Wolf Crawl #26: A contest of corpses

   1 May 1536: this, surely, is the last day of knighthood. What happens after this – will be no more than a dead parade with banners, a contest of corpses. The king will leave the field. The day will end, broken off, snapped like a shinbone, spat out like smashed teeth.

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further resources: Hilary Mantel | Wolf Hall

Welcome to Week 26 of Wolf Crawl. I am your guide,

Simon Haisell

, 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

Bea Stitches

, 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, Things Fall Apart by Chinua Achebe, 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 the second of five sections from Part Two. Chapter II. Master of Phantoms. London, April–May 1536.

In the UK Fourth Estate edition, this section runs from pages 323 to 361. In the US Picador edition, it runs from pages 271 to 301. It begins, “Mark at Stepney” It ends, “We shall have no trouble with her now.”

This summary is followed by a few footnotes of interest.

This week, we ask, Why Mark Smeaton? Consider an edgy young man and the things one can learn from pain. We take a simple salad of purslane with a glass of the truth, as Anne liquefies onto the cobbles. In the archives,

Bea Stitches

looks over Henry Wyatt’s correspondence, a mysterious list of nobles, and prepares us gently for the contents of a leather bag.

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.

To get these posts in your inbox or the Substack app, subscribe to Footnotes and Tangents and turn on notifications for ‘2025 Wolf Crawl’ in your subscription settings.