A few necessary remarks before I start: this is the third in Hilary Mantel's "Wolf Hall" trilogy of novels about Thomas Cromwell, the blacksmith's son who clawed his way up to become the fixer at Henry VIII's court, eventually reaching the position of Principal Secretary and Chief Minister to the King and Chancellor of the Exchequer. Henry granted him the earldom of Essex and this was the high point of his fortunes. His fall was as swift as the falls of previous favourites of Henry.
I hadn't read the previous two novels because, to be blunt, I dislike Cromwell while Mantel is a superfan of the guy (I'm pro-Katherine of Aragon and Thomas More in the whole sorry mess of the king's marriage). I only read this novel because it deals with Cromwell's fall from grace, hence it was spite-reading. So, declarations of bias given, how's it going? Well, having finished this, I went on and bought the other two novels to see the full story, at least according to Mantel. Then I went and bought a couple of biographies of Cromwell, to get a view of the man distinct from Mantel’s fan worship. And after that, I went on to a couple of biographies of Henry VIII, because he is the sun around whom all these characters orbit.
As regards this volume, I enjoyed it immensely. Mantel has Cromwell refer to himself in the third person, which is pretty weird (and often requires her to add in some clarification when there's a group of men talking and she has to use "he, Cromwell" so you know which "he" is speaking at that moment). It starts off with the immediate aftermath of Anne Boleyn's execution (her head is off and the body has hit the floor) and we get the reactions of various parties to this, including the scheming before the blood has even dried involved in jockeying for favour. The king has a new wife lined up and is only waiting to hear "yes, your ex is dead" before he marries again. Cromwell thinks he is now riding high on the pig's back and is being a jerk about it.
Well, that's how he strikes me. I don't know if it's intentional or not, Mantel being such a stan for Cromwell, and I do wonder if she's trying to set it up so that later on she will present these moments as "See how his vindictive enemies turned the king's mind against him using such harmless trivial details!" but in practice it reads as Cromwell getting several friendly warnings and deliberately ignoring them because he thinks he is so high in the king's favour (he has just come from witnessing Anne Boleyn having her head lopped off, someone else who thought she was so high in the king's favour and yet look what happened to her, so he should not be this cocky and confident!)
Cromwell has made enemies and is happily making new ones, secure in the knowledge that he is untouchable because of his closeness and utility to the king (any hints that the king could be fickle in his favour and turned against him are brushed aside). For someone who Mantel portrays as clever, tricky, a skilled diplomat and gifted linguist and subtle in how he manipulates language and occasions, Cromwell does a lot of stupid things in these first two chapters. Pissing off the reluctant allies who helped you bring down Anne Boleyn is not a wise thing to do, and the impression it leaves is both that Cromwell is someone who will break his word, and someone who is careful not to give his word because he knows he's going to break it. This makes the preachy tone Mantel adopts towards several other characters very ironic.
Cromwell of all people, having helped engineered Anne's downfall, should be well aware of Henry's temperament and how he goes from "my best pal!" to "off with his/her head!" - Wolsey, More, Katherine, his daughters, Anne - just a selection of the wreckage he left behind of people who were, or who should have been, closest to him. And yet Cromwell and his protégé/nephew, even while talking amongst or to themselves about how the Boleyns swaggered it before their downfall and are now replaced by the Seymours who are swaggering in the same way due to their new fortunes, are behaving exactly like the overbearing and overconfident king's in-laws. Richard, Cromwell's nephew, behaves like a thug in these pages so far:
‘Do you think these people brought the Boleyns down so you could be cock of the walk?’
‘Yes,’ Richard says. ‘That’s exactly what we think. It may not have been their intention. But we aim to make that the result.’
There's a lot of joking and flippancy about the entire matter of Henry's marriages (three to date) and his ability - or lack of it - with women, so nobody in the entire court seems to be convinced that their king is suffering so terribly in his marital travails. Amusingly, Mantel comes across as somewhat of a cliché Little Englander in her portrayal of the few foreigners we meet at first in the book; the Imperial Ambassador, Eustace Chapuys, is presented as being unable to speak English fluently or indeed adequately for his position, despite spending years in England (something I take leave to doubt, given that he was the Imperial Ambassador and seems to have been perfectly capable of learning other languages). Cromwell, by contrast, the boy from Putney, is a skilled multi-linguist fluent in French and other tongues.
So I was looking forward to seeing Cromwell reap what he has sown when he falls off the tiger's back eventually and all the missteps that he is merrily making in these first chapters come back to bite him in the backside. I decided to indulge in reading the previous two novels of the trilogy, as I was very curious to see how Mantel handles the character of Thomas More (and events such as the execution of the Carthusian monks), since from reviews I've read she very much puts down More in order to build up Cromwell as the guy who is always in the right, who does regrettable things against his will but is forced to do so by his loyalty to the king, his devotion to the new age of progress that is going to come once all the bad old things have been swept away, and the intransigence of his opponents who will insist on what they maintain are principles, rather than bending in compromise as Cromwell would wish them to do in order to preserve their lives. It particularly sticks in my craw that Cromwell goes from "we never wanted this to happen" about Anne's execution to, moments later, talking about how she was malicious and wicked, and the way that the testimony of incest and adultery is treated as "well it was all true" rather than "we extracted what we wanted to hear from people who we subtly threatened would also end up in the Tower if they didn't sing like birds and tell us what we wanted to hear". And yet Cromwell is supposed to be the man of principle while others are motivated by vanity and pride and other vices.
The further I read, the more I wondered about the real historical Cromwell. The guy here is omnicompetent (after being a teenage soldier in Italy and getting chewed up and spat out by that, he then became a cook in the Frescobaldi household and, decades later, is still mentally improving the recipes his own household cook devises; he is teaching himself Classical Greek and is interested to hear a Portuguese ambassador can speak Arabic; he knows art better than the painter - Hans Holbein in this case - and it's down to Cromwell that we get the iconic positioning of Henry in the famous portrait: had Cromwell not instructed him to do so, Holbein would not have painted Henry facing the viewer and once the portrait is done, Holbein is suitably overawed by how Cromwell's suggestion is so great; and so forth) but seems to have no friends - he has protégés and a circle of young(er) men around him (and with the gossip/heavy hinting from people that he should remarry, it's a wonder Mantel never thought to have malicious rumours about Cromwell maybe likes boys better floating around from his enemies) but the closest thing to a friend seems to be Chapuys, the Imperial ambassador, and that more in the sense of "honoured enemy who, because we are both doing the same job, knows what my professional life is like and the constraints".
Even his allies are tenuous, not least because as I said this version of Cromwell is good at appearing to promise something in return for aid and then afterwards going "Did I say that? I said nothing, I'm quite sure" and leaving you dangling in the wind. He misses chances to make allies (e.g. with his treatment of Norfolk, whom he seems to first spare and then leave out in the cold on political whim) and the way it's presented is because of his inferiority complex about his humble origins - yes some of them openly sneer about him being a commoner, but the pragmatic Cromwell should know that you don't have to personally like your ally to have a successful alliance.
He's a very powerful man, but he has no friends/allies/supporters who are in a position of strength to back him up - he's pulled himself up by his own bootstraps, the only man he seems to acknowledge any kind of debt towards is Wolsey who is long dead, and the king is certainly not his friend, no matter how "hail fellow well met" he may act with him - already, the cracks in Henry's patience are showing and this is before the débacle with Anne of Cleeves. Cromwell is isolated and is not strong enough to survive Henry's wrath on his own, and you can see disaster looming. Even this Cromwell has some notion of the king's fickleness and that he should be prepared to get out of Dodge fast, but he is too busy making grand plans about new houses and what he'll do when he gets his hands on the former Launde Abbey for himself to dwell in (he never did, being executed for treason but his son got it).
Speaking of abbeys, the treatment of religion is disappointing to me so far. Cromwell is set up as a great exponent/defender of the pure Gospel, yet despite some lip-service to how once the mean old pope and superstition is done away with, everything will be rosy in the religion garden, one of the ironies here (there are so many, you could set up a foundry) is that Anne Boleyn was also so reputed, yet it didn't stop her and Cromwell from getting into a bitter life-or-death fight that ended with Cromwell helping to bring about her execution. There's a lot of flannel, to be blunt, involved in what Mantel has Cromwell thinking on the subject; we get much more about what he doesn't believe (mainly along the lines of "popery bad, pope bad, king head of church good") rather than what he does. He wants a Bible in English but is very cloudy on what this will mean (he appreciates Tyndale's piety but deplores his intransigence - this version of Cromwell is very big on 'well just nod your head and agree with what the state asks of you').
That's terribly close to "offer the pinch of incense to Caesar" which seemingly never strikes him or anyone else. I honestly don't know if Mantel is deliberately dropping these little plums in with a knowing glance sideways at the reader to get them, or if she is not aware of the contrasts between the situations Cromwell is setting up or involved in and the contrast between what he is saying and doing. Having looked up Wikipedia, I see that she's ex-Catholic and that explains a lot - she knows about what her childhood faith was but nothing about what a Protestant of that time would be, so she is strong on "boo Catholic ritual and practice!" but has nothing to go on to show what a (presumably) convinced Protestant would think/do. There's little to nothing of Cromwell practicing his religion, nothing much in the way of prayer, I don't recall him attending services, and certainly for all his talk of liturgy and Scriptures in English, no reading of those Scriptures. Yet the historical Cromwell was Protestant with Lutheran inclinations (more Reformed than those of his master the king) and alleged Evangelical sympathies. For Mantel's Cromwell, religion is primarily a matter of a power struggle between the authority of the king and the pope, and actual belief is some rarefied notion of "people will now have God in their heart". A very tidy arrangement: you can keep your notion of God tucked away in the privacy of your own mind while the outward physical acts, deeds and speeches required of you is all for whatever the wishes of the particular monarch of the day may demand of you.
It was very satisfying to see Cromwell getting his comeuppance, I’m not going to lie about that; I was slightly disappointed not to get the view from Henry/his enemies' side, but of course writing this from Cromwell's perspective we don't know what he doesn't know. Mantel puts it that the Cleves affair was just the cherry on top of the entire cake of "uh-oh you are on the way out" - and certainly her Cromwell overplays his hand there - and that Henry seems to have regretted the downfall of Wolsey/displaced the blame onto others (as usual).
I think I agree with the conclusion that Cromwell had simply become too powerful and Henry mistrusted that (using the history with Wolsey as an excuse? really believed? That Cromwell bore him a grudge for that and feared him). I did like the little contrasts where Cromwell is telling himself and others that More's mistake was to think he knew Henry's mind/could guide Henry's conscience and they shouldn't fall into the same trap, but then he falls into it himself. And complaining to himself that Henry (who by now is nearly fifty years old) is like a child who expects to get everything he wants - well, guy, you spent your entire career getting him what he wanted and indulging his whims, why do you think he behaves like that?
Cromwell's end comes fast - Henry is brutal like that, and you see traces of what Elizabeth his daughter will be like when she comes to reign. Elizabeth famously wavered about the fate of Mary, Queen of Scots, and signing her death warrant (which she eventually did). Henry runs away when he's finished with someone - his queens, his ministers, his former bestest pals ever - and turns his back on them, then later is all regrets (and putting the blame for it on others). Pinning your hopes on "if I can only talk/write to him" is useless since he avoids all chance of this. Cromwell knows this, tells himself that hoping for a last-minute change of mind is useless, yet human nature being what it is, he can't help slipping into that himself at times. He scrabbles about with "if I can only survive for these next few weeks, they will need me. The king will need me, the councillors will need me, because without my hand on the tiller they will get into a series of crises and I'm the only one who can sort that out. If I can convince them/Henry to let me live this little while longer, they'll see it and I'll be restored". Not going to happen: his enemies want him dead, he has no allies because he drove away/failed to make them, and the king doesn't like being reminded he is not the one doing the ruling and besides, when Henry is tired of you, that is it: he wants you gone, no second chances, and do it fast.
Cromwell goes to what he thinks is going to be an ordinary, if fraught, council meeting and ends up arrested while the other councillors strip away his symbols of office by force, is brought to the Tower (where he has sent others in his time) and the show trial begins. Except he doesn't even get a trial, because his work in bringing in handy little bills of attainder where you can be accused of and convicted of treason in one go work his downfall as he has worked the downfall of others. The 'interrogations' (questioning sessions) are only a figleaf, to scrape together some excuse to accuse him of treason (rather than "Henry got tired of him for failing to make everything happen by magic, but wants to keep his image as a good king rather than a tyrant") and follow the pattern he himself has used in this novel (and doubtless in the preceding ones). From the other side of the desk, yes it does sound ridiculous that jokes, casual conversation, and the colour of your clothes can bring you down, but he used a piece of embroidery as evidence when working against Margaret Pole, Countess of Salisbury, so it's turn about is fair play. Everything that happens to him is exactly what he did to others, the machinery he constructed how to do it, and how he trained his subordinates to do it (the ones now turning on him). So poetic justice, indeed.
I liked this book more than I thought I would. I didn't come away liking Cromwell, but I didn't expect to. I did like how his end was a product of his very success, and how the machinery of entrapment and destruction that he helped create was then used against him. I can't feel sorry for him, because he dug this pit himself: a guy so big on having the Bible in English should have remembered Proverbs 26:27 " Whoso diggeth a pit shall fall therein: and he that rolleth a stone, it will return upon him." Cromwell's mistake, Mantel seems to say, was falling prey to the same misapprehension all the others did: maybe Henry turned on these people, but I'm different, I understand how to handle him. Even Cromwell, for all his cunning and cleverness, for all his telling himself not to fall for that, in the end was blinkered by his own ambitions.
Mantel ties up the ending neatly with the return to the beginning: at the start, we get Cromwell in the immediate aftermath of witnessing Anne Boleyn's execution, and the great haste that Henry gets married to Jane Seymour practically within hours of that. At the end, as Cromwell himself is mounting the scaffold, we are told (in end notes) that Henry was marrying Catherine Howard the same day. This has been the pattern of Henry's reign and the fate of those he took up, used, then discarded when he tired of them. Even the Earl of Essex (as Cromwell ended, and as he thought was such a sign of the king's favour to him it meant he was protected) couldn't escape that pattern.
My recommendation? Don't read this trilogy for history but do read it for entertainment! I dislike Cromwell, but this book managed to convince me to hunt up more books about him so that I could get a better grasp of his character. I still lean towards disliking him, but I have some sympathy for the position he found himself in: he had to cling on to the tiger’s back as best he could, because falling off meant utter destruction.
Unfortunately for Cromwell (though he did contribute to his own downfall), everyone eventually falls off.
And what of Henry VIII, the absence which is so vivid and so compelling at the heart both of these novels and in reality? As I said, I eventually went on to biographies of Henry to try and get a picture of who he was. But he remains as elusive as smoke. For one thing, he (or those after his death in a position to do so) left very little documentary evidence behind. We get little to no idea of what Henry the man was like, for the lack of something personal written down.
This means that everyone can interpret him their own way, and they have done: a man’s man; a mama’s boy; someone clever but lazy and willing to let others run the country for him while he indulged in his favourite pastimes; a capable, wily king who was on top of everything and often surprised those who thought they were in charge with his knowledge of affairs; someone with a romantic, outdated view of the past who was living in his own personal historical re-enactment; someone who was modernising England and its government; a petulant, selfish brute; a cultured, witty prince; a great builder, who copied modern European architecture and taste to revitalise English culture; a monarch of a small island who claimed imperial privileges – the /static/images/acx/images68_103 tumble about like a kaleidoscope and we come away with no real insight into who this man, this king was, this master of such capable servants, this Pantalone who was pulled hither and thither by the noble families dangling their nubile daughters before him to catch his wandering fancy.
Henry is the constant presence in all three books, as Cromwell works hard to gain his favour, to climb the ladder of advancement, and to serve Henry in his personal desires and what is best for the realm. Henry takes full advantage of Cromwell’s energies, abilities, and scheming to take on more responsibilities, but in the end it is Henry who has made Cromwell and the other New Men, and it is Henry who is the little god of their world: what the Lord has given, the Lord has taken away.
Cromwell sometimes ruminates on More’s advice – “If you follow my advice, you shall, in your counsel-giving unto his grace, ever tell him what he ought to do but never what his is able to do . For if a lion knew his own strength, hard were it for any man to rule him” – but does not seem to have been able to use it to save himself. The impression I get from Mantel is that Cromwell considered himself a lion-tamer. Biographies of him tend to palliate his actions in the service of the king with “Well, what else could he do but go along with what the king wanted? It would have been his head otherwise”.
Henry is the fascinating, maddening enigma: genuinely gifted, intelligent, capable, but sinking under the burdens of age, ill-health, disappointed hopes, and self-pity. His worst tendency is to displace blame on everyone but himself, then swing round like a weathercock later and change his mind. Or does he do that on purpose? How much is petulance and unreasonableness and how much is calculated to keep everyone around him uncertain and walking on eggshells so that they will never be quite sure they are safe?
The King of Six Wives, with executed former favourites at every step of the way. The Henry that even Mantel’s Cromwell cannot, in the end, fathom, and to whom he addresses in the final extremity his last, desperate, unsuccessful plea:
Most gracious Prince, I cry for mercy, mercy, mercy.
Books referred to in this review:
Wolf Hall, Hilary Mantel, 2009 (Book One of the Wolf Hall trilogy)
Bring Up The Bodies, Hilary Mantel, 2012 (Book Two of the Wolf Hall trilogy)
The Mirror And The Light, Hilary Mantel, 2020 (Book Three of the Wolf Hall trilogy)
Thomas Cromwell: Servant to Henry VIII, David Loades, 2009, 2013
Thomas Cromwell: The Untold Story of Henry VIII’s Most Faithful Servant, Tracy Borman, 2014
Thomas Cromwell: A Life, Diarmaid MacCulloch, 2018
In The Lion’s Court: Power, Ambition and Sudden Death in the Reign of Henry VIII, Derek Wilson, 2001
Henry: Virtuous Prince, David Starkey, 2008
Henry VIII: King, Reformer, Tyrant, Derek Wilson, 2009 (part of the “A Brief History Of” series)
Henry VIII and the Men Who Made Him, Tracy Borman, 2018
Hans Holbein: Portrait of an Unknown Man, Derek Wilson, 1996, 2006