Try always to find out what people wear under their clothes

The expression “Try always to find out what people wear under their clothes” is a recurring instruction to look past appearances for the loyalties, vulnerabilities, and histories concealed beneath them. First associated with Wolsey’s reading of Katherine, it expands into a way of interpreting bodies and political power: clothing may hide religious allegiance, while a ruler’s apparent identity may conceal a contested ancestry.

Reading Beneath the Surface

As Katherine’s marital dispute comes before a secret hearing, Wolsey urges attention to what is not immediately visible. Cromwell observes Katherine in gowns stiff with gemstones, her faded auburn hair beneath a gable hood, and the Franciscan habit she wears under her court clothes. The contrast makes clothing more than ornament: the queen’s visible royal magnificence covers a private religious identity, while the layered garments suggest that her outward role does not exhaust who she is.

The advice also changes Cromwell’s understanding of people. He recalls that he once assumed that beneath clothes there was only skin. Wolsey’s maxim teaches him to look for another layer, a hidden condition that can alter the meaning of the surface. In Katherine’s case, the habit sits beneath the display of a queen; in the larger marriage dispute, what seems to be a question of personal conduct is bound up with the status of a wife, the legitimacy of children, and the authority of the Church.

From the Body to the Bloodline

The expression returns in a dream in which Cromwell turns the instruction upon Henry’s ancestry. Stories that Edward IV was the son of an English archer called Blaybourne, rather than the Duke of York, mingle with the legend that Edward married a serpent woman. Cromwell’s sleeping mind recombines those stories into a grotesque imagined genealogy: the king appears as a mixture of bastard archer, hidden serpent, Welsh descent, and debts to Italian banks. The maxim’s search beneath clothing thus becomes a search beneath royal lineage, where the apparently solid body of kingship is made strange by disputed origins and inherited secrets.

The dream grows out of Cromwell’s own memory of a wager in Italy. He held a snake while others counted to ten; it bit him between four and five, but he maintained his grip until the count was complete, then released it and collected his winnings. The puncture in his pale inner arm makes concealed danger literal: poison enters beneath the skin, yet he survives and remembers the episode as part of his becoming quick to hide and strike. In the dream, the snake’s descendants carry images of the Thames, joining an Italian encounter to Cromwell’s English identity and to the country’s uncertain royal past.

A Political Method

In Parliament, the same habit of looking beneath declared positions becomes a practical political skill. When Cromwell brings forward a bill to suspend annates paid to Rome, he calls for a division of the House, an unusual procedure that makes members reveal which side they support. Henry watches and learns who is for him and who is against him; in the Lords, where the tactic will not work, the king must argue his own case three times. Cromwell’s method identifies opponents and, where possible, divides them. The maxim therefore describes not only close observation of individuals but also the exposure of interests beneath formal political appearances.

Cromwell’s negotiations with Anne Boleyn show how personal relations function as part of this information network. Anne knows that he has spent money in support of Wolsey and asks whether he works for himself; Cromwell privately recognizes a likeness between them without saying so. She invites him toward confidence, but does not yet tell him everything. At the same time, he reads the material signs of the Boleyn family’s advantage after Wolsey’s fall, including George’s spending on horses and women, and answers Anne that he takes only his conveyancer’s fee. Beneath the language of service and gratitude lie money, access, and the question of whose interests a courtier serves.

Concealment, Office, and Succession

The maxim’s political reach appears again in Cromwell’s conversation with Wriothesley. He explains the more deliberative working style of Wolsey’s advisers, contrasting it with a king’s council where Norfolk and Charles Brandon may oppose a man because of who he is, even when they agree with his policy. Gardiner has threatened Wriothesley with ruin and accused him of disloyalty for failing to serve Gardiner’s interests while abroad. Cromwell offers him responsibility at the Signet if confirmed in office, but immediately tells him to seek a better offer from Gardiner and hedge his bets. In this world, a stated allegiance does not settle the matter: office depends on competing patrons, and survival requires recognizing the interests concealed beneath a threat or a promise.

The expression ultimately joins intimate and public forms of concealment. Katherine’s habit, Anne’s uncertain negotiations, the hidden stories of royal descent, and the competing claims within government all make visible appearance an incomplete guide to identity. The instruction is therefore both a lesson in observation and a model for the novel’s political imagination: power is read by examining what people wear, what they claim, and what their surfaces cannot quite keep hidden.