WHEN I ARRIVED AT Austin Friars I knew that my life would change and change it did. Thomas guarded carefully the time he spent with us, his family and friends. He also passed many long weeks on his horse, travelling up and down Oxfordshire, closing another group of small monasteries. The Cardinal long wanted to build new colleges and the closure of these monasteries meant that he grew wealthier and wealthier. He built his colleges and Thomas has overseen this work.
As the Cardinal became wealthy from the closures, we benefited. There were bribes to persuade Thomas to go easier on the monks. Sometimes he did. I do not question the source of our recent wealth and the new properties my husband has purchased. After all, he is the Cardinal’s director of works and he has been meticulous with his attention to detail. Perhaps he deserves recompense, but I have thought it sad to close down any monasteries.
The years passed and I did not conceive again. After all, I am in my thirty-seventh year. Yet, I feel youthful still, and there are but few white hairs amongst the silver on my head. The King is more determined than ever to set Queen Catherine aside. He hopes to marry the Lady Anne and have a son off her.
Of late, the Lady Anne has shown a dislike for the Cardinal, whom she says is not on her side in their great matter. It has not gone so well for Cardinal Wolsey. If the Cardinal falls where will my husband be? Thomas says he has more and more legal work from courtiers, the noble and the great. They all respect his talent, even the hook-nosed Norfolk. He is the cleverest lawyer who ever lived in the realm, they say. If the Cardinal falls, Thomas will survive because he serves others. My husband may be a loyal servant to his Cardinal, but he is pragmatic also. He is ambitious though cautious.
My mother’s new husband died a year since, and she has come to live with us. She says she will never remarry - two husbands are enough in one life-time - and I am glad of her company. Our friends adore her and our family is complete now that she dwells in Austin Friars. Though she enjoyed Sir John Pryor’s company, he never replaced Father in her affections and her saddened heart has healed again. She teaches the girls to sew and to play the virginals. Some afternoons, as I listen to them play I wish that time would stand still for us all. I wish we were a moment captured in a painting, and that the moment will last for ever.
Only a few weeks ago, Toby married Bess. They will move to Lincoln to claim his inheritance. He has given in his notice as a guard because they have an estate to manage. Meg and Smith thrive, as does their cloth business. I make sample books, several every year, and am paid in silk ribbons and new fabric. Sometimes I take a servant and walk to Cornhill just to gaze on and feel the silk material caress my fingers and to select my favourite silk mixes for gowns for the girls and myself. Thomas still favours dark grey velvets or expensive black silk. When I see him in a colour, which he will wear on pageant days, or the forester green he wears for the hunt with his hawks, my heart lifts. Just as my jewellery coffer fills with bright gems, my being swells with pride for what my husband has accomplished. We are so happy that I feel I shall burst like a peach that has received too much sunshine.
I must hurry along the passage to the kitchen because a friend of Thomas has shot a doe while hunting and has promised to send it to me as a gift. I shall speak with cook as to its destiny, for we shall dine well on princely meat.
A frown creases my brow. Is that another bell I hear, yet another death? I pause and listen, anxiety knocking at my breast, making my heart beat so fast that I fancy I hear it echo from wall to wall. The bell tolls on and on. This summer, the sweating sickness has returned to our city, seeping along the river, virulent, stealing of our lives as if they must be blown away like the pollen on Tom’s roses. The bell’s sombre toll is close. It is tolling too close to us and I fear that the sickness will catch us up. I whisper a small prayer. I lightly touch an amulet, the St Christopher that I wear on a long, thin chain of gold, praying for protection. ‘God save all our souls,’ I whisper.
I hear horses neighing in the courtyard and the clip of their hooves on the cobbles. Thomas is home. His voice calls out, ‘Elizabeth’ and I hurry to greet my well-beloved husband. The low pealing bell, the cook and the deer are forgotten in my haste to see him, Thomas Cromwell, my well-beloved, loyal-hearted husband.
Author Note
First of all, thank you, readers, for reading this story. I hope that you enjoyed it and can forgive the inventions that exist alongside the few known facts about Thomas and Elizabeth Cromwell’s marriage. Although this is the nature of historical fiction, I do acknowledge a responsibility to stay with recorded facts where they exist, and have done so. Although this book is thoroughly researched, I would though remind the reader that it is a work of historical fiction.
Not much at all is known about Elizabeth Cromwell. She was previously married to Tom Williams who was supposed to have been a member of the King’s guard. The couple did not have children. Elizabeth was allegedly a wealthy widow by the time she met her second husband. It is suggested in most sources that the Cromwells married circa 1514. Elizabeth’s father was a cloth merchant from Fulham, and it is likely that Thomas Cromwell’s father, who owned a fulling mill (to refine cloth before it was dyed), knew Elizabeth’s father. As a girl, Elizabeth may have known the boy Thomas Cromwell.
Cromwell was a commoner, not necessarily impoverished at all, as was Thomas Wolsey. He lived on the continent in his youth and may or may not have run away from home to seek his fortune. He did say in later life that his father was violent. His father, Walter, owned land and property and Thomas, as a late child of the marriage, may have been formally educated, at least until the age of fourteen. It is recorded that Walter had been in trouble circa 1513 with the law over issues regarding brewing - for, in addition to his other businesses, he owned a public house and a brewery close to the river in Putney.
The characters in both families were researched as far as it is possible to research them. Their spouses were named as in the story. There is no suggestion, according to my research, that when Elizabeth died Thomas Cromwell had an affair with Elizabeth’s sister, although I cannot say conclusively that he did not. After Elizabeth died from an outbreak of sweating sickness in 1529, Thomas Cromwell never remarried. There were frequent outbreaks of this illness in London during this period. It is suggested by historians that the sweat was carried from the continent by Henry VII’s mercenaries during the Cousins’ War. It was a deadly disease, although there were survivors, but sadly not in Thomas Cromwell’s family. The sweat took all classes of people, rich and poor.
Thomas mentions a child, Jane, who dwelt near Chester, in a will he had drawn up in the early 1530s after the deaths of his two daughters, Anne and Grace, from sweating sickness. Jane is documented as having married a wealthy farmer and, interestingly, she was a Roman Catholic all her life. I found Jane’s existence intriguing, thus that aspect of the story is from my imagination, not the records of history. Cromwell’s son Gregory survived and in the late 1530s married Jane Seymour’s sister. He was related by marriage to royalty.
Mercy Wykes, Elizabeth’s mother, remarried after her husband Henry’s death. Either she moved into Austin Friars alone in the middle to late 1520s or along with her second husband. This part is evidenced fact.
It is also fact that Thomas Cromwell was a humanist, which I found profoundly interesting, and the friends mentioned in the story were indeed his friends. Humanists questioned rather than accepted and were interested in Classical Roman and Greek texts in particular. Cromwell was a Renaissance man. He spoke several languages fluently and loved everything Italian. He also admired the works of Erasmus and Machiavelli. He was different in the detail of his religious beliefs to Thomas More, who was a devout Catholic and believer in all the trappings of Roman Catholicism.
Thomas Cromwell, I believe, genuinely questioned aspects of the Catholic religion from 1517 onwards. He had travelled that year to Rome to obtain permission for the Boston Stump to sell indulgences. Thomas More and even the decadent, outrageo
usly wealthy Cardinal Wolsey saw faults in the Church and advocated some reform, but they absolutely would not question the Pope’s authority or Transubstantiation. They would have accepted traditional beliefs and the ancient Latin Vulgate Bible. Cromwell was responsible for Tyndale’s English translation of the Bible being placed in Churches during the 1530s. Sources tell us that he learned Erasmus’ translation of the New Testament into Latin from Greek by heart. This indicates a man who cared about religion, although he did possess a relic, which is recorded in the Tudor-era inventory for Austin Friars. His interest in humanist thought and in older writings suggest to me that he admired the Gospels written in Anglo-Saxon, as they were scribed in the vernacular prior to the Norman Conquest. I speculate in this novel that Cromwell was aware of Tyndale much earlier, as early as 1517, and I believe that, although I invented this section of my story, it is plausible. It contains my personal favourite scenes in the novel.
I was interested in looking at Thomas Cromwell’s early career as a merchant, as a lawyer and as an employee of Cardinal Wolsey. I believe that before he became involved with Henry VIII he was upwardly mobile and ambitious but that at this earlier point in his personal history, since he was not placed in the extremely ruthless position he later embraced, he may have been an interesting and likeable person who loved family and cared about the dispossessed. I suggest though that one reads Machiavelli’s The Prince to understand Cromwell’s mind set. He was a strange, complex character. He was totally devoted to the notion of family and he was extremely loyal to his masters. He had a formidable memory and he was extremely intelligent and resourceful. He was good company and sociable. He was witty, fun-loving and he loved to entertain. He was also a workaholic and could be very stern. In later years, of course, he was a king’s henchman and a brilliant negotiator.
Looking at Cromwell through Elizabeth’s eyes has, for me, humanised a person who possesses a very nasty reputation within the traditional historical record, although this reputation is being more fairly re-examined by many historians. He lived through cruel times, growing wealthy and important during a period of great societal change that involved men, and some women too, rethinking men’s place within the world. The middle classes were increasing, and London possessed a very wealthy cloth merchant class. New draperies, as referred to in the story, were the latest thing in fabrics and probably made a nonsense of sumptuary laws that existed throughout the sixteenth century. Foreigners were suspected of taking away Englishmen’s livelihoods and laws were issued to curtail their trading in cloth. The London May Day riots did happen as described in 1517.
Women had businesses, though they were usually widows, so I decided to give Elizabeth a degree of independent thought for a woman of her time. Her husband’s difficult secret was my own invention, as was the fire to her property. The story needed to be cohesive. The themes and ideas I have explored in the book: those of the merchant class, Tudor London and guilds, humanism, women as housewives and merchants in early Tudor England, cried out for a story frame that would allow these themes to show through the text. I allowed Elizabeth to worry about her first husband’s soul in an accepting way. I think that the fictional Elizabeth is resourceful. She is conflicted about any challenging religious atmosphere that enters her home. I saw their personal story as a love story, despite the unanswered question over whose daughter Jane really was. I invented Jeanette and her gift to Thomas. There is no existing record of Jane’s mother.
Importantly, in The Woman in the Shadows, I wanted to give a flavour of the atmosphere of the period and a sensory portrait of London during this era. I hoped to give a sense of birth, marriage and death rituals in the early Tudor period and a sense of daily life inclusive of the major seasonal festivals. We know much about important men and royal women. This time, I wanted to explore the everyday life of an early Tudor woman married to a man who became one of the most famous men of Henry VIII’s court, and I wanted to consider the speculated-upon, intimate side of this particular marriage, particularly because, after Elizabeth died, Thomas Cromwell, the king’s loyal servant, never remarried.
Carol McGrath
A Short Bibliography
The following may be useful for a reader interested in further reading and research. Here listed are a small number of the books that I consulted when writing The Woman in the Shadows.
Ackroyd, Peter, London, Chatto & Windus, 2000
Ackroyd, Peter, Thomas More, Vintage, 1999
Borman, Tracy, Thomas Cromwell, The Untold Story of Henry VIII’s most faithful Servant, Hodder, 2014
Bowden, Peter J, The Wool Trade in Tudor and Stuart England, St Martin’s Press, 1962
Cavendish, George, The Life and Death of Cardinal Wolsey, 1815, 1959
Cressy, David, Birth, Marriage & Death, Ritual, Religion and the Life Cycle in Tudor and Stuart England, Oxford University Press, 1997
Goodman, Ruth, How to be a Tudor, Viking Press, 2015
Hutchinson, Robert, Thomas Cromwell: The Rise and Fall of Henry VIII’s Most Notorious Minister; Weidenfield & Nicolson, 2007
Loades, David, Thomas Cromwell, Servant to Henry VIII, Amberley Publishing, 2013
Lipscomb, Suzannah, A Visitor’s Companion to Tudor London, Ebury Press, 2012
Manchester, Peter, A World Lit by Fire, Little, Brown, 1992
Power, Eileen, Medieval Women, Cambridge University Press, 1975, 1997
Schofield, John, Thomas Cromwell, Henry VIII’s Most Faithful Servant, The History Press, 2011
Sim, Alison, The Tudor Housewife, Sutton Publishing, 1998
Sim, Alison, Pleasures and Pastimes in Tudor England, Sutton Publishing, 1999
Snow, John, A Survey of London 1598, Sutton Publishing, 2005
These are only a few of the books, articles, blog sites, Tudor houses, etc., I visited while writing the novel.
Acknowledgements
Many thanks are due to those who helped bring this story from my pen into the world. First of all most thanks go to a superb editor Greg Rees, whose comments were invaluable, and who thoughtfully helped me to shape the book’s content. I would like to thank Karen, Kate and Ffion at Accent Press, and publisher Hazel Cushion, for all their hard work as regards this story. The cover was designed by Hazel herself and is gorgeous. Thanks also to Jane Judd, a friend in the literary world, who suggested that I write this novel. Thank you Jane. I am so glad I listened to you. This novel has been a labour of love; it was a delight to research and write. My husband, Patrick, to whom this novel is dedicated, has been ever helpful and supportive. Finally, I would like to acknowledge Theresa, Mel and Brenda, and thank them for their input during our weekly writing meetings in the Greek Mani, where I spend much time. Thanks too to Sarah Bower and Deborah Swift, my generous beta readers for The Woman in the Shadows. Your input has been invaluable.
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Published by Accent Press Ltd 2017
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Copyright © Carol McGrath 2017
The right of Carol McGrath to be identified as the author of this work has been asserted by the author in accordance with the Copyright, Designs and Patents Act 1988.
The story contained within this book is a work of fiction.
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ISBN 9781786152299
eISBN 9781786152282
Table of Contents
About the Author
Dedication
Halftitle
Midsummer’s Eve
Part One
Chapter One
Chapter Two
Chapter Three
Chapter Four
Chapter Five
Chapter Six
Chapter Seven
Chapter Eight
Chapter Nine
Chapter Ten
Chapter Eleven
Chapter Twelve
Chapter Thirteen
Chapter Fourteen
Chapter Fifteen
Chapter Sixteen
Chapter Seventeen
Chapter Eighteen
Part Two
Chapter Nineteen
Chapter Twenty
Chapter Twenty-one
Chapter Twenty-two
Chapter Twenty-three
Chapter Twenty-four
Chapter Twenty-five
Chapter Twenty-six
Chapter Twenty-seven
Chapter Twenty-eight
Chapter Twenty-nine
Chapter Thirty
Chapter Thirty-one
Chapter Thirty-two
Chapter Thirty-three
Part Three
Chapter Thirty-four
Chapter Thirty-five
Chapter Thirty-six
The Woman in the Shadows: Tudor England through the eyes of an influential woman Page 33
