Power, Politics, and a Man Who Remembers Everything
Review of Hilary Mantel's "Wolf Hall" (2009)
Office politics bothering you? Try navigating King Henry VIII's court, where a wrong word can cost your head.
Hilary Mantel's Wolf Hall (2009) set a new standard for historical fiction by telling the well-worn tale of Henry VIII's break with the Roman Catholic Church through the eyes of Thomas Cromwell, a blacksmith's son who rose to become the king's most trusted advisor.
Mantel drags Cromwell out of the history books—where he’s often cast as a villain—and thrusts him into the spotlight as the most fascinating, cunning, and oddly sympathetic figure of Henry VIII’s court.
She also dispenses with the usual Tudor tropes – no bodice-ripping, no convenient exposition, no cartoonish Henry VIII. Instead, she plunges you into the mindset of the 1520s with such conviction that you'll find yourself thinking in present tense.
In what could be the novel's thesis statement, Mantel's Cromwell muses:
"It's not the having and the getting, but the wanting and the choosing."
When Historical Fiction Becomes Literature
The novel follows Cromwell’s rise from a blacksmith’s son to Henry VIII’s most trusted advisor, manoeuvering through the treacherous labyrinth of Tudor politics.
England is on the brink of religious upheaval. The king, desperate for a male heir, wants to discard Catherine of Aragon and marry Anne Boleyn. The Pope won’t allow it. Enter Cromwell, a man who can make the impossible happen.
“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. He will quote you a nice point in the old authors, from Plato to Plautus and back again. He knows new poetry, and can say it in Italian. He works all hours, first up and last to bed. He makes money and he spends it. He will take a bet on anything.”
Mantel doesn’t give you a detached, omniscient view of events. Instead, you see everything through Cromwell’s sharp, calculating eyes.
“You learn nothing about men by snubbing them and crushing their pride. You must ask them what it is they can do in this world, that they alone can do.”
His mind is a ledger, constantly weighing debts and favors, cataloging who can be used and who must be destroyed.
And yet, he’s no mere schemer—he’s a survivor, a man who’s been beaten, exiled, and shaped by hardship.
“Fortitude. ... It means fixity of purpose. It means endurance. It means having the strength to live with what constrains you.
Where Mantel Shines
The writing is electric. Mantel’s prose is precise, lyrical, and filled with quiet menace.
“Over the city lies the sweet, rotting odor of yesterday's unrecollected sins.”
She writes in the present tense, a bold choice that makes everything feel immediate, as if history is unfolding in real-time.
"The world is not run from where he thinks. Not from border fortresses, not even from Whitehall. The world is run from Antwerp, from Florence, from places he has never imagined; from Lisbon, from where the ships with sails of silk drift west and are burned up in the sun. Not from the castle walls, but from counting houses, not be the call of the bugle, but by the click of the abacus, not by the grate and click of the mechanism of the gun but by the scrape of the pen on the page of the promissory note that pays for the gun and the gunsmith and the powder and shot.”
Mantel's most daring choice is her use of "he" to refer to Cromwell throughout, creating an intimacy so close it's almost claustrophobic.
You're not just reading about Cromwell; you're wearing his skin, seeing through his eyes, feeling the weight of his rings on your fingers.
When he notes that "some say the Tudors were descended from King Arthur," you hear the slight skepticism in his thought.
Dialogue crackles with wit and tension.
“I picked up a snake once. In Italy."
"Why did you do that?"
"For a bet."
"Was it poisonous?"
"We didn't know. That was the point of the bet."
"Did it bite you?"
"Of course."
"Why of course?"
"It wouldn't be much of a story, would it? If I'd put it down unharmed, and away it slid?”
Court intrigue is rendered with the detail of a forensic autopsy.
"The fate of peoples is made like this, two men in small rooms. Forget the coronations, the conclaves of cardinals, the pomp and processions. This is how the world changes."
When someone falls from favour, you feel the cold steel of power shifting against them.
Her characters defy traditional portrayal. Her Thomas More is no "Man for All Seasons" but a cruel ideologue who burns heretics.
“A lie is no less a lie because it is a thousand years old. Your undivided church has liked nothing better than persecuting its own members, burning them and hacking them apart when they stood by their own conscience, slashing their bellies open and feeding their guts to dogs.”
Anne Boleyn becomes a political strategist rather than a seductress.
“He wants to say, because Anne is not a carnal being, she is a calculating being, with a cold slick brain at work behind her hungry black eyes. "I believe any woman who can say no to the King of England and keep on saying it, has the wit to say no to any number of men, including you, including Harry Percy, including anyone else she may choose to torment for her own sport while she is arranging her career in the way it suits her. So I think, yes, you've been made into a fool, but not quite in the way you thought.”
And Mantel gives Cromwell layers—he’s ruthless, yes, but also deeply loyal, darkly funny, and capable of genuine love and grief.
What might disappoint you
The book's greatest strength – its uncompromising immersion in the period – can also be its weakness. This is not a light read.
Mantel demands your attention, and if you don’t give it, the first hundred pages alone can become notoriously challenging. You will struggle to track the multiple Thomases, countless Marys, shifting alliances, and unspoken threats.
Mantel's use of “he” without clarification can be disorienting, especially in crowded scenes.
And while Cromwell is compelling, he’s so competent, so in control, that he rarely feels vulnerable. You admire him, even fear him, but do you truly fear for him?
That lack of unpredictability might make the book feel slow at times, especially if you already know the historical outcomes.
The Verdict: A Masterpiece of Political Intrigue
Wolf Hall is a towering achievement. It’s history told with a novelist’s ear for character and a playwright’s instinct for drama.
“Some of these things are true and some of them lies. But they are all good stories.”
Wolf Hall won the 2009 Man Booker Prize and spawned a successful BBC adaptation starring Mark Rylance.
The novel sparked renewed interest in Tudor history and influenced countless subsequent historical novels, art exhibitions, walking tours of Tudor London, and even fashion collections.
Academic historians have engaged with Mantel's interpretation, leading to new scholarship about Cromwell's role in the English Reformation. "Cromwellian" has become shorthand for a particular kind of political pragmatism.
“It is wise to conceal the past even if there is nothing to conceal. A man’s power is in the half-light, in the half-seen movements of his hand and the unguessed-at expression of his face. It is the absence of facts that frightens people: the gap you open, into which they pour their fears, fantasies, desires.”
If you want spectacle, go watch The Tudors. If you want to live inside the mind of a man who shaped history, read this.
Read Next:
If you’re craving more Tudor intrigue, Bring Up the Bodies, Mantel’s sequel, is even sharper and deadlier.
For a different take on Henry VIII’s court, Alison Weir’s The Lady in the Tower dissects Anne Boleyn’s downfall with forensic detail.
Diarmaid MacCulloch's biography Thomas Cromwell: A Revolutionary Life provides scholarly context for Mantel's portrayal.
And if you want another novel that turns a historical villain into a protagonist, Robert Graves’s I, Claudius does for the Roman Empire what Mantel does for Tudor England.