Book Review – Wolf Hall by Hilary Mantel

Wolf Hall (Thomas Cromwell, #1)Wolf Hall by
Hilary Mantel
My rating: 4 of 5 stars

It’s a masterful account of Thomas Cromwell’s rise to power. Hilary Mantel has captured the essence of the time and has presented the readers a truthful journal of Tudar period. The book covers journey of Thomas Cromwell from a ruffian at Putney, becoming a lawyer and finally got himself installed as the chief minister at King Henry’s court. He acted as a fixer for King Henry & Anne Boleyn and engineered their marriage against strong opposition from Pope and Queen Katherine. The book covers the story till when Cromwell reaches the peak of his powers, it continues in the equally good sequels of this triology. The intrigues of King Henry’s court, the characterisation of Wolsey, Cranmer, both Archbishops and of Thomas Moore, author of Utopia provides readers a glimpse of difficult life under monarchs in medieval Europe. Cromwell went on the change England in ways that led the small island on the periphery of Europe to later become one of strongest empires in human history. Cromwell was one of the strongest and most powergful proponents of the English Reformation. He later became Viceregent in Spirituals and charted an evangelical
and reformist course for the Church of England breaking the hold of Catholic church on English society. This later allowed English society to adopt reformist, protestant beliefs, increased the nation’s efficiency in material and spiritual pursuits, ultimately leading to Industrial Revolution making England the premier nation of modern humanity.

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