2. The World of Christopher Marlowe, by David Riggs, pp. 25-44

Chapter Two: Lessons Learned in Childhood

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At the age of six, Marlowe started attending petty school, which taught children to read and write. Instruction largely consisted of learning the ABC's and memorizing religious texts, including a Catechism that contained the Apostle's Creed, the Lord's Prayer and the Ten Commandments. Parents whose children, eight years and older, who could not say the Catechism were subject to a fine of ten shillings. The petty schools had been founded by Henry VIII: "He and Elizabeth viewed the instruction of children in English as a way of fashioning obedient subjects." The aim was to wean Englishmen off of Catholic iconography by instructing them in the Scriptures, but the method was not particularly successful. In one of the charges of atheism leveled against Marlowe by Richard Baines, Marlowe was said to have proclaimed, "if there be any god or any good Religion," it would be found in Catholicism because of its ritualistic and ceremonial character -- its theatricality. "The reformers overestimated the capacity of words to impose uniform meanings on the impressionable minds of young readers."

Moreover, because the method of instruction relied on memory of the text and not on examination of the ideas within the text, those who actually did think about what they had memorized began to question it. "The Tudor programme of popular religious instruction created the agnostic reaction that it was meant to pre-empt." The doctrine of the Trinity was a particular stumbling block, partly because it was not specifically based in the Scriptures. "During Marlowe's lifetime, atheism, a category unknown to the pre-Reformation world, became the 'sin of sins.'" Early "atheists" also questioned the doctrine of eternal damnation. "The fear of God was the bedrock of moral order in Marlowe's England." Contributing to the burgeoning unbelief was the instability of the church: "As the state church changed back and forth between Protestant and Catholic regimes, the dubious assertion that God upheld princely rule had the unintended consequence of compromising divine authority."

Meanwhile, young Marlowe also learned about the world on the streets of Canterbury, which because of its location on the way between Dover and London "attracted a steady stream of diplomats, soldiers, merchants and messengers going to and from France." The event that caused the greatest stir was the St. Bartholomew's Day massacre in Paris on August 24, 1572, when Catholics led by the Duke of Guise murdered three thousand Protestants. Then, with the encouragement of Charles IX, another ten thousand were killed in other French cities. Refugees fleeing to England told the grisly stories, and bought the word massacre to England. In French the word originally referred to a slaughterhouse, but it now came to mean "mass murder." In Lyons, the soldiers had refused to carry out the execution of Protestants, so the authorities sent butchers into the prisons to do the killing. Two of Marlowe's early plays, Tamburlaine and The Jew of Malta contain scenes of massacre, and the last of his plays to be performed was The Massacre at Paris.

In 1573, when Marlowe was nine years old, Queen Elizabeth visited Canterbury and on September 7 celebrated her fortieth birthday.

The queen had a genius for incorporating the rejected symbols of the Catholic faith into her own self-image.Trading on the discarded cult of the Blessed Virgin Mary, Elizabeth would fashion herself into the secular counterpart of the virgin queen.... Marlowe shared the queen's fascination with theatrical constructions of sovereignty. His early masterpiece Tamburlaine the Great considers monarchical self-fashioning from the standpoint of a young playwright at the outset of a stunning career. 

The record of Marlowe's education has a gap from the age of eight, which is when tradesmen's children usually left petty school, to the winter of 1578-79, when he won a scholarship to the King's School. During those six years, his father may have paid for his education at the King's School, but given the expense and his family's low income it's likely that he attended a free grammar school that Archbishop Matthew Parker had founded when Marlowe was five. "Since candidates for the Parker scholarship that sent Marlowe to Cambridge had to read music at sight, Christopher doubtless acquired this facility in the schoolhouse across the street from the Eastbridge Hospital."

The usual grammar school texts were William Lyly's Short Introduction of Grammar and A Catechism or First Instruction of Christian Religion by Alexander Nowell, Dean of St. Paul's Cathedral. Henry VIII and Elizabeth mandated Lyly's grammar because it was based on classical Latin texts and not on medieval church Latin: "It prepared Marlowe and his schoolfellows to think like Ovid and Cicero rather than St Thomas Aquinas." The Catechism instilled in students the basics of Calvinism: "bondage of the will, predestination, election and reprobation." The aim was to teach students obedience. Students copied these texts by hand and then repeated what they had transcribed under questioning. The entire system depended on "rote memorization and repetition." The Grammar involved learning "page after page of Latin verb forms and syntactical constructions with no overarching system to guide them through the maze." When they did begin to read Latin texts they were "actively discouraged from thinking about what they meant." It was, Lyly explained, "a discipline for governing boys by teaching, admonishing, rebuking, punishing and on all occasions." The whole system was designed to inculcate, as Riggs puts it, "a generalized attitude of deference to authority that suited the needs of Renaissance princes."

Classes were typically from six or seven in the morning to seven at night, six days a week, with religious instruction on Sundays and holidays. Meanwhile, boys who had left school at the age of eight and had not yet become apprentices, as they would in their teens, were left to run free. Even apprentices had the late afternoon, Sundays and holidays free. "Learning Latin was the labour-intensive alternative to indigenous youth culture."

The emphasis on classical Latin over medieval led to a contempt for the vernacular. "Medieval Latin incorporated the English word order; classical Latin dissolved it. Marlowe's introductory work on prose translation emphasized style at the expense of piety. It implied that the Holy Scriptures were inferior to the work of classical Roman authors." So when in one of his reported "blasphemies" Marlowe said that the New Testament was "filthily written," he was saying what "He had been taught to think ... since the age of ten." His dismissal of Christ's apostles as "base fellows" was also a consequence of his teaching.

The irony of these "damnable" opinions is that the apostles were supposed  to be base fellows. That was why Jesus chose them for his ministry; they spread the Word to all who had ears to hear in language that anyone could understand.

Marlowe also imbibed some of the contradictory messages of Calvinism. "Under Elizabeth I, external conformity became the master principle of church discipline." Even if you were not of the elect, those with a "true and lively faith," you were expected to behave as if you were. "In the Calvinist theology of the Catechism, only two or three of Marlowe's schoolfellows were presumed to speak from the heart, and God alone knew who they were." The rest were expected to go through the motions. "Queen Elizabeth, Archbishop Parker and Lord Burghley sought outward compliance with the state church, rather than inner assent to its doctrinal content," which Riggs aptly describes as a "'don't ask, don't tell' approach."

The tacit acceptance of hypocrites, commonly known as "close" or "inward" atheists, explains why unbelievers rarely came out of the closet.... Closet atheists were part of the social order; open atheists cried out for swift and violent retribution."

1. The World of Christopher Marlowe, by David Riggs, pp. 1-24

Prologue: Reinventing Marlowe. Chapter One: Citizen Marlowe.

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"This is a book about Marlowe's life, his works, and his world," David Riggs tells us.

Marlowe was present at the creation, or "born on the threshold of modern theatre, before the words playwright and dramatist had entered the English language." The English theater was a "rickety start-up venture" for which he created "a thrilling repertory of poetic tragedies" that dealt with such matters of concern to the theater-goers as "grinding poverty, class conflict, erotic desire, religious dissent, and the fear of hell." He had friends like Shakespeare and Ben Jonson, but lots of enemies who claimed that he was "a proselytizing atheist, a counterfeiter, and a consumer of 'boys and tobacco.'"

Riggs begins with the most familiar speech in Marlowe's best-known play, Dr. Faustus, the speech in which the scholar Faustus summons up the spirit of Helen of Troy, "the most beautiful woman in the best book ever written, Homer's Iliad," and asks,

Was this the face that launched a thousand ships, 

And burnt the topless towers of Ilium? 

Sweet Helen, make me immortal with a kiss.

Riggs notes that the answer to Faustus's question is both yes and no -- no because "From the standpoint of an early modern Christian, what Dr Faustus sees is a succubus." And, "The contrast between the hero's bookish fantasy life and the exterior world that he is up against gives Dr Faustus a subjective depth that was new to European theatre." He contrasts Marlowe's Faustus with Cervantes's Don Quixote:

Dr Faustus inhabits an older, more supernatural plane of reality than his Spanish contemporary does. The enchanted landscape of Dr Faustus is haunted by demons that expect the audience to believe in them. Where Dr Faustus is possessed, Don Quixote is crazy. Where Dr Faustus comes at the end of a waning tradition of Medieval religious drama, Don Quixote marks the birth of the modern novel.

 And he likens Marlowe to his "younger contemporary Caravaggio,"whose painting The Conversion of St Paul turns a spiritual moment into a very physical one:

"Marlowe too conceived of Scriptural events in entirely physical human terms. The core of Marlowe's atheism lay in his refusal to read the Bible 'after the spirit'. In taking Scripture literally, he read it 'after the flesh.'" But of course his atheism -- whatever it consisted of -- along with the allegations that he was a pederast and a spy put him in trouble with the Elizabethan authorities, and may have led to his murder when he was only 29.

Marlowe was forgotten for a long while after the theaters were closed during the English Civil War in 1642, but he was rediscovered in the nineteenth century, and Victorians went out of their way to portray his accusers as spiteful and malicious or to turn him into "a prototype of the romantic poet who lived for his art, suffered for his excesses, and died young. His immorality, like that of Byron and Shelley, was part of the artist's unrelenting search for the truth." Dr. Faustus began to be hailed as a moral fable.

In the twentieth century, moralizing went out of favor, and New Historicist scholars "have recently shown that Marlowe's writing voiced the aspirations of blasphemers, sodomites, foreigners, unemployed scholars and the mutinous poor in Renaissance England." Researchers have uncovered evidence of his criminal record. "We now know that Marlowe was a counterfeiter and landmark figure in the history of atheism and sedition" and that his murder may have been ordered by the authorities. "Within the history of modern unbelief, Marlowe bestrides the moment when English atheism comes out of the closet and acquires a public face."

Riggs's aim is to "describe the culture that created the wayward master lurking in the archives" by focusing on "the institutions -- city, church, grammar school, university, secret service and public playhouse -- that taught Christopher Marlowe what transgression was."

He begins with Christopher's father, John Marlowe, arriving in Canterbury in the mid-1550s. Because the Archbishop of Canterbury is the leader of the Church of England, the town had been the center of the religious troubles that had afflicted England. "During the reign of 'Bloody' Mary, Canterbury saw more executions for heresy than any place in England, apart from London. John Marlowe came to a city in crisis."

All told, the English state religion changed three times between 1547 and 1558: from the Anglo-Catholicism of the ageing Henry VIII to radical Protestantism under his short-lived son Edward VI; then to the reactionary Roman Catholicism of his elder daughter Mary I; and again to moderate Protestantism under his younger daughter Elizabeth I. Canterbury felt the full shock of these seismic alternations. 

In Canterbury, sometime in 1559 or 1560, John became an apprentice shoemaker. He married Katherine Arthur in 1561, and their first child, a daughter they named Mary, was born a year later. Canterbury was also the home of two future Elizabethan playwrights, Stephen Gosson and John Lyly. John Marlowe's son Christopher, born in February 1564, completed a Canterbury triumvirate. (Shakespeare was born two months after Marlowe, in Stratford-upon-Avon.) 

John Marlowe did not get involved in religious conflict. "The father's wary detachment gives the first inkling of his son's ironic, uncommitted stance on questions of religious belief.... Christopher Marlowe, the son of immigrants situated on the margin of their community, spent most of his life in a place where elementary structures of religious belief were constantly being discredited." In his plays, religion is treated "as a site of conflict ... between Muslim and Christian, Christian and Jew, Christian and Epicurean, and Protestant and Catholic."

John Marlowe rose from apprentice to master shoemaker in 1564 when his master died during an outbreak of bubonic plague, and had set up his own shop by 1565. Shoemakers were ranked lower middle class, but John had a distinction in that he was able to read and write. The former skill was less rare than the latter: In 1536 Henry VIII had "ordered all parents and masters to teach their children and servants the Lord's Prayer, the Apostle's Creed and the Ten Commandments" and to show them the texts in writing or print. But by learning to write as well, John had been "Educated beyond his station."

Katherine Marlowe bore nine children, six of whom survived infancy. When his sister Mary died at the age of six, four-year-old Christopher became the eldest child and at that time the only son, giving him a "privileged position" in the family.

John Marlowe seems to have been involved in numerous legal quarrels with his neighbors: He went to court ten times in 1573 alone. This gave him "a rudimentary knowledge of pleas, writs and depositions" at a time when "Literate tradesmen often found work as freelance law clerks." He began to do legal and clerical work and became a "professional bondsman, especially for couples seeking wedding licenses." Learning the value of education by becoming a "litigant-entrepreneur," Riggs says, made him conscious of the importance of seeing to it that Christopher was educated.

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

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

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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..."

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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."

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Cromwell argues theology with Henry:

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

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

"Would you, if you were a cardinal?"

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

"Indeed no." 

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

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

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?"

24. "Wolf Hall," by Hilary Mantel, pp. 396-408

Part V, II, "Devil's Spit," Autumn and Winter 1533, through "...That howling you hear is only the Londoners."

_____

"Call her Elizabeth. Cancel the jousts." It's Henry's way of acknowledging that Anne has failed to produce a son. But after Cromwell and Cranmer console him, "He smiles: and one can catch in flight, as if it were a bird with a strong-beating heart, the act of will that transforms a desolate wretch into the beacon of his nation."

The prophesying nun Elizabeth Barton has been brought to London to be grilled by Cromwell and others. Her real crime is not prophesying ill for Henry and Anne, but that she has gained followers from the Poles and Lord and Lady Exeter, claimants to the throne. Richard Riche, the Solicitor General, is present. "He looks at Riche and it is as if he can read his thoughts: Niccolò's book says, the wise prince exterminates the envious, and if I, Riche, were king, those claimants and their families would be dead." Riche wants to burn the nun, but Cranmer says, "she speaks this way because she has been taught to ape the claims of certain nuns who have gone before her, nuns whom Rome is pleased to recognize as saints. I cannot convict them of heresy, retrospectively. Nor have I evidence to try her for heresy." Riche says, "Burned for treason, I meant."

Cromwell's niece, Alice Wellyfed, has been keeping an eye on the nun, and says "she knows she is a fraud." She asks him why he hadn't brought her in for questioning before, and he explains that he wanted to see who was on her side. She says, "'I should like to see her before...' Before they kill her. Alice is no innocent in this world. Just as well. Look how the innocent end; used by the sin-sodden and the cynical, pulped to their purpose and ground under their heels."

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.

22. "Wolf Hall," by Hilary Mantel, pp. 359-372

Part V, I, "Anna Regina," 1533, continued, from "In March, news comes from Calais that Lord Berners has died...." through "...He opens his palm; in it a needle, tip toward her."

_____

Visiting Anne, Cromwell sees Jane Seymour, who is obviously bullied by Lady Rochford and Anne. They talk about Katherine's plotting against Anne with the Plantagenet claimants to the throne.

With the king, he sees Chapuys, who persists in referring to "Dr. Cranmer" rather than "the archbishop" and when he mentions "Queen Katherine," the king asks, "Who? You mean my late brother's wife, the Princess of Wales?"

The king makes Cromwell chancellor of the exchequer, which was Lord Berners' post.

Cromwell decides that Helen Barre's husband is dead and resolves to "tell her she is free."

Watching the expressions of the courtiers in the presence of Anne, he thinks, "Arrange your face, Nicholas Carew, your ancient family face. He hears Anne saying, these are my enemies: he adds Carew to the list."

The king sends Cromwell to talk to Katherine about what is to happen after the dissolution of their marriage. He suggests that Cromwell leave Rafe Sadler with him: "I can rely on him to say what Cromwell would say." Then he weeps because his sister, Brandon's wife, is so ill. He is also bothered by having to declare Mary Tudor a bastard. And he decides that Richard Cromwell should not marry Mary Boleyn. Back home, Cromwell breaks the news to Richard, saying that Henry "needs Mary for himself" because "he is afraid to touch Anne" during her pregnancy. He proposes a marriage to Frances Murfyn, daughter of the Lord Mayor, instead.

He goes to see Katherine, who refers to Cranmer as a heretic, but calls the king only a schismatic. She notes that the archbishop will be excommunicated. But she also says to Cromwell, "I shall be sorry if I don't see you again. You are so much quicker in conversation than the dukes."

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."

20. "Wolf Hall," by Hilary Mantel, pp. 326-340

Part IV, II, "'Alas, What Shall I Do for Love?'" Spring 1532, concluded, from "The nun has plunged the king into gloom...."
Part IV, III, "Early Mass," November 1532

_____

Henry's nerves are rattled by Elizabeth Barton's prophecies, and neither Norfolk nor Brandon is able to settle him down until Cromwell suggests, "I think perhaps she can't tell what she sees in the outside world from what is inside her head. Some people are like that. She is to be pitied, perhaps. Though not too much."

On deck of the ship as they cross the Channel to Calais, Cromwell talks to the Duke of Richmond, Henry's illegitimate 13-year-old son, who says to him, somewhat tactlessly, "I am glad you prosper. Because it is said in the book The Courtier that in men of base degree we often see high gifts of nature." Henry joins them on deck, feeling better, and they discuss the book by Castiglione.

In Calais, the king and Anne are given adjoining rooms. "Mary told him, before they left dry land, 'Till not she wouldn't, but now she would, but he won't. He tells her he must be sure that if she gets a child it's born in wedlock.'" Cromwell sneaks off for a secret meeting with three old men in a sleazy pub, but Mantel is coy about its purpose. The old men, who "look like alchemists," represent a Maître Camillo who is apparently creating something he wants to give the king. Cromwell is irritated because the old men don't bring drawings and are evasive about anything to do with the item. Cromwell extends an invitation to Maître Camillo to come to England, but one of the old men says, "The magister believes he would dislike the English climate. The fogs. And also, the whole island is covered with witches."

In Boulogne, Francis I asks to see him. "Henry deliberates before giving him permission; face-to-face, monarchs should deal only with fellow monarchs, and lords and churchmen of high rank." Cromwell finds the French king repellent: "Choose your prince: You wouldn't want to look at this one every day. Henry is so wholesome, in his fleshy, scrubbed pink-and-whiteness." At the end of their meeting, one of the courtiers gives him a "gift from His Highness," a pair of gloves. Cromwell finds a ruby in one of the fingers, which he gives to the king.

The two kings go together to Calais, where Anne dances with Francis. Henry is nervous about the French king's attentions to her, so Cromwell goes to Norfolk: "My lord, fetch your niece away. She has done enough diplomacy. Our king is jealous." Norfolk does so rather roughly. Later, he hears that Anne has sent for a Bible.

Cromwell plays chess with Edward Seymour, and asks about his sister Jane, and whether her father has made a match for her.

Mary Boleyn comes to see him and tells him that the king and Anne unbolted the door between their room. "She is in his arms, naked as she was born. She can't change her mind now." The Bible had been for them to swear on: "They are married in God's sight. And he swears he will marry her again in England and crown her queen when spring comes." Mary is putting the moves on Cromwell and he almost succumbs before they are interrupted by a man Cromwell doesn't know, William Stafford, with whom she leaves. Cromwell thinks about getting away from the court: "East of the Boleyns. East of everybody."

19. "Wolf Hall," by Hilary Mantel, pp. 310-326

Part IV, II, "'Alas, What Shall I Do for Love?'" Spring 1532, continued, from "Next day he is early for the meeting of the king's council...." through "...Father Bocking does the price list and keeps the accounts."

_____

Cromwell, whose character is being presented as less amiable than earlier in the novel, bullies Harry Percy into swearing that he didn't sleep with Anne and has no claim to being married to her. Later, at Austin Friars, he tells Rafe, "Now Harry Percy can borrow more money, and edge himself nearer his ruin. A progress which I shall be pleased to facilitate.... I think one day I will have that earldom off him." This is the first time Cromwell has betrayed an ambition to join the nobility. His motivation to crush Percy stems largely from Percy's treatment of Wolsey.

A young woman named Elizabeth Barton has been having prophetic visions about calamity if the king marries Anne Boleyn. Cromwell is keeping track of those who visit her, including More and Fisher. She is now at Canterbury, and has also been visited by the wife of Henry Courtenay, Marquis of Exeter, "the king's nearest male relative" and hence a potential claimant to the throne, which Cromwell notes would be "useful to the Emperor, when he comes with his troops to boot out Henry and put a new king on the throne." There have also been "outbreaks of blasphemy" during the mass.

Anne is made Marquess of Pembroke. Many of the new courtiers are Cromwell's "friends from Wolsey days." After the ceremony, at which Thomas Wyatt and Mark Smeaton sing "Alas, what shall I do for love?" Cromwell speaks with Jane Seymour.

The king meets with François I of France at the Field of the Cloth of Gold, taking with him "the possible claimants to the throne, including the Yorkist Lord Montague, and the Lancastrian Nevilles, to show how tame they are and how secure are the Tudors." Cromwell is aware that any treaty that comes from the meeting is little more than show: "Wolsey always said that the making of a treaty is the treaty. It doesn't matter what the terms are, just that there are terms. It's the goodwill that matters. When that runs out, the treaty is broken, whatever the terms are."

Charles Brandon is furious that Henry expects Anne to take precedence over his wife, Henry's sister who was once married to the French king: "You expect her to wait on you? On Boleyn's daughter? Pass you your gloves, madam, and serve you first at dinner? Make your mind up to it -- that day will never come." Henry tells him to go calm down, and sends Cromwell to talk to him. Brandon doesn't believe Anne is chaste, and he tells Cromwell that Anne's mother, Elizabeth Howard, was the first person Henry ever had sex with. Cromwell ignores the stories and tells Brandon to say his wife can't go to France because she is ill. "Anne is unforgiving.... Hard to please, easy to offend. My lord, be guided by me." Being guided by Cromwell rankles with Brandon, but he replies, "We all are. We must be. You do everything, Cromwell. You are everything now. We say, how did it happen? We ask ourselves.... We ask ourselves, but by the steaming blood of Christ we have no bloody answer."

Meanwhile, the French are having trouble with Anne's presence at the meeting, too. They can't find a noblewoman to be hostess to her. Finally, it is decided that Anne will stay in Calais while the king goes to meet François in Boulogne.

Warham has died, and a successor as Archbishop of Canterbury needs to be named. Thomas Cranmer is expected to take his place: "Anne has begun to refer to him as the Archbishop-Elect."

On the way to France, the court stops at Canterbury, where the king and Anne are confronted with Elizabeth Barton, who calls Anne a heretic and tells Henry, "if you enter into a form of marriage with this unworthy woman, you will not reign seven months." A small riot ensues, but Cromwell follows Elizabeth as the monks take her to safety and asks her to tell him if Wolsey is in heaven, hell, or purgatory. He offers to make a substantial donation, and she says she'll "have to talk to Father Bocking," whom a monk identifies as "this lady's spiritual director."

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

_____

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."

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..."

_____

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.

10. "Wolf Hall," by Hilary Mantel, pp. 163-182

Part III, II, "Entirely Beloved Cromwell," Spring-December 1530, through "...But they are all good stories."

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York Place is now Anne Boleyn's residence, and when he visits it he encounters the lute-player named Mark (i.e. Smeaton). As he enters the room where Anne and her sister and several other women are sitting, he is met by "a flurry of little dogs," and she is charmed because he seems to like them and they act "as if he were someone they had so much longed to meet." Anne, he notices is "so small. Her bones are so delicate, her waist so narrow; if two law students make one cardinal, two Annes make one Katherine." She seems to speak French better than English, and she pronounces Cromwell "Cremuel."

He asks her, "how much progress have you seen in your cause?" since Wolsey was ousted. She admits there has been none, and he tries to make a case for the cardinal, but with little evident effect. Mary Boleyn follows him out when he leaves, and he asks her about the rumor that Anne is pregnant. She says that she would know, and, "Besides, she can't, because they don't. They haven't." She assures him that Anne would tell her if they had been having sexual relations "out of spite!"

He then goes to Henry to plead for money so the cardinal can go to York. "At such moments, Henry expects you to fall to your knees -- duke, earl, commoner, light and heavy, old and young. He does it; scar tissue pulls; few of us, by our forties, are not carrying injuries." Henry admits, "Every day I miss the Cardinal of York," and grants him the money. But he commands him not to tell anyone, especially the Duke of Norfolk. He goes back to help the cardinal prepare for the journey north. "Wolsey gives him a package. Inside it is a small and hard object, a seal or ring." The cardinal tells him to open it when he's gone.

As the cardinal travels north, the Emperor's ambassador, Eustache Chapuys, comes to see Cromwell to say, "The Emperor, in defense of his aunt, may make war on England." The message, Cromwell knows, is meant for the cardinal. Rafe Sadler is entrusted with messages to the cardinal, who calls him "mine own entirely beloved Cromwell." Meanwhile, Henry is plotting to loot Wolsey's colleges of "their silver and gold plate, their libraries, their yearly revenues and the lande that produces the revenues." He tells Cromwell, "I could make good use of the money that flows yearly to Rome. King François is richer by far than I am. I do not have a tenth of his subjects. He taxes them as he pleases. For my part, I must call Parliament. If I do not, there are riots.... And riots if I do."

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."

8. "Wolf Hall," by Hilary Mantel, pp. 116-130

Part II, II, "An Occult History of Britain," 1521-1529, concluded, from "New Year's 1529: Stephen Gardiner is in Rome...." Part II, III, "Make or Mar," All Hallows 1529.

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The illness of Pope Clement raises the possibility of Wolsey's becoming pope, which would solve both the king's problem and Wolsey's. But the pope recovers, and the "trial of the king's great matter" goes on. Wolsey seeks out witnesses to the marriage of Katherine and Arthur, hoping to prove that the marriage had been consummated, but the wedding took place 28 years ago and the potential witnesses are dead or doddering. Cromwell reflects "that he cannot imagine anyone, even a hasty fifteen-year-old, wanting to penetrate Katherine. It would be like copulation with a statue." In the end the court rules in Katherine's favor. "They all know the court will never sit again. They all know the cardinal has failed."

The plague returns with the summer, and Cromwell decides not to send his daughters to the country. "It's the wrong decision." Anne and Grace both die.

Wolsey's failure brings about his fall. "So now they swagger into York Place, the Duke of Suffolk, the Duke of Norfolk: the two great peers of the realm. Suffolk, his blond beard bristling, looks like a pig among truffles; a florid man, he remembers, turns my lord cardinal sick."

On All Hallows Day, 1529, Cromwell is overcome with grief for Liz, Anne and Grace, but also because he is certain that the fall of Wolsey means his fall, too.

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."