Italy

Italy is both a literal setting in Thomas Cromwell’s past and a recurring measure of the skills he brings to England: there he learned how disorderly war could be, turned from fighting toward supply, and acquired a reputation for nerve and bargaining. The book also returns to Italy through his recollection of handling a snake, an episode that links bodily risk to the self he has made: watchful, resilient, and quick to strike when necessary.

War, travel, and practical judgment

Cromwell’s account of military life in Italy is defined less by battle than by its long intervals of confusion and uncertainty. Soldiers must scavenge for food, endure exposed camps and abrupt movements, and wait on faulty equipment, delayed supplies, and leaders whose decisions they distrust. The description makes the work of survival depend on logistics as much as courage. Cromwell does not remain in fighting for long: within a few winters, he moves into supply, a practical turn toward the business of keeping an army functioning.

Italy also appears as a place where war is seasonal and, for Cromwell, partly a matter of choice. He observes that a man could fight in summer if he wanted to go out; the phrasing sets the possibility of action against his eventual preference for the less theatrical work of supply. His experience there becomes part of the worldly judgment he later applies to commerce and politics.

Risk, money, and reputation

In a later recollection of Italy, Cromwell describes accepting a bet that requires him to hold a snake while others count to ten. He continues holding it after it bites, releases it only when the count is complete, and collects his winnings. The incident establishes his willingness to accept risk for a wager, but the narrative gives it a larger significance: he waits to see whether the bite will kill him, survives, and emerges, in the telling, stronger and more formidable.

That memory sits beside a more calculated kind of risk. In his London business, Cromwell and Rafe Sadler follow the daily exchange rates on Lombard Street, while he arranges international loans and assesses a volatile market. The account explicitly connects his financial instinct to an eye for risk. Italy’s remembered danger thus has a counterpart in the measured hazards of credit and trade: in both settings, Cromwell reads uncertain conditions and acts where others may hesitate.

Italy in the imagined past

Italy is also part of the book’s wider reflection on power and dynastic uncertainty. In a conversation with Thomas Wolsey, Cromwell recalls picking up a snake there and explains the episode as a bet. Wolsey’s amused response turns the story into an emblem of the bond between the two men: the cardinal wonders how he will manage without Cromwell among the “double-tongued French,” while the anecdote offers a compact demonstration of Cromwell’s composure and storytelling skill.

Later, in a dreamlike passage, the Italian snake gives rise to an image of serpentine descendants bearing the name Thomas and carrying pictures of the Thames. The association joins distant Italy to Cromwell’s English identity without making the recollection a simple account of travel. It transforms the snake into a figure for concealed ancestry, inherited uncertainty, and the hidden histories that may lie beneath an apparently settled royal lineage.

Narrative significance

Italy’s significance rests on this double register: it is a place of practical experience and a storehouse of remembered images. The military recollections explain Cromwell’s movement from combat toward supply; the snake story condenses risk into a personal legend; and the dream makes that legend available for thinking about unstable dynastic claims. Across these returns, Italy helps shape a character who treats survival not as passivity but as a skill—one grounded in attention, calculation, and the capacity to endure uncertainty.