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Welcome to week 22 of Wolf Crawl
This week, we are reading the first part of ‘The Black Book, London, January – April 1536’ up to page 223 of the Fourth Estate paperback edition and the line: ‘But her hands and feet are cold and her heart is like a stone.’
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 posts:
This week’s story
January 1536. The chapter begins with the Queen of England on fire. Cromwell investigates why it was allowed to happen and consults the Black Book. ‘It orders the household: orders everything.’ Jane Rochford is on hand to fill in the gaps concerning the comings and goings in the queen’s chambers.
Cromwell considers the borderlands between truth and lies. He surveys this territory with a helpful example: What happened to Anthony’s teeth? There are many ‘twisted tales’ but surely only one reality? Perhaps, but it makes people happy when Gregory believes tall tales. Cromwell’s son pretends to be the king, and Master Secretary hides a smile with his hand.
On the day of the tournament, he makes his excuses so as not to see Gregory in danger. He remembers the advice of an old knight he knew in Venice: ‘Look, he said: there are three ways to fail. Horse can fail. Boys can fail. Nerve can fail.’
But it is not Gregory who fails in the lists. It is the king. He lies dead in a tent when Cromwell enters. Later, he remembers the Boleyns shouting their name and Norfolk bellowing, ‘Anne cannot rule. Me, me, me.’ He, Cromwell, bats the duke away and raises the king from the dead. Afterwards, they will say this never happened.
‘It was a bad moment for me,’ he tells Richard Cromwell that night, ‘I have everything, you would think. And yet take Henry away and I have nothing.’
Now the contest is sharper: the stakes clearer, the risks laid bare. News arrives that Anne has miscarried again, and the king makes it clear that she is to blame. He consults Cromwell and Cranmer: How can I be rid of her? In an antechamber, the two councillors talk things over as Cromwell eases Cranmer into the idea of a future world without Anne Boleyn.
This week’s characters
Click on each link for more details and plot summaries for each character:
Thomas Cromwell • Christophe • Anne Boleyn • Henry VIII • Lady Rochford • Anthony • Richard • Thomas Wriothesley • Richard Riche • Thurston • Gregory • Rafe • Henry Norris • Thomas Howard • William Fitzwilliam • Jane Seymour • Mary Shelton • Thomas Cranmer
This week’s theme: The contest
In January 1536, three events in quick succession shake our world: a fire in Anne Boleyn’s chambers, the king’s accident on the tilting ground, and the queen’s second miscarriage. We know all of this happened from chronicles and ambassador’s letters at the time.
Into the facts, Hilary Mantel throws a fiction: an old knight who Cromwell met in Venice. He ‘was a Portuguese, but he spoke dog-Latin and a kind of German,’ and Cromwell’s memory of the encounter is notably long and detailed. It reminds me of the extended account of Joan Boughton’s death in ‘Alas, What Shall I Do For Love?’ – these past memories are important to understanding Cromwell’s present situation.
‘One drink in, the old knight talked as if everybody had followed his trade.'
He tells Cromwell how to win a tournament, not noticing or caring that he, Cromwell, is no knight. Still, he can use the advice. Wolf Hall was structured around life-as-theatre, politics as a play. Bring up the Bodies is a game, a hunt, a contest. In Wolf Hall, he learned to ‘arrange his face’ and hide the book of his heart. Here, the old knight tells him he must ‘break his instincts.’ It is natural to swerve to avoid a headon collision. Or be a man who closes his eyes at the moment of impact.
These men are of two kinds: the ones who know they do it and can’t help it, and the ones who don’t know they do it. Get your boys to watch you when you practise. Be neither of these kinds of men.
Cromwell has no shortage of ‘boys’ to help him improve his game. We see Rafe and Richard studying him. How much does he know of what he does? Which man is Thomas Cromwell? The old knight puts the choice plainly:
But remember this above all: defeat your instinct. Your love of glory must conquer your will to survive; or why fight at all? Why not be a smith, a brewer, a wool merchant? Why are you in the contest, if not to win, and if not to win, then to die?
Did the old knight really say this? Or did he, Cromwell, son of a blacksmith, son of a brewer, son-in-law to a wool merchant, put these trades on the knight’s tongue? The memory serves its purpose: You are not Walter Cromwell or Henry Wykys. You are Secretary to the King of England. You want to win. You won’t back off. You won’t fail.
Look, he said: there are three ways to fail. Horse can fail. Boys can fail. Nerve can fail.
When Rafe tells him the king is dead, he feels the ‘killing blow.’ A brief hesitation as he wonders whether he should ‘seize this moment, perhaps the last moment, to quit the scene.’ As he later admits to Richard and then Fitzwilliam, the king is his only friend. If he dies, he is done for.
He has never backed off; or once, perhaps, from Walter when he was seven years old: but Walter came on. Since then: forward, forward, en avant!
So he doesn’t quit the scene but raises Henry from the dead. And when the king awoke, he ‘did not see God. Or angels.’ Only Thomas Cromwell.
After the king’s accident, everything is the same, yet nothing is the same. He is still on the wrong side of the Boleyns, of Mary’s supporters, the Duke of Norfolk, the Duke of Suffolk, and the absent Bishop of Winchester; not to mention the King of France, the Emperor, and the Bishop of Rome, otherwise known as the Pope. But the contest – every contest – is sharper now.
I think we have had this sense at least since Calais: that Cromwell could quit while he’s ahead and serve a sweeter, less lethal master. Choose a quiet life. Choose Anselma in Antwerp. As the king turned on Thomas More, we felt the danger close in.
Now, in January 1536, he, Cromwell, feels it too.
Footnotes
1. The Black Book
All these things are written down in the Black Book, which comes from King Edward's time.
The Black Book was drawn up for Henry VIII’s grandfather, Edward IV, in 1478. It’s not to be confused with the Black Book of the Order of the Garter or the Black Book of the Admiralty, two other medieval manuscripts with distinctive black bindings.
It’s no accident that the Black Book appears in our story at the same time as The Book Called Henry: Cromwell’s imaginary instruction manual for serving his prince. His book fills in the gaps of the one gone before: ‘What does the Black Book say? Nothing to the purpose.’
2. Absalom: Rebel son
The fire has not touched King David's son. He hangs from the branches, strung up by his long hair: his eyes are wild and his mouth opens in a scream.
Hilary Mantel frequently uses wall tapestries and paintings to tell the story around us. King Solomon and the Queen of Sheba at York Place and Austin Friars, Adam and Eve at Kimbolton. In Anne’s chambers is an arras (a Flemish wall hanging) of the Battle of Ephraim's Wood, as told in the Book of Samuel.
Absalom was one of King David’s sons, a ‘handsome’ man without ‘blemish’, who killed his half-brother Amnon to avenge the rape of his sister Tamar. He declared himself king and led a rebellion against King David, which ended with his death in the Wood of Ephraim.
King David had 19 sons. Queen Anne has none. Amnon’s incest foreshadows events to come and rumours that are already circling. For centuries, parents in Jerusalem took their children to Absalom’s tomb to throw stones and teach them about what happens to rebellious children. But if Cromwell is a rebel son, can he escape the flames coming for Anne Boleyn?
3. Hector and Achilles
‘There were some Italian visitors once, they were cheering us on, Brandon and myself, and they thought that Achilles and Hector had come back to life. So they said.’ But which is which? One dragged through the dust by the other...
Henry is very susceptible to flattery. Here, he and Brandon are compared to the greatest warriors of Greece (Achilles) and Troy (Hector) in the Trojan War. What Henry sees: the glorious warrior. What Cromwell sees: Achilles dragging Hector’s corpse around the walls of Troy. This act leads to Hector’s brother Paris taking revenge and killing Achilles by shooting an arrow into his heel (‘Achilles’ heel’).
Like Absalom in Anne’s chambers, this is another ambiguous reference to the ancient world. In neither case is it clear who the hero is. And in each story, both sides end up dead.
4. International news
Gregory was disappointed when his father had excused himself from watching. He pleaded a prior engagement with his papers.
While Henry fails in the lists, Cromwell reads the news. The bull of excommunication hangs over Henry and England. This papal decree will officially sever England from Christendom and damn Henry’s soul. Once published, the bull will make it the sacred duty of every Christian prince to overthrow the Tudors.
Down in the Mediterranean, Emperor Charles V is engaged in another holy war. After the battle of Tunis, Barbarossa has left the North African coast for Constantinople. Charles prepares to attack Algiers, but storm damage forces him to delay his attack until 1541.
The abbot with the six whores is William Thirsk of Fountains Abbey in North Yorkshire. Cromwell is reading a report from his two agents visiting northern monasteries: Richard Leighton and Thomas Leigh. Their letter to Cromwell, dated 20 January 1536, reads:
Please it your mastership to understand, that the Abbot of Fountains hath so greatly dilapidated his house, wasted their woods, notoriously keeping six whores… for the truth is he is a very fool and a miserable idiot.
The bullying behaviour of Leighton and Leigh is notorious and contributes to the growing opposition to Cromwell’s reforms in the north. Thirsk will be removed, but he will later be caught up in the northern rebellion of 1536 and executed at Tyburn in 1537.
5. The woman on the wall
Light flares against the wall. Out of the brick blossoms a flow of silk, red silk or pooled blood. He sees a white curve, a slender moon, a sickle cut; as the light washes over the wall, he sees a woman's face, the curve of her cheek edged with gold. She is a goddess.
In Venice, Cromwell is shown a painted wall by the artist Giorgione, friend of Titian. The two painters founded the Venetian school of Renaissance art with its focus on textures, colour and mood.
Giorgione’s goddess is a recurring memory in Cromwell’s reveries. Like Anselma/Queen of Sheba, she seems to represent an alternative history for the ‘prince of Putney’ away from the Tudor court. In his mind’s eye, the goddess appears alongside ‘an expensive whore’, and both vanish into the past as he would vanish into his future:
Parting from Karl Heinz, the moon herself a stone in the waters of the canal, he sees an expensive whore out late, her servants supporting her elbows, teetering over the cobbles on her high chopines. Her laughter rings on the air, and the fringed end of her yellow scarf snakes away from her white throat into the mist. He watches her; she does not notice him. Then she is gone. Somewhere a door opens for her and somewhere a door is closed. Like the woman on the wall, she melts and is lost in the dark. The square is empty again; and he himself only a black shape against the brickwork, a fragment cut out of the night. If I ever need to vanish, he says, this is where I shall do it.
6. Long live the king
On 24 January 1536, Henry suffered a serious jousting accident. At the end of the month, Chapuys wrote to one of the emperor’s advisors: ‘The King being mounted on a great horse to run at the lists, both fell so heavily that everyone thought it a miracle he was not killed, but he sustained no injury.’
In March, the emperor’s ambassador in Rome reported news that ‘the king of England had fallen from his horse, and been for two hours without speaking. “La Ana” was so upset that she miscarried of a son.’
The outcome is in stark contrast to Henry’s assurance that ‘no one ever does badly. It is not allowed.’ The heralds always say ‘the king has jousted best of all.’ But instead, Windsor Herald will write later: ‘the King ran that time at the ring and had a fall from his horse, but he had no hurt.’ But what really happened will be erased from history.
Mantel continues the theme of official and unofficial history, truth and lies, rumour and speculation. Like what happened to Anthony’s teeth, the story takes on a life of its own. ‘The way I tell it,’ he says to Fitzwilliam, you would think that the blow on the head had improved him.’
These are the ‘twisted tales’ that entwine Cromwell, Henry and Anne at the beginning of 1536. It’s not what happens that matters, but what we believe takes place.
He gives his son a long look. 'You do know it's Arthur Cobbler's tales?' Gregory gives him a long look back. 'Yes, I do know.' He sounds regretful. 'But it makes people so happy when I believe them.'
And then Gregory does an impression of Thomas Wriothesley doing an impression of His High Horridness Henry VIII, ‘fists on his hips’ stamping across the room.
Note: The expression ‘Arthur Cobbler’s tales’ appears to be Mantel’s own invention. ‘A load of old cobblers’ is twentieth-century Cockney rhyming slang for rubbish or nonsense. As far as I know, it is not real Tudor slang. But it sounds convincing. It is an example of how Mantel creates dialogue that feels both strange and familiar, old and modern, immediate and distant.
7. Dr Chramuel
‘No, do not confer, I want an answer from each of you, each Thomas alone.’ He grimaces, though he means to smile. ‘Do you know the confusion you cause among the French? They have made of you one composite counsellor, and in dispatches they call you Dr Chramuel.’
This is true. It is some comfort that not only modern readers struggle with the tide of Thomases in these books. This detail is a delight to Hilary Mantel, who makes Cranmer and Cromwell into mirror-selves of one another:
Dr Chramuel goes out. In an antechamber, one of him turns to the other. 'He will be different tomorrow,' the archbishop says.
Cranmer is the ‘angel’ and Cromwell ‘the pork butcher.’ And now they cross ‘thin ice; leaning into each other, taking tiny, timid steps.’ Cranmer is the heart, Cromwell the head. And now the head must prepare the heart for what the butcher does best.
Quote of the week: Twisted tales
What is the nature of the border between truth and lies? It is permeable and blurred because it is planted thick with rumour, confabulation, misunderstandings and twisted tales. Truth can break the gates down, truth can howl in the street; unless truth is pleasing, personable and easy to like, she is condemned to stay whimpering at the back door.
Next week
Thank you for reading and joining me on this slow read of the Cromwell trilogy. Next week, we will be reading the second part of ‘The Black Book, London, January – April 1536.’ This runs from page 223 to 255 of the Fourth Estate paperback edition, ending with the line: ‘One day he will give in and invite it to stand by the hearth.’
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Until next week, I am your guide,
Master Simon Haisell
You can feel all the different timelines that could be sprouting, multiverses being born, as we'd say today. A world were the queen burned. A world where the king died. A world were a Boleyn heir was born. We're marching inexorably on the timeline we know so well, but wouldn't that be fun, to venture on another branch and see what happens there?
By the way, the fresco that Cromwell saw in Venice should be this one https://arthive.com/res/media/img/oy1000/work/f9a/649113@2x.jpg https://artslife.com/wp-content/uploads/2020/06/Giorgione-Nuda-1.jpg "La Nuda", the naked one, by Giorgione. It used to be on the walls of Fondaco dei Tedeschi (a palace that literally translates to "the German warehouse"), by 1760 it was so degraded that they had to cut out what was left of it, it's preserved inside the Gallerie dell'Accademia museum now.
Oh my, just half a chapter, 36 pages, but so much happening! "Where protocol fails, it is war to the knife." It gets quickly very dangerous if you remove Henry from the chessboard. "And Norfolk buzzing from side to side, an angered wasp" (🤭)- at least good old Norfolk makes me chuckle. He is a constant in this.
The character of Lady Jane Roachford, I don't know, she is always painted like this, gets some of the blame for what will happen and her role in this is not even proven or is it?
And Gregory, there is more to him that the people around him see in him. The father-son relationship is something I keep thinking more and more about.