These political climbers crashed and burned
Two new biographies of well-known historical figures might, at first glance, seem redundant — how many times have Thomas Cromwell and Napoleon Bonaparte been written about, after all? But Diarmaid MacCulloch’s Thomas Cromwell: A Revolutionary Life, and Adam Zamoyski’s Napoleon: A Life, give us new insights into these muchexamined lives. They also present us with early examples of a now cautionary figure: the political climber who transforms his world only to tragically crash and burn.
Reading these two biographies together invites us to make comparisons. In many interesting ways, Cromwell and Napoleon led parallel lives, three hundred years apart (Cromwell died in1540, Napoleon in 1821). When the up-and-coming Thomas Cromwell meets Henry VIII for the first time in the BBC miniseries Wolf Hall, the king quickly gets to the point by saying “Master Cromwell, you have a bad reputation.”
Thomas Cromwell did have a bad reputation in the16th century, and for a long time after. Henry’s chief hatchet man and fixer was one of the great villains of English history before being redeemed, somewhat, by more recent scholarship and by Hilary Mantel’s novels.
Now, Diarmaid MacCulloch, author of bestselling histories of Christianity and the Reformation, has given us a thorough and as close to authoritative biography as may be possible of both the politician and the man.
Historical biographies face two dangers: that of having not enough information, leading to speculation, or having too much, leading to the seemingly endless recitation of dates, names and other facts. MacCulloch’s life of Cromwell has to deal with both: moving from a youth and young adulthood we can only partially reconstruct to a time in office that is very well documented.
MacCulloch gives us a fresh perspective on the Tudor horror show, and makes the case for how important a figure Cromwell was in effecting a revolution in English government. But even after all his careful sifting of the evidence, mysteries remain, as they must, with regard to Cromwell’s motives and inner life. A devoted family man? A passionate evangelical? Or just a cynical operator climbing the pole of power?
It’s easier to feel we know Bonaparte, and not just because there may already be more biographies written of him than of any other historical figure. Where Cromwell kept himself a mystery, Napoleon could afford to be more direct, having achieved absolute power.
That said, there’s still a lot of mythology to get through, which Zamoyski does in this excellent new biography. He quickly but effectively covers all of the essential ground in a single manageable volume.
Zamoyski sticks close to verifiable primary sources, avoiding much of the legend of Napoleon that was thrown up immediately after his death. What we get is more a historical Napoleon than the colossus of cultural memory, but a figure no less fascinating for that.
Both Cromwell and Napoleon were ambitious, intelligent and highly capable: self-made men who rose to promi- nence among an aristocracy that saw them as upstarts.
MacCulloch subtitles his biography A Revolutionary Life, and highlights the way Cromwell changed England more than perhaps anyone since. Indeed, he could be said to be the man who dragged England into the modern age.
Napoleon wasn’t just a child of his revolutionary moment, but its very embodiment. He was the revolutionary man par excellence, giving not just France but all of Europe a new political establishment.
But how much of this is what either man wanted? Were they revolutionary men, or just men who recognized they were living in revolutionary times, a chaos that bred opportunity? Both Cromwell and Napoleon knew they were riding the whirlwind when they lent their hands to overthrowing their old orders, but in the end each sought to be a new boss who’d be much the same as the old boss, now standing at the head of vastly enriched and newly ennobled families.
Politics is a spectator sport, as well as a great game in its own right. The truth may not be any stranger than these fictions, but it’s every bit as entertaining, and when it’s as well done as it is here, can be even more instructive.