Fortune and the Turn of Power

Fortune and the Turn of Power describes the novel’s recurring vision of authority as unstable: a great man can be pulled down as readily as he was raised, while a successor waits to occupy the place he leaves. The river journey after Cardinal Wolsey’s fall gives that idea its clearest image, as public hostility, private grief, and the competition for access to Henry VIII converge. Elsewhere, new laws, appointments, and claims to legitimacy show that political change is not simply a wheel turning: it is made through human calculation and institutional action.

Wolsey’s fall and the fickleness of the crowd

On the journey from London to Putney, Thomas Cromwell and George Cavendish accompany Wolsey aboard his barge. The cardinal’s flags are flying, but the crowd gathered along the bank greets him with boos, threats, and obscene gestures. Wolsey had expected goodwill from the people whose trades he had promoted and whom, he says, he had tried to help in times of scarcity. He remembers pleading with the king to spare apprentices after a riot, even as they stood wearing the nooses intended for their execution. Now, after fifteen years as Chancellor and twenty years in the king’s service, he hears the crowd’s hostility as an accusation that his efforts have counted for nothing.

Cavendish offers a bleak explanation: people desire change for its own sake, and cannot bear to see a great man remain raised. Cromwell answers that the desire is human rather than uniquely English; people always hope that something better may come. Cavendish’s counter-image makes the hope more troubling: one dog, sated with meat, is replaced by a hungrier dog that bites nearer the bone. The metaphor refuses to make succession a simple renewal. The newcomer may be less restrained, not more just, and the displacement of a powerful figure does not guarantee improvement for anyone beneath him.

The scene turns public politics into an intimate reckoning. As the barge moves upriver, Wolsey weeps and grips Cromwell’s hand painfully. Cromwell imagines the passengers as figures in an allegory of Fortune: the fallen magnate at the centre, Cavendish beside him as a belated counsellor, and Cromwell himself in the place of a tempter. The imagery exposes his own proximity to the change he is observing. He considers how easily he might push Cavendish overboard, then recognizes that the old servant’s platitudes contain an uncomfortable truth. Wolsey’s authority has diminished, but his dependence on Cromwell, and Cromwell’s dependence on the shifting court, are still palpable.

Successors, patronage, and the uncertain court

The dog-and-bone image becomes political analysis when Cromwell thinks about Stephen Gardiner. Gardiner, once formed in Wolsey’s service, has been promoted to Henry’s private secretary. The transfer is part of a familiar pattern: the cardinal’s cultivated servants move into the king’s household, carrying with them skills learned under their former master. Yet Gardiner’s new position places him unusually close to the king, and therefore makes him a possible rival to Cromwell. The court’s changing fortunes are not abstract cycles: they pass through appointments, service, and control of access to the monarch.

Cromwell’s own position is correspondingly provisional. In the winter of 1529–30, Rafe Sadler reports that the Duke of Norfolk believes Wolsey has hidden treasure and thinks Cromwell knows where it is. Norfolk also appears ready to recruit him. Cromwell goes to see Wolsey at Esher rather than abandon his former master, then encounters Norfolk at Blackfriars, where the duke presents himself as a possible new patron. The episode places competing loyalties beside practical calculation: Cromwell must read Norfolk’s intentions without pretending that the old relationship with Wolsey has ceased to matter.

Later, Anne Boleyn tests Cromwell’s usefulness and allegiance. She knows that he has spent money on Wolsey and points out that those who received grants from the cardinal’s lands might be expected to show gratitude. Cromwell describes his compensation as a conveyancer’s fee; privately, he notices the wealth and lack of gratitude among the Boleyn family. Anne suggests that he works for himself, while Cromwell recognizes an affinity between them without saying so aloud. The exchange shows political advancement as a negotiation over information, money, and trust, not a clean transfer from one settled faction to another.

Fortune written into dynastic memory

Wolsey’s account of England’s past gives political reversals a longer and more violent reach. He recalls murdered kings, the vanished sons of Edward IV, and the repeated dangers posed by rival claimants. He tells Cromwell how Henry VII brought the White Rose out of the Tower and had him executed after the Spanish royal family demanded action against the chief Plantagenet claimant. The story makes the survival of a dynasty depend on recurring acts of violence: there will always be another claimant, Wolsey says, and therefore a renewed demand for killing. In this account, the rise of one royal house does not end instability; it stores up the possibility of a fresh challenge.

The past also shapes the fears of the living. Wolsey explains that the Duke of Norfolk’s family lost its dukedom after fighting on the losing side at Bosworth, and had to labor for years to recover it. That inherited memory, he suggests, helps explain why the present Norfolk trembles when Henry is angry: favor can be withdrawn at a ruler’s whim, and a family that has once fallen knows what is at stake. Dynastic fortune thus reaches beyond individual ambition, binding present conduct to remembered dispossession.

The novel also places claims to power inside arguments about law and legitimacy. In 1531, Katherine of Aragon insists that she remains queen and recounts the stages of her life in England, from being called Princess of Wales at three to her marriage to Arthur and later queenship. Her insistence contests the political effort to redefine her position. At the same meeting, Mary Tudor asks whether what has been defined can be redefined; Cromwell concedes that nothing is irrevocable. The formulation makes political status appear both legally constructed and vulnerable to revision, while Katherine’s experience of earlier poverty gives the prospect of renewed humiliation a personal weight.

From personal turnover to institutional change

By 1532, the question of who holds power extends beyond rival courtiers to the terms on which England is governed. Cromwell works with Rafe and Thomas Wriothesley through the night on amendments to a Commons petition challenging the jurisdiction of the church courts. He also proposes a division of the House on a bill to suspend payments of annates to Rome, allowing Henry to see which members support the measure. In the Lords, where that tactic will not suffice, the king must argue his case in person. Political change advances through parliamentary procedure, royal pressure, and the identification of opponents—not simply through the replacement of one court favorite by another.

In 1534, Cromwell brings Henry propositions from Marsiglio of Padua, arguing that Christ did not establish papal rule and that priests, like other people, are subjects of the state. The argument assigns civil government and legislation to the prince and locates the king’s authority in a legislative body acting for the people. It also turns church wealth into a question of public use. Henry goes further than Cromwell initially intended, suggesting that shrines could be broken and their riches taken. The scene dramatizes how a political opening can enlarge as ruler and adviser act upon it: an argument about jurisdiction and authority begins to authorize material dispossession.

Cromwell’s dealings with Thomas More later reveal the limit of that parliamentary logic. Richard Riche reports More’s distinction between temporal authority, which Parliament can alter, and spiritual jurisdiction, which More believes lies outside the realm. Cromwell recognizes that More has not plainly stated a denial of Parliament’s power, and that the exchange could be presented as an abstract argument rather than treason. Nevertheless, the conversation can be made politically dangerous by how it is recorded and interpreted. The struggle over power therefore turns not only on what a law declares but on who can define the meaning and consequences of speech.

The meaning of the turn

Across these episodes, fortune is neither a supernatural force with a fixed moral ledger nor a promise that every fallen ruler will be replaced by a better one. Wolsey’s fall brings grief and public mockery; his former servants rise through the channels he helped create; and the king’s policies make old ecclesiastical and political arrangements newly vulnerable. The same court that can elevate a servant can threaten his livelihood, while the same legal machinery that recognizes parliamentary authority can be used to turn a disputed conversation into evidence against a man.

The recurring motif’s force lies in holding two kinds of change together. There is the intimate reversal—the hand that once commanded now clinging to Cromwell’s—and the structural one, in which authority migrates through offices, laws, and claims to jurisdiction. People hope for something better, but the arrival of a hungrier successor remains possible; institutions can constrain power, yet they can also carry it farther. The turn of fortune is therefore not a conclusion but a condition of political life, demanding attention to who is rising, what has enabled the rise, and who may pay for it.