Christmas

Christmas in the novel is more than a date in the court calendar: it is a recurring test of loyalty, political fortune, and household memory. From the court festivities of 1521 to a later Christmas without songs or plays at Austin Friars, its ceremonies and familiar objects register both the promise of advancement and the accumulated cost of loss. For Thomas Cromwell, the season’s public spectacle repeatedly gives way to private remembrance.

Courtly celebration and political promise

At Christmas 1521, the court welcomes the young Anne Boleyn, who appears dancing in a yellow dress. She is about twenty, the daughter of Thomas Boleyn, and has spent her youth at the Burgundian court and in France. Her arrival is not merely a festive episode: the narration places it before the political ruin that will make the cardinal attend to her history, and presents her early court presence as the beginning of a consequential story. Christmas thus opens onto the ambitions and rivalries that will shape the years ahead.

In a later, rain-soaked summer, the court’s daily rhythms make a different kind of promise. Henry VIII and the cardinal exchange remedies for their illnesses; the king sets aside state business when he sneezes, and hopes for music or a stroll if the rain lets up. Anne sometimes withdraws with him in the afternoon, while, in the evenings, she reads the Bible and points out scriptural commendations. After supper Henry worries that the King of France and the Emperor are laughing at him, then sleeps heavily and alone. By daylight, he has recovered his optimism and believes his cause hopeful. The passage sets romantic longing and royal confidence against diplomatic anxiety, while the cardinal continues working through his own illness.

The Christmas song at court turns loyalty into a seasonal refrain. Its speaker compares constancy to holly that remains green through winter, singing of fidelity to a lady while ivy stands alongside the holly. The repeated image offers a language of steadfastness at a moment when political attachments are anything but secure. The song’s return to greenery and endurance also gives the later domestic Christmas scenes a counterpoint: a cherished ideal of constancy persists in verse even as the people and household traditions that sustained it are lost.

Bereavement at Austin Friars

By another Christmas, the cardinal is at Esher, ill in bed and convinced that the king and Anne’s New Year kisses will keep danger at bay until Twelfth Night. He turns toward Cromwell and vehemently sends him home. At Austin Friars, the household is decorated with holly, ivy, laurel, and ribboned yew, but the kitchen omits its usual songs and Christmas plays. No year has brought such devastation. The seasonal greenery remains, yet the performances that would make the house feel alive have stopped.

Cromwell’s losses reach across both his immediate family and his sister’s household. His sister Kat and her husband, Morgan Williams, have died, as have his daughters. The passage remembers the speed of those deaths: people who had been walking and talking one day are, the next, cold and buried in graves beside the Thames. Its account of the dead is bound to the details of a world they can no longer experience—the bell at Putney, the smell of ink, hops and malted barley, wool bales, pine resin, apple candles, and soul cakes. Christmas belongs to this sensory life as much as to formal observance, and bereavement makes its ordinary surroundings newly painful.

Two orphans, Richard and the child Walter, are added to Cromwell’s house as the year ends. Remembering Kat, he recalls that she could no longer understand him, and that she had told him she could never add him up. The remark touches the limits of the education and practical care he had given her: he had taught her to count on her fingers and work out a tradesman’s bill, yet she could not make sense of the brother he had become. Christmas brings the children into the household, but does not repair the rupture death has made in it.

The star and the absent pageant

The family’s Epiphany customs had once depended on planning throughout the year. From summer, Cromwell and his wife, Liz, gathered unusual cloth and trimmings for the Three Kings’ costumes. From October, Liz secretly sewed new shining panels onto the robes, quilted shoulders, weighted hems, and devised fantastical crowns. Cromwell devised the gifts to go inside the kings’ boxes; one year, a casket had begun to sing and startled its bearer. These preparations made the celebration a work shared between husband and wife, extending Christmas backward through months of anticipation.

That year, nobody can bear to hang the large gilded star in the great hall. Cromwell visits it in its dark store room, removes the canvas sleeves covering its rays, and checks that they are not chipped or faded. The care he gives the unused star preserves the possibility of a future celebration, although he cannot imagine that future. Nearby, the Three Kings’ robes are packed away with the children’s sheepskins; shepherds’ crooks lean in a corner, and angel wings hang dusty from a peg. He lifts the wings, gently shakes them, and hangs them back. The pageant survives as stored objects, carefully handled but no longer animated by the family who made it.

His conversation with Johane turns the dormant costumes toward another kind of absence. He tells her he wishes there were a baby in the house, then asks whether her husband, John Williamson, still performs his duty. Johane replies that duty is not pleasure; as he walks away, Cromwell recognizes that he should not have had the conversation. The scene does not turn the wish into a new family arrangement. Instead, it places his longing for a baby beside the silent props of the children’s pageant and the lives already lost.

Stories told by the fire

Christmas also returns through recollection. When Gregory asks his father whether he remembers the parish pageant’s giant, Cromwell remembers the line the performer spoke: “I am a giant, my name is Marlinspike.” Gregory asks about the Cornhill maypole, and Cromwell explains that it was taken down in the year of the riots, Evil May Day, when Gregory was still a baby. A question about the pageant therefore opens onto a public disturbance and a piece of the city’s past, linking domestic memory to political history.

Gregory recalls another Christmas when he played a devil, his face dyed black and his body wrapped in black calfskin. Cromwell remembers that Anne had wanted the same treatment, but her mother had thought it unsuitable for a girl. He wishes he had insisted that Anne have a turn as a parish angel, even if she had to wear one of the parish’s sideways-slipping yellow wigs. His memory registers a small missed opportunity in the language of a father reconsidering what he once allowed or withheld.

Grace’s angel costume is remembered in more vivid detail. Cromwell had made her wings from peacock feathers while the other girls wore ungainly goose costumes whose wings caught on stable corners. Grace glittered with silver thread in her hair, and the shifting feathers seemed to give her a perfumed, rustling presence. Liz told her to move away from the fire lest the wings catch alight. Grace backed into shadow and climbed the stairs in her plumes; Cromwell followed, afraid of fire and of an unnamed danger. The memory ends not in festive wonder but in the knowledge that Grace has died. He thinks that at least he will never have to give her to a husband for her dowry, then wishes that Grace and Anne were alive—and imagines Anne promised to Rafe Sadler, if she were older and he younger. The remembered pageant becomes inseparable from the future that death has made impossible.

Public revels and private mourning

At the beginning of 1530, Cromwell does not hold an Epiphany feast. People who know of the cardinal’s disgrace might feel obliged to refuse his invitation, so he takes the young men to Gray’s Inn for the Twelfth Night revels instead. What follows is a mocking play about the cardinal’s fall: he flees York Place by barge, is pursued by students with nets and fishing rods, and is shown floundering in mud at Putney on the way to Esher. The comedy turns a fallen statesman’s humiliation into a spectacle for the legal community. Cromwell rises, displeased, and his household has to leave with him; outside, laughter from the hall follows them.

The walk home puts the revels back in their seasonal setting. Bone rattles, torches, hobby horses, and men wearing antlers fill the night; costumed boys dressed as an orange and a lemon greet Gregory courteously, and he answers before telling the lemon to send his father about a lease. The ordinary business of property and household relations continues amid the noise of the holiday. At home, Cromwell sends the young men to bed and sits alone at his work table, where the memory of Grace’s peacock wings replaces the public spectacle.

The novel’s Christmases therefore hold two kinds of performance in tension. At court, the season offers song, display, and a language of loyal constancy; at Gray’s Inn, festive play can degrade a fallen cardinal into a grotesque figure. In Cromwell’s household, the star, costumes, and children’s roles carry the record of shared labor and family life, while their silence marks bereavement. The return of these seasonal customs does not restore what has vanished. Instead, each Christmas makes the gap between remembered celebration and present loss more visible.