He has retrieved her thimble

After my return from the Wolf Hall Weekend in Devon in late June, I received a package full of treasure in the post. Buttons, buckles, clasps, and thimbles, all retaining tiny grains of soil from where they had been dug up from the earth around Cadhay. One thimble is much heavier than the others - I think it is made of pewter, and I wonder whether it might date from the sixteenth century.

To me, there is something about thimbles that conjure up the act of stitchery more than any other object. Which is strange, because I have never found a thimble I can get on with. Over the last 20 years, I have obtained a huge range - metal, plastic, leather, rubber - in an attempt to protect my fingertips, but I can never get a small enough quilting stitch when I am wearing one. Instead, I wince as my needle pierces the tip of my right middle finger until the skin forms what is known as a “quilter’s callous” - a hard piece of skin that provides some protection from the needle’s point.

As I haven’t really stitched for the last three weeks or so (resting my hands), my callous has healed and my fingertip is smooth. But if I look carefully I can see a little dent on the fingertip where needles have repeatedly stabbed for the last two decades as I have pushed and pulled them through cloth.

In Hilary Mantel’s Cromwell Trilogy, we see just one stitcher using a thimble - Katherine of Aragon. She stands to confront Thomas Cromwell, and, as her needlework drops, “her silver thimble goes skittering across the boards and rolls into a corner”. Cromwell - always useful - retrieves it. (Wolf Hall, Anna Regina). Is it safe to assume that the other stitchers of the Trilogy use thimbles behind the scenes? I think Margaret Pole is probably a thimble wearer. Does Mary Boleyn use a thimble for her embroidery, or is it an object to be dropped so that any passing gentlemen - such as Thomas Cromwell - might retrieve it? I suspect that Helen Barre uses a sailmaker’s palm that is too large for her when circumstances make this a necessity, but I also suspect that - like me - she is a thimble refuser once her hands turn to fine embroidery. Anne Cromwell definitely doesn’t wear one, but Grace probably would, if she were old enough. What about Anna of Cleves? Or Lizzie Cromwell? Mercy? The text might be silent - but I find I “know” the tools that each stitcher prefers.

The beautiful Cadhay thimbles capture an echo of stitchers past. I understand that a lot of them have been found under a particular tree - so perhaps this has been a favourite place over the centuries to sew, making the most of the natural light of the outdoors. Were the stitchers repairing clothes, or making new ones? Embroidering or quilting? Plain work or fancy? Did these long-passed stitchers drop their thimbles by accident, or did they remove them from hot fingertips in the heat of a sunny day? Or did they discard them - frustrated that they couldn’t achieve the stitch length they desired - and leave them out in the ground, to be rediscovered and touched centuries later? There are stories in each of them.

In my studio

I have a new companion in my studio. Tommaso is a dress form that is helping me to answer a question that I was asked at the Wolf Hall Weekend: do I ever make wearable Cromwellia?

I don’t. I am not a dressmaker, and I don’t have those skills. But the question intrigued me, and I started to think about cloaks and capes. Could I? Should I? And Tommaso arrived, ready to assist.

I haven’t had much studio time in recent days - migraine has laid me low for much of the past week - but I have had the chance to think about some of the construction methods for a Cromwell Cloak. And what it might look like. I’m in a very material culture mood at the moment so I am combing through inventories and account books for objects to reproduce in stitch - as well as using the Trilogy as inspiration, as ever. I have been hunting artichokes. And fish. But that’s the thread of a tale for another time.

What caught my eye

Yesterday I went over to Hampton Court Palace for a quick visit to see the newly reopened Wolsey Rooms. I wanted to get there before the English schools break up for the summer holiday, and the palace gets very busy with its summer festivals. I usually visit in February - it’s twenty years since I have been there in the summer - and the site overall was busier than I am used to, but the Wolsey Rooms themselves were quiet. Perhaps because - in the words overheard from another visitor - there’s “nothing to see” in them.

There might be “nothing to see”, but there is everything to feel.

Suppose within every book there is another book, and within every letter on every page another volume constantly unfolding; but these volume take no space on the desk […] held within a place which is no place.

Hilary Mantel, Wolf Hall, Anna Regina

These rooms were constructed in the 1520s and are the oldest part of the Palace. They are surrounded by a “Tudor World” exhibit, in which there are remnants of interior decoration, paintings, display boards, objects - some touchable, some not. School parties in matching fluorescent jackets roam through while being counted by their patient teachers, young women pause to look at Anne Boleyn and whisper amongst themselves, a guide explains a large painting of the Field of the Cloth of Gold. But inside the Wolsey Rooms themselves, all is silent. I am there alone.

Occasionally my peace is disturbed. A stray fluorescent jacket wanders through, declares it “boring” and goes to find his classmates. An adult visitor complains there’s “nothing there” and that the rooms have been opened to make the display look bigger. But these disturbances are fleeting.

And those making them clearly can’t see what I can see.

The rooms are empty of objects but they are full of - something intangible. I can almost touch it. Ghosts? Vibrations? Echoes of long departed footsteps? Or just my imagination, immersed as it always is in Hilary Mantel’s Cromwell Trilogy?