Martin
A gaoler at the Tower
The story so far…
Week 16: The Map of Christendom (Part 1)
Martin is thirty, wiry, his fair hair under his cap already sparse: pleasant face with a crinkly smile. His native town is Colchester, his father a tailor, and he learned to read on Wycliffe’s gospel, which his father hid in their roof under the thatch. This is a new England; an England where Martin can dust the old text down, and show it to his nieghbours.
He asks Cromwell to be his child’s godfather. Thomas, if it is a boy. Grace, it is a girl.
Week 17: The Map of Christendom (Part 2) / To Wolf Hall
Martin’s new baby is well. When Cromwell goes to see More, Martin says: “He looks like a little carved hunchback on a bench end.” It is from writing too much. Words, words. Just words.
Week 30: Wreckage (I)
Martin tells Cromwell how civil Thomas Wyatt is and how uncivil the other gentlemen were when they still had their heads. Cromwell asks after his god-daughter, Grace. She is ‘rising two’.
Week 32: Salvage (Part 2/3)
Lord Cromwell complains to Martin about Wyatt’s ‘beggarly furnishings.’ Martin says Wyatt, ‘a gentleman’, hasn’t complained.
Week 33: Salvage (Part 3/3)
When Cromwell visits Francis Bryan in the Tower, he finds the ‘miserable stool’ still there. He asks Martin to remove it.
Week 39: Vile Blood (Part 2/2)
Cromwell to Martin: ‘You are becoming acquainted with the highest in the land.’
Martin to Cromwell: ‘Amongst whom I count yourself. Though I trust it shall be many a day before I see you here.’
Week 44: Corpus Christi (Part 1/2)
While interrogating Geoffrey Pole, Cromwell asks Martin for ‘the frame’ and hammers. Afterwards, Martin asks him whether he would really torture someone. Cromwell asks him ‘What persuaded you into this trade?’
'A man must get a living.' 'You could have been an honest farmer.' 'And kill pigs?' Sow seed, that's what he was thinking. Harvest the grain. There is a pure, clean world, where men subsist on milk and apples, and bread so white and soft it is like eating light.