Twelfth Night

Twelfth Night is the seasonal revel at which political order becomes spectacle: in 1530, Gray’s Inn law students stage Cardinal Wolsey’s fall as a bawdy comedy, and Thomas Cromwell’s angry departure makes the celebration’s central question plain—who is allowed to laugh at power, and who decides? Elsewhere in the novel, the feast-day setting also marks Cromwell’s deliberate choice to avoid a formal Epiphany feast and take the young men to the revels instead.

The Feast and Cromwell’s Choice

As 1530 begins, Cromwell does not hold an Epiphany feast. With Wolsey disgraced, many guests would feel obliged to refuse an invitation, making a traditional gathering an awkward public measure of the cardinal’s loss of favour. Cromwell instead takes the young men to Gray’s Inn for the Twelfth Night revels, but regrets the choice almost at once: the festivities are noisier and more bawdy than any he remembers.

The occasion is not politically innocent. The revels give the law students a crowd, a license for theatrical invention, and a subject whose recent fall is still dangerous to treat openly. What begins as seasonal amusement turns into a test of the limits of mockery at court.

Wolsey Made into a Pageant

The students dramatize Wolsey’s flight from York Place to his barge on the Thames. Dyed sheets stand for the river; performers throw water from leather buckets, while others pursue the cardinal with hunting cries. A fool rushes into the hall with otter hounds, and students carrying nets and fishing rods try to haul Wolsey back to shore.

The scene then sends him floundering through mud at Putney as he runs toward his refuge at Esher. The mock cardinal weeps and raises his hands in prayer. He offers the bishopric of Winchester to anyone who can get him back onto his mule; students under a donkey-skin frame play the animal, which turns about, jokes in Latin, and farts in his face. The performance adds sexual wordplay and a knitted red-wool phallus, reducing the once-powerful churchman to a body exposed to ridicule. Its jokes draw their force from the reversal: a man whose favour courtiers once sought is now helpless before the laughter of students.

Protest, Permission, and Power

Cromwell rises in displeasure, and his household must rise and leave with him. Outside the performance, he challenges the benchers for allowing it to proceed. Wolsey is sick and may die, he reminds them; the young men who now assault a fallen great man would, only weeks earlier, have begged for his favour. The benchers follow, apologizing, but their voices cannot compete with the laughter still pouring from the hall.

Cromwell’s protest does not end the comedy. His young household linger and glance back as the students continue their degrading portrayal. On the way home, Gregory says that they can laugh only if Wolsey permits them; Rafe answers that Wolsey is no longer the man in charge. Their exchange makes the scene’s political logic explicit: the permission that once protected Wolsey has disappeared with his authority. Cromwell then jokes about Pope Alexander’s reputed harem, and Richard remarks on the actor’s enormous waist. His indignation gives way, at least briefly, to acknowledgment that the performance was entertaining.

Revelry and the Everyday World

The journey home passes through a city still alive with seasonal play: bone rattles, torches, hobby horses, antlered men with bells, and boys dressed as an orange and a lemon. The citrus-costumed boys greet Gregory Cromwell and wish him a good new year; Cromwell replies, then asks the lemon to remind his father to discuss a Cheapside lease. The shift from political farce to business and household routine makes the revels feel less like an interruption of public life than one of its recurring forms.

At home, Cromwell sends the young men to bed and adds a blessing for their safety. Left alone at his work table, he remembers his daughter Grace dressed as an angel in peacock-feather wings, and his late wife Liz warning her to stand away from the fire. The memory places the revel’s bright, noisy spectacle beside the private images of family life that it cannot restore. Twelfth Night thus gathers festivity, political vulnerability, and loss into one evening: the crowd can turn a fallen minister into a joke, but neither laughter nor authority can make the past harmless.