The Ghosts of other lives you might have led

This piece is about chronic pain – specifically endometriosis – and also covers issues of fertility, infertility, and surgery. It was originally posted on The Thread of Her Tale, my “Show your workings” site, where it resonated with many people, so it is being republished here, with a couple of minor amendments.

People ask me “Why Cromwell?” They look at my stitching and ask “Why Cromwell?” But I’m not stitching Thomas Cromwell, not really. I’m stitching Hilary Mantel.

“Little Miss Neverwell”

I first came across Hilary Mantel and her writing as a much younger woman. Back in 2003, I had lived with endometriosis for about 20 years, although for the first decade I didn’t have a name for it. All I knew was that I used to faint with pain every month – in classrooms in Stalybridge, and later in offices in London. It used to be called “period pain”, and I was ashamed. I would be told I was making a fuss; that it was my fault for not having had breakfast; that I should take more exercise; that I was too fat; that for goodness’ sake what was the matter with me, always ailing?

But in 2003, I heard a voice on the radio reading a book called Giving Up the Ghost by Hilary Mantel. I was at home recovering from (failed) surgery aimed at treating my endometriosis. I think I had quite a lot of nerve endings in my abdomen excised with a laser on that occasion but it’s difficult to remember now; I had eight lots of surgery over a decade or so, and the detail has blurred. There was little public awareness of endometriosis in 2003, but the book on the radio was talking about it. In some detail. And it was making my life make sense.

I loved Hilary Mantel from that moment on. There’s a place in my heart for Giving up the Ghost, which articulated endometriosis in a way I never could. When I met her, I thanked her for it. I will never forget that she put her hand on mine and said “It is survivable”. Those were words I had waited to hear all my life. I have a photograph of that moment, and because of the way my camera works, it captured a few frames, which move. I can watch her take my hand, as a ghost of my memory.

In late June 2024, I was in Devon for the Wolf Hall Weekend, which was a celebration of Hilary’s work. I haven’t really processed the event in my mind yet, other than to note it as a magical time. But I also remember crying surreptitiously when her editor and agent mentioned the terrible impact of endometriosis on Hilary’s life. I was sitting at the front of a packed room, and, as I was compèring much of the event, I didn’t want to cry in front of everyone. Tracey – lovely Tracey – sitting a couple of rows back – saw and was so kind.

“My body is getting the better of me, though people seem to feel I am responsible for what it does.”

These were tears for Hilary, but also for me; I block out the impact that endometriosis has had on my life as much as I can, and I don’t let myself think about it. But when I got back from Devon, I reread Giving Up the Ghost. I think of Hilary’s memoir as a book about endometriosis, but in fact the descriptions of the condition don’t appear until almost the end and take up only a few pages. But they are powerfully and unshrinkingly written.

Her words gave me permission to think about the time unusable because of pain; the wasted years stagnating far too long at one workplace that made no issue of my sickness (for which I was not sufficiently grateful); managers elsewhere who thought they were entitled to make an issue of it – why couldn’t I be more “resilient”?; appointments cancelled; hospital stays; endless medication and its side effects; my shame about my body; and my wonderful partner who doesn’t complain about the impact it has on him too.

I’m not writing this for sympathy; most of the time I just get on with things and make the most of the time I can use. My dentist thinks I have a very distorted relationship with pain because I am so used to it.

And, with regard to one of the most severe impacts of endometriosis, I have been really lucky. I never wanted children. Infertility has never caused me grief. Childhood stuff, family stuff, showed me that motherhood wasn’t for me. I am happy with that.

But the emphasis placed on fertility did have an impact on my treatment. As a young woman, I learned that I was wrong to not want children. “You’ll change your mind,” was a phrase I heard over and over. And as my endometriosis progressed, I did my best not to make the “When are you going to have children?” interrogators – so rude! – feel bad. I didn’t want them to feel uncomfortable if I said I couldn’t carry a pregnancy, and I wanted to be truthful, so I said I didn’t want to. And we’d be off. “What never? Oh girls say that but they don’t mean it. You’ll change your mind.” I would seethe inwardly wanting to shout that they weren’t listening and why didn’t they go and torment someone else. Only once, when confronted with a particularly persistent stranger I eventually cracked. “I won’t be having children. I have severe endometriosis and I am having a hysterectomy in about three weeks’ time.” Undaunted, this woman who didn’t know me at all promised she would pray for me. A miracle baby would be mine. A miracle for whom? I muttered.

Sadly, that mindset was also rampant in the medical profession. How many times did I hear that having a baby would deal with the endometriosis? I would sit there thinking that it was a poor reason to get pregnant. Or that this or that doctor had once had a patient who had changed their mind so no, they wouldn’t offer a hysterectomy because I too would change my mind. I was being a Bad Patient. It was exhausting. The same conversation every single appointment for years and years. My GP was sympathetic but she couldn’t get through the gatekeepers up the line.

But eventually, after passing out on the bathroom floor at home, and being nudged back into consciousness by a curious kitten, there was tentative agreement that more radical surgery might be possible. If I am Good.

“Some inflamed growth inside me was bending me down at the waist, pulling my abdomen, knotted with pain, down towards my knees.”

“Oh! That’s you!” said the surgeon, opening my file. “My students get to see you all the time. I use you in teaching.” I look down at the file on his desk and see a brightly coloured photograph. I expect to see my face, but it’s something different and it takes me a little while to realise – that’s my womb. There are blackish spots and lesions all over it. That’s my endometriosis. I am a teaching aid. I wish I didn’t know that. He tells me that now I am 35, he thinks I am “old enough” to know my own mind so he will grant my wish of a hysterectomy. But there’s one condition. My partner must accompany me to my next appointment, so that the surgeon can assess our relationship, how serious it is, and whether I am depriving A Man of his Right to Fatherhood.

My partner is not amused. Taking an afternoon off work to go and talk to a surgeon who lacks the ability to believe a woman – whose own word is not to be trusted – who has been telling him for seven years that she doesn’t want children. It goes against his values, my values, and our joint values. But it must be done. We go to the hospital and see Mr Surgeon. Mr Surgeon tries to open a dialogue about how my partner feels about this. My partner will not play ball. “It’s her body. Not mine,” he says and I cheer inwardly. My partner is wonderful. We leave the hospital and sneak off to see Master and Commander on the big screen in the middle of the afternoon. Master and Commander continues to be one of my favourite films.

So on Wednesday 7 April 2004 I finally have my hysterectomy. I am scolded by Mr Surgeon before the operation for insisting on being cut open. I have deprived his students an opportunity to observe keyhole surgery because I am Difficult. I am a Bad Patient. Inwardly I think of Mr Surgeon’s photograph and decide that Mr Surgeon’s students have observed enough of me, thank you very much. But the anaesthetist is nice, and talks to me about John Noakes and Blue Peter while I count down from 10.

When I wake up, my womb is gone, and, while they were in there, they took my cervix too. I wasn’t expecting that but never mind. I believe that’s it. My stitches are removed, and the long scar starts to fade. My endometriosis is over. But.

“Now my body was not my own. It was a thing done to.”

I am back in the surgeon’s office, for a post-surgery catch up. All satisfactory, the surgical team are pleased. I am a Good Patient again, despite my temerity in exercising choice over the type of surgery. I report that I am recovering well and feeling a lot better. Mr Surgeon looks at his notes and mentions – casually – that he had to leave some endometriosis behind and that it might continue to trouble me. There were strings of it in a tricky place, apparently. In fact there still are.

“It was too risky to remove it.”

“Oh”, I say, suppressing my anger, not asking “If you had agreed to operate seven years ago when I first asked you, would it be there at all?” Instead, I say thank you sweetly, politely, smiling, smiling, smiling, so grateful. Inside I am burning with rage.

The rage turns into regular monthly migraine. Or perhaps it’s not rage but yet more hormonal shock. I might not bleed any more, but the endometriosis finds another way to make itself felt. Dull aches, flare ups. Being bent double from time to time. The new world of monthly migraine wastes my time, makes me incoherent, puts paid to full-time work. Despite all that surgery, my body will still not behave. But at last I am a Good Patient, and I don’t make a fuss this time. I just put up with it.

The last word should go to Hilary. From Giving up the Ghost:

Just which bits of you are left intact? I have been so mauled by medical procedures, so sabotaged and made over, so thin and so fat, that sometimes I feel that each morning it is necessary to write myself into being… When you have committed enough words to paper you feel you have a spine stiff enough to stand up in the wind.

She says what I cannot. I do this too. Except in my case I stitch myself into being. And I stitch myself into being through the medium of her Cromwell. But really, it is all about Hilary Mantel herself.

Helen Barre’s Needle: The act of stitching in Hilary Mantel’s Cromwell Trilogy

This is an extract from my paper written for and delivered at An Overflow of Meaning, the first international conference dedicated to the work of Hilary Mantel, held at the Huntington Library, California, in October 2021.

As a stitcher, specifically a quilter, I am particularly interested in the way in which Hilary Mantel described needlework in her Thomas Cromwell Trilogy. She differentiated between different types of stitchery, the people who stitched, and what they made, in a way that paid tribute to the hands that plied – and continue to ply – needles. After reading my analysis of her literary stitchery, Hilary wrote to me that “I cannot really sew”. I find that almost impossible to believe, given her respect for the act of stitching, but it is evidence of her astonishing talent as a writer.

They have brought out bolts of fine holland, velvets and grosgrain, sarcenet and taffeta, scarlet by the yard [1]

Anyone who reads the Cromwell Trilogy cannot fail to notice the centrality of fabric to the lives of those within it. There are incredibly descriptions of textiles of varying weights, weaves, fibres, and designs, as they are deployed to make up clothes, bedhangings, carpets, and napery. As Lucy Arnold has pointed out:

The language of the textile industry, the processes of weaving, dying, tailoring and adapting fabrics, saturates the novels as a well of talking about textuality, intertextuality and the signifying power of words. Cromwell returns repeatedly to tapestries which depict Biblical and mythological texts, and identifies flaws in the weave of fabrics which interrupt their ability to signify or signal authenticity […] Even written dispatches are sewn into their envelopes.[2]

It helps having a protagonist who knows about textiles. Thomas Cromwell appreciates fabric and the processes that lie behind it: having a background in the cloth trade, how could he fail to do so? Cromwell’s appreciation allows the reader to enjoy many stitched items: the silk flowers given to Katherine by Henry; Jane Seymour’s Kingfisher sleeves; Anselma in the tapestry; Cromwell’s orange coat; Margaret Pole’s treasonous embroidery. My favourite is Cromwell’s own Quylte of Yelow Turquye Saten – a piece of bedding that once existed, according to his will. I have an expensive piece of Yelow Saten ready and waiting to be quilted.

The first time I read Wolf Hall back in 2009, I was struck by the amount of textile imagery. I remember noticing the recycling of Wolsey’s clothes on that reading, and drawing parallels with spotting an old and much-loved piece of fabric in a patchwork quilt:

The cardinal’s scarlet clothes now lie folded and empty. They cannot be wasted. They will be cut up and become other garments. Who knows where they will get to over the years? Your eye will be taken by a crimson cushion or a patch of red on a banner or ensign. You will see a glimpse of them in a man’s inner sleeve or in the flash of a whore’s petticoat.[3]

Two other phrases stuck with my stitching self, as they related to difficulties with a needle. One was the child Jo’s ‘awkward little backstitch which you would be hard-pushed to imitate’.[4] Her technique might not be all her mother Johane would desire, but its value is quickly recognised by Cromwell, who knows that even an unconventional stitch can come in useful, provided it can hold together, and promises her ‘I shall give you a present for sewing the cardinal’s letters’.[5] The other related to knitting:

He has never witnessed, or quite believed in, Lady Anne’s uncontrolled outbursts of temper. When he is admitted she is pacing, her hands clasped, and she looks small and tense, as if someone has knitted her and drawn the stitches too tight.[6]

I’m not a knitter, but I understand the difficulties of pulling a thread too tight when quilting and watching the fabric pull and pucker, knowing that at some date in the future, the thread will pull itself out, its starting knot emerging to the front of the quilt, insecure and hanging loose.

Neat Stitching … Who did this? [7]

My stitching hands: photography © Michael Wicks

It is the descriptions of the actual practice of stitchery that thread their way throughout the trilogy that fascinate me most. There is a clear understanding that needlework is labour, that it takes time, effort, and skill, that it is a deliberate act. George Cavendish knows this. As the Cardinal’s vestments and copes, ‘stiff with embroidery’, are confiscated he asks that the chests are lined:

with a double thickness of cambric. Would you shred the fine work that has taken nuns a lifetime?’ [8]

Mary Boleyn knows this. When she leaves Anne’s chamber to talk to Cromwell:

she’s brought her sewing with her, which he thinks is strange; but perhaps, if she leaves it behind, Anne pulls the stitches out.[9]

Bess Seymour, now Bess Cromwell, knows this. She brings Cromwell ‘news of needlework’, in which there is emotional as well as physical labour:

I was bidden to do a piece of work. One of the maids could have done it, but it was handed to me out of malice. It was something of Jane’s. Jane the queen, my sister, it was her girdle book, her little prayers. I was told, take this and pick the initials out. I said, I will not do it. I am Mistress Cromwell, not some servant.’ […] ‘The next thing I see, Katherine Howard is wearing it at her waist.’ [10]

Unpicking is never a pleasant task, it represents wasted effort and wasted time. There is an additional viciousness here: in an act of deliberate cruelty, Bess is expected to remove embroidery stitched for her dead sister, so that it can be given to another of the King’s loves. And for some people, sewing will never be pleasant whether the thread is going in or coming out. Cromwell’s young daughter Anne knows this. She does not enjoy learning needlework from her mother:

When Anne applies to her needle, beads of blood decorate her work. Liz says, she’d be better with a cobbler’s awl, except a cobbler wouldn’t be so chatty. He will not let his wife strike her; Anne cannot be faulted for diligence, and for the rest he feels she should not be faulted. ‘I suppose she will outgrow it,’ Liz says.[11]

Cromwell’s unknown daughter Jenneke, on the other hand, having learned perhaps from Anselma, is a proficient stitcher. Before we meet her in person, before Cromwell knows who she is, he is commenting on her ‘neat stitching’:

As they speak he is unrolling the jerkin. With a shake, he turns it inside out, and with a small pair of scissors begins to split open a seam. ‘Neat stitching… who did this?’ The boy hesitates; he colours. ‘Jenneke.’ He draws out from the lining the thin, folded paper.[12]

Thomas Cromwell knows that stitching isn’t just something that happens, there is a person (in his world, usually a woman) behind it, and that it is a conscious act on the part of the person who plies the needle. He knows this because he recognises the vital importance of the cloth trade to England’s economy and to the people who work within it.

She has been sewing – or rather unsewing [13]

In Cromwell’s world, sewing is never neutral. What is sewn, how it is stitched, and who threads the needle all have an impact on the cut of the cloth. Emblems and badges are embroidered so, as queens change, their supporters are kept busy unpicking and stitching new emblems to reflect the current state of the king’s matrimonial affairs. The blackwork embroidered by Henry’s first queen is long gone by the time of his third; now his shirts ‘are stitched by paid and proficient hands, with lions and laurel crowns’.[14] The politics of pregnancy are played out by the letting out and taking in of bodices.

Cromwell, who ‘of your gentleness… interest[s] yourself in the work we women do’,[15] hopes that Honor Lisle will incriminate herself with a letter to or from Reginald Pole hidden in her sewing box.[16] She is not caught out, but Pole’s mother is caught stitching treasonous embroidery. Margaret Pole’s hands might look innocent enough as she ‘takes a neat loop of her thread and slips her needle into the cloth’,[17] but her stitching demeanour is far from placid as ‘her hawk’s profile is lowered over her work, as if she is pecking it’.[18] Her stitched garden contains hopes of an alliance between the Princess Mary and the Pole family.

Cromwell, of course, is wise to what she is stitching and considers it ‘useful to have the evidence stitched together. “I hope that when that cloth is finished,” he says, “the family will protect it from the light.”’ [19] It is, ultimately, stitched evidence that Cromwell is able to present – wordlessly [20] – to Parliament: ‘a figured vestment found in the possession of Margaret, Countess of Salisbury. It quarters the arms of England with a pansy for Pole and a marigold for the Lady Mary, signifying their union; between them grows a Tree of Life […] He says, I always maintained that embroidery would get her into trouble.’ [21]

Every hand that could hold a needle would go to work [22]

A close reading of the three novels shows that the stitching activities are as various as the (mostly) women who undertake them and the textiles to which they contribute:

Sail-making: Helen Barre

Utility stitching: Jenneke; Hans Holbein (metaphorical)

Backstitch (awkward): The child Jo

Shroud-making: Mercy (assumed); Cromwell, Jane Rochford, Thomas Wyatt (metaphorical)

Clothes-making: Queen Katherine; Anne Boleyn; Mary Boleyn; Jane Seymour; Liz (not explicit); Cromwell (implied)

Clothes recycling: Mercy; Johane; Bet; Kat; Princess/Lady Mary

Clothes repair: Lady Bryan; Katherine Howard (hemming); Margaret Douglas (hemming)

Patchwork: Liz

Quilting: Liz

Embroidery: Queen Katherine; Jane Seymour; Anna of Cleves; Mary Boleyn; Liz; Helen Barre; Margaret Pole; Bess Darrell; Honor Lisle; unnamed nuns; Mercy, Anne/Grace Cromwell (possible)

Blackwork embroidery: Queen Katherine; Liz

Silk work: Liz

Braiding: Liz

Unpicking: Jo; Anne Boleyn; Mary Boleyn; Bess Seymour; Jane Seymour’s ladies

Unspecified sewing: Johane; Kat; Anne Cromwell; Queen Katherine; Anne Boleyn; Jane Seymour; Anna of Cleves; Thomas Seymour’s wife; Anne Boleyn’s ladies; Jane Seymour’s ladies; Lady Shelton

Untangling of thread: Cromwell

Eye surgery using needle (dog): Cromwell

Both in the novels and in life, it should not be assumed that because someone can work in one type of sewing, they will be proficient at all. If, for example, you quilt, you are likely to be asked to repair a dropped hem on somebody’s skirt. If you embroider, you might be asked to take in a dress. If you are a dressmaker, you might be asked to finish off someone’s abandoned cross stitch. But this results from a misunderstanding of the difference in technique, skill, and specialism. Patchworkers are not necessarily quilters, who are not necessarily embroiderers, who are not necessarily tapestry weavers; who are not necessarily dressmakers, and so on. One of the many pleasures of the Cromwell Trilogy is Mantel’s differentiation of stitchery. From sail-making to silk embroidery, the needlework is various, and highly specialist. It is not a neutral activity, but is weighted with class, expectation, and intent.

The most able stitcher, in terms of the number of techniques in which she is proficient, is Elizabeth Cromwell. Liz uses patchwork and quilting techniques in the making of Twelfth Night costumes; she embroiders cushions for her home and narrows that embroidery down to blackwork when making shirts for Gregory (and, while the text is silent about this, perhaps we can assume she has stitched said shirts); she does silk work, including braiding, and, like many experienced stitchers, she has the muscle memory to work without thinking:

Once he had watched Liz making a silk braid. One end was pinned to the wall and on each finger of her raised hand she was spinning loops of thread, her fingers flying so fast he couldn’t see how it worked. ‘Slow down,’ he said, ‘so I can see how you do it,’ but she’d laughed and said, ‘I can’t slow down, if I stopped to think how I was doing it I couldn’t do it at all.’ [23]

And in an echo of Cromwell saying he would – deliberately – leave his needle in if he were stitching the king’s shirts,[24] Liz – unconsciously – stores her needle in a piece of embroidery, a bad habit shared by so many stitchers, and leaves behind a ghost in her stitching:

There is a cushion over on which she was working a design, a deer running through foliage. Whether death interrupted her or just dislike of the work, she had left her needle in the cloth. Later, some other hand – her mother’s, or one of her daughters’ – drew out the needle; but around the twin hole it left, the cloth had stiffened into brittle peaks, so if you pass your finger over the path of her stitches – the path they would have taken – you can feel the bumps, like snags in the weave.[25]

Liz’s skill with needle and thread is such that her hands can move while she talks or thinks of other things; her craft has become part of her. That is not to say that her work is without intent or that it is easy. Her confidence in the tiny movements of textile work is brought about from long experience and repeated practice.

Helen Barre unwinds the thread of her tale [26]

A green notebook with a packet of sail makers' needles resting on it, one of the needles is out of the packet and is large. — Sail Makers’ Needles

The different types of stitchery are exemplified in Helen Barre, and that is why this paper is named after her. When we first meet Helen, she explains that, in about 1530, she was ‘stitching for a sailmaker’ somewhere in Essex, maybe around Tilbury (where her first husband disappeared).[27] Cromwell notices that Helen’s hands are ‘skinned and swollen from rough work’.[28] This is unsurprising: while I am not an expert in antique sailmaking tools, I can confirm that from a 21^st century stitcher’s perspective, sailmaking continues to be rough work. Sailmakers’ needles are terrifying things: long, thick, and lethal. You would not want to get on the wrong side of one. To get your needle through heavy canvas or to attach rope securely, a finger thimble would be useless; you need a Sailmaker’s Palm: a leather strap that goes around your hand with a metal pad that fits in your palm. Then you can employ all your strength to push your needle through. I have a Sailmaker’s Palm in my sewing basket, but it is far too big for my hand. I suspect these tools are designed for larger and stronger hands than mine, and indeed Helen’s.[29]

Helen is destined for finer fabrics. As with his habit of dressing and re-dressing queens, when she first arrives at Austin Friars, Cromwell ‘mentally… takes her out of cheap shrunken wool and re-dresses her in some figured velvet he saw yesterday, six shillings the yard.’ [30] Later, when Helen prepares a room for the visit of the Princess Mary, he watches her pleasure at the opportunity ‘to handle the fine stuff and have a brigade of cushions at her command.’ [31] And as Helen learns to ‘handle the fine stuff’, the nature of her stitching changes. As the wife of Rafe Sadler, a sailmaker’s needle is no tool for her gentlewoman’s hand. By 1536, she is working on fine embroidery; her thread is now fine silk rather than coarse twine or rope, her needle is thinner, shorter, and sharper. She sews for Dorothea Wolsey ‘a kerchief of fine linen […] worked with the three apples of St Dorothea, and with wreaths, sprigs and blossoms, the lily and the rose’,[32] in ‘loving stitches… to give pleasure to a stranger’.[33] The stranger – Dorothea – rejects both the loving stitches and Cromwell himself. When Cromwell returns to London, with the embroidered kerchief, he passes it to Rafe to give back to Helen.[34]

Dorothea’s rejection of Cromwell is shocking enough on its own, but for a stitcher, with a keen awareness of the time and effort that went into those loving stitches, the rejection of Helen’s work is an additional blow. Perhaps it would have been kinder for Cromwell – or perhaps Rafe – to keep the kerchief for himself, rather than let Helen know it was not wanted. I noted, with relief, when watching the stage version of The Mirror and the Light that Helen’s embroidery was absent when Cromwell went to see Dorothea. But the casting of Umi Myers in the dual role of both Helen and Dorothea is a subtle reminder that these two women are linked by stitch.[35]

My fingers are kept supple by plying my needle [36]

It is unsurprising that a trilogy of novels that pay so much respect and attention to the act of stitching should have a particular resonance for anyone who works in textiles, and, in my case, form the inspiration for a large ongoing sewing project (or should that be projects?). My first Cromwell-related quilt was made in 2014; since then there have been numerous projects. As I write, I am looking at the first 30 feet of my current Cromwell Narrative Cloth – a piece that tells the story of the Trilogy in chronological order. Hilary Mantel’s Cromwell Trilogy is a constant source of inspiration, and now I cannot think that I will ever stop stitching it.

Sixteenth Century Stitchery – still holding documents together

[1] Hilary Mantel, Wolf Hall: Visitation (London: Fourth Estate, paperback edition, 2019) , p.50.

[2] Lucy Arnold, Reading Hilary Mantel: Haunted Decades (London: Bloomsbury, 2020), pp.166-167.

[3] Wolf Hall: Entirely Beloved Cromwell, pp.265-266.

[4] Wolf Hall: Entirely Beloved Cromwell, p.239.

[5] Wolf Hall: Entirely Beloved Cromwell, p.259.

[6] Wolf Hall: ‘Alas, What Shall I Do For Love?’, p.373.

[7] Wolf Hall: Arrange Your Face, p.304.

[8] Wolf Hall: Visitation, p.50.

[9] Wolf Hall: Entirely Beloved Cromwell, p.203.

[10] The Mirror and the Light: Magnificence (London: Fourth Estate 2019), p.788.

[11] The Mirror and the Light: The Bleach Fields, p.420.

[12] Wolf Hall: Arrange Your Face, p.304.

[13] Wolf Hall: Devil’s Spit, p.501.

[14] The Mirror and the Light: Vile Blood, p.334

[15] The Mirror and the Light: Salvage, p.193.

[16] The Mirror and the Light, Magnificence, p.766.

[17] The Mirror and the Light: Salvage, p.194.

[18] The Mirror and the Light: Salvage, p.106.

[19] The Mirror and the Light: Wreckage II, p.198.

[20] See Susan Higginbotham, Margaret Pole: The Countess in the Tower (Stroud: Amberley Publishing, 2017), p.129.

[21] The Mirror and the Light: Ascension Day, p.665.

[22] The Mirror and the Light: Magnificence, p.720.

[23] Hilary Mantel, Bring Up the Bodies: The Black Book (London: Fourth Estate, paperback edition 2019), pp.286-287.

[24] Wolf Hall: An Occult History of Britain p.92.

[25] The Mirror and the Light: Salvage, p.65.

[26] Wolf Hall: Anna Regina, p.419.

[27] Wolf Hall: Anna Regina, p.420.

[28] Wolf Hall: Anna Regina, p.419.

[29] Traditional Sailmaking is now officially considered an Endangered Craft with between just 21 and 50 professional makers left in the UK. As the Heritage Crafts Association note, ‘Many people would like to have sails made traditionally, but very few are willing to pay the price of someone working eight hours a day hand-sewing’. Red List of Endangered Crafts: Sailmaking, Heritage Crafts Association website, https://heritagecrafts.org.uk/sail-making/ [accessed 1 October 2021].

[30] Wolf Hall: Anna Regina, p.419.

[31] The Mirror and the Light: Salvage, p.149.

[32] The Mirror and the Light: The Five Wounds, p.282.

[33] The Mirror and the Light: The Five Wounds, p.289.

[34] The Mirror and the Light: The Five Wounds, p.290.

[35] The Mirror and the Light, Royal Shakespeare Company and Playful Productions, first performed at the Gielgud Theatre London on 23 September 2021.

[36] The Mirror and the Light: Magnificence, p.726.

A Year of Weeping

It is now a year since the sudden passing of Hilary Mantel on 22 September 2022. I still cannot believe that this is true.

In the days following her death, I thought of memorials, mourning, and grief; I wondered how her characters – so alive on the page – might pay tribute. I thought of weeper tombs – those elaborate memorials that include kneeling mourners paying silent tribute to the departed. And I stitched a series of weepers, who do not pray, but who each hold a copy of a book from Hilary Mantel’s Cromwell trilogy; with precisely written and now carefully chosen words about each of them unrolling from the pages.

The Weepers: A tribute to Dame Hilary Mantel, 6 July 1952-22 September 2022.

A quilted picture of Thomas Cromwell, kneeling under an arch and holding a book. A strip of fabric with text attached falls from the book. — The Weepers: Thomas

A quilted picture of Elizabeth Wykyes, kneeling under an arch and holding a book. A strip of fabric with text attached falls from the book. — The Weepers: Lizzie

A quilted picture of Anne and Grace Cromwell, kneeling under an arch and holding a book each. Strips of fabric with text attached fall from their books. Above them, stitched text reads “Do not forget us. As the year turns, we are here”. — The Weepers: Anne and Grace

A quilted picture of Gregory Cromwell, kneeling under an arch and holding a book. A strip of fabric with text attached falls from the book. — The Weepers: Gregory

A quilted picture of Helen Barre, kneeling under an arch and holding a book. A strip of fabric with text attached falls from the book. — The Weepers: Helen

A quilted picture of Rafe Sadler, kneeling under an arch and holding a book. A strip of fabric with text attached falls from the book. — The Weepers: Rafe

A quilted picture of Jenneke, kneeling under an arch and holding a book. A strip of fabric with text attached falls from the book. — The Weepers: Jenneke

A quilted picture of Christophe Cremuel, kneeling under an arch and holding a book. A strip of fabric with text attached falls from the book. — The Weepers: Christophe Cremuel

All photographs © Michael Wicks

Stitching the Evidence Together

A quilted piece with the words “Not holy Not a maid” visible. Some turqouise stitching on black fabric shows words that are not entirely clear but read “Wolf Hall Six”. A needle and thread at the end of the word “Six” is pushed half way into the fabric. — The last stitch in the first Wolf Hall quilt

Twenty five months ago today – on 19 August 2021 – I put the last stitch into the First Wolf Hall Quilt. I’d spent a very uncomfortable few hours joining all the sections together to make forty six feet of quilting, and had struggled while wrestling the writing and coiling length into one long roll.

More recently, I have been regularly visiting the National Archives at Kew, just outside London, looking at Sixteenth Century documents relating to Thomas Cromwell. Such documents – especially those that take the form of rolls – are often stitched together. This gives me a feeling of continuity – these old parchments and my quilting are hand-sewn together with needle and thread, joining narratives and the historical record.

A rolled document with long stitches showing where different pages are joined together.

Many documents are stitched together at the top – or the end that eventually forms the core of the roll. And, having been rolled up for centuries, contents can be challenging to untangle. On numerous occasions, I haven’t dared unroll very far for fear of damage. Sometimes, I can’t find the end and struggle to unroll in such a way to avoid different membranes springing back.

Four sheets of parchment, which have been rolled since the 16th century, sprung back into individual roles.The words “Gregory Cromwell” are visible on the second roll down. — Where is the end of this document that refers to Gregory Cromwell?

Despite the frustrations of working with these rolls, I love them. I love seeing the stitches, and I love the act of unrolling bit by bit, an inch at a time, and not being able to see the whole document at once. It reminds me of my rolled quilted interpretation of Wolf Hall, which cannot and should not be seen all at once.

Some invaluable surviving documents are not rolled, but preserved flat, boxed carefully under lock and key. These are King’s Bench documents from 1536 – and they are from the trial of Queen Anne Boleyn and the men accused of treason alongside her.

Today, I saw documents listing the names of George Boleyn, William Brereton, Francis Weston, Henry Norris, and Mark Smeaton – the men accused with the queen. Their names are clearly readable in beautiful script – but there’s something very unsettling about carefully controlled handwriting when it documents death sentences. I have never had such a strong visceral reaction when looking at documents before. These papers carry a weight of pain, grief, fear, death, and betrayal. I felt shaken just brushing my hand against them, and against the remains of the leather bags in which the documents were once carried.

A pale brown gathered pouch made of leather, ripped and decaying. — What remains of the leather bag that held the trial documents that condemned Anne Boleyn

These papers remind me of the stage play of Bring up the Bodies. Gregory asks his father whether the executed men are guilty. And he clarifies, “I didn’t mean, ‘Did the court find them guilty?’ Father. I meant, ‘Did they do it?’” Thomas replies: “Who knows?”

The trial papers include documents that were extended by the careful use of herringbone stitch. As Hilary Mantel wrote in The Mirror and the Light, “it’s useful to have the evidence stitched together”. But even today, this stitched together evidence is controversial, contested, unreliable, shifting. The stitches don’t strengthen the evidence, but they strengthen its documentation.

Parchments stitched together with herringbone stitch, pictured from the back — Herringbone stitch, stitching the evidence together

Searching for Thomas Cromwell’s Quilts

A parchment document, pasted into book form, written in black ink in 16th century hand. The word “Quylte” is visible two thirds of the way down. This is an inventory, or list, of mostly textile items. — Cardinal Wolsey’s Quyltes

I have been searching for Thomas Cromwell’s quylte of yelow Turquye Saten for some years now. What I mean is, of course, that I’ve been looking for any traces of it in anything other than Cromwell’s will (and of course in Hilary Mantel’s Cromwell Trilogy). I don’t expect to find the actual object – it is highly likely to be long gone, such is the nature of old textiles.

But I have become a bit obsessed by knowing what happened to this high value item. In his 1529 will, Cromwell left his yellow quilt to his son Gregory. However, many of Cromwell’s possessions were seized after his arrest and execution in 1540: so whether Gregory ended up with the quilt is questionable. I’ve started to look into documents relating to the King’s Wardrobe, and note that some of Cromwell’s textiles were listed there – does this include the yellow quilt? I will be taking a closer look in the coming weeks.

A few days ago, I was reading a 1527 inventory of Cromwell’s possessions, and noted a reference to a second quilt- a “yerdure coverlid” or “detailed green quilt” (as listed in Caroline Angus: My Hearty Commendations: The Transcribed Letters and Remembrances of Thomas Cromwell). And a closer look at Cromwell’s 1529 will indicates a bequest of another coverlet or quilt to be left to “Elizabeth Gregory, sometime my servant”.

My quilt search has given me the perfect excuse to spend some very pleasurable days at the National Archives looking at Sixteenth Century documents. I have seen beautiful things, been frustrated by tightly rolled layers, learned to read a little bit of Secretary Hand – and cursed my lack of Latin. So far I haven’t come across any references to Cromwell’s quilts but I am loving the process of looking.

And I was delighted to recognise the word Quylte when I finally saw it – even thought it was a quilt belonging to someone else. In an inventory of Cardinal Wolsey’s goods taken at Cawood in about 1530, there is a “Quylte for covyring of bedde” and “another very old Quylte”.

Of course that inventory sent me straight back to the Cromwell Trilogy. In Wolf Hall, Hilary Mantel imagined George Cavendish, Wolsey’s Gentleman Usher, telling Cromwell about Wolsey’s arrest at Cawood in November 1530 – the context in which this real inventory, including its quilts, would have been taken.

In Mantel’s version, at Austin Friars, Cromwell’s city house, Cavendish has to recount the event in detail, he has to tell someone, he has to tell Cromwell everything:

‘George, make this story short, I cannot bear it.’ But George must have his say…
Hilary Mantel, Wolf Hall, Entirely Beloved Cromwell

Cromwell cannot bear it. He turns away, so he does not have to witness Cavendish’s grief – and to hide his own: “He looks at the wall, at the panelling, at his new linen fold panelling, and runs its fingers across its grooves.” This is the moment when he knows he will take revenge on all those who brought down his master.

And right now in 2023, I’m energised by the shock of seeing Wolsey’s quilts inventoried nearly 500 years ago. I shall carry on looking.

In the Weave in Worcester

A woman in a green flowered top smiles at an audience looking at a screen featuring advertising images for Wolsey Underwear, and the Quixote “Try always, Wolsey says, to find out what people wear under their clothes.” — Talking Text, Textiles, Thomas Cromwell, and Thomas Wolsey

I recently spent a very enjoyable few days out of London, having been invited by Hilary Mantel scholar Dr Lucy Arnold and the Tudor House Museum in Worcester to take part in a public event at the Museum entitled “In the Weave”. We are both fascinated by the role that textiles play in Hilary Mantel’s Cromwell Trilogy, and we were delighted to share our enthusiasm with an engaged audience, many of whom left planning to read or re-read Wolf Hall. Lucy talked about the role of textiles and the textile trade in the Cromwell Trilogy, and how these appear in the text, while I shared my analysis of who stitches and what they stitch across the Trilogy, and talked about some my textile work.

A long piece of quilting, on cream, black and gold fabric, reading Wolf Hall, sits on a dark brown antique chest, in a half timbered interior. A vase of lavender rests on a window ledge above the chest — The first Wolf Hall quilt visits a 16th Century setting

I have written before about the complex relationship I have with the first Wolf Hall quilt, the circumstances in which it was made, and how I feel it doesn’t really work as a piece. However, taking it out for the first time in nearly a year, laying it out, folded loosely, and watching people handle it and photograph it made me start to question my relationship with it. Does it in fact work? And does it have potential for further development?

This time last year, I put aside the stitched chapter titles I made back in 2020 for Bring Up the Bodies and The Mirror and the Light. I didn’t want to use them then. But I’m now wondering if that 46 feet of Wolf Hall quilt might like to grow further? I had completely forgotten that I left the end unfinished, open to further work should I choose to add to it.

A woman bends to look round at a screen, showing a piece of textile art work described on screen as The Weepers. — *The Weepers* in Worcester – completed just a few days earlier

While in Worcester I took the opportunity to visit the Cathedral. There was something particular I wanted to see – the tomb of Prince Arthur and his Chantry Chapel. I was very fortunate to visit at a quiet time, so I had the Chantry to myself and thus an ideal opportunity to look closely at carvings and symbols. The Chantry was vandalised during the reign of Edward VI, and some visible scars from axes and swords can still be seen, scars I found unexpectedly upsetting.

A Sixteenth Century rectangular tomb surrounded by carved walls, sixth some figures carved into the walls. — Prince Arthur’s Chantry at Worcester Cathedral

I had assumed that the Chantry was Prince Arthur’s burial place and that it a mourning Henry VII and Elizabeth of York had been involved in its design and construction, but according to this wonderful piece by Lucy Arnold, it seems that we don’t actually know exactly how the Chantry was built, where Prince Arthur was/is buried, or how much the memorial cost. Interpreting material items left to us from centuries ago is often challenging, partial, and ambiguous.

Pomegranates carved on the door to Prince Arthur’s Chantry

A Pomegranate symbol on the exterior Chantry wall

I was interested to see pomegranate symbols both inside and outside the Chantry – the symbol of Katherine of Aragon, Prince Arthur’s widow. These symbols are survivors of destruction – both during the reign of Henry VIII and Edward VI:

They search out and obliterate any trace of Katherine, the queen that was, smashing with hammers the pomegranates of Aragon, their splitting segments and their squashed and flying seeds.
Hilary Mantel, Bring Up the Bodies – Falcons

But far more unexpected than the surviving pomegranates, was Master Secretary Cromwell himself. Walking in the Cloisters, I looked in detail at the stained glass and, to my surprise, there was Thomas Cromwell, his hand over his mouth. What is he doing?

Stained glass windows featuring Henry VIII, Thomas Cromwell, Thomas Cranmer and Hugh Latimer

Perhaps Henry can tell us:

He is better than you at keeping his face straight. I see you, when we sit in council, with your hand before your mouth. Sometimes, you know, I want to laugh myself.
Henry VIII to Thomas Cromwell: Hilary Mantel, Wolf Hall – Anna Regina

The Weepers – Christophe Cremuel

A young man stitched and quilted on grey fabric, wearing a cap and kneeling on a cushion.

Christophe might just be my favourite character in Hilary Mantel’s Cromwell Trilogy – apart, of course, from He, Cromwell. The young ruffian meets Cromwell in Calais, and makes a life-changing decision: “I thought to take service with you, monsieur. I have made up my mind to go travelling.” (Wolf Hall, Anna Regina).

At his new home in London, Christophe soon becomes indispensable to Cromwell, “supposedly to look after his clothes, but really to make him laugh.” Cromwell sees in Christophe something of his younger self – his fighting, his troublemaking, his survival as a runaway, his irreverence. But slowly, slowly we see that Christophe loves Cromwell, and increasingly becomes the person who cares deeply for his wellbeing.

Christophe’s Cornflower on The Wolf Hall Quilt

At the end of Wolf Hall, Cromwell goes to his office and finds that “someone – probably not Christophe – has put on his desk a shining silver pot of cornflowers.” (Wolf Hall, To Wolf Hall) I have always believed that the person who left the cornflowers was in fact Christophe, and I included a cornflower in my first Wolf Hall quilt, as a tribute.

He is capable of doing violent, dirty work on Cromwell’s behalf. But Christophe is present at one of the defining moments of Cromwell’s story – his visit to Dorothea at the convent at Shaftesbury in 1536. And he knows something has changed, that a crisis has occurred. And he now wishes to ease Cromwell’s grief, with moments of care and concern:

Sir, do not weep any more. You said you would not.

Are you sitting up writing your king book tonight?

I think my master ought to have a holiday.
Christophe caring for Cromwell in The Mirror and The Light

On the last night of his life, Cromwell teachers Christophe the Three Card Trick, so that if he is ever without food or money he can earn his living through sleight of hand. Loyal to the very end, Christophe tries to give Cromwell his mother’s holy medal to carry to his death. In the name of Christophe Cremeul he curses the king who has destroyed his beloved master. He breaks my heart.

Christophe is one of the few fictional characters in the Trilogy. Hilary Mantel made him so vital and vibrant that he lives off the page. Just before the Museum of London closed prior to its relocation, I visited and was pleased to see a woollen hat, which could have belonged to him. In fact, some part of me is convinced that it did. So when I came to sew him, I stitched it on to his head.

A brown knitted woollen cap dating from the 1500s, as part of a museum display.

The Weepers – Jenneke

A quilted figure of a woman holding a book. She has long skirts and cloak on, and she is kneeling on a cushion pad.

Warning:

This post contains spoilers relating to Jenneke’s identity, as revealed in The Mirror and the Light.

In Hilary Mantel’s Wolf Hall, Thomas Cromwell welcomes home his protégé Thomas Avery, who has travelled from Antwerp carrying a woollen jerkin. The jerkin conceals a letter from Bible translator and religious scholar William Tyndale who is in hiding in Europe. Tyndale’s letter is hidden in the lining – stitched in behind a seam. Cromwell slits the seam with scissors, and asks ‘Neat stitching… Who did this?’ Avery answers ‘Jenneke’. The unknown Jenneke is clearly a proficient stitcher (Wolf Hall – Arrange Your Face).

When I first read Wolf Hall back in 2009, I noted Cromwell’s interest in this neat stitching, and also noted his implied knowledge of the skill involved in creating a neat seam, strong enough to hide smuggled paperwork. The exchange with Thomas Avery still fascinates me – Cromwell looking at the sewing, admiring it, and still destroying the work to get to the information he wants. And, at the same time, appreciating that the unknown stitcher had taken the trouble to produce good work, in the full knowledge that it would soon be ripped out.

From my first reading, I fell in love with the idea that Cromwell knows that neat stitching isn’t just something that happens. He recognises that there is a person (usually a woman) behind it, and that neat stitching has to be a deliberate act on the part of the person who plies the needle. He knows this because he recognises the vital importance of the cloth trade to England’s economy and he values the people who work within it.

The first *Wolf Hall* quilt: ‘Tell me who is Jenneke?’ Photography: © Michael Wicks

Jenneke remains an unknown and unseen stitcher until some years later, in The Mirror and the Light , a young woman appears at Cromwell’s door. She looks familiar, so he invites her inside, offers her wine and an apple, and conversation. She has come ‘from over the sea’, from Antwerp. And when he asks her who her father is, her reply is direct:

‘You are.’
Hilary Mantel, The Mirror and the Light – The Bleach Fields

Jenneke has come to England to see her father. She knows he is an important figure, a rich man, but that he is now in some danger politically. But until her revelation, Cromwell has no idea of her existence – although when he looks back on certain conversations, with certain individuals, he realises that some of his friends and acquaintances knew of her, and kept her a secret. ‘How could I have a daughter and not know it?’ he asks her.

She unsettles him. She asks him questions – about women, about his dead daughters, about his work, about his religion. She is blunt, and employs no artifice. He tries to take control of the situation; asks her to stay in England; says he will arrange a marriage for her; he will arrange a house for her. But Jenneke is independent. She has not come to stay. She has come to meet her father briefly, to tell him of her life, of how she has lived and what she has seen. And in an echo of the letter she once stitched into a seam, to tell him of the death of Tyndale. She then returns over the sea to Antwerp. And although Cromwell writes to her, he receives no reply.

Her visit marks her place in the book of his life – a book which falls back into loose leaves. Printers can read as if through a mirror. It is their trade. Their fingers are nimble and their eyes keen. But examine any book and you will see that some characters are upside down, some transposed.
Hilary Mantel, The Mirror and the Light – Corpus Christi

Jenneke’s Needle in the first Cromwell Trilogy Quilt. Photography: © Michael Wicks

Jenneke is a fictional character, but as Hilary Mantel notes in the afterword to The Mirror and the Light, Cromwell might indeed have had an illegitimate daughter, who was possibly called Jane. Who Jane Cromwell’s mother was is unknown. According to Tracy Borman, Jane ‘appears in the archives of the county of Chester…. [but] here is little other than the girl’s surname to suggest that she might have been his daughter.’ (Tracy Borman: Thomas Cromwell: The Untold Story of Henry VIII’s Most Faithful Servant: ‘Not without sorrow’, 2014). And a cautious Diarmaid MacCulloch notes that ‘her chronological place in his story is a matter of back-projecting much later facts with the aid of a fairly generous dose of supposition’ (Diarmaid MacCulloch, Thomas Cromwell: A Life – ‘Managing Failure 1528-1529’, 2018).

From such tiny fragments and her magnificent imagination, Hilary Mantel created a memorable fictional character to be Cromwell’s unknown daughter. And in his admiration of her neat stitches, Mantel’s Cromwell demonstrated his interest in and knowledge of textiles, an interest that sparked neat stitches of my own.

The Weepers – Helen Barre

A hand quilted figure of a kneeling woman, wearing a cloak, long skirts, and holding a book.

When I gave my paper about stitching in the Cromwell Trilogy at the Huntington Library in October 2021, I called it She is embroidering her thoughts with Helen Barre’s Needle. Why Helen’s needle? Why not Liz’s? Or Jenneke’s? Because Helen’s needle was, for me, central to understanding the significance of stitchery in Hilary Mantel’s Cromwell Trilogy.

Helen is a beautiful young woman with two children who comes to Thomas Cromwell for help in 1533 after being abandoned by her husband. She becomes part of his household, and, within a few months, marries Rafe Sadler in secret. She is a stitcher of some talent, and can turn her hand to markedly different types of needlework.

In Mantel’s words, Helen ‘unwinds the thread of her tale’ to Cromwell, and is therefore inextricably linked – to a reader interested in textiles – to needlework tools and techniques. When he first meets her, she explains that, when her husband first left her in about 1530, she was ‘stitching for a sailmaker’ somewhere in Essex. Cromwell notes that Helen’s hands are ‘skinned and swollen from rough work’ (Wolf Hall, Anna Regina). The state of Helen’s hands is not surprising: while I am not an expert in antique sailmaking tools, I can confirm that, from a 21^st century stitcher’s perspective, sailmaking continues to be rough work. Sailmakers’ needles are terrifying things: long, thick, and lethal. You would not want to get on the wrong side of one.

A green notebook with a packet of sail makers' needles resting on it. The needles are out of the packet and can be seen to be large and thick, — Sail Makers’ Needles

And then there is the question of how to get such a needle through through heavy sail canvas. A finger thimble would be useless; you need a Sailmaker’s Palm – a leather strap that goes around your hand with a metal pad that fits in your palm. That way, you can employ all your strength to push your needle through the canvas. I have a Sailmaker’s Palm in my sewing basket, but it is far too big for my hand. I suspect such tools are designed for larger and stronger hands than mine, and indeed Helen’s. No wonder her hands are battered.

A hand inside a large leather strap which has a hard surface resting against the palm. — Too big for my hand…

But once her hands are healed, Helen is destined for finer fabrics. When he first sees her, Cromwell ‘mentally… takes her out of cheap shrunken wool and re-dresses her in some figured velvet he saw yesterday, six shillings the yard.’ Some years later, when Helen prepares a room for a visit of the Princess Mary, Cromwell watches her pleasure at the opportunity ‘to handle the fine stuff and have a brigade of cushions at her command’ (The Mirror and the Light, Salvage).

And as Helen learns to ‘handle the fine stuff’, the nature of her stitching changes. As Rafe’s wife, a sailmaker’s needle is now no tool for her gentlewoman’s hands. By 1536, she is working on fine embroidery; her thread is now fine silk rather than coarse twine or rope, her needle is thinner, shorter, and sharper. She sews for Dorothea Wolsey ‘a kerchief of fine linen […] worked with the three apples of St Dorothea, and with wreaths, sprigs and blossoms, the lily and the rose’, in ‘loving stitches… to give pleasure to a stranger’. (The Mirror and the Light, The Five Wounds).

In Mantel’s telling, Helen’s needlework tools change with her marital status. But, as she asks Cromwell on first meeting him, ‘which am I – wife or widow?’ (Wolf Hall, Anna Regina). The real Helen – or Ellen – Barre was indeed abandoned by her first husband before appealing to Cromwell for help, and going on to marry Rafe Sadler when her husband was presumed dead. But after Cromwell’s death (and therefore outside the timing of Mantel’s trilogy, and my stitching), Helen and Rafe received bad news:

In 1545, after fifteen years of marriage and with seven children by Sadler (three sons, the eldest of whom was named Thomas in honour of the master, and four daughters), Ellen discovered to her horror that her estranged first husband was still alive. She was therefore guilty of bigamy. A drunken Barre had been over heard by one of Thomas Wriothesley’s servants boasting that he was Lady Sadler’s husband.

Tracey Borman, Thomas Cromwell: The Untold Story of Henry VIII’s Most Faithful Servant, ‘The suddaine rising of some men’ (London: Hodder and Stoughton, 2014)

Ralph Sadler was able to petition Parliament to have his children legitimised, and, in a private Act of Parliament, had his marriage to Helen confirmed. The thread of Helen’s and Rafe’s tale thus outlasted Cromwell himself. But for my purposes, and for my Weepers series, Helen is depicted as the young woman with whom Rafe Sadler fell in love, and who was a talented needleworker, adapting her skills to her circumstances, and plying her needle with loving stitches.

The Weepers – Rafe Sadler

A quilted figure of a young man kneeling and wearing a Tudor-style coat and hat, and holding a book — Rafe Sadler: work in progress

In Hilary Mantel’s Cromwell trilogy, Rafe Sadler is a key support to Thomas Cromwell: his chief clerk, his confidante, his protégé, his ideal son. Rafe has been with Cromwell since childhood (‘Heaven direct me, boy or hedgehog?’), brought up at Fenchurch Street and Austin Friars, one of the very few people for whose good opinion Cromwell cares.

Rafe sometimes acts as Cromwell’s conscience, sometimes as his advisor, sometimes as his ally. He is not afraid to challenge Cromwell, and to warn him when he thinks he is taking unnecessary risks. Most of all, ‘ he is a tribute to the man who brought him up: dogged, sardonic, quick on the uptake’. (Wolf Hall, An Occult History of Britain).

When Cromwell’s wife Elizabeth is dying, it is Rafe who tries to find him. In the month after her death, it is Rafe who is there for him. The pair play chess together until they reach stalemate. During Anne Cromwell’s short life, she hopes that she will be able to marry Rafe when she is older. This idea gives Cromwell comfort, albeit briefly:

For a minute, for two minutes together, he feels his life might mend.
Wolf Hall, An Occult History of Britain

But Anne does not live long enough to fulfil her hope. And Rafe later does the one thing that disappoints Cromwell. As they travel home together by river in Master Secretary’s river barge, Rafe confesses a secret:

‘I have been married half half a year,’ Rafe says, and no one knows, but you know now. I have married Helen Barre.’
Wolf Hall, Supremacy

Cromwell is initially aghast, wondering how this relationship could have developed under his roof (and he recalls a specific occasion when he could perhaps have guessed). He says that, in marrying the beautiful but penniless Helen, Rafe will be ‘held up as a prime example of how to waste your connections’. But Rafe replies that he is ‘violently in love’ with Helen, and Cromwell is quickly reconciled to their marriage. After all, he reflects, he has not brought Rafe up without feeling, and he is witness to the happiness that Helen and Rafe share.

When Cromwell fell from power, Rafe Sadler remained loyal to him. Mantel gives us scenes of Rafe visiting Cromwell, imprisoned in the Tower of London, and taking his final letter begging for mercy to the King. And her imagining of the last meeting of Rafe and Cromwell is heartbreaking. The stage play of The Mirror and the Light ends with Rafe weeping at Cromwell’s death, until he is pressured by Cromwell’s enemies to shout ‘Long live the King!’

Years before, when he first brought the child Rafe home to Fenchurch Street in the pouring rain, Cromwell cheered him by declaring that ‘We drowned men will stick together’. And Rafe sticks to Cromwell, the man who brought him up, the man he loves, until the very end.

A digression, and an unexpected link…

Three copies of A Traveller in Time by Alison Uttley resting on a patchwork cushion.

When I was eight years old, I read Alison Uttley’s A Traveller in Time, a story of Mary Queen of Scots and the Babington Plot. I loved that book and read it over and over. It includes wonderful textile descriptions including some magnificent patchwork quilts, and I always dreamt of making a quilt just like those Uttley describes. But until this week, I hadn’t noticed that A Traveller in Time contains four references to one ‘Sir Ralph Sadleir’, the custodian of the imprisoned Queen at Wingfield Manor, Derbyshire, in 1584-85.

This is, of course, Cromwell’s Rafe in later life. During his long career, he was briefly in charge of the imprisonment of Mary Queen of Scots. A Traveller in Time awakened my early interest in history and planted the seeds of all sorts of study choices when I was older. Decades later, I am delighted to find a link between my favourite childhood book, and the magnificent trilogy that has played such a central role in my life since Wolf Hall was first published in 2009.

Stitching Thomas Cromwell

Textile interpretations of the Wolf Hall Trilogy

Author: Lucie Bea Dutton