Thomas cromwell and anne boleyn biography

4th January, 2016 in Biography & Memoir, History

By John Schofield

Truth is stranger than fiction, as the saying goes.

Thomas cromwell and anne boleyn biography

But telling the two apart is not always easy, especially in a subject as fraught as the fall of Anne Boleyn.

According to most biographies or other supposedly ‘factual’ accounts, with notable exceptions like George Bernard’s, Anne was falsely accused and destroyed by a conspiracy orchestrated by Thomas Cromwell.

She and Cromwell are said to be at loggerheads for some reason – maybe a quarrel over the monasteries. And it is taken for granted that witnesses were tortured, or threatened with torture, to extract confessions.

Cromwell is thus the arch villain of the Tudor court, a man whose perfidy and cruelty know no bounds; so surely the worthy, engaging hero of Wolf Hall and Bring up the Bodies must be a fictional character.

Well, maybe not, because when the Tudor archival records are exam