Epiphany

Epiphany is the Christian feast that gives the novel one of its most revealing annual rhythms: a season of welcome, household ceremony, and communal festivity that becomes painfully difficult to sustain amid political disgrace and bereavement. Through Thomas Cromwell’s preparations, memories, and refusals, the feast marks both the persistence of ritual and the way private and public life are altered by the cardinal’s fall.

Household Ritual and Its Absence

At Austin Friars, the household traditionally welcomes its Epiphany guests beneath a large gilded star hung in the great hall on New Year’s Eve. The preparations begin months earlier. Thomas and Liz collect unusual cloth and trimmings for the Three Kings’ costumes; from October, Liz secretly sews new shining panels onto the robes, quilts a shoulder, weights a hem, and devises fantastical crowns. Thomas plans the gifts placed in the kings’ boxes. One year, a casket’s gift sings so unexpectedly that a king drops it in shock. The pageant is not merely a decoration for the feast: it is a work of shared invention, repeated and improved by the household.

That year, however, the family cannot bring itself to hang the star. Thomas visits it in its dark storeroom, removes the protective canvas sleeves, and checks that its rays remain unchipped and unfaded. The costumes, children’s sheepskins, shepherds’ crooks, and angel’s wings are still there, but the wings have gathered dust. He gently shakes them, then hangs them back and gives the key to Johane. He imagines that better years may come, though he cannot picture them. The preserved objects hold the shape of a future ritual even as grief prevents its performance.

Mourning, Memory, and Continuity

The absent feast belongs to a year of extraordinary loss. At Christmas, the household has holly, ivy, laurel, and ribboned yew, but omits its usual songs and plays. Kat Cromwell and Morgan Williams have died, as have Thomas’s daughters; the family’s two new orphans, Richard and Walter, join a house that has lost many of its children. The contrast between festive greenery and the dead is sharp: seasonal customs continue in altered form, while the family cannot summon the spirit that once animated them.

Epiphany nevertheless remains a store of memory. Thomas recalls earlier Christmas plays in which Gregory appeared as a devil in blackened face and calfskin, and Grace shone as an angel with peacock-feather wings that he had contrived for her. These recollections connect the feast’s material ingenuity to the children who once embodied its roles. Their costumes are more than props: they make the vanished household visible to him, while their storage records the interruption of its customary life.

Public Revels and Political Reversal

As 1530 begins, Thomas does not hold an Epiphany feast. Many people, aware of Wolsey’s disgrace, would feel compelled to refuse his invitation. Instead, he takes the young men of his household to the Twelfth Night revels at Gray’s Inn, where the law students stage the cardinal’s downfall as a farce. Their play sends Wolsey from York Place to his barge, through a mock Thames made of dyed sheets, and on to a muddy flight toward Esher. Students portray the cardinal flailing and praying, while others, under donkey skins, make his mule turn and joke in Latin. The performance reduces a fallen prelate to a body mocked for mud, bodily indignity, and sexual wordplay.

Thomas finds the spectacle cruel rather than witty. He rises and leaves with his household, then rebukes the benchers for permitting the students to attack a great man who has fallen on evil times and whose favour, only weeks before, they would have sought. His protest cannot quiet the laughter still rolling out of the hall. The scene turns the festive license of the season into a political image: the hierarchy that once commanded respect can be publicly inverted, while those who resist the mockery cannot restore the former order.

The Feast as a Measure of Change

The novel sets private celebration against the political theatre unfolding around it. Elsewhere, the celebration of Anne Boleyn’s advancement and the great river procession that brings her to London display authority through spectacle, ceremony, music, banners, and crowds. Those public occasions can still be organized and made magnificent; at Austin Friars, the family’s own star remains unlit. The contrast makes the household’s silence a measure of how political change reaches into domestic life.

The feast also sits beside the novel’s account of power as something made through precise performance. In Parliament, Thomas has members physically divide to show their positions on the bill suspending annates to Rome; the king watches and learns who supports him. Such political procedure, like a carefully prepared household pageant, turns actions into legible signs for an audience. But the revels at Gray’s Inn expose the danger in spectacle: a performance can make a fallen man ridiculous, and festive spectatorship can become a means of punishment. Epiphany thus gathers together ritual, memory, and political reversal without promising that repetition can undo loss.