Wolf Hall

One tradesman the same as the next? Not in the real world. Any man with a steady hand and a cleaver can call himself a butcher: but without the smith, where does he get that cleaver? Without the man who works in metal, where are your hammers, your scythes, your sickles, scissors and planes? Your arms and armor, your arrowheads, your pikes and your guns? Where are your ships at sea and their anchors? Where are your grappling hooks, your nails, latches, hinges, pokers and tongs? Where are your spits, kettles, trivets, your harness rings, buckles and bits? Where are your knives?

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

The cardinal used to say, the English will forgive a king anything, until he tries to tax them.

Why do I feel I have heard this story before? She has a flock of monks and priests about her, who directed the people’s eyes heavenward while picking their pockets.

A lie is no less a lie because it is a thousand years old.

When have I, when have I ever forced anyone to do anything, he starts to say: but Richard cuts in, “No, you don’t, I agree, it’s just that you are practiced at persuading, and sometimes it’s quite difficult, sir to distinguish being persuaded by you from being knocked down in street and stamped on.”

The king laughs. “Why would I trust a man with my business, if he could not manage his own?”

“He is a good boy, Gregory. Not the most forward, but I can understand that. We’ll make him useful yet.”

“You don’t intend him for the church?” Cranmer asks.

“I said,” growls Rowland, “we’ll make him useful.”

Lent saps the spirits, as of course it is designed to do.

“Tell me, why do you think I do this?” The king sounds curious. “Out of lust? Is that what you think?”

Kill a cardinal? Divide your country? Split the church? “It seems extravagant,” Chapuys murmurs.

But it is no use to justify yourself. It is no good to explain. It is weak to be anecdotal. It is wise to conceal the past even if there is nothing to conceal. A man’s power is in the half-light, in the half-seen movements of his hand and the unguessed-at expression of his face. It is the absence of facts that frightens people: the gap you open, into which they pour their fears, fantasies, desires.

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 say.

Leases, writs, statutes, all are written to be read and each person reads them by the light of self-interest.

Wherever he goes he is cheered by the people.

“The people?” Norfolk says. They’d cheer a Barbary ape. Who cares what they cheer? Hang ’em all.”

“But then who will you tax?” he says, and Norfolk looks at him fearfully, unsure if he’s made a joke.

Rumors of the cardinal’s popularity don’t make him glad, they make him afraid. The king has given Wolsey a pardon. But if he was offended once, he can be offended again. If they could think up forty-four charges, then—if fantasy is unconstrained by truth—they can think up forty-four more.

Anne says, “I am Jezebel. You, Thomas Cromwell, are the priests of Baal.” Her eyes are alight. “As I am a woman, I am the means by which sin enters this world. I am the devil’s gateway, the cursed ingress. I am the means by which Satan attacks the man, whom he was not bold enough to attack, except through me. Well, that is their view of the situation. My view is that there are too many priests with scant learning and smaller occupation. And I wish the Pope and the Emperor and all Spaniards were in the sea and drowned.”

Gambling is not a vice, if you can afford to do it.

He says, this silence of More’s, it was never really silence, was it? 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.

“You see,” she says slowly, “I was always desired. But now I am valued. And that is a different thing, I find.”

And I suppose the cardinal might send him a present for his trouble. Some money, I mean. Our aunt Mercy says that the pope does nothing except on cash terms.

Have you ever observed that when a man gets a son he takes all the credit, and when he gets a daughter he blames his wife? And if they do not breed at all, we say it is because her womb is barren. We do not say it is because his seed is bad.

In his student days he was known for a sharp slanderous tongue, for irreverence to his seniors, for drinking and gaming for high stakes. But who would hold up his head, if people judged us by what we were like at twenty?

“Oh, you are not disappointing,” Henry says. “But the moment you are, I will let you know.”

When you are writing laws you are testing words to find their utmost power. Like spells, they have to make things happen in the real world, and like spells, they only work if people believe in them. If your law exacts a penalty, you must be able to enforce it—on the rich as well as the poor, the people on the Scottish borders and the Welsh marches, the men of Cornwall as well as the men of Sussex and Kent.

Seven years she schemed to be queen, and God protect us from answered prayers.

All our lives and fortunes depend now on that lady, and as well as being mutable she is mortal, and the whole history of the king’s marriage tells us a child in the womb is not an heir in the cradle.

Henry stirs into life. “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.” He drops his voice. “Do you think it is for your personal beauty? The charm of your presence? 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.”

I don’t suppose she would be a bad wife, for somebody who was prepared to keep her chained to the wall.

He had said to More, prophecy didn’t make her rich. He makes a memorandum to himself: “Dame Elizabeth Barton to have money to fee the hangman.” She has five days to live. The last person she will see as she climbs the ladder is her executioner, holding out his paw. If she cannot pay her way at the last, she may suffer longer than she needs. She had imagined how long it takes to burn, but not how long it takes to choke at the end of a rope. In England there is no mercy for the poor. You pay for everything, even a broken neck.

The all-consuming passion of Wolsey for Wolsey was hot enough to scorch all England.

The ladies of Italy, seemingly carefree, wore constructions of iron beneath their silks. It took infinite patience, not just in negotiation, to get them out of their clothes.

“I have never understood where the line is drawn, between sacrifice and self-slaughter.”

“Christ drew it.”

“You don’t see anything wrong with the comparison?”

“She is selling herself by the inch. The gentlemen all say you are advising her. She wants a present in cash for every advance above her knee.”

“Not like you, Mary. One push backward and, good girl, here’s your fourpence.”

“Well. You know. If kings are doing the pushing.” She laughs. “Anne has very long legs. By the time he comes to her secret part he will be bankrupt. The French wars will be cheap, in comparison.”

“He told me that you had a loathing of those in the religious life. That was why he found you diligent in his work.”

“That was not the reason.” He looks up. “May I speak?”

“Oh, for God’s sake,” Henry cries. “I wish someone would.”

He is startled. Then he understands. Henry wants a conversation, on any topic. One that’s nothing to do with love, or hunting, or war. Now that Wolsey’s gone, there’s not much scope for it; unless you want to talk to a priest of some stripe. And if you send for a priest, what does it come back to? To love; to Anne; to what you want and can’t have.

“If you ask me about the monks, I speak from experience, not prejudice, and though I have no doubt that some foundations are well governed, my experience has been of waste and corruption. May I suggest to Your Majesty that, if you wish to see a parade of the seven deadly sins, you do not organize a masque at court but call without notice at a monastery? I have seen monks who live like great lords, on the offerings of poor people who would rather buy a blessing than buy bread, and that is not Christian conduct. Nor do I take the monasteries to be the repositories of learning some believe they are. Was Grocyn a monk, or Colet, or Linacre, or any of our great scholars? They were university men. The monks take in children and use them as servants, they don’t even teach the dog Latin. I don’t grudge them some bodily comforts. It cannot always be Lent. What I cannot stomach is hypocrisy, fraud, idleness—their worn-out relics, their threadbare worship, and their lack of invention. When did anything good last come from a monastery? They do not invent, they only repeat, and what they repeat is corrupt. For hundreds of years the monks have held the pen, and what they have written is what we take to be our history, but I do not believe it really is. I believe they have suppressed the history they don’t like, and written one that is favorable to Rome.”

He stands by a window. A flock of starlings settles among the tight black buds of a bare tree. Then, like black buds unfolding, they open their wings; they flutter and sing, stirring everything into motion, air, wings, black notes in music. He becomes aware that he is watching them with pleasure: that something almost extinct, some small gesture toward the future, is ready to welcome the spring; in some spare, desperate way, he is looking forward to Easter, the end of Lenten fasting, the end of penitence. There is a world beyond this black world. There is a world of the possible. A world where Anne can be queen is a world where Cromwell can be Cromwell. He sees it; then he doesn’t. The moment is fleeting. But insight cannot be taken back. You cannot return to the moment you were in before.

The king turns, he looks at him, astonished. “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.”

“So now, tell me how was Yorkshire.’”

“Filthy.” He sits down. ‘Weather. People. Manners. Morals.”

Thomas More says that the imperial troops, for their enjoyment, are roasting live babies on spits. Oh, he would! says Thomas Cromwell. Listen, soldiers don’t do that. They’re too busy carrying away everything they can turn into ready money.

“The multitude,” Cavendish says, “is always desirous of a change. They never see a great man set up but they must pull him down—for the novelty of the thing.”

He never sees More—a star in another firmament, who acknowledges him with a grim nod—without wanting to ask him, what’s wrong with you? Or what’s wrong with me? Why does everything you know, and everything you’ve learned, confirm you in what you believed before? Whereas in my case, what I grew up with, and what I thought I believed, is chipped away a little and a little, a fragment then a piece and then a piece more. With every month that passes, the corners are knocked off the certainties of this world: and the next world too. Show me where it says, in the Bible, “Purgatory.” Show me where it says “relics, monks, nuns.” Show me where it says “Pope.”

It is a sure sign of troubled minds, the habit of quotation.

News comes from France of the cardinal’s triumphs, parades, public Masses and extempore Latin orations. It seems that, once disembarked, he has stood on every high altar in Picardy and granted the worshippers remission of their sins. That’s a few thousand Frenchman free to start all over again.

A part of the art of ruling, I suppose, is to know when to shut your ears.

He says, “No ruler in the history of the world has ever been able to afford a war. They’re not affordable things. No prince ever says, ‘This is my budget, so this is the kind of war I can have.’ You enter into one and it uses up all the money you’ve got, and then it breaks you and bankrupts you.”

There cannot be new things in England. There can be old things freshly presented or new things that pretend to be old.

“His reliquary!” George is upset, astonished. “To part with it like this! It is a piece of the true Cross!”

“We’ll get him another. I know a man in Pisa makes them ten for five florins and a round dozen for cash up front. And you get a certificate with St. Peter’s thumbprint, to say they’re genuine.”

Unreliable, is the word that comes to mind. If all the old stories are to be believed, and some people, let us remember, do believe them, then our king is one part bastard archer, one part hidden serpent, one part Welsh, and all of him in debt to the Italian banks…

More pats his arm. “Have you no plans to marry again, Thomas? No? Perhaps wise. My father always says, choosing a wife is like putting your hand into a bag full of writhing creatures, with one eel to six snakes. What are the chances you will pull out the eel?”

“But I need a new husband. To stop them calling me names. Can the cardinal get husbands?”

“The cardinal can do anything. What kind of husband would you like?”

She considers. “One who will take care of my children. One who can stand up to my family. One who doesn’t die.”

Beneath every history, another history.

He will remember his first sight of the open sea: a gray wrinkled vastness, like the residue of a dream.

For what’s the point of breeding children, if each generation does not improve on what went before?

The trouble with England, he thinks, is that it’s so poor in gesture. We shall have to develop a hand signal for “Back off, our prince is fucking this man’s daughter.” He is surprised that the Italians have not done it. Though perhaps they have, and he just never caught on.

Katherine finds him too intimate with his co-legate; anyone who has spent much time with Wolsey, she thinks, no longer knows what honesty is.

We don’t have to invite pain in, he thinks. It’s waiting for us: sooner rather than later.

It’s not easy to speak of nonexistence, even if you’ve already commissioned your tomb.

It will be the usual tense gathering, everyone cross and hungry: for even a rich Italian with an ingenious kitchen cannot find a hundred ways with smoked eel or salt cod. The merchants in Lent miss their mutton and malmsey, their nightly grunt in a featherbed with wife or mistress; from now to Good Friday their knives will be out for some cutthroat intelligence, some mean commercial advantage.

Norfolk approaches him. He stands far too close. His eyes are bloodshot. Every sinew is jumping. He says, “Substitute nothing, you misbegotten—” The duke stabs a forefinger into his shoulder. “You…person,” he says; and again, “you nobody from Hell, you whore-spawn, you cluster of evil, you lawyer.”