Wolf Hall

by

Hilary Mantel

Clothes Symbol Analysis

Clothes Symbol Icon

In Wolf Hall, people’s clothes are a reflection of their motivations and desires—particularly the ones that they want the world to see. For instance, Cardinal Wolsey has a great fondness for fine silks and velvets. His luxurious tastes contradict his position as a man of God, but he delights in expensive garments and flaunts them because he knows he is too powerful for anyone to object, and he wants everyone to notice that power. Queen Katherine’s gowns are “bristling with gemstones” and seem “as if they are designed less for beauty than to withstand blows from a sword.” Like her clothes, Katherine has no use for beauty and shows strength and resolve as she fights against the king’s decision to divorce her. Throughout, clothing is a way for people to control what they show the world and hide away their flaws and vulnerabilities. This is why Wolsey tells Cromwell that he must learn to “find out what people wear under their clothes.” In some cases, people’s hidden selves match their outward appearances—most notably, the religious fanatic Thomas More wears a hair shirt under his clothes, which highlights the masochistic pleasure he takes in suffering and martyrdom. But in other cases, clothing masks underlying weakness; for instance, Wolsey ultimately loses his power and influence, despite his confident appearance. Overall, clothes symbolize aspects of characters’ selves that they want to reveal while also helping them conceal the things they want hidden.

Clothes Quotes in Wolf Hall

The Wolf Hall quotes below all refer to the symbol of Clothes. 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
).
Part 2: Chapter 1 Quotes

This is an indecent spectacle: the man who has ruled England, reduced. They have brought out […] the scarlet silk in which he braves the summer heat of London, the crimson brocades that keep his blood warm when snow falls on Westminster and whisks in sleety eddies over the Thames. […] There have been days when, swaggering out, he would say, “Right, Master Cromwell, price me by the yard!”

[…] So day by day, at his request and to amuse him, he would put a value on his master. Now the king has sent an army of clerks to do it. But he would like to take away their pens by force and write across their inventories: Thomas Wolsey is a man beyond price.

Related Characters: Cardinal Wolsey (speaker), Thomas Cromwell, King Henry VIII, Duke of Norfolk/Thomas Howard, Duke of Suffolk/Charles Brandon
Related Symbols: Clothes
Page Number: 46
Explanation and Analysis:

How simple it would be, if he were allowed to reach down and shake some straight answers out of Norris. But it’s not simple; this is what the world and the cardinal conspire to teach him. Christ, he thinks, by my age I ought to know. 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; somehow he thinks that’s what Norris is, and he feels an irrational dislike taking root, and he tries to dismiss it, because he prefers his dislikes rational, but after all, these circumstances are extreme, […] [and] Wolsey’s unraveling, in a great unweaving of scarlet thread that might lead you back into a secret labyrinth, with a dying monster at its heart.

Related Characters: Thomas Cromwell (speaker), King Henry VIII, Cardinal Wolsey , Henry Norris
Related Symbols: Clothes
Page Number: 54-55
Explanation and Analysis:
Part 2: Chapter 2 Quotes

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: 77
Explanation and Analysis:

Thomas More says that the imperial troops, for their enjoyment, are roasting live babies on spits. Oh, he would! Says Thomas Cromwell. Listen, soldiers don’t do that. They’re too busy carrying away everything they can turn into ready money.

Under his clothes, it is well known, More wears a jerkin of horsehair. He beats himself with a scourge, of the type used by some religious orders. What lodges in his mind, Thomas Cromwell’s, is that somebody makes these instruments of daily torture. […]

We don’t have to invite pain in, he thinks. It’s waiting for us: sooner rather than later. Ask the virgins of Rome.

He thinks, also, that people ought to be found better jobs.

Related Characters: Thomas Cromwell (speaker), Thomas More
Related Symbols: Clothes
Page Number: 80
Explanation and Analysis:
Part 4: Chapter 2 Quotes

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: 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: 359
Explanation and Analysis:
Get the entire Wolf Hall LitChart as a printable PDF.
Wolf Hall PDF

Clothes Symbol Timeline in Wolf Hall

The timeline below shows where the symbol Clothes appears in Wolf Hall. The colored dots and icons indicate which themes are associated with that appearance.
Part 1: Chapter 1: Across the Narrow Sea, Putney, 1500
Poor Leadership and Violence Theme Icon
Children and Human Connection Theme Icon
...his nose is bleeding, and one eye is swollen shut. The twine on his father’s boot has come loose, and Walter blames Thomas for it, saying that by kicking him, he... (full context)
Part 1: Chapter 2: Paternity, 1527
Power, Ambition, and Deception Theme Icon
Despite the warmth of the April night, Stephen Gardiner is dressed in black furs that “look like oily and dense black feathers” that he gathers around him “like black angel’s... (full context)
Part 2: Chapter 1: Visitation, 1529
Power, Ambition, and Deception Theme Icon
Poor Leadership and Violence Theme Icon
...of Norfolk and the Duke of Suffolk arrive at Cardinal Wolsey’s house and tell him that he has been dismissed from his position as Lord Chancellor. They have been instructed by... (full context)
Power, Ambition, and Deception Theme Icon
Poor Leadership and Violence Theme Icon
...“the man who has ruled England, reduced.” As the men evaluate the worth of his jewels and fine clothes, Cromwell wants to tell them that “Thomas Wolsey is a man beyond... (full context)
Part 2: Chapter 2: An Occult History of Britain, 1521-1529
Power, Ambition, and Deception Theme Icon
Poor Leadership and Violence Theme Icon
...spies in her household and denying her meetings with the Spanish ambassador. Wolsey tells Cromwell that he expected her to see the whole business as Wolsey’s fault while completely exonerating Henry.... (full context)
Children and Human Connection Theme Icon
Dogmatism vs. Open-Mindedness Theme Icon
Thomas More says that the emperor’s soldiers are having great fun by “roasting live babies on spits,” a claim... (full context)
Myth and Storytelling Theme Icon
Liz mutters sleepily as Cromwell gets into bed beside her. His dreams that night are filled with the cardinal’s stories, and he dreams that under his clothes, Henry... (full context)
Power, Ambition, and Deception Theme Icon
...him, “her skirts lifted, showing a fine pair of green silk stockings.” She tells him that her uncle Norfolk and her brother George Boleyn were complaining about Cromwell that morning for... (full context)
Part 3: Chapter 1: Three-Card Trick, Winter 1529-Spring 1530
Power, Ambition, and Deception Theme Icon
Norfolk rattles as he walks since “his clothes conceal relics: in tiny jeweled cases he has shavings of skin and snippets of hair,... (full context)
Part 3: Chapter 2: Entirely Beloved Cromwell, Spring-December 1530
Power, Ambition, and Deception Theme Icon
After Cromwell leaves the room, Mary Boleyn follows him out. She tells Cromwell that she and Mary Shelton can’t wait for him to come again because they thought Anne... (full context)
Part 3: Chapter 3: The Dead Complain of Their Burial, Christmastide 1530
Power, Ambition, and Deception Theme Icon
Poor Leadership and Violence Theme Icon
Children and Human Connection Theme Icon
As soon as Cromwell walks in, the king tells him that his “dead brother came to [him] in a dream,” and Cromwell stays quiet because he... (full context)
Power, Ambition, and Deception Theme Icon
Poor Leadership and Violence Theme Icon
Instead, Cromwell tells More that “feeling will come back,” and More says that he knows that Cromwell, too, has had... (full context)
Part 4: Chapter 1: Arrange Your Face, 1531
Power, Ambition, and Deception Theme Icon
Children and Human Connection Theme Icon
Cromwell is speaking with Katherine in her chambers, and he notices that her daughter Mary Tudor seems to be in a lot of pain—“she is shrunken into... (full context)
Poor Leadership and Violence Theme Icon
Children and Human Connection Theme Icon
Dogmatism vs. Open-Mindedness Theme Icon
...brings Cromwell a note from Tyndale which has been sewn into the lining of a jacket, in which Tyndale writes that he doesn’t believe he can ever come back to England... (full context)
Part 4: Chapter 2: “Alas, What Shall I Do for Love?”, Spring 1532
Children and Human Connection Theme Icon
...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 fabric with which he’d wrapped her... (full context)
Part 4: Chapter 3: Early Mass, November 1532
Power, Ambition, and Deception Theme Icon
Rafe wakes Cromwell from uneasy dreams, saying that the king has already gone to Mass but that they didn’t want to wake Cromwell... (full context)
Part 5: Chapter 1: Anna Regina, 1533
Power, Ambition, and Deception Theme Icon
...“her face is entranced.” Cromwell wills Anne not to stumble, and he finds himself praying that the child she is carrying should be “hard, alert, watchful of opportunity, wringing use from... (full context)