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I completely agree with your assessment. Mantell definitely seemed like she was trying to rehabilitate Cromwell, and her depiction of Moore was cartoonish.
In particular, the (not) torture of Mark Smeaton before he confessed to adultery with Anne Boleyn was absurd. The idea that he would confess to a crime that guaranteed his death due to being put in a scary cellar wasn't exactly convincing.
The BBC miniseries was also fantastic. They really went all in on the historical realism, including things like not having any artificial lighting, and even refusing to use modern candles in place of historically accurate tallow candles.
I might give Macculloch's biography a read, the reviews on Amazon seem positive.
It is good, and I say that as someone who is probably on the exact opposite of Macculloch in every way (he's English of Scottish descent, former Anglican, Unionist etc.) It's fair to Cromwell and also shows the environment he was working in, the changes going on not just in England but in Europe, and the reasons both for his success and his fall. It does show his flaws, too. And he was ruthless, there's no two ways about that. Throughout his career, he was a fixer for a lot of people, he was lobbied by people for that purpose, and he worked as Henry's fixer and his downfall came when he made missteps and could no longer provide the 'fixes' Henry wanted.
Henry VIII really is a fascinating character and despite reading a couple of biographies, I can't really get a handle on his character because nobody seems to be able to do that; one writer will describe him as a man's man, impatient of the world of women, while another will write him as brought up in a woman's world and thus being less sure of his position in the all-male world of the court. Nobody could really claim to know him, or be able to control him. And whatever one's opinions on their merits, I think More made a better end by standing up for his principles even though he knew this would probably end in his death eventually, as against Cromwell who went with the king on everything he asked and still ended up begging for mercy in one last, pathetic letter because his downfall, too, was assured.
I don't have much sympathy for Anne Boleyn because she did a lot to get herself into the position she ended up in (whatever about family pressure, and all the highborn families were dangling their daughters in front of Henry for hopes of getting advancement, she was - if we believe her supporters - smart and capable, so she was not some delicate blossom forced into chasing the king, she went for it too with her full consent). But her end was miserable, and the list of ridiculous charges was just Henry's ego at work. Smeaton is a victim, too; a bit of a cocky idiot who liked the idea of chasing the queen, did too much bragging, and ended up being used by men much cleverer and more powerful than him because he was a weak link who could be used for their purposes. I don't think anyone really believed that Smeaton was Anne's lover, but he could be portrayed as such, and coerced into a confession about it all, and that was what they wanted: the excuse to prosecute her.
Yes, I don't think it's at all credible that "we'll just sit him in a spooky cellar" was as far as Cromwell went, because (1) he was fighting for his survival against Anne himself and (2) he was not the kind of man to be squeamish about what needed to be done to get what he wanted.
There's a good video about the Holbein Tudor portraits here. I didn't see the BBC series, but I did read somewhere that the visual of Cromwell was, ironically, based more on the More portrait than the Cromwell portrait. It is fascinating to compare the two pictures, the one of More seems a lot more detailed and realistic than the one of Cromwell which is a lot flatter and old-fashioned. Does that mean Holbein preferred More to Cromwell, or that Cromwell made sure the painting would not reveal more than the surface he wanted to present?
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