Wolf Hall Companion Read online

  CONTENTS

  INTRODUCTION

  Finding Cromwell

  Fact and Fiction

  A New Cromwell

  CHAPTER 1 Rising Fortunes

  Cromwell’s Early Life

  Walter Cromwell

  Thomas Cromwell on the Continent

  A Mercantile Education

  Cromwell the Lawyer

  The Cromwell Family at Austin Friars

  Cromwell and the Cardinal

  Richard Fox

  Wolsey

  The Tudor Dynasty

  Heirs and Spares

  The Tudor Court

  The Royal Palaces

  Families of Court

  CHAPTER 2 Cromwell Ascends

  The Cardinal’s Man

  Katherine of Aragon

  The Rivals and Henry’s ‘Great Matter’

  Entry to court

  Anne Boleyn

  Tudor Pastimes

  Feast Days and Holy Days

  Tudor Christmas

  The Trappings of a Gentleman

  Men of the Privy Chamber

  CHAPTER 3 A New Era

  The Cardinal’s Descent

  Thomas More

  The Ambassador

  The Privy Council at Westminster

  Turning Point

  Elizabeth Barton: The Holy Maid of Kent

  Calais

  A Way Forward

  Prince[ess]

  Personal Spheres

  Renaissance

  Renaissance Influences

  The Oath of Succession

  CHAPTER 4 Henry’s Wrath

  Around the Throne the Thunder Rolls

  The Death of Katherine

  The Fall of the Boleyns

  Gathering Evidence

  Interrogation

  Trial and Execution

  After the Execution

  Personal Spheres

  The New Court Structure

  The Seymours

  The Rise of the Seymours

  Old Families, New Order

  Success and Succession

  Religion, the Dissolution of the Monasteries and the Pilgrimage of Grace

  CHAPTER 5 The Fall of Cromwell

  A Birth and a Death

  The Search for a New Queen

  New Alliances and Anne of Cleves

  Miscalculations and Execution

  The Aftermath

  Further Reading

  Index

  Acknowledgements

  ‘So now get up.’

  (Wolf Hall)

  The violent blows of his father leave the young Thomas Cromwell sprawled on his side, his bruised body finding little comfort from the dirty cobblestones. The smell of blood and beer infuses the air of the Putney blacksmith’s yard. In the distance he hears shouting, but all Thomas can focus on is his father’s large boot, placed inches away from his head, the stitching tying the boot together unravelling from the violent movements.

  Everything shifts out of focus, yet somehow he stands up and hobbles to the house of his older sister, Kat Williams. Married into the Williams family, whose influence stretches no further than Wimbledon, but seemingly powerful to a boy who has never ventured beyond Putney, Kat has escaped their abusive father but can offer little protection when Walter inevitably comes to rage at the door demanding that Thomas return home. Thomas realizes that he must leave Putney but begins to dream a little bigger. He wonders if somewhere in Europe there is a war raging and imagines becoming a soldier.

  He flees to the port of Dover where he encounters three Lowland cloth merchants. In return for helping them carry their bundles on board the boat crossing the English Channel, they take him along as a member of their party. Throughout the journey he reveals the details of his life to them: stories of his childhood, his father’s abuse and illegal activities. The men are horrified at how badly the English treat their children. When the ship docks in Calais they part ways, the men tell Thomas that if he ever needs a bed and hearth, he will be welcome. But the young Cromwell will not stop till he finds a war. As he is greeted by the sight of the vast open sea for the first time, he kisses the holy medal his sister has given him for protection and drops it into the sea.

  With this unsentimental introduction to the 16th century, and to the boy who would become one of the most infamous individuals of the period, so begins Mantel’s opus Wolf Hall with an undeniable freshness (stale beer and blood in the air notwithstanding) and honesty, portending a darker, grittier world than we are accustomed to.

  The lure of historical fiction, as author Margaret Atwood suggests, is the lure of time travel. Every generation or so, across various forms of media, the Tudor kings and queens are reimagined and refashioned. Readers don’t require a new ending, for we know Henry VIII’s songbook all too well. What we want is to immerse ourselves in the glamour, opulence and infinite intrigues and trysts of the Tudor court, all rich and beguiling thrills for our imaginative senses. In most novels of the period, we are invited to marvel at the majesty and sophistication of Henry’s palaces; partake in the extravagant, multi-course feasts of beast, fish and fowl; to feel the weight of jewel-encrusted velvet gowns brushing across stone floors; and catch the advisors jostling for power as they scheme and squabble behind the doors of the Privy Chamber. And just beyond all this we can witness the towering figure of Henry as he pursues his women into the royal bedchamber, beckoning the reader, where, on occasion, bodices are ripped.

  Hilary Mantel’s compelling trilogy – Wolf Hall (2009), Bring Up the Bodies (2012) and The Mirror and the Light (2020) – and their stage and screen adaptations, invite us into a world of religion, politics, international affairs and Tudor governmental reform. Mantel treads the same ground as historian and novelist alike, but her construction of the past allows for an entirely new perspective. As Mantel has said, while the Tudor period remains vigorously contested for historians, to a general audience it is a rich vein of endless escapades and melodrama, with surprising tableaux of light entertainment. There are bookshelves full of novels about Henry VIII and his six queens, but in Mantel’s words, ‘change the viewpoint, and the story is new’. It is not Henry who leads us through the corridors of court and power, nor one of his legendary queens. Instead we follow Mantel’s ‘He, Cromwell’, whom the foremost Tudor historian, Geoffrey Elton, famously declared was ‘not biographable’.

  FINDING CROMWELL

  With the fall of Cardinal Wolsey, Thomas Cromwell emerged to become one of the most powerful men of the Tudor age, whose career has divided historians ever since. While he has always been a pivotal figure in Tudor politics, some historians have viewed him as a morally dubious character who drew around him sinister spheres of court officials and hangers-on. The Cromwell of Wolf Hall is an astute observer of the machinations of the court, clever and calculating, at least until he flies too close to the royal personages and himself gets burned.

  Yet of the enigmatic historical figure that was Thomas Cromwell, we know very little, which seems to be exactly how he wanted it. For Cromwell, information and knowledge were forms of currency, to be traded for leverage and influence with those around him; a guarded man when it came to his own background, he successfully cultivated an air of mystery, perplexing friend and enemy alike. He has remained elusive to many historians as there is a distinct lack of textual evidence to define him. Furthermore, elements of Cromwell’s legacy are lost to history owing to the deliberate destruction of years of his accumulated papers and letters following his execution, and the passage of time. There is a definite one-sidedness to surviving documents from Cromwell: as historian Professor Diarmaid MacCulloch notes, only the ‘in-tray’ survives. This largely comprises letters addressed to him of a personal nature, or in his various offici
al roles up to and including his highest appointment, as Chief Minister. We have so few letters in his own hand, MacCulloch notes, that Cromwell’s ‘own voice is largely absent’. And it is precisely in the absence of evidence that an impressive mythology has evolved over the centuries. As Mantel’s Cromwell prophesizes: ‘Strive as I might, one day I will be gone. When the time comes I may vanish before the ink is dry. I will leave behind me a great mountain of paper, and those who come after me will turn the page over and write on me.’

  And we have. As Mantel has it, the living chase the dead.

  FACT AND FICTION

  Even during his lifetime, Cromwell’s friends and enemies struggled to explain how a man with such an obscure, if not outright questionable, background could rise so high at the English court. Some contemporary sources attributed Cromwell’s elevation to a single conclusive meeting he had with Henry VIII in 1530. This was when Cromwell presented a blueprint which would allow the King to take control of the Catholic Church in England, improve its administration and, most importantly, end Rome’s dominance and interference in matters of state. Henry wanted an annulment of his marriage to Katherine of Aragon to be determined in England and not by the Pope in Rome, who was far less favourable to the annulment. Our main sources for this breakthrough moment in the long and exasperating negotiations are Imperial ambassador to the Tudor Court, Eustace Chapuys, Cardinal Reginald Pole, and John Foxe. All three believed that Cromwell, in one masterful stroke, had ingeniously solved Henry’s marital problems, thus ensuring his promotion within the government, and forever endearing himself to the king.

  Cromwell would become involved in some of the darkest events of Henry VIII’s reign, all of which have left an indelible stain on his character for many historians, while Henry seems to have escaped much of that censure. Nineteenth-century historians unsurprisingly found Cromwell guilty of leading Henry astray, describing him variously as: ‘the most despotic minister who had ever governed England;’ a ‘notorious chief minister;’ and a ‘supreme master of the bloody game of faction politics’. As one modern Tudor historian noted, ‘for mafia-style offers you can’t refuse, look no further than Thomas Cromwell.’

  Historian Geoffrey Elton argued that Cromwell was the architect of radical changes in legal, political, social, economic and religious life. More recently, Professor Diarmaid MacCulloch, in his comprehensive biography Thomas Cromwell: A Revolutionary Life (2018) presents quite a formidable reappraisal of the man and minister, leading us through a tangle of surviving documents to show how this son of a Putney blacksmith modernized Tudor bureaucracy and politics. In fiction, Robert Bolt’s memorable play A Man for All Seasons (1960) and the movie based on it (1967), present Cromwell as an accomplished villain and a royal hit-man. In the movie Anne of a Thousand Days (1969), Cromwell is depicted as brutish thug, a shrewd fixer and henchman for the king. The popular British TV Series The Tudors (2007) depicts Cromwell as a ruthless minister, a smirking, Machiavellian-style schemer, though with something of a conscience.

  Cromwell is neither hero nor villain in Mantel’s work, and she deftly explores his psyche, from the thrashing at the hands of his father through to his extraordinary rise as the King’s indispensable ‘fixer’.

  A NEW CROMWELL

  While historical facts are non-negotiable, Mantel weaves a narrative of fact and fiction from one of the most famous periods in history. She sculpts entire conversations from the dispatches of the period, extracts references to individuals and quirky expressions from fragments within communiqués and fills the gaps in the historical record with plausible motives and interior monologues, She is always reaching for that distinctive tone she came to recognize as ‘He, Cromwell’, asking us to look beyond his image as the King’s enforcer, at the same time reminding us that this is fiction. The power of a persuasive narrative is that it allows us to identify with great figures of the era. And that is the double-edged sword of historical fiction – long after we forget the exact details and dates, we still hold our emotional tie to the characters we loved, and loathed.

  Mantel guides us through the labyrinthine corridors of power in this first dedicated fictional portrait of Henry VIII’s chief minister. At first he watches from the sidelines but he is by no means an impartial observer – he is making mental notes, remembering everything. He is calculating – ‘What’s in this for me?’ – and cynical; for he has learned to be suspicious of peoples’ motives. Along the way he is just a man with a family, with all the vicissitudes that entails, as he endures personal tragedy, great grief and self-doubt.

  Mantel reimagines Cromwell’s consciousness, and through his eyes we see the major players of the Tudor pantheon: Henry VIII, Anne Boleyn and Cardinal Wolsey among others, effectively upending the traditional tropes. Anne Boleyn is darker and more brittle than she has usually been drawn, Cardinal Wolsey is more than a haughty mountain of scarlet, and Thomas More is not a man for all seasons but one of cruel conviction. Controversial portraits indeed, but Mantel is merely asking us to ‘consider this’. From his cell in the Tower, the real Cromwell wrote to Henry, admitting that ‘I have meddled in so many matters under your highness, that I am not able to answer them all.’ Certainly the extent of Cromwell’s involvement in some of the most extraordinary and violent moments of Henry VIII’s reign may never be truly known. Mantel blends fact and fiction – people, personalities, and motivations have been imagined and embellished for dramatic effect, interwoven with documentary evidence. History has provided us with the how and what, but Mantel has made her own suggestions as to why.

  This companion presents the main events, places and themes rendered in Mantel’s monumental trilogy; however, with such a vast dramatis personae, not every character makes an appearance. And while Mantel’s Cromwell may have written ‘the book called Henry’, this work is not concerned with the monarch, but rather the court and the people whose lives revolved around him, aiming to enrich the reader’s understanding of Mantel’s works and the history beneath it, while threading through the historical narrative of this endlessly fascinating period.

  CROMWELL’S EARLY LIFE

  In a generation everything can change.

  (Wolf Hall)

  In August of 1485, likely the very year Thomas Cromwell was born, two men fought at the heads of their armies on Bosworth Field in Leicestershire: King Richard III of the House of York and his challenger, Henry Tudor. Within hours, Richard III lay dead on the battlefield, his 10,000-strong army scattered. The battle followed Richard’s victory over the House of Lancaster in the Wars of the Roses, the dynastic struggle that had plunged the country into civil war for decades. Appreciating the gravitas of the moment, Lord Stanley, Henry’s step-father, rushed to his side and placed the golden circlet that had been attached to Richard’s helmet on his head, thereby proclaiming him Henry VII, King of England and Wales.

  Rewards and titles would flow to those whose exceptional valour had won this victory, but Henry required a new age for England. Although he and later historians would defend the legitimacy of his claim to the throne, he recognized that only a successful kingship would truly justify his seizing the crown. For now he needed to secure the best counsel around him, not just from the ranks of the nobility that had served previous kings, but men of talent and education, chosen on merit rather than birth, to lead his government and bring peace and prosperity to his kingdom. Henry VII’s new way of doing business opened up career opportunities to many in the Tudor equivalent of a civil service. These new men serving the Tudors rose from amongst the middle ranks of town and country to become some of the most famous Tudor personalities.

  Under Henry’s son, Henry VIII, the court became a stock exchange for courtiers craving advancement where they could list their personal value and demonstrate their skills; a change in their status could bring power, estates and titles. Yet even in a world of opportunity, few could have imagined that Thomas Cromwell of Putney, son of a blacksmith and brewer, would become indispensable to the king.
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  As discussed in the introduction, exactly how this happened is something of a mystery, for Thomas Cromwell’s trajectory from the grimy streets of Putney to the Privy Council is not well documented; he was guarded about his early life, leaving us with few textual traces from which we can construct his backstory, but from which, in the right hands, an interesting fictional narrative might be woven.

  Cromwell is an Anglo-Saxon name, originating in Ireland and Nottinghamshire, and it is likely our Thomas was distantly related to the Lords Cromwell who owned the beautiful moated, red-bricked Tattershall Castle in Lincolnshire. The Cromwell name even graced royal records, as in Ralph de Cromwell, third Baron Cromwell, who fought alongside Henry V when he defeated the French at the famous battle of Agincourt. In 1420 he was one of the commissioners who assisted Henry V in the negotiations for the Treaty of Troyes, which ensured that upon the death of Charles VI of France, the French crown would pass to the English king. During the reign of Henry VI, he was appointed Lord Treasurer of England. So, the family had consorted with those of power and prestige at the English court, and our Cromwell would not be the first of his name to achieve success.

  Cromwell’s particular line, however, was of the yeoman class, forever struggling to break through class barriers. Their moment came when Cromwell’s grandfather, John Cromwell, a successful business owner from Ireland, moved the family including his two sons John and Walter to Putney in London.

  With Cromwell, there was a degree of gentility mixed with the mercantile; he enjoyed describing himself as a former ruffian, cultivating an image of a low-born man made good, something his enemies would later sneer at and use against him. Although Cromwell may have wanted to retain an air of mystery about his life, we have four key sources, individuals who, as we shall see, took a keen interest in his progress and were able to flesh out his early years: ambassador Eustace Chapuys, who served for almost two decades at the Tudor Court; Matteo Bandello, a contemporary Italian writer, soldier, monk, and sometime bishop; Cardinal Reginald Pole; and protestant martyr John Foxe.