The Reverse Portrayal of Character of Thomas Cromwell- the Protagonist of the Booker Prize Winning Novel Wolf Hall Written by Hilary Mental
Abstract:
The novel Wolf Hall reveals Sir Thomas More is a national and tragic hero whose pride brings him down and Thomas Cromwell emerges as a hero whose thirst for revenge finds satisfaction in the King’s desire to get rid of his queens. Thomas More‘s portrayal demands a new perspective on the saintliness and on the other side Cromwell’s portrayal demands a new perspective to the man who is known in history as the devil. In the novel Cromwell grows from the abused brat to Cardinal Wolsey’s legal counsel and from loyal supporter of the disgraced cardinal to a close advisor of King Henry VIII. Mantel’s Cromwell is the man who reforms England. He will be remembered as much for his political strategies as for his hospitality and his recollection of the classical texts he reads. She dares to represent Cromwell in a non-traditional way. Mantel suggests that Cromwell uses the information network that consists entirely of women whose rate of literacy was extremely low. Most importantly Mantel wants us to know that Cromwell had ambitions for England. His ambitions gave birth to one of England’s most admired institutions, Parliament, Cromwell’s breathing monument.
Key Words: Reformation, History, Revenge, Hero, Devil, Saintliness, Renaissance Characterization.
Introduction:
The plot of the novel reveals Sir Thomas More is a national and tragic hero whose pride brings him down and Thomas Cromwell emerges as a hero whose thirst for revenge finds satisfaction in the King’s desire to get rid of his queens. Thomas More‘s portrayal demands a new perspective on the saintliness and other side Cromwell’s portrayal demands a new perspective to the man who is known in history as “the devil incarnate”. In the novel Cromwell grows from the abused brat to Cardinal Wolsey’s legal counsel and from loyal supporter of the disgraced cardinal to a close advisor of King Henry VIII. Mantel’s Cromwell is the man who reforms England. He will be remembered as much for his political strategies as for his hospitality and his recollection of the classical texts he reads. She dares to represent Cromwell in a non-traditional way. Mantel suggests that Cromwell uses the information network that consists entirely of women whose rate of literacy was extremely low. Mantel wants us to know that Cromwell had ambitions for England. His ambitions give birth to one of England’s most admired institutions like Parliament, Cromwell’s breathing monument.
Cromwell as a Renaissance man
Wolf Hall introduces Cromwell as the mature legal advisor of Cardinal Wolsey. It was Cromwell who performed all the legal activities when Wolsey began dissolving monasteries and using the profits from the sale of the land for building his colleges. Mantel finds his stories most fascinating. Her description of Wolsey’s advisor reveals him as a Renaissance man. It is an irony that he has been represented as a villain in history and fiction, his “name a hissing and a byword” (Hitchens 151). In early pages of Wolf Hall, Mantel’s unnamed narrator gives us a portrait of Cromwell:
Thomas Cromwell is now a little over forty years old. He is a man of strong build, not tall, various expressions are available to his face, and one is readable: an expression of stifled amusement. His hair is dark, heavy and waving and his small eyes which are of very strong sight, light up in conversation: so the Spanish ambassador will tell us quite soon. It is said he knows by heart the entire New Testament in Latin and so as a servant of the cardinal is apt-ready with a text if abbots flounder. His speech is low and rapid, his manner assured; he is at home in the courtroom or waterfront, bishop’s palace or inn yard. He can draft a contract, train a falcon, draw a map, stop a street flight, furnish a house and fix a jury. He will quote you a nice point in the old authors from Plato to Plautus and back again. He knows new poetry, and can say it in Italian. He works all hours, first up and last to bed. He makes money and he spends it. He will take a bet on anything (Mantel 31).
Except these qualities, his formidable memory is also notified in the novel. Cromwell’s interest in finding better strategies to store memory is self-reflective on Mantel’s part. One of his discussions of Camillo’s work occurs in a critical scene in Wolf Hall that warrants a closer look because Mental wants for a new perspective on Cromwell. Following the coronation of Anne Boleyn in Wolf Hall, Mantel describes a feast held in Westminster Hall, the oldest building which is today known as London’s Parliament Buildings. It is a building that plays an important role in British History. Ironically, it is where the trials of both Sir Thomas More and Anne Boleyn take place. The opening of this scene situates Henry VIII in “a gallery, high above Westminster Hall” (Mantel 470),watching the celebration of Queen Anne’s coronation below, “picking at a spice plate, dipping thin slices of apple into cinnamon despite having “fortified himself earlier”( Mantel 471). He is not alone, Thomas Cromwell is there.
This extract comes at a critical point in the plot. It is the coronation of Queen Anne and a crucial time in Cromwell’s career as well. This is the time of celebration of his strategies to free the king from Katherine of Aragon. The scene also clears the growing image of Cromwell in the circle of Henry VIII’s courtiers. In the following pages of the Westminster Gallery scene, Mantel describes the royal recognition of Anne. “On 12 April, Easter Sunday, Anne appears with the king at High Mass and is prayed for as Queen of England” (Mantel 443). When Cromwell expresses his wish that Holbein, the painter, would come to the tower where rooms are being prepared for Henry and Ann, the narrator says that “times goes quickly between Easter and Whitehall, when Ann will be crowned” (Mantel 448). Following the coronation ceremony Cromwell visits six-month pregnant Anne in her chamber, where he finds her exhausted and Mary Boleyn servicing Henry. It emphasizes Cromwell’s success in the king’s great matter. In the critical scene at Westminster Hall, Henry plays the voyeur to the festivities below where “his queen takes her seat in the place of honor, her ladies around her, the flower of the court and the nobility of England” (Mantel 471). The lines emphasize one of Henry’s most widely known vices, his gluttony and state his status and accompanying wealth as well.
There is one more characteristic that we find in the story is pricing out the garments of others. Mantel uses this trait to inform the reader the value of clothing and shifting focus on capitalism and materialism. Further Cromwell examines “stitching and padding, studding and dyeing; he admires the deep mulberry of the bishop’s brocade” (Mantel 471). Within the paragraph Cromwell’s third person point of view shifts from clothing to power dynamics “they say these two Frenchman favor the gospel, but favor at Francois’s court extends no further than a small circle of scholars that the king, for his own vanity, wishes to patronize” (Mantel 471).
If Mantel’s representation of Thomas More contradicts the saintly representation of earlier similarly her representation of Cromwell contradicts traditional representation of him as evil. Like More Cromwell possesses ambition, as evidenced his rise from blacksmith’s son to Henry’s councilor, and pride as evidenced by his refusal to attach his name to the genealogical history of a more Cromwell family. Cromwell‘s pride has a dark side too, which is demonstrated in Bring Up the Bodies. We also find him generous and humble but in his domain only the hidden side of Cromwell. In the novel we see him distributing the food among the poor near his home.
Cromwell’s rise
The plot of the novel grows with the rise of Cromwell. It is the time when Wolsey was removed from York palace and Cromwell’s daughters died. Anne Boleyn invites Cromwell to visit her at York Palace. She is curious about him, she says because “the king does not cease to quote Master Cromwell” (Mantel 201). She observes the series of events, starting with gaining the seat in parliament and acquiring the attention of the king. It begins with talk of military strategy at a battle that took place in the French town of Therouanne. The king asks him on his argument in parliament that England could not afford a war. Henry asks him how he came up with the amount of “one million pounds in gold” (Mantel 183) the amount to which Cromwell claims. Cromwell’s reply is:
“I trained in the Florentine banks. And in Venice”
The king stares at him Howard said “you were a common soldier”
“That too” (Mantel 183).
The above lines show Cromwell’s journey as common soldiers do not usually train in Florentine banks.
The memories stirred by his visit to Anne take Cromwell back to Florence, to the kitchens of the Frescobaldi house where he had taken a position to leave behind soldering. He is called to the upstairs section of the house. Young Cromwell removes his apron, the symbol of his position. On his way up the stairs, he encounters a young boy singing a song in Italian about going to war. It symbolizes the life of Cromwell which he left behind as he ascends the stairs. Cromwell recalls that apron “for all he knows…is there still” (Mantel 206) because, after going upstairs, he had “never come down again” (Mantel 207). Now he has impressed the king with the knowledge he gained in those financial houses and is ready to impress Anne and her women:
He sends those ladies some flat baskets of small tarts, made of preserved oranges and honey. To Anne herself he sends a dish of almond cream. It is flavored with rose –water and decorated with the preserved petals of roses, and with candied violets (Mantel 206).
Cromwell positions himself well by removing himself from the battlefield and the kitchen before rising to the next level. Cromwell set himself well in the time of Wolsey’s fall with a seat in parliament. Historical record in the Oxford Dictionary of National Biography tells little on Thomas Cromwell and more about his father’s drunkenness and disregard for authority in Putney.
Before Anne’s coronation, Cromwell flashes back to his voyage with Henry and Anne to Calais and how he met Christophe, his servant. This flashback serves to give Christophe a background. It also emphasizes the ambitious Cromwell has to perfect his memory and his unfinished sentence to Christophe “if any man were walking around today with all of Cicero’s wisdom in his head he would be” (Mantel 450). This incomplete sentence completes the meaning that Cromwell wants to convey that such a man would be “on the side of the king”. This truly implies his goal of power and a fight against Rome’s influence in England. It also gives an opportunity to Mantel to increase the tension between Cromwell and Thomas More.
Clash of pride of Thomas Cromwell and Thomas More
It is only Thomas More who could pierce the persona that Cromwell had built around himself. Mantel imagines a meeting between Young More as a student in Cardinal Morton’s residence and Cromwell whose uncle is Morton’s cook. Young Cromwell while serving to young More, beer and bread, pointed out to him and told the archbishop, “More will be a great man so deep his learning already and so pleasant his wit” (Mantel 113). On the day it was his turn to serve More, he dares to question the young scholar about knowledge:
One day he brought a wheaten loaf and put it in the cupboard and lingered and master Thomas said, “Why do you linger? But he did not throw anything at him. “What is in the great book?” he asked and Master Thomas replied, smiling, “Words, words just words” (Mantel 114).
The contrast between boy servant and young scholar is cult. The irony in Thomas More’s refusal to share knowledge with a servant while we know Cromwell will be a father whose children are the best educated in Europe is equally sharp. One more example of their conflict is when More sarcastically greeted and asked Cromwell, “Still serving your Hebrew God, I see…I mean your idol usury” (Mantel 91). While Cromwell sponsors young boys like Ralf Sadler and raises them as apprentices, teaching them law or accounts. More only takes guardianship of two girls and educates them with the rest of his family. More was a guiding light to other schools of humanism in the Renaissance. But Cromwell too was learning and skilled. According to David Loades, Cromwell was skilled in several languages and in merchandising and had a good working knowledge of Latin, which he appears to have developed by memorizing large chunks of the Erasmian version of the New Testament. These historical records prove Mantel’s representation of his Renaissance man. This base of learning he received after he quit the army. It needed him when he had to bring Thomas More to trial for treason. When it comes to the abilities of Cromwell, we find the unnamed narrator summarize Cromwell’s succession in life:
Thomas Cromwell is now a little over forty years old. He is a man of strong build. Not all…It is said he knows by heart the entire New Testament in Latin…His speech is low and rapid, his manner assured; he is at home in a courtroom or waterfront, bishop’s palace or in a yard. He can draft a contract, train a falcon, draw a map, stop a street fight, furnish a house and fix a jury. He will quote you a nice point in the old authors, from Plato to Plautus and back again. He knows new poetry, and can say it in Italian (Mantel 31).
When Thomas More is imprisoned for not supporting Henry’s marriage to Anne, Cromwell reminds him of the “words, just words” episode. But More does not recall the incident. Embarrassed by his lack of memory, he still considers himself far superior to Cromwell. Though he does not believe the story but those words haunt him at this point between their interactions. When Cromwell again visits More’s cell, he elaborates the difference between two of them. Cromwell says that More’s mind is fixed on the next world because he does not find any scope to improve this one. Cromwell replies by an ironic speech of How English weather might be:
The spectacles of pain and disgrace I see around me, the ignorance, the unthinking vice, the poverty and the lake of hope, and oh, the rain- the rain that falls on England and rots the grain, puts out the light in a man’s eye and the light of learning too, for who can reason if Oxford is a giant puddle and Cambridge is washing away downstream, and who will enforce the law if the judges are swimming for their lives (Mantel 635).
Thomas More says “How you can talk?” Cromwell replies “words, words just words” (Mantel 636). This scene shows Mantel’s representation of More’s arrogance and condescension, his “dogmatic certainty” (S.A.White) toward the blacksmith’s son who once served him bread and beer. But he is surprised by the sophistication of the former servant’s response.
Cromwell as a family man
Mantel also shows Cromwell’s other side, his affection towards his family. After escaping from his father and continent, Cromwell visits Cardinal Wolsey, his master. During his one conversation with Cardinal he recalls a young widow with whom he lodged during his early year. He reflects, “Since they had shared a bed, should he have married her? In honor, yes. But if he had married her he could not have married Liz, and his children would be different children from the ones he has now” (Mantel 23). It is easy to identify a man who loves his family and would not trade them for another. Cromwell’s pride in the members of his family reveals at many places in the novel. For example, he boasts the achievement of his son Greagory to Mary Boleyn that reveals his pride and love for family (Mantel138).
When we first meet Liz, Cromwell’s wife, she welcomes Cromwell home from his long visit to York and his recent interview with Wolsey. He assesses his wife, finding her looking well if “worn by her long day…she is wearing the string of pearls and garments that he gave her at New Year” (Mantel 35). Their cordial relation and giving respect to each other in this scene clearly shows Cromwell’s generosity and his affection for Liz. The grief he experiences when she dies when he misses her accomplishments:
Liz does a bit of silk work Tags for the seals on document, fine net calls for ladies at court. She has two girls’ apprentices in the house, and an eye on fashion: but she complains as always about the middleman, and the price of the thread “We should go to Genoa,” he says. I’ll teach you to look the suppliers in the eye (Mantel 35).
This is how Mantel manages to bring out the position of women of that period into the social network of the time.
The first time when Cromwell meets Mary Boleyn, he asks about her children. She replies but then expresses her sympathy over the recent death of his wife and asks after his children. Cromwell pleased with the question because “no one ever asks me that” (Mantel 137), he replies:
I have a big boy…he’s at Cambridge with a tutor. I have a little girl called Grace, she’s pretty and she has fair hair, though I don’t…My wife was not a beauty and I am as you see and I have Anne, Anne wants to learn Greek ( Mantel 138).
Mary was surprised to hear a young girl learning Greek; Cromwell tells her that Anne says, “Why should Thomas More’s daughter have the pre-eminence? (Mantel 138). Anne is alluding to Margaret More, making this protestation on Anne’s part also a comparison of father-daughter relationships. Whereas Thomas More boasts to all of Europe about the achievements of his children, Cromwell boasts modestly to Mary Boleyn of his daughters’ talents. This is how Cromwell reflects his pride by telling the achievements of his children.
Cromwell takes great care of his children and their needs. As for his big boy he assures that he has a tutor in Cambridge and has placed him in houses where Gregory can learn from books as well as the manners practiced by a higher social class than Cromwell ever belonged to. Sometimes Gregory fails to meet his father’s expectations yet Cromwell like every father concedes. Cromwell reflects, “When people tell him what Gregory has failed to do, he says, he’s busy growing” (Mantel 132). Cromwell also has one adopted son, his nephew Richard William. Cromwell compares his archery expertise with the king’s great grandfather. Cromwell is satisfied that the king's great grandfather was not the archer as the story says. Though it is not clear why Cromwell finds it satisfactory. It might be his pride in his children and his family.
Mantel’s portrait of Cromwell highlights his working class roots; this represents only one aspect of her revision of standard views of a character with whom she has been intrigued for quite some time. Mantel herself had to grow her career in law because of lack of funds. Cromwell is another working class legal advisor who enjoyed rise in a society of the Tudor era. Mantel very well represents the discrepancy between him and the peers within the king’s council chamber makes him the target of their condescension and disregard. For example, The Duke of Norfolk continually insults Cromwell. Norfolk has a medieval understanding of war as an exercise in a country’s honor a notion he thinks Cromwell cannot understand:
How can a butcher’s son understand-?“La gloire?”
“Are you a butcher’s son?” “A blacksmith’s”
“Are you really? Shoe a horse? (Mantel 164).
This is how Mantel shows the noble and not so noble men around Henry. They appear as elitists, parvenus, or buffoons. Men like Norfolk and Brandon represent the medieval, the era that Renaissance thinkers delineate from their own era of new understandings of art and science. Cromwell represents the Renaissance thinkers. Even his working class image is often ridiculed by courtiers to show their superiority. Since the fall of Cardinal, Cromwell has had to face some difficult decisions. In a scene that relies on George Cavendish’s biography, Mantel represents Cavendish coming upon Cromwell crying. Although Cavendish assumes Cromwell’s tears are either for how Wolsey’s downfall has affected Cromwell’s position or for Wolsey himself. Mantel interprets them as Cromwell reflecting upon his wife’s book of hours. He imagines the ghostly traces of his daughter’s fingers there. It is his grief over their death that compels him to take action. He has organized Wolsey’s household and plan for restoration he discussed with Cavendish:
When (the servants pay has been arranged) I shall leave you. I shall be back as soon as I have made sure of a place in the Parliament”. But it meets in two days…How will you manage it now?” “I don't know, but someone must speak for my lord. Or they will kill him.” He sees he is hurt and shocked: he wants to take the words back; but it is true. He says,” I can only try. I’ll make or mar before I see you again (Mantel 157).
The scene clearly suggests Cardinal’s downfall and the desperation it brought to those who supported and worked for him. Cromwell’s words “make or mar” is the reaction against the memory of the humiliation of Wolsey. The events surrounding the downfall, especially that of courtiers sent to arrest him, is the “Toxic matter left by the past to the present” (Poole 35). As Cromwell suspects, Wolsey does not die and he must digest the “conflicting duties, loyalties, passions and injuries” (Pool 35).
Cromwell’s Revenge
Revenge and vengeance are two terms which look synonymous but having different meaning. The Oxford dictionary defines revenge as the “intentional infliction of punishment or injury in return for a wrong to oneself or one’s family or close friends”. Vengeance, on the other hand, is the “satisfaction of such an intention”, while avenge means to “take revenge on behalf of someone else who cannot do so for him or herself. Modern philosophers consider revenge a passion, in opposition to rational thinking. However for the early Greeks, “revenge was not a problem but a solution. It was a form of necessary repayment” action in its most extreme form that of blood vengeance.
The story of the novel moves ahead with the revenge of Cromwell against Priest and Thomas More. That is another aspect of Cromwell’s character. He is known in history for having a low opinion of the clergy. Mantel uses this fact to emphasize this attitude of Cromwell. In a discussion with the king Cromwell elaborate about the corruption in religious life and his defense of the poor and their children:
I have seen monks who live like great lords, on the offerings of poor people who would rather buy a blessing than buy bread, and that is not Christian conduct…The monks take in children and use them as servants, they don’t even teach dog Latin (Mantel 219).
Scandals surrounding the Catholic clergy in relation to sexual acts committed against children in their care had been disclosed long before Wolf hall’s publication. In an interview to The Guardian in nearly 2009 Dublin Archbishop, Martin that an imminent report would shock us all on how deeply involved Irish priest were in the global sexual abuse scandal. Mantel herself reflects in an essay “No passes or Documents required” claims to never had feelings of Englishness. She asserts that she lost her faith in Catholicism at a very young age. Such an approach we can see in the novel also.
She portrays priests in Wolf Hall as manipulative, oppressive and opportunistic in the episode of Elizabeth Barton, a prophet, known as the maid of Kent. Barton, who prophesied Henry’s death, is imprisoned in the Tower while those priests who brought her to the attention of the aristocracy, are interrogated. When Cromwell suggests to Bishop Fisher that Barton prophesied Anne’s succession to the throne, “Fisher would have called her a witch” (Mantel 544). Cromwell is actually criticizing the Catholic Church’s polemics and how its interest in supremacy. Presenting the corruption of church, and especially its priests are a critical factor in the novel and an indication of writer towards contemporary society in England.
Mantel does not hide Cromwell’s engagement with pride and vengeance. Even she quotes the classical philosophers, especially Pluto to convince the reader that such an act was considered noble by them. In the novel we know that Cromwell quotes the old authors from Plato to Plautus.
Mantel’s Cromwell saw a Lollard woman burned to death, when he was a child. One of the female members of the crowd assembled at the burning instructs young Cromwell to watch so “he always goes to mass after this and obeys his priest” (Mantel 353). Mantel describes this woman as “having a shrill voice like a demon” (Mantel 354). When young Cromwell asks, “But what’s her sin” (Mantel 353). The shrill voiced woman tells him that the old woman believes worshipping statues of saints is like worshipping wooden posts. The crowd was equally shrill and the woman bound with chains was terribly old that he had never seen. Crowell said “nobody prays for her?” the demon woman answered “What’s the point” (Mantel 353). Moreover she informs Cromwell, “Any that bring faggots to the burning, they get forty days’ releaser from Purgatory” (Mantel 353). Only the priest could have given these simple people that kind of information.
This scene is an example that shows the history of Cromwell and his disliking of the clergy. By including this flashback in the novel, Mantel wants to convey the human suffering that lasted long life with Cromwell. It provides Crowell an act of vengeance for the religion and towards priests. Later Cromwell works with Wolsey to dissolve the corrupt monasteries into other better run monasteries.
Revenge, tragedy and ghosts often appear together. For example in Hamlet, his father’s ghosts orders Hamlet to revenge his murder. In Wolf Hall, Cromwell’s occasional interaction with the cardinal’s spirit recalls the same. After Anne is crowned Cromwell thinks on how “the clergy own a third of England” (Mantel 353). He returns to Home to find “the cardinal waiting for him in a corner (Mantel 533). In Wolf Hall the living Cromwell acts for the dead Wolsey, because tragedy always deals with toxic matter left by the past to the present.
Mantel also shows the conflict between Thomas More and Cromwell. Mantel’s portrayal of Cromwell revises conventional views of the man himself and also to revise perceptions of More. Cromwell repels More in an insulting way in all his dealings. In a conversation More greets Cromwell with “Still serving your Hebrew God, I see. I mean your idol Usury” (Mantel 91). He refers to the medieval Catholic laws against lending money at interest, laws to which Jews were not subjected. Cromwell reflects this that More, “a scholar through all Europe awakens each morning to conduct prayers in Latin”, while Cromwell awakens each morning “to a creator who speaks the swift patois of the markets” (Mantel 91).
These thoughts reflect how Mantel views the two of them opposites, different characters with opposing values and choices. Their common friend, Italian merchant Antonio Bonvisi, begs Cromwell to assure him that “no one will hurt More” (Mantel 588). Cromwell’s reply suggests he has no sympathy for More, “Why do you think I’m no better than he is? Look, I have no need to put him under pressure. His friends and family will do that. Won’t they” (Mantel 588). It indicates Cromwell’s no leniency towards More. Mantel’s plot follows the form of a Greek tragedy. As it is clear that Cromwell’s strategies regarding More are motivated by revenge. The reasons are More’s persecution of men in the city, his historical writings against Martin Luther, his stubborn refusal to sign the Oath of Supremacy, and his letters during his imprisonment. Though these letters were addressed to his daughter but Cromwell knows they were written for his friend in Europe to read. Thomas More as the Lord Chancellor is the first to sign “all the articles against Wolsey” (Mantel180) by adding a peculiar charge on cardinal:
The Cardinal is accused of whispering in the king’s ear and breathing into his face, since the cardinal has the French pox, he intended to infect our monarch (Mantel 180).
Cromwell’s reaction was undoubtedly disapproving, but he knows that the realm in which More has a charge and where it was circulated “People will believe anything”. Cromwell does not want More’s head because he knows what More’s death will cost the realm. Before More is imprisoned in the Tower, he is first at Lambeth Palace and interrogated by Cromwell, Thomas Audely and Thomas Cranmer. But More will not budge on his refusal. Cromwell’s frustration erupts. He compares the drama of convincing Thomas More to swear the Act of Succession to play:
He swears under his breath, turns from the window, we know his reasons for refusing to swear the oath. All Europe knows them. He is against the divorce. He does not believe the king can be head of the church. But will he say that? Not him. I know him. Do you know what I hate? I hate it that minds could be better employed, I hate to see our lives going by, because depending upon it, we will all be feeling our age before this pageant is played out. And what I hate most of all is that Master More sits in the audience and sniggers when I trip over my lines, for he has written all the parts and written them these many years (Mantel 563).
Cromwell knows Thomas More’s role as the genius of England and it turns him into a martyr. Historically Thomas More is known “who dies for his own conscience” (The NewYork 2012) while Mantel emphasizes that “other people die for his conscience too” (The NewYork 2012). Historians are still not firm how to bring together More, the heretic hunter and torture, with the martyr More. Historical records say the martyrdom of John Tewkesbury, John Pety, James Bainham, Richard Bayfield, and John Firth all of who died at the will of More. They all appear in Wolf Hall and Cromwell reflects on the torture of Bainham “men he knows the disgraced and broken Bainham, the monk Bayfield, John Tewkesbury, who God knows was no doctor of theology. That’s how the year 1531 goes out, in a puff of smoke, a pall of human ash hanging over Smithfield'' (Mantel 335). These young men whom More tried to convince back to the Catholic Church, are men that Cromwell knows. In his own household, Cromwell employs a boy, Dick Purse, whom More “whipped before the whole household” (Mantel 348) for announcing that he did not believe that “God was in the Communion host” (Mantel 348).
Conclusion
It is the dark side of More, who died for his conscience and made sure that other people died for his conscience too. And Mantel is interested in exploring Wolf Hall. But she knows it will be against the Bolt’s A Man for all Seasons, Hitchen’s The Man Who Made England. Mantel has Cromwell and she drives a portrait of Thomas More from his perspective. Mantel creates this image from Cromwell’s point of view. She reminds that history has flattered Thomas More. But that flattery has been through another mirror. But probably the most impressive Cromwell makes for a reconsideration of More’s sainthood is his claim that Thomas More is not a simple soul, though history has often simplified him.
Work Cited