'Alas, What Shall I Do For Love?' (Part 1)
Wolf Crawl Week 10: Monday 4 March – Sunday 10 March
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Welcome to week ten of Wolf Crawl
This week, we are reading the first part of “Alas, What Shall I Do For Love? Spring 1532”. A busy Cromwell reels in two big fish and becomes indispensable to the Howards and Boleyns.
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.
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In this week’s post:
This week’s story
This week’s characters
This week’s theme: Making the world
Tangent: No country for young men
Theme: Divide and rule
Footnote: Jezebel and the wild dogs
Footnote: Balancing the books
Footnote: Two big fish
Quote of the week: Those days are not these days
Next week
1. This week’s story
It is early 1532, and Thomas Cromwell is moving against the clergy in Parliament. Stephen Gardiner feels obliged to lead the loyal opposition and it is Cromwell who saves Gardiner from losing his job as Master Secretary.
Cromwell is doing everyone’s job these days but has no office of his own. So, as Henry Wyatt suggested, he asks Anne Boleyn for a position in the Jewel House.
Thomas Wyatt comes to see Cromwell. He says he never slept with Anne Boleyn but thinks she has had other lovers. Cromwell says it suits him to take her at her own valuation: the queen-to-be is a virgin.
Thomas More comes to Austin Friars to threaten Cromwell. Cromwell remembers the burning of a Lollard he witnessed as a child.
In April, he becomes Keeper of the Jewel House. Hugh Latimer visits him and asks about James Bainham, awaiting execution. But Bainham must burn. Thomas Avery returns home with a book of mathematics by Luca Pacioli.
Cromwell bags two big fish in May: More resigns as Lord Chancellor. And Stephen Gardiner gets his house pinched by the king for Anne Boleyn, the queen-in-waiting. Cranmer writes from Nuremberg, with notes in the margin: he has a secret, he says.
The painter Hans Holbein is at Austin Friars. Holbein does not want to return home to the religious infighting in the Swiss cantons and cities. Cromwell assures him that he and the king have plenty of work for him.
But first a crisis: Harry Percy’s wife is petitioning for a divorce. He claims he is married to Anne Boleyn. The Boleyns and Howards call in Cromwell. They need a man like Wolsey to make Harry Percy go away. Cromwell steps up.
He meets with the earl and explains to him how the world works. And the next day the young earl swears on the Good Book that he was never married to Anne Boleyn. Later, at Austin Friars, Cromwell consults another case pending: a prophetess down in Kent speaking out against the king’s marriage.
“This girl, you know, she claims she can raise the dead.”
2. This week’s characters
Click on each link for more details and plot summaries for each character:
Thomas Cromwell • Stephen Gardiner • Henry VIII • Thomas More • Thomas Audley • Richard Riche • Rowland Lee • Hugh Latimer • John Petyt • Thomas Cranmer • George Boleyn • Thomas Boleyn • Anne Boleyn • Henry Norris • Mary Boleyn • Mary Shelton • Harry Percy • Mark Smeaton • Jane Rochford • Thomas Wyatt • Dick Purser • Thomas More • Eustace Chapuys • William Warham • Thomas Avery • Thomas Wriothesley • Stephen Vaughan • Hans Holbein • Francis Bryan • Thomas Howard • Elizabeth Barton • Henry Courtenay • Lady Courtenay
Bonus: The Haunting of Wolf Hall
Paying subscribers can read the 10th instalment in my series exploring the spectral in Mantel’s Cromwell trilogy. This week, I look at the ghost of Joan Boughton.
3. This week’s theme: Making the world
How can he explain to him? The world is not run from where he thinks. Not from his border fortresses, not even from Whitehall. The world is run from Antwerp, from Florence, from places he has never imagined; from Lisbon, from where the ships with sails of silk drift west and are burned up in the sun. Not from castle walls, but from counting houses, not by the call of the bugle but by the click of the abacus, not by the grate and click of the mechanism of the gun but by the scrape of the pen on the page of the promissory note that pays for the gun and the gunsmith and the powder and shot.
Wolf Hall is a book about making things. Making a man, a country, a history, the world. It is also about unmaking and breaking things, but we will come to that.
Anne Boleyn and her people are fond of saying they made Thomas Cromwell. “She made Tom Wyatt a poet. She made Harry Percy a madman. I’m sure she has some ideas about what to make you.” But we are often deceived about where power lies and who is making who.
Cromwell believes Parliament and the statute book can make the world. Law says what England is and the best laws are poetry to the lawmaker. “Anything that is precise is beautiful,” he says, “anything that balances in all its parts, anything that is proportionate.”
But power is not something you have. It is the doing of a thing. It is a verb, not a noun. It is he, Cromwell, and Rafe and Call-Me-Risley, “scribbling amendments between the lines” all night long to make law, divide enemies and rule England.
There are people, like the Earl of Wiltshire, Thomas Boleyn, who think titles confer power. He is the father of the queen-to-be so he “deserves some special title.” Monseigneur. It doesn’t matter if it means nothing, and that they all smirk behind your back. Some are happy with titles.
But titles will deceive you. As Wolsey once said, "It doesn’t really matter what the title of the office is. Let any colleague on the council turn his back; he would turn again to find that I was doing his job.” Stephen Gardiner is still Master Secretary, but “he, Cromwell, now sees the king almost every day.”
This is what England is, now, in 1532. You think you know your mind and your memories. You think you know what truth is. You may believe you are married to Anne Boleyn. Or you are Master Secretary or Lord Chancellor of England.
But minds and memories are faulty. They fail like wafers in the irons, fish gasping on the riverbank. Minds and memories can be put right, by exacting men like Thomas Cromwell, working late into the night, balancing their books to make your errant facts and figures disappear.
The world is not what you think it is.
4. Tangent: No country for young men
‘That song of his, “Pastime With Good Company.” When I hear it there is something inside me, like a little dog, that wants to howl.’
Henry VIII wrote “Pastime With Good Company” when he was very young and it was incredibly popular at the start of his reign, and long after. It evokes the confident youthful energy of the new king:
Pastime with good company I love and shall until I die; Grudge who will, but none deny So God be pleased thus live will I For my pastance Hunt, sing, and dance My heart is set: All goodly sport For my comfort Who shall me let?
Here is the king in the year of his accession, 1509:
But is not now 1532. Cromwell tells Thomas Wyatt: “The king is past forty. It is melancholy to hear him sing of the days when he was young and stupid.” Wyatt is still “a young man”, but his hair is receding, he cannot hold his drink or stand up to lions any more. “I’m too old for such behaviour,” he says. “But too young to lose my hair.”
The king may be past forty, but he is still a child. His skin is thin, and he has tantrums, shrieks, and stomps. He has nightmares and must be comforted by his councillors. “For sure we would win,” Cromwell once told him. “It is what you would say to a child.”
Cromwell is closer to fifty than forty. But if the king’s best days are behind him, Cromwell is only now reaching his stride. The king considers his youth with melancholy, but Cromwell prefers his past in the shadows. “He doesn’t mean to give away pieces of himself.” When the king was young, hunting and jousting, he, Cromwell, was hiding from his father and watching an old woman burn for her beliefs.
This is no country for young men. Anne’s lute-player, Mark Smeaton, is such a “sweet boy” but “he does goggle.” Or the Earl of Northumberland, Harry Percy, who thinks he can make a stand on his conscience with his castles and men in livery. Drowning in drink and debt, the young earl says, “Henry may be king, but he is stealing another man’s wife; Anne Boleyn is rightfully my wife.”
Young men say, “I am not afraid to speak the truth”, and feel the invincibility of “ancient rights” that let them be stupid, over and over. But Cromwell is not young and has no ancient rights. He has his wits and his nerve and his "banker friends.” And right now, the Howards and the Boleyns and Henry Tudor, all in his hand. He knows that success at life isn’t about youth and beauty, but about the precise geometry of finding out what people want and then finding a way to make it happen:
'Yes,' Anne says, 'but the cardinal fixed him, and most unfortunately the cardinal is dead.' There is a silence: a silence sweet as music. He looks, smiling, at Anne, at Monseigneur, at Norfolk. If life is a chain of gold, sometimes God hangs a charm on it.'
Be old and useful, not young and foolish. And whatever you are, never be old and useless. Like the Archbishop of Canterbury, William Warham:
'And Warham is here,' someone says: the door opens, nothing happens, then slowly very slowly the ancient prelate shuffles in. He takes his seat. His hands tremble as they rest on the cloth before him. His head trembles on his neck. His skin parchment-coloured, like the drawing that Hans made of him. He looks around the table with a slow lizard blink.
Warham had once been useful. He had arranged Arthur’s marriage to Katherine of Aragon and crowned the new king and queen in 1509. He was once Lord Chancellor, before Wolsey “relieved him of worldly office.” Now, he’s ready to shuffle off this world altogether. He is no fan of Henry’s new men and the king’s assault on the ancient rights of the church. But only an old dying man can tell the king the truth:
'I have seen you deify your own will and appetite, to the sorrow and scandal of Christian people. I have been loyal to you, to the point of violence of my own conscience. I have done much for you, but now I have done the last thing I will ever do.'
5. Theme: Divide and rule
The king is present; he watches, he learns who is for him and who against, and at the end of the process he gives his councillor a grim nod of approval.
To this day, votes in the English Parliament (now the UK Parliament) are made by acclamation. Those in favour shout “yay”, those opposed shout “no”, and the winner is the side that shouts the loudest. In most cases, this is the simplest and quickest means of polling the House. But if the House is divided, the Speaker calls, “Division! Clear the lobbies!” The halls outside the debating chamber are emptied of non-members, and the parliamentarians divide down the government and opposition lobbies to register their support or dissent.
The process obliges everyone to make their position clear. When the king is watching, the moment will focus minds and encourage acquiescence to his will.
The first division was probably in the 1523 Parliament when Thomas More was Speaker. It may have even been More’s idea, no small irony given that Cromwell uses it in 1532 to flush out the king’s opponents, led by an increasingly uncomfortable Lord Chancellor More.
You must wait till the steam dies down, and then you start counting. If you miss a beat the smell of scorching permeates the air. A second divides the successes from the failures.
Hilary Mantel craftily squeezes these dry parliamentary proceedings between a description of the baking of spiced wafers at Austin Friars. Like Cromwell’s management of Parliament, the “process involves a good eye, exact timing and a steady hand.” The “smell of scorching” must make us think of the executions to come, and the failed wafers are the unhappy men who find themselves unable to support the king.
But the bills are voted into law, the king takes another step towards supremacy over the church, and the Boleyns inch closer to the throne. No wonder he, Cromwell, sends a fresh batch of wafers to Monseigneur Thomas Boleyn.
It’s pleasant business when you’re winning, but Cromwell knows he needs his enemies. They deflect attention, and they draw out poison. Besides, “We quite like fighting,” says Cromwell. “I’d prefer to put my past behind me, but I’m not allowed to.” And politics runs on conflict, not consensus. When the king asks Cromwell to patch up his differences with Gardiner, Cromwell thinks his king deceives himself of the rules of the game:
It is not oxen he wants, but brutes who will go head-to-head, injure and maim themselves in the battle for his favour. It's clear his chances with the king are better if he doesn't get on with Gardiner than if he does. Divide and rule. But then, he rules anyway.
Tangent: The Legend of the Baker of Eeklo
OK, so I couldn’t resist sharing this painting inspired by a Flemish folk legend of the baker of Eeklo. It tells the story of a baker who sold new heads to men dissatisfied with their appearance. The baker’s assistants lop off the customers’ heads and replace them with cabbages to stem the bleeding. Then they knead and roll out fine new heads and bake them in the oven. In the painting, you can see a woman remonstrating with the baker, perhaps returning her husband’s head that hasn’t turned out quite as she hoped.
I feel Mantel’s Cromwell may have appreciated this image, and may have called his opponents in Parliament “cabbage heads”, if that expression was in use in the 1530s. The first recorded use of “cabbage head” to mean a fool is in the writing of Aphra Behn in 1682.
Footnote: Waffles and wafers
Here, I don’t want to tread too much on
’s toes. She’s doing a wonderful job of documenting the food in Wolf Hall. In last week’s post, Andrea shared this seventeenth-century painting of Belgian waffles. This drew my attention to the detail that Cromwell’s spiced wafers are more like waffles than biscuits or cookies:When you press the plates together there is an animal shriek as they meet, and steam hisses into the air. If you panic and release the pressure you will have a claggy mess to scrape away.
If you’ve ever cleaned a waffle iron, you can share the pain of the kitchen boys at Austin Friars. There’s plenty more on Early Modern waffle-making on this page, including irons for stamping the crest of the Burgundian dukes. At Austin Friars, it is always, and only the Tudor rose.
6. Footnote: Jezebel and the wild dogs
Anne says, 'I am Jezebel. You, Thomas Cromwell, are the priests of Baal.' Her eyes are alight. 'As I am a woman, I am the means by which sin enters this world. I am the devil's gateway, the cursed ingress. I am the means by which Satan attacks the man, whom he was not bold enough to attack, except through me. Well, that is their view of the situation.
Eustace Chapuys gives an account of William Peto’s sermon to the king in his letters to the emperor. It fits the ambassador’s belief that all England opposes the Boleyn marriage. It also adheres to the stereotype of the sexually promiscuous and controlling woman behind the throne: a society led by men afraid of powerful women.
But also: “Jezebel was thrown out of a window of her palace,” Mantel writes. “Wild dogs tore her body into shreds.”
As we step further into this book, we find many dogs lurking in the corridors of power. Cromwell, the “butcher’s dog”. Stephen Gardiner, the “mastiff being let towards a bear.” At home, there is Bella and there are Gregory’s greyhounds. Anne’s little dogs. Wolf Hall is the title of the book and is the Seymour’s Wiltshire home. But it is also a symbol for the Tudor court, where Homo homini lupus, “man is wolf to man.”
Lion, bears and wild dogs. It’s dog-eat-dog out there, and we’re only getting started.
7. Footnote: Balancing the books
‘I heard him lecture in Venice, it will be more than twenty years ago now, I was your age, I suppose. He spoke about proportion. Proportion in building, in music, in paintings, in justice, in the commonwealth, the state; about how rights should be balanced, the power of a prince and his subjects, how the wealthy citizen should keep his books straight and say his prayers and serve the poor. He spoke about how a printed page should look. How a law should read. Or a face, what makes it beautiful.’
Another little piece of the Cromwell puzzle and his half-hidden Italian years: a self-made student of the Italian mathematician Luca Pacioli. We might imagine that the Frescobaldi sponsored his journey to Venice to learn from the “father of modern accounting.”
The book Cromwell holds in his hands is powerful. Summa de Arithmetica sets out the principles of double-entry bookkeeping, a system of accountancy known at the time as the Venetian style. It shows you how to balance the books, accounting for every transaction twice to avoid costly errors. It is a how-to book for the early modern merchant, and it is going to change the world.
Of course, Thomas Cromwell, has a way of making accountancy sound menacing. When Thomas Wyatt’s friends don’t have the shillings to pay Cromwell, he says calmly. “Never mind. I’ll put it on the account.” Wyatt’s drinking friends include Francis Weston, one of the four devils in the Wolsey play. When he saves Gardiner’s skin from the Tudor bear, he thinks: “You owe me, Stephen. The bill will come in by and by.”
And when More retires from public life to “Write. Pray,” he, Thomas Cromwell, gives the ex-Lord Chancellor some legal advice, pro bono:
'My recommendation would be write only a little, and pray a lot.' 'Now, is that a threat?' More is smiling. 'It may be. My turn, don't you think?'
8. Footnote: Two big fish
Late in May, two fish of prodigal size are caught in the Thames, or rather they are washed up, dying, on the muddy shore. 'Am I expected to do something about it?' he says, when Johane brings the news in.
There are no prizes for guessing who these big fish represent: Stephen Gardiner is out in the cold, and Thomas More has returned his chain of office. They certainly look washed up and defeated. But are they dying on the muddy shore? Not yet. And portents and prophecies can sometimes be very wrong.
9. Quote of the week: Those days are not these days
Think back to 1529, “Make or Mar”, and the last days of Cardinal Wolsey. Remember how he looked at the starlings, “black buds on a bare tree”, and thought of a “world beyond this black world.” The world of the possible, where Anne can be queen, and “Cromwell can be Cromwell.”
Well, Anne is not yet queen, but Cromwell feels a little more like Cromwell. He seems safe in his skin, with a stride in his step and the trace of a smile about the lips. For now, things are going his way. And for now, he is no longer haunted, and the dead are sleeping:
There were days, not too long past, days since Lizzie died, when he'd woken in the morning and had to decide, before he could speak to anybody, who he was and why. There were days when he'd woken from dreams of the dead and searching for them. When his waking self trembled, at the threshold of deliverance from his dreams. But those days are not these days. Sometimes, when Chapuys has finished digging up Walter's bones and making his own life unfamiliar to him, he feels almost impelled to speak in defence of his father, his childhood. But it is no use to justify yourself. It is no good to explain. It is weak to be anecdotal. It is wise to coneal the past even if there is nothing to conceal. A man's power is in the half-light, in the half-seen movements of his hand and the unguessed-at expression of his face. It is the absence of facts that frightens people: the gap you open, into which they pour their fears, fantasies, desires.
10. Next week
Thank you for reading and joining me on this slow read of the Cromwell trilogy. Next week, we finish “Alas, What Shall I Do For Love? Spring 1532” and the brief following chapter “Early Mass, November 1532.” Guys, we’re going to France!
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Until next week, I am your guide,
Master Simon Haisell
Every other spring semester for the past 15 years, I've run an extended role-playing simulation about Henry VIII, Thomas Cromwell, Thomas More, and the Reformation Parliament in my course on early modern political theory. We read and discussed Marsilius of Padua, More's Utopia, Luther's treatises, bits of Erasmus, and Machiavelli's Prince and then I distributed their role descriptions. On the first day of the simulation, I put on a robe and crown and, holding a bejeweled scepter made by one of my students, delivered a speech to open Parliament and make it clear to Members that I expected them to do my bidding. Then I went to the back of the class and stayed there for the next five weeks while the students worked to put their heads and voices into political ideas of the 16th century. They debated and strong-armed each other, deciding whether the King would replace the Pope as decision-maker (the rise of state sovereignty, which Henry is pushing), whether the clergy had the power make law (leading to the end of ecclesiastical rule, which we saw happen in our reading this week), and eventually whether the King can demand an oath of loyalty that supercedes all other bonds (an oath that More will not tolerate). This week's reading, as indicated in Simon's commentary in #3 and #5 above, is all about this remaking of the English political world and Cromwell's (so far successful) attempt to manage it through "balanced accounting." Each semester, some student played Cromwell and figured out what Machiavelli meant about exercise of power, another became More and tried to erase heresy, others played the roles of Norfolk, Boleyn, Cranmer, and smaller characters who are popping up in our reading. The students were sometimes overwhelmed and often electrified by the experience, and I had the most damn fun I could possibly have as I watched it happen anew with each group of students. Political theory played out on the ground, and we worked to figure out how it all mattered when the simulation ended. When Wolf Hall was published, several years after I started running the simulation, Mantel turned on the lights for me in a way I will never forget. Suddenly I was inside Cromwell's head and my behind-the-scenes conversations with the students went to a whole new level. I retired from teaching last year and the many iterations of the Cromwell simulation are some of my happiest memories, which means that rereading Wolf Hall now — at leisure, slowly savoring Mantel's glorious writing, and basking in the fun of Simon's weekly summaries and everyone's commentary — is sheer delight. This week, as we really got into the nitty gritty of the way Tudor political actors tried to create their world through law, images are dancing in my mind of students wearing bishops' miters and Lord Chancellor's chains and quoting Machiavelli, More, and Erasmus. What fun!
This section of the book contains two moments that have lived rent free in my mind since I first read WH in 2012. First, after the Lollard woman is burned, and one of her fellow Lollards smudges ashes on Cromwell in her name. The visceral feeling of fatty ash, the sacredness of the moment, the remembrance that all are dust; chills! And then, when Anne exclaims that the cardinal is who fixed Harry Percy last time “and the cardinal is dead!” Cromwell’s smile, his pure satisfaction, radiates from some deep place with him, like Wolsey’s “fat paternal beam.”