He doesn’t deny that he wouldn’t let the jury in Thomas More’s trial eat until they had pronounced him guilty – but he ‘didn’t carry an axe’, as some suggest. It’s no surprise to find Mantel teasing out not only how Cromwell operates, but how he calculates the effect of what he does – and, crucially, the way that he does it – on those who get to know about it. Not only that: he is a master of presentation, something dear to the hearts of 21st Century political commentators – and to most of the class making up the people who read this kind of novel. Anyone who has read Wolf Hall knows this already, but Mantel spends most of these first two chapters establishing just how much power he has, and what a gifted political operator he is. But he is a fixer, and many of the things that he fixes mean that people have to die. Is Cromwell a murderer? Not exactly, despite his reputation. We get a couple of Wolf Hall’s best lines, including the reply that Thomas Cromwell gets when he complains that in his portrait Hans Holbein has made him look like a murderer: ‘Didn’t you know?’ The novel of that name ended on the journey towards the house of the Seymours, and this one begins during the visit. How much detail do you want? How much can I remember of this dense interweaving of accepted historical fact and Mantel’s fictionalised speculation concerning the inner psychological workings of the major players? For a few pages we get a kind of Previously in Wolf Hall….
See also Wolf Hall and The Mirror and the LightĬhapters 1-2 – Falcons and Crows, September to December 1535
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