“Some of these things are true and some of them lies. But they are all good stories.”

Sweet Gregory. From The Weepers, 2023

This morning, it seemed of vital importance that I knew the date on which Cardinal Bainbridge was killed. Because, if I have correctly interpreted the surrounding paragraphs that refer to this event in Hilary Mantel’s The Mirror and the Light, that will give me the date of an event crucial in Thomas Cromwell’s story. Well, Hilary’s version of it in any case.

One of the issues that comes up for anyone researching Cromwell is that so little is known of his early years, particularly his time spent in Italy. His recent biographer Diarmaid MacCulloch draws our attention to a Sixteenth Century “Italian novella by a prolific author and occasional Bishop, Matteo Bandello”, from which many stories about Cromwell took root in the centuries after his lifetime.¹ The gaps in his record provided Hilary Mantel with opportunities for imaginative reconstruction, not available to the historian. There is a fascinating discussion between the historian and the novelist about Cromwell, recorded by the Church Times in 2019, which explored the differences in their respective crafts, and their respective approaches to the historical record.

I was reminded of this discussion this week when working on the timeline that underpins the chronology for my Cromwell Narrative Cloth. Rather than stitching Cromwell’s narrative in the order it appears in Hilary Mantel’s trilogy, I am stitching the story in chronological order - a decision which seemed fairly straightforward to begin with, but has fast become a challenge.

Firstly, there’s piecing together the exact order of events in his youth (Was the snake incident before or after Garigliano? I decided it came afterwards. Under what circumstances did he get his second knife? When did he go to Antwerp?). And secondly, there’s a chronological discrepancy in the novel, and I can’t decide how to stitch it into the Cloth. In Wolf Hall, Cromwell’s son Gregory is born in about 1514; and his daughter Anne is born in 1518-19. Of course, Mantel doesn’t do anything as obvious as give us the dates, but from a very close reading of the text and some working backwards, those timeframes make sense.

Except they don’t. MacCulloch’s research shows that Gregory was born “at the earliest in 1519 and far more likely 1520”. It seems that Gregory’s age was miscalculated in the nineteenth century, and that miscalculation has stuck.²

In the Church Times discussion, historian and novelist discuss this and Hilary admits to having wondered whether Gregory was in fact younger than the age at which he was placed and, as the novels progressed, ““I very surreptitiously started reducing his age… but I didn’t reduce it enough”, as she didn’t have the evidence to challenge earlier historians. Had MacCulloch’s biography been published before she wrote the novels, she says, her Gregory would have been younger.

I’m not drawing attention to this discrepancy to criticise it. I’m not in the business of hunting through my favourite books to find errors. Rather, I find it fascinating - the division between history and fiction, and the fact that two leading practitioners can discuss the boundaries between their work and their differing skills in such an enlightening way. And I’m working out how to represent this in my Cromwell Narrative Cloth. Do I include Gregory’s birth, and if so, when? Do I stitch in both dates? Do I stick to the Trilogy as my source, or make reference to the historical record? Or do I skirt this issue and show him only as a young man, birth date unknown?

In my studio

This week I have been working on the Cromwell Narrative Cloth and after a long and helpful discussion with a friend, decided that during January I am going to focus on 1500-1520. The project was feeling a bit overwhelming - and when I admitted I had already stitched about 12 feet of it and was worried about the practicalities of the piece as a whole, her response was “Have you learned nothing from your previous work? Why am I not surprised?” Which was fair enough. I do have a habit of making out-of-control textile pieces.

Anyway, wrestling with a 6ft section today confirmed my hunch that it will have to be worked in 6ft sections as a maximum; the piece will be simply too heavy and unwieldy to work in a continuous piece. What on earth I will do with the Cromwell Narrative Cloth when it’s done, I have no idea. But I don’t need to worry about that at the moment.

Work in progress. Thomas Cromwell bumps into Stephen Gardiner at York Place, 1527. Gardiner is particularly furious that he hasn’t been quilted yet.

What caught my eye?

The Ort jars for 2023 in my studio. All those bits of cut off thread, which come from projects worked last year. I don’t quite know why I keep them, but I always do. I think they assure me that I am making progress, even when it is slow. And even when I get bogged down with Cardinal Bainbridge. He died on 14 July 1514. I need to re-read those Mirror and the Light paragraphs again.

1. Diarmaid MacCulloch, Thomas Cromwell: A Life (London: Penguin, 2018)

2. MacCulloch identifies the first misinterpretation as coming from W. F. Hook, Lives of the Archbishops of Canterbury, based on the research of J. S. Brewer, and published 1860-76