84 THENEWYORKER,MARCH16, 2020
an antique milieu, for the most part
the books feel so contemporary be-
cause their style, their themes, and their
hero are, in fact, manifestly modern.
At the office, Cromwell hatches an
F.D.R.-like plan to use government
spending on public works as a means
of elevating the lower classes. (To no
avail: “Parliament cannot see how it is
the state’s job to create work,” he bit-
terly reflects.) At home, he’s just an-
other successful middle-aged business-
man, fussing over the details of
Christmas festivities, lavishing gifts of
jewelry on his wife and nieces, and—
he was a garmento at one point—guess-
ing the cost of someone’s outfit to the
nearest shilling.
By means of deftly interwoven flash-
backs, “Wolf Hall” traces the astonish-
ing rise from lowly origins that helps
make Cromwell an appealing protago-
nist for today’s audiences, a hero of
glass-ceiling-shattering mobility. The
son of a commoner, perhaps a black-
smith or a brewer, he was born prob-
ably around 1485, the year in which
“Crookback” was defeated at the Bat-
tle of Bosworth Field by Henry VIII’s
father—the event that ended the cen-
turies-old Plantagenet dynasty and
brought the Tudors to power. The teen-
age Cromwell left home—some say to
escape his violent father—and spent a
number of years on the Continent, in
Antwerp and Italy, where he learned
about banking and trade. This educa-
tion would help him nudge England
away from the chivalric and feudal mind-
set of the medieval world and into the
modern one, which, as Mantel has him
think, is run “not from castle walls, but
from countinghouses.”
“Wolf Hall” and “Bring Up the Bod-
ies” embraced many of the author’s
long-standing preoccupations. Each
volume elegantly mirrored the other’s
structure, a symmetry that foregrounded
the ironies of history and the complex-
ities of Mantel’s Cromwell. In the end,
he’s yet another of her characters who’s
trying to impose a pattern on chaos.
The two books have the same basic
plot: Cromwell’s ascent to ever-greater
positions of power is contrasted with
the downward trajectory of a queen
against whom he connives. “Wolf Hall”
tells the story of the ambitious minis-
ter’s scheme to bring down Henry’s first
wife, Catherine of Aragon, who, after
a quarter century of marriage, hadn’t
borne the King a male heir—a crisis
known as “the King’s Great Matter.”
Catherine was set aside in 1533 in favor
of Anne Boleyn, a move that necessi-
tated England’s break from the Roman
Church, which had refused to annul
the King’s marriage to Catherine. A
touching element of that first install-
ment is an evocation of Cromwell’s loy-
alty to his beloved mentor, Cardinal
Wolsey, the Lord Chancellor who fell
from Henry’s favor for failing to achieve
what his protégé eventually did.
“Bring Up the Bodies” raised the
moral stakes and complicated the reader’s
perception of Henry’s Lord Privy Seal—
one of the many lofty titles that Crom-
well eventually earned. Here, Cromwell
smoothly engineers the downfall of the
woman he’d gone to such efforts to see
crowned. (Anne, it turned out, couldn’t
produce a male heir, either.) Mantel
skillfully sifts the immense and confus-
ing historical record, finding moments
that spotlight the moral cynicism that
so often serves power. In “Wolf Hall,”
the King’s ministers get wind of a rumor
that, before she caught Henry’s eye,
Anne had “pre-contracted” a marriage
to a nobleman named Henry Percy—a
quasi-legal arrangement that threatened
the validity of her planned marriage to
the King; Cromwell is shown bullying
Percy into swearing an oath asserting
that the pre-contract never existed. In
“Bring Up the Bodies,” when Henry
needs to get rid of Anne, Cromwell once
again tracks down poor Percy, this time
in order to intimidate him into retract-
ing that oath—a hypocrisy at which
Percy, to his credit, balks: “You made
me a liar as I stood before God. Now
you want to make me a fool as I stand
before men.”
In Mantel’s presentation of Crom-
well, this is all in a day’s work: a book-
worm who reads Machiavelli, he doesn’t
let niggling ethical and moral consid-
erations get in the way of his prince’s
grand agenda. The author’s early in-
terest in the law bears fruit in a number
of scenes in “Bring Up the Bodies” in
which Cromwell is shown putting his
legal and rhetorical talents to unsavory
use. (Not content to rely on Percy, he
and his associates levelled charges of
treasonous adultery against the Queenand half a dozen courtiers, including
her own brother.) Throughout the tril-
ogy, there’s a chilling pleasure in ob-
serving Cromwell as he weaves verbal
webs around his hapless prey. “You have
no proof,” one of his aristocratic ene-
mies incredulously exclaims during an
interrogation. “All you allege is words,
words, words.” But words are enough
to make heads roll.T
he fall of another character pro-
vided Mantel with a vehicle for re-
visiting an old theme. At the time of the
split from Catherine and Rome, Hen-
ry’s Lord Chancellor was the scholar,
theologian, and statesman Sir Thomas
More, who was eventually executed for
protesting the new religious and polit-
ical arrangements that Cromwell effected.
(The Catholic Church rewarded More
with a sainthood.) In the acclaimed
1960 play “A Man for All Seasons”—
later an Oscar-winning movie—More’s
story was dramatized as a parable about
heroic conscience speaking truth to
brute power. But Mantel resists this
appealing if sentimental interpretation.
She makes More a symbol of a doc-
trinaire pre-modern mentality that
baffles the forward-thinking Crom-
well. During an imaginary conversa-
tion with More, he wonders:
Why does everything you know, and every-
thing you’ve learned, confirm you in what you
believed before? Whereas in my case, what I
grew up with, and what I thought I believed, is
chipped away a little and a little, a fragment then
a piece and then a piece more. With every month
that passes, the corners are knocked off the cer-
tainties of this world: and the next world too.The next world: something else that
Mantel does well in these books is to
evoke the urgency of the theological
and spiritual controversies of the era,
which could well confound readers in
a secular age. You never doubt why so
many of her characters are willing to
burn at the stake. (Her interest in re-
ligion and madness comes in handy
here.) But, for the pragmatist Crom-
well, whom she carefully portrays as
being allergic to ideological extremes,
such gestures are repugnant. “They de-
serve each other, these mules that pass
for men,” he muses apropos of More
and More’s great enemy, the Protes-
tant William Tyndale, whose insis-
tence on translating the Bible into En-