Rags-to-riches hero or villainous torturer? The truth about Henry VIII's scheming right-hand man Thomas Cromwell

With her award-winning Wolf Hall series of books, Hilary Mantel made Tudor bad guy Thomas Cromwell sympathetic. But as TV adaptation Wolf Hall: The Mirror and the Light premieres in the US, the question is: did she also 'sidestep crucial matters'?

Nearly 500 years after his death, Thomas Cromwell lives again, reborn in the popular imagination thanks to novelist Hilary Mantel, and her Wolf Hall trilogy. For decades, historians piled layer after layer of interpretation upon Henry VIII's astute chief minister, a key figure in the Reformation, when King Henry broke from the Catholic Church to establish his own Church of England. But now, with the emergence of Mantel's fictional Cromwell – so attractive, so splendidly presented – the real man is in danger of being buried forever.

Going forward, Cromwell's name will likely call to mind the lean, canny look of actor Mark Rylance – star of the television adaptations of the Wolf Hall series – rather than the grumpy, heavy-jowled visage captured by artist Hans Holbein in a portrait done from life circa 1534. And a figure once counted among history's villains will retain the glow of Mantel's revisionist high regard for many years to come.

Starting on 23 March, US audiences can watch Rylance play Cromwell, alongside Damian Lewis as King Henry, one more time. Six hours of Wolf Hall: The Mirror and the Light, based on the third and final book, make up the last tranche of episodes of the BBC's lavish costume drama. The script takes the complicated story of Cromwell's fall, culminating in his execution for treason in 1540 after six years as the King's right-hand man, and renders it (relatively) easy to follow. Especially impressive is the dialogue, often lifted directly from Mantel's text. The author, who died of a stroke in 2022, had a gift for rendering 16th-Century speech in a non-risible way. (The Wolf Hall novels have also been adapted into two plays.)

Although critics consider The Mirror and the Light to be the least successful of the novels – it's the only one of the three not to win the Booker Prize – the TV version received rapturous reviews when broadcast in the UK last autumn. The Guardian's five-star review proclaimed: "The final instalment of Hilary Mantel's masterpiece is the most intricate television you are ever likely to see. It is so beautifully made it's breathtaking."

But where do sumptuous production values end, and the facts begin? Such questions have accompanied Mantel's project from the start. Tracy Borman, Chief Historian at Historic Royal Palaces and author of 2015's Thomas Cromwell: The Untold Story of Henry VIII's Most Faithful Servant, tells the BBC about the impact Mantel's first Tudor novel, Wolf Hall, had on her upon its publication in 2008. "All through my education, from early school days until university, I was taught that Henry VIII's chief minister was a grasping, ruthless, cynical henchman, driven by greed and power. Then I read Wolf Hall and it gave such a different perspective… I was inspired to write a non-fiction biography so that I could find out where the truth lay." 

Researching her book, Borman discovered a sharp-witted and enterprising Cromwell, as Mantel did, and realised just how thorough the novelist had been in mining primary sources for innumerable details, including Tudor swear words, Cromwell's favourite wines, and the names of his servants. "Granted, she took artistic license when she needed to," Borman says. "Notably in downplaying Cromwell's role in Anne Boleyn's execution, and in making him something of a heartthrob at court."

Samantha Rogers, who teaches early modern history at Vanderbilt University, agrees. "There are a great many popular novels about the Tudors I can't bear to read," she tells the BBC. "Mantel's work is the gold standard – well-researched and rooted in history. However, to paint a largely sympathetic portrait of Cromwell, she does sidestep some crucial matters."

Rogers notes that when King Henry wanted to rid himself of his second wife, Anne Boleyn, the court musician Mark Smeaton, under torture, implicated her in serious crimes – adultery with five men including her own brother. Cromwell most certainly supervised his torture, and yet in the taut and chilling Bring Up the Bodies, the second of Mantel's Tudor novels, Smeaton is merely threatened, put in a dark closet, and never physically assaulted.

Literary critic and biographer Megan Marshall, author of the Pulitzer Prize-winning Margaret Fuller: A New American Life, explains to the BBC how, in writing about a historical figure, both a biographer and novelist "will pluck out what concerns us, and what concerns the audience… although the novelist likely has a more conscious agenda than a biographer".

Mantel's view of Cromwell is inevitably coloured by her personal perspective. She made no secret of her rejection, during adolescence, of the Catholic faith she was brought up in, nor her scorn for the representation of Cromwell and his staunchly Catholic nemesis Sir Thomas More in Robert Bolt's play A Man for All Seasons, which, as a film, won the Oscar for best picture in 1967. In Bolt's telling, Cromwell is the big baddie, both ruthless and underhanded in his methods. More, Lord High Chancellor of England, and later venerated as a saint by the Catholic Church, is the hero, executed for refusing to swear an oath recognising the monarch as the supreme head of the Church in England. More's eloquent resistance, and faithfulness to the dictates of his own conscience, resonated amid the counter-culture of the 1960s.

Eamon Duffy, emeritus professor of history at the University of Cambridge, has accused Mantel of going too far with her demythologising of More. He says that she made More into a monster, "a torturer and a misogynist whose wife and womenfolk were afraid of him," he said in a recent interview with the Idler magazine, adding, "I think that [More] portrayal was the least successful bit of Wolf Hall." 

Yet as she drags More down, Mantel is simultaneously rehabilitating Cromwell. And in the process, does she not give readers a Cromwell that fits the 21st Century? A hero for our time? Rogers believes that she does, pointing out that writer and actor Lin-Manuel Miranda, with his hit musical Hamilton, recast Founding Father Alexander Hamilton in a similar way. "Both are appealing, scrappy guys who come from nothing," says Rogers. Appealing, in other words, to audiences preoccupied by the structural barriers – be they based on class, race, wealth or gender – that prevent people today from flourishing.

Borman concurs. "Henry VIII's court was far from being a meritocracy: most of its members were blue-blooded nobles and the top positions were practically hereditary. Then in comes Cromwell, the son of a blacksmith from a seedy part of London, and he takes the court – and its king – by storm. It's a story as dramatic as it is seductive."

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What Wolf Hall leaves out, however, is of particular interest to the leading Cromwell scholar working today. Diarmaid MacCulloch, emeritus professor of history at the University of Oxford, and author of 2018's Thomas Cromwell: A Life, argues that rather than Cromwell pursuing the country's religious change for political ends, he was a sincere Protestant, determined throughout his years in the King's service to bring church reform to England. And while MacCulloch greatly admires Mantel's novels, in a 2018 interview with the podcast History Extra, he said that "the one thing she played down… is the religion". He added: "Perhaps for a modern novel-reading audience, you simply can't do it."

Historical fiction may indeed reveal as much about the time it is written in, as the time it is written about. Mantel referred to this duality in her Reith Lectures on the craft, presented for the BBC in 2017, along with the many challenges of weaving fiction out of fact. "The pursuit of the past makes you aware, whether you are novelist or historian, of your own fallibility and inbuilt bias," she declared. It's in the gaps in the official record that a writer of fiction can do her most valuable work, she said.

That audiences – readers, theatregoers, TV viewers – all find Mantel's Cromwell so compelling testifies not only to her skill at filling in gaps, but to her love for the protagonist – the witty, affectionate, energetic, all-seeing polymath – she contrived after emerging from the archives. "When I sat down to write at last," Mantel recalled in a 2012 essay, "it was with relish for his company."

The Mirror and the Light premieres on 23 March on PBS Masterpiece in the US and is available now to stream on BBC iPlayer in the UK

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