Animals Symbol in Wolf Hall

Many of the characters in the novel are likened to animals, and these comparisons represent the notion that civilization and morality are a veneer that barely disguises people’s animalistic natures. Hilary Mantel has said that the idea of naming the novel Wolf Hall appealed to her because “it seemed an apt name for wherever Henry’s court resided.” The literal Wolf Hall is the home of the Seymour family, and it gains infamy for being a seat of incest and immorality. In the novel, wolves symbolize the violence and roughness of human nature, which make people indistinguishable from wild animals. When Cromwell thinks of how he and his colleagues fight for power, he imagines them as “[w]olves snapping over a carcass” and recalls the Latin saying homo homini lupus, which means “man is wolf to man.” While wolves and wolf-like behavior are a particularly striking symbol in the novel, characters are also compared to other animals to highlight their cruel behavior or brutal natures. For instance, Wolsey compares Cromwell to a “fighting dog” because of his pugnaciousness, and the self-satisfied priests who burn the Loller woman are compared to “fat gray rats.”

Animals Quotes in Wolf Hall

The Wolf Hall quotes below all refer to the symbol of Animals. For each quote, you can also see the other characters and themes related to it (each theme is indicated by its own dot and icon, like this one:

Power, Ambition, and Deception Theme Icon

“So now get up!” Walter is roaring down at him, working out where to kick him next. […] “What are you, an eel?” his parent asks. He trots backward, gathers pace and aims another kick.

It knocks the last breath out of him; he thinks it may be his last. His forehead returns to the ground; he lies waiting, for Walter to jump on him. The dog, Bella, is barking, shut away in an outhouse. “I’ll miss my dog,” he thinks. […]

Inch by inch. Inch by inch forward. Never mind if he calls you an eel or a worm or a snake. Head down, don’t provoke him.

Related Characters: Walter Cromwell (speaker), Thomas Cromwell

Related Symbols: Animals

Page Number and Citation: 3-4

Explanation and Analysis:

“Is it something to do with the English?” Cavendish asks earnestly. He’s still thinking of the uproar back there when they embarked; and even now, people are running along the banks, making obscene signs and whistling. “Tell us, Master Cromwell, you’ve been abroad. Are they particularly an ungrateful nation? […]”

“I don’t think it’s the English. I think it’s just people. They always hope there may be something better.”

“But what do they get by the change?” Cavendish persists. “One dog sated with meat is replaced by a hungrier dog who bites nearer the bone. […]”

He closes his eyes. The river shifts beneath them, dim figures in an allegory of Fortune. Decayed Magnificence sits in the center. Cavendish, leaning at his right like a Virtuous Councillor, mutters words of superfluous and belated advice […]; he, like a Tempter, is seated on the left […].

Related Characters: Thomas Cromwell (speaker), George Cavendish (speaker), Cardinal Wolsey

Related Symbols: Animals

Page Number and Citation: 50-51

Explanation and Analysis:

There never was a lady who knew better her husband’s needs.

She knows them; for the first time, she doesn’t want to comply with them.

Is a woman bound to wifely obedience, when the result will be to turn her out of the estate of wife? He, Cromwell, admires Katherine: he likes to see her moving about the royal palaces, as wide as she is high, stitched into gowns so bristling with gemstones that they look as if they are designed less for beauty than to withstand blows from a sword. Her auburn hair is faded and streaked with gray, tucked back under her gable hood like the modest wings of a city sparrow. Under her gowns she wears the habit of a Franciscan nun. Try always, Wolsey says, to find out what people wear under their clothes. At an earlier stage in life this would have surprised him; he had thought that under their clothes people wore their skin.

Related Characters: Thomas Cromwell (speaker), Cardinal Wolsey (speaker), King Henry VIII, Queen Katherine

Related Symbols: Clothes, Animals

Page Number and Citation: 77

Explanation and Analysis:

“I wonder,” Wolsey says, “would you have patience with our sovereign lord? When it is midnight and he is up drinking and giggling with Brandon, or singing, and the day’s papers not yet signed, and when you press him he says, I’m for my bed now, we’re hunting tomorrow…If your chance comes to serve, you will have to take him as he is, a pleasure-loving prince. And he will have to take you as you are, which is rather like one of those square-shaped fighting dogs that low men tow about on ropes. Not that you are without a fitful charm, Tom.”

Related Characters: Cardinal Wolsey (speaker), Thomas Cromwell, King Henry VIII, Duke of Suffolk/Charles Brandon

Related Symbols: Animals

Page Number and Citation: 79

Explanation and Analysis:

“Cromwell, I am content you are a burgess in the Parliament.”

He bows his head. “My lord.”

“I spoke to the king for you and he is also content. You will take his instructions in the Commons. And mine.”

“Will they be the same, my lord?”

The duke scowls. […] “Damn it all, Cromwell, why are you such a…person? It isn’t as if you could afford to be.”

He waits, smiling. He knows what the duke means. He is a person, he is a presence. He knows how to edge blackly into a room so that you don’t see him; but perhaps those days are over.

Related Characters: Thomas Cromwell (speaker), Duke of Norfolk/Thomas Howard (speaker), King Henry VIII, Cardinal Wolsey

Related Symbols: Animals

Page Number and Citation: 150-151

Explanation and Analysis:

When the Loller was led out between the officers the people jeered and shouted. He saw that she was a grandmother, perhaps the oldest person he had ever seen. The officers were nearly carrying her. She had no cap or veil. Her hair seemed to be torn out of her head in patches. People behind him said, no doubt she did that herself, in desperation at her sin. Behind the Loller came two monks, parading like fat gray rats, crosses in their pink paws. The woman in the clean cap […] balled her two hands into fists and punched them in the air, and from the depth of her belly she let loose a scream, a halloo, in a shrill voice like a demon. The press of people took up the cry.

Related Characters: Thomas Cromwell, William Tyndale, The Loller

Related Symbols: Clothes, Animals

Page Number and Citation: 326

Explanation and Analysis:

“Look,” she says. She holds up her sleeves. The bright blue with which she has edged them, that kingfisher flash, is cut from the silk in which he wrapped her present of needlework patterns. How do matters stand now at Wolf Hall, he asks, as tactfully as he can: how do you ask after a family, in the wake of incest? She says in her clear little voice, “Sir John is very well. But then Sir John is always very well. […] Why don’t you make some business in Wiltshire and ride down to inspect us? Oh, and if the king gets a new wife, she will need matrons to attend her, and my sister Liz is coming to court. […] I would rather go up-country to the queen, myself. […]”

“If I were your father…no…” he rephrases it, “if I were to advise you, it would be to serve Lady Anne.”

Related Characters: Thomas Cromwell (speaker), Jane Seymour (speaker), King Henry VIII, Anne Boleyn , Queen Katherine, John Seymour, Liz Seymour

Related Symbols: Animals, Clothes

Page Number and Citation: 359

Explanation and Analysis:

There is a feral stink that rises from the hide of a dog about to fight. It rises now into the room, and he sees Anne turn aside, fastidious, and Stephen puts a hand to his chest, as if to ruffle up his fur, to warn of his size before he bares his teeth. “I shall be back with Your Majesty within a week,” he says. His dulcet sentiment comes out as a snarl from the depth of his guts.

[…]

Henry says, “Stephen is a resolute ambassador, no doubt, but I cannot keep him near me. […] I hate ingratitude. I hate disloyalty. That is why I value a man like you. You were good to your old master in his trouble. […]” He speaks as if he, personally, hadn’t caused the trouble; as if Wolsey’s fall were caused by a thunderbolt.

Related Characters: King Henry VIII (speaker), Stephen Gardiner (speaker), Thomas Cromwell, Cardinal Wolsey , Anne Boleyn

Related Symbols: Animals

Page Number and Citation: 501-502

Explanation and Analysis:

Henry stirs into life. “Do I retain you for what is easy? Jesus pity my simplicity, I have promoted you to a place in this kingdom that no one, no one of your breeding has ever held in the whole of the history of this realm.” He drops his voice. “Do you think it is for your personal beauty? The charm of your presence? I keep you, Master Cromwell, because you are as cunning as a bag of serpents. But do not be a viper in my bosom. You know my decision. Execute it.”

Related Characters: King Henry VIII (speaker), Thomas Cromwell, Anne Boleyn , Thomas More

Related Symbols: Animals

Page Number and Citation: 585

Explanation and Analysis:

Animals Symbol Timeline in Wolf Hall

The timeline below shows where the symbol Animals appears in Wolf Hall. The colored dots and icons indicate which themes are associated with that appearance.

Children and Human Connection Theme Icon

...tries to crawl away from Walter, who mockingly calls him “an eel.” Cromwell hears a dog barking and thinks he will miss his dog, Bella, when he is dead. He thinks... (full context)

...would still be his honored guest.” Wolsey “makes a great, deep, smiling sigh, like a leopard settling in a warm spot,” and rests his “large, white, beringed hand” on his ample... (full context)

...when Cromwell gets home, even though it is very late. She hands him his little dog, Bella, and tells him a book arrived for him from Germany which had been packaged... (full context)

...“[b]utcher’s boy.” He says that Cromwell, who is also in the room, is the “[b]utcher’s dog.” Cromwell notices that in the firelight, Wolsey’s arms look very long—“his reach is long, his... (full context)

...king, too, would have to accept Cromwell for being like “one of those square-shaped fighting dogs that low men tow about on ropes.” Cromwell thinks that it is unlikely that he... (full context)

...includes the story of King Edward, Henry’s grandfather, marrying a woman who descended from the serpent woman Melusine, who had prophesied that “her children would found a dynasty that would reign... (full context)

...hair dry, Liz came in and laughingly asked if Cromwell had brought a “boy or hedgehog.” (full context)

...beheaded him if the cardinal hadn’t spoke on his behalf. Wolsey says he has known “horses with more wit” than Suffolk, and he asks Cromwell to go to court and bring... (full context)

...thinks that Anne is now bored enough to send for Cromwell. She has three little dogs—Cromwell thinks of them as “Bellas” in reference to his old dog—that lick his face and... (full context)

...says “with relish” that if Henry wasn’t the king, “one could pity him. For the dog’s life they lead him.” (full context)

...mildly tells Gardiner that his cousin Richard Williams “sends greetings.” Gardiner’s “eyebrows bristle, like a dog’s hackles,” and he says that he doesn’t believe the “old tale” and that he “will... (full context)

...excellent at horse-riding and swordsmanship, though his Greek isn’t very good. He has two black greyhounds at Cambridge but wants to get rid of them because people say only criminals who... (full context)

Dogmatism vs. Open-Mindedness Theme Icon

Earlier, Cromwell had been to Suffolk’s kennels to admire his hounds, and he had given him a useful tip on how to cure his favorite dog,... (full context)

...“out for bloody murder” and “wants the cardinal’s guts in a dish to feed her spaniels, and his limbs nailed over the city gates of York.” (full context)

...have a child born in wedlock who can reign. Norfolk is incredulous that “[t]hat talking shrimp” Mary Tudor might ever rule, but Gardiner seems interested in the idea. Cromwell says it... (full context)

...nunnery since no one will marry her now after the tales about “those sinners at Wolf Hall” have gotten out. (full context)

...and he abandons this project. He thinks that “More, Tyndale, they deserve each other, these mules that pass for men.” Tyndale refuses to openly support Henry’s divorce, as does Luther, and... (full context)

...person he had ever seen.” She was followed by “two monks, parading like fat gray rats, crosses in their pink paws.” (full context)

...girl he is so taken with. She holds up her hands and shows him the “kingfisher flash” of the blue silk that she has edged her sleeves with—she has reused the... (full context)

...had flirted with Cromwell once, since there’s nothing between them. Their household won’t become like Wolf Hall. Rafe wonders if the bride has different ideas about this. He tells Cromwell that... (full context)

...her “bricked up alive” if her belly shows. Anne says that the Seymour family in Wolf Hall would “give her a bouquet,” causing Jane Seymour great embarrassment. Anne tells the other... (full context)

...to Katherine. The Pope says that when Henry dies, “his corpse will be dug with animal bones into a common pit.” Rumors circulate in the city that Cromwell has a secret... (full context)

...for years. There is a racket outside the house and Christophe wonders if there are wolves in England. Cromwell tells him, “[t]hat howling […] is only the Londoners.” (full context)

...then rushes off. Cromwell thinks that people like himself and Wriothesley are “[i]nveterate scrappers,” like “wolves snapping over a carcass.” (full context)

...Cromwell feels there is “a feral stink” in the room, like “the hide of a dog about to fight.” (full context)

...it is for the king to decide. As he leaves the Tower where “the king’s beasts” are kept, he feels “slightly nauseous, he can smell stale blood and from the direction... (full context)

...Norfolk had said he’d “tear” Wolsey with his teeth, and he thinks that “man is wolf to man.” (full context)

...She tells him she will serve another season in court and then head home to Wolf Hall since Anne Boleyn dislikes her. (full context)

...he keeps Cromwell around—despite his low origins—is because he is “cunning as a bag of serpents.” He demands that Cromwell execute his decision. (full context)

...and he tells Rafe that the two of them should go visit the Seymours in Wolf Hall. (full context)

Animals Symbol Analysis

Animals Quotes in Wolf Hall

Animals Symbol Timeline in Wolf Hall