The household is quiet, calm. The turmoil of the city is locked outside the gate; he is having the locks renewed, the chains reinforced. Jo brings him an Easter egg. ‘Look, we have saved this one for you.’ It is a white egg with no speckles. It is featureless, but a single curl, the colour of onion-skin, peeps out from under a lopsided crown. You pick your prince and you know what he is: or do you?
Last Week | Home Page | Reading Schedule
Further Resources: Hilary Mantel | Wolf Hall
Welcome to week 8 of Wolf Crawl. I am your guide,
, and this is a year-long slow read of Hilary Mantel’s Cromwell trilogy: Wolf Hall, Bring Up the Bodies, and The Mirror & the Light.Each week, I dive into the detail with summaries, background, footnotes and tangents to enrich your reading. I am joined on this journey by
, who delves into the archive on our behalf, and Matt Brown, who makes maps to help us find our way through Cromwell’s world.You can find the reading schedule and plot summaries for the full cast of characters on my website, Footnotes and Tangents. There, you can join other slow reads, including Leo Tolstoy’s War and Peace, The Siege of Krishnapur by J. G. Farrell, and Hilary Mantel’s A Place of Greater Safety.
I start each post with a summary of the week’s story illustrated by a map created by Matt Brown. This week, we are reading Part Three. Chapter III. The Dead Complain of Their Burial, Christmastide 1530 and the first half of Part Four. Chapter I. Arrange Your Face, 1531.
In the UK Fourth Estate edition, this section runs from pages 272–305. In the US Picador edition, it runs from pages 251–281. It begins, ‘The knocking at the gate comes after midnight.’ It ends, ‘… because in the end we all come home to God.’
This summary is followed by a few footnotes of interest.
This week, we pick our prince and sail down to the Palace of Placentia. We dream of our once and future kings, visit four queens, and make men talk in the Tower. We visit our misremembered past in the archive with Bea Stitches and consider the dangers of raising ghosts and interpreting dreams in the haunting of Wolf Hall. We close with my favourite quote of the week.
And then it is over to you. In the comments, let us know what caught your eye and ask the group any questions you may have. And if you’ve tumbled down a rabbit hole or taken your reading off on a tangent, please share where you have been and what you have found.
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