Wolf Hall 7

Week 7 of #wolfcrawl

Week 7: Entirely Beloved Cromwell (part 2)
Monday 12 February – Sunday 18 February
Pages 236 – 271 (36 pages) (section starting: “Mary Shelton is in attendance; she looks up, simpers.”)

Posturing and circling

‘Do you know, there are ways and ways…Sometimes people just tell me things.’

Cromwell and Anne Boleyn are similar in some respects, each working for themselves. Cromwell trying to stay buoyant, despite his masters fall; Anne to rise to Queen. I feel that they are quite well matched, in their conversations, they circle each other and I think they have a grudging respect for the other.

Thomas Howard, 3rd Duke of Norfolk by Hans Holbein the Younger, Royal Collection.

Norfolk is such a great character, bolshie, swaggering and almost perpetually angry. Walking around jangling with relics he is trying to petition the pope for the king, threatening to hang the people, Cromwell puts him down and he’s not sure how to take him. Again all this posturing and circling.

‘Tell him if I ever see him again, I will chew him up, bones, flesh and gristle.’

I believe him.

He is absolutely frothing, crimson and incandescent. How dare Wolsey set himself up in the North as a substitute King, it might not have been a bad idea thinks Crum. But he turns it on its head and wants to work together to bring Anne up to be Queen; she is Norfolk’s niece and so his family will rise. Anne sees the Cardinal as the sole obstruction to the crown and literally wants his guts.

I feel sorry for the Cardinal….

Thomas Cranmer, yes another Thomas has returned from Rome. Nothing has changed and it is Anne’s turn to boil. She is clearly intelligent, knows her mind, reads and keeps herself up to date but above all she is determined. She means to have the King, despite the threats, prophecies ‘ Anne sans tête.’ She is not frightened, she is facing it head on.

Thomas Cranmer 1545

‘I’m John Seymour’s daughter. From Wolf Hall.’

Jane Seymour flits in and out of the edge of our sightline. Pale, small, unnoticeable, out in Anne’s court to spy. She is, for now, mousey and unimportant.

Cromwell and Cranmer share stories and we learn more about the churchman, both widowers, both seem on a level. I feel that Cromwell actually likes Cranmer, unlike More. Cromwell worries that the Cardinal thinks badly of him, and that he is working for himself. And why wouldn’t he? He has to save his own skin

‘There is no time. The snare is set for him and I dare not move.’

After the hunt

The hunt occupies the king, mind and body but as the season ends it is his conscience and his pride and the delivery of results that matter. Never alone, ever. It would drive me nuts, people there, all the time, while you eat and sleep. Henry has no patience, yet still lives with his wife. The one who he tells everything- still. So weird! He can’t bear to look weak in the eyes of Anne. And he always has to win, this childlike king.

November 1530 sees the end of the road for the Cardinal, arrested and dies en route to London

‘What was England, before Wolsey? A little offshore island, poor and cold.’

Cardinal Wolsey at the Gates of Leicester Abbey, by Charles West Cope, 1847, via the Royal Collection Trust

Arrested for high treason by Anne’s old lover Harry Percy. But even then the Cardinal shows his power and walks away, even at the last, whilst George Cavendish barrs the door to trembling Percy and takes up the story for Cromwell. Cromwell wants vengeance, the people come out for the Cardinal, candle lit and in support but he knew his time was up, stopped eating and was dying. Nailed up in a plain coffin, gone.

Cromwell at last unwraps the package he was given. It is the Cardinals turquoise ring, which fits him like a glove.

Ring from the portrait of Thomas Cromwell by Hans Holbein

Wolsey in Hell

There is a play depicting the demise of Wolsey, for entertainment. It’s a bit like the one in Nativity when the baby is torn apart by Herod. Bad taste, done for effect, the court laughing at his expense, Anne happy and glowing. The King, troubled. Cromwell watches and notes the players; George Boleyn, Henry Norris, Francis Weston, William Brereton all gleeful and full of swagger. The Kings fool and the cardinals man of old has his part too.

Image from Episode 2 BBC TV production Wolf Hall

In reality, Anne Boleyn’s father, Thomas Boleyn and Uncle Norfolk were the ones behind the masque. Performed at Thomas Boleyn’s London home at a private dinner for Claude la Guische, the French ambassador, in January 1531, later than in the book. It is likely that George Boleyn was present, he was after all family but there is no evidence that he or the others took part in the production, why would they? Men on the rise wouldn’t want to demean themselves by acting as players. The aim would be to show the King’s attitude to the catholic church, showing the importance of the Boleyn family now that Wolsey was gone. For Cromwell though, Mantel gives a hint towards the men caught up in Anne’s downfall, we can see his mind turning, noting the players.

He paints out the cardinals arms.

‘Leave a space’

It is Christmas 1530.