On the other hand… you’re quite prepared to torture someone, if reasons of State demand it and the King agrees. (You probably don’t torture Mark Smeaton.) You are a natural arbitrator and negotiator, preferring a settlement to a fight, but if pushed – as you are by the Boleyns in 1536 – you are ingenious and ruthless.
You marry Elizabeth Wykys, a prosperous widow with connection in the wool trade. You have three children. You take up the law and go to work for Cardinal Wolsey, looking after his business affairs. You help him raise the funds for Cardinal College (which is now Christchurch) by closing or amalgamating a group of small monasteries, work which equips you for the mighty programme of Church reorganisation you will soon undertake for Henry.
You and Wolsey are close. When he falls from favour, you are the only person who remains completely loyal. Much about you is equivocal, but this is not. You get yourself a seat in the Commons, and through his long winter in exile at Esher you attend every sitting, trying to talk out the charges that have been brought against him. You expend effort and your own money. When he goes north, you remain in London looking after his interests. You warn him that the way to survive is to retire into private life. But, though he listens to you on most matters, in this instance he doesn’t. His loss is devastating to you. Ten years later, you are still defending his good name: though Wolsey, a corrupt papist, ought to have been everything you hate.
You first come to Henry’s notice when Wolsey’s empire has to be pulled apart. Henry does not think he has many true friends and is touched by your loyalty to the Cardinal. You become his unofficial adviser long before you are sworn in to the Council. Your promotion causes predictable outrage, not just because of your humble background but because you are still known as the Cardinal’s man. To save everyone embarrassment, it is proposed you adopt a coat of arms from another, more respectable family called Cromwell. But you refuse. You are not ashamed of your background; you don’t talk about it, but you don’t conceal it either. In fact, you never apologise, and never explain. (And when you get your own coat of arms, you incorporate a motif from Wolsey’s arms, so that it flies in the faces of his old enemies for years to come.)
When your wife (and two little daughters) die, you do not marry again. This, for the time, is unusual. We don’t know your reasons. You have women friends; this is not understood, for example, by the Duke of Norfolk, who tells you that he never had a conversation with his own daughter until she was about twenty years of age, and was perplexed to find that she had ‘a good wit.’
Your household at Austin Friars, as you progress in the King’s service, is transformed, extended, rebuilt, into a great ministerial household, a power centre, cosmopolitan and full of young men who are there to gain promotion. You take on the people written off elsewhere, the wild boys who are on everybody’s wrong side, and make them into useful workers. You are an administrative genius, able to plan and accomplish in weeks what would take other people years. You are good at delegating and your instructions are so precise that it’s difficult to make a mistake. You extend the secretary’s role so that it covers most of the business of State; you know what happens in every department of Government. Your ideas are startlingly radical, but mostly they are beaten off by a conservative Parliament. At the centre of a vast network of patronage, you have a steady tendency to grow rich. You are generous with your money, a patron of artists, writers and scholars, and of your own troupe of actors, ‘Lord Cromwell’s Men’. The kitchen at Austin Friars feeds two hundred poor Londoners daily. All the same, you are a focus of resentment. The aristocracy don’t like you on principle, and the ordinary people don’t like you either. In the opinion of the era, there’s something unnatural about what you’ve achieved. In the north they think you’re a sorcerer.
Much of your myth is ill-founded. You do not control a vast spy network. You do not throw elderly monks into the road; in fact, you give them pensions. You are not the dour man of Holbein’s portrait but (witnesses say) lively, witty and eloquent. You have a remarkable memory, and are credited with knowing the entire New Testament by heart. Your particular distinction is this: you are a big-picture man who also sees and takes care of every detail.
Apart from your intellectual ability, your greatest asset is that you manage to get on with the most unlikely people. You are affable, gregarious, and amazingly plausible. You easily convince people you are on their side, when common sense should suggest different. You tie people to you by favours rather than by fear, and so they don’t easily see what a grip you’ve taken. People open their hearts to you. They tell you all sorts of things. But you tell them nothing.
What do you really think of Henry? No one knows. You don’t seem to feel the warmth towards him that Wolsey did, but you respect his abilities and you serve him because he is the focus of good order and keeps the country together. Dealing with him on a day-to-day basis needs tact and patience. You are optimistic and resilient, and believe there’s hope even for the bigoted and the terminally stubborn. Those who are on the inside track with you have their interests protected, and you take trouble to help out those in difficulties. But those who cross you are likely to find that you have been out by night and silently dug a deep pit beneath their career plans.
Your weakness is that you do not head up a faction or an interest group and have no power base of your own; you depend completely on the King’s favour. You are resented by the old nobility, and you are destroyed when your two implacable enemies, Norfolk and Gardiner, manage to make common cause. But by then, you have reshaped England, and even the reign of the furiously papist Mary can’t undo your work; you have given too many people a stake in your remodelled society.
ELIZABETH CROMWELL
You were the daughter of Henry Wykys, a prosperous wool trader, and were first married to Thomas Williams, a yeoman of the guard, and then to Cromwell. Your family were connected to Putney and may have been Welsh in origin. You have three children, Gregory, Anne and Grace. You die in one of the epidemics of ‘sweating sickness’ that sweep the country in the late 1520s, and your daughters follow you. You are a member of a close family and your sister, mother and brother-in-law continue to live at Austin Friars for many years.
We know nothing about you, so we can only say, ‘women like you’. City wives were usually literate, numerate and businesslike, used to managing a household and a family business in cooperation with their husbands. In Wolf Hall I make you a ‘silk woman’, with your own business, like the wife of Cromwell’s friend Stephen Vaughan, who supplied Anne Boleyn’s household with small but valuable articles made of silk braid: cauls for the hair, ties for garments. Cromwell watches you weave one of these braids, fingers moving so fast that he can’t follow the action. He asks you to slow down and show him how it’s done. You say that if you slowed down and stopped to think you wouldn’t be able to do it. He remembers this when he is deep into the coup against Anne Boleyn.
CARDINAL ARCHBISHOP THOMAS WOLSEY
You are, arguably, Europe’s greatest statesman and greatest fraud. You are also a kind man, tolerant and patient in an age when these qualities are not necessarily thought virtues.
You are not quite the enormous scarlet cardinal of the (posthumous) portrait. You are more splendid than stout, a man of iron constitution who has survived the ‘sweating sickness’ six times. You are a cultured Renaissance prince, as grand and worldly as any Italian cardinal. Renowned for the speed at which you travel, you are capable of an unbroken twelve-hour stint at your desk, ‘all which season my lord never rose once to piss, nor yet to eat any meat, but continually wrote his letters with his own hands…’ Your household observes you with awe, as does the known world. You hope you might be Pope one day, but think it would be more convenient if you