Michael Coren discusses the career and reputation of Henry VIII’s powerful and capable Lord Chamberlain until he fell from favour and was executed in 1540:
Portrait of Thomas Cromwell, First Earl of Essex painted by Hans Holbein 1532-33.
From the Frick Collection via Wikimedia Commons.
The panoply of British history doesn’t include too many monsters. The nation was founded more on meetings than massacres, and other than the usual round of chronic blood-letting in the Middle Ages, and a civil war in the seventeenth-century, the English have left it to the French, the Russians, and the Germans to provide the mass murderers and the genuine villains. But if anyone was generally regarded as being unscrupulous, with a touch of the devil always around his character, it was Thomas Cromwell, the main fixer for Henry VIII in the 1530s, and according to the Oscar-winning movie A Man for all Seasons, the dark politician who had hagiographical Thomas More executed. For decades both on British television and in Hollywood epics it was this self-made man who was willing to smash the monasteries, torture innocent witnesses into giving false evidence, and assemble lies to have that nice Anne Boleyn beheaded.
This was the dictatorship of reputation. Historians provided the framework, and popular entertainment dressed it all up in countless Tudor biopics. But then it all began to change.
The first person to seriously challenge the caricature was himself a victim of lies and hatred. The revered Cambridge historian GR Elton was born Gottfried Rudolf Otto Ehrenberg, son of a German Jewish family of noted scholars, who fled to Britain shortly before the Holocaust. He’s also, by the way, the uncle of the comedian and writer Ben Elton. GR, Geoffrey Rudolph, was one of the dominant post-war historians, and insisted that modern Britain, with its secular democracy and parliamentary system, was very much the child of Thomas Cromwell the gifted administrator and political visionary.
So we had the Cromwell wars. On the one side were the traditionalist, often Roman Catholic, writers who insisted that Cromwell was a corrupt brute and a cruel tyrant; and the rival school that regarded him as the first modern leader of the country, setting it on a road that would distinguish it from the ancient regimes of the European continent. But there was more. While previous political leaders – the term “Prime Minister” didn’t develop until the early eighteenth-century – had sometimes been of relatively humble origins, and Cromwell’s mentor and predecessor Thomas Wolsey was the son of a butcher, they were invariably clerics. Cromwell wasn’t only from rough Putney on the edge of London, and the son of a blacksmith, but he was a layman, and someone who had lived abroad, even fought for foreign armies.
Here was have the embodiment of the great change: the autodidact who was multi-lingual, well travelled, reformed in his religion and politics, and prepared to rip the country out of its medieval roots. Yet no matter how many historians might believe and write this, the culture is notoriously difficult to change, and understandably indifferent to academics. Not, however, to novelists. And in 2009 the award-winning author Hilary Mantel published Wolf Hall, a fictional account of Cromwell’s life from 1500 to 1535. Three years later came the sequel, Bring Up the Bodies. Both books won the Man Booker Prize, an extraordinary achievement for two separate works. The trilogy was completed recently with The Mirror and the Light. The first two volumes were turned into an enormously successful stage play and a six-part television show. Forget noble academics working away in relative obscurity, this was sophisticated work watched and read by tens of millions of people. Cromwell was back.
“It is as a murderer that Cromwell has come down to posterity: who turned monks out on to the roads, infiltrated spies into every corner of the land, and unleashed terror in the service of the state”, wrote Mantel in the Daily Telegraph back in 2012. “If these attributions contain a grain of truth, they also embody a set of lazy assumptions, bundles of prejudice passed from one generation to the next. Novelists and dramatists, who on the whole would rather sensationalise than investigate, have seized on these assumptions to create a reach-me-down villain.”
