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mylogicisfuzzy's review
Thought I'd read Diarmud MacCulloch's Thomas Cromwell biography prior to reading Hilary Mantel's The Mirror and The Light and I've read just about a half before losing interest. It's meticulously researched but just a bit too dense and dry. Shame, I've read his Reformation book years ago and used it a lot since for reference. Maybe I'll get back to this book at some point in the future but abandoning for now.
footnotes_and_tangents's review
informative
medium-paced
The Art of Dissimulation
"I have meddled in so many matters under your Highness that I am not able to answer them all."
3 o'clock in the afternoon on 10 June 1540, Lord Cromwell Earl of Essex was arrested for treason.
When news reached his household they knew exactly what to do. Servants built up the hearth, gathered up his personal papers and set about destroying their master's words. They worked silently and in great haste. Within the hour the King's Archers were at the door and the game was up.
The ash in that hearth held the spirit and thoughts of the man who dominated England's political life for a decade.
In the smoke of those burnt papers, Hilary Mantel famously traced out a ghost. And from a phantom, built a palace of words and three epic novels.
Macculloch doesn't have the freedom of fiction and must make do with what was not destroyed.
And it's not an easy task. Cromwell did not write books, like the verbose Thomas More. He did not write poems, like the courtier Thomas Wyatt, or give sermons and lectures from the pulpit like Archbishop Cramner.
What he thought and what he believed, were fiercely guarded secrets.
With so few words to hang him by, his enemies skewered him on his actions. The heartless and heretical bureaucrat who lured England away from the Catholic religion, who masterminded the divorce of Henry VIII's first queen and the execution of his second.
A man responsible for show trials and the introduction of thought-crime as a weapon of state terror.
Not a man to love.
However.
“The word however is like an imp coiled beneath your chair."
Working in tandem, Macculloch and Mantel have spent the last decade following all those little "howevers" - hunting down the man scribbling in the margin of other people's letters, letting his mask slip in conversations with ambassadors and associates.
Novelist and historian mostly agree on what they have found.
A ruffian and a fixer who became an evangelical for the reformed religion. A lowborn counsellor unafraid of his own ambition, possessing prodigious energy and terrifying abilities.
Not always a man to love, but utterly mesmerising nonetheless.
"I have meddled in so many matters under your Highness that I am not able to answer them all."
3 o'clock in the afternoon on 10 June 1540, Lord Cromwell Earl of Essex was arrested for treason.
When news reached his household they knew exactly what to do. Servants built up the hearth, gathered up his personal papers and set about destroying their master's words. They worked silently and in great haste. Within the hour the King's Archers were at the door and the game was up.
The ash in that hearth held the spirit and thoughts of the man who dominated England's political life for a decade.
In the smoke of those burnt papers, Hilary Mantel famously traced out a ghost. And from a phantom, built a palace of words and three epic novels.
Macculloch doesn't have the freedom of fiction and must make do with what was not destroyed.
And it's not an easy task. Cromwell did not write books, like the verbose Thomas More. He did not write poems, like the courtier Thomas Wyatt, or give sermons and lectures from the pulpit like Archbishop Cramner.
What he thought and what he believed, were fiercely guarded secrets.
With so few words to hang him by, his enemies skewered him on his actions. The heartless and heretical bureaucrat who lured England away from the Catholic religion, who masterminded the divorce of Henry VIII's first queen and the execution of his second.
A man responsible for show trials and the introduction of thought-crime as a weapon of state terror.
Not a man to love.
However.
“The word however is like an imp coiled beneath your chair."
Working in tandem, Macculloch and Mantel have spent the last decade following all those little "howevers" - hunting down the man scribbling in the margin of other people's letters, letting his mask slip in conversations with ambassadors and associates.
Novelist and historian mostly agree on what they have found.
A ruffian and a fixer who became an evangelical for the reformed religion. A lowborn counsellor unafraid of his own ambition, possessing prodigious energy and terrifying abilities.
Not always a man to love, but utterly mesmerising nonetheless.
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