Lent

Lent is both a liturgical season of fasting and penitence and a recurring measure of political and personal strain in the novel. Across the winters and springs of 1530, 1531, and 1532, its demands frame Thomas Cromwell’s attempts to manage rivalries at court, his changing relationship with the king’s circle, and the domestic life that continues alongside public religious conflict. The fast is not simply a backdrop: it gives the narrative a rhythm of restraint, frustration, and anticipated release, with Easter marking a future that may—or may not—be different.

A season of restraint and negotiation

In the spring of 1530, Anne Boleyn is isolated at York Place. The king has returned to Katherine of Aragon, while Anne’s father, brother, and Thomas Wyatt are away. Bored and impatient, she sends for Thomas Cromwell. He uses the meeting to argue that Cardinal Wolsey, despite his fall from power, remains the man best placed to secure a favorable papal judgment and resolve the king’s marital crisis. The religious calendar becomes part of the scene’s emotional terms: Anne says that during Lent she rations her patience, and insists that the matter has already taken too long.

Cromwell presses the political case without disguising the delay. He reminds Anne that Wolsey’s interests and the king’s desire are aligned, and that the cardinal is essential to the outcome she wants. Anne counters that Wolsey refused the one thing she asked of him. Their exchange leaves no settled agreement, but it makes Lent a season of negotiation under pressure: Anne’s hopes are stalled, Wolsey’s position is precarious, and Cromwell is trying to keep a connection between them alive. Her sister Mary Boleyn’s aside that Anne is not getting younger adds a personal dimension to the political wait, without resolving what the future will bring.

Fasting, food, and practical authority

The abstinence of Lent is also shown as a rule that can be managed, interpreted, or circumvented. Cromwell tells the kitchen staff at Austin Friars that Wolsey is ill and dispensed from the fast, adding that the dispensation comes from him. He then arranges for beef olives, stuffed with sage and marjoram, to be prepared for Wolsey and sent to Richmond, where they need only be baked. His joke about where Scripture forbids beef olives in March makes the meal an instance of worldly improvisation under a religious constraint.

The food sent to Anne and her household serves a different purpose. Cromwell sends the women small tarts made with preserved oranges and honey, and Anne an almond cream flavored with rosewater and decorated with preserved rose petals and candied violets. These gifts accompany his effort to persuade her about Wolsey, but also register the practical attentiveness with which he moves among households. His ability to provide food during a fast reflects the reach of his household and his readiness to turn domestic provision into part of courtly business.

The narrative links these kitchens to Cromwell’s earlier experience in Florence. He remembers preparing calf’s-foot jelly at the Frescobaldi kitchen, speaking a mixture of French, Tuscan, and Putney while a younger boy scrubbed the steps and sang. The recollection gives his present authority a longer history: the man who now directs cooks and sends delicacies to powerful people has not forgotten the work of a kitchen or the people who did it. Lent’s restrictions make food especially visible, but the scene also connects appetite and service to Cromwell’s past.

The political calendar and the approach of Easter

At the end of Lent in 1530, Cromwell’s meeting with Anne is followed by a moment of unexpected hope. Watching starlings settle among the black buds of a bare tree and then open their wings, he recognizes that he is looking forward to Easter and to the end of fasting and penitence. The change in the natural scene prompts a political thought: a world in which Anne can be queen is a world in which Cromwell can rise on his own terms. The insight is fleeting, and he immediately doubts it, but he understands that it cannot simply be undone. The season’s end briefly opens a view of possibility without promising that possibility will be realized.

In the spring of 1531, Cromwell makes cheerfulness a deliberate response to the moods of power. Wolsey had been a habitual complainer, and the more he complained, the more cheerful Cromwell became; now the king complains of headaches, his councillors, the weather, and the country’s decline. Cromwell’s steadiness answers the king’s anxiety, while petitioners seek his company for his unfailing courtesy. Lent’s draining effect on spirits is acknowledged, but Cromwell chooses to act against it, carrying into the season a composure useful both to those around him and to his position at court.

Household memory and religious reform

Lent also intersects with the household’s customs and losses. When Jo asks how the family should decorate its Easter eggs, she recalls that in earlier years they gave them hats like Wolsey’s. Cromwell tells her that she may paint crowns instead: he is now on the king’s council. The small domestic exchange registers a change in political allegiance and status through a repeated family practice, while leaving room for affection toward the fallen cardinal. Jo’s question shows that public reversals are remembered at home in the objects and rituals of the calendar.

In the same spring, Mercy speaks to Cromwell about the king’s effort to resolve a legal and theological obstacle to marrying Anne, given his former relationship with Mary Boleyn. Cromwell explains that Cranmer has sought learned opinions from rabbis in Venice on ancient texts, and that the divines find the proposed marriage not incestuous unless a marriage to the sister had actually taken place. Mercy asks how much the inquiry cost; Cromwell distinguishes the scholars’ negotiations from the less godly business of paying them. The exchange places religious interpretation, money, and royal policy in the same conversation. Lent does not halt political work: it accompanies the continuing attempt to make doctrine serve a dynastic question.

Repetition, discipline, and public action

By the spring of 1532, political action is again set beside careful work in Cromwell’s kitchens. The preparation of spiced wafers requires the right mixture, well-greased and heated irons, sustained pressure, and exact timing. A pause or a missed beat can ruin the batch; when the cooks succeed, they repeat the process until they can make a hundred wafers, stamped with Tudor badges and perfumed with rosewater. This account of discipline and repetition appears alongside Cromwell’s parliamentary maneuver over annates, the payments owed to Rome.

Cromwell proposes a division in the Commons, an unusual procedure that makes members declare themselves for or against the bill suspending those payments. The king watches and learns who supports him; at the end, he gives Cromwell a grim nod. The same tactic will not work in the Lords, where the king must argue his case in person on three occasions, and aristocratic families with their own dynastic claims openly support the Pope and Katherine. The contrast between a recipe made reliable through repeated practice and a parliamentary strategy applied to a divided political body underscores the season’s larger pattern: restraint and discipline can prepare an outcome, but cannot ensure it. Lent gives way to political action without ending the conflicts that define it.