It's a 21st-century sport for doctors to weigh in on what exactly was wrong with Henry: it used to be thought he had syphilis, but diabetes now appears to be winning out. In his later years, says Dickens, Henry was "a swollen, hideous spectacle, with a great hole in his leg, and so odious to every sense that it was dreadful to approach him". Charles Dickens, in his quirky A Child's History of England, has no use for him, calling him "a most intolerable ruffian, a disgrace to human nature, and a blot of blood and grease upon the History of England". His early life was golden – Renaissance prince, sportsman, composer of poems, sprightly dancer, the glass of fashion and the mould of form, and so on – but he became increasingly despotic, bloodthirsty, rapacious, and possibly crazy.
While Cromwell has always had a bad press, Henry has generated mixed reviews. He was very feared and very smart, with a capacious memory for facts and also for slights, none of which he left unavenged.
Then he joined with her enemies to overthrow her, which we see him doing with steely finesse in Bring Up the Bodies. He played Beria to Henry VIII's tyrannical Stalin: he did the dirty work and attended the beheadings, while Henry went hunting.Ĭromwell elevated reform-minded Anne Boleyn, and sided with her until she stupidly thought she could get rid of him. Cromwell rose from obscure and violent origins through a life abroad – sometime soldier, sometime merchant – to become England's top go-to man, the prime maker-and-breaker of fortunes and spines, secretly hated and despised, especially by aristocrats. The historical Cromwell is an opaque figure, which is most likely why Mantel is interested in him: the less is truly known, the more room for a novelist. "He watches from horseback, acres of England stretching behind him they drop, gilt-winged, each with a blood-filled gaze … All summer has been like this, a riot of dismemberment." And we're off, into the deep, dark, labyrinthine, but strangely objective mind of Thomas Cromwell. "His children are falling from the sky," Mantel begins. Thomas Cromwell is flying his hawks, named after his dead daughters.
Henry and his court are staying at Wolf Hall, home of the Seymours, where Henry has his piggy eye on stiff, prudish little Jane, destined to be his next queen. Now comes the aptly titled Bring Up the Bodies, which picks up the body parts where Wolf Hall left off.Īs the book opens, it's summer. I have a weakness for the Tudors, so I inhaled Hilary Mantel's terrific Booker-winning Wolf Hall – the first in her series about Thomas Cromwell the Calculating and Ruthless – in almost one sitting.
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