Thomas Cromwell—Anne Cromwell

Thomas Cromwell—Anne Cromwell is a father-daughter relationship that moves from teasing conversation and guarded hope to sudden bereavement. Anne’s intelligence and force of will unsettle easy ideas of childhood, while the sweating sickness exposes how little love can protect against death. In the aftermath, her name in a copybook becomes the object of a final wish: that the child herself be remembered and buried with the evidence of who she was.

A Daughter with a Mind of Her Own

Anne appears in household conversations as a child who watches adults closely and answers them on her own terms. When Grace struggles to understand the family’s relationships, Anne taps her head and calls her “Slow.” Cromwell defends Grace, saying that she is not slow, only young; Anne’s reply suggests a child confident that she and her father understand matters better than everyone else. Their exchange gives their affection a teasing edge: he corrects her, but does not mistake her bluntness for a lack of intelligence.

When Anne asks why people marry, Cromwell answers that it is so there can be children, and then says that most people find marriage increases their happiness. Anne accepts the explanation readily enough, but asks whether she may choose her husband. He says that she may, though he privately qualifies the permission. She chooses Rafe, and for a moment Cromwell feels that his life might mend. The hope immediately meets time and responsibility: Rafe would need to establish his own household, while Anne would still be very young even five years later. Anne, meanwhile, knows that waiting feels slow. Their conversation shows her testing the future as if it were a matter for negotiation, and Cromwell recognizing both the force of her wish and the limits around it.

Anne’s independence is also visible in the way she treats the conventions around her. She removes her cap, twists its seed pearls, pulls at her hair, and wraps it around her neck while worrying that Grace believes she cannot marry Rafe because they are related. Cromwell assures her that they are not cousins, then tells her to put her cap back on before her aunt sees. Anne imitates Johane’s raised-brow exasperation at his certainty. He hides a smile, but thinks that although she is very little, she would be better suited by a helmet. The image joins tenderness to an awareness of her spirited, almost combative nature.

Separation and the Sickness

Cromwell’s attachment to Anne is sharpened by his awareness that she loves him. When Mercy reminds him that Anne cries if she does not see him, he is astonished and asks whether Anne cries. Mercy answers with asperity, asking whether he thinks his children do not love him. He lets Mercy decide that the girls will remain at home rather than be dragged about the countryside. The choice becomes painfully consequential when the sweating sickness reaches the household. The women hang signs against the disease and scrub the house, but cleanliness and prayer cannot keep Anne safe.

Anne falls ill first. Mercy and Johane shout at her and shake her to keep her awake, believing that sleep will mean death. She struggles for breath and sinks into a black stillness, her fingers clenching and unclenching. Cromwell takes her hand and tries to still it; its motion seems to him like that of a soldier itching for a fight. The child who had argued about marriage and teased her elders is now present through a single resisting gesture. When she briefly rouses, she asks for her mother and for the copybook in which she has written her name. At dawn the fever breaks. Johane weeps with relief, and Anne, sitting up, sees Cromwell, smiles, and says his name.

They wash her face with water strewn with rose petals. Anne tentatively pushes the petals beneath the water, each becoming, in Cromwell’s perception, a vessel or cup. The delicate moment of recovery does not last: with the sun, her fever rises again. Cromwell refuses to let the women resume the pinching, shaking, and pummelling, and entrusts her to God. He stays beside her, watching her chest heave as she fights and loses. His confidence that he is not at risk of contagion—because Wolsey has survived the plague four times—does not alter the helplessness of his vigil.

Death and the Name in the Copybook

Cromwell is outside Anne’s room when she dies. Grace has also fallen sick, and he is seeing her put to bed; when he is ushered back in, Anne’s stern little face has relaxed into sweetness. Her hand is already heavy, and the weight of it exceeds what he can bear. The scene makes his absence at the instant of death part of the loss: he has been close beside her, yet is not there when she dies.

Coming out of the room, he says that Anne was already learning Greek. Mercy calls her a wonderful child and his true daughter, then describes her as clever, good, and beautiful in her own way. Cromwell’s thought returns to Greek: perhaps Anne knows it now. The language of learning becomes inseparable from the question of what survives death, while the account refuses to make grief abstract. Anne was not merely a beloved child; she had been learning, thinking, writing her name, and asking for the book in which she had written it.

Cromwell asks the priest whether Anne may be buried with her copybook. The priest says he has never heard of such a thing, and Cromwell is too tired and angry to fight. The request gives the book a precise emotional meaning: it is a record of Anne’s own hand and identity, something of hers that might accompany her when the adults can no longer protect or speak for her. Its refusal leaves her name—Anne Cromwell—at the center of the memory of her.

Grief, Faith, and the Limits of Consolation

Anne’s death is followed by Grace’s, and the loss of both daughters transforms the family relationship into an enduring wound. Cromwell thinks of his daughters as being in Purgatory, a place of slow fires and ridged ice, then asks where the Gospels speak of it. His grief therefore meets not only the fact of death but uncertainty about the religious language used to explain what follows. The question is not settled; it remains open inside his mourning.

The contrast between “love” and “charity” sharpens that uncertainty. Cromwell recalls Tyndale’s words that love never fails and sets them against Thomas More’s insistence on “charity,” a difference of translation for which More would punish dissent. For Cromwell, the dispute is not merely verbal: his dead child makes the meaning of love and the fate of the dead urgent. The relationship’s decisive significance lies in the details that remain when protection fails—the name Anne wrote, the Greek she was learning, and the small hand Cromwell could hold but not keep.