Entirely Beloved Cromwell (Part 2)
Wolf Crawl Week 7: Monday 12 February – Sunday 18 February
To get these updates in your inbox, subscribe to Footnotes and Tangents and turn on notifications for the Cromwell Trilogy.
Welcome to week seven of Wolf Crawl
This week, we are reading the second part of “Entirely Beloved Cromwell, Spring–December 1530”. Cromwell is increasingly where he shouldn’t be. Wolsey dies, and the court makes a play about 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
These resources are free for all, thanks to the generosity of paying subscribers who support my writing and this slow book group. Supporters can read my series of posts on The Haunting of Wolf Hall, and start their own discussion threads in the chat area.
This is a long post and may get clipped by your email provider. It is best viewed online here.
In this week’s post:
This week’s story
This week’s characters
This week’s theme: ‘Suppose he dies?’
Spotlight: A burning prophecy
Theme: Secrets
Character focus: Thomas Cranmer
Background: The English longbow
Location: Hampton Court Palace
Focus: All the world's a stage
Quote of the week: The cardinal is alive
Next week
1. This week’s story
After supper with Thomas More, Cromwell calls on Anne Boleyn. The Boleyns are getting more powerful now the cardinal is down, but the relationship between Anne and Cromwell is still uncertain.
August: the cardinal is behaving like a king in the north. Norfolk and Gardiner are plotting. And Cromwell is afraid. Norfolk comes to him, spitting blood about the cardinal. Thomas Howard wants the cardinal’s man to work for him. “Can we not work together?” Cromwell says. “Do not forget your place,” says Uncle Norfolk.
When next Cromwell sees Anne, she is with Dr Thomas Cranmer, the Cambridge scholar. In her bed, Anne has found a drawing of her without a head. The “sickly milk-faced creeper” in Anne’s service is John Seymour’s daughter from Wolf Hall. Alone, Cranmer reminds Cromwell of the scholars dead in the fish cellar at Cardinal College, Oxford.
Cranmer comes to see him and tells him his story. It contains the dead: his father, a wife and an unborn child. A wasteland within a man, who has now become a priest. Cranmer says the men now around the king have no kindness, charity, or love. He must bring back Wolsey, Cromwell says. Cranmer: “That cannot happen now.”
Cromwell meets the king in the butts, bow in hand, practising his shot. The king wants to talk to him alone, which means without Norfolk or Suffolk. There is something desperate about Henry; he wants a solution now. Anne is threatening to leave him. He is the “winter king”, turned inward, prepared to reward anyone who will show him the way back to summer.
November. Norfolk is raging and ranting because his niece is still not queen. A whole year since the cardinal came down and nothing to show for it.
All Soul’s Day at Austin Friars, the Cromwell household are at war. Alice and Jo want the Pope to rescue Liz from Purgatory. Mercy, the old Lollard, is smirking. Richard denies the sacrament. They are “the world in little”.
That same day, Harry Percy is sent to arrest Cardinal Wolsey for high treason. He is arrested two days before his arrival at York. Wolsey falls ill on the road to London and dies at Leicester Abbey. George Cavendish tells Cromwell of the cardinal’s last days, and Cromwell opens the package from his master: the turquoise ring.
At Hampton Court, they perform a farce: “The Cardinal’s Descent Into Hell.” Norfolk chortles. Anne laughs and applauds. The king looks afraid. When it is all over, Cromwell goes backstage to identify the devils: George Boleyn, Harry Norris, Francis Weston, and William Brereton. Patch the fool is playing Wolsey. “I can fix you,” Cromwell warns him. Patch says, “Come and meet me here, ten years today, if you’re still alive.”
“You would have a fright if I was dead.”
Ten years from now, Thomas Cromwell will be five months dead.
2. This week’s characters
Click on each link for more details and plot summaries for each character:
Thomas Cromwell • Henry VIII • Thomas Cranmer • Stephen Gardiner • Duke of Norfolk • Thomas Wolsey • Mary Tudor • George Cavendish • Mary Boleyn • Anne Boleyn • Harry Percy • Thomas Wyatt • Alice Wellyfed • Harry Norris • George Boleyn • William Brereton • Francis Weston • Jo Williamson • Thomas Wriothesley • Master Sexton
3. This week’s theme: ‘Suppose he dies?’
He thinks, my lord would have made such an excellent king; so benign, so sure and suave in his dealings, so equitable, so swift and so discerning. His rule would have been the best rule, his servants the best servants; and how he would have enjoyed his state.
This week is all about the succession. The transfer of power. Picture Norfolk panicking, in the last week of October 1530. Thomas Howard is so close to, and so far from, seeing his niece crowned Queen of England. With the cardinal and Katherine out of the way, the Howards and Boleyns can rule England. But, frets Norfolk, “Suppose he dies?”
If the king dies, the Boleyns will be finished, the Howards will totter, and a regency will form around Queen Katherine and her heir, “that talking shrimp”, little Mary.
Cromwell is also afraid. Not for the death of King Henry, but for the fate of another king, his master Thomas Wolsey, on the road to his enthronement as Archbishop of York.
The cardinal has reverted to form. “He is holding dinners, and inviting all the local gentry. He is dispensing charity on his old princely scale, settling lawsuits, and sweet-talking estranged husbands and wives into sharing a roof together.” He is building again. And wherever he goes, he is cheered by the people. He is “alter rex”, the other king. Norfolk spits:
‘Does he think he can dig in up there and carve himself a kingdom? Cardinal’s hat not enough for him, only a crown will do for Thomas bloody Wolsey the bleeding butcher’s boy.’
When Henry becomes the “winter king”, he issues a fresh charge of treason against Wolsey. The cardinal has been in communication with the French. As the historian Diarmaid MacCulloch notes:
Wolsey’s fall left Cromwell desperately vulnerable, regardless of what he had actually known about the plotting. After all, he was a great friend of Dr Augstine, who was unquestionably entangled in the Cardinal’s promiscious intrigues.
Dr Augstine doesn’t make it into Wolf Hall, but he is branded a traitor and “ignominiously ridden to London with his feet tied under his horse’s belly.” For a brief moment in late 1530, Cromwell enters a dangerous interregnum. He’s one traitor’s testimony away from the executioner’s block.
But he survives. Like the cardinal’s heir apparent, he receives Wolsey’s turquoise ring, “cold as if it came from the tomb.” The ring fits “as if it had been made for him,” and now everywhere he looks, he sees the cardinal’s red, “the cardinal is alive and speaking.” The cardinal is dead. Long live Thomas Cromwell.
Read Hilary Mantel’s thought on Thomas Wolsey: The other king.
4. Spotlight: A burning prophecy
‘There is a prophecy that a queen of England will be burned. But a prophecy does not frighten me, and even if it is true, I will run the risk.’
In the historical record, it is the Imperial Ambassador Eustache Chapuys who tells us that Anne “did not care” about this prophecy. But we readers have foreknowledge of what is to come. “Divorced, beheaded, died. Divorced, beheaded, survived.” We know what happens to Anne.
Mantel can’t resist this, from time to time. Last week, Cromwell looked at Thomas More’s carpet and thought: “The flaw in the weave hardly matters. A turkey carpet is not an oath.” No one is going to lose their head because Thomas More doesn’t know a good carpet from a bad one. But More will lose his head later in the story for an oath he refuses to take.
Or, at the end of this chapter, when Patch says: “Come and meet me here, ten years today, if you’re still alive.” The hairs on our neck must stand up because, in ten years' time, Cromwell will be dead.
Anne’s prophecy of burning seems to be traced back to Merlin. Like Nostradamus, Merlin’s prophecies were mined for meaning throughout the medieval world and into the Early Modern. And we will remember that, last week, Gregory Cromwell found Anne Boleyn on the title page of the latest edition of Le Morte d’Arthur.
King Arthur’s queen Guinevere narrowly escaped death by burning for adultery. In Tudor England, adulterers were not burned at the stake. But adultery with the king’s wife was high treason. Men were hanged, drawn and quartered. Women were burned. In both cases, a merciful king might commute the sentence to a swift beheading.
The other crime punishable by burning was heresy. Anne Boleyn has heretical views on religion and has shown the king a book by the heretical translator William Tyndale. Remember that only a couple of years ago, Thomas More was trying to get Cromwell to admit to reading Tyndale.
Treason. Heresy. Burning. Prophecy. We will never be far from this fearsome four.
5. Theme: Secrets
‘There are no secrets, are there?’
One of my favourite details from this week is Jo’s “awkward little backstitch which you would be hard-pushed to imitate.” Her “poor sewing” is put to good use, sealing Cromwell’s dispatches to Wolsey.
If you want to, this can send you down a warren of rabbit holes on Tudor codes, cyphers and letter locking. The fascinating history of cryptology and secrets before end-to-end encryption and two-factor authentication.
The Cromwell trilogy is all about secrets. In the 1530s, the political and religious landscape shifts at an alarming speed. As we will see, survival is all about dissimulation and the careful arrangement of your public face. Your truths, if you have any, must be kept behind high walls and inside locked rooms. Secrets will unmake you. They will get you killed.
The problem of secrets was raised last week, at the start of “Entirely Beloved Cromwell”. He is thinking about the rumours the musician Mark Smeaton was spreading:
To himself he says, as he moves away, you may never think of us, Mark, but we think of you. Or at least I do, I think of you calling me a felon and predicting my death. It is true that the cardinal always says, there are no safe places, there are no sealed rooms, you may as well stand on Cheapside shouting out your sins as confess to a priest anywhere in England. But when I spoke to the cardinal of killing, when I saw a shadow on the wall, there was no one to hear; so if Mark reckons I’m a murderer, that’s only because he thinks I look like one.
No safe places, no sealed rooms. When Cromwell first meets Cranmer, the scholar advises him that Anne Boleyn doesn’t want Cromwell for a brother. “There are no secrets, are there?” replies Cromwell. A slight indiscretion in a hallway with Mary Boleyn, and the whole world knows about it.
If there are secrets, Cromwell makes it his business to know about them. If there are sealed rooms, you must find a way inside. And Thomas Cromwell, “who is increasingly where he shouldn’t be”, is adept at picking the locks designed to keep gentlemen safe from men like him:
Says the duke, ‘Cromwell, why are you here? Listening to the talk of gentlemen?’
‘My lord, when you shout, the beggars on the street can hear you. In Calais.’
6. Character focus: Thomas Cranmer
A whisper in a panelled room raises spirits from the fens, fetches the dead: Cambridge twilights, damp seeping from the marshes and rush lights burning a bare swept room where an act of love takes place.
Enter: Thomas Cranmer. Yeah, I know, another Thomas. But he’s another key character moving into the plot. Later, he will be the first reforming Archbishop of Canterbury, setting out the foundations of the Anglican Church. In 1556, Mary I will have him burned at the stake as a heretic. And in 1563, his life will be immortalised in John Foxe’s Book of Martyrs.
But right now, he’s just simple Doctor Cranmer, formerly of Jesus College, Cambridge, and now appointed to Anne Boleyn’s household.
What will interest us is the relationship between Cromwell and Cranmer. And who better to sketch that out for us than Hilary Mantel herself, in her notes on characters:
You are the introvert to Cromwell’s extrovert. You act so much in concert that some less well-informed European politicians think you are one person: Dr Chramuel. When you and your other self are with Henry, you go smoothly into action, able to communicate everything to each other with a glance or a breath … You must be wary of Cromwell, with his reputation as Wolsey’s bully boy. But once you begin to work together, you instinctively understand each other and become friends.
We’re about to see a lot more of Cran and Crumb working together, and I think you may enjoy the flowering of this rather unlikely but productive friendship.
7. Background: The English longbow
At home or abroad, in wartime or peacetime, happy or aggrieved, the king likes to practise several times in the week, as an Englishman should; using his height, the beautiful trained muscles of his arms, shoulders and chest, he sends his arrows snapping straight to the eye of the target.
There is a lot of history packed into the short scene with Cromwell watching Henry practising his archery. The English were famous for their longbows, although they may have originally been used against them by the Welsh in the Anglo-Norman conquest in the eleventh century. Here Cromwell compares the king’s archery to Cromwell’s own Welsh relatives:
Compare him with Richard William, Richard Cromwell as he is now. His grandfather ap Evan was an artist with the bow. He never saw him, but you can bet he had muscles like cords and every one in use from the heels up.
English archery played a decisive role in the One Hundreds Years’ War against France, most notably at the Battle of Crécy in 1346. Longbows proved more deadly than crossbows, with far greater range and rate of fire.
In 1363, the first law was passed compelling Englishmen to practice archery on Sundays and holidays. As Cromwell says, the king practises whenever he can, “as an Englishman should”. In 1511, Henry passed his own law ordering all men under 60 to practice regularly and take responsibility for arming their sons and servants. These laws prohibited games and gambling, including early versions of football, cricket and tennis, so men could spend more time in the butts.
There was a serious drawback to arming every man in England with a lethal longbow. During the Peasants’ Revolt of 1381, rebels took up the weapon against the nobility. And the longbow became synonymous with that most famous of green glade outlaws, Robin Hood.
It’s a dangerously democratic weapon, and the king is a “gentleman amateur”. Cromwell tells him that his fellow guildsmen “destroy the butchers and the grocers” every Sunday on Moorfields, an open space north of the City of London.
Henry would like to go “in disguise” and shoot with Cromwell and his lawyer friends. "For sure we would win,” Cromwell says. “It is what you would say to a child.” One suspects the king would not be quite so impressive as those mighty butchers, grocers and vintners of London.
Read more about the history of the longbow and archery in Tudor England.
8. Location: Hampton Court Palace
He is surprised there is any daylight left; he had thought it was deepest night. In these courts, Wolsey lingers; he built them. Turn any corner, and you will think you will see my lord, with a scroll of draughtsman’s plans in his hands, his glee at his sixty turkey carpets, his hope to lodge and entertain the finest mirror-makers of Venice – ‘Now, Thomas, you will add to your letter some Venetian endearments, some covert phrases that will suggest, in the local dialect and the most delicate way possible, that I pay top rates.’
Many thanks to
for sending me pictures from her most recent visit to Hampton Court. The Great Hall provides the staging for the final big scene in this chapter: “The Cardinal’s Descent into Hell.”The cardinal began work on Hampton Court in 1514. Inspired by Italian Renaissance architecture, it became one of the finest palaces in Tudor England. So it is an appropriate setting for Wolsey’s final fall, “Alter Rex” descending through the earth and down into hell. A butcher’s son who lived like a prince? The nobility must ensure such a thing never happens again.
After 1529, the palace became one of Henry’s favoured residences. Much of the Tudor building was later destroyed in the 1690s, as the palace was renovated and expanded to rival the Palace of Versailles across the narrow sea. The last monarch to reside there was George II, in the eighteenth century.
Explore the palace with Google Art and Culture.
9. Focus: All the world's a stage
did some delving into the archive for me this week. A version of this play about Wolsey was performed around this time. The Imperial Ambassador Eustace Chapuys wrote to his master Charles V in January 1531:He picks up the costume Patch has cast off. Its red is the fiery, cheap, quick-fading scarlet of Brazil-wood dye, and it smells of alien sweat. ‘How can you act this part?’
‘I act what part I’m paid to act. And you?’
The earl of Wiltshire lately gave a supper to seigneur De la Guiche, when there was played a farce of the going of the Cardinal to hell; for which De la Guiche blamed the Earl, and still more the Duke, because he had commanded it to be printed.
The earl is Anne Boleyn’s father, Thomas, and the Duke is our friend, Uncle Norfolk. De la Guiche was an ambassaor to France. The foreign dignitaries were clearly not impressed by this Boleyn-Howard party piece. This was a private performance and not at Hampton Court. But Hilary Mantel fills in a gap in history, and puts Wolsey’s fall on stage in the palace of Wolsey’s rise.
In Wolf Hall, this is a play within a play. This book is framed as a theatrical piece. Turn to the front and consider again the cast of characters and the two epigraphs on classical and Tudor theatre. It is a book about performance and pageantry, where everyone, and especially Cromwell, learns to play their part. The greater part of the trilogy is taken up by dialogue, and it should be no surprise that the books were adapted into an immensely successful stage production.
I am sure we will return to these themes over the course of the year. For now, I highly recommend this video from The Huntington conference on Hilary Mantel. It includes a brilliant interview with Ben Miles, who played Thomas Cromwell in the stage version, and a paper by English Literature scholar Kevin Gallin on “Staging the World: Wolf Hall, the Historical Novel, and the Global Nation-State”.
10. Quote of the week: The cardinal is alive
Do you remember how the Cromwell household cut up Liz’s clothes to make new garments? Mantel echoes that ritual here, and then raises her game even further to mark the moment when Cromwell picks up Wolsey’s bloodstained banner:
The cardinal’s scarlet clothes now lie folded and empty. They cannot be wasted. They will be cut up and become other garments. Who knows where they will get to over the years? Your eye will be taken by a crimson cushion or a patch of red on a banner or ensign. You will see a glimpse of them in a man’s inner sleave or in the flash of a whore’s petticoat.
Another man would go to Leicester to see where he died and talk to the abbot. Another man would have trouble imagining it, but he has no trouble. The red of a carpet’s ground, the flush of the robin’s breast or the chaffinch, the red of a wax seal or the heart of the rose, implanted in his landscape, cered in his inner eye, and caught in the glint of a ruby, in the colour of blood, the cardinal is alive and speaking. Look at my face: I am not afraid of any man alive.
Bonus: The Haunting of Wolf Hall
And for paying subscribers, I expand on this quote in a little piece I’m just going to call:
11. Next week
Thank you for reading and joining me on this slow read of the Cromwell trilogy.
Next week, we are reading the short chapter, “The Dead Complain of Their Burial, Christmastide 1530” and the first section of “Arrange Your Face, 1531”. In the Fourth Estate paperback edition, this section concludes on page 305, with the line: “because in the end we all come home to God.”
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 so much for all your support.
Until next week, I am your ever-faithful servant,
Master Simon Haisell
I look forward to these posts so very much.
On the topic of Mantel's foreshadowing: George Boleyn, struggling to remove his devil costume after the Wolsey "roast," complains that his costume is like the "Shirt of Nessus." I had to look it up. It's the fatal, poisoned shirt Hercules/Heracles wore that contained the hydra's venom that "cooked Heracles alive," per Wikipedia.
I loved the passage about Wolsey’s cut up and repurposed clothing. The future lives of our clothes. The things that go on without us and the little scraps of ourselves that we leave behind. Likewise, the section where Cromwell and Cavendish discuss Wolsey’s death and Cavendish admitting that he falsely said that Cromwell was on the way. Anyone who has ever tried to race against time to be with a dying loved one will understand Cromwell’s “make this story short, I cannot bear it”. And when Cromwell inadvertently laughs at the play when mock-Wolsey asks about the quality of the devil’s wine. Cromwell laughing in fondness and recognition as the others mock. Beautifully done. … And wear your shirts of Nessus with pride boys… what goes around comes around. Love it!