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| Detail of portrait of Thomas Cromwell, 1532-33, by Hans Holbein the Younger. |
Thomas Cromwell review – new biography of the hero of Wolf Hall
Diarmaid MacCulloch
Wed 3 Sep 2014 11.05 BST
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This ingenious dramatic device of Mantel's plays precisely makes Cromwell present even when he isn't saying anything, and that is an effective way of conveying the peculiar nature of his vast surviving set of papers, now split between the National Archives and the British Library, with a clutch of strays elsewhere. The surprise of those manuscripts is that Cromwell himself is hardly there; the thousands on thousands of documents are his in‑tray, so sifting through them is like listening to the noise of suppliant voices pouring into his ears while he himself sits, silent, as in his famous black-clad portrait by Holbein, contemplating the babble of 16th-century Europe, and grasping one of those letters, tightly.
It might seem obvious that an archive is an in-tray, for Cromwell's answers to those letters flowed out to expectant correspondents across the kingdom and beyond – but that is not how methodical Tudor statesman kept their papers. They also had a record of the out-tray, kept as drafts and in "letter-books", copies of outgoing correspondence kept by clerks (Cromwell had an army of clerks, some with exceptionally beautiful handwriting and talented enough to be more a trusted PA than a human version of a word processor). So what happened to the out-tray archive? I would hazard that, in 1540, the household, warned of their master's arrest, sat up all night burning the out-tray, before the king's commissioners arrived to confiscate the papers. That destruction would leave vast bundles of incoming correspondence for them to hand over, with every appearance of eager compliance, far too overwhelming in bulk for harassed royal officers to check straight away. It is much less easy to be convicted on the contents of your in-tray than what you write to others. In the end, the loyal precaution (if such it was) failed to work, since enduring the wrath of Henry VIII was only marginally less injurious to health than standing in the path of an oncoming tube train. Cromwell died anyway.
There is the problem in writing his life: he is a relative of Macavity the cat. It hasn't stopped folk having their stab at writing a Cromwell biography, though it's interesting that the scholar who knew more about him than anyone else in the last hundred years, Geoffrey Elton, didn't try, amid his awesome pile of writings about the man. In the years before Wolf Hall, there was a tabloid-style denunciation from Robert Hutchinson (2007) and a fine, careful effort from John Schofield (2008). Post-Mantel, we have had David Loades, and now Tracy Borman. It's a crowded field, and not easy to get ahead of the pack. As Cromwell's biographer, you can't help ticking off a predictable set of achievements (nor avoid deciding which are admirable and which are despicable): humiliating Catherine of Aragon; shaping the English protestant reformation; destroying monasteries, Anne Boleyn and sundry gentlefolk and nobility; taming Wales and initiating unsuccessful efforts to tame Ireland; and innumerable bits of bureaucracy including the introduction of registers of baptisms, marriages and burials, for which last achievement, historians of all creeds and none must bless Holbein's Man in Black. Shall we call it quits and simply hail Cromwell, the maker of parish registers? We could be more neutral and agree that to do all this in one decade is pretty impressive.
Cromwell had had a fine instructor in the art of doing everything and missing nothing: his old master Cardinal Wolsey, the previous specimen of a low-born minister saving the king the bother of ruling, except on occasions when Henry would suddenly want to. Around 1524, Cromwell left a conventional job in the household of the Marquis of Dorset to enter service with the all-powerful cardinal legate and lord chancellor of England, because of one peculiar gift: Cromwell was the most Italian Englishman in England, after years of bumming around Italy and acquiring, mysteriously, a quite exceptional education. Now Cromwell's cultural awareness and contacts among England's Italian community would be put to use in an essential project for any leading churchman of the era: designing his tomb (Cardinal Albrecht of Brandenburg, Luther's foe and Wolsey's equal in ostentation, changed his mind on his tomb at least three times during his lifetime).
The point was that Italians were doing the work. We still have fragments of it: the marble sarcophagus now rather surprisingly tenanted by Lord Nelson in the crypt of St Paul's Cathedral, and the four angels which were a recent sensational rediscovery, serving as gatepost finials for a stately home. Cromwell would liaise with the Italian craftsmen, and he also masterminded the other half of Wolsey's legacy project, setting up the biggest and best pairing of school and university college that England would ever see. For four years, that was about all he did for his master, then he spent the next two years trying to make the cardinal's fall from power and wealth less painful than it was. Mantel has been brilliantly perceptive in seeing the Wolsey-Cromwell relationship as crucial to Cromwell's career: the younger Thomas spent his royal service trying to be a better Wolsey, with the added twist of furthering the reformation rather than resisting it.
How does Borman measure up to the challenge? She has a tin ear for religion, which is fatal in understanding the motives of a man who permanently altered its official expression in this land; it shows poor judgment to speculate that Cromwell "privately preferred the traditional faith" on the basis that a possible illegitimate daughter of his in Cheshire (their connection is questionable) became a Catholic recusant under Elizabeth I. Cromwell was deeply ideologically committed to Protestantism, already quietly helping to move the reformation forward in his years serving Wolsey; in fact, once he got the chance, he began steering England decisively past the relatively moderate reformation that Martin Luther constructed in north Germany. In 1537, at the height of his career, he did something suicidally risky, for no political gain: he established semi-clandestine relations with the far‑away Swiss city of Zurich, simply because its thoroughgoing (and non‑Lutheran) version of the reformation was the one he wanted England to follow, despite the king's evident hatred of Zurich's brand of Protestantism.
King Henry therefore executed Cromwell for the right reason: he was a heretic. But there was more beyond religion. Borman has spotted the significance of something others have missed: I remember how it brought me up with a jolt when I first noticed it. Cromwell married his son Gregory to Queen Jane Seymour's sister, and thus made himself King Henry VIII's uncle by marriage. Henry made a speciality of killing people who were potential dynastic rivals to himself and his children, so even if Cromwell had not been a Protestant, he might have had his head chopped off to stop him taking the throne. You did not have to make the attempt, you just needed someone with a grudge to whisper to the king that you might try.
Borman also gets right the dynamics of Anne Boleyn's fall and execution, not to the credit of her subject: Cromwell coolly betrayed his ally in religion when she was becoming obstructive and a liability to his plans for the future, and the tale is abominable. Borman has read an impressively wide range of modern historical literature on Cromwell, though you have to know that literature already in order to see how it shapes her account: neither her footnotes nor the text itself are forthcoming about those sources. The book contains far too many little slips or misunderstandings of the period to inspire confidence. Its story is slightly out of focus, as is bound to be the case if a biographer almost exclusively uses the printed editions and Victorian summaries of original documents rather than the Tudor manuscripts themselves. This is not a seriously misleading biography, but Cromwell still clutches a letter from his in-tray, and stares ahead, impassive and in black.
• Diarmaid MacCulloch's latest book is Silence: a Christian History.
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