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Wolf Hall Companion E-Book

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Herausgeber: Batsford
Kategorie: Geisteswissenschaft
Sprache: Englisch

Beschreibung

An accessible and authoritative companion to the bestselling Wolf Hall trilogy by Hilary Mantel, published after the third and final book, The Mirror and the Light. Wolf Hall Companion gives an historian's view of what we know about Thomas Cromwell, one of the most powerful men of the Tudor age and the central character in Mantel's Wolf Hall trilogy. Covering the key court and political characters from the books, this companion guide also works as a concise Tudor history primer. Alongside Thomas Cromwell, the author explores characters including Anne Boleyn, Thomas Cranmer, Jane Seymour, Henry VIII, Thomas Howard, Cardinal Wolsey and Richard Fox. The important places in the court of Henry VIII are introduced and put into context, including Hampton Court, the Tower of London, Cromwell's home Austin Friars, and of course Wolf Hall. The author explores not only the real history of these people and places, but also Hilary Mantel's interpretation of them.

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Seitenzahl: 289

Veröffentlichungsjahr: 2020

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Leseprobe

INTRODUCTION

Finding Cromwell

Fact and Fiction

A New Cromwell

CHAPTER 1 Rising Fortunes

Cromwell’s Early Life

Walter Cromwell

Thomas Cromwell on the Continent

A Mercantile Education

Cromwell the Lawyer

The Cromwell Family at Austin Friars

Cromwell and the Cardinal

Richard Fox

Wolsey

The Tudor Dynasty

Heirs and Spares

The Tudor Court

The Royal Palaces

Families of Court

CHAPTER 2 Cromwell Ascends

The Cardinal’s Man

Katherine of Aragon

The Rivals and Henry’s ‘Great Matter’

Entry to court

Anne Boleyn

Tudor Pastimes

Feast Days and Holy Days

Tudor Christmas

The Trappings of a Gentleman

Men of the Privy Chamber

CHAPTER 3 A New Era

The Cardinal’s Descent

Thomas More

The Ambassador

The Privy Council at Westminster

Turning Point

Elizabeth Barton: The Holy Maid of Kent

Calais

A Way Forward

Prince[ess]

Personal Spheres

Renaissance

Renaissance Influences

The Oath of Succession

CHAPTER 4 Henry’s Wrath

Around the Throne the Thunder Rolls

The Death of Katherine

The Fall of the Boleyns

Gathering Evidence

Interrogation

Trial and Execution

After the Execution

Personal Spheres

The New Court Structure

The Seymours

The Rise of the Seymours

Old Families, New Order

Success and Succession

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

CHAPTER 5 The Fall of Cromwell

A Birth and a Death

The Search for a New Queen

New Alliances and Anne of Cleves

Miscalculations and Execution

The Aftermath

FINDING CROMWELL

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

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

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

FACT AND FICTION

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

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

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

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

A NEW CROMWELL

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

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

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

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

CROMWELL’S EARLY LIFE

In a generation everything can change.

(Wolf Hall)

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

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

Under Henry’s son, Henry VIII, the court became a stock exchange for courtiers craving advancement where they could list their personal value and demonstrate their skills; a change in their status could bring power, estates and titles. Yet even in a world of opportunity, few could have imagined that Thomas Cromwell of Putney, son of a blacksmith and brewer, would become indispensable to the king.

As discussed in the introduction, exactly how this happened is something of a mystery, for Thomas Cromwell’s trajectory from the grimy streets of Putney to the Privy Council is not well documented; he was guarded about his early life, leaving us with few textual traces from which we can construct his backstory, but from which, in the right hands, an interesting fictional narrative might be woven.

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

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

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

Eustace Chapuys was sent to act as Katherine of Aragon’s divorce lawyer by Charles V, her nephew, to mediate between Queen Katherine and King Henry. His official position at Henry’s court was Imperial ambassador so it is surprising that, as we shall see, he and Cromwell developed a close personal relationship.

Chapuys was a prolific letter writer, sometimes completing up to ten a day. Many were to Charles V and to Charles’ aunt, Margaret of Austria, and others including his friend and confidant, Nicolas Perrenot de Granvelle, a politician and ambassador from Burgundy.

Chapuys, like all ambassadors, had to be well-informed about the convictions and motives of courtiers, especially those who held sway over the monarch. Assembling fragments of Cromwell’s life and lineage was a particular challenge for Chapuys given the secrecy surrounding his background. But Chapuys did discover that he was imprisoned briefly for crimes unknown, before travelling to Flanders, Rome and other Italian cities. There may be some truth to the imprisonment story as much later, in 1516, Cromwell was involved in a legal dispute against the sheriffs of London who intended to imprison him for an outstanding debt. In one report to Charles V, Chapuys wrote that Cromwell’s uncle had been a cook for William Warham, Archbishop of Canterbury, and his father Walter was an unsuccessful and impoverished blacksmith who had lived, toiled and died in Putney. This was rather innocent information which Cromwell himself might have revealed in a rather unguarded moment, or on one of those occasions when he would wallow in regret about his misspent youth, when he was ‘rather ill-conditioned and wild.’

WALTER CROMWELL

Thomas may not have obsessed over his lineage, but in Wolf Hall it is an obsession for his father Walter. His savage beating of son Thomas that opens the novel turns us against Walter and forever wins us over to Thomas’s side. Walter’s life is said to have been full of disappointment and bitterness, eating away at him as his dreams of reclaiming the wealth and status of his ancestors were shattered: ‘Walter thinks he’s entitled. He’d heard it all in his childhood: the Cromwells were a rich family once, we had estates.’

When we look at the history, there is some confusion, unhelpfully perpetuated by historians. Historical references reveal that Walter had various interests, from farming and commercial beer brewing to woollen clothmaking. One historian added blacksmithing to his curriculum vitae, even that he had served as a farrier, a smith who shoes horses, and that he served in Henry Tudor’s contingent at the Battle of Bosworth. Still other historians ascribed a certain degree of lawlessness. Among our 20th-century historians it was Roger Merriman who disparaged Walter’s character, describing him as a ‘most quarrelsome and riotous character’ and ‘not seldom drunk’. It only takes one reference to cause a veritable flood, and soon later historians, building upon these foundations, speculated that Walter was not only a violent man but a criminal; after all, he had a record of being fined for assaulting a man, convicted of brawling, fraud and repeatedly fined for breaking the assize of ale, which meant he sold watered-down merchandise. But the meticulous examination of court records by Professor MacCulloch has rescued Walter from this last accusation, noting that the frequency of the fines points to a ‘routine, manorial system of licensing ale selling, couched in terms easy to mistake as a fine in the modern sense.’

But MacCulloch had drilled down further to find every historian’s dream: real evidence in the form of a letter written to Thomas Cromwell in 1536 from Anthony St Leger, a protégé of Cromwell’s who would later become Lord deputy of Ireland. It thanks Thomas for all that he has done, and praises Walter for his goodness and assistance. Far from being the lawless drunk we have heard about, Walter was a successful local tradesmen and member of the community, as reflected in his frequent calls to serve as a juryman and his appointment as constable of Putney, suggesting he was well thought of in the community.

This has resulted in a debate regarding Cromwell’s parentage, suggesting that it may be more complicated – was Walter Thomas’ biological father? Writing of Cromwell’s years in Italy, his Italian contemporary Matteo Bandello recounted a scene in which Cromwell described himself as ‘the son of a poor cloth shearer’, which is seemingly confirmed by Reginald Pole in his Apologia ad Carolum Quintum (1539). John Foxe, however, was more succinct, writing that Cromwell was ‘born in Putney or thereabouts, being a smith’s son, whose mother married afterwards to a shearman’. Certainly the varying portraits – well-to-do brewer or poor blacksmith and cloth shearer – do not quite correspond.

Far more elusive, historically and in Wolf Hall, is Cromwell’s mother, Katherine. She is rarely referred to in official records although Cromwell once made the unlikely claim that his mother was 52 when she gave birth to him. Her maiden name was Meverell, and she came from a well-to-do family. She and Walter lived in a small house that adjoined their brewery near Putney Bridge Road in London. They had three living children, with Thomas being the youngest, born sometime between 1483 and 1485. Whatever the nature of Cromwell’s relationship with his parents, he remained close to his two older sisters, Katherine and Elizabeth; Katherine’s son, Richard, later adopted the Cromwell surname and became a protégé of his uncle’s.

Thomas Cromwell’s family details continue to be debated among historians, but with so little evidence available, not to mention Thomas Cromwell’s own conflicting stories, we may never have the full picture.

THOMAS CROMWELL ON THE CONTINENT

Thus, in his growing years, as he shot up in age and ripeness, a great delight came in his mind to stray into foreign countries, to see the world abroad, and to learn experience; whereby he learned such tongues and languages as might better serve for his use hereafter.

John Foxe

It is unlikely that Cromwell impetuously left Putney for the Continent to escape his father; more likely, he secured employment abroad before he left London. In Wolf Hall, Mantel draws back the curtain on his time in Europe but only intermittently, allowing us glimpses of the years that really shaped him:

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 ... if he was homesick, it was for Italy ....

Diarmaid MacCulloch remarks that much of Cromwell’s early career rested on his ‘ability to be the best Italian in all England’. And Italy does loom large in Cromwell’s life, a connection that began in 1503 when, in his early twenties, he joined an expedition to Italy as part of the French army, fighting the Spanish at the Battle of Garigliano, just south of Rome, on 29th December 1503. Mantel invokes the Italian connection when noting that Cromwell does have ‘something of that dark glitter of the Mafia boss about him’.

The Italian peninsula became the battleground for the French Valois kings and the Habsburg monarchs, who for decades were engaged in bloody hostilities known as the Italian Wars (1494–1559) as they fought for control over the powerful and wealthy Italian states of Florence, Venice, Genoa, the Papal States, the Duchy of Milan and the kingdoms of Sicily and Naples. Cromwell may have found himself a war, along with many of the other mercenaries who sustained both armies, but he picked the losing side. His first experience of warfare ended in a decisive defeat for the French, sealing a Habsburg domination of southern Italy. From the humiliation of defeat upon the battlefield, Cromwell slowly made his way to the famed city of Florence. Even then the city lured in 16th-century merchants and tourists alike with its iconic buildings: the Cathedral of Santa Maria del Fiore and its magnificent dome by Filippo Brunelleschi; the medieval Ponte Vecchio spanning the Arno river; and the nearby Pitti Palace, which the Medici family had coveted for so long and would purchase in 1549, consolidating their rule over this great city of the Renaissance.

THE FRESCOBALDIS OF FLORENCE

It was from the streets of Florence, Bandello tells us, that Francesco Frescobaldi, a member of a wealthy Florentine mercantile family, rescued the young Cromwell from a life of poverty. How this might have happened is a mystery, but we do know that Cromwell was fortunate to associate with Francesco, for the Frescobaldis had been a powerful family in Florence since the 13th century. Their business interests were considerable, extending even to England and the new Tudor king, Henry VII, with whom they enjoyed an informal arrangement whereby goods imported from the East were allowed to travel via England, thence to Florence, thereby circumnavigating the highly taxed papal-controlled routes. The Frescobaldis were in the wine business and a leading exporter to England; today this 700-year-old history continues and they are still a large producer of Tuscan wines.

The Frescobaldi family were well-connected and respected among the Florentine gentry, renowned for their hospitality and entertaining, thus providing Cromwell with an unprecedented entrée into a world of wealth and privilege. Florence was a sophisticated city of art, culture and commerce, home to some of Europe’s leading personalities of the period – including Michelangelo, who received many commissions from the Frescobaldis.

Mantel’s Cromwell fondly recalls his time in the Frescobaldi sphere of influence and there are only a few casual references where she allows Cromwell to briefly reminisce:

It’s not so many years since the Frescobaldi kitchen in Florence; or perhaps it is, but his memory is clear, exact. He was clarifying calf’s-foot jelly, chatting away in his mixture of French, Tuscan and Putney, when somebody shouted, ‘Tommaso, they want you upstairs.’

In describing the scene, Mantel may have taken inspiration more from John Foxe’s recollections of a young Cromwell encountering the new Pope, Giovanni di Lorenzo de’ Medici, who became Pope Leo X. Cromwell was hired by the Merchant’s Guild of our Lady in Boston, Lincolnshire, which had been a prosperous wool-trading community since the 13th century. His mission was to travel to Rome to petition the Pope to renew their authority to collect papal indulgences on behalf of the Guild; many religious communities relied on the income generated by indulgences and without the papal licence their revenues would run dry. The mission was successful because Cromwell understood how business worked, perhaps something he had learned at the home of the Frescobaldis. Whereas most petitioners had to wait for months to be heard, Cromwell researched Pope Leo’s personal tastes and discovered that the Pope delighted in new and ‘dayntie dishes’. While on a hunting trip, Leo X was intercepted by Cromwell who had been working on an offering of his own, and produced several culinary delights, including jelly, for the Pope. This was a masterful stroke which so pleased the Pope that the Guild’s petition to renew the indulgences was immediately granted. Frescobaldi’s description then of Cromwell is on the mark:

‘Quick-witted and prompt of resolution...and could dissemble his purpose better than any man in the world.’

The Frescobaldi experience would have been a revelation for Cromwell, arousing a taste for the finer things in life, such as fine art and tapestries, which he collected. This son of a Putney blacksmith must have indeed puzzled those at Henry’s court, for where could this man have acquired such intelligence, worldliness and sophistication?

The provincial world of Putney was far behind as Cromwell, now fluent in Italian, Latin and French, was entrusted with the business transactions on behalf of the family, joining Francesco whenever he travelled for business. Cromwell’s last mission for the Frescobaldis took him to Venice where he and his master parted ways, though not on bad terms. Perhaps Cromwell had decided to broaden his world, and the 16 gold ducats and fine horse that Francesco gave Cromwell as a parting gift shows their close bond. Mantel may even be alluding to Cromwell’s affinity with Florence when her Henry teases him in Bring Up the Bodies: ‘Cromwell has the skin of a lily,’ the king pronounces. ‘The only particular in which he resembles that or any other blossom.’ The lily is the historic emblem of Florence, a fitting symbol of loyalty to the Florentine family who had set him on the path to success.

ANTWERP

We know that Cromwell also spent a short time in Venice, where he worked as an accountant, but from here the story shifts out of focus once more. Cromwell likely followed the trade routes from Venice through the cities of Europe, eventually reaching the Netherlands where he would again assimilate the skills and machinations of local business in a new area of commerce, namely as a cloth merchant. Cromwell had honed his financial skills in Italy, but Antwerp was the perfect training ground for a merchant.

Antwerp sits on the right bank of the Scheldt river, a gateway to the North Sea, ensuring it would surpass its rival, the city of Bruges, as a major centre of trade and commerce in Europe. Governed by bankers who were forbidden to engage in any trade themselves, Antwerp was well-organized and full of lucrative industries: breweries that would later make the city synonymous with beer; sugar refineries that imported the highly sought-after raw product from Portugal and Spain; salt imported from France and shipped abroad; diamonds bought from Indian merchants that were cut in the city by highly skilled Jews who had fled the persecutions of the Iberian peninsula. Its major activity was its tapestry workshops, which evolved into the major marketplace for Flemish tapestry. Indeed, Antwerp was the centre of the luxury market where dealers traded in exquisite tapestries, English cloth, and high-quality silks from Italy, from where Pope Leo X would commission the finest examples for his rooms in the Vatican. Antwerp was the mercantile capital of Western Europe, a financial centre that launched a stock exchange in 1531, drawing bankers from England, France, Portugal, Italy and the nations of the Holy Roman Empire; London would have to wait another 40 years for the creation of its stock exchange.

These channels of international trade and commerce also brought new religious and humanist influences, with the wind of reform in Antwerp attributable to the city’s pre-existing tensions with the Catholic Church. Cromwell worked as a clerk or secretary, possibly for English merchants, and would have been aware of all the trends and movements in the city, and is likely to have been influenced by the religious discourse flowing through the city. Mantel’s Cromwell gazes up at one of Wolsey’s tapestries and is reminded of a young woman he had loved in Antwerp. Incidentally, the woman would turn out to be the fictional Anselma as Cromwell discovers in The Mirror and the Light, but the real Cromwell would have focused on the value of that tapestry, which workshop made it (Arras or Tournai perhaps) and the going rate for a similar work.

A MERCANTILE EDUCATION

Cromwell knew the value of a practical education and contemplated sending his son Gregory to stay with Stephen Vaughan, a merchant in Antwerp. Cromwell once wrote to Vaughan, declaring ‘You think I am in Paradise, and I think in Purgatory.’ But he did have a great affection for Antwerp and a certain nostalgia for the place where he achieved so much.

Cromwell’s return to England was thought to be some time in 1513 or 1514, but the Boston Guild’s records of Cromwell in Rome place him in Italy in 1517 and 1518, so we can surmise that he travelled between England and Europe on various business trips during those years. With so many years spent in Europe, it is not surprising that Cromwell’s fluency expanded to include numerous languages, including French, Italian, German and Spanish, as well as the languages reserved for scholars and academics: Latin and Greek.

Mantel’s Cromwell overhears several conversations in a variety of languages including Flemish Latin and Greek. Not all of the conversations are useful, Cromwell says to himself, but they are to be remembered.

CROMWELL THE LAWYER

Our lesson with Cromwell is that he can be an unreliable narrator, and so historians have looked to official records to unearth his early career, particularly his time as a lawyer. We have no evidence of where Cromwell might have received legal training or if he had formal training at all, but his years in some of the most important centres of trade throughout Europe were enough to recommend him, and by the early 1520s he was well-known throughout London’s legal and mercantile spheres, both of which offered considerable opportunities for the lawyer and merchant. Cromwell was admitted to the Honourable Society of Gray’s Inn, one of the four inns of court in London, which was a prerequisite should Cromwell wish to be called to the bar.