An Occult History of Britain (Part 1)
Wolf Crawl Week 3: Monday 15 January – Sunday 21 January
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“Beneath every history, another history.”
“I think Hilary Mantel taught me what it means to be English. The myths of Englishness, by which we all still live, were explained to me in these books, especially in the section of Wolf Hall called An Occult History of Britain.”
Ben Miles, narrator of the books and “Thomas Cromwell” in the stage adaptations of Mantel’s novels.
Welcome to week three of Wolf Crawl
I am delighted you are joining me this week for the first half of An Occult History of Britain. It is a complex section, with many new characters, plot threads, themes and ideas. I’m here to guide you through it, explain what is going on, and why it matters.
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.
As always, this post is free to read, but it wasn’t free to produce. So, if you value this resource and are able to do so, I encourage you to become a paying subscriber. If you have already upgraded, thank you! You have exclusive access to the next instalment in my series, The Haunting of Wolf Hall.
This is a long post and may get clipped by your email provider. It is best viewed online here.
This week’s story
There are many layers to this chapter. But let’s get the narrative straight first:
Last week, we were with Cromwell in 1529, the cardinal in disgrace and his enemies on the rise. This chapter is about how we got there.
We must rewind the clock to 1521. Cromwell has just entered the service of Thomas Wolsey. Anne Boleyn has arrived at court. She falls in love with Harry Percy, the future Earl of Northumberland. Her older sister, Mary, is sleeping with the king. Wolsey and Cromwell suspect the father, Sir Thomas Boleyn, of using his daughters to get closer to power. Wolsey stops Anne from marrying Harry Percy, incurring the wrath of a very clever and determined young woman.
By 1527, Wolsey is feeling the heat. The king wants a divorce, and Wolsey can’t give him one. In a last-ditch attempt to make Henry a bachelor again, Wolsey heads to the continent to convene with his fellow cardinals. Pope Clement in Rome will have the final say on the divorce, but he’s currently under the control of Queen Katherine’s nephew, Emperor Charles V.
This section ends with a personal tragedy. Thomas Cromwell disappears into the city to get Little Bilney out of trouble. Like Cromwell, Bilney believes in religious reform. Unlike Cromwell, he doesn’t know when to keep quiet. When Cromwell gets home, he finds his wife Liz has died of the sweating sickness.
This week’s characters
Click on each link for more details and plot summaries for each character:
Thomas Wolsey • Henry VIII • Anne Boleyn • Thomas Boleyn • Harry Percy • Thomas Cromwell • Mary Talbot • Earl of Shrewsbury • Duke of Norfolk • Mary Boleyn • Elizabeth Boleyn • Katherine of Aragon • Henry FitzRoy • George Cavendish • Earl of Northumberland • Henry VII • Elizabeth Plantagenet • Mary Tudor • Anne Cromwell • Charles Brandon • Pope Clement • Emperor Charles • Thomas More • Cesare Borgia • Liz Cromwell • Gregory Cromwell • Richard Williams • Rafe Sadler • Edward IV • Henry VI • Richard III • Thomas Bilney • Mercy • Grace Cromwell • Ann Cromwell • Niccolo Machiavelli
How to read this chapter
“An Occult History of Britain” is about the stories we believe in. What matters is not the truth of events, but the myths and narratives we create about our history and our past.
Imagine this entire chapter as a set of memories returning to Cromwell, as he sits in Esher Palace in 1529. He’s wondering: when did it all start to go wrong? Why did it go wrong? And, what can I, Cromwell, do to make it right again?
In this chapter, Wolsey is teaching Cromwell how the world of politics works. How to navigate the shark-infested waters of the English court. And Cromwell is studying Wolsey’s successes and his failures.
Try always, Wolsey says, to find out what people wear under their clothes.
Occult refers to the paranormal and the mystical. But it also means hidden or secret. This chapter is all about hidden things: a secret betrothal, guarded memories, our true beliefs, and a secret history of how the English became English.
Before Albion was thought of
The characters in Wolf Hall don’t have Wikipedia. They don’t have Mary Beard and Simon Schama and the History Channel to tell them what happened in the past. Everything they know about what has happened comes from stories, some written down, and others not. If we want to understand how these characters see themselves, we must listen to the tales they tell.
“These are old stories, he says, but some people, let us remember, do believe them.”
The chapter opens with myths about the founding of Britain. These stories can be found in a body of medieval literature called the Matter of Britain. It includes the Arthurian legends and pseudohistorical accounts of the British Isles by writers like the Welsh cleric Geoffrey of Monmouth.
Wolsey sits with his elbows on his desk, his fingers dabbing his closed lids. He takes a great breath, and begins to talk: he begins to talk about England.
You can’t know Albion, he says, unless you can go back before Albion was thought of. You must go back before Caesar’s legions, to the days when the bones of giant animals and men lay on the ground where one day London would be built. You must go back to the New Troy, the New Jerusalem, and the sins and crimes of the kings who rode under the tattered banners of Arthur and who married women who came out of the sea or hatched out of eggs, women with scales and fins and feathers; beside which, he says, the match with Anne looks less unusual.
We tend to think about the Tudors as the beginning of modern England and later modern Britain. They are our founding myth, which is one of the reasons we are so fascinated by them. But to understand them, we must imagine the world they were born into and the stories they read and rewrote.
In the 1530s, Thomas Cromwell will become a leading participant in the country’s transformation. Hundreds of years of belief will be overturned. Abbeys torn down, saints boxed up. An English bible in every parish. New stories written over pages of faded ink.
And remember that we are seeing this story of England through the mind of a relentless reformer. Someone who thinks there are always new and better ways to do old things. This chapter sets up one of the main ways Cromwell imagines this reform: as a long war between Old England and the New. Between the Living and the Dead.
The spectre of civil war
The characters of this book have grown up during a forty year peace. The Tudor peace. Henry VIII’s father, Henry Tudor, defeated Richard III at the Battle of Bosworth Field in 1485. The Tudor victory ended the Wars of the Roses between the Houses of Lancaster and York, two branches of the Plantagenet dynasty.
Those wars are even now slipping into the land of myth. King Henry V, victor of Agincourt, who married the Glass Princess. Edward IV, who witnessed the miracle of three suns rising over Mortimer’s Cross. His brother Richard, the Scorpion king, who killed (so they say) his nephews in the Tower.
“Whichever way you look at it, it all begins in slaughter.”
But are the wars over? What these characters don’t know is that the Tudor dynasty will last until 1603, and there won’t be another civil war until 1642. Successful invasions of Britain are a thing of the past. None of this is certain to Cromwell, or Wolsey, or Henry. And that spectre of a return to civil war will haunt these books:
There will always be the need for more killing; one must, says the cardinal, have the stomach for it, I suppose, though I dont know I ever have; I am always ill when there is an execution.
A stomach for killing
He Thomas, also Tomos, Tommaso and Thomas Cromwell, withdraws his past selves into his present body and edges back to where he was before. His single shadow slides against the wall, a visitor not sure of his welcome. Which of these Thomases saw the blow coming? There are moments when a memory moves right through you. You shy, you duck, you run: or else the past takes your fist and actuates it, without the intervention of will. Suppose you have a knife in your fist? That’s how murder happens.
The cardinal does not have a stomach for killing, but Cromwell does. In the opening scene of this chapter, Wolsey stretches out a friendly hand a fraction too fast. Something recoils within Thomas Cromwell, a muscle memory from twenty years ago: “Night ice, the still heart of Europe; a forest, lakes silver beneath a pattern of winter stars; a room, firelight, a shape slipping against the wall. He didn’t see his assassin, but he saw his shadow move.”
This is how we and Wolsey learn for sure that Cromwell is a murderer. It is a secret Cromwell does not willingly hand over. But it is one of his many Italian secrets by which we may come to know him.
Later in the chapter, we learn of his “summer with Cesare Borgia”. A famous Italian mercenary, cardinal and ruler from the equally infamous House of Borgia – a family with a reputation for many sins, including murder.
Read more about Cesare Borgia here.
Cesare Borgia was a major inspiration for Niccolò Machiavelli’s The Prince, a guide to kingship that argues that it is better to be feared and loved. At the end of this week’s section, Cromwell is reading The Prince while playing chess with his protege Rafe Sadler:
Someone says to him, what is in your little book? and he says, a few aphorisms, a few truisms, nothing we didn’t know before.
You sense here that, in his head, Cromwell is devising a different guide to kingship. A better way to advise your king. Ways he has learned from Wolsey, and new ideas of his own reckoning. But he is keeping all those thoughts secret from us, for now.
Tears of dread
The first outbreak of the “English sweat” came in 1485, the same year the Tudors came to power. “Now every few years it fills the graveyards,” writes Mantel. “It kills in a day. Merry at breakfast, they say: dead by noon.” The last outbreak is in 1551, after which this mysterious sickness vanishes. No one knows exactly what it was, but it may have been a side-effect of the peace and prosperity under the Tudors: rats running riot in bigger kitchens as houses grew and the population rose.
Read more about the sweating sickness here.
The king’s brother, Arthur, probably died of it in 1502. And in Wolf Hall, it carries of Liz Cromwell at the end of this week’s reading:
At one o’clock, she called for a priest. At two, she made her confession. She said she had once picked up a snake, in Italy. The priest said it was the fever speaking. He gave her absolution. And he could not wait, Mercy said, he could not wait to get out of the house, he was so afraid he might take the contagion and die.
At three in the afternoon, she declined. At four, she put off the burden of this life.
This is a horrible moment in the story. Cromwell must put the children to bed and see his wife’s body and listen to how she died. And we must sit with him, so terribly close that we cannot escape: “These things happen; but not to us.”
Not to us, until 2020. A house touched by sickness must shut its door for forty days. Cromwell’s mother-in-law suggests they say it was just a fever. “No,” says Cromwell. “We must do it. My lord cardinal made these rules and it would not be proper for me to scant them.”
Hard not to hear the echoes in our time, with lockdown laws and politicians that did or did not obey their own rules. Cromwell is a lawyer and this notion, that laws bind all men, will be a guiding principle in the years ahead.
Bonus: The Haunting of Wolf Hall
In this week’s post for paying subscribers, I talk about the only thing I have in common with Thomas Cromwell. And the appearance of the first ghost in Wolf Hall.
Your secret serpent self
In her fever, Liz Cromwell, says she picked up a snake in Italy. But Liz never went to Italy. Cromwell did. And earlier in the chapter, Cromwell tells Wolsey he held a snake once for a bet. And it bit him. He tasted the poison and collected his winnings:
He waited to die, but he never did die. If anything, he got stronger, quick to hide and quick to strike… Tonight is hot, it is July; he is asleep; he dreams. Somewhere in Italy, a snake has children. He calls his children Thomas; they carry in their heads pictures of the Thames, of muddy shallow banks beyond the reach of the tide, beyond the wash of the water.
In the morning, he notices his “serpent eyes” in the mirror. Wolsey tells him that Henry’s grandfather married a lady descended from the serpent woman Melusine. The story is, Melusine passed herself off as a princess until her husband spotted her serpent’s tale. Cromwell’s time in Italy is his snakeskin. His Occult History propels him forward, and arms him for the next battle. George Cavendish says:
‘There are people, in this household and elsewhere, who would give much to know the whole of what you learned in Italy.’
He nods. Of course they would.
Quote of the Week
To be honest, I am spoilt for choice this week. I could quote every page, and looking back over this post, I see that I may have done just that. But I want to close this week with Thomas and Liz alive and happy in their house at Austin Friars. This busy house is rarely quiet. But tonight, they have it to themselves:
‘Hush,’ Liz says, ‘Listen to the house.’
At first, there is no sound. Then the timbers creak, breathe. In the chimneys, nestling birds shuffle. A breeze blows from the river, faintly shivering the tops of the trees. They hear the sleeping breath of children, imagined from other rooms. ‘Come to bed,’ he says.
The king can’t say that to his wife. Or, with any good effect, to the woman they say he loves.
Endnotes
Thank you for reading. I want to just let you know of other people writing about our read-along:
- has been looking at the food mentioned in each chapter, along with a few other rabbit holes. Read her most recent post here.
- has been drawing out one-word writing prompts from the reading here.
- has been posting her updates. Here is last week’s post.
- used Gregory Cromwell as a spark for a discussion on raising children of privilege.
Let me know if you write about anything connected to the read-along and I will try to share your work here.
My ‘Great Matter’
The king wants to annul his marriage. This is his ‘great matter’, and it’s not going so well right now. My ‘great matter’ is that I’ve spent the last two days putting together this post and the additional character summaries. If you’re able to support me as a paying subscriber so I can keep doing this for everyone, my wife may promise not to annul our marriage. And I’ll promise not to pass on any pennies to that snake-king Henry VIII. Thank you and I’ll see you next week for the second half of An Occult History of Britain.
Until next week, I am your humble servant,
Master Haisell
Tremendous, tremendous work, Simon. These posts, read after the prescribed chapters, are a lovely way to confirm the thoughts that occur whilst reading, as well as elaborate on facts I may have missed or on pieces of English history (/myth) that I simply wasn't aware of.
What struck me most this week was how emotionally derailed I was by Liz's death. It's a testament to Hilary's skillful prose and structure that someone spoken of very little (just as Liz spoke little herself) could, in her departure, leave a hole in my heart. In that moment, and for numerous pages after, I was crushed by Cromwell's loss, far more so than in books where a character has been a major player and met their demise.
Simon, I appreciate the care and thought that goes into your essays on this work. I greatly appreciate your insights and commentary.
1) To highlight one valuable point you make, it is very difficult to read history or historical fiction and forget that all events in the past were once in the future. This active forgetting does not come naturally or easily to anyone.
Given the civil wars that had recently ended, the people of the Trilogy had no cause to think of England as a stable state. The century long Victorian/Edwardian era would have seemed to them to be a utopian fantasy about many things, perhaps especially about England's status and stature on the world stage.
2) You quoted one of my favorite "writing" passages from the trilogy, the scene when Wolsey suddenly reaches out for Thomas, and Thomas darts back from instinct. There is much content to glean from the passage, but the writing itself is spectacular. The way Mantel uses short words and short sentences to convey the action that flashes by in a few seconds. Yet the passage is long compared to the time it covers, so it's as if Mantel has slowed time down for us so we can see with precision what has happened.
It starts with "Laughing, the cardinal pushes back his chair, and his shadow rises with him." and ends with "That's how murder happens."