New Year

New Year recurs as a threshold in Thomas Cromwell’s story, joining private grief to public business. Its celebrations and requests for gifts give way to prison petitions, household reckonings, and legislative work; the turn of the calendar offers no clean beginning, but makes visible what has been lost and what remains to be done.

Requests and reckonings

At the turn of the year, Cromwell asks Thomas Wolsey to give him Little Bilney, imprisoned in the Tower for a year. He reminds Wolsey that Bilney is timid and physically weak, and invokes the deaths of Sumner and Clerke, who had been locked in the cold cellars of Wolsey’s college and died there during the summer plague without a priest. Wolsey agrees to seek Bilney’s release on conditions: Bilney must return to Cambridge and abandon his plan to go to Rome to address the Pope. The request turns New Year’s gift-giving into an appeal for mercy, while the memory of the scholars’ deaths presses against Wolsey’s carefully qualified tolerance of religious debate.

On New Year’s Day, Cromwell works at his writing table on letters for Wolsey while moving counters across his counting board. The cardinal’s position has contracted sharply: York Place has been taken, Hampton Court is already gone, and the king is considering how to tax the bishopric of Winchester. Into this strained evening comes Gregory, who tries to help by stacking his father’s papers and arranging the counters. Cromwell notices, perhaps for the first time since Gregory was a baby, that his son’s hands have become those of a gentleman’s son. The household’s quiet exchange offers a measure of continuity amid the collapse of Wolsey’s former wealth and power.

The household and its absences

The New Year season also recalls the family’s Epiphany celebrations. In earlier years Cromwell and Liz planned costumes for the Three Kings, gathering unusual cloth; Liz secretly sewed new robes and crowns, while Cromwell chose the gifts to place in the kings’ boxes. One year a king dropped his casket in shock when the gift began to sing. After Liz’s death, the household cannot bring itself to hang the star. Cromwell visits it in storage, removes its protective canvas sleeves to check that its rays are unchipped and unfaded, then returns to the packed robes, sheepskins, crooks, and dusty angel’s wings. His care for these things preserves the shape of a family ritual even when he cannot imagine its return.

After closing the storeroom, Cromwell gives Johane the key and tells her he wishes there were a baby in the house. Their exchange turns abruptly intimate: he asks whether her husband, John Williamson, does his duty by her, and she answers that his duty is not her pleasure. As Cromwell walks away, he recognizes that the question was one he should not have asked. The season’s longing for new life is therefore joined to a boundary he has crossed in conversation, not to any promised resolution.

A political turning point

In the winter of 1529–spring 1530, the New Year frame gives way to Cromwell’s effort to secure a seat in Parliament. Rafe Sadler has obtained him Taunton, in territory shaped by Wolsey’s influence; Cromwell understands that entry depended on the king’s assent and Thomas Howard’s. Rafe reports that Howard believes Wolsey has buried treasure and suspects Cromwell knows where it is. Howard may seek to employ him, while Cromwell remains with Wolsey at Esher and insists through his actions that he will not simply forsake the cardinal. The new year thus opens not with a settled allegiance but with political choices made under pressure from rival patrons.

The calendar’s turn also structures a later account of parliamentary change. In spring 1532, Parliament meets as Cromwell and his allies work through the night on amendments to a petition challenging the jurisdiction and even the existence of church courts. The Commons considers legislation against payments to Rome; Cromwell proposes a division of the House so that members must show openly whether they support or oppose the bill. The king watches who stands on each side. In the Lords, the tactic does not suffice, and Henry must argue his case in person. The New Year’s threshold has become a political one: debate and procedure help identify opposition and build the means for royal authority to act.

Renewal as unfinished work

In 1534, during the convivial days between Christmas and New Year, Cromwell rereads Marsiglio of Padua before bringing selected propositions to Henry VIII after Epiphany. He argues that Christ did not establish papal rule, that priests remain subjects, and that secular authority governs matters such as marriage and legitimacy. He also presents Parliament as the body through which the people’s will gives a king his kingship, while reassuring Henry that Marsiglio’s argument does not license rebellion against a monarch who rules within the law. The calendar marks a return to courtly business, but the substance is a contest over the foundations of jurisdiction and royal power.

Across these episodes, New Year does not erase what has come before. It gathers the dead, the absent, and the politically defeated into moments that demand another action: a request for Bilney, an attempt to sustain a family ritual, a decision about patronage, or a new argument before the king. Its recurring force lies in that tension between renewal and persistence. The year changes; the consequences of earlier choices remain, and Cromwell must carry them into whatever comes next.