There are some episodes of popular history that it’s easy to think you’ve had too much of. It only takes one too many TV series or supermarket novels and indigestion sets in. For instance, even the name Mary Queen of Scots makes me queasy. As for English history’s defining moment — when the Bluebeard king, Henry VIII, traded in his Spanish queen for a younger Protestant model and took England out of the Church of Rome (a period I’ve written about myself) — my stomach definitely turns.

So I was apprehensive about Hilary Mantel’s Wolf Hall, especially when I realised it would be looking at the break with Rome through the unattractive eyes of Thomas Cromwell. He was the man from nowhere whom Henry used to bring about the change of wives, and religious confessions, and get his hands on the wealth of England’s Catholic monasteries. In a portrait by Hans Holbein, Cromwell has the face of a greedy thug; sly little eyes fastened on the main chance. I wasn’t at all sure I wanted to spend 700 pages with him.

But as soon as I opened the book I was gripped. I read it almost non-stop. When I did have to put it down, I was full of regret the story was over, a regret I still feel. This is a wonderful and intelligently imagined retelling of a familiar tale from an unfamiliar angle — one that makes the drama unfolding nearly five centuries ago look new again, and shocking again, too.

For all his physical ugliness, Mantel’s Cromwell is a beguiling character. She reworks the stereotype of the ruthless Tudor backstabber, so that he becomes a softer-edged, more modern figure. He is a subtle, self-aware, self-disciplined entrepreneur: what we know as the self-made man.

This Cromwell has known hardship for most of his days, which is what has made him appreciate the finer things he has earned later in life. We see his whole learning curve: the scary childhood in Putney, the drunk abuser of a father. We see Cromwell the urchin, hanging round Lambeth Palace hoping for kitchen scraps; a watchful child who doesn’t forgive a snub from the Archbishop’s posh pageboy Thomas More. We see the boy with the bruises run away to sea and make a new life among the merchant grandees of Italy. In the counting-house he masters the finer points of how fortunes are made and wars won (the answer the same both times — just get the money right).

Perhaps most important, we’re shown the heart beating beneath the scarred skin. Cromwell’s marriage is contracted in businesslike fashion, but there’s love in it. When he comes home to find his wife struck dead by the sweating sickness, there’s just one howl of bewilderment, of “Liz, didn’t you fight?” and it’s in his head. Then he gets on quietly with dealing with a life in grief. There are out-and-out gold-diggers in this story, though, even if Cromwell isn’t one. We quickly rediscover the shock value of Anne Boleyn — the sheer madness of her ambition to get the King of England to forget the demands of blood and class that defined him, and England, and marry her to slake his desire. This Anne is a tiny skinny thing, with no breasts and a phoney French accent. Her ladies alternate between boredom and terror of her sparrow-on-speed intensity, but they always know she means business. They can, and do, tell the detail of exactly which inch of her body she’s allowing the love-crazed King to touch that day, in return for which of the titles, castles, or favours he has brought.

Readers may also be shocked by Mantel’s hostility to the Catholic Thomas More. Cromwell eventually replaces More as chancellor, once Catholicism goes out of fashion and More refuses to drop his faith. Cromwell’s men then bring about More’s downfall. Having written my own fictional (and negative) Thomas More, I was inter-ested in how she characterised him. Mantel cuts More no slack. Whether people love him or hate him — he’s a saint to Catholics, while Protestants tend to regard him as a torturer — on the whole they give him credit for nurturing a loving family. Mantel doesn’t give him even that. Her More is a cold fish who weds a woman he can’t love, then torments her for years.

It’s only a generation since More’s obstinacy made him a literary hero. Robert Bolt’s play had him as a good man who would rather die than be dishonoured. But how things have changed. We don’t want martyrs any more. We want something more flexible and pragmatic: a person of subtlety; a survivor. In Mantel’s rethinking of the Tudor drama, intriguingly, it’s Thomas Cromwell who is put forward, and plausibly too, as a new generation’s choice of Man for All Seasons.

Wolf Hall by Hilary Mantel
Fourth Estate, £18.99; 672pp Buy the book

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