Book Review | Anne of the thousand days The second part of the British author’s breathtaking Thomas Cromwell trilogy delivers on all the promise of the first

Bring Up the Bodies begins where Wolf Hall stops; at Wolf Hall, the estate of the Seymour family, where Henry is enraptured by young Jane Seymour. The king’s right-hand man, Thomas Cromwell, who in Wolf Hall engineered England’s breakaway from Rome to secure the king a divorce from his first wife, Katherine of Aragon, must now rid the king of his second wife, Anne Boleyn. Cromwell, son of a Putney blacksmith, is far from his humble origins—he is now master of the rolls, chief minister, master of the jewels, chancellor of the exchequer, clerk of the hanaper, and master secretary to the king. He is the man you will go to when you need things to be done, and in the court of Henry VIII, you will often need things to be done.
It is 1535 and Cromwell has broken England free of the pope. He has masterminded the English Reformation, instituted the distinctly Protestant Church of England and has had the Catholic Church discredited. He has surveyed the country, conducted a preliminary census, and investigated the corruption of the monastic order. Staunch papists like Sir Thomas More and Bishop John Fisher have been beheaded, and new acts of succession and supremacy have been passed in parliament. Without Rome’s support, the country teeters dangerously between its two closest allies, France and Spain. England has no male heir and the Plantagenets are eyeing the throne. At home, the threat of civil war hovers; from overseas, the bull of excommunication. But none of these things matter as much as the fact that Henry is already bored of his new wife.

Losing his head: An illustration of Henry VIII’s first meeting with Anne Boleyn.

Once more unto the breach, then: The second marriage must be annulled and a new one must be forged. But why should the king—indeed, any man—prefer plain Jane Seymour to brilliant Anne Boleyn? No one, not even Jane’s brothers and father, can comprehend the king’s attraction to this girl who is “as much use as a blancmange”. Anne’s volatility “was what fascinated the king, to find someone so different from those soft, kind blondes who drift through men’s lives and leave not a mark behind”. But it is just such a blonde that the king has now decided he desires.Anne and Cromwell linger over the king like a pair of daggers poised towards each other, blurring into likeness. Both are ambitious, quick-witted, and cunning; they are crafty administrators, sophisticated and prescient; they evince surprising warmth of spirit; in conversation, they are incessantly funny; and they are both driven, in their own ways, by a pervasive love for the king. It is no wonder, then, that they are bent upon destroying each other. When Cromwell reflects upon Anne, he could just as well be describing himself: “He has always rated Anne highly as a strategist. He has never believed in her as a passionate, spontaneous woman. (…) He wonders what it would take to make her panic.”
Cromwell and Anne grudgingly admire each other, although they are both acutely aware that only one of them will survive the king’s new fancy. “But what will Anne the queen do, if Henry takes as mistress a young woman she has laughed at since ever Jane waited upon her: whom she calls pasty-face and milk sop? How will Anne counter meekness and silence? Raging will hardly help her. She will have to ask herself what Jane can give the king, that at present he lacks. She will have to think it through. And it is always a pleasure to see Anne thinking.”
Mantel’s Cromwell is not the Lutheran that history would have us believe. He is a rationalist, a man who would have done well in the Enlightenment. He leans, decidedly, away from the papists, but mostly because it seems a convenient position, considering the many political and economic reforms he has in mind for England. He is most concerned with Henry’s purse strings, and will not let the exchequer go to Rome. He is a shrewd statesman who has read Machiavelli and found him “trite”. At the same time, he is a man of unwavering loyalty. He will avenge, however he can, the death of his mentor, Cardinal Wolsey; and no matter how grim circumstances turn, he will stay true to his friend Thomas Wyatt. Over and above everything else, he will serve the king.

Bring Up the Bodies: Fourth Estate/HarperCollins, 407 pages, Rs 399.

It is Anne who must finally concede her hand. She fights for Henry, but Cromwell fights harder—and so much better—and Anne must now face charges of adultery, incest and treason. Four young men are hand-picked by Cromwell for the charges of adultery, and these are four young men who have been unkind to the memory of Cardinal Wolsey. In giving Henry what he wants, Cromwell will extract revenge. The four interrogation scenes are laid out like the four paws of a beast. These four men are rich and corrupt and cruel, and Cromwell has nothing but contempt for them. The barbarous machinations of those with power and the careless freedom of the elite are richly and articulately debated in Cromwell’s questionings (he would have done well in the Occupy movement as well). But the irony—which will strike us only later, for we have come to love Cromwell too well by now—is that Cromwell, too, in his position as vigilante, has come to abuse his powers with the presumption of a common man who has risen above his own. Really, the question we are left with is this: Can power ever not be abused?
Anne Boleyn must die, and Jane Seymour must become queen. We cannot un-know these facts. Yet Mantel will not stop laying her traps. We pray, foolishly, that Boleyn will be acquitted, just as we will pray, when the third instalment of the trilogy comes, that Cromwell will survive Henry’s fleeting attention span.
Cromwell is given to peculiar flights of imagination. In his head, he conducts conversations with More and Cardinal Wolsey, organizes extravagant and grotesque dinner parties at which the heads of the Boleyns are served for the main course, and constantly writes a book on how to manage the king. Cromwell’s dealings with women, especially the women of Henry’s life, are the sharpest, wittiest sections of the two books. The conversations are awash with humour and ingenuity of wordplay. Mantel’s writing, aside from being clever and interesting and wicked and beautiful, is also hilarious. Her priceless sense of humour is most persuasively seen in her dialogue, particularly when it is Cromwell who speaks.
Mantel does not let your brain rest for a single moment. Her ambiguous pronouns and disconcerting refusal to explain herself will keep you on your toes; you must pay attention, for everything that transpires is of consequence. She will not let your attention waver, as Henry’s often does; she will collar you uncomfortably and hold you to your seat as Cromwell does to his detainees; she will draw you in and then, like Anne Boleyn, she will tease you for being drawn. All the while, she maintains such calm and elegance and mastery over her craft that you will be loath to accuse her, as Eustache Chapuys, the Spanish ambassador, accuses Cromwell: “You are laughing behind your hand!”