Look, he says: once you have exhausted the process of negotiation and compromise, once you have fixed on the destruction of an enemy, that destruction must be swift and it must be perfect. When an aide asks if so many high-ranking people need to die to free the King from Anne, Cromwell explains: He carried out such tasks with a ruthlessness and force of personality that over-awed (and deeply angered) other ambitious men and women. Bring Up the Bodies ends with Anne and her five putative lovers suffering the same fate.Ĭromwell laid the groundwork for those and other executions as part of his job - keeping Henry happy and content. Wolf Hall ends with Thomas More’s decapitation, at the connivance of Anne Boleyn and her greedy family. Or is it stoicism?Īfter reading Bring Up the Bodies, I see more clearly the stoicism at the core of Cromwell’s personality, uncomfortably sharing space with his robust ambition and his sheer joy at solving the fiscal, legal, social and emotional puzzles of governance. He’s a technocrat with a bit of a soul, more than a little art, and an enviable objectivity. T’s Cromwell who dominates the scene in this meaty novel. When I reviewed Wolf Hall in 2009, I wrote: The first novel, Wolf Hall, tracks Cromwell’s rise from his rough father’s London blacksmith shop and through an apprenticeship with Cardinal Thomas Wolsey that put him at Henry’s side as an increasingly indispensable adviser and fixer.
And he is the central character of what Mantel has promised will be a trilogy. The one who brought this about is Henry’s right-hand man, Master Secretary Thomas Cromwell. She wouldn’t go quietly, and these trials are the result. The King, wishing to marry his third wife Jane Seymour, wanted Anne removed. Of course, technically, none of these six accused is condemned. This calls to mind the term formerly used in American prisons, “Dead man walking,” which was shouted to alert guards and inmates that a condemned man was being taken down a hallway. The order goes to the Tower, “Bring up the bodies.” Deliver, that is, the accused men, by name Weston, Brereton, Smeaton and Norris, to Westminster Hall for trial. (The Queen herself as well as her brother George will also stand trial on the same charges.) The title for Hilary Mantel’s Bring Up the Bodies comes from a phrase used very late in the novel.įour courtiers to Henry VIII and his consort Anne Boleyn are being held in the Tower of London, awaiting trial for treason for having sex with the Queen and wishing the King dead.
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