8. "Wolf Hall," by Hilary Mantel, pp. 116-130

Part II, II, "An Occult History of Britain," 1521-1529, concluded, from "New Year's 1529: Stephen Gardiner is in Rome...." Part II, III, "Make or Mar," All Hallows 1529.

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The illness of Pope Clement raises the possibility of Wolsey's becoming pope, which would solve both the king's problem and Wolsey's. But the pope recovers, and the "trial of the king's great matter" goes on. Wolsey seeks out witnesses to the marriage of Katherine and Arthur, hoping to prove that the marriage had been consummated, but the wedding took place 28 years ago and the potential witnesses are dead or doddering. Cromwell reflects "that he cannot imagine anyone, even a hasty fifteen-year-old, wanting to penetrate Katherine. It would be like copulation with a statue." In the end the court rules in Katherine's favor. "They all know the court will never sit again. They all know the cardinal has failed."

The plague returns with the summer, and Cromwell decides not to send his daughters to the country. "It's the wrong decision." Anne and Grace both die.

Wolsey's failure brings about his fall. "So now they swagger into York Place, the Duke of Suffolk, the Duke of Norfolk: the two great peers of the realm. Suffolk, his blond beard bristling, looks like a pig among truffles; a florid man, he remembers, turns my lord cardinal sick."

On All Hallows Day, 1529, Cromwell is overcome with grief for Liz, Anne and Grace, but also because he is certain that the fall of Wolsey means his fall, too.

7. "Wolf Hall," by Hilary Mantel, pp. 95-116

Part II, II, "An Occult History of Britain," 1521-1529, continued, from "1527: when the cardinal comes back from France..." through "... He wonders if she intends to poison him. Or eat him."

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The cardinal returns, having failed to end the king's marriage to Katherine, and learns that Henry has sent his own envoy to try to bring the divorce about. Everyone recognizes that the negotiations are doomed, even Henry, who as the younger son "was brought up and trained for the church, and for the highest offices within it," so he recognizes the problem. And both the cardinal and Cromwell begin to sense that Wolsey's power is beginning to decline.

In spring 1528, Cromwell and More meet in a scene that further emphasizes their differences. More "is genial, always genial; his shirt collar is grubby." He is also intensely set against Luther and in the scatological language More has used in his pamphlets against him, "No one has rendered the Latin tongue more obscene." More is also on the hunt for Tyndale, and Cromwell turns the tables on him by asking "Have you found sedition in Tyndale's writing?" which implies that More is familiar with them. Cromwell reflects that "More would have been a priest, but human flesh called to him with its inconvenient demands. He did not want to be a bad  priest, so he became a husband."

Meanwhile, Wolsey tips off Cromwell, in slyly indirect fashion, that a friend of Tyndale's, Humphrey Monmouth, is under suspicion. But "When Monmouth's house is raided, it is clear of all suspect writings. It's almost as if he was forewarned." Cromwell knows that "Monmouth himself would be a heap of ashes, if Thomas More had his way."

Cromwell's daughter Anne is "not like a flower, a nightingale; she's like ... like a merchant adventurer, he thinks." When the plague comes back in the summer, he sends her and Grace to the country. "This time the court is infected" and Anne Boleyn is also sent to the country, but falls ill, as does her father. They survive but Mary Boleyn's husband dies. Wolsey says to Cromwell, "I am praying for everybody.... Only when I say to the Lord, 'Now, about Thomas Cromwell--' does God say to me, 'Wolsey, what have I told you? Don't you know when to give up?'"

Cromwell learns that two Oxford scholars, Clerke and Sumner, who had been imprisoned for possessing Lutheran books, have died there, "in the college cellars, the deep cold cellars intended for storing fish. Even in that silent place, secret, icy, the summer plague sought them out. They died in the dark and without a priest." Wolsey is also distressed to learn of their deaths, but when Cromwell pleads for the release of another critic of the church, Father Bilney, to be released from the Tower, the cardinal is reluctant. "Heresy -- his brush with it -- is a little indulgence that the cardinal allows him."

One thing that Cromwell doesn't tell Wolsey about is Mary Boleyn's flirtation with him. He meets her one day and learns from her that the king has been writing love letters to Anne. He urges Mary to steal them for him. She also talks about her own son named Henry, and says that Anne forbade the king from acknowledging him, as he has done with his other illegitimate son. "He does what she says. She means to give him a prince herself, so she doesn't want mine in his nursery." And the recently widowed Mary says to Cromwell,

"Do you know what I want? I want a husband who upsets them. I want to marry a man who frightens them."
There is a sudden light in her blue eyes. An idea has dawned....
Thomas Howard for an uncle? Thomas Boleyn for a father? The king, in time, for a brother?
"They'd kill you," he says.

Afterward, he reflects, "There are some men, possibly, who would be fascinated by a woman who had been a mistress to two kings, but he is not one of them." Still, he has to tell someone, so he tells Rafe Sadler, who says, "I think you imagined it." And he realizes, "To the Boleyns, other people are for using and discarding." He later "hears that Anne has taken the wardship of her sister's son, Henry Carey. He wonders if she intends to poison him. Or eat him."

6. "Wolf Hall," by Hilary Mantel, pp. 77-95

Part II, II, "An Occult History of Britain," 1521-1529, continued, from "Now the cardinal's many bags are packed for France..." through "... A boatman whistled back from the river."

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The cardinal prepares to leave for France and negotiations on the king's divorce, and talks to Cromwell about the mythic and real origins of the Tudors. Before he leaves, the cardinal also talks about his enemies, and the stories that he has "a ring which enables its owner to fly, and allows him to encompass the death of his enemies. It detects poisons, renders ferocious beasts harmless, ensures the favor of princes, and protects against drowning." Wolsey says he wishes he knew which one it was, and if he did he'd have one copied for Cromwell. And Cromwell tells him,

"I picked up a snake once. In Italy."
"Why did you do that?"
"For a bet."
"Was it poisonous?"
"We didn't know. That was the point of the bet."
"Did it bite you?"
"Of course."
"Why of course?"
"It wouldn't be much of a story, would it? If I'd put it down unharmed, and away it slid?
Unwillingly, the cardinal laughs. "What will I do without you," he says, "among the double-tongued French?"

The horrible event in the Cromwell household occurs after the cardinal leaves for France: Liz Cromwell dies, apparently of the plague that has been spreading in the summer heat. The household is put in quarantine, and Cromwell spends a month at home, reading. One of his books is by Machiavelli. "Someone says to him, what is in your little book? and he says, a few aphorisms, a few truisms, nothing we didn't know before." But no one else in the household, including his daughter Anne and Grace, gets sick, and when the weather cools in September the family can reunite to mourn Liz.

He recalls his return to Putney, where he met his father again and he him he was studying to be a lawyer, which angered Walter Cromwell: "If it weren't for the so-called law, we would be lords." Which, Thomas thought, was "an interesting point to make. If you get to be a lord by fighting, shouting, being bigger, better, bolder and more shameless than the next man, Walter should be a lord." He also recalls running away to Lambeth, where his uncle John was a cook for Cardinal Morton. "One of the pages was pointed out to him: Master Thomas More, whom the archbishop himself says will be a great man, so deep his learning already and so pleasant his wit." (Once again, the "whom" in that sentence should be "who.") More, he is told, is fourteen, which may be twice his age -- which he still doesn't know. "At Lambeth he follows the stewards around and when they say a number he remembers it; so people say, if you haven't time to write it down, just tell John's nephew. He will cast an eye on a sack of whatever's been ordered in, then warn his uncle to check if it's short weight."

5. "Wolf Hall," by Hilary Mantel, pp. 54-77

Part II, II, "An Occult History of Britain," 1521-1529, through "Or, with any good effect, to the woman they say he loves."

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So we go back a bit to bring things up to date. The chapter begins with a true occult history of Britain, about its founding by a Greek king's murderous 33 daughters who were exiled by him to the far-off island they called Albina, where they mated with demons and gave birth to giants that were overthrown by Brutus, the great-grandson of Aeneas, whose descendants ruled until the Romans came. And the Tudors were descended from Brutus through Constantine who was King Arthur's grandfather. And his descendant Prince Arthur was born in 1486, but died at 15, so his brother Henry (who would have been Archbishop of Canterbury if Arthur had lived) married his widow, Katherine of Aragon.

The true part is the troublesome part, especially after the appearance at court in 1521 of the 20-year-old daughter of Thomas Boleyn. Wolsey wanted her to marry into the Irish court, but she caught the eye of Harry Percy, heir to the Earl of Northumberland. Wolsey's plan is for Percy to marry Mary Talbot -- the Boleyns are comparative upstarts. Cromwell is in the shadows, taking notes, as Wolsey and Boleyn lock horns. Boleyn claims that Percy and Anne have already "pledged themselves before witnesses," and Wolsey orders him, "Marry the girl into Ireland before the Butlers hear any rumor that she's spoiled good. Not that I'd mention it. But the court does talk." And he adds, "notwithstanding your remarkable good fortune in marrying a Howard, the Boleyns were in trade once, were they not?" Boleyn stalks out, muttering "Butcher's boy" and, at Cromwell, "Butcher's dog."

But Cromwell knows something Wolsey doesn't, thanks to the gossip his wife has heard: "'The women judge from orders to the silk merchants that the king has a new--' He breaks off and says, 'My lord, what do you call a whore when she is a knight's daughter?'"  He means Mary Boleyn, Anne's sister, "a kind little blonde, who is said to have been passed all around the French court before coming home to this one, scattering goodwill, her frowning little sister trotting always at her heels." He also heard that Henry had lost his virginity to Boleyn's wife, which surprises Wolsey. And they mention the king's son by "John Blount's daughter," known as Henry Fitzroy, a ten-year-old whom the king has made Duke of Somerset and Duke of Richmond.

As Cromwell leaves Wolsey, "The trouble with England, he thinks, is that it's so poor in gesture. We shall have to develop a hand signal for 'Back off, our prince is fucking this man's daughter.' He is surprised that the Italians have not done it. Though perhaps they have, and he just never caught on."

We jump ahead to 1529 and to Cromwell and Cavendish in conversation at the cardinal sleeps. They recall how when she was parted from Harry Percy, who has married Mary Talbot, Anne Boleyn "said that if she could work my lord cardinal any displeasure, she would do it." And we review the rise of Anne and the efforts of Henry and Katherine to conceive that resulted only in a series of miscarriages and infant deaths with the exception of their "small but vigorous" daughter, Mary, born in 1516. The queen is now 42. "Under her gowns she wears the habit of a Franciscan nun. Try always, Wolsey says, to find out what people wear under their clothes." Cromwell compares Mary to his own daughter, Anne, who is two or three years younger than the princess: "Anne Cromwell is a tough little girl.... Mary Tudor is a pale, clever doll with fox-colored hair, who speaks with more gravity than the average bishop."

Wolsey has also advised Cromwell about serving the king: "If your chance comes to serve, you will have to take him as he is, a pleasure-loving prince. And he will have to take you as you are, which is rather like one of those square-shaped fighting dogs that low men tow about on ropes. Not that you are without a fitful charm, Tom."

The efforts to get Pope Clement to annul the marriage of Henry and Katherine was complicated by the pope's capture during the sack of Rome. Thomas More claims that the imperial troops in charge of the pope were "roasting live babies on spits," which elicits Cromwell's derision: "Listen, soldiers don't do that. They're too busy carrying away everything they can turn into ready money." It's a reaction that speaks of the difference between More, the protomartyr, and Cromwell, the practical man of business. And a paragraph follows that further elaborates on the difference between the medieval More and the modern Cromwell:

Under his clothes, it is well known, More wears a jerkin of horsehair. He beats himself with a small scourge, of the type used by some religious orders. What lodges in his mind, Thomas Cromwell's, is that somebody makes these instruments of daily torture.... Are simple villagers paid -- how, by the dozen? -- for making flails with waxed knots? Does it keep farmworkers busy during the slow winter months? When the money for their honest labor is put into their hands, do the makers think of the hands that will pick up the product? ... He thinks, also, that people ought to be found better jobs.

Meanwhile, Cromwell's own legal business thrives, "and he is able to lend money at interest, and arrange bigger loans, on the international market, taking a broker's fee." And this elicits a gibe from More: "Still serving your Hebrew God, I see.... I mean, your idol Usury." But Cromwell thinks himself lucky, with his thriving family.

But this, remember, is a scene from the past. When, as has been noted earlier, the plague has arrived. And, as noted still earlier, in the last chapter, when they arrived with the fallen cardinal at the grim house of exile, Cromwell reflected, somewhat surprisingly: "He doesn't need to think of going home; there's no home to go to, he's got no family left." So obviously the novel is about to tell us that something horrible has happened to the Cromwells.