The Known World relates the oddities and peculiarities of America and slavery her old mistress in antebellum Virginia. Guess what, you may be thinking that only whites subjected blacks to slavery, but oddly blacks subjected other blacks to slavery. “Black slave owners owned slaves who were slaves of slaves.

Book Summary

“When the supply ship came in, in Old Virginia days” – Source Wikimedia

The Known World refers to a map brought by a Russian who travelled through Manchester, VA. The map showed for the first time the word America, which had never been put on a map. The land of North America on that map was small. South America was about the right size, but it alone was called America. North America was nameless.

In antebellum Virginia, Henry Townsend a black freed slave, who owned slaves, was born to Milred and Augustus Townsend former slaves themselves. Milred and Augustus Townsend bought their freedom, before working hard to save enough to buy their son Henry’s freedom from their former master William Robbins. Henry grew up under the tutelage of his former master William Robbins and made fortune by making boots and shoes. He became better than the man who taught him boot making. Henry became known as the “king of footwear God intended for feet to have.”

Henry went on to build a two-story house and purchased his first slave, named Moses, from his former master. Henry Townsend succumbed to illness leaving his widow Caldonia with an estate and many slaves: thirteen women, eleven men, and nine children. Caldonia had a tryst for a short period of time with Moses, who was the overseer of the Townsend plantation.

Caldonia struggled to manage the plantation and faced several slave runaways. The story of Henry Townsend is mostly about two peculiarities or oddities of American history:

1. Slave owning Negroes: How blacks came to acquire black slaves

Slave auction in Virginia – Source Wikimedia

Between 1870 and 1880 a white man from Canada, Anderson Frazier, made a good living publishing pamphlets about America and its people called their “peculiarities.” The most successful series he published was related to odd aspects of life in the South, called Curiosities and Oddities about our Southern Neighbors. It was about slave owning Negroes, specifically, free Negroes who had owned other Negroes before the War between the states.

Anderson met a Negro woman Fern Elston, Henry and Caldonia Townsend’s former teacher, who also owned slaves and he related to her that Negroes owning slaves was the oddest of all the oddities he had come upon. To Anderson, it would be like owning his family, the people in his family. But to Fern, it was not the same at all. She retorqued that: “all of us do only what the law and God tell us we can do. None of us who believes in the law and God does more than that. We owned slaves. It was what was done, and so that is what we did. We, not a single one of us Negroes, would have done what we were not allowed to do. This is the truth as I know it in my heart.”

To acquire his slaves, Henry stood at the back of the slave market. A stranger might think he was waiting for his master to take him home when the market closes. But no. Using Henry’s money, Robbins the former master of Henry and his parents’, did all the purchasing of slaves. At that time, most white men knew that when they sold a slave to Robbins, they were really selling to Henry Townsend. They protested saying: who knew what a nigger really planned to do with other niggers?

In Richmond VA, there were slaves who themselves had slaves, and some of those slaves of slaves had slaves. They were all members of a free Negro class, who while not having the power of some whites, they had been brought up to believe that they were rulers waiting in the wings.

2 Slave Insurance policy sold by the Atlas Life, Casualty and Assurance Company, based in Hartford, Connecticut.

Copy of Slave insurance policy – Source Wikimedia

The details of the insurance policy they sold are as follow:

Policy for slaves injured during work:

• There was a policy for a premium of 25 cents per month, which in case of the slave’s death, paid the owner the price of the slave less some % to account for depreciation due to aging.

• For 15 cents a head every two months, per property each working slave over five years old, would be protected for just about everything God could think up:

  • Getting kicked in the head by a mule while working in the field.

  • Dying from tainted food – as long as a doctor could certify the food was not rancid.

  • Breaking a neck in a well after falling down in it while cleaning it out.

  • Getting bit by a snake on one foot or longer while working in the field or the barn or the smokehouse; said snake alive or dead; with suitable missing fang or fangs, would have to be produced to collect on the policy.

  • Slave death by mad dogs in fall, winter or spring was compensable, canine madness in the summer was an “ordinary act of God” to be expected.

  • Nothing comes from the loss of an arm or one or both eyes, because such losses were not the best indicia of how much work a slave could still perform.

  • No money for a slave hurt or killed by someone while said slave was visiting his family on another plantation.

  • Being struck by lightning while working in the field as long as recuperation was less than three days and as long as the slave has not been given sufficient warning that lightning was about to strike.

  • Death by lightning was compensable; such deaths were simply another “ordinary act of God” that the Company, in its wisdom, could not reward.

  • A separate policy to protect against “plain old natural death was 10 cents a head every other month. in case the policy is declined, there will be no protection on the “Perishment,” or natural death of your human property.

• The word perishment had been coined by a man, who emigrated from Poland, working at the Hartford office, to convey the fragility of human life especially that of slaves.

To the Atlas agent, people who decline his offer did not know the benefits of Atlas products. A negative response was the groundwork for a positive one.

Reflection & Insights

This story is mostly about the oddities and peculiarities of America and slavery her old mistress. Guess what, you may be thinking that only whites subjected blacks to slavery but oddly as the author Edward P. Jones revealed, blacks subjected other blacks to slavery. “Black slave owners owned slaves who were slaves of slaves.”

Henry Townsend was born to slave parents who worked hard to buy themselves out of slavery. His parents had to delay buying him out of slavey because it was so expensive that they had to work years to save enough. When Henry made fortune making boots, he started acquiring slaves and ended up owning dozens of slaves.

Fern Elston who was a black teacher also owned slaves. To justify why blacks ended up owning slaves, she said that they did only what the law and God told them they could do. They owned slaves. They would not have done what they were not allowed to do.

Another odd thing was the concept of slave insurance promoted by the Atlas Life, Casualty and Assurance Company. For some fee, they were willing to insure odd things, including: getting kicked in the head by a mule, dying from tainted food, breaking a neck in a well, getting bit by a snake, or being struck by lightning.

During the antebellum period, moral and religious authorities condoned slavery and remained tight-lipped about it. The law upheld and promoted slavery. So, there was nothing wrong with owning slaves.

In Uncle Tom’s Cabin, Harriet Beecher Stowe posited that: “Perhaps you laugh too, dear reader, but you know how humanity comes out in a variety of strange forms nowadays, and there is no end to the odd things that humane people will say and do.”

So, I’d say, dear reader you may laugh or cry, but black slave owners owning slaves who were slaves of slaves is odd and it testifies of the utter oddity of human nature.

Character Growth Takeaways

Wisdom: [Scattered wisdom from the book to chew the cud]

• Teaching older people (men vs women): A man does not learn very well. Women, yes, because they are used to bending with whatever wind comes along. A woman no matter the age, is always learning, always becoming. But a man stops learning at fourteen or so. He shuts it all down. A log is capable of learning more than a man. To teach a man would be a battle, a war, and I would lose.

• Unusual way a white mentor (Mr. Robbins) teaches his black mentee (Henry) perseverance in life:

  • Mr. Robbins: Don’t settle for just a house and some land, boy. Take hold of it all. God is in heaven and he don’t care most of the time. The trick of life is to know when God does care and do all you need to do behind his back.

  • Henry: Yessir.

  • Mr. Robbins: I know you have it in you to want, to want to take hold and pull it in for yourself, don’t you. Henry?

  • Henry: I do Mr. Robbins.

  • Mr. Robbins: Then take it and let the world be damned, Henry.

• Worry about rain for your garden, and don’t go any higher on the worry ladder.

• The hitter can never be the judge. Only the receiver of the blow can tell you how hard it was, whether it would kill a man or make a baby just yawn.

• What is fevered love?

  • “The love Saskia had for Thorbecke was a fevered one. Her mother said it would burn itself out if she gave it time, but Saskia disappeared with Thorbecke to Europe and the love only grew… After what happened to her in Europe, she would never love another human being in the same way.”

  • I’d say” If only Saskia had listened to her mother and let it burn out…

• The ruin of an empire could not start with rebellion in the farthest reaches of the empire, but in the attic or bedroom or the kitchen of the emperor’s palace where he had allowed domestic chaos to fester and eventually bring down the palace, and with the palace the empire could follow.

• There was a reason God had made telling the truth one of his commandments; lying had the power to be a high wall to hide all the other transgressions.

• “Anything can get better on another day.”

• The God of that Bible, being who he was, never gave a slave a good day without wanting something big in return.

• A horse ain’t nearly as smart as a mule, the way I hear it.

• A conversation about quitting smoking:

  o I have never seen anything wrong with it…it is just a little habit that God don’t mind.

  o If you pile up enough habits, you soon have enough for a real sin. Then you have trouble…

• According to the University of Virginia historian: the Manchester County of Virginia “was torn asunder.” The historian called it “the greatest disappearance of land” in the Commonwealth.

Temperance: [Lesson about restraint, balance, humility]

The following fact illustrates some level of temperance and self-control

Sobering lesson of temperance:

Travis (police patroller in Manchester, VA county) was good at what he did and Skiffington (the Sherrif) saw him as a free-ranging cat who couldn’t be tamed but who killed enough mice to make up for his lawlessness.

Have you ever experienced such a troublemaker who you could not get rid of because you need his/her skills?

She would have sighed but that was not in her nature. Sighing was an indication of surrender, of approaching helplessness.

Courage: [Lesson about strength, risk, or standing up]

This passage depicts some level of quest for courage:

The lantern of truth: A body should be able to stand under some..some kinda light and declare what he knows without retribution. There should be some kinda lantern, that we can stand under and say, “I know what I know and what I know is God’s truth, and then come from under the light and nobody makes any big commotion bout what he said. He could say it and just get on about his business, and nobody would say: He be stickin up for nigger, he be stickin up for them Indians. The lantern of truth wouldn’t allow them to say that. There should be that kinda light.

Justice: [Lesson about fairness, integrity, or responsibility]

An act of justice from the book:

• Nothing about Justice caught my attention

Memorable Quotes & Phrases

Memorable Quotes from the Book:

• Moses had thought it was already a strange world that made him a slave to a white man, but God has indeed set it twirling and twisting every which way when he put black people to owning their own kin. Was even God up there attending to business anymore?

• If William Robins said a storm was coming, then it did not matter how blue and pleasant the sky was and how much the chickens strutted happily about the yard.

• Skiffington had learned from his father how much solace there was in separating God’s law from Caesar’s law. “Render your body unto them, but know your soul belongs to God.”

• A runaway slave was, in fact, a thief since he had stolen his master’s property – himself.

• I’m just a little somebody and I don’t care a bit.

• The law will protect you as a master to your slave, and it will not flinch when it protects you…But the law expects you to know what is master and what is slave.

• I suspect that if he had taken a beater to that suit, the dust would have been enough to engulf him.

• In a world where people believe in a God they could not see and pretended the wind was his voice, paper meant nothing. It had only the power that people would give it.

• The hope that more hands could wring more from the land.

• Most crimes and misdemeanors by slaves were dealt with their masters; they could even hang a slave if he killed another slave, but that would have been like throwing money down a well after the salve had already thrown the first load of money down.

• He was only a jackrabbit hop from …reaching the goal… the end.

• The sun did not rise very high and it was only one day at a time and no one day was kin to the next.

• There was a chasm and he was telling her that it was an easy thing for her to jump, that she should simply make the jump to this freedom thing that wouldn’t even include him at first.

• How can you sell a free man? Outside the law…. You go outside the law.

• Could the cord of a man born into slavery ever be cut forever and completely, even if he had been free for some years. Was he not doomed by virtue of the color of his skin?

• I wanted to tell you somethin, and I have been working my mind so the words will tumble out in a straight line. …. Just set them words one by one and they’ll do fine and we’ll get where we got to go.

  Vocabulary Builder

Words, phrases, and expressions from the book to season and spice up your language

• To chew the cud: think or talk reflectively, to ponder. (literally chew partly digested food). He spent the afternoon chewing the cud over the new agreement weighing its strengths and weaknesses.

• As difficult as chopping a log with a dull ax.

• Something threatening was loose in the land.

• Don’t go back to Egypt after God done took you outa there.

• Manumit: to release from slavery

• Perishment: word coined by an employee of The Atlas Life, Casualty and Assurance Company, to convey the fragility of human life especially that of slaves

• Buckety-buck up: clop or jerk the way up to somewhere

• Hant: ghost (U.S. southern)

• Snooker: trick, trap, entice

Who Should Read This?

• Anybody wishing understand another facet of America’s history with slavery

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The French executioner has performed his office with style. Queen Anne Boleyn is now dead by beheading. King Henry VIII marries Jane Seymour to continue his quest for a male heir to the throne of England. The king’s councilor Thomas Cromwell continues to rise in power. Mingling with kings brings power and fame, but fame and power come with the danger of playing with fire.

Book Summary

King Henry VIII – Source British Library

May 1536: London is still processing and trying to recover from what they had never seen before in England: Queen Anne Boleyn is dead. Executed by beheading. Her remains stuffed in an arrow chest and buried in the chapel by her brother George Boleyn (Lord Rochford) who is also accused of having committed adultery with her.

People said in two years Cromwell has wreaked on his late master, Cardinal Wolsey’s enemies. Thomas More, the Queen and her lovers and everyone who slighted Wolsey. But the king being the greatest enemy of Wolsey, people asked what revenge will Cromwell seek on his sovereign, his prince, when chances serve?

Power Struggle over who should rule England

Cromwell now saw himself like a Damascene cat who had climbed up the stars. He has travelled so far to get there. And nothing people do or say disturbs him nor disquiet him high on his branch.

The king’s new family now ranks with the Seymours, the Howards, the Talbots, the Percys, and the Courtenays. But to Cromwell, they will need to count with the Cromwells – father, son, nephew, of ancient family too. Because as the saying goes When Adam delved and Eve span, who were then the gentlemen? When the Cromwells stroll out, the gentlemen of England get out of their way.

King Henry’s three children are now bastards. The courtiers are divided over who should inherit the throne and every family wants Cromwell to side with them.

On one side, Thomas Howard, Duke of Norfolk wants Richmond (the king’s illegitimate son) to be named heir because he is his son-in-law. This will put all England under his thumb.

On the other side, the old families of England: the Courtenay family, the Marquis of Exeter, the Pole family are the nearest families to the throne: the king’s daughter Mary represents their interests. They are papists as well.

In truth, there was a bargain between Cromwell and the Carews: To them they are of the Princess Mary’s side; the king’s bastard daughter. She became a bastard after the annulment of the marriage between the king and her mother the late queen Catherine. The agreement between Cromwell and the old families was to help them remove Anne Boleyn, and afterward, if Cromwell grovels to them and serve them, then they refrain from ruining him. But Cromwell’s version was different: He understood that the Carew family helps remove Anne Boleyn and…and nothing. Will that work?

Bleak prospects for the succession to the throne

The king who was restless said: Crumb what if some accident befalls? I could die tomorrow; I cannot leave my kingdom to my daughter or my son. Neither of them born in wedlock.

Cromwell responded to the king: I will urge his Majesty to trust in God and use your best endeavors to get a son of your marriage. In the interim, we can make an instrument allowing your Majesty to name a successor at your pleasure. And you need not reveal your choice.

Margaret Pole (from the Pole family, pretendant to throne) issued a stark warning to Cromwell:

Margaret advised Cromwell to keep his ambitions in check:

• You are not afraid when you should be afraid. You are like someone who has loaded the dice. You are playing with the greatest man in the land. You have Henry’s favors. But if he withdraws it, you’ll suffer death as your late master Cardinal Wolsey. You have certain friends, no doubt, but no affinity, nor great family at your back. You are a blacksmith’s son. Your whole life depends on the next beat of Henry’s heart and your future on his smile or frown.

• Do not join battle with the noble families of England. You have lost before you ride out. Who are you? You are one man. Who follows you? Only carrion crows, bone-pickers.

• Do not stop moving, or they will eat you alive. He who climbs higher than he should, falls lower than he would.

The reconciliation of Lady Mary the king’s daughter with the king

Now that Anne is gone, the conditions for Mary the king’s daughter to regain her father’s good grace are met. Cromwell sends a letter to Mary and asks her to sign. It reads: I do recognize, accept, take repute and acknowledge the king’s highness to be supreme head, under Christ, of the church of England. I do freely, frankly recognize and acknowledge that the marriage formerly had between his majesty and my mother was by God’s law and man’s law incestuous and unlawful. Therefore, I put my soul under your direction and commit my body to your mercy.

The days has been long in coming: the evening dove-like: orations, mutual courtesies, promises and blessings. Lady Mary’s wobbling curtsey. The king face flashes as he crosses the room to sweep her up. Her sniffling and whimpering as she grips to the king’s gold jacket. His gasp, his sob, his broken endearments and the hot tears that spring from his eyes. Jane the queen removes a jewel from her finger and says: Here wear this. Mary juggles with the vast diamond ring. The servants wait, kneeling for the royal party to pass.

Cromwell continues to rise in power

Sir Thomas Cromwell – Earl of Essex. Source Wikimedia

As a Viceregent of the church under God and the king, Lord Cromwell introduced in Parliament the Act of Extinguishing the Authority of the Bishop of Rome (the Pope). Bishops meet in Convocation to discuss from dawn till dusk about: the sacraments of the Church, their nature and number, which ceremonies are laudable, what is idolatry, who should be allowed to read the gospel, and in what language. “Confession is not a sacrament. Show me where Christ ordained it.”

To Cromwell, the king sees that an English church needs a Bible. A translated bible for all to read who can. They will see their own eyes that nowhere in the scriptures does it mention penances and popes and purgatory and cloisters and beads and blessed candles, or ceremonies and relics.

Cromwell is elevated to Garter knight by king Henry VIII

Coat of arms of Sir Henry Radclyffe, 2^nd Earl of Sussex – Source Wikimedia

The Garter is Europe’s most ancient order of chivalry, the highest honor the king can bestow. To fill in a vacant stall, the king chooses Cromwell who, although a low born man, is not loyal to any great families, but only to the king. At the Garter ceremony at the St George’s chapel, Cromwell walks to the quire, head bare, supporters on each side, places a hand on the gospel and takes the oath. The blessing is read beseeching St George to guard Cromwell against the prosperities and adversities of this world.

Queen Jane give birth to a male heir, but fails to recover from the childbirth

Jane Seymour – Source Wikimedia

Queen Jane Seymour is pregnant. There is a rustle from where she sits, through the room, through the court, through England and across the sea. At last, the news is public.

The queen’s child quickens. The parish churches ring their bells, cannons are fired. Butts of free wine trundle over the cobbles and even beggars join in crying, ‘God bless our queen Jane.’ As Jane let’s out her bodices and appears unlaced, she yearns for cherries and peas and quails. Her brother Edward Seymour is so certain of a prince, that he is walking around with his head swelling like a yeasted loaf. If she has a boy, the Seymour brothers will be promoted.

On September 16, Jane went to her chamber to rest and wait. The queen is two days and three nights in labor. The city worthies form a solemn procession to Paul’s to pray for her and people join them standing in the street and some kneeling. Some doubt the efficacy of prayer at such times. Why should God spare one woman and not another?

On October 12, she gave birth to a son. The entire country sing Te Deum. It was on St Edward’s Eve and the child will be named after the saint. It is a prince conceived in the most lawful matrimony…joyous and glad tidings. The whole nobility gallops to Hampton Court for the christening. The Duke of Suffolk says: Cromwell Well done! He is handing the same compliment to every man as if the whole of England had set seed.

Two days after the christening, the queen is reported fevered and nauseous. The queen weakens and is given the last rites. On October 24, the king goes to the queen’s bedchamber and take his last look. Her breathing labors. The doctors withdraw, their art and craft failed. What is a woman’s life? It is dew in April that falls on the grass.

Who will Lord Cromwell let the king marry next?

The Cromwell reformation in action: the dissolution of monasteries

Illustration of the Reformation – Source Wikimedia

As the king’s Viceregent, Cromwell makes new ordinances for the church:

• The English Bible: with this good book in hands, God speaks to you as father and mother spoke, and if you cannot read, others will read it for you. In this close, this familiar tongue.

• The king never agrees that clergy may marry.

• An end to pilgrimages

• An end to the Angelus bell, which causes people to kneel in the fields.

• No lights burning before statues or pictures

• No more of the spangled red-lipped Virgin, who wears silver shoes when poor women go barefoot.

• Becket’s shrine is to be closed: strip the precious metals and gems, weigh and value them and arrange transport to the king’s treasury. Then rebury the supposed saint in some obscure place.

o Few bones and a skull, which is believed to be that of Becket, a supposed saint. Cromwell ordered the chest to be shipped to his house

o Over the years, they attracted many pilgrims. Lead cross, crystal cross: they wrung out the pennies from the credulous and awed.

o Some say Jesus himself trod this ground.

o At St. George’s inn they have an impact of Christ’s foot. And for a fee you can trace around it and bring the paper home.

o They claim that after crucifixion, Joseph of Arimathea turned up with the Holy Grail in his baggage. He brought a relic from Mount Calvary itself, part of the hole in which the foot of the cross was placed. He planted his staff in the ground, from which a hawthorn flowered and continues to flower through the fat years and the lean ones.

o In a box there is a livid two-inch piece of gristle, which is the ear of Malchus, servant to Israel high priest, cut off by St Peter at the time of our Savior’s arrest.

• The last of the monasteries will go down and the king will begin to found colleges and cathedrals in the stead, there will be devices for the poor relief and the defense of the realm, and a device for the unity of religion.

English Bible – Source British Library

Cromwell has devised a new order of precedence for the realm to be enacted by parliament. From now on, it is not your noble and ancient blood that will place you in the hierarchy. It is what job you do for the king.

The king’s viceregent, him, outranks the bench of bishops. The king’s secretary, a baron, outranks all barons.

He brings in a new way of counting people. Each parish must record baptisms and burials. This is to allow his countrymen to know who they are and where they come from. The nobility has heralds to tell them their lineage, but the butcher or ploughman, the shepherd or shoemaker’s apprentice might have grown in a wood like a toadstool.

His scheme for registration is badly taken, the people say, recording baptism will enable the king to tax us in our infancy. Recording weddings will allow him to impose a levy on every bride and groom. Cromwell is laying a plan to steal our firewood, chickens and spoons, impound millstone, tax cauldrons and stewpots, weight the beam, tamper the baker’s scale, fix liquid measures in his favor. The man is like a weasel who eats his own weight every day.

Power moves between France and Spain left English fretting

The king of France is proceeding to Nice where he will meet the Emperor of Spain. It seems to Henry the only way to break their amity is to choose a bride from one party and therefore insulting the other party. The emperor and the king of France proceeded to ratify a treaty. They meant this concord to last their lifetimes and they swore to make no agreement with England – marital, military. Who can deal with an excommunicated king?

Cromwell advised the king to wed the Princess of Cleves, Anna, from Germany

We need the alliance and from all he hears she is a gracious lady and will give the king more children.

The emperor of Spain dislikes the match. The French are disaffected, the Scots grizzling.

All the Duke of Wilhelm’s councilors are in accord. Wilhelm will give a thousand crowns with his sister. But it will remain on paper and there is no need to pay it. We are pleased to waive the due. The duke being young with great charges. My king prefers virtue and friendship to hard cash.

In the first week of September 1539, a contract of marriage is signed in Dusseldorf. Wilhelm’s envoys are on the road that same day to carry the papers to England.

When the delegation arrives from Germany, the king is up-country hunting and Cromwell receives them until the king returns. On 5 October the marriage articles are fully executed at Hampton Court paving the way for Anna to set out for England.

The ladies gather at the court to form a team of maids for the new queen. Every duke wants to place a daughter or a niece. Jane Rochford will head Anna’s privy chamber due to her experience.

On 26 November Anna leaves her home to travel toward Calais. She will have an escort of some 250 persons plus her ladies travelling with her.

King Henry is disappointed by his new bride

The king decides to ride to meet Anna on the way and surprise her because he wants to “nourish love”, to the disagreement of his councilors. When the king met her, he addressed her, but she did not turn, taking him for some Jolly Jankin dressed up for a festival. When people drew her attention, she flinched at the sight of the king, then recovered herself, dissimulated it, and exclaimed: My lord and my king and she made a smooth curtsey.

The king asks Cromwell: we have not had the papers about the Lorraine marriage, the pre-contract, it was stated that she will bring it, but she did not. I cannot proceed with marrying her until I’m sure she is clear of all past promises. When I encountered her, I had much ado to master myself. A great outlandish bonnet with wings sticking on either side of her head. And with her height and stiffness, she looked like the Cornhill Maypole. And she had painted her mouth, which if true is a filthy thing.

Cromwell explained to the delegation from Cleves that the king wants to delay until they furnish copies of all relevant documents. But the papers are an excuse. Henry dislikes Anna. To Cromwell France and the Emperor of Spain have sealed an alliance against England. Ireland and Scotland are against England. Unless England makes an alliance with Germany, they will be overrun by the enemies. Therefore, the king needs to make this marriage. England needs it.

But the king doubles down: have you inspected her shoes? She must be wearing raised soles. Tell her there is no ordure on the soil of England.

The council manages to sign an agreement with Cleves. And the court proceeded with the wedding ceremony. The king is bitter: if it were not for the fear of making a ruffle in the world, and driving Germany into the hands of the Emperor of Spain, I would not do this today. In a short and simple ceremony, they made their vows of holy matrimony. The king’s bishop says, Deo Gracias. Fanfares sound. Courtiers cry, Gaudete!

After the feast, the attention of the court is fixed on the king’s privy chamber. All Henry has to do is to climb aboard and make a Duke of York. But the king is naught, he complains: “I like her not well before, but now I like her much worse.” “Her breasts are slack and she has loose skin on her belly. It struck me to the heart. I have no appetite for the rest.”

To the opinion of the queen’s lady-in-waiting, nothing happened.

Talks are engaged for Henry to renounce his marriage to Anna. We could offer her a settlement and find something to placate her brother in Cleves. How to salvage your Majesty’s reputation and allow him to hold up his head before his fellow princes?

The councilors meet with Cromwell to tell him that the king believes he does not need the friendship from Cleves, then considering his intractable dislike of Anna, there is only one course, which is to work out how to free him.

The plan: find a pension for the lady and pay whatever Cleves demands for recompense. They will mention that since Anna had a pre-contract, the king had scruples that the lady might be unfree, and contracted to Lorraine. It weighed so heavy on the king’s mind that he determined to leave her intact, till the matter is resolved.

Cromwell is arrested, a bill of attainder condemns him to death, and he is executed by beheading

10 June 1540 at 3pm. He goes to meet with the council at the palace. And he said: shall we begin? And the Duke of Norfolk said: we do not sit down with traitors. I will tear your heart and stuff it into your mouth. The king’s halberdiers fill the room. The councilors fall on him. A wrestle ensues. They yelp, snarl, grunt, and flail. A shove here and there. They tug, kick, and haul. His is barged and buffeted. They have taken away his gold chain and Garter badge. William Kingston the London tower’s constable presents him a warrant and orders him to come with his guards. There is a boat waiting for him to take him to the tower. Since he is a gentleman, Christophe is assigned to him as a servant.

Charges against Cromwell:

King Henry is terrified of Cromwell, who has gone beyond what any servant or subject should be. Part of the charges include the story about how Cromwell wanted to marry Mary the king’s daughter, then thrust him aside and become king.

12 June 1540: First interrogation by the king’s councilors:

• Cromwell was seen wearing a purple satin doublet. Who gave you the right to wear such a color? It is the preserve of royal persons and high dignitaries of the church. It was above your rank and station to dress as if you were an earl already. Cromwell responded that it was a gift from a foreign prince who did not know our rules.

• Lutherans Letters have been discovered at Austin Friars highly prejudicial to your claims to be a loyal and quiet subject. Clear proof of treason.

• The king has entrusted you with high office. You scant the procedures and put your signature to scrap paper and thousands are paid out to you without warrant.

• You meddle with the king’s business, overrides his councilors, pull state policy out of your pocket.

• You offered lady Mary a ring. Did you want to marry her? In 24 January 1536, when the king laid unconscious after his accident, all your concern was, where is Mary?

• You were heard pronouncing treasonable words: if the king returns to Rome, you would take the field against him with your sword in hand.

• You said you will bring a new doctrine in England and if you live one year or two, it shall not lie in the king’s power to resist.

• You said you will kill Reginal Pole and not a drop of blood is shed. The king hates a man who breaks his word.

• You said you would do the king of France a favor if he would do one for you.

• Your household falls little short of three thousand: runaway apprentices, roisterers, ruffians

A letter from king Francois of France comes congratulating the king for Cromwell’s arrest. It transpired that Francois hinted an alliance with England and named his price: Cromwell’s head.

Cromwell writes to the king a letter to implore his mercy. He signs off: written with the quaking hand and most sorrowful heart of your most sorrowful subject and most humble servant and prisoner, this Saturday at your Tower of London.

No answer.

He knew the archbishop will press for heresy charges, which mean burning.

He can also be charged for treason. Treason can be construed from any scrap of paper if the will is there. A syllable will do it. The power is in the hands of the reader, not the writer.

Within nine days of his arrest, they have put together enough matter against him to bring a bill of attainder into Parliament. The bill of attainder had three readings, which at the third reading he was a dead man by law.

If the king prefers to punish him for heresy, he will die by fire. If treason he is to be cut up alive.

Cromwell write a second letter to the king. “To the king my most gracious sovereign lord his royal majesty. I cry for mercy. Wednesday the last day of June. With heavy heart and trembling hand.

But no answer from the king again.

On 27 July, all he gets is mercy by the king to die by the axe. While the king prepares to wed a new bride, Katherine Howard, Cromwell reads Erasmus’s Preparation unto Death to prepare for his final moments.

On 28 July after 48 days of prison, Cromwell is brought to the scaffold. With trembling, he stepped on it to face the executioner. The man holds out his palm and Cromwell drops his fee into it and says to the headsman: Do not be afraid to strike. You will not help me, or yourself, by hesitating. The man kneeled to ask for forgiveness and said: forgive me what I must do. It is my office and my duty. I have this cloth. Will you cover your face?

My lord, you must kneel. When you are ready, repose your head upon this block.

Cromwell kneels and makes his prayers and eases himself to die.

The headsman strikes. The pain is acute, a raw stinging, a ripping, a throb.

Deeds of blood. Kings’ game.

Who is Thomas Cromwell? The Commoner who rose to become the second man of England

Thomas Cromwell – Source Wikimedia

• Cromwell is now 50 years old. Small eyes and thicket body. And he calls home many places: his city house at Austin Friars or at Whitehall with the king.

• He rises at five, says his prayers, conduct personal hygiene and breakfasts.

• By 6 o’clock he begins work meeting with petitioners and takes the Master Secretary barge to the mint and armories at the Tower of London

• He is the king’s deputy in the affairs of the church; he has license to enquire into any department of government or the royal household.

• He carries in his head the statutes of England, the psalms and the words of prophets, the kings accounts books, and the lineage, acreage and income of every person of substance in England.

• He is famous for his memory and the king likes to test it, by asking him for details of obscure disputes from 20 years back. The only things he cannot remember are the things he never knew.

• His chief duty is to get the king new wives and dispose of the old.

• His days are long and arduous, packed with laws to be drafted and ambassadors to beguile.

• He works by candlelight through summer dusks and winter sunsets when it is dark by 3:30.

• He often sleeps in a chamber near the king and Henry wakes him in the middle of the night and asks questions about treasury receipts or asks him to interpret his dreams.

• As a widow sometimes he thinks he would like to marry but no woman would tolerate his lifestyle

• He is the devil in guise of a knave. He wears a hat and under his horns.

Reflection & Insights

Ambition brings reward, but keep your ambition in check and hedge your bets

How Thomas Cromwell, a low-born son of some dubious blacksmith and shearsman, rose to the power of England is the question on all the lips over Europe. From a mere member of the British Parliament, the following ranks illustrate his ascension by increasing order of importance:

1. Royal Councilor (Privy Council)

2. Master of the Jewel House

3. Secretary to the King / Principal Secretary

4. Master of the Rolls

5. Vicegerent in Spirituals (Henry VIII’s deputy over the Church)

6. Chancellor of the Exchequer

7. Lord Privy Seal

8. Baron Cromwell of Wimbledon

9. Knight of the Order of the Garter

10. Earl of Essex (highest title)

As the Viceregent in Spirituals and the king’s deputy over the church, he saw himself as the third high ranking member of England: God, then Henry VIII the king of England, and then the king’s deputy Thomas Cromwell. No doubt his ambition paid off, but it grew to the point where even the king feared him. Cromwell failed to hedge his bets because his only friend and main ally was the king. For the interest of England, he enticed the king to marry into Cleves the German ruling family so England could seal an alliance against France and Spain. Unfortunately, the king did not like his new bride the Princess of Cleves, Anna, which triggered his downfall. Because he lacked powerful allies to back him, it led to his arrest and execution.

So, ambition in life pays off, but keep it in check and always hedge your bets.

We are fortunate to be blessed by technology and photography, but we take it for granted.

Nowadays, we take for granted technology and photography, which makes taking a picture the most banal act in life. Consider the following section to sense how painful it used to be to get a new portrait:

“The king is getting a new portrait by the painter Hans Holbein. He eases his shoulder, flexes his knees. Portrait-taking freezes muscles, makes feet hard to manage, makes elbows feel as if they belong to someone else.”

Today, taking a picture requires only one click! We can even record videos. We take it for granted. I contend that in the 1500s if they had cameras, it could have saved Cromwell’s life. The king would have seen the Princess of Cleves’s picture and made his decision not to marry her. But he relied on an exaggerated painting and praises from people for her beauty, and pressure from Cromwell to marry into the German rulers to seal an alliance with Germany.

Character Growth Takeaways

Wisdom: [Scattered wisdom from the book to ponder over]

Having killed your foe at the gate, would you slaughter him again at the door? I neglect no precaution, the times being what they are, a man may enter the gate as your friend and change sides while he crosses the courtyard. (That’s why we implement zero trust policy in technology today!)

Cardinal Wolsey always said, work out what people want, and you might be able to offer it; it is not always what you think, and may be cheap to supply.

You need to write everything down. Distrust yourself. Human memory is fallible.

I have been told there is a curse. Don’t repeat it. Repetition is the only force it has.

You must make no signal, and certainly never in a woman’s presence. They see plenty that men miss.

Understand princes’ mindset

• A prince cannot be impeded by temporal distinctions: past, present, future. Nor can he excuse the past for being over and done. The past always trickling under the soil a slow leak you can’t trace. Often, meaning is only revealed retrospectively…

• As for the future, the king’s desires move swiftly and the law must run to keep up. … “Bear in mind his Majesty’s remarkable foresight, at the trial of the late queen. He knew the sentence before the verdict was in.” “The executioner was already on the sea.”

• King Henry says: “This is my wish,” it becomes so dear and familiar a wish that he thinks he has always had it. He names his need, and he wants it supplied.

When fire breaks out you run to the rescue with a bucket. But it’s not the smoke and flames that kill you, it’s the bricks and timbers that fly out when the chimney blows up.

Most of us do wrong, if we know it or not. Enquire into any man’s conduct, and I am sure some charge will lie.

If you marvel at your good fortune, you should marvel in secret: never let people see you.

Marriages work better than wars. If you want a kingdom, write a poem, pick some flowers, put on your bonnet and go wooing.

If war is a craft, peace is a consummate and blessed art.

At a traitor’s demise, one must smile.

He who climbs higher than he should, falls lower than he would.

Try everything. Discard no possibility. Keep all channels open.

Some of The Seven Wise Men (of Greece) sayings: Moderation in all things, nothing to excess. Know yourself. Know your opportunity. Look ahead. Don’t try the impossible.

Bias of Priene was one of the Seven Wise Men of ancient Greece ( 6th century BCE): Most men are bad. (i.e. easily corruptible by power. Crowds follow self-interest. Laws matter more than personalities.)

Walls have eyes and ears.

There is no fortress that cannot be undermine or betrayed from within.

It is important a child’s first tutor should be gentle and like a mother, so the child is not afraid of making mistakes.

What you say by night haunts you by day, and what you refuse by day will return by night.

Right is what you can get away with, and wrong is what they whip you for…I’m sure life will instruct you by and by, if your father’s precept can’t get it through your skull.

Giants (princes) are lonely; they don’t know any other giants. Sometimes they want a boy like Jack to amuse them, to run errands and teach them songs.

Conquer your awe then, grab your chance, if you know how to talk to a giant it works like a spell. The monster becomes your creature. He thinks you serve him, but in fact you serve yourself.

Life is short and art is long, the opportunity sudden and fleeting: experiment dangerous, judgement difficult. (paraphrasing Hippocrates: ars longa, vita brevis)

Daily, one must practice the courtier’s art, and nightly, the art of governance: and never get it right.

Sometimes it is years before we can see who are the heroes in an affair and who are the victims.

“You leave a trail of bread and the ravens eat it. You drop cherry stones, and they grow into trees.

Sometimes Pride and Folly speak, as if they were persons: Humblewise and Good Council answer them, in verse.

Versions multiply as soon as a tale is told.

Friendship swears it will stand and never alter, but when the weather changes men change their coat.

Not every man has a price in money: some will betray you for a kind word from a great man, others will foreswear your company because they see you limp, or lose your footing, or hesitate once in a while.

Undertake no course without deep thought: but learn to think very fast.

Anabaptists: will take no oaths. They will serve no kings. They deny the commonwealth their labor, the magistrate their obedience, the child his book. They love ignorance. They say we live in the last days, so why learn anything? Why tend crops, why store grain: there is no need of a harvest.

Every absent day he loses advantage. If kings do not see you, they forget you. Even though nothing in the realm is done without you, kings think they do it all themselves.

Our rulers count up our derelictions. They may say nothing, but they keep a secret book.

It is not written that great men shall be happy men. It is nowhere recorded that the rewards of public office include a quiet mind.

Be generous especially to children, as it stores up goodwill for the future.

Give a man a Tartar hat and he will try it on, whether he has a mirror or not.

Manuals of advice tells us you should fear weak men more than strong men. But we are all weak in the presence of the king.

Sometimes transactions have holes in them. Sometimes columns fail to tally. To mend the matter, it is possible to be ingenious, without being dishonest.

There are books which say, contemplate your final hour: live every day as if, that night, you go not to your bed but to your bier. The divines recommend this not just for the prisoner or invalid, but for the man in his pride and pomp, prosperity and health: for the merchant on the Rialto, for the governor in the senate.

From the volumes Mirrors for Princes: Wise councilor must always prepare for his fall. He should embrace death as a privilege.

Truth is the daughter of time.

I wish time bred like rabbits. We would arrive at reckoning sooner.

Princes hate those to whom they have incurred debts.

It is not only kings who cannot be grateful. The fortunes he has made, the patronage he has dispensed: these count against him now, because favors that cannot be repaid eat away at the soul. Men scorn to live under obligation, they would rather be perjurers, and sell their friends.

Erasmus: no man is to be despaired of, so long as the breath is in him.

Frightening people is cheap but it doesn’t get the best results. If you want a prisoner to yield you everything, offer him hope.

· It is not wrong to speak your mind. On selected occasions. They make it painful for you. But you must do it.

· The book of henry excerpts:

o never enter into a contest of wills with the king.

o Ask him questions to which you know the answers. Do not ask him the other sort of questions.

o Keep your eyes clear. Remember he is a king first and a man second. This is where Anne went wrong. She began to think he was only a man.

o Do not turn your back on the king. This is not just a matter of protocol.

o The king is like the shrike or butcher bird, who sings in imitation of harmless seed-eater to lure his prey, then impales it on a thorn and digests it at his leisure.

You leave one singing bird in the cage to lure another home.

He sought the company of sober elders, whose table talk was refined and who would give away their wisdom to young foreigners who admired them. One who asks questions, and look impressed by the replies. Such dignitaries always need a repository for their secrets.

Temperance: [Lesson about restraint, balance, humility]

The following fact illustrates some level of temperance and self-control

Do you think only weak people obey the law, because it terrifies them? Do you imagine only weak people do their duty, because they dare not do other? In obedience, there is strength and tranquility.

Be calm: not like a hasty gardener, who tugs out the weed but leaves the root in the ground.

The purpose of ghost stories is extorsion, generally: to frighten poor folk into paying for prayer charms to protect them.

Bargain technique: they are asking for an outrageous sum with Mary (to marry the king’s daughter): the king should offer two-thirds.

Always a good rule of thumb: knock off the other party’s ask by a third, see what answer you get.

To be a councilor: to learn when to speak and when to keep silence, when I should look and when I should not.

There is a time to be silent. There is a time to talk for your life. He saw Henry’s need and he filled it., but you must never let a prince know he needs you; he does not like to think he has incurred a debt to a subject.

Obedience binds us together; all practice it, under God. It is the condition of our living as humans…Even beasts defer to the lion: beasts show wisdom and policy thereby.

Courage: [Lesson about strength, risk, or standing up]

This passage depicts some sheer courage:

In Antwerp Cromwell made a bet and picked a snake. His friend slowly counted to 20 and the startled snake recoiled and bit him. And he collected his winnings and got ready to die. But he never died. Since he was bit, something had entered his blood, and he could lie coiled till needed.

Justice: [Lesson about fairness, integrity, or responsibility]

An act of justice from the book:

• Cromwell often took a stand in Parliament to defend the cause of the poor and needy in England.

Memorable Quotes & Phrases

Memorable Quotes from the Book:

• with the ease of a man skipping over puddles

• Like a hare he seems alert to what’s happening behind him, half-knowing, half-guessing, always on edge.

• For this is England, a happy country, a land of miracles, where stones underfoot are nuggets of gold and the brooks flow claret.

• With this king one needs a reversible garment. One never knows, it is dying or dancing.

• You do right to draw it to my attention. I will amend.

• The midmorning scent of lavender ripples into the air like bubbles of laughter.

• At the Frescobaldi house: we used to stuff little ravioli with minced pork and sprinkle them with sugar. How typical of bankers. More money than taste.

• He admires these speculative worlds, that grow up in the crevices between truths.

• For Anne Boleyn’s coronation, I filled the streets with speaking saints, with falcons the height of men. I unspooled a mile of blue like a path to Heaven, from the abbey door to the coronation chair.

• I must find out what ails the women at court. I have seen it. There is a story beneath the story. They have secrets not yielded yet.

• If God made me a crewman in his ship of fools, how can I murder the drunken captain, and steer it to port and not be wrecked.

• Nothing they love more than to see me clawing my way through thorns.

• Lions sometimes eat their cubs. Is it any wonder?

• The claimant of Henry Tudor’s crown must die: not in some hole-and-corner scuffle, some stabbing or smothering, but in daylight, on Tower Hill, by the axe

• Dog eat dog, but no man eats England.

• A man who cannot control his wife is not fit to serve his country.

• It is for the accuser to demonstrate guilt.

• It has been debated in every students’ hall, bawled out in every pulpit, and jangled in every alehouse.

• Let us ask God to bless our repast and our new amity, and I pray it may never falter.

• Words are needless, for at a so sweet a flower, it is enough to gaze.

• If Cromwell can pacify Lady Mary, I expect soon to see him descend to Hell and fetch up Satan to shake hands with Gabriel.

• My friend, let this be a new area of concord.

• The light falters. Nestling birds rustle under the eaves. Vespers are sung Compline, the offices of night.

• He speculates on what maggots of ambition might be burrowing into the mind of the Duke of Norfolk.

• He will get it by fair mean or foul.

• Asclepius, the doctor’s god, learned his art from a snake. (His daughter is Panacea)

• Shivering like a greyhound whelp, nothing but ribs and eyes: bewildered, bereft, never complaining once.

• To kisses and illicit embraces, to promises and sighs, and so to feather bed.

• Poems written by foolish lovers: “they will be giggled at by whores, and used to wipe their arses.”

• Cromwell keeps his promises for good or ill.

• They will scour out privies for a living and haul shit in carts by the light of the moon.

• In the golden age the earth yielded all we require, but now we must dig for it, quarry it, blast it, we must drive the world, we must gear and grind it, roll and hammer and pulp it.

• Hunters live longer than other men; they sweat hard and stay lean; when they fall into bed at night, they are tired beyond all temptation; and when they die, they go to Heaven.

• I will not surrender this house. Not this year, nor next, nor any year this side of Heaven.

• All Stanleys are turncoats, they will watch to see which way the battle goes before they join it.

• I will not say I want truth unadorned. I will not make that claim. I have my share of human vanity.

• The first time I came into Henry’s presence, it was like the Fox and the Lion. I trembled at the sight. But the second time, I crept a bit nearer and had a good look. And what did I see? I saw solitude. And like the Fox to Lion, I stepped right up and parleyed with him, and never looked back.

• He labors day and night for his prince’s increase. Niccolò says when a prince has such a servant, he should treat him with respect and kindness, advance him to honors and promote his fortune.

• Curses with me have none effect, because I give them no credit. They may curse till they combust.

• An apple? It was by eating of an apple that sin came into the world.

• The common people, outside the gate, you must show them you have the king’s favor. They only understand what they see plain. If you put on no show, they take you for nothing.

• It was there – in Venice, in Rome – that he learned to be sly and sidelong, always vigilant, always ready to take offence or pretend it, ready also to back off with a soft word when the odds were against him. He learned to walk by night, to whisper, to bow to magnificoes; to step forward at the right time, with the right hint or suggestion made in a low voice, so magnifico can take credit.

• Young men claim they want change, they want freedom, but the truth is freedom just confuses them and change makes them quake. Set them on the open with a purse and a fair wind, and before they’ve gone a mile, they are crying for a master: they must be indentured, they must be in bond, they must have someone to obey.

• Thomas More’s epitaph (wrote by himself): Terrible to heretics.

• But think of Ruth in the bible. She adapted herself…you mistake those times for those. We live in the last days. They at the dawn of the world.

• In our forefathers’ time a nobleman’s life was worth six times that of a man who followed the plough. The rich man can slaughter as he pleases, if his pocket can bear the fines, but the poor man cannot afford one murder across his lifetime.

• It goes into the big box of secrets, where an ogre squats on the lid.

• What is a woman’s life? She knows she may not come alive out of that bloody chamber where she gives birth. Before her lying-in, if she is prudent, she settles her affairs. If she dies, she will be lamented and forgotten. If the child dies, she will be blamed. If she lives, she must hide her wounds. Her injuries are secret. It is Eve’s sin, the long continuing punishment it incurred, that tears at her from the inside and sheds her.

• Tough the Hydra was never a fair opponent. It lurked in caves, and could only be killed in daylight.

• Short of taking out his privy member and waiving it, there were no more he could do to establish his presence (Surrey, the son of the duke of Norfolk)

• Mabel Brigge: Every lent neighbors pay her to fast for them. For a fee, she will fast for a godly purpose, like the recovery of a sick child. But she will also make a black fast that aims to waste its victim.

• To Cromwell king Henry is the only prince. The mirror and the light of other kings.

• Henry levered himself upright; his eyes turned, and took in the scene. Alive again, he looked at England. He saw her dark valleys and green fields, her broad silver waters, her nightingale woods. He saw her just laws, her free people, he heard their prayers.

• Young fowl deboned and baked into what English call Lombard pastries, though he never met a Lombard who knew aught of them. LOL

• He dropped his napkin, like someone discarding a flag of truce.

• I think it was not by a serpent, but by paper and ink that evil came into the world.

• The grandees of England claim descent from emperors and angels. To them (pretendants to the throne), Henry Tudor is the son of Welsh horse-thieves: a parvenu, a usurper, a man to whom oaths may be broken.

• I can see why good men want to believe that Christ is coming. We want His justice, when justice seems to be long delayed.

• When he was a little lad, he used to think that boatmen spat for luck. But his uncle John told him that they do it to alert their gods, who look up through the tides at the underside of vessels, and see the leaks not yet sprung.

• Thomas Cromwell has nothing to say against inheritance. Already the name of his grandson Henry is beginning to appear on title deeds. And the child as yet has no teeth.

• If he were here with us today, he would be shivering and hastening home to a good fire and spiced wine.

  Vocabulary Builder

Words, phrases, and expressions from the book to season and spice up your language

• Walk a knife’s edge: Operating in a dangerous, precarious, or highly critical situation where two very different, often extreme, results are possible

• The scales falling from his eyes: to suddenly realize the truth about something after being deceived, mistaken, or spiritually blind, often involving a profound, life-changing enlightenment

• To be the cock of the walk.

• You are making me pick my ways through thorns

• I can get him by way of spoils

• He picks his way on stilts: Move carefully above the mess (literally and socially)

• I see you are agog with news: highly excited, eager to share news

Who Should Read This?

• People advising presidents, rulers, or leaders

• Decision and policy makers

• Everyone who wants to sharpen his/her skills on power dynamics

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In the 1500s, Queen Anne Boleyn failed to bear a son for King Henry VIII to secure the succession to the throne of England. As a result, the king is out of love with her. He now loves Jane Seymour, and he cannot have her unless Anne is removed. Since Anne will not go quietly, Henry instructed his councilor Thomas Cromwell to push her out. Cromwell wants to gratify the king a new bride. And it will not be long; even if it turns out to be bloody!

Book Summary

King Henry VIII – Source British Library

A kingly hunting party

It is summer in 1535. The king is now married to Anne Boleyn. The former queen Katherine of Aragon now demoted to Dowager of Wales, is ailing and under house arrest with her daughter Mary. King Henry VIII and his buddies are hunting up-county. Every household up-country strives to put forward its best show for the king: panic-stricken plastering, speedy stonework, display of the Tudor rose. They search out and obliterate any trace of Katherine, smashing with hammers the pomegranates of Aragon. If there is no time for carving – the falcon of Anne Boleyn is crudely painted up on hatchments.

Who is Thomas Cromwell? Son of a dubious low-born blacksmith who came out of nowhere to ascend to the post of Master Secretary of England:

Thomas Cromwell – Source Wikimedia

How the son of such a man has achieved his present eminence is a question all Europe asks.

• He was out of the realm from boyhood, a hired soldier, a wool trader, a banker. No one knows where he has been and who he has met, and he is in no hurry to tell them.

• He is now 50 years old. Laborer’s body, stocky. Greying black hair. Some say he haunts the company of sorcerers.

• His father was an Irishman, a brewer and blacksmith, a shearsman, a man with fingers on every pie, a scrapper and a brawler, a drunk, and a bully, often hauled before the justices for punching and cheating someone.

• He never spares himself in the king’s service, he knows his worth and merits and makes sure of his reward: offices, perquisites, title deeds, manor houses, and farms.

• He has a way of getting his way, he has a method; he will charm a man or bribe him, coax him or threaten him, he will explain to a man where his interests lie. And he will introduce that same man to aspects of himself he didn’t know existed.

• He is distinguished by his courtesy, his calmness and his indefatigable attention to England’s business.

• He is not in the habit of explaining himself and discussing his successes. Whenever good fortune called on him, he is always ready to fling open the door to her timid scratch on the wood.

• No man in England works harder than he does. Say what you like about Thomas Cromwell, he offers good values for what he takes. And he’s always ready to lend.

• Cardinal Wolsey used to say “Cromwell will do in a week what will take another man a year, it is not worth your while to block him or oppose him. If you reach out to grip him, he will not be there, he will have ridden twenty miles while you are pulling your boots on.”

• If he had a grievance against you, you wouldn’t like to meet him at the dark of the moon. His father Walter used to say, “My boy Thomas, give him a dirty look and he’ll gouge your eye out. Trip him, and he’ll cut off your leg. But if you don’t cut across him, he’s a very gentleman. And he’ll stand anybody a drink.”

• Now crowds scatter when he walks. Since he was sworn councilor, trestles and packing cases and loose dogs are swept from his path. Women still their whispering and tag down their sleeves and settle their rings on their fingers, since he was named Master of the Rolls. Kitchen debris and clerk’s clutter and footstools of the lowly are kicked into corners and out of sight, now that he is Master Secretary to the king.

• He reads about all subjects: how to be a good prince, or a bad one. Poetry books and volumes of accounting, books of phrases abroad, dictionaries, books on how to wipe your sins, how to preserve fish.

• A crowd has formed outside his gate, expecting largesse. His staff has money to disburse. There is the usual dole to the poor. Thurston, his chief cook, says they are feeding two hundred Londoners, twice a day.

Cromwell, always to the service of England, carrying out sweeping reforms

Parliament Procession of the Rolls – Source British Library

To him oaths to the papacy are of none effect, yet our oath to the king, as head of the church, is required. It emphasizes most strongly that the king’s authority is divine, and descends to him directly from God. And in no wise from a Pope. It descends from God without intermediary.

England needs better roads and bridges that don’t collapse. He is preparing a bill for Parliament to give employment to men without work, to get them waged and out mending the roads, making the harbors, building walls against England’s foes. It is a shame to see people begging their bread, when honest labor could keep the realm secure. We could pay them by levying an income tax on the rich.

Parliament opposed Cromwell’s new poor law requiring rich men to have some duty to the poor; that if you get fat, as gentlemen of England do, on the trade wool, you have the responsibility to provide for the men dispossessed and needy. But Parliament doesn’t think it is the state’s job to create work. These matters are in God’s hands. Poverty and dereliction are part of the eternal order and everything has a season: a time to starve and a time to thieve. It is an outrage to levy an income tax on the rich and enterprising to put bread in the mouths of the workshy. If Secretary Cromwell argues famine provokes criminality, Parliament suggests hiring more hangmen.

An act to give Wales members of Parliament and make English the language of the law courts.

Cromwell thinks they must have a great Bible in English. His ideal. A single country, single coinage, just method of weighing and measuring. And above all one language that everybody owns.

His greatest ambition for England: the prince and his commonwealth should be in accord. He doesn’t want the kingdom to be riddled with infighting. He wants it to be a household where everybody knows what they have to do and feels safe doing it.

Cromwell crusades against the monasteries

• As for the monks, he believes, like Martin Luther, the monastic life is not necessary, not useful, not commanded of Christ. There’s nothing imperishable about monasteries. They’re not part of God’s natural order.

• To Cromwell sins are sure to happen if you shut up men without recourse to women they will prey on the younger and weaker novices, they are men and it is only a man’s nature.

• Those monks who are ordained priest can be given benefices to do useful work in parishes. Those under 24, men and women both, can be sent back into the world.

• If the king had the monks’ land, not just a little but the whole of it, he would be three times the man he is now. He needs no longer go cap in hand to Parliament, wheedling for a subsidy.

• They say if the Abbot of Glastonbury went to bed with the Abbess of Shaftsbury, their offspring would be the richest landowner in England.

• This is not about your God, or my God, or about God at all. This is about which will you have: Henry Tudor or Alessandro Farnese? The king of England or some corrupt foreigner in the Vatican?

In light of this, Cromwell drafts an act to dissolve small monasteries, those worth under 200 pounds a year. He went on to pass an act to set up a Court of Augmentations to deal with the inflow of revenues from these monasteries.

Meanwhile, the Pope does not take it kindly, that he is laughed at in England and called mere “Bishop of Rome,” that his revenues are cut off and channeled into Henry’s coffers. A bull of excommunication hovers over Henry, making him an outcast among the Christians of Europe.

Former queen Katherine passes away. A mysterious fire catches queen Anne’s chamber. Are individuals visiting the queen when the lights of the palace are out?

Queen Katherine of Aragon dies under house arrest at Kimbolton castle. King Henry and Anne Boleyn are relieved and welcome the news with celebration. The king ordered a joust and the musicians tune up for the celebration at the queen’s chambers. Henry wanted Katherine’s plates and furs back. Richard Riche, a courtier and stickler for the law, made this cutting rejoinder: Majesty if you were never married to her, she was a feme sole, not a feme covert. If you were not her husband, you have no right to lay hands on her property.

Queen Anne offers to make peace with princess Mary, the daughter of the deceased queen Katherine, but she declined saying that she will not hold hands with someone who has shaken paws with the devil.

Queen Anne’s chambers catch fire. She is unhurt as the fire did not come near her. The conflagration burned only the corner of the arras.

Cromwell interrogates Jane Rochford, lady-in-waiting, to the queen and his informant: she gets on high horse and suggests that the queen may have people visiting her nightly: I shall be plain with you. I do not know who lit the candle. If I did, I would not tell you. No one will tell you either. If as it may happen, some persons visit the queen for the usual purposes of bedchambers after the lights are out, then it is an event over which we should draw a veil. Not that I say that there is such a person, I would not have knowledge of it, the queen knows how to keep her secrets.

The king’s jousting accident sent the court in turmoil; Cromwell realizes that the Crown succession line is not secured: Courtiers strategize against their enemies and seal alliances

Despite the opposition of his councilors, the king continued to joust. While jousting, the king was unseated and knocked over. Cromwell rushed to the tent, where the king was manhandled. He laid unconscious. Amid the wailing and babbling that filled the tent, the jousters told him that while the contest had not begun, the king was running and the point of his lance scooped the eye of the circle, sending the horse to stumble and roil with a scream and Henry beneath it. Some said he knocked his head.

Cromwell wonders now who can govern: Anne’s unborn child with Anne as regent? What becomes of England if Henry dies? He was married to Katherine for 18 years. This autumn it will be three with Anne, still no son to follow him, but a daughter with each and a churchyard’s worth of dead babies, some half-formed and christened in blood, some born alive but dead within hours, within days or weeks. He has a bastard, the Duke of Richmond, fine boy of sixteen, but what use to him is a bastard? The kingship as it goes is not secure to survive such a course. What does the King Edward’s Black Book say: nothing to the purpose. No one has made a plan for a king struck down between one moment and the next. No one dared to think about it.

Cromwell stares down at Henry. He thinks he has seen, but it might be a fantasy, a twitch of an eyelid. He stands over Henry and he sees that flicker again. He put his hand on the king’s chest, slapping it down. Says calmly. “The king is breathing”. Let the king breathe! As if in obedience, the king takes a deep sucking breath, and he swears and he tries to sit up. And it was over. They shout “Long live the king!” Cromwell studies the faces of the Boleyns apparently disappointed that the king had survived: they look numb, bemused with pinched faces.

The king recovering in his chamber instructed Cromwell to expunge the records to consider that this accident never happened: the king’s horse stumbled. But God’s hand plucked him from the ground and set him back laughing on his throne. The king’s accident was a reckoning moment for Cromwell: He could say. I’m a man whose only friend is the king of England. I have everything, you would think. And yet take Henry away and I have nothing.

Queen Anne is pregnant again, Hail, England!

Queen Anny Boleyn – Source British Library

Anne is pregnant again and lets out her bodices. The good news seeps and leaks through the court. Bets are laid. Pens scribbled. Letters are folded. Seals pressed to wax. Horses are mounted. Ships set sail. The old families of England kneel and ask God why he favors the Tudors. King Francis of France frowns. Emperor Charles V sucks his lip. King Henry VIII dances.

A short-lived euphoria: Queen Anne’s second miscarriage prompts the king to cast doubt on his marriage to Anne

As queen Katherine’s body was being lowered into the ground, queen Anne had her second miscarriage. As soon as she experienced this, her face changed and her ladies immediately swept her to her chamber and bolt the door, leaving a trail of blood left on the ground. People gossiped that Katherine has reached out from her tomb and shaken Anne’s child free.

The king lamented the news. What does God want of me now? What must I do to please him? I see he will not give me male children. If this miscarriage is an accident of fallen nature, I thought God regarded every sparrow that falls, truculent as a child. Then why does God not regard England?

Henry went on to blame Anne: Just to be clear on this madam. If any woman is to blame, it is the one I am looking at. I will speak to you when you are better. And now fare you well, and you better stay in bed till you are restored. I myself doubt I will ever be. Anne shouted back: Stay my lord! I will soon give you another child.

Henry sent for Cromwell. He sat whispering to him, the planets their only witnesses: what if I were to begin to suspect, there is some flaw in my marriage to Anne, some impediment, something displeasing to God Almighty. Henry added: it seems to me I was somehow dishonestly let into this marriage. It seems to me I was seduced. I was practiced upon, perhaps by charms, perhaps by spells. Women do such things. And if that were so, then the marriage would be null, would it not?

Now the king wants Anne Boleyn out and Jane Seymour in.

The king is enamored of Jane Seymour; Cromwell and the Seymours strategize to hedge their bets at the court

Jane Seymour is well-known from the court, as she was lady-in-waiting to both former queen Katherine and current queen Anne. Anne laughed at Jane, called her pasty-face and miksoap, and asked what Jane can give the king that she lacked. The Boleyns are Cromwell’s enemies and Anne threatened to fell his head unless he submits to her. He devised an alliance with the Seymours since the king has taken interest in Jane Seymour their daughter. If Cromwell places Jane Seymour before Henry’s eyes, her brother Edward Seymour will rise within the court and give him an ally where allies are scarce.

Because Cromwell has a better business sense, he did not let Jane sell herself cheap. Now the king has walks with Jane and wrote her verses. Cromwell and the Seymour family advised Jane not to give in to the king’s sexual advances. Jane related that the king asked her to be his good mistress and they told her to limit her interactions with the king to walks and reading verses. She absolutely must not give in to anything beyond, because men will tell you that they are so in love that they fear unless they have you, they will die. The moment you give in, they get up and walk away and lose all interest.

The King gives Cromwell firm instructions to bring down queen Anne: Ease out the Boleyns, ease in the Seymours. Anne’s love affairs uncovered

Henry instructed Cromwell to get rid of Anne, get him Jane, and deliver him from bitterness, from gall. Cromwell met with the queen’s father Thomas Boleyn and brother George Boleyn (Lord Rochford) to have them convince the queen to retire to a convent. Her father agreed to the arrangement provided that his titles and possessions are not taken away. He expected a generous settlement. George Boleyn objected.

Cromwell goes on to interrogate Mary Shelton the queen’s lady-in-waiting: (betrothed to Harry Norris). Mary related that all day there are shouting, slamming doors, running feet, hissed conversation in undertone from the queen’s rooms.

Harry Norris declared that he visits the queen chambers because he loved the queen. Harry Norris quarreled with Mary about Francis Weston. Then Francis Weston quarreled with Harry Norris about the queen. And both of them quarreled with Will Brereton. Because the queen praised him saying: Here the man for me, Will is one who shoots his arrow straight.

Harry Norris said he will walk barefoot to China for the queen because he loves the queen and if aught came to the king, but good, he would look to have the queen.

Cromwell who records the conversation noted that it is treason to speculate on the death of the king. The law recognized it. It is called “imagining” his death:

When taken into custody, Harry Norris admitted his love for the queen, but denied the adultery and devising the king’s death.

Cromwell interrogated Lady Jane Rochford (George Boleyn’s wife) who related the following: My husband George is always with the queen. We have seen them kiss. A brother may kiss his sister, but he may not that way. He kissed her his tongue in her mouth. And her tongue in his.

Mary Shelton also reported: Mark Smeaton – the lutenist – is always in the queen’s presence chamber. As she goes by, she does not speak to him, but laughs and tugs his sleeve or knocks his elbow, and once she snapped off the feather of his cap as a love play.

Cromwell and his staffer took Mark Smeaton into their custody to interrogate him. Mark admits that the queen is unhappy with the king because she is in love with him. Put under duress, Mark admitted the next morning that he has had to do with the queen three or four times.

Cromwell met with the king to provide all details. The king orders Cromwell to arrest the queen the next day.

Arrests and building of the case for adultery and treason

Arrest of Anne Boleyn – Source Wikimedia

The next day, the queen is asked to appear at the king’s council, seating in his Majesty’s absence. The councilors informed her that she was charged with adultery with Henry Norris, Mark Smeaton, Willam Brereton, and her brother George Boleyn. When she was told that Harry Norris and Mark Smeaton had confessed, she burst into tears. From the council chamber, she is escorted to her own rooms.

The council proceeded to arrest her and bring her to the London Tower. The right protocol due to her rank is performed: Rolling performed, folding of napery accomplished and the correct reverences are made.

Anne is taken into a barge to the Tower. Instead of going to the Tower, she would rather go see the king. But she knows the answer. Henry never says goodbye. When Anne reaches the Tower, she gets on her hands and knees on the cobbles, her head thrown back, wailing. The Tower constable asked: are we to fire the cannon? That’s usual when a person of note comes in, at the king’s pleasure. The boom of the cannon catches the courtiers unaware, shuddering across the water. You feel the jolt inside, in your bones.

Harry Norris, Francis Weston, Will Brereton, Mark Smeaton, George Boleyn (Lord Rochford): The queen’s lovers are arrested, interrogated and indicted for adultery and treason.

The trial of the queen’s lovers

Statements, indictments, bills are circulated, shuffled between judges, prosecutors, the Attorney General, the Lord Chancellor’s office, each step in the process is clear, logical, and designed to create corpses by due process of law. The protocol is the following: George Rochford (queen’s sister) will be tried apart as a peer. The commoners will be tried first. And the queen to be tried last. The order goes to the Tower, Bring up the bodies (title of the book): Francis Weston, William Brereton, Mark Smeaton, Harry Norris to Westminster Hall for trial on 12 May 1536.

They are brought in by armed guards through a fulminating crowd, shouting the odds and gambling over who will get off. The charges are read in court, as usual in treason trials, they will have no legal representation. And can speak, represent themselves, and can call witnesses. The king may grant them mercy of death by the axe, which will not add to their shame; Mark Smeaton will hang because being a man of low birth he has no honor to protect.

Mark only declares his guilt. He pleads for mercy. The other defendants are succinct. They are guilty, all condemned to death. Cromwell will move the king to grant them mercy to die by the swifter end. Including Mark. When they came in, the guards stood with halberds reversed; when they went out convicted, the axe edge is turned to them. The crowd shout: dead men! They are hustled back to their temporary home to write last letters and make spiritual preparations. All have expressed contrition, though none but Mark has said for what.

Queen Anne Boleyn’s trial:

Queen Anne entered the great chamber to stand before the peers of England. All men and none of them desiring her. The judges and peers consist of the nobilities of England: Lords, dukes, earls, among them moves softy, plain Cromwell. Greeting here and a word there. The Crown’s case is in order, no upsets are expected or will be tolerated, we shall be home for supper and sleep safely in our own beds tonight. The Attorney General reads the indictment and it takes time: crimes under statute, crimes under God. Cromwell stands up to begin his prosecution. The king wants a sentence by mid-afternoon.

The queen listens intently from her chair the list of her crimes: dizzying catalog of times, dates, places, of men, their members, their tongues: into the mouth, out of the mouth, into diverse crannies of the body; the loose words and taunts, jealous quarrels, the declaration by the queen that when her husband is dead, she will choose one of her lovers to be her husband, but she cannot say yet which. Did you say that: she shakes her head: No. All she will say is no, no, and no. At once she answers yes when asked if she has given money to Weston. And there was a whoop from the crowd.

The verdict drags in. The court implored brevity. No speeches please, one word will suffice: ninety-five vote guilty, and not one nay-sayer. The Duke of Norfolk (the queen’s own uncle and enemy) began to read the sentence: “thy judgement is this: Thou shalt be burned here, within the Tower, or else to have thy head smitten off, as the king’s pleasure shall be further known of the same.”

The queen rises from her chair, still composed, with an air indicating that she still doesn’t believe it. The messenger Francis Bryan is already gone to inform the king of the sentence.

A French ambassador meets with Cromwell to plead for mercy. The French find the whole England drama incomprehensible. If Henry wants to be rid of his concubine, why can’t he do it quietly? To the French, the best actions are covert. Henry does not need to parade his shame to the world. The ambassador related that two weeks ago before the trial, Henry sent for a French executioner, a man accustomed to chop heads. It seems there is not Englishman whom he trusts to behead his wife. So why does Henry not take her out himself and strangle her in the street?

Cromwell takes the death sentence warrants to Henry to be signed. Cromwell implored the king to grant all the convicts mercy to die by beheading instead of burning or hanging.

A court is convened to hear the divorce proceedings with Anne

Henry wants to kill queen Anne. But it is not enough to kill her. He is suspicious that Elizabeth Anne’s daughter, who is heir to the throne, is not his daughter. To put her out of succession, Henry needs to invalidate his marriage with Anne.

Cromwell goes to a court convened to hear the divorce proceedings with Anne. Two proctors of the queens are present. The king sent two substitutes. After a lengthy discussion to devise the marriage invalidity, they reached an agreement to declare the king’s marriage with Anne null. A decree is issued, but the grounds are to be kept secret, because “Truth is so rare and precious that sometimes it must be kept under lock and key.”

The execution of the queen’s lovers

The queen’s lovers are brought to the Tower Hill for execution. Her brother George Boleyn (Lord Rochford) after an eloquent speech was killed first and needed three blows of the axe. The other said not much, all proclaimed themselves sinners and deserved to die, but they did not say for what. Mark Smeaton being of low birth was left till last and slipping in the blood, called for God’s mercy and the prayers of the people.

The executioner must have steadied himself after the first blunder all died cleanly. Their bodies are hauled in cart, a heap of entangled bodies without heads. There are stripped of their clothes, which are the perquisite of the headsman and his assistants, and left with their shirts. The commoners are to be buried into a cemetery for commoners except Lord Rochford alone to go beneath the floor of the chapel.

The execution of queen Anne Boleyn by beheading

On the day of her execution, Anne took the Eucharist, declaring her innocence on the Body of God, then lamented the men who were gone and went on to joke that she will be known hereafter as Anne the Headless, Anne sans tete. The scaffold is secured by two hundred yeomen. The sword is heavy needing a two-handed grip. Four feet by two inches broad, round at the tip, double edge.

The solemn procession: the city first, aldermen and officials, then guards, in the midst of them the queen with her women. She wears a gown and a gable hood to hide her face. Once or twice the queen falters and slows the procession. To Cromwell she does not look like a powerful enemy of England, but looks can deceive. Anne has given alms as she walks. Her velvet bag is empty now. She passes the purse then moves to the edge of the scaffold. She turns to the crowd and begins to speak. “Pray for the king, for he is a good, gentle, amiable and virtuous prince…Then takes in a breath. Amen, she says amen.

Her head goes down. The executioner steps in and Anne’s eyes focus on him. As a formality he bobs his knees to ask pardon. He motions Anne to kneel. As Anne is blindfolded her lips move in prayer. The executioner waves everyone back. They all retreat and kneel. The executioner calls out. Get me the sword. Anne is misdirected and does not sense him. Then There is a groan. One single sound from the crowd. Then a silence and into that silence, a sharp sigh of a sound like a whistle through a keyhole. The body exsanguinates, and its flat little presence becomes a puddle of gore.

Charles Brandon, enemy of the queen and childhood friend of the king, is still standing. All other have knelt and taken off their hats to pay respect to the departing soul of the queen. The executioner retreats and the women handle her corpse. The queen’s sodden remains are lifted into an arrow chest. Her head is laid by her feet. The women walk away awash in the queen’s blood, closing ranks like soldiers.

Deeds of blood. Kings’ game!

King Henry marries Jane Seymour, drawing the curtain on the Boleyns

At the palace, the keys to all rooms are called in. Locks are changed. There are new servants everywhere, and old servants in new offices. New appointments to erase the Boleyns and promote the Seymours. Anne’s white falcon is replaced by the badge of the phoenix.

The king’s marriage to Jane Seymour is swift and private at Whitehall. Jane is found to be the king’s distant cousin, but all dispensations are granted in paper form.

Cromwell is still in charge. He has helped the king and the Seymours to the new world, the world without Anne Boleyn. If his new allies try to sweep him out, they will find him armored and entrenched, and stuck like a limpet to the future.

He has laws to write, the good of the commonwealth to serve, and his king. He has houses to build, books to read, he has titles and honors still to attain. He is now promoted Baron Cromwell. Can he call himself Lord Cromwell of Putney? He might laugh at himself.

We shall see.

Reflection & Insights

Deeds of blood. Kings’ game! – bloodletting

On the surface, England’s business under king Henry VIII was all about acts of parliament, dispatches to ambassadors, revenue and Wales and monks and pirates and traitorous devices and Bibles and oaths and trusts and wards and leases and the price of wool and whether we should pray for the dead. Beneath this routine, one thing was certain. It did not matter how many heads were chopped and how much blood was shed. What mattered was to ensure a clear path for the line of succession to the throne. The old families of England may squabble up, as it pleased, over who should rule. Queens unable to bear male children may be replaced in one way or the other. But ultimately, England will tend to its business as it has always been. The England crown will prevail. And Hail, King!

Contemporary rulers and statemen continue to wield power in a similar way with often some level of bloodletting. Thanks to technology, humans’ lethal capacity has increased manyfold over the centuries. In the name of the country or the state, rulers have at their disposal the weaponry and technology that allows killing in scale and at a fast pace.

Statemen always get their business done irrespective of the casualties and bloodshed: Deeds of blood. Kings or statemen’ game!

Mingling with kings brings power and fame, but fame and power come with the danger of playing with fire.

Thomas More, who was beheaded for refusing to recognize the king of England as the head of the church, epitomizes how mingling with kings or powerful people can be a dangerous game:

You can be merry with the king, you can share a joke with him, but it’s like sporting with a tamed lion. You tousle its mane and pull its ears, but all the time you’re thinking, those claws, those claws, those claws.

A lady-in-waiting reported that she once came to find queen Anne’s feet on king Henry’s lap, and he rubbing them like an ostler nursing some splayed-hooved mare. Now that she was beheaded, one can see that she tousled the lion’s mane and pulled its ears and got obliterated by its claws.

That was Anne Boleyn’s mistake. She took Henry for a man like other men, instead of what he is, and what all princes are: half god, half beast.

Besides that, we can tell that there is no mercy in the world of courtiers and powerful people. Cromwell took opportunity of the queen’s downfall to wipe out his main enemies: the Boleyns and everyone who slighted his deceased Master Cardinal Wolsey. They were all strangely indicted and convicted for treason and heinous crimes, and condemned to beheading. He slaughtered them all and only spared the life of Thomas Wyatt his friend’s son, who was part of the accused. Wyatt was the only one who escaped the scaffold.

We’ll see how his enemies treat him when they get the opportunity.

Cromwell: the successful courtier

Cromwell started as a staffer under Cardinal Wolsey and was then sworn in as the king councilor and ascended to high-ranking positions such as Master of the Rolls and Master Secretary of England. He relied on the following key traits: he was well-read and cultivated, he worked hard and outperformed his peers, he developed a network of informants to help make informed decisions, he mastered law and banking, he had a vast memory allowing him to remember all relevant key events, he mastered his emotion, he made money and spent it, and he was generous and attentive to the needs of his kinfolk. To this present days, we can tell that these traits continue to be essential for success in whatever endeavor or challenge you intend to tackle.

Character Growth Takeaways

Wisdom: [Scattered wisdom from the book to ponder over]

Looks can deceive – do not always trust your eyes with what you see. Our perception can be misleading!

The following sections well illustrate that:

You would think, to look at Henry laughing, to look at Henry praying, to look at him leading his men through the forest path, that he sits as secure on this throne as he does on his horse. Looks can deceive. By night, he lies awake, he stares at the carved roof beams; he numbers his days. He says, “Cromwell what shall I do? Cromwell save me from the emperor. Cromwell save me from the Pope. Then he calls in his Archbishop of Canterbury, Thomas Cranmer, and demands to know, “Is my soul damned?”

As Anne walked in the procession toward the scaffold of her execution, she wore a gown and a gable hood to hide her face. Once or twice, the queen faltered and forced the procession to slow down. To Cromwell, she did not look like a powerful enemy of England, but (here again) looks can deceive.

More words of wisdom:

• All our labors, our sophistry, all our learning both acquired or pretended, the stratagems of state, the lawyers’ decrees, the churchmen’s curses, and the grave resolutions of judges, sacred or secular: all and each can be defeated by a woman’s body.

• A good master gives more than he takes and his benevolence guides you through your life.

• Cardinal Wolsey once said: Never let me hear you claim, you don’t know what goes behind closed doors. Find out.

• Death is your prince, you are not his patron: when you think he is engaged elsewhere, he will batter down your door, walk in and wipe his boots on you.

• You know Thomas More used to say: if the lion knew his own strength, it will be hard to rule him.

• Roses snatched from the thorns.

• An old man once told him: a dying lioness can maul you, flash out with her claw and scar you for life.

Lessons learned from an old Portuguese knight

• A man’s reputation would go before him, and in the end, given a bad season, a run of ill-luck, reputation’s all you’ve got. So don’t you push your luck when the fortune’s star is shining, because the next minute, it isn’t…. Don’t pay out good money for horoscopes. If things are going to go badly, is that what you need to know when you saddle up?

• (In jousting), there are three ways to fail: Horse can fail. Boys can fail, Nerve can fail (Interpretation: in whatever challenge you are taking on, you can fail in three ways: the means used, the people engaged, or their mindset)

• Some people veer away in the second before clash. It is natural, but forget what is natural. Practice until you break your instinct.

• Some men don’t swerve, but instead they close their eyes at the moment of the impact. These men are of two kinds: the ones who know they do it and can’t help it, and the ones who don’t know they do it. Get your boys to watch you when you practice. Be neither of these men.

• Remember this above all: defeat your instinct. Your love of glory must conquer your will to survive; or why fight at all? Why not be a smith, a brewer, a wool merchant? Why are you in the contest, if it is not to win, and if not to win, then to die?

More words of wisdom

• What is the nature of the border between truth and lies? It is permeable and blurred because it is planted thick in rumor, confabulation, misunderstandings, and twisted tales. Truth can break the gates down, truth can howl on the street, unless truth is pleasing, personable and easy to like, she is condemned to stay whimpering at the back door.

• Did we follow the Black Book’s protocols from King Edward’s time? It orders everything in the household except the king’s privy chamber, whose workings are not transparent.

• Make them prosper; out of superfluity, they will be generous. Full bellies breed gentle manners. The pinch of famine makes monsters.

• The bleat of the man of fifty: I used to, I can’t now. There are compensations: the head is better stored with information, the heart better proof against chips and fractures.

• Erasmus says you should praise a ruler even for the qualities he does not have. For the flattery gives him to think. And the qualities he presently lack, he might go to work on them.

• It has always surprised me that those who are untrustworthy themselves are blind when placing their own trust.

• Princes do not think as other men think.

• The thought is father to the deed, and the deed is born raw, ugly, premature.

• Parliament is an exercise of frustration. It is a lesson in patience. They commune of war, peace, strife, contention, debate, murmur, grudges, riches, poverty, truth, falsehood, justice, equity, oppression, treason, murder, and the edification and continuance of the commonwealth; then they do as their predecessors have done. They leave off where they began.

Temperance: [Lesson about restraint, balance, humility]

The following fact illustrates some level of temperance and self-control

• Have you ever left a conference room or a board room feeling like Cromwell and Cranmer leaving the king after a discussion, where the king cast doubt on his marriage with queen Anne?

  • They are like two men crossing thin ice; leaning into each other, taking tiny, timid steps. As if that will do you any good, when it begins to crack on every side.

• Pain-confusion technique taught by a blacksmith Walter, Cromwell’s father advised him as follows: Raise your hands and cross your wrists before you when you get burned.

The following sections illustrate how Cromwell used this technique to diffuse the king’s anger.

Henry is convulsing with rage: I really believe Cromwell, that you think you are king and I’m the blacksmith’s boy.

He knows his face shows nothing, neither repentance nor regret nor fear. He thinks the king could never be a blacksmith’s boy. Walter would not have had you in his forge. Brawn is not the whole story. In the flames you need a cool head, when sparks are flying to the rafter you must note when they fall on you and knock the fire away with one swat of your hard palm: a man who panics is no use in a shop full of molten metal.

And now Henry’s sweating face thrust into his: he remembers something his father told him. If you burn your hand, Tom, raise your hands and cross your wrists before you, and hold them so until you get to the water or the salve. I don’t know how it works, but it confuses the pain, and then if you utter a prayer at the same time, you might get off not too bad,

He raises his palms. He crosses his wrists. Back you go, Henry. As if confused by the gesture – as if almost relived to be stopped. The king ceased ranting and backed off turning his face away and so relieving him

Walter’s advice is not real magic — it’s a pain-confusion technique

As anybody experienced the effectiveness of this pain confusion technique?

Courage: [Lesson about strength, risk, or standing up]

This passage depicts some sheer courage:

His nephew Richard Cromwell is a solid boy with the Cromwell eye, direct and brutal, and the Cromwell voice that can caress or contradict. He is afraid of nothing that walks the earth, and nothing that walks below it; if a demon turned up at Austin Friars, Richard would kick it downstairs on its hairy arse.

Justice: [Lesson about fairness, integrity, or responsibility]

An act of justice from the book:

• Cromwell often took a stand in Parliament to defend the cause of the poor and needy in England.

Memorable Quotes & Phrases

Memorable Quotes from the Book:

• From his uprising to his downlying, and all his private hours in between.

• The sky is so clear you can see into Heaven and spy on what the saints are doing.

• Think of the great limbs of those dead men, stirring under the soil. War was their nature, and war is always keen to come again.

• We ladies, we do not spend all our time in idle calumny and scandal. Though God knows, we have gossip enough to occupy the whole town of women.

• I have no time for wooing. I am fifty. At my age one would be a loser on a long-term contract. If I want a woman, best to rent one by the hour.

• Letters from foreign rulers wishing to know if it is true that Henry is planning to cut off the heads of all his bishops. Certainly not, he (Cromwell) notes, we have excellent bishops now, all of them conformable to the king’s wishes, all of them recognizing him as head of the church in England; What an uncivil question! How dare they impugn his sovereign judgement?

• The Italians say the road between England and Hell is worn bare from treading feet, and runs downhill all the way.

• In village alehouses up and down England, they are blaming the king and Anne Boleyn for the weather: the concubine, the great whore. If the king would take back his lawful wife Katherine, the rain would stop. And indeed, who can doubt that everything would be different and better, if only England were ruled by village idiots and their drunken friends?

• Once they were young men of esprit, young man of elan. A quarter of century has passed and they are grey or balding, flabby or paunchy, gone in the fetlock or missing some fingers, but still as arrogant and with the mental refinement of a gatepost

• Now there is a new litter of pups, Weston and George and their ilk, whom Henry has taken up because he thinks they keep him young.

• They (privy chamber members) know his (the king) person, each mole or freckle, each bristle in his beard.

• If you guys don’t respect my awning, I’ll shear off your testicles and hang them over the doorway on a ribbon.

• The English are a nation of hypocrites. Ingrates, natural liars.

• Wreathed arms, laurels of victory, the shaft of the lictor’s axe, the shaft of the spear.

• If you said to Lady Rochford, “it’s raining, “she would turn it into conspiracy, as she passed the news on.

• Be the man with good news. Who knows, he (the king) might knight you on the spot.

• All of them (boys) in flight from their father, from their belts and fists, and from the education they were threatened with if they ever stand still.

• Those sectaries in Europe who are always expecting the end of the world, but who hope that, after the earth has been consumed by fire, they will be seated in glory: grilled a little, crisp at the edges and blackened in parts, but still, thanks be to God, alive for Eternity, and seated at his right hand.

• They say money follows you these days like a spaniel his master.

• The fashion for yellow in London: You’d see a woman in a brothel hoisting her fat dugs and tight-lacing her yellow bodice.

• For we are condemned to fight until breath goes out of our bodies. She is my death and I’m hers.

• Women pray to St Uncumber to be rid of useless husbands. Now, is there a saint that men can pray to if they wish to be quit of their wives?

• The Commons. God rot them. Their heads are empty. They never think higher than their pockets.

• It’s the way business has always been done, favors, sweeteners, a timely transfer of funds, or a promise of split proceeds.

• Cromwell you are a Lutheran. No sir I am a banker. Luther condemns to Hell those who lend at interest.

• Women age, men like variety: it’s an old story, and even an anointed queen cannot escape it to write her own ending.

• Cromwell is supposed to manage it for him (the king). Ease out the Boleyns, ease in the Seymours. His business is kinglier: praying for the success of his enterprises, and writing songs for Jane.

• I will give that puppy a kick in the ribs he will not forget.

• She induced the king to put his seed otherwise that he should have. So now he berates her, that she caused him to do so. Opportunities lost. Seed gone waste slid away in some crevice of her body or down her throat.

• Every duchess would be frolicking in a copse with a woodcutter. Only there are so few duchesses and so many woodcutters. There must be competition between them.

• In France, torture is usual, as necessary as salt to meat; in Italy, it is a sport for the piazza. In England, the law does not countenance it. But it can be used, at a nod from the king: on a warrant.

• When a man admits a guilt, we have to believe him. We cannot set ourselves to proving to him that he is wrong. Otherwise, the law courts would never function.

• You understand there are charges that are written down in an indictment. And there are the other charges, those we don’t commit to paper.

• If what someone wants from you is an admission, it is never in your interest to give it.

• To intend the king’s death, that is treason. …but the queen says “if he dies”. So let me put a case to you. If I say “All men must die,” is that a forecast of the king’s death? And therefore treason?

• Doing so would not be consonant with his dignity.

• Marlinspike (Cardinal Wolsey’s cat), after some years of fighting and scavenging he ran off, as cats do, to make his career elsewhere.

• We do not need any false excitement. After all, it is a law court, not a Roman circus.

• The trial is fixed for getting Anne out, Jane in. The effects of it have not been tested yet, the resonances have not been felt; but he expects a quaking at the heart of the body politic, a heaving in the stomach of the commonwealth.

• The monks have relics that make it rain or make it stop, that inhibit the growth of weeds and cure diseases of cattle. They charge the use of them, they do not give them free to their neighbors

• The prior has six children and keeps his sons in his household as waiting men. He says in his defense he never meddled with married women, only virgins, and when he was tired of them or there were with child, he found them a husband. He claims he has a license given under papal seal, allowing him to keep a whore.

  Vocabulary Builder

Words, phrases, and expressions from the book to season and spice up your language

• Ride with the reins slack on the neck of one’s mount: loosen the reins or ride with slack reins means to relax control over a situation, person, or project.

• he’ll stand anybody a drink: he will pay for a drink as a treat or gift for anyone

• Find something that will fit the bill

• The queen eggs them on (egg on): to strongly encourage or provoke them to do something, usually something foolish, risky

• The enemy is within a bow shot.

• The scrapping for the spoils has begun: a competitive, aggressive struggle between parties to claim the benefits, assets, or rewards from a victory or the collapse of a former authority

• He is as courteous to a dairy maid as to a duke.

• Not a gossamer thread of him is snapped: describes a person’s enduring spirit or life’s hardships, no part of their core identity or vitality has been broken.

• To be at outs: to be estranged, unfriendly, or not on good terms with someone, often after an argument, disagreement, or conflict

• Get the rough side of my tongue: to speak angrily or harshly to someone about something that they have done wrong

• His behavior was mild to a fault: the person is so gentle, patient, or non-confrontational that it actually becomes a weakness or a problem

• To be hanged and gralloched by the hangman:

• Once they were young men of esprit, young men of elan.

  o Esprit: the intellectual way—charming, funny, and deeply clever

  o Elan: Vigor and vitality, dash and panache, confidence, momentum

• A bone-crushing hug

• Drain the flask: Drink to empty the bottle

Condign punishment: punishment appropriate to the wrongdoing

Fancy words

• Lily-liver: weak and cowardly

• Coxcomb: vain and conceited man; a dandy

• Tittle-tattle: idle talk, gossip

• Fuckwit: a stupid or contemptible person

• Hoity-toity: haughty or snobbish

• Tosspot: a contemptible or obnoxious person

• Tilt yard: a place where jousts took place

Who Should Read This?

• People advising presidents, rulers, or leaders

• Decision and policy makers

• Everyone who wants to sharpen his/her skills on power dynamics

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While King Henry VIII is engaged in his unfruitful quest for a male heir to the throne, England severs ties with Rome to undertake the sweeping reformation movement.

But behind the plight of unfortunate queens accused of having barren wombs unable to produce a male heir, and all the boasting about the sola scriptura tenets, the reformation lurks high stakes of economic interests and much more.

Besides the entanglement of politics, religion, and economic interests in 1500s Europe, Wolf Hall illustrates how a low-born man emerged as a courtier and went up the ladder rungs to take a prominent seat in the countinghouse of England.

Book Summary

King Henry VIII – Source: British Library

Humble beginnings of Thomas Cromwell

Around the 1500s in Putney, England, a boy named Thomas Cromwell goes out fighting against other boys. To punish him, his father Walter Cromwell creeped up behind him and knocked him over. When Thomas fell down unconscious, Walter beat him so bad that he became unrecognizable. When he managed to stand up, knowing that his father will come after him when he had had a skinful, Thomas went to borrow money from his sister and her husband and fled abroad to Calais, where he enlisted in the French army as a paid soldier fighting in the war. After the war, he remained in Europe to conduct more lucrative trading activities. He spent significant time in Florence, Italy where he practiced law and developed tremendous banking skills.

Where else had he been? No one knew for sure. Thomas Cromwell was now back in England working as a staffer under Cardinal Wolsey, the all-powerful papal legate of England and Master Secretary at the court of king Henry VIII.

King Henry VIII and queen Katherine of Aragon lived in vain the hope for a male heir

The king of England Henry VIII had been married to queen Katherine of Aragon (Catalina) a princess from the family of Emperor Charles V of Spain for 18 years. Katherine was betrothed to Arthur, the brother of Henry who died and paved the way for Henry to wed Katherine. Six times, Katherine, the king, and all England lived the hope for an heir. But they all breathed only few days. Their first child Princess Mary lived, but as a girl she was deemed unfit to rule. King Henry confessed to Cardinal Wolsey that his 18 years of marriage was to be annulled, because he realized that his deceased brother Arthur had consummated his marriage with Katherine and because the marriage was consummated, Katherine lied to him, so Katherine was his sister and he needed Pope Clement’s dispensation to annul his marriage and expiate this 18 years sin.

Cardinal Wolsey failed to secure dispensation from Pope Clement to annul king Henry VIII’s marriage – Fall from grace of Wolsey

Cardinal Wolsey was the Master Secretary of England and papal legate. He first failed to rally European allies around the king’s intent to get a dispensation from Rome to annul his marriage with queen Katherine. In England, Wolsey held a legatine court hearing presided by Cardinal Campeggio from Rome on the matter of king Henry’s attempt to annul his marriage.

Whereas the king doubled down his claim that when queen Katherine came to him, she was not a virgin, having consummated her marriage with his brother Arthur, Katherine contented that she was a virgin when she married the king. Cardinal Campeggio implored Katherine to bow to the king’s will, accept that her marriage was invalid and retire to a convent, to which she objected unless the king becomes a monk.

Cardinal Wolsey failed to get the dispensation for king Henry. The king’s council proceeded to move writs against the Cardinal and charged him with the violation of the statutes of praemunire, meaning that he asserted a foreign jurisdiction in the king’s realm, by exercising his role as papal legate. Wolsey was stripped of everything: wardrobe, jewels, documents, and the Great Seal of England and put under house arrest at Escher a remote deserted property with a complete sign of ill keeping. He later died of illness, which appeared to be poisoning.

A local English court hearing presided by Dr Cranmer the king’s new archbishop was held to annul the marriage. Queen Katherine, now demoted to Dowager of Wales, declined to attend the hearing. The marriage was pronounced invalid and Katherine put under house arrest up-country at Hertfordshire.

Thomas Cromwell, then a staffer under Wolsey wept, bowed his head and prayed for light. He had just lost his wife Liz and two daughters to the plague within a few months apart. Cromwell realized that his situation was bleak and he nearly lost everything: family, his master, and the prospect of success. He needed to do something. Thomas decided to go make a place in the Parliament: he meant to make or mar.

The rise to power of Thomas Cromwell: A courtier without equal

Key character traits of Thomas Cromwell, the accomplished courtier

The following facts describe the character traits that contributed to make him the most powerful courtier of England, whom all Europe talked about:

• He was cultivated and well-read

o He knew by heart the whole New Testament in Latin and was always ready with a text to confront abbots when they flounder.

o He quoted nice points from old authors such as Plato, Erasmus, Marsiglio of Padua, Nicollo Machiavelli, etc.

• He was very knowledgeable of the law, adroit at manipulation it, and versatile

o His manner assured whether he was at home, in the courtroom, or at the waterfront.

o He could draft a contract, train a falcon, draw a map or stop a street fight, furnish a house and fix a jury.

o He was the man to cut through some legal entanglement that’s ensnared you for three generations.

• He worked very hard

o He worked all hours, first up and last to bed, approximatively 18 hours per day.

o He relied on to-do lists to keep track of the king’s various affairs.

• He was generous and cared for his kinfolk and friends

o He made money and spent it. He will take a bet on anything.

o Cromwell was generous. He had beer and bread sent to the crowd standing at the gate of Austin Friars, his house, and broth delivered to them as the morning got sharper.

o Cromwell took great care of his kinfolk. He built houses for his male children and arranged advantageous marriages for all the girls living under his guardianship.

• He was very persuasive

o He could talk your sniffling daughter into the marriage she swears she will never make

o Nobody can outtalk him if he wanted to talk.

o He was the very man for telling your tenants twelve good reasons why their rent is fair.

• He was an astute businessman, a skilled trader, and an intelligent investor

o He can converse you about the Ceasars or get you Venetian glassware at a reasonable rate.

o Nobody can better keep his head when the market was falling and weeping men were standing in the street tearing up letters of credit.

o With animals, women, or timid litigants, he was gentle, but could make your creditors weep.

• He was methodic and organized

o He took notes of the names and abilities of everyone he interacted with: e.g. dress a salad, play a drum, say Pater Noster, etc.

o He liked to interact with people, study their faces, ask them questions which prompted them to think deep and understand their abilities.

o His mind was peopled with imaginary images, which allowed him to cast thousand plays and interludes when he tackled challenges.

• He mastered his emotions, possessed self-control and temperance, and was fearless

o Cromwell was not subject to the vagaries of temperament.

o He could shape the events, mold them. He could contain the fears of other men, and give them a sense of solidity in a quaking world.

Cromwell’s introduction to king Henry VIII and diatribe against monks

After the fall of his master Cardinal Wolsey, Cromwell managed to become a burgess at the Parliament, where he turned out to be an eloquent speaker. He was then introduced to king Henry by other courtiers. When he met with Henry, he did not miss the opportunity to knock his socks off. He convinced him that England did not possess the financial means to afford a war. He showed the king his knowledge of politics and trade in Europe and waging wars.

Cromwell went on to engage in a virulent diatribe against the monasteries, told the king that monasteries were not well governed. They were fraught with waste and corruption. He said he had seen monks live like great lords on the offerings of poor people. Instead of being repositories of learning, the monasteries subjected children to servitude and abused them. He said he cannot stomach their hypocrisy, fraud, idleness, their worn-out relics, their threadbare worship and lack of invention; they only repeat and what they repeat was corrupt. To him, the monks had distorted England’s history to favor Rome and he was convinced that they could make good use of the monasteries’ money that flowed yearly to Rome.

How Cromwell was sworn into the king’s council: Interpretation of Henry’s haunting dream

One day after midnight, the king sent for Cromwell to report at his Greenwich property. When they got there, the king explained that his deceased brother Arthur came to him in a dream. He stood and looked at him. Arthur was so sad to seem to say that he took his place, that he had taken his kingdom and used his wife. He said that Arthur came back to make him ashamed.

Henry was shaken by this dream. To calm him down, Cromwell explained to the king that his brother meant to tell him to become the king that he would have been. Arthur himself could no longer fulfill the prophecy, but he willed it to Henry. For Arthur, the promise, and for the king, the performance of it. Now, it was time for Henry to become the ruler he should be and to be the sole and supreme head of the kingdom of England. The interpretation of the dream soothed Henry and relieved him of his worries. Impressed by Cromwell, Henry slowly smiled and said: Very well, I see I understand it all now. When he dismissed them, it was four o’clock in the morning. Later that day, Cromwell was called back to Greenwich into a paneled chamber of councilors. The king said to him, radiant: the council is waiting. Go and join them. They will give you your oath.

Thomas Cromwell swore to give faithful counsel, in his speech to be plain, impartial, in his manner secret, in his allegiance true. He swore to uphold the king’s authorities. His preeminence, his jurisdictions. He swore to uphold his heirs and lawful successors.

Cromwell devoted his talent to serve king Henry VIII

The king favored Cromwell, who continued to rise in power. The king appointed him Keeper of the Jewel House. From there, he could take an overview of the king’s income and outgoings. Cromwell now saw the king every day. If Henry wants advice, he can give it. Or if the subject is outside his remit, he will find someone else who can. If the king has a complaint, he will say leave it to me. If the king is in a good humor, he is ready to laugh, and if the king is miserable, he is gentle and careful with him. The king sees him in private; he prefers his nobles not to know how often he consults with Cromwell.

Cromwell concerned himself solely on Henry’s kinship and his role as the ruler of England and the head of the church. He did not want to meddle with the king’s sexual escapades with the women at the palace. The king moved on to appoint Cromwell Master Secretary of England, despites the fact that he was a low-born son a of an ill-reputed blacksmith.

Cromwell’s wealth and generosity

Cromwell accumulated significant wealth. His place Austin Friars had become a large room filled with light. The clock. A new chest from Flanders with carving of the birds and flowers. Paintings, lutes and books of music, a mirror, an ivory comb. He was throwing money at the London goldsmiths and mercers so the women at Austin Friars were bywords among city wives who said behind their hands, with a worshipful murmur, almost a genuflection: Dear God, Thomas Cromwell, the money must be flowing in like the grace of God.

Cromwell possessed two manors in Kent, he was buying another in Essex, eyeing others in Hackney and Shoreditch and the king just gifted him one in Monmouthshire. Those who wanted access to the king expected to pay for it, and no one had better access than he. Help Cromwell and he will help you. Be loyal, be diligent, be intelligent on his behalf; you will come into reward. Those who committed their service to him were promoted and protected.

Despite his wealth and rising status, he was frequently subject to abuses. They said that his father was a blacksmith, a crooked brewer, he was an Irishman, he was a criminal, he was a Jew. He was a wool-trader, a shearsman, and now a sorcerer. Who else but a sorcerer would get the reins of power in his hand?

The king marries Anne Boleyn

On 1521 a lady, Anne Boleyn of about 22, appeared at the court during a Christmas party. She was the daughter of a diplomat Thomas Boleyn. She grew up overseas and spoke French, betrothed at some point to Harry Percy from Northumberland. The king opposed the marriage because he had his eyes on her. Henry took interest in Anne and the pair vowed to ride over hell to marry.

In January 25, 1533, in a chapel at Whitehall, king Henry VIII and Anne Boleyn took their vows of holy matrimony to confirm the contract they had made to get married. That happened almost in secret with no celebration and just a huddle of witnesses.

Anne got pregnant by the king and the news of her happy state spread to all over Europe.

Meanwhile, Pope Clement ruled that Henry’s marriage to Anne was void. He will excommunicate him if he did not return to Katherine. Christendom will slough him off, body and soul, and his subjects will rise up and eject him into ignominy and exile. No Christian hearth will shelter him, and when he dies his corpse will be dug with animal bones into a common pit. Cromwell advised Henry to shrug off the ruling and referred to the Pope as the bishop of Rome and laugh when his name was mentioned.

Queen Anne’s coronation and failure to produce a male hair

In preparation for the procession of the coronation of Anne Boleyn, Cromwell supervised major projects, including the renovation of the Tower, where he persuaded the foremen to keep their men working through frost and rain.

Four days for Anne’s coronation, Day one and two being the apogee

Day one: fifty barges in procession to the tower. Boats packed with hundreds of musicians. Aquatic dragons spitting fire accompanied by men throwing fireworks. Ships discharging their ordinance in salute. By the time she reached the Tower, the sun was out and the Thames ablaze. The king was waiting to greet Anne when she landed. Radiant!

Day two: Anne was brought to Westminster. Her procession was led by a retinue of ambassadors, judges, knights, and bishops. Sixteen people hand carried Anne in a white litter with silver bells, which rang at each step. Ladies on palfreys trapped with white velvet, and ancient dowagers in their chariots. Everywhere were pageants, gifts of gold from city coffers, recitations of their virtues, her falcon emblem crowned and entwined with roses and blossoms.

The pregnant Anne was mantled in purple velvet edged with ermine. She walked to the altar to lie face down and got back on her feet to get crowned by Archbishop Cranmer in a dense cloud of incense. Anne sat with an ivory specter in her hands and briefly wore the crown of St Edward. The nobility of English worked through twenty-three dishes. So many fountains flowed with wine that it was hard to find one flowing with water.

Automn 1533, Anne gave birth to a baby girl. The king, mortified by the child’s gender, took the blow perfectly. Barely able to disguise his shaking voice, he asked: Healthy? “Then I thank God for his favor to us; as I thank you, my lords, for this comfortable intelligence.” As the king walked away, he said: “Oh! Call her Elizabeth. Cancel the jousts.” The king retired in his chambers to “mourn” the news. To console him, a courtier said: “The queen is strong and her family is fertile. You can get another child soon. And perhaps God intends some peculiar blessing by this princess.”

The key tenants of England reformation

Cromwell continued to frame the tenets of the power of England’s monarchy as he prefaced this: This realm of England is an Empire, and so has been accepted in the world, governed by one Supreme Head and King. He believed that all English people wanted was good authority, one they can properly obey. That authority was the English king, who will exercise his powers under Parliament and all under God’s blessing.

Cromwell studied Marsiglio of Padua, who made forty-two propositions in 1324, and went on to propose sweeping reforms for England to the king:

• When Christ came into this world, he came not as a ruler or a judge, but as a subject: He did not seek to rule, nor pass on to his disciples a mission to rule. He did not give power to one of his followers more than another. Christ did not make Popes. He did not give his followers the power to make laws or levy taxes, both of which churchmen have claimed as their right.

• The prince gets the power to make laws or levy taxes, and his power to enforce it, through a legislative body, which acts on behalf of the citizens. It is from the will of the people, expressed in Parliament, that a king derives his kingship.

• Christ did not bestow on his followers grants of land, monopolies, offices, promotions. All these things are the business of the secular power. For a man who has taken vows of poverty, how can he have property rights? How can monks be landlords?

Henry tasked Cromwell with drafting and passing sweeping reforms at the parliament, which some of the key tenets were:

• Act of Supremacy

It was time for England to assume her capacity for self-rule. It was time to say what a king is, what trust and guardianship he owes his people, what protection from foreign incursions moral or physical, what freedom from pretensions of those who would like to tell an Englishman how to speak to his God. The Act of Supremacy draws together all the powers and dignities assumed by the king to declare him the head of the church.

• Enactment of the scope of treason

A second enactment came into force, which defined the scope of treason. It will be a treasonable offense to deny Henry’s titles or jurisdiction, to speak or write maliciously against him, to call him a heretic or a schismatic.

• Severance of ties with Rome, Valor Ecclesiasticus

The king gave Cromwell a title, which no one had ever held before: Viceregent in Spirituals, his deputy in church affairs. Cromwell was tasked with the following: break the bishops and make the king head of the church and take away their revenues from the Holy Father and give them to Henry.

Cromwell had the power to visit and inspect the monasteries to perform as follows:

• Assess the wealth of the church, clergy and monasteries, – Valor Ecclesiasticus

• Reform monasteries to affirm Henry as the supreme ruler of the church, with the clergy to become the king’s subjects and bishops no longer taking an oath to obey and support the Pope.

• Break the resistance of the bishops to Henry’s new order

• Bring their assets under his control and put in place a legislation that will cut revenues to Rome

• The legislative to provide for the maintenance of bishops and priests and use the rest of the church’s colossal wealth for the public good.

Sola Scriptura – by Scripture alone

Cromwell’s reformation questioned the roman catholic tenets, shrines, and practices: purgatory, saints, veneration of sacred objects. The reform posited that Christ taught us how to remember him by leaving us bread and wine, body and blood. What more else did we need? Where was it asked for shrines to be set up, or instituted a trade in body parts, in hair, and nails, or asked to make plaster and worship them? This question summed it up: Show me where it says, in the Bible, Purgatory. Show me where is says relics, monks, nuns. Show me where it says Pope.

A Collateral victim of the England reformation: Thomas More (now a catholic saint)

Besides Cardinal Wolsey and numerous nuns, priests, and monks, there was another major figure who fell victim to the England reformation. Thomas More, who is now a catholic saint.

Thomas More was, a respected scholar in Europe and the Lord Chancellor of England. His opinions were fixed and impervious to arguments. He spent his life reading, writing, talking about what he believed was the Christian commonwealth under one, undivided, and universal church headed by Rome. It was said that Thomas More spent significant time persecuting heretics. More regarded Cromwell as in infidel conspiring with Luther and the Germans or some heathen god or English deity. He firmly opposed the king’s marriage annulment.

More was later required to swear to the Act of Supremacy, an act which declared the king the head of the church. More refused to take the oath arguing that his conscience advised him against it. The king directed Cromwell to introduce a bill of attainder against More. More was indicted for treason, trialed, declared guilty, and condemned to death by beheading.

On the day of his execution, a stoic More made some quip to the headsman, knelt at the block, and said his final prayer. At the sickening sound of the ax, his head and corpse flew asunder. More’s trial was the arm wrestling of England against Rome. Rome and More appeared to have lost to England.

Reflection & Insights

1. The England Reformation: Religion, politics, and economic interests: a mixed bag of writhing double-headed serpents. Religious zealots, think again!

This fateful quest for a male heir to the throne of England morphed into the reformation movement. Beyond the game of blaming queens for their incapacity to produce an heir to the throne, the reformation offered a stage for religion, politics, and economic interests to intertwine in the 1500s Europe as a bag of writhing double-headed serpents, capable to biting on either side. Some religious zealots may think that this was only about England against Rome, Protestant Reformation against Catholicism, but a careful analysis reveals that geo-politics and economic interests were at stake between European powers (France, Germany, Spain, Rome, etc.).

On one hand, the Reformation promoted Sola scriptura – by the scripture only – as opposed to catholic values and traditions. But obviously through monasteries, the catholic church owned about the third of England. The English monarchy was envious of the colossal fortune that the clergy had, along with all the funds that were funneled into Rome. Through the Reformation, England found the subterfuge needed to redirect that wealth to fund its national interests. On the other hand, if the clergy did own about the third of England, how did they accumulate such wealth? Was that wealth necessary for spreading the gospel in England?

And guess what! On October 2025, King Charles III of England traveled to Rome to meet with Pope Leo XIV to pray together and seal the reconciliation after nearly 500 years since they cut ties during the Cromwell reformation.

So, whether you are Catholic or Anglican, I’d suggest zealots to curb their zeal and show humility, because this was not only a matter of faith. It was mainly about politics and economic interests.

2. The key traits of the accomplished courtier: Anatomy of people who rise to take a seat in the countinghouse

According to Robert Greene in his seminal book the 48 Laws of Power, if the world is like a giant court and we are trapped in it, there is no use in trying to opt out of the game of power. That will render us powerless and miserable. Instead of trying to evade and escape the power game, it is far better to exert ourselves to excel at the game. Throughout Wolf Hall, various key character traits were displayed by Thomas Cromwell to tame the power and become the greatest courtier in the history of England. As social animals interacting with others in society, we ought to develop some of the following key character traits, which helped him get invited to the countinghouse:

• Cromwell was well-read: he knew the New Testament by heart, and he quoted great thinkers such as Plato, Marsiglio of Padua, Erasmus, Castiglione, etc.

• He was an astute lawyer and skilled with testing words to find their utmost power.

• He worked long hours, about 18 hours a day to draft contracts and direct the king’s various affairs

• He was generous: his affairs minted a ton of money, he lived lavishly, but he gave money away and made sure his kinfolk were taken care of.

• He leveraged a network of friends inside England, at the palace, and throughout Europe to gather the intelligence necessary for making informed decisions.

• He cultivated courage, was cunning and ruthless when taking on his opponents and peer courtiers, and he exercised temperance.

So, if you desire to go up the later, grub more power, and get a seat in the countinghouse, work hard, read voraciously, develop emotional intelligence, network and gather intelligence, and be generous.

Personally, I strive to be bookish and well-read by reading books from great thinkers to keep testing my mental fitness. Which one is your favorite character trait?

3. Why England seems to be so superstitious and gossipy?

This book is littered with gossip and superstition mainly around the British monarchy.

Superstition about the princes

Stories have been put about that Anne’s child was born with teeth, has six fingers in each hand, and is furred all over like a monkey, so her father (the king) has shown her off to the ambassadors, and her mother is keeping her on display to counter the rumors.

The serpent queens of England, black-fanged and haughty, dragging their blood-soaked linen and their crackling skirts. They kill and eat their own children; this is well-known. They suck their marrow before they are even born.

The wives of England, they all keep secret books of whom they are going to have next when they have poisoned their husbands. And you (Cromwell) are the top of everyone’s list.

The royals’ intimacy and sex life is exposed:

All Europe talked about Katherine and what body part was put where, was she penetrated and if she was, did she know?

One courtier reported: Harry’s leg pains him at night. He is afraid the queen will kick him in the throes of her passion. When the queen lies still under the king he says, what madam, are you so little interested in making my heir? She says she gets no pleasure with him. The king said he fought seven years to get her, he can hardly admit it has stalled so soon. So, between the kicking and sore leg, and the luck of prowess, and her lack of desire, it will be a wonder if we ever have a Prince of Wales?

I understand why until today tabloids continue to thrive and roil Londoners and the world with the lives of the British crown. However, I wonder how the country of eminent thinkers such as Isaac Newton and Adam Smith can be so gossipy and superstitious?

Character Growth Takeaways

Wisdom: [Scattered wisdom from the book to ponder over]

• The world in not run from fortresses. Not even from Whitehall (the king’s palace). The world is run from Antwerp, from Florence, from Lisbon where the ships with sails of silk drift west. Not from castle walls, but from countinghouses, not the call of the bugle, but by the click of the abacus, not by the grate and click of the mechanism of the gun, but the scrape of the pen on the page of the promissory note that pays for the guns.

• The wise prince exterminates the envious. The wise prince is not the most popular. (Niccolo’s book)

• Unarmed prophets always fail. (Niccolo’s book)

• There is an art to being in a hurry but not showing it.

• When you make a king cry, know that it’s time to back off.

• When you are writing laws you are testing words to find their utmost power. Like spells, they have to make things happen in the real world, and like spells, they only work if people believe in them.

• If your law exacts a penalty, you must be able to enforce it on the rich as well as the poor.

• You don’t get on by being original. You don’t get on by being bright. You don’t get on by being strong. You get on by being a subtle crook.

• Try always to learn what people wear under their clothes, for it’s not just their skin.

• Choosing a wife is like putting your hand into a bag full of writhing creatures, with one eel to six snakes. What are the chances you will pull out the eel?

• Bishop Fisher has said in court that no power, human or divine, could dissolve the marriage of the king and queen. To Cromwell, if there’s one thing he’d like to teach Fisher, it’s not to make grand overstatements. Cromwell had an idea of what the law can do, and it’s different from what Bishop Fisher thinks.

• Sometimes it is weak to be anecdotal. It is wise to conceal the past even if there is nothing to conceal.

• A man’s power is in the half-light, in the half-seen movements of his hand and the unguessed-at expressions of his face. It is the absence of facts that frightens people; the gap you open, into which they (people) pour their fears, fantasies, desires.

• It is said in the book called the Courtier that in men of base degree, we often see high gifts of nature.

• If the lion knew his own strength, it would be hard to rule him.

• Leases, writs, statutes, all are written to be read, and each person reads them from the light of self-interest.

• The moment is fleeting. But insight cannot be taken back. You cannot return to the moment you were in before.

• A part of the art of ruling is to know when to shut your ears.

• Deeds of blood. Kings’ game.

• To lose gracefully is an art that every gentleman cultivates. – from some French lord

• Man is wolf to man.

• A gift blesses the giver.

• He that maketh haste to be rich shall not be innocent.

• All the rivers run into the sea, but the seas are not full yet.

• Fortune is inconstant, fickle, and mutable.

• The wolf comes down on the sheepfold, but not the nights when the men with dogs are waiting for him.

Temperance: [Lesson about restraint, balance, humility]

The following fact illustrates some level of temperance and self-control

• Cromwell is no longer subject to the vagaries of temperament, and he is almost never tired. Obstacles will be removed, tempers will be soothed, knots unknotted…His spirit is sturdy, his will strong, his front imperturbable. The courtiers see that he can shape the events, mold them. He can contain the fears of other men, and give them a sense of solidity in a quaking world: this people, this dynasty, this miserable rainy island at the edge of the world.

• Prudence is a virtue. But they are other virtues that belong to princes.

Courage: [Lesson about strength, risk, or standing up]

In Italy, Thomas Cromwell made a bet to pick up a snake and people counted until ten. He picked up the snake and they counted very slow. The snake coiled his head and bit him. He waited until the count was over, dropped the snake which slid away. Then, he collected his winnings and waited to die, but he did not die. Instead, he got stronger and got the reputation of being the quickest to hide and strike.

Fortitude. It doesn’t mean courage in battle. It means fixity of purpose. It means endurance. It means having the strength to live with what constrains you.

Justice: [Lesson about fairness, integrity, or responsibility]

An act of justice from the book:

• Cromwell often took a stand in Parliament to defend the cause of the poor and needy in England.

Memorable Quotes & Phrases

Memorable Quotes from the Book:

• As rare as apple blossom in January

• In England there is no mercy for the poor. You pay for everything, even a broken neck. (on the scaffold people sentenced to death still needed to pay a fee to the hangman, so they can make it swift and quick or they may suffer longer)

• Snuggled to the bosoms of whores, slack breasts rubbed with rose petals and ambergris

• A king is obliged to be gallant, till he reaches the age when he puts on his long gown and sits by the fire with his chaplains.

• Lock Cromwell in a dungeon in the morning, and when you come back that night, he’ll be sitting on a plush cushion eating larks’ tongues, and all the jailers will owe him money.

• Beyond the gate, cries and shouts, London never still or quiet; so many in the graveyards, but the living parading in the streets, drunken fighters pitching from London Bridge, sanctuary men stealing out to thieve, Southwark whores bawling out their prices like butchers selling dead flesh.

• When a man gets a son, he takes all the credit, and when he gets a daughter, he blames his wife. And if they do not breed at all, we say it is because her womb is barren. We don’t say it is because his seed is bad.

• The making of a treaty is the treaty. It doesn’t matter what the terms are…just that they are terms. It is the goodwill that matters. When that runs out, the treaty is broken.

• He will drag you out from whatever hole you are cowering in and bite your bollocks off.

• The English will forgive a king anything until he tries to tax them.

• If I ever see him again, I will chew him up bones, flesh, and gristle.

• There are some people in the world who like everything to be square up and precise, there are those who will allow drift at the margins. He is both these kinds of persons.

  Vocabulary Builder

Words, phrases, and expressions from the book to season and spice up your language

• Addle-witted: confused, muddled, or unable to think clearly

• Tax her wits: to severely strain, exhaust, or put a heavy burden on her intelligence, mental faculties, or capacity to think quickly

• Double-bluff: Action or statement that is intended to appear as a bluff but is in fact genuine

• Make or mar: a decision, action, or factor that will either lead to great success (”make”) or cause complete ruin and failure (”mar”)

• Make hay: Make good use of an opportunity; use a situation to one’s advantage

• Hedge your bets: avoid committing oneself when faced with a difficult choice

• A skewering glance

• Bill of attainder: legislative act that declares a specific person or group guilty of a crime and imposes punishment without a judicial trial

• Give someone the slip: evade or escape from someone

• Have a skinful: drunk or intoxicated by alcohol

Who Should Read This?

• People advising presidents, rulers, or leaders

• Decision and policy makers

• Everyone who wants to sharpen his/her skills on power dynamics

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Hitler and his Nazi regime mercilessly persecute the Jews in Europe. Joe Kavalier, a young Jew, escapes their persecution to the United States and unites with his cousin Sammy Clay. Although they lack the experience to protect the intellectual property of their art work, they join their artistic talent and genius to invent the Amazing Adventures of the Escapist comic series to take the fight against Nazism and evil to a different stage. While contributing to the blossoming of the comic book industry, they land punches on Hitler’s jaw through their Escapist character.

Book Summary

In 1939 most of Europe was under the siege of the German Nazi regime and the Jewish community had been suffering from their persecution. The Kavaliers, a persecuted Jewish family from the German occupied Prague in the Czech Republic sold all their possessions to pay for the required paperwork fees so that their older son Joseph Kavalier can exile into the United States. However, at the border crossing, the Nazis did not allow Joe to leave the country pretexting that he was missing some stamp on his exit visa. A sullen Joe rode the train back to his hometown, but he was not resigned. Instead of going home, he went to his former escapism teacher’s house, Bernard Kornblum, a magician, performing illusionist and specialist of tricks with straightjackets and handcuffs, a disciple of the famous escapist Harry Houdini.

At the same time, the Prague Jewish community assigned Kornblum the mission to ship to a safe haven their Golem, a Jewish folklore humanoid made by clay and brought to life through mystical means. Kornblum managed to smuggle Joe hidden in a coffin under the Golem to nearby Vilna, Lithuania. During the train ride to Vilna, Joe laid silent for more than a dozen of hours with only a bottle to pee in and a tube for pumping water connected to his mouth so he can remain hydrated. Once in Vilna, thanks to a right of transit granted by the Japanese officials to persecuted Jews, Joe sailed to San Fransico via Kobe, Japan. He finally took the bus to NYC, where he united with his cousin Sammy Clay.

At age nineteen and twenty, the pair of young tyro artists initiated the Kavalier & Clay partnership in the comic book industry, which was characterized at that time by what Michael Chabon coined a congenial atmosphere of rascality. Novices were easily taken advantage of. Joe and Sam partnered to design the Amazing Adventures of the Escapist series, which they hurriedly signed a contract to sell off the rights for “about a hundred bucks” to Sheldon Anapol the publisher of the Empire Comics. Joe was in charge of drawing the Escapist characters, while Sammy focused on developing the scripting and writing. Joe leveraged the Escapist series to publish satires to fight against the Nazi regime which was persecuting his kindred stranded in Europe. To the disagreement of his publisher, he frequently illustrated the Escapist punching Hitler in the face. Joe and Sam contributed tremendously to develop the comic book industry, which was subject to fierce competition, copyright infringement lawsuits, and publication rights wars.

The Escapist competed against other famous comic characters such as Tarzan, The Phantom, The Angel, the Arrow, the Comet and the Fin, all the Captains (Flag, Freedom, Midnight, Venture), Major Victory, Superman, Batman, and Wonder Woman, to name a few. As the comic book industry boomed, Joe and Sammy made good money, but this was far below the millions of dollars that Sheldon Anapol the publisher and his associates were amassing to their detriment.

Amid their emerging comic artist career, Joe met Rosa Saks another artist painter from the New York immigrant community and they immediately fell in love. Joe had always dreamed of getting his family out of Prague so they can reunite in America, the country of freedom and swing dance. After several unsuccessful attempts through the German consulate to bring his brother Thomas Kavalier to the United States, Rosa connected Joe with an organization which was raising funds for chartering ships to evacuate persecuted children from Europe to America.

Sadly, a few days before Thomas’s arrival in America, while Joe and Rosa were in the middle of the preparation to welcome him, a tragedy struck them. The Ark of Myriam, the ship transporting them was torpedoed by the Germans and sank into the Atlantic Ocean, killing Thomas and a hundred of other innocent children.

The death of Thomas left Joe Kavalier grief stricken and consumed by rage and rancor against the Germans. This woebegone event of life, led Joe to escape (abandoning his work and a pregnant girlfriend Rosa) to enlist in the U.S. Navy as a radioman and fight against the Nazis to avenge his brother. His duties in the Navy brought him to various naval bases including the Guantanamo Naval base in Cuba. While performing his radioman duties, he uncovered a secret German station in Jotunheim in the Antarctica. The station was run by Klaus Mecklenburg a German geology scientist, who Joe managed to slain in a perilous mission that nearly killed him.

During Joe’s escape to the Navy, Rosa explored abortion, but Sammy Clay dissuaded her and made the sacrifice by ending his incipient homosexual relationship with his boyfriend Francis Bacon, and married Rosa Saks, who gave birth to his cousin Joe’s son. They named him Thomas and called him Tommy in remembrance of Joe’s brother. Sammy and Rosa despite their incompatible sexual orientation rose above their humble persons to live as husband and wife to offer a safe haven for Tommy, who grew up happy but quite mischievous. Sammy continued a struggling career in the comic book industry. Rosa pursued her artist work, while collaborating with Sammy on some art activities.

At the end of his duties in the Navy, Joe continued to live in the shadow drawing comic series and he would not reemerge from his escape until more than a decade later. After Joe’s re-appearance, and despite having abandoned his relatives, he was welcomed, open arms, by his cousin Sammy and wife Rosa as well as their son Tommy, who developed a keen interest in escapism.

At the same time, there were some growing beliefs in the U.S. public opinion that the Escapist and other comic series by offering young readers a means to escape was pernicious to their young mind and was leading them to perversion. Sammy Clay was subpoenaed to appear before the U.S. senate to testify about that hokum. During the testimony, a senator humiliated Sam by exposing his homosexuality on live TV and went on to amalgamate comic books with homosexuality, pornography, and pedophilia. Humiliated, it was now Sammy’s turn to escape to California abandoning his house to Joe who reunited with his love Rosa and their son Tommy. Sammy engaged into fleeting homosexual relationships here and there, while on either side the Kavalier and Clay continued to answer their calling for comic books until their old days.

Reflection & Insights

The Amazing Adventures of Kavalier & Clay by Michael Chabon is centered on two key themes: escapism and comic books.

First, the most prominent Escapist of human history is incontestably Harry Houdini, a magician, performing illusionist and specialist of tricks with straightjackets and manacles. Beyond straightjackets and handcuffs, escapism gives humans a means to escape from life’s adversity and challenges. The Nazis did not allow Joe Kavalier to leave Prague, but thanks to escapism, he escaped Jewish persecution hiding in a coffin under a Jewish Golem. When the passing of Thomas aggrieved Joe, he escaped to the Navy to fight the Germans. The Escapist offered Joe a fighting ring to punch Hitler in the face. Finally, when the senator humiliated Sammy Clay by exposing his secret homosexuality and accusing him to corrupt the youth (similar charges brought against Socrates 2400 years ago), he escaped by leaving his family behind to go lurk in the shadows of California.

Second, the book presents the genesis and thorough development of the comic art, which morphed into a booming industry. The comic industry grew tremendously and gave birth to a wealth of famous comic series, including all the Captain series, Superman, Wonder Woman, and Batman. No doubt the early dedication and toil of these artists allowed the coming of age of the comic books industry and laid the groundwork for today’s animated movies that we take for granted. When the talented young artists Kavalier and Clay invented the Amazing Adventures of the Escapist series, they were obviously callows who rushed to sell off their rights to Sheldon Anapol the publisher of the Empire Comics for few hundred dollars and as Sammy Clay later reflected on their lawsuits to win back their rights “We were dummies – Every jury I’ve ever met seems to agree on that.’’

Today in many industries, artists, engineers, and entrepreneurs continue to fall victim to the trap of rushing to give up the right of their creativity to corporates which always have the best lawyers to protect their interests. In the tech industry for example, the war to win the AI race is currently raging and company pooh-bahs don’t hesitate to poach each other’s talent at any cost. The Amazing Adventures of Kavalier and Clay teaches artists, entrepreneurs, and creators the lessons to pay close attention when signing or negotiating contracts to avoid getting ripped off like Joe Kavalier and Sam Clay.

The book also paints some humanity on the face of homosexuality, helping readers better grasp the meaning of sexual orientation. While the U.S. senator tried to humiliate Sammy assimilating homosexuality to pornography and pedophilia, there was a Sammy Clay who having always preferred men to women, made the huge sacrifice to break up with his boyfriend and remain in NYC to marry a woman, abandoned by his cousin Joe, and be a loving father to Tommy, his cousin’s son. So, Chabon helps understand that homosexuality does not necessarily equate to pornography or pedophilia.

Finally getting back to escapism, when fate gets hard on me, be it a failure, disappointment or even grief, I always tend to escape to slumber by falling asleep. When I was in college my dream job was to become a pilot one day. Having grown up in Burkina Faso, the chances to get into a school of aviation were very slim. Then one day, I had a once-in-a-lifetime opportunity to take the exam to become a plane mechanic, hoping that maintaining planes could be a stepping stone to get me into the cockpit. I passed written test, but I did not get selected after the practical skills assessment. I was so disappointed and I went to bed to fall in deep sleep hoping to forget my failure when I wake up.

In addition, few years ago when I learned the news that my mother had unexpectedly passed, I was so grief stricken that I wanted to fall in slumber hoping that when I wake up, I’ll find that no such thing happened and that I simply had a nightmare. Sadly, when I woke up, I had to face reality. She had escaped life forever.

How do you escape from the reality of life’s trials and tribulations?

Character Growth Takeaways

Wisdom: [Scattered wisdom from the book to ponder over]

• Forget about what you are escaping from. Never worry what you are escaping from. Reserve your anxiety for what you are escaping to: Focus your attention and energy to tackle current challenges, live hic et nunc (here and now), focus on the present, do not get distracted by what lies ahead

• Genius does not always lead to success and great financial reward: Kavalier and Clay were talented young artists who invented the Amazing Adventures of the Escapist series. Anapol Sheldon and associates reaped most of the benefits.

• You could always count on finding your way in and out of a labyrinth from the moment you entered it if you kept one hand in continuous contact with one wall. Good tip if you ever go spelunking; how can this tip be applied to life’s twists and turns?

• People notice only what you tell them to notice, and then only if you remind them

  • People tend to have a selective attention focusing mostly on what is repeated, reminders, breaking news, or written in bold and plain sight

• True genius is never recognized in his own time

• Only love could pick a nested pair of steel Bramah locks – A nested pair of steel Bramah locks are locks designed by Joseph Bramah in the 18^th century and difficult to pick. Only love and not brute force or logic can allow one to pick them and break through such defense. Could that be applied to life’s circumstances as well?

• Every golden age is as much a matter of disregard as of felicity

Temperance: [Lesson about restraint, balance, humility]

The following fact illustrates some level of temperance and self-control

• Sammy repressed his homosexual orientation to enter into a heterosexual relationship so that his nephew Tommy and Tommy’s mother Rosa can have a safe haven to live

  • This sacrifice made by Sammy teaches us a lesson of temperance and selfless love

Courage: [Lesson about strength, risk, or standing up]

Joe hiding in a coffin to escape German persecution is an unstinting and absolute feat of courage, determination, and perseverance to never give up to evil

He went on to find meaning in life through comics (to paraphrase Viktor Frankl on Man’s Search for Meaning)

Justice: [Lesson about fairness, integrity, or responsibility]

An act of justice from the book:

• Comic book artists were freedom fighters. Through the comic book characters they invented, they offered a platform and a springboard to fight for justice and liberation for the downtrodden.

• The Escapist served justice in lending many punches on Hitler and his evil Nazi regime

Memorable Quotes & Phrases

Memorable Quotes from the Book:

• To all those who toil in the bonds of slavery and the shackles of oppression, I (the Escapist, Avenger, Superman, Wonder Woman, Avenger) offer the hope of liberation and the promise of freedom!

• They had dreams but given their last names and lack of experience, it was a challenge to make it through a lofty industry (comics industry)

• They (Jews) are dust in their (Nazis) boots to be whisked off with indiscriminate broom

• Belly dancers. Turkish delight. All alone without mother and father. – Have you ever experienced this?

• Interregnum between the gullible wondering of childhood and the know-it-all watchfulness of adolescence

Phrases/Expressions to Remember – Powerful language or metaphors.

• Country boy right off the bus

• Unstinting praise and unassuageable hunger

• The world greatest charlatans, conjurors, and fakirs

• Save the best for last

• The whole damn stinking world

• How fucked up and broken the world is

• The tenebrous benthos of human unconscious

• Their oeuvres, sex live, and family connections – (Jewish artist community of NYC)

• The city of freedom and swing (America)

• Overweening human ambition

• Weaving a skein of reversals and legal maneuverings too complicated and tedious to tease out in these pages.

• Buried under the heavy brambles of indebtedness and chocked in the ivy of frustration and blame

  Vocabulary Builder

Words, phrases, and expressions from the book to season and spice up your language

• Jumped for lunch: I was attacked (verbally or otherwise) over something minor or harmless — like just trying to get lunch.

• Dock someone’s pay: Reduce an employee wage as a penalty and some sort of deduction

• Bolt food: eating very quickly, without chewing properly or taking time to savor the food. It’s often used to describe eating in a hurried or even reckless manner.

• Go belly-up: bankrupt, to fail completely, typically referring to a business becoming bankrupt “go belly up” likely originates from the image of a dead fish floating with its belly exposed on the surface of the water.

• Raining in fits: raining intermittently or sporadically

• Give a fish eye: unfriendly look

• Man about town: a fashionable male

• Vocabulary from Yiddish

• Mezuzah: “doorpost” and refers to a small parchment scroll upon which the Hebrew words are written

• Kibitzer: person who offers unwanted advice or commentary, often in an annoying way

• Narrischkeit: foolishness or nonsense

• Luftmensch: “air person”, that describes an impractical, unrealistic person whose head is in the clouds

Vocabulary – More words

• Callow = Tyro = novice, inexperienced or new to something.

• Hokum: nonsense

• Wastrel: Wasteful or good for nothing person

• Stumblebum: Clumsy or inept person

• Aleck: Stupid person

• Goofus: foolish, stupid person

• Aetataureate : Something in its prime or golden age – “aetas” (age) and “aureatus” (golden) – Coined by Chabon Michael

• Pooh-bah: a person who is considered important or powerful, often with an air of self-importance or pomposity

• Cloak-and-dagger: involves mystery, intrigue, or espionage

Who Should Read This?

• Artists, designers, aspiring entrepreneurs in media and entertainment

• Researchers, historians on comic books, Jewish persecution, resilience and creativity

• Adventure book lovers

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The caste system instituted by the Jim Crow laws in the American South triggered the Great Migration, the most dramatic and compelling story of American history.

The following sections describe the epic story of the American Great Migration. A story ripe with myths, untruths, hope and despair...

Book Summary

Introduction and origins of the Jim Crow South

The name Jim Crow originated in the 1830s, when Thomas Dartmouth Rice a New York itinerant white actor popularized a song-and-dance performance called “the Jim Crow” in a minstrel show across the country. He wore a blackface and ragged clothes and performed a jouncy palsied imitation of a handicapped black stable boy, he had seen likely in his travels, singing a song about “Jumping Jim Crow.” Jim Crow was said to be the name of either the stable hand or his owner, living in Kentucky or Ohio. Rice who became a national sensation impersonating a crippled black man died penniless in 1860 of a paralytic condition that limited his speech and movement by the end of his life. By 1841, the term was applied to segregation laws. Southern state legislatures began devising laws that would impact every aspect of black people’s lives, solidify the caste system, and prohibit even the most casual and incidental contact between races.

With the Jim Crow caste system now in place, every black family in the American South had a critical decision to make. They were sharecroppers always losing at settlement with their planters. Typists wanting to work in an office. Yard boys scared that a single gesture near a planter’s wife could leave them hanging from an oak tree.

Then, WWI offered the golden opportunity. During the war, the demand for workers in the North went up. The North industrialists created incentives to coax the South workers into the North. It triggered a great exodus of blacks to the North. The South planters used all sorts of means to prevent the exodus by establishing laws, pay increase, or even threats, but people kept going up North to flee the caste system. The exodus to flee the South is known as the Great Migration, which lasted over six decades from 1915 to 1970.

The American Great Migration had more in common with the vast movements of refugees fleeing famine, war, and genocide in other parts of the world: oppressed people, whether fleeing 21^st century Darfur or 19^th century Ireland. The Tusti or Hutu people fleeing the Rwandan genocide. They all go to great distances, journey across rivers, deserts, and oceans or as far as it takes to reach safety with the hope that life will be better wherever they land.

Yes! In response to the Jim Crow caste system, black American families did what humans have done for centuries when life became untenable, what the pilgrims did under the tyranny of the British rule, what Scots-Irish did in Oklahoma when the land turned to dust, what the Irish did when there was nothing to eat, what the European Jews did during the spread of Nazism, what the landless in Russia, Italy, China, and elsewhere did when something better across the ocean called to them. They did what the African youth do today desperately sailing through the Mediterranean Sea in makeshift boats to flee the economic hardship and conflicts in their countries. They did what human beings looking for freedom and a better place, throughout history, have often done.

They left.

In 1919, Edwin Hubble observed a star far away that was not the same sun that fed life on Earth. It was another sun from another galaxy. This book’s title, The Warmth of other Suns, derived from this parallel, which inspires black Americans seeking to flee the harsh South, that in fact there were other suns.

The following stories describe the lives, trials, and tribulations of three black American migrants who emigrated from the Jim Crow South to seek the warmth of other suns. They are (1) George Swanson Starling, born in Eustis, Florida, who migrated to New York; (2) Robert Joseph Pershing Foster from Monroe, Louisiana, who migrated to the West in Los Angeles, California; and (3) Ida Mae Brandon Gladney from Chickasaw Country, Mississippi who migrated to Chicago, Illinois. Each story describes their origins and early childhood, why they left the South and the trials and tribulations they faced where they immigrated as well as life in their old age and legacy as migrants of the Great Migration.

Story # 1/3: George Swanson Starling - Eustis, Florida (1930-1998)

Birth, Origins, and early life

Lil George (George Swanson Starling) was born in Eustis, Florida in 1930, and spent most of his early years circling north central Florida with his sharecropper parents. He spent his early life in the Jim Crow caste system, which pitted people one against the other. Whites against blacks, landowners against sharecroppers, poor against the poorer, blacks against blacks for extra scraps of privilege. George left Florida to live in New York because he would have died by lynching if he had stayed.

George attended school until high school and had planned on going to college. George liked school, was good with numbers and was always studious. His father, Big George, not getting the point for attending school refused to pay for his college tuition. In retribution to his father’s opposition to him going to college, he impudently took his girlfriend Inez to a ride, then surprisingly changed course and drove to the courthouse, then informed her that they were getting married on the spot. He paid two dollars for the marriage certificate fees and tied the knot with Inez for better or worse.

Three reasons that led George to flee the South

Under the Jim Crow regime, George experienced several events of lynching with torture and mutilation that had remained etched in his memory for the rest of his life. Lynching black people was commonplace.

In Marianna, Florida, Claude Neal a colored man was accused of murdering a white girl named Lola Cannidy. Neal was arrested by a white mob, which first castrated him, had his fingers and toes cut one by one, and they used a hot iron to burn his body for hours, then tied his nude mutilated body to the back of a car and dragged him to the house of the deceased girl’s family house. His body parts (fingers and toes) were then displayed throughout the town as souvenirs. The NAACP demanded that the federal government conduct an investigation, but President Franklin D. Roosevelt fearing the alienation of the South with a Democratic majority in Congress did not intervene. No one was ever charged in Neal’s death or spent a single day in jail. The Jackson grand jury concluded that the execution had occurred “at the hands of persons unknow to us.” Neal and Lola were lovers and it transpired that she may have been slain by her father, in an honor crime, because of the shame she brought to her family by dating a black man.

One day, George went to the pharmacy of his hometown. In the middle of a white crowd, the pharmacist, asked his terrier dog: would you rather be a nigger or die? The dog rolled over on cue, flipped his back, folded his legs, shut its eyes, and froze. Everyone erupted in laughter and George felt deeply humiliated.

George graduated high school, but could not attend college. Now that he had a family to take care of, he spent his time using his old car to drive people around for a fee and working as a fruit picker in the many groves of Florida, the fruit basket of the world. The pay for picking fruit was so meager that blacks could barely eke out a living. He decided to drive to Detroit to work in the booming manufacturing industry with few friends. In Detroit, when everything seemed to be going well, a major riot opposing whites and blacks over a false rumor of murder and rape erupted in the city. The riot caused dozens of casualties on both sides and hundreds of wounded. It got so worse that George decided to quit his job and go back to fruit picking in Florida.

Back in Eustis, WWII was raging and most of the youth were enlisted in the war leaving only few young people and mostly old men and women available to pick fruits, and they were so many groves gravid with fruits that needed picking. Instead of resorting to the yesaam and yessirs, George and a few friends organized the workers in a sort of union to force the packinghouses to pay them respectable wages. Instead of 15 cents a fill they demanded 25 cents and they would not pick unless the packinghouse budged, knowing that they desperately needed pickers. This resistance allowed the pickers to make more money in a day than they would have made working over a week. They all hated the war, but deep inside they wished it would never end.

Despite the significant improvement of their wages, some pickers who were afraid, went to the white grove owners and told them that they wanted to continue to work and get paid at the regular low wage, but they were prevented from working by George and his band. The grove owners met to prepare a plot to arrest George and his friends and lynch them. A houseboy overheard the grove owners plotting to treat George and his friends to a “necktie party” (execution by hanging) and informed him. George had only time to gather few belongings and say goodbye to Inez and flee to the North in New York. Lil George left the South, angry with a feeling of betrayal by negroes from his place. He had helped them get more pay a day than they got working for a week, but they complained to the grove owners that he was preventing them from working.

Life and challenges George faced as a migrant in Harlem, New York

George stayed at his aunt Annie Swanson’s place to look for a job right away. Hardworking and motivated, he found a job at the railroad company as a car attendant travelling with passengers to help them handle their luggage and get settled. Within a few months, George managed to save enough and sent for his wife Inez to join him in New York. Once there, Inez took a job in nursing at a nearby hospital.

George spent most of his career as a porter travelling between the South and North helping passengers in the train cars. Southerners brought all sorts of odd things in the train. One day, a passenger spilled sweet potatoes in the car and scrambled all over the place to pick them up. People helped themselves to free potatoes while heartily laughing at the incident. In another case, a bag containing some freshly butchered meat kept pitapatting blood on the car’s floor and George struggled to keep the floor clean. The bag vanished at the end of the trip and he never got to know what kind of meat was in the bag or who the owner was. Some other passengers carried watermelon in their trunks while some even brought live chicken.

Life was not always about laughter. Rent was outrageously expensive in New York, where rascal landlords more than doubled the rent to take advantage of the influx of black migrants fleeing the South by the thousands. To make ends meet and get the rent, most black tenants from the South, threw paid parties in their houses, which they called house parties, where they allowed people to party for a fee. They served southern food including pork chops, sweet potatoes, alcoholic beverages and often resorted to gambling to increase the revenue.

From New York, the Eustis, Florida Jim Crow caste system continued to haunt him. George learned that a black boy sent a Christmas card to a white girl. The girl showed the card to his father. A white mob forced the father of the girl to witness the torture, mutilation, and killing of the boy. Harry Moore an NAACP member petitioned the local government and the U.S. DOJ about the case. In retribution, the Eustis Klan members placed a bomb under his bed which exploded and killed him and his wife. The FBI investigated, but no one ever got arrested or jailed.

George’s legacy and the winter of his life

George had a colicky marriage with Inez, who was difficult to get along with. She had a rough upbringing by the whip. She was an orphaned child who lived with Baptist aunts and a grandmother, who caught the spirits and spoke in tongue, and who only believed in the thumbscrew and the whip. As a consequence, she developed an unyielding character. They had two children Gerard and Sonya, who never gave satisfaction to George. While he travelled most of the time through the railroad and Inez at work, Gerard got into drug abuse and ended up moving back to Florida to become a drug dealer. Sonya got pregnant in her teenage period during a summer trip to Eustis.

George continued to work as a porter at the railroad and despite his education he never got promoted. He leveraged his many years of experience to make recommendation for improvement at the railroad organization, but he was never listened to and was never considered for anything. Similar to Eustis, he tried to make colored people aware of their condition. In July 2, 1964 President Lyndon B. Johnson signed the Civil Rights Act into law, 101 years after the Emancipation Proclamation by President Abraham Lincoln, ending segregation. But colored people continued to travel in the colored people’s cars. George tried to make them aware that they no longer needed to remain in the colored section or move to the colored cars when entering the South territories.

Later in life, Inez took ill and passed away. George spent his old days in his Harlem, NY brownstone now deacon of his church, surrounded by a community of black hooded and disheveled youth devasted by drugs, prostitution, violence, and crime. He challenged them to go to rehab, to go back to school to avoid being trapped by the system like himself. He taught them a precious life lesson: “never spite in life because it will always come back to zap you hard.”

George passed away from a coma in 1998. A service was held in NY before he was transferred to Eustis for a second service and interment. George spent most of his life chasing money to care for his children whom he was never around to watch after and it cost him a stiff price.

Story # 2/3: Robert Joseph Pershing Foster - Monroe, Louisiana (1918 - 1997)

Birth, Origins, and early life

Robert Joseph Pershing Foster was born in Monroe, Louisiana in 1918 to Maddison Foster (the principal of Colored High – the Monroe high school for colored students) and to Ottie Foster, a teacher.

During his childhood, Pershing went to the Monroe movie theater, which was segregated under the Jim Crow caste system. Blacks considered as second-class citizens, the agent sold tickets swiveling between two windows: One window for whites and another for blacks. White customers always have priority over blacks, meaning that the agent should always finish serving all whites before helping blacks. Inside the theater, blacks were relegated to upstairs seats near the bathrooms, which reeked the odor of urine.

All his life, Pershing craved status acceptance from those who were most determined to withhold it from him and met slight and rejection at nearly every turn.

Reasons that led Pershing to leave the South and immigrate to the West

Pershing attended Monroe High, where his father was the principal. To get school supplies, black students drove to the back of the white high school to load their truck with hand-me-down supplies and used books. The city built a 2200-acre balconied building called Nivelle High School for white students, while black high schoolers remained in a grade school building. Research showed that at that time, the state spent $10 for every white student, while only $1 was spent for a black student. White teachers were earning 43% more than their black counterparts. It is estimated that the 1930s Jim Crow caste system created an abysmal wealth inequality that will continue to impact several generations of black people until at least the current 21^st century.

11^th grade was the limit to the education of black students in Louisiana. Pershing got a ticket to travel to St Louis to join his brother Madison, who was a medical school resident there. The bus ride was humiliating. During the trip, as white passengers boarded the bus, black passengers had to keep moving to the back of the bus, which was usually neglected and dirty. The Fosters decided that Pershing will attend the Moorehouse college, but he needed to attend two years at the Leland College, a lesser-known college, so they could save more money to pay for his tuition.

During a summer break at Leland, Pershing applied for a janitor job at a furniture store and the owner denied his application for the reason that he did not need a janitor job because he was a college student. He added that providing too much education to colored people will upset the balance of power and give blacks more ideas to cause trouble. The memory of this event continued to hurt Pershing deep inside himself. He was trying to make something of himself and an invisible hand kept punishing the ambitious and rewarding the servile to keep the colored in their place.

Later, he went at the sawmill to look for work, but the foreman told him that nothing was available. He got to work staking wood staves to make barrels. The foreman looked at him, but Pershing pretended not to see him and worked even harder. The foreman left and when he came back, Pershing was still working and the foreman hired him. In light of this, Pershing concluded that sometimes “you have to stoop to conquer.”

After that, Pershing was finally admitted to Morehouse, in Atlanta. At the homecoming celebration, they took girls to while away a night out imbibing sloe gin. On the way back from the club, he felt so elated and relieved from the stooping and yessums of Monroe that he stood in the middle of the street and shouted out loud” I’m free!”

At Moorehouse, the ambitious Pershing got involved the with upper crust of the southern black bourgeoisie. He dated Alice Clement, the only daughter of Dr. Rufus Clement, the almighty President of Moorehouse university, who forced WEB Dubois to retire and retreat to New York at the NAACP chapter.

After he graduated from Moorehouse, Pershing enrolled in graduate school at Atlanta University, while Alice completed her time at Spelman. Dr. Clement expected Pershing to become worthy of his daughter. Pershing decided to enter medical school at Meharry Medical College, following the footsteps of his older brother Madison. Pershing, besotted with the bourgeois world, took Alice as his ticket out of the caste system world he came out from Monroe, LA. He married Alice Clement, the daughter of the President of Atlanta University, in a dazzling wedding dubbed as “a setting of splendor and beauty.” After the wedding, he went back to graduate medical school as a doctor specialized in surgery.

In the medical world, Pershing and Madison were relegated to country doctors because they were not allowed to exercise in white hospitals. As a young doctor, Pershing was sent for to assist a woman in labor. Not having much experience, he tried few tricks, but he was not able to deliver the baby. The woman rolled over and said” all right Doc, get out the way.” She squatted on the bare surface and pushed hard, with few grunts. “Come on catch it now. The baby plopped into his hands. From this experience, Pershing learned this lesson: book knowledge and equipment in the world didn’t make you a good doctor if you didn’t know what you were doing or listen to your patients.

Pershing enlisted in the army and was denied the position of chief surgeon because of his race. On another case, a black soldier Wilbur Little returned from WWI duty to the Jim Crow South in Blakely, GA. A white mob ordered him to take off his uniform and walk home in his underwear; he refused and was lynched to death. Cases like these pushed many black veterans to flee the South for the North. After WWII, a colonel encouraged him to deploy to Austria, a European base as a captain and surgeon with his family.

There, he experienced humiliation. He could not deliver any white woman and although he was more competent than most white doctors, his opinion was always ignored and he could not even get into the operating room in the case of white women delivery. One day, a white doctor ordered a cesarean procedure and Pershing intervened and advised a treatment that saved the woman from the operation. Later on, when the woman met with Pershing, she kissed him and introduced him to her family as the doctor who saved her from a cesarian procedure. Pershing could not be happier and prouder.

Pershing continued to struggle to establish the practice he had always dreamed of in the Jim Crow South. As black surgeons, he and his brother could not operate at the nearby St. Francis hospital. But Pershing was persistent. He will not settle with a small practice like his brother travelling with a portable surgery table, operating people in their kitchen and getting paid with buttermilk or the side of a freshly killed hog; and he did not want to deliver babies in somebodies’ kitchen either.

He set out to go to California in the West, a place he had never been before.

Life and challenges Robert faced as a migrant

After a farewell party, Pershing pulled away from his father’s house and pointed his Buick Roadmaster to one direction: West. He headed for California not knowing where exactly in California he will land. For this new beginning, he decided to ditch his old clunky name Pershing to become now simply Bob or Robert, which was his other first name. He drove through Texas and made few stops before reaching El Paso, the border between the Jim Crow South and the West. In the Jim Crow South, he could not find any hotel accommodation for black people. Robert drove past El Paso and entered New Mexico, he went to the city of Lordsburg, the only place where black people could obtain a hotel room. He spent the night in a seedy hotel and hit the road the next morning. He drove several hours to reach Arizona hoping that he was finally done with the South, but this desert crossing turned out to be something he will remember for the rest of his life.

Crossing the Phoenix desert: No way for a black doctor and U.S. army captain to get a hotel room

After several hours of travel, he saw a motel where the vacancy sign was on and decided to stop and stay for the night. He was turned down for the reason that they forget to turn off the vacancy sign. He went to other motels down the road and he was turned down over and over. Finally, exhausted he went to a gas station and broke down sobbing and venting his condition to a white gas station manager. He said, he was a doctor and a U.S army captain having honorably served his country and still did not have the dignity to rent a single hotel room in his own country. The gas station manager consoled him, filled up his tank and gave him coffee, while warning him to expect to face some level of segregation in California, which was coined as the “James” Crow.

Alone in the desert, exhausted, and struggling to keep his eyes open, Robert drove miles and miles over more than a dozen of hours without sleep through the dark and chilling desert night. The next morning at dawn, he reached a fork on the road that read LA 380 miles and SD 348 miles. He decided to drive to SD to the shortest distance. He finally reached SD county in the morning. He spent a night in another seedy hotel before driving to LA, where he decided to settle for good.

The colored people who, preceded him in LA wouldn’t extend a hand to a newcomer.

Indeed, in LA, Robert did face James Crow, where he could not practice in any major hospitals such as the UCLA Medical Center. Also, black patients from the South were reluctant to accept him as their doctor. Robert resorted to going door to door to perform physicals and collect vials so he can save enough money to rent an office to establish his own practice.

Now, he was ready to send for his wife Alice and his two daughters. The apartment he rent for his family was nowhere close to the mansion of the president of Atlanta University, in which they were living in, but they had to make a go of it. When Robert started his practice, it was not a hit from the get-go. The people he knew from Monroe were not coming. Some were not coming because they were still nursing a grudge over cases when Robert’s parents were their teachers in Monroe. Other people from Monroe were simply envious seeing someone from Monroe succeed, they simply preferred to go to a white doctor.

Now that Robert reunited with his family in LA, they began suffering the consequences of having lived apart for years. They were cramped in a walk-in apartment, which had not a whiff of the luxury of their Atlanta place. Alice and the girls lived in a mansion located in a vast estate with a waitstaff. There began all the battles of the wills over their lifestyle and food taste. On one side, Alice and the girls were socialites from the high tone world of the black elite preferring souffles and casseroles. On the other side, there was a hardscrabble, but no less proud, black middle class of small-town Louisiana man, preferring oxtails, turnip greens with red peppered gambo.

Humiliation galore anew

After two years of hard work, Robert managed to attract enough patients needing surgery that he was able to secure the privilege to access a small hospital called the Metropolitan Hospital, nothing like the Cedars Sinai or the UCLA Medical Center. There, he met with white doctors and they often stay in the break room during lunch to exchange notes and brag about their weekend exploits.

The white doctors kept talking about their night escapades in Vegas and sometimes asked Robert’s opinion about some facts from Vegas. Blacks were not allowed in Vegas and Robert who really enjoyed life in the casinos felt irritated anytime they talked about Vegas and asked him questions. One day, he finally gathered his courage and told them that he was tired of them asking him about Las Vegas not knowing that blacks cannot go to the hotels in Vegas. He added that it was a thorn on his side and asked them to stop asking him about Vegas. That embarrassed the doctors, who stopped asking him about Vegas from then on.

Later on, Robert learned that blacks were now allowed in Vegas. Robert and his friends organized a party of thirteen black people to Vegas, including doctors and their spouses. The ladies bought clothing to satisfy three completely different outfits every day. They booked their plane tickets, made the hotel arrangement, and flew to Vegas.

When they arrived, guess what! The Pheonix hotel episode repeated itself. They arrived at the Riviera hotel with enough suitcases for a European tour, and there was no reservation to be found. They insisted and called the manager to no avail. Not only they were denied rooms, but the helpdesk did not offer any tangible explanation or any help to get accommodation anywhere else. They finally called Jimmy Gray an influential black casino owner, who managed to book them at another hotel. They were finally able to check into their rooms and begin to while away their casino time in Vegas.

Robert continued to work so hard that within a short time he attracted so many patients, got rich and purchased a house that really matched with his family’s fitting. He did not get into the hassle of moving into a white neighborhood. He picked a house with a putting green lawn and bougainvillea.

The legendary Ray Charles was one of Robert’s friend and patient. One day Ray Charles, intoxicated by drugs and exhausted from a preparation of a long-awaited tour tumbled out, fell and sliced his left hand on the edge of the table and severed an artery. Robert performed an emergency surgery, which saved his arm. Robert followed him through the tour to care for Ray’s arm. Ray Charles was surrounded by the Raelettes in form fitting sequin dresses with stilettos. He lived in a world of shimmying wig-, rouge- wearing back singers always embroiled in love triangle relationships.

In Detroit they met on stage a young blind prodigy called Steve Wonder. Robert returned to LA to deliver Ray’s wife Della Bea’s third child; they named him Robert after him. Ray Charles wrote a song in his honor, titled Hide Nor Hair which remained on the billboard for seven straight weeks in 1967.

Robert barely traveled back home to Monroe. He was more into gambling, either in casinos in Vegas or at the racetrack in LA.

Dr Rufus Clement passed on November 7, 1967 after a heart attack, sending his widow Pearl Clement to move in to LA with her daughter Alice and husband Robert.

Robert had always been ambitious. His practice was minting plenty of money. He had many famous patients from the black elite society. He married Alice Clement a well-born woman, he was gifted by three beautiful daughters, he lived in a 3600 square feet property and was driving a white Cadillac and socializing with prominent people such as Ray Charles. Yet Robert, being born on Christmas day, his birthdays had always been overshowed by the Christmas celebration. He had always yearned for a real birthday celebration. He decided to throw himself a sumptuous party on his 52^th birthday in 1970. He spent more than a year to prepare for the party, hosting nearly 400 prominent people, which was titled in the newspapers as “the party of the year 1970 in LA.”

The winters of the life and legacy of Robert

In 1975, four years after the party of the year in LA, Alice, the socialite wife who gave him the ticket to the black patrician society took ill and passed. Robert, now widowed, lived with his aggrieved mother-in-law. They could not get along and Pearl packed her luggage and moved to Kentucky, the Clement’s hometown. Now alone in an empty big mansion, Robert sank into heavy gambling either in Vegas or at the racetrack. At times, he could make $50,000 a night and lose it in the next instant, and end up borrowing money so he can continue to indulge himself in gambling.

Robert also left his private practice to enter a veteran hospital, but that did not work well. Toward the end, he could not be accepted by the hospital management and to his surprise, he was being treated and ostracized for incompetence to the point where he was demoted and relocated to an office close to the lavatories reeking urine and feces. Had what he fled from the South in Monroe, LA caught him in his promised land LA? That really took a toll on his health and he ended up having a stroke who slowed him down.

Robert retired and was now a grandfather. He spent most of his time playing blackjack and gardening. His health continued to deteriorate after a heart and kidney issues and a cancer diagnosis. He later became homebound and remained under the care of a home nurse. There was a whole lot of food off his diet: chicken, cornbread, collard green, oxtail, red-peppered gumbo, grits, and chitlin. But as a southerner, Robert continued to indulge himself whenever he got the opportunity.

Dr. Foster Robert passed away on August 6, 1997 at age 78 after a heart attack that sent him into a coma, from which he never came out.

Gambling was his mistress and medicine his beloved. He cared for every single of his patients. In his eulogy, one of his patients testified: “He delivered my son; he saved my life. He was the greatest man I ever knew. I will never forget him as long as I live.”

Story # 3/3: Ida Mae Brandon Gladney - Chickasaw Country, Mississippi (1913-2004)

Birth, Origins, and Childhood

Ida Mae Brandon Gladney married her husband George Gladney in 1929 at age 16 during the Jim Crow period in Chickasaw Country, Mississippi. The couple moved to Edd Person’s plantation to pick cotton as sharecroppers. Every year after the harvest season, Mister Edd deducted what his sharecroppers owed him namely the furnish (cottonseed, fertilizer, implements, ginning fees, cornmeal, salt pork, etc.) and this took almost half of what they produced. In the Jim Crow South, there was barely money flowing between planters and sharecroppers, the entire system being built on credit. Mr. Edd gave few dollars to George and Ida Mae. Ida Mae had never been a good cotton picker and she could never reach 100 lbs. to get 50 cents.

Cotton picking was harsh work. Pickers’ hands were cramped and calloused from the repetitive motion of picking. A good crop and high price never made any improvement in Ida Mae’s existence, but it meant a planter’s wife can begin dreaming of a new carpet, piano, or parlor and the salesman of farm implements could be lavish with more expensive cigars that he had smoked last year. Despite the hard toil of picking cotton from sunrise to sunset, pickers could not even afford clothes made from the cotton they picked. Instead, they had to resort to clothes made from flour sacks.

Ida Mae was rather very good at cooking, raising chicken, and gardening. When Ida Mae was a child in school, she was called a tomboy because she was courageous and daring and liked to do boys’ things. One day a Speckler snake ventured into their kitchen and she picked it by the tail and threw it outside. Ida Mae gave birth to a girl whom they named Velma. Within another year, she gave birth to Elma. They set the kids unattended under a plum tree and got to work. Elma ate plum, got food poisoning, and died due to a lack of appropriate care.

Reasons that led Ida Mae to flee the South and immigrate to the North

Ida Mae and other women in the plantation raised turkey for their master Mister Edd. A lady named Addie B’s turkey went missing one day and Addie B told Mister Edd that Joe Lee (George Gladney’s cousin) stole them. Mister Edd and a white mob bound Joe Lee to a log in the wood and beat him so bad that his coveralls, soaked with blood, stuck with the surface of his skin, then they took him to the county jail and threw him in a cell. Joe laid there unconscious and unattended for hours until George found him. Guess what! The turkeys went out roosting in the countryside and came back home few days later. Mister Edd never apologized. George made the resolution to leave Mississippi and go to the North. He said to Ida Mae: “This is the last crop we’re making.”

At the end of the harvest season, it was time for George to go to settlement with Mister Edd. George and Ida Mae bowed their head and prayed for light on how to inform Mister Edd that they were leaving his plantation without triggering any retribution. At the settlement, George got few dollars from Mister Edd and he carefully informed him that he was leaving his plantation. Mister Edd protested, but luckily, he did not prevent them from leaving. Prior to the settlement, Ida Mae had sold their possessions one by one so as not to draw people’s attention on them planning to leave.

According to the Anthropologist Hortence Powdermaker, about 20% of sharecroppers earned between $30 and $150 for a year of hard labor. The remaining sharecroppers either broke even, meaning the owner had decided that he owed nothing to the sharecroppers and in return the sharecroppers got nothing from the harvest. They either got nothing for a year of hard work or they remained in debt.

Ida Mae and family packed their luggage, purchased train tickets, got blessing from her mother and left the South for Milwaukee in the North. Without any comments after more than 24 hours of road travel, they crossed the Mason-Dixon Line at the Ohio River, which was the border between Kentucky and Illinois, between the provincial South and the modern North, between servitude and freedom.

Life and challenges faced by Ida Mae and family as migrants

Ida Mae and her family arrived in Chicago, IL riding the Illinois central. They were disoriented by the scenery of the fast-paced city, where people barely have time to say hi. They needed to catch another train to Milwaukee. There, George found a job as an ice delivery man into cold-water flats, which was no doubt a stoop labor, but far better than what they were making back in the Jim Crow South. They had a brush with the temptation of big cities, stacked heel harlots stumbling out of buffet flats, card shanks, crapshooters.

Life in Chicago was not easy. Migrants were coming by the thousands fleeing the Jim Crow caste system of the South. Industrialists took advantage of their cheap labor using colored workers to break strikes or simply denying them some positions, which were reserved for whites even if the black workers had the qualifications. The housing market was characterized by an atmosphere of congenial rascality, where landlords outrageously increased the rent for everything: cellars, garages, flats. The city of Chicago also came to be segregated in some way. On one side, there were blacks and whites on the other side. The industrialists worked to pit the blacks against the whites, who nursed a grudge against colored workers accusing them of deteriorating their work conditions. That resulted in a series of riots with several dozens of causalities on either side and thousands of wounded.

In 1940, something unthinkable in the South happened. Ida Mae and George voted for the first time in their lives in Chicago helping Roosevelt win a 3^rd term in the White House. George and Ida Mae continued to struggle to find a respectable job in Chicago. Obviously, the apartheid that pushed them out of the South continued to haunt them. Black workers were mostly hired for menial work. They moved from the mind-numbing sameness of picking cotton to the mind-numbing sameness of turning a lever. Black women’s access to work was even worse. They were confined to hire themselves out to menial tasks, housekeeping, and often they were subject to white male abuses.

In 1966, blacks could vote and sit in the same break room as whites, but they were still confined to the overcrowded sections of Chicago, restricted from the positions they could hold and the mortgages they could afford. This was happening not by edict like in the South, but by circumstances in the North. Ida Mae witnessed the march in Chicago led by MLK to protest against segregating blacks in the hardscrabble North. A white mob hit his head with a rock bringing him down to his knees, but he refused to back down. They carried their protest amid chants treating black marchers as cannibals, savages, and worse a bus was overturned and a car burned and the entire community plundered causing dozens of wounded and arrested.

After 30 years of life working in the unskilled labor market, Ida Mae, George, and their children were able to purchase a tree-flat in a newly open-up neighborhood on the south shore. As blacks moved in, whites progressively fled the area. This separation was coined by socialists as hyper-segregation: a separation of the races that was so total and complete that blacks and whites rarely intersected outside of work.

Black migrants were at a disadvantage in comparison to European immigrants (Czechs, Pols, Italians, Hungarian). European immigrants could easily ditch their eastern or southern European names, wipe away their ethnicity by adopting Anglo Saxon surnames and melt into the world of privileged native-born whites. e.g. Issac Danielovich son of immigrants from Belarus could become Kirk Douglas so his son Michael Douglas could pursue stardom instead of Michael Danielovich. Blacks were already wearing their slave forefathers’ names acquired from their owners, which they could not slough off.

George became a pastor and continued with his blue-collar job until old age, where he took ill from a heart disease. He didn’t take any medicine from the doctors and only relied on prayers and natural medicine from the South. He passed away at age 68 after having suffered multiple stokes.

The winters of Ida Mae’s life and legacy

Ida Mae remained an eyewitness to the war on drugs playing out in the streets below her window. She spent most of her time sitting at her window looking at the police, drug dealers and gangbangers and lookout boys dealing drugs chasing and shooting each other. The black youth was mired by drugs and prostitution. Ida Mae got older and healthy and loved cooking southern food (collard green, cornbread, etc.) or she attended funerals as the family matriarch.

In the 1997s crime, drugs, prostitution remained rampant in Chicago. Ida Mae and her neighbors regularly attended BEAT meeting where they discussed their community crime handling status. On August 14, 1997, a certain South Shore District 13 senator named Barack Obama made an appearance at the BEAT 421 meeting, made a minilecture on state legislation, and offered them to call him in case they needed anything a senator can help with and left the church basement. No one imagined that they had just met with the man who a decade later, became the 44^th U.S. President, Barrack Obama.

In 1999, Ida Mae turned 89 close 90. It was unthinkable to see her witness the new millennium. She relegated all the disappointment she experienced in life to the furthest recesses of her mind and looked at every moment as a blessing and every breath she took as a gift.

Ida Mae peacefully passed in her sleep at age 94 in September 2004.

Conclusion

Southern blacks debunked the theory of the British historian E.G. Ravenstein stating that due to human pragmatism and inertia, migrating people tend to go no further from their homes in search of work than is absolutely necessary. The bulk of migrants prefer a short journey to a long one, the more enterprising long-journey migrants are the exceptions and not the rule. Southern blacks were the exceptions. It is true that like Europeans immigrating to the U.S., they did not cross the turnstiles at Ellis Island, NY. They travelled deep into far flung regions of their own country.

People developed several misconceptions about immigrants from the South. Illiterate, more likely to divorce, bear child out of wedlock, single parents, etc. In brief, they were considered as bedraggled hayseeds right off the plantations, (who came to the North to cause trouble). Speaking a slow syrup accent, lacking education, wearing rough cast clothes. This was a pure myth and untruthful. Like Robert and George, the migrants from the South were likely more educated than the black natives of the North and often as educated as the whites if not more.

In addition, they had the migrant advantage: they were more goal-oriented, more likely to stick to their jobs, to succeed so as not to return home to face the “I told you so”. The migrants tended to stick together in solidarity. The higher the obstacles and farther the distance travelled, the more ambitious and resilient they were. So, let’s debunk the calcifying untruths about Southern black migrants.

Several key questions emerged from the Great Migration:

Was the Great Migration positive or negative? The Chicago commission of race relations obtained the following answers from the migrants:

• More dignity, freedom, more money

• More consideration, stop being held down

• Can vote, considered as human beings, no more lynching, no fear of mobs,

• But don’t like rooming and closeness of houses, the city noises and bustling with people.

Did the Great Migration achieve the objectives of those who willed it? Was the loss of what they left behind worth what confronted them in the anonymous cities they fled to?

Did the migrants find what they were looking for? Did they make the North a better or worst place?

No one knows the right answer for sure. But they were pilgrims who inspired the courage that you can always pack your stuff and leave. They gave the opportunity to their children. They gifted the world with mavericks such as Miles Davis, Toni Morrison, Spike Lee, Denzel Washington, James Baldwin, Diana Ross, Jesse Owens, Aretha Franklin, Jackie Robinson, Serena and Venus Williams, Condoleezza Rice, Nat King Cole, Michael Jackson, Oprah Winfrey, Jimi Hendrix, Prince, Whitney Houston, Mary J. Blige, Queen Latifah, Woopie Golberg, Will Smith, Beyonce, Mae Jemisson, and last but not least, Isabel Wilkerson, the author of this great book.

They gifted the world with many celebrities and luminaries away from the Jim Crow caste system of the South.

Reflection & Insights

If you’re currently facing a predicament, know that there are always other warm suns. Even warmer ones.

The Warmth of Other Suns teaches us a powerful lesson. Whatever the predicament you are facing, don’t feel hopeless and doomed. There is always another alternative available somewhere, which you haven’t considered. Whether:

• You are downtrodden or held down in society,

• You are a victim of bullying or you don’t feel welcome,

• Your organization does not create the conditions to unlock your true potential,

• You are engaged in an abusive relationship,

• You entered into an enterprise agreement in which your partners are not playing fair,

Simply know that there are other warm suns. There are even warmer suns. There is an option B you should consider. Pack your luggage, stand up, and leave. You still have the agency to act and influence your life and better your perspectives. It is never too late!

The migrant advantage: Immigrants are inclined to be more goal-oriented, dedicated and perseverant

The United States being a country of immigrants, this book put into light the migrant advantage, a strength possessed by most migrants. Per the British historian E.G. Ravenstein, due to human pragmatism and inertia, migrating people tend to go no further from their homes in search of work than is absolutely necessary. Southern blacks debunked this theory by braving the unknown to travel far away from the South. They were more goal-oriented, more likely to stick to their jobs, they stuck together in solidarity. The higher the obstacles and farther the distance travelled, the more ambitious and resilient they were.

Personally, when I immigrated to the U.S. to attend college in South Dakota, I also experienced some of the challenges faced by the migrants described in this book. College tuition was expensive and I struggled to make ends meet. Perhaps my migrant advantage helped me remain goal-oriented and focus on my goals to graduate college and get back to work to avoid going back home to face the “I told you so.”

Character Growth Takeaways

Wisdom: [Scattered wisdom from the book to ponder over]

• Are nature and animals prone to more solidarity than humans?

o Ida Mae: You know a hen will take up for her chickens more than people will take up for one another. Whenever an old hawk would come along – you heard talk how a hawk will hover and all the chicks run under her wing – she hugs them and she sticks up for ’em and keep a funny noise, and you knew that hawk was somewhere around.

o She (Ada Mae) trusted God and nature more than any man and learned to be a better person watching the lower creatures of the earth.

o The ant sees a crumb, he can’t carry it himself. Don’t you know another ant will come and help him? They better than people.

• Pershing learned this lesson from struggling to deliver a baby: “book knowledge and equipment in the world didn’t make you a good doctor if you didn’t know what you were doing or listen to your patients.”

• If people saw you and liked you, it’s your job to charm’em, show how efficient you were.

• As the distance of the migration increases, the migrants become an increasingly superior group. – Everett Lee.

• To hell with what people think of me. Go on and do what you wanna do. They gonna do what they wanna do anyhow, say what they wanna say anyway.

• It always happened that young people got to a certain age and thought they were the best thing that ever walked the earth.

• The way to change things was to be better than anybody at whatever you did, wear them down with your brilliance, and enjoy the heck of doing it.

• What you give, what more He gives to you.

• Every day to her was a blessing and every breath she took a gift.

• Her success was spiritual, perhaps the hardest to achieve. And because of that, she was the happiest and lived the longest.

• A measure of the man’s estimate of your strength is the kind of weapons he feels he must use in order to hold you fast in a prescribed place. – Howard Thurman

• What go in the wash come out in the rain/ it will all come out in the wash.

• “Never spite in life because it will always come back to zap you hard.”

Temperance: [Lesson about restraint, balance, humility]

The following facts illustrate some level of temperance and self-control

• Sometimes, “you have to stoop to conquer.”

• A surgeon with U.S. military awards traveling to collect urine as if you were a traveling salesman: that’s the cut you took to get your foot in the door.

• Absolute will, near-blind determination, and some necessary measure of faith and just plain grit – the temperance that fueled blacks to flee the South

• You took a lump in the jaw and kept on going to the next office.

Courage: [Lesson about strength, risk, or standing up]

On several occasions, the migrants demonstrated courage and temerity.

At the end of the harvest season, George went to settlement with Mister Edd. George needed to inform Mister Edd, their planter, that they were leaving his plantation without triggering any retribution. At the settlement, George got few dollars from Mister Edd and he carefully informed him that he was leaving his plantation. Luckily, Mister Edd protested, but he did not prevent them from leaving.

This could have cost George his life if Mister Edd had decided to bring his white posse after George and his family.

Instead of bowing the yesaam and yessirs, George and a few friends organized the workers in a sort of union to force the packinghouses to pay them respectable wages. Instead of 15 cents a fill, they demanded 25 cents and they would not pick unless the packinghouses budged. This resistance allowed the pickers to earn more a day than they were earning in a week.

This could have caused George and his friends to be treated to a “necktie party” (execution by hanging).

Justice: [Lesson about fairness, integrity, or responsibility]

An act of justice from the book:

A white mob forced the father of the girl to witness the torture, mutilation, and killing of the black boy who sent a Christmas card to a white girl. Harry Moore an NAACP member petitioned the local government and the U.S. DOJ about the case. In retribution, the Eustis Klan members placed a bomb under his bed, which exploded and killed him and his wife. Harry was a courageous man who sought justice and fighting for justice cost him and his wife their lives.

Memorable Quotes & Phrases

Quotes from the Book:

Phrases, Expressions, Anecdotes to Remember – Powerful language or metaphors.

• They were all stuck in a caste system as hard and unyielding as the red Georgia clay.

• They were (falsely) said to have brought family dysfunction with them, to be more likely be out-of-work, unwed parents, and on welfare, than the people already there.

• Ordinary people listen to their heart instead of the leaders. At a clandestine meeting after a near lynching in Mississippi, a colored leader stood before the people and urged them to stay where they were. A man in the audience rose up and spoke. “You tell us that the South is the best place for us,” “what guarantees can you give us that our life and liberty will be safe. If we stay?” The leader was speechless.

• Throughout the South, the conventional rules of the road did not apply when a colored motorist was behind the wheel. If he reached an intersection first, he had to let the white motorist go ahead of him. He could not pass a white motorist on the road no matter how slowly the white motorist was going and had to take extreme caution to avoid an accident because he would likely be blamed no matter who was at fault.

• A black person could not contradict a white person or speak unless spoken to first.

• A black person could not be the first to offer to shake a white person’s hand. A handshake could occur only if a white person so gestured, leaving many people having never shaken hands with a person of the other race.

• A planter (Mr. Reshard) and sharecropper at settlement after harvest:

o Come on in John. Come here boy, come here. Have a seat. Sit down here.

The planter pulled out his books.

o Well john, Boy we had a good year, John.

o Yes sir, Mr. Reshard. I’m sure glad to hear that.

o We broke even. You don’t owe me nothing. And I don’t owe you nothing.

And that was it. The sharecropper got nothing to show for a year of hard labor in

the field.

• All this stepping off the sidewalk, not looking even in the direction of a white woman, the sirring and ma’aming and waiting until all the white people had been served before buying your ice cream cone, with violence and even death awaiting any missteps.

• A Georgia farmer near Albany this year laid aside his whip and gun, with which it is reported he has been accustomed to drive his hands, and begged for laborers.

• Colored people learned to pack their own food to avoid needing what they couldn’t get (when traveling in the train): Cold fried chicken, hard-boiled eggs, and biscuits in shoe boxes.

• Newark sounds close to New York. Right? It is said that is how Newark gained a good portion of its black population, those going to New York, but getting off in Newark by accident and deciding to stay.

• A boy named Charles Parker was skinned alive for opening a door to a white woman and speaking to her in a way she didn’t like, as the grown folk told it.

• I was hoping I would be able to live as a man and express myself in a manly way without the fear of getting lynched at night.

• Los Angeles: it was a blank canvas waiting for him (Robert) to start painting on it. “Big, open, hustle, and bustle.”

• Harlem, NY: tenants had to sleep in shifts. As soon as one person awoke and left, his bed was taken over by another.

• They were jitterbugging on a floating wood floor in the sequins and Florsheim’s they could now afford, toasting themselves in another world together, a world of their own making in the North - if only for a Saturday night.

• It was as if he had married a perfect stranger and was now confronting the enormity of getting to know her after the deed was done.

• Baby, come on. The doctor’s ready to do your physical. I told you I wasn’t going to let no nigger doctor examine me.

• To the people of the North, the blacks from the South were: bedraggled hayseeds right off the plantations

• Big city temptations in the North: reefer pads, card sharks, gangsters and crapshooters.

• Chicago had been first settled in 1779 by a black (Haitian) man named Jean Baptiste DuSable, a fur trader who built a cabin.

• A black skin was a death warrant on the streets of this Illinois city.

• Ray’s hard-driving life of drugs and women was beginning to catch up with him

• One hard-working migrant was astonished when a detective from Atlanta approached him and informed him that he was wanted back home for spitting on the sidewalk.

• He was a pragmatist who had learned the fine art of extracting whatever he needed from guilt-ridden northerners and poorly credentialed but powerful segregationists.

• The rope lines that had hemmed in his life seemed to loosen with each plodding mile on the odometer.

• He had to walk a thin line between being a man and act a slave. Step too far from one side and he couldn’t live with himself. Step too far from the other side and he couldn’t live at all.

• One set of people could be in a cage and the people outside couldn’t see the bars.

• Children emerged from a church in the South and threw rocks at a passerby boy. When the boy got home, he asked: What kind of God they got inside that church?

• They went (to the North) in search of a kinder mistress. It was like getting unstuck from a magnet

• Without a whiff of sentimentality

• Bridging unrelated things as hyphens do

• Define the course of the fortune and misfortunes

• All the people who made a way of out no way in

• The poor at odd with the broke

• He felt life had never cut him a fair deal

• It sounded like voodoo talk to me

• God pity the day when the negro left the South

• Why hunt for a cause when it is plain as noonday sun?

• He was playing catch up with the tide that has rolled away.

• To have to deny who you were to get what you deserve in the first place

• It would have been opening night jitters

• He was gassed up at the prospect of new possibilities.

• He put on the most charming rendition

• Resentment and suspicion; bemusement and contempt

• Calcifying untruths they would have to come over

• Staked-heels harlots stumbling out of call houses and buffet flats

• Melt inside the neon anonymity of city life

• The riot was in full cry

• This expresses the anger of put-upon electors

• This negro ought to be taken down a peg or two

• A worldly-wise companion

• Sitting straight, talking with an accent and eating with their pinkies out

• Not a whiff of the grandeur they had back home

• Trying to find a place in a not altogether welcoming place

• A big gulf between the two of them would never be resolved

• My lifestyle would blow them out of the water

• Stout heart and sound limbs

• The great clocks of the sky – cotton fields in the South

• A rivalrous sense of uneasiness and insecurity washed over them

• At ease with the plain-spoken common folk

• Wring the most of whatever they have

• He chose to leave the South and the whips and thumbscrews

• A butt-, booty-shaking generation of singers

• The most trying seasons of their lives

• Change did not come without incident

• There is an aloneness to the character of his life

• I’m lighting seven candles for you!

• She put the disappointment in the back of her mind and lived in the present moment

• I’m lighting seven candles for you!

• She put the disappointment in the back of her mind and lived in the present moment

Vocabulary Builder

Words, phrases, and expressions from the book to season and spice up your language

• Tomboy: a girl who enjoys activities more traditionally associated with boys

• Double dog dare: emphatic way to challenge someone to do something

• Top billing: to be given the most important role or attention in any situation

• Hell-bent jury: determined to achieve something at all costs.

• Standoffish: distant and cold in manner; unfriendly

• Uppity: self-important or assertive in a way regarded as inappropriate.

• They paid it no mind

• I’ve seen enough not to go gaga over it: to become extremely excited, enthusiastic, or infatuated, often in a slightly foolish way

• Colicky marriage: a marital relationship experiencing extreme noisy distress

• Rough-cast yeoman

• Stoop labor: back breaking work

• Putting green lawn: very short-grass area known for its smooth, consistent, and fast surface

• Slay the dragon: overcoming a significant obstacle

• Fist-shaking crowd

• Kick up a fuss: object loudly or publicly to something

Who Should Read This?

• Anyone wishing to understand American history, the Great Migration, life as a migrant, wealth inequalities, and today’s race relation.

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Elena Greco and Lila Cerullo met in first grade and developed a lifelong friendship by competing for the best student in school, teaming up to stand up to bullies, engaging in daring adventures, and complementing one’s cautiousness with the other’s temerity and determination to take on life challenges in Naples, Italy.

Book Summary

A lifelong friendship since early childhood

Elena Greco and Lila Cerullo’s friendship started in Naples, Italy since first grade. They forged their friendship mingling and walking to and from school together. Competition was omnipresent in their school community. Students competed in the classroom to show who was the smartest. Their teacher Maestra Oliviero competed against the other teachers by making students compete on different subjects. The students’ behaviors throughout the competition were always influenced by the alliances and rivalries stemming from their community’s social dynamic. One student could engage in a fierce competition against another and at the same time remain lenient when facing another contender.

Quite frequently, Lila and Elena had to stand their ground against boys attempting to bully them. When attacked by those bullies throwing rocks at them, they teamed up to defend themselves. Elena picked the best rocks for Lila to charge back at the bullies. They grew up in a community gravid with poverty, disease, violence, and never-ending drama. Lila had such a character that had always influenced Elena. Elena approached life with a lack of conviction, always cautious and unclear about what to do next, while Lila was the absolute characteristic of determination, most often knowing clearly how to act, and that mix of cautiousness and determination made their friendship stick.

They engaged in incredible adventures

Lila and Elena engaged in daring adventures throughout their childhood that forged their lifelong friendship. One day, they dropped, through the grate, each other’s dolls into their neighborhood cellar, then had to get into the cellar to retrieve them. While searching for their dolls in that tenebrous cellar, they stepped onto all sorts of imaginary or genuine gross things that will make your hair stand up and send chills down your spine. This event, which remained stamped in Elena’s memory taught her a skill which she had retained forever: to hold back one’s despair in the face of any predicament.

Then, Lila always courageous and daring led Elena into the haunted house of Don Achille, a man depicted by the community as an ogre, to frontally accuse him of stealing their dolls. To their astonishment, the Don Achille which their parents ostracized as an evil and wicked man and forbade them to approach, gave them money to buy new dolls but he reminded them that it was his gift to them. The pair buried the money for a while and used it later to purchase books so they could read and in turn learn how to write books and become rich.

In light of this, Elena concluded that every disobedient act contains breathtaking opportunities. While going up the stairs to face the redoubtable Don Achille, they were both very terrified. Elena was trailing so behind that at some point Lila dompted her own fear, stopped, went back to her, grabbed her hand, and held it firmly to lead her forward. That act of grabbing her hand amid their common deep fear locked their lives together forever.

On another adventure, they skipped school to take a long walk to the sea to taste freedom. They walked past bucolic communities and came across weird country people. One man emerged from a tumbledown, but had nothing to show off except his mere crotches. After several miles of walk over many hours, their long walk did not lead them to the sea. Finally, exhausted and famished, the truant pupils trekked back home under the rain to face their parents’ ire.

Adolescence marked by the Naples community dynamics

Elena advanced to middle school whereas Lila went to a vocational school, while working part-time at her parents’ shoe repair shop. The pair continued to intermingle, studying sometimes together, going to mass, and exploring love by sharing stories about who had a crush on them. At some point, Lila quit her vocational school to share her time between housekeeping and helping her father Fernando and brother Rino at the Cerullo’s shoe repair shop. Lila and Rino wanted to start a business of shoemaking, but their father was always opposed to that idea, arguing that they should focus on repairing shoes rather than venturing into shoe manufacturing, which was only reserved for big companies capable of providing the high capital investment required upfront. Secretly, Lila designed a shoe and worked with her brother to make the shoe, which they named Cerullos.

Elena continued high school, where she studiously studied Latin, Greek, philosophy, and religion. The two girls continued to nurture their friendship sometimes reading books together, discussing love, learning to dance, attending parties and wandering around the city. The Solaras, a well-to-do family, who owned a bar in their community, amassed a fortune by selling alcohol and pastries. Their boys Marcello and Michele Solara drove an 1100 model car, which made Rino and his friend Pasquale jealous and caused rivalries, rancor, and hatred among the youth.

During a summer break, Elena was sent to the region of Ischia, in the Island of Burano, to bask in the sunlight of the Maronti Beach while staying in Nella Incardo’s house, a cousin of their teacher Maestra Oliviero. Nella rent part of her house to families vacationing on the island. Elena enjoyed her time on the beach swimming and reading, while helping Nella with cleaning the house and cooking for her guests. While in Burano, the Sarratores, a family from their Naples community, came to visit. Elena spent time with their daughter Marisa and had a crush on their son Nino, who was also her high school classmate. While in Burano, Elena wrote multiple letters to Lila, but she never responded and she got so desperate to read her that she was on the brink of giving up on her. Surprisingly, she was relieved to receive a letter from Lila on her birthday and reconnected with her dear friend.

After several weeks, a well-read Elena returned to Naples where she reunited with her family and friend Lila, who while she was gone, was forced to engage into a relationship with Marcello Solara. Marcello had been coming to the Cerullo’s house every evening for supper. He showered them with generous gifts and goodies and even brought a TV. The TV became the subject of interest to the entire community, which gathered at Lila’s house to watch TV every evening. Rino hated Marcello, but their parents, enjoying all the bounty they were getting from Marcello, silenced Rino and pressured Lila to accept Marcello’s courtship.

Love relationships with twists, a marriage drama, and how they held on to each other

Thereafter, Stephano, from the Carracci family, owners of the community grocery store bought a new car and engaged in wooing Lila and she liked him. One evening, Lila frontally asked Marcello to stop seeing her because she was in love with Stephano and asked Marcello to take away his TV. Marcello got so angry that he beat his fist against a wall to the point of bleeding.

On one hand, Lila went on to engage with Stephano, who partnered with Fernando, Lila’s father and her brother Rino to expand their shoe store and funded the manufacturing of the Cerullos, the shoes designed by his lover Lila. Elena on the other hand, continued to do well in school and flirted with a boy named Alfonso. Although she was doing well in school, Elena found her life dull in comparison to Lila’s who had become a moneyed and free spending fashion queen, changing expensive purses on a whim and going to the hairdresser whenever she pleased.

To their former teacher Maestra Oliviero, Lila lost her beauty of mind, replaced by her beauty of body, which is fleeting. Elena dated Alfonso, but she did not really love him. She rather continued to love Nino Sarratore, but there was another twist, because Donato Sarratore, Nino’s father secretly declared his love to Elena. Lila and Elena remained accomplices and partners to the point that they even wrote together a newspaper article, which was never published, leaving Elena disappointed.

Stephano and Lila got engaged, made plans to get married and the wedding preparation prompted tremendous drama. Picking the wedding dress was a subject of contention between Lila and her in-laws. Elena, then donnish, had to rely on her bookish wit to strike a compromise between them. Then, another crisis came when Stephano picked the Solara father to be the speaker at the wedding. Lila was so disappointed that she abandoned the marriage plan and locked herself in a room for so long that her parents and Elena had to work out another compromise. In the end, Lila gave up her opposition to the Solara father’s attendance, but in return she requested that Marcello Solara, her former boyfriend, was not invited to the wedding, to which Stephano agreed. The day of the wedding was another testimony of how deep the intimacy of the relationship between Lila and Elena was. Lila asked her to help her bathe and dress for the wedding.

The wedding ceremony itself stirred the community so profoundly. Some people could not afford the wedding clothes and had to get into debt to purchase a suit or a dress. Some managed to get something to wear, but could not get a car ride to join the procession. Elena came to the wedding with Alfonso, to find herself torn between him and her mother who didn’t want her daughter to date a mere mechanic. Her mother did not allow her to sit with Alfonso, who got mad at Elena and turned his back on her. To Lila’s surprise, Marcello Solara showed up at the wedding ceremony. She was so dumbstruck with Stefano’s broken promise that she turned red with anger and resentment.

Lila vanished from life prompting Elena to engage in introspection

Throughout the course of their friendship, Lila experienced an intriguing event, which she coined as dissolving margins. That striking experience may have set a precedent for her to confide to Elena that she will disappear someday from the surface of the earth. During that experience, she noticed that the outlines of people and things suddenly dissolved or disappeared. She was sweating and was shaken by nausea and everyone around her was shouting loudly and moving too quickly. While she felt the horror of the cries emerging from the people’s throat, she had a sense of repulsion of the poorly structured bodies of people around her and the human species in general.

Later on, the two friends definitively settled in life. After marriage they had children, and life went on. One day, Lila’s son named Rino called Elena to enquire about his mother and Elena told him that she was not with her and asked him to look around and tell if there was any sign that Lila had ever lived. Rino looked, but could not find any. Everything, which showed that Lila had ever lived on earth was erased: clothes, personal items, documents, pictures, everything disappeared from the surface of the earth as if Lila had never existed.

Reflection & Insights

My Brilliant Friend by Elena Ferrante; a novel ranked #1 on the NYT 100 Best Books of the 21^st Century is centered on the story of a lifelong friendship, which brings into light the compromises and sacrifices that make friendship last for long.

Celebration of lifelong friendship

My Brilliant Friend celebrates the value of true friendship. Elena and Lila’s relationship is the epitome of a sort of symbiosis: two different individuals engaged in a mutually beneficial relationship. On one hand, we had the fearless, determined, and daring Lila, while on the other hand was a more careful and cautious if not hesitant Elena. This mix of impudence tamed by cautiousness allowed their friendship to thrive by weathering life’s many storms.

Lila’s determination and temerity allowed them to stand up to bullies and engage in daring adventures such as going to Don Achille, the community pariah’s apartment or attempting the long walk to the sea, or rather to paraphrase Nelson Mandela a long walk to freedom. Elena’s cautiousness and compromise also helped them overcome major crises such as when Lila abandoned her wedding plan in opposition to the attendance of the Solaras at the wedding, and the drama with Lila’s in-laws over picking the wedding dress.

Although they may seem to be in competition, they relied on each other’s mutual support and validation to thrive. They were mutually in thrall to each other. Their friendship survived thanks to the mix of the multifaceted elements of their characters to plot and fight together against life’s challenges.

Temperance and self-control

Lila and Elena’s friendship is also the absolute testimony of temperance and self-control. Throughout their story, they disappointed and offended each other. For example, Lila ignored the many letters which Elena wrote to her and she only responded once on Elena’s birthday. Elena was desperate, but as she learned while walking through the stairs to face the “ogre” Don Achille, she held her despair and did not hold any grudge. Instead, she was delighted to read Lila on her birthday. Occasionally, the pair traded each other mean words, which hurt, but they have always found a way to redeem themselves and make amend. Their story teaches us the lesson that temperance, selfless love, and a dose of forgiveness are the strings that weave the fabric of a lifelong friendship.

Determination in life and courage

Lila’s determination and courage teach us that one needs determination and courage to achieve life’s goals. She did not shy away from standing up to bullies. When she wanted to walk to the sea to enjoy freedom, they skipped school to go. When it was time to break up with Marcello, she did it without blinking or any hint of regret. Temerity and determination are key character traits that contribute to success in life, but they may come with some cost. Let’s remember that Lila survived a defenestration and recovered with a broken arm when she stood up to her father in defense of her brother Rino’s cause.

Similar to Lila and Elena, I personally have a lifelong friend. Fredo and I met for the first time in elementary school, then we went to different middle schools, embraced different careers but we have remained friends to this present moment. During our childhood, we played together, relied on each other’s strengths and weaknesses, fear and conviction to thrive. We plotted together to break rules set by our parents, sometimes we got through without retribution, but in some other cases, we paid a hefty price for our disobedience.

When it came to love, we sometimes dated girls we were never interested in. We have always supported each other in the face of trials and tribulations. In many occasions, we disappointed and offended each other, but as illustrated in this book, we have always forgiven each other. Despite having embraced different careers, got busy though life challenges and living in different continents, we have remained friends for life. Whenever possible, we always meet to continue to nurse our friendship. This book confirms that temperance, forgiveness, and love remain the bedrock of a lifelong friendship.

What is your lifelong friendship story? How do you thrive through your relationship amid trials and tribulation?

Character Growth Takeaways

Wisdom: [Scattered wisdom from the book to ponder over]

• Every disobedient act contained breathtaking opportunities

• The adult vs the children’s way:

  • Adults, waiting for tomorrow, move in a present behind which is yesterday or the day before or at most last week: they don’t want to think about the rest.

  • Children don’t know the meaning of yesterday, of the day before yesterday, or even of tomorrow, everything is this, now: the street is this, the doorway is this, the stairs are this, this is Mamma, this is Papa, this is the day, this is the night.

• Lila convinced Elena that one achieves security in love only by subjecting the wooer to hard tests.

• When there is no love, not only the life of the people becomes sterile but the life of cities.

• In a city without love, people are deprived of happiness.

• The beauty of mind that Cerullo had from childhood didn’t find an outlet, it has all ended up in her face, in her breasts, in her thighs, in her ass, places where it soon fades and it will be as if she had never had it.

• Good and evil are mixed together and reinforce each other in turn.

Temperance: [Lesson about restraint, balance, humility]

• Elena persevered in going to school and striving to write, despite the dullness and lack of apparent imminent reward. Thanks to her perseverance, this book is now ranked #1 on the NYT 100 Best Books of the 21^st Century.

• Caught in conflict between Lila and her in-laws, Lila had to walk on a tightrope to strike a compromise:

  • I chose one of the styles at random, truly at random, careful not to pick one of those that Lila favored, and went on to demonstrate that it incorporated the qualities of the styles favored by the two women, and the qualities of the ones favored by my friend.

• We entertained a long-standing friendship being accomplices, plotting against the rest of the world, one supporting other through life predicaments, knowing how to redeem themselves when they offend, hurt, or disappoint each other is a proof of temperance. Entertaining a friendship is a true exercise of temperance

Courage: [Lesson about strength, risk, or standing up]

• Don Achille was perceived as the ogre of the community. Children were strictly forbidden to venture near him. Lila and Elena climbed up the stairs to Don Archille’s apartment to frontally accuse him of stealing their dolls, which he hid in some black bag.

  • “We climbed slowly toward the greatest of our terrors of that time, we went to expose ourselves to fear and interrogate it.”

  • This confrontation with the ogre of the community was an absolute feat of audacity and mettle.

• Lila took Marcello outside of their house to look into his eyes and without blinking and hesitation let him know that their relationship was over and asked Marcello to stop seeing her.

• I always felt slightly detached from my own actions. Lila on the other hand, had, from a young age, the characteristic of determination, she would do anything without hesitation.

• Disappearing by effacing herself from the face of the earth

  Justice: [Lesson about fairness, integrity, or responsibility]

  

• The human condition was so obviously exposed to the blind fury of chance that to trust in a God, a Jesus, the Holy Spirit – this last a completely superfluous entity, it was there only to make up a trinity, notoriously nobler than the mere binomial father-son was the same things as collecting trading cards while the city burns in the fires of hell.

  Is Elena trying to do justice for humans?

Memorable Quotes & Phrases

Quotes from the Book:

• Every prohibition lost substance in her presence. She knew how to go beyond the limit without ever truly suffering the consequences.

• I feel no nostalgia for our childhood: it was full of violence. Every sort of thing happened, at home and outside, every day, but I don’t recall having ever thought that the life we had there was particularly bad. Life was like that, that’s all, we grew up with the duty to make it difficult for others before they made it difficult for us.

• There are no gestures, words, or sighs that do not contain the sum of all the crimes that human beings have committed and commit.

• They displayed kindness and politeness toward everyone, as if they were John and Jacqueline Kennedy visiting a neighborhood of indigents.

• Whatever she put on, her beauty enhanced the dress, the dress enhanced her beauty.

• If God is present everywhere, what need does he have to disseminate himself by way of the Holy Spirit?

• But to turn to her meant that to continue to recognize her authority, when in fact I, by now, knew more than she did.

• They had a fight giving each other a more or less equal beating.

• Those moments are stamped into my memory.

• The daughter of the murderer was in love with the son of the victim.

• An energy that dazed them like the swelling sound of beauty arriving.

• I was pleased with my role as confidante with generous advice, as accomplice in weaving plots.

• We were girls, even if we imagined ourselves wickedly daring.

Phrases/Expressions to Remember:

• Masterpieces of sturdy lightness, of dissonant harmony.

• Mixture of pride and suffering

• Fear-rancor-hatred-meekness

Vocabulary Builder

• From Italian

  o Stradone: Avenue, wide road, often a tree-lined one

  o Antipasto: (in Italian cooking) an appetizer typically consisting of olives, anchovies, cheeses, and meats.

• Hopscotch: skip from place to place; move erratically (from a children’s game in which each child by turn hops into and over squares marked on the ground to retrieve a marker)

Who Should Read This?

• Anybody who is eager to explore the subtleties of friendship in order to grow relationships with friends.

• Anyone wishing to undertake a life initiative, but is held by doubts and a lack of confidence and wanting to discover life adventure stories, which could inspire them to act, to just do it.

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