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.

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."  

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."

_____

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."

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

_____

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.