Tag Archives: Biography
(Biography) Book Review – Thomas Cromwell: A Life
REVIEW
IT is generally through Hilary Mantel’s inspiring and prize-winning novels, such as Wolf Hall and Bring Up The Bodies, that most people today have come to know the Tudor politician Thomas Cromwell. TV adaptations of the books, through the glowering performances of Mark Rylance, have also added to our understanding of Cromwell’s character.
But, what kind of man was the real, historical Cromwell? Six years in the making, Diarmaid MacCulloch’s monumental biography attempts to answer that question in painstaking, and even in excruciating and fine detail.
It comes as no great surprise that some of the most memorable scenes in Wolf Hall have no basis in fact. Novelists do that as they are prone to make things up.
The book’s opening sequence has a young Cromwell taking a terrible beating from his father. Not true, according to MacCulloch. There is no real evidence that the father was a brutal bully. There is little record of Cromwell’s early life at all. He was a little-known and obscure brewer’s son from Putney.
What is striking is how often and how closely Mantel did follow the historical record.
Cromwell’s most notable trait was his ruthlessness in pursuit of power. Both novelist and biographer make that abundantly clear. He achieved it because he found a solution to what was known as “The King’s Great Matter”.
Henry VIII had decided that he had breached a biblical prohibition in marrying Katherine of Aragon, who had been his deceased brother’s wife. The lack of a male heir was proof of God’s wrath.
Henry’s eagerness to annul his marriage was increased by his passion for Anne Boleyn. Unexpectedly, Anne insisted that she would not share Henry’s bed unless she was his wife. (Her sister Mary, an earlier lover of the king, had displayed no such scruples.)
It was Cromwell who found a way to fulfill the King’s wishes. He smoothed the path to Anne’s royal marriage.
Yet, when she also failed to produce a male heir, he turned on her. Anne already resented her husband’s chief minister. She was heard to say that she would see “his head off his shoulders”.
But it was Cromwell who saw her to the scaffold. Henry already had his eye on a young noblewoman named Jane Seymour.
He complained that “he had been seduced and forced” into marriage with Anne “through spells and charms”. The speed with which Anne was toppled is remarkable. Cromwell was behind charges, almost certainly untrue, of adultery. She was even accused of incest with her brother.
She was executed in the Tower in front of a thousand spectators. Prominent amongst them was her nemesis, Thomas Cromwell. Eleven days after her death, Henry married Jane Seymour.
Throughout this biography, MacCulloch suggests an element of sadism in Cromwell’s character that is absent in Mantel’s depiction. He recommended the torture of a prisoner with the words, “pinch him with pains”.
When he heard that some monks from the London Charterhouse had died in Newgate prison, he was furious. He swore that he’d had something far more unpleasant in mind for them.
Cromwell’s own tragedy was that he served a master even more ruthless than he was.
Mantel will tell of her hero’s downfall in the third, as yet unpublished, volume of her trilogy.
MacCulloch’s final chapters show Henry’s willingness to cast off his chief minister as soon as his usefulness came to an end.
Anne of Cleves was the unwitting catalyst of his downfall. After the death of Jane Seymour in childbirth, Cromwell was determined that the King should next marry a German Protestant. Anne fitted the bill.
Unfortunately, when she arrived in England, Henry was appalled by her.
To his embarrassment, he couldn’t make love to her either on his wedding night or on any succeeding night. Cromwell had to face the fact that “his own protracted diplomacy had resulted in the King’s humiliation”.
Even worse, Henry came to believe that his chief minister was gossiping about his problems between the sheets. Cromwell was doomed.
HE was arrested on June 10, 1540. From prison, he wrote to the King, ending his letter with the words, “I cry for mercy! mercy! mercy!”
The only mercy he was given was the privilege of being beheaded rather than facing burning at the stake (for heresy) or hanging, drawing and quartering (for treason).
Even then, one account suggests that the executioner botched the job and took several swipes of the axe to kill him.
On the very same day that Cromwell died on the scaffold, Henry married his fifth wife, Katherine Howard.
There is a paradox at the heart of this epic work of scholarship. Despite the relentless accumulation of detail, Thomas Cromwell himself remains a mystery. He is as unknowable at the end of the book as he is at the beginning.
It might even need a novelist of Mantel’s exceptional gifts to bring such an enigmatic character fully to life.
– ‘Thomas Cromwell: A Life’ by Diarmaid MacCulloch is published by Allen Lane for £30
Biographical Book Review: Reverend Geoffrey Studdert Kennedy
WOODBINE WILLIE
Selfless: The Reverend Studdert Kennedy
Intro: The Army chaplain who handed out almost a million cigarettes as WWI troops lay dying
AMID the carnage of the trenches, the Reverend Geoffrey Studdert Kennedy, offered spiritual and practical succour to injured and dying troops.
And at a time when an estimated 96 per cent of soldiers smoked, one of the ways the clergyman helped them was to hand out cigarettes.
The British Army chaplain’s generosity in giving Woodbine to men on the front line to boost morale earned him the sobriquet of “Woodbine Willie”.
Official records also show that he regularly ventured – unarmed – into No Man’s Land, often under heavy machine gun and artillery fire, to give dying troops one last cigarette.
Clutching his Bible for protection, the “Battlefield Saint” would whisper the Lord’s Prayer and hold their hands until the end.
Reverend Kennedy’s selfless bravery during the First World War, particularly at the Battle of Messines, earned him a Military Cross.
Now his biographer has calculated that he spent most of his wartime wages handing out nearly one million cigarettes to Allied troops, returning home virtually penniless.
Dr Linda Parker said he sacrificed his family’s financial future to safeguard the emotional wellbeing of the men in his care.
“Studdert Kennedy was one of the First World War’s true heroes – a courageous and selfless Christian who gave away everything he had for the benefit of others,” she said.
“With the exception of his family’s annual living expenses, he spent the rest of his salary – his family’s entire income, really – on the men he took under his spiritual wing. He did, in almost complete certainty, spend virtually everything he owned. He filled his backpack with Woodbines, Bibles and a great deal of love.”
Book Cover: A Seeker After Truths by Dr Linda Parker
Troops were issued with two ounces of cheap rolling tobacco with their rations, but supply was irregular. Woodbines, which were strong and unfiltered, were not widely available on the Western Front and were like gold dust in the trenches.
Dr Parker – the author of A Seeker After Truths: The Life and Times of G A Studdert Kennedy (‘Woodbine Willie’) 1883–1929 – estimates he gave away 864,980 cigarettes at his own expense. She reached the figure by calculating the total number of men Studdert Kennedy is likely to have met between December 1915 and September 1918, the smoking rate among troops at the time, and his propensity to offer one or more cigarettes to “every man he met”.
She believes that over the course of nearly three years, he spent the equivalent of £43,249 in today’s money – every spare penny of his Army’s salary. This is based on a packet of five Woodbines costing 1d, which equals 25p today. His grandson, the Reverend Canon Andrew Studdert-Kennedy, team rector in Marlborough, Wiltshire, and an honorary chaplain to the Queen, agrees with Dr Parker’s findings.
“Anecdotes about my grandfather’s generosity are part of the annals,” he said. “My grandmother allegedly came home one day to find him dragging their mattress downstairs to give to someone in need, and another time he gave his coat away.
“I’ve no doubt whatsoever that he did everything within his financial means to help those men on the front line.”
Before the war, Studdert Kennedy served as a vicar in a poor parish in Worcester. When war was declared against Germany he enlisted as a temporary chaplain.
In December 1915, he was stationed at a railway station in Rouen, France, where he held communion with the troops, wrote letters for the illiterate, and prayed with young soldiers. When they left for the front line, he gave them copies of the New Testament and, to the 96 per cent of soldiers who smoked, one or more Woodbines.
News of Studdert Kennedy’s kindness and generosity spread, and by early 1916 he was known as “Woodbine Willie”.
His fame spread further when he was sent to the trenches of the Somme, Ypres and Messines. He routinely prayed with dying soldiers and was awarded the Military Cross after running through “murderous machine gun fire” at Messines Bridge to deliver morphine to men screaming in agony in No Man’s Land. He was gassed at the Battle of the Canal du Nord in 1918 and sent home on sick leave.
After the Great War, Studdert Kennedy became a pacifist, social reformer, author and poet. He was also made personal chaplain to King George V. When he died in 1929 aged 45, ex-servicemen sent a wreath with a packet of Woodbines at the centre to his funeral in Worcester.
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