With her brilliant new book, Hilary Mantel has not just written a rich, absorbingly readable historical novel; she has made a significant shift in the way any of her readers interested in English history will henceforward think about Thomas Cromwell, the man at the heart of what the historian Geoffrey Elton, who first put him on the map 50 years ago, called the Tudor revolution in government. To activate what she has called her ‘informed imagination’, she has read widely and deeply in the literature of the period and then let all her extraordinary talent as a writer of fiction rip. Her book is as true to the facts as she could make it, but just as true to her novelist’s gift for empathy and emotional insight.
The story starts violently, with a boy living near the Thames in Putney in 1500 being beaten half to death by his brutal blacksmith father. Mantel’s Tudor England is strong meat, reeking with blood and guts and filth, and her Cromwell, having escaped across the Channel, fights in France, travels in Italy, learns the wool trade and several languages, and grows into a man no one would want as an enemy. In the novel, as in the contemporary record, he reappears in England as a lawyer and prosperous man of business, living in the city of London with a wife and three small children as the righthand man of the greatest prelate in the land, Henry VIII’s own righthand man, Cardinal Wolsey. Mantel’s Cromwell, like Elton’s, is tough and ruthlessly effective. David Starkey, who, like other historians of the period, admires her handling of the sources, has called her version Alastair Campbell with an axe.
One of the ways Mantel manages to make a well-known story new is by eschewing chronological narrative. She creates immediacy by using the present tense, and a sense of intimacy with the characters through dialogue. She gives their language period touches, but never falls into pastiche. The pieces of the jigsaw may be familiar, but she shuffles them around so that the full picture emerges only gradually, in bright fragments. When we meet Wolsey, he is already paying the price for failing to get the King what he wants most: a divorce from Katharine of Aragon so that he can marry Anne Boleyn. Cromwell and Wolsey respect each other, and Mantel brings warmth and tenderness to their relationship, described in a series of flashbacks, as Cromwell, whose loyalty was never in doubt, tries to protect him from the courtiers and grandees who loathe them both and sneer at their origins, as the sons of a blacksmith and a butcher. After Wolsey’s fall, Cromwell takes his place as the King’s counsellor and fixer. Now it is up to him to get Henry what he wants.
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