A Man for All Treasons
A Man for All Treasons
Crimes By and Against the Tudor State in the Novels of Hilary Mantel
Chapter 4 discusses the crime of treason as depicted in Hilary Mantel’s novels Wolf Hall and Bring Up the Bodies, which complicate the standard view of Thomas Cromwell as, at best, a Tudor-era fixer and, at worst, a murderer and torturer. LaCroix claims that Mantel’s Cromwell is instead the industrious creator of the modern administrative state. In this characterization Mantel follows the scholarly path of Geoffrey Elton, who argued that Cromwell reformed English government by replacing personal rule with modern bureaucracy and systematizing the royal finances. Both accounts rebut the simple image of Cromwell as criminal. But LaCroix argues that Mantel’s Cromwell continues to represent two modern species of crime and perpetrator: crimes against the state, in the form of treason, and crimes by the state, in the form of espionage and torture. Because the crimes depicted presuppose the existence of the modern administrative state itself, Mantel’s and Elton’s modernizing Cromwell may not be as distinct from Bolt’s devious Cromwell as the competing accounts would suggest.
Keywords: Hilary Mantel, Thomas Cromwell, Tudor England, Henry VIII, Anne Boleyn, treason, administrative state, torture
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