Once the queen’s head is severed, he walks away. A sharp pang of appetite reminds him that it is time for a second breakfast, or perhaps an early dinner. The morning’s circumstances are new and there are no rules to guide us. The witnesses, who have knelt for the passing of the soul, stand up and put on their hats. Under the hats, their faces are stunned.
The book begins and ends with a beheading. This was long before the discovery of electricity, much less the ability to harness for the purpose of state executions. The queen’s head was severed by a thick-muscled man wielding a large axe. As for the witnesses, well, it is really only within reach of our modern sensibilities that public executions are not a normal occurrence. Don’t go getting too proud: if they were suddenly reintroduced, doubtlessly they would be just as well attended. The thing to remember is that watching an execution by beheading—even of a queen—was not quite as upsetting back then as we might think it to be. The man is Thomas Cromwell, the headless queen is Anne Boleyn and the normalcy of immediately thinking of eating in the wake of such a seeming abomination should not be viewed with modern sensibilities which, even the wake of several centuries of progress, would likely describe the situation here sampling one that is what it is.
For this is England, a happy country, a land of miracles, where stones underfoot are nuggets of gold and the brooks flow with claret. The Boleyns’ white falcon hangs like a sorry sparrow on a fence, while the Seymour phoenix is rising. Gentlefolk of an ancient breed, foresters, masters of Wolf Hall, the king’s new family now rank with the Howards, the Talbots, the Percys and the Courtenays. The Cromwells – father, son and nephew – are of an ancient breed too. Were we not all conceived in Eden? When Adam delved and Eve span/Who was then the gentleman? When the Cromwells stroll out this week, the gentlemen of England get out of their way.
Boleyn is dead. King Henry married his new queen just the day before. She is Jane Seymour and for most of the court it is like waking up to an entirely different world than the one which bid them slumber the night before. But Cromwell does not consider himself in light of the rest of the court or even in light of the rest of England. Like Henry, he is unique and special. Well, so he thinks. But then, Henry has the scepter and the crown while Cromwell serves entirely as the pleasure of the increasingly mercurial monarch. His position is not, even so, quite the same as the Seymours, however. They not only serve at the pleasure of Henry, they got to where they are at the pleasure of the king. Cromwell is fully cognizant of the distinction: he got to where he was not through accident, but superior intellect and guile.
He thinks of picking up the axe and felling the headsman, but this is what life does for you in the end; it arranges a fight you can’t win. In his time he has encouraged many who lack practice and capacity. In other circumstances he would take the axe from the man’s fumbling grip: say patiently, ‘This is how.’
This is how the world ends for Thomas Cromwell. He was of the canniest politicians in British history, one of the few who managed to survive almost all the way through the reign of the increasingly unpredictable psychopathy of Henry VIII. Until the arrival of this trilogy, however, Cromwell was almost completely unknown to Americans. He was one of those shadowy figures in the history of the British monarchy that those who grow up learning about it know all too well, but whose particular part to play in that history is a little too complicated for the anti-aristocratic American mind to fully appreciate.
The author has been rightly praised for presenting Cromwell in all his dramatic complexity in an accessible way. By turning his story into almost a thriller—certainly a political thriller in the mold of the popular House of Cards series airing around the same as the release of the books—Mantel has managed to finally bring Cromwell out onto the world stage on which he belongs. It is no easy thing to upstage a figure like King Henry VIII, Cromwell does it. How much that is due to Cromwell and how much to Mantel may never been known.
