An Occult History of Britain (Part 2)
Wolf Crawl Week 4: Monday 22 January – Sunday 28 January
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“We drowned men will stick together.”
Welcome to Week 4 of Wolf Crawl
This week we are reading the second half of An Occult History of Britain. This long chapter is composed of Cromwell’s memories of the 1520s, looking back on the events leading up to the fall of his master Cardinal Thomas Wolsey. He sifts these events for clues as to the cause of the catastrophe that seems set to destroy his world.
We sit like the imp on his shoulder and try to make sense of all that he remembers.
You will find everything you need for this read-along on the main Cromwell trilogy page of my website, including the reading schedule and plot summaries for each character. There is also a page with links to online resources about Mantel’s writing and Thomas Cromwell.
It’s not quite my life’s work, but it takes a couple of days a week to put these resources together. So, if you find them useful, please consider becoming a paying subscriber. If you have already upgraded, thank you! You can read the next instalment in my series, The Haunting of Wolf Hall.
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This week’s story
Here is a summary of the second part of An Occult History of Britain.
It begins with a family gathering of Cromwells and Wellyfeds, and other relatives of Thomas Cromwell and his dead wife. It reminds Cromwell of another reunion, between himself and his father, a year after he returned to England. And this memory chases another further back, to when he was seven and went to work in the kitchens of Lambeth Palace.
Late in 1527, the cardinal is back from Europe, empty-handed and miserable. He has two cards left to play. An alliance with France and an ecclesiastical court held in England to rule on the legality of the king’s marriage. But everyone knows the case is weak, and the French hate the English.
In Spring 1528, we get a good look at Thomas More. He tries to get Cromwell to admit he’s read Tyndale’s bible, an English translation forbidden by the Church. Meanwhile, the cardinal warns Cromwell about a raid on one of Tyndale’s friends in the city. And the Williamson family move into Austin Friars.
In a short vignette, Cromwell remembers the night he brought his protege Rafe Sadler up from Essex. A drowned hedgehog of a boy, who is now his sharp-witted apprentice.
When the sweating sickness returns in 1528, Cromwell sends his daughters out of London. Anne Boleyn falls ill but recovers. William Carey, the husband of Anne’s sister Mary, dies.
The sickness also kills two evangelical scholars locked in a fish cellar in Cardinal College, Oxford. Wolsey put them there and forgot about them. The cardinal cries when he is told and cries again when Cromwell asks that another scholar, Thomas Bilney, be released from the Tower.
In Autumn 1528, Cromwell runs into Anne Boleyn’s sister Mary. Or rather, she runs into him. Her relatives, the Howards and Boleyns, are after the cardinal’s head. And Mary tells Cromwell that her sister means to marry the king. Mary is now a widow and she tells Cromwell she wants to marry “a man who frightens” her family. A man like Cromwell. “Don’t ask, don’t get.” Cromwell can tell no one of this, so he tells Rafe.
As the year turns, Stephen Gardiner is in Rome “breathing sulphur” in the pope’s ear. Pope Clement falls ill, and Cardinal Wolsey imagines being Pope Wolsey. Behind every future, another future.
But Clement doesn’t die, and the legatine court proceeds in 1529. Cardinals Campeggio and Wolsey will determine whether the king is lawfully married. Gardiner returns from Rome, scowling and delighted to see the cardinal’s final failure. The court is a tawdry affair that serves only to make England a laughing stock and raise a princely ghost, these thirty years buried.
Cromwell goes home to write his will. “To God his soul. To Rafe Sadler his books.”
Now the plague returns. The wolf among the sheepfold. Mercy says: “can anyone outrun it?” At the end of July, the court adjourns without ruling on the marriage. Cromwell knows it is all over for Wolsey.
The Cromwells decide not to send the girls away. It is the wrong decision. Anne prays like she’s going into battle. But it is not enough. She is buried without her copybook. And Grace dies in her father’s arms.
October 1529. Writs are drawn up against the cardinal. He is accused of setting himself up as another king in England. Suffolk and Norfolk come knocking. As they leave, Norfolk says to Cromwell: “Come and see me.”
This week’s characters
Click on each link for more details and plot summaries for each character:
Morgan Williams • Thomas Cromwell • Bet Wellyfed • Kat Williams • Mercy • Grace Cromwell • Johane Williamson • Jo Williamson• Alice Wellyfed • Anne Cromwell • King Francis • John Wellyfed • John Williamson • Gregory Cromwell • Richard Williams • Walter Cromwell • Liz Cromwell • Uncle John • Cardinal Morton • Thomas More • Thomas Wolsey • Henry VIII • Anne Boleyn • William Tyndale • Bishop of London • Cardinal Campeggio • Stephen Gardiner • Martin Luther • Humphrey Monmouth • Rafe Sadler • Thomas Bilney • Lady Carey • John Fisher • Queen Katherine • Duke of Suffolk • Duke of Norfolk
Green Groweth the Holly
At Christmas, 1527, the court sing a carol written by Henry VIII called ‘Green Groweth the Holly’. You can listen to a version of it in this video. It’s a love song of a sort. Like holly in the winter, when all the greenwood leaves are gone, I will be forever true.
The carol is a clue to the theme of this week’s reading. Yes, we can imagine a lovesick Henry singing it to Anne Boleyn. But there’s more to it than that. It is about the virtues of perseverance and faithfulness. In a masque mentioned at the start of the chapter, Anne Boleyn dressed as Perseverance.
He says, ‘Her particular virtue may be tested.’
And if Cromwell has a virtue, it is an unswerving faith in his master, Cardinal Wolsey. It is also tested. Wolsey’s household is a sinking ship. Another of the cardinal’s men, Stephen Gardiner, swims rat-like to the safety of the king’s court. Cromwell stays faithful. Even while the cardinal blunders and his actions cause innocent men to die in cellars beneath his own college.
‘We drowned men will stick together.’
Cromwell says this of a bedraggled Rafe Sadler. But the same is true for Wolsey. He admires Wolsey’s mind and his kindness. And then there is a question of base, lowly origins. As Thomas Boleyn says, Wolsey is the “butcher’s boy”, and Cromwell is the “butcher’s dog”. If he turns his back on Wolsey, he admits defeat to the noble families of England, who believe they were born to rule.
But Cromwell is not the only one thinking about virtues.
Character Focus: Thomas More
Tyndale says, not abideth faith, hope and love, even these three; but the greatest of these is love.
Thomas More thinks it is a wicked mistranslation. He insists on ‘charity’. He would chain you up. He would, for a difference in your Greek, kill you.
The Thomas More in Wolf Hall is not the More we are used to. The same year of his execution, the Catholic Church canonised Thomas More as a martyred saint. In the year 2000, Pope John Paul II declared him the patron saint of statesmen and politicians. He is the humanist scholar who wrote Utopia, a book on good governance, and died on a matter of conscience. A patron of science and the arts and a friend of Erasmus, the leading light of the Rennaisance in northern Europe.
One fictional interpretation of Thomas More appears in the film A Man for All Seasons, based on the play of the same name by Robert Bolt. There he is an incorruptible man of virtue. Mantel gives us another, very different fictional Thomas More.
More, in his pamphlets against Luther, calls the German shit. He says that his mouth is like the world’s anus. You would not think that such words would proceed from Thomas More, but they do. No one has rendered the Latin tongue more obscene.
The most significant point to make here is this: Mantel’s More is Cromwell’s More. It is how Cromwell sees More. They are adversaries in matters of religion and, later, in politics. And Mantel’s version of Cromwell cannot understand or tolerate More’s way of seeing the world.
It is a reminder that everything in these three books is filtered through the mind of one character. We only see what he sees. We only get to think what he thinks. And if he is wrong – and he sometimes is very mistaken on matters of great importance – we must read between the lines.
Character Focus: Katherine of Aragon
You may have noticed that so far, we haven’t met King Henry, Queen Katherine or the king’s mistress, Anne Boleyn. They are floating around the story, in gossip and secondary accounts of events behind closed doors. This is because, as I have already said, we only see what Cromwell sees, and he is only the cardinal’s lawyer. When Katherine turns up to defend her marriage, we get a back-row view:
The hall is packed. He and Rafe are far-off spectactors. Afterwards, when the queen has made her statement – a few men have been seen to cry – they come out into the sunshine. Rafe says, ‘If we had been nearer, we could have seen whether the king could meet her eye.’
‘Yes. That is really all anyone needs to know.’
We, and Cromwell, will get closer to Katherine later. For now, we get the sense of a woman of great fortitude and strength of character. Cromwell, the lawyer, sees that she is her best weapon, and it was a mistake to absent herself when the witnesses come out to testify that she slept with the king’s brother Arthur:
If he had been her adviser, he would have kept the queen in court, however much she squealed. Because, would the witnesses have spoken, to her face, as they spoke behind her back?
That is a bit of Cromwell lore. A rule he sets himself going forward: always be in the room. Never let things happen elsewhere without your knowing.
Katherine came to England in 1501, aged sixteen. As the historian Lauren Mackay puts it, “she had more royal blood than Henry and all his wives put together”. She was the daughter of King Ferdinand of Aragon and Queen Isabella of Castile. She even had a claim to the English throne that was stronger than the Tudors.
She married Henry’s older brother Arthur, Henry VII’s heir. Within a year of their marriage, Arthur was dead, and Katherine was a widow. Henry VII proposed himself and then his surviving son as alternative grooms. But the marriage to Arthur made Prince Henry her brother-in-law, and a papal dispensation was sought and obtained to allow the marriage to proceed.
Katherine always maintained she was a virgin when she married Henry. The dispensation covered all eventualities, all versions of events in their marriage bed. This irritates Cromwell, the lawyer, who sees this public airing of the queen’s sex life as shameful and unnecessary:
The Spanish documents are different from the English documents, and that is where we should be now, among the subclauses, studying paper and ink, not squabbling in a court of law over a shred of skin and a splash of blood on a linen sheet.
Do you remember in week one, I said Wolf Hall consists of stories written on bodies, texts and textiles? Here in one sentence, we have all three.
And now, we need to talk about words.
‘Words, word, just words’
This is what Thomas More says are in his book when a seven-year-old kitchen boy called Cromwell asks him at Lambeth Palace. ‘Words, words, just words.’
But as this chapter makes clear, words are never just words. Words have meaning. Words have power. Words can get you killed.
Cromwell learns to read while working for his uncle at Lambeth Palace:
He learns to read from the scribbled orders for wheat flour or dried beans, for barley and for duck’s eggs, that come out of the stewards’ pantries. For Walter, the point of being able to read is to take advantage of people who can’t, for the same purpose one must learn to write. So his father sends him to the priest.
This issue lies at the heart of the English Reformation. In England, ordinary people cannot read the Bible. Even if they could read English, the scriptures are in Latin. They depend entirely on their priest to tell them what it says.
At some point on Cromwell's journey, he becomes a Gospeller. The word Protestant doesn’t exist yet, and these men and women will refer to themselves as Gospellers. They believe the Gospels should be translated into their native tongue so that ordinary people can read and understand what is written.
In England, 1528, this is heresy. The cardinal and the bishops are buying up all the Tyndale bibles and heretical pamphlets and burning them. It is an offence to own one, and it is perilous to admit you’ve read one. Cromwell has a copy and has read it. But he’s not going to let that slip to Thomas More:
‘Ah, Master Cromwell!’ More rubs his hands together. ‘I relish you, I do indeed! Now I feel as a nutmeg must do when it’s grated. A lesser man – a lessar lawyer – would say, “I have read Tyndale’s work, and I find no fault there,” But Cromwell won’t be tripped – he casts it back, he asks me, rather, have you read Tyndale.’
Cromwell is careful, but his fellow Gospellers are not so cautious. He’s forever getting them out of harm’s way. A warning to Thomas Bilney last week went unheeded, and now Bilney is in the Tower. And this week, the cardinal gives Cromwell the heads-up that another Gospeller, Humphrey Monmouth, is in danger:
‘Monmouth … I am merely mentioning his name. Because … now why am I?’ The cardinal had closed his eyes. ‘Because I am merely mentioning it.’
It’s a touching moment. Wolsey knows his lawyer has heretical friends. He may even be a heretic himself. But Wolsey is the best sort of hypocrite. A humane one. He will burn books, but not men. While there are plenty out there who will burn both.
And then there is Anne Cromwell. She wants to learn Greek:
‘Yes, but she says, “Why should Thomas More’s daughter have the pre-eminence?” She has such good words. And she uses them all.”’
Anne Cromwell, who they joke will one day be Lord Mayor of London. It would be unusual in Tudor England for a common woman to read English or Latin, let alone Greek. But Anne is no ordinary girl. Her father encourages her. He wants her to have all the words.
She is not given time. After she has died, Cromwell thinks: “she was learning Greek: perhaps she knows it now.” Do the dead need translators?
perhaps in a moment, in a simple twist of unbecoming, they know everything they need to know.
Where is Anne now? The Church says she is in Purgatory. “A country of slow fires and rigid ice.” Cromwell thinks: ‘Where in the Gospels does it say “Purgatory?”’
When your daughters have died, and your wife too. It matters whether they are in Heaven, Hell or somewhere in between. Cromwell’s secret campaign for an English translation of the Bible is no longer an academic matter – if it ever was. It’s personal because the truth or untruth of that one word, Purgatory, means everything to him and his dead family.
Words, words. Words are not just words.
The wheel of fortune
He’d heard it all his childhood: the Cromwells were a rich family once, we had estates.
A recurring image in medieval and early modern philosophy is the Wheel of Fortune, a symbol of the capricious nature of fate. People rise and people fall. A family gets a bit of luck, and then war, plague and misfortune carry it all away. Or, in the case of Walter Cromwell, lawyers do:
‘So how do we come to such a low place?’ he would ask, and Walter would say it was because of lawyers and cheats and lawyers who are all cheats, and who thieve land away from its owners.
It’s a wee bit of foreshadowing for what Cromwell, the king’s lawyer, will do, or be accused of doing, in the 1530s.
Walter is entitled and bitter. “I suppose once it’s gone it’s gone. I suppose fortune, when it’s lost, it will never visit again.”
But the wheel is turning. This week Cromwell was propositioned by Lady Carey. If they married, and Anne and Henry married, Cromwell would be the king’s brother. It’s not to be, but it plants a thought: from blacksmith’s boy to brother of the king?
Now that would be a story worth telling.
Bonus: The Haunting of Wolf Hall
In this week’s post for paying subscribers, I talk about Cromwell’s complex relationship with the cardinal and the raising of a royal ghost:
Quote of the Week
I want to put two quotes side-by-side and see what they say to each other:
October comes, and his sisters and Mercy and Johane take his dead wife’s clothes and cut them up carefully into new patterns. Nothing is wasted. Every good bit of cloth is made into something else.
I love the respect for Liz and her craft in the word ‘carefully’ here. Cloth tells a story, and then it tells a new one.
When Cromwell is at sea, and his cardinal is sea-sick, the captain says: “Sailors don’t like anything new.”
‘Nor does anyone else,’ he’d said. ‘Not as far as I can see.’
There cannot be new things in England. There can be old things freshly presented, or new things that pretend to be old. To be trusted, new men must forge themselves an ancient pedigree, like Walter’s, or enter in the service of ancient families. Don’t try to go it alone, or they’ll think you’re pirates.
Will Cromwell cut and paste Wolsey’s rulebook, and make a new pattern from old cloth? Or will he attempt to make something entirely new and unexpected that no one has seen before? Go it alone, and be a pirate.
I guess we will just have to keep reading.
Thank you
The wheel of fortune is turning for this poor writer. The words are not just words. Thank you to everyone who has been able to become a paying subscriber, you’re keeping me in ink and hose. And you’re allowing thousands of people around the world to get more from Wolf Hall. Thank you.
Next week, we push on into the 1530s. A short chapter at Esher Palace, “Make or Mar”, and then a turning point for Thomas Cromwell, as he plays his “Three-Card Trick”. Until then, I am your ever-faithful and persevering servant,
Master Haisell
Another great post, Simon! I particularly enjoyed the section on Thomas More. It was interesting to read A Man for All Seasons after Wolf Hall, to see Cromwell as Thomas More must have seen him -- an ambitious, amoral, grasping destroyer of tradition. As most people would have seen him, I suppose.
I think this chapter is where the book really finds its feet -- moving backwards and forwards in time, the story always thick with the dead. You are immersed in Cromwell's head, to the point where you could almost mistake his thoughts and prejudices for your own.
Great post Simon. All your work is very much appreciated.
The scene with Mary, mixing sexual and power politics together, is extraordinary. The reveal of legs, the heaving bosom, the pretty, fresh face, the compliment to his cloth, the connection they have, both being single parents of young children. Her giving him just enough gossip to show her information value. Both lonely. What a tour de force of flirtation. And then.
"There is a sudden light in her blue eyes. An idea has dawned. She rests one delicate finger on the grey velvet she so admires, and says softly, "Don't ask, don't get."
She throws his very words back at him. She's also a good listener!
But it's similar to the scene in Wolsey's chamber where Thomas jumps back from the Cardinal. His instincts are so finely tuned and so quick.
"They'd kill you," he says.
Ninety-nine men out of a hundred.would have fallen!