The real Cromwell

One of the many pleasures of writing the life of Thomas Cromwell was to reach out behind the various versions of his life published in the past few years and glimpse the real man lost for so long: a complex, often admirable statesman who set England and Ireland and their successor-kingdom on to new paths.

From page one, the story needs rewriting. The great opening of Hilary Mantel’s modern-classic novel Wolf Hall is the boy Thomas reeling under blows from his father. This dark picture of the bad pub landlord Walter Cromwell is good fiction, but not history: in fact, it’s Victorian fantasy, cheekily made up by a 19th-century antiquary.

The few reliable elements of his Walter story were drawn from the Court Rolls of the Manor of Wimbledon, which do include charges against Thomas’s father of assault and falsifying deeds. However, court records are construed to be records of offences even when they are purely technical, aimed at triggering a judicial process to resolve a dispute: Walter was not the only Tudor yeoman to bear such a record.