9. "Wolf Hall," by Hilary Mantel, pp. 133-162

Part III, I, "Three-Card Trick," Winter 1529-Spring 1530

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Cromwell has been given a seat in Parliament, courtesy of Thomas Howard: "'The Duke of Norfolk,' Rafe says, 'believes my lord cardinal has buried treasure, and he thinks you know where it is.'" The duke, "approaching sixty," is "Flint-faced and keen-eyed," "lean as a gnawed bone and as cold as an ax head." "He thinks the Bibile a book unnecessary for laypeople, though he understands priests make some use of it. He thinks book-reading an affectation altogether, and wishes there were less of it at court. His niece is always reading, Anne Boleyn, which is perhaps why she is unmarried at the age of twenty-eight."

Meanwhile, the cardinal is still at Esher, where Cromwell finds him listening to a boy named Mark who plays the lute. "I think I shouldn't keep him here," he tells Cromwell, "but send him to the king. Or to the Lady Anne, perhaps, as he is such a pretty young thing. Would she like him?" We don't find out here, but it's fairly obvious that this pretty young lute player is Mark Smeaton. Later, Cromwell overhears the lute player talking to someone about "the lawyer," i.e. Cromwell: "They say he has killed men with his own hands and never told it in confession. But those hard kinds of men, they always weep when they see the hangman." Mark also says that "Tom Wyatt has had her," meaning Anne Boleyn. The conversation is in Flemish, "language of Mark's birthplace," and Cromwell can't see the person he's talking to.

We learn that Cromwell's sister Kat and her husband, Morgan Williams, have also died, so at Austin Friars "they omit this year their usual songs and Christmas plays. No year has brought such devastation." Wolsey has been charged on numerous counts but it seems that "the king will allow the cardinal his life, and a measure of liberty; but whatever money is left him will be a fraction of his former income." Cromwell is now acting as father to Kat and Morgan's sons, Richard and Walter. Richard volunteers to change his name from Williams to Cromwell. He tells Richard that Henry VII "had an uncle, Jasper Tudor. Jasper had two bastard daughters, Joan and Helen. Helen was Gardiner's mother. Joan lmarried William ap Evan -- she was your grandmother." Richard is unimpressed. "'But if I am the king's cousin,' Richard pauses, 'and Stephen Gardiner's cousin ... what good can it do me? We're not at court and not likely to be.'" After Richard leaves, Cromwell "touches his throat, where the medal would have been, the holy medal that kat gave him; his fingers are surprised not to find it there. For the first time he understands why he took it off and slid it into the sea. It was so that no living hand could take it."

More, as Lord Chancellor, has signed off on all the accusations against Wolsey, including one of his own, that the cardinal breathed in the king's face and "since the cardinal has the French pox, he intended to infect our monarch." Cromwell thinks, "imagine living in the Lord Chancellor's head."

Cromwell goes to see the king just as he and his courtiers are going out to hunt. Henry asks him,

"You are not of Thomas More's opinion, are you?"

He waits. He cannot imagine what the king is going to say.

"La chasse. He thinks it barbaric."

"Oh, I see. No, Your Majesty, I favor any sport that's cheaper than battle...."
...
"You said, in the Parliament, some six years ago, that I could not afford a war.... You want a king who doesn't fight? You want me to huddle indoors like a sick girl!"

"That would be ideal, for fiscal purposes." 

Henry and Cromwell argue over the cost of war, but it's clear that although the king doesn't like Cromwell very much, he is impressed by him. And when Charles Brandon rides up and asks Cromwell, "'How's your fat priest?' The king flushes with displeasure. Brandon doesn't notice."

In the spring of 1530 Cromwell is invited to supper at the house of an Italian merchant, Antonio Bonvisi, and is surprised to find More there along with "Humphrey Monmouth, whom More once locked up, ... seated well away from the great man." When he sees Cromwell enter, More "falls silent halfway through a sentence; he casts his eyes down, and an opaque and stony look grows on his face." And the table conversation turns into a battle of wits between Cromwell and More. Bonvisi chides him afterward: "Thomas More is my old friend. You should not come here and bait him." But Cromwell is more interested in Bonvisi's confirming what he overheard about Thomas Wyatt's affair with Anne Boleyn. Finally, Richard (now) Cromwell and Rafe Sadler come to accompany Cromwell home, but not before Bonvisi gives him some parting advice: "Wherever you dine next, pray do not ... sit down with the Boleyns."

1. "Wolf Hall," by Hilary Mantel, pp. 3-13

Part I, I: "Across the Narrow Sea," Putney, 1500.

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The young Thomas Cromwell is beaten senseless by his father, Walter. His sister, Kat, and her husband, Morgan Williams, clean him up and give him shelter, but he decides to leave Putney and seek his fortune abroad, perhaps as a soldier. The historical Thomas Cromwell was born in 1485, which makes the fictional Thomas's claim to be 15 pretty close to the mark. 

Mantel uses the historical present and usually narrates from Thomas's angle of vision, reporting his thoughts.

"I wonder what I've married into," Morgan Williams says.
But really, this is just something Morgan says; some men have a habitual sniffle, some women have a headache, and Morgan has this wonder. The boy doesn't listen to him; he thinks, if my father did that to my mother, so long dead, then maybe he killed her? No, surely he'd have been taken up for it; Putney's lawless, but you don't get away with murder. Kat's what he's got for a mother: crying for him, rubbing the back of his neck.

Neat exposition there of the mother's long-ago death.

One pitfall for the historical novelist is dialogue: too much archaism and it sounds artificial, too much modern idiom and it sounds condescending. So far, Mantel has managed to make her characters sound believably early-16th-century:

"I'd say the magistrates have had their bellyful," Morgan says. "If he's not watering his ale he's running illegal beasts on the common, if he's not despoiling the common he's asaulting an officer of the peace, if he's not drunk he's dead drunk, and if he's not dead before his time there's no justice in this world."

Mantel has Thomas echo Morgan's string of consequences in his own thoughts: "I've had enough of this. If he gets after me again I'm going to I'm going to kill him, and if I kill him they'll hang me, and if they're going to hang me I want a better reason."

But it's also clear that Mantel doesn't intend to limit herself to Thomas's point of view. In this passage about Kat, some of the details are out of the usual range for even a precocious 15-year-old boy:

She's not crying for him, because nobody, he thinks, will ever cry for him, God didn't cut him out that way. She's crying for her idea of what life should be like: Sunday after church, all the sisters, sisters-in-law, wives kissing and patting, swatting at each other's children and t the same time loving them and rubbing their little round heads, women comparing and swapping babies, and all the men gathering and talking business, wool, yarn, lengths, shipping, bloody Flemings, fishing rights, brewing, annual turnover, nice timely information, favor-for-favor, little sweeteners, little retainers, my attorney says.... That's what it should be like, married to Morgan Williams, with the Williamses being a big family in Putney.... But somehow it's not been like that. Walter has spoiled it all.

And so Thomas's character -- observant, tough, resourceful -- begins to emerge. He surprises Morgan by speaking Welsh: "All those days he'd spent haging around the Williamses' households: did they think he'd just come for dinner?" Thomas Cromwell: born to spy. He's still naive: He sets off for France because "France is where they have wars." But his ingenuity -- "If you help load a cart you get a ride in it, as often as not. It gives him to think how bad people are at loading carts" -- and his adaptability -- "He'd watched a man doing the three-card trick, and when he learned it he set up for himself" -- will obviously get him far.

And so he hitches himself to "three elderly Lowlanders" by giving them a high sign so they aren't cheated when they bribe a port officer. And he's surprised when he learns that there are "people in this world who are not cruel to their children."

Crossing to Calais, he kisses the "holy medal" Kat has given him "for luck." And "drops it; it whispers into the water."