It was comforting to slide back into the familiar mind of Thomas Cromwell as imagined by Hilary Mantel. If you haven’t tackled Mantel’s Tudor trilogy, it’s a very apt project for the lockdown – three enormous tomes, all of them quite hard work, all worth the effort.
They are novels told in the present tense, and the reader sees the world entirely through Cromwell’s eyes. They cover the period 1500 to 1540, the year in which Cromwell was executed.
The third in the trilogy, The Mirror And The Light, was published on 5 March 2020.
The novels have been criticised by some as impenetrable, but they are widely acclaimed. The first two, Wolf Hall and Bring Up The Bodies, both won the Booker. The Mirror And The Light may deliver a hat-trick.
The content of these hefty volumes is challenging: the reader has to keep track of different dukes and lords as they gain and lose their titles and sometimes their heads. Reading the novels calls for patience and a willingness to look things up, if only in the list of characters given at the front of the books. Most readers will know the bare bones of the story, and what happens to the principals, yet the books are still like thrillers if you’re prepared to persist. Even dyed-in-the-wool historians may not recall who wields the dagger in each death.
Controversy has raged around the author’s decision to use the third person pronoun “he” to refer to Cromwell, instead of his name – an unusual device, which means the central character is not clearly differentiated from other male characters: the reader has to work it out. Many people found Wolf Hall infuriating to read, often not knowing to whom “he” referred; so the next two volumes use the device “he, Cromwell”. The following passage describes Anne Boleyn’s executioner:
“The man turns away and begins cleaning his sword. He does it lovingly, as if the weapon were his friend. ‘Toledo steel.’ He proffers it for admiration. ‘We still have to go to the Spaniards to get a blade like this.’
“He, Cromwell, touches a finger to the metal. You would not guess it to look at him now, but his father was a blacksmith; he has affinity with iron, steel, with everything that is mined, from the earth, or forged, everything that is made molten, or wrought, or given a cutting edge. The executioner’s blade is incised with Christ’s crown of thorns, and with the words of a prayer.”
Someone ought to try printing out all three books with normal grammar, to see if the reader still inhabits Cromwell’s skin, breathes through his nose, looks through his eyes. I’d guess: probably not, or not to such a full extent.
The historian G R Elton reckoned Thomas Cromwell was “unbiographable”. Elton wrote England Under The Tudors, the history book to which I was glued as a schoolgirl. He was reputed to have reinstated Thomas Cromwell, believing him to be the pivotal character in the English Reformation and the architect of the modern state - not a mere pen-pusher as previously portrayed.
Cromwell was clearly a leading protagonist of the English Reformation, yet history generally deplores him. Perhaps the point is that he did not make his omelette without breaking eggs.
What Cromwell achieved was revolutionary – the monasteries came down with terrifying speed, and that is captured in the Wolf Hall trilogy. At the same time, the apparatus of the state was going up, meritocracy beginning to replace aristocracy. The king’s power was receding. Cromwell surfed the wave of nascent capitalism and didn’t hesitate to thrust feudalism and its trappings out of his way. He had a timely hand in the rise of nations and the diminution of the power of the Pope to control trade.
What drove him? In Mantel’s novels, his driving force chiefly seems to be determination to set up a dynasty of his own, one to rival that of the great aristocratic houses of England; to drag himself and his protegés out of the mud of Putney. A degree of workaholism – that treadmill which is so hard to step off. But Mantel also alludes to his evangelical Christian sympathies; his determination to get the Great Bible into every church, his attempts to save heretics from burning.
We occupy Cromwell’s mind in Wolf Hall and its sequels, but we don’t see much of God. Perhaps Mantel is clever in the way that she hints at his Reformist belief but keeps it shrouded, just as he himself must have had to bury his religious zeal in the secret places of his heart.
But I would have liked to see that fervour front and centre. In the modern West, few literally envisage the eternal fires of Hell and Damnation. None expect to be gruesomely executed by the state for wayward religious beliefs. Yet that must have been Cromwell’s theological reality, and he put his life on the line for it. His personal conviction about God was not at one with the king’s. To brush that fact of his life aside for the sensibilities of a modern readership is to jettison the intensity of the age.
And violence was part of that intensity. Mantel implies that Cromwell’s relationship with his king is a replay of the one with his father: in both, subversion is rewarded with severe brutality.
Cromwell’s beliefs paved the path which would make my Huguenot ancestors welcome in this Protestant country, escaping, as they were, from the devilry of Catholicism. Under Cromwell, the Church of England slid away from Lutheranism towards the more radical Calvinism: a subtle difference, but one that counts. He was accused of heresy as well as treason, victim – in part - of the internecine struggles within Protestantism.
It may be hard to credit it in the age of Love Island, but the sex life of the Tudor monarch was not the only game in town.
In addition to the books, there is a radio adaptation, magnificently read by Anton Lesser, and a TV adaptation starring Mark Rylance. Both do full credit to Hilary Mantel’s work, and I recommend them.
Well done Jo. Great review. Incisive as ever. I find your interest in the religious ideology prompts me to revisit the trilogy. I loved Wolf Hall but had to really devote serious time to reading it. Your review suggests the remaining books warrant that investment.
Especially in lockdown, when you can really get stuck in!
Ah, Elton, I remember him, studying the Tudors for A level. But my school had taken us to Stratford upon Avon and I returned several times, becoming enamoured of the Plantagenets, so I read a book about them and knew far about Richard II to Henry V than I did about the Tudors.
Thank you for your review of The Mirror and The Light – which I haven’t read – but I’ve read about it, and heard a lot on the radio, and heard Anton Lesser’s elegant reading of the book. The strange rendering “He, Cromwell” puzzled me, but you are quite right – “He, Cromwell, touches a finger to the metal” gives quite us a different, suspended present to inhabit, than a simpler “Cromwell touches a finger to the metal”. And it is interesting that “we see the world entirely through Cromwell’s eyes” although the book is written in the third person. I would need to read the book to appreciate that.
Elton, and Mantel, and now (when we read his book) Diarmaid MacCulloch each reveal a new layer of Cromwell’s character, a fascinating process. You too, with your hope for a deeper understanding of the intensity of Cromwell’s “theological reality” hint at the need to really grasp the dangerous time in which he lived.
Not having read any of Mantel’s books so far, your review gives me an introduction which, as with all your reviews, makes me want to go and engage with the works. Your reviews are short, but subtle. You can handle a cliché without it appearing to be one, as with Cromwell’s “omelette”. And your choice of the word “shrouded” in paragraph fourteen, followed by “bury”, is far more telling than the more prosaic ‘hidden” and “hide” would have been.
I also like the way you have photographed the book without its cover, as well as with. I like to enquire underneath the dust jacket to see what kind of book I have in my hands. The most delightful recently has been Philip Pullman’s Book of Dust, book one of the trilogy – the hard cover spangled like miniscule stars.
Good old Elton. I loved him.
This is a very readable and interesting review. Well done for getting through the book, for a start! As usual, your review is written with real panache. It zips along and the points a are made with a punch! I liked the way you look at how Mantel writes, use of tense and also the third person which has been a subject of controversy. I do know some people who were driven mad by this device of calling Cromwell ‘he’. I haven’t read Part 3 yet but will be interested to see if ‘her, Cromwell’ makes any difference! I enjoyed the quotation you chose and it reminded me of just how vivid and exciting I found the writing in the first two books, how poetic and bold she is in the presentation of character and place. Your review did raise questions for me but this is not necessarily a criticism of the review as much as it making me want to reread the first two books and then read he third but I might never have time for this! For example, you write of him having a part in replacing the aristocracy with the meritocracy? Did this really happen at the time? Is it a bit of an overstatement of the case? And is your statement about him having a timely hand in the rise of nations a little sweeping? Also, did TC really believe he could rise to the top? It seems such a modern notion. His desire to influence the path of religion seems more credible for a man of his time. Your comment about the relationship between TC and HVIII interested me too: is it not true that Mantel portrays TC as being the father to the King as much as vice versa? anyway, it is a good review and these are just some of my thoughts.
You make some very salient points! My downfall is to be more than a little sweeping. However, when you read the third volume, you will see what I mean: Mantel is making Cromwell’s role in history clear. There is a lot more in this book about the power of the aristocracy being pitted against Cromwell’s own family and proteges, and about his belief that he could indeed rise to the very top. Likewise, there is a great deal about the shape-shifting of fathers and sons.
On the question of the rise of nations, it’s not generally known that, at the time, the Pope restricted international trade by controlling what nation-states could do. Cromwell will have witnessed first-hand the frustration this caused merchants, who wanted free trade. By ridding England of Papal Supremacy, the path to free trade was cleared; although that path was not without obstacles in the first instance.
A stimulating and engaging review of Mantel’s latest. You succeeded in making me re-examine my prejudices against Mantel as writer, particularly in the three volume chronicle. I managed hitherto only to make headway with the first volume. I may now try again; but part of the basis of my objections is Mantel’s prejudiced treatment of Sir Thomas More, a far greater man in so many ways than Cromwell.
Yes, her depiction of Thomas More has been very controversial. Has he been wrongly lionised, though? Thomas More represented the forces of reaction, whereas Cromwell pushed Britain towards the forefront of mercantile progress, free from the control of the Pope – quite apart from other aspects of progress, such as parliamentary democracy.
I thought this was a witty and incisive review of the final book in Mantell’s Cromwell trilogy. The question you raise towards the end about our capacity to understand the power of religious belief as a motive for action strikes me as very important. Can we imaginatively enter the mind of someone whose social ambitions are so closely entwined with a serious belief in damnation?
Thanks, Jo.
Perhaps Tony Blair is a modern-day equivalent, not in terms of his religious belief, but in terms of believing that there are massive threats to world peace, and that the accumulation of vast personal wealth by campaigning about them is absolutely fine. Greta Thunberg has achieved international celebrity by campaigning about a huge threat to human existence, but so far seems reluctant to capitalise on it personally.
Such a good review of Mantel’s final part of the Cromwell trilogy. Thank you, Jo.
I’m glad you enjoyed the review – thank you for your response!