Thomas Cromwell biographer spent half-century researching

Thomas Cromwell hasn’t fallen off the historical radar in the five centuries since he lost his head to Henry VIII, but he has enjoyed even wider recent fame thanks to Hilary Mantel’s novels Wolf Hall and Bring Up the Bodies, each of which won the Man Booker Prize. Award-winning English historian Diarmaid MacCulloch’s new book, Thomas Cromwell: A Revolutionary Life (Viking, $40) is a major biography. Q: When did you first get the idea to write this book? A: I’ve been living with Thomas Cromwell for 50 years, nearly, since my undergraduate days. My old supervisor was the greatest expert ever on Cromwell, Sir Geoffrey Elton of Cambridge. He was asked to write the biography many times, and he said Cromwell was “not biographable,” a word he invented. I had read Cromwell’s papers since I was in my early 20s, but many things intervened in the time since. Ten years ago, I decided to write it. There are four biographies in print and they rather repeat themselves. I’ve always found that with old subjects you can always find something new to say — not just by finding new evidence, but just by looking at the old evidence with new eyes. Lives go in a straight line, and in that way biography is easier to write than most forms of history. You have a person in the middle of it; you start at the beginning and go to the end. That sounds ridiculous, but you can really do that with Cromwell because the Victorians arranged his archives in day order. They thought they could date them, and they printed summaries of that vast archive in a huge collection, 55 volumes. The archive starts when he was in his mid-20s, so you have to reconstruct the early life from various fleeting sources because he was so unimportant when he was a young man and a boy. Q: What’s the most surprising thing you learned? A: A local historian of the place where Cromwell was born, a place called Putney, which is now a suburb of London, wrote to me and said, “I’m writing a pamphlet about Cromwell and his family; would you like to see it?” And I said, “Yes, I certainly would.” He’d been through lots of the things I’d been through, but what he found was that many stories about the family had been made up in the late 19th century by another local historian. Once you discard that … another possibility emerges: Walter, Cromwell’s father, might have come from Ireland. There were curious comments from a couple of contemporaries that he had come from there, but no one had paid any attention. That of course makes the other famous Cromwell, Oliver, Irish too, and he’s the biggest villain in Irish history. Q: How is the book you wrote different from the book you set out to write? A: The story which emerged for me that changed the central narrative was of one relationship, between Cromwell and one of the other great figures of the early Tudor period, Anne Boleyn. From the late 16th century on, they’ve been seen as allies … but it became clear to me that they weren’t. He absolutely adored Cardinal Wolsey, and even took his coat of arms, a really strong gesture. Anne was a hater of Wolsey. So that makes their relationship utterly different. They’re both pushing forward the Protestant Reformation in England, but they’re not going about it as allies or friends. One of the great puzzles of his life was why he participated in the fall and death of Anne Boleyn, so this simplified the story for me. He regarded her as an enemy, a threat, a rival; and the memory of what she had done to his beloved former master drove him. I was given encouragement in this by Hilary Mantel’s wonderful novel Bring Up the Bodies. She tells the story of the revenge Cromwell had on those who humiliated the cardinal. Hilary got it right with her novelist’s instinct, and the record backs her up. Q: Persuade someone to read Thomas Cromwell in 50 words or less. A: It’s a story of someone who jumped into a snake pit and managed to stay there and thrive for nine years before the inevitable happened. It’s like a Greek tragedy. He overreached himself, but what fun and drama there was on the way.