Wolf Hall Companion

by Lauren Mackay

  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.

  Cromwell and his wife had three children, Gregory, Anne and Grace. Cromwell also had an illegitimate daughter, Jane (or Janneke in Mantel’s series), following the death of his wife, but we know very little about her circumstances, or of her mother. Jane may have resided in the Cromwell household as she had contact with the Cromwell family because she spent some time living with Gregory Cromwell at Leeds Castle in 1539. There has been speculation about Cromwell’s relationship with his wife, but evidence suggests a happy and close marriage.

  When we need evidence to substantiate a claim, there is nothing better than correspondence. One surviving letter reveals a dutiful husband, not only requesting news, but also providing meat for the family, a ‘fat doe’ which he had killed himself while out hunting. Cromwell also bought his wife expensive jewellery, including a sapphire ring and a gold bracelet worth £80 – or approximately £40,000 in today’s currency. Both Cromwell and his wife corresponded with various merchants and hosted many suppers at their imposing home, all providing intimate glimpses of the couple, which Mantel brings beautifully to life as she conjures joyful family gatherings, loving and warm conversations between Cromwell and his wife in their bedchamber, and business meetings with his son Gregory, nephew Richard and Rafe Sadler, a young boy who Cromwell had taken as a ward.

  Austin Friars was home to Liz’s father and stepmother, Henry and Mercy Wykys; Liz’s sister Johane Williamson and her husband John, and their daughter, Johane, who is often called Jo; Cromwell’s niece, Alice; and the son of his sister Kat, Richard, who would later adopt the Cromwell surname. Cromwell sought educations for all three children as well as his son and ward.

  ... it’s not a dynasty, he thinks, but it’s a start.

  Following Liz’s death in 1529, Cromwell never remarried, despite the advice of friends who urged him to do so. At the very height of his power, it seemed that matrimony was never on the cards, and while one might imagine that dealing with Henry’s endless matrimonial woes was enough to deter him, it is more likely that his choice to remain widowed was personal – perhaps he could not bear the thought of another wife living within the walls of Austin Friars.

  CROMWELL AND THE CARDINAL

  It is not clear how Cromwell, merchant and lawyer, moved from the Grey household to that of Cardinal Wolsey, but historians have several theories. Wolsey had a strong connection to the Greys: Thomas had met Wolsey while at Oxford and Thomas Grey’s father had given Wolsey his first benefice. But there were others in the Grey circle, such as John Allen, a family friend, who appointed Cromwell conveyancer to handle the sale of a property in York to Wolsey in 1524, and by January 1525 Cromwell was leading several complex projects for the Cardinal. Mantel’s Cromwell notes: ‘Wolsey cannot imagine a world without Wolsey’, but nevertheless, Wolsey had already begun to plan his legacy: twin Cardinal Colleges and his tomb.

  Such projects required vast sums of money but Wolsey had targeted six monasteries in decline, some around Ipswich and Oxford, which could be converted to colleges. Wolsey appointed Cromwell to survey the properties, and when the plan proved feasible, he was appointed to do the same for 30 more religious houses, which would go towards the college precinct, or if they could be sold, the proceeds could fund building works.

  Wolsey had commissioned the Italian Renaissance sculptor Benedetto da Rovezzano to design and construct his final resting place. Wolsey must have considered his legacy, having attained the position of the most important person in England next to the king. Working with a team of Italian sculptors, this would be a monument to Wolsey’s status and power: a black stone surrounded by copper pillars, decorated by bronze statues. Cromwell’s mastery of Italian made him indispensable. Wolsey’s trust in Cromwell now accelerated as he oversaw every financial and artistic element of these tasks. At the time of his death, the tomb was incomplete, the location undecided, and his legacy lay in tatters.

  RICHARD FOX

  But to understand Wolsey, we need to go back. Before Thomas Cromwell, before the brilliant Wolsey, there was another political mastermind: Richard Fox.

  Richard Fox was an Oxford-educated lawyer from Lincolnshire who had loyally served Edward IV but could not support Richard III’s claim to the throne, and fled to the young Henry Tudor’s side in Brittany. The two men forged an immediate rapport, a collaboration that would endure for the next 25 years, with Fox becoming indispensable to Henry VII. Fox masterminded and engineered the highly ambitious alliance between England and the power couple of Europe, Spain’s Ferdinand of Aragon and Isabella of Castile, through the marriage of their daughter, Katherine of Aragon, to Prince Arthur. Following Arthur’s untimely death in 1509, Fox ensured that the royal coffers retained the dowry by arranging her marriage to his younger brother, Henry VIII. Fox also negotiated the famous Anglo-Scottish alliance between Princess Margaret and James IV in 1503, one that decades later would see a Scottish king on the throne of England.

  Following the death of Henry VII and the accession of Henry VIII, Fox continued to be counsel the young, pleasure-loving king and his wife. But Fox was a pragmatist and could be a ruthless and unscrupulous opponent, as evidenced by his involvement in the infamous downfalls of Henry VII’s old councillors and hatchet men, Edmund Dudley and Richard Empson, who were executed within the first days of the new king’s reign. Powerful and influential, Fox was involved in most of the business conducted in the kingdom, with Henry trusting him to make decisions when he was absent from court, earning him the soubriquet alter rex (‘other king’), to the chagrin of many of country’s nobles. It was Henry VIII who, having measured Fox’s character, declared that Richard Fox was not a man to be underestimated, for he was, as his name implied, ‘a fox indeed’.

  Within this world of power, intrigue and patronage, Fox was also a supreme mentor, shaping the lives of two men in particular – Cardinal Thomas Wolsey and Stephen Gardiner. Wolsey would, of course, go on to mentor Thomas Cromwell, imparting the skills Fox himself had once wielded; their own success is part of Fox’s legacy.

  WOLSEY

  The cardinal, at fifty-five, is still as handsome as he was in his prime.

  (Wolf Hall)

  A tall, impressive man, Wolsey was the gateway to Henry, and Henry relied completely on Wolsey: no two such significant figures could have been closer. He stood above the royal councillors, many of whom resented his power and influence; even foreign rulers were highly deferential in their letters to him, as if they were writing to a fellow monarch. Cardinal Thomas Wolsey was one of the wealthiest and most powerful men of the Tudor age; his magnificent estate, Hampton Court, was even coveted by the King of England. Wolsey is an integral character in the Tudor narrative, and thus has played no small part in the many Tudor novels, movies and television dramas. In Wolf Hall it is Wolsey who conjures ghosts from behind his desk – Henry VII, Richard III, Prince Arthur – reminding us that Wolsey lived through the last tumultuous years of the Wars of the Roses and the reign of the first Tudor monarch.

  But we have only two contemporary narratives of Wolsey, each from a different perspective. The first is by the 16th-century London chronicler Edward Hall, who described Wolsey as a self-serving, duplicitous advisor who manipulated and controlled the young king, advancing his own personal and political agendas, his arrogance and corruption contributing to his own demise. The other account was by Wolsey’s loyal and long-term servant George Cavendish, a not entirely impartial observer who apologized for Wolsey extravagances but stressed that he was a most loyal servant of the king. These accounts of Wolsey’s life are really a response to a very narrow period of history that took place during the twilight of Wolsey’s life and career, and which led to his own downfall. In either case, these depictions affirm our view of Wolsey, accentuated in his famous portraits: the rapacious, rotund cardinal, scarlet robes stretched across his portly belly, with
pink, fleshy hands adorned with gold and jewels.

  Mantel rejects the tired readings of Wolsey, and avoids drawing on his enemies to strike him with their grievances: Anne Boleyn or Thomas More, for example. Rather she relies on Cromwell’s more sympathetic and charitable account of Wolsey by breathing life into the meetings between the powerful Lord Chancellor and his servant. In a non-linear narrative she delves first into Cromwell’s years in Wolsey’s service, then offers us glimpses of Wolsey’s powerful nature through Cromwell’s recollections. These insightful exchanges flesh out every element of Wolsey’s character: most memorable is that he speaks in ‘honeyed tones, famous from here to Vienna’.

  In Wolf Hall, several courtiers refer disparagingly to Wolsey as a butcher’s son or butcher’s dog, common slurs used frequently of the Cardinal, who was not of the aristocracy. Nor was he of the nobility, but the evidence suggests that his father was a reputable grazier, therefore landowner, from Ipswich in Suffolk, who reared sheep for wool for the lucrative textile industry, a far cry from a butcher. The young Wolsey was a prodigy as he was accepted into Magdalen College, Oxford, in his early teens, graduating at 15 with a Bachelor of Arts degree in 1486, earning him the nickname ‘boy bachelor’. In March of 1498, Wolsey was ordained a priest, but he soon turned to administration, entering the service of Richard Fox, loyal supporter and advisor to Henry VII, part of the Henry’s inner circle, along with his mother Margaret Beaufort. Serving as secretary to Fox, Wolsey was trained in the art of foreign policy, and cultivated important connections with the younger courtiers of Henry VII’s reign. According to historian Polydore Vergil, Wolsey made friends through ‘singing, laughing, dancing and clowning about with the young courtiers’, a rather prudish observation.

  Wolsey’s career is impressive: in 1514 he became archbishop of York, and then a year later was elected Cardinal. He was Lord High Chancellor of England between 1515 and 1529, a position in which Wolsey wielded almost as much power as the king, which inevitably angered almost everyone.

  With the accession of the young King Henry VIII in 1509, Wolsey quickly eclipsed his mentor Richard Fox, as he moved closer to the centre of power. He became a father figure to the young king, over 20 years his junior, and took over most of the administrative tasks, for young Henry preferred more trivial pursuits. Indeed, among many historians there is the sense that Henry shirked his responsibilities or allowed himself to be governed. But as Tudor historian Geoffrey Elton once reasoned: ‘a man who marries six wives is not a man who perfectly controls his own fate’.

  What Wolsey did do beautifully was to cultivate the king’s dual nature – young man, young monarch. Mantel illuminates Wolsey’s most important role in Tudor history: his influence on foreign diplomacy. Wolsey’s vision was to position England as a facilitator of peace in Europe, with France on one side and the Holy Roman Empire on the other. In the first years of Henry’s reign, different factions with vested interests jostled to influence the young king, urging Henry to go to war with Scotland. It was Wolsey who made a countermove by reasoning that warring with the French would position Henry as a powerful leader on the European stage. This decision was quickly followed by Wolsey’s first diplomatic triumph, namely to convince Henry to join Pope Julius II’s Holy League in 1510, which would unite the Papacy, Venice and Spain against France. Wolsey masterminded almost all the ensuing diplomatic negotiations, but his greatest achievement was to organize the most highly anticipated, and now famous, event of Henry’s reign. The Anglo-French summit – the Field of Cloth of Gold – between King Henry VIII of England and King Francis I of France, which took place between 7 and 24 June 1520 in the English Pale of Calais, was designed to usher in a new era of Universal Peace between France and England.

  Wolsey’s career and political life are well-documented, but Wolsey the man is difficult to read through the sources despite the abundance of surviving letters. We do know that he was a deeply passionate advocate for education, a lover of humanist literature, art, music and architecture, but these traits are often used as examples of his opulent lifestyle. Wolsey spent a fortune building his colleges, but his other projects, Hampton Court and York Place, later called Whitehall, were architectural masterpieces.

  Mantel discovered something in Wolsey beyond the stereotype and the criticisms. Perhaps Wolsey is in greater need of rehabilitation, as Mantel knows there is vastly more to his circumstances and his stellar ascent to the golden centre of the Tudor court. Mantel’s Wolsey reclines in his chair and picks apart the threads to reveal the history of England and the Tudors for his clever new assistant, Cromwell, an insider’s account of how it all began.

  It only lasted three generations, but the Tudors are undoubtedly the best-known of all English royal dynasties. They ruled from 1485–1603 as the Middle Ages gave way to Early Modern Britain at the beginning of the 1500s. It was a time when everything started to shift, particularly the relationship between the people and their monarch, and the people and their God. The Tudors could not boast a strong claim to the throne – the line can be traced back to humble Welsh origins sometime during the 13th century – but their rise to prominence began two centuries later with Owen Tudor, a Welsh landowner, who fought in the armies of Henry V.

  ‘These are old stories’, he says, ‘but some people, let us remember, do believe them’.

  Wolsey tells the story of Henry V’s Queen, Catherine of Valois, mother of Henry VI, who embarked on a relationship with Owen Tudor, Keeper of the Wardrobe. Doubt has always been cast over whether Owen and Catherine ever married, and even if they had wed, it would likely not have been recognized, as the Act of 1428 forbade any royal marriage without the consent of Parliament. Owen Tudor’s relationship with the widowed queen took place during the vicious civil wars between the two dynasties and rival branches of the royal house of Plantagenet – York and Lancaster. In an age when heirs and spares could cause tensions within a royal family, there was no animosity between Owen and Catherine’s two sons, Edmund and Jasper, and their royal half-brother. Both Jasper and Edmund served as loyal advisors to Henry VI, devoted to his Lancastrian cause, and in turn they were highly trusted and respected members of the King’s inner circle.

  Owen and his son Jasper also led troops at one of the most decisive battles of the Wars of the Roses, the Battle of Mortimer’s Cross in February 1461. It was a Yorkist victory and, unfortunately for Owen Tudor, he was captured by the troops of the Yorkist Edward IV, and beheaded without ceremony.

  As Cromwell notes to Wolsey in Wolf Hall:

  ‘By your account, my lord, our king’s Plantagenet grandfather beheaded his Tudor great-grandfather.’ ‘A thing to know. But not to mention.’

  It was the first and last time a Tudor would be executed. From that point, Tudors would be the ones wielding the axe.

  Of the remaining Tudor heirs, Edmund married the 13-year-old Margaret Beaufort, a great-granddaughter of John of Gaunt, son of King Edward III, which provided a tenuous claim to the English throne. Margaret’s marital track record – four husbands – would almost rival her grandson’s, the future Henry VIII. She would only have one child, Henry Tudor, born on 28 January 1457, at Pembroke Castle in Wales, three months after the death of his father. With the deaths of Henry VI and his only son, Edward, the child Henry found himself the sole surviving male Lancastrian heir, a dangerous position in a country currently ruled by a Yorkist king. Henry was taken by his uncle Jasper to the duchy of Brittany in France, where it seemed he would live the rest of his years in exile, although his mother Margaret never lost faith that her son would one day sit on the throne. Edward IV died unexpectedly on 9 April 1483, and left two very young sons. His heir, 14-year-old Prince Edward, was too young to take the throne without a regent, and sparring factions within the divided royal family swiftly chose sides: one supporting the king’s widow, Elizabeth Woodville; the other the dead king’s brother, Richard, Duke of Gloucester. Richard made a pre-emptive strike by declaring himself Lord Protector of the young Prince Edwar
d and his 12-year-old brother, Richard, and removed them to the ‘safety’ of the Tower of London, where they were lodged in preparation for Edward’s coronation. However, no plans were forthcoming and the children disappeared from their apartments in the Tower, never to be seen again. Their uncle, Richard, Duke of Gloucester, crowned himself Richard III in July 1483. Richard could never escape the suspicion that he murdered his nephews, and he was surrounded by enemies who turned to the only alternative, Henry Tudor.

  In early 1485, Henry had the financial and military backing for an assault on England and King Richard; his fleet sailed along the heavily defended south coast of England, around Land’s End, arriving at the entrance to Milford Haven near Pembroke in Wales. Twelve days later, as Richard’s troops marched towards Leicester, the two armies met on Ambien Hill, near the town of Market Bosworth, on 21 August 1485. By the next morning, Richard III lay dead on the battlefield.

  With the country ravaged by years of conflict, Lancastrians and Yorkists now looked for peace rather than war, led from the top by two women: Henry’s mother, Margaret, and Edward IV’s widow, Elizabeth Woodville. They accomplished a union of the red and white roses through the marriage of Henry Tudor and Elizabeth of York, eldest daughter of Edward IV. Now crowned Henry VII, he and Elizabeth began the glorious Tudor Age, which would last till the end of Elizabeth I’s Golden Age.