He once thought it himself, that he might die with grief: for his wife, his daughters, his sisters, his father and master the cardinal. But pulse, obdurate, keeps its rhythm. You think you cannot keep breathing, but your ribcage has other ideas, rising and falling, emitting sighs. You must thrive in spite of yourself; and so that you may do it, God takes out your heart of flesh, and gives you a heart of stone.
Wolf Hall is the story of the rise and fall of Thomas Cromwell, the son of a blacksmith who became the second in command to the king of England, the notorious Henry VIII. In the second book of the trilogy, Cromwell has been through it. The rhythm is steady—dun, dun, dun—and then it slows as we get to the death of Anne Boleyn.
But at this point in the story, he has faced such grief, a harrowing amount of grief. The death of his wife Liz, whose face he can sometimes see if he glances at the stairwell, the death of his precious daughters, one of whom was learning Latin. The death of his master the cardinal, a man whom he served and had the misfortune to witness his fall as he refused to do Henry’s bidding.
Part of the amazement of Wolf Hall is that Cromwell keeps going. In spite of himself or maybe to spite everyone else, he moves continually. He rarely catches a breath. There is no looking back for him. He is sentimental but it is subtle. He does not allow grief to undo him.
I’ve written about grief a lot, the intangible kind. I’ve been blessed enough to not have so many deaths in my life at this point. Cromwell’s grief is layered, even though it doesn’t really feature majorly in the books. His motivations and his actions are informed by his grief—his willingness to take in people in poor circumstances, the people who he chooses to point the finger at for Boleyn’s trial. Grief isn’t always overt.
It can be innocuous, the coincidental amount of times you’ve cried in a week, the ache in your chest when a certain song comes on.
Hilary Mantel is an artist, even more so for taking a real person and building a world around them. This twist of scripture, of Ezekiel 36:26. In Cromwell’s grief, instead of a softer, tender heart, his heart is hardened, and it leads him to make decisions that his enemies condemn him for.
There’s this scene where Cromwell is on a prayer bench, and he holds his wife Liz’s prayer book in his hands, and he’s overwhelmed with grief. This is whom I love that I can no longer hold. This is a life I can no longer return to. The old Robert Frost poem, and sorry, I could not travel both. Death steals the paths we can no longer travel, and we cannot return to life as we wish it were. It is tinged in a shade of blue, forever marked by the thing you can’t replace.
Cromwell isn’t necessarily wrong for believing God to be the kind of God who hardens hearts. We have Pharaoh in Exodus who faced plague after plague and refused to let the Hebrews go. Scripture says that God hardened Pharaoh’s heart, so that he could perform miracles and show the Hebrews that He is the Lord.
We see the spurts of the Reformation in Cromwell. His disdain for the rituals of the Catholic Church–the relics and the saints—was clear. He kept a copy of Tyndale’s Bible and knew Thomas Cramner, the writer of the (Anglican) Book of Common Prayer. It’s a gift to see the value of the Bible, and painful to discard ritual because it seems empty on its surface (though I’ve done the same.)
As a reader, walking through Mantel’s book of early Reformation England in the 1530s, part of me feels dread, the prerequisite to the grief I know is coming. Cromwell’s story, unfortunately, does not end well. He gets a taste of it when it becomes clear that he has only one friend, the King of England, and when the King withholds information from him, it should be a warning. A sign that the tides are changing, a time to hedge bets, but Cromwell is stubborn. He is not unaware of the dangers, but he continues on, not quite acknowledging that the rhythm has changed, that the rhythm has slowed and he is the one with a bull’s eye on his back.
An unwitting theme in the trilogy apart from faith, ritual, the allure of power, the misfortune of being a wife to King Henry VIII is indeed death. Cromwell has lived many lives: a poor man’s son, a soldier, a financier in Italy, a servant to the cardinal, and now second in command to the king. There is a loss inherent in Cromwell, not only the many deaths of his loved ones, but of the lives he has lived and left. It never quite leaves him. They live on in the memory palace of his mind, a place to go when the fire burns bright and the darkness of the night enfolds him.
Signing off,
Gigi
Studying Life with Gigi 