My knowledge of the Tudors has always been pretty average. Really you can't avoid knowing quite a bit about them because they are so very ostentatious -- all those clothes studded with jewels, the magnificent palaces, the massive progresses around the kingdom, forcing themselves on their hosts and sometimes bankrupting them, the imprisonments, the burnings, the beheadings. As for Henry VIII, most of us can name his wives and the manner of their deaths -- "divorced, beheaded, died, divorced, beheaded, survived" -- how very convenient that they made such a memorable pattern. And, though I'm far from being a fully paid up Tudorophile, I've read some books and seen that rather disappointing film, The Other Boleyn Girl. But I would have been hard pressed until recently to tell you anything at all about Thomas Cromwell.
All this has changed, now, of course, because I have been living with Thomas, on and off, for the past several months. So now I know all about his abusive father and his tough childhood in Putney, and his years on the continent soldiering and learning the law -- his great love for his wife Liz and their two lovely daughters, and his grief when the plague took them away from him -- his devotion to his master Cardinal Wolsey and his subsequent loyalty to the difficult, charming, obstinate king -- his generosity in filling his house with poor relations, wards, assistants and general hangers on -- his extraordinary intelligence and his varied talents (he can "draft a contract, train a falcon, draw a map, stop a street fight, furnish a house and fix a jury" and much more besides) -- his attraction to Mary Boleyn and his growing awareness of and love for Jane Seymour -- his ambivalent relationship with Thomas More -- and much much more.
Of course a good deal of what I now know may well be the fruit of Hilary Mantel's extraordinary, prolific, rich imagination, though in no case has she tampered with what's known of the historical record. But I honestly don't mind what she invented because it seems to me to have an absolute artistic truth. History is a funny thing, though, when it makes its way into fiction. This novel ends when Anne Boleyn has miscarried a second child, and the king is still hoping for a son and heir. Of course we all know what's going to happen next in that scenario. What I did not know until I was within a hundred or so pages of the end of the novel was what was going to happen to Cromwell. I found out because I googled him in order to see the portrait painted by his friend Hans (Holbein, that is).
I was really shocked when I discovered what his fate was going to be, just a few years after this book ends. In fact I rather wished I hadn't found out, because it upset me. But anyway all will be revealed in the sequel which I gather is under way right now -- and I for one can hardly wait.
One thing that really fascinated me in this wonderful novel was the way Hilary Mantel chose to tell the story. She could have told it in the first person, but she doesn't -- however she almost does, if that makes sense, because Cromwell is always referred to as "he" (never Thomas or Cromwell) which, though I found it rather confusing at first, actually gives an extraordinary sense of being inside his head, though somehow it still gives a little distance. Also she writes in the present tense, which I have to say is not always my favorite form. But she has said that she did it because "it was a way for me to capture the soundtrack inside Cromwell's head -- the immediacy of his experience.... the present tense forbids hindsight and propels us forward through this world, making it new, just as it was, in every unfolding moment, for the players". Yes. I'll buy that.
I may well be the last person on earth to have read this remarkable book. But if by chance you haven't, please do so as soon as possible. You will not regret it.
