Mantel on Cromwell

The Booker-prize winning novelist explores how she navigated 6JQOCU %TQOYGNNoU PCN [GCTU

The conclusion to Hilary Mantel’s Wolf Hall trilogy has been the publishing sensation of the year. Here she speaks to Rob Attar about how she pieced together the fateful final years of Thomas Cromwell's life

You pick up Cromwell’s story in 1536. How much has he changed from the man we met in Wolf Hall and Bring Up the Bodies? When begins, it seems a crisis is behind Cromwell; Anne Boleyn’s head has fallen. But the court is still in a panic. History tells us that no more of the queen’s ‘lovers’ would be tried and executed – but no one knew that at the time. Possibly even the king could not tell what might emerge from the tangle of bizarre accusations that flew around in the early summer of 1536.

The defeat of the Boleyns clears a path for Cromwell, but the deals he has struck bring their own complications. The months after Anne’s death are crowded, and even Cromwell is surprised by events that – disconcertingly – throw new light on her final days. Anne never ceases to haunt him, but there’s no time to repine when the next crisis is never more than a heartbeat away.

Having already risen so far, what are Cromwell’s ambitions in these years? Religious reform and – central to the project – the acceptance by the king of an English Bible, and its dissemination. He hopes to secure the future of the Reformation by creating stakeholders in the new order – those families who have received leases of monastic land will not want to return their assets to Rome. Cromwell wants to keep the peace, protect trade and ensure better governance. The difficulty is meeting such objectives in a time of crisis, when France and the Holy Roman Emperor are threatening to invade. His achievements can seem negligible, compared to what he projects. But all the same we owe to Cromwell the beginning of England’s systematic knowledge about itself – the parish registers of baptisms, marriages and deaths. At the time, this initiative was not gratefully received. It was seen as an instrument for surveillance and taxation.

Beyond the domestic agenda, it seems that Cromwell is looking to a reconfiguration of Europe – there is a chance for England to forge alliances with those who, like Henry, have broken with Rome. Henry’s opposition to doctrinal change slows the process, but you can see Cromwell’s efforts for the future – not only is he moving towards the Lutheran princes, but towards the Swiss reformers.

He was a creative politician. The scope of his influence across government makes you understand why he’s a nightmare for biographers – do you take him day by day, or topic by topic? A novelist perhaps has an advantage here; she can judge her subject’s priorities from the inside. Sitting in the council chamber, Cromwell may be imagining something way outside the agenda – he might be thinking about Greek philosophers, or his father, or his dinner.

How are his early life experiences still shaping this later-period Cromwell?

He doesn’t come on to the historical record much before the 1520s, so his early life is largely my imaginative construct – both his rough and difficult upbringing in Putney, and his European travels. The record suggests that his father took a turn towards respectability in his later years, but in my telling, it’s the early years that shape Thomas. He has a resourcefulness and resilience that comes from adversity, but also a driving sense of need and lack. He must dominate to survive, he must buttress himself with offices and material goods, and perhaps he doesn’t know when to stop? He has to act the humble courtier, but it doesn’t come naturally to him.

I tend to resist, though, situating the cause of his fall in some political misjudgment or

Thomas Cromwell, shown in a painting from the 1530s, made plenty ofenemies among the common people of England

PREVIOUS PAGE:

BenMiles and Lydia Leonard star as Thomas Cromwell andAnneBoleyn in the stage version of Wolf Hall. Hilary Mantel drew inspiration from the play when writing The Mirror & the Light personal trait. His problem was structural. It wasn’t easy to break into what were seen as the natural ruling classes.

Despite his incredible advancement, did Cromwell’s humble background still count against him at this point?

When I began this project, tracking Cromwell through mentions of him in narratives of the king’s reign and biographies of other courtiers, I was amused at how often the adjective ‘low-born’ cropped up, as if commentators were still judging him by the values of his own time. I found it fascinating to work out who had laid a trail for Cromwell, who had set precedents; he wasn’t the first commoner to rise high in the service of the state. Most men of humble origin rose inside the church’s structure. Wolsey is the familiar example; once he was a cardinal, it didn’t matter that his father was a butcher.

Nowadays we see ambition as natural, and in some circumstances a virtue, but in Cromwell’s day it was a vice – you were defying God, trying to get above the station in which you were born. It is no surprise that the noblemen around the king resented Cromwell as someone who was usurping their influence. But the common people didn’t applaud his efforts either. One of the demands of the popular uprising of 1536 was to have all “vile blood” removed from the king’s council. Henry backed Cromwell – it would have been weak to sacrifice him to the rebels – but he also tried to justify himself to Cromwell’s enemies, claiming that he had just as many noble advisors as at the start of his reign. Preserving the status quo was vital – to everyone except Cromwell.

One of the most important episodes in this RGTKQF KU *GPT[|8+++oU FKUCUVTQWU OCTTKCIG to Anne of Cleves. Why do you think Cromwell’s plan ended in such failure?

I ought to say that it was also Henry’s plan – very much so. The Duke of Cleves was a military and economic ally for him at a time when he badly needed one. The idea that he was nudged and fooled into the marriage doesn’t hold water, while the notion that Henry publicly and rudely rejected Anne, so embedded in folklore, is simply wrong.

When Anne arrived at Calais, a welcome party from England was waiting – the courtiers were very taken with her, despite a language barrier they took to be temporary. She was friendly but dignified, and there was seemingly no fault in her appearance or

self-presentation. The weather kept them in port, but they entertained themselves with supper parties and teaching Anne to play the king’s favourite card games; they embarked for Deal in good heart. No one could have predicted that Henry, anxious “to nourish love”, would ride down the country to a disastrous first meeting for which the bride was unprepared.

My book doesn’t give the usual version of that meeting. We don’t need to look at a woman through Henry’s eyes; there are other possibilities. It was some time before the king’s inner circle realised that he was unable or unwilling to consummate the marriage. It is difficult to see what Cromwell could have done, except try to keep the king in a good humour and warn of the consequences of upsetting the German princes.

But then the international situation took a turn – the Holy Roman Emperor and the king of France, who had been in alliance, fell out. As the threat of invasion receded, the Cleves alliance became less necessary. Ironically, it was Cromwell’s friend Thomas Wyatt who helped drive a wedge between the great princes. He was following his instructions as English ambassador, but he unwittingly helped bring his patron down, because Henry saw his chance to slide out of his unwanted marriage and into another – ultimately disastrous – match to the Duke of Norfolk’s niece, Katherine Howard.

How much had Henry, and his relationship with Cromwell, changed by this time? One puzzling aspect of Cromwell’s career is the promotions the king gave him in the last months of his life. He gave him the title of Earl of Essex, and also made him lord great chamberlain, a position the Earl of Oxford’s family considered theirs by custom, if not by right. Henry was defying tradition. It seemed as if he was deliberately pushing his minister into an exposed situation, in a way that would energise his enemies. Henry’s actions are often baffling, and we shouldn’t look for too much rationality in human affairs. I have asked myself if he was afraid of his own creation; he does seem to have entertained, at least for a short time, the idea that Cromwell wanted to make himself king.

6JGTG CTG OCP[ FKʘGTGPV XKGYU QP VJG cause of Cromwell’s downfall in 1540. Which seem most important to you? They all work together – fraught religious affairs in Calais, negotiations between the

Hilary Mantel seeks to challenge popular assumptions about Henry’s ill-fated marriage to his fourth wife, Anne of Cleves

Mantel has spentmore than a decade writing about Henry VIII’s chief minister, to enormous acclaim

Holy Roman Emperor and Cleves, the king’s failure to consummate his marriage, the tactical rapprochement between Cromwell’s long-time opponents, and Henry’s tendency to fall in love – in this case with Katherine Howard. You can argue over which factors matter the most, but I think they all matter.

At the time, it couldn’t have been possible to rank them in the dispassionate manner of scholars safe in a library. It’s natural for historians to hang on to a causative string – ‘because this, therefore this, and so next this’ – but that can make reality too simple. In real life, bad things don’t happen sequentially, or fall into categories for timely consideration. They snarl up into one ruinous inextricable knot.

Which characters, aside from Henry and Cromwell, were you especially drawn to in researching and writing this novel?

I wonder if Ralph Sadler is due for a fresh look. Sadler grew up in Cromwell’s household, the minister taught him everything he knew, and he was one of the era’s great survivors. He served Henry in his later years, then the child Edward VI, and then Elizabeth; he was still in harness as an aged man at the trial of Mary, Queen of Scots. You can visit the house he built as an up-and-coming young courtier; now known as Sutton House and in the care of the National Trust, it is in Hackney, in what were once green fields.

Are there any aspects of the story that QʘGT RCTCNNGNU VQ OQTG TGEGPV GXGPVU!

One reader from Michigan has just written to me: “Thank you for… keeping your king so firmly in the 16th century and not making the Trump allusions that are so fashionable these days.” This reader evidently agrees with me that there’s no point writing about the past if what you really want to write about is the present.

But that said, this book formed up against the background of the Brexit negotiations, and I couldn’t help imagining what the cosmopolitan Cromwell would have said about the plan to shrink these islands back into themselves, instead of taking on a confident role in the wider world. From the example of the Pilgrimage of Grace, he would have understood the gulf between the centre and the regions, between urban and rural interests. He would have recognised the populist strand in the Brexit campaign, and the ‘golden age’ nostalgia that informed it.