Thomas Cromwell & Hilary Mantel.

 

Not very long ago, I read Diarmaid MacCulloch's biography on Thomas Cromwell.  

Anne Boleyn's enmity towards Cardinal Wolsey stemmed from his failure to get Henry's marriage to Catherine of Aragon annulled, but Cromwell never forgave her for bringing Wolsey down. Cromwell told Eustace Chapuys, how he engineered Anne Boleyn's downfall which he choreographed as King Henry's chief fixer. MacCulloch writes: "Cromwell and Anne, had very good reasons for detesting each other dating back to Thomas Wolsey's humiliation.Their mutual hatred came to override their joint enthusiasm for promoting a religious revolution." 

Cromwell was the man that most English people blamed for the dissolution of the monasteries. The nobility in Henry's Tudor court saw both Wolsey and Cromwell, as upstarts and resented their rise in Tudor society. Some also saw Cromwell's ambitions as posing a danger and a threat to them. What brought Cromwell down is Henry's marriage to Anne of Cleves which was a disaster and the enemies that he made, within Henry's court. King Henry also thought that Cromwell had acted beyond his authority and had consistently negotiated beyond his brief and without his master's knowledge. 

One of the last places to close was Thetford Priory where the ancestors of Duke of Norfolk, Thomas Howard, had been buried for centuries. The Duke of Norfolk saw this as a deliberate insult to Howard honour and blamed Thomas Cromwell. The bodies of his ancestors had to be moved elsewhere and reburied. It was the Duke of Norfolk who ripped the collar of St George from Cromwell's neck at the time of his arrest. 

For the most part Thomas Cromwell has been portrayed throughout English history as a kind of villain and was called a disciple of Machiavelli. He certainly liked all things Italian and had fought in Italy. Cromwell knew that the case that he choreographed against Anne Boleyn was a total fiction but he still contrived it as he had done to bring down Thomas More. Cromwell may well have thought it was better to take Anne's head before she took his head. At Anne's beheading, I believe Cromwell had a front row seat. 

I'm not quite sure why Hilary Mantel set out to make it her mission to portray Cromwell in a better light and to destroy the reputation of the saintly Thomas More, but that is what she did.