Man Is Wolf to Man: Thomas Cromwell and Thomas More

In Hilary Mantel's Wolf Hall, the resident genius of King Henry VIII's court is the novel's protagonist, Thomas Cromwell. Mantel's genius is in choosing to tell the story of the English Reformation and its attendant personal and political turmoils through Cromwell's perspective. Does Mantel's view of Cromwell reflect accurately the reality of Cromwell's character? It's impossible to say with certainty, but the portrait she displays here is nonetheless convincing, and in it we see Cromwell as the central figure who takes England from its backward-looking feudal past and propels it headlong toward its future. Through Mantel's novel, we see what exactly is at stake here, and though religion is the mechanism of the social and political change at work, religion is ultimately only a part of what's going on at this historical moment. Wolf Hall presents nothing less than the story of the formation of the modern world: Cromwell is a self-made man, a prototype of the modern man, and his work is ingeniously devoted to breaking the stranglehold of authoritarian tradition. It takes a little bit of authoritarianism, of course, to do such a thing, and Cromwell is ready just for that.

What Mantel does--and what Shakespeare's Henry VIII and Richard Bolt's A Man for All Seasons do not do--is to present Cromwell as a fully realized human being. Cromwell, a prodigiously talented linguist, financier, and power broker, is a sharp and at times Machiavellian critical thinker, a pragmatist who is at times ruthless. He can both endure beatings and give them out, but he is also a man with heart--one who takes in urchins in need of a home, one who cares deeply for his family and grieves mightily but quietly at their loss, one who is sympathetic to heretics whose only crime is that they want the people to be able to read the Gospels in their native tongue. Cromwell has a heart, but it does not malign his character to say that at times he has to override his feelings to serve his duty. Mantel has based her depiction of Cromwell on historical research, but more importantly there is an idea underlying her development of his character, an idea that is illustrated in the conflict between Cromwell and Thomas More.

Many accounts of this era in British history paint Thomas More as the icon of conscience, as the moral exemplar in a time of great corruption. Mantel, however, will have nothing to do with such notions. She pits Cromwell and More against each other, but they are not so diametrically opposed here that they don't have some room to move around; though enemies, they seem to realize that the paths they tread are parallel, though moving in opposite directions. To define these antagonists more fully, Mantel plays up the background of the two figures: Cromwell the son of a notoriously violent and crude blacksmith/brewer, More the educated child of some status and privilege whose humanism stops shy of admitting the actual masses of humanity who surround him. Cromwell is of the people, More above them. In Mantel's fiction, Cromwell remembers a childhood encounter with his future nemesis, and this event sets a pattern for future interaction between the two: when young Cromwell works as a serving boy in the house where More takes his studies, the young scholar refuses to discuss with his future rival the contents of a book he is reading. It is telling as well that Cromwell remembers the incident very clearly, More not at all.

Beyond class and background, though, More is set here as a man of conscience, certainly, but the novel raises the question--in such a way that the reader will never forget it--what good is conscience if the thing that it defends is crooked, outmoded, or merely false? It's hard not to think of the certainty that propels our modern day religious extremists--Islamic terrorists, the Texas Board of Education--when thinking of how More is portrayed here. Mantel captures the sum of More's character through Cromwell's thoughts after an encounter with More early in the novel:

Why does everything you know, and everything 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 then a piece more. With every month that passes, the corners are knocked off the certainties of this world: and the next world too. (32)

Cromwell lays it all out in plain, nearly undeniable terms in a later encounter with More:

Your undivided church has liked nothing better than persecuting its own members, burning them and hacking them apart when they stood by their own conscience, slashing their bellies open and feeding their guts to dogs. (463)

Cromwell himself presents with a slippery conscience--not a weak one, but one that is accustomed to ambiguity. It's not that the ends justify the means for Cromwell, but rather that ends and means are sometimes hard to separate. All of which is to say that Cromwell inhabits a moral world that is shot through with uncertainty, with gray areas. Cromwell's moral world looks familiar to us. As such, Wolf Hall continually suggests itself as a parable of modern politics. It could replace All the King's Men in that regard.

And what of the king that Cromwell serves? (It is worth remembering that he is the same king that More served until religious matters got in the way; had Pope Clement decided otherwise on Henry's request for an annulment to his marriage, More might never have gone to the chopping block.) No doubt, Henry is true to the notions we already have of him: he is vain, self-important, lustful. But he is also tender at times and charismatic. More importantly, Cromwell the pragmatist says,

If he were oppressive, if he were to override Parliament, if he were to pay no heed to the Commons and govern only for himself ... But he does not ... so I cannot concern myself with how he behaves to his women. (366)

Of course, how Henry behaves to his women becomes a matter of national and even international importance, but Cromwell seems to see beyond the personal and find the political here: Why should England answer to Rome? It's true that the break with Rome will keep funds that were in the past headed toward the Vatican at home instead, which serves Henry's greed but also serves the overall good of the state. What Cromwell understands, what we of the fully modern world do not, is that at this era in history the good of the people is indeed to some extent necessarily reliant upon the good of the king. It's no secret as well that the Catholic Church was notoriously corrupt at the time; why should the wealth of the English people go to support corruption abroad?

Cromwell eventually comes to serve not only as the king's political advisor but as his conscience as well: "If you snap your fingers, Majesty, a hundred priests will come running to tell you right from wrong," he says to the king, who responds: "It seems I prefer to hear it from you" (419). After Henry divorces Catherine of Aragon to marry Anne Boleyn, Cromwell considers the child of Henry and Anne's union "the guarantee of no more civil war ... the beginning, the start of something, the promise of another country" (367). That child--though not the boy Henry and Anne hoped for, but a girl, the Princess Elizabeth--would eventually be the monarch that brings England together for good. As Mantel has it, Henry and Anne conceive the child, Cromwell the nation. The Reformation--in England as elsewhere--was a bloody, remorseless process, but the solution was perhaps inevitable from the start: the formation of the secular state--the world we live in now.

More and Cromwell lived in a time that was caught between past and future. As Cromwell says in the novel: "It's England against Rome ... The living against the dead" (521). Mantel's approach to this material is riveting. You can't help but admire Cromwell after reading this novel, even if the compromises he makes threaten to tear him apart--literally as well as figuratively, given the punishments of the day--punisments that Cromwell evetually succumbs to himself. Knowingly, we wait for the moral and personal tragedy that is to be Cromwell's downfall and demise, but it doesn't come--not yet, not in Mantel's pages, which end with King Henry's second marriage in decline but not at the bottom. As Joan Acocella wrote in her review of Wolf Hall in the New Yorker, "Mantel should be congratulated for creating suspense about matters whose outcome we’ve known since high school. What’s going to happen to Anne Boleyn? we think." To anyone who has ever endured sighingly an episode of The Tudors or winced at the pat moral satisfaction of A Man for All Seasons, Wolf Hall is a revelation.