It seems that Thomas Cromwell rarely talked about his life. He is supposed to have told Thomas Cranmer, ‘I was a ruffian in my youth’, but there are huge blanks in the record which he never troubled to fill in. His early career is very hard to reconstruct. To the Elizabethan writer John Foxe, Cromwell was a hero and a martyr for the Protestant cause. He tells some odd and entertaining stories about him in Actes and Monuments; they don’t quite fit together. But then, our memories never quite fit together either, and I have tried to suggest in this book how incomplete and sporadic our inner record of our life is apt to be. Cromwell kept no diaries, and his many letters are business letters. They are strictly to the point, except for occasional outbursts of strong feeling, suggesting that he was not a passionless man, but a man who exercised iron self-control. From the early 1530s to the end of the decade, the business that crossed his desk can be understood from the basic source for students of Henry’s reign, the collected Letters & Papers, Foreign and Domestic. Cromwell’s letters were published in 1902 by the scholar Roger Bigelow Merriman in a collected edition, in the obscurity of the original spelling and with a commentary of rare obtuseness. Hardly any of the material is personal. There is nothing for a biographer to work with. There are no good biographies of Thomas Cromwell, though there are many studies of his policies, and the historian G. R. Elton devoted a great part of his working life to understanding what Cromwell did and why.

For a novelist, this absence of intimate material is both a problem and an opportunity. I have had to do my best with hints and possibilities. Did he really meet Thomas More when he was a small child? There is a coincidence of time and place which adds up (in the novelist’s arithmetic) to an opportunity; his uncle, John Cromwell, was indeed a cook at Lambeth Palace when 14-year-old More was a page in the household. Did Cromwell love his daughters, who died young? We don’t know, but we can see how he cared for his son, and he would surely have educated Anne and Grace if they had lived; he moved in the same circles as More, and education for girls was the fashion. Stray remarks of Cromwell’s show how he admired strong and clever women. But did he – it seems unlikely – really like small dogs? A 1534 letter to Lord Lisle in Calais from his man of business in England suggests that a present of ‘some pretty dog for Master Secretary’ should be high among his lordship’s priorities.

Everyone who has written about Cromwell tells how George Cavendish, Cardinal Wolsey’s gentleman usher, came into the Great Chamber at the palace of Esher ‘upon All-Hallows day in the morning … where I found Master Cromwell leaning in the great window, with a Primer in his hand, saying of Our Lady mattins … he prayed not more earnestly than the tears distilled from his eyes.’ When asked why he was crying, Cromwell said, ‘I am like to lose all that I have toiled for all the days of my life.’ This makes sense; his patron Wolsey had fallen from grace, and Cromwell would be disgraced too, perhaps losing even more than his livelihood. Historians inquire no further. As a novelist, I ask if people cry for just one reason. I notice the date; it’s early November, it’s the time of year when dead souls slide through the barrier from the next world into this. You need not be superstitious to feel them in the cold air. Cromwell had lost his wife and both daughters within a couple of years of each other. His situation that winter’s day was one of unremitting bleakness. I have deduced his state of mind, and also noticed with admiration the bounce and resilience which has him say, moments later, ‘I do intend (God willing), this afternoon, when my lord hath dined, to ride to London and so to the court, where I will either make or mar before I come again.’

This novel takes me only partway through the story of Cromwell’s rise to power. I admire him for his tenacity, his endurance and his brilliant politician’s brain. He was a visionary, but a practical one: one of those rare people who can both grasp the big picture and nail down the details. In writing this book I have pushed and shoved at a solid intractable mass of historical material. It’s hard to please both the historian and the literary critic. The former wonders why you don’t include all the detail – don’t you know it? – and the latter wonders why you aren’t more slick; couldn’t you lick history into a more dramatic shape? The art, if there is one, lies in grasping why things happened and then forgetting the reasons. Unlike the historian, the novelist doesn’t operate through hindsight. She lives inside the consciousness of her characters, for whom the future is a blank. Acting always on imperfect information and, like all of us, only half-conscious of their own motivations, they have to hazard the unknown. It is up to the historian to analyze their actions and pass judgment in retrospect. The novelist agrees just to move forward with her characters, walking into the dark.

I realized quite late in life, as these things go. A lot of people know they’re going to be writers when they’re children, but I made a conscious decision to become one when I was 22, when, because of my poor health, I saw other career prospects slipping away from me. I knew I could write – you couldn’t take the decision otherwise – but what I didn’t know was whether I could write fiction. I didn’t seem to be what people call a ‘natural storyteller’. I had to learn that bit.

How did you first come across Cromwell, and when did you decide to write about him?

I first came across him when I was a child learning history in a Catholic school. I grew up with the sainted Thomas More looking down from stained-glass windows. As I am a contrarian, it made me ask whether there was more to Cromwell’s story than just his opposition to More, and I carried that question with me. When I began writing, I registered him in my mind as a potential subject. This would have been in the 1970s, before I’d finished my first novel. There seemed to be a lot of blanks in his story, and it wasn’t easy to find out anything about him, but it’s in those gaps that the novelist goes to work.

When you eventually came to write about Cromwell, was there a discovery that helped you to unlock his character?

When I began writing Wolf Hall, it was the arc of Cromwell’s story, the transformation from blacksmith’s son to Earl of Essex, that fascinated me. I wondered, ‘How is that done?’ You’ve got to try to answer that question – it’s the very kind of question that novels are for. But what made me sure that I could work with him, so to speak, was a letter he wrote to a friend in the 1520s, when he was an MP. It is a huge rhetorical description of the course of Parliament and all the business it dealt with, which finishes with a simple, and totally deflationary, line. I paraphrase: ‘And at the end of it, absolutely nothing changed.’ The wry humour in that letter showed me there was a personality that I could write about.

Another thing that drew me was Cromwell’s will, which he wrote towards the end of the 1520s. When you’ve seen somebody’s life so minutely taken apart, when you know who’s going to get his books and who’s going to get his second-best gelding, and you know the names of the people in his household, you become part of that life. You see his daily existence and routine and his whole system of orienting to the world. Seeing the will was like being able to go into Cromwell’s house and take photographs.

How did you find a title?

I liked the idea of a book that was always in progress, right up until its last words. Wolf Hall, the Seymour house in Wiltshire, is where we’re going at the end of the book. But, of course, I chose it primarily for its metaphorical resonance: who could resist it? The whole of Henry’s court is Wolf Hall.

‘Alistair Campbell with an axe’ is one of the less flattering descriptions given to Cromwell by the historian David Starkey. What persuaded you that this unlikely hero not only required, but actually deserved an advocate?

I think Cromwell’s been given a very hard time by writers. In fiction and drama he’s been caricatured as an evil figure in a black cloak, lurking in the wings with dishonourable intentions. In biography he’s missing, because his private life is almost entirely off the record.

David Starkey’s phrase works wonderfully to alert you to Cromwell’s role as a propagandist for Henry, but Cromwell was a lot more subtle than Alistair Campbell – or at least, more subtle than the popular picture of Alistair Campbell suggests. Cromwell didn’t deploy his heavy artillery unless he needed to. He was a persuader and a negotiator and, to a degree, a compromiser.

I think the picture darkened with the Victorians. Cromwell’s image hasn’t always been bad: in Elizabethan legend and literature he was a hero, but to the Victorians he presented a problem. He wasn’t a varsity man. Historians couldn’t get their heads around the idea of a member of the lower orders rising so high in the hierarchy. There was also a sentimentality about the medieval world, with Cromwell seen as one of its destroyers. This idea persists today.

How did you tackle the challenge of writing about a period of history that is so familiar to modern readers? And why did you choose to do so in the present tense?

The Tudors are the great national soap opera; their story has been worked over so extensively that we see it as having a kind of inevitable, predetermined quality about it, so I needed to find a way of telling the story that would create an immediacy of viewpoint and cancel out the preconceptions we were brought up with. In writing the opening scene, of the boy being beaten up by his father, I was simply launched into the present tense. And I stayed with it because it was a way for me to capture the soundtrack inside Cromwell’s head – the immediacy of his experience. Also, though we may know how it all ends, Henry and his court didn’t. They didn’t know that the War of the Roses had ended; because the Tudor claim was weak, they dreaded that civil war might break out again. Henry didn’t know he would have six wives – even when he married number five, he couldn’t have known it. The present tense forbids hindsight and propels us forward through this world, making it new, just as it was, in every unfolding moment, for the players.

How did you go about finding a voice for Cromwell and getting under his skin?

Because they were so often dictated, letters, personal or impersonal, can give you a sense of the rhythm and vocabulary of the character’s spoken voice, and hence their mode of thought. So you look at those, and you look at what other people have said about your character.

The main person who tells us about Cromwell is the Spanish Imperial Ambassador, Chapuys, who was his enemy, but he was also his neighbour in the city and someone whom Cromwell saw a great deal of. Chapuys was a very astute observer. He tells us about how, when you were talking to Cromwell, he would fasten his eyes on your face, to calculate minutely the effect his words were having on you. He also paints a portrait of Cromwell as a very open-handed, generous, affable host, a man with whom it was wonderful to have a conversation.

Can you talk a little about what it’s been like to live with a character like Cromwell during the writing of this book?

There’s huge exhilaration in following a career like this, charting someone’s rise and rise. I do think without doubt that you become completely involved: someone of Cromwell’s strength and optimism can’t help but get into you. But the downside of it is that sooner or later your character will fall from the heights. Living with Cromwell has been a good experience so far, but you’ll have to ask me again when I’ve executed him.

Near the end of the novel you write: ‘It’s the living that turn and chase the dead. The long bones and skulls are tumbled from their shrouds, and words like stones thrust in their rattling mouths. We edit their writings, we rewrite their lives.’ How much of a responsibility do you feel towards your historical characters, who have had an existence independent of your imagination, when you pin them to the page?

In the lines you’ve just quoted, I am holding up my hands and saying to readers, you might think that what I’m doing in this book is dubious – it might even be thought reprehensible – yet we can’t help but reimagine the past; we have no choice. It is part of us, and we must acknowledge that it is we who reimagine it, we in the present moment, who can’t help but project our own insights and preoccupations backwards.

I think this creates a responsibility for the writer. I feel research must be as good as I can possibly make it, and guesses should be made only where there are no facts to be had. They must be plausible. Where gaps occur, the way you fill them must offer a possible version. I owe these characters as much scholarship as I can contrive, and all my care to try to get them right.
I should also say that it’s immensely rewarding to feel that you have, perhaps, succeeded in reanimating someone. There is a kind of magic moment where you feel your characters are really speaking, and you don’t have to think about their dialogue any more. I found that very early in this book, particularly with Thomas Wolsey. As soon as he began to speak, I felt that my job was simply to take down what he said, like a secretary. There is a peculiar pleasure to be had in feeling that you’ve brought someone back to life in that way.

You’ve written in a number of forms – short story, memoir, the contemporary and historical novel. Have any of these had a bearing on the composition of Wolf Hall?

Looking back, I think that writing my memoir was a kind of training ground for future novels, and something that was good for me as a writer. There are people who insist that almost all your memories of childhood are later reconstructions, but what I found when writing my memoir was that my childhood rose before me as an utter sensory wraparound, so that I was able to inhabit my past, and my work was to simply describe it. When you write fiction, the object is to achieve that on behalf of a character that you’ve invented or a person who is dead. I don’t think I’ve ever managed to do it as successfully, in fiction, as I have in Wolf Hall.

What I also found when writing Giving Up the Ghost was that whilst I could capture the entirety of my childhood experiences, I often couldn’t tell the reader why things happened, or how the event I was describing linked to another, and I think I carried this discovery into Wolf Hall. When Cromwell remembers an incident from his childhood – for example, he recalls plunging the head of another boy into a butt of water – he has no idea why he did it, and I knew from my own experience that these gaps and holes are part of the texture of memory. In this book I was determined to reproduce a life from the inside. I thought, ‘Let us try to see a man in his full complexity. Even if there are bits that he himself doesn’t understand and can’t add up, let me still include them, because that’s the experience of being alive.’

Can you describe your mood on launching into the Tudor period once more, for the follow-up to Wolf Hall?

Exhilaration. I’m longing to be back in the thick of the action. Partly it’s because I want to know what’s going to happen next. When I write, there are often times when I go into a scene not quite sure what I think, knowing that the problem I have to solve revolves around one question, ‘How did this happen?’ And by the end of the scene I have an answer, because it’s happened on the page. So I am looking forward to getting back to those puzzles in the new book.

Also, I’ve been so heartened by the way in which Wolf Hall has been received. There’s always the danger with historical fiction that it may fall short as both literature and history. I knew when I took on this project that it was going to be a very difficult thing to do. But, ha! Who’s interested in what’s easy?