Snakes and serpents

Snakes and serpents in the novel are both creatures encountered in the world and figures through which people interpret ancestry, marriage, and political power. A legend of the serpent woman Melusine gives an obscure royal marriage a supernatural genealogy; a snake Thomas Cromwell handles in Italy becomes a remembered test of nerve. The images meet in Cromwell’s speculation about the royal bloodline, where myth competes with credit and practical power as an explanation of dynastic success.

Melusine and Royal Ancestry

Cardinal Wolsey tells Cromwell that King Edward IV’s choice of wife departed from the expected plan of a French marriage. One woman he might have married was Eleanor Talbot, said to descend through the female line from a woman who was a swan. But Edward’s eventual attachment, Wolsey says, was to the widow of a Lancastrian knight, whose claim to descend from Melusine mattered more than her beauty. Melusine, in the account, concealed her serpentine nature while living as an ordinary princess; when her husband saw her naked and discovered her hidden tail, she foretold that their children would found a dynasty of apparently unlimited power. She then vanished, leaving a story in which royal descent is bound to secrecy and a supernatural promise.

Wolsey applies the legend to the politics of marriage. Edward’s marriage brought a claim to the throne of Castile, while the three suns seen before his victory at Mortimer’s Cross could be read as a sign of the thrones of England, France, and Castile. Wolsey connects that interpretation to Henry VIII’s marriage to Katherine, presenting the king as ruler of three kingdoms through ancient rights. The serpentine story thus makes dynastic claims seem at once ancient and unstable: a marriage can carry power through inheritance, but the origins of that inheritance may be obscure, disputed, or fantastic.

Cromwell’s Snake in Italy

Cromwell recalls that he once picked up a snake in Italy for a bet. Wolsey asks whether it was poisonous and whether it bit him; Cromwell answers that it did, because otherwise there would be little of a story. The memory then expands into a narrated scene. Cromwell holds the snake while those around him count slowly to ten. It bites before the count is finished, but he keeps hold of it until the agreed moment and then sets it down. He collects his winnings and waits to die, but survives.

The incident becomes part of the account of Cromwell’s emergence as a formidable man. After surviving the bite, he is described as growing stronger and as quick to hide and strike; his reputation for blood before bargaining is said to make even military men fall back. The story does not establish that the snake gave him power. Instead, it places a dangerous encounter beside the traits through which he later operates: endurance, self-command, and a willingness to take risks while others watch.

From Royal Myth to Political Reading

In bed beside Liz, Cromwell retells the thought that the king’s grandfather married a serpent. He then reasons through disputed stories of Edward IV’s parentage: if Edward was not the Duke of York’s son, but was fathered by an English archer, and if his wife descended from a serpent woman, then the royal line could be imagined as a mixture of uncertain human and mythical origins. The passage presents this as Cromwell’s speculative reasoning, not as proof of either claim. Its point is the instability of lineage when political legitimacy depends on stories that cannot be securely verified.

That speculation is checked by the material account of power that follows. Cromwell thinks that Edward’s battles and conquests depended on Medici money and that letters of credit mattered more than signs and wonders. The contrast does not simply dismiss the supernatural story: it sets the serpent’s hidden ancestry beside the less fabulous but consequential support of Italian finance. Royal authority may be narrated through prophecy and descent, yet armies and campaigns also depend on credit.

A Motif Across Court and Household

The serpent story enters political conversation as both instruction and test. Wolsey urges Cromwell to look beneath what people present outwardly, since appearances conceal more than skin. Their discussion of Edward’s marriage and the Boleyn family leads Cromwell to ask whether he should know of hidden serpentine qualities among them. He is teasing Wolsey, but also asking for useful intelligence as he is left to watch the situation. The myth supplies a language of concealed ancestry and concealed purpose; the courtier’s task is to distinguish what matters from what is merely a story.

The animal image also appears in moments of political conflict. At a meeting about parliamentary maneuvering, the king’s councillors are compared to wolves snapping over a carcass and lions fighting over Christians. The comparison makes competition in government resemble predation, though it does not make the animals literal participants. Elsewhere, Cromwell’s remembered encounter with the snake gives his own reputation a related shape: he is associated with hiding, striking, and surviving. Together, the images make the serpent more than a symbol of royal descent. It is part of the novel’s vocabulary for concealed origins, dangerous knowledge, and political life in which apparent civility can coexist with the threat of attack.