Thomas Cromwell, in fact and fiction

Thomas Cromwell: A Life. By Diarmaid MacCulloch. Viking; 752 pages; $40. Allen Lane; £30.

WALTER CROMWELL, father of Henry VIII’s right-hand man Thomas, lurches drunkenly through the early scenes of Hilary Mantel’s “Wolf Hall”, dealing out kicks, punches and curses to his put-upon son. He bursts a boot on Thomas’s head and then chastises him for vomiting. Walter is a Putney brewer who waters down his beer; he is also a farrier and a blacksmith (although, because of his “sour breath, or his loud voice, or his general way of going on,” the horses are afraid of him). In Ms Mantel’s telling, young Thomas is energised by the pressing need to escape his domineering dad. Played with brutal panache by Christopher Fairbank in the recent television adaptation, Walter is firmly established in the minds of the millions who have encountered him on the page or the screen as one of history’s villains.

In fact, as Diarmaid MacCulloch’s definitive biography of Thomas Cromwell demonstrates, this ferocious image is largely bunkum. Walter was certainly a brewer in Putney, but the rest is either the stuff of Ms Mantel’s imagination, or of what Mr MacCulloch terms the “wildly untrustworthy research” of John Phillips, a sensationalist Victorian historian. In his lucid, forensic style, Mr MacCulloch shows that the 48 charges apparently filed against Walter Cromwell-Smith in the court rolls of the Manor of Wimbledon are not testimony to his infamy, nor to his beer-watering, but rather to the way licences to sell ale were issued. The “Smith” in his surname in the paperwork is, incidentally, the only evidence for his career as a blacksmith.

Walter’s character is a detail in the sweep of his son’s life, but it illustrates the challenge that Mr MacCulloch’s book faces and the calm, quietly impressive manner in which he deals with it. The problem, of course, is Ms Mantel, and the wildfire success of both “Wolf Hall” and “Bring Up the Bodies”; the third novel in her trilogy is due to be published next year. As with the demonic Richard III of Shakespeare’s play, these books have fixed in the contemporary consciousness an image of Thomas Cromwell and his milieu that, like a dominant plant, has displaced all others. It has come to be seen not just as the real story of Cromwell’s life, but the only story.

Mr MacCulloch writes of the “mounting weariness” with which Ms Mantel, a friend of his, responds to those seeking in her portrayal of Cromwell a representation of historical fact rather than an act of imagination. He says his book is different, in that it “invites you, the reader, to find the true Thomas Cromwell of history, by guiding you through the maze of his surviving papers.” Considering the two exemplary authors alongside one another extends a further invitation to readers: to assess the strengths and limitations of their crafts, and compare the kinds of insights at which the novelist and the historian aim.

Cromwell (played on television by Mark Rylance, pictured above) is the right man for this job. His has always been a shifting, multi-faceted reputation. In the centuries since his rise and grisly fall, he has been regarded as a pragmatic arch-bureaucrat; a Machiavellian eminence whose machinations enabled Henry’s break with the church of Rome and the king’s despotism; a jumped-up thug bent on self-advancement; or the principled architect of the parliamentary system. Quite possibly he was all of these things and more, a complex political man keen to nurture the legend of himself as an enigma. He lived in an era when record-keeping was expanding exponentially, partly because of his own mania for documentation. Yet as Mr MacCulloch points out, any effort to reconstruct his life must contend with a “vast absence.”

When Cromwell was arrested in 1540, his papers were seized. Owing either to the alacrity of his staff or an oversight by his enemies, only the correspondence he received was taken; the copies he kept of his own letters may have been burnt. Unlike Thomas More, his canonised rival who preceded him to the scaffold, little in Cromwell’s own hand survives.

This accounts for some of the lacunae in Mr MacCulloch’s book, and the sometimes dazzling feats of historical sleuthery he employs to fill them. At one point he goes in search of the “one letter” that will reveal “the obscure end of a little Augustinian priory in north Wales” during the violent dissolution of the monasteries, which Cromwell oversaw. The gap may partly explain the manner in which Ms Mantel ventriloquises her protagonist. She fashions an eerie third-person voice for him, neither antiquated nor gratingly modern, rather than using the first person, so that her Cromwell is above all an observer.

The absence also opens up the question of moral judgment, and of sympathy. Naturally, novels are often expansive in their sympathies, and call upon the reader’s imagination as well as the author’s. At the same time, partiality is inherent in traditional storytelling, which pins down one account of events to the exclusion of others. As Ms Mantel said in a lecture in 2017, readers of historical fiction are “actively requesting a subjective interpretation” of the evidence. It was her job to settle on a single narrative strand and follow it to its conclusion. Conversely, as the tangents and entertaining footnotes that Mr MacCulloch provides for almost every detail and anecdote attest, non-fiction allows for multiple versions of the past. Where the novelist’s first loyalty is to the story, and then to her perception of human nature, historians must privilege the truth.

All seasons and none

Both authors share a common source in the work of G.R. Elton, who recognised in “The Tudor Revolution in Government” that Cromwell was the key player of his political age (Mr MacCulloch disagrees with Elton on the extent to which Cromwell modernised the bureaucracy of government). It is easy to forget that the admiring portrait of Cromwell offered by both Mr MacCulloch and Ms Mantel is itself a revisionist view. The Encyclopaedia Britannica of 1911 claimed Cromwell’s “power has been overrated”; pro-More partisans long contrasted their saintly hero with the base, avaricious Cromwell, most memorably in Robert Bolt’s play “A Man for All Seasons”. “Thomas Cromwell: a Life” conducts an extended dialogue both with Ms Mantel’s novels and Elton’s scholarship.

An enthusiastic cover blurb by Ms Mantel declares that this is “the biography we have been awaiting for 400 years.” She herself takes most of the credit for the Cromwell vogue. Still, it says something about both the inscrutability of the man and the ultimate opacity of history that even with Mr MacCulloch’s exhaustive research—to add to more than a thousand pages that Ms Mantel has penned so far—Cromwell, ever-slippery, feels just out of reach.