Mirror (Part 1/2)
Wolf Crawl Week 51: Monday 16 December – Sunday 22 December
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Welcome to Week 51 of Wolf Crawl
This 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.”
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
Next year, I will be revising these posts and turning them into a podcast, furnished with some original music and illustrations. In Wolf Crawl 2025, I am collaborating with two exceptionally talented people.
will bring weekly pieces from the archive to complement our reading, and is making a series of maps to help us navigate Cromwell’s world.Please recommend this read-along to anyone you think would enjoy it. And if you are in a position to do so, consider giving someone a gift subscription to Footnotes and Tangents, so they can take part in Wolf Crawl 2025.
Last week’s post:
This week’s story
Christophe comes at sunset with news of his people and his papers. ‘They came like an army,’ he says, but anything incriminating will already have been removed or burned. He, Christophe, dropkicks the king in his mind’s eye, leaving him ‘a smear on the cobbles.’
Next day, his boy Rafe is here. Sadler is the only man who has spoken for Cromwell. He tells Rafe to keep himself apart from Gregory and Richard. Avoid anything that looks like conspiracy. ‘I know how Henry’s mind works.’
First interrogation: Cold Richard Riche, uneasy Thomas Wriothesley, Gardiner bubbling with anticipation. They re-write his life, giving a treasonous aspect to his wardrobe, his treatment of Lady Mary, the things he’s said and the things he’s done. Going out, Call-Me tries to justify himself. ‘He’s all yours,’ Cromwell tells Gardiner.
He reads Cranmer’s letter to the king, and explains to Rafe that they had always agreed never to go down together, but to protect themselves. The Book Called Henry has been burned. He, Cromwell, asks for Thomas Lupset’s tome, The Way of Dying Well.
He writes to the king. He abases himself; he who has never limited his desires. He goes lower, as the fool Patch advised him to do. He wonders whether Henry will rise to be human, and read what his servant Cromwell wrote.
Thomas Audley and Charles Brandon join the interrogations. Fitzwilliam disappears; he is now Privy Seal. He learns that one of his associates, Lord Hungerford, is also locked up and charged with treason. And Call-Me implies to Cromwell that Thomas Wyatt has betrayed him, and been rewarded by the king.
The bill of attainder goes to Parliament. Brandon brings him a bright idea that isn’t so bright: confess to heresy and recant. Let the king save you. But that’s not how it will end. The bill passes, and Gardiner is here, looking to you to finish your final job: a full account of the ‘supposed’ marriage between the king and Anna of Cleves. ‘The annulment will annul me,’ he thinks.
The document complete, he is superfluous. There is nothing left but to cry for mercy. And so that it might stick, he repeats it twice. Mercy. Mercy. Mercy.
This week’s characters
Click on each link for more details and plot summaries for each character:
Thomas Cromwell • Christophe • William Kingston • Rafe Sadler • Richard Riche • Stephen Gardiner • Duke of Norfolk • Thomas Wriothesley • William Fitzwilliam • Charles Brandon • Thomas Audley
This week’s theme: Strange to himself
They are rewriting my life, he thinks. They represent that all my obedience has been outward obedience, and all these years in secret I have been creeping closer to Henry's enemies.
Back in 1536, Cromwell returns from the convent at Shaftesbury and his interview with Wolsey’s daughter. ‘Dorothea has rewritten his story. She has made him strange to himself.’ She says, ‘There is no faith or truth in Cromwell’, and when he asks himself whether he betrayed her father, he is unsure of the answer. Wolsey’s ghost disappears, leaving him vulnerable to the dangers of the living and the dead.
In 1529, Wolsey’s gentleman usher, George Cavendish, finds Cromwell crying over a prayer book at Esher. He thinks Cromwell is crying for himself, his career ruined by Wolsey’s fall. But Cromwell is crying for his wife and daughters, recently lost, and for his beloved master, brought down by proud and ignorant lords.
Cromwell is an unreliable narrator of his story, but no more than the rest of us. He is not driven purely by ambition, or revenge, or piety, or greed, or a desire to live – but all these things. When he asks himself why he does something, he cannot know the answer. He writes the best version of his story and hides the darkest threads from himself.
In The Mirror and the Light, those threads unstitch and tangle the weave. His conscience is not overly troubled by the murders of Thomas More and Anne Boleyn. But he is haunted by George, by Francis Weston and Mark Smeaton: men who, like him, hoped to live but had their stories rewritten and foreshortened by him.
What sort of man would do that? The ugly truth is Walter’s boy, the Putney lad, who let the eel boy fall on his knife.
Did Anslema pack his bags, or did he leave Antwerp because he was young and restless and London was calling?
Did his daughters die knowing he loved them, or did they wonder why their father was hardly ever at home?
Was he the cardinal's ‘entirely beloved Cromwell’, or did he pick his prince and rise as Wolsey fell? Was he the king’s most loyal councillor, or did he harbour ill will against the man responsible for Wolsey’s death?
And did he do all he could for true religion in England, or did he pray only to be saved from the fates of brothers Bilney, Lambert and Frith?
The questions never make more sense than they did on the first day, nor does the picture of his life ever reflect the reality as he sees it. The mirror presents an alien face, eyes askew, mouth gaping.
In the Tower, the interrogators continue this memory work. They drag up a scene from Week 7 of Wolf Crawl, where Cromwell tells Norfolk that Mary can rule, but ‘It depends who advises her. It depends who she marries.’ But most of the memories are from this book: secrets divulged in Sadler’s garden at Hackney; his interview with Chapuys in the garden tower. The slip he made to Bess Darrell about fighting Henry with ‘my sword in my hand’ is restaged in public in front of witnesses.
As his past becomes strange to him, so does his body:
He puts his hand to his heart. He feels something alien inside his chest – as if the organ has been forced out of shape, stretched at one point and squeezed at another.
He has been dispossessed of everything he had: ‘Everything here belongs to the king.’ Even his body is not his own: a bill of attainder makes him legally dead. ‘I cannot complain of the process,’ he thinks. ‘I have used it myself.’
But the king does not stop there. When Cromwell is legally dead, he is forced to carry on working, writing out the case for the annulment of Henry’s marriage. This is a final act of purgatory, a cleansing of Cromwell’s soul, and a mourning for his life. And in writing, he becomes clear again to himself. It is his final confession and a case for the prosecution. If he is monstrous, it is the king who made him so:
He sits down. The facts marshal themselves in his mind, the phrases form themselves in order, but before he can write, he sheds a tear and thinks, I am in mourning for myself: with these papers, my usefulness gone. I could not do it again: the years of sleepless toil, the brute moral deformation, the axe-work. When Henry dies and goes to judgement, he must answer for me, as for all his servants: he must account for what he did to Cromwell.
Footnotes
1. The Book Called Henry
Do not turn your back on the king. This is not just a matter of protocol.
Advice from The Book Called Henry. By now, it has been destroyed, along with swathes of documents from Cromwell’s desk; burned by his friends when news of his arrest reached Austin Friars.
‘Do not turn your back’ is the advice often given to those who find themselves uncomfortably close to a lion, a tiger or a bear. Remember, it was Thomas More who said being merry with the king is ‘like sporting with a tamed lion. You tousle its mane and pull its ears, but all the time you're thinking, those claws, those claws, those claws.’
But in the end, it is Henry who turns his back on Cromwell:
The king turns away and stares at the wall. As if he has become entranced by the panelling, absorbed into the linenfold.
Cromwell has always relied on the ‘mutability’ of the king’s mind: he takes his opinions from the last person he speaks to – so make sure that person is Cromwell. But when he turned his back on Katherine and Anne, he rode away and never came back. When they wrote to him, he gave the letters to Cromwell, unread.
2. Cromwell’s Traitors
Rafe Sadler says of Thomas Wriothesley:
‘All the years we have known him, I think he has been trying to show us his own unhappy nature. How fretful he is, how ill-at-ease, how envy eats away at him. He was trying to warn us about himself.’
Call-Me emerges as the unhappy man who betrayed his master. ‘Christ entertained Judas,’ Cromwell says. ‘Not that I force the comparison.’
We’ve always known about Wriothesley’s divided loyalty. Cromwell prised him away from Stephen Gardiner. He admired Call-Me’s intelligence and sought to nurture it, but his ‘vanity’ made him assume no one ‘would prefer Gardiner’s service’ to his own.
While it is likely Gardiner threatened Call-Me (‘choose me or death’), there are hints throughout the story that Wriothesley felt Cromwell was weak and complacent. Cromwell admonished Call-Me for threatening Mark Smeaton with torture; Call-Me raised an eyebrow over Cromwell’s leniency towards treasonous women like Gertrude Courtenay and Lady Lisle; he warned Cromwell countless times to destroy Norfolk while he still could.
Richard ‘Ricardo’ Riche is a less complicated traitor. In Wolf Hall, he is a pedantic student of Niccolo Machiavelli, who is more than happy to embellish evidence to convict Thomas More. Unlike Call-Me, the Master of Augmentations does not suffer sleepless nights over his duplicity. It’s all part of the job.
Thomas Wriothesley knows he is wretched. He does not want to be the only friend who betrayed Cromwell, so he goes to great lengths to insinuate something about Thomas Wyatt’s recent rewards from the dissolution of the monasteries:
‘My lord, do you not ask yourself, why now? It is done by his Majesty’s direct command. He finds Wyatt deserves well.’
This feels like a needle to the heart. Did Wyatt betray us? ‘It seems he has given answers, helpful or at least not disagreeable to the king.’ The Mirror and the Light begins with Wyatt in the Tower, his life saved by his friendship with Cromwell. But where is Wyatt now?
Wyatt’s betrayal would wound us far more than anything done by Call-Me or Riche. Like Dorothea’s accusation, it would undo the past and make us strange to ourselves.
Mantel leaves us with a clue. In Week 45, Cromwell told Wyatt’s lover, Bess Darrell, that he would ‘take a sword in my hand’ if Henry turned back to Rome. This accusation appears in the bill of attainder. The nightingale Bess Darrell sang to someone, but was it to Wyatt?
Further resources:
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3. The Way of Dying Well
Cromwell’s reading material in the Tower gives Rafe Sadler pause for thought:
‘Do not yield. Do not resign yourself, I beg you.’
He asks for Petrarch’s Remedies for Fortune, a collection of dialogues and aphorisms with a theme of humility in prosperity and fortitude in adversity. He would also like to read Thomas Lupset’s The Way of Dying Well. This is one of a genre of medieval and early modern manuscripts on Ars moriendi, the art of dying.
Cromwell mentions that Lupset was ‘tutor to the cardinal’s son.’ We haven’t heard anything about Thomas Winter since the early chapters of Wolf Hall. Wolsey’s son pursued his studies abroad, ran into financial difficulties, and was often bailed out and supported by his father’s former servant.
Cromwell also asks for his Hebrew grammar by Nicolas Clendardus. The Flemish grammarian writes that ‘you can learn the rudiments in three months.’ Cromwell does not have that long. As we sit in our cell in London, Clendardus is currently making a way for himself in Fez, Morocco, studying Arabic so that he can read the Koran.
Further resources:
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4. All my thoughts are dashed into dust
As always, Wyatt is never far away. When Cromwell feels the ‘alien’ organ fluttering ‘behind his ribs’, he thinks of the words of his friend:
Love and Fortune and my mind, rememb'rer
Of that that is now with that that hath been,
Do torment me so that I very often
Envy them beyond all measure.
Love slayeth mine heart. Fortune is depriver
Of all my comfort. The foolish mind then
Burneth and plaineth as one that seldom
Liveth in rest, still in displeasure.
My pleasant days, they fleet away and pass,
But daily yet the ill doth change into the worse,
And more than the half is run of my course.
Alas, not of steel but of brickle glass
I see that from mine hand falleth my trust,
And all my thoughts are dashed into dust.
5. Cromwell’s final letter to the king
But he cannot think how to end it. It may be the last letter they will allow. So he writes I cry for mercy. He writes it again, in case Henry should be distracted: mercy. And once again, mercy, to get it into the royal skull, to pierce the royal heart.
When John Lambert told the king, ‘I rest in your clemency’, he, Cromwell, thought: ‘Don’t … Not there.’ Cromwell’s last letter survives, with its heartstopping postscript. Beyond Mantel’s story, we don’t know whether Henry read it.
Mercy here does not, cannot, mean life. Parliament has seen to that in the bill of attainder. ‘By law he is dead.’
The only thing uncertain is by what process they will make him a corpse.
As a lord, Earl of Essex, he is entitled to the axe. But heretics are burned at Smithfield; traitors are cut up at Tyburn. When he asks the king for mercy, he is asking for the pain to stop.
He dreams he is facing a door painted scarlet, or not painted but bathed in scarlet, and the wall is the same hue; the surface is wet, the floor, the wall, and the room behind the door is wet and scarlet too.
Further resources:
Quote of the Week: The wolf gaining on you
These books take place in cities, palaces, houses, and their gardens. But in England, the forest is always there in the imagination. The ancient woodland haunts us in our stories, our fairy tales, our dreams. In his mind’s eye, Cromwell has always been far from the Tudor court, deep in dark woodland, hunted by wolves:
Sometimes his mind drifts away, as it must: far from this room, beyond the city walls, across the fields and into the forest. The cover is dense, as in the years before trees were cut down for houses and ships, and all the creatures now extinct are alive again, for good or ill: the beaver in the stream, the wolf gaining on you with his long stride. When a man does not know which path to take he scatters crumbs from the loaf he carries in his hand, but the birds swoop behind him and eat them. He takes off his shirt and tears it into strips, and ties a strip to a branch at each fork in the road, but the ogres who live deep in the wood tread after him and steal the linen to bind their wounds: for ogres are always fighting. He labours on, and talking trees snigger about him, hiding their expressions of contempt behind their leaves.
Next week
Thank you for reading and joining me on this slow read of the Cromwell trilogy. Next week is the last week of Wolf Crawl. We will read the second half of ‘Mirror, June–July 1540’ and ‘Light, 28 July 1540’. This runs from page 847 to 875 in the Fourth Estate paperback edition. It begins: “Edmund Walsingham, the Lieutenant of the Tower, comes next day.” It ends: “…tracking the light along the wall.”
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
I'm taking these betrayals personally, even if they've been on the record for hundreds of years, and I've read this book before.
I was struck by Mantel’s description of Cromwell’s heart sensation and believe that she is beautifully describing takotsubo cardiomyopathy - otherwise known as broken heart syndrome. This is a ballooning of part of the left ventricle (with impaired cardiac function) in response to a surge in stress hormones, typically from strong negative emotions such as loss of a loved one. It can mimic a heart attack.
I continue to be in awe of her research and meticulous descriptions.
https://www.health.harvard.edu/heart-health/takotsubo-cardiomyopathy-broken-heart-syndrome