Thomas Cromwell is back, and this time he’s a romantic. In Wolf Hall: The Mirror and the Light, the latest BBC TV adaptation of Hilary Mantel’s Tudor novels, we see Henry VIII’s chief facilitator turn 21st-century empath, offering a listening ear to half the young women of the Henrician court.
Mark Rylance, former artistic director of Shakespeare’s Globe, is an actor with an extraordinary capacity for vulnerability. Here he is at his best and most sympathetic. As Cromwell, we watch him safeguard the victimised adolescent Mary Tudor, coaching her to negotiate her way out of looming execution at the hands of her axe-happy father, Henry. (Cromwell made a promise to Mary’s dying mother, you see, and he’s a sweetie like that.)
We follow him as he tracks down another obstreperous girl, the illegitimate daughter of his late mentor Cardinal Wolsey, promising her the world and his own hand in marriage (sex optional) if she’ll only see sense and escape her Catholic monastery before conflict comes to its doors. The man even understands consent. Lucky Tudor ladies.
What about Cromwell’s notorious act of theft, the despoliation of England’s ancient monasteries and the redistribution of their wealth? Wolf Hall has an answer for that, too. Cromwell’s son, Gregory, acts as expository device, asking the question on all our lips: “It is a pity that the monasteries should close and the poor get nothing?”
In reality, Anne Boleyn had made the same point, instructing her followers to lobby for the wealth of Catholic monasteries to be redistributed to educational and charitable institutions with a Protestant ethos. It was key to her judicial murder on manufactured charges of adultery, for it put her on a collision course with Cromwell’s plan to reassign the estates to personal allies and crown loyalists.
But Rylance’s Cromwell explains that even this campaign of corruption has a saintly agenda. “Once these lands are given away to King Henry and to his gentlemen, they’ll never return to the church. Prayers can be rewritten, but not leases.” In this version of history, Cromwell’s forgeries and seizures are all necessary to defend good Englishmen against a regressive counter-Reformation. “Then we’ll have change, Gregory,” he explains. “The poor will have good-living clergy who counsel the ignorant and help the unfortunate.” The largest Tudor enrichment programme for the Protestant aristocracy turns out to have been for the benefit of the poor.
This is not the real Thomas Cromwell. It is true that the Tudor politician was a strategic, careful and self-taught Renaissance man. He was also a killer who rewrote a nation’s constitution and bullied its parliament into submission in the service of an impulsive dictator. Now, as Donald Trump returns to the White House, we need to be clear-eyed about the men who enable tyrants. When we whitewash Cromwell’s legacy, we blind ourselves to the warning he offers us.
Cromwell did help reconcile Mary Tudor with her father, but largely for reasons of self-preservation. Even Cromwell’s sympathetic biographer, Diarmaid MacCulloch, acknowledges that “he realised what a catastrophe the execution of the king’s daughter would be for the monarchy”. In the armed revolt that would almost certainly have followed (Mary was a beloved Catholic figurehead), Cromwell would have been first up against the wall. There is no evidence that Cromwell made any kind of sentimental promise to Mary’s mother, or ever visited Wolsey’s daughter.
This is no disparagement to Mantel’s book The Mirror and The Light: her late novels are once-in-a-century acts of imagination. They are powered by her lifelong curiosity about how humans maintain a sense of self in any society in which the fundamentals are in flux. Her 1992 novel about the French Revolution, A Place of Greater Safety, seemed to predict the rage and fury of the Brexit era, 25 years before we lived it. Her first book in the Wolf Hall series was right to deconstruct the myth of Thomas More, a man sainted by the Catholic church but who doled out little mercy to the Protestant prisoners of conscience whom he caged, racked and burned.
Mantel always understood that Henry VIII was a tyrant; TV writer Peter Straughan makes him a psychopath, played by a cold-eyed Damian Lewis. This is a psychological reading of Henry that is gaining currency: the recent movie Firebrand, which shows a desperate Katherine Parr scheming to survive his brutality, takes a similar approach.
For my own PhD thesis, I examined Parr’s role in the education of the young Elizabeth I, a significant plot strand of Firebrand. The film captures Parr’s yearning for independence and self-realisation through her own theological scholarship, but dives off the deep end into levels of ahistorical melodrama that Mantel would never have countenanced.
With more nuance, the historian Suzannah Lipscomb has argued that the pivot of Henry’s VIII’s development into a monster came in 1536 – perhaps less due to psychological psychopathy than the permanent pain he lived with after that year thanks to a jousting accident that left him with an ulcerous leg.
Whether or not Henry was a psychopath, Cromwell was a familiar figure, the legal officer who facilitated the human rights abuses of a despot in the highest office. Tudor monarchs aimed to bend the law to their will, but they were always constrained by its basic principles. Cromwell made a career of finding legal excuses for Henry’s diktats.
This makes him a poor role model for our times. Last week, Trump unveiled his own list of Thomas Cromwells: the yes men and enablers who will frame US law to fulfil his wishes. First on the agenda is Trump’s promise to deport the full undocumented population, thought to include 11 million migrants.
In an essay for the New York Times, the immigration expert Dara Lind explained that such a policy will rely on lawyers and logistics experts willing to lend their skills to help Trump build “a deportation machine” – constructing vast new holding centres, and browbeating third-party countries into letting planes land. These are pragmatic skills in which Cromwell excelled. They are not heroic.
Mantel’s original novels are more morally complicated. The Mirror and the Light, as a text, was never an exoneration of Cromwell but a Faustian narrative in which our unreliable narrator slowly comes to realise his own moral decay. In the most revelatory chapter, he is confronted by his betrayal of the Protestant William Tyndale. The TV series, so far, has missed this point. In an era which demands that we each examine our political conscience, that is an unforgivable mistake.
• Kate Maltby writes about theatre, politics and culture
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