Wolf Crawl #31: Never look back

'Now I've told him – Majesty, don't brood on it. I don't want this in his mind – following him, like a curse. You tell him to press on and never look back.'
[...]
   We shall not escape these weeks. They recapitulate, always varied and always fresh, always doing and never done.

last week | home page | reading schedule
further resources: Hilary Mantel | Wolf Hall

Welcome to Week 31 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 by Matt Brown. This week, we read the first of three parts of Part One. Chapter II. Salvage. London, Summer 1536.

In the UK Fourth Estate edition, this section runs from pages 27 to 77. In the US Picador edition, it runs from pages 22 to 64. It begins, ‘Where’s my orange coat?’ It ends, “…feeling as if for the first time the beat of his own heart.”

This summary is followed by a few footnotes of interest. This week, we place our hand on our heart and the knife concealed there. We don our orange coat and walk out into Eden. There are new characters, a curse, and the nine lives of a cat called Cromwell. In the archives,

Bea Stitches

looks over letters from fallen families, and from our poor tiny Duke of Richmond. In The Haunting of Wolf Hall, we consider two dead queens out for revenge.

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.