Notes from Wolf Hall: alternative futures
"It is a crime to envisage the future. We are trapped in the hour we occupy."
Hello & welcome to anyone who has found this post through ’s 2025 Wolf Crawl! I am posting this as the 2024 Wolf Crawl is drawing to a close, so it contains references from throughout the trilogy, & may contain spoilers…
In The Mirror & the Light, Cromwell looks forward to a pleasant retirement at Launde:
“This abbey, where he ate honey scented with thyme, stands in the heart of England, far from the dangers of salt water. It basks in woods and fields, and summer or winter the air is sweet. When he visited for the cardinal he looked at figures as he was bidden, but he found it so blessed a spot that he could not see it through the grid or lattice of an account book. Now he thinks: I'll have Launde for myself, when its surrender comes. I'll build a house, and live there when I'm old, far from the court and council. It's time I had something I want.”
‘Myself for Launde,’ wrote the real-life Cromwell, and he did indeed purchase the Abbey lands after its dissolution, although he never lived there himself. Although we may know what the future holds for these characters, Cromwell’s repeated consideration of this plan for his old age is just one of many reminders in these books that for the real-life people that they are based on, the future seemed wide open.
As readers of fiction spun around such well-known figures from history, we live in a similar dual reality to Henry’s courtiers; for us the story’s future is both known and unknown. (I’ve often seen people comment on
’s weekly posts that we get swept along and find ourselves believing it might turn out differently, even if we know the ending.)“It is clear that we are living in a dual reality, such as experienced courtiers can maintain. For many years now, more years than we can count, the King of England has been a fair youth. So often, he has been married, and then unmarried; and the dead have been in Purgatory, and plaster saints have moved their eyes. Now the councillors shoulder their double burden: their knowledge of the king’s failure, and their pretence that he has never in all his days met with anything but success.”
Henry and Cromwell are no strangers to this phenomenon of believing in two versions of reality at once. In one of my favourite scenes in the trilogy, Henry’s detailed reminiscences about their trip to the Weald together end with the admission that it never quite happened:
‘But when I think about it, Cromwell … I recall we never made that journey.’
‘Into Kent? No, but it was projected –’
‘Projected, yes. But always some reason we could not go.’
He sits down again, facing the king. ‘Let us say we did, sir. It is no harm to imagine it.’ England’s green heart: distant church bells, the shade of the trees from the heat. ‘Let us say the ironmasters gave us their best welcome, and opened their minds to us, and showed us all their secrets.’
Counterfactuals
Mantel introduces the idea of alternate realities very early in Wolf Hall during the first meeting that we are shown between Cromwell and Cardinal Wolsey.
“The Queen of Sheba - smiling, light-footed - reminds him of the young widow he lodged with when he lived in Antwerp. Since they had shared a bed, should he have married her? In honour, yes. But if he had married Anselma he couldn't have married Liz; and his children would be different children from the ones he has now.”
This theme is developed further in The Mirror & the Light when his visit from Jenneke causes him to remember his time in Antwerp, including an image of a possible future where “I would have forgotten my English and been entirely a Fleming: a stout burger, persuading younger legs to run to the wharves for me, or climb up to high places to see if my ships are coming in.”
I love this beautifully bittersweet reflection on the intertwined lives and losses that would never have been:
“In this reconfiguration of circumstance, Gregory would be unborn. His soul would be bobbing around in the somewhere, still waiting for a body. Anne and Grace, likewise, would never have been conceived. And this house would not have been his house. The day not his day, when they told him his wife was dead, and the day not his day, when his daughters were sewn into their shrouds and carried to burial: two lost little girls, weighing nothing, owning nothing, leaving barely a memory behind.”
On the political side, Wolsey later points out that Henry himself grew up believing that he was to have a very different life, and the country a different king:
“Henry, as the younger brother, was brought up and trained for the church, and for the highest offices within it. ‘If His Majesty’s brother Arthur had lived,’ Wolsey says, ‘then His Majesty would have been the cardinal, and not me. Now there’s a thought.’”
Branching futures can grow out of seemingly small interactions too; after failing to prevent Henry leaving on his fateful mission to surprise Anna and ‘nourish love,’ I found myself wondering along with Cromwell about what impact a few different words might have had:
“He thinks, I spoke to him as a subject to a prince. What if I had taken courage and said: ‘Henry, I am advising you, man to man, not to do it?’”
Predictions
There are many moments in the book where characters firmly believe in a future that we know did not come to pass. One striking passage describes Cromwell’s optimism at Anne Boleyn’s coronation about the son he believes she is carrying:
“He finds himself praying: this child, his half-formed heart now beating against the stone floor, let him be sanctified by this moment, and let him be like his father's father, like his Tudor uncles; let him be hard, alert, watchful of opportunity, wringing use from the smallest turn of fortune. If Henry lives twenty years, Henry who is Wolsey's creation, and then leaves this child to succeed him, I can build my own prince: to the glorification of God and the commonwealth of England.”
Early on in The Mirror & the Light, the old noble families of England are confident of their ability to step into the gap left by Anne Boleyn:
“To Carew, to the Poles, to the Courtenays and their supporters, the Boleyns were a crass blunder, an error now cancelled by the headsman. No doubt they assume Thomas Cromwell can be cancelled too, reduced to the clerk he used to be: a useful man for getting money in, but dispensable, a slave that you trample as you stride up the stairway to glory.”
Whereas Henry Fitzroy believes in - and even dares to speak of! - a future where he will be the one to succeed Henry:
“‘I want to be king,’ Richmond says. ‘I am fitted for it. Surrey says my father should recognise that. If he should die now, I am not afraid of the whelp Eliza, for she is only the concubine’s child - unless, as they say, she was a foundling picked up in the street. There is not a man in the nation who will lift a finger for her claim.’”
Not all of the predictions are so favourable to those who imagine them - some likely-seeming futures must have been genuinely terrifying. Here Cromwell is reminding the council of the very real threat of invasion when the King of France and the Emperor are on good terms:
“They are like planets, gentlemen, and their conjunction draws sea and land after them, and makes our fates. They have a fleet and funds to come against us. Our forts are still building. Ireland is against us. Scotland is against us. If we are not to be overrun this spring we need the princes of Germany on our side, either to send men to our aid or to engage our enemy till we can defeat him or force a truce.”
What if…?
Hilary Mantel has done a powerful job of conveying the possibility of alternative histories despite sticking closely to the facts of what actually happened.1 Her portrayal of the emotional reactions of people who lived through these events without knowing their outcomes is so compelling that we find ourselves drawn into imagining what might have happened if Katherine’s New Year’s prince had lived … or Wolsey had become pope … or Henry had died in a jousting accident … or Anne Boleyn had borne a boy … or Jane Seymour had lived … or Henry hadn’t ridden down to surprise Anna … or Charles V and Francis I had managed to make their alliance last.
Of course, this game could play on well past the end of Mantel’s trilogy - what if Edward had lived to adulthood … or Lady Jane Grey had held the throne … or Mary had had a child?
Fate
From the reader’s point of view, the future of this story really is fixed: if we aren’t already sure, 5 minutes on the internet will tell us the broad brush strokes of Henry’s break with Rome, how many wives and children he had, or how Cromwell’s story ends, none of which can be changed.
During the play of Britannia unconquered put on at Henry’s (4th) wedding celebrations, Cromwell reflects on the idea that perhaps nothing happens by chance:
“And if you go further back, the nation was founded on a murder: Trojan Brutus, father of us all, killed his own father. A hunting accident, they claimed, but perhaps there are no accidents. Those mis-aimed arrows, and the ones that bend in flight: they know their target.”
If this is true, perhaps Henry has it right, and Cromwell’s story was pre-ordained from the start:
‘The king explained to me how I was an aspect of his glory. He said, “It is not given to every ruler to look past a man’s provenance to his capacities. God gave you talents, Cromwell. And he caused you to be born at such a time and place that you could use them in my service.”’
This belief would be a convenient one for Henry - after all, he must have preferred to think of his father as God’s chosen victor at Bosworth, rather than a man with a shaky claim to the throne who was lucky in battle.
But I prefer to think of destiny and chance as a pair of balanced forces; maybe somewhere out there in the multiverse, another version of Cromwell did enjoy that peaceful retirement at Launde, looking back happily at his memories of the time he travelled to the Weald with Henry2.
(with a few notable exceptions such as the characters of Anselma and Jenneke)
And in other realities, the monks of Launde Abbey are still worshipping there and producing thyme-scented honey…
My alternative future thoughts revolved around Cromwell and his dream of retirement at Launde. Cromwell had earned a safe retirement by the end of the novel. Up to and including his designation as Earl of Essex, Cromwell had continuously advanced in status and power based largely on merit.
It is difficult for many to retire when self-identity is woven together with one’s career. For Cromwell, his career (to use a modern term) or calling was combined with political power, which can be even more difficult to retire from. This reticence may be seen with a number of political leaders recently eg Joe Biden and Justin Trudeau. Throughout his advancement in Henry VIII’s court, Cromwell successfully bent his principles and manoeuvred to survive temperamental Henry’s whims and desires. As time progressed, Cromwell’s survival skills enhanced with experience. However, this pattern of successful survival may have made Cromwell overly confident. Did he ignore that ultimately political survival can be beyond one’s personal control. There are points in time when political power is lost simply by one being in the wrong place/position at the wrong time - bad luck. Was Cromwell’s fate, hubris - his failure to retire at the “top of his game” because he thought that he would keep on advancing? Did Cromwell fear giving up his self-identity through power? Was Cromwell’s fate a product of the government system of his day, an absolute monarchy, where many held positions for life, but often a life span that was cut short by execution when an individual fell out of favour with the monarch. The Author’s Notes identifies numerous individuals that fell from favour after Cromwell. Although Cromwell dreamed of a comfortable retirement at Laudne, did he know that this may have been an impossible dream? Once ensnared in Henry’s web, no one was able to escape the King alive.
As The Mirror and the Light approached its end, I had hoped that Cromwell would attain his comfortable retirement at Laudne where he could read and write. I knew this would never happen. Perhaps, Cromwell knew the same.
Wonderful! The post I needed as we draw to the end of the yearlong read.