By Paul Carrier
Mantel, who won the Man Booker Prize in 2009 for Wolf Hall, snagged it again in 2012 for Bring Up the Bodies, which continues her insightful exploration of Cromwell’s inner and outer lives. That makes Mantel the first woman to win the award twice in the 43-year history of the prize.
In Bring Up the Bodies, Cromwell orchestrates the ouster of Anne Boleyn, Henry VIII’s second queen, a spirited, mercurial woman who failed to provide Henry with a male heir. She was convicted of high treason in 1536 based on questionable evidence, and beheaded.
The story of Anne’s rise and fall is one of the best-known episodes in English history, but as The New York Times says of Bring Up the Bodies, Mantel “makes the familiar story fascinating and suspenseful again.” With queen-to-be Jane Seymour waiting in the wings, Cromwell quietly but effectively pulls the strings to assure that Henry gets his way.
Cromwell was a commoner who rose to such prominence in Henry’s court that he effectively became the second most powerful man in the kingdom for a time, only to be condemned to death and beheaded in London on July 28, 1540. Perhaps less famous than the 17th-century revolutionary Oliver Cromwell, a distant relative, Thomas Cromwell nonetheless makes appearances in Shakespeare’s Henry VIII and Robert Bolt’s A Man for all Seasons, as well as in the film adaptation of the latter play.
Tradition has it that Cromwell was one-dimensional: scheming, blindly ambitious, ruthless and amoral. But Mantel offers us a complex and contradictory man who is far more rounded and nuanced than purely negative (some might say simplistic) portrayals would suggest.
This Cromwell, too, is Machiavellian and, at times, merciless. Ireland, the reader learns, is quiet in 1536, thanks to Cromwell: “Mainly he has brought this about by hanging people. Not many; just the right ones.” And the flimsy evidence of Anne’s adultery does not stand in Cromwell’s way when he sets out to prove treason charges against her. “He needs guilty men,” Mantel tells us. “So he has found men who are guilty. Though perhaps not guilty as charged.”
But he’s also thoughtful, cosmopolitan and empathetic toward those who are close to him, a man who still mourns the loss of his wife and daughters to disease long after they are gone. Cromwell is a blacksmith’s son whose mix of sophistication and street smarts have thrust him into the highest circles of power, despite the hostility of well-placed noblemen. Mantel’s Cromwell is blessed (or cursed) with both a prodigious memory and a thirst for revenge, so even old slights eventually come back to haunt their perpetrators.
Yet this most manipulative of men also is a visionary and a reformer, drafting a public-works bill for Parliament that would impose an income tax on the rich to pay jobless men to upgrade roads, bridges and harbors. He believes the king should sponsor an English-language Bible, and “put it in every church.”
And thanks in part to his working-class roots and his early stays in Italy and elsewhere as a soldier and a banker, Mantel’s Cromwell is remarkably well-informed about the world around him. Whether the subject is falconry, the respective merits of various types of weapons, the inner workings of the king's Privy Council or the machinations of European rulers, Cromwell’s knowledge is encyclopedic.
Mantel is, of course, a great storyteller, but she’s also a captivating stylist. When the sun emerges after a brief shower, “the sky is so clear you can see into Heaven and spy on what the saints are doing.” London lawyers are described as “flapping their black gowns like crows.” It takes great skill to write a novel in which such charismatic figures as Henry VIII and Anne Boleyn do not overshadow the low-born protagonist in this character study of Cromwell.
The Cromwell trilogy has become something of a sensation, both in literary circles and among fans of historical fiction. In an interview with USA Today following the publication of Bring Up the Bodies, Mantel said she originally intended to write one book about Cromwell, but she “realized that the project must be a trilogy.” Mantel is now at work on the third and final book in the series, to be entitled The Mirror and the Light.
