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Joining late and catching up while curled up under a scratchy wool blanket to mitigate the deep cold outside this winter. As an occasional stitcher myself, I will pay more attention to the fabrics this time, and look forward to Bea Stitches’ insights.
This is my second read of the trilogy. I finished The Mirror and the Light a year ago, watched the BBC series last summer, and decided to go right back into the story. Mantel’s work is so layered and inspiring, and it wraps me up into a ghostly blanket of its own.
A little late to the party but I have just finished Week 1. Thankyou to Tracey from Carpe Librum for the share and gift. I am thrilled to be part of this slow read. It's my first time doing something like this and I am looking forward to it. I started Wolf Hall a year ago but was overwhelmed by all the characters, places and time lines. However, after reading through the Week 1 resources, links and maps I am feeling much better about beginning from a better researched starting point. I hope to catch everyone at the current reading schedule point soon.
I’m a week late with posting this but just wanted to chime in and say that I really loved reading all of the banter in these two chapters. First, we have Kat and Morgan Williams arguing lovingly about what would be best for young Thomas. They seem to be a loving family but they’re portrayed with a messy vitality instead of boring sentimentality. Yet, Thomas feels viscerally that he’ll never enjoy what they have: “… nobody, he thinks, will ever cry for him, God didn’t cut him out that way.”
Then, we fast-forward to his own playful verbal sparring with Cardinal Wolsey. It feels like he’s gone all the way from rock bottom to the top of the world, with an important position and the trust and favor of one of the most powerful men in the country. He’s respected, protected, and seems to have found his way in the world. What could possibly go wrong?
It looks like your audio podcasts haven’t been updated for the new year. I’m still seeing all the podcasts from last year. Are you planning to remote last years and start reposting each week this year?
Finally, after three attempts at starting both the Trilogy and War and Peace, I am keeping up with the readings and everything provided here for both books. I want to remember when I turn 75 this May, that I am capable of returning every day to reading. I am reading first thing in the morning, with my cup of tea, and this suits me well. It's finally becoming a daily habit.
I am just fascinating information. I am a stitcher, knitter, and needlepoint creator, so of course, the video with Dr. Lucy Bea was very interesting. I also looked up the paper about the eels. I can't imagine writing 400 pages about eels!
I plan to be here reading everyone's comments, the extras provided here, and just enjoy a very rich experience! Thank you, Simon, and all of you contributors. Viki Sigler, Indiana, USA
Love that you're carving out a daily reading habit there, Viki. And there's so much to explore now with Wolf Crawl, it only gets richer and richer as more people contribute!
Ahh, forgot to click my way through to this post when I finished reading, so swinging back through now. I'm excited to be here! I read Wolf Hall for the first time in 2010 when I was working on my undergraduate thesis on representations of Anne Boleyn, and I mainlined a lotttt of Tudor fiction in a short amount of time. I made my way through Bring Up the Bodies a couple years later and then called it quits.
Immediately, I'm so glad to be coming back to this as a slow read (and not a read as frantically as possible read life the first time). Loved the week's pages, the gorgeous writing, and the humor! I found myself struggling much less with the writing than I did on my first read too.
I'm struck by the 27 year gap to start and now in 1527 there are only 13 years to cover until 1540. That gap represents a lot of life but this last decade and change was the historically significant bit (and the part we have records for). Interesting how much historical figures in general must have done in those years where we don't know much about them. And it reminds me how fast Henry's court started to move and shake up in later years and how quickly someone can rise and fall.
Glad you clicked through! Yes, Mantel does so much with that big gap in the historical record. None of the people he meets later in life really know where he's been and what he's done, and Cromwell is quite happy to keep it that way!
It’s a joke - a fake legal letter that Cromwell is writing in his head, in the style he would send to Norfolk were he to have to draft wording about haunting. So he includes various options to cover every possibility. But of course he wouldn’t really send a legal letter about a haunting.
In an earlier post, I wrote about the similarity of writing styles between historians such as Dan Jones and novelists such as Hillary Mantell. I wrote about having my academic papers rejected for publication because they didn't conform to the "norm" For years, I attempted to play the academic game. I submitted papers to journals, meticulously researched and heavy with the weight of primary sources. Twice, I was met with the same rejection: “Too many direct quotations. You must paraphrase these voices. You must provide more analysis.”
In the sterile language of peer review, "analysis" is often a polite word for "silencing." I was being told to take the raw, breathing testimony of people who actually lived through history and grind it down into the bland, processed flour of academic prose. They wanted my voice, the voice of the detached, 21st-century observer, to be louder than the voices of those who were actually there.
I refused. Because when we paraphrase the past, we don’t just shorten it; we sanitize it. We remove the rhythm of their speech, the heat of their anger, and the specific texture of their truth. We replace their humanity with our "rigour."
We are told that the "objective," analytical style of history is the gold standard. But in the grander timeline of human consciousness, this academic distance is a mere blip, a 300-year-old experiment born of the Enlightenment’s obsession with categorization.
Before this, for two millennia, history was narrative. From Herodotus and Thucydides to Edward Hyde, Earl of Clarendon, Samuel Pepys, Edward Gibbon, David Hume and Voltaire, the goal was to tell a story that captured the essence of the human condition. And even further back, for 65,000 years, Indigenous cultures have preserved history through oral narrative. They understood a truth that the modern academy has forgotten: information without a story is easily lost, but a story is a vessel for survival.
By turning to the narrative style, inspired by Hilary Mantel and the great non-fiction storytellers, I am not "dumbing down" my research. I am actually making it more honest.
In a narrative, the historian cannot hide behind jargon. You have to show how power actually felt. You have to show Thomas Cromwell not just as a series of legislative reforms, but as a man in a room, smelling the rushes on the floor, hearing the sharpen of a blade, and feeling the weight of a King's whim.
When I include "masses of quotations," I am not being lazy. I am being a host. I am inviting the dead back to the table to speak for themselves. If an academic finds that "distracting," it is perhaps because they are uncomfortable with any authority that doesn't belong to them.
The modern legal system in the West is often an adversarial battle of wits where the "winner" is the one who argues most effectively within the rules. Academic history has become the same: a performance for a small gallery of peers.
I am choosing a different path, the path of the "inquisitorial" system, where the goal is the collective discovery of truth. I am writing for the people, not the professors. If the public is to have any hope of seeing through the "clichés of the victor," they need history that they can actually inhabit.
They don't need my "paraphrase." They need the truth, in the words of those who bled for it.
I did a double take reading these lines where the Cardinal is talking to Cromwell:
‘The king called me this morning,’ he says, ‘exceptionally early.’ ‘What did he want?’
Because of the word 'called', I had a mental image of a telephone call.... How difficult communications must have been. Or perhaps we have it too easy today :)
And the time taken to travel. There was only one bridge across the Thames, many journeys around London required a boatman to take you across the river, letters arriving via messenger on horseback, letters from overseas taking days to arrive…. A different pace.
So much of beauty and fascination to explore, but I found myself distracted by Walter accusing his son of being an eel. Why an eel? Why not anything else that crawls upon the ground. Fell into a rabbit hole about the role of eels in British cultural and economic history and read this dissertation where More is mentioned in the intro. https://ecommons.cornell.edu/server/api/core/bitstreams/b72df967-55f6-4083-b048-051035921aae/content
Thanks for this research. It struck me that he is an eel, some metaphor potentially much more complicated than a snake and much more complicated than a worm.
I know nothing about this Wolf Hall period, so my husband suggested I watch the 1960’s movie “A Man For All Seasons” about Thomas Moore. I did and it helped me jump into Wolf Hall with some understanding and picturing of the characters and plotline.
Hello everyone. I wanted to say thank you for all your informative and insightful comments. I originally subscribed to do War and Peace but then investigated the Trilogy and decided to do both. I’ve read quite a few biographies on the Tudor family so I thought this is right up my alley. Thanks again for making this read along so enjoyable.
Regarding the scream and other sounds in this section, I like to imagine Mantel at her writing desk, hearing a mysterious hullabaloo coming from down the way and imagining what that might have been like to hear such things in an age before the constant hum of electric and motorized things, when the loudest sounds most people heard were thunder or church bells, and then weaving it all in to the sensory background that brings Wolf Hall to life.
Thanks for the post, Simon. It's certainly helped explain the narrative voice. I'm not fully there yet, but soon I'm sure. As a non-British reader, I was wondering what the subtext was when describing someone as 'overly Welsh' - this Welsh description of characters comes up in both chapters. Thank you!
Hi Anne! We might think of the Welsh in London as perhaps a bit rustic, rural and uncivilised … but then it is also worth saying that the Tudors have Welsh ancestry, and the old aristocratic families of England look down on Henry Tudor for his “common” Welsh roots.
Discussion Code of Conduct
Welcome to the comments section! Please remember that this is an inclusive space with a diverse community. Respect others and their opinions, and help keep this a welcome space for everyone.
You may start one thread in the comments section. If you would like to make additional comments, please add to your thread or reply to other readers' threads.
Many thanks!
Joining late and catching up while curled up under a scratchy wool blanket to mitigate the deep cold outside this winter. As an occasional stitcher myself, I will pay more attention to the fabrics this time, and look forward to Bea Stitches’ insights.
This is my second read of the trilogy. I finished The Mirror and the Light a year ago, watched the BBC series last summer, and decided to go right back into the story. Mantel’s work is so layered and inspiring, and it wraps me up into a ghostly blanket of its own.
What a cosy message, Jennifer ... welcome, I hope you enjoy being wrapped up in Mantel's writing this year!
A little late to the party but I have just finished Week 1. Thankyou to Tracey from Carpe Librum for the share and gift. I am thrilled to be part of this slow read. It's my first time doing something like this and I am looking forward to it. I started Wolf Hall a year ago but was overwhelmed by all the characters, places and time lines. However, after reading through the Week 1 resources, links and maps I am feeling much better about beginning from a better researched starting point. I hope to catch everyone at the current reading schedule point soon.
Fantastic. Welcome, Kym! I hope you have a great time reading the trilogy here.
I’m a week late with posting this but just wanted to chime in and say that I really loved reading all of the banter in these two chapters. First, we have Kat and Morgan Williams arguing lovingly about what would be best for young Thomas. They seem to be a loving family but they’re portrayed with a messy vitality instead of boring sentimentality. Yet, Thomas feels viscerally that he’ll never enjoy what they have: “… nobody, he thinks, will ever cry for him, God didn’t cut him out that way.”
Then, we fast-forward to his own playful verbal sparring with Cardinal Wolsey. It feels like he’s gone all the way from rock bottom to the top of the world, with an important position and the trust and favor of one of the most powerful men in the country. He’s respected, protected, and seems to have found his way in the world. What could possibly go wrong?
It looks like your audio podcasts haven’t been updated for the new year. I’m still seeing all the podcasts from last year. Are you planning to remote last years and start reposting each week this year?
Hey Adrienne. No, no plans to do that. All the posts were recorded last year – so you've got them all lined up and ready for this year!
Finally, after three attempts at starting both the Trilogy and War and Peace, I am keeping up with the readings and everything provided here for both books. I want to remember when I turn 75 this May, that I am capable of returning every day to reading. I am reading first thing in the morning, with my cup of tea, and this suits me well. It's finally becoming a daily habit.
I am just fascinating information. I am a stitcher, knitter, and needlepoint creator, so of course, the video with Dr. Lucy Bea was very interesting. I also looked up the paper about the eels. I can't imagine writing 400 pages about eels!
I plan to be here reading everyone's comments, the extras provided here, and just enjoy a very rich experience! Thank you, Simon, and all of you contributors. Viki Sigler, Indiana, USA
Love that you're carving out a daily reading habit there, Viki. And there's so much to explore now with Wolf Crawl, it only gets richer and richer as more people contribute!
Ahh, forgot to click my way through to this post when I finished reading, so swinging back through now. I'm excited to be here! I read Wolf Hall for the first time in 2010 when I was working on my undergraduate thesis on representations of Anne Boleyn, and I mainlined a lotttt of Tudor fiction in a short amount of time. I made my way through Bring Up the Bodies a couple years later and then called it quits.
Immediately, I'm so glad to be coming back to this as a slow read (and not a read as frantically as possible read life the first time). Loved the week's pages, the gorgeous writing, and the humor! I found myself struggling much less with the writing than I did on my first read too.
I'm struck by the 27 year gap to start and now in 1527 there are only 13 years to cover until 1540. That gap represents a lot of life but this last decade and change was the historically significant bit (and the part we have records for). Interesting how much historical figures in general must have done in those years where we don't know much about them. And it reminds me how fast Henry's court started to move and shake up in later years and how quickly someone can rise and fall.
Glad you clicked through! Yes, Mantel does so much with that big gap in the historical record. None of the people he meets later in life really know where he's been and what he's done, and Cromwell is quite happy to keep it that way!
I’m confused about the end part about the Duke of Norfolk and why Cromwell is sending a letter about Woolsey, not haunting him.
It’s a joke - a fake legal letter that Cromwell is writing in his head, in the style he would send to Norfolk were he to have to draft wording about haunting. So he includes various options to cover every possibility. But of course he wouldn’t really send a legal letter about a haunting.
Thank you- maybe because I don’t know how the Duke of Norfolk fits into the history I don’t understand the joke.
I just looked him up - so that helps
We will all get to know Uncle Norfolk far too well this year!
In an earlier post, I wrote about the similarity of writing styles between historians such as Dan Jones and novelists such as Hillary Mantell. I wrote about having my academic papers rejected for publication because they didn't conform to the "norm" For years, I attempted to play the academic game. I submitted papers to journals, meticulously researched and heavy with the weight of primary sources. Twice, I was met with the same rejection: “Too many direct quotations. You must paraphrase these voices. You must provide more analysis.”
In the sterile language of peer review, "analysis" is often a polite word for "silencing." I was being told to take the raw, breathing testimony of people who actually lived through history and grind it down into the bland, processed flour of academic prose. They wanted my voice, the voice of the detached, 21st-century observer, to be louder than the voices of those who were actually there.
I refused. Because when we paraphrase the past, we don’t just shorten it; we sanitize it. We remove the rhythm of their speech, the heat of their anger, and the specific texture of their truth. We replace their humanity with our "rigour."
We are told that the "objective," analytical style of history is the gold standard. But in the grander timeline of human consciousness, this academic distance is a mere blip, a 300-year-old experiment born of the Enlightenment’s obsession with categorization.
Before this, for two millennia, history was narrative. From Herodotus and Thucydides to Edward Hyde, Earl of Clarendon, Samuel Pepys, Edward Gibbon, David Hume and Voltaire, the goal was to tell a story that captured the essence of the human condition. And even further back, for 65,000 years, Indigenous cultures have preserved history through oral narrative. They understood a truth that the modern academy has forgotten: information without a story is easily lost, but a story is a vessel for survival.
By turning to the narrative style, inspired by Hilary Mantel and the great non-fiction storytellers, I am not "dumbing down" my research. I am actually making it more honest.
In a narrative, the historian cannot hide behind jargon. You have to show how power actually felt. You have to show Thomas Cromwell not just as a series of legislative reforms, but as a man in a room, smelling the rushes on the floor, hearing the sharpen of a blade, and feeling the weight of a King's whim.
When I include "masses of quotations," I am not being lazy. I am being a host. I am inviting the dead back to the table to speak for themselves. If an academic finds that "distracting," it is perhaps because they are uncomfortable with any authority that doesn't belong to them.
The modern legal system in the West is often an adversarial battle of wits where the "winner" is the one who argues most effectively within the rules. Academic history has become the same: a performance for a small gallery of peers.
I am choosing a different path, the path of the "inquisitorial" system, where the goal is the collective discovery of truth. I am writing for the people, not the professors. If the public is to have any hope of seeing through the "clichés of the victor," they need history that they can actually inhabit.
They don't need my "paraphrase." They need the truth, in the words of those who bled for it.
This makes a lot of sense to me thanks Gavin July 30 2026
I did a double take reading these lines where the Cardinal is talking to Cromwell:
‘The king called me this morning,’ he says, ‘exceptionally early.’ ‘What did he want?’
Because of the word 'called', I had a mental image of a telephone call.... How difficult communications must have been. Or perhaps we have it too easy today :)
And the time taken to travel. There was only one bridge across the Thames, many journeys around London required a boatman to take you across the river, letters arriving via messenger on horseback, letters from overseas taking days to arrive…. A different pace.
is this the right place to comment on the 2026 read through?
It is!
So much of beauty and fascination to explore, but I found myself distracted by Walter accusing his son of being an eel. Why an eel? Why not anything else that crawls upon the ground. Fell into a rabbit hole about the role of eels in British cultural and economic history and read this dissertation where More is mentioned in the intro. https://ecommons.cornell.edu/server/api/core/bitstreams/b72df967-55f6-4083-b048-051035921aae/content
Thanks for this research. It struck me that he is an eel, some metaphor potentially much more complicated than a snake and much more complicated than a worm.
And don't ever forget the eel. It will be back!
Oh, cool!
I am scared of eels.
I don’t think I’ve ever seen a real-life eel here in the states. I don’t think I’d want to lol
They are pretty amazing creatures.
I know nothing about this Wolf Hall period, so my husband suggested I watch the 1960’s movie “A Man For All Seasons” about Thomas Moore. I did and it helped me jump into Wolf Hall with some understanding and picturing of the characters and plotline.
Love that movie! Had a hankering to watch it again awhile back and it’s as riveting as it was in my first watch many many years ago.
Hello everyone. I wanted to say thank you for all your informative and insightful comments. I originally subscribed to do War and Peace but then investigated the Trilogy and decided to do both. I’ve read quite a few biographies on the Tudor family so I thought this is right up my alley. Thanks again for making this read along so enjoyable.
You're welcome! The discussion in the comments for Wolf Crawl has become its own amazing resource!
Regarding the scream and other sounds in this section, I like to imagine Mantel at her writing desk, hearing a mysterious hullabaloo coming from down the way and imagining what that might have been like to hear such things in an age before the constant hum of electric and motorized things, when the loudest sounds most people heard were thunder or church bells, and then weaving it all in to the sensory background that brings Wolf Hall to life.
Thanks for the post, Simon. It's certainly helped explain the narrative voice. I'm not fully there yet, but soon I'm sure. As a non-British reader, I was wondering what the subtext was when describing someone as 'overly Welsh' - this Welsh description of characters comes up in both chapters. Thank you!
Hi Anne! We might think of the Welsh in London as perhaps a bit rustic, rural and uncivilised … but then it is also worth saying that the Tudors have Welsh ancestry, and the old aristocratic families of England look down on Henry Tudor for his “common” Welsh roots.
I love this tidbit about the "common" roots of the Tudors!
I had this same question! Thanks for the reply!