CONTENTS
INTRODUCTION
Finding Cromwell
Fact and Fiction
A New Cromwell
CHAPTER 1 Rising Fortunes
Cromwell’s Early Life
Walter Cromwell
Thomas Cromwell on the Continent
A Mercantile Education
Cromwell the Lawyer
The Cromwell Family at Austin Friars
Cromwell and the Cardinal
Richard Fox
Wolsey
The Tudor Dynasty
Heirs and Spares
The Tudor Court
The Royal Palaces
Families of Court
CHAPTER 2 Cromwell Ascends
The Cardinal’s Man
Katherine of Aragon
The Rivals and Henry’s ‘Great Matter’
Entry to court
Anne Boleyn
Tudor Pastimes
Feast Days and Holy Days
Tudor Christmas
The Trappings of a Gentleman
Men of the Privy Chamber
CHAPTER 3 A New Era
The Cardinal’s Descent
Thomas More
The Ambassador
The Privy Council at Westminster
Turning Point
Elizabeth Barton: The Holy Maid of Kent
Calais
A Way Forward
Prince[ess]
Personal Spheres
Renaissance
Renaissance Influences
The Oath of Succession
CHAPTER 4 Henry’s Wrath
Around the Throne the Thunder Rolls
The Death of Katherine
The Fall of the Boleyns
Gathering Evidence
Interrogation
Trial and Execution
After the Execution
Personal Spheres
The New Court Structure
The Seymours
The Rise of the Seymours
Old Families, New Order
Success and Succession
Religion, the Dissolution of the Monasteries and the Pilgrimage of Grace
CHAPTER 5 The Fall of Cromwell
A Birth and a Death
The Search for a New Queen
New Alliances and Anne of Cleves
Miscalculations and Execution
The Aftermath
Further Reading
Index
Acknowledgements
‘So now get up.’
(Wolf Hall)
The violent blows of his father leave the young Thomas Cromwell sprawled on his side, his bruised body finding little comfort from the dirty cobblestones. The smell of blood and beer infuses the air of the Putney blacksmith’s yard. In the distance he hears shouting, but all Thomas can focus on is his father’s large boot, placed inches away from his head, the stitching tying the boot together unravelling from the violent movements.
Everything shifts out of focus, yet somehow he stands up and hobbles to the house of his older sister, Kat Williams. Married into the Williams family, whose influence stretches no further than Wimbledon, but seemingly powerful to a boy who has never ventured beyond Putney, Kat has escaped their abusive father but can offer little protection when Walter inevitably comes to rage at the door demanding that Thomas return home. Thomas realizes that he must leave Putney but begins to dream a little bigger. He wonders if somewhere in Europe there is a war raging and imagines becoming a soldier.
He flees to the port of Dover where he encounters three Lowland cloth merchants. In return for helping them carry their bundles on board the boat crossing the English Channel, they take him along as a member of their party. Throughout the journey he reveals the details of his life to them: stories of his childhood, his father’s abuse and illegal activities. The men are horrified at how badly the English treat their children. When the ship docks in Calais they part ways, the men tell Thomas that if he ever needs a bed and hearth, he will be welcome. But the young Cromwell will not stop till he finds a war. As he is greeted by the sight of the vast open sea for the first time, he kisses the holy medal his sister has given him for protection and drops it into the sea.
With this unsentimental introduction to the 16th century, and to the boy who would become one of the most infamous individuals of the period, so begins Mantel’s opus Wolf Hall with an undeniable freshness (stale beer and blood in the air notwithstanding) and honesty, portending a darker, grittier world than we are accustomed to.
The lure of historical fiction, as author Margaret Atwood suggests, is the lure of time travel. Every generation or so, across various forms of media, the Tudor kings and queens are reimagined and refashioned. Readers don’t require a new ending, for we know Henry VIII’s songbook all too well. What we want is to immerse ourselves in the glamour, opulence and infinite intrigues and trysts of the Tudor court, all rich and beguiling thrills for our imaginative senses. In most novels of the period, we are invited to marvel at the majesty and sophistication of Henry’s palaces; partake in the extravagant, multi-course feasts of beast, fish and fowl; to feel the weight of jewel-encrusted velvet gowns brushing across stone floors; and catch the advisors jostling for power as they scheme and squabble behind the doors of the Privy Chamber. And just beyond all this we can witness the towering figure of Henry as he pursues his women into the royal bedchamber, beckoning the reader, where, on occasion, bodices are ripped.
Hilary Mantel’s compelling trilogy – Wolf Hall (2009), Bring Up the Bodies (2012) and The Mirror and the Light (2020) – and their stage and screen adaptations, invite us into a world of religion, politics, international affairs and Tudor governmental reform. Mantel treads the same ground as historian and novelist alike, but her construction of the past allows for an entirely new perspective. As Mantel has said, while the Tudor period remains vigorously contested for historians, to a general audience it is a rich vein of endless escapades and melodrama, with surprising tableaux of light entertainment. There are bookshelves full of novels about Henry VIII and his six queens, but in Mantel’s words, ‘change the viewpoint, and the story is new’. It is not Henry who leads us through the corridors of court and power, nor one of his legendary queens. Instead we follow Mantel’s ‘He, Cromwell’, whom the foremost Tudor historian, Geoffrey Elton, famously declared was ‘not biographable’.
FINDING CROMWELL
With the fall of Cardinal Wolsey, Thomas Cromwell emerged to become one of the most powerful men of the Tudor age, whose career has divided historians ever since. While he has always been a pivotal figure in Tudor politics, some historians have viewed him as a morally dubious character who drew around him sinister spheres of court officials and hangers-on. The Cromwell of Wolf Hall is an astute observer of the machinations of the court, clever and calculating, at least until he flies too close to the royal personages and himself gets burned.
Yet of the enigmatic historical figure that was Thomas Cromwell, we know very little, which seems to be exactly how he wanted it. For Cromwell, information and knowledge were
