The man who invented modernity Marcus Nevitt

The final moments of Hilary Mantel’s magnificent Wolf Hall see its central protagonist, Thomas Cromwell, trying to banish ghosts. Assailed by memories of his orchestration of the execution of his rival Thomas More, the sight of his head on a block, the ‘sickening sound of the axe on flesh’, Cromwell turns to two sources of solace to improve his mood: the welfare of his household and — oddly, but characteristically —admin. In order to give us a Cromwell who is so much more than an insanely ambitious judicial murderer, Mantel leaves her readers with her protagonist fretting over the future happiness of his recently married secretary Ralph Sadler at the same time as he plots the precise detail of Henry VIII’s imminent progress to Bristol with real care and exactitude.

There is something of this determination to bring the quirks, warmth and light out of the dark material traces of Cromwell’s character in Diarmaid MacCulloch’s captivating and definitive new biography of Henry VIII’s most controversial of royal counsellors. Indeed, so nuanced and even-handed is his portrait that MacCulloch acknowledges that some might argue that he ‘underplays the… rapacity of Cromwell’s public career’.

It is easy to see why rapacity might be thought to be the key to unlocking the enigma of Thomas Cromwell; in a period obsessed with the preservation of vertiginous social hierarchies, but also familiar with the troubling phenomenon of social mobility — Cardinal Wolsey himself was likely a butcher’s son — Cromwell’s rise was so spectacular that it seems to demand some sort of further explanation rooted in the psychology of extraordinary individualism or in Nietzschean ideas of preternatural will. Thus, in his lifetime, Cromwell went from describing himself as a ‘ruffian’ member of the Putney yeomanry, whose family farmed and brewed beer, to becoming the father of the king’s brother-in-law (through the marriage of his son Gregory to Elizabeth Seymour, sister of Jane Seymour, third wife of Henry VIII).