Devil's Spit / A Painter’s Eye
Wolf Crawl Week 14: Monday 1 April – Sunday 7 April
To get these updates in your inbox, subscribe to Footnotes and Tangents and turn on notifications for the Cromwell Trilogy.
Welcome to week fourteen of Wolf Crawl
This week, we are reading “Devil’s Spit, Autumn and winter 1533” and “A Painter’s Eye, 1534”. Treason, satanic saliva, battles in the bedchamber, and mushroom-picking.
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 posts 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. Thank you so much for all your support.
This is a long post and may get clipped by your email provider. It is best viewed online here.
In this week’s post:
This week’s story
This week’s characters
This week’s theme: Defensive fortifications
Footnote: Squashed letters
Character focus: Richard Riche
Tangent: The world is not what is was
Footnote: The last wolf in England
Tangent: Bedchamber battles
Character focus: Lady Rochford
Footnote: Holbein’s portrait
Quote of the week: God’s pen is poised
Next week
1. This week’s story
Autumn 1533. A princess of England is born. Cromwell is there when the king hears the news. For a moment, Henry is felled. But Cromwell’s other self, Thomas Cranmer, puts the king back on his feet. “It was like watching Lazarus get up,” says Thomas Cromwell.
Elizabeth Barton is brought to London for questioning. On her lips is the devil’s spit, and the prophecy that all heretics will be dead in six months. It is not quite treason. ‘I think new laws are needed,’ says Sir Richard Riche. ‘I have it in hand,’ says Thomas Cromwell.
Sunday supper at Austin Friars. A cosmopolitan table: statecraft and gossip. His niece Alice comes to see him: the Maid of Kent is close to breaking point. But so is Alice. Her mother has died and she wants to wed. Thomas Rotherham. Cromwell adds the boy’s name to his dead wife’s book of hours. Then crosses out another Thomas, Liz’s first husband. ‘I have got over Liz, he says to himself. Surely?’
Elizabeth Barton cracks. She confesses to being a fraud. Cromwell has them now: John Fisher, the Courtenays and the Poles. And “a fat haul of Franciscans.” Barton will do public penance while they decide what to do with the rest.
Jane Rochford comes to Cromwell. She offers friendship for information. Her husband, George Boleyn, wants her dead, she says. And the queen “craves novelty” beyond the stale bed of the King of England.
Cromwell counsels the king towards mercy and patience. Thomas More is adamant that he played no part in the affair. “Thomas. In the name of Christ, you know that.” He sounds rattled. But he will not recognise Henry as head of the church.
Anne Boleyn is pregnant again. This time, surely it will be a boy. They are breaking up the household of Lady Mary, the princess-that-was. She will go to Hatfield and serve the baby Elizabeth. Cromwell exerts his power and influence over the old families: telling Margaret Pole and Nicholas Carew what they must do.
1534, and Holbein’s portrait comes to Austin Friars. Everyone has an opinion and the real Thomas Cromwell learns that he is middle-aged, stout, and vain. The painter’s eye sees a man like a seawall with fingers that could wield a killing knife. I look like a murderer, Cromwell says.
Gregory says, ‘Did you not know?’
2. This week’s characters
Click on each link for more details and plot summaries for each character:
Thomas Cromwell • Henry VIII • Thomas Cranmer • Edward Seymour • Gertrude Courtenay • Elizabeth Barton • Mercy Wykys • Thomas Audley • Richard Riche • Alice Wellyfed • Princess Elizabeth • Anne Boleyn • Stephen Vaughan • William Butts • Nikolaus Kratzer • Thomas Wriothesley • Rafe Sadler • Honor Lisle • Hans Holbein • Bet Wellyfed • Christophe • Hugh Latimer • Jo • Thomas Boleyn • Charles Brandon • Jane Seymour • Edward Seymour • Lizzie Seymour • Jane Rochford • George Boleyn • Mark Smeaton • Thomas Wyatt • Thomas Howard • Henry Courtenay • Thomas More • Duke of Richmond • Gregory • Margaret Pole • Mary Tudor • Nicholas Carew • Eustache Chapuys
3. This week’s theme: Defensive fortifications
‘Thomas, it is like hugging a sea wall. What are you made of?’
Last week, our hopes and dreams overflowed. We were buoyed by rising expectations, the ship of state sailing straight and true into safe harbour. A queen crowned and an heir on the way.
This week, it is all about containing the crisis behind strong sea walls.
Here at the close of the year 1533, his spirit is sturdy, his will strong, his front imperturbable. The courtiers see that he can shape events, and mould them. He can contain the fears of other men, and give them a sense of solidity in a quaking world: this people, this dynasty, this miserable rainy island at the edge of the world.
This is how Hans Holbein paints him: as though he is “made of a more impermeable substance than most men, more compacted. He could well be wearing armour.”
He is fortified, and so is Anne Boleyn. Lady Rochford says: “La Ana is enceinte.” The French word for pregnant is also the word for the main defensive enclosure of a castle. Anne retreats behind her walls: she will not be safe until a son is born.
You cannot joke with Anne these days. You cannot laugh. You must think her perfect, or she will find some way to punish you.
It’s just like Cromwell and Anne to make a fortification look like a line of attack. The king’s men go after the prophetess Elizabeth Barton and uncover a web of treason, ensnaring two of the oldest families in England: the Courtenays and the Poles. The whole conspiracy unravels and “the hard thing has been to stop them complicating the story by rumours and fantasies, so that half England is dragged into it.”
It could all get out of hand very quickly. He, Cromwell, must contain the crisis. Hold back the king’s fury and killer instincts. Do not give Henry’s enemies, at home and abroad, more reason to make war. “This is the season for humility.” For confessions and clemency. “You incline him to mercy?” asks Alice. “I incline him to patience,” says Cromwell.
Because there is power in holding back. He feels it now at the close of 1533. “You can strike, or you can not strike, and if you choose to hold back the blow, you can still feel inside you the resonance of the omitted thing.”
4. Footnote: Squashed letters
It’s Sunday, four in the afternoon. He goes and laughs a bit at the clerks who have ‘prince’ written on their proclamations, and who now have to squeeze extra letters in.
5. Character focus: Richard Riche
But who would hold up his head, if people judged us by what we were like at twenty?
Enter Richard Riche. Ricardo. Sir Purse. The Solicitor General is a key character going forward, so pay attention to him. He’s got a colourful history, but so has Cromwell, and Cromwell recognises Riche’s talent for detail and drafting legislation. He is later described as going
through paperwork like a raven through a rubbish heap. Stab, stab, stab – with his pen, not a beak – till everything before him is minced or crushed or shattered, like a snail-shell burst on a stone.
His mind is “ingenious” and “retentive”, but transparent and perhaps lacking in imagination. He reads Niccolò Machiavelli and takes him literally:
He says to Riche, Niccolò tells us unarmed prophets always fail. He smiles and says, I mention this, Ricardo, because I know you like to have it by the book.
If Cromwell relies on his memory, intuition and wits, Riche has got where he is today by sitting up late studying “Statecraft for Dummies” and taking copious notes. But he is not stupid. He is one of the highly capable and intelligent ‘new men’ in government. Mantel describes him as “completely unburdened by principles", going about his work “in a way that is passionless and efficient, calm and polite.”
A useful man to have on your team. But not one you readily bring home for dinner, as this vignette at Austin Friars suggests:
Richard Riche arrives at eight o’clock, his face astonished and alarmed. ‘They stopped me at your gate, sir, and said, where’s your bag of mushrooms? No one comes in here without mushrooms.’ Riche’s dignity is affronted.
In the domestic sphere, he doesn’t fit in like Rafe Sadler or Richard Cromwell. But as Cromwell’s workload increases, he will need Richard Riche more and more.
6. Tangent: The world is not what is was
We are living in interesting times. The pope is no longer the pope. No one is quite sure whether the bread in church is still the body of Christ. There are new treasons and new heresies. New men at court. Thomas Wyatt says, “If you’d been like a knight in a story, lying under an enchantment? You would look around you and wonder, who are they, these people?”
We look back with nostalgia on the days before the Internet and the 24-hour news cycle, the Twitter storm and the deep fakes. Simpler, less cynical times?
When the last treason act was made, no one could circulate their words in a printed book or bill, because printed books were not thought of. He feels a moment of jealousy towards the dead, to those who served kings in slower times than these: nowadays the products of some bought or poisoned brain can be disseminated through Europe in a month.
Or a second. A flick of a finger in 2024.
In London, 1533, we are suffering from motion-sickness. Everything we thought we understood, is now uncertain, in doubt, under interrogation. “Either my calculations are wrong,” says Nikolaus Kratzer, “or the universe is not as we think it.”
At Austin Friars, Kratzer “draws the sun and the planets moving in their orbits according to the plan he has heard of from Father Copernicus.” The calculations of the Polish polymath Nicolaus Copernicus are revolutionising how we understand the cosmos and our place in it. We thought God’s unmoving Earth lay at its centre, while the heavens spun all around. We were wrong.
He shows how the world is turning on its axis, and nobody in the room denies it. Under your feet you can feel the tug and heft of it, the rocks groaning to tear away from their beds, the oceans tilting and slapping at their shores, the giddy lurch of Alpine passes, the forests of Germany ripping at their roots to be free. The world is not what it was when he and Vaughan were young, it is not what it was even in the cardinal’s day.
7. Footnote: The last wolf in England
'I think the wolves all died when the great forests were cut down. That howling you hear is only the Londoners.'
There are no dangerous beasts in England, only the English.
Wolves menaced sheep flocks in Anglo-Saxon and medieval England but were driven to extinction by the fourteenth century through deforestation and hunting.
According to legend, around 1390, Sir Edgar Harrington vowed to kill all the wolves on his land in Lancashire. He offered his niece Adele’s hand to the man who brought down the last wolf. An unknown knight chased England’s last wolf to Humphrey Head in South Cumbria, where it was slain. The champion revealed himself to be Sir Edgar’s estranged son John Harrington. Father and son were reconciled and John and Adele married in a nearby cave, adding the wolf to their family crest.
An older story tells of Gelert, the faithful wolfhound of Llywelyn the Great, a thirteenth-century Welsh ruler. Llywelyn finds his baby missing and Gelert’s mouth smeared with blood. He kills Gelert, thinking the wolfhound has devoured his child. But the child is alive and well, lying next to the wolf that Gelert killed to protect the baby.
Distinguishing between wolf and wolfhound, friend and foe, is a matter of life and death in England 1533, and at the Tudor court.
8. Tangent: Bedchamber battles
Bosworth, the tattered standards, the bloody field; the stained sheet of maternity. Where do we all come from, he thinks, but this same hole and corner dealing: sweetheart, yield to me.
The Tudor cannot afford wars. No one can, says Thomas Cromwell. Henry dreams of glory on the battlefield but makes do with hunting and the tilt yard. As a result, he is forty-three with an old leg injury and a thin skin.
If his ancestors fought in France, Henry fights in the bedchamber. The king’s war is for a son, and he hears the news of his daughter’s birth like taking a blow in the jousts: “It is magnificent. At the moment of impact, the king’s eyes are open, his body braced for the atteint.”
His councillors get him back on his horse, but his wounds are deep. Lady Rochford says: “Harry’s leg pains him at night. He is afraid the queen will kick him in the throes of her passion.” Cromwell considers they may be “battle-weary, exhausted,” but holds Mary in reserve for when her sister is again “hors de combat." Out of combat.
But they rally and Anne is pregnant again. “This time for sure,” says the king. “England is ours.”
Archaic, that cry from his heart: as if he were standing on the battlefield between the bloodied banners, the crown in a thorn bush, his enemies dead at his feet.
The thorn bush is an allusion to the Battle of Bosworth, where Richard III’s crown rolled into the undergrowth to be picked up by Henry Tudor. Henry is always living in the shadow of his father, and his grandfather Edward IV, who conquered England on the battlefield, while Henry must be victorious in bed.
9. Character focus: Lady Rochford
‘In your heart, if you are honest, you would like to know the things I know.’
George Boleyn’s wife and Queen Anne’s sister-in-law, Jane Rochford steals the show this week. Cromwell describes her mind as “underoccupied” and her manners “rough”, but she is itching to intrigue and wants his “friendship” in return for information.
She is the Wolf Hall gossip queen of one-liners and barbed putdowns. Lady Rochford will serve four queens of England before her story’s over. If she and Anne were once close allies, that friendship has now soured. And while no one wants to be on the wrong side of Anne Boleyn, everyone needs to watch out for Lady Rochford.
Here is Jane Boleyn on her husband, and on Cromwell, and on sheep:
‘There is not a minx within thirty miles who has not had a set of Rochford’s verses. But if you think the gallantry stops at the bedchamber’s door, you are more innocent than I took you for. You may be in love with Seymour’s daughter, but you need not emulate her in having the wit of a sheep.’
And here she is on Mark Smeaton:
‘He sticks like a burr to his betters. He does not know his place. He is a jumped-up nobody, taking his chance because the times are disordered.’
But let Cromwell have the last word:
'I suppose you could say the same of me, Lady Rochford. And I am sure you do.'
10. Footnote: Holbein’s portrait
Hilary Mantel in her Reith Lectures:
At the Frick Museum in New York, Holbein’s portraits of More and Cromwell hang either side of a fireplace. It is only a fireplace: it’s easy to create a false polarity between the two men, who had so much to say to each other. Thomas More is looking fiercely, attentively at whatever passes before him, and Thomas Cromwell, it seems, is gazing into the next room. He's not looking at us. He's giving us nothing. He's going to let us struggle.
“A Painter’s Eye” sees Hilary Mantel’s Cromwell come face-to-face with Hans Holbein’s version of the man. The painter makes him unreadable: “You cannot trace those thoughts behind his eyes.” Hilary Mantel considered it a challenge.
Very sadly, she did not live long enough to learn one the best secrets hiding in plain sight in this painting. She writes:
Hans had asked to see his Bible, rejected it as too plain, too thumbed. He had scoured the house and found the finest volume he owned on the desk of Thomas Avery. It is the monk Pacioli’s work, the book on how to keep your books, sent to him by his kind friends in Venice.
Except that is not the book in the painting. Historians Kate McCaffrey and Owen Emmerson, and Hever Castle curator Alison Palmer, recently found and identified an ornate printed Book of Hours that matches the one on Cromwell’s table. Katherine of Aragon and Anne Boleyn also owned copies of the same edition.
Did Cromwell just grab the “finest volume he owned”, as Mantel suggests? Or did he want to convey a message about his piety and the strength of his religious convictions? A traditional devotional book seems like an unusual choice for a proponent of religious reform. And yet it would show how seriously he considered the task in hand. And how Hilary Mantel would have loved to have explored all these questions!
In the video below, Owen Emmerson explores the symbolic meaning of some of the other items in the painting:
11. Quote of the week: God’s pen is poised
At the close of 1533, our sea-wall protagonist is again thinking about the future. In Anna Regina, he fantasised about building a better king. In this chapter, we see his vision for a new England under a reformed religion. Here Mantel paints the picture Holbein hides, an evangelical on a fervent mission:
The sky has cleared now, to a flawless lapis blue. The London gardens are bright with berries. There is an obdurate winter ahead. But he feels a force ready to break, as spring breaks from the dead tree. As the word of God speaks, the people's eyes are opened to new truths. Until now, like Helen Barre, they knew Noah and the Flood, but not St Paul. They could count over the sorrows of our Blessed Mother, and say how the damned are carried down to Hell. But they did not know the manifold miracles and sayings of Christ, nor the words and deeds of the apostles, simple men who, like the poor of London, pursued simple wordless trades. The story is much bigger than they ever thought it was. He says to his nephew Richard, you cannot tell people just part of the tale and then stop, or just tell them the parts you choose. They have seen their religion painted on the walls of churches, or carved in stone, but not God's pen is poised, and he is ready to write his words in the books of their hearts.
12. Next week
Thank you for reading and joining me on this slow read of the Cromwell trilogy. Next week, we read the chapter: “Supremacy, 1534.”
Before I go, a quick reminder that this book group is entirely funded by its readers. So, if you have enjoyed this post and found it helpful, please consider a paid subscription to access the bonus posts on The Haunting of Wolf Hall and start your own discussion threads in the chat area. You can also donate to my tip jar on Stripe. Thank you so much for all your support.
Until next week, I am your guide,
Master Simon Haisell
We finally got to two of my favorite lines:
I look like a murderer, Cromwell says.
Gregory says, ‘Did you not know?’
♥️♥️♥️♥️♥️
I'm finding it hard to not read ahead of schedule at this point in the book! Wolf Hall feels like a huge cresting wave. I'm caught up in the swell, paddling against the tide to hang back and not ride this thing all the way to the shore. However reading slowly (with restraint) is sweetening the whole experience. I'm prolonging my time in Cromwell's company and what a delight it is to be in his orbit.