“You see, do you, that it is impossible for me to believe that for twenty years I was a harlot?” Catherine asks him. The Pope and the most of Europe are against him. Henry VIII wants to annul his 20-year marriage and also marry Anne Boleyn. If the king dies without a male heir, the country could be devastated by civil war. And benevolence can be a weapon, too, one that Cromwell uses as he tries gently but persistently to dislodge Catherine from her position as Henry’s legal wife. Wolf Hall Book PDF download for free England in the 1520s is one step away from disaster. Cromwell’s “I could not dissuade him from his liking for you” is a feeble defense. And benevolence can sometimes be rather toothless: “How hard did you try?” Mary Boleyn asks Cromwell, who has failed to protect her from Henry, who insists on having sex with her while Anne is pregnant. Just because a man is benevolent doesn’t make dependence on him something other than dependence. We see Helen Barre, escaping from an abusive husband gone blessedly missing, first into a convent that would strip her of her children, then into the more humane embrace of Cromwell’s household. Mantel shows us the cost of men’s desires ruling women over and over again in this section of the novel. Few women in the world can be valued in such a way, but as Mantel makes clear, all of them can be victimized.
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