The 1529 sweating sickness outbreak returns to Thomas Cromwell’s household after he has already made provisions for his family in his will. Faced with the possibility of sending the children away, he leaves them at home on Mercy’s advice; both Anne and Grace then fall ill, and both die. The episode makes epidemic risk a question of family judgment and responsibility, while exposing how little protection wealth, cleanliness, prayer, or parental care can offer.

The threat returns

In July 1529, Cromwell asks Mercy and Johane whether they should send the children away when the summer plague comes back. Johane asks where they might go; Mercy wonders whether anyone can outrun it. They take some comfort in the belief that the previous year’s severe infection might mean a less violent outbreak this time. Cromwell is not persuaded. He recognizes that this hope treats the disease as if it possessed a predictable, almost animal intelligence: a wolf that strikes only when the shepherds are unprepared. The possibility that the plague might instead be God’s doing remains in his thoughts, but offers no practical means of protection.

The household’s uncertainty is heightened by Cromwell’s existing preparations for death. In his will, he makes detailed provision for his son Gregory, his daughters Anne and Grace, and other relatives and dependants. The document sets out money, clothing, household goods, and marriage portions; it also leaves forty pounds for forty poor maidens’ marriages, twenty pounds for road repairs, and ten pounds for poor prisoners in London gaols. His body is to be buried where he dies, and the residue of his estate is to fund Masses for his parents. The will gives form to his duty toward those around him, but it cannot settle the question now facing the household: whether moving the children would protect them or expose them to danger elsewhere.

The decision to stay

Mercy argues that Liz Wykys would not have wanted her daughters dragged around the countryside, and adds that Anne cries when she cannot see her father. Cromwell is surprised to learn that his daughter is so attached to him. He allows Mercy to decide, and the girls remain at home. The choice is later described as the wrong one, although the narrative does not establish that leaving would have saved them.

Mercy hangs signs of the sweating sickness outside the children’s door. She points to the household’s scrubbing and prayers as evidence that they have done what they can; Anne, she says, prays with the intensity of someone preparing for battle. Yet the signs, cleanliness, and devotion do not keep the disease away. The contrast between careful domestic effort and the illness’s arrival gives the episode its central force: the household can prepare, watch, and hope, but cannot command the outcome.

Anne’s illness and death

Anne falls ill first. Mercy and Johane try to keep her awake, believing that sleep will be fatal, but she grows exhausted and struggles to breathe. Her hand continues to clench and unclench as Cromwell holds it. Later she rouses herself and asks for her mother and for the copybook in which she has written her name. At dawn her fever breaks. Johane weeps with relief, and Mercy sends her away to rest. Anne sits up, recognizes Cromwell, and smiles; the women wash her face with water strewn with rose petals.

The reprieve does not last. When the sun rises, Anne’s fever returns. Cromwell refuses to let the women begin again the pinching, shaking, and other efforts they have used to keep her awake. He entrusts her to God and stays beside her, watching her struggle to breathe. He is not in the room when she dies: Grace has also taken sick, and he is seeing her put to bed. When he is brought back, Anne’s face has become peaceful, but her hand is already too heavy for him to bear. He remembers that she was learning Greek. The copybook in which she wrote her name becomes a particular point of grief: he asks the priest whether she may be buried with it, but, too tired and angry to argue, accepts the refusal.

Grace and the aftermath

Grace dies in Cromwell’s arms. Her death is described as easy, yet its quietness does not lessen his sense of loss. He lays her back against the sheet and thinks that he never knew her, or even knew that he had her. The passage links that feeling to the near-unremembered circumstances of her conception and to the name her parents had considered: Henry for a boy, Katherine for a girl, in honor of Cromwell’s sister Kat. When he first saw the child, he chose another name, and Liz agreed. His thought that grace cannot be earned or merited gives the child’s name a spiritual resonance without making her survival a reward for anyone’s virtue.

After Anne and Grace die, Cromwell imagines his daughters in Purgatory and asks where it appears in the Gospels. The question connects his bereavement to religious disagreement about what scripture can establish. The narrative recalls William Tyndale’s rendering of the greatest of the three virtues as love, and contrasts it with Thomas More’s insistence on the word charity. Cromwell wonders whether the dead need translators at all, and whether they might already understand what the living debate. The outbreak thus ends not with an explanation of why the children died, but with unresolved questions about care, faith, and what language can do for the dead.

Narrative significance

The outbreak is presented through household decisions and losses rather than as a broad account of the epidemic. Its consequences are specific: Mercy’s advice keeps the girls at home; Anne survives a brief apparent turn before dying; Grace dies in her father’s arms; and Anne’s copybook becomes an object Cromwell wants to accompany her in burial. These details distinguish the sisters’ deaths while showing how one illness can transform a family’s ordinary calculations into lasting grief.

The episode also places Cromwell’s public world beside his private vulnerability. Around the time of the outbreak, he is engaged in political maneuvering and the struggle over Wolsey’s failing position; at home, however, the decisive question is whether his children can be kept safe. His will records obligations he can anticipate and arrange, while the deaths expose what those arrangements cannot control. The plague’s return is therefore both a domestic catastrophe and a limit placed on the confidence that planning, influence, and devotion can secure the future.