A Great Matter of Things

When I was at university, around the time my heart left legal practice, I studied a module called trials of dissenters. The focus was not on learning the ins and outs of the operation of law, but on its historical application where the law was used in part to persecute those beyond the pale of respectable society and what it showed us about jurisprudence. The list of trials studied was eclectic; it's not often you'd find the trial of Jesus Christ being studied and presented alongside the trial of Oscar Wilde.

Among those studied in the early days of the module was the trial - such as it was - of Anne Boleyn. We looked at procedure. We looked at the facts. We looked at the historical context of the time. We skipped the outcome; once convicted, it really was a case of burying the bodies so far as the sentence was concerned.

I have a question for my university professors now: why not study Thomas Cromwell's role in that trial and his eventual downfall? Was he a dissenter, in a broad definition? Is it significant that he had no real trial of his own other than bills of attaintment, considering what had happened with the woman he had installed as queen consort - and subsequently brought low with the harvested testimonies of others? Leaving aside matters of time, there's more in Cromwell and his rise and fall than there is in Anne Boleyn in any matter other than a trial itself.

Over the past year I've been working my way through Hilary Mantel's phenomenal Thomas Cromwell trilogy with those questions in mind. As I finished the trilogy this morning - with its inevitable tragic denouement - the questions resurfaced. Here was a common man, risen to the highest office in the land despite his birth, at a time when value was placed on blood far more than ability. Here was a man who stood against the Catholic Church and played his part in the English Reformation. Was he not, in his way, a dissenter, eventually brought down by that dissent?

There's no doubt that Cromwell was no typical figure of his age and Mantel's depiction of him shows him as such. The boy from Putney made good into the Lord Privy Seal, a baron of England despite his common birth. He was a soldier, a lawyer, a statesman. A man who relied on his prodigious wit and prudence to become King Henry VIII's right-hand man. Someone at the heart of schemes to promote England's interests - but also the interests of a new orthodoxy that challenged the status quo. Such a man - as shown by Mantel - challenges the establishment, who would wish that such a man be brought down. The end, when it comes - and I hope I'm not spoiling the ending for anyone, considering these events took place in 1540 - has a sense of inevitability to it, and not just because of the knowledge of Cromwell's real-life fate.

Cromwell can be said to be a dissenter in the sense that he transgressed from the norms of the time. He would have fit hand in glove with the trials of dissenters unit studied in the same way as Anne Boleyn and Jesus; a social and political misfit who rose and rose before being destroyed - in a physical way, at least - by those who took a position of social and political orthodoxy, damned by his own actions even as they progressed the interests of the place - and beliefs - he served.

I cannot recommend the trilogy - beginning with Wolf Hall - highly enough. It's possible to enjoy the ride, but it's also possible to read far more into the events and apply them to now. Vested interests face upstarts. The psychology of power and interplay of various interests. The darkness of humanity and the treachery of those who are only a misstep away from a slippery slope. Mantel's work is masterful. As for Cromwell himself, he continues to blaze a trail through history as a man both of his time and outside of it. A modern man in an early modern setting, who helped to shape modern England.