This portrayal of Cromwell as a deeply humane man who treats his victims with kindness is unsettling to say the least. Where the historical record is sketchy, imagination supplies the deficit, and that is Mantel's prerogative as a writer of historical fiction. When it comes to torture, the same applies: one victim is locked in an attic which, he is told, is haunted. Brushing against a bag of feathers, his imagination runs wild. Thinking it's a ghost he is terrified, but it's his own imagination torturing him, not Cromwell, thus absolving Cromwell entirely. 

Mantel's Cromwell is a man who only has to present the facts, rationally and liberally, to his victims to make them comply: "Well, now, I didn't rack Thomas More, did I? I sat in a room with him." He is the image of reasoning tolerant humanity, completely absolved and untainted by murky dealings. If anyone has died, he is not to blame because they brought it upon themselves. His hands are clean:

What you dreamed has enacted itself. You reach for a blade but the blood is already shed. The lambs have butchered and eaten themselves. They have brought knives to the table, carved themselves, and picked their own bones clean.

There is no blood on the hands of Mantel's Cromwell. He is like a state                      fashioning an image of itself as morally clean, above practices like water-boarding or extraordinary rendition, needing only to show to the world its enlightened and rational face for all to realise its moral superiority.

Mantel's interest in the values of the French Revolution, explored most thoroughly in A Place of Greater Safety, continues in Cromwell. He embodies European Enlightenment values, for all that he's a Tudor man. He regards anyone who cannot reason themselves out of supersitition as beneath contempt, and is in many ways a proto-Hitchens, "the very man if an argument about God breaks out".