Make or Mar / Three-Card Trick
Wolf Crawl Week 5: Monday 29 January – Sunday 4 February
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Welcome to week five of Wolf Crawl
This week we are reading the chapters “Make or Mar, All Hallows 1529” and “Three-Card Trick, Winter 1529–Spring 1530”. These chapters see Cromwell pick himself up after a year of losses and busy himself in the cause of saving Cardinal Wolsey.
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. Full members 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: Make or break
Spotlight: Cromwell’s tears
Theme: Memory
Theme: How to be a person
Character focus: Thomas Howard, Duke of Norfolk
Background: Twelfth Night revels and Lenten supper
Quote of the week: peacock wings
Next week
1. This week’s story
After the flashbacks of the last two weeks, we have caught up with the present. It is All Hallows, 1529, and Cromwell is sitting with Liz’s prayer book at Esher Palace. George Cavendish disturbs him and sees that he, Cromwell, is crying and praying. Things must be very bad. Rafe has gone to Westminster, and Cromwell must go too. He must sit in Parliament and speak for his master Wolsey. Someone must do this. “Or they will kill him.”
Rafe Sadler gets Cromwell into Parliament, and Cromwell makes that visit to Norfolk. But he will not forsake Wolsey, he says. He sees the king, who will not talk of Wolsey. And he overhears a musician called Mark Smeaton spreading gossip that Anne is no maid. She has, everyone knows, slept with Thomas Wyatt.
Christmas 1529. We learn that Kat and Morgan Williams have died this year, and no one is in the mood to celebrate. The big gilded star stays wrapped in its canvas sleeves. Grace’s peacock wings, unused. His son Gregory comes in like a gentleman and goes out like a little boy. Twelfth Night. The law students revel at the cardinal’s expense, and Cromwell’s nephew, Richard Williams, asks if they are all Cromwells now.
In 1530, Cromwell finally has a proper interview with the king. “Your reputation is bad”, says Henry Tudor. “What would Your Majesty like me to be?” Cromwell does not back off, he does not concede he was wrong in opposing the king’s war. And his fortitude makes his monarch smile.
In the weeks that follow, rumours spread that Wolsey is soon to return to favour. Henry needs him, and “ignorant” Norfolk and “annoying” Suffolk are no substitute for the “proud prelate”, his lord Cardinal.
It is Spring. Cromwell is invited to supper by Antonio Bonvisi, an Anglo-Italian merchant friendly with Thomas More. And the Lord Chancellor is there, “among a company of lawyers and aldermen.” After civility, More attacks Wolsey, and Cromwell attacks More. All is saved by the arrival of the Imperial ambassador.
Afterwards, Cromwell asks Bonvisi about Thomas Wyatt and Anne Boleyn. Bonvisi says that the woman tortured Wyatt, so much so he fled the country. The merchant warns Cromwell that “the cardinal is finished”, and he will be too, if he is not careful. Whatever you do next, Tommaso. “Do not sit down with the Boleyns.”
2. This week’s characters
Click on each link for more details and plot summaries for each character:
Thomas Cromwell • George Cavendish • Rafe Sadler • Thomas Wolsey • Duke of Norfolk • Duke of Suffolk • Anne Boleyn • Mark Smeaton • Thomas Wyatt • Antonio Bonvisi • Henry VIII • Kat Williams • Morgan Williams • Richard Williams • Johane Williamson • Gregory Cromwell • Liz Cromwell • Anne Cromwell • Grace Cromwell • Stephen Gardiner • Thomas More • Humphrey Monmouth • Eustache Chapuys
3. This week’s theme: Make or break
‘I’ll make or mar, before I see you again.’
This week’s reading is a pivotal moment in Cromwell’s life. He has chosen to stick with the cardinal even though he knows his old master is done for. Why? Because, as we learned in “Paternity”, “he will take a bet on anything.” He takes risks, and this is the biggest gamble of his life so far.
When he was fifteen and had nothing, he set himself up in Dover, winning money with the three-card trick. Passerbys bet which card is the queen. Odds on, they’ll lose their money, and you’ll be a penny richer. It’s a confidence trick, and Cromwell now thinks with a bit of nerve he can swap failure for success, and find the highest card on the table:
How brightly coloured the king is, like the king in a new pack of cards: how small his flat blue eye.
4. Spotlight: Cromwell’s tears
Cavendish walks about the household, saying, Thomas Cromwell was reading a prayer book. Thomas Cromwell was crying. Only now does George realise how bad things are.
A few weeks ago, in my series, The Haunting of Wolf Hall, I alluded to this moving scene in Esher Palace, where Cromwell cries over Liz’s prayer book. This event is based on a remarkable account in George Cavendish’s biography of his former master Cardinal Wolsey. Cavendish wrote:
I found Master Cromwell leaning in the great window, with a primer in his hand, saying Our Lady Matins, which since had been a strange sight. He prayed not more earnestly than the tears distilled from his eyes; whom I bade goodmorrow. And with that I perceived the tears upon his cheeks.
Cavendish goes on to recall how Cromwell told him: “I am like to lose all that I have laboured for, all the days of my life, for doing of my master true and diligent service.” This speech in Wolf Hall ends: “But look at me! I’m finished.”
Cromwell tells Cavendish, “I am crying for myself,” which is only half true. Do we ever cry for only one thing? The passage leading up to this moment is one of the most magnificent pieces of writing so far in the book. It is All Hallow’s Day, “grief comes in waves” as he sits with his prayer book, thinking of Liz, Anne and Grace:
Now he stands in a window embrasurer, Liz’s prayer book in hand. His daughter Grace liked to look at it, and today he can feel the imprint of her small fingers under his own.
I found myself crying, too, by the end of this chapter. If we believe Cavendish, and we have no reason not to, this scene took place. Cavendish assumed that the ambitious boy from Putney was weeping over his own failed career. As well he might have been. But Mantel must have looked at the dates and the other events of 1529, and thought: no. There’s more to it than that. And with this one scene, it is as though she cracks the man open. And finds the story waiting to be told.
Bonus: The Haunting of Wolf Hall
For paying subscribers, I discuss the gathering ghosts in “Make or Mar” in the next instalment in my series The Haunting of Wolf Hall:
5. Theme: Memory
It is Cicero who tells us this story. He tells us how, on that day Simonides invented the art of memory. He remembered the names, the faces, some sour and bloated, some blithe, some bored. He remembered exactly where everyone was sitting, at the moment the roof fell in.
“In Italy he learned a memory system.” The previous chapter, An Occult History of Britain, was Cromwell’s prestigious memory at work: reconstructing the last few years, “every stage of how he got here.” Now, we have a hint of what his memory system looks like.
Simonides was an Ancient Greek poet, born in Thessaly, in the sixth century BC. He is credited with inventing new letters in the Greek alphabet and a memory system known as either the “memory theatre” or the “memory palace”. This form of mnemonic makes use of our visual memory to attach important information to images. Fans of the TV show “Sherlock” will be familiar with the detective’s memory palace, and it’s also used by Hannibal Lecter in the books by Thomas Harris.
We’ll return to this topic later when Cromwell divulges more of his secrets and goes in search of an even better method of remembering.
6. Theme: How to be a person
‘Damn it all, Cromwell, why are you such a … person? It isn’t as if you could afford to be.’
That’s Thomas Howard, or Uncle Norfolk, as he is better known in this book. Much more on him later. Norfolk’s problem is that Cromwell is a “presence”; he doesn’t “edge blackly into a room so that you don’t see him”, which is what lawyers and servants – and frankly, anyone who is not Norfolk – should do.
Cromwell does not appear to know his place. The sixteenth-century world is ordered according to the Great Chain of Being. All authority is derived from God and is passed down a strict social hierarchy from the king, through the dukes and earls of the great noble families of England, down to common men like Cromwell.
But the world is changing. Kings need new men who understand the fine details of law and the complex workings of international trade. They need educated men more than noble blood. King Henry’s father, Henry VII, had Richard Fox, an Oxford-educated lawyer of humble origins. Fox masterminded the alliance and marriage contract that brought Katherine of Aragon to England. And he was mentor to the “butcher’s boy” Cardinal Wolsey, who in turn was mentor to Thomas Cromwell.
All three commoners were accused of challenging the natural order of things, setting themselves up above their betters, and even becoming alter rex “other king”, more powerful than their sovereign lord.
Meanwhile, at Austin Friars, Gregory Cromwell comes into his father’s study:
For the first time, perhaps, since Gregory was a baby, he notices his hands, and he is struck by what they have become: not childish paws, but the large, white untroubled hands of a gentleman’s son.
How does one go about becoming a “person” in England? Cromwell is always conscious that his status as a person is something of a confidence trick:
He looks down at his own thick-fingered hands, scars and burn marks hidden in the palms. He thinks, gentleman? So you call yourself, but who do you hope to mislead?
Later, his city associate will turn to him at supper and say: “And what do think, now you are a courtier?”
There are smiles around the table. Because, of course, the idea is so ridiculous, the situation so temporary.
Cromwell cannot be a person, a gentleman or a courtier for long because he has no name. When his nephew, Richard, adopts the surname Cromwell, he thinks: “It matters what name we choose, what name we make”. Richard Williams has a drop of bastard Tudor blood in him. Why dilute that with something as base as blacksmith Cromwell?
7. Character focus: Thomas Howard, Duke of Norfolk
‘But I want him north,’ Howard says. ‘Tell him to go. Tell him Norfolk says he must be on the road and out of here. Or – and tell him this – I will come where he is, and I will tear him with my teeth.’
‘My lord.’ He bows. ‘May I substitute the word “bite”?’
Norfolk approaches him. He stands far too close. His eyes are bloodshot. Every sinew is jumping. He says, ‘Substitute nothing, you misbegotten –’ The duke stabs a forefinger into his shoulder. ‘You … person,’ he says; and again, ‘you nobody from Hell, you whore-spawn, you cluster of evil, you lawyer.’
Isn’t Uncle Norfolk just wonderful? I mean, terrifying. Look at his portrait and imagine him jangling his holy medals and threatening to tear you limb from limb with his own noble-born teeth. By the mass! Mantel serves up a first-rate villain, a final-level boss, as Cromwell’s ultimate antagonist. Like some evil troll beneath the bridge, he embodies old England, the old religion and everything Cromwell sets out to destroy.
Some things to know about Norfolk: his grandfather lost the dukedom, and his life, fighting Henry Tudor at the Battle of Bosworth. His father regained royal favour by annihilating the Scots at the Battle of Flodden. So Norfolk’s relationship with the Tudors is complicated. For the stage adaptation of Wolf Hall, Mantel provided the actors with notes on their characters. Here is some of her prep for Norfolk:
And you expect a battle every day, and are always armed for one, visibly or not. You never forget what damage a king’s displeasure can do. To his face, you are creepingly servile to Henry Tudor. In private, you probably regard him as a parvenu, and a bit of a girly as well.
Norfolk is the premier nobleman in England and hates Wolsey and anyone who displaces Thomas Howard at the king’s side. He is uncle to two of Henry’s future wives, Anne Boleyn and Katherine Howard. He hates learned men, all books and most women. He’s violent, he’s ignorant, he’s ferocious. He is Thomas Howard, Uncle Norfolk.
8. Background: Twelfth Night revels and Lenten supper
The night is loud with the noise of bone rattles, and alive with the flames of torches. A troop of hobby horses clatters past them, singing, and a party of men wearing antlers, with bells at their heels. As they near home a boy dressed as an orange rolls past, with his friend, a lemon.
Thomas Cromwell wishing Happy New Year to an orange and a lemon is one of the more surreal moments of Wolf Hall. Twelfth Night marks the end of Chistmastide, a final night of revels and merrymaking before the world returns to normal. Traditions include the drinking of wassail (hot mulled cider) and eating Twelfth-night cake, containing a bean representing the Christ Child. The person who finds the bean becomes king for the night.
The world is turned upside down. Anything goes. But maybe not everything. The law students at Gray’s Inn put on a play about the cardinal. Wolsey wallowing in the mud at Putney. Cromwell berates the lawmen who allowed it to go ahead. But this is Twelfth Night, and even he, Cromwell, has to concede that, as Richard delicately puts it, ‘it was quite entertaining.’
The merchants in Lent miss their mutton and malmsey, their nightly grunt in a featherbed with wife or mistress; from now till Good Friday their knives will be out for some cut-throat intelligence, some mean commercial advantage.
Cromwell’s Lenten supper with Antonio Bonvisi sits at the other end of the spectrum. Lent is a solemn observance of the forty days from Ash Wednesday until the Easter celebrations. In Tudor England, it was forbidden to eat meat, eggs or cheese without a special dispensation. Sexual intercourse was also off-limits. London merchants would break their fast in the evening with “smoked eel and salted cod”.
It’s the perfect venue for a frosty confrontation between Thomas Cromwell and Thomas More:
‘Lord Chancellor,’ Bonvisi says, ‘you are looking at your herring as if you hate it.’
Says the gracious guest, ‘There’s nothing wrong with the herring.’
9. Quote of the week: peacock wings
Cromwell is a destroyer of holy relics. An iconoclast. But Wolf Hall has many objects bestowed with meaning and memory that make them almost characters in their own right. This week, we meet Grace Cromwell’s angel wings made of peacock feathers. Cromwell made them himself, and Lizzie, the skilled silk woman, says, “Thomas, there’s no end to you, is there?”
In medieval Christian iconography, the peacock comes to symbolise immortality. There is no end to Cromwell, there is no end to Grace. Except, of course, there is an end.
He sits at his work table. He remembers Grace, at the end of her evening as an angel: standing in the firelight, her face white with fatigue, her eyes glittering, and the eyes of her peacock’s wings shining in the firelight, each like a topaz, golden, smoky. Liz said, ‘Stand away from the fire, sweetheart, or your wings will catch alight.’ His little girl backed off, into shadow; the feathers were the colours of ash and cinders as she moved towards the stairs, and he said, ‘Grace, are you going to bed in your wings?’
‘Till I say my prayers,’ she said, darting a look over her shoulder. He followed her, afraid for her, afraid of fire and some other danger, but he did not know what. She walked up the staircase, her plumes rustling, her feathers fading to black.
10. Next week
Thank you for reading and joining me on this slow read of the Cromwell trilogy. Next week, we are reading the first part of “Entirely Beloved Cromwell”, up to page 236, or the line: “Wolsey is a merciful man, but surely: only up to a point.”
If you have enjoyed this post and have found it helpful, I would be delighted if you could support my work by sharing and spreading the word, and by splashing out on a paid subscription to keep me in candles, parchment and ink. Thank you.
Until next week, I am that … person,
Master Simon Haisell
"His sister Kat, her husband, Morgan Williams, have been plucked from this life as fast as his daughters were taken, one day walking and talking and next day cold as stones, tumbled into their Thames-side graves and dug in beyond reach of the tide, beyond sight and smell of the river; deaf now to the sound of Putney's cracked church bell, to the smell of wet ink, of hops, of malted barley, and the scent, still animal, of wooden bales; dead to the autumn aroma of pine resin and apple candles, of soul cakes baking."
The beauty of that sentence alone brought tears to my eyes, I had to stop and read it a couple of times. This whole Christmas-time passage, starting with Kat and Morgan Williams' deaths and ending with the talk between Gregory and his father just about killed me. I'll be thinking about Grace and her peacock feather wings for a long time...
Uncle Norfolk is one of Mantel’s most brilliant characters. I must admit he is one of my guilty favorites among the entire cast of Wolf Hall. His clanking medals, his cursing, his complaining. We’ve all met lesser versions of him...he’s like one of those magnificent extinct meat eating dinosaurs and your terrifying CEO is just a Florida gator. For those who have ever dipped into the audiobook version, actor Ben Miles creates an indelible live version of the Duke as well.