– Chronicling Last 4 Years of Statesman’s Life –
by Meilan Solly | Smithsonian Magazine | March 20, 2025
The final years of Henry VIII’s reign were a dark period for Tudor England: a time when a queen could be beheaded on trumped-up charges of treason, and a longtime friend of the king could meet that same fate simply for staying silent. No longer the beloved Renaissance prince of his youth, Henry was, by his mid-40s, an increasingly infirm and mercurial monarch who had few qualms about sending his closest companions—among them the aforementioned Thomas More—to the executioner’s block.
As the late author Hilary Mantel wrote in The Mirror & the Light, the final volume in her best-selling, magisterial Wolf Hall trilogy of historical novels:
The age of persuasion has ended, as far as Henry is concerned; it ended the day More dripped to the scaffold, to drown in blood and rainwater. Now we live in an age of coercion, where the king’s will is an instrument reshaped each morning, as if by a master-forger: Sharp-pointed, biting, it spirals deep into our crooked age.
Thomas Cromwell, chief adviser to the Tudor king for much of this period, has long been blamed for enabling Henry’s worst impulses to secure his own grasp on power. In the words of his enemies and less sympathetic modern historians, the minister was “an agent of Satan sent by the devil to lure King Henry to damnation,” and “an ambitious and totally corrupt statesman [who] was also a devious, ruthless instrument of the state.” Critics pointed to his role in the dissolution of the monasteries, an initiative of the English Reformation that saw most of the kingdom’s abbeys and priories shut down, their art and relics destroyed and their wealth diverted to fill the king’s coffers.
With the publication of Wolf Hall in 2009, Mantel turned this perception of Cromwell on its head, reinventing the polarizing politician as a fiercely loyal, intelligent and well-intentioned family man. While previous generations praised More as a martyr, the saintly foil to Cromwell’s “obvious villain,” Mantel “didn’t like the picture of Thomas More that she had been brought up with. … And so she reversed it,” says historian Diarmaid MacCulloch, author of the 2018 biography Thomas Cromwell: A Revolutionary Life.
The first season of “Wolf Hall,” a 2015 television adaptation of the book and its 2012 sequel, Bring Up the Bodies, introduced Mantel’s more nuanced portrayal of Cromwell to a wider audience. Now, the second installment in the series, titled “Wolf Hall: The Mirror and the Light,” is bringing Cromwell’s story to a close. Filmed after Mantel’s death at age 70 in 2022, the six-episode season aired in the United Kingdom last fall and will debut in the United States on PBS on March 23. Here’s what you need to know ahead of the premiere, from Cromwell’s humble origins to the decisions that led to his own execution in 1540.
Bringing “Wolf Hall: The Mirror and the Light” to the Screen
As Mantel told the Paris Review in 2015, she was drawn to Cromwell as a character because “he’s almost a case study in ambiguity.” Though 20th-century historians like Geoffrey Elton had argued that Cromwell was a trailblazing statesman, fictional portrayals of the royal adviser, chief among them the pro-Catholic 1966 film A Man for All Seasons, tended to present him as an unscrupulous villain. “There’s the Cromwell in popular history and the one in academic history, and they don’t make any contact really,” Mantel explained.
To determine which version of Cromwell was closer to the truth, Mantel undertook rigorous research, even creating a card catalog system that pinpointed the minister’s probable location at a given time. “Soon the complexity of the material began to unfold,” wrote Mantel in her posthumously published memoir. “So many interpretations, so many choices, so much detail to be sifted, so much material: but then, suddenly, no material, only history’s silences, erasures.” She relied on her imagination to fill these gaps, inventing the interior life of a towering figure who left behind surprisingly little personal correspondence. The result was “not a neutral portrayal,” Mantel told NPR in 2012. “It’s not an overview. It’s very angled.”
Upon reading Wolf Hall, MacCulloch says, “What struck me straight away was that the Thomas Cromwell she was meeting was the Thomas Cromwell I was meeting by looking at the original sources.” He wrote to Mantel, praising her ability to capture “the fine grain detail of the [Tudor] period”—a skill that earned the writer legions of fans and such accolades as two Man Booker Prizes. Much like Mantel’s trilogy, the TV adaptation of Wolf Hall earned rave reviews and high-profile awards. Together, the books and the show prompted a reckoning over Cromwell’s reputation, elevating him from villain to hero.
“He’s the most unlikely hero, in a way, because he’s a bureaucrat,” says historian Tracy Borman, author of Thomas Cromwell: The Untold Story of Henry VIII’s Most Faithful Servant. “He’s behind the scenes. … Mantel chose a really interesting, sort of shadowy figure, and just turned him into this incredibly sympathetic hero.”
The first season of “Wolf Hall” covers the years 1529 to 1536, chronicling Cromwell’s rise to power, his rivalry with More and the downfall of Anne Boleyn, Henry’s second wife. Though Henry—aided by the reform-minded Cromwell—broke from the Catholic Church to secure an annulment from his first wife, Catherine of Aragon, and marry Anne, he quickly tired of his outspoken new queen after she was unable to provide him with a male heir.
“Wolf Hall: The Mirror and the Light” opens in May 1536, around the time of Anne’s execution. Mantel assigns much of the blame for Anne’s beheading to Henry (played in the series by Damian Lewis of “Homeland” and “Band of Brothers”), framing the king’s chief minister as a reluctant enforcer, but Borman and MacCulloch argue that Cromwell (Mark Rylance), in truth, bears more responsibility for Anne’s fall.
With Anne dispatched, Cromwell’s focus in the TV series turns to the king’s new marriage to Jane Seymour (Kate Phillips) and the continued disobedience of Henry’s eldest daughter, the future Mary I (Lilit Lesser), who refuses to acknowledge her father’s supremacy. Later in the season, Cromwell must navigate his own fall from grace, which serves as a dramatic reminder of the king’s capriciousness.
“‘The Mirror and the Light’ is [actually] a description of Henry,” says Lewis in a PBS statement. “He is the mirror in which everyone is reflected. He can shine his light on you, and he can leave you in the dark very quickly.”
How Thomas Cromwell Rose to Power
Historians know little about Cromwell’s early life. Often described as the lowborn son of a blacksmith, he was born around 1485 in Putney, a village west of the City of London. Contrary to popular belief, says MacCulloch, Cromwell’s father, Walter Cromwell, was “a bit of a jack of all trades” who dabbled in multiple businesses but was not actually a blacksmith. Walter may have immigrated to England from Ireland; his wife, meanwhile, was a member of a lower gentry English family. The class below the nobility, the gentry consisted of wealthy landowners who could rise above their station, like the Seymour and Boleyn families did after they married into the Tudor dynasty.
Unlike many of his peers, the young Cromwell spent nearly a decade in mainland Europe, where he fought as a mercenary before moving to Florence, the birthplace of the Italian Renaissance. There, he served in the household of a prominent banker, learning what Borman says was a mark of “his genius”: namely, “finding out what makes great men tick.” He also worked as a cloth merchant in the Low Countries before returning to England around 1512 and starting a family.
Cromwell’s time on the continent lent him a unique perspective on 16th-century Europe’s tangled web of diplomatic relations. It also offered him a chance to become fluent in French and Italian and proficient in Latin, Greek, Spanish and possibly German. “He really was a cosmopolitan person when England was very insular and marginal in Europe,” says MacCulloch. “That’s why a lot of people particularly hated him among the gentry and the nobility, because they knew he was better-educated and cleverer than they were, and that was a cause of great resentment.”
By the early 1520s, Cromwell was working as a lawyer in the service of Cardinal Thomas Wolsey, then-chief minister to Henry. The son of a butcher, Wolsey wielded incredible power, overseeing the affairs of the kingdom to such an extent that his critics deemed him the “alter rex,” or “other king.” Wolsey fell from grace in 1529, after failing to secure an annulment of the king’s first marriage. Few spoke up for the man viewed by many as a lowborn upstart, but Cromwell, his faithful servant, was the exception, petitioning Henry at great risk to his own reputation. Despite (or perhaps because of) this show of loyalty, Henry recognized Cromwell’s administrative talent and appointed him to the royal service. Within weeks of Wolsey’s death in November 1530, Cromwell had ascended to the Privy Council, a group of the king’s leading advisers.
Henry VIII’s Chief Minister
Between 1532 and 1536, Cromwell held increasingly influential positions at court, including master of the king’s jewels, principal secretary and lord privy seal. The minister’s rise angered many courtiers, who believed their noble birth entitled them to wealth, influence and the ear of the king. As a 17th-century historian wrote, “Many of [Cromwell’s] advancements were interpreted not so much [as] honors to him as injuries to others.”
Borman says that “Cromwell had a much harder time of it than Wolsey, because Wolsey came to power at the right time. Henry was young. He wasn’t interested in governing, so he handed everything to Wolsey.” By the early 1530s, however, Henry “made it very clear that he, the king, is running the show, [and] Cromwell is there to just take his orders.” So, when Henry ordered his minister to do what Wolsey could not and clear the way for his marriage to Anne Boleyn, Cromwell complied.
Cromwell came up with a legal solution for the king’s problem, pushing Parliament to pass a series of acts that renounced papal authority and declared Henry the supreme head of the nascent Church of England. Free to wed the woman he had courted for the past seven years, Henry made Anne his queen in 1533. She gave birth to a daughter, the future Elizabeth I, that September, disappointing the king, who had hoped for a male heir to the throne.
Though Cromwell and Anne worked together toward common goals—first the annulment and then religious reform—their alliance was always a rather shaky one. “While quick to recognize his usefulness, Anne—in contrast to her husband—had never shown any great liking for Cromwell, or appreciation of his personal qualities,” writes Borman in her biography. Moreover, while both Cromwell and Anne favored evangelical teachings, they clashed over the dissolution of England’s monasteries, and each wanted to be the sole champion of the English Reformation. As Eustace Chapuys, the Holy Roman Empire’s ambassador to England, wrote in a 1535 letter, Anne told Cromwell “that she would like to see his head off his shoulders.” According to Chapuys, Cromwell confided in him, saying, “I trust so much on my master that I fancy she cannot do me any harm.”
Luckily for Cromwell, his fall from Anne’s favor arrived at a time when the queen’s position was increasingly precarious. As the king turned his attention toward Jane Seymour in the spring of 1536, Cromwell devised a plan to end Henry’s second marriage. “He absolutely brought [Anne] down and destroyed her reputation” by baselessly claiming that she’d engaged in incest with her brother and adultery with at least four other men, Borman says. “This is character assassination by Cromwell, and it’s motivated by saving his own skin.” Anne was executed for high treason on May 19, 1536; Henry wed Jane 11 days later, on May 30.
Mary Tudor, Jane Seymour and Thomas Cromwell
This is the moment where “Wolf Hall: The Mirror and the Light” picks up. One of the first challenges that awaited Cromwell was convincing the king’s daughter from his first marriage, Mary, to submit to her father’s will. By mid-1536, Mary was the only one of the king’s subjects who had yet to accept Henry’s status as head of the church and the invalidity of his marriage to her mother, Catherine of Aragon. (Henry claimed the union was incestuous because Catherine had previously been married to his older brother, Arthur.) Multiple people had been executed for refusing to accept these terms, among them Cromwell’s erstwhile rival Thomas More and various members of the clergy. Mary’s supporters feared that she would face the same punishment if she continued to hold out.
“It was Cromwell who persuaded [Mary] to give enough to the king in terms of concession, to do the awful thing of saying that her mother had not been married to him,” says MacCulloch. “But it got her back in the game,” positioning her as Henry’s most likely heir even as she acknowledged that her father now viewed her as illegitimate. Though Henry had an out-of-wedlock son named Henry FitzRoy, Mary’s claim to the throne was far stronger than FitzRoy’s or Elizabeth’s, as many of the king’s subjects still viewed her parents’ marriage as legitimate. FitzRoy’s death in July 1536 at age 17, likely of tuberculosis, furthered Mary’s cause even more.
Cromwell and Mary were fundamentally opposed on matters of religion, with Mary famously clinging to the old ways of the Catholic Church. Yet the pair enjoyed “a degree of affection [and] respect,” says Borman, and this close relationship was evident throughout Henry’s third marriage to Jane Seymour. Mary knew that any children born to Jane would supplant her in line for the throne, but she still felt great affection for her stepmother, who’d urged Henry to make amends with his daughter and even pushed him to restore her to the succession. When Jane died in October 1537, less than two weeks after giving birth to Henry’s long-awaited male heir, the future Edward VI, Mary served as her chief mourner.
Jane’s death also signaled a blow for Cromwell, who’d arranged the marriage of his only son, Gregory Cromwell, to Jane’s sister Elizabeth Seymour in the summer of 1537. The match represented “the apogee of [Cromwell’s] career,” writes MacCulloch in his biography. “His son was unchallengeably uncle to a future king.” With Henry once again in need of a new wife, it was up to Cromwell to ensure that his choice fell on a foreign princess whose marriage would offer England an alliance, not an Englishwoman whose family would compete for prominence at court.
The Downfall of Thomas Cromwell
Cromwell’s decision to look abroad for Henry’s fourth wife was motivated in no small part by the Pilgrimage of Grace, an uprising that unfolded in northern England between October 1536 and January 1537. The rebels, or pilgrims, as they preferred to be called, objected to the recent religious reforms, particularly the widespread closure of the kingdom’s abbeys and priories, which evangelicals viewed as hotbeds of corruption but conservative northerners prized as sites of learning, community and charity.
Instead of blaming the king for these changes, the rebels singled out Cromwell, whom they criticized as a person “of low birth and small reputation.” Thomas Darcy, a prominent northern nobleman who allied with the rebels, directly accused Cromwell of being “the very original and chief causer of all this rebellion and mischief,” in addition to conspiring daily “to bring [the nobility] to our end and to strike off our heads.”
Though the pilgrimage ultimately failed to force Henry’s hand on issues of religion, it marked a turning point in the king’s relationship with Cromwell, whom he briefly considered abandoning to assuage the rebels. “Henry was this golden boy used to having the adoration of his subjects, and the Pilgrimage of Grace makes him realize actually, his popularity is waning, so he makes Cromwell a scapegoat,” Borman says. “You get the sense … that Cromwell is skating on such thin ice and can never rest easy from 1536 onward.”
Cromwell has sometimes been accused of pursuing religious reform as a way of accumulating power. But Borman and MacCulloch both say that the minister’s religious convictions were genuine. As Borman points out, “He took risks for his faith,” from secretly importing banned books that could have gotten him burned at the stake for heresy to paying out of his own pocket to ensure that Henry’s subjects had access to an English Bible at a time when most Bibles were written in Latin.
Given Cromwell’s religious views, arranging Henry’s marriage to a noblewoman from the Lutheran territories in the Holy Roman Empire seemed like an obvious move. Anne of Cleves, sister to the duke of a German duchy, emerged as a promising candidate. Henry famously sent his trusted court painter, Hans Holbein, to create a portrait of Anne; the painting so enchanted the king that he agreed to marry Anne without ever meeting her.
In person, however, Henry decided that Holbein’s portrait had flattered its subject too much. “I like her not! I like her not!” he reportedly told Cromwell in a fit of rage. The king’s contemporaries were more complimentary of Anne’s looks and character, raising the question of exactly why Henry reacted so strongly to her. In The Mirror & the Light, Mantel suggests that it was 24-year-old Anne, not 48-year-old Henry, who was taken aback upon first impression. When the aging, increasingly corpulent monarch approached his bride while in disguise, Mantel wrote, “she flinched from him. He could not miss it. … Then she recovered herself. She dissimulated marvelous well.”
Regardless of which half of the couple objected to the other first, Henry and Anne’s wedding moved forward on January 6, 1540. The next morning, Cromwell later recalled, he asked the king “how [he] liked the queen,” to which Henry responded, “I liked her before not well, but now I like her much worse.” The king claimed he’d been unable to consummate the marriage after feeling Anne’s breasts and belly and concluding that she was not a virgin.
Conventional wisdom attributes Cromwell’s downfall to his role in organizing the disastrous match. But “it wasn’t really that neat of a progression,” says Borman. Henry forgave Cromwell, she argues, even rewarding him for his service by appointing him to the nobility as Earl of Essex in April 1540. This elevation proved to be the final straw for Cromwell’s enemies, who continued to view him as a lowborn upstart, much like his former master, Cardinal Wolsey. With Henry eager to find someone to blame for his failed fourth marriage, the conservative bloc—led by Bishop Stephen Gardiner and Thomas Howard, Duke of Norfolk—seized the moment to take Cromwell down.
“[Henry’s] ear was always available to be opened to suit whatever mood he liked, and the constant stream of poison against Cromwell that would have been there for so long suddenly could penetrate the king’s ear much more clearly,” says MacCulloch, who more decisively links the minister’s fall to the Cleves marriage and the humiliation it caused Henry. “The political turmoil through the first half of 1540 was extreme,” the historian adds. “One faction was up, another was down, and then it was reversed. And it was really a convulsion within that turbulence which brought Cromwell’s arrest in June of that year.”
According to an account by the French ambassador, Cromwell’s foes ambushed him at a meeting of the Privy Council, with some saying “he was a traitor, [and] others that he should be judged according to the laws he had made, which were so sanguinary that often words spoken inadvertently with good intention had been constituted high treason.” Like Anne Boleyn and Thomas More before him, Cromwell was transported to the Tower of London, where he was imprisoned on charges of treason; heresy; and, most implausibly, conspiring to wed Henry’s daughter Mary.
Six weeks later, on July 28, Cromwell was beheaded on Tower Hill. He’d enjoyed a temporary reprieve from execution while writing up, at Henry’s request, a full account of why the Cleves marriage was invalid, but once he was no longer useful, the king was quick to consent to his death. Cromwell apologized for any wrongdoings in order to protect his surviving family. Accounts of his final moments differ, but one 16th-century chronicler wrote that Cromwell “patiently suffered the stroke of the ax, by a ragged and butcherly miser, [who] very ungoodly performed the office.” Describing the response to Cromwell’s fall, the chronicler concluded, “Many lamented, but [more] rejoiced.”
Thomas Cromwell’s Legacy
Less than a year after Cromwell’s execution, the French ambassador recounted a curious show of remorse by a famously remorseless king: “[Henry] sometimes even reproaches with Cromwell’s death, saying that, upon light pretexts, by false accusations, [his ministers] made him put to death the most faithful servant he ever had.” As MacCulloch writes in his biography, “Self-pity has a talent for rewriting events.”
Henry reigned for another six years, dying at age 55 in January 1547. Upon his death, his young son took the throne as Edward VI, a king who, with the help of Cromwell’s protégé, Ralph Sadler, and former allies like Archbishop of Canterbury Thomas Cranmer, transformed England into a decidedly Protestant nation. Though Edward’s successor, Mary I, reversed her brother’s religious reforms and sought to restore Catholicism, Elizabeth I, the last of Henry’s children to wear the English crown, embraced Protestantism once again.
Over the next several centuries, Cromwell’s reputation ebbed and flowed, often in accordance with dominant attitudes toward Protestantism versus Catholicism. Viewed positively during the Enlightenment as a self-made man of principle, by the 19th century, Cromwell was derided as “one of the greatest villains in history,” according to Borman. In the 20th century, scholars like Geoffrey Elton removed religion from the equation, instead emphasizing Cromwell’s achievements in modernizing the government and recognizing Parliament’s strength in effecting change.
It was Cromwell’s descendant Oliver Cromwell who arguably saw this lesson in parliamentary power through to its apogee. As the leader of the Parliamentary faction during the English Civil Wars, Oliver was instrumental in the abolition of the English monarchy and the execution of Charles I in 1649. Britain would find it difficult “to slough off the memory of two Cromwells: one who came to the executioner’s block at the order of a king of England; the other who repaid the compliment,” wrote MacCulloch.
A ruthless politician operating in a ruthless age, “[Thomas Cromwell] broke the rules,” Borman says. “He defied his humble background, defied the conventions of court to become the most powerful man in England, next to the king, and he made sweeping changes, not all of which are very popular today.”
Thanks in large part to Mantel and the work of the historians she inspired, including Borman and MacCulloch, Cromwell is a far more sympathetic figure today than he was in the 19th and 20th centuries. Through Mantel’s evocative prose, Cromwell’s humanity is evident. Consider, for instance, the minister’s final plea to Henry. “Most gracious prince,” Cromwell wrote at the bottom of the letter that would help the king secure his annulment from Anne of Cleves, “I cry for mercy, mercy, mercy.” In The Mirror & the Light, this repetition takes on added pathos. Mantel writes of Cromwell: “He cannot think how to end it. It may be the last letter they will allow. So he writes I cry for mercy. He writes it again, in case Henry should be distracted: mercy. And once again, mercy, to get it into the royal skull, to pierce the royal heart.”
Despite asking for the letter to be read three times, Henry never responded to his “most faithful servant.” On the same day as Cromwell’s execution, Henry married his fifth wife, Katherine Howard. Their union lasted for less than 18 months. It ended, like so many of the king’s other relationships, on the scaffold, with Katherine beheaded for adultery in 1542.
Read the rest of the original article at Smithsonian Magazine