Wolf Hall

Citation

Mantel, Hilary. Wolf Hall. Toronto, CA: Harper Perennial, 2009. 9781554687787.

Abstract

“England, the 1520s. Henry VIII is on the throne, but he has no male heir. Despite opposition from the pope and most of Europe, he is determined to annul his marriage of twenty years and marry Anne Boleyn. The quest for the king’s freedom destroys his brilliant advisor, Cardinal Wolsey, and leaves a power vacuum and a deadlock. Into this impasse steps Thomas Cromwell. A political genius, a briber, a bully and a charmer, Cromwell has broken all the rules of a rigid society in his ascent to power, and he is preparing to break some more. Pitting himself against parliament, the political establishment and the papacy, he is prepared to reshape England to his own and Henry’s desires.”

Annotations

“There are three kinds of scenes, one called the tragic, second the comic, third the satyric. Their decorations are different and unalike each other in scheme. Tragic scenes are delineated with columns, pediments, statues and other objects suited to kings; comic scenes exhibit private dwellings, with balconies and views representing rows of windows, after the manner of ordinary dwellings; satyric scenes are decorated with trees, caverns, mountains and other rustic objects delineated in landscape style. VITRUVIUS, De Architectura, on the theatre, c.27BC” Note: Epigraph, story

“These be the names of the players: Felicity / Liberty / Measure / Magnificence / Fancy / Counterfeit Countenance / Crafty Conveyance / Cloaked Collusion / Courtly Abusion / Folly / Adversity / Poverty / Despair / Mischief / Good Hope / Redress / Circumspection / Perseverance / Magnificence: an Interlude, JOHN SKELTON, C. 1520” Note: Epigraph, story

Part One

I. Across the Narrow Sea. Putney, 1500.

“some men have a habitual sniffle, some women have a headache, and Morgan has this wonder” (6) Note: Habit

“He can only manage like this: short, simple, declarative sentences” (8) Note: Language

“‘Look at him—if it were up to me, I’d have a war just to employ him’” (11) Note: War

“She’s not crying for him, because nobody, he thinks, will ever cry for him, God didn’t cut him out that way” (12) Note: God

“He says, ‘Hwyl, Morgan Williams. Diolch am yr arian.’ Thank you for the money. ‘Gofalwch am Katheryn. Gofalwch am eich busnes. Wela i chi eto rhywbryd. Pob lwc.’ / Look after my sister. Look after your business. See you again sometime. / Morgan Williams stares. / He almost grins; would do, if it wouldn’t split his face open. All those days he’d spent hanging around the Williamses’ households: did they think he’d just come for his dinner? / ‘Pob lwc,’ Morgan says slowly. Good luck” (12) Note: Language

“They are so pleased with this, they laugh at their own wit so much, that he continues asking, just to give people pleasure” (14) Note: Language

“For the first time, the weight in his chest shifts a little; he thinks, there could be other places, better” (15) Note: Place

“They laugh; they like to see him telling a story. Good talker, one of them says. Before they dock, the most silent of them will stand up and make an oddly formal speech, at which one will nod, and which the other will translate” (15) Note: Language

“He will remember his first sight of the open sea: a grey wrinkled vastness, like the residue of a dream” (16) Note: Place

II. Paternity. 1527.

“Stephen sings always on one note” (17) Note: Language

“In the case of his man Cromwell, the cardinal has two jokes, which sometimes unite to form one … And the cardinal has other jokes, from time to time: as he requires them” (20) Note: Language

“These are the phrases with which to negotiate” (21) Note: Language

“The cardinal justifies the text, referring to the Hebrew; his voice is mild, lulling. He loves to instruct, where there is the will to be instructed” (24) Note: Language

“everything that comes to pass will pass by God’s design, a design re-envisaged and redrawn, with helpful emendations, by the cardinal. He used to say, ‘The king will do such-and-such.’ Then he began to say, ‘We will do such-and-such. Now he says, “This is what I will do’” (28) Note: Action

“half a lifetime waiting to be expunged, eased from the record” (30) Note: Record

“There is another story about Katherine, a different story” (30) Note: Story

“Thomas Cromwell is now a little over forty years old. He is a man of strong build, not tall. Various expressions are available to his face, and one is readable: an expression of stifled amusement. duble His hair is dark, heavy and waving, and his small eyes, which are of very strong sight, light up in conversation: so the Spanish ambassador will tell us, quite soon. It is said he knows by heart the entire New Testament in Latin, and so as a servant of the cardinal is apt-ready with a text if abbots flounder. His speech is low and rapid, his manner assured; he is at home in courtroom or waterfront, bishop’s palace or inn yard. He can draft a contract, train a falcon, draw a map, stop a street fight, furnish a house and fix a jury. He will quote you a nice point in the old authors, from Plato to Plautus and back again. He knows new and poetry, and can say it in Italian. He works all hours, first last to bed. He makes money and he spends it. He will take a bet on anything” (31) Note: Language

III. At Austin Friars. 1527.

“‘He greets us. As if there were only one of us. Bad Latin” (35) Note: Language

“‘He doesn’t have to know everything I know.” (35) Note: Knowledge

“he likes to be told stories, dragon stories, stories of green people who live in the woods” (36) Note: Story

“The thing people don’t understand about an is its great, unpunctuated wastes of inaction: you have to you army scavenge for food, you are camped out somewhere with a rising water level because your mad capitaine says so, you are shifted abruptly in the middle of the night into some indefensible position, so you never really sleep, your equipment is defective, the gunners keep causing small unwanted explosions, the crossbowbut men are either drunk or praying, the arrows are ordered up not here yet, and your whole mind is occupied by a seething anxiety that things are going to go badly because il principe, or whatever little worshipfulness is in charge today, is not very good at the basic business of thinking. It didn’t take him many winters to get out of fighting and into supply. In Italy, you could always fight in the summer, if you felt like it. If you wanted to go out” (37) Note: War, thought, logistics

“And your book from Germany. It was packaged as something else” (38) Note: Book

“He had only thought, and Wolsey had only thought, that the Emperor and Spain would be against it. Only the Emperor. He which smiles in the dark, hands behind his head. He doesn’t people, but waits for Liz to tell him. ‘All women,’ she says. ‘All women everywhere in England. All women who have a daughter but no son. All women who have lost a child. All women who have lost any hope of having a child. All women who are forty’” (38) Note: Women

“read it for yourself: that’s the point, Lizzie. You read it, you’ll be surprised what’s not in it” (39) Note: Protestant

“Thomas More, some sort of failed priest, a frustrated preacher. 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?” (39) Note: More

“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” (39) Note: Knowledge

“He turns back to his German book. The king, with help from Thomas More, has written a book against Luther, for which the Pope has granted him the title of Defender of the Faith” (39) Note: Protestant

“[Cromwell] keeps up with what’s written with what’s smuggled through the Channel ports, and the little East Anglian inlets, the tidal creeks where a small boat with dubious cargo can be beached and pushed out again, by moonlight, to sea” (39-40) Note: Books

“Wolsey will burn books, but not men. He did so, only last October, at St Paul’s Cross: a holocaust of the English language, and so much rag-rich paper consumed, and so much black printers’ ink” (40) Note: Books

“The Testament he keeps in the chest is the pirated edition from German proper Antwerp, which is easier to get hold of than the printing. He knows William Tyndale; before London got too hot for him, he lodged six months with Humphrey Monmouth, the master draper, in the city. He is a principled man, a hard man, and Thomas More calls him The Beast; he looks as if he has never laughed in his life, but then, what’s there to laugh about, when you’re driven from your native shore? His Testament is in octavo, nasty cheap paper: on the title page, where the printer’s colophon and address should be, the words ‘PRINTED IN UTOPIA’. He hopes Thomas More has seen one of these. He is tempted to show him, just to see his face” (40) Note: Protestant

“It is surprising how much love there is, these days, between those who read German” (40) Note: Language

“prone to start a sentence in one language and finish it in another” (41) Note: Language

“He said, ‘I found an easier way to be’” (41) Note: Easier way

“Mercy, he suspects, comes from a family where John Wycliffe’s writings are preserved and quoted, where the scriptures in English have always been known; scraps of writing hoarded, forbidden verses locked in the head. These things come down the generations, as eyes and noses come down, as meekness or the capacity for passion, as muscle power or the need to take a risk” (41-42) Note: Protestant, writing

“it is surprising how international is the language of old men” (42) Note: Language

“People are always the key, and if you can look them in the face you can be pretty sure if they’re honest and up to the job” (43) Note: People

“For what’s the point of breeding children, if each generation does not improve on what went before?” (44) Note: Children

“Possibly it’s something women do: spend time imagining what it’s like to be each other. One can learn from that, he thinks” (44) Note: Women

Part Two

I. Visitation. 1529.

“They are bundling up parchments and scrolls, missals and memoranda and the volumes of his personal accounts; they are taking even the ink and the quills” (47) Note: Texts

“to think the letter of the law is some kind of luxury” (47) Note: Letter

“They scatter across the floor, letters from Popes, letters from the scholars of Europe: from Utrecht, from Paris, from San Diego de Compostela; from Erfurt, from Strassburg, from Rome. They are packing his gospels and taking them for the king’s libraries. The texts are heavy to hold in the arms, and awkward as if they breathed; their pages are made of slunk vellum from stillborn calves, reveined by the illuminator in tints of lapis and leaf-green” (48-49) Note: Texts

“the best way lies in suggesting that they are brothers from some old campaign” (52) Note: Language, people

“I wanted the Commons to take some lessons from the last time. To cast their minds back” (53) Note: Learning, mind

“do you know what fifty miles is, to a halfstarved infantryman in winter, when he sleeps on wet ground and wakes up cold? Do you know what fifty miles is to a baggage train, with carts up to the axles in mud?” (53) Note: People, logistics

“‘I don’t think it’s the English. I think it’s just people. They always hope there may be something better’” (55) Note: People, better

“One of them has said too much; one of them has felt too much” (56) Note: Say and feel

“It is not because, in Putney, Englishmen are less fickle. It’s just that they haven’t heard yet” (56) Note: People, hearing

“‘To part with it like this! It is a piece of the true Cross!’ / ‘We’ll him another. I know a man in Pisa makes them ten get 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’” (58) Note: Certificate, religion

“‘Don’t teach me the law’” (59) Note: Teach, law

“But it’s not simple; this is what the world and the cardinal conspire to teach him” (59) Note: Teach

“You don’t get on by being original. You don’t get on by being bright. You don’t get on by being strong. You get on by being a subtle crook” (60) Note: Criminal

“‘I’m damned if they’re going unpaid’” (63) Note: People

II. An Occult History of Britain. 1521-1529.

“Whichever way you look at it, it all begins in slaughter” (66) Note: Compare Girard

“a woman to whom, several years before the dukes walk in to despoil him, he will need to turn his attention; whose history, before ruin seizes him, he will need to comprehend” (66) Note: Woman

“Beneath every history, another history” (66) Note: History

“Now she speaks her native tongue with a slight, unplaceable accent, strewing her sentences with French words when she pretends she can’t think of the English” (67) Note: Language

“‘You can never advance your own pedigree and God knows, Tom, you were born in a more dishonourable estate than me - so the trick is always to keep them scraped up to their own standards. They made the rules; they cannot complain if I am the strictest enforcer’” (70) Note: Pedigree, rules

“‘It’s only what the women are saying. The silk women. And the cloth merchants’ wives.’ He waits, smiling. ‘Which is of now interest to you, I’m sure’” (71) Note: Women

“He Thomas, also Tomos, Tommaso and Thomaes Cromwell, withdraws his past selves into his present body and edges back to where he was before” (71) Note: Names, selves, languages

“the bow to the breadth of his jurisdiction” (73) Note: Law speaking

“But the cardinal looks him over; he is still puzzling. It is early in their association and his character, as invented by the cardinal, is at this stage a work in progress; in fact, perhaps it is this evening that sets it going?” (73) Note: Character, puzzle

“‘The women judge from orders to the silk merchants that the king has a new—’” (74) Note: Women

“‘Thomas, from now on, any London gossip,’ he touches the damask cloth, ‘bring it right here to me. Don’t trouble about the source. Let the trouble be mine. And I promise never to assault you. Truly.’ / ‘It is forgotten.’ / ‘I doubt that. Not if you’ve carried the lesson all these years’” (75) Note: Fabric, gossip, lesson

“The trouble with England, he thinks, is that it’s so poor in gesture” (76) Note: Gesture

“What happened next, he asked George, with Harry Percy and Anne Boleyn? / He knew the story only in the cardinal’s chilly and dismissive rendition. But George said, ‘I shall tell you how it was. Now. Stand up, Master Cromwell.’ He does it. ‘A little to the left. Now, which would you like to be? My lord cardinal, or the heir?’ / ‘Oh, I see, is it a play? You be the cardinal. I don’t feel equal to it.’ / Cavendish adjusts his position, turning him imperceptibly from the window, where night and bare trees are their audience. His gaze rests on the air, as if he were seeing the past: shadowy bodies, moving in this lightless room. ‘Can you look troubled?’ George asks. ‘As if you were brooding upon mutinous speech, and yet dare not speak? No, no, not like that. You are youthful, gangling, your head drooping, you are blushing.’ Cavendish sighs. I believe you never blushed in your life, Master Cromwell. Look.’ Cavendish sets his hands, gently, on his upper arms. ‘Let us change roles. Sit here. You be the cardinal’” (77) Note: Performance

“‘So what shall I do?’ / ‘Just pretend!’” (77) Note: Pretense, perform

“‘I like,’ he says, ‘the way you remember the exact words. Did you write them down at the time? Or do you use some licence?’ / Cavendish looks sly. No one exceeds your own powers of memory,’ he says. ‘My lord cardinal asks for an accounting of something or other, and you have all the figures at your fingertips’” (78) Note: Words, memory

“‘Perhaps I invent them.’ / Oh, I don’t think so.’ Cavendish is shocked. ‘You couldn’t do that for long.’ / ‘It is a method of remembering. I learned it in Italy.’ / ‘ There are people, in this household and elsewhere, who would give much to know the whole of what you learned in Italy’” (79) Note: Memory

“‘Go on. What happened next?’ / In May 1527, feeling embattled and bad-tempered, the cardinal opens a court of inquiry at York Place, to look into the validity of the king’s marriage” (80) Note: Shift to narration

“Try always, Wolsey says, to find out what people wear under their clothes. At an earlier stage in life this would have surprised him; he had thought that under their clothes people wore their skin” (84) Note: Clothes, skin, surfaces

“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” (87) Note: People

“Is it monks who make them, knotting and snipping in a fury of righteousness, chuckling at the thought of the pain they will cause to persons unknown?” (87) Note: Righteous

“We don’t have to invite pain in, he thinks. It’s waiting for us” (87) Note: Pain

“Might we not rule? It ought not to be beyond the wit of men or angels to send a message to Pope Clement, even in captivity, and the same men or angels will bring a message back - surely endorsing our ruling, for we will have heard the full facts” (88) Note: Ruling

“What a woman she is, Thomas Cromwell remarks in Spanish: to no one in particular” (89) Note: Language

“Business always increases” (90) Note: Business

“The cardinal says, reimburse yourself, and trusts him to take a fair percentage on top; he doesn’t quibble, because what is good for Thomas Cromwell is good for Thomas Wolsey and vice versa” (90) Note: Business

“The market is volatile—the news from Italy is never good two days together - but as some men have an eye for horseflesh or cattle to be fattened, he has an eye for risk. A number of noblemen are indebted to him, not just for arranging loans, but for making their estates pay better. It is not a matter of exactions from tenants, but, in the first place, giving the landowner an accurate survey of land values, crop yield, water supply, built assets, and then assessing the potential of all these; next, putting in bright people as estate managers, and with them setting up an accounting system that makes yearly sense and can be audited” (90) Note: Business, assay

“He has a sideline in arbitration, commercial disputes mostly, as his ability to assess the facts of a case and give a swift impartial decision is trusted here, in Calais and in Antwerp. If you and your opponent can at least concur on the need to save the costs and delays of a court hearing, then Cromwell is, for a fee, your man; and he has the pleasant privilege, often enough, of sending away both sides happy” (91) Note: Business

“‘Thomas Cromwell?’ people say. That is an ingenious man. Do you know he has the whole of the New Testament by heart?’ He is the very man if an argument about God breaks out; he is the very man for telling your tenants twelve good reasons why their rents are fair. He is the man to cut through some legal entanglement that’s ensnared you for three generations, or talk your sniffling little daughter into the marriage she swears she will never make” (91) Note: Genius

“With animals, women and timid litigants, his e manner is gentle and easy; but he makes your creditors weep” (91) Note: Negotiation

“Nobody can out-talk him, if he wants to talk. Nobody can better keep their head, when markets are falling and weeping men are standing on the street tearing up letters of credit” (91) Note: Talk

“‘Men say,’ Liz reaches for her scissors, “I can’t endure it when women cry” - just as people say, “I can’t endure this wet weather.” As if it were nothing to do with the men at all, the crying. Just one of those things that happen’” (92) Note: Men and women

“his house is full of people every day, people who want to be taken to the cardinal. There are artists looking for a subject. There are solemn Dutch scholars with books under their arms, and Lübeck merchants unwinding at length solemn Germanic jokes; there are musicians in transit tuning up strange instruments, and noisy conclaves of agents for the Italian banks; there are alchemists offering recipes and astrologers offering favourable fates, and lonely Polish fur traders who’ve wandered by to see if someone speaks their language; there are printers, engravers, translators and cipherers; and poets, garden designers, cabalists and geometricians” (93) Note: Guests

“You can’t know Albion, he says, unless you can go back before Albion was thought of. You must go back before Caesar’s legions, to the days when the bones of giant animals and men lay on the ground where one day London would be built. You must go back to the New Troy, the New Jerusalem, and the sins and crimes of the kings who rode under the tattered banners of Arthur and who married women who came out of the sea or hatched out of eggs, women with scales and fins and feathers; beside which, he says, the match with Anne looks less unusual. These are old stories, he says, but some people, let us remember, do believe them” (94) Note: Old stories, occult histories

“Edward Plantagenet … he was a native of Aries, the sign under which the whole world was made” (95) Note: World, astrology

“When no one else could see, he could see: and that is what it means to be a king” (95) Note: King

“Three months later he was in London and he was king. But he never saw the future again, not clearly as he had that year. Dazzled, he stumbled through his kingship as through a mist. He was entirely the creature of astrologers, of holy men and fantasists” (95) Note: Occult history

“He didn’t marry as he should, for foreign advantage, but became enmeshed in a series of half-made, half-broken promises to an unknown number of women. One of them was a Talbot girl, Eleanor by name, and what was special about her? It was said she was descended - in the female line from a woman who was a swan” (95) Note: Occult history

“It was not exactly that; it was that she claimed descent from the serpent woman, Melusine, whom you may see in old parchments, winding her coils about the Tree of Knowledge and presiding over the union of the moon and the sun” (96) Note: Occult history

“‘I picked up a snake once. In Italy.’ / ‘Why did you do that?’ / ‘For a bet.’ / ‘Was it poisonous?’ / ‘We didn’t know. That was the point of the bet.’ / ‘Did it bite you?’ / ‘Of course.’ / ‘Why of course?’ / ‘It wouldn’t be much of a story, would it? If I’d put it down unharmed, and away it slid?’” (98) Note: Snake

“letters of credit were more important than signs and wonders” (99) Note: Business

“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” (99) Note: Old stories

“Try always, the cardinal says, to learn what people wear under their clothes, for it’s not just their skin. Turn the king inside out, and you will find his scaly ancestors: his warm, solid, serpentine flesh” (99) Note: Skin, history

“When in Italy he had picked up a snake for a bet, he had to hold it till they counted ten. They counted, rather slowly, in the slower languages: eins, zwei, drei … At four, the startled snake flicked its head and bit him. Between four and five he tightened his grip. Now some cried, ‘Blood of Christ, drop it!’ Some prayed and some swore, some just kept on counting. The snake looked sick; when they had all reached ten, and not before, he eased its coiled body gently to the ground, and let it slip away into its future” (99) Note: Snake

“He collected his winnings. He waited to die, but he never did die. If anything, he got stronger, quick to hide and quick to strike” (100) Note: Snake

“Somewhere in Italy, a snake has children. He calls his children Thomas; they carry in their heads pictures of the Thames, of muddy shallow banks beyond the reach of the tide, beyond the wash of the water” (100) Note: Snake

“He sees his own eyes in a polished mirror. They look alive; serpent eyes. What a strange dream, he says to himself” (100) Note: Snake

“The business is not legal; the discussion is of texts” (100) Note: Texts

“‘For Christ’s sake, man,’ he says. ‘Don’t think you can crawl out of your hole because the cardinal is away. Because now the Bishop of London has his hands free, not to mention our friend in Chelsea.’ / ‘Masses, fasting, vigils, pardons out of Purgatory all useless,’ Bilney says. ‘This is revealed to me. All that remains, in effect, to go to Rome and discuss it with His Holiness. I am sure he will come over to my way of thinking’” (101) Note: Protestant

“The Cromwell household is as orthodox as any in London, and as pious. They must be, he says, irreproachable” (101) Note: Protestant

“He would have been home early, if he had not arranged to meet up in the German enclave, the Steelyard, with a man from Rostock, who brought along a friend from Stettin, who offered to teach him some Polish. / It’s worse than Welsh, he says at the end of the evening. I’ll need a lot of practice. Come to my house, he says” (101) Note: Language (to talk to fur traders earlier)

“He would like her to shorten her account, but he understands her need to tell it over, moment by moment, to say it out loud. It is like a package of words she is making, to hand to him: this is yours now” (103) Note: Words

“At one o’clock, she called for a priest. At two, she made her confession. She said she had once picked up a snake, in Italy. The priest said it was the fever speaking” (103) Note: Snake

“Liz must be buried quickly. He will not be able to send for Gregory or call the family together. The rule is for the household to hang a bunch of straw outside the door as sign of infection, and then restrict entry for forty days, and go abroad as little as possible. / Mercy comes in and says, a fever, it could be any fever, we don’t have to admit to the sweat … If we all stayed at home, London would come to a standstill. / ‘No,’ he says. ‘We must do it. My lord cardinal made these rules and it would not be proper for me to scant them’” (104) Note: Like covid

“He never expects to make any better sense of it than it makes now. He knows the whole of the New Testament by heart, but find a text: find a text for this” (104) Note: Text

“Liz who never did say much” (104) Note: Speech, say

“he reads. He reads his Testament, but he knows what it says. He reads Petrarch whom he loves, reads how he defied the doctors: when they had given him up to fever he lived still” (104) Note: Read

“He has got Niccolò Machiavelli’s book, Principalities; it is a Latin edition, shoddily printed in Naples, which seems to have passed through many hands” (105) Note: Print, text

“Someone says to him, what is in in your little book? and he says, a few aphorisms, a few truisms, nothing we didn’t know before” (105) Note: Book, knowledge

“He and Rafe read a book about chess. It is a book printed before he was born, but it has pictures. They frown over them, perfecting their game” (105) Note: Book, game

”‘J’aboube.’ Rafe snatches his hand away. / For a long time they sit gazing at their pieces, at the configuration which locks them in place. They see it coming: stalemate. / ‘We’re too good for each other.’ / ‘Perhaps we ought to play against other people.’ / ‘Later. When we can wipe out all-comers.’” (105) Note: Game, adjust

“when he wakes he has to learn the lack of her all over again. / From a distant room a child is crying. Footsteps overhead. The crying stops. He picks up his king and looks at the base of it, as if to see how it is made. He murmurs, ‘J’adoube.’ He puts it back where it was” (105) Note: Game, adjust

“Anne Cromwell sits with him, as the rain falls, and writes her beginner’s Latin in her copy book. By St John’s Day she knows all common verbs” (106) Note: Language

“He doesn’t have the news the cardinal wants, so he doesn’t write at all” (107) Note: News, write

“It is a sure sign of troubled minds, the habit of quotation” (107) Note: Quotation

“‘The harvest is passed, the summer is ended, and we are not saved’” (107) Note: Quotation, Jeremiah 8:20

“The small child Grace wakes in the night and says that she sees her mother in her shroud. She does not cry like a child, noisy and hiccupping, but like a grown woman, weeping tears of dread. / ‘All the rivers run into the sea, but the seas are not yet full’” (107) Note: Tears, quotation

“‘As long as I get the right piece of paper from Rome’” (109) Note: Paper

“In the year before he came back to England for good, he had crossed and recrossed the sea, undecided; he had so many friends in Antwerp, besides good business contacts” (109) Note: Friends, contacts

“Florence and Milan had given him ideas more flexible than those of people who’d stayed at home” (109) Note: Ideas, travel

“‘You look like a foreigner.’ / ‘I am a foreigner’” (111) Note: Foreigner

“So what have you been doing?’ / He could imagine himself saying, ‘This and that.’ He did say it” (111) Note: Doesnt have to know everything p. 35

“‘I’m learning the law’” (111) Note: Law

“Walter thinks he’s entitled. He’d heard it all his childhood: the Cromwells were a rich family once, we had estates. ‘When, where?’ he used to say. Walter would say, ‘Somewhere in the north, up there!’ and yell at him for quibbling. His father didn’t like to be disbelieved even when he was telling you an outright lie. ‘So how do we come to such a low place?’ he would ask, and Walter would say it was because of lawyers and cheats and lawyers who are all cheats, and who thieve land away from its owners” (111) Note: Lawyers, stories

“He used to hang around by … and watch the people come and go” (112) Note: People

“recognising them next time by the colours of their clothes and the animals and objects painted on their shields” (113) Note: Learn

“Those that passed his test he counted as they went in; standing by him, pretending to be his deputy, he learned to count” (113) Note: Pretend, learn, count

“‘Words, words, just words’” (114) Note: Words

“He learns to read from the scribbled orders for wheat flour or dried beans, for barley and for ducks’ eggs, that come out of the stewards’ pantries. For Walter, the point of being able to read is to take advantage of people who can’t; for the same purpose one must learn to write. So his father sends him to the priest. But again he is always in the wrong, for priests have such strange rules” (114) Note: Read, write, learn, rules

“At Lambeth he follows the stewards around and when they say a number he remembers it; so people say, if you haven’t time to write it down, just tell John’s nephew. He will cast an eye on a sack of whatever’s been ordered in, then warn his uncle to check if it’s short weight” (115) Note: Memory, count

“He scarcely needs an account of the tactics of the summer just past. The cardinal has promised to help finance a French army which will go into Italy and try to expel the Emperor” (117) Note: Tactics

“The English will never be forgiven for the talent for destruction they have always displayed when they get off their own island. English armies laid waste to the land they moved through. As if systematically, they performed every action proscribed by the codes of chivalry, and broke every one of the laws of war. The battles were nothing; it was what they did between the battles that left its mark” (117) Note: Talent for destruction

“the kings may forgive each other; the people scarcely can” (118) Note: Kings, people

“making drawings of the sails and rigging, and of notional ships with notional rigging, and trying to persuade the captain—’yourself not offended,’ he said—that there was a way of going faster” (118) Note: Invention

“‘any Christian vessel will think you’re pirates, so don’t look for help if you get in any difficulties. Sailors,’ he explained, ‘don’t like anything new. / ‘Nor does anyone else,’ he’d said. ‘Not as far as I can see’” (118) Note: New

“There cannot be new things in England. There can be old things freshly presented, or new things that pretend to be old. To be trusted, new men must forge themselves an ancient pedigree, like Walter’s, or enter into the service of ancient families. Don’t try to go it alone, or they’ll think you’re pirates” (118) Note: New, England

“Mercy and Johane take his dead wife’s clothes and cut them up carefully into new patterns. Nothing is wasted. Every good bit of cloth is made into something else” (120) Note: New, cloth

More: “‘Are you bound for Frankfurt this year, Master Cromwell? No? I thought the cardinal might send you to the fair, to get among the heretic booksellers. He is spending a deal of money buying up their writings, but the tide of filth never abates’” (121) Note: Books, Protestant

“More, in his pamphlets against Luther, calls the German shit. He says that his mouth is like the world’s anus. You would not think that such words would proceed from Thomas More, but they do. No one has rendered the Latin tongue more obscene” (121) Note: Language

“no proper authorities to stop the proliferation of so called translations, translations of scripture which in my opinion are malicious and wilfully misleading” (121) Note: Knowledge, authority

“‘Have you found sedition in Tyndale’s writing?’” (121) Note: Protestant

“‘A lesser man—a lesser lawyer—would say, “I have read Tyndale’s work, and I find no fault there.” But Cromwell won’t be tripped—he casts it back, he asks me, rather, have you read Tyndale? And I admit it. I have studied the man. I have picked apart his socalled translations, and I have done it letter by letter. I read him, of course, I do. By licence. From my bishop’” (122) Note: Protestant

“Ashes, dry bread. England was always, the cardinal says, a miserable country, home to an outcast and abandoned people, who are working slowly towards their deliverance, and who are visited by God with special tribulations. If England lies under God’s curse, or some evil spell, it has seemed for a time that the spell has been broken, by the golden king and his golden cardinal. But those golden years are over, and this winter the sea will freeze; the people who see it will remember it all their lives” (125-126) Note: England

“‘Go on then, tell me what it means,’ they say, ‘Means, master?’ as if they thought that words and their meanings were so loosely attached that the tether would snap at the first tug” (126) Note: Words

“‘We drowned men will stick together’” (130) Note: Drowned

“for the cardinal, any contentious point must be wrapped around and around again with a fine filament of words, fine as split hairs. Any dangerous opinion must be so plumped out with laughing apologies that it is as fat and harmless as the cushions you lean on” (134) Note: Words

“He has to smuggle him the content, without the context” (135) Note: Words

“faces soften, perhaps, from their habitual brave distress, and into the conspiracy of the bereft” (138) Note: Distress

“Uncle Norfolk has priests to do that for him. He hates ideas and never reads a book” (140) Note: Books

“July 1529: Thomas Cromwell of London, gentleman. Being whole in body and memory. To his son Gregory six hundred and sixty-six pounds thirteen shillings and four pence. And featherbeds, bolsters and the quilt of yellow turkey satin, the joined bed of Flanders work and the carved press and the cupboards, the silver and the silver gilt and twelve silver spoons. And leases of farms to be held for him by the executors till he comes to full age, and another two hundred pounds for him in gold at that date. Money to the executors for the upbringing and marriage portions of his daughter Anne, and his little daughter Grace. A marriage portion for his niece Alice Wellyfed; gowns, jackets and doublets to his nephews; to Mercy all sorts of household stuff and some silver and anything else the executors think she should have. Bequests to his dead wife’s sister Johane, and her husband John Williamson, and a marriage portion to her daughter, also Johane. Money to his servants. Forty pounds to be divided between forty poor maidens on their marriage. Twenty pounds for mending the roads. Ten pounds towards feeding poor prisoners in the London gaols. / His body to be buried in the parish where he dies: or at the direction of his executors. / The residue of his estate to be spent on Masses for his parents. / To God his soul. To Rafe Sadler his books” (148) Note: Text, document, will, books

“His thought had been: [Anne] was learning Greek: perhaps she knows it now” (152) Note: Language, death

“We cannot earn grace. We do not merit it” (152) Note: Grace, protestant

“His daughters are now in Purgatory, a country of slow fires and ridged ice. Where in the Gospels does it say ‘Purgatory’?” (152) Note: Protestant

“Tyndale says, now abideth faith, hope and love, even these three; but the greatest of these is love. / Thomas More thinks it is a wicked mistranslation. He insists on ‘charity’. He would chain you up, for a mistranslation. He would, for a difference in your Greek, kill you” (152) Note: Words, authority, protestant

III. Make or Mar. All Hallows 1529.

“Halloween: the world’s edge seeps and bleeds. This is the time when the tally-keepers of Purgatory, its clerks and gaolers, listen in to the living, who are praying for the dead” (154) Note: Purgatory

“All Hallows Day: grief comes in waves. Now it threatens to capsize him. He doesn’t believe that the dead come back; but that doesn’t stop him from feeling the brush of their fingertips, wing tips, against his shoulder” (154) Note: Grief

“In Italy he learned a memory system, so he can remember everything: every stage of how he got here” (156) Note: Memory system

“Poets have strange vagaries” (157) Note: Poets

“Simonides was a remarkable man. Whatever he saw was imprinted on his mind. He led each of the relatives through the ruins; and pointing to the crushed remains, he said, there is your man. In linking the dead to their names, he worked from the seating plan in his head. It is Cicero who tells us this story. He tells us how, on that day, Simonides invented the art of memory. He remembered the names, the faces, some sour and bloated, some blithe, some bored. He remembered exactly where everyone was sitting, at the moment the roof fell in” (158) Note: Memory

Part Three

I. Three-Card Trick. Winter 1529 – Spring 1530.

“He thinks the Bible 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. He does not see why it’s a gentleman’s business to write letters; there are clerks for that” (163) Note: Books

“The conversation is in Flemish: language of Mark’s birthplace” (169) Note: Language

“He is putting the documents into a stack. On what principle is he doing it? He can’t read them, they’re the wrong way up. He’s not filing them by subject. Is he filing them by date? For God’s sake, what is he doing?” (172) Note: Documents

“He needs to finish this sentence, with its many vital subclauses. He glances up again, and recognises Gregory’s design. It is a system of holy simplicity: big papers on the bottom, small ones on top” (172) Note: Language

“He crosses to the counting board. With a forefinger he inches the counters about. Then he scoops them together, picks them up and clicks them into a tidy pile. He looks up at last. ‘That was a calculation. It wasn’t just where I dropped them’” (172) Note: Calculation

“Once the boy has gone to bed he sweeps his papers out of the tidy stack he has made. He refolds them. He sorts them with the endorsement out, ready for filing” (174) Note: Documents

“There is much wordplay about bishoprics and bishop’s pricks, which might pass as witty if they were street-sweepers, but he thinks law students should do better” (175) Note: Words

“It matters what name we choose, what name we make. The people lose their name who lie dead on the field of battle, the ordinary corpses of no lineage, with no herald to search for them and no chantry, no perpetual prayers” (178) Note: Names, ordinary corpses

“imagine living inside the Lord Chancellor’s head. Imagine writing down such a charge and taking it to the printer, and circulating it through the court and through the realm, putting it out there to where people will believe anything” (180) Note: Words

“‘I heard you were a ready man.’ / ‘Would I come here unprepared?’” (181) Note: Memory

“Advance, and he may just falter. 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’” (181-182) Note: War

“‘You advocate prudence. Prudence is a virtue. But there are other virtues that belong to princes.’ / ‘Fortitude.’ / ‘Yes. Cost that out.’ / ‘It doesn’t mean courage in battle.’ / ‘Do you read me a lesson?’ / ‘It means fixity of purpose. It means endurance. It means having the strength to live with what constrains you’” (182) Note: Words, meanings

“‘I trained in the Florentine banks. And in Venice.’ / The king stares at him. ‘Howard said you were a common soldier.’ / ‘That too.’ / ‘Anything else?’ / ‘What would Your Majesty like me to be?’” (183) Note: Skills

“‘My lord, they tell that story all over Italy. Of this cardinal, or that.’ / Brandon’s face falls. ‘What, the same story?’ / ‘Mutatis mutandis’” (184) Note: Translation

“He is surprised—as they thrash out a financial settlement for the cardinal—at Henry’s grasp of detail. Wolsey has always said that the king has a fine mind, as quick as his father’s, but more comprehensive” (185) Note: Mind

“He thinks of the king as a terrain into which he must advance, with no sea coast to supply him” (187) Note: Terrain

“He understands what Henry has learned from his cardinal: his floating diplomacy, his science of ambiguity. He sees how the king has applied this science to the slow, trackless, dubious ruin of his minister. Every kindness, Henry matches with a cruelty, some further charge or forfeiture. Till the cardinal moans, ‘I want to go away’” (187) Note: Ambiguity

“he drops into Latin. The company, linguistically agile, sit and smile at him. He advises, pleasantly, ‘If you wish to be half-secret, try Greek. Allez, Monsieur Chapuys, rattle away! The Lord Chancellor will understand you’” (193) Note: Language

“Everything Chapuys does, he notices, is like something an actor does. When he thinks, he casts his eyes down, places two fingers to his forehead. When he sorrows, he sighs. When he is perplexed, he wags his chin, he half-smiles. He is like a man who has wandered inadvertently into a play, who has found it to be a comedy, and decided to stay and see it through” (193) Note: Performance

“They have slid back naturally into Italian” (194) Note: Language

“He looks around the room. That’s where the Lord Chancellor sat. On his left, the hungry merchants. On his right, the new ambassador. There, Humphrey Monmouth the heretic. There, e are Antonio Bonvisi. Here, Thomas Cromwell. And there ghostly places set, for the Duke of Suffolk large and bland, for Norfolk jangling his holy medals and shouting ‘By the Mass!’ There is a place set for the king, and for the doughty little queen, famished in this penitential season, her belly quaking inside the stout armour of her robes. There is a place set for Lady Anne, glancing around with her restless black eyes, eating nothing, missing nothing, tugging at the pearls around her little neck. There is a place for William Tyndale, and one for the Pope; Clement looks at the candied quinces, too coarsely cut, and his Medici lip curls. And there sits Brother Martin Luther, greasy and fat: glowering at them all, and spitting out his fishbones” (196) Note: Simonides, p. 158

“A servant comes in. ‘Two young gentlemen are outside, master, asking for you by name.’ / He looks up. ‘Yes?’ / ‘Master Richard Cromwell and Master Rafe. With servants from your household, waiting to take you home.’ / He understands that the whole purpose of the evening has been to warn him: to warn him off. He will remember it, the fatal placement: if it proves fatal. That soft hiss and whisper, of stone destroying itself; that distant sound of walls sliding, of plaster crumbling, of rubble crashing on to fragile human skulls? That is the sound of the roof of Christendom, falling on the people below” (196) Note: Simonides

II. Entirely Beloved Cromwell. Spring-December 1530.

“there are no safe places, there are no sealed rooms” (199) Note: Secrets

“The king does not cease to quote Master Cromwell” (201) Note: Quotation

“He sees her speed, intelligence and rigour … her skewering dark glance. The king, too, knows how to look blue eyes, their mildness deceptive. Is this how they look at each other? Or in some other way? For a second he understands it; then he doesn’t” (204) Note: Looking, understanding

“insight cannot be taken back. You cannot return to the moment you were in before” (205) Note: Time, insight

“But if you will forgive me, master, you always look like a man who knows how to cut up a carcase” (206) Note: Appearance, murderer

“‘Show me where it says in the Bible, a man shall not eat beef or olives in March’” (206) Note: Protestant

“His thoughts bubbled and swirled, Tuscan, Putney, Castilian oaths. But when he committed his thoughts to paper they came out in Latin and perfectly smooth” (207) Note: Language

“He calls himself Richard Cromwell now” (209) Note: Names

“He has a long soothing talk in Welsh with Richard, who laughs at him because old words are fading from his memory, and he is forever sliding through bits of English, with a sly borderlands intonation” (209) Note: Language

“So much has been said between them that it is needless to add a marginal note. It is not for him now to gloss the text of their dealings, nor append a moral” (212) Note: Text

“In Italy he learned a memory system and furnished it with pictures. Some are drawn from wood and field, from hedgerow and copse: shy hiding animals, eyes bright in the undergrowth” (216) Note: Memory

“It is no use hoping to remember with the help of common objects, familiar faces. One needs startling juxtapositions, images that are more or less peculiar, ridiculous, even indecent. When you have made the images, you place them about the world in locations you choose, each one with its parcel of words, of figures, which they will yield you on demand” (216) Note: Memory

“He keeps them, in strict order, in the gallery of his mind’s eye. Perhaps it is because he is used to making these images that his head is peopled with the cast of a thousand plays, ten thousand interludes” (216) Note: Memory

“‘And have no other master,’ the king says. ‘My lord Suffolk asks me, where does the fellow spring from? I tell him there are Cromwells in Leicestershire, Northamptonshire landed people, or once they were. I suppose you are from some unfortunate branch of that family?’ / ‘No.’ / ‘You may not know your own forebears. I shall ask the heralds to look into it.’ / ‘Your Majesty is kind. But they will have scant success.’ / The king is exasperated. He is failing to take advantage of what is on offer: a pedigree, however meagre” (218) Note: Pedigree

“Henry wants a conversation, on any topic. One that’s nothing to do with love, or hunting, or war” (219) Note: Conversation

“‘What I cannot stomach is hypocrisy, fraud, idleness—their wornout 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 they avourable to Rome’” (219) Note: Monasticism

“Henry says, ‘Our history… As you know, I am gathering evidence. Manuscripts. Opinions. Comparisons, with how matters are ordered in other countries” (220) Note: History, texts

“When the weather is too wet to hunt, Gregory sits poring over The Golden Legend; he likes the lives of the saints. Some of these things are true,’ he says, ‘some not.’ He reads Le Morte d’Arthur, and because it is the new edition they crowd around him, looking over his shoulder at the title page” (221) Note: Truth, stories

“‘Some of these things are true and some of them lies. But they are all good stories’” (222) Note: Truth, lies, stories

“‘You’re a useful sort of man’” (223) Note: Skills

“In the forest you may find yourself lost, without companions. You may come to a river which is not on a map. You may lose sight of and forget why you are there. You may meet a dwarf, or the living Christ, or an old enemy of yours; or a new enemy, one you do not know until you see his face appear between the rustling leaves, and see the glint of his dagger. You may find a woman asleep in a bower of leaves. For a moment, before you don’t recognise her, you will think she is someone you know” (224) Note: Lost in the forest

“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. Leases, writs, statutes, all are written to be read, and each person reads them by the light of self-interest” (228) Note: Science of ambiguity

“In More’s great hall, the conversation is exclusively in Latin” (229) Note: Language

“After supper they talk about wicked King Richard. Many years ago Thomas More began to write a book about him. He could not decide whether to compose in English or Latin, so he as done both, though he has never finished it, or sent any part of to the printer. Richard was born to be evil, More says; it was written on him from his birth. He shakes his head. ‘Deeds of blood. Kings’ games’” (231) Note: Books, writing, deeds

“‘But we all know his opinions, which I think are fixed and impervious to argument’” (234) Note: Opinions, arguments

“people imagining what they cannot know” (235) Note: Knowledge

“‘Where’ve you been?’ / ‘Utopia’” (236) Note: Utopia

“‘Do you know, there are ways and ways… Sometimes people just tell me things.’ It is an invitation. Anne drops her head. She is on the verge of becoming one of those people. But perhaps not tonight” (237) Note: Telling, information

“I say I don’t know one man in England who would have done what you have done, for a man disgraced and fallen. The king says so. Even him, Chapuys, the Emperor’s man, he says, you cannot fault what’s-he-called” (240) Note: Integrity

“Cranmer … Master Tyndale says, ‘One king, one law, is God’s ordinance in every realm.’ I have read his book, The Obedience of a Christian Man. I myself have shown it to the king and marked the passages that touch on his authority” (242) Note: Reform, Protestant, texts

“‘I assure you he would have found no heresy in me.’ / … / He says to Wriothesley, ‘Is he? At all points orthodox?’” (245) Note: Heresy, reform

“I’ve been to most places” (246) Note: Places, travel

“‘How I miss my master. Now he has gone north, there is no one to invent me’” (247) Note: Invent

“‘There are some strange cold people in this world. It is priests, I think. Saving your presence. Training themselves out of natural feeling. They mean it for the best, of course’” (250) Note: Strange cold people

“The hunter is among the most innocent of men; living in the moment makes him feel pure. When he returns in the evening, his body aches, his mind is full of pictures of leaves and sky; he does not want to read documents” (252) Note: Hunter

“But the winter king, less occupied, will begin to think about his conscience. He will begin to think about his pride. He will begin to prepare the prizes for those who can deliver him results” (252) Note: Winter king

“When he sees Henry draw his bow, he thinks, I see now he is royal” (253) Note: Royal

“His grandfather was royal; his mother was royal; he shoots like a gentleman amateur, and he is king through and through” (254) Note: Royal

“‘Grant his own divorce?’” (257) Note: Divorce

“The room is full of undercurrents, some of which he does not understand” (259) Note: Understanding

“On 1 November 1530, a commission for the cardinal’s arrest is given to Harry Percy, the young Earl of Northumberland. The earl arrives at Cawood to arrest him, forty-eight hours before his planned arrival in York for his investiture. He is taken to Pontefract Castle under guard, from there to Doncaster, and from there to Sheffield Park, the home of the Earl of Shrewsbury. Here at Talbot’s house he falls ill. On 26 November the Constable of the Tower arrives, with twenty-four men at arms, to escort him south. From there he travels to Leicester Abbey. Three days later he dies. What was England, before Wolsey? A little offshore island, poor and cold” (260) Note: Death of Wolsey

“Cromwell, stands with his arms folded, his writing hand tucked into a hidden fist” (269) Note: Writing, fighting

III. The Dead Complain of Their Burial. Christmastide 1530.

“he has established that he has no ancestors” (275) Note: Ancestry

“‘The dead do not come back to complain of their burial. It is the living who are exercised about these matters’” (275) Note: Living, dead

“You are a man of vigorous invention” (278) Note: Invention

“Clerics can do this: speak about your character. Give verdicts: this one seems favourable, though the doctor, like a fortuneteller, has told him no more than he already knew” (279) Note: Verdicts, fortune telling

Part Four

I. Arrange Your Face. 1531.

“The queen speaks in English. ‘Do you know who this is? This is Master Cromwell. Who now writes all the laws.’ Caught awkwardly between languages, he says, ‘Madam, shall we go on in English, or Latin?’” (288) Note: Writing, laws, language

“now he finds he has a talent for legislation too—if you want a new law, just ask him” (288) Note: Laws

"’… to soothe the conscience of the bishops, they have caused this formula to be inserted: “as far as the law of Christ allows”.’ / ‘What does that mean?’ Mary says. ‘It means nothing.’ / ‘Your Highness, it means everything.’ / ‘Yes. It is very clever’” (289) Note: Meaning

“‘What is defined can be redefined, yes?’” (290) Note: Definition

“‘They say you had a trade as a blacksmith; is that correct?’ / Now she will say, shoe a horse? / It was my father’s trade.’ / ‘I begin to understand you.’ She nods.’ The blacksmith makes his own tools’” (291) Note: Tools, laws

“‘She says our precedents are fake.’ / Rafe: ‘Does she understand that you and Dr Cranmer sat up all night over them?’” (292) Note: Precedents

“I don’t tell stories about myself” (292) Note: Stories

“Wriothesley’s face is a study. He does not understand how much you can learn from boatmen” (295) Note: Learn

“the name of your printer, the name of the master of the ship that brought these books into England” (298) Note: Torture over books

“everything he knows is lost” (299) Note: Knowledge

“These are days of brutal truth from Tyndale. Saints are not your friends and they will not protect you. They cannot help you to salvation. You cannot engage them to your service with prayers and candles, as you might hire a man for the harvest. Christ’s sacrifice was done on Calvary; it is not done in the Mass. Priests cannot help you to Heaven; you need no priest to stand between you and your God. No merits of yours can save you: only the merits of the living Christ” (299) Note: Reform, Protestant

“An hour’s search realised nothing; so are you sure, John, the Chancellor said, that you have none of these new books, because I was informed you had?” (300) Note: Books

“‘He can take our goods, but God will prosper us. He can close the booksellers, but still there will be books. They have their old bones, their glass saints in windows, their candles and shrines, but God has given us the printing press’” (301) Note: Books

“Anne says, I have tried, I myself as you know have put Tyndale’s books into his hand, his royal hand; could Tyndale, do you think, come back into this kingdom?” (302) Note: Books, reform

“Henry has not said no. He had not said, never. Though Tyndale’s translation and any other translation is banned, he may, one day, permit a translation to be made by a scholar he approves. How can he say less? He wants to please Anne. But summer comes, and he, Cromwell, knows he has gone to the brink and must feel his way back. Henry is too timid, Tyndale too intransigent. His letters to Stephen sound a note of panic: abandon ship. He does not mean to sacrifice himself to Tyndale’s truculence; dear God, he says, More, Tyndale, they deserve each other, these mules that pass for men. Tyndale will not come out in favour 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. And when Henry demands, ‘Who is Tyndale to judge me?’ Tyndale snaps a message back, quick as word can fly: one Christian man may judge another” (303) Note: Reform

“I hope I can always look myself in the face” (312) Note: Mirror, face

“He looks down at them and arranges his face. Erasmus says that you must do this each morning before you leave your house: ‘put on a mask, as it were.’ He applies that to each place, each castle or inn or nobleman’s seat, where he finds himself waking up” (320) Note: Masks, face

“From the day he was sworn into the king’s council, he has had his face arranged” (321) Note: Face

“‘He plays kings’ games now’” (322) Note: Games

“‘You’ve the steadiest hand I know.’ He smiles, puzzled; nothing in his world seems steady to him” (327) Note: Science of ambiguity

“‘One letter is everything, in legislating. But my precedents are not faked’” (329) Note: Letters, laws, precedents

“they do their best, the gentlemen, to make him uncomfortable; he imports his own comfort, his calm, his exact and pointed conversation” (330) Note: Conversation

“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 armour, your arrowheads, your pikes and your guns? Where are your ships 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?” (331) Note: Trades

“I don’t have a natal chart. So I don’t have a fate” (334) Note: No chart, no fate

“In recent years, of course, scholars have tried to give him a fate; men learned in reading the Heavens have tried to work him back from what he is and how he is, to when he was born. Jupiter favourably aspected, indicating prosperity. Mercury rising, offering the faculty of quick and persuasive speech. Kratzer says, if Mars is not in Scorpio, I don’t know my trade. His mother was fifty-two and they thought she could neither conceive nor deliver a child. She hid her powers and disguised him under draperies, deep inside her, for as long as she could contrive. He came out and they said, what is it?” (335) Note: Fate

II. ‘Alas, What Shall I Do For Love?’ Spring 1532.

“Time now to consider the compacts that hold the world together: the compact between ruler and ruled, and that between husband and wife” (338) Note: Compact, contrast

“It is time to say what England is, her scope and boundaries: not to count and measure her harbour defences and border walls, but to estimate her capacity for self-rule. It is time to say what king is, and what trust and guardianship he owes his people: what protection from foreign incursions moral or physical, what freedom from the pretensions of those who would like to tell an Englishman how to speak to his God” (338) Note: England, king

“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 mere form of words. The Commons drafts a petition against the church courts, so arbitrary in their proceedings, so presumptuous in their claimed jurisdiction; it questions their jurisdiction, their very existence. The papers pass through many hands, but finally he himself works through the night with Rafe and Call-Me-Risley, scribbling amendments between the lines” (339) Note: Texts, papers, laws

“Utopia, after all, is not a place one can live” (340) Note: Utopia

“When he brings into the Commons a bill to suspend the payment of annates to Rome, he suggests a division of the House. This is far from usual, but amid shock and grumbling the members comply: for the bill to this side, against the bill to the other side. The king is present; he watches, he learns who is for him and who against, and at the end of the process he gives his councillor a grim nod of approval” (342) Note: Cf. Simonides, p. 158

“They think they are fixing her tactics, but she is her own best tactician, and able to think back and judge what has gone wrong; he admires anyone who can learn from mistakes” (344) Note: Tactics, learning

“Anne is not a carnal being, she is a calculating being, with a cold slick brain at work behind her hungry black eyes” (350) Note: Calculation

“I take her at her own valuation” (351) Note: Valuation

“Wyatt is the king’s regular tennis partner. Therefore he knows about humbled pride. He fetches up a smile. Your father told us all about the lion. The boys have made a play out of it. Perhaps you would like to come one day and take your own role?’ ‘Oh, the lion. Nowadays, I think back on it, and it doesn’t seem to me like a thing I would do. Stand still, in the open, and raw it on.’ He pauses. ‘More like something you would do, Master Cromwell’” (351) Note: Lion taming

“He thinks, I was a child, nine or so, I ran off into London and saw an old woman suffer for her faith” (352) Note: Faith, suffer

“What’s her crime? he said, and they said, she is a Loller. That’s one who says the God on the altar is a piece of bread. What, he said, bread like the baker bakes? Let this child forward, they said. Let him be instructed, it will do him good to see up close, so he always goes to Mass after this and obeys his priest. They pushed him to the front of the crowd. Come here, sweetheart, stand with me, a woman said. She had a broad smile and wore a clean white cap. You get a pardon for your sins just for watching it, she said. Any that bring faggots to the burning, they get forty days’ release from Purgatory” (353) Note: Persecution, reform

“He twisted to look up into the face of the woman who was his mother in this crowd. You watch, she said. With the gentlest brush of her fingers she turned his face to the spectacle. Pay attention now. The officers took chains and bound the old person to the stake” (354) Note: Watch

“Does nobody pray for her, he said, and the woman said, what’s the point? Even after there was nothing left to scream, the fire was stoked. The officers trod around the margins, stamping out any wisps of straw that flew off, kicking back anything bigger” (355) Note: Pray

“When the crowd drifted home, chattering, you could tell the ones who’d been on the wrong side of the fire, because their faces were grey with wood ash” (355) Note: Faces

“He prayed for the woman, thinking it could do no harm” (356) Note: Pray

“I have prayed for her too, he said. / Have you? Good lad” (357) Note: Pray

“He has never forgotten the woman, whose last remnants he carried away as a greasy smudge on his own skin, but why is it that his life as a child doesn’t seem to fit, one bit with the next?” (357) Note: Memory

“He has never told anyone this story. He doesn’t mind talking to Richard, to Rafe about his past—within reason—but he doesn’t mean to give away pieces of himself” (358) Note: Story, self

“they will knit together against foreign interference” (358) Note: Foreign

“They are the same people who rioted against foreigners, on Evil May Day; the same people, narrow-hearted, stubborn, attached to their patch of ground” (359) Note: Foreigners, England

“There were days, not too long past, days since Lizzie died, when he’d woken in the morning and had to decide, before he could speak to anybody, who he was and why” (359) Note: Mirror, face

“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” (359) Note: THESIS

“‘What you are, I make you. I alone. Everything you are, everything you have, will come from me’” (360) Note: Self

“My view is that there are too many priests with scant learning and smaller occupation” (362) Note: Learning, priests

“‘Look,’ he says to him, ‘I have another present, what do you think of this? It is perhaps the only good thing ever to come out of a monastery. Brother Luca Pacioli. It took him thirty years to write.’ / The book is bound in deepest green with a tooled border of gold, and its pages are edged in gilt, so that it blazes in the light. Its clasps are studded with blackish garnets, smooth, translucent. ‘I hardly dare open it,’ the boy says. / ‘Please. You will like it.’ / It is Summa de Arithmetica. He unclasps it to find a woodcut of the author with a book before him, and a pair of pair of compasses. ‘This is a new printing?’ / ‘Not quite, but my friends in Venice have just now remembered me. I was a child, of course, when Luca wrote it, and were not even thought of.’ His fingertips barely touch the page. ‘Look, here he treats of geometry, do you see the figures? Here is where he says you don’t go to bed until the books balance’” (363) Note: Book, math

“‘He spoke about proportion. Proportion in building, in music, in paintings, in justice, in the commonwealth, the state; about how rights should be balanced, the power of a prince and his subjects, how the wealthy citizen should keep his books straight and say prayers and serve the poor. He spoke about how a printed page should look. How a law should read. Or a face, what makes his it beautiful” (364) Note: Proportion

“‘I think all the poems are in here… Not that a page of figures is a verse, but anything that is precise is beautiful, anything that balances in all its parts, anything that is proportionate … do you think so?’” (364) Note: Poems, precision, beauty

“‘we will put this book on your desk. So that you can be consoled by it when nothing seems to add up at all’” (365) Note: Book

“The page of an accounts book is there for your use, like a love poem. It’s not there for you to nod and then dismiss it; it’s there to open your heart to possibility. It’s like the scriptures: it’s there for you to think about, and initiate action. Love your neighbour. Study the market. Increase the spread of benevolence. Bring in better figures next year” (365) Note: Accounts, action

“They will not make new church legislation without the king’s licence, and will submit all existing laws to a review by a commission which will include laymen—members of Parliament and the king’s appointees” (365) Note: Laws

“Anne is in the gallery beside him. She is wearing a dark red gown of figured damask, so heavy that her tiny white shoulders seem to droop inside it. Sometimes—in a kind of fellowship of the imagination—he imagines resting his hand upon her shoulder and following with his thumb the scooped hollow between her collarbone and her throat; imagines with his forefinger tracking the line of her breast as it swells above her bodice, as a child follows a line of print” (366) Note: Imagination, desire

“‘my Lord Chancellors are nothing but grief to me. Perhaps I shall do without one.’ / ‘The lawyers will not like that. Somebody must rule the courts’” (366) Note: Law, courts

“If life is a chain of gold, sometimes God hangs a charm on it” (375) Note: Life

“You are a man whose money is almost spent. I am a man who knows how you have spent it. You are a man who has borrowed all over Europe. I am a man who knows your creditors. One word from me, and your debts will be called in” (378) Note: Accounts

“‘Bankers have no armies’” (378) Note: Bankers, armies

“‘The king will take your title away, and your land, and your castles, and give them to someone who will do the job you cannot’” (378) Note: Title

“‘He will not. He respects all ancient titles. All ancient rights.’ / ‘Then let’s say I will.’ Let’s say I will rip your life apart. Me and my banker friends” (378) Note: Bankers

“The world is not run from where he thinks. Not from his border fortresses, not even from Whitehall. The world is run from Antwerp, from Florence, from places he has never imagined; from Lisbon, from where the ships with sails of silk drift west and are burned up in the sun. Not from castle walls, but from counting houses, not by the call of the bugle but by the click of the abacus, not by the grate and click of the mechanism of the gun but by the scrape of the pen on the page of the promissory note that pays for the gun and the gunsmith and the powder and shot” (378) Note: The world is run

“‘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.’ It is the processions that matter, the exchange of gifts, the royal games of bowls, the tilts, jousts and masques: these are not preliminaries to the process, they are the process itself” (391) Note: Treaties, process

“‘You do everything, Cromwell. You are everything now. We say, how did it happen? We ask ourselves’” (394) Note: Many skilled

“Anne reports back to her relations, no detail spared. You have to admire her; her measured exactness, her restraint. She uses her body like a soldier, conserving its resources; like one of the masters in the anatomy school at Padua, she divides it up and names every part, this my thigh, this my breast, this my tongue” (394) Note: Calculation

“the price list and keeps the accounts” (399) Note: Accounts, money

“she can’t tell what she sees in the outside world from what is inside her head” (400) Note: Reality, outside, world

“‘it is said in the book called The Courtier that in men of base degree we often see high gifts of nature.’ / ‘You read Italian, sir?’” (400) Note: Base degree, high gifts, reading language

“If your people will translate for you that part of Castiglione’s book” (400) Note: Reading, translation

“Castiglione says that everything that can be understood by men can be understood by women, that their apprehension is the same, their faculties, no doubt their loves and hates” (401) Note: Women

“Calais, this outpost of England, her last hold on France, is a town where he has many friends, many customers, many clients” (401) Note: Contacts

“He knows it, Watergate and Lantern Gate, St Nicholas Church and Church of Our Lady, he knows its towers and bulwarks, its markets, courts and quays, Staple Inn where the Governor lodges, and the houses of the Whethill and Wingfield families, houses with shady gardens where gentlemen live in pleasant retreat from an England they claim they no longer understand. He knows the fortifications—crumbling—and beyond the city walls the lands of the Pale, its woods, villages and marshes, its sluices, dykes and canals. He knows the road to Boulogne, and the road to Gravelines, which is the Emperor’s territory, and he knows that either monarch, Francis or Charles, could take this town with one determined push. The English have been here for two hundred years, but in the streets now you hear more French and Flemish spoken” (402) Note: Knowledge, language

“to pass the time, he runs over in his head the figures for last year’s receipts to the king from the Duchy of Cornwall” (403) Note: Numbers

“He greets them in French. They shudder, and one of them asks in Latin if they are not going to have anything to drink. He calls for the boy, and asks him without much hope what he suggests. ‘Drink somewhere else?’ the boy offers. A jug of something vinegary comes. He lets the old men drink deeply before he asks, ‘Which of you is Maître Camillo?’” (403) Note: Language, theatre of memory

“‘You see this councillor of mine? I warn you, never play any game with him. For he will not respect your ancestry. He has no coat of arms and no name, but he believes he is bred to win’” (407) Note: Games, winning, right

“For they are all, he notices, intent on winning this game, on taking a piece of gold from the King of England. Gambling is not avice, if you can afford to do it. Perhaps I could issue him with gaming tokens, he thinks, redeemable only if presented in person at some office in Westminster: with tortuous paperwork attached, and fees to clerks, and a special seal to be affixed. That would save us some money” (407) Note: Bureaucracy

“‘Of course, you will compound with the goldsmith to put a higher valuation on it, and arrange to split the profit with him… but I shall be liberal in the matter.’ / Arrange your face. / The king laughs. ‘Why would I trust a man with my business, if he could not manage his own? One day Francis will offer you a pension. You must take it’” (408) Note: Face, business

“she wears a strange half-smile, not quite human, as if behind the mask were another mask” (408) Note: Face, mask

“The moon, as if disgraced, trails rags of black cloud” (411)

III. Early Mass. November 1532.

“He has slept in a bed of phantoms” (415)

Part Five

I. Anna Regina. 1533.

“‘They tell me you would like to learn to read, so you can read the gospel’” (420) Note: Read, gospel

“his own newly granted arms” (420) Note: Arms, title

“I am always translating, he thinks: if not language to language, then person to person” (421) Note: Always translating

“Here is a romance of King Arthur: ‘When I started reading it I almost gave up the project. It was clear to me it was too fantastical to be true. But little by little, as I read, you know, it appeared to me that there was a moral in this tale’” (423) Note: Library, scholar, unknown moral

“He does not say what it is. ‘And here is Froissart done into English, which His Majesty himself bade me undertake’” (423) Note: Chivalric revival

“‘I know you are a good man for business. Might you in confidence look over my accounts?’” (423) Note: Business

“All he can find is money owing. This is what you get for devoting yourself to scholarship and serving the king across the sea, when you could be at court with sharp teeth and eyes and elbows, ready to seize your advantage” (423) Note: Scholar vs court

“He sits down to his drafting. They bring in candles. He sees the shadow of his own hand moving across the paper, his own unconcealable fist unmasked by velvet glove. He wants nothing between himself and the weave of the paper, the black running line of ink, so he takes off his rings” (426) Note: Writing

“He hesitates, his quill hovering. He writes, ‘This realm of England is an Empire’” (426) Note: Act in Restraint of Appeals of 1533

“He is hoping that Cranmer, by way of coaxing, will impart the secret he promised in his letter, the secret written down the side of the page” (427) Note: Secret

“As our severance from the Vatican is not yet complete, we cannot have a new archbishop unless the Pope appoints him. Delegates in Rome are empowered to say anything, promise anything, pro tem, to get Clement to agree. The king says, aghast, ‘Do you know how much the papal bulls cost, for Canterbury? And that I shall have to of pay for them? And you know how much it costs to install him?’ He adds, ‘It must be done properly, course, nothing omitted, nothing scanted’” (428) Note: Bureaucracy vs bureaucracy

“He pauses, to let her think her own thoughts: which he sees are precious to her. ‘So,’ she says, ‘you have a nephew Richard a Tudor of sorts, though I am sure I cannot understand how that came about’” (431) Note: Jasper Tudor > Joan > Morgan Williams > Richard Williams (later Cromwell)

“he has to walk mentally through his rooms at Austin Friars, picking up his memory images from where he has left them on windowsills and under stools and in the woollen petals of the flowers strewn in the tapestry at Anselma’s feet” (432) Note: Memory images

“At Westminster his clerks are in and out, with news and gossip and paperwork” (433) Note: News, gossip, paperwork

“He calls on the Wardens of the Mint, and suggests a spot check on the weight of the king’s coinage. ‘What I should like to do,’ he says, ‘is make our English coins so sound that the merchants over the sea won’t even bother weighing them’” (433) Note: Coinage

“‘I have written books and I cannot unwrite them. I cannot unbelieve what I believe. I cannot unlive my life’” (435) Note: Books, belief, life

“He wants to make an offer for his books” (439) Note: Books

“‘Sometimes it is a solace to me,’ Henry says, ‘not to have to talk and talk. You were born to understand me, perhaps’” (445) Note: Understanding

“‘If he were a model of conduct in his private life, one would be surprised… but for me, you see, I can only concern myself with his kingship. If he were oppressive, if he were to override Parliament, if he were to pay no heed to the Commons and govern only for himself… But he does not… so I cannot concern myself with how he behaves to his women’” (447) Note: Private life, rule, women

“He scribbles a direction to the overseer: Arrow to be picked out in gold. All goddesses have dark eyes” (449) Note: Art for/of life

“‘And Cicero?’ / ‘We lawyers try to memorise all his speeches. If any man were walking around today with all of Cicero’s wisdom in his head he would be…’ He would be what? ‘Cicero would be on the king’s side,’ he says” (450) Note: Wisdom, memory

“‘This archbishop is the best guardian of the church, madam, that we have seen in many centuries.’ He thinks of what Bainham said, before they burned him; in England there have been eight hundred years of mystification, just six years of truth and light; six years, since the gospel in English began to come into the kingdom. ‘Cranmer is no heretic. He believes as the king believes. He will reform what needs reformation, that is all’” (454) Note: Church, reform

“He has filed away all the depositions from the Blackfriars hearings, which seem to have happened in another era. ‘Angels defend us,’ Gardiner says, ‘is there anything you don’t file?’” (456) Note: Files

“I’m not asking you to agree with John—you think he’s a heretic, perhaps he is a heretic—I’m asking you to concede just this, and to tell it to the king, that Frith is a pure soul, he is a fine scholar, so let him live. If his doctrine is false and yours is true you can talk him back to you, you are an eloquent man, you are the great persuader of our age, not me—talk him back to Rome, if you can. But if he dies you will never know, will you, if you could have won his soul?” (460) Note: Doctrine

“And looking down on them, the other Londoners, those monsters who live in the air, the city’s uncounted population of stone men and women and beasts, and things that are neither human nor beasts, fanged rabbits and flying hares, four-legged birds and pinioned snakes, imps with bulging eyes and ducks’ bills, men who are wreathed in leaves or have the heads of goats or rams; creatures with knotted coils and leather wings, with hairy ears and cloven feet, horned and roaring, feathered and scaled, some laughing, some singing, some pulling back their lips to show their teeth; lions and friars, donkeys and geese, devils with children crammed into their maws, all chewed up except for their helpless paddling feet; limestone or leaden, metalled or marbled, shrieking and sniggering above the populace, hooting and gurning and dry-heaving from buttresses, walls and roofs” (464) Note: Gargoyles

“When the cardinal came to a closed door he would flatter it—oh beautiful yielding door! Then he would try tricking it open. And you a you are just the same, just the same.’ He pours himself some of the duke’s present. ‘But in the last resort, you just kick it in’” (465) Note: Tactics, violence

“Who says two bishops should hold up her hem? It’s all written down in a great book, so old that one hardly dare touch it, breathe on it; Lisle seems to know it by heart. Perhaps it should be copied and printed, he thinks” (466) Note: Books, printing

“let him be hard, alert, watchful of opportunity, wringing use from the smallest turn of fortune” (467) Note: Opportunity

“I can build my own prince: to the glorification of God and the commonwealth of England” (467) Note: Invention

“I shall not be like Henry Wyatt and say, now I am retiring from affairs. Because what is there, but affairs?” (467) Note: Affairs, action

“Anne, shaky, is back on her feet. Cranmer, in a dense cloud of incense is pressing into her hand the sceptre, the rod of ivory, and resting the crown of St Edward briefly on her head, before changing for a lighter and more bearable crown: a prestidigitation” (467) Note: Ritual, magic trick

“They say these two Frenchmen favour the gospel, but favour at François’s court extends no further than a small circle of scholars that the king, for his own vanity, wishes to patronise; he has never quite been able to grow his own Thomas More, his own Erasmus, which naturally piques his pride” (471) Note: Gospel, scholars

“In Paris they are burning Lutherans. He would like to take it up with the envoys, but he cannot while the odour of roast swan and peacock drifts up from below” (471) Note: Persecution, Protestant

“‘Messieurs,’ he asks (music rising around them like a shallow tide, silver ripples of sound), ‘do you know of the man Guido Camillo? I hear he is at your master’s court.’ / De Selve and his friend exchange glances. This has thrown them. ‘The man who builds the wooden box,’ Jean murmurs. / ‘Oh yes.’ / ‘It is a theatre,’ he says.” (471) Note: Memory theatre

“De Selve nods. ‘In which you yourself are the play.’ / ‘Erasmus has written to us about it,’ Henry says, over his shoulder. ‘He is having the cabinetmakers create him little wooden shelves and drawers, one inside another. It is a memory system for the speeches of Cicero.’ / ‘With your permission, he intends it as more than that. It is a theatre on the ancient Vitruvian plan. But it is not to put on plays. As my lord the bishop says, you as the owner of the theatre are to stand in the centre of it, and look up. Around you there is arrayed a system of human knowledge. Like a library, but - can you imagine a library in which each book contains another book, and a smaller book inside that? Yet it is more than as if that’” (472) Note: Memory theatre

“‘Already there are too many books in the world. There are more every day. One man cannot hope to read them all’” (472) Note: Too many books

“even this feast has been superbly managed” (473) Note: Skills, managed

“‘I told you I had a secret’” (475) Note: Cranmer’s secret wife

“‘but I cannot turn him from his path.’ / ‘He should have run into the woods. That was his path.’ / ‘We do not all…’ but Cranmer drops his gaze. ‘Forgive me, we do not all see as many paths as you’” (476) Note: Paths

“‘I never thought, when the king gave me this dignity, when he insisted I occupy this seat, that among my first actions would be to come against a young man like John Frith, and to try to argue him out of his faith.’ / Welcome to this world below” (477) Note: Faith, world

“They will believe it, Rafe says. The word in the city is that Thomas Cromwell has a prodigious… / Memory, he says. I have a very large ledger. A huge filing system, in which are recorded (under their name, and also under their offence) the details of people who have cut across me” (481) Note: Memory

“Hans Holbein says, Thomas, I’ve got your hands done but I haven’t paid much attention to your face. I promise this autumn I’ll finish you off” (482) Note: Painting, hands

“Suppose within every book there is another book, and within every letter on every page another volume constantly unfolding but these volumes take no space on the desk. Suppose knowledge could be reduced to a quintessence, held within a picture, a sign, held within a place which is no place. Suppose the human skull were to become capacious, spaces opening inside it, humming chambers like beehives” (482) Note: Memory

II. Devil’s Spit. Autumn and winter 1533.

“Niccolò’s book says, the wise prince exterminates the envious, and if I, Riche, were king, those claimants and their families would be dead” (488) Note: The Prince

“‘she has been taught to ape the claims of certain nuns who have gone before her, nuns whom Rome is pleased to recognise as saints. I cannot convict them of heresy, retrospectively. Nor have I evidence to try her for heresy’” (492) Note: Speech, heresy, form

“‘Words have been construed as treasons, there are precedents, you know them.’ / ‘I should be astonished,’ Audley says, ‘if they have escaped Cromwell’s attention’” (492) Note: Words, laws

“He can see that, in the years ahead, treason will take new and various forms. When the last treason act was made, no one could circulate their words in a printed book or bill, because printed books were not thought of” (492) Note: Laws, books

“‘I think new laws are needed,’ Riche says” (492) Note: Laws

“Conversation is in various tongues and Rafe Sadler translates adroitly, smoothly, his head turning from side to side: high topics and low, statecraft and gossip, Zwingli’s theology, Cranmer’s wife” (494) Note: Talk, language

“‘It is not the stars that make us, Dr Butts, it is circumstance and necessità, the choices we make under pressure; our virtues make us but virtues are not enough, we must deploy our vices at times’” (494) Note: Fate, virtu

“He draws the sun and the planets moving in their orbits according to the plan he has heard of from Father Copernicus. He shows how the world is turning on its axis, and nobody in the room denies it. Under your feet you can feel the tug and heft of it, the rocks groaning to tear away from their beds, the oceans tilting and slapping at their shores, the giddy lurch of Alpine passes, the forests of Germany ripping at their roots to be free. The world is not what it was when he and Vaughan were young, it is not what it was even in the cardinal’s day” (495) Note: New knowledge

“‘He thought you would look at him in that way you have… as if you were weighing him’” (497) Note: Calculation, valuation

“I never think of Johane Williamson now: Johane as she was for me. Her body once had special meaning, but that meaning is now unmade; the flesh created beneath his fingertips, hallowed by desire, becomes just the ordinary substance of a city wife” (499) Note: Meaning, flesh

“Christophe, folding garments, says, ‘Is there loups? In this kingdom?’ / ‘I think the wolves all died when the great forests were cut down. That howling you hear is only the Londoners’” (499) Note: Wolves, Londoners

“‘God dealt her a good enough hand but she never knew how to play it’” (503) Note: Play

“‘What’s the use of talking to women?’ he asks earnestly. ‘Cromwell, you don’t talk to women, do you? I mean, what would be the topic? What would you find to say?’” (509) Note: Talking, women

“You don’t get torta di funghi unless you pick the raw ingredients” (509) Note: Ingredients, recipe

“He thinks, the heart is like any other organ, you can weigh it on a scale” (511) Note: Calculation

“Henry squeezes his arm and says, ‘Thomas, it is like hugging a sea wall. What are you made of?’” (513) Note: Stature, made, invent

“He takes the paper. He gapes. ‘Is this what we must do this morning? This list?’ / ‘Not more than fifty items. We shall soon work through’” (513) Note: Fifty items

“It is necessary to break the hold of these people who talk of the end times and threaten us with plagues and damnation. It is necessary to dispel the terror they create” (514) Note: Terror, faith

“He thinks, More is too proud to retreat from his position. He is afraid to lose his credibility with the scholars in Europe” (515) Note: Scholar

“As the word of God spreads, the people’s eyes are opened to new truths. Until now, like Helen Barre, they knew Noah and the Flood, but not St Paul. They could count over the sorrows of our Blessed Mother, and say how the damned are” (515) Note: Reform, Protestant

“carried down to Hell. But they did not know the manifold miracles and sayings of Christ, nor the words and deeds of the apostles, simple men who, like the poor of London, pursued simple wordless trades. The story is much bigger than they ever thought it was. He says to his nephew Richard, you cannot tell people just part of the tale and then stop, or just tell them the parts you choose. They have seen their religion painted on the walls of churches, or carved in stone, but now God’s pen is poised, and he is ready to write his words in the books of their hearts” (516) Note: Faith, gospel

“He says to Cranmer, these people want a good authority, one they can properly obey. For centuries Rome has asked them to believe what only children could believe” (516) Note: Belief, authority

“There’s a feeling of power in reserve, a power that drives right through the bone, like the shiver you sense in the shaft of an axe when you take it into your hand. You can strike, or you can not strike, and if you choose to hold back the blow, you can still feel inside you the resonance of the omitted thing” (517) Note: Violence

“Bosworth, the tattered standards, the bloody field; the stained sheet of maternity. Where do we all come from, he thinks, but this same hole and corner dealing” (518) Note: Dealings

“The courtiers see that he can shape events, mould them. He can contain the fears of other men, and give them a sense of solidity in a quaking world: this people, this dynasty, this miserable rainy island at the edge of the world” (522) Note: Shape, mould, events

III. A Painter’s Eye. 1534.

“He looks at the picture’s lower edge, and allows his gaze to creep upwards. A quill, scissors, papers, his seal in a little bag, and a heavy volume, bound in blackish green: the leather tooled in gold, the pages gilt-edged. Hans had asked to see his Bible, rejected it as too plain, too thumbed. He had scoured the house and found the finest volume he owned on the desk of Thomas Avery. It is the monk Pacioli’s work, the book on how to keep your books, sent to him by his kind friends in Venice” (525) Note: Painting, All his details

“He wears his winter clothes. Inside them, he seems made of a more impermeable substance than most men, more compacted. He could well be wearing armour” (526) Note: Painting

“I doubt, he thinks, they can hack through to the heart. The king had said, what are you made of?” (526) Note: Made, p. 513

“For one never thinks of you alone, Cremuel, but in company, studying the faces of other people, as if you yourself mean to paint them” (527) Note: Painting

“‘I looked like a murderer.’ / Gregory says, ‘Did you not know?’” (527) Note: Murderer

Part Six

I. Supremacy. 1534.

“he is rereading Marsiglio of Padua. In the year 1324 Marsiglio put to us forty-two propositions” (531) Note: Pre Reformation

“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?’” (531) Note: Gospel vs law

“Since Christ did not induce his followers into earthly power, how can it be maintained that the princes of today derive their” (531) Note: Reform

“power from the Pope? In fact, all priests are subjects, as Christ left them. It is for the prince to govern the bodies of his citizens, to say who is married and who can marry, who is a bastard and who legitimate” (532) Note: Reform, govern

“Where does the prince get this power, and his power to enforce the law? He gets it through a legislative body, which acts on behalf of the citizens. It is from the will of the people, expressed in Parliament, that a king derives his kingship” (532) Note: Sovereignty

“All these things are the business of the secular power. A man who has taken vows of poverty, how can he have property rights? How can monks be landlords?” (532) Note: Property

“The king says, ‘Cromwell, with your facility for large numbers …’” (532) Note: Numbers

“It is a characteristic of Henry, to run before you to where you were not quite going. He had meant to gentle him towards an intricate legal process of dispossession, repossession: the assertion of ancient sovereign rights, the taking back of what was always yours. He will remember that it was Henry who first suggested picking up a chisel and gouging the sapphire eyes out of saints. But he is willing to follow the king’s thought. ‘Christ taught us how to remember him. He left us bread and wine, body and blood. What more do we need? I cannot see where he asked for shrines to be set up, or instituted a trade in body parts, in hair and nails, or asked us to make plaster images and worship them’“ (531-532) Note: Laws, Reform

“Parliament is about to reconvene. He says to the king, no parliament in history has worked as hard as I mean to work this one. / Henry says, ‘Do what you have to do. I will back you.’ / It’s like hearing words you’ve waited all your life to hear. It’s like hearing a perfect line of poetry, in a language you knew before you were born” (533) Note: Laws, poetry

“The cardinal says, you do think this is a tilting ground? Do you think there are rules, protocols, judges to see fair play? One day, when you are still adjusting your harness, you will look and see him thundering at you downhill” (534) Note: Rules

“The gentlemen of England apply for places in his household now, for their sons and nephews and wards, thinking they will learn statecraft with him, how to write a secretary’s hand and deal with translation from abroad, and what books one ought to read to be a courtier. He takes it seriously, the trust placed in him; he takes gently from the hands of these noisy young persons their daggers, their pens, and he talks to them, finding out behind the passion and pride of young men of fifteen or twenty what they are really worth, what they value and would value under duress. You learn nothing about men by snubbing them and crushing their pride. You must ask them what it is they can do in this world, that they alone can do” (534) Note: Value, do

“The eyes and ears of the unlettered are as sharp as those of the gentry, and you need not be a scholar to have a good wit” (535) Note: Equal

“Inveterate scrappers. Wolves snapping over a carcase. Lions fighting over Christians” (536) Note: Fighting, wolves, lions

“Anne the takes the draft out of Henry’s hand. She shakes it in a passion. She is angry with the paper, jealous of the ink. She says, ‘This bill provides that if I die, say I die now, say I die of a fever and I die undelivered, then he can put another queen in my place’” (537) Note: Law, ink, affect

“‘We try to write laws sparingly. And so that they are not personal.’ / ‘By God,’ Gardiner says with relish, ‘if this isn’t personal, what is?’” (538) Note: Law

“‘An oath?’ Gardiner says. ‘What sort of legislation needs to be confirmed by an oath?’ / ‘You will always find those who will say a parliament is misled, or bought, or in some way incapable of representing the commonwealth’” (538) Note: Oath

“‘Rome has no legitimate voice in England. In my bill I mean to state a position. It is a modest one. I draft it, it may please Parliament to pass it, it may please the king to sign it. I shall then ask the country to endorse it’” (539) Note: Law

“Why should I not swear them? Do you think because they are bishops they are brutes? One Christian’s oath is as good as another’s” (539) Note: Gospel, equal

“‘In a generation these people can learn to read. The ploughman can take up a book. Believe me, Gardiner, England can be otherwise’” (539) Note: Read, otherwise

“‘I hate ingratitude. I hate disloyalty. That is why I value a man like you. You were good to your old master in his trouble. Nothing could commend you more to me, than that.’ He speaks as if he, personally, hadn’t caused the trouble; as if Wolsey’s fall were caused by a thunderbolt. ‘Another who has disappointed me is Thomas More’” (541) Note: Loyalty

“‘I don’t think I ever saw a puppet show,’ Fisher says sadly. ‘At least, not one of the kind of which you speak.’ / ‘But you’re in one, my lord bishop! Look around you. It’s all one great puppet show’” (542) Note: Puppets

“talk to the women, is his idea, rather than listen to Shelton after supper on the subjects of horses, dogs and his youthful exploits” (550) Note: Talk, women

“‘When I was Princess of Wales. Which I still am. How is it I am put out of the succession, Master Cromwell? How is it lawful?’ / ‘It is lawful if Parliament makes it so.’ / ‘There is a law above Parliament. It is the law of God. Ask Bishop Fisher.’ / ‘I find God’s purposes obscure, and God knows I find Fisher no fit elucidator. By contrast, I find the will of Parliament plain’” (555) Note: Law

“Chapuys, who stays up till dawn studying the tables of descent of the English aristocracy” (557) Note: Descent, title

“‘They do. They read me Tyndale’s gospel. Do you know that Bishop Tunstall and Thomas More between them have identified two thousand errors in his so-called Testament? It is more heretical than the holy book of the Moslems’” (557) Note: Gospel

“‘But who would rule?’” (559) Note: Rule

“‘it’s all very well planning what you will do in six months, what you will do in a year, but it’s no good at all if you don’t have a plan for tomorrow’” (559) Note: Plan

“She tells him Boleyn secrets; he tells her no secrets, though she thinks he has” (560) Note: Secrets

“This is how the book Utopia begins: friends, talking in a garden” (562) Note: Utopia, garden, friends, vs painting

“‘Do you know what I hate? I hate to be part of this play, which is entirely devised by him. I hate the time it will take that could be better spent, I hate it that minds could be better employed, I hate to see our lives going by, because depend upon it, we will all be feeling our age before this pageant is played out. 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’” (563) Note: Play

“there must be some perplexity? For you must ask yourself, as you are a scholar and accustomed to controversy, to debate, how can so many learned men think on the one side, and I on the other?” (565) Note: Scholars

“You call history to your aid, but what is history to you? It is a mirror that flatters Thomas More. But I have another mirror, I hold it up and it shows a vain and dangerous man, and when I turn it about it shows a killer, for you will drag down with you God knows how many, who will only have the suffering, and not your martyr’s gratification” (566) Note: History, self interest

“‘How could you be? More publishes all his letters from his friends. Even when they reprove him, he makes a fine show of his humility and so turns it to his profit. He has lived in public. Every thought that passes through his mind he has committed to paper. He never kept anything private, till now’” (568) Note: Letters

“‘But tell me: when it was put to you, about the lords Cromwell that once were in England, you said you were nothing to them. Have you thought further?’” (569) Note: Ancestry, interest

“‘My lord Norfolk says you enjoy being low-born. He says you have devised it so, to torment him’” (569) Note: Descent, ancestry

“I’d rather keep my hand in. In case things take a downturn” (572) Note: Hands, fortunes

“‘you have made your choice. You must never repent it’” (574) Note: Choice

“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” (574) Note: Laws, words, power, effects, affairs, dealings

“They are dug into shallow graves, the Cornishmen who came up the country when he was a boy; but there are always more Cornishmen. And beneath Cornwall, beyond and beneath this whole realm of England, beneath the sodden marches of Wales and the rough territory of the Scots border, there is another landscape; there is a buried empire, where he fears his commissioners cannot reach. Who will swear the hobs and boggarts who live in the hedges and in hollow trees, and the wild men who hide in the woods? Who will swear the saints in their niches, and the spirits that cluster at holy wells rustling like fallen leaves, and the miscarried infants dug into unconsecrated ground: all those unseen dead who hover in winter around forges and village hearths, trying to warm their bare bones? For they too are his countrymen: the generations of the uncounted dead, breathing through the living, stealing their light from them, the bloodless ghosts of lord and knave, nun and whore, the ghosts of priest and friar who feed on living England, and suck the substance from the future” (575) Note: Another landscape, England, dead

“In England there is no mercy for the poor. You pay for everything, even a broken neck” (576) Note: England

“Midsummer: bonfires are lit all over London, burning through the short nights. Dragons stalk the streets, puffing out smoke and clattering their mechanical wings” (579) Note: England, dragon

II. The Map of Christendom. 1534-1535.

“The post of Master of the Rolls is vacant. It is an ancient judicial office, it commands one of the kingdom’s great secretariats. His predecessors will be those men, bishops for the most part, eminent in learning: those who lie down on their tombs, with their virtues in Latin engraved beneath. He is never more alive than when he twists the stem of this ripe fruit and snaps it from the tree” (580) Note: Learning, Latin

“So this house will become a place of business. As all his houses will become places of business. My home will be where my clerks and files are; otherwise, my home will be with the king, where he is” (584) Note: Business

“All this is small stuff. It’s nothing to what he intends to have, or to what Henry will owe him” (584) Note: Ambition

“Meanwhile, his outgoings would frighten a lesser man. If the king wants something done, you have to be able to staff the enterprise and fund it” (584) Note: Logistics

“He knows when to let these debts run; there is more than one kind of currency in England. What he senses is a great net is spreading about him, a web of favours done and favours received” (584) Note: Currency, favours

“If people don’t like new ideas, let them have old ones. If they want precedents, he has precedents” (588) Note: Ideas, precedents

“This is new, people say to him, this treason by words, and he says, no, be assured, it is old. It casts into statute law what the judges in their wisdom have already defined as common law. It is a measure for clarification. I am all for clarity” (589) Note: Law, clarity

“under the Emperor’s laws, 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” (590) Note: Printing, faith

“These prophets engage in daylight robbery, in the name of holding goods in common” (590) Note: Prophets, robbery

“‘You should write a play,’ More says wonderingly. / He laughs. ‘Perhaps I shall.’ / ‘It’s better than Chaucer. Words. Words. Just words.’ / He turns. He stares at More. It’s as if the light has changed. A window has opened on a strange country, where a cold wind from childhood blows. ‘That book … Was it a dictionary?’ / More frowns. ‘I’m sorry?’ / ‘I came up the stairs at Lambeth … I asked you, Master More, what is in that great book? You said, words, words, just words’” (592) Note: Play, words

“he learned to read on Wycliffe’s gospel, which his father hid in their roof under the thatch. This is a new England; an England where Martin can dust the old text down, and show it to his neighbours. He has brothers, all of them Bible men” (593) Note: Gospel, reading

“More’s letters are beyond the human. They may be addressed to his daughter, but they are written for his friends in Europe to read” (594) Note: Letters

“‘Master Secretary deals with everything. I’m surprised I don’t make the king’s shirts’” (599) Note: Dealings

“In his idle moments—in the week there are two or three—he has been picking through the records of the Rolls House. Though the Jews are forbidden the realm, you cannot know what human flotsam will be washed up by the tide of fortune, and only once, for a single month in these three hundred years, has the house been empty. He runs his eye over the accounts of the successive wardens, and he handles, curious, the receipts for their relief given by the dead inhabitants, written in Hebrew characters. Some of them spent fifty years within these walls, flinching from the Londoners outside. When he walks the crooked passages, he feels their footsteps under his” (602) Note: Records, accounts, receipts

“Hans knows he has an English bible, a translation almost ready. He puts a finger to his lips; too soon to talk about it, next year maybe. ‘If you were to dedicate it to Henry,’ Hans says, could he now refuse it? I will put him on the title page, displayed in glory, head of the church.’ Hans paces, growls out a few figures. He is thinking of paper and printer’s costs, estimating his profits. Lucas Cranach draws title pages for Luther. Those pictures of Martin and his wife, he has sold prints by the basketful. And Cranach makes everybody look like a pig’” (603) Note: Bible, printing

“‘My husband used to say,’ and he notes the past tense, ‘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 larks’ tongues, and all the gaolers will owe him money’” (605) Note: Dealings

“‘It’s the law of the land. The custom of the country’” (606) Note: Law, custom

“‘This is the Scots border,’ he says gently. ‘Harry Percy’s country. Look, let me show you. These are parcels of his estates he has given away to his creditors. We cannot let it continue, because we can’t leave our borders to chance’” (607) Note: Borders, credit

“‘He can keep the style. We’ll give him something to live on.’ / ‘Is this because of the cardinal?’” (608) Note: Revenge, cardinal

“‘I have to settle the kingdom’s bills’” (608) Note: Bills, numbers

“Early in the new year the king gives him a title no one has ever held before: Vicegerent in Spirituals, his deputy in church affairs. Rumours that the religious houses will be put down have been running about the kingdom for three years and more. Now he has the power to visit, inspect and reform monasteries; to close them, if need be. There is hardly an abbey whose affairs he does not know, by virtue of his training under the cardinal and the letters that arrive day by day” (608) Note: Title, Affairs, reform

“He says to Chapuys, ‘Were you ever at the cathedral in Chartres? You walk the labyrinth,’ he says, ‘set into the pavement, and it seems there is no sense in it. But if you follow it faithfully it leads you straight to the centre. Straight to where you should be’” (609) Note: Labyrinth

“He takes a breath and begins to talk. Henry has no time for other women. He is too busy counting his money. He is growing very close, he doesn’t want Parliament to know his income. I have difficulty getting him to part with anything for the universities, or to pay his builders, or even for the poor. He only thinks of ordnance. Munitions. Shipbuilding. Beacons. Forts” (610) Note: Money, war

“The fate of peoples is made like this, two men in small rooms. Forget the coronations, the conclaves of cardinals, the pomp and processions. This is how the world changes: a counter pushed across a table, a pen stroke that alters the force of a phrase, a woman’s sigh as she passes and leaves on the air a trail of orange flower or rosewater; her hand pulling close the bed curtain, the discreet sigh of flesh against flesh. The king - lord of generalities - must now learn to labour over detail, led on by intelligent greed” (610) Note: Fate, Change, detail

“As his prudent father’s son, he knows all the families of England and what they have. He has registered their holdings in his head, down to the last watercourse and copse. Now the church’s assets are to come under his control, he needs to know their worth. The law of who owns what the law generally—has accreted a parasitic complexity—it is like a barnacled hull, a roof slimy with moss. But there are lawyers enough, and how much” (610) Note: Holdings, number, calculation

“ability does it require, to scrape away as you are directed? Englishmen may be superstitious, they may be afraid of the future, they may not know what England is; but the skills of adding and subtraction are not scarce” (611) Note: Calculation

“Westminster has a thousand scratching pens, but Henry will need, he thinks, new men, new structures, new thinking. Meanwhile he, Cromwell, puts his commissioners on the road. Valor ecclesiasticus” (611) Note: New structures

“when I come to judgment I mean to come with a memorandum in my hand: I shall say to my Maker, I have fifty items here, possibly more” (613) Note: Judgment, memorandum, fifty items

“the total unmakes itself and all sense is subtracted” (613) Note: Calculation, fever

“Perhaps this is Utopia? At the centre of that place, which is an island, there is a place called Amaurotum, the City of Dreams” (614) Note: Utopia

“He is tired out from the effort of deciphering the world. Tired from the effort of smiling at the foe” (614) Note: Cipher, face, mask

“I remember, he says, I remember Calais, the alchemists, the memory machine. ‘Guido Camillo is making it for François so he will be the wisest king in the world, but the dolt will never learn how to use it’” (614) Note: Memory theatre

“there is a man in Paris who has built a soul. It is a building but it is alive. The whole of it is lined with little shelves. On these shelves you find certain parchments, fragments of writing, they are in the nature of keys, which lead to a box which contains a key which contains another key, but these keys are not made of metal, or these enfolded boxes of wood” (614-615) Note: Memory soul

“They are made of spirit. They are what we shall have left, if all the books are burned. They will enable us to remember not only the past, but the future, and to see all the forms and customs that will one day inhabit the earth” (615) Note: Spirit, form, custom

“Butts says, he is burning up. He thinks of Little Bilney, how he put a hand in the candle flame the night before he died, testing out the pain. It seared his shrinking flesh; in the night he whimpered like a child and sucked his raw hand, and in the morning the city councillors of Norwich dragged him to the pit where their forefathers had burned Lollards. Even when his face was burned away, they were still pushing into it the emblems and banners of popery: their fabric singed and fringes alight, their blank-eyed virgins cured like herring and curling in the smoke” (615) Note: Persecution

“you have made a thinking machine that marches forward as if it were alive, you don’t need to be tending it every minute of every day” (615) Note: Thinking machine

“He says, send Thurston up. They have been keeping him on a low diet, invalid food like turkey. Now, he says, we are going to plan—what?—a piglet, stuffed and roasted in the way I once saw it done at a papal banquet. You will need chopped chicken, lardo, and a goat’s liver, minced fine. You will need fennel seeds, marjoram, mint, ginger, butter, sugar, walnuts, hen’s eggs and some saffron. Some people put in cheese but we don’t make the right kind here in London, besides I myself think it is unnecessary. If you’re in trouble about any of this send out to Bonvisi’s cook, he’ll see you right” (616) Note: Recipe, logistics

“It would be useful to know where the bridges are, and to have a note of the distance between them. It would be useful to know how far you are from the sea. But the trouble is, maps are always last year’s. England is always remaking herself, her cliffs eroding, her sandbanks drifting, springs bubbling up in dead ground. They regroup themselves while we sleep, the landscapes through which we move, and even the histories that trail us; the faces of the dead fade into other faces, as a spine of hills into the mist” (619) Note: Useful, England, land, history

“‘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 you would take your sword in your hand’” (620) Note: Fear, murderer, violence

“‘you should see the work he gets out of Cromwell’” (621) Note: Work, dealings

“‘My dear Thomas, you are always the only opponent’” (621) Note: Opponent

“Thomas Avery smuggles in to him Luca Pacioli’s book of chess puzzles. He has soon done all the puzzles, and drawn out some of his own on blank pages at the back” (621) Note: Chess, puzzles, game

“He re-emerges into the world. Knock him down and he will get up. Death has called to inspect him, she has measured him” (621) Note: So now get up, measure, death

“have you ever noticed how he has one shoulder up and the other down? It comes from overmuch writing, he says. One elbow on the desk, the other shoulder dropped” (625) Note: Body, writing

“‘Let me be clear. I am no example. I am just myself, alone. I say nothing against the act. I say nothing against the men that made it. I say nothing against the oath, or against any man that swears it.’ / ‘Ah, yes,’ he sits down on the chest where More keeps his possessions, but all this saying nothing, it won’t do for a jury, you know. Should it come to a jury’” (625) Note: Alone, nothing

“Silence. The loud, contentious, quality of More’s silence. It’s bouncing off the walls. More says he loves England, and he fears all England will be damned. He is offering some kind of bargain to his God, his God who loves slaughter” (626) Note: Silence, More’s God

“‘The cases are not the same. When I compel an answer from a heretic, I have the whole body of law behind me, the whole might of Christendom. What I am threatened with here is one particular law, one singular dispensation of recent make, recognised here but in no other country’” (628) Note: Law, right

“‘On numbers I suppose you have me beat. But have you looked at a map lately? Christendom is not what it was’” (628) Note: Christendom

“He cuts in on him, incredulous. ‘You do nobody harm? What about Bainham, you remember Bainham? You forfeited his goods, committed his poor wife to prison, saw him racked with your own eyes, you locked him in Bishop Stokesley’s cellar, you had him back at your own house two days chained upright to a post, you sent him again to Stokesley, saw him beaten and abused for a week, and still your spite was not exhausted: you sent him back to the Tower and had him racked again, so that finally his body was so broken that they had to carry him in a chair when they took him to Smithfield to be burned alive. And you say, Thomas More, that you do no harm?’” (629) Note: Pious evil

“He says, ‘Unless we hear soon of a change of heart, we must take away your pen and books. I will send papers. And your someone’” (629) Note: Papers, books

“Cromwell, can talk for a week” (630) Note: Talk

“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 bosom. You know my decision. Execute it’” (631) Note: Dealings

“‘For one is a temporal jurisdiction, and Parliament can do it. The other is a spiritual jurisdiction, and is what Parliament cannot exercise, for the jurisdiction is out this realm’“(632) Note: Jurisdiction

“‘A jury won’t understand that. They’ll take him to mean what he said. After all, sir, he knew it wasn’t some students’ debate.’ / ‘True. You don’t hold those at the Tower’” (633) Note: Debate

“‘I am glad I am not like you.’ / ‘Undoubtedly. Or you would be sitting here.’ / ‘I mean, my mind fixed on the next world. I realise you see no prospect of improving this one’” (635) Note: This world, next world

“‘I once had every hope,’ he says. ‘The world corrupts me, I think. Or perhaps it’s just the weather’” (635) Note: The world, the weather

“‘And you do?’ / Almost a flippant question. A handful of hail smacks itself against the window. It startles them both; he gets up, restless. He would rather know what’s outside, see the summer in its sad blowing wreckage, than cower behind the blind and wonder what the damage is. ‘I once had every hope,’ he says. ‘The world corrupts me, I think. Or perhaps it’s just the weather. It pulls me down and makes me think like you, that one should shrink her inside, down and down to a little point of light, preserving one’s solitary soul like a flame under a glass. The spectacles of pain and disgrace I see around me, the ignorance, the unthinking vice, the poverty and the lack of hope, and oh, the rain - the rain that falls on England and rots the grain, puts out the light in a man’s eye and the light of learning too, for who can reason if Oxford is a giant puddle and Cambridge is washing away downstream, and who will enforce the laws if the judges are swimming for their lives? Last week the people were rioting in York. Why would they not, with wheat so scarce, and twice the price of last year? I must stir up the justices to make examples, I suppose, otherwise the whole of the north will be out with billhooks and pikes, and who will they slaughter but each other? I truly believe I should be a better man if the weather were better. I should be a better man if I lived in a commonwealth where the sun shone and the citizens were rich and free. If only that were true, Master More, you wouldn’t have to pray for me nearly as hard as you do’” (635) Note: THESIS

“‘How you can talk,’ More says. Words, words, just words” (636) Note: Words

“There is a silence which precedes speech, there is a silence which is instead of speech” (636) Note: Silence

“It’s England against Rome, he says. The living against the dead” (637) Note: England/Rome, living/dead

“They are experienced men, with all the city’s prejudices. They have seen enough, as all Londoners have, of the church’s rapacity and arrogance, and they do not take kindly to being told they are unfit to read the scriptures in their own tongue” (638) Note: Church, violence, reading

“Dick Purser drops his shorn head against his shoulder and bawls, in shame, in relief, in triumph that will have outlived his tormentor” (640) Note: Torment

“‘I will follow you to the death,’ the boy declares” (640) Note: Loyalty

“Audley asks for a seat for the prisoner, butMore twitches to the edge of it: keyed up, combative. / He glances around to check that someone is taking notes for him. / Words, words, just words. / He thinks, I remembered you, Thomas More, but you didn’t remember me. You never even saw me coming” (640) Note: Words, memory

III. To Wolf Hall. July 1535.

“More sniggering when some clerk made a slip in his Latin” (641) Note: Contempt

“But are not drinking, dice and fighting more natural in a young man, on the whole, than fasting, beads and self-flagellation?” (642) Note: Nature, piety

“There’s nothing harder than a London burgess who thinks he’s being played for a fool. Audley or any of the lawyers could have put the jury right: it’s just how we lawyers argue. But they don’t want a lawyer’s argument, they want the truth: did you say it, or didn’t you?” (642) Note: Law, truth

“George Boleyn leans forward: can the prisoner let us have his own version of the conversation? More turns, smiling, as if to say, a good point there, young master George. ‘I made no note of it. I had no writing materials, you see. They had already taken them away. For if you remember, my lord Rochford, that was the very reason Riche came to me, to remove from me the means of recording’” (642) Note: Smug, writing, record

“And he had paused again, and looked at the jury as if expecting applause; they looked back, faces like stones” (642) Note: Out of touch

“They hurry in; the wind bangs a door behind them. Rafe takes his arm. 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” (644) Note: Two dictionaries, silence

“But there was nothing new in it: not new anyway to him. I follow my conscience, More said, you must follow yours. My conscience satisfies me - and now I will speech plainly - that your statute is faulty (and Norfolk roars at him) and that your authority baseless (Norfolk roars again: ‘Now we see your malice plain’). Parnell had laughed, and the jury exchanged glances, nodding to each other; and while the whole of Westminster Hall murmured, More proffered again, speaking against the noise, his treasonable method of counting. My conscience holds with the majority, which makes me know it does not speak false. ‘Against Henry’s kingdom, I have all the kingdoms of Christendom. Against each one of your bishops, I have a hundred saints. Against your one parliament, I have all the general councils of the church, stretching back for a thousand years.’ / Norfolk said, take him out. It is finished” (645) Note: Speech, treason, law, foreigners

“Rafe comes in with a book in his hand. It is his prayer book, that More had with him at the last.’ / He examines it. Mercifully, no blood specks. He holds it up by the spine and lets the leaves fan out. ‘I already did that,’ Rafe says” (646) Note: Book

“‘I need the memory machine.’ Guido has quit Paris, they say. He has scuttled back to Italy and left the device half built. They say that before his flight for some weeks he had neither spoken nor eaten. His well-wishers he has gone mad, awed by the capacities of his own creature: fallen into the abyss of the divine. His ill-wishers maintain that demons crawled out of the crannies and crevices of the device, and panicked him so that he ran off by night in his shirt with not even a crust and a lump of cheese for the journey, leaving all his books behind him and his magus’s robes. It is not impossible that Guido has left writings behind in France. For a fee they might be obtained. It is not impossible to have him followed to Italy; but would there be any point? It is likely, he thinks, that we shall never know what his invention really was. A printing press that can write its own books? A mind that thinks about itself?” (647) Note: Memory, divinity, writings, invention, press, mind

“Petrarch writes, ‘between one dip of the pen and the next, the time passes: and I hurry, I drive myself, and I speed towards death. We are always dying—I while I write, you while you read, and others while they listen or block their ears; they are all dying’” (648) Note: Dying, writing, reading

“better maps would help. Even in the cardinal’s day he was asking himself, might this be a project we could undertake?” (648) Note: Maps

“It’s the living that turn and chase the dead. The long bones and skulls are tumbled from their shrouds, and words like stones thrust into their rattling mouths: we edit their writings, we rewrite their lives” (649) Note: Living, dead, words, writing, editing

“The past moves heavily inside him, a shifting of ground” (650) Note: Past, ground

“Just this last year a scholar, a foreigner, has written a chronicle of Britain, which omits King Arthur on the ground that he never existed. A good ground, if he can sustain it; but Gregory says, no, he is wrong. Because if he is right, what will happen to Avalon? What will happen to the sword in the stone?” (650) Note: History, myth, matter of Britain

“From Bromham—we are now in early September—towards Winchester. Then Bishop’s Waltham, Alton, Alton to Farnham. He plots it out, across country. The object is to get the king back to Windsor for early October. He has his sketch map across the page, England in a drizzle of ink; his calendar, quickly jotted, running down it. ‘I seem to have four, five days in hand. Ah well. Who says I never get a holiday?’” (650) Note: Map, calendar, logistics

Author’s Note

“The gentleman usher George Cavendish, after the death of Wolsey, retired to the country, and in 1554, when Mary came to the throne, began a book, ‘Thomas Wolsey, late Cardinal, his Life and Death.’ It has been published in many editions, and can be found online in an edition with original spelling. It is not always accurate, but it is a very touching, immediate and readable account of Wolsey’s career and Thomas Cromwell’s part in it. Its influence on Shakespeare is clear. Cavendish took four years to complete his book, and died just as Elizabeth came to the throne” (651) Note: Author’s Note

Acknowledgments

“Dr Mary Robertson; her business as a scholar has been with the facts of Cromwell’s life, but she has encouraged me and lent me her expertise through the production of this fiction, put up with my fumbling speculations and been kind enough to recognise the portrait I have produced” (653) Note: Acknowledgments, fiction