The Dead Complain of Their Burial / Arrange Your Face (Part 1)
Wolf Crawl Week 8: Monday 19 February – Sunday 25 February
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Welcome to week eight of Wolf Crawl
This week, we are reading the short chapter “The Dead Complain of Their Burial, Christmastide 1530” and the first part of “Arrange Your Face, 1531”. Cromwell turns a bad dream into a good one and starts his new job as councillor to the king.
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. Supporters 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: ‘Pick your prince’
Location focus: The Palace of Placentia
Tangent: The dreams of kings
Background: The former king is the future king
Spotlight: Four Queens
Background: Making men talk
Quote of the week: ‘Madam, your daughter should sit.’
Next week
1. This week’s story
Christmastide, 1530. After midnight, William Brereton comes knocking. One of the four devils who carried the cardinal into hell. Cromwell thinks he’s come to arrest him, which is possible. But no, the king wants him at Greenwich. “He wants you now.”
“Cromwell,” says the king, “my dead brother came to me in a dream.” Cranmer is there telling Henry that one shouldn’t pay attention to dreams. But Cromwell makes the bad dream a good one: a sign Arthur wants his brother to fulfil the prophecy. “Neat work”, says Cranmer afterwards.
Later that day, Cromwell is back at Greenwich to be sworn in as a councillor. “You a councillor,” says the Archbishop of Canterbury. “What the world comes to!” Thomas More is there, crying over his dead father. Thomas Boleyn is there, stroking his beard. Cromwell takes the oath, and outside in England, it is snowing.
Cromwell goes to the queen to tell her that she is not to accompany Henry. If she is difficult, they will separate her from her daughter, Mary. Anne will be with the king from now on, but the word on the river is that Anne is sleeping with her brother, George.
Speaking of scandal, at New Year, Anne was delighted to report that Old Seymour had been sleeping with his son's wife. “Pastyface” Jane Seymour has gone back to Wolf Hall. No one will want to marry her now, says Anne.
In February, there is burning, and poison, and torture. Thomas Hitton is burned for heresy. Bishop Fisher is almost poisoned, and his cook is tortured in the Tower. Cromwell thinks it has been mismanaged.
In March, Lucy Petyt comes to see Cromwell to petition him to help free her husband, John, locked up on heresy charges. Johane is without sympathy. But what can Cromwell do?
He speaks to Anne, but she will not help a mere grocer. It is a delicate time. They are trying to get Tyndale to come home. But he will not moderate his words, and the king is afraid of heresy. Thomas Avery comes to Austin Friars from Stephen Vaughan. He carries letters from Tyndale, sewn into a jerkin by a neat hand. The stitcher is an orphan with lovely eyes called Jenneke.
2. This week’s characters
Click on each link for more details and plot summaries for each character:
Thomas Cromwell • William Brereton • Harry Norris • Princess Mary • John Fisher • Thomas More • Queen Katherine • Thomas Wriothesley • Stephen Gardiner • William Warham • Thomas Boleyn • Richard Cromwell • Gregory Cromwell • Thomas Cranmer • Anne Boleyn • Henry VIII • Jane Seymour • Thomas Avery • Johane Williamson • Jane Rochford
3. This week’s theme: Pick your prince
‘Harsh, yes … but the question is, have you picked your prince? Because that is what you do, you choose him, and you know what he is. And then, when you have chosen, you say yes to him – yes, that is possible, yes, that can be done. If you don’t like Henry, you can go abroad and find another prince, but I tell you – if this were Italy, Katherine would be cold in her tomb.’
This week marks a significant moment in the story. Patch called Cromwell a “retired mercenary” at the end of last week. His master gone and sent to hell. “No wonder your humour’s so bitter these days.”
Now it is 1531, and Cromwell has joined the king’s council. He has no chain of office or official position. He’s a junior councillor, useful to the king only because of his influence and connections in the city, in parliament and in the law courts. But he has now picked his prince. His future is in Henry’s hands.
And that future is very uncertain. By the end of 1530, it became clear that Henry was not going to get international legitimacy for his divorce, from France, Spain or Rome. His advisers began making overtures to evangelical reformers and Protestant princes in mainland Europe. Under the influence of Anne Boleyn, Henry looked to the exiled biblical translator William Tyndale for support in his Great Matter.
These are days of brutal truth from Tyndale. Saints are not your friends and they will not protect you. They cannot help you to salvation. You cannot engage them to your service with prayers and candles, as you might hire a man for the harvest. Christ’s sacrifice was done on Calvary; it is not done in the Mass. Priests cannot help you to Heaven; you need no priest to stand between you and your God. No merits of yours can save you: only the merits of the living Christ.
This was all too much for Henry. In a rare surviving letter from Cromwell, he warns his man in Antwerp, Stephen Vaughan: “his Highness nothing liked the said book, being filled with seditious slanderous lies and fantastical opinions.”
It’s a dangerous time. Cromwell and Cranmer find themselves on one side of a growing religious divide at court, with Thomas More and Stephen Gardiner leading the traditionalists. In the middle: a king who wants a divorce but who is afraid of heresy.
But summer comes, and he, Cromwell, knows he has gone to the brink and must feel his way back. Henry is too timid, Tyndale too instransigent. His letters to Stephen sound a note of panic: abandon ship. He does not mean to sacrifice himself to Tyndale’s truculence; dear God, he says, More, Tyndale, they deserve each other, these mules that pass for men.
Cromwell has picked his prince. It means he must be a pragmatist and an opportunist. More like Marlinspike, and less like William Tyndale. ‘A cat may look at a king.’ He will tell the king the stories he wants to hear so that he, Cromwell, will get to write some new ones. He must tell brethren like Canmer, "Believe me. I am sincere,” but offer nothing to people like Lucy Petyt, who hopes his influence can free her husband from the Tower. Like the Lord Chancellor’s victims, he must stretch and compress himself into tortuous shapes to please his prince. He must arrange his face. Wolsey was a kitten. Henry is a beast.
He’s made his choice. He’s picked his prince.
4. Location focus: The Palace of Placentia
‘Go back to bed,’ he tells his household. ‘The king wouldn’t order me to Greenwich to arrest me; it doesn’t happen that way.’
It doesn’t happen that way. Prisoners were usually taken to the Tower, a fortified castle on the north bank of the Thames. Built under William the Conqueror during the Norman conquest, the Tower now housed an armoury, a menagerie and a prison. Out of custom, Tudor monarchs stayed here prior to their coronation. But it was no longer a place for recreation and entertainment.
In contrast, Greenwich Palace was built in 1443 by Henry VI’s uncle, Humphrey, Duke of Gloucester. He called it Bella Court. After his fall, Margaret of Anjou renamed it the Palace of Placentia, a pleasant place to live. On the south bank, downstream from London, it was an escape from the city.
In Tudor England, it became the main royal residence. Henry VIII, Mary I and Elizabeth I were all born here. The palace fell into disrepair under the Stuarts, and during the English Civil War, one Oliver Cromwell turned it into a biscuit factory and then a prisoner-of-war camp.
Oliver Cromwell’s great-grandfather was Richard Cromwell, born Richard Williams. Thomas Cromwell’s nephew. So a century from now, people will be arrested and taken to Greenwich. But not at the behest of a king. On the orders of a man descended from Richard Williams, son of Morgan and Kat:
It matters what name we choose, what name we make. The people lose their name who lie dead on the field of battle, the ordinary corpses of no lineage, with no herald to search for them and no chantry, no perpetual prayers. Morgan’s bloodline won’t be lost, he is sure of it, though he died in a busy year for death, when London was never out of black.
5. Tangent: The dreams of kings
Dr Cranmer says, from the shadows, ‘The dead do not come back to complain of their burial. It is the living who are exercised about these matters.’
Thomas Cranmer has spent a quarter decade studying theology at Jesus College, Cambridge. He is not a politician. He is a scholar and a priest. So he doesn’t tell the King of England what he wants to hear; he tells the king what he believes. Cranmer cites Saint Augstine. In 421, the Bishop of Hippo wrote On the Care to be Taken For the Dead, in which he argued that Christian burial was an important rite for the living but not for the dead. The dead don’t come back, and Augustine rejected the belief in ghosts or visions in dreams. Henry VIII is not convinced:
‘During the twelve days, between Christmas Day and Epiphany, God permits the dead to walk. This is well known.’
So Cromwell gives Henry something he can believe in: “The dreams of kings are not like the dreams of other men.”
Cramner will “still counsel against heeding dreams”, but there is an interesting postscript to this story. In 1556 he was tried for treason and heresy under the reign of Mary I. In his last days, he recanted and professed his loyalty to the Catholic Church. However, before he was executed, he dreamed he saw two kings, Jesus and Henry, turning away from him in shame. He wrote a recantation for him to give as a sermon on the day of his execution. But instead, he told those gathered that his “unworthy hand” would be first to burn, and he denounced the Pope as “Christ's enemy, and Antichrist with all his false doctrine.”
So, in the end, did Cranmer heed his own dreams?
Bonus: The Haunting of Wolf Hall
For paying subscribers, you can read the next instalment in my study of the phantoms and paranormal in Wolf Hall. We need to talk about the return of Arthur’s ghost:
6. Background: The former king is the future king
‘If your brother seems to say that you have taken his place, then he means you to become the king that he would have been. He himself cannot fulfil the prophecy, but he wills it to you. For him, the promise, and for you, the performance of it.’
If you ask Google where King Arthur is buried, twenty-first-century algorithms will point you to Glastonbury Abbey. There, in 1191, the monks found a hollow log containing two bodies believed to be King Arthur and his queen Guinevere. The less generous and more cynically minded maintain that this was a publicity stunt to attract pilgrims after a great fire destroyed most of the abbey in 1184.
Gregory Cromwell is not cynical, but he is romantic. Earlier in the novel, we caught him reading the Arthurian stories written by Thomas Mallory. In these legends, a wounded Arthur is taken to recover on the Isle of Avalon. He is not dead but sleeping, and on his tomb, it is written: The former king is the future king.
Gregory says, ‘Our king takes his descent from this Arthur. He was never really dead but waited in the forest biding his time, or possibly in a lake. He is several centuries old. Merlin is a wizard. He comes later. You will see.’
Henry’s father won England in battle at Bosworth in 1485. The Tudors had some dubious royal blood via their Beaufort ancestors. So, to bolster his claim to the throne, Henry VII drew up a genealogy that linked his grandfather, Owen Tudor, to Cadwaladr ap Cadwallon, the last King of Britain. Cadwaladr was supposedly descended from King Arthur, even though the legends do not speak of surviving children.
Geoffrey of Monmouth wrote that Cadwaladr gave up his throne because of a prophecy that a great king would come and free the Britains from their oppressors. In 1485, Henry marched under the red dragon, the banner of Arthur and Cadwaladr. This would fulfil another prophecy from Geoffrey’s writing, that the red dragon of Britain would vanquish the white dragon of the Saxons.
The following year a son was born. And, of course, Henry named him Arthur. The once and future king.
It is this deep prophecy that Cromwell puts back into Henry’s head, that night at the end of 1530. Cromwell does not want to serve a king scared of his brother’s shadow. He wants an enlivened and energetic monarch who is ready to change the world.
‘Gregory, those Merlin stories you read – we are going to write some more.’
7. Spotlight: Four Queens
The queen speaks in English. ‘Do you know who this is? This is Master Cromwell. Who now writes all the laws.’
Caught awkwardly between languages, he says, ‘Madam, shall we go on in English, or Latin?’
Cromwell’s first meeting with Queen Katherine nicely mirrors our first glimpse of Anne Boleyn at the start of “Entirely Beloved Cromwell.” There, he asks Anne, “My lady, are we having this conversation in English, or French? Your choice entirely.” Today, the choice is English or Latin. They proceed in English because Katherine has spent most of her life in England and is now “a sort of Englishwoman.”
We also now have a name to put to “Pasty-face”, the Seymour girl who waits on Lady Anne. She is, of course, Jane Seymour of Wolf Hall. Scandal has enveloped the Seymour family: Jane’s father has had children with Jane’s brother’s wife. Anne hasn’t heard what the boatmen are saying about her and her brother George (or perhaps she has?). But anyway, she is gloating about “those sinners at Wolf Hall”:
‘Her best move would be to follow the sister-in-law into a nunnery. Her sister Lizzie married well, but no one wants Milksop, and now no one will.’
Once again, we’re treading on the future’s toes. Jane Seymour will be Henry VIII’s third wife after Anne Boleyn. Milksop will be a queen of England.
So this week, the boy from Putney has come into contact with four queens. Katherine’s daughter will rule as Mary I between 1553 and 1558. He’s heading up in the world. He gives Anne silver forks. “He hopes she will use them to eat with, not to stick in people.” Jane gets needlework patterns. And we haven’t seen the last of those, or her, or Wolf Hall.
Katherine and Mary get the boot. One morning, Henry Tudor goes out hunting and never comes back. Katherine may regard herself as “still queen”, but she will no longer be treated like one.
‘I expected this, but I did not expect he would send a man like you to tell me.’
8. Background: Making men talk
The word is that the Lord Chancellor has become a master in the twin arts of stretching and compressing the servants of God.
In the Tower of London, stretching was done on the rack, also known as the Duke of Exeter's Daughter.1 Compressing was achieved by the Skeffington’s Daughter, named after Sir Leonard Skevington, Lieutenant of the Tower. In these early chapters, the Tower and its devices are distant from Cromwell’s world. But they won’t be forever.
In her lecture, “Iron Maiden”, Hilary Mantel talks about our confused relationship with the violence of the past:
Each century speaks of the grotesque cruelties of the one that went before, as if cruelty were alien to the prsesent, and we couldn’t own or recognise it. It seems we are doomed to be hypocrites – repulsed by the cruelties of bear-baiting while polishing off our factory-farmed dinner. Often, we crave the style of the past while condemning its substance.
She goes on to say that many instruments of torture, such as the Iron Maiden, are nineteenth-century fabrications, ghoulish inventions that we store “in a corner of our psyche where we keep the obscenities, under a veil of cobwebs.”
The risk in writing historical fiction is that “we treat it like a horror film. It sickens us. It’s safely distant and we pay to view.” We indulge in a confused version of the past, tailored to be “sordid and gorgeous, both together”. The truth, Mantel argues, is far more interesting.
You can listen to that lecture here.
9. Quote of the week: ‘Madam, your daughter should sit.’
History remembers Mary I, Mary Tudor, Bloody Mary, as the queen who tried to return England to the Mother Church and burned plenty of people in the process. But all that is in the future, far beyond the story contained in this trilogy. It is barely conceivable. So here, Hilary Mantel introduces us to a different Mary, no bigger than Uncle Norfolk’s thumbnail:
Whether it is through pain or fear, or some defect of nature; whether because of the summer heat, or the sound of hunting horns winding into the distance, or the spinning of sparkling dust in empty rooms; or whether it is that the child has lost sleep, while from dawn onwards her father’s decamping household was packed up around her; for whatever reason, she is shrunken into herself, and her eyes are the colour of ditchwater. Once, as he is going through the preliminary Latin politeness, he sees her grip tighten on the back of her mother’s chair. ‘Madam, your daughter should sit.’ In case a contest of wills should ensue, he picks up a stool and places it, with a decisive thud, by Katherine’s skirts.
10. Next week
Thank you for reading and joining me on this slow read of the Cromwell trilogy. And next week, we are reading the second part of “Arrange Your Face, 1531.”
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Until next week, I am your guide,
Master Simon Haisell
The Duke was William de la Pole, 1st Duke of Suffolk, a favourite courtier to the weak king Henry VI. His descendants in the time of Cromwell will have reason to fear this instrument later in our story.
When crafty Cromwell gives Henry the explanation of the dream that Henry needs to hear, I thought immediately of Joseph explaining to Pharaoh his dream. The dream explanation was a game changer for Joseph in Egypt and it is also, we sense, a game changer for Cromwell.
Cromwell is a Joseph archetype, the advisor to a ruler who rises from humble origins to become the second most important man in the kingdom by dint of his brilliance.
"Once again, we’re treading on the future’s toes." Simon, that's a great sentence! Once again, a terrific summary of the week's reading; thank you.