All Souls' Day

All Souls’ Day is the November observance on which the novel sets a household appeal to remember the dead and intercede for them. It coincides with the anniversary of Thomas Wolsey’s fall from power, joining public political loss to private grief and turning a religious day of remembrance into a test of changing belief at Austin Friars.

The Day and Its Political Anniversary

The scene takes place on All Souls’ Day, which Norfolk marks as November again. A year has passed since he and Suffolk entered York Place, demanded Wolsey’s chain of office, and forced him from his home. The date thus carries the memory of a political reversal: the cardinal who had been at the centre of royal power is now absent, and the men who displaced him meet amid the consequences of that change.

The political discussion turns to the succession. Norfolk dismisses Mary Tudor as too young and physically unsuited to rule, while Cromwell answers that her ability to govern would depend on her advisers and marriage. Their argument makes the day’s concerns about the dead resonate with anxieties about who will inherit the future. In the same conversation, Cromwell recalls the story of Edmund Mody, the low-born man who supposedly pulled a Tudor king from a ditch; the recollection gives his interest in humble origins a pointed place among the gentlemen debating royal legitimacy.

A Petition for the Dead

After the political gathering, Alice and Jo approach Cromwell with Bella on a pink silk ribbon. They ask him to write to Wolsey, and have Wolsey ask the Pope, to release Cromwell’s late wife, Liz, from Purgatory. Their request is direct and practical: Cromwell has served the cardinal, they reason, so Wolsey might help; and the Pope, they suppose, still favours the cardinal. Jo further imagines that the cardinal might send money to secure the favour.

Cromwell asks why the children seek help for Liz but not for his sister Kat and his daughters. Alice and Jo answer by distinguishing the dead according to their imagined merits and failings: they think the children have not been in Purgatory as long, but that Anne Cromwell’s pride in her arithmetic and Greek, and Grace Cromwell’s vanity about her hair and claim to have wings, might mean they suffer more. The children’s reasoning makes the doctrine tangible, even as it reveals how they have absorbed adult ideas about sin, punishment, and intercession.

Cromwell does not dismiss their appeal. He tells them to come with him and brings them to Mercy and Johane, so they can explain their request themselves. Jo begins to cry, and Alice speaks for them. Their small embassy gives the day’s remembrance a domestic form: grief for the dead becomes a request for action, framed through the religious practices the children have been taught.

Belief Divided Under One Roof

The appeal opens into an argument about the Pope, Purgatory, and the sacrament. Cromwell is startled that the children believe the Pope can enter the underworld with keys, while Richard denies the sacrament. Mercy supports Richard’s reading, arguing that Christ’s words mean the bread signifies his body, not that priests have been given power to perform a marvel. Cromwell counters that Christ said it is his body, not that it is like his body; Alice replies that God can do anything. Johane calls her a little minx, and the dispute threatens to become a family quarrel before Cromwell asks them not to fight.

The scene places incompatible accounts of religious authority side by side without resolving them. The children’s hope for intercession depends on beliefs that other members of the household now question; the same household contains disagreement over the sacrament, papal power, and the meaning of scripture. Cromwell describes Austin Friars as a miniature world, more like a battlefield than a settled home. All Souls’ Day therefore gathers together the book’s larger conflict between inherited religious practice and emerging reform, while showing that the conflict reaches into the language of family grief.

Memory, Grief, and Change

The day’s remembrance is sharpened by its two losses. The anniversary recalls Wolsey’s political humiliation, while the children’s petition recalls Liz, Anne, and Grace as members of Cromwell’s family. The living try to speak for the dead through familiar religious structures, but those structures are no longer shared by everyone in the room. What begins as a request to help a beloved aunt becomes evidence of a household changing faster than its members can agree on what the dead require.

All Souls’ Day is thus more than a calendar marker. It binds the memory of a fallen minister to the continuing grief of a family, and sets remembrance against a Reformation-era uncertainty about Purgatory, papal intercession, and the sacrament. The scene ends not with a settled doctrine but with Cromwell trying to prevent a fight: the day gives the household a common reason to remember, not a common way to believe.