Master of Phantoms (Part 5/5) / Spoils
Wolf Crawl Week 29: Monday 15 July – Sunday 21 July
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Welcome to week 29 of Wolf Crawl
This week, we are reading the final part of ‘Master of Phantoms, London, April–May 1536’ and the last chapter of the book, ‘Spoils, London, Summer, 1536’. This section runs from pages 441 to 484 of the Fourth Estate paperback edition. It starts with the line, ‘The queen wears scarlet and black…’ It ends: ‘They are all beginnings. Here is one.’
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
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Last week’s post:
This week’s story
Anne Boleyn is judged by her peers, the lords of the realm — but only her uncle Norfolk dares look at her now. He, plain Thomas Cromwell, presents the prosecution in a drowsy murmur designed to make adultery, incest, conspiracy, and treason seem yawn-achingly routine. She, the queen, sits there and denies everything.
Her brother, George, is suave and eloquent. He defends himself but cannot compete with the Master of the Rolls, who appears indifferent and untiring. He tricks Boleyn into speaking treason in court. The judges confer. Harry Percy faints.
The next day, the French ambassador comes to see him at the Tower. Jean de Dinteville appeals on behalf of young Sir Francis Weston. But he is too late. William Kingston is in the dark as to the manner of Anne’s death. But the ambassador says the king has called up the Calais headsman, with his sword.
Thomas Cranmer looks ill. He says Anne has not yet confessed, although she is asking everyone: Shall I go to Heaven? Cranmer doubts everything now. He tells Cromwell the rumours about him and Lady Worcester. He, Cromwell, thinks: I am afraid. Afraid of the times that are coming.
Henry, eighth of his name, minotaur in his labyrinth, prevaricates. So it is he, Cromwell, who must press the point and stand over his sovereign as he signs his name on the death warrants. He is at Lambeth when Anne’s lovers die, busy ending the queen’s marriage before they end her life.
He brings Gregory to the queen’s beheading. He tests the scaffold and holds the sword. Anne comes in Katherine’s furs, looking back in hope of reprieve. As she dies, Richmond and Suffolk stay standing. There’s no coffin, so she is laid in an arrow chest. Her head at her feet.
At Austin Friars, Call-Me wants to recollect the morning’s events. Cromwell wishes Rafe or Richard or Gregory were there. Wriothsley says, who’s next? ‘A gentleman’ asked him what Cromwell plans for Wolsey’s greatest enemy: Henry Tudor. He, Cromwell, thinks only one gentleman would dare pose that question. For how much longer can he keep Stephen Gardiner away from England?
Spoils: Jane Seymour is to be queen, her brother: a viscount. Francis Bryan enters the privy chamber and he, Thomas Cromwell, Putney boy, enters the House of Lords. Baron Cromwell of Wimbledon. It is summer, 1536. We have begun.
This week’s characters
Click on each link for more details and plot summaries for each character:
Thomas Cromwell • Anne Boleyn • Norfolk • Thomas Audley • Charles Brandon • Francis Bryan • George Boleyn • Harry Percy • William Kingston • Thomas Cranmer • Jean de Dinteville • William FitzWilliam • Nicholas Carew • Edward Seymour • Jane Seymour • Richard Riche • Thomas Wriothesley • Henry VIII • Richard Cromwell • Henry Norris • Mark Smeaton • Francis Weston • William Brereton • Thomas Wyatt • Gregory • Christophe • Earl of Richmond • Earl of Surrey • Johane
This week’s theme: Summer thunder
These bloody days have broken my heart.
My lust, my youth did them depart,
And blind desire of estate.
Who hastes to climb seeks to revert.
Of truth, circa Regna tonat.
Sir Thomas Wyatt wrote these lines from his cell in the Bell Tower, overlooking the scaffold where his friends, George Boleyn, Harry Norris and Francis Weston, were beheaded, alongside William Brereton and Mark Smeaton.
Not knowing whether he would be next, Wyatt put in ink: circa Regna tonat. “Around the throne the thunder rolls.” It is May, 1536. ‘In England it’s been raining, more or less, for a decade.’ Anne says, it will not stop raining until she is released. ‘Or start raining,’ Kingston considers. ‘Or something.’
The thunder is the king, who ‘breathes unseen in a labyrinth of rooms.’ England’s minotaur. A man’s life is all he has, and it can be scrubbed out by the ‘square, complex letters’ from Henry’s hand. ‘A man’s hand, when all is said.’
Wyatt’s words sum up where we are at the end of the first two books of the Cromwell trilogy. Hearts breaking, conscious of how far we have climbed (we, Putney boy), cognizant of the deadly storm rising from the king’s chambers. We will not survive this week.
Hilary Mantel initially conceived of one big book on Thomas Cromwell. But as she began, she realised she had two books on her hands: the road to Wolf Hall, and the road to the Tower. Then, these weeks of 1536 demanded their own story, and two became three.
As we will see, this episode in Cromwell’s life will become its own ghost and like Banquo to Macbeth, it will return us to the scene of the crime. Stitch by stitch, it will unpick Cromwell’s truth. Mantel wrote:
You don’t become a novelist to become a spinner of entertaining lies: you become a novelist so you can tell the truth. I start to practise my trade at the point where the satisfactions of the official story break down. Some stories bear retelling. They compel retelling. Take the last days of the life of Anne Boleyn. You can tell that story and tell it. Put it through hundreds of iterations. But still, there seems to be a piece of the puzzle missing. You say, I am sure I can do better next time. You start again. You look at the result – and realise, once again, that while you were tethering part of the truth, another part has fled into the wild.1
As she writes in the Author’s Note at the end of this book: she is not telling Anne’s story. This is ‘a proposal, an offer’ to the readers to imagine Anne’s last days from Thomas Cromwell’s point-of-view. She omits details and names that would complicate and distract from the puzzle she is working on. She concludes:
Meanwhile, Mr Secretary remains sleek, plump and densely inaccessible, like a choice plum in a Christmas pie; but I hope to continue my efforts to dig him out.
And it is to those efforts we return next week, as we begin the final novel in the trilogy: The Mirror and the Light.
Footnotes
1. Anna Bolena Medusa
She is tainted now, she is dead meat, and instead of coverting her – bosom, hair, eyes – their gaze slides away. Only Uncle Norfolk glares at her fiercely: as if her head were not Medusa’s head.
I love how Mantel fully inhabits the gaze of the court here: Anne is Medusa, and it is only Thomas Howard who doesn’t see it. In Wolf Hall, Hans Holbein said he would like to paint her. Cromwell said,
'I don’t know. She may not want to be studied.’ ‘They say she is not beautiful.’ ‘No, perhaps she is not. You would not choose her as a model for a Primavera. Or a statue of the Virgin. Or a figure of Peace.’ ‘What then, Eve? Medusa?’ Hans laughs. ‘Don’t answer.’
At the start of Bring Up the Bodies, we learn Hans has sketched the queen but she is not pleased with the result. ‘How do you please her, these days?’ In fact, there are no reliable contemporary portraits of Anne Boleyn. Mantel writes:
Her image, her reputation, her life history is nebulous, a drifting cloud, a mist with certain points of colour and definition. Her eyes, it was said, were "black and beautiful".2
She uses those eyes on ‘lord and commoner, on the king himself’ to make each man ‘her creature’. Like Medusa, her victims turn to stone. ‘Almost always it works; it has never worked on him.’ Cromwell is Perseus. Or maybe the Greek hero is Uncle Norfolk? It depends on who you ask.
My Lord Suffolk calls it witchcraft. He, Cromwell, knows it to be a ‘trick.’ He knows his own tricks and men, in their turn, call him a magician. Anne and Cromwell’s trade is power: how to bend a person’s will; how to make them want what you want them to want. The Cromwell trilogy is a study in power: how it works and what happens when it ceases to have its desired effect.
Let’s give Hilary Mantel the last word on Anna Regina, the queen-that-was:
Anne Boleyn is one of the most controversial women in English history; we argue over her, we pity and admire and revile her, we reinvent her in every generation. She takes on the colour of our fantasies and is shaped by our preoccupations: witch, bitch, feminist, sexual temptress, cold opportunist. She is a real woman who has acquired an archetypal status and force, and one who patrols the nightmares of good wives; she is the guilt-free predator, the man-stealer, the woman who sets out her sexual wares and extorts a fantastic price. She is also the mistress who, by marrying her lover, creates a job vacancy. Her rise is glittering, her fall sordid. God pays her out. The dead take revenge on the living. The moral order is reasserted.3
Further reading:
2. Leave the world tidy
Slowly re-reading this section, I am struck by Cromwell’s concern for an orderly execution of events. At the trial, he makes himself dull as a country priest: he wants no surprises. When Harry Percy faints (yes, he did actually faint), it is not in the script, and the sight slices at Cromwell’s conscience:
A memory stabs him, Italy, heat, blood, heaving and rolling and flopping a dying man on to knotted saddlecloths, cloths themselves scavenged from the dead, hauling him into the shade of the wall of – what, a church, a farmhouse? – only so that he could die, cursing, a few minutes later, trying to pack his guts back into the wound from which they were spilling, as if he wanted to leave the world tidy.
Most of the grisly images in these books appear as memories or flights of the imagination. Early in the novel, Anne wears ‘rose pink and dove grey’ that makes Cromwell think of ‘intestines looped out of a living body.’ At her execution, all heads are bowed when the head is severed. What we don’t see haunts us most. As Cromwell thought in Wolf Hall: ‘It is the absence of facts that frightens people: the gap you open, into which they pour their fears, fantasies, desires.’
For Anne, he tests the scaffold with his own weight; he inspects the sword. When she kneels, he wills her to put her arm down, ‘for God’s sake put your arm down.’ For the stage adaptation of the book4, Hilary Mantel counsels the headsman: ‘You depend on your victim’s cooperation.’ For a quick, clean and tidy death, everyone must play their part. Cromwell is conscious that Anne has ‘rehearsed’ her own death.
The farce that follows: the confusion of corpses, Anne in an arrow-chest. These are careless mistakes that needle Master Secretary’s hopes for tidy deaths.
But can a death be tidy? Like Lady Macbeth, he’s looking at his hands for that ‘damned spot’ of blood. Chapuys is conveniently absent, but he, Cromwell, thinks: ‘you ought to get up from your sickbed if you need to, and see the results you have willed.’ Death may be swift, but it is never tidy: there is always wreckage. ‘I smell burning buildings,’ says Call-Me.
'Fallen towers. Indeed there is nothing but ash. Wreckage.' 'But it's useful wreckage, isn't it? Wreckage can be fashioned into all sorts of things: ask any dweller on the sea shore.'
Further reading:
3. Memento Mori
The ambassador inclines his head. His cap badge glitters and winks; it is a silver skull. 'I shall report to my master that sadly I have tried and failed in the matter of Weston.' 'Say you came too late. The tide was against you.' 'No, I shall say Cremuel was against me.'
Jean de Dinteville did intercede on behalf of Francis Weston. We met him in the chapter Anna Regina in weeks 12 and 13, ‘furred against the June chill’ of 1533. Three years later, ‘he still fears the English summer’. In his painting, Hans Holbein has captured every hair of the ambassador’s thick, luxurious furs. It is a common joke among the English that Europeans overdress in all weather, as though cold could kill.
The French ambassador’s motto is Memento mori, ‘Remember thou shalt die’, which is why he has a silver skull badge in his cap. And perhaps why Hans Holbein painted an anamorphic skull in the foreground of his painting.
4. Thomas Wyatt in the Bell Tower
At least two of Wyatt’s poems reference his time in the Tower. I began this post with a quote from one, which you can read here. A second poem, In Mourning wise since daily I increase, remembers the five men who died. The poem concludes:
And thus farewell each one in hearty wise!
The axe is home, your heads be in the street;
The trickling tears doth fall so from my eyes
I scarce may write, my paper is so wet.
But what can hope when death hath played his part,
Though nature’s course will thus lament and moan?
Leave sobs therefore, and every Christian heart
Pray for the souls of those be dead and gone.
Further reading:
5. The Calais executioner
‘Are you Cremuel? They told me you are in charge of everything. In fact they joke to me, saying, if you faint because she is so ugly, there is one who will pick up the sword, his name is Cremuel and he is such a man, he can chop the head off the Hydra, which I do not understand what it is. But they say it is a lizard or serpent, and for each head that is chopped two more will grow.’
We know nothing about the man who killed Anne Boleyn; one of the most famous executions in British history. We don’t know his name. We don’t know where he was born or where he died. We cannot be sure he was even from Calais. We do know he was given an allowance to appear as a gentleman so as not to frighten his victim. We know his fee was £23.6.8d, and he performed his craft to perfection.
Another book ends with a beheading. Thomas More. Anne Boleyn. We cannot live these pages without thinking of how the final book will conclude. The sword is a small mercy compared to the axe; the axe is a great mercy compared to a Tyburn hanging or a burning at Smithfield.
But how much of a mercy? Over the centuries, doctors have debated how long the victim remains conscious after a beheading. ‘A savage vivisection’ or ‘the most gentle of lethal methods’? I have linked below to some of the most recent discussion on the topic.
In early modern Europe, there were far worse ways to die. And it was a death penalty opponent, the French physician Joseph-Ignace Guillotin, who put his name to a device touted as the most humane killing machine of all. Hilary Mantel gives the guillotine her full attention in her other historical epic, A Place of Greater Safety.
Further reading:
Quote of the week: However
When I read the final lines of Bring Up the Bodies, I can see Hilary Mantel. Over his shoulder, she is reading Master Secretary’s words. He can sense her presence (but let us say it is only Rafe), and he knows there is a day coming when he will vanish and leave behind only ink.
He thinks, strive as I might, one day I will be gone and as this world goes it may not be long: what though I am a man of firmness and vigour, fortune is mutable and either my enemies will do for me or my friends. When the time comes I may vanish before the ink is dry. I will leave behind me a great mountain of paper, and those who come after me – let us say it is Rafe, let us say it is Wriothesley, let us say it is Riche – they will sift through what remains and remark, here is an old deed, an old draft from Thomas Cromwell's time: they will turn the page over, and write on me. Summer, 1536: he is promoted Baron Cromwell. He cannot call himself Lord Cromwell of Putney. He might laugh. However. He can call himself Baron Cromwell of Wimbledon. He ranged all over those fields, when he was a boy. The word 'however' is like an imp coiled beneath your chair. It induces ink to form words you have not yet seen, and lines to march across the page and overshoot the margin. There are no endings. If you think so you are decieved as to their nature. They are all beginnings. Here is one.
The Haunting of Wolf Hall
Next week
Thank you for reading and joining me on this slow read of the Cromwell trilogy, and congratulations on finishing Bring Up the Bodies! I have compiled all the posts for this book onto one page, along with some excellent bonus posts written by our fellow readers
and .Next week, we start the final novel in the trilogy: The Mirror and the Light. We will begin with the first chapter, ‘Wreckage (I) London, May 1536’. This runs from page 3 to page 25 in the Fourth Estate paperback edition. It begins: ‘Once the queen’s head is severed, he walks away.’ It ends: ‘It is 20 May 1536.’
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Until next week, I am your guide,
Master Simon Haisell
The Reith Lectures, The Day Is for Leaving.
Notes on characters in the script and stage notes.
It is interesting how easily we gloss over Anne's hope of a last minute pardon. But even the constable of the Tower expected a messenger to come. It is hard to imagine Anne will be killed: a queen has never been executed before. As readers, we're stuck in a reality where the event is inevitable. But for the participants it is the reverse: her death is inconceivable, until it is undeniable.
Footnote: Certain memories are totemic to Cromwell. The devil play after Wolsey's death is something he recalls viscerally. It gets four men killed. But remember also that someone shouted out 'Shame on you, Thomas Howard!" and he, Cromwell, thought it was Wyatt who spoke. I'm not saying that heckle saved Wyatt's life. But it is part of the texture of that memory; it means Thomas Wyatt cannot die with the other gentlemen, who dressed as demons.