A Cloth for the Cromwell Trilogy?

The Bacton Altar Cloth - a section featuring a small bear

In late February 2020, not long before the first Pandemic lockdown in England, I went to Hampton Court to see a piece of fabric. This was the Bacton Altar Cloth - a piece of needlework that dates from the 1590s and is likely to have been adapted from a dress once worn by Elizabeth I. It’s an extraordinary piece of work and provides evidence of the skill and creativity of sixteenth century embroiders, as well as demonstrating the importance of reusing and recycling expensive textiles. The fabric itself is cloth of silver, and has tarnished over the intervening centuries, but one can still imagine its shimmer.

This piece of cloth worked its way into my subconscious while I was working on the first Wolf Hall Quilt during 2020-21, but I am only just really understanding its impact now, having had the opportunity to see it again this past week. I can remember, at some point during lockdown, going to an online session at which participants tried to identify various plants on the cloth. Was that a pomegranate? A carnation? Could that be a daisy and, if so, why did the same plant have berries? What did the stitcher intend? We couldn’t be sure, and although the session itself now has a dreamlike quality typical of many events of that time (did it actually happen?), I know that it prompted me to make a key to my 46 feet Wolf Hall piece, annotating every symbol and image I included. Just as well - there are a few places where I - having stitched it myself - don’t quite remember what’s there.

I saw the Bacton Altar Cloth again last week, as it was included in an exhibition put together by the Worshipful Company of Gold and Silver Wyre Drawers at the Guildhall Art Gallery in London. There was some amazing work on display - from theatrical costumes to ecclesiastical copes - but it made me reflect on how placement has such an impact on reception. At Hampton Court, the Bacton Altar Cloth was a magical thing: shown on its own in a low light small room. At the Guildhall Gallery it was overshadowed by newer, shinier, more glittering work, and almost overlooked in a corner while costumes from The Crown and Charles Dickens’ Court Suit attracted attention. To me, there was still magic in the tarnished cloth of silver and I just wished I could see it again in more sympathetic surroundings. It also reignited my wish to make a Cromwell Trilogy Cloth. But does it have to be a Cromwell Trilogy Dress first?

In My Studio

One step forward and two steps back with my Cromwell Houses project. I started to cut up the larger Fenchurch Street piece I made and abandoned, and realised I could make use of it if I changed the nature of the project entirely. So far, so good. But then I pinned up my small Austin Friars piece on my new noticeboards, took a step back, and thought - this isn’t working. I think it’s the windows. And the kitchen. Thurston wouldn’t like the kitchen.

I can point out Austin Friars on a map, but stitching it is another matter…

I went to Austin Friars this week and had a peer through a gate into the remnants of what was once part of Thomas Cromwell’s garden at Drapers’ Hall; of Cromwell’s first Austin Friars house, there is nothing to see, but I got a bit excited about a curved road and wondered whether it could possibly be a footprint of the original friary. I suspect the stitched Austin Friars might have come out better if I’d gone to the site first - one can never tell what hidden echoes of an earlier place might appear in stitch.

Anyway, I have decided to park the Cromwell Houses pieces for the time being. They just aren’t coming out right. And I’m now thinking about the possibility of a Cromwell Trilogy Cloth. Not on cloth of silver obviously.

What caught my eye?

I read a reference in Diarmaid MacCulloch’s (excellent) biography of Thomas Cromwell to a novel by John Buchan about the Pilgrimage of Grace, called The Blanket of the Dark, first published in 1931. I’m interested in different fictional portrayals of Cromwell, and so, with some trepidation, I picked up The Blanket of the Dark. It hasn’t dated as badly as some of Buchan’s other work (his colonialist and racist attitudes are less apparent when he is telling a story of 1536 than in his better-known Richard Hannay stories), but I can’t say I am enjoying it. There’s quite a lot of heavy handed explanation - we are told that the Duke of Buckingham was executed in 1521 four times on four consecutive pages - and the dialogue is pastiche of the “Nothing, gentle sirs, but some nettle broth, with the thickening of a dead partridge, half-plucked by a hawk, which Dickon found in Waterman’s Acre” variety. But I am keeping reading because I am waiting to see if the much talked of villain “Crummle” himself will make an appearance and I’m anticipating a terrifying encounter with Henry VIII later in the book.

It’s definitely reading for work, not pleasure, and there’s much more pleasurable work reading I could be doing. But I am also in the middle of Wolf Hall again - I just re-listened to a dinner party scene at Antonio Bonvisi’s “tall house on Bishopsgate” and had a “Oh! That’s what it’s about!” moment. That’s the great thing (or one of the great things) about Hilary Mantel’s writing. It’s so rich - I have read the trilogy so many times, and even now I find new things. That’s what I call reading for pleasure.