Thomas Cromwell—Grace Cromwell

Thomas Cromwell’s relationship with Grace Cromwell is a story of paternal affection shadowed by absence: illness takes Grace while she is still young, and her father’s grief is sharpened by the knowledge that he had not fully known her. After her death, memories of her childhood, her name in a copybook, and possibilities that can no longer be realized become enduring measures of his loss.

Family Life and Distance

When Grace returns to London at the end of summer, sun has bleached her hair. Cromwell wonders whether she now associates him with the night he carried her to bed after learning that her mother had died. The episode suggests that their closeness exists alongside uncertainty: he worries about what she remembers of him, rather than assuming that his place in her life is secure.

The household’s affection for Cromwell becomes clearer when Mercy challenges his decision about whether the girls should leave the city during the sickness. She tells him that Anne cries when she does not see him and asks whether he thinks his children do not love him. Her intervention prompts him to let the girls stay at home, a choice she later considers mistaken when illness reaches the household. The account places his paternal care within the limits of what he can know or control.

Illness and Loss

Anne falls ill first. Mercy and Johane try to keep her awake, but she grows too weak to resist the sickness. Cromwell remains with her, watching as her condition worsens, but he is outside the room when she dies: he has gone to see Grace, who has also become ill. When he is brought back, Anne’s face has become peaceful. He says that she was already learning Greek, and Mercy remembers her as clever, good, and beautiful. His thought that perhaps Anne knows Greek now turns an ordinary detail of her education into an expression of grief and uncertainty.

Grace dies in Cromwell’s arms. Unlike the painful vigil over Anne, her death is described as easy, but the loss is no less devastating. He thinks that he never knew her—not even that he had her. His reflection links bereavement to the mystery of parenthood: the child whose life began through an unremembered moment has become, in death, someone he feels he failed to know.

Memory, Names, and Unlived Futures

The children’s names preserve the family’s history. Cromwell recalls that he and Liz had considered Henry for a boy and Katherine for a girl, a name that would honour his sister Kat. Yet when he first saw the child, he chose another name, and Liz agreed. The recollection sits beside his religious thought that grace cannot be earned or merited, joining the child’s name to the limits of human intention and control.

After Anne’s death, Cromwell asks whether she can be buried with her copybook, where she had written her name, Anne Cromwell. The priest has never heard of such a request; Cromwell is too exhausted and angry to press the matter. The copybook makes her learning and her identity tangible, while his inability to secure its burial with her marks a small, immediate helplessness amid a much larger loss.

Later, memories of Grace return through the elaborate angel costume he had made for her, with peacock-feather wings. Unlike the other girls’ plain costumes, hers glittered, with silver threaded through her hair and broad wings that held together. The memory carries the pride of a father who had once contrived to make his daughter remarkable. In the same passage, Gregory leans against Cromwell before going to bed, briefly seeming like a younger child; the remembered image of Grace and the present gesture of his son bring family affection into the room, but cannot undo what has happened.

Grief and the Future That Cannot Be

A later recollection turns Grace’s costume into an image of disappearance: she climbs the stairs, her feathers fading to black. Cromwell imagines the future in which she might have wanted a title, and is struck by the thought that her death means he will never have to arrange a marriage or give her away. The thought is not a resolution of grief; it reveals how even the ordinary duties and negotiations of a parent have become impossible because she is gone.

His mind moves from Grace to Anne, wishing that Anne were still alive and imagining her promised to Rafe Sadler if she were older and Rafe younger. The conditional future underscores the family’s accumulated losses: the marriage he pictures cannot happen because Anne, too, has died. Soon afterward, Cromwell returns to Cardinal Wolsey’s letters and the political work before him. His private bereavement therefore persists beside public responsibility, not as something resolved but as a recurring history beneath the business of power.