Arrange Your Face (Part 2)
Wolf Crawl Week 9: Monday 26 February – Sunday 3 March
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Welcome to week nine of Wolf Crawl
This week, we are reading the rest of “Arrange Your Face, 1531”. Cromwell’s star is rising as he steps out of the shadows and arranges his face.
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: ‘Arrange your face’
Tangent: Bilney the Martyr, Cromwell the Pheonix
Tangent: Born under a good sign
Footnote: Lions and giants and bears, oh my!
Quote of the week: ‘Where are your knives?’
Next week
1. This week’s story
It is spring, 1531. Thomas Cromwell is making it his business to be cheerful. He is on the king’s council and must look and act the part. At home, he decides to draw a line under his indiscretions with Johane Williamson, a married woman and sister to his late wife. They part amicably. “Thomas,” Mercy says, “when you’re cold and under a stone, you’ll talk yourself out of your grave.”
In the summer, Halley’s Comet is visible in the night sky. Austin Friars is busy. Theology in the garden, astronomy in his study. Petitioners visit hourly, and gentlemen send gifts of meat. Cromwell offers to help Thurston with the butchery. “Are our benefactors getting letters of thanks?”
Anne Boleyn is always with the king now. But her temper is no better. One of her enemies at court, Stephen Gardiner, has replaced Wolsey as Bishop of Winchester. She would prefer an ally as Master Secretary. Like Thomas Cromwell? “Too soon.” Little Bilney goes to the fire, and there are more burnings to come.
The king wants his two councillors, Cromwell and Gardiner, to settle their differences. But Cromwell thinks it will be better for Cromwell if they don’t. Later, Gardiner is sent on embassy to France, leaving him in charge in all but name.
Sir Henry Wyatt visits Austin Friars and tells the children stories of bad king Richard, a dungeon and a cat. He tells the one about the lion and his son, Thomas Wyatt. We meet him at the end of the year, drunk with his gentleman friends. “Say thank you to Master Cromwell… Who else would be up so early on a holiday, and with his purse open?”
When Cromwell dines with Anne Boleyn, he sees “she has made pets of the king’s friends.” A bigger set of fools you would go far to seek. They are all in love with Anne. “You don’t see it, do you?” says Henry Norris. They seem under some enchantment, like the one Chapuys would like him to break.
This is Cromwell in 1531. The courtier, the facilitator, the yes-man. So we end the chapter in 1497, when he was an unruly child with a self-made knife like an “evil tooth” ready to kill Cornishmen and a giant called Bolster. They hope the Cornish rebels will kill Walter too, but no such luck. The rebels are minced at Blackheath, and the giant is gone.
‘Dead till next time,’ his sister says.
2. This week’s characters
Click on each link for more details and plot summaries for each character:
Thomas Cromwell • Mark Smeaton • Anne Boleyn • Henry VIII • Jo Williamson • Mercy • Johane • Henry Norris • Thomas Cranmer • Hugh Latimer • Gregory • Nikolaus Kratzer • Thurston • William Brereton • Little Bilney • Francis Weston • Stephen Gardiner • Eustace Chapuys • Henry Wyatt • Alice • Thomas Wyatt • Wriothesley • George Boleyn • Walter Cromwell • Mogan Williams • Bet Wellyfed • Francis Bryan
3. This week’s theme: ‘Arrange your face’
From the day he was sworn into the king’s council, he has had his face arranged. He has spent the early months of the year watching the faces of other people, to see when they register doubt, reservation, rebellion – to catch that fractional moment before they settle into the suave lineaments of the courtier, the facilitator, the yes-man.
In week seven, we talked about how Wolf Hall is presented as a performance: with its cast of characters, its theatrical epigraphs, wood-panelled dialogues and public pageantry. This week, Hilary Mantel expands this theme and makes explicit that the court is a stage where every player must master the art of dissimulation. They must listen to Erasmus:
Arrange your facial expression beforehand at home, so that it may be ready for every part of the play and so that not even a glimmer of your true feelings may be revealed in your looks. You must plan your delivery at home so that your speech suits your looks and your looks and the bearing of your whole body suit your feigned speech. These are the rudiments of courtly philosophy, for which no one will be fitted unless he has first wiped away all sense of shame, and leaving his natural expression behind at home, has put on a mask, as it were.1
The courtier’s face is a blank mask that hides one’s true feelings. After Wolsey’s death and descent into hell, Cromwell ordered the cardinal’s arms to be painted over at Austin Friars. “Leave a blank,” he said. It was the first act in a careful arrangement of his public and private personae. No longer the cardinal’s man. A year later, he tells his niece she “can paint crowns” on her Easter eggs if she likes. “I am of the king’s council now.” But when old Sir Henry Wyatt visits, he looks soberly at the blank wall: “He has only been gone a year, Thomas. To me it seems more.”
In a few weeks, we will come to Thomas Cromwell’s portrait by Hans Holbein. The painter has captured Cromwell’s arranged face. “He’s not looking at us,” wrote Hilary Mantel.2 “He’s giving us nothing. He’s going to let us struggle.” If he did look at us, it would be as his niece watches him, “to read back the effect of her words.” The face as siege engine: armoured against attack, eyes as arrow slits to penetrate the enemy’s thoughts.
Cromwell has one face: a cheerful mirror to his master’s misery. Nikolaus Kratzer made a gold sundial with nine faces. “Seven more than the Duke of Norfolk,” quips Cromwell. He is not afraid of duplicitous, unprincipled men, like Wriothesley, with their many faces. Dangerous are those with no mask. Like Thomas More, Tyndale, Bilney, and Stephen Vaughan. The true believers, who “will carry you over the abyss.”
Cromwell once ruffed up a new Cupid’s face to make it look old. And sold it to a gullible cardinal for a handsome profit. Old love, new love. It’s a dangerous game. He’s been busy looking at Johane, “but looking doesn’t bring back the dead,” and the hardest person to convince is himself. Who is he, when he removes his mask at night?
Henry Norris has been doing this all his life. The sweet-talking courtier and a lifelong friend of Henry Tudor. He pats your shoulder and calls you Tom, mops his face with your handkerchief. But when you get home, “Henry’s gentlemanly features will be imprinted on the cloth.”
And you’ll still remember the night at Hampton Court, when Norris wore a devil’s mask, and Wolsey was the king’s fool in cheap crimson.
4. Tangent: Bilney the Martyr, Cromwell the Pheonix
‘You know they have burned Little Bilney? While we have been in the woods playing thieves.’
1531 is a year of striking contrast. With the buttery and squeamish Wolsey out of the way, the Church has picked up the pace and is burning heretics. Thomas Bilney, who Cromwell tried to save at the start of our story. James Bainham, a barrister who might endanger Cromwell when put to the rack. Richard Bayfield, a monk smuggling banned books. John Tewkesbury, a leather merchant with Luther in his pocket.
That’s how the year goes out, in a puff of smoke, a pall of human ash hanging over Smithfield.
But if evangelicals are burning, two brethren are rising above the flames. Henry VIII has begun to behave as though Anne Boleyn is his betrothed. She is always at his side, playing Robin Hood and Maid Marion in the Greenwood.
And Thomas Cromwell. Out of nowhere, he is suddenly everywhere. And although he has no official title, he is busier than ever, and everyone is coming to him at Austin Friars:
Fat files of the king’s business arrive almost hourly, and the Austin Friars fills up with city merchants, monks and priests of various sorts, petitioners for five minutes of his time. As if they sense something, a shift of power, a coming spectacle, small groups of Londoners begin to gather outside his gate, pointing out the liveries of the men who come and go: the Duke of Norfolk’s man, the Earl of Wiltshire’s servant.
His cook Thurston is inundated with the gifts of “hunting gentlemen… they have sent us enough meat to feed an army.” So Cromwell feeds the hungry at the gate, while he gets “the locks renewed, the chains reinforced.”
Inside, his house fills up with fine things. “All these things,” says Johane, “these things we have now.” Clocks, chests, expensive clothes and ivory combs. “I want it,” he tells his accountant, Thomas Avery, “I don’t care what it costs.” When the Emperor’s ambassador comes to dinner, he makes careful note of “the food, the music, the furnishings.” Cromwell is rising fast and increasingly looks the part.
His aspirational spending and conspicuous consumption map onto the experience of the nouveau riche throughout history. Cromwell thinks, “Why are we so attached to the severities of the past?” Hilary Mantel will have heard versions of this story in post-Thatcherite Britain. The concerns of “Essex Man” or Tony Blair’s Mondeo Man. The working-class swing-voter who owns his own business and feels no nostalgia or loyalty to the poverty of the past.
Into this narrative, Mantel throws the story of the Florentine friar Girolamo Savonarola. On 7 February 1497, Shrove Tuesday, his supporters created a bonfire of the vanities in the main square in Florence. So far, our story has included the burning of books and the burning of bodies. Now, we have the burning of beauty:
‘Some people think he was a magician and they fell under his spell for a season, they made fires in the streets and they threw in everything they liked, everything that had made or worked to buy.’
Savonarola was excommunicated. The next year, a rival preacher challenged him to a trial by fire. They would walk through the burning square to see who God favoured. In the event, a sudden downpour drenched spectators, and the event was cancelled. A riot broke out. On 23 May 1498, Savonarola and two other friars were hanged and burned where the vanities had been destroyed the previous year.
‘… and do you know what was worst, Johane — they threw in their mirrors. So then they couldn’t see their faces and know how they were different from the beasts in the field and the creatures screaming on the pyre.’
Screaming on the pyre, like Little Bilney, who was burned on a windy day, “so it was a long time before he died.” Anne Boleyn thinks Bilney was a fool. “People must say whatever will keep them alive, till better times come. That is no sin. Would not you?”
What a question. “Oh, come, you have thought about it,” says Anne. Both of them, survivors of the fires of 1531, will be killed by their king before they are old. Their gentle and beneficient monarch, the model prince of Christendom, the mirror and the light.
5. Tangent: Born under a good sign
‘Why are comets bad signs? Why not good signs? Why do they prefigure the fall of nations? Why not their rise?’
The 1531 comet is Halley’s Comet. It is our comet, the only one that regularly passes close enough to Earth to be visible to the naked eye. The last apparition was in 1986, and the Soviet Union printed stamps to commemorate its passing. Five years later, the Soviet Union was gone. We will see Halley again in 2061.
Mark Twain was born in a Halley year, 1835, and died in the next, 1910. “It will be the greatest disappointment of my life if I don't go out with Halley's comet,” he wrote the year before he died. “Two unaccountable freaks; they came in together, they must go out together.”
Halley’s Comet was visible in 1066, months before Harold II died at the Battle of Hastings and the Normans conquered England. The 12th Century historian William of Malmesbury, wrote:
Not long after, a comet, portending (they say) a change in governments, appeared, trailing its long flaming hair through the empty sky: concerning which there was a fine saying of a monk of our monastery called Æthelmær. Crouching in terror at the sight of the gleaming star, "You've come, have you?", he said. "You've come, you source of tears to many mothers. It is long since I saw you; but as I see you now you are much more terrible, for I see you brandishing the downfall of my country."
In 1531, the English government were gathering historical evidence to support the king’s right to annul his marriage to Queen Katherine. One body of evidence was a collection of historical texts known as the Collectanea satis copiosa (“Sufficiently abundant compilation”). It provides the basis, two years from now, for an Act of Parliament that will declare England an empire.
This evidence included Geoffrey of Monmouth’s stories of Arthur. When Cromwell told Gregory that they were going to write more “Merlin stories”, this is what he meant. Making England an empire turns Henry into an emperor. And unlike kings, emperors have no overlord or mediator between them and Heaven. Emperors have no need for popes.
‘Master Cromwell, either my calculations are wrong, or the universe is not as we think it is.’
This is the context for Cromwell’s musing on comets and bad signs. It is the gall of “a man of vigorous invention” who reads the stars backwards and declares England an empire in 1531. It is also the year that Cromwell begins to come into his own.
Cromwell is now forty-six, or thereabouts. No one seems sure of when he was born. “I don’t mind,” he tells his brother-in-law. “I don’t have a natal chart. So I don’t have a fate.”
Bonus: The Haunting of Wolf Hall
And for more on Thomas Cromwell’s birth and fate, I have written a little extra for paying subscribers called:
6. Footnote: Lions and giants and bears, oh my!
‘Leontina, I called to her, stand till I lead you back; but then she crouched, quite silent, and sighted me, and her eyes were like fire. It was then I realised, he says, that I was not her father, for all that I had cherished her: I was her dinner.’
Sir Henry Wyatt comes to tea. This is an important character mostly because he is the father of Thomas Wyatt, who will play a key part in Cromwell’s story in the weeks ahead. Henry was Master of the Jewels long before Thomas Cromwell assumed that position. Unlike other Tudor taxmen (remember Empson and Dudley?), he has lived to tell the tale. And he tells fine stories: about Good Samaritan cats in Plantagenet dungeons, and a poet-son who can entrance a lion long enough to save his father’s life. “Tom Wyatt,” says the king, “can tame lions.”
Hans Holbein paints Henry Wyatt in a similar manner to Cromwell. Diarmaid MacCulloch writes, “We see the same black cap and befurred gown, the same little folded administrative paper in a tight grasp — above all, the same preoccupied, watchful expression.”3 There is the suggestion here that Cromwell models his public image on Wyatt: both busy, serious, competent servants of the King. And Cromwell does not plan to end up like Empson and Dudley. He wants to be Wyatt and live long enough to enjoy his retirement.
Wyatt also survived his pet lion, the king of beasts. The three lions of England first appeared on the heraldic emblems of Richard the Lionheart and his brother King John, grandchildren of Geoffrey Plantagenet. His son, Henry II, founded the Plantagenet dynasty that ruled England for three centuries until the Tudors came along:
‘Oh, they were wicked folk of that name,’ Alice bursts out. ‘And do you know, there are still some of them left?’
Alice is right, and we will return to the surviving Plantagenets in later weeks.
Like any good story for children, Wyatt’s lion story works on two levels. It is an allegory for councillors of the king. As Thomas More said, the king’s friendship is like wrestling with an angel. Don’t kid yourself that he’s your pet. You, Thomas, are his dinner. But if your monarch does move in for the kill, try to have someone like Thomas Wyatt nearby, to save your neck.
Thomas Cromwell now knows he can touch the king. “In case of peril, you may pick him up. Fish him out. Whatever.” So he tells the king, “Lean on me, sir,” and the king does.
The king locks an arm around his neck, in a sort of wrestling hold. Bear-keeping’s a steady job. For a moment he thinks the king is crying.
In Tudor England, you keep bears to bait them. A gruesome blood sport where dogs are set upon a chained bear for entertainment. It is hard to picture Bella in the ring, or Gregory’s greyhounds. But Thomas Boleyn called Cromwell the “butcher’s dog”, and he, Cromwell, likens himself and Stephen Gardiner to “two fighting dogs” that have put on muscle since their Wolsey days.
But if you’re the king’s councillor, you don’t just have to look out for lions and bears. There are wolves at court who will stick forks in you. And out in the country, there are giants ready to rise up at the next provocation:
His sister Bet says, ‘You know that giant, Bolster? He hears that St Agnes is dead. He’s cut his arm and in sorrow his blood has flowed into the sea. It’s filled up a cave that can never be filled, which goes into a hole, which goes down beneath the bed of the sea and into the centre of the earth and into Hell. So he’s dead.’
‘Oh, good. Because I was really worried about Bolster.’
‘Dead till next time,’ his sister says.
Bet’s tale is based on a real Cornish legend. The giant Bolster lived at the cliffs near the Cornish village of St Agnes. He ate sheep, cattle and children, and was a general public nuisance. The local worthies brought in knights to slay him, including a legendary King of Britain, Sir Constantine. But all failed. In the end, a beautiful young girl called Agnes challenges Bolster to fill a hole in the cliffs with his blood. The legend is still reenacted today with giant puppets on Bolster Day, the last Sunday before May Day.
In Wolf Hall, Bolster embodies the angry commons in 1497, refusing to pay taxes levied by the King and Parliament. The giants rose up again in 1525 against a tax imposed by Cardinal Wolsey. An uprising in East Anglia was put down by our friends, the Dukes of Norfolk and Suffolk.
It is now 1531, and the giants are sleeping. But they are not dead.
6. Quote of the week: Where are your knives?
At the start of this chapter, Queen Katherine considers Cromwell: “I begin to understand you. The blacksmith makes his own tools.” Cranmer calls him a “man of vigorous invention,” but Cromwell looks like a murderer and knows his way around a carcass. When his cook complains about the butchering, he offers to lend a hand. “It will be a pleasure,” he says, easing off the cardinal’s ring.
Courtiers, like the young Francis Weston, get confused about Cromwell’s trade. But Katherine knows, and she understands what he’s doing. He’s put down the hammer and picked up the pen. But he’s still working metal, and now he’s forging a new England:
One tradesman the same as the next? Not in the real world. Any man with a steady hand and a cleaver can call himself a butcher: but without the smith, where does he get that cleaver? Without the man who works in metal, where are your hammers, your scythes, your sickles, scissors and planes? Your arms and armour, your arrowheads, your pikes and your guns? Where are your ships at sea and their anchors? Where are your grappling hooks, your nails, latches, hinges, pokers and tongs? Where are your spits, kettles, trivets, your harness rings, buckles and bits? Where are your knives?
7. Next week
Thank you for reading and joining me on this slow read of the Cromwell trilogy. And next week, we are reading the first half of “Alas, What Shall I Do For Love? Spring 1532.” In the Fourth Estate paperback edition, this section ends on page 384 with the line: “This girl, you know, she claims she can raise the dead.”
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 on Stripe. Thank you so much for all your support.
Until next week, I am your guide,
Master Simon Haisell
On the Writing of letters by Desiderius Erasmus, the Dutch Renaissance philosopher. Erasmas was friends with Thomas More, so no wonder he is surprised by Cromwell’s gift: “He has heard only bad things of Thomas Cromwell.”
BBC Reith Lecture: The Iron Maiden. You can listen to Mantel’s lecture here or read it in A Memoir of My Former Self.
Thomas Cromwell: A Life by Diarmaid MacCulloch.
That part about the Italians burning their possessions and Cromwell’s opinion that the loss of the mirrors was the worst…it reminds me of a vampire short story I read that put forth the idea that being able to see yourself is part of what makes you human. And here Cromwell says that a man should be able to look at himself so as to judge what he has become, to assure himself that he is still a man and not a beast. People say that the eyes are the window to the soul and perhaps that's what Savonarola wanted: not to destroy beauty, but to crush people's very soul by taking away the ability to see who they are.
"Anne says, come and eat a poor Advent supper with me. We'll use forks."
I did a bit of digging into the history of the fork - turns out it arrived in Italy via the Byzantine Empire and the Middle East. It came to France with Catherine de' Medici in the early 1530's and became quite popular, though it took much longer to catch on in northern Europe & especially in England.
So Anne, imitating the customs of the French court, is being fashionable by using forks (at least by French & Italian standards). She is also aware that Cromwell has lived in Italy, and will understand that she is being fashionable. He might even be impressed by her cultured behaviour, rather than repelled by the possibility of eating with instruments that the English generally thought of as unmanly.