The nook for a person who got suddenly obsessed with Wolf Hall series.
I usually draw fantasy anime / manga stuff:
https://linktr.ee/harukakanata
Raised in Osaka, Japan. Live in Portland, Oregon, US. She/her.
I've been completely occupied with personal projects and works and life and seeing the collapse of the goddamn country I live in, then finally I noticed:
And the reason why I flew back here was I just cried to find The Decemberists' new album has a charming fantastical song called William Fitzwilliam
Don't lose your head to this brooding and raging
Don't lose your heart to the sweetness of sin
And don't go out wandering, the ghosts hover around you
The Howards and the Seymours,
the Poles and Boleyns
Tagged by @stilltrails
(Hey I'm so sorry for not taking it for such a long time!)
Prompt:
Make a new post with the names of all the files in your WIP folder, regardless of how non-descriptive or ridiculous.
Let people send you an ask with the title that most intrigues them, and then post a little snippet or tell them something about it!
And then tag as many people as you have WIPs.
Am doing illustrations, so I still have three character sheets of Wolf Hall (Anne Boleyn, Rafe, William and Gregory), and some fanarts featuring Thomas and Rafe. :D
It's been already a month?! Oh my. I've been hectic with my own projects and a bit away from the fandom
(If anyone would be interested in some dark-fantasy comic /illustration stuff,
I'm posting things on Bluesky: https://bsky.app/profile/harukakanata.bsky.social/
And Cara: https://cara.app/haruk04/all )
(I have some fanfic comic idea sketches about Cromwell and his boys but already great fanfics about them are produced day by day. What a time I live in!!)
Title: Penace
Summary: “If you think I am Walter, I will show you, Walter!” He cries, and Thomas freezes, his eyes are filled with fear. Rafe has never seen his master so afraid."
/
Moments before the final blow ends Thomas’ life, a herald arrives with a letter bearing the King’s seal, granting Thomas a reprieve.
Unfortunately, Henry’s mercy has its limits. Thomas survives the pain of a botched execution, yet Rafe, Richard, and Gregory live through the consequences.
And in attempting to fill the shoes of Thomas Cromwell, Rafe accepts it is a battle he may never win.
Let me take over. The thought aches in Rafe’s chest and he is wise to keep it there. It is rare for Gregory to mutter obscenities, but as his trembling hands make apprehensive strokes upon the mangled back of what one might assume to be the lifeless husk of Thomas Cromwell, Gregory lets out a string of swears. The elder Cromwell jerks away for the fifth time.
Rafe sighs.
“Gregory-”
“No.” He is my father, I need to do this, is what he means to say.
Rafe leans against the wall and in silence watches this tragic plot transpire.
It is Augst 2nd, 1540 and his master has woken from his coma following his poor timed reprieve.
On July 28th, the page boy, accompanied by a guard, makes it to the scaffold moments after the ax is lodged into his back a second time. The letter carries the king's seal, and the rushed yet careful words read as if they are spoken from the uncertain, yet repentant mouth of Thomas Wriothesley. The crowd disperses, muttering in anger and disappointment. Rafe remembers thinking how demonic they are, so frantic to see his master butchered.
Rafe ponders on the conversation between those fools and wonders what exactly was said by Risley to command the king’s regret. Rafe knows he should be thankful for their intervention, and if it stopped there, perhaps he would have been.
But the king is frivolous, and a reprieve does not mean forgiveness, even for Thomas Cromwell.
Rafe returns to Agust, and stares on in silence as his master sits hunched over in a chair, soiled shirt lifted, revealing the deep scars sown into his back. Gregory is behind him, as dutiful a son as he attempts to be, dabbing a sterile cloth in a bucket of a warm, alcoholic water mixture and then with great care, tends to Thomas’ wounds.
Through the pain and the weeping, and the drenched gray and black curls that haphazardly fall over his face, dark pupils catch Gregory in their path.
Once again, he flinches and jerks away from his son.
“Father.” His voice trembles. In sadness, in anger? Rafe supposes it’s both. He does not blame Gregory for the cesspool of emotions swelling within the pits of his chest. He’s tired, his body shakes, his steps are heavy, and all his money and efforts have been spent on this moment. Bargains, pleas to the king, his estates and titles given up to please the burned ego of His Majesty and the new queen; Gregory’s own wife having had left him in the process.
For Thomas, Gregory has become a pauper.
“I don’t want you, you are no son of mine,” Thomas mutters in the silence; it is enough for Gregory to stop. “I want Rafe.”
Thomas, cannot stand his son’s touch.
Gregory pauses, cloth still hovering over Thomas’ back. His eyes glisten, and he does not cry only silently motions to Rafe, who comes and takes over. Gregory leaves and Thomas does not say a word.
“It’s alright sir, I’ve got you”
The door closes and Gregory is gone.
For Rafe’s part, he is no stranger to this. He stands behind Thomas and picks up where his wayward brother left off. The solution from the cold rag falls down his wrist, and gently he scours the wounds upon his master’s back. Thomas does not flinch or push him away. It is as if his body eases, and the threat of an uncomfortable force is no longer upon him.
Still, Thomas shakes. The frigid air stings his wounds, and Rafe quickens his deed. Within an hour, the bandages are changed and he helps Thomas back to his bed. It does not take him long to fall asleep, and his body trembles in pain with every breath that escapes his lips. Rafe fears it will be his last.
Now, however, he must tend to the younger Cromwell.
__
Gregory has exiled himself to a storage room, and he stands by the window, leaning over with his hands resting upon the ledge.
He is quiet, though his shoulders shake and his head hangs low. Rafe can tell that he is weeping.
“Gregory.” Rafe disturbs the silent isolation he supposes Gregory preferred, but the young Cromwell turns in his direction, wiping his eyes. There is a small movement of what Rafe figures is a letter, stuffed into Gregory’s jacket.
“Rafe, how is he?”
Gregory arranges his face in a way dissimilar to his father's. He does not hide emotion behind a stone-like facade. Rather he smiles. Eyes puffy beneath, breath still shaky, Gregory erects a smile so unsettling, Rafe does not know what to say.
So he speaks only the truth. “He is fine. May I come?”
Gregory nods as if speaking now causes too much pain. So Rafe saves him the trouble and pulls him into a hug as if he has embraced one of his own children. Though Gregory, now twenty is a grown man, Rafe can only see the child he helped raise before him. The boy trembles in his arms and when he is sure they are alone, he allows himself to cry.
He does not make legible words, but Rafe gathers ‘Why doesn’t he want me?’ ‘Why do I frighten him?’, and his eyes, pained yet beautiful scream ‘I gave him everything, and I lost everything, and I am still not enough’.
“Shh.” Rafe whispers into silence, his embrace upon the younger Cromwell tightening. He feels his strength beneath his shirt, the muscles that have marked his transition from boy to man, and yet all Rafe holds is a child. The child who ran to him at night during storms, the child whom he taught to read when his father and mother were away, the child that in some instances did not know whether to call him ‘Master Saddler’ or ‘Brother’.
Either suffices, but Rafe feels a different connection now. A father of his own making, he realizes that Gregory has lost his.
He holds him tighter and gently places a kiss on Gregory’s forehead as if he is a parent, chasing away the nightmares of a shaken toddler.
“It will pass,” Rafe says softly, cupping Gregory’s face in his hands. He sniffles and gasps, and tears pour down his cheeks, Rafe speaks. “My Master…your father he is…” He is not there, and his mind has perhaps gone to heaven. We do not know the man who lies in the bed in pain, who cries himself to sleep at night, who calls you Walter, who refers to Richard and me as his sons, who asks why the King was so cruel to him. But we can’t hold it against him, he wants to tell Gregory. We cannot hold him accountable for what the King did to him.
But Rafe knows that is true only for this moment. For Gregory’s life, the struggle for his father’s affection has been constant.
Rafe would never presume to take the place of his master, but for now, perhaps, Gregory needs a tender father.
He still holds Gregory’s pale, child-like face in his hands and wipes the tears with his thumbs. He starts to see the timid boy once again, even beneath the facial hair and flushed cheeks.
“There you are, Gregory.” He smiles. “Helen may have prepared dinner, if you go down, I will meet you there.” He holds Gregory until the younger man nods and musters some form of smile. “And now no more. Hold your head high. It will be well.”
He releases him and prays that things will go well.
–
Richard comes the next day and as Rafe fears, things do not go well.
It is not uncommon knowledge, that since the ill-timed reprieve and even before that, when first Thomas was arrested, Richard harbored some sort of resentment toward his cousin.
“Why did he not come to visit his father, my uncle in the Tower?” Richard had once asked Rafe.
“Thomas told him not to. And before you say anything else, he also instructed Gregory and Bess to write that letter against him.” Rafe had responded.
“My uncle would not have wanted you to go, but still you went.”
You didn’t visit him in the tower either, Rafe had wanted to say, but he knew that would be fruitless. It was evident that if Richard stepped within a foot of the tower, he would’ve turned to violence, and would have had a place right next to his uncle.
The truth, however, is that on that day, Gregory did not want to come. Rafe had repeatedly asked Gregory to join him in the tower, and Gregory refused. In fact, to a random wanderer, Gregory’s lack of reaction to hearing of his father’s execution would cause concern, or even a seed of doubt in the fact that Gregory was in fact, the son of Thomas Cromwell. He simply did not care, nor show any emotion.
While it pained Rafe, Gregory’s reaction, or rather a lack of one, made sense to him.
It is how the young Cromwell coped. How was one supposed to react to hearing of the oncoming execution of their father, wherein, the lack of a concrete relationship clouded any form of empathetic emotion? Thomas was Gregory’s father in name; he knew he had the man’s curly hair, dark eyes, and pale skin, he knew those around him would call him ‘Thomas’ if he passed them quickly, only to correct themselves. Most of the time it does not impact him. (Though when Call Me Risley, well rather Wriothesley, had made that mistake once, Gregory lashed out, and Rafe still does not know why that angered Gregory so much).
Back then Gregory prepared to mourn both his father and the unattainable relationship he yearned for with his father. Still, he refused to see him and he came to regret it.
Now, since the reprieve, he makes up for it any way he can. Except, it hasn’t been easy. Thomas does not recognize him, and if he does, he hates him. He doesn’t call Gregory ‘son’, or even by his name, he calls him Walter. When Gregory tries to change his bandages and clean the wounds the ax men left on his back, he pushes away and calls for Rafe and Richard instead. Richard finds it hilarious, but it breaks Rafe to see Gregory so isolated.
Especially given how much Gregory has sacrificed to ensure his father’s survival. It was, in a surprising turn of events both Rafe and Wriothesely (filled with guilt and remorse) who moved the king to a reprieve, but Gregory as his son, had to shoulder Henry’s anger and ensure that his father never ended up on the scaffold again.
Without a title and assets, Gregory had little to appease the financial appetite of Henry and Katherine Howard, but what he had, he gave it. That left him with nothing. Bess left him (for reasons not exactly tied to his drop in station - and Gregory did not begrudge her), and his home was taken from him, as was his title. The remaining fines to keep Thomas alive were paid by Wriothesley, Richard, and Rafe. Subsequently, Rafe more than offered to let Gregory and Thomas stay with him.
That was a few weeks ago, and things had been going as decent as possible. Gregory can somewhat accept his father’s poor actions toward him; he understands how the ax may have ruined his mind.
Richard’s taunting on the other hand...he does not take that well.
I know it had always been traditional for a book of hours to be passed down and given to family - often it was intended to be owned by more than its first user.
But still, Raphe Sadler keeping Thomas’s, and clearly instilling it with such a sense of importance that it was preserved and handed down over multiple generations, and then donated to be properly looked after? That it was kept so safe, even after his arrest and execution?
Research by Assistant Curators at Hever Castle, Dr Owen Emmerson and Ms Kate McCaffrey, suggests that the Book of Hours, printed in Paris by Germain Hardouyn in 1527 or 28, would have been among the books left by Cromwell to his secretary and protegé Ralph Sadleir.
And it came to Trinity from Dame Anne Sadleir who married the grandson of Cromwell’s secretary.
Anne Sadleir, the daughter of eminent lawyer Sir Edward Coke, a member of Trinity, is one of the few women who donated to the College. She gave this Book of Hours, along with Trinity’s best-known manuscript – The Trinity Apocalypse – to the College in 1660.
I voted Cromwell but wanna put honorable mention to Cranmer ('cause my partner, who are into English reformation history, once told me: "Listen, Cranmer in Wolf Hall looked almost like just a NPC but his final speech was heavy freakin' metal - he said "Forasmuch as my hand offended in writing contrary to my heart, therefore my hand shall first be punished. For if I may come to the fire, it shall be first burned." Then he actually did so upon his own execution" )
Hello! I should’ve asked before following, but you’re not a minor, right? You don’t have your age in your bio, so I wanted to make sure because I don’t want to follow or be followed by minors. I hope you don’t mind me asking, but it’s important to me. Thanks for understanding!
I understand! I'm a generation who started using the internet when win 95 and web 1.0 became a thing, I remember the time Livejournal was a thing - I hope it makes sense and you rest assured
I'm generally fascinated with Rafe and Cromwell's relationship as father and son/mentor and mentee.
(So it's not necessarily about shipping, but anyways, shipping is fun - let's dive into a nook of fandom and suppose every single character is bi, because why not?)
So I've read Rafe-involved parts of The Mirror and The Light before reading whole part of the books, and... and... my feeling and expectation about the upcoming TV adaptation is completely tangled... I really look forward to seeing it but how can I look forward to seeing Rafe losing Cromwell in a cruel death?
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