26. "Wolf Hall," by Hilary Mantel, pp. 435-458

Part VI, I, "Supremacy," 1534, through "...He flounces over in the feather bed, and falls asleep again."

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Cromwell argues theology with Henry:

Christ did not make Popes. He did not give his followers the power to make laws or levy taxes, both of which churchmen have claimed as their right.

Henry says, "I never remember the cardinal spoke of this."

"Would you, if you were a cardinal?"

Cromwell is trying "to gentle him toward an intricate legal process of dispossession, repossession: the assertion of ancient sovereign rights, the taking back of what was always yours." He urges the king to fill his coffers with what he can get back from the church -- "His guess is, the clergy own a third of England." Henry gives him the go-ahead, but Cromwell imagines what Wolsey would say: "he will take the credit for your good ideas, and you the blame for his bad ones."

Cromwell and Gardiner meet with the king "to secure the succession of Anne's children." She's there too, and takes offense at the fact that the bill says that if she dies, "he can put another queen in my place." And if that queen bears him a son, she wants to know "what happens to my daughter and her claim?" She also wants the bill to declare Mary illegitimate. They gentle her out of all these problems. Cromwell also pushes for an oath from the king's subjects "to uphold the succession to the throne." Gardiner objects, but is overruled.

The king expresses disappointment with Thomas More, and Anne says, "When you write your bill against the false prophetess Barton, put More in it, besides Fisher." Cromwell objects that More put not stock in Elizabeth Barton, but Anne insists, "I want him frightened. Fright may unmake a man. I have seen it occur."

Cromwell meets with Fisher to get him to apologize for supporting Elizabeth Barton. Fisher objects that she never plotted against the king. Cromwell replies, "Ah, but she never foresaw anything that she didn't hope would happen. She sat down with the king's enemies and told them how it would be." Fisher protests that he is being hounded because he gave council to Katherine. When Cromwell says that Fisher is seen as being in the camp of the enemy, Fisher says, "I see why Wolsey retained you. You are a ruffian and so was he. I have been a priest forty years, and I have never seen such ungodly men as those who flourish today. Such evil councillors."

Fisher's name is in the bill against Elizabeth Barton, "and so, at Henry's command, is More's." Cromwell goes to see her before she is executed, and tells her that six others will also be executed with her.

Cromwell goes to see Princess Elizabeth and Mary Tudor. Lady Bryan, in charge of Elizabeth, says, "you could show her at a fair as a pig-baby." She doesn't resemble Henry at all, and Gregory Cromwell, who has come with his father, says, "She could be anybody's." Cromwell rebukes him: "People have gone to the Tower for saying less." Mary, they discover, does not take her meals with the others, "because she will not sit below the little princess." Cromwell finds her sitting beside a small fire: "The man who brings the wood will not give me my title of princess." Cromwell "thinks: make life as hard as possible for yourself." She says Reginald Pole says Cromwell is Satan.

He says softly, "I am not Satan. Your lord father is not a heretic."

"And I am not a bastard, I suppose."

"Indeed no." 

Cromwell is of the opinion that because Henry and Katherine believed themselves to be married, Mary is not illegitimate. He advises her to make "an outward show" of respect for Anne. Mary says Anne is frightened that she will marry and have sons who will challenge her children's claim to the throne." Cromwell knows of the plot to marry her to Pole: "marry the half-Spanish Tudor back into the Plantagenet line." He advises her against it. She complains of poor eyesight and that they read Tyndale's translation of the gospel to her. "It is more heretical than the holy book of the Moslems."

When they leave Mary, "'She likes you,' Gregory says. 'That's strange.'"

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."

17. "Wolf Hall," by Hilary Mantel, pp. 277-294

Part IV, II, "'Alas, What Shall I Do for Love?'" Spring 1532, through "...into which they pour their fears, fantasies, desires."

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Parliament meets mid-January. The business of the early spring is breaking the resistance of the bishops to Henry's new order, putting in place legislation that -- though for now it is held in suspension -- will cut revenues to Rome, make his supremacy in the church no more form of words. 

The king is angry with Stephen Gardiner about the progress of his plans. "The king has a high voice, for a big man, and it rises when he is angry to an ear-throbbing shriek." Gardiner is shaken by the encounter and when Cromwell encounters him afterward, he says, "If he does lock you up, I'll make sure you have some small comforts." This only makes Gardiner angry: "God damn you, Cromwell. Who are you? What office do you hold? You're nothing. Nothing." But Cromwell is able to get the king to calm down and see Gardiner's point of view, to which Henry comments, "I know you dislike Gardiner." Cromwell replies, "That is why Your Majesty should consider my advice." Cromwell says to himself, "you owe me, Stephen. The bill will come in by and by."

Meanwhile, Anne is still playing her part. The king gives her a bedroom at Whitehall: "He led her to it himself, to see her gasp at the wall hangings." Henry Norris tells Cromwell that Anne missed her cue and just admired the room. "Then she remembered what she ought to do; she pretended to feel faint at the honor, and it was only when she swayed and the king locked his arms around her that the gasp came. I do devoutly hope, Norris had said, that we shall all at least once in our lives cause a woman to utter that sound."

When Cromwell visits Anne, he notices the presence of Mark Smeaton and refers to him as "your goggle-eyed lover." When he leaves, Mary Boleyn follows him. She mentions that all is not well between George Boleyn and his wife, Lady Jane Rochford: "Jane and our brother George, you know they hate each other? He won't go to bed with her. If he is not with some other woman he sits up at night with Anne in her rooms." She reminds Cromwell that she warned him against getting too involved with Anne: "But now we cannot do without you. Even my father and my uncle say so. Nothing is done, nothing, without the king's favor, without his constant company, and nowadays when you are not with Henry he wants to know where you are." He says he needs a job in the household, perhaps in the Jewel House or the Exchequer. Mary says of Anne: "She made Tom Wyatt a poet. She made Harry Percy a madman. I'm sure she has some ideas about what to make you."

Thomas Wyatt comes to apologize for his misbehavior. "My father says that now Wolsey is dead you're the cleverest man in England." And he tells Cromwell, "If Anne is not a virgin, that's none of my doing." Cromwell asks how many lovers Anne has had, but Wyatt doesn't know: "Brandon tried to tell Henry she was soiled goods. But he sent Brandon away from court." He worries that when she does sleep with the king he'll know she isn't a virgin, but Cromwell says, "the king is no judge of maidenheads. He admits as much. With Katherine it took him twenty years to puzzle out his brother had been there before him." But he also warns Wyatt that the king will be jealous once they're married, which he assures him is very likely. And he tells Wyatt about his father's story about the lion. Wyatt replies, "it doesn't seem to me like a thing I would do.... More like something you would do, Master Cromwell."

Thomas More visits him:

"I know about your letters that come and go to Stephen Vaughan. I know he has met with Tyndale."

"Are you threatening me? I'm just interested."

"Yes," More says sadly. "Yes, that is precisely what I am doing."

He sees that the balance of power has shifted between them: not as officers of state, but as men.

Cromwell recalls the burning of a "Loller" that he witnessed when he was nine years old.

12. "Wolf Hall," by Hilary Mantel, pp. 202-222

Part III, II, "Entirely Beloved Cromwell," Spring-December 1530, concluded, from "When Cranmer comes to the house, he feeds him..."

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Cranmer visits Cromwell and they spend some time getting to know each other, although Cromwell thinks, "at some level of his being this man will always believe I am a heathen." Cranmer has been visiting universities, talking to theologians, most of whom, he says, believe "the king is right." But as Cromwell notes, the pope "isn't open to persuasion now. Only to pressure. And I don't mean moral pressure." Cranmer replies that the king must also persuade "all of Europe. All Christian men." To which Cromwell replies, "I'm afraid the Christian women may be harder still." Cranmer and Cromwell do see eye to eye on the difficulty of clerical celibacy -- Cranmer having to resign from the priesthood when he got a woman, whom he married, pregnant. He returned to the priesthood after she died in childbirth. Cromwell: "There are some strange cold people in this world. It is priests, I think. Saving your presence. Training themselves out of natural feeling." Cromwell "has Alice, and Johane and the child Jo, and in the corner of his eye, at the periphery of his vision, the little pale girl who spies on the Boleyns. He has hawks in his mews who move toward the sound of his voice. What has this man?"

He goes to see the king, who is restless because he can't hunt, so he talks with him while shooting arrows into a target. "He says, Nan threatens to leave me. She says that there are other men and she is wasting her youth."

Norfolk is obsessing on the problem of succession: "The old king bred, and by the help of Heaven he bred sons. But when Arthur died, there were swords sharpened in France, and they were sharpened to carve up the kingdom. Henry that is now, he was a child, nine years old. If the old king had not staggered on a few more years, the wars would have been to fight all over again. A child cannot hold England." When Cromwell mentions that there is Mary, Norfolk scoffs at the idea of a woman ruling England. Stephen Gardiner asks if Cromwell thinks she can rule, and he replies, "It depends who advises her. It depends who she marries." Norfolk and Suffolk both treat Cromwell as an outsider, a man of low birth.

Meanwhile, at Austin Friars, he discovers that Jo and Alice are having theological arguments about Purgatory. "Dear God, what is going on under this roof? These children believe the Pope can go down to the underworld with a bunch of keys." He reflects, "The Austin Friars is like the world in little."

In November, Wolsey is arrested by Harry Percy, Earl of Northumberland, and on the 29th he dies. "What was England before Wolsey? A little offshore island, poor and cold." From Cavendish, Cromwell learns that people "'asked God to send vengeance on Harry Percy.' God need not trouble, he thinks: I shall take it in hand." Cavendish also reports that Wolsey had not eaten for a week, and "he cried your name, God forgive me, I said you were on the road. He said, the ways are treacherous. I said, you know Cromwell, the devil does not delay him -- if he says he is on the road he will be here." Cavendish vows that he will tell no one at court about what Wolsey said in his last days.

At Hampton Court, Cromwell witnesses a vicious lampoon of Wolsey being dragged off to hell by devils. When Norfolk mocks the cardinal, "Someone calls, 'Shame on you, Thomas Howard, you'd have sold your own soul to see Wolsey down.'" No one knows who said this, but Cromwell thinks it was Thomas Wyatt. Backstage, he discovers that the devils were played by George Boleyn, Henry Norris, Francis Weston, and William Brereton, and that the cardinal was Sexton, who used to be the cardinal's fool.

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..."

2. "Wolf Hall," by Hilary Mantel, pp. 14-27

Part I, II: "Paternity," 1527

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It is 27 years later, and Thomas Cromwell is now a secretary to Cardinal Wolsey, Lord Chancellor of England. Henry VIII is getting restless about not having a male heir and trying to find a way to end his marriage to Katherine of Aragon.

Cromwell is sensitive about his humble origins, which Stephen Gardiner twits him about in the opening of the chapter: "You must have done some river work, when you were a boy." Cromwell notes that Gardiner is "the king's unacknowledged cousin" and observes that "he resents his knowledge that if they met on a dark night, Master Thos. Cromwell would be the one who walked away dusting off his hands and smiling."

Wolsey is beautifully characterized as "like a leopard settling in a warm spot." While genial, he maintains his authority over Cromwell by joking that Cromwell "walks in demanding cherries in April and lettuce in December" and that "he goes about the countryside committing outrages, and charging them to the cardinal's accounts." Wolsey, too, is from lower-class origins: "the scholar son of a prosperous and pious master butcher, a guildman, a man who also kept a large and well-regulated inn, of the type used by the best travelers." He has sent Cromwell to Yorkshire on a matter of business, diverting the income from two monastic foundations into "the two colleges he is founding: Cardinal College, at Oxford, and a college in his hometown of Ipswich." Wolsey envisions the colleges as his memorial, "carrying into the world the cardinal's wit, his sense of wonder and of beauty, his instinct for decorum and pleasure, his finesse." Cromwell observes that Wolsey "cannot quite accept that real property cannot be changed into money with the same speed and ease with which he changes a wafer into the body of Christ."

We get our first reference to Thomas More here, and it's hardly as flattering as Robert Bolt's portrait in A Man for All Seasons. Wolsey is characterized as the type of person who, upon hearing of "some nest of heretics in the city" would be reluctant to use force against them, but would simply threaten that "Thomas More will get hold of them and shut them in his cellar. And all we will hear is the sound of screaming."

We have a little bit of exposition of what has happened with Cromwell in the intervening years: that he served in the French army, that he lived in Antwerp with a widow named Anselma, and that he married a woman named Liz with whom he has children.

And we have a glimpse of Henry VIII: "a man of some thirty-five years of age ... in good health and of a hearty appetite" who has his "bowels opened every day," whose "joints are supple" and whose "bones support" him, and who wants "to marry another lady. Any lady. Any well-connected princess whom he thinks might give him a son." (Not the best grammar there: "whom" should be "who.") The king's problem comes down to an interpretation of Scripture, which of course contradicts itself, Deuteronomy urging one to marry one's brother's widow, Leviticus forbidding it. And "the question of which takes priority was thrashed out in Rome, for a fat fee, by leading prelates, twenty years ago when the dispensations" -- i.e. for Henry to marry Katherine, his brother Arthur's widow -- "were issued, and delivered under a papal seal."

We learn that the cardinal has a son named Thomas Winter, and a daughter named Dorothea, who is a nun. Wolsey speculates on whether Cromwell has any illegitimate offspring himself "running around on the banks of the Thames." He points out that he was 15 when he ran away from home and reflects, "It amuses Wolsey that he doesn't know his age." It's a mark of class distinction between Wolsey, "the butcher's beef-fed son," and Cromwell, whose exact birthday is unknown. And Wolsey, knowing of the dislike Cromwell and Gardiner feel for each other, "knows quite well that, dissatisfied with their original parentage, they are fighting to be his favorite son."

Wolsey's proposal to send Gardiner to Rome to sound out the possibility of an annulment of the king's marriage reveals that Cromwell has also had the kind of experience in Rome that Wolsey hasn't: "He has never felt the chill at the nape of the neck that makes you look over your shoulder when, passing from the Tiber's golden light, you move into some great bloc of shadow. By some fallen column, by some chaster ruin, the thieves of integrity wait, some bishop's whore, some nephew-of-a-nephew, some monied seducer with furred breath; he feels, sometimes, fortunate to have escaped that city with his soul intact." Cromwell insists that if Gardiner goes, he take plenty of money to use as bribes.

If he succeeds, Wolsey says, he will marry Henry, "smartly, to a French princess." Cromwell knows that Wolsey has more than one princess in mind: "He never lives in a single reality, but in a shifting shadow-mesh of diplomatic possibilities." Wolsey's power is such that "He used to say, 'The king will do such and such.' Then he began to say, 'We will do such and such.' Now he says, 'This is what I will do.'"

There is a brief recapitulation of the arrangements that brought about Henry's marriage to Katherine when "he was eighteen, guileless" and when he recognized, "I have married a virgin since my poor brother did not touch her; I have married an alliance, her Spanish relatives; but, above all, I have married for love." All of which are part of the problem now.

Cromwell takes his leave of Wolsey, and we get a portrait of our protagonist from the author's point of view:

Thomas Cromwell is now a little over forty years old. He is a man of strong build, not tall. Various expressions are available to his face, and one is readable: an expression of stifled amusement. His hair is dark, heavy and waving, and his small eyes, which are of very strong sight, light up in conversation: so the Spanish ambassador will tell us, quite soon. It is said he knows by heart the entire New Testament in Latin, and so as a servant of the cardinal is apt -- ready with a text if abbots flounder. His speech is low and rapid, his manner assured; he is at home in courtroom or waterfront, bishop's palace or inn yard. He can draft a contract, train a falcon, draw a map, stop a street fight, furnish a house and fix a jury. He will quote you a nice point in the old authors, from Plato to Plautus and back again. He knows new poetry, and can say it in Italian. He works all hours, first up and last to bed. He makes money and he spends it. He will take a bet on anything. 

In short, a Renaissance man. Like Machiavelli.

As he heads for his town house, he meets up with Rafe Sadler, "a slight young man with pale eyes" who, the "Cast of Characters" tells us, is "Cromwell's chief clerk, brought up at Austin Friars." Sadler fills him in on the news while he has been away, and Cromwell starts to ask him something about the Duke of Norfolk, then changes his mind.

"Someone is screaming, down by the quays. The boatmen are singing. There is a faint, faraway splashing; perhaps they are drowning someone."

Just another day in Tudor London.