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

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

_____

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.

27: "Wolf Hall," by Hilary Mantel, pp. 459-474

Part VI, I, "Supremacy," 1534, concluded, from "When Fisher comes to his senses and asks pardon..."

_____

Elizabeth Barton is sentenced to be hanged. The councillors plead with the king to remove Thomas More from the bill, and he agrees. "Anne is not present, or it might have gone otherwise."

Pope Clement rules that Henry's marriage to Katherine is valid.

Cromwell goes to More, to try to persuade him to sign the oath supporting the Act of Succession. He fails, and tells Cranmer, "I hate to be a part of this play, which is entirely devised by him.... And what I hate most of all is that Master More sits in the audience and sniggers when I trip over my lines, for he has written all the parts. And written them these many years." More persists in his refusal, saying that it goes against his conscience, even though he won't condemn anyone who does sign the oath -- which his own family does. When he evokes the angels and saints and the church, Cromwell is enraged:

"Oh, for Christ's sake!" he says. "A lie is no less a lie because it is a thousand years old. Your undivided church has liked nothing better than persecuting its own members, burning them and hacking them apart when they stood by their own conscience, slashing their bellies open and feeding their guts to dogs. You call history to your aid, but what is history to you? It is a mirror that flatters Thomas More." 

And he concludes by charging that More gives "comfort to every enemy of England." More retorts that Cromwell fought for the French and banked for the Italians: "No, I tell you what you are, Cromwell, you are an Italian through and through, and you have all their vices, all their passions."

Henry promotes Cromwell to Master Secretary. 

Rafe informs Cromwell that he has married Helen Barre, who is pregnant.

Anne miscarries.

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."

_____

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.'"

23. "Wolf Hall," by Hilary Mantel, pp. 372-395

Part V, I, "Anna Regina," 1533, concluded, from "The word is about town that Thomas More has fallen into poverty."

_____

Still concerned about the fate of John Frith, he goes to see More, who sends his daughter Margaret from the room, saying, "I won't have you in this devil's company." He's joking: "It is Reginald Pole, lying in Italy, who says he is a devil." They talk about Elizabeth Barton, whom More calls "an impostor. She does it for attention." Cromwell thinks, "So he does not like holy maids. But Bishop Fisher does. He has seen her often." When he asks More to come to Anne's coronation, he replies, "'You'll be company for each other, in Hell.' This is what you forget, this vehemence; his ability to make his twisted jokes, but not take them." Cromwell asks More to see the king -- "He will welcome you like a lost child" -- to make a case for Frith, "a pure soul, he is a fine scholar, so let him live." But More won't commit to doing so.

Back home, he tells Helen Barre that he's certain her husband is dead.

"So I could marry again. If anybody wanted me."

Helen's eyes rest on his face. She says nothing. Just stands. The moment seems to last a long time. 

He takes Frith to see Cranmer, and on the way gives him an opportunity to escape, which Frith doesn't take.

The coronation, of which Cromwell is in charge, takes place. Chapuys tells Cromwell, "I don't understand it, nothing do I understand in this benighted country. Is Cranmer Pope now? Or is Henry Pope? Perhaps you are Pope? My men who were among the press today say they heard few voices raised for the concubine, and plenty who called upon God to bless Katherine, the rightful queen."

The success of the coronation causes Cromwell to have fantasies of ambition: "If Henry lives twenty years, Henry who is Wolsey's creation, and then leaves this child to succeed him, I can build my own prince: to the glorification of God and the commonwealth of England. Because I will not be too old.... And I shall not be like Henry Wyatt and say, now I am retiring from affairs. Because what is there, but affairs?"

He goes to see Anne, where Jane Rochford says to her, "Make up your mind to it, madam -- they will never love you, any more than they love ... Cromwell here." He talks to Mary Boleyn about her role in the king's bed as a surrogate for Anne. "She will get another child by Henry, he thinks. Anne will have it strangled in the cradle."

Sitting with Henry and some French emissaries, Cromwell and the king talk to them about the theater of Guido [Giulio?] Camillo, who is now at the court of the French king. Henry says he is sending Stephen Gardiner to France. When one of the emissaries asks who will do Gardiner's job, Henry says "Oh, Cromwell will do it. Won't you?"

Wriothesley says to Cromwell, "you have done what the cardinal could not, and much more beside." Christophe comes with an urgent message from Cranmer. He visits the archbishop and is introduced to his pregnant wife, Margarete. Cromwell is aghast: "Do you know what the king will do to you when he finds you out? The master executioner of Paris has devised a machine, with a counterweighted beam -- shall I draw it for you? -- which when a heretic is burned dips him into the fire and lifts him out again, so that the people can see the stages of his agony. Now Henry will be wanting one. Or he will get some device to tease your head off your shoulders, over a period of forty days." In the end, he brings Helen to keep Cranmer's wife company.

Frith is executed, while Cromwell is out riding with the king. "He has taught Henry to call the Pope 'the Bishop of Rome.' To laugh when his name is mentioned. If it is uncertain laughter, it is better than the former genuflection." Cromwell laughs when he hears Katherine's response to the king's demand that she give him the robes in which Mary was christened for the birth of Anne's child. "Nature wronged Katherine, he says, in not making her a man; she would have surpassed all the heroes of antiquity."

He goes to Greenwich to prepare the rooms where Anne is to give birth. "Proclamations (undated) are prepared, to go out to the people of England and the rulers of Europe, announcing the birth of a prince. Just have a little gap, he suggests, at the end of 'prince,' so if need be you can squash in ... But they look at him as if he's a traitor, so he leaves off." On August 26, 1533, Anne goes to Greenwich.

21. "Wolf Hall," by Hilary Mantel, pp. 343-359

Part V, I, "Anna Regina," 1533, through "...a child in the womb is not an heir in the cradle."

_____

Cromwell adds a young woman, Helen Barre, with two small children to his household. She has been deserted by her husband, who beat her. He has also added Christophe, a boy who worked at the tavern where he met he three old men who represented Maître Camillo.

Henry and Anne renew their Calais vows on January 25, 1533, in a chapel at Whitehall, with "a huddle of witnesses," including William Brereton, who threatens, "Keep away from my family's affairs. Or you'll come off worse, Master Cromwell, than you can imagine." The priest is Rowland Lee, a friend of Cromwell's. As the wedding party leaves, Mary Boleyn gives him a sign that Anne is pregnant: "She had always said, I will be the first to know. It will be me who lets out her bodices." He concludes that the king probably doesn't know yet. And he tells Brereton "you have made a mistake in threatening me."

Cromwell meets with the designated Archbishop of Canterbury, who still has to be approved by the Pope, Thomas Cranmer. He tells Cranmer that Anne is pregnant, and Cranmer observes that "officially" he's not supposed to know even that Henry and Anne are married. "As I am to be judge in the matter of the king's old marriage, it would not be proper for me to hear that his new one has already taken place."

Anne summons him to tell him that she wants her sister to be married off. She thinks of Richard Cromwell, his nephew, because he's related to the Tudors.

In the Tower, he meets with John Frith, who was imprisoned by More while Cromwell was in Calais. He notes that Frith is married. "The one thing the king cannot abide -- no, many things he cannot abide -- but he hates married priests. And he hates Luther, and you have translated Luther into English." So Cromwell fears he can't help keep Frith from being burned at the stake for heresy. Frith is unrepentant about his beliefs.

In discussing the prospect of Richard's marrying Mary, Rafe observes that "all our lives and fortunes depend now on" Anne Boleyn, "and as well as being mutable she is mortal."

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."

_____

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."

_____

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.

14. "Wolf Hall," by Hilary Mantel, pp. 235-250

Part IV, I, "Arrange Your Face," 1531, through "...because in the end we all come home to God."

_____

Cromwell has an audience with Katherine and Mary, in which the former tells the latter, "This is Master Cromwell. Who now writes all the laws." When Mary makes a slighting remark about Wolsey, Cromwell retorts, "will you, of your charity, cease to speak ill of a man who never did you harm?" causing Mary to blush and reply, "I did not mean to fail in charity" and to look "cowed." But Katherine is incensed that the king "would send a man like you to tell me" that they are to be banished from the court, and makes a reference to his father's having been a blacksmith.

Having completed that task, Cromwell is surprised to learn from Wriothesley that Katherine and Mary are to be sent to separate residences. And when Gregory asks if he would be involved in executing Katherine, he explains to his son that "you give way to the king's requests. You open the way to his desires. That is what a courtier does. Now, understand this: it is impossible that Henry should require me or any other person to harm the queen.... Henry's heart, I assure you, is a heart full of feeling; and Henry's soul, I swear, is the most scrutinized soul in Christendom." Later, Gregory says, "Call-Me-Risley is frightened of you.... He thinks you would do anything."

From Anne Boleyn, Cromwell learns that John Seymour has had an affair with Catherine Fillol, his son Edward's wife. And that Anne is contemptuous of Jane Seymour, calling her "Pasty-face" and saying that "no one wants Milksop, and now no one will" after the scandal caused by her father's adultery. "They could tell Boccaccio a tale, those sinners at Wolf Hall."

Thomas Hitton, "a smuggler of Tyndale's scriptures" has been burned at the stake, and someone has poisoned the guests dining with Fisher, Bishop of Rochester, who was responsible for Hitton's execution. Thomas More "has become a master in the twin arts of stretching and compressing the servants of God. When heretics are taken, he stands by at the Tower while the torture is applied." Cromwell tells Anne that Fisher's cook is to be boiled alive. "Anne's face wears no expression at all. Even a man as literate as he can find nothing there to read." She wants to know how they will do it, but Cromwell "did not ask about the mechanics."

A grocer named John Petyt has been arrested on suspicion of heresy, and his wife Lucy comes to see Cromwell to see if he can help. He is unable to get either Anne or the king interested in the matter. He also corresponds secretly with Tyndale, who wants to come home, but "Tyndale will not come out in favor of Henry's divorce; nor, for that matter, will the monk Luther. You'd think they'd sacrifice a fine point of principle, to make a friend of the King of England: but no." Cromwell reflects that "More, Tyndale, they deserve each other, these mules that pass for men."  

13. "Wolf Hall," by Hilary Mantel, pp. 223-231

Part III, III, "The Dead Complain of Their Burial," Christmastide 1530

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The household at Austin Friars is awakened after midnight by William Brereton and "an armed escort." Cromwell has been summoned by the king, who is at Greenwich. Accompanied by Rafe Sadler, Richard Cromwell and Gregory Cromwell, he goes to see Henry, who has had a bad dream about his brother, Arthur, and has gathered people, including Cranmer, to help him interpret it. "The king says, 'During the twelve days, between Christmas Day and Epiphany, God permits the dead to walk. This is well known.'" Henry thinks that Arthur's spirit is restless because his body had to be transported from Ludlow to Worcester in an oxcart. Cranmer opines, "The dead do not come back to complain of their burial. It is the living who are exercised about these matters." But the king wants to know why Arthur has chosen to come back now, twenty years after his death. Cromwell takes the lead:

He bites back the temptation to say, because you are forty and he is telling you to grow up.... "Because this is the vital time," he says. "Because now is the time to become the ruler you should be, and to be sole and supreme head of your kingdom. Ask Lady Anne. She will tell you. She will say the same."

"She does," the king admits. "She says we should no longer bow to Rome."

"And should your father appear to you in a dream, take it just as you take this one. That he has come to strengthen your hand. No father wishes to see his son less powerful than himself."

Afterward, Cranmer congratulates Cromwell on the way he handled the situation: "A deft touch, 'and should your father appear to you...' I take it you don't like to be roused often in the small hours." He also noticed that Cromwell had seized the king's arm. "And Henry, he felt it.... You are a person of great force of will."

Later that day, Cromwell returns to Greenwich where he takes the oath as a councillor to the king. Warham, the Archbishop of Canterbury, administers the oath in the presence of Thomas Boleyn and Thomas More. The latter is crying because his father has just died. Boleyn notices that Cromwell is wearing the turquoise ring left him by Wolsey. More gives him some advice: "Now you are a member of the council, I hope you will tell the king what he ought to do, not merely what he can do. If the lion knew his own strength, it would be hard to rule him."

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..."

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."

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.

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.

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

Part I, II: "Paternity," 1527

_____

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.