His greatness is as inimitable as it is unfathomable to his contemporaries.
You get the sense that he is grimly laughing at everyone, all the time, even as events become increasingly serious. George’s Day and on into the breathtaking final third, the grinding death march. A procession of events: We’re at Christmas within 100 pages, then St. Only this time he doesn’t have eight years, just nine months. It is up to Cromwell, once again, to intuit the king’s wishes and realize them. Anne is as haughty as ever, but after three years of marriage, she has gone from being so alluring as to inspire a new religion to annoying enough to provoke a beheading, all without changing her affect. The king grumbles frustrations, as the once-bewitching Anne turns shrewish, her womb not as promising as hoped. At one point, he screams at his chief minister: “I really believe, Cromwell, that you think you are king, and I am a blacksmith’s boy.” Cromwell reflects, “You could never be the blacksmith’s boy.” Mantel sets the stage through the autumn and winter before that deadly spring. Henry is made decent only by the reverence with which Cromwell treats him. One fool he suffers gladly is the king, who calls him “Crumb.” There are shades of Jeeves and Wooster, as the buffoon Henry, romantically hopeless, rages and whines and boasts, and the dark cloaked minister looks on gravely. You want to say that he is Machiavellian, but he’s already read The Prince and deemed it “almost trite … nothing in it but abstractions.” Having more than ably established his humanity in Wolf Hall, here Mantel gives him free rein.
Cromwell: the blacksmith’s son from Putney, the soldier from Italian campaigns, risen to be the King’s right hand. Until then there is the magic of Cromwell’s mind.
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