I recently spent a couple of weeks reading Diarmaid MacCulloch's excellent biography of Thomas Cromwell in every spare moment, and I keep trying to explain to people why I found it so gripping.
(As my husband asked at the start of the year when I first plunged head-first into Simon Haisell’s Wolf Hall slow read, “Why Thomas Cromwell all of a sudden?”)
The first explanation I came up with was the onion-skin layering of dry and dramatic. I find it utterly fascinating that this man's life, so central to the larger-than-life & stranger-than-fiction antics of Tudor history1, requires years of painstaking archival research to uncover, which in turn leave only distilled traces in the compelling narrative eventually composed from those hard-won insights.
I also enjoyed the biography's occasional moments of pure historian snark: one source, Alexander Alesius, can only be considered a reliable witness “after discounting his assumption that the history of early Tudor England revolved around himself”, while Charles Brandon “lacked the administrative abilities required for celebrations in a brewery, let alone governing a kingdom”.2 Memorable phrases like “the delicate art of persuading the king to homicidal sadism” are somehow more delightful when set against lengthy passages about the intricacies of land transfers and clerical appointments, carefully analysed to illuminate the implications of the precise wording of obscure legal documents.
The main reason why I picked up this biography was to shed light on the life and times of the ‘real’3 Cromwell alongside the fictional version in Wolf Hall. The first thing that struck me was how closely the two overlap. When MacCulloch's Cromwell spoke to the Duke of Norfolk “with his usual candidly grim humour”, I had the eerie feeling that the historian was describing the character conjured by Mantel. These personal echoes continue: Cromwell as a patron has a “distinctly soft spot for wild young men”; MacCulloch's Cromwell, like Mantel’s, combines ruthless ambition with sincere faith and loyalty to Wolsey, and is happy when “a personal moral crusade meshed conveniently with harassing his political rival.” Other characters are familiar too: the Duke of Norfolk is “not the most empathetic of men” and MacCulloch quotes a surprisingly self-aware letter to Cromwell where Norfolk reported that he has given the king some rather personal advice “peradventure not wisely, yet after mine accustomed manner plainly”.
This sense of overlap between historical and fictional characters reminded me of Mantel’s description of how a different kind of overlap shaped her unusual narrative style:
“He seemed to be occupying the same physical space as me, with a slight ghostly overlap. It didn't make sense to call him ‘Cromwell’, as if he were somewhere across the room. I called him ‘he’.”
In some key areas, such as their portrayal of Cromwell and Anne Boleyn as rivals despite their shared religious beliefs, Mantel & MacCulloch appear to have reached similar conclusions independently - evidence of the quality of Mantel’s research, I felt, although he also admits to being encouraged by her re-telling:
“I’d had the germ of this idea; but what reading particularly Wolf Hall and then Bring Up The Bodies gave me was the nerve to follow it through, because it goes right against all the orthodoxy of historians I respect and admire, particularly Eric Ives, who wrote a brilliant biography of Anne about 20 years ago.” - Diarmaid MacCulloch
That quote comes from a lovely conversation between the two authors (warning: contains spoilers!) in which they also discuss the differences between their approaches. I was fascinated by their discussion of a fictional element in Mantel's narrative that I won't reveal here as we haven't got to it yet in the read-along, but she describes as “my boldest and biggest invention in the course of the three books”:
“A historian can say, ‘We know this, this, and this about [SPOILER], and that’s all we know.’ But a novelist can’t not know [SPOILER], because Cromwell knows! And I have to know what he knows. And there’s no technical way . . . there’s no sleight of hand that can remove that problem from me.” - Hilary Mantel
& later:
“It shows you the difference of our crafts. They overlap, but on the extremes of the overlap, you’re doing two different things.” - Diarmaid MacCulloch
Although there are so many similarities in their interpretations, the novelist and historian don't always emphasise the same points. I am sure a more careful reader could point out many more, but the difference that stood out most to me was that MacCulloch describes Cromwell as favouring a more cautious piecemeal approach to closing some monasteries and reforming others, but being pushed to go further by Audley & Rich. Mantel’s Cromwell, on the other hand, seems more gung-ho about the project of dissolution: getting Henry’s enthusiastic support for his plans is “like hearing a perfect line of poetry, in a language you knew before you were born.”
Overlaps and disjunctions between a character’s real and imagined lives have captivated me before. One of the books that reignited my love of history after a long period away from it was Prairie Fires: The American Dreams of Laura Ingalls Wilder, by Caroline Fraser, which presented the grittier reality behind the cosy Little House stories, resulting in a reading experience that felt both comfortably familiar and startlingly new. And I know I'm not the only person to have devoured Ron Chernow’s epic biography of Alexander Hamilton while looking out for traces of Lin-Manuel Miranda's fictionalised version.
I've even occasionally had this sense of co-existing echoes in my own life, when coming back to a place after years away and feeling shadowed by my former self, walking the same paths and seeing the same things but with a totally different perspective. I‘ll let my teenage daughter have the final word: when I rummaged through my memory to locate the spot in London where I first experienced that feeling, and realised that it was in fact on Putney Bridge, she saw my startled expression and announced dramatically that it wasn't my own past self I'd been haunted by, but the ghost of Thomas Cromwell4.
Example: at one point MacCulloch refers to an incident where a corpse was dug up and burnt at the stake for heretical remarks in a will.
Is it too immature to mention the Newman & Baddiel ‘That’s you, that is’ sketches at this point? For those of you who didn't watch UK 90s TV, I'll let Wikipedia explain: “Each 'episode' begins as a standard historical debate, but quickly degenerates into a playground-style quarrel with the professors exchanging childish insults. The humour lies largely in the juxtaposition of the professors' formal tone of voice with their puerile words.”
Scare quotes because obviously a biographer is also constructing a narrative, but I won't go down that rabbit hole right now.
Tediously prosaic fact check: if so, he'd have been in a boat, because there was no bridge there until 1729.