Historical revisionism in Wolf Hall : redeeming Thomas Cromwell

• Main Author: Lim, Stella Huei Lin
• Other Authors: School of Humanities and Social Sciences
• Format: Final Year Project
• Language: English
• Published: 2014
• Subjects: DRNTU::Humanities
• Online Access: http://hdl.handle.net/10356/59293
• Institution: Nanyang Technological University

Contesting against the dark portrayals of Cromwell in most historical records, Hilary Mantel intervenes into conventional historical understanding of his character and attempts to conduct a historical revisionism of the Tudor villain by contextualising his evil deeds in order to moderate and justify them, through Wolf Hall. This paper attempts to rehabilitate Cromwell’s evil image as portrayed by most historical records by exonerating him from his charges against history through understanding the motivations of his evil deeds via various theoretical frameworks. This paper will show that the socio-religious climate of the English Reformation formed a slippery slope where differing moral standards could lead to the confusion of what is truly good. Following which, a reading of Cromwell’s evil deeds through a Platonic framework suggests that Cromwell is not inherently evil. Instead, his evil is a result of a mere confusion, compelled by the desperation which is created by experiences in his turbulent past. Thus he mistakenly locates good in the wrong places. Lastly, Hannah Arendt’s modern-day philosophical understanding of evil offers a contemporary parallel to Plato’s reading of the absence of evil in Cromwell’s character by seeing him as a mere functionary of higher orders.