Tudor rose (from Elizabethan jacket made by Mary Addison)

Hilary Mantel wastes no words over her descriptions of textiles, clothes, jewellery or furnishings in her two Cromwell books. When – rarely – she describes these things, they have a point, either revealing character or state of mind. I’d go further and say that for me the cardinal’s red clothing never makes an unimportant appearance and on one occasion is the psychological pivot of the two books. This is ‘Wolf Hall’ told by the clothes, jewellery and occasionally by other textiles.

Mantel is very fond of knitting and sewing metaphors and sewing tools can be symbolic of bigger, more dangerous implements.

The page numbers refer to the hardback book (4th Estate, 2009) should you wish to look up the references. As in the book, ‘he’ usually, but not always refers to Cromwell. I offer little  other comment, except where context is required to better understand the quotation, so, launching straight in:

(All photographs show details of my Elizabethan jacket which I blogged about in 5 posts beginning here.)

p. 47 – 8 “And now the cardinal’s ready to go…Over his customary scarlet, he is wearing a travelling cloak that belongs to someone else;  they are confiscating his wardrobe piece by piece, so he has to grab what he can.”

p. 49 “They take down the tapestries and leave the bare walls blank. They are rolled up, the woollen monarchs, Solomon and Sheba; as they are brought into coiled proximity, their eyes are filled by each other and their tiny lungs breathe in the fibre of bellies and thighs.”

The Cardinal’s vestments and copes are “Stiff with embroidery strewn with pearls, encrusted with gem stones they seem to stand by themselves. The raiders knock down each one as if they are knocking down Thomas Becket. They itemise it, and having reduced it to its knees and broken its spine, they toss it into their travelling crates. Cavendish flinches: ‘For God’s sake, gentlemen, line those chests with a double thickness of cambric. Would you shred the fine work that has taken nuns a lifetime?’ ”

“This is an indecent spectacle: the man who has ruled England reduced. They have brought out bolts of fine holland, velvets and grosgrain, sarcenet and taffeta, scarlet by the yard: the scarlet silk in which he braves the summer heat of London, the crimson brocades that keep his blood warm when snow falls on Westminster and whisks in sleety eddies over the Thames. In public the cardinal wears red, just red, but in various weights, various weaves, various degrees of pigment and dye, but all of them the best of their kind, the best reds to be got for the money. There have been days when swaggering out,he would say, ‘Right, Master Cromwell, price me by the yard!’ ”

Insect from Elizabethan embroidered jacket (made by Mary Addison)

“So day by day…he would put a value on his master. Now the king has sent an army of clerks to do it. But he would like to take away their pens by force and write across their inventories: Thomas Wolsey is a man beyond price.”

p.54 –   Awaiting him on the shore is his customary mule ” in usual scarlet trappings” but attended only by his fool. Harry Norris rides up to the cardinal who, un-coordinated in his haste to greet the king’s messenger, falls off the mule. The gift of a ring from the king  symbolises all is not lost to the cardinal who clumsily takes a chained reliquary from his neck and places it on Norris.

p.60  “as if Wolsey’s unravelling, in a great unweaving of scarlet thread might lead you back into a scarlet labyrinth, with a dying monster at its heart.”

p.66 Anne Boleyn “at court at the Christmas of 1521, dancing in a yellow dress.”

p.70  Sir Thomas Boleyn, turns “in a sweep of dark silks”. Dismissed he leaves, “torn into strips and dropped on the ground like orange peel”

p.84 Katherine of Aragon “as wide as she is high, stitched into gowns so bristling with gem stones that they look as if they are designed less for beauty than to withstand blows from a sword.”

auburn hair  “faded and streaked with grey, tucked back under her gable hood like the modest wings of a city sparrow. Under her gowns she wears the habit of a Franciscan nun. Try always, Wolsey says, to find out what people wear underneath their clothes.”

p.87  “Under his clothes, it is well known, More wears a jerkin of horsehair. He beats himself with a small scourge, of the type used by some religious orders. What lodges in his mind, Thomas Cromwell’s, is that somebody makes these instruments of torture…”

Pomegranate from embroidered Elizabethan jacket (hand embroidered by Mary Addison)

p.88 June 1527  “still trim from certain angles, and wearing white silk, the king makes his way to his wife’s apartments” to persuade her of the illegality of their marriage. “You can hear what Katherine says. That wreck of a body, held together by lacing and stays, encloses a voice you can hear as far as Calais: it resounds from here to Paris, from here to Madrid, to Rome.”

p. 92  Liz is embroidering shirts for Gregory with a blackwork design, ” it’s the same one the queen uses, for she makes the king’s shirts herself.  ‘If I were Katherine, I’d leave the needle in them’, he says.’ ”

p.102 In a sweep of dramatic suddenness, Liz lies dead of the sweating sickness in “The room, which this morning was only their bedroom…They have bound up her jaw with linen, so already she does not look like herself.”

p.120 “his sisters and Mercy and Johane take his dead wife’s clothes and cut them up carefully into new patterns. Nothing is wasted. Every good bit of cloth is made into something else.”

p.170 “The year that Grace was an angel, she had wings made of peacock feathers. He himself had contrived it. … Grace stood glittering, her hair entwined with silver threads; her shoulders were trussed with a spreading silver glory. … Lizzie said, ‘She has the best wings the city has ever seen’.”

p.174  1530  The law students of Gray’s Inn perform a ribald play about the cardinal.  When he falls off his donkey, he lies on his back, “a crimson mountain”,  “he sits on the ground and laments, while a flaccid and serpentine member, knitted of red wool, flops out from under his robes.”

p.176 “He remembers Grace… the eyes of her peacock’s wings shining in the firelight, each like a topaz, golden, smoky….His little girl backed off, into the shadow; the feathers were the colours of ash and cinders…”

p.199 Spring – December 1530: “Sheba makes Anne look bad: sallow and sharp.”

“her waist so narrow; if two law students make one cardinal, two Annes make one Katherine.”

Lion from Elizabethan embroidered jacket (made by Mary Addison)

p.207  ” he prices and sources her, hood to hem, foot to fingertip. For her headdress Anne affects the French style, the round hood flattering the fine bones of her face…”

p.213   “the servants ask him, are we to paint out the cardinal’s coat of arms? No, by God he says. On the contrary, repaint it…The choughs could look more lively. And we need a better scarlet for the hat.”

p.227 Cromwell  considers the man More calls his fool “it would be like him to have a fool that wasn’t. Pattinson’s supposed to have fallen from a church steeple and hit his head. At his waist, he wears a knotted string which he sometimes says is his rosary; sometimes he says it is his scourge. Sometimes he says it is the rope that should have saved him from his fall.”

Holbein’s portrait of the More family, “fixed for ever: as long as no moth consumes, no flame or mould or blight.”

“In real life, there is something fraying about their host, a suspicion of unravelling weave; being at leisure, he wears a simple wool gown.”

p. 228 More, proud of his new carpet asks Cromwell to look at it. A wonderful half page of Cromwell’s evaluation ends with “…but next time, he thinks, take me with you.”

p.240 September 1530   Norfolk hastening in from a fitting with his armourer, “is still wearing sundry parts – his cuirass, his garde reins – so that he looks like an iron pot wobbling to the boil.”

p.241 “Anne wears a crucifix on a gold chain. Sometimes her fingers pull at it impatiently, and then she tucks her hands back in her sleeves. It is so much a habit with her that people say she has something to hide, a deformity; but he thinks she is a woman who doesn’t like to show her hand.”

p. 265. “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.”

Honeysuckle from Elizabethan embroidered jacket (made by Mary Addison)

p.266  At Hampton Court for ‘The Cardinal’s Descent into Hell’. It reminds Cromwell of the Gray’s Inn play the previous year.

“a vast scarlet figure, supine is dragged across the floor howling by actors dressed as devils.” The devils are masked. There are four of them.

p.267-8  “When he rolls on the ground, gasping, they thrust their forks into him and wind out lengths of scarlet wool bowel.” “The cardinal is dragged off to Hell which is located, it seems, behind the screens at the back of the hall.” The actors toss off their masks and “try to claw off their knitted devil coats”. “It’s like the shirt of Nessus, George Boleyn says, as Norris wrenches him free.” “These are the hand-devils.” “The two foot devils are still wrestling each other from their trappings. They are a boy called Francis Weston, and William Berenton, who, like Norris is old enough to know better. … Still wearing their cloven hooves, they swagger out to take their bow.”

the scarlet mound (Patch, the cardinal’s fool)  says, “This must be Hell if the Italian (Cromwell) is here.” ..

p.269  “He picks up the costume Patch has cast off. It is the fiery, cheap, quick-fading scarlet of Brazil-dyed wool…”

Home, Cromwell asks for the cardinal’s arms, only recently retouched, to be painted out now and the wall left blank. “Leave a space.”

p. 274. Christmastide 1530  The king calls for Cromwell. Henry has had a bad dream about his brother Arthur,  “the russet nightgown, the one trimmed with sables” is called for.

“Now Berenton comes in, with the russet velvet, sable-lined. Henry stands up and sheds one layer of velvet, gains another, plusher and denser. The sable lining creeps down over his hands, as if he were a monster-king, growing his own fur.”

p.277 “From the dream…he seems to uncurl, and stretch himself. … The fire stripes his robe with light, and in its deep folds flicker ochre and fawn, colours of earth, of clay.”

p.278  the last day of 1530   Cromwell is sworn in as a member of the Council at Greenwich. he thinks back to the day that York Place was wrecked and the cardinal’s vestments removed. “The copes were sewn in gold and silver thread, with patterns of golden stars, with birds, fishes, harts, lions, angels, flowers and Catherine wheels. When they were repacked and nailed into their travelling chests, the king’s men delved into the boxes that held the albs and cottas, each folded by expert touch into fine pleats. Passed hand to hand, weightless  as resting angels, they glowed softly in the light; loose one, a man said, let us see the quality of it. Fingers tugged at the linen bands…Freed, the cloth drifted against the air, dazzling white, fine as a moth’s wing.”

Fantasy bird from Elizabethan embroidered jacket (made by Mary Addison)

p.287 1531  Princess Mary is ” shrunken into herself, and her eyes are the colour of ditchwater.”

“The queen (Katherine) leans back, rigid inside her boned bodice…”

p.291  ‘You look fit to be painted, Master Wriothesley. A doublet of azure, and a shaft of light precisely placed.’

p.296 “At New Year he had given Anne a present of silver forks with handles of rock crystal. He hopes she will use them to eat with , not to stick  into people.” “He has brought another present for her to pass on. It is wrapped in a piece of sky-blue silk. ‘It is for the little girl that always cries’.” (A book of needlework patterns for Jane Seymour.) Questioned as to whether it is right for him to give Jane a present he protests that it’s not as if it is tales out of Boccaccio. Anne laughs, “They could tell Boccaccio a tale, those sinners at Wolf Hall.”

p.299 Mistress Peyt, wife of a master grocer, comes to Austin Friars to beg for her husband,  who has been imprisoned by More. “She is wearing black lambkin – imported at a guess – and a modest grey gown. Alice receives her gloves and surreptitiously slides a finger to apprise the silk lining.”

p.308 The king’s marital situation is in reverse  to  Cromwell’s  (in love with his dead wife’s sister). “It has been a constant temptation to him to have Johanne beautifully dressed, and he has dealt with it by …throwing money at the London goldsmiths and mercers, so the women of Austin Friars are bywords among the city wives…” If Henry’s marriage to Katherine is annulled (and should Johanne’s husband die), there will then be no hope for a legal union. It is agreed their relationship can go nowhere.

Bird from Elizabethan embroidered jacket (made by Mary Addison)

p.316 August 1531 “Anne  … dressed as Maid Marion … shooting at a target.”

“In her green glad, in her green silks, Anne is fretting and fuming.”

“She is selling herself by the inch. … She wants a present in cash for every advance above her knee.”

p.320 Erasmus says you must arrange your face each morning before you leave your house. “From the day he was sworn into the king’s council, he has his face arranged.”

p.338 Spring 1532  Anne’s brother, George, Lord Rochford. “today, what fascinates him is the flame-coloured satin that is pulled through his sashed velvet over-sleeve. He kept coaxing little puffs of fabric with a finger tip, pleating and nudging them and encouraging them to grow bigger, so that he looks like one of those jugglers who run balls down their arms.”

p.343  ” He dresses not a whit above his gentleman’s station, in loose jackets of Lemster wool so fine they flow like water, in purples and indigos so near black that it looks as if the night has bled into them; his cap of black velvet sits on his black hair, so that the only points of light are his darting eyes and the gestures of his solid, fleshy hands; those, and flashes of fire from Wolsey”s turquoise ring.”

p. 343  For Christmas the king has had Anne’s bedchamber in York Place decorated. “…the wallhanging were of cloth of silver and cloth of gold, the carved bed hung with crimson satin embroidered with images of flowers and children.” Anne is slow to gasp at the sight .

Pansy from Elizabethan embroidered jacket (made by Mary Addison)

p. 347. “Master Wyatt wears a jacket of stiffened cream brocade trimmed with sables which he probably cannot afford; he wears a doublet of tawny silk.”

p. 348 The King has given Cromwell Wolsey’s tapestry monarchs – Solomon and the lovely Queen of Sheba, “…make a place for her. I think she should come to live with you.”

p. 370 Hans Holbein, who so brilliantly captured Cromwell, looks at Cromwell’s new painting of 2 Italian bankers, which, on rather a lot of points,  resembles Holbein’s own Ambassadors. I suspect Mantel is playing a trick on the reader here, tempting us to tell her she’s a rogue and has made he painting up  and guessing we’re not brave enough to do so!

p.373. Mary Talbot is petitioning Parliament for a divorce from Harry Percy because he will not sleep with her, maintaining that he cannot as he is married to Anne Boleyn.

Francis Bryan (“his eyepatch, sewn with jewels, winks as he giggles”) comes for Cromwell as Anne is ‘”breaking up the furniture and smashing the mirrors”.  She “looks small and tense as if someone has knitted her and drawn the stitches tight.”

George Boleyn suggest Percy, having been fixed once, can be fixed again.

‘ “Yes,” Anne says, but the cardinal fixed him, and most unfortunately the cardinal is dead.”

. “There is a silence, a silence sweet as music…If  life is a chain of gold, sometimes God hangs a charm on it.”

Cornflower from Elizabethan embroidered jacket (made by Mary Addison)

p. 380 Harry Percy swears his denials to Henry. “The king comes in. It is a warm day and he wears pale silks. Rubies cluster on his knuckles like bubbles of blood. … He rests his flat blue eye on Harry Percy.”

p. 382 “He thinks of Harry Percy,walking in to arrest the cardinal, keys in his hand: the guard he set, around the dying man’s bed.”

p.387 September 1 1532 “Anne kneels before the king to receive the title of Marquess of Pembroke. … She is vivid in red velvet and ermine and her black hair falls, virgin-style, in snakey locks to he waist.”

“At the feast, Anne sits beside Henry … She is almost there now, he body taut like a bowstring, her skin dusted with gold, with tints of apricot and honey; when she smiles … she shows small teeth, white and sharp.” She has plans to take over Katherine’s barge and have H & K burned off. The king has sent for Katherine’s jewels so new settings can be made. Katherine relinquishes them only on receipt of the royal command.

p.387 At the dance after Anne’s installation, Jane Seymour holds up her sleeves, “The bright blue she with which she has edged them, that kingfisher flash, is cut from the silk in which he wrapped her present of needlework patterns.”

Unicorn from Elizabethan embroidered jacket (made by Mary Addison)

p. 390 October, to Calais for the meeting of Henry and Francis, the French king, the first since Wolsey arranged the Field of the Cloth of Gold. (This must cost less than before, yet Henry orders everything bigger, better, more gilded.)

p.397  After mass at Canterbury on the way to France, the Holy Maid, Elizabeth Barton, warns Henry that the heretics with which he surrounds himself should be burnt and, further, that marriage to Anne will see him reign  fewer than seven months.  ” Anne shrinks against the king; against the scarlet and gold of his jacket she melts like wax.”

p.420 At Austin Friars, Wolsey’s arms are replaced by those recently granted to Cromwell. The black choughs from Wolsey’s arms are there – “some people hoped they would never see them again.”

p.425  25 January 1533, Anne and Henry are married in a Whitehall Chapel. Anne is pregnant from the night they slept together in Calais upon making the marriage contract. Mary indicates her sister’s state to Cromwell by holding her thumb and finger an inch apart. “She always said I’d be the first to know. It will be me who lets out her bodices.”

p.426  “sees…his own unconcealable fist unmasked by velvet glove. He wants nothing between himself and the weave of his paper, the black running line of ink, so he takes off his rings, Wolsey’s turquoise and Francis’s ruby – at New Year, the king slid it from his own finger and gave it back to him, in the setting the Calais goldsmith had made, and said… now that will be a sign between us, Cromwell, send a paper with this and I shall know it comes from your hand even if you lack your seal.”

Deer from Elizabethan embroidered jacket (made by Mary Addison)

p.456 “We hear you can’t come to the coronation because you can’t afford a new coat. The Bishop of Winchester will buy you one himself if you’ll show your face on the day. … Or the guildsmen will make a collection … for a new hat and double as well.” Cromwell tells More. As for Cromwell, Anne has said , “you shall not dress like a lawyer on my coronation day. Thomas must go in crimson.”

p.460 Crimson robes arrive at Austin Friars.

p.462 The 4 days of Anne’s coronation begin. 50 barges in procession furnished by the livery companies. Katherine’s barge has been re-badged for Anne. At the Tower Henry greets Anne, “scooping back her gown, pinning it at her sides to show her belly to England.”

Page 463 Day 2. Anne processes to Westminster  “Anne in a white litter hung with silver bells which ring at every step, … the queen is in white, her body shimmering in its strange skin.”

Pageant and living statues  line her way, “her white falcon emblem crowned and entwined with roses, and blossom mashed and minced under the treading feet of the stout sixteen (knights carrying the litter), so scent rises like smoke.”

p.466 Anne is “mantled in purple velvet, edged in ermine. She has seven hundred yards to walk, on the blue cloth that stretches to the altar” … “Far behind her, the dowager Duchess of Norfolk, supporting her train; nearer, holding up the hem of her long robe, the Bishop of Winchester at one side, the Bishop of London at the other” …Who says two bishops should hold up her hem? It’s all written down in a great book, so old that one hardly dare touch it,” … “Perhaps it should be copied and printed, he thinks.”

Anne ” folds herself towards the ground to lie face-down in prayer before the altar, her attendants stepping forward to support her for the crucial 12 inches before belly hits sacred pavement.”

Insect from Elizabethan embroidered jacket (made by Mary Addison)

p.468 Cromwell takes a diamond ring from Henry to Anne. “Anne is lying in her shift. She looks flat as a ghost, except for the shocking mound of her six-month child. In her ceremonial robes, her condition hardly showed, and only that sacred instant, as she lay belly-down to stone, had connected him to her body, which now lies stretched out like a sacrifice: her breasts puffy beneath her linen, her swollen feet bare.”

Anne, ” “Let me look at you. … Is that crimson. It’s a very black crimson. Did you go against my orders?” “Your cousin Francis  Bryan says I look like a travelling bruise.” “A contusion on the body politic”, Jane Rochford laughs.’ (Why did the TV adaption change the colour to scarlet for this exchange? Surely the bruise analogy loses its force with scarlet.)

“Oh, what, another diamond?”

p.470 Mary Boleyn is back in the King’s bed while Anne is pregnant. Cromwell, with more than a soft spot for her finds himself telling her that the king will release her, give her a settlement, a pension. He’ll speak to the king. Mary has no illusions, “Does a dishcloth get a pension?”

p.471 The ceremony continues in Westminster. Curiously, there is no description of Anne at all her apart from noting she is sitting next to the Archbishop under her canopy of state. In the gallery, Jean de Dinteville (one of the ambassadors in Holbein’s double portrait – although the other isn’t really an ambassador but a priest) is “furred against the June chill; his friend the Bishop of Lavaur is wrapped in a fine brocade gown. Cromwell takes in everything, not least ” stitching and padding, studding and dyeing; he admires the deep mulberry of the bishop’s brocade.”

Butterfly from Elizabethan embroidered jacket (made by Mary Addison)

p.474 “fatigue enwraps his shoulders, an iron cloak.”

Cranmer reveals his pregnant wife to Cromwell and asks for his support; Cromwell sends Helen a member of his household.

p.480 “The king has two bodies. The first exists within the limits of his physical being; you can measure it, and often Henry does, his waist, his calf, and his other parts. The second is his princely double, free floating, unteathered, weightless, which may be in more than one place at a time. Henry may be hunting in the forest, while his princely double makes laws. One fights, one prays for peace. One is wreathed in the mystery of his kingship: one is eating a duckling with sweet green peas.”

p.483 Cromwell prepares rooms at Greenwich for the confinement according to strict conditions, “shutters must be closed, the room sealed so that she can make her own weather”. A procession escorts Anne, ” a tiny jewelled head balanced on the swaying tent of her body”.

p.484 Elizabeth is born. Jousts are cancelled.

p.486 Cromwell, Cranmer, Riche and Audley are at the questioning of The Maid of Kent who says she has seen Wolsey’s soul seated among the unborns. “Audley twists a button on his sleeve round and round till the thread tightens”.

p.493″The princess, unswaddled, had been place on cushions at Anne’s feet: an ugly, purple, grizzling knot of womankind, with an upstanding ruff of pale hair and a habit of kicking up her gown as if to display her more unfortunate feature.”  She is on display to counter rumours of deformity.

p.499 ” in rose-tinted light they set out from Austin Friars, his men in their new livery of grey marbled cloth collecting the party from the city house where the nun has been held…”  The Maid is “at the end of her invention”…’by 9 o’clock she is unwinding the threads she has spent years ravelling up. She confesses in style, so hard and fast that Riche can hardly keep track,”

p.501 Jo, sitting as female companion to the Maid,  “has been sewing – or rather, unsewing, teasing out the pomegranate border from a crewel-work panel – these remnants of Katherine, of the dusty kingdom of Granada linger in England still”.

p.502 Jane Seymour’s sister,  “Lizzie comes packaged into her velvet and lace, her outlines as firm as her sister’s are indefinite and blurred, her eyes bold and hazel and eloquent. Jane whispers in her wake; her eyes are the colour of water, where her thoughts slip past, like gilded fishes too small for hook or net.”

Snail from Elizabethan embroidered jacket (made by Mary Addison)

p.503 Lady Carey (Mary Boleyn) has gone down to Hever. She is no longer wanted since Anne is back n duty in the bedchamber. Jane Rochford comments with irony “You go into Anne’s rooms now and what do you see? The queen at her prie-dieu. The queen sewing a smock for a beggar woman, wearing pearls the size of peas.” Jane provokes suspicions – the match was stale before they even came back from Calais, Mark is ” in and out of everyone’s bedchamber. He is the go-between for them all. My husband pays him in pearl buttons and confit boxes and feathers for his hat.”

p.512 Henry thinks Anne is pregnant again – “the flare of colour in her cheeks, the silk sleekness of her person” and is physically full of largesse. He embraces Cromwell, “his great hands with their blazing rings seizing handfuls of the black velvet of his jacket.”

p.517 The Duke of Richmond marries Norfolk’s daughter, Mary, at Hampton Court, although they are not to live together yet as she is too young  Anne dances, “her thin face flushed,her shining hair braided with dagger-tips of diamonds.”

p.520 “December: in her frozen angularity, a blue light behind her cast up from the snow, Margaret Pole looks as if she has stepped from a church window, slivers of glass shaking from her gown; in fact those splinters are diamonds. He has made her come to him, the countess, and now she looks at him from beneath her heavy lids, she looks at him down her long Plantagenet nose… ” (Margaret has been looking after Princess Mary and was in Katherine’s suite when Katherine married. She and her family are now suspected of plotting with the emperor against Henry.)

Frog from Elizabethan embroidered jacket (made by Mary Addison)

p.526 Holbein brings Cromwell his portrait, ” He wears his winter clothes. Inside them, he seems made of a more impermeable substance than most men, more compacted. He could well be wearing armour. He forsees the day when he might have to.”

p.527 Cromwell looks at his son with a painter’s eye, “a slender angel of the second rank in a fresco dappled with damp, in some hill town far from here. He thinks of him as a page in a forest riding across vellum, dark crisp curls under a narrow band of gold.”

p.532 Cromwell discusses with Henry the crown’s assertion of ancient sovereign rights over the church and particularly her wealth. ” ‘But how to free it,’ Henry says, ‘I suppose shrines can be broken.’ Gem-studded himself, he thinks of the kind of wealth you can weigh,”

“He will remember that it was Henry who first suggested picking up a chisel and gouging the sapphire eyes out of saints.” But he is willing to follow the king’s thought.

Ladybird from Elizabethan embroidered jacket (made by Mary Addison)

p.536 Looking through the bill the king proposes to put before Parliament to secure the succession of Anne’s children. “She has a habit of reading over Henry’s shoulder; she does it now, her exploring hand sliding across his silky bulk, through the layers of his clothing, so that a tiny fingernail hooks itself beneath the embroidered collar of his shirt, and she raises the fabric just a breath, just a fraction from pale royal skin; Henry’s vast hand reaches to caress hers, an absent, dreamy motion, as if they were alone. The draft refers, time and again, and correctly it would seem, to ‘your most dear and entirely beloved wife Queen Anne’.”

p.541 “Anne’s bodice is still tight-laced, only a slight fullness of her breasts indicating her condition. … But the whole court is sure she is carrying the heir … all the foods she craved when she was carrying the princess revolt her, so the signs are good it will be a boy.  This bill … is not, as she thinks, some anticipation of disaster, but a confirmation of her place in the world. … For how many years did he laugh at her flat chest and yellow skin? Even he can see her beauty now she is queen. Her face seems sculpted in the purity of its lines, her skull small like a cat’s; her throat has a mineral glitter, as if it were powdered with fool’s gold.”

p. 544 Cromwell visits the Maid before her death is scheduled, “and finds her slumped on a stool like a badly tied bundle of rags.”

Centipede from Elizabethan embroidered jacket (made by Mary Addison)

p. 552 Both princesses, Mary and Elizabeth, living at  Hatfield receive a visit from Cromwell and his son.

“The child Elizabeth is wrapped tightly, her fists hidden: just as well, she looks as if she would strike you. Ginger bristles poke from beneath her cap, and her eyes are vigilant; he has never seen an infant in the crib look so ready to take offence.”

“Mary’s old servants are about, faces he has seen before; there are clean patches on their jackets where Mary’s livery badge has been unpicked and replaced by the king’s badge.”

Mary will not eat with those who will not call her princess and Anne has forbidden food to be taken to her. At Cromwell’s approach “she almost stumbles, her feet entangled in the hem of her dress.” … “She casts around her as if bewildered for the stool on which she was sitting. ‘Gregory,’ he says,  and his son dives to catch the ex-princess, before she sits down on empty air. Gregory does it as if it were a dance step; he has his uses.”

p. 556 “Mary watches him, and she does it sideways; she still wears an old-style gable hood, and she seems to blink around it, like a horse whose headcloth has slipped.”

p.558 ” ‘All that rabbit fur she is bundled up in,’ Gregory says. ‘It looks as if it has been nibbled.’ ”

Dragon from Elizabethan embroidered jacket (made by Mary Addison)

p. 578 “Midsummer: women hurry to the queen’s apartments with clean folded linen over their arms. … Fires are lit within the queen’s apartments to burn what has bled away.”

p. 617  17 April the king makes his visit to Cromwell who has been ill. “The ladies of the house, Mercy and his sister-in-law Johane are decked out like Walsingham madonnas on a feast day. They curtsey low and Henry sways above them, informally attired, jacket of silver brocade, vast gold chain across his chest, his fists flashing with Indian emeralds.”

“The little brides  Alice and Jo he (Henry) whirls up into the airs if they were butterflies, and kisses them on the mouth, saying he wishes he had known them when he was a boy. The sad truth is, do you not notice, Master Secretary, the older one gets, the lovelier the girls?

Then eighty will have its advantages’, he says: every drab will be a pearl.”

Bead embroidered bag (hand embroidered by Mary Addison)

p.640 “More is brought in, the hall (Westminster Hall) is visibly shocked at his appearance. The Tower was never known to do a man good, but he startles them with his lean person and his ragged white beard, looking like a man of seventy than what he is.”

p.641 “More …attentive, head tipped a little to the left, picking away at his sleeve.”

p.642 “Was it then Master More played a trick too many? He had pulled himself together, hauling his slipping gown on to his shoulder; the gown secured, he paused he calmed himself, he fitted one fist into another…”

p.649 “More is at the block. … He is wrapped in a rough grey cape that he remembers as belonging to his servant. … He is shedding the cape, the hem of which is  sodden with rainwater. He kneels at the block, his lips moving in his final prayer.”

p. 650 Like all the other witnesses, he swirls his own cloak about him and kneels. At the sickening sound of the axe on flesh he darts one glance upwards. The corpse seems to have leapt back from the stroke and folded itself like a stack of old clothes – inside which, he knows, its pulses are still beating. He makes the sign of the cross. The past moves heavily inside him, a shifting of ground.”