Roger Collett wrote:
> You might be interested in this:
> http://select.nytimes.com/mem/tnt.html?pagewanted=1&tntget=2008/01/20/books/review/Logan-t.html 
>

For years I've been a closet Thomas Cromwell admirer. That is probably a 
damning confession to a poetryetc-ite and totally irrelevant to anyone 
else except an historian.  My confession was not forced from me on the 
rack, and I trust it will not send me to Tyburn (I spent the last two 
years there and spiritual disembowelment is an overrated form of 
entertainment), where I can be subjected to endless discussions of 
publication minutiae.

I would rather take my chances in a room with Thomas Cromwell than in a 
discussion of editions or in a car driven by Dubya after a party at Yale.

This is one of those cases where the despised television led to better 
things.  In 1972, already on the road to read in Tudor literature 
leading up to Shakespeare himself, I watched the assuredly doctored Six 
Wives of Henry VIII with Keith Michell, followed by the equally 
interesting Elizabeth R with Glenda Jackson.  It was Henry who got to 
me, or rather, his ministers.  I don't know where in the world they 
found the actors Wolfe Morris and Bernard Hepton to impersonate Cromwell 
and Cranmer, but they were almost perfect physical reproductions sprung 
from Holbein portraits. Oh yes, they also could act.  As for Holbein the 
Younger, during my first go-round at Morgan Stanley in the mid-1990s (I 
should mention I'm back there, on my second "tour"), I tacked in my 
cubicle postcard-sized reproductions of Holbein's Cromwell and his 
antagonist Sir/St. Thomas More, acquired during a visit to the Frick 
Collection.  Both men taught me something it was far too easy for me to 
forget in years to come: you can't make an omelet without breaking a few 
eggs (how original!), but one day you are probably going to become the 
egg.  Aka, smartasses get them wiped.  Something like that.  In the end, 
all of them--More, Cromwell, Cranmer--wound up either stretching out 
their arms to signal the executioner to drop the ax, or (in Cranmer's 
case) smelling like Zabar's Delicatessen.

Tudor politics seemed very much like what J. F. Danby wrote about in 
connection with King Lear: a case of Handy-Dandy, damned if you do, 
damned if you don't.  Style was all because a grisly death was 
near-certain the closer you came to the throne.

It never occurred to me that Tudor political figures like Cromwell could 
be poetry fodder.  If I thought of building a poem around an historical 
figure (and I did, several times, but I don't show them because they 
mostly suck), I assumed I was indulging my taste for obscurantism and 
that nobody would care a damn to read about the Thaw-White murder in 
1906 ("WHO?"--see, I told you so!).  As far as Cromwell, helping form a 
secularly-governed Church and the British civil service are not 
necessarily the stuff of great verse.  I had forgotten, if I ever knew, 
that a "real" poet, Sir Thomas Wyatt, was under Cromwell's wing.  Tudor 
court life reminds me of what I've heard about life in New Jersey 
prisons: you allied yourself for protection to power, in the Jersey case 
to gangs like the Bloods, Crips, or Latin Kings.  Wyatt probably was 
fortunate to outlive his patron by two years before succumbing at age 39 
to one of the 3,000 diseases that could take you out back then.

Poor Cromwell, Earl of Essex for about 20 minutes.  He had one 
principle--to survive.  He was lucky to dive away from Wolsey just in 
time, and then to serve his King as the path to self-aggrandizement.  Of 
course he made one fatal mistake, trusting that the portrait of Anne von 
Cleves was the real deal, not an advertisement.  When I look at the 
Holbein portrait of a rather well-fed, serious Cromwell in middle age, I 
think of Dick Cheney.  Except Cromwell was probably a lot smarter and, 
if he was a soldier during his youth, undoubtedly was a better shot.

Ken

 
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Kenneth Wolman			kenwolman.wordpress.com
    Abuse of power comes as no surprise--Jenny Holzer