Content area
Full Text
Robert HUTCHINSON, Thomas Cromwell: The Rise and Fall of Henry VIII's Most Notorious Minister, New York: St. Martin's Press, 2009, 360 p.
reviewed by Alvaro Silva
The Cromwell years were few but among the most crucial in England. Thomas Cromwell came from nothing and got everything. He dominated every aspect of government and English life, only to end his days executed as a traitor to the monarch he had so loyally served. One would think such a man would generate plenty of excitement among biographers. But in an age that loves biography, his absence from the genre is a bit odd. By my reckoning, Roger B. Merriman's work, The Life and Letters of Thomas Cromwell (1902), has been the standard for a long time. In the bibliography of the book under review, I see only three: two published in 1887 and 1891, and one in 1935. The biography by B. M. Beckingsale appeared in 1978 and a more recent one is J. Patrick Coby's Thomas Cromwell: Machiavellian Statecraft and the English Reformation (2009). Perhaps Hilary Mantel noticed the gap and her much praised novel of Cromwell's life, Wolf Hall (winner of the Man Booker in 2009 and rave reviews everywhere) fills it with a vengeance. It so pleased Christopher Hitchens that the reader of his review in The Atlantic would think that the novel is not only a masterpiece of historical fiction but the best possible biography Cromwell could ever get, a tribute to the greatness of England as a consequence of her liberation from papist power, dogma and superstition.
In the past century, G. R. Elton and A. G. Dickens worked hard at shaping an image of Cromwell...