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Part 2: Chapter 3
Themes
and Colors
Key
LitCharts assigns a color and icon to each theme in Wolf Hall, which you can use to track the themes throughout the work.
Power, Ambition, and Deception
Poor Leadership and Violence
Children and Human Connection
Dogmatism vs. Open-Mindedness
Myth and Storytelling
Summary
Analysis
Rafe succeeds in getting Cromwell a seat in the House of Commons from Taunton, which is “Wolsey terrain.” He couldn’t have gotten the seat without the approval of the king and the Duke of Norfolk. Cromwell wonders what Norfolk’s intentions were in approving him for the seat, and Rafe tells him Norfolk thinks that the “lord cardinal has buried treasure” and that Cromwell knows its location. Rafe tells Cromwell that Norfolk will want Cromwell to work for him.
Rafe seems to be a capable assistant to Cromwell, and he is also very perceptive and helpful when they discuss problems. He seems to have Cromwell’s talent for looking beyond the obvious, which is what will make Rafe an able courtier, just like Cromwell. Meanwhile, Norfolk’s ludicrous reason for wanting to ally himself with Cromwell shows just how irrational and chaotic the workings of the court often are.
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Norfolk rattles as he walks since “his clothes conceal relics: in tiny jeweled cases he has shavings of skin and snippets of hair, and set into medallions he wears splinters of martyrs’ bones.” He thinks that “book-reading” is “an affectation” and doesn’t think the Bible needs to be read by laypeople. He tells Cromwell that he is happy to have him be a burgess in the Parliament, and that he is to take orders from Norfolk and the king. Cromwell wants to know if their orders will be the same, to which the Duke frustratedly asks why he has to be such a “person,” since he can’t exactly afford to be one. Cromwell smiles, acknowledging to himself that he has become “a presence” and that his days of merging into the shadows of a room are perhaps over.
Norfolk seems to be a superstitious man (he suspected that Wolsey must have made a pact with the devil and stuck pins into a wax figure representing Norfolk), which is why he carries numerous holy relics around, probably believing that they will grant him protection from evil. However, these relics seem grisly—they are composed of the skin and bones of dead people, which points to Norfolk’s rough and violent side. He accuses Cromwell of being a “person,” using the word like an insult. Norfolk means that Cromwell is being unnecessarily difficult, but Cromwell takes it as proof that he has come into his own. He is no longer the “butcher’s dog” who followed his master Wolsey around, or “an eel” who quaked at Walter’s blows. Now, Cromwell has become a force in himself—a person rather than an animal.
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Norfolk tells Cromwell that the king hasn’t forgotten that Cromwell argued against his war with France years ago, and that “he is preparing to quarrel” with Cromwell about this. The duke says that though they could never win over France, they must “fight as if [they] can.” He says Wolsey and Cromwell wouldn’t understand the glory of war since they are not royalty. Cromwell advises him to “negotiate” rather than fight, saying, “It’s cheaper.”
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The king’s advisers are preparing 44 charges against the cardinal, which include “buying beef for his household at the same price as the king” and violation of the statutes of praemunire, or “the upholding of a foreign jurisdiction with the king’s realm,” a law which no one quite understands and which “seems to mean what the king says it means.”
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The cardinal’s biggest fear is that the king might shut down the colleges he started. He worries about all this at his house in Esher, and he waits anxiously for Cromwell to bring him news from London. One night, Cromwell arrives at Esher when a boy named Mark Smeaton is playing the lute for the cardinal. The cardinal wonders if he should send the boy to Anne Boleyn as a present. After Mark leaves the room, Cromwell discloses his plan to bribe everyone who can help the cardinal’s case. The cardinal hopes that the king doesn’t mean to charge him with treason.
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Cromwell has tried several times—unsuccessfully—to see the king and talk to him about Wolsey. He tells Wolsey that the king looks like he does not sleep, and Wolsey laughs as he says that it is probably because it is so cold and he cannot hunt—“It is lack of fresh air […]. It is not his conscience.”
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As Cromwell is leaving, he overhears Mark Smeaton chatting with another servant. Mark is saying he is glad that he will be given to Anne Boleyn since “any day the king may behead” the cardinal. He says that the cardinal deserves it because he is “so proud,” and that Cromwell is sure to be executed, too, since he is probably a murderer and certainly looks like one. Mark says that Lady Anne might look on him “with favor” while “she is still refusing the king.” He also says that she is “no maid” and that “everybody knows” that “Tom Wyatt has had her.” Cromwell thinks this information is worth remembering.
At Christmas, the cardinal is very ill and takes to bed, and he sends Cromwell home. While the house at Austin Friars is decorated for the season and “the kitchen is busy, feeding the living,” they are not putting on their usual songs and Christmas plays. “No year has brought such devastation,” and they are in mourning. Kat and her husband, Morgan Williams, died this year too. Their children, Richard and Walter, come to live in the Cromwell household.
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On New Year’s Day, Cromwell is writing letters for the cardinal. In “return for a formal guilty plea to the praemunire charges, the king will allow the cardinal his life,” but he will take away most of his income. Gregory comes in, bringing Cromwell some more lights. Gregory begins to neaten up documents on the table, and Cromwell realizes that he is using “a system of holy simplicity: big papers on the bottom, small ones on top.” After Cromwell writes the letters, he and Gregory discuss the Christmases of the past when Liz, Anne Cromwell, and Grace were alive. When Gregory kisses him goodnight, “his son leans against him, as if he were a child.” Cromwell then returns to work and has “the endorsement out, ready for filing.”
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As 1530 begins, Cromwell does not hold an Epiphany feast since he is aware that many guests will refuse his invitation, because the cardinal is in disgrace. He takes the young men in the household to watch a play put on by law students at Gray’s Inn, which turns out to be a satire that mocks the cardinal’s fall from grace. Cromwell leaves in anger, and he asks the benchers how the law students are being allowed to mock “a great man who has fallen on evil times.” However, while walking home with Rafe and Richard, Cromwell calms down and admits that the play was entertaining.
Later, Cromwell works on the cardinal’s letters again. Wolsey is appealing to the rulers of Europe to ask for their support. Cromwell wishes that he wouldn’t, or that he’d at least phrase his appeal more subtly. He knows Henry would deem it treasonous that Wolsey is “asking them to withdraw their approval of a king who very much likes to be liked.”
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Cromwell’s nephew Richard comes in and he asks if he and his brother Walter Williams can now take on Cromwell’s name, since he is like a father to them. Cromwell says he is surprised that they want to since the Cromwell name is in disgrace, but Richard insists that he will “never disown it.”
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Later, Cromwell goes to the Duke of Norfolk, “who is always ready to see him,” to ask for his help in managing the cardinal’s household. Norfolk immediately offers to take on the cardinal’s servants as his own, and then he directs “a searching look at Cromwell,” who “[k]nows himself coveted” and “[w]ears an expression like an heiress: sly, coy, cold.” The Duke of Suffolk, too, is happy to take on some of the cardinal’s men.
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Meanwhile, Thomas More, the Lord Chancellor, “has put his signature first on all the articles against Wolsey.” Cromwell hears that an extra allegation has been added at More’s request—the cardinal “is accused of whispering in the king’s ear and breathing into his face.” Since he has “the French pox,” More says, he intended to infect the king. Cromwell tries to imagine what it might be like “living inside the Lord Chancellor’s head,” to imagine an accusation like that and “[put] it out there to where people will believe anything.”
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One cloudy morning, Cromwell finally gets the chance to speak with Henry as he is getting ready to leave on a hunt. Henry says there are 44 charges against the cardinal, and Cromwell says they will be able to defend against each charge if given a hearing. The king asks if Cromwell can defend them right now, and Cromwell says he could, if the king would take a seat. The king says he has heard that Cromwell is “a ready man,” and Cromwell, almost without thinking, says he would not come here “unprepared.” This amuses the king, who says he will listen to him another day since Suffolk is waiting for him now.
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Cromwell tells the king that he thinks the clouds will clear and that it will be “[a] good day to be chasing something.” Henry is surprised that Cromwell doesn’t think hunting is “barbaric,” like Thomas More does. Cromwell says he likes “any sport that’s cheaper than battle.” Henry says that this brings them to “a sticky point,” and reminds Cromwell that six years ago, he said in Parliament that the king “could not afford a war.” Cromwell thinks that it was actually seven years ago, in 1523, and notes that they are already talking about this even though his conversation with the king has lasted for only seven minutes.
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Cromwell understands that Henry will “chase [him] down” if he tries to back off, but that he “may just falter” if Cromwell pushes forward. So, he says that “[n]o ruler in the history of the world has ever been able to afford a war.” Henry says he captured the town of Thérouanne in 1513, and he demands to know how Cromwell could have called it a “doghole.” Cromwell says he’s been there. The king is angry and says that a country must “support a prince in his enterprise.” Cromwell says that he’d said the country didn’t “have the gold to see [the king] through a year’s campaign.” The king is shouting now and asks if Cromwell would prefer a king who “doesn’t fight” and “huddle[s] indoors like a sick girl.” Cromwell replies that this “would be ideal, for fiscal purposes.” Henry starts to laugh.
Henry says that Cromwell advocates prudence, but that princes have other virtues. Cromwell suggests that fortitude is one virtue, and Henry agrees, challenging Cromwell to put a cost on it. Cromwell tells him fortitude doesn’t mean “courage in battle,” but that it “means fixity of purpose. […] It means having the strength to live with what constrains you.” The king wants to know what constrains him, and Cromwell says that France’s distance, terrain, people, and weather are all constraints. He says that England only holds Calais and will not be able to support and provision an inland army. The king grows thoughtful at this and then says that the next time they fight France, they will need to take a seacoast. He says that Cromwell’s ideas are “[w]ell reasoned.”
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Henry says that Cromwell said in his speech in Parliament that “there was one million pounds of gold in the realm,” and Henry wants to know how he reached that figure. Cromwell says he trained in the Florentine banks and in Venice. The king is surprised and says that Suffolk said Cromwell was “a common soldier,” and Cromwell admits that he was that, too. Henry asks him if he was anything else, and Cromwell asks him what he’d like him to be. Henry says that he has a bad reputation and asks him if he’d like to defend himself. Cromwell says, “Your Majesty is able to form his own opinion,” and Henry says he will.
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Suffolk accosts Cromwell on his way out and asks him how his “fat priest” is. The king “flushes with displeasure” but Suffolk doesn’t notice. Afterward, Cromwell runs into Stephen Gardiner, who is now the king’s Master Secretary. Gardiner wants to know if Cromwell’s meeting with the king was unpleasant, and Cromwell says it was the opposite. Cromwell feels a “dull bruise inside his chest” as he leaves Gardiner, and he asks Gardiner if they could “drop this.” Gardiner refuses to. Cromwell walks on and thinks Gardiner might have to “wait a year or two,” but that he will get him.
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Two days later, at Esher, Cavendish is amazed as he tells Cromwell that the king has sent them “four cartloads of furnishings.” The quality of the items is below the cardinal’s high standards, but he admits that they will make life more comfortable. Cavendish says they need to move to be truly comfortable, and he tells Cromwell to ask the “king’s council” about it. Cromwell says he will ask the king himself, to which the cardinal “smiles [a] fat paternal beam.”
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The cardinal then moves to a “little lodge at Richmond.” Cromwell runs into Suffolk, who tells him that they “need no cardinals in this realm.” When the cardinal hears about this, he is upset and says that when Suffolk married the king’s widowed sister, the king would have beheaded him if the cardinal hadn’t spoke on his behalf. Wolsey says he has known “horses with more wit” than Suffolk, and he asks Cromwell to go to court and bring him better news. Cromwell meets the cardinal at Richmond every day, and then he rides out to see the king. He “thinks of the king as a terrain into which he must advance, with no seacoast to supply him.”
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Since Cromwell meets the king so often, rumors have started circulating that the king will reinstate the cardinal in return for his wealth, and that he no longer likes the company of Norfolk and Suffolk. Norfolk tells Cromwell that the cardinal must go north, away from the king—if not, Norfolk will “tear him with [his] teeth.” He repeatedly stabs his forefinger into Cromwell’s shoulder, calling him a “person,” and a “nobody from Hell.” Cromwell’s “flesh is firm, dense and impermeable. The ducal finger just bounces off.”
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In the spring of 1530, a wealthy merchant named Antonio Bonvisi invites Cromwell for dinner. He is surprised to find that Thomas More is at the dinner, too. As they are eating, More proclaims that the cardinal “has a greed that will never be appeased, for ruling over men.” Cromwell immediately feels “ready for this fight” and says that the cardinal has a public role just like More does. More answers that the cardinal should have a “little less evident appetite” and that he ignored his “real friends” who advised him to be humble. Cromwell says the cardinal will be glad to know that More thinks he is his friend, and that this thought will console him “as he sits in exile and wonders why [More has] slandered him to the king.”
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Bonvisi tries to end the argument, but Cromwell refuses to back down. He says that More likes to say that he “would have been a simple monk” if his father had not forced him to study the law, and that he is “indifferent to wealth” and the “world’s esteem.” So, Cromwell wonders, “how did he become Lord Chancellor?”
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Just then, the Emperor’s ambassador, Eustache Chapuys, walks in, and he provides a distraction from the argument. Cromwell later asks Chapuys if he can explain why his “master’s troops plundered the Holy City.” Cromwell says that More thinks the Mohammedans and the Jews in the Emperor’s army “ran wild,” and that before that, the German Lutherans had wreaked havoc. More thinks that “the Emperor must blame himself.” Chapuys is shocked that More would speak about his master in such a manner.
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More gets up to leave, but before he does, he declares that Cromwell is indefensible since he is friends with “the most corrupt [priest] in Christendom.” Chapuys seems disappointed by More, as if he expected him to be more of an ally. Cromwell notices that “[e]verything Chapuys does […] is like something an actor does.” He looks 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.”
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After the dinner is over and the guests have left, Cromwell asks Bonvisi if he knows why Thomas Wyatt left “the English court in such haste” three years ago and went to Italy. Bonvisi says the story of “Wyatt and Lady Anne [Boleyn]” is an old one, which makes Cromwell wonder how the king hasn’t heard it. Bonvisi says that “part of the art of ruling […] is to know when to shut your ears.”
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Bonvisi tells Cromwell that the cardinal “is finished,” and that soon Cromwell will be “a man without a master.” Cromwell says the king likes him, but Bonvisi warns that “the king is an inconstant lover.” He tells Cromwell to be cautious and to never meet with the Boleyns. Cromwell “understands that the whole purpose of the evening has been to […] warn him off.”
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