28. "Wolf Hall," by Hilary Mantel, pp. 475-532

Part V, II, "The Map of Christendom," 1534-1535. III, "To Wolf Hall," July 1535.

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The closer I get to the end of a book, the faster I read....

Henry holds out the possibility of Lord Chancellor to Cromwell, but for the time being he takes the post of Master of the Rolls. The Master's house is ancient, built 300 years earlier "as a refuge for Jews who wished to convert." There he builds "a treasure room, a repository secure for any gold plate the king entrusts to him; whatever he deposits can quickly be turned into ready money." He is unsure about leaving Austin Friars, but he does so. He thinks about his properties and concludes, "All this is small stuff. It's nothing to what he intends to have, or to what Henry will owe him."

He is a good friend and master; this is said of him everywhere. Otherwise, it is the usual abuse. His father was a blacksmith, a crooked brewer, he was an Irishman, he was a criminal, he was a Jew, and he himself was just a wool-trader, he was a shearsman, and now he is a sorcerer: how else but by being a sorcerer would he get the reins of power in his hand?

A treaty has been made with the Scots, but now the Irish are rebelling.

Richard Cromwell "has proved a formidable man in the lists. It is more or less as Christophe says: biff, and they are flat.... He carries the Cromwell colors, and the king loves him for it, as he loves any man with flair and courage and physical strength."

"Thomas More is losing weight, a wiry little man emerging from what was never a superfluity of flesh."

More is now required to swear to the Act of Supremacy, an act which draws together all the powers and dignities assumed by the king in the last two years. It doesn't, as some say, make the king head of the church. It states that he is head of the church, and always has been.... It will be a treasonable offense to deny Henry's titles or jurisdiction, to speak or write maliciously against him, to call him a heretic or a schismatic.

More remarks that the "sweating sickness" has broken out among the troops in Ireland. Cromwell doesn't tell him that plague has, too, "or that the whole Irish campaign is a debacle and a money sink and that he wishes he had done as Richard said and gone out there himself." More asks about Tyndale, who is in hiding because on the continent "printers are branded and have their eyes put out, and brothers and sisters are killed for their faith, the men beheaded, the women buried alive." Cromwell urges More to take the oath.

"An idea has been floated that the infant Elizabeth should marry a son of France; the Boleyns really think this is going to happen." Anne is furious because she has learned that Mary Boleyn is pregnant and suspects that the king may be the father. Thomas Boleyn says, "She claims the child's father is William Stafford, and she has married him." Henry asks him, "My lord Wiltshire, can you not control either of your daughters?" Anne says that Mary "will sail about the court with her great belly, and pity me and laugh at me, because I have lost my own child."

Cromwell looks in on Mary, who is packing to move. Jane Seymour and Mark Smeaton are helping her. Jane Rochford is gloating, and says that her husband, George Boleyn, "will be sensible, as I am, that you have disgraced all your kin." Mary says that Anne holds on to the king with "whore's tricks" that don't "conduce to getting a child.... Seven years she schemed to be queen, and God protect us from answered prayers."

Cromwell's attraction to Jane Seymour continues. He feels restrained by his dead wife: "Liz, he thinks, take your dead hand off me. Do you grudge me this one little girl, so small, so thin, so plain?" With Mary leaving, Jane is returning to Wolf Hall.

Hans Holbein tells Cromwell, "The wives of England, they all keep secret books of whom they are going to have next when they have poisoned their husbands. And you are at the top of everyone's list."

Alice More comes to see Cromwell. She says, "my husband used to say, lock Cromwell in a deep dungeon in the morning, and when you come back that night he'll be sitting on a plush cushion eating lark's tongues and all the jailers will owe him money." She resents that More doesn't write to her but to her stepdaughter, Meg.

Henry gives Cromwell a new title: Vicegerent in Spirituals, "his deputy in church affairs."

Chapuys tells him, "There are rumors that La Ana is distraught. That Henry is looking at another lady." Cromwell reflects, "The fate of peoples is made like this, two men in small rooms."

Cromwell falls ill. When asked if he wants to confess, he's told that he should "or you will be thought a sectary." After a week, Christophe says, "they say le roi Henri is groaning as if he were in pain himself: oh, where is Cremuel?" The king comes to see him, awing the household. "Henry stretches out his arms and displays himself before the company: 'Forty-five in July.'"  Cromwell "notes the incredulous hush. It does the job. Henry is gratified." When Henry says he fears being invaded by the Emperor with Katherine on the Emperor's side, Cromwell says, "If that happens, ... I will be out of this chair and take the field, my own sword in my hand." After Henry leaves, Johane says,

"Henry is frightened of you."

He shakes his head. Who frightens the Lion of England?

"Yes, I swear to you. You should have seen his face, when you said you would take your sword in your hand."

Four monks are being executed: hanged, drawn and quartered, "the most horrible of all deaths." Henry asks Richmond, his illegitimate son, to attend. Richmond comes to Cromwell to ask him to take his place. Cromwell advises, "If you plead sickness, or fall off your horse tomorrow or vomit in front of your father-in-law, he'll never let you forget it.... Keep your eyes on the duke, and pattern your conduct on his." But Norfolk comes to Cromwell afterward claiming that one of the monks said "Jesus save us, poor Englishmen" after his heart was out.  Cromwell says this is impossible and that he knows so from experience. "The duke quails. Let him think it, that his past deeds have included the pulling out of hearts. 'I dare say you're right.' Norfolk crosses himself. 'It must have been a voice from the crowd.'"

Before the execution, Cromwell signed a pass for Margaret Roper to see her father, More. He tells More, "the men who died yesterday had followed your example, and refused to swear."

The pope elevates Fisher to cardinal. "Henry is enraged. He swears he will send Fisher's head across the sea to meet his hat."

Cromwell, Norfolk, Charles Brandon, Richard Riche and Audley go to see More in the Tower. More says he has heard that Tyndale has been arrested. Cromwell thinks, "Someone tempted him out of his have, and More knows who." More says, "The Emperor will burn him. And the king will not lift a finger to save him, because Tyndale would not support his new marriage." Cromwell says that when More accused men of being heretics and they would not talk, he tortured them. "If they were made to answer, why not you?" More does not recognize the law that would compel him to swear the oath. Brandon suggests that the king may not commute More's sentence to beheading from the more cruel method the monks suffered. "More quails; he curls up his fingers on the tabletop." Cromwell "notices this, detached. So that's a way in. Put him in fear of the more lingering death. Even as he thinks it, he knows he will not do it; the notion is contaminating." Cromwell threatens to take away More's books.

Anne Boleyn thinks that More's resistance is all about her: "he will not bend his knee to my queenship." Cromwell observes that Henry and Anne "are not the same couple from day to day: sometimes doting, sometimes chilly and distanced. The billing and cooing, on the whole, is the more painful to watch." When he says that putting More on trial will not be easy, Henry retorts,

"Do I retain you for what is easy? Jesus pity my simplicity, I have promoted you to a place in this kingdom that no one, no one of your breeding has ever held in the whole of the history of this realm.... I keep you, Master Cromwell, because you are as cunning as a bag of serpents. But do not be a viper in my bosom. You know my decision. Execute it."

When Riche reports that the books were taken away from More, who closed the blinds to his cell, Cromwell "can hardly bear it, to think of More sitting in the dark."

Cromwell visits More on the evening before Fisher's execution. He urges More to throw himself on the king's mercy, asserting that he is "not a cruel man." More replies, "He used not to be. He had a sweet disposition. But then he changed the company he kept." Cromwell notes the difference between them: More's mind is "fixed on the next world" with "no prospect of improving this one." It's the medieval man vs. the modern man. When he leaves, More has broken down at the prospect of being drawn and quartered. "Let me be killed cleanly. I ask nothing, but I ask that."

The night before the trial, Cromwell is visited by Dick Purser, "the boy whom More had whipped before the household at Chelsea, for saying the host was a piece of bread." Purser weeps, "in shame, in relief, in triumph that soon he will have outlived his tormentor."

At the trial, More shows contempt for Richard Riche, whom he calls "a gamer and a dicer, of no commendable fame even in your own house." It goes against him with the jury: "But are not drinking, dice and fighting more natural in a young man, on the whole, than fasting, beads and self-flagellation?" After More's conviction, Cromwell reflects on More's refusal to take the oath: 

It was loud with his treason; it was quibbling as far as quibbles would serve him, it was demurs and cavils, suave ambiguities. It was fear of plain words, or the assertion that plain words pervert themselves; More's dictionary, against our dictionary. You can have a silence full of words. A lute retains, in its bowl, the notes it has played. The viol, in its strings, holds a concord. A shriveled petal can hold its scent, a prayer can rattle with curses; an empty house, when the owners have gone out, can still be loud with ghosts. 

The novel ends with Cromwell and Rafe going to Wolf Hall to visit the Seymours.

25. "Wolf Hall," by Hilary Mantel, pp. 409-432

Part V, II, "Devil's Spit," Autumn and Winter 1533, concluded, from "Sunday: in rose-tinted light they set out from Austin Friars...." Part V, III, "A Painter's Eye," 1534

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Elizabeth Barton confesses that she made up all her prophecies. "Something has broken inside her, and he wonders what that thing is." Cromwell reflects, "She has ruined many, if we care to press for their ruin. Fisher, certainly, Margaret Pole perhaps, Gertrude and her husband for sure. Lady Mary, the king's daughter, quite possibly. Thomas More no, Katherine no, but a fat haul of Franciscans."

Charles Brandon has remarried, a girl of fourteen who "was betrothed to his son, but Charles thought an experienced man like him could turn her to better use." Jane Seymour reports that her brother Edward is happy because his wife is likely to die -- the wife his father slept with.

Jane Rochford offers her services as a spy among the Boleyns, and asks Cromwell "what will you do if the queen does not have another child?" She also says that if she dies, there should be an autopsy: "I am afraid of poison. My husband and his sister are closeted together for hours, and Anne knows all manner of poisons." She suggests that he marry Jane Seymour: "The Seymours are not rich. They will sell you Jane, and be glad of the bargain." She reports that the marriage of Henry and Anne is in trouble. His leg is bothering him and he's afraid she will "kick him in the throes of her passion." And: "She says she gets no pleasure from him. And he -- as he fought seven years to get her, he can hardly admit it has staled so soon." She hints that George Boleyn is sleeping with his sister, and that Mark Smeaton is "in and out of everyone's bedchamber."

Thomas Wyatt comes to see Cromwell and asks to be sent back to Italy. He is still obsessed with Anne.

The king hasn't yet decided on what punishment should be administered to the followers of Elizabeth Barton. Brandon advises against forgiving them, but Cromwell says, "Everything they do from now on, they do under my eye." Cromwell sends Rafe to Lady Exeter to tell her to "grovel. Advise her on the wording. You know how to do it. Nothing can be too humble for Henry." On a cold day in November, "the Maid and half a dozen of her principal supporters do penance at Paul's Cross. They stand shackled and barefoot in a whipping wind." Cromwell advises More to make conciliatory movements toward Henry.

Cromwell advises Cranmer that the English "want a good authority, one they can properly obey. For centuries Rome has asked them to believe what only children could believe. Surely they will find it more natural to obey an English king, who will exercise his powers under Parliament and under God."

The Duke of Richmond, Henry's illegitimate son, marries the Duke of Norfolk's daughter Mary. "Anne has arranged this marriage for the glorification of the Howards; also to stop Henry marrying his bastard, to the boy's advantage, to some princess abroad." Anne also expels Mary Tudor from her house in Essex, giving it to her brother George. "There is a young woman walking the roads of the kingdom, saying she is the princess Mary, and that her father has turned her out to beg. She has been seen as far north as York and as far east as Lincoln, and simple people in these shires are lodging and feeding her and giving her money to see her on her way."

Hans Holbein has painted Cromwell's portrait. Chapuys says, "Looking at that, one be loath to cross you." Viewing the painting with his son, Gregory, Cromwell says,

"I fear Mark was right."

"Who is Mark?"

"A silly little boy who runs after George Boleyn. I once heard him say I looked like a murderer." 

Gregory says, "Did you not know?"

19. "Wolf Hall," by Hilary Mantel, pp. 310-326

Part IV, II, "'Alas, What Shall I Do for Love?'" Spring 1532, continued, from "Next day he is early for the meeting of the king's council...." through "...Father Bocking does the price list and keeps the accounts."

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Cromwell, whose character is being presented as less amiable than earlier in the novel, bullies Harry Percy into swearing that he didn't sleep with Anne and has no claim to being married to her. Later, at Austin Friars, he tells Rafe, "Now Harry Percy can borrow more money, and edge himself nearer his ruin. A progress which I shall be pleased to facilitate.... I think one day I will have that earldom off him." This is the first time Cromwell has betrayed an ambition to join the nobility. His motivation to crush Percy stems largely from Percy's treatment of Wolsey.

A young woman named Elizabeth Barton has been having prophetic visions about calamity if the king marries Anne Boleyn. Cromwell is keeping track of those who visit her, including More and Fisher. She is now at Canterbury, and has also been visited by the wife of Henry Courtenay, Marquis of Exeter, "the king's nearest male relative" and hence a potential claimant to the throne, which Cromwell notes would be "useful to the Emperor, when he comes with his troops to boot out Henry and put a new king on the throne." There have also been "outbreaks of blasphemy" during the mass.

Anne is made Marquess of Pembroke. Many of the new courtiers are Cromwell's "friends from Wolsey days." After the ceremony, at which Thomas Wyatt and Mark Smeaton sing "Alas, what shall I do for love?" Cromwell speaks with Jane Seymour.

The king meets with François I of France at the Field of the Cloth of Gold, taking with him "the possible claimants to the throne, including the Yorkist Lord Montague, and the Lancastrian Nevilles, to show how tame they are and how secure are the Tudors." Cromwell is aware that any treaty that comes from the meeting is little more than show: "Wolsey always said that the making of a treaty is the treaty. It doesn't matter what the terms are, just that there are terms. It's the goodwill that matters. When that runs out, the treaty is broken, whatever the terms are."

Charles Brandon is furious that Henry expects Anne to take precedence over his wife, Henry's sister who was once married to the French king: "You expect her to wait on you? On Boleyn's daughter? Pass you your gloves, madam, and serve you first at dinner? Make your mind up to it -- that day will never come." Henry tells him to go calm down, and sends Cromwell to talk to him. Brandon doesn't believe Anne is chaste, and he tells Cromwell that Anne's mother, Elizabeth Howard, was the first person Henry ever had sex with. Cromwell ignores the stories and tells Brandon to say his wife can't go to France because she is ill. "Anne is unforgiving.... Hard to please, easy to offend. My lord, be guided by me." Being guided by Cromwell rankles with Brandon, but he replies, "We all are. We must be. You do everything, Cromwell. You are everything now. We say, how did it happen? We ask ourselves.... We ask ourselves, but by the steaming blood of Christ we have no bloody answer."

Meanwhile, the French are having trouble with Anne's presence at the meeting, too. They can't find a noblewoman to be hostess to her. Finally, it is decided that Anne will stay in Calais while the king goes to meet François in Boulogne.

Warham has died, and a successor as Archbishop of Canterbury needs to be named. Thomas Cranmer is expected to take his place: "Anne has begun to refer to him as the Archbishop-Elect."

On the way to France, the court stops at Canterbury, where the king and Anne are confronted with Elizabeth Barton, who calls Anne a heretic and tells Henry, "if you enter into a form of marriage with this unworthy woman, you will not reign seven months." A small riot ensues, but Cromwell follows Elizabeth as the monks take her to safety and asks her to tell him if Wolsey is in heaven, hell, or purgatory. He offers to make a substantial donation, and she says she'll "have to talk to Father Bocking," whom a monk identifies as "this lady's spiritual director."

18. "Wolf Hall," by Hilary Mantel, pp. 294-310

Part IV, II, "'Alas, What Shall I Do for Love?'" Spring 1532, continued, from "On April 14, 1532, the king appoints him Keeper of the Jewel House...."through "...Call-Me laughs so hard he has to lean against the wall."

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Cromwell's appointment as Keeper of the Jewel House gives him financial power. Meanwhile, Thomas More is continuing to torture and execute heretics, and Cromwell tells Hugh Latimer that he won't visit one of them, Bainham, in the Tower because it would "give ammunition to the Lord Chancellor." A Franciscan, William Peto, preaches a sermon in the king's presence, about Ahab and Jezebel. "Anne says, 'I am Jezebel. You, Thomas Cromwell, are the priests of Baal.'"

Thomas Avery returns from Europe and Cromwell continues to train him in his financial religion: "The page of an accounts book is ... like the scriptures: it's there for you to think about, and initiate action. Love your neighbor. Study the market. Increase the spread of benevolence. Bring in better figures next year." Religion and the rise of capitalism.

James Bainham is burned at the stake. "Wrapped in his sheet of flames, the dying man calls out, 'The Lord forgive Sir Thomas More.'"

"On May 15, the bishops sign a document of submission to the king." More is no longer Lord Chancellor. Cromwell encounters More:

"Sir Thomas?" He offers his hand. More turns away. Then he thinks better of it; he turns back and takes it. His fingertips are ashy cold.

"What will you do now?"

"Write. Pray."

"My recommendation would be to write only a little, and pray a lot."

"Now, is that a threat?" More is smiling.

"It may be. My turn, don't you think?"

Cromwell tells Stephen Gardiner that the king has requested he find a country house for Anne Boleyn, and that Cromwell's suggestion is Gardiner's house at Hanworth which was leased to him when Gardiner became Master Secretary.

Wriothesley (known as "Call-Me Risley") intercepts a letter from Eustache Chapuys to the Emperor with comments about Cromwell: "He says your antecedents are obscure, your youth reckless and wild, that you are a heretic of long standing, a disgrace to the office of councillor; but personally, he finds you a man of good cheer, liberal, openhanded, gracious..."

Cromwell is summoned to Anne Boleyn's because she has just heard that Harry Percy wants a divorce from his wife, Mary Talbot, because he claims that their marriage is illegal because he was married to Anne. Wolsey had persuaded Percy to forget his claims, but as Anne says, "most unfortunately the cardinal is dead." Cromwell says, "Lady Anne, if the Pope cannot stop you becoming queen, and I do not think he can, Harry Percy should not be in your way." Cromwell leaves to see Percy, followed by Francis Bryan, who says "I thought I would go with you. I want to learn what you do." Cromwell "checks his stride, slaps his hand flat into Bryan's chest, spins him sideways and hears the thud of his skull against the wall. 'In a hurry,' he says."

Cromwell suspects that Anne's opponents, including Charles Brandon, have put Percy up to the claim. Wriothesley has tracked Percy to an inn, where Cromwell confronts him. He tells Percy that he knows he's in debt and threatens to arrange to have his debts called in if he doesn't drop the claim.

How can he explain to him? The world is not run from where he thinks. Not from his border fortresses, not even from Whitehall. The world is run from Antwerp, from Florence, from places he has never imagined; from Lisbon, from where the ships with sails of silk drift west and are burned up in the sun. Not from castle walls, but from countinghouses, not by the call of the bugle but by the click of the abacus, not by the grate and click of the mechanism of the gun but by the scrape of the pen on the page of the promissory note that pays for the gun and the gunsmith and the powder and the shot.

He also threatens him with the political power of the Howards and the Boleyns, "and as for the Duke of Norfolk, if he hears the slightest imputation against his nieces honor he will drag you out of whatever hole you are cowering in and bite your bollocks off."

11. "Wolf Hall," by Hilary Mantel, pp. 182-202

Part III, II, "Entirely Beloved Cromwell," Spring-December 1530, continued, from "When the king next calls him to court...." through "...Did he tell you about the barmaid?"

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Cromwell unexpectedly "spends an amiable hour with Brandon" who, after Cromwell suggests a remedy for the blindness of one of the king's hounds, pronounces him "a useful sort of man." He also confides that there is tension with his wife because of Anne Boleyn: Brandon's wife has always been a friend of Katherine's and as a former Queen of France, she resents that "Norfolk's niece" (Anne) will have precedence over her at court. He also wonders if he should tell Henry that Anne and Thomas Wyatt have been lovers. Cromwell advises him not to.

At Austin Friars the household now includes Thomas Avery, who is being trained to handle Cromwell's personal finances, and Thomas Wriothesley "pronounced Risley," whom Richard Cromwell and Rafe Sadler accuse of being a spy for Stephen Gardiner. Cromwell thinks about one of the young women at Anne Boleyn's: "He had meant to write to Gregory and say, I have seen such a sweet girl, I will find out who she is and, if I steer our family adroitly in the next few years, perhaps you can marry her."

Cromwell is invited to Thomas More's to discuss what is to happen with Wolsey's colleges -- and to see his roses and his new carpet. Stephen Gardiner is there. Cromwell meets More's large household, including his fool, Henry Pattinson: "normally you take in a fool to protect him, but in Pattinson's case it's the rest of the world needs protection." Cromwell displays his expertise in examining More's new carpet, and also displays some of his character: "There are some people in this world who like everything squared up and precise, and there are those who will allow some drift at the margins. He is both these kinds of person. He would not allow, for example, a careless ambiguity in a lease, but instinct tells him that sometimes a contract need not be drawn too tight." When More asks if he should walk on the carpet or hang it on the wall, Cromwell chooses the latter.

The dinner conversation at More's is in Latin, although More's wife doesn't speak it. Cromwell reflects on the difference between the family as painted by Holbein and the one he sees here: "The painter has grouped them so skillfully that there's no space between the figures for anyone new. The outsider can only soak himself into the scene, as an unintended blot or stain; certainly, he thinks, Gardiner is a blot or stain." He also thinks of Holbein's portrait of More, "you can see that he's thinking, but not what he's thinking, and that's the way it should be."

As he leaves, Alice More asks why Cromwell doesn't marry again: "Got a good house, haven't you? Got the king's ear, my husband says. And from what my sisters in the city say, got everything in good working order." He walks with Gardiner, who says "More goes to bed at nine o'clock." "With Alice?" Cromwell asks. "People say not." "You have spies in the house?" He gets no answer from Gardiner. When Gardiner talks about Cromwell's marrying again, "He feels afraid.... He is sure he and Johane have been secret." Johane Williamson, Liz's sister, and her husband live at Austin Friars. When he tells Gardiner that he is going to see Anne Boleyn, "Gardiner is affronted."

When he tells Anne that he has been to More's, she says, "They say that Thomas More is in love with his own daughter." He replies, "I think they may be right." He reflects that Anne's brother, George, and her father, Thomas, Earl of Wiltshire, have gotten rich because of Wolsey's fall. When he asks why she sent for him, Anne replies, "We like to know where you are." And when he asks why her father or brother didn't send for him in that case, she says, "They do not think you would come."

In the cardinal's move northward, he has been greeted with enthusiastic crowds, which upsets the Duke of Norfolk. "Rumors of the cardinal's popularity don't make him glad, they make him afraid." But Norfolk commends Cromwell for his loyalty to the cardinal and says, "It's a pity you don't work for me." Cromwell replies, "we all want the same thing. For your niece to be queen. Can we not work together?"

On the next visit to Anne, he sees that "something shadowy is bobbing about, on the fringes of the circle of light." It is Thomas Cranmer. "They embrace cautiously: Cambridge scholar, person from Putney."  Anne shows them a drawing she discovered in her bed: the king and two women, one of whom has no head. "Anne sans tête," she says. Cromwell wishes he could get Mary Boleyn out of all this. "She asked me once. I failed her. If she asked me again, I would fail her again."

On the way out with Cranmer, he meets the pale girl he had noticed before and learns that she is "John Seymour's daughter. From Wolf Hall." She is there to spy for her brothers. "Every rising family needs information. With the king considering himself a bachelor, any little girl can hold the key to the future, and not all the money is on Anne." He has a suspicion that she may have been the one who left the drawing in Anne's bed. As he leaves, Cranmer says, "You owe much to Anne Boleyn. More than perhaps you think. She has formed a good opinion of you. I'm not sure she cares to be your sister-in-law, mind..."

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.

4. "Wolf Hall," by Hilary Mantel, pp. 39-53

Part II, I: "Visitation," 1529

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Cardinal Wolsey has been dismissed as Lord Chancellor and Cromwell and others are helping him move from York Place, which the king has taken over for Anne Boleyn, to an empty and unprepared house at Esher.

The ousting of Wolsey from York Place is overseen by the Dukes of Norfolk and Suffolk, although Cromwell is able to delay it with a few legal technicalities. When Suffolk, Charles Brandon, protests, Cromwell observes, "That's like Suffolk; to think the letter of the law is some kind of luxury." Wolsey hugs Cromwell, "his face gleeful," when he succeeds in putting off the move for a day, but "it is the last of their victories and they know it."

Also participating in the move are Sir William Gascoigne, the cardinal's treasurer, and George Cavendish, the cardinal's gentleman usher. For Cromwell, "This is an indecent spectacle: the man who has ruled England, reduced." Wolsey puts on a brave face: "Everything I have, I have from the king. The king gave it to me, and if it pleases him to take York Place fully furnished, I am sure we own other houses, we have other roofs to shelter under." Gascoigne, however, comes in with the rumor that Wolsey is to be taken to the Tower of London. Cromwell puts Gascoigne in his place, however, and announces that they're going to Esher. But he observes, "It's hard to escape the feeling that this is a play, and the cardinal is in it: the Cardinal and his Attendants. And that it is a tragedy."

As they get in the boat to go upriver, "and not downstream to the Tower," the "hooting and booing" crowd that is watching Wolsey's disgrace protests. "It is then that the cardinal collapses, falling into his seat.... 'The multitude,' Cavendish says, 'is always desirous of a change. They never see a great man set up but they must pull him down -- for the novelty of the thing.'" But when Cavendish speaks disrespectfully of the king, Wolsey calls him "The gentlest, wisest prince in Christendom" and says he "will not hear a word against him from any man."

The cardinal is so fat that he has trouble mounting the mule he has always ridden, inspiring some jokes from his fool Patch, or Master Sexton, whom Cromwell dislikes. A rider approaches. It is Sir Henry Norris, one of the king's friends, who brings the cardinal a ring from the king. The cardinal falls to the ground and kisses the ring, then begins to cry. Cavendish is scandalized when the cardinal takes the chain from his neck and puts it around Norris's neck because it's a reliquary, "a piece of the true Cross," but Cromwell says he knows someone in Pisa who makes them: "a round dozen for cash up front," further scandalizing Cavendish.

Cromwell feels "an irrational dislike" for Norris, "and he tries to dismiss it, because he prefers his dislikes rational." But he's distressed by seeing the cardinal on the ground in the mud, by "Wolsey's unraveling, in a great unweaving of scarlet thread that might lead you back into a secret labyrinth, with a dying monster at its heart." And then there's a scene in which Patch protests because the cardinal decides to send him to the king as a gift.

They arrive at the cardinal's palace at Esher to find it in utter disrepair. And after they get the cardinal into a "bed worthy of the name," Cavendish and Cromwell talk about who will succeed Wolsey as Lord Chancellor. Wareham, the Archbishop of Canterbury, is too old. And Cromwell decides it won't be the Duke of Suffolk -- "in his view Charles Brandon is no brighter than Christopher the mule, though better at fighting and fashion and generally showing off" -- because "the Duke of Norfolk won't have him." He decides it will be Thomas More, despite his opposition to the king's divorce: "The king is known for putting out his conscience to high bidders. Perhaps he hopes to be saved from himself."

3. "Wolf Hall," by Hilary Mantel, pp. 28-36

(Not quite ten pages today. I'm not used to books with short chapters -- I've been reading Proust, where the sentences are as long as chapters and the chapters are as long as books.) 

Part I, III: "At Austin Friars," 1527

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A domestic scene at the Cromwells', in which we meet Liz Cromwell, get news about their son, Gregory, and learn that Thomas has a small dog named Bella -- which was the name of the dog he left behind when he ran away from home.

Liz seems to be a source of information for Cromwell: She reports that a friend of hers, the wife of a master jeweler, knows about the ordering of a big emerald for a woman's ring. "It must be the king, so we think. Nobody else in London would be in the market for a stone of that size. So who's it for? It isn't for the queen." Cromwell reflects that the cardinal will tell him.

Gregory Cromwell is "coming up thirteen" and at Cambridge, but is not much of a scholar: "He likes to be in the woods and fields and he likes to hunt." They hope he will be tall, and there's a reference to the king's being six foot two and the cardinal being able to "look him in the eye. Henry likes to have about him men like his brother-in-law Charles Brandon, of a similar impressive height and breadth of padded shoulder."

In bed, Liz returns to the emerald. "I only ask because people say the king is wanting to do something very strange, and I can't really believe it. But that is the word in the city." Cromwell is surprised that the word has gotten out "in the fortnight while he has been north among the slope-heads." (He doesn't much care for Yorkshire, "which smelled of unwashed men, wearing sheepskins and sweating with anger.") Liz opines that "half the people in the world will be against" the king's divorcing Katherine. "He had only thought, and Wolsey had only thought, that the Emperor and Spain would be against it." Liz's point is that women will be against it.

We learn that Liz has been married before, and that she reads her prayer book although he encourages her to read Tyndale's translation of the New Testament, which they keep under lock and key -- "the pirated edition from Antwerp, which is easier to get hold of than the proper German printing." He is acquainted with William Tyndale, "a principled man, a hard man, and Thomas More calls him the Beast." He wants to ask More, "Why does everything you know, and everything you've learned, confirm you in what you believed before? Whereas in my case, what I grew up with, and what I thought I believed, is chipped away a little and a little, a fragment then a piece and then a piece more." He questions such Catholic doctrines as Purgatory as unbiblical, along with "relics, monks, nuns" and "Pope." But he agrees with the cardinal that "it would be better if Luther had never been born, or better if he had been more subtle." Wolsey's attitude toward heretics is that he "will burn books, but not men."

Liz's father was Henry Wykys, also from Putney, who recognized Cromwell as Walter's son, and says of Thomas, "by God, there was no one rougher than you when you were a boy." Cromwell had helped Wykys on  legal matter and then advised him on his business, the wool trade, taking him to Antwerp, where they met the three old men who crossed the channel with Cromwell when he ran away from home. When Cromwell helps make the business profitable, Wykys marries him to his widowed daughter.

At the end of the chapter, Cromwell "pats his wife, kisses his dog," and is off to work for the cardinal.