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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

"I fear Mark was right."

"Who is Mark?"

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

Gregory says, "Did you not know?"

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.

16. "Wolf Hall," by Hilary Mantel, pp. 264-276

Part IV, I, "Arrange Your Face," 1531, concluded, from "October: Monsieur Chapuys, the Emperor's ambassador, comes to Austin Friars...."

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Dining at Austin Friars, "Chapuys praises the food, the music, the furnishings. One can see his brain turning, hear the little clicks, like the gins of an elaborate lock, as he encodes his opinions for his dispatches to his master the Emperor."

Sir Henry Wyatt visits them in November and tells stories of his imprisonment by Richard III and how his son, the courtier-poet Thomas Wyatt, was nearly killed by a lion they thought they had tamed. Cromwell thinks, "Tom Wyatt. He can tame lions." Rumor has it that Anne Boleyn "has done Thomas Wyatt all the favors a man might reasonably ask, even in a brothel." Henry Wyatt asks Cromwell to keep an eye on Thomas.

Cromwell visits Anne: "She has made pets of the king's friends, the gentlemen of his privy chamber: Henry Norris, William Brereton, those people, and her brother, of course, Lord Rochford. ... A bigger set of fools you would go far to seek." Norris observes that Cromwell doesn't understand why the king is so infatuated with Anne, and asks whom Cromwell would choose for the king. He replies, "A woman I could love, would be a woman in whom the king has no interest at all." Norris says, "If that is a piece of advice, tell it to your friend Wyatt's son." He says that Francis Weston is jealous of everyone Anne sees, including "a boy she brings in to sing for us some nights." (A reference to Mark Smeaton?) And "Every time she looks at you, he keeps count, he says, there, there, do you see, she is looking at that fat butcher, she looked at him fifteen times in two hours." Cromwell says, "It was the cardinal who was the fat butcher." Norris replies, "To Francis, one tradesman's the same as the next." This provokes Cromwell to thoughts that other trades are worthless without the skill of the blacksmith and to memories of his father.

On New Year's Day he's awakened by Gregory with the news that Thomas Wyatt has been arrested for disturbing the peace. He engineers his release along with the others, including Francis Weston and Francis Bryan.

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..."

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."