Thomas Cromwell (not to be confused with Oliver Cromwell who was born almost 60 years after Thomas's death) was was Henry VIII's chief minister from 1532 to 1540.
Cromwell masterminded the dissolution of the monasteries, in which Henry disbanded England's monasteries, nunneries and friaries and took their income (which is why, to this day, their are many ruined monasteries in England and why England has no nuns and monks). He also advocated the English church's break with Rome (which is why England's monarch, and not the Pope, is the head of the Church of England).
Both Cromwell and Henry were brutal. 15 Carthusian monks who had refused to acknowledge Henry as the new Supreme Governor of the English Church were herded in to the damp and putrid Fleet prison in London and deliberately starved.
During the Pilgrimage of Grace, when Northern England protested against the dissoultion of the monasteries, the protestors' leader, Robert Aske, begged not be hanged, drawn and quartered. Henry agreed, so instead (with cruel humour) hung him in chains from the walls of York Castle leaving him to die of thirst and anger.
Eventually, Thomas fell out of favour with the King. He was beheaded at the Tower of London on 28 July 1540, the head stuck on a pike, facing away from the City, in disgrace.
Now, Cromwell is the subject of Hilary Mantel's Booker-winning novel, Wolf Hall, which delves deep into the psychology of his pathological lust for power.
Prince of Darkness: The truth about Thomas Cromwell
By C J Sansom
09th October 2009
Daily Mail
His birth was humble in the extreme, something that would haunt him as he ascended the greasy pole of power and influence, and moved more and more among the scornful aristocrats of the court.
Thomas Cromwell might have been born the son of an alehouse keeper, but he rose to become Henry VIII's chief minister - one of the most ruthless and powerful operators ever to dominate the politics of this country.
His mastery of the black arts of spin and propaganda, of flattery, patronage and sudden betrayal, make the most ruthless modern politicians seem mild by comparison.
He ran a spy network that was the nearest thing a 16th-century regime could get to the Stasi, saw off his foes with trumped up charges of adultery and revelled in the torture of his enemies.
Thomas Cromwell, shown here in 1534, built a network of spies and informer
In a reign of unadulterated terror against the Church, he masterminded the dissolution of the monasteries and the biggest land grab since the Norman invasion of 1066 - seizing one-sixth of the nation's wealth and turning it over to his master, the King.
He was a man whose private life was filled with tragedy, who ultimately went to the scaffold when he put his religious convictions above his Machiavellian politics.
Now, Thomas Cromwell - not to be confused with the better known Oliver Cromwell of the following century - is back in the news.
He is the brooding subject of Hilary Mantel's Booker-winning novel, Wolf Hall, which delves deep into the psychology of his pathological lust for power, and his total absence of scruple in attaining it.
Yet it is also a book which manages to find humanity and heartbreaking pathos amid the brutality of his turbulent life and tragic fall.
James Frain (left) played Thomas Cromwell alongside Jonathan Rhys-Meyers, who starred as King Henry VIII, in the BBC TV series Tudors
However, we must remember that Wolf Hall, though an excellent book, is a work of fiction. So who was the real Cromwell? And what was it that drove him to such appalling, inhuman excesses?
Not surprisingly for someone of such humble birth, we have no records of how Cromwell's early life was spent, nor whether he had any schooling.
We can only guess at the grinding poverty of young Thomas's boyhood, the sparse, miserable diet, the bitter cold of the Tudor winters and the stench of the Thames in high summer.
It was a world in which the weak died, and only the strongest survived. Thomas, with an iron will and an almost limitless ambition, was a survivor.
He would become a master of languages, speaking Latin and Italian fluently, though whether he was taught these at school seems unlikely.
More probably, with his quick, brilliant brain, he picked them up on his mysterious travels, on which he embarked some time in his teens.
We know that he fought as a mercenary in the savage Italian wars of the early 16th century, as the Spanish, French and Venetians fought bitterly for power and territory.
One shrewd and cynical observer of these ruinous wars was Niccolo Machiavelli, a brilliant Florentine who would go on to write the book The Prince, one of the most notorious works of all time, giving us the word 'Machiavellian'.
The Prince describes with unflinching candour the grim truth about how power is actually seized and held on to in the world of men.
Machiavelli observed that: 'A man who strives after goodness in all his acts is sure to come to ruin, since there are so many men who are not good.'
Likewise he said that while it is important for a successful ruler to appear honest, merciful and humane, in reality he should eschew these qualities as they will only make him weak.
Small wonder that the Catholic Church had The Prince banned. Yet it circulated widely, and Thomas Cromwell certainly knew it and seems to have taken its lessons to heart.
Here was the New Learning of the Renaissance at its most ruthless and worldly.
Hilary Mantel winner of the Man Booker Prize for Fiction for her book, Wolf Hall
Cromwell would also have encountered the first stirrings of Protestantism on his travels. Armed with such dangerous ideas, he went on to the Netherlands, where he established the beginnings of his own personal fortune as a merchant, probably in the lucrative wool trade. Money is also power.
He came back to England, a small island kingdom, still in many ways in the Middle Ages: a King who went jousting, a court bedecked in cloth of gold and finery, and politics dominated by a hereditary caste of grand aristocrats.
Henry's court very much spoke the language of chivalry and justice, while paying lip-service to the more humanitarian side of the new, humanist ideals.
Cromwell set about becoming a lawyer, always a useful grounding for the politically ambitious. This in itself was an astonishing achievement for a low-born mercenary and tradesman.
He must have paid his own way through the Inns of Court, qualifying as a barrister, no doubt encountering scorn from the better-born lawyers surrounding him.
He seems to have studied hard, kept silent, and bided his time. Eventually he would rise to the most senior levels of the judiciary, becoming Master of the Rolls.
Meanwhile he was noticed by Cardinal Wolsey, also from humble origins, the son of an Ipswich butcher - though the Church was always more open to the low-born - and the second most powerful man in the kingdom after the King.
Henry was lazy and bored by administration, delegating it to the Cardinal. Thomas Cromwell soon became Wolsey's secretary and right-hand man.
During this time, Henry, still the devoutly Roman Catholic monarch of a Catholic country, was agonising over his wish to divorce Catherine of Aragon, who had failed to give him the son the Tudor dynasty needed and was past childbearing age.
He wished to marry the feisty, sexy and much younger Anne Boleyn.
Wolsey bullied, threatened and begged the Papacy to annul the marriage for six long years. His failure eventually aroused the King's anger, and he fell spectacularly from royal favour.
In 1530 he was riding back to London to face charges of treason when he died, a broken man.
Cromwell was said to have wept at his patron's fall. Yet within a year or two, he was well on the way to becoming the King's chief minster.
In 1534 Cromwell had his portrait painted by the great court painter, Hans Holbein.
Dressed in severe black fur-lined robes, Cromwell, a paper in his hand, middle-aged and pudgy-faced, nevertheless continues to exude all the sense of physical threat, menace and sheer power of an ex-mercenary.
In addition to his stocky bulk there are also the small, penetrating eyes, which you would not wish to see at an interrogation. You sense he would see through you, pitilessly.
Gradually, relentlessly, Cromwell built up his power. He had the King's ear, and Henry, though he loved the pomp and show of aristocratic life, trusted this taciturn, low-born man implicitly.
Cromwell understood that though the King was no fool, he was gullible, suspicious and easily influenced, and a whisper or two in his ear at the right moment could bring about the ruin of an enemy.
During his swift rise to power, however, tragedy struck. Cromwell's wife Elizabeth and their two daughters died of the plague.
Only a son, Gregory, survived. Cromwell did succeed in marrying the boy off to a sister of the Queen, Jane Seymour, but like so many sons of powerful and successful men, Gregory would come to nothing.
As for the deaths of his wife and daughters, we know nothing of Thomas's heartbreak, though Hilary Mantel imagines it movingly. He never remarried, seeming to become married to the State.
In the slow transformation of England from Catholicism to Protestantism, Thomas Cromwell oversaw some of the greatest changes ever made in England - and the greatest increase in power of the centralised state over the life of the nation.
In medieval times it was the Church and the monasteries, for instance, which had provided the country with its schools and hospitals, quite independently of king or Parliament.
Yet now most of those monasteries were falling into decay, and as Cromwell slowly edged his country towards Protestant practices, he saw a brilliant way of further augmenting centralised power and providing the King with new riches.
Destroy the monasteries, and seize their vast assets.
Though decrepit, the monasteries of Tudor England still owned an astonishing one-sixth of the nation's wealth and land, and reaped more in the form of various ecclesiastical taxes.
But Cromwell was far too clever simply to descend on the monasteries with troops of men-at-arms - not that there would have been nearly enough.
Instead he established searching enquiries, and a network of informers, inside the religious houses, collecting incriminating evidence.
He sent his own commissioners to the larger monasteries to offer the priors and abbots either a pension and a peaceful retirement - or deep trouble. The commissioners murmured that they knew about the abbot's mistress, or his illegitimate children.
Already, in the very blackest of black propaganda, Cromwell ordered the circulation of a bluntly pornographic pamphlet, actually called The Black Book, describing in salivating detail the very worst of the natural and unnatural lusts that the commissioners had been able to unearth.
And 15 Carthusian monks who had refused to acknowledge Henry as the new Supreme Governor of the English Church had already been herded in to the damp and putrid Fleet prison and deliberately, agonisingly starved. With such savage examples to hand, little surprise that most of England's last monks went quietly.
Martyrs are rare.
The great bare bones of the monasteries, the melancholy, majestic ruins of places like Rievaulx in Yorkshire or Glastonbury in Somerset, stand to this day as stark reminders of the ruin wrought by Cromwell's reign of terror.
The ruins of Rievaulx Abbey in Yorlshire
The result was that he and his king became more powerful still, and Henry became immensely rich.
Crucially, it meant that the King no longer needed to rely on Parliament for its crucial role of voting for taxes. Henry was becoming financially independent of Parliament altogether, and his chief minister was building him up into the great Machiavellian figure of the absolute ruler - or, in modern terms, a totalitarian dictator, answerable to none.
The Dissolution of the Monasteries did not go unchallenged, though. There was a huge revolt in the North, known as the Pilgrimage of Grace, involving a terrifying raggle-taggle army of some 20-30,000 outraged peasants and gentry.
The 1536 Pilgrimage of Grace was a protest in Northern England against the Dissolution of the Monasteries nd England's break with Rome
Henry, with the callous advice of Cromwell, surprised the Pilgrims by agreeing to all their demands, and they went peacefully home. Then he did nothing - except raise an army.
Finding their demands not satisfied, the North revolted again - and was brutally put down. Their leader, Robert Aske, begged not to be hanged, drawn and quartered.
Henry promised, and then with cruel humour, instead had him hung in chains from the walls of York Castle - an even crueller lingering death from starvation and thirst.
The image of Henry VIII as the man of limitless power, energy and brutality was now established - and behind him stood the all-seeing figure of his chief minister.
At the same time, Cromwell took a central role in the trial and execution of Anne Boleyn. By 1536 Henry had tired of Anne, who had also failed to provide him with a son.
Like Cromwell, whose rise she had helped, she was inclined to radical religious reform, and her unpopularity meant that those leading men who wanted to keep Catholic doctrine had her - and Cromwell - in her sights.
In a brilliant and savage manoeuvre, Cromwell himself took the lead against Anne, fabricating accusations of multiple adultery against her, including with her own brother, which astoundingly the King believed. Cromwell managed her show trial, swiftly followed by her execution.
In 1540 he arranged Henry's marriage to the Protestant, German Anne of Cleves. Henry disliked Anne from the moment he met her, but this time Cromwell did not abandon the Queen.
Henry wanted another divorce so he could marry Catherine Howard, scion of a great Catholic aristocratic family.
It is tempting to think that perhaps Cromwell's Protestant conscience at last triumphed over his political ambitions. He tried to keep the marriage alive; and Henry turned against the marriage's fixer.
At the fall of this low-born wretch, the old nobility of England rejoiced. The Duke of Norfolk - the head of the Howards - ripped the figure of St George from around his throat, and the Earl of Southampton tore the Order of the Garter from his leg.
He was beheaded at the Tower of London on 28 July 1540, the head stuck on a pike, facing away from the City, in disgrace.
Within a year, Henry VIII was blaming others for Cromwell's death, and lamenting the loss of one of the most faithful ministers he had ever had. But Henry always needed someone to blame.
He never appointed another Chief Minister, but for the first time ran policy himself. Seven years later Henry died - having wasted the entire amount gained from the monasteries in a huge and totally unsuccessful war against France, leaving England penniless and isolated. Cromwell, I think, would have dissuaded him.
The fourth novel in C.J. Sansom's bestselling Shardlake series, Revelation, is out now (£7.99).
dailymail.co.uk
Cromwell masterminded the dissolution of the monasteries, in which Henry disbanded England's monasteries, nunneries and friaries and took their income (which is why, to this day, their are many ruined monasteries in England and why England has no nuns and monks). He also advocated the English church's break with Rome (which is why England's monarch, and not the Pope, is the head of the Church of England).
Both Cromwell and Henry were brutal. 15 Carthusian monks who had refused to acknowledge Henry as the new Supreme Governor of the English Church were herded in to the damp and putrid Fleet prison in London and deliberately starved.
During the Pilgrimage of Grace, when Northern England protested against the dissoultion of the monasteries, the protestors' leader, Robert Aske, begged not be hanged, drawn and quartered. Henry agreed, so instead (with cruel humour) hung him in chains from the walls of York Castle leaving him to die of thirst and anger.
Eventually, Thomas fell out of favour with the King. He was beheaded at the Tower of London on 28 July 1540, the head stuck on a pike, facing away from the City, in disgrace.
Now, Cromwell is the subject of Hilary Mantel's Booker-winning novel, Wolf Hall, which delves deep into the psychology of his pathological lust for power.
Prince of Darkness: The truth about Thomas Cromwell
By C J Sansom
09th October 2009
Daily Mail
His birth was humble in the extreme, something that would haunt him as he ascended the greasy pole of power and influence, and moved more and more among the scornful aristocrats of the court.
Thomas Cromwell might have been born the son of an alehouse keeper, but he rose to become Henry VIII's chief minister - one of the most ruthless and powerful operators ever to dominate the politics of this country.
His mastery of the black arts of spin and propaganda, of flattery, patronage and sudden betrayal, make the most ruthless modern politicians seem mild by comparison.
He ran a spy network that was the nearest thing a 16th-century regime could get to the Stasi, saw off his foes with trumped up charges of adultery and revelled in the torture of his enemies.
Thomas Cromwell, shown here in 1534, built a network of spies and informer
In a reign of unadulterated terror against the Church, he masterminded the dissolution of the monasteries and the biggest land grab since the Norman invasion of 1066 - seizing one-sixth of the nation's wealth and turning it over to his master, the King.
He was a man whose private life was filled with tragedy, who ultimately went to the scaffold when he put his religious convictions above his Machiavellian politics.
Now, Thomas Cromwell - not to be confused with the better known Oliver Cromwell of the following century - is back in the news.
He is the brooding subject of Hilary Mantel's Booker-winning novel, Wolf Hall, which delves deep into the psychology of his pathological lust for power, and his total absence of scruple in attaining it.
Yet it is also a book which manages to find humanity and heartbreaking pathos amid the brutality of his turbulent life and tragic fall.
James Frain (left) played Thomas Cromwell alongside Jonathan Rhys-Meyers, who starred as King Henry VIII, in the BBC TV series Tudors
However, we must remember that Wolf Hall, though an excellent book, is a work of fiction. So who was the real Cromwell? And what was it that drove him to such appalling, inhuman excesses?
Not surprisingly for someone of such humble birth, we have no records of how Cromwell's early life was spent, nor whether he had any schooling.
We can only guess at the grinding poverty of young Thomas's boyhood, the sparse, miserable diet, the bitter cold of the Tudor winters and the stench of the Thames in high summer.
It was a world in which the weak died, and only the strongest survived. Thomas, with an iron will and an almost limitless ambition, was a survivor.
He would become a master of languages, speaking Latin and Italian fluently, though whether he was taught these at school seems unlikely.
More probably, with his quick, brilliant brain, he picked them up on his mysterious travels, on which he embarked some time in his teens.
We know that he fought as a mercenary in the savage Italian wars of the early 16th century, as the Spanish, French and Venetians fought bitterly for power and territory.
One shrewd and cynical observer of these ruinous wars was Niccolo Machiavelli, a brilliant Florentine who would go on to write the book The Prince, one of the most notorious works of all time, giving us the word 'Machiavellian'.
The Prince describes with unflinching candour the grim truth about how power is actually seized and held on to in the world of men.
Machiavelli observed that: 'A man who strives after goodness in all his acts is sure to come to ruin, since there are so many men who are not good.'
Likewise he said that while it is important for a successful ruler to appear honest, merciful and humane, in reality he should eschew these qualities as they will only make him weak.
Small wonder that the Catholic Church had The Prince banned. Yet it circulated widely, and Thomas Cromwell certainly knew it and seems to have taken its lessons to heart.
Here was the New Learning of the Renaissance at its most ruthless and worldly.
Hilary Mantel winner of the Man Booker Prize for Fiction for her book, Wolf Hall
Cromwell would also have encountered the first stirrings of Protestantism on his travels. Armed with such dangerous ideas, he went on to the Netherlands, where he established the beginnings of his own personal fortune as a merchant, probably in the lucrative wool trade. Money is also power.
He came back to England, a small island kingdom, still in many ways in the Middle Ages: a King who went jousting, a court bedecked in cloth of gold and finery, and politics dominated by a hereditary caste of grand aristocrats.
Henry's court very much spoke the language of chivalry and justice, while paying lip-service to the more humanitarian side of the new, humanist ideals.
Cromwell set about becoming a lawyer, always a useful grounding for the politically ambitious. This in itself was an astonishing achievement for a low-born mercenary and tradesman.
He must have paid his own way through the Inns of Court, qualifying as a barrister, no doubt encountering scorn from the better-born lawyers surrounding him.
He seems to have studied hard, kept silent, and bided his time. Eventually he would rise to the most senior levels of the judiciary, becoming Master of the Rolls.
Meanwhile he was noticed by Cardinal Wolsey, also from humble origins, the son of an Ipswich butcher - though the Church was always more open to the low-born - and the second most powerful man in the kingdom after the King.
Henry was lazy and bored by administration, delegating it to the Cardinal. Thomas Cromwell soon became Wolsey's secretary and right-hand man.
During this time, Henry, still the devoutly Roman Catholic monarch of a Catholic country, was agonising over his wish to divorce Catherine of Aragon, who had failed to give him the son the Tudor dynasty needed and was past childbearing age.
He wished to marry the feisty, sexy and much younger Anne Boleyn.
Wolsey bullied, threatened and begged the Papacy to annul the marriage for six long years. His failure eventually aroused the King's anger, and he fell spectacularly from royal favour.
In 1530 he was riding back to London to face charges of treason when he died, a broken man.
Cromwell was said to have wept at his patron's fall. Yet within a year or two, he was well on the way to becoming the King's chief minster.
In 1534 Cromwell had his portrait painted by the great court painter, Hans Holbein.
Dressed in severe black fur-lined robes, Cromwell, a paper in his hand, middle-aged and pudgy-faced, nevertheless continues to exude all the sense of physical threat, menace and sheer power of an ex-mercenary.
In addition to his stocky bulk there are also the small, penetrating eyes, which you would not wish to see at an interrogation. You sense he would see through you, pitilessly.
Gradually, relentlessly, Cromwell built up his power. He had the King's ear, and Henry, though he loved the pomp and show of aristocratic life, trusted this taciturn, low-born man implicitly.
Cromwell understood that though the King was no fool, he was gullible, suspicious and easily influenced, and a whisper or two in his ear at the right moment could bring about the ruin of an enemy.
During his swift rise to power, however, tragedy struck. Cromwell's wife Elizabeth and their two daughters died of the plague.
Only a son, Gregory, survived. Cromwell did succeed in marrying the boy off to a sister of the Queen, Jane Seymour, but like so many sons of powerful and successful men, Gregory would come to nothing.
As for the deaths of his wife and daughters, we know nothing of Thomas's heartbreak, though Hilary Mantel imagines it movingly. He never remarried, seeming to become married to the State.
In the slow transformation of England from Catholicism to Protestantism, Thomas Cromwell oversaw some of the greatest changes ever made in England - and the greatest increase in power of the centralised state over the life of the nation.
In medieval times it was the Church and the monasteries, for instance, which had provided the country with its schools and hospitals, quite independently of king or Parliament.
Yet now most of those monasteries were falling into decay, and as Cromwell slowly edged his country towards Protestant practices, he saw a brilliant way of further augmenting centralised power and providing the King with new riches.
Destroy the monasteries, and seize their vast assets.
Though decrepit, the monasteries of Tudor England still owned an astonishing one-sixth of the nation's wealth and land, and reaped more in the form of various ecclesiastical taxes.
But Cromwell was far too clever simply to descend on the monasteries with troops of men-at-arms - not that there would have been nearly enough.
Instead he established searching enquiries, and a network of informers, inside the religious houses, collecting incriminating evidence.
He sent his own commissioners to the larger monasteries to offer the priors and abbots either a pension and a peaceful retirement - or deep trouble. The commissioners murmured that they knew about the abbot's mistress, or his illegitimate children.
Already, in the very blackest of black propaganda, Cromwell ordered the circulation of a bluntly pornographic pamphlet, actually called The Black Book, describing in salivating detail the very worst of the natural and unnatural lusts that the commissioners had been able to unearth.
And 15 Carthusian monks who had refused to acknowledge Henry as the new Supreme Governor of the English Church had already been herded in to the damp and putrid Fleet prison and deliberately, agonisingly starved. With such savage examples to hand, little surprise that most of England's last monks went quietly.
Martyrs are rare.
The great bare bones of the monasteries, the melancholy, majestic ruins of places like Rievaulx in Yorkshire or Glastonbury in Somerset, stand to this day as stark reminders of the ruin wrought by Cromwell's reign of terror.
The ruins of Rievaulx Abbey in Yorlshire
The result was that he and his king became more powerful still, and Henry became immensely rich.
Crucially, it meant that the King no longer needed to rely on Parliament for its crucial role of voting for taxes. Henry was becoming financially independent of Parliament altogether, and his chief minister was building him up into the great Machiavellian figure of the absolute ruler - or, in modern terms, a totalitarian dictator, answerable to none.
The Dissolution of the Monasteries did not go unchallenged, though. There was a huge revolt in the North, known as the Pilgrimage of Grace, involving a terrifying raggle-taggle army of some 20-30,000 outraged peasants and gentry.
The 1536 Pilgrimage of Grace was a protest in Northern England against the Dissolution of the Monasteries nd England's break with Rome
Henry, with the callous advice of Cromwell, surprised the Pilgrims by agreeing to all their demands, and they went peacefully home. Then he did nothing - except raise an army.
Finding their demands not satisfied, the North revolted again - and was brutally put down. Their leader, Robert Aske, begged not to be hanged, drawn and quartered.
Henry promised, and then with cruel humour, instead had him hung in chains from the walls of York Castle - an even crueller lingering death from starvation and thirst.
The image of Henry VIII as the man of limitless power, energy and brutality was now established - and behind him stood the all-seeing figure of his chief minister.
At the same time, Cromwell took a central role in the trial and execution of Anne Boleyn. By 1536 Henry had tired of Anne, who had also failed to provide him with a son.
Like Cromwell, whose rise she had helped, she was inclined to radical religious reform, and her unpopularity meant that those leading men who wanted to keep Catholic doctrine had her - and Cromwell - in her sights.
In a brilliant and savage manoeuvre, Cromwell himself took the lead against Anne, fabricating accusations of multiple adultery against her, including with her own brother, which astoundingly the King believed. Cromwell managed her show trial, swiftly followed by her execution.
In 1540 he arranged Henry's marriage to the Protestant, German Anne of Cleves. Henry disliked Anne from the moment he met her, but this time Cromwell did not abandon the Queen.
Henry wanted another divorce so he could marry Catherine Howard, scion of a great Catholic aristocratic family.
It is tempting to think that perhaps Cromwell's Protestant conscience at last triumphed over his political ambitions. He tried to keep the marriage alive; and Henry turned against the marriage's fixer.
At the fall of this low-born wretch, the old nobility of England rejoiced. The Duke of Norfolk - the head of the Howards - ripped the figure of St George from around his throat, and the Earl of Southampton tore the Order of the Garter from his leg.
He was beheaded at the Tower of London on 28 July 1540, the head stuck on a pike, facing away from the City, in disgrace.
Within a year, Henry VIII was blaming others for Cromwell's death, and lamenting the loss of one of the most faithful ministers he had ever had. But Henry always needed someone to blame.
He never appointed another Chief Minister, but for the first time ran policy himself. Seven years later Henry died - having wasted the entire amount gained from the monasteries in a huge and totally unsuccessful war against France, leaving England penniless and isolated. Cromwell, I think, would have dissuaded him.
The fourth novel in C.J. Sansom's bestselling Shardlake series, Revelation, is out now (£7.99).
dailymail.co.uk
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