shows us the Thomas More who patronised the arts and encouraged the education of his daughters. This is the More who wrote Utopia, and dreamed of a better world, while keeping his dreams in check with a sharp sense of humour.
The art critic Jonathan Jones called Mantel’s version of More “a travesty”:
Why did Hilary Mantel choose to portray him in a way that flies in the face of all the evidence? The 16th century was another world, violent, extreme and cruel. More was no saint – although he is a Catholic saint. Both More and Thomas Cromwell – Hilary Mantel’s darling – had blood on their hands – and both got executed in their turn. “Around thrones it thunders,” as Thomas Wyatt, the English Renaissance poet warned.
Jones is not alone in his reaction to Mantel’s More. But I think he’s missed the point. Wolf Hall is not supposed to be a neutral account of history. It is a character study of Thomas Cromwell, and we are inside his head. He is an unreliable narrator (aren’t all narrators unreliable?), and Cromwell has only contempt for the Lord Chancellor, Thomas More.
Why? Two things matter most to Cromwell: loyalty to his master Wolsey, and the protection of his fellow evangelicals. More is bringing down the cardinal, who helped put him where he is in the first place. And More is hunting down the Gospellers, who are Cromwell’s brothers and comrades in religion. And to top it all, there’s something envious about Cromwell’s time at Chelsea. More was the Oxford scholar when Cromwell was the kitchen boy. He now sits with his wife and daughters, who are conspicuously alive.
The painting is a perspective, but so is this reality that we see through Cromwell’s eyes. There may be kindness and warmth in this room, but why would Cromwell, so recently bereaved, so close to destruction, be able to see it? He moves through dark days.
‘Dark days,’ says the fool.
‘Let them never come again.’
‘Amen.’ The fool points to the guests. ‘Let these not come again either.’
9. Quote of the Week: Black notes
After the last two weeks of grief, we have the first buds of spring. We should rejoice in them:
He stands by a window. A flock of starlings settles among the tight black buds of a bare tree. Then, like black buds unfolding, they open their wings; they flutter and sing, stiring everything into motion, air, wings, black notes in music. He becomes aware that he is watching them with pleasure: that something almost extinct, some small gesture towards the future, is ready to welcome the spring; in some spare desperate way, he is looking foward to Easter, the end of Lenten fasting, the end of penitence. There is a world beyond this black world. There is a world of the possible. A world where Anne can be queen is a world where Cromwell can be Cromwell. He sees it; then he doesn’t. The moment is fleeting. But insight cannot be taken back. You cannot return to the moment you were in before.
10. Next week
Thank you for reading and joining me on this slow read of the Cromwell trilogy. Next week, we finish this chapter, “Entirely Beloved Cromwell”, taking us up to Christmas 1530.
This book group is entirely funded by its readers. So, if you have enjoyed this post and have found it helpful, I now have two ways you can show your support. You can subscribe to get access to the bonus posts on The Haunting of Wolf Hall. And you can also put some pennies in my tip jar:
Thank you for all your support. Until next week, I am your entirely beloved,
Master Simon Haisell
Instructions for the performers in the Royal Shakespeare Company’s adaptation of Wolf Hall and Bring Up The Bodies. Available here.
Strong, Roy (1990). Lost Treasures of Britain: Five Centuries of Creation and Destruction.
I so appreciate Mantel's depiction of Anne, and the depictions all of the women who show up in these books. So much focus is generally on Anne's appearance: her dark flashing eyes, her French hood flirtatiously showing a bit of her hair, her darker complexion compared to the pale English roses around her. But would mere looks really hold Henry VIII's interest for the years they spent waiting to get married? Anne Boleyn was a charismatic person, but also an intelligent one who gained the sort of power she needed to be a player in the Tudor court. Like most of the other women in this story, she was an active participant in history, not some passive figure that men drool over because she had pretty eyes. It's frustrating when authors diminish female characters to their appearance and fashion sense, and Mantel never falls into that trap. These women are fully aware of who and where they are, and the influence they can have on events, even when they're dismissed by most of the men around them.
I wonder if Cromwell goes around asking random people if he looks like a murderer. Does he care how others perceive him, or is he affirming what he already knows?
And that poor toddler almost crying at the sight of Gardiner! It’s these little moments, so entirely human and vivid, that make this trilogy stand out.