And so they did, manufacturing a case against him which convinced the king he had to be killed. Cromwell was reported to have boasted that he might one day be king himself. Any ambition could be believed of him. Unimpressed by the grandeur and reputed holiness of institutions that seemed to him corrupt, he abolished them with ruthless efficiency. He methodically destroyed buildings of great antiquity and beauty.
He had no pity for the superannuated; he was too busy making the new. Forget noble academics working away in relative obscurity, this was sophisticated work watched and read by tens of millions of people. Cromwell was back. Novelists and dramatists, who on the whole would rather sensationalise than investigate, have seized on these assumptions to create a reach-me-down villain. But as she researched and wondered, Mantel was pulled in other directions. My character scraped himself up from the ground and staggered into his future.
From behind those small eyes, the sharp eyes of a good bowman, the Tudor world looked complex and unfamiliar. The angles were different. Light and shadow fell in unexpected places. Then, in , and with exquisite timing came what is almost certainly the definitive biography of Cromwell, by one of the most respected historians in the English-speaking world.
Sir Diarmaid MacCulloch, the author of a number of seminal books and host of several television series about history and Christianity, gave us Thomas Cromwell: A Revolutionary Life. It was the book waiting to be written, and in pages MacCulloch put flesh on the body that the novelist Mantel had resurrected. It was, of course, a harsher age, with harsher expectations. It was also in many ways a more intellectually engaged age, especially when it came to politicians.
Cromwell was quintessentially practical, willing to trim his views when needed, and operated in an era that lacked formal political parties — although it was nevertheless profoundly and often bloodily divided between conservative and reforming. But he was always connected to the intellectual and scholarly class, familiar with the latest works and ideas, and a reader of the humanism that so dominated thinking in the sixteenth-century.
He had a hunger for knowledge, as an end in itself. She told the Guardian: "He wasn't just a serious, humourless bureaucrat … He's somebody you'd quite like to have at a dinner party. He's great fun. But she added that his ruthlessness would deter her from wanting to be "great friends with him". Mentioning Hilary Mantel 's bestselling novel Wolf Hall , which portrays Cromwell as a hero for our time — a self-made man who earned his success — Borman said: "It's a character that readers of Mantel will partly recognise.
She shows that an invitation to dine at a Cromwell house would guarantee a sumptuous feast: "As well as the bewildering array of … meats and fish — such as venison, pheasant, capon, swan, rabbit, oxen, cod, oysters and cockles — Cromwell's cook … used such exotic delicacies as ginger, nutmeg, figs, oranges and marzipan.
Guests with a sweet tooth were treated to tarts or puddings from 'Mrs Bigges', and lavish quantities of wine from the royal cellars washed it all down. Documents reveal that he kept near to horses, "a cage of canary birds" and greyhounds.
When members of the Catholic aristocracy persuaded Henry VIII that Cromwell should die, the clincher for the king was the accusation that Cromwell was a heretic. But he also died because members of the English nobility were affronted that this talented upstart usurped what they regarded as their natural place in government. By —40 Cromwell was increasingly unwell and his political judgment faltered, giving his enemies the opportunity that they had lacked in his brief period of unrivalled power just a couple of years earlier.
Cromwell made four terrible mistakes in his last year of life. One is very well known, two are less so, and one has previously been missed altogether. That was a ghastly error, but worse was to come — the element in the story previously forgotten. Thetford Priory in Norfolk was the family burial place of the dukes of Norfolk. Thetford hung on longer than almost any other monastery in England but eventually, in February , it closed — and there was no college in the offing. Howard had to move some of his family tombs and ancestral bones 35 miles to Framlingham in Suffolk.
Two dark coincidences then made matters even worse. Cromwell decided that it would be agreeable if he himself became Earl of Essex, one of the oldest titles in England — and so, within a few weeks, he was.
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