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 – Elizabeth Wykys

Two quilted figures on grey fabric: one a man wearing long robes and a hat; the woman wearing a long dress and cloak. Both are kneeling and holding books

A stitched figure of a kneeling woman wearing a long cape and skirt, holding a book

Since my earlier post about commemorating the dead, and my explorations of weeper tombs, I have started stitching characters from Hilary Mantel’s Cromwell Trilogy who are to be included in my Weepers series. It’s quite an intense process: sketching out ideas, reminding myself of small details in the text, noting down some of their words, or what is said of them.

Once I get to the stitching stage, I start with outlines. Then I add a little detail. Then the figure sits for a while, waiting. Eventually, once I feel that the future is ready, I draw in a face. I am yet to add any text – and yet to decide exactly how I will do this; and I am still considering whether to also add objects relating to each figure. Maybe, maybe not.

Yesterday morning I finished the initial work on Cromwell’s wife Elizabeth Wykys. We know very little about the real Elizabeth Wykys, but in fiction, Hilary Mantel conjured a memorable character, and chose to give her great proficiency in textiles. In the Play Script, she wrote:

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.
Wolf Hall and Bring Up the Bodies. Adapted for the stage by Mike Poulton. From the novels by Hilary Mantel. (Notes on characters by Hilary Mantel)

My stitched Liz took a while to emerge. Although I quilted her outlines some weeks ago, she wasn’t fixed. For a while, I thought she might turn out to be Jenneke. I stitched another set of outlines, but my second attempt turned out – very definitely – to be Helen Barre. Liz was difficult to capture, as Cromwell himself finds after her death. He wishes Hans Holbein had painted her while she was alive, as in his memory:

even Liz’s face is a blurred oval beneath her cap.
Hilary Mantel, The Mirror and The Light: Augmentation, London, Autumn 1536

In the Cromwell Trilogy, Liz represents the happiness of Cromwell’s private life and domestic stability during his marriage. She and Thomas enjoy each others’ company, they relax together, and make each other laugh:

‘Men say’, Liz reaches for her scissors, ‘”I can’t endure it when women cry” – just as people say, “I can’t endure this wet weather.” As if it were nothing to do with the men at all, the crying. Just one of those things that happen.’

‘I’ve never made you cry, have I?’

‘Only with laughter,’ she says.
Hilary Mantel, Wolf Hall: An Occult History of Britain, 1521-1529

Liz plays another vital role in my reading of the Cromwell Trilogy: that of a very skilled maker. My analysis of the practice of stitching in the Trilogy indicates that she is the most proficient stitcher in terms of the number of techniques she uses. At various points in the novels, we observe her working with fabric and thread – she embroiders Gregory’s shirts with a black-work design (and I think it is reasonable to assume she has made said shirts); she makes costumes for the Christmas celebrations, using quilting and patchwork; professionally she is a silk woman, making braids, tassels, and net cauls. Less successfully, perhaps, she also teaches her daughter Anne to sew, but Anne struggles with a needle, asserting her own interests instead.

After her death, Cromwell finds a cushion she had started embroidering. She didn’t finish the piece but she left her needle in the fabric. Cromwell can feel the path Liz’s stitches would have taken, the bumps that have been left by her abandoned needle.

Like many experienced stitchers, Liz has the muscle memory to work without thinking. When Cromwell asks her to slow down so he can see how she spins loops of thread for a braid, she laughs.

“I can’t slow down, if I stopped to think how I was doing it I couldn’t do it at all”.
Hilary Mantel, Bring Up the Bodies: The Black Book, London, January-April 1536

While her work may be automatic, it is not without intention. Liz’s confidence in the tiny movements of textile work is brought about through long experience and repeated practice.

I hope my representation does justice to the character that Hilary created. Liz is now hanging up in my studio next to Cromwell himself, waiting to become part of a larger piece of work.

Follow the River

Hampton Court Palace - a brick building with numerous tall chimneys is shown on the opposite bank of the river on a sunny day. The Palace is reflected in the ripples of the water.

Three sets of rolled and embroidered fabric, on a wave designed background — Three Cromwell Thames Rolls

Since finishing the first Wolf Hall quilt, and reframing the shape of the Cromwell Trilogy Quilt project, I have been working thematically, rather than novel by novel. Closely following the structure of Wolf Hall worked well for the first piece, but the temporal shifts and reassessments of past events that run through Bring Up the Bodies and The Mirror and the Light mean that continuing this approach would not satisfy me and, more importantly, would not do justice to Hilary Mantel’s work.

For a while, I was stuck, but once I realised that a thematic approach would serve the project better, I knew I had unlocked something creatively. I have already noted how the role of the river influenced the shape of the Wolf Hall piece, and how it led me to make something long and flowing. This is because the River Thames plays such an important role in Hilary Mantel’s Cromwell trilogy. And now my stitching is seeking to answer young Thomas’ enquiry in the opening chapter of Wolf Hall:

If I follow the river, is that as good as anything?
Hilary Mantel, Wolf Hall (Across the Narrow Sea, Putney, 1500)

From sixteenth century Putney where he begins, to the Tower of London, where he ends, travelling by water is part of Thomas Cromwell’s routine. There is only one bridge over the Thames – London Bridge – so many of his journeys to and from Westminster, Whitehall, Richmond, Greenwich, the Tower, and Hampton Court are by boat. Travel unfolds at a slower pace than many of us are used to today, and it’s not always straightforward.

Cromwell can’t go about his business without the services of the Thames boatmen. We first meet him as an adult, made late by the revelry of boatmen on the river who are celebrating the eve of one of their patron saints. His later elevation means his travel will be far easier:

It would be convenient, he thinks if I had Master Secretary’s barge, instead of making ad hoc arrangements when we have to cross the river.
Hilary Mantel, Wolf Hall (Devil’s Spit, Autumn and Winter, 1533)

But while he is still making ad hoc arrangements, Cromwell gets valuable information from the gossip of Boatmen, who are a reliable – and salaciously filthy – source. His conversation about Putney’s opinion of the Boleyn family with his old acquaintance Sion Madoc reminds him:

… how much you can learn from boatmen, their argot blasphemous and rapid. At twelve he spoke it fluently, his mother tongue, and now it flows back into his mouth, something natural, something dirty.
Hilary Mantel, Wolf Hall (Arrange your Face, 1531)

There is much inspiration in Mantel’s writing of Cromwell’s river, and I am currently enjoying making a series of Thames Rolls to explore the many references and images that run through the trilogy. It’s going to be a long job but it’s endlessly pleasurable – and I want to ground this part of the project with a sense of place.

The first Thames Roll, representing the river in *Wolf Hall* (Across the Narrow Sea)

I am not yet sure how this will materialise in the finished work, but I have been accompanying my stitching with visits to the Thames. Of course I can’t recreate the experience of Cromwell – either the real person or Mantel’s version – growing up alongside or travelling by the river but I can experience the Thames as it is now.

Cobbles and a brown stretch of water, shadowed on a sunny day. — Cobbles leading into the Thames, near Ship Lane, Mortlake

I can visit Ship Lane in Mortlake and see the perimeter wall of Mortlake Manor, once owned by Cromwell.*

A white woman with blonde hair and dark glasses, in a blue dress, holds a strip of fabric in an alleyway between two brick walls. The wall on the right of the picture dates from the Tudor period. — Unrolling a Cromwell Thames Roll (Across the Narrow Sea) by what remains of Mortlake Manor

I can take trips on the river between Greenwich and Hampton Court and get an inkling of the time it takes to travel by boat, albeit by motor rather than oarsmen. If I focus hard, I can tune out the running commentary by the boat crew, and imagine the tales of Sion Madoc. I can ignore buildings on the banks and wonder what Cromwell saw. I can look at the river and wonder at the stories it can tell and what it has seen.

The river with a bank of trees and parched grass on the opposite bank. — Thames bank from the river on the approach to Hampton Court, July 2022

* If you want to know more about Mortlake Manor, this post by the Tudor Travel Guide is very informative. It was invaluable when I took a trip to Ship Lane earlier this year.

Forty Six Feet of Wolf Hall

Quilted strips, showing words and images, including circles, a falcon, a needle and thread. Fabric in cream, grey, black and cream is visible. — Wrestling the Wolf Hall Quilt together

When I started working on the Cromwell Trilogy Quilt project, I had the intention of making one single piece to convey my interpretation of the whole of Hilary Mantel’s trilogy. But – best laid plans and all that – I didn’t realise how long the Wolf Hall section alone would turn out. Forty six feet of quilting later, and having faced the difficulties inherent in managing such a long textile piece, I have revised my plans.

Pieces of quilted and decorated textile in pieces, with a join ready to be made with some grey fabric. — Parts One and Two, still in separate sections, 14 August 2021

I stitched the Wolf Hall quilt in sections – one section for each of the six parts of the book. As each section was stitched, I drew myself a key to show the elements I had included. Once that was ready – at the very end of the making – I had the slightly nightmarish job of joining the sections together to make a single piece.

An open notebook containing a diagram showing chapter titles from Hilary Mantel’s Wolf Hall, and notes written in orange text, with scribbled sketches and words. — The Wolf Hall Quilt key – parts Five and Six

I joined each section with a placefinder bar, quilting the book title and part number at each join. As the piece got longer and longer and heavier and heavier, I found I was grappling with something that twisted and writhed like the snake that bit Cromwell in Italy. And as it grew, I became increasingly afraid to move in case I twisted it further.

The day that I finished the Wolf Hall quilt was odd. I was very tired, and my hands and wrists hurt from manipulating 46 feet of quilt. It had taken five days to join the sections together, and hours were spent just trimming off excess wadding. On the last day, I sat for hours ploughing on, which was very bad for the hands and the back. But finally, it was done.

Pieces of quilted fabric in cream with decoration; a dark grey strip joining two pieces with blue text stitching and a needle and thread ready to set a stitch. — The very last stitch going in, 19 August 2021

I finished all the joins at 3 minutes past 1 on 19 August 2021. I was exhausted but also exhilarated as I rolled it up as one piece. This all-consuming project had reached a significant milestone – the first large piece was complete.

A woman in a blue dress and grey trousers holds up a long pieces of quilted work against a backdrop of a brown fence.

A woman in a blue dress and grey trousers holds up a long pieces of quilted work against a backdrop of a brown fence. The quilted lettering reads “To Wolf Hall”

Last week, for the first time in months, I unrolled all 46 feet of the Wolf Hall quilt. I was giving a talk about the project, and the audience of quilters was keen to see the stitching close up – and to experience the scale of this unwieldy textile piece. Given that I rarely get a chance to see the quilt in one go – its length makes it difficult to view – it was very exciting.

I had completely forgotten that I’d left an unfinished grey placefinder bar at the end – after “To Wolf Hall” – thus leaving my options open. In August 2021, I clearly intended to join similar quilted pieces interpreting Bring Up the Bodies and The Mirror and the Light to the Wolf Hall piece. But the challenges of 46 feet of quilting made me rethink this idea. Now I am pleased that the ending of the first Wolf Hall quilt is still open to further possibilities. As Hilary Mantel writes at the very end of Bring Up the Bodies:

There are no endings. If you think so you are deceived as to their nature. They are all beginnings. Here is one.

The Wolf Hall Quilt: Designing around the text

In the summer of 2020, when I started embroidering the chapter titles from Hilary Mantel’s Wolf Hall, Bring Up the Bodies, and The Mirror and the Light, there was a distinct absence of planning. Yes, I made sure there was some regularity about the lettering I stitched, but I didn’t have any sort of scheme for how the pieces would fit together or how they would be quilted. It is unsurprising therefore that once I got into working out the quilting design, this presented challenges.

A rectangular rush basket full of embroidered wording — A basket of embroidered chapter titles waiting to be quilted

There were two main issues. Firstly, once I started putting the pieces together, I wondered why I hadn’t simply quilted the chapter titles from the start. I often quilt using chain stitch, so why had I chosen to embroider the words on to just one layer of fabric, thus necessitating a whole separate quilting exercise that ultimately led to a distortion of the lettering? The answer, of course, lay in the fact that I had never really intended to stitch all this text at all – I just intended to sew Mirror and Light but carried on stitching for five months until the chapter titles from the whole trilogy were done, and my left thumb ached from gripping the thread.

The second issue was one of design. Some of the trilogy’s chapter titles are short – Early Mass, Angels, Wreckage, Salvage – and the text, as it was sewn on to the fabric, provided space for prominent quilting designs before or after the words in question. Other chapter titles, however, were almost as long as the fabric strips on which they were stitched – An Occult History of Britain; Alas, What Shall I Do for Love?; The Image of the King – so adding very prominent quilting would have both confused the eye and detracted from the text.

Embroidered fabric with the words Anna Regina and a postcard of Anne Boleyn — A shorter title – *Anna Regina* – gives space for prominent quilting motifs

The trick with these longer titles was to come up with a quilting design that faded into the background while still conveying meaning. For An Occult History of Britain, for example, I spent hours studying pictures of snakes so I could design a serpent to sit behind the lettering, in homage to the snake that slithers through the trilogy (I picked up a snake in Italy) after biting Cromwell. I enjoy the appearances that snake makes on the page, so I wanted to add him to the quilt.

Embroidered fabric reading Entirely Beloved Cromwell, with a copy of the play script — *Entirely Beloved Cromwell* – Lettering takes up the entire length of the fabric

And for The Dead Complain of their Burial I was inspired by a description of Cromwell and George Cavendish watching Cardinal Wolsey’s possessions being ransacked at York Place:

“He and George Cavendish stood by as the chests were opened and the cardinal’s vestments taken out. The copes were sewn in gold and silver thread, with patterns of golden stars, with birds, fishes, harts, lions, angels, flowers and Catherine wheels.”

Hilary Mantel, Wolf Hall (London Fourth Estate, 2009), p.282.

That gave me my start. I designed fishes, stars, and a Catherine wheel; and for bird designs I consulted a book of sixteenth and seventeenth century sewing patterns: Richard Shorleyker’s A Schole House for the Needle. That book tells its readers to ‘compose its patterns into beautifull formes, as will be able to give content, both to the workers, and wearers of them’. So I quilted these background designs in silver and gold thread – subtle enough not to detract from the chapter title, but occasionally catching the light.

Embroidered and Quilted panel — Fishes and Star

Embroidered and quilted fabric — Fishes and Star

The unplanned nature of this project had ramifications for the overall design and look of the finished piece, and while I was sewing it, I had various thoughts along the lines of “If I were starting again, I wouldn’t start from here”. But I also reflected on the fact that the Cromwell Trilogy stitching project has its own history – it is a long term project started in lockdown. The finished Wolf Hall piece carries that timing with it. Now I am sewing other pieces inspired by Hilary Mantel’s trilogy, I’m working with less constraint. And I haven’t tried to do anything with the restrictive lockdown stitched chapter titles from Bring Up the Bodies and The Mirror and the Light. Yet.

Stitching Wolf Hall: Methods

Index cards with notes from Wolf Hall — Quilt planning on index cards

In 2020, I started stitching the chapter titles in Hilary Mantel’s Cromwell Trilogy with no coherent thought about what this stitching might become. It was just a way of passing some lockdown time and processing what I had read (I have written more about the origins of the project here). But as the pile of stitched chapter titles grew and grew, I knew I would ultimately want do something more purposeful with them. And given that I love handquilting, and I take great pleasure in sewing tiny stitches to make tightly controlled patterns, or lettering, or pictures, it made sense to make use of this technique.

A hand holding a pile of embroidered fabric — The embroidered chapter titles waiting to be quilted

I took some time deciding on a format for a quilted piece. There was no plan, no overall design in my head. I had embarked upon the stitched chapter titles with a vague idea that I might make a traditionally shaped quilt based on The Mirror and the Light. But I was never quite satisfied with that concept. I kept thinking there was something inappropriate about a bed-shaped item based on these novels: how could one sleep under the story of an execution?

The plan unfolded itself at an event for the Women’s Prize for Fiction that I watched online in September 2020. Mantel was interviewed, and said:

All of the stories are borne along on the River Thames and the river has its deeps and its mysteries, and although the book is pegged very firmly to the historical record, there are still subterranean depths within the hearts of the people whom the record concerns and we swim around below the surface.
Women’s Prize Live: Hilary Mantel and Angie Cruz on their writing inspirations, plus readings from Coral Pena and Ben Miles, The Women’s Prize for Fiction, 2020

I liked the idea of creating something long, snaking out like the river, in a single strip. I had visions of a deconstructed set of the novels, pages rearranged chronologically in a lengthy horizontal timeline. And so I started to think about working a quilt in the shape of a long strip. At that point, I didn’t know how big it would be. I had a vision of joining together multiple strips so that all three books would be represented in one long piece, starting and ending with So Now Get Up. Given that the Wolf Hall quilt alone ended up being 46 feet long, I have since revised this idea.

An ipad with the audio book of Wolf Hall and a section of quilting — Quilting and listening to *Wolf Hall* Part One, Chapter One: Across the Narrow Sea

When I decided to put all the embroidered chapter titles together into one handquilted piece, I knew that the quilting had to be approached in a considered way – partly because I knew it would be the most pleasurable part of the stitching, but mainly because I wanted the experience of quilting this piece to be as immersive as possible. That meant establishing a tight practice for working on each section of the quilt. I decided from the start of the quilting process that I would work incrementally, and sew each section in a strict order – I would not dot back and forwards throughout the Trilogy, and I wouldn’t piece the whole thing together in one go. I wanted to be very intentional about what I was doing, which meant reading and listening to the chapter I was stitching as I quilted it.

I worked out a process to support this way of working: although I know the three books very well, I wanted to reacquaint myself with the text before starting quilting each chapter title. So when a section was pressed and basted ready for quilting, the first step was to re-read the relevant chapter. I then made notes on index cards as prompts for the stitching. I drew up three sets of index cards: anything that might inspire me to draw a quilting motif, or phrases that might spark an image went onto white cards; I made a note of the colours that are prominent in the chapters on pink cards; and finally, references to anyone who actually engages in an act of stitching went onto green cards.

Index Cards with notes relating to An Occult History of Britain — Index Cards: *An Occult History of Britain*

I then started the quilting process. I listened to the audiobook of the relevant chapter as I worked, and the act of listening brought out other ideas, almost without me realising it. Hearing Mantel’s words sometimes highlighted an element to be sewn into to the quilt, so I usually listened to the chapter on repeat. Sometimes I listened to it in the German translation – I know the original English so well that I can follow it even though my German isn’t really up to it. I didn’t move forward with reading and listening to the book until each individual section was quilted.

The decision to work in this way had an impact on the way the quilt developed. I didn’t have an overall plan worked out for the entire piece, with each section evolving as I read and listened. And sometimes it was a difficult process; some chapters contained almost unbearable levels of loss and pain and I had particular problems when I came to An Occult History of Britain and Make or Mar when Cromwell’s grief overwhelms him. I actually had to leave part of that section unsewn as it was too distressing to continue, thereby breaking my own rules. And I foresee problems with this process once I approach the end of the Trilogy in The Mirror and the Light, but that’s a worry for another day.

This contrasts strongly with my stitching of the chapter titles in 2020. That was very unfocused, with no sense of a larger project to come. That presented some significant design challenges which I can see in the finished piece.

Green thread, a notebook, containing a sketch for a quilting design — Planning out a shattered emerald for *Wolf Hall* – Part One, Chapter Three: At Austin Friars

It’s interesting to reflect on how the first Wolf Hall quilt was made. A year on, looking back on the tight practice and the self imposed rules I put in place, I wonder how much these were a subconscious reflection of the restrictions of the pandemic. When I look at the finished piece, I can see how its rigid shape was influenced by the time in which it was made. As the project evolves into 2022, its form is rather more fluid – although the immersive reading and listening remains.

Stitching Thomas Cromwell

Textile interpretations of the Wolf Hall Trilogy

Textile Practice