The Tudor novels of Hilary Mantel – Wolf Hall and Bring Up the Bodies, with a third installment still to come – depict two species of crime: crimes against the state, and crimes by the state. The crimes against the state are variations on the obvious one, given the context of the court of Henry VIII: treason. The crimes by the state, in contrast, are more inchoate and subjective. Indeed, they are portrayed by Mantel as perhaps only potential crimes. Torture, or merely aggressive questioning? Blackmail, or simply shrewd intelligence gathering? The reader cannot be certain whether a crime has in fact been committed, or whether she simply expects that a crime will be committed, given that Mantel’s protagonist is Henry’s notorious consigliere Thomas Cromwell, described in Mantel’s “Cast of Characters” as “a blacksmith’s son: now Secretary to the King, Master of the Rolls, Chancellor of Cambridge University, and deputy to the king as head of the church in England” (Bodies, ix).

Throughout the novels, Mantel plays with her readers’ expectations of Cromwell, whose modern-day infamy stems from at least two sources, only one of which was contemporary. Those sources are his brooding, massy, black-clad portrait by Hans Holbein the Younger, of 1532-33; and Robert Bolt’s 1960 play A Man For All Seasons, in which Henry describes Cromwell as one of his “jackals with sharp teeth” and another character calls him “a coming man” (surely a faint-hearted euphemism for the brute whom Bolt depicts as holding the hand of his own protégé in the flame of a candle).

Mantel, in contrast, gives readers a Cromwell famous in his own time as a formidable enforcer of the royal will, a man tutored in the armies, alleys, and counting-houses of continental Europe. Mantel’s Cromwell is fluent in, inter alia, Flemish, ancient Greek mnemonic strategies, knife-fighting, silks and woollens, and canon and common law. Cromwell’s reputation in his own time made his contemporaries fear him, Mantel suggests, permitting him to prosecute his work as the king’s servant efficiently and with a minimum of actual violence. By 1536, the year he helped to bring down Anne Boleyn, Mantel’s Cromwell is such a terrifying figure that his mere presence leads the targets of his inquiries to talk themselves into believing that they have been tortured.

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