Art of memory

The Art of memory is a method of fixing knowledge in the mind by attaching words and figures to vivid images placed in an ordered landscape. Thomas Cromwell learned it in Italy and uses it to retain the stages of his own past, to retrieve information, and to populate an inner world where political calculation and private memory meet. The novel extends the method beyond a tool of recall: its images and locations offer a model for how history is assembled, preserved, and repeatedly encountered.

Origins and the story of Simonides

Cromwell’s method is introduced alongside the classical story of Simonides, a poet invited to recite at a banquet hosted by Scopas. Simonides included verses in praise of Castor and Pollux as well as his host; Scopas, displeased, said he would pay only half the fee and that Simonides should seek the rest from the Heavenly Twins. Shortly afterward, two young men were reported to be waiting outside for the poet. Simonides left the hall to find them, but saw no one.

As he turned back toward dinner, the roof collapsed. Simonides alone survived. The dead were too disfigured for their relatives to identify, but he could point each family to the right person by recalling where each guest had been seated. The account, attributed in the novel to Cicero, makes the seating plan the foundation of a memory art: Simonides linked names to places because he remembered the arrangement of the banquet and the people within it. The method arises from an act of witness, making memory not only a private capacity but a means of restoring identities after catastrophe.

Images placed in a mental landscape

Cromwell’s version depends on deliberate invention. Ordinary objects and familiar faces are not distinctive enough to secure recall; instead, the practitioner devises unusual, ridiculous, or indecorous combinations, then places them in selected locations. Each image holds a parcel of words or figures that can be recovered when needed. The method turns the mind into an ordered gallery: information is not left as an undifferentiated mass, but stored by association and position.

The images can be drawn from fields and hedgerows, or made from animals and fantastic creatures, including griffins and dragons. Religious and classical figures may carry incongruous objects: St Ursula a crossbow, St Jerome a scythe, Plato a soup ladle, and Achilles a bowl of damsons. Locations anchor the images too. A shaven cat might peer from behind a cupboard at Greenwich; a snake might look down from a beam at the palace of Westminster. Some figures lie flat, others seem to move about the room, and some speak or make animal noises. Cromwell keeps them in strict order in the gallery of his mind’s eye.

This structured strangeness is functional. The more peculiar the image, the more readily it can be distinguished from its neighbors and retrieved with the words or figures attached to it. The system therefore joins imaginative freedom to disciplined arrangement: invention supplies memorable images, while location and sequence make them usable. Its imagined inhabitants include figures resembling Norfolk or Suffolk, as well as animals and hybrid beings, so the gallery can accommodate political as well as abstract knowledge.

From recall to political use

The technique belongs to Cromwell’s practical life as well as his imagination. When his position feels irretrievable and he considers going after Wolsey, a prayer book held in his arms and a problem of household accounts redirect his attention toward action. The scene identifies the memory system as part of his capacity to retrace how he reached the present; recall is not detached from decisions about what to do next. The mind that can retain a sequence of past stages can also organize obligations and plan for a possible political restoration.

The novel also places the art beside the storage of political intelligence. Cromwell describes his memory in terms of a large ledger or filing system, recording people both by name and by offence. That image is not identical to the elaborate gallery of animals and classical figures, but it shares the same principle: information is retained through classification and made available for later use. In this sense, memory serves not only personal reflection but the administration of power, preserving the record of those who have crossed him.

A related episode concerns the sack of Rome. Cromwell recalls reports that it had been foretold ten years earlier by noises of battle heard in the air and underground. He had not been in Rome to hear them, and the account reaches him through a chain of reported witnesses. Set beside his carefully designed memory images, this story marks a limit as well as a use: a system can preserve and arrange what is received, but it does not remove uncertainty about how knowledge was acquired.

Memory, grief, and the novel’s form

Cromwell’s mind is crowded with images because he has trained himself to make them. The method also gives a form to grief. He repeatedly glimpses the image of his dead wife, Liz, in a stairwell or around a corner at Austin Friars or Stepney. The memory is not simply summoned as part of an orderly exercise; it intrudes upon the places where he lives. As the image begins to merge with that of Johane, he tries to stop the overlap and scrub the image from his mind. The same imaginative faculty that helps him preserve and retrieve information can therefore make personal loss recur, and can blur distinctions he wishes to keep clear.

The Art of memory also appears as an idea under discussion at court. At a gathering where Anne performs as Maid Marian, Nikolaus Kratzer considers the comet and questions whether celestial signs must portend the fall of nations rather than their rise. His astronomical calculations and Cromwell’s memory practice belong to a shared world in which knowledge depends on reading signs, yet the novel distinguishes the tasks: one interprets the heavens, while the other constructs places in the mind to hold information. Both make the unseen legible through patterns.

The subject returns in the conversation about Guido Camillo’s wooden theatre, described as a system of nested shelves and drawers for remembering Cicero’s speeches. Cromwell explains a larger ambition: the owner stands at the centre, looking up at an ordered arrangement of human knowledge, like a library whose books contain smaller books within them. The theatre is more than a mnemonic device; it makes knowledge spatial and places the knower inside the structure being surveyed. Later, the image of a book containing another book, with further volumes unfolding within letters and pages, carries the same logic toward an impossible-seeming compression: knowledge held in a picture, a sign, or a place that is no place.

Across these episodes, memory is both a subject and a principle of narrative design. Images attach the past to locations; those locations make fragments retrievable, but they also expose how recollection can be selective, reported, or involuntary. Cromwell’s mental gallery holds political records and personal returns together, while the nested theatre imagines the world’s knowledge as an ordered space. The art promises command over what has been seen, yet the recurring image of Liz shows that memory’s contents do not always remain under command.