“You were the boy at Compiègne?”

In a recent post, I wrote an introduction to my Cromwell Cloke, with a view to sharing the “becoming” of a piece of my textile art. With that in mind, this series discusses some of the objects depicted on the Cloke, and the creative decisions behind each piece. It also gives me an opportunity to record sources and references both in and outside the text of Hilary Mantel’s Cromwell Trilogy.

On the Cromwell Cloke, placed below the Artichoke from Hampton Court, there sits a gold and silver dish. A standing dish to be exact. Slightly battered, as though it has been shoved into a sack and secreted under a ragged shirt. A stolen dish - stolen from a Cardinal.

In Hilary Mantel’s Wolf Hall, Cardinal Wolsey complains that, while on his embassy to France in 1527, he was robbed. “Though he mounted a day-and-night guard on his gold plate, a little boy was found to be going up and down the back stairs, passing out the dishes to some great robber who had trained him up.” The robber was caught, but the little boy ran away.

The child thief turns out to have been Christophe. He later confesses to Cromwell that he was sorry to rob Wolsey - a kind man who made sure this poor waiting boy had his dinner, who gave him apricots. But Christophe - then called Fabrice - went up and down the stairs to the Cardinal’s lodging, carrying water up in a bucket, and carrying a gold cup back down each time, in the same bucket, now empty of water.

Christophe is one of the few fictional characters in the Cromwell Trilogy. But he has his roots in a real boy. In George Cavendish’s biography - Thomas Wolsey, Late Cardinall, his Lyffe and Deathe - written between 1554 and 1558, he recounts events at Compiègne:

At Compigne he lost his standysshe of sylver and gilt ; and there it was espied and the partie taken, which was but a littell boy of xii or xiii year of age, a ruffians page of Paris, whiche haunted my lordes lodgings without any suspicion.

From this brief mention of the “littel boy”, Hilary Mantel conjured one of her most beloved characters. In the notes on characters that are included in the play scripts for Wolf Hall and Bring Up the Bodies, she wrote:

One one of Cardinal Wolsey’s State visits to France, he was systematically robbed of his gold plate by a small boy who went up and down the stairs unnoticed, passing the loot to a gang outside. In the world of Wolf Hall, you are the small boy. So you are a fiction, with a shadow-self in the historical record.

And if Christophe is the shadow-self of the boy in the historical record, perhaps he is also Cromwell’s shadow-self. He is the ruffian shadow-self who stays with him until the end, and who - I remain completely convinced - left cornflowers in a silver jug on Cromwell’s desk.

Christophe, from The Weepers - years after his days as his shadow-self Fabrice, the thief of gold plate

“I robbed him, sir. Did you not know?”

I love that link between Christophe and the Cardinal, and that the link is unknown to Cromwell until years later. One could view it as too great a coincidence - a literary device I particularly dislike - and in the hands of a less skilled writer, it might not have worked. But in Wolf Hall it is perfect. Christophe confesses when Cromwell is sick with fever, and he can’t be sure of what is true and what is coming from his imagination. In Christophe’s case, either could be true. And it is nice for Cromwell to have a confidante who recognises the Cardinal’s kindness.

I therefore wanted to include the link between Christophe and Wolsey in the Cardinal Section of the Cromwell Cloke. I started by working out what Cavendish meant by a “standdyshe” - a term we don’t use now - and concluded that it must have been a standing dish, or a dish on a stand. Despite my best efforts, once quilted, the shape of the dish came out as slightly off true, but once I had painted it with silver and gold ink, I felt that it looked just right: as though Christophe - or Fabrice - had been looking after it for a while. Probably sitting on it by mistake. Or bashing it against a wall during his efforts to run away when the master thief was taken.

I hope that Christophe’s shadow-self (how I love that concept) was able to sell the standdyshe and buy food. Perhaps not apricots - even though the cardinal had given him a taste for them - but something to sustain him until he was able to take up service with Milord Cromwell.