Falcons

I’m continuing my stitched explorations of Hilary Mantel’s Cromwell Trilogy, and doing some work based on symbols relating to the various Queens of England as they are presented in these novels. Falcons might be the name of the first chapter of the second book, Bring Up the Bodies, but the Falcon was also the symbol of Anne Boleyn and her family.

Grey fabric quilted with a falcon atop a tree stump and a Tudor rose.. The falcon holds a sceptre in one leg and is crowned. — A stitched interpretation of Anne Boleyn’s Falcon

I am currently working a layered section of my Mirror and the Light piece (or series of pieces) that represents these symbols: Mantel writes a lot about the changing of symbols with the changing of Queens – from pomegranate (Katherine of Aragon) to falcon (Anne Boleyn) to phoenix (Jane Seymour), and my intention with the stitched piece is that, as you peel back the layers, you see the changing political and marital allegiances. The pomegranate and the phoenix are embroidered so they lie flat, but I made a stylised representation of Anne’s falcon first, and I quilted that in order to give it some additional weight and texture. The falcon was the most difficult to remove, and Anne’s presence haunts the novels, so a denser piece for her queenship seems most appropriate.

I was able to visit both Hampton Court and the Tower of London in recent weeks, and on both visits I was very conscious of being able to see symbols and emblems which I have been reading about in the Cromwell Trilogy. I included pomegranates and a falcon in my first Wolf Hall piece last year; and the emblems recur throughout the trilogy. When I gave my 2021 conference paper about the role of stitching in these novels, I talked about the stitching and unpicking of emblems and badges, and how Mantel represents these activities in her writing.

Re-reading The Mirror and the Light, I see these themes even more strongly. This novel starts with the execution of Anne Boleyn, but her presence is still felt in dreams, and also in the falcon symbol that she has left behind. After her fall, Henry VIII wanted no reminders of her; but her falcon emblem, her initials, and their initials entwined (HAHA) were everywhere – on fabric, on wood, on stone. Occasionally one of her emblems survived attempts at removal; this stone falcon is on display at Hampton Court, there’s one in the gatehouse roof, and I believe their is a HAHA in the wood in the Great Hall. In the words of the Duke of Suffolk, in the novel, “You’ve got a HAHA.” Fabric is easy to unpick, paint can be overpainted, but wood and stone are a bit more difficult to deal with.

A square shaped carving, on point, showing a falcon with Tudor rose devices in the background, carved in stone. — Anne Boleyn’s falcon, on display at Hampton Court Palace

At the Tower of London, in the Beauchamp Tower, there is a rough falcon carving that might relate to Anne Boleyn. Historian Eric Ives, in The Life and Death of Anne Boleyn, wrote that this is Anne’s

“most poignant memorial… Which of her ‘lovers’ made it we do not know, but the image is unmistakable. The tree stump is there – the barren Henry – the Tudor rose bursting into life, the perching bird whose touch wrought the miracle. But there is one change to the badge which Anne had proudly flourished in the face of the world. This falcon is no longer a royal bird. It has no crown, no sceptre; it stands bareheaded, as did Anne in those last moments on Tower Green.”
Eric Ives, The Life and Death of Anne Boleyn (Blackwell Publishing Ltd, 2004, p.364)

A carving on a stone wall of a rough bird shape, perched on top of a rounded shape with a short stalk. Both are carved within a shield shaped border. — The falcon carving in the Beauchamp Tower

The Tower’s own description, to be found on the wall nearby, is less definite and reads “Unknown. The shield is thought to be Anne Bolyen’s falcon carved by one of her supporters”. I’ve seen speculations that it might have been carved by Anne’s brother George, or by the poet Thomas Wyatt, both prisoners at the Tower, and probably the best known of Anne’s supporters, but really we cannot know who made it.

Quilted representation of a roughly drawn falcon, sitting on top of a round shape, both inside a shield shaped border — Quilted and stylised representation of the Tower Falcon

To stop myself becoming too distracted by the origins of the Tower Falcon, I have to remind myself that I am working on pieces inspired by Hilary Mantel’s version of events, and those novels are my one source text.

While many scenes in the trilogy take place at the Tower of London, there is just one mention of the Beauchamp Tower in the text, and that is by Cromwell himself. After his arrest, in The Mirror and the Light, he is held in the Queen’s Apartments, before being moved to the Bell Tower. “Can I not go to the Beauchamp Tower?” he asks, to be told that it is already occupied.

Does Mantel present a scene any of Anne’s alleged lovers (Henry Norris, William Brereton, Francis Weston, Mark Smeaton, brother George, or Thomas Wyatt) carving this uncrowned falcon? No. In Mantel’s telling in Bring Up the Bodies, George Boleyn is imprisoned “in his light circular room in the Martin Tower”. Thomas Wyatt is seen by Richard Cromwell “looking down from a grate in the Bell Tower”; and as Mantel notes in The Mirror and the Light, Wyatt’s own poetry references the Bell Tower. And the exact location of the other four prisoners is not present in the text.

So, I ask myself, have I overdone things by stitching an impression of this carving? It doesn’t appear in the trilogy. Have I been distracted by a material artefact, which should not form part of my textile interpretation of a specific text? Yes, and no.

This falcon carving does not appear in the novels, but there is a reference to “The Boleyns’ white falcon [hanging] like a sorry sparrow on a fence, while the Seymour phoenix is rising”, and that makes me think of this carving. And there’s something else for me to think about. To me, the “tree stump” on which the carved falcon is perched looks a little like a pomegranate; and my stitched adaptation deliberately plays on that. I wanted the now defeated and uncrowned falcon to still be determined to show dominance over the pomegranate, even in its final days. There is more than one way of reading these symbols.

Enjoying Hard Time with Jodi Taylor

This is a blog tour stop for Jodi Taylor’s marvellous new book – Hard Time – the second in the Time Police series.

*Hard Time* by Jodi Taylor on my And The World Went White quilt

Many thanks to Antonia Whitton and Headline Press for inviting me to review Hard Time, and for sending me an advance hardback copy.

About the Book

Team Weird are back causing havoc in the Time Police in this irresistible spinoff series by international bestseller Jodi Taylor, author of The Chronicles of St Mary’s. If you love Doctor Who, Ben Aaronovitch and Jasper Fforde, you’ll love the Time Police.

The Time Police do not have problems. They have challenges. Idiots who want to change history have always proved ‘challenging’. But now temporal tourism is on the rise – highly illegal but highly lucrative.

Step forward Jane, Luke and Matthew. They may be about to graduate, but there’s still plenty of time for everything to go wrong. Throw in the Versailles time slip, a covert jump to Ancient Egypt and a race against Time itself and you’ve got yourself an assignment worthy of Team Weird.

My Review

I am a great admirer of Jodi Taylor’s books. From the moment I picked up Just One Damned Thing After Another, I have been captivated by her work. Her ability to conjure up characters, institutions, and worlds is phenomenal – and her new Time Police series is no exception.

I noticed that some of the other reviewers on this blog tour haven’t read the St Mary’s series – they have a treat to come – and their enjoyment of Hard Time demonstrates that the Time Police books can hold their own as a series in their own right as well as a spinoff. I’m coming to Hard Time as a lover of St Mary’s, so my perspective is that of someone who knows and loves St Mary’s Institute of Historical Research. And, yes, I would love to work there.

Readers of the Chronicles of St Mary’s know the Time Police. Or at least we know the Time Police from the point of view of Max and Leon and Dr Bairstow. But we now get to see events from the Time Police point of view, and share the career and personal development of Jane, Luke and Matthew – three very different young recruits who don’t really fit in. In the first book in the series, Doing Time, we saw their early mistakes, their incompatibility, and the trouble in which they found themselves – and now in Hard Time we see them growing slowly into a solid team, forming friendships – and still finding themselves in trouble.

I don’t want to give away the plot of Hard Time, but I can guarantee that it is a funny, tense and exciting read. There are shocks galore, plenty of jumps to interesting places, lots of chaos, unexpected heroism, the appearance of some St Mary’s personnel, and some very bad behaviour by some very unpleasant people.

The overall tone is slightly lighter than that of the St Mary’s books; anyone who knows the Chronicles will be aware that alongside the laughter there is tragedy (I can’t bear to think about what happened at Troy) – and there are no guaranteed happy endings for anyone. But the Time Police have a less emotional approach to history, which makes Hard Time the ideal read for a gloomy autumn day, when you want to be transported to different times and watch a bunch of engaging characters jump in and out of trouble.

You don’t need to have read the Chronicles of St Mary’s to appreciate Jane, Luke and Matthew – so why not give them a go? I thoroughly recommend getting to know the Time Police – and I am sure you will enjoy the ride.

Hard Time by Jodi Taylor was published by Headline on 15 October 2020, and is available in hardback for £18.99 from all good booksellers. It is also available as an ebook, and I am looking forward to listening to Zara Ramm reading the audiobook.

A Visit to Green Knowe

The Manor, Hemingford Grey

I have a large collection of books about sewing. This collection has changed over the years: to begin with when I first started learning to quilt, I bought books that focused on technique, that set out rules about thread type, dictated strict seam allowances and hinted at the correct way to press fabric. As my quilting developed and I stopped following patterns – and gained the confidence to dispense with the rules that didn’t work for me – these books were given away and replaced with books about quilt histories and culture. But one book has stayed with me from the start: The Patchworks of Lucy Boston by Diana Boston.

I knew that Lucy Boston (1892-1990) was the author of the children’s Green Knowe series and I remember reading The Castle of Yew years ago. But discovering that she was a stitcher meant that I looked at her work with new interest. The names of her quilts intrigued me: The Babes in the Wood Patchwork, The Patchwork of the Crosses and – most exciting of all – The High Magic Patchwork. These names give the quilts additional depth, for the naming of quilts is an important way of conveying the intention of the maker. Lucy Boston may have described the occupation of patchwork as “disorderly and messy, the room littered with snippets of paper, cotton and lengths of thread, and a maelstrom of materials,” but from disorder and mess comes beauty and deliberation.

Tolly “saw the head of a giant stone man, carrying a child on his shoulders.”

Last week I visited the Manor at Hemingford Grey, near Huntingdon, Lucy Boston’s house and the setting for the Green Knowe books. It is a beautiful house, with the oldest parts dating back to the 12th Century. Its situation by the river Great Ouse makes it very easy to imagine the floods that open The Children of Green Knowe when the boy Tolly approaches the house by boat in the evening when “the windows were all lit up, but it was too dark to see what kind of a house it was, only that it was high and narrow like a tower.” To Tolly it is like a castle, and he wants to know “Do things happen in it, like the castles in books?” And of course they do.

I don’t actually remember reading the Green Knowe books as a child, but I must have done because, when I went into the room at the top of the house, “a room under the roof, with a ceiling the shape of the roof, with a ceiling the shape of the roof and all the beams showing,” there was Toby’s Japanese mouse and I knew him straight away.

“On the chest of drawers Tolly had seen two curly white china dogs, an old clock, and an ebony mouse, life-sized with shiny black eyes. It was so cleverly carved that you could see every hair, and it felt like fur to stroke.”

And there was more – “a beautiful old rocking-horse … a horse whose legs were stretched to full gallop, fixed to long rockers so that it could, if you rode it violently, both rear and kick.” The creak-croak of the rockers was almost audible. It was The Children of Green Knowe come to life – perfectly.

As well as the joy of finding Tolly’s room, I had the pleasure of seeing Lucy Boston’s quilts. I was especially privileged to be able to touch them, as, wearing white gloves, I helped our guide, Diana Boston, turn them out for viewing. The quilts are made from an eclectic range of fabrics – from wartime dusters to silk, from needlecord to embroidered wedding dress cotton, from heavy furnishing fabric to Liberty prints. Many pieces were fussy cut – with the sort of precision that I admire but never have the patience to achieve – and the piecing is extraordinary. There is a stunning Mariner’s Compass quilt – with twelve of that most complicated of blocks (which I have never dared attempt). When making it, Lucy Boston experienced a feeling known to all quilters: “My patchwork is proving very difficult indeed. It has large circular patterns that will not lie flat. They all heave up like rising tea-cakes.” The Babes in the Wood was a triumph of applique, as owls, birds and squirrels wandered amongst leaves and flowers in autumn colours. My favourite was the High Magic Patchwork: a mass of stars, suns and the phases of the moon. Lucy Boston made this piece when she was writing An Enemy at Green Knowe and noted that it “served to keep my thoughts moving.”

The Manor is open all year round and can be visited by appointment. The photography policy is very generous and visitors can take pictures all over the house and gardens. However, it isn’t possible to photograph the quilts. Instead, Diana Boston’s lovely book The Patchworks of Lucy Boston can be purchased from the Manor along with cards featuring some of the quilts (and proceeds go towards the upkeep of the house and garden). And the Patchwork of the Crosses, probably the most well-known of Lucy Boston’s quilts, can be seen here thanks to the British Quilt Study Group of the Quilters’ Guild of the British Isles.

The Fabric of Wolf Hall

I grew up reading a lot of historical fiction. From the age of about ten, I devoured novels by Jean Plaidy, Margaret Irwin and Margaret Campbell Barnes, and particularly enjoyed their books about Henry VIII. I had an especial fondness for Jean Plaidy’s Murder Most Royal and Brief Gaudy Hour by Margaret Campbell Barnes. Both books were about the rise and fall of Anne Boleyn and both featured a villain – Thomas Cromwell – who tortured musicians and brought down queens. My early ventures into reading Tudor fiction meant that I always thought of Cromwell as a Very Bad Man.

NPG 1727; Thomas Cromwell, Earl of Essex after Hans Holbein the Younger. © National Portrait Gallery, London. *

But in April 2009, a new book was published and this book changed my viewpoint completely. This book featured Thomas Cromwell as its central character: Hilary Mantel’s magnificent Wolf Hall. As Mantel’s hero (or should that be anti-hero?), Cromwell is witty, charismatic and slippery, loyal to his friends and ruthless to those who cross him. A devoted family man. A patron saint for administrators, archivists and minute writers. And a man who knows about cloth.

The Thomas Cromwell Quilt

Re-reading Wolf Hall recently, I was struck by the number of references to textiles, and how beautifully they are described by Mantel. Velvets, brocades, silks, wool, sables, satins all burst from the page.

As a youth fleeing England, young Thomas Cromwell meets “three elderly Lowlanders”, traders in cloth, who show him their “woollen samples and discuss among themselves the weight and the weave.” Cromwell learns about cloth and concludes that “with wool so long in the fleece these days, and good broadcloth hard to weave, he ought to be getting into kerseys, lighter cloth like that, exporting through Antwerp to Italy.” He understands what clothes of the right fabric can do; on meeting the poor but beautiful Helen, “mentally, he takes her out of cheap shrunken wool and re-dresses her in some figured velvet he saw yesterday, six shillings the yard.”

As Cardinal Wolsey’s man, Cromwell admires a tapestry of “the woollen monarchs,” Solomon and Sheba: a tapestry that depicts a woman he has known and that weaves its way throughout the book. When Wolsey falls, Cromwell watches the cardinal’s finery being packed away: “bolts of fine holland, velvets and grosgrain, sarcenet and taffeta, scarlet by the yard.” Cromwell knows its value. “In public the cardinal wears red, just red, but in various weights, various weaves, various degrees of pigment and dye, but all of them the best of their kind, the best reds to be got for money. There have been days when, swaggering out, he would say, ‘Right, Master Cromwell, price me by the yard!'” And in a spirit of thrift that will be appreciated by patchworkers everywhere, this fabric has a second life after Wolsey’s death: “The cardinal’s scarlet clothes now lie folded and empty. They cannot be wasted. They will be cut up and become other garments. Who knows where they will get to over the years? Your eye will be taken by a crimson cushion or a patch of red on a banner or ensign. You will see a glimpse of them in a man’s inner sleeve or in the flash of a whore’s petticoat.”

Sewing the binding.

Cromwell’s wife, Liz, does “a bit of silk-work” and complains about “the price of thread.” Their sheets are of fine linen and they sleep “under a quilt of yellow turkey satin.” In one of my favourite scenes, Liz embroiders shirts for their son Gregory “with a black-work design; it’s the same one the queen uses, for she makes the king’s shirts herself. ‘If I were Katherine I’d leave the needle in them,’ he says.” In this world, sewing is a weapon. Does Anne Boleyn pull the stitches out of her sister’s embroidery? How can his niece’s “awkward little backstitch” be used to protect Cromwell’s letters? Will a book of needlework patterns wrapped in kingfisher blue silk be taken from Jane Seymour? Who will unpick embroidered pomegranates, representing the badge of Katherine of Aragon?

As readers may have guessed, I know the text of Wolf Hall very well. It’s my favourite book, and as well as reading from the page, I find the excellent unabridged audiobook, read by Simon Slater, the perfect sewing accompaniment. And in 2014, my enjoyment was enhanced even further by the magical stage adaptations of Wolf Hall and its sequel, Bring Up the Bodies, developed by the Royal Shakespeare Company and Playful Productions.

Wolf Hall and Bring Up the Bodies at the Aldwych Theatre

I was lucky enough to see the plays in both Stratford-upon-Avon and London, and was so swept away by them that I simply had to sew something. Mantel’s Notes on Characters, written for the plays, say of Cromwell: “You don’t say much about your past, but you tell Thomas Cranmer, ‘I was a ruffian in my youth.’ Whatever this statement reveals or conceals, you have a lifelong sympathy with young men who have veered off-course.” I love that sentiment – and it formed the basis for a little quilt tribute to Thomas Cromwell, Hilary Mantel, Mike Poulton, and the cast, musicians, production team and backstage crew of the plays that I enjoyed so much.

Memorial plaque at Tower Green

* The image of Thomas Cromwell from the National Portrait Gallery, London is used under the terms of the Creative Commons license.

Travelling in Time

When I was eight years old, I read A Traveller in Time by Alison Uttley. First published in 1939, A Traveller in Time tells the story of Penelope Taberner, who, when visiting her aunt and uncle in Derbyshire, is transported back to 1582. She finds herself in the midst of the Babington Plot which aimed to free Mary, Queen of Scots from captivity, and place her on the English throne in place of Elizabeth I. I found this book completely magical and it led directly to my desire to study history.

Uttley’s vivid recreation of the Derbyshire countryside and the people who lived there was enhanced by her evocative descriptions of objects. The magic of an old chest containing “cashmere shawls, the silk-embroidered waistcoats, the pistol with its mother-of-pearl and incised roses and leaves,” and drawers full of “old bits of jewellery, silver buttons, jet and amber brooches, and broken earrings,” still make me want to dig around in forgotten corners of antique shops. I read about Mistress Foljambe’s Book of Hours and dreamed of the illustrations that captivated Penelope.

Most tantalising were the fabrics. How I longed for a sewing workbox like Aunt Tissie’s, full of “curious spools of silks”. I wanted to make a rag rug from an old waistcoat, trousers that were a hundred years old, and a scarlet soldier’s coat. I dreamed about the embroidery sewn by Mary, Queen of Scots, and, years later, was delighted to find some of it on display in the Victoria and Albert Museum. The best thing of all was some wonderful, abandoned patchwork:

“There was a needlecase with a cover of ancient blue taffeta, like the kirtle of Mistress Babington’s gown. I had found it in Aunt Tissie’s patchwork bag, where there was a storehouse of treasures, ancient silks and faded velvets, and scraps of half-made patchwork, each with its lining of stiff paper. I saw faded writing and crabbed words and odd spelling, with poems and hymns half-concealed in the squares and diamonds of the patches. Some of the paper was parchment, I was sure, but Aunt Tissie said they were only old documents she had found in an oak chest when she was a girl, and cut up for her quilt linings.”

How could I fail to become a quilter after reading that?

is there room for me to sew?

Quilting, Reading, and Keeping the Needles Sharp

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