By Herta Pitman
Thomas Cromwell died yesterday– and nearly 500 years ago. I knew it would end this way, and still I feel blindsided. I first became aware of him, Cromwell, years ago when I attended weekly Wolf Hall events at Twin Cities Public Television. He was there as a special guest, brought by Hilary Mantel. I was mesmerized. He, the understated, commanding man, standing just to the side of all the glittering beings, drew my attention. I never crossed the room.
My attendance at Wolf Hall events came to an end as Anne Boleyn’s life was coming to an end. I sought to learn more from Mantel. Obligingly, she spun further tales of Thomas Cromwell for me for years, adding more depth to what I knew of him from Wolf Hall. She revealed Tom Cromwell as Henry the 8th’s king-whisperer, and in doing so, she became my Cromwell-whisperer. Even as I learned of the role Tom Cromwell played in Boleyn’s losing her head, I could not prevent myself losing my own head to him, Cromwell. She, Mantel lured me not to Thomas Cromwell, Lord Essex; puppet master whose in-the-background string-pulling benefited many, but no one so much as himself. Instead she lured me to the boy he’d been, who she breathed into being; his early suffering, and what he overcame, and everything in him that drove him to become the man he was. I never wanted to love him.
Yesterday, he too lost his head, and here I am today, almost 500 years later, bereft.
Hilary Mantel cast a spell about a spellcaster in her trilogy about Thomas Cromwell. That spell is holding me beyond the last book, The Mirror and the Light (Henry Holt, 2020). What captured me was not the period, or those people, or all but the basic story (packed with details that were, for me, nearly impossible to follow). It’s the way she told the tales; her conception, dialogue, and flourishes. Amid the torturing relationships, she scatters pearls; lines like this one example: “The low murmur of their voices, the settling, preening doves in their cote: like a flake of summer snow, a stray feather floats past, and his eyes follow it into the dust.” Fanciful, descriptive details are strewn all over the story she tells. They hold me in the snarled history of a long-ago real person, a man that I would have prefered not to know.
“Like a flake of summer snow, a stray feather floats past.” His eyes follow it. My mind’s eye too. I drift away on the floating feather and my own flight of fancy, losing my head.
