Sorting Letters to Cromwell

Try and Keep Cheerful

Three years ago today Hilary Mantel passed away. Hilary was kind and generous about my Stitching Cromwell work and I continue to stitch Cromwell as an ongoing tribute to her. Not a day goes by when I don’t wish I could share new work with her, and thank her for the inspiration she gave me. I miss her every day.

I have my feet up as I write this. Not because I am tired, but because my latest bout of chronic pain is targeting my knee joints. The hormonal imbalance I have lived with for most of my life is always finding new ways to make itself felt, and this is an unwelcome new development. So, while I await tests and hopefully some relief, I am resting as much as I can. It’s not ideal; I want to be in my studio, I want to be doing my other job, I want to be going for a walk, I want to be planting my new apricot tree in the big pot by the front door. Instead I am lying on my bed and resting my knee. And seeking to follow the advice of Hilary Mantel’s Thomas Cromwell:

Try and keep cheerful.

Cromwell writes this in The Book Called Henry, his guide for working with an unpredictable and vengeful king. Try and keep cheerful.

I have the pleasures of Stitching Cromwell to keep me cheerful and occupied. There’s always something new to discover, and something different to do. So my current enforced rest isn’t all bad. It provides an opportunity to review my Letters to Cromwell project and look at the (literally) thousands of photographs and pages of notes I have relating to his correspondence. And make inroads into the mammoth task of filing and logging the images properly.

Ah yes, the log. I usually record my stitching projects in a very analogue way - notebooks and index cards, handwritten notes and quick sketches - but for a project of this size and complexity I need something more easily searchable. And so I have resorted to technology.

Every single letter is meticulously logged, with archive references, dates (where known), sender, location of sender, place and form of address to Cromwell (which tells a story in itself), summary of content, date on which I saw the original (I have seen most but not all of the letters), and the text that I have come up with to represent each. I also record any gifts (or, as my husband would say, bribes) that accompany letters - greyhounds, horses, barrels of salmon, gloves…

And these are just the surviving letters to Cromwell. He received masses of correspondence, particularly between 1530 and his death in 1540. Goodness knows how he kept on top of it all. Did he ever sleep? How did he file them? What did he do with all those greyhounds?

Sorting and stitching Cromwell’s letters should keep me going for years. And right now I am keeping cheerful by logging them, doing bits of transcription, and marvelling over the sheer range of business that crossed his desk. And thanking Hilary Mantel for writing her trilogy, which continues to give such pleasure and inspiration - and giving us a fascinating profile of the multi-faceted Thomas Cromwell, Master Secretary, my Lord Privy Seal, Master of the Jewel House, Master of the Rolls, and Earl of Essex.