More, he insists, was quite prepared, when required, to impose Catholic beliefs on dissenters by the exercise of royal might. And now, he suggests, Mantel is compounding the erroneous approach of seeing history in the light of subsequent events by her eagerness to set More against her hero, Cromwell, to make the latter appear a “herald of the future”.  “This is equally as preposterous as Bolt’s approach,” he says. “To reach such a conclusion about More and Cromwell from the very difficult and complicated 16th-century sources is just silly. Both men believed in the idea of enforcing ideas on others by persecution and execution. They only disagreed which ideas.”  And if he had to choose between the two? “Well, More at least died nobly with magnificent insouciance. The night before Cromwell was executed, he was screaming 'Mercy, mercy’, like a stuffed pig. That alone tells us all you need to know about the moral quality of the two.”  The real danger, then, is projecting the views of the present on to historical figures and allowing it to reshape their stories. While audiences love it – remember the huge success of Amanda Foreman’s 1998 biography of an 18th-century aristocrat, Georgiana, Duchess of Devonshire, taken at the time as a parallel narrative to the troubles of Diana, Princess of Wales – it distorts the facts on which history must be based.  In Mantel’s case, according to Starkey, she has been over-influenced by Geoffrey Elton, regius professor of history at Cambridge in the 1980s. “He was my own teacher, who presented a ludicrous picture of the 16th century as a time when no one really believed very much in religion. That was a result of his own secular views. So he hated Thomas More because he was religious and tried to suggest that Thomas Cromwell was some kind of government bureaucrat, a source of modernity, when in fact he was a highly intelligent, brutal thug, who enforced the king’s will with ruthless efficiency.” It is a charge that Mantel’s many fans dispute.  The distinguished biographer Claire Tomalin believes something more obvious may be at work in the questions now being asked about More. “He was up for grabs,” she says. “All historical figures are, but Thomas More in particular because he had been made into a saint. Every English schoolchild had been told in A Man For All Seasons that More died for principle. It was what we all knew about him – all we knew about him – so someone was bound one day to take a different view of him.”  There is, however, a difference when that fresh perspective comes not in a biography rooted in the sources, but in a work of fiction open to the imagination. “The thing about writing biographies,” Tomalin muses, “is that you have to accept that all of us are capable of doing bad things, that we are mixed creatures. Morality is complicated.”  Thomas Cromwell’s latest biographer, Tracy Borman, argues that, by contrast, those complications can be ironed out in a work of fiction, however well researched. “Because she is writing a novel, Hilary Mantel obviously feels she needs a goodie and baddie,” she says “And so she tees Cromwell up as the goodie by making More the baddie.  “She’s certainly not the first to do that. Historians often say of the two of them, you can’t like both. You have to choose one or the other – More or Cromwell – and More has been ahead in the PR game from the start. You could even say that his execution, for a point of principle, was a masterstroke, and gave him an unassailable lead for centuries.”  Yet playing one off against the other, as Borman explores in Thomas Cromwell: The Untold Story of Henry VIII’s Most Faithful Servant, inevitably ignores how much common ground the two men had. “They were both lawyers, both clever, both good at debating and even had a grudging respect for each other.”  She argues that Cromwell also had religious principles to match More’s. “There is very strong evidence of his personal piety. He pays out of his own pocket for the printing of a translation of the Bible in English, so it can be distributed to ordinary people, who he believes passionately should have access to it, and not have to rely on what parts are handed down to them by their priests.”  At the church most associated with More, with his statue in its garden, the controversy apparently has little impact on his standing. Chelsea Old Church, next to the Thames, is where More worshipped with his family, and where he went to confession for the last time before his execution.  “I think our congregation today is subtle enough to understand that our world is very different from Thomas More’s,” says the vicar, the Reverend Canon David Reindorp, “and so their views on him and Thomas Cromwell will be as varied as anyone else’s. We don’t feel the need to rush to his defence, or as if we are under attack because he is being questioned.  “In Anglicanism, unlike the Roman Catholic Church, we don’t declare individuals saints. Instead, we give them a day, when we can remember them for their witness and for the mixture of things that they inevitably were. So, for us, even though his presence can feel very real here, Thomas More need never be either saint or sinner.”  Born: February 6 1478, Cheapside, London, “of honest stock”  Educated: St Anthony’s School, Threadneedle Street; Canterbury College, Oxford; and Lincoln’s Inn  Family: married (1) Jane Colt in 1505 – they had three daughters and one son; and after her death in 1511 (2) Alice Middleton, a widow with a daughter  Career high: appointed lord chancellor in 1529 by Henry VIII  Career low: found guilty of treason for his refusal to take the Oath of Supremacy that declared Henry Head of the Church  Death: beheaded at the Tower of London on July 6 1535  Least likely to say: “Every man has his price”  Most likely to say: “I die the king’s faithful servant, but God’s first”  Thomas Cromwell, Earl of Essex  Born: around 1485, Putney, London, son of a blacksmith  Educated: little formal schooling; described himself when young as a “ruffian”  Family: married Elizabeth Williams, a widow, and had two daughters, who died as infants, and a son, Gregory  Career high: pushing through annulment of Henry’s x year marriage to Catherine of Aragon by breaking with Rome so Henry could marry Anne Boleyn in 1533  Career low: as his chief minister, arranging the King’s fourth marriage to Anne of Cleves in 1540, and taking the blame when she was deemed too ugly  Death: beheaded and dismembered at the Tower of London on July 28 1540  Least likely to say: “I just want to follow in my dad’s footsteps”  Most likely to say: “Don’t worry your royal head about it, Your Majesty – I can fix it for you”
In the BBC's adaptation of Hilary Mantel's Wolf Hall, Sir Thomas More -   traditionally viewed as a man of principle - is recast as a ruthless schemer   with blood on his hands