Wolf Hall is set in 16th-century England, at the time when King Henry VIII was trying to dissolve his marriage to Queen Katherine so he could marry Anne Boleyn. Since the Catholic Church believed that marriages were permanent, Henry couldn’t get a divorce. Unable to sway the Catholic Church, Henry broke away from it and declared himself head of the church in England. He did this with the help of his ambitious and canny minister, Thomas Cromwell, who is the central character of this historical novel. Wolf Hall traces Cromwell’s rise from his lowly origins as the son of a blacksmith and shows how his success hinged on his ability to stay a step ahead of the intrigues and deceit of the Tudor court. As Cromwell rises in power, his sharp mind combined with his knack for exploiting legal loopholes and human insecurities serves him well. He observes early in the novel that a person can achieve success in public life only “by being a subtle crook,” and he uses this knowledge to elbow his way into the upper echelons of power. Through Cromwell’s rise, and through the actions of other characters like King Henry and Cardinal Wolsey, the novel makes the case that deception and hypocrisy are the essential foundations of power.
The novel shows that the people in the Tudor court are very ambitious and are unrelenting in their attempts to grab more power—often through deception and corruption. For instance, when King Henry knows that the Church won’t grant him a divorce, he seeks an annulment on the grounds that Katherine was married to his brother Arthur before she married Henry, which makes her Henry’s “dear sister.” Of course, the reality is that he has grown tired of his wife, who hasn’t borne him a son, and he wants to marry Anne Boleyn. Additionally, Henry yearns for more power and dislikes the Catholic Church’s hold over the English court, and he sees this situation as a way to rebel against the Church and assert his own authority. He disguises his true motives with claims of conscience and religion. Other courtiers, too, are shown to deceive and finagle their way into power, like Anne Boleyn, who carries on “coy negotiations” with the king, procuring titles for her brother and father, and insisting that the king marry her so she can be queen before they consummate their relationship.
Cromwell is introduced to the workings of the court through his mentor, Cardinal Wolsey, who teaches him that he must never place his faith in appearances and must always question people’s stated intentions. Wolsey tells Cromwell he must always “find out what people wear under their clothes” because most people cloak their true selves and disguise their vulnerabilities and desires. Wolsey teaches Cromwell how to use this deeper understanding in order to exploit people and move up in court—a lesson that Cromwell takes to heart. For instance, when Cromwell is initially building his relationship with King Henry, he sees that Henry has no friends in court whom he can talk to and laugh with. Cromwell fills this gap in Henry’s life not because he genuinely wants to be Henry’s friend, but because he knows that it will result in his own personal success, and he ends up becoming indispensable to Henry.
Cromwell also learns that it is essential to hide his own thoughts, as power lies in deception. After he is sworn into the king’s council, he “put[s] on a mask” every morning. He understands that 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.” His real self and ideas remain cloaked from the world since he knows that these would make him vulnerable. In the same way, he keeps a keen watch for moments when others betray their true emotions—he looks for the “doubt, reservation, rebellion” that are exposed before their faces “settle into the suave lineaments of the courtier, the facilitator, the yes-man.”
In order to hold onto his position of power and of camaraderie with the king, Cromwell is willing to ignore the dictates of his own conscience and instead fulfill the king’s desires. Cromwell observed that the cardinal was only powerful for as long as the king was pleased with him, and that Wolsey’s fall was swift when he could no longer serve the monarch by procuring an annulment for his marriage. He saw how Wolsey behaved when the king shouted at him—he was “half-smiling, civil, regretful.” Wolsey’s power and dignity vanished at the king’s displeasure, which taught Cromwell that he must have the king’s favor to rise in court. Accordingly, Cromwell is willing to always oblige the monarch, even when he is morally opposed to what the king asks for, like when Henry asks him to indict Thomas More for a crime he didn’t commit. Cromwell’s ambition coupled with his skill as a suave trickster help him climb the ranks, demonstrating that these were necessary skills in Henry’s court and that, more broadly, such deception lies beneath all power of the kind that Cromwell gains.
Related Themes from Other Texts
Power, Ambition, and Deception ThemeTracker
Power, Ambition, and Deception Quotes in Wolf Hall
He never lives in a single reality, but in a shifting shadow-mesh of diplomatic possibilities. While he is doing his best to keep the king married to Queen Katherine and her Spanish-Imperial family, by begging Henry to forget his scruples, he will also plan for an alternative world, in which the king’s scruples must be heeded, and the marriage to Katherine is void. Once that nullity is recognized—and the last eighteen years of sin and suffering wiped from the page—he will readjust the balance of Europe, allying England with France, forming a power bloc to oppose the young Emperor Charles, Katherine’s nephew. And all outcomes are likely, all outcomes can be managed, even massaged into desirability: prayer and pressure, pressure and prayer, everything that comes to pass will pass by God’s design, a design reenvisaged and redrawn, with helpful emendations, by the cardinal.
Thomas Cromwell is now a little over forty years old. […] Various expressions are available to his face, and one is readable: an expression of stifled amusement. […] It is said he knows 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.
This is an indecent spectacle: the man who has ruled England, reduced. They have brought out […] the scarlet silk in which he braves the summer heat of London, the crimson brocades that keep his blood warm when snow falls on Westminster and whisks in sleety eddies over the Thames. […] There have been days when, swaggering out, he would say, “Right, Master Cromwell, price me by the yard!”
[…] So day by day, at his request and to amuse him, he would put a value on his master. Now the king has sent an army of clerks to do it. But he would like to take away their pens by force and write across their inventories: Thomas Wolsey is a man beyond price.
“Is it something to do with the English?” Cavendish asks earnestly. He’s still thinking of the uproar back there when they embarked; and even now, people are running along the banks, making obscene signs and whistling. “Tell us, Master Cromwell, you’ve been abroad. Are they particularly an ungrateful nation? […]”
“I don’t think it’s the English. I think it’s just people. They always hope there may be something better.”
“But what do they get by the change?” Cavendish persists. “One dog sated with meat is replaced by a hungrier dog who bites nearer the bone. […]”
He closes his eyes. The river shifts beneath them, dim figures in an allegory of Fortune. Decayed Magnificence sits in the center. Cavendish, leaning at his right like a Virtuous Councillor, mutters words of superfluous and belated advice […]; he, like a Tempter, is seated on the left […].
How simple it would be, if he were allowed to reach down and shake some straight answers out of Norris. But it’s not simple; this is what the world and the cardinal conspire to teach him. Christ, he thinks, by my age I ought to know. 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; somehow he thinks that’s what Norris is, and he feels an irrational dislike taking root, and he tries to dismiss it, because he prefers his dislikes rational, but after all, these circumstances are extreme, […] [and] Wolsey’s unraveling, in a great unweaving of scarlet thread that might lead you back into a secret labyrinth, with a dying monster at its heart.
“All along, we were misled, […] because when the king said, Mistress Anne is not to marry into Northumberland, I think, I think, the king had cast his eye on her, all that long time ago.”
[…]
“I wonder,” he says, “how it can be that, though all these people think they know the king’s pleasure, the king finds himself at every turn impeded.” At every turn, thwarted: maddened and baffled. The Lady Anne, whom he has chosen to amuse him, while the old wife is cast off and the new wife brought in, refuses to accommodate him at all. How can she refuse? Nobody knows.
[…] “How has my lord cardinal…” Missed a trick, he wants to say. But that is not a respectful way to speak of a cardinal.
There never was a lady who knew better her husband’s needs.
She knows them; for the first time, she doesn’t want to comply with them.
Is a woman bound to wifely obedience, when the result will be to turn her out of the estate of wife? He, Cromwell, admires Katherine: he likes to see her moving about the royal palaces, as wide as she is high, stitched into gowns so bristling with gemstones that they look as if they are designed less for beauty than to withstand blows from a sword. Her auburn hair is faded and streaked with gray, tucked back under her gable hood like the modest wings of a city sparrow. Under her gowns she wears the habit of a Franciscan nun. 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.
“I wonder,” Wolsey says, “would you have patience with our sovereign lord? When it is midnight and he is up drinking and giggling with Brandon, or singing, and the day’s papers not yet signed, and when you press him he says, I’m for my bed now, we’re hunting tomorrow…If your chance comes to serve, you will have to take him as he is, a pleasure-loving prince. And he will have to take you as you are, which is rather like one of those square-shaped fighting dogs that low men tow about on ropes. Not that you are without a fitful charm, Tom.”
“Cromwell, I am content you are a burgess in the Parliament.”
He bows his head. “My lord.”
“I spoke to the king for you and he is also content. You will take his instructions in the Commons. And mine.”
“Will they be the same, my lord?”
The duke scowls. […] “Damn it all, Cromwell, why are you such a…person? It isn’t as if you could afford to be.”
He waits, smiling. He knows what the duke means. He is a person, he is a presence. He knows how to edge blackly into a room so that you don’t see him; but perhaps those days are over.
[H]e hears a boy’s voice, speaking behind a half-open door: it is Mark, the lute-player. “…so for my skill he says he will prefer me to Lady Anne. And I shall be glad, because what is the use of being here when any day the king may behead the old fellow? I think he ought, for the cardinal is so proud. […] Yes, for sure the lawyer will come down with him. I say ‘lawyer,’ but who is he? Nobody knows. They say he has killed men with his own hands and never told it in confession. […] So when I am with Lady Anne she is sure to notice me, and give me presents.” A giggle. […] Then Mark: “She is no maid. Not she.” […]
One can do nothing with this. Except bear it in mind.
There’s no point backing off; do that and Henry will chase you down. 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. […] You enter into one and it uses up all the money you’ve got, and then it breaks you and bankrupts you.”
[…]
“You said I was not to lead my troops. You said if I was taken, the country couldn’t put up the ransom. So what do you want? You want a king who doesn’t fight? You want me to huddle indoors like a sick girl?”
“That would be ideal, for fiscal purposes.”
The king takes a deep ragged breath. He’s been shouting. Now—and it’s a narrow thing—he decides to laugh.
He sees her speed, intelligence and rigor. He didn’t think she would help the cardinal, but what do you lose by asking? He thinks, it is the first proposition I have put to her; probably not the last.
[…] There is a world of the possible. A world where Anne can be queen is a world where Cromwell can be Cromwell. He sees it; then he doesn’t. The moment is fleeting. But insight cannot be taken back. You cannot return to the moment you were in before.
“A thousand pounds?” Henry whispers.
It is on the tip of his tongue to say, that will be a start on the ten thousand which, to the best of my knowledge and belief, you have owed the Cardinal of York for a decade now.
He doesn’t say it, of course. At such moments, Henry expects you to fall to your knees—duke, earl, commoner, light and heavy, old and young. He does it; scar tissue pulls; few of us, by our forties, are not carrying injuries.
The king signals, you can get up. He adds, his tone curious, “The Duke of Norfolk shows you many marks of friendship and favor.”
The hand on the shoulder, he means: the minute and unexpected vibration of ducal palm against plebeian muscle and bone. “The duke is careful to preserve all distinctions of rank.” Henry seems relieved.
From the day he was sworn into the king’s council, he has had his face arranged. He has spent the early months of the year watching the faces of other people, to see when they register doubt, reservation, rebellion—to catch that fractional moment before they settle into the suave lineaments of the courtier, the facilitator, the yes-man.
He finds himself praying: this child, his half-formed heart now beating against the stone floor, let him be sanctified by this moment, and let him be like his father’s father, like his Tudor uncles; let him be hard, alert, watchful of opportunity, wringing use from the smallest turn of fortune. If Henry lives twenty years, Henry who is Wolsey’s creation, and then leaves this child to succeed him, I can build my own prince: to the glorification of God and the commonwealth of England. Because I will not be too old. […] And I shall not be like Henry Wyatt and say, now I am retiring from affairs. Because what is there, but affairs?
It is magnificent. At the moment of impact, the king’s eyes are open, his body braced for the atteint; he takes the blow perfectly, its force absorbed by a body securely armored, moving in the right direction, moving at the right speed. His color does not alter. His voice does not shake.
“Healthy?” he says. “Then I thank God for his favor to us. As I thank you, my lords, for this comfortable intelligence.”
He thinks, Henry has been rehearsing. I suppose we all have.
[…]
The urge arises to put a hand on his shoulder, as one does for any inconsolable being. He resists it; simply folds his fingers, protectively, into the fist which holds the king’s heart. “One day we will make a great marriage for her.”
There is a feral stink that rises from the hide of a dog about to fight. It rises now into the room, and he sees Anne turn aside, fastidious, and Stephen puts a hand to his chest, as if to ruffle up his fur, to warn of his size before he bares his teeth. “I shall be back with Your Majesty within a week,” he says. His dulcet sentiment comes out as a snarl from the depth of his guts.
[…]
Henry says, “Stephen is a resolute ambassador, no doubt, but I cannot keep him near me. […] 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. […]” He speaks as if he, personally, hadn’t caused the trouble; as if Wolsey’s fall were caused by a thunderbolt.
“The queen will be coming to visit her daughter soon. If you would simply greet her respectfully in the way you should greet your father’s wife—”
“—except she is his concubine—”
“—then your father would take you back to court, you would have everything you lack now, and the warmth and comfort of society. Listen to me, I intend this for your good. The queen does not expect your friendship, only an outward show. Bite your tongue and bob her a curtsy. It will be done in a heartbeat, and it will change everything. Make terms with her before her new child is born. If she has a son, she will have no reason afterward to conciliate you.”
“She is frightened of me,” Mary says, “and she will still be frightened, even if she has a son.”
