Reconstructing Thomas Cromwell
WOLF HALL
By Hilary Mantel
Henry Holt and Company
Available at select National Book Store branches
The uncanny centerpiece of Hilary Mantel’s absorbing historical novel, Wolf Hall, is Sir Thomas Cromwell, a figure of ill repute who ascended the ranks of Tudor England by supposedly manipulating the papacy and the bluebloods.
In this year’s Man Booker Prize-winning novel, however, the conniving miscreant of stage plays like Robert Bolt’s A Man for All Seasons and the much more popular television series The Tudors, reverses his role from a warty villain of monochromatic angles into a sympathetic character of stunning complexities, tracing his life from a forlorn childhood to his stint as the cunning operator behind the English Reformation.
While Sir Thomas More, the jaded utopian dreamer who fell under the blade for refusing to renounce the tenets of his faith, continues to be remembered as a wise and pious man; Cromwell, the minister who convinces Anne Boleyn into marrying Henry VIII, is stained by historical accounts as a shady bureaucrat shorn of scruples. But Mantel here appears to reconstruct him as a much rosier character, and alternatively portrays a decent person who comes off as genial and intriguing. This Cromwell is a self-made man, a hero chiseled with contours that trail many unexpected turns in this clever retelling of an olden England steeped in the lore of fantasy and history.
Hilary Mantel isn’t new to reupholstering some of history’s most undesirable characters. In her 1992 novel A Place of Greater Safety, she cloaks the sinister Jacobin leader François Robespierre in a garb that sheds light into his inquests on the morality of power. In Wolf Hall, she accomplishes a similar feat with Sir Thomas Cromwell, portraying him as ambitious and servile, privy to the whims and desires of ye olde high society while capitalizing on the tense connections between church and state. Gifted with a facility for language, politics, the humanities, and money-making, Thomas is known to society as “an ingenious man,” a polymath who “has the whole of the New Testament by heart…the very man if an argument about God breaks out…the man to cut through some legal entanglement that’s ensnared you for three generations…he can converse with you about the Caesars or get you Venetian glassware at a very reasonable rate. Nobody can outtalk him, if he wants to talk. Nobody can better keep their head, when markets are falling and weeping men are standing on the street tearing up letters of credit.”
Clearly, this description only slightly resembles the kind of Thomas Cromwell depicted as a man born “with an aptitude for ruin and destruction.” However, if Mantel’s narrative is anything to go by, the minister instead cuts an honorable and urbane character — a dignified person thrown into a jumble of nobles and clergymen wallowing about in their puddle of lies, spies, and decapitations. His cunning is therefore a necessary survival tactic — to thrive in this elaborate Machiavellian game, Cromwell must be calculating, measuring the consequences of his actions against the religious schisms and societal struggles that threaten the balance of order in Tudor England.
Thus, a man like Cromwell, who is entrusted with the task of maneuvering the hierarchies of power, must have a far more colorful story to tell than the workaday, two-dimensional authority he is commonly portrayed to be. At the beginning of the novel, the reader is, in fact, entreated to an epiphanic snippet of his early life. His father, a blacksmith, was a violent drunk who beat him repeatedly, as if he were “a sheet of metal.” Upon turning 14, he ran away to mainland Europe, where he stayed for more than a decade while learning various languages and trades. He then returns to London as a financier and lawyer. During his mid-thirties, he becomes an adviser to Cardinal Wolsley, the lord chancellor of Henry VIII, and rubs shoulders against bigwigs like the king of France and Thomas More, a Catholic who comes across as a pious sycophant with an axe to grind against blameless Protestants.
Although Henry’s court is remembered as one of the most glamorous in English history, it is also one steeped in a never-ending list of scandals and infamy. History informs us that the king was discontent with his betrothed, Katherine of Aragon, after he sets his sights on the lovely albeit disreputable Anne Boleyn. And history reminds us, too, that it was this same affair that tipped the scales in Cromwell’s favor. Since Wolsley hadn’t yet obtained an annulment for the King, he was dismissed, and passed away a year later.
After the cardinal’s death, Cromwell is appointed as a minister to Henry and becomes an indispensable chess master in the King’s dirty game of religion and politics. He not only orchestrated the laws that eventually bore the English Reformation, but by orienting himself with the nobiliary, he too was instrumental in moving around several prominent figures at the king’s behest. Ass an arbitrator, he was chosen to persuade the Queen to relocate from his castle-prison; as the King’s loyal observer, he sharply looks out for the monarch’s next fling, Jane Seymour, after the Boleyn girl becomes a tiresome welt. No doubt he made many enemies, but his shrewdness effectively made him the second most powerful man in England. At one point, even the Duke of Suffolk tells him, “You are everything now.”
While it remains unlikely that the Thomas Cromwell of this novel resembled anything like history’s flesh-and-blood minister, what Mantel does with him creates an intelligent, and humane portrait of this essentially controversial character. Early on, we are shown his endearing capacity to love his family and friends. During his tenure as assistant to Cardinal Wolsley, he displays a rare kindness to the disgraced clergyman. And even as that self-important Thomas More, who was strangely bestowed the part of the novel’s moral counterpoint, had once wronged him by sending his Protestant friends to the auto-da-fé, Cromwell continues to seek a way out for him even as the former’s reputation had been blackened by the King.
Curiously enough, the story ends not with Anne Boleyn and Thomas Cromwell’s classic demise, but rather with a pensive hero distantly looking on at an England “always remaking itself.” While this conclusion is mystifying for a character who broke a lot of eggs, it does provide some partial closure to a story about the timeless, crucial issues of relationships, power, politics, and religion. That the author alters her idiom from the day’s Shakespearean vernacular to a modern, perfumed English prose efficiently bridges the epoch’s intrigues to the 21st century reader.
One minor quibble though: Mantel tends to scatter a lot of ambiguous “he’s” and “his’es,” all apparently revolving around Cromwell. While initially annoying to grammar sticklers, one does eventually get used to it.
Petty reservations aside, Hilary Mantel’s Wolf Hall is a spellbinding novel that, while richly entrenched in Tudor history, nonetheless etches a modern tale about a flawed man’s irrepressible ambitions and the great strides and sacrifices he must make in pursuit of power.
