About the year 1533 Hans Holbein painted a portrait of Thomas Cromwell, a
lawyer in the service of King Henry VIII. Hans (as he was casually called) was
not yet established as Henry’s court painter, but drew his sitters from minor
courtiers and the Hanseatic merchant community. He was not seen as a remote
genius, more as a jobbing decorator who you would call in to design a tassel, a
gold cup, a salt cellar or the scenery for a pageant. Thomas Cromwell had not
yet acquired his status as Henry’s chief minister; as the paper on his desk
informs us, he was Master of the Jewel House. A gregarious, cosmopolitan man who
had spent time in Italy and the Low Countries, he was probably better placed to
know Holbein’s worth than many of his courtier contemporaries. The politician
and the painter, both due to rise rapidly at Henry’s court, were bound together
by a network of shared friends and shared interests.
But the portrait is not a friendly one. Holbein would soon paint The
Ambassadors, rich and splendid and symbol-laden, one of the icons of Western
art. There are no metaphors in his Cromwell picture. There is no echo of his
portrait of Thomas More: none of that swift intelligence, intensity, engagement
with the viewer. What you see is what you get. Cromwell looks like a man hard to
reach and hard to impress. He does not invite you to conversation. His posture
is attentive, though, as if he might be listening to someone or something beyond
the frame.
Of course, a Tudor statesman who commissioned his portrait didn’t want to
look bonny. He wanted to look powerful; he was the hand, the arm, of the state.
Even so, when (in my novel Wolf Hall) the portrait is unveiled, Cromwell himself
is taken aback. “I look like a mur derer,” he exclaims. His son Gregory says,
“Didn’t you know?”
It is as a murderer that Cromwell has come down to posterity: as the man who
tricked and slaughtered the saintly Thomas More, the man who ensnared and
executed Henry’s second queen, Anne Boleyn; who turned monks out on to the
roads, infiltrated spies into every corner of the land, and unleashed terror in
the service of the state. If these attributions contain a grain of truth, they
also embody a set of lazy assumptions, bundles of prejudice passed from one
generation to the next. Novelists and dramatists, who on the whole would rather
sensationalise than investigate, have seized on these assumptions to create a
reach-me-down villain. Holbein’s portrait is both the source of their
characterisation, and a reinforcement of it.
For full story and video link here to The Telegraph
For full story and video link here to The Telegraph
