Purgatory

Purgatory is the imagined state or place in which the dead undergo a term of suffering before entering glory, and in the novel it becomes a charged meeting point for grief, religious belief, and institutional power. Thomas Cromwell cannot settle what scripture says about it, yet the prospect that his dead wife and daughters remain there shapes his prayers, his household’s arguments, and his dealings with the Church. The doctrine offers hope that the dead may be helped; at the same time, the question of who can grant that help becomes part of the struggle between papal and royal authority.

Doctrine, scripture, and translation

After the deaths of his daughters, Cromwell thinks of them as being in Purgatory, a place of slow fires and ridged ice. The image brings no assurance: he asks where the Gospels speak of Purgatory, setting the doctrine against the textual authority claimed for the vernacular Scriptures. William Tyndale’s wording that love is the greatest of faith, hope, and love stands in contrast to Thomas More’s insistence on the word “charity.” Cromwell imagines More willing to punish a translator over a difference in Greek. Translation is therefore more than a matter of vocabulary: it can mark a boundary between permissible belief and heresy, even as Cromwell wonders whether the dead, once beyond earthly life, might know what they need without translators at all.

The uncertainty does not make the doctrine emotionally irrelevant. On All Hallows’ Eve, Cromwell keeps vigil alone, as he and Liz had once prayed with their parish for the dead in their families: Liz’s father Henry Wykys, her first husband Thomas Williams, Cromwell’s father Walter Cromwell, and relatives whose names have faded from memory. He thinks of Liz as able to find him at Esher, where he is with Thomas Wolsey, drawn by the prayers, candles, and incense. In the morning, grief remains, though he does not believe that the dead return. Holding Liz’s prayer book, he feels the remembered presence of his daughter Grace in the imprint of her fingers and turns through the offices and illuminated scenes. The book makes prayer tangible without resolving what happens to the dead.

The dead within the household

The prayer book gathers several losses into one object. Grace had liked to look at it; its pages depict the Annunciation, the Visitation, the Nativity, the Magi, and the deaths of infants. As Cromwell reaches the image of a child killed by Herod, its painted tears blur before his eyes. George Cavendish finds him crying and mistakes his distress for concern about Wolsey. Cromwell tells him instead that he is crying for himself and for the losses that seem to gather around him. In that moment, the book is at once a devotional object, a reminder of his wife and children, and a private means of giving grief a form that another person cannot fully see.

The household’s children turn that private grief into a request. More than two years after Liz’s death, Alice and Jo ask Cromwell to write to Wolsey and ask him to appeal to the Pope to release their aunt from Purgatory. They distinguish Liz’s case from those of Cromwell’s daughters: Anne had been proud of her arithmetic and had said she was learning Greek, while Grace had been vain of her hair and claimed to have wings. The children reason that the girls may have to suffer longer, but that the cardinal might still try to help. Their request treats prayer, papal authority, and patronage as connected means of intercession.

Cromwell brings the children to Mercy and Johane so that they can explain their appeal themselves. Their conversation reveals a household divided over doctrine: Jo asks for Liz’s release, while Mercy argues that the Pope is not the only authority on the dead or the sacraments. The children’s hope that the Pope might enter the underworld with a bunch of keys meets a more radical disagreement over what priests can claim to do. Cromwell stops the quarrel and reassures the children that they have done nothing wrong. He offers them presents, but their request has already exposed the difficulty of directing a household in which belief is not uniform.

Intercession and competing authority

The children’s appeal rests on the idea that the Pope can act on behalf of souls in Purgatory. They suppose that Wolsey, once powerful and still connected to the Pope, might obtain a favorable intervention. Jo even imagines that the cardinal writes to the Pope every day and could send him money for his trouble, repeating Mercy’s view that papal action comes at a price. Their childlike scheme is also a practical account of religious authority: access to the dead appears to depend on access to powerful intermediaries.

That domestic belief sits beside the political contest over jurisdiction. When Katherine of Aragon says she prays to shorten Wolsey’s term in Purgatory, the doctrine remains present in a conversation shaped by her opposition to the king’s actions and her loyalty to the Church. Later, she insists that there is no salvation outside the Church and warns that even kings come to judgment. Cromwell answers from the other side of the divide: the king’s authority over the English Church is presented as a position that can be defined and renegotiated, while Katherine maintains that legitimate spiritual authority lies beyond the realm. Purgatory is not itself the subject of their political dispute, but the question of the Church’s authority over salvation gives their conflict its deeper stakes.

Belief amid political change

The novel places devotional practice alongside political and administrative work rather than separating sacred belief from worldly affairs. Cromwell can grieve for his dead and still turn, with George Cavendish, to the practical question of how to pay Wolsey’s household servants. His response to the children likewise moves between religious conflict and household management: he hears their petition, contains the dispute, and offers gifts. These actions do not show that he has resolved the theological question. They show him acting amid beliefs that cannot be made to agree.

The wider political order is changing by means of laws, offices, and public ceremonies, while the dead remain beyond the reach of ordinary proof. The doctrine promises a passage from suffering to glory and gives survivors a reason to pray, but the novel withholds certainty about what the dead know or require. Cromwell’s question about translators leaves that uncertainty open. The result is a concept that functions both as a belief about the afterlife and as a measure of earthly authority: people seek help for the dead through forms of intercession, while disputes about who can offer it reflect the larger struggle between the Church, the Pope, and the Crown.