In practice, however, the division of labour between policy and politics, architect and salesman, has never been quite so benign. Far from being shrinking violets doing what is best, the powers behind the throne have all too often been true believers — feverish sectarians for fanatical causes. Here lies the paradox of the political aide. As misfits, they possess a greater desire for domination than do the exnominated parroters of establishment opinion. It is this quality that endears them to rulers. Donald Trump surely believed that only a batty figure like Steve Bannon was capable of doing something as daunting as draining the Beltway swamp. And yet the zealous aide is his own worst enemy. With no real curbs on his shadowy authority, there is the all-too-real danger of enemies accruing and mistakes multiplying. Ultimately, his unsound decisions catch up with him. So it is that his downfall is just as dramatic as his rise.

Take that political aide par excellence, Thomas Cromwell, who supplied the template for the tragedy of the power-drunk maverick. Half a millennium on, our fascination with the Cromwell story is still going strong. The late, great Hilary Mantel bagged two Bookers retelling it in her Wolf Hall series, which was followed by a Beeb adaptation. Now, the TV series is back with a sequel, Wolf Hall: The Mirror and the Light, another chiaroscuro romp through draughty Tudor piles enlivened by chiselled persiflage. The upshot of the renewed attention, no doubt aided by the taciturn brilliance of Mark Rylance’s sad-eyed performance, has been a reversal in Cromwell’s fortunes. Long vilified as an intemperate megalomaniac, he has been recast as one of history’s heroes.

What’s more, to contemporary sensibilities, Cromwell appears as a meritocrat. Here is the story of a plucky parvenu, a fellow of “base degree” as he himself put it, who rose to the very top through sheer skill.  It’s a rags-to-riches tale that has beguiled the very best. The German historian Geoffrey Elton’s mid-century view, now discarded but explosive at the time, was that Cromwell yanked England out of its mediaeval past by ushering in the “Tudor Revolution in Government”. Cromwell himself cultivated that image. This is the Cromwell of Holbein’s stern portrait, a mandarin hard at work with his quill and papers, unflecked by emotion, begetting England’s modern bureaucracy.

Truth be told, he did no such thing. As Diarmaid MacCulloch, his no-nonsense biographer shows, Cromwell was the quintessential mediaeval fixer, a hard-nosed, power-grubbing politico. There was nothing modern about the way he went about gobbling offices, hogging the king’s calendar, and staffing all echelons with loyalists. The rationalisation of the Privy Council as a modern cabinet of sorts, which Elton credited him for, in fact came in the way of Cromwell’s progress. He thrived in the cut and thrust of court life, its perils and possibilities, much as his descendants have done. The maverick political aides of our century — from Alastair Campbell to Dominic Cummings — really are a throwback to this Henrician world of old. Properly speaking, they are the Cromwells of today.

His modern heirs, of course, aren’t quite up there with the OG. Cromwell could be quite unsentimental in his handling of adversaries. For prophesying against the royal mésalliance with Anne Boleyn, for instance, the Catholic nun Elizabeth Barton was hung and beheaded, becoming, according to MacCulloch, “the only woman in English history to have her severed head placed among those spiked on London Bridge”. Then there was the fire and fury brought to bear on the Pilgrimage of Grace, the popular uprising by conservatives protesting social change.

Such bestial blitheness pointed to a willingness to tear up the rulebook if the occasion demanded it. But while Cromwell was a disruptor, he was also a diplomat. During his teenage stint as a globetrotting merchant, he absorbed tongues like a sponge, and in due course became “the best Italian in all England” — a linguistic ability he turned to good account by becoming Cardinal Wolsey’s protégé and later Henry VIII’s advisor during his break with the Bishop of Rome. Cromwell’s savoir-faire extended to delicate situations as well. It was as a marriage broker that he got into the good graces of England’s ruler, dealing with his breakup with Katherine of Aragon; the marriage to Boleyn, and then her beheading; and finally his wedding to a German princess, Anne of Cleves. It was the latter foray into matchmaking that proved his undoing. The well-upholstered Henry, in that innocent age before Ozempic, couldn’t get it up with Anne. Poor Cromwell became the fall guy.

Suggested reading

Alastair Campbell won't stop spinning

By Alwyn Turner

Throughout his brief decade in power, what was never in doubt was Cromwell’s ruthlessness as Henry’s enforcer. He proved capable of accelerating the pace of history without losing his grip on power — no mean achievement. Many historians have typically explained away some of his more radical measures as the work of a manipulative Machiavelli, loyal to no calling but his career. We now know, however, that Cromwell was that rare thing, a true believer, something of a fanatic even. His Protestantism, or more accurately his evangelicalism, was serious business. The historian Dominic Selwood wasn’t too far off the mark when he described Cromwell’s creed as the “Islamic State of his day”.

The same fanaticism can be glimpsed in Alastair Campbell, Tony Blair’s enforcer and latterly has-been podcaster. In recent years, he has tried to present himself as no more than a ventriloquist for New Labour, but at the time, Campbell appeared to be a true believer. Blair certainly thought so, describing his first encounter with the former tabloid hack as some kind of coup de foudre. Campbell had “clanking great balls”, Blair wrote in his memoirs. A rather abrasive character, Campbell was prepared to bare them at the slightest provocation, as he did during his war of retribution against David Kelly, the weapons inspector who accused Campbell of “sexing up” the Iraq dossier that made the case for the invasion that New Labour was itching for. Soon after, Kelly committed suicide. Relations between the press and government continued to deteriorate in the runup to the war thanks to Campbell’s bullying and hectoring. As a result, Campbell was dropped as Downing Street director of communications in August 2003.

Campbell may not have “sexed up” the dossier, but it is important not to lose sight of the forest for the trees. The fact remains that Campbell not only joined in beating the drums of war, but did so with an amplitude that put many of his party mates to shame. Like the cocksure Cromwell, he had something of the fundamentalist about him. And like Cromwell, his actions exacted a toll on the world beyond. The Iraq war resulted in some 600,000 deaths according to Lancet. Blair himself paid a price: along with his weird pact with Gordon Brown, it was his plummeting popularity on account of the war that led to his resignation. Still, as late as 2010, Campbell could declare that the war was one that Britain ought to be “proud of”.

The bearded Brummie Nick Timothy, by contrast, was a lesser Rasputin, despite his appropriate mien. As unelected advisors go, his reign wasn’t in any way damaging to the national fabric. His sin was more of a peccadillo. But he seems to have shared the hubris of a Campbell or Cromwell, and like them, was ultimately responsible for the reckless gambit that led to his downfall. Along with his joint chief of staff Fiona Hill, Timothy had the bright idea of cajoling his ruler into calling a snap election in 2017, thus giving Corbynism a new lease of life and his English compatriots a lesson in Northern Irish politics when May inevitably lost her majority and needed to be shored up by the DUP. After an inevitable Tory revolt, Timothy and Hill were duly put out to pasture.

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The moral weakness of Britain's ruling class

By Pratinav Anil

Thomas Cromwell’s greatest modern heir, undoubtedly, is Boris Johnson’s Svengali, Dominic Cummings. Their backgrounds, though, couldn’t have been more different. Cummings is no working-class lad from Putney. He may be an anti-establishment figure, but his credentials signal its deepest depths: Oxford via public school; father-in-law the baronet owner of Chillingham Castle; an Islington townhouse for a pied-à-terre. Also unlike Cromwell, who kept his cards close to his chest, Cummings likes to lay it on the line, as those subjected to his epithets know all too well: David Davis (“vain as Narcissus”), Nick Clegg (“revolting character”), Ed Llewellyn (“classic third-rate, suck-up-kick-down sycophant”) among others. Like Cromwell, however, Cummings was capable of being perfectly unforgiving when the occasion demanded it. Take his defence of herd immunity: the aim of the government, he declared early on in the pandemic, was to “protect the economy and if that means some pensioners die, too bad”. It’s a sentiment Cromwell might have approved of.

As Johnson’s unelected fixer, Cummings unleashed a “reign of terror”, according to Whitehall mandarins. He went over the head of Sajid Javid to fire one of the chancellor’s advisors, ordering “an armed police officer to escort her out of Downing Street”. Javid later resigned over Downing Street’s penchant for muscling in on Treasury appointments. Throughout his career, Cummings has cultivated the reputation of an iconoclast, by turns intrepid and independent. His Oxford tutor recalled that he was a bit of a Robespierre: “someone determined to bring down things that don’t work.” When he left his job as advisor to education secretary Michael Gove in 2014, Cummings explained his decision with a 237-page manifesto in which he argued that education ultimately didn’t really matter, since in the end it was genetics that determined ability.

The following year, he found himself in charge of Vote Leave, a perch from which he urged Leavers to “pick up a baseball bat and smash David Cameron and George Osborne over the head”. Cummings ran a slick show. “Take back control” was a clever empty signifier, throwing up a tent wide enough to encompass Left sovereigntists, Right xenophobes, and patriotic bien pensants. Less convincing was the downright dishonest claim that some 80 million Turks would descend on the Thames and Tyne. Cummings and his cronies would have surely known that Ankara’s accession was never a real prospect. The misrepresentation brings to mind the manner in which Boleyn was thrown under the bus by Cromwell, who maligned her for, inter alia, conducting incestuous relations with her brother.

Cummings’ next gig, his last real one, was his 16-month tenure as Johnson’s chief advisor. Early on, he set about courting “weirdos from William Gibson novels”, whose presence in the civil service would, he hoped, diminish the outsized influence of “Oxbridge English graduates”, the kind, apparently, “who chat about Lacan at dinner parties with TV producers”. At all events, unlike Cromwell, Cummings never really had a chance to shape the government in his image. His general disdain for “the rules” no doubt prompted him to break them by driving up to Durham despite reeling from Covid with his family, and then making a further sojourn to Barnard Castle despite a “weird” sensation in his eyes. His sorry-not-sorry mea culpa cut no ice. Not even Benedict Cumberbatch playing him in a biopic, nor for that matter BrewDog’s Barnard Castle Eye Test IPA, could save him from the Tory MPs clamouring for his ouster. Very simply, Cummings had made too many enemies.

These days, Campbell is a sterile podcaster, Cummings a logorrhoeic Substacker — forlorn advisors abandoned by their masters now adored only by a vanishing minority of diehards (Campbell) and blowhards (Cummings). They can thank their lucky stars that they don’t live in the age of Cromwell, when the ruling class tended to be rather literal-minded about the expression “heads will roll”. For all that, Cromwell’s age is closer to us than we might think. Shadowy figures of the likes of Morgan McSweeney, purger of the Left, and Waheed Alli, Santa to the front bench, continue to haunt Westminster, running the Labour show from behind the scenes. The throne may be gone, but the powers behind the throne remain.

Whether it does survive, or whether it plunges into crisis, can turn on the unexpected — where what is supposed to be is overturned by death or marital disaster. There is no way of human-proofing it. Monarchy must contend generation to generation, with the vulnerabilities inherent to human life.

It absorbs life’s seasons from birth to death. Each reign begins after a death and ends in one. It is an ongoing journey through mortality, resting on an idea that something given to each monarch at a reign’s beginning can at its end be passed on to the future. As Hilary Mantel has Thomas Cromwell meditate about kings in The Mirror & the Light: “that burst of light” bestowed in the coronation “has to last him. That instant’s transformation of grace must sustain him for thirty years, forty years, for the rest of his mortal life.” At times such as the crisis through which we are living — when, hour by hour, we know that in the midst of life we are in death and when we don’t know what’s coming for us — monarchy seasoned by death and rebirth has to be present. If it is not, it is pointless.

Last Sunday, in her four-minute broadcast from Windsor Castle, our 93-year-old Queen was unequivocally present. That is why her words and demeanour unleashed such deep emotion, even in life-long republicans like Alastair Campbell. In an unprecedented collective moment of worldwide fear and grief Queen Elizabeth II was present for the country and the Commonwealth, and present without performance or any overt display of emotion.

She made the past present too. Her life journey as monarch reaches deep into what Britain has chosen to remember about its past. When she invokes herself and her sister, Princess Margaret, broadcasting in October 1940 from Windsor on BBC’s Children’s Hour, and when she tells us “we will meet again”, she is summoning a story about the country’s endurance through a terrifying past trial.

Much could be remembered more accurately about all who fought for Britain during the Second World War, all who sacrificed, and at what human cost. Much has changed. The British empire is gone. The Union has seen rather better days. She has known much disappointment and sorrow, even in the last few months. But in reaching back to the past, she touched an ideal of collective purpose and individual stoicism that at times, it is too easy to suppose, is lost in its recesses. We would like to be who she remembers us to be, who she takes us to be, and perhaps because we listened to her, who we might find more compassion and inner strength to be.

Obviously the ‘we’ here is far from everybody. There are millions who did not watch on Sunday evening and who see no reason at all to care about what the Queen says. There are those who see the Queen not as a remarkable individual or a portal into a country’s collective memory. For them, she is a personification of unearned wealth and hierarchy, or an erroneous claim to British exceptionalism. There are those who do not see her at all. Some have scarcely ever been given a reason to feel or think that they belong to a collective realm she could symbolise.

Nonetheless, the ‘we’ of this monarchical moment is rather larger than those who voluntarily, knowingly, and happily would have signed up to any proposition about the monarchy’s usefulness a week ago. Under heightened conditions of life and death, there are bonds and attachments we discover we have to each other, to those who came before us, and to those who will come after us. Liberal ideas of the autonomous self and the conscious pursuit of self-realisation have always struggled with these wells of hidden, temporal emotion, sometimes with good reasons. But democratic politics need them and constitutional, powerless monarchy is as safe a vessel as there can be for them.

Further reading

Why doesn't Britain value its farmers?

By James Rebanks

Monarchy, and this Queen in particular, are potent checks on a cavalier assumption that our lives are primarily made by our own choices. As she said in the year that marked the 40th anniversary of her accession, “it’s a question of maturing into something that one’s got used to doing, and accepting the fact that here you are, and it’s your fate”.  But her capacity to move us also goes beyond her character. Her longevity could not be willed. Listening to her also comes with the knowledge that the time is not so far away when the country will have to go on without her.

Her reign has never escaped the travails thrown up by contingency. The rules of monarchy did not render her father King and she his heir. The Crown was not supposed to be the Queen’s fate. The heredity principle should have made her Nazi-sympathising uncle the country’s wartime King. If Edward VIII had stuck to the script and fathered a legitimate child, she would not have been more than the supporting cast.

George V died in the winter of 1936  fearing the worse for the monarchy, knowing responsibility for it would fall on his oldest son  and that he was powerless to change anything about what happened next . “After I am dead,” he told the Prime Minster, Stanley Baldwin, “the boy will ruin himself in twelve months.” But the King held out hope that the monarchy would, nonetheless, survive.

During the last weeks of his life, he reportedly said: “I pray to God that my eldest won will never marry and that nothing will come between Bertie [George VI] and Lilibet (Queen Elizabeth) and the throne”. Of course, his eldest son did marry, but his chosen bride only precipitated the Queen’s future accession.

Further reading

Call yourself a Monarchist?

By James Kanagasooriam

Her grandfather, whom she appears to have adored, lies in rest in Windsor chapel close to where she made her broadcast. It is hard to think he would have felt anything but entirely vindicated in his hope for the future, if, 84 years after his fearful death, he could have witnessed his granddaughter meet the gravity of the occasion this Palm Sunday.

Fortune has also given the Queen a long life. She is now the fourth longest reigning monarch in history. If she lives for a little more than four years more, no one will ever have reigned for longer. As it came to pass that Edward VIII abandoned the throne, so it also came to pass that the teenager who spent the Blitz with her sister in Windsor Castle still has time before a new King must, at a time he will not choose, begin again.

In this time of deep misfortune, the Queen spoke to us because in who she is, and who she became, she reminds us that arbitrary fortune works benevolently too — as it did for those who came before us and as it will for those who come after.