Thomas Cromwell, the protagonist of the historical novel Wolf Hall, lives most of his life with the threat of danger and violence, from his early childhood with his alcoholic and abusive father, to his time as minister in Henry VIII’s court. While the violence in these two settings seems very different on the surface—the intrigues of the Tudor court are subtler than the crude beatings that Cromwell was subject to at his father’s hands—they are equally dangerous and deadly. Since Cromwell has already been exposed to a violent environment early on and has learned how to navigate and survive it, he seems especially suited to maneuver his way around court. As the novel unfolds, Mantel implies that danger and violence result when an ineffective and self-indulgent leader is at the helm of affairs, and in this way likens the violence and danger of Cromwell’s early life to the situation at the Tudor court.
The novel makes the case that violence stems from ineffective, illogical leadership. The opening scene of the novel is a brutal one, in which the young Thomas Cromwell’s father beats him nearly to death with a plank of wood. Later, Cromwell’s brother-in-law Morgan Williams asks what spurred the beating, and Cromwell says it was because he’d been fighting with some boys down by the river. Williams is incredulous at Cromwell’s father’s lack of logic—that he’d disapproved of Cromwell fighting, had “wait[ed] a day, then [hit] him with a bottle. Then he knock[ed] him down in the yard […] [and] beat up and down his length with a plank of wood.” To Williams, the punishment makes no sense for several reasons: for one thing, it seems much like the crime itself, which means that it isn’t so much a punishment as a perpetuation of the crime. Secondly, the punishment is extremely disconnected from the crime in terms of time and consequence—strangely, it comes a day after Cromwell was caught fighting, and it’s also a disproportionately severe punishment for a young boy roughhousing.
Cromwell experiences another instance of danger caused by ineffective leadership when he is serving as a soldier in France. The “mad capitaine” in charge is “not very good at the basic business of thinking” and often puts his troops in unsafe situations like having them camp out “somewhere with a rising water level” or moving them to an “indefensible position.” Cromwell experiences “seething anxiety” and emotional turmoil because of the perilous position his troop is put in, and it’s all due to an incompetent leader.
In King Henry VIII’s court, too, no one is quite safe from imprisonment in the Tower of London or a sudden beheading ordered on the whims of the monarch. The king comes across as a coddled tyrant who will not stand for opposition and is quickly offended. While Cardinal Wolsey was once the king’s most trusted advisor, he suddenly finds himself branded as a traitor because he doesn’t succeed in procuring an annulment for the king’s marriage, despite his best efforts. One of the charges leveled against him is that of violating the statutes of praemunire, or “the upholding of a foreign jurisdiction with the king’s realm.” This is a law that no one quite understands and that “seems to mean what the king says it means.” This tyrannical and blatantly illogical atmosphere allows violence to flourish, with people’s lives at the mercy of the king’s fickle favor.
In contrast, Cromwell’s interactions with his mentor Cardinal Wolsey are devoid of this air of fearfulness. Through this, Mantel suggests that when logical leaders are in charge, there is no cause for constant fear and anxiety. Cromwell and the cardinal share a relationship of mutual respect and affection, with each of them admiring the other’s mental acuity and kindness. Cromwell believes the cardinal “is a man beyond price.” As a result, even when he disagrees with the cardinal, he never fears him.
Additionally, the Cromwell household is a place of warmth and security, since Thomas Cromwell runs his home with sense and fairness and treats his wife and children with respect. It is a complete contrast to his childhood home. in which he experienced unpredictable violence. When Cromwell asks his wife, Liz, if he’s ever made her cry, she tells him she has “only [cried] with laughter,” showing that his sensible attitude as head of the household results in happiness and harmony for everyone there.
To Cromwell, who comes across as a sensible, practical character, peace and safety seems like the logical choice. He opposes violence whenever possible, whether by speaking out in Parliament against Henry’s plan to march on France or by opposing Thomas More’s violent treatment of those he brands heretics. Cromwell doesn’t think of his actions as being born out of kindness. To him, it is just good sense not to waste money and human resources on a war fought for honor. He also cannot comprehend why More feels the need to severely punish those who don’t agree with his religious beliefs—Cromwell sees that More’s actions do nothing to propagate Catholicism and only succeed in spreading fear.
However, the novel repeatedly points out that the world—and especially the Tudor court—often does not operate out of logic and good sense. The very name of the novel, Wolf Hall, suggests violence and irrational behavior. In an interview, Mantel has said, “Wolf Hall, besides being the home of the Seymour family, seemed an apt name for wherever Henry’s court resided.” At one point in the novel, Cromwell thinks of the Latin saying, homo homini lupus, or “man is wolf to man,” as being an accurate description of the interactions at court, suggesting that many of Henry’s courtiers put aside their human rationality and behave with animalistic violence. So while Mantel indicates that calm, competent leadership is the only way to avoid violence, she also suggests that such leadership is rare in an inherently violent, irrational society.
Related Themes from Other Texts
Poor Leadership and Violence ThemeTracker
Poor Leadership and Violence Quotes in Wolf Hall
“So now get up!” Walter is roaring down at him, working out where to kick him next. […] “What are you, an eel?” his parent asks. He trots backward, gathers pace and aims another kick.
It knocks the last breath out of him; he thinks it may be his last. His forehead returns to the ground; he lies waiting, for Walter to jump on him. The dog, Bella, is barking, shut away in an outhouse. “I’ll miss my dog,” he thinks. […]
Inch by inch. Inch by inch forward. Never mind if he calls you an eel or a worm or a snake. Head down, don’t provoke him.
He never lives in a single reality, but in a shifting shadow-mesh of diplomatic possibilities. While he is doing his best to keep the king married to Queen Katherine and her Spanish-Imperial family, by begging Henry to forget his scruples, he will also plan for an alternative world, in which the king’s scruples must be heeded, and the marriage to Katherine is void. Once that nullity is recognized—and the last eighteen years of sin and suffering wiped from the page—he will readjust the balance of Europe, allying England with France, forming a power bloc to oppose the young Emperor Charles, Katherine’s nephew. And all outcomes are likely, all outcomes can be managed, even massaged into desirability: prayer and pressure, pressure and prayer, everything that comes to pass will pass by God’s design, a design reenvisaged and redrawn, with helpful emendations, by the cardinal.
Thomas Cromwell is now a little over forty years old. […] Various expressions are available to his face, and one is readable: an expression of stifled amusement. […] It is said he knows the entire New Testament in Latin, and so as a servant of the cardinal is apt—ready with a text if abbots flounder. His speech is low and rapid, his manner assured; he is at home in courtroom or waterfront, bishop’s palace or inn yard. He can draft a contract, train a falcon, draw a map, stop a street fight, furnish a house and fix a jury.
What he says about Gregory is, at least he isn’t like I was, when I was his age; and when people say, what were you like? he says, oh, I used to stick knives in people. Gregory would never do that; so he doesn’t mind—or minds less than people think—if he doesn’t really get to grips with declensions and conjugations. When people tell him what Gregory has failed to do, he says, “He’s busy growing.” He understands his need to sleep; he never got much sleep himself, with Walter stamping around, and after he ran away he was always on the ship or on the road, and then he found himself in an army.
This is an indecent spectacle: the man who has ruled England, reduced. They have brought out […] the scarlet silk in which he braves the summer heat of London, the crimson brocades that keep his blood warm when snow falls on Westminster and whisks in sleety eddies over the Thames. […] There have been days when, swaggering out, he would say, “Right, Master Cromwell, price me by the yard!”
[…] So day by day, at his request and to amuse him, he would put a value on his master. Now the king has sent an army of clerks to do it. But he would like to take away their pens by force and write across their inventories: Thomas Wolsey is a man beyond price.
“I wonder,” Wolsey says, “would you have patience with our sovereign lord? When it is midnight and he is up drinking and giggling with Brandon, or singing, and the day’s papers not yet signed, and when you press him he says, I’m for my bed now, we’re hunting tomorrow…If your chance comes to serve, you will have to take him as he is, a pleasure-loving prince. And he will have to take you as you are, which is rather like one of those square-shaped fighting dogs that low men tow about on ropes. Not that you are without a fitful charm, Tom.”
There’s no point backing off; do that and Henry will chase you down. Advance, and he may just falter. He says, “No ruler in the history of the world has ever been able to afford a war. They’re not affordable things. […] You enter into one and it uses up all the money you’ve got, and then it breaks you and bankrupts you.”
[…]
“You said I was not to lead my troops. You said if I was taken, the country couldn’t put up the ransom. So what do you want? You want a king who doesn’t fight? You want me to huddle indoors like a sick girl?”
“That would be ideal, for fiscal purposes.”
The king takes a deep ragged breath. He’s been shouting. Now—and it’s a narrow thing—he decides to laugh.
“A thousand pounds?” Henry whispers.
It is on the tip of his tongue to say, that will be a start on the ten thousand which, to the best of my knowledge and belief, you have owed the Cardinal of York for a decade now.
He doesn’t say it, of course. At such moments, Henry expects you to fall to your knees—duke, earl, commoner, light and heavy, old and young. He does it; scar tissue pulls; few of us, by our forties, are not carrying injuries.
The king signals, you can get up. He adds, his tone curious, “The Duke of Norfolk shows you many marks of friendship and favor.”
The hand on the shoulder, he means: the minute and unexpected vibration of ducal palm against plebeian muscle and bone. “The duke is careful to preserve all distinctions of rank.” Henry seems relieved.
He finds himself praying: this child, his half-formed heart now beating against the stone floor, let him be sanctified by this moment, and let him be like his father’s father, like his Tudor uncles; let him be hard, alert, watchful of opportunity, wringing use from the smallest turn of fortune. If Henry lives twenty years, Henry who is Wolsey’s creation, and then leaves this child to succeed him, I can build my own prince: to the glorification of God and the commonwealth of England. Because I will not be too old. […] And I shall not be like Henry Wyatt and say, now I am retiring from affairs. Because what is there, but affairs?
There is a feral stink that rises from the hide of a dog about to fight. It rises now into the room, and he sees Anne turn aside, fastidious, and Stephen puts a hand to his chest, as if to ruffle up his fur, to warn of his size before he bares his teeth. “I shall be back with Your Majesty within a week,” he says. His dulcet sentiment comes out as a snarl from the depth of his guts.
[…]
Henry says, “Stephen is a resolute ambassador, no doubt, but I cannot keep him near me. […] I hate ingratitude. I hate disloyalty. That is why I value a man like you. You were good to your old master in his trouble. […]” He speaks as if he, personally, hadn’t caused the trouble; as if Wolsey’s fall were caused by a thunderbolt.
Henry stirs into life. “Do I retain you for what is easy? Jesus pity my simplicity, I have promoted you to a place in this kingdom that no one, no one of your breeding has ever held in the whole of the history of this realm.” He drops his voice. “Do you think it is for your personal beauty? The charm of your presence? I keep you, Master Cromwell, because you are as cunning as a bag of serpents. But do not be a viper in my bosom. You know my decision. Execute it.”
