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.

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."

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"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."

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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."

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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."

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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."

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."

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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."

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

11. "Wolf Hall," by Hilary Mantel, pp. 182-202

Part III, II, "Entirely Beloved Cromwell," Spring-December 1530, continued, from "When the king next calls him to court...." through "...Did he tell you about the barmaid?"

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Cromwell unexpectedly "spends an amiable hour with Brandon" who, after Cromwell suggests a remedy for the blindness of one of the king's hounds, pronounces him "a useful sort of man." He also confides that there is tension with his wife because of Anne Boleyn: Brandon's wife has always been a friend of Katherine's and as a former Queen of France, she resents that "Norfolk's niece" (Anne) will have precedence over her at court. He also wonders if he should tell Henry that Anne and Thomas Wyatt have been lovers. Cromwell advises him not to.

At Austin Friars the household now includes Thomas Avery, who is being trained to handle Cromwell's personal finances, and Thomas Wriothesley "pronounced Risley," whom Richard Cromwell and Rafe Sadler accuse of being a spy for Stephen Gardiner. Cromwell thinks about one of the young women at Anne Boleyn's: "He had meant to write to Gregory and say, I have seen such a sweet girl, I will find out who she is and, if I steer our family adroitly in the next few years, perhaps you can marry her."

Cromwell is invited to Thomas More's to discuss what is to happen with Wolsey's colleges -- and to see his roses and his new carpet. Stephen Gardiner is there. Cromwell meets More's large household, including his fool, Henry Pattinson: "normally you take in a fool to protect him, but in Pattinson's case it's the rest of the world needs protection." Cromwell displays his expertise in examining More's new carpet, and also displays some of his character: "There are some people in this world who like everything squared up and precise, and there are those who will allow some drift at the margins. He is both these kinds of person. He would not allow, for example, a careless ambiguity in a lease, but instinct tells him that sometimes a contract need not be drawn too tight." When More asks if he should walk on the carpet or hang it on the wall, Cromwell chooses the latter.

The dinner conversation at More's is in Latin, although More's wife doesn't speak it. Cromwell reflects on the difference between the family as painted by Holbein and the one he sees here: "The painter has grouped them so skillfully that there's no space between the figures for anyone new. The outsider can only soak himself into the scene, as an unintended blot or stain; certainly, he thinks, Gardiner is a blot or stain." He also thinks of Holbein's portrait of More, "you can see that he's thinking, but not what he's thinking, and that's the way it should be."

As he leaves, Alice More asks why Cromwell doesn't marry again: "Got a good house, haven't you? Got the king's ear, my husband says. And from what my sisters in the city say, got everything in good working order." He walks with Gardiner, who says "More goes to bed at nine o'clock." "With Alice?" Cromwell asks. "People say not." "You have spies in the house?" He gets no answer from Gardiner. When Gardiner talks about Cromwell's marrying again, "He feels afraid.... He is sure he and Johane have been secret." Johane Williamson, Liz's sister, and her husband live at Austin Friars. When he tells Gardiner that he is going to see Anne Boleyn, "Gardiner is affronted."

When he tells Anne that he has been to More's, she says, "They say that Thomas More is in love with his own daughter." He replies, "I think they may be right." He reflects that Anne's brother, George, and her father, Thomas, Earl of Wiltshire, have gotten rich because of Wolsey's fall. When he asks why she sent for him, Anne replies, "We like to know where you are." And when he asks why her father or brother didn't send for him in that case, she says, "They do not think you would come."

In the cardinal's move northward, he has been greeted with enthusiastic crowds, which upsets the Duke of Norfolk. "Rumors of the cardinal's popularity don't make him glad, they make him afraid." But Norfolk commends Cromwell for his loyalty to the cardinal and says, "It's a pity you don't work for me." Cromwell replies, "we all want the same thing. For your niece to be queen. Can we not work together?"

On the next visit to Anne, he sees that "something shadowy is bobbing about, on the fringes of the circle of light." It is Thomas Cranmer. "They embrace cautiously: Cambridge scholar, person from Putney."  Anne shows them a drawing she discovered in her bed: the king and two women, one of whom has no head. "Anne sans tête," she says. Cromwell wishes he could get Mary Boleyn out of all this. "She asked me once. I failed her. If she asked me again, I would fail her again."

On the way out with Cranmer, he meets the pale girl he had noticed before and learns that she is "John Seymour's daughter. From Wolf Hall." She is there to spy for her brothers. "Every rising family needs information. With the king considering himself a bachelor, any little girl can hold the key to the future, and not all the money is on Anne." He has a suspicion that she may have been the one who left the drawing in Anne's bed. As he leaves, Cranmer says, "You owe much to Anne Boleyn. More than perhaps you think. She has formed a good opinion of you. I'm not sure she cares to be your sister-in-law, mind..."