And we have. As Mantel has it, the living chase the dead.
FACT AND FICTION
Even during his lifetime, Cromwell’s friends and enemies struggled to explain how a man with such an obscure, if not outright questionable, background could rise so high at the English court. Some contemporary sources attributed Cromwell’s elevation to a single conclusive meeting he had with Henry VIII in 1530. This was when Cromwell presented a blueprint which would allow the King to take control of the Catholic Church in England, improve its administration and, most importantly, end Rome’s dominance and interference in matters of state. Henry wanted an annulment of his marriage to Katherine of Aragon to be determined in England and not by the Pope in Rome, who was far less favourable to the annulment. Our main sources for this breakthrough moment in the long and exasperating negotiations are Imperial ambassador to the Tudor Court, Eustace Chapuys, Cardinal Reginald Pole, and John Foxe. All three believed that Cromwell, in one masterful stroke, had ingeniously solved Henry’s marital problems, thus ensuring his promotion within the government, and forever endearing himself to the king.
Cromwell would become involved in some of the darkest events of Henry VIII’s reign, all of which have left an indelible stain on his character for many historians, while Henry seems to have escaped much of that censure. Nineteenth-century historians unsurprisingly found Cromwell guilty of leading Henry astray, describing him variously as: ‘the most despotic minister who had ever governed England;’ a ‘notorious chief minister;’ and a ‘supreme master of the bloody game of faction politics’. As one modern Tudor historian noted, ‘for mafia-style offers you can’t refuse, look no further than Thomas Cromwell.’
Historian Geoffrey Elton argued that Cromwell was the architect of radical changes in legal, political, social, economic and religious life. More recently, Professor Diarmaid MacCulloch, in his comprehensive biography Thomas Cromwell: A Revolutionary Life (2018) presents quite a formidable reappraisal of the man and minister, leading us through a tangle of surviving documents to show how this son of a Putney blacksmith modernized Tudor bureaucracy and politics. In fiction, Robert Bolt’s memorable play A Man for All Seasons (1960) and the movie based on it (1967), present Cromwell as an accomplished villain and a royal hit-man. In the movie Anne of a Thousand Days (1969), Cromwell is depicted as brutish thug, a shrewd fixer and henchman for the king. The popular British TV Series The Tudors (2007) depicts Cromwell as a ruthless minister, a smirking, Machiavellian-style schemer, though with something of a conscience.
Cromwell is neither hero nor villain in Mantel’s work, and she deftly explores his psyche, from the thrashing at the hands of his father through to his extraordinary rise as the King’s indispensable ‘fixer’.
A NEW CROMWELL
While historical facts are non-negotiable, Mantel weaves a narrative of fact and fiction from one of the most famous periods in history. She sculpts entire conversations from the dispatches of the period, extracts references to individuals and quirky expressions from fragments within communiqués and fills the gaps in the historical record with plausible motives and interior monologues, She is always reaching for that distinctive tone she came to recognize as ‘He, Cromwell’, asking us to look beyond his image as the King’s enforcer, at the same time reminding us that this is fiction. The power of a persuasive narrative is that it allows us to identify with great figures of the era. And that is the double-edged sword of historical fiction – long after we forget the exact details and dates, we still hold our emotional tie to the characters we loved, and loathed.
Mantel guides us through the labyrinthine corridors of power in this first dedicated fictional portrait of Henry VIII’s chief minister. At first he watches from the sidelines but he is by no means an impartial observer – he is making mental notes, remembering everything. He is calculating – ‘What’s in this for me?’ – and cynical; for he has learned to be suspicious of peoples’ motives. Along the way he is just a man with a family, with all the vicissitudes that entails, as he endures personal tragedy, great grief and self-doubt.
Mantel reimagines Cromwell’s consciousness, and through his eyes we see the major players of the Tudor pantheon: Henry VIII, Anne Boleyn and Cardinal Wolsey among others, effectively upending the traditional tropes. Anne Boleyn is darker and more brittle than she has usually been drawn, Cardinal Wolsey is more than a haughty mountain of scarlet, and Thomas More is not a man for all seasons but one of cruel conviction. Controversial portraits indeed, but Mantel is merely asking us to ‘consider this’. From his cell in the Tower, the real
