Florence

Florence is one of the places that shaped Thomas Cromwell beyond England: it belongs to the Italian world he remembered with longing and to the practical culinary knowledge he later put to work at home. In the novel, its significance lies less in a narrated visit than in the skills and memories Cromwell brings back from it.

Memory and the Italian Years

During the more than twelve years Cromwell spent away from England, he crossed and recrossed the sea before deciding to return for good. Antwerp offered friends, business contacts, and the promise of a city expanding year by year, but his homesickness was for Italy: its light and language, and the memory of Tommaso as he had been there. Venice had cured him of nostalgia for the Thames, while Florence and Milan had given him ideas more flexible than those of people who had stayed at home. Italy thus stands in contrast to the homecoming he delayed: the pull of family brought him back, but his imagination remained attached to a wider, more adaptable world.

Culinary Knowledge in Practice

At Austin Friars, Cromwell’s familiarity with cooking is presented as practical expertise rather than a passing ornament. He arranges beef olives, stuffed with sage and marjoram, for the sick Cardinal Wolsey, and sends Anne Boleyn almond cream flavoured with rosewater and decorated with preserved rose petals and candied violets. He also sends small tarts of preserved oranges and honey to the ladies around her. He does not consider himself above carrying the food across the country, and his recollection of the Frescobaldi kitchen in Florence makes the distance between his former life and his present household work feel close. He remembers clarifying calf’s-foot jelly there, speaking a mixture of French, Tuscan, and Putney, before being summoned upstairs; a kitchen child brought water so he could wash his hands and remove his apron.

Craft, Discipline, and Political Work

The novel sets the exacting rhythm of cooking beside Cromwell’s approach to political action. In the Austin Friars kitchens, young cooks learn to make spiced wafers: the mixture must be right, the long-handled irons hot and greased, and the pressure held until the steam dies. A missed beat can leave a claggy mess or let the wafers scorch; once the first succeeds, the kitchen turns out a hundred, rolling each half-set wafer around a wooden spoon before drying it crisp. Tudor badges are stamped onto the golden disks, perfumed with rosewater and packed in inlaid boxes. This work of judgment, timing, and repetition echoes Cromwell’s political method without collapsing the two into one: in Parliament he proposes dividing the Commons over the bill suspending annates to Rome, allowing the king to see who supports the measure and who opposes it. Florence’s legacy is therefore not simply a store of exotic memories; it is part of the practical formation behind Cromwell’s eye for process, precision, and consequence.