Getting to know Cromwell - or not - in Wolf Hall

Henry VIII wants to dump wife # 1 (Katherine of Aragon) and move on to wife #2 (Anne Boleyn), and it's up to others, Cardinal Wolsey I guess, to get him the clearance from the church to do so - annulment of the marriage. Wolsey depends on Thomas Cromwell for advice, and that's the basic setup or premise of Hilary Mantel's "Wolf Hall." It helps to know something of the history because Wolf Hall throws you right into the events and doesn't lard the story with lots of expository background - the strength of the novel but in a way also its weakness. I'm getting to know Cromwell through glimpses of his family life - tense relation with his bullying father, the sorrow of the death of his wife from some kind of flu or plague, his relation with his children, hints now (about 125 pp in) that he may be seeking to remarry (parallel to Henry VIII in a way). Usually historical novels are built more on the facts of the public life, and so far that element is pretty thin in Wolf Hall. I don't really see what Cromwell is doing, what his place in history is, and so far despite initial promise this novel is looking to be neither fish nor fowl, so to speak - I don't have a strong enough sense of Cromwell as a character to be deeply interested in his personal life, nor do I (yet) see his political and legal genius at play, I don't see what role he's played in shaping these remote historical events. This novel should be giving me a new and deeper understanding of the course of history, but right now the waters are kind of shallow.