Arrange your face

Memory and repetition in Hilary Mantel's Cromwell trilogy

Good morning! Whatcha reading?

I’m halfway through Silverview, the final novel from the late great John le Carré, and I’m re-reading Snow Crash (which I first read back in middle school, very formative) as homework before we get the pleasure of interviewing Neal Stephenson on our Decrypt podcast in a couple weeks.

Now, without further ado, arrange your face and come with me to England in 1500.

I think of myself as not being a big fan of historical fiction. There have been some exceptions (I loved David Mitchell’s Thousand Autumns of Jacob de Zoet), but for the most part I’m usually not excited by novels set more than, oh, 200 years in the past.

But you should throw all your preconceptions out the window to read Hilary Mantel’s trilogy about Thomas Cromwell, who was born a poor blacksmith’s son and rose skyward to become the right hand of King Henry VIII, holding illustrious titles like Master of the Rolls, Lord Privy Seal, Baron of Wimbledon, and Earl of Essex. The series is so vivid and absorbing, and her Cromwell is so plausible (even… relatable) that it shouldn’t be pigeonholed as historical fiction. I would recommend it to almost any type of reader.

Rather than try to convey all the thrill of these three novels (1,758 pages in total—don’t be scared), I want to zoom in on just a few repeated qualities of the writing that add to Mantel’s alchemy.

The first book, Wolf Hall (2009), starts in disorienting fashion: “So now get up.”

We don’t know right away who’s speaking, or who’s being told to get up. There’s blood: “blood from the gash on his head—which was his father’s first effort—is trickling across his face.” Okay, so we know someone’s father hit him. And kicked him. (“He can see that the stitching of his father’s boot is unraveling… a hard knot in it has caught his eyebrow and opened another cut.”) Then we learn the father is named Walter, and Walter is a mean son of a bitch: “Look what I’ve done. Burst my boot, kicking your head.” He mocks his son while his son heaves and vomits.

We can assume the boy is Thomas Cromwell, but we aren’t told explicitly until five pages in, when he’s getting cleaned up by his sister, who warns her husband, Morgan Williams, to stand back: “You don’t want bits of Thomas on your London jacket.”

In time, we come to understand, though nothing is stated in any overly explicit way (there’s no false exposition in this series, you pick things up by reading closely), that Thomas Cromwell’s father Walter beats him up all the time, and this time is the last straw. Thomas flees Putney by boat, crossing the channel to continental Europe.

The second chapter starts 27 years later: Cromwell is married with children, and works for Cardinal Thomas Wolsey, a close adviser to the king. Within a few dozen pages, Wolsey has fallen from the king’s favor and is stripped of his privileges and title. From this point on, Cromwell, whose association with Wolsey should have been an impediment, embarks on a rise to power that lasts until late in the final book.

Throughout the series, we continually return to his youth in Putney and his misadventures in France and Italy, often to extremely specific memories that have clearly left indelible marks on him. One example: he picked up a snake in Italy on a bet, and held it for ten seconds. After four seconds, the snake bit him—and he didn’t let go. When he finally does let go, it’s the snake who sounds worse from the encounter: “The snake looked sick; when they had all reached ten, and not before, he eased its coiled body gently to the ground, and let it slip away into its future.”

The point is obvious: Cromwell is tough, fearless, can hold writhing snakes without flinching. And in case the message of the scene isn’t clear enough, the same story is recalled again in the third book, and snakes or serpents are mentioned throughout all three books. He compares Anne Boleyn to a snake, others call him a snake, King Henry compares him to a “bag of serpents” (in praise), and in the final volume he recalls being struck by a fresco in Italy, when he was eighteen, depicting infant Hercules crushing a snake in his hand.

The repetition of memories over the course of the series is not tedious—far from it, when they arise on second and third mentions it’s like we share Cromwell’s memories. We remember when we first heard that story, and he feels very alive and real to us.

Mantel also likes repetition of phrases in Cromwell’s head. And for the entire duration of the three books, we live in his head. We never witness anything Cromwell is not present for, much like in “Tar.” (Some of the people on the internet who believed the final shot of “The Sopranos” signaled that Tony died reasoned that we saw through his eyes the entire series, so if the screen went black it meant Tony had died, but that wasn’t true, we witnessed tons of scenes that Tony wasn’t present for.)

About halfway through Wolf Hall, Cromwell counsels himself to “arrange your face” and not react too obviously to something Henry says. Later in the book, he catches Nicholas Carew with a “downturn of his mouth” while being bossed around by Anne Boleyn, and in his head, he warns him: “Arrange your face, Nicholas Carew, your ancient family face.” Later in the book, the phrase appears a third time, and this time it’s Cromwell’s nephew Richard turning it around on him, telling Cromwell, “Arrange your face” before they go in to see Bishop John Fisher, who will be executed. The phrase makes it all the way to the final book, when he scolds his nephew Richard, his son Gregory, and their helper Dick Purser to stop horsing around as Henry Howard (Earl of Surrey), a little shit and the son of Thomas Howard (Duke of Norfolk), approaches: “Stop that. Arrange your faces. Here is Norfolk’s boy.”

There’s another scene in Wolf Hall that will be referenced again and again over the course of the trilogy: the day Cromwell’s wife Liz dies. That morning, Cromwell wakes early. The bed sheets are damp and Liz is “warm and flushed,” but he thinks nothing of it. He kisses her and she says, “Tell me when you are coming home.” His barber comes to the house to give him a shave. “He sees his own eyes in a polished mirror. They look alive; serpent eyes.” (Ahem.)

Then, this weird moment: “As he goes downstairs he thinks he sees Liz following him. He thinks he sees the flash of her white cap. He turns, and says, ‘Liz, go back to bed…’ But she’s not there. He is mistaken.”

When he arrives home that evening, he knows something is wrong. “You see the dismayed faces; they turn away at the sight of you.” Liz has died, and his two daughters are also sick (they’ll die too). Mercy, the house maid, gives him the news (“but here is no mercy”). But what Cromwell will remember the most—and he recalls the moment again in the later books—is that trick of his mind when he thought he saw Liz on the stairs that morning, like she was already gone at that point, a ghost.

The second book, Bring Up the Bodies (2012), starts with a confusing action scene just as the first did, and holds onto the confusion for longer. The first line is: “His children are falling from the sky.”

Is it a bad dream? We’re told only that he’s on horseback. Grace Cromwell “hovers in thin air. She is silent when she takes her prey, silent as she glides to his fist.” Anne Cromwell “bounces on the glove of Rafe Sadler.” The only hint is the chapter name: “Falcons.” You could perhaps figure it out from contextual clues, but I had to re-read the first few pages to get it, and not until page 11, having moved on to a completely new scene, do we get the explicit reveal, when John Seymour says: “I don’t know, Cromwell, all these falcons named for dead women… don’t they dishearten you?”

It’s another memorable image: Anne Boleyn and other treacherous women of the court are snakes, while the women Cromwell loved and buried are falcons.

There’s a lot of this type of imagery throughout the series, people as animals. There’s also a lot of metonymy. (Or is it synecdoche? Remember learning these terms in Latin class? “The crown” to represent the monarchy is typically cited as the classic example of metonymy—using a concrete thing to represent the larger abstract thing—but I always thought it could equally be argued that “the crown” is synecdoche—using a part of something to represent the whole—since the king or queen wears the crown.) The constant rain is repeatedly used to represent all of England. And Cromwell himself is a metonymy for all the people of England, the King’s subjects. He reflects that his former master Cardinal Wolsey “was a man whose emotions would master him and wear him out,” whereas, “He, Cromwell, is no longer subject to vagaries of temperament… The courtiers see that he can shape events, mold them. He can contain the fears of other men, and give them a sense of solidity in a quaking world: this people, this dynasty, this miserable rainy island at the edge of the world.”

The entire trilogy might better have been called The Crown, in fact, and the book predates the Netflix series by six years. What’s strange about Mantel naming the first book Wolf Hall, which naturally became the way people refer to the entire trilogy, is that Wolf Hall, home of the Seymour family, is only mentioned a very few times in the first book, in the context of a scandalous rumor: that John Seymour has sex with the wife of his son Edward, his daughter in law. Thus Wolf Hall, the house, is quite aptly named. I’ve seen online forums where people say this is why it’s a fitting title for the book, since the men and women around the king are like wolves. But it would be a more fitting title for the second volume, ironically, which is focused on Anne Boleyn and the many men she sleeps with, truly a den of wolves. Cromwell doesn’t even visit Wolf Hall until the second book; the first book ends with the plan to go there: “End of September. Five days. Wolf Hall.” The very clever title of the second book, Bring Up the Bodies (a legal term), would be better for the first book, since it applies to all three books, in which Cromwell and the rest of the king’s men execute dozens of characters at the king’s whim.

Or she could have called the series Cromwell.

The third book is the longest, baggiest, and the most brutal, but Mantel thought it was her finest.

The first book is very tightly focused, plot-wise, on Cromwell’s rise and his efforts to help the king figure out a way to divorce Katherine of Aragon and marry Anne Boleyn. The second book is tightly focused on the infidelity, trial, and death of Anne Boleyn and her many suitors. The third book spans far more action: Henry’s marriage to Jane Seymour, the birth of his son (finally), the death of Jane Seymour, multiple attempted revolts, the rebellion of Henry’s cousin Reginald Pole, and Cromwell’s arranging of Henry’s fourth marriage, to Anna of Cleves (Cromwell’s downfall).

Befitting of the years of action it must cycle through, the third book begins in brutal reality, in the very instant after the second book ends: “Once the queen’s head is severed, he walks away.”

The third book rewards those who’ve been with Cromwell since page one of Wolf Hall: so many repeated and re-referenced memories, stories, and experiences.

The entire trilogy ends, again, by falling back on the indelible power of memory and spoken quotes; we end where we began, the very first line of the first book. At the moment of his death, kneeling awaiting the executioner’s axe, Cromwell is transported back to Putney as a child, with his father’s cruel challenge ringing in his ears: “So now get up, so now get up.”

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I hope I’ve whet your appetite to get to know Mantel’s version of Thomas Cromwell. As always, I welcome your comments (posted publicly or sent to me directly) and hope you’ll forward and share this issue with friends.