‘Edward,’ he says, ‘I should have been Pope.’ He is only half-joking. After Cromwell has expounded scripture to Jane Seymour, her brother remarks that ‘he should have been a bishop’. His quips are sharp but never flippant: they carry an undertow of hard truth. This advocate of poor relief acquired his wealth through corruption. Mantel’s Cromwell is one of the most complete creations of modern English fiction, not only due to his accomplishments – he is a linguist, a merchant, a lawyer, a soldier, a diplomat, a religious controverter, a bureaucrat, a literary critic of fine discrimination, a man as adept with his hands as with his brain – but due to the subtle shading of his character. All these encounters are recounted with Cromwell’s attentive commentary. Cromwell meets Katherine of Aragon in her damp, fenny prison at Kimbolton to scrutinise her ailing health he meets the Seymours to plot Jane’s enticement of the king he discusses alliances with Eustache Chapuys, the ambassador of the Holy Roman Emperor. True, some are the claustrophobic closet dramas of the interrogation chamber, but many are not. It is hard to overstate the skill with which Hilary Mantel drives her story through what is, essentially, a series of business meetings.
Every impression on his taut, responsive inner life is recorded. Bring Up the Bodies – every inch as well wrought and serenely written as its predecessor – is, like Wolf Hall, a map of Cromwell’s hinterland. But events, dear boy, are not everything.
The events recounted in this novel are well known: Anne Boleyn miscarries Henry’s much-hoped-for son Henry falls in love with Jane Seymour Cromwell collects – some might say creates – evidence of Anne’s adultery with gentlemen of Henry’s privy chamber and of incest with her brother the accused are executed. Wolf Hall saw the downfall of Cardinal Wolsey Bring Up the Bodies tells of Anne Boleyn’s demise and in The Mirror and the Light, we are led to expect, Cromwell himself will be dispatched to the Tower. ‘How many men can say, as I must’, he asks his nephew Richard, ‘“I am a man whose only friend is the King of England”? I have everything … And yet take Henry away and I have nothing.’ Bring Up the Bodies is the second volume in Hilary Mantel’s projected trilogy about the precariousness of those who stand, as the Tudor poet Thomas Wyatt wrote, ‘upon the slipper top of court’s estates’. He is the king’s intellect and his conscience and his chain-mailed fist. Thomas Cromwell is Henry VIII’s Principal Secretary, Master of the Rolls, Vicegerent in Spirituals.
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