Magnificence (Part 2/2)
Wolf Crawl Week 50: Monday 9 December – Sunday 15 December
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Welcome to Week 50 of Wolf Crawl
This week, we are reading the second half of ‘Magnificence, January–June 1540’ This runs from page 765 to 806 in the Fourth Estate paperback edition. It begins: “When the court moves to Westminster, they go by river.” It ends: “The flint sparkles like sunlight on the sea.”
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
Give someone the gift of Cromwell in 2025
Wolf Crawl will run again next year for paid subscribers. All my posts will be revised and updated so that more readers can savour these extraordinary books in a slow year-long read. If you know someone who would enjoy this experience, consider a gift subscription so they can take part in Wolf Crawl 2025. Paid subscribers can also join the War and Peace readalong, read any of my book guides, or take part in any of the other 2025 slow reads.
Last week’s post:
This week’s story
The court moves upriver to Westminster. The king has summoned Parliament for new taxes; the money from the monasteries moves too slowly into his hands. He, Cromwell, feels like the Wound Man in a surgeon’s manual. He bleeds money.
The king visits the queen every other night, but Henry’s chaste kisses are not going to make a Duke of York, says Lady Jane Rochford. The Duke of Norfolk is sent to France and appears happy about it. Before he sails, he is seen with Stephen Gardiner, conspiring. Let them. Cromwell has planned his own surprise for Thomas Howard.
During Lent, Gardiner and Robert Barnes fight it out in preaching wars that push Barnes closer to the fire. Gardiner hopes he will drag Cromwell with him. He, Cromwell, goes to the king on a mercy mission, and they end up talking of memories that never were.
He is losing the king, and he knows it. He wishes himself far away. He loses patience and lashes out: orders men to be racked and Thetford Priory to come down, where Norfolk’s ancestors are buried. It would be a declaration of war, if we were not already down in the cockpit with the feathers and the blood.
In March, the Earl of Essex dies, followed days later by the Earl of Oxford. He goes to Gardiner’s house to make peace, as the king desires. But Norfolk is there, and they fight. Thomas Howard storms out. Alone, Wolsey’s two old servants glare at each other over the preserves and pickled greens. ‘Mind your back,’ Stephen says as he, Cromwell, walks away.
In the barge home, he hands his knife to Christophe to keep. It is no use to him now.
Lord Lisle’s men in Calais are hunting heretics. He, Cromwell, is hunting Lord Lisle. He takes his suspicions to the king, linking Henry’s uncle to Reginald Pole. The king takes him aside. While the French ambassador spreads word that Cromwell is down, news bleeds into the world: Walter’s boy is now the Earl of Essex.
Rafe and Call-Me are promoted: Master Secretary with two heads. Richard Riche is aggrieved, left out in the cold. He, the Earl of Essex, displays his magnificence to Stephen Gardiner and threatens to live another thirty years.
Parliament sits, and the court fills up. Lady Rochford is strangely distant, but Bess Seymour (‘Lady Cromwell’) keeps him informed of the news close to the queen. The king is chasing Katherine Howard, and on May Day, Richard Cromwell will fight the Howards in the jousts and in foot combat, where there is no place to hide.
His nephew is triumphant. The crowd cheers, and the king calls Richard his diamond. ‘For Richard, these are the greatest days of his life.’
Wyatt comes to warn him of Bishop Bonner and of Suffolk; Brandon will not protect you when you need it most. Wyatt feels guilty; he thinks he has worked against Cromwell’s cause in Europe. But he, Thomas Essex, thinks we will be alright.
Rumours of invasion circulate. He uses it to bring Lord Lisle down. He learns that Gardiner has put on the play ‘Magnificence’ against Cromwell. Norfolk was there. Call-Me was there. The king reproves the performance, but tells him that he, Essex, is the reason he is stuck with a Lutheran wife he does not love.
The next day, he waits to be summoned. He considers the king’s case. He considers his own fate. The following day, he sits in the Lords and then walks to the council chamber. He loses his hat to an ill wind that leaves his fellow councillors’ heads covered. A lad from the street retrieves it, and is rewarded with a coin.
Inside the council chamber, no one sits.
When they come, he is ready for them. There is a fight. But they are many, and he is only Cromwell. His chain of office is removed, his Garter badge taken from his coat. William Kingston waits to take him to the Tower. Cranmer, Rafe, Gregory are safe. He asks for Christophe. He does not ask about Call-Me Risley.
In the doorway, Gardiner says, 'Adieu, Cromwell.'
This week’s characters
Click on each link for more details and plot summaries for each character:
Thomas Cromwell • Henry VIII • Anna of Cleves • Thomas Howard • Charles Brandon • Katherine Howard • Earl of Surrey • Thomas Wriothesley • Richard Riche • Stephen Gardiner • Robert Barnes • Henry Bouchier • Jane Rochford • Lady Mary • Christophe • Bishop Sampson • Rafe Sadler • Thomas Avery • Charles de Marillac • Bess Seymour • Richard Cromwell • Gregory • Thomas Culpepper • William Fitzwilliam • Thomas Wyatt • Thomas Audley • William Kingston
This week’s theme: A Man for All Seasons
Now the season changes. Each brightening day is made up of other days he has known. He sees a flock of chaffinches rise like flying roses from a still pool. His hawks watch dust motes as they flitter against a wall, as if the sunlight is a living thing, their prey.
The 1960 play about Thomas More, A Man for All Seasons, takes its title from a description of More by one of his contemporaries, the scholar Robert Whittington:
More is a man of an angel’s wit and singular learning. I know not his fellow. For where is the man of that gentleness, lowliness and affability? And, as time requireth, a man of marvellous mirth and pastimes, and sometime of a sad gravity. A man for all seasons.
We now use this expression to describe someone who can adapt to any situation. Mantel’s Cromwell may have thought the epitaph ironical for More, since his inflexibility killed him. He was no man for the season of the king’s killing vein. But then, More may have offered one of his chilly smiles, and said, I have adapted myself to my fate. I do what Cicero says, ‘live hopefully, die bravely.’
Sometimes, they call Henry the Summer King. The hunting is good, the braves tilt at glory, the long evenings are light with music and masques, and he is beloved and magnificent. Other times, he is the Winter King. His leg is bad, his dreams oppress, and he drags himself into the council chamber to determine who to blame.
Yet the worst of all is not winter, but spring.
‘Summer is coming, but the king rains and shines like April.’
What makes this chapter unbearable to read is not its darkness, but its light. Cromwell rises to close the shutters, and Henry says, ‘Leave those, I want what light there is.’ Signs of spring give us hope and keep us going. ‘Old wives say we shall have a hot summer.’ The turn of phrase unsettles us when we think what the manner of that heat may be; and, because, where will we be in June or July 1540?
Geoffrey Chaucer opens The Canterbury Tales by celebrating the ‘sweet showers’ that April brings to draw forth new life. T. S. Eliot inverted the imagery in the opening lines of The Waste Land:
April is the cruellest month, breeding Lilacs out of the dead land, mixing Memory and desire, stirring Dull roots with spring rain.
Mantel has already alluded to Henry and Cromwell standing alone in a ‘wasteland’; they are surrounded by the corpses of these last years. Men with more past than future, who are aware there was something they were meant to do, but never did:
‘But when I think about it, Cromwell … I recall we never made that journey.’
Their plan to ride down to the Weald to see the ironmasters is a dream that Henry has mentioned a few times throughout the trilogy. The Weald is a region of South East England, its name coming from the old English for forest. King and councillor fantasise about leaving their affairs of state and walking out like country gentlemen, or Arthut’s knights, free from everything that holds them here in failing light:
‘It will be only two nights or three, I said, though we shall take it at an easy pace. We shall listen to the birdsong and ride, like knights of Camelot, through the woods. We shall enjoy the sunshine.’ Henry pauses. ‘The sunshine, where did that go?’ 'God made February, sir, as well as June.'
But now no more for lack of time. It’s getting late. Cromwell remembers the king’s unwanted gift, the Lutheran clock. ‘Its case was made by an artist; its machinery, by a gunsmith.’ That machine disturbs his pulse; it is like a ticking time bomb in his hand.
When the king makes him Earl of Essex, it is miraculous. ‘He had thought the sands of time were running out.’ But he is ‘the greatest miracle of all, Thomas Cromwell, the Putney boy: who holds that the passage of time does not add lustre to fakes.’ He leaps up from the dead, like Lazarus, or the poet Petrarch, who went on to live ‘another thirty years. Thirty years, Stephen.’
That is what a warm Spring day does to you. It wraps your cold bones in hope, and you ‘become light as air.’ But tomorrow, the wind may blow ill. And on Thursday, a late frost and rain like broken glass.
Gardiner says, ‘Don’t you feel the wind changing?’
On his way to the council chamber, ‘an ill wind’ takes his hat off. Cromwell remembers the occasion at Wolf Hall when the king lost his hat, and everyone went uncovered for the rest of the day in deference. ‘Five days. Wolf Hall’. Those were the days.
He goes in as Lord Privy Seal, he comes out as a prisoner to the Tower. We know it was dark within because outside, ‘the sunlight whites out the spectators.’ He is like William Tyndale in the Bleachfields. Spring came and went, with its meetings in shadows and its ‘splintering sunlight.’ But now it is summer, and everything is illuminated.
It is June 1540, and the ‘old wives say we shall have a hot summer.’
Footnotes
1. On Nightingales
Then Harry will want a new wife, and God knows who. A song drifts into his head, it must be one Walter sang: I kissed her sweet, and she kissed me; I danced the darling on my knee.
He has recalled some verses written by John Skelton, author of Magnificence (more on that later). The song ends, ‘So merrily singeth the nightingale.’
The nightingale is dusk’s counterpart to the lark, the bird that sings in the dawn. In Ovid’s Metamorphoses, Philomela is raped by her sister’s husband, who cuts out her tongue so she cannot tell her story. Like Anselma, she weaves her story into a tapestry to obtain her revenge. In the story, she is then transformed into a nightingale, that fills the air with its mournful song. However, in nature, only the male nightingales sing, and the females are mute.
Perhaps what is jarring about Skelton’s verse is that the nightingale sings merrily. Like this chapter, its lightness is incongruous and eerie, for it marks the coming of the dark.
You may recall that in the chapter ‘Inheritance’, Mathew buys a nightingale in a cage for one mark. Christophe thinks he has paid too dear. A reader in the comments suggested this was a reference to Cromwell paying too high a price (his life) for spies like Bess Darrell. A bird may sing for anyone. We will return to this later.
Further resources:
2. Saint Sebastian and The Wound Man
When he left the Frescobaldi bank he went to Venice. There at his workplace they had a long chest with carved panels, showing St Sebastian stuck with arrows. Every night he used to pack the ledgers away, dropping the key into his pocket; he had never given the martyr a glance. So how is it he can see him now? There are longbowmen on one side. Crossbowmen on the other. He is pierced from every angle.
The early Christian martyr supposedly survived the ordeal, only to be clubbed to death on the orders of the Roman Emperor Diocletian (Jovius). It is not a reassuring story for Cromwell, who feels himself dying by a thousand wounds. He pictures himself as ‘Wound Man’, found in contemporary medical manuscripts.
He holds out his arms, one half-severed at the wrist: ‘Come on, come on, what else have you got?’
Further resources:
3. Pandar
'If you want power,' he says, 'get it like a man. It does not become your grey hairs, to play Pandar.'
Pander is a Trojan warrior in Homer’s Iliad, but Cromwell is thinking of the character in Giovanni Boccaccio’s story of Troilus and Criseyde and perhaps Geoffrey Chaucer’s poem on the same subject. In both, Pandar is the go-between in the relationship. Shakespeare will expand on this character in his 1609 play, and the ageing, lecherous bawd will give us the English words to pander. ‘God rot you!’ Despite Norfolk’s lack of reading, he does appear to know who Cromwell is talking about.
Stephen signals for the wine jug. 'Insult is a fine art. I wondered for a moment if he knew who Pandar was. I thought you might have been too subtle.' 'No, not today,' he says. 'I'm not feeling subtle at all.'
4. Traitor Knights
When Cromwell became a Garter Knight in Week 42, I mentioned his entry in the Black Book of the Order of the Garter. Here the king wonders aloud what to do when a knight is unmasked as a traitor. We could cross out the name or tear out the page. ‘But will that not mar the beauty of the pages?’
The decision is that the disgraced name should remain. But the words 'VAH! PRODITUR' should be written in the margin, so the man is branded for ever.
‘Fie on you! Traitor.’ The first traitor knight to be branded in this manner was Thomas Cromwell, and you can see his amended entry in the Black Book here.
5. Death is your lackey
Back in Bring Up the Bodies, Cromwell considers that one must never desire ‘the death of any human creature.’ In ‘Angels’ he thinks:
Death is your prince, you are not his patron; when you think he is engaged elsewhere, he will batter down your door, walk in and wipe his boots on you.
Faced with the atrocious sight of a rejuvenated Lord Prviy Seal, Stephen Gardiner wheels out the story of Calchas, the seer from Homer’s Iliad. It is he who tells Agamemnon to sacrifice his daughter Iphigeneia to appease Artemis and provide a favourable wind to sail to Troy.
Gardiner refers to the prophecy that he would never drink wine made from his own vineyards. Having drunk the wine and proved the prediction wrong, he laughed himself to death. Calchas appears alongside Pandar, also mentioned in this chapter, in William Shakespeare's play Troilus and Cressida.
Thomas Cromwell counters with the story of Petrarch sitting up at his funeral and living another thirty years. We know Cromwell’s love of Italian poetry. Early in The Mirror and the Light, Cromwell finds Thomas Wyatt reading Petrarch in the Tower. Wyatt says:
‘In this edition the verses are arranged in an order that corresponds to the poet’s life. They tell a story. Or they seem to. I always want a story, don’t you?’
Petrarch lived out his old age in the Euganean Hills near Padua and died in 1374. At the house where he died, there is a marble slab inscribed with verse. The last lines read:
Through all my exemplary life, So well did I in constant strife Employ my claws and curses, That even now, though I am dead, Those nibbling wretches dare not tread On one of Petrarch's verses.
Further resources:
Between the contests musicians play. They sing 'England be Glad', their voices lost in the open air. Then they play the Bear Dance, and Montard Brawle, which makes the ladies jump in their seats and beat time, and all those who are not in armour clap their hands.
6. Stroppendragers
In the noble city of Ghent, the Emperor sits in a hall draped in black, dealing out fates. He strips the guilds of their privileges, levies a fine, impounds weapons and knocks down part of the walls as well as the principal abbey, announcing that he will build a fortress garrisoned with Spanish troops. He parades the chief citizens barefoot, in the smocks of penitents, nooses around their necks. The executions have gone on for a month.
The bloody backdrop to Cromwell’s arrest is Charles V’s suppression of the revolt of Gent in the imperial Low Countries. Its enduring image is the procession of sheriffs, clerks, officials, and noblemen through the streets, nooses around their necks, begging their emperor for mercy. Ever since, the people of Ghent have called themselves ‘noose bearers’ (stroppendragers), and each year, the procession is re-enacting by the Guild of Noose Bearers.
With terrible dramatic irony, Cromwell says to Brandon, ‘They call our king a killer,’ but the emperor is clearly a monster in comparison. Recently, Cromwell has tried to make a friend of the Duke of Suffolk, hoping that he will protect him from the king’s more murderous moods. Brandon’s response here is less than reassuring:
‘With all of his troubles with men and women both, with traitors and rebels and councillors false, I call him an annointed saint.’
Further resources:
7. Magnificence
‘At Gardiner’s house they played a masque. It was Magnificence. Sir, they played it against you.’
John Skelton was a poet, satirist and playwright. He had been Henry’s tutor during his father’s reign. In the chapter ‘The Five Wounds’, the pilgrim rebels sing one of Skelton’s poems. And if you grab your copy of Wolf Hall and open it up at the epigraph, you will see a cast of characters from Skelton’s play Magnificence:
These be the names of the players: Felicity Cloaked Collusion Liberty Courtly Abusion Measure Folly Magnificence Adversity Fancy Poverty Counterfeit Countenance Despair Crafty Conveyance Mischief Good Hope Redress Circumspection Perseverance
Magnificence is a morality play where a good king is ruined by wicked and ambitious councillors and rescued by Good Hope, Redress and Perseverance. Cardinal Wolsey had been a patron of Skelton, but in the 1520s, the poet turned on the increasingly unpopular prelate.
As I have discussed throughout our slow read, Hilary Mantel presents the Tudor court as a stage, in which men play their parts and succeed or fail based on their performance. Cromwell is the man who has learned to ‘arrange his face’ and play the role of the good and loyal councillor. In Wolf Hall, he cursed Thomas More’s attempt to rewrite the script and give himself all the best lines. The staging of Wolsey’s descent into hell inspired Cromwell’s revenge against the play devils in Bring Up the Bodies.
Now, Thomas Howard and Stephen Gardiner have written a new part for Cromwell to play: the traitor heretic who wanted to be king. Crumb may not like the lines. But, by Jude, they’re going to make him learn them.
Further resources:
Quote of the Week: Tell the dead
The final two weeks of Wolf Crawl will make for sober reading. So I will leave us here with Cromwell at the top of his ladder. The blacksmith’s boy, the butcher’s dog, has been made Earl of Essex. There’s only one way to go from here.
Truth is, he had stood on the threshold and thought, those I want to tell are dead. I want to tell my good master Frescobaldi, and my friends in his kitchen. I want to tell the boy who, as I walked upstairs to the counting house, was scrubbing the stairs. I want to tell Anslema, and my wife and children, and the girl in Rome who gave me my knife. I want to sing Scaramella: Scaramella to the war is gone, bomboretta bomboro. I want to tell Wolsey, and get his blessing. I want to tell Walter, and see his face. News will travel to Putney: Put-an-edge-on-it has been made an earl! He wants to tell the eel boy; he wishes he were alive, so he could go down there, dig him out of his drinking den, and pound it into his skull.
Next week
Thank you for reading and joining me on this slow read of the Cromwell trilogy. Next week, we are reading the first half of ‘Mirror, June–July 1540’ This runs from page 809 to 847 in the Fourth Estate paperback edition. It begins: “Sunset, Christophe stands on the threshold.” It ends: “As Wyatt writes, Lauda finem: praise the end.”
If you are enjoying this slow read, please consider recommending it to others so they can take part in Wolf Crawl 2025. You can now give your friends, or your enemies, the gift of Cromwell with an annual subscription to Footnotes and Tangents.
Until next week, I am your guide,
Master Simon Haisell
The moment when his hat tumbles away across the courtyard is so, so chilling. It reminds me a bit of the moment when Cromwell sees a flash of Liz’s white cap in the corner of his eye, but there’s no one there when he turns around. Only this time, everyone is there: be-hatted and coldly standing around him. There’s an eerie feeling to it all that makes the hair stand up on the back of your neck, the brain slowly catching up with your body’s inner animal sense that something is very, very wrong. Ugh.
I was so shocked with the reading this week. The turn for Cromwell is much like SPOILER ALERT the death of Petya in War and Peace. You expect it for so long and then it springs up and surprises you. The themes of birds and sunlight in this section are heavy to bear. I was so distracted by the light, that I didn't notice the end creeping in. To be given a new title and then to be taken to the Tower.
I can't believe we're in the final weeks of this reading. Mantel has led us to a heartwrenching end.