At Austin Friars / Visitation
Wolf Crawl Week 2: Monday 8 January – Sunday 14 January
To get these updates in your inbox, subscribe to Footnotes and Tangents and turn on notifications for the Cromwell Trilogy.
Welcome to week two of Wolf Crawl
Thank you so much to everyone who shared and commented on last week’s post. In that post, I asked how many people are joining us for Wolf Crawl. Almost 900 people responded, which is just incredible! I never expected this level of interest when, last summer, I raised the idea of a slow read of the Cromwell trilogy.
You will find everything you need for this read-along on the main Cromwell trilogy page of my website, including the reading schedule and a list of characters. There is now also a page with links to online resources about Mantel’s writing and Thomas Cromwell.
This week we’re reading:
III At Austin Friars. 1527
PART TWO. I Visitation. 1529
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 week’s story
It is still 1527. We have left York Place and returned to Cromwell’s own home at Autin Friars. We meet his wife, Liz Cromwell, and they read a terse letter from their teenage son Gregory, who is being tutored at Cambridge. Liz tells Thomas the gossip about an emerald ring that may have been bought by the king for someone other than the queen. In bed, Cromwell thinks of his books: Tyndale’s bible and a book from Germany smuggled across the narrow sea. He remembers how he met Liz’s father, turned his business around, and married his daughter. For the second chapter running, Rafe Sadler is waiting to see him on his way.
Fast forward to 1529, and it is all over for Cardinal Wolsey. The two greatest noblemen in the land have come to kick him out of York Place and make it ready for Lady Anne Boleyn, the king’s mistress. Cromwell is on hand to delay matters, but only by so much. Wolsey has got face and stays calm, but his fingers are trembling. And out on the river, in his barge, with Londoners insulting him from the darkness: the cardinal breaks down. Upriver, they meet his fool Sexton with the horses to take them to Esher. Henry Norris arrives with words of comfort from the king, and the cardinal sends Sexton as a gift in return. There is much work to be done at Esher, as Cromwell and George Cavendish consider the future and a world without Wolsey.
This week’s characters
In order of appearance:
Thomas Cromwell • Liz Cromwell • Gregory Cromwell • Anne Cromwell • Grace Cromwell • Bet Cromwell • Charles Brandon • William Tyndale • Humphrey Monmouth • Henry Wykys • Mercy Wykys • Rafe Sadler • Thomas Howard • Cardinal Wolsey • William Gascoigne • George Cavendish • Stephen Gardiner • Master Sexton • Harry Norris • William Warham • Cuthbert Tunstall • Thomas More
Focus: Private worlds
The novel’s opening epigraph quotes De Architectura by Vitruvius:
There are three kinds of scenes, one called the tragic, second the comic, third the satyric. Their decorations are different and unalike each other in scheme. Tragic scenes are delineated with columns, pediments, statues and other objects suited to kings; comic scenes exhibit private dwellings, with balconies and views representing rows of windows, after the manner of ordinary dwellings: satyric scenes are decorated with trees, caverns, mountains and other rustic objects delineated in landscape style.
I think one of the things Mantel is signposting here is that this is not just a story played out in public space, the world of the court and the domain of the king. Wolf Hall is about private worlds. Both in the sense of domestic settings and the closed-off realm of thoughts and memory.
This is where we go in chapter three, At Austin Friars. Cromwell’s home. Scenes familiar to many of us: a husband back late from work. A couple who need only a few words to say how they feel. A letter home from a child who has flown the nest. A couple awake in bed: “Asleep?” Liz says. ‘No. But dreaming.’
Dreaming memories of times before. The private landscape that lies out of reach of the historian, the inquisitor, and often, the dreamer himself. A landscape where he is young again, “not long back from abroad, prone to start a sentence in one language and finish it in another”. When what he wanted was a wife, “with city contacts and some money behind her”.
Most of us don’t step foot on the public stage. The political world of the court. But we all lie in bed dreaming of the past. Get in late or stay up waiting. It’s here, at home with the Cromwells, that we meet ourselves walking in the shadows at Austin Friars.
And Liz Cromwell does something else for us. In the last chapter, we learned of the king’s great matter. Wolsey presented it to us as we might find it in a history book: the King of England wanted to divorce his first wife because he needed a male heir to secure the succession. Liz tells us why this matters in private, in the hearts and minds of every woman in England:
If he tries this … then half the people in the world will be against it… All women everywhere in England. All women who have a daughter but no sons. All women who have lost a child. All women who have lost any hope of having a child. All women who are forty.
And here it is worth noting Hilary Mantel’s own story. Treatment in her twenties for endometriosis left her unable to have children: “If, like me,” she wrote, “you have a surgical menopause at the age of 27, you’ve thought your way through questions of fertility and menopause and what it means to be without children because it all happened catastrophically.”
Through Mantel and through Liz Cromwell, the king’s “great matter” becomes a personal matter played out in a private world.
Focus: Dangerous books
Wolsey will burn books, but not men.
This is an age of great change, where men are burning books for the dangerous ideas they contain. And others are burning men, for the dangerous words on their lips.
Back in 1517, a German priest called Martin Luther began writing and speaking publically against the practices of the Church. He didn’t just criticise corruption – rife at the time. He attacked the basic tenets of the Catholic religion: the seven sacraments, clerical celibacy, salvation through good works and the role of the priest in communion. This is the beginning of the Protestant Reformation.
Henry VIII read Luther’s work and was appalled. Possibly with the help of Thomas More, he wrote a book called The Defence of the Seven Sacraments. The book defended the sacrament of marriage and the supremacy of the pope. In recognition of his support, the pope conferred on him the title “Defender of the Faith”. It’s a title still held by Charles III.
So right now, England is a hostile place for anyone with these dangerous new ideas drifting off the continent. And it might be a bit of a surprise that Wolsey’s lawyer, Cromwell, has some of these banned books in his house. The most powerful cleric in England appears to have a heretic for a secretary.
Locked in a chest is Cromwell’s copy of Tyndale’s bible. In 1526, William Tyndale began printing his English translation of the New Testament from the relative safety of the continent. A much older English translation by John Wycliffe was still being covertly passed around by a sect called the Lollards. Cromwell suspects his wife’s mother, Mercy, of Lollardy. It’s not something to shout about. For over a hundred years, it was associated with rebellion and heresy and was punishable by death. By burning.
Cromwell’s bible comes from Antwerp, and on the title page are the words: ‘PRINTED IN UTOPIA’.
He hopes Thomas More has seen one of these. He is tempted to show him, just to see his face.
Thomas More is a lawyer like Cromwell and a close adviser to the king. He is also a philosopher and a writer. In 1516, he wrote Utopia and coined that term as the name of his fictional island, an ideal society with the best government.
More opposed Luther and the early reformers and regarded Tyndale’s bible as heretical. He would probably have been unamused, to say the least, to see his religious adversaries describing their new religion as Utopia.
For further reading, I recommend this essay by
on Burning Books and Burning Bodies in Wolf Hall.
Focus: A visitation upon a turbulent priest
These books are full of echoes in English history. Echos forward, and echoes back.
These books are also full of Thomases. I think I have counted at least thirteen, including three principal characters we have now met: Thomas Cromwell, Thomas Wolsey, and Thomas Howard, the Duke of Norfolk.
If you want to know why everyone is called Thomas, you have to go back to the 12th Century and the murder of the Archbishop of Canterbury, Thomas à Becket. He was killed by four knights who believed they were acting on a royal command from Henry II to “rid me of this turbulent priest”. Becket was assassinated in the cathedral at Canterbury, a sacrilegious act that led to Becket being venerated as a Christian martyr and canonised as a saint. A remorseful Henry II did public penance at Canterbury, and Becket’s shrine became a site of pilgrimage for faithful across Europe. It is the destination of the pilgrims in Geoffrey Chaucer’s Canterbury Tales.
His popularity eclipsed Edward the Confessor, the only English king to be made a saint. And he led to a lot of babies being christened Thomas.
Now, both Wolsey and Cromwell have Cornish choughs on their coat of arms. In the language of heraldry, a chough is called a “becket.” These relatives of the crow have red feet and a red beak, as though they have been standing in and drinking the blood of their enemies. It’s just a thought.
So here we are. 1529. Two knights of the garter, Norfolk and Suffolk, have barged in on another archbishop called Thomas. Here are the echoes of history. And Mantel gives it a nod:
They bring out the cardinal’s vestments, his copes. Stiff with embroidery, strewn with pearls, encrusted with gemstones, they seem to stand by themselves. The raiders knock down each one as if they are knocking down Thomas Becket.
But there is another echo, resounding from the future. The title of this chapter is “Visitation”. Much later, Cromwell will oversee the dissolution of the monasteries. It’s what he’s famous for. It’s why he’s still hated by northern ghosts whistling through the stonework of abbey ruins. The inspections by Cromwell’s men will be called “visitations”. This is the stereotype of Cromwell: the greedy black-clad bureaucrat seizing the splendour of the religious houses, and throwing monks out into the cold. Here, in 1529, it is a Visitation to take Wolsey’s wealth and throw Cromwell and his master out on the road.
Read more about the story of Thomas à Becket at the British Museum.
But he, Cromwell, seeks to reassure the cardinal:
Whatever we face at journey’s end, we shall not forget how nine years ago, for the meeting of two kings, Your Grace created a golden city in some sad damp fields in Picardy. Since then, Your Grace has only increased in wisdom and the king’s esteem.
This is a reference to the Field of Cloth of Gold, a grand meeting between Henry VIII and King Francis I of France in 1520. Henry wanted to fight and win wars, but Wolsey sold his king the idea of winning the peace with extravagant demonstrations of wealth, pomp and pageantry. The cardinal orchestrated the construction of a fabulous temporary city, with turrets and battlements, cloth of gold and fountains that flowed with wine.
But now we are to Esher. To an “empty house” without a pot, a knife or a spit. How far we have fallen.
Read more in the Smithsonian Magazine about the 18-day party that was the Field of the Cloth of Gold.
Quote of the Week
Cromwell, the bureaucrat and statesman, never wrote about his beliefs. His contemporary and adversary, Thomas More, wrote copiously about what he thought and his opposition to the Reformation. But Cromwell’s actions throughout his later life demonstrate a real belief in religious reform. Here, Mantel brilliantly captures the process by which the man begins to doubt everything he thought was true:
He never sees More – a star in another firmament, who acknowledges him with a grim nod – without wanting to ask, what’s wrong with you? Or what’s wrong with me? Why does everything you know, and everything you’ve learned, confirm you in what you believed before? Whereas in my case, what I grew up with, and what I thought I believed, is chipped away a little and a little, a fragment then a piece and then a piece more. With every month that passes, the corners are knocked off the certainties of this world: and the next world too. Show me where it says, in the Bible, ‘Purgatory’, Show me where it says relics, monks, nuns. Show me where it says ‘Pope’.
Bonus: The Haunting of Wolf Hall
For paying subscribers, here is the next instalment on the spooky side of Mantel’s fiction:
Endnotes
And that’s all for this week. Next week’s reading is:
Week 3: An Occult History of Britain (part 1)
Monday 15 January – Sunday 21 January
In the 4th Estate paperback edition: pages 65 – 107
Section ending: “All the rivers run to the sea, but the seas are not yet full.”
This is one of my favourite chapters in the entire trilogy, so I’m very excited to see what everyone thinks of it.
And let me know in the comments what stood out for you this week. We were with Cromwell at home and Cromwell in action. What did we learn about this pugnacious lawyer from Putney? And also: What did we not learn? What do we not know?
Thank you for reading. If you found this post valuable, I encourage you to become a paying subscriber, if you haven’t already. This keeps our book group in Utopia and my lord Cardinal forever in the king’s favour.
Until next week, I am your faithful servant,
Master Haisell
I really enjoy the domestic moments in this section - Cromwell's wife is so well written. In just a few words of dialogue we can feel her presence. And by showing us his family life, Mantel allows us to appreciate Cromwell as a whole person, not just as a clever scheming politician.
One of my favourite bits: 'He wonders. why should my wife worry about women who have no sons? Possibly its something women do: spend time imagining what its like to be each other. One can learn from that he thinks?'
Is this an explanation of why most of my favourite novelists are women?